i am a professor of biology at a good uk university and a member of a national academy, and can regard myself as success- ful by most standards. i am comfortable with, and proud of, my indian heritage and culture, as well as my british heritage. yet, as is often the case for black, asian and minority ethnic (bame) staff and students, many less fortunate than me, i bring the burden of my personal history to university. i was raised in the english midlands, the son of an indian father and an english mother. my father was one of a large influx of people from the indian subcontinent who settled in the region from the s to the s. the period is an ugly chapter in british history, marred by violent gangs who took up ‘paki-bashing’ with relish. the insult, derived from ‘pakistani’, was thrown at anyone with real or perceived roots in the indian subcontinent. only when i entered secondary school aged did i have it applied to me. i spoke up confidently in class, until a group of boys had enough of the ‘smart alec paki’ and roughed me up a few times. the physical abuse i experienced was trivial; the psychological impact was profound. a monkey chant, a sneer, a condescending attitude — these things accumulate to do corrosive damage over time. even a single comment can be devastating. and, for every explicit act of racism, there are countless other, more subtle acts in which the racism is suspected, but not easy to substantiate. i overcompensated for my vulnerabilities in bizarre ways: pretending i didn’t care, and even making racist jokes to fit in. i look back on this with embarrassment now, but such ‘internalized prejudice’ is common. the racism in academia, and why the ‘little things’ matter subtle biases and structural inequalities need to be challenged, just like overt acts of racial discrimination. by kevin n. laland is a b e l i n fa n t e s /a n a d o l u a g e n c y /g e t t y black lives matter protesters demonstrate in london in july . nature | vol | august | advice, technology and tools work send your careers story to: naturecareerseditor @nature.com your story © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. w omen, people from minority ethnic groups, first-generation university students and disabled people — to name but a few — are woefully under-represented in the basic sciences worldwide. reports by the association of american medical colleges and the us national science foundation show that this under-representation is pervasive at every level of academia, including among graduate students, postdocs and faculty members. as scientists, we need to ensure that the basic sciences are more welcoming and inclu- sive. the covid- pandemic has created a tipping point at which no one can ignore the growing public outcry for justice and equality, particularly in light of the black lives matter movement, which quickly became global. we already know that diverse perspectives increase productivity and creativity. so we must reimagine our spaces, behaviour and processes to promote a sense of belonging. d.m. actively works to diversify her clinical field as chair of the committee on diversity and inclusion in anaesthesiology at weill cornell medicine in new york city. for more than two decades, r.g. helped weill cornell’s tri-institu- tional md-phd program to become a nationally recognized leader in recruiting and retaining students from under-represented groups. she also ran a popular summer programme in bio- medical science for undergraduate students psychological defence mechanisms that lead us to mis-categorize our experiences as trivial — to say to ourselves, ‘they’re just little things’ — are part of the problem. there are no ‘little things’ when it comes to racism. the explicit racism of my past is now superseded by subtler discrimination. for years, i have struggled with the fact that some founders of my field are still idolized as if their racist and eugenicist views were unimportant. (only in has this problem finally been acknowledged by the society for the study of evolution, based in st louis, missouri, which is renaming one of its prizes to avoid such associations.) i welcome this step, but i fear there remains little general suggestions to reduce racism in academia increase awareness • give undergraduates tutorials on racism, bias and the benefits of a diverse team. • create opportunities for staff and students to have conversations on racism, and be willing to listen. • review curricula to ensure that black, asian and minority ethnic (bame) academics are fairly represented and that no groups feel marginalized. provide support • develop clear procedures for people to report workplace bullying and prejudice, with support for complainants. • set up bame staff and student networks, and provide a bame counsellor in student- support centres. • lobby universities to address bame pay and promotions gaps. deliver opportunities • develop robust, transparent recruitment procedures that ensure all job ads also target minorities. • adopt guidelines for the organization of diverse conferences and workshops. • ensure bame representation on interview panels, paying for external members if required. make role models visible • organize a prestigious annual public lecture by a bame researcher. • nominate worthy researchers from minority ethnic groups for prizes and honorary degrees. • lobby universities to appoint bame staff to senior positions. more suggestions and links to resources are at go.nature.com/ hftk d. k.n.l. understanding of how academic cultures inadvertently exclude some groups. and for decades, i’ve also been attending scientific conferences in europe and north america and have seen barely any bame representation. i probably would have been less successful as an academic if my father hadn’t anglicized our family name. his original surname was lala, which he changed in the hope that his children would experience less prejudice. even today, people with names associated with minority ethnic groups are substantially less likely to get a job interview, according to a report by sociologists valentina di stasio and anthony heath (see go.nature.com/ egysnh), and bame researchers receive fewer and smaller grants than their white counterparts. names still matter in , yet name-blind procedures are applied only haphazardly across academia. that said, for me, academia has been a haven. others are not so fortunate, and i regularly hear reports of harassment of bame students across the sector. we delude ourselves if we think that there is no racial discrimination in academia because racist expletives are rarely uttered. statistics show that the bame popu- lation is under-represented at many uk and us universities (particularly at top-ranked institutions, and at more senior levels), that ethnic-minority staff are less likely to get pro- moted than their white counterparts, and that there exists a pay gap between white and bame university employees (see kalwant bhopal’s book the experiences of black and minority ethnic academics). sadly, many uk and us bame academics continue to feel like outsiders, and that they have to reach higher standards to have the same level of success (as bhopal also describes). for the ethnic diversity of our universi- ties to improve, actions are required that increase awareness and provide support (see ‘suggestions to reduce racism in academia’). these are small steps, but they can have lasting effects, too. our policies need to reach out to the excluded, to give them opportunities, and help them to perform at their best. it is better to regard actions, rather than people, as racist. each stereotype, social slight or micro-aggression propagates inequality, as does every case of someone being overlooked for promotion or admission to an institution, and every unfairly rejected grant application. many of us, including me, have spent too long viewing our experiences as too trifling to complain about, but we were wrong. the black lives matter movement has helped me to appreciate this. redressing racist brutality is surely the priority, but it is not enough. all of us must speak up and take responsibility for our corner of the world. racism will be defeated only when people understand that these ‘little things’ matter. kevin n. laland is professor of behavioural and evolutionary biology at the university of st andrews, uk, and a long-standing participant in equality, diversity and inclusion initiatives in academia. tips for boosting campus diversity reimagine spaces to promote belonging. by danielle mccullough and ruth gotian. | nature | vol | august work / careers © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. #black lives matter? analyzing the effects of police-caused black deaths on media coverage and public interest in the movement article     ___________________________________________________________________________ i department of criminal justice & criminology, washington state university, pullman, washington, usa corresponding author: dale willits, department of criminal justice & criminology, washington state university, pullman, washington, , usa e-mail: dale.willits@wsu.edu the authors wish to express their appreciation to the blind reviewers of the original manuscript for their comments, which were helpful during preparation of the final version of the manuscript. the authors thank davis makin, kim andersen, and duane stanton for their helpful feedback on early drafts of this article. francesca bordonaro and dale willits i abstract black lives matter is a social movement, created and maintained on social media networks; its formation was spurred in part by the number of black men and women who have been killed by police officers in the united states. this research focuses on the relationship between police-caused deaths of black men and women and media coverage of and public interest in black lives matter. the primary goal of the research was to determine whether traditional news coverage of black lives matter was linked to the killings of black citizens by police. we found that black citizen deaths did not result in increased mentions of black lives matter in either newspaper articles or google searches. we did, however, find that when police officers were killed at a protest, mentions of black lives matter in both the news and google queries increased at a substantial rate, as did searches for “blue lives matter.” the implications for police use of force, black lives matter, and traditional news media are discussed. keywords black lives matter, racial disparity, police use of force, media coverage in february , george zimmerman shot and killed trayvon martin, a -year-old black male, in sanford, florida (freelon, mcilwain, & clark, ). following the acquittal of zimmerman, the hashtag #blacklivesmatter was created by alicia garza, patrisse #black lives matter? analyzing the effects of police-caused black deaths on media coverage and public interest in the movement journal of criminal justice and law: official journal of the law and public policy section of the academy of criminal justice sciences volume , issue , pp. - ( )       journal of criminal justice and law:    official journal of the law and public policy section of the academy of criminal justice sciences    cullors, and opal tometi (blacklivesmatter, ), although the hashtag did not begin trending on twitter until august (freelon et al., ). responding to the acquittal of zimmerman, garza, a community activist in oakland, california, wrote the following message on facebook: “black people. i love you. i love us. our lives matter.” cullors, a friend of garza, then posted this statement: “declaration: black bodies will no longer be sacrificed for the rest of the world’s enlightenment. i am done. i am so done. trayvon, you are loved infinitely. #blacklivesmatter” (cullors, ). this was the first use of the hashtag, which turned into a method of communicating the messages of the movement that is used worldwide, as well as a method for showing support. the hashtag spread across twitter, facebook, and instagram when ferguson police officer darren wilson shot and killed michael brown, whose body was left on the street for hours; this incident resulted in significant unrest (buchanan et al., ). in essence, this hashtag spurred the formation of a social movement focusing largely on police officers’ treatment of people of color (blacklivesmatter, ). yet the portrayal of the #blacklivesmatter movement in the media has often been contentious. the protests and riots associated with the movement gained considerable national attention, and some commentators described the movement as “directionless” and “run by thugs” (french, ; reynolds, ). despite the fact that the black lives matter movement has been associated with a number of policy successes, it is unclear that it has ever gained much traction from mainstream media sources, and it remains an online movement. indeed, research demonstrates that black lives matter has largely been maintained online through twitter and other social media platforms (ince, rojas, & davis, ). although the prominent deaths of black men, like trayvon martin and michael brown, have frequently been the catalyst for increased action on the part of the movement, resulting in protests, marches, and other highly visible activities, it is unclear that these have led to substantial mainstream media coverage or public interest in black lives matter. this gap in knowledge is important because prior research has highlighted the role of media coverage in the success or failure of other movements (bond, ; hall, ). moreover, we argue that interest in the movement is at least partially reflective of the level of interest in police-caused violence directed toward black men and women, and although the amount of academic interest in this topic is substantial, it is not clear that the broader public is similarly concerned. although black lives matter focuses on a number of outcomes, this loosely knit organization has frequently been organized and mobilized to combat racially biased policing. in this study, we examine general trends in traditional news media coverage of black lives matter and the extent to which police-caused deaths of black individuals are related to news and general public interest in black lives matter. this research is important for two reasons: it documents trends and patterns in the black lives matter movement, and it demonstrates the degree to which coverage of the movement corresponds to police- caused deaths of black men and women. indeed, one of the major contributions of the study is that it demonstrates that police violence against black citizens generates very little news and public interest, and thereby demonstrates the very real need for the movement itself, inasmuch as there is little evidence to indicate that black lives do in fact matter to the general public.         francesca bordonaro and dale willits    black lives matter black lives matter is organized as a “call to action in response to state-sanctioned violence and anti-black racism” (black lives matter, ), and as such, it attempts to engage directly the issue of differential policing previously described. to date, the organization has achieved several successes, including the launch of campaign zero, a comprehensive list of proposals to combat police violence, racial profiling, and misconduct through legislation and protest (wetheprotesters, ). in addition, the movement has successfully secured meetings with politicians and police leaders to voice its concerns. despite recent debate regarding the degree to which police interactions with black citizens are biased regarding the use of force (rousell, henne, glover, & willits, ; cesario, johnson, & terrill, ), most of the literature indicates that black communities and individuals are disproportionately policed, with outcomes often worse than those of whites at the hands of the police. for example, evidence shows that police deployments are directed toward black neighborhoods at disproportionate rates (beckett, nyrop, & pfingst, ), that black people are searched at disproportionate rates (gelman, fagan, & kiss, ), that black drivers are disproportionately pulled over for traffic stops (lundman & kaufman, ), and that black citizens are more likely than whites to be arrested (huizinga et al., ). black lives matter is an online-spurred movement that attempts to draw attention to the historical devaluation of black men and women in the united states. some debate is ongoing regarding the extent to which black lives matter constitutes a social movement, given its loosely knit nature. the classic definition of a social network set forth by diani ( ) requires that a social movement organization involve political or culturally informed and sustained interactions by individuals on the basis of a shared, collective identity. black lives matter seems to meet this basic threshold, although the interactions therein typically occur online, and it is not completely clear to what extent the individuals who use the black lives matter hashtag consistently have a shared, collective identity or the same goals. mundt, ross, and burnett ( ) view black lives matter’s use of social media as an asset and in fact argue that its use of social media can serve as an organizing model for other social movements. similarly, byrd, gilbert, and richardson jr. ( ) and cox ( ) argue that the emphasis on social media as a communication and organizing framework makes black lives matter different from past social movements, although importantly, a similar emphasis on organizing through social media was seen in the occupy movement (kavada, ) and arab spring (kamel, ). in summary, a small body of research seems to accept black lives matter as a social movement, although one that is substantively different from older social movements. some of the successes of black lives matter are evidenced by the creation of new hashtags and movements driven by social media. the hashtag #iftheygunnedmedown was used to point out discrepancies in the headlines and photographs used by news agencies when reporting the deaths of persons killed by police. most notably, headlines for stories about young white men who had committed crimes were compared with headlines for stories about young black men who had been killed by police. the professionally taken photos of the white men were obtained from yearbooks or family photo shoots, and the headlines referred to them as suspects and mentioned their talents or bright futures. alternatively, the black men were shown in candid or nonstaged photographs, or with hand       journal of criminal justice and law:    official journal of the law and public policy section of the academy of criminal justice sciences    signs. the headlines described them as thugs and often blamed their deaths on actions they had taken before they were shot (stampler, ). the examples given through this hashtag can reveal the discrepancies between white and black america’s interactions with police and media, just as black lives matter works to illuminate those same discrepancies. broadly, however, it is unclear to what extent the black lives matter movement has been successful in achieving its goals. previous social movements with a racial orientation, like the civil rights movement, have been linked to major federal initiatives, including the civil rights act of . research also shows that the civil rights movement has had a sustained effect on political outcomes over time, just as localized movements have continued to be successful in increasing black political voices (andrews, ). during its active years, the civil rights movement was able to exert its influence as a social movement to generate news coverage (andrews & biggs, ). it is unclear to what extent the same can be said of black lives matter, although undoubtedly racially oriented social movements can be incredibly powerful. broad research has been undertaken on the devaluation of black lives and the prevalence of stereotypical views about black people. sociological research demonstrates, for example, that perceptions of neighborhood safety are linked to black population levels, even after control of neighborhood crime rates (quillian & pager, ). similarly, hawkins ( ) directly argues that the historical devaluation of black lives has resulted in a climate in which less attention is given to family violence in black households. more broadly, a considerable amount of literature shows that blacks are viewed as negative stereotypes by a substantial portion of the population (greenwald, poehlman, uhlmann, & banaji, ; sellers & shelton, ; welch, ). unsurprising, then, is the long history of unfavorable coverage in the media for people of color. van dijk ( ) has argued that contemporary news routines are based on perceptions of what is most likely to be of interest to white readers, and that these routines can serve to reproduce systemic racial biases. for example, reporters are more likely to use the term “riot” than “protest” in civil unrest events occurring in or around black communities, which in turn may affect how news consumers view these communities. evidence also indicates that coverage of black individuals in natural disasters (sommers, apfelbaum, dukes, toosi, & wang, ) and in sports (davis & harris, ) often invokes stereotypes. regarding criminality, oliver ( ) argues that the media’s portrayal of race and crime represents the vital role that news plays in stereotyping people of color as violent and dangerous. oliver ( ) found that news sources depict black suspects as more dangerous than white suspects, overrepresenting them as perpetrators but underrepresenting them as victims. the subsequent effects can be seen in the attitudes and beliefs of news viewers. those who view television news regularly are more likely to have racist views of people of color; they are more likely to believe that black men are dangerous and more likely to suggest punitive measures (oliver, ). moreover, chiricos and eschholz ( ) show that television news coverage tends to portray black (and hispanic) crime suspects in more threatening contexts than whites (who appear more frequently as victims in crime stories). put simply, evidence indicates that media depictions of race and crime exaggerate stereotypes and reproduce racial biases (van dijk, ) yet, the coverage of race-based social movements is of great importance. discussing the civil rights movement, hall ( , p. ) notes that the media “made the protests         francesca bordonaro and dale willits    one of the great news stories of the modern era.” although it would be simplistic to state that the successes associated with the civil rights movement were possible only with media coverage, the media have historically played a key role in resource mobilization for social movements (andrews & biggs, ). regarding the civil rights movement, bond ( ) notes that media coverage can largely be divided into the “early era of factual reportage” and the later “period of increased suspicion, hostility, and cynicism,” and that these eras can be linked to some extent to the successes and failures of the movement. to date, very little research has examined mainstream or traditional news coverage of the black lives matter movement, nor has the link between police-caused deaths of black individuals (one of the primary topics discussed by the movement) and coverage of and interest in the movement been examined. leopold and bell ( ) provide perhaps the only direct examination of traditional news coverage for black lives matter in their qualitative analysis of news articles following the death of michael brown. like the authors of much of the prior literature, they found that most coverage included language that indicated disapproval of the protests and dissent and included strong elements of blame attribution toward black victims. to date, no research has examined black lives matter in a broad, quantitative sense, nor has any research examined general public interest in the movement. the current study begins to address the gap in the literature by examining trends in the coverage of and public interest in the black lives matter movement, and whether these trends have changed as a result of black deaths. given the broad arguments of van dijk ( ) regarding news coverage and social reproduction, and the history of unfavorable coverage applied to people of color, we hypothesize that black deaths are generally unrelated to black lives matter coverage. indeed, although we do not assume that police- caused deaths of black men and women would necessarily lead to coverage of the black lives matter movement, one might expect that increases in the number of deaths would lead to an increase in coverage because protests occur in response to some deaths and, more importantly, reporters could connect police-black violence to the broader issues discussed by black lives matter. here, we conduct our analysis at the national level to examine the success and current state of the movement, although again, given historical racialist biases, we do not expect the occurrence of black deaths to generate increased interest in the movement. methods to examine news coverage and public interest in the black lives matter movement, we took a descriptive and exploratory approach to examining data from three sources: ( ) newspaper mentions of the black lives matter movement from lexisnexis academic, ( ) crowdsourced data on police-caused deaths of black persons in the united states, and ( ) google trends data on black lives matter searches. data cover the time period from may to november . our initial primary goals were twofold: ( ) to examine aggregate coverage of the black lives matter movement by traditional news media and ( ) to determine by means of basic statistics and visualization techniques if media mentions of the black lives matter movement correlate with police-caused deaths of black individuals.       journal of criminal justice and law:    official journal of the law and public policy section of the academy of criminal justice sciences    this research has contributed to our understanding of police use of force against black citizens by documenting the extent to which police-caused deaths of black men and women do or do not generate interest in black lives matter, an organization that directly confronts the issue of racially biased policing. our general methodological strategy was descriptive and exploratory. specifically, we followed the advice of maltz ( , ) to allow the data to generate hypotheses. as detailed below, we noted a spike in black lives matter coverage in july , which we believe was linked to the killing of five police officers at a black lives matter protest in dallas, texas. therefore, although it was not our original intent to do so, we also examined july from the perspective of an interrupted time series – that is, we attempted to describe the extent to which coverage and interest in black lives matter changed following this month. this analysis served as a tool to examine the degree to which police deaths appeared to matter more than the deaths of black men and women. to do this, we used interrupted time series analysis because this quasi- experimental method is well suited for detecting instantaneous and long-term changes in an outcome variable (news mentions of black lives matter). as a robustness check, we made use of google trends data to ensure that our news mention data were accurately capturing trends in the public interest and coverage of the black lives matter movement black lives matter news mentions using the lexisnexis academic search feature, we searched the term “black lives matter,” expanding the search to include “blacklivesmatter” and “#blacklivesmatter” as well, to account for phrasings that were formatted differently. in addition, we searched for both “blm” and “#blm”, although we included the “#blm” results only in our monthly counts of news mentions because the search “blm” also returned results related to the bureau of land management. specifically, each month from july to december was searched for newspaper articles containing one or more of the above terms, and this search was completed for five regions (midwest, northeast, southeast, southwest, and northwest). the lexisnexis output was a list of articles with a headline containing the search term. for each search, the title and preview panel for the articles were reviewed to ensure that they were about the correct topic, and a count per region-month was created. mentions were manually counted and verified by the “results” feature, which listed the number of articles containing the keywords within the headline. although these data were eventually aggregated to the entire nation and combined in a single data set, this month- by-month and region-by-region process was important for ensuring that lexisnexis academic would produce all relevant articles (non-disaggregated searches would cap out with a maximum number of articles). police-caused deaths although much of the research on race and police violence has made use of the fbi supplementary homicide reports (jacobs, ; willits & nowacki, ), research suggests that these data miss many lethal force incidents (barber et al., ). for this reason, a number of efforts to collect alternative measures of police violence have started since . for this project, we obtained our data from “mappingpoliceviolence.com,” which aggregates data from several crowdsourced efforts. early work comparing crowdsourced data versus a subset of data requested with the freedom of information act         francesca bordonaro and dale willits    indicate that crowdsourced data on police violence are highly accurate (farman, ), and a number of studies using crowdsourced data have been published (campbell, nix, & maguire, ; hirschfield, ; ross, ; ross, winterhalder, & mcelreath, ). google trends data although our analysis focused first on examining the degree to which traditional news media cover the black lives matter movement and the extent to which coverage is associated with police-caused deaths of black men and women, we also used google trends data to examine the popularity of google searches for black lives matter during the same time period. we included internet search data as a robustness check to ensure that the lexisnexis news data accurately captured trends in how often the public is discussing black lives matter (ie, we would expect searches for black lives matter to increase during months with more news coverage). google trends provides a normalized rating (from to ) of the popularity of a particular search term over a specified period. these data do not reflect the frequency or total number of searches, but rather the relative popularity of a particular search term. researchers suggest that google trends data are a useful measure of public attention to a given topic (ripberger, ), and a small body of criminological research makes use of these data (makin & morczek, , ; song, song, an, hayman, & woo, ) results we begin by examining the link between news mentions and the deaths of black persons descriptively, with a focus on the visual examination of trends. here, we follow the advice of maltz ( , ) to use visualization not only for description but also as an integral tool for generating hypotheses. in this case, we first examine the visual trends in news mentions and then inductively generate hypotheses to explain these trends. figure : black lives matter newspaper mentions and police-caused deaths of blacks f re q u e n cy  o f  p o li ce ‐c a u se d   d e a th s f re q u e n cy  o f  n e w sp a p e r  m e n ti o n s date news mentions black deaths       journal of criminal justice and law:    official journal of the law and public policy section of the academy of criminal justice sciences    black lives matter did not pick up any significant traction in news coverage in any part of the country until late , despite the fact that the term “black lives matter” was coined in july of . the absence of high-profile police-caused deaths of black men or women during this period and the general decline in the number of police-caused deaths of blacks from the summer peaks of suggest some other impetus for early coverage of the movement. the most likely explanation is the increased news coverage following the ferguson protests and riots following the acquittal of a police officer charged with killing michael brown. after this, the rate of news mentions declines and is relatively steady until july of , at which point the coverage of black lives matter increases substantially and dramatically. a total of , articles during july contained the phrase “black lives matter,” although importantly, the numbers declined immediately in subsequent months. a number of people of color were killed by police around this time, but the number of black persons killed by police was not dramatically greater than in prior months. figure presents a time series chart of the number of black individuals killed by police officers (dotted line) and the number of newspaper mentions of black lives matter (solid line) over the same period. although the number of deaths does show some variation from month to month, no substantial variation is seen that would explain why news mentions of the black lives matter movement increased so dramatically in july . interestingly, this pattern was consistent across the country. using newspaper mention data disaggregated by region, we observed a similar pattern across the country (with slightly more mentions of black lives matter in newspapers located in the midwest and southeast areas of the united states). after a quick review of some of the news articles that emerged in july , it became clear that the july increase was related to an incident that occurred at a black lives matter protest in dallas, texas. on july , , micah xavier johnson ambushed officers during a black lives matter protest, killing five police officers and wounding seven more, as well as two civilians (nbc , ). the protest was against the shootings of alton sterling and philando castile, who had been killed by police in separate incidents just days before. johnson made national news, not only as the first person to be killed in america by a police robot (selyukh & rosenberg, ) but also, more predominantly, as a radical black lives matter militant responsible for the deadliest incident in terms of police deaths since the september , , terror attacks. the shooting gave validity to negative perceptions of the movement, potentially contributing to the increased number of articles in july . although the dramatic increase in news mentions in july is visually apparent, we also present the results of a simple, single-group interrupted time series model to demonstrate that this change in the number of news mentions of black lives matter was a statistically significant departure from the amount of prior news coverage. several different approaches can be used to examine the effect of a specific interruption on a given trend, but the interrupted time series model is widely accepted as one of the strongest quasi- experimental approaches for identifying the short- and long-term effects of interventions (bernal, cummins, & gasparrini, ; cook, campbell, & day, ; wagner, soumerai, zhang, & ross-degnan, ) and has been used in the criminological literature (chamlin, ; koslicki, ; vásquez, maddan, & walker, ). here, we make use of the         francesca bordonaro and dale willits    segmented regression approach to interrupted time series modeling described by linden ( ), which uses the following formula: where is the outcome measure at time t, is the time since the study start, and is a dummy variable indicating whether some interruption has happened ( or not ( ). in terms of interpretation, this model is formulated such that is the trend in the outcome variable before the interruption point, is the immediate effect of the interruption, and is the trend in the outcome variable following the interruption point. in addition to displaying the trend in an outcome variable directly, this model makes use of newey-west standard errors to account for autocorrelation. to simplify the analysis, we explored an interrupted time series for all of the black lives matter mentions (not disaggregated by month). therefore, for this study, is the number of news mentions for black lives matter in a given month, is the number of months since july , and is a dummy variable for july and onward (as we are conceptualizing the dallas shooting as the interruption point). the results of this model are presented in table . these results confirm that black lives matter newspaper mentions increased dramatically at the point of intervention (july ). specifically, an immediate increase of more than , news mentions occurred during july . the model also demonstrates that news mentions declined significantly following this month, suggesting that the news focus on black lives matter was short-lived and not reflective of a change in the volume of news coverage for the movement. as a robustness check, we also used the previously described google trends data to examine trends in internet searches for black lives matter. given that our initial analysis of the news mention data had generated the hypothesis that the increased coverage was in response to the july shooting deaths of five police officers, we expanded our search criteria to include “blue lives matter” as well. figure displays google trend results for black lives matter and blue lives matter from july to december . the google trends data reveal the same basic pattern as the news mentions data. general interest in both black lives matter and blue lives matter is limited for much of the time series, with a large spike in july , after which interest falls off. interestingly, google       journal of criminal justice and law:    official journal of the law and public policy section of the academy of criminal justice sciences    trends data are also available by week, and although these results are smoothed by monthly averages, black lives matter received a google trend score of during the second week of july , indicating that it was among the most searched-for terms on the internet in the united states (searches for blue lives matter peaked during the week of the shooting, at a high google trends value of ). figure : google trends on black lives matter and blue lives matter internet searches taken together, these data suggest that neither black lives matter news mentions nor internet searches for black lives matter are related to police-caused deaths of black individuals. although the visual trends presented seem clear, we also examined bivariate correlations between police-caused deaths of black men and women and google trends results for black lives matter, and between police-caused deaths and newspaper mentions of black lives matter. the results, presented in table , support the conclusion that an increased number of deaths does not result in additional news coverage or internet searches for black lives matter. they do provide a robustness check for our measure of newspaper mentions as our monthly newspaper mention values correlate strongly and significantly with the google trends measure. importantly, no significant correlation was found between police-caused deaths of black individuals and news mentions or between police-caused deaths and google searches. jul‐ nov‐ mar‐ jul‐ nov‐ mar‐ jul‐ nov‐ mar‐ jul‐ nov‐ g o o g le  t re n d  v a lu e s black lives matter blue lives matter         francesca bordonaro and dale willits    discussion analyzing trends in newspaper mentions of and internet searches for black lives matter and examining the relationship between these trends and police-caused deaths of black men and women suggest that the mainstream news media and the average person searching the internet are not particularly interested in black lives matter. moreover, no evidence suggests that interest in black lives matter increased over time as more black individuals were killed or that interest in black lives matter corresponded in a meaningful way with police-caused deaths of black persons. put simply, no great outpouring of news articles has addressed the movement or the need for the movement following the death of a black person at the hands of police, nor is the public at large searching out black lives matter in response to these actions. the only significant shift in coverage and internet interest in black lives matter happened after the tragic death of five police officers in dallas at a black lives matter protest. a cynical interpretation is that our results indicate that blue lives matter more. in some sense, these results are unsurprising. first, police deaths are tragic and can involve a great deal of public outcry and attention. for example, pantti and sumiala ( ) note that certain police deaths can produce a sense of national tragedy and instigate public mourning rituals, although interestingly, other research suggests that most police deaths go unnoticed by the public (kynoch, ). importantly, research also demonstrates that particularly tragic deaths can result in dramatic shifts in news coverage. for example, rosie and gorringe ( ) argue that newspaper media largely ignored police actions against protesters before the police-caused death of an innocent bystander at the g summit protests, and that this death was enough to cause a shift in how the media cover these protests. more broadly, substantial evidence indicates that media coverage tends to focus on sensational and violent themes, especially with regard to the coverage of social movements and related protests (donson, chesters, & welsh, ; juris, ). further, the fact that the only spike in news coverage of and internet searches for the movement occurred following a negative event supports much of what we know regarding racialized patterns of news coverage. regarding the black lives matter movement specifically, leopold and bell ( ) have previously shown that much of the mainstream coverage of the movement is negative, and research on the civil rights movement demonstrated that media coverage became more and more negative over time (bond, ). we consider these findings to be supportive of the argument of van dijk ( ) that the routinized structure of modern news places an emphasis on stories that are attention- grabbing, fast to produce, and sensational, and that this process ultimately reproduces systemic racial bias. the current results are supportive of these trends. put simply, police-caused deaths of black citizens and the resultant social movement responses may not be sensationalist enough to attract sustained media attention, whereas the deaths of five police officers fit the “if it bleeds, it leads” approach to media coverage. of course, we do not mean to diminish the deaths of these police officers or to suggest that this incident should not have generated considerable news coverage and internet searching. our interpretation of our results is simply that the deaths of hundreds of black citizens at the hands of police in the years covered by our data did not result in any appreciable increase in news coverage of or internet searches for the black lives matter movement, whereas the tragic deaths of       journal of criminal justice and law:    official journal of the law and public policy section of the academy of criminal justice sciences    the police officers in dallas did. as policing in black communities is one of the major areas of emphasis for black lives matter, the lack of general coverage of black lives matter and the concurrent and heightened specific coverage of police deaths associated with a black lives matter protest might have the effect of reproducing systemic biases by further devaluing the lives of black people through both neglect and stereotyping. in addition to the previously described studies showing that black individuals and communities are differentially policed, broad research has examined the stereotype of the dangerous black criminal (dixon & maddox, ; dixon & rosenbaum, ; johnson & king, ), and an entire body of research suggests that being the member of a racial minority, and in particular being black, is a focal concern that affects the degree to which a person is viewed as blameworthy (crow & adrion, ; nowacki, ; steffensmeier, ulmer, & kramer, ). indeed, many theorists have commented on the manner in which race, ethnicity, and other ascribed characteristics can affect how people are perceived and treated by the criminal justice system. black individuals, as well as members of other minorities, have been considered classified as the dangerous underclass (wilson, ), the symbolic assailant (skolnick, ), or the suitable enemy (wacquant, ). in this regard, the lack of news coverage and internet searches in response to black deaths may simply be part of a broader pattern of discrimination and racism against black individuals and black communities. nonetheless, our results are indicative of an interesting juxtaposition. the black lives matter movement was successful in helping to generate some level of criminal justice policy reform, such as legislative changes outlined by campaign zero, in at least states (wetheprotesters, ), yet the movement has not been successful in garnering ongoing news attention or in attracting broad interest from the american public. the apparent paradox between how black lives matter is able to produce changes on the ground while not receiving broad coverage from the news media or generating substantial internet searches is an interesting and important quandary. if more people are not actively discussing why black lives matter, is the movement successful? of course, it is impossible to discuss the success of the black lives matter movement without remembering that it started as an online movement. it is entirely possible that the social movement is fueled by instances of police violence, and that although traditional media coverage is not reflective of this pattern, noticeable increases in online mentions and hashtag use have occurred. research suggests that twitter has been the predominant hub for black lives matter information (freelon et al., ). social movements with a strong online presence have a number of advantages (mundt, ross, & burnett, ). for example, whereas traditional social movements often either focused on local residents or required people to travel great distances to participate, online-oriented social movements can frequently involve activists from around the world in both in-person and online activities (hara & huang, ). in this regard, it may be the case that black lives matter is targeting individuals on twitter and is quite successful at energizing and mobilizing its base. indeed, the population that consumes traditional news media may not be broadly reflective of the black lives matter message. for example, the pew research center found that the largest percentage of consumers of traditional news (network television and print newspapers) consisted of persons aged and older, whereas the largest percentage of consumers of online news         francesca bordonaro and dale willits    consisted of those between the ages of and (mitchell, ). these trends are similar to those regarding support for black lives matter; only % of adults aged to expressed support for the movement, and those aged and older showed even less support, at %, whereas % of those younger than expressed support for the movement (horowitz, ). although it would be easy to conclude that the black lives matter movement is unsuccessful in that it has failed to generate news coverage in response to police-caused black deaths, it may be that in some general sense the audience that obtains information from newspapers and, indeed, from internet searches is not the audience that the movement is trying to reach. it is, however, more difficult to explain the lack of interest as measured by google searches. regardless, it is difficult to envision how the black lives matter movement can be more broadly successful if it is unable to reach non-core audiences. if our results suggest that both the black lives matter movement and the police-caused deaths of black men and women are not significantly capturing the public’s attention, then clearly more work needs to be done. interestingly, some research suggests that the black lives matter movement may have an indirect effect on news coverage of police-caused black deaths (freelon, mcilwain, & clark, ). this does not directly contradict our results and, in fact, suggests that black lives matter may lead to news coverage of such deaths without resulting in increased coverage of the movement itself. freelon et al. purchased a data set of all public tweets from june , , to may , , and analyzed the public twitter conversations started by the black lives matter movement. they found that these conversations on police brutality and specific use of force incidents led to posts about similar topics by mainstream news organizations on twitter. these results might suggest that #black lives matter attention to a given incident increases media coverage of that incident, but that the media do so in a manner that strips black lives matter from the conversation (as suggested by our results and data). freelon et al. ( ) suggest that black lives matter may have an indirect effect on news coverage, whereas our research only provides evidence against a direct effect. in addition to being unable to account for a potential indirect effect of black lives matter on news coverage and public attention, our research has several other limitations. first, although the interrupted time series method is a strong tool for estimating causal effects, our formal approach is a single-group time series study. these approaches have been critiqued in the literature for not being able to isolate causal effects (linden, ). in our case, we cannot definitely identify that the dallas police shootings were the cause of the spike in media coverage and public interest in july , although informally, it is clearly the case that the dallas shooting was the primary topic of many of the newspaper articles including the phrase “black lives matter.” it is beyond the scope of this research to explain precisely whether the increased coverage was solely a matter of public and media interest or whether outside factors influenced how the incident was covered. the incident occurred during the presidential race, and (then) presidential candidate donald trump made significant mention of the killing of police officers. moreover, other incidents, including the colin kaepernick u.s. national anthem protest, likely generated some of the media and public interest in the movement. unfortunately, with no clear control group available, it was not possible to parse out the potential effect of these external factors. although the potential       journal of criminal justice and law:    official journal of the law and public policy section of the academy of criminal justice sciences    for external effects is worth considering, this does little to change the conclusion that coverage and interest in black lives matter are not driven by the deaths of black persons. lastly, our analysis of media coverage and public interest is narrow in that it focuses on newspaper mentions and internet searches. given historical trends in how the media cover racialized stories, it is possible that some stories did in fact cover black lives matter events but failed to use the movement’s name or associated hashtag (and instead made use of terms like “rioters” and “looters”). although we cannot test this possibility directly, such a result would largely coincide with the work of leopold and bell ( ) documenting that when black lives matter is discussed following a death, it is discussed in a negative context. it is also possible that other metrics, like televised news stories, might reveal different trends. further, as previously mentioned, much of the focus of black lives matter has been on the “hashtag” social media companies (twitter, instagram, and tumblr), and these data are not publicly available for analysis. therefore, we cannot determine the degree to which the movement itself responds to and is energized by black deaths. moreover, although we disaggregated the data by region and found a similar pattern of media coverage, it is possible that police-caused black deaths may have more of an effect on media coverage and internet searches in smaller, more localized units of analysis. still, we believe it was important to document that police-caused deaths of black men and women were largely unrelated to how the movement was covered. future work should explore the degree to which the national and regional patterns we have revealed persist at the county or city level, and especially the role that the race of a population plays in coverage of the movement. lastly, we are unable to describe the manner in which the news media covered black lives matter (either in general or following the dallas incident). although leopold and bell ( ) have demonstrated that media coverage of black lives matter is generally negative, important questions still remain regarding whether different types of newspapers cover the movement differently and to what extent the dallas incident shifted how coverage occurred. this latter question is especially important as historically, a shift in media focus on protesters and their legitimate demands to a focus on “violent looters” and “kooks” has been the point at which the social movement’s cause ceases to be a story (bond, ). conclusions our primary goal was to examine the degree to which news coverage of the black lives matter movement was associated with police-caused deaths of black individuals. as a robustness check, we also examined the degree to which internet searches were associated with police-caused deaths of black individuals in the united states. interestingly, although newspaper mentions and google searches of black lives matter were strongly related, neither was related to police-caused deaths of black men and women. our results plainly suggest that public and news interest in black lives matter is not affected by the number of police-caused deaths of black individuals. conversely, the tragic death of five police officers at a black lives matter protest appeared to result in a large and statistically significant increase in news mentions and searches. these results suggest that blue lives appear to matter more than black lives, at least in terms of news coverage and internet searches.         francesca bordonaro and dale willits    it is important to put these results in context within the broader literature on race and use of force. although our work does not address differential rates of police use of force, the lack of public interest in the topic is interesting in that it seems to reflect an ongoing debate within academia. a number of studies have produced laboratory results suggesting that officers are in fact slower to use force against minority suspects (james, james, & vila, ; james klinger, & vila, ; james, vila, & daratha, ), and researchers have suggested as a result that police may be “reverse racists” against white suspects. other research has produced similar results, suggesting that early use of force is not disproportionately applied to black suspects (fryer, ; wheeler, phillips, worrall, & bishopp, ). this point remains a matter of debate, as other studies have found opposite results (correll et al., ; ross, ; sadler, correll, park, & judd, ; willits & makin, ), and the concept of “reverse racism” has been strongly called into question (roussell et al., ). the debate continues, though. ross et al. ( ) argue that much of the confusion is the result of researchers using an incident as the level of analysis, whereas aggregated levels of use of force consistently demonstrate racial disparities. in any event, our results suggest that to some extent the general public and news media are not particularly concerned with this topic, yet we know that black lives matter supporters are clearly concerned. although the comparison is admittedly imperfect, we consider the academic debate regarding the extent to which racialized police use of force and the divide among the public about the same topic to be of the utmost importance, and perhaps related to the growing trend of american polarization on political topics, including issues related to policing and race (donovan & klahm, ). more work needs to be done to better understand the academic divide both on racialized patterns of use force and on public and news interest in these and related topics. more narrowly, and perhaps somewhat pessimistically, our results might be taken as evidence that the black lives matter movement has been unsuccessful. the broader population of the united states does not in fact seem to be concerned with police-caused deaths of black people. we caution against this interpretation, given that black lives matter is ultimately a movement in its early stages and its primary focus still seems to be on online organization, which may in turn have an indirect effect on increasing the coverage of incidents of police brutality (freelon et al., ). we and other scholars (byrd et al., ; cox, ; leopold & bell, ; mundt, ross, & burnett, ) have approached black lives matter as a social movement, but the disparate and loosely knit nature of the organization may classify it as a different type of movement altogether, and perhaps one that requires different measures of success. still, our research suggests that more work needs to be done and that, at the current date, black lives do not matter enough. declaration of conflicting interests the author declares no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author received no financial support with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.       journal of criminal justice and law:    official journal of the law and public policy section of the academy of criminal justice sciences    references andrews, k. t. 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( ). the truly disadvantaged: the inner city, the underclass, and public policy. chicago, il: university of chicago press. authors’ biographies francesca bordonaro graduated from washington state university in with a bachelor’s degree in criminal justice. this article is based on her honor’s thesis. dale willits is an assistant professor of criminal justice and criminology at washington state university. his research interests include police-community interactions, with a particular focus on race and policing. pps_ .. outgroups. rather, it is about the preservation and integ- rity of the ingroup. for instance, taken together, the results jardina brings to bear on immigration suggest that whites who are more connected to their race than others see immigrants (presumptively from south of the border) and policies that ease immigration as threats to the ameri- can way of life. contrasted with analyses of welfare and affirmative action, where the results suggest that white racial solidarity offers little in the way of explanatory power one way or the other, these findings largely support her claim that it is not racism per se that explains preferences in these domains. jardina’s findings on trump and obama, among others, are also of a piece with her theory. those scoring high on measures of white solidarity preferred trump in , while rejecting obama in . why? because trump promised to safeguard whites from the encroach- ing threat; obama, in contrast, was a source of threat. auxiliary analysis, on data collected more than years ago, demonstrates the continuity of her argument. using a white feeling thermometer as a proxy for white solidarity, jardina shows that it (solidarity) militated against support for the civil rights movement. white identity politics is an example of careful social science. it confronts an important, timely question while using complementary sources of evidence as a means of sorting through competing claims. in concert, the obser- vational evidence, along with the experiments and open- ended questions, go a long way toward elaborating a mostly convincing narrative. however, there are a few loose ends about which i am curious. to begin, one wonders how white solidarity represents a departure from status threat. there are many places in the book in which jardina claims that white solidarity is activated by threats to white dominance and their (whites’) desire to “reassert” or “restore” it (dominance). this suggests something beyond threat: it implies loss of some kind. this sounds very much like status threat, an approach to intergroup relations pioneered by joseph gusfield and richard hofstadter in the early s. further, recent work in political science (diana mutz) and many works in social psychology draw on this theory to explain the recent angst of many in white america. yet, this work is never fully engaged. this is important because jardina acknowledges in an endnote that “status threat …is an argument very much in keeping with my own,” yet i am not sure where her argument ends and where status threat begins (p. ). they seem to do the same work. if this is true, i am not sure what white solidarity can tell us beyond what status threat already explains. another observation related to theory concerns the omission of the social dominance orientation (sdo) from the models of immigration, affirmative action, and welfare dealing explicitly with race. jardina rightly notes, in chapter , a robust correlation with sdo, and this was with data collected in —before the beginning of trump’s run for president. as far as i know, measures for sdo were included in the anes, a data source on which she draws. one wonders, therefore, how much white solidarity is capable of explaining in the presence of sdo, especially after when trump announced his candidacy. on the measurement side, for most of the analysis, she uses a single item to measure white identity. of the six datasets on which the evidence rests, there is only one survey for which multiple items are available. by contrast, there are four surveys on which multiple items for white consciousness are available. further, to the extent that white identity represents a component of white consciousness, one wonders why jardina did not stick with white consciousness instead of jumping back and forth between the two. given this and the lack of more robust measures for white identity, one also wonders why she did not simply use white consciousness as the proxy for white solidarity. having said that, white identity politics is a must read for students of american politics, particularly those who study race and racial politics. it is a well-written, mostly careful account of how we arrived at the current political moment. jardina has mapped a potentially fruitful path for herself and other scholars who wish to explore a more benign alternative to white nationalism and racism. more scholars should follow her path, asking big questions that address emergent contemporary issues in american society. the great broadening: how the vast expansion of the policymaking agenda transformed american politics. by bryan d. jones, sean m. theriault, and michelle whyman. chicago: university of chicago press, . p. $ . cloth, $ . paper. doi: . /s — matt grossmann , michigan state university grossm @msu.edu the us federal government since the mid-twentieth cen- tury is the political science discipline’s most frequent case study. and yet its fascinating trajectory is often treated as mere background for current events, rather than as a unique story merging broad political patterns and specific historical developments. bryan d. jones, sean m. theriault, and michelle whyman’s new book, the great broadening, tells its familiar and important narrative with substantial new insight because it synthesizes the large-scale dynamics of the political system’s substantive focus. the federal government massively broadened in policy- making scope in the s and s, presaging a con- servative backlash, partisan and ideological polarization, and a move from congressional lawmaking to oversight. from – , congress passed many more important laws than usual—and nearly all political indicators show a march | vol. /no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://doi.org/ . /s https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:grossm @msu.edu https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core bulge of activity around that time. the action was largely bipartisan and occurred across the policy spectrum. this activist era is reflected in the permanent new institutions that it built and the expansive new vision of national government that it endowed us. the great broadening shows that this extensive law- making led to a largely permanent expansion of the national policy agenda: it both brought new social prob- lems and issues to government’s attention and deepened the scope and scale of its engagement with existing issues. the agenda expansion was visible in the topics of legisla- tive hearings, bills, and budgets. a conservative backlash was able to stop the growth of the agenda but not to reverse it. the national government thus still pursues myriad goals in differentiated policy pockets. the expansion had two key consequences for congress. first, it passed fewer but larger bills, addressing many different topics at once and leaving most policy-making details to agencies. second, it stopped holding many hearings on bills or new legislative ideas and shifted to executive branch oversight. despite congress’s burgeon- ing role in maintenance, these changes made it less an institution for developing new policy and more a forum for grandstanding. polarization came after the broadening, largely led by conservatives (with the republican party moving steadily rightward starting in ). the interest group explosion also came in its wake, with most groups fighting to protect existing benefits or stop new regulation, rather than calling for new policies. republicans, who had been partners in the expansion, became more opposed to new initiatives and more critical of the inherited policy structure. policies of the broadening era created the bureaucracies and constituencies to remain sustainable, but not to continue expanding indefinitely. as a result, groups pushing for change are now more likely to have stable opponents and partisan sides. the great broadening helps fill in the gaps between research on policy making and political parties. like the initial broadening discussed in the book, theories of policy making also tended to start out largely nonpartisan. but it is clear in retrospect that much of the policy development they tracked was dependent on republican acquiescence, which has now become much harder to count on. the long success of liberal policy making eventually under- mined conservative cooperation—and republicans have become less interested in maintaining the enlarged system. the great broadening is structured as an outline of this phenomenon, followed by an evaluation of its potential causes and then a review of its many consequences. the methodological discussion is admirably clear in articulating both the reasons why broad social research over decades is necessary and the inevitable downsides that come from the macro-level approach. social scientists, the authors remind us, should not pretend that variables such as election outcomes, interest group organizing, or the content of media coverage have relatively constant influence on the political system over time. instead, we have experienced and cataloged one particular history. in the only version we have, many different influences came together at once and enduringly changed what came afterward. scholars nonetheless have to work with the evidence available—and the incredible team of jones, theriault, and whyman have assembled copious data to document the key trends and evaluate their potential antecedents and implications. scholars who work in any particular policy area or subset of us policy-making institutions should not lose sight of the big picture. analyzing the development of energy or health policy without seeing it as part of a general expansion and stalemate would be incomplete, for example, just as tracking the workings of agencies or lobbying firms without noting their provenance would shortchange the foundational role of policy. given such a broad political transformation, however, any monocausal explanation is likely to fall short. although jones, theriault, and whyman are cognizant of the many important factors driving change, they concentrate on the role of social movements, especially protests sur- rounding civil rights, in coaxing the political system to broaden. i remain deeply skeptical of this explanation. protest activity certainly coincided with the policy- making period, but (as always) it is difficult to tease out causal forces with time-series plots alone. congress expanded its policy action in many areas that were not the subject of substantial protest and did not draw from demands of broad social movements. like interest group development, many social movements fol- lowed (rather than led) associated policy innovation. in addition, analogous broadening was occurring in other global political systems less tied to the us civil rights movement. the book does usefully dispel other theories based on single explanatory factors, such as critical elections, parti- san majorities in congress, and public opinion trends. but as with the role of protests, it is difficult to see the broadening reaching its full potential without these back- ground factors also being present. political science should also give the internal actors of the time period real agency in bringing about the expansion: many experienced presi- dents, legislators, and group leaders are widely credited by historians for working out passable compromises. despite the complexity of understanding causes, the great broadening has important lessons for contemporary politics. first, although keeping an issue off an agenda has long been seen as the critical second face of power, nearly everything is now on the political agenda in some form. the challenge for activists and policy entrepreneurs is instead fighting for attention against nearly everyone else to raise the salience of one issue among many, even for minor revisions updating prior policies. perspectives on politics book reviews | american politics https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core a second key lesson is that scholars and policy makers must be attentive to the many layers of policy that are now our inheritance. for example, even with a flowering of new policy ideas in the campaign season, the actual stimulus bills recently debated in congress tended to include long lists of incremental adjustments to prior policies alongside their headline initiatives. any new policy idea has to enter the thicket of current laws and institutions. although the great broadening itself is focused on congress, it should also persuade political scientists to give more attention to the bureaucracy and subnational governments. jones, theriault, and whyman have (per- haps inadvertently) illustrated why much of the action is no longer in congress. if the agenda is already wide (and if congress can barely update the many government func- tions it has already initiated), much of the innovation is likely to come in administrative rulemaking and state and local implementation. the great broadening is an impressive synthetic achieve- ment. it tackles macro-level questions with grace and attention to detail. it constitutes proof that political science can still add a new perspective, even about the institutions and periods scholars have studied most closely. gender differences in public opinion: values and pol- itical consequences. by mary-kate lizotte. philadelphia: temple university press, . p. $ . cloth, $ . paper. doi: . /s — leslie a. caughell , virginia wesleyan university lcaughell@vwu.edu the background for the us elections included a global pandemic that had already killed well over , americans, a president expressing at best tepid support for democratic institutions, and months-long black lives matter protests against structural racism. nevertheless, one thing about the election felt familiar to anyone who follows american politics—the ubiquitous coverage of gender gaps. these systemic differences in women and men’s evaluation of candidates, policies, or political party capture our attention because they remain a consistent presence in american politics. as important, they also influence the outcomes of american elections. gender gaps in policy preference create gender gaps in partisan identification and vote choice. yet despite their important consequences, the academic literature on gender gaps in policy preferences leaves many questions about their causes unanswered. mary-kate lizotte’s book, gender differences in public opinion, addresses these questions, exploring the role that values play in the creation of the gender gaps in policy preferences. lizotte offers us a new explanation for the gender gaps in political preferences: gender differences in prosocial values. women possess greater concern than men with the well-being of other people. as a result, she argues, women express lower levels of support for the use of force by the government and higher levels of support for regu- lations and government spending to protect the environ- ment, as well as for policies and government spending on social welfare programs. gender gaps in prosocial values also seem to explain large portions of gender gaps in support for gender roles, affirmative action, racial resent- ment, and gay rights. her mediation analysis indicates that two particular prosocial value types, universalism and benevolence, explain substantial portions of the gender gaps that exist on attitudes about the use of force, the environment, equal rights, and social welfare issues. gender differences in public opinion makes a meaning- ful contribution to the literature on gender gaps in policy preferences. much of this literature involves theories explaining gender gaps that fail to transcend policy domains. for example, explanations of gender differences in aggression relate to gender gaps in foreign policy preferences, but this theory does not readily explain the emergence of gender gaps on economic or social issues. in focusing on gender differences in values that underlie issue preferences, lizotte offers a theoretical framework for the development of gender gaps that transcends the piecemeal approach to explaining them that characterizes much of the scholarly literature on this topic. at the same time, lizotte compares the impact of prosocial value types on the development of gender gaps with that of other prominent explanations, including feminist consciousness, economic circumstances, and social role theory. consistently, her analysis suggests that prosocial values play a greater role in the development of gender gaps than other potential causes. her inclusion of these competing explanations provides the reader with a sense of the impact of prosocial values relative to other possible causes of the phenomenon, albeit often with less- than-ideal measures of those other possible causes. her careful analysis of how her theory performs relative to others represents a clear attempt to move the literature forward, not just by offering another competing explan- ation for the development of gender gaps but also by allowing us to evaluate and potentially discard other theories. yet as a reader, i found myself questioning whether lizotte missed opportunities to integrate existing theories into her framework and to resolve some of the seemingly disparate findings in the gender gaps literature. for example, lizotte could have integrated feminist consciousness and social role theory into her values frame- work. both of these explanations also involve values—in particular, values that are, to a large extent, prosocial. a feminist consciousness, as defined by pamela conover in “feminists and the gender gap” (journal of politics, [ ], ), means that an individual possesses an awareness of inequalities, demonstrates a willingness to use government to address those inequalities, and march | vol. /no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://doi.org/ . /s https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:lcaughell@vwu.edu https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core © journal of mediation and applied conflict analysis, , vol. , no. http://jmaca.maynoothuniversity.ie page | critical conflict resolution, systemic consciousness and systemic contractions michael d. english and derek sweetman abstract this paper offers an introduction to critical conflict resolution, a form of conflict resolution practice that addresses larger, systemic concerns while also focusing on the conflicts produced by systemic contradictions. it describes two forms of practice for these conflicts, emergent and evolutionary, as well as identifying the need to develop systemic consciousness in both practitioners and parties in order to produce real change. it provides suggestions for practitioners and conflict scholars as they engage with this developing area of practice. keywords conflict resolution, criticism, critical evaluation, systemic contractions, systemic consciousness introduction the critical conflict resolution project began as an effort to understand the role conflict resolution could play in conflicts that we identified as systemic. our work arose, initially, out of a desire to apply the tools of conflict resolution to the system-challenging conflicts at the time: the arab spring and the occupy movement in the united states.i these events served as a vehicle to help us generate a schema and vocabulary to describe situations that required something more than traditional third party intervention. today, one of the most obvious cases of a systemic conflict in the united states involves law enforcement and the african-american community, represented by the black lives matter movement. the cessation of hostilities between activists and the police is a laudable goal, as is the “resolution” of the immediate conflict; but in this conflict, bringing two parties to the table does not appear to have a long-lasting impact on how the police do their job or how activists relate to both perceived and real injustices perpetrated by law enforcement. this situation is true for those struggling not only in cities like baltimore and ferguson, but also in cairo and istanbul. this article will present an overview of the model of critical conflict resolution (ccr). ii while ccr employs and builds from concepts within peace and conflict studies, it also integrates insights from the critical philosophical tradition and therefore uses terminology that might be new (and somewhat awkward) to practitioners unfamiliar with the critical tradition. our goal is to help peace and conflict http://jmaca.maynoothuniversity.ie/ © journal of mediation and applied conflict analysis, , vol. , no. http://jmaca.maynoothuniversity.ie page | studies reengage with this tradition and its knowledge, which for the better part of our field’s history was mystified by cold war political posturing, in order to address conflicts that are not otherwise amenable to traditional third-party intervention. it is important to note that our usage of the term critical denotes something more substantial than what is typically described as critical thinking. as will be discussed later, the critical tradition offers a way of appreciating the importance of historical developments on social conflicts in a manner that meshes both the personal and the material. another way of saying this might be to argue that we are attempting to root a specialized version of critical thinking in the normative, social justice orientation of peace and conflict studies. critical conflict resolution can assist practitioners and analysts in cultivating an awareness of systemic factors or what we refer to as developing a systemic consciousness. given the exceedingly complex contemporary social struggles in which race, gender, and economic injustice sit at the forefront, we must develop additional tools for analysing and intervening in situations where traditional third party practice alone is insufficient. critical conflict resolution postulates that in cases of systemic conflict, conflict occurs on at two levels, the manifest level and the system level. a conflict is manifest when it is visible and the parties involved recognize themselves to be in a situation that cannot be resolved through a simple negotiation or termination of relationship.iii the history of conflict resolution and alternative dispute resolution (adr) is premised on the ability of third parties to intervene at this level, working to reduce hostilities, clarify problems, and in the best cases, empower the parties to generate mutually agreeable solutions. given that many social conflicts are not also systemic conflicts, these processes generally do the trick and speak decidedly about the ability of people to learn and use communicative practices to resolve their differences. however, in cases of systemic conflict, we are confronted with conflicts that resist resolution or, in some cases, where the same type of conflict recurs between other parties in other locations. we term these conflicts reproduced conflicts. settlements in these situations are possible, but often temporary and subject to repeated breakdowns. this failure is rarely due to character flaws or the bad faith of individual actors; rather, failure is a result of structural and cultural factors that influence both the conflict and the parties involved. we identify these factors as operating at the system level because they structure the world in which the parties (and the intervenors) live; they provide us with both the language and meaning frameworks we use to process our experiences, as well as normalize the operations of power used to reproduce the rules governing a given system. we are rarely conscious of the influence of systemic factors in our daily lives, and typically even less so when engaged in our practice. there may be perfectly good reasons for reaching a negotiated settlement, but in systemic conflicts a negotiated settlement will not prevent a reoccurrence of the conflict. only by changing the underlying system dynamics can the contradiction generating the antagonism be transformed and, hopefully, moved down a path toward resolution, which should reduce or eliminate the reproduced conflicts created by this contradiction. systemic conflict cannot be tackled by focusing only on the few bad apples or trimming the rot at the top. http://jmaca.maynoothuniversity.ie/ © journal of mediation and applied conflict analysis, , vol. , no. http://jmaca.maynoothuniversity.ie page | seeing the contradiction: the case of ferguson before going any further, we want to present an example to help illustrate the significance between recognizing conflict as manifest and recognizing conflict as systemic. the shooting death of michael brown in by ferguson, missouri police officer darren wilson set off a wave of protests across the united states. brown was one of several african american men shot and killed by police officers that year. the details leading up to the incident, as well as those of the actual killing of brown are contested. at the manifest level, the community of ferguson demanded brown’s death be investigated as part of a history of mistreatment of african americans by the police department, and the officer involved charged with a crime. the ferguson police, both in defence of officer wilson and in opposition to what it felt was an inaccurate depiction of its service to the community, portrayed brown as a dangerous thug and accused those involved in the protests as b e i n g manipulated by outside agitators. a typical analysis conducted by a third party would likely conclude that the protestors and the police are the two major stakeholder groups, and that the best course of action in this conflict would be to bring leaders from the police and activists together for some kind of facilitated dialogue or problem-solving process. other stakeholders from local government and organizations might also be included. the work of the mediator would likely focus on identifying a mutually agreeable solution to the problem between police and protestors. but what in this case is the actual problem? and will an agreement between police and protestors actually resolve it? here, of course, is where our concern with issues of power and justice make it difficult to accept that third party practice focused on improving communication can provide a path to resolution. for the police, the problem is often the act of protest itself, which is viewed both as destructive and a challenge to the police’s mandate to maintain social order within a specific geographic location. from this view, the killing of michael brown is tragic, but brown’s failure to comply with officer wilson instigated the situation and as such, the community’s response is unjustified. respect for police authority is the foremost solution to this problem. on the other side, community members, and not just those engaged in the protests, note that the police department has a history of abusing its power and acting against the well-being of the community. the killing of michael brown was the last straw, and the status quo is no longer worth returning to if the law does not prosecute those charged with upholding it for violating their duty. respect for the community is the primary solution to this problem, and this cannot happen without replacing police leadership and holding officers accountable. both solutions are framed as zero-sum propositions and intentionally so, to demonstrate how unsatisfactory a negotiated settlement is likely to be in such a situation. outside investigations later vindicated the community’s perception of the police, while at the same time, these same investigations found little evidence of wrongdoing to prosecute officer wilson for brown’s death. while tensions might exist between activists and the police, neither activists nor the police can resolve the contradiction that rests at the centre of this conflict, which extends far beyond the series of events that led to brown’s death and wilson’s dismissal. developing an awareness of the systemic level http://jmaca.maynoothuniversity.ie/ © journal of mediation and applied conflict analysis, , vol. , no. http://jmaca.maynoothuniversity.ie page | and systemic factors allows practitioners to see beyond the immediate situation, and to historicize the case before them. brown’s death served as a catalyst for a collective series of actions in protest of police shootings, yet the conflict is ultimately not about michael brown or the ferguson police department. it is about the treatment of african-american and low-income communities by police, the state agency often responsible for providing services in areas that face extreme levels of poverty and unemployment. the police have no way of changing these economic conditions. improving relations between the police and the communities they serve is a laudable goal, but one that offers little in terms of preventing a reoccurrence of the conflict in ferguson or in other communities facing similar conditions. necessary concepts the ability of intervenors to recognize systemic factors in such conflicts is built upon two bedrock concepts, systemic contradiction and systemic consciousness. while inspired by marxist analysis that sees economic contradictions as the driving force of history, this conception of systemic contradiction is more concerned with form than content. iv in any complex system, there are elements that are in tension with one another where that tension cannot, in a real sense, be “resolved” in a way that keeps the benefits of the separate elements and simultaneously, removes the negative consequences of the interactions. the ability to resolve tension in a system allows us to differentiate between systemic problems, which can be addressed by modifying individual elements, and systemic contradictions, which cannot be resolved within the context of the existing system. the contradictions may be economic, but they may also be cultural, structural, or even exist in a currently-unobserved form. systemic contradictions become evident to us in the world through the recognition of reproduced conflicts. we recognize that a system with serious contradictions can persist for a very long time, and that the presence of contradictions does not mean a system is weak or failing. all large systems will include some contradictions and, as a result, one of our roles is to identify and transform destructive contradictions. we argue that these systemic contradictions will create conflict that repeats throughout the system. it is important to realize that while these reproduced conflicts share a common “root cause” (the contradiction itself), this does not mean two conflicts must be identical to be classified as reproduced. similarly, not all conflicts that appear significantly similar are related in this way. identifying true reproduced conflicts is one of the key challenges of ccr, and one that needs additional work. this allows us to recognize that ferguson is a case of reproduced conflict, where, the systemic contradiction is created by a mix of economic and historical factors. one factor that encourages this conclusion is the demographic makeup of the community. any intervenor must be curious about the geographic dispersal of people, especially when the conflict reveals disparities along racial and economic lines. the predominantly african american composition of ferguson clashed quite visibly on national television with what was perceived to be the predominantly white composition of the police department, state and local officials. race is therefore a factor, but so also is class. it comes as little surprise that news reports focused on ferguson’s poverty as soon clashes broke out, revealing statistics that one in four http://jmaca.maynoothuniversity.ie/ © journal of mediation and applied conflict analysis, , vol. , no. http://jmaca.maynoothuniversity.ie page | persons in the community lived in poverty. v while it is always tempting to blame one of these factors as the sole cause, such simplistic analysis misses the dynamic relationship these factors have structured between the police and the community. the second necessary concept is systemic consciousness, which we derive from the work of paolo freire, who describes conscientizaҫāo (conscientization) as “the deepening of the attitude of awareness characteristic of all emergence” ( , p. ). for freire, this awareness arises out of an individual’s ability to recognize that they are “in a situation,” meaning that they live within a system of forces and meanings that shape their opportunities and outcomes. this awareness is created through a process of critical thinking that results in the situation “ceas[ing] to present itself as a dense, enveloping reality or a tormenting blind alley,” from which the individual can “perceive it as an objective-problematic situation” (ibid, p. ). freire recognizes that “intervention” is impossible without “emergence” from the situation through systemic consciousness. for intervenors, the development of a personal systemic consciousness is what allows third parties to enter situations like the one in ferguson with the foresight that the work to be done is something more than a negotiated settlement between the parties, even though that may be the starting point. here again, we move beyond just knowing the history of the immediate parties involved, but the history of relations between groups, communities, and organizations. where did the relationship pattern emerge and what continues to reproduce the economic and/or social disparities that enforce the relationship? we also become keenly aware of how groups recognize shared grievances in events occurring outside their geographic boundaries, and how the ability to access information on demand replaces old notions that the parties to the conflict are those immediately present. now, actors from across the globe can shape and influence how parties understand even the most l o c a l of conflicts and the strategies they use to contest. the shooting of michael brown must be contextualized alongside a variety of similar cases that polarized communities, including other recent deaths such as tamir rice and freddie grey, but also older incidents such as the shootings of amadou diallo and timothy thomas. conflict between the police and african-american communities span the whole of u.s. history, and yet, there is a temptation when such events arise every decade or so to assume, rather paradoxically, that this conflict is either new or already resolved. from these two concepts, it is possible to map out a new model of conflict resolution that intends to address systemic conflicts. outline of the ccr approach the critical conflict resolution approach conceives of systemic conflict and its intervention as a process that can be divided into four parts: manifestation, emergent practice, evolutionary practice and critical evaluation. it is imperative to remember that the impetus behind the critical approach is to address the contradiction, not simply the manifested, reproduced conflict. http://jmaca.maynoothuniversity.ie/ © journal of mediation and applied conflict analysis, , vol. , no. http://jmaca.maynoothuniversity.ie page | manifestation the first step in the ccr approach is for the intervenor to evaluate the manifestation of the conflict, and to distinguish whether the conflict is systemic or localized. contradictions are rarely visible to the eye, yet they materialize in the form of conflicts that can be observed in the social world. to make such an evaluation, the intervenor analyses the situation for the presence of a contradiction or contradictions that might be feeding the antagonism between the parties. for instance, community outrage over injustices rarely erupt as the result of one death, even if media coverage and official explanations simplify such events by reporting a causal linkage between the two. michael brown’s death in ferguson and mohamed bouazizi’s self- immolation in tunisia, which helped launch the arab spring, speak to larger structural antagonisms, which often play out in relations between police forces and populations. recognizing the tools for this analysis are still underdeveloped, we can provide three initial suggestions related to distinguishing between systemic and localized conflicts.vi the first of these is simply to recognize repetition. if the “same” conflict arises repeatedly either between the parties or in different locations under similar circumstances, this is a good indication that there is an underlying systemic contradiction contributing to the manifestation of this conflict. this was the primary insight of black lives matter, helping others see fatal interactions between police and unarmed african-american men as symptomatic instead of isolated episodes. the second suggestion is to closely examine hard-to-resolve conflicts. all practitioners have had the experience of intervening in a conflict where they feel the solution seems obvious, and yet, one (or more) of the parties refuses to accept, or even consider it. this additional resistance might reveal the presence of systemic factors, particularly when dynamics such as race, class, and gender are assumed inconsequential to achieving an agreement. a third suggestion is to look for repeated sub-optimal outcomes in conflict resolution. one of the difficulties in identifying contradictions is that reproduced conflicts can appear amenable to negotiated settlement. this is in part because the system has already influenced what the parties see as acceptable (or even possible) outcomes. this narrowing of possibility pressures parties toward immediate solutions, and often prevents parties from pushing the matter far enough to reveal that the system itself is implicated. since most conflict resolution approaches value party autonomy and agency over optimal certainty, practitioners often have a good sense of when parties may have left gains “on the table.” while settlements may satisfy a need for closure or material compensation, they are rarely comprehensive. this distance between accepted and optimal outcomes may point to systemic conflicts. after a conflict has been recognized as systemic, intervention takes place in three separate parts of ccr: emergent practice, evolutionary practice, and critical evaluation. http://jmaca.maynoothuniversity.ie/ © journal of mediation and applied conflict analysis, , vol. , no. http://jmaca.maynoothuniversity.ie page | emergent practice “emergent practice” is our term for intervention targeted at the manifest level, as opposed to intervention focusing on the contradictions at the system level. practitioners at this level are the “first responders” of ccr. primarily, emergent practice occurs at the interpersonal and community levels, but it is not limited to these. on its face, emergent practice looks similar to traditional conflict resolution practice, with one important difference. it would be unethical to allow people to suffer in conflicts when we could otherwise assist with the tools of conflict resolution, even if such a resolution would not resolve the underlying contradiction that is reproduced in the conflict. however, simply mitigating the damage of the contradiction will allow the contradiction to persist. therefore, we must add systemic consciousness to our practice to promote this resolution. systemic consciousness applies to both the practitioner and the parties in the conflict. in traditional conflict resolution, we are not only helping parties resolve their conflicts, but also trying to teach them to use similar tools to resolve conflicts in their future. this pedagogical function of conflict resolution is seldom recognized, but should be acknowledged as a crucial component of our work. ccr sees this act of teaching as a vital tool for building systemic consciousness within the parties. as we teach parties skills of conflict resolution during our practice, we need to teach the skills of systemic consciousness. clearly, this also entails cultivating systemic consciousness within themselves that is attentive to the situation of the parties and the situation in which the practitioner finds herself, which makes this a more complex activity than what is generally described as reflective practice.vii four basic principles guide practice at the manifest level. first, we should simply help. most (if not all) systemic contradictions cannot be resolved in a single case, but this does not mean we should allow the reproduced conflicts to continue. following schoeny and warfield ( ), we recognize the moral dilemma with pneumatic models of social change that claim enough suffering will lead to change. one of the strong ethical obligations we have as practitioners is to act when we expect our assistance will make a difference. hopefully, through developing systemic consciousness, we will learn to separate interventions that reinforce contradiction from those that resist or at least do not assist it. second, we must seek connections between conflicts. the bureaucratized nature of much conflict resolution work encourages practitioners to treat each conflict as a separate “case,” to be completed and filed away. in some situations, adr programs actively require this kind of thinking, in part to prevent breaches in client confidentiality. however, to see reproduced conflicts, we must be able to investigate across these “case” boundaries. only critical reflection and review can help with this. third, the people most effected by a contradiction are likely in the best position to help us understand it. first responders are also field researchers. the raw data that we use to generate our analysis comes from the parties in conflict and is dependent, to a large extent, on their interpretation of their experience. practitioners at the emergent level should appreciate the unique research aspect of their work, and seek to engage parties when possible as co- constructors of knowledge. http://jmaca.maynoothuniversity.ie/ © journal of mediation and applied conflict analysis, , vol. , no. http://jmaca.maynoothuniversity.ie page | finally, no one is a “solo practitioner.” ccr is collective work to resolve collective problems, practiced through a community of practitioners and scholars. to participate in this community, you must share your knowledge and experiences with fellow practitioners, researchers, and the broader public. this act of sharing moves us from emergent practice into evolutionary practice. evolutionary practice at first, what we call “evolutionary practice” may not often seem like conflict practice, at least in the traditional sense. however, the concept of mediation itself provides a bridge between traditional and evolutionary approaches. when conflict resolution scholars and practitioners speak of mediation, they are referring to a host of processes that involve a third party inserting herself between parties in a conflict to assist in the conflict’s resolution. yet this interpretation emphasizes only one aspect of mediation. raymond williams writes that, instead, there are two important features of “mediation.” looking back to chaucer, williams recognizes that “mediation” functions both to represent “interceding between adversaries, with a strong sense of reconciling them” and “a means of transmission – or agency as a medium” ( , p. ). viii while conflict resolution has focused extensively on the first, our work requires that we also develop and deploy mediation in this second sense, which has been developed through marxist analysis into “one of the essential processes not only of consciousness, but of ideology” (ibid, p. ). evolutionary practice is intervention made into the mediated world of consciousness and ideology. since there is no way to “speak” to the system itself, there is no way to mediate its contradictions in the first sense. we must therefore promote action through interventions that seek to reform, reconstitute, or replace the existing system to resolve the contradictions. evolutionary activity aims to demystify that which obscures the true contradictory reality of a given system. pierre bourdieu, speaking in the context of neoliberalism, noted that a system has “the means of making itself true and empirically verifiable” ( , np). as an intervention, such practice confronts the rules guiding social interactions within the system and contests discourses that support unjust exercises of power. there are existing forms of conflict resolution practice that operate in an evolutionary fashion, from narrative intervention (cobb, ) to media engagement (galtung & fischer, ) to peace and/or critical education (hooks, ; giroux, ). other forms of evolutionary practice are less likely to be considered traditional conflict resolution. this includes interventions in the political system that are specifically not consensus-driven, such as activism, as well as activities, particularly efforts in the realm of music, art, film, and literature, undertaken to interfere with the system’s ability to decide what is “true.” often, these interventions take the form of satire that undermines truth claims, a prime example of which is the genre of war satires epitomized by joseph heller’s catch- . another example, pussy riot’s “i can’t breathe,” combines political activism and art in an effort to reach audiences that might otherwise be oblivious to injustices that happen outside of their own local context. ix to summarise, there are four basic principles that support evolutionary or, more specifically, http://jmaca.maynoothuniversity.ie/ © journal of mediation and applied conflict analysis, , vol. , no. http://jmaca.maynoothuniversity.ie page | within the individuals within the system. this sounds daunting, but it is simply a call for more critical reflection among the parties to the system. next, we recognize that systemic contradictions do not naturally resolve in the hegelian sense, or inevitably lead to systemic revolution, in the simplistic marxist sense. instead, the process is long and difficult, thus “evolutionary” instead of “revolutionary.” additionally, addressing these contradictions on the systemic level has the potential to produce additional reproduced conflicts, at least in the short term. which is closely related to the next insight; interventions upon the system, if in any way effective, will change the nature of the system. we must constantly re-evaluate the system and look for variations in reproduced conflicts. resolving systemic contradictions is a reflexive process, which means that neither our analysis, nor our interventions can be cookie cutter. finally, and unlike the manifest level, there are many targets and sites for intervention at the system level. practitioners are not restricted to working only with the parties; they can expand their vision work toward changing the conditions in which the conflict takes place. for example, evolutionary practitioners might focus on helping individuals see the damage caused by the systemic contradictions and/or see how the contradiction leads to reproduced conflict. they could also provide the language, metaphors, or analogies that allow us to speak of issues previously unspeakable, a task often left to the humanities, whether art in the sense of picasso’s masterpiece guernica or philosophy, when seen through gilles deleuze and felix guittari’s lens as an engine of concept-creation ( , p. ). both emergent and evolutionary practice must be supported by scholarly work, which in this case we call critical evaluation. critical evaluation scholarship and research remain an essential third form of practice in ccr. critical evaluation stresses the interdisciplinary nature of peace and conflict studies, but seeks to encourage the creation of more scholarship directed specifically at systemic conflicts and systemic interventions. in the first instance, critical evaluation reflects the traditional aims of academic production, yet places the emphasis on researchers to, when possible, address both the manifest and systemic levels. conflict experts tend towards being area specialists. while that depth of knowledge is important, it too often becomes an excuse for viewing their conflict as unique, rather than an opportunity to make connections with other cases, or investigate the role of global factors external to the immediate situation. in the second instance, critical evaluation also stresses the need for more research on designing and evaluating systemic interventions. researchers working on these issues must do a better job of engaging both emergent practitioners and parties to explore what types of interventions and practices are best suited to doing the most immediate good while also addressing the systemic contradictions. no academic discipline or field has a monopoly on truth about systems and conflict, which means there are endless possibilities for collaboration across departments and organizations. http://jmaca.maynoothuniversity.ie/ © journal of mediation and applied conflict analysis, , vol. , no. http://jmaca.maynoothuniversity.ie page | communication is free and it is becoming increasingly easier to speak with people all over the world. researchers must stretch beyond their departments and especially beyond academia, to engage those closest to manifest conflicts. implications of ccr for practitioners and scholars in closing, we would like to briefly outline a few of the implications of ccr for practitioners and scholars in the field of peace and conflict studies. first, it is no longer enough to speak simply of reflective practice. developing a systemic consciousness is the next evolutionary step for the field, and such an activity requires that we apply systemic awareness not only to our interventions, but also our work as researchers and teachers. second, we must place more emphasis on distinguishing systemic conflicts from localized conflicts. connections between the local and the global are interlinked today more than at any other period in history. there is a pressing need to recognize how structural factors have helped structure the relationship between antagonistic parties. third, there is a need for multi-level listening. listening to the parties is always a crucial part of interventions and research, but we must also learn to hear the context, which remains unspoken by the parties. this can be done in part by proper background research, but it also requires us to use the tools of discourse and narrative analysis to deconstruct the rules guiding the parties’ interactions and to search for meaning in silences and topics that remain unaddressed. fourth, we must participate in dialogue across both professional and academic divides. there may not be final answers to our questions, but that should not prevent us from trying. borrowing from marx, we can say that the point of conflict resolution is to change the world, not comprehensively document it. this cannot happen if scholars refuse to engage with practitioners, or if practitioners dismiss scholarship as disconnected from the realm of the practical. the development of ccr will be a collaborative process and we encourage both those new to the field and those already committed to join us its elaboration. http://jmaca.maynoothuniversity.ie/ © journal of mediation and applied conflict analysis, , vol. , no. http://jmaca.maynoothuniversity.ie page | references bourdieu, p. ( ) “the essence of neoliberalism”. le monde diplomatique, december, http://mondediplo.com/ / / bourdieu, np. jeremy j. shapiro, translator. cobb, s. ( ) speaking of violence: the politics and poetics of narrative dynamics in conflict resolution. new york, ny: oxford university press. deleuze, g. and f.guattari ( ) what is philosophy? london: verso books. freire, p. ( ) pedagogy of the oppressed. new york, ny: continuum. galtung, j. and d. fischer ( ) “high road, low road: charting the course for peace journalism” in “johan galtung: pioneer of peace research”, springerbriefs on pioneers in science and practice . berlin, ger: springer: – , doi: . / - - - - _ . giroux, h. ( ) pedagogy and the politics of hope: theory, culture, and schooling. boulder, co: westview press. hooks, b. ( ) teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom new york, ny: routledge. schoeny, m., w.warfield ( ) reconnecting systems maintenance with social justice: a critical role for conflict resolution. negotiation journal ( ): – , doi: . /a: . williams, r. ( ) keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society, rev. ed. new york, ny: oxford university press. notes i aspects of this article were presented at the and association for conflict resolution annual conferences as ““critical conflict resolution: practice in the new normal” and “critical work in communities: transforming systemic violence.” an early formulation of our thinking was published in english, m.d. and d. sweetman, “critical conflict resolution: notes on its development and key concepts,” unrest magazine, october , https://unrestmagazine.com/ / / /critical- conflict-resolution/. readers of both articles will note similarity, but also differences that we hope clarify areas of prior confusion and expand the applicability of the work. ii toren hansen first used the term “critical conflict resolution” in a article of the same name. readers of both articles will notice a significant diversion from hansen’s usage, even if we do share a similar orientation. iii this definition finds its root in kriesberg’s definition of a social conflict. see kriesberg, l. . “social conflict theories and conflict resolution”. peace & change , no. – : pp. - . doi: . /j. - . .tb . x. iv the role of contradiction in marxist theory has been discussed extensively. see althusser, l. . “contradiction and overdetermination”. new left review, no. : – ; williams, r. “base and http://jmaca.maynoothuniversity.ie/ http://mondediplo.com/ / / bourdieu https://unrestmagazine.com/ / / /critical-conflict-resolution/ https://unrestmagazine.com/ / / /critical-conflict-resolution/ © journal of mediation and applied conflict analysis, , vol. , no. http://jmaca.maynoothuniversity.ie page | superstructure in marxist cultural theory . new left review, no. : pp. – ; giddens, a. . central problems in social theory: action, structure, and contradiction in social analysis. berkeley, ca: university of california press. v see for instance http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hit-by-poverty-ferguson-reflects-the-new- suburbs/ vi helpfully, critical disciplines such as cultural studies have begun to develop tools for seeing beyond manifestations and behaviors to the contradictions behind them. see for instance hebdige, d. subculture: the meaning of style, new accents (new york, ny: routledge, ). vii see warfield, w. and cheldelin, s. “reflections on reflective practice,” in from conflict resolution to social justice: the work and legacy of wallace warfield, ed. pfund, a. (new york, ny: bloomsbury publishing, ), pp. – . viii williams identifies a third meaning of mediation, “division or halving,” but concludes this is “now obsolete.” ix pussy riot’s work was published on the free streaming website youtube in response to the death of eric garner. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxcta bqf a biographies dr. michael d. english is an adjunct lecturer at the school for conflict analysis and resolution at george mason university. derek sweetman is a phd candidate at the school for conflict analysis and resolution at george mason university and the dispute resolution director for the better business bureau of metropolitan washington, dc and eastern pa. http://jmaca.maynoothuniversity.ie/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hit-by-poverty-ferguson-reflects-the-new-suburbs/ http://www.cbsnews.com/news/hit-by-poverty-ferguson-reflects-the-new-suburbs/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=dxcta bqf a s xjed .. editorial endurance the ghost light, an illuminated bulb placed center stage in an otherwise darkened theatre, has become one of the most poignant and frequently cited theatrical sym- bols of the covid- pandemic. part superstition, part safety measure, the ghost light holds space for absent bodies, living and dead, and anticipates the moment of return, when stage crew, actors, and audience will fill the space once more. ghost lights have become stars in their own right in recent months, inspiring news sto- ries, academic associations, recirculated photo essays, and, in my home town of toronto, ontario, a new company dedicated to providing mentorship and train- ing for theatre artists during lockdown. matthew gilson’s beautiful photo- graphs of ghost lights in chicago theatres grace this issue’s cover and interior (see fig. ), testifying to the ghost light’s power as a symbol of hope and endurance. the articles gathered in this issue also speak to the power and pain of endurance, while offering glimmers of hope. although written well before any of us knew what would bring, in their documentation of past lives and theatrical moments, figure . chicago shakespeare theater, jentes family courtyard theater. set for short shakespeare! macbeth, with scenic design by scott davis. photo: © matthew gilson, all rights reserved. © american society for theatre research theatre survey ( ), , – doi: . /s x terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core they remind us of the persistence of performance, of its capacity to linger long after the crowds have disappeared. in “katherine dunham’s global method and the embodied politics of dance’s everyday,” harmony bench and kate elswit meticulously track the global move- ments of african american dancer and choreographer katherine dunham as she toured with her company in the s. drawing on data gathered as part of their digital humanities project, dunham’s data: katherine dunham and digital methods for dance historical inquiry, they drill down to the scale of the “everyday” to “understand better the global method necessary for her company’s survival, and how the ongoing pursuit of solvency propelled her, her performers, and her work into the world.” what emerges is an account of a woman in constant motion who endured financial challenges, illness, and a grueling schedule for the sake of the people she employed and the hope of a better life. bench and elswit’s account of dunham’s everyday as a black artist resonates in new ways in the wake of the most recent black lives matter protests and ongoing public discourse about anti-black racism and institutional culpability. rashna darius nicholson writes about a different kind of endurance in “a christy minstrel, a harlequin, or an ancient persian”?: opera, hindustani classical music, and the origins of the popular south asian ‘musical.’” here, nicholson challenges received narratives of the history of hindustani music by pointing to the influence of italian opera on performers and musicians as they migrated to bombay in the mid-nineteenth century and participated in the forma- tion of the “powerful pan-asian performance phenomenon” known as parsi the- atre. “by citing the formative signifier ‘opera,’” nicholson asserts, “both parsi theatre and its numerous, localized south and southeast asian imitations capital- ized on aesthetic and linguistic associations of high civilization, refinement, and cultural domination within a global entertainment economy.” opera’s influence endures today in the descendants of parsi theatre, most notably bollywood cinema. the experiences of theatre artists returning to the theatre after a period of dev- astating loss is the focus of nick underwood’s article, “the yiddish art theatre in paris after the holocaust, – .” working from rich archival material, underwood recounts the final july performance of the parisian yiddish avant-garde theatre (parizer yidisher avangard teater / pyat), an important s yiddish theatre troupe, and then offers a detailed analysis of the newly formed yiddish art theatre (yidisher kunst teater / ykut). for these artists, the- atre was essential to the revitalization of yiddish culture after the horrors of the holocaust. it gave them an opportunity not only to document and reflect upon their lives during the war but also to carve out a path toward reintegration into “the changing and chaotic postwar french cultural, social, and political landscape.” themes of survival and endurance likewise shape dror harari’s “what remains? a critical historiography of s– s israeli lost performance-based works.” zeroing in on the performative turn in israeli art in the s and s and the concomitant development of performance-related practices, harari asks why documented action and performance works from this period have been excluded, lost, or otherwise overlooked in “the historical memory and historiography of israeli art.” the answer, harari suggests, has much to do with art scholars’ initial prejudice against performance art during the s, which has, in turn, informed endurance terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core subsequent histories of the period. seeking to redress this historiographic oversight, harari returns to the personal archives and collections of the artists themselves, where he glimpses long-forgotten performances and faces new challenges. such archives, he suggests, are “extensions of the artists’ embodied and lived memory—and, therefore, saturated, haphazard, elusive.” through his conversations with artists like nonagenarian dov or ner, harari encounters the possibilities as well as the limits of documentation and memory. caroline weist investigates darker elements of memory and endurance in “‘i’ll wait’: crip-queer temporality and reproductive futurism in musical adaptations of dürrenmatt’s der besuch der alten dame (the visit of the old lady),” tracing the fascinating history of swiss playwright friedrich dürrenmatt’s “tragic comedy,” der besuch der alten dame. the play centers on claire zachanassian, an elderly billionairess who returns to her bankrupt hometown of güllen after four decades with revenge on her mind. she proposes to save the town by giving it one of her billions but only on the condition that they kill alfred, the man who fathered her child and then betrayed her. drawing on queer and crip theory, weist analyzes the “tangled temporality” of dürrenmatt’s play and its three subsequent adaptations, including kander and ebb’s the visit: a new musical, arguing that “the foundation of dürrenmatt’s play rests on the usurpation of the gülleners’ desired timeline by claire’s unconventional one —a temporality that i contend is inherently crip in a way that is also inherently queer.” however, later adaptations departed from the play’s most subversive aspects, “curtail[ing] the perceived physical, sexual, and temporal excesses of the protagonist to fit the conventional genre” of the musical. underlying weist’s sophisticated reading are two important questions: what endures through adapta- tion? what is lost? • • • a final note: this issue marks the end of my tenure as editor, and so i would like to take this opportunity to thank the wonderful people who have supported me on this journey: holly o’neill and jonathan geffner at cambridge university press; associate editor (soon to be editor!) brandi wilkins catanese; book review editors erika t. lin and donovan sherman; assistant editor shannon hughes; and copyeditor extraordinaire michael gnat. thanks as well to the members of the theatre survey editorial board and to the members of the astr publications committee, led by two dynamic vice presidents for publications, esther kim lee and dorothy chansky. it has been a tremendous honor to edit theatre survey these past two years, and although the world around us looks very different from the world when i started my journey, i draw hope from the image of the ghost light and the many perfor- mances that continue online. i also recognize the crucial work that lies ahead for scholars like me—a white, middle-class, cis-gender canadian—as we contend with our complicity in white supremacist structures and cultural arenas, including academic journals. i have been fortunate in these past two years to have had a col- league like brandi wilkins catanese, who has offered thoughtful corrections at important moments. i am grateful for her patience, advice, and collegiality, and am thrilled to be passing the journal into her very capable hands. i trust that theatre survey and the community it serves will be the better for it. theatre survey terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core notes lindsey wilson, “why do broadway theatres keep a ‘ghost light’ burning on the stage?,” september , www.playbill.com/article/ask-playbillcom-the-ghost-light-com- , accessed may . katie daubs, “a ‘ghost light’ has brightened the stage for more than a month at the royal alex, as theatre faces its second pandemic,” toronto star, april , www.thestar.com/news/insight/ / / /a-ghost-light-has-brightened-the-stage-for-a-month-at-the-royal-alex-as-theatre-faces-its-second- pandemic.html, accessed may . erin hurley, “catr coronavirus response,” email communication, may . matthew gilson, “leave the light on,” chicago reader, march , www.chicagoreader.com/chi- cago/leave-the-light-on/content?oid= , accessed may . glenn sumi, “meet the bright lights behind theatre mentorship platform ghostlight,” now, may , https://nowtoronto.com/lifestyle/education/ghostlight-theatre-mentorship-graham-abbey/, accessed may . cite this article: ( ). endurance. theatre survey , – . https://doi.org/ . / s x endurance terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.playbill.com/article/ask-playbillcom-the-ghost-light-com- https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/ / / /a-ghost-light-has-brightened-the-stage-for-a-month-at-the-royal-alex-as-theatre-faces-its-second-pandemic.html https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/ / / /a-ghost-light-has-brightened-the-stage-for-a-month-at-the-royal-alex-as-theatre-faces-its-second-pandemic.html https://www.thestar.com/news/insight/ / / /a-ghost-light-has-brightened-the-stage-for-a-month-at-the-royal-alex-as-theatre-faces-its-second-pandemic.html https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/leave-the-light-on/content?oid= https://www.chicagoreader.com/chicago/leave-the-light-on/content?oid= https://nowtoronto.com/lifestyle/education/ghostlight-theatre-mentorship-graham-abbey/ https://nowtoronto.com/lifestyle/education/ghostlight-theatre-mentorship-graham-abbey/ https://doi.org/ . /s x https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core 	endurance 	notes covid- , social media, and the role of the public physician review - advances in ckd blood purif covid- , social media, and the role of the public physician joel m. topf a paul n. williams b adepartment of medicine, oakland university william beaumont school of medicine, rochester michigan, rochester, mi, usa; bdepartment of medicine, lewis katz school of medicine at temple university hospital, philadelphia, pa, usa received: september , accepted: october , published online: january , joel m. topf oakland university william beaumont school of medicine mile road, suite rochester, mn (usa) joel.topf @ gmail.com © s. karger ag, baselkarger@karger.com www.karger.com/bpu doi: . / keywords social media · twitter · youtube · covid- · sarscov · public health · infodemic abstract the covid- pandemic has resulted in an avalanche of in- formation, much of it false or misleading. social media posts with misleading or dangerous opinions and analyses are of- ten amplified by celebrities and social media influencers; these posts have contributed substantially to this avalanche of information. an emerging force in this information info- demic is public physicians, doctors who view a public pres- ence as a large segment of their mission. these physicians bring authority and real-world experience to the covid- discussion. to investigate the role of public physicians, we interviewed a convenience cohort of physicians who have played a role in the infodemic. we asked the physicians about how their roles have changed, how their audience has changed, what role politics plays, and how they address mis- information. the physicians noted increased audience size with an increased focus on the pandemic. most avoided con- fronting politics, but others found it unavoidable or that even if they tried to avoide it, it would be brought up by their audience. the physicians felt that confronting and correct- ing misinformation was a core part of their mission. public physicians on social media are a new occurrence and are an important part of fighting online misinformation. © s. karger ag, basel introduction the coronavirus pandemic of is the first global health crisis in the age of social media. during this pan- demic, there have been countless examples of social me- dia being used to both mitigate and, unfortunately, prop- agate harm. infodemic is used to describe the “overabun- dance” of information in response to an epidemic and applies equally to factual information as well as misinfor- mation [ ]. the spread of this information can be com- pared to the pandemic itself, but the frictionless commu- nication inherent in social media allows information to spread even faster than the virus [ ]. social media is equally efficient at spreading informa- tion as misinformation, and the nature of social media results in celebrities and influencers having outsized im- pact on what information is spread [ ]. widely known public figures making false and misleading claims, such as advocating for the use of unproven or potentially dan- topf/williamsblood purif doi: . / gerous therapies, can cause public harm and exacerbate the outbreak [ ]. in january , a belgian physician, kris van kerckhoven, told the newspaper het laatste nieuws that g was life-threatening and linked to the coronavirus. the newspaper quickly issued a correction and deleted the article, but it was too late. anti- g groups began spreading the rumor. in early april, celebrities started inflating the rumor by posting it to twitter and instagram [ ]. this resulted in spate of arson attacks on g cell towers across europe [ ]. even when not overtly harmful, the sheer volume of dubious or not useful information poses the risk of drowning out more useful information. one study exam- ined videos (with nearly . billion total views at the time of publication) about coronavirus posted to tiktok, the popular video-based social media platform, and found that there was little to no useful information to be found [ ]. a study of youtube videos about coronavirus categorized % of them as being useful, % as mislead- ing, and % neither useful nor misleading, while anoth- er found that over a quarter of youtube videos about coronavirus contained misleading information [ , ]. this propagation of misleading or nonfactual infor- mation on social media has the obvious potential for harm. individuals who use social media as their primary source of information are more likely to have conspiracy- related beliefs about coronavirus and less likely to engage in health-protective behaviors [ ]. social media, due to its algorithmic design has the capacity to create “filter bub- bles,” a monoculture where an individual’s biases are re- flected back to them by other like-minded people, poten- tially reinforcing untrue or dangerous beliefs [ ]. addi- tionally, on platforms like facebook and twitter, fringe conspiracy beliefs take the same visual format as high- value sources like the centers for disease control and prevention and the new york times. social media plat- forms remove contextual clues people normally use to as- sess information validity (see fig.  ). co lo r v er si on a va ila bl e on lin e fig. . the format of facebook flattens contextual clues to the validity of a post so that posts by reputable sourc- es like the cdc have a similar look to the ravings of an ill-informed commentor. cdc, centers for disease con- trol. public physicians in the covid- pandemic blood purif doi: . / despite these hazards, social media can be used to share quickly evolving information to those on the front line of care and to feedback information from the front- lines of care. social media is a key tool that can shorten the time from publication to wide dissemination [ ]. so- cial media can be used as a “just in time” means of infor- mation sharing, as shown by one group’s rapid dissemi- nation of an airway management infographic via twitter and wechat [ ]. social media also has the potential to be harnessed to support the public health response by communicating reasons for social distancing, providing reassurance when appropriate, and giving practical ad- vice on living in this time of coronavirus [ ]. in their review of coronavirus youtube videos, d’souza et al. [ ] found that respected agencies such as the centers for disease control and who were under- represented, as were academic institutions. however, so- cial media has allowed individuals to use their platforms to educate the public as well as their fellow healthcare providers. prominent figures such as drs. esther choo and jeremy faust have used their platforms to engage with the public during this time [ ]. physicians have his- torically been cautioned regarding their social media us- age, but in this current era, they have the potential to use their platforms and expertise to shape the messaging around the coronavirus pandemic [ ]. indeed, there is a clear role for the “public physician” as defined by dr. bryan vartabedian [ ]. dr. vartabe- dian [ ] identifies the public physician as someone who “sees public presence as part of their work,” and “is inten- tional in the way he connects and creates.” this physician is “outward-facing” and recognizes the value of visibility and engagement. social media is an obvious tool for this engagement and can allow experts to openly and visibly debate topics, potentially identifying false information in real time [ ]. clinicians are often tempted to traffic solely in facts, but the public physician should be prepared to use crisis communication strategies to engage with the public and address, not just misinformation, but underly- ing sources of fear and anxiety [ ]. for this perspective, we spoke to a convenience cohort of several prominent public physicians and asked them to table . the public physicians we engaged in this article. sources: twitter.com, youtube.com, instagram.com, itunes, and personal communication. accessed / / public physician and handle specialty social media channels audience size matt watto @doctorwatto internist podcaster . k on twitter podcast with > k regular listeners, ratings, and reviews nick mark @nickmmark critical care doctor twitter and blogger . k on twitter arghavan salles @arghavan_salles surgeon twitter, instagram, columnist for national newspapers, and tv appearances . k on twitter and . k on instagram f. perry wilson @methodsmanmd nephrologist medscape opinion writer and videos . k on twitter and . k on youtube mark shapiro @etsshow hospitalist podcaster and twitter . k on twitter and podcast with ratings and reviews robert centor @medrants internist podcaster, video conference, blogger, and twitter . k on twitter, podcast with ratings and reviews mikhail varshavski @realdoctormike family practitioner youtube, instagram, and twitter . k on twitter, . m on youtube, and . m on instagram jen gunter @drjengunter ob/gyn columnist, tv, twitter, and blogger . k on twitter and . k on instagram bob wachter @bob_wachter hospitalist and chief of medicine twitter k on twitter preeti malani @preetinmalani infectious disease and chief medical officer at the university of michigan print, radio, and television . k on twitter, ~ radio, television, and print interviews since february topf/williamsblood purif doi: . / discuss this role, what it means to them, how it has af- fected their lives, and how it has evolved during this time of the coronavirus pandemic [ ]. the interviews were largely conducted over email. additionally, both authors are public physicians and have first-hand experience with the change in perception and roles during the covid- pandemic. physicians that responded have various roles as public physicians (see table  ). platforms the physicians we interviewed had various platforms from traditional media including television and newspa- per columns to pure social media on twitter, instagram, and youtube. most public physicians felt that their pri- mary audience was other physicians, though they found covid- broadened their appeal as more people sought information on the pandemic. dr. robert wachter does weekly video conference grand rounds on zoom and then moves the recordings to the university of california san francisco youtube channel where they average , views. the public physicians found that most of their con- tent focused on the pandemic, as this was the primary subject on the minds of their audiences, especially at the beginning of the pandemic. dr. jen gunter, who spends a lot of her public time confronting and disputing pseu- doscience, felt that her role did not change much. she was very used to the attention and confrontation that comes from disputing conspiracies and false information. her normal beat crosses the intersection of science and sex, so she is used to controversy and politics in her social media confrontations. and a lot of what came out of the co- vid- pandemic felt familiar. dr. preeti malani, chief medical officer of the university of michigan, found her role as a public physician exploded with the pandemic. while she did occasional interviews prior to the pandem- ic, since february , she has found herself constantly in front of a camera or microphone. she estimates she has done interviews since the pandemic began and now is regularly recognized by strangers when she goes about her private life. content dr. mike varshavski’s youtube channel normally does a lot of entertainment, but during the peak of the covid- pandemic, he redirected his videos to answer core and important questions people had regarding coro- navirus. dr. wilson similarly reprogrammed his channel to cover covid- . dr. salles had a similar focus on co- vid- in march through may but noted a change in in- terest in june with the emergence of black lives matter and interest in social justice concerns following the mur- der of george floyd [ ]. in addition to changes in the content that public phy- sicians discussed there was also a change in the way some of these physicians approached the content they pro- duced. previously, dr. mark focused on innovations in critical care medicine. but with the increased interest in critical care and the influx of less experienced people needing to expand their knowledge of acute respiratory distress syndrome and ventilatory management, he shift- ed from cutting-edge innovation to emphasizing clinical excellence through one-page descriptions of various in- tensive care unit therapeutics and procedures on his blog (https://www.onepagericu.com). dr. watto’s podcast (co-author dr. williams is also a host) the curbsiders, focused a lot of coverage on the epidemic and increased the frequency of their periodic “journal club” episodes to cover new therapeutics and emerging evidence on the disease. before the pandemic, dr. wachter focused on hospital medicine, quality, safety, and innovations through the use of electronic medical records. however, in march, he embraced the role of educator on co- vid- and has been entirely focused on the covid- pandemic since then. while most public physicians reported that their audi- ence not only grew during the pandemic but also became more diverse as more people became interested in the pandemic, dr. shapiro reported his audience sharpened and narrowed to be more healthcare oriented. dr. shap- iro’s podcast, explore the space, predominantly inter- views medical professionals, but also includes athletes, politicians, and academics. even his medical interviews skew toward a more general audience, with discussions about coffee, fitness, leadership, and social justice. during the pandemic, shapiro’s guests, and the focus of his inter- views, have sharpened to focus more on the community of physicians and their welfare. as a result, his audience has shifted in that direction while the content remains ac- cessible to a broad audience. dr. salles noted that she found herself doing yoga as a form of self-care during the pandemic. she began tweet- ing images of her yoga, which became popular. she start- ed tweeting these with the hashtag #socialdistancingfit- nesschallenge, which eventually became a collective movement of people exercising while maintaining safe public health standards. social media became a way for public physicians in the covid- pandemic blood purif doi: . / people to come together metaphorically while they stayed apart physically. dr. salles also notes that her typical “lane” of highlighting women in medicine has taken a back seat during the epidemic and racial justice move- ments of the summer. dr. wilson promotes medical education on youtube. he performs critical analysis of clinical studies, and one of his early videos (https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= - l zk yvu) during the pandemic looked at the data on lopinavir and hydroxychloroquine. it was the latter that got him in trouble. some pro-hydroxychloroquine groups saw the video and its lukewarm conclusions (“some bio- logic plausibility, no compelling data yet”) and attempted to use a youtube rule designed to curb misinformation regarding the pandemic to get this video removed. ironi- cally, this rule was designed to limit videos that promote unproven treatments, so a pro-hydroxychloroquine group complained that wilson’s video was promoting the unproven treatment of hydroxychloroquine in order to muzzle his weakly negative review of hydroxychloro- quine. in addition to having the video taken down, wil- son was given one “strike.” if a youtube creator receives strikes, they lose their account, their videos, and their audience. wilson writes, “fortunately, i posted about the experience on twitter and got a lot of support from some very pro-science youtubers who were able to lobby to get the video put back up (and the strike removed). so it did end up being a victory for science, but it helps to illustrate how rough it is out there, especially for people who do not have the supportive colleagues that i do.” politics the passionate response to a mildly negative review of hydroxychloroquine is a result of politics being injected into the covid- infodemic. we asked if the public physicians had noted an increase in politics in their feed or in their audience. while drs. watto, wilson, centor, malani, and mark specifically avoided politics in their roles as public physicians, wilson specifically noted in- creased politics in his audience. he has been accused of being a member of the “radical left” or “just a democrat” or “the deep state.” being a leader in the public discussion regarding abortion rights, dr. gunter has always had a lot of politics in her content and the pandemic did not mean- ingfully change that. dr. varshavski elegantly described his experience with the politicization of medicine, “[the] audience is without a doubt becoming more political. medical discussions unfortunately are becoming more politicized. i tend to point out where political polariza- tion is driving information regarding the pandemic, but i try not to get into direct political conversations. i have never called out misinformation by politicians prior to this pandemic.” and, wachter says that if you are really covering and digging in on covid- , it invariably re- sults in a discussion of policy and that is political by its nature. he tries to remain neutral, but the facts often align up against one side of the political spectrum. misinformation the public physicians feel that a lot of their mission is to specifically call out and correct misinformation they see. dr. mark recounted a story he was involved in. dr. steven salzberg [ ], a johns hopkins university profes- sor and biomedical engineer, wrote an editorial in forbes advocating skipping phase trials to speed inoculation. this was met with a wave of pushback including thou- sands of tweets and an editorial in the new york times[ , ]. dr. mark was part of this wave pushing back on the initial story, and a few days later, dr. salzberg [ ] re- versed himself in an article explaining what he got wrong and how he misunderstood vaccine trials. dr. malani feels the same obligation to correct mis- takes that most of the public physicians feel. she says that she is seeing a lot of nonepidemiologists drawing conclu- sions with neither formal training nor complete data. she points out that these are intelligent people, often with deep knowledge about statistics but without formal epi- demiologic training, so they can draw erroneous or in- complete conclusions. discussion the coronavirus pandemic has occurred during an un- precedented age of simultaneous atomization and con- nectivity. the accompanying infodemic has posed signif- icant challenges in terms of controlling misinformation and prioritizing the sharing of new data. physicians have historically been cautioned to maintain strict boundaries when engaging in the social media space, keeping a clear line drawn between professional and personal identity [ ]. but a new paradigm is emerging, a paradigm that is probably better suited to addressing the present infodem- ic – that of the public physician. vartabedian defines the public physician: someone who sees the public presence as part of their work, who is topf/williamsblood purif doi: . / outward-facing, and who recognizes that the benefits of public engagement outweigh the risks [ ]. each of these elements is worth examining. the physicians we inter- viewed clearly view part of their role as being a public presence. dr. gunter has created a public presence to de- bunk myths. similarly, dr. mark has used his growing twitter platform with the intention to correct or preempt misinformation as well as spread best and evidence-based medicine in critical care. dr. salles has leveraged her so- cial media presence to address social justice issues, such as organizing the #sharethemicnowmed campaign to amplify the voices of black women in medicine. physicians actively engaged in social media are by def- inition “outward-facing,” but the doctors we have spoken to exemplify this practice. dr. wachter has had over million views of his tweets since the coronavirus pandem- ic began. dr. varshavski counts millions of subscribers across multiple platforms, including youtube, insta- gram, and facebook. many of the physicians we talked to reported that the number of people following them swelled with the onset of covid- . but more impor- tantly, many of them also felt that their followers were more engaged. dr. wachter states that there is “far more interest by lay public in this than anything i’ve ever seen. [they are] sophisticated, they keep up…[the] lay audi- ence asks sophisticated questions, follows the literature.” he also notes that the overwhelming tone of engagement is respectful. this respectful tone is not universal, however, and there are indeed risks in being publicly engaged. when the university of michigan went forward with having stu- dents on campus in the fall of , dr. malani’s face- book profile was bombarded with hurtful and aggressive messages from angry parents. this forced her to pull her public facebook profile to protect her mental health. most of our respondents stated that their audiences grew, and their focus narrowed in response to the coro- navirus pandemic. but each of them was uniquely posi- tioned to address the accompanying infodemic by em- bracing their role as a public physician. the social media space allows physicians to provide high-quality informa- tion, to fact-check and repudiate misinformation, and ul- timately to shape the narrative around disease, and po- tentially modify its course. the covid- pandemic highlights these opportunities for the public physician to leverage their outward-facing role to significantly impact public health in a meaningful and positive way. acknowledgements the authors would like to acknowledge the public physicians we interviewed for this paper: matthew watto, nick mark, argha- van salles, f. perry wilson, mark shapiro, robert centor, mikhail varshavski, jen gunter, bob wachter, and preeti malani. statement of ethics this paper is exempt from ethical committee approval. all participants were told the nature of the paper prior to the inter- view. there was no promise of reimbursement for anyone’s par- ticipation. conflict of interest statement both authors are public physicians. otherwise, the authors have no conflicts of interest to declare. funding sources no funding was used for this paper. author contributions j.t. conceived of the paper and outlined the scope. p.w. wrote a partial early draft and developed the outline. both authors reached out to their contacts to develop the list of public physicians to interview. j.t. wrote an early draft of the interview questions but both authors jointly finalized the questions. both authors worked on the final version of the manuscript. j.t. was chiefly responsible for responding to the editors’ questions and suggestions. references tangcharoensathien v, calleja n, nguyen t, purnat t, d’agostino m, garcia-saiso s, et al. framework for managing the covid- in- fodemic: methods and results of an online, crowdsourced who technical consultation. j med internet res. jun; ( ): e . depoux a, martin s, karafillakis e, preet r, wilder-smith a, larson h. the pandemic of social media panic travels faster than the co- vid- outbreak. j travel med. may; ( ): taaa . gottlieb m, dyer s. information and disinfor- mation: social media in the covid- crisis. acad emerg med. jul; ( ): – . andrews tm. why dangerous conspiracy theories about the virus 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york: oxford university press. . summer in the city: john lindsay, new york, and the american dream. edited by joseph p. viteritti. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press. . sunny stalter-pace on january , , the new york herald tribune featured a series titled “new york city in crisis.” the opening article proclaimed: “new york is the greatest city in the world—and everything is wrong with it.” this lede yokes together exceptionalism and disaster; a pairing that has become increasingly more common in contemporary american political discourse. crisis and excep- tionalism are two sides of the same coin, and they both shut down discussion about everyday economic and social structures. new york city had of course been in crisis before—jacob riis’s how the other half lives was one of the most important texts from an earlier moment of financial inequality and urban renewal. yet the herald tribune article makes its list of problems so exhaustive that it is difficult to see any reason for the continued belief in exceptionalism or any way to begin moving forward. “new york city in crisis” achieved the implicit goals of the paper’s editors and publisher: to discourage incumbent mayor robert wagner from running for a fourth term (roberts ). the only suggestion for how change can be brought about comes late in the article: “representative john v. lindsay, a young repub- lican mentioned increasingly as a candidate for mayor,” suggests that the right sort of executive might convince city dwellers to take responsibility for their own city. by the time the first “new york city in crisis” article was published, lindsay had made a name for himself as a progressive republican from the “silk stocking district” on manhattan’s upper east side, siding with the democrats to pass the civil rights act in and supporting a number of other important liberal bills. by the time the articles were turned into a book in july of the same year, lindsay had declared his opposition to the vietnam war and declared his candidacy for mayor of new york city. congressman lindsay was an embodi- ment of the personality-driven, optimistic liberalism of the early s. the complexity of the city in crisis, he felt, could be cut through by someone with strong morals and a deep well of affection for his hometown. lindsay is quoted in the article as saying, you hear a lot of people say that the city is too big to be governed by one man. i don’t agree with that at all. it’s just a cliché. but to run this city properly and get it going again, the mayor has to be very tough. he’s got to ask for the moon and he’s got to convince the people to make sacrifices. it will take a man who loves the city and a man who loves its people. if we don’t get going again soon, new york will become a second-class city. here we get a sense of the sheer force of his charisma and the immensity of local, national, and international forces against which his administration had to struggle. as the poster-boy for progressive urban politics in this period, lindsay was dependent on both sides of the “city in crisis” trope: the unique qualities of city space and the unique problems it posed. “new york is the greatest city in the world. . . earlier writers about john lindsay have understood as a turning point in different terms. in his retrospective essay from in the conservative journal the public interest, george will says of , “that year was the hinge of our postwar history.” for will, and for john lindsay’s most recent biographer vin- cent cannato, this is true because is the height of lyndon johnson’s great society programs and the activist warren supreme court. cannato’s comprehen- sive but rightward-leaning biography, the ungovernable city: john lindsay and his struggle to save new york ( ) sees in lindsay’s service as mayor a story about “the decline of the city and the crisis of liberalism.” refracted through the broken-windows policing of the giuliani administration, lindsay’s city seems to mark the end of a political era. but in the contemporary moment, when crit- ics on the left and right agree that current new york city mayor bill de blasio shares many qualities with john lindsay, the story of lindsay as a naïve liberal deserves another look. two recent books reconsider lindsay’s reputation and impact, while a third looks at the crime films of the s as exemplars of the city lindsay worked in, grappled with, and left to his successor abe beame. taken together, they give scholars a clear sense of the ways that history, economics, geography, and culture intersect in contemporary urban studies. america’s mayor, edited by new york times writer sam roberts, is a com- panion to an exhibit at the museum of the city of new york that was mounted in and remains online at http://americasmayor.mcny.org. the fifteen essays included in the text are mostly authored by reporters, though there are solid es- says by urban studies stalwarts hilary ballon and kenneth jackson, as well as lindsay staffers, architects, and even a current conservative think-tank fellow reflecting on the administration’s spending priorities and racial politics. “most of the authors,” according to roberts, “witnessed the lindsay era for themselves, but as outsiders without the baggage of having to second-guess their own record” ( ). the essays in america’s mayor take an equally journalistic tone, avoiding academic terms commonly used in urban studies. there’s not even a mention of neoliberalism. instead, the essays move in roughly chronological fashion through lindsay’s career, beginning with his campaign and discussing the identity politics, labor disputes, budget concerns, and management of the built environment during his two terms in office. a few themes coalesce over the course of the book, and they tend to appear in pairs emphasizing their interrelation: lindsay’s sympathy for african-american and puerto rican new yorkers and his estrangement from labor unions and other bastions of “white lower middle class” power ( ); and his administration’s move toward increased departmental efficiency and its financial difficulties that would eventually lead to new york city’s bankruptcy in . the final essays consider lindsay’s reputation and the impact that his practices had on later administrations, which are particularly clear in the arenas of data tracking and urban planning. though it functions separately from the museum exhibit, america’s mayor maintains an exhibit-like format: interleaved among the retrospective essays and striking photographs of the period are pull-quotes and longer reflections, often sunny stalter-pace from lindsay staffers and other politicians doing some degree of second-guessing. most interesting to me, and perhaps to the american studies readership as well, are the extracts from primary sources that played an important part in shaping lindsay’s public image. the primary sources reinforce many of the claims made in the retrospective essays: that lindsay was too patrician, for instance, or that his presence in harlem on the night of martin luther king’s assassination helped prevent riots there. the selection of these artifacts emphasizes the role of local newspapers in lindsay’s rise and fall. along with the “city in crisis” series, roberts includes a column about the campaign that spawned the slogan “he is fresh and everyone is tired” ( – ) and another that chided the newly sworn in mayor for proclaiming that new york, then suffering through a transit strike, was still a “fun city” ( – ). there are other sources—transcripts of campaign commercials and nixon tapes—but readers come away from this book with the sense that his reputation was made in the city papers. at least in the late s and early s, all politics was still local. where america’s mayor aims for breadth and inclusivity in its reconsidera- tion of john lindsay, summer in the city aims for depth. with nine extensively footnoted chapters to the roberts book’s fifteen, the viteritti edited collection is more explicitly academic in its allegiances. and though america’s mayor tries to encompass more of the period’s social context, summer in the city’s preface and conclusion put mayor lindsay’s career and the state of the city from to into far more direct dialogue with its current state in . viteritti seems particularly interested in recovering lindsay’s reputation because doing so offers an alternative to the austerity-minded, law-and-order vision of the contemporary city: “more than any mayor since fiorello laguardia,” he says in the preface, “john lindsay understood and fostered the civic project that has been lost as the city became absorbed in sustaining its fiscal solvency” (x). former lindsay budget director charles r. morris appears in both books, suggesting that finan- cial issues continue to be a central concern in the history of this administration. summer in the city considers the ways that lindsay diverges from the national norms of the period—first the liberalism of johnson’s great society, then the law-and-order reactivity of the nixon administration. in his contextual introduction, viteritti discusses the ways that civic projects of the great society were brought to cities through the community action program, or cap. this component of johnson’s war on poverty required extensive participation of the city-dwellers it was meant to help, an admirable goal that short-circuited the usual relationship between the federal government, the city government, and the local institutions to whom funding was distributed (viteritti – ). lindsay recognized the moral obligations of government not because he was beholden to johnson but precisely because he was a progressive republican, one who “blended the seemingly antithetical impulses of elitism and populism” (viteritti ). since lindsay is so commonly associated with s liberalism, both because of the cannato biography and because his strain of republicanism has mostly died “new york is the greatest city in the world. . . out, geoffrey kabaservice’s chapter “on principle: a progressive republican” provides the most necessary reframing of lindsay’s reputation. chapters three through five continue to position lindsay in the national landscape, but they explain how the principles of a progressive republican in the johnson era clash so dramatically with the institutional norms of robert wagner’s city hall and the broader city’s democratic machine. clarence taylor’s chapter discusses the ways that lindsay’s civil rights policies often had the effect of alienating the white ethnic unions upon whose power robert wagner depended. charles morris gives a broad history of the economic and demographic changes that the city underwent in the late s, showing how lindsay’s budget re- sponded to factors beyond his control. david rogers emphasizes the technocratic side to lindsay’s good government philosophy. his chapter gives a thorough account of lindsay’s use of management consultants to reorganize government agencies and streamline the process by which change could take place. lindsay felt that well-trained outsiders, rather than those with the most comprehensive institutional memory, would be most able to cut through the bureaucratic red tape that had built up as a side effect of one-party rule. not surprisingly, long-time civil servants were suspicious: the old-liners wanted to run the agencies as they always had, with little analysis of the costs and benefits of different programs. they prided themselves on their long experience in city government and weren’t about to be displaced or made to change their work habits by young outsiders who regarded academic training in management and policy analysis as qualifying them to change the ways agencies were managed (viteritti ). with this process of remaking organizations by importing fresh, enthusiastic experts without on-the-ground experience in the system they were reorganizing, it is clear that lindsay’s process for getting things done anticipates many of the processes visited on american cities today, particularly in the education system. lindsay believed that academic expertise and enthusiasm could overcome the bureaucracy and inertia of the city government as it stood in . chapters six through eight discuss the relatively dramatic and uncontested impact of the lindsay administration in city planning. in these chapters, we see how he pushes back against a figure more dominant in new york city than richard nixon or lyndon johnson or robert moses. where moses famously dictated the spatial changes in the city from the top down, paul goldberger’s chapter discusses how lindsay tried to balance the centralized expertise of planners with the input of community members. lizabeth cohen and brian goldstein explore the increasing importance of public-private partnerships and city incentives to lure businesses to new york city and to keep them there. they discuss how “economic devel- opment became a realm of increasing importance” in an era when the loss of sunny stalter-pace manufacturing jobs and the containerization of shipping led to a dramatic loss in manual labor jobs while traffic congestion and crumbling infrastructure made the city less appealing for white-collar companies (viteritti ). this chapter and the mariana mogilevich one that follows consider the ways that deindustrializa- tion led lindsay to foster the business of arts and culture. as i discuss below, the strategies for reshaping city space in this period conceive of the city not as a place to work but a place to play, what james sanders in america’s mayor calls an “adventure playground” (roberts ). most of these chapters are acutely interested in the local maneuvers of the lindsay administration: zoning, project management, playground construction, and the like. the one major exception is cohen and goldstein’s chapter on eco- nomic development, which does discuss the movement of corporate headquarters from manhattan to nearby states and the relocation of outer-borough factories to other regions of the u.s. this kind of focus is not surprising, both because of the authors’ areas of expertise and because many in the period claimed that lindsay was just an ex-congressman waiting to run for president. but neither the viteritti nor the roberts book considers the ways that lindsay’s candidacy and administration takes place on a regional, national, and even an international stage. john lindsay’s face appears on the cover of national magazines through- out america’s mayor; in the caption to one of the photographs, we are told that he is a “frequent guest on johnny carson’s ‘tonight’ show, and that new york was often the butt of carson’s jokes” (robert ). how does the image of new york city become constructed in the broader media landscape during lindsay’s administration? stanley corkin’s monograph starring new york begins to answer this question, though he does so in a way that lacks some of the local grounding that roberts and viteritti provide. though it includes some stellar close readings of films and a convincing reading of the nostalgic strain that runs from midnight cowboy to manhattan, corkin’s book can seem a bit agentless. in the films he analyzes, the spaces and relationships onscreen “situate viewers in a broader tale of anti-urbanism,” making the forces of gentrification, neoliberalism, and neoconservatism appear to be natural correctives to the immoral, fragmented, and dangerous city (corkin ). corkin analyzes some two-dozen films from the s whose mise–en–scène and story evoke new york city as a place. over the course of the decade, he sees the films morph in their representations of urban space and mobility; these changing images, he argues, both record and help to reinforce the changing economic conditions of the post-industrial city. corkin’s introduction establishes the context in which these auteurist films were made, including the changing role of the independent producer within the studio system, the move to lighter and more flexible camera technologies, and the lindsay ad- ministration’s opening up of the process for obtaining location shooting permits. in starring new york, corkin discusses the ways that these films created new “cognitive maps” of the city, borrowing from kevin lynch’s the image of the city. corkin incorporates the work of several politically-minded spatial “new york is the greatest city in the world. . . theorists and cultural geographers, but his notion of the changing role of the city in late capitalism seems most directly derived from the work of neil brenner, who sees cities like new york playing an outsized role in the globalization process, reconfiguring the scale of political power among city, state, and nation. these newly distorted ideas of scale and interrelation between the individual and the group make their way into social relations as well. instead of participatory government serving as the model for an individual’s integration into the broader community—through family, local community, and state government—we are now thinking about the individual and the global economy with no measures of broader community support in between. it is the marketplace that models the ideal forms of social relation, and indeed of self. in corkin’s discussion of new york-centered films such as midnight cow- boy ( ) and prince of the city ( ), he considers the visual representation of local space, the ways that space does or does not connect with other spaces, and the kinds of economic and social possibilities that arise from these spatial arrangements. he builds upon henri lefebvre’s concepts of centripetal and cen- trifugal space, applied to earlier films noir by edward dimendberg. centripetal space “looks inward and seems isolated from that which is not defined as part of it,” while centrifugal space “spiral[s] outward to gesture and affix to the world beyond” ( ). the first types of films, covered in chapters two through four, can be roughly understood as centripetal ones: they present mostly marginal characters living in insular neighborhoods with limited economic opportunities. we see a more centrifugally oriented spatiality in the films discussed in chapters five and six, where the narratives move between new york neighborhoods and other regions and nations, integrating the city into the global flows of capital. the final chapter brings these two movements together, showing how characters of an insular neighborhood (the upper east side) nevertheless can call upon the cultural capital available to them in the newly networked world. keeping corkin’s critical perspective in mind, i will conclude with some of the issues raised in these three books that suggest other forms of spatial reorganization of new york city in the lindsay era. lindsay’s major policy initiatives and management techniques highlight the processes of centralization and decentralization in local government of the period. his walks in minority neighborhoods, mentioned throughout america’s mayor, emphasize the impor- tance of physical presence and even vulnerability as a political strategy. and finally, lindsay’s insistence on the importance of art in everyday life leads to a new and more spectacular relation to city space overall. these new ways of envisioning city space all have roots in lindsay’s campaign; instead of presenting ways to fix the city in crisis, they offer new ways to move through it. while many critics in these volumes emphasize the decentralization at work in lindsay’s government, i feel it is important to understand the impulse in tension with the simultaneous desire for centralized (and often technologically mediated) governmental expertise. lindsay’s administration focused on establishing clear ways of moving through government channels as a way of setting themselves sunny stalter-pace in opposition to the democratic machine that preceded them. “new york city in crisis” suggested that the city government was an unmanageable labyrinth, one that only a supercomputer could figure out: one planning commission specialist has come up with a novel suggestion that is guaranteed never to see the light of day under the present city administration. “the city needs a lot of things but i’d like to use an ibm machine to figure out some chain of command for how to go about getting something done in the city,” he says. “then you’d know exactly where the power was and exactly where to go to get something accomplished.” though this quote appeared before lindsay ran, it reflected a broader desire for technological solutions to bureaucratic and institutional problems. this techno- cratic approach extended into many different departments at city hall, but most prominently the police department. according to nicholas pileggi’s “crime and punishment” article, lindsay demanded accurate crime statistics and instituted computerized call dispatching (roberts ). paul golderberger’s chapter in summer in the city identifies an important moment in the campaign, a “helicopter tour of the city” when john lindsay’s ideas about urban development crystallized (viteritti ). in urban planning, as in the rest of his administration, lindsay imagined the administration’s role as seeing that big picture, while the community’s role was talking about how things worked and did not work on the local level. they centralized expertise and decentralized community feedback. lindsay saw planning—both the manage- ment of projects and spaces—as a means of creating clearer and more pleasant paths through the city. this model was implemented in lindsay’s campaign. he opened more than local campaign offices in neighborhoods across the boroughs, staffed with enthusiastic young republican volunteers. as with barack obama’s election in , lindsay’s election was dependent upon the creation of a broad and flex- ible campaign infrastructure, one that could respond to the concerns of local populations. he continued to spread channels for communication throughout the city with his creation of “little city halls,” local community centers where constituents could share their problems and know that they would be shared with the mayor’s office. “his little city halls were not simply another way of building a network of predictable middle-class sources,” says pete hammill in his “power to the rest of the people” chapter; “those urban consulates were also charged with opening contact among non-conventional groups, including militants, gang leaders, sports groups. they were a big city version of an early warning system” (roberts ). but listening to new voices often comes at the expense of groups who had been the “predictable middle-class sources” of the past, especially unions. lindsay’s most controversial proposals—such as civilian review of complaints against the police force, community-controlled “new york is the greatest city in the world. . . school boards, and scatter-site public housing—were rejected by people who felt decentralization meant the redistribution of power away from them. in this era of regular protests that “black lives matter,” one of the issues that lindsay’s election highlights is just how long this lack of police accountability has been an issue in city governments. as with most politicians, lindsay is remembered more for his personal interventions than his institutional ones. charlayne hunter-gault remarks that, “lindsay also went to the people, a familiar figure in shirtsleeves, walking the sometimes mean streets of black and hispanic neighborhoods, talking to the people who lived there” (roberts ). the mayor’s walking tours earned the respect of community activists. it also established his credibility in advance of his most famous walk through harlem, which took place the night that martin luther king jr. was assassinated. lindsay offered harlem residents a sense of immediacy and emotional engagement when the majority of the city’s spatial politics were organized to distance and dehumanize them. corkin discusses the ways that establishing shots in blaxploitation films tend to do the latter, since they “provide high-angle shots of harlem … designed to aggregate and objectify african american humans and their associated space” ( ). though lindsay views the urban landscape from overhead for the purposes of planning, he engages with minority constituents at street-level, as an equal in the crowd. indeed, one of the issues i had with corkin’s spatial framework had to do with the absence of a positive street-level model for engaging with the city. when he brings up the harlem helicopter shots, he discusses their distancing point of view in relation to michel de certeau’s famous chapter in “the practice of everyday life” that begins at the top of the world trade center. but that chapter is called “walking in the city,” and it discusses the ways that moving through the city produces a different kind of knowledge than the “totalizing” and disembodied view from above. indeed, i would argue that the most important totalizing vision of city space in lindsay’s new york city is the idea of urban space as a spectacle. it is specifi- cally in the lindsay era that the government begins to imagine art and film as engines driving city economies no longer fueled by manufacturing and middle- class tax dollars. this too begins during his mayoral campaign: “as a candidate in , lindsay promised to streamline the cumbersome bureaucratic process of obtaining the permits necessary to shoot films in new york city” (corkin ). the creation of the mayor’s office of film, theater, and broadcasting in codifies into city policy the move away from understanding urban centers as manufacturing centers and toward understanding them as nodes in the production and consumption of information and entertainment. the parks department, the office of cultural affairs, and other city offices all supported events that present the city as what james sanders dubs an “adven- ture playground” (roberts ). parks commissioner thomas hoving planned a huge number of open-ended, playful events in central park that were dubbed “happenings,” after the avant-garde participatory performances planned by al- sunny stalter-pace lan kaprow. the city’s public art events collapsed the distinction between art and everyday life in much the same way kaprow desired. mariana mogilevich discusses the ways that the parks department’s “mobile units” put this ideal into practice, bringing jazz, film, arts and crafts, and theater to minority and outer- borough neighborhoods (viteritti ). indeed, lindsay’s new york city saw an overall “cultural decentralization” (viteritti ); instead of presenting all of its artifacts and performances in a central museum district, new york began fund- ing new museum and art spaces throughout the city. that decentralization, like the economic and political ones described throughout the two edited collections, redistributes cultural capital within the city space. america’s mayor and summer in the city reframe the debates about john lindsay and new york by moving away from the assumption, implicit in vincent cannato’s title, that the city in the s and s was ungovernable. instead, both edited collections make the case for some of lindsay’s successes and con- textualize his difficulties. the texts are fairly detailed and locally-oriented: while they might be useful in a class about the s or one that explores different modes of city governance, they are going to be most useful to scholars of new york city across disciplines. i wish that stanley corkin had these new takes at his disposal when writing his monograph starring new york. his local history comes pretty directly from cannato and so it lacks the nuance and contempora- neity that is especially present in the viteritti edited collection. similarly, when reading roberts and viteritti, i missed the aesthetic and narrative understanding of space that corkin brought to his argument. cultural images of new york city always mediate our view of everyday life in the city, and it is up to urban stud- ies scholars to develop a more complex vocabulary for discussing the interplay between the two. was a turning point in how americans understand their cities. we might consider a number of signal events from that year: the northeast blackout on november , for example, shows how the urban infrastructure of the period was tied to regional and international networks. the three recent books reviewed here raise intriguing questions about the resonance of these earlier political and cultural changes in present-day new york city, particularly in the wake of the financial collapse of and the continuing criticism of the police force. it might be easy to see how tv shows like sex and the city extend “the lindsay- era impulse” identified by james sanders “to regard the city’s urban landscape as, in some real sense, a giant outdoor stage” (roberts ). this impulse seems at least somewhat different in more contemporary shows like girls, broad city, and unbreakable kimmy schmidt; though they are all playful and include a number of scenes shot on location, they also communicate a more pronounced sense of the city’s inequality and lack of permanent jobs. these books offer us a starting point for thinking about the root causes of the current “city in crisis.” “new york is the greatest city in the world. . . notes . barry gottehrer, new york city in crisis (new york: david mckay, ): . . new york city in crisis, . . new york city in crisis, . . george f. will, “looking back to ,” the public interest, fall : . . vincent j. cannato, the ungovernable: john lindsay and his struggle to save new york city (new york: basic books, ): ix. . vincent j. cannato, “vincent cannato: the return of the s in new york,” wall street journal, september , , sec. opinion; joshua freeman, “de blasio’s new york,” dissent , no. ( ): – . . fredric jameson has usefully reimagined lynch’s cognitive mapping a means of think- ing about how the individual can orient herself in relation to the expansive interconnectedness of globalized, postmodern space. see postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism (duke university press, ), . . new york city in crisis, . . michel de certeau, the practice of everyday life (university of california press, ), – . sunny stalter-pace “new york is the greatest city in the world. . . mark hulsether blends in with some unidentified histoical or mythic figures, possibly sages on the way to bethlehem around the beginning of the common era. covid- and india’s trail of tears comment covid- and india’s trail of tears chandana mathur # springer nature b.v. the covid- pandemic has made plainly visible what has always been true, viz. that in capitalist nation-states, an electorate’s voting decisions are a matter of life and death. in the year , the people of india are paying with their lives for the election victory in may of the hindu-supremacist bharatiya janata party (bjp) and its strongman prime minister narendra modi. the covid- crisis could not have arrived at a more opportune time for the bjp government, rocked as it was by the large-scale protests that had erupted following the passage of the citizenship amendment act (caa) in december . the act expedites the granting of indian citizenship status to non-muslim religious minorities from pakistan, bangladesh and afghanistan, but withholds this privilege from muslim applicants. this is the first time that religious profiling, prohibited by the indian constitution, will explicitly be used to deny indian citizenship to muslim applicants. home minister amit shah had stated in the indian parlia- ment in summer that the national register of citizens (nrc), a brutal bureaucratic exercise conducted in the north-eastern state of assam that threatens nearly two million people with statelessness, would be extended to cover all of india. widespread fears that the two initiatives would be used in conjunction with each other—whereby the nrc will declare impoverished indian muslims lacking requisite documents as foreigners while the caa will ensure that they are ineligible to apply for citizenship—led to nationwide protests. millions of people across the country, of all ages and religions, ethnic and caste back- grounds, and of varied political persuasions, came out into the streets to protest the anti-muslim character of the new law. young people were the first to dominate these demonstrations. the student marchers’ calls for protest were echoed across indian society, by dalit groups, the gay community, trade unions and the entire political opposition. the scale of these protests was reminiscent of the days of india’s decolonisation struggle: a bharat bandh, or national shutdown, called by the trade union movement brought out an estimated million protesters across the country on january (panicker ). if there was an initial concern with brandishing the multi-religious character of the opposition to government-imposed anti-muslim measures, it soon gave way to an unapologetic resistance that refused to downplay muslim https://doi.org/ . /s - - - * chandana mathur chandana.mathur@mu.ie department of anthropology, maynooth university – national university of ireland maynooth, maynooth, ireland published online: august dialectical anthropology ( ) : – http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:chandana.mathur@mu.ie involvement. in this respect, there is some similarity with the way in which the “black lives matter” movement has come to gain wider acceptance in the usa in the wake of the killing of george floyd. the enduring symbol of the anti-caa/nrc/npr resistance was shaheen bagh, a neighbourhood in new delhi, where a group of muslim women (many of them very elderly) and their supporters held a continuous sit-down protest that began three days after the passage of the caa in december and was ended by the police on march , the day that modi announced india’s covid- lockdown. announced with about four hours of notice on march , india’s lockdown has been regarded as one of the world’s most stringent (petherick et al. ). before and after it went into effect, pm modi addressed himself solely to those indians whose class standing ensured lifestyles approximating those to be found in the wealthy north of italy. possibly impressed by the images of locked-down italians singing to one another from their balconies, for example, modi instructed indians to do likewise on march . misunderstanding this top-down central government directive, crowds jostled each other in noisy street displays across the country, making a mockery of all prior official pleas to observe strict social distancing. instead of using the lockdown period to test, trace and limit the spread of the virus, the central government organised further stunts aimed at enthusing its middle class supporters—a coordinated “chal- lenge the darkness” lights-off candlelight vigil directive in april that required substantial preparation to avoid potential damage to electrical grid systems, and a flypast with war planes showering flower petals over hospitals at a time that health workers were desperate for ppe and decent working conditions. not only was it one of the world’s strictest covid- lockdowns, it was also one of the worst planned. from the standpoint of india’s working poor and her destitute masses, it was as if the class war had suddenly turned nuclear. in – , in an effort to understand the nature of everyday rural poverty in india, the journalist p. sainath resolved to spend a -year period in the poorest districts in the country, and discovered that the rural poor were forced by their circumstances to be exceptionally mobile. “i mostly visited the districts in the off-agricultural seasons”, he writes in the ethnographically textured book that came out of this experience. “the question for me was: what do the poor do in some – days during which there is no agriculture in their areas? how do they survive? what are their coping mechanisms? what kind of jobs do they find? the answers led me to far more than the ten districts i had set out to cover. in most of these areas, huge sections of the population simply upped and migrated after the harvest. often, they took their families with them. so i ended up travelling and living with the migrants in districts other than my own. at the end of it, i had covered close to , km in seven states across the country” (sainath : xi). decades later, there is greater awareness of the massive volume of internal migration, not least because of the efforts made by sainath and the people’s archive of rural india. yet the central government made no preparation or provision whatsoever for india’s migrant workers when it abruptly imposed the -day lockdown. all passenger trains were suspended by the railway ministry two days before the lock- down, and all road transport was halted once it began. tens of millions of migrants from rural india working in indian cities—a vast proportion of them daily wage workers in the informal sector—became unemployed overnight, and in many cases were rendered homeless as they lost access to workplace-based accommodation. thus began their desperate journeys on foot or bicycle to their home villages hundreds or thousands of kilometres away. they also had to contend with the police enforcement of the lockdown and its requirement that everybody stay at home, regardless of whether they had homes or not. both indian and international media have recorded the beatings, torture and humiliation india’s impoverished masses have had to c. mathur endure at the hands of the police for contravening lockdown regulations (yadav ; abi- habib and yasir ). faced with starvation, migrant families continued to walk for days with their few belongings along the national highways, without any form of central govern- ment assistance. efforts by private individuals, ngos and some state governments to step into the breach could not prevent the many hundreds of non-covid deaths of migrant workers and their kin due to exhaustion, road accidents, starvation, police brutality and other lockdown- related causes. belated central government efforts to provide some relief and organise special trains in the wake of migrant protests were themselves poorly carried out, and resulted in further deaths due to hunger, thirst and exhaustion. we will never know how many people lost their lives on this particular trail of tears—one attempt to estimate deaths had listed entries by early july, with many of these entries encompassing several family members (thejesh et al. ). the subcontinent has not witnessed human displacement on this scale since the partition of india in . all of this for nothing. conventional economists are left marvelling at an exceptionally severe lockdown that has produced the worst of all possible worlds—the “double shock” in kaushik basu’s words, of out-of-control rates of infection and death accompanied by spec- tacular economic collapse. thus, basu writes: “at the time of the announcement, with a four- hour notice, there was a natural expectation that the government had plans of how to handle the sudden stoppage of work and movement of people, and the break in supply chains. but there was no evidence of any of these ancillary actions. i do not have enough information to know what plans there were, but the total absence of any supporting action, to ramp up testing, expand the medical sector and to help the millions of stranded poor workers, was baffling” (basu ). inevitably, the lockdown has also been a crackdown. it has targeted india’s muslim minorities, with senior bjp figures vilifying all muslims and stoking fears of a “corona-jihad” in the wake of the discovery in march of a cluster of covid- cases traceable to the headquarters of the tablighi jamaat, an islamic organisation based in new delhi (menon ; jain ). it has also provided cover for the gutting of the most basic legal protections for indian labour—some states have passed ordinances legalising the -hour working day and doing away with grievance redressal processes. these moves draw on the received wisdom that india’s industrialisation has been held back by laws favourable to labour, an assumption flatly contradicted by the careful analysis advanced by the economist aditya bhattacharjea (bhattacharjea ). the covid- lockdown/crackdown has enabled the central govern- ment to imprison and harass with impunity the university students and public intellectuals who had stood up to them earlier this year to protest the anti-muslim caa-nrc-npr legal apparatus (the polis project ). the space for hope that had been opened up by that movement recedes further into the distance every day. references abi-habib, maria and samir yasir. . india’s coronavirus lockdown leaves vast numbers stranded and hungry. the new york times. march . https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /world/asia/coronavirus-india-migrants.html?action=click&module=relatedlinks&pgtype=article. accessed august . basu, kaushik. . the way in which it was executed, india’s lockdown itself became source of virus’s spread. the indian express, july . https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/coronavirus-lockdown- india-covid- -cases-deaths- /. accessed august . covid- and india’s trail of tears https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /world/asia/coronavirus-india-migrants.html?action=click&module=relatedlinks&pgtype=article https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /world/asia/coronavirus-india-migrants.html?action=click&module=relatedlinks&pgtype=article https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/coronavirus-lockdown-india-covid- -cases-deaths- / https://indianexpress.com/article/opinion/columns/coronavirus-lockdown-india-covid- -cases-deaths- / bhattacharjea, aditya. . labour market flexibility in indian industry: a critical survey of the literature. working paper no. . centre for development economics. delhi school of economics. jain, ritika. . how india’s government set off a spiral of islamophobia. article . https://www.article- . com/post/how-india-s-government-set-off-a-spiral-of-islamophobia. accessed august . menon, nivedita. . the virus, the muslim and the migrant. kafila. https://kafila.online/ / / /the- virus-the-muslim-and-the-migrant-part-i-comvid- /. accessed august . panicker, prem. . a million mutinies tied together by humanity and hope. the wire. https://thewire. in/rights/million-mutinies-humanity-caa-revolution. accessed august . petherick, anna et al. . variations in government response to covid . blavatnik centre for government working paper, university of oxford. sainath, p. . everybody loves a good drought. new delhi: penguin books. the polis project. . manufacturing evidence: how the police is framing and arresting constitutional rights defenders in india. https://thepolisproject.com/wp-content/uploads/ / /manufacturing-evidence-.pdf. accessed august . thejesh, g.n., kanika sharma, aman and krushna. . non virus deaths. https://thejeshgn. com/projects/covid -india/non-virus-deaths/. accessed august . yadav, jyoti. . real social distancing: special planes for india’s rich, police lathis for working-class poor. the print. https://theprint.in/opinion/real-social-distancing-special-planes-india-rich-police-lathis-working- class-poor/ /. accessed august . publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. c. mathur https://www.article- .com/post/how-india-s-government-set-off-a-spiral-of-islamophobia https://www.article- .com/post/how-india-s-government-set-off-a-spiral-of-islamophobia https://kafila.online/ / / /the-virus-the-muslim-and-the-migrant-part-i-comvid- / https://kafila.online/ / / /the-virus-the-muslim-and-the-migrant-part-i-comvid- / https://thewire.in/rights/million-mutinies-humanity-caa-revolution https://thewire.in/rights/million-mutinies-humanity-caa-revolution https://thepolisproject.com/wp-content/uploads/ / /manufacturing-evidence-.pdf https://thejeshgn.com/projects/covid -india/non-virus-deaths/ https://thejeshgn.com/projects/covid -india/non-virus-deaths/ https://theprint.in/opinion/real-social-distancing-special-planes-india-rich-police-lathis-working-class-poor/ / https://theprint.in/opinion/real-social-distancing-special-planes-india-rich-police-lathis-working-class-poor/ / 	covid- and india’s trail of tears 	references article doi: . /djph. . . , copyright (c) delaware academy of medicine / delaware public health association towards a more healthy america: reallocation of health care resources in an inequitable health care system carole guy, m.d., f.c.c.p. pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine; sleep disorder centers of delaware the covid- pandemic and the video recorded murder of george floyd have brought long overdue national mainstream focus and discussion to the persistent inequities in our american health and healthcare system. it is my belief and hope that these horrific events will serve as a catalyst for more rapid solutions. a brief historical journey may help us find solutions towards the creation of a more equitable healthcare system. since the institution of slavery in , our country has experienced over years of systemic racism. the institution of slavery was later replaced by harsh systems of share- cropping and convict leasing and by black codes and jim crow laws well into the late th and early th century. the legacies of such systems continue to this day – affecting all aspects of life, including healthcare. during slavery, the united states healthcare system was in its infancy. in , a survey by the american medical association (ama) found that % of practicing physicians in virginia were practicing medicine without either an apprenticeship or medical school education. those en- slaved suffered from cholera, pneumonia, dysentery and dietary deficiencies. in order to avoid the expenses of physicians for enslaved persons, those maintaining slavery, including masters and overseers, often provided the “care” for sick or ailing enslaved persons themselves. equally troubling, virginia medical schools used black persons, enslaved and free, for both clinical and anatomical medical studies more often than whites. scholars have determined that medical ex- perimentation on enslaved persons and freed blacks was often done without anesthesia and used to develop certain medical techniques and professionalize medicine. after the american civil war ( - ) and the emancipation proclamation ( ), black american citizens were held back from obtaining their constitutional rights promised under three new constitutional amendments (the th, th, and th amendments) by black codes and jim crow laws. the black codes, sometimes called black laws, were instituted to limit the rights and freedoms of both free and recently freed black persons, and to compel them to work for low wages. such laws existed in both northern and southern states before and after the civil war – denying black persons the right to vote, to attend public schools, and to equal treatment under the law. for example, in , mississippi had a black code or law that required black workers to have written evidence of employment for the coming year. if they left before the end of the employment contract, they would be forced to forfeit earlier wages and they were subject to ar- rest. as is true today, with low or no wages it is difficult, if not impossible, to obtain sufficient, consistent or quality healthcare. following the reconstruction era ( - ), during which period gains were made by afri- can-americans, the black codes were expanded by jim crow laws - state and local laws that enforced racial segregation in southern states. such laws were upheld by the u.s. supreme court in plessy v. ferguson and remained in effect until the mid to late ’s. thus, our american constitution failed to secure the blessings of liberty to all her citizens. article doi: . /djph. . . , copyright (c) delaware academy of medicine / delaware public health association as late as , kentucky’s laws required separate but “equal” accommodations for nursing homes for african-americans. such accommodations and healthcare were rarely if ever “equal” during this period. facilities for african-americans were consistently inferior and underfunded; and sometimes, there were no facilities at all. although such laws were not adopted by northern states, discrimination in healthcare, housing, and education existed there as well. w.e.b. dubois wrote in , “the high infant mortality in philadelphia today is not a negro affair but an index of social condition.” dubois advocated for improved sanitary conditions, ed- ucation, and better economic opportunities to improve the health of blacks. american hospitals denied blacks admission or treated them in segregated wards in attics and damp basements. due to segregation and discrimination, black doctors and health professionals found it necessary to establish separate hospitals and professional organizations such as the national medical associa- tion (nma), which was formed in . in in the journal of the national medical associa- tion, black physicians wrote about health disparities created from socioeconomic inequalities not physiologic or biologic differences or inferiority. such laws and practices created both unequal access to healthcare and segregated healthcare fa- cilities which laid the foundation for present health and healthcare system inequities. in , president johnson signed into law legislation that created the medicare and medicaid programs. the formation of medicare proved to be a tipping point for our then-segregated healthcare system, because it forced the rapid desegregation of american hospitals. hospitals that practiced racial discrimination could have their now necessary medicare federal funds with- held under title vi of the civil rights act of . delaware, like the rest of the united states, has a long history of segregation in its healthcare system. the history of tuberculosis treatment of african americans in delaware provides a lens from which to view this segregated system. the delaware anti-tuberculosis society and the tu- berculosis commission worked to build the first tb sanatorium in the united states dedicated exclusively to the treatment of black patients. the edgewood sanatorium was built with funds from the delaware state legislature and the delaware anti-tuberculosis society and opened in . dr. conwell banton, an african american physician who graduated from the university of pennsylvania school of medicine in and was licensed to practice in delaware, served as the medical director for many years. the sanatorium was expanded in . tuberculosis dis- proportionally infected and affected blacks then and now. in african americans accounted for % of all cases of tb in delaware despite making up only % of the delaware population at the time. in , the cdc reported an eight times higher case rate of tb amongst african americans compared to whites. i, an african american female physician, had the privilege of providing clinical care to tuberculosis patients at the delaware department of public health clin- ics during the late s until . i was able to provide care to black, latino, white and asian patients in a desegregated health care system, unlike dr. banton who served his patients tire- lessly in a segregated sanatorium. while we have made progress towards our goal of eliminating health inequities, there is much work to be done and a more accelerated progression is necessary. prior to completing medical school in and practicing in a desegregated healthcare system, my personal history is that i was born days before the march on washington in in a seg- regated philadelphia hospital, mercy douglass. the frederick douglass memorial hospital and training school was founded in by african american physician, dr. nathan f. mossell, to article doi: . /djph. . . , copyright (c) delaware academy of medicine / delaware public health association care for the sick, to afford hospital opportunities for black physicians and to train black nurses. after merging with mercy hospital in , it closed in . founded on a systemically racist system, though our healthcare system is now desegregated it remains inequitable, and the covid- pandemic has magnified these inequities. blacks and latinos are suffering disproportionately and we have not been spared that reality in delaware. as of august , , the case rate of covid- in delaware was / , among latino/his- panics, / , among blacks and . / , among whites. health care providers can no longer be silent or neutral about inequities in health and healthcare. some have recognized this and are speaking out. we knew about these inequities prior to covid- and solutions are necessary. there is evi- dence that african americans have a higher incidence of conditions requiring intensive care unit (icu) level care compared to whites after adjustment for differences in poverty and re- gion. african americans also have higher age adjusted rates of both in and outpatient cardiac arrest, acute lung injury, noncardiogenic acute respiratory failure, and venous thromboembo- lism. we can no longer ignore what we know. the healthcare community must find solutions. in- creased access to health insurance and medical care to improve chronic pre-existing conditions is necessary. black and brown patients must receive medical care early when they develop a criti- cal illness. differential access to post-acute care, including post-acute covid- care, must be eliminated. public health advocates, practitioners, activists, legislators and other policy makers must also fight together to improve education, decrease poverty, and increase healthcare literacy. each is an important variable to health outcomes. broken public school systems contribute to inequity in health and healthcare by decreasing the pipeline of physicians to our communities and decreas- ing the ability of minority patients to fully advocate on behalf of themselves and their family members in health care contexts. america in general – and delaware specifically – must fix our schools and create successful pipelines to increase the number of black and brown physicians and healthcare providers. blacks make up % of the u.s. population and % of the delaware population, but only make up % of u.s. medical students and % of active u.s. physicians. delaware mimics this inequity with non-hispanic blacks making up only . % of the primary care physicians in delaware. african american physicians and health care providers must feel welcome and supported in del- aware. feeling “alone” in medicine may be felt by black physicians. despite having board certi- fications, medical degrees and clinical expertise, black medical students, residents and attending physicians may find themselves continuously having to “prove” themselves to colleagues. dr. banton advocated for black tuberculosis patients in the early s; more than years later, black physicians continue to tirelessly advocate for black and brown patients too often “alone.” minority students have been found to be more likely to report that race/ethnicity negatively im- pacted their medical school experience and have cited “racial discrimination, racial prejudice, feelings of isolation and different cultural expectations.” the legacy of my father graduating from temple university school of medicine in cer- tainly assisted me in becoming a physician, and likely contributed to my decision to specialize in pulmonary, critical care and sleep medicine. however, after graduating almost three decades article doi: . /djph. . . , copyright (c) delaware academy of medicine / delaware public health association later from the same medical school as my father, his legacy could not shield me from the en- trenched racism of america’s medical schools and healthcare system. i'll never forget my excite- ment of starting my first clinical exposure. it was sullied by a white clinical instructor who in- formed me unprovoked that, “it did not matter” how smart i was or that i had received all hon- ors and high passes in my first two years of medical school, but that this was “different now” and that he was now in charge of the grading during my clinic course. the nma is the largest and oldest national organization representing african american physi- cians and their patients in the united states. it is the collective voice of african american physi- cians, and the leading force for parity and justice in medicine and for the elimination of dispari- ties in health. the local delaware first state chapter of the nma was an active voice in the fight to ensure black and brown delawareans were counted during the covid- pandemic. by providing a community of physicians with shared experiences, the nma helps black physicians to not feel “alone,” and to assist in the advancement of social justice in medicine. the formation of the nma in was in response to the exclusion of african-american physi- cians from the ama (american medical association) and local state medical societies. in , the ama voted against motions prohibiting racial discrimination by member/local medical soci- eties despite “condemning racial discrimination,” thereby sending the implicit message that such discrimination was permissible. in , the ama issued a formal apology to the nma and af- rican american physicians for one and a half centuries of systemic and overt racism towards af- rican american physicians, their families and patients. in , i am optimistic but vigilant. the covid- pandemic has exposed the inequitable allocation of health care resources and re- sultant disparities in the health of blacks and latinos/hispanics. during the regional peak of the covid- pandemic in delaware, i wrote an opinion piece entitled, “delaware needs statewide ethics board to oversee allocation of ventilators, covid- supplies.” at the time, my concern was that a possible surge in hospital admissions could make ventilators a scarce resource that would require attention to the necessity of fair and just allocation. i recom- mended creation of a statewide ethics board for pandemic covid- with representation from our delaware community, including young and old, black, brown, white and asian individuals. subsequently, on the journal of the american medical association (jama) published a system- atic review, “variation in ventilator allocation guidelines by us states during coronavirus dis- ease pandemic.” only states provided guidance on how this allocation should occur. guidelines varied significantly and it was concluded that there could be inequity in allocation of mechanical ventilator support during a public health emergency such as the covid- pan- demic. i remain concerned that this statewide inequity could again mimic the racial inequities in our health care system in the us. as a state, a refocus on social justice work was spurred by the storm of the covid- pandemic and the murder of george floyd, as demonstrated by the passage of delaware senate bill . sb is a delaware constitutional amendment to protect against discrimination on the basis of race, color and national origin with protections that parallel those provided in the national civil rights act of . after the passage of sb , the legislative black caucus of delaware an- nounced their “justice for all agenda” in june, which includes establishment of an african american task force “entrusted with exploring the disparities experienced by people of color throughout delaware and proposing remedies to address those inequities.” it is our duty as health care providers to not only care for our patients at their bedsides, but to improve their health through advocacy and education of our legislators to ensure that racial inequities in health article doi: . /djph. . . , copyright (c) delaware academy of medicine / delaware public health association and healthcare systems are eliminated. a similar effort was seen in michigan when governor whitmer created the coronavirus task force on racial disparities to ensure all michiganders have equal access to critical health care resources; we can do the same in delaware. fortunately, delaware never required ventilator allocation. but we may require covid- vac- cine allocation, and we should ensure this allocation is just and equitable. additionally, our en- tire health and healthcare system, at the state and national level, requires just and equitable allo- cation of resources. i believe we are up for the task. we have the resources, the skill sets, and our efforts are now refocused due to the intersecting impact of covid- and the civil discourse re- lated to the “black lives matter” movement. when i graduated from medical school three decades ago, i took a modified hippocratic oath. one current version is “as a member of the medical profession i will not permit considera- tions of age, disease, disability, creed, ethnic origin, gender, nationality, political affiliation, race, sexual orientation, social standing or any other factor to intervene between my duty and my patient” [emphasis mine]. we know “we can’t breathe” and we need to fix this. references . kaufman, m., & savitt, t. l. ( ). medicine and slavery: an essay review. the georgia historical quarterly, ( ), – . pubmed . black codes. (n.d.). retrieved from: https://www.history.com/topics/black-history/black- codes . jim crow laws. ( , aug ). retrieved from: https://www.history.com/topics/early- th-century-us/jim-crow-laws . gamble, v. n. ( , april). “there wasn’t a lot of comforts in those days:” african ameri- cans, public health, and the influenza epidemic. public health reports (washington, d.c.), (suppl ), – . pubmedhttps://doi.org/ . / s . centers for medicare and medicaid. (n.d.). history. retrieved from: https://www.cms.gov/about-cms/agency-information/history . a history of the de anti tuberculosis society, - . chapter : building program [re- trieved by archivist delaware academy of medicine] . edgewood sanatorium ( , jan ). anniversary edgewood sanatorium, - , open house program. . centers for disease control and prevention. (n.d.). tuberculosis. retrieved from: https://www.cdc.gov/tb/statistics/default.htm . delaware department of health and social services. (n.d.). my healthy community portal. retrieved from: http://myhealthycommunity.dhss.delaware.gov/locations/state . soto, g. j., martin, g. s., & gong, m. n. ( , december). healthcare disparities in criti- cal illness. critical care medicine, ( ), – . pub- medhttps://doi.org/ . /ccm. b e a a . american association of medical colleges. ( ). diversity in medicine: facts and figures . retrieved from: https://www.aamc.org/data-reports/workforce/report/diversity-medi- cine-facts-and-figures- https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=retrieve&db=pubmed&list_uids= &dopt=abstract https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=retrieve&db=pubmed&list_uids= &dopt=abstract https://doi.org/ . / s https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=retrieve&db=pubmed&list_uids= &dopt=abstract https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=retrieve&db=pubmed&list_uids= &dopt=abstract https://doi.org/ . /ccm. b e a a article doi: . /djph. . . , copyright (c) delaware academy of medicine / delaware public health association . mitchell, k., iheanacho, f., washington, j., & lee, m. ( ). addressing health disparities in delaware by diversifying the next generation of delaware’s physicians. delaware jour- nal of public health, ( ), – . . dyrbye, l.n., thomas, m.r., eacker, a. ( ). race, ethnicity, and medical student well- being in the united states. arch intern med, ( ), - . doi; . /archinte. . . . guy, c. a. ( , apr ). delaware needs statewide ethics board to oversee allocation of ventilators, covid- supplies. delawareonline. retrieved from: https://www.delaware- online.com/story/opinion/ / / /delaware-needs-statewide-ethics-board-oversee-allo- cation-ventilators-covid- -supplies/ / . piscitello, g.m., kapania, e.m., miller, w.d., rojas, j.c., siegler, m., parker, w.f. ( , jun ). variation in ventilator allocation guidelines by us state during the coronavirus dis- ease pandemic. jama new open, ( ). doi: . /jamanet-workopen ./ . delaware senate bill . ( ). retrieved from: https://legis.delaware.gov/billde- tail/ . delaware house democrats. ( ). delaware legislative black caucus announces package of racial justice legislation. retrieved from: http://www.dehousedems.com/press/delaware- legislative-black-caucus-announces-package-racial-justice-legislation 	towards a more healthy america: 	reallocation of health care resources in an inequitable health care system 	references sides, k. ( ). precedence and warning: global apartheid and south africa’s long conversation on race with the united states. safundi: the journal of south african and american studies , ( ), - . https://doi.org/ . / . . peer reviewed version link to published version (if available): . / . . link to publication record in explore bristol research pdf-document this is the author accepted manuscript (aam). the final published version (version of record) is available online via taylor and francis at https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/ . / . . . please refer to any applicable terms of use of the publisher. university of bristol - explore bristol research general rights this document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. please cite only the published version using the reference above. full terms of use are available: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/red/research-policy/pure/user-guides/ebr-terms/ https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/publications/ c f- bba- e c-bd -bd bb https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/publications/ c f- bba- e c-bd -bd bb 	 	 “precedence and warning: global apartheid and south africa’s long conversation on race with the united states” kirk	b.	sides	 this paper brings together histories of race, both in the united states and in south africa, in order to think about how slavery, segregation, and apartheid, as well as responses to these, have shaped ideas about national identity and belonging. in it i explore the ways these two histories of racial oppression – both slavery and segregation in the u.s., as well as segregation and apartheid in south africa – share not only common and overlapping discursive histories, but can be seen as part of larger transatlantic dialogues on race, racial governance, and the boundaries of national belonging. the paper attempts to chart a history of exchange, between south africa and the u.s., of ideas on racial policy and race thinking. this different genealogy for crossing the atlantic will offer ways to think together events such as the shootings in ferguson in the u.s. and the shooting of miners at marikana in south africa, as related instances of how race – as defining feature of neoliberalism – continues to function in both places. keywords: segregation, apartheid, us south, jim crow, south africa, neoliberalism correspondence to: dr. kirk b. sides kirkbsides@gmail.com 	 	 “precedence and warning: segregation, apartheid, and south africa’s long conversation on race with the united states” kirk b. sides, university of johannesburg this essay brings together two histories of race, both in the united states and in south africa, in order to think about how the racist technologies of segregation and apartheid have shaped ideas about national and racial belonging in each context. first, i argue that engaging these two histories together works against the persistent imaginings of exceptionalism in south africa and the us. in doing so, i believe there is a case to be made – though it is mostly beyond the scope of this article – for thinking about the contemporary dynamics of race in both countries, each a nodal point of violence in an unfolding, global crisis of racism. moreover, i will begin to gesture towards ways in which demands for redress in each space resonate as part of a shared critique of this racialist modernity. my larger point is that thinking south africa and the us together, whether it be in relation to the expansive platform of black lives matter and the fees must fall movement, or in relation to postapartheid reconciliation and discourses about reparations for slavery, should be seen as part of a transatlantic history of relation and exchange between the two countries that spans at least the whole of the twentieth century. thus while these are some of the contemporary stakes of what i am trying to bring together, much of the focus of the article will be to show how these two histories of racial oppression – both post- slavery reconstruction and segregation in the united states, as well as segregation and apartheid in south africa – share not only common and overlapping discursive histories, but can be seen as part of a geographically broader and and historically longer transnational conversation about racial governance and the discontents of modernity, what i am marking out as a history of ‘global apartheid’. 	 	 in what follows i will pay particular attention to ways in which the us formed a racial horizon of both precedence and warning for a newly formed south africa, and especially as the latter developed a national platform of segregation that would later be officially codified under the rubric of apartheid. i want to suggest that current attempts to exorcise the racial pasts in both spaces can offer us a way to view how race and racism function in contemporary political configurations. it must be said that i recognize, along with others who caution against such comparison, that postapartheid south africa and what we might tentatively name post-slavery america do not share identical racial histories, configurations, or dispensations. indeed, the racial logic of each society today varies widely. the point i am trying to make is based instead on a genealogical approach in the sense that if we start by exploring an earlier moment in the exchange of racial ideas between the two countries, rather than beginning with the contemporary moment of what looks like incommensurability, we might begin to see the unfolding – admittedly in sometimes widely divergent directions – of a conversation on race and racial governance between the us and south africa that spans more than a century. race across the atlantic: common grounds? because there has been much equivocation about the possibilities and dangers of comparison between the us and south africa, it is important to consider some of the stakes involved in thinking about these two spaces together. leigh anne duck, a critic of southern (us) literature, warns that “[c]omparison of the us south with south africa not only poses the danger of resuscitating problematic spatial paradigms, but also threatens to return each field to a focus on racial segregation, at a moment 	 	 when such analysis could be outdated.” duck also writes that “comparison between any system and south african apartheid is also, inevitably, fraught with complication.” while i am certainly not trying to forego comparative rigor, i find two problems with much of the equivocating around the possible relation of south african apartheid to other racialist technologies—and especially to american forms (institutionalized and otherwise) of segregation. the first is the obvious and most egregiously committed problem of re-inscribing a south african exceptionalism. this paradigm refuses to compare apartheid, or rather to see it as part of and indeed resultant from a global dialogue comprised of various racialist imaginaries, and even structurally and materially based upon precedent systems, precisely like those of southern, jim-crow segregation. this in turn suggests the second aporia created from apprehension around this comparison, that historically, american policies on race, and especially those that were made to bear structural significance in processes of us national formation (the native american reservation system, slavery, jim crow segregation), were in many ways pioneer technologies of racial governance and served as precedents and examples for the larger colonial world. south african literary critic rita barnard expresses many of the same anxieties of comparison in her otherwise cautionary article “of riots and rainbows: south africa, the us, and the pitfalls of comparison.” barnard’s article both warns those who would make transatlantic comparisons between south africa and the us, as well as offers methodological recommendations for the “brave souls who wish to 																																																								 duck, “apartheid, jim crow, and comparative literature,” . ibid., . barnard, “of riots and rainbows: south africa, the us, and the pitfalls of comparison,” . 	 	 compare south african and us culture [and] the difficulties of such an enterprise.” i want to explore the equivocations behind barnard’s warnings, though i want to make it clear that barnard is not unique in expressing these comparative concerns; i cite her article here precisely because of her critical reach as an analyst of both spaces. firstly, barnard cites jacques derrida’s famous essay on the inhospitable and hence untranslatable word “apartheid.” derrida’s essay, “racism’s last word,” i argue, is somewhat dangerous for the same reasons that discourses on postraciality are dangerous: they implicitly chart a teleology of progress along an axis supposedly marking the societal erasure of racism. derrida expresses the hope that “apartheid may…remain…the unique appellation for the ultimate racism in the world, the last of many.” i take issue with derrida’s essay for a number of reasons. firstly, the hyper- exceptionalizing of apartheid as the “unique” and “last” racism of the planet reinforces the view of south africa as a space of incomparable and ultimate racism and violence. i find this exceptionalism dangerous precisely because one of its animating assumptions seems to be that if, or when, apartheid has finally been worked through, racism must come to some kind of end. as barnard writes, “once the drama of racial conflict ceases to be the animating concern for students of post-apartheid south africa (as it gradually must), the us will increasingly seem an unlikely comparative partner.” i wonder just how much we can hold to such a statement a little more than a decade after its writing, particularly in light of the ways both countries have re-emerged on the global stage as spaces of highly visible racial violence as well as of extreme racial neoliberalism, but also for the ways in which 																																																								 quoted in barnard, “of riots and rainbows,” . ibid., . 	 	 racism and xenophobia continue to animate the political (and economic) imaginaries of both countries. even if we bracket the last decade, i would still argue that such ideas of incommensurability are complicit in erasing the histories of exchange and dialogue between south africa and the us. rob nixon, in his otherwise path-breaking study homelands, harlem and hollywood ( ), while convincingly mapping nearly half a century of entangled cultural, political, and social imaginaries between the united states and south africa, equivocates precisely around the question of race, its various taxonomical systems, and the problem of their “illusory sense of mutual intelligibility.” the construction of race is uniquely dependent upon both the historical moment as well as the cultural, political, and socio-economic context in which the construction takes place; indeed, the modes and tropes for representing race vary and shift according to the variegations of the cultural topography of a given place. race moves, in other words. in other words still, race is a global phenomenon continually made local. as david theo goldberg writes: the conceptions and comprehensions as well as the institutional arrangements and exclusionary expressions no doubt are deeply local in the exact meanings and resonances they exhibit as well as the effects and 																																																								 think here of dylann roof, who self-identified with the old south african and rhodesian regimes, choosing to use both as potent markers of whiteness; roof was convicted of shooting nine black members of a church in south carolina in a self-proclaimed act of white supremacist murder. think, too, of the continued relationship between the black lives matter and the fees must fall/rhodes must fall and larger decolonize movements. from the discourse on land redistribution in south africa to the recent declaration of reparations for descendants of slaves sold by georgetown university, we have in just the last two years witnessed a strange resurgence of something like a return of a transcolonial racist imaginary as well as a transnational consolidation of the responses to these racist aggressions. nixon, homelands, harlem, and hollywood: south african culture and the world beyond, . 	 	 implications to which they in the end give rise. but these local resonances nevertheless are almost always tied to extra- or trans-territorial conceptions and expressions, those that circulate in wider circles of meaning and practice. while on some level i agree with nixon when he writes that “[t]he inevitably partial character of the connections” between the two countries “becomes particularly manifest in the unstable zone of ethnic and racial discourse: the terms black, african, ‘colored,’ nonracial, multiethnic, multicultural, pluralist, and minority have quite different valences and implications in the u.s.a. and south africa,” i argue that the semiotics and semantics of race particular to the us and south africa do not tell the whole story. this is at least partly the case because, and nixon is hardly alone in this, the story (of race) does not reach back far enough. nixon is concerned largely with the period of apartheid itself, and the cultural flows between spaces such as harlem and sophiatown from the s onwards. similarly to derrida’s preclusion of apartheid’s comparability discussed above, the grounds for comparison are inevitably bounded by the historiographical fence of apartheid itself. this in turn sets the terms – quite literally, in the case of derrida’s piece – for any possible commensurability. i want to argue that rather than looking for one-for-one correlations, we can map more expansive regions of critique by instead focusing on racial/racist imaginaries, ones that include the us and south africa in a long conversation. moreover, if we think beyond the apartheid boundary of history to an earlier pre-history of colonial and segregationist racial technologies, then other genealogies, influences, and resonances, 																																																								 goldberg, “racial comparison, relational racisms: some thoughts on method,” . nixon, homelands..., . 	 	 begin to emerge. we begin to see a map outlining a history of a certain racial modernity of the atlantic between south africa and the united states. ultimately, i maintain that the persistent equivocation around comparison distracts from what might otherwise be productive critiques of both shared histories, as well as for how looking at these two spaces might tell us something about how race operates, and has been operationalized in our current planetary dispensations of racial neoliberalism, about which i will focus on more below. it is precisely, and perhaps only, through a study of the relations between these two spaces and the discursive flows across their racial histories that we might disenchant ourselves of the aura of exceptionalism hovering around each. i suggest further that it is the historical legacies of transatlantic slavery as well as the southern african experience of apartheid that continue to mark the boundaries and chart the terrain of a racialized global modernity, a modernity reverberating across the atlantic, from ferguson to marikana. pushing against the exceptionalism of regionalist histories, paul gilroy makes the claim that, “[i]n a sense then, geo-politics has itself been reordered along the lines of old south africa.” outside of the nation-state of israel, this is perhaps nowhere better exemplified than in the united states. gilroy gestures towards precisely what david theo goldberg refers to as a form of “racial 																																																								 ‘ferguson’ refers to the events of august in ferguson, missouri following the fatal shooting of michael brown, a black man by a white police officer, darren wilson. though only one moment in a vast landscape of black deaths at the hands of police officials, ferguson is a significant moment in the recent history of violence against blacks in the u.s., not only for its highlighting of an increased militarization of police forces across the country, but also for how the incident has acted as catalyst for solidarity against state-sanctioned police brutality since the event. ‘marikana’ refers to the killing of mine workers by the south african security forces following a strike by the miners and subsequent stand off over the course of days during august . the tragedy occurred at the marikana platinum mine outside of rustenburg, and resulted in the death of over miners. it has been described as one of the deadliest uses of state force in south african history. gilroy, . 	 	 south africanization.” apartheid and segregation have become world-organizing systems, their logics extended to the planet through economies of outsourcing and offshoring, and within ideologies of privatization and neoliberalism. re-constructing the nation: the ‘southern voice’ of maurice evans’s black and white in the southern states i turn now to look at several historical examples of the conversations on race and racial policy that animated the early relationship across the atlantic between south africa and the united states. while these are by no means exhaustive, i believe that they give a glimpse into the texture of the dialogue, its ideological stances towards segregation and assimilation, and most importantly, the ways in which the white south african racial imaginary in the early twentieth century was influenced by the figure of the post-reconstruction southern united states, one that loomed large for the budding south african nation, both precedent and warning. maurice evans was an outspoken south african liberal segregationist who traveled to the united states in and wrote a lengthy study on his time there. titled black and white in the southern states. a study of the race problem in the united states from a south african point of view, evans’s study is perhaps the first comparative look at the race situations of both south africa and the united states and reads like a sociological appraisal of the southern us half a century after the end of the american civil war. what is particularly peculiar about evans’s text is not the ethnographical comparison of the two spaces, but rather the ways in which the author maps an imaginary geography in which the racial modernities of the two nations are linked. he begins by locating his study within a cartography in which the atlantic recedes; looking out 																																																								 goldberg, “a political theology” 	 	 from the shores of the southern states, evans sees the horizon of a segregationist future in south africa. “notwithstanding the markedly different experiences through which each country has gone since european settlement first began”, evans writes, the visitor from south africa to the southern states sees much that is familiar. every now and then some experience brings vividly to his mind the country he left. it was one of the pleasures of my visit to find, so far away, how often the very conditions i had left were reproduced before my eyes, the thousands of miles melted away, and africa was before me. i have quoted this passage elsewhere in safundi, but i argue it begs a revisiting precisely for the ways in which evans’s imaginary topography maps not just a collapsing geography of the racial/racist atlantic, but also a teleology in which american racial technologies first served as templates for the development of what later became apartheid. mahmood mamdani captures this development succinctly, noting how south african homelands “had first been created in north america half a century before. the american reservation became the south african reserve.” for evans and other south africans, the post-civil war reconstruction of the united states served as ideological and practical warning. indeed, much of 																																																								 maurice evans, black and white, . kirk b. sides, “ecologies of relation: post-slavery, post-apartheid and rethinking race across the atlantic in zakes mda’s cion. safundi, . . mamdani, “settler colonialism,” . it should be noted that evans was not unique, neither for espousal of segregation and anti- assimilation stances, nor for his articulation of these subsequent to travel in the united states. a revealing number of popular advocates of segregation in south africa had indeed traveled in the united states, and the south in particular. in addition to evans, there are c.t. loram, edgar brooks, hendrik verwoerd, and others. 	 	 evans’s text reads like an allegorical diagnosis of the racial and social dimensions of south africa, from the ideological position of the us. evans warns south africans explicitly against, “those …who, for the sake of economic advancement, would not hesitate to bring the native people into surroundings in which they would be brought into industrial competition with the whites…” not only does evans claim that such economic and social intimacy would “inevitably lead to race conflict and race hatred,” but he sites the history of the united states as exemplary and instructive, writing that: “such contact in america has neither led to the true advance of the black, nor the advance of the white, nor to racial peace.” he goes on to say that the wisest friend of the american negro, both white and black, after all these years of contact, would welcome a separation of the races such as is still possible to us in south africa…we still have our black states. we still have basutoland, bechuanaland, swaziland, the transkei, the large reserves in zululand and the locations in natal and the transvaal, and yet short-sighted ones would break them up…to such [short-sighted ones] the experience of the south should act as a warning. for south african commentators on the american south, the temporality of thinking about jim crow segregation as template for south africa was a curious ‘always already too late’ example for the future. while evans and others supported the segregationist efforts of the american south, they largely believed that it was too late for their own region. the historical experience of slavery and the project of 																																																								 evans, black and white, . ibid. 	 	 assimilation they saw as forced upon the south by the victorious north after the civil war had effected a level of cultural, economic, and racial mixture that could not be undone. noting how south africa ran a decade or two behind the project of the american south, john cell writes: “the apparent failure of segregation in america might conceivably have led white south africans to conclude that the problem of race relations in their country might require a fresh approach.” instead, he continues, “[t]hey thought the south had not begun soon enough. its segregation had not been sufficiently thorough…the prescription of white south africans for remedying the faults of segregation was…more segregation.” the banner of racial modernity was to be picked up where the south had left it, and carried into the future by a newly formed, modern south african nation. the racial future of the twentieth century was to be a carrying forward across the atlantic of an american project of violent racial governance. it is equally important to say something about evans’s views on race in general, especially for the ways in which his opinions on the immutability of ‘racial character’ shaped his political positions on race in both the us and south africa. at first blush evans’s conceptions of race read as largely in step with many (mostly white) liberal commentators of his day. he begins with a characteristically universalist belief in the what he calls the “brotherhood of man,” claiming that “widely as the races differ, the resemblances are far greater than the differences, that human nature is much the same all the world over.” evans continues to make clear his historical and anthropological positions on race and the claims for the unity of “human nature,” espousing a belief in monogenesis (the unitary origin of the human species). he also claims that this common origin is the source of similar responses “to 																																																								 cell, the highest stage, . evans, black and white, . 	 	 the same stimuli”; that humans “respond…under given provocation, love and hate, desire and accumulate, in much the same way.” framing his comments on race in this way, evans is careful not to appear in any way as racist. this is a label never directly ascribed to him, and one he would probably have opposed vehemently. if the reader is lulled into a narrative of racial harmony, based on shared species origins and notions of shared emotional “natures,” then evans just as quickly contradicts himself and spends the rest of this chapter staging elaborations on the fundamental, even foundational, differences between races. why the contradiction? the answer, i argue, has everything to do with evans trying to reconcile his ideological position on race with his political one, a rhetorical trap in many ways definitional to the ‘liberal segregationism’ defining the atlantic racial modernity i have been gesturing towards. common origins and common emotional responses – those traits shared out across the human spectrum – “vary enormously”, according to evans, and “become very much attenuated when we compare the bushmen, the veddah, or the andaman islander with the englishman or the german.” the reasoning for this difference, evans claims, rests on the spatial and teleological analogy of (racial) diffusionism, where “resemblances become less or more in proportion to the length of time which has elapsed since they diverged from a common stock.” to be sure, this is a fairly common philosophy of (racialist) world history, where even when a common origin for human beings is admitted, the idea is that races perceived to be different both moved away from this origin at different (historical) velocities, but also become deterministically limited or advantaged according to their supposed “racial genius” or 																																																								 ibid. ibid., - . ibid., . this was of course not a given, and the debate between monogenesis and polygenesis is the key debate here. 	 	 racial characteristics. evans couches the whole idea of racial difference in a geological metaphor whereby race identity is the result of the sedimentation of racial character over the longue durée of “geological time”, producing the “adamant of…race genius, formed by gradual accretion from thousands of long forgotten ancestors.” the solidity and immutability of evans’s racial metaphor is meant to serve as relief against which notions of “civilization,” “progress,” “education,” and most importantly “assimilation”, are dashed and thus seen to be “ephemeral” (as evans suggests). again, why would evan equivocate so within this text? i want to suggest that he is walking something of a line here, making it clear that he does not support a platform of out-and-out racism, while simultaneously laying the literal and metaphorical groundwork for his ideological and legislative recommendations for south african forms of segregation at the end of his text. evans is at pains to make it clear that his evaluation of various races is not quantitative, but rather qualitative. in other words, “that while one may not be superior to the other, the races have special powers and special limitations, and are essentially different.” it is precisely upon this carefully mediated line, between a blatant racism and a liberal humanist patronizing, that evans is able, ultimately, to clear the ground for a platform of segregation – which is both prescription and proscription for south africa. and here evans is more than clear; segregation is to be the only hope for south africa, and his study of the american south’s experiment with reconstruction and black enfranchisement as well as its experience of assimilation is the ‘proof’ evans feels his south african audience requires. the south african future and the american precedent are linked by the responsibility laid at the feet of the former by evans. among a host of other “specific lessons” evans feels he 																																																								 ibid., - . ibid., . 	 	 has garnered from the history of the american south, the paramount one is that “[t]he races are so different that to reduce antagonism and give each its full opportunity for race development, a conscious and reasoned attempt at race separation should be made.” evans admits that while it may be too late for the south, in the strengthening and wise adjustment of this policy of separation, guardianship, and wise control [is] the greatest hope for the races in south africa. had this policy been adopted in the united states at the time of emancipation, when it was practicable, some at least of the present tension might have been avoided. if evans begins in the universalizing tones of a common humanity, then his liberal humanism is sacrificed (or is it sacralized?) in the crucible of economic and pragmatic racism. the us and south africa for him are two nodal points in the mapping of an atlantic racial modernity unfolding across the twentieth century. the perceived failures of reconstruction, as well as the supposed sin of racial “miscegenation” (“debauchery” in evans’s words), were to be rectified and rearticulated in the building of a modern south african nation. america’s racial sins, in other words, could be cleansed across the waters of the atlantic. writing just on the cusp of unification in south africa, another prominent proponent of segregation, howard j. pim, imagines specifically how non-white enfranchisement might be approached. perhaps not surprisingly, he also employs the example of the post-reconstruction united states. pim’s ideas about enfranchisement crescendo into a dramatic world vision of how, in the face of what we today might 																																																								 ibid., . ibid., . 	 	 call globalization, to maintain what segregationists termed “national” (read: racial) integrity. according to pim’s vision of a racialist future (which is almost identical to evans’), “what we can look forward to and strive for is a self-supporting white community in south africa, dealing justly with its coloured neighbors who live under the same sovereignty.” pim points directly to the ways in which the racial horizon of the us served as both precedent and warning for south africa: i often wonder whether the enormous developments in our methods and means of locomotion during the last years have not unduly shifted the standpoint from which we view the world as a whole. physical barriers between nations have well-nigh disappeared, and a good many things appear to have been done on the assumption that differences of race disappeared with them. this is not so. these differences, even between white nations, extend far down into the foundations of society; and though at present the great cauldron of the american union may seem to be an exception, i am convinced that they will reassert themselves, and that the future will lie with those nations that keep themselves clean, independent, self-sufficing and self- contained. what strikes one here is the notion that in the articulation of a world vision, a post- industrial notion of globalization, there is the persistent marking out of an idea of 																																																								 pim, “the question of race,” . ibid., emphasis added. 	 	 modernity, decidedly a racialist one; a racialist modernity that consistently thinks through the examples of the united states and south africa. south african j. e. holloway, writing on the proceedings of the native economic commission in south africa, frames his analysis of the commission’s decision to adopt an “adaptationist” policy towards race relations with this succinct appraisal. “the progress among the american negroes of assimilation, the stages which it has completed and the difficulties in the way of its complete fulfillment, are of great interest to the study of race relations in south africa”, he writes. holloway’s essay, entitled “the american negro and the south african abantu – a study in assimilation” and originally read as a speech at the meeting of the pretoria branch of the economic society of south africa in , lays out an argument for the perceived dangers of an assimilationist approach to race relations as witnessed in the united states, and in the south specifically. holloway notes that the native economic commission, rather than adopting an assimilationist approach, “affirmed their adherence to an adaptationist approach to the handling of the problems which concern the native.” adaptationism, holloway explains, purports to “take out of the bantu past what is good, and even what is merely neutral, and, together with what is good of european culture for the abantu, building up a bantu future.” not simply a racist historiographical re-envisioning of the past, this program – what amounts to racial and social engineering – is explained through a series of botanical and biological metaphors whereby, “the adaptationist aims at transforming, at giving shape and direction to what is growing, or, to vary the metaphor, at grafting on the existing 																																																								 holloway, “the american negro and the south african abantu,” . ibid., . ibid. 	 	 stock. his view of human beings is essentially evolutionary…. their reactions are largely conditioned by their racial past and are therefore difficult to destroy.” the remainder of holloway’s treatise details the nature and extent to which assimilation – delineating between economic, social, and racial forms of assimilation – had progressed within the united states, as well as the possible lessons to be learned and, indeed, warnings to be heeded from what is ultimately viewed as the failed project of assimilation in the united states. holloway, like evans and many other south africans, felt that the segregation of the south, while lauded by many across the atlantic, was ‘too little, too late.’ slavery was blamed for a level of assimilation that precluded the future effectiveness of a regime of separate development. noting that the us was not only a slaving society but also a settler colonial one, holloway distinguishes the relationship between the “american negro” and the “american indian” and each group’s respective relationship to the us state. whereas “the institution of slavery made it an easy matter to destroy their [slaves] primitive economic conceptions and substitute therefor the more advanced conceptions of their masters…the red indian, being a free man, was not subjected to this process.” leaving alone any number of problems with these statements, i want to highlight the comparisons holloway is mapping out between various racial policies of governance between the us and south africa, making the comparison quite explicit: “our [south african] blacks, like the american reds, have never been slaves.” indeed, this is key for holloway and others who would cite the american example as potentially formative for a young south african state. that is, unlike black slaves in the us, indigenous, first nation peoples of the us, much like the 																																																								 ibid., . ibid., . ibid., . 	 	 indigenous peoples of southern africa, were perceived to be less effected by european culture and thus somehow ‘closer’ to their own, and thus a process of separating them out from the national body (politic) was made infinitely easier. the native american reservation system – wherein, holloway notes, “their [native americans] rights as free individuals were recognized” – was key to this proposed commensurability with the south african “abantu,” also perceived to be closer to an autochthonous, and thus supposedly free, state of being. with less of the rhetorical flourish and bucolic nostalgia of evans, holloway is pragmatic and explicit in his recommendations based on this transatlantic comparison. he notes that while “[t]he americans…have followed a policy of assimilation of negros…[they] are as far from a solution to the problem of social and racial assimilation as we are in south africa.” despite nearly a century and a half of an assimilationist experiment, holloway notes the lack of progress this approach had affected, as well as the perceived problems it has produced in the united states. if the example set by the us is clear, so to are the proposed paths leading from this warning for south africa. holloway is clear when he writes that either a country be willing to accept the “ultimate and complete” assimilation of white and black elements or this course should be totally avoided. moreover, his prescription for south africa based on the experience of the us offers another uncanny prefiguration of apartheid, especially for its resonance with hendrik verwoerd’s later “separate development” platform. holloway writes that “[a] bantu community developed”— and let his word developed be stressed—“on the basis of its own cultural heritage may 																																																								 ibid., . holloway spends a long digression on the difficulty, when speaking of racial assimilation in the us, to accurately ‘decipher’ the amount of ‘mixed’ blood in the population. clearly this type of creolization presented as anathema to the increasingly taxonomical policy paradigms informing the construction of the south african state. 	 	 in time become a separate, homogeneous civilized group living in peace and contentment and full opportunity for progress next to but apart from the white man.” holloway ends in a prophetic pitting of segregation against assimilation by quoting popular african-american intellectual booker t. washington’s famous hand metaphor and again “warning of the danger of pursuing a policy of assimilation in this country [south africa].” maurice evans also prophesizes in the opening line of his text that, “many signs and portents are in the air showing that among the many questions calling for solution…that of the relations of the races hitherto regarded as civilized with those we have been accustomed to consider backward, will be the world-wide and important one.” and within this global vision, the racialist platforms of the us and south africa loomed as harbingers of sorts, precisely because of how the racial dynamic in each country was viewed: “the union of south africa” evans claims, “is the country in which the problem (of race) is most nearly like what it is in the southern states.” envisioning the problem as simultaneously quite cosmic – unfolding as part of a world historical process – and quite grounded, determined by and determining of racial relationships to land, he writes that “[t]he question the fates have set both countries is this – how to ensure that two races so different, yet living in the same land, shall each have opportunity for its full development, without clashing and without fusion.” 																																																								 ibid., - ; emphasis added. ibid. evans, black and white, . ibid., v. ibid., ; emphasis added. 	 	 in a strange triangulation of advice and moral precedent on the racial governance front, evans reverses the ‘flow’ of advice and precedent and offers the south the words of an english man: the running of a tropical colony is of all tests the most searching as to the development of a nation that attempts it; to see helpless people and not oppress them, to see great wealth and not confiscate it, to have power and not abuse it, to raise the natives and not sink yourself – these are the supreme tests of a nation’s spirit. what this triangulation points to is not only the influence and affinity – if largely un- acknowledged – between the us and south africa, and especially where issues of racial policy were concerned, but it also more explicitly and accurately figures the united states as not only a participant in the application of colonial and racialist technologies, but as an innovator and pioneer of those very technologies influencing the larger colonial world. while much of the history of the us is reluctant to admit that colonial practices were part of its statecraft and foreign policy, evans’s and others’ statements reveal the extant to which the us actually played a formative role in the development of technologies structuring the intensification of imperialism in the early twentieth century. i argue that this history, of the globalizing force of technologies of racial governance emanating from the us during the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, lays the common ground for a discussion of not only apartheid and segregation across these two contexts, but also for the after-effects of more than a century of racialist dispensations in both. it is crucial to understanding 																																																								 ibid., . 	 	 how recent claims for reparative justice against racism, whether in the us or south africa, continue to be informed by this shared history of the forces of a globalizing modernity, a decidedly racist one. it should also be noted here the intense affinity which hendrik verwoerd himself displayed towards the american social sciences in general and the disciplines of psychology and sociology in particular. roberta miller chronicles an often forgotten aspect of the apartheid politician’s earlier life and career as an academic, most notably at the university of stellenbosch. verwoerd was first a professor of psychology and then served as the head of south africa’s first department of sociology and social work, also at stellenbosch. prior to his appointments as professor, verwoerd turned down a bursary to study at oxford and instead took up post-graduate study in germany, and upon his return voyage home traveled through the united states, visiting “psychology laboratories” at harvard and other institutions. miller notes that “verwoerd’s brief visit to the united states on his return trip to south africa was far more important to his intellectual development than was his much longer stay in germany.” it is also interesting to note that while verwoerd does not explicitly refer to the scientific management or social engineering of taylorism, popular in both corporate america and schools of social scientific thought during the time of verwoerd’s trip to the us, his “later racial policies, particularly apartheid, are widely referred to as ‘social engineering.’” whether or not verwoerd’s role in the design of apartheid – as a project of social engineering – can be linked to the influence of taylorism specifically, the influence of american social science on both his academic career and his later life as a politician is clear. by the end of his of his time as a professor at stellenbosch, “verwoerd became recognized 																																																								 miller, “science and society,” ibid., . 	 	 not only as an expert in american social science but also as a proponent of american social welfare systems, and his department at stellenbosch was known as the place where one could learn about american social welfare.” as a project that attempted to map a racial/racist modernity across the social, cultural, and economic landscape of south africa, apartheid found roots and resonances across the atlantic in both the construction of the american nation-state as well as notions of industrial and social engineering. it seems accurate to say that within both the imagination and practical training of verwoerd – ‘the architect of apartheid – that the american social landscape loomed quite large, forming a horizon of racial modernity and precedent for what would become the future of south africa for most of the twentieth century. these ideas of a racial modernity resonating across the atlantic are imperative for evans and others. indeed, much of this image of modernity will later come to form the backbone of afrikaner nationalism as well as apartheid ideology. for all of these so-called ‘liberal’ segregationists, the paramount warning was embodied by us assimilation: the “great sin of the white man against the black,” writes evans, “lay not in slavery, nor in economic exploitation, but in the debouchment of the race by illicit sexual intercourse.” above and beyond all the ills and violence perpetrated by the practices of slavery, and the systemic disenfranchisement of generations, evans and others are unwavering in their claims that violating the sanctity of each races’ supposed uniqueness amounts to the greatest moral as well as national transgression. the material trappings of race, or rather the infrastructural models to which racial ideas are able to attach vary greatly according to the expedients of the moment and the place. however, what evans in particular distills into a quite unmistakable essential 																																																								 ibid., . ibid., . 	 	 fear lurking behind these (political, economic) systems, is recognizable across and within each context. the idea being that these affinities would be in the service of a shared racialist future. racial neoliberalism: racism in/as the private sphere i want to turn now to think about contemporary racial and ideological dispensations as a way to map the continuing resonances between the us and south africa. david t. goldberg’s recent book offers a titular provocation: are we postracial yet? to which he has responded with the revealing equivocation of: “yes, but not in the way we think.” “postracial,” goldberg explains, is “the claim we today inhabit – or have come close(r) to inhabiting – a postracial society embeds the insistence that key conditions of social life are less and less now predicated on racial preferences, choices and resources.” in short, crossing the threshold of the postracial, perhaps ironically or contradictorily, opens up a new panoramic dispensation of race. the postracial is the rebirth of raciality. the postracial is a function of the ideology of “racial neoliberalism,” which goldberg expounds upon in his earlier volume the threat of race, and in which early forms of racism are seen to actually morph into a diffuse and pervasive social agent within political and economic configurations as the state publically disavows racism in order to move beyond its national racist past. goldberg explains how under the current neoliberal dispensation – now planetary in scope – that race and racism have “been placed behind a wall of private preference expression, of privatized choice.” he goes on to say that neoliberalism…does not reduce the state sphere of 																																																								 goldberg, are we postracial yet?, goldberg, the threat of race, . 	 	 government regulation and intervention altogether. it dramatically shifts the relation of state to private sphere…in doing so it thus also ensures a space for extending socio-racial interventions – demographic exclusions, belittlements, forms of control, ongoing humiliation, and the like – difficult or impossible any longer for the state to carry out baldly in its own name. moreover, racial neoliberalism, or rather, the privatization and decoupling of racism from the state, has historiographical implications in that it serves to quarantine the state (politically) and the nation (mythologically) from its racist past. goldberg writes elsewhere that “[p]ostracialism is reduced to reinstating a sociality of purity only now superficially scrubbed of its explicit pernicious terms of characterization. in its name racisms are manufactured and manifested more silently, informally, expressions of private preference schemes rather than of formalized state policy.” this is largely the danger with so-called “postracial” dispositions; the nation is resacralized, baptized in the waters of privatization, and thus are its racist sins washed away. to be clear, racism doesn’t disappear; it’s just no longer the state’s business, so to speak. i want to add here the provocation that nowhere are these logics of racial neoliberalism more evident than in south africa and the united states. this is partly a result of the trajectories of race in both countries; that is, from race explicitly forming the state projects of both nations, to a ‘post-racial’ state project of denialism of race as operative in either state ideology or state functions. this more global history that i am trying to map, between south africa and the us, asks us to think about how in the 																																																								 ibid., - goldberg, “a tale of two of obamas,” . 	 	 present moment of both spaces (the black lives matter movement, the fees must fall movement, the marikana massacre of miners by the south african state and events in ferguson, mo and increasingly more places in the us) are related. as well as how these events might be addressed as part of a global crisis of racism rather than specifically national ones. how, i want to ask, are solidarities between the black lives matter and the fees/rhodes must fall movements articulated within a long history of racism and resistance between the us and south africa? conclusion: decolonization and “imagining a new country” i want to conclude with another short quote from mamdani, who, in writing about america’s contemporary dispositions towards race, offers an uncanny description of post-apartheid south africa. he writes: if america’s greatest social successes have been registered on the frontier of race, the same cannot be said of the frontier of colonialism. if the race question marks the cutting edge of american reform, the native question highlights the limits of that reform. the thrust of american struggles has been to deracialize but not to decolonize. a deracialized america still remains a settler society and a settler state. we need to think seriously about just how far this term “deracialized” carries us across the racial topographies of the us, as well as south africa for that matter. if by deracialized we mean that racism as an overt practice of violence against another individual is no longer condoned by the state, then i believe the comparison with south africa is a productive one. neither country, whether in its political doctrines or its actual legislation, officially condones practices of racism. thinking about 																																																								 mamdani, “settler colonialism,” . 	 	 processes of “deracialization” also exposes precisely the distance between the ideology of the state, which sees itself as non-racial, or past, or post its racial historical moment, and the realities of how race and racism operate everyday on the ground. the idea of a deracialized america reveals the extant to which the us has failed to decolonize fully, and in this way i believe the resonances with south africa are particularly vital. mamdani is right to emphasize america’s continuing colonial nature. it is within the historical aporia of indigenous rights/justice in the us that the american narrative of postraciality has been allowed to grow. postraciality, a discourse based in and continuing to emanate from the experience of the civil rights moment, is an alibi for both a continued, if sublimated and coded, racism, as well as for the denial of a persistent colonial character within the american social and political psyche. as an active, often violent, debate about the myriad forms of decolonization still necessary in south africa continues to shape the social and political landscape in this country, the decolonial discussion has not been part of the mainstream discourse in the us. indeed, the discussion of race – whatever its other inadequacies at various moments might be – continues to eclipse, or perhaps preclude, an acknowledgement of the colonial nightmare serving as relief against which the american dream is imagined. the tenor of the contemporary discourse on decolonization in south africa on the other hand demonstrates how far these political and social rectifications still need to move. i want to suggest that there are also some moments within south africa’s transition that resonate with discussions of race in the united states. for instance, in , then president thabo mbeki writes of south africa that an illegitimate state was imposed upon the majority of the people – a state whose codified system of injustice 	 	 the international community justly declared a crime against humanity. it is this reality of a state founded on conquest that led to the gross violations of human rights whose investigations constitutes the heart of the work of the truth and reconciliation commission (trc). what mbeki points to is the context into which the trc was tasked: an imperative that at its heart was fundamentally about re-imagining a new nation, carving out a common ground for ways of being and national identity. mbeki’s emphasis on van riebeeck’s now decrepit “thorn-bush hedge” meant to delineate colony from the “african hordes” highlights the fact that the trc was also meant to re-imagine the very landscape of the nation itself. decolonization is predicated upon investment in and imagining of a de-colonial space; it also emphasizes how a truly decolonial national position is predicated upon this fuller view of history. this is a point for which mbeki has been taken to task, too. similarly, south africa’s fees must fall movement increasingly positions itself as having political aims which exceed the horizon of free higher education, advocating for a complete structural readjustment of south african society at a very fundamental level, something most young people today believe to be a continuing failure of the post-apartheid dispensation. we can and certainly must call to account the successfulness of this process of radical re-imagining. speaking about the trc, goldberg puts it quite succinctly: “reconciliation, restoration, reconstruction, one might say, pretty much without redistribution or recompense.” he could just as easily be referring to the united states’ relationship to its own history of slavery and segregation, where the material is sacrificed on the altar of the symbolic. ta-nehisi coates is interesting here for the 																																																								 mbeki, “haunted by history,” . goldberg, the threat of race, . 	 	 ways in which his recent book between the world and me, in its antiracial stances, articulates a certain justice-based philosophy of history. in this epistolary text addressed to his son, coates writes: you must struggle to remember this past in all its nuance, error, and humanity. you must resist the common urge toward the comforting narrative of divine law, toward fairy tales that imply some irrepressible justice. the enslaved were not bricks in your road, and their lives were not chapters in your redemptive history. they were people turned to fuel for the american machine. enslavement was not destined to end, and it is wrong to claim our present circumstance – no matter how improved – as the redemption for the lives of people who never asked for the posthumous, untouchable glory of dying for their children. slavery – or the struggle to end it, for that matter – does not culminate inevitably in the civil rights movement any more than in the presidency of barak obama. to think so is an act of historical narrative making, the projection of redemption back into the archive of lived experience. coates reminds his son, the intended of this long epistolary address, that appropriating the narrative of slavery as the “redemption song” of blacks in the us today runs the risk of dehumanizing those very people who died under this vicious system. not only have their bodies been historically “transfigured… into sugar tobacco, cotton and gold,” as coates says, but the narrative which takes for granted the end of slavery in some grand march towards 																																																								 coates, between the world and me, . 	 	 freedom, further transfigures these bodies into metaphors of struggle; historically dehumanizing them further. according to coates, black success today cannot be read as the inevitable or the direct result of the sacrifices of these slave bodies, because as he writes, “our triumphs can never compensate for this.” and, he continues, “[p]erhaps our triumphs are not even the point. perhaps struggle is all we have because the god of history is an atheist, and nothing about the world is meant to be.” what coates articulates here is a philosophy of history devoid of historical acts of redemptive revisionism. the struggle against slavery was never meant to culminate in anything; comfortably believing so is a denial of the daily danger that still defines our racial realities in the us today. historical atheism precisely because it rejects the belief that a culmination means disenchanting ourselves of an eschatological narrative structure to struggle. eschatology is both belief in a future and projection into the past; that each moment of struggle is cumulative and tending towards an end point of “irrepressible justice” or irrevocable freedom; daily our news feeds remind us of how this is not true. coates is able to hold both the longue durée of the “never-ending night” of being black in the us simultaneously with the ability to resist the grand narrative of redemption. there is no redemption in a place where black people are many times more likely than whites to be killed by police in . to put this the other way around, the historical experience of slavery has everything to do with the racial violence we see today across the us, it permeates all the minutiae of each act of racism. quarantining slavery to the past, moving towards one side of the historical spectrum which is otherwise marked by the inertia of inevitable justice not only metaphorizes slavery but it also constructs a particular view of historical movement which is the same 																																																								 ibid., - ; emphasis added. 	 	 version animating ideas of “postraciality”. race no longer matters, thus racism no longer exists. slavery has been fought and overcome in the long historical past, and therefore it does not haunt our racial reality today. coates and others argue that the ghost of racial slavery has never been more present, never more haunting of our national house, than when we name ourselves enlightened and disenchanted of our racial and racist pasts. the end of slavery, coates suggests, signifies just that: the end of the institution of slavery. it signifies neither the end of institutional racism, nor a paradigmatic shift in american society whereby race ceases to be integral and operative. keeanga yamahtta-taylor captures this historical process of contradiction, writing that “black people were not freed into an american dream, but into what malcom x described as an “american nightmare” of economic inequality and unchecked injustice.” yamahtta-taylor continues to claim that [f[or those who consider mastery of american politics and black political representation as the highest expression of inclusion in the mainstream, then we are surely in the heyday of american ‘race relations.’ yet, paradoxically, at a moment when african americans have achieved what no rational person could have imagined when the civil war ended, we have simultaneously entered a new period of black protest, black radicalization, and the birth of the new black left. this has also been the terrain of the rhodes/fees must fall movements: both a calling to account for the how little transformation has been effected, but also a subjecting of this contemporary deficit to a much longer historical analysis in order to 																																																								 yamahtta-taylor, from #blacklivesmatter, . ibid., 	 	 see the persistent post-apartheid structural inequalities of south africa as not solely an apartheid narrative but as part of the history of colonization. likewise, the united states, as mamdani points out, has largely failed to recognize or admit its historical – much less its contemporary – colonial character. this has been a connection repeatedly made by the black lives matter (blm) movement, which is one of the reasons it continues to stand at the vanguard of imaginative change in the us. recent official statements made by blm in solidarity with the sioux groups protecting water rights at standing rock, north dakota, declare that “we are in an ongoing struggle for our lives and this struggle is shaped by the shared history between indigenous peoples and black people in america, connecting that stolen land and stolen labor from black and brown people built this country.” this connection, between american coloniality and institutional racism demands to be made clear, especially for the ways in which this long history continues to frame the struggles of the present. as the blm writers argue, “there is no black liberation without indigenous sovereignty.” these forms of trans-struggle solidarities, i argue, are prerequisite for a meaningful and paradigmatic shift in the nature of race and racism in america, and south africa as well. they are also part of the historical processes requisite for the imagining of a new country, and a distinctly de-colonial/de-colonized one. i end with another quote from ta-nehesi coates who suggests that precisely what american needs is to imagine a new country…what i’m talking about is more than recompense for past injustices – more than a handout, a payoff, hush money, or a reluctant bribe. what i am talking about is a national reckoning that would lead to a 																																																								 http://blacklivesmatter.com/solidarity-with-standing-rock/ ibid. 	 	 spiritual renewal…reparations would mean a revolution of the american consciousness, a reconciling of our self-image as the great democratizer with the facts of our history. if the transition from apartheid positioned south african at the vanguard of a non- racial modernity in the s, one in which the country at least started down the path of imagining a new nation, then some twenty years on we can say that the same contradictions and possibilities haunting the south african context continue to plague the american 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( ): - . cell, john. the highest stage of white supremacy. cambridge: cambridge university press, . coates, ta-nehisi. “the case for reparations” the atlantic june, . coates, ta-nehisi. between the world and me. new york: random house, . duck, leigh ann. “apartheid, jim crow, and comparative literature.” safundi: the journal of south african and american studies no. ( ): - . evans, maurice. black and white in th e southern states: a study of the race problem in the united states from a south african point of view. london, new york: longmans, green & co., . derrida, jacques. “racism’s last word.” trans. peggy kamuf. race, writing, and difference. ed. henry louis gates, jr. chicago: u of chicago p, . gilroy, paul. “a new cosmopolitanism.” interventions no. ( ): - . goldberg, david theo. “racial comparison, relational racisms: some thoughts on method.” ethnic and racial studies no. ( ): – . goldberg, david theo. “a political theology of race: articulating racial southafricanization,” cultural studies no. ( ): - . goldberg, david theo. are we postracial yet? (wiley, ). goldberg, david theo. the threat of race: reflections on racial neoliberalism. oxford: wiley blackwell, . goldberg, david theo. “a tale of two of obamas” qual sociol ( ): - . holloway, j. e. “the american negro and the south african abantu – a study in assimilation,” south african journal of economics no. ( ): - . mamdani, mahmood. “settler colonialism: then and now.” critical inquiry no. ( ): - . mbeki, thabo. “haunted by history: race and national reconciliation in south africa,” harvard international review. . 																																																								 coates, “the case for reparations,” . 	 	 miller, roberta b. “science and society in the early career of h.f. verwoerd,” journal of southern african studies no. ( ): - . nixon, rob homelands, harlem, and hollywood: south african culture and the world beyond. new york: routledge, . pim, j. howard. “the question of race” james howard pim papers – , a , william cullen library, historical papers, university of the witwatersrand. sides, kirk b. “ecologies of relation: post-slavery, post-apartheid and rethinking race across the atlantic in zakes mda’s cion. safundi, no. ( ): - . yamahtta-taylor, keeanga. from #blacklivesmatter to black liberation. chicago: haymarket books, . “solidarity with standing rock” black lives matter http://blacklivesmatter.com/solidarity-with-standing-rock. october . article journal of social science education volume issue summer doi . /jsse- “i mean, everybody is kinda racist.“ powerpoint presentations in social-studies classrooms in germany sören torrau teacher at district school, hamburg – learn and explore how students hold presentations in social-studies classrooms and how they foster “racial literacy”. – the article shows that presentations have didactic functions: students learn to transform knowledge in a socio-constructivist way. – a case study catches the deconstruction of racism in everyday school life. – presentations are an indicator of a change in the culture of teaching. purpose: powerpoint presentations have changed representations of knowledge. they repre- sent a social transformation process of communication which is also reflected in social-studies classrooms. thus, it is important to examine not only how students hold presentations but also to explore the construction of knowledge through presentations: what are the didactic func- tions? methodology: the article focuses on a case study that was part of a doctoral dissertation that uses audio recordings, interviews and classroom observations in order to explore presenta- tions in social-studies classrooms. findings: a presentation – the shooting of michael brown – by th-grade student laura shows: students select and transform knowledge in a socio-constructivist and didactic way. presentations are the starting point of a process of negotiation of knowledge, which is trig- gered by the presenting students. laura asks within the lesson: what is racism and what can we learn about racial structures? by reading the article teachers can learn about teaching stu- dents about race and racism through presentations. keywords: presentations, social-science education, transformation of knowledge, perfor- mance, racism, racial literacy, michael brown, anti-racist bildung corresponding author: sören torrau e-mail: soerentorrau@gmail.com mailto:soerentorrau@gmail.com torrau “i mean, everybody is kinda racist.” introduction: presentations as a cultural phenomenon “powerpoint is a social phenomenon, and as society is constructed by meaningful social ac- tions, it is also a cultural phenomenon.” (knoblauch , p. ) presentations are well established in society (cf. heafner ; knoblauch ; mason et al. ; peters ) and children are introduced to presentations early in school – they are an integral and ritualized part of school teaching (cf. hertz et al. ; kernbach et al. ): “now, powerpoint is eve- rywhere and is expected everywhere.” (knight , p. ) students learn how to prepare a presentation, how to deal with a topic and how to introduce it to fellow students. a presenta- tion is always followed by a discussion and a feedback: students learn how the act of speaking becomes a presentation and they are taught to present knowledge to others in public, i.e. in the classroom. in school, teachers introduce students systematically to this complex task. the social significance of presentations is not new, lectures were held before the appear- ance of digital slides. nevertheless, theoretical approaches to society, especially in the context of the use of digital media, speak of a cultural change (cf. schnettler/knoblauch ): presen- tations “as a form of communicative action” (knoblauch , p. ) are the very essence of a so-called knowledge society (cf. schnettler/knoblauch ) or an expression of a perfor- mance culture which stresses the relevance of presentations in modern society and the importance of developing different ways of dealing with knowledge. from a sociological point of view it is relevant to analyze the way presentations form knowledge: “knowledge is not 'just there' but subject to processes of negotiation, acceptance, canoniza- tion, and transmission by more or less institutionalized teaching and learning processes. it is exactly at this juncture that powerpoint plays a prominent role. the powerpoint presentation is, in a nutshell, the communicative form of knowledge. it is by the very form of the communi- cative actions performed in powerpoint presentations that something can be treated as 'knowledge' is constructed. as knowledge is in principle intangible, it depends on being objec- tivated by communication […]. the knowledge society depends even more on processes by which ‘knowledge’ can be objectivated, fixed and made transferable […] powerpoint presen- tations are the very form for this objectivation and fixation.” (knoblauch , p. ) in the following, i use a case study from a social-studies lesson of a district school in ham- burg, germany to show how students learn to act in a didactic way. i will discuss what these findings mean in the context of school in general and particularly for social-studies classrooms: • how is knowledge presented and staged by students in presentations and how are presentations held by students? • which didactic functions do presentations have in social-studies classrooms? • how is the topic of the presentation – racism – negotiated in the classroom? this article shows that presentations in social-studies classrooms have a unique function: the case study of a th grade class reveals how students learn to select a topic, develop ques- tions, choose pictures or videos and distinguish between the important and the unimportant. students not only learn how to present in front of a class, they also learn to transform knowledge. in short: they learn to point in a didactic way. transforming knowledge is originally the central task of teachers. by transferring the act of pointing to students, the central didactic function can be identified: with presentations, stu- dents learn that knowledge – in the social-sciences – is constituted through communicative and social actions between themselves and others. torrau “i mean, everybody is kinda racist.” the second chapter defines racism and stresses the importance of negotiating racism in so- cial-studies classrooms. in the third chapter, i will discuss the construction of knowledge from a socio-constructivist point of view and connect that process with the act of pointing. in the fourth chapter, i will present an empirical evaluation approach for the analysis of knowledge processes on the basis of the model of knowledge forms (cf. grammes ). the fifth chapter deals with the reconstruction of a lesson on racism. in the sixth chapter i will conclusively dis- cuss presentations as a ritualized method which is crucial for the development of understanding how knowledge is constituted through social actions. teaching and learning about racism “to what extent does racism trigger police violence?” asks th grade student laura in her presentation. laura selects the shooting of michael brown in ferguson, mo – an unarmed black teenager who was shot by a police officer (ransby , pp. ff.) – to reflect upon and to criticize racism in society and everyday life. she is interested in the topic and after she was assigned the task to hold a presentation, she uses this communicative form to discuss racism. laura chooses pictures, charts and statistical data in order to convince her teacher and her classmates that there is a connection between racism and police violence – exemplified by the shooting of michael brown. she renders the topic in a specific way: by her interest, her guiding question and her contextualization of the event. “race is without a doubt a complicated, contentious, and highly charged topic.” (brown/brown , p. ) anti-racist teaching and learning processes (german: anti-racist bildung) locate racism not merely as a phenomenon of individual prejudices and attitudes – “racism-as-prejudice view” (bonilla-silva , p. ) – but rather as a “socially constructed category” (bonilla-silva , p. ). anti-racist bildung tries to empower students to recog- nize, understand and criticize racism in its various forms and grasp racism as a multidimensional and “material” (loc. cit.) phenomenon which is embedded in historical and sociopolitical contexts (cf. elverich/scherr ). students should be enabled to deconstruct the central belief of racism that “some people are better than others because of their race” (bonilla-silva , p. ) while ‘race’ can be regarded “as primarily a biological or cultural category easy to read through marks in the body […] or the cultural practices of groups” (loc. cit.). even though it is important for students to reflect personal attitudes and prejudices, central questions should embrace socio-political conditions and structural patterns of racism: “a struc- tural analysis views racism not as a misperception but as a structural arrangement among racial groups.” (sleeter , p. ) in which way, under which conditions and with what con- sequences are attitudes and actions – of individuals, groups and institutions – conveyed through racism? what kind of functions have racist structures and how can they be changed? students can identify and criticize a “racial structure” (bonilla-silva , p. ), that is defined as a “network of social relations at social, political, economic, and ideological levels that shapes the life chances” (loc. cit.) of different groups and individuals. this structure “plac- es subjects in common social locations” (loc. cit.), in which individuals experience racist structures – as personal mindsets – and reproduce them through social actions. although races are invented categories, people experience them as “socially real” (loc. cit.; cf. king et al. ). this framing gives students the opportunity to grasp racism as an invented biological or cultural category that is not only significant in overt racist mindsets and systems like nazi ger- many; the structural analysis can rather reveal that the origin of extreme and racist thinking torrau “i mean, everybody is kinda racist.” and structures can be located in ordinary socio-political, socio-economic and social-cultural conditions (cf. bonilla-silva ; varela/mecheril ). although many teachers emphasize the relevance to teach about racism in social-studies classrooms, “many teachers feel uncomfortable teaching about race, period.” (brown/brown , p. ) in germany, most states do not stress the topics of racism and discrimination in their curricula and teaching about race and racism rather takes place in extracurricular educa- tion (cf. elverich/scherr ). this observation also applies to other countries like the u.s.: “the official curriculum tends either to ignore these concepts or to dilute their complexity or significance.” (king et al. ) king et al. argue that one reason why teachers feel uncomfort- able is because “we lack a common racial literacy” (king et al. , p. ). when students hold presentations in social-studies classrooms they can stress certain top- ics. laura for example examines the case of the shooting of michael brown and tries to speak about and define racism not only in u.s. contexts: by connecting the case of michael brown with german social realities laura grasps racism as a global problem that needs to be dis- cussed and criticized. while holding her presentation, laura is the mainspring to discuss racism. thus, presentations are significant for students to address topics in social-studies class- rooms that are ignored or marginalized in curricula – such as racism. knowledge, presentations and pointing presentations put students – like laura – in a central role in the production of knowledge: the interplay of speech, gestures and slides constitutes knowledge in the situation of a presenta- tion (cf. adams ; idel/rabenstein ). thus, presentations emphasize the communicative actions of students who are put into a situation that is unique in the classroom – they should take over the process of pointing: “powerpoint enhances, quite literally, the ability or power to point.” (adams , p. ) the presenting students significantly influence the way in which knowledge is presented and they influence the mediation of knowledge. despite the frequent use in everyday school life, little is known about the didactic functions of presentations and there are no detailed case studies on presentations in social-studies classrooms so far. lesson plans conceive presentations as a teaching method independent of the content (cf. vallance/towndrow ). that is why presentations have often been criti- cized for promoting a so-called disposal of the content (cf. gruschka ) focusing rather on competences than on topics. but it is not just competences that matter: presentations are “event[s] [that] integrate technology, audiences, and presenters” (knoblauch , p. ). this concept is called performance: “the action of presenting slides to an audience by a speaker – its performance – bestows meanings and thus situationally creates knowledge not inscribed or encoded in the documents [like slides, s.t.]. performance as the embodied form of communication in time, rather, adds corporeality and sociality, and with it time, space, and new meaning to the information.” (knoblauch , p. ) hence, it is relevant to focus on the content of a presentation or, more precisely, on the process how content is formed in a presentation. presentations are directed – socially – to others, a process that weber calls social actions (cf. doolittle/hicks ; berger/luckmann / ; weber / ). social actions are key concepts for social constructivism to define knowledge: “knowledge is not a mirror image of reality.” (doolittle/hicks , p. ) the foundation of the social-constructivist approach torrau “i mean, everybody is kinda racist.” rather is that “the construction of knowledge and the making of meaning are individually and socially active processes” (doolittle/hicks , p. ). presentations represent this under- standing of knowledge in particular: this – the presentation of knowledge by students in front of others, the follow-up discussion which is “a backseat to socially agreed upon ways of carving up reality” (prawat , p. ) – is “where knowledge construction occurs” (doolittle/hicks , p. ). in order to negotiate topics in the classroom, teachers usually point to topics: prange (cf. ) calls pointing the main operation of didactics. thus, a topic that is negotiated in society is re-presented in the classroom (cf. grammes & ). in this respect, the content is not technically mediated but rather didactically transformed. the didactic transformation of the topic should lead students to a learning process, that ideally promotes bildung: “it proposes that bildung should be perceived as an experience that the subject [that is the student, s.t.] comes out of changed; a change which not only affects one’s thinking, but rather the subject’s relation to the world, to others, and to itself.” (koller , p. ) by transferring the act of pointing to students, topics are addressed in a different manner. this not only affects the general structure of lessons but also the transformation of political topics. the model of knowledge forms in order to analyze the dynamics of knowledge processes in the classroom, a didactic definition of knowledge is required. for teaching in social-studies classrooms, it is not only important to re-present the topic through pointing, but also to consider how and in what form the topic should be addressed. therefore, teachers need to differentiate between different knowledge forms. they have to ask: under what perspectives should the topic be dealt with? torrau “i mean, everybody is kinda racist.” fig. : model of knowledge forms according to tilman grammes ( , p. ), translated from german into english. the model of knowledge forms (cf. grammes , p. ; petrik , p. ) emphasizes differences of perspectives as the central didactic category and focuses on transformation processes of knowledge. a topic can be staged in many ways: is it about common knowledge or a situation of everyday life that is to be introduced in the classroom? should a current polit- ical case be addressed? is it about an analysis of a problem that affects society as a whole? these questions reflect different ways of accessing a topic in social-studies classrooms. never- theless, all modes of access are part of society, but there is a didactical difference with regard to specific contexts – a situation, a case, or a problem. circling back to example of th grade student laura, it makes a difference whether racism is addressed (i) as a situation, for example experiences of the students with racism in their everyday lives and the way they handle them; (ii) as a political case, for example the shooting of michael brown and the following lawsuit against the police officer which requires a decision; or (iii) as a problem, exemplified by laura’s central question “to what extent does racism trig- ger police violence?”, that addresses structural causes of racism which can be researched and criticized. through the act of pointing, teachers develop a specific perspective on the content. with the three forms of knowledge – common, institutional, social-science knowledge – teachers develop tasks which should lead to a learning process. the model uses the didactic triangle (in the background of the model) as the fundamental concept of teaching. the arrows represent the didactic act of pointing. the model of knowledge forms can be used as a tool for preparing and analyzing social-studies lessons (cf. grammes ). the model understands knowledge in a sociological and socio-constructivist way: in gen- eral, knowledge is linked to action. in social relations – such as powerpoint presentations – ideas of the individuals shape knowledge by legitimizing and meaningfully selecting and justify- ing it. knowledge is no external category that is beyond reach for individuals but rather individuals constitute knowledge and social reality through actions (cf. berger/luckmann / ): “thus, constructivism emphasizes the active role played by the individual learner in the construction of knowledge [and, s.t.] the primacy of social and individual experience in the process of learning”. (doolittle/hicks , p. ) the model visualizes the ‘action of presentation’ and the social ‘making of knowledge’. it helps to differentiate didactically be- tween different processes of legitimization und justification of knowledge, such as the process of decision-making in the context of cases or the ‘handling’ of everyday-life situations (cf. grammes ). the model focuses on the operative logic of teaching (cf. meseth et al. ; proske ), which produces a certain social order of teaching through the cooperation of teachers and students: operative, in this case, means that the structure of the lesson is determined through communicative actions – depicted in the center of the didactic triangle. thus, knowledge can be reconstructed in presentations, since the communicative actions are constitutional for the construction of social-studies lessons. the empirical study was divided into two parts. in the first part presentations were record- ed in the classroom; slides, transcripts of students and teachers as well as planning notes were obtained. in the second part the students and teachers were invited to listen to the recorded presentations in an interview. they provided their views, impressions and opinions on the lesson and on the subject of the presentation. torrau “i mean, everybody is kinda racist.” both parts were combined in a revised transcript and were interpreted with the didactic model of knowledge forms described above. this evaluation method interprets the transcript hermeneutically (sequence analysis) and focuses on actions: the objective was the reconstruc- tion of the social meaning of interaction and specific kinds of communication in the classroom. (cf. reichertz ) this method which uses the model of knowledge form as the centerpiece to reconstruct learning processes in social-studies classrooms is called “wissensdidaktische hermeneutik” (cf. torrau ). “i mean, everybody is kinda racist.” student’s didactic actions in presentations the following excerpts contain the interaction in the classroom during and after a presentation and the political controversy surrounding the issue of racism. the lesson was recorded in no- vember in a th-grade class in social-studies with students and the class and subject teacher, mr. mueller. mr. mueller has been teaching the class for several years in sports and socials studies. in the last few weeks the class dealt with the weimar republic, nazi-germany and the second world war, as well as the current debate about refugees and right-wing ex- tremism. at the moment, presentations are being held. all students chose their topics on their own. today, laura, a -year-old afro-german, holds a presentation and presents her topic – rac- ism and police violence using the example of the shooting of michael brown – in the final lesson of the day. her presentation starts after an hour-long lunch break. the teacher announces at the beginning of the lesson that laura’s is a “very serious topic”. he briefly mentions that the presentation is about “racism in the us” and that the lesson fol- lows the typical, ritualized pattern: (i) the presentation is held followed by (ii) a discussion and (iii) a feedback for the presenter. after a brief overview of the lesson given by mr. mueller laura introduces the topic to the class starting with the following slide: [the slide reads: police violence (ferguson)] torrau “i mean, everybody is kinda racist.” laura: “so, my topic is police violence in the us, especially the shooting of michael brown.” the slide shows a protester of the "black lives matter" movement on a demonstration in oakland, ca, following a decision by a grand jury not to open a criminal case against the police officer who shot michael brown (cf. ransby ). laura says, that her presentation is about “police violence in the us”. subsequently, she reads her central question to the audience: [the slide reads: to what extent does racism trigger police violence?] laura: [next slide] so, i start with my central question which is: to what extent does racism trigger police violence? with her central question laura takes a specific perspective on “racism”: she stresses the topic of “police violence” and examines the shooting of michael brown to answer the central question of the presentation. the act of pointing is transferred to laura: by asking questions, laura develops the topic of racism. the presentation is not about racist comments on twitter nor the change of communication on the internet. neither is it about the strengthening of right-wing parties and their effect on the party system in germany – although these questions would also address racism. within the scope of the model of knowledge forms, her question transforms the content specifically: her perspective shows an approach of a political case (shooting of michael brown) as well as a social and political problem (racism in police action in the us in general) that goes beyond the case of michael brown. thus, laura transforms knowledge in two ways: she specif- ically mentions the case of michael brown and addresses the problem of racism on an abstract sociological level. with her lead question laura renders racism not as “simple acts of individual prejudices” (king et al. , p. ) but rather examines racism in its socially constructed structures (connection between “police violence” and “racism”). torrau “i mean, everybody is kinda racist.” in the interview after the presentation laura says about her choice of the topic: laura: “uh, just because i’m interested in it and i mean, it isn’t that extreme like in the us, but that's what it's like in germany sometimes, too. and i just wanted to deal with it, because it's kind of, it is about me, too [laura is an afro-german, s.t.], and about the world, how it works with racism and so on. that is why, i was just interested in the topic.” (interview laura) laura's choice of the topic is influenced both by her interest in the case of michael brown and by her understanding of “the world, how it works with racism”. laura contextualizes the topic from different perspectives, which reveals a complex process of pointing: firstly, through her own interest (“it is about me”), laura deals with the topic in her everyday life (common knowledge) and transfers her personal interest into her presentation topic – she “just wanted to deal with it”. thus, she chose a case that interested and affected her. going beyond her own experiences with racism, she develops another perspective through the case of michael brown. thirdly, she also takes a socio-scientific perspective by pointing out the transnational significance of racism ("that’s what it’s like in germany, too"), pointing at racism as a political and social problem. these relations lead to the central question: “to what extent does racism trigger police vio- lence?” the different aspects of the topic (situation, case, problem) are connected – especially for laura herself – and are translated into the presentation. laura contextualizes the topic in a way in which she can identify a “racial structure” (bonilla-silva , p. ) that goes beyond individual mindsets and prejudices. shortly afterwards, laura presents the circumstances of the crime for which she uses a se- ries of pictures of the shootings of michael brown and trayvon martin, who was also shot unarmed by a member of a neighborhood watch: laura: so [next slide], this is michael brown, this is how he lay on the ground. and a lot of pic- tures were taken, that was one of them. torrau “i mean, everybody is kinda racist.” an image appears on the digital board in the classroom. mr. mueller and the students can see a corpse lying on a street: "so, this is michael brown, this is how he lay on the ground," says laura. using that image, she introduces michael brown to her presentation and immedi- ately adds that he lay on the ground after the shooting. she also says that the picture shown here is one of many pictures. by showing the picture of the dead body of michael brown it becomes crystal clear, that ‘race’ as “an invented concept” (king et al. , p. ) is “real for those who are victim to the social construct’s manifestations in actions and thoughts, and to the systems that have been created to oppress and privilege certain groups of people” (loc. cit.). in the interview laura answers to the question, why she chose the picture: laura: “this picture [slide with michael brown, s.t.], yeah, simply, because it is simply genuine and this is exactly the way, how he lay on the ground. that is why, i simply wanted to [stress, s.t.] the importance, and that it didn’t happen just like that but that it really needs to be taken seriously what's going on in america. well, somehow i cannot play down what exactly hap- pened there.” (interview laura) the presentation of the pictures serves to enable the students and mr. mueller to get an accurate idea of the events. the photos are used for the documentation of the events, they mirror the actions that happened in the streets of ferguson, according to laura. it becomes clear that she did not choose the photos arbitrarily – they carry social reality into the class- room: she says that the picture is “genuine”, it visualizes social reality: “this is exactly the way, how he lay on the ground.” on the one hand, the exact representation of the shooting of mi- chael brown in the presentation stresses the "importance" of these events which laura already highlighted when choosing her topic. on the other hand, laura argues that the explic- itness of the picture precludes a reading of objective, unalterable reality: “it didn’t happen just like that.” laura identifies and contextualizes racism as a socially constructed concept: the photo can “serve as a catalyst to help students critically consider the nature and impact of race in the u.s.” (brown/brown , p. ) and in the world which is due to actions of individuals in existing socio-political, socio-economic and social-cultural conditions. she says about her presentation that the selected images were used to point at an im- portant topic: "that it really needs to be taken seriously what's going on in america." laura identifies the problem as a result of a social construct (racism) and points to the problem based on this political case (shooting of michael brown). the students and mr. mueller do not only see the image itself, but also the importance of dealing with racially motivated crimes in the united states: the image could trigger an irritation, it is a wake-up call. laura proves this by presenting the case of trayvon martin. by doing this laura emphasizes that there is omnipresent racism that goes beyond the case of michael brown – her presenta- tion is a structural analysis. following a brief account of the police officer’s trial and subsequent protests in ferguson, laura uses charts to answer her central question. the following chart shows road checks in the us by ethnicity (black/white), sex (male/female) and age, and was published in the new york times. torrau “i mean, everybody is kinda racist.” laura: okay, yeah. as you can see, racism might trigger police violence. it also happens quite often, that is why there are quite a lot of cases like michael brown’s or, or trayvon martin’s […] and this is [pointing at the chart], for example, when you're stopped in road traffic or something like that in america […] so most of the time dark-skinned, male americans are stopped the most. laura cites the chart as evidence ("as you can see") that "racism might trigger police vio- lence". laura verifies the connection of police violence and racism and answers her question from the perspective of social science by relying on empirical data (visualized by the charts). it is no longer just about the case of the shooting of michael brown – even though the strong and emotionally laden pictures support her argument – because now laura focuses on a gen- eral social context: “it also happens quite often, so there are quite a lot of cases like michael brown’s or trayvon martin’s.” her presentation represents a process of legitimization of knowledge in the classroom: “knowledge acquisition and meaning making cannot simply be transferred or transmitted from one individual or group of individuals to another.” (doolit- tle/hicks , p. ) due to the verification of her lead question in front of her classmates and her teacher, meaning-making and the construction of knowledge are “active social pro- cesses of social negotiation [and, s.t.] shared discourse” (doolittle/hicks , p. ). the presentation is the starting point of this process. at this point, the presentation is not about one specific decision made in a trial but about conjectures and criticism: the diagram that laura chose deals with the police road traffic in- spections, situations similar to that of michael brown’s: "so most of the time dark-skinned, male americans are stopped the most." laura draws rudimentarily a connection that is also relevant in academic papers: “where there are large black populations, high unemployment, crumbling infrastructure, and an active underground economy, there is heavy-handed policing, which takes different forms. so-called broken windows policing, a racist and highly flawed model, has been the modus op- erandi of the chicago and new york police forces and many others across the country for years. the supposed logic maintains that smaller, seemingly benign offenses portend serious crimes, and tackling the former will prevent the latter. in other words, there is criminal behav- torrau “i mean, everybody is kinda racist.” ior and ‘precriminal’ behavior. this mind-set sets the stage for racial profiling and harassment of entire groups of people, who ‘might’ be headed toward serious crimes. michael brown’s treatment at the hands of ferguson police is an example of where this approach can lead: a petty, or perceived, infraction leads to confrontation and deadly results.” (ransby , p. ) laura’s findings and theses lead to an intense discussion in the social-studies classroom. the presentation becomes “a springboard to discussion” (adams , p. ). the following part shows the interaction in the classroom after the presentation and the political controver- sy surrounding the issue of racism. [the slide reads: thank you for listening.] the students applaud at the end of the presentation and the teacher, mr. mueller, takes over starting a classroom discussion using the image last shown in laura’s presentation: teacher: nice picture here [reads]: “black lives matter.“ what does that mean? duhan: i don’t know what “matter“ means. teacher: yes, laura [laura raises her hand], i know that you know. can anybody else tell me what this english phrase means? duhan: clara?! clara: why me? teacher: well, clara, you know it, too. [student: “lives of blacks are also important.“] yes, cor- rect. black lives... laura: ...matter. [student: “yes.“] teacher: […] okay, questions, observations, comments. i’m sure there is something you can say about it, right?! questions, observations, comments. apply it to the topic, what is it about, socially? […] torrau “i mean, everybody is kinda racist.” jonathan: well for example there also are black police officers, uhm, are they also discriminat- ed against by their white colleagues or somethin’ like that? and, is there also, do black police officers also discriminate against whites? rather not, right? laura: [some laughter] sorry, i didn’t listen. teacher: that’s a good question that jonathan asked, right?! anthony: [to laura] if whites uhm… the colored police officers discriminate against whites? lara: if there is racism going the other way, so to speak. laura: how? what? whites are… i don’t know. teacher: more questions, first we collect, we try to bundle the questions a little bit. laura: it probably happens, i mean, everybody is kinda racist. teacher: can you … again … well, everybody is somehow a racist? [maurice, ironically to laura: “are you trying to offend me?“] laura: yes. teacher: what exactly do you mean? laura: [to maurice] no, well not everybody is a racist, but uhm… teacher: i know, that you mean something specific, you mean that everybody has [lara: “eve- rybody has some prejudice.“] some subtle prejudice maybe or something like that? laura: yes, i don’t mean racist, like really bad, i rather mean generally, we’ve all got it in us. laura comments on the lesson: laura: “what jonathan said upset me most.” interviewer: “do you remember what he said?” laura: “yes! that racism against uh americans or europeans, well, that blacks discriminate against white. that was something that he like… mentioned. well, we were just talkin’ about […] problems for colored people in the us and then he talked about how whites are treated in the united states. that’s why… i didn’t think it was very considerate.“ (interview laura) after the attempt to translate and clarify the meaning of the english phrase (and move- ment) “black lives matter” (cf. ransby ) mr. mueller asks the students for „questions, observations, comments“ and specifies this request further by adding: „what is it about, so- cially?“ mr. mueller links his question – from a didactic point of view (cf. the model of knowledge forms) – to the social-scientific conclusion of the presentation and poses the guiding question for the discussion from this perspective. it is neither about the case of the shooting of michael brown nor about personal experiences or opinions of the students, but rather what the shoot- ing of michael brown “is about socially”: this question could move the discussion into a social- scientific field. with the help of the presentation, the students should identify a structural problem which is relevant for society. at the same time the students are encouraged to ask torrau “i mean, everybody is kinda racist.” “questions” and formulate “observations and comments” themselves that could evoke other contexts such as personal experiences in everyday life situations. the teacher is undecided whether to work out a problem on the one hand or to discuss spontaneously given comments by students on the other hand. the argument from laura that the charts are evidence that racism “might trigger police violence” is not contested, and therefore it can be read as accept- ing her central findings. in class, the need for clarification of the aim of the discussion becomes obvious. jonathan asks laura two questions: first, if “black police officers” are “discriminated against by their white colleagues” and then, if “black police officers also discriminate against whites”. in the interview it becomes clear that jonathan's question annoys laura: his question "upset" her the “most” and in laura’s opinion it was not “very considerate” to talk about how „whites are treated in the united states“ after listening to her presentation. laura stresses in the interview that her presentation was about “problems” of “colored people”. laura reacts to jonathan's question with incomprehension: “how? what? whites are… i don’t know.” this scene illus- trates how the importance of the content of the topic of racism grew from talking about the case of michael brown and racism in the us, to also becoming personally significant for the students – for example for laura as an afro-german – themselves: laura wants or can not answer this question: "i don’t know." nevertheless, laura takes up – after a brief invitation of the teacher to ask “more ques- tions” – the comment expressed by jonathan and formulates the core of the upcoming discussion: “it probably happens, i mean, everybody is kinda racist.“ laura no longer argues socio-scientifically, as she did in her conclusion using the charts. now, with this statement she locates racism on the level of everyday life by expressing experiences and/or personal opinions as a declarative sentence ("everybody is kinda...") and thus addressing her classmates directly (“are you trying to offend me?”). mr. mueller is surprised by laura's statement (“can you … again … well, everybody is somehow a racist?”) and asks for clarification (“what exactly do you mean?”). laura puts her statement in perspective (“i don’t mean racist, like really bad”) after mr. mueller tries to re- construct that laura “means something specific” – the teacher tries to defuse the statement (“subtle prejudice”). laura, nevertheless, concludes: “i rather mean generally, we’ve all got it in us.” thus, laura invites the audience to further discuss the issue of racism in the classroom and to deal with the question of racism in society. laura creates a “teachable moment” (brown/brown , p. ) about racism and provocatively invites her classmates to talk about the topic because she connects current events and social-cultural conditions with the “social realities” (loc. cit.) of the students and mr. mueller: “to put it simply, race and racism are al- ready explicitly and implicitly part of the students’ lives” (brown/brown , p. ) and laura stresses that connection. thus, laura – as a student – models the social-studies lesson signifi- cantly: to talk about and reflect on racism is everyone’s business. laura’s presentation in general and particularly her results lead to an intense discussion. laura expresses her everyday life observation as a statement which her classmates will refer to their own experiences. from a didactic point of view, laura establishes a direct connection between the problem of racism in society and the everyday life situations of her classmates. in short, laura points at this connection through communicative actions. thus, her classmates discuss an important question for every society: what is racism and how is it expressed in eve- ryday life situations and society in general? the th graders discuss what racism is about, in germany and in the world, they discuss their own experiences with racist insults including torrau “i mean, everybody is kinda racist.” forms of “new racism” (cf. bonilla-silva ), struggling with the ambiguity of political and social knowledge – brought up in laura’s presentation who points at an important topic and as a result encourages her classmates to gain “racial literacy” (cf. king et al. ). not only her last slide reads “black lives matter”, her whole presentation is a wake-up call that “all black lives matter” (ransby ) and that racism is a structural problem which affects every society and therefore needs to be addressed and discussed. conclusion when students hold presentations they transform knowledge, because they act didactically. the distinguishing feature of the method is that during the presentation, the act of pointing will be transmitted from the teacher to the student. since the results are presented to others, a process of social legitimization of knowledge is triggered – teachers and classmates discuss the acquired knowledge controversially. presentations are a method of producing knowledge in society: “the legitimation of knowledge is no abstract process; it is rather embedded in the event of a presentation, since it is prepared and performed by the speaker (or presenter) with the tech- nology [in front of an, s.t.] audience who take the presenter and speaker to represent knowledge.” (knoblauch , p. ) hence, presentations are used as a teaching method in class in order to explore the socio- constructivist constitution of knowledge in social sciences. this is relevant for teaching in social-studies classrooms and for students to learn about the importance of social actions (cf. weber / ). students can explore this central aspect explicitly through presentations and learn how to act didactically themselves: first, students prepare for a presentation, they deal with sources such as articles or videos on the topic, they decide what is important, they choose a central question and work out re- sults such as laura who is personally involved and wants to send a message to her classmates. therefore, students use knowledge that has been objectivated through communication pro- cesses (for example sources like a chart) in society and re-present it in their presentations: laura, for instance, re-presents the exact sequence of events of the shooting of michael brown. however, the presented knowledge is specifically transformed by the key question and the acts of pointing – laura points out, that there is a connection between police violence and racism albeit she could have come to another conclusion. second, presentations always lead to discussions. mr. mueller tells his students to com- ment on the topic. the presenters discuss the represented and transformed knowledge of the presentation with others: for example, the results of laura’s presentation and especially her statement „everybody is kinda racist“ that came up through questions by her classmates. third, students and teachers can therefore discuss and deal with the results and statements of presentations and decide together what is right and what is wrong; for example what com- ments in everyday life are racist and if or in what way “everybody is kinda racist”. it is a ritualized process that takes place during every presentation. this process is especial- ly important when teaching and learning about racism because it can expose racism as a socially invented category. in social-studies classrooms, the concept of racism can be chal- lenged and criticized due to a socio-constructivist understanding of knowledge that presentations foster. students learn how to act didactically themselves and hence learn about the social making of knowledge in social-sciences. torrau “i mean, everybody is kinda racist.” this is an indicator of change in the culture of teaching because the act of pointing is transmitted from the teacher to the students. students thus have a great influence on what knowledge is presented and they have influence on co-designing school curricula in action (cf. young/lambert ). thus, students are actively involved in the constitution of “powerful knowledge” (loc. cit.); laura brings up a topic which is not part of the official curriculum and thus decisively shapes the construction of knowledge in the classroom. for teaching, these findings mean that the task to hold a presentation can be staged and used in pedagogical prac- tice. students can grasp a key concept of the construction of knowledge: in social sciences, knowledge cannot be transmitted technically but rather is mediated through social and com- municative actions – it is an active social process. references: adams, c. 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( ). der . november als unterrichtsanlass [teaching about the november pogroms in social studies classrooms]. zeitschrift für didaktik der gesellschaftswissenschaften, ( ), – . vallance, m., & towndrow, p. a. ( ). towards the “informed use” of information and communication technology in education: a response to adams’ “powerpoint, habit of mind, and classroom culture.” journal of curriculum stud- ies, ( ), – . varela, m. do m. c., & mecheril, p. ( ). sobald der vorrang gefährdet ist: die dämonisierung der anderen [the demonization of others]. polis, ( ), – . weber, m. ( / ). wirtschaft und gesellschaft [economy and society]. tübingen: mohr. torrau “i mean, everybody is kinda racist.” young, m., & lambert, d. ( ). knowledge and the future school. curriculum and social justice. london [u.a.]: bloomsbury. endnotes didactics is a term used in german-speaking articles to stress the difference between pedagogical and didactic actions in school and lessons. by using the term didactics, i can focus on the subject of lessons, on the transfor- mation of knowledge which is different from subject to subject and on curricula in which official knowledge is determined. in this article i use the term pointing didactically. in this sense, pointing is the central action in lessons to transform knowledge and to develop learning processes. the following excerpts are translated from german. laura uses a photo for her presentation: source: cf. sim, d. ( ): black lives matter: ferguson protests in oakland, new york and other us cities. international business times (online-ausgabe uk): https://www.ibtimes.co.uk/black-lives-matter-ferguson-protests-oakland-new-york- other-us-cities- [ . . ]. laura uses this photo again on the last slide. publishing and printings those pictures is a controversial and contentious topic (cf. https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /magazine/media-bodies-censorship.html). the disrespectful and inhumane treatment of michael brown’s corpse by leaving him uncovered in the streets of ferguson should not be down- played. the author is aware that an uncommented and isolated publishing of those pictures can lead to a further dehumanization of the victims of racist crimes. ransby criticizes: “michael brown’s lifeless body was left in the middle of canfield avenue as crowds gathered and news of the latest murder spread by cell phone, texts, and twit- ter. this callous disregard for brown’s basic humanity had ‘black lives don’t matter written all over it.” (ransby , p. ) to criticize that inhumane treatment, laura chooses to show this picture to her classmates and her teacher. i support laura in showing that picture as a wake-up call to deconstruct racial structures in society. but i decided not to publish the picture in this text. in this article, a blank slide is published instead. source: oppel jr., r. a. ( ): activists wield search data to challenge and change police policy. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/activists-wield-search-data-to-challenge-and-change-police- policy.html [ . . ]. with another interpretation of this sequence one could argue that the teacher provides further misunderstand- ings und misconceptions about racism with his questions and comments: one could argue, that instead of helping facilitate the conversation and to help push students in their thinking about race the questions and comments instead allowed for “white tears” to dominate the conversation and make it about them instead of the subject of laura’s presentation: black lives matter and police violence against black americans. sören torrau, phd., is a teacher at a district school in hamburg. research focuses: classroom research, antiracism, social-science education & "wissensdidaktische hermeneutik" 	the students applaud at the end of the presentation and the teacher, mr. mueller, takes over starting a classroom discussion using the image last shown in laura’s presentation: 	teacher: nice picture here [reads]: “black lives matter.“ what does that mean? 	laura: [some laughter] sorry, i didn’t listen. book review: nazism and neo-nazism in film and media by jason lee review how to cite: wintle, p. . book review: nazism and neo-nazism in film and media by jason lee. open screens, ( ):  , pp.  – , doi: https:// doi.org/ . /os. published: august peer review: this article has been peer reviewed through the double-blind process of open screens, which is a journal published by the open library of humanities. copyright: © the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (cc-by . ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. open access: open screens is a peer-reviewed open access journal. digital preservation: the open library of humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the clockss scholarly archive service. https://doi.org/ . /os. https://doi.org/ . /os. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / wintle, p. . book review: nazism and neo-nazism in film and media by jason lee. open screens, ( ): , pp.  – , doi: https://doi.org/ . /os. review book review: nazism and neo-nazism in film and media by jason lee phil wintle university of leicester (history of film department), leicester, uk pjw @le.ac.uk this review explores jason lee’s timely work nazism and neo-nazism in film and media. lee raises several intriguing, and at times, challenging arguments about the position of the far-right as a mainstream power in modern society. lee’s work covers films, television, video games, and other media which raises possibilities for further discussions, as noted in this review. however, this review suggests that lee’s work too often abandons its remit as a study focused on film and media to instead explore philosophy and politics, and also highlights problematic discussions in lee’s text. keywords: nazism; neo-nazi; politics; philosophy; trump nazism and neo-nazism in film and media is a ranging text moving from the representation of nazis in film to their global spread and influence in modern politics. throughout, jason lee makes a contentious but interesting argument that nazism is in the mainstream and not the fringes of society. trump’s america is an overt example, but lee argues this trend is a global issue noting the influence and normalisation of the far-right that has forced policy shifts among national centralist parties. indeed, we live in a society that demonises the weak and poor (lee points to the tabloid presses that present those on welfare as ‘parasites’) which are ‘core values’ of nazism (lee, : ). looking at film and media surrounding both nazism and neo-nazism is ambitious as either one would provide enough discussion for a fair monograph, for instance with sabine hake’s screen nazis: cinema, history, and democracy ( ); however, lee does well to connect the two. discussion on film and television is mostly provided in the second and third chapters of the text; the second chapter https://doi.org/ . /os. mailto:pjw @le.ac.uk wintle: book reviewart.  , page of mostly focuses on depictions of nazism and the holocaust, moving from ilsa: she wolf of the ss ( ), to the reader ( ), and the hunger games ( ), the latter of which lee claims presents a nazi work ethic (which lee suggests is also found in capitalism). here arguments on ‘authenticity’ are made, for instance, that naziplotation allows the viewer to recognise and engage with the overt modification of history, whereas ‘authentic’ films such as son of saul ( ) present nazis as ‘the embodiment of evil’ and so offer only a ‘singular depiction’ (lee, : – ). neo- nazi films are discussed briefly, with lee noting that they offer ‘ontological crisis’ as a plot device, showing how ‘normal’ individuals descend to violence (lee, : ); a stronger link could be made between this argument and later points about the acceptability of the far-right in modern society. more space is given to the netflix series nsu german history x ( ) which follows teen neo-nazis, where lee notes how neo-nazism is presented not as a group looking to history but instead towards a hopeful future. this is potentially appealing narrative to youth and lee explains how neo-nazis on stormfront.com have found interest in parts of the show – an issue that deserves further academic discussion elsewhere. in the third chapter, looking at nazism and comedy, specifically look who’s back ( ), lee argues that fiction can be used to educate and warn of history, as well as to detach the evil ‘other’ from ourselves (lee, : ). these are justified arguments, although the chapter is short and a wider exploration on a relatively niche field would have been intriguing – indeed, most of the chapter focuses on the novel of look who’s back rather than the film adaption, which seems to contrast with the purpose of the text. that lee’s focus moves away from film and media is emphasised in the following chapter on ‘necrospectives and media transformations’ which heavily employs philosophical texts including nietzsche, baudrillard, and levinas, among others. without familiarity of such works, this chapter (and sections of the book overall) makes for complex reading. the separation of film and philosophy in lee’s book is jarring, whereas a merger of the two subjects (using philosophical text to support debates arising from film) could have been more conducive. the following chapter on globalization offers an interesting overview of nazism worldwide, importantly noting that through trump and the media the splintered http://stormfront.com wintle: book review art.  , page of right have united. the chapter concludes with a brief but constructive argument on nazism in video games, arguing that the universality of gaming demonstrates the global branding of nazism, and that nazi games may even ‘mirror’ society – these are interesting arguments for expansion; lee’s work is strongest when looking at media in detail as such maintaining this focus would have been beneficial. there are other issues with lee’s work. for instance, he explores the rising anti- semitism in america noting that between trump’s inauguration in january and march there were over one hundred bombing attempts on jewish community centres and synagogues in america (lee, : ). yet, lee gives no reference for this, and upon researching the matter it materialises that the bomb threats (not bombing attempts) had been orchestrated by a teenager in israel, not by american neo-nazis (beaumont, ); in lee’s text this is unclear, and is questionable evidence of rising global neo-nazism. in a text that bemoans the manipulation of the media by trump and his claims of ‘fake news’ this is a problematic misrepresentation. equally, lee claims that ‘[i]nstead of changing the world, citizens are more likely to photograph and record it’ (lee, : ), referring to this interaction as potentially able to provoke change but equally leading to a ‘narcissistic’ ‘false sense of activity’. there is, perhaps, some truth to this, but lee’s comments read as patronising and dismissive, especially as recently several videos have spread on social media showing police brutality in america and have raised public awareness of the issue. moreover, the black lives matter movement started as an online campaign, and the #metoo campaign has highlighted injustice and sexual abuse in the film industry and in society. the concluding chapter of lee’s work ostensibly focuses on modern politics. for instance, lee points to trump’s manipulation of the media, both social and news- broadcast, as evidence of nazism entering the mainstream. trump’s politics often do align with the far-right, his comments on immigration and travel bans do point to extremism in mainstream politics. lee equally argues that brexit is evidence of the social shift towards the right. yet, brexit divided traditional boundaries of the political left and right (moore, ), and relating brexit to nazism ignores the complexity of the vote and this political divide. indeed, the relevance of brexit to a text on wintle: book reviewart.  , page of nazism in the media is lacking. this said, lee’s concluding argument explaining how nazis dehumanise themselves is potent, as is lee’s challenge to the normalisation of nazism and far-right extremism in modern society and media. more emphasis on film and media is needed in lee’s work where the focus is often fragmented. nonetheless, lee’s work raises thought-provoking points for ongoing discussions on the acceptability and spread of the far right in modern society, and how this affects our humanity. competing interests the author has no competing interests to declare. references beaumont, p. . israeli teen accused of , bomb hoax calls and blackmail. guardian online, april [online access at: https://www.theguardian.com/ world/ /apr/ /israel-michael-kadar-jewish-centre-bomb-threats. last accessed june ]. hake, s. . screen nazis: cinema, history, and democracy. madison: university of wisconsin press. lee, j. . nazism and neo-nazism in film and media. amsterdam: amsterdam university press. moore, p. . how britain voted, june. available at: https://yougov.co.uk/ news/ / / /how-britain-voted [last accessed july ]. how to cite this article: wintle, p. . book review: nazism and neo-nazism in film and media by jason lee. open screens, ( ): , pp.  – , doi: https://doi.org/ . /os. submitted: june accepted: august published: august copyright: © the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (cc-by . ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. open screens is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by open library of humanities. open access https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /apr/ /israel-michael-kadar-jewish-centre-bomb-threats https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /apr/ /israel-michael-kadar-jewish-centre-bomb-threats https://yougov.co.uk/news/ / / /how-britain-voted https://yougov.co.uk/news/ / / /how-britain-voted https://doi.org/ . /os. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / 	competing interests 	references : interdisciplinary studies in the long nineteenth century 	 	login | register 	home 	about 	 live 	articles 	issues 	contact 	 start submission 	 account 	login 	 register 	 issue • • women collectors: taste, legacy, and cultural philanthropy c. – this issue of explores the contribution of women as collectors from the mid-nineteenth century to the aftermath of the first world war, paying particular attention to the cosmopolitan transfer of artworks, ideas, and expertise between britain, france, and the united states. the authors reflect on women’s role in acquiring, displaying, and donating works of art, often in ways that crossed national borders or that subvert gendered assumptions about taste. beyond its value as a form of personal expression, the articles reflect on how far collecting provided women with a public platform in the late nineteenth century, enabling them to shape the contents of cultural institutions and promote new types of inquiry. but the articles also cast light on the archival and methodological reasons why women’s crucial contributions in this domain have so often been obscured. the idea for this issue originated with the study days organized in to celebrate the philanthropy of lady wallace, who gifted the collections of the hertford family to the nation. cover image: detail of william rothenstein, the browning readers, , oil on canvas, × . cm, cartwright hall art gallery, bradford. editors: tom stammers (guest editor) introduction women collectors and cultural philanthropy, c. – tom stammers - - issue • • women collectors: taste, legacy, and cultural philanthropy c. – article ‘life was a spectacle for her’: lady dorothy nevill as art collector, political hostess, and cultural philanthropist caroline mccaffrey-howarth - - issue • • women collectors: taste, legacy, and cultural philanthropy c. – beyond the bowes museum: the social and material worlds of alphonsine bowes de saint-amand lindsay macnaughton - - issue • • women collectors: taste, legacy, and cultural philanthropy c. – french taste in victorian england: the collection of yolande lyne-stephens laure-aline griffith-jones - - issue • • women collectors: taste, legacy, and cultural philanthropy c. – unmasking an enigma: who was lady wallace and what did she achieve? suzanne higgott - - issue • • women collectors: taste, legacy, and cultural philanthropy c. – more than mere ornaments: female visitors to sir richard wallace’s art collection helen c. jones - - issue • • women collectors: taste, legacy, and cultural philanthropy c. – new collections for new women: collecting and commissioning portraits at the early women’s university colleges imogen tedbury - - issue • • women collectors: taste, legacy, and cultural philanthropy c. – ellen tanner’s persia: a museum legacy rediscovered catrin jones - - issue • • women collectors: taste, legacy, and cultural philanthropy c. – the artistic patronage and transatlantic connections of florence blumenthal rebecca tilles - - issue • • women collectors: taste, legacy, and cultural philanthropy c. – a woman of no importance?: elizabeth workman’s collection of impressionist and post-impressionist art in context frances fowle - - issue • • women collectors: taste, legacy, and cultural philanthropy c. – afterword afterword kate hill - - issue • • women collectors: taste, legacy, and cultural philanthropy c. – created by potrace . , written by peter selinger - | - | published by open library of humanities | 	privacy policy 	sitemap 	contact 	login contested wealth: social and political mobilisation in extractive communities in africa miles larmer faculty of history and african studies centre, university of oxford department of historical and heritage studies, university of pretoria vito laterza department of social anthropology, university of oslo centre for african studies, university of cape town highlights • this special section provides analyses of social and political mobilisation in diverse extractive communities in africa. • it builds on a panel organised by the editors at the african studies association of the uk in cambridge in september . • it reveals conflicts between companies and communities, and within communities, over gains and costs of extractive production. • it assesses africa’s past and present position in global economic and political processes of extractive exploitation. • building on the insights of these articles, it suggests ways in which research on these communities may be developed. abstract this introductory paper analyses historical and contemporary developments in the social and political mobilisation of what are termed ‘extractive communities’ in africa. it demonstrates the centrality of diverse contestations, both between extractive corporations and extractive communities, and within communities themselves, over the real and envisioned benefits of mining and oil production. in contextualising the articles carried in this special section of extractive industries and society, it places these dynamics in an assessment of africa’s past and current position in global economic and political processes of extractive exploitation, and, building on the insights of these articles, suggests ways in which research on these communities may be developed in the future. keywords: africa; mining; extractives; communities; mobilisation; corporations; contestation; oil; copper; gold; platinum; labour unions; zambia; south africa; sierra leone; nigeria; democratic republic of congo; angola; mozambique . introduction in september , riots broke out in the guinean towns of boke and kamsar, one of the country’s centres of bauxite production. residents took to the streets to protest the pollution produced by the mines and the constant electricity cuts they experience, in an area where the vast majority of power is consumed by mining companies jointly owned by the guinean state and by western and chinese investors. one person was killed, at least twenty injured and bauxite production was halted as anti-riot police were deployed and negotiations were launched to seek a solution to the problem. this was the latest in a wave of protests that first erupted in april : one of the victims of those riots, shopkeeper mohamed camara, told a journalist: “this is the fault of the state. we have all the mining, and no electricity”. local resident lamine banoro told reuters he had sent his cv to the mining companies but had no success obtaining employment: “there are big mining companies here, yet no one who is a native to boke can get a job. even the guineans getting jobs come from outside boke". while mine companies claimed the unrest was not directly caused by their operations, mines minister abdoulaye magassouba admitted: “there is a legitimate frustration but it cannot justify violence … our challenge is to reassure people that every job that can go to a guinean will. we also plan ... to better use our revenues to develop these zones, so people can see the impact". https://www.reuters.com/article/us-guinea-mining/guinean-protests-halt-bauxite-miner-cbgs-operations- iduskcn bu (accessed october ). http://africatimes.com/ / / /guinea-new-clashes-erupt-in-boke-bauxite-mining-center/ (accessed october ). http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/r-one-dead-as-riots-in-guinea-mining-hub-enter-fourth- day- - - ; https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/ - - /guinea-towns-unrest-a- cautionary-tale-for-african-mining (accessed october ). https://www.reuters.com/article/us-guinea-mining/guinean-protests-halt-bauxite-miner-cbgs-operations-iduskcn bu https://www.reuters.com/article/us-guinea-mining/guinean-protests-halt-bauxite-miner-cbgs-operations-iduskcn bu http://africatimes.com/ / / /guinea-new-clashes-erupt-in-boke-bauxite-mining-center/ http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/r-one-dead-as-riots-in-guinea-mining-hub-enter-fourth-day- - - http://markets.businessinsider.com/news/stocks/r-one-dead-as-riots-in-guinea-mining-hub-enter-fourth-day- - - https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/ - - /guinea-towns-unrest-a-cautionary-tale-for-african-mining https://www.usnews.com/news/world/articles/ - - /guinea-towns-unrest-a-cautionary-tale-for-african-mining these recent events in guinea exemplify not only the types of protests and mobilisations that are examined in this special section, but also the divisions within extractive communities and between such communities, mining companies and their states. when proposing the category of ‘extractive community’ for the conference panel that led to this set of articles, our aim was to problematize and bring into comparative analysis a set of issues affecting parts of africa where extractive industries operate, but which are commonly analysed separately with unhelpfully normative frameworks: for example, the treatment of industrial-scale and artisanal extraction as inherently distinct; the position of workers employed to extract minerals and communities affected by them; and the separate analysis of specific divisions within extractive communities – class, gender, generational, racial and ethnic – in processes of social change and conflict. while extractive communities are clearly influenced by their engagement with economically and geo-politically significant minerals, they also have the capacity to shape their exploitation, its wider effects, and the distribution of the wealth they generate. the articles in this special issue demonstrate that placing extractive communities at the centre of our analysis helps overcome some of the limitations imposed by other ways of approaching the exploitation of mineral wealth in recent african history until today. . historicising extractive communities much historical analysis of mineral extraction in africa implicitly associates such exploitation with the imposition of colonial rule and the establishment of western-controlled mining companies, whose authority to seize territory and exploit it regardless of local claims rested on their colonial connectivity. if we take a longer view, to encompass for example the centuries-long extraction of gold in west and southern africa and its sale into trans-saharan, south asian and chinese markets, or the ways in which copper mining partly fuelled the rise of some of central africa’s savannah kingdoms in the th and th centuries, then we can better appreciate both the continuities and breaks between indigenous and colonial forms of mineral exploitation. here, and in the asante kingdom, great zimbabwe and mapungubwe, mineral extraction and trading enabled the establishment of powerful states, able to convert that wealth into political hierarchy, the conquering and/or incorporation of neighbouring societies, and the exploitation of unfree or subject labour. the concentrated nature of mineral wealth has always enabled its possessors to accumulate wealth in a relatively portable form, but that wealth was also dependent on accessing and controlling trade routes and on realising its fluctuating value in global markets. colonial annexation shattered many of those trade routes and redirected them along different routes controlled by europeans, though african challenges to that control were ever present. colonial-era industrial mining certainly looked different to its pre-colonial predecessors and was commonly perceived by western observers as a qualitatively new, modernising process that brought new technologies and industry to the african ‘interior’ and supposedly integrated these areas into the global economy for the first time. in reality, colonially connected mining companies required the capacity of colonial states to displace and re- order indigenous communities, precisely because those communities had their own ideas about those minerals and the land under which they lay. turning deposits of gold, copper or diamonds into profit meant altering the legal ownership and the cultural meaning of land. as frederiksen argues, colonial-era mining developments were constituted as ‘scientific’ projects involving the imposition of a colonial production of knowledge on the african landscape (frederiksen ). all such processes required economic, political and cultural investment, each of which had to be negotiated and each of which was contested in unpredictable ways that ultimately shaped its outcome. of equal importance to land alienation was the harnessing of african labour power for the extraction of minerals, which involved unfree labour of various kinds. authoritarian labour regimes were established in colonially connected mining centres, though they were limited in effect: aspirant workers commonly succeeded in evading labour controls. the migration – organised, ‘spontaneous’ or somewhere in-between – of workers to mining locations was usually necessary, but the documentation of this process was distorted by a structural marxist emphasis in a dual model of migrant labour vs a working-class in the making. in practice, mine work was, for most africans, commonly conducted alongside non-mine work, particularly agricultural activity, and could itself be seen as a seasonal activity for many of those concerned: mine companies, for example in the belgian congo, sometimes used contractors to develop mine sites on their behalf (vellut ). structural marxists tended to see such ‘migrant labour’ systems as a ‘beta’ version of the african working-class they desired to locate and explained it in terms of its deficiencies or distortions in relation to an idealised proletariat, conceptualised in relation to a particular reading of the west’s history of industrialisation and the birth of its working-class (larmer ). the racial categorisation and segregation of mine workforces was equally central to colonial notions of labour: migrant workers from the western world were employed on an entirely different basis to their african migrant counterparts and the former often accepted and reinforced this division. yet, as duncan money argues in his article on white mineworkers in northern rhodesia, it should not be assumed that ‘race’ was always the primary ‘category of difference’ (brubaker ) in the conscious thinking of such workers, or even their mining communities. according to money, white mineworkers in northern rhodesia emphasised their exploitation by and antagonism to mining capital in the political language of global communism and socialism and – notwithstanding their extraordinary privilege, resting as it did on a contractual colour bar – saw themselves primarily through the prism of class rather than race. money’s findings have relevance for today’s deeply hierarchical mine labour forces in which senior, internationally recruited and racially heterogeneous skilled workers remain strikingly segregated – residentially and in the provision of support services) from a larger, less skilled and often casualised workforce recruited from the locality and nearby. in their efforts to produce a usable workforce, many mine companies built new mine townships (see also below) and provided health and welfare services. over time, and sometimes with the prompting of organised labour and late-colonial and post-colonial states, residential and educational services were provided that enabled some workers to accommodate their families in what evolved into towns. while today there is in some extractive communities a pronounced nostalgia for a golden age of corporate paternalism, company towns were – as udelsmann rodrigues demonstrates here for angola – sites primarily designed to control and discipline labour. company towns were also inherently exclusionary places that sowed or reinforced divisions: between company town residents and those (mainly women) who were not formally employed by mines but who provided services to these communities; between urban and rural communities linked to mine towns by remittances, migration, and ideas; and – in some cases – between ethnically constituted groups placed in competition for jobs and services. like mine companies themselves, researchers have often been guilty of privileging organised (usually male) labour over other members of extractive communities, both because of a primary focus on the assumed role of organised labour and because of their greater archival legibility. if we step away from an institutional approach it quickly becomes clear that, while mine communities may see themselves as having unified interests opposed to mine companies, they are themselves marked by significant divisions – racialised, gendered, generational, ethnic and educational, for example – and should never be assumed to have inherently shared interests. nor however should the meaning of more visible divisions be assumed: although industrial mineworkers with employment contracts may benefit from the exclusion of artisanal miners who seek control of some of the same resources, they may equally be members of the same extended family networks, and indeed be the same individuals whose circumstances have changed, with the ebb and flow of markets and investments and related employment opportunities over time (rubbers : ; cuvelier : ; laterza & sharp : - ). . fixed workplaces and mobile communities if we challenge the primacy of production, or expand our definition to encompass the production of livelihoods, meanings and societal relations, then we can then see that other aspects of economic or social activity in mine communities, or areas linked to them by migrations, remittance flows and the supply of resources, are as influential and therefore worthy of analysis on outcomes. this raises the complex question – addressed by some of our contributors – of where to draw the boundaries of what an extractive community consists of. in this volume, maha rafi atal suggests that attempts to understand conflicts in james ferguson’s ( ) give a man a fish: reflections on the new politics of distribution, as the title suggests, calls for a shift from a focus on ‘production’ to one of ‘distribution’, but in doing so presents a narrow and conventional definition of production. lonmin’s platinum mining areas in south africa have focused primarily on workplace dynamics, thus failing to appreciate the wider community in which various stakeholders – particularly local residents with no formal link to the mine – engage with and challenge company activities, particularly as they affect land usage. many analysts, sometimes for practical reasons but also for ideational ones related to assumptions, have previously drawn artificial analytical lines around mine townships and workplaces that excluded rural sending areas, especially when the latter were in ‘foreign’ countries. as carini demonstrates in this volume, migrant ‘sending’ communities in mozambique are a vital part of understanding the dynamics between migrants and self- declared autochthons in south african gold mines, but – with a few honourable exceptions – have often gone unrecognised or been analysed separately from the ‘mainstream’ nationally constituted workforce. carini’s work builds on the more historical research of the late patrick harries ( ) to analyse post-apartheid mozambican mineworkers in situ in their south african workplace, in relation to their home areas in mozambique and in transit, in the regulatory environment of the border between the two countries. in general however, the academic examination of fixed geographical mining/non-mining space – conceptualised and imagined as counterposed urban vs rural places – has often failed to capture the holistic experience of migrant mining communities who continued to move from place to place, utilising a range of livelihood options over time. the governance of mining space involves shifting legal norms – for example a change from corporatist control of vast land areas to which some colonial-era mine companies laid claim, to neo- liberal models of thin corporations that reduced their footprint to the area of the mine only. these need to be understood as ideological constructions, in which companies and investors seek to project a normative model of exploitation so as to claim or refute certain rights and/or responsibilities for the land and people vital to their operations. in this respect, industrial mining areas constructed as male were occupied by large numbers of women, rendered invisible by policy but in practice a vital part of extractive communities: women who were excluded from mineral production grew food which fed mineworkers and provided other vital entrepreneurial and reproductive services, whether they were resident in ‘rural’ areas of origin or in ‘urban’ mining towns (larmer : - ). in artisanal mining, masculinity has often been defined by the development of skills and a personal definition of ‘craftsmen’ who could provide for their families, but men’s capacity to establish this status was fragile and rested on highly contested access to production sites and external markets. in some places, for example lesotho, women play a significant role in the process of artisanal mining carried out in close proximity to rural communities (makhetha ). in all cases, mining communities are spaces in which gender identities and sexual relations have developed in both commodified and affective ways. less well documented but equally central are generational dynamics and the capacity of youths to make the transition to adulthood via new means, either paid employment or cash paid for artisanal production. this destabilised rural patterns of generational relations, potentially allowing young men to achieve high status via visible enrichment – as documented for some formally employed mineworkers in the early-to-mid twentieth century – or, in areas of mineral production where that wealth is largely absent, of fuelling for a particularly insightful discussion of gender and sexual relations in tanzanian gold mining communities, see d.fahy bryceson et al. ( ). generational conflict. in this volume, iwilade focuses on generational divisions in the niger delta in a context where the achievement of respectability, so often undermined by the extraction of wealth with no noticeable benefit to local communities, is pursued by youth social networks in ways that ultimately incentivise violence as a path to social adulthood. rather more positive findings are reported by roy maconachie, whose work on post-conflict sierra leone demonstrates that youth activism, in response to grievances arising from the limited opportunities arising from artisanal diamond mining, is opening up new opportunities for public engagement in policy-making in an economy still dominated by the perilous extractive-based path to development. . company governance and its discontents historically, the effective exploitation of mineral resources required the concentration of wealth, science and labour in towns – once african populations began to establish themselves in these places (while remaining linked to rural areas of origin), they began making social and economic demands that were predicated on extractives’ potential for wealth generation and differential distribution and which intersected with nationalist demands in complex ways. late colonial and post-independence models of developmentalism, whilst at the same time increasing compensation for workers, drove demands for higher productivity and reductions of the scale of the labour force, a process that continues in various forms today. from the s and with the onset of fully fledged neo-liberalism, liberalisation often occurred in consort with economic decline, leading to the wholesale reduction of formal sector jobs and the ‘cradle to grave’ welfare services sometimes associated with them. simultaneously there was a rise in artisanal mining, often associated with conflict (see below) but which may also be interpreted as reflecting the driving down of the costs of mining by replacing unprofitable organised industry with illegal, unregulated extraction that passed on most of the costs to the workers and communities affected. industrial-scale mining reasserted itself in some places with the chinese-fuelled boom from the mid- s: now the neo-liberal setting created the possibility of mncs operating without, as they saw it, the costly burden of community production/reproduction, and by outsourcing much of the work to contractors, the latter often employing former mineworkers on lower pay and casual contracts. while mine companies may seek to ‘enclave’ their activities, communities continue to challenge their attempts to do so, but not necessarily in unified ways (ferguson ). this has however been widely contested: existing and new mine communities have demanded that companies take responsibility for the social costs of extraction and/or that some of the proceeds of mining accrue to them. in a context of reduced formal mine employment resulting from mechanisation and skilling, the benefits from mining may come in forms less tied to wage employment, and may also involve demands that companies pay for the social and environmental costs of their activities. political elites have sometimes welcomed new investment while downplaying or suppressing such resistance, but on other occasions have sided with communities and occasionally played populist cards to good effect, when attacking chinese or indian investors. contemporary mine companies, unlike many of their colonial-era predecessors, have had to engage not only with nation-states but also a well-established set of traditional authorities with governance rights over the land under which minerals lie and problematic claims to represent extractive communities for a historical perspective on enclave development in southern africa, see laterza ( ). for a critique of the ‘enclave’ argument, see kesselring . most notably the presidential campaigns of then opposition leader michael sata in zambia (larmer & fraser , fraser ). themselves. this can and has led to the interpretation of ‘community interests’ as the construction of palaces for chiefs and the provision of jobs for royal retainers, fuelling intra- community disputes and tension between ‘residents’ and ‘migrant workers’ in such areas. in south africa’s platinum belt this has resulted in lengthy legal disputes about the bapo ba mogale royal family’s right to speak for the communities in negotiations with companies (capps , ; manson ). patience mususa’s current research explores the complex power relations in zambia’s ‘new’ copperbelt, involving chiefs, national officials, non-governmental organisations and companies (mususa ). in this collection, sara geenen and judith verweijen demonstrate that the ‘hyper-fragmented and fluid’ forms of social mobilisation they analyse in gold mining areas in the eastern democratic republic of congo reflect myriad divisions of these types, shaped as they are by the complex interplay of diverse political forces from above and below. attempts by new mine companies to impose innovative new forms of spatial authority, then, simultaneously build on and contrast themselves with older models of company towns. maha rafi atal, whose wider research analyses the role of private companies as providers of ‘public’ goods and services’, explores in this volume the provision of welfare services as the basis of conflict both between lonmin and local stakeholders, and between the many sections of its extractive community, over what is deemed the right kind of corporate governance. cristina udelsmann rodrigues, in her analysis of the diamond mining lunda provinces of angola, contrasts the historically hegemonic authority of company control over mining towns during the colonial and wartime periods to , with the contemporary environment. today, attempts by the angolan state, and diamond miners such as catoca, to create new centralised mining towns, provide opportunities for communities to engage with and contest the power dynamics within these projects and, in particular, the specific provision of welfare and social services envisaged by these dominant actors. . beyond ‘resource curses’ and greed vs grievance mining in africa, as elsewhere, clearly has contributed to the growth and entrenchment of social division, political conflict and economic inequality. it may also – though the point is less often made – contribute to the increase in living standards and the earning of income by states and workers. it has never done so, however, in isolation from more significant political and social factors: neoliberal states, mine companies and non-state actors ‘curse’ africa, resources do not (auty ). likewise, the notion that the likelihood of mineral-linked conflict in africa can be usefully understood via a ‘greed vs grievance’ binary framework has generally been shown to be a fallacy, partly because it also tends to assume that there are self-evidently legitimate and illegitimate ways to extract and exploit mineral wealth (collier & hoeffler ). while some extractive projects can be observed to be more beneficial than others, it is not evident that for example industrial-scale mining carried out by multi-national companies in legal contractual arrangements with nation-states, in which csr processes have been completed, necessarily bring more benefits to extractive communities than illegal or semi-legal extraction projects. artisanal mining may reflect conflictual surroundings, may enable the extraction of resources from areas at well below its market rate and may have damaging environmental and social consequences, but the same can be said for industrial-scale mining. artisanal mining, commonly associated with poor safety conditions, illegality and environmental damage, may offer the least worst way in which some element of mineral wealth can ‘trickle down’ to some members of extractive communities: states and companies have their own reasons for regulating or preventing their activities, many of which may make such trickle down less likely. nor should the link between artisanal mining and violence go unchallenged: industrial-scale mining companies have often used their own security forces and those of host states to repress opposition to their activities. it may be noted that the marikana massacre, one of the most violent repressive acts ever carried out in a postcolonial african mining community, was the act of the police force of a constitutionally liberal democratic country, of workers employed by the uk-based multinational lonmin, a company with clearly documented csr policies and recognition agreements with that country’s national union of mineworkers (alexander et al. ). . extraction without growth: political and social mobilisation in a global context what becomes clear from such analysis is that understanding political and social mobilisation among extractive communities is never simple. on the one hand, there often are clear differences between the interests of communities and those of extractive companies, which have generally opposed aims regarding the desirable use of mineral revenue. political mobilisation of unionised mine labour and conflict with late-colonial and post-colonial states; new constructions of mine capital under nationalisation and then privatisation; and swings in global economy affect different minerals differently, but the colonial legacy of ‘underdevelopment’ tends to prevent african communities ever gaining effective control over mineral wealth and directing it for development. in the twenty-first century, this is reinforced by massive global tax evasion and avoidance by mine companies (uneca ), meaning that contestation over which local actors benefit from extractive activity – central state vs local government, workers vs residents, elders vs youth, autochthons vs migrants, and so on – amounts to an unedifying scrap over leftovers. while the - financial crisis had a limited effects on african markets, due in significant part to sustained demand for extractives in china and other emerging economies, since a global slump in mineral demand has had a negative effect on african economies. it has badly affected countries that – despite efforts at diversification – remain heavily reliant on extractives, such as nigeria, angola and zambia. mass retrenchments have taken place, there have been drastic reductions in government revenue and the stalling of, for example, new natural gas projects in countries such as mozambique and tanzania. beyond the inevitable short-term fluctuations, analysts generally agree that this is an uncertain moment and predictions about future trends are more difficult than ever. geopolitical factors such as the contestation of free market neoliberal orthodoxy in some western countries, make the scenario particularly unstable. recent literature on the economics of energy and mineral investment highlights that energy returns on investment are constantly declining, and suggests that we are rapidly approaching peak oil – and peak minerals – a situation where extracting more fossil fuels and more minerals becomes increasingly more costly, spurring a permanent and irreversible decline in profitability. this in effect would mean that the global economic growth witnessed from the end of th century until the s might be over. there is much work to be done to empirically explore this hypothesis in the african context and beyond, but these are conceptual frameworks that surely deserve more attention than they have received thus far. on peak oil, declining energy returns on investment and the long-term decline of global economic growth, see ahmed ( ). on peak minerals, see may et al. ( ). this modern economic development in the global north was largely driven by the availability of cheap energy and raw materials to drive industrialisation and redistribute the wealth produced in a virtuous cycle that overcame economic dualism (lewis ). africa was largely excluded from this, or rather, it fuelled this growth while reaping few benefits from it – we can see colonialism and the continued exploitation of africa’s resources by multinational capital as distinct legal-political regimes that enforced economic dualism up to the present day. the growing instability of western and global politics, with populist parties utilising anti- establishment rhetoric, has a direct impact on the fragile relations between states, markets and societies in africa, and extractive communities find themselves at crucial conjunctures in these systemic imbalances and intensifying social and political struggles for resources. there is no sign that african states are today better equipped to mount a challenge to the rule of multinational capital than in the recent past. indeed, state actors often facilitate unfair deals that negatively affect communities, citizens and the environment, encouraging new forms of corruption and malpractice across the continent. despite rhetorical statements to the contrary, there is little demonstrable commitment from northern economies to clamp down on this state of affairs. many african states which have been at the centre of the mineral boom of the s have also borrowed large amounts of money on the international bond markets, and are now struggling – or will soon struggle – with repayments. with diminishing revenues, this debt is clearly unsustainable. the imf has already started a programme in ghana, has approved another one in cameroon, and, at the time of writing, is in negotiations with zambia. there is a real risk that public debt, very much like in the s and s, will be used to further weaken the negotiating power of states, and could easily lead to further loss of control and wealth from future extractive ventures. the sustained economic growth has not only failed to bring substantial benefits to the majority, but also corresponded with further erosion of alternative forms of livelihoods and legal and political systems working on rules and valuations outside the market principle. costs have risen everywhere, states have not helped local communities to strengthen agriculture and alternative forms of livelihood to wage employment, reduced workforces made the amount of cash available to the wider communities even smaller than before. despite this, our selection of articles show that communities have responded in a number of ways, and resilience and the capacity to adapt to a highly uncertain environment has in some cases increased. while it is crucial to highlight inequalities in structural trends, it is equally important to avoid falling into a narrative that posits africa and africans as passive victims of international forces, with no active agency countering these trends and building their own sense of dignity and belonging in admittedly adverse conditions (laterza & sharp : ). https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ - - /imf-approves-one-year-extension-to-ghana-s-credit- program (accessed october ); https://www.imf.org/en/news/articles/ / / /pr -imf- executive-board-approves-arrangement-under-the-extended-credit-facility-for-cameroon (accessed october ); https://www.economist.com/news/finance-and-economics/ -falling-commodity- prices-mean-loans-are-needed-imf-back-africa (accessed october ). see for instance recent trends in the zambian copperbelt after the privatization of the mines (e.g. mususa ). the resurgence of various forms of social and political mobilisation built around ethnicity, traditional ideologies, gender, race and work identities needs to be understood in the context of increased dispossession – and increasing awareness by extractive communities of the negative effects of mining under such conditions. after many large-scale transformative and redistributive social and economic programmes undertaken in the early liberation years, post-colonial states have gone back on the promises made to their citizens at independence, making national liberation more of a symbolic, than an economic process. the weakening of formal representation is resulting in a rise of spontaneous forms in which symbolic and affective dimensions are often the main drivers of complex popular revolts that, while never literally “leaderless”, are not easily understood in reference to conventional forms of organization such as trade unions and political parties – a dynamic which is certainly not specifically african (see for instance the spread of occupy movements and black lives matter in north america, among others). karl polanyi’s ( ) classic analysis of capital, popular movements and political change certainly helps us frame the current rise in social and political mobilisation as a direct response to the increasing expansion of big capital – and its demands of more for less (i.e. continued presence, less and less redistribution of benefits to locals). but polanyi’s work is weak when it comes to understanding the role of identities – e.g. race, ethnicity, gender - in these forms of mobilisation. understanding that all capitalism is racial and gendered at its origin is key in locating the plight and potentials of african communities interacting with this system (robinson , crenshaw , hill collins ). inequalities and divisions occur at different levels and scales with regard to gender, the divide between rural and urban on the rise of spontaneous labour unrest in southern africa, see laterza ( ). places, and the local and global histories of discrimination and conflict between different racial and ethnic groups, among others. with african states weakened in their potential to redistribute wealth and resources to their citizens and local communities, extractive communities are in practice often mobilised against both multinational giants and powerful national interests. when it comes to mobilising against the negative effects of extraction, these multiple histories and identities play a crucial role in shaping narratives and imaginations of redress and restorative justice. in a context of increasing state fragility, and erosion of post-colonial national social contracts, understanding these dimensions is key to develop effective economic and political intervention to address the legitimate concerns of local communities. while it is true that capital operates in a context of increasing fragmentation, the boundaries of these communities is far from being located in well-defined physical localities, and encompass virtual and physical ties cutting across different national, regional and intercontinental spaces. emerging social movements forge alliances and networks horizontally, increasing their multi-scalar ties across vast distances, in a way also mirroring the flexible and non-linear logics of multinational capital. in this fluid landscape, we can find the seeds of alternative forms of governance and sovereignty that are distinct from the current system of state interests closely allied with corporate capital. the current reconfiguration of global capitalism suggests an uncertain future, but it is likely that the struggles for political autonomy and economic improvement waged by extractive communities across africa will intensify, and they too might produce unanticipated and unexpected political outcomes. what is clear is that established scholarly frameworks to understand and analyse these trends are lagging behind, and we need to do more work to improve empirical descriptions and theoretical analysis of these complex realities. we hope this special section will contribute useful insights in this direction. references n.m. ahmed, failing states, collapsing systems: biophysical triggers of political violence (cham, switzerland: springer, ). p. alexander, t. lekgowa, b. mmope, l. sinwell and b. xezwi, marikana: a view from the mountain and a case to answer (johannesburg: jacana, ). r. m. auty, sustaining development in mineral economies: the resource curse thesis (london: routledge, ). r. brubaker, grounds for difference (cambridge ma: harvard university press, ). g. capps, ‘victim of its own success? the platinum mining industry and the apartheid mineral property system in south africa's political transition’, review of african political economy, , ( ), - . g. capps (ed.), special issue, ‘white gold: new class and community struggles on the south african platinum belt’, of review of african political economy, , ( ) p. collier and a. hoeffler, “greed and grievance in civil war,” world bank policy research working paper (may ), http://papers.ssrn.com/sol /papers.cfm?abstract_id= (accessed october ). k. crenshaw, ‘mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color’, stanford law review, , ( ), - . j. cuvelier, ‘men, mines and masculinities: the lives and practices of artisanal miners in lwambo (katanga province, dr congo ‘, phd dissertation, university of ghent ( ). d. fahy bryceson, e. fisher, j, bosse jonsson and r. mwaipopo (eds.), mining and social transformation in africa: mineralizing and democratizing trends in artisanal production (london: routledge, ). j. ferguson, give a man a fish: reflections on the new politics of distribution (chapel hill nc: duke university press, ). j. ferguson, ‘seeing like an oil company: space, security and global capital in neoliberal africa’, american anthropologist, , ( ), - . a, fraser, ‘post-populism in zambia: michael sata’s rise, demise and legacy’, international political science review ( ). t. frederiksen, ‘seeing the copperbelt: science, mining and colonial power in northern rhodesia’, geoforum, ( ), - . p. harries, work, culture and identity: migrant labourers in mozambique and south africa, c. - (london: james currey, ). p. hill collins, black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness and the politics of empowerment (new york: routledge, ). r. kesselring, ‘disenclaving the planners’ enclave: the housing project kabitaka in solwezi, northwestern zambia’, blog post on comparing the copperbelt project website: http://copperbelt.history.ox.ac.uk/ / / /disenclaving-the-planners-enclave-the- housing-project-kabitaka-in-solwezi-northwestern-zambia-rita-kesselring/ (accessed october ). m. larmer, ‘permanent precarity: capital and labour in the central african copperbelt’, labor history, : ( ), - . m. larmer and a. fraser, ‘of cabbages and king cobra: populist politics and zambia’s election’, african affairs , ( ), – . v. laterza, ‘waves of unrest: wildcat strikes and possible democratic change in swaziland’, in k. hart (ed.), economy for and against democracy (oxford: berghahn, ), - . v. laterza, ‘resilient labour: workplace regimes, globalisation and enclave development in swaziland’, journal of development studies, , ( ), - . v. laterza and j. sharp, ‘extraction and beyond: people’s economic responses to restructuring in southern and central africa’, review of african political economy, , ( ), - . a.w. lewis, the evolution of the international economic order (princeton: princeton university press, ). a. manson, ‘mining and ‘traditional communities’ in south africa's ‘platinum belt’: contestations over land, leadership and assets in north-west province c. – ’, journal of southern african studies, , ( ), - . e. makhetha, ‘small-scale artisanal diamond mining and rural livelihood diversification in lesotho, ‘phd dissertation ( ) university of pretoria. d. may, t. prior, d. cordell and d. giurco, ‘peak minerals: theoretical foundations and practical application’, natural resources research, , ( ), - . p. mususa, ‘mining, welfare and urbanization: the wavering character of zambia’s copperbelt’, journal of contemporary african studies, , ( ), - . p. mususa, ‘“we were there before the mines”: rural struggles and mining investment in north western province, zambia’, asauk conference paper, cambridge ( ). k. polanyi, the great transformation: the political and economic origins of our time (boston, mass.: beacon press, ). c.j. robinson, black marxism: the making of the black radical tradition (london: zed books, ). b. rubbers, ‘l'effondrement de la générale des carrières et des mines chronique d'un processus de privatisation informelle’, cahiers d’etudes africaines ( ). united nations economic commission for africa (uneca), ‘illicit financial flow: report of the high level panel on illicit financial flows from africa’ ( ): http://repository.uneca.org/handle/ / (accessed october ). j.-l. vellut, ‘les bassins miniers de l ancien congo belge. essai d histoire économique et sociale ( - )’. les cahiers du cedaf, n° , (brussels: centre d Étude et de documentation africaines, ). 	highlights 	abstract 	keywords: 	africa; mining; extractives; communities; mobilisation; corporations; contestation; oil; copper; gold; platinum; labour unions; zambia; south africa; sierra leone; nigeria; democratic republic of congo; angola; mozambique correction for johnson et al., officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings correction psychological and cognitive sciences correction for “officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings,” by david j. johnson, trevor tress, nicole burkel, carley taylor, and joseph cesario, which was first published july , ; . /pnas. (proc. natl. acad. sci. u.s.a. , – ). the authors wish to note the following: “recently, we pub- lished a report showing that, among civilians fatally shot, officer race did not predict civilian race and there was no evidence of anti-black or anti-hispanic disparities ( ). specifically, we esti- mated the probability that a civilian was black, hispanic, or white given that a person was fatally shot and some covariates. the dataset contains only information about individuals fatally shot by police, and the race of the individual is predicted by a set of variables. thus, we compute pr(racejshot, x) where x is a set of variables including officer race. “although we were clear about the quantity we estimated and provide justification for calculating pr(racejshot, x) in our report (see also , ), we want to correct a sentence in our significance statement that has been quoted by others stating ‘white officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-white officers.’ this sentence refers to estimating pr(shotjrace, x). as we estimated pr(racejshot, x), this sentence should read: ‘as the proportion of white officers in a fatal officer-involved shooting increased, a person fatally shot was not more likely to be of a racial minority.’ this is consistent with our framing of the results in the abstract and main text. “we appreciate the feedback that led us to clarify this sen- tence ( ). to be clear, this issue does not invalidate the findings with regards to pr(racejshot, x) discussed in the report.” . d. j. johnson, t. tress, n. burkel, c. taylor, j. cesario, officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings. proc. natl. acad. sci. u.s.a. , – ( ). . d. j. johnson, j. cesario, reply to knox and mummolo and schimmack and carlsson: controlling for crime and population rates. proc. natl. acad. sci. u.s.a. , – ( ). . d. j. johnson, j. cesario, reply to knox and mummolo: critique of johnson et al. ( ). https://doi.org/ . /osf.io/dmhpu ( august ). . d. knox, j. mummolo, making inferences about racial disparities in police violence. proc. natl. acad. sci. u.s.a. , – ( ). published under the pnas license. first published april , . www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. www.pnas.org pnas | april , | vol. | no. | c o r r ec ti o n d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , https://doi.org/ . /osf.io/dmhpu https://www.pnas.org/site/aboutpnas/licenses.xhtml https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. https://www.pnas.org retraction psychological and cognitive sciences retraction for “officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings,” by david j. johnson, trevor tress, nicole burkel, carley taylor, and joseph cesario, which was first published july , ; . /pnas. (proc. natl. acad. sci. u.s.a. , – ). the authors wish to note the following: “our article estimated the role of officer characteristics in predicting the race of civilians fatally shot by police. a critique pointed out we had erroneously made statements about racial differences in the probability of being shot ( ), and we issued a correction to rectify the statement ( ). despite this correction, our work has continued to be cited as providing support for the idea that there are no racial biases in fatal shootings, or policing in general. to be clear, our work does not speak to these issues and should not be used to support such statements. we take full responsibility for not being careful enough with the inferences made in our original report, as this directly led to the misunderstanding of our research. while our data and statistical approach were appropriate for investigating whether officer characteristics are related to the race of civilians fatally shot by police, they are inadequate to address racial disparities in the probability of being shot. given these issues and the continued use of our work in the public debate on this topic, we have decided to retract the article.” . d. knox, j. mummolo, making inferences about racial disparities in police violence. proc. natl. acad. sci. u.s.a. , – ( ). . d. j. johnson, t. tress, n. burkel, c. taylor, j. cesario, correction for johnson et al., officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings. proc. natl. acad. sci. u.s.a. , ( ). published under the pnas license. first published july , . www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. | pnas | july , | vol. | no. www.pnas.org https://www.pnas.org/site/aboutpnas/licenses.xhtml https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. p sy c h o lo g ic a l a n d c o g n it iv e sc ie n c es officer characteristics and racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings david j. johnsona,b, , trevor tressb, nicole burkelb, carley taylorb, and joseph cesariob a department of psychology, university of maryland at college park, college park, md ; and b department of psychology, michigan state university, east lansing, mi edited by kenneth w. wachter, university of california, berkeley, ca, and approved june , (received for review march , ) despite extensive attention to racial disparities in police shoot- ings, two problems have hindered progress on this issue. first, databases of fatal officer-involved shootings (fois) lack details about officers, making it difficult to test whether racial dispari- ties vary by officer characteristics. second, there are conflicting views on which benchmark should be used to determine racial disparities when the outcome is the rate at which members from racial groups are fatally shot. we address these issues by creating a database of fois that includes detailed officer information. we test racial disparities using an approach that sidesteps the bench- mark debate by directly predicting the race of civilians fatally shot rather than comparing the rate at which racial groups are shot to some benchmark. we report three main findings: ) as the pro- portion of black or hispanic officers in a fois increases, a person shot is more likely to be black or hispanic than white, a disparity explained by county demographics; ) race-specific county-level violent crime strongly predicts the race of the civilian shot; and ) although we find no overall evidence of anti-black or anti- hispanic disparities in fatal shootings, when focusing on different subtypes of shootings (e.g., unarmed shootings or “suicide by cop”), data are too uncertain to draw firm conclusions. we high- light the need to enforce federal policies that record both officer and civilian information in fois. officer-involved shootings | racial disparity | racial bias | police use of force | benchmarks recent high-profile police shootings of black americans haveraised questions about racial disparities in fatal officer- involved shootings (fois). these shootings have captured public concern, leading in part to the black lives matter movement and a presidential task force on policing ( ). central to this debate are questions of whether black civilians are overrepresented in fois and whether racial disparities are due to discrimination by white officers. however, a lack of data about officers in fois and disagreement on the correct benchmark for determining racial disparity in fois have led to conflicting conclusions about the degree to which black civilians are more likely to be fatally shot than white civilians. we address both issues by creating a comprehensive database of fois that includes officer informa- tion and by using a method for testing racial disparities that does not rely on benchmarks. until recently, the only nationwide data on fois was compiled yearly in the federal bureau of investigation (fbi) uniform crime report. on a voluntary basis, departments report the number of justifiable homicides by on-duty law-enforcement offi- cers. not only are these shootings underreported (by ∼ %; ref. ), such reports do not provide information about the officers or circumstances surrounding these shootings. begin- ning in , news companies such as the washington post and the guardian began to collect information about fois to address the issues with the fbi data. through reporting and freedom of information act requests to law-enforcement agencies, such organizations have created more complete fois databases. these databases provide information about shoot- ings not available in federal databases: where they took place, what police departments were involved, and demographic infor- mation about civilians. however, even these databases fail to provide information about involved officers, which prevents ask- ing whether certain types of officers are more likely to show racial disparities.∗ when officers fire their weapons at civilians, there are three possible outcomes: ) they miss the civilian, ) they result in a nonfatal hit, or ) they result in a fatal hit. not only do officers miss civilians the majority of times they fire [estimates of hit rates range from to % ( , )], many shootings do not result in fatalities. thus, it is important to be clear at the outset that our analyses speak to racial disparities in the subset of shootings that result in fatalities, and not officers’ decisions to use lethal force more generally. why should we expect officer characteristics to relate to the race of a person fatally shot? decades of research from criminal justice have investigated whether officer characteristics relate to the degree of force used by police. whereas officer race does not typically predict how much force an officer uses ( – ), male and inexperienced officers use more force ( , , ), perhaps due to their use of more aggressive tactics (e.g., initiating more stops; ref. ). one issue with this research is that it focuses on whether officer characteristics increase the degree of force used, not whether force is used disproportionately by civilian race. some researchers have proposed that racial disparities in fois might be driven by discrimination by white officers ( ), but research on this issue is uncommon due to a lack of officer significance there is widespread concern about racial disparities in fatal officer-involved shootings and that these disparities reflect discrimination by white officers. existing databases of fatal shootings lack information about officers, and past analytic approaches have made it difficult to assess the contributions of factors like crime. we create a comprehensive database of officers involved in fatal shootings during and predict victim race from civilian, officer, and county characteristics. we find no evidence of anti-black or anti-hispanic dispari- ties across shootings, and white officers are not more likely to shoot minority civilians than non-white officers. instead, race-specific crime strongly predicts civilian race. this suggests that increasing diversity among officers by itself is unlikely to reduce racial disparity in police shootings. author contributions: d.j.j. and j.c. designed research; d.j.j., t.t., n.b., and c.t. performed research; d.j.j. analyzed data; and d.j.j. and j.c. wrote the paper.y the authors declare no conflict of interest.y this article is a pnas direct submission.y published under the pnas license.y to whom correspondence should be addressed. email: djjohnson@smcm.edu.y this article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental.y published online july , . * although some news organizations have gathered officer information, they have either not released it ( ) or gathered information only about large departments ( ). www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. pnas | august , | vol. | no. | – d o w n lo a d e d b y g u e st o n j u ly , d o w n lo a d e d b y g u e st o n j u ly , d o w n lo a d e d b y g u e st o n j u ly , see retraction published july , https://www.pnas.org/site/aboutpnas/licenses.xhtml mailto:djjohnson@smcm.edu https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /pnas. &domain=pdf data. the only national examination of this question found that white officers were no more likely to fatally shoot black or his- panic civilians than non-white officers ( ). however, their key analyses were based on only a small subset ( – %) of all fatal shootings. beyond race, researchers have not tested whether offi- cer sex or experience impact racial disparities in fatal shootings. to address this gap, we created a comprehensive database of all fois in with information about officer race, sex, and years of experience. however, even with this officer information on hand, there is still a challenge of exactly how to quantify racial disparities in fois. how to calculate racial disparities in fois a persistent point of debate in studying police use of force con- cerns how to calculate racial disparities. racial disparities in fatal shootings have traditionally been tested by asking whether offi- cers fatally shoot a racial group more than some benchmark, such as that group’s population proportion in the united states. dis- parity is assumed when the rate of fatal shootings deviates from this benchmark. for example, % of civilians killed by police shootings in were black ( , ), even though black civilians comprise only % of the us population. according to this % benchmark, more black civilians are fatally shot than we would expect, indicating disparity. news organizations and researchers using this method ( , – ) find robust evidence of anti-black disparity in fatal shootings. however, using population as a benchmark makes the strong assumption that white and black civilians have equal exposure to situations that result in fois. if there are racial differences in exposure to these situations, calculations of racial disparity based on population benchmarks will be misleading ( , ). researchers have attempted to avoid this issue by using race- specific violent crime as a benchmark, as the majority of fois involve armed civilians ( ). when violent crime is used as a benchmark, anti-black disparities in fois disappear or even reverse ( , – ). in essence, benchmarking approaches test whether mem- bers from certain racial groups are shot more than we would expect relative to some benchmark. the issue is that conclu- sions regarding racial disparities depend more on the benchmark used (population or violent crime) than the data (the number of people fatally shot). rather than trying to identify which benchmark is best, another way to test for racial disparities in fois is to directly predict the race of a person fatally shot. specifically, we used multinomial regression with civilian race as the outcome and various factors—officer, civilian, and county characteristics—as predictors. in this way, we approached racial disparity from a different angle and asked: “what factors predict the race of a person fatally shot by police?” this approach has several benefits. by focusing on individual shootings, we can test how much officer and civilian character- istics predict racial disparities in fois. a benchmark approach necessarily blends data on individual shootings with the broader population, stripping away the context in which fois take place. second, this approach can test the degree to which common benchmarks like violent crime predict the race of a person shot. this is more informative than tying fois deaths to a single benchmark, which provides no information about the predic- tive validity of that factor. third, this approach estimates racial disparity in fois, controlling for civilian, officer, and other contextual variables simultaneously. whatever remains when controlling for all relevant variables provides an upper bound for racial disparity in fois. finally, this approach can test whether racial disparities vary by the type of shooting. racial disparities by type of shooting by creating a more detailed database of fois and focusing on individual shootings, we are able to address how the type of shooting might impact racial disparities in fois. for example, anti-black or anti-hispanic disparities in fatal shootings may depend on whether the civilian was armed or suicidal. examination of national violent death reporting system data shows racial differences across types of fatal shootings. black civilians fatally shot by police (relative to white civilians) are more likely to be unarmed and less likely to pose an immedi- ate threat to officers ( ). in contrast, white civilians (relative to black civilians) are nearly three times more likely to be fatally shot by police when the incident is related to mental-health concerns and are seven times more likely to commit “suicide by cop” ( ). these are incidents where a civilian threatens a police officer for the purpose of ending their life ( ) and reflect higher rates of suicide overall among whites relative to black and hispanic civilians ( ). racial differences in the frequency of certain types of fois matter because they may mask racial disparities in other types of fatal shootings. even if a person fatally shot during a criminal encounter is more likely to be black than white, this disparity will be difficult to detect if white civilians commit suicide by police intervention more frequently and such cases represent a large proportion of the overall fois. as past work has not distin- guished between shootings where the civilian is or is not suicidal, it is unclear how much these disparities cancel each other out. results given the lack of national data on officers in fois, we first briefly described the officers involved in fatal shootings dur- ing . civilian and county characteristics are provided in si appendix. in a majority of fois ( %), a single officer fired their weapon. in % of cases, two to four officers fired their weapons. cases with five or more officers were rare ( %). compared with officers nationwide ( % white, % black, % hispanic, % male; ref. ), % of officers were white, % hispanic, % black, and % from other racial groups. officers were over- whelmingly male ( %). the average officer had almost y of experience (officers often retire after y; ref. ). officer and civilian characteristics. to test whether officer charac- teristics predict the race of a person fatally shot, we regressed victim race against all officer and civilian predictors. predictors and coefficients for this model are reported in table . for all effects, we report odds ratios (or) comparing black or hispanic individuals to whites and % cis (in brackets). in terms of officer race, as the percentage of black officers who shot in a fois increased, a person fatally shot was more likely to be black table . predicting race from officer and civilian factors black hispanic variable or % ci or % ci intercept . . , . . . , . civilian age . . , . . . , . civilian armed . . , . . . , . civilian mental health issue . . , . . . , . civilian suicidal . . , . . . , . civilian attacking . . , . . . , . officer number . . , . . . , . officer % black . . , . . . , . officer % hispanic . . , . . . , . officer % women . . , . . . , . average officer experience . . , . . . , . or above (below) . indicate a positive (negative) relationship between the predictor and the odds that a person fatally shot is black or hispanic. whites served as the referent group. n = . χ ( ) = . ; p < . ; r = . . | www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. johnson et al. d o w n lo a d e d b y g u e st o n j u ly , see retraction published july , https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. p sy c h o lo g ic a l a n d c o g n it iv e sc ie n c es table . predicting race from officer, civilian, and county factors black hispanic variable or % ci or % ci intercept . . , . . . , . civilian age . . , . . . , . civilian armed . . , . . . , . civilian mental health issue . . , . . . , . civilian suicidal . . , . . . , . civilian attacking . . , . . . , . officer number . . , . . . , . officer % black . . , . . . , . officer % hispanic . . , . . . , . officer % women . . , . . . , . average officer experience . . , . . . , . county population size . . , . . . , . county median income . . , . . . , . county income inequality . . , . . . , . county % rural . . , . . . , . county % white homicide . . , . . . , . county % black homicide . . , . . . , . county % hispanic homicide . . , . . . , . odds ratios (or) above (below) . indicate a positive (negative) rela- tionship between the predictor and the odds that a person fatally shot is black or hispanic. whites served as the referent group. n = . χ ( ) = . ; p < . ; r = . . (or = . [ . , . ]) than white. as the percentage of his- panic officers who shot in a fois increased, a person fatally shot was more likely to be hispanic (or = . [ . , . ]) or black (or = . [ . , . ]) than white. the number of officers, percentage of female officers, and average experience of officers did not predict civilian race. older civilians were . times less likely (or = . [ . , . ]) to be black than white and . times less likely (or = . [ . , . ]) to be hispanic than white. suicidal civilians were . times less likely (or = . [ . , . ]) to be black than white. in sum, as the percent- age of black or hispanic officers increased, the likelihood that a civilian fatally shot was black or hispanic (respectively) also increased. greater anti-black and anti-hispanic disparity among fatal shootings where more black or hispanic officers were involved might not be due to bias on the part of black or hispanic offi- cers, but instead to simple overlap between officer and county demographics. to test this, we reran the model including county demographics. model coefficients are reported in table . when county variables were included, the relationship between offi- cer and civilian race was attenuated or eliminated. black officers were not more likely to fatally shoot black civilians (or = . vs. . ), and hispanic officers were less likely to fatally shoot black (or = . vs. . ) and hispanic (or = . vs. . ) civilians, although the latter disparity was still significant. this suggests that the association between officer race and black and hispanic disparities in fois largely occur because officers and civilians are drawn from the same population. additional analy- ses (si appendix) provided converging evidence for this account; counties with more hispanic civilians also had more black or hispanic officers (r = . and . , respectively). county characteristics. we also tested whether county variables predict the race of a person fatally shot. an advantage of conducting our analyses at the level of individual shootings is the ability to test the degree to which race-specific violent crime and population proportions predict the race of a per- son fatally shot. we could not test this question in the model with all county-level predictors because of the strong correlation between violent crime and population size for all races (r > . ; si appendix). we therefore examined the effects of each variable independently. if crime matters for police shootings, as race-specific crime rates increase for a given group (i.e., black or hispanic civilians), the odds of a person fatally shot belonging to that group should increase as well. conversely, as the rate at which whites commit violent crime increases, the odds of a person fatally shot being black or hispanic should decrease (because whites serve as the comparison group in our models). finally, crime-rate changes for the noncomparison minority group (hispanics for blacks and blacks for hispanics) should not predict the race of a person fatally shot. we found strong support for these predictions, as the race of a person fatally shot closely followed race-specific homicide rates. as illustrated in fig. , as the proportion of violent crime committed by black civilians increased, a person fatally shot was more likely to be black (or = . [ . , . ]). as the propor- tion of violent crime committed by hispanic civilians increased, a person fatally shot was more likely to be hispanic (or = . [ . , . ]). conversely, as white crime rates increased, a per- son fatally shot was less likely to be black (or = . [ . , . ]) or hispanic (or = . [ . , . ]). finally, hispanic crime rates were unrelated to the odds of a person fatally shot being black (or = . [ . , . ]), and black crime rates were unre- lated to the odds of a person fatally shot being hispanic (or = . [ . , . ]). race-specific violent crime was a very strong predictor of civil- ian race, explaining % of the variance in the race of a person fatally shot. this reveals that the race of a person who is fatally shot closely tracks same-race violent crime, at least as indexed by centers for disease control and prevention homicide data. we largely replicated this pattern with population data (lower half of fig. ). race-specific population rates accounted for % of the variance in civilian race, showing that the race of a person who is fatally shot also closely tracks population size. hispanic % population black % population white % population hispanic % crime black % crime white % crime odds of civilian being white vs. black/hispanic hispanic black fig. . odds ratios predicting the race of civilians fatally shot by police from county-level race-specific violent crime (estimated by race-specific homicide data) and population size. values to the left (right) of the dotted line indi- cate that the civilian was more likely to be white (black/hispanic). civilian race was regressed on each variable individually due to multicollinearity. lines represent % ci. n = . johnson et al. pnas | august , | vol. | no. | d o w n lo a d e d b y g u e st o n j u ly , see retraction published , july https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental do racial disparities in fois vary by type of shooting? we con- ducted a set of regression models to test whether a person fatally shot was more likely to be black (or hispanic) than white in certain types of fois. in this set of models, we strategically centered predictors to identify racial disparities across shoot- ing types. when all predictors are centered or effects coded, the test of the intercept indicates racial disparities in the aver- age shooting. this provides an estimate of racial disparities across all shootings. when categorical predictors are dummy- coded so that zero represents the absence of the factor, model intercepts reflect whether anti-black and anti-hispanic racial disparity was observed for this type of shooting (e.g., unarmed shootings). when continuous predictors are centered a sd below the mean, model intercepts reflect whether anti-black and anti- hispanic racial disparity was observed for this type of shooting (e.g., shootings of young civilians). we tested racial disparities across all types of shootings as defined by civilian and officer factors. table reports tests of racial disparities by type of shooting. model tests whether there is evidence of racial disparity in the typical shooting (all variables are centered or effects coded). controlling for predictors at the civilian, officer, and county lev- els, a person fatally shot by police was . times less likely (or = . [ . , . ]) to be black than white and . times less likely (or = . [ . , . ]) to be hispanic than white. thus, in the typical shooting, we did not find evidence of anti-black or anti-hispanic disparity. however, averaging across shootings may provide an incom- plete picture if racial disparities vary across types of fatal shoot- ings. the remaining models ( – ) separate different types of shootings to test for this variation. no model showed significant evidence of anti-black or -hispanic disparity, although evidence for anti-black and anti-hispanic disparities was stronger when civilians were young (model vs. ). evidence for anti-black dis- parities was also stronger when civilians were not suicidal (model vs. ). overall, there was considerable variation in racial table . racial disparity in civilian race by shooting type black hispanic model and variable level or % ci or % ci . typical shooting — . . , . . . , . . civilian age low . . , . . . , . . civilian age high . . , . . . , . . civilian armed no . . , . . . , . . civilian armed yes . . , . . . , . . civilian mh issue no . . , . . . , . . civilian mh issue yes . . , . . . , . . civilian suicidal no . . , . . . , . . civilian suicidal yes . . , . . . , . . civilian attacking no . . , . . . , . . civilian attacking yes . . , . . . , . . officer number low . . , . . . , . . officer number high . . , . . . , . . officer % black low . . , . . . , . . officer % black high . . , . . . , . . officer % hispanic low . . , . . . , . . officer % hispanic high . . , . . . , . . officer % women low . . , . . . , . . officer % women high . . , . . . , . . officer experience low . . , . . . , . . officer experience high . . , . . . , . model represents the typical shooting (all variables are effect coded or centered). models – are coded to indicate certain types of shootings. level indicates at what level of the variable racial disparity is tested. mh, mental health. n = . disparities (or ranges from . to . ) across different types of shootings. discussion concerns that white officers might disproportionately fatally shoot racial minorities can have powerful effects on police legit- imacy ( ). by using a comprehensive database of fois during , officer race, sex, or experience did not predict the race of a person fatally shot beyond relationships explained by county demographics. on the other hand, race-specific violent crime strongly predicted the race of a civilian fatally shot by police, explaining over % of the variance in civilian race. these results bolster claims to take into account violent crime rates when examining fatal police shootings ( ). we did not find evidence for anti-black or anti-hispanic dis- parity in police use of force across all shootings, and, if anything, found anti-white disparities when controlling for race-specific crime. while racial disparity did vary by type of shooting, no one type of shooting showed significant anti-black or -hispanic disparity. the uncertainty around these estimates highlights the need for more data before drawing conclusions about disparities in specific types of shootings. policy implications. overall, officer demographics such as sex and experience were not related to racial disparities in fatal shoot- ings. although officer race was related to racial disparities, the fact that black and hispanic civilians were more likely to be shot by same-race officers was largely explained by similarities between officer and county demographics. because racial dis- parities in fois do not vary based on officer race, hiring more diverse officers may not reduce racial disparities in fois. this is not to say that increasing officer diversity is without merit, as increasing officer diversity may broaden understanding of diverse communities and increase trust in law enforcement. however, these data suggest that increasing racial diversity would not meaningfully reduce racial disparity in fatal shootings ( ). one of our clearest results is that violent crime rates strongly predict the race of a person fatally shot. at a high level, reducing race-specific violent crime should be an effective way to reduce fatal shootings of black and hispanic adults. of course, this is no simple task—crime rates are the result of a large and dynamic set of forces. however, the magnitude of these disparities speaks to the importance of this idea. in counties where minorities com- mitted higher rates of violent crime, a person fatally shot was . times more likely to be hispanic than white and . times more likely to be black than white. this suggests that reduc- ing disparities in fois will require identifying and changing the socio-historical factors that lead civilians to commit violent crime ( ). one limitation of our results is that they only focus on officers who fired at a civilian that was fatally wounded. not all officers responding to such calls fire their weapons. therefore, charac- teristics such as officer race, sex, or experience may impact racial disparities in fois through whether officers fire their weapons. testing this will require additional information about responding officers who do not fire their weapons. what is the evidence for racial disparity? when considering all fois in , we did not find anti-black or anti-hispanic dis- parity. how do we explain these results? our data are consistent with three possible explanations. one police-centered explanation is that these disparities reflect depolicing ( , ). depolicing occurs when police offi- cers’ concerns about becoming targets in civil litigation and the media spotlight impede officers from enforcing the law. such concerns have been heightened due to recent high-profile shoot- ings of black men ( ). the disparities in our data are consistent with selective depolicing, where officers are less likely to fatally | www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. johnson et al. d o w n lo a d e d b y g u e st o n j u ly , see retraction published , july https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. p sy c h o lo g ic a l a n d c o g n it iv e sc ie n c es shoot black civilians for fear of public and legal reprisals. all else equal, this would increase the likelihood that a person fatally shot was white vs. black. however, depolicing might be limited to areas with high-profile shootings ( ). this explanation also does not explain the disparity observed when comparing white and hispanic civilians. future research could test for depolic- ing more rigorously by using a quasiexperimental time-lagged study investigating police use of force in cities before and after high-profile shootings where racial issues are prominent. on the other hand, a civilian-centered explanation for these disparities is that white civilians may react differently toward police than racial minorities in crime-related situations. if white civilians present more threat toward police, this could explain why a person fatally shot was more likely to be white than black or hispanic. among those fatally shot by police, whites are more likely (relative to racial minorities) to be armed and pose a threat ( ). we attempted to control for civilian threat level by mea- suring whether they were armed and attacking, but found these variables unrelated to the race of a person fatally shot. these issues illustrate a broader challenge in inferring civilian char- acteristics during fatal shootings. the newspaper databases we analyzed contained at least some errors (e.g., in whether civil- ians are coded as armed; ref. ). there are likely more false positives and negatives in these databases, such as when sepa- rating individuals committing suicide who are not experiencing a mental health crisis from those who are experiencing a men- tal health crisis. another challenge is that dichotomous variable codes may not capture the complexity of these interactions (e.g., a person is coded as attacking, but they had stopped struggling before they were fatally shot). one solution is to code civilian threat level in a more continuous way (e.g., ref. ). but this will only be realistic if better records of fois are kept at the federal level. for this reason, we urge caution when interpreting the impact of civilian characteristics on racial disparities in fatal shootings. finally, the lack of anti-black or anti-hispanic disparity and the impact of race-specific crime are consistent with an exposure argument, whereby per capita racial disparity in fatal shootings is explained by non-whites’ greater exposure to the police through crime. this explanation is consistent with studies that have used violent crime as a benchmark for testing disparity ( , – ). however, this does not mean that researchers should continue to use benchmarking approaches, even if using violent crime over population size. rather, researchers can take one or both pre- dictors into account with our approach. moreover, unlike the benchmark approach, our conclusions regarding racial disparity do not depend on which predictors are used (si appendix). what these findings do not show. our analyses test for racial disparities in fois, which should not be conflated with racial bias ( ). racial disparities are a necessary but not sufficient, requirement for the existence of racial biases, as there are many reasons why fatal shootings might vary across racial groups that are unrelated to bias on the behalf of police officers. for example, we found that a person fatally shot by police was much more likely to be white when they were suicidal. this does not mean that there are department policies or officer biases that encourage fatal shootings of suicidal white civilians. a more plausible explanation is that white civilians are more likely to attempt “suicide by cop” than minorities ( ). similarly, black and hispanic officers (compared with white officers) were more likely to fatally shoot black and hispanic civilians. this does not mean that there are department policies encouraging non-white officers to fatally shoot minorities. rather, the link between officer race and fois appears to be explained by offi- cers and civilians being drawn from the same population, making it more likely that an officer will be exposed to (and fatally shoot) a same-race civilian. we stress that these findings cannot incriminate or exonerate officers in any specific case. findings at the national level do not directly speak to the presence or absence of bias in individual shootings. in other words, whether a particular officer shows bias in any individual case is a different question than whether officers in general show bias. claims of national bias in fois requires examining fatal force in aggregate, and not just in one incident or racial group ( ). conclusion. until now, researchers have been unable to test ques- tions related to officer characteristics in fatal shootings. we created a near-complete database of fatal shootings in to test questions about racial disparities in fois. however, contin- ued work on this issue will require more information about the officers, civilians, and circumstances surrounding these events. we encourage federal agencies to enforce policies that require recording information about the civilians and officers in fois to better understand the relationship between civilian race and police use of force. materials and methods we began by creating a list of all fois of civilians by nonfederal on-duty police officers, as this was the first year that news organizations collected near-complete databases of fois. we obtained this initial list of civilians by combining information from the washington post and the guardian databases on january , . we limited our analyses to white (n = ), black (n = ), and hispanic (n = ) civilians, because there were insufficient data to analyze other racial groups. the institutional review board at michigan state university deemed this study exempt, as it relied on public information. we next obtained officer information by contacting all police depart- ments who had officers involved in a fatal shooting. we initially sent letters requesting the race, sex, and years of experience of each officer who fired at the civilian. from this written request, we received information on % of shootings. we next called police departments to request missing data. finally, we searched newspaper articles, court documents, and internet sources to supplement the missing data. in all, we were able to obtain complete officer information in % of shootings and partial information in % of shootings. rather than remove shootings with missing informa- tion, we estimated the missing data with multiple imputation (ref. ; si appendix). we included several factors to predict the race of a person fatally shot. officer characteristics included the total number of officers who fired in the shooting, the percent of officers who were black or hispanic, the percent of female officers, and the average experience across the offi- cers in years. civilian characteristics included civilian age and whether they were armed, suffering from a mental health issue, suicidal, or attacking the officer. county-level factors included county population size, median income, income inequality, percent of the county that was urban, and race-specific violent crime rates. details and correlations are provided in si appendix. in defining what constitutes a mental health issue, we relied on the washington post’s coding, which indicates whether the person was expe- riencing a mental health crisis or if there was no known crisis. the post does not specify the nature of the crisis. we also used the post’s coding of whether an individual is armed. we used newspaper reports to code that a civilian was suicidal if ) they left an explicit suicide note; ) a family mem- ber reported the civilian was suicidal; or ) police reported that the civilian explicitly told officers to shoot him or her. we also used newspaper reports to code civilians as attacking if they were armed or actively struggling with an officer. behaviors such as fleeing or advancing toward an officer were not coded as attacking. more details about these codes are provided in si appendix. all multinomial regression models were estimated with mplus (version . ; ref. ). whites served as the referent category relative to black and his- panic civilians. we used clustering to correct standard errors due to county- level nonindependence. details can be found in si appendix. estimates for each predictor were converted to or to facilitate interpretation. acknowledgments. d.j.j. is a postdoctoral researcher in the laboratory for applied social science research at the university of maryland. we thank the police departments who completed our information requests for their cooperation. we also thank william chopik, david clark, and william terrill for their helpful comments on earlier drafts of this manuscript. johnson et al. pnas | august , | vol. | no. | d o w n lo a d e d b y g u e st o n j u ly , see retraction published , july 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revista sobre acesso À justiÇa e direitos nas amÉricas abya yala d o ss iê : f r o m s t a n d in g r o c k t o f li n t a n d b e y o n d : re si st in g n e o li b e ra l a ss a u lt s o n i n d ig e n o u s, m a rr o n , a n d o th e r si te s o f ra ci a ll y reitos abstract protests against the dakota access pipeline led by water protectors from the standing rock sioux tribe in north dakota have brought human rights violations related to indigenous sovereignty, environmental justice, and sustainable development into the foreground of political debate in the united states. the struggle at standing rock has been strengthened by a coalition formed with activists from other indigenous nations, including representatives from the amazon basin, and from non-indigenous movements and political organizations such as the green party and black lives matter. this article reflects upon the centrality of indigenous sovereignty within the broader struggle for human rights and democracy in their most inclusive and substantive senses, especially in societies whose development has been built upon the violence of colonial expansion, white supremacy, and heteropatriarchy. the article also situates indigenous rights within regimes of multiple articulated alterities in which the subjugation and dispossession of indigenous and afro-descendant peoples have been historically differentiated yet intertwined in the americas. the article offers a multi-sited framework for understanding the convergent and divergent points of reference in the logics of indigenous and afro-descendant identity, the relationship with the state and market, and connections to the material and spiritual resources of land. attention is directed to cases in the united states, honduras, and suriname (including those of communities that define themselves as “afro-indigenous”) in which some notion of common ground, affinity, or alliance with past or present- day indigenous peoples has been mobilized in afro- descendants’ collective claims on rights to land, development, and cultural resources. keywords: human rights; indigenous; democracy; supremacy; heteropatriarchy. resumo protestos contra o acesso ao gasoduto de dakota liderado por protetores da água da tribo standing rock na dakota do norte trouxe violações dos direitos humanos relacionados à soberania indígena, justiça ambiental e desenvolvimento sustentável ao primeiro plano do debate político nos estados unidos. a luta em standing rock foi reforçada por uma coligação formada por ativistas de outras nações indígenas, incluindo representantes da bacia amazônica, de movimentos não-indígena e de organizações políticas como a green party e o #blacklivesmatter (#vidasnegrasimportam). este artigo reflete sobre a centralidade da soberania indígena dentro da luta mais ampla pelos direitos humanos e pela democracia em seus sensos mais inclusivos e substantivos, especialmente em sociedades cujo desenvolvimento foi construído sobre a violência de expansão colonial, a supremacia branca e o heteropatriarcado. o artigo também situa direitos indígenas dentro de regimes de alteridades múltiplas articuladas, nas quais o subjugamento e a desapropriação de povos indígenas e afro- descendentes foram historicamente diferenciados ainda interligado nas américas. o artigo oferece um enquadramento multi-localizado para o entendimento da convergência e divergência de pontos da referência na lógica identitária de indígenas e de afro-descendentes, a relação entre o estado e o marcado, e conexões aos recursos materiais e espirituais de uma terra. a atenção é direcionada aos casos nos estados unidos, honduras, e suriname (incluindo aqueles das comunidades, as quais se definem como “afro-indígena”) na qual alguma noção básica de solo, afinidade, ou aliança com povos indígenas do passado o do presente tem sido mobilizada nas reivindicações coletivas afro- descendentes ao direito à terra, ao desenvolvimento e aos recursos culturais. palavras-chaves: direitos humanos; indígenas; democracia; supremacia; heteropatriarcado from standing rock to flint and beyond: resisting neoliberal assaults on indigenous, maroon, and other sites of racially subjected community sustainability in the americas faye v. harrison university of illinois at urbana-champaign estados unidos artigo recebido em: / / aprovado em: / / d o s s iÊ v. , n. – issn - revista sobre acesso À justiÇa e direitos nas amÉricas abya yala d o ss iê : f r o m s t a n d in g r o c k t o f li n t a n d b e y o n d : re si st in g n e o li b e ra l a ss a u lt s o n i n d ig e n o u s, m a rr o n , a n d o th e r si te s o f ra ci a ll y resumen las protestas contra el acceso al gasoducto de dakota, lideradas por los protectores del agua de la tribu standing rock en dakota del norte han conducido al primer plano del debate político en estados unidos las violaciones de los derechos humanos relacionadas con la soberanía indígena, la justicia ambiental y el desarrollo sostenible. la lucha en standing rock fue reforzada por una coalición integrada por activistas de otras naciones indígenas, incluyendo representantes de la cuenca amazónica, de movimientos no indígenas y de organizaciones políticas como la green party y el #blacklivesmatter (#vidasnegrasimportam). este artículo trata sobre la centralidad de la soberanía indígena en el marco de la lucha más amplia por los derechos humanos y la democracia en sus sentidos más inclusivos y sustantivos, especialmente en sociedades cuyo desarrollo fue construido sobre la violencia de la expansión colonial, la supremacía blanca y el heteropatriarcado. el artículo también sitúa los derechos indígenas dentro de regímenes de alteridades múltiples articuladas, en las cuales el subyugamiento y la desapropiación de pueblos indígenas y afrodescendientes en las américas fueron históricamente diferenciadas a pesar de encontrarse interconectados. el artículo ofrece un encuadramiento multilocalizado para el entendimiento de la convergencia y divergencia de puntos de referencia en la lógica identitaria de indígenas y de afrodescendientes, la relación entre el estado y el mercado, y las conexiones a los recursos materiales y espirituales de la tierra. la atención se centra en los casos en los estados unidos, honduras, y surinam (incluyendo aquellos de las comunidades que se definen como "afro-indígenas ") en los que alguna noción básica de suelo, afinidad, o alianza con pueblos indígenas del pasado o del presente ha sido movilizada en las reivindicaciones colectivas de los afrodescendientes relativas al derecho a la tierra, al desarrollo ya los recursos culturales. palabras claves: derechos humanos; indígena; democracia; la supremacía; heteropatriarcado. he mass protest that the standing rock sioux are leading against the dakota access pipeline in the united states has brought to the world‘s attention how this particular infrastructural development project, along with others like it, inflicts economic, environmental, and spiritual violence against the fundamental human rights of indigenous people as self- determining entities recognized by international law and policy. the dakota access pipeline‘s failure to consult, gain the consent of the sioux, and seriously consider their legitimate worries concerning potential hazards to their community‘s water supply ―conflicts with the international human rights standards, norms, and principles found in the vienna convention, geneva conventions, international criminal law, humanitarian law, and the international climate agreement (paris)‖ (red owl legal collective, ). the water protectors‘ mass demonstrations, which are less than a mile outside of standing rock reservation, have attracted representatives from other u.s.-based native american tribes and even indigenous communities and movement organizations from the amazon. there has also been the physical presence and practical solidarity of environmentalists, antiracist activists, and others who see themselves as allies in the struggle for indigenous peoples‘ rights and the struggle against the interlocking oppressions that adversely affect native americans‘ life chances and well-being. among the allies who have made their presence felt at standing rock are demonstrators involved in black lives t v. , n. – issn - revista sobre acesso À justiÇa e direitos nas amÉricas abya yala d o ss iê : f r o m s t a n d in g r o c k t o f li n t a n d b e y o n d : re si st in g n e o li b e ra l a ss a u lt s o n i n d ig e n o u s, m a rr o n , a n d o th e r si te s o f ra ci a ll y matter or the movement for black lives (mays ). the significance of building mutual alignments between the struggles of native americans and african americans is clearly reflected at standing rock as well as in native american activists‘ expressions of solidarity with african americans who are navigating the lead-poisoned water crisis in flint, michigan. according to kyle t. mays, an urban historian of black and saginaw anishinaabe heritage, working against the grain of conventional assumptions about their distance, divergence, and conflicting interests, black and indigenous activists have been reimagining the possibilities for mutual solidarity in the way they have engaged with the water politics of flint and standing rock. mays writes that before black lives matter went to standing rock, indigenous people from detroit went to flint. [hip-hop] [a]rtists like soufy and sacramento knoxx, both anishinaabe and from southwest detroit, made protest songs to bring awareness to the flintwatercrisis; they also donated water and supplies to the residents of flint. these native people have and continue to work in solidarity with new era detroit and other black organizations. moreover, the little river band of ottawa [based in northwest michigan] also donated $ , to assist with the flintwatercrisis. these actions show that black–indigenous solidarity is real, not rhetorical (mays ). this article reflects upon the centrality of indigenous self- determination and the freedom of afro- descendants across the african diaspora within the broader struggle for democracy and human rights in their most inclusive and substantive senses. these objectives are especially relevant in societies, such as those in the western hemisphere, whose historical development has been built upon the violence of colonial expansion, white privilege and supremacy, and heteropatriarchy. the article argues in favor of situating indigenous rights within the context of regimes that are structured around the logic and articulation of multiple alterities (i.e., otherness, differences) in which the subjugation and dispossession of indigenous and afro-descendant peoples, among others, have been historically differentiated yet intertwined in varying contexts across the americas. the article aims to offer a multi-sited framework for understanding convergent and divergent points of reference in the formation and experience of indigenous and afro- descendant identities, their relationship with the state and market, and their connections to the material and spiritual resources of land. our attention will be directed to cases in the united states, honduras, and suriname and will also include consideration of communities that define themselves in terms of the hybrid category of ―afro-indigenous.‖ in the cases to be discussed, some notion of common ground, affinity, or alliance with past or present-day indigenous peoples has been mobilized in afro-descendants‘ collective claims on rights to land, development, and cultural resources. toward these ends, new insights will be offered for understanding some of the concerns and nuances related to recent trends in the dynamics of new social movements whose motor force is driven by struggles for indigenous and afro- descendant peoples‘ human rights and dignity. standing rock and indigenous rights in u.s. politics v. , n. – issn - revista sobre acesso À justiÇa e direitos nas amÉricas abya yala d o ss iê : f r o m s t a n d in g r o c k t o f li n t a n d b e y o n d : re si st in g n e o li b e ra l a ss a u lt s o n i n d ig e n o u s, m a rr o n , a n d o th e r si te s o f ra ci a ll y the standing rock sioux are a part of the great sioux nation (the oceti sakowin), with which the united states government signed the fort laramie treaties of and . those historic, purportedly legally- binding agreements codified the indigenous right to self-determination and extended those rights to control of a portion of the traditional territories over which the sioux exercised stewardship long before colonial expansion deprived them of most of their land and resources. in the historical consciousness and social memory of the sioux nation, those th century treaties continue to exercise legal authority and efficacy today, in protecting their control over the land and the resources upon which their sociocultural, spiritual, economic, and overall ecological well- being depends. the u.s. government has regularly breached the terms of those treaties, yet claims to be a paragon and leader of liberal democracy in the world community. since his january inauguration, u.s. president donald trump has demonstrated his support for the corporate interests and profit-above- people practices of the dakota access, llc, ―a delaware limited liability company [which is a subsidiary of the energy transfer partners, l.p. this limited partnership business is] authorized to do business in [the state of] north dakota and [to construct]… the , -mile-long dakota access pipeline … intended to transport crude oil from the bakken shale of north dakota to refineries in patoka, illinois‖ (red owl legal collective, , p. , footnote ). a former stockholder in energy transfer partners, trump sought to undermine the temporary moratorium that in the federal government, with former president barack obama‘s approval, placed on completing the construction of the pipeline adjacent to the unceded traditional territory of the great sioux nation. with most of the pipeline already built, the specific area affected by the moratorium is located in the vicinity of the standing rock reservation around the lake oahe, a reservoir created by a government-built dam on the missouri river more than years ago. this is the main water source for the standing rock sioux reservation community. the lake‘s vulnerability to being contaminated by oil leaks is one of the main environmental objections the sioux are making against the pipeline. other objections have to do with the pipeline‘s violating the spiritual integrity and sanctity of burial sites and other culturally significant landmarks on the territory upon which a euro- american settler colonial regime encroached in the past and continues to do so in the present. beginning in july , the standing rock sioux tribe took its grievances and numerous appeals to federal court. initially, the u.s. district court for the district of columbia, the nation‘s capital, ruled that the u.s. army corps of engineers had not complied with the law when it granted a permit to the dakota access pipeline without having undertaken a review of the potential environmental hazards. the court, however, did not concur with the sioux tribe‘s argument for an injunction to block further construction of the pipeline. in its october , ruling, it decided not to arrest the pipeline‘s construction while the army corps completes its environmental review by april . in response to the disappointing news, mike faith, the standing rock sioux chairman lamented: ―from the very beginning of our lawsuit, what we have wanted is for the threat this pipeline poses to the people of standing rock indian reservation to be acknowledged. today, v. , n. – issn - revista sobre acesso À justiÇa e direitos nas amÉricas abya yala d o ss iê : f r o m s t a n d in g r o c k t o f li n t a n d b e y o n d : re si st in g n e o li b e ra l a ss a u lt s o n i n d ig e n o u s, m a rr o n , a n d o th e r si te s o f ra ci a ll y our concerns have not been heard and the threat persists‖ (earthjustice ). compliance with the declaration of indigenous people’s rights? in january , president trump ―signed an executive memorandum directing the army corps of engineers ‗to review and approve in an expedited manner‘ the [dakota access] pipeline ‗to the extent permitted by law and as warranted‘‖ (new york times, ). in the first several months of his term, trump reversed the environmental policies that former president barack obama‘s administration put into place on climate change, and will likely undermine the liberal concessions that the former administration made toward complying with the terms of the united nations‘ declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples, a non-binding but morally significant agreement and international standard that went into effect in without the signature and ratification of the united states along with canada, australia, and new zealand/aotearoa. since then, however, all four countries have decided to support the declaration. the united states‘ opposition to it was reversed, or perhaps softened, in , when obama and susan rice, then the u.s. ambassador to the united nations, publicly proclaimed the federal government‘s endorsement of indigenous rights. however, what did that endorsement really mean? social critic four arrows (wahinkpe topa, also known as don trent jacobs), a prolific native american scholar activist of cherokee ancestry, emphasizes the unlikelihood that the government will comply with the true spirit and substance of the declaration, given its contradictory track record (four arrows, ; four arrows, no date). he admits that there are reforms that the administration has backed (e.g., establishing college scholarships, settling water rights lawsuits, and addressing grievances against the department of agriculture‘s discrimination against native farmers and ranchers). however, he points out that, despite these cursory reforms, ―next to nothing has…happened to change the dismal health, violence, poverty, and educational problems on american indian reservations‖ (four arrows, [accessed ]). he goes on to claim that: ―private industry still trumps tribal sovereignty,‖ and in the past several years, beginning under president obama, for the first time in more than thirty years, the state department has stipulated that citizens of iroquois or haudenosaunee confederacy nations (i.e., the onondago, mohawk, seneca, oneida, tuscorora, and cayuga) have to hold u.s. passports when traveling internationally. this new ruling was tested in the case of the iroquois lacrosse team. as four arrows explains, there are many reasons the iroquois honour their own passports. one has to do with national pride and identity. another is that the team is competing as a sovereign nation and the competition requires evidence of their own national identity. the iroquois have been allowed to use their own passports for decades after an agreement among the us, british, canadian, and other governments. why didn't the president—or one of the cabinet members who ha[d] supposedly been instructed to consider indigenous perspectives and [complying with]… the decision to support undrip—intercede? ( ) this is four arrow‘s way of saying that the united states‘ claim to support the un declaration for the v. , n. – issn - revista sobre acesso À justiÇa e direitos nas amÉricas abya yala d o ss iê : f r o m s t a n d in g r o c k t o f li n t a n d b e y o n d : re si st in g n e o li b e ra l a ss a u lt s o n i n d ig e n o u s, m a rr o n , a n d o th e r si te s o f ra ci a ll y rights of indigenous people is a ―nonevent.‖ citizenship, the carceral state, and human rights black lives matter demonstrators supporting the water protectors at standing rock are part of a movement that mobilizes against the militarized force of police, who defend the security of corporate property, white public space (page and thomas ), and the state. a parallel situation exists in the case of the encampment at standing rock. state sanctioned and complicit violence in the united states has racializing effects within a society organized around the logics and articulations of multiple alterities and modes of producing otherness, through which anti-blackness and anti- indigeneity are manifested along with systemic biases against other racially profiled and surveilled bodies. the latter category implicates the darkening and stigmatization of categories of immigrants presumed to be problem populations, notably, segments of the latina and latino (or ―latinx‖) communities, especially mexican and central american migrants, but also muslims presumed to be potential radical jihadists. the state‘s war on terror and on undocumented migration along with the longstanding war on crime (and drugs), which is often translated into a war on black and brown people in ghetto and barrio communities, feeds into the workings of the neoliberal securitization of the state. this process is increasingly associated with the consolidation of a carceral state that is theorized in critical studies of mass incarceration and the prison industrial complex (marable, steinberg, and middlemass ). the securitized state administers the integration of the terror industrial complex (rana ), the immigrant retention or immigrant industrial complex (golash-boza, ; ho and louky, ), and the prison industrial complex (davis, ). these three spheres of the penal justice system are rarely addressed together as interrelated facets of the carceral state. an integrated approach is being explored in some recent work on the expansion of police power in the politically manufactured moral panic over private safety and national security (harrison a, page ). the carceral state has grown in tandem with the neoliberal minimalization of the government‘s responsibility for providing safety nets, social welfare, and other supports for the socioeconomic rights that are delineated in the international covenant on economic, social, and cultural rights, one of the two covenants comprising what is called the international bill of rights along with the universal declaration of human rights. the status of economic, social, and cultural rights are still highly contested as universal human rights, although the international human right regime now insists that they are indivisible and interdependent with civil and political rights, considered the negative, first generation rights of individuals (un chronicle ). they protect individuals from the negative excesses of state power and are enshrined in the universal declaration of human rights and the international covenant on civil and political rights. these instruments continue a long democratic legal tradition that dates back to the england‘s magna carta ( ) and bill of rights ( ), france‘s declaration of the rights of man and of the citizen ( ) and the united states‘ declaration of independence ( ) and bill of rights ( ), which represented the first ten v. , n. – issn - revista sobre acesso À justiÇa e direitos nas amÉricas abya yala d o ss iê : f r o m s t a n d in g r o c k t o f li n t a n d b e y o n d : re si st in g n e o li b e ra l a ss a u lt s o n i n d ig e n o u s, m a rr o n , a n d o th e r si te s o f ra ci a ll y amendments to the u.s. constitution. the rights delineated in the international covenant on economic, social, and cultural rights have been considered positive, second-generation rights (un chronicle, ). the third generation of human rights encompasses collective rights, such as those related to indigenous self- determination, economic development, natural resources, and a sustainable and healthy environment. these rights are considered to be largely aspirational and have generated a great deal of debate. they are, however, central to the goals and objectives of indigenous and afro- descendant movements throughout the americas. third generation rights have been difficult to codify and enforce in legally binding documents. some legal scholars strongly argue that only negative civil and political rights have legitimate status as universal human rights, because most states lack the material wherewithal to deliver positive rights. the indivisibility and interdependence of both negative and positive rights, however, have been recognized by the un general assembly since it issued the declaration on the right to development on december , (un general assembly ). according to article . of the declaration: ―all human rights and fundamental freedoms are indivisible and interdependent; equal attention and urgent consideration should be given to the implementation, promotion and protection of civil, political, economic, social and cultural rights‖. the principle of indivisible and interdependent rights was reinforced in the vienna declaration and program of action, which resulted from the world conference on human rights. since those interventions, the definition of human rights has been expanded, as indicated on the website of the un office of the high commissioner for human rights, where it clearly states that: all human rights are indivisible, whether they are civil and political rights, such as the right to life, equality before the law and freedom of expression; economic, social and cultural rights, such as the rights to work, social security and education, or collective rights, such as the rights to development and self- determination, are indivisible, interrelated and interdependent. the improvement of one right facilitates advancement of the others. likewise, the deprivation of one right adversely affects the others (un office of the high commissioner of human rights). the legality of indigenous people‘s rights, which together constitute dimensions of collective sovereignty, is embedded in international law and progressively codified in un covenants, conventions, and in softer instruments whose role in the human rights regime is more informal but morally significant. there are also important regional conventions and declarations, such as those ratified through deliberations within the organization of american states (oas) and, since june , the american declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples. the american convention on human rights is the central treaty that guides the workings of the inter- american commission on human rights and the accompanying inter- american court on human rights. court judgments play a significant role in contributing to the legal framework and establishing legal precedents that support the claims-making process that indigenous and afro-descendant claimants undertake. as we shall see, important precedents in human rights v. , n. – issn - revista sobre acesso À justiÇa e direitos nas amÉricas abya yala d o ss iê : f r o m s t a n d in g r o c k t o f li n t a n d b e y o n d : re si st in g n e o li b e ra l a ss a u lt s o n i n d ig e n o u s, m a rr o n , a n d o th e r si te s o f ra ci a ll y court cases have had implications for both of these oppressed populations and their movements for social, economic, and environmental justice. regimes of multiple racialized alterities the analysis here draws on peter wade‘s ( ) concern that indígena and afro-descendant predicaments are rarely analyzed within a common framework that implicates differential yet interconnected facets of structural racism with its variegated processes of racialization. building upon his notion of ―structures of alterity‖ (wade, , p. ), this article argues that an adequate analysis of indigenous, black, and latinx human rights violations in the united states and in other settings needs to be placed within the context of the multiple structures of alterity that configure the relationship between the state and racially othered groups. within the context of u.s. race and ethnic relations, this approach is an alternative to the once-dominant bipolar perspectives on the ―negro problem‖ in which black-white relations have been conventionally distinguished from all other ethno-racial relations. there has been considerable resistance to situating native american and african american predicaments on the same critical analytical terrain (mays ). in this respect, studies of indigenous and african-descended populations in the united states and in latin american contexts have developed roughly parallel approaches. a multiple alterities framework permits the analysis of both similarities and differences across the various social locations and sites of lived experience in which ethno-racial identity formation occurs. this framework is attentive to the plural trajectories followed and the strategies deployed in claiming citizenship and human rights, especially when the strategies and tactics are based on forms of identity that are collective and resonate with concerns expressed in ―third generation‖ human rights. the extent to which collective or group identity is corporate or based on a unified communal subject position varies considerably among afro- descendants in the americas. anthropological research has documented the corporate character of social and economic organization and of political authority among, for instance, rainforest maroons in suriname, whose moral and legal status within the national body politic is that of a distinct people and not merely a group or confluence of individuals (price ). their struggle for human rights gives priority to communally-based territorial sovereignty. indigenous & afro- descendant convergences & divergences across time & space a multiple alterities approach to interrogating indigenous rights within the u.s. context could very well lead to a scrutiny of the intersection, interrelationship, and, in some instances, the overlap that exists between indigenous and other ethnic peoples‘ rights, such as those of populations classified as latinx or ―hispanics.‖ this issue is especially significant in those instances in which latin american immigrants are of mainly indigenous background, such as the case of guatemalans of maya descent and heritage (burns, , ; hiller, linstroth, vela ). however, the more neglected v. , n. – issn - revista sobre acesso À justiÇa e direitos nas amÉricas abya yala d o ss iê : f r o m s t a n d in g r o c k t o f li n t a n d b e y o n d : re si st in g n e o li b e ra l a ss a u lt s o n i n d ig e n o u s, m a rr o n , a n d o th e r si te s o f ra ci a ll y intersection between indigenous and afro-descendant peoples‘ rights in the united states and across the americas will be examined instead. a few cases will be highlighted that should stimulate rethinking along neglected lines of inquiry. today, the environmental injustices that preoccupy the water defenders at standing rock, north dakota resonate strongly with the environmental racism that many african american communities confront in both rural and urban settings in the united states, whether in the katrina catastrophe in new orleans, louisiana and in the surrounding gulf coast or in flint, michigan, where in january a federal state of emergency was declared because lead levels in the water supply had reached critical poisonous proportions. the health and the life of residents had become endangered in that disproportionately african american populated rust-belt city of blight, economic displacement, and food deserts. the rights to life and well-being are also constrained by yet another environmental factor, and that is the factor of violence, which exists in a continuum of structural and intersubjective modalities (scheper- hughes, ; scheper-hughes and bourgois, ). the threat of anti- black extrajudicial killings, whether by police who are rarely held accountable or by armed citizens in fear of black crime (e.g., george zimmerman in the trayvon martin case), has reached crisis proportions and is being vigorously debated in the public sphere. it is important to point out, however, that native americans actually suffer the highest per capita rate of police killing than any other segment of the us population. although less than % of the country‘s total population, native americans killed by law enforcement are nearly % of all police killings. statistically, this is the highest rate that any group experiences although the aggregate numbers are small (indian country today, ; see also voice of america, ). public awareness of this trend is virtually nil. intersecting histories historically, relations between american indians and african americans (and amerindians and african descendants more broadly) have varied across time and space. the history of inter-group relations, whether focused on conflicting interests or on alliances, has been greatly neglected. the historian and anthropologist jack d. forbes (powhatan-renapé and delaware-lenape) redressed this silencing of the past (trouillot, ) in his seminal africans and native americans: the language of race and the evolution of red-black peoples (forbes, ), a text that takes a decolonial turn from the conventions of native american and african american studies, which have historically been treated in separate silos. in the u.s. context, the history of inter-group alliances is exemplified most clearly in the seminole and black seminole confederacy which developed in the state of florida in the th and early th centuries. the seminoles and their black seminole allies fought against the u.s. army in three seminole wars during the first half of the th century (howard ). an anthropologist who studied the impact of fugitive african americans on the lower creek population that eventually became seminoles in florida was laurence foster, whose doctoral dissertation focused on black-indian relations in the u.s. southeast (foster ). his multi-sited ethnohistorical v. , n. – issn - revista sobre acesso À justiÇa e direitos nas amÉricas abya yala d o ss iê : f r o m s t a n d in g r o c k t o f li n t a n d b e y o n d : re si st in g n e o li b e ra l a ss a u lt s o n i n d ig e n o u s, m a rr o n , a n d o th e r si te s o f ra ci a ll y and ethnographic research, conducted most intensively in - followed the migratory path mixed groups of seminoles had taken from florida to mexico, texas, and oklahoma. the communities that settled in the united states were affected by racial discrimination. laws in oklahoma made it illegal for indians to marry persons with any african ancestry. that worked against the close ties that once existed between black and ―red‖ seminoles. the anthropologist and ethno- historian william s. willis, jr. ( ) wrote about the ways that the th century government administration used tactics of divide and conquer in its colonial expansion strategies, pitting indians against blacks, who when enslaved were likely to run away from plantations and seek refuge in the wilderness beyond the borders of the plantation zone. to offset the possibility of indians providing shelter to maroons (fugitives from slavery), the army and civilian government in the colonies and later in states like georgia fomented antagonisms between the two subordinate groups, who together outnumbered the euro-american settlers and, if united, could potentially jeopardize the feasibility of the colonial status quo and political economy. the white colonial authorities enlisted indians in the role of capturing and returning runaways, and they inculcated within africans the fear and distrust of indians. later in the context of the westward expansion of u.s. settler colonialism, african americans were conscripted in the frontier army as ―buffalo soldiers‖ to fight ―renegade indians,‖ who resisted the euro- americans‘ displacement, pacification and reservation practices, whose effects were often genocidal (deloria ; dunbar-ortiz ). more recent trends in historical research on ―afro-indians‖ or ―black indians‖ demonstrate that inter-group mixing was not uncommon, although disincentives were imposed from above, stigmatizing black-native families and denying them recognition as indigenous (miles, [ ]; brooks, ). the one-drop rule or hypodescent jeopardized the legal status of native communities with mixed-heritage, especially those with black admixed members. white admixture did not carry the same stigma, a symptom of the hegemonic weight of white supremacy even in ―indian country.‖ the wedge constructed to divide indigenous people and africans had a negative effect on families and on the rights of african descendants who were once legally recognized citizens of those indian nations originally concentrated in the southeast which settler colonialists characterized as the five ―civilized‖ tribes. these so-called civilized natives of the cherokee, chickasaw, choctaw, creek, and seminole nations were incorporated into the plantation mode of production, which depended on the exploitation of enslaved laborers. when coercively removed westward to oklahoma territory (via the ―trail of tears‖), these tribes were accompanied by their freedmen, who were recognized as citizens in post-bellum (i.e., post- civil war) treaties between the u.s. government and the tribal polities. decades later and into the present era, that citizenship would come to be contested. older generations of african american freedmen, however, often had competence in indigenous languages and cultures, reflecting ethnic if not ―racial‖ commonalities shared with their indigenous counterparts (sturm, ). recently, there have been a number of court battles over the status of the descendants of freedmen, their rights to indian benefits and the tribal v. , n. – issn - revista sobre acesso À justiÇa e direitos nas amÉricas abya yala d o ss iê : f r o m s t a n d in g r o c k t o f li n t a n d b e y o n d : re si st in g n e o li b e ra l a ss a u lt s o n i n d ig e n o u s, m a rr o n , a n d o th e r si te s o f ra ci a ll y ballot, and access to heritage archives and other resources because of their de jure, treaty-based citizenship within indian nations dating back to the aftermath of emancipation. even when indian ancestry has been a component of the freedmen‘s court claims, it has rarely been adequately documented. when the dawes rolls determining tribal membership were compiled, as was stipulated by the dawes act which converted communal land ownership into individualized allotments, freed african americans were usually presumed to be (only) black rather than indian by virtue of the prevailing ―one-drop‖ rule, even when their families included members who were recognizably indians. mixed- heritage individuals were not included on the dawes roll but on a separate list for freedmen. genealogical information on black indians‘ ancestry and heritage was, therefore, not recorded in those cases (native heritage project, ; sturm ). this partial, skewed documentation contributed to the erosion of freed people‘s eligibility for substantive citizenship, since the dawes roll is the legal point of reference determining eligibility for tribal membership and belonging. by the s, the cherokee nation amended its legal criteria for citizenship, denying freedmen‘s votes in tribal elections (cherokee phoenix, ). at that time, voting rights were determined by blood quantum. this required the documentation of descent from someone listed on the dawes rolls as ―cherokee by blood.‖ this rule change disenfranchised the descendants of cherokee freedmen. today, more african americans are publicly claiming their indigenous heritage and organizing around their cultural and legal interests as indians or black indians. this trend is gaining momentum at a historical moment when hegemonic racial classifications and the cultural principle of hypodescent are being questioned and resisted. federally recognized indian tribes do not necessarily welcome african descendants‘ claims to indigenous ancestry and rights to tribally administered resources and services. the descendants of freedmen of the five civilized tribes association is one organization that has advocated for african americans whose foreparents‘ status as freedmen was recognized by the treaty. after many years of back and forth litigation, a u.s. district court ruled that the historic treaty had indeed granted freedmen ―all the rights of native cherokees‖ (pri [public radio international] ). in the judgment rendered in the cherokee nation v. nash case, the cherokee nation can continue to define itself as it sees fit but must do so equally and evenhandedly with respect to native cherokees and the descendants of cherokee freedmen. by interposition of article of the treaty, neither has rights either superior or, importantly, inferior to the other. their fates under the cherokee nation constitution rise and fall equally and in tandem. in accordance with article of the treaty, the cherokee freedmen have a present right to citizenship in the cherokee nation that is coextensive with the rights of native cherokees (pri, ). the cherokee nation‘s legal counsel has issued a statement that it will respect the rule of law and will not seek to appeal the court‘s decision. afrodescendant and indigenous convergences in the circum- caribbean the garifuna of honduras v. , n. – issn - revista sobre acesso À justiÇa e direitos nas amÉricas abya yala d o ss iê : f r o m s t a n d in g r o c k t o f li n t a n d b e y o n d : re si st in g n e o li b e ra l a ss a u lt s o n i n d ig e n o u s, m a rr o n , a n d o th e r si te s o f ra ci a ll y in other parts of the americas, afro-descendant and indigenous contact and interaction have been integral to many societies‘ historical development, particularly in the caribbean and latin america (forbes, ; wade, ). a key example is the garifuna or black caribs whose heritage is arawak, carib and african. the garifuna‘s unique ethno-genesis resulted from an alliance between maroons and caribs who resisted european domination in st. vincent in the eastern caribbean. in the british forcibly relocated them to central america, where their descendants are now found along the atlantic or caribbean coast, from belize (formerly british honduras) to nicaragua, with communities found in guatemala (gonzalez ) and honduras (anderson, ). there are also other indigenous populations with documentable (albeit understated or denied) african heritage, but the garifuna are the most iconic case of dual african and indigenous cultural heritage, reflected especially in their language, which is of arawakan origin. some garifuna in honduras even define themselves as indigenous, afro- indigenous, or autochthonous. others emphasize their blackness and align themselves with other afro- descendants. these alignments are also reflected in the wider regional networks to which garifuna civil society organizations and social movements belong (anderson, ). the activists who emphasize the ethnically autochthonous character of the garifuna seek to expand the meaning of indigenous so that it is not conflated with or restricted strictly to indian. by claiming autochthonous status, garifuna activists have asserted their identity and social location as ―long-standing occupants of territory who bear non-european linguistic and cultural ‗traditions‘ and the same collective rights as indigenous peoples‖ (anderson, , page. ). the language and ideology of autochthony have facilitated the garifuna‘s pursuit of a political agenda perceived as equivalent to that of indigenous people in their common preoccupation with issues related to rural communities‘ vulnerability to displacement and to having their communal rights to land discounted. these convergent interests lie at the heart of the politics of indigeneity, despite the fact that the two populations have been differently racialized as black and indian. according to mark anderson, mobilizing around an indigenous rights paradigm or model has enabled the garifuna to address cultural and linguistic oppression and claim rights to cultural and linguistic difference. it helped turn stereotypes of garifuna primitiveness into valorized traditions. the paradigm brought to the fore the problems of access to land and resources, rendering rural communities the center of political concern. like (other) indigenous peoples, garifuna would mobilize an image of themselves as stewards of the environment, protecting that which western modernity destroyed. indigeneity thus provided a language through which collective claims could be made and heard; it made garifuna a collective subject that the state and other actors could recognize as legitimately distinctive. garifuna, though identifying and identified as black, became ‗visible‘ as a collective subject to the state, indigenous and environmental organizations, international ngos, multilateral institutions, and the public media by appearing in the same metacultural frame as indigenous peoples (anderson, , page ). during the s, hondoran multicultural discourse, as reflected in v. , n. – issn - revista sobre acesso À justiÇa e direitos nas amÉricas abya yala d o ss iê : f r o m s t a n d in g r o c k t o f li n t a n d b e y o n d : re si st in g n e o li b e ra l a ss a u lt s o n i n d ig e n o u s, m a rr o n , a n d o th e r si te s o f ra ci a ll y ―legislation and presidential accords[,] employed the phrase ‗etnias autóctonas‘.‖ later, the legal language shifted to ―pueblos indígenas y afrohondureños,” recognizing that state policies on the indigenous should also include or apply to afro-hondurans. these shifts in government policy and action resulted from the relatively effective mobilizations the garifuna undertook to be recognized as a distinct people politically and legally convergent with indigenous citizens. this approach gave them greater leverage in combatting displacement from ancestral territories whose communal stewardship was being eroded by the increasing encroachments from real estate development, projects in tourism and agribusiness, and mestizo peasant land occupation (anderson, , page , ). although the relationship between blackness and indigeneity continues to be debated, the garifuna‘s status as a distinct people is firmly established in honduras‘ multicultural regime. their collective subject position is no longer questioned, even when it is argued that the garifuna can be more accurately characterized as mestizos— that is, as descendants of caribbean island arawaks and caribs as well as of black africans (anderson, , page ) in a society in which the hegemonic category of mestizo is traditionally reserved for descendants of spaniards and indians. the maroons of suriname another historical case of afro- descendant and indigenous contact and exchange which did not lead to a garifuna-like cultural and linguistic fusion, is found in the case of maroon societies, especially those of suriname‘s rainforest maroons, formerly referred to as ―bush negroes.‖ richard price ( ) has thoroughly documented how maroons developed some aspects of their adaptation to the rainforest from their contact with their indigenous neighbors, who were sometimes allies but often rivals over land, resources, and women. during what is called the historic ―first-time,‖ when the saamaka (called saramaka in the literature), for instance, fought against the th century dutch colonialists for their autonomy, there was a paucity of women runaways (price, ; ). consequently, maroons raided indigenous villages for women whom they abducted to adopt into their settlements. price recounts a number of stories about amerindian women whose saaamaka descendants retain the ―memory‖ of their partial indigenous ancestry, which is integral to their sense of authenticity as sovereign rainforest inhabitants and communal stewards of ancestral territories. claiming collective, tribal rights: important legal precedents the struggles of afro- descendants often have implications, legally and politically, for indigenous peoples—and vice versa. one clear instance of this lies in surinamese maroons‘ petitions to the inter- american commission on human rights and the subsequent litigation for rights via the inter-american court of human rights (price, ). the maroons filed their grievances against the ―destructive resource exploitation that the state and transnational corporations promote in their relentless pursuit of development at the expense of maroon and indigenous wellbeing‖ (harrison, b, page ). the court judgments have been important legal precedents that have benefited indigenous and tribal human rights v. , n. – issn - revista sobre acesso À justiÇa e direitos nas amÉricas abya yala d o ss iê : f r o m s t a n d in g r o c k t o f li n t a n d b e y o n d : re si st in g n e o li b e ra l a ss a u lt s o n i n d ig e n o u s, m a rr o n , a n d o th e r si te s o f ra ci a ll y claims. as we shall see, tribal status is roughly equivalent to the autochthonous status that garifuna have achieved in honduras. richard price‘s ( ) award- winning rainforest warriors: human rights on trial, along with many articles in legal journals (e.g., antkowiak, ), have documented how the ndjuka and particularly the saramaka/saamaka have taken their rights claims to the inter-american court on human rights and won important judgments. three consequential surinamese maroon cases are: the aloeboetoe et al. v. surname; the moiwana v. suriname case, which built upon the case as well as the awas tingni v. nicaragua (which was the ―first binding judgment recognizing indigenous peoples‘ property rights as being grounded in custom,‖ page ); then in the saramaka people v. suriname case, which was made around the time of a shift in favor of indigenous rights due to the ratification of the un declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples. each of these cases (which implicated the suriname state for military incursions, massacres, and economic and environmental assaults against maroon communities) built on earlier judicial precedents, taking the question of communal self- determination a step further in human rights jurisprudence. there has been a mutuality and symbiosis between indigenous (amerindian) and tribal cases. key indigenous cases that have been particularly relevant to the jurisprudence are: awas tingni v. nicaragua, ; yakye axa v. paraguay, ; and sawhoyamaxa v. paraguay, . the more recent judgment for the case of the sarayaku v. ecuador clearly drew upon the saramaka case, which set an important international precedent for stipulations of consent and prior consultation (fasken martineau, ). according to one source: the standard regarding the need to obtain consent of indigenous peoples has already been established by the inter-american court in the sentencing of the case saramaka v. surinam, in which the court said that whenever large-scale development or investment plans have a significant impact within indigenous territory, the state has the obligation to consult, but also to obtain free, prior and informed consent, respecting their culture and traditions (amazon watch, ). tribal designation recognized drawing on jurisprudence developed from earlier court precedents and established policies such as the world bank group‘s policies on indigenous and tribal peoples adopted in (price, , page ), the inter- american court strengthened the determination that the saramaka constituted a: tribal community whose social, cultural and economic characteristics are different from other sections of the national community, particularly because of their special relationship with their ancestral territories, and because they regulate themselves, at least partially, by their own norms, customs, and/or traditions (price , page , quoting the court). according to escr-net [or the international network for economic, social, cultural rights] caselaw database, ―the court decided [on november , ] that although the saramakas were not an indigenous community, they had certain resemblances with traditional indigenous communities and therefore enjoyed the same rights. as a v. , n. – issn - revista sobre acesso À justiÇa e direitos nas amÉricas abya yala d o ss iê : f r o m s t a n d in g r o c k t o f li n t a n d b e y o n d : re si st in g n e o li b e ra l a ss a u lt s o n i n d ig e n o u s, m a rr o n , a n d o th e r si te s o f ra ci a ll y consequence, they did not need a title in order to own the lands (possession was sufficient)‖ (escr-net, no date). price writes that some legal scholars claim that the saramaka case ―was the first binding international decision to recognize tribal peoples‘ rights to the natural resources located in their lands, indicating that tribal peoples are more akin to indigenous communities than they are to other ethnic, linguistic, or religious minorities‖ (price, , page ). however, price explains that the suriname maroons gained recognition as ―tribal peoples‖ before the decision. their tribal character was acknowledged in the judgment of aloeboetoe v. suriname, which was informed by the court‘s use of definitions in ilo (international labor organization) convention no. , ―a treaty ratified widely in the americas and which applies to both indigenous and tribal peoples‖ (price, , page ). moreover, in moiwana village v suriname, the court recognized and ―upheld ndjuka maroon land and resource rights, though in a more limited context than in the saramaka people v. suriname‖ (ibid.). broader implications of human rights court judgments according to price, the broader implications of the decision and the interpretive judgment issued the very next year is that for the first time the court addressed a people‘s corporate (collective) rights, instead of viewing them merely as an aggregation of individuals or as a community/village. in this case, the court established the saramaka people‘s right to recognition as a corporate legal identity, despite the lack of such a possibility under current suriname law. in addition, the court awarded monetary damages for the first time to an indigenous or tribal people for a state having caused environmental harm to its lands and resources ( , page ). territorial rights include ―recognition of ‗their right to manage, distribute, and effectively control such territory, in accordance with their customary laws and traditional collective land tenure system‘‖ (page ). price points out that indigenous and tribal peoples (whose territories contain ―large stretches of rainforest‖) should be participants in negotiating policies and programs related to climate change, the reduction of carbon dioxide emissions (―caused by deforestation,‖ page ), and the development of low carbon development strategies. this can only be the case if states can be held accountable to the human rights principles emphasized in the saramaka people v. suriname and the un declaration on the rights of indigenous peoples. however, it is much more common for indigenous and tribal peoples to be excluded from these high stakes discussions. this continues to be the case in suriname, where the government and the transnational corporations with which it colludes have refused to comply with the court‘s ruling (price, ; human rights brief, ). the french edition of price‘s book ends with an updated and expanded afterword in which the author provides details on the ways that the republic of suriname has repeatedly repudiated the inter- american court‘s mandates. his discussion underscores the limitations of the international neoliberal human rights regime. concluding remarks v. , n. – issn - revista sobre acesso À justiÇa e direitos nas amÉricas abya yala d o ss iê : f r o m s t a n d in g r o c k t o f li n t a n d b e y o n d : re si st in g n e o li b e ra l a ss a u lt s o n i n d ig e n o u s, m a rr o n , a n d o th e r si te s o f ra ci a ll y indigenous peoples and afro-descendants have had trajectories of struggle that at times overlap or intersect in significant ways. it is important to recognize the convergences as well as the divergences in these histories and in present-day predicaments that inform human rights politics and legalities. the interrelationships and interdependence between black and indigenous struggles are transnational in salience and scope. we need to map them from standing rock and flint to san jose, costa rica where the inter-american commission and court on human rights does its adjudication, juridical work that is absolutely necessary but clearly insufficient, as the outcomes of positive judgments have revealed. the international community has to find more effective ways enforce human rights law by compelling states, transnational corporations, and global civil society to comply with the judgments and recommendations of regional and international human rights courts. otherwise, the international human rights regime, as it is constituted now, cannot effectively operate to curtail the persistence of a global status quo in which humanity, human rights, and human dignity are—despite the universalist claims to the contrary— differentially calibrated. this results in some lives mattering more than others due to the racialized workings of modes of sociopolitical disciplining and tactics of population management that result in the division of the world‘s population into full humans, not-quite-humans, and nonhumans (weheliye ). we are facing many crises throughout the world, but those of highest priority are ecological and political-economic, implicating environmental injustices along with widening disparities of power, wealth, health, and life expectancy. the survival and sustainability of the earth and human life are seriously at stake. the world‘s growing disparities cannot be adequately interrogated without the critical insights provided by an intersectional understanding of racializing processes. indigenous and afro-descendant communities are among those that bear the brunt of the convergent crises that these processes engender. the movements that have arisen from these peoples‘ predicaments can potentially offer decolonial visions and sensibilities for forging paths toward a more humane and sustainable future. engaged scholars should be encouraged to illuminate and give voice to those critical insights. v. , n. – issn - 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[also retrievable from water protector legal collective website posting, ―red owl collective/national lawyers guild calls on dnb (bank of norway) to divest from dakota access pipeline.‖ november , . https://waterprotectorlegal.org/red-owl- legal-collectivenational-lawyers-guild- calls-dnb-bank-norway-divest-dakota- access-pipeline/. accessed on may , .] scheper-hughes, nancy. ―the genocidal continuum,‖ in mageo, jeannette, ed. power and the self. cambridge: cambridge university press, , pp. - . scheper-hughes and philippe bourgois. . ―introduction: making sense of violence.‖ in scheper-hughes, nancy and philippe bourgois, eds. violence in war and peace. malden, ma and oxford: black publishing, , pp. - . sturm, circe dawn. blood politics: race, culture, and identity in the cherokee nation of oklahoma. berkeley: university of california press, . trouillot, michel-rolph. silencing the past: power and the production of history. boston: beacon press, . https://nativeheritageproject.com/ / / /cherokee-freedmen-rolls/ https://nativeheritageproject.com/ / / /cherokee-freedmen-rolls/ https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/keystone-dakota-pipeline-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/keystone-dakota-pipeline-trump.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/keystone-dakota-pipeline-trump.html https://www.pri.org/stories/ - - /cherokee-freedmen-overjoyed-federal-court-ruling-granting-tribal-citizenship https://www.pri.org/stories/ - - /cherokee-freedmen-overjoyed-federal-court-ruling-granting-tribal-citizenship https://www.pri.org/stories/ - - /cherokee-freedmen-overjoyed-federal-court-ruling-granting-tribal-citizenship https://www.pri.org/stories/ - - /cherokee-freedmen-overjoyed-federal-court-ruling-granting-tribal-citizenship http://martinezlaw.net/wp-content/uploads/ / / -dnb-bank-divestment-letter-rolc.pdf http://martinezlaw.net/wp-content/uploads/ / / -dnb-bank-divestment-letter-rolc.pdf http://martinezlaw.net/wp-content/uploads/ / / -dnb-bank-divestment-letter-rolc.pdf http://martinezlaw.net/wp-content/uploads/ / / -dnb-bank-divestment-letter-rolc.pdf https://waterprotectorlegal.org/red-owl-legal-collectivenational-lawyers-guild-calls-dnb-bank-norway-divest-dakota-access-pipeline/ https://waterprotectorlegal.org/red-owl-legal-collectivenational-lawyers-guild-calls-dnb-bank-norway-divest-dakota-access-pipeline/ https://waterprotectorlegal.org/red-owl-legal-collectivenational-lawyers-guild-calls-dnb-bank-norway-divest-dakota-access-pipeline/ https://waterprotectorlegal.org/red-owl-legal-collectivenational-lawyers-guild-calls-dnb-bank-norway-divest-dakota-access-pipeline/ v. , n. – issn - revista sobre acesso À justiÇa e direitos nas amÉricas abya yala d o ss iê : f r o m s t a n d in g r o c k t o f li n t a n d b e y o n d : re si st in g n e o li b e ra l a ss a u lt s o n i n d ig e n o u s, m a rr o n , a n d o th e r si te s o f ra ci a ll y united nations general assembly. ―declaration on the right to development.‖ december , . th plenary meeting of the general assembly. http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/ / a r .htm. accessed on november , . united nations office of the high commissioner of human rights. no date. ―what are human rights?‖ http://www.ohchr.org/en/issues/pages/ whatarehumanrights.aspx. accessed on november , . un chronicle. . ―international human rights law: a short history.‖ january. ( & ), . https://unchronicle.un.org/article/interna tional-human-rights-law-short-history. accessed on november , . voice of america (voa). ―native americans most likely victims of deadly police force.‖ august , . http://www.voanews.com/a/native- americans-most-likely-victims-of- deadly-force-by-police/ .html. accessed on november , . wade, peter. . race and ethnicity in latin america. second edition. london: pluto press. weheliye, alexander g. habeas viscus: racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and black feminist theories of the human. durham, nc: duke university press, . willis, william s., jr. ―divide and rule: red, white, and black in the southeast.‖ journal of negro history ( ): - , . http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/ /a r .htm http://www.un.org/documents/ga/res/ /a r .htm http://www.ohchr.org/en/issues/pages/whatarehumanrights.aspx http://www.ohchr.org/en/issues/pages/whatarehumanrights.aspx https://unchronicle.un.org/article/international-human-rights-law-short-history https://unchronicle.un.org/article/international-human-rights-law-short-history http://www.voanews.com/a/native-americans-most-likely-victims-of-deadly-force-by-police/ .html http://www.voanews.com/a/native-americans-most-likely-victims-of-deadly-force-by-police/ .html http://www.voanews.com/a/native-americans-most-likely-victims-of-deadly-force-by-police/ .html egalitarianism, safety, and virtue in education: a response to callan copyright ©, jonathan turcotte-summers ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d’auteur. l’utilisation des services d’Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d’utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. 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   egalitarianism,  safety,  and  virtue  in   education:  a  response  to  callan   jonathan turcotte-summers thammasat university so here we are: two more white cis-hetero male academics discussing the practice of “safe space.” is this practice necessary, we ask, to eradicate the academy’s long-standing exclusion and domination of people deemed different from us, or does it constitute an unacceptable attack on academic freedom and the right to free speech? eamonn callan opens his essay “education in safe and unsafe spaces” ( ) by briefly contrasting the arguments of each side before leading us on a search for middle ground between them. but i see much more truth in the first than in the second, and irony in the fact that we philosophize from our comfortable seats at the intersection of “ascribed privilege of certain kinds” (p. ) on the efforts of the oppressed to liberate themselves from the very same systems of oppression that offer us such privilege. before directly addressing some of callan’s points, i think it might be helpful to do the same justice to the history of safe space that callan does to that of the western conception of human dignity. bell ( ) traces the origins of safe space to group psychotherapy and the sensitivity training that social psychologist kurt lewin introduced to corporate america for leadership building in the s. two decades later, humanistic therapist carl rogers “developed the idea into encounter groups which were more aimed at self-actualisation and social change” (bell, , para. ). it was around this time that the concept of safe space appeared in the women’s movement, claims kenney ( ), where it was distinguished from therapy in that it was used with the aim of analyzing and changing women’s social conditions rather than individual women themselves. it was not so much an end as it was a means, and not so much a physical space as one “created by the coming together of women searching for community” (p. ). also, while it failed to provide refuge from violence and harassment from police or others, it “[implied] a certain license to speak and act freely, form collective strength, and generate strategies for resistance” (p. ). in short, safe space, which had previously been a corporate tool for self-improvement, became by the end of the s an activist tool for social justice. from the women’s movement, the concept of safe space became central to the development of the lesbian movement, and subsequently the gay one. hanhardt ( ) describes how the queer community in new york and san francisco began organizing and agitating for such space after the stonewall 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   freire ( / ) might add that the oppressed aim to free not only themselves, but also their oppressors, by destroying systems of oppression that dehumanize all involved. a quote variously attributed to booker t. washington expresses a similar sentiment: “you can't hold a man [sic] down without staying down with him.” rogers is also noteworthy for his “person-centred” approach, which would inspire the “student-centred” credo that is, much like “safe space,” today so carelessly thrown around as a hollow buzzword in many educational circles. philosophical inquiry in education riots, although these efforts emphasized individual instances of urban violence against community members rather than more deep-seated structural violence. so the emerging bourgeois white (liberal) gay mainstream allied itself with real estate developers and policymakers focused on physical safety through privatization and policing—the very same policing responsible for the raid on the stonewall. consequently, as this mainstream found power in homeownership (kenney, ), it contributed to gay gentrification and the further marginalization of people according to race, class, and gender identity; working-class gender and sexual minorities of colour in particular either were excluded or excluded themselves from this community. rather than using safe space to abolish systems of oppression, then, the gay mainstream used it to improve its own standing within those systems, as callan ( ) says, “at the cost of oppressing others” (p. ). boostrom’s essay addresses safe space as an emerging metaphor concerning all students in a general educational context, offering a definition of what was previously “not a topic of educational inquiry” (p. ). but on the ground, at north american college campuses, talk of safe space at that time generally remained centred on gender and sexuality, though in an increasingly inclusive sense. for example, montreal’s mcgill university established its safe space program in , “[aiming] to enhance the acceptance and integration of people of all sexual orientations and gender identities” (mcgill, n.d., para. ). it seems that only recently has the notion of safe space been extended to address racism, the form of oppression with which callan ( ) is most concerned. also, many have begun to qualify it instead as “safer space”—much like “safer sex”—to avoid false expectations and acknowledge the fact that, despite our best efforts, safety is not absolute for everyone all the time but requires the continued commitment of all parties involved (holley & steiner, ; haley, ; turcotte-summers, ). “rather than individuals opting in,” suggests bell ( ), creating a safer space has come to be seen “as something that should define acceptable public behaviour”; it’s “considered to be a social responsibility and you can opt out, but only by leaving” (para. – ). some who belong to the academic community in addition to groups directly affected by oppression (e.g. cobb, ; lafargue, ; and khan, ) have been turning to non-academic media with strong rebuttals to the fashionable charges—commonly levelled by those of us with more privilege— that safer space and other such anti-oppressive practices are themselves oppressive or that the students who advocate for them are coddled, selfish, hypersensitive children who should stop whining and “grow up.” because callan’s ( ) argument is much more nuanced than that, and because of my own privileged positionality and limited experience with anti-oppression work, the rest of my discussion of safer space is focused instead on the following three of callan’s points: ( ) the assumption that egalitarian social relations require “liberal” institutions; ( ) the premise that establishing “dignity safety” is the best means of promoting egalitarianism while respecting freedom of speech and academic freedom; and ( ) the conclusion that education should prioritize the virtues of civility and candor. 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   the relationship between the queer community and the police has been challenged more recently through such actions as the black lives matter interruption of the edition of the pride parade in toronto. the local chapter of blm had been invited to lead the parade, an annual commemoration of stonewall, and staged a sit-in until organizers agreed to a list of demands among which was the exclusion of police floats. among the many post-secondary institutions with similar programs is the university of chicago, despite the fact that it made headlines in the fall of when incoming undergraduates received a letter condemning the practice from dean of students jay ellison—who is listed, curiously, as a “safe space ally” on that program’s website (lourgos, ; lgbtq student life, n.d.). jonathan turcotte-summers 	
   i’m happy to see callan engaging with and bringing attention to such critical issues, perhaps after being confronted with them in his own teaching practice. i’m also grateful to the editors of this journal for inviting me to respond. but i’ve hesitated to do so, not wanting to contribute to the appropriation of space from those with less privilege who are better positioned to address these matters. on the other hand, as one female blogger of colour puts it (in a quote that has been circulated in social media without attribution), to expect those on the front lines of oppression to disregard their own emotions and put in the additional labour of calmly educating the rest of us “is the epitome of entitlement” (thanapal, , para. ). she continues, “all privileged people need to take the responsibility for educating ourselves” (para. ). a liberal university for an egalitarian society callan ( ) asserts that there is some “residual” oppression which is “apt to disclose itself with whom one interacts” (p. ) in the form of stereotypes, generalizations, “performance-impairing social cues” (p. ), and “subtle acts of derogation” (p. ). in academia, contends callan, this means that some individual students are sometimes victims of “insult and humiliation” (p. ) by other individual students. stengel ( ) goes even further in suggesting that some, such as those “with darker skin” or “with lesser resources” (p. – ), are not only sometimes but “regularly treated disrespectfully and harassed by other students and/or teachers” (p. ). she laments that being different “is tough enough without getting a hard time in school” (p. ). however, such accounts fail to make explicit that, beyond isolated interpersonal conflicts, many if not most students in the typical western classroom face one or more forms of serious systemic, institutional oppression. i contend that the “liberal” education advocated by callan does not do enough to address these oppressions and help realize egalitarian norms. like the liberalism of the gay community in the s, callan’s vision of the university eschews the collective for the individual and promotes deference to authority—as expressed, for example, in his possessive references to “my” rather than “our class” and more directly in his text “when to shut students up.” in his view, it is the teacher who has sole agency to establish an authoritative “civility regime” in the classroom, illustrative of a banking concept of education whereby the teacher is the active subject acting upon the passive student (freire, / ). callan’s model particularly objectifies students from oppressed groups by making them especially dependent on the teacher; they do not speak, but the teacher speaks for them, on their behalf, to defend them and “reaffirm [their] standing” when they are attacked by other students ( , p. ). such an education fails to empower them and is actually complicit in maintaining and reproducing “the oppressor-oppressed contradiction” in the broader society; it is not, as donovan livingston ( ) pointed out at the convocation of the 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   while readers of this journal will likely readily admit to the reality of systemic oppression, it’s worth keeping in mind that, as sara ahmed ( ) points out on her feministkilljoys blog, “[n]o matter how much evidence you have of racism and sexism, … what you have is deemed as insufficient. the more you have to show the more eyes seem to roll. my proposition is simple: that the evidence we have of racism and sexism is deemed insufficient because of racism and sexism” (para. ). especially revealing is callan’s ( ) recommended assertion of teacher authority in the face of “uncivil” behaviour: “‘i won’t tolerate such appalling rudeness in my classroom. now shut up’” (callan, , p. , italics mine). philosophical inquiry in education harvard graduate school of education, what horace mann called “a great equalizer of the conditions of men [sic].” instead, oppressive conditions call for spaces where oppressed people, as kenney ( ) described, can form collective strength and generate their own strategies for resistance. such conditions call for more radical, liberatory, and genuinely democratic spaces—assuming “democracy” doesn’t mean simply once every few years voting in elections that supposedly “determine how we are ruled” (callan, p. ), but rather learning to rule ourselves. forms of safety and freedom of speech it is natural, and desirable, for teachers to be preoccupied with students’ safety, especially for those of us who have been entrusted with young children, although callan ( ) complicates matters by asserting that “[t]here are as many kinds of safety as there are threats to the things that human beings might care about” (p. ). one of these kinds of safety, he posits, is “dignity safety,” which means “to be free of any reasonable anxiety that others will treat one as having an inferior social rank to theirs” (p. ). i argue, however, that callan’s notion of dignity safety—and his notion of safety itself, for that matter—is not the most useful construct for teachers seeking to help abolish systems of oppression. to start with, one problem with the idea of dignity safety is that it encourages us to addresses symptoms without tackling the cause of the disease; it encourages us to addresses manifestations of structural inequality without tackling the fact of structural inequality itself. treating each other in the classroom with the same level of dignity is one thing, but simply imagining that we all have the same social rank does not make it so, as the larger social context works to reinforce our unequal status. to the contrary, confronting the regrettable reality of this injustice is required in order to ensure that members of oppressed groups are offered the resources—including space—they need to combat their oppressions and dismantle systems that rank us in the first place. the idea of dignity safety, like that of “colorblindness” or of willful ignorance to other forms of othering, is counterproductive to these efforts and has no place in an actively anti-oppressive social environment. safety, the way callan describes it, can be defined as a lack of threats to things we care about or, more accurately, as a lack of anxiety about such threats. stengel ( ) similarly contrasts safety with fear. other authors writing on the topic also define safety in terms of feeling or affect, although these—as barrett ( ) and stengel ( ) both argue—hardly form a sound basis for policy, whether in a classroom or in a larger polity. also, as suggested in the above discussion of “safe” versus “safer” 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   “you and i have never seen democracy; all we’ve seen is hypocrisy” (malcolm x, / , para. ). eduardo bonilla-silva has written extensively on this topic, including the book racism without racists: color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the united states ( ). however, the use of the metaphor “colourblind” in a postracial liberal context has been recognized by others as ableist.	
   callan ( ) distinguishes between efforts for institution-wide safety, on which his authoritarian liberal argument is focused, and “self-segregated refuge” (p. ) for particular groups within an institution. it is segregated safety that stengel is talking about, although not self-segregation but segregation by authority figures. what interests me here is the fourth quadrant of this graph, which might be described as more self- or collectively- regulated inclusive safety. i’m particularly cynical about the concept of safety as absence of that which is “offensive,” another term that has been used and abused much more than it has been critically analyzed. 	
   jonathan turcotte-summers 	
   space, there is little sense in interpreting safety as an absolute that we can guarantee to all people all of the time. callan ( ) tells us he has been pursuing “the most compelling interpretation” of safety in the face of calls for safe space (p. ). in that spirit, i would here like to submit another for consideration, one that might prove more useful for egalitarian educators while also being more congruent with the common understanding of the word. i suggest that safety be interpreted not as metaphor but in the literal sense of the reduction of proven, demonstrable causes of harm. to cause harm to someone is not to cause them simply discomfort or even pain, but some kind of lasting and unnecessary damage or injury. one proven, demonstrable cause of harm is violence and, as freire ( / ) points out, “[v]iolence is initiated by those who oppress … not by those who are oppressed” (p. ). therefore, in the context of safer space, we can further interpret safety as the reduction of behaviours that serve to reinforce or perpetuate longstanding systems of oppression. in other words, the less systemic oppression is expressed in a given space, the safer that space is. now, how many forms of systemic oppression are there? what constitutes an expression of systemic oppression? if not the teacher alone, who exactly should have the power to decide? i think these questions may prompt interesting and necessary debate. anti-oppressive safer space doesn’t necessarily make everyone feel comfortable or stress-free or benefit everyone in any way at all, except to reduce the dehumanization that afflicts both oppressed and oppressor (freire, / ). i here invoke the distinction between equality and equity: just because lifejackets make swimming safer doesn’t mean that everyone swimming needs a lifejacket. looking at safety through an anti-oppressive lens, it might be argued that individuals like callan and myself generally enjoy a relatively high degree of it most of the time in most social environments; we are able to swim in these environments and personally have little need for the lifejacket of safer space. in contrast, a queer woman of colour may face various intersecting forms of oppression in many different social environments, and in these rough waters may benefit much more from safer space. people like callan and i may participate in safer space, but it’s essential that we understand that it may not be for us, and we should definitely not take it away from those who may be drowned without it—at least until the day none of us are forced to swim. this view of safety makes it unproductive to distinguish, as several authors do, between physical and psychological safety, since the two are inextricably linked. while the anti-defamation league itself supports the state of israel’s brutal subjugation of palestinians, its “pyramid of hate” ( ) is useful in illustrating how seemingly minor expressions of psychological oppression like stereotypes and belittling jokes at the base of the structure support more severe manifestations higher up—physical violence and, at its peak, genocide. as khan ( ) explains, racist speech leads to an environment that is conducive to racist [physical] violence. it marginalizes students of color and makes the university not “uncomfortable,” but unsafe. anti- 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   lifejackets are a little individualistic; maybe a liferaft would be more a more appropriate metaphor for safer space, but it doesn’t work quite as well here. not only may safer space not be for people as privileged as callan and me, but it may sometimes appear to be against us. even when oppression is ended, freire writes, “the former oppressors do not feel liberated. on the contrary, they genuinely consider themselves to be oppressed. conditioned by the experience of oppressing others, any situation other than their former seems to them like oppression” ( / , p. ). put another way in a quote variously attributed to brian sims, the first openly gay member of pennsylvania's house of representatives: “when you're accustomed to privilege, equality feels like oppression.” philosophical inquiry in education lgbt speech makes campus unsafe, not merely “uncomfortable” for lgbt students. misogynist speech creates an environment that is conducive to sexual assault. any decent social scientist knows this. it is not about people being “uncomfortable” or “offended.” it is about people being unsafe and oppressed. (para. ) what does anti-oppressive safety mean for freedom of speech? whose freedom, to say what, about whom? khan ( ) points out that the concept of freedom of speech was originally used to protect the marginalized from repression by the powerful, but is actually much more often turned the other way around, instrumentalized to secure even further platforms for oppressors while the oppressed, and their critiques of their oppressors, continue to be left out of the discussion or silenced altogether. the freedom to offend the powerful, writes cobb ( ), is confused with the freedom to bully the relatively disempowered. an anti-oppressive concept of safer space, and the more democratic processes that i believe it entails, should help to correct this. it should also help to address dictatorial interpretations of “academic freedom” according to which those with higher academic status have the freedom to impose their will to those with less. just as independent and citizen journalists are breaking down the barriers to “press freedom,” egalitarian academics have a responsibility to help extend freedoms to all people, even beyond the confines of the ivory tower. civility and candor, not equity or justice callan prescribes civility and candor as virtues for those who speak in the classroom, and suggests open-mindedness and interpretive charity as virtues for those who listen. in advocating his authoritative liberal view of education, he appears to be primarily concerned with teachers cultivating these traits in students, or even imposing these traits on them, rather than cultivating them in themselves. while acknowledging their value, i would like to explore some of the drawbacks of focusing too much on civility and candor in particular as virtues to be cultivated in the classroom, and examine some alternatives that might be better suited to all members of the educational community for the purpose of addressing oppressions through the practice of safer space. barrett ( ), although she juxtaposes the two in advocating for a shift from one to the other, elsewhere argues for a discourse of classroom safety “predicated on the notion of student civility” (p. ). callan ( ) similarly proposes an authoritative “civility regime” to defend students’ dignity safety from occasional individual breaches of egalitarian orthodoxy. but we’ve already acknowledged that the more serious underlying problem is longstanding systemic oppressions, that his notion of dignity safety leads us to ignore these fundamental injustices within the walls of the institution, and that no teacher— especially not one so privileged as either callan or me—should try to impose solutions to such injustices on our students. so, while civility is certainly not undesirable in a classroom, it’s clear that enforcing it should not be our foremost goal. stengel ( ) seems to concur, citing mayo’s ( ) contribution on “the lure of beautiful manners” in asserting that occasional incivility brings necessary attention to problematic social relations and is “a precondition for democratic decision making” (p. ). similarly, steven salaita ( ), let go by the university of illinois for speaking out for palestine, calls on academics “to be uncivil to preserve academic freedom and take on the corporate university.” 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   the need to democratize knowledge is what makes quality open-access journals like this one so valuable. jonathan turcotte-summers 	
   even callan himself, in his paper, acknowledges that “[t]here are certainly much grander virtues than civility” (p. ), though he declines to engage with them. is political correctness one of these grander virtues? callan doesn’t think so, and neither do i— although maybe for different reasons. political correctness, according to callan, “is simply the label for the creed of the american academic left when it is armored with vices that insulate it from criticism” ( , p. ), although he adds that this label is also used opportunistically by the right. in contrast, others argue that the label’s use by the right is actually what has come to define it: what had previously been an inside joke among liberal academics making fun of themselves was seized by conservatives also seeking to make fun of liberals, and gradually inflated over a few decades into the right-wing boogeyman that donald trump employed in his presidential campaign (schultz, ; hess, ). what about the virtue of candor? callan introduces it toward the end of his most recent essay, distinguishing it from sincerity: while “[s]incerity means only that i must not say what i do not believe,” candor requires “that i say what i do believe” ( , p. , emphasis added). callan addresses candor at greater length in his text, calling it “a cardinal virtue in a democratic culture of free speech” (p. ), one that must be encouraged “despite the threat that [it] will pose to students most vulnerable to stigmatization” (p. ). candor may be as welcome in a classroom as civility, but to prioritize its cultivation ahead of student safety seems an invitation, if not to open bigotry, at least to the hijacking of class discussion by relatively privileged individuals and to “concern trolling”—described on that venerable bastion of staunch intellectualism, urban dictionary, as critics in the guise of supporters making themselves appear sympathetic to a cause by expressing concerns, sincere or not, that in reality serve only “to disrupt dialogue or undermine morale” (thevineyard, ). less privileged individuals, who may already be subject to civil but oppressive candor on a daily basis, are thus not only deprived of space needed to advance discussion on issues that are important to them, but trapped in a defensive posture. it’s not civility that should temper candor, as callan ( ) suggests, but the exigencies of anti- oppressive safer space. the difference between sincerity and candor may be what holley and steiner ( ) and hunter ( ) refer to as a willingness to open up and take risks, which defines their notions of safety. others might call this a willingness to be vulnerable, and i suggest it’s a somewhat more important virtue for anti-oppressive teachers to cultivate in their students and themselves. while no one should be forced into vulnerability by condition or circumstance, callan ( ) regrettably dismisses it altogether as weakness to be eliminated. at the same time, researchers like brené brown are increasingly pointing to the inherent strength and courage involved in being vulnerable, soft, sensitive—in allowing oneself to be seen. vulnerability makes us less likely to intentionally commit harm to others, and more likely to empathize with those who have been harmed. maybe callan would be more accepting of it if we were to reframe it as open-heartedness, to go along with his concept of open-mindedness. but rather than focus on “[eliminating] the vulnerability of vulnerable groups” ( , p. ), we should perhaps focus on exploring that vulnerability and preventing others from exploiting it and causing harm. 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   a washington post column by alexandra petri helped popularize the term “concern troll.” petri’s column centers on former new york times editor bill keller gently chastising a stranger with metastatic cancer for the manner in which she chose to cope with her illness, and for not going quietly into the good night like his father- in-law. another prominent example of concern trolling that comes to mind is benjamin netanyahu’s ( ) odious assertion that “i, the prime minister of israel, care more about palestinians than their own leaders do.” 	
   philosophical inquiry in education if we recognize the necessity of creating anti-oppressive safer spaces, we may also recognize that the cultivation of vulnerability as a virtue is much more essential to this task than the cultivation of other desirable traits such as civility and candor. it’s impossible for a teacher to impose a “vulnerability regime” in the classroom; it’s a culture that must be patiently nurtured and grown alongside a commitment to equity and a love of justice—and of each other. these virtues are required not just of students but of all of us concerned with their safety and interested in taking apart systems of oppression. the legacy of the civil rights movement i have responded to eamonn callan’s essay “education in safe and unsafe spaces” ( ), in this issue of the same journal, with three main counterarguments. first, the correct response to the systemic oppressions faced by our students is not a more liberal but a more liberatory and radical education. second, dignity safety is not a useful construct for such an education, nor are any constructs of safety based on psychological states; instead, i propose one based on reducing proven, observable causes of harm, especially the violence of systemic oppressions—an interpretation that may challenge the hegemonic view of free speech and academic freedom. third, while civility and candor are desirable in a classroom, they should not be prioritized over virtues that are more essential to anti-oppressive harm reduction, such as commitment to equity, love of justice, and vulnerability. callan ( ) concludes his own essay by arguing that his vision of safe space “discloses a deep continuity with the civil rights movement” that was led by black americans in the s. further, he suggests that others’ claims for safer space might be “little more than an infantile parody of the epochal social movement” (p. ). but callan, who elsewhere accuses some of his students of “smug intellectual torpor” (p. ), here makes himself seem rather smug by presuming to adjudicate on the legacy of that movement. on top of that, some of its best-known figures admonished white liberals like him, accusing them of being poor allies and, essentially, concern trolls themselves. martin luther king, jr., in his letter from a birmingham jail ( /n.d.), wrote about approaching “the regrettable conclusion that the negro's great stumbling block in his stride toward freedom is not the white citizen's counciler or the ku klux klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice” (para. ). and malcolm x ( / ) proclaimed “the government itself has failed us, and the white liberals who have been posing as our friends have failed us” (para. ). our task is not to try to raise as many of the oppressed as possible to the status of their oppressors, or have the abused act more like abusers themselves, but to seek an end to destructive and dehumanizing relationships. there’s lively debate to be had about how we in the academy can best do this, how we can include all members of the community in this work, and what role the notion of safety should play. some, including bell hooks, are now advocating instead for a conceptual shift from “safe space” to “brave space” (the new school, ). the most important voices in this discussion will not be those of white cis-hetero male academics like callan and myself, but those of people directly affected by one or more forms of systemic oppression. i would urge our readers to seek out and pay greater attention to those voices—especially given the present historical context of rising far-right extremism. those who depend on plato and socrates for their understanding of the university are out of touch with an institution that now seems to draw more inspiration from hedge fund managers, ceos, and pr jonathan turcotte-summers 	
   specialists. members of oppressed groups who accept ever-increasing amounts of personal debt in order to pay rising tuition fees are likely (and understandably) just as worried, if not more so, about trying to make a decent living for themselves and their families as they are about any ancient european ideals of truth or wisdom. but it isn’t enough for the academy to enable a limited amount of social mobility within oppressive structures. redmond ( ) cites ng’s ( ) assertion that it isn’t, in absolute terms, a democratic place, but when it can’t at least be more so, when it can’t serve to dismantle systems of oppression but only reinforces and perpetuates them, then the time will come for the academy itself to be dismantled, and new institutions created in its place. references ahmed, s. ( , july ). evidence [blog post]. feministkilljoys. retrieved from https://feministkilljoys.com/ / / /evidence/ anti-defamation league. ( ). pyramid of hate. retrieved from http://www.adl.org/assets/pdf/education-outreach/pyramid-of-hate.pdf barrett, b. j. ( ). is “safety” dangerous? a critical examination of the classroom as safe space. the canadian journal for the scholarship of teaching and learning, ( ), article . http://dx.doi.org/ . /cjsotl-rcacea. . . bell, v. ( , november ). the real history of the “safe space” [blog post]. mind hacks. retrieved from https://mindhacks.com/ / / /the-real-history-of-the-safe-space/ bonilla-silva, e. ( ). racism without racists: color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the united states ( nd ed.). retrieved from https://anth .files.wordpress.com/ / /eduardo_bonilla- silva_racism_without_racists_color- blind_racism_and_the_persistence_of_racial_inequality_in_the_united_states_ nd_edition__ . pdf boostrom, r. ( ). “safe spaces”: reflections on an educational metaphor. journal of curriculum studies, ( ), – . http://dx.doi.org/ . / callan, e. ( ). when to shut students up: civility, silencing, and free speech. theory and research in education, ( ), – . http://dx.doi.org/ . / callan, e. ( ). education in safe and unsafe spaces. philosophical inquiry in education, x(x), x–x. cobb, j. ( , november ). race and the free-speech diversion. the new yorker. retrieved from http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/race-and-the-free-speech-diversion freire, p. ( ). pedagogy of the oppressed. (m. bergman ramos, trans.). toronto, on: penguin books. (original work published ) haley, k. ( ). safer people, safer spaces deepens sense of allyship. syracuse university. retrieved from http://news.syr.edu/safer-people-safer-spaces-deepens-sense-of-allyship- / hanhardt, c. b. ( ). safe space: gay neighborhood history and the politics of violence. durham, nc: duke university press. 	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
  	
   i’d like to thank my colleague at thammasat, james burford, as well as the editors of this journal for their thoughtful feedback on drafts of this paper. philosophical inquiry in education hess, a. ( , july ). how “political correctness” went from punch line to panic. the new york times magazine. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /magazine/how-political- correctness-went-from-punch-line-to-panic.html holley, l. c., & steiner, s. ( ). safe space: student perspectives on classroom environment. journal of social work education, ( ), – . http://dx.doi.org/ . /jswe. . howard, g. ( , august ). the easiest way to get rid of racism? just redefine it. the new york times magazine. retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /magazine/the-easiest-way-to-get- rid-of-racism-just-redefine-it.html?rref=collection% fcolumn% ffirst% words hunter, m. a. ( ). cultivating the art of safe space. research in drama education, ( ), – . http://dx.doi.org/ . / kenney, m. ( ). mapping gay l.a.: the intersection of place and politics. philadelphia, pa: temple university press. khan, t. ( ). masking oppression as “free speech”: an anarchist take. anarchist agency. retrieved from http://www.anarchistagency.com/commentary/masking-oppression-as-free-speech-an- anarchist-take/#_ftn king, m. l., jr. (n.d.). letter from a birmingham jail. african studies center—university of pennsylvania. retrieved from http://www.africa.upenn.edu/articles_gen/letter_birmingham.html (original work published ) lafargue, f. ( , march ). “coddled” students and their “safe spaces” aren’t the problem, college official says. bigots are. the washington post. retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/ / / /coddled-students-and- their-safe-spaces-arent-the-problem-college-official-says-bigots-are/ lgbtq student life. (n.d.). safe space. the university of chicago. retrieved from https://lgbtq.uchicago.edu/page/safe-space livingston, d. ( , may ). lift off. harvard graduate school of education. retrieved from http://www.gse.harvard.edu/news/ / /lift lourgos, a. l. ( , august ). u. of c. safe space critic named on college's website as safe space ally. chicago tribune. retrieved from http://www.chicagotribune.com/news/local/breaking/ct- university-of-chicago-letter-response-met- -story.html malcolm x. ( ). the ballot or the bullet. digital history. retrieved from http://www.digitalhistory.uh.edu/disp_textbook.cfm?smtid= &psid= (original work published ) mcgill. (n.d.). diversity training on lgbtq issues. retrieved from http://www.mcgill.ca/equity_diversity/students/lgbttq/diversitytraining netanyahu, b. [netanyahu]. ( , august ). i, the prime minister of israel, care more about palestinians than their own leaders do. sounds incredible, right? [tweet]. retrieved from https://twitter.com/netanyahu/status/ petri, a. ( , january ). enter the concern troll. the washington post. retrieved from https://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/compost/wp/ / / /enter-the-concern- troll/?utm_term=. c d f redmond, m. ( ). safe space oddity: revisiting critical pedagogy. journal of teaching in social work, , – . http://dx.doi.org/ . / jonathan turcotte-summers 	
   salaita, s. ( , september ). six ways to unsettle colleagues and irritate administrators. jacobin. retrieved from https://www.jacobinmag.com/ / /palestine-bds-academic-freedom-unions- colleges-boycott/ schultz, d. l. ( ). to reclaim a legacy of diversity: analyzing the “political correctness” debates in higher education. new york: national council for research on women. retrieved from http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ed .pdf stengel, b. s. ( ). the complex case of fear and safe space. studies in philosophy and education, , – . http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - - thanapal, s. ( , january ). reflections on ignorance [blog post]. retrieved from https://medium.com/@geethat/reflections-on-ignorance-e d c#. iqilzvvi the new school. ( , october ). bell hooks and laverne cox in a public dialogue at the new school [video file]. retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= ommzijijgy thevineyard. ( , april ). concern troll. urban dictionary. retrieved from http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=concern% troll&defid= turcotte-summers, j. ( ). en défense [sic] des pratiques antioppressives à l’université: réplique à normand baillargeon. ricochet. retrieved from https://ricochet.media/fr/ /en-defense-des- pratiques-antioppressives-a-luniversite about the author jonathan turcotte-summers is foreign expert with thammasat secondary school and the faculty of learning sciences and education, thammasat university, thailand. he also serves as editorial assistant for this journal. he can be reached at jtsummers@riseup.net science magazine april • vol issue sciencemag.org s c i e n c e il l u s t r a t io n : r o b e r t n e u b e c k e r editor’s note in her working life piece “instagram won’t solve inequality” ( march, p. ), meghan wright examined why she feels conflicted reading #scicomm instagram posts by fellow women scientists. she explained that she recognizes the good they can do, yet it seems unfair that such scientists must devote time to social media outreach to combat systemic inequities. so, she has decided that she prefers to separate her social media use from her scientific activities. wright named a social media role model at her university—the science sam instagram account run by samantha yammine—before detailing why she did not want to participate in this kind of outreach. although she intended to use science sam as an example of social media success, wright’s critical comments about such outreach were interpreted by some as a sexist and mean-spirited personal attack on samantha yammine in particular and women science communicators in general. in this section, samantha yammine and colleagues describe the power of social media, the women scientists organization responds to the working life article, and two scientists recognized by aaas (the publisher of science) for public engagement discuss how outreach and institutional reform can go hand in hand. in the online buzz box, we provide several excerpts from the online eletters we received. jeremy berg editor-in-chief . /science. aat other marginalized scientists must overcome as minorities in science, tech- nology, engineering, and mathematics (stem) ( ), they should not be expected to bear the full responsibility for out- reach—nor should they be penalized for choosing to do this work. diversity among communicators should be encouraged because multiple styles and approaches of science communication can make science more accessible and relatable to more people, including those who may not otherwise seek stem edu- cation. selfies on instagram are optional, but they receive % more engagement than pictures without a face ( ), enabling open dialogue with broad audiences in an effectively personal manner. further research can determine whether shar- ing selfies from a research setting helps confer more trust without sacrificing credibility, and these data will inform strategies for improving the public’s lack of trust in scientists ( , ). social media serve an important role in the movement toward increased equity, diversity, and inclusion within stem because it provides a widely available, readily accessible platform for many to use easily. social media allow high- throughput networking and exploration of careers, which benefits trainees who may otherwise lack access to professional development ( ). although not free from the bias and prejudice inherent in society, social media can connect diverse groups, enable rapid information exchange, and mobilize like-minded communities. this connectivity can allow those same groups to challenge tradi- tional structures, identify and call out systemic barriers, and question hierarchies of power. instagram, for example, allows for visible represen- tation of individuals who are often unseen, and can amplify voices that may go unheard in traditional settings. furthermore, increased representa- tion of those who break stereotypes and are underrepresented creates a more inviting percep- tion of stem careers, and these efforts can improve diversity and inclusion in academia ( – ). for a diverse academic com- munity to thrive, inclusion and acceptance of every scientist, regardless of edited by jennifer sills component of publicly funded research grants, and public engagement activities should have weight in merit, tenure, and promotion assessments. whether scien- tists do outreach themselves or work with communication and media experts, public engagement with science is a responsibil- ity requiring important skills that should be valued accordingly. given the other barriers women and letters insights social media for social change in science although we agree with m. wright (“insta- gram won’t solve inequality,” working life, march, p. ) that there are many systemic structures perpetuating the marginalization of women in science, we view social media as a powerful tool in a larger strategy to dismantle such structures. in addition, scientists have been using social media productively to address several other concerns in aca- demia, including engaging with the public about science, increasing science literacy, promoting trust, exploring career options, networking internationally, and influenc- ing policy. strong public trust in science con- tributes to a democratic, civil society. scientists have a responsibility to engage effectively with society, especially when trust is lacking ( , ) and scientific knowledge is not equitably accessible ( ). within academic science, much of this outreach is done by women ( ) and underrepresented groups ( ). thus, not surprisingly, outreach has been grossly undervalued and sometimes demeaned. instead of urging academia to stop celebrating this essential service, we should ensure sufficient compensation and recognition for public engagement. evidence of outreach is increasingly a da_ letters.indd / / : am published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ april • vol issue s c i e n c e sciencemag.org online buzz scicomm speaks the working life “instagram won’t solve inequality” (m. wright, march, p. ) sparked a wide-ranging discus- sion about the value and purpose of social media in science. excerpts from readers’ reactions to the article are below. read the full eletters and add your own at http://science.sciencemag. org/content/ / / / tab-e-letters. a selection of your thoughts: not every tweet, post, or youtube video that happens to feature a woman sci- ence communicator is uploaded with the express intent of challenging the status quo or systemic and institutionalized bias…. to assume this…fails to under- stand the many reasons why women choose to communicate science to the public. there are indeed activists who constantly challenge the institutional- ized bias favoring men, people who sporadically participate in collective events such as women in science day, and also science communicators who just hap- pen to be women. we should applaud all of their efforts…. victoria j. forster …like the author, i strongly believe that women and other underrepresented minori- ties in science should feel no obligation to take on additional emotional labor for the sake of educating others. i also agree that systemic issues of inequality will likely require systemic solutions to enact lasting change.… it is evident that the author views #scicomm on instagram as a chore, but for some of us it is a labor of love. if build- ing model satellites out of cake…or posing my dog in front of apollo moon trees… weren’t incredibly fun, i wouldn’t be doing it.… instagram has significant and largely untapped potential as a vehicle for science communication. the visual nature of the platform, in conjunction with the large and diverse userbase,…provides tremendous opportunity to reach nontraditional audi- ences. i agree with the author that science communication must be performed in a manner authentic to each individual, but my hope is that we can continue to encour- age each other to promote science in a variety of ways. right now, we need #scicomm more than ever. beth r. gordon …as an early-career researcher, the first in my family to go to university, social media has provided me with both community and opportunities that would have been unimaginable without it. having a window into the lives other academics and scientists from a range of backgrounds has helped me feel i belong and reassured me that there is a place in the academy for people like me…. at the same time, i was recently invited to publish a comment piece… after an editor noticed my tweets. i have also found coauthors on twitter and used it to keep up with recent publica- tions and research…. i have nonetheless begun to limit time spent on social media, realizing that it…distracts me from important work. but the benefits far outweigh the limitations…. glen wright . /science.aat indianapolis, in , usa. louisiana state university, college of science, baton rouge, la , usa. department of chemistry and biology, ryerson university, toronto, on m b k , canada. *corresponding author. email: samantha.yammine@mail.utoronto.ca r e f e r e n c e s . m, “state of science index global report” ( ); https://multimedia. m.com/mws/media/ o/ presentation- m-state-of-science-index- -global- report-pdf.pdf. . s. t. fiske, c. dupree, proc. natl. acad. sci. , ( ). . m. anderson, “the race gap in science knowl- edge,” pew research centre ( ); www. pewresearch.org/fact-tank/ / / / the-race-gap-in-science-knowledge/. . e. h. ecklund, s. a. james, a. e. lincoln, plos one , e ( ). . m. ong, “the mini-symposium on women of color in sci- ence, technology, engineering, and mathematics (stem): a summary of events, findings, and suggestions” (terc, cambridge, ma, ). . n. gupta, c. kemelgor, s. fuchs, h. etzkowitz, curr. sci. , ( ). . s. bakhshi, d. shamma, e. gilbert, “proceedings of the nd annual acm conference on human factors in computing systems” ( ), pp. – ; http://comp. social.gatech.edu/papers/chi .faces.bakhshi.pdf. . a. l. gonzales, commun. res. , ( ). . b. j. drury, j. o. siy, s. cheryan, psychol. inquiry , ( ). . s. d. hermann et al., basic appl. soc. psychol. , ( ). . s. cheryan, j. o. siy, m. vichayapai, b. j. drury, s. kim, soc. psychol. person. sci. , ( ). . /science.aat appearance (whether conventional or not) is necessary. no single post or person on social media should be expected to change the world, but social media have been instrumental in mobilizing grassroots political move- ments, including those related to safety in education, research, and equity, such as the march for our lives, the march for science, black lives matter, #metoo, and the women’s march. thus, we challenge the false dichotomy that use of social media for public engagement with science and working to change policy and remove systemic barriers to inclusion are mutu- ally exclusive. rather, they are intrinsically linked, and we need to harness the poten- tial power of social media to create social change. as scientists, we must look to data and evidence to inform our understanding of the benefits and pitfalls of the use of social media for public outreach and policy change, and uphold the same rigor and analysis in determining what has value and what should be celebrated. samantha z. yammine, * christine liu, paige b. jarreau, , imogen r. coe department of molecular genetics, university of toronto, toronto, on m s e , canada. helen wills neuroscience institute, university of california, berkeley, berkeley, ca , usa. lifeomic, journal editors should not divide scientists we’re writing to express our disappoint- ment at the poor judgment that led to the publication of “instagram won’t solve inequality” (m. wright, working life, march, p. ), which singled out and criticized a successful woman science communicator for her instagram presence promoting and celebrating science. the editor of this piece should have ensured that the message focused on the issues: women and underrepresented minorities take on a great deal of science com- munication, mentorship, and outreach work without recognition or professional reward from their institutions. despite increasing institutional pressure to com- municate about science — whether to increase a university’s public profile or meet the national science foundation’s broader impact requirements — many institutions expect the work to be done on personal time without compensation or additional resources. although the piece hinted at these systemic issues, those arguments were undermined when the editors allowed the author to criticize the work of another woman with an da_ letters.indd / / : am published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ unabashed tone of condescension and did not give the target of the comments an opportunity to respond. rather than address the roadblocks facing women and underrepresented groups in science, technology, engi- neering, and mathematics (stem) or grapple with the author’s personal misgivings around science communica- tion, the piece was framed as an attack. the tone implied that anything beyond basic research is a frivolous waste of time, belittling meaningful approaches to science communication and public engagement. it offered a false choice between an authentic and relatable social media presence and effective advocacy for institutional change. the choice to run this inflammatory article demonstrates a lack of thoughtfulness on the editors’ part. pitting one woman scientist against another is destructive and irresponsible, and it perpetuates unreasonable standards for women and underrepresented groups in stem. it is antithetical to the open, accessible, and inclusive future that we at women scientists envision for science. maryam zaringhalam,* rukmani vijayaraghavan, juniper simonis, kelly ramirez, and jane zelikova, on behalf of women scientists women scientists, boulder, co , usa. *corresponding author. email: info@ womenscientists.org . /science.aat efforts large and small speed science reform the working life article “instagram won’t solve inequality” (m. wright, march, p. ) asserts that science outreach efforts by individual women cannot counteract struc- tural inequities and that women are doing outreach at a cost to their own careers. we concur that collective action and structural change are needed to diversify science and improve meaningful science engagement with the public. however, when such reform is absent or too slow, individual efforts fill the vacuum and should not be condemned. along with hundreds of other scientists, we devote time and energy to individual public engagement initiatives, while pushing for institutional reforms to support more scientists who wish to engage effectively. these reforms would provide support and incentives through professional recognition, financial and logistical resources, networks of support, and an inclusive culture and capac- ity for public engagement. with support, more scientists could develop collabora- tive and innovative engagement practices to broaden participation in science. while changing the culture of public engagement, we must similarly push to dismantle other structural barriers to women and minorities in the sciences. to accelerate these changes, data collection and learning networks would enable us to improve the effectiveness of our efforts to create a diverse workforce and tackle science-societal challenges. individual action versus structural change is not an “either/or” question; it is a “yes, and.” anne j. jefferson * and melissa a. kenney department of geology, kent state university, kent, oh , usa. cmns-earth system science interdisciplinary center, university of maryland, college park, md , usa. *corresponding author. email: ajeffer @kent.edu . /science.aat “...when [structural change] is absent or too slow, individual efforts fill the vacuum...” insights 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government works copyright © the authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee american association for the advancement of o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/about/terms-service http://science.sciencemag.org/ many librarians are inspired by greta thunberg and the millions of young people who have begun mobilizing to pressure government and corporate entities to address the climate cri- sis. during the global climate strike week from september to , , it is estimated that over . million people worldwide joined thunberg in agitating for change (global climate strike, ). our situation is dire. in june of , scientists at the permafrost laboratory at the university of alaska fairbanks reported that permafrost melting in the our house is on fire: how librarians can help young climate activists by jen ferro reference and instruction librarian, lane community college library ferroj@lanecc.edu @livenerve jen ferro has been a professional librarian for years. her current research interests include sustainability, information literacy curriculum design, media manipulation and disinformation, artificial intelligence, mass surveillance, and civil liberties. jen grew up on an arizona cattle ranch and is also an actor, vocalist, and playwright. she is co-founder of the lane climate action team at lane community college. you can find them at www.lanecat.org. greta thunberg canadian high arctic had already exceeded estimates of melting not previously expected to occur until the year (farquharson et al., ). in response, jennifer morgan, execu- tive director of greenpeace international, stated that “thawing permafrost is one of the tip- ping points for climate breakdown and it’s happening before our very eyes” (reuters, ). rapid permafrost thawing would suddenly release enormous quantities of carbon dioxide and methane, initiating a feedback loop that could cause global temperature to rise even more catastrophically (reuters, ). recently, scientists from different countries released a statement urging mass actions of civil disobedience as the only way to pressure policy makers to act quickly enough in order to avert the worst consequences of climate change (green, ). although many environmental activist groups, including the sunrise movement, fridays for future, and .org, have worked together to organize previous and future climate strikes, the group that has received the most media attention worldwide is extinction rebel- lion. extinction rebellion activists have staged numerous actions all over the world, includ- ing a “die-in” on wall street wherein activists splashed the iconic charging bull bronze statue with fake blood, during which activists were arrested (associated press, ). students affiliated with extinction rebellion recently staged a sit-in at the low memorial library at columbia university, demanding that the university become carbon-neutral within six years (o’connell-domenech, ). in london, extinction rebellion has engaged in repeated and disruptive actions for months, blocking streets (snaith & mitib, ) and bridges (“ex- tinction rebellion protests,” ) and obstructing access to banks (davies, ), weapons manufacturers, and train stations near financial districts (gayle & quinn, ). there are large worldwide climate protests planned for earth day, april , . o r e g o n l i b r a r y a s s o c i a t i o n children are protesting in the streets. as actions of civil disobedience continue and build worldwide, police have responded with mass arrests, which have been welcomed by protesters. as noted by alleen brown of the intercept, “by getting arrested in visually compelling acts of civil disobedience inspired by gandhi, the civil rights movement, and act up, extinction rebellion hopes to jolt world leaders into taking action on the climate emergency” ( ). but law enforcement agencies have also carried out more controversial actions. in london, the metropolitan police declared a total ban on protests in london (“extinction rebellion: police,” ), a ban which was later overturned in court (dodd & matthew, ). in australia, the queensland parliament designed legislation specifically for members of extinction rebel- lion so that activists possessing lock-down devices risk a possible two years’ imprisonment (brown, ). in paris this past june, police officers sprayed peaceful climate activists with teargas at point-blank range during a sit-in on the pont de sully (“french police,” ). on the th of october, plan b, a united kingdom-based group formed to “sup- port strategic legal action against climate change,” wrote a letter to the metropolitan police service documenting many human rights violations in the policing of protests sponsored by extinction rebellion, including “treading on protestors and dragging protestors,” “cyber attacks on social media assets . . . including its website and crowd-funding platform,” and “a plain clothes police officer attempting to incite violence in the crowd” (crosland, ). recently, one of the co-founders of extinction rebellion, roger hallam, was jailed for six weeks and his electronic equipment was confiscated (extinction rebellion, ). in the united states, there is a long history of law enforcement efforts to silence, in- filtrate, surveil, and imprison activists. in , a group of activists known as the citizens’ commission to investigate the fbi burglarized an fbi field office in pennsylvania and stole documents proving the existence of a program called cointelpro, or the “counter intelligence program.” from to , the fbi carried out a series of covert, and at times illegal, operations targeting a wide range of activists and organizations, including martin luther king, jr. and others in the civil rights movement, anti-war organizations, the american indian movement, the black power movement, and the communist party usa. under cointelpro, the fbi used the same techniques used against foreign espionage agents against domestic “perceived threats to the existing social and political order” (select committee, , p. ). scholars have widely acknowledged that in , black panther fred hampton was assassinated by members of the chicago police department in collusion with the fbi (williams, ). more recently, additional disturbing information about intelligence activities has sur- faced. in , cia whistleblower edward snowden released to the media secret documents that revealed that the national security agency had been collecting americans’ phone records, text messages, and internet activity (franceschi-bicchierai, ). in the wake of publishing his autobiography, permanent record, snowden has given interviews to many media outlets describing the current state of cell phone surveillance. smartphones are in constant communication with nearby towers, not only reporting users’ physical location and movements, but also allowing users’ various applications to continuously report their data and behaviors to advertisers, analytics servers, and other third-party vendors (powerfuljre, ). and it turns out that these third parties not only do not have users’ best interests in mind, but regularly report users’ information to u.s. intelligence agencies. amazon, for ex- ample, is a major defense contractor and works closely with ice, the cia, the department v o l n o • w i n t e r of defense, domestic local police forces, and the data mining company palantir (scheer, ). police departments target particular neighborhoods and individuals based on algo- rithms developed by data mining companies like palantir. any government or government agency can now utilize information supplied by facebook, google, and amazon marketing services to compile an extensive trove of details about everything a person does using those applications (scheer, ). these companies can do so without fear of violating the fourth amendment because the data shared is legally not the customer’s property. it is considered to be the property of the corporations that collect it (powerfuljre, ). in , oregon attorney general ellen rosenblum admitted that an investigator with the oregon department of justice had digitally surveilled oregonians who mentioned the social justice group black lives matter in messages on social media platforms (theriault, ). in august, the british newspaper the guardian obtained emails showing that the southwestern oregon joint task force (swojtf), a group led by the coos county sher- iff ’s office, had been monitoring activists who oppose the jordan cove liquefied natural gas plant project. the task force shared intelligence to an email list that included a anti-envi- ronmental public relations operative as well as the fbi, the bureau of land management, the department of justice, the national forest service, oregon state police, and a number of local sheriffs and police departments (parrish & wilson, “revealed: fbi,” ). more recently, the guardian reported that the oregon titan fusion center, which describes itself as “a collaborative effort of state and federal law enforcement agencies” focused on “terror- ism, organized crime and gang-related criminal activity,” disseminated information gath- ered by the swojtf and by a private security firm attached to the gas project. in a letter to oregon legislators advocating for an increase in funding for the fusion center, coos county sheriff craig zanni stated that the task force would “be instrumental in combat- ing the extremist agenda in southern oregon.” in response, lauren regan, the executive director of the civil liberties defense center, stated that “the use of the term ‘extremism’ is a government calling card when it intends to use repressive criminalization against a social movement” (parrish & wilson, “revealed: anti-terror,” ). librarians can and should begin more aggressively collecting materials in the areas of community organizing, environmental activism, nonviolent direct action philosophies and strategies, mass surveillance, and the history of law enforcement efforts to repress social movements in the united states. we should begin producing finding aids devoted to similar topics, including what civil liberties americans are guaranteed under the united states constitution (for an example, see the “climate activist toolkit” libguide developed by this author for students and staff at lane community college [lcc] [ferro, ]). libraries can also begin offering programming aimed at young people who have already become ac- tivists or who wish to begin. for example, libraries can invite lawyers or experienced activists to offer trainings on climate activism, direct action methods, and/or how to interact with police officers, whether young activists intend to get arrested or not. here at lcc, librarians have begun forming ties with a local organization, the civil liberties defense center, hop- ing to begin offering “know your rights” and “digital security” trainings for students and staff. lcc librarians have also been at the forefront of recent efforts to organize staff and students to form a new climate action team on campus, lanecat, which would serve as a means to more aggressively pressure decision-makers to take action to accelerate lcc’s plans to become carbon-neutral sooner than our current goal of . o r e g o n l i b r a r y a s s o c i a t i o n of course, libraries have long been considered bastions of democracy, and librarians the staunch defenders of civil liberties, the bill of rights, the freedom to read, the right to privacy, and intellectual freedom. nancy kranichin focused on the function of libraries in democracies during her tenure as ala president from to . she advocated that li- braries play an active role in civic education, including acting as “civic information centers,” gathering difficult-to-locate materials, but also that they serve as active educators, teaching “youth to participate in community problem solving” ( , p. ). in the well-known radical collection of essays revolting librarians, celeste west contended that “true profes- sionalism implies evolution, if not revolution; those who ‘profess’ a calling have certain goals and standards for improving existence, which necessarily means moving, shaking, transforming it” ( , p. [i]). it is not all that revolutionary to call for librarians to begin providing young activists with the information they need to preserve their own freedom and safety as they attempt to save the very civilization that makes our profession possible. references associated press. ( , october ). arrested after protesters deface iconic ‘charging bull’ statue on wall street. retrieved october , , from nbc new york website: https://tinyurl.com/umlb to brown, a. ( , october ). can extinction rebellion build a u.s. climate movement big enough to save the earth? the intercept. retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/ue jdz crosland, t. ( , october ). extinction rebellion and others—mps human rights viola- tions. retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/wmmscce davies, g. ( , october ). extinction rebellion bring traffic to standstill around bank of england as group targets city of london. the telegraph. retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/tzh r dodd, v., & matthew. 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( , october ). climate activist toolkit. retrieved october , , from lane community college library website: https://libraryguides.lanecc.edu/climateactivism franceschi-bicchierai, l. ( , june ). the biggest revelations from edward snowden’s leaks. retrieved october , , from mashable website: https://mashable.com/ / / /edward-snowden-revelations/ french police filmed teargassing climate change protesters. ( , july ). the local france. retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/u nnnek gayle, d., & quinn, b. ( , october ). extinction rebellion rush-hour protest sparks clash on london underground. the guardian. retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/yyxl gou global climate strike—sep. – . ( , september ). retrieved october , , from https://tinyurl.com/woqeaw green, m. ( , october ). scientists endorse mass civil disobedience to force climate action. reuters. retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/y hmzo kranich, n. ( ). libraries and civic engagement. in d. bogart & b. j. turock (eds.), li- brary and book trade almanac ( th ed., pp. – ). https://doi.org/ . /t vx dws long term strategy—extinction rebellion. (n.d.). retrieved october , , from ex- tinction rebellion us website: https://extinctionrebellion.us/long-term-strategy o’connell-domenech, a. ( , october ). columbia students storm low library as part of extinction rebellion protest. the villager. retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/ts ppr parrish, w., & wilson, j. ( , august ). revealed: fbi and police monitoring oregon anti-pipeline activists. the guardian. retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/y fqqe parrish, w., & wilson, j. ( , october ). revealed: anti-terror center helped police track environmental activists. the guardian. retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/y oy o powerfuljre. ( , october ). joe rogan experience # —edward snowden [video file]. retrieved from https://youtu.be/efs qrr lww reuters. ( , june ). scientists shocked by arctic permafrost thawing years sooner than predicted. the guardian. retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/y zrrk scheer, r. ( , october ). is orwell’s big brother here? bezos & amazon team up with defense, cia & ice (interview by m. steiner) [transcript]. retrieved october , , from the real news network website: https://tinyurl.com/vek p o r e g o n l i b r a r y a s s o c i a t i o n select committee to study governmental operations with respect to intelligence activities. supplementary detailed staff reports on intelligence activities and the rights of americans: book iii, s. rep. no. – , d sess. (apr. , ). retrieved from https://www.intelligence.senate.gov/sites/default/files/ _iii.pdf snaith, e., & mitib, a. ( , july ). extinction rebellion bring london streets to stand- still amid fresh wave of coordinated protests across uk. the independent. retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/yydow nl theriault, d. ( , november ). black lives matter: oregon justice department searched social media hashtags. the oregonian. retrieved from https://www.oregonlive.com/politics/ / /black_lives_matter_oregon_just.html west, c. ( ). [introduction]. in c. west & e. katz (eds.), revolting librarians (pp. i-iv). san francisco, ca: booklegger press. appendix bibliography of suggested titles for collection development climate activism borrowed time. ( ). retrieved january , , from https://borrowed-time.org/ farrell, c., green, a., knights, s., & skeaping, w. (eds.). ( ). this is not a drill: an extinction rebellion handbook. london, uk: penguin books. hallam, r. ( ). common sense for the st century: only nonviolent rebellion can now stop climate breakdown and social collapse (a. ford, ed.). golden grove, carmarthenshire, uk: common sense for the st century. hunter, d. ( ). climate resistance handbook: or, i was part of a climate action. now what? retrieved from https://tinyurl.com/y rdq n klein, n. ( ). on fire: the (burning) case for a green new deal. new york, ny: simon & schuster. miller, c., & crane, j. (eds.). ( ). nature of hope: grassroots organizing, environmental justice, and political change. louisville, co: university press of colorado. robinson, m. ( ). climate justice: hope, resilience, and the fight for a sustainable future. new york, ny: bloomsbury. thunberg, g. ( ). no one is too small to make a difference. penguin books. v o l n o • w i n t e r community organizing bobo, k. a. ( ). organizing for social change ( th ed.). santa ana, ca: the forum press. kauffman, l. a. ( ). how to read a protest: the art of organizing and resistance. berkeley, ca: university of california press. mackinnon, c., hertzberg, m., smith, r., & westphal, r. ( ). a consensus handbook: co-operative decision-making for activists, co-ops and communities. lancaster, england: seeds for change lancaster co-operative. mann, e. ( ). playbook for progressives: qualities of the successful organizer. boston, ma: beacon press. staples, l. ( ). roots to power: a manual for grassroots organizing ( rd ed.). santa barbara, ca: praeger. warren, s. ( ). generation citizen: the power of youth in our politics. berkeley, ca: counterpoint. history of law enforcement activities suppressing activism churchill, w., & vander wall, j. ( ). agents of repression: the fbi’s secret wars against the black panther party and the american indian movement. boston, ma: south end press. glick, b. ( ). south end press pamphlet series: vol. . war at home: covert action against u.s. activists and what we can do about it. boston, ma: south end press. matthiessen, p. ( ). in the spirit of crazy horse. new york city, ny: penguin books. potter, w. ( ). green is the new red: an insider’s account of a social movement under siege. san francisco, ca: city lights books. swearingen, m. w. (n.d.). fbi secrets: an agent’s expose. boston, ma: south end press. tilted scales collective. ( ). tilted guide to being a defendant. san bernardino, ca: combustion books. zinn, h. ( ). a people’s history of the united states (reissue ed.). new york city, ny: harper perennial modern classics. https://doi.org/ . / zuboff, s. ( ). age of surveillance capitalism: the fight for a human future at the new fron- tier of power. new york, ny: public affairs. nonviolent direct action chenoweth, e., & stephan, m. j. ( ). why civil resistance works: the strategic logic of nonviolent conflict. new york, ny: columbia university press. o r e g o n l i b r a r y a s s o c i a t i o n fithian, l. ( ). shut it down: stories from a fierce, loving resistance. hartford, vt: chelsea green. kauffman, l. a. ( ). direct action: protest and the reinvention of american radicalism. london, uk: verso. linn, j. 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( ). the art of invisibility: the world’s most famous hacker teaches you how to be safe in the age of big brother and big data. new york, ny: little, brown & company. v o l n o • w i n t e r asian american college student activism and social justice in midwest contexts this is the author manuscript accepted for publication and has undergone full peer review but has not been through the copyediting, typesetting, pagination and proofreading process, which may lead to differences between this version and the version of record. please cite this article as doi: . /he. . this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. the midwest regional context complicates asian american college student activism and social justice efforts so understanding these dynamics can equip higher education practitioners to better support these students. asian american college student activism and social justice in midwest contexts jeffrey grim, nue lee, samuel museus, vanessa na, marie p. ting systemic oppression shapes the experiences of asian americans. globally, imperialism, colonialism, and struggles among major economic powers have led to systemic violence toward, and significant challenges for, asian american communities (aguirre & lio, ). nationally, systemic racism—as well as other systems of oppression such as neoliberalism, poverty, and heteropatriarchy—continue to cause challenges for asian america and the diverse communities within it. and, on college campuses, these forces have an impact on the everyday lives of asian american faculty, staff, and students (museus & park, ). many asian americans engage in efforts to resist systemic forms of oppression and advance equity through political activism. college and university leaders often view such resistance as a burden. however, political activism is a fundamental democratic process (kezar, ; slocum & rhoades, . therefore, we believe that institutions that claim and seek to cultivate students‘ skills to productively engage and lead in a democratic society should encourage student activism and understand how to collaborate with activists to improve conditions on their campuses and in their surrounding communities. in this chapter, we provide insight into the factors that shape asian american activism in the midwest. in the following sections, we provide critical context necessary to understand the experiences of asian american activists in postsecondary education in the midwest region. then, we present the findings of our study on the experiences of asian american college all authors contributed equally to the production of this chapter, and names are listed in alphabetical order. https://doi.org/ . /he. https://doi.org/ . /he. https://doi.org/ . /he. this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. student activists in the midwest. we also offer a set of recommendations to support educators engaging asian american college student activists in the midwest region and beyond. racial context: racism, misconceptions, and misleading data scholarship on how systemic racism and other forms of oppression and discrimination impact asian american college students is sparse. however, research that does exist demonstrates that asian american students often experience the effects of racial oppression in college (kiang, ; museus & truong, ; vue, ). for example, this population experiences racial stereotypes, isolation, and hostility, as well as anxiety resulting from pressure to assimilate into majority cultures (lewis, chesler, & forman, ; museus & park ; vue, ). there is also evidence of the ways in which racism intersects with sexism to emasculate asian american men and objectify asian american women in college (museus & truong, ). one of the most salient mechanisms through which racism shapes asian american experiences is the model minority myth, which portrays asian americans as passive or docile, successfully integrated into mainstream society, and academically exemplary relative to other racially minoritized groups (museus, ). although this myth may not seem harmful on the surface, it can result in the false narrative that asian american students do not face challenges or need support. this assumption can lead to a lack of investment in support for asian americans, pressure for them to avoid seeking help, and pressure for them to major in science or math while foregoing other options that might lead some of them to be satisfied or find meaning in their education and profession (choi & lahey, ; museus & park; ). in addition, researchers have noted that reliance on aggregate data can reinforce model minority misconceptions (kiang, ; museus, ). as an aggregate, asian americans appear to have high rates of educational attainment. however, many asian american subgroups face significant disparities in college access, persistence, and success (museus, ). in fact, some asian american students come from some of the most under-resourced communities in the nation (kiang, ; ngo & lee, ; um, ). this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. asian american college students and activism while dominant narratives position asian americans as failing to possess leadership skills and engage politically (lien, conway, & wong, ), this community has a history of political activism in higher education and surrounding communities across the u.s. (nguyen & gasman, ; umemoto, ). indeed, prominent asian americans have been heavily involved in some of the most significant national movements in history, such as the civil rights movement. in addition, asian americans have spearheaded movements in support of immigration (lowe, ; vo, ), against unfair labor practices (wong, ), against racial violence and discrimination (kurashige, ; mcclain, ), against residential racial segregation (massey & denton, ; park, ), for educational equity (umemoto, ), and for redress for japanese americans forced into internment camps during world war ii (maki, kitano, & berthold, ). thus, despite stereotypes of asian american complacency, they have historically organized politically, socially, and economically to fight for social justice in the u.s. within higher education, asian american activism frequently emerges in response to systemic oppression manifesting on college campuses and in surrounding communities. for example, in the s and s, in response to higher education‘s failure to meet the needs of minoritized communities, asian american students joined their peers to fight for more culturally relevant curricula and increased racial equity (ryoo & ho, ; umemoto, ). since these student movements, asian american students across the nation have advocated for and created ethnic subcultures (e.g., asian american studies and asian american student organizations) that provide mechanisms for these students to increase awareness of their realities, support their peers on campus, and give back to their communities (chhuon & hudley, ; kiang, ; museus, ; museus, shiroma, & dizon, ; vue, ). these identity-based subcultures often provide space for the exploration of asian american history, culture, and community, thereby cultivating leaders and activists (lin, ; suyemoto, day, & schwartz, ). for example, lin ( ) conducted a mixed-method study of asian american college students and established that grassroots political student organizations led to increased political consciousness among these students and led them to advocate for educational and social justice causes. because asian american historical narratives and this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. voices are often ignored in social and political conversations, they must often create their own counterspaces to learn about and engage in social justice work. midwest contexts and asian american activism asian american communities vary across geographic contexts within the u.s. (lee, ). for example, according to the last national census in , almost half ( %) of asian americans in the u.s. resided in the west, followed by % in the south, % in the east, and % in the midwest (u.s. census bureau, ). these statistics suggest that asian american communities in the midwest are smaller than in other regions, which might lead to them facing unique challenges as a result of these low levels of representation. at the same time, there are sizable asian american communities in the midwest. for example, over million asian americans lived in the midwest in , and illinois has the sixth largest asian american population of all u.s. states (u.s. census bureau, ). with regard to southeast asian americans (cambodian, hmong, lao, and vietnamese americans)—the refugee groups that face some of the most significant barriers to education—several midwest states are among those with the largest communities (southeast asian resource action center, ). in addition. between and , the asian american community grew most rapidly in the south ( %), while their growth was second fastest in the midwest ( %). in sum, these data indicate that the asian american community is growing faster in the midwest than in most areas of the country, asian americans in the midwest might continue to play an increasingly salient role in defining asian america moving forward, and it is therefore important to understand their experiences, needs, and stories within this region‘s context. there is some indication that geographic context in general and the midwest context in particular might play a role in shaping the experiences and perspectives of asian american college students. for example, scholars have argued that place, space, and geographic location influence how race is experienced, understood, and expressed (berry & henderson, ). researchers have also documented the ways in which different geographic origins, along with other contextual factors (e.g., family and mentors) influence how asian americans make sense of their racial identity (chan, ). this research suggests that the midwest is dominated by black-white racial discourse, a lack of asian this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. american representation, and smaller asian american communities that lead to limited educational opportunities to learn about asian american histories and cultures. yet, little is known about whether and how such regional factors shape asian american activism taking place within the midwest. study and methods qualitative methods were utilized to execute the current investigation because they facilitate the in- depth examination of processes and phenomena through detailed information (creswell, ). in addition, qualitative methods were deemed ideal for answering our overarching research question: how does the midwest regional context shape asian american social justice activism? to answer this question, we conducted qualitative focus group interviews with administrators and staff working with asian american student organizations in the midwest. participant recruitment to recruit the sample for this study, we utilized purposeful sampling to achieve intensity (i.e., information richness) and variation (i.e., diversity in social identity, position, and institutional type). specifically, we sought administrators who work with asian american student organizations because they were deemed most likely to understand the systems within which asian american student leaders and activists are embedded. a letter soliciting recommendations of participants for the study was sent to senior student affairs administrators at institutions of higher education affiliated with the midwest asian american student union (maasu). maasu is a regional annual student-run conference that is held in various locations across the midwest region and focuses on understanding asian american issues, asian american leadership development, strengthening asian american resistance to all forms of oppression, and uniting and serving asian american communities. we utilized responses from senior administrators who were contacted to develop an initial list of potential participants. these potential participants were invited to apply to participate in the study by providing basic demographic data, describing their experiences with asian american student leaders, and submitting their curriculum vitae. participants who had significant experience working with asian american organizations and diverse social identities (race, ethnicity, gender) and position levels (entry, mid, and executive level) were selected for participation. the final sample included participants. this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. data collection and analysis the participants were split into three focus groups, which were facilitated by a member of the research team and lasted approximately three hours, including breaks. participants were asked a series of questions about contextual factors that influence asian american students‘ experiences and involvement in social justice activism. another member of the research team took notes and recorded observations. the interviews were also audio-recorded and professionally transcribed. once the focus group interviews were transcribed, we coded data in dedoose—a web-based qualitative analysis software program. we used initial, axial, and focused coding to analyze the data (charmaz, ; glaser & strauss, ). in this first phase of initial coding, we read transcripts with an openness to all possible thematic and theoretical possibilities that may be generated. we then used axial coding to build upon the initial codes and identify their attributes (e.g., properties or elements). finally, we utilized focused coding to determine the most salient themes in the data and relationships among them. findings our analysis generated important insights into how the midwest context shapes asian american student activism. in this section, we provide an overview of these themes. before doing so, however, it is important to underscore that participants supported asian american students engaging in many forms of activism, including supporting national movements (e.g., #blacklivesmatter and the movement to protect undocumented students), organizing events (e.g., social justice conferences), facilitating dialogues across communities of color, and responding to discriminatory incidents that sparked tension in their campus climates. thus, asian americans in the midwest were fighting for social justice in many ways. these efforts, however, were complicated by the realities of the midwest context, to which we now turn. exclusion from diversity and equity discourse given the relatively small size of asian american communities and low levels of representation in most areas of the midwest, it is not surprising that asian americans in this region often experience exclusion. however, participants also described ways in which diversity and equity conversations specifically excluded asian american voices, concerns, and issues in the midwest. one participant this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. stated, ―in the midwest, asian americans don't have a seat at the table. they are not invited to conversations about diversity. they're not thought of in diversity initiatives.‖ they noted that these conversations typically focused on white and underrepresented students, and the term ―underrepresented‖ was often used synonymously with black students or black and latinx students. participants underscored the importance of addressing challenges faced by these communities, and problems with ignoring asian americans—as well as native americans and pacific islanders— altogether. as a result of these dynamics, asian americans in the midwest struggled to balance their support for movements to advocate for other communities (e.g., #blacklivesmatter) and fighting for their own voices and issues to be acknowledged. participants also noted that the dismissal of asian americans from these conversations was fueled by the model minority stereotype, reliance on simplistic aggregate data, and myopic focus on retention rates in determining who should be included in conversations about diversity. specifically, they described how campus leaders often emphasized lower retention and graduation rates among black and latinx students as a rationale for ignoring asian americans. they underscored that such assumptions were problematic, given that asian americans faced significant struggles as well. they also highlighted the problem with their institutions‘ overreliance on aggregate data, because it masked significant disparities within asian american communities and reinforced model minority assumptions. these realties often led asian american students to expend excessive amounts of energy explaining and justifying why they should be included in diversity and equity conversations. limited structures to support activism participants also discussed the reality that there were limited structures to support the training and work of asian american social justice activists in the midwest. they highlighted the reality that histories of asian american activism and engagement in social justice work exist in the midwest, citing asian american icons from the civil rights movement and the ways in which asian american movements led to the creation of asian american studies programs and departments on midwestern college and university campuses. asian american studies was also noted as a critical source of constructing asian american histories and sharing knowledge of asian american communities in the midwest and beyond. this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. yet, interview participants noted that these stories were untold and unheard in most spaces in the midwest. they reported that students who were not from major cities had limited exposure to stories of activism in general and asian american activism in particular. as a result, they perceived many asian american students in the midwest to be unable to see themselves as social justice activists. participants discussed the need for faculty and staff to spend significant time and energy with asian american students to build a foundation of knowledge about the social and political issues that affect their communities and the importance of addressing them, before cultivating their skills to engage in social justice leadership and advocacy work. cooling effect of “midwest niceness” participants discussed the ways that midwest culture was characterized by ―midwest niceness,‖ which was described as being nice to each other and avoiding conflict and disruptive behavior. they perceived this midwest nice culture as making asian american and other college students on their campuses more inclined to participate in social organizations, activities, and events than to gravitate toward social justice work. our interviewees also suggested that this midwest niceness compounded other pressures for asian american students to avoid engaging in social justice activism. for example, they emphasized that stereotypes of asian americans as passive, docile, and assimilative model minorities reinforced messages that they should not engage in disruptive activist behavior. in addition, they noted that many families of asian american students with whom they worked did not immediately understand the value or benefits of students engaging in this work. in response, they highlighted the importance of educating students about how the model minority stereotype might influence their lives and the lives of other people of color and informing asian american families about the benefits of being involve in social and political causes. pull away from the midwest finally, participants discussed the ways in which asian american students in the midwest experienced a pull away from the region. specifically, they noted that asian american students often romanticized the volume of historical and contemporary forms of activism on the west and east this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. coasts. they attributed this romanticization, at least in part, to students‘ limited knowledge of the racial challenges and struggles that existed in other regions of the u.s. participants also noted that many asian american student activists with whom they worked expressed a desire to leave the midwest after finishing college. these students believed they would learn much more about activism and develop increased capacity to make change on the coasts. participants believed that these perceptions were inflated, given the significant potential to make a difference in the midwest. for example, one participant underscored the reality that many swing states that determined the outcome of the last presidential election were located in the region. as a result, they underscored the need for more documented stories and models of activism and progress taking place in the midwest, so that asian american students can see their potential impact on the system. although participants discussed this phenomenon primarily as a pull away from the region, the exclusion of asian americans from diversity and equity conversations, limited representation and structures to support their activism, and midwest niceness that hinder activist behavior also likely fueled these desires to leave. recommendations for institutional policy and practice our analysis has several implications for administrators and educators working with asian american activists in the midwest and beyond. they include the following:  ensure asian americans are part of the larger diversity and equity agenda. institutions of higher education can and should engage asian american student leaders in campus diversity and equity conversations to ensure that their needs and interests are included in their institutions‘ larger diversity and equity agenda. the engagement of asian american college students in these conversations is necessary for campuses to provide them with opportunities to develop civic responsibility and commitments, cultivate their capacities to engage in political processes, and foster greater understanding between them and other communities on their respective campuses.  create data systems to facilitate more accurate understandings of asian american communities. institutions of higher education must create and maintain systems to generate this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. data that illuminate the diversity and disparities that exist within the asian american community. colleges and universities should implement policies and practices to normalize disaggregation of institutional data across ethnicities and socioeconomic classes to equip campus community members to challenge pervasive misconceptions about asian americans.  encourage greater understanding of regional differences and similarities. educators working directly with asian american students should provide them with opportunities to engage in hands-on advocacy experiences in different areas of the midwest and beyond. for example, institutions in rural areas of the midwest can collaborate with asian american community organizations in chicago, minneapolis, and other major cities to learn about and engage in activism with these organizations. such opportunities can help students develop a more complex understanding of activism across regional contexts and help them find greater value in activism within the midwest region. asian american student leaders should also be encouraged to attend regional and national meetings that focus on asian american issues and social justice, such as the midwest asian american student union (maasu) and the association of asian american studies (aaas) conferences, where they have an opportunity to interact with asian american community leaders across the nation and learn about common and different struggles and successes across regions.  support, expand, and sustain asian american studies programs and curricula. asian american studies programs provide spaces for asian americans to learn about their communities and how to advocate for them. asian american students should be encouraged to take courses in asian american studies to gain a richer understanding of their communities‘ histories and contemporary issues. equally important, however, is the fact that faculty across disciplines and fields—such as history and sociology—can offer culturally relevant curricula that engages the histories, struggles, and stories of asian american communities into their courses. it is especially urgent for faculty in the midwest to find ways to highlight the histories of asian american communities in the midwest to expose students to the many ways that asian american social and political action takes place within the this article is protected by copyright. all rights reserved. region.  encourage engagement in controversy with courage. asian american student activists struggle with their ―place‖ in conversations about current social justice issues such as immigration and black lives matters. for example, asian american students may struggle with how to balance their support of black student activism with fighting for recognition of the history of racism against asian americans. and, while such conversations can be difficult, activism requires some level of risk (cabrera, matias, & montoya, ), and advocating for social justice requires engaging in controversy with courage (museus, sanchez-parkinson, calhoun, lee, & ting, ). institutions should consider how to equip and support asian american and other students to engage in these conversations within and outside of their communities. campuses should also create more spaces to engage in dialogue about critical social and political issues across 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( ). ―on strike!‖ san francisco state college strike - : the role of asian american students. amerasia journal, ( ), - . u.s. census bureau ( ). the asian population: . washington, dc: author. vaughn, s., schumm, j. s., & sinagub, j. m. ( ). focus group interviews in education and psychology. thousand oaks, ca: sage publications, inc. vo, l. t. ( ). asian immigrants, asian americans, and the politics of economic mobilization in san diego. amerasia journal, ( ), page numbers vue, r. ( ). searching for self, discovering community: an examination of the experiences of hmong american college students. in s. d. museus, d. c. maramba, & r. t. teranishi (eds.), the misrepresented minority: new insights on asian americans and pacific islanders, and their implications for higher education (pp. - ). sterling, va: stylus. wong, k. ( ). building an asian pacific labor movement. in f. ho, c. antonio, d. fujino, & s. yip (eds.), legacy to liberation: politics and culture of revolutionary asian pacific america (pp. - ). san francisco, ca: big red media. wu, f. h. ( ). neither black nor white: asian americans and affirmative action. boston college third world law journal, , - . jeffrey grim is a doctoral candidate at the center for study of higher and postsecondary education at the university of michigan, ann arbor. nue lee is a graduate of the university of minnesota, twin cities. samuel d. museus is professor in the department of education studies at university of california, san diego. vanessa na is a doctoral student in the department of education studies at the university of california, san diego. marie p. ting is associate director at the national center for institutional diversity at the university of michigan, ann arbor. volume | issue article renewing the civic and democratic mission of higher education: perspectives of leadership heidi whitford barry university, usa recommended citation: whitford, h. ( ). renewing the civic and democratic mission of higher education: perspectives of leadership [review of the book democracy, civic engagement, and citizenship in higher education: reclaiming our civic purpose, by w. v. flores & k. s. rogers, eds.]. international journal of research on service-learning and community engagement, ( ), article . https://doi.org/ . / c. international journal of research on service-learning and community engagement volume , issue , article | | issn: - | https://ijrslce.scholasticahq.com/ 	 renewing the civic and democratic mission of higher education: perspectives of leadership democracy, civic engagement, and citizenship in higher education: reclaiming our civic purpose, edited by william v. flores and katrina s. rogers. rowman & littlefield. . isbn- : . pp. reviewed by heidi whitford barry university, usa university and center leaders have a strategic role in shaping higher education toward a mission that values democratic and civic engagement. a unique feature of this book is that most of the contributors are college and university presidents and center directors. several chapters contribute to historical knowledge of the transformative role that higher education plays in civil society and public life. many of the values espoused in these chapters are visions of ideals and calls to action that speak to the challenges of injustice, racism, and inequity embedded within higher education and societal structures. while many of these issues remain in our midst, we may still appreciate the hope and optimism within these ideals if our higher education and community leaders are progressing in a positive direction. keywords: center directors, democratic engagement, racism, service-learning renovando la misión cívica y democrática de la educación superior: perspectivas del liderazgo los líderes de universidades y de centros académicos tiene un papel estratégico en la formación de la educación superior hacia una misión que valore el compromiso democrático y cívico. un aspecto único de este libro es que la mayoría de los colaboradores son presidentes de universidades o directores de centros académicos. varios capítulos contribuyen al conocimiento histórico del rol transformativo que la educación superior juega en la sociedad civil y en la vida pública. muchos de los valores compartidos en estos capítulos son visiones de ideales y llamadas a la acción que responden a los desafíos de la injusticia, el racismo y la inequidad integrados en la educación superior y en las estructuras de la sociedad. mientras muchos de estos asuntos siguen presentes, podemos todavía apreciar la esperanza y el optimismo dentro de estos ideales si nuestros líderes en las esferas universitarias y comunitarias progresan en una dirección positiva. palabras clave: directores de centros académicos, el compromiso democrático, el racismo, el aprendizaje de servicio editors’ note: translation by megan j. myers department of world languages and cultures iowa state university, usa democracy, civic engagement, and citizenship in higher education: reclaiming our civic purpose represents a unique contribution to the field of scholarly work in democratic and civic engagement in higher education. this field of scholarship covers a wide range of topics such as service-learning, community/civic engagement, and democratic engagement. amid the ongoing political, economic, and social crises that have engulfed the united states in recent years, this volume is a welcome addition to an array of scholarly work that focuses on higher education institutions (heis). the editors have brought in the collective voices of university presidents and center directors. many of the contributors were part of the kettering presidents | international journal of research on service-learning and community engagement 	 group, an initiative established by the kettering foundation. the members of this group participated in the deliberative democracy exchange, which provided a platform for an ongoing dialogue that allowed a collaborative exchange of ideas among higher education executive leaders. the resulting conversations become the foundation for this book. this review will first make connections between themes in the book and prior works in civic and democratic engagement in higher education and then evaluate the book’s themes. connections to the scholarly field the overarching purpose of this book is to explore the role of heis in creating a better, more just society for all citizens. scholars in this field have long questioned the role of heis in the realm of public life, which is continuously under pressure from social, economic, and political influences. for example, boyte ( ), who contributed a notable chapter to the present collection, wrote an earlier work calling for greater participation in public and civic work within heis. the more specific angle that the present book explores is higher education executive leaders’ role in shaping the direction of democracy, civic engagement, and citizenship within their institutions. flores and roger’s edited book deftly provides an illuminating glimpse into higher education leaders’ perspectives on this crucial topic. today, heis are under more pressure than ever from external and internal forces arising from economic, social, and political factors. these forces have been explored at length by other authors who took a more critical stance. giroux ( ) and giroux and giroux ( ) come to mind as authors who forcefully critiqued the commodification of higher education and its decreasing role in a democratic society. to take a stand on these issues often implies a political stance, which higher education leaders usually try to avoid to maintain an appearance of neutrality. yet, the topics tackled by the present book’s authors evoke a turn toward social justice issues that have become encumbered by partisan politics brought about by the changing tides of the turbulent times in which we live. some authors in the field have argued in earlier works that service and service-learning are critical parts of the definition of civic engagement within higher education (e.g., butin, ; aramburuzabala et al., ), and some of the authors in the present book touch on these themes. while many leaders embody the values espoused in this book, they just as often find themselves bearing the brunt of protests and activism themselves. pierce ( ) wrote extensively of college presidents becoming embroiled in conflict-filled scenarios in which college presidents themselves became targets of organized demonstrations. college presidents are at once idealized visionaries and strategic negotiators who must manage a complex multitude of competing interests and rapidly evolving situations. birnbaum and eckel ( ) incisively described this ongoing dilemma of the contemporary college president. overview of the book democracy, civic engagement, and citizenship in higher education is organized in five sections, with an introduction in which flores and rogers, the editors, describe the ongoing crisis in higher education. section i, “rising to the challenge,” contains chapters describing how higher education changed from a public good to a consumer good. sections ii, iii, and iv are focused on the voices of college and university presidents. section ii, “voices of presidents on renewing the civic purpose of higher education,” illustrates the challenges of moving from self-contained institutions to ones with a civic purpose. in section iii, “voice of presidents in urban settings,” authors describe the strategically important role of community colleges in democratic education and the challenges of incorporating social justice and equity values into the colleges’ missions. section iv, “the voices of presidents on student learning and democracy,” represents the crucial perspective of student learning. finally, section v, “theory and practice: views from center directors,” provides a tangible illustration of the center directors’ role as they navigate this challenging environment. whitford | renewing the civic and democratic mission of higher education | responses to the challenges: a crisis of democracy the first section of the book explores how heis have responded to the various crises described by flores and rogers in the introduction. in the introduction, they summarize the leading problems in democracy: challenges to the media, lack of voter participation, suppression of dissent and protests, and an erosion of trust in the branches of government. these multifaceted problems extend to the environment of higher education, with each college or university representing a kind of microcosm that reflects what is taking place in the larger society. the editors described how the kettering foundation created the college presidents group to create a dialogue among the executive leaders of heis to address these challenges at their respective institutions and to bring back the public role in civic and democratic engagement. whereas previous works by authors such as jacoby and associates ( ) and butin ( ) provided comprehensive conceptual and practical guidelines for civic engagement in higher education, this book takes on a unique angle through the contributors’ perceptions. in chapter , william v. flores and noël bezette-flores describe their journey through higher education as they purposefully sought to engage in service to others through various community organizations with ties to heis. they also discuss the racism that they observed and experienced growing up in the united states. as two of several authors in this book to discuss racism issues directly, flores and bezette-flores have brought to mind the work of arday and mirza ( ) who investigated systemic racism within the academy. this chapter also describes the formation of the kettering college presidents group, which played a crucial role in developing the book’s ideas by providing a framework and platform for the dialogue. chapter , by david matthews, brings to the fore the connection between two simultaneous crises: one in the societal realm of democracy and the other in the milieu of higher education. matthews argues that higher education has evolved from a public good to a consumer good and asks whether and how to return higher education to the realm of a public good with a role in democratic and civic engagement. although matthews paints a gloomy picture, he also espouses hope for the role that higher education can play if it can successfully navigate this transformation. in the author’s view, hei leaders need to be supported by their constituents and their partners in foundations and other heis to bring this movement to the forefront. this chapter evokes the theme of giroux and giroux’s ( ) critique of the commodification of higher education as the sector has evolved from a public good into a consumer good, with less public expenditure going toward higher education. voices of leadership: strategies, visions, and contexts the first section of the book explores how heis have responded to the various crises described by flores one of the book’s salient features is that the authors are (or were) college and university presidents and center directors. the second, third, and fourth sections provide a fascinating glimpse into the hei leaders’ perspectives and visions. while college presidents may represent a view from a lofty perch, they are, nonetheless, pivotal in shaping their institutions’ direction as they move forward with new approaches in furthering a mission of democratic and civic engagement. moreover, college presidents have access to information and data that few others have. another distinctive feature of this book is that it is in large part a product of cooperative dialogue among the contributors. sean creighton introduces this team effort in chapter by describing the framework that gave rise to the collegial exchanges among college and university presidents. jonathan alger and abraham goldberg follow in chapter , calling for a renewed interest in civic engagement through the mission of heis. they describe how they created an engagement advisory group at james madison university to implement their vision of civic and democratic engagement within the university, and particularly within academics. the next section of the book delves into issues related to urban campuses and community colleges. in chapter , david wilson describes how the fight for justice was part of the founding mission of an hbcu—morgan state university, in baltimore, maryland. beyond its history in the civil rights movement, | international journal of research on service-learning and community engagement 	 the students of morgan state were fighting for justice in the present day as part of the black lives matter movement in the wake of the recent killing of black citizens. wilson further describes the “morgan community mile” in northwest baltimore. this program provided students, faculty, and staff with opportunities to work collaboratively with community members on various projects in the area adjacent to the university campus. as president of morgan state, wilson describes being a participant in the activities, not just a supportive leader, and his description of these activities brings the chapter to life. embedding civic learning and democratic engagement concepts into the curriculum is another theme discussed extensively in the book. an example of this is found in chapter , by terrence bensel and james mullen, in which they describe integrating civic engagement into student learning at allegheny college in pennsylvania. the authors provide details of the community wellness initiative, a collaborative effort of students, staff, and community members. the initiative focused on a community garden and healthy eating programs, and on providing healthy food options through a mobile farmers market to community members in need, such as those in public housing and senior centers. in chapter , eduardo m. ochoa describes how a relatively new hei implemented a social equity agenda. the initiatives at california state university, monterey bay included an award-winning service- learning program, a regionally focused career guidance program called bright futures, and community dialogues to offer the external community “the opportunity to discuss important issues across differences in a thoughtful, open-minded, and respectful way” (pp. – ). describing the results of dialogues with community members as “varied” (p. ), ochoa notes that his university established a pathway for future discussions to continue building on this engagement. the fifth section of the book offers center directors’ contributions to greater democratic engagement among heis. these contributors represent a range of university and community centers. chapter , by windy y. lawrence and bezette-flores (with john locke), provides one of the most compelling and useful essays in this book section. the chapter shares the experiences of two faculty members (with a student) in leading public deliberation/civic engagement centers (and a student government association). the accounts of their experiences may provide guidance and inspiration for faculty members and students alike, who aspire to similar accomplishments. concluding thoughts democracy, civic engagement, and citizenship in higher education contains insightful information gleaned from a careful reading of its contents. it provides inspirational essays, much like other volumes such as those by peters et al. ( ), who similarly took a storytelling approach, and saltmarsh and zlotkowski ( ), whose essays encapsulated ideals related to the importance of connecting civic and democratic engagement to heis. as argued by fitzgerald et al. ( ), community members and other stakeholders outside the academy should play a central role in shaping the purpose of higher education. this book admirably evokes a passionate response to this call from its contributors. this book provokes thought by describing different higher education contexts; therefore, it is incumbent on the reader to envision how the ideas might contribute to one’s own institution. although some are compelling, the chapters generally lack details of the implementation of specific initiatives, and there is scant information regarding funding and resources that many of the projects require. several of the chapters contain idealized visions that, if those visions are to be actualized, require the full involvement of stakeholders who have competing interests. although these visionary leaders provide excellent examples and an inspirational path forward, more is needed to empower those at the grassroots level to implement and practice the values articulated. whitford | renewing the civic and democratic mission of higher education | references aramburuzabala, p., mcilrath, l., & opazo, h. (eds.). ( ). embedding service learning in european higher education: developing a culture of civic engagement. routledge. arday, j., & mirza, h. s. (eds.). ( ). dismantling race in higher education: racism, whiteness and decolonising the academy. springer. birnbaum, r., & eckel, p. d. ( ). the dilemma of presidential leadership. in p. g. altbach, r. o. berdahl, & p. j. gumport (eds.), american higher education in the twenty-first century ( nd ed., pp. – ). johns hopkins university press. boyte, h. c. (ed.). ( ). democracy’s education: public work, citizenship, and the future of colleges and universities. vanderbilt university press. butin, d. ( ). service-learning in theory and practice: the future of community engagement in higher education. springer. fitzgerald, h. e., bruns, k., sonka, s. t., furco, a., & swanson, l. ( ). the centrality of engagement in higher education. journal of higher education outreach and engagement, ( ), – . giroux, h. a. ( ). neoliberalism’s war on higher education. haymarket books. giroux, h. a., & giroux, s. s. ( ). take back higher education: race, youth, and the crisis of democracy in the post-civil rights era. macmillan. jacoby, b., & associates. ( ). civic engagement in higher education: concepts and practices. jossey- bass. peters, s. j., alter, t. r., & schwartzbach, n. ( ). democracy and higher education: traditions and stories of civic engagement. msu press. pierce, s. r. ( ). governance reconsidered: how boards, presidents, administrators, and faculty can help their colleges thrive. jossey-bass. saltmarsh, j., & zlotkowski, e. ( ). higher education and democracy: essays on service-learning and civic engagement. temple university press. about the author heidi whitford is an associate professor in the adrian dominican school of education at barry university (miami, fl, usa). correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to heidi whitford at hwhitford@barry.edu. addressing the caste system in u.s. healthcare in the era of covid- commentary open access addressing the caste system in u.s. healthcare in the era of covid- karthik sivashanker , * , cheri couillard , jennifer goldsmith , , normella walker and sunil eappen abstract in healthcare, we find an industry that typifies the unique blend of racism, classism, and other forms of structural discrimination that comprise the u.s. caste system—the artificially-constructed and legally-reinforced social hierarchy for assigning worth and determining opportunity for individuals based on race, class, and other factors. despite myths of meritocracy, healthcare is actually a casteocracy; and conversations about racism in healthcare largely occupy an echo chamber among the privileged upper caste of hospital professionals. to address racism in healthcare, we must consider the history that brought us here and understand how we effectively perpetuate an employee caste system within our own walls. keywords: health, equity, racism, caste main text the covid- pandemic and resurgence of black lives matter amidst continued police killings of unarmed black men and women, have led us to a historic moment. we are collectively grappling with the recognition of structural racism that pervades our society, and with the significance of systems that normalize and elevate whiteness while diminishing black and brown experience. this awakening is also happening in hospitals across the country. in healthcare, we find an industry that typifies the unique blend of racism, classism, and other forms of structural discrimination that comprise the u.s. caste system—a frame- work from pulitzer-prize winning author isabel wilkerson that describes the artificially-constructed and legally-reinforced social hierarchy for assigning worth and determining oppor- tunity for individuals based on race, class, and other factors. to address racism in healthcare, we must consider the history that brought us here and understand how we effectively per- petuate an employee caste system within our own walls. the creation of caste in the u.s in codifying u.s. slavery in the ’s, a privileged elite created racist policies and practices to preserve a system of wealth and social inequality, establishing concepts of ‘white’ and ‘black’ formally in us law. rich and poor whites alike were conferred a special status, while blacks were relegated to slavery. thus, the elite class reduced the risk of poor whites from uniting and rebelling in common cause with black enslaved peoples. from re- construction forward, racism has defined and influenced almost all of our social and economic policies in one way or another—from housing, education and employ- ment discrimination, to mass incarceration, medical ex- perimentation, lynchings, mob violence, and state- sanctioned police brutality. thus, through systematic op- pression and deprivation, black people have been rele- gated to the lowest socioeconomic rank of the u.s. caste system. we see other groups similarly treated. the geno- cide, forced assimilation and relocation of indigenous and native american people to reservation lands, and the ongoing xenophobic treatment of undocumented brown people and immigrants, are other examples. © the author(s). open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's creative commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article's creative commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. the creative commons public domain dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/ . /) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. * correspondence: ksivashanker@bwh.harvard.edu department of quality and safety, brigham and women’s hospital, boston, usa department of diversity, inclusion, and experience, brigham and women’s hospital, boston, usa full list of author information is available at the end of the article sivashanker et al. international journal for equity in health ( ) : https://doi.org/ . /s - - -x http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - -x&domain=pdf http://orcid.org/ - - - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/ . / mailto:ksivashanker@bwh.harvard.edu the caste system in u.s. healthcare healthcare exemplifies this manufactured hierarchy whereby white (and cisgender, non-disabled, affluent, male) employees are assigned the highest value and pref- erential treatment over others. as a result, employees of color remain grossly overrepresented in low-wage essen- tial jobs such as cleaning patient rooms, transporting pa- tients, and preparing food, while being overseen by mostly white supervisors; and underrepresented among hospital boards, executive leaders, and managers, with little change over the last decade [ ]. this labor hierarchy descends from eras when low-skilled jobs were the only ones avail- able to people of color and echoes a lack of generational wealth. roughly % of medical school graduates come from the two highest household income quintiles and black students entering medical school must contend with much higher levels of educational debt ( %) as compared to white students ( %) [ ]. in additional to economic in- equities, these same clinicians routinely face racist micro- and macro-aggressions from staff and patients. despite myths of meritocracy, healthcare is actually a casteocracy; and conversations about racism in health- care largely occupy an echo chamber among the privi- leged upper caste of hospital professionals. academic activities (research, publications, grand rounds) and hospital initiatives like social justice committees, typic- ally cater to a salaried, educated, primarily english- speaking workforce. rarely are hourly employees who are at the bottom of the socioeconomic hierarchy mean- ingfully included in this work. covid- and employee fracturing under fear and anxiety associated with covid- , fractures emerged among employee groups at healthcare institutions. nurses filed safety reports, questioning why doctors waited outside patient rooms while nurses themselves provided hands-on care. clinicians questioned the thoroughness of room cleaning and timeliness of transportation, while envir- onmental services and transportation workers reported re- sistance from some clinical staff in sharing scarce personal protective equipment (ppe). staff redeployment led to ques- tions about why some had to report in-person and others were allowed to work virtually. themes emerged from safety and experience reports around fragmentation, power dis- plays, top-down decision-making, information hoarding, and breakdowns in communication. these problems are perva- sive across many hospital systems and reflect longstanding mistrust and tension between labor groups at different socio- economic levels. challenges for low wage healthcare workers low wage healthcare workers have long faced poverty even despite their employment. as of , people of color were concentrated in the lowest wage healthcare positions. among them, % of non-white healthcare workers earned less than $ per hour and earned less on average than their white colleagues [ , ]. among fe- male healthcare workers and their children, . million lived below the poverty line and many lacked healthcare coverage and/or relied on public assistance to survive [ , ]. in the context of the covid- crisis, many of these low-income workers struggled to find or afford child- care, many saw job losses in their families putting them at risk while still employed and some were furloughed or experienced reduced hours at hospitals across the coun- try. these same employee groups also contracted covid- at higher rates compared to those in higher income brackets, reflecting challenges with socially dis- tancing often due to crowded housing conditions, much higher use of public transportation, multiple worker households, and essential frontline jobs. brigham health and covid- : a case example at brigham health, these inequities were identified early in the pandemic through a robust incident command in- frastructure that systematically incorporated equity- based reporting of both patient and employee data [ ]. we discovered that some of our lower paid employee groups like environmental and food services were testing positive for covid- at up to times the rates of higher wage frontline workers such as physicians and nurses. based on infectious disease tracers and a com- parison of employee and community-level data, we saw that covid-infection rates between employee groups reflected transmission patterns in the community. em- ployees from lower-income neighborhoods and neigh- borhoods of color tested positive at higher rates often mirroring the red-lined maps from generations ago. we recognized that these employees were unlikely to read the barrage of email covid- updates since their workdays are not spent in front of computers. we ob- served that email messages were exclusively offered in english and often written in a technical rather than practical style. thus, even with the need to de-densify and limit group meetings, hospital leadership felt it was essential to offer clear accessible information face-to- face with frontline staff. bridging the caste divide from april – june , we hosted socially-distanced small group sessions for workgroups including environ- mental services, security, materials management, food services, transport, and patient care and medical assis- tants. substantively, the sessions acknowledged frontline workers’ contributions and expressed appreciation, transparently shared information on covid- infec- tion rates by groups and geography, reinforced best practices to avoid covid- transmission, presented sivashanker et al. international journal for equity in health ( ) : page of human resource policies, and made accessible resources such as housing, finance, and domestic violence assist- ance. we encouraged covid- testing for symptoms, and provided reassurance around job, income, and per- sonal leave time if employees tested positive for covid- . childcare costs were significantly subsidized by the hospital for lower income staff and made free for in- ternal centers, and equitable access to ppe and covid- testing was ensured. sessions were held around shift change including meetings at : am and : pm, times when the lowest wage workers (not salaried employees) typically fill the halls of the hospital. one hundred two in-person sessions were attended by employees. over staff across multiple disciplines served as facilitators. documents were translated into five different languages and sessions were recorded for virtual viewing. employee assistance program (eap) utilization in- crease - x among employee groups that attended the ses- sions. this aligned with our observation that many staff who needed help were previously reticent from shame, fear, lan- guage barriers, and other reasons. during the sessions we answered more than ques- tions on topics including workplace transmission, labor practices that shed light on underlying power dynamics, and societal factors about covid- rates by race and zip code. sessions were designed to mitigate unhealthy power dynamics and hierarchies. for example, leaders external to these employee groups were brought in as speakers to ensure that everyone felt safe to raise local concerns and that nobody was silenced. a particularly poignant moment came when an environmental services worker commented that she had always wanted to enter the large elegant auditorium where the sessions were held. for some, this was their first time there as an audi- ence member, and not as the person cleaning the room. in , in this same auditorium, all-male portraits of clinical department chairs—of whom were white and one was asian—were removed [ ]. the homogeneity of these portraits were an undeniable reminder that the u.s. healthcare was and remains a casteocracy. their re- moval created essential space for staff to come together across differences to feel heard and respected. conclusions: a small but critical first step caste systems formed independently in numerous soci- eties across the world—yet the cross-cultural application of caste as a framework for addressing structural dis- crimination in u.s. healthcare is a new advance in our understanding. while the covid- pandemic is not behind us, lessons learned from opening communication among employee groups will carry us forward; and our experience provides concrete next steps for organiza- tions—in the u.s. and abroad—to consider in pursuit of equity for their staff and patients. we are expanding health equity and anti-racism efforts at bh, inclusive of voices across job roles, and working with managers to ensure participation. we are listening to the questions raised and genuinely rethinking policies that impact lower-paid employees disproportionately. for example, conversations about a living wage are no longer being whispered in offices and are instead being discussed with conviction and clarity with leaders. importantly, our work is not a solution to the deeper systemic issues of racism, classism, and ultimately casteism. rather, bridg- ing conversations between those with and without privil- ege within healthcare organizations is a necessary step that we must take. acknowledgements no grant support or drug company support. presentations this manuscript has not been presented at any meetings. statement this manuscript represents original material, has not been previously published, and is not under consideration for publication elsewhere. all of the authors have read and approved the final submitted version of the manuscript. authors’ contributions ks participated in the literature search, writing, and editing. cc participated in the writing and editing. jg participated in the writing and editing. se participated in the writing and editing. all authors read and approved the final manuscript. funding no funding to report. availability of data and materials not applicable. ethics approval and consent to participate not applicable. consent for publication not applicable. competing interests the authors declare that they have no competing interests. author details department of quality and safety, brigham and women’s hospital, boston, usa. department of diversity, inclusion, and experience, brigham and women’s hospital, boston, usa. trauma therapist, brandon residential treatment center, natick, usa. division of global health equity, brigham and women’s hospital, boston, usa. department of medicine, brigham and women’s hospital, boston, usa. brigham and women’s hospital, boston, usa. received: september accepted: october references . institute for diversity in health management. diversity & disparities: a benchmark study of u.s. hospitals (available at:) https://www.aha.org/ 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( , may th). how to address equity as part of covid- incident command. boston: institute for healthcare improvement. http://www.ihi.org/communities/blogs/how-to-address-equity-as-part-of- covid- -incident-command. . sivashanker k, rexrode k, nour n, kachalia a. healthcare portraiture and unconscious bias. bmj. . https://doi.org/ . /bmj.l . publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. sivashanker et al. international journal for equity in health ( ) : page of https://www.aamcdiversityfactsandfigures .org/report-section/section- / https://doi.org/ . /ajph. . https://doi.org/ . /ajph. . https://doi.org/ . /ajph. . https://doi.org/ . /ajph. . http://www.ihi.org/communities/blogs/how-to-address-equity-as-part-of-covid- -incident-command http://www.ihi.org/communities/blogs/how-to-address-equity-as-part-of-covid- -incident-command https://doi.org/ . /bmj.l 	abstract 	main text 	the creation of caste in the u.s 	the caste system in u.s. healthcare 	covid- and employee fracturing 	challenges for low wage healthcare workers 	brigham health and covid- : a case example 	bridging the caste divide 	conclusions: a small but critical first step 	acknowledgements 	presentations 	statement 	authors’ contributions 	funding 	availability of data and materials 	ethics approval and consent to participate 	consent for publication 	competing interests 	author details 	references 	publisher’s note s jed .. international medical graduates: how can uk psychiatry do better? emmeline lagunes-cordoba, raka maitra, subodh dave, shevonne matheiken, femi oyebode, jean o’hara, derek k. tracy bjpsych bulletin ( ) page of , doi: . /bjb. . camden and islington nhs foundation trust, uk; tavistock and portman nhs foundation trust, uk; derbyshire healthcare nhs foundation trust, uk; east london nhs foundation trust, uk; national centre for mental health, uk; south london and maudsley nhs foundation trust, uk; oxleas nhs foundation trust, uk correspondence to: dr emmeline lagunes-cordoba (emmeline. lagunescordoba@candi.nhs.uk) first received may , final revision oct , accepted oct © the author(s), . published by cambridge university press on behalf of the royal college of psychiatrists. this is an open access article, distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. summary the national health service (nhs) was created years ago to provide universal healthcare to the uk, and over the years it has relied upon international medical graduates (imgs) to be able to meet its needs. despite the benefits these professionals bring to the nhs, they often face barriers that hinder their well-being and performance. in this editorial, we discuss some of the most common challenges and the adverse effects these have on imgs’ lives and careers. however, we also propose practical measures to improve imgs’ experiences of working in psychiatry. keywords imgs; nhs; bame; career; stigma and discrimination. the staff of the national health service (nhs) includes many doctors who have trained abroad. unfortunately, des- pite their contributions, many international medical gradu- ates (imgs) face considerably greater difficulties than uk graduates. longitudinal data clearly show differential attain- ment of img doctors in both postgraduate examinations and more senior clinical, academic and managerial positions. , they are also more likely to be reported to the general medical council (gmc) for misconduct and to have such complaints upheld. this is detrimental to their well-being and risks affecting the quality of care provided by them. there are many contributing factors, from direct dis- crimination, through a lack of familiarity with and support from the uk system, to a failure to harness imgs’ strengths. this editorial will explore this, taking the available evidence and experiences of the authors to propose positive next steps for individuals and organisations. imgs: who are they? definitions of imgs: a heterogeneous group the gmc defines an img as someone who has obtained their primary medical qualification outside the european economic area (eea). however, that simple definition cov- ers a range of complexities. it can encompass a childhood in another culture and different intersectional experiences of nationality, religion, gender and skin colour. it involves medicine studied in a different healthcare system, with nuanced variations in communication and therapeutic rela- tionships. some things, however, are common to most imgs: personal and professional loss from the country they left; a need to build a network of friends and embrace a new life; exposure to a new environment and health sys- tem; and the hope for a better future, which despite any adversity keeps many motivated to continue. however, every img’s journey is unique, and the challenges faced will depend on the interplay of many factors; for example, we note that technically the term ‘img’ applies to a white british citizen who studies abroad and returns to work in the uk, yet such an individual is less likely to face attain- ment gaps. there is no single route for an img to transition into the nhs. those from an eea country or switzerland (not considered imgs by the gmc) are eligible for full gmc registration and licence to practise medicine in the uk as long as they demonstrate proficiency in english. for other imgs, the most common method of obtaining registration praxis downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:emmeline.lagunescordoba@candi.nhs.uk mailto:emmeline.lagunescordoba@candi.nhs.uk http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog?doi= . /bjb. . &domain=pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core is by passing the professional and linguistic assessments board (plab) examination, an initiative designed to ensure parity of medical education and training standards. post-plab doctors are then free to apply to appropriate training schemes, and to work as specialty and associate spe- cialist (sas) or locally employed doctors. another route is the medical training initiative (mti) scheme sponsored by a uk medical royal college, faculty or gmc-approved institution for postgraduate training. some imgs can also gain registration if they hold a relevant postgraduate qualifi- cation from an approved overseas awarding body. finally, imgs can get their registration by applying for a certificate of eligibility for specialist registration. this requires doctors to demonstrate that their training matches the uk equivalent. however, once an img starts working in the nhs, they are expected to adhere to the norms outlined in the gmc’s good medical practice guide. some trusts invest in provid- ing appropriate induction and extra support; however, there is currently no clear national guidance or requirement for either organisations or imgs on how to support this transition into the uk. data on img numbers and specialties/roles a report from the house of commons noted that of doctors in non-primary care settings, % are from asia, . % are from the european union and . % are from africa. imgs account for % of non-consultant and non-training doctors currently working in the uk. it is not clear why imgs are more likely to work as sas or locally employed doctors. some might have found these roles more suitable to gain experience before enrolling in formal training, while some might be less interested in the recognised chal- lenges that come with traditional training and consultant roles. however, some people may prefer a more flexible role for reasons including childcare, especially as they might have less family and informal support than british doctors; while others might find it practically easier to obtain such a job. having said this, it is also likely that for a fair few it is a second-choice career pathway on account of failure to succeed in passing the relevant postgraduate examinations. having a non-uk primary medical qualifica- tion has the largest influence on postgraduate examination attainment; the pass rate in some postgraduate examinations is % for imgs, compared with % for uk graduates. these attainment differences have also been identified between imgs and uk graduate doctors training in psychiatry. psychiatry is particularly popular among imgs, who account for % of psychiatry trainees. a preference for psychiatry has also been demonstrated in the usa and among uk doctors from black and minority ethnic (bame) backgrounds. the reason for this is not clear, although psychiatry has long had a particular recruitment problem, and it is possible that a need to pass the residence labour market test may be encouraging some to take posts that are more easily available. the authors’ own discussions include the reflection that many imgs may come from cul- tures where mind and body are not so separated, and find a natural affinity with psychiatry. imgs: challenges they face practical and cultural aspects to change initially, many imgs need to find a place to live, to become orientated with public transport and potentially to learn to drive on the left side of the road. they need to open a bank account, get a uk telephone and identify where and how to access shops, sport clubs, religious centres and schools. they must adapt to the uk’s many regional accents, and learn both local idioms and british colloquialisms. in addition, the first few years are often clouded by financial and visa-related stresses. imgs go through adaptation (changes in individuals or groups due to environmental demands) and acculturation (cultural changes resulting from encounters with members of different groups). this includes learning appropriate new behaviours and unlearning behaviours that are no longer appropriate. refugee doctors merit additional com- ment. they are also imgs, but they have had to flee their home countries and lives to escape persecution or other threats. so they often have experienced trauma, more finan- cial difficulties and less certainty regarding visas, leading them to face greater isolation. cohn et al noted that owing to having to leave their homes rapidly and in fear, refugee doctors might not have all the paperwork required for registration, or may not be able to contact people in their home countries to get relevant documents, which may complicate their ability to fulfil gmc requirements. loss of status, discrimination and racism imgs often not only leave behind family and friends, they almost always leave a social status, identity and trust that they previously earned and enjoyed. many take up posts of lower grade or status than expected or warranted by their expertise. , imgs have reported a loss of autonomy in their decision-making, and a professional devaluation which can lead to a loss of their confidence to perform or even defend themselves in cases of harassment or where their practice is being scrutinised. many imgs still suffer greater levels of direct and indir- ect discrimination and harassment. imgs have reported feeling discriminated against by colleagues and at an institu- tional level. institutional racism has also been evidenced by bias regarding hiring practices of doctors with foreign names. subjective bias due to racial discrimination has also been considered a factor associated with the failure of the clinical skills assessment for uk bame and img doc- tors. a third of sas and locally employed doctors in the uk, who are predominately imgs, have reported experi- enced bullying or harassment in their workplaces, mainly characterised by rudeness. greater rates of complaints the gmc’s fair to refer report shows a disproportionate number of fitness to practise referrals for overseas doctors ( . times greater) and doctors from bame backgrounds (two times greater) compared with white uk graduates, and they are more likely to face harsher sanctions. it is less clear whether this is compounded in imgs from praxis lagunes‐cordoba et al international medical graduates downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core non-white backgrounds. the report offers potential expla- nations, including inadequate induction and support, lack of honest and effective feedback, working patterns or con- tracts that lead to isolation, pervasive insider–outsider dynamics, and a lack of confidence in raising concerns or challenging accusations. this last factor fits with the finding of jalal et al that imgs are less likely than uk graduates to report bullying. the gmc report has been criticised for not addressing why the gmc tends to give harsher sanctions to referred imgs and bame doctors. existing evidence and initiatives imgs’ perspectives wolf et al found that imgs and bame trainees reported more difficulties, cultural differences and lack of trust with senior doctors, as well as biased assessments and recruit- ment processes. hashim identified challenges for imgs in understanding the nhs system and values, learning envir- onments (with a lack of direct guidance), receiving feedback and feelings of being undervalued by colleagues. a survey of imgs’ understanding of the gmc regulatory framework found that many were surprised or confused by the range and specificity of the regulations, including the emphasis on individual patient autonomy. it also identified that imgs could have difficulties with nuances of non-verbal communication and uk social and behavioural norms. a key aspect was the lack of relevant information prior to registration, variable levels of training and support, and isolation in non-training posts. international literature on interventions there is a limited evidence base to support interventions, including international examples from canada, the usa, and south africa. two recent literature reviews , summarised the following recommendations: individual assessments prior to induction with follow-up; making rele- vant information available; providing comprehensive infor- mation about the role and job; addressing the culture gap (providing supervisors and mentors, understanding clinical and cultural differences); considering different learning styles; buddy systems (for guidance and help); improving cultural awareness from the organisation; and establishing a national induction programme, complementary to local inductions. with regard to refugee doctors, butt et al ( ) showed that formal support to gain their licence to practise was an effective intervention. although all these could be potentially effective interventions to improve imgs’ well-being, there still seems to be no consensus regarding which organisations are responsible for imple- menting them or overseeing these changes. work by uk professional bodies some gmc initiatives have been put in place to address the differential attainment; these include the optional ‘welcome to uk practice’ workshop, which according to a recent report is highly valued by doctors and their supervisors, improving knowledge on ethical issues, gmc guidance and uk practice in general, as well as communication and a focus on patient centredness. it provided opportunities to meet colleagues, share learning and gain support, but the report also suggested that imgs feel a general lack of support once they are in practice. the mti by the association of medical royal colleges is specifically for imgs and provides a helpful guide to aid with preparation for relocation, as well as providing mentor- ship on starting the scheme. a recent evaluation of the mti psychiatry scheme reported that enrolled imgs highly rated their clinical supervision and overall experience with this initiative. the british medical association (bma) website also has a section focusing on imgs, including information regarding life and work in the uk; while we were preparing this manuscript, the bma sent their very first img newslet- ter, focused on key news and information relevant to imgs. online communities are mushrooming to support imgs while they redefine their identities in a new culture with its evident uniqueness. this differential img attainment also affects member- ship and representation within the royal colleges, as sas doctors do not have the same rights as fully registered mem- bers of some royal colleges. positively, we note that the roles and representation of sas doctors within the royal college of psychiatrists is currently under review. the royal college of psychiatrists has a trainee support group which provides guidance regarding the needs of img trainees to heads of schools of psychiatry across the uk to improve differential attainment, while the psychiatric trainee committee is cur- rently drafting a guide that will contain sections to support imgs, including cultural induction to the uk, training path- ways, exams and visa information. the college also organises workshops to help supervisors to gain the knowledge and skills to mentor and supervise an img doctor, and confer- ences to foster networking among imgs. we also recognise that the college has recently established two new professional leads on race equality. next steps recognising the wider societal issues: black lives matter and covid- the black lives matter movement has re-emphasised the social disparities between white british people and those of bame and immigrant backgrounds. it reminds us that many of the adverse experiences of imgs are also encoun- tered by uk bame medical graduates, notably, discrimin- ation, racism and differential attainment. compared with their white counterparts, uk bame doctors underperform academically; are more likely to fail their clinical skills assessments; are less likely to be accepted into a specialty training programme, apply for consultant posts, or be short- listed for and offered consultant posts; and earn less. wolf et al found that perceived difficulty in talking about race with trainees and isolation or non-specificity of interven- tions were the main barriers to improvement. the covid- pandemic has also shown the different vulnerabil- ities of bame staff and patients, many of which are due to fundamental societal inequities, and the need for appropri- ate support and care. as a positive note, it was heartening praxis lagunes‐cordoba et al international medical graduates downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core to see the bmj recently commit a whole issue to the topic of racism. recognising imgs’ strengths: the ‘problem’ is not in the individual most discussion still unconsciously locates the ‘problem’ in the img rather than adopting a systemic perspective and working to embrace imgs’ strengths and their knowledge and experience of working in other socioeconomic and healthcare systems. many imgs not only achieve their goals but also go on to subsequently become prominent and respected doctors, leaders in their field and admired by their peers. within psychiatry, we have many such examples who have suc- ceeded and developed internationally high-profile careers as clinicians and academics; the simplest scan of uk psychiatry’s output and reputation will show its gains from many imgs. the strengths of an internationally trained, multicultural and multilingual workforce need to be har- nessed. box summarises our recommendations for positive change, based on an assimilation of the existing literature, our experiences as imgs (all but one author) and practising clinicians in the uk, and our application to uk psychiatry. we have provided a suggested clustering of which organisa- tions and individuals might be best placed to provide these. conclusion our personal experience – all but one of us are imgs – has been that uk society is marked by a focus on fairness. this has motivated us to raise some of the issues that many imgs are currently facing. we are grateful that british society and culture has, largely, welcomed imgs and given us the box . recommendations for positive change, clustered by provider. regulatory bodies • continued evaluation and addressing the disproportionality of gmc (and local) complaints and investigations into imgs. • an open and transparent process of data collection and a clear accountability framework to ensure that progress, or its lack, in these areas can be monitored. • host img-specific resources and disseminate via nhs trust websites, including sharing of examples of good practice (for example, the mti, while recognising that there can be specialty-specific challenges and opportunities. the royal college of psychiatrists • explicit investigation into differential attainment in the mrcpsych examinations. • explicit inclusion of imgs in examination and curriculum design. • publishing data on img representation on college bodies. • have img-specific events, resources and examples of best practice for psychiatrists. nhs trusts • trusts have an img champion working with human resources to informon all img appointments. • trusts’ hr staff to receive training to enable them to deal competently with img issues. • trusts have explicit policy and action targeting racism, with open publication and updates. • local induction programme specifically for imgs, mainly during the first years of their career in the uk/nhs. • focused support and mentoring for imgs new to the nhs. • encourage and facilitate imgs’ interaction with uk graduates (e.g. universities host a welcome day for international students). • host events dedicated to local imgs – to celebrate successful journeys and to foster a sense of community. • continuing professional development events to learn how imgs’ experience in their home countries can contribute positively to improved patient care in the nhs. individual services, teams, supervisors/mentors and imgs • link up imgs with appraisers at the time of starting work so that appropriate mentoring can be organised. • inclusion of modules focused on img issues for educational and clinical supervisors. • encourage imgs to attend local balint groups. • encourage imgs to attend local academic days for trainees in specific specialities. there is some overlap and the boundaries between these are only suggestions that might benefit from local change. praxis lagunes‐cordoba et al international medical graduates downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core freedom to make these comments. however, we also feel that for many local doctors, imgs can become invisible and their specific strengths and learning needs go unnoticed. we do rec- ognise that each img has had a different journey, with many factors affecting their own challenges – gender, ethnicity, skin colour, religion and sexual orientation – just like every non-img doctor. motivated by personal challenges, dreams of a new life or even external factors uncontrolled by them, each img has to go through a process of acculturation, and loss of former identity and building of a new one, influenced by their professional and personal experiences. for imgs, there is much to learn personally and profes- sionally upon coming to the uk. in healthcare, this includes familiarising oneself with the ‘process of regulation, challen- ging, making appeals’ and fostering a culture of ‘learning not blaming’. in society, every citizen has the responsibility to respect the rights of others and to treat others with fairness; in return, the uk offers freedom of speech and freedom from unfair discrimination. uk healthcare systems, regulatory bodies, royal colleges, nhs trusts, medical leaders and indeed all of us are responsible for being aware of imgs’ struggles, as these can have long-lasting effects not only on imgs’ careers and lives but also on the care of the patients they serve. if we can start to demonstrate a degree of compassionate curiosity about imgs, appreciating their diversity and strengths, the new knowledge, skills and wisdom that we will acquire can only lead to better patient care and a happier workforce. about the authors dr emmeline lagunes-cordoba, camden and islington nhs foundation trust, and the department of health service and population research, institute of psychiatry, psychology & neuroscience, king’s college london, uk; dr raka maitra, tavistock and portman nhs foundation trust, trainee support group, royal college of psychiatrists, and department of psychosis studies, institute of psychiatry, psychology & neuroscience, king’s college london, uk; dr subodh dave, trainee support group, royal college of psychiatrists, and derbyshire healthcare nhs foundation trust, uk; dr shevonne matheiken, east london nhs foundation trust, london, uk; professor femi oyebode, national centre for mental health, birmingham, uk; dr jean o’hara, south london and maudsley nhs foundation trust and department of psychological medicine, institute of psychiatry, psychology & neuroscience, king’s college london, uk; dr derek k. tracy, oxleas nhs foundation trust, london, uk and department of psychosis studies, institute of psychiatry, psychology & neuroscience, king’s college london, uk. e.l.c., r.m., s.d., s.m., f.o. and d.t. identify as imgs, and j.o.h. as a uk bame graduate. the authors note that their own journeys have informed this piece. they further reflect that their challenges, opportunities, and the various intersectional issues they have faced have all been unique, and some have faced greater and lesser adversities than others. author contributions all authors met all four icmje criteria for authorship, jointly conceiving and writing the manuscript. icmje forms are in the supplementary material, available online at https:// doi.org/ . /bjb. . . funding this research received no specific grant from any funding agency, commer- cial or not-for-profit sectors. declaration of interest none. references general medical council. what are we doing to address differential attainment? gmc, (https://www.gmc-uk.org/education/stan- dards-guidance-and-curricula/projects/differential-attainment/what- are-we-doing-to-address-it). wolf k. differential attainment in medical education and training. bmj ; . available from: https://doi.org/ . /bmj.m . general medical council. fair to refer? gmc, (www.gmc-uk.org/ about/what-we-do-and-why/data-and-research/research-and-insight- archive/fair-to-refer). hns employers. working and training in the national health service. nhs employers, 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associate specialist (sas) and locally employed (le) doctors. gmc, . jalal m, bardhan k, sanders d, illing j. overseas doctors of the nhs: migration, transition, challenges and towards resolution. future healthc j ; ( ): – . majid a. what lies beneath: getting under the skin of gmc referrals. bmj ; . available from: https://doi.org/ . /bmj.m . woolf k, rich a, viney r, needleman s, griffin a. perceived causes of differential attainment in uk postgraduate medical training: a national qualitative study. bmj open ; . available from: https://doi.org/ . /bmjopen- - . hashim a. educational challenges faced by international medical grad- uates in the uk. adv med educ pract ; : – . slowther a, lewando hundt g, purkis j, taylor r. experiences of non-uk-qualified doctors working within the uk regulatory framework: a qualitative study. j r soc med ; : – . kirmayer lj, sockalingam s, po-lun fung k, fleisher w, adeponle a, bhat v. et al. international medical graduates in psychiatry: cultural 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praxis lagunes‐cordoba et al international medical graduates downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://doi.org/ . /bmj.f https://doi.org/ . /bmj.f https://doi.org/ . /bmj.m https://doi.org/ . /bmj.m https://doi.org/ . /bmjopen- - https://doi.org/ . /bmjopen- - https://doi.org/ . /bmjopen- - https://www.gmc-uk.org/about/what-we-do-and-why/learning-and-support/workshops-for-doctors/welcome-to-uk-practice/doctors https://www.gmc-uk.org/about/what-we-do-and-why/learning-and-support/workshops-for-doctors/welcome-to-uk-practice/doctors https://www.gmc-uk.org/about/what-we-do-and-why/learning-and-support/workshops-for-doctors/welcome-to-uk-practice/doctors https://www.gmc-uk.org/about/what-we-do-and-why/learning-and-support/workshops-for-doctors/welcome-to-uk-practice/doctors https://www.aomrc.org.uk/medical-training-initiative/ https://www.aomrc.org.uk/medical-training-initiative/ http://www.aomrc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/ / /mti_relocation_guide_may -v -wr.pdf http://www.aomrc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/ / /mti_relocation_guide_may -v -wr.pdf http://www.aomrc.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/ / /mti_relocation_guide_may -v -wr.pdf https://doi.org/ . /bmj.d https://doi.org/ . /bmj.d https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/international-doctors?utm_source=the% british% medical% association&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign= _img% newsletter% &amp;utm_content=international% doctors% resources&amp;dm_i=jvx, zzm , kbr,s co , https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/international-doctors?utm_source=the% british% medical% association&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign= _img% newsletter% &amp;utm_content=international% doctors% resources&amp;dm_i=jvx, zzm , kbr,s co , https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/international-doctors?utm_source=the% british% medical% association&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign= _img% newsletter% &amp;utm_content=international% doctors% resources&amp;dm_i=jvx, zzm , kbr,s co , https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/international-doctors?utm_source=the% british% medical% association&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign= _img% newsletter% &amp;utm_content=international% doctors% resources&amp;dm_i=jvx, zzm , kbr,s co , https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/international-doctors?utm_source=the% british% medical% association&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign= _img% newsletter% &amp;utm_content=international% doctors% resources&amp;dm_i=jvx, zzm , kbr,s co , https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/international-doctors?utm_source=the% british% medical% association&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign= _img% newsletter% &amp;utm_content=international% doctors% resources&amp;dm_i=jvx, zzm , kbr,s co , https://www.bma.org.uk/advice-and-support/international-doctors?utm_source=the% british% medical% association&amp;utm_medium=email&amp;utm_campaign= _img% newsletter% &amp;utm_content=international% doctors% resources&amp;dm_i=jvx, zzm , kbr,s co , https://doi.org/ . /bmj.m https://doi.org/ . /bmj.m https://dx.doi.org/ . /bmjopen- - https://dx.doi.org/ . /bmjopen- - https://www.bmj.com/racism-in-medicine https://www.bmj.com/racism-in-medicine https://www.bmj.com/racism-in-medicine https://www.cambridge.org/core 	international medical graduates: how can uk psychiatry do better? 	summary 	imgs: who are they? 	definitions of imgs: a heterogeneous group 	data on img numbers and specialties/roles 	imgs: challenges they face 	practical and cultural aspects to change 	loss of status, discrimination and racism 	greater rates of complaints 	existing evidence and initiatives 	imgs&rsquo; perspectives 	international literature on interventions 	work by uk professional bodies 	next steps 	recognising the wider societal issues: black lives matter and covid- 	recognising imgs&rsquo; strengths: the &lsquo;problem&rsquo; is not in the individual 	conclusion 	box 	about the authors 	author contributions 	funding 	declaration of interest 	references science during crisis and the arnold berliner award editorial science during crisis and the arnold berliner award matthias waltert # the author(s) the global covid- pandemic has led to an unprecedented global health crisis with a terrible human toll. it has also caused enormous disruption to our society, and the scientific community has been no exception. with the closure of universities and re- search institutes and the implementation of lockdown measures to slow down the virus spread, many researchers have had to put their research projects on hold. many of us in the scientific com- munity have experienced considerable challenges to adapt to the new situation. in universities, professors have faced challenges in the sudden and forced adaption of their study programs and teaching to virtual formats. others have struggled to adapt to home-office work, with those having children to look after and home-school experiencing the biggest challenges. data shows that this has had a more significant impact on female researchers, whose publishing success has dropped after the closure of schools (https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/ pandemic-lockdown-holding-back-female-academics-data- show). we are well aware that many of you, as authors, reviewers, and editors have also been affected by these disruptions. thus, we want to thank all of you for helping us to continue covering and sharing important scientific findings. the greater negative impact on productivity among female researchers is just one of the effects of the pandemic, which also exposed many other existing social problems. protests against other social injustices have gained particular and much-needed momentum. after the killing of george floyd, protesters took streets and social media to demand change against historical injustices. these protests have already led to symbolic achieve- ments such as the removal of statues of slave traders and colo- nialists or the release of statements by companies, institutions, and governments backing up the demands of protesters. but the movement may be having a less evident but more profound impact too, by forcing all of us to reflect on racial biases and prejudices and the existing institutional racism. as the editorial team, we also want to take this opportunity to condemn all forms of racism and say that “black lives matter.” despite all the recent negative developments and current de- spair, we believe that there is room for hope. the current situation isproviding some critical lessons that could help addressour many other current and future crises: above all, we can learn from it that science may overcome a crisis and even prevent it. scientists have been warning for decades on the risks of pandemics like the cur- rent one (e.g., cheng et al. ). but their claims remained in the scientific spheres and were broadly ignored by policy-makers. we arefinally seeing some of our governmentsturning tothe scientific community to seek answers and following their advice even when this requires making hard decisions. who would have imagined, before , that drastic measures such as mandatory social dis- tancing, restricted freedom of assembly, or restricted movement could have been introduced by our governments and broadly adopted by all of us—mainly based on scientific advice? some months after the outbreak of the global covid- pandemic, we are starting to see that most of the countries which seriously and promptly embraced the recommendations of scientists are faring relatively better than those that failed to do so. however, it is still unclear whether the lessons learned from this crisis, including the need to listen to science and invest in crisis prevention, will also be applied to other pressing global crises, in particular some of the most considerable challenges of our generation: climate change and the biodiversity crisis. in this regard, previous research has shown that deadly zoo- notic diseases such as ebola or sars-cov- are a consequence of how we, humans, are interacting with our ecosystems (e.g., rulli et al. ). deforestation, habitat degradation, climate change, and wildlife trade are known to be associated with current and future zoonotic and vector-borne diseases (e.g., guerra et al. , chomel et al. , gottwalt , myers et al. , guégan et al. ). nevertheless, these drivers of disease spread still are to receive political attention adequately. it is also highly likely that new zoonotic diseases with potentially similar or even worse effects will appear in the future unless we are able to stop the improper handling and trade of wildlife species such as bats, monkeys, and civets. we need to build green economies to * matthias waltert mwalter@uni-goettingen.de conservation biology/workgroup on endangered species, faculty of biology and psychology, university of göttingen, bürgerstrasse , göttingen, germany https://doi.org/ . /s - - - published online: august the science of nature ( ) : http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/pandemicockdownoldingackemalecademicsata-how https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/pandemicockdownoldingackemalecademicsata-how https://www.timeshighereducation.com/news/pandemicockdownoldingackemalecademicsata-how mailto:mwalter@uni-goettingen.de protect our climate but also argue for increased spending for protecting the last rainforests on our globe, not only for the sake of preventing diseases but also to avoid future crisis caused by the loss and degradation of the functioning of the ecosystems we all depend upon. it is my sincere wish that we find enough publicity to turn facts into policies. i also want to take this opportunity to announce the winner of the arnold berliner award. the science of nature grants the arnold berliner award to the lead authors of articles distin- guished by their excellent, original, and—especially—interdisci- plinary research. as such, the awarded articles ideally reflect the visionof arnold berliner (autrum ; thatje ). the award is sponsored by springer and includes the arnold berliner award medal (fig. ), a biennial subscription to the journal’s electronic edition, a -euro voucher for springer ebooks, and a cash prize of euro. i am very proud to announce that, this year, the board of editors has decided to award frank glaw (fig. ) for his article “integrative evidence confirms new endemic island frogs and transmarine dispersal of amphibians between madagascar and mayotte (comoros archipelago).” together with co-authors oliver hawlitschek, kathrin glaw, and miguel vences, frank glaw described two new species of frogs for the comoro islands and shed further light on the phenomenon of overseas dispersal by amphibians (glaw et al. ). dispersal of amphibians to oceanic islands is a rare phenomenon due to the negative effect of salinity on their eggs, which already had been thought about by charles darwin. the study shows that there were at least two different events of overseas dispersal in the studied amphibians and also describes their ecological predispo- sitions facilitating this dispersal. the authors apply an integrative and interdisciplinary approach by combining morphological, bio- acoustic, and genetic evidence for their taxonomic work, therefore representing well one key criterion of the award. the study has also been covered by many websites, and our editors believe that it has excellent potential to become a textbook case. on behalf of the board of editors, i congratulate frank glaw on the award. funding information open access funding provided by projekt deal. open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adap- tation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, pro- vide a link to the creative commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's creative commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article's creative commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. references autrum h ( ) arnold berliner und die“naturwissenschaften”. naturwissenschaften : – cheng vc, lau sk, woo pc, yuen ky ( ) severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus as an agent of emerging and reemerging in- fection. clin micr rev ( ): – chomel bb, belotto a, meslin fx ( ) wildlife, exotic pets, and emerging zoonoses. j infect dis ( ): glaw f, hawlitschek o, glaw k, vences m ( ) integrative evidence con- firms new endemic island frogs and transmarine dispersal of amphibians betweenmadagascarandmayotte(comorosarchipelago).scinat : gottwalt a ( ) impacts of deforestation on vector-borne disease inci- dence. j glob health ( ): – guégan jf, ayouba a, cappelle j, de thoisy b ( ) forests and emerging infectious diseases: unleashing the beast within. environ res lett inpress guerra ca, snow rw, hay si ( ) a global assessment of closed forests, deforestation and malaria risk. ann trop med parasitol ( ): – myers ss, gaffikin l, golden cd, ostfeld rs, redford kh, ricketts th, turner wr, osofsky sa ( ) human health impacts of eco- system alteration. proc natl acad sci ( ): – rulli mc, santini m, hayman dt, d’odorico p ( ) the nexus be- tween forest fragmentation in africa and ebola virus disease out- breaks. sci rep : thatje s ( ) the arnold berliner award . sci nat : publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdic- tional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. fig. dr. frank glaw, the winner of the arnold berliner award fig. the arnold berliner award medal. arnold berliner ( – ) was the founding editor of the science of nature (formerly naturwissenschaften) and the journal’s editor in chief from to page of sci nat ( ) : https://doi.org/ 	science during crisis and the arnold berliner award 	references psc_ .. ps • july news ©american political science association, tlc keynote: democracy is more important than a p-value tlc track summaries american political science review editors’ report - perspectives on politics editors’ report - the epa and federalism: a pracademic perspective congressional fellowship program updates apsa council and officer nominees meet the bunche fellows minutes of august council meeting dissertation list annual meeting information tlc keynote: democracy is more important than a p-value: embracing political science’s civic mission through intersectional engaged learning lori m. poloni-staudinger, northern arizona university j. cherie strachan, central michigan university introduction and acknowledgements hello. thank you, steve and paula, for the introduction. we want to thank shane and sara for asking us to be here. special thanks as well to tanya and her team and every- one at apsa. finally, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention mike wolf who is in the audience today. mike introduced us to each other about a decade ago, and it has been a match made in heaven ever since. if you like what we say today, you can thank mike. if you don’t, you can blame him. reprioritizing our civic mission today we want to talk to you about democ- racy and embracing the civic engagement mission of our discipline. you’ll notice that the title of our talk is inherently provoca- tive. democracy is more than a p-value. we know that we can embrace the science in political science while still keeping in sight our core mission to educate our next gener- ation of citizens. so, we are purposefully setting up a bit of a straw woman here to force us to confront what we see as a creep- ing problem in our discipline. namely, we have gone too far in pursuit of the newest method or the most complicated equation, and sometimes we lose sight of what we argue ought to be the fundamental core of our discipline: embracing the civic mission of political science. from what apsa funds, to what our top journals publish, to what we look for in the hottest new candidates on the market, we argue that the pendulum has swung too far away from this core value and it is time to swing back. we hope that what we can talk about today is how we can do better. how can we embrace the civic engagement mission of political science, and how can we work in our classrooms, in our communities and in our discipline to advance this mission? there is no better time for us to have this conversation. by many accounts, democ- racy is in trouble. studies show a decrease in support for democratic institutions across advanced industrial democracies, and this decrease in support for democracy is stronger among younger generations than older. for example, only % of american millennials say that it is important to live in a democracy compared to % of people born before . in fact, in a poll, fully % of younger americans said that democ- racy was a bad form of government (foa and mounk ). the trend has not improved in the last decade. this is not a phenome- non unique to the united states. research- ers have found a similar cohort pattern across all longstanding democracies, “with the proportion of younger citizens who believe it is essential to live in a democracy falling to a minority” (foa and mounk ). recently published data shows that across the globe, % of respondents are above: j. cherie strachan (left) and lori m. poloni-staudinger (right) deliver the tlc keynote address. ps • july n e w s ©american political science association, dissatisfied with democracy as a form of government (mounk and foa ). this statistic mirrors a concomitant decrease in trust among younger generations as well (poloni-staudinger and wolf ).this evidence alone should give all of us pause and make us stop and reflect for a moment about what we are doing in our classrooms and communities to ameliorate this issue. why do we feel so strongly about this? because like winston churchill, we believe that democracy is the worst form of govern- ment, except for all the others. you’ll notice that the part of our title we haven’t addressed yet is this idea of inter- sectional engaged learning. it isn’t enough that we re-embrace the civic mission of political science if this does not apply to all our students and all our communities. we need to be mindful that what we teach and how we teach has implications not only for the health of our democracy but for who engages in politics in the future and how they choose to engage. what we do in our public spaces, including our classrooms, signals who belongs at the table and who is not welcome. in a recent edition of liberal education published by the association of american colleges and universities, cathy davidson, a distinguished professor at cuny, reminds us that all our theorizing about equality hasn’t changed our actual profession (davidson ). we can’t alter structural inequalities simply with good words—we have to build structures that put equality at the core. when we engage with students, we are passing on a value system as well as implicit bias, and it is important that we keep this at the forefront of our minds. given declining opportunities for civic and political socialization in natural settings like the public sphere and civic organizations, it is incumbent upon each of us to embed civic engagement pedago- gies in our classrooms, in our institutions, in our professional organizations and in our communities. this means, we need to engage in conversations about best prac- tices around active citizenship, democratic decision making and political leadership. this also means we need to walk the walk. eitan hersh wrote recently in the atlantic about the rise of the political hobby- ist (hersh ). this is a college-educated individual who reads a lot about politics, can recount in detail the latest political or social issue, like the warren-sanders elect- ability question, but does not really partici- pate in any real way in the system outside of voting. in this piece, based on his book poli- tics is for power, dr. hersh tells the story of a woman named querys matias. matias is a -year-old immigrant from the dominican republic. she lives in haverhill, massachu- setts, a small city on the new hampshire border. her paid work is as a bus monitor for a special-needs school. matias is also a leader of a group called the latino coali- tion in haverhill, bringing together the dominicans, puerto ricans, and central americans who together make up about % of the residents of the city. the coali- tion gets out the vote during elections, but also meets with elected officials, pushes for dual language access to political power and has been instrumental on moving the dial on several pieces of public policy. how many among our discipline are political hobbyists? yes, maybe our meth- ods are fancier and we read peer-reviewed journals in addition to the washington post, but are we really that different from the armchair “political scientist” reading the latest new york times or monkey cage with- out ever practically engaging in our political process? we ask you to think if the major- ity of those in our discipline are modeling what it means to be an engaged citizen, or are simply studying it? what would it mean to use querys matias as a role model, and to truly embrace our civic engagement mission and embed intersectional engaged learning into all aspects of our discipline? political science’s role in civic engagement’s next wave it is important to note, as we encourage the discipline to embrace intersectional engaged learning and to play a bigger role in the next wave of the civic engagement movement, that we are not starting from scratch. we need to recognize those who paved the way. because of them, we have broad shoulders of colleagues —colleagues who have been active members of the political science education section, many of whom are here this afternoon—to stand on. so, it is important to note that the disci- pline of political science was there in the s, when scholars and administrators first noted concern that our students were less engaged in public life—and launched the service learning and community engagement movement to address those concerns. political scientists were there, again, a decade later when we realized that this emphasis on voluntarism had not led to increased political participation among our students but had in fact provided many of them with an excuse not to participate in politics. in response, political scien- tists helped transition from this focus on service learning and community or civic voluntarism to the political engagement or democratic engagement movement. hence the current version of these efforts to re-engage our students in public life is focused on student voter registration and turnout. yet participation in all these efforts, from promoting service learning to more explicitly promoting political participation, has always occurred on the periphery of our discipline. indeed, outside of this room— or at least beyond the type of faculty who typically attend apsa’s teaching & learn- ing conference—it would not surprise us to learn that many political scientists have not heard of the civic or political engagement movement in higher education, or to learn that they do not really understand what it is. hence, we argue that political scientists must step up. we argue that, for the sake of our students and the sake of democracy, political scientists should play a central role in the next wave of the civic and political engagement movement. further, we believe political scientists must play this role for three reasons. the first of these is that, as in the title of the book we just mentioned, political scien- tists understand, better than scholars in any other discipline, that politics is for power. we know that the social ills and public issues that our students are dedicated to address- ing through voluntarism will never truly be solved until they also wield the power of the policy-making process. who better to carry this message, not only to our students, but to our colleagues in educational lead- ership, as well as to student affairs staff in our campus volunteer centers, who are now positioned at the center of the community and civic engagement movement? who better than us to normalize wanting to wield such power—and to convey to others and to our students that it is acceptable, and in fact a good thing, to want to influ- ence public policy making? so, the first reason political scientists should be at the forefront of a reinvigorated engagement movement on our campuses is that we are the ones who truly understand that politics is about power. the second reason is that political scientists understand that metrics, or the number of activities students participate in on campus, are not engagement. more so than scholars from any other discipline, ps • july n e w s ©american political science association, political scientists understand that life- long participation in public life requires the cultivation of civic identity. others on our campuses may be confused by the term engagement, equating it with the perfor- mance of activities. rather than focusing on cultivation of civic identity, they often focus on counting how many students show up to events, how many volunteer hours our students have logged, or more recently how many have registered and voted in elections. but political scientists know that the term engagement refers to psychological engage- ment, because sustained participation in the type of activities just described, after students graduate and leave our campuses, requires intrinsic civic identity. hence as we noted, it is important that political scientists more widely embrace being active, engaged citizens as part of our own identity. for the only way we convey the importance of this identity to our students is if we internalize and embrace it ourselves. we need to convince our students that when they come to campus, they are being invited to join not just a commu- nity of scholars—but a community of public-spirited scholars who take both our commitment to rigorous scholarship and our commitment to public life seriously. if our students lack exposure to this type of robust political socialization, they will not come to think of themselves as public-spir- ited or engaged citizens, and they will not be motivated to close the gap in civic and political participation that affects younger generations. but, if we can change the way they think of themselves, changes in their behavior will inevitably follow. political scientists understand this connection, and we intuitively know that engaged learning ultimately needs to be about cultivating our students’ civic identities. even political scientists who under- stand the importance of intrinsic identity, however, often feel intimidated by the task of achieving this outcome with our own students. yet we guarantee you that the task is not as difficult as some make it out to be. in fact, as authority figures, faculty engage in socialization to cultivate intrinsic identi- ties all the time—by simply making it clear who we expect our students to be and hold- ing them accountable for performance of behavior linked to those roles. we swear, it’s not rocket science. to illustrate this point, we can turn to a simple example not from academia or teaching— but from parenting. when one of our sons was young, he asked for drum lessons. this request made his father, who is a music- lover, very happy—and he proceeded to purchase a rather expensive drum kit. as a result, the son was told, “oh, you aren’t just going to take drum lessons, you are going to be a drummer!” after joining a school of rock program, where he performed in a band with other kids, the son pulled out his metronome and practiced regularly, without being asked. he was motivated to prepare for those performances with his band, because he had internalized the iden- tity of “a drummer,” and that’s just what drummers do. cultivating identity can be as simple as that. we just need to adopt the same approach when we encourage our students to become engaged citizens. we simply need to make it clear that we expect them to perform as engaged citizens, and they need to do so not at some later stage in their lives when they become “adults,” but now while they are still on campus. and we make sure to give them the oppor- tunity to practice. we aren’t starting from scratch as we start to think about creat- ing similar types of “performances” that prepare students for political engagement, where we create learning experiences that make it clear we already think of them as citizens. many of our colleagues here have contributed articles about civic and politi- cal engagement to the journal of political science education—as well as to the two edited collections published by the ameri- can political science association—which provide a wealth of examples, both in small- scale ways that scaffold civic skills in the classroom to more immersive applied learn- ing experiences, in campus life or intern- ships or simulations (bennion et al. ; bennion et al. ). these are all designed to promote intrinsic civic identity and the lifelong political engagement that will accompany it. and of course, we have the insights provided by the carnegie foundation for the advancement of teaching’s (cfat’s) political engagement project (pep) which relied on multi-campus research to learn that the best practices for promoting politi- cal engagement include opportunities to participate in politically-active commu- nities where students practice civic and political skills and engage in discussion of political issues in racially- and ethnically- diverse settings (colby et al. ). and this leads us to the third reason why it is so unfortunate that political science has been at the periphery of the civic engage- ment movement and why we need to play a more central role. this is because we have so many insights to offer into the type of learn- ing experiences students need to become engaged citizens, and, in particular, about why effective civic and political engage- ment must be intersectional. up until now, the civic engagement movement has, for the most part, attempted to identify univer- sal best practices that, if simply imple- mented in a blanketed fashion across all our campuses, would be effective in turning our students into citizens. yet who better than political scientists to recognize that demographic groups will react differently to political stimuli—including political learn- ing—in different ways? who better to hold up a finger and to say, “oh, but lived experi- ences matter!” can any one of you imagine trying to publish political behavior research without including a full array of demo- graphic identities as controls? what would you do to that piece as a reviewer? you know you would turn into reviewer # , and that you would shred it! because we know that people’s lived experiences, based on their race, ethnicity, sex, orientation, religion, and so on will affect their reactions. and that, we believe, is the next step those of us committed to civic engagement pedagogy must take, crafting effective civic and politi- cal learning for all our students, and not just those already inclined or encouraged to participate in politics. intersectional civic engagement in practice so, what might this approach—this inter- sectional civic engagement pedagogy we keep talking about—look like? again, it’s not rocket science. it simply requires taking insights gleaned from our own scholar- ship and applying it to our teaching. what follows are some examples of intersectional approaches that we and others in our disci- pline have been working on. the first example we want to share comes from a consortium project on rude politics and college student engagement that cherie undertook with elizabeth bennion (indiana university, south bend), monica schneider (miami university), and angie bos (college of wooster). together, they conducted an online experimental design on campuses, with about students enrolled in political science classes participating. students were randomly assigned to view clips of rude or civil polit- ical interactions and to answer a post-test about how those interactions affected their attitudes toward participation. the major ps • july n e w s ©american political science association, finding was that almost all students were alienated by rude politics—which they all thought was typical (schneider et al. ). this means that we need to re-think the skills required to participate in politics. all students need help learning how to respond to rude and aggressive political figures in order to feel comfortable jumping in. but of course, that isn’t the entire story. students who scored high on interest in wielding power—who also happened to be overwhelmingly men—might not like rude politics, but they were willing to learn how to do it, in order to gain power. and those who scored low on interest in power—who were more likely to be women—were partic- ularly alienated. what this means is that if we don’t want politics to become even more gendered and if we don’t want to exacerbate the masculine ethos of politics, we need to focus on helping students develop a thicker skin, to learn to take a hit, and to worry less about being liked when they step into the political lime-light. one example of a tactic that might work that we highlight in our new book, why don’t women rule the world, is “name it, shame it, pivot” (strachan et al. ). so, when a woman is targeted with a sexist attack, we have them practice saying “that was a sexist thing to say, and i don’t want those kinds of comments to detract from the real reason i’m running for office, which is this issue, and here’s why i’m the best candidate to solve that issue.” yet another demographic difference we found in this research is that women of color also responded to rude politics with a sharp spike in political ambition, not because they have high interest in power, but because they feel a deep civic obliga- tion to fix what is wrong with the political system (schneider et al. ). if you read our own literature such as books by patricia hill collins or melissa harris perry’s sister citizen, this response makes complete sense (collins ; ; harris perry ). the deep history of hardship but also of self-reliance, combined with socialization in social justice movements, makes afri- can american and latinx women particu- larly apt to respond this way. in qualitative research that explores this type of political motivation, one woman told an interviewer, “who better to do it than me?” (frederick ). and yet, these women seek political power through community organizing and movement politics, and might need to be convinced that those activities qualify them for public office. this means our discipline needs to do a much better job of teaching about disruptive politics and normalizing alternative pathways to power. if we don’t, these women, the kind of women who founded black lives matter and women like querys matias who step up to fight for policies every day in their local commu- nities, aren’t going to stick with political science. they will take intro to american government and then abandon us for disci- plines like sociology, and we will lose the opportunity to train a more diverse array of students for explicitly political leadership. we can draw another example from civic engagement’s reliance on deliberative pedagogy. an array of scholars, from anne beaumont’s work with the political engage- ment project to david campbell’s work in why we vote to diana hess and paula mcavoy’s research on k- classrooms, emphasize the importance of deliberation (beaumont ; campbell ; hess and mcavoy ). discussion of controversial political issues in a safe classroom setting in terms of in-class learning provides the most bang for your buck, for promoting long-term, consistent political participa- tion across adulthood. scholars think this happens not simply because such conversa- tions build political interest and awareness of current events, but because peer expecta- tions shape intrinsic civic identity and that drives participation over the decades. but guess what? deliberative pedagogy isn’t so great for everyone, and if we look to the critics of deliberative democracy theory from the s and early s, scholars like iris marion young or lynn sanders, we shouldn’t be surprised that deliberative pedagogy works really well for white men, who feel comfortable and aren’t judged or subject to social sanction when they express political opinions, but not so well for women and minorities (marion young ). again, rather than throwing the baby out with the bathwater, we should look to our own discipline’s literature for how to fix deliberative pedagogy to make it work better for everyone. christopher karpow- itz and tali mendelberg had a great book about deliberative forums a few years ago titled the silent sex (karpowitz and mendelberg ). they found that forum rules make a huge difference. if you want women and minorities to participate, for example, you can’t rely on simple major- ity votes. you should use super-majority votes or consensus building to reach deci- sions because those rules mean women and minorities can’t be ignored or talked over. another tactic, if you can manage it, is to assign groups where women are close to half of the members because then conversation norms are more apt to promote facilitation and listening, and less apt to promote argu- ment and interruption, which again makes it easier for them to participate. another option could be to teach all students parlia- mentary procedure and require them to use it. this is because parliamentary procedure enforces norms of civility like no inter- rupting, waiting to be recognized, limiting speaking time and turns and makes it easier for women and minorities to gain the floor and to participate without being judged. we just need to use the insights from our own discipline’s research to make sure we design civic engagement pedagogy that works for everyone (strachan ). a third example comes from another consortium project—the national survey of student leaders, which cherie under- took with elizabeth bennion. we were interested in civic learning that takes place in student organizations, so we sent a questionnaire to the presidents of regis- tered student organizations on over campuses across the united states. we found major differences in how different types of students responded. one of the most interesting findings was that greek organizations provided by far the best opportunity to hone a wide array of civic and political skills. and fraternity presi- dents overwhelmingly recognized that they could transfer these skills to achieve political influence. despite having the same robust civic learning, however, sorority presidents were less likely than not only fraternity presidents, but than all other types of presidents, to anticipate using their skills to achieve political influence. hence women’s self-selection into groups that embrace traditional gender roles over- rides civic learning. that is an outcome that political scientists should care about and should try to help resolve (strachan and senter ).we also found that first-gener- ation students were far less likely to wind up in leadership positions at all, likely just not realizing how important such activi- ties are. on most campuses the percentage of first-generation students in the student body far out-paced the percentage who served in leadership positions. one of our participating campuses found this effect for first generation latinx students and then worked with their diversity office to create more clear pathways to leadership posi- tions for those students, fixing the issue. sometimes intersectional civic engagement ps • july n e w s ©american political science association, pedagogy is just a quick fix after paying attention to the ways our students experi- ence college differently. it doesn’t always have to be hard or a major initiative. but sometimes it should it be a major initiative. we argue that when we teach classes about marginalized groups (women, ethnic or racial groups, lgbtq+ people, and so on) that are likely to attract students from those groups—it is important to incor- porate civic engagement pedagogy designed to be effective for them. that sentiment was part of the inspiration for our new textbook, why don’t women rule the world? (sage/ cq press), co-authored with our colleagues shannon jenkins (university of massa- chusetts, dartmouth) and candice ortbals (pepperdine university). research from our own discipline tells us—and has told us—that aside from voting, women have lower levels of political partici- pation and ambition than men. this is a major feature of the substantive knowl- edge taught in women and politics courses. but that same literature reveals the type of experiences that bolster women’s effi- cacy, interest, and ambition. so, as we were talking about the book, we said: why isn’t anyone using those insights to create activi- ties that replicate such important experi- ences? and our discipline’s own research findings provided the basis for ambition activities that we embedded at the end of every chapter. we know that women need to be asked several times to run for office and that they need to be encouraged to view their expe- riences as relevant. one activity requires students to pair off, conduct an interview— and to write one another encouraging letters. we know that women are more likely to run when they extend care giving and nurturing into public policy. so, we also ask women to consider all the people affected by issues that they care about and to think how many they could help if they were the ones with the power to draft relevant public policies. we know that women’s ideas are often appropriated by others in deliberative settings—so we ask them to practice a tactic developed by women in the obama white house called “amplify”—where they agree to work as a team, to call out and give credit to other women, when their ideas are re-stated by men. we know that women in the public sphere will inevitably face sexism and misogyny, so we teach them the name-it, shame-it, pivot tactic described above. but we also have a reflective activity that prevents less overt micro-aggressions from taking root and transforming into imposter syndrome. we could go on with examples from our own text or from other people’s teaching and projects, but think you have the idea now. overall, we are grateful to those who launched the civic engagement movement and gave us shoulders to stand on. and we believe the best way to build on this founda- tion is to focus on intersectionality, so that we don’t leave any of our students behind. given political science’s careful attention to the effects of demographic identities in our scholarship, we think that our discipline has a great deal to offer the broader civic and political engagement movement, as we take this next essential step. bringing balance to our discipline for our discipline to truly embrace our mission of civic education, we need to offer up some tough love. sorry apsa, but this is what we call the fried green tomatoes part of the talk; it may be a little irreverent, but to paraphrase kathy bates, we have job security and good insurance. if we truly care about good governance, then as political scientists we need to ourselves engage. for some of you, we are preaching to the choir. for others, or for our discipline writ large, this is something we need to talk about. we need to not only incorporate an engaged pedagogy in our classrooms, we need to model what it is to be an engaged citizen in our communities, in our country and in our world. just as a medical doctor would be negligent in seeing a person who was sick and not suggesting medical treatment, we commit malpractice if as political scientists we look at a world in fracture, a country sliding away from democratic ideals, and a climate in crisis but choose not to act. we have gone too far in the direction of chasing the “science” in political science, that we have neglected the political part of our discipline. we have slowly become the hobbyists we bemoan who are negatively impacting our system of government. expanding this approach to teach- ing, however, means grappling with why political science has prioritized cultivat- ing academic “hobbyists” over cultivat- ing engaged citizens. we know that the discipline of political science emerged in response to the progressive movement. scholars, and in particular historians, launched a new discipline precisely because they wanted to not only study the political process, but because they wanted to make recommendations that would be taken seri- ously and would be used to improve demo- cratic governance. in short, our discipline emerged with an overtly normative agenda. early political scientists realized, however, that our recommendations would not be taken seriously by politicians and policy makers unless we established ourselves as a respected social science. so initially, adopt- ing rigorous and cutting-edge social science methods was a means to a normative end. over time, the means became the end. so much so that in graduate school, we are socialized to reject any whiff of a norma- tive agenda. so much so that our discipline spends inordinately more time, arguing about which method is the most rigorous and which one new approach will (finally) solidify our status as a respected social science in academia than it does worrying about if our students are engaged citizens. in short, we are out of balance, hyper- focused with being scholarly at the expense of being public-spirited. those of us who are truly intellectually curious know that we gain the most insight through triangulation. every method of data collection has strengths and weak- nesses, and we learn the most when schol- arship from a wide array of methodological approaches reinforces the same conclu- sions. so why do really smart people in our discipline spend so much time fight- ing over which method is the best, or the only scientific one? they do so because by establishing themselves as experts in the only “truly” scientific method, they stand to garner substantial status within the discipline such as the ability to recruit the best graduate students, control access to the top-ranked journals, win elections to apsa council, and receive the bulk of grant monies. everything in academia, and in the way our discipline is currently structured, encourages artificial arguments about who among us are the most rigorous scientists, while discouraging concern for our students’ democratic capacity. and of course, we would be remiss if we didn’t mention the way in which classism and sexism reinforce these choices. this is because civic education is seen as some- thing that, largely, women and k- social studies teachers do, while male political scientists are scholars who prioritize their research. ps • july n e w s ©american political science association, we need to change our perspective. we need to celebrate those among us who are teacher-scholars. the work you are doing is more important than a journal publication with a fancy equation using the latest open source program. you are educating our next generation of leaders. this work should be highlighted in our top journals. this work should be funded by our discipline, and this work should be elevated in discussion. lori was on a flight recently and in the row behind her was a retired marine. the flight attendant stopped everything, had her section of the plane thank him for his service and gave him free drinks. in no way do we want what we say next to be seen as a denigration of that marine’s service, but this experience makes one think. the work that you do in your class- rooms to advance the cause of democracy, to teach our next generation of leaders and to enhance civic skills among our citizens should be celebrated like travelers cele- brated that marine’s service. in our ideal world, we thank the political science profes- sor for the service they do in training the next generation of public-minded leaders. while we’re not going to buy you all drinks, we want to thank all of you for your service. it is unconscionable that in , the political ambition of our female students still lags behind that of their male counter- parts. we want to stop for a moment and ask all of you to think about what you are all doing in our classrooms, in our commu- nities, in our departments to ensure that this changes. in is it going to be the same story? or will two of our students be up here standing before you giving the tlc keynote to tell you that women’s politi- cal ambition in universities surpasses that of their male peers? concluding call to arms so, this is a call to arms of sorts. we can all do more to embrace the civic mission of our discipline. we can all be better role models. for some of us, this may be taking up a voter registration drive on campus. for others, we may be incorporating the type of ambition activities discussed earlier. we may ask our students to practice deflecting microaggressions and to name, shame and pivot from sexist attacks. for still others, we may encourage a young woman or non- binary student to run for office or maybe we may even run ourselves. each and every one of us has an obligation to more fully incorporate intersectional civic education into our departments, our universities and our classrooms. we have an obligation to become more involved in our communi- ties. we challenge you to take some time during this conference to think about how you can incorporate some of the strategies we talked about into your classrooms or your institutions. we know that in this room there is a wealth of knowledge and experience and that there are many of you out there more qualified than we to be standing at this podium. we hope that you learn from each other and you leave albuquerque on sunday with a renewed focus and commitment to civic education. our discipline needs you, your communities need you, but most of all our students need you. thank you. ■ n o t e s . the consortium refers to the consortium for inter-campus sotl research, co-founded and co-directed by elizabeth a. bennion and j. cherie strachan. with approximately member campuses, the 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rios millet mccartney, and dick simpson, eds. . teaching civic engagement: from student to active citizen, nd edition. washington, dc: american political science association. campbell, david e. . why we vote: how schools and communities shape our civic life. princeton, nj: princeton university press. colby, anne, elizabeth beaumont, thomas ehrlich, and josh corngold. . educating for democracy: preparing undergraduates for responsible political engagement. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. collins, patricia hill. . black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment. new york: routledge. collins, patricia hill. . black sexual politics, african americans, gender, and the new racism. new york: routledge. davidson, cathy. . “why we need a new liberal education: we have a responsibility to the next generation of students.” association of american colleges & universities. available at https://www. aacu.org/liberaleducation/ /spring/davidson. foa, roberto stefan 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Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l’université de montréal, l’université laval et l’université du québec à montréal. il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. https://www.erudit.org/fr/ document généré le avr. : atlantis critical studies in gender, culture & social justice Études critiques sur le genre, la culture, et la justice speaking freely and freedom of speech: feminists navigating the "new" right rachel alpha johnston hurst et jennifer l. johnson volume , numéro , uri : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar doi : https://doi.org/ . / ar aller au sommaire du numéro Éditeur(s) mount saint vincent university issn - (numérique) découvrir la revue citer ce document hurst, r. & johnson, j. ( ). speaking freely and freedom of speech: feminists navigating the "new" right. atlantis, ( ), – . https://doi.org/ . / ar https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/atlantis/ https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar https://doi.org/ . / ar https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/atlantis/ -v -n -atlantis / https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/atlantis/ atlantis journal
 issue . / special section: speaking freely and freedom of speech editorial “speaking freely and freedom of speech: feminists  navigating the ‘new’ right” rachel alpha johnston hurst  is associate professor  of women's and gender studies at st. francis xavier  university in antigonish, nova scotia. she is author of  surface  imaginations:  cosmetic  surgery,  photography,  and  skin  ( ) and co­editor of  skin,  culture,  and  psychoanalysis  ( ).  her  most  recent  essays  have  been  published  in  history  of  photography,  feminist  studies, configurations, and body & society. jennifer  l.  johnson  is  associate  professor  of  wo­ men’s, gender, and sexuality studies, orneloe uni­ versity at laurentian. she is co­editor of feminist issues:  gender, race, and class  th edition (pearson education  ), feminist  praxis  revisited:  critical  reflections  on  university­community engagement (wlup  ) and  maternal  geographies:  mothering  in  and  out  of  place  (demeter press  ). at the end of october  , posters appeared on campuses  across  north  america  that  read:  “it’s  ok to be white.” e message bore similarity to previ­ ous messaging and graffiti left on university campuses  stating “white lives matter” as direct backlash to the  black lives matter movement in   and  . e  ‘alt­right,’  ‘alternative  right,’  or  ‘new  right’  as  it  has  come  to be known,  is  a  largely online  ideology  that  unifies  a  variety  of  smaller  movements  opposed  to  mainstream conservatism and roughly attempts to con­ solidate values and ideas that seem to them to be lost  under  an  evermore  liberal  society  (hodge  and  hall­ grimsdottir  ).  as  many  students  of  feminist  thought will contend, even as voices of the so­called al­ tright spill out onto university campuses, the content  of their ideas are not new. feminist thinkers will add  these public expressions of white racial anxiety to femi­ nist analyses of those documented during the abolition  and civil rights eras, and the aftermath of  / , among  other examples. in conjunction with white nationalist  statements, some of these messages have also included  anti­semitic,  anti­immigrant,  anti­feminist,  and  anti­ slgbtq+ language, and in some cases mention di­ rect  links  to  white  nationalist  organizations.  ank­ fully,  such  affirmations  of  white  supremacy  and  misogyny stand in contrast to the vocal documentation  and protest of a range of injustices in canada (and the  united states) today. ese injustices include the loss of life, physical injury,  and psychic violence caused by police brutality against  black and indigenous people, as well as very public at­ tacks  led by white men against  racialized people and  indigenous women (gillis  , globe  , ibrahim  , porter  ). e past decade has also seen bru­ tal attacks on large groups of people or individual wo­ men by men who identify as incels, whose social media  activities  often  reveal  links  between  misogyny,  xeno­ phobia, and racism and identify women, immigrants,  and  black,  indigenous,  and  people  of  colour  as  the  atlantis journal
 issue . / source  of  their  aggrievement  (boisvert  ,  cbc  news  a and  b, pickard  ). e restric­ tions placed on the arrivals of refugees by the cana­ dian state, and particularly refugees who are people of  colour, may well galvanize a new generation of human  rights activism on a global  scale  (humphreys  ).  e totality of these hostile messages aimed at ‘others’  signals the need for attention to systemic and everyday  gendered, racialized, and sexualized violence in cana­ dian  society.  e  dismantling  of  normative  invest­ ments  in white supremacy in north america  is slow  and by no means a given. a common thread that connects these acts of violence  is the idea that canadian institutions—including uni­ versities—have become places that actively exclude and  silence “white men,”  to use sara ahmed’s  shorthand  ( ), and that violent retribution is justified as a re­ sponse. with varying levels of visibility and commit­ ment to change, many canadian universities recognize  the importance of acknowledging and making amends  for  historical  and  contemporary  harm  wrought  by  their racist practices as part of the canadian state—at  least in universities’ supportive public statements and  public relations. institutions like universities may have  acknowledged racialized violence through special  lec­ tures, teach­ins, and vigils, as many did after barbara  kentner was  fatally  struck  in under bay, ontario,  on january  ,   (a crime for which the charges  were  downgraded  from  murder  to  manslaughter  in  ).  public  commitments  to  combating  racism —and  especially  anti­black  racism—by  universities  most  recently  proliferated  after  the  mass  public  demonstrations  of  protest  in  north  america  in  re­ sponse  to  the  murder  of  george  floyd  by  police  in  minneapolis,  minnesota  on  may  ,  ,  and  breonna taylor  in  louisville,  kentucky  on  june  ,  ,  and  in  canada,  the  violent  deaths  of  regis  korchinski­paquette in toronto, ontario on may  ,   and chantel moore in edmundston, new brun­ swick on june  ,  . however, these public declarations of opposition to ra­ cism and expressed commitment to developing better  internal procedures and policies could be considered a  part  of  what  a  diversity  practitioner  interviewed  by  sara ahmed for on being included: racism and institu­ tional life aptly characterizes as “doing the document  rather than doing the doing” ( ,  ). public state­ ments and policy­making risk becoming practices that  stifle dissent and critique (especially internally) while  presenting an inclusive anti­racist public face that does  not represent the reality for those studying and work­ ing in those spaces. as frances henry, enakshi dua,  carl e.  james, audrey kobayashi, peter li, howard  ramos, and malinda s. smith and many others have  documented, indigenous and racialized faculty are un­ derrepresented across  the  ranks of  these  institutions,  and face overt  racism and microaggressions at work.  eir work  is undervalued  in  tenure and promotion  processes;  at  the  same  time,  the  internal  procedures  and policies to address racism at work are inadequate  and often fail  (henry et al.  ,  ­ ). like uni­ versity faculty, racialized and indigenous students face  conditions similar to those described by black at west­ ern, a group of alumni who graduated over decades  from western  university.  ey  record  traumatic  ex­ posure to racist professors and an unsympathetic uni­ versity  administration  (rodriguez  ).  black  at  western refer specifically to the white supremacist psy­ chologist j. philippe rushton and also to white pro­ fessors  who  insist  on  speaking  the  n­word  aloud  in  class. eternity martis’s memoir  ey  said  is would  be  fun:  race,  campus  life,  and  growing  up  ( )  extends this picture through narrating her experience  as a black woman and undergraduate student at west­ ern, where she faced racist verbal harassment, assault,  and physical threats, as well as constant microaggres­ sions, from other students and community members. e tension between the public face of the university  and the silenced experiences of oppression within cre­ ates impossible conditions for racialized and indigen­ ous  faculty,  students,  and  staff,  and may compound  the negative experiences of those who are queer, trans,  feminist,  and disabled.  institutional accountability  is  often circumvented through a public condemnation or  statement of solidarity. further, ameil j. joseph, julia  janes,  harjeet  badwall  and  shana  almeida  astutely  critique how these statements frequently expose racial­ ized  members  of  university  communities  to  further  harassment and threats, and that such statements are  also often made alongside a proclamation of the value  of  free  speech,  freedom  of  expression,  or  academic  atlantis journal
 issue . / freedom ( ,  ).  despite robust evidence to the  contrary,  the alt­right claims a position of victimiza­ tion  and  oppression  for  white  men  that  has  come  about as the result of the small gains to increase equity  in  universities,  small  gains  which  are  showcased  by  universities as evidence of their “progress.” is  collection  of  papers  in  atlantis  engages  with  a  range  of  very  public  moments  in  which  feminist  teachers, students, and administrators have faced the  type of hostilities described above. e violent ramific­ ations of xenophobic and anti­feminist messaging oc­ curring  in  educational  institutions  is  not  surprising  given the ease with which anti­black racism, anti­fem­ inist  positions,  and  violence  continue  online  and  in  peoples’ everyday lives. ose working in postsecond­ ary education will already have noticed that, predict­ ably,  research  funding and resources have pivoted to  covid­ ­related issues and rightly so. but also very  troubling is that the productivity of certain groups of  researchers, including women, and anyone with care­ giving  responsibilities  outside  of  paid  work,  has  de­ clined noticeably (dolan and lawless  ) and that  existing inequalities between male and female­identi­ fied faculty in doing the service­work associated with  academic life reinforces an even more inequitable fu­ ture for existing and incoming faculty (guarino and  borden  ). ese studies suggest that a less diverse  range of academics and students will be around to re­ ceive  funds  that  will  shape  who  is  allowed  to  help  solve  the  problems  of  covid­   and  who  will  be  sidelined  to  the  essential  work  of  caregiving  in  the  home, or other forms of caregiving and service within  universities.  combined  with  the  hostilities  we  refer­ ence  above,  the  intersections  of  gendered  carework  with deep racial inequities in health could also further  marginalize  many  of  the  people  whose  presence  in  universities has only recently become more common.  as universities and colleges cope with the impacts of  government responses to covid­ , it is hard not to  anticipate plans for more fiscal austerity that may un­ der­fund some of the very educational fields in the lib­ eral  arts  and  sciences  where  women,  indigenous  people, and black people have made inroads. to  return  to  the  scale  of  the  classroom,  hostilities  characterized as free speech by proponents and even  some university administrations reveal policies that are  ill­conceived  to  deal  with  the  issues  that  arise  from  these hostilities. in living a feminist life ( ), sara  ahmed presents the illogic and disconnections among  arguments  about  women’s  and  gender  studies  as  oversensitive  to  these  problems.  ese  arguments  so  often flung into the media, sometimes by our own col­ leagues,  unfairly  bait  students  to  enter  into  debates  that,  for  all  intents  and  purposes,  reduce  peoples’  struggles to academic exercises. ose who find them­ selves the targets of such acts of so­called free speech  are  frequently  under­represented  in  official  responses  and are described as censorious and oversensitive when  they protest. as janet conway argues, the invocation  of “free speech” is a deliberate—and easy—attempt to  discredit  the  scholarship,  teaching, and expression of  marginalized people  through what has been a  liberal  claim ( ). administrations in canadian universit­ ies have attempted carefully reasoned responses that all  too easily ignore the unreasonable conditions in which  minoritized students and faculty and their supporters  must study and work. e contributors  to  this  section analyze  the barriers,  violence, and harassment experienced on a daily basis  by feminist university students, faculty, and staff, espe­ cially  those who are black,  indigenous, or people of  colour, queer,  trans, and disabled, which exposes  the  fallacy of alt­right claims that feminists are oversensit­ ive and unable to tolerate being challenged. e section opens with an essay by robyn bourgeois.  “hostility, harassment, and violence: on the limits  of  ‘free speech’  for minority feminist scholars” un­ masks the opportunistic and hollow character of most  free speech defences that occur in the popular media,  which tend to defend free  speech only when  it  sup­ ports  the  status  quo.  bourgeois  begins  with  the  re­ sponse  to  her  public  scholarly  analysis  of  the  mass  murder of   people in rural nova scotia on april  ­ ,  ,  an  analysis  which  named  the  murderer’s  white  masculinity  as  central  to  understanding  this  massacre and to disputing an emerging narrative of its  ‘senselessness.’  predictably,  the  response  was  violent  and  dedicated  to  silencing  her  analysis—which  is  grounded  in  scholarship  and  experience—through  personal  attacks  that  targeted  her  as  an  indigenous  atlantis journal
 issue . / woman and mother,  threatening physical  and  sexual  violence and calling for her to be fired. her essay pub­ lished  in  this  collection  guides  readers  through  ten  vignettes that explore different facets of the reality that  is obscured in right­wing politics and punditry, which  is  that  professors  and  students  who  are  not  white,  male,  able­bodied,  heterosexual,  and  cisgender  are  subject to extraordinary scrutiny within and outside of  the university,  scrutiny  that has  silencing as  its  aim.  ese stories demonstrate the unequal application of  so­called free speech principles within the university as  well  as  the  popular  media,  particularly  for  feminist  scholars who are indigenous, black, or people of col­ our. elizabeth  brulé’s  article  shares  a  similar  interest  to  bourgeois’s essay, as it examines how marginalised stu­ dents’  activism  and  speech  on  campus  are  regulated  and curtailed through student codes of conduct, civil­ ity policies, and, most recently, free speech policies in  the  provinces  of  ontario  and  alberta.  although  a  common assumption is that university students enjoy  rights of freedom of expression and rights of assembly  protected under  the  canadian  charter  of  rights  and  freedoms, universities in canada have the right to es­ tablish  their own regulations and policies  for  speech  and conduct, a right outlined in universities’ legislative  acts  and  legal  statutes.  again,  the  popular  narrative  that  circulates  is  about  universities  obsessed  with  a  political  correctness  that  actively  silences  groups  of  students (e.g., white men, conservatives) or positions  on social issues (e.g., anti­abortion) in order to main­ tain a sheltered environment. however, a closer exam­ ination of how student codes of conduct and civility  policies  are used  shows  that  they most often quelch  marginalised students’ activism and speech and do not  protect  students  from  discrimination  and  harmful  speech.  brulé  proposes  that  focusing  on  preventing  “harm to one’s dignity” over “free speech” is a useful  way of balancing the necessity for an expansive vision  of expressive  freedom on campus with ensuring stu­ dents  are  not  subject  to  discrimination  and  harass­ ment,  because  such  a  focus  shifts  attention  from  individualised rights to collective responsibility.  madison  mcdonald  picks  up  the  thread  of  free  speech policies  that have been recently mandated by  the conservative governments of ontario and alberta  and at  individual universities. “free speech rhetoric  and  normalizing  violence”  presents  an  analysis  of  campus  free  speech  policies  that  conflate  academic  freedom and free speech. mcdonald argues that het­ eroactivist,  far­right,  and  alt­right  discourses  exploit  universities’  commitment  to  academic  freedom  and  deploy  a  framework  she  calls  “bridging  rhetoric.”  bridging  rhetoric  refers  to  the  recasting  of  violent  ideologies  within  more  acceptable  social  norms  and  discourses;  for example,  framing a professor's  refusal  to use a student's requested pronouns as resistance to  “compelled speech,” rather than as an explicitly trans­ phobic refusal to recognize the student’s gender iden­ tity.  diverting  the  attention  towards  the  issue  of  “compelled speech” stokes anxieties about authoritari­ anism, normalising the transphobia inherent in the re­ fusal to use someone’s requested pronouns. mcdonald  argues that serious consideration must be given to bar­ ring speech that normalises acts of harm, and she ana­ lyses  the  unintended  consequences  of  free  speech  policies that do not take a position against discrimina­ tion and harassment. emily colpitts’s article, “addressing sexual violence  at ontario universities in the context of rising anti­ feminist  backlash,”  is  also  engaged  with  questions  about university policy­making and what can and can­ not be said. in her article, she grapples with the diffi­ culties  in  naming  the  root  causes  of  sexual  violence  within  a  context  shaped  by  anti­feminist  backlash.  colpitts examines how the arguments of anti­feminist  groups  like  men’s  rights  activists  and  incels  shape  media  discourse  about  sexual  violence  on  university  campuses, creating moral panic about the persecution  of  white  men  and  the  unlimited  power  of  prudish  feminist  censors  at  canadian  universities.  however,  once again the reality is that survivors of sexual viol­ ence face significant limits to speech through non­dis­ closure  agreements,  and  campus  sexual  violence  policies are often written so that systemic oppression  (e.g., misogyny, white supremacy) is minimised in fa­ vour of individualistic and gender­neutral descriptions  of  sexual violence. as  such, key campus community  members—survivors,  feminist  faculty,  and  students —are excluded from policy­making, and sexual viol­ ence prevention activity is disproportionately directed  atlantis journal
 issue . / at presenting its messages in a palatable way that will  not trigger anti­feminist backlash. rough her analys­ is,  colpitts  explores  how  anti­feminism  limits  and  shapes how anti­violence work is being done, and ar­ gues  that  concerns  about  how  to  deliver  these  mes­ sages to cisgender men have diluted these efforts. lindsay ostridge’s “speaking freely and freedom of  speech: why is black feminist ought left out of  ontario university sexual violence policies?” dovetails  well with colpitts’s analysis, although ostridge focuses  on a different dimension of  sexual violence policies:  the theoretical framework that guides the policy­mak­ ing process. ostridge offers a detailed analysis of the  ways sex and sexual violence continue to be hived off  from racialized violence in what would otherwise be a  practical application of feminist ideas to making edu­ cational  institutions  freer  from  violence.  in  a  case  study of a standalone campus sexual violence policy,  the  author  examines what  administrators hear when  mandated to act upon high rates of sexual violence on  campus. specifically, ostridge argues  that decades of  black feminist theorizing and activism that articulate  an intersectional approach to challenging violence are  ignored  in  these administrative  responses  to pressure  from feminists themselves. instead, critical black fem­ inist concepts like intersectionality are hollowed out to  describe individual identities, and administrations are  resistant to acknowledging that systems of oppression  are interlocked and reinforce one another (combahee  river  collective,  ).  consequently,  administra­ tions continue to criminalize black people on campus;  for example, ostridge rightly highlights the separation  of “women” from “marginalised groups”  in  the uni­ versity of ottawa sexual violence policy, a discursive  move that positions white women as reified survivors  of sexual violence and “marginalised groups” as other  to the campus community. heather latimer’s  article,  “snapping: feminist ped­ agogy  and  navigating  the  ‘new’  right,”  returns  us  full­circle to theoretical analysis and reflection on one’s  experience,  this  time  grounded  in  affect  theory  and  anecdotal theory (gallop  ). rough a critical re­ flexive  analysis  of  four  moments  in  the  classroom,  latimer  pushes  readers  to  engage  with  the  affect  of  “shock” as a response to the contemporary rise of the  alt­right and trumpism as well as the feminist pedago­ gical  challenges  of  encountering  students  with  pas­ sionate  attachments  to  ideas  and  movements  that  oppose  what  they  are  learning  in  the women’s  and  gender studies classroom. in her analysis, latimer ar­ gues that reacting with “shock” to evidence of the rise  of  alt­right  ideologies—for  example,  the  election  of  donald trump as president of  the united states—is  an affective response structured by whiteness, but for  students  who  are  black,  indigenous,  and  people  of  colour  such  events  are  all  too  predictable.  she  con­ siders the consequences of investing time and energies —guided by a feminist pedagogical approach that po­ sitions  students as  responsible  for  their  learning and  positions—into  supporting  privileged  students  through their exploration and questioning of alt­right  ideas and arguments while other students continually  crash  up  against  institutional  brick  walls  (ahmed  ). rough sara ahmed’s concept of the “femin­ ist snap,” latimer advocates for a reflexive process that  works with the brokenness of the university, not for a  naïve optimism but rather for critical engagement that  the invitation to snap provides for feminist educators.  e  issues  and  debates  broached  by  contributors  to  this  section  are  not  new.  feminist  thinkers  have  already equipped readers to respond to the alternative  right.  for  generations,  the  production  of  ideas,  re­ sponses,  positions,  and  critical  thought  about  sex,  race, sexuality, and power has shaped the field of wo­ men’s and gender studies, and feminist thought more  broadly. e work of audre lorde, sherene razack,  kimberlé crenshaw, and so many more equip teachers  and students to respond very well. readers will also be  familiar  with  the  work  of  himani  bannerji,  linda  carty, kari dehli, susan heald, and kate mckenna in  unsettling relations: e university as a site of feminist  struggles, published almost  thirty years ago  in  .  is important book also critiqued the permeability of  the  university  to  racist  and  misogynist  movements  that scaffold and embolden people within higher edu­ cation to  limit the expression of people of colour  in  particular. in unsettling relations, the authors analyzed  harassment  and  discrimination  as  taking  place  in  classrooms, through labour conditions for faculty, and  within  the  structures  of  the  university,  all  of  which  negatively impacted the authors’ lives and professional  atlantis journal
 issue . / security.  however,  one  thing  that  we  observe  when  reading these still­salient essays in   is that thirty  years  ago  the  harassment  and  discrimination  was  in  many ways contained at the scale of the university and  its  actors,  and  at  the  classroom  level  in  particular.  when we reflect on robyn bourgeois’s essay, we note  the  significant  ways  that  alt­right  groups  in  the  us  and  canada  can  reach  directly  into  the  university  through the internet,  social media, and email. a re­ cent  example  of  this  occurred  shortly  after  north  american universities transitioned classes online in re­ sponse  to  the  coronavirus  pandemic.  online  classes  were  interrupted  by  misogynist,  racist,  and  violent  “zoombombing” attacks and alt­right leaders encour­ aged  students  to  record  their  classes  to  expose  their  professors  online  (redden  ;  sommer  ).  us,  what  is  new  about  this  particular  moment  is  that the public intimacy of online spaces creates expo­ nentially greater opportunities for harassment and vi­ olence that redirects the energies of faculty, staff, and  students towards disputing specious and bad faith cri­ tiques and away from their research and teaching pro­ grams. among the visible outcomes of people’s  reactions  to  the pandemic was an  immediate  turning  inwards of  social  relationships  for  essential  information.  e  world health organization’s exhortation to physically  isolate in order to survive covid­  risks over­reli­ ance  on  the  consumption  of  tailored  social  media  messaging for current news. ose already inclined to  believe the messages of social conservatives, conspiracy  theorists, and white nationalists may be more vulner­ able  than  ever  to  both  mis­information  and  dis­in­ formation  during  the  global  pandemic.  given  the  necessarily delayed reaction of mainstream journalism  to covering emerging news under covid­  (due to  the need for physical distancing), a void has been cre­ ated in which hatemongering has thrived. while those who overtly claim membership to white  nationalist movements may be fewer in number, those  who express degrees of support for these ideas or lat­ ently approve of their presence in social media are in­ creasingly  emboldened.  in  online  spaces,  students,  faculty, and staff who are black, indigenous, people of  colour, feminist, queer, and trans may find themselves  subject to verbal and physical hostility. a series of in­ tersecting  gendered,  racial,  and  class  inequities  have  been laid bare through different countries’ responses to  the  covid­   pandemic.  in  this  special  section  of  atlantis, we collectively ask: what are the implications  of these inequities for feminist research and teaching in  the era of free speech debates?  endnotes . we should note that although the summer of    has seen heightened public attention about racism at  western university, we do not consider western to be  an outlier; indeed, what is remarkable about western is  that students and alumni have been successful in draw­ ing attention to racism on campus in the national me­ dia. as we finalize this special section, a group of    university of ottawa professors have signed a public  letter  defending  another  professor  who  used  the  n­ word in class and was suspended. e signatories claim  that her  suspension  is  a  threat  to  academic  freedom  and critical thinking, while black and indigenous stu­ dents are organizing to challenge this claim and draw  attention  to  the  racism  they  face  at  uottawa  (glowacki  ). atlantis journal
 issue . / references ahmed, sara.  . living a feminist life. durham:  duke university press. _____.  . “white men.” feminist killjoys (blog),  https://feministkilljoys.com/ / / /white­men/. _____.  . on being included: racism and diversity  in institutional life. durham: duke university press. boisvert, nick.  . “homicide at toronto massage  parlour was an act of incel terrorism, police say.”  cbc news, may  ,  . https://www.cbc.ca/news/ canada/toronto/incel­terrorism­massage­parlour­ . cbc news.  a. “alek minassian admits in court  document to planning, carrying out toronto van  attack,” march  ,  . https://www.cbc.ca/news/ canada/toronto/minassian­admits­planning­toronto­ van­attack­ .   cbc news.  b. “immigration advocates demand  permanent status for asylum seekers working in  quebec's long­term care homes,” june  ,  . https:// www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/asylum­seekers­ immigration­covid­ ­front­lines­chsld­quebec­ .   combahee river collective.  . e combahee  river collective statement : black feminist  organizing in the seventies and eighties. albany, ny:  kitchen table: women of color press. conway, janet.  . “notes on free speech fights,  anti­feminism and the rising right.” seminar  presentation at st. francis xavier university,  antigonish, nova scotia, march  ,  . crenshaw, kimberle.  . "mapping the margins:  intersectionality, identity politics, and violence  against women of color." stanford law review  ,  no.  :  ­ . diangelo, robin.  . white fragility: why it's so  hard for white people to talk about racism. boston:  beacon press. dolan, kathleen and jennifer l. lawless.  . "it  takes a submission: gendered patterns in the pages of  ajps." american journal of political science (blog),  https://ajps.org/ / / /it­takes­a­submission­ gendered­patterns­in­the­pages­of­ajps/. gillis, wendy. “what happened the night regis  korchinski­paquet died, according to ontario’s  police watchdog.” e toronto star, august  ,  .  https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/ / / /what­ happened­the­night­regis­korchinski­paquet­died­ according­to­ontarios­police­watchdog.html glowacki, laura.  . “students decry letter  defending n­word use at the university of ottawa.”  cbc news, october  ,  . https://www.cbc.ca/ news/canada/ottawa/university­of­ottawa­professor­ racism­ .   guarino, cassandra m., and victor m.h. borden.  . "faculty service loads and gender: are women  taking care of the academic family?" research in  higher education  , no. :  ­ . hodge, edwin, and helga hallgrimsdottir. "networks  of hate: the alt­right,“troll culture”, and the cultural  geography of social movement spaces online." journal  of borderlands studies  .  ( ):  ­ . henry, frances, enakshi dua, carl e. james, audrey  kobayashi, peter li, howard ramos, and malinda s.  smith.  . e equity myth: racialization and  indigeneity at canadian universities. vancouver: ubc  press. humphreys, adrian.  . “with covid­   clampdown, number of asylum seekers at canada­ u.s. border slows to a trickle.” e national post,  april  ,  . https://nationalpost.com/news/with­ covid­ ­clampdown­number­of­asylum­seekers­at­ canada­u­s­border­slows­to­a­trickle  atlantis journal
 issue . / ibrahim, hadeel.  . “killing of indigenous  woman raises questions about who should be  doing wellness checks.” cbc news, jun  ,    https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/new­brunswick/ chantel­moore­indigenous­woman­shot­by­police­ edmundston­ .   joseph, j. ameil, julia janes, harjeet badwall and  shana almeida. “preserving white comfort and  safety: e politics of race erasure in academe.”  social identities  ,   ( ):  ­ . lorde, audre.  . sister outsider: essays and  speeches. berkeley, ca: crossing press. martis, eternity.  . ey said is would be fun:  race, campus life, and growing up. toronto: penguin  random house canada. pickard, arron. “marcus drive 'incel' attacker told  police he was 'out to murder a little white girl'.”  sudbury.com, january  ,  . https:// www.sudbury.com/local­news/marcus­drive­incel­ attacker­told­police­he­was­out­to­murder­a­little­ white­girl­   porter, jody.  . “first nations woman dies after  being hit by trailer hitch rown from passing car  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racism and health disparities: a statement from editors of family medicine journals a n na l s o f fa m i ly m e d i c i n e ✦ w w w. a n n fa m m e d . o r g ✦ vo l . , n o. ✦ ja n ua ry / f e b rua ry editorial systemic racism and health disparities: a statement from editors of family medicine journals sumi m. sexton, md caroline r. richardson, md sarina b. schrager, md, ms marjorie a. bowman, md john hickner, md, msc christopher p. morley, phd, ma timothy f. mott, md nicholas pimlott, md, phd john w. saultz, md barry d. weiss, md american family physician annals of family medicine fpm journal of the american board of family medicine the journal of family practice primer fpin/evidence based practice canadian family physician family medicine fp essentials conflicts of interest: authors report none. corresponding author sumi m. sexton, md georgetown university reservoir rd, nw washington, dc makkars@georgetown.edu ann fam med ; : - . https://doi.org/ . /afm. . t he year has been marked by historic protests across the united states and the globe sparked by the deaths of george floyd, ahmaud arbery, breonna taylor, and so many other black people. the protests heightened awareness of racism as a public health crisis and triggered an antiracism movement. racism is a pervasive and systemic issue that has profound adverse effects on health. , racism is associated with poorer mental and physical health outcomes and negative patient experiences in the health care system. , as evidenced by the cur- rent coronavirus pandemic, race is a sociopolitical construct that continues to disadvantage black, latinx, indigenous, and other people of color. - the association between racism and adverse health outcomes has been discussed for decades in the medical literature, including the family medi- cine literature. today there is a renewed call to action for family medicine, a specialty that emerged as a counterculture to reform mainstream medi- cine, to both confront systemic racism and eliminate health disparities. this effort will require collaboration, commitment, education, and trans- formative conversations around racism, health inequity, and advocacy so that we can better serve our patients and our communities. the editors of several north american family medicine publications have come together to address this call to action and share resources on racism across our readerships. we acknowledge those members of the family medicine scholar community who have been fighting for equity consistent with the black lives matter movement by writing about rac- ism, health inequities, and personal experiences of practicing as black family physicians. while we recognize that much more work is needed, we want to amplify these voices. we have compiled a bibliography of scholarship generated by the family medicine community on the topic of racism in medicine. the collection can be accessed here: https://www.ann fam med.org/ content/shared-bibliography-systemic-racism-and-health-disparities. while this list is likely not complete, it does include over pub- lished manuscripts and demonstrates expertise as well as a commitment to addressing these complex issues. for example, in , dr j. nwando olayiwola, chair of the department of family medicine at ohio state university, wrote an essay on her experiences taking care of patients as a black family physician. in january of , family medicine published an entire issue devoted to racism in education and training. dr eduardo medina, a family physician and public health scholar, co-authored a call to action in for health professionals to dismantle structural racism and support black lives to achieve health equity. his recent article builds on that theme and describes the disproportionate deaths of black people due to racial injustice and the covid- pandemic as converging public health emergencies. , in the wake of these emergencies a fundamental transformation is warranted, and family physicians can play a key role. mailto:makkars@georgetown.edu https://doi.org/ . /afm. https://www.ann​fam​med.org/content/shared-bibliography-systemic-racism-and-health-disparities https://www.ann​fam​med.org/content/shared-bibliography-systemic-racism-and-health-disparities a n na l s o f fa m i ly m e d i c i n e ✦ w w w. a n n fa m m e d . o r g ✦ vo l . , n o. ✦ ja n ua ry / f e b rua ry a n na l s o f fa m i ly m e d i c i n e ✦ w w w. a n n fa m m e d . o r g ✦ vo l . , n o. ✦ ja n ua ry / f e b rua ry e d i t o r i a l s we, the editors of family medicine journals, com- mit to actively examine the effects of racism on society and health and to take action to eliminate structural racism in our editorial processes. as an intellectual home for our profession, we have a unique responsibil- ity and opportunity to educate and continue the con- versation about institutional racism, health inequities, and antiracism in medicine. we will take immediate steps to enact tangible advances on these fronts. we will encourage and mentor authors from groups under- represented in medicine. we will ensure that content includes an emphasis on cultural humility, diversity and inclusion, implicit bias, and the impact of racism on medicine and health. we will recruit editors and editorial board members from groups underrepre- sented in medicine. we will encourage collaboration and accountability within our specialty to confront systemic racism through content and processes in all of our individual publications. we recognize that these are small steps in an ongoing process of active antira- cism, but we believe these steps are crucial. as editors in family medicine, we are committed to progress toward equity and justice. simultaneously published in american family physi- cian, annals of family medicine, canadian family physician, family medicine, fp essentials, fpin/evidence based practice, fpm, journal of the american board of family medicine, the journal of family practice, and primer. to read or post commentaries in response to this article, see it online at https://www.ann fam med.org/content/ / / . key words: racism; racial bias; racial discrimination; racial prejudice; family medicine; primary care; health disparities; delivery of health care submitted october , ; accepted october , . acknowledgments: the authors thank renee crichlow, md, byron jas- per, md, mph, and victoria murrain, do for their insightful comments on this editorial. references . institute of medicine, committee on understanding and eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in health care, board on health sci- ences policy, smedley bd, stith ay, nelson ar, eds. unequal treat- ment: confronting racial and ethnic disparities in health care. national academies press; . . bailey zd, krieger n, agénor m, graves j, linos n, bassett mt. structural racism and health inequities in the usa: evidence and interventions. lancet. ; ( ): - . . ben j, cormack d, harris r, paradies y. racism and health service utilisation: a systematic review and meta-analysis. plos one. ; ( ): e . . paradies y, ben j, denson n, et al. racism as a determinant of health: a systematic review and meta-analysis. plos one. ; ( ): e . . american academy of family physicians. institutional racism in the health care system. published . accessed sep , . https:// www.aafp.org/about/policies/all/institutional-racism.html . yaya s, yeboah h, charles ch, otu a, labonte r. ethnic and racial disparities in covid- -related deaths: counting the trees, hiding the forest. bmj glob health. ; ( ): e . . egede le, walker rj. structural racism, social risk factors, and covid- —a dangerous convergence for black americans [published online ahead of print july , ]. n engl j med. ; ( ): e . https:// doi.org/ . /nejmp . centers for disease control and prevention. health equity consider- ations and racial and ethnic minority groups. updated jul , . accessed sep , . https:// www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/ - ncov/community/health-equity/race-ethnicity.html . stephens gg. family medicine as counterculture. fam med. ; ( ): - . . olayiwola jn. racism in medicine: shifting the power. ann fam med. ; ( ): - . https:// doi.org/ . /afm. . saultz j, ed. racism. fam med. ; ( ): - . . hardeman rr, medina em, kozhimannil kb. structural racism and supporting black lives - the role of health professionals. n engl j med. ; ( ): - . https:// doi.org/ . / nejmp . hardeman rr, medina em, boyd rw. stolen breaths. n engl j med. ; ( ): - . https:// doi.org/ . /nejmp https://www.ann​fam​med.org/content/ / / https://​www.aafp.org/about/policies/all/institutional-racism.html https://​www.aafp.org/about/policies/all/institutional-racism.html https://​doi.org/ . /nejmp https://​www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/ -ncov/community/health-equity/race-ethnicity.html https://​www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/ -ncov/community/health-equity/race-ethnicity.html https://​doi.org/ . /afm. https://​doi.org/ . /nejmp https://​doi.org/ . /nejmp https://​doi.org/ . /nejmp s x x.indd du bois review, : ( ) – . © hutchins center for african and african american research - x/ $ . doi: . /s x x toward a critical environmental justice studies black lives matter as an environmental justice challenge david n. pellow department of environmental studies , university of california , santa barbara abstract in this paper i expand upon the recent use of the term “critical environmental justice studies.” this concept is meant to capture new developments in environmental justice (ej) studies that question assumptions and gaps in earlier work in the field. because this direction in scholarship is still in its formative stages, i take this opportunity to offer some guidance on what critical environmental justice (cej) studies might look like and what it could mean for theorizing the relationship between race (along with multiple additional social categories) and the environment. i do so by ( ) adopting a multi-disciplinary approach that draws on several bodies of literature, including critical race theory, political ecology, ecofeminist theory, and anarchist theory, and ( ) focusing on the case of black lives matter and the problem of state violence. keywords: environmental justice , black lives matter , state violence , racism , speciesism , scale , expendability , indispensability introduction black lives matter (blm) is a social movement centered on the problem of state- sanctioned racist violence. the movement began as a response to the acquittal of george zimmerman, a man who killed trayvon martin, a seventeen-year old african american boy in sanford, florida, in . from that moment on, social media, mainstream media, and the black lives matter movement would routinely inten- sify the national focus on racialized state-sanctioned violence when yet another video or testimony surfaced featuring an african american being shot, beaten, choked, and/or killed by police or white vigilantes. the role of social media tech- nology was pivotal. as one writer put it, “social media could serve as a source of live, raw information. it could summon people to the streets and coordinate their movements in real time. and it could swiftly push back against spurious media narratives . . .” (bijan ). blm co-founder alicia garza explained what the movement stands for: “black lives matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. it is an affirmation of black at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core david n. pellow du bois review: social science research on race : , folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression” (garza ). in this paper, i draw links between what i view as the most important insights and questions that emerge from the black lives matter movement and the strug- gle against environmental racism. this is a connection that many scholars might not make at first glance because police brutality and environmental politics would appear to be only tangentially related, but i argue they are in fact closely intertwined and that we must explore their myriad connections in order to excavate the roots of racist violence no matter the form it takes. the questions i explore here include: how can black lives matter’s emphasis on police violence against african american communities inform our understanding of the scourge of ecological burdens facing those same communities? conversely, what can the violation of black bodies and spaces by ecologically destructive agents produced by states and corporations tell us about the violation of those same bodies by police and law enforcement agents? i find that a “first-” and “second-generation” environmental justice studies frame- work can assist in this effort, but can only take us so far. therefore, i propose that a critical environmental justice studies framework can more fully address these pressing concerns. environmental justice studies the environmental justice (ej) movement is composed of people from communities of color, indigenous communities, and working-class communities who are focused on combating environmental injustice—the disproportionate burden of environmental harm facing these populations. for the ej movement, social justice is inseparable from environmental protection. in the early s, researchers in the united states found strong correlations between social class status and air quality in the united states. as a result of social movement activism, however, the focus began to broaden from social class to race and from air pollution to a range of environmental hazards (pulido ; walker ). for example, in , hundreds of civil rights leaders and community activists protested a toxic waste dump in the majority african american community of warren county, north carolina. that action sparked the discourse of environmental rac- ism and the growth of environmental justice studies, and since that time, scholars and other researchers have documented the reach of environmental racism/inequality in the united states and around the globe, as well as the social movement that has emerged to highlight and challenge this phenomenon (bullard ; cole and foster, ; pellow and brulle, ). thus, hundreds of studies have documented that people of color, people of lower socioeconomic status, indigenous and immigrant populations, and other marginalized communities are disproportionately affected by ecologically harmful infrastructures, such as landfills, mines, incinerators, polluting factories, and destructive transportation systems, as well as by the negative consequences of ecologically harmful practices, such as climate change/disruption and pesticide exposure (ringquist ). much of this work has documented the troubling depths and breadth of environmental injustice’s impact on the lives of people—including public health and mental health effects—and on how these communities make meaning out of these assaults while organizing for environmental justice. and while ej studies may have earlier focused on the united states, scholars are also documenting environmental inequalities and ej move- ments’ responses to them around the globe (agyeman et al., ; pellow ; at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core critical environmental justice studies du bois review: social science research on race : , roberts and parks, ). a small but growing group of researchers—including and especially environmental humanities scholars—have focused on the ways that gender, sexuality, citizenship, indigeneity, and nation shape the terrain of eco- logical inequalities, but those areas of scholarship remain in need of further devel- opment (adamson ; bell ; buckingham and kulcur, ; gaard ; smith ). toward a critical environmental justice studies recent scholarship divides ej studies into two phases: ( ) the “first-generation,” which was focused primarily on documenting environmental inequality through the lens of race and class; and ( ) “second-generation” studies that extend beyond questions of distribution to incorporate a deeper consideration of theory and the ways that gender, sexuality, and other categories of difference shape ej struggles (buckingham and kulcur, ; walker ). in our book power, justice, and the environment , robert brulle and i used the term “critical environmental justice studies” (pellow and brulle, ), which has since been adopted by other scholars working to expand the academic field and politics of environmental justice (adamson ; holifield et al., ). this concept is meant to build on recent scholarship in ej studies— “second-generation” writings—that questions assumptions and gaps in earlier work in the field by embracing interdisciplinarity and methodologies and epistemologies including and beyond the social sciences. as this direction in scholarship is still in its formative stages, i take this opportunity to offer some guidance for what a critical ej studies might look like. critical ej (cej) studies is a perspective intended to address a number of limita- tions and tensions within ej studies. these include, for example: ( ) questions con- cerning the degree to which scholars should place emphasis on one or more social categories of difference (e.g., race, class, gender, sexuality, species, etc.) versus a focus on multiple forms of inequality; ( ) the extent to which scholars studying ej issues should focus on single-scale versus multi-scalar analyses of the causes, consequences, and possible resolutions of ej struggles; ( ) the degree to which various forms of social inequality and power—including state power—are viewed as entrenched and embed- ded in society; and ( ) the largely unexamined question of the expendability of human and non-human populations facing socioecological threats from states, industries, and other political economic forces. on the first point above, ej scholars have a tendency to focus on only one or two forms of social inequality in studies of environmental injustice. for example, some scholars continue to debate the relative importance of race versus class in terms of which category is most important with respect to the distribution of environmental hazards, while only a small group of scholars have explored the role of gender and sexuality in ej studies (buckingham and kulcur, ; smith ). moreover, the key social category species remains, at best, at the margins of the field of ej studies, despite the fact that, generally, when and where humans suffer from environmental inequalities, so does the more-than-human world (and vice versa) and often as a result of ideological frameworks that link marginalized humans to “nature.” my point here is that since multiple forms of inequality drive and characterize the experi- ence of environmental injustice, the field would do well to expand in that direc- tion. thus cej studies brings greater attention to how multiple social categories of difference are entangled in the production of environmental injustice, from race, gender, sexuality, ability, and class to species, which would attend to the at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core david n. pellow du bois review: social science research on race : , ways that both the human and the more-than-human world are impacted by and respond to environmental injustice. with respect to the second point above concerning scale , the ej studies literature tends to be characterized by research at one scale or another, rather than a multi-scalar approach. in other words, most researchers focus on the local, regional, national, or sometimes transnational or global scale, but few studies attempt to grasp how ej struggles function at multiple scales, from the cellular and bodily level to the global level and back (herod ; sze ). some scholars have addressed this important question by exploring cases in which pollutants produced in one part of the world travel across national borders and impact human and ecological health in another hemisphere (sze ). scale is of critical importance because it allows us to under- stand how environmental injustices are facilitated by decision-makers who behave as if sites where hazards are produced “out of sight and out of mind” are somehow irrel- evant to the health of people and ecosystems at the original sites of decision-making power and consumption. attention to scale also assists us in observing how social movement responses to environmental injustices draw on spatial frameworks, networks, and knowledge to make the connections between hazards in one place and harm in another. cej studies thus advocates multi-scalar methodological and theoretical approaches to studying ej issues in order to better comprehend the complex spatial and temporal causes, consequences, and possible resolutions of ej struggles. regarding the third point above—the degree to which various forms of inequality and power are viewed as entrenched in society—this concern stems from my conclu- sion that the vision of change articulated by ej studies scholars and most ej activ- ists generally looks to the state and capital to accommodate demands via legislation, institutional reforms, and other policy concessions. the concern here is that such an approach leaves intact the very power structures that produced environmental injus- tice in the first place. yes, it names those institutions and structures as sources of the problems and seeks to reform them, but by working in collaboration with those entities, such efforts ultimately risk reinforcing their legitimacy. cej studies urges a deeper grasp of the entrenched and embedded character of social inequality—including speciesism and state power—in society and therefore a reckoning with the need for transforma- tive (rather than primarily reformist) approaches to realize environmental justice. in other words, critical ej studies seeks to push our analyses and actions beyond the human, the state, and capital via a broad anti-authoritarian perspective. regarding the fourth point above, ej studies suggests that various marginalized human populations are treated—if not viewed—as inferior, and less valuable, to society than others. this point is largely undertheorized in the literature (mills ; pulido ). critical ej studies makes this theme explicit by arguing that these populations are marked for erasure and early death, and that ideological and institutional other- ing is linked to the more-than-human world as well. moreover, cej counters that dominant perspective with a framework that contends that these threatened bodies, populations, and spaces are indispensable to building socially and environmentally just and resilient futures for us all. the above constitute what i call the four pillars of cej studies. cej studies draws from the work of scholars across numerous fields that only periodically inter- sect, such as environmental justice studies (adamson ; bell ; bullard ; cole and foster, ), critical race theory (goldberg ), critical race feminism (hong ; smith ), ethnic studies (márquez ), gender and sexuality studies and ecofeminism (buckingham and kulcur, ; gaard ), political ecology (bennett ), and anti-authoritarian/anarchist theory (scott ; smith ). furthermore, cej studies is interdisciplinary, multi-methodological, and at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core critical environmental justice studies du bois review: social science research on race : , is activist-scholar inspired in that it seeks to bridge and blur the boundaries and borders between the academy and community, theory and practice, analysis and action. critical ej studies is only intended to be one of many possible approaches to environmental justice scholarship and action. it is neither prescriptive, nor is it a declaration of where the field should be headed. in the following sections, i apply a cej studies framework to the black lives matter movement to demonstrate the importance of encouraging scholars and activists to think through linkages across theory and social change politics that might not usually emerge from “traditional” ej studies or from within many social change movements. critical ej studies and black lives matter in order to examine black lives matter as a cej case study, i gathered data from the blm website, archives, and social media, as well as major essays published in national and international media outlets by blm advocates and supporters. this selection of data is not intended to be strictly representative, but rather, as a purposive sample it speaks to the core blm frames and the four pillars of cej studies. the first pillar: intersectionality and the racial discourse of animality cej studies recognizes that social inequality and oppression in all forms intersect and that members of the more-than-human world are subjects of oppression and agents of social change. black lives matter is a social movement organized primarily around the social category of race, but extends the analysis to multiple categories of difference, reflecting an emphasis on intersectionality . intersectionality is a concept intended to explain the ways that many identities and social categories work together to produce advantages and disadvantages across bodies and space, and that inequalities do not act independently of one another (collins ; hong ). the founders of blm present a deeply intersectional approach to the problem of devalued black life that is inclusive of class, gender, sexuality, immigration status, citizenship, age, ability, and other differences and social categories. all three founders of blm are women of color. one of them—alicia garza—identifies as a queer woman of color, while another—opal tometi—is the daughter of nigerian immigrants and works for an organization focused on the human rights of black immigrants. the third founder—patrisse cullors—who also identifies as queer, organizes support for incar- cerated persons and their families, with a focus on mental health. thus their political and professional work itself is a study in intersectional theory and practice. as blm co-founder alicia garza writes, “black lives matter affirms the lives of black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women, and all black lives along the gender spectrum” (garza ). critical ej studies speaks to the ways in which various social categories of dif- ference work to place particular bodies at risk of exclusion, marginalization, erasure, discrimination, violence, and othering. these insights are important for building an understanding of the ways that intra-human inequality and oppressions function and how they intersect with human-nonhuman oppression. as david nibert and michael fox put it, “[t]he oppression of various devalued groups in human societies is not independent and unrelated; rather, the arrangements that lead to various forms of oppression are integrated in such a way that the exploitation of one group frequently augments and compounds the mistreatment of others” (nibert and fox, , p. ). “various devalued groups in human societies” frequently include women, immigrants, at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core david n. pellow du bois review: social science research on race : , lgbtq persons, people of color, indigenous peoples, disabled persons, the elderly, low-income people, and nonhuman species. and while the experiences of these groups are qualitatively distinct (i.e., not equivalent), the logic of domination and othering as practiced by more powerful groups, the state, and capital provides the common thread of intersectionality through each of their oppressions. law enforcement personnel routinely engage in violent acts against humans and nonhumans, even when no threat is evident, thus revealing the ways that state violence produces intersecting oppressions. a baltimore sun investigation of the baltimore, maryland police department (the same town where freddie gray was murdered), detailed numerous incidents in which vulnerable people and nonhumans were the sub- jects of brutal and sometimes lethal force at the hands of police in that city. the report notes that young african american males were the targets of such violence, and so were elderly people, women, children, and nonhuman animals (friedersdorf ). the report discusses, for example, the use of a dead rat to intimidate a police officer working on a police brutality case and the murder of a dog by an officer to intimidate his girlfriend. the baltimore sun investigation appears to reflect what scholarly studies have long revealed: that there is a well-documented link between the use of violence against nonhuman animals and efforts to exert control over other humans, whether in the destruction of livestock and other food sources during wartime and conquests or through domestic violence directed primarily at women, children, and nonhuman companion animals or pets (adams ; ascione ; smits ). this brings us to what i call the racial discourse of animality , a term meant to capture the language that people use to describe human behavior using nonhuman references and analogies, signaling a set of assumptions surrounding what we view as acceptable “human” versus nonhuman behavior and how different bodies are valued. it reveals the means through which we discuss race, racism, and racial politics in more-than-human terms, as a way of defining the limits and boundaries of the human. this discourse is common in discussions around racial politics and flared up many times around blm protests against police brutality. what is fascinating is that people on all sides of the issues—activists, lawyers, and agents of the state—use this language. in other words, people deploy the racial discourse of animality in the service of white supremacy and in the service of racial justice. consider the following examples: lesley mcspadden, the mother of michael brown (an african american teenager killed by a police officer in ferguson, missouri) spoke to reporters at a public dem- onstration to call attention to the tragedy of her son’s death. she spoke to the bleak outlook of young african americans facing police brutality: “you took my son away from me! you know how hard it was for me to get him to stay in school and gradu- ate? you know how many black men graduate? not many! because you bring them down to this type of level where they feel they don’t got nothing to live for anyway!” while other protesters around mcspadden peacefully raised their hands in symbolic surrender, a police officer’s voice was heard and recorded yelling at them, calling them “animals” (fantz et al., ). in early , freddie gray, a twenty-five year old african american man was taken into police custody in baltimore, maryland, and, in the process, incurred severe spinal cord and neck injuries and died shortly afterward, sparking nationwide protests. in baltimore, the protests, led by african americans and many supporters of the blm movement, were mainly peaceful but were marred by property destruction, looting, and a number of police officers being injured. many whites took to social media— including baltimore county police officer jennifer lynne silver—and displayed their views on the matter referring to the people involved as “animals” and, in her words, a “disgrace to the human race” ( change.org ). at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core critical environmental justice studies du bois review: social science research on race : , the racial discourse of animality is also used to combat racism. an article in the guardian responded to jennifer silver’s epithets regarding protesters in baltimore by arguing that police and society often treat nonhuman animals better than african americans: but ‘animals’ is a misnomer. people—including police officers—are punished for killing or doing harm to domestic animals. baltimore has busted dog fighting rings and sent offenders to prison for animal cruelty. in , former baltimore city police officer alec taylor was sentenced to a year behind bars for killing a dog. that might not seem like much, but it is longer than the sentences given to the killers of michael brown, eric garner, trayvon martin, rekia boyd, or seven-year old aiyana stanley-jones (nichols ). in the spring of , a police officer shot walter scott, an unarmed african american man in north charleston, south carolina, after he fled his car during a traffic stop. malik shabazz, president of black lawyers for america and former chairman of the new black panther party, appeared on “cnn newsroom” and stated, “black men are being killed and hunted down like deer and like dogs” (griswold ). that same month, democratic congressman hank johnson of georgia took to the floor of the house of representatives to urge his colleagues to confront police brutality. drawing on a phrase usually reserved for hunting nonhuman animals, he stated, “it feels like open season on black men in america” (griswold , emphasis added). in these last examples, references to nonhumans are used to communicate the sentiment that african americans—like all human beings, presumably—should not be treated like nonhuman animals. the assumption here is also problematic because it is speciesist in that it implies that it is acceptable to wantonly hunt and slaughter nonhumans, even if the primary aim is to counter racist violence. my point is that we cannot understand racist violence, and the way we think, talk, and enact it, with- out paying attention to the relationship between humans and nonhumans, as these examples illustrate. finally, the role of agency is key to the first pillar of cej, since african americans and other marginalized populations are not just the targets of oppression but also regularly resist their subjugation. while traditional elements of what sociologists call “resource mobilization” (morris ) are on full display with the black lives matter movement—including the mobilization of human bodies, ideas, words, discourses, tactics, and strategies in protest—it is also the case that the urban built environment, information technology, and other forms of more-than-human objects and natures are also integral to that agency and therefore central to making this vision and practice of social change possible (bennett ). the second pillar: scale, race, and difference cej studies embraces multi-scalar methodological and theoretical approaches in order to better comprehend the complex spatial and temporal causes, consequences, and possible resolutions of ej struggles. scale is deeply racialized, gendered, and classed. the impacts of climate change offer a telling example of how environmental racism reflects this fact. while the conclusions of climate scientists are remarkably clear that anthropogenic climate change is occurring at a dramatic pace and with increasing intensity, this is also happening unevenly, with people of color, the poor, indigenous peoples, peoples of at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core david n. pellow du bois review: social science research on race : , the global south, and women suffering the most (harlan et al., ). thus, while climate change matters for all of us, it impacts people and nonhumans with dif- ferent levels of intensity. if one only pays attention to the global scale, it appears that the worst effects of climate change are not yet upon us. but if one examines what is occurring in neighborhoods, barrios , indigenous peoples’ lands, and much of the global south, the picture is quite different because the impacts are extensive and ongoing. as keith ellison and van jones ( ) put it, “[o]ur kids are being poisoned by the air they breathe. environmental injustices are taking black lives— that’s why our fight for equality has to include climate and environmental justice too.” social cognition studies find that “implicit bias” among white research sub- jects results in perceiving threats to their wellbeing when they see black and brown people when no such threat exists (kang ). while this research is highly con- sequential for everyday microsociological interactions across the racial spectrum (especially in the case of gun violence in the name of white “self defense”), it has major macrosociological implications as well. therefore i find that implicit bias is useful for thinking more deeply about the intersection of race and scale. in other words, if these studies find that people of color are implicitly viewed as threaten- ing, then their presence is perceived to be much larger in the social-cognitive terrain of whites. thus race and scale intertwine to reveal also that when black people respond to racism (whether by police or via environmental racism), their actions may be viewed as a threat that is disproportionate and outsized. we can see this, for example, in the militarized response by police departments when interacting with the black lives matter movement. many supporters of the black lives matter movement, and even military veterans, decried these practices when disturbing images of police and pro- testers clashing in ferguson, missouri, in response to the police killing of michael brown, seemed to be indistinguishable from media images of civilians being repressed by an occupying military force in some far away land. this fact begs for a scalar analy- sis that links militarized oppression of african americans to the u.s. military’s treat- ment of people of color elsewhere in the world—in afghanistan, iraq, syria, pakistan, yemen, palestine, and many other nations where the united states uses military force directly or by proxy to protect its interests. this is also an environmental justice issue because the u.s. military is one of the largest sources of pollution on earth (nazaryan ) and because militarism and masculinist politics tend to go hand in hand and both tend to result in socially and ecologically harmful practices. finally, blm’s work speaks to the myriad ways that scale can be thought of and articulated temporally . in fact, the entire point of the blm movement is, in some ways, an intervention to remind us that blatant acts of anti-black violence are not a thing of the past and are still quite rampant in what some observers had hoped would be a “postracial” era. blm co-founder alicia garza uses time as an indicator of the inter- section of race, sexuality, and scale’s intersections, but does so linking history to an imagined future: but what i can say to my child, just like my mom says to me, is that there was a time when it wasn’t ok for people to be out [about their sexuality]. there was a time when black people were being slaughtered. and i hope that the end to that story is, ‘and then we organized, and we built a vibrant international movement, and we really changed conditions for black people in this country, and for every- body.’ and i’m hoping that the story that i’m also able to tell is that our demands went beyond ‘stop killing us,’ to ensure the quality of life for everybody. and that we won that (brydum ). at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core critical environmental justice studies du bois review: social science research on race : , the third pillar: an anti-statist/anarchist reading of blm social inequalities—from racism to speciesism—are not aberrations, but rather are deeply embedded in society and reinforced by state power and market systems. there- fore, the current social order stands as a fundamental obstacle to social and environ- mental justice. a logical conclusion of this observation is that social change movements may be better off thinking and acting beyond the state and capital as targets of reform and/or as reliable partners. racism, for example, is a foundational component of the political, legal, economic, and cultural systems in the united states. african americans, for instance, enjoy fewer rights and significantly lower social value than whites, suffering deep economic, educa- tional, public health, and environmental inequalities; earning far less income and owning far less wealth and property than whites; and being more likely than whites to attend low quality, segregated schools and live in residentially segregated communities marked by financial disinvestment, a brutal occupying police force presence, and environmental racism (bullard ; cacho ; gilmore ; vargas ). public health dispari- ties impact african americans dramatically, as homicides, infant mortality, life expec- tancy, asthma, and a range of other illnesses and life events reveal a much lower statistical value of black life (williams and collins, ). and millions of african americans are either confined to prisons via mass incarceration or subjected to routine surveillance and control through the system of mass probation. thus, racism is, for black lives matter co-founder alicia garza, “a disease that this country has in our very dna” (garza ). in a statement posted on the black lives matter website, activists contend that the current state of racist violence against african americans is a core component of american life, a form of oppression that blacks have consistently challenged: “rooted in the experiences of black people in this country who actively resist our de-humanization, #blacklivesmatter is a call to action and a response to the virulent anti-black racism that permeates our society” ( blacklivesmatter.com ). debates often center on whether social movements should seek to reform or trans- form the legal system. blm is an important part of that conversation because it is a movement whose participants often embrace the state, but frequently do so in a critical fashion. for example, much of the chanting and protest calls at blm events include demands to “prosecute the police” and implement stronger laws against hate crimes and police brutality (furst ). the blm’s “national demands” document reads, in part, “we will help develop a network of organizations and advocates to form a national policy specifically aimed at redressing the systemic pattern of anti-black law enforcement violence in the u.s.” (moore and cullors, ). in november , after a group of white supremacists shot and wounded several activists who were pro- testing the police killing of an unarmed african american man named jamar clark in minneapolis, blm released a statement declaring, “the black lives matter network urgently calls upon the department of justice to investigate this shooting as a hate crime” ( blacklivesmatter.com ). finally, blm activists have regularly called for greater oversight over police and for increased presence of black people in govern- ment decision-making bodies. for example, in the wake of numerous police killings of african americans in recent years, the los angeles chapter of blm demanded that the mayor appoint activists from the black community to key city commissions, and a number of blm activists are running for political office. when blm demands inclusion in governmental bodies and invokes the language of hate crimes and terrorism, such efforts may appear to reflect the power of grass- roots movements to move state actors on important progressive issues, but it also indicates the movement’s willingness to expand troubling, controlling, authoritative, and at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core david n. pellow du bois review: social science research on race : , lethal state power. blm is therefore not asking how we might build safe communities beyond the state, but rather how we might do so with greater state intervention. blm co-founder patrice cullors’ vision of social change includes a plan to “divest from policing and divest from this prison system . . . and reinvest into poor communities, reinvest into allowing us to have access to healthy food, access to jobs, access to shelter” (cullors ). from a pluralist perspective, states are sites where citizens and other stakeholders converge to elect representatives and make their voices heard and shape public policy (dahl ). departing from that view, a power elite perspective casts states as sites of power struggles, where certain interest groups tend to dominate others, setting public policy agendas and unevenly shaping life chances for members of society (domhoff ). from women of color feminist, critical race theory, and anarchist per- spectives, states are also institutions that, by definition, practice exclusion, control, and violence (in addition to their other functions) (goldberg ; hong ; mills ; scott ; smith ). thus, the very purpose of a state is to exert dominance over populations, resources, and territory, among other things. if black lives matter was founded to challenge state-sanctioned violence then it makes sense to extend the reach of this movement’s analysis and action to the prob- lem of environmental racism. since environmental racism is often a form of state- sanctioned violence via the harm that state agencies and state-regulated companies perpetrate in communities of color, then blm might do well to pay greater attention to this issue. if we think of environmental racism as a form of violent control over bodies, space, and knowledge systems then we can more effectively theorize it as a form of state violence, a framework that is absent from most ej scholarship. more- over, as some blm activists urge us to think about how to make our communities safe “beyond policing” (tometi ), both blm and ej activists and scholars might begin to think about how to make our communities sites of ej and racial justice beyond the state . in fact, the blm movement, the ej movement, and ej scholarship generally look to the state and its legal systems to deliver justice and to regulate industry. thus far, however, the track record of state-based regulation and enforcement of racial and environmental justice policies in communities of color has been abysmal (cole and foster, ; gilmore ; lombardi et al., ). the fourth pillar: indispensability critical ej studies centers on the concepts of racial and socioecological indispensability . in black and brown solidarity ( ), john márquez introduces the concept “racial expendability” to argue that black and brown bodies are, in the eyes of the state and its constituent legal system, generally viewed as criminal, deficient, threatening, and deserving of violent discipline and even obliteration. márquez and other ethnic studies scholars contend that, in a white supremacist society, people of color are constructed as and rendered expendable (cacho ; márquez ; mills ; vargas ). ruth wilson gilmore speaks to this point in her book golden gulag ( ), in which she argues that the massive build up of prisons to warehouse people of color in the state of california and the united states nationally was a public policy deci- sion designed to contain and control populations whose very existence is viewed as troubling. extending this logic to the problem of environmental racism, philosopher and critical race theorist charles mills argues that people of african descent are con- sidered “trash” by policy makers and institutions promoting discriminatory envi- ronmental policies because these populations are associated with filth, waste, and uncleanliness in the popular imagination—thus locating pollution in their com- munities actually makes cultural common sense (mills ). at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core critical environmental justice studies du bois review: social science research on race : , critical ej studies builds on the work of these scholars by countering the ideology of white supremacy and human dominionism and articulating the perspective that excluded, marginalized, and othered populations, beings, and things—both human and more-than-human—must be viewed not as expendable but rather as indispensable to our collective futures. this is what i term racial indispensability (when referring to people of color) and socioecological indispensability (when referring to broader commu- nities within and across the human/more-than-human divide and their relationships to one another). racial indispensability is intended to challenge the logic of racial expendability and is the idea that institutions, policies, and practices that support and perpetrate anti-black racism suffer from the flawed assumption that the future of african americans is somehow de-linked from the future of white communities. people of color are members of our society, are core participants in our social systems, and are members of our socioecological systems, and are therefore key to ensuring the contin- ued functioning, sustainability, and resilience of our society and planet. the idea of indispensability is distinct from an assimilationist perspective, which seeks to (often involuntarily and violently) incorporate “others” into one’s own vision of a society (smith ). rather, indispensability honors key ej and ecological prin- ciples by seeing all communities (more-than-human and human) as interconnected, interdependent, but also sovereign and requiring the solidarity of others. indispens- ability should also not be confused with a functionalist view of society and socio- ecological relations as it recognizes that social roles, positions, and behaviors among various populations can and do conflict and change over time, and that the character of inequality and state and market power in most societies is highly unjust and must be confronted. functionalism, on the other hand, posits that whatever the character of inequality, social roles, and behaviors may be, it must be positive for society and there- fore is in no need of change (parsons ). indispensability argues against that logic because cej studies is fundamentally focused on securing justice and sustainability in a highly unjust and unsustainable system. thus indispensability demands dramatic change but does so from the perspective that all members of society and socioecologi- cal systems have something to contribute to that process and to our collective futures. socially, politically, philosophically, and ecologically, what this means is that we are all linked in webs of social interdependence, so that what happens to one group affects, in some way, all others. as dr. martin luther king, jr. famously wrote in his landmark “letter from birmingham jail” with regard to racism and the future of the united states: “injustice anywhere is injustice everywhere. . . . in a real sense all life is inter-related. all men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial ‘outside agitator’ idea . . .” (king ). thus the importance of cej studies here is to underscore that social systems predicated on the annihilation of black life reveal a self-defeating error. in other words, the idea that whiteness can only triumph and survive via the annihilation of black life commits the classic ecological error of dualism or separation . dualism is the idea that we see various categories of existence as separate and arranged in oppo- sitional hierarchies, such as culture/nature, man/woman, european/non-european, human/animal, white/black, heterosexual/homosexual, etc., when in fact these cate- gories are constantly blurred, transgressed, and revealed to be socially constructed and highly fluid and malleable. so cej studies facilitates an understanding that a vision of white supremacy premised on the destruction of people of color is as illogical and self-defeating as a vision of an economy and a nation-state premised on the destruc- tion of ecosystems. in a sense, this observation demonstrates a reality of social systems as ecosystems, and vice versa: that everything in the universe is hitched to everything at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core david n. pellow du bois review: social science research on race : , else, so that what affects one member or element affects all of them. the destruction of people of color harms white people and it harms the more-than-human world, and vice versa, so cej studies affirms that black lives, the lives of people of color, are indis- pensable . going further, the idea of socioecological indispensability reflects the cej studies perspective that the wellbeing of all people, species, and ecosystems is indispensible . this is both a socioecological reality and an affirmation of a politics of solidarity and coalition building that firmly states “all of us or none!” black lives matter activists routinely speak to this issue as well. in , blm issued a “state of the black union” in which they wrote, “none of us are free until all of us are free” ( declarationproject.org ). this is a variation on a quote that has been attributed to the likes of the poet emma lazarus, the reverend dr. martin luther king, jr., and many others. it is also articulated powerfully in the barry mann song “none of us are free,” which includes the chorus, “none of us are free, none of us are free, if one of us is chained, none of us are free.” expressing this view more than a century ago, african american historian anna julia cooper told a group of black clergymen in , “only the black woman can say ‘when and where i enter, in the quiet, undisputed dignity of my womanhood, without violence and without suing or special patronage, then and there the whole . . . race enters with me’” (bailey , p. ). a year later, making this claim even stronger, at the world’s congress of representative women, cooper stated: let woman’s claim be as broad in the concrete as the abstract. we take our stand on the solidarity of humanity, the oneness of life, and the unnaturalness and injus- tice of all special favoritism, whether of sex, race, country, or condition. if one link of the chain is broken, the chain is broken. a bridge is no stronger than its weakest part, and a cause is not worthier than its weakest element. least of all can woman’s cause afford to decry the weak. we want, then, as toilers for the universal triumph of justice and human rights, to go to our homes from this congress demanding an entrance not through a gateway for ourselves, our race, our sex, or our sect, but a grand highway for humanity (cooper ). blm co-founder alicia garza echoes and articulates this idea as follows: #blacklivesmatter doesn’t mean your life isn’t important—it means that black lives, which are seen as without value within white supremacy, are important to your liberation. given the disproportionate impact state violence has on black lives, we understand that when black people in this country get free, the benefits will be wide reaching and transformative for society as a whole. when we are able to end hyper-criminalization and sexualization of black people and end the poverty, control, and surveillance of black people, every single person in this world has a better shot at getting and staying free. when black people get free, everybody gets free . this is why we call on black people and our allies to take up the call that black lives matter. . . . our collective futures depend on it (garza , emphasis added). discussion and conclusion critical environmental justice studies seeks to expand the field of ej studies to move beyond its conceptual, theoretical, disciplinary, and methodological limitations. since that path is still very much in formation, this paper is an effort to chart one course in that direction with greater specificity. critical ej studies draws from numerous fields at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core critical environmental justice studies du bois review: social science research on race : , of scholarship in order to produce more robust accounts for why environmental injus- tices occur and persist, for how human and nonhuman forces shape and are shaped by them, and for what environmental justice might look like. that is, the promise of cej studies lies in its capacity to more fully explain the sources and consequences of our socioecological crises and develop more generative analyses of how social change efforts within and across species may meet those challenges. finally, cej studies can aid scholars and advocates in thinking through a redefi- nition of the concept of environmental justice itself . perhaps any discussion regarding the future of ej studies and the ej movement might begin by connecting early ej scholarship, which centers primarily around the intersection of social inequality and environmental harm, with the concept of ecological justice , which centers on the rela- tionship of human beings to the broader nonhuman world. by the term ecological justice, i mean to suggest a more respectful and egalitarian relationship of human beings to one another and to the greater more-than-human world. this model of analy- sis and politics begins with humans taking responsibility for practicing transforma- tive socioecological political work and extends to understanding inequalities within and across species and space to imagine and struggle for a more democratic multi- species world. nonhuman species and ecosystems may not engage in politics the way humans tend to, but they can and do exert influence and power over the world (bennett ): for example, consider the impacts of fossil fuels on the daily lives of human beings and on the political systems and economies of every nation on earth. ecological justice destabilizes the notion of the human as a biological category at the apex of a human/nature hierarchy and, instead, embraces it as a political cat- egory that engages with the broader ecological community. this model of politics also rejects the state as an arbiter of justice and inclusion. the state has managed, included, excluded, homogenized, and controlled humans and nonhuman natures for the benefit of a small elite. that should be reason enough to consider the merits of an anarchist or anti-authoritarian approach to socioecological change. curiously, this concept of ecological justice closely mirrors and parallels the principles of envi- ronmental justice—a sort of founding document of the u.s. ej movement, suggest- ing that, in many ways, the ej movement and ej studies have yet to catch up to the vision of the movement’s founding principles, which are largely aligned with a cej studies perspective. in this paper, i applied a critical environmental justice perspective to the phenomenon of the black lives matter movement, demonstrating how attention to multiple categories of difference and inequality (including more-than-human species and the built environment); an emphasis on the role of scale as a way of understanding the violence of racism and the promise of resistance movements; a focus on linking the entrenched character of social inequalities with transformative, anti-authoritarian and anarchist perspectives; and an application of the concepts of racial and socioecological indispensability can produce an enriched account of that movement’s core concerns, its limitations, and its possibilities. black lives matter challenges the scourge of state- sanctioned violence against diversely constituted communities of african descent, with a primary emphasis on police brutality and mass incarceration. i argue that if we think of environmental racism as an extension of those state-sanctioned practices—in other words a form of authoritarian control over bodies, space, and knowledge systems— then we can more effectively theorize it as a form of state violence, a framework that is absent from most ej scholarship. corresponding author : david n. pellow, environmental studies program, university of california santa barbara, bren hall, santa barbara, ca - . e-mail: pellow@es.ucsb.edu at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core david n. pellow du bois review: social science research on race : , notes . after the november police killing of jamar clark, an unarmed african american male in minneapolis, minnesota, black lives matter protesters demanded that the state prosecute the officers involved. the state declined to do so. . for exceptions, see, e.g., liam downey ( ) and andrea smith ( ). references adams , carol j . 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survey to assess provision for people from diverse ethnic backgrounds in england and wales international journal of environmental research and public health article a national memory clinic survey to assess provision for people from diverse ethnic backgrounds in england and wales shovanne brown , gill livingston , and naaheed mukadam , ,* ���������� ������� citation: brown, s.; livingston, g.; mukadam, n. a national memory clinic survey to assess provision for people from diverse ethnic backgrounds in england and wales. int. j. environ. res. public health , , . https://doi.org/ . / ijerph academic editor: robbert huijsman received: december accepted: january published: february publisher’s note: mdpi stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. copyright: © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). division of psychiatry, faculty of brain sciences, university college london, gower street, london wc e bt, uk; skgtsb @ucl.ac.uk (s.b.); g.livingston@ucl.ac.uk (g.l.) camden and islington nhs foundation trust, st pancras way, london nw pe, uk * correspondence: n.mukadam@ucl.ac.uk; tel.: + - abstract: english national guidelines regarding dementia assessment and management recommend consideration of cultural and linguistic diversity when assessing people with cognitive complaints. to date there has been no assessment of adherence to these guidelines. we aimed to assess whether current services provided in memory assessment services (mas) adhere to national policy, in their approach to the assessment and management of individuals with memory problems from minority ethnic backgrounds. we sent a survey to memory services in england and wales. twenty mas from seven regions responded to the survey. we found that % ( ) provided translated resources, % ( ) used cognitive assessment tools that are culturally sensitive and appropriate, and % ( ) showed good use of sufficiently skilled and knowledgeable interpreters. communication barriers, particularly language, were raised as a potential obstacle to diagnosing minority ethnic patients. memory clinics appear to reflect national policy for the assessment and management of memory problems in minority ethnic patients. however, only a minority of services responded and they may be more engaged in considering these populations. we need wider knowledge of practice to explore how guidelines support healthcare professional’s assessment of patients from minority ethnic groups in memory service diagnostic procedures. keywords: dementia; ethnicity; health inequalities; memory assessment service . introduction the united kingdom (uk) has a sizeable minority ethnic population making up % of the whole population and % of the london population [ ]. an estimated , people in the uk living with dementia are from minority ethnic backgrounds [ ]. this number is expected to double to , by [ ]. with an increased prevalence of dementia [ – ], it is important that minority ethnic patients can access services that address their cultural and linguistic needs, facilitating timely and accurate diagnosis. in the uk, the main path- way to obtaining a dementia diagnosis for older adults is referral to a memory assessment service (mas) where trained clinicians (usually psychiatrists) will clinically assess and diagnose dementia with the aid of imaging and neuropsychological testing where needed. all services are free at the point of care through the national health service (nhs). the english national dementia strategy [ ] consists of objectives and acts as a strategic framework for health and social care professionals, to improve the quality of life for people with dementia and their carers, and anyone affected by dementia. the frame- work highlights the importance of providing better knowledge of dementia to reduce stigma, minimise the fear and misunderstanding of dementia, and help people understand the benefit of early diagnosis. it emphasises developing services that meet the needs of everyone, regardless of ethnic background. this is supported by supplementary policy documents such as the national dementia strategy equalities action plan [ ] that states that dementia services should recognise and consider the effect that culture and social differences, such as english fluency, lack of understanding of dementia, and inaccessible int. j. environ. res. public health , , . https://doi.org/ . /ijerph https://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph https://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph https://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - https://doi.org/ . /ijerph https://doi.org/ . /ijerph https://creativecommons.org/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://doi.org/ . /ijerph https://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph https://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= int. j. environ. res. public health , , of and culturally insensitive services may have on ethnic communities accessing health and care services. in addition, the prime minister’s dementia challenge [ ] was introduced in with the aim of improving health and care services, creating dementia-friendly communities and investing in dementia research. the benefits of specific service provision for minority ethnic patients may facilitate timely diagnosis which acts as a gateway to the opportunity to access pharmacological treat- ments, non-pharmacological interventions for cognition and for non-cognitive symptoms and time to consider advance planning in the earlier stages of dementia. this may help to increase a patient’s quality of life allowing them to live well with dementia [ ]. despite this, an earlier study finds that some mas provide no or limited specific memory services for patients from minority ethnic backgrounds [ ]. such studies assessing service provision for minority ethnic patients looking at only small geographical regions in england and wales may not reflect the overall current practice of mas, possibly due to the difference in diversity and practice within england and wales. currently, we have a better understanding of the facilitators and obstacles to dementia diagnosis in minority ethnic patients. these include but are not limited to the effect that culture and ethnicity have on carer beliefs and attitudes of help-seeking, language barriers and english proficiency, the stigma of dementia diagnosis, and negative experiences and opinions of treatment within the healthcare system [ – ]. these cultural and social differences between minority ethnic groups and the majority population in help-seeking may cause delays in early diagnosis and intervention. it is therefore important to assess whether national policies are being taken up to address these obstacles and are being used to achieve good standards of care and quality of life for all patients. we aimed to assess whether current services provided in mas reflect national policies, regarding their approach to the assessment and management of individuals with memory problems from minority ethnic backgrounds in england and wales. . materials and methods the study did not require ethical approval as using the nhs research ethics guidelines and university college london research authority, the study was defined as a service evaluation (see supplementary materials for the exemption certificate-figure s ). reporting of aggregate data here is anonymous so the participants cannot be identified. in this study, the term ethnic minority referred to any individual with a different national or cultural tradition to the majority population in the uk- white or white british. this included individuals from white other, irish/gypsy travellers, indian, pakistani, bangladeshi, chinese, other asian, mixed ethnicity, african, afro-caribbean and black british backgrounds. . . data collection instrument in the uk, strategic frameworks regarding assessment and treatment of cognitive impairment, such as the national dementia strategy [ ], memory services national ac- creditation programme (msnap) [ ], and the national institute for health and care excellence (nice) [ ] have been published with the consideration of cultural and linguis- tic diversity when assessing people with cognitive complaints. we searched for these and other england and wales guidelines on dementia diagnosis and management and read each document to extract guidance specific to assessment and management of people from minority ethnic backgrounds. the main guidelines on dementia services regarding patients from minority ethnic backgrounds state that they should: provide services that meet the needs of all patients; use interpreters who are sufficiently skilled and knowledgeable, using family members of a patient only in exceptional circumstances; provide services that are accessible for all; and not rely solely on cognitive tests for diagnosis, including in circumstances where it is not possible to administer the test in a language in which the patient is sufficiently fluent. using these published guidelines, we designed and created an online survey about memory assessment service practice. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of prior to distributing the survey, two consultant old age psychiatrists and a memory service manager evaluated it for clarity, understandability and relevance and we edited based on their feedback. adjustments included adding a ‘not applicable’ option and free text boxes to multiple-choice questions to provide an opportunity for participants to include responses that we had not initially considered as part of the set answers. we also changed the time frame so questions asked about the last year of routine practice. this allowed participants to find data to answer the questions more easily. the final survey consisted of questions (six single selection drop-down responses, multiple choice questions and four open-ended questions) and measured six main con- structs: mas patient demographics, patient referral, availability of interpreters, translated resources, cognitive assessment tools and barriers to dementia diagnosis and outreach activities (see supplementary materials for the survey items-table s ). the first section of the survey concerned the patient demographic data of the mas. the second section focused on the approximate total number of patients referred for an assessment, the percentage of patients who did not have their ethnicity recorded, the percentage of patients who were white british, and change in minority ethnic patient referral. the next section looked at the percentage of patients who did not speak english fluently and the use of family and professional interpreters. the fourth section assessed the use of cognitive assessment tools for minority ethnic patients, any limitations of use, and strategies used to support diagnosis. the final section of the survey concerned mas outreach activities with community services, significant obstacles to diagnosing minority ethnic patients, and barriers to post-diagnostic services or interventions. the end of the survey included space for participants to pro- vide additional comments on their experience of diagnosing and offering post-diagnostic support to minority ethnic patients in their memory clinic. . . survey procedure members of the nhs england dementia clinical network were recruited to assist in the circulation of the survey. participants of our study were managers or clinical leads for mas in england and wales. they were identified through the nhs england dementia clinical network, the royal college of psychiatrists, msnap and emails and telephone calls to individual services. the survey was distributed to mas in the following regions in england and wales: north east england, north west england, yorkshire, west midlands, east midlands, south west england, south east england, east of england, greater london, and wales. all mas were sent an introductory letter by email which detailed the aim of the study, the definition of minority ethnic group, the duration of the survey, that all responses would be strictly confidential, mentioned a £ voucher incentive, a link to the online survey and contact details of the researcher. the letter also detailed relevant instructions to aid the completion of the survey, specifically, that participants should think about the year prior to covid- adjustments when routine memory assessment service activity took place. we contacted all mas in england and wales by email in april . data was collected between april and august . four weeks after sending the survey, we sent a follow-up email to all mas, and again in mid-june for those who had not participated in the survey. . . data analysis we made demographic information non-identifiable by not reporting names of mas and grouping the data by region of the mas in england and wales. to assess whether mas were reflective of national policy regarding the assessment and management of individuals with memory problems from minority ethnic backgrounds, we grouped quantitative data into the six question constructs. we summarised the data by calculating the percentage of responses to show the proportion of mas that provided a particular answer. qualitative data from the open-ended questions were organised by common themes that emerged from data analysis and reported under their question subtype. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . results . . demographics of the mas contacted, ( . %) in seven out of regions we sent the survey to in england and wales responded to the survey. we received responses from mas in the following regions: north east england ( ), north west england ( ), south west england ( ), south east england ( ), east of england ( ), greater london ( ), wales ( ). in ( %) of the participating mas, ethnic minority referrals comprised less than % of patients seen for an initial assessment (refer to table ). almost half- ( %) of participating mas were based in greater london where a greater range of diversity in patients is seen, possibly due to the higher percentage of minority ethnic groups making up the total population. the majority of mas- ( %) reported that in their experience, the number of minority ethnic patients attending memory services was staying the same. no mas reported that the number of minority ethnic patients attending their memory clinic had decreased in the last year. table presents a summary of the number of responses we received from each region, the demographic makeup of the region, the percentage of ethnic minority patients that each mas estimated they saw in the last year, the percentage of patients who did not speak english fluently, the approximate use of interpreters in one year and if the mas provides translated resources. in general, the percentage of referrals from minority ethnic groups was similar to the expected percentage of people of minority ethnic groups in those regions, according to national surveys. . . availability of interpretation in memory clinics the majority of patients attending mas were reported to speak english fluently enough to be fully assessed in english. ( %) of mas reported that less than % of their patients did not speak english fluently. use of interpreters in mas ranged from two to in a year (refer to table ). the percentage of referrals that required an interpreter ranged from . %- . % of the total number of patients seen for an initial assessment. use of interpreters was generally aligned with percentage of referrals from minority ethnic groups. in the case that a patient did not speak english fluently enough to be assessed in english, ( %) of mas used professional interpreters in more than % of cases when an interpreter was indicated. ( %) of mas reported using family members as interpreters in less than % of the cases where a patient did not speak english fluently. the most common circumstances a family member of a patient was used as an interpreter was due to a lack of availability of professional interpreters in the required language, followed by the refusal by a service user: “sometimes people say they speak english but when we see them it is not sufficient to complete an assessment so we would not have booked an interpreter” (mas greater london) another challenge to the provision of professional interpreters highlighted was inter- preters cancelling at short notice or not attending the appointment. “the interpreter booked and did not arrive on the day” (mas greater london) “the professional interpreter cancelled in short notice” (mas greater london) . . provision of translated resources mas who responded offered resources in a range of languages with the most common being information about dementia diagnosis ( responses), followed by leaflets about med- ication ( responses) and information about dementia subtypes ( responses). the three most common languages that resources were translated in were punjabi, urdu and bengali. participating mas also offered translated materials in other languages including russian, farsi, vietnamese, and tagalog. four mas, ( %) did not provide any translated resources. our findings show that ( %) of mas report that less than % of their referrals are patients from minority ethnic groups, with ( %) reporting that less than % of their patients do not speak english fluently to be fully assessed in english. of the four mas int. j. environ. res. public health , , of who reported not providing translated resources, two of the services reported that ap- proximately – % of their patients attending their clinic do not speak english fluently, one reported that – % of their patients do not speak english fluently, and the final mas did not provide data on their patients english fluency (refer to table ). there was a wide range in type of translated resources available and this was not related to the percentage of referrals from minority ethnic groups. table . summary table with demographic information and its relation to the percentage of minority ethnic patients attending mas and use of interpreters. region number of responses received in region % of ethnic minorities in region number of referrals per year (range) % of ethnic minority referrals % not speaking english approximate use of interpreters in one year n (% of total referrals) translated materials north east england . – – ( ) , , north west england . – – ( . ) , , – – ( . ) , , , , , , , – – ( . ) , , , , , , , , n/a – – , , , , south west england . – – ( . ) , south east england . – – ( . ) , , , , , , , – – ( . ) – – ( ) , , , , , , , – – ( . ) , , , , , , east of england . – – ( . ) greater london . – – – ( . – ) , , , , , , – – – ( . – ) , , , , , , , - - n/a - - ( . ) , , , , , - - n/a - - ( . ) - - ( . ) - - ( . ) wales . – – ( . ) , , , , , , , total note: n/a- mas who report not storing information to provide data to answer the question. provision of translated materials options: -no translated resources, -online videos, -information about dementia diagnosis, -information about dementia subtypes, -leaflets about medication, -leaflets about other psychosocial treatments including cognitive stimulation therapy cst, -information about participation in research, -information about lasting power of attorney, -information about advanced care planning, -leaflets about driving and dementia, -other. in analysing the qualitative data for these questions, a common theme that emerged was the use of the internet to access readily available translated materials if the mas did not offer it: “we access all languages available on the alzheimer’s society website if we do not have it in house” (mas greater london) . . cognitive assessment tools the majority– ( %) of respondents reported using alternative standard and vali- dated cognitive assessment tools for minority groups with the most commonly used being the rowland universal dementia assessment scale (rudas) and translated versions of the addenbrooke’s cognitive examination (ace). mas highlighted that some limitations of using alternative cognitive assessments tools were that they had difficulty translating the assessment and interpreting alternative cognitive tests may be challenging in a high functioning patient. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of “interpreting the results by a non-speaker of the language is difficulty. there is a lack of guides translating and explaining the cultural adaptations to the tests” (mas north west england) we found that mas also did not solely rely on cognitive scores for diagnosis and used specific strategies to diagnose minority ethnic patients. three key themes emerged from data analysis with regards to additional information used to support a diagnosis: (i) understanding of cultural beliefs “we always ensure we are aware of differences in cultural norms, respect for beliefs are paramount. we have at least one post that has a protected characteristic i.e., staff member must speak punjabi fluently to enable people to attend cst in more than one language” (mas greater london) (ii) collateral information: “seek collateral information from family, social, and health networks” (mas greater london) (iii) assessing patient functioning: “activities of daily living assessment” (mas greater london) . . barriers to dementia diagnosis and outreach activities nine ( %) of participating mas highlighted that the most significant obstacle to diagnosing minority ethnic patients was language barriers followed by the patient’s lack of understanding of dementia. problems with communicating via letters written only in english were raised as potential barriers to the assessment of minority ethnic patients “language has been an issue when appointment letters are sent out in english” (mas north west england) there was evidence of some engagement between mas and community services with the most common outreach activities being with the local voluntary sector ( . % responses), followed by community centres ( . % responses), and partnering with places of worship ( . %). with regards to outreach activities in mas, % of respondents reported that in their experience these activities increase the number of minority ethnic patients in the service, whilst % reported that it has no impact. one participant stated that: “raising events with specific communities does not seem to raise referral rates, but it helps with the management of those who are referred” (mas wales) . . additional comments mas reported trying to improve their services to suit the needs of minority ethnic patients. those based in less diverse regions seem to lack the opportunity to tailor their approaches, possibly due to low referral rates of patients from diverse backgrounds. “we have been focusing on trying to better address needs of our growing number of ethnic minority patients but so far with limited success- primarily due to language barriers. our numbers are relatively small so it is proving difficult to do things other than on an individual one to one basis” (mas wales) . discussion this is, to our knowledge, the first national survey to evaluate if mas adhere to national policy in their approach to the assessment and management of individuals with suspected memory problems from minority ethnic groups. focusing on the services pro- vided to minority ethnic patients and the experiences of diagnosis from the perspective of healthcare professionals, we found that there was a wide range in the proportion of minority ethnic patients seen in each memory service. for almost half of the memory services, most of their patients were from a white british background which is in line with what would be expected based on underlying demographics though, in some areas in london we would expect the proportion of minority ethnic patients to be much higher. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of this may indicate that referral rates in some regions of england and wales may not reflect the underlying population or suggests underuse of mas. our findings provide an initial indication of how well mas reflect guidelines for dementia assessment and management and it appears that mas are practicing in accor- dance to the guidelines. in general, mas used professional interpreters, likely to be more knowledgeable and skilled in interpretation compared to family members, in the majority of cases where a patient did not speak english fluently. they considered communication barriers, particularly language, as a major obstacle to diagnosing patients from diverse backgrounds. mas were able to recognise the obstacles faced when diagnosing minority ethnic patients which suggests a good awareness of the different cultural and linguistic needs of these patients. there was some evidence of services trying to actively overcome these obstacles, for example, the majority of participating mas did provide resources in translated formats and also used the internet to source readily available resources if they did not have the language available. this demonstrates that mas do attempt to reduce some of the inequalities of service provision where resources are readily available to use. however, a fifth of mas surveyed did not provide any translated resources to their patients. it may be that mas who reported not providing translated resources may not have the demand for these services, for example they have a low minority ethnic population in their region. if mas do not frequently have patient referrals from minority ethnic groups, they may not have reason to provide specific services, and rather do things on a case by case basis. however, this does not mean that the mas would be unable to provide culturally and sensitive appropriate services. there was also some evidence of engagement between mas and community services, although opinions were divided in whether this increased the referral rates of minority ethnic patients or if it had no impact. the majority of mas recognised that cognitive assessment tools used for the majority population are not suitable for minority ethnic patients, due to factors such as differences in the level of education, culture, language and potentially different baseline cognitive states and so they used different culturally adapted assessment tools that were available. our findings reflect national policies for dementia diagnosis where msnap guidelines state that the use of a patient’s family member as an interpreter should only be considered in exceptional circumstances, e.g., when it is not possible to get an interpreter in time. this is because the use of a professional interpreter may provide a degree of accuracy in delivering diagnostic feedback, which may be limited by a family member’s ability to translate medical information appropriately [ ]. it is encouraging to see mas following practice guidelines and providing professional interpreters in the majority of the cases where a patient does not speak english fluently. however, a potential barrier to the assessment of minority ethnic patients in mas raised was problems with communicating the need for interpreters. some services said in some cases, they were unaware an interpreter would be needed until the patient arrived. in this case, they may have to re-book an appointment. this suggests that there may be a gap in communication between other parts of the dementia care pathway, patients and mas. the addition of this topic to further surveys might establish the role of this problem in mas to assess if it is a significant hindrance in their ability to provide professional interpretation when required. this would help to ensure patients from minority ethnic backgrounds are appropriately assessed and supports timely and accurate diagnosis. previous research has also highlighted inequalities that exist at all stages of the diagnostic and care pathway and we need work to better connect services and ensure people from all ethnic groups have equal access and quality of assessment and care [ ]. problems with communicating via letters written only in english was raised as another potential barrier to assessment, which supports previous research that demonstrates how language proficiency may affect mas use [ ]. this is important because if patients are un- aware of their referral or appointment offered, they are less likely to attend mas, delaying diagnosis and reducing the benefit of pharmacological treatment on symptoms [ , , ]. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of it is important for healthcare staff to be aware of a patient’s linguistic needs at all stages of the dementia care pathway, e.g., offer referral letters that are translated into a patient’s language, so it does not affect service provision [ ]. this would help to ensure that infor- mation giving is accessible and consistent throughout the whole dementia care pathway and not just in a single service. in line with previous research studies, it is possible that mas in less diverse areas of england may not provide as much specific services that meet the needs of minority ethnic groups [ ]. in comparison to mas based in regions that are highly diverse, who have the opportunity to be more active in addressing key inequalities, e.g., having a protected post for staff who speak a particular language and links with local communities. this suggests that there may be a difference between areas of england and wales in their provision of specific dementia services, however, due to our low response rate it makes it difficult to spot any trends in service provision based on regions. in regions where there is a high population of specific minority ethnic groups, it may be advisable that mas employ staff members that have competencies in a particular language. this may be especially important where the majority of people in the region do not speak english. long term, this may not cost more in comparison to hiring an interpreter when required. it may also ensure that some of the problems with arranging interpreters including the lack of availability of a professional interpreter in a required language, and interpreters not arriving on the day or cancelling at short notice are less common. this may provide some additional benefits which enable mas to be more culturally sensitive on the whole. although, it is worth noting that people from the same country may not speak the same languages and several different dialects may be spoken. therefore, having a protected staff post for a particular language does not mean the needs of the whole group or other minority ethnic groups who are less represented in the area will be met. however, employing staff members with language competencies may break down some linguistic barriers and provide common ground for understanding. low referral rates of minority ethnic patients in particular regions of england and wales may mean that there is little demand for specific dementia services such as inter- preters and translated materials. with ethnic diversity becoming more evenly spread in the uk [ ], mas should have the ability and be ready to provide culturally appropriate and sensitive dementia services when needed. however, intention and ability to provide were not factors that we measured in our survey, rather we focused on current provision. the addition of this factor to a future survey could allow a better understanding of mas adherence to national policy. for example, it would allow mas who may not be currently providing specific services to minority ethnic patients (due to lack of demand, low re- ferral rates, or low minority ethnic population) to provide answers about whether they have procedures, services and resources in place if requested. this would provide a more holistic understanding of whether mas adhere to national policy in their approach to the assessment and management of individuals with memory problems from minority ethnic backgrounds. the msnap [ ] guidelines states that clinical staff should fulfil competencies in higher education dementia core skills in topics including equality diversity and inclusion in dementia care. there should be an emphasis on staff working in mas to be confident in understanding the differing needs of minority ethnic patients with dementia, e.g., through training. we were not able to assess this during the survey so this may be an impor- tant aspect to study to ensure healthcare professionals are better equipped to deal with cultural diversity. recent events highlighted by the black lives matter movement have made societies around the world more aware of systematic racism and its drastic impact on the black community and ethnic minorities. more than ever, it has highlighted the importance of educating and understanding the racial disparities that unfortunately still exist in our communities. in recent years, there has been increased awareness of the challenges that black and minority ethnic communities face in dementia care. however, there is an urgent int. j. environ. res. public health , , of need to persist in research that addresses how we can make adaptations to interventions and services, so they are inclusive and appropriate for these communities. the impact of these events has welcomed an avenue for change in dementia research. for example, professional bodies are recognising the need to have honest and open conversations with staff working in dementia services, regarding support in addressing and accommodating the needs of minority groups [ ]. our research follows suit in that we hope to implement best practices in the future and highlight the importance of all patients having access to support and suitable services in memory clinics. . . limitations we aimed to gain a broad and representative understanding of the current practice in mas and managed to collect data from seven out of regions we contacted in england and wales. we initially intended to include scotland in our sample but could not as we did not have a centralised list for scottish memory services, and were unable to contact any before data collection started. the survey was sent out at the beginning of the covid- pandemic and therefore it was perhaps unsurprising that response rates were low. memory service activity was disrupted, for example, staff members may have been ill or redeployed to inpatient psychiatric and general services. we attempted to overcome this limitation by sending two follow-up emails and collating information about all memory services so we could contact them directly through telephone to increase our response rate. understandably, this was a very difficult time and participants may not have been able to complete the survey. % [ ] of the responding mas were from greater london with other regions less represented. therefore, it may be difficult to generalise our findings to suggest that all memory clinics in england and wales are offering services to minority ethnic patients which reflect national guidelines. despite this, participating mas came from areas with both high and low underlying minority ethnic populations. this may provide an indication that mas are reflecting national guidelines and considering the cultural and linguistic needs of minority ethnic patients, regardless of region. a potential source of bias in our study is non-response bias, where participants who were interested in the study’s research topic were more likely to participate in our survey. it could be that mas who did not respond to the survey may have no or limited service provision for minority ethnic patients or few minority ethnic patients. therefore, the data collected from the survey may only reflect the positive side of current practice and may lead to an over-estimation of how well mas reflect national guidelines. we attempted to overcome this by collecting data over a number or months and by being flexible with the data collection deadline and extending it to accommodate for later responses from some of the mas. we also ensured confidentiality by stating in our introductory letter that all responses are strictly confidential and results would be reported without naming memory services. . . future research future research could consider further how national policy is used in mas to support the diagnosis of minority ethnic patients. future studies could assess mas views on national policies such as msnap, the national dementia strategy, and nice guidelines to see if they provide enough specific guidance for the assessment of minority ethnic patients and if they judge they cover everything necessary. for example, if the guidelines provide mas with reasonable knowledge on how to tailor memory services with consideration of cultural and linguistic needs to meet the increasing demand for the assessment of these patients. this would provide further insight into the effectiveness of these guidelines, when used to diagnosis minority ethnic patients and provide services that support timely and accurate diagnosis and perhaps provide suggestions to use for future updates of national dementia guidelines. we could additionally survey provision for training staff in assessing diverse populations. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . conclusions in conclusion, this study shows that in general mas respondents recognise the lin- guistic and cultural needs of minority ethnic patients, attempt to overcome the recognised obstacles of diagnosing these patients and provide culturally sensitive and appropriate services including the use of professional interpreters, translated resources and use of culturally sensitive cognitive assessment tools, which reflects national policy for dementia assessment and management. our survey suggests that there may be a disparity across england and wales in the provision of specific dementia services tailored for minority ethnic patients that would facilitate timely and accurate diagnosis. this may be due to the population of minority ethnic groups in certain regions being low, therefore less use, or the number of patients who attend the memory clinics who do not speak english. however, this does not provide an indication on a mas ability or readiness to provide these services when required. there is a growing understanding of the obstacles minority ethnic groups face in the dementia care pathway. it is now essential to assess the use of national policy in mas to evaluate if strategic frameworks for dementia diagnosis and management reflect this knowledge, and provide guidelines that are specific enough to support dementia healthcare professions in the assessment of patients from minority ethnic backgrounds. this will ensure that healthcare professionals are confident in their ability to tailor ser- vices and interventions, so they are culturally appropriate and meet the needs minority ethnic patients. supplementary materials: the following are available online at https://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / /s . author contributions: conceptualization, n.m., g.l. and s.b.; methodology, n.m., g.l. and s.b.; formal analysis, s.b.; investigation, n.m., g.l. and s.b.; writing—original draft preparation, s.b.; writing—review & editing, n.m., g.l. and s.b.; supervision, n.m. and g.l. all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. funding: this research received no external funding. institutional review board statement: ethical review and approval were waived. the study did not require ethical approval as using the nhs research ethics guidelines and university college london research authority, the study was defined as a service evaluation. informed consent statement: patient consent was waived due to no patient level data being used. data availability statement: data are available from the authors upon request. acknowledgments: the authors would like to express their gratitude to helen souris and laura cook from nhs england dementia clinical network for their time to provide feedback and distribute the survey. we are also thankful to suzanne joels and lauren huzzey for their input in designing the survey. thank you to all the respondents of the survey for their time and comments. nm is funded by an alzheimer’s society senior fellowship, and gl and nm are supported by uclh national institute for health research (nihr) biomedical research centre. gl receives funding from the north thames national institute of health research (nihr) applied research collaborations (arcs). conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. references . ons.gov.uk. . census—office for national statistics. available online: https://www.ons.gov.uk/census/ census (accessed on august ). . all-party parliamentary group on 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[crossref] . rc psych royal college of psychiatrists. analysis of third covid- rcpsych member survey. . available online: https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/ (accessed on august ). http://doi.org/ . /wnl. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://doi.org/ . /j.jstrokecerebrovasdis. . . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://doi.org/ . /gps. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-dementia-strategy-equalities-action-plan https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/national-dementia-strategy-equalities-action-plan https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-s-challenge-on-dementia https://www.gov.uk/government/news/prime-minister-s-challenge-on-dementia https://www.hc.bris.ac.uk/phcdb/pubpdf/pubs/ ab.pdf http://doi.org/ . / . . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://doi.org/ . /hlthaff. . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://doi.org/ . /geront/gnz http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ https:www.rcpsych.ac.uk/msnap http://doi.org/ . /bmj.m http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://doi.org/ . /gps. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://doi.org/ . /bmj.h http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://doi.org/ . / http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://doi.org/ . /s - - -z https://www.rcpsych.ac.uk/ 	introduction 	materials and methods 	data collection instrument 	survey procedure 	data analysis 	results 	demographics 	availability of interpretation in memory clinics 	provision of translated resources 	cognitive assessment tools 	barriers to dementia diagnosis and outreach activities 	additional comments 	discussion 	limitations 	future research 	conclusions 	references psc_ .. our fiscal numbers in the state are not catastrophic; neither are they great. our cases of covid- are spiking in utah—a state that previously effectively handled the pandemic. yet, with a us presidential election and the necessarily charged atmosphere resulting from the black lives matter protests, political science enrollments have already set a record for the fall. political science is not an industry, it is a vocation. we must find ways to help these students navigate the political world that has proven to be far more important in shaping the response to this pandemic than anything else. for department chairs who are handling this emergency situ- ation going forward, i suggest the following six “good-enough” practices: • people care most about their jobs, their health, and their families. prioritize these when relaying the prospects for cuts or furloughs and for the provisions made by a university or your department in protecting the health (mental, emotional, and physical) and safety of instructors, graduate assistants, and staff. in turn, communicate that any obstacles regarding colleagues’ pay, job security, and health will be attended to immediately. • consider regular but not too frequent communications to all department instructors, teaching assistants, and staff. resist the urge to appear “on top” of the situation with constant communication. less frequent but detailed updates stream- line and summarize the deluge of emails from central admin- istration and also highlight other information that has been shared in town hall meetings between chairs and higher administration. • avoid the temptation to overdo contingency planning. there will be long-term drawbacks to the good-enough approach; that is, strategic plans will need to be postponed to a more certain time. however, our energy is being sapped daily and relentlessly by this dynamic situation. even planning for “scenarios” in this fluid time is difficult and borderline quixotic. furthermore, communicate this reality to higher- ups in your university administrative structure who other- wise consistently use strategic planning. • teaching evaluations will be haphazard. flexible instructors likely will be rewarded for their understanding and empath- etic approach to their students and classes. however, stu- dents who feel they are being “shorted” tuition value by the adjusted formats of online teaching during the pandemic may take it out on the instructors in their evaluations. recognizing that your faculty members also are under pres- sure in various life roles (e.g., instructor, scholar, and parent), advocate for those who are using the good-enough approach in their teaching. address how course evaluations should be used (or not) in their own assessments and reviews. • if you are at a research institution (as i am), recognize that there is a bifurcation in research productivity happening throughout the academic world. some scholars are not pro- ducing any research. i am a parent first, a department chair second, and a research scholar third. i am not getting any research done—at all. yet, other faculty are using this new format as a quasi-sabbatical and accomplishing a lot. some of this breaks down along gender lines (weigand et al. ). be sensitive to this and advocate for maximum flexibility for your research faculty regarding timelines for tenure and promotional reviews in the coming years. • although many colleagues appreciate the flexibility of the good-enough approach, others are perfectionists or prefer a more controlling, confident, and certain approach. i have witnessed this in some of my colleagues. they will be frustrated with this type of leadership, as some are with me. so be it. doing good enough inevitably entails dealing with the disappointment and disapproval of colleagues. some of us, however, do not need to be a perfect department chair. we just need to get by. we remain in an emergency situation. the actor with agency, the one securitizing the entire situation, however, remains the virus. until covid- is resolved or defeated, i am not going to be perfect. i am going to be just good enough.▪ references murphy, michael p. a. . “covid- and emergency e-learning: consequences of the securitization of higher education for post-pandemic pedagogy.” contemporary security policy ( ): – . schick, kate. . gillian rose: a good enough justice. edinburgh, scotland: edinburgh university press. wiegand, krista, debbie lisle, amanda murdie, and james scott. . “journal submissions in a time of covid- : is there a gender gap?” duck of minerva. available at https://duckofminerva.com/ / /journal-submissions-in-times- of-covid- -is-there-a-gender-gap.html. concluding thoughts: what can(’t) we research about emergency e-learning? michael p. a. murphy, university of ottawa doi: . /s the interventions in this spotlight draw attention to various ways that political science and international relations experi- enced the emergency e-learning transition in response to the covid- pandemic. by way of conclusion, i turn to the ques- tions still to be asked about pandemic pedagogy and what lessons it might hold for teaching and learning. although the university has increasingly expanded the criteria for instructors who want to teach remotely while also being attentive to the importance of student preferences for in-person teaching. the latter shapes enrollments, important for the financial health of the university. all of this has only led to further uncertainty. ps • january teac her s potlight: covid - and emer g enc y e-lear ni ng in political s cience a nd ir ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. https://duckofminerva.com/ / /journal-submissions-in-times-of-covid- -is-there-a-gender-gap.html. https://duckofminerva.com/ / /journal-submissions-in-times-of-covid- -is-there-a-gender-gap.html. thought-provoking and productive for our present reality, the norm/exception logic embedded in analysis of pandemic peda- gogy risks overemphasizing the emergency. in its least harmful form, attention to the emergency nostalgizes the norm ; at worst, overemphasis of deficiencies in the emergency crowd out space in which those in the normal condition might be expressed. the tightrope to be walked in researching pandemic pedagogy is that careful examination is necessary but may blind our analysis to important elements. what can we research about emergency e-learning? when looking to future directions in emergency e-learning research, several important avenues require exploration. reflec- tion on pedagogical practice is an important part of the scholar- ship of teaching and learning (sotl) because it draws out the lessons learned from the perspective of the agents of change in the classroom. simply stated, because the professor plans the course, sharing the professor’s perspective can assist other pro- fessors in similar situations. however, this is only one way of “doing sotl,” and it captures only one particular qualitative form of empirical material. many institutions are collecting student-experience surveys, which surely will provide new quan- titative material to provide general insights into another per- spective. however, a fuller understanding of emergency e-learning experiences will be possible only through systematic research com- bining approaches. this type of in-depth analysis is particularly important to recognize barriers to access and other unequal experiences of emergency e-learning. pre-pandemic, laptop ownership (reisdorf, triwibowo, and yankelevich ) and technology maintenance and dependability (gonzales, calarco, and lynch ) already pointed out how socioeconomic barriers lead to an unequal experience of postsecondary education. in the age of emergency e-learning, when laptops and dependable connections are not only necessary for assignments and reading but also for the course experience, the socioeconomic barrier increases. racial- ized inequality in emergency e-learning is another important topic; previous e-learning researchers have found that—even beyond the economic digital divide—“access does not solve nor provide equitable learning conditions” on its own (oztok , ). the extent to which emergency e-learning reproduces institutional and systemic racial inequalities merits careful attention. greater attention is necessary to understand how economically disadvantaged communities—as well as other populations with access and dependability issues including rural areas—experienced emergency e-learning and how supports might best be designed in preparation for future pandemics (or future waves of covid- ). the mental health impacts of covid- and emergency e-learning are further important considerations for future research. halladay et al. ( ) suggest that the quality of student–teacher relationships may support students’ decisions to seek out mental health treatment, which would be especially important during the pandemic. preliminary evidence suggests that postsecondary students faced higher levels of anxiety, stress, depression, and substance use during covid- (charles et al. ). however, the emergency e-learning environment—even in a synchronous format—is a less-personal connection than face-to- face instruction. the combination of increased mental health symptoms with less classroom contact is an important consider- ation for pedagogical planning. finally, institutional responses to covid- emergency e-learning have proceeded largely on an institution-by-institution basis, and the effectiveness of this policy-making strategy requires attention that political science and international relations may be uniquely able to provide. in contrast with the collaborative response to hurricane katrina—in which the so-called sloan semester brought many institutions together to offer a catalog of online courses to affected students (tarantelli )—emer- gency e-learning responses to covid- occurred largely on an institution-by-institution or system-by-system basis. what can’t we research about emergency e-learning? increasing the attention to the exceptionality of emergency e-learning, however, comes at a cost. examining the deficiencies, inequalities, and barriers of emergency e-learning as exceptional experiences obscures the deficiencies, inequalities, and barriers that exist in the normal arrangements of educational systems (murphy , ). despite specific attention being warranted to this exceptional experience of emergency e-learning, it is important that its difference from the normal condition not be overstated. the digital divide, racial inequality, policy coordin- ation, and other issues are not limited to the case of covid- responses. it is our hope that this spotlight’s presentation of various perspectives will provide insights as professors and administrators prepare for an uncertain future of covid- . we also hope that it sparks a broader conversation and research project into the politics of the classroom, in both exceptional and normal times.▪ note . i thank heather smith for pointing out this tendency at the women in inter- national security—toronto twitter conference. references charles, nora e., stephanie j. strong, lauren c. burns, margaret r. bullerjahn, and katherine m. serafine. . increased mood disorder symptoms, perceived stress, and alcohol abuse among college students during the covid- pandemic. psyarxiv. available at https://doi.org/ . /osf.io/rge k. gonzalez, amy l., jessica mccrory calarco, and teresa lynch. . “technology problems and student achievement gaps: a validation and extension of the technology maintenance construct.” communication research ( ): – . halladay, jillian, kathryn bennett, mark weist, michael boyle, ian manion, matthew campo, and katholiki georgiades. . “teacher–student relationships and mental health help seeking behaviours among elementary and secondary students in ontario, canada.” journal of school psychology : – . murphy, michael p. a. . “covid- and emergency e-learning: consequences of the securitization of higher education for post-pandemic pedagogy.” contemporary security policy ( ): – . oztok, murat. . the hidden curriculum of online learning: understanding social justice through critical pedagogy. london: routledge. reisdorf, bianca c., whisnu triwibowo, and aleksandr yankelevich. . “laptop or bust: how lack of technology affects student achievement.” american behavioural scientist ( ): – . tarantelli, thomas l. . “lessons from katrina: the response of higher education to assist students impacted by the storm.” state university of new york–albany: phd dissertation. ps • january ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. https://doi.org/ . /osf.io/rge k spotlight contributors oumar ba is assistant professor of political science at morehouse college. he can be reached at oumar. ba@morehouse.edu. delton t. daigle is associate professor and director of online learning at the schar school of policy & government at george mason university. he can be reached at ddaigle@gmu.edu. rebecca a. glazier is associate professor of political science in the school of public affairs at the university of arkansas at little rock. she can be reached at raglazier@ualr.edu. emma hutchison is associate professor and australian research council decra fellow in the school of political science and international studies at the university of queensland, australia. she can be reached at e.hutchison@uq.edu.au. eric d. loepp is assistant professor of political science at the university of wisconsin, whitewater, and co-guest editor of this spotlight. he can be reached at loeppe@uww.edu. stéphanie martel is assistant professor of political studies at queen’s university and a fellow at the centre for international and defence policy. she can be reached at stephanie.martel@queensu.ca. michael p. a. murphy is sshrc doctoral fellow and part-time professor at the university of ottawa, and an associate member of the advancement of the scholarship of teaching and learning research unit. he also served as co-guest editor of this spotlight. he can be reached at michaelpa.murphy@uottawa.ca. john laforest phillips is associate professor of political science and public management at austin peay state university in clarksville, tn. he can be reached at phillipsj@apsu.edu. ayesha ray is associate professor of political science at king’s college, wilkes-barre, pa. she can be reached at ayesharay@kings.edu. joseph w. roberts is associate professor of politics and international relations at roger williams university in bristol, ri. he can be reached at jroberts@rwu.edu. serena rourke is a student of political studies at queen’s university. brent j. steele is the francis d. wormuth professor of political science at the university of utah and chair of the department. he can be reached at brent.steele@utah.edu. aaron stuvland is a phd candidate at the schar school of policy & government at george mason university. he can be reached at astuvlan@gmu.edu. taiyi sun is assistant professor of political science at christopher newport university in newport news, va. he can be reached at taiyi.sun@cnu.edu. jennie sweet-cushman is associate professor of political science at chatham university in pittsburgh, pa. she can be reached at jsweetcushman@chatham.edu. sydney wade is a student of political studies at queen’s university. munro watters is a student of political studies at queen’s university. ps • january teac her s potlight: covid - and emer g enc y e-lear ni ng in political s cience a nd ir ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - x https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - x https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - black lives matter, and yes, you are racist: the parallelism of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries vol.:( ) child and adolescent social work journal ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - - i n v i t e d pa p e r black lives matter, and yes, you are racist: the parallelism of the twentieth and twenty‑first centuries henrika mccoy published online: august © springer science+business media, llc, part of springer nature abstract the united states of america is at a crossroads, one that we have been at before. this is not the first time that we have bat- tled a pandemic while experiencing an economic downturn, state sanctioned violence and racial terror against blacks, the boiling over of racial tensions encouraged by the president of the united states, and a movement focused on forcing america to reckon with its endemic racism, anti-blackness, and state-sanctioned violence against blacks. this article provides a brief overview of that history and its striking parallel to what is happening today. it pushes white social workers to understand how they are beneficiaries of racism. it reminds social workers of their ethical obligation to be change agents. finally, it provides basic suggestions for those who are willing to see their complicity and are still willing to work on dismantling the injustice that impacts black people in america. keywords black lives matter · state-sanctioned violence · pandemic · racism · privilege · anti-black many black people are experiencing today’s events while remembering the childhood stories they heard from their parents or grandparents about a child, sibling, spouse, or friend who died during the spanish flu. others are recalling family traditions attributed to surviving the great depres- sion. the american tradition of the family heading out to the open road for a summer vacation has also had a resurgence due to the covid- pandemic (mzezewa, ). how- ever for many black people, road trips serve as a reminder of times when driving south to visit relatives meant being fearful of what danger you might encounter from the police, while driving to your destination, or local whites who did not want you stopping in their town to get food, gas, use the restroom, or spend the night (mzezewa, ). for others, such as activists during the civil rights movement of the s and s, the black lives matter (blm) movement is invigorating. representative john lewis, inspired by pro- testers and supportive of the movement said, “we must use our time and our space on this little planet that we call earth to make a lasting contribution, to leave it a little better than we found it, and now that need is greater than ever before” (capehart, , para ). each of those experiences is like a piece of a compli- cated puzzle. social workers must understand that blacks in america are “both creatures and creators of history in that history has placed them where they are right now and has shaped their point of view, their identity, and their aspira- tions” (martin & martin, , p. ). history is the foun- dation for every person’s life story. however, consider the exhaustion that you might feel if you heard those childhood stories, have those childhood memories, and believed they would never be repeated. except now, you are reminded of them every day because the current state of our society is mirroring the past. the first part of might be conceptualized as a twenty-first century confluence, into a matter of months, of the spanish flu ( – ), the red summer of , the great depression ( – ), and the civil rights move- ment ( s– s). individually each crisis is cause for distress, but conflated into a few months, they have created overwhelming feelings of turmoil. blacks were dispropor- tionately impacted by each phenomenon then, only months into this decade history is repeating itself, blacks are yet again being disproportionately impacted. we are living in unprecedented times that are remarkably parallel to the last century. thus, understanding the history of * henrika mccoy hmccoy@uic.edu jane addams college of social work, university of illinois at chicago, w. harrison (m/c ), chicago, il  , usa http://orcid.org/ - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf h. mccoy black people in america, can create sensitivity to their experi- ences and an understanding of how their past and present are parallel (martin & martin, ). embedded in that parallel- ism is a snowball, which keeps rolling down a mountain and growing larger with each rotation. however, the problem is not just the snowball. it is the accompanying avalanche that created it, and the rapidity at which both are moving and seem- ingly focused on destroying all the gains black people thought had been accomplished during the twentieth century. as social workers living through and witnessing today’s events it could be easy to feel overwhelmed and not know where to begin. it might also be possible to be so enthusi- astic and eager to get involved that a thoughtful, informed approach is not used. to be effective, good intentions are not enough; they are also often misguided. you must consider what not to do, plus what to do. you must also understand your responsibility and opportunity as an educator, practi- tioner, researcher, or policymaker. you must be prepared to do more than just read the latest best seller, join a book club, post on facebook, and tweet your opinions. you must be active and do something. the first step to doing is learn- ing and in this case learning the history of black people in america. this article begins with a very brief overview of histori- cal events, the parallel between the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, and impact on blacks in the united states. second is a reminder of our responsibilities as social workers to be change agents, in particular how that charge is embed- ded in our code of ethics and educational standards. the last three sections, although written to specifically address white social workers, are useful for everyone as either new information or a much-needed refresher. therefore, third, is a review of basic definitions that should be understood before taking on the role of change agent during our current times. fourth are clear recommendations about what not to do because engaging in those actions would be counterpro- ductive to the goal. finally, are suggestions for what to do in your particular social work role. this article purposely approaches this topic with black people at its core, and their experiences with white people in the united states. this is not to diminish the experiences of, or relationships with, other groups of people in this country. it is however an acknowledgement of the continuing per- petuation of anti-black attitudes infused into this country and how their creation and legacy are based in the original relationship between whites and blacks: we-them. twentieth century world war i, which lasted from to , was still being fought when many black world war i veterans returned home. they had answered the call and risked their lives to secure american freedom and democracy. what they had not secured was their own freedom and upon return they experienced the same denial of rights and opportunities they had encountered before leaving (bates, ). their status as a war veteran meant nothing beyond their community and race alone continued to define their identity. spanish flu of  – between and , the world was overwhelmed by the spanish flu, the deadliest disease outbreak in modern history, with deaths totaling more than million; , were from the united states (centers for disease control and prevention, ; mcdonald, ). at the start of the pandemic, blacks were experiencing longstanding barriers to health care access, as well as higher overall rates of mor- tality and morbidity than their white counterparts (gamble, ). blacks lived in segregated housing, which seemed to initially limit the exposure of blacks to the virus, thus fewer deaths (gamble, ). however, they were often left to take care of themselves and when they received care it was substandard taking place in basements and inadequately supported segregated hospitals (mcdonald, ). by the end of the pandemic, whites had higher rates of morbidity, yet blacks experienced higher rates of mortality (Økland & mamelund, ). notably, the spanish flu also began as the great migra- tion, which started in , was growing and racial ten- sions between whites and blacks throughout the country were heightening. those existing tensions were exacerbated further by the ongoing promulgation of theories of black racial inferiority attributed to their biology, physiology, and morality (gamble, ). the result was a reign of terror on blacks, by groups supported by local law enforcement, like the ku klux klan (kkk), who had been revived in (greenberg, ). they dragged black men, women, and children from their beds and lynched them: they were muti- lated, burned, beat, tortured, dismembered, and murdered (equal justice initiative, , ; greenberg, ). those lynchings were commonly advertised and conducted in white communities as family entertainment (greenberg, ). beyond advertising, souvenirs or mementos were also created. for example, on august , a photo was taken by lawrence beitler at the lynchings of teenagers, thomas shipp and abram smith, in marion, indiana. their lynchings occurred before a crowd estimated in size to be , includ- ing women and children (rozen-wheeler, ). between and more than blacks, men, women, and children were lynched by whites (brown, ). fueling the great migration were companies recruit- ing black workers from the south with free train fare, bet- ter wages, and promises of a kinder environment than the jim crow south (rehagen, ). to prevent blacks from black lives matter, and yes, you are racist: the parallelism of the twentieth and twenty-first… leaving the south, wide-ranging strategies were imple- mented. for those recruiting blacks to move, severe fines were employed, which were often too high to pay so the consequence was jailing and peonage (anderson, ). trains that were moving goods to help the war effort were even stopped in hopes of negatively impacting the railroad industry because of its role in helping to relocate blacks to the north (anderson, ). whites viewed their efforts as necessary because blacks who were leaving in droves were causing the socioeconomic structure of the south to approach collapse (anderson, ). white northerners were threatened by the relocation and employment of blacks because blacks were viewed as a threat to their own job security. for example, in in east st. louis, illinois, the aluminum ore company brought blacks in to break the strike of their existing white labor- ers (o’neil, , para. ). that action led to white workers protesting and was the beginning of what became known as the east st. louis massacre of (brown, ). news reports in the st. louis post-dispatch described white mobs as murdering every black man in sight (brown, ). “black skin was a death warrant” (o’neil, ). some blacks managed to escape to st. louis, missouri via the eads bridge which connected east st. louis to st. louis (rehagen, ). however, the police eventually shut down the bridge forcing many blacks to try, not always success- fully, to swim across the mississippi river (keyes, ). the murder spree lasted three days and nights; the reported death toll, although likely under-reported by hundreds, was blacks and whites (brown, ). according to news- paper accounts, blacks were murdered with callousness; black men could be seen raising their hands, pleading for their lives, and having their cries ignored (brown, ). white women beat and stoned black women as they begged “for mercy” (brown, , para ). the national guard, who had been called in to monitor the strike, remained in town and stood by silently, watching, joining, and encourag- ing the white mobs to commit violence (mclaughlin, ). red summer of  those acts of terror became normal and by the summer of , the relentless oppression of and discrimination towards blacks, the continued growth of the kkk, and the impact of the pandemic, converged into months of nationwide anti-black violence known as the red sum- mer of (bates, ). violence broke out nation- wide between blacks and whites including in chicago, washington, d.c., and houston (bates, ). in chicago, when blacks attempted to move into certain neighbor- hoods, whites regularly assaulted them and bombed their homes (rothstein, ; spear, ). between and in chicago, bombs were dropped on the homes of blacks, as well as white and black real estate agents who sold to blacks looking to leave black neighborhoods; of those bombings occurred during a six-month period in in one concentrated area (rothstein, ; schla- bach, ).throughout the country the majority of those injured, killed, or left homeless were black (wormser, a). this period of concentrated racial terror reigned upon blacks in cities and lasted until when the all- black town of rosewood, florida was destroyed (brown, ); the end result was lynchings (anderson, ). in some instances, such as the tulsa massacre of , local authorities supplied white mobs with firearms and ammunition (equal justice initiative, ). that instance of racial terror was the destruction of the greenwood community, a thriving black business district commonly known as black wall street, which resulted in the death of at least black tulsans (equal justice initiative, ). white mobs, indiscriminately shot blacks, burned their homes and buildings, and dropped firebombs on the area (equal justice initiative, ; fain, ). eventually the oklahoma national guard was called into quell the “negro uprising” and arrest black survivors; no whites were punished or prosecuted, and over , blacks were displaced (equal justice initiative, ). thus, blacks who managed to survive the pandemic, still had to live in a world enveloped by anti-black, state-supported violence. the great depression ( – ) the great depression began with a stock market crash in and lasted until . the overall unemploy- ment rate skyrocketed from % in to % in (greenberg, ). it became common for blacks, who were working low-wage jobs (greenberg, ) to be fired from jobs traditionally reserved for them because whites were seeking new employment after losing their better paying positions (library of congress, n.d.; wormser, b). thus, in some urban centers, their unemployment rates rose extraordinarily high, such as in detroit ( %), philadelphia ( %) atlanta ( %), memphis ( %), and norfolk ( %; greenberg, ). when white men could not find jobs, many ambushed and killed black men and took their jobs (wormser, b). for blacks, the after- effects of the great depression lasted for decades and led to the founding of organizations like the national council for negro women (giddings, ) and first meeting of the national negro congress (klein, ). in , the southern negro youth congress began registering voters and organizing boycotts (klein, ). with those activi- ties the seeds of the civil rights movement of the s and s were born. h. mccoy the civil rights movement of the  s and  s by the s, the ongoing racial inequality, oppression, and terrorism of blacks via anti-black, state-supported violence forced segregation across sectors including the military, schools, housing, health care, and labor, forcing blacks to rely even more heavily on each other for education, goods, services, and other necessities. the frustrations many blacks felt finally reached a boiling point and were often expressed in black churches, a cornerstone of the black community, where it was frequently preached that oppression was a sin and protesting such oppression was sanctioned by god (mor- ris, ). the combination of those circumstances culmi- nated into the start of the civil rights era (morris, ), a national social movement focused on seeking justice. there were nationwide protests and marches calling for and dem- onstrating unification, including the march on washington in . it also included the selma to montgomery march, known to many as bloody sunday, which occurred on march , . state troopers and county possemen attacked unarmed, peaceful marchers as they crossed the edmund pettus bridge with tear gas, clubs, bullwhips, and trampling them while riding horseback (anderson, ; franklin & moss, jr. ). the media was front and center to capture the events for all to see, including when dogs were sicced on, and water hoses forcibly directed at, peaceful pro- testers (mcwhorter, ; morris, ). there were a number of landmark decisions by the supreme court such as brown v. board of education ( ) which found that the “separate but equal” standard, previ- ously set in plessy v. ferguson ( ), violated the th amendment. attempts to pass civil rights legislation failed every year between and and only after much delay, and the assassination of john f. kennedy in , was the civil rights act of was passed. it declared discrimination was illegal in the united states of america on the basis of race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. that victory was quickly followed by the assassination of martin luther king, jr. and in , malcolm x (franklin & moss, jr. ). the combined efforts and movements from various individuals and organizations resulted in additional legal and policy changes, although not always practices, as indicated by redlining which enabled housing segregation to continue unfettered (werner, frej, & madway, ) and ongoing efforts to suppress the ability of blacks to vote (anderson, ). despite the losses and ongoing challenges, many in the black community felt encouraged and that better times were on the horizon. better times occurred for some yet not others. for exam- ple, median household levels improved for blacks, but the gap between whites and blacks widened (pew research center, ). more blacks were completing their high school education; however, they were still less likely than their white counterparts to earn a college degree (pew research center, ). interspersed throughout was also the dilution of the voting rights act of (anderson, ), the framing of the “war on drugs” which created havoc in black communities, the increase of blacks in the juvenile and criminal justice systems (alexander, ), and the continued segregation in housing which continued the devaluing of black owned homes and challenges with becoming a black homeowner (rothstein, ). recently disconcerting was the election of donald trump, following barack obama, which has led to an increase in white nation- alist and white supremacist hate groups (southern poverty law center, ), the president’s race baiting and unwill- ingness to denounce such language or behavior (koski & bantley, ; parker & olorunnipa, ), and an increase in hate crimes against blacks (federal bureau of investiga- tion, , , ). twenty‑first century: present day the events from the last century provide a context for under- standing our current environment and highlight why current events might reverberate for some blacks. our country is at a crossroads and the convergence of negative experiences and outcomes are uncannily like those experienced to  years ago. there are high rates of mortality and morbid- ity exacerbated by a pandemic, disproportionate unemploy- ment levels exacerbated by the same pandemic, and anti- black, state-supported violence. there is also the positive outcome of a growing civil rights movement as reflected in the black lives matter (blm) movement. covid‑ pandemic the novel coronavirus, covid- , swept the world quickly and viciously. what began with the reporting of one case in december of of a pneumonia of unknown origin, has rapidly become a pandemic with worldwide total cases confirmed as of july , at over . mil- lion and deaths at over , (gutiérrez and clarke, ) and as of july , in u.s., total cases were just over million and deaths at , (cdc, ). like their experience with the spanish flu, blacks are experiencing covid- differently than whites due to larger social inequities. when compared to whites, they are at higher risk of contracting the virus and are more likely to die if they contract the virus (goody, ; oll- ove & vestal, ). the disproportionate impact can partially be attributed to factors that also impacted blacks during the spanish flu: poorer access to health care, pre- existing medical conditions that increase risk of illness, the reliance for many on public transportation, a greater black lives matter, and yes, you are racist: the parallelism of the twentieth and twenty-first… likelihood of employment in positions that increase expo- sure to the virus, and ongoing residential segregation which causes some blacks to live in more densely popu- lated areas (cdc, ; goody, ; gould & wilson, ; ollove & vestal, ). additionally, blacks often experience poorer treatment from health care providers; thus, when combined with their experiences with racism, stigma, and systemic inequalities, their vulnerability to negative health outcomes increases (cdc, ; ollove & vestal, ). covid‑ recession during the great recession of to , blacks expe- rienced unemployment numbers higher than the national average, . % and % respectively, those numbers did decrease to pre-recession rates in (maxwell & solo- mon, ) but that decrease does not reflect the overall impact. many blacks also experienced home foreclosures and lost up to % of their net worth—which was already at levels far below their white counterparts (maxwell & solomon, ). those who did return to the workforce were often relegated to jobs with low wages, limited pro- tections, and few benefits, including health insurance (maxwell & solomon, ). eleven years later, blacks are still experiencing the aftereffects and the covid- recession has been additive and led to worsening outcomes. the temporary nature of unemployment experienced by many during the covid- recession versus the perma- nency experienced during the great depression is different (iacurci, ; zumbrun, ). in addition, overall rates are not as high; however, unemployment rates have increased, and the impact can be compared to the great depression (kocchar, ). in february, the unemployment rate for blacks was . % and by april it was . %; with fewer than % of adult blacks being employed (gould & wilson, ). during the covid- pandemic, many blacks were laid off because they were less likely to be working in positions that allowed for tele-working and more likely to be working in service positions such as in retail, restaurants, and personal services (maxwell & solomon, ; perry, ). they were also more likely to be working “essential jobs” (e.g. grocery stores, public transit, health care, child care, postal service, and warehouses) which ultimately increased their likelihood of contracting covid- (gould & wilson, ) or work- ing in positions without health insurance (thompson, ). the resulting economic destabilization, from the covid- pandemic has been similar to what blacks experienced during the spanish flu pandemic and it further exacerbated pre-existing inequities. black lives matter movement covid- has occurred at a time when our access to media, social and traditional, is at an all-time high. we can see and hear news from around the world in a matter of seconds. most people have instant access to a camera and the ability to share video and their opinion to people who are known and unknown. we also have easy access to countless pro- gramming available through streaming and cable on a range of devices. the by-product of the covid- pandemic has been the complete disruption of those new norms. we have little original television programming and our spring and summer sporting events were delayed with new ones just starting in july, months late. these changes have been combined with mandates in many places to shelter in place or self-quar- antine. thus, via television or a myriad of websites, many americans repeatedly witnessed the murders of ahmad aubrey and george floyd, and heard the call made by the boyfriend of breonna taylor, after she was shot eight times by police and left to die in her own home. there is no doubt that each murder needed to be brought to light; however, the media turned each tragedy into fodder for the american public by repeatedly and casually showing them on television. that action has potentially further devalued their deaths and the deaths of the countless other black men and women who have been murdered before and after them. repeatedly hearing and watching each murder, has likely created a numbness and desensitization, like what is experi- enced when repeatedly watching any other image of violence (mrug et al., ; stafford, ). the message sent repeat- edly to every viewer is that black lives do not matter. lest we forget, george floyd was casually murdered on camera by a policeman after being accused of using a counterfeit $ bill. innocent until proven guilty in a court of law was not the default. state sanctioned violence was the default. the black lives matter (blm) global network was founded in , following the acquittal of george zim- merman, the man who followed, shot, and killed trayvon martin a -year-old black teenager who was walking home from his local store (ramaswamy, ). trayvon’s murder inspired blm’s ( ) goal of building local power and intervening when black communities were inflicted with state and vigilante perpetrated violence. throughout the united states, canada, and the united kingdom, blm’s “mission is to eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on black communi- ties by the state and vigilantes.” since its founding there have been numerous high (and low) profile murders of black people by law enforcement throughout the country and blm ( ) has continued to focus on “combating and countering acts of violence, creating space for black imagination and innovation, and centering black joy”. h. mccoy those efforts are the foundation of the current world- wide uprising demanding that black lives matter be acknowledged, the words spoken out loud, and the concept embraced. there has been a dismissal of the cause with responses of “blue lives matter” and “all lives matter”. the president has even called a mural which was to be painted on the street in front of the new york trump tower, and depicted the phrase, black lives matter a “symbol of hate” and said its existence would denigrate the street (wag- ner & ikowitz, , para ). the public demonstrations of support or solidarity by policemen, as well as everyday people, have been met with threats of punitive action. for example, the president of the fraternal order of police (the police union) in chicago stated publicly, “any member of lodge who is going to take a knee and basically side with protesters while they’re in uniform will subject themselves to discipline in the lodge up to and including expulsion from lodge ,” (sirott, , : ). employees at starbucks were initially told they could not wear buttons supporting blm although the company permits the wearing of, and distrib- utes to employees that want it, paraphernalia to support lgbtq rights (murphy, ). the murder of george floyd has been identified as a tip- ping point for this current galvanization (e.g. ifill, ; abadi, ). notably, in colin kapernick was penal- ized and ostracized when he began to kneel during the national anthem to protest racial injustice and when pres- sured by the press to speak he said, “there are bodies in the street and people getting paid leave and getting away with murder” (branch, , “a quest for an education,” para. ). “i am not looking for approval. i have to stand up for people that are oppressed” (branch, , “a quest for an education,” para. ). we now seeing that when others protest the treatment of blacks in this country they are met with the same vehemence and even harsher treatment. thus, only time will tell as to whether the current momentum will create necessary long-lasting change in the united states. what is clear is that we are witnessing a movement. guiding principles of social work: past, present, and future as social workers we have a responsibility to not simply witness change, or tout mottos about change, but play a part in creating change. our profession has its roots in a commitment to dismantle injustice. that commitment can be seen in the actions of social work pioneers who are fre- quently taught in social work history or policy classes such as jane addams, mary ellen richmond, and edith abbott. it can also be observed in the accomplishments of pioneer- ing black social workers who were committed to improving the lives of blacks, not as a by-product of helping everyone, but as a guiding principle. many are well-known such as e. franklin frazier, mary church terrell, whitney m. young, jr., while others are lesser-known such as birdye henrietta haynes, lawrence oxley, lugenia burns hope, and dr. george edmund haynes. ms. haynes was a leader in the settlement house move- ment for blacks in chicago and new york (carlton-laney, ). she “was never able, nor willing to separate her racial identity from her practice of social work. race was a sig- nificant variable in determining the direction and extent of her career path” (carlton-laney, , p. ). mr. oxley was a pioneer in social work training and public welfare work and even appointed to the u.s. department of labor by franklin roosevelt (carlton-laney, ). ms. hope founded the neighborhood union which established settle- ment houses throughout atlanta and focused on ensuring health care access for blacks; she went on to serve on the faculty of the atlanta school of social work, the first school of social work for blacks (frierson, ; rouse, ). dr. haynes, co-founder and first executive director of the national urban league, helped to establish the first social work training center for black students at fisk university and his support of blacks obtaining social work educa- tion led to them studying at schools such as the new york school of philanthropy and the atlanta school of social work (carlton-laney, ; nasw foundation, ). their varied responses demonstrate there is not just one way to respond when we see injustices happening to a disen- franchised population. it is simply essential that we respond or as john lewis said, according to barack obama during his eulogy of him, “if you don’t do everything you can to change things, then they will remain the same” (obama, , : ). as social workers we are bound by the nasw code of ethics to, “pursue social change, particularly with and on behalf of vulnerable and oppressed individuals and groups of people (nasw, , p. ). we should also “promote social, economic, political, and cultural values and institutions that are compatible with the realization of social justice” (nasw, , p. ). our opportunities to engage in those mandates are plentiful. we continue to see attempts to limit consti- tutional rights, such as the right to vote. for example, over polling locations have been closed across the south in republican-led states, there have also been the addition of voter id requirements and shorter hours, impacting areas where blacks primarily reside (cohen, ; salame, ; sullivan, ). we continue to see disproportionate num- bers of black people jailed because of an inability to pay bail (sawyer, ) or the need to assume extraordinary debt because they cannot afford monetary sanctions (har- ris, ). those consequences are directly related to the disproportionate contact of blacks with the criminal justice system due to race and their higher likelihood of having black lives matter, and yes, you are racist: the parallelism of the twentieth and twenty-first… fewer financial resources (harris, ). the time to act is now. we have agreed to “promote policies that safeguard the rights of and confirm equity and social justice for all people,” and “act to prevent and eliminate domination of, exploitation of, and discrimination against any person, group, or class on the basis of race” (nasw, , pp. – ). for those engaged as social work educators, the council on social work education (cswe, , p. ), educational policy and accreditation standards mandate us to use our “understanding of social, economic, and environmental justice to advocate for human rights at the individual and system levels; and engage in practices that advance social, economic, and environmental justice.” we perpetrate systems that have destroyed individuals, fami- lies, and communities and assisted in the promulgation of policies and practices that are to the detriment of blacks in america. there have been recent calls from social work students around the country seeking the inclusion of a spe- cific anti-racist focus in the social work curriculum, not just diversity or multiculturalism (alicitadelfina, ; pitt ssw do, ; ub-social work ). we must take heed and prepare future social workers to think broadly and deeply about the issues before us. as social work professionals we must stop being complicit in the discrimination, oppression, and exploitation of this country’s black citizens. what does that word mean? before moving forward, know the basics. racism is not sim- ply about your intentions or about your actions, racism is inevitable because this country was built and sustains itself on a foundation of racism. this does mean that you are not responsible for the individual actions that you engage in which perpetuate racism because you are responsible. it also means that you benefit from racism. if you are really invested in change you must seek to understand how you benefit and engage in new or additional behaviors that focus on dismantling racist systems. now that we are immersed in a world where we are being bombarded with a host of webinars to attend or bestselling books to read about racism and anti-racism, many of us are being exposed to words that we do not understand or are new. here are three fundamental concepts to help you begin your journey. i have selected them because their footprint can be easily identified in the aforementioned history. they may also help you see how you have benefitted and been complicit. structural violence structural violence exists because of racism. its existence leaves black people vulnerable to physical, socioeconomic, and psychosocial risks which result in health inequities and increased rates of morbidity and mortality (uic-cher, ). the outcomes from ongoing policies and practices that result in housing segregation, devalued housing, inad- equately funded public education, higher unemployment rates, and poorer health are not because black people do not try hard enough to have more or do better. it is because the foundation of our society is predicated on making sure that every white person, no matter how dire their circumstances, can look down on black people. as lyndon b. johnson said, “if you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you” (moyers, , para. ). this ideology maintains structural violence. white privilege white privilege is real and if you are reading this and you are white, yes you have white privilege, they are no excep- tions. it does not matter how poor you grew up. it does mat- ter if you were a first-generation student. it does not matter if the black people you know live in bigger houses, have higher levels of education, and drive nicer cars. you have a privilege they do not have. your white skin allows you as a parent of a young man or woman to not worry about whether a traffic stop will turn into their death sentence. it enables you to have your successes attributed to your hard work versus minimized and assumed to be the result of lower standards being applied when evaluating your work. it also protects you from being viewed as the janitor even when you are dressed nicely and standing in the front of the class- room preparing to teach your first class or assumed to be the store clerk when you are shopping and are not wearing a store uniform or a name badge. white privilege means that you are automatically afforded the benefit of the doubt and advantages unlike black people. state‑sanctioned violence and racial terror since before the slave codes, blacks have lived in a country filled with racial terror and state sanctioned violence. this reality continues. during colonial slavery, it was not only legal to beat, torture, and murder someone who was enslaved without consequence; in fact, it was an oft-employed strat- egy for subordinating blacks (franklin & moss, jr., ). after the demise of slavery, the black codes were enacted to legislatively create another system of forced labor for blacks, as well as severe consequences when they were uncooperative (franklin & moss, jr., ) including being whipped and sold on an auction block to the highest bidder (anderson, ). during jim crow the federal government pulled federal troops out of the south and did not enforce h. mccoy federal civil rights legislation (alexander, ). the kkk was allowed to bomb, lynch, and use mob violence against blacks (alexander, ). laws were designed and enacted that criminalized blacks, allowing them to be arrested, and when they couldn’t pay their fines be sold into forced labor where they were subjugated to “almost continual lashing by long horse whips, and those who collapsed due to injuries or exhaustion were often left to die” (alexander, , p. ). during the civil rights movement, eugene “bull” connor, the public safety commissioner in birmingham allowed a mob of whites to viciously beat a busload of freedom rid- ers upon arrival at the trailways station without any police intervention (sitkoff, ). he also ordered students who were leaving a church preparing to engage in a peaceful pro- test to be attacked with billy clubs, water hoses, and dogs, all of which was broadcast to the world (morris, ; mcwhorter, ). the ideology behind those attacks and unforgettable images have returned to our current discourse without fear of condemnation. we hear words being used that have not been spoken publicly in decades with purposeful wantonness so as to invoke and justify state sanctioned racial terror. we are witnessing state sanctioned violence used against peaceful protesters asserting their first amendment right. on june , , police used rubber bullets and tear gas to clear peace- ful protesters so that president trump could take a picture in front of st. john’s episcopal church, across lafayette square (rogers, ). additionally, news reports began circulating in july of federal officers wearing camouflage and no clear agency identification, grabbing protesters peacefully dem- onstrating against police brutality, off of the street, whisk- ing them away in unmarked vehicles, and holding them. when asked to comment about the actions president trump remarked, “we’ve done a great job in portland,” “portland was totally out of control, and they went in, and i guess we have many people right now in jail. we very much quelled it, and if it starts again, we’ll quell it again very easily. it’s not hard to do, if you know what you’re doing.” (shepherd & berman, , para. ). president trump also has a history of dog-whistling and using race-baiting language that promulgates the we-them dichotomy previously used during the creation of colonial slavery. as he has begun to struggle in the election polls (pew research center, ; enten, ) he is increas- ingly relying on these tactics as his primary strategy. on may , , regarding clashes between protesters and the police, president trump tweeted, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts” (trump, a). this same statement had been used in by the chief of police in miami, walter headley, long known for leading a depart- ment which had amassed numerous complaints for their treatment of blacks. headly stated, “we don’t mind being accused of police brutality” (sprunt, , para. ) and focused his task force, which used guns and dogs, on the % of black people residing in miami (wines, ). in his june , remarks in the rose garden when he signed his executive order on safe policing for safe communities trump stated, “nobody needs a strong, trustworthy police force more than those who live in dis- tressed areas” (trump, b, para. ). note: the police are a legacy of southern slave patrols instituted to preserve slavery, prevent revolts, and catch those who had escaped from plantations (waxman, ). thus, because blacks are more likely than others to reside in distressed areas, it is no wonder many see president trump’s language as coded. during a fox interview on june , when asked about his message to african americans he stated, “we have a heritage, we have a history, and we should learn from the history. and if you do not understand your history, you will go back to it again, you will go right back to it. you have to learn—think of it. you take away that whole era, and you’re going to go back to it sometime.” (kilmeade, , : ). many blacks heard this state- ment as a veiled threat. that perception was only bolstered on july , when president trump retweeted a video of a supporter shouting “white power” very clearly to pro- testers; his team denied that he’d heard the comment yet their response did not include a denouncement (parker & olorunnipa, ). those examples are just a tiny fraction of the numerous instances that the leader of our country has led the charge for, encouraged the use of, or failed to disavow violence against black people. it is unnecessary for me to list the number of times that a police officer has not been charged with or has been acquitted of murdering a black person in the “line of duty”. there is no need for me to recount the thousands of black people who have been subjugated to longer and harsher sentences than whites for the same or sometimes an even lesser crime. simply understand, when there are no punitive consequences, by default those actions are state sanctioned violence. furthermore, because it is state sanctioned violence, it creates racial terror, such as what has been perpetrated against blacks since their arrival in this country, by government entities and law enforcement who: ( ) failed to intervene when blacks were being terrorized, brutalized, and murdered by whites, ( ) protected the white perpetrators who engaged in such terrorism, and ( ) enabled white mobs and terror- ist groups like the kkk to terrorize, brutalize, and murder blacks to their benefit (anderson, ; fairclough, ; franklin & moss, jr., ). remembering those facts, will provide you a clear understanding: black people in the united states live in a world where state sanctioned violence creates racial terror and is the norm. black lives matter, and yes, you are racist: the parallelism of the twentieth and twenty-first… what not to do do not respond with “i am color‑blind, i do not see color” under no circumstance should you use a “color-blind” approach when interacting with or talking about black people. this approach dismisses a physical attribute many black people find beautiful and derive great joy and pride. it also dismisses a physical trait that has been and is still used to demean and denigrate black people and deny them equitable treatment. if you choose not to see color, you are choosing not to acknowledge or understand how color is fundamental to white supremacy and impacts the eve- ryday life of a black person. it is color that is first seen when the decision is made to call the person by a racial slur. it is color that is seen when a police officer decides whether to engage in stop-and-frisk. it is color that is seen when a person decides not to rent to a possible tenant after meeting them, even when their rental history makes them a better option than other applicants. viewing people from a “color-blind” perspective gives you the privilege of wrestling with that person’s daily reality, a privilege black people do not have. do not invalidate or require proof when black people share their experiences with racism when a black person tells you about an experience they have had with racism, or how they think you have engaged in racist behavior, do not argue with them, tell them they are wrong, or spend your time trying to prove they are wrong. remember, not only is perception that person’s reality, they are an expert in knowing how racism looks and feels. racism is “any prejudice against someone because of their race, when those views are reinforced by systems of power” (oluo, , p. ). “racism does not require conscious intent: actions are racist if race is coded in them” (rawls, and duck, , p. ) and they “systematically constrain some individuals’ opportunities and resources on the basis of their race or ethnic group” (braveman, egerter, & williams, , p. ). race is a social construct created from the we-them ideology that undergirded slavery (kolchin, ). thus, race is coded in the dna of the united states. the obvious skin color differences between whites and blacks enabled wealthy plantation owners to use a we- them ideology, create an unequal power structure between we-them, and divide and conquer we-them by empower- ing poor europeans (we) to engage in white supremacist behaviors against africans (them; kolchin, ; rawls and duck, ). the perpetual inheritance for whites is privilege. inherent in that privilege is not having to be familiar with what racism looks like, how it benefits you, or how you are maintaining your privilege at the expense of someone else. thus, if you don’t see the racism that the black person is telling you they see, you should take a step back and assess whether it is because acknowledging their truth will force you to question how you have ben- efitted from not being black. ask yourself, did you really earn what you have? would you have earned it without a little family help? this might be as simple as your par- ents having owned their home which gave them enough credit worthiness to cosign for you to get a car. it might have occurred when everyone in your family contributed money towards your college application fees. would you have made it this far without the police deciding that the little scrape you got into in high school was just a mistake and since you live in a “nice” neighborhood they would just let you go? the result of that decision is no criminal record which might inhibit your ability to get a job. these are privileges and “privilege has to come with somebody else’s disadvantage—otherwise it’s not privilege” (uluo, , p. ). do not ask or expect a black person to speak for or represent all black people do not expect the black person who you know, or are merely acquainted with, to give you lessons about the experiences of all black people. in this country black people are per- ceived to be a monolithic group. that viewpoint eradicates their socioeconomic status, ethnicity, national origin, level of education, generational status, place of residence, familial history in this country, etc. not every black person grew up poor, in an urban, gang-infested, violent neighborhood, with- out a father, and is a first-generation student. let me be clear, there is absolutely nothing wrong with any of the aforemen- tioned experiences, but they cross race and ethnicity, black people don’t singularly experience them. hence, not every black person can tell you what it is like to have those origin stories. if the person you know did not experience any or all of them, you also don’t have the right to question their truth about their experience because of what you read in the latest bestseller or what you heard once from someone who was willing to be vulnerable and share their story. just as your story does not represent all white people, their story does not represent all black people. do not expect a black person to educate you about racism and becoming anti‑racist do not expect a black person to be your sole teacher about what it is like to be black in america and experience racism. h. mccoy they live with racism every single day. asking them to recount their hurtful, and likely traumatic experiences, so that you can learn is no different than asking a victim of abuse to recount their stories just so that you can learn what it felt like. if you would not do the latter, you should not do the former. does this mean you can never ask a black person a question, no. but it does mean they have a right to say no. they have a right to be annoyed. they have a right to say, “it’s not my job to educate you” and expect you not to com- plain if given that response because you have now decided you are ready to learn. the tricky part is this, you should also not rely on white authors as your sole or predominant source of material for learning about racism and how to be anti-racist. if you want to know what something looks like you obtain that information from the expert in the field. you wouldn’t ask someone to explain to you how to accurately prepare for and successfully climb mt. everest and share how they feel making the climb and reaching the top if all they have ever done is watch a movie about the experience. they cannot describe from firsthand knowledge the toil it takes to physically and emotionally prepare for beginning the journey and what it takes to simply breathe and stay alive while trying to accomplish the goal, why should this be any different? black people have been writing about racism and its impact since those who were enslaved began narrating and writing about the horrors of slavery stretching back to (gates, jr., ). their writings have just simply been dismissed by the larger privileged society. therefore, go to the source. i am not saying that white authors have nothing to contribute to our discourse, of course they do. what i am saying is that if their perspectives are your predominant source of information, perhaps you should accept that you might not be ready to hear hard truths about how a black person sees the world and where you fit into that world. only a black person can tell you how it actually feels to be assaulted by racism. what to do social work practitioners my charge to you is simple. if you are a white practitioner, be aware of the privilege you bring when you enter into your professional relationship with your black client. remember, the country where we reside was built on the degradation and devaluing of people who look like them. this does not mean that every black person experiences life in america the same way. it does mean that you should be prepared, when they have an experience that they attribute to racism, not to discount what they say. be ready to listen with open- ness not defensiveness or excuses. yes, it may make you uncomfortable or come close to your reality. choosing not to experience the discomfort is a privilege that black people are not afforded. social work educators if you are a white social work educator, you have a responsi- bility to ensure that racism, not just diversity, multicultural- ism, and cultural competency or humility are acknowledged and taught in your program. it is not okay to think by dis- cussing the latter that racism is covered by default. it is also not okay to think that you do not need a class that has an acknowledgement and understanding of racism at its core because you have a course about diversity or multicultural- ism or because it is “infused” throughout the curriculum. if you notice that you have few or declining numbers of black students in your program, or that those who are there are struggling, speak up about it, and lead an action to identify the problem so that it can be corrected. if you look around the room at your faculty and there are no, or only a few black faculty, ask yourself why? is your program or school not an attractive choice for someone who is black or are they not being considered, interviewed, and hired. either possibility requires interrogation and responsive action for change to happen. by residing in the united states, you are impacted by racism. to eradicate it we must all work to understand racism and the role we play in its ongoing, per- vasive existence. social work researchers if you are a social work researcher, you have a responsibil- ity to include informed and engaged black researchers on your team when studying black people, and when study- ing all people. they have something to contribute. it is also not okay to use race as your control variable and pretend like experiences associated with race are equal and can be held constant. nor is it okay to not look for differences by race and then conclude the differences that you find must be due to class or gender. some of the biggest offenders of using this technique are those who conduct research in areas where black people are disproportionately represented such as child welfare, special education, and the juvenile or criminal justice system. when conducting research about black people you have a responsibility to your participants, and your work, to ensure that the research process is filtered through eyes that do not benefit from white privilege. your black participants do not benefit from white privilege. you have a responsibility to rely not on stereotypes about black people or norms based on white people when you inter- pret your results and write your discussion section. if you use your research skills to engage in manuscript or grant reviews, do not decide that a study is weaker, or unworthy, because it only includes black people. most studies only black lives matter, and yes, you are racist: the parallelism of the twentieth and twenty-first… include white people and the question is never, “why did you not include black people in your sample?” hence, it should not be asked why white people are not included in a study about black people. social work policymakers if you are a policymaker, pay attention to the creation and implementation of policies. are they really designed to ensure equal benefits to all, or will they only predominately help whites because larger societal context and existing pol- icies, practices, and mandates will nullify the intent of the policy or law? ask yourself are you wanting this new policy to help blacks because you think it is what they need or is it because the community who you partnered with is seeking to have implemented? note, if you have not partnered with the community you should ask yourself, why do you think you are better equipped than those who will be impacted to make potentially life altering recommendations about their lives? conclusion black people are not victims. we have survived in this coun- try despite the middle passage, enslavement, and the numer- ous other attempts to make us the footstool that everyone who is not black or american indian/native american (survivors of numerous attempts at indigenous erasure) has the privilege of using to reach a ladder so they can climb unfettered and accomplish the american dream. if you are silent, you are complicit. if you fail to demand change, you are giving approval. if you fail to demand justice, just know, you are guilty, and you support injustice. references abadi, m. 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( , may ). the history behind ’when the looting starts, the shooting starts’ npr. retrieved from https ://www.npr. org/ / / / /the-histo ry-behin d-when-the-looti ng- start s-the-shoot ing-start s stafford, z. ( , may ). america’s new tv violence: videos of black men dying on loop. the guardian. retrieved from https ://www.thegu ardia n.com/comme ntisf ree/ /may/ /when-we- watch -video s-of-black -men-dying -on-loop-it-harms -us sullivan, a. ( , september ). southern u.s. states have closed , polling places in recent years: rights group. reuters. retrieved from https ://www.reute rs.com/artic le/us-usa-elect ion- locat ions/south ern-us-state s-have-close d- -polli ng-place s-in- recen t-years -right s-group -idusk cn vv j thompson, v. s. ( ). african american employment and covid- : disparities and compounding risks. washington, dc: research-to-policy collaboration. retrieved from https ://www. resea rch p olicy .org/covid -afric an-ameri can-emplo yment trump, d. j. [@realdonaldtrump]. ( a, may ). these thugs are dishonoring the memory of george floyd, and i won’t let that happen. just spoke to governor tim [tweet]. twitter https ://twitt er.com/reald onald trump /statu s/ trump, d. j. ( b. june ). remarks by president trump at signing of an executive order on safe policing for safe communities. retrieved from https ://www.white house .gov/briefi ngs-state ments /remar ks-presi dent-trump -signi ng-execu tive-order -safe-polic ing- safe-commu nitie s/ ub-social work [@ubssw]. ( , july ). here is the letter @ ubssw #phd students sent today to @csocialworked - via @ cskrzy #antiracist #socialwork #sweducation [tweet]. twitter https ://twitt er.com/ubssw /statu s/ university of illinois at chicago, center for health equity research. ( ). conceptual framework of structural violence and health inequality. retrieved from https ://hospi tal.uilli nois.edu/about -ui- healt h/resea rch/healt h-equit y-resea rch wagner, j., & ikowitz, c. ( , july ). trump says painting ‘black lives matter’ on new york’s fifth avenue would be ‘a symbol of hate’. washington post. retrieved from https ://www.washi ngton post.com/polit ics/trump -says-paint ing-black -lives -matte r-on-new- yorks -fifth -avenu e-would -be-a-symbo l-of-hate/ / / / a f -bba - ea-bdaf-a f f_story .html waxman, o. b. ( , may ). how the u.s. got its police force. time. retrieved from https ://time.com/ /polic e-histo ry- origi ns/ werner, f. e., frej, w. m., & madway, d. m. ( ). redlining and disinvestment causes, consequences, and proposed remedies. clearinghouse review, ( ), – . wines. m. ( , may ). ‘looting’ comment from trump dates back to racial unrest of the s. the new york times. retrieved from https ://nyti.ms/ yiih il wormser, r. ( a). red summer ( ). the rise and fall of jim crow. retrieved from https ://www.thirt een.org/wnet/jimcr ow/stori es_event s_red.html wormser, r. 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(may ) over recent months, the undersigned members of npts faculty have formulated the following statement in response to the debates in the nation concerning race and the justice system. we were moved to do so because of the tragic incidents in ferguson and elsewhere, and we wished to add our own voices to others on the north park campus and in the evangelical covenant church calling for change. we also noted and supported the engagement of many of our own students in actions calling for just treatment for all. this statement is far from the first to be issued on this topic in the world of theological education, but we hope that to publish our statement now is all the more timely in a context where the media news cycle is gradually prioritizing other concerns and paying less attention to these matters. as faculty of north park theological seminary we join our voice to those of our university, denomination, neighborhood, city, and nation and declare unequivocally: black lives matter. we affirm the dignity of every human being as made in the image of god, created to flourish physically, emotionally, spirituality, socially, culturally, and economically. as one body in christ, if one part of the body suffers we all suffer; if one part of the body cannot breathe, none of us can breathe. the outcry heard on our campus and our streets demonstrates that the body of christ cannot breathe. violence against black lives without sufficient cause or accountability points to a broken system and demands justice. we affirm the biblical witness that god desires justice on earth (gen- north park theological seminary faculty statement on race and the justice system february esis : ; deuteronomy : – ; amos : – ), that christ himself is the servant who proclaims justice to the nations (matthew : – ; cf. isaiah : – ) and whose gospel puts to death hostility between races (ephesians : – ), and that the spirit intercedes as we pray that equal- ity before the law be realized (romans : – ). when our institutions, our churches, and especially our justice system, do not align with these values, the systems—and not the values—are at fault. as a seminary we support nonviolent forms of civil disobedience that show solidarity with victims of power abuses and that refuse to perpetuate the very cycles of violence that spawn injustice. we commit to striving toward creating safe places for dialogue and conversation on the topic of racial justice in co-curricular activities, in our classrooms, and in our community life. we as faculty acknowledge that the toil for justice is arduous and long. nevertheless, christians must not ignore any injustice; therefore, we are committed in our vocations as educators to teach and embody god’s heart for justice on our campus, in our city, and in the world. deb auger paul koptak jodie boyer-hatlem max lee jim bruckner hauna ondrey stephen chester jay phelan michelle clifton-soderstrom elizabeth pierre paul de neui soong-chan rah tim johnson klyne snodgrass dave kersten stephen spencer ellen kogstad research. the book is a much-needed and timely intervention that sets an example for interdisciplinary approaches to history and religion in an increasingly diverse society. jenny körber, humboldt-universität zu berlin doi: . /rqx. . saintly women: medieval saints, modern women, and intimate partner violence. nancy e. nienhuis and beverly mayne kienzle. routledge studies in medieval religion and culture . london: routledge, . xvi + pp. $ . social movements, most notably me too and black lives matter, have fought to draw attention to the pervasive violence of systemic inequalities. these forms of resistance have coincided with a rise in the blatant visibility and political support of misogyny, racism, and religious intolerance across the world. in response to the state of our domes- tic and global scenes, scholarly communities have challenged each other to engage a public audience and to use our research for social change. saintly women is a crucial contribution to that effort. nancy e. nienhuis and beverly mayne kienzle confront the complicity of religious traditions in providing theological justifications for intimate partner violence (ipv). while the authors recognize current efforts of religious leaders and practitioners from diverse faith traditions to end abuse, they also reveal that historical studies rarely accom- pany such critical work. their book thus focuses on archival narratives of violence to chal- lenge the continued “misuse and misapplication of religious and cultural beliefs” to excuse batterers and work against survivors’ attempts to find safety ( ). saintly women analyzes hagiographies of medieval and early modern christian saints and martyrs that cultivated theologies of suffering, subordination, and ownership through the sanctification of domestic abuse victims. the staying power of these oppressive theologies, in fact, derives precisely from turning the records of victims into sacred texts to be emulated by survivors from our past and in our present. the strength of the book lies in its accessibility, which makes it a teachable text for students, non-academic audiences, and especially for groups who offer resources, guid- ance, and support to survivors of ipv. the first chapter defines ipv and gives an overview of its ubiquity, affecting people of all religious backgrounds, genders, races, and sexual orientations. a detailed justification for their methodologies follows with an explanation of the important perspectives gained through literary analyses guided by feminist criticism and ethics to dismantle rather than uphold kyriarchal systems. saintly women contextu- alizes hagiographic accounts, uncovers the patterns and attitudes that enable violence, reads for silences and gaps in narratives, and underscores that oppressive systems of power have authorized certain voices to be heard, remembered, and extolled over others. reviews downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog?doi= . /rqx. . &domain=pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core for example, rather than take timothy and peter with their strong injunctions against women as indicative of feminine subordination in early christian communities, the authors insist that such instructions point to women’s enfranchisement during a time of widespread religious persecution due, in part, to the perceived radical egalitarian practices of early christians. the command for women’s submission adhered to the dominant greco-roman standards of the family and society. women were called “to sacrifice themselves on the altar of male domination in order to blend in more unob- trusively to the surrounding culture” ( ). through a comparative study of primary sources on holy women (e.g., saint monica, hildegard of bingen, radegund, godelieve of gistel, umiliana dei cerchi, dorothy of montau, and catherine of genoa), the book questions the motivations behind the commemoration of domestic abuse victims, whose hagiographies conve- niently align with oppressive social, economic, and political patriarchal norms. ambitious in its scope, the book also considers the effects of christianity on the cultural practices of native populations like the montagnais during the colonization of new france, as well as the theological groundings espoused in defense of the transatlantic slave trade. the book, therefore, can be placed in dialogue with existing scholarly work on critical race studies, the global spread of christianity, and on the erotics of masochism and submission. some particularly poignant moments include excerpts from the diary of abigail abbot bailey and the testimonies of contemporary women of faith who painfully dem- onstrate the internalization of the messages contained in medieval hagiographic accounts. despite its focus on victimization, the book also provides a message of hope. buried in the archives—the authors stress—lies a history of resistance to violence, such as the records of merovingian women, medieval women exegetes, the cathar woman guilhelme maury, and matteuccia francisco of todi. their voices reveal the strength of communities that challenge oppressive structures. saintly women provides a historically based theological support for such communities endeavoring to empower those who suffer abuse as they make the decisions to become survivors. kirsten n. mendoza, university of dayton doi: . /rqx. . the reform of zeal: françois de sales and militant french catholicism. thomas a. donlan. st andrews studies in french history and culture . st andrews: university of st andrews, . iv + pp. free. in his short book, thomas a. donlan offers a new interpretation of françois de sales’s spirituality, arguing that the savoyard saint developed a piety that was the opposite of a renaissance quarterly volume lxxiii, no. downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core doi: . /s 	 ©	american	political	science	association,	 	 ps	•	july ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ p o l i t i c s s y m p o s i u m state legislatures at ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ introduction: the enduring relevance of the state assemblies richard a. clucas, portland state university on july , , elected representatives convened in a small wooden church along the marshy banks of the james river to consider the laws governing the virginia colony. it was unbearably hot and humid during the six days that the assembly was in session and many of those attend- ing were ill, including the colony’s governor and the assembly speaker. one burgess died mid-session. despite these obstacles, the assembly was successful in ratifying the colony’s new char- ter, converting past instructions from the company’s leaders in england into law, and adopting several new laws that the bur- gesses themselves wanted to see enacted. before adjourning, the assembly passed one final measure: approval of the first tax ever proposed by an american legislature, which required adult colonists to pay one pound of their best tobacco to the colonial government (kammen , – ). the story of how a representative assembly first arose in jamestown is not a glorious tale of a struggle for democracy. the colonists did not rise up to demand a voice in their own political affairs, as their successors would years later. instead, the creation of the assembly was part of a larger plan implemented by the virginia company—the joint-stock com- pany that oversaw the colony—to salvage its holdings in the new world. after more than a decade of senseless deaths among colonists, continuing missteps in the colony’s manage- ment, and persistent financial losses, the company was on the threshold of collapse. “what can we do to save the venture?” company leaders asked themselves. packaged together with a set of other reforms, the creation of an assembly offered what seemed to be the best hope for overcoming the colony’s prob- lems. although the virginia company’s action in creating the assembly was a pragmatic business decision, it opened the door to representative government in america and marked the birth of state legislatures (craven ). with the upcoming th anniversary of the jamestown assembly on july , , this is a particularly oppor- tune time to reflect on the relevance of state legislatures in american politics and on the study of these assemblies. the purpose of this symposium is to provide that reflection. collectively, the symposium articles offer an overview of what we know today about state-legislative politics, provide direc- tions for future research, and shine light on the importance of state legislatures as both a focus for research and actors in american politics. because this symposium is meant to mark the -year history of state legislatures, i use this introduction to explain why this anniversary merits recognition. why look back to jamestown? why use the anniversary of the jamestown assembly as the linchpin for reflecting on state legislatures? part of the answer is that it makes sense from an historical perspective, and it provides a vehicle to emphasize the value in studying state legislatures in other periods and across time. the history of state legislatures is one that transcends the nation’s founding, reaching back to events that played out in jamestown. virginia may have been the first colony in british north america to gain a representative assembly, but it was not alone for long. as the british government established additional colonies along the atlantic seaboard in subsequent years, it granted each one its own little parliament. with the founding of the nation, these colonial assemblies were trans- formed into state legislatures, experiencing little change in their operations, structures, and role in society (see squire in this symposium). this continuity is why it is appropriate to include colonial assemblies in the study of state legislatures. state-legislative scholars are recognizing this unbroken history and looking back to earlier periods for testing theoret- ical questions. peverill squire is the foremost scholar in this research area. in his contribution to this symposium and in earlier works ( ; ), he analyzes how state legislatures have evolved since the founding of the jamestown assembly. squire’s focus on legislative development is a topic that has been of particular interest to state-legislative scholars. by analyzing the long-term historical development of these institutions, his work provides a much fuller understanding than by reviewing the past few decades, which is more com- mon. state-legislative scholars have long benefited from the ability to test theories across separate chambers. adding this extensive temporal dimension further strengthens the research. squire’s work also makes clear that the structures and procedures of modern state legislatures are deeply rooted in the past, demonstrating why it is reasonable to look back to jamestown. although squire’s effort to incorporate colonial assemblies into legislative research is novel, it is consistent with perspec- tives on historical studies in other fields. among historians, there has been growing recognition in the past years that narratives on american history should not be divided arbi- trarily between the colonial and postcolonial periods. rather than viewing the revolution as a watershed event—one in which everything in america was transformed—recent historical studies recognize that the stories of america do not routinely begin or end with the revolutionary era (mcdonnell and ............................................................................................................................................... 	 ps	•	july p o l i t i c s s y m p o s i u m : s t a t e l e g i s l a t u r e s a t ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ waldstreicher , ). in looking at the states in particular, greene ( ) emphasized the need for scholars to acknowl- edge the “profound continuities between the colonial and national segments of the american past” ( ). before the rev- olution, state legislatures were at the center of american govern- ment, a place in which they remained far into the new republic. similarly, the emergence of american political develop- ment as a subfield in political science has brought renewed attention to american history and the value of studying american politics diachronically. much of this research has focused on institutional development, including in the pres- idency (skowronek ), bureaucracy (carpenter ), congress (schickler and rubin ), and courts (whittington ). by returning history to political science, these studies bring richer insights to the development of american polit- ical institutions. there has not been a similar effort within american political development to study state legislatures. however, the historian william novak ( ) argued that scholars of american political development should look directly at the role of state legislatures from colonial times through the antebellum period. he compared the exclusion of state legislature in the history of early american statecraft as being “something like writing a history of the civil war that leaves out slavery” ( ). from the contributions of these and other scholars, it is clear that looking back through time to the jamestown assembly is not only historically appropriate. it also is essen- tial for developing a better theoretical understanding of legislative politics and the nation’s development. a central actor in american politics it is important to reflect on the -year history of state legislatures not only because of these scholarly concerns but also because state legislatures have been and continue to be important actors in american politics—although their con- tributions often are overlooked and underappreciated. state legislatures have been generating increased public attention recently because of the controversial character of some of their actions, including the gerrymandering of electoral dis- tricts (see masket in this symposium; daley ), the adop- tion of laws suppressing voter turnout (weiser and feldman ), and their efforts to counter the initiatives of both presidents obama and trump (see rose in this symposium; bulman-pozen ). although these activities have made state legislatures more visible, the efforts by the state assem- blies to shape american politics are not new. to make sense of these recent events, it is valuable to understand the relevance of state legislatures in american politics over time. think about the importance of state legislatures in the following defining events in american history. the revolutionary generation often is credited with cre- ating democracy in america, but it was the colonial assem- blies that first established representative government in the american colonies long before the revolution. the story of david lloyd, the pugnacious pennsylvania assembly speaker at the turn of the eighteenth century, is a good example of the importance of those assemblies and their leaders. william penn is revered for his advocacy of religious freedom and the government he created in pennsylvania. however, it was lloyd—along with his legislative allies—who successfully forced the defiant penn to allow the assembly to have a mean- ingful voice in the colony and eventually to govern. elisha cooke, john robinson, charles pinckney, and edward moseley were among the many legislators who successfully championed representative government in the other colo- nies (greene ; lokken ). the colonial and state legislatures played a central role in the creation of the union. when the first and second continental congresses convened to address increased threats from parliament, the delegates were chosen by the colonial assemblies or by the committees of correspondence cre- ated by these legislatures. today we trace the founding of the nation to july , , yet some colonial legislatures already had voted to cut their ties to the crown by that date. moreover, some scholars trace the real declaration of inde- pendence to may , , when the continental congress directed the colonial assemblies to adopt independent gov- ernments (woods , ). it was in this period that colonial legislatures evolved almost unchanged into state legislatures. it was the state legislatures that then sent representatives to philadelphia in —to the pennsylvania state house—to revise the articles of confederation. after the convention ended, the state assemblies were responsible for approving the new constitution. the political power of state legislatures was at its zenith during the first several decades after the nation was founded (novak ). there simply was no other political body at either the national level or in the states that was in a position to challenge state assemblies. novak ( ) pointed to the breadth of legislation and the extensive police-power regulations enacted into law as evidence of the activism of early state legislatures. but early legislatures also were heavily involved in trying to expand the market for their state’s manufactured goods and farm products. to bolster economic development, the legislatures embarked on a campaign for internal improvements, creating pri- vate corporations and banks and using public funds to build roads, rail lines, canals, and bridges. the most famous of these internal improvements was the erie canal. the building boom created by the assemblies established with the upcoming th anniversary of the jamestown assembly on july , , this is a particularly opportune time to reflect on the relevance of state legislatures in american politics and on the study of these assemblies. ps	•	july ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ the transportation network that crisscrossed the young nation, helping the country to develop economically and providing the infrastructure for westward expansion (goodrich ; goodrich ). state assemblies were central in the battle over slavery and events that led to the civil war. in the years preceding the civil war, the south carolina legislature was the leader in the southern states in defying the federal government. it repeatedly challenged congress’s actions and championed an extreme view of states’ rights—one that perceived states as having the right to nullify the acts of the federal government. by , the south carolina legislature had become so incensed at the federal government that it became the first assembly to approve a convention to secede, voting unani- mously for the convention a few days after lincoln’s election. where south carolina led, other southern legislatures fol- lowed, tearing the union apart and plunging the nation into war (haw ). state legislatures continued to play a critical role in american politics in the latter part of the nineteenth century. with the end of reconstruction, they led efforts to deny african americans their newfound rights and liberties by instituting jim crow laws and restricting participation in politics. in the late s, party organizations dominated state politics through their control over state assemblies. the organizations used that power to place their pawns in the us senate and to enjoy the spoils from all levels of government (silbey ). with the rise of the progressive movement, state legislatures became engines for major polit- ical and social change. although scholars often deemphasize the importance of the states after the growth of the national government in the s, state legislatures were not moribund (teaford ). if nothing else, state legislatures offered some of the strongest resistance to change in american society after world war ii, particularly in the south where they fought the civil rights movement. during the legislative-reform movement in the s, state legislatures became involved in all aspects of american life, addressing issues ranging from animal rights to welfare reform. in recent years, state legislatures have been at the center of many of the nation’s most important policy debates (see rose in this symposium). they play an active role and, in some cases, lead the way in addressing issues such as black lives matter, climate change, cybersecurity, education reform, gun safety, marijuana legalization, minimum wage, the opioid epidemic, and the shared economy. they challenge presidents on health care, immigration, gendered restrooms, climate change, and other issues. moreover, state legislatures enact significant policy on almost every type of issue imaginable. the average number of laws enacted each year per state is more than , compared with fewer than by congress (little and ogle , xiii). in other words, as they have in the past, state legislatures play a central role in american politics today. for scholars, state-legislative politics is worth studying because these assemblies provide chambers and years of existence for testing theoretical arguments about legislative politics. for americans, state legislatures matter because of their enduring relevance in american politics since their beginning along the james river years ago. the anniversary of jamestown provides an opportunity to emphasize the scholarly and polit- ical importance of these institutions. in this symposium the first two articles in this symposium focus specifically on the development of state-legislative institutions. peverill squire traces the development of these institutions from the colonial assemblies to state legislatures. he explains how these evolutionary changes led to the considerable organi- zational and procedural similarities found across american legislatures today. gary f. moncrief examines the history of state-legislative scholarship since the s, linking the changing focus of research on the changes over time and the differences among state legislatures in their institutional arrangements. the next three articles focus on the relationship of state legislatures to some of the most important political con- cerns in america today. beth reingold assesses trends in diversity in state legislatures and how the research in this area contributes to our understanding of gender, race and ethnicity, and representation in us politics. seth masket focuses on the differences across state legislatures to test some of the most frequently heard explanations for leg- islative polarization in america. his research, along with the studies of other state-legislative scholars, raises impor- tant challenges to these prominent arguments as to why american legislatures—including congress—have become so polarized. finally, shanna rose examines the position of state legislatures within the federal system, focusing on their role in shaping national politics and policy in the trump era. in the concluding article, keith e. hamm documents the sig- nificant progress that has been made in state-legislative stud- ies during the past decade. he focuses particular attention on four research areas: legislative professionalism, majority- party control, representation, and state constitutions. n today we trace the founding of the nation to july , , yet some colonial legislatures had already voted to cut their ties to the crown by that date. moreover, some scholars trace the real declaration of independence to may , , when the continental congress directed the colonial assemblies to adopt independent governments (woods , ). 	 ps	•	july p o l i t i c s s y m p o s i u m : s t a t e l e g i s l a t u r e s a t ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ ........................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................ r e f e r e n c e s bulman-pozen, jessica. . “unbundling federalism: colorado’s legalization of marijuana and federalism’s many forms.” university of colorado law review ( ): – . carpenter, daniel p. . the forging of bureaucratic autonomy: reputations, networks, and policy innovation in executive agencies, – . princeton, nj: princeton university press. craven, wesley frank. . dissolution of the virginia company: the failure of a colonial experiment. gloucester, ma: peter smith. daley, david. . ratf**ked: the true story behind the secret plan to steal america’s democracy. new york: w.w. norton. goodrich, carter. . “the revulsion against internal improvements.” journal of economic history ( ): – . goodrich, carter. . “internal improvements reconsidered.” journal of economic history ( ): – . greene, jack p. . the quest for power: the lower houses of assembly in the southern royal colonies, – . new york: w.w. norton. greene, jack p. . “colonial history and national history: reflections on a continuing problem.” william and mary quarterly ( ): – . haw, james. . “‘the problem of south carolina’ reexamined: a review essay.” south carolina historical magazine ( ): – . kammen, michael. . deputyes & libertyes: the origins of representative government in colonial america. new york: alfred a. knopf. little, thomas h., and david b. ogle. . the legislative branch of state government: people, process, and politics. santa barbara, ca: abc-clio. lokken, roy n. . david lloyd: colonial lawmaker. seattle: university of washington press. mcdonnell, michael a., and david waldstreicher. . “revolution in the quarterly? a historiographical analysis.” william and mary quarterly ( ): – . novak, william j. . “a state of legislatures.” polity ( ): – . schickler, eric, and ruth bloch rubin. . “congress and american political development.” in oxford handbook of american political development, eds. richard m. valelly, suzanne mettier, and robert c. lieberman, – . new york: oxford university press. silbey, joel h. . the american political nation, – . stanford, ca: stanford university press. skowronek, stephen. . the politics presidents make: leadership from john adams to bill clinton. cambridge, ma: belknap press. squire, peverill. . “historical evolution of legislatures in the united states.” annual review of political science : – . squire, peverill. . the evolution of american legislatures: colonies, territories, and states, – . ann arbor: university of michigan press. teaford, jon c. . the rise of the states: evolution of american state government. baltimore, md: johns hopkins university press. weiser, wendy, and max feldman. . the state of voting . new york: brennan center for justice, new york university. available at www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/publications/ _ _stateofvoting_v % % % .pdf. accessed august , . whittington, keith. . “law and the courts.” in oxford handbook of american political development, eds. richard m. valelly, suzanne mettier, and robert c. lieberman, – . new york: oxford university press. woods, gordon s. . the creation of the american republic, – . chapel hill: university of north carolina press. s y m p o s i u m c o n t r i b u t o r s richard a. clucas is professor of political science at portland state university and executive director of the western political science association. he is the coauthor of the character of democracy: how institutions shape politics (oxford university press, ). he is the guest editor of this symposium and may be reached at hprc@pdx.edu. keith e. hamm is edwards professor in american government at rice university. he is the coauthor, with peverill squire, of chambers: congress, state legislatures, and the future of legislative studies (ohio state university press, ). he may be reached at hamm@rice.edu. seth masket is professor of political science and director of the center on american politics at the university of denver. he is the author, most recently, of the inevitable party: why attempts to kill the party system fail and how they weaken democracy (oxford university press, ). he writes frequently for pacific standard and vox. he may be reached at seth.masket@du.edu. gary f. moncrief is university distinguished professor emeritus, boise state university, and consulting scholar, state government and politics, eagleton institute of politics, rutgers university. his books include why states matter, nd ed. (rowman & littlefield, ) and state legislatures today, rd ed. (rowman & littlefield, ), both coauthored with peverill squire. he may be reached at gmoncri@boisestate.edu. beth reingold is associate professor of political science and women’s, gender, and sexuality studies at emory university. she is the author of numerous works on gender, race, and representation in state legislatures, including “welfare policymaking and intersections of race, ethnicity, and gender in u.s. state legislatures” ( , with adrienne r. smith, american journal of political science : – ) and “race relations, black elites and immigration politics” ( , with irene browne and anne kronberg, social forces : – ). she may be reached at polbr@emory.edu. shanna rose is an associate professor of government at claremont mckenna college. she is the author of financing medicaid: federalism and the growth of america’s health care safety net (university of michigan press, ) and coauthor, with andrew karch, of responsive states: federalism and the evolution of us policy (cambridge university press, forthcoming). she may be reached at srose@cmc.edu. peverill squire is professor of political science and holds the hicks and martha griffiths chair in american political institutions at the university of missouri. he is the author of the rise of the representative: lawmakers and constituents in colonial america ( ) and the evolution of american legislatures: colonies, territories, and states, – ( ). he may be reached at squirep@missouri.edu. http://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/publications/ _ _stateofvoting_v % % % .pdf http://www.brennancenter.org/sites/default/files/publications/ _ _stateofvoting_v % % % .pdf mailto:hprc@pdx.edu mailto:hamm@rice.edu mailto:seth.masket@du.edu mailto:gmoncri@boisestate.edu mailto:polbr@emory.edu mailto:srose@cmc.edu mailto:squirep@missouri.edu do police officers in the usa protect and serve all citizens equally? $ € £ ¥ social sciences article do police officers in the usa protect and serve all citizens equally? william de soto department of political science, texas state university, san marcos, tx , usa; wd @txstate.edu; tel: + - - - received: september ; accepted: october ; published: october ���������� ������� abstract: survey research has clarified the extent to which racial minorities and majority white americans disagree about whether police should be trusted. racial minorities are generally far more suspicious of the police officers who serve their communities. other forms of evidence would appear to corroborate the views of minority citizens in the usa. this requires scholars and others interested in policing to think about reforms that may create a fairer system of law enforcement. keywords: policing; minorities . introduction the united states appears at times to have two separate policing systems. journalist hayes ( ) captures this apparent reality with the title of his recent book, the colony in a nation. racial minorities, hayes argues, are treated as a subordinate community or colony that must be ruthlessly controlled. police in these communities are instruments of social control. by contrast, anglo or white citizens are treated respectfully by police, as though they were part of the nation. police officers in these communities do “protect and serve” the citizens who pay their salaries. minority citizens, however, may feel that police subjugate and oppress them. this paper provides evidence that largely confirms hayes’s thesis. this paper has six sections. first, a brief comparison of the usa with several other countries makes clear that the issue of bias in policing is a pervasive problem. second, a brief description of the historical context of policing in the usa leads us to wonder whether contemporary police treatment of minority communities has changed over time. the third section of the paper reviews some of the survey research that examines the degree to which attitudes toward police are shaped by one’s race or ethnicity. the fourth section presents findings from an original dataset that represents a sample of students taken from a large u.s. university in the southwest. the fifth section provides a review of some of the research efforts that have explored the issue of bias in policing in the usa by employing “objective” data such as arrest rates. the final section reviews the most important conclusions and offers suggestions for future research. . global comparisons racial bias appears to influence police practices in numerous countries. understanding these patterns in other countries illuminates crucial issues in the usa. it should be noted that “race” is thought by biologists and anthropologists to lack scientific meaning. it does, however, have a cultural significance that seems to shape how police officers interact with their fellow citizens. nevertheless, some scholars believe that the term “ethnicity” is a more scientifically meaningful term. for our purposes, “race” can be thought of as a social construct that depends on one’s skin color while ethnicity refers to one’s country of origin. “hispanic,” for example, can be construed as a racial category because it has a cultural meaning for many americans. a comparison of the usa with several other soc. sci. , , ; doi: . /socsci www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci http://www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci http://www.mdpi.com http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /socsci http://www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci soc. sci. , , of english-speaking countries illustrates the point that many (perhaps most) other countries struggle with perceptions that their police systems are unfair. minority and majority communities frequently perceive their law enforcement communities in quite different ways. this pattern appears in australia, canada, and the united kingdom. oliveira and murphy ( ) analyze survey data that complicate the general consensus that race or ethnicity is the principal variable distinguishing respondents’ perceptions of police bias. using a sample of australian adults, they discover that a respondent’s strength of identification with different groups in society, rather than her ethnicity, predicts her attitudes toward police. murphy et al. ( ) provide survey evidence from a medium-sized australian city that shows that cities will help police officers when they view the police as legitimate. a survey of australian muslims found that adherents of the islamic faith perceived that they were viewed as potential terrorists after the attack on the usa on september (madon et al. ). canada is also debating its legacy of racism. chan and chunn ( ), for example, find that racial bias is still prominent in policing in canada. black canadians make up % of the federal prison population, though they are only . % of the overall population. lana maclean, a nova scotia social worker, gave a cultural impact assessment to the sentencing court following the second-degree murder conviction of a black canadian man in (bascaramurty ). she argues that the overrepresentation of black people in the criminal justice system is a consequence of this racial bias, although critics have called the maclean statement an attempt to get black offenders a “race discount.” nova scotia has begun incorporating cultural impact assessments into its sentencing practices. bias against people of color appears to begin in childhood. during the – school year, for example, . % of the students suspended by the halifax regional school board were black, even though black students only make up . % of the total population (bascaramurty ). this has led to discussion of race in other regions. how would the background of a first-generation somali immigrant in edmonton be considered? a second-generation trinidadian in toronto? a moroccan international student in quebec city? research in the united kingdom generally detects a disparity in how minority and majority communities perceive police in their community. patel ( ) use qualitative analysis to find that ethnic hostility is evident in how “brown” (i.e., those who appear to be from south asia or the middle east) residents of great britain are treated. “brown bodies” are marked as suspicious even if they have done nothing to warrant scrutiny. this fear was heightened by islamaphobia and xenophobia after the / attack in the usa. a related research effort (barrett et al. ) uses a qualitative sample from to assess how black minority residents interact with a north of england police force. giles et al. ( , p. ) noted that the macpherson report of was the first official acknowledgement of how deeply engrained racist attitudes were in english policing. stop and search data indicate the disproportionate impact on bmes (black minority ethnics). the authors, in contrast to much of what is written about the usa, however, conclude that data suggest that bmes are becoming more satisfied with the police in their region as communication improves. curiously, however, bradford et al. ( ) use the crime survey of england and wales to report that immigrants are actually more trusting of english and welsh police than are natives. the authors speculate that this may be because new immigrants see british police as more professional than the police in their country of origin. . the historical context of police bias in the usa studying policing is especially timely given the current national controversy in the usa, but it important to recall that there have long been debates about policing in the usa. many scholars have argued that the whole criminal justice system has historically been used to maintain racial hierarchies. robert perkinson’s texas tough: the rise of america’s prison empire (perkinson ), for example, makes the case that texas police and prisons have been used to suppress ethnic minorities since the era of the republic of texas in the s. slavery ended in , but segregation persisted in the state and soc. sci. , , of across the south for another century. the defeat of the confederacy did not end bias in the criminal justice system. the chain gangs were used to break the spirits of the incarcerated, who were then and now disproportionately african american. police, prosecutors, and courts continued to be profoundly hostile to ethnic minority communities. the civil rights cases of held that the civil rights act of was unconstitutional because it had said that private businesses could not be prohibited from discriminating against private individuals. “pig laws” unfairly penalized african americans for crimes such as stealing an animal. “black codes” sharply limited the civil rights and liberties of african americans after reconstruction ended in the s. as the book flames past midnight made clear, extrajudicial violence reinforced institutionalized oppression of the regular criminal justice system in places like texas. the kerner commission of years ago lamented that institutionalized racism in police practices had alienated non-white communities (logan and oakley ). byington et al. describe the vicious murder of james byrd in . byrd was tied to the back of a truck by three men who were members of the ku klux klan and dragged to his death. the execution of lawrence brewer in marked the first time in texas history that a white person was executed for killing a black person. the matthew shepard and james byrd jr. hate crimes prevention act, a federal law, expanded hate crime legislation to include crimes motivated by gender, sexual orientation, gender identity and disability. however, federal prosecutors have pursued fewer than cases since then. while it is likely that the criminal justice system in the usa has been biased against ethnic minority communities throughout the nation’s history, recent debates have attracted unprecedented national attention. black lives matter called attention to the frequency of police officer shootings of sometimes unarmed citizens. these victims have been disproportionately minority. the activists who guide this effort call for fairness in policing and the criminal justice system. president barack obama organized the president’s task force on st century policing in late . scholars, the media, and political leaders are increasingly interested in the issues raised during this period. controversy over athletes in the national football league who have kneeled during the national anthem to protest police abuse has attracted critical commentary from the u.s. president. defenders of the existing criminal justice system argue that in most cases these actions are justifiable. blue lives matter has organized to respond to the issues raised by the civil rights activists. as worden and mclean ( ) note, a consensus on how to measure and define legitimacy in policing has yet to emerge. as the authors explain, police must accomplish vague and conflicting goals, and there is difficulty in evaluating the effects of their work given the ambiguous measures of legitimacy. law enforcement in the usa is decentralized. federal law enforcement is limited to the fbi, cbp, ice and a few other federal agencies. states have primary responsibility for most aspects of the criminal justice system. local governments, in turn, hire most police officers. sheriffs are often elected and lead county government law enforcement. cities have their own departments. there are about county governments and about , municipal governments. the nypd has about , officers; other police departments are often quite small. the country’s nearly million licensed police officers are employed by roughly , police departments. by contrast, australia has just nine police departments: one federal and eight regional departments. county sheriff departments in the usa tend to have broader responsibilities than city law enforcement agencies. among other things, sheriffs have responsibility for jails. this decentralization results in substantial differences in policing styles across the usa. the american tradition of federalism permits enables subnational governments to be “laboratories of democracy,” but it also means that there can be wide variations in how fairly and professionally police departments perform their social roles. it is important at this moment in american history to assess the claims of scholars like perkinson that the criminal justice system is an instrument for the repression of ethnic minorities. a variety of types of evidence can be useful as we analyze these claims. survey data can shed insight on how police and other components of the criminal justice system are perceived by different ethnic communities. soc. sci. , , of are police officers perceived as professional and fair? in addition to these data, we can examine a variety of other data that may reinforce the impressions that we gain from survey data. . survey research two research strategies promise to enable us to assess the degree to which policing in the usa is biased against racial minorities. the first strategy is to assess the perceptions of different racial groups. many scholarly analyses of survey data consistently illustrate the chasm between how white majority and ethnic minority citizens view their criminal justice systems. peck ( ) provides a helpful and exhaustive assessment of the current state of research on minority perceptions of the police. status as a racial minority is consistently significant as a predictor of trust in police. while the list of articles that reach this conclusion is long, a few of the representative research efforts include brunson and weitzer ( ), cochran and warren ( ), macdonald et al. ( ), and wu ( ). brunson ( ) makes the helpful point that we should understand young african american men’s experience of harassment by police as something that accumulates over time. he used in-depth interviews to gain insights into minority perceptions of the police. as other scholars have found, citizen distrust of the police is common among african american young people. it is important to remember that a citizen who has had an unpleasant encounter with a police officer will share her experience with friends and neighbors. brunson recommends that compliance review processes be opened up to civilians in order to improve the image of the police in minority communities. gabbison and higgins ( ) use gallup survey data to find that blacks are less positive than whites about the police. smith and alpert ( ) argued that harsher police treatment cannot be explained by higher levels of minority group criminality. instead, they theorize that this disparity is caused by stereotypes that result from social conditioning. hispanics, for example, are stereotyped as gangsters. president trump, for example, claimed that many mexican immigrants are rapists. social identity theory accounts for the power of this discriminatory behavior. feinstein ( ) interviewed male juveniles who resided in a correctional facility in minnesota and found that youth of color were less likely to be treated fairly by police or to be given a second chance. she points out that police officers are still disproportionately white males, despite efforts to diversify policing in the usa. she argued that the usa has a double system of justice. although some studies of hispanics reported null findings, the most common finding is that hispanics also share a negative view of the police. nuno ( ) makes the important point that few existing studies examine the perceptions of hispanics toward the police. she finds no difference between hispanic and white perceptions of police legitimacy in maricopa county. other scholars find instead that hispanics are less positive about the police. garcia and cao ( ) found that hispanics had the lowest satisfaction with the police, while whites had the highest satisfaction in a small northeastern u.s. city. wu ( ) compares the views of asian, black, hispanic, and white americans toward the police. her survey of seattle residents concludes that all three minority groups hold more negative views toward police than majority whites. unfortunately, it appears that more research will be needed before we can confidently generalize about the attitudes of hispanics toward police officers. epp et al. ( ) use survey and interview data to make a convincing case that race significantly affects investigatory police stops. about % of motorists are stopped per year; this percentage is % for ethnic minority drivers. they emphasize that this disparity is not necessarily the result of conscious racism. instead, police officers are trained to stop individuals whom they believe are most likely to commit crimes. those who are stopped by these investigations are deeply offended even when the officers involved are professional and polite. armaline et al. ( ) use interviews to explore the degree to which police in oakland, california are regarded as legitimate by young people of color. the respondents they authors interviewed believed that oakland police consistently failed at the task of protecting their communities. in fact, the oakland police department (opd) was considered by minority respondents to be the “biggest gang soc. sci. , , of in oakland.” this department was grievously lacking in legitimacy. the documented and persistent abuse of force left residents alienated from local law enforcement. flexon et al. ( ) found that minority youth resented the likelihood that they would have negative interactions with the police. . present study because the issue of police bias has attracted such extraordinary recent attention, an exploration of current attitudes toward police in the usa is warranted. the author obtained survey responses from undergraduate students at a large university in the southwest in the spring and summer of . the data are obtained from a convenience sample, although the ethnic composition of the respondents appears to be approximately representative of the student body as a whole. the university is designated as a hispanic serving institution. forty-four of the respondents are hispanic; % of the respondents reported being non-hispanic white; and % report being african american. those who reported being asian american or a member of some other ethnic group were excluded from the analysis because their numbers are so small. the student respondents answered a series of questions about policing. all survey data were gathered in classroom settings with pen and paper survey instruments. table gives the distribution of responses. race is coded for african american, for anglo; and for hispanic. table . anova results. race (a) race (b) n mean diff. † (a-b) % ci lower bound upper bound black vs. hispanic − . ** − . − . white − . ** − . − . hispanic vs. black . ** . . white − . ** − . − . † scheffe test of significance. ** significant at α < . . given the previous discussion about racial minority citizens’ views of police officers, we hypothesize that minority racial groups will express more negative views about the police than majority white respondents. analysis of variance is the appropriate statistical technique because the data are parametric and we are interested in examining the difference between mean responses to a series of questions about how the respondents view police officers. four questions comprised the dependent variable. these are: ( ) police are respectful toward people like me; ( ) police officers are courteous and communicate well; ( ) i do not believe the police are effective in controlling crime in my community; and ( ) i do not have much trust in the police in my community. in combination, these questions explore the respondent’s assessment of police officers’ procedural fairness and effectiveness. the four questions were combined into a composite measure of police performance. the primary independent or explanatory variable is respondents’ racial identification. the analysis reveals several distinctive patterns. students who completed our survey do differ significantly in how they view police. anglo students consistently express more positive views toward police than either hispanic and african american students. although the literature review suggested that hispanics are not as consistently distrustful of the police as african americans, our results indicate that both minority groups are less positive about the police than white students. . research using objective data to assess minority perceptions of police survey data provide important insights into the nature of policing in the usa today. they tell us that there is a disparity in how members of different communities perceive law enforcement in their communities. improvements in our understanding of how different ethnic groups perceive law enforcement are surely invaluable in assessing the question of bias in the criminal justice system. however, a second type of research can complement the use of survey data. other “objective” data can soc. sci. , , of be used to assess the question of bias as well. a variety of other research strategies can shed additional light on this debate. in combination, these approaches shine essential light on the question of whether policing system in the usa is fair toward all racial groups. the scholar might begin with the u.s. department of justice ( ) scathing critiques of police practices in baltimore and chicago . after federal investigators reviewed police procedure statements, conducted interviews, and observed police on the job, they concluded that poor and ethnic minority communities are overpoliced but underserved. the omnibus crime control and safe streets act of prohibits discrimination based on race, but the doj investigators found little reason to believe it was being honored. rector ( ) offers an account in the baltimore sun of a city troubled by allegations that its police are racist. doj investigators discovered racial disparities in rates of searches, seizures and arrests. citizens in minority areas of their cities routinely had their civil liberties violated. the fourth amendment ban on unreasonable search and seizure was regularly flouted. training of the police was poor; oversight of their work was generally limited. sex crime victims were ignored or even told that they had not suffered a “real” crime. police would sometimes fire into moving vehicles without knowing whom they might hit. the community collaboration division in the bpd was ineffective. they found that police officers engaged in unnecessary and dangerous foot and vehicle pursuits. freddie gray was arrested for having a knife in and died while in police custody. the six officers who were transporting gray were acquitted of criminal charges. beyond the introduction of four “transformation zones” in the city, which pair policing resources with those from other city departments to support communities devastated by violence, there is no overarching, well-articulated crime-fighting strategy to address the problems. the current spike dates to gray’s death and the riots of april . there were homicides in baltimore in , per , people (tkacik ). before , baltimore had not broken homicides in a year for decades. at the same time, arrests have dropped, continuing a years-long trend. in absolute numbers, baltimore trailed only chicago in homicides. per capita, baltimore is deadlier. mayor catherine pugh, johns hopkins university president daniels, and police commissioner kevin davis have led discussions in baltimore, but little has been achieved. the chicago police department has attempted to implement a series of reforms agreed to in a consent decree agreed to during the presidency of barack obama, but progress has been slow (ruthhart ). for example, illinois attorney general lisa madigan wants chicago police officers to document every instance in which they draw their gun and point it at someone. she argues that this is needed to ensure that officers are properly using the threat of a gun, given the department’s history of excessive force and mistreatment of racial minorities. chicago mayor rahm emmanuel and his police superintendent eddie johnson suggested that this proposal shows a lack of confidence in chicago police officers and may put their lives at risk by making them hesitant to respond appropriately in potentially dangerous situations. the gun-pointing debate follows a heated discussion about police reform that began when laquan mcdonald was fatally shot in . the department of justice, under u.s. attorney eric holder, documented severe bias against ethnic minorities. lori lightfoot, a chicago mayoral candidate in , chaired the police accountability task force and has called for the inclusion of the gun-pointing policy. she and madigan argued that including the provision in the consent decree would not compromise officer safety. balko ( b) published a recent review of scholarly research on policing in the washington post and concluded, “there is overwhelming evidence that the criminal justice system is racist.” balko mentioned that even african american u.s. senator tim scott (r-s.c.) reported being repeatedly pulled over by police. balko notes that just % of stops of minority group citizens who are pulled over produce any evidence of a crime. only % of white but % of black drivers and % of hispanic drivers are searched by police. similar patterns occur in study after study. police are far more likely to solve homicides involving whites than minorities (fagan and geller ). smith and petrocelli ( ) use data from traffic stops conducted by police in richmond, va in . richmond officers used mobile data computers that recorded each stop. minority soc. sci. , , of drivers comprised % of all persons ticketed or criminally arrested during the data collection period. the authors also note that african americans outnumber whites as victims of police gunfire by a ratio of : (smith and petrocelli , p. ). prosecutors are more likely to decline to prosecute african americans than whites, suggesting that they were arrested under conditions that could not be used in court to secure convictions (hepburn ). the florida highway patrol ( ) reported that hispanics constituted % of traffic stops even though they were just % of the state’s population. smith and petrocelli ( ) report that racial bias is evident in traffic stops. their evidence is substantiated by the case of philando castile, a -year-old black american, who was shot in a suburb of minneapolis on july . while his girlfriend videotaped the encounter, castile was fatally shot. the video of the encounter was viewed more than million times on youtube. the officer was acquitted of all charges. castile had been stopped for traffic violations on occasions by police before the final, fatal encounter. scholars have carefully studied the use of force by police to gain more understanding of the impact of race on policing. paoline et al. ( ) reviewed police officer use of force records and discovered that white officers are more coercive toward black suspects. black officers’ use of force, however, is not affected by the race of suspects. menifield et al. ( ) explored the recent shootings of civilians by police officers. they gathered data on every fatal shooting in and . unfortunately, the death in custody reporting act of began to report uses of police force only recently. when -year-old michael brown was shot by police in august , the issue sparked both protests and scholarly attention. the authors show that african americans are killed far out of proportion to their share of the population. latinos are also killed more often than one would expect, while asian americans and anglos are killed less than one would expect. roughly % of all shooting victims are black even though african americans comprise just % of the u.s. population. the authors argue that this fact is not the result of a few “bad apples” or racist white cops. interestingly, civilians of color are as likely to be killed by african american police officers as by white officers, so simply diversifying police departments is not the solution. as the authors note, their conclusion is consistent with the survey data gathered by epp et al. ( ). it is crucial to address these long-running racial disparities in the way force is applied or the trust between minority communities and law enforcement will continue to erode. as the authors mention, a variety of strategies should be considered. they suggest that the dallas police department has improved public relations for the department by training its officers in emotion management in high-stress situations and in how to deal with suspects with mental challenges. as mentioned above, the frequency of civilian deaths at the hands of police officers has provoked a crisis of legitimacy. the black lives matter protests and the refusal of national football league players to stand for the national anthem are efforts to draw attention to these deaths. the shooting deaths of five police officers in dallas in july fueled the national controversy. what do the data tell us? are police officers implicitly and perhaps unselfconsciously biased against ethnic minorities? are they more likely to use deadly force against ethnic minorities as a result? nix et al. ( ) found evidence of bias in their analysis of civilians killed by police in . they analyzed fatal police shootings in using data compiled by the washington post. they used two indicators of threat perception failure: ( ) whether the civilian was not attacking the officer or other civilians just before being fatally shot and ( ) whether the civilian was unarmed when shot. the results indicated that civilians from minority groups were more likely than whites to have not been attacking the officer and that black civilians were more than twice as likely as white civilians to have been unarmed. the authors make the undoubtedly valid point that the department of justice should publish a use-of-force database that provides extensive information about the circumstances in which officers fatally shoot civilians. militarized policing has been a striking development in contemporary law enforcement. mummolo ( ) published a study in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences that examined this trend (balko a). the study looked at data from maryland, where a state law required that police agencies in the state submit biannual reports on how and how often they used their swat teams. mummolo performed a statistical analysis of the maryland data and crime rates, officer safety data, and race. after controlling for variables such as local crime rates, mummolo found that for every soc. sci. , , of % increase in the black population of a given zip code, there was a % increase in the likelihood of that zip code being raided by a swat team. the data showed that % of the swat raids were to serve search warrants. mummolo found no change in assaults or deaths of police officers after the introduction of swat teams. there was no statistical relationship between violent crime rates and swat teams over time. . conclusions and recommendations do police in the usa truly protect and serve everyone equally? qualitative and quantitative social science research has improved our ability to answer this question. the answer seems to depend on one’s race. the survey data consistently show stark contrasts between racial minority citizens and anglo residents. minorities frequently believe that the police oppress rather than serve them. the white majority may wonder whether their fellow citizens of color are too sensitive to perceived mistreatment. law enforcement seems fair to white citizens. the disparity in perception is striking and has been persistent. there is simply no doubt that the police (as well as nearly every other major social institution) was substantially biased against people of color for most of american history. martin luther king’s famous protest against racial segregation was just years ago. but are some white citizens correct in believing that bias in law enforcement is entirely in the past? additional data appear to confirm minorities’ perception of bias in policing. a variety of creative research efforts document the disparity in how different ethnic groups are treated. data on officers’ killing of civilians and other patterns of interaction of the police with the communities they serve are quite revealing. future research should use mixed-method research strategies and expand the range of minorities that are the focus of the research. countries outside the english-speaking world should also be examined. at present, however, the perceptions captured by survey data indicate that policing in the usa does protect and serve white communities, while often oppressing minority communities. this reality makes it imperative that we explore reforms to make policing in the usa fair to all racial groups. scholars and law enforcement administrators have explored a number of reforms to try to address some of the problems that have recently been identified. policing reforms have attempted to achieve a variety of goals. some seek to improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the police. others seek to improve the accountability, representativeness, or reputation of their police to promote effectiveness. the most fundamental purpose the police serves is to protect social order and begin the process of punishing those who commit crimes. police officers are evaluated by several criteria. one is whether police officers are competent in their jobs. a second criterion is whether the officers have built trust with those whom they serve. several reforms hold promise. patil ( ) describes one legacy of the violent crime control and law enforcement act of , h.r. , pub.l. – . since , the office of community oriented policing services (cops) has committed more than $ billion of federal funds. the trump administration is proposing a % cut to the cops program in the budget. this is a mistake. by redirecting funding to developing protocols that are proven to work in real-life situations, cops can truly live up to its mandate. funds should be redirected to develop and test standard operating procedures that help officers make better decisions under pressure. the current administration’s decision is likely to exacerbate, rather than ameliorate, the current crisis of legitimacy faced by policing in many communities. at least states have passed laws requiring their law enforcement agencies to collect data on the racial demographics of motorists stopped by police (smith and petrocelli , p. ). this increases transparency and the possibility of accountability. this is the first step towards helping us better assess the current fairness and professionalism of policing in the usa. we can begin to accomplish the goal of making police departments serve every race as we improve our understanding of the current experience of ethnic minority communities. problem-oriented policing (pop) is an approach to policing in which discrete pieces of police business (each consisting of a cluster of similar incidents, whether crime or acts of disorder, that the soc. sci. , , of police are expected to handle) are subject to microscopic examination (drawing on the especially honed skills of crime analysts and the accumulated experience of operating field personnel) in hopes that what is freshly learned about each problem will lead to discovering a new and more effective strategy for dealing with it (braga et al. ). problem-oriented policing places a high value on new responses that are preventive in nature, are not dependent on the use of the criminal justice system, and engage other public agencies, the community and the private sector when their involvement has the potential for significantly contributing to the reduction of the problem. pop carries a commitment to implementing the new strategy, rigorously evaluating its effectiveness, and, subsequently, reporting the results in ways that will benefit other police agencies and ultimately contribute to building a body of knowledge. pop has the potential for improving contemporary law enforcement if minority concerns are incorporated into ongoing policing strategies. some strategies may pose the risk of worsening existing inequities in policing. hotspot policing aims to concentrate police resources in communities with high crime rates. the difficulty is that this strategy may lead to problems similar to those caused by the much earlier broken windows theory developed by james q. wilson. the problem with broken windows—the idea that minor symptoms of disorder may lead offenders to commit more serious crimes because they think they can get away with it—is that officers too aggressively punished innocuous offenses. this leads us back to hayes’s notion that ethnic minority communities are treated as colonies that need to be repressed. political mobilization may be the most effective way to make policing fair for all racial groups. roughly % of the population of ferguson, mo is african american, yet at the time of the police shooting of michael brown in just one of seven city council members was black. electing more black city council members promises to make future city managers and police chiefs more responsive to the concerns of black and hispanic citizens. unfortunately, civil service protections in some u.s. communities may make it challenging to discipline racist or abusive police officers (de soto and castillo ). since all police administrators must respond to democratically elected supervisors, civil rights leaders in the black and hispanic communities and their allies must become politically active. logan and oakley ( ) show that antiracist policy achievements remain fragile. current u.s. attorney general jeff sessions has generally been hostile to efforts to remedy racial bias in policing. among his first actions upon being confirmed to his position in was a review of agreements on police reform that had been agreed to under the obama presidency. as these authors rightly argue, the only path ahead is to mobilize politically and to search for reforms that can make policing fair and just for citizens of every racial group. the evidence presented here makes it clear that these efforts are necessary. considering both the survey and other forms of evidence regarding the current state of policing in the united states leads to a clear but tragic conclusion: the hope for a completely fair and just system of law enforcement has not been attained. this reality brings to mind w.e.b. dubois’s remark that the problem of the th century is the problem of the color line. sadly, it appears to remain a problem even as the second decade of the st century draws to a close. funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. references armaline, william t., claudia g. vera sanchez, and mark correia. . the biggest gang in oakland: re-thinking police legitimacy. contemporary justice review : – . 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[crossref] © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / - . http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . /bjc/azw http://dx.doi.org/ . /ss.v i / . http://dx.doi.org/ . /pijpsm- - - http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	global comparisons 	the historical context of police bias in the usa 	survey research 	present study 	research using objective data to assess minority perceptions of police 	conclusions and recommendations 	references mirrors and windows: black poetry in this era - / / - $ . / american studies, : ( ): – review essay mirrors and windows: black poetry in this era damaris b. hill citizen: an american lyric. by claudia rankine. minneapolis, mn: graywolf press. . bastards of the reagan era. by reginald dwayne betts. new york, ny: four way books. . i learned from toni morrison to rest in the “how” when asking “why” is too hard. begin here. gynnya mcmillen, sandra bland, freddy gray, samuel du bois, sharanda coleman-singleton, cynthia hurd, depayne middleton doctor, miz susie jackson and her cousin miz ethel lance, senator reverend clementa pickney, tywanza sanders, reverend doctor daniel simmons, sr., pastor myra thompson, eric garner, trayvon martin, tamir rice, eric harris, walter scott, jonathona farrell, renisha mcbride . . . continue. question how michael vick, serena williams, president barack obama, florence griffith joyner . . . question again. begin here. begin with you and i. damaris b. hill to be black in the united states in the era of black lives matter is to live with a heightened sense of anxiety and awareness of race and the biopolitical realities of “blackness” in american culture. to be non-black means that one is on a quixotic quest to believe that the absence of “race” exempts one from the violence and criticisms that daily torment black bodies. if one is relatively “woke” or informed about racial injustice, it means that you are attentive to an insipient racialized american consciousness and its connections to the daily humiliations black americans face. to be truly aware means that you understand that race is a lie and serves as a governing catalyst for terror and confusion. race, in kind, has become a marble veined frame for the american imagination, like- wise american culture. race and culture continue to be examined by american poets, particularly black poets who continue to painstakingly and meticulously analyze the connection. lyrical and liberated roots in published forms, black american writing began with lucy terry’s ballad “bars fight”. her piece was followed by phillis wheatley’s “poems on various subjects, religious and moral” ( ) and jupiter hammond’s “an evening thought: salvation by christ with penitential cerise,” which was published as a broadside in . each of these works spoke to liberation and documented injustice. in her work “furious flower: african american poetry, an overview”, poet and writer joanne gabbin points out the ways in which african american poetry expresses ideas of liberation. she also reminds us that the earliest african american poets attempted to lyrically express their existence within a society that literally questioned their humanity. gabbin contends that this exploration was expressed in the ways black po- ets intensely explored voice in the waning years of a racially charged twentieth century. she finds that african american poetry continues to be an aesthetic tradition that affirms a different king of americanness, improvising or riffing on language and literary modes. this is most evident when examining the black arts movement (bam). the poets of that movement were inspired by racial hostility, particularly following the assassination of malcolm x. poets such as amiri baraka, carolyn rodgers, haki madhubuti and sonja sanchez wrote rigorous and imaginative forms of poetry that responded to the violence and social unrest of the american landscape. bam’s poetry extends the philosophies of liberation reflected in malcolm x’s political nationalism, inclusive of the strident language and at times chauvinistic way of expressing blackness. it was youthful, radically charged, and intemperate! the writers of the bam genera- tion continued a legacy and expansion of what the cultural critic addison gayle called the black aesthetic. it reflected a necessary and vital collectivity. it was an extension of the previous tradition and an assemblage of all the black writers who wrote full-throated modernist poetry expressed through jazz, blues and free verse idioms from the s through the s. poets as diverse as langston mirrors and windows: black poetry in this era hughes, margaret walker, robert hayden and gwendolyn brooks. building off this poetic inheritance, bam poets rebelled their way into history. rooted in liberation and lyrically challenging injustices, black poetry, specifically african american poetry, has always kept a critical eye toward american culture. because american culture is rooted in imperial and colonial exploitation, black poetry has reflected associated tensions and struggles. black poetry is therefore a rigorous art form and acts as a cultural archive citing the multiple struggles for freedom. some would argue that these themes are pres- ent across the large body of african american literature. therefore, many have made comparisons between the cultural impact of african american poetry and memoir writing used as ethnographic writing. like memoir, black poetry has ethnographic properties; it denotes something about racial identity and the com- plexities of the self, individual and collective. in doing so black poetry speaks to a broad audience of readers, and in some cases specifically non-black people on quite another register and with somewhat different messages. in order to ascribe value to the work black poetry is doing in american culture, it is essential to acknowledge the influences of the african american literary canon and visual awareness on contemporary poetry collections. it is also important to consider what contemporary poetics is stating about blackness in american culture. twists and leaps of the st century postmodern philosophies that reject the stigma of genre influence the cre- ative diversity and fluidity present in contemporary black poetry. postmodern philosophies are often coupled with the attention to language and literary tradition within black poetry. in kind, it is being enhanced to meet and extend the expecta- tions associated with st century visual awareness. i will begin here - some key questions in my work explore how race and gender are embodied and performed within american culture. my work, creative and scholarly, also questions, how is one, inclusive of her intersectional identity, present in a world that blends physi- cal, psychological, and digital spaces, particularly when each of these spaces are rapidly shifting and seemingly eroding? in light of such shifts, i am curious about how intersectional identities are expressed. in this essay questions about black femininity and masculinity are key. they will inform my thoughts about rankine’s and betts’s collections. like many black poets and writers, i reject constraints pertaining to genre. i find my mind akin to dawn lundy martin’s in her recent interview with adam fitzgerald entitled on the black avant-guard, trigger warnings, and life in the east hamptons. martin’s ideas in this interview are central to this essay about black poetry. in that interview martin states, “genre, like identity, is socially constructed, but we all collude to try to make our categories seem natural, im- manent.” she continues to clapback against and counter the marginalization and segregation of genre by reminding us that writing - “it’s not [a question of] genre . . . it’s a question of form and approach.” by embracing questions of form damaris b. hill and approach, rather than prescriptive notions of genre, the work becomes more expansive. the work begins to exceed disciplinary constraints. black poetry: the celebration the complexity of black poetry and the means by which it engages the american culture exceeds the limitations and expands the ideologies associated with genre of literary schools. blackness is a specific experience that is rooted in individual and collective identity. in kind, blackness resonates with the ex- periences and consequences of racialized oppression. one aim of this essay is to honor the ways contemporary black poets continue to use form and approach to exceed these limitations. in his blog cultural front, howard rambsy questions and cites the rates at which black poets have become finalist for the national book award. rates have increased for black nominations and award wins. rambsy finds that in the s, there were six finalists for the national book award between - ; between - eleven black poets were finalists. the black poets that have won the national book award: ai ( ), lucille clifton ( ) terrance hayes ( ), nikky finney ( ) and robin coste lewis ( ). i would be remiss not to mention the black pulitzer prize winning poets natasha trethewey ( ), tracey k. smith ( ) and gregory pardlo ( ). it seems that black poets are achieving recognition in the literary landscape and gaining prominence among mainstream literary audiences. two of the most celebrated books over the past year are claudia rankine’s citizen and reginald dwayne betts’s bastards of the reagan era. both collec- tions of black poetry rely heavily on visual awareness as a means of articulating the collective experiences of black people. i am inclined to believe that these books are intentional in their showings and their desires to engage in a cultural conversation concerning race. these books articulate the negotiations of race in content, form and approach. racial injustice is popular in the media and some readers may be attracted to the works because they are seeking to expand their knowledge about race relations in the united states. rankine and betts craft poems using form and approach to emphasize how racism impacts black people in american culture. in doing so, they educate readers about blackness and the violence-associated racism. because the these collections are employing forms and approaches that combine language and visual awareness, i will pay special attention to how rankine and betts incorporate visual awareness into their work and comment on what readers stand to gain in this coupling. citizen: an american lyric citizen: an american lyric is claudia rankine’s latest collection of poetry. rankine’s citizen is embraced by readers as both poetry and memoir. it has been mirrors and windows: black poetry in this era lauded as one of the guardian’s best politics books of , one of the guard- ian’s readers’ books of the year for , one of entropy’s best nonfiction books of and one of npr’s, the atlantic’s, the guardian’s, pioneer press, bitch media’s, and subtext bookstore’s best books of . the collection was a finalist for the national book award in poetry and the national book critics circle award in criticism. citizen: an american lyric has won awards such as the pen oakland-josephine miles literary award, hurston/wright legacy award in poetry, forward prize for best collection, pen open book award, the national book critics circle award in poetry, naacp image award for outstanding literary work, forward prize and the poets and writers’ jackson poetry prize. in claudia rankine was awarded the prestigious macarthur ‘genius’ fellowship from the john d. and catherine t. macarthur foundation. rankine’s citizen attests to the complexity of the human experience in a racially oppressive society. in her poems, rankine studies instances of racial discrimination in the context of american identity and american citizenship. rankine’s citizen is a collection of prose poems that is extensive, detailing the layers associated with blackness. her work examines black identity, inclusive of the ways it is performed and rendered visible. the collection of poems acts as a close examination of racial aggression in the united states. the work details the ways this specific form of aggression impacts the individual and collective lives of black people. rankine artfully demonstrates how racism impacts the ways black people negotiate american citizenship rights in the face of racial humilia- tion. the book also becomes one lens for examining how perverse and inaccurate notions of a “post-racial” society are in this contemporary cultural landscape. citizen is a collection that blends ‘genres’ and multiple ways of knowing. there are two significant aspects to citizen that i am interested in. each speaks directly to form and approach. the first being the way rankine disrupts tradi- tional understandings related to genre. the form and approach in rankine’s work employs “yes, and” connotations, rather than “yes, but”. “yes, and” rather than “yes, but” is a merit based comparison rankine introduces on in a poem. the poem reads: an unsettled feeling keeps the body front and center. the wrong words enter your day like a bad egg in your mouth and puke runs down your blouse, a dampness drawing your stomach in toward your rib cage. when you look around only you remain. your own disgust at what you smell, what you feel, doesn’t bring you to your feet, not right away, because gathering energy has become its own task, needing its own ar- guments. you are reminded of a conversation you had recently, comparing the merits of sentences constructed implicitly with “yes, and” rather than “yes, but”. you and your friend decided that “yes, and” attested to a life with no turn-off, no alternative damaris b. hill routes: you pull yourself to standing, soon enough the blouse is rinsed it’s another week, the blouse is beneath your sweater, against your skin, and you smell good. ( ) this “yes, and” rather than “yes, but” connotation rankine embraces in citizen is a reflection of the some of the work the book is asking readers to do. this work the reader is asked to do includes considering the humanity of black people. the reader’s response to the work relies on previous literary traditions. although the dialogue is not limited to art and american culture, the collection’s approach and form is a type of call and response. the book is a conversation with contemporary media and early literary traditions such as the slave narrative traditions. the collection is a type of epic poem familiar in classical literatures, a form used to explore the humanity of heroic figures. in addition, rankine’s “yes and” metaphor can be extended into her approach and form to the book that recognizes text and image as interchangeable tools. this “yes, and” approach to poetry introduces the reader to the work associated with making one visible in a culture that has proved to be hostile and lethal to black bodies that are otherwise invisible outside of the context of violence. her form and approach to this type of work is a type of remix, one that samples from contemporary art and media. the “samples” are rooted in a context of memory and re-emphasize how racism contributes to collective memory and trauma. relying on the visual awareness of popular images and celebrities in american culture, the collection provides an opportunity to transition into a larger dialogue with other contexts for racialized aggression in american culture. “yes and”: black femininity in rankine’s work “yes, and” becomes a metaphor used to articulate the ways black identity is often reduced to stereotypes. “yes, and” speaks to the ways black identity is made visible, human, whether voiced or rendered visual. “yes, and” calls into question “[i]s visibility the only defense against violence and the dehumanization of black people in american culture? author and owner of the wild fig books & coffee, crystal wilkerson and i discussed the ways black femininity is articulated in the rankine’s collection. we think that the treatise of serena williams in chapter ii of citizen is a significant commentary on the complexity of the intersections of race and gender, black femininity in america. we discussed how rankine’s form and approach to serena williams is a testament to rankine’s genius and attention to craft. in this way, rankine’s critiques of racism take a “yes and” approach that includes perspec- tives about black bodies and how intersectional narratives pertaining to gender are expressed. the “yes and” consideration adds to the complex relationship between stereotypes and hyper-visibility, gender and racism in american culture. in chapter ii of citizen, the reader learns that serena williams’ professional success and celebrity do not exempt her from racial aggression. it addresses how mirrors and windows: black poetry in this era serena williams’s blackness and femininity put her at risk for a specific style of racist aggression. this illustration aims to contrast the ideas about tokenism and celebrity in the lives of black americans, thus countering the popular misconcep- tions that many celebrity and professional athletic careers protect black people from racism. in this portion of the book, rankine shows how micro-aggressions rooted in race, gender and class publically undermine the professional reputations of black women. she also shows how these micro-aggressions are used to psycho- logically torture black people, particularly black women on an individual basis. in this way, rankine extends the argument of previous black women and scholars. historically, black women policed their own behavior and framed their everyday actions in ideas of respectability. they acted in this way in order to socially defend themselves from racist acts. “this type of ambiguity could also be diagnosed as dissociation and would support serena’s claim that she has had to split herself off from herself and create different personae (rankin).” this splitting of oneself, self-policing and framing is done in defense of racist remarks [and potentially violent actions] made against black women. in kind, these acts are defensive strategies that are in direct response to the racial aggression she has experienced. although black women scholars and writers have written about these defensive behaviors for many decades, few have used a popular figure to illustrate the complexities. by framing chapter ii as a type of poetic case study of serena williams, rankine’s poems show that the consequences for black rage as response to racism have severe consequences in american society. this is punctuated by popular images and relies upon the readers’ visual awareness of historic racism and contemporary celebrity. the chapter concludes with a picture of caroline wozniacki mocking and racially bulling serena williams. in an attempt to insult william’s professional accomplishments and person, wozniacki stuffs her uni- form with towels. the act of stuffing her uniform with towels created enlarged breasts and buttocks that mimics williams’ figure. in doing so, wozniacki at- tempted to reduced williams’ greatness to a stereotypical minstrel caricature that mocked black femininity. because the chapter ends with a photo of caroline wozniacki using racial- ized micro-aggressions to bully serena williams, the reader is forced to reflect on the sequence of poems in the chapter. in kind, the reader is forced to consider that neither rage, nor passivism, nor the threat of public ridicule deters racist acts against black people. in kind, this chapter allows rankine’s poems to illustrate that racial aggressions are public—even if these aggressions are seemingly ig- nored by the masses. here rankine shows that individual aggressions and racist acts are also aggressions against the collective of black americans. she shows this by documenting the amount of people attending the sporting event and the intense media coverage of the act. in doing so, rankine implies how these micro- aggressions are used to undermine the achievements of black americans in front of international audiences. she also demonstrates how silence and acceptance of racialized aggression is common in the us. damaris b. hill rankine’s work encourages readers to seriously consider the complexities of black femininity in the united states and learn. rankine’s poems explore the psychology of racism, ways that it is gender specific, particularly micro- aggressions and their various expressions in american culture. because rankine’s form and approach includes studying black identity from perspectives that are layered with documentary observations and visual stimuli, readers may develop complex levels of understanding about race in the american imagination. in her treatment of intersectional racism, rankine’s book citizen embodies anna julia cooper’s sentiments “ let woman’s claim be as broad in the concrete as in the abstract. we take our stand on the solidarity of humanity, the oneness of life, and the naturalness and injustice of all special favoritism, whether sex, race, county or condition.” in addition to the aforementioned, it is important to consider the ways citizen most closely resembles clifton’s generations. both texts embody anna j. cooper statements. it is a treatment of intersectional rac- ism that situates the experience of black women in solidarity with humanness. bastards of the reagan era the release of bastards of the reagan era asserts strong criticisms of american culture and serves as one way for readers to understand black life in a contemporary context. the poems illustrate how race, gender in terms of masculinities and economic class intersect in american identity. they also il- lustrate what is at risk in these intersections. betts’s bastards of the reagan era is his third poetry collection. similar to rankine’s citizen, the collection has garnered praise. the collection is the winner of the pen new england award in poetry. it was also shortlisted for the pen open book award and was a finalist for the indiefab book of the year award. then it made library journal’s “best books : poetry” list, and is a finalist for the firecracker award in poetry, and the national council on crime & delinquency’s (nccd) media for a just society award. the imagery in betts’s poetry is a nod to at least two literary traditions popular in the anglophone literary canon, the imagist tradition and the realist documentary prose. the collection likens itself to many works of realist and documentary prose that portray cinematic renderings of black masculinity. in kind betts’s bastards of the reagan era is a type of coming of age story that details a long history of institutional and civic violence against black masculin- ity in america. the work also uses imagery and visual awareness to illustrate the tensions between the american imagination and black masculinities. by setting the collection within the backdrop of the national monuments and other environmental/architectural fixtures associated with the district of columbia, betts emphasizes american racism as a national issue. he uses the tensions be- tween ideas of rugged individualism as a national value (often expressed in the pioneering/entrepreneurial spirit) in stark contrast to the rugged individualism that black men defensively embrace in order to survive the impact of american mirrors and windows: black poetry in this era racism. betts’s work demonstrates to non-black readers how rugged individual- ism is expressed as an aspect of black masculinity and adversely labeled “sav- age”. when black masculinity is referred to as savage or “thug”, it reinforces negative stereotypes about black men that existed in pre-emancipated america. these stereotypes were used to justify the enslavement of black people. the savage stereotype is so perverse in american culture that any expression of rug- ged individualism that is coupled with black masculinity warrants a complete rejection of the intersectional complexities of black manhood. in addition, the savage stereotype is used as propagandist support of hyper-surveillance and ex- cessive incarceration of black men. in this way, black masculinity also becomes a “bastardized” form of american citizenship. this specific and stark contrast of american ideas is expressed in betts imagery and illustrates the complexity of american racism and citizenship to readers. betts’ speaker in bastards of the reagan era is engages in a host of poetic monologues that articulate notions of black masculinity. they also comment on how the concept of black masculinity inhabits the american imagination. the collection makes clear how the negative stereotypes associated with black masculinity are used to galvanize and sustain poor public policy and a lack of legitimate economic opportunities for black men. considering the ways this col- lection embraces a certain amount of pessimism, betts’ bastards of the reagan era can be viewed [in part] as a literary nod to elliot’s waste land. t.s. elliot’s waste land ( ) is an epic poem that reflects the pessimism that followed world war i. this allusion to elliot’s work informs the reader about bastards’ potential to explore the pessimisms that accompanied black masculinity during and after the reagan administration. the subjects in these poems are young black men and boys that were victims of poor public policy, poverty and racism, inclusive of state sanctioned violence. i view state sanctioned violence as a broad term that blends police brutality, mass incarceration and the under-documented economy of the illegal drug trade that perpetuates violence and death at alarming rates in the black community. these literary allusions to the waste land add to the allegorical complexity of betts’ collection. similar to the ways elliot’s waste land uses vignettes of contemporary british society interchangeably with referents to the american south (st. louis), betts uses imagery that relies on historic and cinematic renditions of black masculinity interchangeably with tropes of american citizenship. incorporating these ‘ghosts’ of american nationalism and cinema into his work adds framing for the readers and additional visual references that aid readers in contextual- izing black masculinity. look to part one of the title poem “bastards of the reagan era” entitled ‘countdown to armageddon’. the poem explores the tensions between mass incarceration, black masculinity and chattel slavery in american culture. the poem illustrates that racial inequality is a long struggle that proceeds from the us’ struggle for independence. in this way, betts satirizes the glorification of damaris b. hill us colonial independence. therefore, this passage prepares readers to recognize how racial equality and economic stability are inherently linked in american culture and expressed in american racism. the “for the city that nearly broke me” poems are a series of elegies, memories of all the young men who were victims to state sanctioned violence and seductive possibilities associated with rugged individualism expressed in the illegal drug trade. the kind of seductive possibilities included wealth and “leadership/ruler” opportunities that are used to promote the entrepreneurial spirit that dominated the illegal drug trade during reagan’s administration. betts’s closing poem, “what we know of horses,” echoes many of the themes and scenes expressed in the “for the city that nearly broke me” poems and others. “what we know of horses” reflects the constant threat of death that black men may or may not survive. one of the themes the poem reiterates is “history is written on the back of the horse.” this theme and others serve opportunities for readers to reflect the connections betts created in the poems “bastards of the reagan era” and “for the city that nearly broke me”. these connections include the impact of the prison industrial complex and state sanc- tioned violence on black men. in addition, betts’s collection explores how the ideas of black masculinity include a desire for black men to have full access to citizenship rights, civic protection and the right to be “a man” under the constitution. in kind, he illustrates the long history about the ways citizenship rights have been denied to black men. he shows how black men since the middle passage have been economically exploited and victimized by poor public policies. betts makes an effort to keep the reader aware of the complexities of black masculinity within the context of bastardization and the history of american fatherhood. in betts’s work, the absence of fathers and appropriate models of masculinity are two of the emotional factors that make black men particularly receptive to the illegal drug trade, mass incarceration and murder. in many poems, betts makes clear that many black fathers are not available to model a parenting aspect of masculinity to a younger generation of black men. an alternate script pertaining to fatherhood opens betts’s collection and pre- pares readers to engage with the themes of fatherhood in the work. the first two poems in bastards of the reagan era are poems for his sons. in this way, betts documents the impact of absent fathers on black masculinity for the reader and privileges active fatherhood as an expression of black masculinity. betts departure from absent fatherhood as an aspect of black masculinity reflects some of the black masculinity movements happening in the district of columbia. many men are organizing to make sure positive perceptions of fatherhood are incorporated into black masculinity narratives. the poems opening bastards affirm activist efforts such as mike tucker’s daddy’s cool movement, which “. . . creates a new image of good dads and cool dads living for the love of their likeness” and “is set to shift stereotypes and unbalanced frames of mind on [black] fathers today”. mirrors and windows: black poetry in this era betts’s collection expresses some positive aspects of black masculinities in american culture. in kind, the collection is attentive to the ways black mascu- linity is under attack in a contemporary context and historically. the poems in bastards of the reagan era are in conversation with other books in which the complexity of black masculinity is explored in context of us citizenship. betts’s book enters a long literary legacy that includes writers like richard wright, james baldwin and recently ta-nehisi coates. richard wright’s and james baldwin’s books affirm the ways that the industrialized city failed to provide a life for black people, specifically black men. in kind bastards of the reagan era may also be in conversation with ta-nehisi coates’ between the world and me, an open let- ter to coates’ son about the complexities of black identity in the united states. between the world and me has received a number of awards including: macarthur fellowship, national book award for nonfiction, harriet beecher stowe prize for writing and others. the geographic setting and histori- cal era may be changed in these works, but themes such as poverty, fatherhood and the threat of incarceration [or other state sanctioned violence against black people] are evident and illustrate black masculinity in the american landscape. windows and mirrors i see rankine’s citizen: an american lyric and reginald dwayne betts’s bastards of the reagan era as collections of poetry that rely heavily on the visual awareness of readers. deborah willis’ research on the history of photographs and lucille clifton’s theories regarding mirrors and windows complement one another. ideas about how african americans employ visual awareness are central to discussion about why certain collections of black poetry are gaining recogni- tion within american culture. blackness can be defined as a type of american otherness that is often segregated within american narratives. this is important when considering ideas about black visibility and these poets’ attention to visual awareness can be framed in the context of mid-nineteenth century photography. making one’s self visible is a defensive tactic that black americans have employed since abolition campaigns and therefore is central to this reading. deborah willis reminds us that photography is a type of biography. in her book, envisioning emancipation: black americans and the end of slavery, she reminds theorists that “black americans’ interest in photography and black photographers’ command of the technical and artistic aspects of their work support our contention that black americans embraced photography, not simply for its novelty or aesthetic value, but for its recognized potential to present powerful social and political arguments.” i cannot discuss black poetry and how it informs american cultural imagina- tion without mentioning lucille clifton. in a interview with hillary holiday, clifton stated “that children-and humans, everybody-all need both windows and mirrors in their lives: mirrors through which you can see yourself and windows through which you can see the world.” clifton’s quote inspired me to begin to damaris b. hill question how form and approach have been leaning toward a visual awareness since the early part of the twentieth century. for example, as early as , lucille clifton, the master of enjambment and poetic imagery, understood that visual awareness was one strategy for making black humanity present. she, like black people immediately following emancipation, recognized the potential of visual texts to render black humanity in american culture. in her work generations, clifton alternates photographs and literary texts. generations is a memoir and neo-slave narrative that told clifton’s personal history in a relation to her family legacy and by extension black identity. by incorporating photos with the prose poem vignettes that de- tail her life, the photos acted as an echo to the lyrical texts’ ideas and conveyed a complex interpretation of black identity one that disrupted the stereotypes familiar to non-black readers. i would also like to look closer to clifton’s mirrors and windows analogy because i am interested in the ways these two authors use poetry to convey blackness in context of historical marginalization in american culture. i am also interested in the ways each of these authors use intersectional identity and visual awareness as a means of informing readers about the multilayers and complexi- ties of blackness. in betts’s and rankine’s work, the reader is able to examine intersectional identities associated gender and blackness and may be called to upon to question their conceptions of black identity. lucille clifton’s ideas about mirrors and windows is a lens for considering the ways black poets render black humanity, particularly to non-black read- ers. lucille clifton’s mirror and windows analogy helps cultural theorists to understand the multiple ways poetry resonates with diverse audiences that may have different identities and may be informed by different cultural inheritances. conclusion artistic works that employ mirror and window strategies use craft techniques associated with form and approach. form and approach are used to express how multiple forms of racism are enacted on black bodies. the window and mirrors work that betts and rankine employ in their po- etry articulates blackness in a larger cultural economy. the works explore the complexities of citizenship and cultural identity. i feel that the works articulate the complexities of race and negotiations of humanity within an american consciousness. works cited betts, reginald dwayne. bastards of the reagan era. new york: four way books, . poetry. fitzgerald, adam. on the black avant-garde, trigger warnings and life in east hampton: in conversation with dawn lundy martin. lithub, may mirrors and windows: black poetry in this era . web. http://lithub.com/on-the-black-avant-garde-trigger-warnings- and-life-in-east-hampton/ holladay, hilary. she could tell stories: a conversation about names, race and the need for mirrors. poetry foundation, may . http://www. poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/ gabbin, joanne v. furious flower: african american poetry, an overview. modern american poetry, may . http://www.english.illinois.edu/ maps/blackarts/gabbin.htm perry, imani. the year of black memoir. publicbooks, may . http://www. publicbooks.org/nonfiction/the-year-of-black-memoir rambsy, howard. poetry. cultural front, may . http://www.culturalfront. org/ / /a-list-of-award-winning-african.html rankine, claudia. citizen: an american lyric. minneapolis. graywolf press, . poetry. tucker, michael. about. daddyscool.com, may . http://daddyscool. com/about/ willis, deborah. envisioning emancipation: black americans and the end of slavery. philadelphia: temple university press, . http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/ http://www.poetryfoundation.org/features/articles/detail/ http://www.publicbooks.org/nonfiction/the-year-of-black-memoir http://www.publicbooks.org/nonfiction/the-year-of-black-memoir http://daddyscool.com/about/ http://daddyscool.com/about/ p r o c e e d i n g s o f t h e a r i s t o t e l i a n s o c i e t y c h a i r e d b y t i m c r a n e e d i t e d b y g u y l o n g w o r t h s e n a t e h o u s e u n i v e r s i t y o f l o n d o n - t h s e s s i o n | v o l u m e c x v i i a r i s t o t e l i a n s o c i e t y . o r g . u k disagreement in the political philosophy of spinoza and ranciere b e t h lo r d u n i v e r s i t y o f a b e r d e e n p r o c e e d i n g s o f t h e a r i s t o t e l i a n s o c i e t y t h s e s s i o n i s s u e n o . v o l u m e c x v i i - d i s a g r e e m e n t i n t h e p o l i t i c a l p h i l o s o p h y o f s p i n o z a a n d r a n c i e r e b e t h l o r d u n i v e r s i t y o f a b e r d e e n m o n d a y , n o v e m b e r . - . t h e w o b u r n s u i t e s e n a t e h o u s e u n i v e r s i t y o f l o n d o n m a l e t s t r e e t l o n d o n w c e h u u n i t e d k i n g d o m this event is catered, free of charge & open to the general public c o n t a c t mail@aristoteliansociety.org.uk www.aristoteliansociety.org.uk © the aristotelian society b i o g r a p h y beth lord is reader in philosophy at the university of aberdeen. she works on history of philosophy in the continental tradition, with a particular focus on spinoza. currently she is researching the concept of equality in spinoza’s texts from its geometrical origins to its metaphysical and political uses. she recently led a three-year ahrc-funded research project that investigated the relevance of spinoza’s concepts of ratio and equality to housing design. she is co-author (with peg rawes, bartlett school of architecture) of a short, open-access film on spinoza and the uk housing crisis, equal by design, and editor of the forthcoming collection spinoza’s philosophy of ratio. her earlier books include spinoza’s ethics: an edinburgh philosophical guide, and kant and spinozism: transcendental idealism and immanence from jacobi to deleuze. she has been at aberdeen since ; prior to that she worked at the university of dundee ( - ), and received her phd from the university of warwick in . e d i t o r i a l n o t e the following paper is a draft version that can only be cited or quoted with the author’s permission. the final paper will be published in proceedings of the aristotelian society, issue no. , volume cxvii ( ). please visit the society’s website for subscription information: aristoteliansociety.org.uk. d i s a g r e e m e n t i n t h e p o l i t i c a l p h i l o s o p h y o f s p i n o z a a n d r a n c i e r e b e t h l o r d in this paper i examine the concept of disagreement in the political philosophies of baruch spinoza and contemporary french philosopher jacques ranciere. ranciere understands disagreement to be a revolu- tionary and emancipating form of dissent from an excluded part of so- ciety. spinoza, by contrast, understands disagreement to be a divergence from rational agreement that arises from differences of experience and feeling. i examine these two senses of disagreement in the context of the uk’s referendum on membership of the eu and the response to it, concluding that spinoza gives us better resources for understanding what happened. i. introduction in this paper i contrast an early modern philosopher, baruch spinoza, with a contemporary french philosopher, jacques ranciere. i am inter- ested in how both philosophers use a concept of disagreement to specify the nature of politics. i want to frame this discussion with some thoughts about the response to brexit. a few weeks after the referendum on britain’s membership of the eu ( june ), i overheard a colleague say ‘the working class shouldn’t be allowed to vote. they’re not intelligent enough.’ though the comment was made in jest, the serious sentiment behind it was not un- common. in the days and weeks following the referendum a lot of edu- cated people expressed the view that the referendum was won by people who are stupid and ill-informed, who don’t know what’s good for them, and who didn’t think through the implications of their vote. a more mod- erate variant, which quickly became the consensus view on both the left and the right, presented the eu referendum result as the uprising of a group of people ‘long neglected’, ‘left behind’ and ‘excluded from poli- tics’. people as varied as nigel farage (who celebrated this uprising) and this is a draft paper, not yet ready for publication. references and citations are not complete. please do not cite without author’s permission. i would like to thank my col- leagues at aberdeen, as well as audiences in kyoto and london, for their responses to earlier versions of the paper. the data show that this is, at best, an over-simplification. . million people voted draft paper beth lord the political philosophy of spinoza and ranciere christine lagarde (who lamented it) explained the result through feelings of being excluded from, and unbenefited by, globalization. this has now become the standard narrative, blandly restated on the bbc as if it were uncontroversial. voting to leave the eu has thus become associated with the illegitimate expression of irrationality on the one hand, and with the legitimate expression of political and economic frustration on the other. in both cases the leave vote is characterized as arising from the feelings of a group that normally is, and perhaps ought to be, excluded from politics. this characterization shows how little we have moved beyond the anxieties of early modern political discourse. that the rational governance to which the social contract gives way can be disrupted by the irrational feelings of ‘the people’ – leading to revolution and anarchy – is the worry that suffuses the political philosophy of hobbes and spinoza. this coun- ter-rational force is seen as a potentiality by contemporary continental philosophers who uphold the capacity of ‘the people’ or ‘the multitude’ to effect meaningful political change. according to one such philosopher, jacques ranciere, what is at stake both in the th century and today is a challenge to the political order of parts and wholes. a well-ordered com- munity is a whole consisting of subordinate parts. the social contract ex- presses each part’s willingness to be a part, and to be a member of larger parts identified by function, wealth, age, and so on. but in the political moment, some part identifies itself with the whole: with ‘the people’ as such. a part of society presents itself simultaneously as a part and as the whole of society. this move disrupts the order of parts and wholes, bring- ing dissent to community consensus. this has emancipatory potential, to be sure, but it may also give rise to a populism that derides consensus and reason (laclau , p. - ). ranciere has a restrictive notion of politics that does not include all, or even most, struggles for power. he argues that politics exists only in mo- ments of geometrical distortion, when a part of society identifies itself with leave. nearly two-thirds of voters in social groups c /de voted leave, but as dorling ( ) and runciman ( ) both stress, brexit could not have come about without a significant proportion of the middle class voting for it. the single largest determinants of how people voted were educational experience and age, with the non-university-educat- ed and over- s likeliest to vote leave (rowntree , ashcroft ). as runciman argues, the education divide reflects not a difference between ignorance and knowledge but a difference in world-view. leave voters were far likelier to believe that life in britain today is worse than it was years ago, and that there are decreasing opportunities to succeed and to improve one’s standard of living. political engagement was a less sig- nificant factor: those who said they pay a great deal of attention to politics were evenly divided between leave and remain, while those who said they pay little attention to politics were only % for leave (ashcroft ). e.g. hardt and negri, zizek beth lord the political philosophy of spinoza and ranciere draft paper the whole. this is not a matter of one part taking power from another, but of a part refusing to be a part, thereby exposing the flaws in the existing social order. he cites the example of jeanne deroin who, in attempting to vote in a french election in , revealed the contradiction between the law of universal suffrage and the exclusion of women from voting. she asserted that women are not a ‘part’ of the people that can be excluded or included according to the rules of the current government, but that prior to any rules, women are the people. it is not a matter of demanding equal rights for the excluded part, but of asserting that the excluded part is not a ‘part’ at all. ranciere calls this assertion disagreement. this is not a dis- agreement between rational positions or an objection to particular laws or rules. it is declining to agree about what constitutes social order; dissent over the logic of parts and wholes that underlies the very notion of politi- cal community. to be a part of a whole means that one can be counted or not counted, included or excluded, granted or denied equality, according to the social order. disagreement is a rejection of countable parthood, and of the identities that distinguish parts. this all seems a long way from early modern philosophy, which is, after all, heavily invested in the political logic of parts and wholes. spi- noza, like hobbes, understands the political community as a whole made up of identifiable parts, and understands justice to be the proportionate distribution of rights to those parts. for ranciere, this makes spinoza continuous with the tradition of political philosophy that suppresses dis- agreement in the interests of social order and consensus. indeed, spinoza’s concept of political community is typically understood to be based on the agreement of similar beings with similar levels of rationality. contrary to the standard interpretation, i would like to suggest that like ranciere, spinoza thinks disagreement is a crucial element of politics. for spinoza, agreement and disagreement describe how ‘similar’ things are to each other in a metaphysical sense. things that are ‘like’ one an- other (two human beings, for instance) have a common essence, and agree insofar as their thoughts and actions follow from that common essence. agreement results from having true (rational) knowledge of what is good for human nature. disagreement, by contrast, results from the inadequate knowledge and feelings that are caused in us by external causes and that hanley ( a) makes this point: ‘looking at the coverage of the brexit result, we were led to believe that the population of britain can be easily sliced into tribes. the tribes to which the writers of newspaper articles and the producers of television news belong do not have to be named – they are, simply, ‘people’. anyone who falls outside the urban, middle-class tribe is a ‘community’ – usually identified (however erroneously) by race or religion. in the absence of anything other than token representation, people who appear to fall into these groups have to be ‘understood’, rather than making their own case on their own terms’. draft paper beth lord the political philosophy of spinoza and ranciere affect people differently. we agree when we are similarly determined by our essence to think and act from human nature. we disagree because we are differently determined to think and act according to our material and emotional circumstances. insofar as we agree, we rationally understand our interdependence on others and work together as parts of a whole. but insofar as we disagree, we tend to reject our parthood and consider our- selves as wholes, distinct from and unconnected to others. the rejection of parthood is, for spinoza, not emancipating but isolating. since spinoza believes that no one is immune from determination by external causes, every community involves both agreement and disagree- ment: convergence on what is rationally known to be good for human na- ture, and divergence on what is not fully understood, which is differently experienced and felt. every community is a whole of parts that can work together, but contains the tendency of those parts to reject their parthood and regard themselves as wholes, with destabilizing consequences. in comparing ranciere and spinoza in what follows, i will elaborate on these two senses of disagreement: ranciere’s sense of disagreement as a revolt against the political logic of parts and wholes, and spinoza’s sense of disagreement as divergence over what is differently experienced and felt. these senses overlap in that both involve the rejection of parthood and inequality. i will suggest that it is spinoza’s sense of disagreement that is more useful in understanding brexit and the response to it. if we accept this, then brexit and its aftermath are to be attributed neither to a revolt of the excluded nor to irrational voters, but to societal conditions that de- termine us to disagree and to feel good about the rejection of our political parthood. ii. ranciere: disagreement as dissent to understand what motivates jacques ranciere’s belief in the emancipa- tory potential of disagreement, we need briefly to follow the historical narrative he offers for the concept’s emergence. ranciere is interested in the concepts and forces that have made political philosophy and contem- porary politics what they are. in this sense he performs a kind of geneal- ogy upon political thought, following the path of friedrich nietzsche and michel foucault. this leads him to see the history of political philosophy as a suppression of politics, starting with aristotle. democracy, according to aristotle, gives power to those who ‘though free, are not men of wealth and standing, [and] have no claim to good- beth lord the political philosophy of spinoza and ranciere draft paper ness or excellence in anything’ (aristotle , iii. , cf. iii. ). ranciere interprets this origin story of democratic freedom as follows. after debt slavery was abolished in athens, freedom had to be attributed to a group of people of no account: debtors, i.e. people without wealth or civic virtue who were without ‘value’. these people, who had no proper entitlement to freedom according to the prevailing law of the oligarchy – people who were not counted as part of the community – were henceforth free. this move forced a gap between wealth and domination. the wealthy, who previously ruled, were now the part of the community distinguished by their wealth, whereas the poor were the part distinguished by nothing but their freedom. this had two effects. first, the question arose of who legiti- mately governs – the question of aristotle’s politics. second, the poor be- came a ‘part’ whose distinguishing feature, freedom, is actually universal to all people. this allowed the poor to reject their parthood and identify with the whole; to assert that they are ‘the people’. the people are nothing more than the undifferentiated mass of those who have no positive qualification – no wealth, no virtue – but who are nonetheless acknowledged to enjoy the same freedom as those who do. the people who make up the people are simply free like the rest. now it is this simple identity with those who are otherwise superior to them in all things that gives them a specific qualification. the demos attributes to itself as its proper lot the equality that belongs to all citizens. in so doing, this party that is not one identifies its improper property with the exclu- sive principle of community and identifies its name – the name of the indistinct mass of men of no position – with the name of the community itself. (ranciere , p. ) thus the mere ‘people’, those of no account, become ‘the people’ in the sense of the community as such. a specific part, the part that has no legiti- mate part in the community, becomes identified with the whole commu- nity. the contentiousness of the excluded part claiming identification with the whole, is what politics is, for ranciere. before this event, there is no politics, only domination and revolt. after this event politics exists in those moments where a part of society – a part that is normally excluded from political community – rejects its parthood and identifies with the whole. jeanne deroin, as mentioned earlier, rejected the notion that women are an includable or excludable part of the people and asserting that women are the people. similarly rosa parks, in refusing to give up her bus seat to a white person, rejected the social order that made black people a part of the whole that could be included or excluded from it. disagreement motivates the present-day black lives matter movement. the american constitution makes each citizen a free and equal ‘part’ of the whole, but this logic results in a ‘part that has no part’: a part of society that might be references to aristotle’s politics are to book and chapter number. draft paper beth lord the political philosophy of spinoza and ranciere included or excluded and that is actually marginalized and oppressed as a result. in rejecting this logic, black lives matter asserts that black people are not a ‘part’ of the people that can be included or excluded according to the political will; black people are the people. ranciere believes that political community is wrongly understood as a whole of parts, precisely because this results in ‘a part that has no part’. he claims that ‘there is politics when there is a part of those who have no part’ ( , p. ). in other words, politics happens when those who are not counted interrupt the social order by rejecting their parthood and asserting their equality to the whole. thus ‘political community’ always carries connotations both of inequality and of the potential for emancipa- tion from it. insofar as a community is political, it contains the inequali- ties and exclusions that give rise to disagreement; but in disagreement the original, anarchic equality of human beings is asserted. this is the equality of anyone to anyone else. this is where ranciere begins to sound very like rousseau, recalling a ‘natural’ state of equality that has been transformed and suppressed by civilization. indeed, ranciere implicitly posits an egalitarian state of na- ture, opposed to and underlying all social orders. ranciere’s ‘equality’ is not the ‘arithmetical equality’ of the marketplace (and of utilitarian ethics) which takes each person to be of equivalent value to, and exchangeable with, every other. nor does ranciere uphold the ‘geometrical equality’ that grounds aristotle’s view that each person is valued in proportion to his value for the community. both these definitions refer equality to the calculation of value, based on countable parts of a whole. for ranciere, countability is what makes possible the exclusion of parts. he wants to rehabilitate equality ‘that suspends simple arithmetic without setting up any kind of geometry. this equality is simply the equality of anyone at all with anyone else’ ( , p. ). at first glance this notion of equality looks simplistic. indeed, it looks just like the arithmetical equality he claims to reject. however, ranciere understands equality to be embedded in human relationality rather than arithmetical equivalence. specifically, equality is an aspect of our capacity to speak and understand: it is already present in the ‘power of reasoned speech’ through which aristotle defines the political animal (aristotle strictly speaking, ‘politics’ for ranciere occurs in specific actions rather than general movements. it is also arguable that blm does not reject black parthood/identity so much as use it to draw attention to the specific circumstances and causes of black exclusion. nonetheless, this seems to me a pertinent example. ‘justice is equality, but not for all persons, only for those that are equal’ (aristotle , iii. ) beth lord the political philosophy of spinoza and ranciere draft paper , i. ). our capacity to understand one another is presupposed in all human relations, including relations of dominance. for a master to subju- gate a slave, the slave must be deemed capable of understanding the mas- ter’s commands. this confers on them a basic equality of understanding. indeed, aristotle’s definition of the ‘natural slave’ is one who ‘participates in the reasoning faculty so far as to understand but not so as to possess it’ (aristotle , i. ). equality of understanding is therefore already presupposed in the domination of the athenian slaves, and in all social orders: there is order in society because some people command and others obey, but in order to obey an order at least two things are required: you must understand the order and you must understand that you must obey it. and to do that, you must already be the equal of the person who is ordering you. it is this equality that gnaws away at any natural order. (ranciere , p. ) it is this equality that surfaces in the event of politics, the moment in which the ‘part that has no part’ asserts that it is the people. the poor or disenfranchised assert an equality that pertains to them as beings who speak and understand, but that has been denied them as the part of society deemed unequal to political discourse. equality is asserted ‘as a dispute over wrongful exclusion from the order of political speech’ (corcoran, in ranciere , p. ). from that moment of athenian democracy, anyone at all can have his say, even someone with no qualification to do so. if anyone at all, even a freed slave, is equal to anyone else, then all social orders are contingent. according to ranciere, it is hobbes who reveals the contingency of any social order when he claims that the ‘natural’ relationship between human beings (in the state of nature) is a war of all against all, a state of equality in which anyone might dominate or kill anyone else. to gain security, that equality must be given up. the social order that replaces it could be any- thing at all, so long as it replaces natural equality with political inequality (the authority of some over others). the sovereign’s principal anxiety is that the natural equality of anyone with anyone else could reassert itself at any time. but the inequalities in any social order are possible only on the basis of this natural equality. ‘politics occurs because, or when, the natural order of the shepherd kings, the warlords, or property owners is interrupted by a freedom that crops up and makes real the ultimate equal- ity on which any social order rests’ (ranciere , p. ?). this equality cannot be granted by governments or enshrined in constitutions, because it is already there, in the mutuality of understanding and speech, as the hobbes ref. draft paper beth lord the political philosophy of spinoza and ranciere condition of possibility of any kind of governance. a political event, then, involves disagreement, and disagreement in- volves the assertion of natural equality. politics happens rarely, for ran- ciere, because most of the time, the social order – whatever it happens to be – prevails. when politics does occur, it is unsettling, because disagree- ment is dissensus: the disruption of the consensus (agreement, contract) of the social order, and the disruption of the ‘community of sense experience’ (ranciere , p. ). in other words, political events disrupt our feel- ing of community agreement and our ‘sense experience’ of what it is to identify with either a part of the community or its whole. the assertion of equality disrupts sameness, for it disrupts our sense that ‘we all feel the same way’. it disrupts identity, for disagreement involves dis-identification with one’s ‘part’ and its assigned properties. equality is the affirmation of a common capacity (for understanding) between beings who are different and who do not identify with one another through any outward signifiers (religion, race, class). was the brexit vote a political event, on ranciere’s terms? according to the view which has become mainstream, brexit was a revolt by mem- bers of an excluded part against the political system believed to cause their exclusion. but the leave vote would be a political event only if it involved dis-identification with that part and the assertion of equality as a common capacity for understanding amongst heterogeneous beings. brexit is not political, in ranciere’s sense, for three reasons. first, even if we accept that there is an ‘excluded part’ of society consisting of those left behind by pol- itics, it is clear that the result was not caused exclusively or even primarily by this part. second, even if we accept that there was an element of ‘revolt’ against the status quo, it was not instigated by the excluded part itself, but made possible by the political party in power. third, even if we accept that voting leave was an expression of dissatisfaction with political exclusion, it did not involve breaking with the identity of the part to assert equality with the whole. what we saw instead, on both sides, was an entrench- ment of identities of nation, class, and educational background, with each part proclaiming its parthood and asserting its being just as good as, or superior to, the others. this is not politics, on ranciere’s view. brexit did this was evident not only in the proclamation that the british (and specifically the english) should ‘take back control’ of their country and the backlash against ‘experts’, but also in remain voters’ disdain for the supposed ignorance and retrograde attitudes of leave voters. ‘a dissensus … consists in challenging the very logic of counting that marks out some bodies as political beings in possession of speech and consigns others to the mere emitting of noise; some as beings of decision and action, others as consigned to the passive sphere of reproduction; some as capable of refined sentiment and thought, oth- ers as brutish and caught up in simple survival; some as capable of thought and keeping up with the times, others as capable only of reacting to change’ (corcoran, in ranciere beth lord the political philosophy of spinoza and ranciere draft paper not challenge the notion that people are or belong to parts of a whole, but reinforced it. brexit was an effect of what ranciere calls ‘policing’: the exercises and exchanges of power that constitute the governance and management of people, that serve to solidify the part-whole logic, and that cause people further to identify with the ‘part’ to which they have been consigned. iii. spinoza: disagreement as divergence we cannot interpret the victory of the leave vote as disagreement in ran- ciere’s sense. spinoza may give us better resources for understanding brex- it as the outcome of disagreement. it would be all too easy to use spinoza to interpret brexit as the effect of the irrationality of ignorant voters. spinoza’s view about the political potency of the masses is in line with others of the early modern era. like hobbes, he describes the masses as a threat to the stability and harmony of the state. this is largely due to their irrationality: people who have de- veloped reason to a lesser extent have less understanding of what is good for them, and what they should do to realize that good. their actions are determined by incomplete knowledge and feelings caused by experience. people who lack rationality do not act according to what is truly in their own interest and the interest of the community, but according to what they erroneously imagine will be good for themselves. their desires and emotions lead to conflict, and their lack of autonomy means they are eas- ily led by others. all this detracts from community stability, as spinoza explains: anyone with any experience of the capricious mind of the multitude al- most despairs of it, as it is governed not by reason but by passion alone, it is precipitate in everything, and very easily corrupted by greed or good living. each person thinks he alone knows everything and wants every- thing done his way and judges a thing fair or unfair, right or wrong, to the extent he believes it works for his own gain or loss. from pride they condemn their equals, and will not allow themselves to be ruled by them. envious of a greater reputation or better fortune which are never equal for all, they wish ill towards other men and delight in that. there is no need to survey all of this here, as everyone knows what wrong- doing people are often moved to commit because they cannot stand their present situation and desire a major upheaval, how blind anger and re- sentment of their poverty prompt men to act, and how much these things , p. ). draft paper beth lord the political philosophy of spinoza and ranciere occupy and agitate their minds. to anticipate all this and construct a state that affords no opportunity for trouble-making, to organize everything in such a way that each person, of whatever character, prefers public right to private advantage, this is the real task, the arduous work. [no one has ever] succeeded in devising a form of government that was not in greater danger from its own citizens than from foreign foes, and which was not more fearful of the former than of the latter. (spinoza , : ) spinoza here portrays the irrational mob as a danger to the state. yet his understanding of the dynamics of reason and unreason in politics is far more subtle than this characterization suggests. ‘rational’ and ‘irrational’ are not polar opposites: reasoning is one of two ways of thinking which everyone does to some extent. when we reason, we have adequate ideas of things, and deduce other adequate ideas from them. the other way of thinking, imagining, is based on fortuitous experience and includes re- membering, anticipating, and dreaming. from experience we have partial, confused, inadequate ideas. adequate ideas are tied to autonomous ac- tions that follow from our own nature, while inadequate ideas are tied to the passions. we are made to feel the passions by our encounters with external things, and they cause us to react and behave in ways that stem only partially from our own nature. thoughts and actions that arise from our feelings are ‘unfree’, in the sense that they are not autonomously de- termined. spinoza stresses that everyone has some adequate ideas, and everyone has experiences and feels the passions. nobody is purely rational or purely imaginative. our minds are a ratio of adequate to inadequate ideas which changes according to our circumstances. good circumstances (education, supportive family, peaceful community) give us opportunities to enhance our reasoning, whereas bad circumstances (poverty, debt, deprivation, violence) prevent our rational development and cause us to feel stronger passions. the poor and disadvantaged are likelier to be determined by their passions, and less likely to develop much reasoning. but there is no guarantee that the privileged will become highly or consistently rational. reasoning requires effort and discipline, and powerful emotional events such as bereavement or illness can reduce our reasoning power. so peo- ple’s circumstances determine their rational development, and as our lives change, our power of reasoning changes too. references to spinoza’s theological-political treatise are to chapter and paragraph number. spinoza in fact describes three kinds of thinking: imagination, reason, and intuition. spinoza deals with intuition as part of his discussion of the mind’s eternity. since it is unclear whether and how intuitive thinking takes place during our durational lives, we will not consider it here. beth lord the political philosophy of spinoza and ranciere draft paper ‘the multitude’, therefore, is not simply an irrational mob. it is the people, each part of which is determined by different and changing pro- portions of imagining and reasoning. the problem is that developing a high level of rationality is difficult and rare, so most people in a society are determined, most of the time, by their own particular experiences and passions. this leads people to conflict. spinoza argues that ‘insofar as men are subject to passions, they cannot be said to agree in nature’, and ‘they can be contrary to one another’ ( , ivp , p ). he claims that we ‘agree in nature’ only insofar as we reason ( , ivp ). so we will find agreement where there are high levels of reasoning, and disagree- ment where there are low levels of reasoning and the passions are at their strongest. to understand the political significance of agreement and disagree- ment, we need to look at spinoza’s metaphysical account of these terms. spinoza believes people have a common human nature, essence, or power (these three terms can be treated as equivalent for our purposes). he also believes that every individual, from its essence, strives to persevere in be- ing what it is, and to increase its power ( , iiip ). to strive in this way is to ‘seek one’s advantage’. human individuals are instantiations of hu- man essence, which determines them to strive for the continued existence and increased power of human nature in themselves. human nature is what we have in common, so in striving for goods that are determined by human nature, we strive for goods that are common to all human beings and we ‘agree in nature’ (spinoza , ivp - ). thus someone who is determined by his essence to seek his advantage also acts in the interests of others, and agrees with them in nature. only reasoning enables us to understand and act according to what is essentially advantageous to us. it follows that insofar as men live according to the guidance of reason, they must do only those things which are good for human nature, and hence, for each man, that is, those things which agree with the nature of each man. hence, insofar as men live according to the guidance of rea- son, they must always agree among themselves. (spinoza , ivp ) things that agree with our nature – that is, highly rational human be- ings – are good for us, so the more rational people are, the better and more useful they are for one another (spinoza , ivp , p ). politi- cally, ‘agreement’ means convergence on common goods and mutual aid towards achieving them, which leads to a stable, strong, and harmonious society. references to spinoza’s ethics are to part number (roman numerals) and the num- ber of the proposition (p; arabic numerals), followed in some cases by corollary (c) or scholium (s) number. this is a controversial claim which needs some support. (refs) draft paper beth lord the political philosophy of spinoza and ranciere disagreement comes about when we seek our advantage from non- rational, non-essential motives. disagreement is politically significant only between individuals who could, in principle, agree in nature. things that have entirely different essences (a human being and a stone, for instance) disagree in nature, but not in a politically significant way. a thing whose nature is entirely different from our own neither helps nor hinders our striving for human advantage. things can be ‘good or evil’ for us – that is, they can increase or diminish our power – only if they have something in common with us, but they cannot be evil for us through our commonal- ities (spinoza , ivp - ). so it is not through our common essence, but through our differences in existence, that we can be contrary to each other and disagree in nature. our striving for our essential advantage is derailed by what our different backgrounds and circumstances determine us to desire and do. this derailment is more powerful and long-lasting the less reason we have developed. our thinking and acting are determined more by what we experience, and what we feel and imagine will lead to our betterment. our different circumstances cause us to differ in our af- fective responses, and thus in our judgments about what is good and bad for us: different men can be affected differently by one and the same object, and one and the same man can be affected differently at different times by one and the same object. […] because each one judges from his own affect what is good and what is bad, what is better and what is worse, it follows that men can vary as much in judgment as in affect. (spinoza , iiip ) to the extent that our experiences and feelings motivate our thinking and acting, what we strive for differs substantially. politically, disagreement is destabilizing because we do not converge on common goods or help each other to achieve them. instead, each indi- vidual strives in a different direction for what appears to be good for her, frequently leading her to conflict with the striving of others. we all strive for uncertain goods which seem to reflect our own experience and satisfy our own emotions. disagreement can cause sad passions of desiring the same scarce resource, resenting those who appear to stand in our way and envying those who appear more successful. but disagreement can also cause joyful passions: the more we reflect on our differences from others – the more we consider our circumstances and striving to be distinctive – the more likely we are to affirm and love our own distinctiveness, with deleterious results: spinoza uses a man and a stone as an example of two things that have nothing es- sential in common. strictly speaking, however, a stone and a human being share various essential properties, and a stone can be helpful or harmful to a human being’s striving. beth lord the political philosophy of spinoza and ranciere draft paper joy arising from considering ourselves is called self-love or self-esteem. and since this is renewed as often as a man considers his virtues, or his power of acting, it also happens that everyone is anxious to tell his own deeds, and show off his powers […] and that men, for this reason, are troublesome to one another. from this it follows that men are by nature envious, or are glad of their equals’ weakness and saddened by their equals’ virtue. for whenever anyone imagines his own actions, he is affected with joy, and with a greater joy, […] the more he can distinguish them from others, and con- sider them as singular things. so everyone will have the greatest gladness from considering himself, when he considers something in himself which he denies concerning others. (spinoza , iiip s) disagreement can cause us to rejoice in what we perceive to be our unique characteristics and actions. but these passions make us feel other powerful passions, pull further apart from others, and reject or ignore our common- alities with them. all this is contrary to our true advantage. disagreement is ‘irrational’ in that it arises from diminished reasoning and leads us to strive for what is not truly in our interest. yet this is our primary mode of being. most of us, most of the time, do not act in our own interest, although that is exactly what we imagine and joyfully affirm ourselves to be doing. let us now turn to disagreement as the rejection of parthood, for on this, spinoza and ranciere concur. spinoza thinks that when we agree in nature, we cohere as parts of a whole human community. in his account of the origins of the state, spinoza indicates that in the state of nature each person is a sovereign whole, seeking only his own advantage, from a very low point of rationality. everyone agrees to become a part of a larger whole through the social contract, and agrees to seek the advantage of the whole, either through rationally knowing that is good, or through obedience to civil laws that encourage community-oriented action. when- ever we disagree in nature, we revert to thinking of ourselves as sover- eign wholes. this is underwritten by spinoza’s metaphysics of parts and wholes. everything is both a whole and a part of various greater wholes, rising in compositional complexity to the whole of nature. a thing is con- sidered a ‘part of a whole’ insofar as it adapts its nature to those of other parts and they are in ‘the closest possible agreement’; it is considered a whole to the extent that it resists adaptation to other things, and ‘insofar as they are different from one another’ (spinoza , pp. - ). what holds of physical bodies also holds of individuals in political communities. insofar as we agree, we consider ourselves parts of a community whole; insofar as we disagree, we reject our political parthood and consider our- this is explained in spinoza’s letter to oldenburg of (ep. ). draft paper beth lord the political philosophy of spinoza and ranciere selves wholes in our own right. disagreement threatens the social order, for spinoza as for ranciere. unlike ranciere, spinoza does not see any potential for emancipation in disagreement, but sees it as the source of a dangerous narcissism that can lead to factionalist and rejectionist politics. this is particularly apparent when we examine the passions of pride and despondency. these affects arise when people are driven to compare their achievements with those of others, to obsess over their uniqueness or inadequacy, and to feel them- selves to be superior or inferior. in other words, pride and despondency are how we feel our inequality to others. pride is ‘thinking more highly of one- self than is just, out of love of oneself’, and despondency is ‘a sadness born of a man’s false opinion that he is below others’ (spinoza , iii defini- tions of the affects xxviii, and ivp s). both feelings tend to perpetuate themselves. the proud person seeks those who flatter her, loves herself all the more, and feels joy in this self-love. she is highly prone to envy, but rejoices in feeling that she is above others. the despondent person ‘is very near the proud one’ in that he too is prone to envy, and seeks to exult over those even more despondent than himself. this leads him, perversely, to feel good about his own despondency (spinoza , ivp s). out of all the passions that spinoza describes, he singles out pride and despondency as indicating ‘very great ignorance of oneself’ and ‘very great weakness of mind’ ( , ivp - ) for the proud and despondent have no rational understanding of their true value to others, that is, their value as human beings who can agree in nature. they evaluate themselves in terms of their difference from others and take pleasure in their disagreement in nature. ranciere sees disagreement as the assertion of one’s equality. spinoza, by contrast, sees that it can involve the perverse affirmation of one’s in- equality. to disagree from pride or despondency is to assert the superi- ority or inferiority of one’s experience, affects, and actions, and to feel this superiority or inferiority to be good and worthy of respect. these passions are likeliest to arise in societies that are highly unequal and that place value on individual achievement. differences in power and material goods will cause pride and despondency to be keenly felt, while individu- alism leads people to imagine themselves as sovereign wholes with sole responsibility for their achievements or failures. this does not encour- age us to agree in nature, but instead to seek sameness with others ac- cording to those non-essential characteristics we take to distinguish us. we seek the sameness of those who feel similarly proud or despondent about their economic circumstances, their power or oppression, their edu- cational achievement, religion, or nationality. we seek the sameness of those who share our passions, who love what we love, and hate what we hate (spinoza , iiip ). contra ranciere, who takes disagreement to beth lord the political philosophy of spinoza and ranciere draft paper involve dis-identification with affective groups, spinoza understands dis- agreement to cause us to identify with others through our affects and to feel these affects all the more strongly. such groupings have nothing to do with our common essence, and do nothing to encourage the agreement in nature that leads to political harmony. feeling unequal to others can lead to identity-based factions that make us socially and politically unstable (cf. gatens and lloyd ). for spinoza, disagreement derails us from pursuing what is truly in our interest. worse, it leads us to take pleasure in diverging from the com- mon human good. and it leads us to identify with others not on the basis of reason, but on the basis of shared passions and feelings. it is in these terms that i suggest we consider the brexit fallout. after the vote, commentators noted that in places like wales and the north-east that had benefitted from eu funds, citizens voted strongly ‘against their own interests’ for leave. according to spinoza, those who are subject to strong passions, particularly of pride and despondency, and who associate with others who feel the same, are likely to reject what ap- pears to be in their rational interest, and to take pleasure in doing so. this was recognized by writer pankaj mishra shortly after the referendum: what is self-interest in a deindustrialized country wounded by austerity, humiliated by handouts and enraged by a metropolitan elite alternat- ing between callousness and mendacity? […] vulgar rationalism [cannot] cope with the possibility that now universally emergent underground man may take pleasure in defying his rational self-interest. (mishra , p. ) similarly, in her work on the experience of social class in britain, lynsey hanley describes how the working-class rejection of supposedly rational goods – including education and political participation – is experienced as a form of affirmation and resistance to middle-class values. she interprets brexit as just such a rejectionist move ( a, cf. hanley b). but brexit was not achieved exclusively or even primarily by working class voters, and disagreement is not the exclusive preserve of the disad- vantaged. in spinoza’s view, disagreement pervades society, and the rejec- tion of parthood is a constitutive feature of political community. it occurs particularly strongly, at all levels of society, where inequality is rife and individualism is valued. so it is not surprising that in one of the most so- cially and economically unequal countries in the eu, one in which the ideology of individualism is held to be part of the national identity, that . million people voted to reject their parthood of a larger whole and ref (equality trust) draft paper beth lord the political philosophy of spinoza and ranciere to affirm the sovereign wholeness of themselves and the group with which they share the same experiences and feelings. very few could have acted in their true interest, because very few in such circumstances rationally understand what their true interest is. people who are largely determined by their experiences and feelings, and who affirm their distinctiveness and importance through associating only with their own affective groups, lack any basis for adapting to one another as parts of a whole. remain and leave voters perceived themselves to be moving in different directions. in this case, one group – the younger and more educated – was determined by the experience and feeling that their lives were getting better; the other, larger group – the older and less educated – was determined by the experi- ence and feeling that their lives were getting worse. despondency carried the vote, and quickly turned into politically destructive forms of exulta- tion when it won, just as spinoza might have predicted. the purpose of this paper is not to make grand claims about brexit or about our current political state of affairs. it is to draw out the ways that ranciere and spinoza make use of disagreement to understand political events that disturb the status quo. i have also sought to show the reso- nances between ranciere’s and spinoza’s thought on parthood, inequal- ity, identity, and difference. ranciere’s analysis may appear to serve those who wish to see brexit as a revolt of the excluded, but brexit cannot be understood as disagreement, or even as political, on ranciere’s terms. as an event that entrenched people in the groups with which they affectively identify, it is better explained by spinoza’s sense of disagreement as experi- ential and affective divergence. spinoza better helps us to understand how our current political predicament arises from the social fact of inequality. school of divinity, history and philosophy university of aberdeen the old brewery high street aberdeen ab ub s.b.lord@abdn.ac.uk see note , above. beth lord the political philosophy of spinoza and ranciere draft paper references aristotle : the politics, trans. t. a. sinclair. harmondsworth: penguin. ashcroft, m. : ‘how the united kingdom voted on thursday… and why’. lord ashcroft polls ( june ) http://lordashcroftpolls. com dorling, danny : ‘brexit: the decision of a divided country’. bmj . gatens, moira, and genevieve lloyd : collective imaginings: spinoza past and present. london: routledge. hanley, lynsey a: ‘out of it’. the guardian ( september ), pp. - . hanley, lynsey b: respectable: the experience of class. london: allen lane. hobbes, thomas, reference to be supplied. joseph rowntree foundation, statistics on brexit voting patterns (reference to be supplied) laclau, ernesto : on populist reason. london: verso. mishra, pankaj : excerpt in ‘where are we now? responses to the referendum’, london review of books ( july ), pp. - . ranciere, jacques : disagreement, trans. julie rose. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. ranciere, jacques : dissensus: on politics and aesthetics, ed. and trans. and introd. steven corcoran. london: bloomsbury. runciman, david : ‘degrees of separation’. the guardian ( october ), pp. - . spinoza, benedict de : a spinoza reader: the ethics and other works, ed. and trans. edwin curley. princeton: princeton university press. spinoza, benedict de : theological-political treatise, trans. michael silverthorne and jonathan israel. cambridge: cambridge university press. the equality trust, reference to be supplied. president: tim crane (cambridge) president-elect: helen beebee (manchester) honorary director: rory madden (ucl) editor: guy longworth (warwick) lines of thought series editor: scott sturgeon (oxford) executive committee: corine besson (sussex) / kimberley brownlee (warwick) rowan cruft (stirling) / james harris (st andrews) / ulrike heuer (leeds) / sacha golob (kcl) susan james (birkbeck) managing editor: hannah carnegy (ucl) assistant editor: david harris graphic & web designer: mark cortes favis administrator: josephine salverda (ucl) t h e a r i s t o t e l i a n s o c i e t y w w w . a r i s t o t e l i a n s o c i e t y . o r g . u k s x .indd du bois review, : ( ) – . © hutchins center for african and african american research - x/ $ . doi: . /s x state of the discourse bringing du bois back in american sociology and the morris enunciation lawrence d. bobo department of african and african american studies and department of sociology , harvard university aldon d. morris , the scholar denied: w. e. b. du bois and the birth of modern sociology , oakland, ca : university of california press , , pages, isbn - - - - . $ . the resurrection of w. e. b. du bois as a pioneering social scientist foundational to the field of sociology is a project that has been underway, arguably, for at least three decades (bobo ). one important entry in this intellectual project came with the publica- tion by the university of chicago press, in its “heritage of sociology series,” under the general editorship of morris janowitz, of the book black sociologists: historical and contemporary perspectives (blackwell and janowitz, ). the volume featured major essays on w. e. b. du bois as well as on e. franklin frazier and charles s. johnson and chapters from a number of leading african american scholars (e.g., walter wallace, william julius wilson). around this same time others were also pressing the case that the early and innovative work of du bois, in particular, had been grievously overlooked by sociologists (green and driver, ; key ; pettigrew ; rudwick ). a number of other significant publications helped to turn the tide by excavating anew du bois’s contributions and highlighting the lasting and multidisciplinary reach of his efforts. particularly worthy of attention for the social sciences are two edited volumes spearheaded by scholars at the university of pennsylvania, one effort led by historians and another by sociologists. michael b. katz’s and thomas j. sugrue’s ( ) volume focused analytical attention on du bois’s the philadelphia negro ([ ] ) and featured nine chapters, two by sociologists. the chapters explored the eco- nomic, political, and cultural context in which du bois launched and conducted his work as well as important legacies of his findings and perspective. two years later, pivoting off of du bois’s essay “the study of negro problems,” a special issue of the annals (anderson and zuberi, ) contained twenty new essays and featured a more interdisciplinary range of scholars including economists, political scientists, anthropologists, gender studies and literature scholars, as well as philosophers. at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core lawrence d. bobo du bois review: social science research on race : , building upon and significantly extending these many worthy efforts, aldon morris’s the scholar denied authoritatively re-writes the conventional script of the origin of american sociology. the real foundation stone of sociological research in the united states is neither robert e. park and the chicago school nor frank giddings and columbia sociology, but rather, w. e. b. du bois and the atlanta school. morris’s claim and achievement here will come as vindication in the eyes of some sociologists, a great but not unwelcome surprise to many others, and probably a bitterly contested assertion to more than a few. let the debate begin. this well-crafted, meticulously researched, and theoretically serious work will command engagement from the disci- pline writ large. and given the rigor and sophistication of the work morris has done, i have little doubt that his position will, like du bois himself, ultimately prevail. in reflecting on these and many other recent efforts to bring du bois back in (bulmer ; edwards ; itzigsohn and brown, ; prasch ; williams ; zuberi ), one cannot escape the question that comes to be at the heart of the scholar denied : why was it necessary to engage in a long, fitful, and protracted effort to bring du bois back into the mainstream of sociological thinking? why wasn’t he comfortably perched there from the beginning? the short answer, according to morris, is that du bois was systematically and deliberately marginalized. for morris, this marginalization cannot be understood outside the context of a social milieu of anti-black racism and the effects of that context on the perspectives and practices of dominant white sociologists. a personal anecdote can help clarify and sharpen the tangible effects of the point made here. at the time of its publication, i shared my own article in the annals issue on “the study of african american problems” (bobo ) with two very senior white scholars of race relations and racial attitudes. quite independent of one another, these two eminent individuals offered almost identical remarks of bewildered sur- prise that du bois had conducted serious research at such an early point, in their own domain of deep expertise, with which they were essentially completely unfamiliar. to paraphrase a bit, they each said (actually using almost identical words), “interesting. i had no idea du bois had done such serious work. i always thought of him as a kind of worldly propagandist/activist on race issues who left the u.s. in alienation.” such a read from two serious scholars of race relations is indicative of how thoroughly du bois qua important and innovative sociologist had been wiped from collective memory among some sectors of the elite social scientific canon of race relations scholarship. of course, the marginalization of research focusing on minority populations and particularly that done by minority scholars is neither entirely a problem of the past nor an ill afflicting only sociology. according to political scientist michael dawson “one pernicious and all too common variant on this set of practices is the systematic and willful ignoring of the work of minority scholars…. the complaint is not about know- ing what is necessary to do decent work in one’s field; that is a reasonable minimum expectation. the complaint is about the systematic refusal of some white scholars to confront the work of established minority scholars within their fields” (dawson , p. ). specifically with respect to much work on american political behavior and public opinion, melissa harris-perry concluded that african americans were often totally absent as social actors deemed of relevance to the political processes and out- comes under study and of no relevance to the theoretical ideas and body of research brought to bear on explaining and understanding the dynamics of race in much politi- cal science scholarship. as she put it: “african americans are rendered irrelevant or invisible in the study of race politics in two ways: (a) through a failure to account for black agency in affecting white attitudes, and (b) through a refusal of scholars of race to grapple with the literature on black public opinion” (harris-lacewell , p. ). at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core bringing du bois back in du bois review: social science research on race : , yet the omission is particularly egregious in the case of du bois, a point morris drives home persuasively. du bois published the philadelphia negro ([ ] ) at roughly the same moment that emile durkheim published his classic study suicide ( ) and at the point that sociology departments were being established at the uni- versity of chicago ( ) and at columbia ( ). given his training, the quality and innovativeness of his work, and the vigor of his early research program, du bois should be an obvious presence, speaking metaphorically, on the mt. rushmore of american sociology. yet he is not. explicating the gravity of this error, its complete- ness, and its sources is morris’s core project. the sophistication, innovation, quality, and timing of du bois’s early sociological work constitute the first element of morris’s case for regarding du bois as america’s ur-sociologist , the origin point of the discipline. as morris explains: “indeed, du bois emerged from the philadelphia negro as the first number-crunching, surveying, inter- viewing, participant-observing, and field-working sociologist in america, a pioneer in the multimethods approach. he cross-checked his quantitative and qualitative data to ensure accuracy by eradicating undetected errors associated with a particular method. thus he also pioneered the data-gathering technique known as triangulation” (p. ). these methodological advances, morris stresses, were undertaken by du bois at a point when robert park, “four years older than du bois [and with] few professional accomplishments” (morris , p. ) was seeking to attach himself to booker t. washington. a second critical element in morris’s analysis is the way in which robert park and other founding members of the chicago school marginalized and presided over steadily writing du bois out of the sociological canon. the tale as morris tells it begins by noting the enormous reach and influence of booker t. washington, who would eventually become du bois’s nemesis. while the du bois-washington feud is a tale twice told, far less familiar is the fact that robert e. park worked for years as washington’s assistant and ghost writer at the tuskegee institute. in many respects, park carried forward washington’s accommodationist stance and view of the posi- tion of blacks as well as his antagonism toward du bois. morris shows that this antagonism reached so far as to involve trying to publicly vilify du bois in the wake of the atlanta race riot of . morris goes further than this, however, showing that du bois was increasingly written out of an understanding of the origins of sociological theory and research in the united states by park and others at the university of chicago and through- out the discipline. the sin here is not merely one of failing to acknowledge the timing and quality of du bois’s research, morris suggests, but also one of (mis) appropriation of du boisian ideas and insights. for example, park’s notions of the “marginal man” seemingly owed much to du bois’s pathbreaking argument about “double consciousness,” a debt that park left effectively unacknowledged. morris concludes with a strong indictment: given the entire record, this conclusion is inescapable: park and the chicago school locked du bois out of the intellectual fraternity of sociology by system- atically ignoring his scholarship. this exclusion relegated du bois to the institu- tional margins of american sociology because it was accompanied by his exclusion from scholarly networks that functioned as pathways to journal editorships, mem- berships in learned societies, and presidency of learned societies, including the american sociological society. because of his skin color and his challenges to park’s racist propositions du bois was denied meaningful participation in main- stream sociology ( , p. ). at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core lawrence d. bobo du bois review: social science research on race : , in short, park and others were actively complicit in the discriminatory and racist bias characteristic of their times. a third element of morris’s account concerns du bois’s influence on max weber. it is frequently claimed that while in germany du bois “studied with weber.” morris provides a significant correction to this well-rehearsed narrative. du bois and weber really first crossed paths with one another when the former was twenty-four and the latter twenty-eight years old, as status equals, as graduate students, not as pupil and instructor. furthermore and in contradistinction to the standard narrative, morris builds a creditable case that du bois did far more to shape the thinking of the young weber than weber ever did to shape the thinking of the young du bois. both du bois and weber were taking in lessons from the likes of gustav von schmoller and other prominent german intellectuals of the day. as morris explains, “in germany, du bois and weber were taught by many of the same professors, were mentored by the same scholars of the german historical school of economics, and involved in many of the same intellectual activities…” (p. ). later, weber actually solicits an article from du bois to publish in his journal the arvchiv fur sozialwissenschaft and sozialpolitik . moreover, morris points to how du bois’s theoretical analysis of how the projects of imperialism, colonialism, and capitalism were shaping european exploitation of people of color in the united states and around the world came to profoundly affect weber’s own thinking about dynamics on the european continent, particularly con- cerning what was then termed “the polish problem.” the german scholar showed an eagerness to bring du bois into the mainstream while he was being largely ostracized by white american sociology at home. the fourth element in morris’s account is his effort to elevate the tradition of work du bois and his collaborators and students launched to the status of a recognized school of sociological work, namely the du bois-atlanta school. morris is certainly able to show that du bois and his atlanta university collaborators produced signifi- cant and high quality scholarship for a number of years. save for the socially imposed peripheral place of a historically black college in the higher educational hierarchy and the profoundly de-limited access to financial support for their work, the scholars of the du bois-atlanta school of sociology he deems worthy of recognition as such. du bois certainly affected the work of other black sociologists of the day, such as monroe work and richard wright, and staged a number of important topical atlanta conferences and subsequent publications focusing on major arenas of social life within black communities. a fifth element of morris’s analysis involves, in effect, throwing down the gaunt- let before the field of sociology itself. morris’s book, ultimately, represents a genuine intellectual and moral challenge for sociology in the united states. morris thus argues: “here we reach the crux: invisibility and recognition are opposites. because of the color line, white social scientists did not recognize du bois’s scientific contributions as original, rare, and distinctive. as a black person, du bois was largely invisible, as were his pioneering scientific contributions” (p. ). morris thereby openly contests, in a powerful way, what those to whom i refer as “the keepers of the canon” regard as the core works, concepts, theories, and figures of american sociology. the great test here for the future is whether the keepers of the canon come to fully acknowledge the pro- foundly distorting impact of the racism of the past on how we think about and do sociol- ogy even today and, especially, whether they too now work to undo both this shameful legacy and it’s enduring effects on the culture and practices of the discipline itself. morris’s analysis prompts one to speculate, for example, whether sociology as a discipline would have so completely failed to anticipate the emergence of a potent civil rights movement in the s if du boisian theory had been taken more seriously. at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core bringing du bois back in du bois review: social science research on race : , in his presidential address to the american sociological association in , everett c. hughes interrogated the discipline’s failure, despite its many examinations of “the negro problem,” to forecast one of the most significant social movements in american history (hughes ). yet even this otherwise probing reflection on a major failure of the “sociological imagination” fails to cite du bois even once. might direct engage- ment with a du boisian perspective which stresses looking carefully at the internal organization and dynamics of black social life, the moral agency and conscious action of blacks themselves, and the fundamental and irreducible humanity of black people have saved the discipline from this yawning intellectual failure? the scholar denied is not without some limitations. for example, there are points where careful documentation of his claims seems a bit incomplete. morris meticulously documents how du bois disappeared from early treatises on sociology in later editions of important works by figures at chicago. yet, for his all-important claim that du bois shaped weber’s theoretical formulations, this claim rests not on direct evidence of weber citing the work of du bois in his own writings, but instead on weber’s move away from racist ideas dominant among german scholars at the time, particularly after his visit with du bois in the united states in , and on the record of a prominent scholarly public debate where weber did explicitly refer to and praise du bois. the evidence of influence on weber is thus a bit more inferential (though not unreasonable) than it is direct. similarly, if the discriminatory barriers faced by du bois were so extreme, it is something of a puzzle exactly how and why he was able to get so many prominent white scholars of the day to take part in his atlanta conferences over the years. there may also be some tendency to read the tastes and prevailing views of our times into the du bois writings. for example, morris takes to task some prominent scholars who faulted du bois as often patronizing and elitist in his discussion of work- ing class and poor blacks. some of these critiques (berry ; cohen ) still seem cogent and are not directly engaged by morris. these several concerns, in fairness, rank more as a wish that morris had provided fuller detail, documentation, and direct answers on some points than they do a tally of serious shortcomings of the work. within some subfields of the discipline du bois is already accorded a central and prominent place. efforts at theory development in race studies in sociology openly acknowledge a debt to du bois (winant ). likewise, sociological students of urban social dynamics recognize a debt to du bois (hunter ; loughran ). political philosophy is, similarly, a site of vigorous scholarly engagement with du bois’s thought and research (balfour ; gooding-williams ; as well as the related symposium published in du bois review: social science research on race in ). but morris’s work arguably presses these trends to new heights. from my vantage point, the scholar denied is a must read for all broad-minded individuals who regard themselves as well-informed about social science in the united states; if not for its convincing resurrection of du bois’s foundational contribution to american sociology, then for its case study of the role of larger societal patterns of poli- tics, bias, and power in the making of what comes to be regarded as important scientific knowledge and contributions. morris’s book should be required reading for every stu- dent entering graduate sociology phd programs. moreover, the scholar denied should occupy a space next to weber’s ( ) the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism on the list of required readings in introduction to sociology classes around the country: the sins of omission of the past are that great, the quality of what i shall characterize as “the morris enunciation” is that high, and the legacy of the marginalization of the contributions of minority scholars remain that troublingly far from complete eradication. du bois told us long ago that the color line would be the bane of the twentieth century. as is plain enough now, however, the african american journey to full at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core lawrence d. bobo du bois review: social science research on race : , membership in the u.s. economy, polity, and culture is still palpably incomplete as we move into the second decade of the twenty-first century (berry ; bobo ) and find ourselves compelled to shout that “black lives matter!”. du bois’s analysis of race identified the profound, multidimensional impact of constructing a social order wherein color and class were merged in defining who had access to power, wealth, and privilege and who did not. he tried to make it clear to scholars that those who are the targets of prejudice were also those most often shunted to the lowest levels of poverty and economic despair. as such, du bois saw class and race as constitutionally and profoundly fused in the make-up and dynamics of social life. and he maintained that scholarship could either distort understanding of these conditions and processes by yielding to prevailing ideology and bias or it could strive for an historically and contextually grounded and empirically rigorous analysis of the interaction of class and racial inequality in the structuring of the american social order. the depth and power of du bois’s contribution to social science is arguably still not fully appreciated. but aldon morris’s the scholar denied takes an enormous and sure-footed stride toward righting a great historic wrong. american sociology and sociologists failed to acknowledge du bois as the fountainhead of the discipline in his day. finally now, perhaps, he will be recognized as a true colossus of the development of american sociology. aldon morris’s stentorian enunciation brings du bois back into the theoretical and methodological mainstreams of the discipline, right where he has always belonged. acknowledgment i wish to thank matthew clair for comments and suggestions on an earlier draft. references anderson , elijah , and tukufu zuberi (eds.) ( ). the study of african american problems: w. e. b. du bois’s agenda, then and now . annals of the american academy of political and social science , (march): – . balfour , lawrie ( ). democracy’s reconstruction: thinking politically with w. e. b. du bois . new york : oxford university press . berry , mary frances ( ). du bois as social activist: why we are not saved . annals of the american academy of political and social science , (march): – . blackwell , james e. , and morris janowitz (eds.) ( ). black sociologists: historical and contem- porary perspectives. chicago, il : university of chicago press . bobo , lawrence d . ( ). reclaiming a du boisian perspective on racial attitudes . annals of the american academy of political and social science , (march): – . bobo , lawrence d . ( ). introduction . in henry louis gates , jr . (ed.) the oxford w. e. b. du bois. the philadelphia negro: a social study by w. e. b. du bois , pp. xxv-xxx. new york : oxford university press . bobo , lawrence d . ( ). an american conundrum: race, sociology, and the african american road to citizenship . in henry louis gates , jr. , claude steele , lawrence d. bobo , michael c. dawson , gerald jaynes , lisa crooms-robinson , and linda darling-hammond (eds.) the oxford handbook of african american citizenship, -present , pp. – . new york : oxford university press . bulmer , martin ( ). w. e. b. du bois as a social investigator: the philadelphia negro, . in martin bulmer , kevin bales , and kathryn kish sklar (eds.) the social survey in historical perspective, - , pp. – . new york : cambridge university press . cohen , cathy j . ( ). deviance as resistance: a new research agenda for the study of black politics . du bois review: social science research on race , ( ): – . dawson , michael c . ( ). slowly coming to grips with the effects of the american racial order on american policy preferences . in david o. sears , jim sidanius , and lawrence d. bobo (eds.) racialized politics: the debate on racism in america , pp. – . chicago, il : university of chicago press . at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core bringing du bois back in du bois review: social science research on race : , du bois , w. e. b . ([ ] ). the philadelphia negro: a social study . new york : oxford university press . edwards , barrington s . ( ). w. e. b. du bois: berlin, empirical social research, and the race question . du bois review: social science research on race , ( ): – . gooding-williams , robert ( ). in the shadow of du bois: afro-modern political thought in america. cambridge, ma : harvard university press . green , dan s. , and edwin driver ( ). w. e. b. du bois: a case in the sociology of socio- logical negation . phylon , : – . harris-lacewell , melissa v . ( ). the heart of the politics of race: centering black people in the study of white racial attitudes . journal of black studies , ( ): – . hughes , everett c . ( ). race relations and the sociological imagination . american socio- logical review , ( ): – . hunter , marcus anthony ( ). black citymakers: how the philadelphia negro changed urban america . new york : oxford university press . itzigsohn , jose , and karida brown ( ). sociology and the theory of double consciousness: w. e. b. du bois’s phenomenology of racialized subjectivity . du bois review: social science research on race . ( ): – . katz , michael b. , and thomas j. sugrue (eds.) ( ). w. e. b. du bois, race, and the city: the philadelphia negro and its legacy . philadelphia, pa : university of pennsylvania press . key , r. charles ( ). society and sociology: the dynamics of black sociological negation . phylon , : – . loughran , kevin ( ). the philadelphia negro and the canon of classical urban theory . du bois review: social science research on race , ( ): – . pettigrew , thomas f . (ed.) ( ). the sociology of race relations: reflection and reform . new york : the free press . prasch , robert e . ( ). w. e. b. du bois’s contributions to u.s. economics ( - ) . du bois review: social science research on race , ( ): – . rudwick , eliot ( ). note on a forgotten black sociologist: w. e. b. du bois and the socio- logical profession . american sociologist , : – . weber , max ( ). the protestant ethic and the spirit of capitalism . london : george allen & unwin ltd . williams , robert w . ( ). the early social science of w. e. b. du bois . du bois review: social science research on race , ( ): – . winant , howard ( ). race and race theory . annual review of sociology , : – . zuberi , tukufu ( ). deracializing social statistics: problems in the quantification of race . annals of the american academy of political and social science , (march): – . at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core biron - birkbeck institutional research online o’brien, sean joseph and szeman, i. and jagoe, e.-l. ( ) introduction: we have never been democratic. public ( ), pp. - . issn - . downloaded from: http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/ / usage guidelines: please refer to usage guidelines at https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/policies.html or alternatively contact lib-eprints@bbk.ac.uk. http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/ / https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/policies.html mailto:lib-eprints@bbk.ac.uk sean o’brien introduction: we have never been democratic as liberty is relocated from political to economic life, it becomes subject to the inherent inequality of the latter and is part of what secures that inequality. the guarantee of equality through the rule of law and participation in popular sovereignty is replaced with a market formulation of winners and losers. liberty itself is narrowed to market conduct, divested of association with mastering the conditions of life, existential freedom, or securing the rule of the demos. freedom conceived minimally as self-rule and more robustly as participation in rule by the demos gives way to comportment with a market instrumental rationality that radically constrains both choices and ambitions. -wendy brown, undoing the demos of what do we speak when we speak about democracy? to what form of rationality does this term actually pertain? a slightly more attentive observation would show that those who discuss democracy today understand this term sometimes as a form of the body politic’s constitution, sometimes as a technique of government. the term thus refers both to the conceptuality of public law and to that of administrative practice: it designates power’s form of legitimation as well as the modalities of its exercise. -giorgio agamben, “introductory note on the concept of democracy” the contributions to this special issue of public are based on conversations held and work developed during the banff research in culture (bric) research residency, “demos: life in common.” held high in the mountains of banff national park, alberta, “demos: life in common” sought to “bring together artists, writers, researchers, and cultural producers who in their work are exploring the ways in which we might reinvigorate democratic life today—not just ‘democratic’ in its narrow, political sense, but as life in common in which being and belonging engenders the full flourishing of individuals and communities.” twenty-nine participant scholars and artists worked together with the bric faculty, including residency organizers eva-lynn jagoe and imre szeman, distinguished scholar and political agitator nina power, renowned writer and activist astra taylor, and celebrated artist alex hartley. over the course of the residency, the organizers, guest faculty and participant scholars and artists worked individually and collaboratively on a wide array of research and artistic projects, out of which grew a body of work that we have collected here under the theme, “we have never been democratic.” the theme of this issue riffs on the title of bruno latour’s we have never been modern, wherein latour argues that modernity constitutes itself through a dualism between the natural and the social. if, for latour, the modern distinction between society and nature never actually existed, this dossier sets out to challenge the notion that the neoliberal present constitutes a radical deviation from a vibrant history of democratic liberalism, and to assert instead that democracy has since its inception been marked by its own imaginary dualism, between the demos and the sovereign. the demos what does the concept of democracy name? the word democracy derives from two greek words: it is a composite of “demos,” which means “the people,” and “kratos,” meaning “power.” in its most basic sense, then, “demokratia” names the shared power of people thinking and acting together to narrate and decide the shape of collective life. what passes for democracy today, however, falls far short of the ideal form figured in its nomenclature. instead of collective, equitable decision-making, we have a post-welfare security state, a socially and economically precarious populace, and an under-represented and disenfranchised electorate. and in a world beset by financial and ecological crises, whatever faith remained in the liberating potential of new technology has come up against a series of increasingly insurmountable limits. this collection asks how we might begin to think through the possibilities for collective life at a moment when the promises of social democracy heralded during the early postwar period have given way to the perils of a neoliberal order seemingly able to endure its own crises, and when democracy no longer seems to exist anywhere. a “demo” also refers to an experiment, a test or an attempt—as in the case of a musician, for example, who might record their own creative efforts and share them with others—that might suggest alternative paths through which to pursue these questions; be they academic, artistic, tactical or otherwise. to that end, a number of the contributions to this dossier take experimental approaches to the question of collective life in the present. we open the document with catherine ryan’s simultaneously incendiary and comical “manifesto for the new, political pop song,” a polemic that buries the boot-strap individualism of so much contemporary pop, advocating instead for the development of a popular music that is properly therapeutic and collective. mobilizing the melancholia of the pop song, ryan’s “manifesto” offers a program for the implementation of a form of dance-pop that counters the atomized suffering of the neoliberal subject of market society. attention to the political capacities of aesthetic experimentation also informs francesca hawker’s contribution to the dossier. in “beef in the sea,” hawker takes an inventive look at the band bday pres, and the way embarrassment figures in their live shows, drawing connections between performance, intimacy and the formalities that govern our subjectivities and socialities. several of the pieces included here experiment with technology as a means to make sense of the present, while others pay homage to iconic moments of experimental praxis from the past. addressing a gap in the capacity of existing representative forms to adequately capture the realities of extractive industries, david janzen’s “energy demo(s): towards a rhythmanalysis of capital & abstraction” experiments with sound, and especially rhythm, as part of the project of reimaging environmental representation in an era of climate crisis. fraser mccallum’s “the unknown student” examines the history and legacy of the titular sculpture produced at rochdale college ( - ), toronto’s infamous experiment in alternative education and communal living, and draws connections between rochdale’s closure in and the subsequent rise of the neoliberal university. and angel chen’s “wandering gramsciwards,” which is a travelogue that follows her protagonist’s arrival at a research university, draws on antonio gramsci’s prison notebooks to foreground connections between post-secondary education and the cultural hegemony of commodification and financial investment logic. there is yet another meaning to demos—they are manifestations of grievances, mass actions in which people collectively rally to draw attention to problems and limits of existing structures of government, law or economy, or to disrupt the dominant patterns of culture and politics. public demonstrations can take a variety of forms: the protest rally, the march, the blockade, the riot and the occupation are but a few examples. they can be moments in which democratic ideals are reaffirmed against encroaching antidemocratic forces, or they might contest the very terms of political engagement proffered by the discourse of democracy. in “choreographies of binding and unbinding: on the drawings of andrea bowers,” hannah ellul attends to the complex ways in which images of political action intersect with and shape processes of political identification, affiliation, and the desire for political agency. examining bowers’ piecemeal, meticulously-drawn iconography of protest, ellul asks what it means to be preoccupied with protest imagery, and what attachments and detachments play out in these drawings. bowers’ work contributes to the cultivation of a sense of collective political agency, not in terms of excavating a utopian, democratic past that never actually existed, but in reminding us of the collective struggles and forms of political agency that animate human history. the pieces included here seek at times to revitalize the demos, defending democratic life from the onslaught of neoliberal market forces. in “creative publics: participatory political culture and the canadian federal election,” tara mahoney draws on a sample of participatory engagement projects created by citizens leading up to the federal election. drawing on her own election-related field study, creative publics, mahoney explores the possibility of a significant shift in canadian political culture towards a more expressive, critical and potentially transformative approach to political engagement rooted in shared aesthetic experiences and communicative capacities. other pieces address the role of art in politics and public advocacy, particularly with reference to social practice art, or what nicolas bourriaud calls “relational aesthetics.” gretchen coombs’s “remember the hoarding” recounts a conversation held during a seminar with alex hartley at bric , in which the residents contemplated their involvement in a participatory and socially engaged art project in the banff township, and highlights the trepidation they felt towards the creative economy. other contributions to the dossier mount challenges to the primacy of democracy as a conceptual framework through which to consider political possibility in the present. w. oliver baker explores contemporary limits to democratic politics in “democracy, class and white settler colonialism,” resituating the failures of us liberal democracy within the context of a much older yet nonetheless ongoing problem of white settler colonialism. for baker, it is the settler-colonial relation—and its tendency to racialize class conflict—that most forcefully continues to delimit our capacity to envision or constitute forms of collective or democratic life. darren fleet, on the other hand, insists that the contemporary reign of finance capital overshadows any attempt to revitalize democratic citizenship. in his photo-essay, “‘to tenant’: situating the realtor within,” fleet explores the state of real estate speculation in the canadian city of vancouver, tracing the historical transformation in the concept of housing from a discourse of rights to a concept in the language of finance. the multiple modes of the demos outlined here present a range of frameworks through which to consider the possibilities for collective life in the twenty-first century. adopting a diverse set of critical and creative approaches, the pieces in this issue offer a reappraisal of the turn in the latter half of the twentieth century from the keynesian social democracy of postwar liberalism to neoliberal economic doctrine and the reign of a financialized market economy. the neoliberal turn it is by now a familiar narrative: in the late s, an international consortium of politicians and financiers, influenced by the neoclassical economic theory of the chicago school, launched a program of radical political and economic reform—the so-called “neoliberal agenda,” an idea born in the minds of exiled austrian economists in the early-twentieth century that has since rose to planetary dominance on the heels of capitalist crisis. published in , friedrich hayek’s the road to serfdom captured the strident anti-collectivism that he and his austrian compatriot ludwig von mises had been defending since before the term neoliberalism was coined at a meeting in paris in . fearing for the fate of the individual in a world overwhelmed by the advance of totalitarianism, these two giants of neoliberal thought situated the social democratic projects of roosevelt’s new deal and the british welfare state on a continuum with the nazism that had driven them into exile in france. their influential ideas eventually spread from the mont-pelerin society, which hayek founded in , to the think tanks and economics departments of the us, where they would ultimately find their champion in the figure of ronald reagan. but what exactly is neoliberalism? according to david harvey, it “is in the first instance a theory of political economic practices that proposes that human well-being can best be advanced by liberating individual entrepreneurial freedoms and skills within an institutional framework characterized by strong property rights, free markets, and free trade.” here, harvey captures the historical relation between the human subject and the entrepreneur whereby the distinction between the two figures breaks down. while nineteenth-century liberalism retained a sense of the public sphere and its citizens as relatively distinct from the terrain of economics— giving rise to conflicts between so-called democratic and economic freedoms—twentieth-century neoliberalism collapses the distinction between the social and the economic altogether, subsuming the public sphere under the purview of the market until the former vanishes entirely from view. one need only remember british prime minister and fellow champion of neoliberal reform, margaret thatcher, declaring in conversation with woman’s own magazine in that “there is no such thing as society.” in a world in which corporations are people and people are human capital, there is only the “free” association of individual enterprises operating within a legally regulated market framework. if the turn to neoliberalism in the second half of the twentieth century emerges from the economic theory of hayek and von mises, it finds its roots in the economic rationality of the eighteenth-century physiocrats, for whom the market offers a new rationality of governance. in his history of neoliberalism, michel foucault argues that in the eighteenth century there occurred a shift from mercantilism to a new conception of the economy, exemplified in the economic theory of the free market put forth by the physiocrats, a group of enlightenment french economists who insisted upon the “freedom of commerce” from government intervention. for the physiocrats, and for economic theorists of the eighteenth century more generally, the object of economic intervention is no longer the market as it was under mercantilism, but the framing conditions within which the market can flourish when allowed to maintain a relative equilibrium according to its own internal mechanisms. in this way, the market comes to be understood in the eighteenth century as the site of a particular truth, a logic that both extends and deepens with the advent of neoliberalism, as the historical figure of homo æconomicus shifts from a “partner of exchange” (as the physiocrats envisioned) to an “entrepreneur of himself, being for himself his own capital, being for himself his own producer, being for himself the source of his earnings.” no longer a labourer negotiating with capital over the terms of the wage, this enterprising figure is an economic actor who is remunerated for the sale of “human capital inasmuch as the ability-machine of which it is the income cannot be separated from the human individual who is its bearer.” securing economic stability is therefore a matter of personal responsibility, since organized networks of support put in place to mitigate the volatility of capital markets and provide a social safety net for vulnerable populations only interfere with the naturally functioning rationality of the market. democracy in ruin as part and parcel of this paradigm shift in governmental reasoning, the welfare state and other public networks of support have come to appear as obstacles to the market’s flourishing, as fetters on the capacity for economic growth. and sure enough, since the s, union power has declined precipitously, social safety nets have been systematically gutted, and privatization, austerity and deregulation rule the day. many critical accounts of neoliberalism, however, insist that the consequences of the neoliberal turn are more wide reaching than the shared terrain of governmental and economic policy. in undoing the demos, wendy brown writes, “more than simply securing the rights of capital and structuring competition, neoliberal juridical reason recasts political rights, citizenship, and the field of democracy itself in an economic register; in doing so, it disintegrates the very idea of the demos.” brown stresses the paradigmatic character of the neoliberal turn as it unfolds across the social field, remaking the concepts of subjectivity, sociality and citizenship in the image of the market: “the replacement of citizenship defined as concern with the public good by citizenship reduced to the citizen as homo oeconomicus also eliminates the very idea of a people, a demos asserting its collective political sovereignty.” for brown, then, neoliberalism sounds the death knell for democracy. amid the ruins of liberal democracy, the neoliberal subject flourishes. as imre szeman has argued, the thriving protagonist of the narrative of free-market sociality is the figure of the entrepreneur. in “entrepreneurship as the new common sense,” szeman writes: the entrepreneur has become a model of how to be and behave, and not only in the world of business. entrepreneurship has come to permeate our social imaginaries in a way that has quickly transformed its claims and demands on us from fantasy into reality. we are all entrepreneurs now, or, at a minimum, we all live in a world in which the unquestioned social value and legitimacy of entrepreneurship shapes public policy, social development, economic futures, and cultural beliefs and expectations. given the degree to which it has come to saturate the social field, the figure of the entrepreneur—heroic purveyor of human capital, neoliberal subject par excellence—offers a useful heuristic for framing a selection of the contributions in this issue. eleanor king and henry svec’s “roch commune . ” playfully explores the recent transformations undertaken by the rock band roch commune, which in reincarnated form has abandoned cultural production in order to embrace a variety of entrepreneurial media practices. reevaluating the capacity of american democracy to realize its ideals of meritocracy and individual freedom, shama rangwala’s comparative reading of edith wharton’s the house of mirth ( ) and terence davies’ film adaptation ( ) of the novel examines how the movement of narrative across form makes visible fundamental inequities of exchange for women in commodity society. other pieces are more implicitly informed by the figure of the entrepreneur, touching variously on how, in the context of a marketized sociality, an emphasis on personal responsibility shapes discourses of pathology, communicative modes attach themselves to consumerist content and association, and debt replaces wages as the primary mode of social reproduction. in “attention’s deficit,” eva-lynn jagoe forgoes the usual grumbling about society’s increasing speed and alienation, asking instead how the deficit that characterizes neoliberal subjectivity might in fact inhere in the person demanding that attention be paid, and what might be gained by reconsidering the term “deficit” in this way. in “writing as praxis,” catherine ryan talks to nina power about (among other things) the democratic capacity of specific writing practices to disrupt myopic modes of thinking in a digitized discursive field. and in “art, culture and systemic change,” tara mahoney speaks with astra taylor about taylor’s work with strike debt, the rolling jubilee, and the debtors assembly. over the course of their conversation, taylor discusses debt as a financial metric that disciplines the process of subject formation, and is thus a useful example for thinking about the way neoliberalism reconstitutes social relations at the level of individual. as taylor notes, debt is a near universal condition, and is therefore a potential rallying point for political organizing; she reminds us that a critique of neoliberalism is also an opportunity to locate its sites of vulnerability, and a challenge to its authority. critical accounts of neoliberalism have been castigated both for overemphasizing the role of greedy bankers and corrupt politicians in shaping the history of capitalism, and for wearing rose-tinted glasses when it comes to the keynesian social democracy of the early postwar period. moreover, the neoliberal consensus is itself showing signs of crisis: even the international monetary fund is asking if neoliberalism has been “oversold.” with the uk set to exit the world’s largest common market, and us president-elect donald trump vowing to scrap the transpacific trade partnership and the north american free trade agreement, it would seem that the fate of the neoliberal program remains uncertain. but given the centrality of the demos to critiques of neoliberalism such as brown’s, it is pertinent to note here that a fundamental ambiguity animates the concept of democracy itself, even when considered apart from its liberal variant. “never did the demos really rule in liberal democracies,” as brown notes. what if we explore further the implications of this slippage between the people and the power structures that govern them, or indeed between the demos itself and those historically excluded from the category of citizen-subject? a critical reappraisal of democracy as a system of government inevitably encounters a contradiction operating at the centre of the democratic project. as giorgio agamben has argued, democracy is split at its heart not into the demos and the executive power—as the composite demos+kratia would suggest—but between two forms of governmental rationality, “juridico- political on the one hand, economico-managerial on the other.” classical conceptions of democracy maintain a sharp distinction between the public sphere of political life and the economic management of the household—that is, between the polis and the oikos. the polis names the space populated by the demos—the ordinary citizens of the greek city-state—while the oikos is home to those barred from citizenship (historically, slaves and women). these two poles of greek democracy together constitute the terrain on which liberal governmentality gradually comes to collapse the distance between economic and political freedoms: if today we witness the overwhelming domination of the government and the economy over a popular sovereignty that has been progressively emptied of any sense, it may be that western democracies are paying the price for a philosophical legacy they have assumed without reservations. the misunderstanding that consists in conceiving of government as a simple executive power is one of the errors most fraught with consequences in the history of western politics. it succeeded in ensuring that the political reflection of modernity got lost behind empty abstractions like the law, the general will and popular sovereignty, while leaving without response the problem which is from every point of view decisive: that of government and its articulation with the sovereign. the managerial and regulatory tendencies of modern democracies that have since the s come to eclipse the constitutional sovereignty of the demos were in fact always inherent in the concept of democracy as such. as a model of popular sovereignty, democracy necessitates a basic conflict between the constitution and the government, or what agamben calls “power’s form of legitimation” and “the modalities of its exercise.” the rise of neoliberalism in the latter half of the twentieth century represents less a break with the radical spirit of democracy, more a contemporary realization of the historically disavowed underbelly of democratic sovereignty. since its conception in ancient greece, “demokratia” has worn two faces: that of the people, and that of the sovereign. but this constitutive dualism is a veil that conceals a more troubling reality. we have never been democratic against critiques of neoliberalism as a simple anti-democratic turn, this collection begins from the position that the social democratic period preceding the rise of neoliberalism was marked by its own forms of precarity, regulation and exclusion, and that any attempt to come to terms with the present will necessary have to grapple with its tangled roots in the past. indeed, our contention is that the ideal held out by the concept of the demos has never been realized, but is itself a category constituted through exclusion. angela mitropoulos has argued that, “if democracy means the rule of the demos (‘the people’), then the formal emptiness of the proposition of who ‘the people’ are is nevertheless constantly played out along both anthropological and racialised axes of differentiation.” while the critique of neoliberalism provides an analytical framework through which to think about shifts in governmentality and subject formation since the s—not only in terms of changes in policy or as an ideology, but as an entire remake of the concept of sociality in the mode of economics—a singular focus on neoliberalization tends to obscure the broader historical frameworks from within which neoliberalism develops and emerges as the dominant form of reason. in my interview with mitropoulos included here, “border, theory, contract,” she notes how, in their defence of social democracy, critical accounts of neoliberalism also tend to uncritically reassert the taxonomic ranks of individual, family, party, nation, race and species-being. the tendency to reproduce conservative categories in critical discourse is partly a question of the methodologies through which we understand and critique the governing processes of sociality, and there is a danger in placing too much emphasis on the critical capacity of discursive concepts and buzzwords. the critique of neoliberalism often assumes a pastoral view of the social democratic arrangements of the early postwar period, proposing a return to the politics of inclusion and a reinvestment in the institutions of liberal democracy, and thus limits the framework through which we might imagine alternatives. as david eso demonstrates in “an introduction to the poetry of james r. louden,” oppositional and disruptive tactics to secure affordable housing often operate at the quotidian level of everyday life, and can assume forms not immediately identifiable in the terms of critical discourse, from barbeques on the steps of town halls to illegal camping. for all the problems associated with the critique of neoliberalism, there remains something historically distinct about the ways in which economic rationality has come to govern all forms of sociality, insofar as we might want to theorize possibilities for overcoming these conditions. given an apparent lack of capacity to imagine alternative social forms, the discourse of neoliberalism would seem to suggest that we are not only at an economic impasse but a political one: “there is no alternative.” if this is indeed the case, then perhaps we need to rethink the ways in which alternatives are (being) imagined. like jacques derrida’s notion of a “justice to come” that animates the conversation between ryan fitzpatrick and kit dobson, “living in messy times,” derrida’s spectral concept of a “democracy to come” (la démocratie à venir) offers a political horizon that takes the form of a promise—in this case, one that suggests that the ideals held out by the demos arrive incrementally, but always in excess of the governmental mechanisms through which they are eventually implemented. as fitzpatrick asks dobson, if justice and democracy are always to come, how might looking backwards help us see those horizons? we might consider recent social movements such as occupy wall street or black lives matter as pro-democratic, given their insistence on democratic ideals like the right to the city or bodily sovereignty, even as they operate outside the registers of legally sanctioned political engagement. in recent years, however, as struggles have erupted the world over, many of these political movements have had complicated relationships to the horizon of democratic participation. it would be more than a little reductive to suggest that either #ows or #blm can be usefully summed up according to a critique of neoliberalism or a defense of democracy. how should we understand the radicalism of contemporary social antagonisms in an ostensibly neoliberal era? have the ideals of democratic liberalism not yet been entirely hollowed out, or should we think about these struggles from a vantage other than democracy? do these struggles gesture towards a distant democratic horizon, or do they suggest the emergence in the present of radically different forms of life? must today be terrible so that tomorrow might be better? “demos: life in common” invited participants “to consider the ways in which we constitute and experience collective life in this century,” and it is in this spirit that the essays, interviews and artist projects in this issue engage in “experiments of thinking, acting, and making—demos that challenge the self-certainties and pieties of existing structures and practices, and so help to envision and enable renewed forms of democratic life.” any effort to answer the question that the demos raises in the present—namely, what possibilities exist for vibrant forms of collective life amidst the ruins of liberal democracy—requires both the cultivation of a rigorous critical practice and the freedom of spontaneity if we are to grasp the lines of flight leading out of our precarious present. the work collected here constitutes a series of organized endeavors, carefully shaped and curated, that push the boundaries of disciplinary convention. ranging quite widely over a broad variety of themes, adopting different methodological approaches and priorities, and working within divergent stylistic registers and political and empirical scales, this dossier provides an opportunity to reflect upon the virtues and risks of different conceptual, aesthetic, and stylistic forms for critical theorizing. i hope, too, that it speaks to those forms of political expression that erupt in the street and challenge the very categories by which we name them. notes many thanks to bric resident sina rahmani for his suggestion of the title. thanks also to bopha chhay for help with early planning, and to all the residency participants and faculty for their invaluable input on the issue. wendy brown, undoing the demos: neoliberalism’s stealth revolution (new york: zone books, ), . giorgio agamben, “introductory note on the concept of democracy,” theory & event . ( ). “demos: life in common.” http://test.banffcentre.ca/programs/demos-life-common bruno latour, we have never been modern (cambridge: harvard university press, ). bourriaud defines relation aesthetics as “a set of artistic practices which take as their theoretical and practical point of departure the whole of human relations and their social context, rather than an independent and private space.” see nicolas bourriaud, relational aesthetics (dijon: les presses du réel, ), . for critical engagement with the idea of relational, participatory, or social practice art, see claire bishop, artificial hells: participatory art and the politics of spectatorship (new york: verso, ); stewart martin, “the absolute artwork meets the absolute art commodity,” radical philosophy ( ): - ; and marina vishmidt, “‘mimesis of the hardened and alienated: social practice as business model,” e-flux ( ), http://www.e-flux.com/journal/ / /mimesis-of-the-hardened-and-alienated- social-practice-as-business-model/ friedrich a. hayek, the road to serfdom (chicago: the university of chicago press, ). david harvey, a brief history of neoliberalism (new york: oxford university press, ), . douglas keay, interview with margaret thatcher. “aids, education and the year !” woman’s own. october . - . michel foucault, the birth of biopolitics: lectures at the collège de france - (new york: picador, ), . ibid., . homo Œconomicus is a nineteenth-century term associated most immediately with john stuart mill and more generally with classical liberalism, but, according to brown, drawing on foucault, has been radically re-envisioned by neoliberal thinkers as a more fundamentally individuated economic actor via the concept of human capital. see brown, undoing the demos, - . foucault, the birth of biopolitics, . brown, undoing the demos, - . ibid., . imre szeman, “entrepreneurship as the new common sense,” the south atlantic quarterly . ( ): . jonathan d. ostry, prakash loungani, and davide furceri, “neoliberalism: oversold?” finance & development: a quarterly publication of the international monetary fund . ( ): - . brown, undoing the demos, . agamben, “introductory note.” ibid. ibid. angela mitropoulos, “autonomy, recognition movement,” the commoner ( ): - . jacques derrida, spectres of marx: the state of debt, the work of mourning and the new international (new york: routledge, ), . “demos: life in common.” http://test.banffcentre.ca/programs/demos-life-common microsoft word - . polise_beyonce in formation.docx beyoncÉ in formation: remixing black feminism omise’eke natasha tinsley (author) university of texas press, , pp. , isbn reviewed by giuseppe polise n her innovative study, omise’eke natasha tinsley writes about beyoncé as a femme- inist. describing herself, tinsley offers a definition of the word: “for over twenty years i’ve lived my life as a lipsticked, high heeled, glittering black femme, a queer gender marked by a highly stylized and aestheticized femininity” ( , ). drawing on sydney lewis’s attempt to define a black femme-inist criticism, tinsley intends to explore the co-constitution of self-identified straight and queer femininities, showing that beyoncé does not need to be labelled as “queer” to be profoundly related to the black femme experience. as a major contemporary black culture signifier, in fact, beyoncé effectively opposes white heteropatriarchal constructions of black women’s race, gender and sexuality, and unapologetically affirms subjectivity. before focusing on the main body of the work, the author engages the issue of femmephobia, too often internalized. in a society where the fear of women has slowly, but steadily turned into the fear of the feminine as synonym for weak, even homosocial contexts tend to replicate heteropatriachal structures of dominance and take eroticism, sensuality and “girliness” as matters of insufficient interest, and much less do they bother taking seriously those who do. fiercely claiming her black femme-inist identity, tinsley urges to collectively recognize desire as a means of challenging critical regimes that demand separation of body and mind for intellectual credibility. at this point, the reader is enabled to access “beyoncé in formation: remixing black feminism” in its intricacy. as partly a memoir, the book follows the example of many post-black lives matter publications that bear witness to the fragility and hardships faced by real black bodies on a daily basis, while nourishing pro-black sentiments. in this specific case, the book sidesteps linear narratives and brings forth personal anecdotes, thoughts on other singers, tv celebrities, and people that have a i | book review jam it! no. may | nationalism: hyper and post place in the life of the author as well as in her growth as a black scholar. all this is skilfully put in conversation with a well-developed cultural analysis of key songs from beyoncé’s lemonade album ( ). however, as deep and rich as the analysis may be, it is not envisioned as the primary goal of the book. “beyoncé,” tinsley maintains, “is not my target audience. [rather, this is] a textual mixtape for all the women and femmes” ( , ) who know beyoncé, look up to her and grow in a culture where her (admittedly f lawed) contributions to black feminism through popular production can be the beginning of fruitful conversations. what she calls a “femme-inist mixtape” consists of intertwined pieces of analysis of black women’s sexuality and gender, an analysis where the private life of the scholar and the public persona that beyoncé shows in lemonade smoothly f low into each other. shedding light on what it means to be femme and how it can be the opposite of weak is indeed at the heart of the book. section one is titled “family album: making lemonade out of marriage, motherhood and southern tradition.” in it, tinsley proposes a reading of beyoncé’s rock song “don't hurt yourself ” in its association to the blues of ma rainey, bessie smith, and billie holliday. the themes of self-sufficiency, man-shaming, extra-marital sex as a form of revenge, in fact, sustain a parallel between beyoncé’s struggle for agency and that of the great blues women of the s and s. moreover, the sampling of the rock record “when the levee breaks” by led zeppelin, which in turn was constructed around an old blue classic by memphis minnie, hints at the possibility of a re-appropriation of the blue classic itself. in this light, the song would then take a broader cultural meaning, tinsley maintains: “if she was singing with and to jack white (producer of don’t hurt yourself ) as the representative of contemporary blues/rock that builds on black women’s legacies without giving them acknowledgment and appreciation [...] the revengeful tones would become another kind of black feminist artistic protest” ( , ). included in the same section, the song “daddy lessons” provides the possibility to focus on black feminist models of southern motherhood that defy stereotyping. as the many memories of her paternal grandmother fill the pages of the section, they also intercept autobiographies of white country-music women who perpetuate the narrative of the southern sentimental mother. in opposition to such a pious, enduring, and unrealistically sweet model, the type of mother tinsley concludes beyoncé aims at portraying in “daddy lessons” is not at all fictionalized. differently from the unreachable giuseppe polise | model of the (white) southern mother, the black mama is f lawed, yet her existence is tangible. she is not an invisible shadow in her children’s life, she is not waiting, hoping and praying like the sentimental mother; mothering for her means fighting: it means protecting herself and her children by any means necessary. in the idealized plantation villa where the video has been shot, beyoncé as the narrator is heard saying “you go to the bathroom to apply your mother’s lipstick [...] you must wear it like she wears disappointment on her face.” as much as she wants to be like her mother, tinsley concludes, she induces the viewer to the realization that she cannot be anything like her: “teach me how to make him beg. let me make up for the years he made you wait” she chants. the love and admiration for her mother do not leave her short-sighted. for her, succumbing to the man, to be put on a revered yet dusty pedestal is not an option. acknowledge the complexity of “black mamas” lives and feelings is what she aspires to. section two is titled “most bomb pussy: towards a black feminist pleasure politics,” and it quickly moves from the maternal scenarios that characterize section one to explore the black femme-inist use of sexual politics in the “ inch” music video as they coincide with the scholar’s strong rebuke of respectability politics. while dispensing several anecdotes about the harsh criticism and praise that her wardrobe choices on university campus have drawn to her over the years, tinsley resorts to beyoncé’s conjuring of many entities from an afrocentric tradition to urge an end to respectability and its toxic by-products. the most relevant of these images is the ‘mulatta prostitute of new orleans’, which in turn intrinsically evokes other mythical entities like yoruba goddesses oshun and pompa gira, divine ref lections of lust and promiscuity. because of their explicit articulation of sexuality and authority, tinsley comes to understanding beyoncé’s engagement with such images as constitutive of a genealogy of powerful black women that stands unbothered with the manipulative forces that have belittled them through the centuries. by incarnating them, beyoncé provides black women with an opportunity to access the “ratchetness” and promiscuity inside of them and “use it for a divine purpose: supporting other black women’s lives and bodies” ( ) who have been simultaneously de-sexualized and hypersexualized by the male gaze. section three first looks at the “freedom” video in relation to black women’s difficulties to mother their children in contemporary times. here, the long table laid by the plantation villa and the dozens of women who are having a feast symbolize an | book review jam it! no. may | nationalism: hyper and post appropriation of historical markers of black subjugation. to the scholar, those images particularly symbolize an attempt to envision black women who successfully raise their offspring despite the systematic withdrawal of all the basic principles of reproductive justice. as the author reports, “african american children spend more time in foster care, are less likely to go home to their parents, and wait longer for adoption” ( ). in portraying all those women, many of whom are the mourning mothers of the black lives matter movement, the will to show how they can enjoy their time together with younger generations of black girls is fundamental. through such an idealistic picture, beyoncé embodies a call for comprehensive black justice, demanding not only individual reproductive health but also the health and security of the communities where black women choose to bear children. tinsley’s vision for the book comes full circle at the end of section three, where she skilfully construes the “formation” video as the clearest expression of black femme- inist pride of the entire project. to this end, the scholar inscribes the cameo of new orleans queer queen of bounce big freedia in a broader message of female communion, while she also elaborates on the symbiotic relationship between cis-gender women and transgender women as enacted by the common signifier of the southern hair store. a place where wigs, extensions and other styling products are bought, hair shops’ appearance in the visual represent a safe space for women of color to perform the cultural and conceptual labour of working through womanhood. whether it is assigned at birth, reassigned, or just temporarily performed as in drag, femininity finds power and self- expression in such material spaces of southern matrilineal tradition. in the author’s words, these are “touchstones for black southern women, a place where trans-feminine and cis-feminine folk come together to create beauty,” where “cis- and trans women work together to coproduce womanhood” ( ). in this sense, the aestheticized vision of black femininity that bell hooks has harshly labelled a “fashion plate fantasy” upon watching lemonade, claims back its legitimacy through tinsley’s work. this book ultimately suggests that black women’s cultivation of beauty on their own terms does not represent a liability and is indeed much more than frivolous adornment. it is an extension of the self of the black woman and, as such, should always be celebrated with pride. giuseppe polise | giuseppe polise holds a master’s degree in language and comparative literature from the university of naples “l’orientale” where he is currently a second year ph.d. student in the department of literary, linguistic and comparative studies. his scientific interests in the broad field of american studies include black feminist theory, the studies of performance applied to the representation of black diasporic cultural identity. as participant of the oasis summer school, he has published an article titled “black women matter: the black lives matter movement, black female singers, and intersectional feminism.” he took part in the september aisna graduate conference with a paper on “the choreography of marching: from the s black political protest to contemporary popular music” and to the university of naples “l’orientale” graduate conference where he presented the poster “my gods are not your gods, or are they? the counter-hegemonic aesthetics of beyoncé’s live performances.” his ph.d. research aims at extending the critical interpretation of the conjure woman, a powerful archetype of folk tradition, and analyzes the presence of such figure found across the african diaspora in traditional and contemporary forms of popular culture such as the novel and the visual album. in so doing, the project cross-pollinates black feminism and the black protest tradition in the visual/sonic representation of the cultural background that informs any reading of the conjure woman as a viable representative of black womanhood. viewpoint race for equality: reflections of a students’ union officer howisha penny john moores students’ union, john foster building, - mount pleasant, liverpool l uz, uk contact: studentsunion@ljmu.ac.uk abstract it has been eight years since the publication of the national union of students’ (nus) race for equality, a report containing several sobering reflections on the bame student experience in post- uk education. in / many of the themes were revisited with the publication of a universities uk and nus report on the bame attainment gap. in this viewpoint paper, a personal reflection is offered from the perspective of a students’ union officer, drawing attention to the need to be willing to engage with untapped talent, and on the role a students’ union can play in helping universities create more inclusive cultures and, consequently, more vibrant learning communities. keywords equality; students’ union; critical race theory; welfare; student engagement this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial- noderivatives . licence. as an open access journal, articles are free to use, with proper attribution, in educational and other non‐commercial settings. please cite this paper as: penny, h. ( ) ‘race for equality: reflections of a students’ union officer’, innovations in practice, ( ): - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / howisha penny: race for equality: reflections of a students’ union officer innovations in practice © the author(s) online version available at: http://openjournals.ljmu.ac.uk/iip page | race for equality industry calculations indicate that marvel studios’ ‘black panther’ grossed over $ . bn worldwide when released last year. the eager crowds that flocked to see the film followed widespread critical acclaim, with many highlighting the dazzling performances of a largely african american cast of actors. film critic odie henderson, writing on rogerebert.com, opined, “starting this weekend, a lot of brown kids are going to be staring at this movie with a … sense of awe and perception-changing wonder, because the main superhero, and almost everyone else, looks just like them. it was a long time coming, and it was worth the wait.” such poignant reflections coincided with the resurgence of black politicism in the form of the black lives matter movement in the us. inevitably, a string of awards soon followed. at the screen actors guild awards, at which black panther won the best performance by a cast in a motion picture award, lead star chadwick boseman made an impassioned acceptance speech that contextualised the enormity of the achievement: all of us up here know – to be young, gifted and black – we all know what it’s like to be told that there is not a place for you to be featured, yet you are young gifted and black. we know what it’s like to be told there’s not a screen for you to be featured on, a stage to be featured on. we know what it’s like to be the tail and not the head. we know what it’s like to be beneath and not above. as a female and bame elected student officer, boseman’s reflections have a particular and strong resonance. often, many of us arrive at university having negotiated several obstacles, and coming to university represents significant achievement: we come here in hope that our talents will be nurtured, refined, directed, realised or discovered. thus, the student expectation and experience has to be set in context. in this paper, i wish to provide an account of the initiatives we, as a students’ union, have set in motion to inject an enhanced sense of bame students’ belonging and engagement at ljmu, and why this is so important. where we are first, it is worth noting, briefly, the socio- political context. in recent times, the government has highlighted its desire to improve the social mobility of bame students. for instance, success as a knowledge economy noted that non-continuation rates for uk domiciled black students in university are much higher than for their white peers, and pledged to increase the number of all bame students going to university by per cent by . allied to this, there are concerns about attainment. it has not escaped the office for students ( ) attention that, at per cent, white graduates had the highest proportion gaining a first or upper second class degree in / : this compares to just per cent for black graduates, the group with the lowest proportion. incidentally, for asian graduates, the proportion gaining a first or upper second class degree was per cent. the national union of students (nus) and universities uk recently collaborated on research to explore how the bame howisha penny: race for equality: reflections of a students’ union officer innovations in practice © the author(s) online version available at: http://openjournals.ljmu.ac.uk/iip page | attainment gap should be addressed, gathering evidence from universities and students’ unions, and six regional round table sessions with attendees. in their subsequent report, black, asian and minority ethnic student attainment at uk universities, five steps that institutions should take improve bame student outcomes are outlined: o provide strong leadership o have conversations about race and changing cultures o develop racially diverse and inclusive environments o get the evidence and analysing the data on the attainment gap o understand what works thus, in explanation, there need to be an acknowledgment and understanding of the bame attainment gap, and using data and evidence to facilitate open and honest conversations about potential causes and solutions. these conversations need to occur and reverberate across all levels of the university, with leadership taking a proactive approach and committing these into wider organisational policy and strategy, rather than this being seen as a separate, ‘add on’, activity. brokering honest dialogue between student representatives and university staff represents an important mechanism to tackle these complex issues. in fact, students’ concerns with the black attainment gap and student engagement go back some way. for instance, the nus’s ( ) race for equality report included several sobering messages on teaching and learning practice that have persisted as sticking points. in the study, black students commented on the importance of receiving fair and balanced teaching, assessment and support. the study found that there was a significant minority who viewed the teaching and learning environment as ‘cliquey’, ‘isolating’, and even ‘hostile’ or ‘racist’. per cent of respondents did not feel that the curriculum reflected issues of diversity, and a third stated feeling unable to bring their perspective as a black student to lectures, citing racial and cultural bias (nus, : ): if you choose to do what are perceived as ‘black’ subjects or you include ‘black’ material as part of your work – you get lower grades for it because institutions don’t value the work (black african respondent, he) not being able to express or hear [our] own experience in learning – especially with a discipline as subjective as english, being told ‘you are wrong’ at the slightest transgression from the norm, or for not conforming to ‘group think’, or for questioning the assumptions of other students and teachers. is this not the process of learning? questioning the deeply held sentiments and cultural beliefs, attitudes and ideologies of teachers can only lead to trouble, hostility, and behaviour verging at times upon gross professional misconduct. i felt that teachers were trying to fit me into a mould, and if i was resistant then they desired to ‘correct’ my way of looking at the world. surely, they should be working with the diversity and different eyes, mind, and experiences that could bring to their discussion, and/or development of the research areas of the discipline? (mixed race respondent, he). there are striking similarities in these reflections and with amanda arbouin’s ( ) account of ten uk domiciled african caribbean graduates, who had experienced university education in the s. in arbouin’s study, respondents felt disconnected from lecturers who ‘did not look like them’ or felt frustrated by a curriculum that was overtly eurocentric, and there were even accounts of unequal treatment. as this column went to press, in march , the nus announced that it would be circulating a survey on the bame howisha penny: race for equality: reflections of a students’ union officer innovations in practice © the author(s) online version available at: http://openjournals.ljmu.ac.uk/iip page | student experience to track how things had changed in the eight years since the publication of race for equality. it is worth noting the counsel from the last student academic experience survey which advised, “more must be done across the sector to understand the [academic experience] barriers at play for different ethnic groups” (neves and hillman, : ): clearly there are enormous structural and cultural issues that merit immediate and ongoing attention. one cannot reflect on race in universities without acknowledging wider societal concerns. for instance, housee ( ) notes the growing instances of discrimination following the eu referendum vote, and the nus ( ) reported that one in three muslim students had experienced some type of islamophobic abuse or crime at their place of study: one in five had experienced verbal abuse in person. in autumn , the equality and human rights commission will publish its findings and recommendations from its inquiry that investigated racial harassment in universities. ahead of the commission’s call for evidence, as reported by the bbc in december , racism was considered a possible link between the lower qualifications achieved by bame students, despite more entering higher education. a partnership for positive change the john moores students’ union (jmsu) strategy for - set out a simple vision: to see that there were ‘happy’ and ‘confident’ students at ljmu. underpinning this vision are values that support an inclusive culture, and the union’s overall mission is to “support and empower all ljmu students, connecting them to each other and the world around them.” we therefore take great care in our planning and operation of events such as fresher’s fair during induction, or of particular activities and campaigns to ensure these are welcoming and inclusive to our diverse student body. last year we celebrated black history month with a focal event ‘embrace the melanin’, that represented a timely opportunity to promote culture and share ideas via performance, music and a panel debate (‘being black in ’). in addition, we encourage students to get involved in our numerous societies to help them to feel a greater sense of belonging at ljmu. as well as creating a space for shared interests and social interactions, many of these specifically celebrate diversity (afro-caribbean society, chinese student and scholar society, international society, islamic society, to name just a few). this narrative feeds into our wider conversations in the university. for instance, we have relished connecting our experiences, insights and knowledge on inclusivity at ljmu’s bame staff network (launched in november ), as well as other forums, such as the ljmu’s equality, diversity and inclusion working group and the institutional student engagement panel, which hosted workshops on ‘inclusivity’ and ‘respect’. this holistic and purposeful partnership bodes well for the future: recognising the key role that both the students’ union and the university has to play in creating and maintaining an inclusive culture, and ensuring bame students have the best possible experience at ljmu. at the same time, it is vital that our input is both passionate and informed. in , jmsu was one of eight students’ unions in the uk selected to take part in a national project, co-ordinated by the student engagement partnership (tsep), to develop a framework for inclusive student engagement, specifically in order to engage with and explore the experiences of bame students. the timing of this work was howisha penny: race for equality: reflections of a students’ union officer innovations in practice © the author(s) online version available at: http://openjournals.ljmu.ac.uk/iip page | somewhat fortuitous, as jmsu had committed to introducing six equality representatives (including a bame equality rep) in / . the key motivation for this was to give students an opportunity to represent their peers and to lead on the development of relevant projects and campaigns for underrepresented or disadvantaged groups. already, the equality reps’ input has injected a somewhat different dynamic into conversations with the university, introducing new perspectives and the voice of diverse, lived experiences into meetings, committees and project planning. embracing talent education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world. nelson mandela i began this piece by focusing on talent – on being ‘gifted and black’ - as, all too often, much of that talent remains untapped. it is important that bame students see in their representatives people they can identify with: they must have confidence that these individuals will passionately argue their cause. when i began my undergraduate study at ljmu, a female black president led the students’ union, and i am all too aware of the positive impact this had on me. as we rebranded from liverpoolsu to jmsu this academic year, it signalled a new purpose in how and what we do – with a renewed focus on student leadership and engagement in order to empower students and enact change. i am confident that the momentum built from the initiatives we have trialled in recent years will act as a spark that will bring more bame students into representative roles. our best chance of sustaining this success is to continue to evolve our thinking, to try new ideas, to consult and create equitable spaces for discussion – keeping in mind that the specialists on understanding the bame student experience are still, naturally enough, bame students themselves. o howisha penny was jmsu’s vice- president community engagement. she served two years from / and / . howisha led jmsu’s work on equality, diversity and inclusion, and student mental health and wellbeing. o jmsu offers a wide range of activities, services and support to help ljmu students get the most of their time at university. this includes everything from the social side, to making sure students are content and happy in their course. the union supports over a hundred student groups, giving all a fantastic opportunity to develop alongside their studies. (www.jmsu.co.uk) http://www.jmsu.co.uk/ howisha penny: race for equality: reflections of a students’ union officer innovations in practice © the author(s) online version available at: http://openjournals.ljmu.ac.uk/iip page | references arbouin, a. ( ) black british graduates: untold stories, london: trentham books department for business and skills ( ) success as a knowledge economy: teaching excellence, social mobility and student choice, (cm ), retrieved from: https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/gov ernment/uploads/system/uploads/attachm ent_data/file/ /bis- - -success- as-a-knowledge-economy-web.pdf (accessed april ) housee, s. ( ) speaking out against racism in the university space, london: trentham books nus ( ) race for equality: a report on the experiences of black students in further and higher education, london: national union of students nus ( ) the experience of muslim students in / , london: national union of students office for students ( ) ‘differences in student outcomes’, retrieved from: https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/data- and-analysis/differences-in-student- outcomes/ethnicity/ (accessed april ) universities uk and nus ( ) black, asian and minority ethnic student attainment at uk universities: #closingthegap. london: universities uk/national union of students https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/ /bis- - -success-as-a-knowledge-economy-web.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/ /bis- - -success-as-a-knowledge-economy-web.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/ /bis- - -success-as-a-knowledge-economy-web.pdf https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/file/ /bis- - -success-as-a-knowledge-economy-web.pdf https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/data-and-analysis/differences-in-student-outcomes/ethnicity/ https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/data-and-analysis/differences-in-student-outcomes/ethnicity/ https://www.officeforstudents.org.uk/data-and-analysis/differences-in-student-outcomes/ethnicity/ not (just) about the money - / / - $ . / american studies, : ( ): – not (just) about the money: contextualizing the labor activism of college football players daniel a. gilbert in recent years, the business of college athletics has become a touchstone issue in u.s. public culture. growing critical attention to the topic can be at- tributed in part to the work of civil rights historian taylor branch, whose article in the atlantic, “the shame of college sports,” argued that the national collegiate athletic association (ncaa) oversees the exploitation of college athletes. “two of the noble principles on which the ncaa justifies its exis- tence—‘amateurism’ and the ‘student-athlete’—are cynical hoaxes, legalistic confections propagated by the universities so they can exploit the skills and fame of young athletes.” in addition to branch’s piece, the acclaimed documentary film schooled, based largely on his analysis, helped to invigorate a national conversation about the economics of college athletics. media discus- sion of the issue has remained rather narrowly focused on questions of dollars and cents—whether college athletes in the so-called revenue-generating sports (men’s basketball and football) ought to be paid beyond their current scholar- ships in light of the vast and increasing amount of revenue their labor generates. advocates of “pay-for-play” cite figures like the exorbitant salaries that make head coaches the highest-paid public employees in most states and television contracts like espn’s recent -year, $ . billion deal to broadcast college football playoff games. defenders of the ncaa amateur model cite the fact that athletes are already compensated in the form of a “free college education,” a com- modity that, given rising tuition rates, grows increasingly valuable every year. daniel a. gilbert it would be a mistake to limit critical scrutiny of the labor politics of col- legiate athletics to narrow questions of financial distribution. such a focus pre- vents us from observing the ways in which college athletes have become key figures in workplace struggles over the very nature of the university itself. this article examines resonances between college athletes’ labor organizing and two broader struggles sweeping america’s campuses: the fight against student debt and the black lives matter movement. in what follows, i examine and contextualize two of the most significant instances of collective action by col- legiate football players in recent memory: the – unionization campaign at northwestern university and the threatened strike by players at the university of missouri. the northwestern campaign, which culminated in a historic case before the national labor relations board (nlrb) over foot- ball players’ employee status, was not principally a campaign about demanding radical new forms of compensation. rather, northwestern’s football players highlighted two deeper dimensions of the university’s exploitation of their la- bor: being saddled with long-term physical liabilities and health-care costs, and having their educational horizons restricted by their athletic obligations. these underreported yet fundamental elements of the northwestern campaign articu- late concerns shared by an entire generation of u.s. college students over the impact of educational debt on their lives and career paths. when framed against the backdrop of the student debt movement, the northwestern campaign can be seen as one battle in a larger struggle over the value—and values—of u.s. higher education. two years after the northwestern football team’s union campaign, their counterparts at the university of missouri played a critical role in forcing the resignation of campus administrators. the dramatic events in columbia, mis- souri were flashpoints in a historic wave of campus protests. the missouri struggle, like campaigns led by black students and their allies at more than seventy other campuses across north america, made the university a key site of mobilization in the black lives matter movement. by standing in solidarity with other student activists, the football team helped to demonstrate powerful linkages between the struggles on the streets of cities like ferguson, missouri, and calls for racial justice on campuses like their own. taken together, the bold workplace actions that northwestern and missouri football players organized suggest a rethinking of the place of the so-called student-athlete in the modern american university. debates that remain solely focused on revenue generation and fair compensation fail to ask the most pressing question: what role do ath- letes have in the fight to redeem american higher education? the northwestern unionization campaign the – unionization campaign at northwestern represented the latest development in a movement for college players’ rights that had been grow- ing for decades. one of the movement’s central figures, ramogi huma, drew not (just) about the money on his nearly twenty years of organizing experience in helping advance the cause of northwestern’s football players. in , as a freshman linebacker at the university of california at los angeles (ucla), huma saw his roommate disciplined for accepting an anonymous gift of groceries. this incident was the first in a series of events that huma came to understand as evidence of structural hypocrisy and mistreatment, leading him to help found a student organization at ucla dedicated to advocating for athletes’ rights. what began as a local effort grew into a national body, and in the years after college, huma secured the backing of the united steelworkers of america (usw) and founded a new advocacy organization, the national college players association (ncpa). be- ginning with the organization’s initial press conference in january , the ncpa became the nation’s most prominent organization of college athletes, calling for improved safety measures, health coverage, scholarship funding, and educational opportunities. among the organization’s accomplishments were california’s passage of the student-athletes bill of rights, an in- crease in the ncaa’s death benefit from $ , to $ , , and support of the class action litigation brought by former ucla basketball player ed o’bannon over players’ rights to proceeds from the commercial use of their names, im- ages, and likenesses. while football players and other college athletes had been organizing across the country for decades, it was a labor history class that set northwest- ern quarterback kain colter on the path toward militant action. colter cites as a turning point his experience in “field studies in the modern workplace,” taught by nick dorzweiler (then a ph.d. candidate in political science, focus- ing on political theory) in spring as part of northwestern’s academic in- ternship program. according to dorzweiler, the class “explores the social and political history of work as an experience in the united states, beginning with the rise of industrial labor in the late nineteenth century and going through to our service-based, white-collar economy of today. the point is to get students to reflect on what working means to them personally, how it affects their develop- ment as both human beings and citizens, and why our culture associates certain social and political values with work, but not others.” colter was particularly moved by the class’s visit to a steel mill. soon thereafter, he met with other teammates to discuss his growing concerns about their treatment and decided to move forward with action. colter then contacted huma, and their initial phone conversation led to an ongoing working relationship. the two men soon began exploring the possibility of organizing colter’s fellow football players at north- western. conversations and planning continued through the fall, as colter and other prominent athletes contributed to an evolving and expanding national conver- sation about exploitation in college sports. on september , colter was one of several college football players from multiple teams to display the slogan #apu (all players united) on his uniform, an action coordinated by ncpa members in response to criticism of the o’bannon case. the #apu action, daniel a. gilbert like every other instance in which college players have taken collective action, elicited criticism from defenders of the status quo. but the action was also met with a notable level of support and acclaim, including from prominent main- stream sports media figures like espn’s michael wilbon. while the #apu action was a one-time event aimed at seizing media at- tention for the cause of college athletes nationwide, colter was increasingly convinced that the most effective way to make change was to empower players in their day-to-day working lives on campus. the next step was clear: unioniza- tion. with the help of united steelworkers national political director tim wa- ters, colter and huma prepared to reach out to the entire team, with the goal of convincing a majority to sign on before university administrators and other op- ponents could mount an effective anti-union campaign. their initial goal was to be able to make a public announcement of the team’s support for unionization during postseason competition, but the organizers delayed their plans slightly after northwestern did not qualify for a bowl game. on january , , col- ter and huma held a series of meetings with team members, laying out the case for unionization and asking them to sign union authorization cards. two days later, colter met with head coach pat fitzgerald to inform him that a majority of the team supported the union effort. after meeting with an associate athletic director, colter joined huma and usw representatives at a press conference in chicago to announce their submission of a formal petition to the nlrb for recognition as employees. the press conference also unveiled the formation of a new national labor organization—the college athletes players associa- tion (capa). huma informed the press that the struggle at northwestern would constitute just the first stage in capa’s campaign to organize all football bowl subdivision players, as well as division i men’s basketball players. it was significant that as athletes at northwestern, a private university, col- ter and his teammates could press their case as employees under the national labor relations act (nlra). the makeup of the nlrb—the quasijudicial body that decides cases brought under the nlra—is determined by presiden- tial appointments, which has meant in recent decades that decisions that expand workers’ rights (including those that expand the category of “employee”) have been more likely under democratic presidential administrations. public uni- versities—including all of northwestern’s competitors in the big ten confer- ence—are governed by state labor laws. as the northwestern case took shape, republican lawmakers in ohio and michigan moved to explicitly exclude col- lege athletes from employee status. and, as we will see below, the private– public divide within the big ten (and the ncaa more broadly) emerged as a central factor in the nlrb’s treatment of the northwestern case. in announcing the nlrb petition and the founding of capa, colter emphasized that increased compensation was not the group’s top priority in pressing for union rights. rather, colter insisted, he and his fellow players sought a seat at the bargaining table to address “basic protections that we’re not receiving right now,” including improved medical coverage. colter also not (just) about the money cited the poor graduation rates of basketball and football players and suggested that giving athletes a voice through union recognition would empower them to secure expanded educational opportunities. one of the central proposals that colter outlined was for an “educational trust fund” that former players would be able to access to complete their degrees. the ncaa was quick to respond to capa’s announcement, with a statement from the organization’s chief legal officer, donald remy: “this union-backed attempt to turn student-athletes into employees undermines the purpose of college: an education. student-athletes are not employees, and their participation in college sports is voluntary.” the following month, before the presiding nlrb hearing officer joyce hofstra, representatives of capa and northwestern presented their cases. the matter hinged on the issue of employee status—whether northwestern would be able to convince the nlrb region director peter ohr that colter and his teammates should not be considered university employees. at the heart of capa’s case was testimony by colter, who detailed the day-to-day, year- round labor that he and his teammates performed. one of the university’s cen- tral counterarguments centered on a precedent drawn from another contested category of campus workers: graduate teaching assistants. northwestern cited the nlrb’s decision in a case that came out of an organizing drive at brown university. in brown, the bush-era nlrb had ruled that “the overall relationship between the graduate student assistants and brown is primarily an educational one, rather than an economic one.” in citing the brown case, northwestern’s attorneys argued that football players were similarly situated. on march , , ohr issued a decision favorable to the union, ruling that northwestern’s scholarship football players should be considered employees under the nlra, and directed that an official election go forward. ohr rejected the application of brown, dismissing the notion that northwestern’s scholarship football players were “primarily students.” instead, ohr declared, “the play- ers spend to hours per week on their football duties during a one-month training camp prior to the start of the academic year and an additional to hours per week on those duties during the three or four month football season. not only is this more hours than many undisputed full-time employees work at their jobs, it is also more hours than the players spend on their studies.” ohr’s decision found that the players “perform services . . . for which they receive compensation,” and that they labor “under strict and exacting control by their employer.” ohr’s decision was a bombshell, its impact tempered only by the fact that it was subject to appeal to the national nlrb. still, supporters of capa’s cause greeted the news as a major victory for athletes’ rights. on april , northwestern filed an appeal of ohr’s decision, which the national nlrb subsequently agreed to consider. this meant that when the players participated in an election later that month, their votes were immediately impounded, pend- ing the nlrb’s ruling. as the northwestern case proceeded from region to the national nlrb, college sports officials moved to enact reforms in response to the growing play- daniel a. gilbert ers movement. the most significant outgrowth of this managerial response was an organizational shift adopted by the ncaa granting greater autonomy to the so-called power five conferences. this change enabled schools in the atlantic coast, big ten, big , and pac and southeastern conferences to offer in- creased scholarship benefits to athletes. earlier in , the ncaa had passed new rules governing food, allowing schools to provide unlimited meals and snacks. taken together, the new reforms were clear reflections of the grow- ing influence of college athletes’ collective organizing. however, the changes implemented represented minor redistributions of resources from rich athletic budgets to athletes and did nothing to alter the fundamental balance of eco- nomic power that defined college sports. just as significantly, players remained without a collective voice in the decision-making process. only through a union, capa supporters insisted, could real change come to the world of big- time college sports. in august , the nlrb issued a unanimous decision in the northwest- ern case, declining to assert jurisdiction. this ruling, which represented a signif- icant win for university administrators, allowed to board to decline to take up the fundamental question of whether college athletes are employees. the board justified the decision by noting that the body only has jurisdiction over private colleges and universities. “as the ncaa and conference maintain substantial control over individual teams, the board held that asserting jurisdiction over a single team would not promote stability in labor relations across the league.” speaking to a reporter in the wake of the decision, colter tried to place the disappointing decision in context of the larger movement he had helped to lead. “it’s definitely not a loss,” he said. “since we started this movement, a lot of positive changes have come from this—the introduction of four-year scholar- ships, increased stipends, maybe better medical coverage, the lifting of food restrictions. a lot of the things that we’ve been fighting for have been adopted. but there is a lot of room to go.” one of the accomplishments of the northwestern movement, despite the loss at the nlrb, was to draw more attention—from commentators, schol- ars, and activists alike—to athletes as a key category of campus labor. the labor struggles of college athletes had previously remained absent from most accounts of the growing academic labor movement. a representative example is marc bousquet’s how the university works: higher education and the low- wage nation, one of the most important studies of academic labor, highlighting the growth of organizing among graduate teachers and nontenure track faculty, in particular. while bousquet highlights big-time college sports as an exam- ple of the corporatization of the university, he does not examine the employee status of athletes. this observation is not intended to criticize bousquet or other scholars for omitting athletic labor from their analysis, but rather to highlight the ways in which athletic labor has remained largely invisible in even the most critical studies of universities in the age of corporatization and privatization. this invisibility is the product of a core managerial logic of the contemporary not (just) about the money u.s. university—the redefinition of growing sectors of campus labor as non- work, as evidenced in the nlrb case involving brown’s graduate employees that northwestern attempted to invoke as precedent for football players. another accomplishment of the northwestern unionization attempt has been to help mobilize a growing movement of faculty support for college ath- letes. cofounded in march by faculty members from drexel university and the university of south carolina, the college athletes rights and empow- erment faculty coalition (care-fc) has grown into a national organization of professors dedicated to supporting athletes’ struggles for a collective voice over the conditions of their work. as care-fc’s founding press release asserted, “the path to the transformation of college sports rests with the athletes them- selves.” the organization pledged to work to support the movement in four ways: “developing relationships” with capa and other players associations, “educating public policy makers” about exploitation in college sports, draw- ing public attention to the “disproportionate negative impact that college sport business practices have on college athletes in the racial minority,” and opposing so-called reform efforts that “do not result in justice and fairness for athletes.” the nlrb’s “punt” on the employee status of northwestern’s football players did nothing to quell the intensifying public debate over the notion that college athletes ought to be compensated for their labor. there remains a per- vasive sense among many commentators that scholarship athletes are, in effect, already getting paid for their labor on the field, in the form of a free college education. athletes and their advocates have pushed back against these claims with economic arguments of their own. in particular, supporters of pay-for-play point out that the tuition reimbursements and small stipends to cover living ex- penses that athletes receive are insignificant when placed against the backdrop of the soaring profits reaped by the college sports industry. furthermore, despite recent reforms by the power five conferences, most athletic scholarships are not guaranteed, meaning that players who suffer major injuries face the choice of leaving college or taking on enormous debt to remain in school. thanks in large part to the flurry of nationwide organizing that grew out of the occupy wall street movement, student debt lies at the heart of contempo- rary debates over the future of u.s. higher education. according to researchers at the federal reserve bank of new york, student loan debt is “the only form of consumer debt that has grown since the peak of consumer debt in .” stu- dent loan debt now exceeds both credit card and auto loans, and represents “the largest form of consumer debt outside of mortgages.” on one hand, it is pos- sible to see scholarship athletes as inhabiting a world removed from the politics of student debt. the “full rides” that they receive distinguish them from their fellow students, who pay increasing amounts of tuition and interest every year. on the other hand, a closer examination of the northwestern union campaign reveals that the specter of lifelong indebtedness looms just as large for scholar- ship athletes as it does for their classmates and contemporaries. daniel a. gilbert for athletes, debt can take both financial and physical forms. as colter told labor journalist josh eidelson, the long-term impact of injuries sustained in col- lege was a primary impetus for the unionization drive at northwestern. colter noted that that medical coverage “extending past the end of a player’s eligibil- ity” and “concussion reform” constituted capa’s top two priorities. asked to elaborate on the personal experiences that had spurred his activism, colter cited the physical toll that football had taken on his young body. “now that i’m fin- ished, i can, you know, feel the effects of some injuries that i’ve had throughout my time playing football. and you know, not knowing if i need to get those fixed down the road or taken care of, or if it’s going to prevent me from working later on. not having those medical protections guaranteed is a scary thing.” the unionization movement, with its core focus on players’ long-term health concerns and the struggle against student debt, can be seen as twin expressions of student dissent from the ways in which the u.s. university system positions its graduates in the political economy of postcampus life. the expanding business of college sports is hardly an incidental or periph- eral part of the modern u.s. university. on the contrary, high-profile collegiate sports programs, particularly men’s basketball and football, represent signal elements of the neoliberal turn on campus. murray sperber has argued that investments in sports have been central to the rise of funding and curricular changes that have sacrificed the quality of undergraduate education. “in a pe- riod when most institutions of higher education had many more places in their undergraduate classes than students to fill them, and schools desperately needed to increase the flow of tuition dollars, they marketed themselves in every way possible, many emphasizing their big-time sports programs and party atmo- sphere, usually depicted as ‘collegiate good times.’” the changes that sperber identifies coincide with what christopher new- field argues has been a radical assault on u.s. universities’ once-heralded role in expanding access and opportunity to underrepresented minorities and working- class students. the radical expansion of tuition costs is part of the evisceration of public investment in higher education by transferring the burden onto private sources of revenue, including individual students and their families. according to newfield, “as cost pressures increased in the s and s, throughout this period admissions practice evolved toward the money.” significantly, new- field cites the recruitment of athletes and “legacies” (the children of wealthy alumni) as central elements of admissions practices aimed at maximizing cam- puses’ return on investment. considered in this context, the politics of athletic labor and the politics of student debt stand together at the heart of the contested reconfiguration of u.s. higher education in the age of neoliberalism. a key faculty ally of the student debt movement, andrew ross of new york university, offers a powerful analysis of the profound effects of student debt. “many students are now compelled to seek out low-paying jobs to stay in college and stave off further debt; they are encouraged to think of their de- grees as transactions in which their future wages have been traded; and they not (just) about the money are increasingly directed toward fields of study that provide ‘value’ through the earning potential to repay their loans. these are not the conditions under which an agile critical mind is likely to be cultivated, but they are perfectly serviceable to elites who do not want an educated and active, freethinking citi- zenry on their hands.” resonances with this dimension of the student debt crisis have emerged throughout the recent upsurge of player militancy and the northwestern case in particular. at the nlrb hearing, colter explained that he had entered college planning to pursue a pre-med academic track but was quickly derailed from his plans because of pressure exerted by football coaches and academic advisers. as ohr highlighted in his finding in favor of capa, colter ultimately “decided to switch his major to psychology which he believed to be less demanding.” ohr cited this aspect of colter’s collegiate career as evidence of the control that football coaches and other team staff exert over player’s schedules and daily lives. when considered against the backdrop of the student debt movement, colter’s experience—and with it the impetus for the northwestern unionization movement—articulates a broader problem endem- ic to modern undergraduate education. colter, like millions of other students, found his educational aspirations constrained by his accumulating economic obligations to his college. the struggle at the university of missouri among the most unmistakable characteristics of the corporatization of universities in recent years has been the growing cadre of campus leaders plucked from the business world. while u.s. universities have always culti- vated connections with corporations, the hegemony of growth strategies and personnel policies based on corporate models is a relatively recent develop- ment, particularly at public research universities. in recent decades, however, such institutions’ foundational commitments to advancing the “public good” have increasingly taken a backseat to securing the bottom line in the name of budget austerity. the recent history of leadership changes in the university of missouri system, which includes the state’s flagship campus at columbia, along with campuses in rolla, kansas city, and st. louis, is emblematic of the larger national trend toward a corporate approach to the management of u.s. higher education. the campus struggle that brought worldwide attention to rampant racism at the university of missouri–columbia in fall was, among other things, an indictment of the corporate approach to campus leadership embodied by tim wolfe, president of the university of missouri system. a former soft- ware executive, wolfe had begun his term as president in february . wolfe took over for gary forsee, himself a former corporate leader, having previously served as the chief executive of sprint nextel. missouri was not the only site of campus resistance to corporate leadership in fall . as wolfe’s ouster unfolded, the new president of the university of iowa, bruce herreld, who had daniel a. gilbert come to academia after an executive career with such companies as boston chicken and ibm, faced a censure vote from his faculty. from the start, wolfe’s presidency had been marked by controversy and discord, as his policies elicited pushback from students, staff, and faculty. in the first months of his presidency, wolfe eliminated the subsidy to the university of missouri press, enraging many on campus and beyond. staff members, con- cerned faculty and students, and observers across the country were dismayed not only at the prospect of a beloved intellectual institution being sacrificed in the name of the bottom line, but also at the process by which wolfe had taken action, which did not include consultation with the press’s employees. press supporters in missouri and beyond mobilized throughout spring and summer and ultimately succeeded in saving the institution from closure. the bat- tle over the university’s publishing house drew academia’s attention to wolfe as an embodiment of corporate governance. the rest of his presidency would cement that perception. a series of events in fall brought simmering tensions to a boil, unit- ing a broad campus coalition in opposition to wolfe’s administration. one di- mension of the dissent centered on the university’s decimation of reproductive health services. bowing to political pressure, in september , the university of missouri announced it would strip hospital privileges from a planned par- enthood–affiliated physician, effectively depriving the clinic—the only one of its kind in the region—from providing abortion services. this decision came days after campus officials announced that missouri students would no lon- ger be permitted to train at planned parenthood as part of any academic pro- gram. another dynamic feeding into the campus revolt in columbia included an emerging graduate student unionization movement, sparked by university administrators’ cancellation of health coverage for graduate students, a policy change that was reversed because of substantial organizing during the fall se- mester. as the fall semester continued, the mobilization around planned parent- hood and the nascent graduate student campaign were joined by an even more powerful movement on campus, inspired by a growing militancy among black students in the aftermath of the struggle in ferguson, missouri and amid the ongoing black lives matter movement. african american students and their allies announced in the early weeks of the fall semester that business as usual was over. columbia became a central location in the black lives matter movement in response to an escalation of racial intimidation aimed at black stu- dents. on september , payton head, president of the missouri students as- sociation, reported in a facebook post that he had been the subject of repeated racial slurs. “some guys in the back of a pickup just started yelling the ‘n-word’ at me,” head later told the campus newspaper. this wasn’t the first time—he had experienced a similar incident the previous semester. his decision to speak out on social media about the latest incident helped launch a new phase of the movement for racial justice on campus. not (just) about the money black students and allies organized two rallies—on september and oc- tober —under the slogan “racism lives here,” highlighting the depth of rac- ism on campus and calling on campus administrators to act. three days later, a white student harassed and directed a racial slur at members of an african american campus organization, the legion of black collegians. in response to this latest incident, the university’s chancellor ordered “diversity and inclu- sion” training for all faculty and staff, a measure greeted by student leaders as insufficient progress. the movement continued to grow. on october , student activists staged a protest at the homecoming parade, blocking university presi- dent wolfe’s car. wolfe refused to engage with the students, and the protest cul- minated in police surrounding his vehicle, which at one point made contact with one of the protesters, graduate student jonathan butler. the students came away from the homecoming action with clear evidence that their university’s presi- dent did not take their concerns seriously. as head later described, “[wolfe] laughed. in our faces. this is your president. this is america. .” ten days later, concerned student , the organization that had orga- nized the homecoming protest (named for the first year black students were ad- mitted to the university) issued a list of eight demands. the demands included the removal of wolfe, an increase in black faculty and staff, the adoption of a “comprehensive racial awareness and inclusion curriculum,” a new strategic plan to retain marginalized students, and increased funding for campus mental health services and social justice centers. though wolfe eventually met with members of concerned student , he refused their demands. that same week, a swastika smeared from human feces had appeared on a campus build- ing, marking a further escalation of racial hostility. on november , butler be- gan a hunger strike. the next day, students began a boycott in support of butler. on november , with growing national attention focused on the events taking shape in columbia, wolfe issued an apology to concerned student for his failure to engage the activists at the homecoming parade. hours before wolfe’s overdue apology, the university of missouri football team had hosted mississippi state, losing – on a rainy thursday night. that saturday, a group of approximately thirty members of the team met with butler, now in day six of his hunger strike. this meeting came after butler had received visits in previous days by a small number of current and former players. butler’s visitors had included michael sam, the mizzou defensive star who in became the first openly gay player selected in the national football league draft. after hearing butler describe the racism and systematic mistreatment that had driven him to go on a hunger strike, the football players pledged that they would support him by staging a walkout. after the group informed head coach gary pinkel of their plans, sophomore safety anthony sherrils tweeted a statement from fellow black players calling for change on their campus: “the athletes of color on the university of missouri football team truly believe ‘injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.’ we will no longer participate in any football related activities until president tim wolfe daniel a. gilbert resigns or is removed due to his negligence toward marginalized students’ expe- riences. we are united!!!!!” several other team members followed sher- rils’s tweet with messages of their own. the next day, pinkel expressed his support for the players’ stand, tweeting a photo of the entire team, accompanied by the message: “the mizzou fam- ily stands as one. we are united. we are behind our players. #concernedstu- dent .” furthermore, the school’s athletic department went on to issue a press release by pinkel and university athletic director mack rhoades stating that the team would not hold any formal team activities. “our focus right now is on the health of butler, the concerns of our student-athletes and working with our community to address this serious issue.” pinkel’s expression of support for his players’ militant action took many observers and commentators by sur- prise. as the prominent progressive sports journalist dave zirin noted in the early hours of the players’ stand, an earlier wave of militancy by african ameri- can college football players (in the late s and early s) had focused largely on the removal and replacement of racist coaches. pinkel later dis- tanced himself from the larger campus movement, suggesting that the assistant handling his twitter account had mistakenly included #concernedstudent in his now-famous tweet. “it was just about a young man that was really strug- gling.” nonetheless, pinkel’s support for the action, and the unity within the football program and athletic department that it seemed to articulate, helped to spell the end of wolfe’s career. the following day, monday, november , marked a new stage of militancy in the campus movement. professors describ- ing themselves as “concerned faculty of the university of missouri” walked out, joining graduate employees in a coordinated action expressing solidarity with butler and other student activists. at a.m., wolfe announced his resig- nation in a hastily called press conference. hours later, university chancellor r. bowen loftin resigned as well. in the immediate aftermath of wolfe’s announcement, it was clear that the football players’ threat of a strike had been a decisive factor. as several observ- ers were quick to point out, the football team’s stand in support of butler’s hunger strike raised the financial stakes for wolfe and his fellow administrators. forfeiting the upcoming game against brigham young university would result in a $ million fine for breach of contract. that financial pressure, combined with a growing consensus in missouri’s statehouse that wolfe could no lon- ger effectively lead, left no other option besides resignation. within weeks of wolfe’s departure, two republican members of the missouri house of rep- resentatives introduced a bill aimed at curtailing the labor power of college athletes. “any college athlete who calls, incites, supports, or participates in any strike or concerted refusal to play a scheduled game shall have his or her scholarship revoked,” the proposed legislation declared. the bill also called for fines for any coach who “encourages or enables” such activity. the bill’s sponsors withdrew the legislation in the wake of a significant public outcry. this brief legislative skirmish demonstrated the powerful reverberations of the not (just) about the money players’ actions and suggested that the struggle over the labor rights of college athletes—in missouri and beyond—was far from over. the battle over tim wolfe’s tenure at the university of missouri was one of dozens of campus struggles that unfolded in , as students of color and their allies demanded institutional change on campus and beyond. while each campus’s movement emerged from specific local circumstances, many articu- lated similar demands and highlighted a shared vision of change. among the most common demands on campuses across north america were calls for more faculty of color, expanded curricula and campus programming devoted to study of race and racism, and increased support for student services devoted to minor- ity and underserved student populations. on many campuses, the neoliberal transformation of u.s. higher education has been marked by disinvestment in departments, centers, and programs devoted to the study of race and ethnicity, even as administrators express support for the abstract values of multicultural- ism and diversity. the recent upsurge in campus organizing, of which the mis- souri struggle is a key part, represents one of the most significant developments in campus-based social movements since the campaigns of the s and s that first established ethnic studies programs and other campus commitments now under attack. the missouri movement highlights the special position that black athletes occupy in the racial configuration of the modern u.s. university. citing ncaa data, shaun r. harper, executive director of the university of pennsylvania’s center for the study of race and equity in education, notes that african ameri- can men represented just . % of undergraduates enrolled at the university of missouri during the – academic year. that same year, african ameri- cans made up . % of the university’s football team. as harper argues, the events in columbia in fall demonstrated the “unique reputational and eco- nomic powers” that black athletes in revenue-generating sports have on their campuses. it remains to be seen whether coalitions between athletes and other students will emerge on other campuses in the months and years to come. the missouri movement’s impact certainly suggests the potential power of such coalitions. conclusion: considering football’s abolition college football has a growing chorus of detractors, both on campus and off. generations of faculty, students, and observers have questioned the vast in- vestment of resources that football requires, and whether such resources might be better allocated to other campus needs. furthermore, growing attention to the lifelong consequences of brain injuries sustained by football players has fueled powerful arguments that the game compromises the publicly endowed mission of higher education. one prominent voice in this debate has been that of journalist malcolm gladwell. “every single college in this country, rich or poor, big or small, is supported by . . . taxpayer dollars,” gladwell noted in a daniel a. gilbert debate over the abolition of college football. “they are subsidized by us, they are given immunity from taxes, they are supported by laws of congress, by acts of local legislatures. . . . [they are] charged with a sacred trust, and that is to prepare the minds of young men and women to . . . to lead productive lives as full citizens of the united states. and nowhere, nowhere, in that social contract does it say that it’s okay to promote and encourage young men to hit themselves over and over again in the head in the name of entertainment.” gladwell is not the first to call for the abolition of college football. col- lege campuses in the early years of the last century were home to raging debate over the sport’s brutality and possible abolition. that debate led to reforms, and to the formation of a new body—the ncaa—that would further embed the sport within u.s. higher education. the outcome of the contemporary debate over college football’s abolition stands as a major open question, the answer to which will do much to shape the future development of both the u.s. university system and the sports world. it is conceivable that the present era will mark the beginning of the end of college football. it is certain that it marks a water- shed moment in the role of athletes in advocating—alongside other campus allies—for a transformation in the mission and governance of u.s. universi- ties. the high-profile struggles at northwestern and the university of missouri have brought the experiences and perspectives of college football players to the foreground, profoundly shifting the debate over the relationship of the gridiron to the academy. indeed, the most persuasive argument against abolition may be that football players have become indispensible contributors to the growing movement to transform the neoliberal university. notes . taylor branch, “the shame of college sports,” the atlantic, october , http://www. theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/ / /the-shame-of-college-sports/ /. . ross finkel, trevor martin, and jonathan paley, directors, schooled: the price of col- lege sports. culver city, ca: strand releasing, , dvd. . joseph p. williams, “docs and jocks: mds, coaches among states’ highest-paid,” us news and world report, july , , http://www.usnews.com/news/articles/ / / /docs- and-jocks-mds-coaches-among-states-highest-paid; rachel bachman, “espn strikes deal for col- lege football playoff,” wall street journal, november , , http://www.wsj.com/articles/sb . . ben strauss, “as northwestern players pursue unionization, a voice in the wilderness gains a chorus,” new york times, february , , http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /sports/ ncaafootball/as-northwestern-players-pursue-unionization-voice-in-the-wilderness-gains-a-cho- rus.html?_r= . . national college players association (ncpa) website, accessed january , , http:// www.ncpanow.org/. . rohan nadkarni, “q&a: nick dorzweiler, former teacher of kain colter,” daily north- western, january , , http://dailynorthwestern.com/ / / /sports/qa-nick-dorzweiler- former-teacher-of-kain-colter/. . rohan nadkarni, “kain colter’s union battle cost him more than he ever expected,” deadspin.com, august , , http://deadspin.com/kain-colters-union-battle-cost-him-more- than-he-ever-ex- . . philip rossman-reich, “kain colter, others make waves with quiet protest,” lake the posts, september , , http://www.laketheposts.com/ / / /kain-colter-others-make- waves-with-quiet-protest/. see for a discussion of criticism published on social media. . teddy greenstein, “colter on apu: it’s ‘not me versus northwestern,’” chicago tri- bune, september , , http://articles.chicagotribune.com/ - - /sports/chi-kain-coter- not (just) about the money says-of-the-all-players-united-movement-its-not-me-versus-northwestern- _ _apu-nu- players-football-players. . nadkarni, “kain colter’s union battle”; tom farrey, “kain colter starts union move- ment,” espn.com, january , , http://abcnews.go.com/sports/kain-colter-starts-union- movement/story?id= . . travis waldron, “michigan legislature set to ban college athletes from unionizing,” december , , thinkprogress.org, http://thinkprogress.org/sports/ / / / /mich- igan-ban-ncaa-athletes-unions-northwestern/. . kain colter, televised interview with bob ley, “outside the lines,” espn, january , , http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw k azve. . farrey, “colter starts union movement.” . northwestern university and college athletes players association (capa), nlrb de- cision, case -rc- , nlrb no. ( ), – . in his decision, ohr noted that northwestern had the burden of proof: “a party seeking to exclude an otherwise eligible employee from the coverage of the act bears the burden of establishing a justification for the exclusion.” . brown university and international union, united automobile, aerospace and agricul- tural implement workers of america (uaw afl–cio), nlrb decision, case -rc- , nlrb no. ( ), . in august , in a case involving graduate teachers at columbia uni- versity, the nlrb reversed the brown decision. see colleen flaherty, “nlrb: graduate students at private universities may unionize,” inside higher ed, august , , https://www.inside- highered.com/news/ / / /nlrb-says-graduate-students-private-universities-may-unionize. . northwestern, – . . lester munson, “nlrb decision very well-reasoned,” espn.com, april , , http://espn.go.com/espn/otl/story/_/id/ /nlrb-director-decision-follows-road-map-laid- northwestern-quarterback-kain-colter-legal-team. . dan wolken, “ncaa board approves division i autonomy proposal,” usa today, au- gust , , http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/ / / /ncaa-board-of-directors- autonomy-vote-power-five-conferences/ /; ron clements and joe rodgers, “power ncaa schools pass new scholarship, concussion proposals,” sporting news, january , , http://www.sportingnews.com/ncaa-football-news/ -power- -ncaa-schools-vote-new- scholarship-concussion-proposals-autonomy. . paul myerberg, “ncaa schools put money where athletes’ mouths are,” usa today, april , , http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/ / / /unlimited-food-snacks- wisconsin-oregon-ncaa-student-athletes/ /. . “board unanimously decides to decline jurisdiction in northwestern case,” national labor relations board press release, august , , https://www.nlrb.gov/news-outreach/news- story/board-unanimously-decides-decline-jurisdiction-northwestern-case. . tom farrey, “northwestern players denied request to form first union for athletes,” espn.com, august , , http://abcnews.go.com/sports/northwestern-players-denied-request- form-union-athletes/story?id= . . marc bousquet, how the university works: higher education and the low-wage nation (new york: new york university press, ). . “national faculty coalition formed to work with college profit athletes on civil & human rights issues,” college athletes rights and empowerment faculty coalition press release, march , , http://care-fc.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /carefacultycoalitionpressre- leaseembargoeduntilmarch .pdf. . “student loan debt by age group,” federal reserve bank of new york, march , , http://www.newyorkfed.org/studentloandebt/. . josh eidelson, “we’re not little kids!” salon, april , , http://www.salon. com/ / / /we%e % % re_not_little_kids_northwestern_quarterback_kain_coulter_ sounds_off_on_ncaa_union_fight/. . jeff maskovsky, “beyond neoliberalism: academia and activism in a nonhegemonic moment,” american quarterly , no. (december ): . according to maskovsky, charac- teristics of the neoliberal turn on campus include “the advent of consumerist, market-driven learn- ing; the privatization, corporatization, and branding of the university; the decline in public spending on higher education; the speed-up of the academic assembly line; audit culture; outcomes assess- ment and other efficiency-oriented interventions; and the casualization of academic labor.” . murray sperber, beer and circus: how big-time college sports is crippling under- graduate education (new york: henry holt, ), . . christopher newfield, unmaking the public university: the forty-year assault on the middle class (cambridge: harvard university press, ), . . andrew ross, “in defense of economic disobedience,” occasion (november ), . . northwestern, . . sharon terlep and douglas belkin, “mizzou athletic department backs black football players on boycott,” wall street journal, november , , http://www.wsj.com/articles/minori- ty-players-on-university-of-missouri-football-team-threaten-boycott- . daniel a. gilbert . john eligon, “plan to close university of missouri press stirs anger,” new york times, july , , http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/university-of-missouri-press-closing-in- cites-anger.html?_r= . . janese silvey, “press to stay open, shift to mu campus,” columbia tribune, august , , http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/education/press-to-stay-open-shift-to-mu-campus/ article_ d -d c- ac -bb - e c .html. . jason hancock, “university of missouri strips privileges from planned parenthood doc- tor,” kansas city star, september , , http://www.kansascity.com/news/local/news-columns- blogs/the-buzz/article .html. . megan favignano, “mu grad students collect more than , signatures calling for union election,” columbia tribune, december , , http://www.columbiatribune.com/news/ education/mu-grad-students-collect-more-than-signatures-calling-for-union/article_ a f ce - d e- bb-a - c e .html. . ruth severn, “msa president speaks out about racist incident,” the missourian, sep- tember , , http://www.columbiamissourian.com/news/higher_education/msa-president- speaks-out-about-racist-incident/article_ac eb - b e- e - d-a bae .html. . michael pearson, “a timeline of the university of missouri protests,” cnn.com, no- vember , , http://www.cnn.com/ / / /us/missouri-protest-timeline/. . “list of demands from concerned student group,” columbia tribune, octo- ber , , http://www.columbiatribune.com/list-of-demands-from-concerned-student-group/ pdf_ ad - f - - b - .html. . tyler kingkade, “the incident you have to see to understand why students wanted mizzou’s president to go,” huffington post, november , , http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ entry/tim-wolfe-homecoming-parade_us_ cc e b f cadea . . “game report: mississippi state , missouri ,” kansas city star, november , , http://www.kansascity.com/sports/college/sec/university-of-missouri/article .html. . elizabeth merrill, “timeline: how one student started a protest, stopped a football team and rocked missouri,” espn.com, november , , http://espn.go.com/blog/sec/post/_/ id/ /timeline-how-one-student-started-a-protest-stopped-a-football-team-and-rocked-mis- souri. . rohan nadkarni and alex nieves, “why missouri’s football team joined a protest against school administration,” si.com, november , , http://www.si.com/college-foot- ball/ / / /missouri-football-protest-racism-tim-wolfe. . ibid. . dave zirin, “edge of sports,” twitter.com, https://twitter.com/edgeofsports/sta- tus/ . . gary pinkel, interview with kevin kietzman, sports radio whb, november , , http://www.infoblizzard.com/the-blog-smog/a-sports-radio-station-interviewed-gary-pinkel- this-morning-and-things-got-really-awkward. . douglas belkin and melissa korn, “university of missouri system president tim wolfe resigns,” wall street journal, november , , http://www.wsj.com/articles/university-of-mis- souri-system-president-tim-wolfe-resigns- . . michael e. miller, “with $ million at stake, u. of missouri’s president now taking protests seriously,” washington post, november , , https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ morning-mix/wp/ / / /with- -million-at-stake-u-of-missouris-president-now-taking-pro- tests-seriously/. on sunday, november , representative steve cookson, the republican chair of the missouri house committee on higher education, told ia reorter, “it has become clear that the mu system leadership can no longer effectively lead and should step aside.” . dave helling and tod palmer, “missouri lawmakers want scholarships revoked if col- lege athletes go on strike, kansas city star, december , , http://www.kansascity.com/ news/local/news-columns-blogs/the-buzz/article .html#storylink=cpy; a.j. perez, “mis- souri legislator withdraws bill to bar student-athletes from protests,” usa today, december , , http://www.usatoday.com/story/sports/college/ / / /missouri-legislator-rick-brattin- withdraws-bill-bar-student-athlete-protests/ /. . a growing compilation of student demands is available at www.thedemands.org. . shaun r. harper, “black college football and basketball players are the most powerful people of color on campus,” washington post, november , , https://www.washingtonpost. com/posteverything/wp/ / / /black-college-football-and-basketball-players-are-the-most- powerful-people-of-color-on-campus/. . intelligence squared u.s., “ban college football,” debate transcript, may , , http:// intelligencesquaredus.org/images/debates/past/transcripts/ban-college-football.pdf. getting everyone onboard: framing collective goal progress broadens participation in collective marketing campaigns | semantic scholar skip to search formskip to main content> semantic scholar's logo search sign increate free account you are currently offline. some features of the site may not work correctly. 	doi: . /fpsyg. . corpus id: getting everyone onboard: framing collective goal progress broadens participation in collective marketing campaigns @article{kim gettingeo, title={getting everyone onboard: framing collective goal progress broadens participation in collective marketing campaigns}, author={y. kim and crystal reeck}, journal={frontiers in psychology}, year={ }, volume={ } } 	y. kim, crystal reeck 	published 	psychology, medicine 	frontiers in psychology collective marketing campaigns may feature goals that are not shared equally by all customers, such as a fundraiser for an environmental cause. for such campaigns, how can marketers encourage broad participation? the present research demonstrates that the framing of collective progress in such campaigns can broaden participation by highlighting the “large area” of progress toward the goal, emphasizing progress achieved for campaigns in their late stages and progress remaining in their early… expand view on pubmed frontiersin.org save to library create alert cite launch research feed share this paper figures, tables, and topics from this paper 	 figure 	 table 	 figure 	 figure 	fund raising references showing - of references sort byrelevance most influenced papers recency goals as excuses or guides: the liberating effect of perceived goal progress on choice 	a. fishbach, r. dhar 	psychology 	 	 	pdf 	view excerpts, references background save alert research feed pursuing goals with others: group identification and motivation resulting from things done versus things left undone. 	a. fishbach, marlone d. henderson, m. koo 	psychology, medicine 	journal of experimental psychology. general 	 	 	pdf 	view excerpts, references background and results save alert research feed goal gradient in helping behavior 	cynthia e. cryder, g. loewenstein, h. seltman 	psychology 	 	 	highly influential 	pdf 	view excerpts, references background and results save alert research feed how endowed versus earned progress affects consumer goal commitment and motivation 	y. zhang, szu-chi huang 	psychology 	 	 	pdf 	view excerpts, references results and background save alert 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privacy policy, terms of service, and dataset license accept & continue under the umbrella of this broader structure, each chapter makes several subtle turns that are occasionally hard to track. the clearest and most pointed of these readings, from my perspective, is her meditation on political theology and political imagination in edward ii, which also contains some of her most exciting insights about perfor- mance. in response to the puzzle of what to do with an absence of information about early modern staging, she offers an intriguing solution—two possible stagings of the hearse supposedly containing edward’s dead body, including a detailed explana- tion of the implications of each one. does the stage object hide the body (the actor feigning death), or should the actor lie on top, as in a tomb effigy? although perfor- mance is, for the most part, not the focus of vinter’s book, this struck me as a model worth pursuing, and i would have liked to see her treatment of theatrical mate- riality more fully integrated into the book as a whole. in keeping with the compendious approach that characterizes the rest of the book, vinter eschews the typical coda containing a single point of contemporary relevance. instead, her epilogue tackles a multitude of cultural artifacts: the duchess of malfi, elizabeth jocelin’s mother’s legacie, clarissa, a david bowie video, the famous droeshout engraving of john donne in his winding sheet, and photos by hannah wilke and david wojnarowicz. although vinter finds several compelling parallels— especially between the visual pieces—on the whole this large assortment of texts does a disservice to her individual readings. it does a particular disservice to the black lives matter movement by including a mere three sentences on activists’ ongoing attempts to give meaning to unbearably brutal deaths. on the whole, however, this book is deeply researched and skillfully put together. it offers a valuable contribution to the scholarship on death and dying in post- reformation england. elizabeth williamson, evergreen state college doi: . /rqx. . unknowing fanaticism: reformation literatures of self-annihilation. ross lerner. new york: fordham university press, . pp. $ . the title of ross lerner’s book captures its intertwined imperatives: we must “unknow” postsecular notions of fanaticism in order to appreciate the “unknowing” or ambiguous quality of fanaticism in reformation literature. rejecting the binary of fanatical religion and rational politics, lerner aims to show how early modern poets “participate in or resist reformation polemics about religious fanaticism” ( ). by distinguishing his key term from enthusiasm (the platonic notion of possession by a god), lerner is able to analyze fanaticism as a child of the reformation central to the birth of modern politics, rooted in the thought of thomas müntzer and the s german peasants revolt. renaissance quarterly volume lxxiii, no. downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog?doi= . /rqx. . &domain=pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core whereas theologians like luther and calvin and political philosophers like hobbes dif- ferently assert definitive knowledge of fanaticism to contain its revolutionary potential, poets like spenser, donne, and milton are keener on exploring the irreconcilable ten- sion fanaticism poses between divine will and human agency through creative manip- ulations of form. the book begins with discussions of two poetic forms in relation to fanaticism: alle- gorical epic and sacred lyric. in his chapter on spenser’s the faerie queene, lerner focuses on two of the poem’s figures—the “organ” and the “swarm”—to investigate individual and collective fanaticism, respectively. whereas the poem attempts to depict redcrosse as an authentic instrument of god, it struggles to divinize guyon’s destruction of the bower of bliss. lerner cleverly links the swarm of flies unleashed upon the giant’s defeat in book to the poem’s inability to contain all its elements within the explanatory framework of allegory. similarly, the chapter on donne details a poet assiduously work- ing, but self-consciously failing, to contain destructive impulses within the lyric form. in “i ame a litle world” and “batter my hart,” speakers defer self-annihilation for as long as possible, so that their songs can become “completed artifact[s]” ( ). in another clever turn, lerner connects these poetic experiments to donne’s unique theorization of mar- tyrdom as self-annihilation that approaches, but never quite reaches, divine will. the chapter on hobbes’s political philosophy is a productive detour from the book’s focus on poetry, one that highlights the equivocal nature of the poems in its demonstra- tion of hobbes’s definition of fanaticism as madness. lerner unpacks leviathan’s curi- ous reference to biblical texts as “outworks”: public-private hybrids where the civil sovereign and religious fanatics wage discursive war. it is christ, however, defined as the ultimate sovereign, who haunts hobbes’s philosophy; not only does he come dan- gerously close to equating the son of god with the mad fanatics of the civil war era, jesus’s willing sacrifice utterly shatters hobbes’s natural theory of self-preservation. in our postsecular present, in which fanatics are largely construed as inhuman madmen advancing impossible claims to divine inspiration, hobbes’s political philosophy is eerily relevant, despite its paradoxical treatment of christ. returning to and concluding with poetry, the book’s final chapter on milton’s samson agonistes explores the titular protagonist’s violent act of fanaticism and the prob- lem of “tragic recognition” ( ) it poses. lerner makes a sharp critical move in focusing on the witnesses (or lack thereof) to samson’s destruction of the temple of dagon, both within the text and among its readers. seeming to join the new milton criticism, lerner unfolds an argument for the ambiguity of samson’s rousing motions and their telos as a pile of rubble and bodies. in lerner’s treatment, the tragedy of milton’s closet drama resides less in samson’s personal trajectory and more in commu- nal responses to fanatical violence; by occluding the report of direct witnesses to samson’s violent act, milton puts the onus on his readers to meditate on the unknow- ability of fanaticism’s relation to divine order. while this reader tends to see milton as fairly definitive in his portrayal of samson as a hero of faith, lerner’s minutely detailed reviews downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core and uniquely contextualized close reading does open up provocative trails to be explored in this long-standing conversation about the poem. in the absence of a conclusion or epilogue reconnecting to the book’s larger goal of articulating a reformation genealogy of modern politics, one wonders what critical insights might have been gained were the author to have pressed harder on the dynamic between inner faith and state obedience in the thought and practice of the book’s poets. this criticism notwithstanding, unknowing fanaticism demonstrates dense learning while advancing deft arguments, illustrating the subtlety with which three of early mod- ern england’s most sensitive poetic minds grappled with the problems engendered by claims to religious fanaticism through experiments with form. as conveyed by lerner’s supple analyses, it is precisely this formal experimentation that makes these poems com- pulsively readable in a postsecular present committed to thinking religious fanaticism afresh. stephen spencer, stern college for women, yeshiva university doi: . /rqx. . mixed faith and shared feeling: theater in post-reformation london. musa gurnis. philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, . x + pp. $ . . antitheatricalist writers of the tudor-stuart period have had far more traction in our understanding of the cultural location of the early modern theater than they could ever have hoped for. in mixed faith and shared feeling, musa gurnis challenges the polemic-infused portrait of tudor religion that has proved the starting point of many discussions of theater and religion over the last several decades. she argues not only for the far subtler and more nuanced understanding of early modern confessional identities, but also for the professional theater’s power to “involve mixed-faith audiences in shared, imaginative processes that allowed playgoers to engage with the always-changing tangle of religious life from emotional and cognitive vantage points not elsewhere available to them” ( ). beginning with an examination of the documented presence of theatergoing puritans, she goes on to examine the sites in which belief systems mingled with each other as the reformation took root—for instance, in families, in individual conversions, in encounters with foreigners, in playwriting, and ultimately, within theater audiences. central to her argument is an attractive picture of the cultural work of theater as a pro- cess and place that encourages “the imaginative elasticity of audiences” ( )—even when, as she discusses in her analysis of a game at chess, such encouragement can urge collective invigilation against religious minorities. gurnis complements her argument about any given play’s imaginative restructuring of religious valence with an account of the ways in which plays were produced through renaissance quarterly volume lxxiii, no. downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core where and when police use deadly force: a county-level longitudinal analysis of fatalities involving interaction with law enforcement | springerlink advertisement search 	 log in search springerlink search 	original article 	published: february where and when police use deadly force: a county-level longitudinal analysis of fatalities involving interaction with law enforcement 	nolan kopkin  orcid: orcid.org/ - - - x   journal of economics, race, and policy volume  , pages – ( )cite this article 	 accesses 	 citations 	 metrics details abstract in the past few years, there have been numerous high-profile shootings by police, with wide-spread speculation many may have been either racially motivated or the result of an abuse of power by police. while past researchers have used community-level data to test theories of “racial or economic threat”—that police target violence at minorities or the poor to prevent redistributive criminal activity and maintain the existing order—or “reactive hypotheses” of policing focused on the use of force to prevent violence against officers and other citizens, the majority of these studies are dated, rely on incomplete government data on justifiable police killings, and fail to consider predictors of police killings such as non-murder violent offense rates, property crime rates, or violence against police. however, recently, many internet archives have collected more complete data on police killings, and this study utilizes one such source to create a county-level longitudinal dataset of police-related fatalities from to to estimate the causal relationship between changes in county characteristics and police-related fatalities. in addition to finding police-related fatalities are strongly correlated with murder rates, findings show substantial evidence that police-related fatalities are also strongly correlated with rates of property crime and assaults on officers, factors not previously considered. contrary to previous research, this study finds little to no evidence in favor of the “racial or economic threat hypotheses” when examining police-related fatalities within county over time. this is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution. access options buy single article instant access to the full article pdf. us$ . tax calculation will be finalised during checkout. subscribe to journal immediate online access to all issues from . subscription will auto renew annually. us$ tax calculation will be finalised during checkout. rent this article via deepdyve. learn more about institutional subscriptions fig. notes 	 .while not a study analyzing geographic areas as a unit of observation, a well-known, controversial study by fryer ( ) analyzes a handful of large cities to determine that blacks and hispanics are no more likely to experience an officer-related shooting in total or controlling for context and behavior. criticism of fryer ( ) tends to stem from the lack of available data pertaining to prfs in interactions with police, the fact the small number of cities used may not be representative of the usa as a whole, and the fact he relied on arrest reports written by the officers themselves to determine whether each incident was one in which officers involved were justified in exercising deadly force. 	 .vehicle-related fatalities involving law enforcement can happen in multiple ways. in some cases, fatalities result from crashes caused by police chases where individuals flee police. in these cases, the fatally injured parties may be the fleeing parties and/or innocent bystanders. alternatively, fatalities can occur due to accidents involving officers or in other circumstances be due to officer malfeasance. 	 .this is examined by adding an interaction term between a linear time trend and each of the variables contained in x to equation . the interaction is positive and statistically significant for the fraction hispanic (p <  . ) and negative and statistically significant for the fraction asian and pacific islander (p <  . ) and the fraction urban (p <  . ). 	 .population estimates based on the and census are taken from annual estimates as of july st of each year. 	 .another issue that arises when creating a longitudinal dataset of counties is that a handful of counties split, consolidate, cede land, or are created from existing areas over time. for example, bedford city (va), previously classified as an independent city and county-equivalent, was added to bedford county (va) in july . similarly, the independent city of clifton forge (va) was added to alleghany county (va) in july . in both cases, data for the aggregated area was analyzed throughout. similarly, in the period studied the skagway-hoonah-angoon census area (ak) split into the hoonah-angoon census area (ak) and the skagway municipality (ak); and the wrangell-petersburg census area (ak) split into the petersburg census area (ak) and wrangell city and borough (ak). again, in both cases, data for the aggregated area was analyzed throughout. likewise, the prince of wales-hyder census area (ak) was created from the remainder of the prince of wales-outer ketchikan census area (ak) after parts were ceded to the ketchikan gateway borough (ak) and wrangell city and borough (ak). in this case, the prince of wales-outer ketchikan census area (ak) and prince of wales-hyder census area (ak) were analyzed as the same unit over time. additionally, broomfield county (co), created from parts of four separate counties in november , is only analyzed from onward. 	 .for county-year observations with no black or hispanic residents, the relevant dissimilarity indices are imputed at the county-level mean of the corresponding index. 	 .due to limitations in the data, the mean household income for blacks or hispanics is not disclosed for counties with too few members of each group. for county-year observations where a group’s mean household income was not disclosed, the estimate was linearly interpolated where possible. for those counties with too few observations to use this method, it was further assumed that the ratio of the group’s household income relative to whites grows at the same rate as the sample of observed counties. 	 .this includes icpsr studies , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , , and , . 	 .offense data is not available for all counties each year. for county-year observations missing offense data, crime data are linearly interpolated using figures from to . for a handful of counties with no reports in this period, counties are matched to the three most similar counties in-state with reported data based on population and the fraction of the population in urban areas. state police offense data is not allocated to counties in alaska, connecticut, and vermont. for these states, offenses are allocated based on county population. similarly, the new jersey port authority did not allocate offense data to counties, so offense data is allocated across the four covered counties based on population. 	 .counties with no prfs over this period are not analyzed, since prfs in these counties are fully explained by county-fixed effects and dropped from negative binomial regressions in the analysis. 	 .for comparison, appendix table a shows means and standard deviations for counties in which no prf is observed over the sample period. statistical analysis reveals counties in which no prf is observed are on average less populous, less urban, less racially and ethnically diverse, and more economically equal than counties with at least one prf over the period. in addition, hispanics in counties with no prfs have higher household income and lower rates of segregation as compared to whites. furthermore, counties with no prfs also have fewer female police officers and lower rates of officer assault, murder, non-murder violent offenses, and proper crime offenses. 	 .some studies in the literature estimate an ordinary least squares (ols) regression using the dependent variable police-related fatalities per , . however, since the underlying variable is distributed as count data, the non-normality and excessive number of zero values of the dependent variable make ols misspecified. 	 .a likelihood ratio test comparing the fully specified negative binomial regression model to a poisson regression model indicates that the negative binomial regression model is more appropriate (chi-square statistic . , α statistically significant at the % significance level). 	 .a robustness check of the main results that splits property crime into motor vehicle theft rates and rates of other property crimes finds that motor vehicle theft rates are statistically significant (p <  . ) while rates of other property crimes are not (p >  . ). references 	allison pd, waterman r. fixed-effects negative binomial regression models. in: stolzenberg rm, editor. sociological methodology. oxford: basil blackwell; . google scholar  	fryer rg ( ) an empirical analysis of racial differences in police use of force. nber working paper no. . national bureau of economic research, cambridge. 	guimarães p. the fixed effects 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counties and census tracts – . popul res policy rev. ; : – . article  google scholar  download references author information affiliations 	university of wisconsin-milwaukee, p.o. box , milwaukee, wi, , usa nolan kopkin authors	nolan kopkinview author publications you can also search for this author in pubmed google scholar corresponding author correspondence to nolan kopkin. ethics declarations conflict of interest statement the authors declare that there is no conflict of interest. additional information publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. appendix. summary of county-level longitudinal data for counties with no police-related fatalities, – appendix. summary of county-level longitudinal data for counties with no police-related fatalities, – 	 	 mean ( ) 	 sd ( ) 	 	 mean ( ) 	 sd ( ) 	 police-related fatalities (prfs) 	 . 	 . 	 poverty rate 	 . 	 . 	 population ( s) 	 . 	 . 	 land area (sq. mi)/ 	 . 	 . 	 log population 	 . 	 . 	 fraction urban 	 . 	 . 	 black 	 . 	 . 	 officers per , 	 . 	 . 	 hispanic 	 . 	 . 	 fraction officers female 	 . 	 . 	 native american or mixed race 	 . 	 . 	 officer assaults per ,  t- 	 . 	 . 	 asian or pacific islander 	 . 	 . 	 officers killed per , t- 	 . 	 . 	 black-white mean hh income ratio 	 . 	 . 	 murders per , t- 	 . 	 . 	 hisp.-white mean hh income ratio 	 . 	 . 	 other violent crimes per , t- 	 . 	 . 	 black-white dissimilarity index 	 . 	 . 	 property crimes per , t- 	 . 	 . 	 hispanic-white dissimilarity index 	 . 	 . 	 number of counties 	 	  	 gini coefficient 	 . 	 . 	 number of observations 	 , 	  	each of the counties in which no prf occurred is represented once in each year over the  years from to . percentage counts for hispanics represent hispanics of any race and percentage counts for blacks, native americans, and asian or pacific islanders represent non-hispanics of one race. dissimilarity indexes between blacks and whites, and hispanics and whites, use the same convention. however, due to data constraints the black-white mean household income ratio is the ratio of black income of any ethnicity to non-hispanic white income. rates of officer assaults, officer killings, murders, other violent crimes, and property crimes are calculated using lagged values in order to prevent reverse causation whereby these possible drivers of prfs might themselves be impacted by the dependent variable rights and permissions reprints and permissions about this article cite this article kopkin, n. where and when police use deadly force: a county-level longitudinal analysis of fatalities involving interaction with law enforcement. j econ race policy , – ( ). https://doi.org/ . /s - - -z download citation 	received: august 	revised: february 	accepted: february 	published: february 	issue date: september 	doi: https://doi.org/ . /s - - -z keywords 	police 	shooting 	killing 	law enforcement 	deadly force 	crime jel 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neoliberalism craig slatin twenty years ago i co-led a research project investigating occupational health disparities among healthcare workers. we set out to study how the ongoing reorganization of healthcare facilities was shaping worker health and safety and discrimination in relation to sex, race, ethnicity, and immigration status. the research team included members with no prior study or expertise in occupational health and safety. they were sometimes shocked to learn of the dis- regard that managers demonstrated for employee health and safety, from nurses to food service workers. even more, they were dumbfounded by the overall attitude expressed by management and many workers about occu- pational hazards and risks, “it’s part of the job.” nurses and aides were supposed to “deal” with the violence and the lack of ergonomic lift-assist devices. everyone was expected to meet the demands of schedules intent on keep- ing costs down rather than facilitating healthy working conditions and optimizing patient-care capacity. our research was hampered by the difficulty that lower paid workers had in finding time to participate in interviews and focus groups or to complete a survey. they worked two or three jobs, as did their spouses if they were married. they would juggle work schedules within the family so that one parent was always available to feed the children and be home with them in the evenings and on weekends. the higher paid workers had exhausting schedules and also found it dif- ficult to make time for research participation. the neoliberal management ethos of “doing more with less” had taken strong hold by then and many managers had come to the state’s thriving healthcare sector after being laid-off during downsizing in the manufacturing and finance sectors. they thought that what healthcare needed was a strong dose of the lean- and-mean business practices gaining currency in private industry. healthcare, to them, was just another business, but a poorly managed one that they could improve. besides, the insurers, private and government, were forc- ing that on healthcare as they demanded cost reductions along with improved outcomes. but there was a problem with the model, and it came in the form of patient injuries and medical errors that were going through the roof. occupational injuries, especially musculoskeletal injuries for nurses and aides, were soaring. since the late s, back injury rates for these workers exceeded those in most other sectors, including most manufacturing and even some mining sectors. hospital functions were being reduced and out- sourced where possible. bed capacity steadily decreased, as did intensive care unit (icu) capacity. there was an ongoing nursing shortage, even as nurses were being laid off. nurses with more experience and higher pay were taken from direct care and assigned to supervisory roles. registered nurses (rns) were replaced on the floor by other less educated and less experienced rns, and licensed practical nurses as well as aides who delivered patient care under the new rn supervisors. the dynam- ics were even worse in the long-term care facilities, where direct care was mostly provided by aides with very lim- ited healthcare training and education. with all this restructuring—making healthcare work like a business that makes widgets—u.s. healthcare costs steadily rose and u.s. health indicators steadily declined, falling lower than all other wealthy nations and even some not-so-wealthy nations. it turns out that people who need health and medical care need a system that treats them like humans, not widgets. and it certainly seems that healthcare workers get sick and injured while trying to treat patients in a system that treats patients like widgets. a decade later, a worker health and safety training program that i led had an opportunity to get a grant to deliver free infectious disease pandemic training for healthcare workers. we reached out to the hospitals in the greater boston area—and we were surprised to find that none would team up with us to get the training. we were repeatedly told that they were well-prepared and that there were only a few hospital employees who department of public health, university of massachusetts lowell, lowell, ma, usa corresponding author: craig slatin, department of public health, university of massachusetts lowell, lowell, ma, usa. email: craig_slatin@uml.edu new solutions: a journal of environmental and occupational health policy , vol. ( ) – ! the author(s) article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions doi: . / journals.sagepub.com/home/new mailto:craig_slatin@uml.edu http://us.sagepub.com/en-us/journals-permissions http://dx.doi.org/ . / journals.sagepub.com/home/new http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . % f &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - needed any training. we were also told that in case of a pandemic they would triage victims to the regionally designated hospitals that were prepared to address the surge demand. plans were in place and the hospitals were ready. we’ve experienced a decade book-ended by global eco- nomic recessions. the hospital system in massachusetts, and those in much of the country, has become further concentrated and restructured. smaller hospitals have been closed or merged into larger systems. bed capacity has been reduced and more services are being provided on an outpatient basis. patient injuries and medical errors continue to remain high and exposure to acts of violence and the subsequent rates of physical and psychological injuries keep soaring, while the musculoskeletal injury numbers and rates remain consistently high. in much of the united states, the healthcare system— hospitals, long-term care facilities, home care—literally stands on the backs of poorly paid, overworked, workers of color; many of whom are immigrants who fear depor- tation and family dislocation and lack legal protections against abusive employers. those in urban areas live in densely populated communities with poor quality hous- ing. they commute to work on crowded bus and subway lines. others in these communities are the low-paid workers in food retail and distribution and the back ends of restaurants and institutional food services. some work in crowded food processing and meatpack- ing companies. the work and living conditions of these populations made them highly vulnerable to an infec- tious disease pandemic. come the pandemic now the sars cov- novel coronavirus has made its way around the globe. the u.s. northeast corridor has been hit hard. we practice social distancing and are urged to shelter in place unless we are essential workers. businesses have been temporarily closed or operate with restrictions to prevent widespread infection and astro- nomical numbers of deaths. but the economy has also been affected because the public health and healthcare systems were ill-prepared to handle this pandemic, as indicated by widespread concern that the healthcare system was in danger of getting overwhelmed and unable to meet the demand of covid- patients. so who were the essential workers? many worked in healthcare. doctors and nurses of course and emergency medical technicians, but also all the other workers that make hospitals function: aides, housekeeping and food services staff, maintenance and grounds workers, admin- istrative personnel, specialists, and more. they all accepted the mission of working to save the lives of those suffering with covid- , but neither the federal government nor the states were prepared to support such a life-saving effort. hospitals lacked stockpiles of up-to- date personal protection equipment (ppe), including respirators. workers were faced with the choice of leav- ing their work for lack of protection or treating their patients and risking their own lives—that healthcare worker “part-of-the-job” choice. national, state, and local leaders were calling these workers “heroes.” president trump and various governors ordered military flyover tributes to healthcare workers. imagine if the money spent on military flyovers had instead been used earlier to purchase n respirators and other needed ppe such as protective gowns and face shields. that could have protected many healthcare workers throughout the first several months of the pandemic. in the middle of the country, something similar was happening for meatpacking workers. as healthcare, this is an industry that has been restructured for “efficiency” and relies on a workforce largely composed of poorly paid workers of color, a large percentage of whom are immigrants, many lacking documentation and basic human rights and legal protections. the work is done in crowded conditions at an excruciating pace that results in high rates of injuries. though not essential for saving the lives of covid- victims, they were deemed essential for providing the nation with a steady diet of meat and poultry. by the end of april, there were horrible outbreaks of covid- at these facilities, and by the end of may meatpacking and slaughterhouse facilities in every part of the united states had seen thousands of workers become infected with covid- , with at least forty-four deaths. here again is an industry with a workforce that is paid poorly and therefore must live in crowded commu- nities with poor quality housing stock. they often have to commute in crowded transport vehicles. the industry was declared critical infrastructure, the workers essen- tial, and the facilities were ordered to open and keep the meat supply flowing. but meatpacking workers don’t have beloved nurses and doctors presented as the frontline of the industry workforce. the media didn’t have stories similar to those of the hospitals, showing patients struggling for their lives and dedicated health- care professionals putting their own lives on the line to save the patients. no, the meatpacking workers were just “essential” and a wisconsin supreme court justice was even caught making a comment about them being dif- ferent from “regular folks,” although that difference was never stated. we all know what that means though— they are the people who do not matter in a white supremacist nation. healthcare and meatpacking are two industries in the united states where substantial profit is made on the backs of black and brown workers who are paid less than a living wage, provided with no or insufficient health insurance coverage, live in communities with slatin poor housing, food supply and healthcare access, and lack many other critical physical and social determinants of health and well-being. not surprisingly, covid- has ravaged the workers in these two sectors, just as it has disproportionately been spread among workers in food retail, the gig food delivery sector, mail and pack- age sorting work in the postal service, and bus and subway operators who drive these workers to and from these workplaces that are so dangerous in this pandemic. we might know more about these associations between work and covid- , but almost nowhere is the data being collected. a pandemic, economic collapse, and white supremacy as i write this, the united states has been witnessing protests across the nation following the death of george floyd as he was kneed to the ground, face- down and handcuffed, for nine minutes by four minneapolis police officers. one of those officers has been charged with second-degree murder and the other three have been charged with aiding and abetting second-degree murder. this murder is not an anomaly in the u.s. white americans have been allowed to murder black people for as long as the country has existed—when its constitution permitted ownership of black people as property to be enslaved, each counting as only three-fifths of a person. once enslavement was outlawed, laws setting the terms for justified abuse, incarceration, and forced labor were set in place, defin- ing the jim crow era of the nation’s history. under these laws and the social norms that they framed, white mur- derers of black people could easily evade prosecution and murder charges if prosecuted. this story is one of a people who have been kept down by a foot on their heads and a knee to their necks. white supremacy must be ended. the practice of creating the nation’s wealth on the backs of black, brown, indigenous, and other people of color must end now. lastly, the trumpublicans have boldly made clear their opposition to ending white supremacy. senate president mitch mcconnell, senate judiciary committee chair lindsey graham, and the party are clear that they want to appoint a majority of extremely conservative judges to the federal court system who will eagerly set in place dec- ades of a renewed jim crow era. as trumpublicans evis- cerate democracy, the environment, public health, social security provisions, medicare and medicaid, food support programs, public housing, monopoly and finance restric- tions, labor, lgbtq, women’s and civil rights, and even the u.s. postal service, these judges will block citizen suits to reinstate the protections. should the voters manage to strip the republican party majority in the senate and elect a democrat (presumably joe biden) as president, the con- servative judges already in place, from the supreme court down to the district courts, can be expected to act as a bulwark against progressive legislation and regulations that progressive movements manage to get passed and promulgated by pushing the democrats. the trumpublicans are well-aware that they cannot win the presidential and senate elections in november without voter suppression. to be sure, the gerryman- dered redistricting in the states they control is an exten- sive mode of voter suppression, one that allows people to vote while isolating them as a minority in their districts. we must get the vote out to defeat them everywhere we can. gaining more control of the federal, state, and local governments is a necessary but not sufficient step towards taking the yoke of white supremacist capitalism off the shoulders, backs, and necks of oppressed peoples in the united states. black lives matter. onward. declaration of conflicting interests the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. new solutions: a journal of environmental and occupational health policy ( ) history writing without closure history and theory , no. (september ), - © the authors. history and theory published by wiley periodicals llc on behalf of wesleyan university issn: - doi: . /hith. history writing without closure the work of history: constructivism and a politics of the past. by kalle pihlainen. new york: routledge, . pp. . abstract in the work of history: constructivism and a politics of the past, kalle pihlainen pays tribute to hayden white’s work on narrative constructivism through a comprehensive and critical evaluation of his work. the book’s seven chapters are based on previously published and reworked essays, starting with pihlainen’s essay on narrative truth and ending with his essay on the confines of the form. the work of history is timely in light of some world political leaders’ apparent immunity to facts, their use of history, and the role of power, as pihlainen also discusses the ethics and politics of his- torical constructivism (xiii). at the same time, the book is “a meta-critical enterprise,” as white states in his foreword (x): it scrutinizes and explains white’s work and its reception, including the debates on the production of knowledge, the ontological status of historiography, the various representations of history, and the kinds of audiences his- torians envision. although narrative constructivism seems a bit passé, pihlainen wants to further elaborate this theoretical approach to disentangle and explain some fundamental misconceptions about it that still exist among historians. one misconception is that con- structivism inherently neglects the ethical impulse and supposedly lacks the potential for political engagement. pihlainen urges historians and theorists to find ways of becoming politically committed in their writings and to challenge their readers to do the same. keywords: hayden white, constructivism, narrative truth, meaning, critical historiogra- phy, ethical-political responsibility, refusal of closure in at the th international congress of historical sciences in oslo, i attended a session titled “the historical sublime,” which featured presentations by hayden white, frank ankersmit, and others. it was a marvelous and inspiring session attended by some seventy people. white and ankersmit in particular stimulated the audience to ask questions and to comment on their essays. referring to kant’s concept of the sublime, white explained that the historical sublime is the unex- pected moment in which one faces the unrepresentable and vast chaos of the past while at the same time feeling the limits of understanding. white’s statements reminded me of the bewilderment i once experienced while reading some of franz kafka’s stories. indeed, one experiences the historical sublime when a previously familiar past is suddenly disrupted, revealing its complete strangeness. for white, _____________________ this is an open access article under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivs license, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non-commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. history writing without closure encountering the strangeness and unknowability of the past can—in the words of amy j. elias—“only be comprehended through narrative but . . . can never be reduced to narrative, which is always shaped by rhetoric and ideology.” prevent- ing the historiographical habit of attempting to master a supposedly complete past requires an ambiguous way of historical writing and a refusal to provide closure. in the work of history: constructivism and a politics of the past, kalle pihlainen pays tribute to white’s work on narrative constructivism through a comprehensive and critical evaluation of his work. the book, however, only briefly discusses the historical sublime even though—at least in my view—this topic was very important to white. throughout the book, pihlainen addresses three core aspects of the term “history” and the historical discipline: the artefact, the practice, and the effects and consequences of that practice (xiv). the work of history is timely in light of some world political leaders’ apparent immunity to facts, their use of history, and the role of power, as pihlainen also discusses the ethics and politics of historical construction—more particularly, “narrative constructivism” (xiii). at the same time, the book is “a meta-critical enterprise,” as white states in his foreword (x): it scrutinizes and explains white’s work and its reception, including debates on the production of knowledge, the ontological status of historiography, the various representations of history, and the kinds of audiences historians envision. although narrative constructivism is a bit passé, pihlainen wants to further elaborate this theoretical approach in order to coun- teract some fundamental misconceptions about it that he believes have not been adequately recognized. in fact, the general aims of his book are to clarify the practical and ethical consequences of this radical theoretical shift in the historical discipline and to disentangle misconceptions about truth and meaning, particu- larly in the fact-fiction debate. the first misconception about narrative constructivism, according to pihlainen, results from a superficial misreading of narrativism in the academic field of his- tory that leads scholars to neglect constructivism’s and poststructuralism’s ethical impulses (xx). i wonder, though, if this is not an exaggerated view, especially given the many profound studies in historical research that include terms such as “invented” or “constructed” in their titles. second, pihlainen notices that the “excessive” focus on narrative, representation, and language (xv) has stimulated in the philosophy of history a longing for experience, presence, and direct access to the past, or attempts to bring “the real” back into discussions about the theory of history. he emphasizes that the constructivist debate is not “only” about language or reality (xv). he considers these views as caricatures of constructivist theory, which he prefers to call “narrative theory of history,” “narrative constructivism,” or just “constructivism” (xvi). a third concern is the idea of history as fiction, which many historians attribute to white and other experts in narrative theory of history and which pihlainen describes as “equating history writing with literary fiction even on an epistemological level” (xviii). pihlainen gives the example of how histo- rian david carr wrongly framed white as a “‘discontinuity view’ theorist” (xviii), suggesting that white would have argued that there is no continuity between reality . amy j. elias, “the voices of hayden white,” los angeles review of books, april , , https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/the-voices-of-hayden-white/. maria grever and narratives. the fundamental claim of constructivism, however, is that sense or meaning is a construction and that meaning is not “out there” to be discovered as some kind of truth (xxi). moreover, attributing meaning is a process that always takes place in a wider discursive context. pihlainen also stresses that, epistemologi- cally, constructivism does not imply an antirealist position and that historians are bound to reference and make clear arguments in their writings. equally important is the fact that constructivism reveals the ultimate political and ethical character of history writing. historians’ awareness of history writing’s constructedness directs them to acknowledge the ethical-political character of their history practice. this observation is crucial for facing the current challenges in the globalizing historical culture and corresponds with what hans-georg gadamer has called wirkungsgeschichtliches bewusstsein, or “historically effected consciousness”—a consciousness that is aware of both the historicity of the past and the historicity of the conceptual and interpretive framework of the subject. historically effected consciousness includes a metahistorical dimension, or an awareness of the relativity and limitations of one’s own historicity. the work of history consists of seven chapters that are based on previously published and reworked essays, all of which were inspired by white’s work. the book starts with pihlainen’s essay on narrative truth and ends with his essay on the confines of the form. probably one of the reasons for this composition is that the first chapter, “narrative truth,” functions as a kind of umbrella text that discusses three key issues related to truth: realism and representation, falsification, and the position of the readers. pihlainen considers narrative truth as the core of white’s constructivism. taking this concept as his starting point, pihlainen rejects ontological realism and the notion of a truth that is somehow unproblematically “out there.” a related misunderstanding of this notion, according to pihlainen, is that narratives themselves are “real,” as if they exist independent of meaning- construction ( ). following white, pihlainen suggests that creating narratives, or representations as form and process, is a way of making sense of the world as well as an ongoing meaning-making practice. hence, he has hesitations about ankersmit’s recent work on unmediated access to reality in terms of phenomeno- logical experience. according to pihlainen, ankersmit assumes that the world reveals representational truth about itself; truth can be found in the world and even announces itself ( ). for ankersmit, however, the condition is such that the “self- relevation of reality always needs to be ‘triggered’ by representation, . . . for if left to itself reality will remain under the veil hiding it from us.” although narrative forms can be viewed as essential cognitive tools, pihlainen claims it is a “curious mistake to extend this same centrality to historical narra- tives” because we cannot have direct historical experience ( ). thus, narrative as a sense-making strategy does not hold for historical narratives. this statement . hans-georg gadamer, truth and method, transl. joel weinsheimer and donald g. marshall, nd ed., rev. ed. ( ; repr. london: continuum, ), . . maria grever and robbert-jan adriaansen, “historical consciousness: the enigma of different paradigms,” journal of curriculum studies , no. ( ), - . . frank ankersmit, “representation as a cognitive instrument,” history and theory , no. ( ), . history writing without closure remains a bit unelaborate and vague until later in the book, particularly in chapters and , when it becomes clear that pihlainen refers not to fictional creation but rather to the tension between truth and reference. because of historians’ commit- ment to representing a past reality by means of referentiality, pihlainen claims, “[h]istorical narratives—as narratives—are fundamentally disturbed” ( ). so, there are two competing and conflicting positions in contemporary historiography: on the one hand, the writing of history always involves the use of a narrative form, transcending the level of separate propositions; on the other hand, the narrative is incompatible with epistemological evaluation. it is curious that at this point in his book pihlainen does not refer to paul ricoeur. the making of historical nar- ratives is a process of what ricoeur has called “productive imagination,” or the configuration of scattered past events, persons, intentions, goals, and causes into a synthetic whole by means of emplotment. the overarching thesis of his three- volume time and narrative is that the temporality of human experience unfolds by narrative. moreover, ricoeur also includes the role of the reader, which is an important element of pihlainen’s book. narrating history is a process of configur- ing time—that is, the shaping of temporal aspects that are prefigured in acting. the temporal configuration occurs in plots that give coherence to a diversity of individual events from the past. this configurable dimension, ricoeur explains, makes the story intelligible and traceable. yet for the audience to be able to follow a story, there has to be an endpoint from which the story can be seen as a whole, a kind of conclusion where expectation in the beginning finds its fulfillment. fol- lowing the narrative (such as through reading or hearing) implies a refiguration of temporal experiences. in the act of reading, the receiver plays with the narrative constraints and makes the plot work. however it may be, the aforementioned tension that pihlainen invokes is the often discussed and unresolved dilemma, as mentioned by paul a. roth, “between either epistemic standards inapplicable to histories or nonepistemic narrative theorizing.” interestingly enough, pihlainen does not dwell on this dilemma but rather, referring to white, suggests that the constructed nature of meaning makes all participants in “the work of history” ethically and politically involved ( ). historians, publishers, and readers have to take responsibility for the making, consequences, and reception of the narrative. there is no escape: meaning cannot be distilled from facts or reality “out there,” and historians can- not rely on some objective or acknowledged method. this ethical and political issue also touches the presence of history in people’s daily lives and the ways that interpretations of the past thrive outside of the academic field of history. pihlainen explains that this public practice of history has nothing to do with the “presence” of the past or any mystical appeal of historical traces, nor does it have . paul ricoeur, time and narrative, transl. kathleen mclaughlin and david pellauer, vol. (chicago: chicago university press, ), ix. see also ricoeur, “life in quest of narrative,” in on paul ricoeur: narrative and interpretation, ed. david wood (london: routledge, ), - . .. ricoeur, time and narrative, : - . .. ibid., : . this actually implies the diachronic character of every narrated story. . see paul a. roth, “back to the future: postnarrative historiography and analytic philosophy of history,” history and theory , no. ( ), . maria grever anything to do with experiences of—or direct contact with—the past ( ). he obviously dislikes the presence paradigm, especially considering his statement that “the idea of the presence of ‘history’ does not seem to lead anywhere” ( ). but it is possible, pihlainen continues, that encounters with historical sources in the archives or experiences in popular genres (such as literature, theater, and film) might generate corrections on the level of factual statements, consequently undermining the coherence of a narrative. in that case, “the disruptive poten- tial” defamiliarizes the “glossing and colonizing impact of narrativization.” the resulting increased fragmentation can stimulate “the disruption of narration and its control of meaning” ( ). in line with this argument, and inspired by nancy partner’s work, pihlainen advocates in chapters and that historians should become more involved with the world and should pay serious attention to “popular appropriations of the past” ( ). indeed, academic historians increasingly acknowledge—although sometimes reluctantly—the importance of popular media and public memory in building representations of the past ( ). popular media and genres also include performative articulations like historical reenactments, museum exhibitions, street views with augmented reality, and interactive media. telling examples of this are digital games about the second world war, which have become a promi- nent method of cultural expression reaching millions of people all over the world. by allowing players to engage actively with the second world war, this body of commercial digital entertainment games can significantly co-configure how the history of this war is understood. these video games often create immersive experiences, but they can also stimulate informal historical learning. digital games and augmented reality are current trends that can fundamentally change how we think and write about the past, hence even influencing historical scholar- ship. in chapter , pihlainen explicitly argues for historiography that avoids non- committal attitudes toward the past ( ). it is time, he urges, that historians and theorists find ways to become politically committed in their writings and to challenge their readers to do the same ( ). based on this reasoning, the social responsibility of those involved in the work of history also applies to the cur- rent global protests of the black lives matter movement and the fierce conflicts about the content and form of narratives and other representations of the history . see hans ulrich gumbrecht, production of presence: what meaning cannot convey (stanford: stanford university press, ); frank ankersmit, sublime historical experience (stanford: stanford university press, ); eelco runia, “presence,” history and theory , no. ( ), - . . see nancy partner, “historicity in an age of reality-fictions,” in a new philosophy of history, ed. frank ankersmit and hans kellner (chicago: chicago university press, ), - . . see maria grever and karel van nieuwenhuyse, “popular uses of violent pasts and enhancing historical thinking,” in “popular uses of violent pasts in educational settings,” ed. maria grever and karel van nieuwenhuyse, special issue, journal for the study of education and development , no. ( , forthcoming). . see, for instance, pieter van den heede, “experience the second world war like never before!’ game paratextuality between transnational branding and informal learning,” in eds. grever and van nieuwenhuyse, “popular uses of violent pasts,” special issue, journal for the study of education and development , no. ( , forthcoming). history writing without closure of slavery, colonialism, and racism. just like engaged citizens, educators, and policy makers, academic historians cannot remain aloof in public debates. the current removal of statues that deliberately represent white supremacy is under- standable, as is the call for rewriting history. but there is also the understandable fear of cleansing the past, of destroying culture and denying that “[a]ll societies are palimpsests.” what we need is an open conversation about the history of these representations so that opposing parties can learn. but we also need more. no less crucial is avoiding the closure of a narrative and the judgments inevi- tably involved ( ), including—in my view—counter-narratives such as gender history, the history of black slavery, or colonial history. white particularly warned that the realist closure tends to domesticate and normalize the presenta- tion of past events. the absence of closure reveals a narrative’s constructive and ideological nature, but it also provides room for reflection and discussion. that is why, pihlainen explains, white can suggest that the goal of historical representa- tion should be “to create perplexity in the face of the real” ( ); it is also why, in his later works, he appreciated modernist and experimental representational forms that “refuse the kinds of closures attributed to more conventionalist realist as well as propagandic representations” ( ). in the case of material represen- tations, a closure—in the sense of a fixed representation—can be avoided by “counter-monuments,” a term coined by james e. young. counter-monuments represent a shift from the heroic, self-aggrandizing figurative icons that were erected mainly in the nineteenth century to the antiheroic, often-ironic, and self- effacing postmodern conceptual installations of the late twentieth century. these often-abstract monuments are dialogical and interactive by nature. examples include the holocaust monument in berlin and the bronze sculpture by zadkine in rotterdam, which commemorates the bombing of the city on may , . counter-monuments deal in various ways with “the unimaginable, the unspeak- able and unrepresentable horror” of the holocaust or other genocides. they can create feelings of perplexity, functioning as kafka’s ax in literature, “for the frozen sea within us.” pihlainen argues in chapter that complexity creates a space where the text is not simply a given but becomes a space for communication in which readers and other participants are involved ( ). for white, this complexity provides a way to make the past present—that is, to actualize it for readers. his view on the historical sublime, pihlainen continues, “aimed at an experience that makes ‘real’ without imposing closure” and at the same time saves history from domestication ( ). although the demand for complexity and open-ended representations seems . jonathan lis, “colston row: it’s about discussing history, not rewriting it,” politics.co.uk, june , , www.politics.co.uk/comment-analysis/ / / /colston-row-it-s-about-discussing- history-not-rewriting-it. . james e. young, “the counter-monument: memory against itself in germany today,” critical inquiry , no. ( ), - . see also andreas huyssen, “monument and memory in a postmodern age,” in the art of memory: holocaust memorials in history, ed. james e. young (new york: prestel, ), - . . huyssen, “monument and memory,” . on this subject, see also ethan kleinberg, haunting history: for a deconstructive approach to the past (stanford: stanford university press, ). . ibid., . maria grever incompatible with the historian’s responsibility and commitment, it is exactly the responsibility of historians, white emphasized, to resist the inclination to make a closure, particularly given all its implicated judgments. this responsibility includes the world around us, the impact of presenting ourselves as historians, and our interpretations and actions as readers ( ). yet pihlainen is not happy with the way that white deals with the consequences of this complexity ( ). these narratives and other representations, he suggests, risk becoming unread- able and unapproachable. readers expect coherent and appealing historical nar- ratives. complex histories are more difficult to understand and might lack the emotional impact that audiences expect. in his book, pihlainen refutes the equation of “constructivism with uncon- strained relativism” ( ). he makes a strong and convincing argument for the political character of history writing from a constructivist point of view, and he encourages historians to challenge their readers to question received interpreta- tions and to recognize historiography’s ideological elements ( ). his emphasis on the role of readers and the communicative aspects of the work of history is most important. but pihlainen’s constructivist perspective implies that histori- ography is not only political but also normative, often in relation to the political dimension. contemporary discussions about the past do not just incite historians to put different historical narratives in perspective; they also require historians to distinguish which narratives are better than others, be it in terms of accuracy or morality. what, then, are the criteria for these choices? which answers can constructivism provide to this question without resorting to realist ontologies or moral realism? pihlainen does not pose such questions. i regret that the book sometimes reads too much like an exegesis of white’s work, in turn limiting pihlainen’s voice a bit. another disturbing element is that many of pihlainen’s arguments are repeated. but it is beyond dispute that this book is worthwhile reading and that it truly encourages critical thinking about the “work of history.” maria grever erasmus university rotterdam nl-lab of the knaw humanities cluster s jrv .. forum: new perspectives innovation in a crisis: rethinking conferences and scholarship in a pandemic and climate emergency sam robinson, megan baumhammer, lea beiermann, daniel belteki, amy c. chambers, kelcey gibbons, edward guimont, kathryn heffner, emma-louise hill, jemma houghton, daniella mccahey, sarah qidwai, charlotte sleigh, nicola sugden and james sumner* it is a cliché of self-help advice that there are no problems, only opportunities. the rationale and actions of the bshs in creating its global digital history of science * sam robinson, department of history and philosophy of science, university of cambridge, uk. email: samrobinsonphd@gmail.com. megan baumhammer, department of history, princeton university, princeton, nj, usa. lea beiermann, department of history, faculty of arts and social sciences, maastricht university, po box , md maastricht, the netherlands. dániel bélteki, royal museums greenwich, greenwich, uk. amy c. chambers, department of english, manchester metropolitan university, manchester, uk. kelcey gibbons, hasts, massachusetts institute of technology, ma, usa. edward guimont, department of history, university of connecticut, ct, usa. kathryn heffner, department of history, university of kent, canterbury, uk. emma-louise hill, department of history, university of kent, canterbury, uk. jemma houghton, centre for the history of science, technology and medicine, university of manchester, manchester, uk. daniella mccahey, department of history, texas tech university, lubbock, tx, usa. sarah qidwai, institute for the history and philosophy of science and technology, university of toronto, toronto, canada. charlotte sleigh, department of science and technology studies, university college london, london, uk. nicola sugden, centre for the history of science, technology and medicine, university of manchester, manchester, uk. james sumner, centre for the history of science, technology and medicine, university of manchester, manchester, uk. the authors would like to thank dr tim boon for being so trusting and a great towering strength of support and lucy santos for aiding expertly and ably with the administration of the festival. we would also like to thank to all the festival participants for making it the success that it undoubtedly was. bjhs ( ): – , december . © the author(s), . published by cambridge university press on behalf of british society for the history of science. this is an open access article, distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. doi: . /s first published online november https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at mailto:samrobinsonphd@gmail.com http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog?doi= . /s &domain=pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core festival may be a rare genuine confirmation of this mantra. the global covid- pandemic of meant that the society’s usual annual conference – like everyone else’s – had to be cancelled. once the society decided to go digital, we had a hundred days to organize and deliver our first online festival. in the hope that this will help, inspire and warn colleagues around the world who are also trying to move online, we here detail the considerations, conversations and thinking behind the organizing team’s decisions. despite its rapid gestation, the festival emerged as one of the society’s largest-ever events. in total, we hosted over , participants from fifty-nine countries, who took part in fifty- four different sessions across five days. the programme blended formal academic meetings with social activities and provided opportunities to informally socialize at a distance with colleagues from around the world. this unprecedented globality aided us in our central pro- gramming aim, which was to foster british history of science’s developing inclusion of post- colonial, indigenous and other marginalized knowledge communities. we planned from the outset for the festival to be ‘born digital’, built from the ground up in response to the oppor- tunities and challenges of the online environment. after all, you wouldn’t try to re-create a digital environment in the ‘real’ world, so why would you try and replicate a physical con- ference online? this principle became our guiding ethos. this article is divided into three sections. first, we outline the philosophical, political and cultural considerations that led the bshs to begin thinking about sustainable con- ferencing well before covid- forced our hand. second, we explain how the online festival worked at the practical level and the reasons for our decisions. what we provide here is not a step-by-step technical guide to our chosen software or communica- tion platforms – the current urgent pace of development will probably render most of the specifics obsolete before long – but a set of principles and considerations which we found important and think will be applicable for other organizations. in the final section, we consider the lessons learned, note what we would like to have done differently, and reflect on the opportunities we see for the future. we should probably start at the beginning. to do so, we must go back to a time before the covid- outbreak, and revisit some of the conversations that have been taking place both formally and informally in recent years regarding the global purpose and future role of our society, as we reflect on the many facets of the political, intellectual and environmental impacts of our activities as a learned society. opportunity: the new normal? following the ipcc’s call for the world to reach net-zero emissions by , the bshs has been exploring strategies for ensuring its activities meet this target. conferencing is intensely carbon-hungry. a short-haul flight emits on average around kg carbon dioxide equivalent (co e), while an intercontinental visit can emit in february the society organized an online twitter conference. more information about this event can be found at www.bshs.org.uk/bshs-twitter-conference. the ipcc’s report can be found at www.ipcc.ch. sam robinson et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.bshs.org.uk/bshs-twitter-conference https://www.ipcc.ch https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core , kg co e for a single researcher. for those who have travelled by more sustain- able means, the highest impact of a conference is typically accommodation and its asso- ciated activities – a high turnover of bed linen and so forth. it and other electrical activities are also problematic. in the long term, one can hope that conference venues will turn to passive methods of heating and cooling and use renewable power for these requirements, but at present their impact on the climate emergency remains high. the climate emergency is, of course, also closely related to the current pandemic (at time of writing, it is september ). years before the current outbreak, health researchers were drawing attention to the likely role of human-made ecological and climate change in the increasingly frequent appearance of unfamiliar viral diseases. in figure . artwork by alona bach (@bachwards). short-haul based on flight from london to rome, long-haul london to new york city; see www. theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/ /jul/ /carbon-calculator-how-taking-one-flight-emits-as- much-as-many-people-do-in-a-year. for a more detailed consideration see sarvenaz sarabipour, benjamin schwessinger, fiona n. mumoki, aneth d. mwakilili, aziz khan, humberto j. debat, pablo j. sáez, samantha seah and tomislav mestrovic, ‘evaluating features of scientific conferences: a call for improvements’, biorxiv, doi: https://doi.org/ . / . . . . see also http://flyinglessresourceguide.info. julien arsenault, julie talbot, lama boustani, rodolphe gonzalès and kevin manaugh, ‘the environmental footprint of academic and student mobility in a large research-oriented university’, environmental research letters ( ) , at https://doi.org/ . / - /ab e . jonathan sleeman and hon ip, ‘global trends in emerging viral diseases of wildlife origin’, in institute of medicine, emerging viral diseases: the one health connection: workshop summary, washington, dc: the national academies press, , at https://doi.org/ . / . forum: new perspectives https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/ /jul/ /carbon-calculator-how-taking-one-flight-emits-as-much-as-many-people-do-in-a-year http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/ /jul/ /carbon-calculator-how-taking-one-flight-emits-as-much-as-many-people-do-in-a-year http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/ /jul/ /carbon-calculator-how-taking-one-flight-emits-as-much-as-many-people-do-in-a-year https://doi.org/ . / . . . https://doi.org/ . / . . . http://flyinglessresourceguide.info http://flyinglessresourceguide.info https://doi.org/ . / - /ab e https://doi.org/ . / - /ab e https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core this sense, covid- was not a coincidental circumstance that enabled the bshs and others to focus on possible responses to the climate emergency – it is itself a product of the climate emergency. but it is the pandemic that has provided the necessary impetus for many organizations, as well as the bshs, to think about online activity as an alternative to carbon-intensive forms of travel and interaction. anecdotal evidence suggests that academics are conflicted about this change of practice. most accept that carbon emissions from travel need to be cut, but many colleagues object that ‘it just isn’t the same’ if they cannot meet colleagues in person. this may very well be true, but it does not represent a reasoned argument against a shift to online networking. after all, even in person, we can no longer greet old friends with a hug, or shake hands with a new acquaintance – but this is a change we have collectively agreed to make in response to new circumstances. the climate emergency provides an even more serious and longer-lasting context and set of reasons to agree to behavioural change. until a later generation can figure out zero-carbon travel, we are now at the very beginning of figuring out how to research and conference without flying. it is also worth noting another apparent coincidence in the context of the climate emer- gency, the pandemic and the digital shift. the climate emergency has been produced by global inequalities in resources, and continues (with some countercurrents) to exacerbate those inequalities. access to academia and its resources, both tangible and intangible, and in particular to conferences and archives, continues to be very difficult for scholars and would-be scholars in the global south. as states in the global north become more concerned about protecting their resources, visa restrictions tend to become more restrictive, even for those scholars from the south who can afford to travel. there is a growing danger that our conferences will even become occasions of privilege as immigra- tion barriers become more impermeable. however, a digital meeting can go some way to overcoming these physical, economic and political barriers to participation. facilitating this became a major aim of the festi- val. of course, the digital approach is not a panacea. as the historians of technology in our community will appreciate, access to hardware and the internet is not universal but constrained by cost, geography and political control; and, as morgan ames argued in the charisma machine, information technology does not in and of itself produce partici- pation in learning. but at the very least, making the festival financially completely free to access was a very deliberate policy regarding participation. for us, the fact that any scholar – or, indeed, member of the public – was free to attend and participate in the fes- tival was almost as important as its digital nature. besides enjoying the company of scholars from the global south, the bshs – especially as a british scholarly society – wanted to create a space in which to listen to, and hear, the intellectual perspectives of post-colonial and indigenous participants. these perspectives are crucial to the continued growth of our historical understanding of science as a cross- cultural set of practices. they are essential in demonstrating how the history of science morgan g. ames, the charisma machine: the life, death, and legacy of one laptop per child, cambridge, ma: mit press, . sam robinson et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core can help communities think differently about future possibilities. a world that mitigates and adapts to the climate emergency will need scholarship that rethinks both science and politics in a multivocal and consensual manner. as we sought to facilitate this, news of the police killing of george floyd in the united states broke. the global response to this, in the form of protests led by the black lives matter movement, was another manifestation of these bigger issues, and of the need to challenge the taken-for-granted assumptions of society in the uk. we were very con- scious, as we prepared for the event, of the many ‘heroes’ and contentious issues within the history of science that need to be academically and publicly recontextualized. to a degree, white and western scholars in the history of science are already well equipped to critique lazy narratives of heroism, though recent critiques suggest that this work needs to go further (and certainly can be further advanced in the public arena). at the same time, the baby must not be thrown out with the bathwater. consensual science needs to be defined – using the historical methods of seeing how it can be otherwise – and defended as a tool in such pressing areas of concern as climate and epidemiology. with these political issues in mind, the question of intellectual leadership came to the fore as another aspect of festival planning. it was important to the bshs council that early-career scholars be given the freedom to define the agenda of the festival. though not always younger in demographic terms, early-career researchers (ecrs) are typically more attuned to the political and ecological priorities of the coming generation. but we also need to note that the bshs decision to facilitate leadership from ecrs was a creation of virtue from necessity: the volunteers who developed the festival were, with only a couple of exceptions, postgraduate students or working in junior, precarious aca- demic roles. this is a telling state of affairs. the motivation of ecrs to volunteer is prob- ably a mixture of enthusiasm and idealism, but is also somewhat born of desperation – a linda tuhiwai smith, decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples, dunedin: university of otago press, ; prakash kumar, projit mukharji and amit prasad, ‘decolonizing science in asia’, verge: studies in global asias ( ) ( ), pp. – ; sadiah qureshi, peoples on parade: exhibitions, empire, and anthropology in nineteenth-century britain, chicago: the university of chicago press, ; kapil raj, relocating modern science: circulation and the construction of knowledge in south asia and europe, – , houndmills: palgrave macmillan, . this problem has been long identified but change has been slow. see simon schaffer, ‘scientific discoveries and the end of natural philosophy’, social studies of science ( ) , pp. – ; david wade chambers and richard gillespie, ‘locality in the history of science: colonial science, technoscience, and indigenous knowledge’, osiris ( ) ( ), pp. – ; sujit sivasundaram, ‘sciences and the global: on methods, questions, and theory’, isis ( ) , pp. – ; suman seth, ‘colonial history and postcolonial science studies’, radical history review ( ) , pp. – ; andrew s. curran, the anatomy of blackness: science and slavery in an age of enlightenment, baltimore: johns hopkins university press, . see ludmilla jordanova, ‘on heroism’, science museum group journal (spring ), at http://dx.doi. org/ . / ; rebekah higgitt, ‘challenging tropes: genius, heroic invention, and the longitude problem in the museum’, isis ( ), at https://doi.org/ . / ; anna maerker, ‘hagiography and biography: narratives of great men of science’, in anna maerker, simon sleight and adam sutcliffe, history, memory and public life: the past in the present, london: routledge, , pp. – . naomi oreskes, why trust science?, princeton, nj: princeton university press, ; andrew pickering, the mangle of practice: time, agency, and science, chicago: the university of chicago press, ; thomas s. kuhn, the structure of scientific revolutions, chicago: the university of chicago press, . forum: new perspectives https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core desire to earn cv points that may (or may not) ultimately pay off in the search for secure academic work. established scholars are (mostly) ensconced in employment situations that post-docs, bouncing from short contract to short contract, can only dream of inha- biting. the traditional conference exists to support a particular model of academic employment and career advancement, and as such shapes both the content and the form of research that is valued and rewarded. it is an odd and arguably unsustainable state of affairs that established scholars should have their modes of research maintained for them, in conference form, by junior colleagues who are mostly unlikely to attain similar modes themselves. the context for academic work in the coming generation is different, and historians of science, above all, appreciate that context determines the content of research. it did not escape the notice of many of us how strong the reflexive link is between what we study and our own professional lives and practice. the history of science is about how knowledge is produced – the affordances, practices and systems that make it possible. the same issues bracket our labour as academics – indeed, much of the science that we research was produced within a university context itself. new con- texts (climate, pandemic, black lives matter, academic precarity) should become new priorities. within the context of a ruthless academic world, itself critically weakened by neo- liberal economic and political forces, it was important to bshs that our labour practices should reflect the best possible ways of working. the festival organizers hoped to create a positive and collegial working model that resisted the sector’s demand for atomized measurable outputs, valued within a particular and short time frame. concepts such as ‘slow scholarship’ and ‘care-ful’ academic working have been gaining traction and these implicitly inspired our activities. on top of this, we were very aware of the increased levels of anxiety that exist amongst postgraduates and new scholars today, and with that their (reasonable) concerns about identity-based marginalization. we wanted to make it possible for all the organizers to feel that they could make any sophie a. jones and catherine oakley, ‘the precarious postdoc: interdisciplinary research and casualised labour in the humanities and social sciences’, working knowledge/hearing the voice, durham university, uk, at www.academia.edu/download/ /wkps_precariouspostdoc_pdf_interactive.pdf, accessed september ; ucu ( ), ‘counting the costs of casualisation in higher education: key findings of a survey conducted by the university and college union’, at www.ucu.org.uk/media/ /counting-the-costs-of-casualisation-in- higher-education-jun- /pdf/ucu_casualisation_in_he_survey_report_jun .pdf, accessed september . alison mountz, anne bonds, becky mansfield, jenna loyd, jennifer hyndman, margaret walton- roberts, ranu basu, risa whitson, roberta hawkins, trina hamilton and winifred curran, ‘for slow scholarship: a feminist politics of resistance through collective action in the neoliberal university’, acme: an international journal for critical geographies ( ) ( ), pp. – ; yves rees and ben huf, ‘training historians in urgent times’, history australia ( ) , pp. – ; yvonne hartman and sandy darab, ‘a call for slow scholarship: a case study on the intensification of academic life and its implications for pedagogy’, review of education, pedagogy, and cultural studies ( ) , pp. – . thirty-seven per cent of phd students have sought help for anxiety or depression caused by phd study; per cent of phd students feel they have been bullied and per cent believe they have witnessed bullying; per cent of phd students feel they have been discriminated against and per cent believe they have witnessed discrimination. bethan cornell, ‘phd life: the uk student experience’, hepi report number , june , higher education policy institute, at www.hepi.ac.uk/ / / /phd-life-the-uk-student-experience, accessed september . sam robinson et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.academia.edu/download/ /wkps_precariouspostdoc_pdf_interactive.pdf http://www.ucu.org.uk/media/ /counting-the-costs-of-casualisation-in-higher-education-jun- /pdf/ucu_casualisation_in_he_survey_report_jun .pdf http://www.ucu.org.uk/media/ /counting-the-costs-of-casualisation-in-higher-education-jun- /pdf/ucu_casualisation_in_he_survey_report_jun .pdf https://www.hepi.ac.uk/ / / /phd-life-the-uk-student-experience https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core criticism or suggestion and have it positively received, and to take account, as far as pos- sible, of ideological and practical concerns from organizers and participants alike. we became acutely aware of the enormous unpaid labour (time expended) that our organi- zers put into the festival. some colleagues (who were not themselves volunteering) did explicitly critique this mode of production. what’s particularly interesting, though, is that, while the financial model of the festival as we ran it did not make it possible to pay our volunteers, what would have changed if we had monetized the process? if it had been possible to pay our organizers for their time, would that have changed the will- ingness of the society to hand over the festival’s intellectual leadership (to the society’s ‘employees’), and compromised the feeling of collegial working? could it be that events such as this can form part of an alternative economy within academia, one that is not based upon the monetary concerns that have done so much damage to the univer- sity sector? the desideratum of full involvement extended to our attendees, whom we regarded as co-participants in a shared intellectual enterprise. to this end, questions surrounding accessibility were centrally important to the committee and stretched from asking potential presenters to rethink their session structures to facilitate active participation, to questions such as overall scheduling. what kinds of event should we put in which time zones? britain is conveniently placed between the americas and europe/asia, but, even so, it was not possible to put everything at a time when everybody could attend. we were aware that having keynote events in the evening, as is conventional for a conference, made them accessible to the americas but not to asia. live sessions are expected, but could we easily make them available to participants afterwards? the capacity to facilitate asynchronous attendance – something that is almost impossible in a physical conference – was an early point in favour of the digital world. could the opportunity to record events also help avoid the awkward desire to be in two sessions at the same time? we also wanted to create time and space for face time between participants. digital media provide an opportunity for mediation and intentional manipulation of social interactions, avoiding the conference phenomena whereby one only speaks to one’s existing friends, or to people who unconsciously seem one’s own ‘type’. they are an opportunity to mix up different types of people and different levels of seniority, in ways that are refreshing and can breed unexpected outcomes. culturally speaking, we spent considerable time considering how to brand our evening social slot – should we call it the ‘pub’? for some, this would be exclusionary; to others, it would be impossible to imagine a conference that did not, at some point, involve a visit to a pub. accessibility for all types of ability was another priority. we wanted to ensure that those for whom english is not their first language, those with visual or hearing impair- ments, would all find a welcoming space at the festival. it soon became clear that while the digital could be a profoundly enabling space, it could also impose unexpected limits. all of these questions of accessibility connect to the importance of ensuring the partici- pation and input/critique/agenda-setting by a full range of scholars. our plans, however, became even more ambitious. in making the festival completely free to access, we hoped for audience engagement beyond our academic fields, and even forum: new perspectives https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core beyond academia itself. we adopted active strategies for this, reaching out to parents and teachers, for example, through offering online child-friendly activities during a lock- down. in the long term, however, achieving a bigger and more diverse audience would require the development of a careful, organic strategy of outreach. but the digital space does seem to make this possible if given a longer preparation and planning timeline. remember: we only had a hundred days. fundamentally, creating an online festival of science led us to reconsider the nature and purpose of academic conferences, run by scholarly societies. this ‘taken-for- granted’ activity needs re-examination. in an era where university jobs are becoming harder to find, and more precarious and short-term when found, the notion of confer- ences funded by and for securely employed scholars becomes somewhat anomalous. we have already raised the climate emergency and global inequity problems posed by the traditional conference format. but even if we only consider the needs of scholars working within the united kingdom, conferences need to be reformed if they are to be fairly accessible in a rapidly changing world. making academic events open to wider audiences – most easily done online – is potentially a double benefit, taking our scholarship into wider circles, as well as extending its financial support base. this does not have to mean paying for attendance, either: other models, such as the guardian’s donation-based system, or commercial sponsorship, are also possibilities. note, however, that adopting these in the medium to long term would require consider- able thought and planning. similar sets of questions emerge concerning journals and open access, of course. learned societies, which have traditionally relied on income from their journals (such as this one), must, in the medium term, face the loss of that income in the move to open-access publication. problematic though this transition may be in some respects, it must be faced squarely and used to the advantage of scholars and scholarship. rather than doing the same things as before, we could seize the oppor- tunity to do something else with our content – something that could better reflect our responsibilities as scholars and citizens in a democratic society. the history of science has an unparalleled ability to help us see how science, technology and society have been – and therefore can be – configured otherwise. as such, it is potentially of great value to a wide audience. finally, it is notable that almost everything that provoked the development of the digital festival – climate, virus, structures of intellectual institutions – has been or is itself a focus of research in the history of science. as such, it is fitting that as an academic community we wish to embody this reflexivity in our scholarly and professional practice. but still, even as all that was solid melted into air around us, we had to consider how we were going to run something in the digital sphere. in the next section, we outline the more practical side of the festival, as we examine the technical decisions and considera- tions involved in running a large global online history-of-science event. how we did it: approaches and systems our most crucial early decision was that this would not be a matter of adapting the can- celled annual conference to take it online. instead, the festival would be a distinct sam robinson et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core venture, designed from the ground up around the opportunities and constraints of the new medium. though members who had been planning sessions were understandably keen to salvage as much of their work as possible, we saw that a straight translation would simply not work for the audience. the necessary but problematic experience of hastily converting taught courses from physical to online delivery in the spring of meant that some of us were familiar with the pitfalls at first hand. for this reason, we dispensed entirely with the conventional backbone conference format of two-hour sessions featuring four panellists talking through slide shows. such sessions are exhausting to watch attentively as a video stream, in a way they would not be with the same four panellists in the room. we set a standard session length of one hour and favoured the formats we felt audiences could best engage with over that duration: single-paper keynotes, series of short ‘lightning’ talks, and relatively informal discussions. similarly, we did not refer to the typical annual-conference struc- ture of four or five simultaneous session tracks running over two to three days: this depth of parallel tracking would have been both unmanageable, given the limited size of our tech support team, and pointless, given our new-found freedom to spread to additional days without venue charges or travel complications. we also needed to recognize that our audience was not as captive as usual: attendees might vanish instantaneously at the end of any session to attend to childcare, admin, or another online conference hosted on the other side of the world. the welcome flipside of this situation was that we could include visitors in individual sessions without expecting them to invest heavily in the overall event, bringing novel opportunities for engagement with current non-members. social media, particularly twitter, helped to promote the fes- tival in ways that would not have been possible for a physical event: presenters and other interested people could promote individual sessions to followers on the very day of the session, and there would still be time for prospective audiences to sign up. such promo- tion may well have been responsible for a large proportion of the festival’s , + digital attendees. with this opportunity came the challenge of building a sense of community among participants. this, in the end, proved to be one of the strongest innovations of the festi- val, again driven as it was by necessity. networking, one of the most important aspects of any conference, takes place almost entirely outside the formally organized sessions, and often outside the conference venue and schedule altogether. our priority was to keep this in mind in building engagement opportunities as far as possible online: in place of social distancing, distant socializing. the social programme was one area where we did take inspiration from physical annual conferences, more as a best first focus for development than with any specific expectations. each day, two informal drop-in video chat sessions, the morning (uk time) ‘coffee house’ and late evening ‘public house’, allowed the kinds of chance inter- action that bshs regulars might expect from breakfast at the venue and the post-session pub respectively (participants, of course, being responsible for providing beverages as appropriate for their inclinations and time zones). social activities from past bshs meet- ings also inspired the evening social events before the public house: a trivia quiz, film forum: new perspectives https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core night, and historical tour of the internet, explicitly presented as a substitute for the guided walks we might provide around a physical host city. the public house format explored an opportunity provided by the zoom platform: the tech volunteer looking after the session would reassign participants randomly to new ‘digital tables’ – groups of around six participants each – every twenty minutes. this proved useful in helping participants to meet new people, breaking down the social barriers posed by the attendees’ different career stages and creating connections across disciplinary boundaries. but the most effective aspect of online ‘distant socialization’ was the facility for audi- ence members to discuss the sessions while they were going on, using the text chat feature of the crowdcast platform used for session delivery. the chat, which on a typical screen display appears to one side of the presenter video and updates in real time, allows con- versation and reflection, open to all audience members, at a level that could never be tol- erated at a physical conference. far beyond whispering occasionally to the person in the next seat, the digital audience could comment, joke or add in links to relevant resources, enriching the panellists’ talks – which the moderators could then pass on to the panellists too. another crowdcast feature allowed the audience to vote on a choice of options, with the results displayed automatically: this added greatly to the effect of the call my bluff game show, with the viewers pitting their wits against the panellists to deter- mine the right answers. it also provided support. although many technical tasks can be performed using free or nearly free software, this approach generally leaves it down to the individual user to resolve any problems they encounter. given the bshs’s generosity in funding the festival, it made sense to use a paid service offering direct specialist support to make sure the public side of the festival worked reliably. in the event, there were relatively few issues that we could not resolve for ourselves, but these things are best not left to chance. more generally, several individual session organizers made creative use of the oppor- tunities of a ‘born-digital’ event. tim boon’s ‘text film’ played around with the medium by revisiting a talk given by his early bshs presidential predecessor, frank sherwood taylor, in , re-creating taylor’s text in audio and offering reflections with the aid of extensive video editing. james sumner’s tour of the internet incorporated playful use of multiple cameras, which received immediate acclaim in the chat from viewers. other sessions were built around particular tools or exhibitions accessible online, includ- ing a computer simulation of the medieval cosmos as described in robert grosseteste’s de sphaera, the medea-chart database of medieval and early modern nautical charts, and the royal society/met office library and archive collaboration to redevelop a planned physical exhibition on weather and climate science into six digital ‘stories’. a further benefit, as compared to physical conferences, was that – subject to the par- ticipants’ consent – all sessions were recorded and available afterwards for those who had missed them or wanted to recap. it was also possible to add to the text chat discus- sions so that conversations could potentially continue for weeks afterwards. nonetheless, the festival had, to the majority of attendees, the feel of a distinct real- time event – to the extent that, the morning after the closing session, more than one person involved felt the effect of the sudden transition from festival time to post-festival sam robinson et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core time (albeit without the hotel-lobby suitcase forests commonly found at the end of phys- ical meetings). as we noted earlier, however, considerations of accessibility – in its many different senses – strongly informed our planning. online delivery creates many access challenges while resolving or significantly reducing others. most obviously, video conferencing and the absence of a registration fee opened the possibility of involvement to people who might never be able to attend a physical bshs conference owing to lack of funds, work- place or care responsibilities, illness or disability, or geographical separation. this had the effect of making those barriers that remained more visible to the organizers, particu- larly around disability. although the very short development time meant we could not put into effect all the responses we identified as potentially useful, we encouraged organ- izers to provide subtitles for the pre-recorded sessions where possible (jaipreet virdi’s subtitles for her keynote session being a particular highlight) and had automatic tran- scription from the otter service available for all sessions. the discussions with disabled audience members that resulted from the festival will prove useful for future planning, particularly around visual impairment, for which we were less well prepared: in future, we will be advising presenters to describe important slide visuals and to avoid the ‘as you can see here …’ formulation. the other main accessibility consideration that informed our technical planning was the drastic disparities in internet access between users in different geopolitical and per- sonal circumstances, whether due to governmental restriction policies or the vagaries of connection speeds. though our opportunities for addressing these were limited, we at least ensured that our chosen delivery system was largely unrestricted (see below) and that the content could be accessed at some level with the poorest connections, even if only by downloading the recordings rather than watching live. it is worth summarizing the technical arrangements and the thinking behind them: the particular systems available to future organizers will no doubt change rapidly in the months and years ahead, but some of the principles will hold. central to our planning was the early decision to use two different products to manage different elements: speakers gave their talks, took part in discussions, and responded to audience ques- tions using zoom, the video telephony service which grew rapidly in the early stages of the pandemic to become the most familiar system for workplace and informal calling in much of the world. audience members experienced the sessions, commented and submitted questions in their web browsers via crowdcast, a commercial service originally geared to sup- porting corporate ‘webinars’ and other live video events online, which in has been notably widely used by large international festivals such as the hay literary festival. otter.ai is a spoken-voice transcription service. more details available at otter.ai. see https://zoom.us. see www.crowdcast.io. forum: new perspectives https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://zoom.us https://zoom.us https://www.crowdcast.io https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core the two platforms were carefully compartmentalized: audience members never had access to the zoom calls, and speakers and chairs never needed to use crowdcast. the interconnections between the two – transmitting the zoom discussion to crowdcast, and relaying audience questions from crowdcast back into zoom – were managed entirely by the festival tech team. this required a great deal of work from the volunteers, both in pre-planning and throughout the festival, but had several major advantages. most importantly, it meant that our sessions were digitally secure. compartmentalizing made it virtually impossible for malicious intruders to derail the session or distract the speakers. this was high on our list of concerns given the relative ease of online as com- pared to physical intrusion in general, and the specific – and often horrific – spate of zoom-bombing incidents that became notorious during zoom’s early growth. though we were careful to password-protect, our ultimate line of defence against zoom hijacking was to keep zoom entirely away from the public side of the festival. since only the identified speakers, chairs and tech hosts had any business even knowing that the zoom call was available to join, any intruder would have been highly noticeable and swiftly ejected by the tech host responsible for monitoring. had they got as far as sharing offensive content before removal, it would not have reached the audience: the video stream from zoom into crowdcast imposed a time delay of around seconds, within which the tech hosts could stop the broadcast. the only real option for intrusion, then, was to join as an ordinary audience member via crowdcast, which required registration using an email address, and where opportun- ities for mischief were limited to posting offensive messages in the text chat. this, again, was monitored throughout by a member of the tech team, armed with a facility to ban and remove individual users built into crowdcast – which turned out to be necessary only once during the whole course of the festival. the speakers, in any case, would not have seen any of the crowdcast text chat unless the tech team specifically forwarded it for their attention. second, this combination meant that our sessions were technically stable. video con- ference calls involving large numbers of participants have a notorious tendency to glitch, suddenly lose audio/video quality, or cut out altogether, sometimes affecting different users to differing extents. we avoided this problem as far as possible by keeping the dir- ectly interacting participants in one small zoom call and making sure that most people were viewing the session through crowdcast, a paid-for service designed primarily for the reliable one-way delivery of video over the web. our impression, confirmed by atten- dees’ feedback, was that the result was generally delivered smoothly and in consistently high quality, displaying as well as possible for users with slower connections and older machines. of course, the output could only be as good as what was fed into it from the speakers’ computers, and there were occasional glitches here – but any problems would show up identically for the whole audience, making it relatively easy for the tech team to diagnose and fix them. see www.vice.com/en_uk/article/m je y/zoom-bombers-private-calls-disturbing-content, accessed september . sam robinson et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/m je y/zoom-bombers-private-calls-disturbing-content https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core third, the sessions were globally accessible. we were concerned to make sure that the widest possible public audience could access the sessions with no specific software beyond a standard web browser. we were also mindful that some well-known platforms which tend to be thought of as default options in europe and north america are restricted or prohibited in many parts of the world – notably, the question of how far and under what terms zoom is permitted in china is complex and still evolving at the time of writing. although there is no perfect solution to this problem, crowdcast was, as far as we could establish, preferable to many alternatives. finally, one further benefit of the compartmentalized set-up – which, fortunately, did not come into play – was redundancy. theoretically, we could have kept much of the fes- tival going in the event of a major global failure, such as the one that hit zoom in august : this would have been a matter of switching the participants to a different video-con- ference platform and streaming into crowdcast as before. (note, though, that if the crowdcast site itself had failed, we would have had no such protection; organizers who feel the cost is worth it can protect themselves from this kind of problem by signing up for an alternative streaming platform and being ready to manage a quick transfer.) equally important to this largely prearranged set-up was the extensive dialogue that took place between the tech team and most of the participants in the two weeks leading up to the festival. this was managed largely through ‘training’ sessions, organ- ized over zoom. at a minimum, these sessions served the purpose of taking the par- ticipants through the reasons behind the overall approach and made sure they knew what to do on the day, but they also provided crucial opportunities for the contributors to test their connections, their equipment and the effectiveness of their slides or other visuals in the intended setting, while also allowing the tech volunteers to test how their equipment performed while hosting. having a sense of the participants’ varying pre-existing technical expertise, access to facilities, and working environments while pre- senting was particularly valuable to the organizers in shaping the guidelines sent out to contributors and the approaches to session management taken by the tech volunteers. what did we learn? following the festival, we sent a survey by email to all of the more than , partici- pants from fifty-nine countries who had watched any session via crowdcast. we received nearly two hundred responses. in this section, we will examine the answers given to those questions most closely related to either our biggest concerns before the festival or those areas where we feel we learned the most. a key consideration was how global participants would engage with the festival. our support team was not sufficiently globally distributed to run sessions at times that would work for participants in australia and asia, europe and africa, north and south see https://technode.com/ / / /zoom-will-be-local-version-only-for-chinese-users, accessed september . see www.theguardian.com/technology/ /aug/ /zoom-apologises-after-being-hit-by-partial-global- outage, accessed september . forum: new perspectives https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://technode.com/ / / /zoom-will-be-local-version-only-for-chinese-users https://technode.com/ / / /zoom-will-be-local-version-only-for-chinese-users https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ /aug/ /zoom-apologises-after-being-hit-by-partial-global-outage https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ /aug/ /zoom-apologises-after-being-hit-by-partial-global-outage https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core america alike. but early on, we realized that operating on uk time would allow us to span a global audience across the course of the day – and one of the features of crowdcast is that recordings would be available to access afterwards. we didn’t know how many people would utilize this feature since it is certainly not something that could be offered by an in-person conference. whilst per cent of respondents indi- cated that they had only watched sessions live, per cent had to some extent made use of the re-watch capabilities. when asked why they did so, a variety of reasons were offered. some did so simply because they had missed a session. others were fitting the conference around other work or caring commitments. still others found that the ability to watch sessions whilst utilizing the otter transcript made things easier to follow, and again, as mentioned earlier, the ability, and encouragement, of others to put links to resources in the chat (that crowdcast also made available afterwards) meant that some attendees would pause presentations to follow up those links, and would return to the presentation enriched by their wider reading. this flexibility in how, where and when an audience member might engage with content is something to consider, along with the extent to which the replay facility makes online events more globally accessible. another question was just how much of the event our audience members would consume. most participants at a physical conference feel an unspoken obligation to maxi- mize their session attendance, extracting as much value from the financial and time invest- ment as they can. this inevitably leads to what is commonly referred to as conference fatigue. now, whilst there was festival fatigue for members of the tech team, as we ran multiple events over five long days, the experience was different for attendees. there is something about attending a conference whilst going home to your bed each night that seemed to make the next-day recovery somewhat quicker. most of our respondents ( per cent) attended two to five sessions – roughly equivalent to attending for a day or picking up a few sessions over the week. but what it also shows is that most people, having attended one session, were sufficiently encouraged to stay for another. as for the per cent of respondents who stated that they had only attended one session, it seems likely that the online environment makes dipping an academic toe into a conference in an adjacent field both possible and attractive. at the very least, those attracted by a twitter hashtag could follow up their interest, rather than simply being told about what they had missed. from the survey, we know that many of these visitors had never previ- ously attended any history-of-science conference, and would be unlikely to do so in person. numbers attending for one session were smaller than those who attended for between six and twelve sessions (that is, an attendance level more in line with what might be expected for an in-person conference). but of most interest for the bshs – and, indeed, potentially for scholarly societies more generally – is the response to the question “have you ever attended a bshs event before?” fifty-one per cent of responders stated that they had never done so, and only per cent said they were regularly involved in participating in bshs events. we succeeded, we think, in widening our audience base. finally, it is worth reflecting on the content of the festival, its global aim and ambition. to this end, we asked three questions and asked respondents whether they strongly agreed, agreed, disagreed, or strongly disagreed with the following statements: sam robinson et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core . ‘the festival showcased new, creative and challenging ideas.’ . ‘there was something at the festival that encouraged me to think differently or try something new.’ . ‘overall, the festival was well organized.’ the responses to all these questions were overwhelmingly positive. in all cases, over per cent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed with the statements. these responses suggest to us that the online-festival concept has something to recommend it beyond the immediate necessity of the pandemic and the ongoing necessity of the climate emergency. it also suggests that our very basic ambition to put something together that would be enjoyable was met, and probably exceeded. we think we succeeded. but we still think we can do better. the bshs festival was faced with an extraordinary opportunity to meet challenges faced by the pandemic as well as broader issues of academic conduct within in-person conferences. there is still work to be done to ensure that academic space within the history-of-science community is intellectually, institutionally and spatially inclusive. the bshs festival showed that this is possible in a digital arena. we acknowledge that closer engagement with critical race, gender and class frameworks is needed, and that this means we still have improvements to make in the future. it is important to engage with presenters concerning questions of appropriate language and verbal signposting such as providing cues for content warn- ings. while much of the presentation and performance of academic papers falls beyond the control of the organizers, such measures are important for consideration in academic arenas, especially those that seek to be global, inclusive and open. while there is still much to do for the future, we want to end on a familiar note. one of the unexpected outcomes of the digital space was how it opened up the discipline to friends and loved ones in a way that the traditional conference normally does not figure . photo credit: sarah qidwai. forum: new perspectives https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core allow us to do. while professional conferences expect a degree of prior engagement with, and investment in, the field, attendees could join our festival for any session with no prior knowledge of the subject. the virtual environment made the academic space more open and inviting. the pandemic has meant that our working lives are even more embrangled with our personal lives. our online festival meant that our families could see us explain- ing what we were researching and why we were doing it – and could see how the wider world responded to us. taking a community-oriented approach to building the field might be the very best way forward. there is no better way to end this article than with this picture (figure ) – one very proud grandmother, engaging with an international history-of-science conference in a way none of the organizers (or the presenter) foresaw. perhaps our greatest achievement, certainly our happiest. sam robinson et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core 	outline placeholder 	opportunity: the new normal? 	how we did it: approaches and systems 	what did we learn? beyond flood risk reduction: how can green infrastructure advance both social justice and regional impact? vol.:( ) socio-ecological practice research ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - - p e r s p e c t i v e e s s ay beyond flood risk reduction: how can green infrastructure advance both social justice and regional impact? linda shi received: june / accepted: august / published online: september © springer nature singapore pte ltd. abstract green infrastructure is being pulled in divergent directions. as climate impacts intensify, advocates are promoting larger, ecosystem-scale strategies to help mitigate flood risks. yet, research on existing urban greening projects finds that they can cause gentrification and displacement, suggesting that smaller projects may be more desirable from an equity perspective. this essay argues that cities need both large-scale and justice-enhancing nature-based solutions. they can help overcome tensions in these goals by ( ) reframing green infrastructure as a way to support community development and integrated socio-ecological landscapes, and ( ) advancing metropolitan regional governance strategies that alleviate municipal fiscal imperatives to maximize local land development. these proposals suggest that the practice of green infrastructure would benefit from diversifying its ranks to include social and government policy, community development, and agroecology, as well as learning from the global south and those currently positioned as “off the map” of technical expertise. they also point to the need for interdisciplinary research that provides an evidence base for more transformative social, ecological, and governance strategies. while the essay focuses on the us context, it is relevant to an international audience given that similar challenges confront cities worldwide and that it highlights how the global north can learn from the global south. keywords green infrastructure · nature-based solutions · flooding · climate adaptation · governance · equity green infrastructure at a crossroads for decades, cities have implemented smaller-scale green infrastructure projects, such as green roofs, rain gardens, and bioswales, to mitigate stormwater pollution and urban heat islands (escobedo et al. ; gill et al. ; meerow and newell ). now, as cities struggle with climate impacts and decreased permitting for shoreline hardening (dyckman et al. , pp. – ), many environmental and govern- ment groups are advocating larger-scale green infrastructure, such as sand dunes, restored floodplains, and wetlands, to reduce urban flood risk (carter et al. ; fema , pp. , ; liao ; matthews et al. ; opperman ; spalding et al. ). meanwhile, critical urban scholars argue that governments and developers are using urban greening projects to boost property values and dispossess already disadvantaged groups (anguelovski et al. a, b; blok ; brand and baxter ; dooling ; gar- cia-lamarca et al. ). from household-level projects to reduce stormwater runoff in philadelphia to urban greenbelts that reduce landslide risk in medellín, green resilience infra- structure projects have contributed to historic processes of marginalization (anguelovski et al. a, b; shokry et al. ). this has led some academics to advocate smaller- scale projects that are “just green enough” (curran and hamilton , ; wolch et al. ). both seemingly divergent aspirations are necessary— cities need large-scale physical transformations to cope with the magnitude of climate impacts and they need to promote social justice and equity (goh , p. ). the critical question is how to advance on both fronts. in this essay, i argue that green infrastructure for flood risk reduction (gi- frr) can help achieve these contrasting goals if its framing, design, and implementation address underlying drivers of unsustainable urban development in flood-prone areas and urban spatial inequality. in the following sections, i first describe how gi-frr is consistent with neoliberal modes of governance that simultaneously expect cities to deliver landscape-scale benefits while requiring them to compete * linda shi lindashi@cornell.edu department of city and regional planning, cornell university, west sibley hall, ithaca, ny  , usa http://orcid.org/ - - - x http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf socio-ecological practice research ( ) : – for funding and development. i then discuss how municipal fiscal reliance on growth and racist and capitalist develop- ment histories inhibit this approach from advancing more equitable and ecologically sustainable goals. in response, i offer propositions for future directions in research and prac- tice, drawing on concepts of community development from the global south and historic precedents in us regional environmental governance. these include focusing on local livelihoods and productive landscapes, and strengthening watershed-scale planning and governance institutions that would cross the organizational, administrative, and fiscal silos that currently preclude systems-based, integrated, and cumulative assessments, plans, and projects (berke et al. ). while this essay focuses on the us context, the need for gi-frr projects to grapple with the tensions between scale and equity affects many cities worldwide. the compounding climate, health, black lives matter, and economic crises that have erupted in compel scholars and practition- ers to question how current strategies are complicit in and impacted by these dynamics. these crises invite us to holis- tically reimagine alternatives that conceive of gi-frr not as a single-purpose technology but a path to more transforma- tive socio-ecological relationships (anguelovski et al. ). gi‑frr as neoliberal urban environmental governance green infrastructure belongs to a suite of terms and strate- gies using natural or modified systems to provide human and ecosystems benefits. these strategies have been around since the dawn of human civilization, with ecosystems services, nature-based solutions, and green infrastructure serving as the most recent descendants (cohen-shacham et al. ; samora-arvela et al. ). the term “nature-based solu- tions” is associated primarily with international development settings and focuses on conservation, human livelihoods, and community-based development (colls et al. ). despite some overlap, “green infrastructure” (also known as sponge city, green–blue infrastructure, engineering with nature, and low-impact development) focuses more on reducing urban pollution and natural hazards (epa ). in the usa, green infrastructure—promulgated since the s to manage cities’ stormwater pollution and urban heat island effects (gill et al. ; lennon ; lowe et al. ; tzoulas et al. )—is attracting new inter- est as a way to cope with increasing flood risks (carter et al. ; matthews et al. ; seddon et al. ). an estimated – million people live in flood-prone areas, with as much as $ billion of real estate at risk of chronic flooding by (flavelle et al. ; houser et al. ; usgcrp , p. ). meanwhile, many states now restrict new shoreline hardening projects like seawalls, bulkheads, and dykes due to their environmental impacts, yet lack the political will or financial capacity to engage in managed retreat or relocation (dyckman et al. , pp. – ). as a result, green infrastructure presents a politi- cally palatable option to replace seawalls with sand dunes within existing epistemological, operational, and governance structures. two-thirds of strategies listed in a recent federal emergency management agency (fema) guide on nature- based solutions are at the landscape scale, such as restoring or protecting wetlands, creating greenways, conserving land, restoring floodplains, creating stormwater parks, vegetating sand dunes, and rebuilding oyster reefs (fema , p. , ). prominent built examples include hunter’s point south park (a floodable grass park with an acre of wetland) in new york city; dune restoration in beachfront towns like long beach, new jersey; the oro loma horizontal levee south of oakland, california that uses wetlands to treat wastewater and provide habitat; and (more unusually) the us$ billion state-led southern louisiana master plan that seeks, inter alia, to divert sediment from channel dredging to elevate sinking wetlands. implementation of gi-frr bears the hallmarks of con- temporary neoliberal governance: deregulation, devolved environmental governance to the local level, competitive urban entrepreneurialism, financialization of real property benefits from flood risk mitigation, and techno-rational plan- ning without attention to socio-spatial inequality (castree ; ciplet and roberts ; sager ). there is no us green infrastructure policy, though federal agencies like fema, the environmental protection agency (epa), and the  department of transportation (dot) provide grants or allocate funds to pay for green infrastructure projects (epa ; samora-arvela et al. , p. ). instead, in the early s, the us epa, environmental groups, and water utilities began to popularize green infrastructure and low-impact development to reduce inland stormwater pollution under the clean water act (gill et al. ; lennon ; lowe et al. ). famous early examples include chicago’s green roof program, seattle and portland’s urban and suburban bioswales retrofits, and los angeles, chicago, and new york’s commitments to plan a million trees. europe, by contrast, has taken a more government-led approach, with the european commission funding a green infrastructure work- ing group in , advancing nature-based solutions as an economic innovation strategy in , and dedicating € million for nature- based solutions and re-naturing cities under its horizon framework programme for research and innovation (davis et  al. ; samora-arvela et  al. ). many member states now explic- itly cite nature-based solutions in national policies, although the eu has yet to require members to implement them (davis et al. , p. ). socio-ecological practice research ( ) : – agencies encourage municipalities to voluntarily adopt gi- frr practices, even though they involve landscape-scale interventions that can take up a large portion of a munici- pality’s land and extend across multiple jurisdictions. the co-benefits of reduced hazard risks include community health, recreation, and—importantly—increased property values and taxes for those who remain (fema , pp. – ). this can help pay for the new bonds, taxes, and fees that cities must levy to pay for these infrastructure invest- ments. this has the effect of committing cities to continue to develop sites just beyond current flood extents (male- cha et al. under review; shi and varuzzo ). cities can also finance gi-frr by competing for scarce state or fed- eral funds or attracting private investment. the rockefeller foundation has funded numerous rebuild by design com- petitions in which design teams craft bold new gi-frr and waterfront redevelopment schemes for cities. these visual attestations of cities’ commitment to resiliency market their continued attractiveness and competitiveness in the face of doomsday climate forecasts (garcia-lamarca et al. ). as explored below, widespread implementation of gi- frr is difficult due to the structural constraints facing local governments, but its scale-up is also undesirable if socially discriminatory outcomes persist. historic governance char- acteristics have contributed to rising local spatial inequality and continued development in environmentally fragile areas. new visions of larger-scale gi-frr projects—especially to grapple with climate-induced flooding later in the century— revive long-standing questions about the effectiveness and equity of urban land governance frameworks. municipal fragmentation and fiscal reliance on growth and development the premise underlying gi-frr—that local governments can shift their land use to large-scale environmental land- scapes—runs counter to the underlying framework of munic- ipal local development. local governments in the usa rely on property taxes and user fees and charges, both of which require growth and development to sustain or grow local budgets (chapman ; kim ). moreover, us metro- politan regions are fragmented into a hundred municipalities each, on average (savitch and adhikari , p. ), creat- ing cities with relatively small footprints, each of which must fund itself with growth-based development. many cities also incorporated into their own local government expressly to exclude minorities and avoid redistributing taxes, such that fragmentation has contributed to segregation and spatial inequality (orfield ; rothstein ). within this administrative reality, proponents of gi- frr are rather naively asking cities to reduce flood risk by relocating residents from flood-prone areas, convert land zoned for development to land for green infrastructure, and expand the scale and space allotted to land-extensive dunes, wetlands, and restored floodplains. this conversion directly reduces revenue generation. as seen in shrinking and declin- ing cities, this reduces the local capacity to maintain road, drainage, and water infrastructure, as well as provide social services like education and housing (aldag et  al. ). many local governments therefore fear that  leaving land green or converting developed sites back to undeveloped land will result in reduced tax revenues (bendor et al. , p. ; freudenberg et al. , p. ; shi and varuzzo , p. ). historically, when balancing development needs and environmental risks, few cities have prioritized natural haz- ard risks in land use plans, despite growing awareness over the last  years (burby ). evidence suggests that local governments, especially if they are land constrained, have prevented residents from participating in federal floodplain property buyout programs, likely for this reason (miao and davlasheridze under review). as a sign of cities’ resistance to calls for gi-frr and managed retreat, many cities are proceeding with water- front or floodplain development alongside gi-frr projects despite past flood events and cities’ own climate adapta- tion and disaster risk assessments. in new york city, post- sandy recovery efforts bought out neighborhoods on the east side of staten island, restoring some as coastal sand dunes, while advancing the island’s north shore redevelopment with major new projects and one of the world’s tallest fer- ris wheels. boston and its surrounding cities also have pro- posed shoreline greening solutions to mitigate flooding in existing neighborhoods and protect massive new waterfront after hurricane sandy in , foundations and nongovernmen- tal organizations like the nature conservancy helped ignite global imagination around gi-frr (opperman ). in , the rocke- feller foundation launched a rebuild by design competition to reim- agine a resilient new york-new jersey region under climate change. all winning entries dramatically re-naturalized the shoreline, most evocatively in the proposal for a new meadlowlands national park that restores and expands existing wetlands between the two states. this inspired similar competitions in boston, southern louisiana, the san francisco bay area, many also supported by the rockefeller foundation and similarly advocating green infrastructure. these pro- posals in turn have inspired international competitions like designing resilience in asia in . competitions and transnational munici- pal and sustainability networks like the rockefeller foundation’s resilient cities, c , iclei-local governments for sustainability, and dutch delta cities have popularized gi-frr worldwide (goh ; woodruff ). socio-ecological practice research ( ) : – developments (shi and varuzzo , p. ). in , the san francisco bay area passed its first regional tax to sup- port wetland restoration. but in one city on the bay, cargill proposed to build a , -unit development on top of a -acre former salt pond. southeast florida’s regional climate change compact is working with the nature con- servancy to pilot restoration projects to reduce flooding and restore living shorelines, while also planning to accommo- date another million residents in one of the world’s most vulnerable metropolises to sea-level rise (seven ; the nature conservancy ). according to the chief modeler of the region’s water management district, planners con- tinue to generate demographic projections that task water districts with providing the necessary supplies rather than asking how much the ecosystem can sustain and then adjust- ing population and consumption accordingly (obeysekera, personal communication ). green infrastructure is not appropriate everywhere, but these opposing waterfronts strategies are counterproductive if cities seek to increase coastal resilience. cities could do much more to coordinate their plans across agencies (berke et  al. ; malecha et  al. under review), although cities with a large percentage of land at risk of current or future flooding have little fiscal recourse beyond trying to build their way out or suffering a vicious cycle of disasters, declining property tax rolls, and disin- vestment. coordinating land use and fiscal redistribution across cities is that much harder given weak us regionalism. regional institutions have never wielded strong multipur- pose governmental authority in the usa. nevertheless, over the past century, governance of environmental and natural resources has shrunk from federal, to state, to regional, to local levels and the private sector (chapin ; lemos and agrawal ). today, there are few governance institutions equipped to coordinate or integrate cross-sector and cross- jurisdiction responses to climate impacts (shi , p. ). as a result, gi-frr is likely to remain city-bound, con- tradictory, and uncoordinated even though, by definition, strategies require landscape-scale continuity to be effective. gi‑frr as a new tool for capitalism’s racist spatial fix under climate change effectively scaling-up gi-frr projects, however, can have regressive impacts on frontline communities. historically, green amenities and parks have been associated with higher property values and gentrification (czembrowski and kro- nenberg ; immergluck and balan ). a growing body of literature finds urban greening projects world- wide contribute to the displacement of vulnerable people (anguelovski et al. ; anguelovski et al. a, b; lamb b; pearsall ). gi-frr exacerbates these dynamics. in philadelphia, green resilient infrastructure siting corre- sponds to gentrification of census tracts with the highest black and hispanic populations (shokry et al. , p. ). houston controversially has proposed to exercise eminent domain to compel low-income households to leave a flood-prone area and convert it to floodable green space, one of the first times the city has used this power with respect to flooding (wade interview ). from an administrative perspective, gentrification proximate to gi-frr is a fiscal imperative to offset revenue losses associated with this land use. from a racial justice perspective, these projects use climate narratives and disasters to evict black and brown residents that cities long wanted to expel (brand and bax- ter ; bullard and wright ; lamb a). the fact that gentrification is such a big problem reflects the backlog of affordable housing confronting low- and lower-middle- income households. these dynamics underscore how climate risk and adap- tive responses provide america’s racist capitalism with a new spatial fix (harvey ; taylor ). on the one hand, market internalization of climate risks is starting to devalue coast real estate and valorize lower-income com- munities that are inlands or upland, providing new oppor- tunities for profitable urban development—buy low, sell high (keenan ; keenan and bradt ). on the other hand, cities can invest in gi-frr to protect low-lying com- munities, and price out lower-income residents and replace them with whiter and wealthier professional classes who are willing to pay for green amenities. green infrastructure can directly and indirectly contribute to this two-step process of displacing disadvantaged groups and economically exclud- ing them from sites of relative resilience (shi forthcoming). notably, a study of parks in us cities found that gentrification is associated with park qualities—greenways, strong transportation connections, downtown proximity, and location in black or latino communities, but not park size (rigolon and németh , p. ). this suggests that greenways’ recreation and visual amenities more so than the amount of park impact local housing affordability. discourses in floodplain management are starting to attend to inequity and racial injustice (mach et al. , p. ; siders ). grassroots and local government white papers have offered criteria and guidance for socially just climate adaptation projects, including prioritizing resil- ience investments in frontline communities (naacp ; nacrp ). however, as the above examples suggest, targeting such communities for resources can lead directly to displacement (as in houston) or indirectly through processes of gentrification (anguelovski et al. a, b; blok ; pearsall ). scaling-up gi-frr to landscape scales can exacerbate these trends by increasing the number of affected households, reducing supplies of affordable housing, and reducing municipal tax rolls and service quality. equitable socio-ecological practice research ( ) : – green infrastructure for flood risk reduction, therefore, must not only prioritize marginalized communities for invest- ments or resettlement, but also reimagine the approach to address intersectional challenges and structural drivers of inequity (anguelovski et al. ; shi , p. ). propositions to rethink green infrastructure for flood risk reduction the year has seen unprecedented social mobilization against racism, escalating state and local fiscal crisis, and deepening household unemployment, poverty, and food insecurity. what does green infrastructure for flood risk reduction post- look like if it is to achieve ecological benefits at scale, social justice, and fiscally functioning local governments? below, i draw on past us and international developments to identify potential strategies to rethink gi-frr. these propositions invite dialogue and creative problem-solving. . connecting gi‑frr to urban agriculture and community development green infrastructure for flood risk reduction can support multiple social and ecological benefits when connected to food production, community development, and poverty alleviation. research on ecosystem-based adaptation (eba) and nature-based solutions (nbs) from the global south as well as decades of community development efforts led by black, hispanic, and indigenous communities provide a variety of strategies to broaden the imagination behind cur- rent gi-frr. growing support for urban food production that breaks down urban–rural spatial, economic, and class divisions complements these approaches (vaarst et al. ). these strategies underscore the importance of building com- munity capacity and co-production of learning. the eba and nbs projects of the global south usu- ally combine natural resource management, conservation, and restoration with livelihood diversification, learning from local knowledge, land tenure security, and control over decision-making (ayers and forsyth ; jones et al. ; munang et al. ). they not only seek to reduce natural hazard exposure and sensitivity to climate variabil- ity, but also enhance adaptive capacity through processes of learning, experimentation, and empowerment (seddon et al. , p. ). examples include mangrove conservation and restoration in costa rica, south asia, and southeast asia to support local fisheries and reduce flood and tsunami risk; bangladesh’s forestry, fisheries, and food program to support coastal adaptation with livelihood diversification, dykes, embankments, mangroves, and other plantations; and japan’s wetland restoration and adoption of winter-flooded rice paddies to support floodwater storage, migratory bird habitat, and agriculture (cohen-shacham et al. , pp. , ; colls et al. , p. ; rawlani and sovacool , p. ). in a rare large-scale urban example, the , -hec- tare east kolkata wetlands, a ramsar wetland conserva- tion site, hosts fishponds and agriculture, treats a third of the city’s sewage, sequesters carbon, controls flooding, and employs , people (ramsar sites information service ). as rawlani and sovacool found in their research on bangladesh’s community-based adaptation through coastal afforestation project, “technology by itself is only a partial component of successful adaptation efforts, and … multiple and integrated adaptation measures that cut across sectors and social, institutional, and infrastructural dimen- sions are needed to truly build resilience and effectiveness” ( , p. ). many of these projects learn from indigenous knowledge, build the capacity of women-led associations, help communities gain secure land tenure, and design land- scapes that support livelihoods, biodiversity, and community development. these stand in sharp contrast to global north projects that define multi-benefits as multiple environmen- tal and hazard mitigation benefits, and that offer few social benefits or strategies for community empowerment (cohen- shacham et al. , pp. , , ; colls et al. , p. ; meerow and newell ; sussams et al. ). urban and peri-urban agriculture can reduce socio- economic vulnerability, productively use lands that cannot be built upon, and support wastewater and compost reuse (dubbeling and zeeuw ). the environmental benefits of agroecological systems have been under-explored (vaarst et al. , p. ). a study of urban agriculture programs in six us cities finds that while they are not necessarily major sources of employment or tax generation, they are effective as a form of social enterprise that helps supplement incomes, build human and social capital especially among immigrants, refugees, and decarcerated people, and promote food security (vitiello and wolf-powers ). on their own, these efforts do not produce “transformative wealth,” but can promote economic stability and support workforce development, community building, and health outcomes (vitiello and wolf-powers , p. ). for instance, com- munity gardens have been central to community building, poverty alleviation, and food security in rustbelt and declin- ing city centers. mobilization for environmental justice has involved not only opposition to siting polluting facilities in frontline neighborhoods (bullard ), but also the use of community gardens to positively heal and promote commu- nity bonds and sense of place (anguelovski ; ranga- nathan and bratman ). native american tribes have long used clam gardens to supplement local diets, support tribal traditions, and manage coastal erosion, practices now garnering national interest in the face of climate change (n. jones ; sadasivam ). most such programs occupy socio-ecological practice research ( ) : – small footprints, such as vacant lots, and are run by and for youth and disadvantaged groups. detroit’s hantz farms provides a cautionary tale suggesting that scaling-up urban farming is justice enhancing only where it is owned by dis- advantaged communities and advances justice goals. these examples highlight the possibility of gi-frr experts learning from groups currently perceived as “off the map” of centers of scientific innovation. scholars have argued that the global south is not so much a geographic category, so much as a state of marginality that permeates northern and southern hemispheres (miraftab and kudva ). from this perspective, seeing from the “south” and peripheries of global metropoles holds critical learning opportunities for the “north.” rice and burke observe that the “hegemony of liberal, wealthy environmental cosmopoli- tics” with its focus on recreation and conservation has stifled societal imagination for the possible sources and forms that sustainability efforts take ( , p. ). “southern” per- spectives of gi-frr could respond to the exclusionary and often racist impacts of urban greening projects and enhance the long-term social benefits of these efforts. . reviving platforms for watershed and regional governance ecosystem-scale strategies inevitably implicate metropoli- tan, watershed, or coastal zone governance in planning, coordinating, regulating, funding, and implementing such projects. as climate impacts accelerate over the course of the century, projects akin to the southern louisiana mas- ter plan will likely need to be deployed faster and in more places. already, cities and states are recognizing the need for strengthening watershed management, and american history provides institutional precedents for large-scale initiatives. but gi-frr must also address local fiscal imperatives if this approach is to avoid unsustainable and inequitable develop- ment. this requires intermunicipal and intergovernmental coordination, tax redistribution, and potentially redrawing boundaries to realign municipalities with shifting environ- mental landscapes. american history provides numerous precedents for large-scale responses to ecosystem-scale hazards that are very different from contemporary approaches that ask every city to develop their own green infrastructure strategy. in the s and s, confronted with the dust bowl, president franklin d. roosevelt created the prairie states forestry project, which funded workers and farmers to plant million trees stretching , miles in a -mile wide band from canada to texas (sauer ). around the same time, the soil conservation service worked with farmers and ranchers in the west and midwest to conserve water and soil at an ecosystem scale (helms ). in the s, states adopted growth management policies to slow the consumption of agricultural and natural lands and created regional agencies to reduce pollution, manage flooding, and conserve coastal zones (bollens ; carruthers ; degrove ; gale ). in the s, the concept of integrated water resources management emphasized inte- grating spatial geographies, objectives across management goals, governance institutions, and time scales (cardwell et al. ; mukhtarov ). many of these institutions have been watered down over time, dismantled, or defunded (chapin ), but offer examples of institutions to revive. today, evidence suggests watershed planning for climate adaptation is resurgent. in , washington state’s depart- ment of ecology, the nature conservancy, and puget sound partnership created the floodplains by design program to reduce flood risk, restore salmon habitat, and preserve farm- land, working closely with communities, tribes, and farmers (wa doe ). in , texas passed legislation man- dating the division of the state into watershed basins and creation of regional flood management plans that feed into a statewide flood management plan. this is a break from past county-based flood control in the us state with the most flood-prone land and presidentially declared disasters (fer- guson ). following the growing interest in metropolitan regional climate adaptation collaboratives nationwide (shi ), the resilient mystic collaborative in metro boston became one of the country’s first watershed-scale adaptation collaboratives. it seeks to “prioritize, facilitate funding for, and implement cost-effective, multiple-benefit solutions that benefit the watershed as a whole through collective actions and/or site-specific interventions” (mrwa ). the regional plan associations’ th regional plan for the new york-new jersey-connecticut metropolitan area advocates the creation of a regional coastal commission across the three states that creates and distributes an adaptation trust fund (rpa ). what these proposals do not yet do is grapple with the fiscalization of land use and redrawing of municipal bounda- ries. while politically untouchable now, it would be sur- prising if this were not considered given projections of sea- level rise and expanding floodplains. could the municipal map of southeast florida remain unchanged with four feet of sea-level rise? however, fewer examples for metropoli- tan regionalism offer precedents for reforms under climate change. these include city–city and city–county consolida- tions, which are increasingly rare but have taken place where localities face fiscal stress or a crisis in infrastructure or in , detroit freely gave , acres of vacant land (with reduced property taxes) to millionaire john hantz to develop the country’s largest urban farm, ignoring the many community organiza- tions and leaders who had invested decades of unpaid labor in com- munity greening and farming. it is now a large-scale, commercial tree farm (vitiello and wolf-powers , pp. – ). socio-ecological practice research ( ) : – school districts that requires voters to approve the “nuclear” option. as another example, minneapolis/st. paul approved a regional tax in to incentivize development in the inner city and inner-ring suburbs, rather than subsidize exur- ban infrastructure expansion (orfield ). historically, pressures to regionalize have come from federal mandates or from local calls for reform (sometimes to sidestep federal mandates) (barbour ). federal and state funding for flood resilient infrastructure could be one way to incentivize local cooperation on land use, affordable housing, managed retreat, and gi-frr rather than competing local grant appli- cations. however, regional approaches can lend themselves to progressive or regressive political projects (keil ). moreover, while consolidation can in theory offer cost sav- ings, efficiency, improved planning capacity, and greater authority to raise revenues, evidence is lacking or mixed (carr and feiock ; swanstrom ). this calls for careful planning analysis to evaluate social, economic, and environmental impacts of regionalism under climate change. much more research is needed to explore these options in relation to managed retreat, gi-frr, and social justice. implications for practice and research the use of green infrastructure for flood risk reduction is evolving but has yet to grapple with the historic politi- cal, institutional, and governance underpinnings of this approach. ecologically functioning green infrastructure— unleashed rivers, sprawling wetlands—are inconsistent with the current governance landscape of fragmented local gov- ernments seeking to maximize local land values and mini- mize affordable housing. the design imagination for new ecological landscapes has far outpaced a reimagination of the new institutional and governance arrangements needed to enable nature-based solutions that advance social justice and ecological sustainability. failure to address this gap can result not only in continued flood risk but also render green infrastructure a marketing device for cities to tout their cli- mate and sustainability leadership without changing exist- ing unsustainable and inequitable development practices (garcia-lamarca et al. ; wachsmuth and angelo ). growing societal awareness of the twin crises of climate change and social justice worldwide as well as newfound appreciation of the need for local and regional sustainability brought on by the covid- pandemic create openings to consider innovative proposals that are both large-scale and justice-oriented. in this essay, i have argued that reimagining riparian or coastal landscapes as socio-ecological landscapes integrating human livelihoods, food production, and commu- nity development can disrupt long-standing “northern” con- cepts separating urban and rural spaces, and conserved nature versus human settlement. redrawing boundaries can help municipalities retreat, build on higher ground, and make way for ecologically restored landscapes. in so doing, cities have a chance to counteract historic patterns of municipal incorpo- ration that sought to segregate and insulate local tax dollars from being shared with less privileged groups. these propos- als build on past calls for green infrastructure to serve multi- functional purposes (meerow and newell ; sussams et al. ) but like goh ( ) emphasize attending to structural barriers and institutional reforms. green infrastructure alone cannot change the past  years of human history but fram- ing gi-frr in relation to barriers to justice and sustainable development can contribute to goals of progressive reform. for practitioners, this means opening the field to new par- ticipants from community development, black, hispanic, tribal, and immigrant communities, race and gender stud- ies, agriculture, and public health, among others. domestic and international indigenous groups, not just the dutch, have lived with water for millennia in ways that marry local live- lihoods, flood risk management, community governance, and spirituality. privileging their knowledge, that of black communities who were among the first farmers of colonial america, or bringing in immigrant perspectives can expand the possibilities of green infrastructure and diversify, com- plement, and positively complicate current gi-frr practices. moreover, gi-frr practitioners can engage those working in urban governance, administration, and activism to integrate nature-based solutions into federal and state-led policies over natural resource management, infrastructure funding, housing development, and local government fiscal policy. this essay’s proposals invite questions about feasibil- ity and design that provide fertile ground for convergent research among practitioners, social scientists, ecologists, engineers, agriculture specialists, lawyers, public administrators, nonprofits, and community organizations. researchers can build the evidence base that helps cities and advocacy groups assess what green infrastructure can realistically deliver (e.g., ruckelshaus et al. , p. ), how much land might be needed to have gi-frr protect urban settlements, what the impacts are to cities, and what configurations enable cities to expand gi-frr. they can also help assess how much urban 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for flood risk reduction 	 . connecting gi-frr to urban agriculture and community development 	 . reviving platforms for watershed and regional governance 	 implications for practice and research 	references laplage em revista (international), vol. , n. , may.- aug. , p. - issn: - the development of modern technologies is reflected in the process of social network communication. web space has become not only a sphere of language realisation, nowadays it is a space which its own language and rules. appearance of new text formats testifies to dynamic tendencies in discourse evolution (aleksandrova et al., ; malyuga, ). thus, language of the internet performs its own functions in the internet discourse. graphical presentation of the message plays an important role in the process of internet communication. it helps to create special structure of the whole message. thus, hashtags are one of the elements of internet communication that perform specific functions and are formed according to specific rules. the relevance of the research topic is determined by the appearance of new linguistic phenomenon such as hashtag text. the process of hashtagging has recently appeared in modern life but it has influenced the way people get and transmit information (boyd; ellison, ). many scientists from other fields of study such as marketing or pr have already drawn their attention to this phenomenon but from the linguistic point of view hashtags have not been studied properly yet. the purpose of the study is to provide the analysis of hashtag as text format and figure out the main function and special types of graphical realisation of hashtags. the research is based on the material of russian and foreign scientists who have already studied hashtag from linguistic perspective. the works taken as theoretical basis for our article are modern and relevant as the study of hashtag as the element of linguistic study has begun recently. the results of the analysis can be used for further study of hashtags as linguistic phenomenon. the results of the analysis will help to understand the basic functions and types of graphical presentation of hashtags. the received results demonstrate for what purposes hashtags are used in the social network. moreover, it shows how the social network users can form the hashtags to fulfil different functions. in the context of the study, we speak about hashtag as text format following navoloka ( ) who mentions in her work that hashtags are presented as a new text format of the internet. she defines the term text and then presents the definition of the term hashtag text, discussing their categorical features. the study demonstrates that hashtags have the right to be called as hashtag text, as they have the same categorical features as the ordinary text (kozlovskaya; rastyagaev; solzhenikina, ). galperin ( ) presents the following definition of the term text. it is understood as the product of speech generation process. it is a message that has special content, organised according to the model of one of the message forms existing in the literary language and characterised by its own distinctive features. navoloka ( ) says that hashtags as new forms of the text are formed according to their own special rules and peculiarities. following the idea of v.g. admoni ( ) it is claimed that hashtag text is a type of small-format texts. this main feature is determined by the pragmatic function of virtual communication, when the participants want to transmit a great amount of information using as few language units as possible (malyuga; mccarthy, ; kharkovskaya; ponomarenko; radyuk, ). svetlana a. burikova phd in philology. associate professor. senior lecturer in foreign languages department, faculty of economics, peoples’ friendship university of russia (rudn university). orcid: http://orcid.org/ - - - e-mail: burikova-sa@rudn.ru ekaterina ovchinnikova associate professor at peoples’ friendship university of russia (rudn university). orcid: https://orcid.org/ - - - e-mail: katjaow@mail.ru received in: - - approved in: - - doi: https://doi.org/ . /s p. - mailto:burikova-sa@rudn.ru https://doi.org/ . /s - p. - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - • hashtag as modern text format in linguistics laplage em revista (international), vol. , n. , may.- aug. , p. - issn: - according to merriam-webster dictionary online hashtag is a word or phrase that starts with the symbol # and that briefly indicates what a message is about. patrusheva ( ) in her scientific article speaks about the process of hashtag usage as a new communicative process. she claims about the extension of hashtag functions and presents the classification according to functions and topics. nowadays hashtags are more that only the markers of the topic. they have extended their functional variability and now perform more functions than before. kaygorodova ( ) analysing hashtags as new media phenomenon among cognitive structures of the internet follows the classification of hashtag functions presented by foreign scientists daer, hoffmann, goodman ( ). according to this classification hashtag are defined as: • emphasising; • critiquing; • identifying; • iterating; • rallying. the following classification proofs the idea that functional abilities of hashtags in the social network today are much wider than some years ago. wikström ( ) investigates in his study different communicative functions that hashtags perform in written communication from a linguistic pragmatic perspective. hashtags as language devices are used for structuring the information, playing games, engaging in meta-commentary. hashtags are used on social network sites like twitter, instagram and facebook. the users refer to hashtag application for different reasons (zappavigna, ). thus, talking about hashtag functions we can highlight the fact that their functions are diverse. each author of the message uses the hashtag according to the goal he/she wants to reach. the functions of hashtags depend on their graphical presentation and types of word-formation. we have chosen instagram as the material of the research as instagram is one of the most popular virtual platforms used today. instagram is a form of micro blogging where the users can post photos or videos adding the description of them under their post. this fact allows us to speak about the publications made on instagram as the example of creolised text (navoloka, ). under creolised text according to sorokin, tarasov ( ) we understand the material that consists of two inhomogeneous parts: verbal (language), non-verbal (belonging to other sign systems rather than natural language). the data were collected using the continuous sampling method. therefore, we have chosen publications that have hashtags for the analysis. descriptive qualitative method was used to classify and analyse hashtags according to their functions, types of hashtag construction and the position according to the post. the quantitative method is related to the frequency of the usage of different categories. the percentage of the frequency of usage was presented using a pie diagram. with the performed analysis of the chosen hashtags, we have figured out the functions that hashtags perform on instagram. the analysis is displayed in table . svetlana a. burikova, ekaterina ovchinnikova • laplage em revista (international), vol. , n. , may.- aug. , p. - issn: - table . the functional variability of hashtags. topic of hashtag the purpose of usage social or political events to draw the attention of the audience to some social or political events, to speed up the spread of information. different topics (fashion, sport, travelling, healthy lifestyle etc.) to group the information that refers to one and the same topic. communication to unite some groups of social network users, provide their further communication devoted to the common topic. advertising of goods or services to promote goods or services, to draw user’s attention to them expression of emotions to underline personal attitude towards event or situation, to comment it. source: search data. due to the performed analysis, we can figure out different functions of hashtags that depend on the purpose of their usage and the topic they refer to. let us demonstrate it on examples. social movement black lives matter is well known all over the world. activists try to bring justice, healing and freedom to black people across the globe. to provide the spread of the information devoted to this topic and to draw the attention of people from all over the world, the social movement the struggle has moved to social network. thus, #blacklivesmatter appeared on twitter and instagram and caused a great response. hashtags also group the information according to different features. it can be the grouping according to geo-tags like #london, #nyc, #dubai, #topoftheworld for empire state building. hashtags of this category can also serve as branded hashtags that have the name of the brand in their construction like #cocacola, #audi, #herbalessences, #vancleefalhambra. moreover, the hashtags of this category can group the messages of the common topic like #sport, #beauty, #art, #style etc. hashtags that are used to provide communication between the users can also call for activity and likes to promote the social network account, for example, #likeforlike, #follow follow, #commentback, #followme. hashtags used for social network promotion contain both descriptive hashtags like #naturalshampoo, #leatherbag, #blackdress but they also have another category that can be called as author`s hashtags.these hashtags are usually unique and exclusive. for example, #strongerthantime, #withitalyforitaly forcar advertising; #cleanbeauty, #plantpowerineveryshower, #coloristheanswer for the promotion of beauty and cosmetic products. to express emotions and to draw attention to their posts the authors invent their own creative hashtags #whatveganseat, #travellingtheworld, #instapassport, #travelgram etc. thus, according to the performed analysis we can claim that hashtags on instagram perform various functions. the choice of a hashtag depends on the goal that the author wants to reach considering the sphere of hashtag application (navoloka, ). in our study we have also analysed the way of hashtags graphical presentation. this analysis will help us to understand what types of hashtags are used in their composition. following caleffi ( ) we take into account the number of words or other signs in the hashtag. the results of the performed analysis are shown in table . • hashtag as modern text format in linguistics laplage em revista (international), vol. , n. , may.- aug. , p. - issn: - table . types of english hashtags type of hashtag example # +abbreviation #nyc # + lexeme #sport, #london, #run # + lexemes or more #sportmotivation, #justdoit # + coinage #instafood, #instahotel # + initialisms #ootd = outfit of the day # + letters and numbers #like like # you source: search data. we have studied the chosen hashtags and have classified them according to the number and types of words or other signs that follow after #. we can conclude that after the analysis of chosen hashtags we can figure out different types found on instagram. all hashtags have their contextual meaning and perform different functions. the percentage of hashtag types according to the frequency of their usage is presented using a pie diagram. see figure . figure . hashtag types. the frequency of usage on instagram. source: search data. hashtags are flexible. they have different positions according to the post. following zappavigna ( ) we distinguish: • hashtags preceding a post • hashtags integrated within a post • hashtags following the post. following the idea of mahfouz, iman m. ( ) we summarise the data. figure displays the distribution of hashtags position according to the post. % % % % % % # +abbreviation # + lexeme # + lexemes or more # + coinage # + initialisms # + letters and numbers svetlana a. burikova, ekaterina ovchinnikova • laplage em revista (international), vol. , n. , may.- aug. , p. - issn: - figure . distribution of hashtag position source: search data. according to the figure we can see that the most hashtags are following the post. they are used as additional information after the main message. very few hashtags precede the post. their functional position is to designate the type of a post or to make an announcement. similarly, few hashtags are used as the part of the main message. they are integrated in the structure of the post and function as part of its syntactic structure. the above analysis has revealed the characteristics and features of hashtags as new emerging linguistic items. the results of the performed analysis may be used for further study of hashtags as language units. at the present stage of development, the society is under the influence of the process of globalisation. it contributes to the development and the emergence of new concepts and phenomena in all spheres of life (malyuga; mccarthy, ). the virtual space is also developing and transforming. hashtags are used as the main tolls for communication and promotion within the social network. hashtags are becoming new elements of linguistic study. when hashtagging people want to reach different goals and use hashtags to perform various tasks. hashtags have expanded their functional variability. they are no longer used as only a marker for the post, they attract attention to important events, promote goods and services, express emotions, provide the communication (schurina, ). in our work we have studied hashtag text as new linguistic phenomenon. we have figured out the functions that hashtags fulfil on instagram, we have distinguished hashtags into different categories according to their type and the position in the post. all these factors can be useful as the material for the further development of hashtags as linguistic and marketing mechanisms. the prospects for the further development of this topic are determined by the relevance, novelty and unresolved issues of this area of linguistic research. this paper has been supported by the rudn university strategic academic leadership program. % % % preceding a post integrated within a post following a post • hashtag as modern text format in linguistics laplage em revista (international), vol. , n. , may.- aug. , p. - issn: - admoni, v.g. grammar and text. voprosy jazykoznanija [topics in the study of language] , p. - . city: moscow, . aleksandrova, o.v.; mendzheritskaya, e.o.; malakhova, v.l. dynamic changes in modern english discourse. training, language and culture, ( ), - , . available at: https://www.researchgate.net/publication/ _dynamic_changes_in_modern_englis h_discourse. access: jan. . boyd, d.; ellison, n. social network sites: definition, history, and scholarship. journal of computer mediated communication, ( ), - , . available at: https://academic.oup.com/jcmc/article/ / / / . access: jan. . caleffi, p. the “hashtag”. a new word or a new rule? 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https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/heshteg-tekst-kak-novyy-format-teksta-v-internet-prostranstve-na-primere-sotsialnoy-seti-instagram/viewer https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/heshteg-tekst-kak-novyy-format-teksta-v-internet-prostranstve-na-primere-sotsialnoy-seti-instagram/viewer https://scipress.ru/philology/articles/kogeziya-i-kogerentnost-kak-osnovnye-kategorii-v-kheshteg-tekste.html https://scipress.ru/philology/articles/kogeziya-i-kogerentnost-kak-osnovnye-kategorii-v-kheshteg-tekste.html https://journals.udsu.ru/history-philology/article/view/ / https://journals.udsu.ru/history-philology/article/view/ / https://cyberleninka.ru/article/n/komunikativno-igrovoy-potentsial-heshtegov https://www.researchgate.net/publication/ _srynotfunny_communicative_functions_of_hashtags_on_twitter https://www.researchgate.net/publication/ _srynotfunny_communicative_functions_of_hashtags_on_twitter https://www.researchgate.net/publication/ _ambient_affiliation_a_linguistic_perspective_on_twitter https://www.researchgate.net/publication/ _ambient_affiliation_a_linguistic_perspective_on_twitter https://www.academia.edu/ /searchable_talk_the_linguistic_functions_of_hashtags • hashtag as modern text format in linguistics laplage em revista (international), vol. , n. , may.- aug. , p. - issn: - atualmente as tecnologias modernas da internet possuem um papel fundamental em nossa vida. o presente artigo retrata as peculiariades dos hashtags como novo formato de texto utilizado nas redes sociais. o artigo apresenta as características do texto, a classificação das funções e os tipos de hashtags de acordo com a sua construção e posição na postagem. diferentes tipos de hashtags foram submetidos à análise. o método de amostragem contínua, a análise qualitativa descritiva e a análise quantitativa permitiram aos autores chegar à conclusão sobre as hashtags como ferramentas linguísticas. como resultado, cinco funções de hashtag e seis tipos de hashtag foram identificados. essas descobertas ajudariam a entender o discurso online moderno e a provar a ideia de que as hashtags são consideradas elementos significativos de comunicação em rede social. nowadays modern internet technologies play an important role in our life. the present article deals with the peculiarities of hashtags as new text format used in social network. the article presents characteristic features of hashtag text, classification of hashtag functions, types of hashtags according to their construction and the position of hashtags in the post. different types of hashtags were subjected to the analysis. continuous sampling method, descriptive qualitative and quantitative analysis allowed the authors to concluded about hashtags as linguistic tools. as a result, five hashtag functions and six hashtag types were identified. these findings would help to understand modern online discourse and to prove the idea that hashtags are considered as meaningful elements of social network communication. hoy internet tecnologías modernas son muy importante. este artículo se trata de los particularidades de hashtags que son una nueva forma del texto. el artículo presenta las características del hashtag texto, la clasificación de sus funciones y los tipos según su construcción y la posición en el post. en el artículo los autores analizaron diferentes tipos de hashtags. para hacer un análisis se utilizaron los siguientes métodos: los métodos de muestreo continuo, el análisis cualitativo descriptivo y el análisis cuantitativo. estas formas de la investigación han ayudado a sacar ciertas conclusiones. como resultado tenemos funciónes de hashtags y tipos de hashtags. con los resultados podemos entender el online discurso moderno, confirmar la idea de que los hashtags son los elementos significados de la comunicación en las redes sociales. hashtag. formação e texto de hashtag. instagram, comunicação na internet. linguística. hashtag. hashtag formation and text. instagram. internet communication. linguistics. hashtag. la formación y texto del hashtag, instagram. comunicación por internet. lingüística. after the initial covid- surge: a phased radiology departmental re-opening plan commentary after the initial covid- surge: a phased radiology departmental re-opening plan victor j. seghers , & nilesh k. desai , & prakash m. masand , & sadia nasir & traci l. foster & dennis a. indiero & trent d. johnson & thierry a. g. m. huisman , received: may /revised: july /accepted: august # springer-verlag gmbh germany, part of springer nature the global coronavirus disease (covid- ) pan- demic has had a rapid and unprecedented impact upon global health and health care operations [ – ]. in the ini- tial phase of the outbreak, a significant ramping down of nonessential medical care was necessary to prepare hos- pitals for the forecasted surge in covid- patients. simultaneously, the spread of the severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus (sars-cov- ), which causes covid- , had to be contained and slowed (“flattening of the curve”). social distancing, stay home/work safe orders, protective measures for vulnerable individuals (e.g., immunocompromised patients), masking protocols, visitation policies, testing and many more measures re- sulted in an accelerated but necessary ramping down of elective hospital services [ – ]. all medical specialties, including radiology, were affected. in the last months, many radiology departments experienced a – % de- crease in imaging studies [ ]. in addition to its impact on mortality and human suffering, covid- ’s economic impact upon hospital operations has been significant. but what happens when the initial critical phase of the covid- outbreak has passed? hospital operations must be ramped up again to care for patients whose treatments have been postponed. unfortunately, a sars-cov- vac- cine is not expected in the near future and an effective treatment is not yet available [ , ]. social distancing and masking policies are expected to persist to contain and slow repeat surges of sars-cov- infections. consequently, we must break from the past and accept a new normal in our health care approach. the reopening of a safe radiology service requires a carefully designed plan with creative solutions and lays the foundation for an updated imaging department that incorporates many of the changes implemented during the pandemic. in this manuscript, we present insights for how to design and execute a phased reopening of a radiology department after the pandemic outbreak becomes contained. leadership, organization and communication a successful plan should follow a concept of five cs, which refers to communication, coordination, collaboration, creativity and concentration of resources. each plan must have well-defined short-, medium- and long-term goals; col- lect objective metrics for success; and be summarized in a living document that is available to all key players and is updated and adapted in a very dynamic way for unexpected developments. in addition, rules of engagement should be established. examples of these rules include (a) maintain com- pliance with local, state and federal guidelines; (b) ensure safety of patients, families and workforce; (c) maximize utili- zation of technology and automation; (d) optimize throughput and financial performance; and (e) understand and match changing customer preferences with service offerings. a plan cannot be designed or implemented without a clear leadership and reporting structure. the chief executive officer and president of texas children’s hospital, mark a. wallace, has defined leadership maxims. one of the most important is, “leadership always influences or determines outcomes — not some of the time, but all of the time.” in addition, to optimize the five cs we have chosen to follow the “team of teams” concept described by gen. stanley mcchrystal et al. [ ]. the team of teams approach emphasizes a shared * victor j. seghers vjsegher@texaschildrens.org edward b. singleton department of radiology, texas children’s hospital, fannin st., suite , houston, tx , usa department of radiology, baylor college of medicine, houston, tx, usa https://doi.org/ . /s - - - / published online: august pediatric radiology ( ) : – http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:vjsegher@texaschildrens.org consciousness and strong lateral connectivity between teams in which people can see the big picture and the interdependent nature of their work. this improved understanding of the problems is crucial to enable empowered execution, in which leaders encourage and nurture decision-making at all team levels. in our team of teams approach, the department of radiology had multiple teams working simultaneously on various goals. one of our first teams was a small group of radiology leaders tasked at the onset of our local covid- crisis to work over a weekend to brainstorm ideas and plan how to ramp up operations. these ideas quickly evolved and were subsequently enshrined in a shared working document where all action items, goals, metrics of success, and timelines were recorded and color-coded to visually demonstrate status and progress (fig. ). progress and obstacles of the various teams are discussed in a daily virtual microsoft teams con- ference (microsoft corp., redmond, wa) where team leaders work on this document and are given daily insight into hospi- tal, city and state status, operations and goals. this team is led by the hospital executive in charge for the department of radiology and includes representatives of the various radiology clinical subspecialties (neuroradiology, body radi- ology and interventional radiology), administrative directors of all hospital campuses, and the community service chief and radiologist-in-chief. while the radiologist-in-chief also partic- ipates in daily meetings with other clinical service chiefs and executive leadership for the hospital, the radiologist-in-chief is an integral member of the systemwide “phased recovery and redesign team” as well, which includes team captains for infection control, surgery, anesthesia, emergency and urgent care centers, radiology, pathology, ambulatory medicine, spe- cialty care centers, e-health, revenue cycle and billing, and marketing and public relations. a human resources represen- tative, legal and risk compliance officer, and a member of the supply chain are consulted as needed. during these daily meetings, high-level issues regarding covid- testing, current covid- -positive patient cen- sus, personal protective equipment (ppe) availability, travel guidelines, workforce utilization guidelines, etc., are discussed. in the same meeting, the team captain for radiology presents the relevant details of the radiology reopening prog- ress, which allows for an orchestrated and aligned systemwide reopening of clinical services. the team of teams approach is fig. sample working document that includes all radiology action items, goals, metrics of success, and timelines. this document should be accessible to all members of the teams, reviewed and updated daily. color-coding the various action items and metrics promotes visual demonstration of status and focuses attention on problem areas pediatr radiol ( ) : – key to ensuring continued alignment among the hospital ex- ecutives, administrators, and clinical leaders. although a core group of administrative and clinical radiology leaders was involved in the majority of the teams to provide continuity, particularly as we pivoted from ramping down operations to recovery, team membership was otherwise fluid to better re- flect evolving conditions and priorities. to increase buy-in and engagement with the reopening plan as well as commu- nication of information gleaned via roles in overseeing all radiology teams and collaboration with senior executive lead- ership, the radiologist-in-chief assembles daily progress re- ports that are communicated to the radiology faculty, staff and administrators. setting the goals the first step of a successful reopening plan is to set realistic goals and policies, with timing dependent on each institution’s local conditions. planning for a phased reopening is difficult and takes time, and our initial discussion regarding ramping up operations occurred weeks prior to execution. we aimed for a phased reopening with % pre-covid imaging vol- ume for the first week, followed by % the second week and % the third week. at our institution, the department of radiology was one of the first clinical departments to reopen. the impetus for the % imaging volume goal was to ensure that the backlog of unscheduled new imaging orders and the studies that were postponed or cancelled during the initial phase of the covid- outbreak were serviced prior to the expected generation of new imaging orders upon reopening of the ambulatory clinics. our imaging department did not wish to be a limiting factor for future patient visits and health care management, our clinical partners, and their reopening plans. the % volume targets were achievable through offering new expanded imaging slots during the evenings and on weekends, discussed in greater detail in the “expanded imag- ing scheduling grid” section. scheduling templates and staffing models for the % volume target are temporary and are expected to revert to the % volume target upon servicing the imaging backlog. these goals were carefully aligned with the phased opening of the various clinics within the organization and communicated to hospital providers and private practice referrers. multiple lines of often duplicative communication is required, whether through global emails, medical staff meetings, administrative leadership forums, websites, departmental faculty meetings, or one-on-one com- munication. physician liaisons in departments that are fre- quent referrers to radiology (otolaryngology, neurosurgery, neurology, endocrinology, gastroenterology, cardiology, urol- ogy, orthopedics, and hematology/oncology) were also iden- tified and contacted to accelerate the rescheduling of patients and to communicate that radiology is available to service new outpatient imaging orders. next to the organizational chal- lenges of flexing up a radiologic service, any plan must ad- dress and mitigate fears of the patients and staff that it is safe to come to the hospital. in the following paragraphs we summa- rize our approach for a systemwide reopening. staff health assurance it is our responsibility to offer a healthy and, most important, safe sars-cov- work environment for all our employees. the actions that can slow the covid- outbreak must con- tinue. to effectively diminish employees’ fear of getting in- fected, the organization must aggressively invest in safe workflows. our policy includes screening of all employees entering the hospital, using a smartphone app via qr code, no-touch thermal imaging cameras for detecting elevated skin temperatures, mandatory masking for everyone, and social distancing markers on the floors throughout the hospital and within the elevators. departmental break rooms also require social distancing. signage limiting number of employees in the break rooms is advised as well as the wide availability of disinfectant wipes to clean refrigerators, microwaves, and cof- fee machines after each use. in addition, a hospital-wide ini- tiative included removing all self-service areas within the res- taurants and only offering prepackaged foods. moreover, wide availability of ppe should be guaranteed and employees that might be exposed to aerosolizing procedures or covid- patients should be fitted for an n- mask in advance [ ]. finally, wide access of the staff and faculty to rapid testing after unprotected exposure to a positive patient or expression of symptoms including both direct virus detection and anti- body testing is essential. collaboration with the infection con- trol team regarding ppe utilization, definition of aerosol- generating procedures, and testing policies is important to ensure that departmental decisions are in compliance with the institution and evidence-driven. whenever possible, sur- veillance testing on a regular basis for the staff most exposed should be offered. patient health evaluation and assurance much planning and effort are required before imaging proce- dures for multiple categories of patients including hospital and remote-site outpatients, inpatients, urgent care and emergency center patients. depending on the local settings of each radi- ology department, various combinations of policies might be implemented and are summarized in table . at our institution, prior to their scheduled imaging ap- pointment patients receive messaging via phone, text or mail describing what to expect upon arrival at the hospital or imaging center and reassurance that extensive pediatr radiol ( ) : – procedures have been enacted to limit exposure and as- sure their safety. because hospital and departmental safety procedures are expected to evolve over time, it is impor- tant to provide a link to a website in the messaging to ensure the patients always have access to the most up- to-date information [ ]. additional pre-visit screening for symptoms concerning for covid- at least h prior to the date of imaging should also be performed. for imaging exams not requiring sedation, these phone calls can be made by modality technologists and docu- mented in the electronic medical record. patients who fail screening can have their imaging appointment postponed for weeks or be referred for covid- testing. at our institution, only outpatients undergoing procedures requir- ing sedation are automatically tested for sars-cov- . department-approved scripting can enable streamlined and consistent communication, and ensure that crucial in- formation is conveyed appropriately. in addition to further reassuring patients of the numerous safety procedures that exist, these calls also serve to decrease incidence of no- show appointments. current radiology staffing is likely significantly reduced and increased staffing is needed to accommodate any reopening plan, so ensuring that pa- tients present for their appointments is crucial. to support social distancing, only one family member should be allowed with the patient on the day of the imaging appointment. a patient screening process with mandatory masking at designated entrances of the hospital should be performed, similar to what has been described for employees, with additional secondary screening at radiology check-in lo- cations. a virtual screening and check-in process performed via smartphone app and qr code and linked to the electronic medical record can ensure that wait times are kept to a mini- mum. this process could also be utilized to instruct patients to call the radiology front desk upon arrival at the parking lot of the hospital. depending on the number of people in the waiting room, radiology personnel would request they remain in their car until notified to appear for their imaging exam. processes to ensure short wait times for families can be created to support patient satisfaction metrics. escalation procedures should be established for when patients or families refuse to wear masks or have questions regarding safety. welcome desks in radiology reception areas should have plexiglass shielding installed to limit potential exposure between patients and staff, and waiting rooms should be redesigned to limit the number of people present at any one time. removing existing seating and converting seating from cloth- to vinyl-covered seats to make cleaning easier can be quick and cost-effective methods. all outpatients undergoing interventional radiology procedures or imaging exams requiring sedation are screened at least h in advance by radiology nursing staff, documented in the electronic medical record, and scheduled for covid- testing, preferably via drive- through testing locations at all radiology locations (fig. ). the ability to perform rapid testing with results available in a few hours at all imaging locations allows screening and testing to be performed as close to the im- aging appointment as possible and is particularly helpful to enable a single visit for out-of-town patients. to streamline workflows and decrease need to contact order- ing physicians, radiologists place orders for testing. all symptomatic patients who fail radiology screening or test positive for covid- report to a dedicated clinic staffed by anesthesia providers who assess the patients and make treatment and disposition recommendations. table staff and patient health evaluation and assurance . pre-imaging phone call explaining to patients what to expect on arrival and reassurance that extensive measurements are being followed to limit exposure . pre-visit screening on the phone – h prior to the date of imaging . on-site hospital entrance qr code-assisted screening with secondary screening at welcome desks . temperature measurements, masking, etc. . parking-lot check-in . secondary screening at radiology welcome desk documented with extra “dot” on name tag . plexiglas shielding of all welcome desks . uniform masking of all patients and employees . single parent visitation . pre-visit sars-cov- testing for all sedated/intubated patients, drive-through testing – h prior to date of imaging . ppe for all aerosolizing imaging and interventional procedures . n- mask fitting for at-risk staff and faculty . daily metrics including % no-shows . extended hours allowing for more time spacing between imaging studies . home workstations for all faculty . identification of faculty at risk to primarily support clinical services from home (> years old, immunocompromised, etc.) . daily updates for faculty and staff . consider separate ip and op scanner utilization/scheduling . communication strategy to alert hospital providers and private practices that radiology is open and safe . identification of clinical liaisons outside radiology to better triage and accelerate patient rescheduling . value of a phased reopening plan, – – – % . cancellation of academic days/administrative days for faculty in preparation of reopening and surge of postponed studies . academic travel restrictions until the end of the year in order to upgrade the clinical task force availability . work-volume-linked dynamic flexing down and flexing up of staff h hours, ip inpatient, op outpatient, ppe personal protective equipment, qr quick response, sars-cov- severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus pediatr radiol ( ) : – hospital inpatients should be tested for covid- upon admission and again for new or progressive symptoms. patients presenting to the emergency department or inpatients who require emergent imaging are treated as a person under investigation (pui) requiring full ppe on the part of radiology staff. fig. outpatient screening and testing workflows in preparation for procedures requiring sedation. app advanced practice provider, md medical doctor, pass pediatric anesthesia screening service (a dedicated clinic staffed by anesthesiologists and nurse practitioners who screen patients with conditions that might increase risk during anesthesia), sars cov- severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus pediatr radiol ( ) : – expanded imaging scheduling grid to achieve pre-covid- imaging volumes, work through the backlog of cases rescheduled in preparation for the expect- ed surge of patients, and support social distancing measures to prevent patient clustering, multiple changes can be considered including shorter imaging protocols, reduced research in favor of clinical exam volume, and scheduling covid- -positive patients separately from negative patients. we have found that offering expanded scheduling slots during weekday evening hours and on weekends is a quick and effective response. this is difficult with existing staffing models, even more so if the hospital is reluctant to bring back flexed down or furloughed staff as a result of fiscal and operational uncertainty. constant attention to percentage of filled imaging slots and no-shows allows for dynamic flexing up or down of staff relative to work volume, and for discovering trends and making adjust- ments in templates and workflows. this process is challenging because not all modalities or physical locations are equally staffed. identifying the hours of operation for each modality, weekdays and weekends, as well as availability for sedated and non-sedated slots (e.g., mri and interventional radiology) is necessary. ensuring that sufficient gaps between imaging slots exist to prevent patient clustering is required. many in- terdependent variables need to be considered in creating these slots, and communication is crucial. for example, a particular modality might have sufficient technologists and radiologists but lack nursing or front desk support staff. awareness of operations in other areas of the hospital is important because not all clinics will re-open at the same speed, particularly the lower-revenue-generating departments. this creates the op- portunity to utilize non-radiology departmental staff through- out the hospital who might otherwise be furloughed but can be flexed up earlier and more productively. expanded access for sedation slots is likely to be chal- lenging because anesthesia partners will also be utilized aggressively in surgical re-opening plans. however, crea- tive thinking among team members can overcome some challenges of scarcity. for example, if in order to better manage patient throughput certain units or rooms will be temporarily shut down, some efficiencies could occur such as creation of dedicated sedation and non-sedation mr units or operations to better separate inpatient from outpatient volumes. as the new scheduling grids are built and backfilled by patients rescheduled in preparation for the surge, it might be easier initially to bypass centralized scheduling departments whose staff are flexed down in favor of manual scheduling within radiology, whose leaders are familiar with the newly created expanded im- aging schedules. however, as radiology operations in- crease and staff members are needed to handle larger im- aging volumes, a transition back to centralized scheduling might be beneficial. radiologist safety and staffing plan during the initial phase of the covid- outbreak, fac- ulty and staff who were most at risk (e.g., > years of age, immunocompromised) were identified and prioritized to provide clinical services from home. the remaining faculty were placed in non-overlapping teams either working from home or spaced apart in reading rooms to promote social distancing. for institutions interested in developing or broadening home capability for the picture archiving and communication system (pacs), a practical guide including technical specifications has recently been published [ ]. our trainees were sent home, and research efforts were significantly curtailed. clinical conferences, administrative meetings and individual case discussions with trainees or colleagues are held virtually, using a mix- ture of zoom (zoom technologies, san jose, ca), webex (cisco systems, san jose, ca) and microsoft teams. for large groups, it has been helpful to use web cameras and chat features of the video conferencing platforms to im- prove engagement and efficiency of discussion. additionally, all at-risk faculty and staff were fitted for n- masks, and we developed policies ensuring ppe usage for all aerosolizing imaging and interventional pro- cedures. with low clinical volumes, many academic hos- pitals have encouraged radiologists to take vacation or have temporarily ceased financially supporting meeting and academic time in order to upgrade the clinical taskforce availability in expectation of reopening plans and a surge of postponed examinations. at our institution, physician and executive salaries have been temporarily reduced by – %, and radiologists were instructed to use up to % of their annual vacation by june , , and only schedule week of vacation over the summer to ensure clinical coverage in light of expanded imaging templates afterhours, on weekdays and on weekends. in designing a reopening plan, on-site radiologist staffing needs to increase in accordance with increased clinical volumes. radiologists provide a necessary sup- port to referring clinicians beyond their ability to provide image interpretation. leadership within the department and greater clinical integration are needed to ensure that radiology does not simply become a commodity in these financially challenged times. nevertheless, in the absence of a sars-cov- vaccine, social distancing practices will need to continue, which will affect rotational workflows and reading room occupancy rules. guidelines are needed to ensure that most radiologists continue to work in the hospital while leveraging the benefits of home pacs to equitably address health concerns, improve commuting times, increase morale and mitigate issues of burnout, and extend coverage in the evenings and on weekends without the need to be on-site [ ]. pediatr radiol ( ) : – daily assessment/metrics of success a radiology department ramp-up plan will involve many peo- ple, teams and interdependent variables, and it is important to perform daily assessments and determine metrics of success. creation of virtual dashboards enables rapid assessment and dissemination of information and trends. daily communica- tion of the number of covid- tests performed on patients and staff, positive tests, quarantined staff, testing locations, and amount of available ppe is important to assure staff that they remain safe despite efforts to re-open operations. once expanded scheduling templates have been created, prospec- tive analysis of how many slots have been filled for the next day and week will help justify increased labor costs of staffing. retrospective assessment of the daily imaging vol- umes and no-show rate will further verify that staffing is in alignment with imaging volumes and that the scheduling and communication plan is working. as many non-urgent exams are rescheduled to accommodate the expected surge of covid- -positive inpatients, evaluation over time of the backlog of exams to be scheduled will determine whether the new expanded templates are sufficient or need to be ad- justed. this analysis of orders to be scheduled is also an im- portant metric of the future expected volume for the radiology department and can be used to assess how rapidly clinical departments who frequently refer to radiology are re- opening operations. as mentioned, anesthesia support for ex- panded sedation slots might be challenging, so utilization of pre-determined metric thresholds such as at least % utiliza- tion of sedation slots will help justify additional requests for service. finally, financial analysis of current operations rela- tive to budget is necessary to judge performance of the ramp- up plan. through daily, weekly and monthly assessment, trends will be discovered that can be used to create positive momentum for staff, faculty and administration and further help achieve buy-in for the plan. from crisis to opportunity “a crisis is a productive state. you simply have to get rid of its aftertaste of catastrophe.” — max frisch, swiss playwright and novelist ( – ) the coronavirus pandemic has been a trial by fire in crisis management. radiology leaders have had to make difficult, stressful and quick decisions while projecting a sense of calm and confidence. as radiology departments begin recovery op- erations, some will attempt to restore familiar routines, pro- cesses and workflows. however, to ignore the opportunity to redesign a post-covid- radiology service is a mistake. prior to the pandemic, all our departments had vexing issues to a certain degree, ranging from small to large, and insignif- icant to critical. the overwhelming need to expand operations to reclaim volume and finances while maintaining access and safety for patients and staff means that there has never been a better opportunity to create positive and lasting change [ ]. for guidance to what changes should be considered, a focus on our patients and attention to trends already occurring be- fore the pandemic is helpful (table ). this can include patient-directed online scheduling and expanded access to im- aging, offering same-day service with hours and locations adapted to the patient and family lifestyle; improved use of virtual dashboards to more easily track various metrics includ- ing mr efficiency, sedation utilization, and length of patient stay in the imaging department; and investment in table radiology: the opportunity to re-design operations post covid- . flexible opening hours adapted to patient and family lifestyles . bringing imaging to the patient: imaging sites within shopping centers, mobile ultrasound units close to schools or sports centers . online scheduling using decision-tree algorithms to ensure patients can schedule themselves at the right place, the right time and on the right camera . combined imaging with other diagnostic services in standalone diagnostic centers, e.g., pathology or phlebotomy services . combined imaging with other after-hours services such as physical therapy for children with musculoskeletal (msk) injuries . continued development of subspecialty pediatric radiology expertise (neurology, interventional, nuclear, cardiac, msk, fetal radiology) and offering / teleradiology services to small and mid-size adult hospitals . extended telemedicine to interventional radiology (ir) services, e.g., vascular anomalies clinic, individual ir clinic appointments . developed at-home work guidelines for radiologists to leverage benefits of home pacs . expanded walk-in services, e.g., same-day imaging + clinic visit service . redesigned radiology research program to better develop academic careers and focus on topics that match the expertise of the institution . improved departmental website and social media strategy to better communicate with patients . improved mr efficiency, e.g., standardization and shorter imaging protocols, separation of inpatients & outpatients, sedated and non-sedated patients, alternative methods to sedation such as mock mri scanner, child life specialists, therapy animals . greater use of virtual dashboards and patient imaging/care coordinators to improve patient throughput and increase patient satisfaction . investment in leadership development, diversity and inclusion, physician wellness . prioritized value over imaging volume through evidence-based clinical decision support pacs picture archiving and communication systems pediatr radiol ( ) : – telemedicine and teleradiology platforms to better enable pe- diatric radiology subspecialty expertise to come to the patient, no matter their location. while a primary focus for any initial departmental re-opening plan will be to reclaim imaging vol- umes, national health care trends prioritize value of imaging services along with utilization of evidence-based clinical de- cision support [ , ]. the black lives matter movement has renewed focus on how implicit physician bias as well as education, poverty and other social determinants of health contribute to health care disparities among racial groups, most acutely the coronavirus death rate and access to sars-cov- testing and treatment. greater awareness of the negative im- pact of implicit bias within radiology departments as well as recruitment and mentorship programs to prioritize diversity and inclusion can ensure that faculty and staff better reflect the communities in which they serve. creative solutions to these trends in light of the global pandemic will obviously depend on an individual department’s culture, needs and local environment. conclusion the current global health conditions required a rapid response to ramp down operations to ensure safety to patients and staff and ensure bed capacity for the expected surge of covid- - positive patients. now that the initial surge is passing in many parts of north america, radiology departments need to pivot and just as rapidly implement re-opening plans in alignment with loosening of government stay-at-home, work-safe or- ders. institutional culture is of paramount importance to be able to to lead change. at the time of initial manuscript submission, north america appeared to be weathering the current storm, but as of the last week of june, % of all people in the houston metropolitan area tested for sars-cov- were positive and our pediatric institution had agreed to accept a limited number of adult sars-cov- -positive and negative patients to sup- port our community [ ]. we cannot become complacent and need to retain and further evolve our response. our institu- tion’s investment in testing capabilities and supply chain pro- cesses enables us to continue to provide a safe work environ- ment for our patients and staff despite this increase in sars- cov- -positive patients, and we continue to provide emergent and elective imaging services in accordance with local and state mandated orders. however, the implication of this in- crease in positive tested individuals on our recovery plan is still unknown. as the global covid- pandemic continues to evolve, we hope to provide an update to our experience and response in this forum. the magnitude of the challenges sug- gests that attempts to return to familiar routines and workflows is misguided, and instead provides an opportunity for reinven- tion of radiology departmental operations. compliance with ethical standards conflicts of interest none references . li w, cui h, li k et al ( ) chest 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interventional radiology ( ) aerosol generating pro- cedures performed by interventional radiology clinical notification from the society of interventional radiology. sir covid- re- sources for ir website. https://www.sirweb.org/practice-resources/ covid- -resources/covid- -clinical-notification- - - /. accessed july . texas children’s hospital ( ) always here for you. tch covid- updates webpage. texaschildrenscoronavirus.org. accessed july . sammer m, sher a, huisman t, seghers v ( ) response to the covid- pandemic: practical guide to rapidly deploying home workstations to guarantee radiology services in times of quarantine, social distancing or stay at home orders. ajr am j roentgenol. https://doi.org/ . /ajr. . pediatr radiol ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /radiol. https://doi.org/ . /neuros/nyaa https://doi.org/ . /neuros/nyaa https://doi.org/ . /ajr. . https://doi.org/ . /s - - -y https://doi.org/ . /radiol. https://doi.org/ . /radiol. https://www.sirweb.org/practice-esources/covid-resources/covid-clinicalotification- - https://www.sirweb.org/practice-esources/covid-resources/covid-clinicalotification- - http://texaschildrenscoronavirus.org https://doi.org/ . /ajr. . . yamashiro t, kumamaru k, kido a et al ( ) work-style reform and use of information and communication technology among di- agnostic radiologists in japan: results of the jrs/jcr joint survey. jpn j radiol : – . walker s ( ) getting the restart right: how to lead when nobody has a map. wall street journal. https://www.wsj.com/articles/ getting-the-restart-right-how-to-lead-when-nobody-has-a-map- . accessed july . norbash a, bluth e, lee ci et al ( ) radiologist manpower considerations and imaging . : effort planning for value-based imaging. j am coll radiol : – . sarwar a, boland g, monks a, kruskal jb ( ) metrics for radiologists in the era of value-based health care delivery. radiographics : – . texas medical center ( ) coronavirus (covid- ) updates. tmc website. https://www.tmc.edu/coronavirus-updates/. accessed july publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdic- tional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. pediatr radiol ( ) : – https://www.tmc.edu/coronavirus-pdates/ 	after the initial covid- surge: a phased radiology departmental re-opening plan 	leadership, organization and communication 	this link is https://www.wsj.com/articles/getting-he-estart-ightow-oead-henobodyasap-,", 	setting the goals 	staff health assurance 	patient health evaluation and assurance 	expanded imaging scheduling grid 	radiologist safety and staffing plan 	daily assessment/metrics of success 	from crisis to opportunity 	conclusion 	references introduction to deconstructing privilege in the classroom: teaching as a racialized pedagogy stud philos educ ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - -x introduction to deconstructing privilege in the classroom: teaching as a racialized pedagogy shilpi sinha  · shaireen rasheed published online: march © springer science+business media b.v., part of springer nature in a post-trump climate in the united states, racial tensions and societal divisions have been on the rise. educational institutions themselves have been the sites of these divisions and tensions, as evidenced by a rise in hate crimes across college campuses and incidences of bullying of immigrant youth in schools. conversations on diversity and difference through the lens of multiculturalism and tolerance can no longer adequately address issues surrounding the black lives matter movement, the muslim ban, current homophobic policies against lgbtqia and xenophobic policies targeted towards hispanics and other immigrant groups. the essays in this series deconstruct issues of privilege and race in the classroom by bringing to bear the lens of intersectionality to philosophical thought. ethical teacher-stu- dent interactions described through relational and postmodern accounts emphasize teach- ers’ openness, vulnerability and responsiveness to their students, signifying an embodied account of interaction. however, what has been missing from this discussion is how teach- ers’ embodiment is also fundamentally racialized and what effect this may have on the very interactions being described, explored or valued. an underlying assumption of the essays in this special issue is that responsive and hospitable addressing of the societal tensions and divisions that emerge in higher education classrooms, especially those situated in teacher education programs within predominantly white institutions, can only begin to be evinced versions of the papers in this issue were presented as part of the philosophy of education society annual conference panel entitled, “putting the ethics of hospitality in conversation with raced bodies and their experiences,” in seattle, washington. * shilpi sinha sinha@adelphi.edu shaireen rasheed srasheed@liu.edu philosophical foundations of education, ruth s. ammon school of education, adelphi university, south ave., garden city, ny  , usa philosophical foundations, diversity and social justice, post campus of long island university, northern blvd., brookville, ny  , usa http://orcid.org/ - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - -x&domain=pdf s. sinha, s. rasheed if the racialized embodiment of the educator, with all its epistemological and ontological associations is acknowledged and foregrounded. thus, the purpose of this issue is twofold: first it is an invitation to re-think educational spaces in relation to the racialized bodies of educators and students, and second, to re-think what it might mean within the higher education classroom for hospitality to be enacted through the racialized bodies of educa- tors, where the racialized body encompasses educators of color as well as white educators. accordingly, some of the questions explored in this issue are the following: how might educators of color be better supported in institutions of higher education? how do educa- tors create pedagogical spaces to help students understand privilege? what happens when students are resistant to understanding issues of privilege? what happens when we ask stu- dents to reflect on their intersectional identities and their multiple lived experiences? how do educators construct their own racialized identities in relation to their students when dis- cussing issues of privilege in the classroom? how are we “ambushed” (yancy , ) by our own racialized bodies in relation to race and privilege? while each of the essays contain different points of emphasis, a common thread may be evidenced in that teaching, understood through the orientation of the racialized bod- ies of educators, is linked in some form to teacher desire, be it the desire for right-relation (bryzzheva), the never complete, not-an-end-itself desire of the teacher for the fundamen- tally unknowable student (rasheed), or the desire for a connection with one’s students that enables both student and teacher to interrogate their positionalities (sinha). teaching hos- pitably as understood through racialized bodies necessitates a grappling with teacher desire that is not a priori antithetical to the ethic of hospitality, but rather, may allow the teacher to live through the very tension between the singular and universal, or politics and ethics in a way that does not deny the significance of what it means to be a racialized body. in “the racialized body of the educator and the ethic of hospitality: the potential for social justice education re-visited,” shilpi sinha examines how the racialized bodies of educators of color inform their relation to the ethic of hospitality as they interact with their white students. utilizing claudia w. ruitenberg’s analysis of jacques derrida’s conception of the aporias of hospitality, sinha argues that it is only by paying attention to the phenom- enological difference that characterizes raced bodies of color that one may understand how educators of color may best comport themselves to the tension between the self-preserva- tion and self-annihilation that mark the aporias of hospitality. she shows that the racialized body of the educator of color often demands a distinctive comportment towards the ten- sion, which is indicative not of a denial of the ethic of hospitality, but rather, a sojourning with one part of the non-dialectical tensions that characterize hospitality’s aporias. draw- ing on charles w. mills, linda alcoff and sara ahmed, sinha lays out the socio-political materiality of race, which is constructed through its relation to (non-ontological) whiteness and white privilege, thereby pointing to the debasement, dispossession and disorientation that has marked and continues to mark bodies of color to this present day. consequently, she draws attention to the pedagogical implications of the racialized bodies of educators of color in interaction with the white bodies of their students, offering a two-pronged per- spective: ( ) how faculty of color in institutions of higher education may be better sup- ported given the cognitive, perceptual, affective, physical, spatial and economic effects of the socio-political materiality of race and ( ) how the ethic of hospitality may be taken up by educators of color in ways that the alterity of their white students may be honored while also honoring the lived reality of racialized bodies that is not shed when one takes on the role of teacher. in ‘’from hostility to hospitality: teaching anti-racist pedagogy in a post-election climate,’’ shaireen rasheed discusses the challenges faced by educators of color when introduction to deconstructing privilege in the classroom:… discussing issues of privilege and race with a predominantly white student body. by elab- orating on irigaray’s notion of hospitality from the point of view of education, rasheed offers an alternative phenomenological pedagogy of understanding the other, one that con- nects issues of positionality and orientation with those of an embodied epistemology of difference. by using examples from her own classroom, rasheed elucidates how she attempts to create phenomenological, transformative, intersectional anti-racist pedagogies grounded in critical self-reflection, where students are engaging in an authentic discourse on the nature of their positionality. this means taking a hard and self-reflective look at how racism, clas- sism and sexism are often embodied in discussions of privilege. by problematizing notions of multiculturalism, tolerance and neutrality that often accompany discussions on race and white privilege, rasheed urges educators and students to take up ethical questions that con- front the concrete political realities of our times in the classroom. furthermore, she uses such methodologies to facilitate reflection on the part of the students to study the ontic meanings of their own localized positionalities, and how they construct their different reali- ties and objectivities, as entities, occurrences, processes, events, and facts. in “this is a white space: on restorative possibilities of hospitality in a raced space,” lyudmila bryzzheva explores the role of the restorative classroom as a methodological tool to create a ‘right-relation’ pedagogy of racial and social justice. contextualized within martin buber’s i—thou relationship, she explains right-relation as a central value and an ideal outcome of restorative practices. the i-thou relationship requires presence, openness and responsiveness. dialogue that does not appropriate or objectify the other is a part of all i-thou relationships and it takes place both in spoken and non-verbal communication. thus, buber points to the between, the interhuman world of relation where meeting takes place. but in spite of intentionally trying to create a race-conscious right relation restorative justice framework in her classroom, bryzzheva explains how she ended up constructing a white space over and over again, until one black female student told her that she was not learning much in her class and a colleague of color having observed her and having read her syllabus, told her that the class benefited mostly white students. in her positionality as a white educator, bryzzheva realized that often predominantly white classroom spaces mar- ginalize students of color. in her sustained effort to problematize her own ‘historico-racial habits’ when engaging in predominantly white spaces, she envisions an alternative ethics of hospitality, one that allows her to create ‘aporias of unknowability’ to quote claudia ruitenberg. using ruitenberg’s, sara ahmed’s and luce irigaray’s concept of hospitality, bryzzheva further explores how notions of white privilege and race can be deconstructed in classrooms to include non-white spaces. by engaging in questions such as, ‘’what made the space white? how might hospitality affect the restorative possibilities of and in the space?,” she reconceptualizes right-relation as that which necessitates hospitality. responding to the above three essays, claudia w. ruitenberg, in “hospitality and embodied encounters in educational spaces,” highlights how bryzzheva extends the work on hospitality and education by exploring how educational spaces can be marked by white- ness and how hospitality is denied if white educators do not interrogate and change the whiteness of such spaces as they teach racialized students. ruitenberg further highlight’s bryzzheva’s essay as illustrating the inevitable tension that arises when she attempts to create equitable spaces in her classroom: a tension between acknowledging one’s stu- dents’ experiences as raced individuals affected by structural injustice, and the alterity of the other where the other cannot be reduced to a substitutable example of any social category of difference. bryzzheva’s description of her classroom experiences thus serve s. sinha, s. rasheed to showcase, for ruitenberg, how hospitality is rent by the impossible demand of seeing the student simultaneously through a singular and universal lens, which serves to further underscore, according to ruitenberg, that while hospitality is challenged by categorizations of social difference and inequality, such as racialization, it is not determined by it. in contrast to bryzzheva, ruitenberg notes that rasheed and sinha, in their respective essays, examine hospitality from the perspective of racialized educators in interaction with their white students. ruitenberg emphasizes that an ethic of hospitality is amenable to edu- cational discomfort visited upon students, where students are to be given a realistic under- standing of the world they are coming into, as characterized through racial realities, the struggles of the marginalized and oppressed, and the history of how things have come to be the way they are. ruitenberg points to rasheed’s delineations of her classroom interactions with her white students where she provides her students with an honest accounting of being a muslim and not white, in a white world, to be illustrative of the educational discomfort appropriate to the ethic of hospitality. ruitenberg underscores that while the combatting of ignorance may be uncomfortable for students, it does not prevent students from the pos- sibility of finding a place in the world. finally, ruitenberg situates sinha’s essay within the broader question of whether the ethic of hospitality can offer anything to the educational situation where students overtly express oppressive ideas. it is here that some points of contention can be seen to arise between sinha’s uptake of the ethic of hospitality in relation to the racialized body of the educator, and ruitenberg’s interpretation of the ethic of hospi- tality, with reference to the very notions of how such an ethic is to be understood in relation to the ideas of reciprocity, the teacher’s asymmetrical responsibility and desire. acknowledgements we would like to thank the reviewers for their very helpful and constructive feedback on the essays in this special issue. references yancy, g. . look, a white! philosophical essays on whiteness. philadelphia, pa: temple university press. yancy, g. . black bodies, white gazes: the continuing significance of race in america, nd ed. lan- ham, md: rowman & littlefield. 	introduction to deconstructing privilege in the classroom: teaching as a racialized pedagogy 	acknowledgements 	references all the pits have closed generation: the politics of patriarchy and social change ben little and alison winch editors’ introduction in this first instalment of our soundings series on critical terms, we look at the idea of ‘generation’, a term which has become highly prevalent within political discourse since the financial crisis. as with all the concepts in this series, the idea of generation is differently mobilised by different political actors. right-wing thinkers use generation in a sense that can be traced back to edmund burke to mean the transmission of property and culture through time, while other commentators draw on meanings derived from mannheim to refer to the experiences of particular cohorts at times of rapid political change. for activists on the left, it is important to distinguish between these different connotations of generation. the burkean approach has regressive implications, for example in the justification of austerity as a way of protecting future generations from debt; and the mannheimian understanding, although not as conservative, needs to be connected to an intersectional analysis that looks at other identity markers alongside those of age - such as class, race, gender and sexuality - so as to avoid flattening differences within cohorts and impeding solidarities between generations. deborah grayson and ben little generation is a pivotal and structuring concept in contemporary politics, but not enough attention is paid to the way in which it operates. we aim here to outline some of the key questions a consideration of generation raises and can help illuminate, in the belief that it is a concept than opens a vital space both for challenging dominant paradigms and contributing to radical thought. in mainstream political culture one of the most frequently recurring - and loaded - media archetypes is the battle between baby boomers and millennials, who tussle in the homes and streets of britain, pitching tuition fees against triple-locked pensions and free bus passes against impossible house prices. these stories have intensified since the financial crash, partly because it has had differential economic effects on specific age cohorts, but cultural differences centred on generation have also played a significant role. this contemporary discourse is a recent manifestation of a recurring social theme that was most famously theorised by german sociologist karl mannheim in the s. mannheim argued that generations are distinct social units formed by the historical, cultural and technological changes that occur at key times in people’s lives. since we live in a time of crisis and change, mannheim helps to explain why generation is currently emerging as a topic of debate, but it does not explain why the media narrative of recent years has mostly focused on age-based inequality. ben (and others) have argued elsewhere that its use in this context opens up insights into what it is like to grow up under neoliberalism, even if what comes through most often is a stylised conflict between generations. the world of karl mannheim was shaped by the changes wrought in german culture by the first world war. eighteenth-century philosopher and whig politician edmund burke, on the other hand, was writing in the wake of the french revolution - and seeking to reassert the old ways. burke’s understanding of generation is markedly different from that of mannheim. it revolves around the idea of a natural order rather than theorising historical change: society was a contract between the generations. this difference explains burke’s appeal to conservatives. while mannheim looked to explain periods of cultural change and the influence of new dynamic forces in rigid societies, burke’s perspective was focused on renewing tradition by linking the past to the future through the present, putting an emphasis on continuity rather than change. at the heart of the tory manifesto was a depiction of the social contract derived from burke: a partnership between those who are living, those who have lived before us, and those who are yet to be born. during the election theresa may’s references to generation in her awkward election stump speeches should not therefore be understood as part of a pitch dreamed up by election spin doctors: she was using the term in way that reflected an ideological position within a long tradition. (it should be noted, however, that, while burke is often seen as a founding father of conservatism, his establishment of the basic principle of generational social contract is one that also appeals to liberals and environmentalists.) this division of schools of thought on generation - theories of continuity contrasted to theories of change - has also framed scholarly understandings. many commentators have pointed to two distinct approaches: on the one hand there is the biological or familial understanding of generation (lineage, family trees and so on can be seen through this perspective); on the other hand it can be understood dynamically, as a social and historical term, and this means that it can be a signifier of social rupture and cultural difference between generations. generation and common sense while academics may seek to separate out these two understandings, common-sense discourse makes no such explicit division. people usually engage with the idea at both the social and familial levels without distinction. indeed, what marks generation’s explanatory power in dominant discourses is precisely its ability to obscure those differences. in seeking in this essay to unpack some of ways in which ideas of generation work to shore up a conservative world-view, we hope to make a contribution to a deeper understanding of the role of common-sense in sustaining the political order - and of the central importance of challenging it. in some ways, generation has worked as a magic word, the ‘open sesame’ of patriarchal philosophy, present everywhere and understood familially, crossed- through with power and contradiction but framed as a natural phenomenon. and, inasmuch as it takes the predominantly white middle-class experience of generation as universal, it is closely connected to chauvinist discourses of race, class and sexuality. indeed, generation tends to be deployed as an effective way of re-orientating longstanding struggles around class, gender, place and sexuality, through directing attention away from fault-lines based on historical and social division and instead locating division in internal disagreement, on the basis of age, within movements, groups and the wider society. thus, while generation can be indicative of new forms within a shifting conjuncture, it also has the power to obfuscate processes of oppression. it can be productive if it is carefully used in alliance with, rather than opposition to, existing understandings of cultural politics, but its powerful symbolism can also be used to disorientate. in the following sections we look at two key ways in which generation operates, firstly through its connection to ideas about the family and property, and secondly through its connection to ideas about history and time. family and property the burkean generational contract binds together property and patriarchy. its logic thus appealed to the emerging bourgeoisie of the eighteenth century as well as the established aristocracy of the period. today it can bring together a new potential alliance of property-owners - everyone who has received (or will receive) an inheritance that could become the foundation for a livelihood (i.e. everyone who is not reliant solely on wages, including most home-owners). the question of inheritance and property is thus a key theme of generational discourse. burke’s legacy has fed into some of the organisations, think tanks and debates that have grown up as generation has become more central to debate. the intergenerational commission was set up by david willetts’s resolution foundation to: ‘fix the contract between generations that underpins our society’. this commission competes for space in policy-makers’ inboxes and media columns with the more established, more mannheimian, but less well connected intergenerational foundation, which exists to promote: ‘sustainable long-term policies that are fair to all generations - the old, the young and those to come’. in these debates, an older conservatism is resurfacing that stands in an uneasy relationship with the thatcherite neoliberalism that has for so many years dominated the conservative party. this partly manifests itself as anxiety about the future: neoliberalism has very short temporal horizons - the annual budget, the quarterly report, the rapid movement of markets (even if its core strategists took the long view in their assault on social democracy); in contrast to this the burkean conservative asks for due care for the future and respect for the past. moral panics about feckless youth, fear of the degradation of traditional social values and more recent concerns about the young being less materially comfortable than their parents - all these fit into a worldview that can be easily articulated to burke’s social contract: what is being passed on culturally, politically, materially? will the young be suitable heirs? how can they be raised to honour the contract with past generations? a neoliberal focus on individual acquisition does not easily find answers to these questions. yet it is not truly incompatible with burke. by ‘preserving the method of nature in the conduct of the state’, burke sought to link the idea of the family with that of the church and the state: in this choice of inheritance we have given our frame of polity the image of a relation of blood; binding up the constitution of our country with our dearest domestic ties; adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections; keeping inseparable and cherishing the warmth of all their combined and mutually reflected charities, our state, our hearths, our sepulchres and our altars. it is not too much of step for the modern conservative to add the market to this list of combined and mutually reflected charities (perhaps, in part, in place of ‘sepulchres and altars’). this then makes available a space on which these contradictions can be held together, if not resolved. for neoliberal guru milton friedman, the basic productive unit was the ‘family’ or household, and he saw it as a natural right for children to inherit the accumulated wealth of their fathers. in this friedman was arguing for freedom within capitalism, not for a generational social contract; but in seeing the family as a unit that operated in the market, he linked the market to the ‘relation of blood’. thatcher famously made a similar point when she argued that there was no such thing as society, just individual men and women and families. it is this valorisation of the family and its endurance through generations that makes possible a link between neoliberal economics and social-contract conservatism - the family plays a central role in reflecting and reproducing the patriarchal order in both these political ideologies. for the way the family and its reproduction is imagined in contemporary conservative political culture tends to the traditional and the patriarchal. the ghost of aristotle, for whom the ultimate purpose of man was to make more men - ‘it takes a man to make a man’, or, as some translate it: ‘it takes a man to generate a man’ - still lingers. and patriarchy is taken for granted in the traditional christian account of social reproduction. the old testament is full of ‘x begat y’ and the importance of patrilineal authority, and this theme continues in the new. thomas aquinas, discussing aristotle, states: ‘in human generation, the mother provides the matter of the body which, however, is still unformed, and receives its form only by means of the power which is contained in the father’s seed’. throughout its long conceptual history (necessarily much condensed here) there has been a ‘natural’ rather than ‘cultural’ approach to generation: there has always been the idea that there is a biological order to things, that the links between family, social reproduction and the organisation of society are somehow pre-ordained and enduring. because of this long history - internalised in our shared cultural wisdom - mainstream ‘generationalism’ is able to operate as an unquestioned public discourse, and this has powerful and exclusionary effects. how can you participate in a generational politics that centres patrilineal logics if you are not involved (for whatever reason) in biological reproduction - or, if you are involved, are operating outside heteronormative understandings of family? how can you identify with an understanding of history that emphasises a smooth progress from one generation to another if you are a new participant in a society, particularly if you have been brought there under circumstances of distress, or if your ancestors were slaves and the legacy of that history persists? how can you conceptualise that progress if it simply doesn’t reach your social and/or economic location, or if your relative socio-economic status was in crisis and retreat long before the financial crash - as is the case for many established working-class communities? mainstream generational discourses are able to capture people in these kinds of subject positions and draw them consensually into the dominant logics; and in doing so they maintain subordination - a difference from the norm can never be completely overcome. transmitting knowledge and expertise about politics down the generations is not an incidental aspect of right-wing political practice: it is the very foundation of the conservative emphasis on tradition, and it enables an extremely effective praxis. there is an intrinsic advantage in the language of generation because it enables strong links to be made between the family and government. this provides conservatism with a moral rhetoric, and a way of justifying policy programmes, that resonates with something that people from all backgrounds hold most dear: their family. it invites families to think of the consequences if ‘the credit card is maxed out’, as a way of justifying neoliberalism, or places a moral emphasis on not leaving debt to the next generation to justify austerity. this is a politics which enables many core assertions to be glossed over, unexamined, as ‘natural’ common sense: it locates family, household and the intimate sphere in a temporal politics that is identifiable and recognisable. history and social change interest in the concept of generation has tended to go through cycles, marking the periods in which change is felt to be occurring rapidly. it often presages or follows what we might call a conjunctural shift: these upsurges of interest in generation and generations can be mapped, albeit unevenly, onto moments of major change in society. for mannheim, generation was a way of signifying and understanding major social and cultural change. in seeking to understand how generation, like class conflict, could be a driver of history, he proposed that, as young people come of age they make ‘fresh contact’ with their surrounding culture, and this shapes their political views for life. the degree of significance of this process for a given period of politics depends on the scale and intensity of change taking place in society - economically, politically, culturally. he saw the emergence of highly politicised youth groups in s germany as representing a break with the socio-cultural and political norms of the pre-war era and setting the tone for the free-wheeling liberalism of the weimar republic. it was the age cohort born after the second world war that prompted american scholars to begin to explore the concept: the explosion of the counter-culture in the s marked another burst of writing on the subject. douglas coupland, perhaps literature’s most famous invoker of generation, then took up the baton in the s, painting the youth culture of the period in the slackadaisical tropes of generation x, who were said to be drifting aimlessly in the seeming post-political vacuum after the fall of the berlin wall. meanwhile recent interest in millennials is configured (in the anglophone world at least) by the politico-cultural milieu of a post-financial crash society and the rise of digital media. in all these cases, a change in society was seen as being expressed in a difference of attitudes between generations. history could be at least partly understood as a story of generational succession. writing at a time of renewed interest in the term in the s, classicist laura nash saw generation as a central concept in the myths of the ancient greeks: generation, then, is the reference point, in ancient usage as well as today, for a multitude of concepts, a very metaphor for existence. like the verb to be, generation requires an adjective of context, a predicate of relativity, before it takes on meaning. used sometimes with complacency (‘my generation’), sometimes with belligerence (‘your generation’) … generation marks allegiance, time of life, span of years, sameness with one group and otherness from the rest. sociologist judith burnett suggests that for the greeks, generation was a form of mythical periodisation that expressed and indicated the passage of time and change: it provided ‘boundary markers’ that enabled the distinguishing of ‘kinds of people’ who lived in ‘kinds of time’. their conception of generation was figurative, attributing specific properties to people belonging to different eras: generations were ‘endowed with properties (youthful, weak, heroic, fast) … regarded as portents of what is to come or blamed for events which occurred, the genealogy of which can be traced back to them’. burnett contrasts the modern conception of generation to that of the greeks, based as it was on mythological rather than humanistic conceptions of time. but the mythological account gives an insight into the ways in which media uses of the term work at a commonsense level, and we believe it is worth dwelling on this. in greek myths lineage marked the heroes as children of the gods, endowed with the flaws and virtues appropriate to their generational location. contemporary generational myths often follow similar patterns: the heroic capacity of heracles, the son of zeus, resulted from his divine lineage, and so too did his troubles, passed on by his father’s reckless behaviour; the millennial son of the baby boomer is gifted a world of technology and wealth, but lacks the navigational tools of his forebears - whether financial or cultural. while we’re young ( ), directed by noah baumbach, represents a recent attempt to make sense of generational difference, in this case in the context of the world of documentary filmmaking. but the narrative soon collapses from socio-cultural difference into familial relationships. ben stiller’s angsty gen x lead is the son-in- law of charles grodin’s heroic, but difficult, boomer. grodin ultimately favours millennial adam driver’s narcissistic ‘fresh take’ on documentary making: his incorporation of social media and a dubious relationship to truth offers something more exciting than stiller’s reverent approach. the film tries to explore what these generational figures say about a shift in social values, but in the end the narrative reproduces the familial dynamics of greek myth - to the extent that the female characters primarily exist as plot devices to link one man to another, or as sexual conquests. in locating the narrative conflict within the family, the film decentres the socio- cultural and economic changes that have accompanied the rise of these generational exemplars. it takes historical processes out of the picture, operating in the same way and with similar effects to the mythologisation of battles between babyboomers and millennials in the media. the movement from one socioeconomic settlement to another becomes invisible - and along with it the generational inequality of the new settlement. revisiting the ancient practice of using mythical archetypes to explore moral dilemmas and model behaviour brings to mind more recent writing on myth in society, and in particular the work of roland barthes. for barthes, myth was a mechanism for transmitting ideological messages: it revealed and obscured in equal measure. his classic example from the s, of a magazine-cover image of a young black soldier saluting the french flag, plays a similar role to the generational figures we have been discussing. the image represents an inclusive, post-racial france - patriotic, youthful, optimistic and diverse - while masking continuing colonial oppression. in the same way, the figures of the millennial and the baby boomer hide differences of class, race and gender while also telling us something recognisable about changing times. political activism and the intergenerational contract generation has a long history in the service of patriarchy and the old order. it humanises the link between past, present and future, and makes the complex sweeps of time understandable through the medium of family relationships: ancestors, grandparents, parents, children and the unborn. whether in its burkean or mannheimian formulations, it is variously used to justify austerity; to lead attacks on welfare for both old and young (separately but similarly); and to make the case for a rebalancing of the economy in the hypothesised interests of the young/old (what those interests are depends quite clearly on where you sit on the political and age spectrum). it is a category of identity that can be effectively mobilised for many purposes. the tories have been more convincing in their invocation of generation than labour, but labour has occasionally been successful in ridiculing the right on this terrain. tony blair’s first speech as leader lampooned michael portillo’s claim that free markets let wealth ‘cascade from generation to generation’; he counter-argued that socialism required different metaphors, such as community, solidarity and partnership. what these terms eventually came to mean under new labour is another story altogether, but it is worth reflecting here on the effectiveness of this language at the time. ed miliband’s ‘british promise’ that ‘the next generation should do better than the last’ was much less convincing, wrapped as it was in the language and tropes of nationalism, family and a conformist idea of ‘progress’. parts of the environmental movement have also attempted to capitalise on the power of this generational discourse, positing the rights of future generations to argue for effective action on climate change. hungary is the first state to have an operational ombudsman for future generations, and this is seen as a useful means of making a moral case about the abstract notion of intergenerational justice, to be considered alongside the needs and rights of existing citizens. once again the moral force of the family is the pivot: who would want to leave a world devastated by climate change to their children and grandchildren? but such uses of generation repeat the problems outlined in the arguments above. the future generations are imagined as those of the global north, and the language assumes a normative family construction and universalises its logics, all the while excluding people in the global south who are already experiencing the effects of climate change. the structural problems of the conservative discourse on generation are just as present in the environmental argument. climate change is one of the most challenging problems of our time, but linking it to a fundamentally conservative social understanding of society makes it very difficult to articulate the changes that are needed to tackle it. in invoking language that explicitly and implicitly reinforces the existing cultural and social configurations of capitalism, patriarchy and heteronormativity, it limits the actions that can be mobilised. the normalisation of patriarchal family formations in these questions of futurity has also been criticised by feminist and queer scholars; and here the idea of ‘reproductive futurism’, a term coined by lee edelman to explain understandings of time (though in a different context) may be a helpful aid to understanding. edelman argues that time is structured by the all-pervasive figure of the child in need of protection: it is this which represents the possibility of the future: ‘that child remains the perpetual horizon of every acknowledged politics, the fantasmatic beneficiary of every political intervention’. to ‘submit’ to this politics - and it is one that is used by the left-wing environmental movement - is thus to authenticate this social order. as we have already noted, generation is seen as a pivot: the movement from the past to the present to the future revolves around it. and this sense of generational movement through history as a smooth progression lends weight to a wider view of history as progress. but many black activists and writers challenge this framing of history, arguing that it is important to recognise that the violence of past persists in the present. this is especially pertinent when understandings of generation are linked to the inheritance of property through the patrilineal line. how does this relate to someone whose subjectivity is owned, and whose ownership is legitimated by a particular concept of ‘generation’? dylan rodriguez argues that america’s ‘racial chattel logic’ is still present in the prison system, in which the prisoner is legally understood as the bodily property of the state. racial slavery cannot be positioned in the past tense, because ‘slavery shapes our spatial and political present tense’. hortense spillers argues that there is an american ‘grammar’ that maintains subordination through a language and culture that is ‘grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and mutilation, so that it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics, shows movement, as the human subject is “murdered” over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise’. science fiction novels by writers such as octavia butler and toni morrison disrupt a linear and progressive understanding of time as a way of exposing its investment in white supremacy. robbie shilliam invokes the temporal sensibilities of ras tafari philosophy and the ‘now time’ of reparations: ‘struggles of the ancestors must be redeemed because their suffering manifests in the conditions presently experienced by their dependants’. thinking generation with intersectionality in the light of all this, is it possible to reclaim generation for left-wing and social justice groups - and to do so while still being attentive to people who are marginalised or excluded by conventional framings of generation? is it possible to use the concept of generation as a political tool without ignoring class, or to talk about time and history without excluding those who continue to experience injuries of the past in present - and without assuming normative attitudes to reproductive sexualities? we would argue that it is possible, but it is important in so doing to be aware of the complexities and difficulties we have outlined in this essay. in the academic literature, the tendency is to refine and clarify the concept. but this can mean that complexity is lost. for example, sociologists june edmunds and bryan turner, who wrote extensively on generation at the turn of the millennium, offered an alternative master- narrative for social change in which class was replaced by generation: they argued for a generational dialectic whereby active generations change society and passive ones then consolidate these changes. the political consequences of this position are quite obviously negative for the left. on the other hand, youth studies scholars such as daniel woodman and johanna wyn foreground generation as a key sociological area for exploration, but are at pains to argue it must be understood in relation to class, gender, race and sexuality. neither of these approaches is entirely satisfactory, but we have far more sympathy with the latter than the former. for generation to be a productive concept it needs to be understood within a wider conjunctural and intersectional framework. as kimberlé crenshaw suggests: ‘intersectional dynamics are not static, but neither are they untethered from history, context, or social identity.’ generation is not an identity in the same way as class, race or gender: by definition the millennial lacks the long histories that those established vectors of identity carry with them. we are always located in both a specific generational cohort, and a specific age group within our families, but we and our generation will pass from youth to age, and, as we do, this will be mapped on to specific historical moments. generation is not an enduring category of person, and it is often invoked as a way of mythologising or personifying social change rather than as a fixed identity. other identities also change over time but they have longer histories: the working class has a history going back to the industrial revolution; our ideas about women are shaped by millennia of patriarchal oppression. however, when used in specific contexts the idea of generation can work helpfully to locate continuity and difference in relation to current activism. for instance, some black lives matter activists - for example the crunk feminist collective - locate their politics generationally, in relation to but also distinct from previous black feminist and black liberation movements. the idea of generation allows present-day activists to define themselves in continuity with, but also as different from, past generations of activists, including the civil rights movement generation, in relation to issues such as theory, tactics and strategy. this is not a question of continuity being seen as a line passing from father to son, or even from pre- to post- liberation. it is seen, rather, in shifts in approach: for example from one based on performative respectability to one immersed in hip hop vitality; or from one based on a male leadership bound up with religious authority to one of queer feminist inclusivity. for activists involved in blm, generation locates a political movement in the legacy of previous struggle but it does this in order to challenge white supremacist capitalist patriarchy. when using the concept of generation we need to be attentive to specific contexts in which it is being used, and be wary of the ways that the term can be used to gloss over difference. generation can be an explanatory tool only if it is understood as intersecting with other axes of difference and inequality, such as class, gender, race, sexuality, place, ability. generational identity is located differently from these other categories, given its different temporal framing, but, as long as it is understood in conjunction with an intersectional analysis, it can enrich and inform actions taken in the present. for inheritance is not just about property and status, it can also be about inspiration, knowledge and a deep well of emotional support. in conclusion, and going back to the uk election with which we started this article, generation - located by the vector of age - can be seen to have played an important part in galvanising enthusiasm for labour’s election manifesto, as people who were previously alienated from politics became enthused by a genuine alternative. that people across ages and locations in the lifecycle are being re- enfranchised is exciting. nevertheless, this new chapter in labour’s history is only going to be successful and genuinely socially-democratic if, as well as continuing to address young people as legitimate voters, it ensures that its policies and ideologies reach beyond patriarchal understandings of generation (whether based on burke or mannheim). a narrative based on generational conflict always carries the risk of diverting attention from deeper and more entrenched forms of inequality. thanks to deborah grayson for her help in formulating the ideas presented here. all errors are our own! ben little is lecturer in media and cultural politics at uea. he is part of the soundings editorial collective and a co-editor of the critical terms series. his book (with jane arthurs) russell brand: comedy, celebrity, politics came out in . alison winch is lecturer in media studies at uea. she is the soundings poetry editor and part of the editorial collective. her book girlfriends and postfeminist sisterhood came out in and she has recently co-edited special issues of feminist media studies and the journal of gender studies, on generation and intimacy respectively. notes . the soundings series on critical terms seeks to explore some of the main ideas at play in the current political conjuncture. the series was introduced in deborah grayson and ben little, ‘soundings critical terms: conjunctural analysis and the crisis of ideas’, soundings , . each instalment will outline the theoretical and historical background for the term under consideration, and provide empirical examples of its use, showing how subtle differences in the ways in which concepts are understood within different contexts and traditions can lead to very different interpretations of the best way to build a better society. the aim is to develop a rich toolkit of concepts, histories and understandings that enable us to think through what is possible, determine the direction of future interventions, and provide a space in which crucial differences and agreements within left activism can be explored. . karl mannheim, ‘the problems of generations’ in essays on the sociology of knowledge, oxford university press . . see ben little, ‘a growing discontent: class and generation under neoliberalism’, in stuart hall, doreen massey and michael rustin (eds) after neoliberalism: the kilburn manifesto lawrence and wishart . . conservative and unionist manifesto , p : https://s .eu-west- .amazonaws.com/manifesto /manifesto .pdf. . edmund burke, reflections on the revolution in france, penguin [ ] p . . milton friedman, capitalism and freedom, university of chicago press . . for discussion of aristotle’s causality from which this slogan derives see andrea falcon, ‘aristotle on causality’, the stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, spring edition, edward n. zalta (ed): https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/spr /entries/aristotle-causality/. . thomas aquinas, summa theologiae: volume , charity, r.j. batten (ed), cambridge university press , p . https://s .eu-west- .amazonaws.com/manifesto /manifesto .pdf https://s .eu-west- .amazonaws.com/manifesto /manifesto .pdf . jonathan white, ‘climate change and the generational timescape’, sociological review . . see also annie kelly’s article in this issue, which discusses the construction by conservatives in the us of an effeminate millennial generation that does not know how to defend the nation. . laura nash, ‘concepts of existence: greek origins of generational thought’, daedalus, vol. , no. , , p . . judith burnett, generations: the time machine in theory and practice, ashgate , p . . there is a wider argument to be made about the ways in which history is becoming understood in our society as an affective space for identity formation - an understanding of the past that has much in common with these mythological formulations. but there is not the space to go into this now. . roland barthes, ‘myth today’, in mythologies, trans. annette lavers, vintage . . www.britishpoliticalspeech.org/speech-archive.htm?speech= . . www.if.org.uk/ / / /a-parliamentry-ombudsman-for-future-generations/. . philip catney and timothy doyle, ‘the welfare of now and the green (post) politics of the future’, critical social policy, vol. ( ). . see ‘climate change and the generational timescape’ (note ) for a similar argument. . lee edelman, no future: queer theory and the death drive, duke university press , p . . dylan rodriguez, ‘the present tense of (racial) slavery: the racial chattel logic of the us prison’, open democracy, . . . . hortense spillers, ‘mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: an american grammar book’, diacritics, ( ), , p . . robbie shilliam, ‘rastafari and reparation time’, open democracy, . . . . j. edmunds and b.s. turner, ‘global generations: social change in the twentieth century’, the british journal of sociology, , . . daniel woodman and johanna wyn, ‘class, gender and generation matter: using the concept of social generation to study inequality and social change’, journal of youth studies, vol. , no , . . kimberlé w. crenshaw, ‘from private violence to mass incarceration: thinking intersectionally about women, race, and social control’, ucla law review , , p . . see, for example, andreana clay, the hip-hop generation fights back: youth, activism and post-civil rights politics, new york university ; and khadijah white, ‘black lives on campuses matter: the rise of the new black student movement’, soundings , . notes from music city report from the field notes from music city lesley gill # springer nature b.v. in february , african-american students from four historic black colleges sat down at segregated lunch counters in downtown nashville, proclaiming their right to be served and demanding that the city government open the facilities to them. white mobs attacked the young people whom police did not protect, belying nashville’s image as the athens of the south. yet only months later, white store owners capitulated and opened lunch counters to black customers. as the students celebrated a major victory, the ramparts of jim crow crumbled, and nashville led the south in desegregating restaurants, stores, and public facilities. yet years later, the extreme patterns of zoned consumption and racial segregation that have long characterized the city remain on full display. although jim crow is formally dead, downtown is whiter than ever. steel-and-glass skyscrapers loom over downtown, where they have popped up like mushrooms over the last fifteen years, and construction cranes interrupt the skyline in every direction. rapidly gentrifying neighborhoods have fueled one of the hottest real estate markets in the country. the retailers targeted by protesters—woolworths, kress, mcclellan, cain-strauss and harvey—are gone, and the country music industry has taken over the city center, ruling nashville’s economy with a whopping $ billion annual contribution. even though the country genre is more complex than many realize, marketing distinctions from the jim crow-era still persist in more subtle forms today. for example, in the early twentieth century, folk music played by whites was labeled as “country music,” whereas current genres, such as blues, gospel and rhythm and blues, performed by african-americans were labeled as “race music.” music venues cater to white tourists along lower broadway, where the mournful wails of musicians romanticize rural lifestyles and a rustic past. stores trafficking in rural nostalgia hawk cowboy boots and hats. fair-skinned bachelorettes on a fast track to the upper middle- class clutch drinks and mug to passersby from atop party busses and pedal taverns that troll the https://doi.org/ . /s - - -z there is a redesigned woolworths bar/restaurant on the location now, part of a small wave of gentrification- meets-civil-rights-tourism businesses that highlight part of the city’s racial history in order to capture additional niche markets, disarm criticism, and celebrate certain aspects of racial progress. * lesley gill lesley.gill@vanderbilt.edu department of anthropology, vanderbilt university, ashwood ave., nashville, tn , usa published online: july dialectical anthropology ( ) : – http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - -z&domain=pdf https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:lesley.gill@vanderbilt.edu urban streets. groups of revelers stagger along the sidewalks under bright neon signs in the afternoons and evenings, as they hop from one crowded scene to another. the country music hall of fame and the ryman auditorium—the mother church of country music—are a couple of blocks from one another. the extreme makeover of downtown has razed evidence of earlier civil rights struggles, and the municipal government has done little to memorialize one of the most transformative periods in the city’s history. the outbreak of covid- has dealt a blow to this emporium of white consumption, forcing the bars to temporarily close and silencing live music until a premature reopening began a few weeks later, but the virus has hit black and latinx residents hardest. cleaners, bouncers, construction workers, dishwashers, and other low-wage workers in this predominantly white tourist district are often people of color. moreover, blacks make up only % of the metropolitan nashville population but account for nearly half of the covid- deaths, accord- ing to metro pandemic task force chair dr. alex jahangir. similarly, a vanderbilt university medical school study found that at least % of virus positive residents in nashville are hispanic, who comprise only % of the population. the may th murder of george floyd by a minneapolis policeman underscores the fragility of black and brown lives. floyd’s killing and the subsequent murders of breonnna taylor in kentucky and rayshard brooks and ahmaud arbury in georgia have rubbed salt into the unhealed wounds of black nashvillians, after police shot african-american men in the back in and and killed them. although a civilian oversight board of the metropolitan police force emerged from these tragedies, the police chief’s refusal to cooperate has hampered its effectiveness, and the mayor’s office has never forced the matter. not surprisingly, large and small protests erupted after floyd’s murder. holly fletcher initial covid testing data show impact on nashville’s minority communities. http://news.vumc.org/ / / l. gill http://news.vumc.org/ / / although outcries over police killings have happened in the past, a concatenation of recent events has generated a perfect storm that fuels the scope and intensity of current demonstrations. african-americans and other minorities not only shoulder the brunt of covid- . they are also disproportionately represented among the ranks of both “essential workers,” who risk infection because they cannot work from home, and the unemployed, whose numbers have skyrocketed because of the virus-related shutdown and ensuing recession. in addition, president trump’s intensifying racist tweets and his administration’s inability and apparent unwillingness to confront the intertwined health and economic crises have added insult to injury. “fuck trump” graffiti appeared on the old nashville court house, after it was sacked during one of the first downtown demonstrations. protests have taken place in nashville, as well as many small towns and cities in tennessee, where fewer african-americans live. on june th, , demonstrators, mostly wearing masks, flooded downtown to demand racial justice, an end to police violence, and the defunding of the force amid rising numbers of covid- cases. notes from music city led by african-americans and organized by six teenage girls who met on twitter, the multiracial crowd of all ages was mostly young, white, and educated. riot police armed to the teeth greeted them as they marched up lower broadway through the center of the city. activists shouted “no justice, no peace, prosecute the police” and taunted them with chants of “all dressed up in riot gear, but there’s no riot here.” some of the signs read “take your knee off my neck america,” “racism is a pandemic,” “defund the police,” “so bad even l. gill introverts are here,” and, of course, the ubiquitous “black lives matter.” as police returned the derision with stony glares, a phalanx of tourists emerged from bars to gawk, stare, and occasionally jeer at the demonstration. like the police, few wore face masks. keeping track of all the protests is difficult, because they are both numerous and decentralized. they included an ongoing occupation of the capitol grounds, which activists named ida b. wells plaza that has seen waves of arrests. in nashville’s historic music row, a group of musicians proclaimed that “black music matters.” recording artists complained that the music industry shuns hip-hop and urban music, forcing them to go to atlanta or new york, despite nashville’s world-class recording studios. and in the south neighborhood, resi- dents mobilized to back an african-american man fearful of going for walk. “we walk with shawn” highlighted the fears of minorities in this gentrifying enclave. today’s demonstrations are without the charismatic leadership of diane nash, james lawson, and bob moses, who energized the s revolts, and they lack the formal, strategized processes of training, tactical development, and escalation guided by experienced trainers like lawson. contemporary protests are mobilized on social media, where the face-to- face interactions that created strong bonds of solidarity in the s are more tenuous. black activists describe white participants as “allies,” not comrades or brothers and sisters, giving the impression, as adam shatz notes, “that distrust between blacks and whites is not being fought against but institutionalized.” indeed, in one demonstration that i attended in front of legislative plaza, a young black man speculated about the commitment of white people in a verbal commentary recorded over a cellphone video he made of the crowd. he conjectured that many had probably come to be with friends or to take pictures, but, he concluded, “i am glad that they are here.” adam shatz america explodes. london review of books, june . p. . notes from music city the nashville protests have crystalized around the call to defund the police, a topic debated among activist groups before the floyd murder carried it into the mainstream and gave it greater legitimacy. yet, it is still too early to tell whether all the energy will morph into a broader movement or fizzle like occupy wall street. as some cities have taken steps to reconfigure public safety, the nashville city council voted on june th to increase the law enforcement budget by $ . million, which the police department said was needed to hire forty-eight new recruits. and as confederate statues topple elsewhere, even symbolic change is a challenge for music city. the l. gill state assembly refuses to remove a bust of nathan bedford forrest from the capitol. forrest was a tennessee slave owner and one of the biggest merchants in the mississippi river slave trade. he served as a confederate civil war general and was the first grand wizard of the klu klux klan. his statue has been the target of repeated attempts to take it down, past and present. despite tennessee’s reputation as a racist bastion of the right, there is a budding infra- structure of left-wing solidarity in nashville that has educated people about systemic racial injustice and moved the needle beyond calls for more black representation and diversity training, which have been tried and have come up short. activist organizations target prison reform, worker rights, and immigration policy, as well as policing and public safety. while it is easy to make fun of self-absorbed whites “checking their privilege,” diverse protesters are developing their ideas and their ties to one another on the streets amid a crushing pandemic, widespread unemployment, and an economy on the ropes, while faced with an authoritarian president who is not averse to using the military against them and who sanctions the humiliation of minorities. will they be able to forge lasting alliances and scale up their demands? the current round of demonstrations has been mostly silent about the police treatment of immigrants, many of whom live in virus hotspots. activists appear more comfortable amplifying black demands among latinx, rather than broadening the message to demand justice for all people of color, and the nature and duration of future white allegiance is uncertain. while the uprisings have cracked open the door for change, it remains to be seen how much further it can be pried open and who will walk through it. publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. notes from music city 	notes from music city on the question at the end of theodicy religions article on the question at the end of theodicy anthony b. pinn department of religion, university of rice, houston, tx - , usa; pinn@rice.edu received: november ; accepted: december ; published: december abstract: this article argues that theodicy provides an insufficient response to suffering - one that often further victimizes those who suffering most. in it’s place, i argue for a moralist response based on albert camus and w. e. b. du bois. keywords: suffering; black lives matter; theodicy; race; racial disregard what did i do to be so black and blue. —fats waller . the question: theodicy and racial disregard for the theistically inclined, the final court of appeal tends to be theodical in tone and content, the job-like speaking to the “wind” . yet, there is a difference in the two narratives: job questions and receives an angry and dismissive response that renders suffering a mystery to humans and a riddle understandable only by god, who keeps answers to god’s self. on the other hand, the racially despised are met with more pain and deafening silence that means to crush. for job, it was the loss of all that mattered (family, friends, dignity, agency, bodily integrity, and so on) due to a wager between god and other forces, and for the race-discarded, it is the irrational impact of non-biological markers on their movement through a death dealing society. nonetheless, despite obvious differences between job and the racially disregarded, they share something related to the nature of suffering: social circumstances matter, and the graphic nature of this situation becomes more visible over time. this is not to say current patterns of disregard point out new arrangements of life. rather, they intensify and make more difficult dismissal of the destructive nature of the social codes directing collective life. existential circumstances threaten the delicate sense of meaning and purpose that propel the human animal. it is a delicate balance indeed, and one grounded often in metaphysical assumptions and goals. for the religiously inclined, theological argumentations and hope(s) of a transcending variety provide a filler or glue between the gaps in life narratives. what i point to is not simply the socio-political and economic disregard that makes life less than ideal based on color and its connotations. although such connotations are death dealing in their own way, what i intend to highlight is a more elemental nudging toward meaninglessness that undergirds these more readily present challenges. those challenges attack one’s right to occupy physical time and space, and the underlying angst is produced by a deeper troubling not of occupation of time and space but to the significance of the human animal in that time and space. this dilemma of rightful being in time and space promotes a particularly tenacious modality of anxiety tied to a sense that the pain and misery such circumstances entail has gone unnoticed, met with indifference. this situation often prompts a desire to prove worthiness through demonstrations of i would like to thank the reviewer who provided such valuable feedback on my essay. i have worked to provide attention to the insights and questions posed in that review, and i believe doing so has made this a better article. the book of job points to the questionable character of god—i.e., pride that sets up humans as pawns for play. i further interrogate the character of god in relationship to the story of nimrod. see (pinn and callahan ). religions , , ; doi: . /rel www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com http://dx.doi.org/ . /rel http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions religions , , of spiritual and moral fitness. standards of an assumed cosmic variety are difficult to meet, but even this failure when acknowledged and owned provides small comfort within a realm of suffering as those longing for righteousness await divine assistance. or, as so many christians are known to rehearse: “more like jesus let me be . . . ” the asceticism, strength of soul, purity, and charity outlined and graphically illustrated in the african american collective context has often been the stuff of social existence. of course, there are examples of african americans—many in the th century—who embraced extreme markers of righteousness and perhaps some of this bleeds into more contemporary modalities of pentecostalism, for example. but as a mainstay, these have presented themselves as religiously enacted elements of life premised on socio-economic and political need, resolved through a turn to the material world pushed to give more, to surrender more space. (that, surely, is a take away from black and womanist theologies.) the “what is to be made of me” is replaced by a “what is to be made of us?” in this context, the application of human standards involves attention to the construction of blackness, and what cornel west, has called a genealogy of racism that allows the humanity of blacks as a contemporary—but troubled—recognition (west ). it, this narration of race prompting questions of “becoming”, finds particular modes of saintliness wanting and tends to categorize much of this existential distancing as otherworldly confusion. in a word, such efforts are sustained not because they prove fruitful, but precisely because they do not—a failure that is absorbed and re/presented as a personal shortcoming that can, or should, be overcome through continued effort. it is, for example, a failure of will. within religious quarters, the more fundamental nature of racial violence has prompted a range of theological and philosophical questions concerning the nature of embodied life—particularly related discourses of moral evil produced and encountered within the realm of human interactions. this is the realm of theodicy: what can be said about god in light of human suffering in the world? despite common assumptions, theodicy does not always encourage an otherworldly orientation. rather, my argument is theodical efforts have no choice but to promote redemptive suffering orientation within a historical framework. god is perceived as present in human history and concerned with the “good,” and humans are real subjects of history whose existence is marked by injustice and misery. furthermore, this misery and injustice are real—not an idea, not an illusion, but issues with material and historical consequences. these consequences are death dealing at worse and metaphysically deforming at best. some type of resolution is necessary, one that acknowledges felt presence of all three—god, humanity, suffering. herein lies the problem for some theists: if all three are real, and god is defined by at least a portion of what believers say about god, then god has some ability to act in the world. god acting in the world would mean god is aware of injustice/misery and therefore must be “ok” with ongoing conditions. if god is “ok” with the condition of humans, and god is at least remotely good, then misery must have a cosmic rationale. unless believers are willing to say god ( ) endorses evil or ( ) does not exist, there must be some merit (at least indirectly) in suffering. this is the wager suggested by the above: religion must encourage believers to surrender something. they must surrender certain modalities of experience, certain ways of knowing, and grant authority to an unproven but assumed to be concerned god. that is to say, they must find some i more fully develop this in (pinn ). i make this argument in full: (pinn ). i acknowledge, however, that some theists embrace a self-limiting god. however, this begs the question: what value does god see in suffering that god would limit god’s self in order to allow it? this lends itself to redemptive suffering. the percentage of african americans who hold to no notion of god would suggest some (and a growing number of “some”) have moved in the direction of option two. still, so many continue to believe and address the dilemma by saying that suffering might be deserved punishing. some of the extreme examples of this include the assumption of many that natural disasters (e.g., hurricane katrina) are the result of sin. others argue that god takes this situation and uses it pedagogically: we learn something from it. theological wrestling with race-based misery is full of both examples—from the early years of the country pushing into the present. religions , , of type of merit in suffering. mindful of this, theodicy can be addressed as truncating of a particular metaphysical substance (e.g., human integrity and agency) in that it seeks to find in some form a positive outlook on suffering. from my vantage point, to call suffering “redemptive” or to claim it has some merit is a challenge to the integrity of human life. through a looking “beyond” for the cause of disregard, for example, the human is reduced: the significance of human activity (e.g., movement in the world meant to maintain the integrity and dignity of life) is consumed through an appeal to cosmic determinations. as one might imagine, this requirement to surrender something disproportionately impacts those who have already faced violence. this is precisely my point: theistic effort to “save” god puts those who suffer most at greater risk. my statement is not an endorsement of this approach; it is a critique of theological responses to suffering that create greater disregard for those who already suffer disproportionately. after all this, theodicy generates no answers that do not further beg the question or further challenge the integrity of those most prone to socially induced suffering. one might name this predicament theological absurdity—something akin to albert camus’s philosophical absurdity, and both modes of absurdity pull at our existential arrangements and challenge our socialization regarding narratives of possible “unity” and coherence of a deeply meaningful kind—e.g., metaphysical certainty concerning the meaning and outcome of life. to the extent it can be argued that theodicy provides an answer to suffering, it does so at great risk to those who suffer most. in the rest of this essay, i give consideration to the above problem of struggle-death viewed through a moralist discourse anchored by the likes of camus and w. e. b. du bois, and i do so in light of recent us social developments. . social circumstances and black lives: pretext for a question the situation cannot be overstated: we live a legacy of racial violence meant to confine and manage. the manner in which the us orchestrates this process of control has entailed the destruction of difference by brutalizing raced bodies whenever they are “out of place” or out of “time”. the terror involved in this process isn’t simply the threat of death, but the inability to anticipate what will trigger violent response to blackness. as with philando castile in minnesota—the land of “nice-ness”—compliance can be deadly. any sign of struggle—even for one’s breath—can be understood as a threat to the safety of law enforcement and, as was the case for eric garner, can result in death. the jail cell as a place of confinement can also be a death chamber, as sandra bland’s demise makes clear. there are no decipherable ground rules for survival if one happens to live in black flesh. those black men and women who have been murdered by police officers died simply because they occupied time and space in a way considered threatening. they were in the wrong place, or they demanded respect and the exercise of their agency, or perhaps they were simply black in a land where white privilege codes all interactions. yes, not all police officers hate blacks, women, and other “marginalized” groups, but those who do hate seem to operate without significant challenge. the anger felt by so many is not simply the fact that some police officers have murdered, but that these murderers by and large have gone without consequences consistent with their senseless taking of life. no charges and limited reprimand after such killings produces disillusionment and agitation for good reason. so, many look for ways to speak to this injustice, to force change to a deadly system by absurdity, i mean to point to camus’s framing of the concept: the unrequited effort of humans to gain answers to the circumstances of life from a world that is non-responsive. see: (camus a, b). this argument is more fully developed in an early draft of my william james lecture at harvard divinity school, march . much of this material regarding examples of racial disregard is drawn from (pinn ). this articulation of right “place” and “time” is sensitive to mary douglas’s use of these concepts. for instance, according to douglas dirt can be understood as matter out of place. see (douglas ). in body matters, judith butler extends the link arguing that some marginalized groups are identified within the social system as ‘shit’: (butler ). see for examples: (ellis and kirkos ; baker et al. ; nathan ). religions , , of because “black lives matter”. still, the genius of white supremacy is that it mutates and transforms, and it gives up a little in order to present the illusion of fundamental change. it finds ways to blame victims for the violence perpetuated against them. there is a desperate effort to find something in the past of the victim that will justify murder as the safeguarding of order and wellbeing. at times, this something found is nothing more than the connotations blackness. racial violence has always been a prominent dimension of life in the united states. this is a country, truth be told, grounded and enriched through a vicious disregard for difference that allowed for the psycho-physical marginalization and brutalization of those deemed “out of place” (douglas ). this is more than dynamic belittling (e.g., socio-cultural, political, and economic hostility justified through a physical marker of distinction such as race, gender, or class). bodies are coded, and in this coding, all else is found. social coding such as that of race is tenacious, and longstanding. its impact is significant; it “colors”—so to speak—the outlook on life, the struggles encountered, and the range of options for resolution. activism toward change up to this point has been preoccupied with outcomes—measurable and permanent changes that promote wellbeing for all. yet, while admirable in that people are putting themselves on the line, offering themselves for the sake of a larger purpose, such strategies have produced little fundamental change. there is an assumption this country can do better, that it wants to do better, that it is a good system used wrong. so, effort consistent and ongoing can make a difference. such thinking is the basis for hope under girding ongoing protest and critique. this is not identical to, but rather draws its strength from an appeal to love. that is to say, it prompts a sense of the other that truncates the integrity of self. i would argue a prime example of this is the christ event embraced within the christian tradition. this is not blaming the victim, per se, but it is a sacrifice that prompts a particularly positive depiction of suffering. if it is love, what prevents the assumption it is the love of an abuser who damages without taking responsibility for the violence, instead preferring to believe the violence was forced by the abused? isn’t this logic found in some of the responses to the black lives matter movement and other organized efforts for change? isn’t this thinking present in the vocalized assumption that protestors bring violence on themselves through their “disruptive” and divisive behavior? the idea that love is the guiding force serving to bring us citizens together is an old fallacy without historical evidence. this is theological slight-of-hand, a theologically driven wish without grounding. where is the love in that? i understand there is some sense of comfort—a type of space away from the chaos of life—in the claim that religion in the form of love-talk points to the answer. “if we can only get back to loving each other”, so many lament in a variety of ways. this is said as if religion is a type of protective teflon coating that has prevented hate, fear, and violence from actually penetrating the core values of the nation. and because of this coating, evil injustice is superficial and can be removed, the democratic process exercised, and life improved. however, such thinking fails to really consider the biblical text from which its advocates claim it is drawn. what is to be made of the violence and the divinely sanctioned destruction of life that marks the sacred texts so quickly quoted (out of context)? . an alternate question: life without appeal? the dogma and practices of churches do little to change the “folkways, habits, customs and subconscious deeds” that contribute to the condition of african americans (du bois , p. ). if anything, church dogma and theology re-enforce some of the worst patterns of thinking and hence celebrate some of the worst modes of ethics. i develop this idea more fully in a variety of texts, including the end of god-talk: an african american humanist theology (pinn ). religions , , of moving back in time, there is no adequate response to the theodicy question for du bois; the theological wishes expressed by many, from his vantage point, fail to highlight the depth of disregard marking the historical moment and instead seek resolution either as future restitution or divine intervention in the social dynamics of belief beyond the abilities of humans. theodical interrogations go unfulfilled; there is no response given to the question of “why, god?” borrowing from camus, i suggest, this line of questioning regarding human suffering is a mode of suicide—i.e., a surrendering of embodied integrity and agency. instead of theodicy as a response to human suffering and misery, i prefer the question posed by the moralists: “is life without appeal possible?” (camus a). by this question, i aim to redirect inquiry—to push against effort to redress suffering by turning away from material life to an approach that grounds inquiry in the material, historical world. such an arrangement urges confrontation with beliefs by pushing against comforting assumptions as one highlights and forces a view of human suffering without the affective and intellectual safeguard of theologically ‘flinching’ and ethically ‘blinking’ (zaretsky , p. ). there is, then, no retreat from this predicament—no solace that will ultimately offer comfort (zaretsky , p. ). for moralists, life is drowned in suffering. questions regarding disregard, danger, and violence are met with the silence of the world (du bois , p. ). du bois offers a response to theodicy, which is to reject theodicy and in its place offer philosophical-theological revolt. i would propose this is his turn away from theodicy toward moralism and the absurd. it, then, is intellectually akin to camus’ interrogation of the plausibility of life without appeal. cornel west, for one, seems to measure du bois’ sense of the absurdity of life over against his strategies and promotion of sustainable structuring of hope. however, du bois concerns himself with a diagnosis of the condition premised upon a cultural climate or sensibility defined by structures and strategies of disregard. not theodicy, but rather, “how does it feel to be a problem?” (du bois ; west , p. ). by means of this question, du bois shifts away from the dominant narrative of religious faith marked by a certain type of fatalism—sorrow and misery until the next world or a more aggressive theology of revenge. he raises the question of pain and suffering, but as a moralist-absurdist question that rejects the fall back of a grand unity of purpose. instead, can life be lived without appeal? in raising this question, i want to draw attention to my critique of models of theodical response to suffering that connote redemptive suffering strategies. i find such a dilemma in various modalities of constructive and liberation theologies. here, through this question, i want to redirect theological inquiry in such a way as to jettison redemptive suffering. related to the above reading of du bois, i offer a question posed by another moralist, richard wright, who proclaims, “ought one to surrender to authority even if one believed that that authority was wrong? if the answer was yes, then i knew that i would always be wrong, because i could never do it. then how could one live in a world in which one’s mind and perceptions meant nothing and authority and tradition meant everything? there were no answers”. (wright , p. ). to exist is to be caught in this cultural climate. in this sense, as susan mizruchi notes, death and blacks “have become synonymous in white minds” (mizruchi , p. ). physical death, as noted by du bois, and highlighted by john wideman, is ever present; but it is not a separate reality that can be managed and bracketed off. rather, it is akin to life, tied to life. this is only one mode of death noted by du bois. he also highlights another and intense mode of death, what i will call a death as metaphysical irrelevance. he writes, “you might have noted only the physical dying, the shattered frame and hacking cough; but in that soul lay deeper death than that” i have made this argument in various locations, including: (pinn , ). as my earlier work—including (pinn ) demonstrates, i am aware of the various arguments made within womanist and black theological circles. i understand their nuance. however, even their effort to rethink suffering lends itself to redemptive suffering models. religions , , of (du bois , p. ). this, he continues, is the “death that is more than death—the passing of a soul that has missed its duty” (du bois , p. ). for instance, projection of blacks as death produced an extreme effort to control death through death. kristin hunter lattany argues killing and death are intrinsic to the logic of the nation. writes lattany, “we can see that america is not a glamour queen but a grisly skeleton, her only produce death . . . her only lessons how to kill and how to die”. as i have argued elsewhere, such a take on death highlights the manner in which certain human communities are circumscribed—violently at times—so as to protect the status quo. for them, death bleeds into life and life into death. one can lament this situation and be consumed by a certain type of agony; lament this situation and struggle against it—but still maintain the dominant logic. or, one can push against it embracing the tragic-comic nature of life. for instance, according to black lives matter, like moralist du bois, the ever-present threat of death does not stimulate a sense of melancholy. instead, death is simply a dimension of what it is to live within the context of the cultural climate in president obama’s and now president trump’s “america.” the every present threat of death confronts all dimensions of life, and there is no relief available. this, i would argue, is the approach job and his friends feared and his god fought against. circumstances—“yes we can” and “make america great again” narratives of national transformation—do not afford more than illusion. following camus, i would press the following point: “the absurd, godless world is, then, peopled with men who think clearly and have ceased to hope” (camus a, p. ). camus and du bois promote, and i advocated for over against theodicy, living into death without reconciliation but by means of comfort with vulnerability, incompleteness and awareness of the openness entailed. in a sense, the task is to confront the world and not be bent permanently and tamed by the weight of its silence. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. references baker, al, j. david goodman, and benjamin mueller. . beyond the chokehold: the path to eric garner’s death. nytimes.com, june . available online: https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /nyregion/eric- garner-police-chokehold-staten-island.html (accessed on november ). butler, judith. . body matter. new york: routledge. camus, albert. a. the myth of sisyphus and other essays. new york: vintage international. camus, albert. b. the rebel. new york: vintage international. douglas, mary. . impurity and danger. new york: routledge. du bois. . dusk of dawn. new york: schocken, p. . du bois, w. e. b. . the souls of black folk. new york: vintage, p. . du bois, w. e. b. . w.e.b. du bois: a reader. edited by david levering lewis. new york: henry holt and company, p. . ellis, ralph, and bill kirkos. . officer who shot philando castile found not guilty on all counts. cnn.com, june . available online: http://www.cnn.com/ / / /us/philando-castile-trial-verdict/index.html (accessed on november ). i have written about death in a variety of pieces, but the most substantial is the project i am currently completing: (pinn forthcoming), scheduled for submission to press august . (lattany ), i further develop this attention to death in (pinn ). i want to make a distinction between melancholy and nihilism. the former, i argue, involves a sense of loss—a mourning of sorts connected to circumstances lost. this isn’t a rejection of life as meaningful or valuable—but rather the mourning of circumstances that reflect this meaning and value. nihilism is the rejection of possibility. it isn’t recognition of something or someone lost; rather, it is a rejection of life as having value. an extension and fine tuning of this argument will be published as, “in the wake of obama’s hope” in (floyd-thomas and pinn). https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /nyregion/eric-garner-police-chokehold-staten-island.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /nyregion/eric-garner-police-chokehold-staten-island.html http://www.cnn.com/ / / /us/philando-castile-trial-verdict/index.html religions , , of juan floyd-thomas, and anthony b. pinn, eds. forthcoming; religion in the age of obama. london: bloomsbury academic. lattany, kristin hunter. . off-timing: stepping to the different drummer. in lure and loathing: essays on race, identity, and the ambivalence of assimilation. edited by gerald early. new york: the penguin press, p. . mizruchi, susan. . “neighbors, strangers, corpses: death and sympathy in the early writings of w.e.b. du bois”. in the souls of black folk: w. e. b. du bois. edited by henry l. gates jr. and terri hume oliver. new york: w. w. norton & company, p. . nathan, debbie. . what happened to sandra bland? thenation.com. april . available online: https: //www.thenation.com/article/what-happened-to-sandra-bland/ (accessed on november ). pinn, anthony b. . why, lord: suffering and evil in black theology. new york: continuum. anthony b. pinn, ed. . moral evil and redemptive suffering. gainesville: university press of florida. pinn, anthony b. . the end of god-talk: an african american humanist theology. new york: oxford university. pinn, anthony. . on struggle in our historical moment. huffington post religion blog, july . pinn, anthony. . presence together: technology of religion and the interplay of things. new york: oxford university press. pinn, anthony b., and allen callahan. . god of restraint: an african american humanist interpretation of nimrod and the tower of babel. in book african american religious life and the story of nimrod. new york: palgrave macmillan. pinn, anthony b. forthcoming; cold blooded: hip hop and the cultural grammar of death. durham: duke university press. west, cornel. . prophecy deliverance! louisville: westminster/john knox. west, cornel. . the american evasion of philosophy: a genealogy of pragmatism. madison: university of wisconsin press, p. . wright, richard. . black boy. new york: harper and row, p. . zaretsky, robert. . a life worth living: albert camus and the quest for meaning. cambridge: harvard university press, pp. – . © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). https://www.thenation.com/article/what-happened-to-sandra-bland/ https://www.thenation.com/article/what-happened-to-sandra-bland/ http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	the question: theodicy and racial disregard 	social circumstances and black lives: pretext for a question ]much of this material regarding examples of racial disregard is drawn from (b -religions- - ). 	an alternate question: life without appeal? ps • january john gaus award lecture © american political science association, introduction i t is a great honor to receive the john gaus award and to give this lecture. i first encountered the work of john gaus and his understanding of “the ecology of government” as a beginning graduate student in the department of political science at the university of wisconsin–madison in . professor gaus had been a member of the department before he moved to harvard well before i arrived. gaus’s expansive view of government as a multi-party and multi-layered system embedded in larger systems of complementary and competing interests has since colored much of my research, teaching, and service. i wish to acknowledge several people and institutions for their role in my receiving this award. thanks to the award committee for choosing me. fred fisher, jerry kaufman, andre delbecq, and bob einsweiler were wonderful mentors. among my many co-authors, i wish to mention especially fran ackermann, colin eden, and, naturally, barbara crosby. i want to thank three great universities: cornell, where i was an undergraduate; uw-madison, where i did my graduate work; and the university of minnesota, where i have been for the last years. i thank the humphrey school and its deans and faculty for providing such a supportive home; i’d especially like to recognize dean laura bloomberg of the humphrey school and my leadership and management colleagues there. as many of you know, i have written about leadership; strategic management; collaboration; organizational, policy, and community change processes; and public value. a clear thread running through that wide-ranging work is the idea that effective strategizing is a necessity for things to get better—and not to get worse. this talk will cover four things: the first is the back story about how i came to focus on strategizing; the second is the idea of strategizing, at once a timeless and continually evolving idea; third, i want to talk about its applications to different levels of analysis; finally, i will share my views about how efforts to understand strategizing—in the academy and elsewhere—can bear more fruit, so that more things will get better and fewer things will get worse. the back story several colleagues have encouraged me to share how i came to be so interested in strategizing as a major theme uniting my work on topics that are typically treated quite separately in the academy, its disciplines, conferences, journals, and professional associations. the back story is actually quite a long one—not surprisingly, given my age. i will mention three particularly formative experiences. first, i grew up in a very challenging family, one that i sometimes refer to as the most difficult audience i ever had to deal with. i fig- ured out i really needed a strategy and the will to find a better life. second, i came of age in the late s and early s when the civil rights movement, anti-war movement, and student activism were strong and strategizing was an elemental feature of those efforts. spending two years as a vista volunteer and community organizer in augusta, ga, after graduating from college was a truly formative experience. as a -year-old i learned first-hand—and in the most dramatic way—about the importance of leadership, organization, management, strategy, implementation, power, and politics. third, i became really good at whitewater canoe and kayak rac- ing—to the point that my partner and i were national cham- pions in our canoe class and, right after graduating from college, were members of the us national whitewater canoe and kayak team. we raced in the world championships in the french alps. what is the connection? whitewater racing taught a great deal about the interactions of structure (riverbeds, boulders), process (water flows, hydraulics, dynamics), agency (the paddlers), tools and techniques (paddles, strokes, timing), teamwork, coach- ing, and the interplay of theory and practice. i’ve paid attention to all of these subjects in my subsequent research. then came the challenge of finding an academic home. my stud- ies and experience involved multiple intellectual threads. i studied economics, sociology, government, and creative writing at cornell; community planning and organizing as a vista volunteer; and politi- cal science, public administration, public policy, urban and region- al planning, geography, more economics, and management at the university of wisconsin. then i landed at the humphrey school, where public administration, planning, and management were all marginal at the time. fortunately, i found colleagues and coauthors at minnesota and elsewhere and enough sympathetic editors and reviewers to get my particular brand of interdisciplinary work published in top-line journals. then, fortuitously, i was encouraged in by bernard taylor, a british business management professor and the editor of long range planning, to write the book that became strategic plan- ning for public and nonprofit organizations, now in its fifth edition. also in the mid- s, renowned management scholar karl weick strongly encouraged me to write the book that became leadership for the common good, coauthored with barbara crosby. the two oft-cited books won four best book awards. basically, i created my own interdisciplinary academic home. my work weaves together the various intellectual threads mentioned above around decision-making, in the tradition of chester barnard, harold lasswell, herbert simon, and others; and power, relation- ships, and process in the tradition of mary parker follett, hannah the future of strategizing by public and nonprofit organizations john m. bryson, university of minnesota john m. bryson is mcknight presidential professor of planning and public affairs at the hubert h. humphrey school of public affairs at the university of minnesota. he can be reached at jmbryson@umn.edu. ps • january j o h n g a u s a w a r d l e c t u r e © american political science association, arendt, karl weick, anthony giddens, james mcgregor burns, john forester, martha feldman, judy innes, and others. strategiz- ing embraces decision-making, power, relationships, and process. fortunately, and in part with my help, the world also moved in my direction. leadership, management, collaboration, and change pro- cesses are now mainstream academic topics in the literature and central to the curricula of places like the humphrey school. what strategizing is and why it matters strategizing links aspirations and capabilities, issues and answers, problems and solutions (ackermann and eden ; gaddis ). this includes forming, deciding on, or changing aspirations and strategies. it also includes developing or acquiring capabilities, and it includes learning-by-doing and changing your mind (ansell ). strategizing is a response to challenges and opportunities. if one is to address the challenges effectively and take advantage of opportunities, strategizing is certainly necessary, since there are undoubtedly more ways to fail than to succeed. even though strat- egizing can never guarantee success, at least it may reduce the risk of failure, or if failure does occur, it can help increase the likelihood of drawing the right lessons from failure, so that success is more likely in the future. in recent years strategizing as a practice or set of practices has received increased attention and i will claim some credit for this happening. three developments in the conduct of the social science enterprise have been particularly helpful in this regard. first, the “practice turn” has drawn more attention to what actors actually do (schatzki, knorr-cetina, and von savigny ; latour ). sec- ond, the strategy-as-practice turn in strategy research has focused on people, practices, and praxis (whittington ; golsorkhi et al. ). third, the embrace of design thinking has been useful (e.g., simon ; barzelay ; van buuren, lewis, and peters ). design thinking is a kind of strategizing that looks to the past and future in order to do something in the present that can best fulfill aspirations. my own research agenda and approaches have been deeply influenced by these turns at the same time that i have con- tributed to them. what is strategizing in more detail? as noted, strategy links aspirations and capabilities. strategizing in practice necessarily involves thinking, acting, and learning (fer- lie and ongaro ) in a politically astute way (hartley et al. ), and is, for those reasons, a vital source of the effectiveness of pub- lic and nonprofit organizations. my colleague bert george and i define strategizing as “consisting of the activities undertaken by public organizations or other entities to deliberately and emergent- ly (re)align their aspirations and capabilities, thus exploring how aspirations can actually be achieved within a given context—or else need to be changed—taking into account current capabilities and the possible need to develop new capabilities or to change the con- text” (bryson and george a, ). learning, of course, is an inte- gral aspect of effective strategizing and is focused “pragmatically on what works, which likely includes knowing something about what doesn’t; learning of this sort doesn’t have to be by design— much of it will be tacit and epiphenomenal” (bryson , ). definitions, of course, take us only so far. over the years, and often with colleagues, i’ve written about how best to characterize effective strategizing, starting with my award-winning dissertation. my most recent—and best—thinking on the subject was reported in bryson, crosby, and seo ( ), and is presented in figure . the figure indicates effective strategizing consists of facets or ele- ments and their interconnections. figure consists of statements and arrows. each statement rep- resents an important facet of strategic thinking as a crucial feature of strategizing. the arrows indicate an influence of one thinking focus (at an arrow’s tail) on another (at the arrow’s head). in particular circumstances the arrows might indicate causal relationships; more typically, they indicate lines of argumentation, reasons, or reasonable relationships. this does not mean the relationships generally only go one way—clearly they do not (as indicated by some two-headed arrows)—or that other links are not possible. the figure demonstrates that strategizing consists of multiple facets and their interrelationships as part of people’s thinking in response to a moving scene. these facets jointly help the thinkers understand more clearly what, why, how, where, when, and by whom or what something might or should be done (or not done) to achieve purposes within a given context. furthermore, strategic thinking is typically an ongoing, fluid, and often fairly intuitive process since situations, workable strategies, and purposes may, and often do, change (kahneman ; freedman ). the starting point in figure is the need to “have in place ade- quate cognitive, socio-emotional, and behavioral complexity; as well as appropriate wisdom.” in other words, strategists need to have adequate capacity and wisdom for thinking (maccoby ). (an even earlier starting point might have been strategists’ need for self-efficacy and suitable motivations, experiences, and contacts; see mauer , ). cognitively complex individuals “are able to see the world through a rich array of dimensions or lenses and identify commonalities or relationships across dimensions” (crosby , ; hooijberg, hunt, and dodge ). they gather evidence from diverse sources, question the status quo (especially existing power relations), attend to historical influences as well as contemporary trends, and employ systems thinking and a variety of analytical tools. socio-emotional complexity refers to the ability to understand the emotional responses of oneself and others and to regulate one’s own reactions, as well as attending to social context, especially culture and status hierarchies. behavioral complexity is the practical ability to act appropriately in a specific situation by drawing on both cognitive and socio-emotional strategizing is a response to challenges and opportunities. if one is to address the challenges effectively and take advantage of opportunities, strategizing is certainly necessary, since there are undoubtedly more ways to fail than to suc- ceed. ps • january j o h n g a u s a w a r d l e c t u r e © american political science association, skills. metaphorically, cognitive, socio-emotional, and behavioral complexity can be described as thinking with head, heart, and hands (crosby ). of course, we humans think in relation to and with other humans (sapiksky ; storberg-walker and haber-curran ); thus, it is possible to speak about group cognitive, socio-emo- tional, and behavioral complexity. strategic thinking and strategies may achieve desired ends, but the ends and means may not be wise ones, which is why both ancient greek and chinese writers on strategy emphasized the importance of prudence ( jullien ). in a complementary way, holt ( ) in his recent review of classical and contemporary sources of strategy insight emphasizes phronesis, or practical wisdom. next in figure is “emphasize systems thinking—understand the dynamics of the existing system and ideally how it should function across time and space,” and “determine enterprise purposes and goals that make sense, given the context and situational require- ments.” “pay careful attention to stakeholders broadly defined” is also important for determining purposes and systems thinking. these four facets are, or should be, intimately intertwined (senge, hamilton, and kania ; scharmer ). on both ethical and practical grounds, bryson ( ) and ack- ermann and eden ( ) advise starting with a very inclusive list of possible stakeholders to be analyzed. starting this way avoids leaving out important stakeholders, a basic source of unwise and needlessly harmful decisions (nutt ). paying careful attention to stakeholders, in turn, helps with two additional facets: “focus on strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, as well as com- petitive and collaborative capabilities and advantages” and (along with determining enterprise purposes) “gather relevant information about what the issues and requirements for success are, and what has worked or might work to achieve purposes within the context.” “use systems thinking,” “determine social enterprise purposes,” “pay careful attention to stakeholders,” and “focus on strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats” are all helpful for the facet, “gather relevant information about what the issues and require- ments for success are, and what has worked or might work to achieve purposes within the context.” gathering relevant information also includes: “focus on the future and how different strategies might be used to influence it,” “pay careful attention to implementation chal- lenges,” “realize that strategies are both deliberately set in advance and emergent in practice,” and “pay close attention to the particulars of context, including the decision-making context.” understanding the issues and requirements (e.g., mandates, needed capabilities or resources, authorizations, etc.) and what has been done, or might be done, to achieve purposes is hardly just a technical task (maccoby ). instead, truly successful strategies probably should be tech- nically, administratively, politically, legally, ethically, and morally defensible (bryson ). “gather relevant information” along with “focus on strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats, as well as competitive and collaborative capabilities and advantages” and “systems thinking” are important for pursuing the facet, “initially consider a broad agen- da, followed by a later move to a more selective strategic agenda for action, strategic waiting, or doing nothing.” the social psychology and strategy literatures are clear that ill-considered action is rarely successful, though the writers recognize that chance, emotions, and heroic action can change probabilities dramatically (e.g., janis ; light ). when action is called for, the choice can be between pursuing “small wins” (which are less risky, can generate energy and other resources, and can add up to a big win), or “big wins,” which are riskier, but are sometimes the right way to go (bryson , – ). at other times, “strategic waiting” is called for (nutt and f i g u r e elements of strategizing and their interconnections ps • january j o h n g a u s a w a r d l e c t u r e © american political science association, hogan ). the wait can include time for gathering support, the weakening of the opposition, or the opening of a window of oppor- tunity (kingdon ). at still other times, the best choice is to do nothing and let naturally occurring processes result in desirable consequences, or else eventu- ally reveal the need to do something. as mintzberg, ahlstrand, and lampel ( ) note, good strategies can be both deliberate, mean- ing designed in advance and then imposed or partially imposed; or emergent, meaning unfolding more or less of their own accord. in short, sometimes the best thing to do is simply acknowledge what has happened, not do anything to undermine it, or better yet find ways to support it through “nudges” (thaler and sunstein ). the move to a “more selective agenda,” along with “focus on strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats, and competi- tive and collaborative capabilities and advantages” and “pay close attention to the decision-making context” are likely needed for “build commitments and coalitions of support around an agenda likely to achieve purposes with an acceptable level of risk” (mauer ; jenkins-smith et al. ). both the selective agenda and the coalition will be needed for the final facet: “given the enterprise pur- poses, continue, add, or stop actions, while maintaining flexibility to manage and take advantage of opportunities and minimize threats.” in sum, effective strategizing consists of an interconnected set of facets. note we are not in any way indicating or advocating a prescriptive step-by-step process. instead, we offer figure as an orienting framework for understanding the phenomenon of strat- egizing without reducing it to a formula. further research will be needed to determine the usefulness of the framework and whether specific facets or combinations or configurations of them lead to better results. for example, bert george at the university of ghent and i have developed a questionnaire based on the facets. a factor analysis of survey results from a recent survey of over , flem- ish public servants indicates the facets combine into three factors, including attention to a strategy’s purpose and whether it can be implemented and also sustained (bryson and george b). the face validity of the framework is therefore good and its convergent and discriminant validity are also good. beyond that, a recent prize-winning meta-analysis of strategic planning in public, nonprofit, and business organizations indicates that strategic planning has a positive, moderate, and statistically significant effect on organizational performance in public, non- profit, and business sectors (george, walker, and monster ). the study suggests that strategic planning should be part of the standard managerial repertoire—in marked contradiction to many of the critiques of strategic planning. further, and again in contrast to critiques, “the formality of the strategic processes (i.e., the extent to which strategic planning includes internal and external analyses and the formulation of goals, strategies, and plans) is important to enhancing organizational performance.” finally, strategic planning is “particularly potent in enhancing organizational effectiveness (i.e., whether organizations successfully achieve their goals), but it should not necessarily be undertaken in the hope of achieving effi- ciency gains” (george, walker, and monster , ). the study indicates strategic planning helps, but not how it works. i would hypothesize that what matters—the mechanism, if you will—is the panoply of linkages (causal and otherwise) between a strategic planning process, on the one hand, and its constitutive activities of strategic thinking, acting, and learning—strategizing— on the other. the meta-analysis establishes the causal link between strategic planning and performance. the next section considers in more detail how strategic planning can be connected with implementation suc- cess (performance) through the development and use of strategic management systems by public and nonprofit organizations. strategic management of public and nonprofit organizations strategic management is now a conventional feature of govern- ment, nonprofit, business, and social enterprise organizations (fer- lie and ongaro ; whittington et al. ). strategic manage- ment “integrates strategic planning and implementation across an organization (or other entity) in an ongoing way to enhance mis- sion fulfillment, the meeting of mandates, and sustained creation of public value” (bryson , ). strategic management applied to an organization usually requires construction of a strategic management system. different kinds of strategic management systems are designed to perform well in dif- ferent kinds of context (bryson and george b). the systems vary in: comprehensiveness, loose vs. tight coupling, advance planning, approaches to governance and organizational learning, and so on. each system represents an organizational strategy for adapting the organization to its context in such a way that the organization’s mis- sion and goals can be achieved or altered appropriately. meta-analyses of the effectiveness of strategic management sys- tems in governments, nonprofit organizations, and businesses are in short supply, but evidence indicates that such systems can help, especially when organizations are interested in behaving proac- tively (e.g., mintzberg, lampel, and ahlstrand ; andrews et al. ; whittington et al. ). on the other hand, when these systems—and their leaders—are out of alignment with the organi- zation’s challenges, needed change can be stifled and public value creation reduced. leadership for strategy management-at-scale many challenges go beyond what an organization’s strategic man- agement system can handle by itself, including for example, the global covid- pandemic, and us domestic issues like home- lessness; the lack of affordable housing; racial gaps in educational achievement, income, and wealth; and the damage from adverse childhood experiences. making headway against such challenges requires reasonable collaboration among, or at least alignment of, the efforts of multiple organizations, associations, and groups. this approach involves sharing information and power, pooling author- ity, and aligning resources and purposes around a shared objective. multiple strands of reasonably aligned efforts are necessary, often across sectors and levels, for example, global, federal, state, and/or local (drath et al. ). this means strategy management at the scale of the challenge to be addressed, or strategy management-at- scale for short. strategy management-at-scale efforts have gone on for decades— for example, efforts resulting in the virtual elimination of smallpox, polio, and other illnesses—and are likely to increase significantly in the future. unfortunately, the results too often are disappointing, in part because collaboration is not an easy answer to hard problems— in spite of the hype surrounding it—but instead is a hard answer to hard problems. when it comes to collaboration, there are more ways to fail than to succeed (bryson, crosby, and stone ). in this sec- tion, we discuss two different, yet complementary, approaches to strategy management-at-scale: collaboration, especially the popular approach called collective impact (ci); and community organizing, ps • january j o h n g a u s a w a r d l e c t u r e © american political science association, coalition building, and advocacy. collective impact strategy management-at-scale initiatives gained added stimu- lus with the publication of a practitioner-oriented article by john kania and mark kramer in . the authors asserted that achiev- ing ci “required a disciplined cross-organizational and cross-sec- tor approach on a scale that matches the challenge.” they argued that “five conditions” were necessary to achieve collective impact (kania and kramer , – ): a common agenda, shared mea- surement, mutually reinforcing activities, frequent and structured communications, and a “backbone organization” to provide sup- port. the ci framework found a ready audience among foundations, government agencies, health systems, and other actors who were looking for a conceptually simple way to talk about and create large- scale change through single- or multi-sector collaboration. the ci approach fit the bill and, from a scholarly standpoint, was in reason- able accord with more sophisticated, nuanced, and research-based frameworks (ansell and gash ; bryson, crosby, and stone ; emerson and nabatchi ). partly in response to criticisms, ci advocates have modified and elaborated the approach since (hanleybrown, kania, and kramer ; kania and kramer ; kania et al. ). the most serious criticisms assert that ci initia- tives have great difficulty achieving fundamental system change, equity, and justice (e.g., christens and inzeo ; wolff et al. ). nonetheless, a strong community of practice has built up around the approach and we can expect to see many more ci-related initia- tives in the future, and ideally much more research on successful and unsuccessful strategizing in collaborations. community organizing, coalition building, and advocacy really addressing issues of equity, social justice, and system change requires community organizing, coalition building, and advocacy (wolff et al. ). a revision of the ci framework called “collective impact . ” acknowledges this, but doesn’t go far enough (cabaj and weaver ). as originally formulated, ci is a fairly top-down, “grass tops” approach that does not engage the most affected com- munities as equal partners, nor does it get at the deep political, eco- nomic, and racial causes of serious social problems. the shift is to create a social movement that alters power relations so that major system changes can happen. the shift also involves: rec- ognizing that powerful opposition is to be expected; a power analysis is necessary; effective engagement, mobilization, and advocacy efforts are required; and entrenched power must often be confronted and neutralized or overcome. the required leadership tasks are similar to those for ci, but with more emphasis on: grass-roots organizing, systems thinking, political astuteness (hartley et al. ), coalition building, and advocacy ( jenkins-smith et al. ), and a willingness to engage in conflict (christens and inzeo ). strategy mapping (bryson, ackermann, and eden ; barberg ), power map- ping (ackermann and eden ), and system dynamics modeling (stroh ; richardson ) can be particularly helpful. community organizing, coalition building, and advocacy also have their limits. the focus on bottom-up organizing and overcom- ing entrenched power means that—as with ci efforts—there are more ways to fail than to succeed. the focus on “the community” also generally limits the reach of the approach to more local concerns, although grass-roots mobilizing initiatives have also helped change many specific policies at state and federal levels, including smok- ing limits, gun safety legislation, easing or strengthening abortion rights, changes to suffrage, and civil rights legislation. actually, ci initiatives and community organizing, coalition building, and advocacy efforts can be complementary. system chang- es that require better alignment and inter-organizational service coordination may be achieved relatively quickly using a ci-style approach. on the other hand, when “changes require concessions from entrenched interests, or reorganization and reorientation of existing institutions,” community organizing, coalition building, and advocacy are “likely the more effective approach” (christens and inzeo , .) strategy mapping one specific emerging technology that can make both kinds of efforts more effective is interactive, “zoom-able” strategy map- ping. these co-created, software-based maps operate much like google maps in that it is possible for all collaborators to zoom in and out from high-level strategic objectives down to more detailed strategy and action elements (ackermann and eden ; bryson, ackermann, and eden ; barberg ). the maps help man- age the complexity of the changes needed at this scale. they also act help track and monitor progress and can easily be changed as circumstances shift. change at this scale is unlikely to be led by a single backbone organization. instead, the need is for leadership (broadly conceived) and guidance about how all parties can work in a collaborative or co-aligned and committed way toward shared purposes (drath et al. ). shared strategy maps help improve the efficiency and effectiveness of the collaboration or movement by capturing and representing graphically a generally agreed upon, broad strategic framework (common agenda) and, to the extent practical, shared measures, mutually reinforcing activities and continuous commu- nication. the use of strategy maps makes the rest of the conditions of ci or social movements more practical for large scale transforma- tion. i predict that their use will be ubiquitous in five or ten years for single organizations, collaborations, and social movements. leadership of social transformation social transformation takes the magnitude of changes imagined by ci and community organizing a dramatic step further—out, down and up. out means changes well beyond the boundaries of any collaboration; down means deep-seated systemic changes; and up means up to higher more encompassing levels, such as state, national, or global levels. transformation involves major changes to systems and explicitly addresses power relations. patton ( , ) points to the following transformations as offering lessons for leading and managing change: the end of colonialism, the end of apartheid, the fall of the berlin wall and communism, turning back the aids epidemic, creation of the internet, and the rise of social media. none of these transformations occurred due to a central- ly conceptualized, controlled, and implemented strategic plan or massive coordinated initiative. they occurred when multiple and diverse initiatives—that typically included various social, politi- cal, and technological innovations—intersected and synergized to create momentum, critical mass, and ultimately, tipping points. we can assume that far-reaching social transformations will con- tinue and that savvy strategizing by public and nonprofit orga- nizations will recognize them and, ideally, nudge them in public value-enhancing ways. figure illustrates how transformation happens. the x-axis shows ps • january j o h n g a u s a w a r d l e c t u r e © american political science association, changes through time. the y-axis shows changes at three levels: ( ) the deep level of culture, social and economic structure, and the physical and biological environment—that is, the broad, fairly stable landscape; ( ) institutionalized sectoral, policy, and technological regimes (systems); and ( ) ideas, action and innovations. changes in the broad landscape support, but also put pressure on, existing regimes, and open windows of opportunity for system-changing actions and innovations. subsequent changes in systems can change the landscape. regimes are generally stable responses to persistent challenges, but regimes can also evolve and can change rapidly (baumgartner and jones )—and even collapse (e.g., the soviet union)—in response to actions and innovations and pressures from the landscape. regimes vary greatly in their ability to guide and control their environments, but none is ever in complete control. ideas, action, and innovations are influenced by the functioning of regimes and the broader landscape. in turn, the actions of individu- als and groups can produce innovations that can be tested and, if workable, scaled to address deficiencies or inadequacies of regimes. system change accelerates when innovations are mutually reinforc- ing and aligned and powerful supportive coalitions emerge. if the system or systems change enough, societal transformation occurs. system change slows in the face of resistance from opposing coali- tions and inadequacies of the innovations on technological, social, political, or economic grounds. leading social transformation involves thinking differently from strategic management and strategy management-at-scale. the fol- lowing premises are useful guides (patton , ): • systems transformation is the focus for both design, action and evaluation. • complexity theory and systems thinking inform and permeate transformation theory. • transformation frames the nature, scope, and magnitude of change desired and needed, but values, stakes, and perspectives inform judgments about the desirability of the direction of transformation. • systems and transformation transcend project and program- level changes while building on and integrating them for greater momentum and cumulative impact. • no person, organization, entity, nor network is in charge of, controls, or manages transformation, but synergistic interactions can propel and accelerate transformation. • transformational engagement and momentum will generate opposition and resistance from those who benefit from the status quo. transformation also involves changing mental models, at least ultimately if not initially, in a deeper way than in strategy manage- ment-at-scale initiatives (senge ; kania, kramer and senge ; scharmer ). mental models are typically implicit, because unconsciously held, yet they provide the powerful underpinnings of relationships and power dynamics. in turn, relationships and power dynamics underpin explicit policies, practices, and resource flows. that means that changes to policies, practices, and resources flows are limited by relationships and power dynamics, which in turn are limited by mental models. fundamental social changes largely begin, perhaps ironically, with micro-level changes in the mental models held by change advocates. an example of how this happens is provided by the recent unrest f i g u r e how transformations happen ps • january j o h n g a u s a w a r d l e c t u r e © american political science association, in the us unleashed by a series of brutal murders of african ameri- can men and women at the hands of police that catalyzed a growing realization among white people that, indeed, as the movement’s slo- gan says, black lives matter. as those lives must matter—if equal- ity, justice, and freedom from oppression are to mean anything in a country that since its founding has espoused, but not fully realized, those values in practice. in other words, changing mental models for social transformation involves changing or reprioritizing values ( joy ). as another example, the adoption of the un’s sustainable development goals emerged from changing mental models about human and economic development in the context of a need for global resilience and stability (https://sustainabledevelopment.un.org). key foci for practice and research as noted previously, strategizing by public and nonprofit orga- nizations takes place increasingly not just at the organizational level, but also at the strategy-at-scale and social transformation levels. this section highlights several themes that will be part of these efforts and merit significant research attention. these are: approaches to strategizing, leadership, public value, evaluation, and theories of change and transformation. approaches to strategizing my colleagues and i have argued that the elements of effective strategizing are relatively constant. that said, there is great vari- ety in the approaches to how they might be instantiated. take for example strategic planning, which i define as “a disciplined, delib- erative approach to producing fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what an organization (or other entity) is, what it does, and why it does it” (bryson , ). as an approach, its practitioners draw selectively on a set of concepts, practices, pro- cedures, platforms, tools, and techniques to influence change in desirable ways. any strategizing approach involves its own set of contingent choices (bryson and george a). while we know that strategic planning in general has positive benefits, we know less about which specific approaches (includ- ing specific practices, procedures, platforms, tools and techniques) work best in which specific circumstances, and why. what is true about strategic planning is also true about other complementary approaches to strategizing, such as the increasingly popular design approaches (dorst ; bason ; barzelay ). furthermore, strategies can be set deliberately, emerge in practice (mintzberg, ahlstrand, and lampel ), or be the result of bricolage (innes and booher ; macmaster, archer, and hirth, ), so fitting these approaches into ongoing streams of events adds further con- tingencies. one area where i therefore expect to see considerable progress is in matching strategizing approaches to different kinds of issues or problems, for what purposes, in what kinds of contexts (including decision-making contexts), and with what kinds of spe- cific technologies, techniques, and tools. such knowledge will help practitioners be more strategic about their choices. leadership strategizing is a feature of leadership, but how? strikingly little attention is paid to the actual strategizing efforts of leaders of vari- ous kinds in the public and nonprofit literature; what attention exists is seldom informed by a theoretical understanding of strategy and strategizing. similarly, the leadership literature itself contains little attention to the content and practice of strategizing, espe- cially when that literature employs quantitative, variance-based approaches to study leadership (quick ; crosby and bryson ). that said, pockets of literature do attend to strategizing; for example, research on street-level bureaucrats (maynard-moody and musheno ), detailed case histories (e.g., lewis ; barze- lay and campbell ), and of course, the actual case studies many of us use in our teaching. i expect that professional development programs for public and nonprofit leaders, and the core curricula of public affairs, public policy, public administration, and planning schools will increasingly focus on both leadership and strategizing and how best to go about both (‘t hart and tummers ). public value i also predict that far great attention will be paid to public values beyond efficiency and effectiveness in the strategizing efforts of public and nonprofit organizations in the future (bryson, cros- by and bloomberg ). social justice and equity concerns, for example, have risen to prominence. beyond that, there is increased recognition in the united states and elsewhere that a broad range of public values are really important and that governments, non- profit organizations, businesses, and collaborations, often across sectors, are crucial to realizing those values in practice (ferlie and ongaro ; roberts ; torfing et al. ). given the number and scale of the challenges facing the world, the increased attention to a broad range of public values is most welcome. evaluation strategizing and evaluation are likely to become increasingly intertwined. like views of strategy and strategizing, views of evaluation have changed over the years. evaluations, wheth- er formative or summative, originally focused on projects and programs and whether implementation involved fidelity to the designs. later moves have added evaluands and approaches. evaluands now include strategies, missions, organizations, col- laborations, principles, developments, and indeed the earth as a living system. approaches have moved beyond questions of fidelity and accountability to usefulness, assistance with learn- ing, and designing interventions in partnership with planners, stakeholders, and decision makers (patton ; ; ). especially when it comes to the most complex challenges—in which learning is essential to progress—i see thinking strategi- cally and thinking evaluatively as two sides of the same coin. adept evaluators should be involved at or near the start of change efforts. ...strategizing by public and nonprofit organizations takes place increasingly not just at the organizational level, but also at the strategy-at-scale and social transformation levels. ps • january j o h n g a u s a w a r d l e c t u r e © american political science association, logic models, theories of change, and theories of transformation philanthropic funders now typically require proposals to include a logic model, if a program or project is to be funded, or theory of change if the effort involves multiple organizations or multiple projects (funnel and rodgers ; van tulder and keen ). another word for a logic model or a theory of change is a strategy. earlier i highlighted strategy mapping as a valuable way to lay out in a plausible causal sequence how capabilities might be drawn on to achieve aspirations (i am using the word causal loosely). strat- egy mapping is the most powerful strategizing tool i know, and is especially helpful when it comes to collaboration and the need to coordinate and align different organizations’ efforts (ackermann and eden ; bryson, ackermann, and eden ; barberg ). i predict that strategizers and evaluators will make increasing use of strategy mapping as a way of better articulating theories of change and determining whether hypothesized relationships are realized in practice or whether re-mapping is necessary. in other words, can what starts out as fiction be made non-fiction in practice (bryson, ackermann and eden )? i also foresee considerable effort put into developing theories of transformation (patton ). these will involve the blending and aligning of multiple theories of change in order ultimately to change systems. the global alliance for the future of food, an international collaboration of foundations, became one of the first organizations to adopt a theory of transformation (global alliance ). what this means for research i would like to see more research designed to foster the develop- ment of public and nonprofit management as what michael barz- elay calls a design-oriented professional discipline (barzelay ). among other kinds of knowledge and capabilities, the discipline should provide knowledge about, and the ability to, engage effec- tively in strategizing. figure presents a plausible summary in graphic form of what strategizing is for (to determine, given enter- prise purposes, what actions to add, continue, or stop, while main- taining flexibility to take advantage of opportunities and minimize threats), what it consists of (the other facets), and how it works (the arrows linking facets). more research obviously is needed to determine if, and to what extent, this is a useful way of thinking about strategizing. experiments can help (george ), as can reverse-engineering of both successful and unsuccessful efforts at strategizing (barzelay et al. ). i particularly would like to see comparative, longitudinal case studies of strategizing in practice. such studies take a long time and are very hard work, which is why there are so few (abdallah, basque, and rouleau ). that said, such case studies can afford the kind of rich depictions of context, strategizing processes, and outcomes—along with relevant compar- isons and contrasts—that can really contribute to learning. conclusions let me close with a number of observations. first, if you aspire to make the world or some part of it a better place, then understanding what strategizing is, what it consists of, and how it works becomes important. a next step is gaining clarity about what capabilities are needed to achieve your aspirations and how best to acquire and use them. also helpful is appreciation that strategizing is a practice that improves with experience—when coupled with a disciplined approach to learning about what works, for what purposes, how, and why; including learning from the kind of second-hand expe- rience that a design-oriented professional discipline can acquire, curate, and transmit (barzelay ). a second observation is that effective strategizing is important in order to develop the stable and improvable institutions needed for the world to become a better place. these institutions must themselves be sites or platforms to make continuous improvements that human societies require if they are to thrive; ensure security, liberty, justice, democracy and other important public values; and be sustainable (ansell and miura ). finally, strategizing is a phenomenon that cuts across levels. i’ve highlighted strategic management, strategy management-at-scale, and social transformation as sites for this cut-across phenomenon. there are obviously many more sites, starting with each of us as a human being. indeed, the phenomenon is so ubiquitous that, rather ironically, it hasn’t received the kind of attention it deserves. let me conclude with three famous quotes: the late, great baseball player and manager, yogi berra, said, “you can observe an awful lot just by watching.” african american author and icon james baldwin, said “not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” finally, award-winning author wallace stegner observed, “science and reason have always been on the side of utopia; only the cussedness of the human race has not.” the short version of 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himmelman, and kien s. lee. . “collaborating beyond equity and justice: moving beyond collective impact.” the nonprofit quarterly (winter): – . yin, robert k. . case study research: design and methods. thousand oaks, ca: sage. racial-ethnic disparities in case fatality ratio narrowed after age standardization: a call for race-ethnicity-specific age distributions in state covid- data racial-ethnic disparities in case fatality ratio narrowed after age standardization: a call for race-ethnicity-specific age distributions in state covid- data ishaan pathak, bsc, yoonjoung choi, mph, drph, dazhi jiao, ms, diana yeung, msph, li liu, phd, mhs, mb, , . department of population, family and reproductive health, bloomberg school of public health, johns hopkins university . isquared . institute of clinical and translational research, school of medicine, johns hopkins university . department of international health, bloomberg school of public health, johns hopkins university correspondence goes to li liu, phd, mhs, mb, associate professor, department of population, family and reproductive health, bloomberg school of public health, johns hopkins university, email: lliu @jhu.edu manuscript word count: words . cc-by-nc-nd . international licenseit is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted october , . ; https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint note: this preprint reports new research that has not been certified by peer review and should not be used to guide clinical practice. mailto:lliu @jhu.edu https://doi.org/ . / . . . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / key points question: what are the racial-ethnic disparities in covid- case fatality ratios (cfr) across states after adjusting for age? findings: we conducted direct standardization among , covid- cases and , deaths from california, illinois and ohio to compare age-adjusted cfr across race-ethnicities. the racial-ethnic disparities in cfr narrowed and the ranking changed after age standardization. meaning: age distributions in confirmed cases obscured racial-ethnic disparities in covid- cfr. . cc-by-nc-nd . international licenseit is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted october , . ; https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint https://doi.org/ . / . . . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / abstract importance: covid- racial disparities have gained significant attention yet little is known about how age distributions obscure racial-ethnic disparities in covid- case fatality ratios (cfr). objective: we filled this gap by assessing relevant data availability and quality across states, and in states with available data, investigating how racial-ethnic disparities in cfr changed after age adjustment. design/setting/participants/exposure: we conducted a landscape analysis as of july st, and developed a grading system to assess covid- case and death data by age and race in states and dc. in states where age- and race-specific data were available, we applied direct age standardization to compare cfr across race-ethnicities. we developed an online dashboard to automatically and continuously update our results. main outcome and measure: our main outcome was cfr (deaths per confirmed cases). we examined cfr by age and race-ethnicities. results: we found substantial variations in disaggregating and reporting case and death data across states. only three states, california, illinois and ohio, had sufficient age- and race- ethnicity-disaggregation to allow the investigation of racial-ethnic disparities in cfr while controlling for age. in total, we analyzed , confirmed cases and , confirmed deaths. the crude cfrs varied from, e.g. . % among non-hispanic (nh) white population to . % among hispanic population in ohio. after age standardization, racial-ethnic differences in cfr narrowed, e.g. from . % among nh white population to . % among nh asian population . cc-by-nc-nd . international licenseit is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted october , . ; https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint https://doi.org/ . / . . . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / in ohio, or an over one-fold difference. in addition, the ranking of race-ethnic-specific cfrs changed after age standardization. nh white population had the leading crude cfrs whereas nh black and nh asian population had the leading and second leading age-adjusted cfrs respectively in two of the three states. hispanic population’s age-adjusted cfr were substantially higher than the crude. sensitivity analysis did not change these results qualitatively. conclusions and relevance: the availability and quality of age- and race-ethnic-specific covid- case and death data varied greatly across states. age distributions in confirmed cases obscured racial-ethnic disparities in covid- cfr. age standardization narrows racial- ethnic disparities and changes ranking. public covid- data availability, quality, and harmonization need improvement to address racial disparities in this pandemic. . cc-by-nc-nd . international licenseit is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted october , . ; https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint https://doi.org/ . / . . . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / introduction in the wake of the covid- pandemic and black lives matter protests, racial disparities in covid- has received increased attention. , , , the us covid- response has been decentralized, with the federal government leaving responsibility to individual states. this has resulted in large variations in how states have collected, compiled and released covid- data. as a result, publicly available data vary widely in content, format, and completeness, creating barriers for timely generation of evidence on racial disparities to inform policy and action. still, existing data suggest the pandemic has disproportionately affected minority populations. among key indicators, racial disparities in case fatality ratio (cfr, defined as the number of covid- confirmed deaths divided by the number of confirmed cases) is of particular significance as it represents the mortality risk of populations contracting sars-cov- . cfr not only measures the severity of covid- but also reflects differences in access and quality of care between populations. various factors, rooted in the systemic racism of us healthcare , can drive racial disparities in cfr, including comorbidities , , and access to treatment. covid- also has an age- dependent mortality pattern. differences in the age distribution of cases by race may mask true racial disparities in cfr. the age distribution of the general us population varies by race, with non-hispanic (nh) white population being the oldest. working-age nh white population are more likely to be able to work from home, while racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to be essential workers at the front line with low access to sick leaves or share households with someone who is . these factors create variations in the age distribution of cases between race-ethnicities, with the older distribution of nh white cases potentially masking worse cfr in other races. . cc-by-nc-nd . international licenseit is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted october , . ; https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint https://doi.org/ . / . . . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / existing evidence on how age confounds racial disparities in cfr is limited. one analysis compared age-specific covid- mortality rates by race and found that after adjusting for race- specific age distributions, “black people are dying from covid at roughly the same rate as white people more than a decade older. age-specific death rates for hispanic/latino people fall in between”. another report further revealed that not only have hispanic/latino and nh black populations been three times as likely to be infected as their nh white peers and twice as likely to die, but when comparing covid- incidence rate among roughly the same age groups, this racial disparity widens further. however, neither of these studies examined age effects on racial disparities in cfr. meanwhile, a multi-country study investigating the contribution of age to cfr variations concluded that the age distribution in confirmed cases often explains over two-thirds of cfr heterogeneity. in this study, we investigated racial disparities in cfr after controlling for age at the state level. we first assessed the availability and quality of data needed across states. ln states with appropriate age distributions of cases and deaths by race, we illustrated how racial disparities in cfr changed after age adjustment. methods landscape analysis of data availability and quality a landscape analysis was conducted to assess data availability and quality from all states and dc as of july , . we reviewed the department of health and/or covid- webpages from each state. to ensure we identified all relevant public information in any form (e.g., dashboards, reports, machine readable data files), we checked our findings against web searches of state covid- data. we also cross-referenced against sources in the covid tracking project’s racial data dashboard. we examined case and deaths data separately, and recorded the following: metrics (count vs. share of total); age-groups and race and/or ethnicity . cc-by-nc-nd . international licenseit is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted october , . ; https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint https://doi.org/ . / . . . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / groups used for disaggregation; completeness (% of cases/deaths for which age-, race-ethnic, and age-race-ethnic-specific data were available vs. unknown); and downloadability. we developed a grading system to assess availability and quality of these data. five items for age- and race-ethnic-specific data were adopted respectively for a total score ranging from to . the five items for age-specific data were whether: ( ) any age-specific data existed; ( ) for ages +, data were specific by <= -year age increment; ( ) the oldest, open-age group started at +; ( ) data were disaggregated by -year age increments; and ( ) unknown age was reported. the second and third items were the minimum data needed to control for different mortality risks in older ages. the fourth item was a convention in demography. for race-specific data, the five items included whether: ( ) any race-ethnic-specific data existed; ( ) any ethnicity- specific data (i.e., hispanic origin) existed; ( ) hispanic origin could be distinguished from other race-ethnicity combinations; ( ) data were disaggregated by race and ethnicity combinations following federal guidelines; and ( ) unknown race/ethnicity was reported. for example, if case data were reported across five racial groups (nh asian, hispanic, nh black, nh white, and other), the state received a point for the third criterion. if the state additionally reported data by race across eight groups (hispanic asian, hispanic black, hispanic white, hispanic other, nh asian, nh black, nh white, and nh other), an additional score was assigned for the fourth criterion. two co-authors independently assigned initial scores, then reviewed and reconciled the differences and arrived at the final scores. adjusting age in race-ethnic-specific cfr by direct standardization age-and-race-ethnic-specific data on both cases and deaths were available in four states as of july , : california , illinois , michigan , and ohio. however, data from michigan did not distinguish hispanic ethnicity from other races. for the other three states, we extracted age- and-race-ethnic-specific data on both cases and deaths manually. . cc-by-nc-nd . international licenseit is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted october , . ; https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint https://doi.org/ . / . . . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / to minimize idiosyncratic variations, we only included in the analysis a racial-ethnic group if + cases were reported in each age-and-race-ethnic-specific group. as a result, we excluded american indian & alaskan native, hawaiian native and pacific islander, and mixed race. the four race-ethnicity groups included were nh black, nh white, hispanic, and nh asian. ohio reported race and ethnicity based on federal guidelines and distinguishes hispanic ethnicity for each race. to normalize this to the four race-ethnicity groups, we counted all hispanic ethnicity as hispanic race (regardless of stated race) and all the other cases (where ethnicity was nh or missing) as their stated race. california, illinois, and ohio applied cdc definitions of covid- confirmed and probable case and death where relevant. only ohio made probable cases/deaths publicly available. we used direct standardization to adjust for different age distributions among confirmed cases across race-ethnicities so that the cfrs were comparable. for each state, the total number of confirmed cases across all known race-ethnicities by age served as the standard population. age-and-race-ethnic-specific cfrs were applied to this standard population to construct expected deaths within each age-and-race-ethnic group. then the expected number of deaths were summed and divided by the total number of confirmed cases to construct age- standardized cfr as if all races had the same age distribution of confirmed cases. we conducted two sensitivity analyses to better understand the impacts of biases due to incomplete reporting. we included both confirmed and probable cases/deaths using ohio data ( % of total cases and . % of total deaths). we also made a few assumptions about the non- trivial missingness in race-ethnicity. for example, in illinois, race/ethnicity was self-identified at the time of testing and was missing for % of reported tests and % of confirmed cases. we treated “unknown race” as its own racial-ethnic group, divided unknown cases and deaths proportionately among existing racial-ethnic groups, and assumed certain extremes such as all unknown cases being nh white. . cc-by-nc-nd . international licenseit is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted october , . ; https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint https://doi.org/ . / . . . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / to illustrate how downloadable data could generate timely evidence during a pandemic, we also created a web-based dashboard application to automatically calculate age adjusted cfr with continuous updates. in states feasible, we wrote a python script to scrape the covid- race and ethnicity data reported daily, aggregated the data, and used the python data analysis library to calculate the age-standardized cfr. results data availability and quality we found substantial variations by state in disaggregating and reporting case and death data by age and race-ethnicity. figure presents age-and-race-ethnic-specific covid- case and death data availability and quality scores by state. only california, illinois, michigan and ohio reported age-and-race-ethnicity-specific data for both cases and deaths. most states separately published age- and race-specific data. [figure about here] the average score was . (range: - ) and . (range: - ) for case and death data, respectively. only states had sufficient data to study the steep age-pattern of cfr in older populations (i.e., -year interval for age groups above +, and open-age interval starting at +). all states reported age-specific case data, but a few states, mostly with a small number of deaths, did not report age-specific deaths data. the choice of age groups varied widely. a majority of states used -year increments with others using -, - or -year ones. even among states using the same increment, the exact age groups still varied (e.g., - vs - ). some states did not use a consistent increment. the starting age of the open-age group also varied considerably, from + in hawaii to + in pennsylvania. a few states used inconsistent age-groups for cases and deaths, making it impossible to calculate age-specific cfr. . cc-by-nc-nd . international licenseit is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted october , . ; https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint https://doi.org/ . / . . . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / nineteen states had sufficient data to study racial-ethnic disparities in cfr (i.e., data for hispanic origin could be mutually exclusively distinguished from other race-ethnicity combinations). many states reported race and ethnicity independent of each other, making it impossible to ascertain what proportions of cases/deaths within a given race were from hispanic ethnicity. four and five states did not report case and death data by race respectively. north dakota and nebraska did not publish race-specific data for cases or deaths at all. few states reported race and ethnicity according to the federal guidelines, which reported and cross- tabulated both categories as in the censuses. some states e.g. california also allowed the reporting of “other”, an option not available in the census. age-standardized racial disparities in cfr table showed the descriptive statistics of our study data from california, illinois and ohio. in total, we analyzed , confirmed cases and , confirmed deaths. while cases were spread evenly across ages, deaths concentrated among older age groups. note the age grouping in california was different than the other two states and the much higher percentage of unknown race among cases than deaths. [table about here] the crude all-age cfr varied greatly by race and across states (table ). the largest racial- ethnic difference varied between . folds difference in california ( . % among nh asian population vs . % among hispanic population) to . folds difference in ohio ( . % among nh white population vs . % among hispanic population. however, the patterns of age- specific crude cfr were similar across the race-ethnicity groups, where the age-specific cfr increased substantially at + (figure ). there were some distinct patterns across states. for example, asians had the highest crude cfr at + in california and illinois, whereas nh whites had the highest crude cfr at + in ohio. . cc-by-nc-nd . international licenseit is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted october , . ; https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint https://doi.org/ . / . . . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / [table and figure about here] racial-ethnic disparities in cfr narrowed after age-standardization. the largest racial-ethnic difference declined from . to . folds in california, from . to . folds in illinois, and from . to . folds in ohio (table ). the ranking of race-ethnic-specific cfr also shifted after age-standardization. in ohio and illinois, nh whites had the highest crude cfr at . % and . %, respectively; in california, nh whites had the third highest crude cfr at . %. after age standardization, nh whites’ cfr dropped to the lowest in california and illinois at . % and . % respectively (figure ). nh blacks had the second highest crude cfr in california ( . %) and ohio ( . %), and the third highest in illinois ( . %). after age standardization, nh black had the highest cfr in california ( . %) and illinois ( . %), and the second highest in ohio ( . %). hispanic populations had the lowest crude cfr in all three states and in california and illinois, it was substantially lower than the second lowest cfr. after age adjustment the hispanic cfr became the second lowest in all three states. nh asians had relatively high crude cfr in california and illinois. after age standardization, nh asians’ cfr declined in both states but more than doubled in ohio. the age-standardized cfrs were always higher than the crude cfrs among hispanics, indicating the age distribution of hispanic confirmed cases was younger than those of other races combined. the sensitivity analyses did not change the results qualitatively. [figure about here] our online dashboard (https://adjusted-cfr.herokuapp.com/)error! bookmark not defined. provides visualization of the crude and age-standardized cfr based on real-time data from california. the dashboard also presents age-and-race-ethnicity-specific cases, deaths, and expected number of deaths in each age group after age standardization for reproducibility. however, the . cc-by-nc-nd . international licenseit is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted october , . ; https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint https://adjusted-cfr.herokuapp.com/ https://doi.org/ . / . . . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / data needed from illinois and ohio were embedded in dashboards or visualizations, which unfortunately prohibited automation of the age standardization and continuous updates. discussion in the us, more than five months after the first confirmed covid- case, despite persistent racial disparities, only three states reported sufficient data to study racial-ethnic disparities in cfr controlling for age. disaggregated data by either age or race were inconsistently available across states. only thirty states had adequate data to study the steep age-pattern of cfr in old ages. eighteen states had data to study cfr by race-ethnicity. it is critical to identify hispanic ethnicity within racial categories as hispanic populations have distinctive infection and mortality risks compared to other groups. age standardization in california, illinois and ohio revealed the obscuring effects of age distributions in confirmed cases on racial disparities in cfr. racial disparities narrowed across all three states after age standardization and the ranking changed. the older age profile of nh white confirmed cases produced a higher crude cfr compared to other races. upon age standardization, nh whites had the lowest adjusted cfr in illinois and california, and only slightly higher than nh blacks in ohio. meanwhile the younger age profile of hispanic cases led to much lower crude cfr than other races. once age standardized, hispanics had adjusted cfr comparable to others. nh blacks’ cfr remained high or increased after age standardization. this aligned with previous evidence that black communities have been disproportionately affected by covid- . nh asians’ cfr remained high in california and illinois after age standardization, a trend that has not been adequately documented. data from more states is needed to understand the generalizability of these patterns. confirmed cases are only the tip of the iceberg of all covid- infections. multiple studies have documented the large number of asymptomatic and unreported covid- . in the us and other . cc-by-nc-nd . international licenseit is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted october , . ; https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint https://doi.org/ . / . . . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / countries, covid- deaths were less likely to be under-reported than cases. , , thus, the cfrs presented here could overestimate the mortality risk. however, it is unclear how this overestimation varied across age and racial-ethnic groups. while we cannot account for unreported cases, our sensitivity analysis using confirmed and probable cases in ohio found no qualitative differences in the results. covid- death is not a perfect measure either. only % of deaths had covid- as the only cause of death. the remainder had comorbidities as contributory causes and could be subject to misclassification of underlying cause of death. conversely, deaths with covid- as the true underlying cause could also be misclassified to other causes. further investigation is needed to understand the interaction of these errors and how they distribute differentially across age and race-ethnicity. although age reporting among confirmed cases enjoyed high completeness, useful nuances, such as small increments in older ages and consistent age grouping, were often not available. more racial missingness was present among cases than deaths. if a majority of unknown race cases were from private facilities such as nursing homes where those on private insurance were overrepresented, these cases would likely be predominately nh whites, leading to an overestimation of their cfr. conversely, if inequitable access had prevented nh black population from testing, their cfr’s could be overestimated. our analyses have two covid- policy implications: public data availability and quality needs improvement and racial disparities in this pandemic must be addressed. on the data side, there is a need for higher resolution with improved completeness and intersectionality. given the highly age-dependent nature of the covid- pandemic, it is imperative for all states to publicly release age distribution of covid- case and death data by race to gain a comprehensive understanding of racial disparities and their geographic variations in the us. there is also an urgent need to harmonize data across states to appropriately understand differences. . cc-by-nc-nd . international licenseit is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted october , . ; https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint https://doi.org/ . / . . . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / comparable data would also allow states to observe the effect policies in consideration have had on other states. the landscape analysis revealed varying quantity, quality and format of state public covid- data, causing challenges and delays in the generation of timely policy changes to curb the pandemic. large age increments mask variations in cfr. given the high variation in cfr between those in their s, s, and s, + should be the minimum starting age for the open age group to uncover differences between late middle-aged and elderly populations. the format that public data was released in included different dashboards and/or downloadable files, making automatic data scraping difficult, rendering quick data analysis and fast evidence-based policy updates impossible. as we improve on data reporting, we also need to actively address racial disparity and prioritize high-risk groups in healthcare and public health systems. dowling et al emphasized that the response to covid- cannot be “color-blind”. one specific policy to address racial-ethnic disparities could be to mandate race-ethnic reporting among cases as has been done for deaths. we did not include other races such as multiracial, native hawaiians or pacific islander, and native alaskans or american indian in our analyses due to small numbers. however, some of these groups are also at heightened risk of covid- mortality. despite narrowing after age standardization, racial-ethnic disparities were prevalent across all states considered. they indicated racial disparities in underlying comorbidities, healthcare access, and clinical treatment in the short term and chronic systemic racism in the long term. after accounting for age, nh black population had consistently worse cfrs. black communities need active consideration in the battle against covid- . for example, in new orleans, clusters of covid- cases in poor black neighborhoods were missed by drive-through testing . cc-by-nc-nd . international licenseit is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted october , . ; https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint https://doi.org/ . / . . . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / centers as many local residents did not own cars . now testing vans provide tests to these communities and other populations without cars. our analysis also found high cfrs among nh asian population, particularly those at older age ( +). this phenomenon was reported to be more severe in urban areas including san francisco and chicago. little is known on why these high cfrs are present. the nh asian category encapsulates a huge range of cultures. more consideration must be applied to which among these groups are facing the brunt of the poor health outcomes. there has been documented stigma against certain asian americans due to covid- ’s origins in china. this stigma could be affecting access to care. other factors that may impact the high cfrs include low health literacy, low testing access and essential work positions among certain nh asians. publicly available, transparent and harmonized data practices coupled with policies and programs targeting high risk age groups among racial-ethnic minorities can increase our ability to better address racial disparities in covid- and enhance life-saving responses to this dragging pandemic. . cc-by-nc-nd . international licenseit is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted october , . ; https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint https://doi.org/ . / . . . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / acknowledgement this research project is partially supported by the johns hopkins population center covid- lightning pilot award (r hd ). conflict of interest none authors’ contributions liu, choi and jiao conceptualized the study. liu obtained partial funding for the study. pathak carried out most of the analyses and wrote the first draft. jiao conducted the automated data scraping and visualization. yeung managed the project. all authors commented on subsequent drafts of the manuscript. . cc-by-nc-nd . international licenseit is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted october , . ; https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint https://doi.org/ . / . . . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / references yancy cw. covid- and african americans. jama. ; ( ): – . doi: . /jama. . https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/ webb hooper m, nápoles am, pérez-stable ej. covid- and racial/ethnic disparities. jama. ; ( ): – . doi: . /jama. . https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jama/fullarticle/ dowling mk, kelly rl. policy solutions for reversing the color-blind public health response to covid- in the us. jama. published online june , . doi: . /jama. . kristen m. j. azar, zijun shen, robert j. romanelli, stephen h. lockhart, kelly smits, sarah robinson, stephanie brown, and alice r. pressman. disparities in outcomes among covid- patients in a large health care system in california. health affairs : , - gee gc, ford cl. structural racism and health inequities: old issues, new directions. du bois rev. ; ( ): - . doi: . /s x feagin j, bennefield z. systemic racism and u.s. health care. soc sci med. ; : - . doi: . /j.socscimed. . . centers for disease control and prevention. national diabetes statistics report, . atlanta, ga: centers for disease control and prevention, u.s. dept of health and human services; . adult obesity facts. centers for disease control and prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/obesity/data/adult.html. published june , . accessed july , . assari s, chalian h, bazargan m. race, ethnicity, socioeconomic status, and chronic lung disease in the u.s. res health sci. ; ( ): - . doi: . /rhs.v n p ohlson, madeline ( ) "effects of socioeconomic status and race on access to healthcare in the united states," perspectives: vol. : iss. , article . available at: https://scholars.unh.edu/perspectives/vol /iss / schaeffer k. the most common age among whites in u.s. is – more than double that of racial and ethnic minorities. pew research center. https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/ / / /most- common-age-among-us-racial-ethnic-groups/. published may , . accessed july , . covid- in racial and ethnic minority groups. centers for disease control and prevention. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/ -ncov/need-extra-precautions/racial-ethnic-minorities.html. published june , . accessed july , . thomas m. selden and terceira a. berdahl. covid- and racial/ethnic disparities in health risk, employment, and household composition. health affairs https://doi.org/ . /hlthaff. . ford t, reber s, reeves rv. race gaps in covid- deaths are even bigger than they appear. brookings. june . https://www.brookings.edu/blog/up-front/ / / /race-gaps-in-covid- -deaths-are-even-bigger-than-they-appear/. accessed july , . oppel ra, gebeloff r, rebecca kk. the fullest look yet at the racial inequity of coronavirus. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/ / / /us/coronavirus-latinos-african- americans-cdc-data.html. published july , . accessed july , . christian dudel, timothy riffe, enrique acosta, alyson von raalte, c. strozza, mikko myrskylä. monitoring trends and differences in covid- case-fatality rates using decomposition methods: contributions of age structure and age-specific fatality. mpidr working paper wp- - . published online may . doi: . /mpidr-wp- - . cc-by-nc-nd . international licenseit is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. 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(which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted october , . ; https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint https://www.cdph.ca.gov/programs/cid/dcdc/pages/covid- /race-ethnicity.aspx http://www.dph.illinois.gov/covid /covid -statistics https://www.michigan.gov/coronavirus/ , , - - _ ---, .html https://www.michigan.gov/coronavirus/ , , - - _ ---, .html https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/ . /hblog . /full/ https://doi.org/ . / . . . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/ / / /many-black-and-asian-americans-say-they-have- experienced-discrimination-amid-the-covid- -outbreak/. published july , . accessed july , . namratha kandula and nilay shah. asian americans invisible in covid- data and in public health response. chicago reporter. https://www.chicagoreporter.com/asian-americans-invisible-in-covid- - data-and-in-public-health-response/. published june , . accessed july , . . cc-by-nc-nd . international licenseit is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted october , . ; https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/ / / /many-black-and-asian-americans-say-they-have-experienced-discrimination-amid-the-covid- -outbreak/ https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/ / / /many-black-and-asian-americans-say-they-have-experienced-discrimination-amid-the-covid- -outbreak/ https://www.chicagoreporter.com/asian-americans-invisible-in-covid- -data-and-in-public-health-response/ https://www.chicagoreporter.com/asian-americans-invisible-in-covid- -data-and-in-public-health-response/ https://doi.org/ . / . . . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / figures and figure legends figure . availability and quality scores for age-specific and race-specific covid- confirmed case and death data by states, us, . cc-by-nc-nd . international licenseit is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted october , . ; https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint https://doi.org/ . / . . . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / figure . crude age-specific cfr by race in california, illinois and ohio - - - - - + c f r ( d e a th s p e r c o n fi rm e d c a se s) age (years) california - - - - - - - + c f r ( d e a th s p e r c o n fi rm e d c a se s) axis title illinois - - - - - - - + c f r ( d e a th s p e r c o n fi rm e d c a se s) age (years) ohio hispanic nh asian nh black nh white . cc-by-nc-nd . international licenseit is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted october , . ; https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint https://doi.org/ . / . . . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / figure . crude and age standardized cfrs* by race in california, illinois and ohio *age standardized cfrs were not comparable across states . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . crude cfr adjusted cfr crude cfr adjusted cfr crude cfr adjusted cfr california illinois ohio c f r ( d e a th s p e r c a se s) hispanic nh asian nh black nh white . cc-by-nc-nd . international licenseit is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted october , . ; https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint https://doi.org/ . / . . . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / tables table . covid- cases and deaths by age and race in california, illinois and ohio california illinois ohio cases (%) n= , deaths (%) n= , cases (%) n= , deaths (%) n= , cases (%) n= , deaths (%) n= , age groups in california (years) - . . - . . - . . - . . - . . + . . unknown . . age groups in illinois and ohio (years) - . . . . - . . . . - . . . . - . . . . - . . . . - . . . . - . . . . + . . . . unknown . . . . race and ethnicity latino/hispanic . . . . . . white . . . . . asian . . . . . . black/aa . . . . . . multiracial . . american indian or alaskan native . . . . hawaiian native or pacific islander . . . . other . . . . . . unknown/missing . . . . . . . cc-by-nc-nd . international licenseit is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted october , . ; https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint https://doi.org/ . / . . . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / table . covid- crude and adjusted cfrs by race in california, illinois and ohio race california illinois ohio crude cfr adjusted cfr crude cfr adjusted cfr crude cfr adjusted cfr hispanic . . . . . . nh asian . . . . . . nh black . . . . . . nh white . . . . . . largest racial-ethnic disparity (fold) . . . . . . . cc-by-nc-nd . international licenseit is made available under a is the author/funder, who has granted medrxiv a license to display the preprint in perpetuity. (which was not certified by peer review) the copyright holder for this preprint this version posted october , . ; https://doi.org/ . / . . . doi: medrxiv preprint https://doi.org/ . / . . . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / lifetime and twelve-month prevalence, persistence, and unmet treatment needs of mood, anxiety, and substance use disorders in african american and u.s. versus foreign-born caribbean women international journal of environmental research and public health article lifetime and twelve-month prevalence, persistence, and unmet treatment needs of mood, anxiety, and substance use disorders in african american and u.s. versus foreign-born caribbean women audrey l. jones , ,*, susan d. cochran , , jane rafferty , robert joseph taylor , and vickie m. mays , informatics, decision-enhancement and analytic sciences center (ideas), veteran affairs salt lake city health care system, salt lake city, ut , usa department of internal medicine, school of medicine, university of utah, salt lake city, ut , usa departments of epidemiology and statistics, fielding school of public health, university of california, los angeles, ca , usa; cochran@ucla.edu ucla center for bridging research innovation, training and education for minority health disparities solutions (brite), los angeles, ca , usa; mays@ucla.edu program for research on black americans, institute of social research, ann arbor, mi , usa; jraffrty@umich.edu (j.r.); rjtaylor@umich.edu (r.j.t.) school of social work, university of michigan, ann arbor, mi , usa departments of psychology and health policy and management, fielding school of public health, university of california, los angeles, ca , usa * correspondence: audrey.jones @va.gov received: august ; accepted: september ; published: september ���������� ������� abstract: there is growing diversity within the black population in the u.s., but limited understanding of ethnic and nativity differences in the mental health treatment needs of black women. this study examined differences in the prevalence of psychiatric disorders, their persistence, and unmet treatment needs among black women in the u.s. data were from the national survey of american life, a nationally representative survey that assessed lifetime and twelve-month mood, anxiety, and substance use disorders according to the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders th edition (dsm-iv) criteria, and mental health service use among those meeting disorder criteria. one in three african american women met criteria for a lifetime disorder, compared to one in three caribbean women born within the u.s. and one in five caribbean women born outside the u.s. about half of african american women with a lifetime disorder had a persistent psychiatric disorder, compared to two in five caribbean women born within the u.s. and two in three caribbean women born outside the u.s. african americans had more persisting dysthymia and panic disorder and less persisting social phobia compared to foreign-born caribbean women. of the three groups, caribbean women born within the u.s. were most likely to seek mental health treatment during their lifetime. these results demonstrate, despite a lower prevalence of psychiatric disorders in black women, that there is a great likelihood their disorders will be marked by persistence and underscores the need for culturally specific treatment approaches. as black immigrants in the united states are increasing in number, adequate mental health services are needed. keywords: mental health; dsm-iv; race/ethnicity; nativity; psychopathology; black lives matter . introduction psychiatric epidemiologic surveys have estimated patterns of mental health and substance use disorders for adults in the united states (u.s.), including african americans, since the s, but the int. j. environ. res. public health , , ; doi: . /ijerph www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph http://www.mdpi.com http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /ijerph http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph int. j. environ. res. public health , , of scope of mental health treatment needs of black women varying in ethnicity and nativity is not fully known [ ]. the first studies to characterize the prevalence of mental health disorders among women using population-based designs found black women to have a similar or lower prevalence of disorders compared to white women, with some exceptions based on the type of disorder and subpopulation characteristics [ , ]. in the epidemiologic catchment area (eca) study in the s, it was observed that african americans had an equal or lower likelihood of major depressive disorder (mdd) compared to non-hispanic whites. however, young african american women (age – ) in the eca had higher rates of mdd than did young non-hispanic white women [ ]. in the national comorbidity survey (ncs) in the s, black women had lower rates of mdd compared to white or hispanic women, except for a finding of elevated prevalence of mdd for black women ages – [ ]. in the eca, black women were found to have a higher prevalence of drug abuse compared to white women, but there were no black–white differences in alcohol abuse [ ]. while later studies from the national epidemiologic survey of alcohol and related conditions (nesarc), conducted in the early s, found the prevalence of substance use disorders among black women to also be similar to or lower than the prevalence observed in white women [ , ]. other mood disorders (i.e., dysthymia, bipolar i/ii) and common anxiety disorders were not reported for black women in the eca, ncs, or nesarc. a limitation of the population-based studies of black women’s mental health conducted prior to is that these studies primarily focused on black vs. white differences, as samples were not drawn with attention to the variation within the black population. approximately twenty percent of the recent growth of the black population in the u.s. is due to immigration [ ], and caribbean immigrants make up a large portion of the foreign-born black population [ ]. by , the caribbean black population was larger and growing faster than other racial or ethnic populations, such as cubans or koreans [ ]. in , almost half of the . million black immigrants in the u.s. came from the caribbean countries of jamaica and haiti [ ]. caribbean blacks and african-americans have different cultural and historical colonial experiences that may portend different patterns as protective or predictive of mental health disorders [ ]. consistent with the healthy immigrant hypothesis, prior studies comparing the prevalence of mental health and substance use disorders based on nativity found foreign-born adults to have a lower prevalence of disorders than their u.s.-born counterparts [ – ], although many of these studies were conducted in latino and asian populations. studies in the united kingdom have generally found that the rate of mental disorders was comparable for caribbean black women and european white women [ , ]. it is not clear if results from the united kingdom would generalize to the u.s. the national survey of american life (nsal; – ), the first representative population-based psychiatric epidemiologic survey to sample african american and caribbean populations in the u.s. [ ], can help to answer this question for mood, anxiety, and substance use disorders (see table ). for mood disorders, in addition to confirming the sometimes lower prevalence of mdd for african american versus white women [ – ], studies from the nsal found no differences in the prevalence of mdd or dysthymia for african american and caribbean black women [ , ]; african american mothers had elevated rates of bipolar disorder [ ]. when nativity was considered, u.s.-born caribbean women were found to have higher rates of any mood disorder compared to foreign-born caribbean women [ ]. for anxiety disorders, the nsal revealed that african american women have a higher lifetime prevalence of post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd) compared to caribbean black women [ ]; there were no ethnic differences in the prevalence of other measured anxiety disorders, such as generalized anxiety disorder or panic disorder [ , , ]. foreign-born caribbean women also had lower rates of any anxiety disorder compared u.s.-born caribbean black women. for substance use disorders, african american women were found to have a higher prevalence of alcohol abuse compared to caribbean black women [ ]. moreover, when nativity was considered, foreign-born caribbean women were found to have an even lower prevalence of any substance use disorder compared to u.s.-born caribbean or african american women [ , , ]. however, research into the prevalence of specific mental health or substance use disorders in foreign-born caribbean women, such as mdd or panic disorder, remains sparse [ ]. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of table . findings from previous population-based studies of specific dsm-iv mood, anxiety, and substance use psychiatric disorders in african american and caribbean women in the u.s. psychiatric disorder population-based study diagnostic criteria prevalence observation period [reference no.] a rates of disorder by ethnicity? rates of disorder by nativity? groups of women compared main finding mood disorders major depressive disorder eca dsm-iii mo. [ ] no no black < white rates of mdd among black women are less than or equal to that of white women.eca dsm-iii mo. [ ], mo., [ ] no no black ≤ white lifetime [ ] no no black ≤ white (same as above) ncs dsm-iii r day [ ] no no black ≤ white (same as above) nsal dsm-iv mo., lifetime [ , ] yes no nhw > cb = aa (same as above) nsal dsm-iv mo. [ ], lifetime [ , ] no no aa ≤ white (same as above) nsal dsm-iv lifetime [ ] yes no aa = cb no ethnic differences observed among women. nsal dsm-iv mo., lifetime [ , ] no no aa only sociodemographic correlates of mdd differ for aa men compared to aa women. dysthymia nsal dsm-iv mo. lifetime [ ] yes no aa = cb = nhw no ethnic differences observed among women. nsal dsm-iv lifetime [ ] yes no aa = cb no ethnic differences observed among women. bipolar disorder i, ii nsal dsm-iv mo., lifetime [ ] yes no aa ≥ cb = nhw rates of bipolar disorder are sometimes higher for aa women. nsal dsm-iv lifetime [ ] yes no aa = cb no ethnic differences observed among women. any mood disorder nsal dsm-iv mo. [ ], lifetime [ , , ] yes yes aa = cb; u.s.-born cb > foreign-born cb no ethnic differences observed among women. foreign-born status appears protective for women. anxiety disorders agoraphobia nsal dsm-iv mo. [ ], lifetime [ ] yes no cb = aa = nhw no ethnic difference observed among women. post-traumatic stress disorder nesarc dsm-iv tr lifetime [ ] no no nhb = nhw no ethnic differences observed among women. nsal dsm-iv mo. [ ] yes no cb = aa = nhw no ethnic differences observed among women. nsal dsm-iv lifetime [ ] yes no aa > cb aa women have higher prevalence of ptsd. social phobia nsal dsm-iv mo. [ ] yes no nhw > cb = aa white women have highest rates of social phobia general anxiety disorder nsal dsm-iv mo. [ ], lifetime [ ] yes no nhw > cb = aa white women have the highest rates of gad. panic disorder nsal dsm-iv mo. [ ], lifetime [ ] yes no cb = aa = nhw no ethnic differences observed among women. any anxiety disorder nsal dsm-iv mo. [ ], lifetime [ , , ] yes yes aa > cb; u.s.-born cb > foreign-born cb aa women have higher rates of anxiety disorders compared to cb women. foreign-born status appears protective for women. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of table . cont. psychiatric disorder population-based study diagnostic criteria prevalence observation period [reference no.] a rates of disorder by ethnicity? rates of disorder by nativity? groups of women compared main finding substance use disorders alcohol abuse eca b dsm-iii mo. [ , ] no no black = white there are few racial differences in the prevalence of alcohol disorders among black and white women. nesarc dsm-iv mo. [ ] no no black < white nsal dsm-iv lifetime [ ] yes no aa > cb aa women have higher rates of alcohol abuse alcohol dependence nesarc dsm-iv mo., lifetime [ , ] no no black = white no racial differences among women. nsal dsm-iv lifetime [ ] yes no aa = cb no ethnic differences among women. drug abuse eca c dsm-iii mo. [ ] no no black > white rates of drug use are sometimes higher for black women than for white women nsal dsm-iv lifetime [ ] yes no aa = cb no ethnic differences among women. drug dependence ecac dsm-iii mo. [ ] no no black = white no racial differences among women. nsal dsm-iv lifetime [ ] yes no aa = cb no ethnic differences among women. any substance use disorder nsal dsm-iv mo. [ , ], lifetime [ , , , ] yes yes aa > cb; u.s.-born cb > foreign-born cb aa women have higher rates of substance disorders compared to cb women. foreign-born status appears protective for women. any of the above disorders nsal dsm-iv mo. [ ], lifetime [ , ] yes yes aa > cb; u.s.-born cb > foreign-born cb rates of having at least one measured disorder are higher for aa women compared to cb women. foreign-born status appears protective. abbreviations. eca = epidemiologic catchment area study ( – ); ncs = national comorbidity survey ( – ); ncs-r = national comorbidity survey replication ( – ); nsal = national survey of american life ( – ); nesarc = national epidemiologic study of alcohol and related conditions, wave i ( – ); aa = african american; cb = caribbean black; nhw = non-hispanic white; dsm-iv = diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, th edition a number in bracket refers to bibliographic reference; b rates of alcohol or dependence; c rates of drug abuse or dependence. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of while the nsal and earlier psychiatric epidemiologic studies provide insight into the prevalence of mental health and substance use disorders, prevalence alone does not capture the full story for black women. indeed, prior studies of the general population found that disorder prevalence is often lower in black versus white populations, and when present these disorders are more severe, persisting in their course, and more often untreated [ , ]. in one study of black men’s mental health from the nsal, foreign-born caribbean men were more likely than other black men to have persisting anxiety disorders, such as generalized anxiety disorder and social phobia [ ]. thus, the sometimes-observed lower prevalence of disorders can mask the real burden of mental health disorders within the black population. to our knowledge, prior studies have not triangulated information on prevalence, persistence, and service utilization for black women differing in ethnicity and place of birth. in addition, we rarely see mental health services attending to these differences as part of a goal to provide culturally specific mental health interventions. black women, compared to other racial or ethnic groups, are less likely to be married and be head of their households [ ]; this sets up a dynamic for children and other dependents to be impacted by mothers whose mental health needs are not being addressed. research into the mental health of black women is especially important at present when the black lives matter movement has called attention into the ways in which systemic racism weighs on black women in the u.s., from increased interactions with the justice system for themselves and others in their households [ ] to disparities in maternal mortality [ ]. understanding the history of the psychiatric disorder patterns experienced by diverse groups of black women could help with developing culturally tailored solutions to improve women’s mental health currently and provide cause for acceleration in addressing inequities in the field of mental health treatments going forward. . study aim drawing on data from the nsal, the goal of this study is to determine the prevalence, persistence, and unmet treatment needs of mood, anxiety, and substance use disorders among african american and caribbean women in the u.s. we further examine the profile of mental health and substance use disorders for u.s.-born and foreign-born caribbean women to better understand the diversity of mental health issues in black women in the u.s. our goal is to provide insights into how the patterns of various mental health and substance use disorders may change relative to nativity, the persistence of the disorders, and the unmet treatment needs of black subpopulations of diverse women. . methods . . procedures this cross-sectional study uses data from the nsal ( – ), an epidemiologic survey of psychiatric disorders aligned with the diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders th edition [dsm-iv] criteria, and mental health service utilization among black americans [ ]. as described elsewhere, the nsal is the largest survey of psychiatric disorders of black americans to date, as well as the first nationally representative survey of black caribbeans [ ]. the four-stage probability sampling design focused on u.s. households where at least one black adult (age or older) resided in the contiguous u.s. to ensure adequate representation of black adults of caribbean descent, the nsal oversampled geographic areas with a high density (at least %) of black americans who were also of caribbean heritage. trained interviewers administered surveys from january to march . all participants provided written informed consent and were compensated for their time. the nsal response rates ranged from . % among african americans to . % among caribbean blacks. population-based sampling weights were calculated to minimize potential bias related to unequal probability of selection and participant non-response; the weights included a post-stratification correction to allow researchers to provide generalizable estimates of psychiatric disorder prevalence for black americans [ ]. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . . ethics the nsal was conducted in accordance with the declaration of helsinki and the institutional review board at the university of michigan approved the study protocol (irb: b - -r ). the nsal data are publicly available through the interuniversity consortium for political and social research (icpsr): https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/icpsr/studies/ /datadocumentation. . . participants of the participants in the nsal who completed surveys, women were african american and women were of caribbean descent. in the present study, we excluded data from african american women born outside of the u.s. because the small sample size could lead to privacy and confidentiality concerns, as well as unstable estimates. we also excluded data from african american women and caribbean black women due to missing nativity status. the final analytic sample for this study included u.s.-born african american women, u.s.-born caribbean black women, and foreign-born caribbean black women. . . measures . . . ethnicity and nativity participants self-reported their race, ancestry or ethnicity, and country of birth. utilizing rules for racial or ethnic classification from the u.s. census, we created three groups: u.s.-born african american, u.s.-born caribbean, and foreign-born caribbean women. this allowed us to examine not only the role of race in mental health prevalence, persistence, and unmet needs, but also the roles that ethnicity and nativity might contribute to these clinical and public health concerns. u.s-born caribbeans included women who identified as black, reported ancestral ties to a caribbean country, and reported being born within the u.s. the foreign-born group included caribbean black women who reported being born in a country other than the u.s. . . . psychiatric disorder prevalence the presence of probable lifetime and twelve-month psychiatric disorders was assessed using the world mental health version of the world health organization’s composite international diagnostic interview (who-cidi) [ , ]. the who-cidi is a fully structured interview used to assess the prevalence of dsm-iv psychiatric disorders. in this study, the focus was the examination of three mood disorders (i.e., major depressive disorder, dysthymia, bipolar disorders i and ii), five of the dsm-iv anxiety disorders (agoraphobia, ptsd, social phobia, general anxiety disorder, panic disorder), and four of the substance use disorders (alcohol abuse, alcohol dependence, drug abuse, and drug dependence). we also estimated the lifetime and twelve-month prevalence for panic attacks. . . . persistence of disorders we classified each psychiatric disorder as being persistent or not. as in other studies, persistence was defined as the proportion of adults with a lifetime psychiatric disorder who continued to meet diagnosis criteria in the twelve months that proceeded their interview date [ , ]. our persistence analysis focused on the subsample of african american and caribbean black women who ( ) met criteria for a lifetime psychiatric disorder and ( ) reported an age of onset at least two years prior to the date of their interview [ ]. this measure is a proxy for identifying those with a disorder lasting more than twelve months [ , ]. the examination of persistence could illustrate how race combined with other statuses may be a factor in the experience of psychiatric disorders. https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/web/icpsr/studies/ /datadocumentation int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . . . mental health service utilization participants in the study were coded as having a lifetime of mental health service utilization if they selected any response that indicated that they had sought help for nerves, emotions, mental health, or use of alcohol or drugs from a medical provider (i.e., general practitioners), medical specialist (e.g., cardiologist), medical professionals (e.g., nurse), or mental health provider (i.e., psychologist, psychiatrist, counselor, or social worker in a mental health setting). we coded participants as positive for lifetime mental health service utilization if they affirmed seeking help from a medical or mental health provider at any time during their lifetime. similarly, we coded participants as positive for twelve-month service utilization if they sought help from a medical or mental health provider in the twelve months prior to the interview. . . statistical analysis we conducted analyses in four steps. in the first step, we used design-adjusted cross-tabulations to determine the lifetime and prior twelve-month prevalence estimates of each of the measured mood, anxiety, and substance use disorders; the persistence of those disorders; and mental health service use across the three subgroups of black women. as in prior work, the percentages here are weighted study proportions and the standard errors account for the complex survey design [ ]. in the second step, we used multivariable logistic regressions to estimate differences in the prevalence of psychiatric disorders (lifetime and twelve-month disorders) among women varying in u.s. nativity and caribbean heritage. in these analyses, we ran one set of models to compare the adjusted odds of meeting the dsm-iv disorder criteria for the black caribbean groups compared to african american women. then, we ran another set of models to evaluate nativity differences in the adjusted odds of meeting the dsm-iv criteria within the caribbean black sample (i.e., the african americans were excluded). the prevalence analyses, run separately for the lifetime and twelve-month disorders, controlled for sociodemographic characteristics shown in prior research to correlate with risk for a psychiatric disorder [ ]: age, household income, poverty status (a ratio of family income to the u.s. census poverty threshold in ), education, employment status, marital status, and geographic region of the u.s. in the third step, we used multivariable logistic regression analyses to test for differences in the persistence of each measured disorder among women varying in u.s. nativity and caribbean heritage. as described above, the sample was restricted to participants whose disorder began at least two years prior to the interview. the first set of models compared the odds of meeting the twelve-month criteria for a disorder among the black caribbean groups compared to u.s.-born african american women. in the second set of models that excluded african americans, we evaluated nativity differences among caribbean black women. the persistence analyses controlled for participant characteristics thought to contribute to a more chronic or persisting course of disorder [ – ]: age ( – , – , +), education (high school or less vs. other), marital status (married vs. other), poverty status (household income below % federal poverty level vs. other), and age of disorder onset [ , ]. in the fourth step, we used multivariable logistic regressions to test for group differences in the likelihood of mental health service use among those who met lifetime and twelve-month criteria for each mood, anxiety, and substance use disorder. as with the prevalence and persistence analyses above, we first ran the models to test for ethnicity-related differences in the odds of seeking mental health services, and then ran the models to test for nativity-related differences. the models of mental health service use each controlled for predisposing, enabling, and need factors, which are commonly associated with patients’ access to and use of mental health services [ – ]: age ( – , – , +), education (high school or less vs. other), marital status (married vs. other), poverty status (household income below % federal poverty level vs. other), and insurance status at the time of the interview. all statistical analyses were conducted in sas ( . , sas institute inc., cary, nc, usa), included survey weights to provide population-generalizable estimates, and estimated variances according to the complex sampling design of the nsal [ ]. the survey weights were calculated int. j. environ. res. public health , , of to account for the unequal probability of selection and survey response and for post-stratification. the standard errors for estimates in the black caribbean groups were often larger than the standard errors for estimates among african american women because the caribbean black sample was smaller and more clustered than the african american sample. . results characteristics of the sample are presented in table . compared to african american women, u.s.-born caribbean black women were younger and reported higher average household incomes. additionally, u.s.-born caribbean black women, as compared to african american women, tended to report higher levels of education and were less likely to live in households where income was below the federal poverty level. consistent with u.s. residential patterns, a greater proportion of african american women resided in the south compared to both groups of caribbean black women. the women did not differ significantly in their current employment, marital, or insurance status. table . sociodemographic characteristics of black women in the national survey of american life, – . african american caribbean black sociodemographic characteristics u.s.-born (n = ) u.s.-born (n = ) foreign-born (n = ) weighted % (s.e.) x age – . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) – . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) – . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) or greater . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . *** income less than $ , . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) $ , – , . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) $ , – , . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) $ , or greater . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ** employment status working . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) not working . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . marital status currently married . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) previously married . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) never married . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . education less than high school . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) high school . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) some college . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) college . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ** poverty status in poverty . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) not in poverty . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ** geographic region south . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) non-south . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . *** insurance status insured . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) uninsured . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . citizenship u.s. citizen . ( . ) non-u.s. citizen . ( . ) abbreviations: u.s. = united states; s.e. = standard error. note: ** p < . , *** p < . . . . lifetime prevalence of mood, anxiety, and substance use psychiatric disorders approximately one-third of the u.s.-born african american and caribbean women met criteria for a lifetime mood, anxiety, or substance use disorder, while only one in five foreign-born caribbean women met such criteria (see table , below). approximately half of black women born in the u.s with a lifetime disorder also met the criteria for a second lifetime disorder. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of table . weighted prevalence of lifetime dsm iv/wmh-cidi mood, anxiety, and substance use psychiatric disorders among black women in the national survey of american life. lifetime dsm-iv disorders twelve-month dsm-iv disorder african american caribbean black african american caribbean black dsm-iv disorder u.s.-born (n = ) u.s.-born (n = ) foreign-born (n = ) u.s.-born (n = ) u.s.-born (n = ) foreign-born (n = ) weighted % (s.e.) weighted % (s.e.) mood disorders major depressive disorder . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) b . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) dysthymia . ( . ) . ( . ) a . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) a . ( . ) a bipolar disorder i, ii c . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) any mood disorder . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) b . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) anxiety disorders agoraphobia . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) b . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) post-traumatic stress disorder . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) a . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) social phobia . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) general anxiety disorder . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) panic disorder . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) a panic attack . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) a,b . ( . ) . ( . ) a . ( . ) b any anxiety disorder . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) a . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) a substance use disorders alcohol abuse . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) a,b . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) a,b alcohol dependence c . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) a,b . ( . ) . ( . ) a . ( . ) a,b drug abuse . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) a,b . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) a,b drug dependence . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) a,b . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) any substance use disorder . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) a,b . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) a,b any of the above disorders . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) a,b . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) or more of the above disorders . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) a . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) a abbreviations: dsm iv = diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, th edition; wmh-cidi = world mental health version of the world health organization’s composite international diagnostic interview; u.s. = united states; s.e. = standard error. pairwise comparisons of ethnic and nativity differences in the prevalence of psychiatric disorders obtained from multivariable logistic regressions. a adjusted odds of meeting disorder criteria, compared to african american women, was statistically significant at p < . . b adjusted odds of meeting disorder criteria, compared to u.s.-born caribbean women, was statistically significant at p < . . c multivariate pairwise comparisons of ethnic or nativity differences in the -month prevalence of specific disorders were not conducted due to the small samples. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of the patterns of differences in the prevalence of any lifetime disorder were largely mirrored when mood, anxiety, and substance use disorders were considered separately. in the overall sample, % of black women met criteria for a lifetime mood disorder, % for a lifetime anxiety disorder, and % for a lifetime substance use disorder. with only one exception (i.e., dysthymia), there were no statistically significant differences in the rate of lifetime disorders between african american women and caribbean women born in the u.s. however, foreign-born caribbean women, compared to african americans or u.s.-born caribbeans, had a lower lifetime prevalence of major depressive disorder, agoraphobia, ptsd, panic attack, and each of the measured substance use disorders. only % of foreign-born caribbean women met the criteria for any lifetime substance use disorder. . . twelve-month prevalence of mood, anxiety, and substance use psychiatric disorders approximately one out of five african american women and one out of seven caribbean women in this population-representative study met criteria for a psychiatric disorder in the twelve months prior to the interview (table ). of those, about half of african american women and one-quarter of foreign-born caribbean women met the criteria for two or more disorders in the preceding twelve months. there were no statistical differences between groups in the prevalence of having at least one psychiatric disorder in the past twelve months. however, the prevalence of having two or more psychiatric disorders in the preceding twelve months was higher in african american women compared to foreign-born caribbean women. for black women in general, the prevalence of meeting the criteria for a psychiatric disorder in the prior months was % for a mood disorder, % for an anxiety disorder, and % for a substance use disorder. there were some ethnic variations in the prevalence of specific mood, anxiety, and substance use disorders in the past months. compared to african american women, u.s.-born caribbean women were less likely to meet criteria for dysthymia or alcohol dependence, but more likely to meet the criteria for panic attacks. in addition, african american women had a higher prevalence compared to foreign-born caribbean women of dysthymia, panic disorder, any anxiety disorder, alcohol abuse, alcohol dependence, drug dependence, and any substance use disorder. within the caribbean samples, foreign-born caribbean women were less likely than u.s.-born caribbean women to meet recent criteria for panic attacks, alcohol abuse or dependence, and drug abuse. we were unable to obtain adjusted group differences in the prevalence of bipolar i/ii or drug dependence between the u.s. and foreign-born caribbean black women due to the very low prevalence of these disorders in each of the caribbean groups. . . persistence of mood, anxiety, and substance use psychiatric disorders in black women in the u.s. over half of the women who met criteria for a lifetime psychiatric disorder were also classified as having a persistent disorder (table ). the percentage of disorders classified as being persistent was highest for anxiety ( . %) and mood disorders ( . %) and lowest for lifetime substance use disorders ( . %). among the three groups, foreign-born caribbean women had the highest percentage of persistent disorders. they were more likely than u.s.-born caribbean women to still meet dsm-iv criteria for any disorder in the past twelve months. the patterns of ethnic and nativity differences in psychiatric persistence varied somewhat by disorder. african american women were more likely than both groups of caribbean women to continue to meet dsm-iv criteria in the twelve months prior to the interview for dysthymia. african american women were less likely than foreign-born caribbean women to continue to meet criteria for bipolar i/ii or social phobia in the prior twelve months; but more likely than foreign-born caribbean women to meet persistence criteria for panic disorder. within the caribbean sample, foreign-born women were less likely than u.s.-born caribbean women to meet criteria for panic attack and drug dependence in the past year; they were more likely to still meet criteria for any anxiety disorder, alcohol abuse, and alcohol dependence. we were unable int. j. environ. res. public health , , of to estimate nativity differences in the adjusted odds of persisting bipolar disorder i/ii due to sparse numbers of caribbean women meeting criteria in the past months. . . lifetime utilization of mental health services two-thirds ( %) of black women who met criteria for at least one of the measured psychiatric disorders also indicated that they had sought help from a general medical provider or a specialty mental health provider at some point during their lifetime. among the entire sample, % of those with a lifetime mood disorder reported having used mental health services, which was similar to the portion of black women with an anxiety disorder ( %) or a substance use disorder ( %). comparisons of mental health service use among the three groups of black women revealed several significant differences (table ). among women with any lifetime disorder, u.s.-born caribbean women had the highest prevalence of lifetime mental health service use. this pattern was also observed for the subsample of women with two or more lifetime disorders, as well as for those with any mood, anxiety, or substance use disorder. in addition, u.s.-born caribbean women had higher rates of lifetime mental health service use compared to african american women with diagnoses of major depressive disorder, bipolar i/ii, social phobia, generalized anxiety disorder, and each of the substance use disorders. table . proportion of black women with a lifetime dsm-iv mood, anxiety, and substance use psychiatric disorder who met the criteria for a psychiatric disorder in the past months. african american caribbean black dsm-iv disorder u.s.-born u.s.-born foreign-born n weighted % (s.e.) mood disorders major depressive disorder . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) dysthymia . ( . ) . ( . ) a . ( . ) a bipolar disorder i, ii c . ( . ) – ( . ) a any mood disorder . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) anxiety disorders agoraphobia . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) post-traumatic stress disorder . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) social phobia . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) a general anxiety disorder . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) panic disorder . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) a panic attack . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) b any anxiety disorder . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) b substance use disorders alcohol abuse . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) b alcohol dependence . ( . ) – . ( . ) b drug abuse . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) drug dependence . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) b any substance use disorder . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) any of the above disorders . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) b abbreviations: dsm iv = diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, th edition; u.s. = united states; s.e. = standard error. pairwise comparisons of ethnic and nativity differences in the persistence of psychiatric disorders obtained from multivariable logistic regressions. analyses were restricted to those that first met the dsm-iv criteria for a lifetime disorder at least two years prior to the interview. a adjusted odds of meeting persistence criteria, compared to african american women, was statistically significant at p < . . b adjusted odds of meeting persistence criteria, compared to u.s.-born caribbean women, was statistically significant at p < . . c multivariate pairwise comparisons of nativity differences in the persistence of specific disorders were not conducted due to the small samples. within the caribbean sample, rates of mental health service use were much higher for u.s.-born caribbean women compared to foreign-born caribbean women. this pattern was observed for those with major depressive disorder, bipolar disorder i/ii, any mood disorder, agoraphobia, social phobia, any anxiety disorder, drug abuse, drug dependence, and any substance use disorder. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . . past-year utilization of mental health services only one in four black women ( %) who met criteria for a psychiatric disorder in the twelve months prior to the survey also reported seeking mental health care services in the twelve months prior to the interview. among black women as a group, % of those who met criteria for a mood disorder, % of those with an anxiety disorder, and % of those with a substance use disorder received services in the year prior to the interview. there were only a few ethnic differences in mental health service use in the past twelve months (table ). specifically, african american women with a past twelve-month disorder of bipolar i/ii, panic disorder, or alcohol abuse had lower rates of recent mental health service use compared to u.s.-born caribbean women with the same disorders. compared to african american women, rates of mental health service use in the past twelve months were lower for foreign-born caribbean women with major depressive disorder, any mood disorder, social phobia, or panic attack; and higher for foreign-born caribbean women with bipolar disorder i/ii, agoraphobia, alcohol abuse, or alcohol dependence. in the caribbean cohort, foreign-born women with any recent disorder were less likely than u.s.-born caribbean women to have reported using mental health services in the past year. these patterns of nativity differences in service utilization were also observed for women with dysthymia, social phobia, panic attack, or any anxiety disorder. however, the patterns of nativity differences in mental health service use were reversed for women with substance use disorders; foreign-born caribbean women who met criteria for drug abuse or any substance use disorder in the past twelve months had higher rates of recent mental health service use compared to u.s.-born caribbean women with the same diagnoses. nativity differences in the adjusted odds of using mental health services could not be estimated for women with agoraphobia, alcohol abuse, alcohol dependence, or drug dependence due to small numbers and limited variation in responses. for instance, in the very small samples of caribbean women with recent bipolar disorder i/ii or alcohol abuse, all u.s.-born women with these diagnoses reported using mental health services. none of the caribbean women in our sample who met the criteria for drug dependence in the past twelve months reported using mental health services in the prior months. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of table . weighted percentages of african american vs. u.s.-born and foreign-born caribbean black women with a history of a dsm-iv mood, anxiety, or substance use psychiatric disorder that sought mental health services. lifetime service use twelve-month service use u.s.-born african american caribbean black u.s.-born african american caribbean black dsm-iv disorder u.s.-born foreign-born u.s.-born foreign-born n weighted % (s.e.) n weighted % (s.e.) mood disorders major depressive disorder . ( . ) . ( . ) a . ( . ) a,b . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) a dysthymia . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) b bipolar disorder i, ii c . ( . ) ( . ) a . ( . ) b . ( . ) ( . ) a . ( . ) a any mood disorder . ( . ) . ( . ) a . ( . ) a,b . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) a anxiety disorders agoraphobia c . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) a,b . ( . ) – . ( . ) a post-traumatic stress disorder . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) social phobia . ( . ) . ( . ) a . ( . ) b . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) a,b general anxiety disorder . ( . ) . ( . ) a . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) panic disorder . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) a . ( . ) . ( . ) a . ( . ) panic attack . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) a,b any anxiety disorder . ( . ) . ( . ) a . ( . ) b . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) b substance use disorders alcohol abuse c . ( . ) . ( . ) a . ( . ) . ( . ) ( . ) a . ( . ) a alcohol dependence c . ( . ) ( . ) a ( . ) a . ( . ) – ( . ) a drug abuse . ( . ) . ( . ) a . ( . ) b . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) b drug dependence c . ( . ) ( . ) a . ( . ) a,b . ( . ) – – any substance use disorder . ( . ) . ( . ) a . ( . ) b . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) b any of the above disorders . ( . ) . ( . ) a . ( . ) b . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) a,b or more of the above disorders . ( . ) . ( . ) a . ( . ) b . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) abbreviations: dsm iv = diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders, th edition; u.s. = united states; s.e. = standard error. pairwise comparisons of ethnic and nativity differences in the likelihood of seeking mental health services, obtained from multivariable logistic regressions. a adjusted odds of mental health service use, compared to african american women, was statistically significant at p < . . b adjusted odds of mental health service use, compared to u.s.-born caribbean women, was statistically significant at p < . . c multivariate pairwise comparisons of nativity differences in twelve-month service use could not be estimated due to small samples and lack of variation in service use. note: – indicates that weighted estimates could not be obtained because none of the lifetime cases reported using mental health services. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . discussion this study sought to illuminate the diverse mental health needs of black women in the u.s. by combining information on the prevalence, persistence, and treatment utilization patterns of women varying in ethnic background and country of birth. an additional goal was to determine if black women, similar to black men, experienced substantial persistence of mental health and substance use disorders when prevalence criteria were met. indeed our results do call attention to the fact that similar to black men [ ], one-half of black women with a disorder suffer from persistence of that disorder. in the u.s., this is compounded by the fact that some black women are not seeking treatment for these disorders [ ], which puts them at risk for the consequences of untreated mental health. . . patterns of differences in mental health disorder prevalence our findings build on prior literature by presenting estimates of lifetime and twelve-month rates of specific mood, anxiety, and substance use disorders for foreign-born caribbean women to better aid mental health services planning for this growing population. consistent with studies of mental health and substance use among african and caribbean immigrants carried out in other countries [ – ], we found black women who have migrated from the caribbean had lower rates of psychiatric disorders than black women born in the u.s., especially for substance use disorders. these results are consistent with the healthy immigrant literature, which finds that foreign-born populations often have better health and mental health outcomes [ , , , – ]. in addition, this study contributes to the literature by demonstrating the chronic course of mental health and substance use disorders, such as dysthymia and panic disorder in african american women, which appear to persist even for women who have accessed mental health services during the lifetime. . . understanding differences in psychiatric disorder persistence our findings of differences in the persistence of disorders based on u.s. versus foreign-born nativity does not fully align with the healthy immigrant literature—a finding that may be less true for conditions of mental health. the rates of persistence were generally comparable for the foreign-born caribbean women and u.s.-born african american women. it was the u.s.-born caribbean women who, except for panic attacks and drug dependence, stood out as having particularly low rates of persistence. foreign-born caribbean women had the highest rate of persisting social phobia. we might expect persistence to be lower among u.s.-born caribbean black women if they are differentially exposed to stressors commonly associated with mental illness or if there are differences in the amount, quality, or access to mental health treatment. another possible explanation is that caribbean black women differentially weather stressors. one nsal study found more social stressors to be associated with higher rates of depressive symptoms for african american women than for caribbean black women [ ]. in our study, the u.s.-born caribbean women generally had more favorable socioeconomic standing in terms of their education and household income compared to african american women, which could be another contributing factor to the differences in persistence we see [ ]. two unique issues are raised by our findings of ethnic and nativity differences in persistence. first, it is assumed that the marginalized position of being black in the u.s. will result in greater exposure to stressors often shown to be associated with worse mental health outcomes [ – ]. yet there is something about the social patterning of race plus nativity that results in differences in mental health experience, as well as in seeking treatment. the advantage of household income and education may confer resources to better weather stresses and potentially results in fewer cumulative exposures. the u.s.-born caribbean women may be unique from the other groups of black women in their available resources or in the urgency or intensity of treatment when a mental health problem arises. indeed, in the current study, u.s.-born caribbean women had higher rates of lifetime mental health service use, even when compared to african american women. this raises a second point in need of further research, which is that differences in cultural socialization between being black in the u.s. versus int. j. environ. res. public health , , of early socialization of mental health coping in the foreign-born black woman. additional research into mental health coping and other resources to weather stressors could inform the design of interventions to address unmet treatment needs within various groups of black women in the u.s. . . implications for mental health services in our study, foreign-born caribbean women had the lowest rates of treatment utilization, whether across the lifetime or within the twelve months prior to the interview. these findings parallel those for latino and asian immigrants [ , ]. immigrants often face additional barriers to treatment due to residency status or concerns about bringing shame to their community [ ]. a few studies have documented high rates of mental health stigma among caribbean immigrants [ , ], which may contribute to their low rates of treatment seeking. whether these barriers have a differential harmful impact on caribbean women is unknown. because untreated mental health disorders are so closely linked to cardiovascular disease and metabolic disorders [ – ], failure to engage caribbean women in evidence-based mental health treatment is likely to have cascading consequences for not only their emotional health, but for their physical health as well. there were more statistical differences in the rate of treatment across the lifetime than in the twelve months prior to the interview. part of this may be due to the smaller sample size (and thus larger standard errors) that accompanied the twelve-month analyses. however, it could also be the case that there are differences in the time to treatment or in the length or quality of treatment, which may explain the different patterns of results. unfortunately, we do not know, and this is an area for further study. a majority of the population-based studies involving black americans that have examined the time to treatment [ ], the quality of treatment received [ ], or treatment retention [ , ] have focused on black vs. white differences and have not examined the experiences of caribbean immigrants. one study from the nsal found that caribbean migrants had more favorable mental health service experiences compared to u.s.-born caribbeans [ ], but these findings were not reported specifically for black women. the results of our analyses indicate that there are cultural differences in several factors, such as the tendency to seek care, chronicity in different disorders, and prevalence of these disorders. those primary care practices that reside in neighborhoods whose patient populations contain a number of black women should ensure that they are collecting subgroup ethnicity and nativity data so that they can respond adequately to differences in mental health needs among black women. it will not be adequate for clinics and health care systems to merely know that their populations are black, but knowing patients’ ethnicity and nativity may be useful in anticipating and designing effective care for mental health and substance use problems. . . study limitations this study has four primary study limitations. first, the prevalence rates presented here only generalize to non-institutionalized black women. african american women are more likely than white women to be represented in the prison system [ ] and rates of psychiatric disorders are much higher among incarcerated women than community samples [ , ]. therefore, our prevalence estimates from a household-based sample underestimate the burden of mental illness among black women in the u.s. as well as their unmet need for treatment. second, there is evidence from the clinical reappraisal studies that the who-cidi did not perform equally well in identifying psychiatric disorders across ethnic groups in the nsal. the evidence suggests that the who-cidi picked up a larger portion of false positive cases among the caribbean population [ ]. therefore, caution should be exercised in thinking about the prevalence of disorders reported for caribbean women as our findings may have overestimated their prevalence and needs. third, this study was limited by low statistical power to examine ethnic differences in persistence or mental health service utilization for some disorders (such as bipolar disorder or alcohol use disorder) that are less prevalent among black women. we also were limited by low statistical power int. j. environ. res. public health , , of to further examine mental health differences within subgroups of caribbean women (e.g., different immigration cohorts or countries of origin), or to estimate mental health disorder prevalence, persistence, and treatment utilization for foreign-born women emigrating from african countries. previous studies have found that immigrants’ mental health varies by country of origin, the disorder being studied, age at immigration, and time in the u.s. finally, the use of data from – raises questions about the generalizability of findings to the present time. it is likely that the unmet mental health needs of african american and black caribbean women in the u.s. could be higher in than they were in . for example, the economic recession disproportionately affected black households in the u.s. and may have contributed to increased mental health disparities [ – ]. most recently, the coronavirus disease (covid- ) pandemic has led to higher death rates in both the elderly and younger groups in the black population [ – ]. this is occurring without usual burial and grief relief rituals. the social isolation policies under covid- are also contributing to reduced income, food insecurity, and deferred outpatient care, which are all factors in unmet mental health treatment needs [ – ]. in addition, the black lives matter movement has highlighted the concerns of black women about their own safety, as well as that of their male family members, in relation to police shootings. despite the age of the study data, there are still several compelling reasons why the nsal offers relevant insights for use in current mental health service planning and clinical care. currently, the nsal remains the only data set with enough cases within a representative population sample of black racial and ethnic minority adults to conduct meaningful analyses on psychiatric disorders. before the advent of the nsal data set, reliable, nationally representative information on psychiatric disorders for black women was scarce or relied on data that could be only abstracted from treatment settings [ ]. in light of the historic scarcity of national probability-based data sets on black mental health, the rising numbers of suicides in black americans, and the worsening of factors that contribute to mental health, as highlighted by covid- and black lives matter, the nsal remains the best and most comprehensive data for the study of representative mental health in the black female population of the u.s., despite its age. . . implications for future research we recommend launching a new population-based study to determine the prevalence, persistence, and treatment needs of psychiatric disorders in black women in order to provide updated estimates on the mental health of black women following historic events and to illuminate the mechanisms through which black women weather economic and social stressors. critical to extending our findings would be larger subpopulation samples and assessment of migration characteristics (e.g., age, generational status) to further investigate the treatment and health service needs of different subpopulations of black women. this is particularly important as ours and other studies have indicated significant differences in help-seeking patterns, perceived need for treatment, and stigma concerns of caribbean women compared to u.s.-born african american women [ , ]. moreover, there has been a surge in african migration in recent years [ ], and the mental health service needs of african immigrants remain poorly understood from a population-based perspective [ ]. as demonstrated in our study, failure to not separate black women in terms of ethnicity and place of birth would obscure the true rates of perceived need and pathways of seeking treatment for u.s.-born african american women and fail to help us to identify those social and cultural conditions of immigrants adjusting to life in the u.s. that may put them at risk for psychiatric disorders [ ]. . conclusions despite these limitations, this study makes an important contribution to the field, as it is among the first to bring together a trifecta of mental health service issues together to identify the mental health status, persistence of disorders, and unmet treatment needs among a nationally representative sample of african american women and u.s.-born, and foreign-born caribbean black women in int. j. environ. res. public health , , of the u.s. while the rates of psychiatric disorders among black women are lower than the national estimates of psychiatric disorders in the u.s. from the national comorbidity survey replication [ ], nonetheless for those who do have a disorder there is a public health concern. our result illustrate there was wide variation by ethnicity in the prevalence, course, and unmet treatment needs of their psychiatric disorders. as the u.s. continues to be the number one choice for a growing number of african and caribbean women to live and raise their families, researchers and policymakers must attend to differences in this diversity that will allow us to target prevention efforts and mental health service planning to the specific needs of these black subpopulations in the u.s. results of this study help to underscore that despite being racially the same, variations in ethnicity and nativity result in distinctive vulnerabilities and mental health treatment needs. author contributions: v.m.m. and r.j.t. conceived the study. a.l.j., s.d.c. and v.m.m. designed the study and refined the conceptualization. r.j.t. obtained the data. a.l.j. and s.d.c. oversaw statistical analyses with the help of j.r. who also assisted with the creation of variables and conducted the statistical analyses. v.m.m. and a.l.j. wrote the first draft of the manuscript. a.l.j., s.d.c. and r.j.t. participated in the interpretation of results and their discussion. all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. funding: the data collection on which this study is based was supported by the national institute of mental health (nimh; u -mh ), with supplemental support from the office of behavioral and social science research at the national institutes of health (nih) and the university of michigan. the preparation of this manuscript was supported by grants from national institute on minority health and health disparities (md ), national institute of drug abuse (da da ), national institute of mental health (mh ), and the national center for advancing translational sciences under award numbers ul tr and kl tr . the contents of this article do not represent the views of the department of veterans affairs, the national institutes of health, or the united states government. acknowledgments: the authors would like to thank james s. jackson for his pioneering leadership in designing the nsal. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. references . taylor, r.j.; chatters, l.m. psychiatric disorders among older black americans: within- and between-group differences. innov. aging , , igaa . 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[crossref] © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.psychres. . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.drugalcdep. . http://dx.doi.org/ . /mmwr.mm a http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.ympdx. . http://dx.doi.org/ . /peds. - http://dx.doi.org/ . /mmwr.mm a http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - - http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	study aim 	methods 	procedures 	ethics 	participants 	measures 	ethnicity and nativity 	psychiatric disorder prevalence 	persistence of disorders 	mental health service utilization 	statistical analysis 	results 	lifetime prevalence of mood, anxiety, and substance use psychiatric disorders 	twelve-month prevalence of mood, anxiety, and substance use psychiatric disorders 	persistence of mood, anxiety, and substance use psychiatric disorders in black women in the u.s. 	lifetime utilization of mental health services 	past-year utilization of mental health services 	discussion 	patterns of differences in mental health disorder prevalence 	understanding differences in psychiatric disorder persistence 	implications for mental health services 	study limitations 	implications for future research 	conclusions 	references neonatologytoday_ _ _ _ color blind: shedding light on the mental health of lgbtq people of color “ with the rise of the black lives matter movement and threats against wudqvjhqghu�hpsor\phqw� rights and health surwhfwlrqv�������kdv�ehhq� pdunhg�e\�vljql¿fdqw� social distress for communities of color and the lgbtq community." ³�� khlu�ixoo�vxssruw�±� including around mental health issues – can make d�kxjh�gl௺huhqfh�iru� idplolhv��� klv�lv�hvshfldoo\� true for communities of color and lgbtq �/hveldq��*d\��%lvh[xdo�� transgender, questioning/ xhhu��khdghg�idplolhv��� neonatology today�www.neonatologytoday.net�november .ulvwdq� frww�� '�� lqfhqw� &�� plwk�� '�� + it is a frightening, isolating moment to be a new parent. and those supporting new parents right now – from medical providers and social workers to home visitors -- are fulwlfdo�iurqw�olqh�zrunhuv�� khlu�ixoo�vxssruw� – including around mental health issues – fdq�pdnh�d�kxjh�glႇhuhqfh�iru� idplolhv��� klv�lv�hvshfldoo\�wuxh�iru�frppxqlwlhv�ri� froru�dqg�/*% ��/hveldq��*d\��%lvh[xdo�� udqvjhqghu�� xhvwlrqlqj� xhhu��khdghg� families. with the rise of the black lives matter movement and threats against transgen- der employment rights and health protec- wlrqv�������kdv�ehhq�pdunhg�e\�vljql¿fdqw� social distress for communities of color and wkh�/*% �frppxqlw\�� qiruwxqdwho\��lw�lv� now well known that among the many con- sequences of social oppression, there are vljql¿fdqw�qhjdwlyh�hႇhfwv�rq�wkh�phqwdo� health of the oppressed populations. as healthcare providers in a time when more /*% �lghqwli\lqj�\rxwk�duh�hqwhulqj�sh- diatric practices, and the traditional ameri- can family structure is changing with an lqfuhdvh� lq� /*% �khdghg� idplolhv�� zh� pxvw�uhÀhfw�rq�wkh�khdowk�ri�wklv�srsxod- tion, especially as it intersects with com- munities of color. as neonatal providers, it is vital that we also be aware these fami- lies will be carrying additional stresses, magnifying the already taxing experience ri�wkh� ,& ��� klv�fdq�ohdg�wr�vrph�vnhswl- cism related to medical practice and some heightened sensitivity to mistreatment. according to the national institute of men- tal health (nimh), mental illnesses are frpprq��zlwk�qhduo\�rqh�lq�¿yh�dgxowv�lq� america living with a serious mental ill- qhvv��$q�hvwlpdwhg������ploolrq�dgxowv� lq� wkh� qlwhg� wdwhv�kdg�dw�ohdvw�rqh�pdmru� depressive episode. an estimated . % of adults will experience an anxiety dis- order at some time in their lives. notably, /*% � shrsoh� duh� pruh� wkdq� wzlfh� dv� likely to face a mental health problem in their lifetime compared to their heterosex- ual counterparts( )suicide and substance misuse in lesbian, gay and bisexual (lgb. ruh�vwulnlqjo\��/*% �\rxwk�duh�ryhu�wzr� times as likely to attempt suicide than their vwudljkw� shhuv����� kh� pdmrulw\� ri� phqwdo� looqhvv� ghyhorsv� e\� d� shuvrq¶v� plg���v�� zklfk�fdq�xowlpdwho\�kdyh�vljql¿fdqw�lpsol- cations in areas such as work productivity in adulthood. ( , ) unfortunately, studies vxjjhvw�wkdw�wkhuh�lv�d�vljql¿fdqwo\�kljkhu� prevalence of mental health issues such as depression, anxiety, eating disorders, vhoi�lqmxu\��dqg�vxlflgdolw\�dprqj�/*% � college and graduate students, who are in wklv�diruhphqwlrqhg�djh�udqjh��������d�pr- bile survey of randomly selected students � �������dw���� � ��fdpsxvhv��lqfoxglqj� ������jhqghu�plqrulw\�>* @�vwxghqwv��� kh� data for mental health prevalence among racial minority populations varies; howev- hu��vrph�vwxglhv�vxjjhvw�d�vljql¿fdqw�exu- den of mental health problems among ra- cial/ethnic minority students in addition to olplwhg�xvh�ri�phqwdo�khdowk�vhuylfhv������� kh� glvsursruwlrqdwh� suhvhqfh� ri� phqwdo� khdowk�sureohpv�iru�wkh�/*% �frppxql- ty and communities of color is explained by the theory of minority stress. ( ) it outlines krz�wkh�vwljpd��suhmxglfh�dqg�glvfulplqd- wlrq� dvvrfldwhg� zlwk� d� shuvrq¶v� plqrulw\� status (i.e., race, sexuality, gender) cre- ates a negative social environment that uhvxowv� lq� phqwdo� khdowk� sureohpv�� dmru� discriminatory events like observing or ex- shulhqflqj�glႇhuhqwldo� wuhdwphqw�e\�phgl- cal providers that often go unmentioned wr�vwdႇ�duh�fhuwdlqo\�frqwulexwruv�wr�plqru- ity stress. furthermore, microaggressions like providing inadvertently exclusionary handouts that say “mother” and “father” to a same-sex couple in the nicu certainly add to this stress. ( ) intersectionality describes how social iden- tities and social inequality based on race and sexual orientation are interdependent, not mutually exclusive. ( ) as such, the zd\�lq�zklfk�/*% �shrsoh�ri�froru�h[- perience the world is unique as they hold pxowlsoh� lghqwlwlhv� ri� pdujlqdol]dwlrq�� )ru� lqvwdqfh�� /*% � shrsoh� ri� froru� pd\� erwk�h[shulhqfh�udflvp�zlwklq�wkh�/*% � community and homophobia within their respective racial/ethnic minority communi- wlhv�� kh�hqg�uhvxow�lv�wkdw�pdq\�ri�wkhvh� the national perinatal association (npa) is an interdisciplinary organiza- tion that strives to be a leading voice for perinatal care in the united states. our diverse membership is comprised of healthcare providers, parents & caregiv- ers, educators, and service providers, all driven by their desire to give voice to and support babies and families at risk across the country. members of the npa write a regular peer-reviewed column in neonatology today. peer reviewed readers can also follow neonatology today via our twitter feed @neotoday neonatology today�www.neonatologytoday.net�november idplolhv�grq¶w�ihho�zhofrphg�ru�lqfoxghg�e\�hlwkhu�wkh�udfldo�hwkqlf� plqrulw\�ru�/*% �frppxqlw\�� � hfrjql]lqj�wkh�frpsrxqglqj� hႇhfw�ri�wkh�pxowlsoh�plqrulw\�vwuhvvruv��wkh�suhydohqfh�ri�phqwdo� khdowk�sureohpv�lq�/*% �frppxqlwlhv�ri�fxowxuh�pd\�qrw�eh� captured by studies that investigate the association of mental health with race and sexuality independently. /*% � shrsoh� ri� froru� uhsuhvhqw� dq� xqghuvhuyhg� dqg� xqghu� researched population, especially in the area of mental health. considering the potential consequences of the intersectionality ri�udfh�dqg�/*% �vwdwxv��wkh�phqwdo�khdowk�suhydohqfh�ri�wklv� population may not mirror that of the larger population. one online vxuyh\�ri�����sduwlflsdqwv�vxjjhvwv�dq�dgglwlyh�hႇhfw�ri�pxowlsoh� irupv�ri�glvfulplqdwlrq�rq�wkh�phqwdo�khdowk�ri�/*% �shrsoh�ri� color. ( )sexual orientation, and gender identity has been linked to many negative psychological and physical health outcomes lq�suhylrxv�uhvhdufk��lqfoxglqj�lqfuhdvhg�vxlflgdo�lghdwlrq�� zr� kxqguhg�ohveldq��jd\��elvh[xdo��wudqvjhqghu��dqg�txhhu��/*% �� however, few studies have investigated this issue or had a large hqrxjk�vdpsoh�vl]h�wr�hoxflgdwh�vljql¿fdqfh��� as healthcare providers, we must investigate the etiologies and consequences of this inequity in the burden of mental health for wkh�/*% �frppxqlw\�ri�froru�dqg�ghyhors�lqwhuyhqwlrqv�wr�plwl- jdwh�wkh�hႇhfwv�ri�wklv�glvsdulw\�zlwklq�rxu�sudfwlfhv�dqg�xowlpdwho\� within our health care system. furthermore, as neonatal provid- huv��zh�pxvw�uhfrjql]h�wkh�exughq�ri�phqwdo�khdowk�lvvxhv�lp- sdfwlqj�rxu� idplolhv� iurp�/*% �frppxqlwlhv�ri�froru�dqg�eh� proactive about assessing needs and providing essential support. references: . semlyen j, king m, varney j, hagger-johnson g. sexual orientation and symptoms of common mental disorder or low wellbeing: combined meta-analysis of uk popu- lation health surveys. bmc psychiatry. ; ( ): - . doi: . /s - - -z . goldbach jt, rhoades h, green d, fulginiti a, marshal ��,v� khuh�d� hhg�iru�/*% � shfl¿f� xlflgh�&ulvlv� hu- vices? crisis. ; ( ): - . doi: . / - / a . kessler rc, amminger gp, aguilar-gaxiola s, alonso j, lee s, ustün tb. age of onset of mental disorders: a review of recent literature. curr opin psychiatry. ; ( ): - . doi: . /yco. b e ebc c . wang ps, simon ge, avorn j, mcculloch j, petukhova mz, kessler rc. and care management for depressed work- ers and impact on clinical. jama. ; ( ): - . doi: . /jama. . . . lipson sk, raifman j, abelson s, reisner sl. gender mi- nority mental health in the u.s.: results of a national sur- vey on college campuses. am j prev med. ; ( ): - . doi: . /j.amepre. . . . horwitz ag, berona j, busby dr, et al. variation in suicide risk among subgroups of sexual and gender minority col- lege students. suicide life-threatening behav. published online . doi: . /sltb. . lipson sk, kern a, eisenberg d, breland-noble am. men- tal health disparities among college students of color. j adolesc heal. ; ( ): - . doi: . /j.jado- health. . . . busby dr, horwitz ag, zheng k, et al. suicide risk among gender and sexual minority college students: the roles of victimization, discrimination, connectedness, and identity d௻updwlrq��-� v\fkldwu� hv�����������-xo\���������������� doi: . /j.jpsychires. . . . meyer ih. prejudice, social stress, and mental health in lesbian, gay, and bisexual populations: conceptual issues and research evidence. psychol bull. ; ( ): - . doi: . / - . . . . smith v, litt j, wylie m. further insights and suggestions to support the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning (lgbtq)-headed family in the nicu. neonatol today. ; ( ): - . . crenshaw k. mapping the margins: intersectionality, iden- tity politics, and violence against women of color. stanford law rev. ; ( ): . doi: . / . sutter m, perrin pb. discrimination, mental health, and sui- cidal ideation among lgbtq people of color. j couns psy- chol. ; ( ): - . doi: . /cou &rqÀlfw�ri�,qwhuhvw�'lvforvxuhv�� kh�rwkhu�dxwkruv�kdyh�qr�frq- Àlfwv�ri�lqwhuhvw�wr�glvforvh� disclosure: the national perinatal association www.nationalperina- tal.org is a c organization that provides education and advo- fdf\�durxqg�lvvxhv�d௺hfwlqj�wkh�khdowk�ri�prwkhuv��edelhv��dqg� families. nt &ruuhvsrqglqj�$xwkru kristan scott, md, boston combined residency program, department of pediatrics, boston medical center, albany st, boston, ma . e-mail: kristan.scott@childerns.harvard.edu vincent c. smith, m.d. m.p.h. boston medical center albany street room boston, ma vincent.smith@bmc.org ( ) - (t) ( ) - (f) s jxx .. how the coronavirus pandemic will change our future teaching higher education has experienced pandemics and economic downturns over its long history. recent events have invited comparisons to small pox scares, worldwide flu epidemics, and other moments of fear for student, faculty, and staff health. campus leaders are nervously watching the bottom line while students and parents worry and contemplate different modes of learning, deciding whether they want to buy what colleges and universities can offer. faculty, meanwhile, forged new sorts of relationships with their students during spring semester and wonder about how this environment might continue going forward. among many in higher education, there is a sense that something has forever changed. for over a decade, we have talked about the differences between face-to-face and remote classes, debating their relative pedagogical and financial merits. with recent events blurring all forms of instruction into virtual classrooms and online assignments, facebook pages and websites sprung up for faculty to share ideas, teaching modules, and assignments. social distancing has, ironically, added a new appreciation for the larger learning community, reminding us of the value of quality online materials and revealing again that good teaching is as collaborative as good research. having learned new things about teaching and learning, how will this experience be built into our courses going forward? in other words, how has the pandemic affected how we will teach in the future? what has forever changed? as a regular feature of religion and american culture, the editors invite scholars to comment from different perspectives upon an issue or a problem central to the study of religion in its american context. this forum format is designed to foster the cross-disciplinary study of religion and american culture and to bring to the readers of the journal the latest thoughts of scholars on timely, substantial topics. contributors to the forum are asked to present brief essays or “thought pieces” instead of carefully documented articles. religion and american culture: a journal of interpretation, vol. , issue , pp. – , issn: - , electronic issn: - . © by the center for the study of religion and american culture. all rights reserved. please direct all requests for permission to photocopy or reproduce article content through the cambridge university press’s reprints and permissions web page, https://www.cambridge.org/about‐us/rights‐permissions. doi: https://doi.org/ . /rac. . . terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core rebecca barrett-fox almost immediately after the widespread closures of college campuses in mid-march in an effort to slow the spread of the coronavirus, assurances that all would be back to normal as soon as possible began to circulate. we will be okay, we told ourselves. higher ed has survived crises before. institutions rarely fail. we submitted our fall book orders and looked forward to a return to campus. the promise of fall—reading the library books we forgot in our offices in our hurry to leave, greeting fresh-faced students—urged us forward, helping us manage what felt like the impossibility of pivoting quickly to remote teaching and our sadness at saying goodbye to our face-to-face classes. the anticipation of a return to normal was a coping mechanism, a form of denial that helped us delay our grief and anger at injustice in higher education that the coronavirus pandemic was exposing so that we could slog through the remainder of the semester. this hope, though, was also an expression of survival bias: not all of us will be okay. not all of us—faculty, students, institutions—will survive. optimism for a relatively fast recovery helped carry some of us through some difficult weeks. others of us literally died or were swept under by ill health or family obligations. others of us will see our careers derailed by gaps in our cv created by childcare and eldercare, work disproportionately borne by women. as long as this optimism distracts us from the unequal risks of death, injury, and harm created by the pandemic—including health, economic, social, and political harms—then it wicks energy from the transformative work that universities could be doing even, and perhaps especially, now. already, we are being asked to teach in pursuit of homeostasis—to preserve the old relationships among students, educators, administrators, board members, donors, taxpayers, state politicians, and the “public-private” investors who increasingly influence higher education. the pattern we were in was predictable, but, for many of us, homeostasis was an entire career length of decreasing funding from states and increasing costs to students, cuts to the humanities, and mistreatment of the precarious laborers who do the bulk of the teaching at universities. indeed, these are some of the reasons why a virus has become a disaster for higher education. despite fostering some of the world’s best thinkers on topics of pandemics, u.s. universities were broadly ill-prepared, without sufficient training or support for faculty to successfully teach remotely or, perhaps more damningly, a plan for economic survival if campuses could not physically reopen for a single semester. religion and american culture terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core assurances that campuses would return to normal was as much an expression of denial as it was an avoidance of reality: too many campuses, including those with the endowments larger than the gdp of small nations, showed themselves to be financially unprepared for a major dip in tuition, having chosen expansive and risky spending on real estate, international campuses, ballooning coaching and administrative salaries that mimicked income inequality in business, and other ventures that created thin margins for them. their financial expenditures did not always narrowly support student learning, but they were incredibly student-centered in terms of where their money came from. in , according to the state higher education executive officers association’s most recent state higher education finance report, percent of revenue was from students; the organization predicts that will surpass percent during the coming recession. the tension, of course, is that higher costs to students and lowered state support may still result in fewer opportunities for students, including fewer connections to faculty in long-term jobs, even as they pay more for and see a lessened financial return on their investment if they graduate into an economic depression. as frightening as this prospect is, it only follows a long-term trend; nationally, appropriations for higher education have remained below pre–great recession levels even as those who have graduated since launched into precarious jobs. many of us simply are unable to muster nostalgia about a prepandemic university, given that we never participated in it as respected, adequately remunerated campus citizens and, as things were going, never were going to. we are obligated, i think, and also motivated to teach against a return to normal and for a turn toward justice. this means silencing our own internal voices that assure us that everything will be okay and, instead, raising our voices to demand that universities eliminate the inequality that has led to coronavirus’s disproportionate harm to people of color, women, people living in or near poverty, and those with disabilities on campuses. it means rejecting comforting appeals to a past in which the academy was a respected, supportive meritocracy—which, for the roughly three-quarters of college educators who are not on the tenure track, has never been part of our experience—and creating institutions that model and foster the kind of interactions necessary for the welfare of democracy and the demos that compose it. this requires us to reject superficial calls for a return to normality and do deeper, harder, and more honest work. religious studies scholars have unique insights and skills to do this work in their classrooms and as part of the larger university. scholars of religion are critical thinkers, able to read texts carefully, how the coronavirus pandemic will change our future teaching terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core synthesize and analyze information, suss out inconsistencies, discern patterns, and weigh interests. we, too, though, must resist the temptation ever to call our efforts enough; all progress must be guarded not only from attacks from the powers that benefit from neoliberalism in higher education but from our own self-satisfaction. in the remainder of this essay, i focus on three temptations that i face (you may face your own!) in this fight for a better postpandemic university. charity versus justice charity, from the latin caritas, comes from our hearts. it is freely given, gratuitous, and undeserved. indeed, if it is deserved, then it is not charity but simply the repayment for a debt, a transaction between two people who were able equally to enter a contract in which they exchanged things they considered to be of relatively similar value. charity, in contrast, is a gift given with no expectation of reciprocation, though those who give charity may experience altruism, public praise, an increase in the esteem of others, or (even if they do not admit it) superiority, which may be their own rewards. in teaching, charity is tempting. college educators, by definition, have power over students. we can dispense and withhold charity as we like, which means that, if we are not committed to antioppression pedagogies and practices, we will, by default, at least sometimes, allocate it according to internal biases. we will decide that a student who is a father gets an extension on his work because his child’s daycare is closed in response to the pandemic but that a mother should have had a backup plan for childcare; he receives charity, and she does not. we will decide that the covid-caused death of a parent is worthy of an incomplete but that the covid-related death of an ex-step-parent is not; students from families that do not adhere to the nuclear model are, thus, denied charity while those whose families are already likely to be more respected receive it. because black, hispanic, and indigenous communities have higher rates of coronavirus infection and covid-related deaths, sexism and classism in the dispensation of charity around the pandemic is also likely to be racist (and, because poor students are more likely to be students of color, racism, in its dispensation, is likely to be classist). additionally, because some students are better at identifying what they need, who can give it to them, and how to advocate for it, those students are more likely to request charity (or to demand it, perhaps, with the implication that, if it is not granted, we will be hearing from their father the donor). when people’s needs are met through charity, not through justice, then those religion and american culture terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core who are least likely to ask for charity—that is, those who are taking the most responsibility for their inability to meet expectations—are disadvantaged; in contrast, those most likely to ask for charity are those most experienced at getting it. the matthew effect—in which the rich get richer and poor get poorer—results in those privileged enough to have received charity in the past asking for more and those who have been taught not to expect it not asking at all. but charity feels good! we enjoy the gratitude of students who need us to save them. (and, perhaps, we sometimes enjoy judging students whose pleas for charity do not meet our standard for giving it.) we are rewarded, moreover, for charity. applications for teaching awards, for example, often invite students to provide examples of charity, stories of a time when a faculty member “went the extra mile” (a performance of underserved kindness, expressed in a metaphor from christianity). these good feelings make charity a temptation. justice, in contrast, often feels bad. it requires confronting oppressive systems (hard, painful, often unrewarding) rather than giving gifts to individuals (fun, may create a sense of obligation in the person that you can later exploit). it requires admitting to your own power within a system (you are not helpless to effect change, even if you keep telling those with less power that your hands are tied). the pursuit of justice requires you to challenge those with more power than you when you would rather exert benevolent power over someone with less of it. justice requires bringing people without power into power, whereas charity reaffirms the distance between those with less and more power. college educators often feel caught between powerlessness and power. entrusted with shaping the minds of the future of the nation, most of us are also told that our services could be dismissed without cause. in this uneasy place, charity reminds us that we do have power and that enacting it can make a positive impact on the lives of individual students. during a pandemic, it is especially tempting, because we know that students are actually suffering. yet, even now, charity is a poor replacement for justice. during and after the coronavirus pandemic, justice in teaching might look like challenging grading systems that measure student resources to learn during a crisis (such as access to a quiet space to attend your synchronous zoom lectures) rather than student learning. it might mean automatic extensions of funding for graduate students who are parents and must teach their own children at home while also being students. it might mean lowering the cost of tuition for some classes so that students can retain their full-time status and avoid triggering mandatory loan repayment. especially since the economic turmoil from the pandemic is likely to how the coronavirus pandemic will change our future teaching terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core last longer than the health threat, justice includes student loan forgiveness and free tuition, fees, and room and board at public universities. justice is harder to achieve than charity, and, perhaps, readers are now wondering if i am being reasonable, since teachers cannot create justice by themselves. but teachers are part of departments that decide how graduate students are funded, colleges that decide the fee structures for courses, and an electorate that chooses to charge interest for learning. teachers can, at minimum, increase justice in their own teaching practices. you will know you are successful at increasing justice when requests for charity decrease; when everyone has access to what they need to be successful, fewer people will individually petition for it. unity versus solidarity calls for a return to normal often request unity. (take a moment to search your email for the number of times the word has appeared in pandemic-related emails from your chancellor. to date, it has appeared in nearly every email sent by a higher administrator on my campus.) unity demands that members focus attention on shared goals—which means ignoring difference and hushing critique. unity requires a prioritization of common goals, even if they are not the most important or urgent needs of individuals or groups, and, thus, it often results in selecting goals that are least meaningful to those most marginalized and most important to those who already have the most power. consequently, unity delays solutions to problems that may be deep and important but affect those who have less power to set priorities. for example, in the effort to prepare for fall , i witnessed one university chancellor reject the idea that perspectives from people with disabilities or people from racial and ethnic groups disproportionately dying of covid should be specifically considered because not “every single group . . . need to be represented” in pandemic planning. this was a call for unity, with its attendant silencing of complaints by groups whose needs were being ignored, in order to produce a “common good” that served the needs of the majority of people, not those who had the most or most urgent needs. in this case, the same administrator publicly announced that the common good around which faculty and students would rally was the preservation of “our academic environment, the intellectual advancement of our students, and all that [this university’s] experience promises”—which could only be met through a reopening of the physical campus. when those most threatened by prioritizing a physical return to campus criticize that religion and american culture terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core decision, they threaten the façade of unity. one faculty member shared with me that she was scolded by her dean for critiquing her university’s lack of support for online teaching during this time. “whose team are you on?” she was asked. if a campus is, indeed, unified, then there are no “teams.” that the question was raised reveals the way that unity is manufactured to paper over divisions, including ones that, if they were explored, could result in better decision-making. unity gives the false impression of consensus when it is, instead, an effort to subjugate and erase dissent. consensus, or the appearance of consensus, makes us more, not less, vulnerable to a virus if what we agree on is inaccurate, false, dangerous, or misguided. despite the practical problems that result from consensus created through roughshod means, unity is tempting, and it can creep into our teaching, too. as educators, we often deliberately foster a sense of unity, especially among students in the same major, academic cohort, academic honor club, or student group. in the classroom, we may invoke a sense of unity to encourage students to overcome a challenge (“we’re all reading this hard text together!”) or collaborate, but the drive for unity can, even if inadvertently, teach students that they contribute through compliance rather than dissent and that having unique needs met is theft from the group. we do this when we craft policies that we anticipate will work for most students (or students with the most power) and ask other students to sacrifice to comply with them. we do it when we create assignments that benefit some students but not others and ask all students to complete them, regardless of the value of them to their own learning. perhaps, most damagingly, we do it when we ask students who are harmed by hateful speech and arguments to endure a classmate playing “devil’s advocate” or performing a “thought experiment” or ask them to denounce positions they do not hold (“yes, muslim terrorism is bad”) in order to preserve the unity of a classroom. when we encourage people who have been historically oppressed to sit in silence in the face of arguments that injure or disrespect them or their ancestors in order not to disrupt our “academic environment,” we are promoting unity over solidarity. solidarity is a threat to unity because solidarity is a call to identify with the needs of the most vulnerable, including vulnerable faculty and staff, not with the desires of those with enough power to set group priorities. a pedagogy of solidarity adheres to a kind of academic preferential option for the poor: always addressing first the needs of the most vulnerable students. during a pandemic, this means choosing classrooms (physical, digital, hybrid, hy flex), course design and policies, and assignments that are responsive to the needs of the most vulnerable students, not the most vocal how the coronavirus pandemic will change our future teaching terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core students. solidarity will continue to prioritize the needs of students whose lives have been upended by the coronavirus through loss of family members, economic devastation, and medical ptsd and lifelong disability from infection for those who survive it. solidarity means providing time and space for grief, supporting students who repeatedly leave and reenter college, lowering the cost of learning for those whose families cannot afford to invest in education, and making physical campuses and online classrooms accessible to those with new disabilities. you will know that you are achieving solidarity when students begin forwarding the interests of others even when doing so diminishes the chances of outcomes that best serve their personal interests. restoration versus transformation the siren of unity entices us into thinking we want a return to what we had—a restoration of what was. yet, what we had was not functional for many students. more than one out of three undergraduate students who begin a degree do not finish it at their original university within six years according to the april data on college retention and graduation rates from the national center for education statistics. these students, though, still leave with a significant share of the nation’s $ . trillion in student loan debt. those who leave without graduating often owe relatively little compared with their peers who graduate, but they are significantly more likely to default on loans. most distressingly, students from poorer families and those who are black and latino are far less likely to enroll in or graduate from college, as reported in the urban institute’s report “understanding equity gaps in college education.” even as patterns in inequity across categories of race, ethnicity, and class contributed to rising debt for those least able to afford it, college educators have typically not directly benefited from the rising costs of tuition. while some tuition money is used for services that support student learning, such as disability services centers, adjunctification and rising tuition track together tightly. in short, the people most involved in student learning—students and teachers—both paid a lot to maintain the university as it was. the coronavirus pandemic presents us with an opportunity to reevaluate if we even want to restore that. some students, of course, will not have a choice. the coronavirus crisis demands that they shift their priorities to teaching their own children at home or providing all their own childcare for children too young for school. they are caring for ailing parents or partners. they are working mandatory overtime at essential jobs, or religion and american culture terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core they are searching for more work to compensate for falling wages, furloughs, and cuts to their benefits, including healthcare. they are surviving—or they are not—but they are doing it apart from college. typically, enrolling in college during an economic downturn is a wise choice, as college may provide students with training to make them more competitive in a tough job market. instead, the higher education research firm simpsonscarborough’s survey findings, released in april , indicate a possible percent drop for fall enrollment, with black and latino students reporting far less confidence in attendance than their white peers. overall, about half of students reported covid-related disruptions to their family’s finances—numbers only likely to increase as students who previously relied on summer work to pay for college find their jobs gone. restoration, in short, may be neither desirable nor possible. even so, it is beguiling. in my conversations with a wide swath of college educators this spring and early summer, many hope to return to on-campus teaching, for a variety of positive reasons: it affirms their identity, allows them to teach in a way that they best know how to do, and is typically more satisfying for students who choose face-to-face learning. these are good reasons to want to meet again in person soon. the challenge is to restore these parts of the learning environment—when it is safe to do so—without resurrecting patterns that contributed to inequality among students and precarity for so many educators. the university is transforming, and, indeed, the speed at which it is doing so—financial cuts in the millions at some universities, enacted within weeks of the start of the pandemic, with more coming as state tax revenues fall—is frightening for some and frustrating for others. for many of us, universities that have demanded patience with their inertia around issues of accessibility, inclusion, and social justice have promised impossible nimbleness in creating a “socially distant” campus. somehow, universities without funds or ambition to create genuinely accessible campuses—ones that go beyond the requirements of the ada to ensure full inclusion of all students in every area of campus life—now promise to run classes at a fraction of their size, with faculty and students separated by plastic barriers and daily covid testing. these changes, while large and costly, are efforts to restore campus to something like what it was for those students who can access it: those with the funds during an economic crisis to pay for it, the child and eldercare to provide time for it, and the physical bodies more likely to survive an infection. they are not transformations of campus into a more inclusive place, one where more knowledge is generated because more people and how the coronavirus pandemic will change our future teaching terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core more kinds of people participate in the work of learning and teaching and researching; they are expensive efforts to prop up an ever-more-exclusive endeavor. for a college education to be an education, rather than just a credentialing source, it must be transformative. institutions that, in the face of a threat the scale of the coronavirus pandemic, react by pining for a past that never was (and, to the extent that it was, was exclusionary) or consolidating old power differentials will struggle to foster transformative learning, at least for the groups that most need it: those most likely to be harmed by the coronavirus pandemic who need evidence that their own learning can shape their individual lives and collective experiences, and those most secure in the face of the pandemic who need to be challenged to investigate critically the sources of their security. transformative teaching includes identifying the real, specific needs and motivations of students and channeling them into meaningful challenges. it includes exposing students to perspectives they had not previously considered and helping them to see, as much as they can, from them, helping them articulate positions they had not previously considered and evaluating evidence they could not find on their own. transformative teaching is sometimes affirming, but it is mostly disorienting. you know you are succeeding at it when students begin to approach the classroom with questions, curiosity, and humility rather than theses and arguments. you know you are succeeding when students pursue transformation after the semester ends rather than restoration of the ideas with which they entered the course. i understand the argument that a time of medical crisis, economic disaster, and social suffering is not the time to ponder a new university. changes to how we individually teach, changes to our universities, and changes to our higher education system, from funding to the laws that govern it, require time, energy, and resources we may not feel we have right now. a return to homeostasis might not be the long-term best choice, but it is the easiest choice right now, and we all deserve a little ease after spring . i think, though, that the investment in significant changes in teaching, even now, when they are hard to make, are worthwhile for very practical reasons. indeed, i think they may be the only thing that can save a higher education system that has long been threatened. here is why. the university as we knew it was already diminishing. enrollments were down—which is less, to me, a concern about the financial viability of colleges and more a concern about the vibrancy and durability of our democracy. attacks on higher education from religion and american culture terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core multiple angles were waged not just by conservatives who depicted universities as liberal bubbles hostile to their political ideas but also by moderate and liberal politicians who prioritized “readiness to work,” rather than participation as a global citizen in the work of democracy, as the end goal of education. a slowing birth rate among the middle and upper class combined with rising college costs that have kept poor and working people from access to education have contributed to falling enrollments. the percent of students enrolling has declined each of the last ten years according to the national student clearinghouse research center’s spring current term enrollment estimates. very simply, even before the current pandemic, universities’ old ways were not working, not only for so many students and faculty but also for the universities themselves. optimism, individual acts of kindness toward students, calls for unity, and the preservation of tradition have not worked to keep campuses safe from the damage of the global pandemic; to the extent that they competed with justice, solidarity, and transformation, they contributed to vulnerability. perhaps campuses can never be pandemic-proof; they exist in broader systems (and cities), after all, and germs spread among students who enroll to party as well as those who enroll to change the world, among racist faculty and antiracist ones. but universities can be leaders in modeling behaviors and policies that reduce the havoc that a pandemic wreaks. justice, solidarity, and a commitment to transformation mitigate the harms of all kinds of disasters. we build a better and more resilient university when we embrace them. rebecca barrett-fox is assistant professor of sociology at arkansas state university. brandon bayne it is a strange feeling going viral because of a virus. viral is a relative term here. we are talking about thousands, not millions, at the scale of academics, not athletics. still, something that i wrote traveled a bit for a few weeks this past spring, making its way around social media, pedagogy groups, teaching centers, sample syllabi, zoom webinars, and even a few university strategic plans. the chronicle of higher education did a little write-up (beckie supiano, “‘nobody signed up for this’: one professor’s guidelines for an interrupted semester,” chronicle of higher education, march , , https://www.chronicle.com/article/nobody-signed-up-for/ ), how the coronavirus pandemic will change our future teaching terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.chronicle.com/article/nobody-signed-up-for/ https://www.chronicle.com/article/nobody-signed-up-for/ https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core a few reporters and podcasters came calling, somebody turned it into a youtube video, and, ultimately, time magazine featured the piece and a bit of the backstory to my attempt to grapple with the most challenging of semesters (megan mccluskey, “’nobody signed up for this’: college professor drastically rethinks syllabus to prioritize human need amid coronavirus,” time, march , , https:// time.com/ /college-syllabus-coronavirus/). i was getting hundreds of emails there for a while, first from fellow scholars of religion and then from professors of chemistry or communication or clarinet. somehow, my principles for an adjusted semester made their way to school teachers, too, and i began to hear from high school algebra instructors, seventh grade special needs aids, and third grade literacy specialists. my daughter’s kindergarten teacher texted me about it. she said the principles had made the rounds among the faculty and staff at my kids’ elementary school, and they were adapting it in various ways. eventually, somebody translated them to spanish and then to french, portuguese, and mandarin. for a minute, there, i could track in real time as teachers in different parts of the globe began to grapple with the same decisions we had found ourselves making in north america and wrote me or accessed the google doc i had shared. learning that those words were helping some find space to make tough decisions and move forward humbled and encouraged me in the midst of an otherwise terrible time. eventually, it all slowed down, and i heard less from folks, and the requests to use the principles trickled down to a few a week, and, with that, my fifteen minutes of nerd fame came to its predictable denouement. meanwhile, i had to get to teaching and try to implement those impossibly idealistic aspirations. that was the tougher part, but, by late may, i was wrapping up the semester and beginning to forget about the whole episode until i was asked to contribute something to this forum on how the coronavirus pandemic will change our future teaching. currently, i am facing a fall semester in which my university has mandated that i must teach face to face with the ability to be “hybrid” and “hyflex,” prepared to teach both synchronously and asynchronously, in person and from home, and always ready to take it all online at a moment’s notice. so, here we are, once again contemplating what principles we need to hold in mind as we make new decisions about learning objectives, assignments, discussion techniques, and how we do all of that while hoping we do not contract or spread a deadly virus. from those ideas—that nobody signed up for this, that the humane option is the best option, that we cannot just do the same thing online, that we must foster intellectual nourishment, social connection, and religion and american culture terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://time.com/ /college-syllabus-coronavirus/ https://time.com/ /college-syllabus-coronavirus/ https://time.com/ /college-syllabus-coronavirus/ https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core personal accommodation, and that we should be flexible and ready to adjust to an ever-changing situation—we must determine which remain relevant and which were merely helpful for a moment of transition. my mini-viral moment is long gone, but this momentous virus marches on, and we are all once again left to figure out how we must adapt ourselves and not lose our way in these ongoing, seemingly interminable, “trying times.” “nobody signed up for this” the principles were written in twenty minutes, jotted down on the proverbial napkin as my first thoughts after reading the results of a poll that i had sent out to my students. i asked them basic things, modeled on the five w’s (who, what, when, where, why) that i emphasize constantly in every introductory course. “where are you? who is with you? what time zone is it? what technology/resources do you have? how are you feeling and why?” the pie graphs and charts that came back from it told me that we would not be able to simply “do our classes just as promised in the beginning of the semester, but online,” as our administration had instructed us. students were living in a wide range of contexts, with variable access to resources, and experiencing wildly diverging sentiments from anxious boredom to debilitating panic. in light of those responses, i had to figure out what changes to make in our plan and what we all needed to hold foremost in mind as we made them. what was entirely clear at that moment is that none of us were ready in any way for what was ahead. i know i was not ready. i was visiting my father when we received the news. like many of us, my university announced that it would be extending spring break for a week, while instructors would work to transition their courses online for the remainder of the semester. at first, i was personally thankful for the respite because i was not prepared to return. it was the end of a difficult week at the end of a difficult month and still at the beginning of the most difficult of years. i had returned home to help my father as he transitioned to life as a recent widower, still reckoning with the loss of my mother, who passed away in january from an aggressive cancer. i had been back and forth several times already, working to take care of her as she began chemotherapy and radiation treatment, but then having to quickly adapt as she realized her end was coming faster than any of us had imagined. she told me on a wednesday morning after my father left for work, just as i was sitting down for a bowl of quaker oats with blueberries. “i’m not going in for radiation. i am done, and i am at peace.” how the coronavirus pandemic will change our future teaching terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core when i told my students that “nobody signed up for this,” it was about more than the pandemic. it was about life, this shared experience where sudden turns can blind you, spin you around, and leave you swinging aimlessly to the tune mexican children sing when they search for an elusive piñata: dale, dale, dale, no pierdas el tino; porque si lo pierdes pierdes el camino. “go, go, go, but don’t lose your sense, because if you lose it, you’ll lose your way.” i was just trying to keep going, to not lose my senses, to hit on something, so as not to lose my way. in that moment of transition, it just felt like it needed to be acknowledged that nothing was normal. even normal is not normal but is, instead, the imposition of order on an inherently unpredictable existence. yet, we take comfort in normality, in the ongoing regularities that give us relative security. nothing could be worse than to surrender to uncertainty, to fragility. as our normal was stripped so suddenly away, nobody was ready for it. we were all scrambling for sense, searching for a colorful paper burro that none of us could find, a novel virus with no treatment, a social pandemic for which nobody, certainly not our national leadership, had planned. we were not ready for any of it. not the sickness, not the new language and practice of “social distancing,” not the sudden end of our collective lives together on campus. we were equally unprepared to teach and take online classes, and we all felt awkward about that forced and sudden rush to master new technologies that also entailed exposing the sacred space of our homes, the very sanctuaries we had cultivated as refuges from life’s chaos. our deans told us to make up the lost hours, to stick to the plan, to satisfy onlooking accreditors. there we were, trying to remake everything that had been upended and reimpose a sense of order on the fragility of life, “dale, dale, dale,” keep going lest we lose our sense and ultimately our way. “the humane option” i was far from home when i found out my mom had cancer. it was just after new year’s day, and i was in new york city at the annual meetings of the american historical association/ american society of church history/american catholic historical association/conference on latin american history (yes, my strange religion and american culture terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core little research niche means that i attend them all). i was headed to a roundtable for the acha on teaching u.s. catholic history when my sister called. “has dad called you? it’s worse than we thought.” just tell me, i urged her. “it’s everywhere, she’s in tremendous pain, and she can’t breathe.” i held the phone away from my face, and the elevator rose as my stomach sank. stepping out, “i’ll call you back. i have to do a presentation.” i got through it, mumbling something about treating each student with an eye toward our shared humanity and tailoring our classes to personal situations. then, i scrambled out. running back to my hotel room, i pulled out the phone to check my texts, and i realized that i had lost my wallet. so, i hustled back to the sheraton and retraced my steps all the way to the very same elevator where i had received the news, just hours before. the doors opened and i stepped back in, only to greet a hotel concierge who turned to me and asked, “are you brandon?” relieved to reunite with my driver’s license and credit card, i marveled that, because of the finder’s goodwill and a random encounter with the concierge on the fated elevator, i could get a flight and get home. for a moment, i indulged the magical thought that it might be a sign that my mother would be all right. the spring version of the university of north carolina’s “reli : religion in america” kicked off two days later. that was a wednesday, but, by the end of class on the following monday, i had to tell this new batch of students, who had known me for less than a week, that i needed to leave. i had to go home to take care of a family emergency. “please be flexible with me,” i asked of them, and “we will work to communicate clearly, keep the class on track, and take care of each other.” as i flew to oklahoma to be with my mother, i had to lean on excellent graduate student teaching assistants and fellow faculty to step in and help. i asked them all—the students, my tas, my colleagues—to see me as human, remain flexible, and work with me as i found my way. so, from the beginning of the semester, i had needed to prioritize the most important people in my life, and i was going to need everyone else’s support to pull through and keep going. more than ever, we would have to admit to our humanity, submit to life’s fragility, and do our best to find simple solutions and shared resources to pull ourselves along. “not the same online” when it finally was clear that we would need to transition online, it became painfully obvious that we could not just do the same thing. some assignments were no longer possible. some expectations were no longer reasonable. some objectives were no how the coronavirus pandemic will change our future teaching terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core longer valuable. before the break, i had told them to use it as a time to think about their “field experience papers.” they were each tasked with identifying a religious group outside of their own tradition, researching its history, contacting a local congregation, and, ultimately, visiting to do “mini-ethnographies” that reflect on the group’s social location as well as the student’s own positionality. when i sorted through their responses to my poll, however, i realized right away that the field experience paper could not happen, at least not in the same way. even before our governor began to limit meetings, i knew that we could not send our students out to visit diverse religious gatherings throughout north carolina and beyond without putting them and those congregations in danger. then, i began to think of other assignments we had planned. we had two more “ready reactions,” or brief in-class pop quizzes, meant to test preparation and attendance. if we were not meeting in person, that seemed impossible or, at the very least, impractical. and what about that final exam, full of fifty short identification questions and two short essays? could we do that online, and, if so, what sort of surveillance would we need to employ to guard against cheating or plagiarism? it now felt unreasonable and much less valuable than i had always believed. in the month after my mother’s sudden diagnosis and precipitous decline, i read a short blog post that had been on my mind for weeks. it was like another round with the piñata, where it had spun me around and left me swinging for a better approach to life and teaching. it was called “against cop shit.” the author, jeffrey moro, is a phd student at the university of maryland, and he forwarded a simple thesis: “abolish cop shit in the classroom.” moro went on to define this as “any pedagogical technique or technology that presumes an adversarial relationship between students and teachers.” for example, he pointed to the tracking of students’ movements, software to detect plagiarism, overly strict attendance policies, and the celebration of “grit” and “discipline” in the interest of enforcing conformity to our syllabi and class policies. from the second i read it, the phrase had stuck with me. “you are not a cop, so why are you doing cop shit?” (jeffrey moro blog, february , , accessed june , , from https://jeffreymoro.com/blog/ - - -against-cop-shit/) “fostering nourishment and connection” as i write these reflections in early june , that refrain seems more important than ever. collectively, we are asking ourselves the question of how our teaching needs to change in the religion and american culture terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://jeffreymoro.com/blog/ - - -against-cop-shit/ https://jeffreymoro.com/blog/ - - -against-cop-shit/ https://jeffreymoro.com/blog/ - - -against-cop-shit/ https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core face of not just one pandemic but also two simultaneous and interrelated crucibles. at this moment, the coronavirus pandemic has us mostly at home, in front of our screens, and relatively undistracted by school or sports or the impending election. we are attuned in an unprecedented way, and we have just a bit of extra time and increased attention. when those horrific videos of ahmaud arbery and george floyd being murdered began to go viral in their own way, we could not look away as we had with eric garner or philando castile. ahmaud was out for a run when he was gunned down by a recently retired, thirty-seven-year police veteran and his son, acting as a vigilante posse in their gated georgia community. george had a cop kneel on his neck for eight minutes and forty-six seconds as onlookers protested and his fellow officers deflected. these brutal scenes, on top of the stories of countless others— breonna, tamir, botham, trayvon, michael, sandra, to name just a few—had a whole lot of us entirely sick of cop shit and realizing that we had allowed it to pervade every aspect of life. policing is not the same as teaching. the stakes are different, and there are good reasons to build accountability into our learning communities. let us not be tempted, however, into thinking cop shit stops in the streets or remains confined to police departments. we have been doing a lot of policing in our classrooms, lulled into the gradual ramping up of the surveillance of our students’ movements and disciplining of their deviations. yet, what does attendance and participation look like when we all desperately need each other to stay away because we are sick or socially distant when things are dangerous? if we cannot do everything the same as we had promised, maybe we should also consider what it is we have been promising that we never should have done. how can we avoid the sorts of practices that perpetuate an adversarial relationship between ourselves and our students, and why are we doing this in the first place? dispensing with unsafe assignments (in the case of the field experience paper), unreasonable practices (in the case of the pop quizzes), and unworkable assessments (in the case of a content-oriented final exam) left quite a void for the rest of the semester. in a class that i measure on a -point scale, i still had nearly points for which i needed to account. beyond the principles, i needed a pathway for the rest of the semester and for those that followed. the path i choose entails leadership rather than threat, allies instead of adversaries. i got into this profession because it brings me intellectual nourishment, social connection, and the ability to find personal accommodations, both for myself and my students. despite an increasingly corporate approach to learning objectives, course how the coronavirus pandemic will change our future teaching terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core “delivery,” and standardized evaluations, i still love it for the same reasons. in the face of so many surrounding pressures, i want to return to that fundamental commitment to foster nourishment, cultivate social connection, and provide individualized accommodation. one of the first things i realized after reading the poll results was that there could not be one solution. some students were still in their dorm rooms or nearby apartments in chapel hill, but others were in montana, brazil, india, and china. some had dedicated spaces with desks and high-speed internet. others were sharing a room with two siblings and working from their beds. some had their texts and notes, while others had nothing. in the ensuing debates over the virtues of asynchronous versus synchronous instruction, i felt like both would be required. accessible asynchronous content for diverse access, time zones, and contexts, paired with optional synchronous discussion to learn together and combat isolation. “remain flexible and adjust” i had asked students to be flexible from the beginning of the semester, and, once again, i called for a renewed adaptability as we reworked the course schedule, recorded abbreviated lectures, adjusted assignments, and set new due dates. i reminded them again that we would need to remain ready to adjust to situations as they changed. nobody knew where it was going. we still do not. the only thing we know is that we must prepare for a reality in which we are all keenly aware that the “new normal” has reminded us of the transience of normality. this will mean mastering some new technologies and techniques. i just finished teaching an intensive summer school version of the same course, “religion in america,” in the last few weeks of may. to adjust it to a fully online environment, i had to work together with an instructional designer and a graduate student to build out self-contained “lessons” for each day in our learning management system. they consisted of five steps: read (a scholarly overview), watch (an hour-long video), analyze (an historical document), respond (in an online forum post), and discuss (in a daily synchronous gathering on zoom or asynchronous recording/response). it was an incredible amount of work to redesign a course that i have taught dozens of times to this specific context. we dispensed with previously used books and instead identified and linked digital sources for every part of the course. we transitioned from quizzes to small group assignments on google docs. finally, we replaced the field experience paper and final exam with an eight-page digital e-book that offers students the chance to religion and american culture terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core apply all of the skills they acquired to the study of a particular local congregation, describe how they are navigating all of the challenges of our current moment, and present their findings to a four-person cohort in zoom breakout rooms (see jennifer gonzalez, “student-made e-books: a beautiful way to demonstrate learning,” cult of pedagogy, september , , accessed june , , https:// www.cultofpedagogy.com/student-e-books/). you know what? it was a wonderful learning community, far surpassing anything i had imagined could happen online. beyond pedagogical dexterity, however, what we need more than anything in this strange moment is more support and understanding, not only for undergraduates but also for underpaid graduate students, contingent faculty, and overburdened staff. i was one of several faculty who dragged their feet as we transitioned to remote teaching this spring. did i not just write in this very piece that we cannot do the same thing online and that none of us signed up for remote teaching away from our collective life on campus? yet, here i am in june, contemplating a return to face-to-face teaching on campus in less than two months. because i am slotted to teach smaller seminars, our administration has designated my courses to offer “high-impact” classroom instruction and “meaningful in-person experience.” oddly, i now want to tell them that the best possible way of bringing high-impact learning and meaningful personal experience this particular fall would be through well-designed fully online teaching. seminar discussion and small-group active learning seem less appealing with masks, face shields, six feet of social distance, and the imminent threat of a deadly disease. we are, however, grappling with an inflexible system and intransigent budgetary realities, where these humane questions buckle to political pressures, and we cannot fully determine our own way unless we are granted accommodations for medical or personal reasons. protecting myself, however, only passes along increased danger to my faculty, staff, and graduate student colleagues. anti-syllabus as faculty, we are going to need to press administrators for support, to prioritize humanity, and remain flexible and allow us to adapt to this ever-changing situation, even as they demand that we serve students. in the spring, our administrators extended pass/fail and covid grade options to our students but prohibited us from knowing those selections or asking students about it. this functionally meant increased labor for me and my tas as we personally accommodated, worried about lapsed participation, and how the coronavirus pandemic will change our future teaching terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/student-e-books/ https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/student-e-books/ https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/student-e-books/ https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core provided feedback to students who had already checked out. as i consider what remains from my principles for an adjusted semester and what is lacking for what is ahead, these increased demands upon our instructional labor and the intensification of a corporate culture that single-mindedly focuses on undergraduate satisfaction strike me as the dangerous side to what i wrote. recognizing all of the budgetary, political, and demographic pressures our institutions are facing, we nevertheless must insist that we did not sign up for any of this, that the humane option is still the best option, and that we must remain committed to fostering intellectual nourishment, social connection, and personal accommodation for all faculty, staff, and graduate students. when the principles began to get widerattention, acolleague and good friend joked that he was going to write an “anti-syllabus,” in which he would explain to students that he would not adjust a single thing. he joked that these “bizarro world principles” would insist that we all should have been ready for this, that the overall system must take precedence over human concerns, everything could be done online, and that increased rigor and unwavering enforcement would be essential pedagogical touchstones moving forward. of course, it was a joke, meant to lightly tease and gently point out that nothing i had said was all that unique. who does not, after all, want to be humane, flexible, and committed to flourishing right now? in retrospect, that simplicity was likely essential to the appeal of the principles and maybe why they were adapted to so many contexts. when i told my wife that i was struggling to explain to a reporter why they had resonated so widely because i thought they were just common sense, she responded, “i think that’s the point. people just needed a reminder.” at the same time, in talking with other colleagues and reflecting on our current situation, i do wonder if something of an “anti-syllabus” is not required. maybe not a full-throated embrace of inhumanity and inflexibility, but some recognition of the labor required to realize the ideals i articulated and how that work falls unevenly on each of us. as one professor friend, who is an untenured woman of color who has dealt with all sorts of unseen toil and unplanned contingency over the years, told me, “your principles sound great for a white, male, able-bodied tenured professor with strong institutional support and relative autonomy in teaching. for some of us, though, that flexibility and compassion are seen as inconsistency and weakness.” in fact, when she adjusted her syllabus in light of the pandemic, my friend encountered pushback, questions, and students that flooded her email with complaints. by collapsing the distance between professor and students, in the name of humanity and accommodation, some of us receive praise while religion and american culture terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core others have their authority challenged or their vulnerability abused. for these, the principles can feel like an increased burden; it is another bit of shadow labor for folks who have been holding that humane, flexible, personalized space for students for years at risk to their own pedagogical authority and without full recognition, fair compensation, or any real sense of whether it will help or hinder their tenure chances. thinking about how this moment will change our teaching going forward, i am keenly aware of that pushback. now, as it ever should be, those of us with relative privilege in the academy and in the wider society need to be doing that work without demanding it of those for whom it only increases their labor and diminishes their security. let us allow space, even in our ideals, for imperfection and rest. for some time now, i have been studying jesuit history and spirituality, and i believe we should be thinking of new ways to apply the ignatian pedagogical admonition to be people for others, focused on the cura personalis, or care of the entire individual. if we focus too narrowly on ourselves and our students, however, we may miss all the ways our colleagues, our graduate students, our staff members, and our wider communities are struggling. we may also run the risk of perpetuating a sort of individual charity that does nothing to challenge unjust systems. some are doing and have always done too much of this work and for too long been blindfolded, spun around, and told to swing at the professional piñata: “go, go, go and do, do, do.” for these and for ourselves, we need the piñata song’s reminder: “don’t lose your sense, because if you lose it, you’ll lose your way.” let us go into our future teaching with a renewed commitment to hold onto our senses and find a way forward together. brandon bayne is associate professor of religious studies at university of north carolina at chapel hill. valerie cooper shortly after duke university suspended face-to-face instruction this spring in response to the coronavirus pandemic and put our classes entirely online, my next-door neighbor asked me how i was going to adapt to this new reality. “i am going to teach louder!” i responded, laughing. i did not mean that i would shout at my classes through zoom or some other online vector but, rather, that i would be doing what i how the coronavirus pandemic will change our future teaching terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core could to amplify my own and my students’ humanity in what remained of the semester ahead. it seemed to me that, as students left the complex webs of social relationships they had built on campus, a sense of social belonging and connection with peers would be one of the most important things they would be missing and mourning as they hunkered down in front of their laptops and cellphones, trying to listen to lectures in locations far from campus. i believed that it would be a mistake to try to teach students during a pandemic by ignoring their humanity and even the fear and loss that they were feeling. as an african american, i was part of a community that was being hit hard by covid- illness and death. i was determined to make sure that my classes made space for students to share their very human feelings of loss and fear. i felt that a very important part of my classes going forward would be specific efforts at community building—even if that meant building a virtual community. rather than pretend that the semester was just going on as usual, i made an effort to acknowledge the hard work that students were doing to continue showing up for class. i encouraged students to look out for one another and for themselves and tried to make space to acknowledge the uncertainty that many were feeling. that work of virtual community building went first because i believe that students who feel unsafe and unsure will have trouble learning or caring about learning. they lose motivation. in that context, i did everything i could to amplify our humanity even as our classroom had shrunk to the size of a laptop screen. these days, i teach at a divinity school, but in the early years of my university career, i taught in departments of religious studies. my colleagues and i often debated the appropriate amount of self-disclosure in such an educational context. certainly, proselytizing is verboten, but to what extent should a faculty member let any of his or her personal religious or theological beliefs show in the course of instruction? some of my colleagues argued that it was never appropriate to allow any of your personal views to show. i tended to suspect, on the other hand, that despite professors’ best efforts at hiding their personal opinions, students were always able to ferret out at least some of them. most students, after all, have spent their entire academic careers trying to find out exactly what we teachers want and giving us exactly that (and no more) in every assignment they turn in. given that so much of student success is dependent upon their ability to figure us out, i doubted that religious studies faculty were any better at hiding who we were from students than anyone else had been. religion and american culture terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core i believe that our students figure out who we are and what we believe pretty quickly and without a whole lot of intention or even effort. indeed, even in the discussions with my religious studies colleagues, i suspected that it was better to be upfront about our convictions than to leave students guessing—and perhaps misconstruing—who we are and what we stand for. whether or not it is appropriate to disclose one’s personal beliefs in religious studies contexts is a complicated, ongoing debate. as a divinity school professor, however, i am convinced that emotionally distanced teaching is completely inappropriate in the context of a national and social emergency such as this pandemic. by discussing who i am, how the pandemic was making me feel, and by allowing space for my students to do so, also, i believe that i not only amplified my own humanity (despite the humanity-diminishing tendencies of technology) but also, paradoxically, made my virtual classroom a safer space for students who were suddenly feeling unsafe in the world. what womanist theology taught me i identify as a womanist scholar. womanists, like black theologians and many others, reject the idea that anyone can be objective. the myth of objectivity too frequently allows those such as whites, men, and others who wield social, economic, or political power to speak as though their experience is universal and to mask their true, vested interests. pretending that a particular white person’s or a particular male’s experience is somehow universal, or even objective, mutes the voices of others who do not share that experience. frequently, womanists begin their scholarship with an introduction, identifying themselves, their social locations, and their ideological commitments. this allows readers to interrogate the scholar’s arguments with an eye toward the scholar’s own commitments and potential blind spots as well. this seems to me to be a much more honest approach. rather than pretending to be objective while hiding one’s particularity, or denying holding any social or political commitments, womanists disclose theirs and invite the reader to admit that everyone has them. moreover, as a black christian woman teaching at a predominantly white, christian divinity school, acknowledging my social location means delineating it from that of other christians who might share my faith but not my life story. it allows me to demonstrate diversity even as we acknowledge how much we have how the coronavirus pandemic will change our future teaching terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core in common. real community requires that i be allowed to tell my story just as you be allowed to tell yours. part of my commitment to amplifying my humanity during the pandemic involved being honest with students about how unsettled i was feeling. it meant admitting that the course would feel and flow differently and that some elements might not translate well in the virtual environment. it meant reminding students of my instructional goals while having an honest discussion with them about those things i already knew i could not do well, such as being able to handle some of the technologies upon which we were now dependent. part of my commitment to amplifying my humanity during the pandemic meant showing part of myself that i might not otherwise want to reveal. it meant allowing students to see my anxiety about how my teaching might be diminished in its online presentation. it meant inviting my students into deliberations about how our class would go forward in its new reality. what seventh-graders taught me i became convinced very early in my career that it is important for students to know something about their teachers. before i taught at the college level, i taught junior high school. and, yes, much of what i learned from teaching junior high school remains relevant to my teaching today. in order to be certified to teach in a junior high, i had to take courses in course design, lesson planning, and adolescent psychology as well as content-specific courses. those courses taught me how much my ability to teach depends upon my ability to connect with my students. i still believe that teaching junior high school is some of the toughest teaching out there. i am convinced that it was then that i learned how to really teach. in my experience, content is always important to teaching: you must give your students information in a format that they can understand, retain, and be able to use appropriately. the younger the learner is, however, the more important it is to provide them with motivation and discipline to keep them on task in the learning enterprise. as a junior high school teacher, in addition to teaching students content accurately and competently, an essential part of my job was to provide students with the motivation to do the work. i suspect that every parent of an adolescent out there knows that one thing junior high schoolers sometimes lack is motivation! by the graduate and postgraduate level, most students can provide their own motivation for most tasks. that is not as true of religion and american culture terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core junior high school students, who can, at times, hate school, hate their parents, hate their fellow students, and, especially, hate themselves and their rapidly changing bodies. in such a turbulent context, something more than flawless content delivery was required. in teaching junior high school students, i learned how important it is that i, as a teacher, make a personal connection with my students. they were more likely to be able to work hard in spite of everything else that was going on in their lives if they believed that they were part of a community that cared about them, being led by a teacher who cared about them. as a new junior high school teacher, i studied the successful veterans. i learned that they did not try to hide their love of the subject they taught or their care for the students they were teaching. motivating students involved making those kinds of personal connections. it meant that my classroom bulletin boards did not just display content from the curriculum but also included issues i loved from my discipline and that i hoped my students would also find interesting. it meant that i gave students opportunities to link what we were learning to what they were experiencing in their lives outside of school. i came to understand that things that helped my students connect school to their lived experiences also helped them learn. one wonderful thing about teaching junior high school students—and, particularly, seventh graders—is that it is one of the last times in their lives when students will be completely honest about how they are feeling. they have not yet learned to mask their emotions in order to appear more cool or more pulled together. they will just blurt out their hurts, their fears, and, yes, they will rat one another out if you are looking for the culprit in a particular petty crime. in that, they made my job easier as a teacher. by college, however, students have long since learned to limit their self-disclosure and to maintain a competent air even when they are struggling. that makes it harder to recognize when students are in trouble. even if they were unable or unwilling to admit it, it did not take genius to realize that many of my graduate students were struggling as a result of the pandemic and the social, economic, and political disturbances that came in the pandemic’s wake. zoom and other online venues made it easier to see class differences in students’ homes in a way that dorm rooms never revealed. just as i had, some students had seen family members or friends fall ill and even die as a result of covid- . those who had worked on campus had lost their jobs and income, and many had returned to homes where their parents or guardians had also lost their jobs and income. how the coronavirus pandemic will change our future teaching terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core in addition to worrying about completing assignments, some students were now struggling with food insecurity and fearing homelessness. for many students, the pandemic had brought an unprecedented level of instability and insecurity into their lives. although i didn’t experience much of it, i heard from faculty colleagues who saw higher than usual levels of missed assignments, incomplete assignments, and even cheating among their students. it was obvious that many students were struggling and some were failing. none of that meant that students had reverted to adolescence but, rather, that their usual adult coping mechanisms were being strained in this new, covid- context. amplifying humanity did not mean treating them like junior high school students, but, rather, it did mean acknowledging that strain. it meant that i had to be intentional in replacing some aspects of the communities they had built on campus but had had to leave behind. community-building as pedagogical method how then did i “teach louder”? i began every class with a check-in on students. i would model the sort of honest disclosure i expected by admitting how the pandemic had destabilized my life. (by going first, and modeling how i hoped that these disclosures would go, i also modeled the nature of the disclosures. i kept my comments relatively short and professional; i never gave any more information than would be appropriate. this was sharing, not therapy.) then i would call on students to talk about how they were doing. because i teach at a divinity school, i invited students to pray about their concerns corporately once they had articulated them. (we also prayed for concerns students had preferred not to share openly. we made intentional space for that.) i asked them specifically what they were doing to take care of themselves and lower their stress levels. we would sometimes brainstorm about activities that were safe to do in a pandemic, but also helped lower stress, such as taking a walk outside or calling a friend. i repeated important class details because i knew that it was harder for students to pay attention online than it had been in person. i put very important class details in writing but realized that students were being bombarded with emails and that they might not attend to them all very closely. of all the small things i did, such as giving students the opportunity to speak about themselves (rather than all the opportunities i usually give them to speak about the curricular content we present in any given class), i gave them permission to be religion and american culture terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core human and to acknowledge and care for their humanity in a difficult time. although they were less likely than my old seventh graders to admit that they were having difficulties, it was not hard to figure out that they were. i know i was. at the end of the semester, i learned that i had been honored by duke university as the recipient of an abele award for graduate student mentoring (“mary lou williams honors students, faculty and staff with abele honors,” duke today, may , , https://today.duke. edu/ / /mary-lou-williams-honors-students-faculty-and-staff-abele- honors?fbclid=iwar rh t sjyc zn badddngd-oct vuhmpag y yl jrz ckqtjddxk). i was pleased that the university had recognized and approved of the work that i had done to amplify the humanity of my students. as so many of us shelter behind literal masks for protection against covid- , i was glad that i had lowered my metaphorical mask to my students. the metaphorical mask that so many of us have worn since junior high school—the one that says that i am fine even when i am not—was intentionally lowered, and i allowed my students to lower theirs as well. in my classes this semester, the first work was revealing, amplifying, and sharing our humanity so that we might create a space safe enough for learning to take place. then, once the virtual space had become a safe space for human beings to occupy, we could do the work of learning together, as a virtual community bounded together by our interest in the subject matter and by our interest in and care for one another. valerie cooper is associate professor of religion & society, and black church studies at duke divinity school. gastón espinosa spring seemed to unleash the wrath of god and the outrage of humanity. the meteoric impact of covid- across america and around the world appeared to usher in an epidemiological apocalypse. within weeks, the world was brought to a screeching halt—empty streets, disheveled supermarket shelves picked dry, gun stores barren. like a trailer for the walking dead, the pandemic and the ensuing panic created a bunker mentality where people from all walks of life prepared for the end of the world as they knew it. more chillingly, the hopes and dreams of the next generation of students were dashed on the rocks of uncertainty and fear. anticipating the foreboding apocalypse, colleges and how the coronavirus pandemic will change our future teaching terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://today.duke.edu/ / /mary-lou-williams-honors-students-faculty-and-staff-abele-honors?fbclid=iwar rh t sjyc zn badddngd-oct vuhmpag y yl jrz ckqtjddxk https://today.duke.edu/ / /mary-lou-williams-honors-students-faculty-and-staff-abele-honors?fbclid=iwar rh t sjyc zn badddngd-oct vuhmpag y yl jrz ckqtjddxk https://today.duke.edu/ / /mary-lou-williams-honors-students-faculty-and-staff-abele-honors?fbclid=iwar rh t sjyc zn badddngd-oct vuhmpag y yl jrz ckqtjddxk https://today.duke.edu/ / /mary-lou-williams-honors-students-faculty-and-staff-abele-honors?fbclid=iwar rh t sjyc zn badddngd-oct vuhmpag y yl jrz ckqtjddxk https://today.duke.edu/ / /mary-lou-williams-honors-students-faculty-and-staff-abele-honors?fbclid=iwar rh t sjyc zn badddngd-oct vuhmpag y yl jrz ckqtjddxk https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core universities across the nation sent students home to prepare for the worst as the nation waited for the pandemic to steal away upward of . million victims. at home, families struggled to prepare for the unknown, huddled in front of screens announcing the latest death tolls. hardest hit are the dead, sick, and the estimated more than twenty million americans who lost their jobs or were placed on unpaid furlough. the financial disaster had a disproportionately negative impact on the most vulnerable: poorly paid racial-ethnic and disadvantaged families and students. shut up in their homes and neighborhoods by the state-mandated stay-at-home orders, they still felt a strong, even desperate, desire to find work to buy scarce provisions. the covid- crisis put sharp pressure on low-income, jobless, and furloughed families and students that, at times, seemed to overwhelm their sensory faculties. even the brightest students struggled to stay focused on their studies. just when rays of hope seemed to break through fear and news that social distancing was taking effect, a second meteoric disaster hit. like the first, it was also human-made. in the live-stream slaying of george floyd, students saw the same ruling powers and structural system at work that had kept them from jobs badly needed for survival. the tragedy that unfolded on national television seems to disturbingly mirror the social conditions of many minorities and many others whose consciousness about inequality had been heightened by the quarantines. the pent-up frustration and mental angst of a nation strained to the brink over covid- now converged with centuries of racial injustice, erupting into a fireball of masked rioters chanting george floyd’s name, with some torching cities, and demanding an end to the world of racial oppression as they knew it. the prophetic outcries over these two human-made disasters by the same ruling powers sparked a revelation and, in some quarters, a revolution that may bring about long-term structural and catalytic change to the laissez-faire complacency in the united states and around the world. in fact, any discussion about the impact of covid- on the future of american society and teaching must intersect with the riots and student protests sweeping the nation today because the two are inextricably linked, and the protestors know it. as martin luther king, jr., prophetically wrote behind iron bars in a birmingham jail, “all men are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. i can never be what i ought to be until you are what you ought to be, and you can never be what religion and american culture terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core you ought to be until i am what i ought to be. . . . this is the interrelated structure of reality.” students across the nation understood the profound interrelatedness of ordinary lives with george floyd’s death in middle america, and this is precisely why tens of thousands of students and people from all walks of life flooded into the streets, marched, and protested the cruel death of an unarmed black man under the heel of white society. indeed, george floyd died for our sins: the sins of our soiled past shaped by slavery, racism, and centuries of unanswered discrimination along with their ongoing legacy today. his death has taken on cosmic and symbolic, though not yet redemptive, proportions and has unleashed a whirlwind of peaceful marches but also--in the hands of opportunistic spirits--violence, looting, and bloodshed. the violence has, ironically, cut against the spirit of the original protests and hurt the very communities and minority-owned businesses that black lives matter and others have worked so hard to defend. from the arc of history, the world is on fire and trenchantly portrayed on nightly television and social media. while this description might seem like hyperbole, for some, the world is on fire and some things will never be the same—and they ought not to be. these two crises have underscored the importance of religion in u.s. society, with many clergy and religious traditions leading the call for an end to racial injustice. the covid- apocalypse has underscored the continuing salience of religion and prompted black americans and others to turn to religion for hope. a gallup poll survey found that percent of americans reported that religion is important in their lives, and, in an april , survey, percent of blacks and evangelicals, percent of catholics, and percent of americans nationwide reported praying for an end to the spread of covid- . perhaps this should not be surprising because almost all survey research indicates that working-class, poor, and marginalized people—blacks, latinos, koreans, filipinos, and other minorities, as well as women, poor whites, immigrants, and the disabled—are disproportionately religious compared to the middle-class white u.s. population. why blacks and others might turn to their faith to find hope and an end to racial injustice could lead to rich discussions about the intersection among religion, race, economics, and political empowerment and social change. identifying underlying problems of inequality in online higher education how should higher education in general and the field of religious studies in particular respond to these apocalyptic and racial how the coronavirus pandemic will change our future teaching terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core injustice pandemics? after examining the impact of the covid- pandemic in the move to online education, i will reflect on what colleges, departments of religion, and faculty can do to redeem and transform these two tragic events into learning opportunities that can help transform american higher education. in many ways— some of them ironic—the frustration on the part of racial-ethnic minorities and other disadvantaged students in wake of the covid- pandemic served as a primer that set the stage for the protests that have erupted in the american psyche. rather than discuss this situation in the abstract, i plan to write from my own experiences as a religious studies professor who teaches classes on religion, race-ethnicity, and social change. though the college is well resourced, a growing number of its students are not. right after students were returned home in the wake of the apocalyptic prognosis about the impact covid- would unleash on the american people, faculty were made immediately aware of the fact that not all was well with an overlooked segment of students. while many upper- and middle-class students from all racial-ethnic backgrounds were making the at-home adjustment well because of the support and resources that their families could provide, other students from broken and under-resourced families were suffering in the shadows. these students—among the most academically successful in our classes prior to the pandemic—had such sheer grit and determination to succeed that they chose not to complain about the resource inequalities they faced at home. while everyone struggled to adjust and work through the general malaise that seemed to weigh down the end of the semester, their struggles and difficulties were immediately more acute and weighty. after stoically trying to push through their limitations, many lamented privately in and outside of office hours that they were really struggling behind the scenes at home to perform at the same level of excellence they had on campus in claremont. at first glance it appeared that going to percent online teaching might level the playing field because everyone could go home to their supportive families to get their work done. this perception, however, falsely assumed that all families had the necessary material, financial, and other resources to make the transition smoothly and successfully. it seemed to overlook that, in reality, many underemployed racial-ethnic and other disadvantaged families and students from inner-city and marginalized communities face tragic structural inequality and a lack of resources. reports emerged about students in tears saying the pandemic lockdown made it almost impossible to concentrate and get any work done and religion and american culture terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core that it was almost unbearable to live at home due to financial stress that resulted in parental and sibling conflict, yelling, and shouting. what economic, class, and racial-ethnic factors placed minorities and other disadvantaged students at risk of underperforming? the state- and city-mandated stay-at-home orders across the nation forced restaurants, stores, and companies to close shop and either lay off their workers or place them on unpaid furlough. the resulting unemployment disproportionately affected blacks, latinx, and other poor and working-class families and students. reports emerged about students missing class; when contacted, one student explained that their parents had been evicted from their home due to losing their jobs, and now were homeless and looking for a temporary shelter. these students had no place or time to work, let alone read, research, and find the time to concentrate enough on their readings to wade through the sources to write a thoughtful and engaging essay. still other students reportedly shared with tears streaming down their faces that there was so much yelling and screaming going on in their small home due to unemployment and other medical issues that they could not concentrate at all during waking hours. they were forced to work, bleary eyed, from a.m. to a.m., which disrupted their sleep patterns and ability to function. many other students had similar stories. still others reported that their families could not afford the internet upgrade needed to participate in online zoom classes and, in some cases, that their computers at home were so old they did not have working cameras and microphones and the computers often froze during online classes. this reality made completing some of even the most basic assignments exceedingly difficult. finally, not having access to city libraries or places to buy computer and online media equipment, along with living in some of the most dangerous and drug-filled neighborhoods in urban america, made trying to track down research via books and periodicals difficult and even dangerous. these factors led to frustration, despair, and a gnawing fear of failure. more damaging to the spirits of these students, circumstances reinforced negative stereotypes that they did not belong at the claremont colleges as much as their well-off peers. on top of all of these familial and academic resource problems, in the admittedly chaotic transition returning home, some reported having difficulties, confusion, or delays in navigating or accessing key social services such as free peer-tutoring, the counseling center, racial-ethnic student affairs, and the religious chaplaincy center, which had helped many address the anxieties they faced in previous semesters. through no fault of anyone or anything other than the impact of the pandemic, they lost direct in-person on-campus access how the coronavirus pandemic will change our future teaching terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core to the communal support networks and people that had provided critical support. here, they could find supportive peers and professionals and scarce resources. while these resources went immediately online to continue providing excellent care, the return home and loss of in-person meetings due to the state-mandated stay-at-home orders undercut students’ ability to reach them. this lack of physical access contributed to a growing social distance from their educational experience and to a sense of isolation, which undercut their resolve to struggle through the pandemic amid the cascading crises it seemed to engender. the loss of these critical social services along with a reduction or, in some cases, a lack of regular interaction with their professors, students, staff, and guest speakers undermined their overall intellectual stimulation and engagement in the classroom. having to watch prerecorded lectures made it difficult for students that come from relational and oral cultures to engage the material in the same way they had done in class with its more relational interaction. in short, many students painfully struggled to perform at the same level of excellence they had prior to the pandemic due to the absence of direct, interpersonal on-campus teaching relationships with their professors and peers and the practical loss (from their vantage point at home) of the intellectual free space, dorm rooms, library resources and quiet study spaces, and professional support and social services they needed to excel, despite the fact that all were at varying levels still fully operational and eager to help, but only in online formats. the shame that many students felt for seeking help because it reinforced the perception that they did not belong was, perhaps, the greatest pandemic of all. if these academic difficulties were not enough, they also faced pressure from their families at home to find work and somehow contribute to their households. many spent time looking for work and still others were forced back into unhealthy family dynamics and living arrangements, all the while feeling pressure to excel in the classroom. research in economics and other fields has shown that racial-ethnic minorities—especially blacks and latinx—and other disadvantaged youth (some other immigrants, poor whites, and others) have much higher poverty and underemployment rates and tend to live in poorer and under-resourced communities than those in the rest of america. in short, their socio-racial-economic location placed many racial-ethnic minorities and other disadvantaged youth at greater risk of underperforming and failure than the general u.s. population. while middle- and upper-class students and their families could mitigate and better deal with some of these factors because religion and american culture terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core they had the resources and the extra living space to do so, other students were not so lucky, and they found themselves in a crisis and facing various difficulties at home. this situation created something of an educational apocalypse for racial-ethnic and under-resourced students wherein their academic worlds and hopes and dreams for a better life were seemingly dashed on bitter rocks— but with a sharper mercilessness than for most other students. the result was frustration and anger for some and resignation for others. in short, the covid- apocalypse laid bare the structural inequality these students faced and revealed why they were being placed in a position where they were almost predestined to underperform. while most boldly made it through the process, others, i am sad to report, did not. college and student responses to the covid- pandemic how did the college and faculty respond to the covid- pandemic? the college tried to make sure students had a functioning computer. it also provided a one-time payment for transportation home, for increased internet bandwidth for the remaining two months of class, for inexpensive but functional cameras if their computers did not have one so they could participate in online classes and online counseling, and for many other resources. they also worked to make some of the past social services available via zoom or telephone. some students were given the freedom to stay on campus if they were international, homeless, or faced an unsafe or abusive home environment. faculty sought to address these deficiencies by offering students additional office hours and counseling to discuss their work and struggles; assigning new, modified, and shorter readings and papers; creating breakout and chat rooms; providing tutorials and prerecorded lectures students could watch in their own time-zones; reducing three-hour classes to just two hours; and trying to connect the origins, impact, repercussions, and implications of the pandemic to what they were studying. perhaps, more importantly, some faculty brought these issues to the attention of the administration in order to find larger structural ways to support and enable students to push through the crisis. despite these initial faculty efforts in march and april, students and faculty immediately saw the disparity and structural inequality for students who came from underemployed racial-ethnic minority and other disadvantaged backgrounds. as a result, about twenty percent of students banded together to create a petition that asked the college to, among other things, modify the grading scale how the coronavirus pandemic will change our future teaching terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core for spring . students from the other four colleges generated similar petitions. the main argument was that students from racial-ethnic minority and disadvantaged backgrounds would be indirectly penalized and set up to underperform because they went back to homes without the space, resources, and stable working environment they needed to excel. while not conceding to all of the student requests, the college took what it believed to be a middle-ground position: allowing students the choice after they saw their final grade to either keep their letter grade or to change their letter grade to credit/no credit. faculty could not override the student’s choice. the rationale was that students who had underperformed due to factors related to the covid- pandemic—perhaps confidential factors that the student did not feel at liberty to share with their teacher or college for many reasons—would now have the option of taking courses for credit without it adversely affecting their grade point average and, hence, their future job and graduate school applications. many racial-ethnic and other disadvantaged students, faculty, and their allies, however, were frustrated by this course of action. they felt that it would invariably privilege students with greater resources and force students without them to have to take the course only for credit instead of a letter grade, not due to lack of effort or ability but, rather, because of a lack of resources and a stable learning environment—factors completely out of their hands. students proposed instead that the college follow the grading policy of other colleges and universities by requiring all students take a universal pass (no letter grades for anyone) or no record pandemic/ incomplete, thus ensuring that there would be equity for all in the grading system. no one single group would benefit because they had access to greater resources and support. not all students, including some from working class and/or racial-ethnic minority backgrounds, agreed with this universal pass proposal, and they mobilized against it. they claimed they were being forced to accept an unfair grading policy that, in their view, would actually harm their future applications and work prospects in general. seniors, they argued, would be particularly impacted because this semester would be their last chance to increase their overall and major gpas before graduation. after extensive and energetic discussions, the college ultimately sided with the second group of students, though modifying their grading policy further to state that any course grade of d– or better could receive credit in lieu of their final grade. to further close the gap in students’ socioeconomic advantages, the college encouraged the faculty to take into account the difficulties of the covid- semester when assessing final grades. needless to say, the students petitioning for religion and american culture terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core universal pass were frustrated by what they perceived as the structural inequality that shaped both the school’s policy and the larger society that made it more difficult for them and their families to succeed. all of this conflict over grading spotlighted the racial and class disparities and inequality in american higher education. it also revealed—perhaps like never before—the deficiencies of online education and provided tangible grounds to counter the argument that online education and assessment is largely race and class neutral. this inequality, which had hitherto been seen largely by only those students suffering from it and by supportive faculty and staff working behind the scenes to mitigate it, was now publicly exposed for the entire college to see, perhaps for the first time in such a clear and compelling way. racial-ethnic and other disadvantaged students ended the semester frustrated and, in some cases, angry about the structural inequality of not only online education but also the college’s inability to address the issue in a way that leveled the playing field and benefitted the entire student body, not just those with resources. they interpreted the problem as racial in kind because they knew that most of the students who came from racial-ethnic minority backgrounds also correspondingly came from poor, working-class, and underemployed families, including many with single parents, who were unable to match the resources of middle and upper class families. covid- apocalypse and george floyd riots: the end of the world as we know it the growing frustration with the covid- educational apocalypse, in many ways, helped set the stage for the future student revolts, protest marches, and riots that swept the nation in the aftermath of floyd’s tragic death. students saw the intersectional link between their academic scenario, which put them at a clear disadvantage and in a position to underperform, and the killing of george floyd, which was caused by the systemic injustice that his death came to signify in the media aftermath. both the students and floyd had one thing in common: their working-class racial-ethnic heritage resulted in differential resources, treatment, and outcomes in a larger structural system, higher education in one case and the legal system in the other, that did little to mitigate their vulnerability. the fact that floyd’s death happened right after most students had just finished a frustrating and disappointing spring semester in american higher education, primed the pump for a release—nay, revolt—against the institutional forces they believed did not listen to their cries for freedom, equity, and justice. they were not alone. how the coronavirus pandemic will change our future teaching terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core students who were given a universal pass and those who were not both had their consciousness awakened. despite its purported liberal framework, higher education seemed complicit with a system that invariably favored the powerful. the students’ institutions did not— and, perhaps, could not, from their own point of view so late in the semester—adequately correct the imbalance to level the playing field. these students and those who sympathized with them were ready to seek a remedy. the absolute abuse of power that led to floyd’s death was the match that set the country and world on fire. the state-mandated covid- lockdown (ironically, most strictly enforced in democrat-controlled urban areas, including many with high poverty and unemployment rates) along with the student and faculty frustrations over the racial-ethnic structural inequality, resonated deeply with the same frustrated voices that cried out for justice and demanded to be heard in the wake of the floyd’s death. the largely student-staffed black lives matter movement provided a vehicle and forum through which people could express pent-up feelings, anger, and execute a searing search for justice. now, just out of school, students took to the streets and joined countless others from all walks of life to demand justice in the wake of the two human-made apocalypses they were hitherto forced to watch but not protest. no more. they rushed pell-mell into the fray, though not always with ordered discipline, a clear leader, or a set of objectives. like a tornado, they ripped through america’s downtowns and, sadly, inner cities, leaving some of the very places that were already on edge and underserved devastated by outside agitators, who burned, looted, and destroyed big chain stores as well as small, minority-owned businesses, social service agencies, and the already decaying infrastructure that they depended on for survival. the movement to call out violence and restore justice was hijacked by largely white, middle-class, masked, and hooded anarchist groups like antifa, whose followers infiltrated the protests to unleash mayhem not just on the rich but also, invariably, on the poor by setting fire to and destroying the infrastructure and resources in their neighborhoods. still others assassinated black police officers protecting city hall and other civic buildings. a few racial-ethnic minorities from the community created their own mayhem, while others followed antifa’s lead. while black lives matters, black christian clergy, and community leaders attempted to correct this take-over, the damage has already been done. the redemptive orientation of many protesters, along with calls for major reform, were replaced on the nightly news by images of fire, shootings, and violence. in one youtube post that went viral, a group of religion and american culture terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core antifa-styled, white-masked and hooded college-age students are shown setting parts of a poor racial-ethnic community on fire. a brave black woman—despite being surrounded by over half a dozen white masked and hooded anarchists—shouted down what they were doing and told them to go back to uptown and register to vote. she shouted, “these are. . . people who live in public housing! and you just made a melee. . . . you are here profiting off our pain. . . . you come in here with your f*cking privilege and take down resources that my community needs. . . . stay out of our neighborhoods.” rather than stop, they continued to burn what they never cared to know or lift up. responding to educational inequality in the shadow of covid- and george floyd crises how can we transform the meteoric impacts of the covid- pandemic and george floyd protests and riots for racial justice into teaching moments and best practices about how and what we will teach in the future? first, the way we will teach in the future has been forever changed by covid- because almost all faculty across the united states and around the world have been forced to teach online for the first time in the history of the world. in fact, it is a shared generational, paradigmatic “i was there” moment. more than that, it is the birth of a new renaissance in teaching pedagogy that has moved from a largely in-person spatial experience in the classroom to an in-person online virtual experience over the internet. fundamental questions about faculty-student engagement, communication, content, and delivery will be forever changed because now faculty the world over have learned how to teach online. whether this will be a permanent transformation for all faculty or a temporary blip on the screen is unclear. online teaching has both extended the repertoire of pedagogical tools for teachers and possibly undercut (or, from another perspective, underscored) the value of in-person, on-campus teaching. what was once the platform, approach, and pedagogy of for-profit colleges and programs across the nation has now become mainstreamed and acceptable. second, faculty have been forced to find ways to use technology to engage students in new, innovative, and more meaningful ways. students who once listened to live lectures in class are not willing to spend their time listening to live lectures online. most are putting pressure on faculty to simply prerecord the lectures so they can watch them at their leisure and then either test them on the material and be done with it (a more transactional and how the coronavirus pandemic will change our future teaching terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core consumer-driven approach) or hold a meaningful online discussion about the material (a more transformational and experientially driven approach). in the second attitude, we see how the move to online teaching has prompted students to demand more existential value and intellectual engagement and stimulation out of their educational experience. they want to know what this means for them and their world today. third, faculty are having to use more engaging pedagogical approaches to teaching, such as chat rooms, break-out groups, facebook postings, youtube postings, the creation of classroom interactive websites, teaching modules, and break-out group debates. the apocalyptic and racially charged experiences of are forcing faculty to ask questions that go into the deeper meaning and existential significance of the topic. fourth, in my own classes, i have created a carefully selected collection of primary source readings and set of highly focused questions (definitional, thesis/theory/evidential, explanative/ interpretive) that force the students to identify the main thesis, theory, or point of the reading, tie it back into the larger theme of the course, and then reflect on its overall significance in society today. our goal is not simply to identify the main reading topic and then assess it but also to understand its contribution (positively or negatively) to the larger culture. these questions also help guide the student reading, pointing them to what’s really important. moving beyond mere facts and dates, they walk away with a clear understanding of the terms, definitions, main thesis, theory, argument, evidence for the argument, and their own reflections on what they have just learned and how it intersects with profound issues in our day. i found that approach worked well online because giving the students the questions at the beginning of the semester for all of the class units meant that they could take their time to work through the reading and on the paper as far in advance as they wanted—though most just waited until the night before! my larger point is that the move to online education provides faculty an opportunity to find more engaging ways to foster critical thinking and analyses of the material that offers some existential value and new frameworks for interpreting contemporary life. finally, as we saw earlier in this essay, online education has forever spotlighted the inequality and structural problems some students from racial-ethnic minorities and other disadvantaged backgrounds face in the academy. in a real sense, it underscores one of the main values of returning to in-person, in-classroom teaching on campus; if all of the students live on campus and have access to the same resources, then they should have a more similar chance of religion and american culture terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core performing at the same level as their peers. still, as we all know, students who come from inner-city or under-resourced public and private schools may not have had access to the same quality of college-prep teaching, training, and learning as those students who attended highly elite private schools. in all of these ways and in many others, the covid- pandemic has permanently changed not only how we think about teaching online but also its relationship to higher education and the equity and disparities involved in that education. now, we should ask how the covid- pandemic and the george floyd protests for racial justice have each challenged and changed what we teach and why we teach it. the pandemics and protests have given faculty a platform and an opportunity to spotlight and address a number of key themes in religious studies and american society, such as race, class, discrimination, white supremacy, colonialism, economic injustice, structural inequality, justice, hope, fear, redemption, activism, social change, politics, power structures, globalization, biological warfare, violence, futurism, apocalypticism, and a vast array of others. this covid- crisis has created a natural opportunity to discuss the intersection among religion, apocalyptic events, racial strife, struggles for justice, economics, and political disenfranchisement and empowerment. while the covid- pandemic will pass and invariably have a modest but important impact on how we go about teaching in the future, the george floyd racial justice protests could have a much more profound impact on what we teach and how we might respond to the antiblack crisis that this second meteoric pandemic seems to have underscored. our college responded by launching the cmc presidential initiative on anti-racism and the black experience in america. it called on faculty, students, and staff to reflect and act on strategies for addressing racism, anti-blackness, and racial-ethnic marginalization at the college and in society. how might religious studies departments and scholars respond on an institutional, departmental, and personal level to similar initiatives in american society and higher education? some of the possible steps that our department discussed included: • acknowledging the suffering of the black community and our complicity • listening carefully to the struggles of black and racial-ethnic minority people • hiring faculty in departments such as religion, history, politics, and economics where they can naturally teach how the coronavirus pandemic will change our future teaching terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core about racism and civil rights and the black experience in the united states and africa • creating new courses that address racism, antiblackness, and discrimination • creating university policies that promote and ensure racial-ethnic equality for all • addressing inequalities in our educational system (for example, in online classes and grading) • sponsoring speakers and seminars about antiblackness and racism more broadly • funding internships and leadership programs for black and racial-ethnic students • creating new awards, prizes, and scholarships in racial-ethnic studies (for example, best thesis) • creating new religious studies tracks and majors dealing with race-ethnicity • bringing racial-ethnic alums to campus to talk about life and keeping community ties • continuing to mentor racial-ethnic minority alums after graduation • creating student-student tutorial programs with college and high school students • creating faculty-student research assistant programs during the school year and summer • creating five- and ten-year plans for diversifying the faculty and curriculum finally, faculty can reflect together on how they might reach out to and recruit black and other racial-ethnic minority students, faculty, and staff in light of this new programming and, by so doing, contribute to a renaissance and intellectual transformation in the lives of their students and college. all these steps can redeem these two apocalyptic moments into a transformational web of mutuality that helps remake the world as we know it into what it ought to be. gastón espinosa is arthur v. stoughton professor of religious studies at claremont mckenna college. religion and american culture terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rac. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rac. . https://www.cambridge.org/core 	how the coronavirus pandemic will change our future teaching 	outline placeholder 	charity versus justice 	unity versus solidarity 	restoration versus transformation 	&ldquo;nobody signed up for this&rdquo; 	&ldquo;the humane option&rdquo; 	&ldquo;not the same online&rdquo; 	&ldquo;fostering nourishment and connection&rdquo; 	&ldquo;remain flexible and adjust&rdquo; 	anti-syllabus 	what womanist theology taught me 	what seventh-graders taught me 	community-building as pedagogical method 	identifying underlying problems of inequality in online higher education 	college and student responses to the covid- pandemic 	covid- apocalypse and george floyd riots: the end of the world as we know it 	responding to educational inequality in the shadow of covid- and george floyd crises beyond the cultural turn: a critical perspective on culture-discourse within public relations hal id: hal- https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal- submitted on may hal is a multi-disciplinary open access archive for the deposit and dissemination of sci- entific research documents, whether they are pub- lished or not. the documents may come from teaching and research institutions in france or abroad, or from public or private research centers. l’archive ouverte pluridisciplinaire hal, est destinée au dépôt et à la diffusion de documents scientifiques de niveau recherche, publiés ou non, émanant des établissements d’enseignement et de recherche français ou étrangers, des laboratoires publics ou privés. beyond the cultural turn: a critical perspective on culture-discourse within public relations alexander frame, Øyvind ihlen to cite this version: alexander frame, Øyvind ihlen. beyond the cultural turn: a critical perspective on culture- discourse within public relations. bowman, s; crookes, a; romenti, s; ihlen, o. public relations and the power of creativity: strategic opportunities. vol. , emerald, pp. - , , � . /s - �. �hal- � https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr/hal- https://hal.archives-ouvertes.fr beyond the cultural turn: a critical perspective on culture-discourse within public relations alex frame (university of burgundy franche-comté) and Øyvind ihlen (university of oslo) abstract purpose this chapter applies recent theoretical developments linked to the concept of culture to the field of public relations research and practice, notably through the prism of creativity as a vector of cultural change. design/methodology/approach the chapter is theoretical in nature, and draws on relevant scientific literature in the field of public relations research, but also the social sciences more generally, and illustrates the issues being discussed with reference to relevant public relations campaigns. findings while the field of public relations has moved beyond simplistic models of cultural values and characteristics, it is argued that more complex visions of culture have been neglected. specifically, drawing on structuration theory, culture can be seen as a “system-generating mechanism” relying on creativity to uphold and renew cultural references and norms. in this perspective, public relations is both producing/reproducing culture and being produced by culture. it follows that the concept should be apprehended not as an ontological category, but as a social construct, as the source of heuristic and discursive categorisations. social implications a call is issued for public relations to also question the ideological underpinnings of the production of symbols in which practitioners partake on a daily basis. originality/value while the chapter fits into an emerging body of work discussing the cultural dimension of public relations, the link with creativity and the use of structuration theory to conceptualise this link contribute to its originality. keywords critical intercultural theory, culture, cultural appropriation, public relations, social discourse, stereotypes introduction in , sriramesh and white ( ) pointed to the importance of culture for public relations and the need for more research in this domain. two decades later, public relations scholars answered this call in force (e.g., bardhan & weaver, ; carayol & frame, ; edwards & hodges, ; sriramesh & vercic, ). research has thus broadly moved beyond the use of simplistic models that ‘essentialise’ national cultures, seeking to reduce them to distinctive sets of deterministic invariables measured along a few value-based dimensions (e.g., hofstede, ), to a much wider range of theories and perspectives with their roots in sociology and ethnography among others. public relations scholars interested in culture also refer to the “mother discipline” of the concept — anthropology — and point out how practitioners can be perceived as storytellers and mythmakers, as opposed to being seen as managers or technicians (l’etang, ). broadly speaking, public relations scholars have so far (a) analysed culture as an antecedent for public relations practice, (b) investigated the impact of public relations on culture and society, and (c) approached public relations as culture in its own right (sriramesh, ). sriramesh ( ) concludes that most research has focused on the first of these three approaches. some studies have attempted to describe what is culture specific, while others have focused on what is common for different cultures, and yet others have focused on intercultural interaction (zaharna, ). basically, much of the research on public relations and culture has aimed to help public relations practitioners communicate in and across national and sometimes professional cultures. in this short theoretical essay, however, we argue that the debate surrounding the place of culture in public relations research and practice should be repositioned in the context of wider discussions surrounding the concept in the social sciences. more specifically, we point to the need to take a closer look at the ideological and epistemological basis of the culture concept in public relations. first, we will argue that the way that public relations builds or maintains “cultural differences” needs critical analysis. culture should not be reduced to a barrier for practice or something to be harnessed in pursuit of organisational effectiveness, since such approaches, when translated into public relations campaigns, may implicitly reinforce the myth underlying much populist discourse, that social categorisation is a source of inalienable difference. secondly, we will argue that the relationship between public relations and culture is best grasped through the lens of structuration theory (giddens, ). it is not a question of how public relations is formed by culture or vice versa. we see public relations as both producing/reproducing culture and being produced by culture: public relations professionals attune their messages culturally, and these messages, relayed through the media, contribute to the way in which cultural representations evolve. culture and criticism while the surface meaning of the term culture implies that a group shares certain understandings or practices, there are historic (and opposing) approaches to culture as a system of values (parsons & shils, ; weber, ) or meanings (geertz, ; swidler, ). culture is paradoxically one of the most successful concepts to have emerged in the social sciences over the course of the last century, and particularly useful to help us understand many contemporary topics of social debate, but at the same time use of the concept is strongly criticised within the social sciences themselves, where certain academics (e.g., dervin & machart, a) reject the term outright because they see it increasingly being used to construct and maintain difference socially, rather than to try and understand interpersonal and social group dynamics. indeed, it is in part the success of the concept itself outside the academic sphere, and the way that it is used by the media, politicians, and in the public sphere more generally, which has led to this state of affairs. from social and cultural anthropology in the early twentieth century, the concept of culture spread to other social sciences, notably from the sixties onwards (bauman, , p. viii), rapidly moving from the domain of scientific jargon into popular discourse, to the point where, as dervin and machart ( b, p. ) note, it was declared “word of the year” by the merriam-webster dictionary in . however, at the same time, critical voices were being raised in academic circles, calling for the concept to be abandoned. indeed, from being what was already a notoriously polysemic term, according to dervin and machart its popularity has made it into a dangerous “floating signifier” today ( b, p. ), a pseudo-scientific term without a clear or fixed meaning, which leaves it open to all kinds of misuses. already in , hannerz had denounced what he saw as increasingly pervasive “culturespeak”, by which he broadly meant inappropriate and reductive or deterministic use of the concept. culturespeak tends to understate individual differences and favour a static vision of culture, rather than a dynamic one in which culture is seen as a constantly-negotiated social process. although the concept was central in anthropology for many years, it has now become strongly contested within this discipline (anderson-levitt, ; kuper, ). the idea that the members of a society or social group all share the same cultural references has revealed its limits in studies of (post-)modern societies characterised by the diversity of their populations and a certain liquidity (bauman, ) in the identity choices people make. for many anthropologists, including appadurai ( , pp. – ) and amselle ( , pp. – ), the concept with its homogenising overtones is not sufficiently dynamic to capture the complex social processes and contexts within which people evolve today, and its use artificially reinforces perceptions of social distinctions. indeed, the concept of culture has never been ideologically neutral. in his book liquid culture, bauman ( , pp. – ) identifies different uses of the notion of culture in different historical periods and distinguishes four of these: culture as enlightenment (intellectual progress), culture as global domination (elias’s ( ) “civilization process”), culture as homeostasis and maintenance of group boundaries (linked to bourdieu’s ( ) “distinction”), and culture as personal invention (liquid modernity, multicultural societies). in each period, claims bauman, the concept takes on a particular ideological nuance, linked respectively to rationalism, imperialism, elitism and then relativism. except in its liquid version, it has been used to ethically justify various policies and attitudes towards other groups, generally judged as inferior, for example through colonialist projects. elsewhere, bauman describes culture as “simultaneously a man-made and a man-making entity” (bauman, , p. ), in that it replaces, at least to some degree, supernatural rationalisations of the differences in behaviour, development, wealth, and so on between ethnic groups. indeed, despite their historical roots, all four ideologies of culture can be found today in media discourse and public discourse in many western countries, and must also be taken into account by public relations professionals, as the importance of culture or of culture-based discourse emerges and comes to be recognised within this field. the cultural turn in public relations sriramesh and other scholars have criticized much previous public relations research for its focus on the work of hofstede and cultural characteristics that are apparently common across countries (sriramesh, ), rather than approaches which present culture as a social phenomenon on the level of the social group (frame, ), or as a communication resource or tool-kit (swidler, ). sriramesh has argued for a multi-level approach examining the political culture, economic culture, societal and organizational culture, media culture and activist culture of a country and the links between these and public relations. culture can thus be seen as an antecedent for public relations practice, while public relations also exercises an influence on all of these cultures (sriramesh, ). although increased attention to the question of cultures is in many ways a positive evolution in public relations theory and practice, this trend also brings with it new risks associated with increased public sensitivity towards the ways in which cultures and groups are portrayed. this can be illustrated by the “cultural appropriation” debate, when often self-designated representatives of a minority or underprivileged social group accuse non-members of trying to illegitimately appropriate its cultural codes and traditions, often in order to make a profit. the british music group coldplay and american pop stars such as taylor swift, miley cyrus and katy perry have come under such criticism in recent years, for allegedly exploiting cultural traditions from other countries or minority groups (here, using braids or mimicking what are seen as afro-american dance codes) but the debate even extends to which children can legitimately wear which costumes at halloween or for carnival celebrations in the us and elsewhere. in norway, for example, the minister for finance was criticized for posing dressed in a pocahontas costume at a party in the department. another recent example more directly relevant for public relations is the commercial released by pepsi that featured a super model joining in a street protest and handing a policeman a can of the soft drink. a statement from the company declared that “this is a global ad that reflects people from different walks of life coming together in a spirit of harmony, and we think that’s an important message to convey.” given the background of recent us street rally’s under the moniker “black lives matter,“ the commercial caused uproar and was consequently pulled. comedian stephen colbert quipped “attractive lives matter.” other examples of corporate cultural appropriation include the uk clothing chain top shop’s use of the palestinian black & white scarf design for a summer dress and the french company chanel that included a boomerang with their logo as a part of their summer collection. the former caught criticism for appropriating a symbol for the struggle of palestinians, and the latter was criticized by aboriginal organizations. the tensions caused by the cultural appropriation by these and other corporations show just how far things can go when cultural identity claims are taken for absolute truths, and defended as such. cultural appropriation thus constitutes a new risk for public relations professionals, in terms of potential unwanted negative publicity attracted by brands which may be accused of trying to appropriate cultural codes for commercial reasons. in ideological terms, referring to bauman’s classification ( ; supra), this can be analysed as revealing tensions between, on the one hand, visions of culture as homeostasis and a desire to maintain group boundaries, and, on the other hand, a liquid vision of culture as a resource for personal invention. when examining many accusations of cultural appropriation, we can also adopt a post-colonialist reading of the situation: less economically prosperous groups see themselves historically as being victims of colonial exploitation and cultural persecution, at the hands of the very same groups who appear still to be in a position of social and economic dominance, and who now seek to exploit the cultures they once denigrated, in order to make commercial profit. the situation is more acute in multicultural societies, with north-american multiculturalism constituting an extreme example, but the internet is also contributing to spread the debate, and the protests, globally. we would argue that this is symptomatic of a more general ideological tendency to see cultural identity in more “solid,” essentialist (dervin & machart, a), deterministic and reductive cf. https://www.theguardian.com/music/ /apr/ /hunger-games-amandla-stenberg-criticises-miley- cyrus-taylor-swift-cultural-appropriation. page consulted on / / . cf. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/parenting/wp/ / / /cultural-misappropriation-and-my- daughters-halloween-costume/?utm_term=.d cfc e f. page consulted on / / . http://www.newsinenglish.no/ / / /sivs-pocahontas-stunt-backfired/ . page consulted march , . http://people.com/food/pepsi-responds-kendall-jenner-backlash-protest-ad/. page consulted on / / . http://time.com/ /stephen-colbert-kendall-jenner-pepsi-attractive-lives-matter/. page consulted on / / . http://www.commisceo-global.com/blog/how-to-avoid-cultural-appropriation-promote-cultural-awareness- instead. page consulted on / / . terms, a conception which has a very real impact on the practice of public relations all around the globe. indeed, in everyday public relations practice, reliance on cultural identifications is of course widespread, as we tend to unthinkingly use various categories to define ourselves and others in order to predict behaviour and anticipate reactions. in this sense, the concept of culture is a social reality, used to make sense of the social world around us and corresponds to a basic human need to think in terms of categories. as holliday puts it, “while culture may not be real in the solid, essentialist sense, it is real in the way in which it is used and as an excuse, and very often real in the minds of those who use it” (holliday, , p. ). it follows that this concept should be considered . this way of thinking encourages us to identify individuals as members of a particular group, and to consider them first and foremost in terms of the traits which we expect them to share, on the basis of their membership of this group, with the other members of the same group. the more different a group appears to be to our “own” group – perceived differences which we often explain away through “culture” – the more members of that group may tend to appear alike. simplifying the complexity through the use of stereotypes is a way of making it more familiar and less frightening. in order to help us think about otherness (considering an individual as a member of an out- group/denying them the status of in-group membership) or communicate with individuals whom we identify as members of a (little-known) out-group, social categorisation comforts us in the idea that the members of such and such a group share a fairly homogenous culture. in other words, this natural cognitive process tends to comfort us in a falsely essentialist and reductive vision of cultures. for public relations professionals, it is thus essential to tread the fine line between referring to cultures and social categories in order to construct meaningful messages which appeal to familiar categories, and reinforcing the underlying social stereotypes. independently of the desire to avoid accusations of cultural appropriation, on an ethical level, public relations professionals should also think about the kind of images that they are putting into circulation in the media, since they also play a direct role in reinforcing or questioning stereotypes through their work. public relations tends to mirror social beliefs and representations in order to resonate with audiences. this echoes an insight from ancient rhetoric: you need to take into consideration what your audience think, their values and the premises they will accept, and build on this when you try to persuade them about something. of course, values and premises should not be reproduced unthinkingly. public relations professionals should be held professionally and socially accountable for the implicit cultural models and beliefs underlying the materials they produce. however, this question is only very rarely included in discussions of professional ethics by professional bodies. bringing this aspect in would be in line with many of the calls that have been issued in critical public relations over the years (l'etang, mckie, snow & xifra, ). practitioners should “always question the nature of their own institutions and strive to improve them and make them more just” (holtzhausen, , p. ). for the most part, however, such scholarship has addressed, for instance, whether “the democratic, deliberative and decision-making roles of civil society” have been opened up or closed down as a consequence of public relations activity (motion & leitch, , p. ) or public relations has been urged to engage with the public interest (johnston, ). as sriramesh ( ) points out, the impact of public relations on culture and society has not been widely studied. culture, public relations, and creativity the preceding discussion enables us to pinpoint the relationship between culture, public relations and creativity. culture can be understood as the supply of symbols, stories, rituals, and world-views on which people draw to create strategies of action (swidler, ). creativity in public relations relies on these symbolic resources which constitute the foundations and building blocks, from which a message is shaped in a new and original way. in order to better characterise this relationship, it is important to take into account the fundamental duality of what we call “culture”, in that it both structures our social interactions and is performed through them. paraphrasing hall ( ), cultures shape our communication, and our communication in turn shapes our cultures. bauman expresses this idea, focusing on the tensions between conformism and non-conformism underlying our everyday social interactions, when he observes that culture as praxis: is as much about inventing as it is about preserving; about discontinuity as much as about continuation; about novelty as much as about tradition; about routine as much as about pattern breaking; about norm-following as much as about the transcendence of norm; about the unique as much as about the regular; about change as much as about monotony of reproduction; about the unexpected as much as about the predictable. (bauman, , p. xiv) here, bauman is echoing giddens’ vision of the duality of structure, which the latter expressed in the form of structuration theory ( ), reminding us that when individuals produce symbolic acts (speech, actions), they are unconsciously referring to various rules and norms, but the fact of doing so means that the rules and norms themselves are being maintained and possibly updated. the system which structures behaviour is itself reproduced through the behaviour it structures. if we consider it as structure, then, it is important to note that culture is not stable, but a dynamic process. as desjeux points out: culture is both structure and something dynamic, which is what makes it so hard to observe and analyse. as structure, it includes stable elements which can give the impression that it has an essence, whereas in fact this stability results first and foremost from the fact that historically things change over long periods. as a dynamic process, it is indeed subject to historical change [authors’ translation] (desjeux, , p. ). this dynamic nature of culture as a structuring process in communication helps us foreground the links between public relations and creativity, and indeed the role of public relations professionals as cultural mediators (schoenberger-orgad, ) for society at large. as already pointed out, public relations professionals often seek to draw upon social representations familiar to the publics they are targeting, in order to express new ideas in what is likely to be perceived as a convincing way. while doing so, they are acting in a context of intertextuality, where the audience is supposedly able to draw on knowledge from a variety of sources in order to interpret the messages being produced. they are also themselves contributing to enriching this context through the material they produce, which can in turn be used as a new reference in interpreting subsequent messages. thus the “like a girl” campaign by always, for example, clearly sought to build on audience members’ existing representations and widespread social discourse about what it means do something “like a girl”, while reconfiguring these representations to a small degree: the campaign ‘works’ thanks to the cultural context, and aims to influence the context itself. similarly, the company bodyform has recently played on the intertextual codes of female hygiene product advertising, and notably the in the silent language, hall famously states, “culture is communication and communication is culture” (hall, , p. ). the term praxis, as in bauman’s book culture as praxis, is used here to refer to culture which exists through practice: it is only through behaviour marked by culture that culture is maintained, passed on and renewed. conventional use of “blue fluid” by many brands to promote the absorbancy of sanitary products. these ads follow on from pioneering viral youtube marketing in by the same company, which ‘work’ because people recognise this convention, and possibly affect the way they will react to other such adverts in the future. the inherent creativity of public relations campaigns resides in professionals’ capacity to produce forms which reflect existing representations, structures and ideas circulating within a particular cultural or societal frame, in order to ensure that their messages resonate with the target publics, while renewing the underlying cultural conceptions in a way that allows the brand to stand out and be noticed, often to appear “modern”. these representations, structures and ideas may thus be implicitly criticised, questioned or reinforced by the campaign, as it constitutes its own contribution to the discourse “out there” about such and such a topic. the pressure for campaigns to be “creative”, i.e., to remain recognisable while challenging communicational conventions, is one of the motors of cultural change on the societal level. it follows that the notion of creativity in public relations does not suppose total artistic freedom, rather it refers to the ability of creatives and other public relations professionals to adopt and adapt existing cultural frames of reference, to play the role of “cultural mediators” by expressing concepts and ideas in forms which resonate with their audiences’ representations while associating them with a message which is new and different. public relations in this sense molds taste and creates identification between producers and consumers (curtin & gaither, ; edwards, ). with reference to structuration theory, public relations professionals rely on dominant structures to make sense to their audiences, while often seeking to breaking away from them for effect (to increase notoriety or work on image) or to convey a particular message. indeed, public relations is more often about influencing and changing dominant representations than it is about reinforcing them, though both are of course possible. in both cases, creativity is the key, but a form of creativity which is firmly grounded in existing cultural representations. if culture is the underlying structure, in giddens’ sense, public relations messages are thus one of the many ways (materialised forms) in which the structure is dynamically updated and caused to evolve, thanks to the creative work of the public relations teams. the impact of public relations messages are all the more powerful when they are released through mass media outlets, exposing many individuals simultaneously to the same stories and symbolic stimuli. the creative development of the aforementioned pepsi commercial was explained this way by the company: the creative showcases a moment of unity, and a point where multiple storylines converge in the final advert. it depicts various groups of people embracing a spontaneous moment, and showcasing pepsi’s brand rallying cry to ‘live for now,’ in an exploration of what that truly means to live life unbounded, unfiltered and uninhibited. sometimes creative minds go further, playing on stereotypes and cultural taboos for maximal sensationalist effect though at the same time they may create ugly examples, for instance of a misogynist character. despite us discussions of rape culture, the retailer bloomingdale issued an infamous ad which read “spike your best friend’s eggnog when they’re not looking”. whether such campaigns and the outcry they often provoke actually reinforce or rather call into question what http://www.bbc.com/news/uk- . page accessed nd march . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bpy q ddow. page accessed nd march . http://people.com/food/pepsi-responds-kendall-jenner-backlash-protest-ad/. page consulted on / / . https://www.buzzfeed.com/stephaniemcneal/bloomingdales-egg-nog- ad?utm_term=.ahpa nbezk#.mja awdal. page consulted on / / . many people deem to be dominant negative cultural representations is wide open to debate, though it would appear to be an important issue which needs addressing by the ethics bodies of the public relations profession. in contrast to the preceding examples, a campaign that received praise is the one instigated by the personal care brand dove with the slogan “real beauty”. in what has been called “one of the biggest conceptual ad campaigns of the decade” narrow definitions of female beauty were challenged. through ads depicting women with shapes and figures different from the typical slim models, dove, with the help of the public relations agency edelman, “sought to start a conversation about beauty”. the contrast to the campaign from victoria’s secret called “the perfect ‘body’” is striking. the latter was also hijacked by the smaller competitor dear kate, again showing pictures of ordinary women. in this way, public relations professionals as cultural mediators contribute to upholding, challenging, and renewing cultural values and representations within the societies in which they work. it also illustrates a point that by now has grown old; namely that public relations can be used for both positive or negative purposes, and as a profession needs to come to grips with this (fawkes, ; ihlen & verhoeven, ). conclusion although the “cultural turn” in public relations has been salutary in many respects, it finds its (opposing) limits in (a) accusations of cultural appropriation or viral communitarian backlashes, and (b) essentialising identities and reinforcing imagined (homogenous) communities. in this paper, we have argued the need for a more complex vision of culture, its role in society and notably the essential role that it plays in the creative process. building on work done by giddens ( ) or bauman ( ) on culture as a structuration process, we have focused on its social role as a “system- generating mechanism” that creates “knowledge-making groups […] within which individual choice and creativity are produced” (hartley & potts, , p. ). such process-based perspectives place communication and story-telling, indeed, public relations, at the centre of their analysis and, in this sense, public relations can itself be studied as a process of cultural reproduction (frame, ). as such, studying public relations and culture is also a study of how public relations is influenced by and influences society. public relations plays a role in building/maintaining social consciousness of “cultural differences” both in the way it classifies audiences along cultural lines (structural determinism) and through the messages it produces which often tend to flatter audiences’ (stereotyped) preconceptions of society. it is thus essential for public relations theorists and practitioners alike to adopt a critical stance towards their own and their colleagues’ uses of “culture discourse” within the field, questioning their epistemological and ideological underpinnings. what next? we would obviously encourage more research, focusing on, for instance, the cultural toolbox of culture comes into play in public relations on many different levels, or the impact of various types of messages, which appear to reinforce or challenge positive and negative representations, on various audiences. cultures and identities are national, regional, ethnic, organisational and professional, among others, and these different levels of identification and of symbolic recognition mean that public relations practitioners need to take into account many http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ / / /dove-real-beauty-campaign-turns- _n_ .html. page consulted on / / . http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ / / /dove-real-beauty-campaign-turns- _n_ .html. page consulted on / / . http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ / / /victorias-secret-perfect-body-campaign_n_ .html. page consulted on / / . different potential readings of the same message, in the light of what it might mean for many different groups. naturally, the more complexity one seeks to take into account, the more unwieldy the models become. this, however, promises a fruitful future for scholarship on public relations and culture. bibliography: amselle, j.-l. 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( ). intercultural communication and international public relations: exploring parallels. communication quarterly, ( ), - . social media framing within the million hoodies movement for justice g model p s f l c a a r r a b c w r n a m ( b t a o i e m o t m article in pressubrel- ; no. of pages public relations review xxx ( ) xxx–xxx contents lists available at sciencedirect public relations review ocial media framing within the million hoodies movement or justice inda hon ollege of journalism and communications, university of florida, gainesville, fl , united states r t i c l e i n f o rticle history: eceived september eceived in revised form october ccepted november . introduction hallahan’s ( ) overview of framing and its applications laid the groundwork for how seven models of framing could e applied to public relations. one of these models was framing of issues, and hallahan pointed out how this perspective ould be applied to the public relations strategies and tactics of activist campaigns and social movements. since hallahan’s ork was published, digital media, particularly social media, complement and extend traditional public relations efforts elated to activism and social movements. the purpose of this research is to apply framing theory to the social media communication of a particular activist orga- ization, million hoodies. examined here is how the activist group used social media to frame issues related to injustice nd racism toward african-americans and mobilized a large base of supporters. million hoodies includes more than , embers and college chapters across the united states (www.millionhoodies.net). million hoodies refers to itself as a racial justice network (www.millionhoodies.net) and was founded by -year-old daniel maree (williams, ) march , , following the shooting death of trayvon martin www.facebook/com/millionhoodies). trayvon was a -year-old unarmed african-american who was killed by neigh- orhood watchman george zimmerman in sanford, fl, february , . on social media and during public protests, rayvon supporters often wore hooded sweatshirts, or hoodies, to express their solidarity with trayvon who was wearing hoodie when he was killed. zimmerman later was acquitted on the charge of second-degree murder after what some bservers called “the trial of the century” (smith, , para ). the trayvon martin case is especially significant to examine because the shooting represented a turning point in activism n the united states (smith, ). social media were largely credited for creating the widespread awareness that led to cov- rage by mainstream media and pressure on federal and state law enforcement to arrest zimmerman (szekely, ;trayvon artin: how social media, ; wood, ). the case also has been cited as the catalyst for creating the groundswell of utrage and motivation that spawned more recent mobilization efforts such as the black lives matter network (altman, please cite this article in press as: hon, l. social media framing within the million hoodies movement for justice. public relations review ( ), http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.pubrev. . . ). for example, alicia garza, one of the three co-founders of black lives matter, posted her feelings on facebook after he verdict was announced: “black people. i love you. i love us. our lives matter” (quoted in altman, , p. ). million hoodies was chosen to analyze in the context of activism and social media because the online network illustrates any of the unique characteristics of grassroots activist groups in the digital environment (see hon, ). as million e-mail address: lhon@ufl.edu trayvon is referred to by his first name to distinguish him from his father, tracy martin. http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.pubrev. . . - /© elsevier inc. all rights reserved. dx.doi.org/ . /j.pubrev. . . dx.doi.org/ . /j.pubrev. . . http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/ http://www.millionhoodies.net http://www.millionhoodies.net http://www.facebook/com/millionhoodies mailto:lhon@ufl.edu dx.doi.org/ . /j.pubrev. . . g model article in presspubrel- ; no. of pages l. hon / public relations review xxx ( ) xxx–xxx hoodies’ founder, maree could be characterized as a “lone wolf” organizer, or someone who takes on the task of organizing or “leads drastically small teams” (earl and kimport, , p. ). at the time of this writing, millions hoodies has a national administrative staff of eight, including current executive director dante barry. however, the group is largely an unstructured network of volunteer supporters who share information and organize offline protest activity collaboratively through social media. the top-level posts are generated by million hoodies, and anyone reading or viewing them can like, comment, and/or share. . theoretical framework . . social movements, activism, and digital media tilly ( ) identified the three main elements of social movements as campaigns (long-term public efforts that make claims on a target), repertories of contention (strategies and tactics available in a certain sociopolitical environment) and wunc (worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment). tilly’s definition bridges social movement theory with public rela- tions scholarship by highlighting the role of strategic communication and mobilization of publics. digital media scholars have argued that digital technologies have ushered in a communication revolution that has fun- damentally changed the nature of media and power relations among organizational and grassroots communicators. shirky’s ( ) work has focused on how collaboration in the digital sphere is occurring without the formal organizations and extensive resources needed in the past. earl and kimport ( ) addressed how digital media provide supersizing effects (increased speed and reach) and leveraged affordances, or unique dynamics that a new technology makes easier or possible. carty ( ) noted that digital media allow users to create and distribute messages without permission from elites such as the mainstream media, corporate gatekeepers, the police, the military, or campaign managers. carty went on to explain that whereas traditional social movements tended to rely on hierarchy, charismatic leaders, and professional experts, collective behavior in the digital space is more horizontal and interconnected. digital peer-to-peer networks broaden the traditional public sphere and create an electronic, grass roots civil society that operates in ad-hoc settings (castells, ). digital media have provided activists unprecedented opportunity to get their message out, quickly reach a critical mass, and mobilize publics around a formidable campaign (carty, ). . . framing theory and public relations snow and benford ( ) explained that activist organizations use frames to engage supporters, recruit new supporters, and motivate supporters to act in ways congruent with the organization’s mission. they went on to suggest that organizations accomplish these tasks through three core framing processes. diagnostic framing identifies a problem in need of a remedy, prognostic framing proposes a solution to the problem, and motivational framing represents the call to action. diagnostic framing includes attributions of blame or causality so that the movement has a target for its action (carty, ). within this larger context, snow, rochford, worden and benford ( ) identified frame alignment as the device activist groups use for mobilization whereby they articulate how individual interests, values, and beliefs are congruent and com- plementary with the group’s (carty, ). four strategies for frame alignment identified by snow et al. ( ) are frame bridging (linking two or more congruent but structurally unrelated frames), frame amplification (clarification and invigora- tion), frame extension (reaching out to other potential supporters), and frame transformation (redefining what is meaningful within the primary framework in terms of another framework). studies about framing and public relations that are most relevant to this research are the few that specifically addressed framing as it relates to activist organizations and digital media. weberling ( ) examined email messages from the susan g. komen for the cure and komen advocacy alliance to determine how frames were used to inform and inspire involvement among donors, volunteers, and individuals involved with komen. she found three types of email categories—policy, devel- opment, and e-news—strategically used nine frames. policy emails were in-depth and directed toward facts and decision making with a sense of urgency. development emails tended to be shorter with direct emotional appeals for donations that focused on hope, survival, and the “face” of breast cancer (p. ). e-news was the most informative with an emphasis on science, progress, and international news related to the organization and breast cancer. she concluded that hers was one of the first studies to look at framing through direct communication with constituencies. she argued that this approach was increasingly important for nonprofit organizations, given the proliferation of social media and the limited resources of some non-profits for traditional agenda building through the news media. ihlen and nitz ( ) compared texts published on the norwegian oil industry’s website with hearing statements from two environmental organizations and media coverage about whether to lift a moratorium on petroleum exploration in two seas off of norway. they concluded that even though the organizational actors in their study largely failed to get the media to adopt their frames, successful framing still has great potential for communicators. they went on to suggest that larger and differing cultural frames may have led to the impasse and that the various groups, including journalists covering the please cite this article in press as: hon, l. social media framing within the million hoodies movement for justice. public relations review ( ), http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.pubrev. . . issues, should focus on ways to co-create shared meanings (banks, ). zoch, collins and sisco ( ) examined whether snow and benford’s ( ) framing processes were present in the issue-related messages on activist group websites and found that only % of the websites in their study contained public relations messages that included all of the three core framing tasks—diagnostic, prognostic, and motivational. zoch et al. dx.doi.org/ . /j.pubrev. . . g model p c c t a w a t v u d m t w f a t f e c h t f f c i a o q t e o o f p o v r w ( article in pressubrel- ; no. of pages l. hon / public relations review xxx ( ) xxx–xxx oncluded that, overall, the activist organizations were not optimizing the use of core framing processes in their website ommunication, which limited the organizations’ effectiveness at creating support and transforming that support into action. extending research on activist websites, zoch, collins, sisco and supa ( ) investigated specific framing devices within he broader core tasks. they looked at framing devices such as catchphrases, depictions (general description, testimony, nd statistics), exemplars, metaphors, and visual images. again, they found that the activist organizations in their sample ere not optimally framing the messages on their websites to increase awareness, motivation, and supportive behaviors mong publics. zoch, collins and sisco ( ) and zoch, collins, sisco and supa ( ) suggested that practitioners need o drastically improve their website communication and suggested that future research be done via other communication ehicles to further explore framing and its relationship to public relations. muralidharan, rasmussen, patterson and shin ( ) analyzed how nonprofit organizations and media organizations sed facebook and twitter during relief efforts following the earthquake in haiti. these researchers found that the ominant frame for nonprofits and media organizations on both facebook and twitter was episodic rather than thematic, eaning that most of the messages were short and direct and lacked contextual background that could have been included hrough the use of links. they also found that the dominant motivational frame for nonprofits on facebook was morality hile it was attribution of responsibility on twitter. the dominant frame for media organizations was conflict for both acebook and twitter, suggesting “a sensational factor to grab attention” (p. ). muralidharan et al. ( ) concluded that lthough these organizations were using social media during the crisis to communicate, they were not using social media o their full potential to involve stakeholders via stronger, more involving frames and strategies. with this backdrop, this study investigated the following research questions: rq . which specific frames are used by million hoodies in its social media communication? rq . does million hoodies’ social media communication display examples of prognostic, diagnostic, and motivational raming and, if so, how are they expressed? rq . does million hoodies’ social media communication display examples of frame alignment—bridging, amplification, xtension, and/or transformation—and, if so, how are they expressed? . method . . data collection the million hoodies facebook page was selected for analysis. the pew research internet project reported that facebook ontinues to be the most popular social media site among internet users in the united states, and although its growth rate as slowed, the level of user engagement has increased (duggan, ellison, lampe, lenhart, & madden, ). pew documented hat facebook is used by % of online adults, compared to % for linkedin, % for pinterest, % for instagram, and % or twitter (duggan et al., ). facebook also allows for longer text-based conversation than twitter, which is constructed or microblogging, and instagram, which is largely photo-based. however, many of the facebook posts examined here ross-referenced related twitter hashtags, especially #millionhoodies. because examining the initial period of mobilization immediately after trayvon’s death is crucial, the time period exam- ned for this study is the day the site was founded, march , , until july , , one week after zimmerman’s july cquittal. this post-verdict week was included to examine post-trial framing with the particular goal of looking for evidence f preliminary frame transformation, given the outcome of the trial. . . data analysis each post (a total of ) was examined and analyzed by the researcher using an interpretive perspective rather than uantitatively coding units of analysis (fairclough, ; owen, ; putnam, ). the approach was described in the extual analysis of social media communication conducted by carr, pratt and herrara ( ) following japan’s tohoku arthquake. as carr et al. ( ) explained, “textual analysis enables a researcher to decipher the overarching themes based n the sum of mini-messages on [a] sns (social networking site). the analysis is systematic and invokes a broader process f critical reflection on various interpretation of messages and ideological streams embedded in the text” (p. ). the researcher began by reading the posts within the designated period in reverse order since the posts are organized rom most recent to oldest. key words and phrases were noted as the researcher read and re-read the posts. most of the osts contained supporting content such as promotional material (fliers, posters, links to million hoodies’ website and allied rganizations such as global grind.com, a video-centric website focused on african americans), links to news articles and ideos, as well as videos, photos, and photos of artwork posted by trayvon supporters. all of this additional material was please cite this article in press as: hon, l. social media framing within the million hoodies movement for justice. public relations review ( ), http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.pubrev. . . eviewed. however, several of the links were no longer working. the posts were examined for specific frames that emerged inductively within and across the posts (fairclough, ) as ell as to determine whether posts within a particular frame were indicative of one of the core framing processes (diagnostic, because the emphasis of this study was communication from million hoodies, comments to the main posts left by supporters, or in some cases trolls opponents who leave flaming comments), were not included in the analysis. dx.doi.org/ . /j.pubrev. . . g model article in presspubrel- ; no. of pages l. hon / public relations review xxx ( ) xxx–xxx prognostic, or motivational). notes were taken as frames and processes emerged. in addition, posts were reviewed for indicators of frame alignment (bridging, amplification, extension, and transformation). a categorization scheme was created by copying the posts or transcribing the posts verbatim under what appeared to be the most appropriate frame and then placing the post under the appropriate core or frame alignment process. this initial categorization scheme then was analyzed, reanalyzed, and adjusted by moving some examples to other categories to develop the best description of all of the phenomena represented in the posts. sample posts and descriptions of supporting material were selected for the results section by identifying the most rep- resentative and/or compelling examples to illustrate the over-arching specific frames and describe the core or framing alignment process. dates of the posts are included in the results section to indicate the chronology of the posts during the timeframe examined. . results . . diagnostic framing the most prevailing diagnostic frame in million hoodies’ facebook communication is evidenced in the organization’s full name, million hoodies for justice. the campaign mobilized people through the collective frame of outrage at the injustice of the circumstances surrounding trayvon’s death and, later, zimmerman’s acquittal. million hoodies also used the frame of racism to diagnose and explain the problem. . . . justice from the outset (march ), million hoodies began its diagnostic framing using a justice frame. one of the earliest posts featured a photo shared by u.s. professional basketball player lebron james. the photo showed the miami heat (james’ team at the time), wearing hoodies and bowing their heads. a message from james said: “we are all trayvon. hoodies. stereotyped. we want justice” (march , ). another early post showed a photo of a young girl at a trayvon rally in phoenix, az, with a sign that said, “justice is the balance between morality and right and has a valor superior to that of the law” (march , ). in one of the first longer posts, maree included an excerpt from his letter to florida state prosecutor angela corey: in my years on this earth i’ve seen more violent injustices committed against black people at the hands of bigots and racists than i care to recount—to say nothing of the countless others which have no doubt missed the headlines of national news media. my reaction is always the same: anger. sadness. more anger. empathy for the family of the victim. fear (an overwhelming sense that it could happen to me. . .it has happened to me). but at this point—despite lingering thoughts of how to protect my little sister from such violence—i’ve been programmed to console myself with the rationalization that these are just isolated incidents far from the norm and to move on with my day. not today. (march , ) a day later, million hoodies continued this theme: justice is not enough for trayvon martin. yes, justice is what we all want for trayvon. justice is what he and his family deserve. and justice is what i’m confident that they will one day receive, hopefully in the not too distant future. but no, justice alone is not nearly enough for trayvon. if his senseless death can somehow lead to anything of lasting value, it will only be an awakening to a much larger truth. (march , ) two months later, a posted quote from martin luther king, jr., revealed the justice frame again: “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere” (may , ). a year after the shooting, million hoodies still was emphasizing justice. an example came in a post that is an excerpt from a speech given by new york city councilmember jumaane d. williams at a million hoodies vigil. as williams said: please do not make us speak in a language you do not want to hear. please hear us while we’re calm because unheard people do things to be heard. when black men and brown men are shot and killed without any retribution, when stop-and-frisk is condoned by a mayor who will double down on the state of the city address, our people will do things to be heard. so i beg for justice. . . .if you don’t hear us now, you will hear us later. i beg and plead, hear us now. because it is true: no justice no peace. if you know justice, you know peace. please choose justice, don’t ask us for please cite this article in press as: hon, l. social media framing within the million hoodies movement for justice. public relations review ( ), http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.pubrev. . . peace. it’s unfair, it’s immoral. we want justice and we want it now. (february , ) later in the campaign and just days before the zimmerman verdict, million hoodies emphasized justice to communicate its frustration with a mobile application that showed a photo of trayvon giving the camera his third finger (unflattering in some cases, the posts included so many visuals and hypertext that the researcher typed the main text content verbatim before coding the post’s text within the categorization scheme. for direct quotes, the original spelling and punctuation are preserved in the posts with the exception of some minor editing for several posts. this is a reference to the mayor of new york city at the time, michael bloomberg. dx.doi.org/ . /j.pubrev. . . g model p a p l t e p @ i g s t i g a t p m s f b u h e t t s i e s m w article in pressubrel- ; no. of pages l. hon / public relations review xxx ( ) xxx–xxx nd/or doctored pictures of trayvon were circulated on the internet and shared by social media). as the group said in its ost that included a photo of the app: justice for all. “angry trayvon” mobile app portrays the slain teen as a street thug & you can still buy it in the google play store http://bit.ly/ avkpyx the developer announced that they had removed it, but you can still find “angry trayvon hd” in the google play store at a premium price of $ . . ignorance. . . . (july , ) after the verdict, million hoodies continued using the justice frame. for example, the following quote was posted with a ink to a story from crasstalk.com whose headline read, “when will being young, black, and male cease to be a crime?”: this is why the peaceful marches and protests we’ve witnessed in the last hours are so very important. it is marking the will of the people. a clear sign that we feel that justice has not been served. that it is not acceptable to hunt young black men. to stalk them, to instigate a situation where they have to fight for their lives, just to then be put on trial for enacting their rights of liberty in this country. (july , ) . . . racism in its diagnostic framing, million hoodies targeted racism as the explanation for why zimmerman followed and confronted rayvon the night of the shooting. in addition, the group’s posts implied that some police officers are racist and the law nforcement system is characterized by institutional racism. for example, one post said: “no justice, no peace. no racist olice (march , ). another told supporters: “text trayvon to , . help ensure justice for #trayvonmartin. tell thejusticedept to arrest his killer + hold sanford police accountable” (march , ). still another asked readers to “see f you can figure out the common theme” and then provided a list of unarmed african americans who were victims of un violence (march , ). a day after the verdict, million hoodies posted a photo of a girl at a rally holding a sign that aid, “fight systemic racism.” in response, million hoodies posted, “this says it all” (july , ). the racism frame was elaborated by communicating a distrust of the law enforcement system in general. in response o the police video footage of zimmerman’s being questioned on the night of the shooting, million hoodies said, “there s not a scratch on him” (march , ). the day the sanford police chief was fired for his mishandling of the case, the roup posted the story from cnn.com and commented, “accountability is a wonderful thing” (june , ). and, after the nnouncement that zimmerman would be charged in trayvon’s death, million hoodies posted, “long overdue!” (april , ). one of the most compelling posts related to institutional racism toward african-americans is a photo of tracy martin, rayvon’s father, with a tear rolling down his cheek. behind martin is the obscured image of the american flag. below the hoto, million hoodies posted, “this pic just made me cry” (april , ). million hoodies also expanded the racism frame by emphasizing people’s unfounded suspicion of african-american ales. an early post (march , ) showed a photo of a male african-american child, dressed in a hoodie and holding the ame brand of canned drink trayvon was carrying when he was shot. the child is carrying a sign that shows a checklist of our items, all checked off. the items are ice tea, skittles (trayvon also had a packet of skittles with him that night), hoodie, lack. the bottom of the checklist said, “am i next?” several days later (march , ), million hoodies posted a video, featuring male african-american students at howard niversity school of law titled, “do we look suspicious?” in the video, each student pulls the hood of his hoodie over his ead and says, “do i look suspicious?” several of them tell the viewer their major and/or career plans. as one of the men xplained, “contrary to what america has led many to believe, all young black males are not suspicious. unfortunately, for rayvon, we will never know what was in store for him because america believed this innocent child was suspicious.” . . prognostic framing prognostic framing used by million hoodies was less prevalent than diagnostic framing and vague about concrete solu- ions. prognostic frames tended to center around the frame of solidarity among people. solidarity was presented as the olution to countering the feelings of injustice stemming from trayvon’s shooting and zimmerman’s acquittal and prevent- ng such occurrences from happening in the future. however, increased gun control, including repealing stand your ground, merged as a specific proposed remedy for curbing gun violence. . . . solidarity please cite this article in press as: hon, l. social media framing within the million hoodies movement for justice. public relations review ( ), http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.pubrev. . . million hoodies used a solidarity frame to appeal to people’s desire for unity. for example, one of the early posts asked upporters to “help create a collective portrait of an america that won’t stand for racial profiling” (march , ). when illion hoodies launched its website, the group shared this news in a post that said, “when you see me, see you” (march , ). in another post about early protest activities, million hoodies commented, “great photos of our nation coming based on the sanford police department’s inaccurate cataloging of evidence, the media reported the drink was arizona’s iced tea although the drink as actually arizona’s watermelon beverage (bloom, ). stand your ground laws provide people the right to defend themselves with deadly force if they believe they are in mortal danger (http://www.ncsl.org). dx.doi.org/ . /j.pubrev. . . http://bit.ly/ avkpyx http://www.ncsl.org g model article in presspubrel- ; no. of pages l. hon / public relations review xxx ( ) xxx–xxx together for trayvon martin” (march , ). later in the campaign, solidarity still was emphasized. for example, a new poster was distributed on facebook to publicize the justice for trayvon national day of action vigils in cities. in the post that includes the poster, million hoodies told supporters, “please use this one! solidarity!!!.” many individual supporters—of all races and ages—expanded the solidarity frame by posting photos of themselves’ wear- ing hoodies. although some of these posts came from celebrities such as muhammad ali and kathy griffin, the overwhelming majority were shared by the grassroots followers who make up million hoodies’ constituency. . . . gun control within two weeks of the organization’s founding, million hoodies was using a gun control frame. a march , , post read, “let’s put an end to stand your ground nationwide!” less than a month later, the dream defenders, a group of high-school students formed after trayvon’s death, posted a picture of a group of defenders, wearing hoodies, bowing heads, and holding anti-stand your ground signs. the accompanying post said: dream defenders in miami tried to deliver more than thousand petitions collected by presente action to [florida] senator marco rubio demanding for him to revoke his support for the “stand your ground” law. they were received by the police telling them that they would get arrested. please share this message so we can hold senator rubio accountable for supporting the “kill at will” law in florida. mh posts solidarity! (april , ) other later posts illustrated the continued use of a gun control frame. for example, a supporter posted a picture of a postcard (with names of u.s. senators) that read: urgent call now! these senators are facing pressure from the gun lobby to say no to every proposal including background checks. please call them and tell them to vote: yes on background checks, yes on assault weapons, yes on large magazine ban, yes for sensible guns. (february , ) another post said: today is the one-year anniversary of trayvon’s death. we will be tweeting and facebooking the names of kids killed by gun violence in the last year. all of our children deserve to grow up in a safe environment. we must stop the violence. please follow us @millionhoodies or watch this page to join in. (february , ) . . motivational framing the million hoodies motivational framing centered on a participation frame aimed at individual supporters. million hoodies organized marches, rallies, and vigils before and after the trial. million hoodies’ posts also indicated numerous examples of the organization’s encouraging supporters to share information and photos through social media. the first post to use the participation frame borrowed phrasing from the occupy wall street movement. a supporter posted a photo of herself with the caption, “occupy the hood.” in her hand, she is holding a coffee cup that says, “this is your world. shape it or someone else will” (march , ). a sampling of other early posts with calls for participation included the following: marches are spreading—tonight in la, leimert park at pm. (march , ) good luck to all the #millionhoodies events taking place across the nation tonight and this weekend! official website for all organizers coming soon! post your photos here. (march , ) here is an updated schedule of this week’s rallies and vigils. please spread far and wide. (march , ) tonight at : pm est please take your #hoodiesdown for min and s of silence on the month anniversary of #trayvon’s death. please spread the word. (april , ) million hoodies used a participation frame to forge a personal connection between trayvon’s family and supporters. for example, an april , , post asked supporters to send mother’s day wishes to sybrina fulton, travyon’s mother. another said: february , , will mark the one-year anniversary of the death of trayvon martin. we will join his mother and father in new york city for a candlelight vigil in his honor. please join us. please bring a candle, as we will have a special moment at : pm. please spread the word about this event by sharing this flyer and link with your friends: please cite this article in press as: hon, l. social media framing within the million hoodies movement for justice. public relations review ( ), http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.pubrev. . . http://goo.gl/ikcmc our work is not done! justice for trayvon! (february , ) some of the most obvious examples of calls for participation had to do with the verdict. on the day zimmerman’s acquittal was announced, million hoodies posted, “join million hoodies in an open national call tomorrow at am eastern and according to its website, “presente is the largest national latino online organization advancing social justice with technology, media, and culture” (www.presente.org). dx.doi.org/ . /j.pubrev. . . http://goo.gl/ikcmc http://www.presente.org g model p a t c m s s c i t j p a a p c h s d y e a t w p “ b c d s a t article in pressubrel- ; no. of pages l. hon / public relations review xxx ( ) xxx–xxx m pacific to discuss the # zimmerman verdict and response” (july , ). a day later, million hoodies said, “time to ake the gloves off. millionhoodies is now accepting donations” (july , ). on the same day, million hoodies posted alls for attendance at various protests, rallies, and vigils including events in new york city, portland, or, grand rapids, i, washington, d.c., and boston, ma. indicating the international reach of trayvon’s supporters, one post said, “germany tands for trayvon! tonight: berlin at brandenburg gate in front of us embassy, pm ( uhr). please show these folks ome love for standing with us” (july , ). million hoodies also encouraged participation by targeting national law enforcement officials. for example, early in the ampaign (may , ), the organization asked supporters to sign a petition urging then u.s. attorney general eric holder to nvestigate the death of kenneth chamberlin, an african-american man shot by police in his own home (powell, ). after he zimmerman verdict, million hoodies also posted a link to a washington post story indicating that the u.s. department of ustice sought public feedback on the zimmerman case through emails to the department. million hoodies’ accompanying ost told supporters, “you know what to do” (july , ). . . frame alignment—bridging frame bridging can be seen in the social media conversation that linked issues surrounding trayvon’s case to african mericans facing injustice and racism. one of the most obvious examples was comparing trayvon’s circumstances to other frican americans killed by gun violence, often at the hands of whites and/or the police. for example, one post said: “while reparing for the million hoodies march for trayvon martin i received this heartbreaking call from the mother of johnny ash vanderwiele, another victim of gun violence in florida. i promised to share her son’s story” (march , ). million oodies also weighed in on the case of jasmine thar, a -year-old african-american girl who was shot and killed february , , outside of a home she was visiting in chadbourn, nc (harden, ). a year after the shooting, million hoodies hared a link to a news report with the headline, “james blackwell shoots, kills jasmine thar; still no charges filed” (april , ) and posted, “tomorrow we wear our hoodies for all trayvons” (april , ). on november , , jordan avis, a -year-old african-american male, was fatally shot in jacksonville, fl. a week later, million hoodies posted, “make our voices (and radios) heard today at pm in honor of jordan davis!” (november , ). million hoodies also forged connections to other african-americans facing racial profiling and police brutality. for xample, an april , , post said: our inbox is full of messages from all of you. thank you for your continued love, support, and activism. this came from a supporter in sacramento, ca. a young man was asked to leave the mall for wearing a hoodie. when his father intervened, this is what happened. the post includes a link to a video taken by a female customer who witnessed security officers’ restraining an african- merican male in a suburban mall. as the video starts, the woman says: “he’s not doing anything. i’m going to record this.” he viewer then can see the man being held on the floor while pleading with the officers: “what did i do? i have a broken rist. please.” other posts connected million hoodies to the bigger issue of institutional racism in law enforcement. for example, one ost (july , ) included a photo of a promotional poster for the upcoming film about police stop-and-frisk practices, fruitvale station.” in this post, million hoodies told supporters: “commit. since , over million young people have een stopped-and-frisked in nyc. in , % of those stopped-and-frisked were black or latino, and nine out of ten were ompletely innocent, according to nypd’s own reports.” frame bridging also was seen in references to other social justice movements. next to a photo of a group of dream efenders wearing hoodies and blocking the doors to the sanford police department, million hoodies posted, “occupy wall treet” (april , ). another post said: on tuesday may st, , citizens from all over the world will participate in a general strike and take to the streets in support of workers everywhere. we join the call to demand social and economic justice for all the world’s people and stand in solidarity with the direct actions meant to target a racially biased global economic system that contributes to human suffering and countless deaths. (april , ) another example was when maree applied for a “do something” funding award and asked supporters to vote for him. s maree said, “arab spring. occupy wall street. millionhoodies. whose streets!!!???. text dan to , (july , ). . . frame alignment—amplification please cite this article in press as: hon, l. social media framing within the million hoodies movement for justice. public relations review ( ), http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.pubrev. . . many examples were found of how million hoodies’ facebook communication amplified its framing of the trayvon case hrough clarification and invigoration. some posts gave encouraging updates: these awards honor young change-makers in the united states (www.dosomething.org), and maree was selected for a $ , award (williams, ). dx.doi.org/ . /j.pubrev. . . http://www.dosomething.org g model article in presspubrel- ; no. of pages l. hon / public relations review xxx ( ) xxx–xxx we may not have to wait on a grand jury decision to arrest george zimmerman! (march , ) zimmerman is getting charged!!! (april , ) zimmerman confronted martin, court affidavit released! (april , ) motion for acquittal is denied. zimmerman will face the jury. (july , ) implicit in many of the posts was how million hoodies tried to link supporters’ individual identities to the group’s collective identity and shared purpose. for example, a march , , post said: “as you take to the streets and the internet today for #trayvon, remember how powerful your voices are. the whole world knows about trayvon now, and we will get justice for him (march , ). another said: “wow. millionhoodies crashed because of all the love and support. that’s a good thing” (march , ). when a change.org petition demanding zimmerman’s arrest was delivered to sanford authorities with over two million signatures, the group posted, “hoodies, you should all be proud of this.” still another post encouraged supporters to contribute their own content to million hoodies: hello, friends. we are working on a video/media project celebrating all of the wonderful people who have come out to march for #trayvon. if you have attended a march, please send us the best pictures and video you have from the event. we want everyone to see the power of a million hoodies in action. (march , ) other examples of attempts by million hoodies to create and nurture collective identity were discovered. the day after the announcement of zimmerman’s arrest, million hoodies told supporters: “sleep well my friends. although we are just starting our march, we achieved something wonderful today. we should all feel proud” (april , ). on the six-month anniversary of trayvon’s shooting, million hoodies said, “let’s rededicate ourselves to the cause” (august , ). after the zimmerman verdict was announced, million hoodies issued a terse response: “not guilty on all counts” (july , ). the group then tried to clarify its position and invigorate supporters by taking a combative stance. for example, one post said: “the majority of the [media] coverage has been appalling and downright inexcusable. the worst part is that it’s not being done intentionally (for the most part), it’s just plain ignorance” (july , ). another said: “millionhoodies has just received an invitation to appear on the geraldo rivera show this saturday at pm. make sure you tune in and show your support! we’re ready for him! time to set the record straight, geraldo! (july , ). one more said: “hey fox news we’re ready for you! millionhoodies isn’t your daddy’s movement. you better buckle up for @danielmaree this saturday at pm! (july , ). on july , , the group posted a photo from u.s. president obama’s post-verdict speech with the caption, “trayvon martin could’ve been me years ago.” the photo is accompanied by a post that expressed the group’s frustration that obama had waited so long to make a public statement: “it’s about damn time.” other posts expressed disbelief and sadness about the verdict. one included a photo of the lincoln memorial sent by an animator for the television cartoon show, “brooklynians.” the photo showed lincoln wearing a hoodie, pulled down slightly below his eyes. the caption read: i was in the middle of animating when i heard the news of the zimmerman/trayvon martin verdict, and i couldn’t go on with what i was drawing. and, i didn’t have any words either. so i made this. rip trayvon. (july , ) despite disappointment over the verdict, million hoodies rallied and joined other groups in organizing post-verdict protest events. most notable was the july , , national day of action in cities throughout the united states. commenting on the protest in new york city, million hoodies posted, “today was awesome. [recording artists] jay z and beyonce came out to support the cause! next stop, washington dc on aug. th!” (july , ). . . frame alignment—extension examples of frame extension were not as common as other instances of frame alignment, perhaps because of the early time period within the campaign examined here. however, some posts did demonstrate how million hoodies tried to increase its base of supporters. for example, two days before zimmerman is charged, million hoodies announced, “national hoodie day and international day of internet action for justice! spread the word!” (april , ). another post said: “help us build a million #millionhoodies by empowering the next generation of young creatives at the marcus graham project. . . .new recruits: @missvhob @itsmemarcusb @robthehandsome @juliangilliam @jswayp follow them @thinkfruition.” (june , ) please cite this article in press as: hon, l. social media framing within the million hoodies movement for justice. public relations review ( ), http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.pubrev. . . three days after the verdict, million hoodies made its strongest plea yet for new recruits: calling all artists, designers, bloggers, musicians, poets, teachers, union members, dancers, pro- moters, strategists, data scientists, mathematicians, directors, photographers, producers (stage & marcus graham is a male african-american advertising executive who founded the non-profit marcus graham project to recruit and train men of color for the advertising and marketing industries (www.marcusgrhamproject.org). dx.doi.org/ . /j.pubrev. . . http://www.marcusgrhamproject.org g model p a a w p u s w s t t s p l h p a g s o l a t i l p h ( ( i article in pressubrel- ; no. of pages l. hon / public relations review xxx ( ) xxx–xxx screen), activists, citizens!!! if you are ready to take it to the next level with @millionhoodies join us tonight on a national organizers’ conference call. (july , ) million hoodies also affirmed how the organization was extending its reach to international supporters. for example, an pril , , post was a link to a story from democracynow.org, indicating the united nations commissioner had called for probe into trayvon’s death. million hoodies also posted a photo of trayvon’s parents, their lawyer, and travyon’s brother ith a link to an accompanying news story from independent.co.uk: “trayvon martin’s parents call for an end to racial rofiling in britain” (may , ). the next day, million hoodies’ post read: “profiling is a global problem and it is time for s to start working together across borders. love to all of those in the uk who came out to talk about these issues” (may , ). million hoodies’ posts indicated that maree capitalized on the power and convenience of digital media to reach new upporters. for example, less than a week after the verdict, million hoodies announced a google + hangout on air during hich maree and other social media professionals discussed how social media are effectively being used to rally global upport for “ #justicefortrayvon and change national stand your ground laws” (july , ). . . frame alignment—transformation again, given that the time period for this study extends only one week after the zimmerman verdict, indications of frame ransformation were not as discernable as some of the other processes of frame alignment. still, million hoodies’ posts during his week indicated that the group realized it needed to move beyond trayvon’s case and focus on the systemic deleterious ocial conditions disproportionately affecting african-american communities. two posts sought to re-energize million hoodies’ base two days after the verdict: “justice doesn’t stop with george zimmerman” (july , ) and “who is ready to step up? tomorrow night. national call for million hoodies organizers. join us if you are ready to take it to the next level” (july , ). a day later, million hoodies shared a poster from moms demand action. the poster featured sybrina fulton, holding a hoto of a younger trayvon. the poster read: “we are not going to let this verdict define trayvon. we will define our son’s egacy. we have a long way to go to make sure this happens to nobody else’s child” (july , ). next to the poster, million oodies told supporters to ask their friends and families to join million hoodies in the fight to reduce gun violence. other evidence of transformative framing could be seen as million hoodies forged alliances with other protestors. one ost encouraged followers to sign a naacp petition through moveon.org that requested the u.s. department of justice open civil rights case against zimmerman (july , ). another million hoodies’ post shared a link to a news story from lobalgrind.com about recording artist stevie wonder’s vow not to perform in any state with a stand your ground law and aid: “stand with stevie wonder!!! boycott all shoot first states!” (july , ). some of the last posts in the time period for this study illustrated how million hoodies explicitly began to transform its riginal specific frames to other broader frames. for example, on july , , million hoodies sent birthday wishes to the ate nelson mandela with this message: “your continued presence gives us hope during this grave hour of need in america nd indeed around the world. thank you for your strength. we know you are beside us in this other ‘long walk to freedom.”’ perhaps the best example of frame transformation was this july , , post: people love to talk about black on black crime as if it’s trayvon martin vs. black on black crime. as if we have to pick between the two. ok. let’s talk about it. let’s talk about drugs and guns in our inner cities. let’s talk about how they got there. let’s talk about ronald reagan. let’s talk about iran contra. let’s talk about poverty. let’s talk about the victimization of black communities. these black talking heads should be ashamed of themselves for not making that point. let’s be honest about the crises that exist in our communities. let’s not just use them as excuses for not finding justice for trayvon. #getserious # millionhoodies. . discussion all of snow and benford’s ( ) core framing processes could be identified in million hoodies’ facebook posts during he time period examined. the organization mobilized publics using a diagnostic frame of justice and connected people’s ndividual value systems about fairness to the larger issues of social injustice inherent in trayvon martin’s shooting and aw enforcement’s initial failure to arrest zimmerman. million hoodies diagnosed the problem as racism and suggested the rognostic frames of solidarity among people and increased gun control as remedies. through motivational framing, million oodies called supporters to action with a focus on participation in its many protest initiatives—both online and offline. please cite this article in press as: hon, l. social media framing within the million hoodies movement for justice. public relations review ( ), http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.pubrev. . . million hoodies’ facebook communication also displayed all of the frame alignment processes suggested by snow et al.’s ) concept of frame alignment. frame bridging linked trayvon’s circumstances to other examples of african americans particularly men) who have faced injustice and racism such as racial profiling and police brutality because of individual according to its website, moms demand action “was created to demand action from legislators, state and federal; companies; and educational nstitutions to establish common-sense gun reforms” (www.momsdemandaction.org). dx.doi.org/ . /j.pubrev. . . http://www.momsdemandaction.org g model article in presspubrel- ; no. of pages l. hon / public relations review xxx ( ) xxx–xxx and systemic racial biases within the u.s. law enforcement system. million hoodies used frame amplification extensively to provide information about protest events and major breaking news surrounding the trayvon campaign. the group also used frame amplification to encourage and invigorate supporters throughout the turbulent chronology of the trayvon- zimmerman story. examples of frame extension were not as common, perhaps because of the early time period within the campaign examined here. future research should investigate how digital activists may use frame extension to increase their base of supporters over a longer time period. similarly, some examples of frame transformation were evident but mostly tentative. a review of million hoodies’ more recent posts suggests police militarization and brutality as frames. these themes are linked in particular to police crackdowns on protesters after the fatal shooting of michael brown, an unarmed african-american man, by a white police officer, darren wilson, in ferguson, mo, august , . events in ferguson were followed by highly publicized deaths at the hands of police officers of other unarmed african-american men. additional scholarship also should examine the relationship between frame transformation and campaign effectiveness, especially in terms of how transformation might help a short-term campaign create the momentum, or as tilly ( ) said, the wunc (worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment), needed for a long-term social movement that produces meaningful structural change. this research adds to the nascent literature on digital media, public relations, and framing and suggests that commu- nication on social media by grassroots activists may display more examples of effective framing than muralidharan et al. ( ) found for organizations’ and media’s use of social media. this study also raises the question of whether social media, perhaps because of their ease of use, fluidity, and access, may provide more compelling examples of strategic framing than researchers have found when examining other digital media such as websites (zoch, collins, & sisco, ; zoch, collins, sisco, & supa, ). like all research, this study has limitations. although the researcher relied on primary documents (social media texts and supporting content) created or shared by million hoodies, she made inferences about the group’s framing. interviews with million hoodies’ staff members, such as maree, might have provided triangulation of the researcher’s interpretation of the texts with content creators’ intent. this research also was limited to one grassroots activist network, so caution should be taken when applying these findings to other activist groups. similarly, only one social networking site—facebook—was profiled here. although the researcher examined twitter and instagram and noticed similar frames and framing processes, a formal analysis of these sites might have produced different results. this especially might be the case because the percentage of african americans using twitter and instagram is higher ( and %) than percentages for whites ( and %) or latinos ( and %) (krogstad, ). instagram also appeals to a younger demographic (krogstad, ), the target public for much of million hoodies’ digital activism (williams, ). digital activism and social media framing remain a promising research area for public relations scholarship. digital media have given rise to new forms of grassroots public relations, including that performed by social action networks. million hoodies is just one example of how this new brand of communicators is seizing the power of strategic message framing for engaging and motivating supporters, recruiting new followers, attempting to legitimize messages among a broader constituency, and transforming frames as circumstances call for other emphases. references altman, a., ( , august ). where black lives matter goes from here. time, ( ), p. . banks, s. 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( ). on intimacy, geopolitics, and discipline: in conversation with v. spike peterson. international feminist journal of politics, ( ), - . https://doi.org/ . / . . published in: international feminist journal of politics citing this paper please note that where the full-text provided on manchester research explorer is the author accepted manuscript or proof version this may differ from the final published version. if citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version. general rights copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the research explorer are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. takedown policy if you believe that this document breaches copyright please refer to the university of manchester’s takedown procedures [http://man.ac.uk/ y bo] or contact uml.scholarlycommunications@manchester.ac.uk providing relevant details, so we can investigate your claim. download date: . apr. https://doi.org/ . / . . https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/on-intimacy-geopolitics-and-discipline-in-conversation-with-v-spike-peterson( e c -d db- cb - b-cffe b dbaee).html /portal/e.v.barabantseva.html /portal/aoileann.nimhurchu.html https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/on-intimacy-geopolitics-and-discipline-in-conversation-with-v-spike-peterson( e c -d db- cb - b-cffe b dbaee).html https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/on-intimacy-geopolitics-and-discipline-in-conversation-with-v-spike-peterson( e c -d db- cb - b-cffe b dbaee).html https://doi.org/ . / . . 	 	 on intimacy, geopolitics and discipline elena barabantseva and aoileann ní mhurchú in conversation with v. spike peterson v. spike peterson, university of arizona, usa elena barabantseva, university of manchester, uk aoileann ní mhurchú, university of manchester, uk in this conversation we consider the personal intellectual journey of one academic (v. spike peterson) in an attempt to consider “the academic” as produced within a web of intimate global relations. our basis for discussion is a public conversation with spike at the university of manchester (uk) in october that sought, in the spirit of the concept of “the intimate” that inspires this piece, to encourage more personal and informal engagements than the typical lecture format. in her recent publications spike foregrounds the concept of “the intimate” as a terrain of inquiry that productively transgresses conventional dichotomies and disciplinary boundaries by emphasizing co-constitution and processes of attachment (peterson ). put another way, “the intimate” as a lens for analysis in her work enables us to see geopolitical dynamics as a relationship across/among thinking, feeling self(s) and a wide array of practices of governance and regulation through the institutions and political economies of marriage, social reproduction, householding practices and accumulation processes (peterson ; a; b; c). it prompts a rethinking of “issues” in ir (such as globalization, nationalism, security, political economy) as processes of subjectification, implicating us all in the web of global/local relationalities, rather than objects of inquiry that we simply study from a distance. as such, the focus is on “the subject” within a dynamic web of familiar, informal, desiring, affective, personal, sexual and disciplinary relationalities. given the centrality of “the intimate” in spike’s work, we wanted to understand her life through this concept; that is, to consider the sources and forces (the intimate web of relationalities) that have constituted her personal, professional and intellectual life. we asked spike to identify three themes integral to her journey into and through academia and three images of symbolic meaning to this journey. these images guided our conversation, which seeks to provoke reactions beyond simply words and to engage spike’s journey in terms of memories and feelings about interventions in ir, as well as her relationship to research and teaching. we argue in the final 	 	 section that this narration draws attention to a range of emotions that are inseparable from how the processes of “doing ir” are shaped, molded and disciplined. in this manner, we consider the importance of emotions as enabling the web of relationalities within which ir sits. an intervention waking up v. spike peterson (spike): coming of age in the s—that feels like a very long time ago, even to me—meant a lot of “waking up” in my life. this [photo] is a massive march on washington against the vietnam war, which along with the deaths of four protesting students at kent state, and violent resistance against african americans demanding civil rights and access to schools, had very strong politicizing effects and shaped how i came to understand, question and want to change the world i was living in. i had grown up in a conservative household and a very white, middle-class environment, but my emerging political activism led me far from that terrain. aoileann ní mhurchú (aoileann): can you talk a bit more about how your activism influenced what you did in terms of your phd and continue to do now? spike: i entered a doctoral program after a decade of backpacking overseas, so i was pretty critical of the ir scholarship i encountered at the time, which failed to resonate with the world i had experienced while traveling. i found feminist work, post-colonial studies and other critiques of racism that were emerging in the s more relevant and interesting. i tried to make these critical perspectives visible in my own research, which sought to historicize state-formation and inequalities as an intervention in disciplinary ir. 	 	 my dissertation, an archeology of domination: historicizing gender and class in early western state formation ( ), argued that modern european state-making owed more to earlier processes, especially their normalization of social categories and hierarchies, than ir theory recognized. admittedly, there is a great deal of variation in human societies. but the state’s regulation of sex and property through heteropatriarchal marriage arrangements produced and normalized specifically sexed/gendered subjects, property-based membership claims and insider-outsider social categories (peterson a). by the time of state-making in europe, these are simply taken for granted in ir discourse, and their contingent, contested history is simply erased. those of you in the field know it is very resistant to critical and alternative perspectives, and i would say especially in those decades ir was like economics in disdaining whatever could not be “counted” or readily categorized. resistance to acknowledging neo-colonial inequalities, race relations and feminist struggles is still shaping the world politically and impoverishing ir analytically. early on, i attempted to demonstrate that things were more complex than the accepted paradigms of ir would allow. trying to promote feminist and other critical perspectives in ir is obviously a hard sell and i am still working on it. in the early s, however, a variety of “dissident” interventions created some openings and you could imagine small moves in ir. we organized feminist panels and gender conferences, and students also made a significant difference: they asked their professors why gender was not being included in ir coursework (tickner ). so thank you to students for making the professors shift, which is especially evident in the united kingdom, though less so in the united states. in spite of resistance, which continues, feminist interventions expanded in ir, as well as the array of questions asked, literally, from the intimate to the international. aoileann: the concept of intimacy has always been important in your work and analytical intervention(s), so can you say a few things about why it’s useful? and how your life experiences helped you realize the importance of intimacy? spike: it seems to me that my career-long engagement with ir is about trying to persuade the discipline to take the personal seriously, whether we are talking about race, gender, affect or sexuality. intimacy for me is a productive way to engage that insight, and there is a bit more space for that in the past decade due to a proliferation of writing in terms of feminist work but 	 	 also queer theory and post-colonial studies. critiques of imperialism have increased attention on race, gender, sexuality and nationality, all of which involve emotions and intimate connections. i think the most generative aspect of “intimacy” is that it isn’t spatially specific. dichotomies have been relentlessly critiqued but continue in use, especially when invoking spatial connotations — public versus private, or even developed versus underdeveloped. intimacy doesn't fit as readily; it is a subsequent iteration of deconstructing public-private and insisting that what is deemed “private”—whether it is personal, sexual or emotional—is inextricable from, indeed mutually constituted by, contingent “structural” processes and practices. intimacy obviously conjures different things for different people. i think its study is a very expansive project and one can connect with it in various ways—ideally, to make visible what others have not seen or thought about connecting. and yes, i think that it matters in ways we have not explored adequately. ir still needs a lot of shaking up and “intimacy” affords one opening for doing so. enjoying the ride spike: this second image is from travels in zaire [now the democratic republic of the congo] in a vw beetle driven across africa. i spent five years in africa, most of the time hitchhiking and travelling on my own. you’ll just have to imagine what that was like! it certainly was challenging, but backpacking around the world in the s was an incredibly interesting and rewarding experience. i confess that learning to enjoy what was often a very rough ride required 	 	 an attitude adjustment on my part, but i did come to enjoy it, and especially to appreciate what i learned through the challenge of crossing borders and engaging cultural differences. i gained a sense of global realities and inequalities that has clearly shaped my work. i learned a great deal by seeing things for myself, observing how people live, what they deal with and how well they cope in often daunting conditions. given this awareness, i try to make some difference with the work that i do: studying topics that might improve our analyses and inform a progressive politics. given the world i observed and experienced, i became critical of capitalism as a culturally as well as economically corrosive system, and my resentment of it has only deepened with time and its corporate, neoliberal manifestations. i returned to the united states in my mid-thirties and pondered my future. having funded my college education and travels through clerical work, i was sure i didn’t want that as a career. i already had a master’s degree and (mistakenly) thought, “it won’t take very long to get a phd and perhaps teach at a junior college.” i entered the ir doctoral program at american university in washington, dc, attended the first graduate seminar, returned to my communal living situation and announced, “oh shit! they expected me to know something about the study of ir before i got here.” i had never taken a political science or ir course, and it was a curious encounter. i pretty quickly decided that mainstream ir was not all that interesting. while i do consider international relations crucially important to understand politically, the academic discipline of ir doesn't offer as much as i expected or wish that it did. feminist and poststructural critiques drew more of my attention, but they were occurring outside of ir, and within ir i felt pretty isolated. i started the phd program in , continued to work half time, and finally completed my dissertation eight years later. a major obstacle was designing a dissertation that would “pass” as ir scholarship, when i didn't find conventional themes appealing. i was more interested in feminist scholarship, which at that time was questioning the “origins” of gender inequality; where and how it developed and became institutionalized (gailey ; lerner ; silverblatt ). drawing on this research enabled me to craft a dissertation historicizing normalizations of social hierarchy in processes of archaic state formation. aoileann: could you give us some examples of what it was like to be female in academia after you completed your phd in the s? spike: after struggling to identify an “acceptable” dissertation topic, and completing it pretty much in isolation, i was on the job market for what seemed an endless three years. i did have 	 	 interviews, either because my research was so unusual and/or i was a token female on the short list. only conventional ir positions were advertised, and being interviewed by “oh-so-serious” political scientists and orthodox ir scholars was uncomfortable at best, and often quite distressing. i clearly wasn’t—and couldn’t pretend to be—a good fit for “straight ir.” though my topic was intriguing, few were willing to engage the critiques of status quo scholarship it entailed. in general, i rarely felt like i was being taken seriously either as a female or as a critical scholar. i was worn down by feeling relentlessly disregarded and was ready to give up. then the university of arizona advertised a gender and politics position—not because the political science department believed this was valuable but because feminists demanded this when negotiating with ua administration for a women’s studies program. i survived another painful interview process and, because i desired a tenure-track line so much, i was thrilled to be hired. regarding feminist and other critical perspectives in academia, there is the often-noted divide between disciplinary ir in the united states and other english-speaking countries. for a variety of reasons, ir in the united states remains problematically positivist, modernist and masculinist (peterson, forthcoming). this is obviously a significant impediment to feminist, queer, postcolonial and other critical thinking. of course, there have been changes in the field, primarily due to cumulative critiques of orthodox epistemologies and the discipline’s misleadingly labeled “third debate.” by the early s feminist and poststructuralist ir “dissidents” published path- breaking interventions (e.g., tickner ; ashley and walker ; peterson ; sylvester ). but after initial collaborations, a split developed, and regrettably continues, between critical feminists and (non-feminist) post-structuralists. i understand feminists as committed to a transformative critique of ir as theory/practice, one that takes the contingent, complex and even contradictory intersection of social categories as central to analyzing and attempting to ameliorate power asymmetries. so, although there have been significant and exciting developments in the margins of ir inquiry, the mainstream to me looks much the same as it did thirty years ago. in particular, it remains just as uninteresting—yet increasingly problematic—in its failure to deliver more relevant, informed, critical and actionable scholarship in a world that desperately needs more adequate understanding of how power operates. the point is not to produce “the answers” but to critically question how multiple inequalities—their harms, resentments and destructive practices—are re/produced and might be transformed. 	 	 paying back spike: this is my office at home. i do love being an academic—it’s certainly the best job in the world for me. i had had a fabulous time in my travels and adventures—i had learned a lot about myself and a lot about the world—but it was time to “pay back.” as an activist, to end up in the ivory tower, one of the most privileged sites in the world, is a little embarrassing, and i have tried to justify this privilege by what i call “kicking ass” in the classroom and pointing things in more critical directions. i still consider myself a hardened activist, and i still participate in demonstrations and other forms of resistance, but the classroom is where i feel i have the most responsibility and greatest opportunity to try to make political change—and i do try. while a critique of capitalist-racist patriarchy informs all of my work, i am more often identified as a feminist theorist. i endorse this characterization, primarily because i believe at this particular historical juncture—not all the time, because it will change—feminism as i understand it has a particularly important edge. feminists have a bit more to say than many other critical perspectives, because they actually claim a commitment to changing the world and they take intersectionality seriously. being marginalized as they have been, feminists had to be more creative, explore more questions, make more connections, be more reflective and, especially, cross more boundaries in order to do their work. aoileann: your work stands across many fields: gender studies, sexuality, psychology, human geography, anthropology, cultural studies and ir. there are now various journals (what some 	 	 people call camps) where people can speak from different perspectives about politics. is there a danger that they are now speaking within their own areas and own particular work rather than doing the type of cross-disciplinary work you have been championing? spike: all of the above. as i reflect on these things—and i do a lot of reflecting—there are just different trade-offs for any particular approach, and individually, one has little control over determining whether we have camps, a “discipline” or cross-disciplinary work. everyone has their own preferences about what we want to look at, and what we want to contribute. one tires of battling the walls of ir for acceptance. you want to get on with your own work instead of continually arguing with or appealing to a resistant mainstream. i think “camps” become separated and entrenched in part because you cannot get on with more innovative inquiry or pursuing greater specificity if you keep having to justify your research questions or concerns. at the same time, so much is out of one’s control, and with so many different actors and interests in play, the effects of individual choices are rarely predictable. i simply can’t envision any single formula for assessing the trade-offs between the specializations of micro-oriented camps ‘versus’ more macro-oriented disciplinary or cross-disciplinary work. i personally do think working across disciplines is essential to knowledge production that more adequately interprets social relations. yet while cross-disciplinary work is relevant, it is both difficult and less likely to be rewarded. institutional practices clearly shape incentives and trade- offs. in particular, most journals—and especially those prioritized in academic assessment processes—feature a mono-disciplinary focus. cross-disciplinary research has fewer publishing sites and less predictable reviewer practices, and it complicates questions as often as it generates answers. institutionalized impediments are hard to get around or change quickly. mono- disciplinary journals are significant for promoting silos of information, which can afford crucial knowledge specializations. at the same time, we also need to have more macro- or cross- disciplinary and holistic analyses to better understand the larger picture. at present, i think we are ill prepared to address the larger questions and crises confronting us. what i do wish is that we were better able to alter the politics of the mainstream because orthodox ir matters in the world. that does not seem to be happening, so different camps and individuals seem to be going their own way; perhaps because there are few obvious alternatives, especially if one is engaged in critique. again: there are no simple answers, only trade-offs that require conscious and continuing assessment. 	 	 audience member: do you think scholars are doing enough with regards to raising awareness and social consciousness in the area of privilege? spike: i think the only answer i can give to that is the one i give to a lot of questions: it depends. certainly there are some who are doing their absolute damnedest, and i imagine there is a great deal of literature that isn’t being promoted or read because of power structures that minimize the circulation of critical work. perhaps a better question is, if they are not doing enough, then why aren’t they? is it because they don’t wish to, don’t think about it, or fear being rejected or even fired for it? i expect some of these reasons to be operating, but i am not knowledgeable enough to speak about the effects in general. i certainly don't know what it means to hold individual authors “adequately responsible” for the effects of their work! yet here i am, holding hegemonic ir responsible for not delivering adequate analyses. because ir is the discipline uniquely focused on the study of world politics, i do believe it has a greater responsibility than other disciplines or fields of inquiry to ponder, investigate and help us understand how power operates nationally, transnationally and globally. and i don't think we have done a very good job. there are no quick fixes, and everyone is facing institutional and personal pressures that shape our life opportunities and careers. it’s not clear to me whether or how individuals are doing enough. aoileann: you have said elsewhere that you enjoy teaching in particular, that the questions and challenges that come from students “keep you going and force you to keep growing” (peterson , xvii). in terms of paying back, could you say a little bit more about what you see teaching is adding to your career and also what you see as the possibility or potential of teaching? spike: it's a bit complicated. i primarily teach undergraduates, and i love it, because they are very open and i try very hard to make classes interesting. my main objective in teaching is to try to create awareness of how power operates not just directly—the familiar understanding of intentional “power over”—but indirectly, through the less obvious power of normalized beliefs and institutionalized practices. i find that my students at the university of arizona (where i’ve taught since ) have rarely thought about how we are all, and all the time, implicated in operations of power. over the years i have adapted research on the inequalities of privilege to illuminate how all of us participate in reproducing systems, institutions if you will, that are 	 	 differentially valuing what people do and how much their lives matter. for example, all of us have privilege in this room, simply by being here in an institute of higher education. in our racist world, i gain unearned advantages by being “white” that are denied to those who are not perceived as “white.” those with privilege rarely think about it, typically don't want to think about it, and the world i live in doesn't encourage critical thinking, especially about institutionalized inequalities. most of the time most of us follow paths of least resistance that reproduce status quo practices, including those that privilege some at the expense of others. i use many examples to try to defuse the defensiveness that critiques of inequality typically generate. i remind students that none of us is completely responsible for the systems or ways of being we inherit, but we are all responsible for what we do with privileges we inherit. in the classroom i am pretty informal and, i hope, accessible. i let students know how much i care about teaching, about promoting critical thinking skills, and about working toward a more just and less destructive world. in my experience, students respond favorably to my being real and opening myself up as a human being who still struggles to better understand what is going on and what is to be done. they respond positively when i ask how they feel about a topic or event, how it affects them, and what kind of world they want to be living in. it is important to me that they feel heard and not just lectured to. audience member: in terms of making a difference, spike, you said at one point that what you would really like to do is alter the politics of the mainstream, and that you hadn’t seen academics doing that very well. can you provide any examples of academia or wider society positively influencing politics? or identify ways in which academics do and/or can facilitate progressive change? spike: well, that is the question, isn’t it! how does large-scale social change occur? it is a perennial question for those seeking to change the world. but the first question is whether people want to change the world, and this depends on so many factors and competing interests. i do believe that resistance matters, unionization matters, securing rights and the vote matters, and elections matter for making political change. i do believe in organizing, but it has to be a process that recognizes complex intersections—of emotional investments, cultural beliefs, normalized practices and institutionalized structures. i do think it’s possible to provisionally identify those connections and produce more nuanced analyses to better inform activism. it is important to 	 	 emphasize the non-innocent and “provisional” status of interpretations, not to presume we have the answers, which is a seductive but problematic claim. and i definitely believe we have political effects through our teaching. what frightens me most at the moment is the reluctance to criticize capitalism, which concentrates power among the very few and through media shapes how most of us (think we) “know” the world. with my students i can rave on about queer theory and gender politics, and they are willing to engage, but they resist any critique of capitalism. i get it: the united states is built on capitalism and people are sold on it. alternatives lack credibility and are readily dismissed as communist plots—but we need alternative visions! we have to acknowledge that we don't know exactly where we are going, but that shouldn't stop us from pursuing different paths. we do know some things about making change. if you want to get rid of litter, you have an anti-litter campaign. if you want to support diversity, you have a campaign to inform people. these work in some ways but rarely address deeper issues. i think perhaps it’s more difficult these days to engage in a kind of collective social movement than it used to be. social media and the internet create more possibilities for campaigning. in the united states, social media made a difference in the fight for minimum wages and for black lives matter. so engaging these issues might be easier by using this media because people can actually see things happening rather than being mystified, as might have been the case in the past. but i am not very smart about social media, so you should ask someone younger! audience member: i am an anthropologist, and one of my jobs is going out and talking to people and finding out how they are feeling. i’ve noticed that no matter how accessible we make our work, a lot of people still just don't care about changing things. instead, many of us are mostly focused on getting by, figuring out how to survive day to day and discovering practical solutions to problems in our everyday lives—and not really wanting to make the structural changes that we may think are necessary. i think from an anthropology point of view you have to incorporate that into the challenge as well. spike: well said! it is about how we personally are situated, how we engage the world, how we think about having an effect on the world, and what effect we might want or not. may i just return to the observation that we exist as individuals but always within a context of norms, expectations, rules, economic trade-offs and so on. there is no single or simple formula for 	 	 discerning what is “best,” and as you pointed out, each of us confronts a range of choices and constraints. our responses depend in part on who we are as individual subjects. some people are fighters and can really take the heat from being in the public eye, and can do certain things because of that energy. other people can write effectively, other people can organize, other people can raise really wonderful children: all are politically important projects. for me it’s trying to identify how power operates through systems (if you will), and how these are hurting all of us differently but significantly. overall, i think we all need to attempt to take responsibility for whatever choices we make. how do they affect the worlds we live in? you can never answer that specifically, but to not ask it—as if you are independent of larger effects—i think that is problematic. concluding reflection/s this multi-voice narration reflects the intertwining between broader political processes and the intimate, we suggest, by holding a mirror up to the myriad of emotions that go into studying, researching, seeking to understand and teach (or more broadly communicate) international relations. it points precisely to the intertwining of the political processes that make ir possible as a disciplinary field (to be talked about, engaged with and worked upon) with emotions (such as frustration, anger, disappointment, hope, affection) invested in and generated in the process of academic practices. in doing so, we attempt here, in keeping with a growing tradition (e.g., sylvester ), to situate ir in/around thinking, feeling, desiring bodies. emotions of course are increasingly the mainstay of discussions in the social sciences (in particular fear and risk); however this particular narration is different as it challenges the normalized idea that “ordinary people’s emotions are affected, sponge-like and passive, at the bottom” (pain , ). instead, emotions in this piece are understood as actively producing ir. what is foregrounded in this piece is the emotions involved in decisions about the issues that academics and students study, and the positions they take in the discipline of ir regarding what the field of ir should look like. spike, most notably, talks about emotional investments in her long term struggle to contest limited understandings of what ir can look like, to create more room for critical scholarship in the discipline, and to translate research for a general audience. these emotions are also visibly experienced and expressed in the questions and comments made by the audience. in this piece therefore, frustration, solidarity, disappointment, joy and fear do not appear as irrational distractions that hinder analysis and reflection. rather, they are powerful forces that motivate and inspire engagement and enable the production of deeper, more complex 	 	 and nuanced analysis about ir. this is precisely because emotion is presented as integral to how the contours of ir are sketched out—literally the way the study of ir is “known.” take for example spike’s teaching: she asks students to reflect on their feelings with regard to ir issues studied by them in the classroom. this arguably allows them to think about the feelings of people involved in ir events that they study (e.g., linked to struggles for democracy, human rights, sovereignty) and to recognize the importance of feelings for how ir is discussed and articulated, as well as enacted and disciplined by academics, policy makers and governments. by starting with the example of protests against the vietnam war, emotions are shown to be always already part of and bound up within the field of (events and practices we call) international relations. indeed, one of the questions from the audience points directly to the centrality of the concept of survival as an inescapable part of our world today. thus, by beginning to unpack the processes and forces that connect us in a web of intimate relationalities in this piece, we can see how we can develop our understanding of ir in a richer manner. it allows us to take seriously the emotions that go into living in and shaping this global society, day in, day out, as an act of survival. v. spike peterson university of arizona social sciences, tucson, az , usa spikep@email.arizona.edu elena barabantseva university of manchester, arthur lewis building, oxford road, m pl, uk e.v.barabantseva@manchester.ac.uk aoileann ní mhurchú university of manchester, arthur lewis building, oxford road, m pl, uk aoileann.nimhurchu@manchester.ac.uk notes on contributors v. spike peterson is currently researching how state-sanctioned marriage historically produced and continues to regulate sexual/familial practices, racialized hierarchies, citizenship—and hence migration—options, and starkly unequal resource distributions within and between states/nations. 	 	 elena barabantseva researches nationalism, mobility and borders in contemporary china. she is currently participating in the china-europe immigration and the transformation of chinese society research project (esrc ref es/l / ) focusing on marriage migration to china. aoileann ní mhurchú is co-editor of critical imaginations in ir ( ). her current research focuses on connections between vulnerability, resistance and creativity in international politics, focusing on artistic practice in vernacular language and music. bibliography ashley, r.k., and r.b.j. walker, eds. . “speaking the language of exile: dissident thought in international studies.” special issue, international studies quarterly ( ): pages. gailey, c.w. . “the state of the state in anthropology.” dialectical anthropology ( ): - . lerner, g. . the creation of patriarchy: the origins of women’s subordination. oxford: oxford university press. peterson, v.s. . a critical rewriting of global political economy: integrating reproductive, productive, and virtual economies. london: routledge. peterson, v.s. . “a long view of globalization and crisis.” globalizations ( ): – . peterson, v.s. a. “sex matters: a queer history of hierarchies.” international feminist journal of politics ( ): – . peterson, v.s. b. “‘antagonizing’ the marriage debate.” hysteria # : ‘antagonism’, october, – . peterson, v.s. c. “family matters: how queering the intimate queers the international.” international studies review ( ): – . peterson, v.s. . “towards queering the globally intimate.” political geography, (issue): – . peterson, v.s. forthcoming. “problematic premises: positivism, modernism and masculinism in ipe.” in handbook of international political economy and gender, edited by a. roberts, and j. elias. cheltenham: edwin elgar. silverblatt, i. . moon, sun, and witches: gender ideologies and class in inca and colonial peru. princeton: princeton university press. sylvester, c. . feminist theory and international relations in a postmodern era. cambridge: cambridge university press. sylvester, c. . “the forum: emotion and the feminist ir researcher.” international studies review ( ): – . tickner, a.j. . “hans morgenthau’s principles of political realism: a feminist reformulation.” millennium ( ): – . tickner, a.j. . a feminist voyage through international relations. oxford: oxford university press. 																																																								 	v. spike peterson was a leverhulme visiting professor at the university of manchester from july to december ; we gratefully acknowledge the leverhulme trust (vp - - ) for its financial support that enabled us to host the visit and organize a series of events with spike. this narration also avoids reducing emotions and their complexity to one overarching emotion such as fear (see pain on the problems with this). black lives matter and the call for death penalty abolition a articles black lives matter and the call for death penalty abolition* michael cholbi and alex madva the black lives matter movement has called for the abolition of capital punish- ment in response to what it calls “the war against black people” and “black com- munities.” this article defends the two central contentions in the movement’s ab- olitionist stance: first, that us capital punishment practices represent a wrong to black communities rather than simply a wrong to particular black capital defen- dants or particular black victims of murder, and second, that the most defensible remedy for this wrong is the abolition of the death penalty. the black lives matter movement has called for a number of social, polit- ical, and legal reforms in response to what it calls “the war against black people” and “black communities” in the united states. among these is the abolition of capital punishment on the grounds that the death penalty in the united states is a “racist practice” that “devalues black lives.” the movement’s abolitionist stance invites at least two crucial phil- osophical questions. as the movement’s platform notes (and as we docu- ment later in sec. i), a wide body of studies indicate that (a) black capital defendants are more likely to be subject to execution than defendants of other races and (b) those who murder blacks are less likely to be subject to execution than are those who murder members of other races. but those philosophers and jurists who, unlike the movement, do not find capital * we gratefully acknowledge the comments and feedback on earlier drafts provided by david adams, cory aragon, carl cranor, katie gasdaglis, stephen munzer, peter ross, the editors and anonymous reviewers at ethics, and cal poly pomona students present at a de- partmental “brown bag” presentation in february . . movement for black lives platform, “end the war on black people,” https://policy .m bl.org/end-war-on-black-people/. ethics (april ): – © by the university of chicago. all rights reserved. - / / - $ . this content downloaded from . . . on march , : : pm ll use subject to university of chicago press terms and conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). ethics april a punishment “morally repugnant” are likely to doubt that such statistical findings indicate that capital punishment is a racist practice that wrongs black communities, even when viewed in the historical context of trou- bling “policing” practices that devalue black lives (e.g., lynchings). some death penalty retentionists may concede that this statistical evidence shows that american capital punishment has mistreated particular black capital defendants or murder victims unjustly and may therefore welcome re- forms aimed at reducing the likelihood of such mistreatment. but they may well be unmoved (as us courts largely have been) by the claim that capital punishment has been a front in a war against black people in gen- eral. answering these defenders thus seems to necessitate an argument that fleshes out more explicitly the movement’s claims that these capital punishment practices are a wrong to black communities, an argument in- voking an ethical idiom that defenders of capital punishment cannot so readily dismiss. supposing, however, that such an argument can be provided, a sec- ond question arises: if us capital punishment practices represent an injus- tice to black communities, why is abolition the most defensible response to this injustice? there are, after all, other possible remedies short of out- right abolition. here we defend the movement’s call for abolition by engaging these two questions. with respect to the first, we draw on arguments previously developed by one of us (cholbi). cholbi’s arguments are distinctive within the debate on race and capital punishment in the united states. while they do not deny that black americans suffer retributive injustices in the us capital punishment regime (i.e., particular black defendants and mur- der victims are treated in comparatively unjust ways by that regime), they further propose that black americans as a class suffer a kind of distributive injustice under that regime. more specifically, black americans do not re- ceive either the equal protection of or equal status under the law. we then propose (in sec. ii) that the discriminatory patterns in cap- ital punishment that generate this injustice are explained, in part, by im- plicit racial biases. the biases in question are both general, relating to per- ceptions of black criminality, and specific, likely to be triggered in contexts where prosecutors, judges, and jurors make “life or death” choices about capital charges, convictions, and sentences. the effect of such biases is to make murder (at least in the united states) a racially coded act, such that its moral gravity is calibrated in part based on the race of those who com- mit it or those who are its victims. that is, notwithstanding the obvious wrongness and illegality of sentencing on the basis of a victim’s or defen- dant’s race, our criminal justice institutions systematically treat certain . ibid. . michael cholbi, “race, capital punishment, and the cost of murder,” philosophical studies ( ): – . this content downloaded from . . . on march , : : pm ll use subject to university of chicago press terms and conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). cholbi and madva black lives and death penalty abolition a murders as more brutal and morally heinous partly because they are com- mitted by blacks or against whites. situations involving judgments about capital punishment, we suggest, tend to activate and amplify racial bias in distinctive ways. preexisting biases regarding blacks’ proclivity toward and insusceptibility to violence that may otherwise remain dormant are galva- nized when individuals are afforded the opportunity to render judgments regarding who ought to be executed for their crimes. in other words, the possibility of the death penalty (as opposed to life imprisonment serving as the maximum possible penalty) arouses race-based biases that distort judgments regarding the justifiability of imposing death as a punishment. these biases impact not only capital sentences as such but also intuitive judgments of guilt, appraisals of incriminating evidence, charging deci- sions, assessments of the severity of pain and suffering, and general moral intuitions related to punitiveness and desert. in sum, the capital punish- ment regime elicits biases that in turn generate race-based injustice. the social meaning of murder thus comes to vary systematically with the races of those involved. in section iii, we propose that in light of the role implicit biases play in capital sentencing in the united states, not to address this discrimination amounts to a form of societal or institutional recklessness. the continu- ation of the american capital punishment regime means that american society and its judicial and policing bodies engage in unjustified risk- taking with respect to the legal status of black lives, risk-taking of which they are knowingly aware and so culpable. in our estimation, although the abolition of the death penalty does little to address past injustice of this kind, it nevertheless would be the most justifiable remedy for this recklessness going forward. we show in sections iv and v that abolition is unique among plausible remedies both in eliminating the discrimina- tory effects of this bias-based recklessness and in not being itself unjust. thus, while imperfect, the abolition of the death penalty is the least mor- ally perilous response consistent with the aim of eliminating this unjust recklessness that places the lives of black americans at risk. section vi ad- dresses two objections to our proposal for abolition, while section vii places our argument in the context of recent theoretical accounts of ra- cial injustice. . for more on social meaning, see, e.g., lawrence lessig, “the regulation of social meaning,” university of chicago law review ( ): – . . findlay stark, culpable carelessness: recklessness and negligence in the criminal law (cambridge: cambridge university press, ). . this paper is an exercise in nonideal reflection, in two senses: first, our aim here is not to offer a comprehensive or partial characterization of an ideally just criminal system, but to consider concrete remedies for a pressing social ill, and to focus on remedies that are feasible in the near term, given the current state of us politics; second, we intend for our analysis of the relevant injustice, as well as our corrective prescription, to be grounded in social scientific research. this content downloaded from . . . on march , : : pm ll use subject to university of chicago press terms and conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % f &citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % fcbo &citationid=p_n_ ethics april a i in its furman decision, the us supreme court vacated the death sentences of three black defendants on the grounds that the state statutes under which they were sentenced gave judges and juries insufficient guidance regarding when defendants should be sentenced to death. al- though the defendants’ legal counsel presented evidence indicating that racial bias influenced capital sentencing, the court’s reasoning was not primarily grounded in concerns about racial bias. rather, the court held that the state’s capital punishment regime violated the eighth amend- ment’s ban on “cruel and unusual punishment” because, thanks to a lack of clear sentencing guidelines, “there is no meaningful basis for distin- guishing the few cases in which it [death] is imposed from the many cases in which it is not.” the imposition of the death penalty, it concluded, was “wanton,” “freakish,” and “arbitrary.” in response to furman, states intro- duced a number of reforms to more explicitly regulate capital sentencing, measures which (courts subsequently ruled) rendered state capital pun- ishment statutes constitutionally sound. these reforms included the es- tablishment of more precise sentencing guidelines, requiring that both aggravating and mitigating factors be taken into account; the bifurcation of capital trials into guilt and penalty phases; automatic appellate review of capital cases; and proportionality review, in which a state appellate court can consider whether a given capital sentence aligns with, or is instead dis- proportionate to, other sentences issued in the state’s capital cases. given that the furman ruling de-emphasized the role of racial bias in capital sentencing, it is unclear whether the court expected (or hoped) that the sentencing reforms implemented thereafter would mitigate the effects of racial bias. what is clear, however, is that seemingly discrimina- tory racial patterns in capital sentencing have not abated despite these re- . furman vs. georgia, u.s. ( ). . most centrally in gregg vs. georgia, u.s. ( ), but see also woodson v. north carolina, u.s. ( ); godfrey v. georgia, u.s. ( ); zant v. ste- phens, u.s. ( ); sumner v. shuman, u.s. ( ); maynard v. cartwright, u.s. ( ); clemons v. mississippi, u.s. ( ); lewis v. jeffers, u.s. , ( ); richmond v. lewis, u.s. ( ). . that the court later ruled (in mccleskey vs. kemp, u.s. [ ]) that evi- dence concerning patterns of racial discrimination is irrelevant to the legitimacy of any par- ticular death sentence—that defendants can only advance a valid claim of racial discrimina- tion by citing evidence of discrimination in their own case—indicates that the court came to be more skeptical of the racial bias critique than it had indicated in furman. indeed, the ev- idence for racial bias was, by the time of the mccleskey ruling, arguably more compelling than it had been when furman was rendered. see esp. david c. baldus, charles pulaski, and george woodworth, “comparative review of death sentences: an empirical study of the georgia experience,” journal of criminal law and criminology ( ): – . this content downloaded from . . . on march , : : pm ll use subject to university of chicago press terms and conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % f &citationid=p_n_ cholbi and madva black lives and death penalty abolition a forms. empirical studies conducted since indicate that, with respect to racial discrimination, the post-furman reforms have had modest suc- cess at best. indeed, they suggest that the historical patterns in which black defendants have been statistically more likely to be sentenced to death than defendants of other races or ethnicities and in which nonwhite de- fendants are statistically more likely to be sentenced to die for killing whites than for killing individuals of other races or ethnicities continue to the present day. studies conducted since in arizona, colorado, connecticut, delaware, maryland, new mexico, ohio, texas, and wash- ington have concluded that black defendants are more likely to face a death penalty prosecution or to be sentenced to death than defendants of other races. studies conducted since in alabama, arkansas, cali- fornia, connecticut, delaware, illinois, indiana, louisiana, maryland, new mexico, north carolina, south carolina, tennessee, texas, virginia, and the armed forces have shown an even stronger effect on capital sentencing based on victims’ race, concluding that those who kill whites are more likely to be sentenced to die than those who kill members of other racial and eth- nic groups. these two effects also appear to interact, so that “cases involv- . for arizona, see american bar association death penalty due process review proj- ect, “arizona death penalty assessment report” ( ). for colorado, see meg beardsley et al., “disquieting discretion: race, geography and the colorado death penalty in the first decade of the twenty-first century,” denver university law review ( ): – . for connecticut, see john j. donohue, “an empirical evaluation of the connecticut death penalty system since : are there unlawful racial, gender, and geographic dispari- ties?,” journal of empirical legal studies ( ): – . for delaware, see sheri johnson et al., “the delaware death penalty: an empirical study,” iowa law review ( ): – . for maryland, see raymond paternoster et al., “justice by geography and race: the administration of the death penalty in maryland, – ,” university of maryland law journal of race, religion, gender and class ( ): – . for new mexico, see m. wil- son, “the application of the death penalty in new mexico, july through december : an empirical analysis,” new mexico law review ( ): – . for ohio, see american bar association death penalty due process review project, “ohio death penalty assessment report” ( ). for texas, see scott phillips, “racial disparities in the capital of capital punishment,” houston law review ( ): – . for washington, see kath- erine beckett and heather evans, “the role of race in washington state capital sentenc- ing, – ,”commissionedreport(law,societiesandjusticeprogramanddepartmentof sociology, university of washington; ), http://www.deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents /washracestudy .pdf. . for alabama, see american bar association death penalty due process review project, “alabama death penalty assessment report” ( ). for arkansas, see david c. baldus, julie brain, neil a. weiner, and george woodworth, “evidence of racial discrimi- nation in the use of the death penalty: a story from southwest arkansas ( – ),” ten- nessee law review ( ): – . for california, see glenn l. pierce and michael l. radelet, “impact of legally inappropriate factors on death sentencing for california homicides, – ,” santa clara law review ( ): – . for connecticut, see donohue, “empirical evaluation of the connecticut death penalty system.” for delaware, this content downloaded from . . . on march , : : pm ll use subject to university of chicago press terms and conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % fjels. &citationid=p_n_ ethics april a ing black defendants and white victims are treated more punitively than cases with all other defendant/victim racial combinations.” racial dis- crimination in capital sentencing is therefore not merely a “historical” in- justice. rather, it persists into the present day. the vast majority of the academic literature frames this injustice as an individual legal wrong. in other words, this literature assumes that if there is an injustice here, it is a wrong suffered by those particular individuals who engage with the capital punishment regime either as capital defen- dants or as victims of murder. the debates within this literature thus fo- cus largely on questions of retributive justice. for example, if a person’s punishment is deserved, what moral difference does it make if other per- sons equally deserving of that punishment receive a lesser (or greater) punishment? is a person (a black murder defendant, say) treated unjustly if he ends up being executed for his crimes when others convicted of the . david c. baldus and george woodworth, ”race discrimination in the administra- tion of the death penalty: an overview of the empirical evidence with special emphasis on the post- research,” criminal law bulletin ( ): – . . see, e.g., stephen nathanson, “does it matter if the death penalty is arbitrarily administered?,” philosophy and public affairs ( ): – ; ernest van den haag, “the ultimate punishment: a defense,” harvard law review ( ): – ; christopher meyers, “racial bias, the death penalty, and desert,” philosophical forum ( ): – ; patrick lenta and douglas farland, “desert, justice, and capital punishment,” criminal law and philosophy ( ): – ; and matthew kramer, the ethics of capital punishment (oxford: oxford university press, ), – . see johnson et al., “delaware death penalty.” for illinois, see michael l. radelet and glenn l. pierce, “the role of victim’s race and geography on death sentencing: some recent data from illinois,” in from lynch mobs to the killing state: race and the death penalty in america, ed. c. j. ogletree and a. sarat (new york: new york university press, ), – . for in- diana, see mary ziemba-davis et al., “the application of indiana’s criminal sentencing law: findings of the indiana criminal law study commission i” ( ). for louisiana, see glenn l. pierce and michael l. radelet, “death sentencing in east baton rouge parish, – ,” louisiana law review ( ): – . for maryland, see paternoster et al., “justice by geography and race.” for new mexico, see wilson, “application of the death penalty in new mexico.” for north carolina, see isaac unah, “empirical analysis of race and the process of capital punishment in north carolina,” michigan state law review, , – . for south carolina, see michael j. songer and issac unah, “the effect of race, gender, and location on prosecutorial decision to seek the death penalty in south carolina,” south carolina law review ( ): – . for tennessee, see glenn pierce, michael radelet, and raymond paternoster, “race and death sentencing in tennessee, – ,” in american bar association, evaluating fairness and accuracy in death sentencing systems: the tennessee death penalty assessment report ( ). for texas, see phillips, “racial disparities in the capital of capital punishment.” for virginia, see american bar associa- tion death penalty due process review project, “virginia assessment on the death penalty” ( ). for the armed forces, see david c. baldus et al., “racial discrimination in the admin- istration of the death penalty: the experience of the united states armed forces ( – ),” journal of criminal law and criminology ( ): – . this content downloaded from . . . on march , : : pm ll use subject to university of chicago press terms and conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % f &citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % fs - - - &citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % fs - - - &citationid=p_n_ cholbi and madva black lives and death penalty abolition a same crime would not have been executed (thanks to their race)? and if so, how ought such comparative injustices be redressed? while we do not deny that issues of retributive legal justice are im- portant in this context, we believe that this focus neglects an arguably larger political injustice, one that illuminates the movement’s claim that the american capital punishment regime wrongs black communities as a whole. first, cholbi’s arguments underscore how the capital punishment regime wrongs members of the black community irrespective of their ac- tual engagement with that regime. consider the status of blacks as poten- tial murder victims. because would-be murderers are justified in believ- ing that individuals who murder blacks are likely to face lesser costs (the presumptively less severe punishments of prolonged or lifelong incarcer- ation rather than execution) than they would for murdering individuals of other races, the law thus fails to penalize killings of blacks in a manner consistent with their having the equal protection of the law. the injustice in question is one that all blacks face, not only those who actually are mur- dered (or are victims of murder by dint of being a family member of a black murder victim, etc.). all black americans thus inhabit a normative reality that protects their lives less than white lives. second, cholbi argues that, with respect to their status as potential capital defendants, blacks are jus- tified in believing that the criminal justice system will subject them to a greater “cost” for conviction (execution rather than the presumptively less severe punishments of prolonged or lifelong incarceration, say) because of their race. these expectations, in turn, entail that blacks are not ac- corded “equal status” under the law because they face an increased likeli- hood of suffering a greater cost than others would owing to factors (i.e., race) unrelated to objective desert. the law thus penalizes blacks engag- ing in murder in a manner inconsistent with their having equal status un- der the law. note again that the injustice in question— blacks not being accorded equal status under the law—is one that all blacks face, not only those who actually become capital defendants. cholbi’s arguments thus invite us to see the racial wrongs of amer- ican capital punishment less in terms of retributive wrongs done to par- ticular defendants as a result of their race and more in terms of distrib- . benjamin s. yost, “what’s wrong with differential punishment?,” utilitas ( ): – , provides an excellent overview of these questions and the disputes surrounding them. yost makes the case that race-based disparities in punishment reinforce structural oppression in ways that are distinctively retributively unjust. we are sympathetic with his proposal but do not take retributive considerations to exhaust the racial injustices in the us criminal justice system. . cholbi, “race, capital punishment, and the cost of murder,” – . . ibid., . this content downloaded from . . . on march , : : pm ll use subject to university of chicago press terms and conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % fs x&citationid=p_n_ ethics april a utive injustices done to blacks as a class. on this analysis, the wrongs at issue are that two crucial political goods the law (understood here to en- compass not just statutory law, legal doctrine, secondary rules, etc., but also the concrete functioning of the courts, law enforcement, etc.) is re- sponsible for “distributing” are unjustly distributed on the basis of race. black murder defendants are not extended the same legal status as other defendants; they are presumed less innocent than defendants of other racial groups. black victims of murder are not extended the same legal protection as victims of other races; their killers are presumed more in- nocent than those who kill members of other racial groups. the injus- tices wrought by racial bias in american capital sentencing are therefore exhausted neither by the wrongs done to black defendants sentenced to die owing (in part) to their race nor by the wrongs done to black victims of murder whose murderers escape the death penalty (in part) owing to the race of the victims. the injustices are also political, extending (as the movement maintains) to the black community as a whole, because the capital sentencing regime generates normative realities in which blacks are not treated as equals. we contend that the mere fact that the law does not accord blacks equal standing as either potential murderers or potential murder victims is sufficient on its own to constitute a serious racial injustice. yet the in- justice is not exhausted by what might appear to be abstract or “formal” wrongs related to legal standing; these wrongs make concrete differences in the lives of black individuals and communities. here we observe that law can shape the substantive normative realities under which individu- als live independently of their tangible and specific interactions with the law. the law is a system that shapes attitudes, choices, and relationships. consider, for instance, a legal regime that criminalizes same-sex conduct or relations. such a regime shapes the attitudes, choices, and relation- ships of those who live under it even if they never directly interact with the regime in that respect. under such a regime, individuals will try to pur- sue same-sex relations only in private, businesses catering to a gay clientele will take steps to conceal that fact or to evade legal scrutiny, employers who discover that their employees are gay acquire additional leverage over them, landlords may “harbor” such individuals or use the law to deny them housing, and so on. such effects are likely to arise even among those who are never charged with violating the statutes against same-sex conduct. the law thus creates a penumbra of normative realities—a set of atti- . the movement for black lives platform does not typically employ the idiom of “dis- tribution” to characterize the group-based injustices suffered by african americans, refer- ring instead to violations of rights, structural oppression, exploitation, and marginalization. we consider the extent to which our normative analysis of us capital punishment maps onto the movement’s general conception of racial injustice in sec. vii. this content downloaded from . . . on march , : : pm ll use subject to university of chicago press terms and conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). cholbi and madva black lives and death penalty abolition a tudes, expectations, and so on—that extend well beyond its tangible op- erations. hence, the law can create widespread substantive political injus- tices, injustices produced by but not reducible to whatever specific legal injustices the regime may commit. in a similar vein, us blacks operate under a capital punishment re- gime that creates unjust normative realities that exist independently of their specific interactions with that regime. us blacks, even those who are neither charged with murder nor victimized by murder, are (or are certainly in a position to be) aware of how they would be treated by the law were either of those events to occur. but just as with the criminalization of same- sex relations, blacks’ awareness of how they are treated by the capital pun- ishment regime is likely to adversely influence the attitudes and behaviors that shape their interactions with others. for example, this awareness likely contributes toviolence against blacks. given that the regime routinely pun- ishes those who kill blacks less harshly than those who kill others, killing blacks becomes commensurably less risky (especially if the killer is white). this reality is likely to negatively affect blacks’ interactions with, and will- ingness to call upon, law enforcement. as phenomena such as black par- ents giving their children “the talk” about how to safely deal with police and the daughter of philando castile’s fiancée pleading with her mother not to scream for fear that she would “get shooted” illustrate, the black community lives under the shadow of american legal practices, of which capital punishment has historically been an integral part, that assign their lives lesser value. one adverse effect of this awareness is blacks’ greater an- imosity toward law enforcement, rooted in the knowledge that violence against them is less likely to be subject to the harshest sanction our legal system permits. blacks’ skepticism about law enforcement’s willingness to protect their lives likely contributes to greater possession or use of weap- ons, and hence higher levels of violence, among blacks. in turn, these fac- tors increase the probability of lethal violence toward blacks and of crime within black communities. conversely, one might expect that discrimina- tion related to offenders’ race would counteract this effect. after all, if black offenders are morelikely to beexecutedthanothers,wemightexpectaware- ness of that fact to discourage murders by (and to some extent, among) blacks. this may be so, but we suspect that the realities are more complex. for one, agents do not always respond so straightforwardly to the law’s in- centives. moreover, awareness of these facts regarding race of perpetra- tors may equally well contribute to a kind of nihilism, that is, faced with a . taylor pittman, “inside the heartbreaking talk black parents must have with their kids,” huffington post, november , , http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/inside-the -heartbreaking-talk-black-parents-must-have-with-their-kids_us_ ca e b d ce fbb b. . for elaboration of this point, in the context of individual and collective responses to racial profiling, see jack glaser, suspect race: causes and consequences of racial profiling (oxford: oxford university press, ), chap. . this content downloaded from . . . on march , : : pm ll use subject to university of chicago press terms and conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % facprof% aoso% f . . &citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % facprof% aoso% f . . &citationid=p_n_ ethics april a legal regime that one has reason to think discriminates against blacks, blacks may respond not by calibrating their behaviors to the disincentives that regime produces but by treating that legal regime as an arbitrary and unpredictable dispenser of sanctions. no doubt the adverse normative realities we reference here are not caused exclusively by capital punishment, and the realities create attitudes and expectations that interact in nuanced ways. but no matter. for we con- sider it probable that racial discrimination against blacks in the adminis- tration of the death penalty (both as prospective murder victims and as prospective murderers) contributes to normative realities that motivate vi- olence, increase community tension, and exacerbate mistrust, particularly toward law enforcement. we have argued that the movement is therefore correct in seeing the injustices stemming from racial discrimination in the administration of cap- ital punishment in the united states as collective or political. still, several key questions remain. we have not investigated the mechanisms through which these injustices arise. we argue in the next section that implicit ra- cial biases partly explain how these injustices occur, a fact that shapes both how we understand the nature of these injustices and the defensibility of various responses to them. ii implicit racial biases likely influence countless decisions made by witnesses, police, attorneys, judges, and juries, such that blacks can, as a class, reason- ably expect to be mistreated, devalued, and less protected by the capital punishment regime, relative to whites. before reviewing key evidence, . it has long been disputed whether capital punishment has a deterrent effect on crimes such as murder. for a useful overview of this evidence and the surrounding debate, see john j. donohue and justin wolfers, “uses and abuses of empirical evidence in the death penalty debate,” stanford law review ( ): – . as donohue and wolfers conclude, “the u.s. data simply do not speak clearly about whether the death penalty has a deterrent or antideterrent effect” ( ), but what evidence exists for it being a deterrent effect suggests that it is small in comparison to other factors that influence murder rates (“the death penalty does not cause or eliminate large numbers of homicides”; ). we take the considerations advanced in this paragraph to suggest that racial discrimination could well undermine whatever deterrent effect capital punishment has and, at the very least, complicates our ability to make sound inferences about its deterrent effects. indeed, it may be a further advantage of the abolition we advocate in this article that it would en- able disputes about the deterrent effect to be more decisively settled. . for a recent survey highlighting black mistrust toward police, see pew research cen- ter, “the racial confidence gap in police performance,” september , , http://assets .pewresearch.org/wp-content/uploads/sites/ / / /st_ . . _police-final.pdf. . for further theoretical analysis of implicit racial bias, capital punishment, and other aspects of the criminal justice system, including policing and eyewitness identification, see charles ogletree, robert j. smith, and johanna wald, “coloring punishment: implicit social this content downloaded from . . . on march , : : pm ll use subject to university of chicago press terms and conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). cholbi and madva black lives and death penalty abolition a two caveats are in order. first, recent political events have made it clear that reports of the demise of explicit bigotry in liberal democracies have been greatly exaggerated. accordingly, we make no assumptions about the ex- tent to which the “implicit” biases found in these studies are unconscious, unintentional, or simply unspoken. that is, in many of the field- and lab- based studies reviewed here, individuals act in predictably biased ways de- spite verbally reporting that they are unbiased. as far as we are concerned, these individuals might be concealing their conscious, intentional racism, or they might be sincerely egalitarian. we are neutral regarding such ques- tions, and we refer to these biases as “implicit” simply because they go un- reported. second, we do not argue that these biases constitute the sole cause of racial injustices related to capital punishment. a complex and en- tangled set of factors, both internal and external to the criminal justice sys- tem, are likely involved. for example, many police departments appear to allocate disproportionate time and resources to levying fines and seizing assets in black communities (i.e., overpolicing in order to garner revenue to fund local government operations) and, as a direct consequence, have fewer resources to devote to solving violent crimes in those communities (therefore underpolicing when it comes to actually protecting black citi- zens). we claim only that such structural factors do not by themselves . for more on the nature of implicit racial bias and defenses of the predictive value of indirect measures like the implicit association test, see alex madva, “implicit bias, moods, and moral responsibility,” pacific philosophical quarterly (forthcoming), https://doi.org/ . /papq. ; michael brownstein and alex madva, “stereotypes, prejudice, and the taxon- omy of the implicit social mind,” noûs (forthcoming), https://doi.org/ . /nous. ; and michael brownstein, alex madva, and bertram gawronski, “understanding implicit bias: how the critics miss the point” (unpublished manuscript). cf. frederick l. oswald et al., “pre- dicting ethnic and racial discrimination: a meta-analysis of iat criterion studies,” journal of personality and social psychology ( ): – ; anthony g. greenwald, mahzarin r. banaji, and brian a. nosek, “statistically small effects of the implicit association test can have soci- etally large effects,” journal of personality and social psychology ( ): – ; and b. keith payne, heidi a. vuletich, and kristjen b. lundberg, “the bias of crowds: how implicit bias bridges personal and systemic prejudice,” psychological inquiry ( ): – . . see, e.g., rebecca goldstein, michael w. sances, and hye young you, “over-policing, under-policing, or both? an analysis of police resource allocation” (unpublished manuscript); see also the movement for black lives platform’s “invest-divest” demands. for the criticism cognition and criminal justice,” in implicit racial bias across the law, ed. justin d. levinson and robert j. smith (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), – ; robert j. smith and g. ben cohen, “choosing life or death (implicitly),” in implicit racial bias across the law, ed. justin d. levinson and robert j. smith (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), – ; glaser, suspect race; katherine b. spencer, amanda k. charbonneau, and jack gla- ser, “implicit bias and policing,” social and personality psychology compass ( ): – ; joshua correll et al., “the police officer’s dilemma: a decade of research on racial bias in the decision to shoot,” social and personality psychology compass ( ): – ; bruce w. behrman and sherrie l. davey, “eyewitness identification in actual criminal cases: an archival analysis,” law and human behavior ( ): – . this content downloaded from . . . on march , : : pm ll use subject to university of chicago press terms and conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % fpspa &citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % f x. . &citationid=p_n_ ethics april a suffice to account for the injustice in question, and that given the persis- tence of implicit bias and the persistence of racial injustice even after post-furman reforms, no (feasible) package of reforms short of abolition will suffice to eliminate the injustices of capital punishment. research suggests that most white americans, and even many black americans, harbor antiblack implicit biases, many of which are obviously relevant to criminal justice. these biases lead individuals to judge that darker-skinned individuals look angrier and more threatening than lighter- skinned individuals with identical facial expressions. whites tend to be less sensitive to the pain experienced by blacks. whites are more likely to see blacks in some contexts as physically “superhuman” and in other con- texts as subhuman and apelike. even images of five-year-old black boys automatically call to mind problematic racial stereotypes. it is not hard to imagine how these biases could lead to the systematic mistreatment of blacks relative to whites in capital contexts, and a significant body of re- search specifically suggests that prosecutors, judges, and juries are just as susceptible to these biases as everyone else. bias is especially likely to affect individuals when they lack clear-cut guidelines or structural constraints to hold them accountable for their decisions. among the many subjective, institutionally unconstrained de- cisions regularly made by prosecutors, some of the most relevant, for our purposes, are whether to charge and what sentence to seek, but also whether to disclose mitigating or potentially exonerating evidence to the defense, . see, e.g., brian a. nosek et al., “pervasiveness and correlates of implicit attitudes and stereotypes,” european review of social psychology ( ): – . for a review of “mean- ingful life outcomes” predicted by implicit attitudes, see irene v. blair, nilanjana dasgupta, and jack glaser, “implicit attitudes,” in apa handbook of personality and social psychology, vol. , attitudes and social cognition, ed. mario mikulincer et al. (washington, dc: american psycho- logical association, ), – . . kurt hugenberg and galen v. bodenhausen, “facing prejudice: implicit preju- dice and the perception of facial threat,” psychological science ( ): – ; j. r. sha- piro et al., “following in the wake of anger: when not discriminating is discriminating,” personality and social psychology bulletin ( ): – . . sophie trawalter, kelly m. hoffman, and adam waytz, “correction: racial bias in perceptions of others’ pain,” plos one ( ): e . . a. waytz, k. m. hoffman, and s. trawalter, “a superhumanization bias in whites’ perceptions of blacks,” social psychological and personality science ( ): – ; phillip atiba goff et al., “not yet human: implicit knowledge, historical dehumanization, and con- temporary consequences,” journal of personality and social psychology ( ): – . . a. r. todd, k. c. thiem, and r. neel, “does seeing faces of young black boys fa- cilitate the identification of threatening stimuli?,” psychological science ( ): – . that implicit bias discourse is insufficiently attentive to these structural-institutional concerns, see ralph richard banks and richard thompson ford, “(how) does unconscious bias matter: law, politics, and racial inequality,” emory law journal ( ): – ; sally has- langer, “social structure, narrative, and explanation,” canadian journal of philosophy ( ): – . this content downloaded from . . . on march , : : pm ll use subject to university of chicago press terms and conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % fj. - . .psci_ .x&citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % fjournal.pone. &citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % f &citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % f &citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % f &citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % f - &citationid=p_n_ cholbi and madva black lives and death penalty abolition a how to describe defendants and their actions in cross-examinations and closing arguments, and so on. such biases may even lead detectives and prosecutors to devote fewer resources to obtaining evidence when there are minority victims, thereby making cases with white victims seem more serious on average than those with minority victims. thus, a louisiana study found that prosecutor case files were significantly thicker when vic- tims were white women, and thinnest when victims were black, which in turn correlated with severer sentences for those convicted of killing whites and women. one study found that professional lawyers’ decisions in a simulated voir dire reflected the implicit (but not self-reported) biases of jurors. at- torneys randomly assigned to be prosecutors tended to exclude jurors with comparatively weak implicit racial biases. in other words, professional at- torneys are somehow, consciously or unconsciously, tracking the implicit biases of potential jurors and striking them partly on this basis. attorneys will, of course, inevitably be able to cite ostensibly nonracial reasons to jus- tify such decisions—making the influence of implicit bias in this sphere particularly difficult to combat, short of removing the option to strike ju- rors altogether. once selected, jurors’ implicit biases likely lead them to find the tes- timony of black defendants, victims, and their families less credible and sympathetic than their white counterparts. mock jurors are more likely . robert j. smith and justin d. levinson, “the impact of implicit racial bias on the exercise of prosecutorial discretion,” seattle university law review ( ): – . . glenn l. pierce et al., “race and the construction of evidence in homicide cases,” american journal of criminal justice ( ): – . . m. morrison, a. devaul-fetters, and b. gawronski, “stacking the jury: legal pro- fessionals’ peremptory challenges reflect jurors’ levels of implicit race bias,” personality and social psychology bulletin ( ): – . . attorneys randomly assigned to be defenders tended to exclude jurors with stron- ger implicit racial biases. . samuel r. sommers and michael i. norton, “race-based judgments, race-neutral justifications: experimental examination of peremptory use and the batson challenge procedure,” law and human behavior ( ): – . . we know of no experimental evidence directly related to antiblack biases in assess- ments of credibility (i.e., testimonial injustice; see miranda fricker, epistemic injustice: power and the ethics of knowing [oxford: oxford university press, ]), but several studies point to such biases against other ethnic groups, including latinx individuals in the united states and turkish immigrants in germany. see galen v. bodenhausen and meryl lichtenstein, “social stereotypes and information-processing strategies: the impact of task complexity,” journal of personality and social psychology ( ): – ; arnd florack, martin scarabis, and her- bert bless, “der einfluß wahrgenommener bedrohung auf die nutzung automatischer assoziationen bei der personenbeurteilung [the impact of perceived threat on the use of automatic associations in person judgments],” zeitschrift für sozialpsychologie ( ): – ; laura p. minero and russ k. e. espinoza, “the influence of defendant immigration status, country of origin, and ethnicity on juror decisions: an aversive racism explanation for juror bias,” hispanic journal of behavioral sciences ( ): – ; larry r. nelson, mar- this content downloaded from . . . on march , : : pm ll use subject to university of chicago press terms and conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % fs - - - &citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % facprof% aoso% f . . &citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % facprof% aoso% f . . &citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % f - . . . &citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % f - . . . &citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % f% f - . . . &citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % fs - - - &citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % f &citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % f &citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % f &citationid=p_n_ ethics april a to remember “aggressive” details of a crime, and even to falsely remember such details, when defendants are black. they are more likely to think that the conviction of a black defendant remains appropriate despite the use of inadmissible evidence. one field study even found that jurors were more likely to report that the love, grief, and loss experienced by a murder victims’ family were important factors in their decision-making when the victim was white. several experimental studies tie these discriminatory patterns directly to measures of implicit racial bias, such as mock jurors’ automatic associations of black faces with the word “guilty.” although juror bias likely affects conviction and sentencing trends throughout the criminal justice system, it seems especially pernicious in capital contexts. for example, the jurors most likely to be selected in capital cases also seem more likely to implicitly devalue black lives. one study found that individuals tended to associate whites with words like “value” and “merit” and blacks with words like “expendable” and “worth- less,” and that this tendency was especially strong among those who re- . justin levinson, “forgotten racial equality: implicit bias, decisionmaking, and misremembering,” duke law journal ( ): – . . gordon hodson et al., “aversive racism in britain: the use of inadmissible evi- dence in legal decisions,” european journal of social psychology ( ): – ; james d. johnson et al., “justice is still not colorblind: differential racial effects of exposure to inadmissible evidence,” personality and social psychology bulletin ( ): – . in fact, participants in the study by johnson et al. falsely believed that they were less influenced by the inadmissible evidence when defendants were black. for further studies on juror bias, see ellen s. cohn et al., “reducing white juror bias: the role of race salience and racial attitudes,” journal of applied social psychology ( ): – ; danielle m. young, justin d. levinson, and scott sinnett, “innocent until primed: mock jurors’ racially biased re- sponse to the presumption of innocence,” plos one ( ): e . . david r. karp and jarrett b. warshaw, “chapter , their day in court: the role of murder victims’ families in capital juror decision making,” in wounds that do not bind: victim-based perspectives on the death penalty, ed. james r. acker and david r. karp (durham, nc: carolina academic, ), – . such findings are especially disheartening because families of white victims are nearly twice as likely to testify in the first place. . justin d. levinson, huajian cai, and danielle young, “guilty by implicit racial bias: the guilty/not guilty implicit association test,” ohio state journal of criminal law ( ): – ; justin d. levinson and danielle young, “different shades of bias: skin tone, im- plicit racial bias, and judgments of ambiguous evidence,” west virginia law review ( ): – . . for reviews of juror bias, see jennifer s. hunt, “race, ethnicity, and culture in jury decision making,” annual review of law and social science ( ): – ; mona lynch and craig haney, “looking across the empathic divide: racialized decision making on the capital jury,” michigan state law review, , – . . justin d. levinson, robert j. smith, and danielle m. young, “devaluing death: an empirical study of implicit racial bias on jury-eligible citizens in six death penalty states,” new york university law review ( ): – . garet l. signorella, and karin g. botti, “accent, gender, and perceived competence,” his- panic journal of behavioral sciences ( ): – . this content downloaded from . . . on march , : : pm ll use subject to university of chicago press terms and conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % fejsp. &citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % fj. - . . .x&citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % fjournal.pone. &citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % fannurev-lawsocsci- - &citationid=p_n_ cholbi and madva black lives and death penalty abolition a ported being willing to convict someone even if that meant a potential death sentence. in fact, this implicit devaluation of blacks relative to whites predicted mock jurors’ decisions to sentence a black convict to death in- stead of life in prison. this bias may help to explain why, when victims are white, defendants who look more stereotypically black are also more likely to receive a death sentence. nor does racial bias cease at the moment of conviction. rather than serving as final bulwarks against discrimination, post-conviction proce- dures in capital cases may simply create more opportunities for bias to shape outcomes. since judges—like everyone else—tend to be biased, white defendants may be more likely to get sentence relief than black de- fendants. therefore, even if these procedures arevaluable for the broader aim of reducing unjust capital punishments, they may actually exacerbate race-based disparities. in any event, in states where judges are elected, they must appear “tough on crime” and therefore largely tend to uphold cap- ital sentencing on appeals from lower courts. remarkably, one study found that white respondents became more supportive of capital punishment when informed about racial bias in cap- ital sentencing. another study, by glaser et al., found that when the max- imum possible sentence was life without parole, mock jurors were equally likely to recommend convicting black and white defendants ( . % and . they also found that the refusal to sentence someone to death led to the exclu- sion of nonwhite jurors, and that the death qualification process therefore exacerbated the impact of racial bias on capital sentencing. notably, their participant sample was drawn from six of the most active death penalty states: alabama, arizona, california, florida, oklahoma, and texas. moreover, “those who are more likely to be allowed to serve on death penalty cases are not only more likely to harbor racially prejudiced attitudes, but also are more likely to favor the conviction of innocent defendants over letting guilty ones go free.” robert l. young, “guilty until proven innocent: conviction orientation, racial at- titudes, and support for capital punishment,” deviant behavior ( ): – ; cf. mark peffley and jon hurwitz, “the racial components of ‘race-neutral’ crime policy atti- tudes,” political psychology ( ): – . . jennifer l. eberhardt et al., “looking deathworthy: perceived stereotypicality of black defendants predicts capital-sentencing outcomes,” psychological science ( ): – . . on racial bias among judges, see ozkan eren and naci mocan, “emotional judges and unlucky juveniles” (working paper, national bureau of economic research, septem- ber ), http://www.nber.org/papers/w ; jeffrey j. rachlinski et al., “does uncon- scious racial bias affect trial judges?,” notre dame law review ( ): – . . michelle a. petrie and james e. coverdill, “who lives and dies on death row? race, ethnicity, and post-sentence outcomes in texas,” social problems ( ): – . . paul brace and brent d. boyea, “state public opinion, the death penalty, and the practice of electing judges,” american journal of political science ( ): – . . mark peffley and jon hurwitz, “persuasion and resistance: race and the death penalty in america,” american journal of political science ( ): – . cf. rebecca c. hetey and jennifer l. eberhardt, “racial disparities in incarceration increase accep- tance of punitive policies,” psychological science ( ): – . this content downloaded from . . . on march , : : pm ll use subject to university of chicago press terms and conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % fsp. . . . &citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % fj. - . . .x&citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % fj. - . . .x&citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % f &citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % f - x. &citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % fj. - . . .x&citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % f &citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % fw &citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % fw &citationid=p_n_ ethics april a . %, respectively); however, when the maximum possible sentence was death, participants became simultaneously less likely to convict whites ( . %) and more likely to convict blacks ( %). note that these results are inconsistent with the intuitive and widely held view (articulated, e.g., in the supreme court’s ruling in mccleskey v. kemp) that racial bias is insensi- tive to the context or the stakes. glaser and colleagues’ findings, together with the body of evidence reviewed in this section, suggest that the interplay between racial bias, capital punishment, and other patterns of unfairness in the criminal justice system is more complex. in this case, otherwise-equal rates of conviction for whites and blacks (when the maximum sentence is life imprisonment) become stunningly unequal simply by introducing the death penalty as a possibility. such results suggest that capital punish- ment is not just another arena infected with bias but instead represents a distinctive channel for racial discrimination, in at least two respects. first, the possibility of a capital sentence may function as a powerful contextual cue that both activates and amplifies the effects of specific antiblack biases, and second, the bias-amplifying power of capital contexts is not restricted to capital-sentencing contexts, distorting also mock jurors’ judgments of guilt, assessments of evidence, and willingness to convict. the cognitive salience of execution as an ultimate outcome may, then, cast a broad shadow over the perception and treatment of black defendants (and killers of white victims) throughout the criminal justice system, influencing rates of conviction, charging decisions, public support for punitive policies, police uses of force, mistrust of criminal justice within the black commu- nity, and so on. (we will circle back to these hypotheses when we respond to objections in sec. vi.) at this point, we can only speculate about the mechanisms render- ing capital contexts distinctively discriminatory. we suspect that many of the aforementioned biases play a role: the reflexive devaluation of black lives; the implicit denial that black defendants, victims, and families feel pain, love, and loss; and the broader tendencies to perceive blacks as threat- ening, guilty, and variously super- or subhuman. glaser and colleagues spec- ulate that the sheer salience of the death penalty as a live option might interact with implicit racial prejudices and stereotypes to make crimes committed by black defendants (or crimes committed against white vic- tims) seem especially brutal. in other words, for many, black americans do not deserve to die because of the gravity of their crimes; rather, at least in part, their crimes are particularly grave because black americans com- mit them. likewise, those who kill black americans are found not to be worthy of death not because of the lesser gravity of their crimes; rather, . jack glaser, karin d. martin, and kimberly b. kahn, “possibility of death sentence has divergent effect on verdicts for black and white defendants,” law and human behav- ior ( ): – . this content downloaded from . . . on march , : : pm ll use subject to university of chicago press terms and conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % flhb &citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % flhb &citationid=p_n_ cholbi and madva black lives and death penalty abolition a at least in part, their crimes become less grave by virtue of having killed black americans. iii to this point, we have argued for two principal claims: first, that black communities in the united states suffer a distributive injusticedue to amer- ican legal practices surrounding capital punishment, an injustice wherein they are not accorded equal status under the law, nor accorded its equal protection; and second, that the patterns of racial discrimination respon- sible for this injustice cannot be adequately explained without reference to implicit racial bias. remaining, however, are the further questions of whether these pat- terns ought to be remedied and, if so, what the best remedy is. in taking up these questions, we do not consider “backward-looking” remedies whose rationale is to redress the past injustices associated with these patterns. while we believe that past discrimination in capital sentencing merits moral attention and perhaps recompense, our focus instead falls on rem- edies that address the present (and future) state of affairs in which black americans as a class suffer injustice due to the law’s failure to extend equal status and protection to them. past discrimination is relevant to our con- cerns only insofar as it helps explain present discriminatory patterns and predict future ones. why do present-day patterns of racial discrimination morally de- mand a remedy? what wrong is committed if no remedy is offered? such patterns, we have argued, devalue black lives by failing to extend basic le- gal protections to them, regardless of whether black individuals engage with the capital punishment regime either as defendants or as victims. these patterns cannot be adequately explained without reference to both general biases about blacks being criminal or threatening and biases likely to be triggered specifically within capital trials or sentencing. these pat- terns are therefore neither “arbitrary” in the sense of being capricious or unpredictable nor due to systematic intentional discrimination against blacks. but arbitrariness and intentional discrimination are not the only institutional facts that call for remedy. indeed, to allow such patterns to persist would constitute a form of institutional or societal recklessness. a person acts recklessly when she knows (or should have known) that her act will likely cause harm but proceeds to perform that act anyway without due concern for the justifiability of risking harm to others. when recklessness results in harm, the actor can be justifiably held culpable for that harm because the harm is the direct product of her having knowingly engaged in risky behavior. an intoxicated driver, for example, knows (or should know) that her driving increases the risk of injury or death to others but proceeds to drive anyway. when her driving results in injury this content downloaded from . . . on march , : : pm ll use subject to university of chicago press terms and conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). ethics april a or death to others, she is thereby culpable for that harm. this is the case even though (a) the act of driving while intoxicated did not guarantee that others would be harmed, but rather merely increased the likelihood of such harm, and (b) she did not intend to harm inasmuch as she did not drive while intoxicated so that she could harm someone else, nor was harming someone else an essential component of her achieving her ends through her acts. the reckless actor is culpable because and to the extent that the harms resulting from her acts are reasonably foreseeable. racial discrimination in capital sentencing cannot be easily traced to a single individual actor. nevertheless, with respect to such discrimina- tion, our society and its legal system now stand in an equivalent position to the individual considering whether to drive while intoxicated. our so- ciety and its legal system recognize (or should recognize) that continuing with capital punishment practices carries substantial risk of failing to treat black americans as equals with respect to legal status and the law’s protec- tions. while ignorance of this risk and how it comes about thanks to im- plicit bias may have excused our society and its legal system in the past, that excuse no longer holds water. to accede to the capital punishment status quo thus involves an unjustifiable risk-taking with respect to legal equality. that the system and its participants do not intend to wrong black defendants or murder victims, as well as typically opposing the racial wrongs in question, therefore does not exculpate them from moral responsibility for those wrongs. furthermore, that the system and its participants do not intend the political wrongs to which we have referred does not exculpate them from those wrongs either. and given that there are remedies at hand to prevent these wrongs, mere regret at the negative effects of such contin- ued institutional recklessness is woefully inadequate. iv we turn now to the question of what shape the remedy for this injustice should have. the best remedy will meet two desiderata. first, it will dimin- ish the injustice in question, either by eliminating the bias that generates it or by nullifying the effects of that bias. second, the remedy itself will not be unjust. one proposal, which we reject, is that discrimination in capital pun- ishment can be rooted out through sentencing reform alone. as noted earlier, after the furman decision, states implemented a number of re- forms to make capital sentencing fairer, reforms which (courts ruled) ren- dered state capital punishment statutes fair enough to pass constitutional scrutiny. but these reforms were not race conscious. rather, they were aimed at diminishing the latitude that judges or juries have in applying the death penalty so as to make its application less “wanton” or arbitrary. might additional procedural reforms, perhaps including reforms explic- this content downloaded from . . . on march , : : pm ll use subject to university of chicago press terms and conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). cholbi and madva black lives and death penalty abolition a itly designed to address racial bias, eliminate the racially discriminatory patterns in american capital punishment practices? we are skeptical. as the evidence adduced in section i suggests, pre- vious procedural reforms have done little to eliminate the discriminatory patterns in question. some studies, for example, find that efforts to en- courage jurors to more seriously consider mitigating evidence have had no effect on their sentencing decisions. this makes a prima facie case against additional procedural reforms satisfying our first desideratum. still, one might think that reforms reducing discretion in capital sentenc- ing could prove effective. in a recent defense of capital punishment, mat- thew kramer proposes that the death penalty be reserved only for crimes of “extreme gravity” that are “defilingly evil.” when a person has “perpe- trated grotesque inequities that besmirch the moral standing of the com- munity” of which she is a member, a “community is under a moral obliga- tion to resort to capital punishment” as a way of “purging” itself of this evil, according to kramer. by limiting capital punishment only to those whose crimes “defile” the community, kramer’s “purgative” rationale for the death penalty might suitably limit those subject to it so as to eliminate racially discriminatory patterns in its administration. in our estimation, kramer’s proposal runs afoul of both desiderata. as a general matter, kramer is right to note that racial bias is more likely to sway decision-making in ambiguous cases. for example, mock jurors’ im- plicit biases lead them to interpret ambiguous evidence as more damning when the defendant is dark-skinned than when light-skinned. suppose, then, that judges and juries abide by a kramer-inspired principle and im- pose the death penalty only on “defilingly evil” crimes. this will not affect decisions made by police, prosecutors, and so on, that occur prior to judge or jury sentencing, decisions that (as we noted in sec. ii) are likely to be swayed by implicit racial bias. that is, kramer fails to appreciate the role that bias can play in disambiguating cases, as when detectives and prose- cutors devote more (vs. less) time and effort to turning up evidence when victims are white (vs. black), thereby exerting systematic effects on how . richard c. dieter, “struck by lightning: the continuing arbitrariness of the death penalty thirty-five years after its re-instatement in ,” death penalty information center report, july , https://deathpenaltyinfo.org/documents/struckbylightning.pdf; and justice breyer dissenting, glossip v. gross, u.s. ___ ( ). . elizabeth s. vartkessian, jon r. sorensen, and christopher e. kelly, “tinkering with the machinery of death: an analysis of juror decision-making in texas death penalty trials during two statutory eras,” justice quarterly ( ): – . . matthew kramer, ethics of capital punishment (oxford: oxford university press, ), , . . ibid., – . . levinson and young, “different shades of bias”; levinson, cai, and young, “guilty by implicit racial bias.” this content downloaded from . . . on march , : : pm ll use subject to university of chicago press terms and conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % f . . &citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % facprof% aoso% f . . &citationid=p_n_ ethics april a egregious a defendant’s crimes come to seem. thus, this reform may have minimal impact on racial discrimination in capital sentencing over- all. moreover, we doubt that judges and juries would abide by the kramer- inspired principle in a racially neutral matter. whether a crime is “defil- ingly evil” is itself a likely product of implicit bias. mock jurors become simultaneously more likely to convict blacks and less likely to convict whites precisely when capital punishment is a possibility. recall also that the grief and pain expressed by victims’ families—factors which presum- ably affect how “evil” a crime seems—are more likely to influence juror decision-making when victims are white. such considerations illustrate that mere procedural reform would be both ineffective and unjust. (of course, the criminal justice system is replete with injustices, some of which could be ameliorated through sentencing reforms, such as the elimina- tion of harsh mandatory minimums. our point is that procedural reforms are, in the context of capital punishment, radically insufficient.) a second alternative remedy would be to impose the death penalty (a) only on (some) nonblack capital defendants but on no black defen- dants, (b) only on (some of) those who kill blacks but on none of those who kill nonblacks, or (c) both. this remedy has the obvious defect that it then fails to accord nonblacks equal status under or the equal protec- tion of the law. a final possible remedy is entertained by kasper lippert-rasmussen: defendants would receive a “death penalty lottery ticket where the risk of losing varies between the two groups that are being discriminated be- tween such that this differential risk eliminates the overrepresentation of one of these groups within the relevant penal category.” for example, to counteract racial discrimination throughout the capital punishment regime, blacks and whites convicted of capital crimes might receive lot- tery tickets with, respectively, percent and percent chances of receiv- ing the death penalty instead of life imprisonment. this proposal might seem especially well suited to combat the distributive comparative injus- tices on which we have focused. however, lippert-rasmussen does not . pierce et al., “race and the construction of evidence.” . glaser, martin, and kahn, “possibility of death sentence”; cf. hetey and eber- hardt, “racial disparities in incarceration.” . karp and warshaw, “chapter , their day in court”; on the insensitivity of whites to blacks’ pain, see trawalter, hoffman, and waytz, “correction.” . such a remedy might be attractive to those (unlike us) concerned with backward- looking remedies aimed at ameliorating past racial injustice in capital sentencing. . kasper lippert-rasmussen, “punishment and discrimination,” in punishment and ethics, ed. j. ryberg and j. a. corlett (basingstoke, uk: palgrave macmillan ), – , – . . cory aragon suggests that, given that this patently unjust scheme would success- fully eliminate certain race-based distributive injustices, we have reason to conclude that the underlying political injustices are not primarily distributive, but relational (for further this content downloaded from . . . on march , : : pm ll use subject to university of chicago press terms and conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % f _ &citationid=p_n_ cholbi and madva black lives and death penalty abolition a defend this lottery as a legitimate option, and for good reason. to trade a regime in which implicit racial bias results in race-based injustice for one in which racial bias is explicitly encoded into sentencing hardly seems like an improvement. any scheme that explicitly took the race of partic- ular defendants or victims into account with the aim of achieving propor- tional distribution of capital punishment across racial groups would be odious on its face. we assume, for example, that such a race-conscious proposal would strike defenders of the death penalty as especially intol- erable (indeed, less tolerable than abolition). whatever gains this pro- posal would make in terms of comparative justice would be outweighed by losses in noncomparative (retributive) justice, such that final determi- nations regarding who receives the death penalty versus life imprison- ment would become almost entirely disconnected from the facts about what particular individuals deserve. certainly white defendants could be forgiven for objecting that such a lottery scheme would fail to accord them equal legal status, and whites and blacks alike might reasonably raise a more generic comparative complaint, namely, that there is no ra- tional basis for their being subjected to death while others are not. after all, a lottery embodies the very “arbitrariness” in the allocation of the death penalty that the furman-era court condemned. v our proposed remedy is either the outright legal abolition of the death penalty or its de facto suspension (a “permanent moratorium,” so to speak). such a remedy clearly satisfies our first desideratum. if capital punishment does not occur, then racial bias cannot infect its implemen- tation. hence, abolition eliminates the racial discriminatory patterns in capital sentencing and puts blacks and other americans on equal foot- ing with respect to their legal status and the protection of the law. that our proposed remedy satisfies the second desideratum, of not being unjust, is likely to meet resistance from capital punishment advo- cates, especially those convinced of the irrelevance of comparative con- siderations to the justness of punishment. ernest van den haag articu- lates their stance forcefully: discus based ll use if and when discrimination occurs it should be corrected. not, how- ever, by letting the guilty blacks escape the death penalty because guilty whites do, but by making sure that the guilty white offenders suffer it as the guilty blacks do. discrimination must be abolished by abolishing discrimination—not by abolishing penalties. however, sion, see sec. vii). however, this sort of proposal would also seem to counteract race- relational inequality and oppression. this content downloaded from . . . on march , : : pm subject to university of chicago press terms and conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). sprin tice, e see le ethics april all use even if . . . this cannot be done, i do not see any good reason to let any guilty murderer escape his penalty. it does happen in the administra- tion of criminal justice that one person gets away with murder and another is executed. yet the fact that one gets away with it is no reason to let another one escape. though van den haag refers here only to discrimination based on defen- dant’s race, he would presumably argue in the same manner regarding discrimination based on victim’s race, to wit, that when such discrimina- tion occurs, it should be corrected. we ought not abolish capital punish- ment because those who murder blacks more often escape the death pen- alty than do those who murder nonblacks, for doing so merely enables both classes to evade their just desserts. abolition, on van den haag’s view, bars noncomparative retributive justice from being done, that is, it prevents those who deserve to suffer death for their crimes from suffer- ing what they ought. one would thereby anticipate that adherents of van den haag’s position would be no more enthusiastic about our rationale for abolition than they were for prior efforts to justify abolition on the ba- sis of racial discrimination. prior efforts argued that considerations of comparative retributive justice were sufficient to outweigh considerations of noncomparative retributive justice—that the fact that blacks were sub- ject to greater punishments than whites or that the murderers of blacks were subject to lesser punishments than those who murdered members of other races generated a comparative retributive injustice sufficient to outweigh whatever losses in noncomparative justice the abolition of the death penalty would effect. in keeping with the black lives matter move- ment’s understanding of the american capital punishment regime as wronging black communities, we have focused not on the particular re- tributive injustices suffered either by black capital defendants or by black murder victims; rather, we rest our case for abolition on distributive injus- tices done to the black community, namely, that thanks to that regime’s discriminatory practices, blacks do not enjoy equal status under or the equal protection of the law. but if adherents of a van den haag–like posi- tion are correct, then considerations of noncomparative (retributive) jus- tice trump any considerations of comparative justice, whether retributive or distributive. hence, they would likely reject our rationale for abolition on grounds similar to those used to reject prior race-based rationales. we find the thesis that comparative considerations of justice, whether retributive or distributive, must always take a back seat to noncomparative . ernest van den haag and john p. conrad, the death penalty: a debate (berlin: ger, ), . . see, e.g., thomas hurka, “desert: individualistic and holistic,” in desert and jus- d. serena olsaretti (oxford: oxford university press, ), – ; for discussion, nta and farland, “desert, justice and capital punishment,” – . this content downloaded from . . . on march , : : pm subject to university of chicago press terms and conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % f - - - - &citationid=p_n_ cholbi and madva black lives and death penalty abolition a considerations implausible. van den haag himself acknowledges that com- parative considerations are at least morally relevant; upon discovering that members of some races tend to escape the death penalty where others suffer it for the same crime, we ought (he says) to seek to abolish such dis- crimination. comparative considerations count as moral reasons, on his view. what van den haag’s position denies is that such considerations ever count as weighty enough reasons to forego any opportunity whatsoever to give individuals what they ostensibly deserve from a noncomparative per- spective. we reject the homogeneity of comparative considerations that this position appears to entail. on this position, comparative considerations have a roughly equal weight in overall determinations of justice, that is, a uni- formly minute weight. but comparative considerations vary widely in their force. on one end of the scale, some disproportions in the allocation of punishments do not seem to call for any remedy. hurka observes that in almost every society some murders will not be solved and some murder- ers will receive no punishment, but this fact is not sufficient to merit re- thinking how we punish murders. conversely, though, the racial dispro- portions in the allocation of capital punishment in the united states fall toward the weightier end of the scale of comparative wrongs. hurka notes that evils caused by the state are more objectionable than evils the state merely permits, and as we argued in section iii, the united states is en- gaging in a kind of knowing recklessness that causally effects the racial dis- proportions in the allocation of capital punishment. in addition, the fact that these disproportions burden a group (american blacks) that has been historically disadvantaged owing to discrimination and prejudice adds to the weightiness of these comparative considerations. our judgments regard- ing what individuals legally deserve should be guided by what they mor- ally deserve, where what they morally deserve must take into account how legal sanctions shape their lives overall. to ignore the racial dispropor- tionality in capital sentencing is to allow this disproportionality to com- pound the comparative wrongs american blacks suffer owing to other forms of discrimination and prejudice. thus, if any comparative consider- ation is ever weighty enough such that its redress justifies reductions in noncomparative justice, then racial disproportionality in capital sentenc- ing is such a comparative consideration. we therefore do not hold that noncomparative justice trumps com- parative justice, whether retributive or distributive. note, however, that even if one accepts this implausible thesis about comparative justice, van den haag’s position still rests on the controversial stance that the ab- olition of the death penalty involves a loss in retributive justice. but this stance is open to objection. first, that stance assumes that the death pen- . hurka, “desert,” . . ibid., . this content downloaded from . . . on march , : : pm ll use subject to university of chicago press terms and conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). ethics april a alty is not an unjust punishment, that is, that it is one that polities are mor- ally entitled to exact. we have largely assumed this for the sake of argu- ment but recognize its contentiousness. second, that position assumes that the death penalty is a uniquely just punishment for crimes such as murder—that no other punishment is sufficient to render unto those who commit (say) murder what they deserve. but there is no special rea- son to believe that for each and every crime or class thereof there is but one punishment that those who commit that crime deserve or that those who do not receive that specific punishment are not thereby given their just deserts. we need not be “nihilists” about moral desert, denying that there are any facts of the matter regarding what an offender deserves as a result of his wrongdoing, to recognize that commensurability between criminal acts and sanctions is almost certainly not a matter of one-to-one correspondence. third, epistemic doubts can be raised about the reli- ability of judgments concerning the commensurability of punishment and desert. for instance, we suspect that moral intuitions about which specific crimes merit which punishments are themselves likely compro- mised by racial (and other) biases. the research reviewed here indicates the dim prospects of identifying some unbiased source of intuitions about the precise requirements of noncomparative justice, or the relative geo- metric weights of comparative versus noncomparative considerations. we assume that were the death penalty abolished, then the most se- rious crimes would result in lifetime imprisonment with no possibility of parole. is it plausible that such imprisonment, given the wholesale depri- vations of liberty and opportunity it involves, is insufficiently severe to count as a just punishment for the most serious crimes—that any punish- ment short of death is not harsh enough to count as a just punishment for such crimes? we doubt that the geometry of desert is so precise or that our judgments about that geometry should be uncritically relied on. the fact that the suicide rate among prison inmates is three to four times greater than the general us population suggests that the belief that death is al- ways a worse fate than long-term imprisonment may well be wrong. at . russ shafer-landau, “retributivism and desert,” pacific philosophical quarterly ( ): – . . for samples of research on the wide array of psychological, cultural, and structural determinants of intuitions about punitiveness, including additional references to racial bias and capital punishment, see, e.g., johnson’s finding that racial gaps in support for pu- nitive policies reflect white prejudice toward blacks and black perceptions of injustice; devon johnson, “racial prejudice, perceived injustice, and the black-white gap in punitive atti- tudes,” journal of criminal justice ( ): – . see also shadd maruna and anna king, “once a criminal, always a criminal? ‘redeemability’ and the psychology of punitive public attitudes,” european journal on criminal policy and research ( ): – . . american foundation for suicide prevention, “suicide statistics,” https://afsp.org /about-suicide/suicide-statistics/, states that the annual suicide rate is . per , indi- viduals. the us department of justice bureau of justice statistics, “mortality in local jails this content downloaded from . . . on march , : : pm ll use subject to university of chicago press terms and conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % f - . &citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % fj.jcrimjus. . . &citationid=p_n_ https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % fs - - - &citationid=p_n_ cholbi and madva black lives and death penalty abolition a the very least, such facts indicate that if the worst crimes demand “hard treatment,” imprisonment looks like hard treatment indeed and is likely not unjust as a sanction for the most serious criminal acts. thus, we conclude that either comparative justice (and in particular, comparative distributive justice related to the status and protection the law accords to individuals based on their race) is relevant to justice over- all, in which case abolition of the death penalty in response to distributive injustice is defensible, or comparative justice is irrelevant to justice over- all, but the case against abolition rests on controversial views concerning the severity of different punishments and the geometry of wrongdoing and desert. on balance, then, we maintain that abolition fares better than alter- native remedies in satisfying the two desiderata we identified. it elimi- nates the effects of implicit racial bias that generate the racial injustices at issue, and while its being a just remedy is more debatable, our remedy clearly fares better in this respect than the most attractive alternatives. vi two final worries about our abolitionist proposal merit attention. some may worry that it “proves too much.” the abolition of capital punishment, one might hypothesize, will simply result in racial bias man- ifesting itself in the application of the next most severe sentence, namely, life imprisonment without parole. black defendants would be more likely to receive life imprisonment without parole for the same crimes, and those who commit crimes against blacks, where such crimes are eligible for life imprisonment without parole, would be less likely to be sentenced to life imprisonment without parole. but if so, then the very considerations we have adduced in favor of capital punishment would also seem to speak in favor of abolishing life imprisonment: these discriminatory patterns in life sentencing entail that blacks are neither extended the law’s equal protections nor accorded equal status, and so on. once life imprisonment is abolished, then racial discrimination would recur at the next most se- vere sentence, in turn calling for the abolition of that sentence. taken to its logical conclusion, our proposal might seem to entail not merely the abolition of capital punishment but the more radical abolition of pun- ishment altogether. . lenta and farland, “desert, justice, and capital punishment,” – . for its part, the black lives matter movement would likely welcome these implications, inasmuch as its platform calls for the abolition of incarceration altogether. while we harbor signifi- cant reservations about the present american system of mass incarceration, we are less con- vinced that eliminating prisons altogether is the wisest response to its deficiencies. and state prisons, – —statistical tables,” https://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf /mljsp st.pdf, indicates that suicide rates in the incarcerated population have hovered around per , in recent years. this content downloaded from . . . on march , : : pm ll use subject to university of chicago press terms and conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). ethics april a we grant that these untoward implications would be problematic for our position. however, we very much doubt that our position has these implications. for recall that the mechanism behind racial discrimination in capital sentencing, on our view, is implicit bias. and as we observed in section ii, there are good reasons to think that the forms of implicit bias responsible for racial discrimination in capital sentencing are very closely associated with the application of death as a criminal sentence. recall that these biases include the belief that blacks are less sensitive to pain, that the family members of black murder victims are accorded lesser sym- pathy, that blacks are either “subhuman” or “superhuman,” and so on. these specific biases suggest that antiblack biases are closely linked psy- chologically with the infliction of bodily violence, that is, that blacks are perceived to both suffer less harm from it and be more prone to inflict it. although such biases are apt to exert some influence across a variety of contexts, for example, in police officers’ split-second decisions to use force, or in clinicians’ deliberations about prescribing pain medication to black patients, they are likely to be more salient in capital cases than in cases that do not involve murder or capital punishment. indeed, the aforementioned study conducted by glaser et al., wherein the availability of capital punishment (as opposed to life imprisonment) appears to lead mock jurors to convict black defendants at a noticeably higher rate than whites, strongly suggests that death and life imprisonment stand on oppo- site sides of a salience boundary within implicit racial bias. such findings introduce the possibility that capital punishment is not simply another manifestation of racial discrimination but a context that activates biases that make such discrimination more likely, with cascading effects down- ward into other aspects of the criminal justice system, such as conviction rates, police use of force, mistrust of criminal justice in black communi- ties, and so on. in other words, abolishing the death penalty may itself be one among many necessary reforms for reducing broader racial dispar- ities in criminal imprisonment. of course, these are empirical hypotheses, but so too is the speculation that racial bias will manifest no matter the most severe punishment available. proponents of capital punishment have, how- ever, consistently treated this speculation as a truth deduced a priori. we would certainly welcome a more empirically oriented approach, such as a nationwide experiment to assess the multifarious effects of a death penalty moratorium. a second worry is that our proposal leaves an unaccounted-for loss in noncomparative justice. the abolition of the death penalty would place . astha singhal, yu-yu tien, and renee y. hsia, “racial-ethnic disparities in opioid prescriptions at emergency department visits for conditions commonly associated with prescription drug abuse,” plos one ( ): e . . glaser, martin, and kahn, “possibility of death sentence.” this content downloaded from . . . on march , : : pm ll use subject to university of chicago press terms and conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &crossref= . % fjournal.pone. &citationid=p_n_ cholbi and madva black lives and death penalty abolition a blacks on equal terms with others with respect to legal status and to the law’s protections, we have argued, and thus eliminate a large-scale com- parative injustice. but it would apparently do so by introducing noncom- parative injustice, because abolition would (a) reduce the costs that blacks and nonblacks alike ought to face for murder below what it ought to be and (b) fail to give blacks and nonblacks the level of legal protection that they ought to enjoy. equality in legal status or in the law’s protections thus comes at the expense of adequate legal status or legal protection for all. these losses in noncomparative justice could well outweigh the gains in comparative justice that we have invoked in defense of abolition. this worry attributes to us a contentious claim which we do not assert, namely, that there is some quantum of legal status or legal protection to which individuals are entitled that they will not receive under a system of punishment that precludes capital punishment. while we largely concede arguendo the retributive merits of capital punishment, our argument con- cerning the comparative injustice blacks face as a class owing to american capital punishment practices does not rest on any noncomparative claims about how much in the way of legal status or legal protection individuals deserve. admittedly, it is possible that abolition would result in a noncom- parative injustice concerning legal status or legal protection. but that it does, and that the magnitude of this noncomparative injustice would be so great as to outweigh the gains in comparative justice that we have argued would result from abolition, does not seem to follow from capital punish- ment being in principle noncomparatively just. at the very least, our oppo- nents bear the burden of providing an account of legal status and of the law’s protections that entails that neither can be adequately provided un- less individuals are subject to the death penalty. vii we have argued that understanding the racial wrongs of capital punish- ment in political and distributive terms, rather than in terms of individ- ual desert and retributive justice, further substantiates the movement’s controversial claim that the death penalty, by virtue of wronging black com- munities, should be abolished. that these distributive injustices are heavily influenced by implicit racial bias indicates why abolition is likely to be the only effective and just remedy for those injustices. some theoreticians of injustice will worry that our appeal to the un- just distribution of legal status and protections does not get to the heart of the racial injustice in question. they may assert that the injustices with which we are concerned are instantiations of black oppression, oppres- sion which is not adequately conceptualized by talking of distributive in- . lenta and farland, “desert, justice, and capital punishment,” – . this content downloaded from . . . on march , : : pm ll use subject to university of chicago press terms and conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). ethics april a justice. for these theorists, just social relations manifest equality insofar as they achieve equality of relations and the absence of domination. we cannot hope to hash out theoretical disputes such as this here, nor (in our estimation) need this be done in order to vindicate our conclu- sions concerning capital punishment. for we simply note that some dis- tributions of nonmaterial goods (in this case, political goods such as legal status and the law’s protections) are unjust and that these distributions can be conceptualized in different terms: as violations of basic natural rights, as failures to mitigate the effects of luck, as indications of the mar- ginalization or powerlessness typical of oppressive social relations, and so on. thus, we do not share young’s belief that “serious conceptual confu- sion” results from any attempt to capture injustices related to nonmaterial goods in distributive terms. on the contrary: in the case of race and cap- ital punishment, the social or community wrongs associated with ameri- can capital punishment cannot be grasped without reference to distribu- tive facts about nonmaterial goods. but we take no stand on how best to conceptualize these wrongs and anticipate that egalitarians of various stripes can endorse our specific conclusions. the black lives matter movement asserts that american institutions have waged a war on black communities. even if ‘war’ is hyperbole, it seems clear that progress toward greater racial comity and justice will require building greater trust between black communities and institutions, espe- cially law enforcement and the legal system. the abolition of capital pun- ishment in the united states would not only be just; it would also be a powerful step, both symbolically and substantively, toward ending that “war” and establishing peace across divisions of race. . iris marion young, justice and the politics of difference (princeton, nj: princeton uni- versity press, ), ; elizabeth anderson, “what is the point of equality?,” ethics ( ): – ; sally haslanger, “oppressions: racial and other,” in racism in mind, ed. m. p. levine and t. pataki (ithaca, ny: cornell university press, ), – . . young, justice and the politics of difference, . this content downloaded from . . . on march , : : pm ll use subject to university of chicago press terms and conditions (http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/t-and-c). https://www.journals.uchicago.edu/action/showlinks?doi= . % f &system= . % f &citationid=p_n_ acting the part: examining information operations within #blacklivesmatter discourse proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, vol. , no. cscw, article , publication date: november . acting the part: examining information operations within #blacklivesmatter discourse ahmer arif, human centered design & engineering, university of washington, usa leo g. stewart, information school, university of washington, usa kate starbird, human centered design & engineering, university of washington, usa information campaigns that seek to tap into and manipulate online discussions are becoming an issue of increasing public concern. social media companies are now problematizing some campaigns, specifically those that intentionally obscure their origins, as ‘information operations’. this research examines how social media accounts linked to one such operation—allegedly conducted by russia’s internet research agency—participated in an online discourse about the #blacklivesmatter movement and police-related shootings in the u.s. during . we study the interactions of these accounts within the online crowd using interpretative analysis of a network graph based on retweet flows in combination with a qualitative content analysis. our empirical findings show how these accounts imitated ordinary users to systematically micro-target different audiences, foster antagonism and undermine trust in information intermediaries. conceptually, this research enhances our understanding of how information operations can leverage the interactive social media environment to both reflect and shape existing social divisions. ccs concepts: • human-centered computing → empirical studies in collaborative and social computing • human-centered computing → social media keywords social media; twitter; information operations; disinformation; media manipulation; black lives matter acm reference format: ahmer arif, leo g. stewart, and kate starbird. . acting the part: examining information operations within #blacklivesmatter discourse. in proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, vol. , cscw, article (november ). acm, new york, ny. pages. https://doi.org/ . / introduction although the advent of social media was initially met with enthusiasm for more democratic information systems, our evolving information practices are now forcing us to think about how these new points of access can be manipulated. this has become a more urgent consideration in recent years as social media platforms have allowed misinformation—as well as disinformation, and political propaganda—to spread and engage audiences in new ways. recently, social media companies have acknowledged that their platforms have become sites for information operations, i.e. actions taken by governments or organized non-state actors to manipulate public opinion [ , , ]. though information operations are not new, their intersection with social media is not well understood. this study focuses on inauthentic social media accounts as a component of information operations to consider how they harness the sociotechnical infrastructure of social media platforms for their benefit. the accounts that we analyze were publicly suspended by twitter for this research is a collaboration between the emcomp lab and datalab at the university of washington and was supported by national science foundation grant and office of naval research grants n and n . author’s addresses: ahmer@uw.edu, lgs @uw.edu, kstarbi@uw.edu permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee pr ovided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. abstracting with credit is permitt ed. to copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. request permissions from permissions@acm.org. - / /november – art $ . copyright is held by the owner/author(s). publication rights licensed to acm. https://doi.org/ . / mailto:ahmer@uw.edu mailto:lgs @uw.edu mailto:kstarbi@uw.edu https://doi.org/ . / : a. arif et al. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, vol. , no. cscw, article , publication date: november . being affiliated with the internet research agency (ru-ira), a russian organization based in st. petersburg that has been formally indicted by the u.s. government for engaging in professional propaganda, including hiring full-time employees to use social media accounts while pretending to be u.s. citizens [ ]. despite mounting allegations, the tactics used by the social media accounts linked to these efforts have not yet been systematically examined. we investigate how these ru-ira affiliated accounts participated in an online discourse about the #blacklivesmatter movement and shootings in the u.s. during . we did not select this discourse or collect our initial data with the intent to study information operations. instead, we had previously scoped and analyzed this data in work examining “framing contests” within politically charged discourse on twitter [ ]. later, when twitter released a list of ru-ira affiliated accounts during formal hearings with the u.s. house of representatives select committee on intelligence [ ], we recognized several accounts from our earlier work. this led us to ask ourselves: were more of these accounts present in the data we collected, and if so, with whom did they interact, and what were they doing? we approach these questions from a cscw perspective, adapting methods from the field of crisis informatics [ , , ] to analyze both the large-scale interactions between these accounts and other members of these online communities, and the specific online actions that the operators of these accounts took as they worked to infiltrate and influence these communities. to answer the first of our questions—if russian information operations were active in the #blacklivesmatter discourse—we used a network graph of retweets to learn that at least of these accounts did have a meaningful presence within the information flows of this discourse. the graph also revealed that different ru-ira accounts were participating on both “sides” of the conversation—within two structurally distinct communities. then, to understand what these ru- ira accounts were doing, we launched a multi-sited qualitative investigation into the messages, personas, and interactions of these accounts. as we immersed ourselves in their content, our questions about what these accounts were doing evolved. we asked: who did these accounts attempt to mimic? what did these accounts do to produce and maintain their personas? what were these personas used to model and project in the discourse that we studied? to what extent did these ‘performances’ seem to adhere to a common script or set of constraints and where did they deviate from each other? addressing these questions contributes to a fuller account of the dynamics that emerge between information operations and those who use social media platforms for cooperative work such as grassroots political organizing [ ], disaster response [ , , ], and more broadly the collective activity to consume and elevate breaking news [ ]. our findings suggest that information operations were occurring in this context and that while social media platforms may intend to bring us together, at least some of these platforms are being targeted, deliberately, to pull us apart. on another level, this research helps us see that the ‘work’ these accounts were doing to facilitate information operations goes beyond publishing biased information. the work can also be seen as an improvised performance being carried out by an account operator (or, perhaps, a small team of operators) to try and ‘inspire’ the online communities they target. these performances can involve connecting to cultural narratives that people know, enacting stereotypes, and modeling how to react to information. this has implications for platform designers as they consider the strategies they will use—or more specifically, the policies they will create to guide the strategies they will use—to address information operations. acting the part: examining information operations within #blacklivesmatter discourse : proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, vol. , no. cscw, article , publication date: november . literature review in this literature review, we first provide background on information operations generally and on their emerging use in the online sphere. within that accounting, we highlight a specific (theorized) goal of information operations related to the concept of disinformation that is relevant to the study presented here, and explain how our research contibutes to better understanding that goal and the tactics used to achieve it. finally, we explain how approaching this topic from a cscw lens helps to conceptualize the activities of these accounts as a type of online “work” conducted by an information operator (or agent) in interaction with an online crowd. . information operations information operations is a term employed by the u.s. intelligence community to describe actions taken to disrupt the information streams and information systems of a geopolitical adversary [ ]. these actions focus on degrading the decision-making capabilities of others through non rational means (e.g. deception and psychological warfare) [ , ]. unlike ‘information warfare’ which is generally conducted during actual combat, information operations can be carried out in peacetime environments to influence civil affairs [ ]. consequently, these operations are increasingly considered a ‘soft’ yet formidable alternative to ‘hard power’ or ‘hard warfare’, targeting perception and cognition rather than launching physical attacks on infrastructure [ , , ]. some academics [ , , ] and journalists [ ] have theorized that a primary or secondary goal of many information operations is not necessarily to convince someone of something, but to strategically direct discourse in ways that “kill the possibility of debate and a reality-based politics” [ ]. by eliciting confusion, division, disenchantment, and paranoia, information operations can potentially serve to silence political dissent, enable historical revisionism, and hinder collaboration [ , , ]. both journalists and former intelligence professionals have suggested that such efforts can be tied to historical strategies of dezinformatsiya [ , , ], a russian term that translates to disinformation and describes the intentional spread of false or inaccurate information meant to mislead others about the state of the world. disinformation can therefore be viewed as a specific form of information operation that has its historical roots in tactics initially developed and deployed by the soviet union [ , ]. these tactics have been characterized as having an ‘ideological fluidity’ allowing them to overlap with a range of oppositional political groups—with the goal of fostering social division [ ]. the core of these tactics involves harnessing existing public discontent by amplifying reductive social interpretations that confirm existing beliefs, support desired conclusions, or prompt certain strong emotions regarding groups of people and events [ , ]. by strategically and opportunistically tapping into latent social fractures—as in cases surrounding the ku klux klan as well as the aids and ebola epidemics—trust in civil institutions and information intermediaries can be undermined [ , , ]. the clandestine nature of information operations means that our current understanding of the relationship between existing social rifts and disinformation tactics remains speculative. our work empirically examines this relationship by systematically exploring what ru-ira affiliated accounts were doing in a discourse that is already deeply segregated in terms of politics and race. . information operations on social media the announcements by facebook, twitter and tumblr [ , , ] reveal that social networking sites have become a front for information operations—a front that can be accessed from nearly anywhere in the world, by nearly anyone, and where users may be particularly vulnerable. : a. arif et al. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, vol. , no. cscw, article , publication date: november . researchers have noted that the interactivity afforded by these social computing systems can allow information operations to produce emergent and self-reinforcing effects [ , ]. moreover, this new media ecosystem is dominated by increasingly partisan news sources [ ], political homophily [ , ], and algorithmically derived newsfeeds being skimmed by audiences that are trying to cope with the cascades of information before them. these structural issues can contribute to the effectiveness of information operations, including disinformation. at the same time, increasing protection against information manipulation on these platforms risks undermining the free speech and open discourse foundational to democracies [ , ]. . information operations as collaborative work researchers have noted that the ’work’ of information operations on social media is, in principle, collaborative in the sense that high-level digital marketing strategists and political clients work together to design campaign objectives which are then implemented and shaped by a multitude of different actors [ ]. tucker et al. [ ] partially capture the complexity of this assemblage by noting how bots, fake-news websites, conspiracy theorists, trolls, highly partisan media outlets, the mainstream media, influential bloggers, and ordinary citizens are now all playing overlapping—and even competing—roles in producing and amplifying propaganda in the social media ecosystem. relevant here, these authors note that hired trolls or anonymous influencers that use fake online profiles to support disinformation campaigns are a relatively understudied set of actors partially due to the difficulties involved in identifying them [ ]. our research helps to address this gap. although impersonating others to spread harmful narratives is an old practice (e.g. the forged pamphlet, protocols of the learned elders of zion that was used to justify anti-semitic agendas) [ ], its intersection with the networked media environment is not well understood. what we do know is that impersonation is now being used to amplify racist narratives [ , ] and mobilize digital workers being paid to act like grassroot activists in a variety of work arrangements. for instance, rongbin han’s research [ ] on the digital political operations of china’s “fifty-cent army” surfaces efforts to incentivize state-sponsored workers to act like “spontaneous grassroots supporters” in online discussion boards. in contrast to han’s study— which found rigid work arrangements producing unnatural bot-like activity—corpus ong et al.’s research in the philippines context [ ] revealed how a hierarchized group of professional political operators used fake online personas in ways that emphasized individualization and flexibility to conduct an information operation. in our research, we analyze this phenomenon of coordinated impersonation within an online discourse or activist community from a cscw perspective—considering this activity as a type of online “work” conducted by an information operator (or agent) in interaction with an online crowd. this lens allows us to conceptualize how this collective activity includes other collaborating agents as well as more sincere activists who may not recognize that they are interacting with political agents. it also allows us to reveal this work as an improvised performance that both reflects and shapes the discourse within which it is embedded. background our initial data for this study was not collected with the advance intent of studying information operations in relation to the #blacklivesmatter movement. rather, the seed data for this research was collected to facilitate prior related work that studied this discourse to learn about how digital activists frame events and competing social movements [ ]. just weeks after publication of that work, we realized that the communities we had studied had been targeted for online information acting the part: examining information operations within #blacklivesmatter discourse : proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, vol. , no. cscw, article , publication date: november . operations. this motivated us to return to this dataset to better understand how the work of those information operators intersected with the activities of online activists within that conversation. . black lives matter and blue lives matter discourse in as boyd, wardle and others have argued [ , ], the production of online propaganda cannot be understood in isolation from its social, political, technological, and cultural context. this research examines the production of online propaganda on twitter in a context that intersects with issues of race, partisanship, gun violence, digital activism, and the failures of public institutions. specifically, we investigate the activities of one set of actors in an online discourse about the #blacklivesmatter movement and shootings in the u.s. during . the hashtag #blacklivesmatter was first coined in a facebook post by patrice cullors and alicia garza in in response to the acquittal of george zimmerman in the shooting death of trayvon martin [ ]. the post and correspondingly the hashtag spread virally across social media platforms and crystallized in an on- and offline social movement that brought conversations on race into mainstream discourse, particularly shootings of african-american men by police officers. on their webpage, the blm organizers describe blm as "an ideological and political intervention in a world where black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise" [ ]. over time, a counter-movement took shape on social media, specifically critiquing the blm movement for deprioritizing other lives (#alllivesmatter) and being founded in a “false narrative” that vilifies police officers (#bluelivesmatter) [ ]. this counter-movement gained momentum in , after shootings of police officers in baton rouge, louisiana and dallas, texas prompted a spike in the volume of tweets related to counter-frames, for example about #blacklivesmatter activists allegedly advocating for violence towards police [ , ]. . public announcements regarding information operations in this discourse was also taking place during a time ( ) when russian information operations in the us were particularly active, prior to the congressional investigations to highlight the problem [ , ] and the actions taken by the social media companies to address it [ , ]. in an april report, facebook acknowledged that their platform had been used for “information operations” by both state (i.e. russia) and non-state (i.e. wikileaks-affiliated) actors to influence the u.s. presidential election [ ]. after facebook’s announcement, representatives from other social media companies including twitter, tumblr, and reddit also came forward to acknowledge that their platforms had been utilized for information operations by the previously mentioned internet research agency (ru-ira), an entity known to be a russian ’troll farm’. in response to speculation surrounding the role of the ru-ira in the presidential election, twitter released a list of , ru-ira affiliated troll accounts in november [ , ]. after identifying these accounts and presumably to protect other users from further deception, twitter suspended the ru-ira accounts, removing their account profile and tweet history from public view. this illustrates how social media content associated with clandestine activities can be challenging to gather and study due to its ephemerality. our research team was able to overcome the ephemerality issue in this case because we had already curated, visualized, and intensely analyzed the relevant data described here. since the release of the initial list, twitter has announced the suspension of more ru-ira accounts (although the details of these accounts have not been released) and investigative reporting has provided a clearer image of how ru-ira troll accounts operated [ , ]. these reports indicate that the ru-ira employed carefully-vetted individuals with strong knowledge of : a. arif et al. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, vol. , no. cscw, article , publication date: november . american pop culture and fluency in english to pose as americans on social media and engage in conversations surrounding american social issues. journalists have specifically noted that the online conversation around blacklivesmatter and bluelivesmatter was a significant point of access for these information operations [e.g. ]. though these industry reports and journalistic accounts provided rapid and needed insight, there is still a need to more systematically understand what these strategies are and how they interact with online discourse communities. methods our interpretivist mixed-methods research iteratively analyzes our data by drawing on the guidelines and perspective of charmaz’s constructivist grounded theory [ ] to render a nuanced and flexible explanation of the activities enacted by ru-ira affiliated twitter accounts. acknowledging the scale and multi-sited nature of the networked discourse in which we study these accounts, we extend methods for conducting research on large-scale, online social interactions [ , , , ] and analyzing the spread of online misinformation [ , ] during crisis events. we start by generating a network graph of retweets that reveals structurally distinct communities in the politicized discourse we are studying. this guides our inquiry by allowing us to harness structural data (behavioral network ties) to narrow down our case- selection for in-depth qualitative research. we do this by cross-referencing a list of , suspended ru-ira affiliated accounts and systematically selecting the accounts that were well integrated into the information network (the ‘who’). we then conduct a qualitative analysis through bottom-up open coding on the digital traces left by these accounts (i.e. tweets, profiles, linked content and websites), writing analytical memoes, and reflecting on the research process to consolidate observations of how they were participating in this discourse (the ‘what’). juxtaposing these fragmented micro-level observations with the network graph—which illuminates the sub-networks these accounts were integrated with (the ‘where’)—helps us build up into a more macro-understanding of how these accounts worked to support an information operation. . data collection and filtering our initial dataset consisted of . m tweets that were posted and collected between december st and october th . we collected these tweets by tracking shooting-related keywords like “gun shot”, “gunman”, “shooter” and “shooting” using the twitter streaming api. we further filtered this set to tweets containing the terms “blacklivesmatter”, “bluelivesmatter”, or “alllivesmatter” (“*lm”) in the text. the resulting dataset of , tweets was used in prior work which established divergent and competing frames tied to the #blacklivesmatter and #bluelivesmatter hashtags [ ]. this curated dataset—i.e. limited to *lm tweets with shooting terms—enabled us to explore the role played by ru-ira affiliated accounts in a politically-charged online discussion related to activist movements and counter-movements in the u.s. in . importantly, this dataset is not representative of the broader blacklivesmatter discourse but is focused on discourse related to violent offline events that included shootings of african americans by police officers and shootings of police officers by an african american. to focus our investigation on accounts that demonstrated some level of sustained engagement and influence in the conversation, our final filtering step involved limiting our analysis to accounts with a retweet degree (sum of how many times an account was retweeted and how many times an account retweeted other accounts) greater than one. this final step produced , accounts, who were responsible for , of the tweets in our “*lm” dataset. acting the part: examining information operations within #blacklivesmatter discourse : proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, vol. , no. cscw, article , publication date: november . . network analysis we iteratively visualizated retweet flows between the , accounts by constructing a network graph (see figures and ) in which we defined nodes to be twitter accounts and directed edges to be retweets between accounts. we used the force atlas layout in gephi [ ] to determine the visual layout of this graph. the retweet flows between these accounts consisted of , retweets. to formalize structural observations of the network, we used the infomap optimization of the map equation to systematically detect communities in the graph, ultimately producing two main communities (“clusters”) [ , ]. we examined the effect of tuning infomap parameters such as the inclusion of nested subclusters and overlapping modules; however, these did not significantly alter the extreme separation of the two main communities of the graph, and we thus ran the infomap analysis specifying a directed graph with all other parameters at the default setting. to categorize and contextualize these clusters, we applied methods used in our prior work [ ], examining the most frequently appearing hashtags in the account descriptions and supplementing this with the most-followed accounts in each cluster. this established that the two clusters could be categorized as roughly divided across american political lines (right-leaning and left-leaning). finally, we located the ru-ira accounts in the graph. more details on this process and its results are included in the findings section. . identifying ru-ira accounts having established the broader context of the retweet graph, we next looked for the ru-ira accounts. to identify ru-ira-affiliated accounts in this dataset, we relied on a list of , suspended ru-ira accounts released by twitter in november as part of their testimony before the u.s. house of representatives permanent select committee on intelligence [ , ]. in the initial keyword-filtered dataset, cross-referencing with twitter’s list revealed that ru- ira accounts from twitter’s list were present in the data—the subset of ru-ira troll accounts who tweeted at least once with #blacklivesmatter, #bluelivesmatter, or #alllivesmatter. after filtering by retweet degree and limiting to the two large communities as described above, the number of ru- ira accounts in our dataset was reduced to . we can summarize this subset as the ru-ira accounts who participated via retweeting or being retweeted at least twice in the network. as described above, the purpose of this filtering was to find those accounts that were relatively well integrated into the information network, meaning that this subset of ru-ira accounts generally interacted more with the network surrounding them. though this limited the number of ru-ira accounts we examined, it allowed us to focus our subsequent qualitative analysis on those accounts that likely had greater visibility and perhaps greater potential for influence within the network. . qualitative analysis after examining the position of known ru-ira accounts in relation to other accounts in the network, we began an analytic accounting of how these accounts participated in *lm discourse. these accounts produced tweets (retweeted , times) in our *lm collection, which we used as an initial sample in our qualitative inquiry. this data helped us develop some initial interpretations, but our constructivist grounded approach required further data collection via theoretical sampling to check, fill out and extend our theoretical categories. we therefore supplemented our analyses using data from the internet archive’s wayback machine, a free and open-source internet archive that save webpages [ ] through a variety of web crawls being run by different programs. searching this archive, we were able to manually retrieve timeline snapshots—including profile content as well as , tweets and retweets—for these accounts. while timelines for these accounts are not systematically preserved, this content provides : a. arif et al. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, vol. , no. cscw, article , publication date: november . a window into the ru-ira trolls’ digital presence in ways that mitigate the limitations of keyword sampling and thus complement our other data. the snapshots also allow us to see how each account presented itself, including elements like profile images that were otherwise unavailable since twitter had suspended the account. we considered three main units of analysis (in addition to the network graph). first, we examined profile data—i.e. the display pictures, background images and profile descriptions of the ru-ira accounts. second, we considered tweets with a focus on the original content produced by these accounts, including embedded images such as memes. we also paid close attention to cases in which these accounts retweeted each other. third, we considered the external websites, social platforms and news articles these accounts linked to in an effort to “follow the person” [ ] to attain a more holistic understanding of the disinformation campaign we were studying. each of these types of data was examined, segmented and summarized through an initial round of open coding. our codes focused on actions visible in the data and leveraged our prior contextual knowledge from having studied this particular #blacklivesmatter-related discourse. these initial codes which fragmented the data were then drawn together through analytical memoing and clustering to form themes and categories. . methodological challenges this study confronted three main methodological challenges that must be understood to interpret our findings correctly. first, the seed twitter data we used to generate our network graph is both incomplete (due to rate limits) and biased (because of the shooting related terms we tracked). as a result, our findings are not intended to be representative of the overall #blacklivesmatter conversation. rather, we have a portion of a particular online discourse that invokes the movement in conjunction with incidents of violence during . similarly, due to the incomplete nature of our data, we cannot and do not seek to quantitatively assess the impact ru-ira activities and contributions had on even this one discourse. our goal is to understand how ru-ira content was designed to interact with this discourse—which we already understand to be polarized and made up of a heterogenous web of actors who are speaking to different interests and values. second, it is important to note that the identification and suspension of ru-ira affiliated accounts is likely part of an evolving and ongoing effort at social media companies. we do not have access to twitter’s methodology for identifying these accounts, but we do know that at least one of the , accounts was revealed to be a false positive (i.e. unaffiliated with the internet research agency) [ ]. moreover, twitter has identified additional ru-ira accounts since the release of this initial list [ ] but has not made information on these accounts publicly available to our knowledge. independently, we have tracked more accounts being suspended in both clusters—but particularly on the right—since we conducted this analysis (although we cannot infer that these accounts were ru-ira affiliated). consequently, we wish to caution readers from drawing any false equivalencies from the fact that we located and subsequently examined ru-ira accounts in the left-leaning cluster and in the right-leaning cluster. third, despite the generally presumed persistence of social media content, the content associated with clandestine activities is prone to ephemerality, creating challenges for research [ , ]. our multi-sited research approach—using of internet archive data, examining linked websites and considering the activities of these accounts on other social platforms—attempts to address these challenges by acknowledging that information operations on these platforms are interconnected and interrelated activities. acting the part: examining information operations within #blacklivesmatter discourse : proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, vol. , no. cscw, article , publication date: november . findings . structural analysis: positioning across political lines we now return to the accounts in the dataset identified in section . which both tweeted with an *lm keyword and were well-integrated into the retweet network. figure illustrates each step of our analysis of the information flow graph, where the , twitter accounts are nodes and the , retweets between these accounts are directed edges. in our first step, we visualized the structure of the graph, noting that the majority of nodes are concentrated in two relatively distinct clusters. this observation suggests homophily in the accounts retweeting each other. to solidify this, our next step was to use a community detection algorithm to systematically identify clusters. specifically, we used the infomap algorithm, an optimization of the map equation that assigns nodes to a community using a greedy algorithm that optimizes flow (in this case retweets) between nodes. the results of this step supported our earlier observation of structural homophily: . % ( , ) of the nodes are grouped in two large clusters in the center of graph containing . % and . % of the nodes. we focus our remaining investigation on these two clusters (colored pink and green in figure ). our final step was to understand who was in the clusters. to do this, we used salient account characteristics—the top hashtags in the accounts’ profile descriptions as well as the most- retweeted accounts by cluster—to classify and contrast the two clusters (shown in table ). in both clusters, the number of accounts with a hashtag in the user description ranged from . % to . %. this analysis revealed that our graph was roughly divided along political lines. the most frequently occurring hashtags in the pink community bios were #blacklivesmatter, #imwithher (expressing support for democratic presidential candidate hillary clinton), and #blm (a shortening of #blacklivesmatter). #blacklivesmatter is the top hashtag by a significant amount. we also see that left-leaning journalist and activist @shaunking and pro-blm news account @trueblacknews are in the top ten most-retweeted accounts of this community. therefore, we categorize this cluster as broadly left-leaning on the u.s. political spectrum. in contrast, the most frequent hashtags in the green community were #trump , #maga, and # a, where #trump and #maga indicate support for republican presidential candidate donald trump and # a indicates support for the right of private citizens to own guns. nearly % of the accounts in this cluster had #trump in their user descriptions. we categorize this cluster as broadly right-leaning on the u.s. political spectrum. building upon previous work [ ], we infer that these two communities held divergent and competing frames surrounding officer-involved shootings and the black lives matter and blue lives matter movements. next, we identify accounts from within our data that were associated with the ru-ira and examine their location within the retweet network graph. in total, there were ru-ira accounts within our dataset but only of these appeared in our retweet network graph (limited to accounts with a retweet degree of at least two and within the two clusters). of these accounts were in the left (pro-blm) cluster and of these accounts were in the right (anti-blm) cluster. fig. . from left to right: using force atlas to visualize retweet flows, identifying clusters with infomap, and using cluster characteristics to label communities : a. arif et al. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, vol. , no. cscw, article , publication date: november . table . overview of accounts in the two clusters color top hashtags in account descriptions number of accounts top accounts by retweet count pink blacklivesmatter ( . %), imwithher ( . %), blm ( . %), uniteblue ( . %), feelthebern ( . %), allblacklivesmatter ( . %), bernieorbust ( . %), neverhillary ( . %), nevertrump ( . %), freepalestine ( . %) trueblacknews ( ), yarashahidi ( ), shaunking ( ), shaunpjohn ( ), bleepthepolice ( ), crystal johnson ( ), drjillstein ( ), meakoopa ( ), kharyp ( ), tattedpoc ( ) green trump ( . %), maga ( . %), a ( . %), tcot ( . %), trump ( . %), neverhillary ( . %), makeamericagreatagain ( . %), nra ( . %), trumptrain ( . %), bluelivesmatter ( . %) prisonplanet ( ), cernovich ( ), lindasuhler ( ), markdice ( ), drmartyfox ( ), _makada_- ( ), andieiamwhoiam ( ), lodisilverado ( ), blkman trump ( ), jaredwyand ( ) these accounts also demonstrated a wide range of engagement: @bleepthepolice was retweeted times by distinct accounts on our graph while six ru-ira accounts were not retweeted at all. the top-ten most prominent ru-ira accounts by retweet count—such as @bleepthepolice, @crystal johnson, and @blacknewsoutlet on the left and @southlonestar, @ten_gop, and @pamela_moore on the right—are highlighted in table . cross-referencing tables and , we note that in the left cluster, two ru-ira accounts (@bleepthepolice and @crystal johnson) are among the left cluster’s most-retweeted accounts. figure highlights the trajectories of retweets of ru-ira accounts (orange) in the rest of the graph (blue). of the , total retweet edges on the graph, , ( . %) were retweets of ru-ira accounts. we do not attempt to tackle the question of the influence of ru-ira accounts with this graph, but rather to illustrate their position in the ecosystem. while we cannot speak to their impact, we can use this graph to examine where their content circulated and, in tandem with qualitative analysis, identify their tactics and apparent coordination practices and situate these within our current knowledge of information operations. an initial—and striking—observation is that there were clearly ru-ira accounts embedded in both clusters, meaning that ru-ira content was retweeted on both “sides” of the conversation. furthermore, we can see that while ru-ira content spread throughout each community—and in some cases was relatively highly retweeted—it very rarely moved between them. informed by prior work examining divergent framing [ ], this suggests an effort by the ru-ira to purposefully embed themselves in two distinct communities on either side of a highly charged framing conflict. acting the part: examining information operations within #blacklivesmatter discourse : proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, vol. , no. cscw, article , publication date: november . table . prominent ru-ira accounts ordered by cluster and number of retweets fig. . highlighting retweets of known ru-ira accounts (orange) compared to retweets of the rest of the graph (blue). we can summarize these findings by stating that while ru-ira content was clearly broadcast to both clusters, the ru-ira content that circulated in each cluster originated from two distinct groups of ru-ira accounts. with the inference that these communities hold oppositional and incompatible beliefs surrounding officer-involved shootings and race, this suggests that the ru- ira accounts tailored content to each community. this aligns with previous literature claiming that current disinformation tactics are ideologically fluid and seek to exploit social divides [ , ]. we also note that that while the presence of orange nodes and edges appears larger in the left- leaning cluster, the limitation of our original dataset and the curated list of ru-ira accounts provided by twitter prevent any quantitative comparisons between the two sides. in other words, this graph provides a window into ru-ira activity and patterns but does not determine relative impact. handle cluster (left or right) number of tweets in dataset number of retweets in cluster follower count @bleepthepolice l , @crystal johnson l , @blacknewsoutlet l , @gloed_up l , @blacktolive l , @nj_blacknews l , @blackmattersus l , @southlonestar r , @ten_gop r , @pamela_moore r , : a. arif et al. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, vol. , no. cscw, article , publication date: november . . production of inauthentic identities our network analysis reveals that ru-ira affiliated accounts interacted with two different networked audiences in this large-scale discourse (politically left leaning and right leaning). for the remainder of our analysis we will focus on the orange nodes in figure to understand the nature of these interactions and how these accounts adapted to fit within the two structurally distinct communities. we begin by considering how these accounts presented themselves. this helps us understand how processes of feigning authenticity have evolved and adapted to social media environments, which contain less static and more user-driven content production and a networked architecture that blurs the lines between contexts like entertainment and news consumption. this also helps us triangulate the extent to which the ru-ira accounts in figure intentionally targeted different audiences, since how the operators of these accounts attempted to portray themselves reflects their imagined audience [ , ]—i.e. the mental pictures people construct about others to guide self-presentation. just as writers imagine media audiences appropriate to their topic and form, and use textual cues to invoke those audiences into being [ ], the differences and similarities across ru-ira profiles reveals who these accounts were attempting to write to and deceive. . . profiles: like many other social media participants, ru-ira affiliated twitter accounts constructed user profiles to portray both an interesting and authentic self. these profiles were reproduced on other platforms like facebook and tumblr, suggesting an effort to build and maintain consistent online personas. we observed four systematic patterns of forged profiles. the first two were the establishment of ‘the proud african american’ as a political identity, on the one hand, and the articulation of ‘the proud white conservative’, on the other. these two patterns consisted of accounts that presented themselves as the personal twitter accounts of real and ordinary citizens within their communities. these accounts used cultural, linguistic, and identity markers in their twitter profiles to align themselves with the shared values and norms of either the left- or right-leaning clusters. for instance, accounts in the left-leaning cluster that fell in this category consistently used display pictures to present themselves as african americans coming from locations such as chicago, new jersey, and richmond, virginia with profile descriptions such as: @trayneshacole: love for all my people of melanin. your black is beautiful! #mypussymychoice #blackgirlsmagic #blacklivesmatter @crystal johnson: it is our responsibility to promote the positive things that happen in our communities. @ mysquad: no black person is ugly #blacklivesmatter #staywoke accounts in the right-leaning cluster tended to use photographs to present themselves as white men and women living in texas or other southern states who were interested in firearms and the right to bear them, using profile descriptions like: @thefoundingson: business owner, proud father, conservative, christian, patriot, gun rights, politically incorrect. love my country and my family # a #gop #tcot #wakeupamerica @pamela_moore : southern. conservative. pro god. anti racism @usa_gunslinger: they won't deny us our defense! whether you're agree with me or not, you're welcome here! if you don't want to be welcomed, go f*ck yourself. acting the part: examining information operations within #blacklivesmatter discourse : proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, vol. , no. cscw, article , publication date: november . these profiles can appear to be the online personas of real african and white americans because they appeal to creative self-expression and caring for others. another part of what can make these personas intuitively ‘fit’ comes from how they invoke stereotypical thinking by articulating african and white americans as binary groups that are internally homogenous with respect to politics. in the past, such dichotomizations have been directly and indirectly constructed by media portrayals elsewhere [ , ]. but by exploiting the participatory and interactive nature of social media, imaginary others can be brought to life in new ways by information operations in order to sustain and amplify these dichotomizations [ ]. the third and fourth patterns mirrored the first two, but enacted organizational accounts for grassroots political and media groups from these respective “sides”. for instance, accounts in the right-leaning cluster adopted names like @tpartynews, using a "tea party" teapot logo in the colors of the american flag and acting as a conservative news source. similarly. @ten_gop, a well-known ru-ira affiliated account [ ] that appeared in our dataset, described itself as the “unofficial twitter of tennessee republicans. covering breaking news, national politics, foreign policy and more. #maga # a”. in the left-leaning cluster, these accounts presented themselves as alternative media sources for racial justice. these accounts emphasized localness, frustration with mainstream media, and crowd participation, respectively, with profile descriptions like: @nj_blacknews: latest and most important news about new jersey black community @blackmattersus: i didn't believe the media so i became one. @blacktolive: we want equality and justice! and we need you to help us. join our team and write your own articles! dm us or send an email: blacktolive@gmail.com these accounts often linked back to their own websites, which suggests an attempt to undermine traditional media in favor of alternative media websites that might have been setup to support the information operation. for instance, the account @dontshootcom links to the domain donotshoot.us, which describes itself as a tool for empowering grassroots activists: “don’t shoot is a community site where you can find recent videos of outrageous police misconducts, really valuable ones but underrepresented by mass media. we provide you with first-hand stories and diverse videos. our mission is to improve the situation in the us and the lives of its citizens, to do our best to help end inhumane and biased acts. we are here to empower you, give you a voice and help you get justice with all our might.” figure summarizes how ru-ira accounts used profile display pictures to foster identities that could attract and command attention from audiences with different political alignments and news consumption habits. viewing these images collectively in this manner reveals both convergence and divergence in the production dynamics governing how these identities were crafted. the consistent and similar nature of these fake identities (within any one of the single ‘quadrants’ below) suggests convergence: that perhaps a common script, manual or ‘brand bible’ [ ] may have been used to delineate the political stances, social background and personality traits of these accounts. ensuring this kind of brand or identity consistency aligns with professional practices of micro-targeting in marketing and american political campaigning that have evolved to take advantage of the capabilities of social media platforms [ ]. : a. arif et al. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, vol. , no. cscw, article , publication date: november . fig. . display pictures of ru-ira accounts arranged by categories. simultaneously, the differences in these identities (between the left/right or upper/lower sides of figure ) suggests efforts to engage in audience segmentation and having multiple audience touchpoints. for instance, by delivering either a personal identity or a more organizational one, ru-ira accounts collectively took advantage of how social contexts ‘collapse’ together on sites like twitter to promote messages to audiences through different points of access. researchers have noted that trying to balance these contexts through a single account opens the possibility of appearing inauthentic to one’s followers [ ]—a risk the ru-ira mitigated by having accounts specialize in different roles. . . tweets: beyond creating a fake profile, the ru-ira accounts produced tweets containing commentary, images, news and videos that helped shape, reproduce and solidify the political identities they enacted. ru-ira accounts with both ‘personal’ and ‘organizational’ profiles in the left-leaning cluster frequently tweeted to uphold the accomplishments and culture of african americans and share positive feelings around the black lives matter movement. for instance, @crystal johnson maintained a pinned tweet about how muhammad ali’s hollywood walk of fame star is unique for ‘hanging on a wall, not for anyone to step on’ and actively celebrated black history month by tweeting regularly about topics like african american women’s hairstyles and accomplishments in education. similarly, accounts like @trayneshacole, @gloed_up, @blacktolive, @robertebonyking and @blacknewsoutlet tweeted in support of entrepreneurship projects by african americans and locating missing black persons. the expression of personal opinions on events, and the use of humor and entertainment also featured prominently as these accounts also tweeted about music by african american artists and joked around movies like black panther and hidden figures in which african americans played prominent roles. similarly, accounts in the right leaning cluster tweeted to celebrate traditional american holidays, the american flag, and military service. for instance, @thefoundingson maintained a pinned tweet for #pearlharborremembranceday as “a reminder to the rest of the world that acting the part: examining information operations within #blacklivesmatter discourse : proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, vol. , no. cscw, article , publication date: november . american people cannot be easily broken”. similarly, @southlonestar also pinned a tweet that told the personal story of “nick [who] was paralyzed by an ied in afghanistan. wendy met him in va hospital and became his caregiver full-time. now these heroes are married”. moreover, just as left-leaning ru-ira accounts tweeted about certain movies and occasions like black history month, these accounts made it a point to celebrate traditional american holidays like thanksgiving and easter while commenting on television shows with hashtags like #thewalkingdead. another example from @southlonestar is illustrative here: “today is national peace officer memorial day. we honor those that paid the ultimate sacrifice #bluelivesmatter” other accounts like @usa_gunslinger and @karenparker followed similar patterns and used hashtags like #wednesdaywisdom to tweet pictures of snowmen holding up an american flag (see figure ) and children pretending to be police officers. fig. . sample tweets circulated by ru-ira accounts in separate clusters to cultivate trust. these examples highlight how information operations can invoke content that is not always amenable to fact-checking nor straightforward to problematize. the activities of these accounts included not only acts of ‘rational’ political persuasion like presenting arguments and true or false claims. they also involved representing and affirming the personal experiences, shared beliefs and cultural narratives of their audiences. this could help these accounts blend into the communities they targeted, and it could also help them tap into the social and emotional literacies that often guide people’s engagement with the public sphere. although the consistency of this content speaks to a certain level of rigid arrangements (e.g. accounts on the left ought to celebrate black history month), the content also serves to illustrate a level of spontaneity. for instance, multiple accounts demonstrated the ability to understand the nuances of american pop-culture and creatively adapt to trending topics to ‘build their brand’ (e.g. opining about movies, music and television shows). aligning with investigative interviews with former ru-ira employees [ ], we would suggest that these dynamic behaviors are a signal that these accounts were not fully automated bots—and that the workers operating these accounts had at least some agency to “improvise” as part of their work. . . coordination to build trust: on social media, interacting with streams of user-generated content produced by one’s personal network is central to exhibiting ‘evolving connectivity’ [ ] and cultivating trust [ ]. we did not observe explicit interaction between ru-ira accounts when they were in different clusters, but we did observe accounts from within the same cluster mentioning and retweeting each other over a variety of topics. for instance, for a researcher reading their content, the users @gloed_up, @bleepthepolice and @trayneshacole gave the : a. arif et al. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, vol. , no. cscw, article , publication date: november . impression that they were part of a social clique. their occasional, casual interactions projected authenticity while also enabling them to better manage their audience’s attention by generating ‘buzz’ around certain topics such as protests or other news items. figure below furnishes an example that succinctly captures the flavor of interactions between these accounts. fig. . three ru-ira accounts retweeting each other. in this example, @bleepthepolice tweeted out a graphical meme touting “girl power”, celebrating the march and asking if anyone is attending, perhaps with the goal of getting responses—and therefore engagement—from that account’s audiences. @trayneshacole answers that call with a tweeted reply message pleading for black men to get more involved in women’s rights. later, @gloed_up—whose screen name is - -woke-af—retweets both tweets. this example shows the three ru-ira accounts interacting with each other to create the illusion of organic engagement. retweet flows provide an incomplete picture of how ru-ira accounts supported each other’s activities. a richer window into understanding how the ru-ira coordinated and provided mutual support to each other to appear as authentic activists and influencers comes from @blackmattersus. a website associated with this account was promoted on twitter by @crystal johnson, and the site in turn credits crystal johnson as a writer who interned at nbc: “crystal johnson has been with black matters since october . her passion is giving voice to the community. during her undergrad, crystal took an internship with the local nbc affiliate weyi. in she moved to atlanta to help start a new project called blackmatters. she is among the most active members of blackmatters.” aligning with journalistic investigations by craig silverman [ ], we also observed that @blackmattersus took the step of creating and promoting multiple meetups, possibly to create links—or project the illusion of having links—with real, local organizing groups. these meetup related efforts were also supported by accounts like @crystal johnson who recruited volunteers and @blacktivists who set up a ‘black unity march’. @blackmattersus: if you are against #policebrutality #racism #incarceration #oppression take part in #blacklivesmattermarch <link to meetup> @blackmattersus: support black owned small business at this one stop shop expo event!!! #blm #blacklivesmatter <link to meetup> acting the part: examining information operations within #blacklivesmatter discourse : proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, vol. , no. cscw, article , publication date: november . @crystal johnson: we’re looking for good people who are ready to help us in organizing events around the country. dm for more info the blackmattersus website also put together a podcast on soundcloud called ‘skwad ’ to ‘gather strong black voices’ , which was promoted by accounts like @ mysquad which positioned themselves as interested in rap music. these examples illustrate how ru-ira accounts collaborated to feign legitimacy via multiple channels and platforms. . ru-ira participation in #*lm discourse we have described how ru-ira accounts carefully constructed fictitious identities as people and organizations with ethno-cultural backgrounds that systematically shifted depending on whether the account was embedded within the politically left- or right-leaning cluster. in this section we will summarize ru-ira content related to #blacklivesmatter, #bluelivesmatter and #alllivesmatter. we organize this content into three different patterns to show how a seemingly diffuse set of individual actors on social media worked together to amplify certain messages. . . modeling the ‘anti-police’ #blacklivesmatter protestor: each ru-ira account that we examined in the left-leaning cluster connected their african-american identity to being a #blacklivesmatter activist by tweeting extensively about police officers shooting unarmed african american men and women, including disabled persons and minors. these tweets frequently linked to stories from established media sources such as fox news and the new york times but also alternative media sources including conspiracy theory and ru-ira affiliated sites such as thefreethoughtproject and blackmattersus. the process of mixing ‘traditional’ and alternative media sources into a single content stream is notable because it can elevate the image and content of the more alternative sites, particularly for audiences that skim headlines to cope with high volumes of information. these accounts also used their political identities of african-american #blacklivesmatter activists to model an exuberant anti-police stance via tweets, profile background images, and occasionally account names. accounts like @bleepthepolice, @gloed_up, and @ mysquad combined hashtags like #blm and #blacklivesmatter, with #acab (short for all cops are bastards), #amerikkka, #badcop, #bleepthepolice, #cowardcops, #hateit, #killercops and #riot: @ mysquad: they don't hire anyone with an iq of over ' #staywoke #police #dumb #allcopsarebad #acab @gloedup: french #police are too corrupt, incompetent to fight terrorism #blacktwitter #blacktolive #blacklivesmatter #acab @crystal johnson: blue’s a job, that shit don’t matter! #blacklivesmatter! https://blackmattersus.com/ -meet-the-first-skwad- -podcast/ https://soundcloud.com/skwad http://www.foxnews.com/us/ / / /chicago-police-to-take-second-look-at-deadly-shooting-teen-with-antique- gun.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /nyregion/ -black-employees-at-new-york-fire-dept-cite-bias.html https://thefreethoughtproject.com/disturbing-video-shows-cops-shoot-suspect-walk-hostage-put- -rounds/ https://blackmattersus.com/ -major-mismatches-in-the-story-of-white-cop-raping- -yo-black-girl/ https://web.archive.org/web/ /https:/twitter.com/hashtag/staywoke?src=hash https://web.archive.org/web/ /https:/twitter.com/hashtag/police?src=hash https://web.archive.org/web/ /https:/twitter.com/hashtag/dumb?src=hash https://web.archive.org/web/ /https:/twitter.com/hashtag/dumb?src=hash https://web.archive.org/web/ /https:/twitter.com/hashtag/allcopsarebad?src=hash https://web.archive.org/web/ /https:/twitter.com/hashtag/acab?src=hash https://blackmattersus.com/ -meet-the-first-skwad- -podcast/ https://soundcloud.com/skwad http://www.foxnews.com/us/ / / /chicago-police-to-take-second-look-at-deadly-shooting-teen-with-antique-gun.html http://www.foxnews.com/us/ / / /chicago-police-to-take-second-look-at-deadly-shooting-teen-with-antique-gun.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /nyregion/ -black-employees-at-new-york-fire-dept-cite-bias.html https://thefreethoughtproject.com/disturbing-video-shows-cops-shoot-suspect-walk-hostage-put- -rounds/ https://blackmattersus.com/ -major-mismatches-in-the-story-of-white-cop-raping- -yo-black-girl/ : a. arif et al. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, vol. , no. cscw, article , publication date: november . fig. . example memes circulated by ru-ira accounts in the left cluster. figure above also illustrates how the memes these accounts presented favored an uncompromising and adversarial stance towards law enforcement. the use of these charged messages and vocabulary of hashtags in conjunction with the central political tag of #blacklivesmatter suggests an attempt by ru-ira accounts to connect with both existing discontent and amplify it by proliferating certain meanings around the #blacklivesmatter tag— similar to the phenomenon of hashtag drift [ ]. this activity feeds directly into attempts to frame #blacklivesmatter as an anti-police hate- group. from prior research [ ] we know that such framings were actively resisted and addressed by #blacklivesmatter activists while being proliferated within anti-blacklivesmatter discourse. by tapping into this larger reservoir of antagonistic discourses proliferating in american politics, these accounts amplified toxicity in public discussions. this is further supported by how these accounts invoked the competing hashtags #bluelivesmatter and #alllivesmatter to attack them. ‘calling out’ these hashtags illustrates how these accounts did not just speak to the communities that they were pretending to be a part of, but also aimed to communicate an antagonistic representation of those communities to others. @bleepthepolice: #bluelivesmatter is bs @trayneshacole: and y’all not saying #alllivesmatter when y’all are shooting up schools now are you? finally, it is significant that not all of the stories about police misconduct that were circulated by these accounts were verified or grounded in fact. one notable example in our data that highlights the creativity of these accounts, and which has been decisively debunked elsewhere [ ], relates to @ mysquad circulating gifs with the description “shocking video shows black teenage girl being sexually assaulted by nypd officer.” these gifs were framed as surveillance video footage showing a black teenager being assaulted by a white police officer, and they were also presented on @ mysquad’s tumblr account. following these gifs going viral, members of the online crowd began to refute and debunk this story. at this point blackmattersus tweeted see: http://blacklivesmattervermont.com/wp-content/uploads/ / /faq.pdf as an example http://blacklivesmattervermont.com/wp-content/uploads/ / /faq.pdf acting the part: examining information operations within #blacklivesmatter discourse : proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, vol. , no. cscw, article , publication date: november . and published a website article that linked to the gifs and attempted to refute the corrections [ ]. @ mysquad ultimately went on to issue an apology, stating: “it was absolutely insensitive of me to make those gifs. i was furious and stoned...originally i’ve got dis anonymous message asking me to make a post…” [ ] this example represents a creative and intentional attempt to inject false information into the #blacklivesmatter discourse. the apology suggests again that these accounts were not fully automated ‘throw-away’ bots since they were managing their ‘brand’, disguise, and audience by monitoring and responding to feedback. the involvement of the blackmattersus website illustrates how ru-ira accounts worked to sow anger and confusion over multiple channels and platforms. examined as a two-part act, the video incident functioned both to further stoke anti- police sentiments on the left and, once it was debunked, increase anti-blacklivesmatter sentiments on the right. . . promoting anti-blacklivesmatter discourse: diverging from their counterparts, ru-ira accounts in the right leaning cluster tweeted to both support #bluelivesmatter and #alllivesmatter and denigrate #blacklivesmatter. these tweets delegitimized the #blacklivesmatter movement by equating the meaning of the movement with propaganda and anti-police activities. @tpartynews and @ten_gop, for instance, engaged in this type of framing by tweeting out stories around the baton rouge and dallas shootings of police officers with titles like “mother of police shooting suspect blames #blacklivesmatter”, and “watch: #blacklivesmatter supporters interrupt a moment of silence for fallen police officers!” the personal category of ru-ira accounts in this cluster also attacked #blacklivesmatter more directly. @pamela_moore : black lives matter is a political construct, a hateful destructive ideology. it’s never been about black life. @karenparker : rt: if u point a gun at a cop & get shot, who’s stupid #bluelivesmatter @thefoundingson: black man intentionally drives through cops. that is hate that #blm and obama created #bluelivesmatter the additional examples provided in figure also highlight how these accounts made heavy use of aggressive memes and images. overall, these tweets play a complementary role with the content ru-ira accounts were propagating in the left leaning cluster. supporters and followers of the #blacklivesmatter hashtag could potentially see this charged content and use it in forming their perceptions of others and the possibility of civil dialogue. simultaneously, critics of the #blacklivesmatter movement could see ru-ira content that focused more on attacking police and less on the movement’s core messages. both groups of users were also being selectively presented with news and information from these accounts that possibly played to pre-existing beliefs and biases (e.g. #blacklivesmatter affiliated protesters behaving as looters and executing police officers / police officers sexually assaulting black citizens). in summary, ru-ira accounts were acting as both information distributors and antagonistic stereotypes of ethno-cultural others. https://blackmattersus.com/ -major-mismatches-in-the-story-of-white-cop-raping- -yo-black-girl/ https://blackmattersus.com/ -major-mismatches-in-the-story-of-white-cop-raping- -yo-black-girl/ : a. arif et al. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, vol. , no. cscw, article , publication date: november . fig. . ru-ira content about #blacklivesmatter in right-leaning cluster. . . converging to attack the ‘mainstream’ media: ru-ira accounts in both clusters converged by using #blacklivesmatter discourse and their constructed political identities to criticize the ‘mainstream media’. the @blackmattersus profile description and website slogan of “i didn’t believe the media so i became one” effectively summarizes this message, which was also carried forward by personal style ru-ira accounts on the left. these accounts mixed content that a) expressed frustration with how older traditional media institutions cover issues like officer related shootings and the #blacklivesmatter movement itself; and b) equated these long-standing institutions with tools of oppression. figure illustrates more and less direct versions of this message. the second tweet in this example shows @bleepthepolice (boosted by another ru-ira account) repurposing a message by @shaunking to hold up social media as a viable alternative to “the media”. fig. . examples of ‘left’ ru-ira tweets criticizing traditional media. ru-ira accounts in the right-leaning cluster echoed their counterparts in the left cluster using hashtags like #fakenews, #wearethemedia, #wakeupamerica and #cnnisisis. “propaganda is everywhere”, warned one account, after sending out a series of tweets criticizing mainstream media outlets for being the partisan mouthpieces of a corrupt global elite. the examples in figure illustrate how the ru-ira accounts took advantage of the fragmented media landscape in the u.s. by framing traditional outlets for being irrelevant distractions. accounts in this cluster acting the part: examining information operations within #blacklivesmatter discourse : proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, vol. , no. cscw, article , publication date: november . further appropriated #blacklivesmatter as a vector for such messages by linking the movement to globalist conspiracies. @pamela_moore : if we don’t stop george soros now, he will continue to drive divisive race baiting msm narratives & riots to undermine trump! #lockhimup @thefoundingson: while the nyt tells you how soros fights hate crimes his agenda incites hate towards police officers which results in tragedies #keithscott fig. . examples of ‘right’ ru-ira tweets criticizing traditional media. in summary, ru-ira accounts among both the left and right leaning clusters converged to position traditional media outlets as institutions which manufacture a false reality for masses of people. this aligns with previous speculations [ ] suggesting that undermining trust in established media sources can be a characteristic of disinformation, with the end goal of further destabilizing democratic discourse. discussion . information operations as collaborative improvisations information operations—including political propaganda, disinformation, and other forms of manipulation—on online platforms are a growing concern for political officials, platform designers, and the public at large. journalists, intelligence professionals, and researchers from diverse fields are converging to examine this phenomenon. in this paper, we analyze an extended campaign of information operations from a cscw perspective, applying a methodological approach that emerged from research on online interactions and collaborations in crisis events [ , , ] to examine these operations not simply as messages broadcast to audiences, but as interactions between an account operator and their audience—or, more fittingly, as a performance by one or more actors, on and through multiple social media accounts, from within and in interaction with an online community. our research suggests that these performances are not simply automated or even scripted, but are instead like an improvisation in the sense that an actor is given a set of constraints, but then dynamically adapts their performance in interaction with the crowd. considering the limits of our data, we cannot see how this work is explicitly coordinated within the internet research agency itself, but from our perspective we can see how the : a. arif et al. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, vol. , no. cscw, article , publication date: november . accounts enact particular kinds of online personas, how they interact with each other in the online sphere, and, to some extent, how they interact with the online communities that they infiltrated. this view allows us, both as researchers and as people who participate in these online conversations, to better understand these tactics, revealing some of the mechanisms they use to manipulate people and what some of their larger goals are, in terms of shaping online political discourse (specifically in the united states). it also illuminates some of the challenges that social media platforms face in attempting to defend against these operations. . nurturing division: enacting caricatures of political partisan accounts our findings show ru-ira agents utilizing twitter and other online platforms to infiltrate politically active online communities. rather than transgressing community norms, these accounts undertook efforts to connect to the cultural narratives, stereotypes, and political positions of their imagined audiences. understanding this performative aspect of ru-ira accounts is critical for understanding how the work of information operations not only includes activities of disseminating true or false information on social media, but also activities to reflect and shape the performances of other (not ru-affiliated) actors in these communities. taking a perspective based on the theory of structuration [ ], the impact of these accounts cannot be considered in a simple cause and effect type model, but instead should be examined as a relationship of mutual shaping or resonance between the affordances of the online environment, the social structures and behaviors of the online crowd, and the improvised performances of agents that seek to leverage that crowd for political gain. importantly, this activity did not limit itself to a single “side” of the online conversation. instead, it opportunistically infiltrated both the politically left-leaning pro-#blacklivesmatter community and the right-leaning anti-#blacklivesmatter community. though the tone of content shared varied across different accounts, in general these accounts took part in creating and/or amplifying divisive messages from their respective political camps. in some cases (e.g. @bleepthepolice), the account names and content shared reflected some of the most highly charged and morally questionable content. together with the high-level dynamics revealed in the network graph (figure ), this observation suggests that ru-ira operated-accounts were enacting harsh caricatures of political partisans that may have functioned both to pull like- minded accounts closer and to push accounts from the other “side” even further away. though we cannot quantify the impact of these strategies, our findings do support theories developed in the intelligence field that suggest one goal of specifically russian (dis)information operations is to “sow division” within a target society [ , ]. this study also offers some insight into how such an effort works, by leveraging the affordances and social dynamics of online social media. . the challenge of regulating through authenticity as social media platforms (e.g. twitter, facebook) begin to acknowledge the problem of information operations and to devote resources and attention towards addressing it [ ], one repeated refrain has been that these companies do not want to be “arbiters of truth” or seen as censoring political content. this is likely because they are wary of removing posts by ideological believers of that content. this is important here, because the vast majority of accounts in the conversations described in this research—the nearly , other accounts in our twitter collection—would likely fall into the category of ideological believers (not ru-ira agents). reluctant to take on the role of deciding what kinds of ideologies are valid and/or appropriate, the platforms are therefore faced with a challenge of developing other criteria for determining what kinds of activities to promote, allow, dampen, or prevent on their platforms. one recent acting the part: examining information operations within #blacklivesmatter discourse : proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, vol. , no. cscw, article , publication date: november . focus has been on “authenticity” [ ]—which could be defined as whether an account is who it pretends to be and whether the account believes the content it is sharing and/or amplifying. the ru-ira invested considerable time in developing online personas for their operations, yet these accounts do not qualify as authentic by these criteria. so, this developing strategy demonstrates a potential way forward that allows the platforms to walk the fine line between criticisms of rampant manipulation and concerns about censorship. still, our research suggests that those wishing to deceive are working hard to establish the appearance of “authenticity”. to underscore that point, personas featured in this research were “authentic” enough for @jack (twitter’s ceo) and at least one of our researchers to retweet, and we assume it will be challenging for platforms to determine authenticity for the vast number of active accounts. we do not know how difficult or easy it was for twitter to identify the ru-ira accounts featured here, but we can assume that developing mechanisms for determining authenticity—and even refining the criteria for what authenticity means—represents an important and challenging direction for future work. . information operations and the challenges ahead through interactions with and reactions from other users and the connections displayed by linking to their own network of websites, the ru-ira accounts developed unique and individual profiles. discerning between a legitimate social media profile and one constructed by the ru-ira is a complicated—and emotionally fraught—task. our own experiences of conducting this research have taught us that calling out and problematizing accounts as impersonators or information operators can be challenging, especially when those accounts align closely with one’s own values and worldviews. despite having a certain level of critical awareness, an understanding of the context, knowledge of populist rhetoric, and an “official” list of suspended accounts, we found ourselves experiencing doubt when linking some of these accounts with pejorative terms like ‘trolling’ and ‘propaganda’. this was especially true when we immersed ourselves with ru-ira data in the ways that most closely resemble how an ordinary social media user would encounter their content. crucially, we observed that our own biases made it difficult to problematize certain ru-ira accounts in the left-leaning cluster when we were analyzing their tweets. this highlights how the ways in which we make sense of information is significantly impacted by our self-identity and the ‘tribes’ [ ] we associate with. since these accounts tried to present themselves as members of our ‘tribe’ and speak to our truths (i.e. using information laden with progressive values shared by members of our research team), we were sometimes left in a state of doubt and confusion as to whether these left-leaning accounts were bad actors at all. we would express doubts concerning twitter’s methodology for identifying these accounts, requesting each other to rerun certain analyses, and generally searching for anchors to ground us and give us certainty. at one level, this provides another small piece of evidence to suggest that these tactics are effective at what many have argued they intend to do—sowing doubt, creating confusion. it also raises important questions for researchers and educators: what kinds of emotional and critical literacies do we need to cultivate to accurately evaluate credible profiles on social networks and effectively challenge information operations? how can we help users look past their individual interactions with inauthentic accounts to see the larger patterns of activity behind information operations? how can users become more critical of information produced through aggressive and reductive messages? while we support efforts by social media companies to take responsibility to curb propaganda on their platforms, we also feel that it is important for researchers to “intervene” in the sense of helping to call attention to these forms of manipulation : a. arif et al. proceedings of the acm on human-computer interaction, vol. , no. cscw, article , publication date: november . and to help the public (and social media companies) understand these phenomena, including how and where users are being targeted. cscw researchers, specifically, can help by furnishing conceptual frameworks for better understanding the activities of information operations as interactive, and in some ways collaborative efforts that enlist the online crowd (often without their knowledge) in their campaigns. conclusion this study examined the online activities of social media accounts affiliated with an organization that has been accused of functioning as part of the russian government’s intelligence and media apparatus [ , ]. we focus on the activities of these accounts—i.e. their information operations— within #blacklivesmatter discourse during , during the lead-up to the u.s. presidential election. our research demonstrates how these accounts presented themselves as “authentic” voices on both sides of a polarized online discourse, modeling pro- and anti-blacklivesmatter agendas respectively. we also show how these accounts converged to undermine trust in information intermediaries like ‘the mainstream media’. this work conceptually sheds light on how information operations use fictitious identities to reflect and shape social divisions. we conclude by highlighting both the need and the challenges of evaluating authenticity within social computing environments. acknowledgments this research is a collaboration between the emcomp lab and datalab at the university of washington and was supported by office of 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(apr. ) retrieved april th, from https://fbnewsroomus.files.wordpress.com/ / /facebook-and-information-operations-v .pdf [ ] marisol wong-villacres, cristina m. velasquez, and neha kumar. . social media for earthquake response: unpacking its limitations with care. in proceedings of the acm on human computer interaction , cscw, article (december ), pages. doi: https://doi.org/ . / [ ] samuel c. woolley and philip n. howard. . computational propaganda worldwide: executive summary. computational propaganda research project. oxford university, oxford, uk. received april ; revised july ; accepted september . running head: conceptualising social justice conceptualising social justice and sociocultural issues within physical education teacher education: international perspectives joanne hill, university of bedfordshire, bedford, uk. rod philpot, university of auckland, auckland, new zealand. jennifer l. walton-fisette, kent state university, kent, usa. sue sutherland, ohio state university, columbus, usa. michelle flemons, university of bedfordshire, bedford, uk. alan ovens, university of auckland, auckland, new zealand. sharon phillips, hofstra university, new york, usa. sara flory, university of south florida, tampa, usa. corresponding author: joanne hill institute of sport and physical activity research, university of bedfordshire, polhill avenue, bedford, mk dy, uk. joanne.hill@beds.ac.uk mailto:joanne.hill@beds.ac.uk running head: conceptualising social justice abstract background: physical education (pe) and physical education teacher education (pete) have a substantial literature base that advocates for students to develop a critical consciousness, appreciate multiple perspectives, and engage in actions to enhance social justice (tinning ). analysing sociocultural issues, critically reflecting on beliefs, knowledge, biography and values, and developing a sense of agency to enact change, have been recognised as an integral part of the pete knowledge base for some time (fernández-balboa ). however, there remain differences in how social justice itself is conceptualised and enacted. social justice is aligned heavily with critical and ‘post’ theories where taking action for justice, democracy and power are central; but social justice is also found in humanist beliefs in student-centredness and equality and has been co-opted by neoliberal forces that promote individual responsibility. while a lack of consensus is not in itself a problem (bialystok ), diverse definitions might contribute to confusion (randall and robinson ) and lead to uncertainty over what and how to teach for social justice. purpose: in order to work towards greater certainty around concepts of social justice in the pete community, this project sought to map variations in definition and conceptualisation of social justice and sociocultural issues among physical education teacher educators (petes) and physical education and sport pedagogy (pesp) educators, as part of a wider project on social justice and sociocultural perspectives and practices in pete. methods: pete and pesp faculty (n= ) in north america, europe, and australasia engaged in an in-depth interview, during which they were asked how they define social justice and sociocultural issues. additional information about participants’ social identity was collected. a constant comparative method of analysing participants’ definitions mapped a range of concepts building on the theoretical framework of neoliberal, humanist, critical and ‘post’ approaches to social justice. findings: the data demonstrate that there are a range of understandings about sociocultural issues and social justice. most commonly, some participants articulated a humanist approach to social justice by encouraging their pre-service teachers (psts) to have awareness of equality of opportunity in relation to gender, sexuality and/or racism. less prevalent, but strongly stated by those who conceptualised social justice in these terms, was the importance to take action for democracy, empowerment or critical reflection. the terms diversity and equality, framed in neoliberal and humanist discourses, were most commonly used within the united states (us), while critical pedagogy and alignment with critical and ‘post’ theories were more prevalent in australia and new zealand. conclusion: differences exist in the ways social justice is conceptualised in pete. while this can be attributed to the influence of local issues, it is also reflective of what intellectual tools, such as humanism or critical theory, are available for problematising social issues. the range of non-critical concepts found raises concern that psts are not getting the tools to enact social justice or tackle sociocultural issues. key words: teacher education, physical education, social justice, sociocultural issues running head: conceptualising social justice introduction for years, scholars have argued for the importance of physical education teacher educators (petes) to educate pre-service teachers (psts) about equality (e.g. evans ), sociocultural perspectives and issues (e.g. cliff ) and critical pedagogy (e.g. fernández- balboa ; philpot ). there is substantive physical education (pe) and pete literature that advocates for students to develop a critical consciousness, appreciate multiple perspectives, and engage in actions to enhance equity, democracy and social justice (felis- anaya, martos-garcia, and devís-devís ; tinning ). the quest for social justice in all education sectors (including pe) is complex, in part, due to differences in understandings of the concept and the relevance of context to any conceptual understanding (blackmore ). bialystok ( , ) recently described social justice as a ‘nebulous’ or ill-defined term generally progressive in nature and based on a ‘robust notion of democracy.’ what is currently done in classrooms in the name of education for social justice and the tangible outcomes of social justice oriented education are often unclear. in regard to the education sector, hytten and bettez ( , ) claim, [t]he more we see people invoking the idea of social justice, the less clear it becomes what people mean, and if it is meaningful at all. when an idea can refer to almost anything, it loses its critical purchase, especially an idea that clearly has such significant political dimensions. returning to the context of pete, randall and robinson ( ) propose that the diversity in definitions of social justice might contribute to confusion and result in petes being unsure what to teach, in turn leading to variation in what psts take to schools. although our schools continue to become more diverse within our global society, sociocultural issues are typically not a salient component of the ‘overt’ pete curriculum (cliff ) and social justice is not running head: conceptualising social justice consistently enacted. this paper, part of an international project investigating social justice in pete, explores how petes across seven countries conceptualised social justice and sociocultural issues. theoretical positions for conceptualising social justice there are a range of movements and theoretical perspectives through which social justice can be conceptualised. these range from psychological perspectives such as humanism, to a focus on the impact of capitalism on society (critical theory) and more recently to cultural explanations of inequity toward groups (e.g., feminism, queer theory, critical race theory, whiteness theory). the wide range of theoretical positions, such as those identified above, have formed the basis for social justice focused pedagogies such as action research (carr and kemmis ), critical reflection (smyth ), and transformative pedagogies (ukpokodu, ). these perspectives, along with the growing influence of neoliberalism on social justice, will be discussed. humanism ‘has at its core the belief that human interests and dignity should be of primary importance’ (marshall , ) and focuses on ‘self-actualisation’, a psychological theory that prioritises self-fulfilment of human needs. maslow ( ) posits that self-actualisation needs such as morality, creativity, and problem-solving sit at the top of the needs hierarchy. a humanistic educator attends to both the learning and emotional needs of each individual in their classroom, ensuring that teaching provides equality of opportunity through personalised education, and working within the constraints of their classrooms, schools, and communities to cater to the needs of the students they teach. humanism is based on trying to gain equality for the most disadvantaged individuals through uneven distribution of resources to those (individuals) who need it most. culpan and bruce ( ) describe the socio-critical new zealand curriculum as drawing from humanism; this approach may be running head: conceptualising social justice limited as it works within capitalism and therefore does not challenge the structures that create oppression. this critique of a humanist social justice approach is based in a second lens for theorising social justice stemming from the marxist critical theories of the frankfurt school. critical theory focuses on economic explanations of oppression, advocating for taking action against structures that lead to class domination. mclaren ( ) proposes that globalisation and capitalism are the most significant structures of social control that lead to international class domination. advocacy for social justice stemming from the critical theory tradition differs from humanism as the focus is taking action on structures that discriminate against specific groups in society. critical pedagogues challenge socially constructed structures that oppress marginalised others, rather than simply doing their best for students within these constraints. academics have also called on ‘post’ theories as theoretical lenses for explicating social justice. similar to critical theory, ‘post’ theories call for action on structures that create social injustice. a central tenet of ‘post’ theories is that knowledge is socially constructed rather than objective. for example, postmodernism advocates for the deconstruction and problematisation of knowledge through questioning the dominant representations of knowledge and knowers, challenging assertions of what is considered right and normal. as such, post theories raise questions about critical theory perspectives such as empowerment (ellsworth ). cho ( , ) suggests that ‘post’ theories provide a ‘‘language of possibility’ that moves away from economics to culture, shifting theories about the infrastructure (the unity of the productive forces and the relations of production), to the superstructure (particular historical systems of beliefs, religious, juridical, political…).’ problematising this, kincheloe and colleagues ( , ) propose that critical pedagogues need to focus on understanding how class ‘interacts upon multiple groups and sectors in running head: conceptualising social justice various historically specific ways.’ nevertheless, lather’s ( ) position that ‘post’ theories are part of the ‘big tent’ of critical approaches remains compelling for pe scholars working broadly on the ‘critical project’ or transformative pedagogies (tinning ), as will be discussed in the next section. recent examination of social justice as a concept draws predominantly from critical and ‘post’ theories. according to bell ( ), social justice goes much further than examining difference and diversity, to a deeper analysis of the systems of power and privilege that contribute to social inequality. while social justice cannot be captured by a single definition, some characteristics include democracy and political participation (bell ; bialystok ); understanding of power, oppression and empowerment (bell ; kincheloe ). bell ( ) proposes that social justice is both a process and a goal. in this conceptualisation, the process of social justice should include democracy and dialogue, enabled by opportunities to critically examine institutional, cultural and individual oppression. goals for social justice include empowerment, equal distribution of resources and social responsibility (bell ; hackman ). a not-so-new, but growing international force that challenges all theoretical positions on social justice stems from neoliberal ideology. at a superficial level, neoliberalism aligns with humanism due to a focus on self-actualisation and individualised education solutions through choice (e.g. private schools, outsourcing education). neoliberalism is marked by deregulation, open markets, economic liberalisation and privatisation in the belief that free markets can mitigate economic and social problems (ross and gibson ). in education, the emergence of charter and free schools, league tables, competition for students and standardisation of curricula are symptomatic of neoliberal ideology. the neoliberal mantra is that governments should be about providing opportunities and, to succeed, citizens need only to take personal responsibility for their own outcomes (ross and gibson, ). neoliberal running head: conceptualising social justice thinking positions individual responsibility rather than social responsibility as a means of equity and justice. according to bialystok ( ), if social justice is not well defined from a critical perspective, neoliberalism may try to co-opt it for its own aims. concepts of social justice in pete issues of social justice in relation to pe began to gain traction in the mid- s with critiques of pete and pe teachers (e.g. evans, ; kirk, ; tinning, ) and the identification of the hidden messages inherent in pe (bain ). the epicentre of research for social justice in pe and pete at that time can be traced back to deakin university in australia where david kirk and richard tinning worked in conjunction with a broader group of academics to conceptualise ite aimed at social justice, democracy, and equality. notwithstanding the prominent reference to critical theory in the seminal literature of the deakin diaspora (rizvi, ), neither critique nor pedagogies based on marxism or capitalism feature prominently in subsequent pe and pete literature focused on social justice (evans and davies, ). this is consistent with tinning’s ( ) call for a ‘modest’ critical pedagogy that resists exploitation within capitalism rather than resisting or rejecting capitalism. literature concerning social justice in pete confronts issues related to gender equity, diversity, and challenging unjust practices such as motor elitism (tinning, ). this scholarship primarily calls on post theories such as critical race theory and feminism. a recent review of years of socio-critical pe and pete research (felis-anaya, et al. , ) reports that most of the research in the review stemmed from ‘a postmodern ontology’. this is not to suggest a consensus position. fernández-balboa ( ) argues that the social justice agenda in pe is weakened as critical activists fragment their struggles into specific cultural battles. running head: conceptualising social justice in the last decade, scholars in pe and pete have critiqued the growing stamp that neoliberalism is imposing on pe and pete (macdonald ; fernández-balboa ). this draws attention to the impact that the free market and a focus on individualism and competition – central tenets of neoliberalism – have on pe. fernández-balboa ( ) claims that pe embodies neoliberal values through practices such as outsourcing, recontextualisation of concepts such as health, and the ‘scientisation’ of education research. while neoliberalism promotes upward mobility for individuals, azzarito, macdonald, dagkas and fisette ( ) suggest that the inequities perpetuated in pe as a result of neoliberalism impact most significantly on students from lower socioeconomic and cultural minority backgrounds. literature that explores how self-identified critical pete scholars understand social justice is instructive on the nebulous nature of the concept. muros ruiz and fernández- balboa ( ) report that of the teacher educators they interviewed, all of whom claimed to practise a critical pedagogy, more than half did not understand the main principles of critical pedagogy. philpot ( ) reports that teacher educators in a new zealand pete programme underpinned by a critical orientation had understandings that varied from a focus on challenging dominant taken-for-granted assumptions about health, pe and sport, to privileging democratic principles through student input in curriculum planning and assessment, to reflection on pedagogy choices. as critical pedagogy is only one way of approaching education for social justice, these studies suggest that even those who espouse a social justice orientation do so in different ways, for different groups, and to a greater or lesser extent. these multiple theoretical perspectives on social justice, and the concern that they are misapplied or misunderstood, prompt the aim of this paper: pete and pesp educators’ conceptualisations of sociocultural and social justice issues were explored. methodology running head: conceptualising social justice we conducted a critical interpretive qualitative research study, which was based on our social constructivist and transformative worldviews (creswell ). specifically, the broader project, of which this paper represents one element, researched with pete and pesp educators concerning how they understand their professional world and identify their subjective meanings of their experiences (creswell ). setting and participants the participants were pete and pesp educators who work in pete and pesp programmes across australia, canada, ireland, new zealand, sweden, the united kingdom (uk), and the us (see table for breakdown by country). purposive sampling (miles and huberman ) was utilised to recruit participants who identified as a physical and/or health educator in an ite or pesp programme. some initial participants were already personal contacts of the researchers, while others were found through snowball sampling (creswell ). email invites were sent out to mailing lists or through a search for relevant educator contacts on institutional web sites. pete and pesp programmes were included in the remit as some of the participants’ education systems have a + route into qualified teacher status involving an undergraduate non-teacher education specific degree followed by a graduate teacher education programme. participants did not need content knowledge of, or experience with, sociocultural issues. participants had a wide range of professional experiences, which varied with: length of time in the profession (ranging from one to over years), the type of institution employed (e.g., teaching/research-based, small/large institutions), educational backgrounds and subjects taught. all participants in this analysis are from, or currently work in, white majority, english speaking nations apart from one swedish pete. predominantly they identified as white, which reflects the field in general (flintoff, dowling and fitzgerald ). permission to conduct the study was obtained through researchers’ institutional running head: conceptualising social justice review boards/ethics committees and informed consent was granted prior to the start of the study. [table here] data collection data were collected through an informational survey, one-to-one semi-structured interview and course materials, such as syllabi, reading lists, and assessment instructions. the data utilised for this paper are from the informational survey and interviews. seven members of the research team conducted pilot interviews with participants in the us, three in the uk and two in new zealand in autumn . based on the data gathered from the pilot, the informational survey was developed and the interview guide revised for clarity following research team discussion. the remainder of the research was conducted in by the eight members of the research team. all eight are pete or pesp educators in higher education institutions. data from the pilot and research studies are utilised in the analysis. informational survey upon agreeing to participate in this research study, each participant completed an informational survey to provide context and background knowledge about themselves, which included geographic living experiences, educational degrees obtained, professional positions held in higher education, and a social identity profile. individual interviews semi-structured interviews of between and minutes commenced after the completion of the survey. the participants were asked primary questions, with follow up probes as needed. questions for the one-on-one interviews focused on educational background; beliefs, understanding and perspectives about social justice and sociocultural running head: conceptualising social justice issues; and pedagogy within pete programmes and courses related to social justice and sociocultural issues. the interviews occurred in person, by skype, or over the phone, and were audio-recorded and transcribed verbatim, resulting in over , pages of data. this paper concentrates on the interview conversations regarding participants’ definitions of social justice and sociocultural issues. specifically, they were asked: . how would you define social justice? how would you describe sociocultural issues? . what is your understanding and knowledge about social justice and sociocultural issues? data analysis and trustworthiness all interview data were imported into nvivo by the lead author and responses to the research questions and subsequent prompts concerning definitions and concepts of social justice and sociocultural issues were identified and isolated. analysis initially involved content analysis through deductive coding to four categories: a range of social justice concepts, social movements, alternative names for social justice education, and sociocultural issues. codes and categories were devised according to the literature informing the study, and inductive coding added further codes to these categories. this process resulted in over individual nvivo codes for various social justice concepts (e.g. equity), over for sociocultural issues (e.g. racism), for social movements (e.g. black lives matter) and eight for alternative names for social justice education (e.g. critical pedagogy). organised in this way, and taking bell’s ( ) construction of social justice as a goal and a process, data were interrogated for their alignment to neoliberal, humanist, critical, and ‘post’ perspectives and discourses influencing understandings of sociocultural issues. informed by concepts of discursive positions (jager and maier ), any participant’s position is one potential position that they might express and a participant may take up different positions at different running head: conceptualising social justice times. peer debriefing followed in order to check the categorisation and refine the meaning of the categories. the informational surveys were concurrently reviewed to support and enhance the description of each theme by comparing and contrasting participants’ backgrounds. trustworthiness of this research study was ensured by engaging in conversations among the researchers that questioned one another’s perspectives and interpretations, recording in our researcher journals, and maintaining an audit trail. all names are pseudonyms. for participants who are quoted in the following sections, the country in which they live, and where relevant for migrating educators, their region of origin, is noted. findings in the following sections, we report on the participants’ conceptualisations of sociocultural issues and social justice. we categorise their expressions of social justice as neoliberalist notion of individual responsibility; humanist awareness of diversity; from critical or ‘post’ perspectives, examining and challenging injustice; and taking action for justice. finally, we address some national differences in the conceptualisation of sociocultural issues. sociocultural issues were described by the petes as the issues that create a need for social justice. the most commonly discussed sociocultural issues were ethnicity/race/racism, gender, sexual orientation, class/socioeconomic status, and the body (disability and/or obesity). a smaller number talked about home life, religion, political participation, education access, and bigotry in general. although some alluded to an additive model (king ), whereby gender and class and race are sociocultural issues, only one participant, tracy (european living in the us), who researches social justice and equity, mentioned the intersectionality of sociocultural issues; for instance, how gender intersects with class and/or race in manifestations of inequality. one other, jeff (uk), who also has sociocultural research running head: conceptualising social justice interests, noted his own experiences in academia are a result of the combination of his social identities as white, cisgenderi, straight, middle-class. he indicated how this has provided him with privileges in attaining his academic position, and how his perspective might affect the way he teaches about social justice issues in pe and sport contexts. for social justice to be not merely a goal (bell ), it must be something that is enacted. the responses from the participants convey different conceptions of what social justice is, and what teaching for social justice may include. for the purpose of this paper we focus on the variation in conceptions of social justice. neoliberalism in concepts of social justice a small number of participants in the us and uk described a perspective on social justice which might be seen as reproducing privilege or a discourse of an entitlement society. they stated that it is important to ‘cover’ sociocultural issues, and were able to mention equal opportunities or create a ‘laundry list’ (henry, european living in us) of a number of ‘isms’, such as sexism or racism, but did not account for disparities in opportunity or outcome or explain structural causes of discrimination. some participants felt that society is generally equal and so they have no need to challenge structural injustices: they were ‘neutral’ on issues of justice because some people are ‘way too sensitive’ (cliff, us); that is, ‘we’re all the same’ (larry, us), and as a result ‘not getting involved’ is preferable (erica, us). for example, lucy (uk) commented that we need equal opportunities, but, reflecting on what she saw as insurmountable barriers to equality, questioned, ‘is it realistic for that to happen?’ others constructed discourses associated with individual responsibility. for example, in the following quote nicholas (uk) discussed ‘not really liking an entitlement-type society’: [i]f you want to achieve something then i thoroughly believe in presenting opportunities and allowing people to take those opportunities. i have quite a strong running head: conceptualising social justice sense of individual responsibility…because [my partner and i] both had to work quite hard for what we’ve got. the conversation with nicholas may indicate that he held generally liberal political views, but this quote draws upon neoliberal perspectives on equal opportunity and could be interpreted as reflecting a position of privilege. he expressed his experience of growing up in a rural working class environment and being the first member of his family to go to university, subsequently discussing how his experience of working hard shaped his perspective on individual responsibility. this position reflects recent common approaches in neoliberal educational discourse valorising individual merit (stewart ). humanism in concepts of social justice many participants’ knowledge and beliefs about social justice drew on humanistic discourse. specifically, they articulated that social justice required the acceptance of diversity and difference and a greater understanding of equality. accepting difference and diversity for nearly half the participants (including half those in the uk or us), social justice meant having the ability and capacity to accept differences and diversity of individuals. allan (us), for example, emphasised the need to be sensitive to a diverse student body, whereas beth (uk) believed in ‘allowing people to engage in the practices they want to engage in, without restrictions.’ jodie (uk) highlighted the importance of tolerance and not judging one another based on differences, and carrie (us) ‘getting outside your bubble.’ alli (uk) stressed the importance of accepting other people’s perspectives even when they differed from your own. alli learned this lesson from a student’s response to the / attacks in the us: ‘it taught me a lot about listening and having to accept other people’s perspectives even running head: conceptualising social justice though i didn’t agree with them…and it’s the notion of not judging somebody too quickly just because you wholeheartedly disagree with them.’. brian, who was born and raised in japan and has lived in the us since he was years old, described the differences and challenges of holding different personal and professional views on diversity. he contrasted his personal feelings about diversity with how he managed to talk about diversity in his professional life. he described his personal feelings about diversity as inherited from his japanese cultural heritage, which he acknowledged is ‘old fashioned…and that japan is behind years in knowing diversity terms.’ he only shared his personal diversity views at home with his wife, where they could be more critical about other asian ethnicities such as chinese and south korean. however, in brian’s professional life, he refrained from sharing his personal biases of other social identities and emphasised the importance of accepting differences through his teaching and research. awareness and understanding of equality the individualism reflected in accepting difference relates to perspectives on understanding fairness and equality. some noted a responsibility in ‘making sure that everybody's taken care of’ (eric, us) or a duty to ‘look out for the underdog’ (calvin, us). corinne (us) considered social justice to ‘advocate for the benefits of those individuals who aren’t or haven’t been traditionally treated fairly,’ although she places responsibility on society in general, rather than seeing it as something she could enact herself. while corinne focused on the term ‘fairness’ in her definition, many participants emphasised the importance of equal opportunities for all individuals. kate (us) linked her understanding to lady justice, ‘where scales are equal, or scales are even … in allowing individuals, whatever their context is, to have the same opportunities that others might.’ running head: conceptualising social justice emphasis was sometimes placed on being aware of ‘cultural norms’ (henry, european living in the us) or how ‘the decisions we make influence this pocket of people or that pocket of people’ (kate, us), rather than critical theoretical perspectives on social justice education that examine marginalisation in terms of power or structural inequalities, that may be interpreted as in line with a critical theoretical perspective on social justice education. similarly, gary’s (uk) conception of social justice focuses on working within, rather than challenging, the norms of society: you’re accountable to the people, to the norms and values of that group, and if you transgress them, you have an opportunity to show that you can change, or that you realise that you’ve misdemeanoured and you can come back to it. and that the actions of the group always try to positively promote those values. critical and ‘post’ theories in social justice some participants conceptualised social justice in terms of analysis of structural power, taking action for democracy and equity; and critical self-reflection, indicating they took up positions aligned with critical and ‘post’ theories. these concepts are outlined in turn in the below sub-sections. examining and challenging power and injustice acceptance of cultural diversity was also found in positions taken up by educators who further defined social justice as having an understanding of one’s own privilege and the realities of others within dominant structures and ideologies. russ (us) elaborates, understanding the different world views of different groups, for example, understanding history and current social context from the perspective of men and women, from people of different sexualities, races, ethnicities, nationalities…social running head: conceptualising social justice justice also has to have a big component of equity and understanding historical forms of oppression and the ways in which power has leverage by certain groups over other groups. russ’ description, which encapsulated a range of participants’ definitions of social justice, focused on being aware of how power works to disadvantage some and advantage others, aligns with critical and ‘post’ theorising of social justice. similarly, pamela (uk) critiqued the notion of equality of opportunity by noting how it sets up ‘big dreams but they can’t achieve it because culturally or economically…they are socially prevented from doing that and i think it’s quite a misleading idea.’ christine (uk) provided a clear example of the difference between equity and equality through the metaphor of a running race, ‘…imagine being in a running race, and one person has got a clear track and the other person has got a hurdle in the way and a puddle and...some chains to crawl under.’ she continued by stating that in this imaginary scenario, although the two runners had an equal opportunity to start the race, their different experiences during the race would provide a barrier to equity of outcome. this leads us to concepts of social justice that move toward challenging existing systems and enacting change. equity can be seen, as calvin (us), susan (uk) and lara (sweden) described it, in terms of fair treatment and distribution of resources. jeff offered a distinction between the concepts of fairness, equality and equity: i think the starting point is to think about the definition of equity as opposed to equality…we often get blind-sided by the appearance of fairness in an equal society where everyone is treated the same under the law…becoming aware of social justice is about understanding more than just the formal, legal frameworks that guarantee us some rights…it’s about looking at how the structures of society, our cultural norms, and other things that are not entirely reducible to formal state institutions or individual free will still have an impact on shaping our fortunes. running head: conceptualising social justice jeff’s understanding of social justice sheds light on the notion of power regarding relationships and socially constructed dominant ideologies that lead to individuals being privileged or oppressed. for example, gina (us), sarah (nz), tara (us) and tracy (european living in the us) discussed how power can be localised and fluid, playing out in relationships among colleagues, between teachers and students and in a variety of social contexts. in the following quote, sarah suggested that, there are power relationships everywhere…who is advantaged, who is disadvantaged, who has a vested interest in maintaining power, who has a vested interest in trying to create change or who is marginalised. tracy, outlining her own perspective on power relations, proposed that teacher educators should focus analysis of classrooms on how they are ‘viewed from the bottom’. frank (us), louisa (new zealand) and ruby (chinese living in australia) acknowledged their privileges and suggested it is imperative for teachers to create learning opportunities for their students that allow them to become aware of their own privilege(s) due to their social identities and position within society. tara turned the focus on herself and noted that she and others in a position of power have to recognise ‘our inherent implicit bias’ and ‘try to mediate bias in teaching’. diane (australia) named overcoming barriers to rights explicitly as ‘our work…to enable every child to have access to learning.’ katie asked ‘how do i make it so that this is a fair world?’ [emphasis added]. calvin (us) talked about overcoming discrimination by ‘taking action if you do see it, you can call people out’. these examples suggest that for these petes, in challenging structural injustices, emphasis is placed on interactions between individuals, such as peers, or teachers and students. running head: conceptualising social justice petes used examples that might oppose psts’ own beliefs in order to teach them to challenge their own beliefs. georgia (us), for example, described her attempt to teach lgbt issues at ‘a religion-based institution’: i’ve been warned, students are gonna fight you against this because it’s not their belief. [i would say to them] you may not believe in a certain thing, but you can at least…want them [lgbt people] to be healthy. paul (us) described developing a conceptual model to help ‘eliminate obesity biases’ and considered different teaching strategies for psts working with overweight students. this construction ‘eliminate obesity bias’ is a change from the more mainstream ‘eliminate obesity,’ which works to make fat people invisible (calogero, tylka, and mensinger, ). however, these examples suggest that these participants presumed a privileged pst, not a student who might be experiencing marginalisation themselves. in this context, black and minority ethnic, lgbt or fat pete and pesp students may remain marginalised because action is not taken for their democratic engagement. this constitutes a hidden curriculum in pete and pesp. tom (us) raised a problem with the current demographic make-up of psts which can partly illuminate assumptions of a privileged pst: the teaching profession is…very white, and we have students who grew up primarily in middle class backgrounds who are looking to get into teaching, and they don’t have a lot of experience with racial-ethnic diversity, working with people of colour, people who are different than them in fundamental ways. and they don’t understand how to teach them or how to talk to them. taking action running head: conceptualising social justice for a small number of participants, taking action was an explicit part of their understanding of social justice. the specific groups who were disadvantaged appear to be secondary to the process of being socially just (bell, ). many of the participants who advocated for social justice as taking action avoided identifying a hierarchy of specific social justice issues. they did not divide issues into separate entities, as some critical pedagogues have accused ‘post’ theorists of doing (fernández-balboa ). marie (us) proposed that her understanding of social justice is ‘being aware of equity and inequity in many different areas, communities and societies and being active in that space.’ bernard (australia) and jeff (uk) provided succinct examples of the importance of taking action. bernard claimed that social justice is ‘trying to challenge inequity or equity and do something about that. so it’s got an action to it…it’s sort of activist standard rather than a passive researcher, observation.’ jeff drew attention to the notion that being socially just is more than avoiding being the oppressor, or ‘more than just being not-racist. you’ve got to be anti-racist, pro-active. you’ve got to try and change.’ connor (american living in new zealand) was clear that although educating for social justice can be context specific, social justice is action against injustices. he stated, i don’t know if you could technically have one definition of [social justice] but i think that working to eradicate inequality for specific areas, such as gender, race, sexuality, colonialism and things like that…social justice education is actually trying to eradicate social inequalities. henry (european living in the us) and celia (us) were cognisant of how they took action for equity rather than providing equal resources and opportunities to all students. henry offered: let’s say, you and i are in a physical education class and you are a high-skilled youngster and i’m a low-skilled runt, we should not be treated equally. in other running head: conceptualising social justice words, the learning conditions technically should be different for you compared to me; you should be working on different things than i should be working on. so if i am asked to do the same as you are, i’m being treated equally. equitably, i think, is where the teacher makes an attempt to try and get me to be successful from the point where i am versus from the point where you are. henry’s example presented a similar sentiment to the image of the running race described earlier by christine (uk), but henry also articulated the importance of doing social justice work in additional to recognising inequality. in a similar manner, celia highlighted how teaching for social justice necessitates unequal distribution of resources to enable equitable outcomes. she proposed, ‘when we talk about social justice as equitable it’s “what can i do so that all my students can be successful?”’ the salient point for these two participants is the need for educators to act to provide equity, or to act beyond raising awareness through sociocultural content on their courses. for these petes, an unequal distribution of resources may be needed for the purpose of social justice (marshall ). similarly, ruby (chinese living in australia) spoke about building an environment for her own pesp students who she saw as disadvantaged: i guess my understanding is, in a pedagogical sense, how can i include all of my students to understand their rights and their strengths?…because a lot of my students in [university], they always define themselves as not as good as others…so i try to in my class talk about stereotypes, social justice, in terms of who they are, how they can empower themselves. contrasting this with tom’s (us) earlier problematising of the typical pst, this raises questions whether social justice content and sentiment in pete does, and should, change depending on the life experiences of the psts themselves; that is, teaching about, and for, running head: conceptualising social justice social justice with privileged students or with disadvantaged students might look different. ruby’s perspective informs teacher educators that facilitating the empowerment of marginalised students might require particular pedagogies that are different to those designed to engage privileged psts in recognising social justice and sociocultural issues as a valuable element of learning to teach. one way of dealing with this focus on pedagogy over curriculum content is to see social justice as a process of critical reflection as a way to take action (smyth ). ava (us) expressed this point about moving away from content delivery; suggesting that educators need to stop talking and do more asking: i think the first way to train teachers is to not talk at them or teach them about diversity…have them explore their situation because we throw teachers into the deep end pool and don’t really train them at all how to do this …cause how can we teach diversity when every school is different?… [we should take] into account diversity of skill, of culture, what the students can bring…we should stop talking and start asking. while still framed by an understanding of the concept of diversity, ava’s belief about the need to ask questions suggests a more critical approach, of reflection and action, firstly by paying attention to one’s own situation. for some of the participants, taking action needed to involve both outward action on societal structures and social norms but equally, an inward focus on the values and beliefs of themselves as petes through delving into their own biographies (fernández-balboa ). for these participants, social justice involved critically reflecting on the implications of how they exercise power in their classrooms and taking action to address their biases. marie similarly advocated for self-reflection, running head: conceptualising social justice if you’re engaged in social justice, i think that you are interested in understanding and raising awareness for yourself and/or others about the realities that other people live in every single day and being aware of your own background and the benefits that you’ve gotten or challenges that you faced and also being interested and hearing the experiences of others. and thinking about what that means and then being active in the space in different ways to try to change that. june (canada) took a broader view beyond herself, proposing that collective groups of petes within a single programme must reflect on the implicit and explicit values that underpin pete curricula. she suggested, it is really important that programmes go through the process of thinking what the values and beliefs are for that programme…is it just pe or are we talking about pe in the context of developing good, democratic citizens? i would say that’s our responsibility. connections to social movements and national contexts there was modest explicit connection to the critical project in the sense of naming critical theory, critical pedagogy or marxism. a small number of participants, including a majority of those from new zealand, were able to explain being informed by critical pedagogues such as freire, or to problematise the universalist notions of critical pedagogy (lather ). some participants discussed at length, social justice concepts in theory and practice, raising debates over democracy (june, canada; ruby, chinese living in australia); empowerment (tracy, european living in the us); creating and nurturing connectedness (diane, australia); and collectivisation (gary, uk). some of these theoretical debates reflected participants’ interest in the theoretical basis of a critical perspective of social justice and subsequent concerns raised by ‘post’ perspectives (fernández-balboa ; lather ). there was further running head: conceptualising social justice reference to a range of ‘social movements’, shaping participants’ conceptions and informing their knowledge. while there were some differences between countries, it is difficult to tease out any national differences in conceptualisations of social justice and the centrality of different sociocultural issues. connor noted, ‘a sociocultural issue from new zealand is very different than a sociocultural issue from the us.’ susan (uk) pointed out that merely having a sociocultural perspective might not be enough to tackle social justice, because ‘not all sociocultural perspectives…ask questions about power relations…it’s a homogenous term for a set of perspectives that actually could be quite conservative and structural-functionalist.’ in this comment, susan demonstrates the perspective that activism is valuable, not merely offering sociocultural content. some issues were manifested in specific examples of activism or rights-based movements in national contexts. for instance, race lenses from different countries were mentioned as informing positions on sociocultural issues: black lives matter, institutional racism and civil rights in the us; anti-islamophobia, immigrant rights and brexit issues in the uk; and tackling socioeconomic disparities and attacks on cultural expressions for māoriii and pasifikaiii students in new zealand and for indigenous australians. these brought to the fore, tensions between marginalised or oppressed groups in each country and political/state systems or other groups in society, that participants taking up a critical or ‘post’ social justice perspective found concerning. ruby claimed that in australia, although gender and to some extent sexuality have been accepted as lenses for examination, race is ‘not an easy topic to talk about’ because people think they are being criticised. louisa, a white new zealander with pasifika family members, said ‘[this] can’t help but influence your thinking around social justice: why are pacific and māori people at the bottom of the heap all the time?’ these discussions were potentially influenced by the racial and ethnic backgrounds of running head: conceptualising social justice the participants or their personal experiences of race or whiteness; they reflect the discursive position of being troubled by issues of injustice affecting others/others but not oneself. conclusion most petes interviewed, across all countries, could identify some issues of (in)equality, diversity, and (in)justice that existed within their own contexts. eleven participants pointed out that social justice is a broad term; accordingly, their own descriptions remained nebulous. this echoes breunig’s ( ) study with educators who struggled to pinpoint an exact definition. reflected in the findings above, some participants’ definitions did not fit neatly into one category (neoliberal, humanist, critical or ‘post’); instead they expressed views reflecting different theoretical stances. it is not our aim to highlight this as inconsistency or contradiction. rather, a broad range of definitions in itself is not a negative and testifies to the big tent (lather ) and the application of critical, transformative and justice-oriented concepts to a range of sociocultural issues and perspectives. equally, we cannot be too critical of those participants who ‘only’ drew from humanistic or neoliberal ideas and did not align themselves with enacting social justice, because the question they were asked was how they define social justice and their understanding of sociocultural issues. some variation in what stands for social justice education and sociocultural issues in pete may result from responses to local, regional or national political/social/economic issues. at times context is constructed as central to definitions of social justice, but there were few, if any, examples of dividing social justice in specific cultural battles (fernández- balboa ). however, with a small number of exceptions, the substantive difference in perspectives lies in differences between scholars with and without educational backgrounds and research interests in sociocultural issues, or who were in a national context that put social justice at the fore. the language of sociology was less frequently present with educators in running head: conceptualising social justice the us. they were more cognisant of sociocultural issues as an object of study than social justice as action. many european and australasian scholars were cognisant of critical theory and related issues of power, democracy, and equity; for problematising knowledge through social concepts; and creating change in schools. while we recognise that this dichotomy is simplistic, it is a salient heuristic of the breadth of understandings of social justice. if non- critical concepts are associated with social justice, such as a focus on diversity, equality of opportunity, and individual responsibility, psts may not get the tools to enact social justice or tackle sociocultural issues through taking up critical and ‘post’ theories. stewart ( ) warned that by focusing on diversity and inclusion, colleges (and teacher educators) have avoided having to confront the need for institutional change. this neoliberal framing of social justice as an issue to be solved within existing structures may appease policy makers keen to demonstrate their commitment, but it is our belief that tackling social justice issues requires openness to the possibility of addressing structural inequality. teaching for social justice in pete occurs at the nexus of an awareness of local, national and global social issues, understanding of social theory, humanistic teaching based on a genuine concern for individual students, a reflexive approach to one’s own values and beliefs, and a focus on actively leading change for more equitable outcomes. there were examples of conceptualisations of social justice that took into account local or national context. according to the participants who implicitly or explicitly drew from critical and ‘post’ theories, social justice education should focus on taking action against oppression and inequitable power relations, and creating learning environments that support democracy. as bell ( ) notes, social justice is both a goal and a process, not just a method for teaching. emphasis should be on exposing the social, economic, and political factors that produce marginalisation, and producing a critical consciousness that perceives injustices, and then taking action (breunig ). running head: conceptualising social justice references azzarito, l., macdonald, d., dagkas, s., and fisette, j. . revitalizing the physical education social-justice agenda in the global era: where do we go from here? quest, : , - . bain, l. . a critical analysis of the hidden curriculum. physical education, curriculum and culture: critical issues in the contemporary crisis, edited by d. kirk and r. tinning, - . london: the falmer press. bell, l.a. . theoretical foundations for social justice education. in teaching for diversity and social justice edited by m. adams, l.a. bell, d.j. goodman, and k.y. joshi, - . abingdon: routledge. bialystok, l. . politics without “brainwashing”: a philosophical defence of social justice education. curriculum inquiry, ( ), - . blackmore, j. . social justice in education: a theoretical overview. in the handbook of educational theories, edited by b. irby, g. brown, r. lara-alecio and s. jackson, - . charlotte: information age publishing. breunig, m. . problematizing critical pedagogy. international journal of critical pedagogy, ( ), - . calogero, r.m., tylka, t.l., and mensinger, j. . scientific weightism: a view of mainstream weight stigma research though a feminist lens. in feminist perspectives on building a better psychological science of gender, edited by t. roberts, n. curtin, l. cortina, and l. duncan, - . new york: springer. carr, w., and kemmis, s. . becoming critical: education, knowledge and action research. geelong: deakin university press. running head: conceptualising social justice cho, s. . on language of possibility: revisiting critical pedagogy. in reinventing critical pedagogy: widening the circle of anti-oppression education, edited by c. a. rossatto, r. l. allen, and m. pruyn, - . new york: rowman and littlefield. cliff, k. . a sociocultural perspective as a curriculum change in health and physical education. sport, education and society, ( ), - . creswell, j. w. . a concise introduction to mixed methods research. london: sage. culpan, i., and bruce, j. . new zealand physical education and critical pedagogy: refocusing the curriculum. international journal of sport and health science, , - . evans, j. 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acknowledgements this research was partially supported by university of bedfordshire seed funding. we thank the participants for their engagement in the project and the reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier drafts. i relating to a person whose gender identity corresponds with the sex they were assigned at birth. ii the indigenous people of new zealand. iii a term coined by the new zealand government to describe migrants from the south pacific islands. beyond the politics of inclusion university of massachusetts amherst from the selectedworks of korina jocson summer beyond the politics of inclusion korina jocson joel ariel arce available at: https://works.bepress.com/korina_jocson/ / http://www.umass.edu https://works.bepress.com/korina_jocson/ https://works.bepress.com/korina_jocson/ / full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=ueee equity & excellence in education issn: - (print) - (online) journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ueee beyond the politics of inclusion joel ariel arce & korina m. jocson to cite this article: joel ariel arce & korina m. jocson ( ) beyond the politics of inclusion, equity & excellence in education, : - , - to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / . . published online: dec . submit your article to this journal view related articles view crossmark data https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=ueee https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ueee https://doi.org/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=ueee &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=ueee &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - editorial beyond the politics of inclusion short news cycles have become the norm in u.s. media production and consumption. these cycles have a way of dictating public discourse and shaping how formal political leaders frame or construct arguments for change. in this current political climate, critical scholars, activists, and organizers are left to navigate difficult terrain. it is particularly difficult when political systems of representation, interpersonal violence, material inequities, increased measures of surveillance, media bias, historical amnesia, and state-sanctioned violence and rhetoric are historically rooted in ideologies of white supremacy and heteropatriarchy. such publicly-ingrained historicity begs the question: what bends political will toward transformative change? over the summer of , democratic presidential candidates organized campaign rallies and public forums and participated in nationally televised debates. among the various issues and policies that candidates addressed were questions about policing, reparations, and economic justice and restructuring. while the candidates’ responses and recommendations fell short of the necessary visioning and measures to generate paradigm shifts and alternatives to existing institutions and structures, the visible dialogue was due, in large part, to ground-level organizing by black lives matter activists and the movement for black lives policy platform (see www.policy.m bl.org). the robust, multi-dimensional activism was cultivated during the start of the decade and has resulted in a political climate where formal political leaders and institutions are being pressured to reckon with the violence done to black lives as well as the socioeconomic injustices that low-income and communities of color face (garza & perez, ). consequently, national stages and media platforms are not immune to the subversive efforts of activists and community organizers. chants of “fire pantaleo” at the detroit democratic presidential debate remind us that the officer responsible for the death of eric garner was on paid “desk duty” for five years, and annual remembrances of black people murdered by way of state-sanctioned violence serve as counternarratives that defy mainstream discourse and neoliberal media production. in other recent news, the back-to-back mass shootings at el paso, texas, and dayton, ohio, are a stark reminder of how gun violence breeds generational trauma and how the general public can often overlook what is at the root of such tragedies. similar to public perceptions of gun violence in low-income communities of color, shootings are often depicted as individual heinous crimes, detaching it from rooted patterns of violence that can be traced back to systemic racism and pervasive toxic masculinity. to be clear, this point is not an attempt to directly link these mass shootings with the type of violence that sometimes happens in distressed communities and is put on display for deficit-based consumption. what we are highlighting is an approximation of root causes of violence that are often dismissed, contorted, or simply ignored. in the case of el paso and dayton, when political leaders contribute to harmful discourse that conflates people with disabilities with people who subscribe to explicit doctrines of white nationalism, their unwillingness to address how such ideology is preserved and integrated into our social order becomes evident. despite mainstream conservative efforts to disassociate individual acts of violence from rhetoric and policies, a comprehensive understanding of white supremacy recognizes how it blurs notions of u.s. citizenship, border protections, american exceptionalism, american democracy, and gender norms (cohen, ; grande, / ; melamed, ). it might not take the form of an individual mass shooting, but white supremacist ideology is at the core of many institutions that have accumulated power both domestically and globally. this gives credence to those willing to defend it. the most recent immigration and customs enforcement (ice) raid in mississippi is another example of such blurred lines that works in tandem with a divisive model-minority narrative that is becoming normalized across various social institutions equity & excellence in education , vol. , nos. – , – https://doi.org/ . / . . © university of massachusetts amherst college of education http://www.policy.m bl.org https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - we are on the heels of contemporary radical social movements. the twenty-first century activism we are witnessing challenges public consciousness to consider the depths of modern-day violence and inequities. it also urges us to re-imagine our physical and social environments. leonardo ( ) asserts, “dreaming spurs people to act, if by dreaming we mean a sincere search for alternatives and not the evasion of reality” (p. ). by recognizing the u.s. nation-state inherently relies on the parallel façades of democracy and meritocracy to diffuse people power, we can begin to embark on a political project that rejects solutions through historically corrupt and oppressive systems of representation, and, instead, one that embraces collective—though, at times, incommensurable (tuck & yang, )—visions to confront our past, present, and future. in line with this twenty-first century activism, the calls for the resignation of governor ricardo rosselló by the people of the puerto rican diaspora is another example emblematic of a long-term, sustained grassroots effort to re-kindle conversations about the island’s political sovereignty. the legacies of american colonialism and assimilation lie beneath the surface of legislation and discourse around la junta, federal assistance, and pro-statehood, which are tied to the platform and scandals of rosselló’s administration (morales, ). the widespread protests were not only a repudiation of the governor’s misogyny and homophobia, but a challenge to dominant structures and institutions at the behest of the u.s. empire. on the surface, these puerto rican activist efforts may seem disconnected from the aforementioned events but, in actuality, they are entwined in a broader counter-hegemonic political project that renounces oppressive ideologies. we recognize the significance of these efforts and, thus, want to bring to light the connection to educational projects featured in this issue of equity & excellence in education. symposia: ethnic studies and education in this double issue, we are thrilled to include two symposia on ethnic studies and education. i (joel) am actively involved in the ethnic studies movement taking place in western massachusetts. over the past three years, i have offered research and programmatic support to a growing ethnic studies program in a local school district where students, teachers, and leadership face challenges around administrative decision- making, professional development, and teacher diversity. in the years to come, youth and educators who are deeply entrenched in the development of the program will be looking toward ways to strengthen its partnerships with community leaders/organizations, families, and local universities/colleges. they will also explore ways to build resilient pipelines grounded in critical teacher education programs. the implica- tions are many at the local and state level. i (korina) was privileged to participate in the early ethnic studies movement in northern california when only a handful of schools offered courses in african american studies, chicana/o or mexican american studies, and filipina/o american studies (jocson, ). formally educated in ethnic studies both at the university of california at berkeley and san francisco state university, where the third world liberation front and student protests demanded for the creation of what would be to initiate ethnic studies programs, i was able to work directly with scholars, educators, and activists who were integral in the process. still, it was a rare occasion to see schools with ethnic studies curricular offerings at the turn of the twenty-first century. today, that is changing as a result of continued struggles to better serve students in k- education. both of us are delighted to be in this present time of transformation. we invite you—the reader—to read the symposium introductions first as the guest editors contextualize the coming-together of the papers. the first symposium is guest edited by nolan cabrera who draws our attention to the proliferation of ethnic studies in k- education. cabrera’s introduction to the symposium notes the growing efforts across three states and the challenges that have emerged. the symposium, “ethnic studies in an age of expansion,” comprises four articles focused on curriculum, professional development, and educational reform in california, arizona, and texas, respectively. leona kwon and cati de los ríos examine youth civics in “’see, click, fix’: civic interrogation and digital tools in a ninth-grade ethnic studies course.” jocyl sacramento discusses teachers’ work in “critical collective consciousness: ethnic studies teachers and professional development.” anita fernández provides a purview of the xicanx institute for teaching j. ariel arce and k. m. jocson and organizing (xito) in “decolonizing professional development: a re-humanizing approach.” angela valenzuela pens the contradictions of educational reform and continued fight for ethnic studies in “the struggle to decolonize official knowledge in texas’ state curriculum: side-stepping the colonial matrix of power.” the second symposium is guest edited by kevin lam who accentuates the importance of comparative ethnic studies in education. lam’s introduction reminds us of the historical roots of ethnic studies and the need to revisit colonialism, genocide, and u.s. imperialism in these contemporary times. the symposium, “critical ethnic studies in education,” also comprises four articles representing four area studies. dolores calderón and luis urrieta offer insighful analyses in “studying in relation: critical latinx indigeneities and education.” hollie kulago illustrates two examples of engaging settler critical consciousness in “the business of futurity: indigenous teacher education and settler colonialism.” kevin lam discusses gang violence in relation to imperialism and racialization in “asian american youth violence as genocide: a critical appraisal and pedagogical significance.” lastly, kamau rashid explores liberatory philosophies of education in “beyond the fetters of colonialism: du bois, nkrumah, and a pan-african critical theory.” collectively, all the authors included here point to the ways education can serve as a means toward social transformation. the articles in the two symposia engage with the possibilities as well as the contradictions and limitations of the growing ethnic studies movement in k- settings, teacher education, and higher education. despite their differing entry points into the conversation, the scholars in the symposia are fundamentally inviting the reader to reflect on the role that ethnic studies can play within the broader counter-hegemonic political project described above. we are in a time that demands urgent organizing efforts to directly challenge oppressive structures and disrupt business-as-usual (#shutit- down). it demands action and treating social justice and inclusion as more than buzzwords. ethnic studies builds on critical praxis (freire, / ) and the radical feminist vision of the combahee river collective ( / ), which called for a black feminist framework to address interlocking systems of oppression. we echo this radical vision as the struggle for ethnic studies continues. indeed, ethnic studies is about social movement-building and fostering conditions for transformative change. it is already taking place both inside and outside of schools. building on student activist movements of the s, ethnic studies represents a call for education that is liberatory and links various third world and u.s.-based struggles with overarching systems of oppression and white supremacy (elia et al., ; márquez & rana, ; pulido, ). alongside the recent proliferation of ethnic studies in mainstream education reform discourse during the s, practitioners and scholars have been engaging in vigorous reflection and dialogue around the future of the field. there seems to be a level of general consensus among ethnic studies proponents around the causes of educational inequity and the detrimental effects of the existing school system for minoritized student populations. in addition, as we have noticed in the scholar- ship, there are differences within approaches to practice and research. unpacking these conversations reveals the ideological underpinnings of educators and policymakers in their vision and in the development of k- ethnic studies programs. similar to other fields, there are tensions that suggest a highly contested educational movement. elia and colleagues ( ) synthesize these tensions as “a field of political-intellec- tual struggle with dynamic, multiple, and radically divergent focal points” (p. ) that also steer toward an emerging critical ethnic studies project. it is a project that rejects the neoliberal multicultural co-optation of ethnic studies and offers a critique of coalition politics within the tradition of ethnic studies. although the tensions cannot be easily reconciled, educators and researchers alike should be weary of any major detachment of the k- ethnic studies movement from its historical roots because it paves the way for neoliberal descriptions of such programs to focus on nation-building and global citizenship. what is usually absent from such a detachment is a resistance movement to narratives of american exceptionalism and global forms of imperialism, white supremacy, and neoliberal capitalism. that is, just learning about difference for the sake of embracing difference is significantly different from learning about “power and production of difference” (kelley, ). in the context of the u.s., a pluralist rhetoric deradicalizes an analysis of the production of ethnic identities and correlates it with a “european immigrant success model” (san juan, , p. ). state-sanctioned efforts to forge an american equity & excellence in education identity with the ideology of normative pluralism is at the heart of neoliberal multiculturalism. caronan ( ) pinpoints puerto rico and the philippines as case studies to demonstrate how neoliberal multi- culturalism erases imperialist (and colonial) causes of difference and institutionalizes an ideology of “benevolent assimilation.” u.s. nation-building is contingent on hegemonic knowledge production and the banner of democratic pluralism, which upholds a hegemonic understanding of american exception- alism. for third world peoples living in the u.s., migration patterns are not by chance, but instead forged by a socio-historical process of exploitation and violence. modern-day u.s. military interventions are disguised as a moral responsibility to democratize other regions of the world and delegitimizes counter-hegemonic narratives and movements to reject u.s. imperial policies abroad (caronan, ). under this logic, historical narratives about the anti-colonial efforts of political activists like oscar lopez and lolita lebron, for example, are deemed illogical or too radical for the democratic majority. thus, in the near future, as schools begin to comply with state or district mandates with ethnic studies curricula, educators and researchers with a social justice agenda should remain vigilant and attentive to larger social movements. this is, in part, what the two symposia on ethnic studies and education emphasize moving forward. as much as we are excited about the future of ethnic studies, we also want to keep in mind the ways in which the politics of inclusion are being taken up and often seeded in the inclusion of ethnic studies in k- education. we see this playing out with approaches to integrate the curriculum, improve professional development, or recognize communities to reflect difference. ethnic studies is more than just politics of representation, or a simple embracing of difference; it is about a re-structuring of social conditions and the dismantling of colonialist formations that have shaped the what, the who, and the various possible ways knowledge is produced. a prime example is california assembly bill , which proposes the authorization of local educational agencies to require a full-year ethnic studies course for high school students with aims to make it into a graduate requirement. the bill is pending after criticism centered on politics of inclusion; the bill will be revisited in . despite the controversy and delay, there is overwhelming on-the-ground support among students, teachers, and community advocates for #ethnicstudiesnow, and a strong social media presence of #iamethnicstudies across school districts and university campuses. again, what bends political will toward transformative change, toward alternative futures? related articles and educational projects in this issue, we also feature five articles from the journal’s general submissions. two of the articles are authored by graduate students, which we have set out as part of the journal’s aims to highlight works by emerging scholars. this editorial is in line with such aims. in theorizing alternative futures, josué lópez asserts the role of political theory in “(re)imagining education for the immortal child: why theory in education for social justice?” lopez points to temporality and communality in relation to social justice praxis. theory in our work is, without a doubt, a requisite for change. in “hope in the wobbles: negotiations into, out of, and between critical dispositions,” aaron guggenheim examines the affor- dances of participating in a place-based practicum and how university partners engage in the child-driven creation of fictive superhero worlds at an afterschool club. the study illuminates the value of critical literacy as an analytical framework especially in wobbling along a spectrum of equity-oriented practice. similarly, in “negotiating discourses of curriculum and time: tensions of humanizing and dehumanizing discourses in an urban elementary school,” laura taylor explores the conflicting dis- courses mobilized by teachers and students in their pedagogical interactions. the author distinguishes between curriculum as tailored versus standardized and as present-oriented versus future-oriented. in light of the difference, the analysis makes visible the challenges and possibilities of teachers and students co- constructing humanizing pedagogies while suggesting the need to attend to its temporal dimensions. in “teaching for equity and deeper learning: how does professional learning transfer to teachers’ practice and influence students’ experiences?,” meg riordan, emily klein, and catherine gaynor discuss how two urban schools help teachers create equitable spaces for students, j. ariel arce and k. m. jocson and the structures and experiences supporting teacher learning. implications include ( ) paying attention to systemic issues in professional development, ( ) prioritizing teacher ownership, and ( ) engaging students in the process of professional learning for equity within research and policy. lastly, camille wilson, margaret hanna, and michelle li anchor this issue with “imagining and enacting liberatory pedagogical praxis in a politically divisive era.” the authors refer to u.s. political shifts and changing federal policies in education as catalysts for the social and cultural exclusion of vulnerable children of color. they suggest how teacher educators and in-service teachers can use media sources that reveal how children experience and navigate increasingly xenophobic and polarizing political climates as critical texts. in some ways, this type of media-based practice is happening in many classrooms within the current ethnic studies movement and should be supported as teachers become insistent on theorizing and acting on transformative change. to complement media-based practice, we have included in past issues and continue to champion the visual work of artists who offer the public compelling ways of reimagining futures. san francisco bay area-based artist brett cook presents “little bobby hutton power image” both in the collective process of making and also as publicly installed at life is living in oakland, ca. such educational projects enable scholars, educators, artists, and activists alike to come together and re-make the world through art. we are grateful to brett cook for the opportunity to extend conversations about art, culture, and ecology with our readership. the image of little bobby hutton also serves as cover art for the printed version of this issue. in future issues it is a pleasure to be in the forefront of critical scholarship. there is much more to come as we prepare other journal content. soon, we will feature symposia with a focus on “queeruptions” and queer of color critique, the changing terrain of suburban schools and communities, and educational pathways serving indigenous, immigrant, and low-income students, among others. the political is educational, and the educational political. ethnic studies and other projects included in this issue provide us with some examples. in presenting this double issue, we want to acknowledge the guest editors and contributors for their work. we take pride in creating space for timely dialogue in equity & excellence in education, and we are grateful to our readers for their critical engagement of these works. references caronan, f. ( ). legitimizing empire: filipino american and u.s. puerto rican cultural critique. chicago, il: university of illinois press. cohen, c. ( ). death and rebirth of a movement: queering critical ethnic studies. social justice, ( ), – . combahee river collective. ( / ). a black feminist statement. in c. r. mccann & s. kim (eds.), feminist theory reader: local and global perspectives (pp. – ). new york, ny: routledge. elia, n., hernández, d. m., kim, j., redmond, s. l., rodríguez, d., & see, s. e. ( ). introduction: a sightline. in n. elia, d. m. hernández, j. kim, s. l. redmond, d. rodríguez, & s. e. see (eds.), critical ethnic studies: a reader (pp. – ). durham, nc: duke university press. freire, p. ( / ). pedagogy of the oppressed ( th anniversary ed.). new york, ny: bloomsbury. garza, a., & perez, c. ( , may ). #beyondthemoment: this may day, movements unite for labor protection, equity and justice. the root. retrieved from http://www.theroot.com grande, s. ( / ). red pedagogy: native american social and political thought ( th anniversary ed.). lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. jocson, k. m. ( ). kuwento as multicultural pedagogy in high school ethnic studies. pedagogies: an international journal, ( ), – . doi: . / kelley, r. d. g. (university of california tv). ( , july ). over the rainbow: second wave ethnic studies against the neoliberal turn [video file]. retrieved from https://www.uctv.tv leonardo, z. ( ). critical social theory and transformative knowledge: the functions of criticism in quality education. educational researcher, ( ), – . doi: . / x márquez, j. d., & rana, j. ( ). on our genesis and future. critical ethnic studies, ( ), – . doi: . / jcritethnstud. . . equity & excellence in education http://www.theroot.com http://dx.doi.org/ . / https://www.uctv.tv http://dx.doi.org/ . / x http://dx.doi.org/ . /jcritethnstud. . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /jcritethnstud. . . melamed, j. ( ). represent and destroy: rationalizing violence in the new racial capitalism. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. morales, e. ( , july ). why half a million puerto ricans are protesting in the streets. the nation. retrieved from https://www.thenation.com pulido, l. ( ). black, brown, yellow, and left: radical activism in los angeles. berkeley, ca: university of california press. san juan, e., jr. ( ). multiculturalism vs. hegemony: ethnic studies, asian americans, and u.s. racial politics. the massachusetts review, ( ), – . tuck, e., & yang, k. w. ( ). decolonization is not a metaphor. decolonization: indigeneity, education & society, ( ), – . joel ariel arce university of massachusetts, amherst korina m. jocson university of massachusetts, amherst kjocson@umass.edu j. ariel arce and k. m. jocson https://www.thenation.com 	university of massachusetts amherst 	from the selectedworks of korina jocson 	summer 	beyond the politics of inclusion 	editorial 	symposia: ethnic studies and education 	related articles and educational projects 	in future issues 	references interaction and transformation on social media: the case of twitter campaigns https://doi.org/ . / creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution- noncommercial . license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . /) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the sage and open access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). social media + society january-march : – © the author(s) reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalspermissions.nav doi: . / journals.sagepub.com/home/sms si: social media, activism and organizations introduction: new digital spaces and activism the increasing popularity of social media platforms creates new digital social networks in which individuals can interact and share information, news, and opinion with unprece- dented speed and ease. consequently, the use of such tech- nologies appears to have the capacity to transform current social configurations and relations —not least within the public and civic spheres. in this article, we develop the notion of transformation in relation to the particular affor- dances and characteristics of micro-interaction within social media environments. social media are emerging as a new research topic across fields, including social science, web science, computer sci- ence, and psychology. within the social sciences, much emphasis has been placed on conceptualizing social media’s role in modern society (mossberger, tolbert, & mcneal, ; trottier, ) and the interrelationships between online and offline actors, institutions, events, and political and social change (edwards et al., ; harlow, ; housley et al., ; lupton, ; murthy, , ; williams et al., ). empirical work has given attention to categorizing types of content posted on social media (diakopoulos & shamma, ; garcia esparza, o’mahony, & smyth, ) and identifying the discursive practices employed by “trolls” and users posting inflammatory mes- sages (awan, ; hardaker, ; mccosker, ). social scientific work also benefits from the computational analysis of large aggregated data sets, for instance, to trace smsxxx . / social media + societyhousley et al. research-article cardiff university, uk university of oxford, uk university of warwick, uk de montfort university, uk corresponding author: helena webb, department of computer science, university of oxford, wolfson building, parks road, oxford ox qd, uk. email: helena.webb@cs.ox.ac.uk interaction and transformation on social media: the case of twitter campaigns william housley , helena webb , meredydd williams , rob procter , adam edwards , marina jirotka , pete burnap , bernd carsten stahl , omer rana , and matthew williams abstract the increasing popularity of social media platforms creates new digital social networks in which individuals can interact and share information, news, and opinion. the use of these technologies appears to have the capacity to transform current social configurations and relations, not least within the public and civic spheres. within the social sciences, much emphasis has been placed on conceptualizing social media’s role in modern society and the interrelationships between online and offline actors and events. in contrast, little attention has been paid to exploring user practices on social media and how individual posts respond to each other. to demonstrate the value of an interactional approach toward social media analysis, we performed a detailed analysis of twitter-based online campaigns. after categorizing social media posts based on action(s), we developed a typology of user exchanges. we found these social media campaigns to be highly heterogeneous in content, with a wide range of actions performed and substantial numbers of tweets not engaged with the substance of the campaign. we argue that this interactional approach can form the basis for further work conceptualizing the broader impact of activist campaigns and the treatment of social media as “data” more generally. in this way, analytic focus on interactional practices on social media can provide empirical insight into the micro-transformational characteristics within “campaign communication.” keywords activism, interaction analysis, qualitative analysis, social media https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/journals-permissions https://journals.sagepub.com/home/sms mailto:helena.webb@cs.ox.ac.uk http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . % f &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - social media + society the spread of posts during times of societal tension and unease (williams et al., ; zubiaga, liakata, procter, hoi, & tolmie, ) and to explore effects such as a homophily, in which social media users follow and associate with others sharing the same opinions as themselves (murthy, ), a tendency that some claim is now being amplified by personal- ization algorithms to create “echo chambers” (pariser, ). thus, it is possible that networked digital technologies are disrupting and transforming mass public communications in various ways facilitating not only new forms of deliberation, debate, and civil participation but also antagonism and social fragmentation (edwards et al., ; housley et al., ; russo, watkins, kelly, & chan, ). in order to further understand the transformative capacity of these new digital spaces, it is first necessary to understand in detail how prac- tices in these spaces are conducted. it is therefore crucial to observe the interconnections between social media and com- munication, both on a large scale and at micro levels. this includes observing the ways these interconnections trans- form the flow of communicative practices and content that surround topics and “trending items” as they are negotiated, discussed, debated, and refuted by social actors online. activism is one area in which social media have the capac- ity to facilitate the spread of relevant communicative content (cox, ). by activism, we mean the organization of peo- ple around a particular issue or event in order to effect social, economic, cultural, or political change. recent years have seen social media platforms play a key role in the emergence and/or growth of activist campaigns that are both highly dis- tributed and centrally organized. for instance, the “black lives matter” movement began in the united states (frosch & calvert, ) as a hashtag (#blacklivesmatter) on twitter and has grown to include rallies and protest marches, as well as local groups and organizations. meanwhile, long-estab- lished civil society organizations such as the red cross now routinely use social media to spread campaign messages and fundraise (briones, kuch, liu, & jin, ). advocates of social media use in activism have argued that the wide reach and fast pace of digital communications provide grassroots movements, charities, and humanitarian organizations with opportunities to galvanize support (chadwick & howard, ) and enable citizens to take action and “speak critically to power” (elgot, ). however, others suggest (davies, ; white, ) that social media reduce activism to mere “clicktivism” or “slacktivism” in which users “like” or for- ward some content to show their approval for a message, cause, and so on, but do nothing further. also relevant are broader public debates over the capacity for rapidly propagat- ing content on social media to cause harm through unverified claims and malicious campaigns (starbird, maddock, orand, achterman, & mason, ; world economic forum, ). throughout these public discourses, we observe a tendency toward implicit assumptions that social media content, in par- ticular content posted within specific campaigns and move- ments, is homogeneous in character and comprises similar practices and tactics for digital communication. debates over the role of social media in activism raise a number of challenges for contemporary social research. it is necessary to conceptualize and identify means to explore activism in action on social media and to trace its interrela- tionships with offline actors and events. this article contrib- utes to this work by taking as its focus the detailed examination of user interaction as part of activist campaigns. we report on the development of a novel methodological framework that identifies and visualizes the communicative actions occurring within conversational “threads” on twitter (housley, webb, edwards, procter, & jirotka, ). we illustrate this frame- work by reporting on the analysis of case studies of activist campaigns and describe its potential implications. we argue that a highly detailed interactional approach can deepen understanding of the practices of social media activism. for instance, it demonstrates the wide number of communicative actions that may be occurring within an apparently homoge- neous campaign and highlights differing the levels of engage- ment that might occur. analyzing activism in action: toward an interactional approach a growing volume of research provides valuable insights into the interrelationships between new digital spaces and activist campaigning, for instance, by conceptualizing the role social media can play in the organized pursuit of societal change. gerbaudo ( , ) describes the ways that social media are used to re-appropriate the public sphere (habermas, ), creating opportunities to mobilize citi- zens and reflecting features of traditional populism such as openness, directness, and democracy. the ability for users to post and propagate content on social media in real time ensures that critical incidents can be publicized rapidly and campaign messages built around them can reach wide audi- ences while they are still topical. freelon, mcllwain and clark ( ) described social media posts as essential to publicizing the michael brown shooting and galvanizing the black lives matter campaign. opportunities for anonymous messaging can provide individuals in repressive environ- ments with a safe space in which to promote dissent (tufekci, ). in reference to the clicktivism debate, tufekci and wilson ( ) found that the use of social media greatly increased the probability that individuals attended the first day of the egyptian tahir square protests. further work in this field helps us to understand the inter- connections between activist practices and the affordances of specific social media sites. focusing on twitter, we can see how microblogging on this open platform can support activ- ist goals. poell and rajagopalan ( ) and segerberg and bennett ( ) describe how twitter can connect diverse users. the former studied tweets referring to a controversial gang rape incident in new delhi in december and found that the popular activity of retweeting provided a low- effort means through which users could connect with each other and collate collective accounts. the hashtag can be a housley et al. particularly powerful tool: thrift ( ) describes how the #yesallwomen hashtag was used to share stories of female harassment and formed a counterpoint to the defensive #notallmen. the responsive capacity of the hashtag is also described by horeck ( ), who traces the repurposing of the commercial hashtag #askthicke into a feminist one. poell and borra ( ) and duguay ( ) highlight a limi- tation of twitter in activism: tweets within a specific cam- paign can be dominated by a small number of, often high profile, users who seek to self-promote and avoid reference to potentially contentious issues. one final area of insight relates to the conduct of com- municative practices in and through the posting of social media content. this is a potentially highly fruitful area of work but one that remains underdeveloped. analysis can illuminate how users communicate with each other in par- ticular technological environments and thereby advance understanding of how online campaigns emerge and spread. this kind of analysis presents a number of methodological challenges (driscoll & thorson, ), such as the time- consuming nature of social media data collation, and ethical barriers to accessing content posted on private platforms (webb et al., ). nevertheless, existing work has begun to produce some valuable insights. for instance, theocharis, lowe, van deth, and garcía-albacete ( ) conducted a comparative content analysis of activist-related tweets from three case study data sets, with each post coded in terms of its purpose, sender “type,” and evaluation of the larger move- ment it referred to. they argued that while twitter was used to discuss issues and advertise protests, only a small minority of posts concerned protest organization. earl, hurwitz, mesinas, tolan, and arlotti ( ) described how twitter’s real-time status enables protestors to share information about the whereabouts of law enforcement agencies and thus reduce police–protester asymmetries. burgess and matamoros-fernández ( ) mapped posts that related to the gamergate controversy across digital platforms during a particular time period. they produced a social network anal- ysis of online activity and actor relationships, visualizing the associations among accounts and hashtags. a particular con- tribution of this approach was its ability to reveal the exis- tence of minority perspectives which can sometimes be hidden within apparently binary debates online. unsurprisingly, given the newness of digital social spaces and the methodological challenges this kind of analysis cre- ates, work in this particular area is currently underdeveloped. nevertheless, there is great value in taking this strand of work forward in order to advance the detailed understanding of communication in the conduct of social media activism and thereby also add to broader knowledge about the social organization of online campaigns. we note that in much existing work, there is a tendency to analyze social media posts in isolation, treating them as a series of discrete items or as networks of users at a macro level. this risks overlook- ing the (potential) relationships between posts and the development of activism through the interconnected actions of different users. we propose a more granular, interactional approach to the study of social media communications (housley et al., ). this type of approach has already been used, in part, by procter, vis and voss ( ). when applied to the study of activism in action, it offers particular methodological benefits. as we describe further below, it facilitates the detailed description of how social media com- munications are organized, provides the means of under- standing the transformation of interaction in terms of topics and relevant (or otherwise) everyday social categories and actions, and operationalizes a lens through which to consider both the organization and transformation of small-scale interactions in terms of a wider view of the organization of campaign activity on social media methodology the analysis described in this article was conducted as part of a wider study on the spread of antagonistic content on social media (webb et al., ). one of the aims of this study was to identify the interactional features of social media—specifically twitter—threads that have “conversa- tional” features, without assuming that interaction on tweet- ing is “just” conversation (housley et al., ). this detailed qualitative analysis provides insight into the micro-organiza- tion of social media posts and also supports large-scale quan- titative analyses. we observed twitter posts across the period april to may and identified occurrences of social media activism. these occurrences were manifest as groups of tweets identi- fied through the use of the twitter web client “reply” facility and referencing actions or ideas designed to effect social, economic, cultural, or political change and were identified through a common hashtag. observation was first under- taken through the monitoring of the official twitter website to identify “trending,” popular hashtags. subsequently, we used tweetdeck, a software tool that supports sophisticated and efficient keyword searching, plus the cosmos plat- form (burnap et al., ), which is designed to assist aca- demic social scientists with the collection and analysis of twitter data. three campaigns were selected for analysis. these were chosen in order to represent activist campaigns pursuing different aims, and each involved a high volume of posting across the period of the observation: •• #notguilty: student ione wells was sexually assaulted in london in april (bbc newsbeat, ). as a result of her attack, she established the #notguilty campaign, which looked to oppose victim-blaming in rape cases. wells appeared in numerous newspapers (e.g., wells, ) and by may, her name was trend- ing on uk twitter. •• #nepalearthquake: two devastating earthquakes struck nepal in early (bbc news, ). social media + society appeals for aid were quickly established through twitter; us$ million was donated through facebook (carey-simos, ), and google launched a people finder tool (frizell, ). by may, % of uk donations had been made online (charities aid foundation, ). •• #voteyes: in the run-up to the irish gay marriage referendum in may (reuters, ), there was strong social media support for a “yes” vote, with #voteyes being the largest global twitter trend before the event (bt home, ). we used the cosmos tool to collect relevant tweets for each campaign during a set period of time. cosmos col- lects tweets via the twitter application programming interface (api); this allows for the automatic extraction and processing of tweets and provides a faster and more system- atic approach to data collection and management than man- ual methods. cosmos captured tweets containing specific hashtags and we were then able to review the collected data and identify other frequently occurring hashtags and key phrases that might be relevant to the analysis. using the api enables tweets to be collected in real time, and our data sets therefore included posts that were subsequently deleted by users themselves. this ensured the data did not include any omissions, which proved valuable when examining the detail of unfolding social media campaigns. we collected between , and , tweets per cam- paign. using tweetdeck, we conducted keyword searches bounded by size of engagement. this was specified by the number of retweets, likes, or replies that a tweet received and enabled us to identify and rank tweets by the degree of attention they attracted from other twitter users. we dis- carded non-english tweets and selected a subset of , tweets for analysis based on rank and occurrence of appro- priate keywords—for example, “nepal” and “notguilty.” these “opening” tweets were then used to collect the con- versational threads they initiated (webb et al., ). twitter does not provide an api end point to retrieve con- versational threads; however, it is possible to collect them by scraping tweets through the web client interface. using a customized javascript tool ensured that the tweets within each thread could be observed in chronological posting order (webb et al., ; zubiaga et al., ). the tool also enabled the threads to be loaded into a spreadsheet that recorded the content, user details (@ handle and user- name), and timestamp of each tweet alongside other details such as the number of retweets, replies, and likes received. this spreadsheet served as the preliminary resource for analysis, the equivalent to an interview or conversation transcript. we selected threads for each campaign, each contain- ing between and posts. this provided rich data to sup- port in-depth analysis while also providing insight into the variety within and between campaign data sets. analysis drew on insights from the associated fields of ethnomethodology (garfinkel, ), conversation analy- sis (sacks, schegloff, & jefferson, ), membership cat- egorization analysis (housley & fitzgerald, ; sacks, ), and interactionism (housley, ). these fields share an understanding of interaction as comprising taken- for-granted behaviors that are central to social order and as a form of social organization in and of itself. they share a methodological focus on the analysis of naturally occurring and sequentially unfolding interactions. utilizing these approaches, we conducted the following analytic activities. identification of conversational actions in twitter posts taking an inductive approach, we began by identifying the “conversational” actions performed by each tweet in the thread. beginning with the opening tweet and proceeding through it in order of posting, we viewed the content of the post to identify activities occurring such as information- giving, questioning, agreeing, and disagreeing. particular attention was given to the ways that subsequent posts responded to prior ones and how interactions within the thread evolved as posting continued. we note that a more fine-grained sequential analysis of twitter threads and mul- tiparty interaction is salient (see housley et al., ; tolmie, procter, rouncefield, liakata, & zubiaga, ) and treated this focus on action as an important first step in the process of interactional feature identification of social media posts. examination of accounts and membership categorization practice each post in the thread was treated as a type of “account” (housley & fitzgerald, ; scott & lyman, ; stokes & hewitt, ) built up through the use of mem- bership categorization devices and associated predicates (housley & fitzgerald, ). accounts make visible the inherently moral character of interaction. they are to be understood as features of the “interaction order” and draw on goffmanian analyses of remedial work and social repair in everyday encounters (housley & fitzgerald, ). accounts are organized and patterned interactional moves that include practices such as justifications, apolo- gies, acceptance and penitence for blame, and requests that place a moral obligation on the recipient (housley & fitzgerald, ). the examination of membership categorization practices, combined with the identification of conversational actions, provided a means of describing the detail of social media posts as forms of accountable action(s) that are socially and morally constituted and occasioned but, within the context of twitter threads, tied to particular “real-world events.” housley et al. development of a twitter typology once we had analyzed individual threads, we compared across the data set to identify general patterns. we iteratively developed a typology to categorize the actions performed in individual tweets during an online campaign. we used this typology as a basis to annotate tweets within threads and identify the interactional features occurring as threads unfolded. this consolidated the earlier analysis and also paved the way to generate quantitative analyses of “twitter interaction-as-data” at scale. findings in this section, we describe some of the key findings result- ing from the analysis. we begin by outlining the interactions occurring in two twitter threads. these have been selected as they typify the kinds of interactions occurring in the wider data set. they are represented in the form of the spreadsheet used for analysis—here simplified to show account name, tweet content, and a line number for each tweet for easy identification. we illustrate the nuanced understandings of twitter-based interactions that can be gained via focusing on action, accounts, and membership categorization. we then describe how this fine-grained analysis led to the develop- ment of our typology of interactions on twitter. thread comes from the #nepalearthquake campaign (figure ). for reasons of space, we focus here on the tweets most salient to our analysis. the text and web link within tweet perform the action of information-giving and the hashtag frames the topic of the tweet, making it “discover- able” to other twitter users. in the following tweets ( - ), a variety of users post tweets that engage with the topic of the natural disaster and orient to the humanitarian response as moral in character. a variety of actions occur. one kind is questions/requests for information. for instance, in tweet , the poster asks whether there is an opportunity for nurses to go out and work and assist; in tweet , another poster enquires about the possibil- ity of sending “stuff” to nepal via the red cross; in tweet , the poster notes his or her availability and asks “how can i help?”; and in tweet , the user notes his or her desire to help and asks “how can i be involved?” in making these requests, users satisfy the informational parameters of the opening tweet and engage directly with the topic at hand. they also position a humanitarian response—including their own suggested activities—as morally creditworthy. tweets - come from the same poster and perform a dif- ferent kind of action. the poster generates a list of engaged action request formulations. these request formulations are morally constituted in terms of a range of supportive human- itarian activities that concludes on tweet with an appeal to prayer. a further kind of action is an “echo” which repeats available information without adding anything extra—for instance, the retweet in tweet and the tweets solely con- taining relevant @ handles in tweet and later in tweet . all the tweets described so far engage with the topic of the humanitarian response and align with it as appropriate. at tweet , something different happens. the content ques- tions the efficacy of prayer in helping “those who are demol- ished” and is concluded with the hashtag “#wakeupmorons.” while this post still engages with the topic of the humanitar- ian response, it adopts a critical and sarcastic tone rather than a supportive one. at tweet , this critical account is figure . thread . social media + society contested and an appeal to respecting other people’s beliefs is posted. this can be understood as a reaction to provocation and an attempt to counter the earlier antagonistic post. the thread continues with further offers of support and use of the “@” function in relation to the red cross account, the insti- gator of this particular disaster appeal thread. then at tweet a poster asks, “are you trying to make a business out of this?” the post is contextualized by two hashtags one of which is the red cross. once again, the post engages with the topic of humanitarian response and the “call for help” made in tweet but in a critical way. it questions the motive for the appeal—is this a moral matter or one which is, through reference to business, driven by another set of motives? in membership category terms, the thread’s prior contributions (at tweet , for example, through its reference to jobs and occupational categories) may have provided the categorical grounds for this form of reasoning and reframing. at the very least, it indicates some form of orientation to the content of the thread and previous postings as a sequentially relevant matter within a multiparty exchange. this engaged criticism does not receive any direct response in the remain- der of the thread. it is followed by another critical response from a different poster (a complaint about lack of support following hurricane sandy), a response from an official account directly answering the request for information made in tweet and a further request formulation from the user who posted previously in tweets - . examination of this thread reveals several important interactional features relevant across our data. one is an opening tweet that sets up the topic parameters for subse- quent posts, in terms of content, hashtag, and @ handle. another is the engagement (or non-engagement) of other posters with this topic. engagement may be supportive or critical and take the form of actions such as requests for information, requests for action, or echoes. we can also see that posters in the thread not only engage and interact with the opening post but at times also with subsequent posts made by others. as our analysis continued, the reoccurrence of these features helped us to identify patterns of interactions in the threads. we can see this develop in thread . this thread (figure ) comes from the #voteyes cam- paign. the interactions occurring within it share similar fea- tures to thread . once again, an opening tweet (tweet ) sets up the topic parameters for subsequent posts; @revk posts, in paraphrase, that “not all christians are against equal marriage” and concludes with the #voteyes hashtag to express support for the campaign and frame the content of the post. subsequent posts engage with this issue; they use the opening poster’s @ handle to mark direct responses to it and produce posts that are both supportive (for instance, tweets , , , , , and ) and critical (for instance, tweets and ) of @revk’s expressed stance. in thread , we high- lighted the occurrence of posts that perform the action of asking questions about the information provided in the open- ing tweet. in this thread, many posts perform actions of agreeing or disagreeing with the opening post. once again, users also interact with subsequent posts in the thread in addition to the opening one. in particular, a debate develops around the understanding of “christians,” and this involves a range of category-identity work, which we discuss here. the opening poster’s account name and handle (shortened for anonymity) contain the word “rev”—often short for “rev- erend” and a title given to members of the clergy. this orien- tation to religion is accompanied by an explicit reference to it in tweet . tweet deploys an “n-population device.” the population group “christians” is tied to the category-bound association (or predicate) of anger from a general population device, in this case “people.” the reference to “people angry at christians for being against equal marriage” is then fol- lowed by a predicate clause that not all christians agree on the issue. this, in turn, carries the implication that some christians may well agree with equal marriage. in this way, figure . thread . housley et al. the membership category device of “christians” is afforded alternative forms of opinion in relation to the issues raised by the forthcoming referendum. we might understand the account provided by the post as informational in terms of how different groups are being positioned in relation to lines of moral and social opinion. we can also see that through the use of “we” and “rev” @revk positions himself or herself as within the category of christians and therefore someone who has credible knowledge about this issue. the poster also makes clear that, despite being within this category that includes some who are against “equal marriage,” he or she supports it. tweets and respond directly to the opening tweet through the presence of the @ handle and repetition of parts of @revk’s account name. both tweets express explicit agreement with tweet —and therefore the #voteyes cam- paign—via affirmative (“yeah”) and supportive statements (“go rev k” and “thankfully anglicans . . .”). tweet pro- vides a positive receipt of the statement that some christians support equal marriage (“that’s good to know”) and by extension marks support for the #voteyes campaign. however, the positive stance toward tweet is qualified; the user positions being “confused” over whether christians support equal marriage as reasonable (“you can see why”), giving as an example “leviticus”—a book of the bible that condemns homosexuality. at tweet , further qualified agreement with tweet is exhibited. reference is made to “all christians” (rather than the “some” implied in tweet ) that the poster knows “sharing” the same views; this includes a member of the irish clergy who, it is claimed, is going to vote for equal marriage. here, the poster draws on apparent personal experience to legitimate and extend the claim made that not all christians are against equal marriage. the post can be seen to imply that because all the christians the user knows support equal marriage, many other christians must therefore also support it; this is an operationalization of the “etcetera” principle and sacks’ ( ) consistency rule. in tweet , the user directly addresses @revk: “you can’t disown the people of the religion you spread. you are com- plicit in their hatred.” this challenges the identity-category work that has been done so far and explicitly topicalizes the operationalization of the consistency rule in relation to previ- ous posts describing the stance of christians toward equal marriage. in essence, the post positions christians (“the peo- ple of the religion you spread”) as sharing the same identity; this is not distinguishable by particular stance toward equal marriage because christians are morally responsible for each other and the consequences of their religion (“complicit in the their hatred”). the poster invokes the economy rule (sacks, ) that refers to the conversational process by which if a member uses a single category from any device, then he or she can be recognized to be doing adequate refer- ence to a person. in doing so, the post problematizes the stance in tweet that some christians are in favor of equal marriage. this argument made by the poster of tweet is mocked and challenged by direct responses in tweets and , first from @revk (“faceplam”) and then by a new poster (user ): “that is probably the silliest thing . . .”) entering into the discussion. the argument is then challenged in tweet through the (possibly) extreme application of this category logic to a separate issue: in this case, that “living in britain” equals agreeing with the “iraq war” with no space for differ- ence of opinion, and so on. the post mirrors the design of tweet , for instance, through the use of “complicit,” but is built as a response to @revk rather than user . it acts as a commentary on tweet , rather than a response to it and thereby positions user as outside the discussion. the rest of the thread elaborates on this “membership categorization” issue where the moral position and “accountability” of spe- cific groups such as christians in “owning opinions” are questioned, criticized, or supported. this analysis highlights further features of twitter inter- actions that were identified across our data set. in particular, posters draw on various rhetorical devices in their discus- sions regarding activist campaigns and invoke different kinds of normative concerns and categories when doing so. threads and reveal the variety of actions and activities that can be found within twitter threads. detailed qualitative analysis of this kind is necessary to develop a nuanced under- standing of these activities; however, there is also scope to move from the particular to the general, as discussed next. from the particular to the general: developing a typology to visualize how threads transform interactionally, we pro- duced a diagrammatic scheme. this marks the order and sequence of posts and the actions performed within them. the typology shown in figure represents the different kinds of actions that might be performed by tweets in a thread. for instance, as described in our analysis of threads and , we observe actions such as information-giving, agreement, disagreement, requests, and criticisms. this typology also notes nuances of action such as whether an agreement is explicit or implicit or whether a request is engaged or unengaged with the topic of a prior post. we used the typology to label each tweet in a thread (figure , box) and then to create a visualization of the thread as it developed tweet by tweet (figure , circles). the transposition of the detailed qualitative inspection of threads into the typology is not without its problems, not least through the level of interactional detail that is lost within an analytic process where complexity is reduced. nevertheless, typologies of this kind allow for “drilling down” into the data to continually ground any quantitative analysis (including the identification of false positives) in the actual “ground truth” of twitter interactions. the typol- ogy can act as a bridging instrument between small and big data that can be constantly refined in an iterative and social media + society recursive manner while helping to aid and discover points of interest in large data sets that enable repeated interac- tion-oriented sociological inspection across different cases. to demonstrate this, we discuss some of the patterns observed via the visualization of twitter threads using the typology. these relate to engagement, retweets, and sub-conversations. one consistent pattern was the recurrence of tweets char- acterized as unengaged with the opening tweet or topic in a thread (figure ). while engaged responses take up the topic at hand, for instance, through expressing agreement or requesting additional information, unengaged ones appear to do something different. for example, they might refer to an unrelated topic or praise the original poster without making figure . twitter thread typology. figure . thread visualization of tweet action. housley et al. reference to the campaign itself. the consistency of this pat- tern across our data indicates that while at an aggregate level a social media campaign might appear concordant, it is het- erogeneous in nature, with a substantial number of posts deviating from the opening topic. retweets, in which users forward on a prior tweet, were very frequent across the three campaigns studied. the most common retweets were of posts performing praise (of a user rather than the campaign) and echoes (which repeat or para- phrase earlier posts). retweets therefore played a valuable role in spreading and amplifying “on message” content related to the campaign. it appears that the forwarding of content plays a key role in the propagation of a campaign across social media; this is confirmed by studies of informa- tion flow and “sentiment” across social media during digital public reaction to signal events (see burnap et al., , ). it is critical to continue to link this to qualitative inspection in order to understand the interaction that drives propagation and to help inform our understanding of the potential role of phenomena such as homophily. posters frequently responded to each other and thereby played a key role in extending a thread. while entire threads might contribute to one conversation, often individual con- versations deviate from the main topic, resulting in sub-con- versations between certain posters. as threads extend, tweets are increasingly likely to deviate from the topic of the origi- nal post and perform actions that do not relate to the cam- paign itself. for example, after posters exchange successive disagreements they may begin to trade personal criticisms rather than engage with the substance of the campaign (figure ). these might be seen to represent points where campaign communication meets more socially antagonistic and oppositional interactions on social media platforms. a more nuanced reading derived from the qualitative analysis suggests that matters of morality and accountability are embedded features of twitter threads that are concerned with controversial topics of pressing humanitarian importance. this nuanced view is vital to analysis. typologies are neces- sary for a “ , -foot view” of social media in relation to critical events and the quantitative documentation of online activism. however, it remains important to return to the “manual inspection” of threads in order to augment macro- scopic visualization and analysis with more granular detail. these interactions are subject to many of the ordinary and mundane rituals of everyday life, albeit within the particular confines and features of characters. finally, platforms and their associated “functional affor- dances” configure the context in and through which social media in action takes place. for example, the process of “@”-ing a user in a thread can initiate forms of interaction that scale into antagonistic exchanges confined to the short form of characters; further work needs to support cross- platform studies that empirically investigate how the length and detail of posts and “functional affordances” help shape and configure online discourse in different ways with possi- ble implications for antagonism, deliberation, discussion, and the exchange of information online. discussion we studied three online social media campaigns and ana- lyzed them at an interactional level. we have illustrated our analysis here by presenting the findings of two of those campaigns. we iteratively developed a typology for catego- rizing the actions performed in social media posts, before constructing a diagrammatic scheme for studying user inter- action. through this we identified a large range of actions performed within single campaigns, with a substantial num- ber of tweets appearing not to engage with the campaign at all. while threads often begin on a particular topic, they fre- quently deviate through the emergent voices of the partici- pants as they unfold over time. our analysis demonstrates the ways in which attention to interactional practices can provide empirical insight into the micro-transformational characteristics of social media posts within “campaign communication.” we argue that social media activist campaigns should not be considered as homogeneous in content, but rather formed through individual posts that perform a wide range of accountable actions and respond to each other. campaigns include actions that often do not appear to be engaged with the campaign itself, despite the use of a particular hashtag. furthermore, these campaigns develop, at least in part, through interactions between posters, which, once again, might not directly engage with the campaign. our microlevel approach can complement computational analyses of twitter interactions. for example, machine learn- ing classifiers could be trained on existing data, enabling automated categorization of future messages. this could assist the real-time identification of uncivil behavior, which could then be defused by online moderators as well as informing additional computational approaches such as natural language processing (nlp) that may enable the cat- egorization of tweets in real time and at scale. the challenge, however, is integrating macro and micro levels of analysis and social and computational approaches into a coherent framework of interdisciplinary work. in conclusion, we are mindful that our analyses suggest that social media “campaign” interaction forms an ecology of topics and associated actions that represent an emerging value base through which digital activism and related issues of stake and interest (potter, edwards, & wetherell, ) might organize. they also inform an emerging understanding of how a continuum of inter-actions constitute a temporal and figure . engaged and unengaged actions. social media + society therefore transformational trajectory that may differentiate forms of online campaign—especially where certain claims, facts, the right to speak, or information are contested. consequently, interactionist analyses may provide a set of concepts and techniques through which online campaigns can be seen to be processed, through the actions, in real time, of participants on social media, as legitimate, contested, mali- cious, or irrelevant to specific social groups. “topic prolifera- tion” through social media streams provides an opportunity to document the “norms-in-action” associated with online, activist twitter campaigns, and trace the salience of core claims and aligned “stakes and interest” (or otherwise) dis- played through members’ accounts through time. in this way, we respecify the transformation of social media campaign communications in and through interactional practices docu- mented and discussed through the course of this article. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: data collection and analysis in this paper were conducted as part of the esrc sponsored project “digital wildfire: (mis)information flows, propagation, and responsible governance” (ref. es/lo / ). meredydd williams’ contribution was also supported by the centre for doctoral training in cyber security at the university of oxford. he is funded through an epsrc studentship (ref. ep/p x/ ). note . as yet, no consensus exists on whether tweets—which are posted on an open platform—need to be anonymized in publi- cations. in this article, we follow a practice agreed in december with the university of oxford central research ethics office, which oversees the digital wildfire project. all tweets are anonymized with the exception of those from official accounts already in the public eye. references awan, i. 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( ). analysing how people orient to and spread rumours in social media by looking at conversational threads. plos one, ( ), e . author biographies william housley (phd, university of wales, dsc econ, cardiff university) is professor in sociology at cardiff university. his research interests include the emerging contours of digital society, social interaction, and social research methods. helena webb (phd, university of nottingham) is a senior researcher in the department of computer science at the university of oxford. her research interests include interaction, organization, and the interrelationships between technologies and social practices. meredydd williams (mphil, university of cambridge) is a phd stu- dent in cyber security at the university of oxford. his research interests include online privacy, behavior change, and the security aspects of the internet-of-things. rob procter (phd, university of manchester) is professor of social informatics at the university of warwick. his research interests include applications of social media analytics, methodologies for social data science, and socio-technical systems. adam edwards (phd, cardiff university) is reader in politics and criminology at cardiff university. his research interests include collaborative and interdisciplinary research, including work with lawyers, political scientists, computer scientists, and sociologists interested in the impact of emergent technologies, such as social media, on issues of law, governance, and regulation in relation to problems of crime, security, and justice. marina jirotka (phd, university of oxford) is professor of human centred computing at the university of oxford. her research inter- ests include co-producing user and community requirements and human computer interaction, particularly for collaborative systems (cscw). pete burnap (phd, cardiff university) is a reader in data science and cyber analytics at cardiff university. his research interests include the prediction and understanding of web-enabled human and software behavior, with a particular interest in emerging and future risks posed to civil society, business (economies), and governments. bernd carsten stahl (phd, witten/herdecke university) is professor of critical research in technology at de montfort university. his research interests include philosophical issues arising from the intersections of business, technology, and information. omer rana (phd, imperial college, university of london) is professor of performance engineering at cardiff university. his research interests include high performance distributed computing and scalable data analysis. matthew williams (phd, cardiff university) is professor of criminology at cardiff university. his research interests include hate crime, hate speech, and extremism online, computational social science and human factors in cybersecurity. https://www.technologyreview.com/s/ /new-media-and-the-people-powered-uprisings/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/ /new-media-and-the-people-powered-uprisings/ https://www.technologyreview.com/s/ /new-media-and-the-people-powered-uprisings/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/ /oxford-university-female-student-a-letter-to-my-sexual-attacker.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/ /oxford-university-female-student-a-letter-to-my-sexual-attacker.html http://www.telegraph.co.uk/women/womens-life/ /oxford-university-female-student-a-letter-to-my-sexual-attacker.html http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /aug/ /clicktivism-ruining-leftist-activism http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /aug/ /clicktivism-ruining-leftist-activism http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /aug/ /clicktivism-ruining-leftist-activism http://reports.weforum.org/global-risks- /risk-case- /digital-wildfires-in-a-hyperconnected-world/ http://reports.weforum.org/global-risks- /risk-case- /digital-wildfires-in-a-hyperconnected-world/ passer à l’agora : de la pertinence d’une histoire des sujets en action en acadie all rights reserved ©, phillipe volpé ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d’auteur. l’utilisation des services d’Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d’utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l’université de montréal, l’université laval et l’université du québec à montréal. il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. https://www.erudit.org/fr/ document généré le avr. : acadiensis journal of the history of the atlantic region revue d’histoire de la région atlantique passer à l’agora : de la pertinence d’une histoire des sujets en action en acadie phillipe volpé volume , numéro , automne uri : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar aller au sommaire du numéro Éditeur(s) department of history at the university of new brunswick issn - (imprimé) - (numérique) découvrir la revue citer cet article volpé, p. ( ). passer à l’agora : de la pertinence d’une histoire des sujets en action en acadie. acadiensis, ( ), – . https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/acadiensis/ https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/acadiensis/ -v -n -acadiensis / https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/acadiensis/ philippe volpé « passer à l’agora : de la pertinence d’une histoire des sujets en action en acadie », acadiensis, vol. , no (automne/autumn ), p. - . passer à l’agora : de la pertinence d’une histoire des sujets en action en acadie sur l’agora se croisent, s’affrontent mais aussi se reflètent toutes les composantes de la cité. (jean-françois sirinelli, ) depuis une dizaine d’annÉes, les rétrospections sur la production historiographique acadienne sont monnaie courante . des bilans critiques ont été rédigés , des limites ont été soulevées mais, hormis quelques rares exceptions , peu de projets prospectifs ont clairement été énoncés. nous avons certes pu observer des plaidoyers en faveur d’une histoire politique – tantôt consubstantielle à une histoire culturelle et intellectuelle – ou sociale, selon les cas, mais il a bien souvent semblé se dégager de ces positions une attitude défensive où il importait davantage de se réclamer d’un champ pour préserver sa dénomination que de dessiner les contours d’une entreprise, d’une posture, d’une méthode, bref d’un projet historiographique. ce n’est pas notre intention ici de revenir sur cette « attitude » – pour ne pas dire « ces débats » qui, eux, nourrissent la pensée critique – dont l’esprit qui s’en dégage nous paraît contraire à l’avancement des connaissances; comme si « un » champ pouvait répondre à toutes les questions de l’humanité : « la réalité historique, par essence multiforme, est forcément à entrée[s] multiple[s] ». d’autant plus que nous sommes d’avis, avec l’historien martin pâquet, que les frontières entre les champs sont beaucoup moins étanches qu’on ne le laisse souvent jean-françois sirinelli, « de la demeure à l’agora. pour une histoire culturelle du politique », vingtième siècle. revue d’histoire, no (janvier-mars ), p. . l’auteur tient à remercier julien massicotte pour ses commentaires et suggestions. patrick d. clarke (dir.), clio en acadie: réflexions historiques, québec, presses de l’université laval, ; julien massicotte, « histoire et pertinence : notes sur l’historiographie acadienne récente », dans martin pâquet et serge dupuis (dir.), faire son temps : usages publics du passé dans les francophonies nord-américaines, québec, presses de l’université laval, , p. - . joel belliveau et patrick-michel noël, « Éléments pour une rétrospection et une prospection de l’historiographie acadienne », bulletin d’histoire politique, vol. , no (hiver ), p. - . jean-françois sirinelli, « de la demeure à l’agora : pour une histoire culturelle du politique », vingtième siècle, no (janvier-mars ), p. . histoire des sujets en action entendre, d’où la nécessité d’entreprises plurielles et de leur interrelation . enfin, concluons à ce sujet qu’il est à souhaiter que nous assistions au cours des prochaines années à une plus grande ouverture envers la complémentarité des approches af in d ’éviter qu’un gouffre ne se creuse en raison d ’une tendance générationnelle et de dialogues de sourds qui viendraient scléroser la production historiographique acadienne pour ou ans. le bien de la recherche fondamentale et de la formation universitaire en dépend. notre intervention est donc d ’un autre ordre. nous voulons proposer une posture de recherche pour répondre à d’importantes lacunes en histoire de l’acadie contemporaine. Évidemment, notre perspective nous apparaît nécessaire pour combler de sérieuses lacunes mais, précisons-le à nouveau, elle n’en demeure pas moins une approche parmi d ’autres qui doivent se poursuive ou être mises en œuvre. si, comme tout le monde, nous prêchons pour notre paroisse, nous n’avons néanmoins pas la prétention de la présenter comme la seule qui vaille. À ce sujet, on trouvera de stimulantes perspectives, complémentaires à la nôtre, dans le forum de discussion du présent numéro d’acadiensis. considérations préliminaires partons d’une considération générale. l’acadie contemporaine nous place d’abord, lorsque nous entreprenons son étude comme petite société, devant sa dimension politique. reconnaissons qu’une telle affirmation pourrait en étonner quelques-uns puisque, étant sans État et dépourvue d’un territoire précisément délimité, la réalité acadienne peut sembler antinomique avec l ’idée même du politique. appréhender la problématique ainsi, ce serait toutefois méprendre « le » politique – la détermination d’un futur pensable et les gestions du social – pour « la » politique – la politique politicienne . le politique n’implique pas nécessairement l’existence d’un État ou d’un territoire, mais relève plutôt de « l’action collective », au sens où l’entendaient déjà dans les années les sociologues michel crozier et erhard friedberg, selon qui martin pâquet, « histoire sociale et histoire politique au québec : esquisse d’une anthropologie du savoir historien », bulletin d’histoire politique, vol. , no (printemps ), p. - . ivan carel, martin pâquet, stéphane savard et jean-philippe warren, « les principes du bulletin d’histoire politique », bulletin d’histoire politique, vol. , no (printemps ), p. - . pour une typologie distinguant « le politique » de « la politique », voir joseph yvon thériault, « l’acadie politique et la politique en acadie », dans l’identité à l’épreuve de la modernité : écrits politiques sur l’acadie et les francophonies canadiennes minoritaires, moncton, Éditions d’acadie, , p. - . volpé l’action collective, qui est construite et non naturelle, « n’est finalement rien d’autre que de la politique quotidienne ». comme les autres sociétés de ce monde, l’acadie n’est pas naturelle, mais construite. suivant en cela le paradigme du « constructivisme identitaire », nous soutenons que l’action collective est constitutive des sociétés et nations, petites ou grandes . ces dernières prennent donc sens par l’action sociale d’acteurs qui s’emploient à en élaborer les déterminants dans l’espace public, à en définir la référence pour parler comme le sociologue fernand dumont, soit une mémoire historique – chargée d’idéologies – à laquelle des gens se reconnaissent et acceptent d’adhérer et dont ils se font les dépositaires . malgré cette centralité des acteurs dans l’édification et le façonnement de la petite société acadienne, la production historiographique s’est peu attardée à contextualiser et à interpréter les fondements idéologiques et axiologiques de leurs mobilisations. déjà, au début des années , l ’ historien léon thériault relevait que les travaux de ses prédécesseurs, les historiens dits « traditionalistes », avaient surtout porté sur l’étude des « structures » de la petite société acadienne, soit sur l’ensemble de ses composantes matérielles – institutions, associations, établissements –, dans un projet affirmé de tracer un état des lieux de la collectivité nationale : une histoire « comptable » et faible en interprétations, au dire de l’historien michel roy . bien que thériault propose à ce moment de surpasser les limites de ce prisme par une étude des « mécanismes internes » des structures de la société acadienne, une bonne part de ses travaux et de ceux de ses contemporains – les historiens critiques des années - – ont maintenu ce cadre d’analyse largement orienté vers l’étude des structures et des institutions dans une temporalité longue; les travaux de thériault sur les « structures ecclésiastiques » en constituent des exemples éloquents. michel crozier et erhard friedberg, l’acteur et le système, paris, seuil, [ ], p. . benedict anderson, imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism, londres, verso, ; eric hobsbawm et terence ranger, the invention of tradition, cambridge, cambridge university press, . fernand dumont, genèse de la société québécoise, montréal, boréal, . léon thériault, « pour une nouvelle orientation de l’histoire acadienne », revue de l’université de moncton, vol. , no ( ), p. - . michel roy, l’acadie des origines à nos jours : essai de synthèse historique, montréal, québec/ amérique, , p. - et - . léon thériault, « l’acadianisation des structures ecclésiastiques aux maritimes, - », dans jean daigle (dir.), l’acadie des maritimes, moncton, chaire d’études acadiennes, , p. - . histoire des sujets en action cet angle des études acadiennes fait à nouveau l’objet de critiques au tournant des années , alors qu’une génération de jeunes historiennes et historiens sont à définir un nouvel axe de recherche pour répondre aux lacunes et aux limites des travaux des générations précédentes. inf luencée par la nouvelle histoire sociale, cette cohorte de chercheuses et de chercheurs revendique notamment le délaissement de l’histoire nationale acadienne en faveur d’une histoire sociale parcellisée, brisant ainsi avec la tradition des synthèses de longue durée en faveur d’études thématiques et rejoignant les débats canadiens sur l’histoire pluraliste – limited identities . appelants à l’étude de nouveaux sujets et à l’introduction de nouvelles méthodes – notamment les enquêtes quantitatives et orales –, les nouveaux historiens de l’acadie proposent une réorientation des études acadiennes – jusqu’alors centrées sur la « nation » – par une analyse des réalités socio-économiques de la « société » acadienne, contribuant par le fait même à montrer la « normalité » de l’acadie. sans passer en revue tout le mérite et l’originalité des contributions des « normalisateurs » d’acadie , retenons pour notre propos que dans leur entreprise de « dépasser l’obsession du discours » pour étudier l’acadie dans « sa substance même », dans sa réalité matérielle en un sens, ils se sont par le fait même distanciés de l’histoire politique et culturelle. comme le remarque le sociologue julien massicotte, sous la plume des « normalisateurs » des années , une certaine dépersonnalisation – regrettée de notre point de vue – j.m.s. careless, « “limited identities” in canada », canadian historical review, vol. , no (mars ), p. - . l’entreprise de « normalisation » du passé acadien rejoint celle poursuivie par des historiennes et des historiens du québec aussi influencés par la nouvelle histoire sociale, qui dans leurs initiatives pour déboulonner le mythe de la grande noirceur québécoise ont su montrer la « normalité » – surtout dans ses dimensions libérales et laïques – de la société québécoise d’avant la révolution tranquille. À ce sujet, voir ronald rudin, faire de l’histoire au québec, trad. de pierre r. desrosiers, sillery, septentrion, . pour un aperçu de leurs travaux et de leur projet historiographique, voir jacques paul couturier et phyllis e. leblanc (dir.), Économie et société en acadie, - , moncton, Éditions d’acadie, ; jacques paul couturier, « tendances actuelles de l’historiographie acadienne, - », historical papers/communications historiques, vol. , no ( ), p. - . au milieu des années , l’historien jacques paul couturier souligne que la production de sa génération, dans ses aspirations à débusquer de nouveaux chantiers, « s’est surtout préoccupée d’être sociale ou économique avant d’être acadienne », ayant par le fait même « négligé de proposer son propre modèle d’interprétation de l’histoire acadienne ». pour couturier, la limite est à ce moment perçue – « quel est le modèle d’interprétation des nouveaux historiens? » – et il est entendu que lui et ses collègues doivent travailler à y répondre : « mais les nouveaux historiographes, s’ils veulent que l’expression colle, devront expliciter leur projet historiographique et lui donner corps. » ce prisme initial des « normalisateurs » d’acadie nous semble par ailleurs avoir été largement revu au cours des années . l’historienne nicole lang affirme en ce sens, à l’occasion d’une entrevue, qu’aux côtés de ses champs de spécialisation plus « précis » – histoire des femmes, du travail, etc. – se trouve aussi « la volpé du sujet acadien s’est opérée, les acadiennes et les acadiens se retrouvant bien souvent « fragmentés » au point de ne former qu’une langue, un sexe, une profession, un métier, etc. Évacuant de leurs travaux une bonne part des aspects politiques et culturels – perceptions et représentations – ou encore des idées – ces « discours » auxquels aucune portée « créative » et aucune fonction « performative » ne sont attribuées –, les « normalisateurs » des années produisent largement « une histoire de l’acadie en l’absence d’elle-même », ajoute massicotte, soit une histoire d’aspects qui ont lieu « en » acadie plutôt qu’une histoire « de » l’acadie . par ailleurs, cette posture « initiale » des « normalisateurs » acadiens – parce qu’elle a évolué depuis –, bien qu’affirmant vouloir produire une histoire de l’acadie « au ras du sol » – en écho au célèbre plaidoyer de l’historien edward thompson en faveur d’une histoire « du bas vers le haut » de la culture ouvrière –, demeure, pour une bonne part, axée sur les structures : l’État, les entreprises, le développement urbain. ainsi, le prisme initial de leurs travaux, largement vidés d’aspects sociopolitiques et culturels, les conduit à rédiger une histoire toujours désincarnée, sans acteurs et sans mobilisations. les trop rares travaux en histoire des mouvements de femmes – du féminisme – et des ouvriers – du syndicalisme – en font foi, ces sujets occupant normalement une bonne place dans les travaux des spécialistes d’histoire sociale . de cette vue d’ensemble, beaucoup trop lapidaire nous en conviendrons, il nous est possible de conclure que la production historiographique acadienne, jusqu’à la dernière décennie, s’est montrée largement désincarnée, étant question nationale, qu’on ne peut évacuer, qui est omniprésente ». voir julien massicotte, « histoire, engagement et militantisme en acadie. entrevue avec nicole lang », histoireengagée. ca, novembre , http://histoireengagee.ca/entrevue-nicole-lang/; jacques paul couturier, « la production de mémoires et de thèses en histoire acadienne, - : analyse et conjectures », dans couturier et leblanc, Économie et société en acadie, p. . roger chartier, au bord de la falaise : l’histoire entre certitudes et incertitudes, paris, albin michel, . comme l’affirme le sociologue pierre bourdieu à la suite du linguiste john l. austin, « dire, c’est faire ». pierre bourdieu, ce que parler veut dire : l’économie des échanges linguistiques, paris, fayard, . julien massicotte, « les nouveaux historiens de l’acadie », acadiensis, vol. , no (printemps ), p. - ; julien massicotte, « l’historien et la question du politique en acadie », bulletin d’histoire politique, vol. , no (printemps ), p. - . edward palmer thompson, the making of the english working class, new york, pantheon books, . de récentes études ont commencé à répondre à ces manques. voir nicole lang, « les acadiennes et le marché du travail : les revendications et les stratégies des militantes ( - ) », acadiensis, vol. , no (été/automne ), p. - ; david frank, « une acadie qui bouge : la présence acadienne dans l’histoire de la fédération des travailleurs et travailleuses du nouveau-brunswick », acadiensis, vol. , no (été/automne ), p. - . histoire des sujets en action davantage centrée sur l’étude des structures et des institutions au détriment d’une analyse contextualisée des acteurs qui y œuvrent, une « subject-less history », pour reprendre l’expression du sociologue anthony giddens . nous pourrions ainsi conclure avec le sociologue alain touraine que la production historiographique acadienne, peu versée dans l’étude des acadiennes et des acadiens en mouvement et dans la contextualisation de leurs motivations, a elle aussi connu, à sa façon, sa « mort du sujet ». certes, la production scientifique acadienne ne s’est pas butée au raz-de-marée paradigmatique du structuralisme que réprouve touraine et qui, dans sa recherche d’invariants et de permanences, avait objectivé les sociétés au point d ’y supprimer la subjectivité et l’autonomie créatrice des acteurs – alors présentés comme de simples marionnettes des mécanismes de contrôle social –, ou encore du déterminisme économique de la sociologie marxiste qui avait pulvérisé toute compréhension d’un sujet libre et conscient en dehors de ses réalités matérielles, voire de dynamiques de classes. néanmoins, que ce soit pour avoir fait la grande part à l’étude des structures exemptes de contributions humaines, comme dans l ’histoire-bilan et institutionnelle menée par les historiens traditionalistes et critiques, ou encore pour avoir contribué à la décomposition et à l ’évidement culturel du sujet acadien à la suite du positivisme et de l’objectivisme des « normalisateurs » du début des années , il nous faut admettre que les acteurs, pourtant au centre des mobilisations qui donnent sens à la petite société acadienne, occupent rarement le devant de la scène. en définitive, il se dégage de l’historiographie acadienne l’image d’une société désincarnée où les acteurs et leurs mobilisations retiennent peu l’attention. il y a du monde dans la salle, mais « la scène est vide », pour ainsi dire . retour sur une histoire incarnée de l’acadie dans son ouvrage programmatique le retour de l’acteur, alain touraine propose un renversement de paradigme pour supplanter le structuralisme déshumanisant en détournant l’angle d’analyse des structures, ce « monde froid [dans lequel] l’acteur – avec ses croyances, ses projets, ses rapports sociaux, sa capacité d’action proprement sociale – est éliminé », pour justement le réorienter vers les acteurs, ces sujets agissants, conscients et créateurs qui sont anthony giddens, politics, sociology and social theory: encounters with classical and contemporary social thought, cambridge, polity press, , p. . alain touraine, critique de la modernité, paris, fayard, , p. . alain touraine, « acteurs et analystes », dans alain touraine (dir.), mouvements sociaux d’aujourd’hui : acteurs et analystes, paris, Éditions ouvrières, , p. . volpé au centre des dynamiques constitutives des sociétés. touraine nous explique la légitimité du sujet comme objet d’étude par le fait que ce dernier peut contrôler son historicité : l’acteur social, capable d’agir de manière autonome par lui- même sur lui-même, peut être le maître d’œuvre de son histoire. touraine propose, à la suite de cette thèse de la capacité de choix rationnels du sujet, l’étude des mouvements sociaux comme lieux privilégiés où nous sommes à même de saisir comment les acteurs sociaux, dans leurs rapports et conf lits, « luttent précisément pour la gestion de [leur] culture et des activités qu’elle produit ». ne nous méprenons pas, touraine n’est pas à formuler un projet opposant les acteurs à la société. il précise d’ailleurs que, s’il s’en prend au structuralisme comme « système qui exclut tout acteur », la posture qu’il est à définir ne se rallie pas davantage à l’ethnométhodologie, qui étudie l’« acteur en dehors de tout système » . c’est donc des acteurs et des mouvements sociaux « en » société, enracinés dans une culture et un milieu, que touraine nous invite à étudier. l’heure n’est donc plus, comme le soutient l’historien françois dosse, à reproduire la fausse dichotomie « entre divinisation et dissolution du sujet » qui avait marqué les débats en sciences sociales entre structure et sujet, mais plutôt à saisir l’interrelation entre les deux objets : les acteurs en société qui la composent, la façonnent et s’y définissent. cet appel en faveur d’une étude des sujets en action résonne depuis le tournant des années dans nombre de plaidoyers en faveur d’une histoire culturelle des sociétés. c’est en ce sens que l’historien français jean-françois sirinelli propose, après que l’historien michel vovelle eut invité les historiennes et les historiens « à passer de la cave de l’échange économique au grenier des opérations mentales de saisie du réel », de passer « de la demeure à l’agora » , soit à une analyse contextuelle et socioculturelle des personnes dans l’espace public, ce lieu de définition des sociétés. en plaidant pour une histoire politique revigorée par la dynamique histoire culturelle, sirinelli ne cherche pas à touraine écrit sur l’historicité et le rapport qu’elle postule entre acteur et société : « j’appelle historicité, précisément, l’ensemble de ces modèles culturels qui commandent les pratiques sociales, mais seulement en passant à travers des rapports sociaux qui sont toujours des rapports de pouvoir. pareille conception interdit de centrer encore l’analyse autour de l’idée de société : tout comme les théories de l’organisation, elle ne reconnaît à l’ensemble social, ou à tel ou tel de ses sous-ensembles, qu’un faible niveau de stabilité et même de cohérence. » alain touraine, le retour de l’acteur : essai de sociologie, paris, fayard, , p. . touraine, le retour de l’acteur, p. . voir aussi alain touraine, penser autrement, paris, fayard, . françois dosse, l’empire du sens : l’humanisation des sciences humaines, paris, la découverte, , p. . sirinelli, « de la demeure à l’agora », p. - . histoire des sujets en action proposer une nouvelle doxa mais, bien au contraire, à saisir le politique dans ses contextes qui ne peuvent être compris en dehors des dynamiques sociales : « au demeurant, une approche par le culturel est probablement l’une des façons de maintenir des liens entre le politique et le social. » l’historien français propose en ce sens de dépoussiérer l’histoire politique pour la « désenclaver » de ses assises « par le haut » afin de se rapprocher de l’étude des acteurs, de leurs réseaux de sociabilité, itinéraires, perceptions et représentations, bref de l’ensemble des composantes qui donnent sens à leur engagement dans l’agora. il importe pour sirinelli d’analyser et de mettre en relation « la double dimension, agissante mais aussi pensante » des acteurs et non pas de les opposer dans la fausse binarité « idées » et « réalités ». il rappelle à ce sujet qu’il est commun que l’agir humain soit conditionné par des visions du monde : c’est la « perception qui est motrice et non la réalité ». il est en ce sens pertinent de mettre en évidence et de contextualiser l’ensemble « des aspirations, des craintes et des espérances collectives » qui, ayant été crues jadis ou naguère, ont justifié le programme d’action, voire le projet collectif élaboré par les acteurs des collectivités . c’est en somme tout un projet d’histoire culturelle et intellectuelle des sociétés – ou de la culture politique – qu’il nous est possible de lire dans le plaidoyer de sirinelli. le projet proposé, invitant à « aller plus avant sans se soucier des frontières », se veut toutefois moins une entreprise aux contours bien définis qu’une posture épistémologique avant tout « compréhensive », dans le sens wébérien , des phénomènes sociaux. compréhensive, cette approche se veut aussi contextualiste. il n’est en ce sens pas question de choisir entre l’approche internaliste de l’étude des œuvres – comme une histoire des marc angenot, l’histoire des idées : problématiques, objets, concepts, méthodes, enjeux, débats, liège, presses universitaires de liège, . de façon analogue, fernand dumont faisait remarquer que « [c]omprendre une idéologie ne consiste pas à se demander si elle se trompe ou non mais à la replacer dans le contexte dont elle est à la fois le produit et le complément ». fernand dumont, « du début du siècle à la crise de : un espace idéologique », dans fernand dumont, jean-paul montminy et jean hamelin (dir.), idéologies au canada français, - , québec, presses de l’université laval, , p. . sirinelli définit la culture politique comme « l’ensemble des représentations qui soude un groupe humain sur le plan politique, c’est-à-dire une vision du monde partagée, une commune lecture du passé, une projection dans l’avenir vécue ensemble ». sirinelli, « de la demeure à l’agora », p. - . le sociologue max weber définit la sociologie comme « une science qui se propose de comprendre par interprétation l’activité sociale et par là d’expliquer causalement son déroulement et ses effets », faisant en cela de la « compréhension » l’exercice de saisie des fondements et des significations de l’action. max weber, Économie et société, paris, pilon, , p. . volpé philosophies politiques déracinée de leur ancrage social d’énonciation et de réception – et l’approche externaliste des réseaux de sociabilité, mais plutôt un enchevêtrement entre les deux, qui sont en fait, comme le fait remarquer françois dosse, complémentaires : l’histoire intellectuelle pratiquée de la sorte, entre contextualisme et herméneutique, entend « rendre compte des œuvres, parcours, itinéraires, par-delà les frontières disciplinaires ». suivant ce modèle théorique, il importe en ce sens non seulement de « reconstru[ire] des catégories indigènes de l ’intérieur », mais aussi de reconstituer « l’ensemble des chemins possibles ouverts à un certain moment du passé ». soyons clair : l’historienne et l’historien ont le privilège d’étudier un objet dont le présent et le futur relèvent pour eux du passé. ils doivent néanmoins se garder d’adopter une position de surplomb et d’étudier ce passé de manière linéaire à partir de finalités connues ou qui leur ont été prêtées ultérieurement. pour comprendre le passé dans toute son épaisseur, l’historienne et l’historien doivent rendre compte du « champ des possibles [de ce] passé en s’insérant dans ce moment en tant que moment présent ». nous n’aspirons pas, pour notre part, à reconstituer l’histoire à partir d’un point d’arrivée et à chercher des prémisses présentant les couleurs d’une conclusion déterminée. il ne faut pas penser qu’un programme, un projet, une idée, etc., se présentent dès leur origine avec les contours circonscrits de leur forme aboutie. le philosophe michel foucault a vu juste à ce sujet en relevant dans un texte sur la généalogie des choses que « [c]e qu’on trouve, au commencement historique des choses, ce n’est pas l’identité encore préservée de leur origine, – c’est la discorde des autres choses, c’est le disparate ». le sociologue jean-philippe warren fait une remarque similaire dans sa biographie du jeune fernand dumont, où, en marge d’une invitation à l’étude des « intentions primordiales » des acteurs, il avance qu’« une pensée ne s’accouche jamais tout armée, elle connaît ses louvoiements et ses tâtonnements, ne s’épargnant ni les volte-face, ni les palinodies, encore moins le doute ». françois dosse, la marche des idées : histoire des intellectuels – histoire intellectuelle, paris, la découverte, , p. . françois dosse, « l’irréduction dans l’histoire intellectuelle », espaces temps, nos - ( ), p. . michel foucault, « nietzsche, la généalogie, l’histoire », dans suzanne bachelard et al. (dir.), hommage à jean hyppolite, paris, presses universitaires de france, , p. . jean-philippe warren, un supplément d’âme : les intentions primordiales de fernand dumont ( - ), québec, presses de l’université laval, , p. . histoire des sujets en action c’est à la suite de ce projet d’une « histoire incarnée », tournée vers l’étude des acteurs en mouvement et compris dans leurs contextes, que s’inscrit notre projet historiographique. il est pour nous question d’analyser et d’interpréter le bagage idéologique et axiologique au fondement de l’engagement des sujets en acadie, de rendre compte des « visions du monde » qui les animent et qui se font justificatrices de leur action. nous nous intéressons en ce sens à l’étude des mouvements, des tensions et des débats qui animent et, par le fait même, définissent la petite société acadienne. parce qu’il importe pour nous de contextualiser l’action sociale des acteurs en acadie, il est de notre point de vue nécessaire de tenir compte des réalités, certes externes, voire internationales, mais aussi internes de notre sujet, c’est-à-dire de chercher à comprendre l’acadie en soi et pour soi et non pas à négliger la conjoncture intérieure, avec ses particularités, au profit d’une trame uniformisante suivant un pseudo- schème internationalisant. comprenons-nous bien : il n’est pas question en ce sens de présenter l’acadie comme une société autarcique et isolée du monde. bien au contraire. l’acadie des provinces maritimes, dont la « normalité » a été maintes fois montrée, est pour nous tout autant exposée aux courants multiples des époques que les autres sociétés du monde occidental. néanmoins, comme toutes les sociétés, elle est aussi aux prises avec des réalités économique, politique, culturelle, géographique, démographique, etc., particulières et s’inscrit ainsi dans un contexte qui lui est propre. l’acadie des provinces maritimes fait en ce sens partie de l’histoire du canada et de l’amérique du nord, sans pour autant que l’histoire de ces espaces géographiques soit entièrement la sienne, pas plus que celle du québec d’ailleurs. ainsi, afin d ’éviter de gommer les réalités acadiennes au profit de généralités tirées d’autres espaces de recherche, notre posture nous mène à saisir la façon dont les acadiennes et les acadiens comprennent, vivent, s’approprient, perçoivent, etc., les réalités auxquelles ils sont exposés en eux-mêmes, ne serait-ce, suivant une certaine démarche étapiste, que pour mieux les comparer par la suite. soulignons sur ce point que nous ne sommes pas sans rappeler toute la pertinence du projet porté par acadiensis qui, dès ses origines, mettait les chercheuses et les chercheurs en garde contre les écueils téléologiques des approches partielles émanant d’un prisme exclusivement national, qui privilégient souvent l’étude de quelques métropoles – montréal, toronto, etc. – philippe volpé, « autour de l’éducation : plaidoyer pour une histoire incarnée de l’acadie », acadiensis, vol. , no (été/automne ), p. - . volpé au détriment des réalités « périphériques », locales, régionales . s’il est pour nous certain que l’universel n’est pas antinomique avec les réalités locales – parce qu’il faut partir du particulier pour arriver au général –, nous sommes d’avis qu’acadiensis est toujours d’une grande actualité dans le contexte actuel où les plaidoyers stimulants en faveur d’études transnationales et comparées – qu’il faut absolument engager – n’appellent pas moins à certaines prudences devant les possibilités d’un ressac des régions, des petites sociétés, bref des « marges », au profit de l’étude des grandes agglomérations à l’histoire mieux connue et aux fonds d’archives plus volumineux, accessibles et invitants. l’étude de la petite société acadienne, inscrite dans ses contextes particuliers et partagés, soit dans l’interrelation entre ses réalités locales et internationales, nous permet notamment de contribuer à la décentralisation des entreprises et de proposer des points de vue distincts et complémentaires, notamment par la prise en considération de son contexte minoritaire, sur un ensemble de phénomènes sociaux qui traversent les sociétés canadienne et nord-américaine. sortir des lieux communs de la connaissance de notre point de vue, notre posture permet de répondre à certaines des initiatives qu’étaient soucieux de concrétiser les historiennes et historiens « normalisateurs » en travaillant à placer la production historiographique acadienne en dialogue avec les historiographies d’autres espaces géographiques – les mouvements sociaux d’acadie ne sont pas sans avoir des équivalents ailleurs dans le monde – et également de surpasser les limites strictes d’une histoire nationale, sans toutefois la délaisser puisque celle-ci cimente en déf initive la collectivité; à ce point-ci, on aura compris notre réticence devant les entreprises de table rase. c’est dire que notre approche se propose notamment de sortir des lieux communs de la connaissance en histoire acadienne en défrichant de nouveaux chantiers de recherche ou en proposant d’en aborder des plus anciens suivant de nouvelles perspectives. retenons trois axes de recherche en lien avec nos travaux récents. nous l’avons déjà évoqué, l’histoire des mouvements sociaux est l’une des avenues qu’il nous semble urgent d’emprunter pour redynamiser la production historiographique acadienne et pour être à même de mieux comprendre les changements sociaux survenus au sein de cette petite société dans toute son épaisseur, dans son pluralisme. l’histoire des mobilisations et de la prise david frank, « acadiensis, and », canadian review of american studies, vol. , no ( ), p. - . histoire des sujets en action de parole des femmes acadiennes nous semble, à ce propos, éloquente. peu d’études ont cherché à analyser l’engagement des femmes dans l’espace public acadien . nous connaissons certes le cas de marichette – l’institutrice Émilie leblanc – qui, à la fin du e siècle, a publié des lettres d’opinions dans le journal l’Évangéline pour revendiquer le droit de vote et de meilleures conditions de travail pour les femmes. au-delà de ce cas connu de la suffragette acadienne, par ailleurs étudié par des littéraires , les travaux ont surtout porté sur le statut politique et juridique des femmes, avec de faibles prises de vue sur la question de l’engagement des femmes francophones, donnant en somme l’impression que, de marichette à la seconde vague du féminisme des années - , les femmes acadiennes sont demeurées largement passives. les quelques notices biographiques de « grandes femmes » acadiennes dont nous disposons suffisent néanmoins à contester cette impression en nous laissant entrevoir les mobilisations de certaines dans l’espace public : pensons aux chroniques de marguerite michaud dans l’Évangéline, à la participation acadienne dans le women’s institute, cette « université de la femme rurale », ou encore aux mouvements d’action catholique tels que la jeunesse ouvrière catholique féminine. sou lignons quant à ce dernier exemple que les mouvements d’action catholique sont eux aussi largement inconnus en acadie . bien que la professeure en sciences de l’éducation simone leblanc-rainville ait laissé entendre, à la suite d’études analogues au québec , que leur rôle ait pu être notable dans les mobilisations réformistes, féministes, néonationalistes et socialistes des années et au-delà , la production historiographique acadienne, encore largement héritière des préjugés qui avaient conduit à déclasser l ’ histoire religieuse suivant le positionnement iconoclaste des philippe volpé, « “soyons orgueilleuses, mesdemoiselles, sachons nous suffire” : femmes, genre, travail et espace public au tournant du e siècle », revue de la société historique du madawaska, vol. , nos - (juillet-décembre ), p. - . pierre gérin et pierre m. gérin, marichette : lettres acadiennes, - , sherbrooke, naaman, . thérèse lemieux et gemma caron, avec la collaboration de madeleine cyr, silhouettes acadiennes : biographies de femmes, s. l., s. n., . philippe volpé, « de l’acja à l’acjc ou de l’action nationale à l’action catholique : associations jeunesse et mobilisations collectives en acadie, - », acadiensis, vol. , no (été/ automne ), p. - . e.-martin meunier et jean-philippe warren, sortir de la « grande noirceur » : l’horizon « personnaliste » de la révolution tranquille, sillery, septentrion, ; michael gauvreau, the catholic origins of quebec’s quiet revolution, - , montréal-kingston, mcgill-queen’s university press, . simone leblanc-rainville, corinne gallant : une pionnière du féminisme en acadie, moncton, institut d’études acadiennes, . volpé historiens critiques qui en condamnaient l’idéologie, a marginalisé le champ, abandonnant par le fait même de grands pans de l’histoire acadienne dans lesquels les dimensions catholiques ont longtemps été omniprésentes . une histoire des mouvements jeunesse qui va au-delà de l’étude des jeunes qui manifestent pour s’intéresser à l’ensemble de leurs mobilisations, lesquelles témoignent et permettent bien souvent de rendre compte des changements sociaux qui caractérisent les sociétés de différentes époques, nous semble par ailleurs tout aussi porteuse. nous pourrions ajouter à ces exemples celui d ’une histoire des mouvements de solidarité internationale. pensons aux congréganistes d’acadie de la première moitié du e siècle qui œuvrent en côte d’ivoire, au pérou et aux philippines, aux succursales acadiennes de groupes d’appui au « développement » du tiers-monde – les succursales de l ’entraide universitaire mondiale du canada et du ser vice universitaire canadien outre-mer –, aux comités de lutte pour la décolonisation dans les années – acadie-chili, acadie-angola –, ou encore à la pléthore d’ong fondées à la suite des années – oxfam-acadie, réseau acadien de solidarité internationale . sans que ces divers mouvements constituent des microcosmes de la petite société acadienne, il demeure que, dans leur contexte, chacun témoigne d’une partie des préoccupations acadiennes de leur temps. qui plus est, que des mouvements de solidarité, à vocation internationaliste, s’affublent de référents acadiens, cette société sans État, rappelons-le, est un phénomène pour le moins intéressant qui invite à étudier leur interrelation avec la petite société acadienne. notre posture accorde également un intérêt à l ’étude des itinéraires individuels. il n’est pas ici question de proposer un retour à la biographie « classique », dont on a maintes fois critiqué le caractère téléologique de saisie d’un parcours de vie dans une dimension linéaire, mais plutôt, suivant le modèle énoncé, d’étudier l’acteur en société, dans ses rapports à soi et à la collectivité, soit dans ses tensions et ses louvoiements qui mettent en évidence À ce sujet, les travaux de régis brun et de michel roy, qui à leur façon ont contribué à la marginalisation de l’histoire religieuse et à construire, à la suite des historiens modernistes du québec, le mythe de la grande noirceur acadienne, viennent en tête. régis brun, de grand-pré à kouchibougouac : l’histoire d’un peuple exploité, moncton, Éditions d’acadie, ; michel roy, l’acadie perdue, montréal, Éditions québec/amérique, . pour des critiques de cette marginalisation de l’histoire religieuse en acadie, voir pierre trépanier, « les récollets et l’acadie ( - ) : plaidoyer pour l’histoire religieuse », les cahiers de la société historique acadienne, vol. , no (mars ), p. - ; pierre trépanier, « remembrement de l’Église d’acadie », dans guy-marie oury (dir.), la croix et le nouveau monde : histoire religieuse des francophones d’amérique du nord, chambray/montréal, cld/cmd, , p. - . euclide chiasson et marc johnson, « organismes d’acadie et tiers-monde », Égalité, no (automne ), p. - . histoire des sujets en action une partie du contexte dans lequel se situe la société d’une époque et qui marquent et caractérisent le changement social . mentionnons par exemple la pertinence d’une biographie intellectuelle de mathilda blanchard, cette coiffeuse devenue figure de proue du syndicalisme et des mouvements citoyens en acadie des années . autour de mathilda blanchard, de son parcours individuel, c’est toute l’histoire de la participation des femmes à la politique provinciale et municipale, de la syndicalisation des pêcheurs, des revendications des chômeuses et des chômeurs et même de certains événements comme la grève de la cirtex – paradoxalement méconnue dans l’historiographie malgré sa place dans la mémoire acadienne – qui est interrogée. enfin, il est selon nous nécessaire, suivant les plaidoyers des historiennes et des historiens « controversialistes », d’amorcer une histoire des polémiques, des conf lits et des débats en acadie. par leur caractère événementiel, les controverses nous permettent d’effectuer un arrêt dans le temps et de poser un regard synchronique sur l’ensemble des acteurs d’un moment qui sont à débattre d’un enjeu et, par le fait même, de mieux rendre compte des idées, croyances et valeurs au fondement de l’argumentaire de chacun. il est en ce sens question d’étudier les configurations d’idées des différents protagonistes, non pas dans une position de surplomb pour en noter les contradictions ou l’irrationalité, mais plutôt pour chercher à saisir le sens qu’elles prennent et la façon dont elles sont appropriées et crues dans leur contexte précis. cette approche nous permet non seulement de rendre compte des enjeux qui préoccupent la petite société acadienne d’un temps donné, mais également, lorsque nous inscrivons les controverses dans la durée – la diachronie –, de comprendre l’évolution de sa culture politique en mettant en évidence ce qui se perpétue et ce qui change à la suite des conf lits. nous pouvons ici penser aux apports d’une enquête sur les débats eu égard au bilinguisme dans les provinces maritimes, un sujet perpétuellement polémique en acadie depuis la confédération puisqu’il touche à la définition même de la collectivité. que ce soit les composantes du projet collectif acadien, les rapports de la petite société acadienne avec les communautés autochtones, anglophones et immigrantes, ou sur la pertinence de la biographie intellectuelle, voir michel bock, « de la pertinence historiographique d’une trajectoire individuelle : lionel groulx, la confédération et le canada français », canadian historical review, vol. , no (juin ), p. - . mathilda, la passionnaria acadienne (documentaire), canada, réalisation de ginette pellerin, production de l’office national du film, , min. ann thomson, « l’histoire intellectuelle : quelles idées, quel contexte? », revue d’histoire moderne et contemporaine, no ( / ), p. - . volpé encore la place de l’acadie au sein du canada, de l’amérique du nord, voire du monde occidental, toutes ces questions sont liées à la langue, qui « remplit et circonscrit le lieu politique » des sociétés. par-delà les travaux qui cherchent à étudier l’enjeu dans ses composantes juridiques, qu’en est-il de la perception des acadiennes et des acadiens des différentes provinces, régions, classes sociales et époques sur cette question? quels arguments évoquent-ils pour justifier leur position vis-à-vis du bilinguisme et comment les expliquer ? Étudier l’agora, penser la cité notre plaidoyer pour une histoire incarnée de l’acadie se veut, en somme, en faveur de l’étude des acteurs et de leurs mouvements – de femmes, de jeunes, religieux, ouvriers, de gauche, de droite, etc. –, en cherchant notamment à contextualiser leurs actions et à en saisir les fondements idéologiques et axiologiques. il est pour nous question de mettre à l’avant-scène les personnes qui sont souvent dissimulées, englouties ou réduites à des questions statistiques ou structurelles dans les sociétés, institutions et associations au sein desquelles elles sont pourtant les architectes et animatrices. ce passage à l’agora, à l’étude des mobilisations dans l’espace public qui donnent sens à la collectivité acadienne, nous semble doublement à propos dans la conjoncture actuelle, non seulement pour répondre à des lacunes sur le plan des connaissances, mais aussi pour éclairer des enjeux contemporains. ne nous méprenons pas, l’histoire n’est pas une science morale et elle doit conserver une certaine autonomie pour poser un regard à froid sur ses objets suivant ses diktats historiographiques et épistémologiques. alors que nous sommes à l’heure des mouvements idle no more, #metoo, black lives matter et occupy, que le regroupement féministe du nouveau-brunswick fait la promotion de « l’analyse inclusive selon le genre » afin de progresser vers l’égalité des genres, que la fédération des jeunes francophones du nouveau-brunswick milite pour l’abaissement de l’âge du droit de vote à ans afin de soutenir l’engagement michel de certeau, dominique julia et jacques revel, une politique de la langue. la révolution française et les patois : l’enquête de grégoire, paris, gallimard, [ ], cité dans marcel martel et martin pâquet (dir.), légiférer en matière linguistique, québec, presses de l’université laval, , p. . sur cet exemple précis des polémiques linguistiques en acadie, certains travaux menés par des sociolinguistes sur les « idéologies linguistiques » ont amorcé une partie du travail. voir, notamment, annette boudreau et Émilie urbain, « la presse comme tribune d’un discours d’autorité sur la langue : représentations et idéologies linguistiques dans la presse acadienne, de la fondation du moniteur acadien aux conventions nationales », francophonies d’amérique, no (printemps ), p. - ; laurence arrighi et Émilie urbain, « le bilinguisme officiel au nouveau-brunswick : surface paisible, fond polémique », transcanadiana : polish journal of canadian studies/revue polonaise d’études canadiennes, no ( ), p. - . histoire des sujets en action des jeunes dans l’espace public, que les autorités gouvernementales posent de sérieux défis eu égard au respect des « droits » des collectivités francophones, que nombre d’acadiennes et d’acadiens sont à décrier le manque de chefs de file et de projets prospectifs en acadie, il nous semble qu’une histoire des acteurs et des mouvements sociaux ne peut qu’intéresser, non pas pour offrir des leçons ou des modèles mais, à tout le moins, pour engager des réf lexions, susciter des questionnements et leur offrir un fond d’historicité. philippe volpÉ philippe volpÉ is a postdoctoral fellow at l’institut d’études acadiennes de l’université de moncton. his research in cultural and intellectual history focuses on social movements, youth, and social and ideological transformations in acadie. he is the co-author, with julien massicotte, of au temps de la « révolution acadienne » : les marxistes-léninistes en acadie (ottawa: presses de l’université d’ottawa, ). philippe volpÉ est chercheur postdoctoral à l’institut d’études acadiennes de l’université de moncton. ses travaux en histoire culturelle et intellectuelle portent notamment sur l’histoire des mouvements sociaux, de la jeunesse, et des changements sociaux et des transformations idéologiques en acadie. il est coauteur, avec julien massicotte, de l’ouvrage au temps de la « révolution acadienne » : les marxistes-léninistes en acadie (ottawa, presses de l’université d’ottawa, ). the journal of classics teaching to suffer the consequences. handling bodily functions is one (and lawrence is of course well-known for her familiarity with the roman sponge on a stick), but events move from the scatological to the ontological. the book handles themes of growing up (phys- ically, emotionally, intellectually, in relationship terms), where to find courage, who a good mentor might be, mixing the pain of personal situations at an individual level with their global impact. the writing remains as vivid as ever. she invokes all our senses, asking us to enter athens with the child’s curiosity and a teenager’s disdain. sights, smells, sounds and tastes are all brought out, along with the bodily sensations of bouncing in a chariot or even squelch- ing through something unmentionable. archaeological sites are brought to life and put to good use, with real and imagined epi- sodes coinciding. the author’s research is thorough, and is made exciting through the time travel conceit’s ability to present us with ‘as it happened’ views of familiar people and events. the boys meet ‘kid plato’ and get a lesson in life from a snotty-nosed geek. alcib- iades imposes his presence on athens and on the boys, and we reel from seeing him as villain and hero in quick succession, much, one feels, like many of his contemporaries must have done. short chapters hurry us along as a simple plot gains twists and turns. the adventure lasts only a few days, but they are full of excitement. real life impinges in such a way as to draw in classicists across the world, as well as general readers (children and adults alike). the latin teacher is one miss forte (minus the mouse), and alongside professor armand d’angour (whose socrates in love clearly influences the book), the boundary between real and imagined characters is truly blurred. lawrence plays with this when she sees echoes of her fic- tional ancient characters in the other academic in the final chapters, one dr fotini charis. the involvement of big corporations and big governments in the story leaves clear space for a further adventure, if both the children and the author are brave enough to take it on! doi: . /s homer: a very short introduction graziosi (b.). pp. xviii + , ills. oxford: oxford university press, . paper, £ . , us$ . . isbn: - - - - jo lashly shrewsbury high school i possess a relatively large number of this series of books; some are excellent and some i find rather more challenging; this one most defi- nitely fell into the excellent category. graziosi has a knack of speaking directly to readers and drawing them in with her passion (this is a word i generally discourage as it appears far too often in personal statements, but here it is correct). this book would be an invaluable addition to any school or department library. beginning with a brief survey of the arguments surrounded the authorship of the iliad and the odyssey, graziosi carefully traces the academic work that has been done on oral poetry and clearly explains milman parry’s work on oral poetry and metrical analysis as relating to epithets i.e. that ‘if a greek singer had two measures to fill, he would always say ‘luminous achilles” since there was no other formula that would fit’. some might say that research such as this tarnishes the beauty of the poetry and makes it seem over-formulaic, but that can be eas- ily countered with the argument that it demonstrates the poet’s skill in having the flexibility and tools to produce vast quantities of poetry in a particular style for live perfor- mance. the poetry itself is infinitely flexible and allows for insights into the human (or semi-divine in achilles’ case) con- dition as when achilles finds him- self unable to catch apollo (il - ) and bemoans his powerless- ness against a god. from the odys- sey too she uses the example of odysseus’ dilemma when woken by nausicaa and her slave-girls playing ball (odyssey ) and the inter- nal dialogue about how he should proceed. such insights into human character are what make these poems still relevant to us today. moving from the linguistic to the material graziosi explains how schliemann’s drive to prove the reality of homer led him to mycenae and hissarlik. this is not the place to discuss schliemann’s rather questionable meth- ods, but it is an important part of the after-life of the homeric epics and any book on homer needs to mention him. more interesting perhaps are the passages on linear b and evidence directly from the text about agriculture and food as seen in the similes. fishing for instance provide several striking similes – scylla grabbing odysseus’ men off their ship (od - ) or the suitors lying like fish pulled out of the sea by fisherman to lie on the sand (od - ) – but eating fish is never done in the iliad and only once in the odyssey (od ) and the technology used to fish effectively is well described as are building pro- cesses whether divine or mortal (od - ) and the descriptions of drinking vessels that are scattered throughout both poems. the skill of ordinary people is contrasted implicitly by the comparison of heroes with wild animals – lions, boar – that threaten the settled farmer. such subtleties are commonplace within this rich poetry. there is discussion of the poet’s voice and the way that he can focus in on the minutiae but then pan out to take a panorama of the battlefield, or perhaps an aside to a specific character as he does on two occasions to eumaeus in the odyssey. graziosi’s account of homer’s description of the shield of achilles is an excellent survey and gives us a beautiful and varied account of agricultural work, dancing and city life as in people shouting at each other in a court case – all told in an almost cinematic way. there are wonderful touches too, and my personal favourites are the two occasions where eyebrows are used to signal – odysseus tries to order his men to set him free as the sirens work their musical magic on him, and again in book when athene summons odysseus from eumaeus’ hut by gesturing with her eyebrows - and the meeting with argus the dog in book which never fails to bring a tear to the eye even of the most hardened th formers. homer, whoever he (or they) was certainly knew how to touch a nerve. it is only once the more general topics have been covered that graziosi moves on to the two most famous works of homer, the iliad and the odyssey, and each has three chapters devoted to it. these chapters pick out key scenes to illustrate the topic of the chapter e.g. the wrath of achilles discusses achilles’ behaviour following the initial quarrel with agamemnon and how that wrath becomes less like that of a god and more like that of a mortal since achilles can die, continuing the representation of the human condi- tion. there is also a typically well-argued discussion of the role of hector and his part in the narrative as the major protagonist on the trojan side. odysseus, ‘the man of many turns’ is shown to be described https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core book reviews by a ‘wider range of animals than any other hero’; there is the lion when he meets nausicaa, the octopus when he is clinging to a rock before he makes landfall at scherie and a bat when he is clinging to the fig tree in book ; of these the lion is a relatively common comparator, but the latter two are most inventive and typical of the homeric poet. under- standably the journey to the underworld (nekyia) is a chosen theme to explore and explain odysseus’ character and motivation to return home to ithaca and to cheat death in the process. overall, this is an excellent resource and accessible to students, though the sections on the epics themselves would be best read after the text has been studied. doi: . /s not all dead white men. classics and misogyny in the digital age. zuckerberg (d.). pp. . cambridge, ma: harvard university press, . cased, £ . , us$ . , € (paper, £ . , us$ . , € . ). isbn:  - - - - . jo lashly shrewsbury high school. i found this quite a difficult book to read; not because of its complexity, though in a way it was, but because of the sometimes difficult subject matter. it is an interesting book and very apt for its time, coming, as it does, in the age of trump, the handmaid’s tale and black lives matter, but there are so many acronyms to cope with and an overwhelming feeling of the desperate inadequacy felt by the major players in the ‘manosphere’. while i was reading it, the republican national conference was being reported from the states, ‘mrs america’ was being advertised on uk television and there were reports of women calling for one-vote households where the man of the house had the final say, ‘if it were a godly household’. the premise of the book is that the alt-right, the trp (the red pill, named for the choice between red and blue pills in the matrix) and sundry other groups that seem to be united by a resentment against women, people of colour and the liberal élite, have hijacked (and misrepresented in part) classical literature to give a gravitas to their ideas. the author, donna zuckerberg, younger sister of facebook founder, mark zuckerberg, is a classicist and well-read in the literature that she discusses. she is also not blind to the societal norms of the ancient world that kept women more closeted than is the case for western societies these days; but it is a usa-centric approach (that is not to say that there are not elements of it in other western societies but it seems to be less desperate). the alacrity with which these groups focus on classical texts, particularly stoic philosophy and greek tragedies such as hippolytus, is understandable in some respects; but it is also typical of a society which was heavily based on classical constructs – see their political architecture, the naming of the senate and the latifundia plantations of years ago that were tended by slaves (though other western societies were not blameless in this respect). zuckerberg explains how stoicism in particular reinforces the belief that men are guided by rationality and women by emotion which means that women should be ruled by men. she also explains how a reading that stops at this point is missing the point that women too could aspire to true virtue though with the gendered language of the ancient world (virilis, ἀνδρεῖα). whilst the chapter on stoicism was interesting, it would be the chapter on ovid that, i think, would draw in more people. this chapter focuses on the use by the ‘manosphere’ of ovid’s ars amatoria as a handbook not only on seduction but on how to treat women generally. whilst there are parts of this work which are not very savoury (and indeed there are elements of the amores (the behaviour of the narrator in iii. perhaps?) too with which we might take issue), zuckerberg does acknowledge that this is a work of literary fiction and probably not to be taken literally; and the resentment of the members of the ‘manosphere’ is apparent particularly in the section on danish women who, it seems are immune to ovidian seduction techniques as they have ‘no idea what it feels like to not have medical care or free access to university education. they have no fear of becoming homeless or permanently jobless. the government’s soothing hand will catch everyone as they fall’. so, it seems that women are only prey when they are likely to be vulnerable, which rather reinforces the idea that many of those in these groups are inadequate. sadly, the use and abuse of classics is not restricted to the alt-right and the the red pill group: there are numerous examples amongst some uk politicians of latin (and greek) tags and references being dropped into speeches or interviews, perhaps to advertise an élite education and to sound clever. this does classics no good and is unfair on those who work so hard to bring it to a wide range of people, especially those who are encouraged to exert their critical faculties on it, as should be done with all subjects. no civilisation can be perfect, but the faults and beauties should be seen for what they are and not highjacked for political or societally sinister motives. this is an interesting book, but one which i cannot see being widely read in schools. in times of financial probity, it might be a luxury. i am glad i read it, though there are some views that i would hope never to encounter. still, forewarned is forearmed, and a knowledge of how some of these groups work is a useful tool. doi: . /s x aristotle: poetics zerba (m.), gorman (d.) (edd., revised trans.). pp. xxxviii + . new york & london: w. w norton and company, . paper, £ . . isbn: - - - - . maria bergquist merchant taylors’ school, northwood aristotle’s poetics is perhaps the most influential work of literary theory. as such, it enjoys a wider audience than some of aristotle’s other works. this edition, with its introduction, glossary, notes on https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core pacific dynamics: volume number june journal of interdisciplinary research http://pacificdynamics.nz sound tracks of the black pacific: creative commons attribution . music, identity and resilience in australian issn: - x south sea islander communities camellia webb-gannon university of western sydney michael webb university of western sydney abstract australian south sea islanders, the descendants of the melanesians from (primarily) vanuatu and solomon islands who were ‘blackbirded’ to queensland and new south wales ( - ) for their labour, have, through music and dance practices, come to identify as part of a global black ‘transnation’. studies of the ‘black atlantic’ point both to the transnational character of slavery and the importance of music as a medium of resistance. this article proposes that australian south sea islanders’ musical cultures might usefully be understood in terms of a parallel concept, the ‘black pacific’, in relation to which the pacific’s colonised and decolonised peoples have developed their own expressions of black pride and performed resistance. it argues that a more nuanced appreciation of australian south sea islander performance culture as part of the black pacific will allow all australians to better understand some of the vitally important yet obfuscated consequences of australia’s blackbirding past. keywords: australian south sea islanders, melanesia, black pacific, decolonisation, music, dance introduction kidnapping and enslavement are key themes in the narratives of the melanesians ‘blackbirded’ to queensland and new south wales between and . these trauma stories have been passed down to their descendants, australian south sea islanders. over the past sixty years, australian south sea islanders have come to identify as part of a global black ‘transnation’, with descendants of african slaves in the americas in particular, through perceived and actual performance culture affinities. studies of the ‘black atlantic’ point both to the transnational character of slavery and the importance of music as a medium of resistance (gilroy ; genovese ). this article proposes that australian south sea islanders’ musical cultures might usefully be understood in terms of a parallel concept, the ‘black pacific’, in relation to which the pacific’s colonised and decolonised peoples have developed their own expressions of black pride and performed resistance (webb and webb-gannon ; shilliam ; solis ). at the same corresponding author: camellia webb-gannon (c.webb-gannon@westernsydney.edu.au) http://pacificdynamics.nz/ p a c i f i c d y n a m i c s ( ) time, it sets out a conceptual path that would enable the music made by australians of south sea islander descent to be included among the musical traditions of australia. it also points to areas in which further investigation might be fruitful in uncovering the complex pathways created by australian south sea islander performers and performances that connect melanesia with indigenous australia, settler-colonial australia, and black politics globally. this could in turn cast further light on the ways music connects the culturally diverse populations that are characteristic of many modern societies. displacement a complex relationship exists between australian south sea islander expressive culture, coerced labour, and colonialism. the omission of australian south sea islander musical practices and accomplishments from formal histories of australian musical culture is as conspicuous as it is unfortunate. a wikipedia entry conveys some idea of the problem, even if unintentionally, stating: indigenous people in australia are both aboriginal people and torres strait islanders. people of south sea islander descent may be included by popular culture, although they are the descendants of pacific islanders brought to australia during the th century as indentured labour on the queensland sugar canefields. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/category:indigenous_australian_musicians here, by sleight of hand, australian south sea islanders are excluded from the category of ‘indigenous australian musician’, even as their recorded output “may be” classified as indigenous. although there is a considerable literature relating to australian south sea islander experience, to date, only one study of australian south sea islanders’ performing arts has been undertaken, and this focuses on first-hand observers’ accounts of australian south sea islander maritime and plantation music (webb and webb-gannon, ). that this is a serious omission is clear; almost all scholars of the australian south sea islander labour trade have noted how crucial music and dance were to the development of these islanders’ sense of ethnic identity (see banivanua-mar ; corris ; gistitin ; mercer ). between and , , islanders were brought to queensland and new south wales from melanesia (primarily from what are now the solomon islands and vanuatu) as indentured labourers in the pastoral, agricultural, and maritime industries. working conditions were often “slave-like” (moore a). wages in excess of million australian dollars in current terms were withheld from the workers (moore b). approximately one third of recruited labourers died during indenture. under the white australia policy, from - , most south sea islander labourers were deported, not necessarily to their home islands. however, nearly remained in australia, and today the number of their descendants could be as high as , . over the past century, these people have faced conditions of entrenched discrimination and poverty paralleling those encountered by aboriginal and torres strait islander peoples. like the descendants of african slaves in the americas, the caribbean and the united kingdom (the atlantic), australian south sea islanders remain a disenfranchised population suffering from intergenerational trauma (atkinson ). ongoing hardship has not prevented australian south sea islanders from politically mobilising at key moments and ultimately achieving the hard-won victory of official recognition as a distinct cultural group by the australian federal government in . while oppressive conditions may have limited the extent to which australian south sea islanders have thrived as a https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/category:indigenous_australian_musicians camellia webb-gannon and michael webb community, their creativity has contributed significantly to their cultural resilience and capacity to be recognised politically. music and the ‘black pacific’ a shift is underway, notes paul lyons ( ), towards regarding the pacific “as an understudied counterpart” to “atlantic ocean-focused discourse” (see gilroy ; o’neill and lloyd ; and weaver ). this is evident in recent research on music in what a handful of scholars, picking up on the increasing frequency over time of trans-hemispheric black alliances in pacific cultural and political movements, have termed the black pacific (shilliam, ; solis ; and webb and webb-gannon, forthcoming). we contend that the concept of the black pacific in relation to australian south sea islanders is particularly apposite since, unlike maori and other cultures to which the term has been applied, australian south sea islanders, like black atlantic populations, were transplanted overseas, away from their home islands, hence alienated from their land and its cosmological values, beliefs and associated practices. displaced, the original south sea islander labourers and their descendants relied upon that other major cosmological foundation of melanesian identity—music and dance performance—for their survival as a distinct diasporic people in australia. clearly, there are significant differences between black pacific australian south sea islander populations and black atlantic populations affected by the historical trauma of the middle passage, including the number of people involved in transplantation, the distance of removal from homelands, the extent of volition each population had with regard to their own future, and the capacity (in some cases) to return to homelands at the end of indenture. another key rhetorical and ideological distinguishing factor, which we will have to address elsewhere, is the former’s explicit shaping, in recent decades especially, of a complex narrative of indigeneity. yet, there are also remarkable similarities in the ways in which expressive culture has served black pacific australian south sea islander and black atlantic populations over the course of their traumatic histories in order to facilitate continuity in black cultural identification and to achieve self-determination. black caribbean writer edouard glissant observes, “for us music, gesture and dance are … how we first managed to emerge from the plantation: aesthetic form in our cultures must be shaped from these oral structures” (quoted in gilroy , ). similarly, for australian south sea islanders, music and dance sustained labourers not only on ships and plantations but also beyond the labour era down to the present (webb-gannon and webb ). based on anecdotal fragments preserved in newspaper reports, and various writings and sketches by recruiters, settlers, journalists, missionaries and other observers (examined in detail in webb and webb-gannon, ), as well as australian south sea islanders’ own published accounts, we propose that an australian south sea islander musical identity emerged from disparate melanesian musical practices, in three broad, overlapping phases, through which australian south sea islanders came to connect with black transnationalism. the ‘origination’ phase begins with labour recruitment in the late s and ends at the time of mass deportation in the years leading up to . accounts of maritime musical culture by recruiters and government agents tell of south sea islanders singing and dancing while en route to australia, possibly a gesture of solidarity in the face of an unknown future, and on plantations as early as (webb and webb-gannon ). integral to the music of this phase were lyrical texts that employed variant forms of english-based melanesian pidgin; these were fused to melodies that were themselves part of nascent musical pidgins (keesing ; webb ). emotional and affective dimensions of plantation life were explored through islander expressive forms such as p a c i f i c d y n a m i c s ( ) minstrelsy, folk-type campfire entertainment, the singsing dance festival, and traditional male initiation rites for example, which were taken up in sites in australia during the indentured labour trade era. a second, ‘formulation’ phase, involved the anglican and presbyterian churches and the independent queensland kanaka mission from the s, and from the s the seventh day adventist and assemblies of god denominations, introducing south sea islanders to variant forms of christian hymnody. gospel hymns drew islanders to the new religious teachings, and hymnody bound them to each other. some, such as the loyalty island recruits were already familiar with european hymnody, as they received instruction in it from polynesian missionaries beginning around . post-deportation, from , the formulation phase pertained to those islanders who remained and fended for themselves as disadvantaged fringe populations in queensland and new south wales, and extended until the increased demand for australian south sea islander recognition in the s. data concerning australian south seas islander music making during this period largely remains to be collected, but it can be stated with confidence that it overlapped with aboriginal and torres strait island repertoires and was eclectic, drawing on hymnody, ‘island’ songs, blues and jazz, and narrative genres such as folk and country music (see walker , - ). in this phase, music served in evoking and remembering origins, building communities, social mobility (uplift), and religious worship. as an example of the eclecticism of this phase and the ways it overlapped with the phase that followed it, consider the reflections of jardine kiwat, a second generation (australian-born) australian south sea islander, whose “mother’s people were blackbirded to mackay” (queensland) and whose father is of torres strait islander descent (kiwat , ). kiwat ( , ) notes that his mother identified with tahitian music “every time she wanted to feel happy”, and especially during the christmas season. this wasn’t because we were tahitian: it was a music my mother felt close to, a music my mother identified with, even though she was of south sea island descent—a mix of aoba island [vanuatu] and levuka fiji. this music was from a community that sang and danced together, happy and content with many of their traditions alive and intact despite french colonization. (kiwat , ) kiwat then writes: i was influenced by a mixture of jazz and country from mum, traditional torres strait islander music/dance and original songs from dad and by an assortment of david bowie, the beatles, janis joplin, brook benton, jim reeves, the doors, isley brothers, deep purple, neil diamond, skyhooks, wild cherry, little river band, chain and, of course, lashings of tahitian music at christmas time. (kiwat , ). for kiwat’s mother, as a first generation australian south sea islander of mixed descent herself, tahitian songs may have served as a kind of surrogate pacific island music. both benton and the isley brothers, the black artists among those he lists as influences, had a background in gospel music but also made a transition to r&b. a third phase of ‘celebration’ coincided with the upsurge in the s of australian indigenous politics, which was energised by the civil rights movement in the united states and the global reach of black transnationalism. it incorporated into australian south sea islander musical culture african american spirituals and gospel genres, the music of black singers including charlie pride and bob marley, and more recently, socially conscious rap and neo soul. camellia webb-gannon and michael webb the compulsion to sing formed a connecting thread. australian south sea islanders have made use of such music to celebrate their ‘black pasifikan-ness’, to raise awareness of the tragic aspects of their history, to contribute to the building of global black and indigenous networks (gilroy ; clifford ; hau‘ofa ; banivanua mar ), and to comment on current australian indigenous and south sea islander politics. the track ‘freedom riders’ by fred leone’s group yarwah is but one example (leone is of mixed samoan, aboriginal and australian south sea island descent). loosely evoking gil scott-heron’s ‘the revolution will not be televised’, the song marks the th anniversary of the freedom rides across new south wales that were led by the aboriginal activist, charles perkins. the black identity politics expressed in this third phase are premised on the first two phases, which were concerned more with cultural survival (phase one) and cultural fusion (phase two). the complexity involved in delineating the conceptual parameters of australian south sea islander musical culture, and australian south sea islander cultural identity itself, is related to the group’s fractured historical experience. australian south sea islander identity draws on cultural traditions from melanesia (primarily vanuatu and the solomon islands) as well as kinship practices and cultural links with aboriginal peoples and torres strait islanders. australian south sea islanders continue to identify strongly as melanesian, connecting with their melanesian cultures of origin, for example, through reconciliation ceremonies with ‘home’ villages, island tours, and the tracing of kinship. music and dance are formational practices in melanesia (see wolffram ; webb forthcoming). across melanesia, van heekeren contends, songs “bring people together in more than a social way. they promote the modes of being that are most highly valued” (van heekeren , ). knauft concurs; in melanesia, he explains, the performing body celebrates “social and cultural vitality”. in those islands, the singing voice is “an index of relationships between the internal self and the social collective” (knauft , ). drawing on its melanesian roots, australian south sea islander culture values the socially constitutive role of song and dance (webb and webb-gannon ). at the same time, australian south sea islanders have long identified with african-american historical experience and cultural expressions from spirituals, gospel hymns, the music of paul robeson and songs of the civil rights era, to blues, jazz, reggae, hip-hop and break dancing, motown, soul, and recent r&b music (see neuenfeldt , for example). such cultural identification further indexes australian south sea islanders as a black pacific people—a mirrored microcosm of the black atlantic with an identity formulated around narratives of kidnapping and slavery, focused on the search for roots, and performed through creolised and, in prominent instances, black power-oriented music and dance. this is not to argue that all australian south sea islander music is an expression of the trauma of their dispersion, but rather that it is related in some way to their experience of being black or other (for example, traditional music brought from the black islands [melanesia], hymnody acquired from mission encounters, and reggae appropriated through processes of globalisation). australian south sea islander black lives matter the black lives matters campaign of recent years represents a significant meeting of black atlantic and black pacific politics in contemporary australian south sea islander expressive culture. originating in the african american community in the united states as a response to police brutality towards african americans, the campaign achieved exponential growth and influence via social media and has energised black and solidarity movements around the world. in australian south sea islander communities, musicians and political-cultural leaders seized its p a c i f i c d y n a m i c s ( ) message as a powerful expression of australian south sea islander marginality and resistance. most recently, following the debate connected to the black lives matter movement in the united states about the appropriateness of statues memorialising confederate army civil war figures in public places, australian south sea islanders have requested that statues and plaques commemorating kidnapped south sea islanders who laboured in queensland’s sugarcane fields be placed alongside those of colonial era plantation owners already standing, such as that of robert towns in townsville who “made his name blackbirding” (haxton ). similarly, in his track ‘black thoughts’, australian south sea islander descended rapper ziggy ramo refers to the black lives matter movement in australia. he speaks variously to black pride: “the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice” and black power: “throw my blackness in your face without a warnin’ message”. the first of these references is an allusion to the song ‘the blacker the berry’ by rapper kendrick lamar, which in turn alluded to the novel, the blacker the berry: a novel of negro life by harlem renaissance writer, wallace thurman. in new south wales in , president of the australian south sea islander port jackson (assipj) organisation, emelda davis, facilitated a set of b.l.a.c.k. (bold leadership awareness culture knowledge) workshops seeking to raise awareness of australian south sea islander history and identity. in addition to incorporating the colours of the reggae flag into the workshop logo, the events featured other black atlantic influences including a keynote presentation by deng adut, the sudanese-australian lawyer (and former child soldier), and performances by hip hop and spoken word artists (we are a star ). utilising the symbolic valency of the black lives matter campaign, assipj has also worked the slogan ‘black lives matter’ into a black and white colored logo (appropriated from n.w.a.’s straight outta compton album cover, which itself punned on the ‘parental advisory’ label applied to audio recordings). the words ‘black’ and ‘matter’ in bold black letters sit above and below the word ‘lives’ in white lettering that is filled in with old black and white photographs of melanesian labourers brought to australia (australian south sea islanders—port jackson ). blackness, performativity and healing in australian south sea islander communities ziggy ramo is of australian aboriginal as well as australian south sea islander descent. for various reasons, the australian south sea islander identity component of many indigenous musicians in australia is downplayed in both scholarly and popular accounts of australian indigenous performance culture. ziggy is not alone in his combined australian indigenous and australian south sea islander heritage. besides fred leone mentioned above, australian jazz singer shireen malamoo, malcolm cole and richard talonga, who were founding members of the aboriginal islander dance theatre, naomi and joel wenitong of the awarded indigenous hip-hop group last kinection, and emerging australian soul-pop singer marcus corowa all acknowledge both their australian south sea islander heritage and their aboriginal or torres strait islander heritage. the output of these musicians and dancers is valued in the public and commercial spheres for its contribution to australian cultural life as indigenous performance. while the artistic skills and accomplishments of these women and men are celebrated in australia, their ancestral connection to the melanesian islands, often including those of the torres strait, is rarely acknowledged. to date, most scholarly work on the black pacific has concentrated on polynesian and australian aboriginal conceptions of blackness, sidestepping the experiences of the so-called black islanders (melanesians) and their diaspora, including australian south sea islanders camellia webb-gannon and michael webb (banivanua mar [ ] is an exception). as ponipate rokolekutu ( ) has explained, for a range of historical reasons it is not possible to speak of a unitary black pacific experience. nor has there been a single expression of black solidarity that extends right across the pacific islands. such affinities and expressions have ebbed and flowed over time in various parts of the pacific islands, in relation to such particularities as decolonisation (historical and contemporary), nuclear testing, and climate change and environmental despoliation. in a recent study of melanesian music and notions of blackness, webb and webb- gannon ( ) argue that expressions of black identity in that region need to be considered in light of the historical and cultural diversity of the islands that were pejoratively labeled black from the s onwards. a more nuanced understanding of black transnationalism is urgently needed, one that takes into account the pacific and its differentiated articulations of which australian south sea islander cultural identity comprises a powerful case study. such an understanding would highlight australian south sea islanders’ melanesian heritage but would also invite new attention to aboriginal and torres strait islander expressive practices, many of which, as noted above, share a rich culture with those of australian south sea islanders. just as there are different ways of conceiving ‘blackness’, there are different ways of thinking about ‘pasifikan-ness’; indeed, ethnomusicologist gabriel solis is investigating the instances in which various aboriginal and torres strait islander musicians classify their own music as part of a black pacific tradition ( ). just how far west australia’s pacific littoral extends and why is worthy of further investigation. while the salience of a shared black pacific identity might in instances such as this transcend the subtending identities of australian south sea islander and aboriginal, for example, we are interested in the ways in which it might also enhance these by bringing into relief the complexities of different black pacific cultures. australian south sea islander history contains many stories of loss, and a narrative of ‘healing’ has become part of the discourse by which intellectuals and australian south sea islander musicians promoting the idea of black pacific identity explain its significance. this includes the loss of lands, of families, of political autonomy, and the related loss of traditional songs, stories and dances. as australian south sea islander musician namarca corowa asserts, it is “by capturing their memories through music, song, poetry and storytelling” that australian south sea islanders are able to “cradle the smouldering ember of [their] culture” ( ). in notable australian south sea islander musician georgia corowa’s words, her people “sing the spirit, and it’s part of healing, coming from a real place” (izit entertainment ). as anthropologist laura peers writes of the significance of cultural heritage in community recovery, “access to heritage objects [or, in this case, intangible heritage] … can play an important role in healing from colonial trauma for indigenous groups by facilitating strengthened connections … to ancestors, to kin and community members in the present, and to identity” ( , ). conclusion prior to an official visit to melanesia in late , australian foreign minister julie bishop tweeted that the pacific is “our neighbourhood, our priority” (armbruster ). a deeper understanding of australian south sea islander performance culture has the potential to enhance australia’s links with the islands of melanesia while substantially increasing existing knowledge of australia’s cultural history, by utilising the power of music as a constructive cultural mediator. melanesia is often negatively perceived as australia’s ‘arc of instability’. yet, the critical political assistance that melanesian countries have provided to australia, during the pacific war for p a c i f i c d y n a m i c s ( ) example, and more controversially, in providing australia’s asylum seekers with a home, is often overlooked. similarly, in australia, the accomplishments of australian south sea islanders who are australian citizens of melanesian heritage, are rarely mentioned despite the fact that some of australia’s most prominent sportspeople (mal meninga), political spokespeople (for example, faith bandler and bonita mabo) and performers past and present (richard talonga and ziggy ramo) are of australian south sea islander descent. the largely pejorative australian view of melanesia must be reoriented toward a focus on the substantial positive contributions australian south sea islanders have made to australian culture and society. a more nuanced appreciation of australian south sea islander performance culture as part of the black pacific will allow all australians to better understand some of the vitally important yet obfuscated consequences of australia’s blackbirding past. an exploration of the boundaries of the black pacific (bearing in mind that no categorisation of human culture is without its limitations, exclusions and ambiguous edges), particularly in australia, would be useful for better understanding australia’s place in the pacific and the connections and overlaps between australian indigenous and pacific cultures. an understanding of australian south sea islanders (and other black indigenous populations) as forming part of a black pacific would be as illuminating in the straightforward connections it reveals between the pacific and the black atlantic, as in the boundary problems and questions that it generates. the accomplishments of australian south sea islanders, a displaced diasporic people, are remarkable, given their historical and ongoing marginalisation. at present, australian south sea islanders are actively raising awareness of their history and culture using black musical genres such as rap, for example, and through linking to black transnationalism through the black lives matter campaign. their rich cultural traditions of music and dance await systematic exploration, as does the role they have played in ongoing processes of reconciliation and restitution. further research on australian south sea islander musical heritage and identity is therefore critical, in order to further uncover the aspects of this hidden history and to restore dignity to a people who have, disproportionate to their numbers and relative advantage, made strong contributions to australian society and culture. this essay, which has attempted to contextualise australian south sea islander musical identity within the framework of black transnationalism, is an initial step in that direction. references armbruster, s. . bishop presses abc on pacific ‘concern’s over shortwave radio cut. sbs world news. http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/ / / /bishop-presses-abc-pacific- concerns-over-shortwave-radio-cut. australian south sea islanders - port jackson. . ‘black lives matter logo’, australian south sea islanders - port jackson, http://www.assipj.com.au/southsea/wp- content/uploads/black-lives-matter-logo.pdf. atkinson, j. . trauma trails, recreating songlines: the transgenerational effects of trauma in indigenous australia. spinifex p. banivanua mar, t. . violence and colonial dialogue: the australia-pacific labor trade. u of hawai'i press. banivanua mar, t. . decolonisation and the pacific: indigenous globalisation and the ends of empire. cambridge up. brewer, w., . the untold story [documentary film]. queensland: canton media. carr, j. . hawai'ian music in motion: mariners, missionaries and minstrels. u of illinois p. http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/ / / /bishop-presses-abc-pacific-concerns-over-shortwave-radio-cut http://www.sbs.com.au/news/article/ / / /bishop-presses-abc-pacific-concerns-over-shortwave-radio-cut http://www.assipj.com.au/southsea/wp-content/uploads/black-lives-matter-logo.pdf http://www.assipj.com.au/southsea/wp-content/uploads/black-lives-matter-logo.pdf camellia webb-gannon and michael webb clifford, j. . returns: becoming indigenous in the st century. harvard up. corowa, n. . australia south sea islander groove nation project. http://blogs.slq.qld.gov.au/assi/ / / /australian-south-sea-islander-groove-nation- assign-music-project/. genovese, e. . roll, jordan, roll: the world the slaves made. vintage. gistitin, c. . quite a colony: south sea islanders in central queensland to . aebis publishing. hau'ofa, e. . we are the ocean: selected works. u of hawai'i p. haxton, nance. . ‘south sea islanders say statue of townsville founder ‘whitewashes’ slave history’, abc news, august . http://www.abc.net.au/news/ - - /townsville-statue-whitewash-slave-history-islanders-say/ . izit entertainment. . georgia corowa-singer. http://www.izitentertainment.com./index.au.php?option=com_con tent&view=article&id= :georgiacorowa&catid= :indigenous&itemid= . keesing, r. . melanesian pidgin and the oceanic substrate. stanford up. kiwat, j. . new and emerging forms of indigenous music. in bloustien, g. (ed), musical visions: selected conference proceedings from th national australian/new zealand iaspm and inaugural arnhem land performance conference, adelaide, australia, june . kent town (south australia): wakefield press, - . knauft, b. . from primitive to postcolonial in melanesia and anthropology. u of michigan p. mercer, p. . white australia defied: pacific islander settlement in north queensland. james cook university. moore, c. a. australian south sea islanders’ narratives of belonging. in narrative and identity construction in the pacific islands, (farzana gounder, ed.), john benjamins publishing company, - . moore, c. b. the pacific islanders’ fund and the misappropriation of the wages of deceased pacific islanders by the queensland government. australian j of politics and history, ( ): - . neuenfeldt, k, . ‘i wouldn’t change skins for anybody: dulcie pitt/georgia lee, a pioneer indigenous australian jazz, blues and community singer, jazz research, ( - ): - . peers, l. . 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webb, m. forthcoming. melanesian worlds of music and dance, in e. hrisch and w. rollason (eds.), the melanesian world, routledge. http://blogs.slq.qld.gov.au/assi/ / / /australian-south-sea-islander-groove-nation-assign-music-project/ http://blogs.slq.qld.gov.au/assi/ / / /australian-south-sea-islander-groove-nation-assign-music-project/ http://www.abc.net.au/news/ - - /townsville-statue-whitewash-slave-history-islanders-say/ http://www.abc.net.au/news/ - - /townsville-statue-whitewash-slave-history-islanders-say/ p a c i f i c d y n a m i c s ( ) webb, m. and c. webb-gannon. . melanesians and music on the move: south sea island shipboard and plantation performance in queensland, s– . the journal of pacific history, ( ): - . webb, m. and c. webb-gannon. . musical melanesianism: imagining and expressing regional identity and solidarity, the contemporary pacific, ( ): - . wolffram, p. . music and dance performance. in the pacific islands: environment and society (m. rapaport, ed.), u of hawai'i p. songs cited yarwah. . ‘freedom riders’, youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= yomuvj qk. scott-heron, gil. . ‘the revolution will not be televised’, youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qgaoxawl kw. fatnowna, ziggy. . ‘black thoughts’, youtube, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= dp cx -a . authors’ bibliographies camellia webb-gannon is a research fellow at western sydney university and is the coordinator of the west papua project at the university of sydney. she is a ci on the australian research council linkage grant ( - ), music, mobile phones and community justice in melanesia. michael webb lectures in ethnomusicology and music education at the sydney conservatorium of music, the university of sydney. his article on melanesian hymnody won the journal of pacific history best article prize for . academic relational civility as a key resource for sustaining well-being sustainability article academic relational civility as a key resource for sustaining well-being annamaria di fabio ,* and maureen e. kenny department of education and psychology (psychology section), university of florence, via di san salvi, complesso di san salvi, padiglione , firenze, italy lynch school of education, boston college, chestnut hill, ma , usa; maureen.kenny@bc.edu * correspondence: adifabio@psico.unifi.it; tel.: + ( ) - ; fax: + ( ) - received: april ; accepted: june ; published: june ���������� ������� abstract: in the st century, which has been characterized by complexity, instability, and continuous change, the well-being of individuals is threatened. the health and well-being of individuals are recognized as one of the sustainable development goals of the united nations. from a primary prevention perspective, physical and psychological health can be augmented through the early identification and promotion of key psychological resources that sustain well-being across one’s lifetime. with that goal in mind, the present study explored potential relationships between academic relational civility and both hedonic (positive affect, negative affect, and life satisfaction) and eudaimonic well-being (meaning in life and flourishing), controlling for the effect of personality traits among university students. the big five questionnaire (bfq), the academic relational civility scale (arcs), the positive and negative affect schedule (panas), the satisfaction with life scale (swls), the meaning in life measure (mlm), and the flourishing scale (fs), were administered to italian university students. regression analyses identified that academic relational civility contributed significantly to hedonic and eudaimonic well-being beyond the contribution of stable personality factors. academic relational civility may represent one psychological resource for supporting and sustaining hedonic and eudaimonic well-being, suggesting the need for further research and intervention. keywords: academic relational civility; hedonic well-being; eudaimonic well-being; personality traits; psychology of sustainability . introduction the complexity [ ], instability, insecurity, turmoil and continuous change [ – ] that characterize life in contemporary society pose significant risks to the well-being of individuals [ ]. with concern for the large number of people worldwide who suffer from poor physical and mental health, the united nations [ ] has included the attainment of good health and well-being among their sustainable development goals. in this regard, sustainability extends beyond a concern for economic and ecological resources to a concern for enhancing the psychological and contextual resources that can maximize well-being for all [ , ]. the world health organization (who) [ ] defines health as “a state of complete physical, mental, spiritual and social well-being and not merely the absence of disease or infirmity.” this comprehensive definition emphasizes a view of healthy people as, not merely free of serious problems, but as resilient and fully flourishing [ , , ]. positive psychology [ , ] and primary prevention [ ] embrace research and practice agendas directed towards the promotion of health and well-being, including explicitly, the development of resources for resilience and implicitly, the psychology of sustainability [ , ]. positive psychology sustainability , , ; doi: . /su www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability http://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability http://www.mdpi.com http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /su http://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability sustainability , , of identifies two kinds of well-being: hedonic [ ] and eudaimonic well-being [ , ]. hedonic well-being refers to the presence of positive affect over negative affect [ ] and to the cognitive appraisal of one’s life as satisfying [ ]. eudaimonic well-being goes beyond the possession of positive feelings and satisfaction and refers to optimal functioning and a high level of self-realization [ ], life meaning [ ], purposefulness [ ], and the ability to flourish [ ]. flourishing is reflective of the un and who emphases on optimal functioning across multiple life domains and entails a maximal level of social and psychological prosperity based on one’s perceived success in relationships, one’s level of self-esteem, and one’s sense of purpose and optimism. more specifically, flourishing entails great interest and engagement in daily activities that provide a deep sense of meaning and purpose and through which one experiences feelings of competence, actively contributes to the happiness and well-being of others, enjoys supportive, respectful, and rewarding social relationships, and feels optimistic about one’s future [ ]. prior research has found personality traits to be associated with both hedonic [ , – ] and eudaimonic well-being [ , – ]. personality traits are considered to be generally fixed or stable [ ], however, and researchers have sought to identify factors that are modifiable and can be developed though interventions to promote well-being [ , , , ]. the concern in positive psychology [ , ] for the promotion of well-being, both hedonic and eudaimonic, is aligned with the agenda of primary prevention for the promotion of resources and strengths to foster well-being [ , , ], as well as the who [ , ] and the un sustainable development goals [ ] concern for human flourishing. among the psychological variables connected to well-being, the experience of positive and supportive relationships in promoting well-being at work and across life in general has been well established blustein [ , , – ]. positive relationships within organizations can promote well-being that extends beyond the workplace, impacting other life contexts [ , ]. in this regard, the university is no different than other organizational settings, with relational quality affecting both well-being and student academic success. cotton, dollard, and de jong [ ] emphasized the responsibility of the university to nurture the well-being, satisfaction and performance of students. psychosocial work characteristics of the university context, including the amount and quality of social interaction [ ], have been associated with student academic performance as mediated by student well-being and satisfaction [ ]. research has also found that university student reports of psychosocial well-being are associated with their perceptions of interpersonal relationships, including the capacity of those relationships as a source of meaning and fulfillment [ ]. furthermore, social support provided by parents, teachers and friends is also consistently related to psychological well-being among university students [ – ]. while the benefits of positive relationships appear robust, academic incivility, including any words or behaviors that interfere with the climate for teaching and learning, appears to threaten student well-being and academic progress [ ]. reports of academic incivility on university campuses across many regions of the world have increased in recent times as a function of enhanced competition for economic and social resources and increased diversity in terms of ethnicity, race, gender, religion, sexual orientation, and ability status, with harmful effects for student well-being [ ]. in this context, the promotion of academic relational civility is of increasing importance. the promotion of academic relational civility on college campuses could foster basic relational sensitivities and skills among university students that help them to develop more positive relationships that contribute to well-being at the university and hopefully, beyond (e.g., in the world of work and society more broadly). university students represent future global citizens and societal leaders who will impact the relational climate of their organizations, families, and societies and the tone and methods of political dialogue [ ]. as university students, they have the potential to join with other students to produce social transformation, locally and globally, with the civil rights and black lives matter movements in the united states, apartheid divestment in south africa, the velvet revolution in prague, and student uprising in iran and bejing representing just a few examples [ ]. with the speed and vast reach of social media today, student voice can now exert a rapid and broad impact characterized by both civility and incivility [ , ]. sustainability , , of out of concern for the impact of relational incivility on the well-being of college students and building on evidence that workplace relational civility [ ] is positively correlated with hedonic and eudaimonic well-being [ ] among workers, di fabio [ ] developed the construct and measure of academic relational civility to assess relational quality as a basis for flourishing in the academic setting. drawing upon a variety of theoretical perspectives, including positive psychology [ ], relational cultural theory [ , ], and the relational theory of working [ ], di fabio [ ] conceptualized relational civility as encompassing respect and care for oneself and others, sensitivity to the needs of others, interest and capacity to communicate one’s views to others and kind actions toward others. civility includes treating others with dignity and behaving in ways that allow people to live and work together in peace and mutual respect. while initially conceptualized with regard to the workplace, the construct and measure were designed to be relevant for varied settings [ ]. di fabio [ ] identified three dimensions for academic relational civility, which are parallel to those identified in the workplace and are supported by factor analysis: relational decency in the academic environment involves relationships based on decency, characterized by respect for self and others (including friends, classmates, staff and professors), calm and respectful self-assertion, and the ability to express one’s convictions without aggression; relational culture in the academic environment includes politeness, kindness, recognition of accomplishments, and courtesy in relational behavior; and relational readiness or the presence of individual capacities to engage with civility in the academic environment includes sensitivity toward others (responding to the needs of others in a timely and sensitive way), the ability to accurately perceive and interpret the emotions of others, concern for others, awareness of others’ reactions, demonstrating empathy, and showing compassion). from a primary prevention perspective [ , , – ] interventions that enhance resources associated with well-being should be fostered prior to the emergence of difficulties [ – , ]. positive relationships, including academic relational civility [ ], represent one important category of resources that could be promoted to enhance well-being and sustainability [ , , , , ]. while academic civility appears to be a promising construct that can be measured reliably and with validity, further research is needed to evaluate its significance. an important first step is to verify its relationship with well-being among university students. . aim and hypotheses the aim of the present study was to contribute to the psychology of sustainability [ , ] by examining the relationship between academic relational civility and indices of well-being, both hedonic and eudaimonic. across all analyses, we first controlled for the effects of personality traits to assess whether the construct of academic relational civility, which is viewed as modifiable, contributes to well-being beyond the contribution of more stable personality traits. based upon prior research and theory, the following hypotheses were put forth. h : after controlling for the effects of personality traits, academic relational civility will be significantly associated with indices of hedonic well-being, including a positive relationship with positive affect, an inverse relationship with negative affect, and a positive relationship with life satisfaction. h : after controlling for the effects of personality traits, academic relational civility will be positively and significantly associated with indices of eudaimonic well-being, including meaning in life, and flourishing. . material and methods . . participants two hundred and forty one italian psychology students (undergraduate and master’s degree) at a university in the center of italy were involved in the study. with regard to gender, . % of the sustainability , , of participants were men and . % were women. the participants’ age ranged from to years (m = . , sd = . ). the participants were mainly white italians from middle-class backgrounds. . . measures big five questionnaire (bfq). the big five questionnaire (bfq) [ ] was administered to evaluate personality traits. the bfq is composed of items with a -point likert scale response format, ranging from = absolutely false to = absolutely true. the questionnaire assesses five personality traits: extraversion (example of item: “it’s easy for me to talk to people i do not know”); agreeableness (example of item: “i almost always know how to meet the needs of others”); conscientiousness (example of item: “before giving a job, i spend a lot of time reviewing it”); emotional stability (example of item: “usually it does not happen to me to react exaggerated even to strong emotions”); and openness (example of item: “every novelty fascinates me”). with regard to reliability, cronbach’s alpha coefficients were the following: . for extraversion, . for agreeableness, . for conscientiousness, . for emotional stability, and . for openness. regarding convergent validity, the five personality traits of bfq have demonstrated robust correlations with analogous scales of the neo personality inventory revised (neo-pi-r) [ ] and with the stait-trait anxiety inventory, form x (stai) [ ]. concerning divergent validity, the bfq factors did not show significant correlations with the wechsler adult intelligence scale (wais) [ ]). academic relational civility scale. the newly developed and validated -item academic relational civility scale (arcs) [ ] was used to evaluate the three dimensions of academic relational civility: relational readiness (rr, examples of item: “i was interested in the emotional condition of others”; “others were interested in my emotional condition”), relational culture (rcu, examples of item: “i was polite toward others”; “others were polite toward me”), and relational decency (rd, examples of item: “i communicated my disagreement with others without being aggressive”; “others communicated their disagreement with me without being aggressive”). each dimension contains items relating to one’s perception of self and one’s perceptions of others. part a concerns the individual’s perception of himself or herself with regard to a particular aspect of relational functioning (example of item: “i respected the opinions of others”), while part b concerns the individual’s perception of others with regard to the same aspect of functioning (example of item: “others respected my opinions”). the rr dimension contains items for part a and items for part b. rcu contains items for part a and for part b, and rd consists of items for part a and items for part b. scores are computed for the part a and part b items for each dimension and then summed, yielding an overall score for each part of the arcs (part a and part b) and a total score. the participants in this study were asked to describe their relationships with others (friends, classmates, staff and professors) over the past months, and then to describe their perception of others’ (friends, classmates, staff and professors) relationships or interactions with them over the same time period. the items had a response format on a -point likert scale ranging from = not at all to = a great deal. the cronbach’s alpha coefficients for the three dimensions for part a were . for relational readiness (factor a); . for relational culture (factor a); and . for relational decency (factor a). the cronbach’s alpha coefficients for the three dimensions for part b were: . for relational readiness (factor b); . for relational culture (factor b); and . for relational decency (factor b). the cronbach’s alpha coefficients for the total score were . for part a and . for part b. concerning construct validity, the arcs demonstrated positive and statistically significant correlations with the prosocial organizational behaviors scale (pobs) [ ]; and the positive relational management scale [ ]. positive and negative affect schedule (panas). the italian version [ ] of the positive and negative affect schedule (panas) [ ] was administered to evaluate positive affect (pa) and negative affect (na) as indices of hedonic well-being. the panas includes adjectives with referring to positive affect (pa; e.g., concentrating and inspired) and to negative affect (na; e.g., scared and nervous). participants are asked to point out how they generally feel based on a -point likert scale ranging from = very slightly or not at all to = extremely. regarding reliability the cronbach’s sustainability , , of alpha coefficients were . for positive affect and . for negative affect. with regard to construct validity, relationships with measures of personality have been previously documented [ ], including positive associations between pa and extraversion and between na and neuroticism. furthermore pa correlated inversely with the center for epidemiological studies depression scale (ces-d) [ ], with na correlating positively with the ces-d. satisfaction with life scale (swls). the italian version of the satisfaction with life scale (swls) [ ] by di fabio and gori [ ] was administered to measure life satisfaction as a component of hedonic well-being. the scale is composed of five items (e.g., “in most ways my life is close to my ideal”, “so far i have gotten the important things i want in life”), with a response format on a -point likert scale, ranging from = strongly disagree to = strongly agree. regarding reliability, the cronbach’s alpha coefficient was . . with regard to construct validity, di fabio and gori [ ] documented positive correlations between the italian version of the swls and the rosenberg self-esteem scale [ ]. meaning in life measure. the italian version [ ] of the meaningful life measure (mlm) [ ] was administered to measure meaning in life as a component of eudaimonic well-being. the questionnaire includes items, which are rated on a -point likert scale ranging from = strongly disagree to = strongly agree. the mlm distinguishes five dimensions: exciting life (e.g., “my life interests and excites me”), accomplished life (e.g., “i have been very successful in achieving certain things”), principled life (e.g., “i have a system or framework that allows me to truly understand my being alive”), purposeful life (e.g., “in my life i have very clear goals and aims”), and valued life (e.g., “my life is worthwhile”). the cronbach’s alpha coefficients were . for exciting life; . for accomplished life; . for principled life, . for purposeful life; and . for valued life. the alpha value for the total score was . . with regard to the concurrent validity of the italian version of the mlm, positive relationships were found with life satisfaction and positive affect and an inverse relationship was found with negative affect [ ]. flourishing scale (fs). the italian version of the flourishing scale (fs) [ ] in the [ ] was administered to detect flourishing as a component of eudaimonic well-being. the fs is composed of eight items with the response format being a -point likert scale ranging from = strongly disagree to = strongly agree. examples of items include “i am engaged and interested in my daily activities”, “i actively contribute to the happiness and well-being of others”, and “i am a good person and live a good life”. the fs presented a unidimensional structure and the cronbach’s alpha coefficient was . . positive and statistically significant correlations of the italian version of the fs with the meaningful life measure [ ], the authenticity scale (as) [ ], the satisfaction with life scale (swls) [ ] and the positive affect (pa) scale of the positive affect and negative affect scales panas [ ] have offered evidence for validity of the fs. . . procedure the questionnaires were administered to university students in a group setting by trained psychologists in agreement with the requirements of privacy and informed consent of italian law (law decree dl- / ) and the ethical standards for research of the declaration of helsinki revised in fortaleza (world medical association [wma]). students participated in the study in a voluntary manner, and they received no compensation. the order of administration was counterbalanced, changing the sequence of administration of the questionnaires to control for the effects of presentation order. after having distributed the questionnaires, the administrators explained to the participants that there were no right or wrong answers and invited them to respond as accurately as possible to the items of the questionnaire. the students were recruited as volunteers for the study during psychology classes that are offered for students across all level of undergraduate study, and no compensation was offered for their participation. . results descriptive statistics and correlations are reported in table . sustainability , , of table . descriptive statistics and correlations (n = ). m ds . bfq e – . . . bfq a . ** – . . . bfq c . * . * – . . . bfq es . ** . ** . ** – . . . bfq o . ** . ** . * . ** – . . . arcs part a . ** . ** . ** . ** . ** – . . . arcs part b . ** . ** . . ** . ** . ** – . . . pa . ** . * . ** . ** . ** . ** . ** – . . . na − . * − . ** − . ** − . ** − . ** − . ** − . ** − . ** – . . . swls . ** . ** . . ** . * . ** . ** . ** − . ** – . . . mlm . ** . ** . ** . ** . ** . ** . ** . ** − . ** . ** – . . . fs . ** . ** . ** . ** . ** . ** . ** . ** − . ** . ** . ** – . . * p < . . ** p < . . bfq = big five questionnaire; arcs = academic relational civility scale; panas pa = panas positive affects; panas na = panas negative affects; swls = satisfaction with life scale; mlm = meaning in life measure; fs = flourishing scale. sustainability , , of hierarchical regression analyses were conducted to assess the study hypotheses. table presents the findings of five separate hierarchical regression models, with positive affect, negative affect, life satisfaction, meaning in life and flourishing serving as the five separate dependent variables. across all analyses, personality traits were entered at step one and academic relational civility was entered at the second step. table . hierarchical regression. the contributions of personality traits (first step) and academic relational civility (second step) to positive affect (pa), negative affect (na), life satisfaction (swls), meaning in life (mlm) and flourishing (fs) (n = ). pa na swls mlm fs β β β β β step bfq extraversion . *** − . . *** . *** . *** bfq agreeableness . − . ** . ** . . bfq conscientiousness . ** − . * . . ** . * bfq emotional stability . − . *** . * . ** . ** bfq openness . *** − . . . *** . *** step arcs part a . − . . . . * arcs part b . ** − . *** . *** . *** . *** r step . *** . *** . *** . *** . *** ∆r step . * . * . *** . *** . *** r total . *** . *** . *** . *** . *** * p < . . ** p < . . *** p < . . bfq = big five questionnaire; arcs = academic relational civility scale; panas pa = panas positive affects; panas na = panas negative affects; swls = satisfaction with life scale; mlm = meaning in life measure; fs = flourishing scale. for the first regression analysis explaining positive affect as a component of hedonic well-being, personality traits accounted for % of the variance at step one. at the second step, academic relational civility added % variance, with the overall model accounting for % of the variance. for the second analysis with negative affect as the dependent variable, personality traits explained % of the variance at step one. for step two, academic relational civility added % variance, with the overall model overall explaining % of the variance. for the third analysis, personality traits accounted for % of the variance at step one in explaining life satisfaction. at step two, academic relational civility added % variance, with the overall model explaining % of the variance for life satisfaction. for the fourth analysis with meaning in life as a component of eudaimonic well-being, personality traits explained % of the variance at step one and at step two, academic relational civility added % variance, with the overall model accounting for % of the variance for meaningful life. for the final analysis explaining flourishing as an index of eudaimonic well-being, personality traits explained % of the variance at step one. academic relational civility added % to the variance in the second step, with the overall model explaining % of the variance for flourishing. . discussion the aim of this study was to explore the association between academic relational civility and both hedonic well-being (positive affect, negative affect and life satisfaction) and eudaimonic well-being (meaning in life and flourishing) among university students, after controlling for personality traits. in relation to sustainable development goals, an academic environment characterized by relational civility could contribute to the third goal of good health and well-being and also to the fourth goal concerning the quality of education and academic success by improving the quality of the relationships in the academic context. furthermore the enhancement of academic relational civility could potentially promote personal relational skills, which from a primary prevention perspective could contribute to sustainability , , of the construction of a culture of decency in society and at work, thereby advancing movement towards the eighth sustainable development goal related to decent work. the analyses supported our hypotheses regarding the relationship between academic relational civility and indices of hedonic well-being after controlling for the contribution of personality traits. our results add to the existing literature [ ] that has established a relationship between hedonic well-being and relational civility among workers by documenting the association of arc with the activation of positive affect [ ]. the finding of a negative relationship between academic relational civility and negative affect replicates, for university students, the association found between relational civility in the workplace and the activation of negative affect [ ]. the finding that relational civility is related to life satisfaction among university students also replicates findings for workers [ ]. with regard to the contribution of arc to both positive and negative affect, the findings (beta weights) revealed that part b, the perception of others’ relational civility, contributed more to the explanatory power of the construct than part a, the self-assessment of one’s own level of relational civility. the contribution of academic relational civility, especially the perception of others level of arc to well-being among university students, appears somewhat stronger for global life satisfaction than for the experience of positive or negative affect [ ]. our hypothesis that academic relational civility would be related to indices of eudaimonic well-being was also supported. similar to the findings for workers, relational civility in the academic setting, especially the perception of others’ level of arc, is associated with students’ level of meaning in life and their expressed capacity to identify their authentic meaning and pursue meaningful life goals [ ]. the finding of a positive relationship between academic relational civility and flourishing extends previous findings documenting an association between relational civility and eudaimonic well-being among workers [ ], which had not included flourishing in the assessment of eudaimonic well-being. among university students in this study, greater relational civility, especially in regard to the perception of others’ arc, was associated with eudaimonic well-being in terms of flourishing characterized by feelings of optimism, sense of purpose and satisfying and successful relationships [ ]. the finding that relational civility both in the workplace and university setting is associated with two kinds of well-being, beyond the influence of personality traits, suggests that societal attention to promoting relational civility is important, especially during these times of tension and rising incidents of incivility [ ]. while the contribution of part a (students’ perceptions of their own relational civility) for flourishing was statistically significant, it is interesting to note that students’ reports of their own well-being across all dimensions was more strongly associated with their perceptions of others than with their appraisal of their own relational civility. this was also observed in the findings with workers [ ]. it seems that students and workers can experience well-being, even if they do not perceive themselves as relating in civil ways. the finding that the perception of one’s own relationship civility is significant for flourishing makes sense, since this is the only dimension of well-being that considers the quality of relationships. since the overall climate of relational civility depends on the relational behavior of all individuals; however, attention may need to be increased to foster student and worker perspective-taking and their awareness of their impact on others. overall, academic relational civility demonstrated a stronger association with eudaimonic well-being than with the positive and negative affect dimensions of hedonic well-being. regarding hedonic well-being, the association with life satisfaction was more robust than with positive and negative affect, suggesting that academic relational civility, including relational readiness, relational culture, and relational decency, fosters an assessment of one’s well-being at the level of life satisfaction, meaning and flourishing. the realization of different aspects of academic relational civility may support student efforts in constructing lives of meaning with a sense of purpose, perceived success in relationships and individual flourishing. notwithstanding the contribution of the present study in documenting the association between academic relational civility and both hedonic and eudaimonic well-being among university students, sustainability , , of some limitations should be noted. the participants were a limited sample of italian university students from a university in the center of italy and thus, the results are not generalizable to all italian university students. future research should therefore include participants from varied geographical areas in italy as well as in other countries to verify the cross-cultural relevance of the construct. additionally, the measures were self-reported and were thus subject to biases of self-perception. correlational data does not indicate causality, so further longitudinal research is needed to assess change over time. furthermore, the possible moderating role or mediating role of academic relational civility in the relationships between personality traits and both hedonic well-being and eudaimonic well-being could be investigated in future research to better understand the potential causal mechanisms, also taking into consideration the different weights of part a and part b of the scale. further research might also investigate the relationship between academic relational civility and other indices of eudaimonic well-being, such as the subjective experience of eudaimonia [ ] and existential fulfillment [ ], authenticity [ ], as well as in relation to indices of academic success, progress in career development, and persistence in university studies. given the experiences of incivility arising on college campuses related to student differences in social class, ethnicity, race, gender, religion and immigrant status [ ], it is also be important to study the determinants of academic relational civility in relation to student demographics and the level of diversity present at the university and across society. how to engage students, staff, and faculty in the development of relational civility and their concern that they contribute to the level of civility on campus is also important. further research might also seek to identify aspects of the university environment that contribute to the experience of academic relational civility and aspects that reward the demonstration of academic relational civility. despite the limitations and the need for further research, our results advance the related body of literature by documenting the relationship of academic relational civility, especially student perceptions of others’ civility, with well-being overall and eudaimonic well-being, in particular. in contrast to personality traits that are considered generally stable in research findings [ ], evidence suggests that academic relational civility can be increased through specific interventions [ ]. if further research confirms the value of this construct and intervention, universities may offer initiatives to enhance student relational civility in efforts to enhance student well-being and to prepare them for meeting the challenges of contemporary life and to give them lives with meaning, purpose and relational satisfaction. . conclusions the well-being of individuals is one of the sustainable development goals of the united nations [ ] that is considered essential for promoting world sustainable development and to ensure prosperity for all. in recognition of this agenda, building individual strengths and resources is important from a primary prevention perspective for promoting well-being and a flourishing society [ , – , , ]. in the academic environment, positive relationships are central to student well-being and success [ , ]. the construct of academic relational civility [ ] represents a specific and expanded conceptualization of positive relationships defined by relational readiness, relational culture and relational decency in the academic setting. this study examined the relationship of academic relational civility with well-being for university students, in recognition that these skills can be developed with specific intervention strategies [ ]. if the results of the present study are confirmed in future research, academic relational civility could represent a psychological resource that could be promoted more intentionally, is potentially sustainable, and 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[crossref] . längle, a.; orgler, c.; kundi, m. the existence scale: a new approach to assess the ability to find personal meaning in life and to reach existential fulfillment. eur. psychother. , , – . © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . /cs http://dx.doi.org/ . / - . . . http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	aim and hypotheses 	material and methods 	participants 	measures 	procedure 	results 	discussion 	conclusions 	references adapting the xanax generation: meditations on catastrophic precarity and postdigital melancholia commentaries adapting the xanax generation: meditations on catastrophic precarity and postdigital melancholia alexander j. means # springer nature switzerland ag in the spring of , i taught a senior capstone seminar in sociology at my former institution, a -year, largely working-class college in the state university of new york system. the theme i developed for the course was sociologies of the future. as elaborated in the course description: the literary theorist fredric jameson is famous for observing that is now easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism. jameson made this observation at the tail end of the s when thinkers in the social sciences and humanities were responding to a supposed ‘end of history’ and ‘death of grand narratives’. these ideas signaled an emerging malaise concerning the future, including the waning of utopian dreams and projects that had once proliferated in the th and early th centuries. today, we might wish to extend and modify jameson’s observation. today, in mainstream culture, it seems easier to imagine that we live in a hyperreal computer simulation, where our every movement, thought, feeling, sensation, and action becomes an optimizable data point, than to imagine we can make basic modifications to capitalism. this state of affairs reflects a paradox of possibility where radical visions of technological change proliferate, including concerns that advances in super-intelligent artificial intelli- gence threaten to render large swaths of workers redundant, yet we still seem stuck in imaginative inertia when it comes to political economy. this is the sociological problem that we will be deconstructing in this capstone sociology course. we will be engaging readings and concepts that point toward sociologies of the future, through a cognitive mapping of our present historical condition. in the aftermath of the election of donald trump, i had had jean baudrillard on my mind. my general outlook on my institution during this time was that, like the usa itself, campus life had come to resemble a collective hallucination. a https://doi.org/ . /s - - -x * alexander j. means alexmeans @gmail.com university of hawai’i at mānoa, honolulu, hi, usa published online: august postdigital science and education ( ) : – http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - -x&domain=pdf mailto:alexmeans @gmail.com simulacrum. an unreality. on the surface, everything appeared normal enough. however, there was an underlying mood. a tone, or vibration: a pervasive affect of denial and displacement. one afternoon, a student in the seminar succinctly captured this sensation: ‘we are the xanax generation.’ this occurred during a conversation regarding the nature of late modern control societies, their networked digital circuitry, and the way they organize space, time, and consciousness through our active participation in ubiquitous systems of information, commodification, and surveillance. to assist our exploration, we were analyzing concepts meant to extend and complicate notions of ideology as a screen, or filter, thought to cloak reality in a veil of unreality, rendering subjects into objects and objects into subjects (i.e., commodity fetishism, reification, and alienation in the marxist tradition). interpassivity, for instance, describes how ideology manifests in our everyday actions, while simultaneously functioning as a hyperreal form of action, based on pseudo-participation in pseudo-events, such as signing a facebook petition, hurling insults at neo-fascists and clueless liberals on twitter, or consuming a meme with an anti-corporate or anti-capitalist message. these modes of subjective action have little or no impact on objective conditions, yet present the illusion of participating in consequential events (dean ). cynical rationality is similar, but with a twist. it is also how ideology saturates our everyday behaviors and practices, but marks how, rather than embodying a state of false consciousness, we are typically fully aware of our own complicity in systems of power and domi- nation (Žižek ). for instance, i know full well that i should not buy books on amazon as it represents an oligopolistic mega-corporation with abhorrent labor practices. i should buy books at a local independent book store. however, paradoxically, my knowledge of amazon’s greed and exploitation of workers serves to absolve my conscience. i can take an ironic distance to my actions. i am still a good person because i am fully aware of how bad amazon is. i see through the illusion even while i participate in expanding amazon’s market dominance. this is cynical rationality. at the other end of the spectrum, amazon’s megalomaniacal ceo jeff bezos investing his billions on space colonization is also representative of cynical rationality. in his words, ‘we are destroying the earth.’ yet, he fantasizes of planetary escape rather than countenance even minor changes to the current grotesque distributions of wealth and power. students are often savvier than we give them credit, and interpassivity and cynical rationality are in the air they breathe, and as such, they recognize these stultifying patterns of complicity in late capitalism in the most immediate and intimate of ways. however, particularly for working class students, like the majority of students that were in my seminar, there is very little sense that anything can change, or that they might be the agents of change. control societies have absorbed opposition through creative and affective means, seizing our desires, dissimulating our protests, and fragmenting our energies. they do not so much render us passive or even depoliticize us (although they do have these see catherine clifford, ‘jeff bezos: i spend my billions on space because we are destroying the earth.’ cnbc, july , . https://www.cnbc.com/ / / /why-jeff-bezos-spends-billions-on-space- technology.html. postdigital science and education ( ) : – https://www.cnbc.com/ / / /why-jeff-bezos-spends-billions-on-space-technology.html https://www.cnbc.com/ / / /why-jeff-bezos-spends-billions-on-space-technology.html impacts as well), as they render us enervated and atomized. thus, ‘we are the xanax generation’ represents more than simply a playful ironic gesture. rather, it names a deep existential condition of catastrophic precarity: an acknowledgement that even with the very real and present danger of planetary extinction in this century, there appears that there is little that can be done to derail the train of history. things are out of control, the fix is in, and we all know it. capitalism and technology are immutable. power is absolute. the proclamation, ‘we are the xanax generation,’ is thus an effort to shield the self, while coming to terms with complicity—to numb the spirit as all that is solid melts into air. mark fisher ( ) writes, ‘capitalism is what is left when beliefs have collapsed at the level of ritual or symbolic elaboration, and all that is left is the consumer-spectator, trudging through the ruins and relics’ ( ). this is the xanax generation. while youth are persistently sent the message that they need to develop their capacities to become enterprising and innovative twenty-first century global problem solvers, they are in fact being systematically adapted to accept their own nullity. according to fisher, the idea of reflexive impotence internalizes these ideas, stitching them together within an integrative onto-affective vector. it is a negative void, a psycho-social condition of atomized claustrophobia, a malaise on consciousness, particularly afflicting the young and the precarious in late capitalism. a feeling there is no escape. it is an ‘unstated worldview’ correlated with ‘widespread pathologies’ ( ). fisher elaborates: they know things are bad, but more than that, they know they can’t do anything about it. but that knowledge, that reflexivity, is not a passive observation of an already existing state of affairs. it is a self-fulfilling prophecy … many of the teenagers i worked with had mental health problems or learning difficulties. depression is endemic. it is the condition most dealt with by the national health service, and is afflicting people at increasingly younger ages. the number of students who have some variant of dyslexia is astonishing. it is not an exagger- ation to say that being a teenager in late capitalist britain is now close to being reclassified as a sickness. this pathologization already forecloses any possibility of politicization. by privatizing these problems - treating them as if they were caused only by chemical imbalances in the individual's neurology and/or by their family background - any question of social systemic causation is ruled out. (fisher : ) the collapse of the political into the psychological feeds into short-term coping strategies: ( ) dopamine escapes—video games, pornography, instagram-ready life- style projections (keeping up with the influencers). ( ) therapeutic liberation—cult of wellness, mindfulness, psychotropic relief (benzos and lorazepam). reflexive impo- tence is a state of being marked by nihilistic churn (fleeting news cycles, info- saturation, historical amnesia, opportunism, mendacity and lies) along with grinding stasis (the prevailing sense that the only thing that really changes is that everything appears to be getting worse). reflexive impotence is thus manic activity (multitasking and micro-dosing) combined with irrational redundancy (the promise of online con- spiracies like qanon is that they offer a simulacrum of historical participation, mastery, and control; someday, we can all be the one to raid comet pizzeria and save the postdigital science and education ( ) : – children!). reflexive impotence is epistemic implosion: the cambridge analytica scandal revealed that ai algorithms are being trained to transform digital space into a psyop war-zone of manufactured illiteracies. reflexive impotence is the cultural logic of control societies: a banal signpost of societal fatigue and exhaustion. film and television, for instance, have devolved into an endless mill of computer-generated dullness (captain america will not save us!) and recycled reboots (recently, i spotted the new magnum p.i. at a park in waikiki). innovations in music are likewise reduced to hip hop and emo hybrids (lil peep) or kitsch cowboy-hop crossovers (lil nas x). the sound cloud of the xanax generation is downtempo and fueled by lean and molly, drugs designed to neutralize consciousness and simulate empathy. reflexive impotence is too much noise. virtual sex replaces sex. nostalgia replaces experimentation. within our current predicament, which is especially acute for the young, social powerlessness coincides seamlessly with a proliferation of choice—the freedom to redefine the self, to modulate our identities and lifestyles, to retreat into our chosen reality fields. freedom becomes a superego injunction to enjoy. personal therapeutic needs that erupt from the overdetermination of anticipatory uncertainty and the privatization of risk, collide with nihilistic resignation. this is not the one-dimensional man that herbert marcuse ( ) described as the quintessential reified subject of high fordism. power is not hiding behind a veil of illusion. we gaze on in horror as a neo-fascist security state openly kidnaps migrant children and tosses them into cages. politics melts into esthetics: maga. please pass the xanax! slavoj Žižek ( ) elaborates: we live in an extraordinary era in which there is no tradition on which we can base our identity, no frame of meaningful universe which might enable us to lead a life behind hedonistic reproduction. today’s nihilism—the reign of cynical opportunism accompanied by permanent anxiety—legitimates itself as the liberation from the old constraints: we are free to constantly re-invent our sexual identities, to change not only our job or our professional trajectory but even our innermost subjective features like sexual orientation. however, the scope of freedoms is strictly prescribed by the coordinates of the existing system, and also by the way consumerist freedom effectively functions: the possibility to choose and consume imperceptivity turns into a superego obligation to choose. (Žižek : – ) qanon is neo-fascist conspiracy theory prevalent among supporters of donald trump in the usa. part of the conspiracy often referred to as ‘pizzagate’ postulates that hillary clinton and the democratic party run a ritualistic satanic pedophile ring out of the basement of comet ping pong, a pizzeria in new jersey. in , a heavily armed man ‘raided’ the pizzeria and fired off a few rounds from his machine gun with the aim of saving the children. no one was injured. cambridge analytica was a company funded by far right-wing donors that harvested personal data, most notably from facebook, to target populations by micro-targeting specific individuals with social media disinformation to change mass psychology and behavior, such as voting patterns. the company worked on behalf of both brexit and the trump campaigns and likely influenced the outcomes of the referendum and the us election. maga, or make america great again, is the rallying cry of trump and the neo-fascist right in the usa. postdigital science and education ( ) : – not all forms of reflexive impotence are created equal, of course. there are vast chasms that divide the xanax generation. the working-class students at my former institution almost all possessed a sense of social conscience. they also placed a high value on work, learning, and success. even if they themselves were failing, they dutifully blamed themselves. however, a combination of personal burdens (debt, health prob- lems, family troubles), an infantilizing culture of anti-intellectualism, and prior expe- riences of abandonment, effectively rendered, for many, their status as college students unworkable in any traditional sense. many had attended high schools that had left them ill-prepared and alienated from academic reading, study, and conversation. many held two or three jobs, while taking four or five classes a semester—a feat of time management and personal discipline that few adults would be capable of replicating. most had been taught that the only purpose of higher education was to enhance future employment, yet, higher education was seen as a risk rather than any guarantee of economic stability (and thus, who could blame them for a cash-for-degree-for-jobs- mentality, when the price tag of even my ‘affordable’ state institution was an economic albatross for them and their families?). many of these students, particularly first- generation college and racial minority students, drop out, leaving them with debt, but without anything to show for it, except perhaps anger and regret. despite a lack of basic familiarity with literature, economics, philosophy, history, civics, and art, students still listen to the wu tang clan and have correctly internalized the basic truth of late capitalism: cash rules everything around me. working class students know the deck is stacked. the system rigged. futures mortgaged. owning a home, affording health care, getting married, starting a family—these aspirations do not appear congruent with objective reality. in such a context of alienation and compulsory debt, higher education is rendered a simulation. it becomes disneyland. books and articles are assigned. lectures are given and papers are written. but the underlying reality is the vast majority of students simply do not have the time or inclination to perform the real work required, particularly the reading, the essential building block of thought (online forums provide advice to gaming professors and courses with the goal of opti- mizing time-labor-grade ratios—minimization of effort and maximization of return). of course, all of this functions as a kind of lacanian big other: the underlying, unspoken, unspeakable real underwriting the hegemonic symbolic-order of higher education today. for those who might feel i am exaggerating, let me be clear, i have found that students are eager to render these existential-sociological issues into objects of critical analysis and that they are capable of doing so with wit, empathy, and keen insight. despite what they are educated to believe, catastrophic precarity is not their fault. reflexive impotence is artificial and imposed. it has been historically produced. it is not a spontaneous or natural state of being. furthermore, there are, of course, heroic social movements and struggles being waged by young people across the usa and the world. moreover, it must be noted that any pedagogy that unreflexively suggests the dire problems of the world are up to students to solve, even as they have no respon- sibility for creating them, is a neoliberal pedagogy that collapses into false generosity (i.e., classic baby boomer gas lighting). think of it from a student’s perspective. you are paying the entry fee (essentially a lifetime of debt) for access to a college classroom, a minimum requirement for accessing even the lowest strata of livelihoods, while postdigital science and education ( ) : – concurrently working two or three jobs, with no guarantee of attaining future security, only to be informed by your professor that your generation is responsible for fixing all that ails contemporary life. what might your response be? with this said, one of the paradoxes often discussed with students and col- leagues at my former institution was why students were not more politically active on campus and beyond. this was an era of revived campus protest, black lives matter, and of right-wing hysteria regarding safe spaces, trigger warnings, macroaggressions, intersectionality, free speech and political correctness. from our vantage point, these phenomena might as well have been taking place on a different planet, or at least on campuses worlds away, like middlebury college that serves youth overwhelmingly from the very top of the class structure. these are young people, regardless of race or ethnicity, who, having attended the most elite k- schools, are taught at a young age that they have voice, agency, and power. taught that the world belongs to them. i once hosted the new york writer and activist michaela a. davis in one of my undergraduate sociology classes. she was on campus to give our martin luther king day speech. during our open-ended conversation, which revolved around issues of race, power, and inequality in trump’s america, she asked the forty or so students in the room, the majority of whom were working class students of color, how many had attended the women’s march after trump’s inauguration. this was the single largest public demonstration in the usa since the s. ten million participated globally. not a single hand went up. many were seemingly unaware a protest had even taken place. she was gobsmacked. yet, where the new campus activism has flourished, it is often difficult to detach from the sad passions of reflexive impotence. for instance, safe spaces and twitter call- out cultures reduce politics to individual psychology, personal branding (woke virtue signaling), and bad faith recrimination against enemies both real and imagined. as those like judith butler and wendy brown have observed, identity politics is often just liberalism at its worst. it assumes that political veracity coincides with individual experience of ontological injury, and that politics is a matter of personal redress via the state and/or better inclusion into the corporate economy. this is what brown ( ) refers to as ‘wounded attachments’ to power that inscribe injury as essentialized identity, fixing injustice as private interest to be ameliorated/regulated through the state as opposed to an individual and collective will to freedom, power and transformation. in other words, rather than emancipation from domination (the freedom to recreate the present state of affairs in relation with others, including state and corporate power), politics is reduced to making claims on the liberal state and/or the corporation (e.g., ‘lean in feminism’). ‘centrist’ parties such as the democratic party in the usa have likewise offered little more than token symbolic gestures of liberal inclusion and diversity, while openly serving oligarchic power. to be clear here, dismantling the historical, interpersonal, and institutional basis of systemic violence afflicting persons and communities is a crucial imperative. however, we must recognize that late capitalism thrives on incorporation of difference and proliferation of identity-based distinctions. it also produces cata- strophic precarity (ontological and ecological crisis) that fuels a desire for stable foundations and a retreat into the protected psyche. racism, ethnic hatred, homo- phobia, sexual violence, and misogyny have thrived in this environment. as has postdigital science and education ( ) : – white nationalism and neo-fascism. none of these phenomena can be reduced to capitalism or resolved through a reinvigorated class politics alone. however, pursuing anti-racist, anti-colonial, or anti-sexist projects without a critique of capital, state power, and class power is neoliberal. it either vanishes class alto- gether and/or wrongly codes the concept of the working-class as white and male. keenga-yamahtta taylor ( ) offers some ethico-political clarity: no serious socialist current in the last hundred years has ever demanded that black or latino/a workers put their struggles on the back burner while some other class struggle is waged … the american working class is female, immigrant, black, white, latino/a, and more. immigrant issues, gender issues, and antiracism are working-class issues. (taylor : ) as a crisis of institutions, fragmented individualism, and the devolution of class solidarity into the private navigation of catastrophic precarity become the norm within control societies, the private logics of identity, therapy, and self-help displace class solidarity among workers (there is class solidarity today, of course, it is just among the interests and ideologies of the oligarchs). this is a disaster that plays right into the hands of the neo-fascist right-wing. racism, xenophobia, scapegoating, and nativism have always been tools to divide working people. the xanax generation swims in these waters. and young people from the elite and professional class are not immune. while given every conceivable advantage in society, they are subjected to the grueling and often sadistic pressures of achievement culture. elite parents can, of course, buy their children the requisite resume enhancements required to gain entry to elite universities and therefore the symbolic capital and networks required for high status jobs, or they may simply buy admission, as we learned in the recent celebrity admissions scandal in the usa. importantly, children of the rich participate in cutthroat achievement culture not so much because they must reproduce their economic position (that’s what trust funds and inheritance are for), but because the status networks of their families demand elite university pedigrees. chil- dren of the professional managerial class are not as fortunate. their parents know that the emerging ai-economy will be defined by steroidal competition and the superfluity and disposability of large numbers of workers (means ). such are the grim metrics of a winner-take-all future. there will be no mercy. it is thus totally unsurprising that suicide rates, eating disorders, depression, and opioid abuse have spread like wildfire among children of the well-to-do. self-medicating, resignation, and/or resentment are not going to make catastrophic precarity go away. the earth is melting. while reflexive impotence acutely afflicts the xanax generation, i have found that when rendered into an object of analysis, students are eager to think, to read, and to learn. acknowledging the material and psychological conditions of student life, abstracting from the given set of realities, can indeed help interrupt, or short-circuit the atomized collapse into the hyperreal classroom. the students in my sociologies of the future seminar were well aware of many of the issues discussed above. they know interpassivity and cynical rationality quite well. they see it all around them. they certainly schooled me. this was written more by them in some ways. the question becomes where are the pressure points, the gaps in the socio-symbolic order, through which a new collectivity of the young might emerge? postdigital science and education ( ) : – how might we learn to feel, learn, and live differently amid the ruins of control societies? how might we create a culture, a new real for socialist futures beyond the relics of late capitalism? references brown, w. ( ). states of injury. princeton: princeton university press. dean, j. ( ). democracy and other neoliberal fantasies. durham: duke university press. fisher, m. ( ). capitalist realism: is there no alternative? london: zero books. marcuse, h. ( ). one-dimensional man. boston: beacon press. means, a.j. ( ). learning to save the future: rethinking education and work in the era of digital capitalism. new york: routledge. taylor, k.-y. ( ). from #black lives matter to black liberation. chicago: haymarket books. Žižek, s. ( ). first as tragedy then as farce. new york: verso. Žižek, s. ( ). like a thief in broad daylight. london: allen lane. postdigital science and education ( ) : – 	adapting the xanax generation: meditations on catastrophic precarity and postdigital melancholia 	references wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. 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privacy policy | accessibility statement american medical association. all rights reserved search all jama jama network open jama cardiology jama dermatology jama health forum jama internal medicine jama neurology jama oncology jama ophthalmology jama otolaryngology–head & neck surgery jama pediatrics jama psychiatry jama surgery archives of neurology & psychiatry sign in individual sign in sign increate an account trending 	 associations of fish oil supplement use with testicular function in young men original investigation january , 	 association of medicaid expansion with opioid overdose mortality in the united states original investigation january , twitter facebook email more this issue views , citations comments view metrics 	 download pdf 	 share twitter facebook email linkedin 	 cite this 	 permissions 	 comment invited commentary geriatrics august  , evidence, efficacy, and economics—a better path forward for us health care louise aronson, md author affiliations article information 	 division of geriatrics, department of medicine, university of california, san francisco jama netw open. ; ( ):e . doi: . /jamanetworkopen. . visual abstract icon visual abstract editorial comment icon editorial comment related articles icon related articles author interview icon interviews multimedia icon multimedia 	 original investigation telehealth treatment by lay counselors vs by clinicians for depression symptoms in older adults namkee g. choi, phd; c. nathan marti, phd; nancy l. wilson, ma, msw; guoqing john chen, md, phd, mph; leslie sirrianni, msw, lcsw; mark t. hegel, phd; martha l. bruce, phd, mph; mark e. kunik, md, mph the current crisis transforming the united states has primary contributors: the coronavirus disease (covid- ) pandemic, economic collapse, mobilization for racial justice, and historic rates of anxiety, depression, distress, and substance use disorders. the consequent heightened need for mental health care comes at a time when health organizations are fiscally challenged and newly aware of their contributions to creating and perpetuating health inequities. it also enters a medical context of longstanding inadequate recognition of, support for, and investment in mental health, elder care, and health disparities. it is likely not coincidental that older adults and people of color are disproportionately impacted by both the confluent crises and our response to them. for all those reasons, as well as health care’s current accelerated adoption of telehealth, the article by choi et al could hardly be timelier. the authors demonstrate that brief videoconferenced problem-solving counseling by low-cost lay counselors is comparable to videoconferenced care by licensed professionals for treating depressed, racially diverse, low-income, homebound older adults. although slightly less effective for depression, lay counseling had similar efficacy in disability, social engagement, and social role satisfaction outcomes. moreover, as those of us who work in social justice health care are fond of saying, if you can make a difference in the highest-risk populations, chances are you will help all populations, whereas medical history has clearly demonstrated that the reverse is not true. in the medical literature and elsewhere, the term older adult is typically used to refer to people age years and older, and the word geriatric is generally applied to the oldest and frailest of old people. in their article, choi et al reference geriatric mental health workforce shortages and the older americans act, yet their study enrolled homebound participants age years and older and had an average age of just years. it’s worth asking how they could have found so many homebound middle-aged adults. the answer likely comes from the study population’s demographic characteristics. all participants had low income, more than % reported being unable to make ends meet or just getting by, approximately % were black or latinx, and rates of multimorbidity, pain, functional impairment, and polypharmacy were similar to those of truly geriatric populations. these data demonstrate the consequences of the long-described but as yet inadequately addressed phenomenon of accelerated aging in us populations who have systematically received the short end of the socioeconomic stick. poverty, discrimination, and lack of opportunity create chronic stress, which adversely affects physical and mental health, and depression is not only a consequence but a cause of chronic inflammation and accelerated aging. compared to peer nations, the united states has the highest rates of chronic disease, the greatest number of preventable hospitalizations, the lowest life expectancy, and the highest rates of suicide, obesity, and avoidable deaths. these outcomes are produced by a system that costs nearly twice what near peer countries spend and occurs as a result of bureaucratic inefficiencies, overuse of expensive technologies and procedures, and relative underuse of primary care, physician visits, and other cognitive, interpersonal resources. this shameful state of affairs and its nefarious progeny, including structural ageism and race- and income-based health disparities, have been well documented for decades. purported efforts to address the expensive, bias-ridden, self-congratulatory edifice of us health care have largely consisted of moving non–weight-bearing walls and rearranging furniture by the very leaders who built the structure’s flawed foundation and support beams. it’s time for that to change. what might a new, better us health care system look like? it seems clear that it will include significant amounts of telehealth, but change can’t stop there. the new system must also prioritize and pay for the prevention and care of disorders and populations commensurate with their prevalence and risk. to accomplish this, it will need to become a truly evidence-based health care system, not one that cherry-picks the evidence to support preexisting biases. despite the particular demographic and medical foci of their study, the article by choi et al offers insight into some of the significant ways health care might be made less expensive and more inclusive. when the united states pivoted to telehealth in march , lower income, rural, elderly, and disabled populations—those groups most likely to live across the digital divide—were placed in acute-on-chronic jeopardy. already disadvantaged, they were precipitously told that access to medical care required a digital device, internet connectivity, and digital literacy. this meant many would simply not get health care and, worse, would miss the health encounter that is for some older and disabled adults the primary social activity of their week or month. paradoxically, these same groups stand to gain considerably from telehealth if its effectiveness is mostly equivalent to in-person care as choi et al and others have found. telehealth visits are less physically and fiscally costly for frail, disabled, and lower-income patients; they allow those with limited energy to save their reserves for more important activities that may enrich their lives and improve their health. at the same time, the digital divide may be one reason for the social isolation of some older and disabled adults for whom digital devices and capability would provide new access to essential services, social and occupational opportunities, and health promotion activities. among the notable findings of the study by choi et al unrelated to mental health measures were that many participants preferred the ease and privacy of telehealth. they further found that the costs of a video platform and wi-fi connection were significantly less than the costs of sending practitioners on house calls. thus, for some older patients with multimorbidity and considerable health and social burdens, telehealth is not only possible and cost-effective, it is desirable. critically, the us health care system must raze and rebuild its foundational assumptions and structural priorities. it must fund and disseminate interventions that work regardless of who does them (lay counselors vs professionals; social workers, pharmacists, physical therapists, nurses, and all other health professionals vs physicians), how they work (using verbal and relational tools vs technical and pharmacological ones), and who needs them (people who are poor, old, young, disabled, female, black, brown, or gay vs middle- to upper-class, adult to middle-aged, able-bodied, white, heterosexual, christian or jewish males). it also needs to respect social proxies and evidence as it already does physical ones; just as we know lowering cholesterol lowers the risk for vascular diseases, so too do we know that improving mood and opportunities improves physical and social function. as choi et al point out, medications only target disease whereas nonpharmacologic treatments, including the ministrations of trained lay people or professionals, can treat disease and also address the social and behavioral contributors to poor health outcomes and high health care costs. the arrival of covid- demonstrated just how quickly and completely us medical institutions can redirect their priorities and functions. the ascendance of the black lives matter movement has shown just how many people within and beyond health care support fundamental change. this is a pivotal moment for us to reimagine how we prioritize, finance, organize, and deliver health services. back to top article information published: august , . doi: . /jamanetworkopen. . open access: this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc-by license. © aronson l. jama network open. corresponding author: louise aronson, md mfa, ucsf division of geriatrics, california street, suite , san francisco ca (louise.aronson@ucsf.edu). conflict of interest disclosures: none reported. references .choi  ng, marti  cn, wilson  nl,  et al.  effect of telehealth treatment by lay counselors vs by clinicians on depressive symptoms among older adults who are homebound: a randomized clinical trial.   jama netw open. ; ( ):e . doi: . /jamanetworkopen. . google scholar .administration for community living. older americans act: reauthorization of the oaa. . accessed july , . https://acl.gov/about-acl/authorizing-statutes/older-americans-act .squassina  a, pisanu  c, vanni  r.  mood disorders, accelerated aging, and inflammation: is the link hidden in telomeres?   cells. ; ( ): . doi: . /cells pubmedgoogle scholarcrossref .tikkanen r, abrams. mk. us health care from a global perspective, : higher spending, worse outcomes? commonwealth fund. january . accessed july , . https://www.commonwealthfund.org/publications/issue-briefs/ /jan/us-health-care-global-perspective-  .woolf  sh, braveman  p.  where health disparities begin: the role of social and economic determinants—and why current policies may make matters worse.   health aff (millwood). ; ( ): - . doi: . /hlthaff. . pubmedgoogle scholarcrossref .shachar  c, engel  j, elwyn  g.  implications for telehealth in a postpandemic future: regulatory and privacy issues.   jama. ; ( ): - . doi: . /jama. . pubmedgoogle scholarcrossref comment limit characters limit characters conflicts of interest disclosure identify all potential conflicts of interest that might be relevant to your comment. conflicts of interest comprise financial interests, activities, and relationships within the past years including but not limited to employment, affiliation, grants or funding, consultancies, honoraria or payment, speaker's bureaus, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, royalties, donation of medical equipment, or patents planned, pending, or issued. err on the side of full disclosure. if you have no conflicts of interest, check "no potential conflicts of interest" in the box below. the information will be posted with your response. not all submitted comments are published. please see our commenting policy for details. yes, i have potential conflicts of interest. no, i do not have potential conflicts of interest. limit characters limit characters or approximately words submit the following information is required and must be completed in order to submit a comment: thank you. your comment submission was successful. please allow up to business days for review, approval, and posting. comment for this article expand all september , unless emr become user-friendly, inefficiency in health care won't improve much edward volpintesta, md | general practice (retired) the author is right to say that among other things, bureaucratic inefficiencies contribute to the high costs and inefficiency of health care in the u.s. electronic medical records (emr) are considered by many doctors as the single factor that is most responsible for inefficiency in their work. plucking information onto a keyboard is distracting, time-consuming, and a major cause of physician dissatisfaction and disillusionment with medical practice. over time it can lead to anxiety, depression, insomnia—and other signs of burnout. worse, by taking physicians’ time and attention away from their interaction with patients, emr has depersonalized the patient-physician relationship. office visits are often hurried affairs; and patients frequently complain that their physicians seem more interested in their computers than in them. electronic medical records were supposed to improve the quality of care by focusing on the outcomes of physicians’ work and increasing their accountability. but most doctors say that it has added a layer of drudgery that adds noting significant to care. many consider it a billing machine for insurance companies. although they have been around for at least emr have retained all of their inefficiencies; and despite doctors’ pleas to make them user-friendly, they remain physicians’ number one “pain point”. . hawkins m. survey of america’s physicians: practice patterns & perspectives. .https://physiciansfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /physicians-survey-results-final- .pdf. conflict of interest: none reported read more see more about depressive disorders health care economics, insurance, payment health care policy health policy mobile health and telemedicine psychiatry psychotherapy geriatrics download pdf cite this citation aronson l. evidence, efficacy, and economics—a better path forward for us health care. jama netw open. ; ( ):e . doi: . /jamanetworkopen. . download citation file: ris (zotero) endnote bibtex medlars procite refworks reference manager mendeley © permissions comment sign up for emails based on your interests select your interests customize your jama network experience by selecting one or more topics from the list below. 	acid base, electrolytes, fluids 	allergy 	allergy and clinical immunology 	anesthesiology 	anticoagulation 	art of the jama network 	bleeding and transfusion 	cardiology 	caring for the 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al. epj data science ( ) : https://doi.org/ . /epjds/s - - -y r e g u l a r a r t i c l e open access activism via attention: interpretable spatiotemporal learning to forecast protest activities ali mert ertugrul , , yu-ru lin * , wen-ting chung , muheng yan and ang li *correspondence: yurulin@pitt.edu school of computing and information, university of pittsburgh, pittsburgh, usa full list of author information is available at the end of the article abstract the diffusion of new information and communication technologies—social media in particular—has played a key role in social and political activism in recent decades. in this paper, we propose a theory-motivated, spatiotemporal learning approach, actattn, that leverages social movement theories and a deep learning framework to examine the relationship between protest events and their social and geographical contexts as reflected in social media discussions. to do so, we introduce a novel predictive framework that incorporates a new design of attentional networks, and which effectively learns the spatiotemporal structure of features. our approach is not only capable of forecasting the occurrence of future protests, but also provides theory-relevant interpretations—it allows for interpreting what features, from which places, have significant contributions on the protest forecasting model, as well as how they make those contributions. our experiment results from three movement events indicate that actattn achieves superior forecasting performance, with interesting comparisons across the three events that provide insights into these recent movements. keywords: interpretable spatiotemporal learning; event forecasting; civil unrest; protest activities introduction social movements are one of the most complex collective actions. they reflect how collec- tivities articulate and press a collectivity’s interests to make significant changes in public policies and political decisions. every day, news about social movement activity relevant to a variety of contested issues is being updated, on topics ranging from civil rights, to human rights, to gender equality, to gun control and others. throughout human history, protests have been a primary means of engaging in social movements, in which collectiv- ities usually give voice to their grievances and concerns about the rights and well-being of themselves and others [ ]. in recent decades, the diffusion of new information and com- munication technologies—social media in particular—has reshaped the political activism of our time. from the arab spring, to the occupy wall street movement, to the recent march for our lives gun violence protests, social media has been central in providing mo- bilizing information, coordinating demonstrations, and creating opportunities for people © the author(s) . this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, pro- vided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons license, and indicate if changes were made. https://doi.org/ . /epjds/s - - -y http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /epjds/s - - -y&domain=pdf http://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:yurulin@pitt.edu ertugrul et al. epj data science ( ) : page of to exchange opinions [ , ]. in this work, our focus is whether and how online activities can forecast offline protests. we started conceptualizing the prediction problem by considering what motivates peo- ple protest may help forecast; knowing the factors that drive people to protest may help to forecast demonstrations. literature in social movements and social psychology has pro- posed theories and offered insights into why people protest [ – ]. for example, one fun- damental factor of a given movement is its “connectedness,” both in terms of how events connect with other events of a similar kind, temporally and spatially, and in terms of how they are embedded in an environment where people share similar sociocultural context. in other words, social movements are not merely instances of independent collective ac- tions or protest events, but need to be investigated within their social, temporal and ge- ographical contexts [ ]. empirically, however, in part due to the lack of proper analytical tools, studies (including social media studies) often analyze single events or movements via a case-study approach [ – ], or consider a large number of movement-related events independently of their relationships in time and space [ , ]. it is crucial to move beyond single cases or aggregate measures and consider the dy- namic interactions among the multitude of social, temporal and spatial dimensions. anal- yses that are sensitive to spatial and temporal insertion will offer insights into how social movements were different in nature and in terms of progression. for example, some move- ments directly spoke to major national issues and garnered mass media coverage instan- taneously, while others originated locally, relying on the efforts of ordinary advocates and grassroots activists before receiving media attention. to illustrate such differences, in this work we consider three recent movements—all of which connect to a similar social issue but are different in their progression in time and space. these include the black lives mat- ter (blm) movement, which originated in the african-american community, and became nationally recognized during the protests and unrest in ferguson, in august and novem- ber [ ], as well as the marches that occurred following the white supremacist rally that took place in charlottesville, in august . the latter received intense media cover- age immediately following the deadly attack that killed counter-protester heather heyer and president trump’s controversial statements [ ]. as shown in fig. , these different protest events left heterogeneous activity traces, both online and offline, over time and across locations, creating significant challenges in analyzing their spatial and temporal patterns. recent works in predictive modeling have shown considerable progress in predicting and forecasting spatiotemporal events, using machine learning methods such as transfer learning [ , ]. however, most of them focus on prediction performance and lack the capability to facilitate understanding the nuanced spatiotemporal characteristics of social movement events. the theoretically-relevant questions include: in a movement, what so- cial and activity features are associated with the subsequent events? to what extent are the local activities (observed from within a region) predictive of the subsequent events, com- pared to the global activities (observed outside of a region)? and what places’ activities would have more far-reaching predictive power, in terms of signaling subsequent events in other places? none of the existing works have been able to answer these questions. in this work, we aim to provide a predictive modeling framework that is able to unveil the different spatiotemporal patterns and to answer these questions. ertugrul et al. epj data science ( ) : page of figure spatiotemporal occurrence for different social movements by date (x-labels) and by location (y-labels). a red circle indicates at least one offline protest event happening on a particular day and state; the blue shade indicates the volume of tweets posted on the corresponding day/state. charlottesville counterprotests exhibited burst patterns, in which most of the activities were sparked by a deadly violence attack and president trump’s statements on aug th, . in the first few days following the attack and the statements, more protest events occurred nation-wide and larger tweet volume was observed. the ferguson i protests appeared to have a gradual build-up process, in which the activities were initially local (around missouri and few states) following the shooting of michael brown on aug th, and later received global attention. a global increase in tweet volume was observed until aug th, . the ferguson ii protests started on nov th, , with the announcement of the jury decision not to indict the police officer, and garnered global attention. the tweet volume for each state was greater in the first two days after the jury decision compared to the other days figure overview of our proposed actattn architecture. it incorporates hierarchical attentional networks where the top level (a) differentiates the intra-region and inter-region importance, and the second level (b) identifies the hub regions. the temporal dependency of time-varying features in both intra- and inter-regions are modeled using lstm (c), with sparse feature learning using group lasso (d) our proposed work. we propose a theory-motivated, spatiotemporal learning approach called actattn that addresses the aforementioned analysis challenge. figure gives an overview of actattn. using social media and protest data, actattn seeks to character- ize the social, spatial, and temporal features in relation to the subsequent protest activities in a unified and automatic manner. we develop a deep learning architecture that is not ertugrul et al. epj data science ( ) : page of only capable of forecasting the occurrence of future protests, but which also allows for in- terpreting what features, from which places, have significant contributions on the protest forecasting model, as well as how they make those contributions. to accomplish this, we introduce a two-level attentional network architecture that (a) differentiates the feature contribution from local (intra-region) and global (inter-region), and (b) identifies the re- gions, referred as the “hubs”, that have a more salient contribution in predicting protest events globally. we utilize the lexicon approach to extract a range of linguistic features that allows for making sense of the association between the types of activity traces and future protests. we further leverage a sparse learning approach, group lasso [ ], to select the compact set of features for enhancing the feature interpretability and generalizability. contributions. a major strength that differentiates our approach from the prior works is its interpretability. the interpretable capability comes from our model design, which has drawn largely upon prior social movement theories and empirical studies [ , – ]) regarding what motivates people to protest and what geological and sociocultural contexts and conditions may contribute to the inception and development of protests. the model design can be highlighted in terms of two aspects: (a) the selection of features, and (b) the differentiation of the predictive power that comes from local spatial patterns (or beyond). to summarize, our contributions include: ( ) a unified, spatiotemporal leaning frame- work: we propose a novel deep learning architecture, actattn, that automatically learns the relationship between the spatiotemporal activity traces observed from a broader com- munity and the future protest events. this learning framework allows for principally com- paring the spatiotemporal patterns from different movement events. ( ) interpretability in hierarchical attention: we use hierarchical attentional networks, together with long short-term memory (lstm) [ ], to model the temporal and spatial dependencies in the activity traces. the attentional networks allow for interpreting the importance of activities in different regions (intra- vs. inter-region contribution, and hubs), in terms of forecasting future events. this is the first model that differentiates the intra- and inter-region con- tributions in the spatiotemporal event forecasting domain. ( ) interpretability in activity features: we leverage group lasso to select a compact set of linguistic features, which allows for understanding the type of activity traces that are more reliably associated with future protests. ( ) extensive experiments on forecasting performance, with in-depth analy- sis and comparison across three real-world movements: we conduct extensive experiments on three social movement events: the counterprotests to the charlottesville rally (august ), the first wave of ferguson protests (august ), and the second wave of ferguson protests (november ). our results indicate a significant improvement in forecasting performance in comparison to several baseline and state-of-the-art methods. moreover, we present in-depth analysis and comparison across three protest events in terms of their spatiotemporal characteristics and features. the results offer interesting insights regard- ing how social media “connectedness”—as operationalized at the level of features (social embeddedness) and the level of the model (the intra- vs. inter-region contribution)—could predict offline protest activity. such analyses cannot be obtained with previous models. fi- nally, we have made our code and data available to ensure the reproducibility of our results. related work . theoretical perspectives on antecedents of protest behaviors literature in social movements and social psychology offers us insights as to why people protest. van stekelenburgh and klandermants [ , ] proposed a motivational framework ertugrul et al. epj data science ( ) : page of that incorporates and synthesizes several sociopsychological factors that have been theo- rized and studied as critical to protests: ( ) identity: individuals’ identification with certain groups/communities brings about a shared sense of future destiny and social responsi- bility; ( ) grievance: a felt sense of illegitimate inequality; ( ) emotion: emotions such as anger, guilt, fear, shame, and despair that “amplify” the felt grievance to be stronger and “accelerate” people to act more promptly; ( ) social embeddedness: the social contexts one is exposed to and social networks one is embedded in—e.g., the more people engage them- selves in the environment in which information about a certain grievance can be found, the more likely they are to start learning about the inequality and thus may take actions to protest or call for protests; and ( ) efficacy: how one perceives that protests could make a difference. in brief, protests are more likely to happen while people have the social interactions that offer more opportunities to learn about grievance and they emotionally resonate such il- legitimate inequality, while, these people identify themselves as members of the commu- nities that are affected by or responsible for the inequality, and while they believe protests could bring about change [ ]. the framework aims to link the individual’s psychological experiences—which are situ- ated in certain types of social interactions, and which eventually lead to collective action and implications—and is particularly useful for our quantitative study. we are interested in twitter users’ individual tweeting behaviors, and whether the users are immersed in a kind of social embeddedness in which people who are seeking, sharing, and disseminating information about protests would come to gather together and linger. such social embed- dedness transforms individual grievance and emotion into their collective forms and may further facilitate the social actions of protests. we incorporate four factors—grievance, identity, social embeddedness, and emotion—into our model design and leverage the lex- icon approach to operationalizing these factors (see details discussed in sect. . ). . forecasting protests and other events there have been studies that employ social media data to examine social movements and unrest. most of them followed a case-study approach in which descriptive statistics, re- gression analyses, or qualitative analysis were used for the exploration of movements [ , , , ]. for example, conover et al. [ ] examined the temporal evolution of digital com- munication activity related to the occupy wall street movement using twitter-centric features including retweets, mentions, and user engagements. de choudhury et al. [ ] studied the temporal characteristic of social media participation and its relationships to offline protests related to blm movement. chung et al. [ ] studied online social media discussions during the ferguson protests, and employed a thematic analysis to dif- ferentiate tweets that engaged critical sensemaking from those solely focused on the event taking place. while these case studies provide detailed descriptions of the studied events, the analyses depend on specific questions of interests, and thus the results are sensitive to a particular data manipulation along the spatial or temporal dimensions. there have been studies that utilize the spatial, temporal or spatiotemporal dependen- cies in modeling or predicting the events. several studies employed logistic regression or heuristics to forecast/detect events from social media related to anomalies [ , ], crime [ ] and civil unrest [ , ]. cadena et al. [ ] proposed an event forecasting model for civil unrest that uses a notion of activity cascades derived from the twitter communi- cation networks. ning et al. [ ] proposed a multiple instance learning based approach ertugrul et al. epj data science ( ) : page of that jointly forecasts protest events and identifies event precursors from news articles. ramakrishnan et al. [ ] proposed to forecast civil unrest from multiple data sources us- ing models such as logistic regression with lasso. zhao et al. proposed spatiotemporal event forecasting through an enhanced hidden markov model (hmm) [ ] and multi- task learning [ , , ]. most of the existing techniques primarily focus on forecasting performance rather than interpreting spatiotemporal characteristics of social events. in addition, the potential interactions between temporal and spatial dimensions are often overlooked. in terms of analyzing online social media content in the context of social movements, emotional commitment is the most widely studied factor. for example, de choudhury et. al have used liwc lexicon [ ] to extract features that cover aspects of emotional expres- sion, cognition, perception, social orientation, interpersonal awareness, and psychological distance [ ]. on the other hand, the literature on why people protest (e.g., [ , ]) has of- fered theoretical foundations and empirical evidence of what factors may be critical for protest occurrence and participation. in this work, we examine a set of new features that can provide theoretically-relevant interpretations about a social movement. method . problem definition suppose there are l locations (e.g., cities, states) of interest, and each location l can be represented by a collection of static and dynamic features. the static features (e.g., popu- lation, political leaning) are features that remain the same or change slowly over a longer period of time, and the dynamic features (e.g., the percentage of tweets that express the “anger” emotion) are updated for each time interval t (e.g., hour, day). let sl be the set of static features of location l, and xt,l be the set of dynamic features for location l at time t. we are also given a binary variable yt∗,l ∈ { , } that indicates the occurrence of a future protest event for each location l at time t∗. the collection of dynamic features from all locations within an observing time window with size k up to time t can be represented as xt–k+ :t = {xt–k+ , . . . , xt }, where xt′ = {xt′, , . . . , xt′,l}. our goal is to predict the future event occurrence yt∗,l at specific location l at a future time t∗ = t + τ , where τ is called the lead time for forecasting. the forecasting is based on the static and dynamic features of the location itself, as well as the dynamic features in the environment (from all other locations). therefore, the forecasting problem can be formulated as learning a function f (sd , xt–k+ :t ) → yt∗,d that maps the input, the static and dynamic features, to a protest indicator at the future time t∗ for a target location d. to facilitate interpretation of the protest forecasting, we seek to develop a model that can differentiate the contribution of the features, the locality (local/intra-region features vs. global/inter-region features), and the overall importance of each location when con- tributing to the prediction of other locations. therefore, we further organize the dy- namic features xt–k+ :t into two sets: the intra-region features, {xt–k+ ,d , . . . , xt,d} repre- sent the sequence of dynamic features for the location d, and the inter-region features, {xt–k+ ,l, . . . , xt,l} for l ∈ { , , . . . , l}, contain the sequences of dynamic features for all lo- cations of interest. . model as shown in fig. , our proposed architecture involves three primary components: the temporal component mtem, the spatial component msp , and the static features sd . sd pro- ertugrul et al. epj data science ( ) : page of vides location-specific information about the target location d. the temporal model mtem is designed to model the contribution of the local dynamic features (intra-region features) for the target location. the spatiotemporal component msp is to model the spatiotempo- ral contribution of dynamic features for all locations of interest (inter-region features). the recurrent unit. in both mtem and msp , we use lstm as a building block in our model to capture the temporal relationships among the dynamic features. lstm has been shown to be effective in capturing potential temporal dependency [ – ], and it ad- dresses the vanishing and exploding gradient problems of basic recurrent neural networks (rnns) by using explicit gating mechanisms (input, output and forget gates) to regulate the memory updates. we include a single lstm network to model intra-region dynamics in mtem (fig. (c)). to capture the spatiotemporal relationship among all locations in msp (fig. (b)), we include separate temporal components, each of which has the same struc- ture as mtem. each (inter-region) temporal component is then responsible for modeling the temporal dynamics of a single location. the lstm outputs inside mtem and msp are htemd and {hsp , hsp , . . . , hspl }, respectively. hierarchical attention mechanism. an attention mechanism has been shown to be ef- fective in reweighting the internal components in a neural architecture [ , ]. we de- sign a hierarchical attention mechanism to differentiate the importance of spatial and temporal information. first, in msp , we incorporate a spatial attention layer on top of {hsp , hsp , . . . , hspl } to learn the spatial importance among all locations (fig. (b)). the idea is that not all the locations contribute equally to the prediction of event occurrence at a tar- get location, and this attention layer is to reward the locations which contribute the most to correctly forecasting protest occurrence in the target location. the spatial attention is given by: ν sp = ∑ l αl h sp l , ( ) where νsp is the spatial attention output that summarizes the aggregate contribution of all locations, and αl is the attention weight for the location l to be learned based on a softmax function. second, we introduce a spatiotemporal attention layer to differentiate local (intra-region) and global (inter-region) feature contributions (fig. (a)). the idea behind this layer is that, in some cases, the occurrence of protest events may largely depend on the temporal information within the locations themselves, while in other cases, the occurrence may depend more on the context of other locations or the global dynamics. the spatiotemporal attention layer is given by: ν st = αtemhtemd + α sp ν sp, ( ) where αtem and αsp are the attention weights corresponding to the outputs of temporal and spatial components, respectively. they are obtained at the output of the softmax function. νst is the spatiotemporal vector that aggregates the information learned from temporal and spatial dimensions. the forecasting of the occurrence of protest events is then given by: ŷt∗,d = φ ( wc [ sd , νst ] + bc ) , ( ) where sd is the static feature of the target location d, and wc and bc are the weight matrix and bias vector to be learned in the concatenation layer, respectively. φ is the activation ertugrul et al. epj data science ( ) : page of function where we apply the softmax function in order to obtain posterior probabilities of occurrence and non-occurrence of the protest event. objective function. we incorporate the group lasso regularization into loss function. group lasso has been shown to be effective in several domains, such as robotic control [ ] and multi-modal context [ ] to select informative features. this regularization im- poses sparsity on a group level, such that all the weights in a group are either simultane- ously set to , or none of them are [ ]. the main motivation for employing this regular- ization is to select informative features in temporal components (fig. (d)) while assigning the optimal weights of the network at the same time. therefore, it also enables us to in- terpret the model in such a way that redundant information from features are minimized, which allows for differentiating which features are important for the occurrence of protest events. the objective function is defined as: l = – n n∑ i= m∑ j= yij log(pij) + λ ∥∥w tem ∥∥ , + λ l∑ l= ∥∥w spl ∥∥ , , ( ) where the first term is cross entropy loss, n is the number of samples, m is the number of class labels (event and non-event), and pij is the probability of the sample i being assigned to class j by the model. w tem is the input weight matrix in mtem , and w spl is the input weight matrix of (inter-region) temporal component of lth location in msp . note that the input weight matrix contains all weights of lstm except for recurrent and bias weights. moreover, λ and λ are the regularization factors for mtem and msp , respectively. there- fore, each component can be regularized by different factors. group lasso regularization can be written as: ‖w ‖ , = ∑ g∈g √ |g|‖g‖ , ( ) where g is the vector of outgoing connections (weights) from an input neuron, g denotes a set of input neurons, and |g| indicates the dimension of g. we represent each input neuron in mtem and in each (inter-region) temporal component of msp as a separate group so that g contains vectors of these groups. . features as mentioned earlier, there are two types of features: static and dynamic. static features reflect the political and demographic backgrounds of a location in which a protest event may take place, including the population of the state to which the location belongs (given as population), population density, vote to trump (voting behaviors in presidential election as an indicator of the degree of conservativism in the location), and region of the united states (northeast, midwest, south and west). these features either remain unchanged or change slowly over time. dynamic features are to capture social media users’ online activities that may be predic- tive of offline protests. drawn upon social movement literature [ ] (discussed in sect. . ), we focus on four factors: emotion, identity, grievance, and social embeddedness. three dictionaries (liwc [ ], sentisense [ ], and moral-laden [ ]) are used to cap- ture the features indicating emotions, grievance, and identity, while additional relevant ertugrul et al. epj data science ( ) : page of features beyond these key factors are also included to test their usability. liwc and sen- tisense include a range of emotions, either positive or negative; liwc offers the categories of social and personal pronouns that may serve as indicators of identity. the moral-laden dictionary is used with an attempt to capture grievance that results from the appraisal of relative deprivation based on moral rules; the dictionary is derived from moral foun- dation theory which suggests that humans engage in moral judgments along at least five dimensions: harm/care, cheating/fairness, betrayal/loyalty, subversion/authority, and degradation/purity. some of the additional relevant features beyond these key factors dis- cussed in literature are also included to test their usability. furthermore, in order to operationalize the type and level of social embeddedness, we caputre social media users’ engagement in online discussion, including number of tweets, number of reply tweets, and number of tweets with url links. greater volumes of any of these tweeting behaviors (tweets, replies, and urls) suggest that the public may be more aware of focal issues and events, and in turn be more motivated in seeking, spreading, and exchanging information, ideas, and emotions in cyberspaces. such social contexts may raise individuals’ perception of the efficacy of protests, which could lead to actual protest actions. more replies and url links suggest being more embedded in relevant social net- works. replies suggest direct interactions with other embedded users. url links, on the other hand, suggest information networks built based on relevant information/content created by others, including internal links with other tweets, and external links such as news, blogs, etc. the complete list of features and detailed interpretation are provided in fig. (a), fig. (b), and sect. . . experiments . dataset we choose social movements with social significance in order to test the design of our model with respect to the distinct social, temporal, and spatial dimensions of the nature of protests. moreover, we choose movements in which the nature of the issues were relatively similar in order to compare and contrast the performance of the theory-driven features. eventually, we select two movements: black lives matter (blm) and the counter-protests to charlottesville’s white supremacist rally. for blm, we selected the two separate waves of protests regarding the police’s killing of michael brown in ferguson. the ferguson un- rests were symbolic protests under the umbrella of blm in opposition to systemic racism against black people in the us. the charlottesville counter-protests were the largest re- cent nationwide protest activities against white supremacism in the us. twitter data. we collected tweets with specific keywords or hashtags: the counter- protests to the charlottesville rally [ ], and the first and the second waves of the ferguson protests [ ]. the size and statistics of each dataset are provided in table . charlottesville dataset was collected through the streaming api based on keywords and/or hashtags of interest.a retweets were not included. these keywords were emerging during the event and were then widely used on twitter to refer to the relevant issues and happenings. the ferguson i dataset and ferguson ii dataset were collected based on the published work [ ], using keywords including #ferguson, #blacklivesmatter, “black lives matter” and the names of black people killed by police during and . based on the tweet ids provided in the published dataset, we recollected the tweets within the two periods and excluded the retweets. ertugrul et al. epj data science ( ) : page of table basic statistics of the datasets dataset duration #tweets #users #protest occurrences charlottesville aug –aug ( ) . m . m ferguson i aug –aug ( ) . m . m ferguson ii nov –dec ( ) . m . m protest data. we collected ground-truth data from the website of elephrameb , c on the occurrence of offline protest events during the periods of the charlottesville counter- protests and the two waves of the ferguson protests. elephrame provides information about civil unrest events which occurred in the us. this information is kept in a struc- tured way and includes protest occurrence time (start date and end date), protest location (in state-level and city-level), protest subjects (sub-type of the protest event), description, number of participants, and at least one source link. we also incorporate news reports about blm protests that were collected by the authors of [ ]. each piece of protest event information is based on the given source link(s). note that there can be more than one event in the same location at the same time interval. in this work, we only consider whether an event occurred in a given location at that time interval, and we represent the occurrence using binary variables. as a result, we observed , and offline protest events dur- ing the three movements across the country. location extraction. in this work, we seek to forecast the occurrence of offline protest events at the state level, using twitter users’ activities. the locations of tweets are either extracted from their geocodes (if available) or inferred from the users’ profiles. first, the geotagged tweets posted from the united states include state information in their ‘place’ field. these kinds of posts include either a state name or state code. we directly use this in- formation as the location indicator. second, we find the location information of the tweets from user profiles. we follow this approach for the tweets whose locations cannot be iden- tified using the first approach. similar to the first approach, we identify the locations (state name or state code) if they are explicitly written in the user profiles. if they are not, we also look for the names of cities located in the united states. if we identify a city name in the profile, we map it to its corresponding state. for this purpose, we use a dictionary includ- ing city-state pairs in the united states from encyclopedia britannica.d note that there can be more than one city with the same name in different states. therefore, we discard such cities in this study. in total, we were able to extract tweet locations at the state level for . %, . % and . % of all tweets in the charlottesville, ferguson i, and ferguson ii datasets, respectively. . comparison methods and settings we compare our approach with several state-of-the-art approaches as the baseline meth- ods. in order to evaluate the forecasting effectiveness of the proposed model, we select three sets of baseline methods. the first set includes logistic regression (lr) and support vector machine (svm) classifiers, since they are widely-used machine learning methods in the event detec- tion/forecasting literature. with these methods, we examine the effect of static, intra- region and inter-region features by combining all features together. the second set of methods include recently-developed neural-network-based models, such as rnns and lstms in particular, as they have been shown to have superior performance in event ertugrul et al. epj data science ( ) : page of forecasting problems due to their capability of modeling the temporal dependencies. the third set of methods are the state-of-the-art spatiotemporal event forecasting approaches recently proposed by [ ], including regularized multi-task feature learning (rmtfl), constrained multi-task feature learning i (cmtfl- ) and constrained multi-task feature learning ii (cmtfl- ). these methods formulate event forecasting for multiple locations as a multi-task learning problem. they build event forecasting models for different loca- tions simultaneously by restricting all locations to select a common set of features. note that none of the existing approaches support the hierarchical structure of features coming from intra- and inter-regions, and we will discuss the importance of such differentiation more in sect. . the baseline methods are summarized as follows: the first set: • logistic regression (lr) is simple lr model. we have three baselines for this model. lr[tem] uses only intra-region features, lr[s, tem] concatenates static and intra-region features, and lr[s, tem, st] merges all features as the input. • support vector machine (svm) is simple svm model. svm[tem] employs only intra-region features, while svm[s, tem] combines static features with intra-region features. also, all features are used as input in svm[s, tem, st]. the second set: • lstm is a basic lstm network that employs only intra-region features. it does not consider static features and spatial relationships among regions. • s + lstm is the model where intra-region features are given as inputs to the lstm network. then, the embeddings of dynamic features is concatenated with the static features. this model does not consider the spatial relationships among regions. • s + lstm (gl) has the same structure as s + lstm, yet it is trained incorporating group lasso regularization. with this model, we aim to monitor the effect of group lasso regularization on the performance of the s + lstm model. the third set: • rmtfl employs a regularization parameter to control the model sparsity. • cmtfl- introduces a constraint to control the number of features in the model for sparsity. • cmtfl- restricts the number of features selected from static and dynamic groups separately. furthermore, to evaluate the effectiveness of individual components of actattn, includ- ing the group lasso regularization and hierarchical attention mechanism (spatial and spa- tiotemporal attentions), we include several variants of actattn for comparison as follows: • actattn (w/o gl) has our proposed structure, yet group lasso regularization is not applied during training. • actattn (w/o stattn) does not include the spatiotemporal attention layer; instead, htemd and vsp are concatenated. • actattn (w/o spattn) does not include the spatial attention layer; instead, a linear projection layer is used. settings. in the experiments, we use ‘day’ as the time unit and ‘state’ as the location unit. the last five days from each dataset are used as the test sets, and rest as the training sets. the training set of the charlottesville dataset contains protest events ( . % of all samples in the training set) and the test set contains events. the training set of the fer- guson i dataset contains protest events ( % of all samples in the training set) and the ertugrul et al. epj data science ( ) : page of test set contains events. the training set of the ferguson ii dataset contains protest events ( . % of all samples in the training set) and the test set contains events. we enumerate different settings of window size and lead time. the window size k is set to be { , , } and the lead time τ is set to be { , , }. the hidden unit size for lstm is . the architecture is trained using the adam optimizer [ ] with a learning rate of . . for the models incorporating group lasso regularization, regularization factors λ and λ are selected from the set { – , – }. during test time, the input weights with absolute values smaller than – are set to as suggested in [ ]. our code and data are avail- able at https://github.com/picsolab/actattn. for the state-of-the-art mtfl-based models, the regularization parameter is set to be { – , – , . . . , , }. the number of features to be selected in the cmtfl- model is set to be { , , . . . , }. the numbers of static and dynamic features to be selected in the cmtfl- model are set to be { , , , , } and { , , . . . , }, respectively. results in this section, we present a comprehensive set of results. first, in sect. . , we show the forecasting effectiveness of the proposed model in comparison with the baseline and state- of-the-art forecasting approaches, and based on the aforementioned experiment settings. in sect. . , we analyze different kinds of predictive features identified by our model and interpret their effects in relation to the theoretical factors. in sect. . , we analyze and in- terpret different kinds of spatial contributions (intra- vs. inter-region). finally, in sect. . , we explore the potential of using additional content features in the current forecasting framework. . performance comparison we compare the forecasting performance of actattn with the comparison methods. we organize the results to answer the following three questions: . overall, how well could actattn forecast future protest event occurrences, compared with the baseline methods? (sect. . . ) . as missing information is common in social event predicting problems, how robust is actattn in dealing with missing information, compared with the baseline methods? additionally, will actattn’s spatiotemporal architecture help deal with the missing or noisy information? (sect. . . ) . how early in time can actattn effectively predict future protest event occurrences? (sect. . . ) . . overall performance as shown in table , the results indicate that actattn achieves the highest f-score and auc values on the charlottesville ( . and . ), ferguson i ( . and . ) and ferguson ii ( . and . ) datasets. the f-scores for all methods are low due to the imbalance in class distribution ( %– % protest events). further, while the protest occur- rence pattern is different for each dataset (fig. ), actattn is robust with respect to various distribution of the data, and is able to model temporal and spatial dimensions under var- ious conditions successfully. we show the significance of static features by comparing the results of lr[tem] with lr[s, tem], svm[tem] with svm[s, tem], and lstm with s + lstm. it can be seen that, https://github.com/picsolab/actattn ertugrul et al. epj data science ( ) : page of table forecasting results charlottesville ferguson i ferguson ii f-score auc f-score auc f-score auc lr[tem] . . . . . . lr[s,tem] . . . . . . lr[s,tem,st] . . . . . . svm[tem] . . . . . . svm[s,tem] . . . . . . svm[s,tem,st] . . . . . . lstm . . . . . . s + lstm . . . . . . s + lstm (gl) . . . . . . rmtfl . . . . . . cmtfl- . . . . . . cmtfl- . . . . . . actattn (w/o gl) . . . . . . actattn (w/o stattn) . . . . . . actattn (w/o spattn) . . . . . . actattn . . . . . . in nearly all cases, combining static features with intra-region features yields better f- score and auc values. when we further combine inter-region features, we observe that lr[s, tem, st] and svm[s, tem, st] give worse results compared to lr[s, tem] and svm[s, tem], respectively. thus, these models fail to capture the spatiotemporal infor- mation from the concatenated inter-region features. in our approach, combining inter- region features with static features and intra-region features increases the performance in all actattn-based methods except actattn (w/o stattn). moreover, s + lstm (gl) per- forms slightly better than s + lstm and eliminates some of the redundant inputs in all three models. to compare the performance of actattn with the state-of-the-art spatiotemporal event forecasting approaches, we performed experiments on all the datasets with rmtfl, cmtfl- and cmtfl- proposed by [ ] by employing various parameter combinations. we report the best test performances of these approaches on each dataset. the results in- dicate that actattn significantly outperforms all three approaches on all datasets in terms of both f-score and auc values.e to examine the effect of group lasso regularization and the hierarchical attention mechanism, we compared the performance of actattn to its three variants. although actattn slightly outperforms actattn (w/o gl), group lasso regularization provides spar- sity and selection of a compact set of features. the actattn model provides . %, . % and . % sparsity for charlottesville, ferguson i and ferguson ii, respectively. it is com- puted as the ratio of zero input weights over the total number of input connections. fur- thermore, we compare actattn to actattn (w/o stattn) and actattn (w/o spattn) to exam- ine the effect of the hierarchical attention mechanism. we observe that actattn performs significantly better than actattn (w/o stattn). this shows the importance of the spatiotem- poral attention layer which adjusts the local and global feature contributions. similarly, actattn performs superior to actattn (w/o spattn). removal of the spatial attention layer from the proposed architecture also results in loss of interpretation capability about the most contributing locations. our results reflect that incorporating spatiotemporal atten- tion layer enhances the performance of the model the most. ertugrul et al. epj data science ( ) : page of . . robustness to missing information a common challenge in predicting/forecasting social events is that data (including but not limited to social media data) often involve missing information or are only partially complete. for example, social media user activity may be sparse in a certain region or at a particular time. as actattn was designed to capture the spatiotemporal characteristics and features, we expect that actattn would be more robust to missing data if the model effectively captures the spatiotemporal structure from the training data. to test this, we simulate two kinds of missing information scenarios. ( ) missingness in time and space: a missing value could occur in any feature of any region at any time. to simulate this, we randomly removed different levels of input data ( %, %, % and %) from the test sets. we then filled the missing values by ran- domly assigning values taken from the range of non-missing values of the corresponding features. in this setting, the comparison methods include those methods that take all fea- tures (static, temporal and spatial features) as input and have the best overall performance within each of the method variants. figure shows the forecasting performances of the methods for each dataset over different levels of missing data. the results indicate that figure forecasting results against varying levels of missingness (in time and space) from the test sets. the x-axes indicate the levels of missingness, and the y-axes indicate the performance in terms of (a) auc and (b) f-score results ertugrul et al. epj data science ( ) : page of actattn performs significantly better (in terms of both auc and f-score) than all the other methods on all datasets and for almost all levels of missing data. ( ) missingness in certain regions: the missing values could occur in a particular region for an entire (short- or long-term) period of time. to simulate this, we randomly selected different proportions of regions (states, ranging from % to %) and removed their in- puts entirely from the test sets. the removed regions thus do not contribute to forecast- ing events in any of the target regions. in this setting, we included the methods taking features from the other states for comparison. note that although these methods include features from the other states, they do not differentiate intra- and inter-region contribu- tions. therefore, we expect that these comparison methods may suffer from missing some degree of regional input. figure shows the forecasting performance of the methods for each dataset over different levels of missing region information. the results show that actattn outperforms the other methods in terms of both auc and f-score on all three datasets and for all levels of missing region information. also, we observed that actattn performs more stable in nearly all conditions. in both scenarios, we observe that actattn is more robust compared to other meth- ods. this suggests that the design of actattn is particularly useful in dealing with missing information—the hierarchical attention mechanism learns important regions and sum- figure forecasting results against varying levels of missingness for regions (states) from the test sets. the x-axes indicate the levels of missingness, and the y-axes indicate the performance in terms of (a) auc and (b) f-score results ertugrul et al. epj data science ( ) : page of marizes the spatiotemporal information from intra-region and inter-region features, and the group lasso regularization imposes sparsity and selects an informative set of features. . . performance analysis with varying lead time to examine how early in time actattn effectively forecasts future protest event occur- rences, we tested the forecasting under different lead time conditions. a lead time τ is the length of time (number of days, in our experiment) from which the data are available for forecasting events occurring at t + τ (as defined in sect. . ). we evaluated our method with different lead time settings, where τ ∈ { , , }. figure shows the forecasting perfor- mances of actattn and comparison methods over different lead time settings. the results indicate that actattn has significantly better performance compared to other methods in terms of auc and f-score on three datasets across almost all lead time settings. this suggests that actattn is able to achieve better and more stable performance for short- term event forecasting, up to τ = . due to the limitation of our data, we do not examine longer-term event forecasting in this work. we further examine the performance results for actattn with different window size k and lead time τ . as defined in sect. . , the window size represents the amount of informa- tion needed for forecasting in terms of the number of consecutive days as input. the auc figure forecasting results against different lead times. the x-axes indicate lead time τ , and the y-axes indicate the performance in terms of (a) auc and (b) f-score results ertugrul et al. epj data science ( ) : page of table auc results of actattn with respect to different window size k and lead time τ charlottesville ferguson i ferguson ii k = k = k = k = k = k = k = k = k = τ = . . . . . . . . . τ = . . . . . . . . . τ = . . . . . . . . . values for corresponding results are given in table . accordingly, the best performances are achieved when (k = , τ = ), (k = , τ = ) and (k = , τ = ) for the charlottesville, fer- guson i and ferguson ii models, respectively. in general, the performance either remains stable or decreases slightly with an increase in the lead time τ , regardless of window size k. . interpreting the impact of features we interpret the significance of features, organized by intra-region, inter-region, and static. group lasso regularization has selected a subset of features with the most discrim- inative power in the models. . . intra-region dynamic features which dynamic features of a state were most important for predicting future protests in the same state? figure (a) gives a summary, and we provide our interpretation below. to better understand the significance of those features in each protest context, a manual inspection of the tweet content is conducted. . social embeddedness. among the three relevant features (number of tweets, number of replies, and number of tweets with urls), num_tweets is the most powerful that for all of the three protest events, online activism within a state is predictive of future offline protests in the same state. num_urltweet, which indicates the number of twitter posts that contain an external link to other sources, is also found to be a useful predictor—except in the case of ferguson i. this may be caused by the fact that michael brown’s death was initially paid little attention by news outlets, so the external news or relevant urls may be less indicative of online activist engagement. . emotions. both positive and negative emotions (posemo and negemo from liwc), are important in all models. particularly, anger (from liwc) is predictive for all, which sug- gests that anger is a good indicator in predicting protest for all cases. moreover, certain emotions stand out for each protest scenario. for example, disgust (from sentisense) is predictive in charllottesville; hate (from sentisense) in ferguson i; and fear (from sen- tisense) in ferguson ii. in addition, a moral-laden feature, purityvice (the extent of impurity and corruption) unexpectedly captures an intensely annoying emotion in predicting ferguson i protests. we uncovered this when analyzing the relevant tweets, in which the online community extensively express its sense of being “sick of ” or feeling “disgust” for the fact that another black life was taken by the police. . grievance. our results indicate that moral-laden features are not able to capture grievance. however, through further analysis of the feature negation (from liwc)—the use of words such as no, not, never—suggests it may serve as an indicator of grievance. this feature is important for all models, and especially for ferguson i and ii. negation is used in online communities to emphasize appraisals of how unbelievable and unrealistic a ertugrul et al. epj data science ( ) : page of figure mean absolute values of intra-region and inter-region input (gate) weights. these are the input weights learned from the neural network model (the lstm networks in the temporal and spatial components) and the magnitude of weights (which can take any values) allows for a comparison of the relative importance of different features. (a) intra-region input weights. (b) inter-region input weights situation is when they learn about the specific happenings (e.g., the shooting of unarmed michael brown, the grand jury’s decision to not indict officer wilson, and a public rally against racism) that strongly conflict with their normal sense of moral principles, which indicates grievance (referring to the feeling of illegitimate injustice). . identity. social (from liwc), which refers to the use of personal pronouns—especially plural ones such as we, you, they, and people—is predictive for all models. these terms are extensively used to call upon in-group members (we) to recognize the grievances and express protesting voices against out-group members (they; e.g., the police, a group con- sidered by a majority of the online community as an embodiment of racism). . others. we also observed the impact of other features. the features of both verb (from liwc) and present (from liwc) are important in all cases, which indicates the use of verbs (especially present tense of both auxiliary verbs, such as is, are, have, and can) to emphasize the happenings and perceived grievance as serious matters of fact. we also observed the use of action verbs such as go, take, make, need, and think, which call for necessary actions. the features of personal pronouns (from liwc) are also significant predictors, which in- volve the reference of and discussion of certain people at the center of why people protest for or against. for example, you is important for charlottesville; the second-person pro- ertugrul et al. epj data science ( ) : page of noun extensively refers to president trump, as online activists questioned him earnestly about his position on racism. likewise, he is important in predicting ferguson i protests, which is used to refer mostly to either michael brown or eric garner, both of whom were killed by the police; they refers primarily to the police. in ferguson ii, online activists fo- cused more on the judicial system, which was seen as unsuccessful in delivering justice. thus, personal pronouns are less predictive. . . inter-region dynamic features we explore the effectiveness of inter-region dynamic features by analyzing the input weights (only the portions which connect inputs to input gates) of each temporal compo- nent in spatial component, msp . figure (b) summarizes the importance of inter-region dynamic features in predicting protest within given states. large percentages ( . %, . %, and . % in the cases of charlottesville, ferguson i and ferguson ii, respectively) of the input weights are discarded as a result of group lasso regularization. we select virginia (va) from the charlottesville, california (ca) from the ferguson i and ca from the ferguson ii models, to analyze the inter-region input weights because these states are all ‘hub’ states for corresponding models (explained in sect. . ). the result suggests that other states’ features are much less predictive, especially for charlottesville and fergu- son ii. num_tweet performs exceptionally well, which indicates that online community activities in other states could be also significant across all other states. . . static features figure shows the importance of static feature weights in the three models. the features representing us regions indicate how predictive the region class for a given state is—e.g., is a state in the south more or less likely to have future protests? the results of the char- lottesville and ferguson ii models exhibit similar patterns, suggesting that both protest events took place more all over the us, while ferguson i started locally with a majority of black communities, and its model shows that being a southern state itself is predictive of future protests. . interpreting the local and global contributions and hubs actattn enables us to explore the proportion of local (intra-region) and global (inter- region) contributions in forecasting protest events, and allows for discovering the “hubs” that have a more salient contribution in predicting protest events globally. the intra- and inter-region contributions can be identified based on the spatiotemporal attention weights figure values of static feature weights. these are the static feature weights learned from the neural network model. the weights (which can take any values) allow for a comparison of the relative importance of different features. (a) charlottesville model. (b) ferguson i model. (c) ferguson ii model ertugrul et al. epj data science ( ) : page of figure exploration of local and global contributions to forecasting. while the orange nodes represent the states which are correctly predicted by the corresponding models, the gray nodes denote the states either not correctly predicted or where no events occurred, yet still contribute to forecasting events in the correctly predicted states with a value above a certain threshold. the edges indicate the contribution to forecasting from source state to target state. the thicker the edge, the more the contribution in our model, and the hubs can be identified as the regions (states) whose inter-region con- tributions to others are significant. in our study, we observe that spatial attention weights do not differ significantly across different samples. these weights represent an overall, consistent spatial relationship among regions and across days. therefore, in the follow- ing analyses, we present both the results aggregated from all test samples as well as the representative test samples. . . local vs. global contributions to examine the differences between the local (intra-region) and global (inter-region) con- tributions for forecasting events, we create a contribution graph for each model. as shown in fig. , the orange nodes represent states where the offline events are correctly predicted by the model. the gray nodes represent the states where either the events are not correctly predicted or no event occurred, yet still contribute to forecasting events in other states. for visual clarity, we only show gray nodes having an inter-region contribution greater than a certain threshold ( . , . and . for charlottesville, ferguson i and ferguson ii, respectively) to any of the orange nodes. an edge arrow indicates the contribution of fore- casting a target state from a source state and the edge weight (encoded by the thickness) reflects the contribution magnitude. also for visual clarity, we only show edges whose weights are more than a certain threshold, which is . , . and . for charlottesville, ferguson i and ferguson ii, respectively. for a target state, the self-loop represents the intra-region contribution while other incoming edges represent the inter-region contri- butions to that state. note that there might be states where events occurred on multiple days. for such states, we show the average contributions in the graph. the hierarchical attention mechanism in our actattn model enables a systematic way to interpret the intra- and inter-region contributions. the contribution from a source state to a target state (inter-region) on a specific event day is calculated by (αsp ∗ αsource), where αsp is the attention weight corresponding to the spatial component and αsource is the attention weight for the source state in the spatial component, msp . similarly, the intra-region (lo- cal) contribution can be estimated by (αtem + αsp ∗ αtarget ), where αtem is the attention weight corresponding to the (intra-) temporal component and αtarget is the attention weight for the target state in the spatial component. as shown in fig. (a), va has a salient contribu- tion (as a part of global contribution) to forecast the states where the events are correctly ertugrul et al. epj data science ( ) : page of predicted for the charlottesville case. in other words, social media activity in va would be a powerful signal for forecasting offline events in the other states. moreover, ca (mostly), il and mo can be regarded as hubs, as they contribute more than others to the target states for forecasting events in ferguson i (fig. (b)). on the other hand, the inter-region contributions from ca and ny to target states are much greater than the other states in ferguson ii (fig. (c)). note that local (intra-region) contributions (reflected by the self- loop weights) for any target state are higher than the contributions from any other state in all three models. this suggests that local activity still plays a more important role than the activity of any other states. interestingly, in the case of charlottesville, the global con- tribution (the total inter-region contributions of all other states) of a target state is more than the local one, suggesting that the charlottesville protests have a very distinct spa- tiotemporal process compared with other the two cases. . . the effect of hubs to further illustrate the hub effect, we select the representative test samples obtained from texas (tx), washington (wa) and illinois (il), which are correctly predicted events by the charlottesville, ferguson i and ferguson ii models, respectively. in the charlottesville model, the spatiotemporal attention weights for local and global contributions are . and . , respectively, meaning that the global part contributes more to forecasting the protest in tx for the given sample. to further analyze the global contribution and hub effect, we visualize the inter-region input (gate) weights and the spatial attention weights as shown in fig. . we observe that group lasso regularization selects informative features from only a few states—namely va, new york (ny), ca and tx (fig. ( a))—and the spatial attention layer further selects va, ca and ny as hubs (fig. ( b)). va is the most contributing hub in predicting the protest event for the given test sample from tx. since the trigger event of the charlottesville rally occurred in va, higher attention weight for va is the potential indicator that our proposed model is able to model spatiotemporal relationship among the regions successfully for the charlottesville dataset. figure exploration of global contribution and hub effect. (a) mean absolute values of inter-region input weights across states. (b) attention weights of spatial attention for predicting protests in tx ( b), wa ( b), and il ( b) ertugrul et al. epj data science ( ) : page of in the ferguson i model, the spatiotemporal attention weights for local and global con- tributions are . and . , respectively. this indicates that locality is more predictive for the given test sample of wa. spatial attention attends the states ca, il, missouri (mo) and tx (fig. ( b)), suggesting the high impact of these states. ferguson is located in st. louis, mo where the shooting of michael brown happened. it is also very close to the il border. the reactions to the ferguson shooting on social media most likely started spread- ing from these states. ca is an active state where both online (tweet volume) and offline activities occurred much more frequently than other places. in the ferguson ii model, in predicting the protests in il, the spatiotemporal attention weights for local and global contributions are . and . , respectively, for the cor- rectly predicted test sample from il. as shown in fig. ( a) and fig. ( b), ca and ny are selected by the spatial attention as the most attended regions (among those initially given by the group lasso). this suggests that the protest forecasting may be impacted by the heightened social media discussion in these hub states, in relation to, for example, the nypd shooting of akai gurley and the arrest of blm activists in the bay area during the study period. . testing predictive power with additional features while our selection of features is theory-driven, we also consider the possibility of incor- porating additional features, which are emerging from the events unfolding, that could help increase the predictive power of the model in a meaningful way. for example, specif- ically, we consider whether there are keywords utilized by twitter users to plan, organize, or mobilize protests that may also serve as effective features. because mobilization activ- ities and activism on twitter, in most cases, are organized and advocated by twitter users through hashtags, we focus on identifying the most widely-used hashtags. we analyze the top-k (k = ) hashtags based on tf-idf values. we treat each day as a document. we then include these top- as additional features to see if they affect forecasting, and an- alyze the most predictive features. we assign the ratio of number of tweets that include the hashtag to the total number of tweets at the specific time (day) as the feature value for the corresponding hashtag. ac- cording to the results given in table , employing the additional features decreases the performance in terms of both f-score and auc for all three datasets. furthermore, we explore the importance of these hashtag features by analyzing the input weights. in all three cases, less than % of the features have non-zero weights after group lasso regu- larization, meaning that most of the features do not have any contribution to forecasting events as both intra- and inter-region features. the informative hashtags include: “#there- sistance” for charlottesville; “#ferguson,” “#mikebrown” and “# justuceformikebrown” for ferguson i; and “#ferguson,” “# ericgarner,” “#tamirrice” and “#fergusondecision” for fer- guson ii. however, the weights of these features are much less than the weights of those theory-driven features we first employ in the original model. table forecasting results with and without hashtag features. c.f. stands for content features charlottesville ferguson i ferguson ii f-score auc f-score auc f-score auc without c.f. . . . . . . with c.f. . . . . . . ertugrul et al. epj data science ( ) : page of discussion and future work in this work, we presented an interpretable, predictive model to forecast offline protest events from online activities. we developed a novel deep learning architecture which ef- fectively learns a hierarchical structure of effective features, and at the same time, enables a theory-relevant interpretation. through extensive experiments, we demonstrated the strength of the proposed model; compared with the baseline methods, our model achieved superior forecasting performance for all movement datasets. it was also more robust with regard to missing data, and consistently outperformed other methods in various early fore- casting settings. our model not only outperforms existing prediction techniques, but also enables a theory-driven feature selection, together with the differentiation of the intra- and inter- region inputs, allowing us to examine whether these theorized factors are useful in predict- ing protests as well as how the theoretical framework could help to interpret the model’s efficacy and distinct performance across the chosen three threads of protests in a mean- ingful way. such an approach could offer insights for further investigations regarding the nature and happenings of protests. here, we first summarize and explicate whether and how the theory-driven features contribute to forecasting protests. we then discuss the limitations of our work and potential future directions. . interpretation of the theory-driven features first, overall, the greater volumes of tweeting and networking behaviors (including origi- nal tweets, replies, and associated content with hyperlinks) had strong predictive power. this result is consistent with prior empirical studies (e.g., [ ])—more online discussions may reflect higher public awareness and concern regarding the focal issues and events as- sociated with protests and they opened a cyperspace of social embeddness. yet, our model allows more differentiating observation and interpretation across protests, in terms of how the social embeddedment was shaped—by messages and interactions within the local state or beyond. for example, we found that number of reply played a more significant role only in charllottesville, suggesting that there may be different natures of how the social em- beddedness was created between charllottesville and ferguson. also, number of url link was much more useful in ferguson ii when the tweets came from the local state where the protests happened than when they came from other states. second, negative emotions have been studied and theorized to be associated with protests [ , ], and our results are consistent with this—particularly anger. however, other negative emotions, such as disgust, hate, and fear also stood out, and had distinct predic- tive power for the charlottesville counter-protests, ferguson i and ferguson ii, respec- tively. such results, together with our manual inspection of the content of sampled tweets in order to understand what these emotions suggested, also offer insights for future stud- ies in social movements to examine the associations between particular emotions and the nature of protests across contexts. third, while one of the operationalizaion of theorized factors, grievance, did not turn out as planned by leveraging the moral-laden dictionary, we discovered that the language pattern of negation could be a potential signal of grievance. we discovered in the predic- tion results that negation (from the liwc dictionary) could be a good predictor feature for all protest cases, and our manual inspection of the sampled tweets revealed that its se- mantic meaning could serve as an indicator of grievance. this could be a potential means to identify information of grievance in future relevant studies. ertugrul et al. epj data science ( ) : page of finally, identity, operationalized by using the social category from the liwc dictionary was able to capture the group identities, and the results showed its predictive power, espe- cially for charlottesville and furguson i, but not furguson ii; the second-person pronoun is more predictive in charlottesville, and the third-person in ferguson i. in brief, our model goes beyond indicating that online discussion, including emotional tweets, may help predict offline protests. that point has been studied and widely recog- nized. rather, our study offers insights as to where (intra- or inter-) and how (the features were not selected randomly or through unsupervised learning, but theory-driven) the fea- tures may offer explanatory power. . limitations and future work there are some limitations in our current work. ( ) our results indicated that consid- ering spatial relationships among the locations increases the performance of forecasting protest events. however, the proposed architecture models the spatial structure irrespec- tive of the locations of events. in other words, it does not differentiate the pairwise rela- tionship between a particular event location and other locations. future research might consider modeling the relationships between pairs of locations. ( ) in the context of fore- casting protests or other civil unrest events, data is generally sparse in terms of event occurrences. events either increasingly happen within a short period after a trigger event, or only occur in particular locations. the data sparsity makes it difficult to learn complex spatiotemporal relationships. our current model was not specifically designed to tackle this data sparsity issue. ( ) in the currently-proposed architecture, the spatial component msp , which models the spatial relationships over locations, is a complex component. it consists of a set of temporal components for every location, where each component has its own lstm component. as the number of locations increases, the number of parame- ters to be learned increases linearly. although group lasso regularization has significantly reduced the complexity of this component, further reducing the complexity of the model would be more desirable. as part of our future work, we plan to address the aforementioned limitations. in partic- ular, we plan to explore generative models as a solution to overcome data sparsity problem for event forecasting, as well as simplifying the model using weight sharing mechanism. acknowledgements the authors would like to acknowledge the support from nsf # , # , # , and the university of pittsburgh uls open access author fee fund. any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material do not necessarily reflect the views of the funding sources. abbreviations blm, black lives matter; lstm, long short-term memory; hmm, hidden markov model; liwc, linguistic inquiry and word count; rnns, recurrent neural networks; lr, logistic regression; svm, support vector machine; gl, group lasso; mtfl, multi-task feature learning; rmtfl, regularized multi-task feature learning; cmtfl, constrained multi-task feature learning; nn, neural network; sgd, stochastic gradient descent; auc, area under curve; nypd, new york police department. availability of data and materials data and code are available at https://github.com/picsolab/actattn. competing interests the authors declare that they have no competing interests. authors’ contributions yrl, wtc, and ame conceived and designed the study. ame conducted the experiments. my and al contributed to the data collection and processing. ame, yrl and wtc analyzed and interpreted the results and wrote the manuscript. all authors read and approved the final manuscript. https://github.com/picsolab/actattn ertugrul et al. epj data science ( ) : page of author details school of computing and information, university of pittsburgh, pittsburgh, usa. graduate school of informatics, middle east technical university, ankara, turkey. department of psychology in education, school of education, university of pittsburgh, pittsburgh, usa. endnotes a keywords include: charlottesville, kkk, ku klux klan, klansman, klansmen, nazi, nazism, racism, racist, supremacy, supremacist, supremacists, #charlottesville, #domesticterrorism, # firebannon, #whitesupremacist, #whitesupremacists. b https://elephrame.com/. c while the tweets for charlottesville and ferguson were collected separately using different collection methods, the information about protest events was collected from the same data source—the elephrame website. as we mainly focus on the spatiotemporal patterns of the offline protest events, the difference in terms of methods used for collecting tweets will not significantly impact our results and interpretation. d https://www.britannica.com/topic/list-of-cities-and-towns-in-the-united-states- . e the auc of the best model (> . ) suggests it is possible to rank-order or filter the states where protest events are likely to happen with reasonable accuracy. publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. received: july accepted: january references . snow da, soule sa, kriesi h ( ) the blackwell companion to social movements. wiley, new york . valenzuela s ( ) unpacking the use of social media for protest behavior: the roles of information, opinion expression, and activism. am behav sci ( ): – . theocharis y, lowe w, van deth jw, garcía-albacete g ( ) using twitter to mobilize protest action: online mobilization patterns and action repertoires in the occupy wall street, indignados, and 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pp – . de choudhury m, jhaver s, sugar b, weber i ( ) social media participation in an activist movement for racial equality. in: icwsm, pp – . qi h, manrique p, johnson d, restrepo e, johnson nf ( ) open source data reveals connection between online and on-street protest activity. epj data sci ( ): . ferguson unrest. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ferguson_unrest. accessed: - - . unite the right rally. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/unite_the_right_rally. accessed: - - . zhao l, sun q, ye j, chen f, lu c-t, ramakrishnan n ( ) multi-task learning for spatio-temporal event forecasting. in: proceedings of the th acm sigkdd international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining. acm, new york, pp – . zhao l, wang j, chen f, lu c-t, ramakrishnan n ( ) spatial event forecasting in social media with geographically hierarchical regularization. proc ieee ( ): – . scardapane s, comminiello d, hussain a, uncini a ( ) group sparse regularization for deep neural networks. neurocomputing : – 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international conference on advances in social networks analysis and mining (asonam). ieee, new york, pp – . korolov r, lu d, wang j, zhou g, bonial c, voss c, kaplan l, wallace w, han j, ji h ( ) on predicting social unrest using social media. in: ieee/acm international conference on advances in social networks analysis and mining (asonam). ieee, new york, pp – https://elephrame.com/ https://www.britannica.com/topic/list-of-cities-and-towns-in-the-united-states- https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ferguson_unrest https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/unite_the_right_rally ertugrul et al. epj data science ( ) : page of . cadena j, korkmaz g, kuhlman cj, marathe a, ramakrishnan n, vullikanti a ( ) forecasting social unrest using activity cascades. plos one ( ): . ning y, muthiah s, rangwala h, ramakrishnan n ( ) modeling precursors for event forecasting via nested multi-instance learning. in: proceedings of the nd acm sigkdd international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining. acm, new york, pp – . ramakrishnan n, butler p, muthiah s, self n, khandpur r, saraf p, wang w, cadena j, vullikanti a, korkmaz g et al ( ) ‘beating the news’ with embers: forecasting civil unrest using open source indicators. in: proceedings of the th acm sigkdd international conference on knowledge discovery and data mining. acm, new york, pp – . zhao l, chen f, lu c-t, ramakrishnan n ( ) spatiotemporal event forecasting in social media. in: proceedings of the siam international conference on data mining. siam, philadelphia, pp – . zhao l, wang j, guo x ( ) distant-supervision of heterogeneous multitask learning for social event forecasting with multilingual indicators. in: aaai . chung c, pennebaker jw ( ) the psychological functions of function words. in: social communication, pp – . ma j, gao w, mitra p, kwon s, jansen bj, wong k-f, cha m ( ) detecting rumors from microblogs with recurrent neural networks. in: ijcai, pp – . tuor a, kaplan s, hutchinson b, nichols n, robinson s ( ) predicting user roles from computer logs using recurrent neural networks. in: aaai, pp – . hu w, singh kk, xiao f, han j, chuah c-n, lee yj ( ) who will share my image? predicting the content diffusion path in online social networks. in: proceedings of the eleventh acm international conference on web search and data mining. acm, new york, pp – . bahdanau d, cho k, bengio y ( ) neural machine translation by jointly learning to align and translate. preprint. arxiv: . . denil m, bazzani l, larochelle h, de freitas n ( ) learning where to attend with deep architectures for image tracking. neural comput ( ): – . zhao l, hu q, wang w ( ) heterogeneous feature selection with multi-modal deep neural networks and sparse group lasso. ieee trans multimed ( ): – . zhu w, lan c, xing j, zeng w, li y, shen l, xie x et al ( ) co-occurrence feature learning for skeleton based action recognition using regularized deep lstm networks. in: aaai, vol , p . de albornoz jc, plaza l, gervás p ( ) sentisense: an easily scalable concept-based affective lexicon for sentiment analysis. in: lrec, pp – . graham j, haidt j, nosek ba ( ) liberals and conservatives rely on different sets of moral foundations. j pers soc psychol ( ): . freelon d, mcilwain cd, clark md ( ) beyond the hashtags: #ferguson, #blacklivesmatter, and the online struggle for offline justice . kingma d, ba j ( ) adam: a method for stochastic optimization. preprint. arxiv: . http://arxiv.org/abs/arxiv: . http://arxiv.org/abs/arxiv: . 	activism via attention: interpretable spatiotemporal learning to forecast protest activities 	abstract 	keywords 	introduction 	related work 	theoretical perspectives on antecedents of protest behaviors 	forecasting protests and other events 	method 	problem definition 	model 	features 	experiments 	dataset 	comparison methods and settings 	results 	performance comparison 	overall performance 	robustness to missing information 	performance analysis with varying lead time 	interpreting the impact of features 	intra-region dynamic features 	inter-region dynamic features 	static features 	interpreting the local and global contributions and hubs 	local vs. global contributions 	the effect of hubs 	testing predictive power with additional features 	discussion and future work 	interpretation of the theory-driven features 	limitations and future work 	acknowledgements 	abbreviations 	availability of data and materials 	competing interests 	authors' contributions 	author details 	endnotes 	publisher's note 	references david lewis and mark schuller engagements with a productively unstable category: anthropologists and non-governmental organizations article (published version) (refereed) original citation: lewis, david and schuller, mark ( ). engagements with a productively unstable category: anthropologists and non-governmental organizations. current anthropology , ( ) issn - doi: . / © the wenner-gren foundation for anthropological research. this version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/ / available in lse research online: november lse has developed lse research online so that users may access research output of the school. copyright © and moral rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in lse research online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. you may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. you may freely distribute the url (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the lse research online website. http://www.lse.ac.uk/researchandexpertise/experts/profile.aspx?keyvalue=d.lewis@lse.ac.uk http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/toc/ca/current https://doi.org/ . / http://www.wennergren.org/ http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/ / engagements with a productively unstable category anthropologists and nongovernmental organizations by david lewis and mark schuller the category “ngo” (nongovernmental organization) is notoriously hard to fix. the term ngo—which defines these organizations in terms of what they are not—masks great diversity and assumes an unproblematic boundary. the use of the term persists, in no small part because several different types of actors involved in a range of fields depend on what we call the “productive instability” inherent to the ngo category. as a discipline, given our history and meth- odology, anthropology and anthropologists are uniquely poised to grapple with the ideas and practices associated with the inherently unstable category of ngo. rather than attempting to fix the category or contest the boundaries im- plied by it, anthropologists are instead beginning to interrogate the meanings behind the contestations themselves. rather than attempt precise classification or bemoan the uncertainty, we contend that the ngo category is “pro- ductively unstable.” we argue that productive work lies ahead in charting similarities and differences within ngos across aid and activism. this task mirrors an inherent messiness for both ngos and anthropologists as we grapple with dilemmas of engagement. such a critically engaged anthropology of ngos also stands poised to offer useful guidance to the discipline as it struggles over “relevance” in this new century. introduction the category “ngo” (nongovernmental organization) is no- toriously hard to fix. the term ngo—which defines these organizations in terms of what they are not (bernal and grewal : ; fisher : )—masks great diversity and assumes an unproblematic boundary. following wittgenstein on the transitory power of language to describe experience, anthro- pologists such as william fisher ( ) have now suggested that it might even be time to throw the label away. that said, the use of the term persists, in no small part because several different types of actors involved in a range of fields depend on what we call the “productive instability” inherent to the ngo category. as a discipline, given our history and methodology, anthropology and anthropologists are uniquely poised to grap- ple with the ideas and practices associated with the inherently unstable category of ngo. rather than attempting to fix the category or contest the boundaries implied by it, anthropologists are instead beginning to interrogate the meanings behind the contestations them- selves. several ethnographies of ngos have done an excellent job deconstructing the supposedly unitary category and have opened up interrogations of modalities of power, governance, and pedagogy/ideology within ngos (e.g., eriksson baaz ; hemment ; hours ; karim ; sharma ). how- ever, researchers have been slower to attempt to theorize com- mon experiences within what bernal and grewal ( ) termed the “ngo form.” this would require a multisited approach that includes perspectives of recipients, staff, and donors, and it is fur- ther complicated by the fact that the ngo form straddles the worlds of international aid—humanitarian and development— in addition to various forms of activism, such as feminism, hu- man rights, and the environment. rather than attempt precise classification or bemoan the uncertainty, we contend that the ngo category is “productively unstable.” we argue that productive work lies ahead in charting these similarities and differences within ngos across these various sectors. we suggest that this is a task that mirrors an inherent messiness for both ngos and anthropologists as they grapple with the dilemmas of engagement. we further suggest that such a critically engaged anthropology of ngos also stands poised to offer useful guidance to the discipline as it struggles over “relevance” in this new century. david lewis is professor of social policy and development at the department of social policy of the london school of economics (houghton street, london wc a ae, united kingdom [d.lewis @lse.ac.uk]). mark schuller is associate professor in the department of anthropology and center for nonprofit and ngo studies of northern illinois university (grant tower south a, room , northern illinois university, dekalb, illinois , usa [mschuller @niu.edu]). this paper was submitted v , accepted i , and electronically published ix . q by the wenner-gren foundation for anthropological research. all rights reserved. - / / - $ . . doi: . / current anthropology volume , number , october ngos as productively unstable ngos are a highly visible feature across most societies in the early twenty-first century. ethnographic research has decon- structed the category of ngos, questioning the boundaries of what is and is not an ngo. two decades of anthropological resistance, nuance, clarification, ethnographic grounding, and deconstruction have not led to a rejection of the term or, im- portantly, to a decline of the profile of ngos within activist and policy worlds. on the contrary, studies of ngos have prolifer- ated both within anthropology and in other social science dis- ciplines, and resources flowing to ngos have increased. it would seem that the shine came off the “ngo idea” more widely some time ago. during the period of the mid-to-late s, which some researchers have termed an “ngo boom” period (e.g., agg ; alvarez ), a view had emerged of the ngo as a “magic bullet” (edwards and hulme ), while ngos entered the social science sphere with great fanfare. when the astronomically high expectations placed upon ngos failed to materialize, scholarship turned increasingly critical, rejecting ngos, particularly within anthropology. yet these critical perspectives on ngos among anthropologists are in- creasingly at odds with the continued growth and resilience of ngos on the social landscape, wherein ngos are now a mundane, taken-for-granted presence regularly encountered by anthropologists in a great many settings. one interpretation could be that this signifies the continuing marginalization of anthro- pology. we take a different view. we contend that there are par- ticular interests at stake in using an inherently unstable term and that this very instability itself serves particular interests. for example, aradhana sharma ( ) has described a spe- cific collectivity that embodies such instability, defining itself sometimes as “ngo” and sometimes as “government” as dif- ferent circumstances demand, taking on a different shape in particular contexts, to engage with particular audiences, or to achieve particular purposes. the lack of linguistic precision around the concept offers valuable room to maneuver in some cases and opportunity for normative claim making in others. in addition, we note a growing trend within bangladesh and haiti, our respective field sites, of actors who increasingly refuse or reject the term “ngo,” testifying to complex and shifting local understandings of what the term connotes. rather than reject the label, we argue that it is more pro- ductive to interrogate the interests in maintaining the appear- ance of linguistic continuity and uniformity implied by the continued use of the term “ngo.” while donors and states, ngo managers, contractors, political scientists, or development economists may have interests in maintaining the linguistic fic- tion, as anthropologists, we are interested in how we have been complicit in clothing the emperor and how we, too, may have benefited from this inherent instability. in short, ngos appear as a productively unstable category. it could be that ngos have remained unchanged despite grow- ing critique within neoliberal global restructuring. another pos- sibility is that states, for-profit corporations, and other hege- monic assemblages are taking cues from ngos, adapting specific techniques, modalities, and self-representations first fashioned by ngos; they have rebranded themselves to mimic the ngo form. finally, it could be that we anthropologists are shifting, being inspired or coerced into new forms of engagement as the academic institutions that employ many of us are also becom- ing increasingly modeled by and forced to respond to market forces; this means, among other things, a reduction in profes- sorships, and so a majority of phds are now working outside of the academy. answering these questions requires that we chart the tra- jectories of the ngo form, reflect on how ngos became objects of research study, and interrogate how they have become pres- ent within anthropology. historical development of the ngo form ngos have increasingly come to be seen as important insti- tutional actors in most societies. they are active within domes- tic welfare arrangements and international development work, responding to humanitarian emergencies, organizing women’s constituencies, protecting the environment, advocating ethical business, and campaigning for human rights, and they act as ve- hicles for various forms of citizen protest. ngos are normally characterized in residual terms as nonstate organizations that are distinct from the worlds of for-profit business. but after this, any simple characterization of ngos tends to run aground, hob- bled by the limiting constraints of intrinsic ngo diversity, com- plexity, and ambiguity. ngos come in different shapes and sizes. they may appear independent while concealing crucial ties with governments, business, and other interest groups. they may take hybridized forms that make a straightforward identifi- cation with a particular institutional “sector” difficult to de- termine. officially named in the united nations charter, ngos have been around for at least two centuries (charnovitz ; davies ). however, they only began attracting serious at- tention from policymakers within northern (or so-called “west- ern”) governments and international institutions from the late s onward. this interest in the ngo sector emerged within two related but distinct contexts of neoliberal public policy. the first was the rise of the so-called “new public management” in advanced capitalist countries that now favored the rolling back of the state and public services. the second was within the in- ternational“aidindustry,”wherengos,forthefirsttime,began to emerge as key actors within the fields of international devel- opment and humanitarian action. a shift during the s to- ward promotion of more flexible forms of “good governance” among international development agencies, such as the world bank, helped to create a climate that began to favor ngos as private market-based actors to which service provision could be “contracted out” within wider neoliberal restructuring ar- rangements imposed on developing countries through condi- tional lending. lewis and schuller engagements with a productively unstable category conversely, ngos also came to be seen as vehicles for those seeking to challenge mainstream orthodoxies with alternative ideas and practices centered on new forms of grassroots de- velopment, policy advocacy, and collective action. there was also a third factor that informed the modern rise of the ngo: the post–cold war rediscovery of the idea of “civil society” among citizen activists, particularly in eastern europe and latin america (e.g., cohen and arato ; comaroff and comaroff ; hann ; pelczynski ; schechter ). there was an intertwining of this new interest in the concept of civil society with the idea that ngos could serve as catalysts for people-centered developmental change, and as a result, of- ficial funding to ngos skyrocketed during the s as part of the new good governance policy discourse (edwards and hulme ). ngos as research objects from the s onward, ngos were also “discovered” by scholars responding to these wider shifts, resulting in an ex- plosion of writings. academic work on ngos was initially un- dertaken within development studies by sociologists and po- litical scientists, some of whom began celebrating the new profile of development ngos as potentially providing new solutions to a wide range of long-standing development problems (e.g., carroll ; paul and israel ). others, taking a political economy perspective, began reacting against what they regarded as ngo hype driven more by ideological concerns than by sys- tematic evidence and analysis (petras ; vivian ). as a field, ngo research soon became one that was unhelpfully po- larized between supporters and critics. much of the work on ngos was also regarded as compromised by its production within the world of applied consultancy by researchers doing commissioned work. as a consequence, research on ngos has tended to remain an emerging academic field, and it is still viewed with suspicion in some quarters as being conceptually weak and/or overly normative. there are some interesting re- gional variations. for example, as aradhana sharma ( ) ar- gued, scholars and activists in india engaged in a critical eval- uation of ngos earlier than did those within europe or north america. one of india’s leading political scientists, rajni ko- thari ( ), argued that ngos were often used in readying local communities for world capitalists, and sheth and sethi ( ) pointed out that ngos often displaced earlier local tra- ditions of volunteerism and citizen mobilization. less normative work on ngos was, of course, still to be found within wider social sciences and in development studies in particular, and some of the key texts from this period have remained crucial to the field’s growth. for example, michael edwards and david hulme’s series of edited volumes (e.g., edwards and hulme , ; hulme and edwards ) were based on a series of development studies conferences held at the university of manchester. here, academic discussions were informed by the presence of ngo practitioners and do- nors and produced conversations that were focused on actu- ally existing dilemmas of aid agencies: the role of the state, mul- tiple stakeholders, accountability, and autonomy. these texts represent the foundation for much subsequent work on ngos that emerged within the social sciences. in fact, if there were ever a canon of “ngo studies,” these volumes would undoubt- edly serve as essential early explorations and as sources of doc- umentation for the key questions within the changing world of ngos. also crucial to the gradual growth in respectability of ngo research has been the peripheral influence of the field of inter- disciplinary “nonprofit studies” that emerged (mostly) in north america and europe at around the same time as interest in “ngo studies” was gaining ground (billis ; salamon and anheier a, b). the rise of peer-reviewed multidisci- plinary academic journals such as nonprofit and voluntary sec- tor quarterly and voluntas served to institutionalize the field within the university sector (a trend that did not materialize within the counterpart field of “ngo studies”), and this ar- guably led to a more theoretically informed social science around the subject of nonstate actors and “civil society” (albeit one in which there were few anthropologists present). writing from within “nonprofit studies,” olaf corry ( ) is typical of those who wish to move the third sector research tradition away from “ontologically oriented theorizations” that focus on what is and is not included toward an epistemological approach to the nongovernmental sector that pays more attention to pro- cess, practice, and context. such an approach recognizes the value of seeking to understand nongovernmental actors within the context of wider ideas and relationships, through which it becomes possible also “to analyze the balance of social forces in a society” (corry : ). within a us context, the association for research on non- profits and voluntary agencies (arnova)—itself using a dif- ferent set of keywords—initially did include anthropologists, including four on the editorial board of the nonprofit and volun- tary sector quarterly. perhaps as a result of formalization and professionalization, the profile of anthropologists began to dimin- ish within the association. one index is meetings: arnova’s annual meetings have steered clear of political science, man- agement, and economics meetings but are usually held at a time that directly conflicts with the meeting of the american anthropological association. according to an interdisciplin- ary set of scholars at the indiana university lilly family school of philanthropy (personal communication), the research agenda also became more focused on demand-driven queries by non- profit executives, and thus the space dedicated to management case studies grew—a trend that one participant called “praca- demic.” it is perhaps not by accident that these processes mirror those in the nonprofit and ngo sector itself. ngos and anthropologists though anthropological work on ngos has long existed, until recently it was sociologists and political scientists who domi- nated the field. there is, of course, a longer history of anthro- current anthropology volume , number , october pological work on organizations that overlap with aspects of what we now regard as modern ngos. for example, kenneth little ( ) identified the ways that “voluntary associations” in west africa served as adaptive mechanisms for members of communities experiencing rapid change, with tribal institu- tions becoming replaced or supplemented by new organiza- tional forms, such as tribal unions, friendly societies, and oc- cupational and recreational associations. however, broadly speaking, anthropologists have preferred to focus on institu- tions rather than organizations, including the outmoded term “social organization,” particularly kinship networks and asso- ciations. scholars within what has been called “anthropology of religion” also analyzed institutional forms and processes. on theonehand,thereispotentialfortheoreticalcross-fertilization across subfields. on the other, theoretical tools for understand- ingngosqua ngos have only recently been developed, for the historical reasons noted above. despite the long-standing call for “studying up” (nader ), anthropologists have also continued to be more com- fortable engaging at the community level rather than with agencies and policy institutions. this has led us either into grassroots perspectives on the presence and effects of ngos (often informed by a critical view of outside aid and the inter- national system) or toward forms of community-centered or “applied” work. the result is that “ngo studies” and anthro- pology have had an uneasy relationship that is sometimes rid- dled with productive tensions and sometimes marked by si- lences and disjuncture. the impact of “ngo studies” on anthropological theory has remained mainly limited to the subfield of political anthropol- ogy. foucault’s ( ) posthumously published “governmen- tality” quickly became a core thesis within political anthropol- ogy, often parsed as “the conduct of conduct.” offering an alternative reading of “governance” to that promoted by official development agencies, governmentality provided scholars a heuristic with which to interrogate the interactions between different groups as part of official projects. a special issue of political and legal anthropology review (leve and karim ) set out a critical research agenda that challenged the in- sidious outcomes of donors’ instrumental use of ngos in a privatization of the state (bornstein ; karim ; leve ;paley ;peterson ).anthropologistsalsousedthe concepts of governmentality in its transnational dimension (fer- guson and gupta ), neoliberal governmentality (sharma ), “nongovernmentality” (jackson ), and “nongovern- mentalism” (lewis ). another (and associated) trend has been the growth of the “aidnography” tradition within the anthropology of develop- ment (fechter and hindman ; mosse , ), which has begun to chip away at more monolithic understandings of ngos. but as we shall see in the section below, such work has, until now, tended to focus more on public, private, bilateral, and intergovernmental agencies than on nongovernmental ones. even within the long tradition of organizational anthropology, the main emphasis has been on business and government or- ganizations rather than on the so-called “third sector” (a bias that has also operated within wider organization studies and management research). long-standing tensions have also existed within anthropol- ogy around “applied” work (e.g., gardner and lewis ; lam- phere ; rylko-bauer, singer, and van willigen ), with which the field of ngo studies has often been associated. this tension is partly a result of suspicion that compromises in re- search quality are required by work that is commissioned by development agencies and partly a result of the fear that it be- comes impossible, within such work, to “speak truth to power.” for a long time, when it came to studying social change and transformation, one would be far more likely to find anthropol- ogists working alongside grassroots social movements—seen as more likely to be taking up the interests of the marginalized and the powerless—than with more formal organizations, such as ngos, whose motives were characterized as impure. by contrast, the reach of anthropological studies into ngo policy and practice—in the form of organizational anthropo- logical ideas about culture and learning within development agencies, or the use of “participatory” techniques influenced by ethnographic fieldwork methods—is perhaps more wide- spread. at the world bank, the work of applied anthropologist michael cernea ( ) was influential in relation to work on in- voluntary resettlement, and he was an early advocate of bring- ing ngos into the development projects of mainstream do- nors. the world bank itself took what murray li ( ) describes an “ethnographic turn” when its interest in the con- cept of “social capital” led it to take a closer interest in the “minutiae of village life” in indonesia during the s. yet this field nonetheless remains small compared with other disciplines, and it is largely traceable to individual circuits of anthropolo- gists operating within aid agencies. this is now changing. polit- ical, organizational, and policy anthropologists have each built on these earlier foundations to begin contributing some distinc- tive insights. ngos as objects of anthropological inquiry what began as anthropology “in” ngos also evolved further into an anthropology “of ” ngos, following the direction sign- posted by fisher ( ). fisher talks of the importance of work that analyzes “what is happening within and through organi- zations such as ngos” ( : ). as such work has moved forward, the senses in which research “in” and “of” ngos con- trast and interlink—one messy, one critical—become more ap- parent. the field also later embarked on trajectories that strad- dled “applied” and “theoretical” research, and this strand has recently seen exponential growth and diversification. as a whole, such scholarship (at least the “theoretical” strand) still tends to be more critical than that found in other social science dis- ciplines, but during the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, political science scholarship also began to challenge normative conceptions of ngos tied to civil society and the “third sector.” the work of michael barnett (e.g., barnett , lewis and schuller engagements with a productively unstable category ; barnett and weiss ) has opened up spaces for critical work within political science, which had long maintained a pro- ngo bias (as a counterweight to states, the typical object of critique, often locked in a zero-sum calculus). an “anthropology of ngos” subfield has not fully devel- oped in the same way as other subfields, such as medical an- thropology. where it does exist, north american anthropo- logical scholarship on ngos emerged as part of the critical anthropology of development associated with the s work of arturo escobar and james ferguson. drawing on foucault, ferguson ( ) outlined how development agencies create rep- resentations of a developing country, such as lesotho, as lack- ing the qualities that agencies such as the world bank can pro- vide, portraying it as ripe for project-based intervention. this depoliticizes issues of poverty and inequality, turning them into technical problems. the analysis helpfully shifted attention away from whether development projects “succeed” to under- standings of how they work. escobar ( ) furthered the use of foucault’s discourse analysis within the study of the post- war history of western international development ideas and in- stitutions. anthropologists were particularly open to the domi- nant message that development institutions were not doing what they claimed to be doing and operated in complex ways with diverse effects, and they set about creating a critical mass of what ferguson ( ) called “foundational” critiques of development, in contrast to the more “functional” critiques of development being produced by practitioners. work within this new devel- opment critique was diverse and wide-ranging, including ad- dressing issues of power and inequality (crush ), partici- pation (cooke and kothari ), institutionalization (feldman ), and professionalization (crewe and axelby ). neither ferguson’s nor escobar’s foundational texts specif- ically theorized ngos; however, their critiques were widely used by anthropologists studying ngos. william fisher’s re- view article (fisher ) laid the groundwork for a more sus- tained theoretical conversation on ngos within anthropology. this text recognized the importance of ngos as global political actors, elaborating on ngos’ roles within neoliberal restructur- ing of governance relationships in the s. drawing on both gramsci and foucault, fisher showed how states increasingly viewed ngos as flexible tools for maintaining and extending their power. anthropologists draw heavily upon ethnographic case ma- terial to build, deconstruct, sharpen, challenge, combine, or re- trace anthropological theory. the gold standard for anthropo- logical scholarship remains the ethnographic monograph. yet there have been relatively few full-scale ethnographic studies of the nongovernmental sector or its organizations, with much work on ngos appearing instead within chapters, reports, and articles. perhaps this has been one reason why anthropological work on ngos has retained a low profile. early ngo ethnographies tended to focus on international ngos (e.g., fox ; fox and brown ). fox’s study drew on fieldwork within the offices of four us international develop- ment ngos and suggested an “anthropology of activism” that engaged with the activists’ values, beliefs, and practices and inves- tigated relationships “between stated intent and actual endeavors” (fox : ). crewe and harrison’s ( ) whose development? is concerned with an ethnography of two international ngos to deconstruct the developer/beneficiary dichotomy and to show howstructuralandhistoricalforcesconditionideasaboutgender, technology, and race. dorothea hilhorst’s ( ) the real world of ngos provided an account of local ngos in the philippines, dealing with the everyday politics and multiple organizational realities among ngo workers and the communities in which they work. hilhorst’s questions and approaches built on con- versations within british “social anthropology,” especially the manchester school “actor-oriented” tradition of development studies, established in the s by norman long ( , , ). like fisher, hilhorst was impatient with what she saw as static categories of ngos within social science research litera- ture that stressed organizational features, structures, and activ- ities. hilhorst argued instead for a dynamic view that treated ngos not as things but as “open-ended processes” ( : ) in which there were shifting boundaries and multiple positioned realities. focusing on the everyday practices of ngos, she coined the term “ngo-ing.” anthropological work on ngo-related issues continued to build for the rest of the decade with work theorizing on-the- ground inequalities within development, such as hegemony (kamat ), dispossession (elyachar ), or paternalism (eriksson baaz ). cultural analyses of topics such as re- ligion (bornstein ) or ethnomusicology (smith ) are also woven through several texts. later scholarship on the sub- ject within anthropology brought more complexity to analysis of the political form of ngos and the ways in which ngos are conduits of power. part of the complexity lies in the fact that ngos traverse multiple roles, from “aid” (development and hu- manitarian) to “activism” (e.g., women’s rights and environmen- tal activism). common to all threads is an intermediate posi- tion; understanding ngos’ mediating roles provided an impetus for theoretical crystallization, a common theoretical platform for further theory building, and a clear innovation and man- date within “ngo studies,” as distinct from the other related fields (e.g., development studies and the newer humanitarian studies). specifically theorizing these common structural positions of ngos provided a convergence among themes within north american and european scholarship around ngos by the middle of the first decade of the twenty-first century. some anthropologists also began deconstructing ngos as “single” entities with monolithic intentions, identities, missions, and effects. others began to see ngos as intermediaries, brokers, and points of connection between wider flows and processes. as structures, ngos can be seen to bring together different and sometimes disparate sets of actors. anthropologists in europe, in particular, began to focus on the relationships themselves more than on the actors, and they specifically interrogated the role that ngos play as intermediaries, translators, or brokers (lewis and mosse ). some authors note the role that for- current anthropology volume , number , october eigners play in brokering relationships with transnational do- nors (davis ) or how ngos fulfill roles typically reserved for states before neoliberalism (richard ). local popu- lations (rossi ) as well as ngos (robins a) were shown to have the ability to shift the contours of international aid. ngos can be the “glue” to a fragmented neoliberalism (schuller ) or the “friction” as groups across national and cultural boundaries interface (tsing ). heather hindman ( ) focuses attention on aid workers and the cultures they create in “expatria.” for apthorpe ( : ), ngos are part of “aidland,” a political, economic, and geographical construct of practices, “languages of discourse, lore and custom” char- acterized by a “surreal virtuality.” anthropologists have also built upon what didier fassin, who served on the board of médecins sans frontiers (msf), termed the “moral economy” (fassin ; fassin and pandolfi ). fassin draws upon e. p. thompson ( ) and james scott’s ( ) earlier usages of the term (see also edelman ) but asserts the primacy of the moral as opposed to the economic dimension. following this trajectory, erica james ( ) dis- cusses a “political economy of trauma,” and andria timmer ( ) discusses the creation of a “needy subject.” lashaw’s ( ) work discusses the way research on ngo practices offers insights into “the production of morality” and the idea of prog- ress as a “product of struggle.” peter redfield ( ) charts the ways in which ethics both centers and decenters the work of msf, and china scherz ( ) notes the ways in which ngos serve as platforms for individuals to stake claims on their moral worth. work by anthropologists on ngos continues to grow in quantity and in theoretical sophistication. ideas and discourses of the “nongovernmental” and “nongovernmental public ac- tion”remainkeythemesintheearly twenty-firstcentury. work on ngos can be found within political anthropology, anthro- pology of development, public policy, humanitarian action, and organizational anthropology. in , a second special issue of political and legal anthropology review on ngos usefully openeduppossiblenewtheoreticaldirections(e.g.,alvaré ; curtis ; timmer ; vannier ). unlike the first, this collection did not confine itself to a single theme. this is em- blematic of the disparate inquiries that characterize anthropo- logicalworkonngoissues:onmemory(delcore ),identity (kaag ), and public deliberation (junge ). there are increasingly diverse and sophisticated analyses but perhaps, as yet, little cohesion or sustained conversation. the value of ngos’ productive instability to anthropology while there are many potential directions to continue explor- ing within an “anthropology of ngos,” there is no escaping the conundrum that the object of our study is inherently un- settled. as anthropologists, we do not require conceptual, “universal” rigidity; however, we argue that thinking of ngos as a “productively unstable” category offers one way out of what amanda lashaw ( ) has aptly termed an “impasse.” we propose three such ways in which ngos are productive to anthropology. the first relates to methodological challenges and a set of opportunities. second, there are productive instabilities around the idea of ngos as sites for engaged anthropology, in which the binary logics of pure/applied can be challenged. fi- nally, ngo research offers new scope for informing theoretical development. productive instabilities around methodology traditionally, sociocultural anthropological research has been based on long-term participant observation with a priority given to subaltern people and perspectives. the fact that anthropo- logical scholarship on ngos tends to be marginal and more critical than those of other social science disciplines may also derive from issues of methodology (lewis ). recipients of ngo programs have different and often more critical perspec- tives than ngo staff, for example. and long-term participant observation—sometimes in the mode of what david mosse ( ) has called the “observer participant”—sensitizes anthro- pologists to additional problems and perspectives other than that of ngos’ “good intentions.” there are important aspects of productive instability that arise from issues of methodology encountered by anthropol- ogists. there are at least three senses in which this might be the case. first, the study of ngos lends itself to the feeding of ideas and experiences into debates around the importance of doing multisited, multilevel ethnography—and the challenges associated with this. a central problem that emerges in the study of ngos is identifying what precisely is “the field” when we study an ngo (markowitz ). is it the office, the ben- eficiary populations and local communities, or the donor agen- cies? and when we are not setting out to study ngos but nev- ertheless encounter them, how do we respond? as aradhana sharma’s ( ) work reveals, ngos tend to present themselves to anthropologists in the course of research on a wide range of issues, so that some anthropologists may end up studying ngos even if they did not set out to do so (see also lewis, forthcom- ing). this shows the importance of working on, inaddition to in, ngos—that is, specific theorizing on ngos in addition to ad- dressing ngos as part of the ethnographic landscape. whether or not we anthropologists are looking for them, ngos are ev- erywhere we are, and in many places, they got there first. as inherently multisited phenomena, ngos present meth- odological challenges to anthropologists, particularly those con- cerned with representing “local” realities in an inherently “glocal” setting (kearney ). one of these is the need to study the funders and resource relationships that often sustain the ngo. the issues of ngo financing and donorship need further an- thropological exploration. this connects both to issues of the “financialization” of poverty (kar ; schwittay ) and to the efforts by states to regulate forms of not-for-profit action (bornstein ). another challenge is to engage with ngos lewis and schuller engagements with a productively unstable category as producers of information, knowledge, and representation: how should the anthropologist engage with the preexisting rep- resentations that are produced by ngos themselves? second, the distinction between anthropologists working “for” and/or “with” the ngo is one that erica bornstein, in particular, has begun exploring in her work, and it raises im- portant questions about researcher access and positionality. working “for” may be part of the process of negotiated access to the field and makes possible work “on,” since it responds to those within ngos who seek to resist or challenge forms of academic extraction. the money logics of ngos as forms of business enterprise, of course, need to be better understood; at the same time, ngo staff offer a critical view of similar logics within the worlds of academic enterprise that are linked to commodified knowledge production. within such negotia- tions, there may be different types of research products that arise, such as the critical internal report by the anthropologist that stays within the organization and is not sanctioned for wider circulation. these are, as bornstein ( b) puts it, the various kinds of “delicate spaces” where the anthropologist must tread carefully. third, just as james ferguson ( ) once identified develop- ment as anthropology’s “evil twin,” so ngos offer up a mirror to anthropologists that may be at once familiar and uncom- fortable. there are unsettling similarities between the approach taken by anthropologists to their work and that of many de- velopment ngos. both are open to the criticism that they move more or less uninvited into communities where they try to build relationships with people generally less powerful than them- selves. this was precisely the approach taken by the genera- tion of development ngos run by activists in bangladesh that lewis would regularly encounter during his own village-level fieldwork in the mid- s, inspired by the ideas of paolo freire or by the “participatory” ideologies of the time. ngo field staff tried to build relationships with communities, understand local points of view, and listen to how people saw their problems. the anthropologist-ngo interface may be productive, in that it high- lights the importance of ethnographic approaches as contribut- ing to a “methodological populism” (mosse and lewis ) that might offer a counterbalance to the dominant trends of tech- nocratic or managerialist development approaches. at the same time, there is the potential to strengthen the principles and val- ues of anthropological fieldwork approaches that assert a direct engagement with people. given the gaze into the moral economy noted above, it is perhaps not surprising that these dilemmas are about more than access. as noted above, there is an uncomfortable sim- ilarity in the praxis of anthropological and ngo fieldwork (lewis ; markowitz ). in addition to methodology and relationships with local communities, both spheres are fraught with moral stakes (bornstein ; gardner and lewis ). these are not the only similarities, given that moral economies connect anthropologists’ academic worlds with the objects and sites of our study (lashaw ); the space for critical analysis without implicating anthropologists as well is limited. as an- thropologists who depend on local populations as the objects of our study (lemons, forthcoming), what are the political, eth- ical, and moral implications of being dependent on ngos? with whom do our primary ethical responsibilities, our alle- giances, lie? productive instabilities around the idea of ngos as sites for engaged anthropology here productive instability stems from the difficult issue of how anthropologists should best engage with the world beyond academia. ngos serve as sites of engagement in terms of both applied and politically aligned or activist anthropologies. old debates about “applied” versus “pure” anthropology have be- come increasingly outmoded, and there is now a renewed in- terest in wider forms of anthropological engagement (e.g., crewe and axelby ; low and merry ; sanday ). this shift is being informed by increased pressures on university- employed scholars to engage with the world around them (such as the impact case study component of the uk government’s “research excellence framework”; ref) and by the resurgence of the tradition of the “public intellectual” who is obliged to con- tribute to wider society beyond the ivory tower. ngos have been a consistent vehicle for anthropological engagement, in- cluding those cofounded by anthropologists, like partners in health and cultural survival, as well as msf and amnesty in- ternational, wherein anthropologists play roles on governance boards, to name very few. this energy to connect with new audiences is also fed by re- cent events such as the movements against global capitalism and neoliberal globalization that emerged during the s; the financial crisis; the rise of the occupy movement; the street-level movements of the arab world; and a multitactic coordination asserting that black lives matter following the events in fer- guson, missouri, in . american anthropologist, for exam- ple, has begun carrying a section that aims to raise the profile of “public anthropology.” this is seen primarily as an arena for debate and action “dealing with social problems and issues of interest to a broader public or to our non-academic collabora- tors yet still relevant to academic discourse and debate” (grif- fith et al. : ). ngos and civil society issues are threaded through many of these new arenas of engagement, as anthro- pologists see opportunities for engaging in new ways with forms of citizen action. moving beyond engagement as simply informing debate, charles hale’s ( : ) version of “activist research” aims to help close the gap between critically distanced cultural critique and different modes of activist engagement. while it has been common for engaged anthropologists to retain a primary aca- demic affiliation while balancing this with political commit- ment, activist research requires that—however difficult it is to achieve—the anthropologist should strive toward a fuller merg- ing of the two loyalties. for example, schaumberg’s ( : ) effort to resolve tensions between involvement and critical dis- tance during fieldwork in argentina is illustrative: invited by current anthropology volume , number , october activists to give his opinion at a public meeting, he writes: “[they] would no doubt have contested the municipality’s injustice without my contribution. yet, i imagine my contribution en- couraged them to stake their claim at a time when morale was very low and mobilization slow. i believe this example high- lights how politically engaged fieldwork can help support jus- tified local claims.” that said, as a recent collection curated in american anthropologist has uncovered, activism is often fraught with a range of inequalities, contradictions, privileges, and fail- ure (checker, davis, and schuller ). in a related vein, new interest in “protest anthropology” also urges political engagement that goes beyond mere alignment with “protest movements, revolts, and uprisings” to include trying to become “full-fledged participants in them” (maskov- sky : ). while the assemblages that attract anthropol- ogists’ attention call themselves social movements, dilemmas of engagement by ngos offer useful methodological, practi- cal, and ethical as well as theoretical guidance. a key arena for this type of activity has been the occupy movement, within which anthropologist david graeber ( ) played a key role in the initial discussions and architecture. occupy reflected concern at social injustice and economic inequalities and aimed to unsettle by moving beyond the formal limitations of main- stream political and civil society organizations to challenge wider complacency around economic crisis and social inequal- ity. the death of unarmed teen michael brown at the hands of a white police officer in ferguson, missouri, triggered a national mobilization, an intergenerational coalition of activists, artists, and intellectuals who brought the long-suffered issues of racial profiling and white privilege into mainstream public discourse and public spaces. while this movement was more organic than the carefully planned occupy, anthropologists and other social scientists have helped transform the discourse, ground- ing the deceptively simple slogan “black lives matter” in lin- guistic analysis, critical race theory, and reflections of a reen- ergized diaspora (bonilla and rosa ; falcón ; lindsey ). both occupy and black lives matter are distinguished by resisting ngo-ization. assuming that this push for greater engagement within an- thropology is sustained, which institutional arrangements will provide the vehicles? will ngos continue to serve as platforms for anthropologists? will this need for engagement discourage critical reflection on ngo-ization? or can we engage with ngos as knowledge producers in ways that have useful im- plications for reconstructing knowledge more widely and for repoliticizing the academy in important ways (e.g., by chal- lenging the norm of distancing as part of an objective research ideology)? ngo research as offering new scope for informing theoretical development anthropological books on ngos also sometimes offered im- portant glimpses into not only the nascent subfield of “ngo studies” but also the development of wider anthropological theory. the anthropological scholarship on ngos has dem- onstrated various shifts in theoretical trends, grappling with neoliberalism, governmentality, and a reworking of “classic” anthropological themes of religion, the gift exchange, language, citizenship, and ethnicity as well as contemporary discussions of moral economies, identity formation, and hybridity. ngos’ structural position as brokers, as mediators, potentially offers tools for general theorizing within anthropology on power, globalization, and culture contact, long being interests within anthropology. for bernal and grewal ( ), the way that the framing idea of “ngo” has come to be known is particularly productive. they argue that defining the ngo “by something that it is not” has produced both an artificially coherent and unified view of ngos (when we know that they are, in fact, diverse and het- erogeneous) and a normative insistence that there is “a clear divide between public and private realms of power that is con- sistent with models of the normative liberal state” ( : ). the effect is to conceal or deny “the contingent nature of such domains of struggle.” in this way, ngos can represent entry points for understanding blurred boundaries between state and market and state and society. for example, work on individual “boundary crossing” activists who move between state and civil society makes these connections more visible and explores the contents of such relationships (lewis ). ngos can also be explored in the context of “interface analysis” (cf. long ) both as relational actors, and as part of the glue that holds to- gether assemblages of neoliberalism (schuller ). mirror- ing work within cultural studies, some anthropologists have also come to embrace hybridity and complexity in the study of ngos. finally, ngos can also be understood as “boundary ob- jects,” with the potential power to both unify and divide and to contribute to change (e.g., cabot ; davis ; hodžić ; morris-suzuki ; richard ; shrestha ). the wider social science literature on ngos, briefly discussed at the start of this article, has been accused of being weak and normative—partly because ngos have been made visible within this literature mainly by practice. more theoretically informed approaches are beginning to emerge from anthropological work, mainly in the area of politics and power. for example, scholar- ship on the subject within anthropology brought more com- plexity to analysis of the political form of ngos and the ways in which ngos serve conduits of power. grafting foucault and marxist world systems analysis, schuller ( ) discusses bureaucratic logics and processes as “trickle down imperial- ism.” other work by anthropologists has shown that ngos can both empower (hemment ) and quell (nagar and sang- tin writers ) citizen dissent. ngos can also incorporate individuals into transnational circuits of capital (karim ) or projects that are often “sold” within a capitalist logic and system (james ). ngos can be sites for deliberating on and making claims on the common good (rajak ) or for defin- ing those worthy of assistance (nguyen ). working through an ngo structure within a strong centralized state, blurring lewis and schuller engagements with a productively unstable category boundaries, ngos can play pedagogical roles, fashioning neo- liberal citizen subjects (sharma ). anthropologists have also been interested in exploring “ngo” in ideational terms. what constitutes an ngo in one setting may not be understood as such in another. rather than fo- cusing on definitions, it has proved productive to explore how the meaning of the term varies across different contexts and to examine how these meanings may shift over time. for ex- ample, the moral universe of the ngo is diverse and refracted, running from common perceptions of “selfless” ngo work undertaking “good” causes to an association in many contexts with opportunism and corruption, recalling fassin’s reformu- lation of the “moral economy” discussed above. the idea of ngo as a kind of blank slate onto which different interests and ideas are projected is one productive approach. yet the com- monness of ngo as a category is essentially illusory, because the reality is simply a construction, a discursive formation, and it makes no sense to think of ngos as stable formations that are spatially bound. drawing on abrams’s ( ) classic essay “notes on the difficulty of studying the state,” sharma ( ) has suggested thinking of “ngo effects,” the discursive func- tions and productions of ngos as single, stable entities. an- other potentially useful idea that follows from this is that ngos constitute “portals” into wider social, political, and economic processes. work on the state, political parties, and social move- ments offers a set of moving targets in which place is unsettled and personal identities and affiliations are blurred. here per- haps it makes sense to try to reflect messiness and ambiguity by engaging with both the creativity of mess and chaos (doug- las ) and the need to see formlessness as a form (bataille ). does a notion of “weak theory” (gibson-graham ) help us to do justice to our subject matter through careful mus- ing that can offset overdetermined theory? neoliberal systems with their dominant patterns of flexible accumulation are characterized by a form of “unstable stabil- ity” (escobar ). ngos are central to the analysis of con- temporary neoliberalism, since as james ferguson ( : ) points out, a governance context has now been produced in which “de facto government” is “carried out by an extraordi- nary swarm of ngos, voluntary organizations and private foundations.” the potential for ngos—as “neoliberal bads,” in arturo escobar’s term—to produce “non-neoliberal goods” is a crucial question for our argument around productive in- stability, and it raises important questions about the point at which such instability might become unproductive. the in- sistence on residuality at the heart of the ngo category under- pins an artificial distinction between states and markets that is now more open to challenge than ever. in whose interests does the “ngo” categorization operate? as william fisher ( ) has argued, we may find that it is not the ngos that are the shape shifters but the anthropologists and other scholars of ngos who have overdetermined and shape shifted the cate- gory itself, so that it becomes emptied of meaning and simply means what we want it to mean, following humpty dumpty in alice in wonderland. rather than focus on the ngo form itself, it might there- fore be useful to think through ngo as a verb (schuller ; sharma ). examining ngo practices (and relationships), rather than the category itself, may be a more useful way for- ward. as hilhorst ( : ) argued, “ngos are not things, but processes, and instead of asking what an ngo is, the more ap- propriate question then becomes how ngo-ing is done.” a common critique after haiti’s earthquake among people in- volved in social movements is “ah! w ap fè ong” (you are ngo-ing), by which the speaker usually meant adopting a bu- reaucratic structure or adopting a project logic, justifying the use of foreign funding. “ngo-ing” (or the related practice of “do-gooding”)mightmakemoresenseasasignifierthan“ngo” as a noun: ngos all “act,” and these actions serve as justifica- tions for their existence and use of funds. ngo actions include not only “do-gooding” but maintaining relationships and work done “internally.” posed this way, the question “what do ngos do?” as opposed to “what are ngos?” can lead to a productive set of conversations exploring similarities between entities across sectors and organizational types. since language both constructs and expresses social worlds, highlighted in a grammatology of ngos is an analysis of relationships, determining who is en- visioned as the subject and who is the object, recalling mac- kinnon’s ( ) phrase “man fucks woman; subject verb ob- ject.” for example, in humanitarian parlance, the word “actor” is reserved for service agencies, not for recipient populations. what is distinct about ngoing? how does do-gooding re- late to similar collective activity? one point of comparison could be that, whereas a social movement is expected to move, ngos institutionalize: ngos create projects (freeman ; lwijis ), write reports (hodžić ), respond to auditors (shore andwright ;strathern ),mediatecontact (robins b; schuller ), and so on. even in this more focused discussion, it would be misguided to look for rigid criteria that must always be met. wittgenstein’s concept, translated as “family resem- blances” ( [ ]) might be a useful way to think through the similarities of experience while acknowledging that a given ngo may be more or less hierarchical or have greater or lesser bureau- cratic structures, not to mention the diversity of funding, na- tional origin, or domain of interventions. this way, similarities can be sought without ignoring specificities. fisher ( ) took issue with imbuing terms such as “ngo” and “civil society” with high or stable levels of analytical meaning. he argued instead for an approach informed by wittgenstein’s ideas in the tractatus (wittgenstein [ ]) about language, in which wittgen- stein argued that such categorizations are best seen as transitory reference points, serving as ladders that merely help one “to climb up to a new level of understanding and once there [they can be thrown] away” (wittgenstein [ ]: ). conclusion we have argued in this article that, given our history and methodology, anthropology is uniquely positioned to confront current anthropology volume , number , october the inherently unstable category of “ngo.” as bernal and grewal argued, ngos are shape-shifters, perfectly suited to the chang- ing dynamics of neoliberalism. given the value systems within academic anthropology, we are taught to embrace hybridity, rewarded for what geertz ( ) called “thick description,” or boas’s “science of the particular” (see hatch ). from both epistemological and ontological approaches—discussed above— ngos are seen to defy categorization and serve as an ideological cover for “non” governments. we have argued that this inher- ent instability is productive, serving several particular users and uses of the form. ngos can be used by local populations to channel dissent, advocate for resources, or develop the area. they can also be used by donor groups to weaken states and governments, depoliticize solutions to poverty, and serve as a “fig leaf” to cover the more destructive aspects of social and eco- nomic policies. perhaps it is we anthropologists who are the evil twin, as we too have made productive use of the contradictions that are found within the category of ngos. indeed, much of an- thropologists’ writing on ngos is in a deconstructive mode, pointing out the diversity of social groupings lumped under this category that seems purposefully vague. anthropologists have been pointing out this inherent categorical instability since at least william fisher’s review article. why are scholars still writing on the subject today, one might well ask? and what does this portend for the vitality of an “anthropology of ngos”? we would like to offer some final reflections, admittedly provocative, as an attempt to inspire critical reflection and di- alogue and ultimately to open up lines of productive engage- ment, not only in relation to scholarly inquiry but also through engaging ngo publics. this article has argued that, indeed, “ngo” is an unstable category, and so we share the concern and agree with much of this deconstructive theorizing. how- ever, we are concerned about what appear to be two main sets of consequences. first, studies of ngos within anthropology seem to continue to be of marginal importance to the disci- pline. we therefore suggest that ngos need to be moved out of their marginal place within anthropological research and assume a far higher profile and visibility that is commensurate with their place in the world, their value as sites for theoriza- tion, and their potential as sites for reflecting on and rethinking anthropological engagement. second, we suggest that anthro- pologists should also reflect further upon the limited impact they have had on the larger academic and policy conversations, both within scholarly journals and within ngos themselves. we would like to briefly discuss both. as we have argued in this article, anthropological theorizing on ngos has reflected broader trends within anthropology. following the discipline’s engagement with self-critique, par- ticularly of the primitivism and orientalism of earlier sa(l)vage anthropology, and certainly the continuing attachment to the exotic other and the “savage slot” (trouillot ), anthropol- ogists increasingly seek research subjects that are fully connected with the world system. calls to decolonize anthropology (har- rison [ ], write against culture (abu-lughod ), and “study up” (nader ) have each helped to create a stronger foundation upon which the currently strong focus on “public” or “engaged” anthropologies can rest. scholarship on ngos should have provided, and hopefully still can provide,anidealmodelfor the further elaboration of these movements within the disci- pline. for example, the study of ngos as ideas and practices perhaps offers a set of “unconventional subjects and topics” that play to anthropologists’ strengths in the multisited analysis of “uncomfortable ambiguities” (marcus ). however, articles on and not just in ngos have only recently come to be pub- lished in american anthropologist (watanabe ), described as the “flagship” journal of the american anthropological as- sociation. current anthropology, the most widely cited journal in sociocultural anthropology, has not offered an article di- rectly engaging the subject since a article on “voluntary associations” (kerri ). it is also possible to interrogate the funding institutions, such as the wenner-gren. doing so would be an interesting point of departure for further research; how- ever, the top-tier journals are not only more transparent and easier to search for keywords but also offer a final disciplinary stamp of approval. anthropological work on ngos potentially speaks to wider themes across the discipline. what can a deep, anthropological understanding of what steve sampson and julie hemment ( ) call “ngo-graphy” offer to the core stock of knowledge of the discipline, akin to the gift, the kula ring, or segmentary lineages? while it is possible that ngos are too “messy,” too hybrid and privileged, not “pure” as an anthropological object (and thus, we may still have work to do in further decolonizing our praxis), it is equally possible that academic anthropological work on ngos may produce theoretical models that engage, challenge, or add to canonical themes within anthropology (e.g., bands-tribes-chiefdoms-states, organic solidarity, kinship, or rec- iprocity). several writers in the global south, from a wide variety of institutional locations, as scholars, activists and journalists, have posited a more critical rejection of ngos as tools of neoliber- alism and neocolonialism. sociology and critical cultural studies have opened spaces for critical reflection, and as noted above, there is growing critical attention to ngo issues within political science.asetof radical,“foundational”(ferguson )critiques build on recipient communities’ disappointment with or suspi- cion of ngos as political actors, what incite! ( ) termed the “nonprofit industrial complex.” anthropology has long ceded its monopoly on ethnographic methods and claims of repre- sentation of marginalized groups—claims necessarily challenged by feminists, particularly feminists of color (behar and gordon ; harrison ; spivak ; ulysse ). however, these critical discussions on ngos have not yet been able to build on the insights of a critically engaged anthropology and on the lessons learned through anthropological self-critique and re- flection. although it could be that anthropology is being lapped by cultural studies scholars, it might also be a reflection of a sub- tler methodology, with ethnographic grounding tempering out- rightrejectionof the“ngoform”(e.g.,bernalandgrewal ). lewis and schuller engagements with a productively unstable category this is to say nothing of the more mainstream discussions of ngos in economics, management, and development. while adopting—one might say appropriating—the insights of anthro- pology and the language of “participation,” mainstream develop- ment institutions continue to pursue top-down interventions that displace and impoverish local communities. this approach has long argued for reform of “mainstream” development thinking and practice in ways that are implicitly grounded in anthropo- logical thinking; however, little if any of this “alternative” devel- opment has contained work directly produced by anthropolo- giststhemselves.itwasutopianincharacterandinvestedwiththe hope that ngos might provide the vehicles for new alternative, transformative ideas. now that an anthropologist is head of the world bank, will anthropologists be able to further shift the contours of the engagement, the terms of the dialogue, or will we still be primarily employed as imperialism’s shock troops, mopping up after messes and invited to offer rapid appraisals, evaluations, and impact assessments that do not challenge the assumptions behind development interventions and humani- tarian solutions? if these questions are admittedly loaded, even a little polem- ical, it is with the goal of engendering critical reflection and di- alogue and hopefully encouraging a reinvigorated engagement that includes not only publication of scholarly texts but ex- changes with a range of individuals who work with ngos, from recipients to donors, frontline staff to directors. these exchanges include listening as well as critique, helping to craft research agendas that can bridge these yawning gaps in perspectives and priorities. to do so requires what might be called an anthropo- logical imagination. this imagination acknowledges the ties that bind us and our specific places within the world system, our differential privilege, but also respects our differences. tracking between the realms of lived experience to the species level, an- thropological engagement roots the discussion in both local and global, as they are always intertwined. it is admittedly an ambi- tious task, but no more so than the study of “humankind.” comments victoria bernal department of anthropology, university of california, irvine, social sciences plaza b, mail code: , irvine, california , usa (vbernal@uci.edu). lewis and schuller provide a valuable and insightful overview of anthropology’s engagement with ngo research and some of the dilemmas that this raises. i find least interesting their ar- guments around why a new subfield of our discipline is needed on ngos. is it ngos we really want to understand better, or is it, rather, that in order to understand what is going on in the world, we often need to deal with ngos in some way? this makes a big difference in the kinds of research questions that will guide our research. i am not convinced that “productive work lies ahead in charting similarities and differences” among ngos. to what end? what are the compelling research ques- tions that these similarities and differences could help to an- swer? the study of ngos per se may not be the best approach to contribute to the development of anthropology’s methods and theories. the more productive focus might be on questions about power, work, aid, activism, and so on that may traverse ngos, rather than on ngos themselves. this may sound odd coming from a coeditor (in collaboration with inderpal gre- wal) of theorizing ngos: states, feminisms, and neoliberalism (bernal and grewal ). however, that interdisciplinary an- thology is focused on specific questions about feminist activism and gender relations in relation to the proliferation of ngos. perhaps anthropologists could also take some insights from media studies and pay attention to the interplay between ngos as a form and the diverse content that form is being used to connect or engage with various actors and audiences. in re- gard to ngos, we thus might ask to what extent and under what conditions the medium is the message. in other words, the affordances and the constraints of the ngo form vary be- cause ngos are not one thing but are incredibly diverse in form and function, and they need to be examined in context. to the extent that ngos are now an established feature of global and local landscapes of power, our research agendas are mov- ing beyond the initial stage of trying to figure out just what this way of organizing or identifying is and why it has become so popular. new questions about intervention, activism, and north/south inequalities (among others) might productively shift the emphasis to the people, activities, and values involved in ngos rather than focus on the enigma of the ngo that can be so many different things, including, in some contexts, gov- ernmental. for example, the line between ngos and move- ments like occupy, the arab spring, and black lives matter may be less distinct than it seems if some of the important ac- tors also are ngos or become engaged with them around re- lated causes. activists are not necessarily limited to one means of pursuing their cause. ngos are important, but there is a danger in taking them a priori as the starting point of research rather than posing a research question and following where it leads, which may include ngos but not be coterminous with them. the argument that anthropology—with its qualitative, in- terpretive methods and focus on taken-for-granted cultural values and assumptions—may have something valuable to con- tribute to the interdisciplinary field of research focused on ngos is more convincing. is it necessary, though, to establish a subfield of ngo studies in the discipline in order to claim credibility and expertise in interdisciplinary circles? would it not be better to reach that audience by publishing powerful original ethnographic research in interdisciplinary journals? it is a constant lament of anthropologists that the world un- dervalues our work and pays too little attention to our research. i do not think creating new subfields in our discipline will ad- dress that, however. perhaps we, as a discipline and in our roles as department chairs, hiring and promotion committee mem- current anthropology volume , number , october bers, and deans, as well as in other leadership positions, need to place a higher value on interdisciplinary engagement and count publications in recognized interdisciplinary journals with the same weight as publications within the discipline. the thorniest questions raised by lewis and schuller are the profound ones about our own engagement in the world; our solidarity with or possible exploitation of people we study who may have less power, access, and mobility than the anthropol- ogist; and also the question of how to conduct politically en- gaged, activist, or applied research in ways that produce high- quality scholarship. so far, our discipline has reflexively posed itself these questions, and they are now part of graduate train- ing. there are no universal answers, because of the diversity of situations and of individual researchers. but we can strive, across the board, to make our standards of academic excellence more open and inclusive of a range of engaged scholarship. we need to get rid of modes of gatekeeping the boundaries of the disci- pline that stifle creative, innovative research that bridges aca- demic, policy, applied, and/or activist contexts. erica bornstein department of anthropology, university of wisconsin–milwaukee, po box , sabin hall , milwaukee, wisconsin , usa (elbornst@uwm.edu). ix lewis and schuller’s thorough and thoughtful essay offers a useful historical overview of anthropological research with, in, and on ngos. i appreciate the work the authors have done to generate conversations on the anthropology of ngos. it is true that research with, in, and on ngos has facilitated analysis of some of the most pressing issues of our times. for lewis and schuller, ngos are mercurial, formless, “unstable” as a cate- gory, defined by what they are not, and “shape-shifters,” to quote bernal and grewal ( ), and this conceptual ambi- guity has produced a fertile arena for ethnographic analysis. yet it seems the authors are also doing some conceptual alchemy of their own. while reading the essay, i was reminded of a famous passage on ethnography written by clifford geertz, wherein he cautions readers not to mistake the physical world with physics or to confuse ethnographic sites with their con- tent. he writes, “the locus of study is not the object of study. anthropologists don’t study villages (tribes, towns, neighbor- hoods . . .); they study in villages” ( : ). are ngos our contemporary anthropological villages? do we study in them or do we study them? lewis and schuller’s essay stirs up this conundrum. ngos appear in at least four different guises in the essay, in a lexicon of sorts. ( ) they are a category, an object of study. here, ngos are in the world with or without anthropology and ethnographic interpretation. for example, in my early re- search on world vision (bornstein ), the ngo existed in the world with or without my understanding of it. ( ) ngos are a site for anthropological research, a locus of study. world vision was a physical site for my ethnographic analysis of faith and development in zimbabwe. it was an ethnographic loca- tion to explore theoretical questions about the role of religion in development in the rapidly changing global economy of the s. ( ) ngos are a research area, an anthropological social construct, a professionalized zone of scholarship: the anthro- pology of ngos. my ethnography of world vision contributes to the anthropology of ngos. ( ) ngos are a verb, a social process and an active space, referenced by the term ngo-ing. for the purposes of this commentary, i will leave the fourth use aside (as the authors have already discussed it) in order to ex- plore – above. the essay blurs boundaries between ngos as objects of study, loci of study, and as a research area; however, profes- sional institution building is not exactly the same thing as the actual ethnographic study of ngos (either on or in them, as geertz might say). the authors have gone to great lengths to build the anthropology of ngos as a research area. they have, independently and together, started an interest section for the aaa on ngos and nonprofits (http://ngo.americananthro .org/about-us/), organized a biennial conference linked to the interest section, and initiated a book series on the topic. i ad- mit, i have been privileged to participate in many of these intellectually productive forums. resulting from these efforts, the anthropology of ngos is quickly becoming a subfield with its own set of debates, ancestors, and lineages. the essay con- tributes to the institutionalization of the anthropology of ngos as a research area. it also provokes the following questions: what does it mean to study ngos? when anthropologists study with, in, and on ngos, are they studying the institutions as objects and/or sites, or are they studying what the ngos signify? here we are back in geertz’s interpretive territory. to say “anthropologists study ngos” is to assert they are ethnographic objects of study, social formations anthropolo- gists seek to analyze, interpret and understand. if we assume ngos are distinct social spaces worthy of ethnographic anal- ysis, what makes them distinct remains an empirical question, and i have a hunch their distinction can be attributed to more than their categorical instability. as i have written elsewhere, our ability to study with, in, and on ngos and to consider them a discrete category of analysis may be linked to their institu- tional structures as nonprofits that are donor dependent (born- stein a, forthcoming; bornstein and sharma ). what if ngos were not donor dependent? would it change the way anthropologists worked with them? i think it would. if the ngos i have studied throughout my career were mines or shops instead of ngos, where would the delicate spaces be through which i had to tread lightly as an ethnographer? ngos are in- stitutions that serve public interest, and their nonprofit motive affects their orientations and priorities and alters the types of research that ethnographers are able to conduct with, in, and on them. thus, when we study ngos, we might think more deeply about why we are studying them. returning to geertz, anthropologists today might not be interested in villages for the sake of studying villages. we prob- lewis and schuller engagements with a productively unstable category ably would not think twice about a proposal to create an inter- est section on the anthropology of villages—how outmoded! yet ngos are considered valid research entities (objects of study) and conceptual sites (loci of study), while villages are not. why? what do ngos signify in our ethnographic imagi- nation? i suspect that if we interrogate the anthropology of ngos a little further we may conclude that anthropologists who study ngos are actually studying in ngos, and they are studying what ngos do: environmentalism, development, de- fending human rights, social justice activism, and humanitari- anism. anthropologists are also studying what ngos repre- sent. because ngos address the most vexing social problems of our contemporary era, research with, in, and on ngos en- ables anthropologists to tackle these issues as well. manzurul mannan department of social sciences and humanities, independent uni- versity, bangladesh, plot , block b, aftabuddin sorok, bashudhara r/a, dhaka- , bangladesh (manzurulmannan@gmail.com). “where do we go from here? break the cycle of global policy language of ngos” in their overview of anthropological studies of ngos, lewis and schuller conclude that the category of ngo is “produc- tively unstable.” from this determination, they then offer a deep level of introspection for the discipline of anthropology and for finding relevancy in the area study of ngos and development. lewis and schuller touch on a few significant directions in the area study of ngos that i would encourage. first, how- ever, i would make a few observations about the authors’ pro- nouncing the category of ngos as “productively unstable,” which implies an erstwhile expectation of stability from a so- cial formation that is self-defining. anthropologists are not tasked to dictate the terms and expectations of ngos but rather to take clues from the organizations’ malleability as they define and redefine themselves to their stakeholders and the public. a researcher can, then, observe the manipulation of the term (and the object, also, in this case) and associated discourse in whatever context it functions to uncover deeper significance and processes and chart the shifts and varying effects in tar- get sociocultural spheres of operation. anthropologists are well equipped to provide evidence-based challenges to the con- structed illusions and discourse that ngos and their associ- ates perpetuate. the authors report that such deconstruction efforts by anthropologists have been published, and i contend that this trend will become increasingly necessary in the study of this global phenomenon. significantly, the authors’ review essentially poses the ques- tion for an anthropology of ngos of “where do we go from here?” while they hint at some answers, i will suggest more specifically what the discipline might do. again, a bit of decon- struction of the “productively unstable” description offers a clue. for whom is the category unstable? it is unstable for special- ized groups of western-based or western-oriented academics. herein lies the crux of my argument: the sources informing the label derive primarily from western anthropologists and insti- tutions usually too embedded in dominant western discourses of development and the new colonialism—neoliberalism, or globalization—to be able to challenge the status quo adequately. to break from the process of recycling knowledge in the upper stratum of global power—and to grasp the dynamics and effects of ngos better—anthropology must search across sources of knowledge that are related to ngos; encourage and incorporate more widely and deeply the voices of the global south (of schol- ars and targets of aid); and as issa g. shivji said, “analyse the ob- jective effects of action, regardless of their intentions” ( : ); and break the top-down, western-based cycle of the global pol- icy language (gpl) that informs the “development-scape” (man- nan : – ) and surreptitiously drives ngos. gpl describes a process of knowledge production rooted in western ideologies, theories, and institutions (mannan ) that informs a target area of development (a development-scape). gpl concomitantly ignores the particular historical and current realities of sociocultural, political, and economic dynamics. this ahistorical, selective foci aspect of gpl creates a vacuum that it fills with its own myths, such as the idea that ngos, as nonprofit organizations, function as a third sector (in addition to gov- ernment and the economy) and are, therefore, nonpolitical and have nothing to do with power or production. gpl is based on information from ngo development projects primarily located in developing countries, which is then articu- lated, debated, and reconceptualized in western knowledge- production institutions (e.g., universities, research institutions, and think tanks). development knowledge then flows back into developing countries through ngos, development agencies, and organizations. after the completion of a project in – years, the expected outcomes are often beset by new, hybrid, deeper prob- lems. new problems mean more theorizing and design by the same entities that produced the current problems. gpl assumes a perspective that aspects of some spheres of recipients’ lives are abnormal (escobar ), which feeds a dis- course of negative orientalism. ngo projects are essentially de- signed to manipulate poor men and women to transform tra- ditional sociocultural structures and agency in all strata of society. the transformation policies produce new problems and hybridity that benefit ngos according to the imperatives of development. that is, the organizational structures of ngos allow them to gain access to material and ideological resources to further their power rather than to concentrate on their orig- inally expressed aim of alleviating poverty in developing coun- tries. anthropology is ideally suited to deconstruct how develop- ment knowledge is produced through gpl and represented and implemented by ngos. ngo projects impact people at all levels of their life, and anthropologists, with their keenly honed methods and critical stance, are perfectly positioned to assess the impacts in specific sociocultural, historical contexts. how- current anthropology volume , number , october ever, researching or working for ngos without comprehend- ing global processes within which ngos are embedded will only further marginalize anthropology to irrelevancy. a good approach for ngo anthropology begins by dropping debate between development anthropologists (those who design, im- plement, or evaluate programs of change) and anthropologists of development (those who study and critique development agencies and activities) and by converging the areas into a sin- gleanalytical framework that affords anthropologists a voice in and compatibility with other disciplines in development. i further recommend that anthropologists engaged with ngos find relevancy beyond academia and be leaders in challenging the machinations of neoliberalism: ngos cannot be pro-people and pro-change without also being anti-imperialist and anti- status quo (shivji ). it is crucial for anthropologists to don anew the mantle of activism to give relevancy to their intellec- tualism. reply we are grateful to the editors and anonymous reviewers for this opportunity to engage in a conversation with eminent scholars such as victoria bernal, erica bornstein, and manzurul man- nan. we appreciate their questions and critiques. it was just this sort of dialogue we had hoped for when writing the piece. we generally agree with most of the comments from all three respondents as useful continuations of the self-analysis and cri- tique that led us to write the article. however, we wish to clarify some points that the helpful critiques raised. we share with bernal the interest in interrogating when the “medium becomes the message” and resoundingly endorse her call for interdisciplinarity and recommendations for changes to our praxis. as part of the group that has attempted to con- vene a more formal conversation about ngo studies within anthropology, we both have also advocated against a ghetto- ization in favor of publishing within both inter- and intra- disciplinary journals. we also share bernal’s interest in work- ing “through” ngos to get at “what is going on in the world” in terms of power, work, aid, gender relations, and activism. as noted in our paper, ngos are important precisely because of the roles they play, and studying them contributes to un- derstanding these wider themes. ngos can serve as “portals” into these other productive questions. however, we do not share bernal’s skepticism about the value of sustained work within anthropology that focuses on ngos per se. one reason ngos are important is because they, too, are part of “what is going on in the world”—as participants in social movements, as employers of an educated middle class, and as advocates, developers, and humanitarians in all corners of the world—and therefore need to be understood as such. we there- fore prefer not to frame this answer to this question as a binary “either/or.” both need to be prioritized. following from this important dilemma, we believe there is value in charting similarities and differences among ngos. the process of definition of ngos can be an inherently po- litical process. we are interested in how such differences are constructed and understood, and we believe that there are im- portant connections to be found between analyzing and un- derstanding these differences (and the meanings attributed to them) and the “people, activities, and values involved in ngos.” we believe a productive bridge can be constructed between what bernal describes as the “enigma” of the ngo (that can mean so many different things to different people in different contexts) and the need to identify the sorts of compelling re- search questions we all agree need to be taken forward. as critical scholars who have sustained entanglements with collectivities termed “ngos,” we want to guard against the unhelpful polemics that often arise when discussing the term, which may be related to methodological isolationism. learn- ing lessons from others’ experiences is at the core of a praxis- oriented engaged scholarship that a comparative frame en- genders. for example, are “do-gooders” any more or less likely than “activists” to be dependent on donors? are both, at least in part, constrained by logics of outputs and visibility? valuing and providing meaningful spaces for this scholarly exchange is the promise we saw when asking whether a subfield might be useful. we also argue that the subject of ngos is generating a body of work that could form an effective vehicle for further- ing anthropological engagement not only with interdisciplin- ary research and scholarship but also with arenas of policy and practice. whether anthropologists engage with undocumented communities, climate justice, or the current refugee crisis, sooner or later we come into contact with an assemblage “ngoing.” we agree with bernal that anthropologists need to engage more fully with interdisciplinary scholarship, but we do not see this hampered by the creation of a stronger subfield of ngo studies within anthropology. again, this is not an either/or sit- uation, and in fact, a strengthened corpus, perhaps more read- ily identifiable on search engines, can facilitate interdisciplin- ary collaboration. bornstein raises a related set of issues around subject and content. we find bornstein’s reference to geertz on the locus of study very helpful in raising the distinction between study- ing ngos and studying in ngos. we appreciate the four-level lexicon she develops here (ngos as object, locus, area, and verb) as a powerful way to frame and move forward anthropological work in this area. anthropologists such as markowitz ( ) and hilhorst ( ) have similarly focused attention on what con- stitutes “the field” and how to study it. we argue that ngos offer unique opportunities to study the architecture of the contem- porary neoliberal world system (schuller ). we argue that it should not only be possible but also highly desirable to study both what villages (or ngos) are and what they represent. our concern with the traditional ways in which anthro- pologists represented “villages” was that they were often her- meneutically sealed. as roseberry ( ) noted of the balinese cockfight, geertz failed to note colonial and postcolonial/na- lewis and schuller engagements with a productively unstable category tionalist systems of power operating. this is even more true today. crawford ( ) offers an example of how to study vil- lages within the global economy. given their rapidly changing links with outside forces and the growing preoccupations of both social scientists and policy makers with all matters urban, now might actually be a good time to study what villages are as well as what they mean, so an anthropological counterpart to “rural sociology” might be timely indeed. bornstein flags the importance of the disruptive underpin- nings of material resource flows as an important source of in- stability in addition to the categorical instabilities around ngos that we discuss in the paper. her question about donor depen- dency is poignant and very well taken, as it also conditions the ways that anthropologists work with ngos. it is worth noting that not all ngos are externally funded: lewis encountered a local ngo in nigeria that decided not to take donor funding despite it being readily available. this decision formed a central part of its organizational identity, which members identified as an important source of its effectiveness. in the contemporary united states, black lives matter and the resistance to the da- kota access pipeline are deliberately diffuse in their leadership structure, blurring boundaries regarding tax-deductible dona- tions to resist disciplinary functions of the (c)( ) designation. in this way, activists consciously attempt to disrupt the “non- profit industrial complex” (incite! ), as discussed in the critical ethnic studies conference (incidentally, held months before the first biennial conference that bornstein notes, also in chicago). it is precisely these sorts of differences that highlight different forms of activism (to return to bernal’s earlier point), and anthropologists will also need to question the assumptions that they too bring to the category “ngo.” in this way born- stein’s suggested framework assists us further in finding work- able solutions to the potential problems bernal raised. finally, we could not agree more with mannan’s statement about the need to overcome the unhelpful divide between de- velopment anthropologists and anthropologists of development. this is explicitly the point of the third biennial conference to be held november . mannan challenges us to pay closer attention tothe question of “for whom” the categories discussed here are unstable. his concern is that we may still be too em- bedded in dominant western discourses of development and the new colonialism—neoliberalism, or globalization—to be able to challenge the status quo adequately. we accept this as fair critique. noted in the paper and in bernal’s comments, there is a critical need to take anthropological work out of the ivory tower to engage with the system of power he usefully describes as “global policy language” by interrogating this in relation to ngos. we acknowledge the need to communicate the themes of our article, particularly in our respective fieldwork locations of haiti and bangladesh, through discussion and debate locally and through translation. but to go back to the earlier point about anthropology’s relevance and power to influence the world, it might also be the case that we are not embedded enough to be able to act in a meaningful way on these forces of global in- equality. there is still, as each set of comments makes clear, plenty to be done. 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( ). tractatus logico-philosophicus. mountain view, ca: mayfield. ———. ( ). philosophical investigations. th edition. hoboken, nj: wiley. lewis and schuller engagements with a productively unstable category 	engagements_published version_cover 	engagements_published version university of groningen culture meets collective action van zomeren, martijn; louis, winnifred r. published in: group processes & intergroup relations doi: . / important note: you are advised to consult the publisher's version (publisher's pdf) if you wish to cite from it. please check the document version below. document version publisher's pdf, also known as version of record publication date: link to publication in university of groningen/umcg research database citation for published version (apa): van zomeren, m., & louis, w. r. ( ). culture meets collective action: exciting synergies and some lessons to learn for the future. group processes & intergroup relations, ( ), - . https://doi.org/ . / copyright other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license (like creative commons). take-down policy if you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. downloaded from the university of groningen/umcg research database (pure): http://www.rug.nl/research/portal. for technical reasons the number of authors shown on this cover page is limited to maximum. download date: - - https://doi.org/ . / https://research.rug.nl/en/publications/culture-meets-collective-action( d ec d - - d-bed -a ee a f d).html https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / group processes & intergroup relations , vol. ( ) – © the author(s) reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalspermissions.nav doi: . / journals.sagepub.com/home/gpi g p i r group processes & intergroup relations it is clear that demonstrations, strikes, petitions, and other forms of collective action are not restricted to the western world of dutiful democ- racy. as a recent example, the arab spring pro- tests in egypt and elsewhere have shown that the very same phenomenon can be observed across cultural boundaries (with other examples includ- ing the black lives matter movement in the us and the gezi park protests in turkey). this implies that, independent of the specific culture within which one conducts any study of collective action, individuals can and do find agency in the groups they are part of to change the social structure in which they are embedded. or can they? this key question—whether and how culture is relevant to the social psychology of collective action—is at the very core of this special issue. indeed, after previous special issues on collective action aimed to foster integration (see van zomeren & iyer, ) and innovation (see van culture meets collective action: exciting synergies and some lessons to learn for the future martijn van zomeren and winnifred r. louis abstract in this introduction to the special issue of group processes & intergroup relations on “culture and collective action” we emphasize the importance of the special issue topic for the development of the field. specifically, we highlight the globalization of collective action and the internationalization of the social-psychological study of collective action, both of which point to culture as a missing link for this field. we thus propose that the next step is to move toward a proper cultural psychology of collective action—a social psychology in which culture is an integral part. this special issue provides a first step toward such a broad and integrative psychological understanding of collective action, but comes with promises as well as problems. we discuss both the exciting synergies and some lessons to learn for the future, and conclude that a focus on culture will facilitate the development of the rich and fascinating field of the social psychology of collective action. keywords agency, collective action, culture, emotion, identity paper received january ; revised version accepted january . university of groningen, the netherlands the university of queensland, australia corresponding author: martijn van zomeren, department of social psychology, university of groningen, grote kruisstraat / , groningen, ts, the netherlands. email: m.van.zomeren@rug.nl gpi . / group processes & intergroup relationsvan zomeren and louis research-article introduction https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/journals-permissions https://doi.org/ . / mailto:m.van.zomeren@rug.nl group processes & intergroup relations ( ) zomeren & klandermans, ), the current one brings together otherwise isolated research that explicitly links collective action to what seems to be, for this field at least, the undiscov- ered country of culture. the key reason for this is that we, as guest editors of this special issue, believe that this is an important and new direc- tion for theory and research on collective action to take. we view culture as the (often hidden or implicit) background of shared meaning against which individuals can be understood best (fiske, kitayama, markus, & nisbett, ; markus & kitayama, ; smith, fischer, vignoles, & bond, ), including their many and different motivations to engage in collective action to achieve social change. therefore, one aim of putting this special issue together is to raise the question of how culture affects (motivations for) collective action on the scientific agenda. but there is another, perhaps more pressing, factor that makes the inclusion of culture in the social psychology of collective action almost a necessity. this factor is globalization, coupled with the internationalization of both the field of collective action as well as its observed manifes- tation across many different cultures. indeed, it is our educated guess that we will see more and more studies of collective action that come from different cultures, and at present the state of the field is that we are not equipped to deal with such diversity in theoretical and empirical ways. for this reason, this special issue does not just signal a new and important direction for theory and research to take, but also offers an intriguing and diverse collection of studies of culture and collective action that at the same time raise important questions about our lack of theorizing in terms of culture. indeed, the inclu- sion of culture in the social psychology of col- lective action has much promise but also brings with it new problems. we hope that the special issue will start this debate in the field, as we feel culture is the “ele- phant in the room” that almost no social psychol- ogist in the field of collective action talks about. as is evident from the studies in this special issue, once we start talking about culture we will realize that we need to develop the theoretical tools required to integrate the notion of culture with the social psychology of collective action. in what follows we preview the contributions to this special issue that we hope the reader will find both intriguing and thought-provoking, but most of all fascinating in terms of the many different cultural contexts in which collective action takes place and is studied. a preview of the contributions to the special issue the special issue is divided into three sections. the first two articles focus on theoretical aspects of culture and apply them to the broad study of social movements (jasper, ) and the impor- tance of language for culture and collective action in indigenous populations (droogendyk & wright, ). the next triad of papers analyse and study collective action within (typically national) cultural contexts, ranging from southern italy (travaglino, abrams, & russo, ) to new zealand (osborne, yogeeswaran, & sibley, ) and turkey (baysu & phalet, ). the final four papers (chayinska, minescu, & mcgarty, ; fischer, becker, kito, & nayir, ; górska, bilewicz, & winiewski, ; gulevich, sarieva, nevruev, & yagiyayev, ) analyse multiple samples across (again typically national) cultural con- texts (i.e., germany, croatia, hungary, japan, latvia, lithuania, poland, russia, turkey, and ukrain) and also deal with issues such as compa- rability of samples and measurement equivalence. theory the first section of the special issue consists of two theoretical papers that elucidate the notion of culture in the context of collective action. first, jasper ( ) provides a timely reminder of the breadth and depth of the notion of culture, which indeed stretches to include all of “the meanings we carry in our heads [and] the physical objects we use to express and embody them” (p. ). in a wide- ranging paper drawing on decades of scholarship van zomeren and louis in social movement studies (e.g., benford & snow, ; klandermans, ; mcadam, tarrow, & tilly, ), jasper considers how cultures reveal themselves in identities and emotions; how they are defined by and manifested in frames, narra- tives, and leadership; and how they both define and shape the dynamics of collective action across gender, ethnic, religious, or political groups. the scope of the literature review that jasper provides is impressive, and it is somewhat sobering to reflect how closely the content aligns with that of the social psychology of collective action, yet how closed the two fields have been to each other (see van zomeren, ). we hope this will change. second, droogendyk and wright ( ) high- light the importance of language (as part of indigenous culture in the canadian context) for collective action directed at resisting assimilation pressures. specifically, they suggest that language is an important part of culture as it embodies the past and present of a cultural group. indeed, these authors suggest that language can be a key aspect of cultural identity and other motivations for collective action. their analysis suggests an important aspect of culture that we would not have been able to theorize about and research further if we were to ignore culture as part of the social structure within which any collective action occurs. as with jasper’s ( ) contribution, the paper highlights that our field would be much strengthened by considering the notion of cul- ture in the study of collective action, and how much it may be related to language as communi- cating cultural meaning. within-culture comparisons the second set of articles focus on within-culture comparisons (typically within nations). osborne et al. ( ) focus on the society and colonial his- tory of new zealand and in particular on the implications for the indigenous (maori) and non- indigenous population of the country, in terms of collective action (or the lack of it). specifically, they test their dark duo model of postcolonial ideology, which suggests two culture-specific ide- ologies used to negotiate challenges to the current system. these are historical negation, which denies the relevance of colonial injustices to con- temporary inequalities, and symbolic exclusion, which rejects the use of indigenous culture in modern representations of national identity. together, these complementary ideologies thus work against collective action on behalf of the maori through justifying the current system. their findings, based on a longitudinal survey of maori and , non-indigenous new zealanders, show that measures of both of these culture-specific ideologies decrease collective action over time across both samples. travaglino et al. ( ) focus on a specific cul- ture within a nation, examining the southern italian culture and the phenomenon of italian criminal organizations. using a sample of , southern italians, they test their intracultural appropriation theory, which suggests that italian criminal organizations exploit cultural codes of masculinity and honour to legitimize and lower resistance to their actions. the survey findings indeed show that male-honour-related values decrease collective action against those criminal organizations, which suggests that, like osborne et al.’s ( ) contribution, culture-specific ideol- ogies are important aspects of culture to take into account when studying collective action. finally, baysu and phalet ( ) examine opinion-based groups (e.g., mcgarty, bliuc, thomas, & bongiorno, ) in a sample of supporters and activists in the turkish gezi park protests of . four groups of protestors were identified using bottom-up latent class analysis: conservatives, moderates, secularists, and liberals. the interrelationships differed systematically across these groups among their grievances, forms of action taken in the protest, support for democracy, and identification as muslim. for example, secularists and liberals showed stronger support for democracy than conservatives and moderates, in which muslim identification did not play a role; but among conservatives, stronger muslim identification was associated with more prejudice and authoritarianism, and lower sup- port for freedom of speech. this contribution thus nicely links different group identities with group processes & intergroup relations ( ) cultural patterns of meaning and action that do not rely on geography (such as a nation or a region). across-culture comparisons the third and final section of the special issue deals with samples from different (typically national) cultural contexts. górska et al. ( ) analyse data about the collective action of lgb participants collected from five east european countries (i.e., croatia, hungary, latvia, lithuania, and poland; n = , ). after controlling for fac- tors such as country-level democratic governance or religiosity, institutional sexual stigma (consid- ered in terms of rights/legal protection) was associated with citizens’ internalized homopho- bia and lower in-group identification, and via these variables was shown to suppress the collec- tive action of lgb individuals. thus, this research connects macrolevel aspects of culture with microlevel aspects of culture across different cul- tural contexts in order to show how important social structure can be in suppressing (but also enabling) collective action. turning to the ukrainian context, chayinska et al. ( ) examine a sample of over , ukrainian adults reacting to the annexation of crimea by russia in . within the sample, the perceived loyalty of crimean tartars to russia or ukraine was contested and linked to different constructions of pro-russia or pro- european union (eu) political solidarity, and these variables were ultimately linked to partici- pants’ own disidentification or identification from russia or the eu. the authors build on previous work (i.e., subašić, reynolds, & turner, ) to suggest that political solidarity rests on the shared self-categorization of the unaligned majority with an oppressed group rather than with authorities. chayinska and colleagues ( ) turn this proposition around, showing that disidentification or rejection of particular authorities can lead third party groups to posi- tion or construct disadvantaged groups as oppressed by the same authorities. doing so serves to construct an emergent solidarity that legitimizes the group’s political aims and creates moral and political leverage, as well as seeking to focus the attention of others to achieve these aims. this is an important step forward in link- ing the social identity approach—an important social-psychological approach to collective action—to the cultural construction of conflict frames, as different political actors’ social identi- fication is changed and constructed for maxi- mum moral and political leverage. fischer et al. ( ) study collective action against sexism cross-culturally, employing sam- ples from germany, turkey, and japan. importantly, they measured two relevant cultural- psychological variables (self-construal and face concerns) that should underlie different responses to blatant sexism across the three cultural con- texts (as the countries are expected to differ in general on those variables), but also within the three samples (as individual variance should exist within each cultural context). although lack of measurement equivalence prevented these authors from directly comparing the three cul- tural samples, within-sample comparisons showed that female students scoring higher on independent self-construal and lower on face concerns seemed more likely to consider collec- tive action in response to blatant sexism. in fact, those who scored higher on face concerns were less likely to respond with collective action and instead favoured more indirect ways of respond- ing to blatant sexism. these findings suggest that the field of collective action will benefit from importing new concepts from cultural psychol- ogy that nicely fit the social-psychological litera- ture on collective action. finally, gulevich et al. ( ) present an analy- sis of the ukrainian context, comparing russian respondents’ and ukrainian russian-speaking respondents’ support for more normative or nonnormative forms of collective action in rela- tion to internal efficacy (perceptions of one’s own and one’s group’s capacity to act) and exter- nal efficacy (perceptions of the responsiveness of the system/authorities). direct comparison of the two samples highlighted that compared to russians, ukrainians perceived a less dangerous van zomeren and louis and more just world; had higher levels of per- sonal, collective, and external efficacy; and they were more ready to engage in voting, signing peti- tions, and unauthorized protests. both groups were equally unwilling to engage in violent pro- tests and moderately unwilling to engage in authorized protests. furthermore, internal effi- cacy was found to be associated with more nor- mative forms of action, and lower external efficacy with more support for nonnormative action. their model takes an important step for- ward in integrating external efficacy into the study of collective action and, furthermore, their analyses are among the few within the present special issue to address the challenge of compar- ing both mean-level differences across cultures and analysis of differences in the strength and pattern of associations. exciting synergies and lessons to learn for the future across the contributions to the special issue, we want to highlight at least four exciting synergies and lessons to learn for the future. first, the spe- cial issue contributions show collectively how international both the phenomenon and study of collective action is. this enables exciting oppor- tunities for testing the generalizability of key insights into the social and psychological dynam- ics of collective action. at the same time, such international sampling immediately raises the issue of comparability between different cultural samples, and the theoretical dimensions on which we assume to see differences between cul- tures. indeed, although in many cases culture was operationalized at the national level (or as a spe- cific part of a nation), culture does not need to be equated with geography—it is about a shared system of meaning. across the board, we believe that the fischer et al.’s ( ) article nicely illustrates both the promise and problems associated with cross-cul- tural research in general, and on collective action in particular. the promise is that cultural psychol- ogy can provide us with new theories and varia- bles and measures that are clearly relevant to collective action. at the same time, the problem associated with this is that we need to make sure that our measures are equivalent across the cul- tures we derive our samples from, preferably in a structural fashion (i.e., that the same measures have the same meanings in each culture) or at least in a functional fashion (i.e., different meas- ures tapping into the same construct for different cultures). to us this suggests that for any such study it is important to question (and pilot test) the assumptions underlying the measures across the cultures we derive samples from. at the same time, future studies will need to deal with the question of theorizing what any lack of equiva- lence across cultures implies. if important con- structs such as group identity and emotion are experienced in qualitatively different ways across cultures, then how can we integrate culture into the study of collective action? second, it is exciting to see the richness of the work on culture and collective action within the field of social movement studies, as summarized in jasper’s ( ) contribution. similarly, droogendyk and wright’s ( ) contribution is exciting because of the suggested importance of language in a cultural psychology of collec- tive action. nevertheless, on both counts there is a stark contrast with the empirical praxis in the social psychology of collective action, in which culture and language are rarely considered as variables. furthermore, in this literature as well as in this special issue, the notion of culture is often implicit and almost hidden in scattered studies on international or interethnic compari- sons. we believe that without defining the notion of culture, it is difficult to articulate how mean- ing is constructed within a culture, and how cul- ture relates to the groups that engage in collective action. thus, another lesson to learn is to develop a shared definition of culture in the field of collective action. to put our money where our mouths are, we would suggest that a good working definition of cul- ture (at least for social psychologists studying col- lective action) would be “any system of shared meaning that embeds individuals in social struc- ture through their experience and enactment of group processes & intergroup relations ( ) their relationships and group identities.” this definition is a psychological (rather than geo- graphical) definition of culture, and offers a clear link between social structure and human agency by pointing to the importance of the experience and enactment of relationships and group identi- ties, and to the importance of a shared system of meaning, in understanding individuals’ attempts to change the social structure through joint action (which is in line with definitions of collective action; e.g., van zomeren & iyer, ). third, a consideration of culture as shared meaning associated with identity implies a clear link with emotional experience, particularly in the context of collective action. indeed, the centrality of emotion and the blurring of the lines between cognition and emotion—a particular project of jasper ( ) himself in his article, but also a fea- ture of the relevant research in this area—chal- lenge us to attack the reification of emotions and cognitions. we must move beyond attempts to label one variable a predictor of the other and better understand their entwined cocreation (see also louis et al., ). this is particularly the case because much research on collective action still ignores emotion altogether (also visible in the contributions to this special issue) or struggles to articulate the interrelationships among cognitions and emotions. collective actions are often experi- enced as intense emotional experiences and yet in many contributions to this special issue, those experiences are almost invisible. we believe this should change. finally, jasper’s ( ) review of the literatures on leadership, narratives, and frames should remind us that in both fields, arguably—but per- haps even more so within the social psychology of collective action—the leadership processes and contests that are vital to collective action have been underresearched (see blackwood & louis, in press; reicher, haslam, platow, & steffens, ). this deficit will become more glaring as we seek to theorize the relationship between macro- and microlevel factors (e.g., górska et al., ) and to address the cultural contestation of frames (e.g., chayinska et al., ). indeed, to us it seems that analyses of effective leadership and followership in the con- text of collective action require an understanding of the culture within which individuals are embedded. in sum, we think the current collection of arti- cles reflects a first step toward a cultural psychol- ogy of collective action. this is exciting because of all the fascinating international samples involved and the theoretical contributions that urge us to look at concepts and variables that would otherwise remain invisible. the special issue suggests a strong potential for innovation and integration in the social psychology of col- lective action. however, every challenge comes with a price, and in this case it seems that includ- ing the notion of culture into the social psychol- ogy of collective action brings along empirical issues such as cross-cultural comparability and measurement (in)equivalence, together with con- ceptual issues such as developing a shared defini- tion of culture and incorporating new concepts in the social-psychological literature on collective action. meeting those challenges will certainly be fruitful in bringing this field yet another step for- ward in the years to come. conclusion we hope that this special issue contributes to a broader and integrative understanding of the social psychology of collective action. it offers broad and novel theoretical views on why culture matters for collective action, and provides both within- and across-culture (although typically national) comparisons. furthermore, it illumi- nates a wide variety of international contexts in which collective action occurs and the broad applicability of theories and models from the col- lective action literature. finally, it offers a broader picture of how alive and energetic the field of collective action is, how international and diverse, and is itself a good example of how collective action can bring along change. we believe that this state of the field signals a bright and fascinat- ing future with many exciting discoveries ahead of us, as long as we dare to cross cultural bounda- ries and are willing to understand and theorize van zomeren and louis about the different cultural contexts in which we conduct our research. we look forward to the new insights that a cultural psychology of collec- tive action will bring us. funding this research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for- profit sectors. references baysu, g., & phalet, k. 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( ). toward innovation in the social psychology of collective action and social change. british journal of social psychology, , – . doi: . /j. - . . .x scaling social movements through social media: the case of black lives matter https://doi.org/ . / creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution- noncommercial . license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . /) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the sage and open access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). social media + society october-december : – © the author(s) article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions doi: . / journals.sagepub.com/home/sms article introduction in recent years, scholars have begun exploring the signifi- cance of social media for social movements and movement activism. while research differs on how and in what ways social media platforms inform social movement endeavors (earl, kimport, prieto, rush, & reynoso, ), the prolif- eration of scholarship in this area suggests that digital plat- forms “have become essential tools for st-century social movements” (freelon, mcilwain, & clark, , p. ). an under-explored area of social movement research is the role social media can play in broadening movement impact. we address that issue in this article by exploring opportunities and challenges that social media creates for movements to scale up, which we define as the process of expansion and/or internal strengthening that broadens move- ment impact (ross et al., under review). drawing on the case of black lives matter (blm), we use a mixed methods research design to explore how social media platforms, in particular facebook and twitter, can provide opportunities for activist groups to broaden movement impact. we contrib- ute to existing social movement literature by highlighting the importance of social media as a scaling tool that simultane- ously facilitates strengthening the movement by facilitating collective meaning-making and the creation of support net- works and expanding the movement, specifically by enabling local blm groups to form coalitions and to amplify and dis- seminate non-dominant discourses about police brutality and black liberation. our research also illustrates the challenges created by social media usage, which extend beyond limita- tions outlined in existing empirical scholarship. review of the literature broadening the impact of social movements has not been the explicit focus of much scholarship focused on social media. however, existing literature about the role of social media in collective action, more broadly, offers insight into its impor- tance for mobilization, coalition building, and collective meaning making. these illustrate possible functions social media can play in scaling initiatives for social change and provide the framework for this study. social media and mobilization the most obvious and intuitive link between social media and scaling is its potential for mobilizing new activists. as scholars have noted, partly due to its “public sphere” nature, social media creates participation opportunities—such as smsxxx . / social media <span class="symbol" cstyle="mathematical">+</span> societymundt et al. research-article university of massachusetts boston, usa corresponding author: karen ross, department of conflict resolution, human security, and global governance, university of massachusetts boston, wheatley - a, morrissey blvd., boston, ma , usa. email: karen.ross@umb.edu scaling social movements through social media: the case of black lives matter marcia mundt, karen ross , and charla m burnett abstract in this article, we explore the potential role of social media in helping movements expand and/or strengthen themselves internally, processes we refer to as scaling up. drawing on a case study of black lives matter (blm) that includes both analysis of public social media accounts and interviews with blm groups, we highlight possibilities created by social media for building connections, mobilizing participants and tangible resources, coalition building, and amplifying alternative narratives. we also discuss challenges and risks associated with using social media as a platform for scaling up. our analysis suggests that while benefits of social media use outweigh its risks, careful management of online media platforms is necessary to mitigate concrete, physical risks that social media can create for activists. keywords black lives matter, scaling up, social movements, coalitions, narratives, networks https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/journals-permissions https://journals.sagepub.com/home/sms mailto:karen.ross@umb.edu http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . % f &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - social media + society boosting protest turnout or supporting fundraising cam- paigns—that broaden mobilization, thus helping scale move- ment endeavors. for instance, khamis and vaughn ( ) point to the significance of facebook in disseminating infor- mation and mobilizing participants during the tahrir square protests in egypt. they also note the importance of facebook pages and groups in providing “safe spaces” for protesters to meet, as well as “a type of public commons for free speech” not available elsewhere (p. ). de choudhury et al.’s ( ) analysis of blm further emphasizes these points, pointing to social media as a platform for continued involve- ment and reflection around issues related to race and policing and highlighting its significance for developing common understandings of ideology and a shared sense of movement identity. while recruitment of participants is most centrally dis- cussed in the literature, some scholarship indicates that social media activists use social media to mobilize other necessary resources. for instance, sommerfeldt ( , ) shows that activist groups utilize digital media to generate mone- tary donations for their work. doan and toledano ( ) also illustrate the potential for mobilizing funding through digital crowdfunding campaigns. this emerging area of research suggests a powerful role for social media in providing move- ments with the tangible resources necessary for scaling their endeavors. social media and coalition building largely missing from existing literature is the role of social media in shaping coalitions, even as social movement schol- arship outlines the significance of coalitions in building and sustaining movements (ackerman & duvall, ; shaw, ). the handful of scholars who explore the role of social media in shaping coalitions suggest that its role is to create space for online social networks that allow activists to strengthen connections and build social capital. for example, drawing on interviews with protest participants in taiwan, nien ( ) argues that social media can create “weak ties” that draw together protesters with different identities, but who come together against a common enemy. hwang and kim ( ) use a social capital framework to argue that large online networks contribute to weak and strong ties, both of which have positive effects on intention to participate in a social movement. furthermore, as baron ( ) indicates, social media facilitates the creation of large and sustainable interpersonal networks or coalitions by enabling personal- ized and organizational sharing (see also bennett & segerberg, ). researchers point to the importance of shared narratives, ideologies, and/or collective identity as a basis for bringing groups together in coalitions (e.g., bystydzienski & schacht, ; chávez, ; fligstein, ). these authors indicate that the ability to bring together diverse interests around a common cause is critical. mizrahi and rosenthal ( ) suggest that successful coalitions are also characterized by conducive sociopolitical and economic conditions, a compe- tent core leadership group committed to collaboration, and access to resources. however, while resource consolidation or inspirational leaders may spark coalition building, those coalitions that last develop both a shared ideological focus and organizational structures to uphold alliances long term (bystydzienski & schacht, , pp. - ). these essential elements for successful coalition building are the same pro- cesses that scholarship indicates social media use can bol- ster: meaning making, resource mobilization, and member recruitment. social media and meaning making existing research indicates that social media can help shape discourse on relevant political issues. as a “public space,” social media is not used solely to disseminate information about movement tactics or actions but also plays a role in shaping the very discourse on issues that social movements raise (carney, ). milan ( ) argues that by creating opportunities for recurring interactions among activists, social media serves as the vehicle of meaning work, adjoining and to some extent replacing other traditional intermediaries such as alternative and mainstream media and face-to-face interactions. in other words, it became the process through which the symbolic takes form, rather than its mere physical (or virtual) representation. (p. ) writing about the occupy wall street movement, both kavada ( ) and penney and dadas ( ) note the salience of digital spaces both for collective meaning making processes. other authors discuss its importance for dissemi- nating shared ideologies into public discourse (olesen, ; tufekci & wilson, ). because of its role in meaning making, social media plat- forms also enable diverse groups to discuss, plan, and act together. thorson, edgerly, kligler-vilenchik, and luping wang ( ) draws on research around the people’s climate march to highlight the range of groups utilizing digital plat- forms for framing the climate issue, and crucially, for enabling “personalized framings of the climate issue to be made visible to one another, a precondition for building bridges across distinct orientations to climate” (p. ). thorson et al.’s research suggests that social media spaces create “big tents” that enable multiple personalized frames to be used simultaneously under a broad umbrella. as such, these opportunities help engender a sense of collective iden- tity and cause, which has been shown to be crucial for effec- tive social movement organizing (e.g., polletta & jasper, ; valocchi, ). as distinct from traditional organizing, bennett and segerberg ( , ) note that in digital environments, collective action is far more personalized. in social media mundt et al. spaces especially, political content is expressed via “personal action frames” that are inclusive of multiple personal reasons for contesting the status quo (p. ). bennett & segerberg suggest that communication technologies enable the sharing of these personalized frames. movements that use social media platforms “have frequently been larger; have scaled up more quickly; and have been flexible in tracking moving political targets and bridging different issues,” compared with conventional movements (bennett & segerberg, , p. ). calls to action not based on the use of personal action frames, they argue, may not be as widely relevant, necessitating additional resources for aligning diverse frames and creating a sense of collective identity. similarly, earl and kimport ( ) point out that the accessibility of digital spaces has led to organizing around a much broader set of issues than previously. limitations and risks of social media it is important to note, however, that scholarship does not uniformly suggest a positive role for social media in promot- ing activism and social movement participation. youmans and york ( ) highlight constraints that proprietary social media platforms like facebook can place on grassroots orga- nizers who use these platforms to disrupt or challenge regimes. these include preventing the use of pseudonymous or anonymous posts, counter-activism by regime actors to remove the accounts of key movement activists or shutting down the use of social media altogether, or the doxxing of activists by regime allies on social media. as they note, “social media tools that facilitate protest can also be used by repressive regimes and their supporters to dampen and dis- rupt opposition” (p. ). hintz ( ) further addresses restrictions that may exist when social media is used to voice and mobilize dissent due to commercial interests underlying social media platforms. indeed, events such as the cambridge analytica scandal involving facebook data use leading up to the us elec- tions have illustrated the potential for data collected through social media platforms to be exploited and potentially used in insidious ways (tufekci, ). moreover, poell ( ) notes that use of symbols, pseudonymous postings, and cer- tain linguistic choices may be viewed as self-censorship on the part of activists, potentially interpreted “as the result of states successfully steering internet users away from directly expressing political critique, and confronting central state authorities” (pp. / ). in addition, while bennett and segerberg highlight potential benefits of digital organizing, the broader range of issues addressed in this context can also lead to more diverse understandings of movement ideology and potentially mitigate opportunities for collective identity development. indeed, scholars note that the ability to achieve a collective identity is partially shaped by the nature of the movement’s issue of focus. for example, freelon et al. ( ) suggest that the relative success of blm is due to its focus on the concrete issue of police brutality, noting, “unlike wealth or income inequality, police brutality is con- crete, discrete in its manifestations, and above all, visual” (p. ). they argue that this emphasis makes blm’s work par- ticularly well-suited to internet-based activism, in contrast with, for example, occupy wall street, with its focus on the more amorphous (and difficult to visually express) issue of wealth inequality. this suggests that while social media spaces can serve as platforms for building collective identity and creating a cohesive movement ideology that might mobi- lize new participants or facilitate coalition-building, it is also important to explore constraints that social media can place on mobilization for and engagement in collective action. in sum, existing literature suggests that social media can facilitate meaning making, resource mobilization, and coali- tion building, thus pointing to its potential utility for helping social movements scale up. scholarship also points to the constraints of social media on movement activity, both struc- turally through co-option by state agents and in terms of the potential of digital platforms to blur the clear ideology neces- sary for movements to scale. however, none of the afore- mentioned studies explore how these uses and limitations of social media, in tandem, serve to build and constrain a move- ment. indeed, the study that most closely approximates our exploration (de choudhury, jhaver, sugar, & weber, ) maintains a somewhat limited understanding of movement growth, focusing on the number of participants in a move- ment versus a more holistic conceptualization of scaling. likewise, most studies employ a single methodology, either quantitative or qualitative, to address research questions related to social media as a tool for social movements. only baron ( ) approaches his research question with a mixed methodology, but the movements he explores are geographi- cally bound to washington state versus a broadly dispersed, non-hierarchical movement. this indicates that further research is needed in order to understand whether and how social media shapes possibilities for movement scaling, par- ticularly in the context of large, loosely connected move- ments with a strong digital presence. social media and blm to address this gap, we focus on the role of social media in the context of blm, a movement inextricably tied to the digital sphere. since its inception in , blm has grown into a national network, part of the broader movement for black lives that includes more than organizations with a shared vision and platform for black liberation and an end to police brutality. blm is characterized by its explicit rejec- tion of hierarchy and centralized leadership, instead billing itself as “leader-ful,” horizontally structured, and character- ized by an intersectional approach that lifts up queer women of color (milkman, ). as ransby ( ) notes, “the suggestion that the organizations that have emerged from the black lives matter protests are somehow lacking because social media + society they have rejected the old style of leadership misses what makes this movement most powerful.” existing research focusing on blm largely attempts to contextualize the spread of the #blacklivesmatter hashtag. gallagher, reagan, danforth, and dodds ( ) compare the discourse of blm and all lives matter, based on twitter usage of hashtags associated with each. they find that the diversity of topics related to blm is greater than that associ- ated with the #alllivesmatter hashtag, which is more tightly intertwined with conservative perspectives. further to this point, ince, rojas and davis ( ) focus on how the public interacts with blm, highlighting to the potential of broad audiences, rather than just central movement activists, to “alter and manipulate the movement’s construction of mean- ing” (p. ). finally, yang ( ) illustrates that use of #blacklivesmatter provides an opportunity for users to engage in narrative agency, that is, to create their own stories and discourse around the term and its meaning (see also bonilla & rosa, ). in contrast, however, duncan- shippy, murphy, and purdy’s ( ) exploration of variation in the intensity and topical breadth of the coverage of blm by mainstream media finds that mainstream media tends to frame blm through a relatively narrow lens. thus, the lit- erature suggests potential tensions between a possible lack of focus on movement messaging on one hand and a media (and public) perception of blm as narrowly focused on the other hand. existing research points to the significance of blm as an emerging movement in the united states, but also illustrates potential contradictions and gaps in our understanding of the way it is shaped by social media platforms. our study seeks to address some of these gaps by focusing specifically on how social media creates opportunities and challenges for blm to broaden its impact. drawing primarily on interview data from social media–based groups that use the blm frame, we explore the complexity of scaling through social media in the context of a largely, but not solely, digital move- ment. we address both possibilities and challenges of using social media as a tool for broadening the impact of blm as a network and as individual groups. research design our interpretations are the result of a multi-part, mixed meth- ods process of data collection and analysis. we first created a comprehensive database of public “blm” social media accounts on facebook, instagram, and twitter. this database became the basis for a quantitative analysis of the types of groups flying under the banner of black lives matter, blm, or #blacklivesmatter groups. subsequently, we used this database to strategically select a subset of these groups to interview about social media use within and across the move- ment. these interviews provided us with deeper, qualitative insights on the opportunities and limitations of using social media to scale up social justice movements. quantitative methodology: database development our research team first identified social media accounts by searching for the name black lives matter or blm and for accounts that used the #blacklivesmatter hashtag in their pro- file on facebook, instagram, and twitter. comprehensiveness of the database was ensured by searching social media appli- cations multiple times as well as by having multiple individu- als conduct these searches. all three authors were engaged in the searches during two primary windows of time, first in january of and a second time in april of . during each search window, an average of six independent searches were conducted by each author. information collected about each of the social media accounts included location, date when the social media account was started (when available), and stated affiliation (or not) as a chapter of the blm network (when this informa- tion was available). we later added in information about number of members (for groups), likes (for pages), or fol- lowers (for twitter handles), and any information in the “about me” blurb or group/page/handle profile. database profile after compiling the database of blm social media accounts, we conducted an initial analysis to better understand differ- ent approaches and primary mission/activities characterizing blm as a movement. first, we removed accounts with a description illustrating that the nature of the group was to counter or challenge (rather than support) the principles of blm and consolidated the database to prevent duplication of groups with multiple social media accounts. this left us with social media accounts, of which included infor- mation in the profile description that allowed us to categorize the accounts in more detail. of these accounts, ( %) self-identified as linked to the national blm movement, while another ( %) identified in ways that suggested some affiliation but in ways that were unclear. the remaining accounts ( %) used the blm name or hashtag, but claimed no explicit link to the national network or the movement for black lives. as we discuss later in the article, this suggests that the accessibility of social media allows groups to take on the mantle of social movements without direct connections to movement activity or leadership. we also categorized social media accounts according to profile information about engagement with social justice issues; ( %) accounts emphasized issues related to sys- temic oppression of black people, while ( %) focused explicitly on issues related to criminal justice and police bru- tality. another ( %) groups emphasized affirmation and empowerment of black people. of the remaining groups, ( %) discussed a combination of these or other areas of focus, such as addressing capitalism and colonialism, mundt et al. misogyny, or community empowerment. in terms of level of engagement, we noted the existence of groups that claimed to focus on direct action or mobilization of their members ( groups, %); those dedicated to providing information to the broader community about social justice issues ( groups, %); and those social media accounts with a goal of creating spaces for dialogue and communication in the online setting ( groups, %). our categorization of groups also included how they self-identified, specifically when this self-identification addressed something other than existence as a geographi- cally based chapter (formal or informal) of the national blm network. although fairly uncommon, distinct areas of self-identification included several college-based and educationally focused groups ( ), groups explicitly affili- ating as created for white allies engaged in anti-racist work ( ), book clubs ( ), and women’s groups ( ). in addi- tion, one group was created to help organize a “buy black- owned” business challenge, while another community group expanded on the premises of #blm to focus on “black, brown & red lives.” this variety in the self- identification of groups further speaks to the potential of drawing on the #blacklivesmatter hashtag and addressing core premises of the blm movement in a way that remains distinct from some of the movement’s goals, which we discuss in detail later in the manuscript. a summary of these characteristics is presented in table . in addition to substantive areas of categorization, we also noted in our analysis the geographic spread of those groups for which location information was available, highlighting both the international nature of the blm movement as well as the areas of greater and lesser blm density. this geo- graphic dispersal can be seen in figure . our analysis highlighted the wide range of actors and action types that characterize blm-related social media accounts, even as these accounts all signal solidarity or even affiliation with the blm movement as a whole. this variety raised further questions about the use of digital platforms in the context of social movement work, which we aimed to address through in-depth discussions with a subset of the groups in our database. qualitative methodology: semi- structured interviews to better understand these trends and use of social media by these groups, we contacted administrators of social media accounts for interviews, drawn from the accounts for which we had substantive profile information. we used a theoretical sampling strategy to select the groups we invited to interview. specifically, these accounts were selected because they reflected diversity in terms of location, number of followers/members, affiliation with the blm network, type and level of social justice engagement, and other areas of self-identification, as per our initial analysis. our aim was to reach out to a subset of groups that could provide insight into a range of online and on-the-ground activity, connec- tions with other blm groups, and use of social media for social justice engagement related to the principles of the #blacklivesmatter movement. of those contacted, administrators of groups responded; after discussion with these groups about the nature of the research, groups agreed to be interviewed. these groups differed in size (from approximately to nearly , fol- lowers or members at the time of contact), location, relation- ship to the blm network and the movement for black lives, and areas of activity. during the study period, growth across the sample set was substantial. from early to early , we tracked increases in most groups of between and members; some ballooned by several thousand to a following of well over , by . however, this was not the case across the board. for instance, one group dis- solved and its page became dormant by the time we were able to schedule an interview with its administrator. of the remaining groups, another discontinued its page briefly, then later resurged, and a second simply became inactive as it stopped updating its page or adding additional posts. two groups of the interviewed decreased in number of mem- bers or followers by . their characteristics are high- lighted in table . table . typology of blm social media accounts. number percentagea affiliation with blm national network linked to national network % unclear link % no explicit link % type of social justice engagement systemic oppression of black people % criminal justice/police brutality % affirmation/empowerment of black people % combination or other % level of engagement direct action % providing information to broader community % dialogue and online discussion % other forms of self-identification college/educational group % ally group % book club/book discussion group % women’s groups % other distinct form of self- identification % apercentage is percentage of groups out of the social media accounts providing sufficient profile information to be included in these characterizations, rounded to the nearest whole number. social media + society data collection and analysis interviews with the organizations were conducted by the first two authors using skype or phone and recorded using audio recording software. interviews ranged from to min. all interviews used a semi-structured protocol focusing on three primary topic areas: group histories, use of social media, and connections with other blm organizations. however, in line with semi-structured interviewing practices, we allowed interviewees to expand upon those areas they found most rel- evant, leading to different emphases in our interview data for each group. once data were collected, each interview was transcribed verbatim; transcripts were returned to each interviewee for member checking and modifications. subsequently, transcripts were read by all research team members and main themes for analysis were discussed. each team member then coded tran- scripts line-by-line, focusing on the central themes identified. once initial coding was complete, the team addressed discrep- ancies in coding and discussed major connections between codes and broader themes. preliminary findings from the inter- views were written up and sent to all interviewees for member checking, to support the validity of our inferences. in the remainder of this manuscript, we draw on our analysis of this interview data to address the question: how has blm used social media to scale up? we illustrate different roles that social media plays in blm organizing and discuss the chal- lenges that social media use has created for movement activity. blm, social media, and scaling although use of social media by blm organizers was not described as consciously designed or contrived for the spe- cific purpose of fueling growth, it was identified as central in their organizing efforts in three ways: ( ) for mobilizing internal and external resources, ( ) for building coalitions among and between blm groups and other social move- ments, and ( ) for controlling the narrative of the movement. we describe each of these in turn below. social media as a mobilization tool: building internal connections for a number of blm groups, social media was referenced as a tool for building direct, personal ties within the community of blm activists. several group administrators talked about figure . growth of blm social media groups over time, – . the heatmap shows where blm groups were created and where they may have influenced the creation of other groups, using data from the social media groups linked to specific geographic locations. brighter colors indicate high levels of activity in a geographical area during a set period of time. for instance, our analysis shows that groups in the east coast of the united states were created around the same time and place, while groups on the west coast were created at different times. this suggests virality at specific times and geographical region. mundt et al. the immense value of having other blm group leaders online to talk with about personal highs and lows as movement orga- nizers, share ideas, and informally coordinate efforts locally and nationally. for them, social media served as a tool for mobilizing resources in the form of support networks. one blm organizer shared that “before december , i only knew one other person in this [blm] community, directly. and since then, i now know a good, i want to say a good – people, i’m quite sure more than that, that i can actually call and say, ‘look this is what’s happening, i need your sup- port’.” moreover, a recurring challenge cited by leaders of blm groups was leadership attrition due to burn-out. as such, having others to commiserate with and share experiences was recounted as key to maintaining pace and enthusiasm for the cause. one group administrator reflected, [social media] also allows us to be able to network, it allows people in another region to be like, “okay, i send solidarity,” to say, “i feel you.” that gives you the extra push and rejuvenation that you need sometimes in this organizing field. and also, you are doing all this work but a lot of folks are not doing the work with you, right? but then a lot of people are having similar problems and doing similar work around the world and so it allows you to be like, ‘okay, i see what you are doing. how did you get through that? alright, okay. i’m gonna do that over here.’ and it allows us to be a whole network without being right in front of each other’s faces. an additional, and important, benefit highlighted in this quote is the possibility for conversations among leadership online, leading to new initiatives or expansion of existing programming or events between locations. for example, if a vigil or speaker series showed success in one city or town with a blm presence, leaders disseminated success stories to other blm coordinators or administrators. this indicates the importance of access to one another’s work and high- lights how social media can open a path for transmission of ideas and knowledge among widely dispersed activists within a given movement. the strong connections forged among blm activists also suggests that social media can strengthen connections among activists in ways that greatly exceed the creation of “weak ties” indicated in existing scholarship (hwang & kim, ; nien, ). social media as a mobilization tool: generating external resources in addition to building connections among groups within the blm movement, group administrators highlighted the salience of social media for mobilizing resources from out- siders and lay movement members. for instance, given that social media pages are largely accessible without the need to sign-up or attend in-person meetings or events, blm groups online can quickly build and link-up large numbers of fol- lowers, and several mentioned gaining followers simply through maintaining an online presence. online networking features such as “likes” or “followers” also augment the pro- file and status of a group with the click of a button. the fol- lowing quote from an interview with the administrator of a very active southwestern blm group is a particularly good example of this function in practice: facebook, it’s a tool. it’s just about: “did you know this was going on?” we cross-share events. we basically tell people, “hey this is going on here, this is going on there, the school board is happening here.” that’s what we do. and because of the heavy use of social media with the demographic we have, the information spreads like wildfire. of the groups we interviewed, this particular group saw the most substantial growth throughout our research window. however, it was not the only group acknowledging the table . characteristics of black lives matter groups intervieweda. interviewee no. members of blm network (year/no.) approximate sizeb geographic location self-identificationc y ~ , southwestern us n ~ , online only discussion group unclear ~ , southeastern us n ~ , southwestern us university-based group n ~ online; international ally group; women’s group n ~ , online only ally group; discussion group unclear ~ , west coast us n ~ , northwestern us university-based group n ~ , mid-atlantic us n ~ , midwestern us n ~ , midwestern us blm: black lives matter. aspecific group locations and names have been removed to preserve the confidentiality and ensure the safety of activists interviewed. bsize refers to number of followers as of november . cself-identification is included only for those accounts categorized as something other than a location-based blm group. social media + society importance of spreading information about its events, and thus gaining followers, through social media. another group administrator highlighted, “we are firm believers in the orga- nizing capability of social media to make people come together. you can get , people together in hours.” indeed, all but two of our interviewees highlighted the importance of social media as a tool for organizing events, protests, or marches and for getting word about them out to potential attendees. capitalizing on the online audience built through their facebook, twitter, and/or instagram accounts, blm groups stated that they regularly create event pages or posts which are published on the groups’ feed to encourage supporters to take to the streets. several groups explained that these events are then shared by themselves or their fol- lowers to other networks, exponentially and quickly growing the number of potential attendees. one group administrator we spoke to described a march that the group organized in the wake of the alton sterling and philando castile shoot- ings. he noted that in a very short amount of time, the event quickly grew to over people who were committed to attending: social media, you know, worked as an amplifier. [. . . ] i don’t want to say made it more legit because it’s legit either way, but it definitely adds more sound to your voice and it allows you to reach people that you otherwise wouldn’t have reached. another group administrator seconded this, stating, “i’ve seen from my own personal experience of putting [up] a facebook event or even a facebook post go from likes and hits to people showing up for an event.” administrators noted the importance of posting specific action steps rather than just highlighting traumatic things happening in their community and describing different ways in which individuals might get involved, for example, pro- testing or attending in-person events, writing letters, and making calls to legislators for successful mobilization. beyond its potential for getting people involved with con- crete actions and on-the-ground events, a key benefit of open access to information enabled via social media was the ability to obtain both community support and funding. our findings in this regard reinforce and expand upon the emerging literature about activist use of digital resource mobilization, in particular as this suggests the importance of social media as a platform for resource-limited activists (doan & toledano, ). for instance, administrators in one west coast explained, we are so grassroots that we don’t get money through anywhere else but through people power. that’s like the only way that we reach people, by using social media to get people to see what we are doing so that they feel comfortable and willing enough to donate to our cause. they noted that the group uses social media as a platform for connecting with better-resourced groups (e.g. of white allies) and to put out calls for donations or requests for specific resources needed for their events and longer term initiatives. other groups talked about receiving grants, venue space, ride sharing, or other services, all facilitated through social media pages and communication tools therein. one administrator attributed the group’s fundraising success to a strong communications strategy, noting that based on their strong social media strategy for one event, a sponsor reached out with an offer of funding support. the administrator noted, “social media is a space to demonstrate that you know what you are doing. you don’t have to pitch your idea at the office.” another administrator noted, “when we need some- thing we’ll just post, ‘we need this’.” she explained that she would receive messages from people who had seen the post and were willing to help and that those messages were often the start of relationships with new supporters of the group’s work who then remained actively engaged. having wit- nessed the value of social media for this purpose, some groups have now formalized fundraising platforms on their profiles through the introduction of “donate now” buttons and links to other donation sites. social media as a coalition building tool among the recurrent themes that emerged among blm group administrators was the significance of social media for building connections and coalitions with other groups in the movement to facilitate strategic action. this kind of coalition building occurred in the form of the development of partner- ships between groups, in contrast with the creation of rela- tionships among individual leaders characterizing what we describe as building internal connections. administrators of a group in the southwest noted, we are in contact with other blm organizations throughout the country, so we use it just by inviting them on facebook, or, like, they like our page, we like their page. it allows us to link up with other people who are doing the same work as us. administrators of a midwestern blm group likewise noted, “all the chapters [in our state]. . . we get together often, and we all do events together.” their statement speaks to the way that social media facilitates connections between groups that can move beyond a purely online presence and in some cases can further increase event turnout. it is important to note that while connecting with other groups on social media occurred widely, there did not seem to be a single set of criteria for developing partnerships. for instance, some connections took the form of within move- ment coalitions between other groups using the #blacklivesmatter banner or group name. groups talked about how this sort of partnership was facilitated by a simple search for “black lives matter” online. for example, one midwestern group discussed a message they had received from an activist who was looking for connections to local groups in her area, but had been unable to locate these groups mundt et al. on her own. she contacted this group because of its public social media presence and apparent association with the movement: “we had someone down from louisiana who was very worried about the police, asking us for help. [. . . ] she just happened to find us somewhere on facebook, so she inboxed us and asked us for help, because she saw that we were black lives matter.” social media in this instance helped this individual connect to a blm group elsewhere that, through their own connections, was able to link her into the movement. another group administrator noted that she happened to meet some members of another blm group at one of their events, and “we connected and so then we became facebook friends and then i stayed connected that way [with what they were doing].” in addition, several administrators spoke about connecting with multiple groups through conference calls hosted by national blm leadership and using these connections to learn new strategies or about the kinds of events undertaken around the country. in other words, social media facilitated both the initial process of connecting to blm or specific blm groups and the possibil- ity of learning from blm activists in different places. alternatively, many groups we interviewed talked about building cross-movement coalitions within a wider move- ment network, that is, coalitions of blm and non-blm groups or movements, both local and national. one group shared a powerful story of how social media contributed to bringing a diverse group of movement leaders and followers together for an event that was organized immediately follow- ing the orlando pulse nightclub mass shooting: [we] organized a series of vigils here the day of the shooting, so by that sunday evening at o’clock we had, i think it was - people. but the thing is, i posted about that event at like o’clock that morning, and i had been so busy because i was out and about and like doing interviews and talking to the press and they were coordinating with elected officials at that point to make statements at different press conferences. and what came of that is, i hadn’t realized that people literally started emailing things and people were like taking screenshots of this event. and the next thing you know, like, the [local] lgbt chorus was like “oh, we are going to come sing,” and then the other groups started calling up “oh we are going to come too.” and there was this intersectional prayer where each group got to say something from their group. and i represented the atheist community and i was in the middle of it in purple so out of about who were told by word of mouth how, and it’s, it’s amazing how fast it actually spread, and that was my moment of like “what the hell just happened here?” in addition to its potential for bringing together diverse groups of activists around specific events, administrators we spoke with also noted the importance of social media for building longer term coalitions with lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (lgbtq); women; immigrant; and “brown” groups. one group talked about this type of coali- tion building as “the rising tide lifts all boats” and supporting “the least among you,” asserting that social media provided an accessible way to do this: if you see trans women of color and they are looking to like amplify, and they’re talking about something that affects that the least among you, you amplify that. you retweet that, you repost that. you write a comment and say this is the reason why you are posting this. and you bring in allies to the world and you show it and you live it. another group administrator stated, we’ve shared a lot of information about what was happening in standing rock, you know, those kinds of things are relevant because they have to do with the discourse in this country and what’s happening. when you open yourself up to that, you see the patterns more clearly. these statements suggest that through transmission of infor- mation among and between groups, social media plays an important role in building knowledge about the systemic nature of oppression across different populations and thus allows groups facing shared institutional marginalization to create connections and potentially work together to chal- lenge systemic injustices. our research thus suggests social media facilitates coalition building in ways that extend beyond the creation of loosely connected networks or shared ideology, as suggested by existing scholarship (baron, ; nien, ). specifically, social media creates opportunities for amplifying the causes of like-minded activists. this occurs in terms of disseminating information about other areas of focus, and also by using social media platforms to “comment on” and engage with those issues in the process of information transmission. in other words, social media cre- ates opportunities for developing interactive relationships with like-minded activists in ways that extend beyond tradi- tional forms of coalition-based organizing. social media as a narrative amplification tool coalition building, personal networking, and resource mobi- lization all speak to significant roles social media can play in scaling movements such as blm. however, according to our interviewees, perhaps the most notable function of social media is providing activists with the ability to control their own narrative, thus creating awareness and visibility for the issues that the movement addresses. this stands in contrast with the way blm activists discussed portrayal of the move- ment in traditional and mainstream forms of media. for instance, one group shared, “social media provides us a plat- form to tell our story as real, as raw, and as relevant as it may be, without the worry of a filter being put on, or someone else’s perspectives and biases.” moreover, social media tools facilitate amplification of preferred narratives through func- tions such as “repost” or “share” options. social media + society groups also noted that social media provides an open source venue for a direct counter narrative. a blm group administrator in the mid-atlantic region spoke about social media as being more credible than traditional news media, using the example of reporting from a protest: i actually went to baltimore when the freddie gray uprisings happened. and i could see how accurate twitter was, versus what the media was saying. like, i was standing beside the person who was doing the tweeting. and then i see what the media says . . . well now, all the sudden, that’s another thing. now you know, before you didn’t, before you were taught to trust the media, to trust the source like the washington post, like the new york times. you couldn’t cite the internet before . . . you can actually cite twitter, now you can actually cite facebook, and it’s because now there’s more credibility, there’s more exposure. you can actually find the people, the grassroots activists and be there and watch and see and their videotaping and then i can read the same article [in the mainstream media], or an article of accounts of the same day and i can say, “that did not happen.” as these quotations show, the use of social media for pre- senting and amplifying non-dominant narratives highlights an important function of digital platforms in contributing to shifts in public discourse. indeed, this suggests a far more significant role for social media in movement scaling than the existing literature on meaning making indicates (e.g., kavada, ; milan, ), because social media use enables movements not only to create a shared narrative, but to easily and quickly disseminate that narrative as a contrast to existing, mainstream discourse. given the significance of discursive or cultural shifts for movement scaling (authors, submitted), this further illustrates the role social media can play in broadening movement impact. challenges and risks while social media plays an important role for blm groups, there are also challenges to its use. our findings, in fact, sug- gest that these go beyond the primary limitations described in existing literature and include complacency, ideological blurring, and concrete (sometimes physical) risks to activists with an online presence. first, as group administrators emphasized, social media, on its own, cannot build and/or sustain movements for social change. real change, they posited, can only be achieved when social media is coupled with more traditional forms of organizing. one west coast blm group administrator stated, you can start a facebook [group], but it’s how you get people engaged, how you get people to follow you, how you get people to know what’s up. you got to hit the streets too. and that’s what a lot of people don’t want to do, they don’t want to do that part. and that’s why like, facebook only goes so far. thus, while an online presence is beneficial, its accessi- bility can also present limitations in terms of potentially allowing people to feel they have achieved something simply through their virtual participation—a phenomenon known as “slacktivism” (morozov, ). while not all digital partici- pation is meaningless, our interviewees noted that social media in combination with ground-level activism is a more influential and powerful combination for building the move- ment. in the words of another blm group administrator in the southwestern us: “we hit social heavily, and we travel so we can talk with people on other side of the country. we are firm believers in the organizing capability of social media to make people come together.” moreover, despite possibilities created for strengthening blm through social media, these same platforms also miti- gate opportunities for broadening the movement’s reach. the accessibility of social media platforms, for instance, limits possibilities for activists to fully control who is, or is not, part of the movement, or how its primary framing symbol—the hashtag #blacklivesmatter—is utilized. even among groups that support the values blm promotes, not all fit neatly into the movement, as the wide range of issues in our social media account database highlights in terms of areas of focus as well as level of engagement with advocacy and direct action to address systemic injustices against black lives. of the group administrators we interviewed, two groups were led by white women in solidarity with the movement but otherwise unaffiliated with blm or the movement for black lives. the primary focus of these groups, unlike many of the oth- ers, was to foster a greater understanding and awareness of police violence and structural racism among white follow- ers. one group shared that they had even considered limiting membership only to white females and noted that black group members were frequently “silenced” by other mem- bers deleting or derailing their threads. thus, these groups are in a position of working to advance the movement, but they are not part of “a collective that centers and is rooted in black communities,” as the movement for black lives’ plat- form states. these two groups were also notable in that they have no on-the-ground organizing component: they exist solely online as platforms for discussions among primarily white individuals. thus, though many of the blm groups we inter- viewed stressed their support of “ally-ship,” these two groups demonstrate how, given the accessibility of social media platforms and the ease with which symbols can be adopted, the hashtag and the name can be applied to many types of initiatives that may not fully align with the movement’s cen- tral platform. in other words, these groups may share the same fundamental values as the blm movement. however, given their lack of focus on direct action to address the demands of the movement for black lives, as well as their focus on the white community specifically, sometimes to the exclusion of black voices, it seems unlikely that activists formally aligned with blm would perceive them to be part of the movement. indeed, as one of the administrators we interviewed explained, “we are not an official group and mundt et al. have no connection to any other group. probably we shouldn’t even call ourselves black lives matter.” the nature of these two groups in particular points to the way that social media use can potentially hinder positive movement impact by making it easier for groups to adopt or appropriate symbols even if they do not share the collective identity or primary focus of the movement. this can ulti- mately blur movement messaging, something that in the case of blm is further exacerbated by the existence of numerous social media groups that use the blm frame, but which embody values not fully aligned with those promoted by blm as a movement. our findings suggest that the catchi- ness of the #blacklivesmatter hashtag can serve to constrain impact by broadening the range of issues included under the blm umbrella and facilitating opportunities for disseminat- ing counter-messages. this finding emphasizes that social media presents a challenge to controlled framing with “sticky” content, as in the world of marketing, because the open-ended and participatory nature of social media engen- ders “spreadable” content that, while easy to share and engage with, “leads to audiences using content in unantici- pated ways as they retrofit material to the contours of their particular community” (jenkins, ford, & green, , p. ). those opposing blm’s message also target blm group media platforms to disrupt or divert attention away from the cause. one group administrator noted that this was a particu- lar issue in social media spaces, saying, when we first started this facebook group, we spent a lot of our lives online arguing with people, painful argument after painful argument, with folks popping up in response with a knee-jerk response, often racist, about groups mobilizing around racial justice. another group administrator explained, “social media gives everyone a chance to have an opinion about what you do and don’t do.” for many of the groups, these opinions come in the form of comments related to the counter-move- ment #alllivesmatter. group administrators noted that much of this “trolling” occurs as a way of trying to shut down the conversation altogether, that is, by using the com- ment “all lives matter” as a way of saying, “shut up.” the ability to disseminate information broadly and quickly through social media is thus juxtaposed with a need to constantly monitor the space, diverting resources away from amplifying the movement’s central messages. in fact, blm group administrators spoke to the immense amount of time they dedicate to moderating their online social media profiles, in large part to stay on the defensive front against unsavory narratives or outright criticism. some groups take preventive measures such as closing groups to followers only or requiring administrative review before accepting new members. however, these approaches ultimately limit public accessibility and the potential for reaching a broader audience. this further highlights the tensions in using social media as a platform for scaling: while it greatly facilitates opportunities for information transmission, the ease with which opponents can access these same social media plat- forms means that there is a constant need to monitor what is being posted online. in addition, blm group administrators are in the meta- phorical as well as actual line of fire when it comes to secu- rity risks introduced by being associated so visibly with their public pages. although activists in general are at risk of ver- bal or physical attacks from opposition parties or authorities, online activism through social media extends that risk to hr a day, days a week. in an age where the lines are regu- larly blurred between public and private life online, blm group administrators can easily be tracked down at home or in their local neighborhoods should someone wish to take spiteful measures. several group leaders mentioned that they experience a constant sensation of being watched. one administrator shared, “i made a facebook event for a vigil we held for terence crutcher. literally minutes later i got a call from [the local] federal bureau of investigation (fbi) branch.” another group administrator noted, “the police use social media a lot to like stalk and look at you and so you know that you are not alone.” beyond institutional surveil- lance, blm activists pointed to the threat of recognition by the public at large. one mentioned receiving death threats, and another pointed out that as a result of this work, your private life is completely out the window. people are legit starting to recognize us now. it’s just like, it’s gotten to the sense of celebrity, more than ever—something i don’t want. we don’t use our real names . . . but somehow people figure out our full, like our entire names, and everything about us. these statements point to the more challenging aspects of using social media as a platform for engaging in or building movement activities, illustrating that, despite its potential benefits, social media can significantly exacerbate physical risks already associated with nonviolent civil disobedience and activism. conclusion as our case study of blm indicates, social media use by contemporary movements with a significant online presence highlights opportunities that these platforms create for broadening the reach of and strengthening connections between group members, thus suggesting its potential as a tool for scaling movement endeavors. in particular, our inter- views illustrate the key role that social media plays in mean- ing making and resource mobilization, which can build coalitions both within and across-movements and thus expand movement impact. the salience of connectivity that social media creates for these groups suggests that regardless of their on-the-ground or other organizing, blm groups perceive themselves to be social media + society part of a larger blm movement, in large part because of rela- tionships formed through social media platforms. this sense of connectivity points to an important benefit of social media for strengthening and scaling social movements: the possi- bility of helping far-flung activists develop a sense of collec- tive identity. as scholars have long noted, collective identity is central to social movement work and indeed plays a key role in strengthening the identity of movement activists and keeping them engaged in movement endeavors (shaw, ; valocchi, ). our research indicates that digital spaces create new opportunities for the development of collective movement identity. thus, our work suggests that we should further extend the focus of research on internet activism as described in earl et al.’s ( ) typology, from viewing digi- tal platforms solely as spaces for logistical organizing and/or mobilization of resources to spaces for strengthening move- ments and creating coalitions (earl & kimport, ). indeed, our research presents a unique contribution by high- lighting the significance of social media for coalition build- ing activism. in addition, findings from our study significantly extend our understanding of social media’s importance with respect to the potential for collective meaning making and shaping of discourse. these areas have been addressed only briefly in empirical scholarship; both deserve further study in the context of contemporary social movements. all of the activists with whom we spoke indicated, either explicitly or implicitly, that benefits of social media out- weigh its costs. however, given the real, physical risks asso- ciated with social media use, especially for activists who are simultaneously organizing and engaged in on-the-ground initiatives, it’s important to think about potential unintended, and likely unwanted, impacts of using social media as a scal- ing tool. in particular, we encourage further exploration into the way that digital spaces and knowledge transmitted through them can potentially enable counter-protests or even risk of physical harm to activists. research to date has pri- marily addressed these issues from the perspective of state control and surveillance, yet our interviews suggest that tar- geting by “trolls” or counter-protesters is an issue that needs to be taken seriously. finally, it is important to note the inherent challenge in exploring scaling of a broader movement using a single case study. even for the case of blm specifically, our mixed methods approach combining an analysis of online profiles and interviews with activists administering individual, autonomous blm groups around the united states, falls short of speaking for the movement as a whole. our data points to the highly localized nature of these groups and the initiatives they support. moreover, our interviews were con- ducted only with blm groups that have (or had) an active social media presence. therefore, while our research pro- vides important insights about the relevance of social media for scaling groups within one social movements, our analysis is limited by its failure to include groups that may function primarily or entirely outside of the digital sphere or outside of common social media platforms. given the preponderance of groups associated with blm around the united states and internationally, it is difficult to know how many and where such groups exist. discussions with members from such groups would likely provide further insights into social movement scaling possibilities and challenges associated with social media use. declaration of conflicting interests the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article: this work was supported by a grant from private funder sidney topol. notes . doxxing, or doxing, refers to the practice of publishing iden- tifying or private information about individuals. this often occurs with malicious intent (mcnealy, ). . see https://policy.m bl.org/about/ . it is important to note that affiliation as a formal chapter of the blm network was based on self-identification and in many cases did not match the chapters listed on the blm network website. we were unable to clarify, either by information available on social media or via interviews, the basis for for- mal affiliation and/or criteria for joining the network. . we attempted to explore the spread of blm over time but were unable to find creation dates for many of the social media accounts identified and were thus unable to do so. . our database is current through april , when initial com- pilation was completed. . it is important to note that in many cases, self-identification as part of the national movement did not match the chapters listed on the blm network website. we were unable to clarify, either by information available on social media or via inter- views, the basis for formal affiliation and/or criteria for joining the network. . in terms of both type and level of engagement, those groups not explicitly focused on one of these areas did not share this information in this profile and/or emphasized solidary/adher- ence to the focus of the national blm movement. . see https://policy.m bl.org/platform/ orcid id karen ross https://orcid.org/ - - - references ackerman, p., & duvall, j. 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( ). social media and the activ- ist toolkit: user agreements, corporate interests, and the infor- mation infrastructure of modern social movements. journal of communication, , – . author biographies marcia mundt (mspp university of massachusetts boston/ma university of bradford) is a jennings randolph peace scholar at the united states institute of peace and a topol peace fellow and phd candidate in public policy at the university of massachusetts boston. her research interests include the intersection of policy and peace-making, locally led mechanisms for peace building, and cross-sectoral best practices in post-conflict contexts. karen ross (phd, indiana university) is an assistant professor of conflict resolution at the university of massachusetts boston. her research focuses on methodological and conceptual intersections between peace building, education, and sociopolitical activism. charla m burnett (ma, school for international training) is a student/ researcher of global governance and human security the university of massachusetts boston. her research interests include critical femi- nism, migration, geo-spatial technologies, and organizational change. https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/facebook-cambridge-analytica.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/facebook-cambridge-analytica.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/facebook-cambridge-analytica.html s jed .. editor’s corner lynn h. gamble t his issue of american antiquity is signifi- cant in many ways. it comes out in the midst of a covid- pandemic, the black lives matter movement, uncontrolled fires in the west, and more frequent and destructive storms. we are experiencing rapid social shifts and dramatic effects of climate change. many arti- cles in this issue are noteworthy, but two, in addi- tion to the “statement and commitments from saa editors,” are of special relevance to today’s challenges. tim kohler and marcy rockman’s “forum” brings to the forefront the intergovern- mental panel on climate change, a global organ- ization that is leading research about the effects of the changing climate on economic and social institutions and strategies to address these impacts. kohler and rockman propose direct approaches that archaeologists can take to make significant contributions to the many efforts by scientists from multiple disciplines on this committee. as their article demonstrates, archaeologists need to continue to conscientiously work with inter- national leaders and specialists in addressing con- temporary issues where we have considerable expertise and knowledge. this leads to a second article that is also of major relevance today, written by maria franklin and samuel wilson, on a bioarchaeological study of african americans’ health in the post emanci- pation south. although the black lives matter movement began following the death of trayvon martin in , with the death of george floyd in minneapolis at the end of may it expanded into an international recognition that dynamic and rapid actions needed to take place to affect meaningful change. this is why the edi- tors of the saa publications wrote a statement and action plan that is published in the current issue. the submission of franklin and wilson’s substantial study came in late last fall, prior to the events of today’s international move- ment. when i first saw the topic of their paper, i wondered if it would be a better fit for a journal specializing in historical archaeology. then i read it and saw that it was not only a significant contribution to bioarchaeology but also a reflec- tion on the deeply ingrained health disparities in the united states. the reviewers also recognized its relevance to the audience of american antiquity. although it is a coincidence that this paper was submitted right before the inter- national movement expanded, we are pleased to feature this as our lead article in the current issue. join me in acknowledging these authors’ contributions and reading their thoughts during these unsettled times. american antiquity ( ), , p. copyright © by the society for american archaeology doi: . /aaq. . 	 http://www.aejonline.org open access african evaluation journal issn: (online) - , (print) - page of editorial read online: scan this qr code with your smart phone or mobile device to read online. authors: mark abrahams matodzi amisi cara h. hartley caitlin blaser-mapitsa volker schoër nedson pophiwa affiliations: southern hemisphere, cape town, south africa clear-aa, university of witwatersrand, johannesburg; south african monitoring and evaluation association, johannesburg, south africa palmer development group, cape town; south african monitoring and evaluation association, johannesburg, south africa school of governance, faculty of commerce, law, and management, university of the witwatersrand, johannesburg, south africa department of economics and finance, faculty of commerce, law and management, university of the witwatersrand, johannesburg, south africa clear aa, school of governance, university of the witwatersrand, johannesburg, south africa corresponding author: mark abrahams, marka@iafrica.com the south african monitoring and evaluation association (samea) endeavours to build a community of experts and practitioners that will support, guide and strengthen the development of monitoring and evaluation (m&e) as an important discipline, profession and instrument for empowerment and accountability in south africa. the south african monitoring and evaluation association hosted its biennial m&e conference with the theme ‘m&e for sustainable future’ in november . the theme was borne out of recognition that our world is ever changing and problems that societies are grappling with are vast and complex. in coining the theme, samea recognised that for m&e to be able to meet the requirement of providing relevant evidence, some aspects of the profession and the practice will need to adapt. methods, tools, theories and approaches will need to work within the context of those who must use the evidence provided by m&e. otherwise the profession will become irrelevant. monitoring and evaluation must be able to offer responsive and relevant evidence to decision-makers so that they are able to help shape their understanding of the challenges faced and ameliorative interventions needed. the conference provided an ideal platform for emerging evaluators to share their experiences, to learn from each other and to develop spaces for new and emerging voices to be heard. at the time of planning the conference, samea could not have foreseen how relevant that topic will become. from november our world has been gripped by the covid- pandemic, which has infected millions of people across the world, reduced both local and cross-border mobility because of travel restrictions and claimed the lives of thousands of people. it is anticipated that the impact of the pandemic will be felt over many years to come. this includes the health outcomes that are still to be understood, the impact of closure of colleges and schools, economic contraction and loss of livelihoods. it is anticipated that more likely than not, the pandemic will widen existing inequalities. in addition, the calls for racial equality that were renewed through the black lives matter uprising over decades of police brutality and other forms of systemic racism led to a wider movement across the globe to end prejudice and systemic exclusion. the evaluation sector was not spared. pertinent questions have been asked about prejudice in the evaluation sector, about power and white supremacy. these have been difficult and uncomfortable questions for the sector to grapple with, but questions we must grapple with for the profession to remain relevant and serve its purpose as a means for social justice. these events resonate with the samea conference theme and have made the special edition pertinent. the pandemic has highlighted evermore the importance of national monitoring and evaluation capacity and country-led evaluations. each country is affected differently depending on socio-economic, health, political and other factors. also as travel bans were instituted, evidence was needed from those with direct access to what is happening in communities and deeper knowledge of local contexts. the need for evaluation practice that does not merely mimic global practice, but through learning from international trends and developments, remains rooted in producing evidence that is locally relevant and helps countries navigate complexity has been evident. the development of a literature that represents the diversity of voices in shaping the practice is essential to the creation of a transformative discipline and profession. this special edition is an important developmental project of samea. voluntary organizations for professional evaluation the seventh biennial south african monitoring and evaluation association conference : shaping m&e for a sustainable future – editorial read online: scan this qr code with your smart phone or mobile device to read online. how to cite this article: abrahams, m., amisi, m., hartley, c.h., blaser-mapitsa, c., schoër, v. & pophiwa, n., , ‘the seventh biennial south african monitoring and evaluation association conference : shaping m&e for a sustainable future – editorial’, african evaluation journal ( ), a . https://doi.org/ . /aej.v i . copyright: © . the authors. licensee: aosis. this work is licensed under the creative commons attribution license. note: special collection: samea th biennial conference . http://www.aejonline.org� https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:marka@iafrica.com http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /aej.v i . =pdf&date_stamp= - - https://doi.org/ . /aej.v i . � page of editorial http://www.aejonline.org open access (vope) in africa and other developing countries have to be at the forefront of supporting efforts to strengthen national evaluation capacity and creating generative space where ideas emerging from practice and in academic delivery of m&e in their countries can find expression and publication. vopes should encourage authorship and development of academic grade publication from the innovative and impactful work that is happening in the continent. this is critical to address the perceived general scarcity of evaluation capacity, thought leadership and theory development in africa. this special edition is an effort to add to the growing body of knowledge about m&e practice in africa. it also ensures that robust discussions that took place during the conference can be accessed by a wider audience. articles in the special edition speak of pertinent discipline issues, share lessons from practice and offer some forward looking from perspectives of emerging evaluators. the special edition opens with a practitioner reflection article by samea partner and collaborator over the years, the centre for learning on evaluation and research-anglophone africa. drawing from years experience of building and strengthening national evaluation capacity in africa, the article shares critical observations on how m&e is evolving in the continent, the organisation’s system building approach to capacity building and lessons that have been learnt. these lessons and insights question some of the assumptions that underlie approaches to capacity building and would be of interest for researchers of m&e, involved in capacity building initiatives or teaching m&e. in ‘monitoring and evaluation in a changing world: the skills needed for a new approach’, rosenberg and kotschy ( ) reframe monitoring and evaluation skills needed in an integrated, complex world facing climate change as technical, relational and transformational competencies. this reframing implies a range of shifts in the way evaluation is viewed and evaluators are trained. wildschut and silubonde ( ) discuss the formal training of evaluators in south africa. they offer a framework for understanding the supply and demand elements shaping evaluation education. based on the current supply and demand drivers they make recommendations for strengthening evaluation education. the article is instructive for other contexts well beyond the universities where education takes place. specifically looking at impact evaluation, erasmus, jordaan and stewart ( ) respond to the perception that there is insufficient impact evaluation capacity in sub-saharan africa, which necessitates the reliance on international experts, especially from the global north, to lead and conduct impact evaluations on the african continent. by scoping the impact evaluation capacity in sub-saharan africa, they challenge this view and identify substantial pockets of impact evaluation capacity across african regions and initiatives that have grown the pool of african impact evaluation expertise. whilst their findings are promising, impact evaluation capacity still seems to be concentrated in particular countries, disciplines and institutions. thus, building on these existing pockets, the drive to increase impact evaluation capacity in sub- saharan africa through various african evaluation capacity development programmes needs to continue. lomofsky and grout-smith unpack how organisational learning from evaluative evidence can be facilitated using case study of comic relief, a grant-making organisation that is implementing a new learning agenda through its ‘i define me!’ (idm) initiative. they illustrate ways in which the grant-maker supports learning through its grant-making practices and learning facilitation especially amongst its beneficiaries who comprise mostly the not-for-profit sector organisations. the article critically engages the pitfalls of results based management (rbm) paradigm in which organisations often end up proving a vision of success, rather than honestly learning from their implementation experience: an important contribution to ongoing efforts to ensure use of evaluative evidence. the potential for civil society to play a meaningful role in governance of countries on the african continent has been a consistent theme over the last decade. the article by mine, amisi, david-gnahoui, bedu-addo and goldman ( ) explores how civil society organisations have become involved in the use of evidence-based policy formulation and practices in specific countries, benin, south africa, kenya and ghana and four specific sectors namely, agriculture; violence against women and children; sanitation and wildlife. the article draws on case study research on evidence use in africa that formed part of a broader, recently published edited text ‘using evidence for policy and practice – lessons from africa’ that adds significantly to our understanding of the roles and functions that are possible for civil society organisations (csos). the authors contend, that for csos to engage with greater success, countries need to establish relationships and trust through dialogue, supported by strong facilitation, knowledge brokering and well-defined guidelines and incentives. kgaphola and jacob ( ) challenge the predominant focus on summative evaluations within government. using case study of a formative evaluation of the south african government hiv and aids programme ‘you only live once’ colloquially known as yolo, the article demonstrates how the evaluation was useful for adaptive management in the implementation of the programme. the authors share some limitations and difficulties in utilising formative evaluation evidence within government and offer possible solutions. the article argues for the importance of evaluator involvement in programme design and implementation not only at the evaluation stage. it also makes a case about the usefulness of formative evaluation within government, a topic without much literature. in ‘revealing mechanisms in transdisciplinary community reforestation research programme,’ rosenberg and ward http://www.aejonline.org� page of editorial http://www.aejonline.org open access ( ) apply realist evaluation tools to better understand the results of a transdisciplinary research project. they found that mechanisms identified in the evaluation process such as orientations to research and environmental management, play an important role in the success of local sustainability initiatives and better understanding them may support the success of such work in the future. which voices get to shape evidence, knowledge and decisions? in their article, jansen van rensburg and jansen van rensburg ( ) reflect on the role of child participation. they offer perspectives of children on their contributions and participation in developing a document. through an open-ended survey, the children reflected on several critical themes such as enjoyment, satisfaction, learning and awareness that they gleaned from the activity. the study concluded that children contribute unique and valuable perspectives to governance and the evaluation process. this special edition concludes with an article co-authored by a samea board member and two emerging evaluators awarded the emerging evaluator samea award. for emerging evaluators and those with a role in supporting them ngwabi, mpyana and mapatwana ( ) provide a view into several key aspects of the emerging evaluator landscape: the views and recommendations of the emerging evaluators themselves – showing the differences and similarities across their different sectors, the emerging evaluators programme of samea as a vope and international thinking and initiatives in this regard. acknowledgements competing interests the authors declare that they have no financial or personal relationships that may have inappropriately influenced them in writing this editorial. http://www.aejonline.org� by giuliana viglione & nidhi subbaraman n early five years ago, the black justice league student group at princeton university in new jersey organized a sit-in at the office of the institution’s president to demand that woodrow wilson’s name be removed from its vaunted public-policy programme. when he was president of princeton from to , wilson discouraged the enrol- ment of black students, and as president of the united states from to , he supported segregating white and black employees in the federal government. although the sit-in didn’t convince princeton’s trustees to wipe wilson’s name, this year’s wave of demonstra- tions against racism prompted action. the pro- tests, sparked when george floyd was killed by police in minneapolis, minnesota, in may, are part of the black lives matter movement, which calls for an end to police violence and systemic racism against black people. in june, princeton announced that it would rename the programme, as well as a residential college. the university is not alone in rethinking its legacy. in june, the university of southern california (usc) in los angeles removed a former president’s name from a central cam- pus building because he supported eugenics. in the same month, the university of mons in belgium removed a bust of leopold ii, the belgian king who at the turn of the twenti- eth century led a brutal and bloody colonial campaign in what is now the democratic republic of the congo. and in july, cold spring harbor laboratory in new york removed dna scientist james watson’s name from its princeton university will rename a programme to remove association with woodrow wilson, who discouraged enrolment of black students. m e l e v a n s /a p /s h u t t e r s t o c k activists are glad to see progress, but now call for deeper cultural change in academia. universities scrub names of racist leaders — students say it’s a first step nature | vol | august | the world this week news in focus © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. biological-sciences graduate programme, citing his past racist comments. the black lives matter movement has spurred institutions worldwide to announce that they will change or review the names of campus buildings, programmes and memo- rials dedicated to scientists and other figures who had discriminatory beliefs. many of these announcements followed years-long campaigns by students and faculty members who risked their careers to remake their insti- tutions from within. “we got to a tipping point,” says susan reverby, a historian of medicine who studies equality and ethics in public health at wellesley college in massachusetts. “but we wouldn’t have gotten to the tipping point if people hadn’t done all the work they’ve been doing for generations to try to fight this.” still, those who fought for the changes say that renaming buildings is only the first step towards improving diversity and inclusion in academia; they are advocating sustained efforts to transform university culture. delayed action like princeton, many of the institutions that have recently renamed buildings and memo- rials had earlier opportunities to do so and didn’t take them. “it’s not that princeton changed its mind, it’s that public opinion changed around them,” says abyssinia lissanu, a graduate student in public policy who is part of the princeton policy school demands group, one of several that have been pressuring the administration to make the university more inclusive. in february, university college london (ucl) committed to dropping the names of francis galton and karl pearson, celebrated statisticians who supported eugenics, from buildings and lecture halls on campus. “then there was a long pause and nothing happened,” says michael sulu, a ucl biochemical engineer who campaigned for the removal of the names. according to a university spokesperson, the covid- pandemic delayed action. after george floyd died and worldwide protests erupted, ucl announced on june that three spaces would have galton’s and pearson’s names removed immediately. they now bear generic names such as lecture theatre . sulu credits student groups at the university with keeping up the pressure to ensure change. similarly, usc convened a task force last year to re-evaluate its campus buildings and memorials. at the top of the list was the von kleinsmid center, one of the universi- ty’s most prominent buildings. the centre, which houses the department of international relations, was named after past usc president rufus von kleinsmid, who was a member of the now-defunct human betterment foun- dation, a eugenics organization in southern california that advocated the forced sterili- zation of people with disabilities. students had been campaigning for the building to be renamed for years. on june, the university abruptly removed letters spelling out von kleinsmid’s name and a bust of the scientist from the building. the recent protests haven’t sparked swift change ever ywhere. in februar y, a stu- dent organization at stanford university in california delivered a formal request that the institution’s leaders rename jordan hall, which houses its psychology department. the building is named after stanford’s founding president, david starr jordan, a marine biologist and famous eugenicist. the psychology faculty delivered its own request with unanimous support for the move the following month. stanford’s naming-review committee says it won’t deliver its recommen- dations until the beginning of the autumn term, although it announced last month that the evaluation was being expedited. at stanford, faculty members were instru- mental in driving action. irene newton, a microbiologist at indiana university bloom- ington (iub) who co-authored a june petition to rename an iub building also named after jordan, says that this is the first time faculty members at her institution have coalesced around the issue, despite previous actions by students. as a faculty member, “you need to look at the power you have and try and make the change you can”, she says. chris jackson, a geoscientist at imperial college london, agrees that faculty members should put their weight behind such efforts. “you have to kind of stand for something. for me, at least, as a professor at a fancy university, what are you going to use your platform for and your position for?” beyond renaming for many, institutional renaming is only a first step towards universities examining their own racist legacies and becoming more inclusive. campus groups are now ratcheting up the pressure to diversify faculty and student bod- ies and to improve support for black academ- ics. “to me, the treatment of the people in the institutions matters just as much as the name that’s on them,” lissanu says. jackson agrees that more action is needed. the renamings are “very low-activation-energy things”, he says. “i’m happy they’ve done at least that.” but he says he’d like to see policy changes with “far more teeth”. more transparency and accountability around how universities handle cases of racism would help to rebuild trust with black academ- ics, jackson says. he also calls for universities to pay the students and faculty members who serve on diversity and equity committees. this sort of “invisible work” is important but isn’t often rewarded monetarily or factored into career-advancement decisions. renaming buildings will be just a gesture if it is not backed up by meaningful change elsewhere on campus, says ben maldonado, who founded the stanford eugenics history project, the student group that petitioned the university to rename jordan hall. and, he adds, that gesture is long overdue. “it’s a thing you have to do but it’s not something that you should praise stanford — or anyone else — for doing.” stanford university’s psychology department commemorates david starr jordan, a eugenicist. a r c h it e c t o u r /a l a m y “the treatment of the people in the institutions matters just as much as the name that’s on them.” | nature | vol | august news in focus © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. quantifying use of lethal zncl on black lives matter demonstrators by united states homeland security juniper l. simonis dapper stats, portland, oregon, united states of america simonis@dapperstats.com orcid: - - - short title: us homeland security uses lethal gas on demonstrators mailto:simonis@dapperstats.com abstract law enforcement’s use of chemical weapons is a threat to human and environmental health, exemplified during racial justice protests in portland, or. in july, us department of homeland security (dhs) agents used an exceptionally toxic and unknown weapon to quell free speech in support of black lives and against federal presence. with significant help from the community, i combined first-hand accounts, videos and photos of munitions, primary literature, and analytical chemistry to identify the weapon as gaseous zncl from hexachloroethane (hc) “smoke” grenades. using bayesian methods, i estimated that dhs deployed ( – ; % ci) hc grenades. given toxicity that is enough zncl to have killed over people. although no fatalities were reported, the exposed population experienced acute, delayed, and persistent health issues. dhs’s wanton use of zncl will have lasting impacts and was identified through a community standing up for black lives. introduction “the use of poison in any manner, be it to poison wells, or food, or arms, is wholly excluded from modern warfare. he that uses it puts himself out of the pale of the law and usages of war.” general orders no. , article , signed president abraham lincoln following the murder of george floyd in minneapolis minnesota on may , black lives matter (blm) protesters took to the streets around the world to demand justice . in present-day portland oregon (on traditional land of chinook, clackamas, cowlitz, kalapuya, kathlamet, molalla, multnomah, tualatin, and wasco tribes), blm protests continued for over a hundred days, only interrupted by hazardous wildfire smoke , . in response to gatherings, various law enforcement agencies have deployed chemical weapons, building upon a legacy of chemical weapons usage by portland police bureau . indeed, since the start of the george floyd protests and as of october , portland had the most total instances of police brutality among us cities ( ) and more chemical attacks ( ) than the next city has total attacks ( ) (fig. ; s appendix) . although they were outlawed for american wartime use by abraham lincoln via the lieber code in and internationally in the hague conventions of and , as well as the geneva protocol of , chemical weapons have a long history of use by law enforcement against civilians to quell unrest , , . this is despite their being fundamentally indiscriminate, often deployed against specifications, and lethal , , . in the united states, the use of chemical weapons exacerbates systemic inequities and limits constitutionally protected expression of speech and assembly . in portland oregon, law enforcement only deploys chemical weapons to prevent free speech in support of black lives; no such actions are taken against gatherings of recognized white supremacist hate groups , even when occurring on the same day . during the second half of july, as interest in portland’s blm protests was resurging and focused particularly on federal presence (fig. ; data set s ) , agents of the us department of homeland security’s (dhs) new protecting american cities task force (pactf) , deployed deadly gaseous zinc chloride (zncl ) via hexachloroethane (hc) smoke grenades (figs. , s -s ) during operation diligent valor . at the time, zncl was not a familiar chemical weapon to demonstrators nor were hc cans among any munitions recovered in the previous two months of protests (fig. s ). indeed, it took an incredible effort by frontline journalists, scientists, community leaders, legal observers, medics, and protesters to document the munitions so that hc use could be definitively identified, tied to dhs, and connected to production by defense technology, at the time, a subsidiary of the safariland group (si appendix, fig. s ). hexachloroethane is a munitions “smoke” developed in the early s by the us army chemical warfare service that was understood by the mid- s to be a poisonous chemical agent - and which has since been replaced throughout the us armed services . hc itself is listed as hazardous by the international agency for research on cancer, environmental protection agency, department of transportation, occupational safety and health administration, american conference of governmental industrial hygienists, national institute for occupational safety and health, and national toxicology program and has significant human and environmental health consequences. a more dire result of the use of hc grenades, however, is that they produce a high volume (> % of all products w/w) of gaseous zncl , a lethal vapor during the focal reaction , , : 𝐶 𝐶𝑙 + 𝑍𝑛𝑂 → 𝑍𝑛𝐶𝑙 + 𝐴𝑙 𝑂 + 𝐶 (eq. ). indeed, despite being called hexachloroethane smoke grenades, the goal in using them is to produce gaseous zncl , which refracts light and thus creates a “smoke”. additionally, due to the high-energy of the reaction, many noxious gaseous byproducts are created depending on temperature and humidity, most notably carbon monoxide (co), phosgene (cocl ), hexachlorobenzene (c cl ), tetrachloroethene (c cl ), carbon tetrachloride (ccl ), hydrogen chloride (hcl), and chlorine (cl ) , , . hundreds of cases of toxicity from hc smoke have been documented across the intervening decades since its development, showing a range of significant symptoms including immediate dyspnea, coughing, lacrimation, chest pain, vomiting, nausea, and mucosal irritation; delayed and prolonged inflammation of skin and internal organs as well as tachycardia; chronic genotoxicity of the bronchial epithelium; and an average fatality rate of % among case clusters . hc smoke has further significant effects on the environment, including defoliation and long-term reduction in tree growth , and stunted development, scale deterioration, skeletal weakness, and bioaccumulation in fish , , . this is of particular note, as hc grenades were deployed in the catchment of portland’s untreated stormwater system that outfalls directly into nesting and rearing habitats of salmonids. given the lethality of its products, the wanton use of hc by dhs in portland is incredibly alarming and warrants significant further investigation. the goal of this manuscript was therefore to quantify use of hc by dhs to and provide a basis for estimating human and environmental impacts. to accomplish this, i combined multiple data streams of observations (visual confirmations, recovered canisters) on hc use into a single bayesian hierarchical model , fit using a gibbs sampler. i then sampled the protest environment (soil, plants, clothing, canisters, ground, tent) for signatures of hc use (zinc, hexachloroethane, other chlorinated hydrocarbons) using standard analytical chemistry methods. such an exercise would not be necessary if dhs were to release actual chemical weapons deployment data. given the lack of transparency regarding chemical weapons use by all law enforcement agencies in portland, however, including retrieval of canisters to prevent identification and shooting those who touch canisters , estimation is a critical starting point on the road to understanding the scope and scale of hc’s impacts. results over the course of july , dhs deployed an estimated ( - , % posterior interval) grenades of hexachloroethane in the focal protest area in downtown portland oregon, specifically in the immediate vicinity of the wyatt federal building and hatfield federal courthouse (fig. , table ). twenty grenades were recovered (figs. s - , table s ), five more were observed being deployed by agents but not recovered (figs. s -s , table s ), and ( - ) was estimated to be not observed or recovered. the estimated rate of hc grenade deployment (λ) by dhs during july was . grenades per hour of federal agents on the street ( . – . , % posterior interval; fig. , table ). the rate of recovery (ρ) was . ( . – . , % posterior interval), notably higher than the observation rate (ν; . , . – . % posterior; table ). the gibbs sampler efficiently sampled and effectively searched the joint posterior distribution (eq. ). convergence was high among the parallel chains: the potential scale reduction factors (psrf, a.k.a. gelman- rubin statistic; ) being all ~ . (table ). all parameters exhibited very small mcmc autocorrelations (~ . ) and had resultingly large effective sample sizes (table ). translation of the total estimated hc deployment to zncl gas produced , using published lethal doses and weights shows that hundreds of fatalities could have occurred (median: , % posterior interval: – ), although there was large uncertainty due to ld and weight variation among individuals. while the canisters were deployed outside, which certainly prevented many deaths, diffusion was limited by crowds of thousands of people (fig. ), closed tree canopies, cars, and tents (simonis, personal observation). indeed, the off-gassing zncl presented significant risks to individuals in the vicinity as evidenced by high levels of zinc in environmental samples (si data set ) ; immediate , , delayed , , and chronic , symptoms; and odors detectable miles away . of particular note from the environmental chemistry samples was a “spent” hexachloroethane canister (fig. b,c), from which i sampled solid residue. ion chromatography and gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (gc-ms) identified that the residue was % zinc w/w and contained hexachloroethane, identifying that the munition was not fully spent (si data set s ). the grenade also contained tetrachloroethene, benzene, toluene, phthalic anhydride, chromium, and lead (si data set s ). the spread of zncl through the protest area and beyond was shown through all environmental samples having significant concentrations of zinc (si data set s ). perhaps the most notable of which was the organic vapor filter worn by a medic outside of the plume on the far side of the protest area which contained zinc (made gaseous as zncl ), yet no chromium or lead (neither of which were made gaseous), as well as phthalic anhydride, toluene, and xylene (si data set s ). discussion under ideal conditions in a wide open field at night, the concentration of zncl produced by a typical hc grenade is high enough that an unmasked individual yd (three city blocks in portland, m) from detonation has a maximum of min of safety before significant acute symptoms appear . an individual a , yd ( . km) away is still at risk and only has . h . it is unclear how zncl dissipates through a densely-gassed, tree-lined urban landscape within a river valley like portland, but reported signs and symptoms indicate that it spread widely, entered the stormwater system that flows to the willamette river, and cut through protective equipment worn by journalists, protesters, medics, legal observers, and bystanders , , , , , , . the impact of zncl ’s novelty cannot be overstated, as both veteran and newer demonstrators, press, medics, and legal observers were unprepared for this weapon specifically. virtually all existing chemical weapons seen prior to hc’s use produced liquid or solid particles, despite being called “tear gas” for example, that could be filtered using particle filters such as respirators. as such, many individuals had insufficient filtration to remove gaseous zncl . only those with filters designed for gases are able to prevent inhalation, as evidenced by the zinc found on the medic filter (si data set s ). even when using a proper gas mask, however, zncl is absorbed into the body via dermal uptake - , . further, given its capacity to bioaccumulate and cause delayed severe inflammation responses, zncl exposure is measured cumulatively over d , , a significant departure from other presently used chemical weapons , , . despite these life- threatening differences with hc, the public was never informed of dhs’s use of the weapon. indeed, dhs has continued to deny using hc, in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. as a highly mobile and poisonous gas that lacks an odor itself, zncl poses a significant risk to humans as well as the environment , . building upon a legacy of resistance to police brutality , a community of protesters, activists, journalists, legal observers, and scientists standing up for black lives documented its use and are just beginning to understand its impacts on the residents and environment of portland. human health and environmental impact studies are urgently needed to grasp the full impact of dhs’s literal salting of the earth using hexachloroethane smoke grenades in portland, or. methods bayesian model having evaluated a large volume of photographic, video, and print media, i identified deployments of hexachloroethane (hc) grenades and recovery of munitions during july (si appendix, figs. s -s ). i also estimated the time federal agents were out of their buildings and crowd size for each day from the media compilation (fig. , si data sets s ,s ). i combined these data with the two observation streams (visual confirmation of deployment and recovery of canister) using a hierarchical bayesian model to infer the underlying unknown number of canisters deployed by the department of homeland security (dhs) on a given day (𝑑𝑖 ) and over all days (𝐷 = ∑ 𝑑𝑖 ) ( , ). the hourly rate of deployment for that day (𝜆𝑖) is a log-linear (to handle poisson response) function of the raw intercept (𝜆∗) and stochastic error term (ε𝑖), and then is weighted by the time dhs agents were on the street/out of their buildings each night (ft𝑖). the number of canisters deployed each day is then a poisson distribution with rate 𝜆𝑖 ft𝑖 truncated at the minimum by the known cans deployed on that day (𝑐𝑖): ε𝑖 ~ normal( , 𝜎 ) 𝜆𝑖 = 𝑒 𝜆∗+ε𝑖 (eq. ). 𝑑𝑖 ~ poisson(𝜆𝑖 ft𝑖 )c𝑖 deployed grenades were then subjected to each detection process via binomial distributions: observation (regardless of recovery) is governed by rate 𝜈 to give daily observed cans 𝑜𝑖 and by recovery (regardless of observation) by rate 𝜌 to generate daily recovered cans 𝑟𝑖. the processes are joined using a third, constrained binomial describing the number of grenades that were both observed and recovered (𝑜𝑟𝑖) by applying the recovery process to observed grenades, and capping the number at the total grenades recovered. both rates are fit on the logit scale: 𝑜𝑖 ~ binomial(𝜈, 𝑑𝑖 ) 𝑟𝑖 ~ binomial(𝜌, 𝑑𝑖 ) 𝑜𝑟𝑖 ~ binomial(𝜌, 𝑜𝑖 ) 𝑟𝑖 (eq. ). 𝜈 = logit− (𝜈∗) 𝜌 = logit− (𝜌∗) this model therefore assumes no false positives, a fair baseline assumption, given the distinctive burn pattern and resulting canister (figs. , s - ). i used generally uninformative priors on the raw scales: 𝜆∗ ~ normal( , ) 𝜈∗ ~ normal( , ) (eq. ). 𝜌∗ ~ normal( , ) 𝜎 ~ uniform( , ) i fit the model using jags (just another gibbs sampler, v . . ) ( , ) via the runjags v . . - package ( ) in r ( ). i used four mcmc chains with varying starting values for parameters and ran each for , adaptation, , burn-in, and , , final samples thinned to , per chain to total , samples across chains. i evaluated chain convergence using the autocorrelation, sample size adjusted for autocorrelation, and gelman-rubin statistic ( ) for each parameter. all code is included within si data sets s ,s . i converted the estimated number of cans deployed each day to the potential number of human fatalities from zncl . a standard military style can contains oz of hc mix type c ( ), there are . g in an oz, and assuming no loss of mass, g of type c mix generates g products. zncl constitutes . w/w of all products ( ), which translates to . g zncl per grenade. it is difficult to gauge specifically the lethal dose or concentration of zncl , given the multiple modes of uptake (inhalation, orally, dermally). thus, for a simple approximation, i use a log-normal distribution based on nine studies included in pubchem that report ld values for mammal models ( ), which has a back-transformed mean of mg/kg (si appendix). for the distribution of human sizes, i used the most recent ( - ) national health and nutrition examination survey with available data ( ) and combined the reported binary genders to construct a log- normal distribution with a back-transformed mean of kg (si appendix). thus, an average ld is ~ g/person and an average grenade contains enough zncl to kill . people. i treated the zncl as a resource pool consumed by individuals up to their ld to calculate number of fatalities of each sampled mcmc iteration. all code is included within si data sets s ,s . chemical analyses i collected environmental samples from a variety of sources around the areas of hexachloroethane deployment (fig. , si data set s , si appendix): [ ] medic filter: filter medium from a niosh organic vapors dma filter set worn by a medic only on - - , - - , - - in the area of sw th and main. medic only brought out mask when chemical weapons were used and always positioned themselves outside of the visible plume to treat individuals as they came out. [ ] hc can: dust/particle residue from inside defense technology hexachloroethane (hc) smoke can deployed and recovered post “completion” on - - night into - - (fig. s ). [ ] a’s backpack: cut out from a black jansport backpack that was worn by a protester the night of - - and prepped for sampling thereafter. [ ] rd and salmon plants: shrub within the fence at the federal courthouse and tree at the corner of lownsdale, samples taken - - night after a bleach smell was noticed and - - during the following daytime. [ ] lownsdale surface soil sw rd and salmon: scoop of topsoil from the ne corner of the park taken - - midday. [ ] sw rd street: samples of paper and other refuse on the street in front of the federal courthouse on rd near salmon from immediately after a bleach smell was noticed - - into - - . [ ] e’s shirt: water taken from a soak of a shirt worn by a protester on - - into - - , with noticeable bleach-like smell and visible loss of coloration. [ ] green smoke can: dust/particle residue from inside defense technology green smoke canister deployed and recovered post “completion” on - - into - - . [ ] s’s leggings: water taken from a soak of leggings worn by protester recovering spent canisters - into - . [ ] witches’ tent: passive sample taken from existing cotton rounds, paper towels, etc that were present in the witches’ medical tent in lownsdale the night of when the tent reeked of bleach - - . [ ] spicy bucket scrape: residue scraped from inside of a home depot gallon bucket used to cover smoke and gas canisters during - - and - - nights. samples were stored frozen in quart-sized mason jars until submitted to specialty analytical in clackamas, oregon for evaluation. each sample was tested using standard epa methods for volatile organic compounds (sw d and e d); semi-volatile organic compounds (e e); and zinc, chromium, and lead (sw b) (si data set s ). acknowledgements this work would not have been necessary without federal law enforcement’s desire to poison a city to show how much they believe black lives don’t matter, and would not have been possible without civilians standing up despite the wanton use of chemical weapons to say that black lives do matter. front-line journalists including alissa azar, garrison davis, robert evans, mariah harris, laura jedeed, jacob hanning, melissa lewis, sergio olmos, mac smith, tuck woodstock and many anonymous individuals provided invaluable documentation. additional contributions to the dossier are cited in si appendix. substantial thank you to the don’t shoot portland team for documenting, researching, and organizing around use of chemical weapons in portland; sarah riddle for life-cycle documentation; the recompiler magazine for aggregated protest news; and eric greatwood for particularly useful standardized footage. mason fidino gave helpful feedback on the model and sandy simonis provided editing support. black lives matter. land back. references . f. lieber and a. lincoln. the lieber code. general order no. . article . available at https://avalon.law.yale.edu/ th_century/lieber.asp. 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mc % of sd: mcmc standard error as a percentage of the standard deviation of the posterior distribution; ss eff: effective sample size; ac : autocorrelation at mcmc steps (ac for the thinning interval of used); and psrf: potential scale reduction factor (gelaman-rubin statistic; ). figures figure . total and chemical-weapons-based incidents of police brutality during the george floyd black lives matter protests through - - for all cities with at least incidents. figure . top: time series of general interest (normalized google search trends) for the portland metro area in “protests” (orange), “black lives matter” (red), and “federal” (purple) during the george floyd black lives matter protest period to september. bottom: july-focused time series of crowd size (purple) and the number of minutes federal agents were out (red) each night. box points show the number of hexachloroethane (hc) grenades used each night, based on observations and collections combined. lines in both portions were fit using local polynomial regression (loess) ( ). figure . hexachloroethane (hc) / zinc oxide canisters: (a) unexploded ordnance clearly marked as “military style maximum smoke hc” from “defense technology”; (b) hc ordnance off gassing zinc chloride mid-deployment; (c) same canister from (b) after reaction stopped, showing charred remains of the label that matches the canister in (a); and (d) three exploded hc canisters, including the one from (b) and (c) in the middle. photos (a) and (d) from the author, (b) and (c) from sarah riddle and used with permission. figure . posterior distributions for the number of hc grenades deployed (left) and the rate of grenade deployment (grenades per hour) (right). figure . sample locations and pictures for the environmental chemistry samples taken around the downtown area of present-day portland, or. (a) medic filter, (b) hc can, (c) a’s backpack, (d) rd and salmon plants, (e) lownsdale surface soil sw rd and salmon, (f) sw rd street, (g) e’s shirt, (h) green smoke can, (i) s’s leggings, (j) witches’ tent, (k) spicy bucket scrape. blue lines on the street map show the streets drained by the stormwater system that empties unfiltered into the willamette river. #indigenous: a technical and decolonial analysis of activist uses of hashtags across social movements mediatropes ejournal vol vii, no ( ): – issn - www.mediatropes.com #indigenous: a technical and decolonial analysis of activist uses of hashtags across social movements marisa elena duarte and morgan vigil-hayes introduction while it is clear that indigenous peoples utilize social media and digital infrastructures to support social and political goals, work remains to be done to investigate the relationship and impacts of those sociotechnical assemblages in light of the political rights and quality-of-life of indigenous peoples. this essay offers a snapshot of the content, circulation, and amount of data native american activists circulated through twitter during the us presidential election, revealing the contours of the technical challenges as well as the social and political boundaries shaping native american political life. by comparing native american content to a mainstream american dataset from the same period, our study further reveals that tweets propagated by native american rights activists characteristically focus on life-and-death issues, which situates native american and first nations social media communication in an existential sphere. the work of indigenous internet researchers is therefore shifted beyond that of the researcher who ‘finds-out-how’ to the praxis of the activist researcher who discerns colonial effects, interrogates normative thought and practice, and designs alternatives that are commensurate with indigenous worldviews through interpersonal experience, technical expertise, policy and governance, and metaphysical understanding. the praxis of indigenous digital studies at present, a fair amount of indigenous internet researchers are producing work that parallels popular internet research approaches: technical design projects, user studies, network/system analyses, and conceptual/philosophical framings—but from an indigenous research paradigm (carlson ; deschine parkhurst ; dreher et al. ; latimore et al. , lapensee ; vigil et al. ; waitoa et al. ). investigating uses of social media from an mediatropes vol vii, no ( ) duarte and vigil-hayes / www.mediatropes.com indigenous research paradigm means that researchers typically consider political, social, geographic, linguistic, historical, economic, and technological conditions as integral forces shaping indigeneity as a political status (duarte ). indigenous peoples’ orchestrations of digital assemblages are at once evidence for both the exigency and material expressions of indigeneity. for example, while a researcher may presume that an indigenous people’s well-populated facebook group is evidence of progressing economic development through increased access to mobile devices, the indigenous researcher will also note how individuals in that same group post regularly about enduring police brutality. the challenge is multi-fold: intellectual and epistemic, assumptions about structural violence, the liberatory potential of digital media, and what it means to be indigenous. attempting to research indigenous peoples’ uses of social media outside of this paradigm erroneously renders indigenous peoples as ethnic minorities of more perfect nation-states, or, narrowly, as users operating under anomalous or exceptional conditions. both of these depictions are conceptually violent and reproduce epistemic injustice (fricker ; medina ). understanding how large-scale sociotechnical infrastructures intersect and interoperate to allow for the productive transmission of data in colonial contexts substantiates theories of the social and political mechanisms of coloniality, and provides the grounds for understanding the realistic conditions of decoloniality. thus while there is evidence that groups of indigenous peoples in different countries utilize social media and digital infrastructures to support their social and political goals, more work needs to be done to investigate the relationships afforded by and impacts of those sociotechnical assemblages in light of the political rights and quality-of-life of indigenous peoples. as dreher et al. ( ) note, despite the occasional embrace of the politics of indigenous recognition by nation-states, there remains the failure to structurally sustain the “architectures of listening” that make recognition worthwhile. the indigenous internet researcher must learn to appreciate and characterize the depth of the ecology shaping indigenous digital assemblages beyond visual representation (gorzelak et al. ), akin to the ecologist who researches fungal communication systems at the roots of mother trees. indigenous activist researchers ask questions such as: how do indigenous rights advocates utilize social media, and to what end? what technical affordances do certain kinds of social media offer to indigenous peoples? how can systems that enable the political and social mobilization of autonomous indigenous peoples be made? how do the politics of social media platforms interface with the daily experiences of indigenous peoples? how mediatropes vol vii, no ( ) duarte and vigil-hayes / www.mediatropes.com does the circulation of content through available channels relate to the effectiveness of indigenous messaging? what distinguishes indigenous peoples’ uses of social media from non-indigenous uses of social media? how does transmitting digital data about indigeneity relate to being indigenous? layered tacitly beneath these lines of inquiry lies the researcher’s hopes and strategies for ensuring that accessible digital media will allow indigenous peoples to spread awareness and gain public support for the just nature of their causes. furthermore, the goal is to identify and establish digital relational best practices that can guide global societal technological practices and ethics, as practitioners weave increasingly complex webs connecting the virtual and the real, the human and the artificial, the free and the secure, and on- and offline. tracing the twitter content of native american activists in the winter of , our team of internet researchers was faced with three intertwined indigenous intellectual challenges. the first was to address criticism of a grant proposal that was designed to discern the technical capacity of fm radio waves to transmit internet data through sovereign indian land (in the united states). reviewers of the grant proposal characterized the augmentation of existing telecommunications infrastructures and resources as inadequately innovative; instead, they encouraged a research agenda that emphasized the deployment of brand new technology and infrastructure. due to colonial economic development policies, however, many indigenous communities cannot easily afford to invest in brand new large-scale infrastructure and technologies, hence the search for innovative modification of existing infrastructure. moreover, research funders often discount this type of work due to the statistical insignificance of the native american population size within the context of the broader us population. the second intellectual challenge was to conceptualize the cumulative effects of native american activist uses of social media after working in activist circles and qualitatively researching the digital tactics of one particular social movement. after focusing extensively on large-scale digital infrastructure studies, a third researcher attempted to conceptualize the relationship between connective action and the technical requirements of social media networks. together the team designed a study that would provide evidence to address each line of inquiry. all three researchers were motivated to find evidence ) of the relationship between political participation, social media, and bandwidth; ) to support technical network innovation in indian country; and ) to quantify indigenous connective informational practices using pre-existing platforms and infrastructures. mediatropes vol vii, no ( ) duarte and vigil-hayes / www.mediatropes.com methodology: situational indigenous internet research the team conducted a mixed-methods social network analysis of a small sample (n = ) of native american activist uses of twitter from february to march , paying specific attention to the political content circulating through the sample dataset, the network characteristics shaped by hashtags and affinity groups, and the bandwidth characteristics of the content propagated within the sample dataset. in spring , the us presidential race was marked by increasingly extremist rhetoric from the trump campaign, socialist solutions from the sanders campaign, and a neoliberal democratic line from the clinton campaign. our team analyzed social media as a critical micro-media channel for disseminating news among native american social groups, particularly in the absence of accessible structural means of political participation within state and federal governments. the researchers thus conceptualized indigenous political messaging via twitter as evidence of digital political participation by a structurally marginalized social group. the team asked three research questions: ) what political content do native american advocates share on twitter? ) what are the network characteristics of sub-communities present within the native american advocates dataset? ) in light of bandwidth restrictions in indian country, what are the bandwidth characteristics of content propagated by and from native american advocates? while the immediate objectives of the research were to collect quantitative and qualitative data to inform internet infrastructural innovation in low-resource reservation environments, a parallel goal was to produce conceptual evidence of the materiality of native american activism and political participation through digital means. additionally, cognizant of the us national science foundation’s (nsf) preference for projects rooted in evidence-based practice, and the need for evidence to support policy-making, the project was designed with the culture of the nsf and the broadband regulatory mechanisms of the us federal communications commission in mind. the research team thus entered the project attuned to the concept of research as political, tactical, strategic, and oriented toward changing the mindsets of gatekeepers within a colonial environment. data collection for the first round of data collection, the team reviewed their own social media accounts to identify the top hashtags and user accounts they follow for updates mediatropes vol vii, no ( ) duarte and vigil-hayes / www.mediatropes.com about indigenous politics and rights work. they also consulted within their own personal networks, asking fifteen reputable indigenous rights advocates to list the top indigenous-rights-focused twitter and facebook accounts they follow. the resulting list was narrowed to twitter user accounts and hashtags. from february to march , the team queried the twitter streaming api with the list of user accounts and hashtags. the query yielded , unique tweets created by , content creators, and , retweets propagated by , users, resulting in a total of , tweets. for purposes of comparison, a random % sample of us tweets was collected through the same dates. both samples were filtered to yield content relating to political matters based on terms relating to the us presidential race, rights, and advocacy. data analysis the team employed a four-stage process for analyzing the data. the first stage consisted of loosely categorizing topics emerging from random samples of the native american advocates dataset. the second stage consisted of assessing media richness, which included measuring the size of content per tweet and trends in the photos, videos, and links associated with tweets. the third stage consisted of applying social network analytic methods, including hashtag- centric ego networks, descriptive statistics, sequence analysis, and cluster analysis to discern the top trending hashtags and actors, relationships, and dynamics between ego networks and characteristics shaping the propagation of content through the sample set. the fourth stage of analysis consisted of interpreting the findings through the lenses of connective action and media richness, as well as through a sociological understanding of factors and conditions shaping the internet infrastructural and social media landscape in indian country (bennett and segerberg ; daft ). ego networks represent a neighbourhood, wherein the ego node is the focal vertex and neighbours are vertices that form edges with the ego node. for hashtag-centric ego networks, social media hashtags function as the ego nodes and twitter users function as the neighbours. when examined in aggregate, our data can be represented as a bipartite graph (where hashtags form one set of nodes and users form the other set); however, for ease of temporal analysis, we rely upon the ego network representation. connective action refers to the ability of actors who may not know each other face-to-face to communicate and articulate a coherent political vision and goals as well as a set of actions to achieve those goals through the affordances of social media networks rather than through purely social face-to-face means or through the affordances of brick-and-mortar institutions. media richness refers to the meaningful qualities and amounts of information circulating through an array of media channels. in the field of information systems, media richness offers a means by which to assess the relative weight of meaningful packets of information, in this case bytes flowing through digital channels. mediatropes vol vii, no ( ) duarte and vigil-hayes / www.mediatropes.com findings: life-and-death issues, strategic hashtags, and need for greater bandwidth each stage of analysis produced results that addressed the research questions from both technical and social perspectives. read in complementary fashion, the findings reveal how during an integral moment in us political agenda- setting, native american advocates—such as journalists, bloggers, academics, activists, educators, and writers—were disseminating critical news about violations of human rights, civil rights, sovereign tribal rights, and the environment, alongside consciousness-raising messaging about the status of native american and indigenous peoples. this messaging was circulating through affiliated issue groups comprised of twitter user accounts via tweet/retweet functions and the deliberate application of hashtags with conscientious use of photos and links to videos, indicating reliance on multiple interoperable platforms such as youtube and web browsers. the size of the content, and rates of content propagation, indicated the minimum bandwidth and technical system affordances required for such activity to continue among that sample set of users. from february to march , native american advocates tweeted political content relating to life-and-death issues in indigenous contexts more often than updates about the us presidential election. the native american advocates sample dataset consisted of , tweets, and included , distinct hashtags. the top ten most tweeted hashtags were, in descending order, #indigenous; #mmiw (an abbreviation for missing and murdered indigenous women); #tairp (an abbreviation for the american indian red power movement); #nativelivesmatter (which is a movement that parallels the black lives matter movement, and raises awareness of police brutality); #nativeamerican; #idlenomore; #ndn (which is a colloquial abbreviation of indian); #hiring; #colonialism; and #cdnpoli (which refers to canadian politics). only one of these hashtags, #hiring, appeared to emerge from an automated content aggregator. out of , tweets, #indigenous appeared in , original tweets and in , retweets, and was applied by , users. the second most propagated hashtag was #mmiw, which appeared in original tweets and in , retweets, and was applied by , users. out of the top ten hashtags, five capture the politically exigent status of native american and indigenous peoples: #mmiw, #nativelivesmatter, #idlenomore, #colonialism, and #cdnpoli. % of the tweets in the native american advocates dataset referred to matters of indigenous identity and % referred to matters pertaining to civil rights, while in the random % general population dataset only % of tweets referred to matters of identity, and mostly mediatropes vol vii, no ( ) duarte and vigil-hayes / www.mediatropes.com referenced celebrities. none of the top hashtags in the random % general twitter dataset referred to civil rights issues. additionally, comparative statistical analysis of the top most mentioned user accounts associated with political action revealed compelling differences between the native american advocates dataset and the random % general population dataset. the top ten user accounts associated with political action within the native american advocates dataset were, in descending order: @potus, @berniesanders, @zhaabowekwe, @hillaryclinton, @goldmanprize, @indiancountry, @sensanders, @barackobama, @winonaladuke, and @realdonaldtrump. comparatively, the top ten user accounts associated with political action within the random % general population dataset were, in descending order: @realdonaldtrump, @tedcruz, @hillaryclinton, @berniesanders, @marcorubio, @foxnews, @potus, @youtube, @cnn, and @jonkasich. the comparison of the distinct datasets is not intended to create a dichotomous relationship between native american advocates and a presumed mainstream us population, but rather, reveals the distinctiveness of the issues as these discursively emerge through sub- communities of twitter users who advocate and raise awareness of matters affecting indian country. the fact that half of the top ten hashtags circulating through the native american advocates dataset during the spring us presidential campaign relate to basic civil rights, police brutality, the sovereign rights of tribes, and missing and murdered indigenous women reveals the divergence between the platforms of the us presidential candidates and the needs of native american and indigenous peoples. from february to march , distinct sub-communities of native american advocates disseminated a range of content through common frequent use of #indigenous. cluster analysis (louvain method using the jaccard similarity index as a distance metric) of hashtag-centric (egocentric) networks within the native american dataset revealed trends in the propagation of certain sets of hashtags across distinct yet affiliated topical sub-communities. for example, one of the largest topical sub-communities consisted of approximately actors within the sample timeframe, and was characterized by user affiliation through the hashtags #tairp, #freeleonardpeltier, and #indigenous. a methodological approach used by network scientists to group individual data points with similar data points, forming clusters within a dataset. a method used for community detection in a larger network structure. an index used to determine how similar two sets of objects are with respect to set membership. in our analysis, we compare sets of actors that are part of each hashtag-centric network. mediatropes vol vii, no ( ) duarte and vigil-hayes / www.mediatropes.com meanwhile, a distinct neighboring large topical sub-community consisted of approximately actors within the sample timeframe, and was characterized by user affiliation through circulation of the hashtags #mmiw, #idlenomore, #cdnpoli, and #turtleisland. yet another neighboring topical sub-community consisted of approximately stable actors within the same timeframe and was characterized by circulation of the hashtags #nativelivesmatter and #blacklivesmatter. comparison of these three distinct neighboring topical sub- communities shows how stable user accounts—or actors—tweet and retweet certain sets of hashtags through distinct issue groups, which manifest as topical sub-communities in a social graph of a twitter dataset. the persistence of actor engagement around individual hashtags and sets of hashtags reifies the affiliation occurring between different issue groups using twitter to disseminate information. in that sense, tweeting and retweeting certain hashtags and following and referencing associated sets of user accounts heightens the propensity of consolidating issue groups through twitter. a comparison of the three abovementioned topical sub-communities reveals slight differences in perspectives in north american indigenous politics, with the largest group shaped by discourse and issues shaping the american indian movement (aim), the second largest group shaped by an apparent first nations focus, and the latter group, native lives matter, influenced by the discourse of black lives matter (blm). from a social scientific perspective, what binds aim, first nations issues, and native lives matter is the political status of indigenous peoples: indigeneity. in the sample dataset comprised of tweets produced by native american advocates, this is shown through the persistence and prevalence of the hashtag #indigenous across all of the topical sub-communities, where the hashtag #indigenous appears more frequently than any other hashtag, both on its own and in combination with other hashtags. for this research, persistence is characterized as the frequency of consecutive time segments—minutes, hours, and days—in which a hashtag appears after an original post. hashtags that appear for minutes at a time after original posting are ephemeral. in this dataset, #wearebernie was the most persistent ephemeral hashtag. hashtags that appear for hours at a time after original posting are event-driven. in this dataset, #mmiw was the most persistent event-driven hashtag; the research team hypothesized this may have first nations-focused tweets referred overtly to canadian politics; first nations tribes, reserves, or communities; and/or social movements or issues emerging from specific first nations experiences as opposed to social movements or issues emerging from specific native american (us) experiences. mediatropes vol vii, no ( ) duarte and vigil-hayes / www.mediatropes.com been due to a planned grassroots mmiw event. hashtags that appear for days at a time after original posting are pervasive, and #indigenous is the most persistent pervasive hashtag. finally, prevalence measures the frequency of days hashtags persist relative to all other time segments. for the native american advocates dataset, #indigenous, #nativeamerican, #tairp, #mmiw, and #jobs were the most prevalent. out of these five, #jobs is the only one that appeared to emerge from an automated content aggregator. interpreting these measures of content circulation against the topical sub-communities, it is possible to ascertain the function of #indigenous—and to a slightly lesser but still important extent, #nativeamerican, #tairp, and #mmiw—as a technical boundary spanner linking distinct issue groups. from a social scientific perspective, this finding indicates the discursive strength of the concept of indigeneity insofar as it works through a sample of the twitter digital sphere in this particular historical moment. from february to march , native american advocates were more likely to tweet and retweet content with photos, indicating a demand for high- speed bandwidth in the context of native american political uses of twitter. a major motivation of this research was to obtain a realistic sample of uses of a commonly available social media platform—twitter, in this case—that could be used to deduce characteristics of the size in bytes and content in file types that native american advocates might rely on for distributing critical news and updates relevant to indian country. our approach to understanding bandwidth demand entailed mining our collected tweets for the presence of embedded and hyperlinked media. of the , unique tweets we observed in the native american advocates dataset, . % contained embedded video content, . % contained embedded photo content, and . % did not contain any embedded content. per daft and lengel’s ( ) definition, we consider tweets with embedded media to be richer than those that lack embedded media. moreover, we consider tweets with embedded videos or gifs to be richer than tweets with embedded photos based on the fact that such media offers the “simultaneous transmission of multiple information cues” (lengel and daft ). similarly, we consider tweets with embedded videos to be richer than tweets with embedded gifs, as the audio component lends the expression of a greater “variety of languages” (lengel and daft ). critically, we examined the relationship between embedded media and content propagation. we based our comparisons on our collected tweets that containing more information via larger media files. mediatropes vol vii, no ( ) duarte and vigil-hayes / www.mediatropes.com contained embedded content, and those that did not contain embedded content, using two-sample kolmogorov-smirnov tests. overall, we observed that % of tweets with embedded media received at least one retweet while only % of tweets without embedded media were retweeted at least once. additionally, we found that tweets with embedded media (photo or video) received higher levels of user engagement (p < × − ); on average, tweets with embedded media reached . users and tweets without embedded media only reached . users. similar to our analysis of hashtags present in the dataset, we also examined the prevalence of tweets with embedded media, where prevalence is the percentage of days between february and march in which the tweet appeared. when examining the prevalence of tweets containing embedded media, we found no significant difference between tweets with and without embedded media. however, we noted that of the top most prevalent tweets contained embedded media. as with the hashtags, we measured churn of specific tweets using the persistence metric at the scale of minutes, hours, days, and weeks. most tweets did not exhibit persistence at any scale. we found that only . % of all tweets were persistent on the scale of days (i.e., “recurrent”), and of these % contained embedded media (of which all but one were photos). moreover, when analyzing the . % of tweets that are persistent on a week-long scale, we found that % contained embedded media. a pernicious lack of communications infrastructure in indian country prevents native americans in these communities from fully engaging with political discourse that increasingly takes place on media-rich platforms (baldy ; waitoa et al. ). our results demonstrate that the content richest in media is the content that reaches the largest audiences and is the most enduring in native american advocates’ political conversations on twitter. in particular, our investigation into circulation with respect to tweets’ persistence and prevalence further highlights the value of embedded photos. overall, our findings with respect to embedded media agree with daft and lengel’s ( ) assertion that some media are superior to others for communicating information (as measured by propagation and circulation metrics), but it also demonstrates that there are limits to the benefits of increasing media richness—namely, the cost of resources required to support richer media might make “less rich” media a more appropriate communication tool. for instance, only . % of the most persistent tweets in the native american advocates dataset contain video, whereas % of the most persistent tweets contain a photo. while native american advocates may not consciously craft and propagate content with the two-sample kolmogorov-smirnov test compares the statistical similarity between the distributions of two samples. mediatropes vol vii, no ( ) duarte and vigil-hayes / www.mediatropes.com bandwidth requirements in mind, the fact that limitations of the underlying ip network may impact information diffusion across the relatively bandwidth-light twitter platform is worth consideration, particularly if the desired audience for content is connecting from areas with limited ict infrastructure (tufekci ). while the team was unable to discern precise geographic locations of types of content creation—such as, for example, mobile uploads in chicago— this snapshot of the richness of the media types that native american advocates circulate through twitter can nevertheless be understood within the technical landscape of us reservations, and remote, rural, and urban communities in which indigenous peoples reside. the implications of these findings suggest that without accessible bandwidth, social media platforms, devices, and social media savvy, native american advocates may not have the capacity to distribute content about native american and indigenous issues in the midst of mass media focus on mainstream american agenda-setting and political campaigns. discussion: demystifying digital affordances for indigenous goals one of the most challenging aspects of activist research has to do with summarizing conceptually rich findings through a single evocative story that compels people—and especially policy-makers—to make the structural changes that will alleviate systemic social inequity. for indigenous internet researchers, weaving praxis into our research occurs in at least four ways. this particular study inspires renewed understanding of the field and practice of indigenous internet studies at the levels of experience, technique, policy and government, and at the level of ontology, or metaphysics. . at the level of experience it is important to note that a major motivation for this research was the experience of researchers enduring marginalization not only in the academy but also as people advocating for native american rights in everyday life. combining doctoral-level research experience with a keen understanding of the technical aspects of social media specifications and uses, and grassroots organizing by and for native and indigenous peoples, introduces a level of nuance into both the accompanying research and activism. erica violet lee (nēhiyaw/cree) writes about surviving “wastelands”—harsh environments wherein indigenous peoples and lands become marginalized within the constraints of industrial infrastructure: mediatropes vol vii, no ( ) duarte and vigil-hayes / www.mediatropes.com we deserve things written for us, and written by us. we deserve to know our medicines and our laws, but this place is not any utopia, so we grow our medicines from the cracks in concrete sidewalks or in between railroad tracks. we have to dig our laws out from underneath gravel logging roads and tend to our worlds in contaminated fields. (lee , n.p.) finding the data to conduct this research study required just such digging. each member of the research team moved beyond the assumption that ‘everything can be found on the internet’ and reached out to their personal networks. those networks consisted of native and indigenous individuals who likewise have spent years cultivating personal relationships with other native and indigenous advocates, and who relate through a positive change-oriented mentality in spite of living in a ‘contaminated’ colonized life-world. indeed a fourth research team member who later joined the team to assist with statistical and network analysis noted early on how without the ability to tap into personal networks it would be challenging to identify hashtags and user accounts that would yield the essential data. similarly, the construction of the political context and the literature framing the research questions very much required an inherently indigenous interpretation of known relevant studies and historical explanations. in this sense, designing and conducting indigenous internet research is still very much tied to the experience of being indigenous while being digitally connected. the investigation and interpretation of native and indigenous digital spheres and experiences becomes not about setting up false binaries between nature and machine, or spirituality and technology, but rather becomes about understanding how native and indigenous peoples move their political and social efforts through media that rely on digital infrastructure. the medicine in the work—and by medicine we refer to the physical, social, emotional, intellectual, and metaphysical means by which indigenous peoples heal themselves, lands and waters, and others—is in the broader praxis-based impacts of the research findings. . at the level of technique a decolonizing and/or indigenous approach to internet studies requires a technical understanding of what the internet is made of, how digital systems work, and the discourses and methods characterizing the fields and sub-fields that shape computing and digital media. by its nature, indigenous work requires that activist researchers contribute to indigenous ways of life. this occurs mediatropes vol vii, no ( ) duarte and vigil-hayes / www.mediatropes.com through conscientious methodological design, preparation and dissemination of findings, advocacy work, and other forms of creative expression. on many different occasions the research team reflected on their own internet-based practices, and renewed commitments to lines of inquiry, personal practices, and ethical commitments. after the conclusion of this study, one researcher began encouraging activists in her personal network to tag #indigenous and to attach photos as a way to spread messaging further within their various social media campaigns. in addition to her usual level of activism, another researcher began contributing more to her fashion blog, challenging stereotypes, and showing positive images of native women. two of the researchers have started planning projects to articulate these findings with regard to cybersecurity, information assurance, trust and privacy, and the technical requirements and digital literacy needed for citizen journalists, bloggers, students, educators, scholars, and writers to continue using social media platforms to disseminate critical updates in indian country. due to the technical constraints shaping indian country, to advocate for native and indigenous rights through social media is to advocate for digital media communication, which leads to advocating for and learning techniques for the construction of stable and secure infrastructure. . for policy and governmental consideration after the research team completed the final analysis, a number of events profoundly shaped internet and telecommunications policy and research as well as activism in indian country. these included: ) the november election of donald trump as the th president of the united states; ) russian hacking of multiple us data-sharing infrastructures—including social media platforms—for the purpose of destabilizing us electoral processes; and ) the september–december militarized corporate and government attacks on native american activists, journalists, and elders protesting the illegally constructed dakota access pipeline. freedom of information act requests revealed that the department of homeland security, the fbi, tigerswan, and other associated government and security firms were actively surveilling nodapl activists and their allies via social media, and possibly through the use of cell tower-mimicking devices around the sovereign lands of the standing rock sioux tribe (brown et al. ). government surveillance of marginalized populations has long-term structural and social effects. on september , , a whatcom county superior court judge granted the whatcom county prosecutor and the department of justice a warrant to search a bellingham nodapl facebook group, which, due to the expected undefined amalgamation of an unknown mediatropes vol vii, no ( ) duarte and vigil-hayes / www.mediatropes.com amount of personal data gleaned from the individual accounts associated with a facebook group, is expected to affect the privacy rights and civil rights of the approximately , members of the group (last real indians ; relyea ). the outcome of the case may establish precedent for the courts to grant law enforcement searches of loosely affiliated groups of social media users allegedly engaged in acts of civil disobedience, and depending on the amalgamation and presentation of the data, may also grant law enforcement and attorneys with the capacity to collect ephemeral and potentially unreliable and unverifiable social media data in the construction of a case against potential defendants. as these examples, and indeed our own research demonstrates, with just a bit of technical data it is possible to identify associations between user accounts. but how will this data be used or abused? this study occurs in a historical moment when governments themselves use social media to advance policies, spread fear, and to characterize and define terror groups; when corporate social media giants apply consumer-friendly formulas to control— and in some cases block—the flow of user-generated information; and when massive data breaches challenge all levels of government, including tribal governments (dreyfus ; roberts ; schwirtz and goldstein ). the social, political, and technological stakes for indigenous internet research are grounded within particular politico-historical moments. the quality and epistemic truth-value of the work lies in the capacity of researchers to discern the struggles, infrastructures, practices, and conditions of justice— social, relational, political, and juridical—shaping indigeneity. situating the work in a contemporary milieu, while being indigenous and being digitally connected, imbues the work with a quality of credibility in speaking truth to power. in this case, the research team recognized both the relative vulnerability of native american rights advocates of all backgrounds as well as the need to strengthen more robust technical internet infrastructure and secure data environments for marginalized peoples. because internet infrastructures, social media platforms, and digital devices are complex, the solutions must be both through technical, as well as policy work and education. . for metaphysical consideration meanwhile, in native and indigenous studies, the combination of concepts of relationality and a poststructuralist approach to human and nonhuman relationships are allowing researchers to rethink ontological orderings of various indigenous life-worlds. (tallbear ; watts ) at an ontological level, the utterance—in this case the tweet—is meaningful due to the actionable capacity—the potentiality—it co-creates among all beings that experience its existence, from machine-readable systems to civil rights attorneys. mediatropes vol vii, no ( ) duarte and vigil-hayes / www.mediatropes.com from the perspective of social theory, it is surprising to see the work that a hashtag—#indigenous—is doing in binding together political issue groups through twitter. but as indigenous thinkers who, as lee ( ) characterizes, “grow our medicines from the cracks,” the understanding that a hashtag affords responsive actionable communication between diverse land and water defenders points to a mutual experience—a shared language of the senses—cohering and emerging among diverse geographically widespread actively-decolonizing peoples. from a social scientific perspective, more studies are needed to trace the rhetoric and connective action of loosely affiliated converging and diverging indigenous issue groups emerging by means of social media platforms. yet with regard to praxis, what this means is that to construct decolonizing technologies, an indigenous person must also deeply understand the relationality around them—the energetic and actionable qualities among animate and inanimate beings—and how that ecology co- constitutes humanity and belonging. decolonizing technologies must likewise be co-created, and bring forth a particular pace and rhythm of life—in particular, one that restores dignity in spite of the absence of “architectures of listening” (dreher et al. ). of course, not all decolonizing technologies are necessarily digital. many are pressed into clay, planted in the earth, or are enacted in private ceremonies. but they are all structures that indigenous peoples can safely live by and through. what decolonizing technologies have in common is that they afford dimensions of human utterances, and those utterances define the justice of relationality in spite of the persistence of colonialism. conclusion though indigenous internet research is enacted through technological praxis, it is also grounded by distinct ontological orderings of indigenous life-worlds, rooted as they are in the sacred homelands and waterways. creating digital technologies in situ requires a keen understanding of the social, historical, and technical constraints shaping indigenous demand for useful and effective digital systems. while the results of a assessment of native american activist uses of twitter provide data that can be used to improve user experience and enhance technical networks, a decolonial interpretation of the results, and of the study as a whole, reveals the levels of intellectual labour through which indigenous digital praxis occurs. as a mode of resistance, indigenous internet research and praxis is in phases scientific, experiential, technical, governmental, political, and metaphysical. above all, it is oriented toward an interrogation of mediatropes vol vii, no ( ) duarte and vigil-hayes / www.mediatropes.com brutality, and aims to shape a healthier quality-of-life for native american and global indigenous peoples. mediatropes vol vii, no ( ) duarte and vigil-hayes / www.mediatropes.com works cited baldy, c. . “the new native intellectualism: #elizabethcook-lynn, social media movements and the millennial native american studies scholar.” wicazo sa review ( ): – . bennett, l. and segerberg, w. . the logic of connective action: digital media and the personalization of contentious politics. cambridge: cambridge university press. brown, a., parrish, w., and sperri, a. . “leaked documents reveal counter-terrorism tactics used at standing rock to ‘defeat pipeline insurgencies.’” the intercept, may. https://theintercept.com/ / / /leaked-documents-reveal-security- firms-counterterrorism-tactics-at-standing-rock-to-defeat-pipeline- insurgencies/. accessed september . carlson, b., et al. . “trauma, shared recognition, and indigenous resistance on social media.” australasian journal of information systems : – . http://journal.acs.org.au/index.php/ajis/article/view/ / . accessed december . daft, r., and lengel, r. . “information richness: a new approach to manager information processing and organisational design.” in research in organizational behavior , ed. cummings, l. & staw, b. 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minority men and transgender women. vaccines , , . https://doi.org/ . /vaccines academic editor: alessandra casuccio received: february accepted: february published: march publisher’s note: mdpi stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. copyright: © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). department of medicine, school of medicine, university of pennsylvania, philadelphia, pa , usa; teixeird@pennmedicine.upenn.edu department of family and community health, school of nursing, university of pennsylvania, philadelphia, pa , usa; willey@nursing.upenn.edu department of behavioral and social sciences, school of public health, brown university, providence, ri , usa; katie_biello@brown.edu (k.b.); pablo_valente@brown.edu (p.k.v.) fenway health, boston, ma , usa; kmayer@fenwayhealth.org beth israel deaconess medical center, department of medicine, harvard medical school, boston, ma , usa department of medicine, school of medicine, university of north carolina—chapel hill, chapel hill, nc , usa; lisa_hightow@med.unc.edu * correspondence: bjose@nursing.upenn.edu abstract: sexual and gender minority (sgm) populations are particularly vulnerable to poor covid- outcomes and are more likely to experience stigma and medical mistrust that may impact covid- vaccine acceptance. this study examined the prevalence of covid testing and diagnosis and assessed covid- vaccine acceptance among a large sample of sgm. participants were recruited as part of an online cross-sectional study focused on an hiv biomedical prevention technology will- ingness in the united states at increased risk for hiv sero-conversion. multivariate linear analysis was conducted to examine covid- vaccine acceptance. the study sample included predomi- nately gay ( . %), black ( . %), cis-gender ( . %) males with a mean age of . years. medical mistrust and social concern regarding covid- vaccine stigma were significantly associated with decreased covid- vaccine acceptance, and altruism was significantly associated with increased vaccine acceptance. black participants were significantly less likely to accept a covid- vaccine, and asian participants were significantly more likely to accept a vaccine, compared to white peers. as the planning of covid- vaccine rollout efforts is conceptualized and designed, these data may inform equitable implementation strategies and prevent worsening health inequities among sgm populations. keywords: covid- ; sexual; gender; minority; vaccine; acceptance . introduction equitable implementation of covid- vaccine delivery is a national and global priority. the centers for disease control and prevention advisory committee on immu- nization practice highlighted allocation strategies that “aim to reduce existing disparities and to not create new disparities” [ ]. the national academies of sciences, engineering, and medicine published a framework for equitable allocation of covid- vaccine that recognizes the rights and interests of sexual and gender minorities (sgm) but fails to identify strategies or data to achieve that goal [ ]. attitudes about covid- vaccine acceptance can inform planning and implementation, and have been correlated with age, education, race, and employment status [ – ]. however, analyses have predominantly focused on cis-gender heteronormative populations, limiting their generalizability to sgm populations. given that stigma and discrimination drive health inequities among sgm, vaccines , , . https://doi.org/ . /vaccines https://www.mdpi.com/journal/vaccines https://www.mdpi.com/journal/vaccines https://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - x https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://doi.org/ . /vaccines https://doi.org/ . /vaccines https://creativecommons.org/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://doi.org/ . /vaccines https://www.mdpi.com/journal/vaccines https://www.mdpi.com/ - x/ / / ?type=check_update&version= vaccines , , of which may result in increased risk of severe covid- disease [ – ] and influence covid- vaccine acceptance, research examining covid- vaccine acceptance among sgm is needed. these data may inform equitable vaccine implementation strategies and prevent worsening health inequities among sgm populations. the psychosocial and economic impact of the covid- pandemic disproportionately affects sgm compared to cisgender heterosexual populations. studies across international settings have demonstrated that sgm communities have experienced increased depression and anxiety as a result of social distancing measures and worrying about health status related to covid- [ , ]. studies examining global sample of sgm using a smart-phone based “gay social networking” app found that since the beginning of the covid- pandemic sgm have been more likely to experience job loss, income reduction, and decreased access to gender affirming resources [ , ]. in the united states, latinx sgm have experienced increased personal violence due to stay-at-home orders, and racial/ethnic minority status has been associated with increased risk of severe covid- [ , , ]. thus, covid- related vulnerability likely varies across intersectional racial/ethnic, sexual, and gender minority identities. covid- restrictions have been associated with decreased access to healthcare and decreased perceived social support, which may weaken resilience to minority stressors [ , – ]. the confluence of disproportionate psychosocial and economic burdens with increased vulnerability to minority stressors among sgm may decrease covid- vaccine uptake and further deepen health inequities. improved understanding of covid- vaccine acceptance among sgm can inform equitable implementation of vaccine delivery strategies. in a study of hiv vaccine trial acceptance, for example, connochie et al. demonstrated that greater vaccine efficacy beliefs and altruistic attitudes were associated with increased vaccine acceptance while social concerns (e.g., experiencing stigma and discrimination as a result of vaccination) decreased vaccine acceptance [ ]. studies examining human papillomavirus vaccine uptake among sgm have found increased acceptance associated with receiving provider recommendations and decreased acceptance associated with greater perceived barriers and lack of trust in providers [ , ]. medical mistrust is engendered by systems that substantiate and reinforce racism, homophobia, and stigma and has been associated with decreased engagement in routine healthcare among sgm [ , ]. trust in medical and scientific experts has been identified as a predictor of covid- vaccine acceptance [ ]. perpetuating healthcare-related stigma in covid- vaccine delivery strategies may lead to decreased vaccine acceptance and uptake among sgm, exacerbate health inequities, and threaten population level prevention of the covid- vaccine. there is a lack of research, however, examining medical mistrust and stigma associated with covid- acceptance among sgm. in a recent national survey representative of the united states population, only . % of people planned to get the covid- vaccine [ ]. understanding attitudes about covid- vaccine acceptance is an urgent area of investigation to end the covid- pandemic. the current study examined the prevalence of covid testing and diagnosis and assessed covid- vaccine acceptance among a large sample of sgm. we examined the associations between covid- vaccine acceptance and medical mistrust, healthcare experiences, and attitudes towards covid- vaccine. we hypothesized that increased levels of medical mistrust, negative healthcare experiences, and social concerns would be associated with decreased covid- vaccine acceptance while altruism would be associated with increased acceptance among sgm in the united states. vaccines , , of . methods . . participants and procedures as part of an online cross-sectional study focused on a hiv biomedical prevention technology willingness in the united states, we included a series of covid- vaccine acceptance and medical trust questions in our study screener. these questions were the focus of our analysis, and included data collected between october and december , (e.g., prior to the fda approval of the initial covid- vaccines). participants were primarily recruited through advertisements on social and sexual networking sites. there were no set regional or state geographic quotas for the sample. . . procedures upon clicking on the study advertisement, participants were referred to a qualtrics survey where they were asked to consent and complete a study screener. interested individ- uals completed a -min screener including questions regarding their sociodemographic characteristics, hiv and covid testing behaviors, medical mistrust, and covid- vac- cine acceptance. participants were not compensated for screening in the study. study data were protected with a -bit ssl encryption and kept within a university firewalled server. the study was approved by the university of pennsylvania institutional review board, approval id # . . . measures covid- testing and diagnosis. participants were asked whether they had ever been tested for covid- ( = no; = yes) and whether they had been told by a health care provider that they had covid- ( = no; = yes). covid- vaccine acceptance. we assessed hypothetical efficacy based on scientific discussions prior to the results of the pfizer-biontech and moderna vaccines being released to the public and reviewed by the fda. specifically, participants were asked to rate how likely they would be to get a covid- vaccine if it provided % protection. participants used a -point scale ( = “extremely unlikely”; = “extremely likely”) to answer these questions. attitudes towards covid- vaccines. we assessed attitudes towards covid- vac- cines with two subscales previously developed by lee et al. [ ]. these subscales measure both altruistic attitudes towards getting vaccinated, as well as social concerns around getting vaccinated. the altruistic attitude subscale had four items addressing health pro- motive reasons in favor of becoming vaccinated (e.g., “my willingness to get a covid- vaccine is important for the good of all people.”; α = . ), and the social concern scale had six items addressing many previously studied barriers to becoming vaccinated having to do with perceptions of others (e.g., “i would be concerned that getting a covid- vaccine would lead to discrimination against me.”; α = . ). both subscales asked participants to indicate their level of agreement with each statement presented, on a four-point scale ( = strongly disagree; = disagree; = agree; = strongly agree). we computed a mean score for each subscale. medical mistrust. using previously validated questions adapted from the medical mistrust index [ , ]. we assessed participants’ agreement with three statements focused on participants’ medical mistrust (e.g., “patients have sometimes been deceived or misled by health care providers”; “when health care providers make mistakes, they usually cover it up”; and “health care providers have sometimes done harmful things to patients without their knowledge”). we also included three statements focused on medical trust (e.g., “i trust that health care providers are giving me the best treatment available”; “i trust that health care providers have my best interest in mind when treating me”; and “i trust that healthcare providers will tell me if a mistake is made about my medical treatment”). participants were asked to indicate their level of agreement with each statement presented, on a four-point scale ( = strongly agree; = agree; = disagree; = strongly disagree). after reverse vaccines , , of coding responses to statements focused on medical trust, we computed a mean composite score (α = . ) where higher scores meant greater medical mistrust. in addition to mistrust beliefs, participants were asked to note how often they had felt that they had been mistreated or felt ignored by health care providers, or whether they had felt that their health care was not as good as others. participants were asked to answer these three statements using a four-point scale ( = never; = rarely; = often; = always). we computed a mean composite score (α = . ) where higher scores meant greater frequency of negative experiences with health care providers in the past. sociodemographic characteristics. participants were asked to report their age (in years), sex assigned at birth (male, female, or other) and current gender identity (male, female, transgender woman, transgender men, gender variant/nonconforming, or other). for analytical purposes, gender identity ( = cisgender men; = gender minority) was dichotomized due to small numbers within some of the gender identity categories in our regression analyses. participants also self-identified across their races (black, white, american indian/alaskan native, asian, native hawaiian or other pacific islander, mul- tiracial, or other) and hispanic/latinx ethnicity. participants disclosed their sexual orien- tation (gay/homosexual, bisexual, heterosexual/straight, same gender loving, queer, or other). . data analytic strategy descriptive statistics were conducted on demographics and variables of interest (table ). a multivariable linear regression framework was used to examine whether par- ticipants’ acceptance of a covid- vaccine with % efficacy was associated with vaccine attitude subscales (e.g., altruism and social concern), medical mistrust, and prior negative experiences with health care providers (table ). we controlled for age, race/ethnicity, sexual orientation, gender identity, prior covid- testing, and prior covid- diagnosis in the regression analysis. table . demographics of online sample of sexual and gender minority participants (n = ), october–december . n (%) * mean age (sd) . ( . ) race white ( . ) black ( . ) asian ( . ) american indian/alaskan native ( . ) native hawaiian/pacific islander ( . ) multiracial ( . ) another race ( . ) latinx ethnicity ( . ) gender minority ( . ) sexual orientation gay ( . ) bisexual ( . ) queer ( . ) same-gender loving ( . ) multiple identities ( . ) heterosexual ( . ) another sexual identity ( . ) sd = standard deviation, * unless otherwise noted. vaccines , , of table . multivariable linear regression model examining psychosocial correlates of covid- vaccine acceptance among sexual gender minority participants, n = . b s.e. b t p (constant) . . . . age − . . − . − . . gender minority . . . . . latinx ethnicity . . . . . race/ethnicity black − . . − . − . . asian . . . . . american indian/alaskan native − . . − . − . . native hawaiian/pacific islander − . . − . − . . multiracial − . . − . − . . another race − . . − . − . . sexual identity bisexual . . . . . queer − . . − . − . . same-gender loving − . . − . − . . multiple identities − . . − . − . . other − . . − . − . . social concerns − . . − . − . . altruistic motivations . . . . . medical mistrust − . . − . − . . negative experiences with provider − . . − . − . . prior covid- test . . . . . prior covid- diagnosis . . . . . notes. participants identifying as white/caucasian serve as referent group for race comparisons. participants identifying as gay serve as referent group for sexual identity. . results as noted in table , participants who consented to be screened and included in this analysis (n = ) had a mean age of . years (sd = . ). our sample’s distribution by race was as follows: white (n = ; . %), black (n = ; . %); asian (n = ; . %), american indian/alaskan native (n = ; . %), native hawaiian/pacific islander (n = ; . %), multiracial (n = ; . %), or self-identified as another race (n = ; . %). thirteen percent of the sample identified as latinx (n = ; . %), with the majority identifying their ancestry as puerto rican (n = ; . %), mexican (n = ; . %), dominican (n = ; . %), or cuban (n = ; . %). most of the sample identified as cisgender men (n = ; . %). the majority of gender minority participants were gender non-conforming (n = ; . %) or transgender female (n = ; . %). participants identified predominantly as gay (n = , . %) or bisexual (n = ; . %), while others identified as heterosexual (n = ; . %), queer (n = ; . %), same-gender loving (n = ; . %), another sexual identity (n = ; . %), or more than one sexual identity (n = ; . %). nearly two-thirds of the sample reported ever having received a covid- test (n = ; . %). of those tested, participants ( . %) reported having been diagnosed with covid- by a health care provider. acceptance for a covid- vaccine providing % efficacy was moderately high among participants (mean score = , standard deviation = . ). in our multivariable regression (f ( , ) = . , p < . ; see table ), participants’ acceptance of a covid- vaccine was inversely associated with more social concerns regarding the vaccine vaccines , , of (β = − . , p < . ) and medical mistrust (β = − . , p < . ). vaccine acceptance was positively associated with altruistic motivations (β = . , p < . ). in race comparisons, white participants were more willing to use a covid- vaccine than black, american indian/alaskan native, and participants identifying with another race (see table ). asian participants reported greater vaccine acceptance than white counterparts. compared to gay men, participants grouped in the “other” sexual identity category reported lower vaccine acceptance. there were no other differences by sexual identity. no association was found between acceptance of using an % efficacious covid- vaccine and prior covid- testing or diagnosis, age, gender identity, latinx ethnicity, or negative experiences with providers in the past. . discussion sexual and gender minority (sgm) populations are disproportionately vulnerable to poor covid- outcomes, yet little is known about covid- vaccine acceptance among sgm. to address this gap, we examined covid- vaccine acceptance among sgm. as hypothesized, increased medical mistrust and social concerns were significantly associated with lower rates of vaccine acceptance, and altruism was associated with higher rates of vaccine acceptance. our results highlight the impact of medical mistrust and attitudes toward covid- vaccines on vaccine acceptance at the intersection of gender, sexual, and racial minority identities, and can inform equitable vaccine implementation strategies. sgm who experienced medical mistrust were less likely to accept a covid- vaccine. while negative experiences in healthcare were not associated with vaccine acceptance, medical mistrust may also stem from a long history of stigma and discrimination among sgm [ , ]. medical mistrust is a driver of health inequity, and, in the context of the covid- pandemic, may be promoted by conspiracy theories, disinformation, and misinforma- tion [ ]. indeed, belief in covid- conspiracy theories has been associated with medical mistrust as well as decreased likelihood of getting a covid- vaccine [ ]. concerns about vaccine safety and side effects in the setting of expedited vaccine development and approval, and trust in government, may impact covid- vaccine acceptance [ , – ]. the recent promotion of misinformation by government leaders may have contributed to decreased vaccine acceptance and may have also reinforced medical mistrust of providers who refer to government guidelines and evidence to manage covid- treatment and prevention [ ]. in contrast to medical mistrust, covid- vaccine acceptance was greater among study participants who endorsed altruistic attitudes and were less concerned about covid- social concerns. given that healthcare provider recommendations have been found to be associated with increased covid- acceptance, these results suggest that providers and public health efforts that approach medical mistrust with empathy and validation address concerns about discrimination, and support altruistic intentions may be more successful engaging sgm in covid- vaccine uptake [ , ]. while there is a lack of evidence-based interventions for improving trust in medicine, there are promis- ing approaches available for future research [ ]. for example, ehealth technology may be leveraged to increase trustworthiness and trust in medicine, and community-based participatory approaches can help design healthcare services that address medical mis- trust [ , ]. in addition, lessons from aids denialism may have renewed relevance during the covid- pandemic [ ], and interventions effective in reducing hiv stigma, such as the popular opinion leader model, may be adapted to address medical mistrust in sgm communities [ ]. sgm participants in our study who identified as black reported decreased covid- vaccine acceptance. this finding is supported by prior studies [ – , ]. bogart and colleagues, for example, demonstrated medical mistrust to be associated with decreased covid- vaccine acceptance among black sgm [ ]. taken together, these findings underscore the need to address how systemic racism in the u.s. reduces economic oppor- tunity, decreases healthcare access, and produces health inequities that are deepening in the setting of the covid- pandemic [ ]. for instance, racist rhetoric by government vaccines , , of leaders in response to nationwide black lives matter protests against police brutality may have contributed to decreased acceptance of covid- vaccines promoted by federal agencies [ , ]. a national survey found that most black adults agreed that government pandemic response would be stronger if more white people were affected [ ]. black adults also reported being less likely to get a covid- vaccine even if it was free and determined safe by scientists, and cited concerns about safety and side effects more often than distrust in health systems [ ]. populations with intersecting minority racial, sexual, and gender identities may experience increased psychosocial stress compared to white sgm and black heterosexual cis-gender populations [ ]. thus, our findings are likely indicative of psychosocial, economic, and structural factors impacting black sgm and highlight how intersectionality impacts covid- vaccine acceptance among sgm. our study has limitations that deserve to be mentioned. first, the study sample was an online-recruited national convenience sample of sgm interested in being screened for a hiv prevention study. while this approach allowed for an analysis of a large sample size, it may be preemptive to extrapolate the current findings to the larger population of sgm in the united states. second, while the sample includes sgm from across the united states, there was no specific regional geographic quota set for the sample, limiting generalizability of our findings to the entire united states. third, vaccine acceptance was assessed before results of the two fda-approved covid- vaccines were released to the public. as the public becomes more aware of the efficacy and safety of the covid- vaccine, we may see shifts in sgm vaccine acceptance and intention to use it. moreover, acceptance to adopt a covid- vaccine may differ based on the vaccine regimen (e.g., dosage, time between treatment visits required), user characteristics and contexts, and treatment-related costs (e.g., out-of-pocket expenses, insurance). we encourage future research to apply sociobehavioral perspectives to examine how these vaccine-related considerations affect covid- vaccine adoption. fourth, our study sample included few gender minority individuals (n = ), who may be particularly vulnerable to pandemic harms, and our results may not be generalizable to larger gender minority populations [ ]. lastly, our analysis compared outcomes between race categories among sgm populations, which lim- its our understanding of variability within racial groups that may help identify strategies to combat covid- inequities. moreover, in the absence of a racially-matched heterosexual sample, we are unable to assess how intersectional disparities across race, ethnicity, and sexual and gender identity could contribute to vaccine acceptance. future research with larger population-based data may inform covid- vaccine efforts. our analyses did not include measures of socioeconomic status, which can contribute to differences in covid- vaccine acceptance, or other indicators of social vulnerability associated with increased risk of covid- incidence and mortality [ , , , ]. stigma, stress, and discrimination that contribute to health inequities among sgm likely impact vulnerability during the covid- pandemic [ , ]. structural factors such as high rates of unemployment and lack of health insurance among sgm that contributed to health inequity prior to covid- are now worsening [ , , ]. sgm are also more likely to experience homelessness that may increase exposure to covid- . disproportionate rates of mental health disorders and victimization are worsening among sgm in the setting of social isolation due to pandemic restrictions [ – ]. decreased access to health services and delays in seeking care may have grave consequences for sgm who are more likely to have comorbidities, such as asthma and cardiovascular disease, which increase risk of severe covid- disease [ , , , – ]. covid- outcome data rarely include sgm identities, but co-occurring psychosocial, economic, and biomedical inequities among sgm increase risk for poor covid- outcomes [ , ]. public health surveillance must include “key equity indicators”, such as sgm identities, to ensure equitable representation in public policy [ , ]. future research addressing medical mistrust may elucidate how experiences of social and economic inequality among sgm affect medical mistrust [ ]. vaccines , , of . conclusions our study suggests that medical mistrust, social concern, altruism, and race were significantly associated with covid- vaccine acceptance among a national online sample of sgm. covid- vaccine uptake is essential to stopping the spread of covid- and ending the covid- pandemic. as the planning and implementation of covid- vac- cine rollout efforts are designed, administrators must address challenges and opportunities related to sgm vaccine acceptance. author contributions: conceptualization, j.a.b., k.b. and d.t.d.s.; formal analysis, j.a.b.; method- ology, j.a.b. and k.b.; writing—original draft preparation, j.a.b. and d.t.d.s.; writing—review and editing, j.a.b., k.b., d.t.d.s., l.h.-w., k.h.m. and p.k.v.; project administration, w.y.l., j.a.b. and k.b.; funding acquisition, j.a.b. and k.b. all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. funding: this research was supported by the national institutes of health adolescent medicine trials network for hiv/aids interventions and the university of north carolina/emory center for innovative technology (u hd ). dtds is supported by the national clinical scholar program at the university of pennsylvania and the agency for health care research and quality (t hs ). the content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of nih. institutional review board statement: the study was conducted according to the guidelines of the declaration of helsinki, and approved by the institutional review board of the university of pennsylvania (protocol code , april ). informed consent statement: informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study. data availability statement: the data presented in this study are available on request from the corresponding author. the data are not publicly available due to privacy and ethical restrictions. conflicts of interest: the authors declare that there are no conflict of interest. references . mcclung, n.; chamberland, m.; kinlaw, k.; matthew, d.b.; wallace, m.; bell, b.p.; lee, g.m.; talbot, h.k.; 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untitled de terugkeer van alledaags racisme een gesprek met philomena essed over alledaags racisme, wetenschap en activisme julian schaap en philomena essed soc １３ (１): ９３–１０８ doi: １０.５１１７/soc２０１７.１.scha abstract in recent societal debates on racism in the netherlands, cultural anthropolo- gist philomena essed has become one of the key faces of dutch research on racism. over three decades ago, essed published a monograph entitled alledaags racisme (everyday racism), which gave rise to substantial debate within and beyond academia on the existence of racism – especially of a more implicit, everyday variation – in the netherlands. for the first time since , alledaags racisme is granted a new edition and has arguably only gained in relevance in a time when issues regarding race-ethnicity are increasingly politicized (e.g. the ‘black pete’ debate; ethno-racial profiling by police forces). discussing – but also going beyond – this debate, this article reports a conversation between julian schaap and essed on contemporary everyday racism, the sociology of race-ethnicity, and the epistemology and methodol- ogy of research that is distinctly political. １ introductie er zijn weinig terugkerende thema’s in het nederlandse debat zo indicatief voor de toegenomen polarisatie en identiteitspolitiek als het thema zwarte piet. sinds / schudt het bestaansrecht van deze (al dan niet) als racistisch beoordeelde karikatuur op zijn grondvesten. meer dan in de jaren zestig en tachtig van de vorige eeuw – toen de figuur ook al werd bekritiseerd – is het debat de laatste vijf jaar in alle hevigheid losgebroken. belangrijker is echter dat deze discussie zich in razend tempo heeft verlegd naar een breder en (tot nu toe) aanhoudend debat over discriminatie op vol. , no. , basis van ras-etniciteit in het algemeen. mede geïnformeerd door ontwik- kelingen in de verenigde staten, hebben aangrenzende vraagstukken zoals etnische profilering door politie, discriminatie op de arbeidsmarkt en (ge- brek aan) diversiteit in de cultuursector zich naar de voorgrond gedrongen. in deze antiracismegolf duikt een kleine schare nederlandse sociaalweten- schappers geregeld op om het debat van wetenschappelijke fundering te voorzien. twee wetenschappers in het bijzonder lijken het gezicht te zijn gewor- den van nederlands onderzoek naar racisme. ten eerste is dat emeritus hoogleraar genderstudies gloria wekker (universiteit utrecht), wiens white innocence ( ) de gemoederen zowel in de media als in universi- teitslokalen (zie van den berg et al. ) verhitte. ten tweede is dat philomena essed, sinds hoogleraar critical race, gender and leaders- hip studies aan de antioch university in de verenigde staten. essed publi- ceerde in haar baanbrekende studie alledaags racisme. op de achter- flap van de originele uitgave valt te lezen: ‘alledaags racisme zal veel dis- cussie oproepen, en zo is het ook bedoeld. het kan pijnlijk zijn – voor witte nederlanders – te lezen hoe deze maatschappij omgaat met mensen van kleur. het kan pijnlijk zijn voor de mensen van kleur te lezen hoe de realiteit er echt uitziet’. die discussie kwam er: zowel in de pers als in de sociale wetenschap kon alledaags racisme rekenen op een zeer kritische ontvangst. vervolgens publiceerde essed het internationaal breed gelezen en geciteerde understanding everyday racism: an interdisciplinary theory ( ; in het nederlands uitgekomen als inzicht in alledaags racisme). daarna bleef het wat nederland betreft ineens lang stil – het debat over (alledaags) racisme en wetenschappelijk onderzoek hiernaar, leek als een nachtkaars te zijn uitgegaan. tot , toen zwarte piet definitief zijn on- schuld verloor. essed publiceerde vervolgens samen met isabel hoving in de bundel dutch racism (met onder andere werk van gloria wekker). dit jaar wordt dat opgevolgd door een heruitgave van alledaags racisme, jaar na dato. gezien de relevantie van esseds werk in de studie naar gender en ra- cisme in nederland en het feit dat zij vaak wordt opgevoerd als ‘heront- dekt’ (bahara ) in het nederlandse (anti)racismedebat, is dit een uit- stekend moment om met philomena essed in gesprek te gaan over haar werk en de aanhoudende relevantie hiervan. want hoe hangt de heden- daagse politieke context van populisme en ‘zeggen waar het op staat’ samen met alledaags racisme? daarnaast biedt dit gesprek de mogelijkheid om te reflecteren op de sociologische studie naar racisme in het algemeen. onderwerpen zoals methodologie en alledaags/impliciet racisme, ont- vol. , no. , sociologie hecht onderzoek en de rol van de (al dan niet activerende of activistische) sociologie, passeren de revue. dit artikel vormt een verslag van het gesprek dat wij hierover voerden in september . ２ alledaags racisme ３３ jaar na alledaags racisme js: in kwam alledaags racisme uit bij feministische uitgeverij sara. hoewel er relatief veel sociologische literatuur over ras en etniciteit be- stond in de verenigde staten en het verenigd koninkrijk, was uw werk een van de eerste en weinige studies naar racisme in nederland. daarnaast betrof het een vergelijkende kwalitatieve studie tussen nederland en ame- rika – een unicum. nu, precies jaar later, wordt het boek voor het eerst opnieuw uitgegeven. het komt niet vaak voor dat een sociaalwetenschap- pelijk boek ruim dertig jaar nadat het origineel is uitgekomen ineens een herdruk krijgt. waarom nu? en in hoeverre wijkt de nieuwe versie af van het origineel? pe: hoewel er – inmiddels ook internationaal – in toenemende mate over racisme in nederland wordt gesproken, is het verbazingwekkend hoe wei- nig er over is gepubliceerd in de wetenschap. toen van gennep me vroeg voor een nieuwe editie van alledaags racisme, had ik enigszins gemengde gevoelens. enerzijds werd ik er als wetenschapper even stil van. zoiets overkomt meestal alleen de klassiekers of de grote schrijvers. anderzijds was het absurd dat er jaar later vraag was – vooral onder jonge kritische mensen – naar een herdruk omdat er in de tussentijd te weinig verder onderzoek had plaatsgevonden. absurd in politieke zin. midden jaren tachtig was er, deels naar aanleiding van mijn boek, een realisatie en zelfs een beleid van positieve actie vanuit lokale overheden die het probleem van rassendiscriminatie erkenden. er was onder allerlei organisaties en progressieve bewegingen belangstelling voor mijn werk – dat ik bewust voor een breed publiek had geschreven – maar er was ook kritiek van collega-wetenschappers. alledaags racisme schudde aan gevestigde pila- ren – er was iets aan de hand. eigenlijk kort daarna al, begin jaren negentig, werd het weer stil. domi- nante spraakmakers scoorden met de opvatting dat er in alledaags ra- cisme was overdreven en het onderwerp dus ook geen plek verdiende in de curricula. de backlash was heftig in haar gevolgen: een hoogopgeleide generatie werd beroofd van kennis over racisme. als je als student of we- tenschapper onderzoek wilde doen naar dit onderwerp moest je veelal schaap & essed de terugkeer van alledaags racisme terugvallen op buitenlandse literatuur. en dat was terug naar af: de uit- gangspositie van waaruit ik was begonnen. mijn motivatie in de vroege jaren tachtig was juist de noodzaak van racisme-kritisch onderzoek in de lokale context omdat internationaal onderzoek niet altijd direct relevant is voor nederland. daarnaast wilde ik zichtbaar maken hoe racisme zich had genesteld in nederland – niet alleen buiten onze grenzen. mede door die backlash werd duidelijk dat ik mijn tijd kennelijk vooruit was; ik dacht destijds vijftien jaar, maar misschien was het wel dertig jaar. als weten- schapper is pionier zijn mooi, maar voor het streven naar sociale recht- vaardigheid was de achterstand in het nederlandse denken schokkend. het lijkt erop dat we nu bezig zijn met een inhaalslag. de nieuwe versie van mijn eerste boek heeft een toegevoegd voorwoord en een extra hoofdstuk over nieuwe ontwikkelingen op het gebied van racisme, met reflecties op het verleden gezien vanuit het heden. verder heb ik slechts minimale aanpassingen gemaakt in de tekst om zoveel mo- gelijk de originele tekst te behouden. het intact houden van de inhoud heeft een reden: met de toenemende productiegerichtheid van onderwijs, waarin het continu produceren van nieuwe artikelen voorop staat, hebben veel studenten en docenten nauwe- lijks meer tijd om te lezen. de attentiespanne wordt hiermee kleiner. ik zie ook steeds vaker dat studenten slechts artikelen van de laatste tien jaar lezen en klassieke, fundamentele werken overslaan. dat is een probleem. juist door die werken waar bepaalde ideeën in geaard zijn, zoals dat je in de sociologie in weber, durkheim en al die figuren werd gegrondvest, word je getraind in een geschiedenis van een denken. ik zie dat verdwijnen aan de universiteit. klassieke werken waarvan al gauw wordt gedacht dat die geen waarde meer hebben want ‘die zijn al meer dan tien jaar oud’. jazeker, er is meer historische dan actuele waarde in bepaald cijfermateriaal van de editie uit , bijvoorbeeld over de omvang en aanwezigheid van bepaalde etni- sche groepen. maar als je eenmaal daaraan sleutelt, is het corrigeer-einde zoek. het heeft ook iets leerzaams om vanuit de -lens te lezen over en de lezer te prikkelen om zelf te reflecteren op het verschil in tijdsgeest tussen toen en nu. het behoud van originaliteit werkt omdat een bepaald concept, een bepaalde theorie, generaties lang toepasbaar kan zijn. js: veel ideeën en theorieën die worden besproken in alledaags racisme, zijn temidden van andere beschrijvingen terug te vinden in meer recente sociologische studies, met name amerikaans onderzoek. zo heeft u het over ‘klein racisme’, waarmee u doelt op subtiele maar veelvuldig voor- komende momenten van interactie waar huidskleur indirect een rol speelt. vol. , no. , sociologie zo horen surinaams-nederlandse vrouwen vaak ‘waar kom je écht van- daan?’ – ondanks dat zij in nederland zijn geboren. dergelijke mechanis- mes zijn vooral de laatste tien jaar besproken als ‘micro-agressies’ (sue ), hoofdzakelijk in de psychologie. tevens heeft u het over de ingewik- kelde kwesties van het al dan niet negeren van huidskleur: kleurenblind- heid. ondanks dat de intentie van kleurenblindheid antiracistisch is, heeft deze vaak racistische uitwerkingen: iets dat de amerikaanse socioloog eduardo bonilla-silva later muntte als ‘kleurenblind racisme’ ( ). der- gelijke empirische bevindingen en uw theoretische duiding hiervan zijn veelal herkenbaar in later, internationaal werk. hoe kijkt u hierop terug? pe: theorieën en het gedachtengoed daarachter zijn altijd in ontwikkeling, vaak tegelijkertijd op meerdere plaatsen, en dat geeft hier blijk van. het viel me bij herlezen op dat ik het toen al had over de vermenging van seksisme en racisme. ook speelde ik al met termen als ‘seksueel racisme’ of ‘racistisch seksisme’. wat ongeveer in dezelfde tijd de nu veelgebruikte term ‘intersectionaliteit’ is komen te heten (crenshaw ) duid ik in understanding everyday racism ( ) aan als ‘gendered racism’. ‘alledaags racisme’ is een tijdloos concept – een begrip als kleurenblind racisme geeft aan wat er verandert in de uitingen van alledaags racisme. bonilla-silva ( ) noemt het racisme zonder racisten, zelf spreek ik liever van racisme zonder ras-aanduiding. dit verschijnsel kennen we in europa nog beter dan in de vs. de normalisering van een westers-gedomineerde cultuurhiër- archie die zich legitimeert door vooral kleur of ras niet te noemen, ook al denk je dat en ook al zijn de gevolgen van dit uitsluitend-denken zichtbaar in de machtsstructuur van de samenleving – de idee-fixe dat er geen ra- cisme kan zijn als er in termen van (etnische) cultuur wordt gesproken. of recentelijk heel concreet: de formule ‘obama tijdperk = einde racisme’, alsof het post-raciale tijdperk zou zijn aangebroken (vgl. dawson en bobo ). het huidige regime leert helaas hoe krom die redenering was. ‘micro-agressies’ omvatten wat ik de accumulatie noem van racistische praktijken waaruit alledaags racisme bestaat. wat verandert zijn bepaalde uitingen daarvan. maar het principe dat racisme geïntegreerd is in de manier waarop het alledaagse leven plaatsvindt en dat het – structureel – ons hele leven beïnvloed, blijft gelden. racisme omvat niet alleen bijzon- dere, expliciete momenten maar juist ook de repetitieve momenten in ons leven, de routine. en daar gaat alledaags racisme over. racisme verandert mee met de aard van het alledaagse. zo is alledaags racisme nu doorge- drongen in sociale media en voegt het zich naar de mogelijkheden die dit instrument te bieden heeft. schaap & essed de terugkeer van alledaags racisme de term micro-agressie is niet veel anders dan het begrip (negatieve) dis- criminatie; het kan voorkomen om welke reden dan ook en heeft daarmee een depolitiserend effect voor onderzoek. dit is een voordeel als ‘gender’ of ‘racisme’ politiek taboetermen zijn, maar het nadeel is dat het beschrijvend blijft. een verklarende theorie vormt een betere basis voor de ontwikkeling van interventie-instrumenten. maar daarvoor is juist de macrocontext van gender, klasse, ras-etniciteit en disability belangrijk om te begrijpen op basis waarván agressies plaatsvinden, waarom, en hoe zich dat historisch ontwikkelde. discriminatie is een meervoudig inzetbaar mechanisme en racisme als concept één van de specifieke ideologische, historische, cultu- rele en structurele contexten waarin het instrumenteel is. ３ sociale media en rechts-populisme js: sociale media worden vaak aangewezen als drijvende kracht achter aanhoudende ongelijkheid en toenemende polarisering in de samenleving. filterbubbels, nepnieuws en ‘alternatieve feiten’ staan tegenover een ge- globaliseerde blik in een kosmopolitische wereld, met ongelimiteerde in- ternationale en diverse communicatie. in hoeverre denkt u dat sociale media verantwoordelijk kunnen worden gehouden voor de huidige ople- ving van het publiek debat over de rol van ras-etniciteit in hedendaagse politieke tegenstellingen? pe: dit geldt zowel voor de nederlandse als de amerikaanse situatie. de kritische communicatie van wat er aan racisme plaatsvindt – vooral ook bij politiegeweld en politieruwheid tegenover zwarte amerikanen of any mi- nority of color – verspreidt zich heel snel via sociale media. maar uiteraard volgt de backlash daarop even snel. zij die daarin stelling nemen, nemen geen blad meer voor de mond in het uiten van racisme. in dutch racism ( ) noemen wij dit – in navolging van een eerdere publicatie (essed ) – ‘entitlement racism’ of ‘eigengerechtigd racisme’: racistische uit- spraken en afbeeldingen uit naam van de vrijheid van meningsuiting. deze vorm van racisme, hoewel niet per se veroorzaakt door, vindt wel voeding in de aard van sociale media, want de zenders schuilen vaak achter anonimiteit en men weet niet precies wie er leest. als je iemand in het gezicht aankijkt en raciaal beschimpt, is het wat anders dan als je je richt op het stukje technologie van het beeldscherm voor je en je er geen voorstelling van hoeft maken dat het echte mensen zijn die lezen en voelen wat je over hen zegt. en, niet te vergeten, de sociale druk van snel reageren, hetgeen geen tijd laat voor doordacht reageren. vol. , no. , sociologie maar je noemt al de mooie paradox van sociale media. het democratiseert wie gehoord kan worden en wie niet, dus verzet tegen racisme is ook veel zichtbaarder. door de democratisering en de afwezigheid van duidelijke gedragsnormen en een tanend gevoel van morele verantwoordelijkheid voor de effecten van sociale media, kunnen de lelijke en slechtste kanten van mensen ongeremd naar boven komen. toch zal ik sociale media niet ongenuanceerd de schuld geven. het is gewoon een instrument. een instru- ment dat op zichzelf de mogelijkheid geeft om het idee van vrijheid van meningsuiting heel breed en ongelimiteerd op te vatten. eigengerechtigd racisme, nieuw voor deze digitale tijd van web . , zonder morele rem, is de bewuste keuze voor openlijk racistische uitspraken, terwijl men kan weten, anno nieuw millennium, dat het racisme is en ook dat niets geheim blijft. er is ook geen ‘onder ons gezegd en gezwegen’ na het klikken op ‘verzenden’. hierover gaat het toegevoegde hoofdstuk in alledaags racisme. js: dat brengt ons tot een verdere reflectie op het heden: in het originele voorwoord van alledaags racisme schrijft u: ‘wordt het woord racisme in nederland niet angstvallig gereserveerd voor extreemrechts, zodat de over- grote meerderheid altijd naar ‘anderen’ kan wijzen in plaats van naar zich- zelf?’ ( : ). als we een blik werpen op het aanhoudende populisme in nederland en de verenigde staten, waar expliciet racisme een terugkeer lijkt te maken, denkt u dat deze stelling nog klopt voor ? pe: het traditionele denken dat racisme uitsluitend bij extreemrechts plaatst, bestaat nog, met als ijkpunt de tweede wereldoorlog. maar de generatie met een actieve herinnering aan de tweede wereldoorlog is uitstervende. daarmee lijkt ook het morele geweten en het idee van ‘dat nooit meer’ te sterven – waarmee extreemrechts wellicht minder beangsti- gend overkomt. het openlijke racisme baseert zich niet meer op een kwes- tie van ‘niet weten’. anno is er genoeg informatie beschikbaar over racisme waardoor ‘niet weten’ in zekere zin een keuze is geworden. de verruwing van public discourse betekent ook dat openlijk en ruw racisme alledaagser wordt. immers, ‘extreem’ is een relatief begrip in relatie tot een substantiële midden- of meer gematigde groep die op andere manieren meedoet, toekijkt of tolereert, dat vervolgens geïnstitutionaliseerde vor- men aanneemt. maar het ‘midden’ verruwt ook, met als grote voorbeelden politici voor wie beledigen en mensonwaardige dingen zeggen hun signa- ture is. in een kort artikel kan ik geen recht doen aan de complexiteit van het geheel. er is een bijna cultachtige schare rond figuren die ‘recht voor zijn raap’ lelijke dingen zeggen, hetgeen appelleert aan presociale, diep- egoïstische trekken om met niemand rekening te hoeven houden. schaap & essed de terugkeer van alledaags racisme het huidige populisme is een huwelijk tussen het op zich democratisch en menselijk verlangen gezien en gehoord te worden en de onverzadigbare politieke machtshonger van de populist. de vaak dun-geïnformeerde ‘ik vind, dus ik zeg’ want ‘het is mijn recht’ mentaliteit van veel sociale media wordt opgepakt door politici die redeneren: ‘zij vinden, ik zeg hen te begrijpen, dus hun stem komt mij toe’. het cruciale verschil is dat je vanuit een burger of medebewonerspositie vooral je eigen waardigheid op het spel zet met ‘haatpraat’. het is hypocriet af te geven op de gewone burger als politici hen zijn voorgegaan in het presenteren van ongeinme- ningen, onderbuikgevoelens en ongefundeerde zogenaamde feiten over etnische groepen, als ware het vanuit kennis van zaken. fearmongering politici, die hun macht misbruiken vanuit een leidersrol, met grote verant- woordelijkheid en gevolgen voor de hele samenleving. in populisme spelen de opvatting en emotie van entitlement een sterk polariserende rol die mensen bevestigt in een monsterlijk net van angst voor elkaar: ‘wat ik heb komt mij toe’ en ‘anderen misgunnen mij van alles’. terwijl de meeste mensen eigenlijk veel liever zoeken naar verbinding. de stormachtige ma- nier waarop sociale media technologisch de harten van miljarden mensen hebben veroverd kon juist ook plaatsvinden omdat daarmee / verbin- ding met anderen wordt gekoesterd. op dit moment zien we allerlei tendensen tegelijkertijd. in de ver- enigde staten is er de alt-right wier uitlatingen openlijk steun vinden bij de ku klux klan. dan is er de andere alt-right, die zegt dat hun opvattingen niks met racisme te maken hebben, ‘het is de verdediging van ons land, onze cultuur, our way of life’, een nativisme dat herkenbaar is in de wil- ders-beweging en ander nederlands rechts-populisme. het heeft niks met racisme te maken, zeggen ze. dan is er in de verenigde staten, net als in nederland, een middenmoot die geneigd is om te ontkennen dat racisme een geïnstitutionaliseerd probleem is. tegelijkertijd is er een groeiende beweging onder mensen van allerlei komaf die in actie komen tegen ra- cisme en er openlijk voor willen staan dat iedereen gezien en gerespec- teerd wordt in hun mens-zijn. in de verenigde staten loopt dit al langer, in nederland is het groeiende. het interessante is dat je dat vooral ook ziet onder de jongere generatie die deels opgroeit met meer vermenging van sociaaleconomische klassen, vooral op scholen (hoewel je ook wel gesegre- geerde scholen hebt, maar dat is weer niet absoluut), in het straatbeeld, er is veel meer contact in de muziek – bij muziekfestivals is er én segregatie én meer contact –, dus dat is ook weer een gemengd beeld – kijk maar naar jouw onderzoek over de aanhoudende witheid in rockmuziek (schaap ). bovendien helpt internet om continu op de hoogte te zijn van wat vol. , no. , sociologie er in de wereld gebeurt. de invloed van de verenigde staten op nederland is gigantisch. elke nieuwe trend in de vs wordt vertaald als relevant voor nederland in termen van ‘meedoen’ of ‘niet meedoen’. we zagen het al met de occupy-beweging, black lives matter en #metoo – overigens zijn de twee laatste bewegingen geïnitieerd door afrikaans-amerikaanse vrouwen, voortrekkers in actie tegen (de combinatie van) racisme en seksisme. in nederland deels een copy-cat-verschijnsel, maar ook authentieke transna- tionale herkenning is van invloed en lijkt groter, directer en sneller zicht- baar geuit dan het dertig jaar geleden was. ４ epistemologie, methodologie en kritiek js: kortgeleden publiceerde dit tijdschrift een boekbespreking over de bun- del dutch racism (siebers ) waarin u een aantal kritieken ten deel vielen. zo stelt siebers: [...] het boek [dutch racism, js] put uit een veelvoud aan disciplines, behalve de sociologie. dat is opmerkelijk omdat je sociologische data nodig hebt om de bovengenoemde verankering van processen van uitsluiting van migranten in structuren, instituties en discoursen te laten zien én in verband te brengen met racisme. de auteurs gaan er simpelweg vanuit dat de nederlandse samenleving racistisch is om vervolgens reflecties en interpretaties te ontwikkelen, zonder de moeite te nemen om dat uitgangspunt aan te tonen ( : ). vergelijkbare kritieken werden destijds na de publicatie van alledaags racisme, jaar geleden ook in de (geschreven) media (zie o.a. brunt ) geuit. deze kwestie lijkt vooral een epistemologische: u baseert zich in uw werk hoofdzakelijk op een hermeneutische, interpretatieve en erva- ringsgerichte vorm van onderzoek, waar de critici niet door worden over- tuigd. kunt u hierop reflecteren? pe: ik ben ook in alledaags racisme en in understanding everyday racism uitgegaan van de samenleving als racistisch (en bewust dus niet ‘een sa- menleving bestaande uit racisten’). als het een troost is voor siebers: mijn theoretische benadering en methodologie zijn heel positief ontvangen door niet geringe sociologen als joe feagin, patricia hill collins en michele lamont. mijn werk is in meer dan tien landen toegepast. david r. wil- liams, expert in sociologie en public health, destijds aan de university of michigan en nu, net als lamont, aan harvard, kwantificeerde (mijn) kwa- schaap & essed de terugkeer van alledaags racisme litatief geselecteerde ervaringen van alledaags racisme voor survey-onder- zoek, onlangs ook toegepast om self-reported raciaal-etnische discriminatie te kunnen meten in relatie tot bijvoorbeeld een gevoel van gezondheid en welzijn (sharif et al. ). dit zijn allemaal sociologen die zich uitgebreid hebben verdiept in (alledaags) racisme – zie ook lamonts studie getting respect ( ). het wordt vaak vergeten dat racismestudies een vakgebied op zich is. het eerste onderzoek dat ik deed in en ook het geheel nieuwe onder- zoek voor understanding everyday racism – dus overigens geen enkel ge- recycled interview uit zoals ik weleens heb horen beweren – was norm-doorbrekend op verschillende niveaus. het eerste onderzoek betrof wat nederland betreft bijna alleen laagopgeleide vrouwen. in het tweede onderzoek wilde ik de mythe doorprikken dat educatie de sleutel is tot acceptatie en interviewde uitsluitend hoogopgeleide vrouwen. ik wilde verder geen observaties doen, maar luisteren naar omschrijvingen van het- geen reeds was voorgevallen. maar het positivisme predikte observaties. mijn stelling was: ‘waarom weer een sociaal experiment opzetten waarbij zwarte mensen opnieuw door racisme heen gaan, omdat de wetenschap- per meent dat “het pas waar is als ik het zelf observeer”? maar als anderen het hebben gezien of beleefd, dan kan het niet gelden.’ dit stuitte mij ethisch tegen de borst. en overigens, wat is menig survey anders dan self- reported meningen en/of ervaringen? ik heb dus geput uit de ervaringen en kennis die je ontwikkelt als je keer op keer met hetzelfde wordt geconfron- teerd. het blijkt kennis die gerelateerd is aan emotie, maar wel rationele paden van interpretatie volgt. het is kennis die betekenis geeft aan je alledaagse leven en die je helpt in het alledaagse leven om staande te blijven. die kennis heb ik aangeboord, hetgeen destijds ongebruikelijk was in de sociologie. en dan nota bene van vrouwen en dan nota bene – nota bene – de ervaringskennis van zwarte vrouwen. ik deed allemaal din- gen die totaal niet gepast waren in de sociale wetenschappen. het is nu misschien moeilijk voor te stellen, maar dat was allemaal nieuw. verder was er het epistemologische spanningsveld van ‘wiens kennis geldt nu eigenlijk?’, ‘waar vergaar je de kennis?’ en ‘wiens stem geldt?’ verder waren er ook nog de politieke vragen: ‘naar welke stemmen heb je geluisterd?’, ‘wie is de onderzoeker?’ dus mijn werk was traditie-doorbre- kend op vele manieren, niet alleen methodologisch. het principe van over- draagbaarheid van bevindingen – transferibility – wat voor veel kwalitatief onderzoek geldt, stond nog in de kinderschoenen. ik beoogde niet om positivisten te overtuigen, maar een raamwerk te bieden waarin velen vol. , no. , sociologie zich konden herkennen. de conceptuele familie van mijn werk is onder meer (deels) herkenbaar in de tegenwoordig veelvuldig toegepaste groun- ded theory en situational analysis. in haar lijvige boek new racism ( ) over methoden van onderzoek op het gebied van racisme wijdt methodo- loog norma romm een uitvoerig, kritisch hoofdstuk aan mijn methodolo- gie, waar studenten wat mee kunnen. evenmin was mijn doel aan te tonen dat de nederlandse samenleving racistisch is. ongelijkheidsstructuren lopen via raciale en etnische lijnen. en die zijn meer dan zichtbaar in nederland. dus ja, waar begin je dan? dat is ook exact de reden waarom wij dutch racism in een ander paradig- ma hebben verankerd, namelijk dat in nederland, net als elke andere westerse samenleving, en daar niet alleen, racisme in het systeem verwe- ven is. vanuit die positie wilden we onderzoeken of er karakteristieken zijn voor nederlands racisme. die zijn er, in lijn met mijn veronderstelling dat racisme zich voegt naar de aard van de samenleving. deels maakt zij die aard, maar het voegt zich ook toe naar de instrumenten die beschikbaar zijn in de samenleving. het klopt dat veel van deze complexe fenomenen hoofdzakelijk kwali- tatief zijn te ondervangen. deels is het wél in cijfers uit te drukken. maar los van het cijfermateriaal: sommige dingen kun je niet in cijfers laten zien omdat ze kwalitatief van aard zijn. js: sinds de late jaren negentig wordt er steeds meer onderzoek gedaan naar racisme en discriminatie door naar impliciete factoren te kijken, met name door het gebruik van de implicit association test (iat; greenwald et al. ), die in staat zou zijn om impliciete associaties op basis van ras- etniciteit en zelfs ‘racial bias’ te ontaarden. potentieel dus een manier om dergelijke kritieken methodologisch te adresseren? pe: elke methodologie heeft zijn plek. ik hecht veel waarde aan kwantita- tief onderzoek omdat dat bepaalde dingen aantoont en laat zien die je met kwalitatief onderzoek niet kunt laten zien en vice versa. het onderzoek naar impliciet racisme bevestigt wat we vanuit het feminisme en onder- zoek naar racisme al veel langer wisten. wat iat-onderzoek niet goed laat zien is waarom die bias nou net daarover is en niet over iets anders. en hoe impliciet is het nu eigenlijk? want het wordt aangenomen als impliciet omdat men het niet expliciet zegt. maar is het ook impliciet voor de han- delende mens? waarom kleur, gender, religie – waarom zijn dat de asso- ciaties die een opvallendere rol spelen? wat is het dat automatisch wordt getriggerd in de kleurherkenning van ‘oh, die is zwart dus die is anders’ of ‘oh die is wit, dus ik herken iets van mezelf’. wat is het dat je meent te schaap & essed de terugkeer van alledaags racisme herkennen? en daarin kan een laag zijn die heel erg onbewust is. er zijn ook lagen die redelijk in ons bewustzijn liggen. dus het is veel complexer dan sociaalpsychologische onderzoeken kunnen laten zien. maar elke stap telt, dus het ‘unconscious bias’-onderzoek is belangrijk, het heeft een zicht- baar makende plek in de racismetheorie. tegelijkertijd moet daarmee niet de aandacht voor de onderliggende machtsstructuren verdwijnen, anders krijg je zoiets van ‘i’m okay, you’re okay; i’m biased, you’re biased’ – ‘zo werken de hersenen nu eenmaal’. in alledaags racisme intrigeerde mij de vraag ‘hoe weet je of iets racisme is?’ ik vermoedde dat iets intuïtief als racisme herkennen neerkomt op razendsnel gebruik maken van kennis op basis van socialisatie en de her- haaldelijke confrontatie met vooroordelen en discriminatie. onlangs kwam ik bevestigend onderzoek tegen over intuïtie als snelle activering van emotionele en andere accumulatieve kennis (lufityanto et al. ). deze intuïtieve kennis, zo stellen de onderzoekers, is vooral belangrijk in het nemen van beslissingen in situaties van onzekerheid. dat is ten voeten uit vaak het geval bij racisme, omdat het wordt ontkend: ‘zo heb ik het niet bedoeld, je bent overgevoelig, weet je wel hoe erg het is te worden beschul- digd van racisme,’ enzovoorts. in alledaags racisme heb ik een eerste po- ging gedaan intuïtieve kennis over racisme te operationaliseren door in detail te kijken naar de gemaakte vergelijkingen en de geactiveerde kennis en bronnen die mensen gebruiken om te bepalen of iets wel of niet racisme is. dit heb ik uitgebreider en, naar ik hoopte, theoretisch meer solide, kunnen onderzoeken in understanding everyday racism. cognitietheorie heeft mij dus altijd al gefascineerd. ５ wetenschappers op de barricade js: als wetenschapper heeft u een strijdbare houding. u staat hierin niet alleen: in de critical race studies (bijv. delgado en stefancic ; twine en warren ) is een lange traditie van activistische wetenschap, of weten- schap met een duidelijke normatieve stellingname. ziet u uzelf als activis- tisch wetenschapper? en, kijkende naar het idee van waardevrije weten- schap zoals bijvoorbeeld gepropageerd door max weber in wetenschap als beroep ( [ ]), ziet u waardeoordelen in de wetenschap als probleem of als mogelijkheid? pe: waardevrije wetenschap... zo twintigste-eeuws. zijn er echt nog men- sen die dat denken? qua positionering zie ik mezelf als een social justice vol. , no. , sociologie scholar. mijn wetenschappelijke drijfveer is niet alleen, maar wel expliciet ook, het verlangen bij te dragen aan sociale rechtvaardigheid. ik wil hand- vatten bieden voor het begrijpen en tegengaan van onrechtvaardigheid, maar de mensen vrijlaten het op te pikken of niet. als je je kunt laten inspireren door wat ik onderzoek en hoe ik dat doe: prachtig. maar de toepassing is een eigen keuze. in die zin geloof ik in de weberiaanse hou- ding van wetenschappelijke afstandelijkheid. toen ik studeerde was hij overigens mijn favoriet onder de klassieken. js: de laatste jaren is er relatief veel activistisch werk geproduceerd over racisme. in nederland zijn dat het eerder genoemde white innocence (wekker ), sunny bergmans documentaire wit is ook een kleur ( ), anousha nzume’s hallo witte mensen ( ). hoe denkt u dat alledaags racisme zich daartoe verhoudt? pe: ik meen te begrijpen dat die auteurs zich mede hebben laten inspireren door alledaags racisme – en dat zeg ik met enige schroom. bij herlezen na tig jaren besefte ik waarom uitgeverij van gennep het wilde herpublice- ren. er staat zoveel in wat nog zo geldig, nijpend of schrijdend is. interes- sant hierbij is dat de ervaringen van vrouwen van surinaamse komaf, die centraal staan in het boek, deels onveranderd zijn, zoals blijkt uit een onderzoek van dienke hondius en haar studenten ( ), maar ook deels zijn verschoven naar nieuwe groepen in de samenleving. er is nu ook een generatie die behoefte heeft om te begrijpen waar hun kritisch denken vandaan komt. dat heb ik zelf ook gehad. het was een enorm aha-moment toen ik buitenlandse literatuur las en dacht ‘ik ben niet gek, het klopt dat racisme een structureel verschijnsel is in nederland’. dit groeiend bewust- zijn en zelfvertrouwen in de eigen kritische analyses komt niet alleen vanuit ‘zwarte’ nederlanders. het is een grotere, gemengde groep. tegelij- kertijd weet ik ook dat de verworvenheden van het ene op het andere jaar ineens kunnen verdwijnen; een backlash ligt altijd op de loer. ６ een nieuwe generatie onderzoekers js: uit die groeiende groep kritische denkers komen vast ook nieuwe on- derzoekers voort. wat zou u studenten en jonge onderzoekers die zich willen buigen over deze materie willen meegeven? pe: allereerst – voor hen die nog geloven in waardevrij onderzoek – dit is niet het soort onderzoek dat je wilt doen. het is niet mogelijk om racisme te bestuderen en te pretenderen dat je er geen mening over hebt; neutraal staan ten opzichte van de legitimiteit en morele status van racisme. het is schaap & essed de terugkeer van alledaags racisme een duidelijke stellingname en dat is soms lastig. zelf ben ik ongeacht de backlash altijd doorgegaan. contra-intuïtief gebeurt het volgende: dieper in de materie duiken, veel erover lezen en onderzoeken minimaliseert het gevoel van ongemak over het onderwerp en helpt juist meer afstand te nemen. ik neem racisme ook niet persoonlijk, want het is ook nooit per- soonlijk bedoeld – het is een groepsconflict. ten slotte is het belangrijk te herhalen dat een specifieke vorm van domi- nantie – racisme in dit geval – niet lost staat van andere vormen van vernederingen die beogen mensen in hun waardigheid aan te tasten. so- ciale mechanismen die werken in termen van racisme werken ook in an- dere velden. er is wat mij betreft geen hiërarchie van structurele uitsluitin- gen. er zijn slechts verschillende vormen en geschiedenissen van groeps- conflict. uiteindelijk gaat het om de erkenning dat een ieder gelijke waarde heeft als mens. mijn huidige studie naar een ‘cultuur van waardigheid’ heeft iets universeels. maar tegelijkertijd kun je gelijkwaardigheid alleen goed begrijpen als je ook inzicht hebt in de specifieke manieren waarop mensen worden gedehumaniseerd, gemarginaliseerd of vernederd. literatuur bahara, h. ( ) de revanche van de antiracismewetenschap. de volkskrant, juli, https:// www.volkskrant.nl/voorpagina/de-revanche-van-de-antiracismewetenschap˜a /. berg, m. van den, e. berkvens, c. chivers, b. heertje en m. smit ( ) ‘racisme is geen ver-van- mijn-bed-show meer’: een gesprek over de lessen uit gloria wekkers white innocence ( ). sociologie, ( ): - . bonilla-silva, e. ( ) racism without racists: color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in america. lanham: rowman and littlefield. brunt, e. ( ) ik ben racist, jij bent racist. nrc handelsblad, januari, p. . crenshaw, k. ( ) mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color. stanford law review, - . dawson, m.c. en l.d. bobo ( ) one year later and the myth of a post-racial society. du boise review: social science research on race, ( ): - . delgado, r. en j. stefancic ( ) critical race theory: an introduction [derde editie]. new york: new york university press. essed, p. 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( ) just like hendrix: whiteness and the online critical and consumer reception of rock music in the unites states, - . popular communication, ( ): - . scp ( ) integratie in zicht? de integratie van migranten in nederland op acht terreinen nader bekeken. denk haag: sociaal en cultureel planbureau shariff-marco, s., n. breen, h. landrine, b.b. reeve, n. krieger, g.c. gee en b. liu ( ) measu- ring everyday racial/ethnic discrimination in health surveys: how best to ask the questions, in one or two stages, across multiple racial/ethnic groups? du bois review: social science research on race, ( ): - . siebers, h. ( ) de pot verwijt de ketel... hoe antiracisme de analyse van racisme een slechte dienst bewijst. sociologie, ( ): - . sue, d.w. ( ) microaggressions in everyday life: race, gender, and sexual orientation. new jersey: wiley. twine, f.w. en j.w. warren ( ) racing research, researching race: methodological dilemmas in critical race studies. new york: new york university press. weber, m. ( [ ]) wetenschap als beroep. nijmegen: vantilt. wekker, g. ( ) white innocence: paradoxes of colonialism and race. durham: duke university press. over de auteurs julian schaap is cultuursocioloog en als docentpromovendus werkzaam aan de afdeling kunst- en cultuurwetenschappen van de erasmus univer- siteit rotterdam. daar doet hij (onder andere) onderzoek naar de samen- hang tussen sociale ongelijkheid en smaakvoorkeuren in populaire mu- ziek. e-mail: j.schaap@eshcc.eur.nl philomena essed is cultureel antropoloog en hoogleraar critical race, gender and leadership studies aan de antioch university, verenigde sta- ten. zij promoveerde in cum laude aan de universiteit van amster- dam. de daaruit voortgekomen publicatie understanding everyday racism ( ), in het nederlands uitgebracht als inzicht in alledaags racisme schaap & essed de terugkeer van alledaags racisme ( ), behoort nog steeds tot een van de internationale standaardwerken in de studie naar ras-etniciteit en racisme. naast verschillende boeken heeft essed tientallen andere publicaties op haar naam staan, ontving zij verscheidene eredoctoraten (universiteit van pretoria in zuid-afrika, , umeå universiteit in zweden, ) en werd zij in benoemd tot ridder in de orde van oranje-nassau. e-mail: essed@antioch.edu vol. , no. , sociologie freedom to struggle : the ironies of colson whitehead this is a repository copy of freedom to struggle : the ironies of colson whitehead. white rose research online url for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ / version: published version article: kelly, adam maxwell orcid.org/ - - - ( ) freedom to struggle : the ironies of colson whitehead. open library of humanities. freedom after neoliberalism. issn - . /olh. eprints@whiterose.ac.uk https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ reuse this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution (cc by) licence. this licence allows you to distribute, remix, tweak, and build upon the work, even commercially, as long as you credit the authors for the original work. more information 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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. open access: open library of humanities is a peer-reviewed open access journal. digital preservation: the open library of humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the clockss scholarly archive service. adam kelly, ‘freedom to struggle: the ironies of colson whitehead’ ( ) ( ): open library of humanities, doi: https://doi.org/ . /olh. freedom after neoliberalism freedom to struggle: the ironies of colson whitehead adam kelly university of york, uk adam.kelly@york.ac.uk this essay explores the changing role played by the idea of freedom in the fiction of colson whitehead. i begin by outlining some of the significations of ‘freedom’ within american culture before and during the period of neoliberal hegemony, placing particular emphasis on trends in the word’s provenance for african americans between the civil rights era and the time in which whitehead is writing. i then undertake an extended comparison between whitehead’s novels apex hides the hurt ( ) and the underground railroad ( ). i argue that in apex—published against the background of the bush doctrine and the american wars in iraq and afghanistan—whitehead treats freedom ironically. the novel both pursues and treats critically a postmodern aesthetics that envisages symbolic action on language as the primary ground of politics. the underground railroad, by contrast, inhabits an african american literary genre—the novel of slavery—that is strongly wedded to discourses of bondage and freedom. this novel, arriving a decade after apex, shows whitehead responding to changes in american society and culture—particularly the advent of black lives matter and a growing public awareness of the implications of mass incarceration policies for african americans—that seem to call for a more sincere reckoning with the notion of freedom. i conclude with a discussion of time in whitehead, arguing that his distinctive engagement with temporality lies at the heart of the vision of freedom after neoliberalism offered by his fiction. kelly: freedom to struggle in a scene one third of the way through colson whitehead’s novel apex hides the hurt, the story’s unnamed protagonist, an african american ‘nomenclature consultant’ renowned for the successful branding of consumer products, holds a meeting with albie winthrop, the scion of an old white family ( : ). the meeting takes place in the fictional midwestern town of winthrop, named after albie’s ancestors, who had brought much-needed jobs to the town in the late nineteenth century through the construction of a barbed wire factory. despite this link to a successful industrial past, the continued value of winthrop as a name for the town has recently been questioned. lucky aberdeen, a local tech entrepreneur, believes that the name doesn’t reflect the ‘new market realities, the changing face of the community’ ( ). lucky wants to rename the town new prospera, and when he brings his proposal to the three-person town council on which he sits, they vote two-to-one in favour of change. but regina goode, the african american town mayor who has voted with lucky, now demurs on the new name. as albie recounts to the protagonist: ‘we sat there deadlocked. every name—mine, lucky’s, regina’s—had one vote, and no one would budge’ ( ). the result is that the protagonist, a corporate expert in naming, has been brought in to have the casting vote. alongside winthrop and new prospera, the third name being touted is the original one given to the town by its first settlers, a group of former slaves. this name—regina’s choice—is revealed to the protagonist and the reader as albie continues: ‘it was only a settlement really,’ albie said, ‘where regina’s family decided to stop one day. there wasn’t any thought to it. they just dropped their bags here.’ ‘but what was it called?’ ‘oh. they called it freedom.’ freedom, freedom, freedom. it made his brain hurt. must have been a bitch to travel all that way only to realize that they forgot to pack the subtlety. ( ) ‘freedom was so defiantly unimaginative,’ the protagonist thinks to himself a few pages later, ‘as to approach a kind of moral weakness’ ( ). kelly: freedom to struggle in this essay, i seek to understand and explicate this reaction by the protagonist of apex hides the hurt to the name ‘freedom.’ the lack of subtlety, lack of imagination, and even moral weakness he attributes to the name says much, i want to suggest, about the aesthetic and ethical values that typify not only his commercial profession but also his specific intersection of class, race, and generation. this class, race, and generation are colson whitehead’s own: born in , the author is, like most of the protagonists of his novels, an upper-middle-class member of what has been called the ‘post-soul’ generation of african americans. here, ‘soul’ is associated with the attitude and aesthetics of the civil rights era and the generation of whitehead’s parents. in his book soul babies, mark anthony neal claims that black americans born in the generation after civil rights are ‘divorced from the nostalgia’ associated with the movement and therefore able ‘to engage the movement’s legacy from a state of objectivity that the traditional civil rights leadership is both unwilling and incapable of doing’ ( : ). while one might quibble with the word ‘objectivity’ in this claim, the sense of distance that those who came of age in the generation after civil rights feel from the commitments of the earlier movement is undoubtedly a feature of whitehead’s fiction. while his first and most recent novels—the intuitionist ( ) and the underground railroad ( )—are historical fantasias that take place earlier than (or in an alternative reality to) the classic civil rights decades, the four novels in between—john henry days ( ), apex hides the hurt ( ), sag harbor ( ), and zone one ( )—are all set in the late twentieth and twenty-first century, yet each features a protagonist whose relationship to civil rights is either ambiguously hazy, broadly ignorant, or instinctively hostile. in apex hides the hurt, this haziness/ignorance/hostility is exemplified in the protagonist’s sarcastic and dismissive response to the name ‘freedom’. as richard h. king argues in civil rights and the idea of freedom, ‘the search for freedom’ was ‘the as well as being described as post-soul (cohn, ; maus, ), whitehead has also been claimed for the competing terms post-black (touré, ) and postrace (saldívar, ). arguably more important than which ‘post’ one prefers is the fact that the civil rights era marks the origin point for understanding blackness, race, and soul in all these uses of the prefix. kelly: freedom to struggle essence of the civil rights movement,’ and no word has come to be more identified with the goals, attitudes, and legacy of the movement ( : xviii). ‘freedom’ offered a unifying banner, king explains, because its significations and connotations crossed religious and secular boundaries. on the religious side, as conveyed most memorably in the rhetoric of martin luther king, jr., ‘were two powerful and compelling stories of the move from slavery to freedom,’ the old testament journey of the children of israel to the promised land and the new testament story of christ’s spiritual deliverance of man from sin ( ). the more secular uses of ‘freedom’ by black activists and thinkers drew on a wide range of sources, from postwar liberal pluralism to radical marxism to the thought of hannah arendt and frantz fanon. in both these senses, religious and secular, ‘freedom now’ underpinned the possibility of collective action. the era saw the advent of freedom songs, freedom schools, freedom rides, and the freedom summer of . yet in the years immediately following the major legal gains of the movement, and over subsequent decades, the signifying power of ‘freedom’ for black activists and the broader left—its originally inspiring mix of progressive teleology and open utopian possibility—began to wane, with openness and emptiness coming to seem uncomfortably intertwined. in a preface to the second edition of his book, king notes that with the conservative turn in american political life after , attempts to revive the rhetoric of civil rights—including the clarion call of ‘freedom’—came to seem ‘counterproductive, mere exercises in nostalgia’ ( : xi). this essay positions the fiction of colson whitehead as an important engagement with ideas of freedom in the wake of both civil rights and the neoliberal turn. in the next section, i examine the post-civil rights period in more detail, juxtaposing developments on the black left with the rise of the neoliberal and neoconservative right, and tracking the role played by discourses of freedom in the us over the final decades of the century. in the section that follows i return to apex hides the hurt, exploring in more detail the novel’s ironic treatment of freedom in a neoliberal setting. in the final section i turn to whitehead’s sixth and most recent novel, the for more recent work on old testament analogues in the african american tradition, see hartnell ( ) and patterson ( ). kelly: freedom to struggle underground railroad, which inhabits an african american literary genre—the novel of slavery—that is strongly wedded to discourses of bondage and freedom. this novel, arriving a decade after apex, shows whitehead responding to changes in american society and culture—particularly the advent of black lives matter and a growing public awareness of the implications of mass incarceration policies for african americans—that seem to call for a more sincere reckoning with the notion of freedom. and it is also in this novel that the question of ‘after’ raises its head, since whitehead’s distinctive engagement with temporality lies at the heart of the vision of freedom after neoliberalism offered by his fiction. the ironies of freedom while ‘freedom’ was manifestly the keyword of the civil rights movement, it was also a highly popular term with the rising new right of the same era. in the story of american freedom, eric foner traces this popularity, conveying the scholarly consensus that the post- period witnessed a rebirth of conservatism in the united states. this was a movement with multiple strands and multiple overlapping appellations. foner’s taxonomy of s-era conservatism includes the ‘new conservatives,’ who feared the moral decline of the west amid the waning of christian values; the more intellectually ambitious neoconservatives associated with commentary, national review, and the public interest; and the ‘“libertarian” conservatives,’ defined by their ‘equation of individual freedom with unregulated capitalism’ ( : – ). this latter strand of conservatism is generally now referred to as neoliberalism, and its ascent to power from the s onwards was a precipitous one. in this ascent, the the scholarship on american conservatism, and its revival in the postwar era, is vast. for two influential accounts, see schoenwald ( ) and nash ( ). foner’s description of neoliberalism as ‘libertarian’ reflects a s scholarly outlook that has since been questioned (bockman, ). as many critics have more recently noted, neoliberals do not argue for a blanket weakening of state power in order to free the individual; rather, they want the state’s role scaled back only in certain areas—welfare provision, defence of labour rights, financial regulation—while boosted in others—law enforcement, defence of property rights, enforcement of contracts. the effect is to free corporations as much if not more than the individual. neoliberalism is also more philosophically constructionist than classic liberalism or libertarianism: ‘part of what makes neoliberalism ‘neo’ is that it depicts free markets, free trade, and entrepreneurial rationality as achieved and normative, as promulgated through law and through social and economic policy—not simply as kelly: freedom to struggle idea of freedom played a catalysing role. in the preface to his bestseller the road to serfdom, the austrian economist and leading early neoliberal thinker friedrich hayek expressed himself ‘puzzled why those in the united states who truly believe in liberty should not only have allowed the left to appropriate this almost indispensable term but should even have assisted by beginning to use it themselves as a term of opprobrium’ ( : ). the right’s reclamation project on the terms ‘liberty’ and ‘freedom,’ begun by hayek, was continued with aplomb by the key american prophet of neoliberalism, milton friedman. in his capitalism and freedom ( ), friedman argued that ‘competitive capitalism—the organization of the bulk of economic activity through private enterprise operating in a free market’ constituted ‘a system of economic freedom and a necessary condition for political freedom’ ( : ). these ideas gained little wider attention at the time of publication—as friedman himself acknowledged of his television series free to choose, in the early s there would have been ‘no significant audience receptive to its views’ ( : xii). but neoliberal policies began to gain serious influence in the s, when the keynesianism that had underpinned the postwar management of capitalism proved insufficient to address the stagflation crisis of that decade. the increasing prominence of neoliberal discourses of freedom after was also abetted by a change of rhetorical emphasis on the left, with developments in the civil rights movement in the vanguard. one turning point arrived on th june , when stokely carmichael, chairman of the major civil rights organisation, the student nonviolent coordinating committee (sncc), gave a speech to a rally in greenwood, mississippi. released from jail only minutes before, carmichael announced that the time had come to reject the tactic of peacefully inviting arrest that had defined the movement under the leadership of martin luther king. ‘the only way we gonna occurring by dint of nature’ (brown, : , emphasis in original). in foucault’s foundational analysis, the key development in this constructionism is the shift from the liberal conception of homo oeconomicus as a partner of exchange to a neoliberal conception of homo oeconomicus as ‘an entrepreneur of himself’ (foucault, : ). this points to a further way to understand the neo- of neoliberalism: it signifies a combination of the nineteenth-century liberal commitment to freedom with the neoclassical economics that displaced the political economy of smith, ricardo, and marx (harvey, : ). kelly: freedom to struggle stop them white men from whuppin’ us is to take over,’ he told the waiting crowd. ‘we been saying freedom for six years and we ain’t got nothin’. what we gonna start saying now is black power!’ (qtd. in hall, : ). thus began a shift in the rhetoric of the black left from ‘freedom’ to ‘power,’ with the latter term signalling a more militant and separatist political agenda for african americans. as daniel t. rodgers has observed, however, ‘power’ was a term that was itself beginning to shift in valence in intellectual circles during this period, with its origins, meanings, and languages becoming ‘thinner, less concentrated, and more difficult to grasp’ ( : ). on the neoliberal right, it was axiomatic that power had no bearing upon a ‘free market’ emerging out of the uncoerced preferences of individual consumers. but the structuralist underpinnings of mid-century conceptions of power—where power was understood to inhere in institutions and to be wielded by certain groups against others—were also destabilized by new approaches emerging from the academic left. the key figure here was michel foucault, for whom the individual was a construct of ‘power/knowledge’ and for whom power inhered in all actions, while being impossible to pin down using conventional categories of domination and exploitation such as class and wealth. in foucault’s work, ‘freedom’ was not a synonym for individual or collective emancipation but a tool of government; his late- career lectures on the liberal tradition of governmentality ( , ) foregrounded the idea of a post-enlightenment subject governed through her freedom. as rodgers notes, other scholars on the left objected to the slippery and diffuse quality of power and freedom in foucault’s work, the way ‘each moment of apparent progress led only to new forms of unfreedom, like stairways in an escher drawing that folded back upon themselves’ ( : ). but what is clear is that under a foucauldian by contrast, ‘free enterprise’—the phrase that was challenged and eventually replaced in popular discourse by ‘free market’—generally signalled that the freedom to participate in the marketplace as a producer could be damaged without strong regulation to curb corporate power. the shift in the neoliberal vision of the market from emphasising the producer to emphasising the consumer is therefore crucial: one effect of this shift is that the problem of monopoly drops out of view, and companies like standard oil or google no longer look in dire need of regulation. for an astute account of the importance of ‘free enterprise’ in the career of s-era african american author ishmael reed, see donofrio ( ). kelly: freedom to struggle dispensation, ‘freedom’ increasingly shifted in the vocabulary of the left from a collective rallying cry to an object of scepticism, becoming associated with the false promises of a bankrupt liberal tradition. new genealogies of freedom written during this period thus began to emphasise the embeddedness of enslavement at the root of democratic and liberal cultures (morgan, ; patterson, ; foner, ). the newly minted departments of afro-american studies and black studies—institutional products of the civil rights and black power movements—took up the question of american slavery with tenacity from the late s onwards. while one trend was to recover the positive forms of agency possessed by enslaved persons on the antebellum plantations (blassingame, ; levine, ), one of the most influential works, eugene genovese’s roll, jordan, roll, drew on antonio gramsci’s notion of hegemony to argue that strategies of resistance to slavery in fact ‘enmeshed [the slaves] in a web of paternalistic relationships which sustained the slaveholders’ regime’ ( : ). combined with the impact of foucault’s anti-teleological thinking, genovese’s work contributed to a notable shift over the period from highlighting the positive historical trajectory of black american life, in earlier works such as john hope franklin’s from slavery to freedom ( ), to more pessimistic studies such as orlando patterson’s slavery and social death ( ) and saidiya hartman’s scenes of subjection ( ). this latter body of work was premised on the stark proposition that, as hartman put it, ‘the advent of freedom marked the transition from the pained and minimally sensate experience of the slave to the burdened individuality of the responsible and encumbered freed person’ ( : ). this grounding claim that slavery lay at the paradoxical heart of freedom—both historically and philosophically—meant that ‘freedom’ took on a thoroughly ironic tenor in this scholarship. while this newly sceptical questioning, on the left, of the history and meaning of freedom was in many ways salutary, its longer-term effects remain uncertain. what appears more certain is that the rising new right of the period could all too easily abjure this scholarship on slavery laid the ground for the more pronounced afro-pessimist turn in black culture of the black lives matter era. see coates ( ), sexton ( ), and sharpe ( ). kelly: freedom to struggle or ignore this tainted and ironic conception of freedom in its quest for political and cultural control. the powerful alignment of religious conservatism, neoconservatism, and neoliberalism across the s and s culminated in the s presidency of ronald reagan, whose regime of tax cuts, privatization, and deregulation was twinned with attempts to roll back the legislative social gains of the left over the postwar period. all of this was carried out in the name of freedom, a term reagan used more often than any president before or since, in speeches that performed sincerity for a wide audience in an expert manner. through these performances, a stark reversal of the earlier situation described by hayek—where the right ceded ‘liberty’ to the left—took place. as foner notes, ‘reagan’s years in office completed the process by which freedom, having been progressively abandoned by liberals and the left, became fully identified with conservative goals and values’ ( : ). but the freedom proclaimed by the right over this period was a subtly different kind of freedom to that which had dominated public discussion during the mid-century years of the high cold war, when ‘freedom’ had been ‘ballasted by and contained within its complements: responsibility, destiny, justice, morality, and society’ (rodgers, : ). reagan’s version of freedom, by contrast, was ‘disembodied, unmoored, imagined’; its ‘deepest enemy was pessimism’ rather than external constraint; it suggested ‘the possibility of slipping free from limitations altogether’ (rodgers, : , , ). this was a freedom that drew on the inspirational language and images of the counterculture alongside the neoliberal idea of the free, disembedded, spontaneously acting, and naturally self-regulating market. the market, conceived no longer as a site of domination and power but as a forum for voluntary and equal exchange, became the much-touted vehicle by which freedom could be attained and instantiated in the life of the individual. the dominance of this new vision of the market heralded a sea change in economic policy. while in the early s, richard nixon had remarked that ‘we for an insightful account of this alignment between neoliberalism and neoconservatism around opposition to the new social movements of the left, see cooper ( ). on the marketing and televisual techniques used to craft and stage reagan’s speeches as effective acts of communication, see rodgers ( : – ). kelly: freedom to struggle are all keynesians now,’ by the s, as david harvey observes, ‘both clinton and blair could easily have reversed nixon’s earlier statement and simply said “we are all neoliberals now”’ ( : ). the politics of ‘there is no alternative’ underpinned the decade on both sides of the atlantic, and while the prominence of freedom discourse in the united states did not diminish over this period, it became common for artists and intellectuals on the left to be sceptical about its provenance and cultural use. this was as much the case for african americans as for other groups: describing freedom as ‘a word that has been steadily disappearing from the political language of blacks in the west,’ paul gilroy found himself asking ‘why it seems no longer appropriate or even plausible to speculate about the freedom of the subject of black politics in overdeveloped countries’ ( : ). one answer is that by the end of the century the appeal to freedom had come to look to many like little more than a cover story for a series of ideological projects, alternatively of the left and of the right. in the wake of the cold war, the foucauldian turn, the revisionist scholarship on slavery, and the reagan revolution, speaking sincerely about freedom began to look impossibly naïve. ‘freedom’ might still name a noble heritage, but the name had become a brand; while it continued to sound good to many ears, the suspicion for many others was that it sounded good only in the way all advertising sounds good, to the end of feeding desire with consumable and comforting notions rather than any substantial reality. despite gilroy’s well-founded worry that giving up on freedom might prove a political error, it was irony that now seemed to be called for. it is here, at the close of the twentieth century, that colson whitehead enters the scene. freedom hides the struggle all of whitehead’s male protagonists—j sutter in john henry days, the nomenclature consultant in apex, benji in sag harbor, mark spitz in zone one—share an ironic sensibility. in each of these novels, the ironic cool of the main character is whitehead’s female protagonists—lila mae watson in the intuitionist and cora in the underground railroad—are a different matter; the free indirect discourse in these two novels tends to treat the interiority of these protagonists with less of a satirical flourish, as we shall see with cora in the next section. this gendered dichotomy in whitehead’s fiction finds support in the comic opening sentence of the only memoir the author has published to date, the noble hustle: ‘i have a good poker face because i am half dead inside’ ( : ). kelly: freedom to struggle inseparable from his background as a member of the black bourgeoisie. this is nowhere more evident than in apex hides the hurt. the fictive present of the novel is made up of a series of meetings the protagonist holds with various residents of winthrop, as he conducts his research into the most appropriate name for the town. of these characters, the person to whom the protagonist instinctively feels himself most drawn is the white patriarch albie winthrop, who shares with him an educational background at quincy college, the novel’s elite stand in for harvard or yale. ‘there was no secret handshake,’ we are told when they first meet. ‘the two syllables sufficed. quincy was a name that was a key, and it opened doors’ ( : ). but while the protagonist’s relationship with a white man of his own class is notably comfortable, his relationships with the two black working-class characters in the novel, the barman and cleaning lady at the winthrop hotel where he is staying, are distinctly less so. the protagonist thinks of these people not as his racial brethren but as passengers on a ship he is naming. in response to the bartender— whom he secretly names muttonchops—telling the protagonist, ‘this is my home,’ he thinks: ‘already this job was different. time was, you christened something, broke the bottle across the bow, and gave a little good-luck wave as it drifted away. you never saw the passengers. but there were always disgruntled passengers out there, like muttonchops. it was simple mathematics’ ( ). this abstraction of human life to ‘mathematics,’ a classic move in liberal governmentality and neoliberal thought, is both extended and undermined in the protagonist’s relationship with his hotel cleaning lady. although the protagonist never meets this woman face-to-face she becomes a comically threatening spectre outside his hotel door, a reminder of the mostly invisible working-class labour that allows the protagonist to live his comfortably bourgeois existence. all of this satirical material in the novel anticipates the central claim of kenneth warren’s much-debated polemic what was african american literature? ( ): that in the era of neoliberal hegemony, the success of for foucault ( ), the emergence of liberal government in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries was tied to a concern with questions of population, with the emergence of statistics becoming crucial for managing large populations. neoliberal theory, meanwhile, promulgates the extension not only of economic thinking but also of mathematical calculation—for instance of risk—into traditionally non-economic spheres. see mirowski ( : – ). kelly: freedom to struggle what w. e. b. dubois called the ‘talented tenth,’ or what warren calls the black elite, has ‘less and less to do with the type of social change that would make a profound difference in the fortunes of those at the bottom of our socio-economic order’ ( : ). the protagonist’s individual freedoms in apex hides the hurt make no black life better except his own. in foregrounding issues of class as well as race, whitehead’s novel alludes to debates in african american intellectual culture that stem directly from the controversy surrounding william julius wilson’s the declining significance of race ( ). wilson’s sociological study was the first book explicitly to make the claim that in the post-segregation era the experience of well-educated members of the rising black middle class was diverging sharply from that of the unskilled black poor, whom wilson referred to as the ‘underclass.’ whitehead’s allusion to wilson may even be direct, since when pressed to offer a solution to the problems he was diagnosing, wilson claimed that he could only ‘suggest programs such as full employment which provide the band-aids and don’t really get at the basic fundamental cure’ (qtd. rodgers, : ). thus a band-aid that hides but does not heal the hurt becomes the central metaphor in whitehead’s novel. ‘apex,’ the coinage that earns the protagonist fame in his field, is the name he gives to a ‘multicultural adhesive bandage’ that is made to cover wounds on different shades of human flesh ( : ). the idea that the invention and commercial distribution of this bandage does not provide ‘the basic fundamental cure,’ as wilson put it, but instead merely contributes to a culture of identity-based individualism, is something the novel has persistent fun with. ‘the deep psychic wounds of history and the more recent gashes ripped by the present, all of these could be covered by this wonderful, unnamed multicultural adhesive bandage. it erased. huzzah,’ goes one passage ( ). ‘in the advertising,’ reads another, ‘multicultural children skinned knees, revealing the blood beneath, the commonality of wound, they were all brothers now, and multicultural bandages were affixed to red boo-boos. united in polychromatic harmony, in injury, with our individual differences respected, eventually all healed beneath apex. apex hides the hurt’ ( ). kelly: freedom to struggle the comic and even flippant irony in these passages comes at the expense of a ubiquitous multiculturalist discourse that whitehead evidently sees as hiding rather than healing the present-day inequities that stem from past injustices. yet in suggesting how we might address these injustices, the novel refuses to endorse a civil rights language of ‘freedom now.’ while the protagonist’s sarcastic reaction to the name ‘freedom’ can certainly be questioned by the reader, the other names on offer for the town suggest that it is the notion of ‘freedom’ itself being satirised, and not only the protagonist’s views on it. ‘winthrop,’ the town’s current name, points us to john winthrop, a leading early puritan settler in the new world. in an insightful discussion of the allusions to the puritan context within apex, christopher leise argues that ‘the term “winthrop,” after the reagan presidency, has been programmed to trigger american ideals such as “freedom” and the promise that wealth is the reward of hard work, while strategically suppressing the historical winthrop’s faith in the need for class hierarchies to promote a healthy body politic’ ( : ). ‘new prospera,’ meanwhile, has even more the ring of neoliberal branding, both echoing kennedy’s ‘new frontier’ rhetoric and repurposing it for a reaganite idea of freedom as prosperity through deserved wealth. none of these names is finally the one chosen by the protagonist, however. while researching the history of the town, he uncovers the forgotten voice of one of its two original founders, whose preference for naming the town ‘struggle’ found little support among his people and was set aside in favour of ‘freedom.’ whitehead’s protagonist eventually revises this history by choosing ‘struggle’ over ‘freedom’ as the new name for the town. in doing so, he divides up a quoting henry louis gates—‘to rename is to revise, and to revise is to signify’—leise identifies whitehead’s signifying on winthrop as an important prop in the author’s argument regarding class and inequality: ‘rather than citing winthrop as the progenitor of the “protestant ethic,” whitehead argues that america’s economic elect are simply lucky’ ( : ). although leise fails to mention it, it is worth adding that john winthrop is widely considered the first american theorist of freedom, with his ‘little speech on liberty’ ‘often cited as the locus classicus of two fundamental meanings of freedom or liberty’ (king, : ). winthrop’s key distinction is between natural liberty—‘a liberty to evil as well as to good,’ shared with animals—and civil or federal liberty, which comes of submitting one’s will to authority ( : ). kelly: freedom to struggle phrase—‘freedom struggle’—that became prevalent with the civil rights movement and has gained prominence once again during the present moment of protest concerning black life in america. apex brings out the inherent tension between these two normally inseparable terms by making them the subject of a recovered debate between the town’s co-founders abraham goode ‘the light’ and william field ‘the dark’. this debate is in turn mapped by the protagonist onto a distinction between ‘human nature’ and ‘the human condition’: ‘given the choice between freedom, and [field’s] contribution, how could their flock not go with goode’s beautiful bauble? field’s area of expertise wasn’t human nature, but the human condition. […] freedom was what they sought. struggle was what they had lived through’ ( : ). human nature is here associated with optimism—an optimism, the novel implies, that under neoliberal hegemony has become merely ideological, a ‘cruel optimism’ that serves corporate and political interests rather than the interests of all (berlant, ). the human condition, with its echoes of hannah arendt ( ), seems by contrast to point to a role for struggle specifically in the realm of political action. confronting this climactic decision in favour of ‘struggle,’ it becomes tempting to read apex hides the hurt as the story of the protagonist’s developing racial consciousness, his journey from initially identifying with goode and field only as ‘a common business pair: a marketing, vision guy teamed up with a bottom-line, numbers guy’ ( : ), to asking himself near the end of the narrative, ‘what did a slave know that we didn’t? to give yourself a name is power. they will try to give you a name and tell you who you are and try to make you into something else, and that is slavery. and to say, i am this—that was freedom’ ( ). with an apparently new faith in the meaningfulness of language beyond its manipulative power to attain corporate ends, the protagonist finds himself imagining the effect of his new name on the inhabitants of the town: as he fell asleep, he heard the conversations they will have. ones that will get to the heart of this mess. the sick swollen heart of the land. they will say: i was born in struggle. i live in struggle and come from struggle. i work in struggle. we crossed the border into struggle. before i came to struggle. kelly: freedom to struggle we found ourselves in struggle. i will never leave struggle. i will die in struggle. ( ) this passage has an undeniably rousing quality, and it concludes the novel’s penultimate scene. but in the short final scene, the reader is brought back to more immediate realities. first we witness the protagonist tipping ‘the white guy at the desk’ while ‘[giving] the finger’ to muttonchops, the black bartender, as he leaves the town ( ). then we are reminded that the town’s library—‘former library, actually’— is being replaced by an ‘outfit outlet.’ the old sign lies ‘cracked over shards of broken bookcases,’ while the gigantic new sign ‘possessed a certain majesty, and would be visible from even farther away. the next version would probably be visible from space’ ( ). finally we are informed that the act of renaming the town has not healed the protagonist’s infected toe, which has been covered by an apex bandage for much of the novel. ‘there was a moment a few hours ago, as he was lying in bed waiting for the morning to come, when he thought he might be cured,’ the text reads. ‘that if he did something, took action, the hex might come off. the badness come undone.’ but this has not happened, and in the novel’s closing sentence, we are told that it will not happen: ‘as the weeks went on and he settled into his new life, he had to admit that actually, his foot hurt more than ever’ ( ). with this reminder of the stark limitations of symbolic action—the action of naming and renaming—in a world of class disparity and corporate hegemony, the novel places in ironic relief its own postmodern aesthetics, wherein action on language is conceived as the primary action a text can perform. throughout apex, the importance of finding the ‘true’ name for things has been floated as a way of getting beneath an ironic surface, and yet this notion of revealed truth is shown never to escape the ambit of marketing: ‘the name was the thing itself,’ we learn of the original band-aid bandage, ‘and that was holy grail territory’ ( ). whitehead thus suggests that when the name is the thing that is taken to matter most, we can easily overlook the material realities of class, race, privatisation, and even the body— all of which are touched on in the brief closing scene. acknowledging these limits to the power of naming might in turn lead the reader to question afresh the triumphant kelly: freedom to struggle passage just a page before where the protagonist calls ‘struggle’ into being. we can now see that ambiguities remain here. what, in fact, is ‘the heart of this mess’? what is ‘the sick swollen heart of the land’? if apex hides the hurt, then what—more precisely than simply ‘history’—is the hurt that is being hidden? despite its allusions to slavery and its turn to struggle at the finale, apex hides the hurt refuses to endorse an answer to this set of questions. in an essay on john henry days, william ramsey offers both a summary of the ironic method of whitehead’s early novels and a justification for that method: because whitehead gives us bemused skepticism rather than tragedy, and irony not political engagement, he may fail to satisfy readers long accustomed to seeking a solid stance for progressive social action. after all, if one is singing ‘we shall overcome’ while marching on behalf of a civil rights cause, one needs to believe in a fixed, transcendent principle— some grand narrative of higher justice—that explains and indeed impels one’s civil protest. yet importantly, whitehead’s irony does have a vitally progressive potential—namely its radical tendency toward openness, not fixity. ( : ) in ramsey’s view, whitehead’s resistance to constraining narratives—including the ‘grand narrative of higher justice’ referred to above—offers a liberating postmodern spin on martin luther king’s resonant phrase, ‘thank god almighty we are free at last’ ( : ). but whether freedom from narrative constraint offers a genuinely progressive alternative to king’s powerful metanarrative of black and human freedom is a question re-opened in whitehead’s most recent novel. by dividing ‘freedom’ from ‘struggle’ in apex hides the hurt, whitehead had found a way to breathe new life into what could seem a tired cliché. but the division between these two terms is ultimately unsustainable in existential and political terms, since freedom depends on struggle and struggle on freedom. in the underground railroad, whitehead undermines ramsey’s opposition between ‘a fixed, transcendent principle’ and ‘radical tendency toward openness’ by thinking them together. in doing so, he leaves kelly: freedom to struggle behind a postmodern concern with naming in favour of a surprisingly direct and substantive political aesthetic. irony underground apex hides the hurt was whitehead’s first novel written following the attack on the world trade center in september . with this in mind, it is perhaps no surprise that it should convey a jaundiced view of ‘freedom.’ while the decades- long american and african american discourses on freedom, sketched in the second section of this essay, are certainly in play here, a more immediate context is provided by the us government’s response to the / attacks, led by operation enduring freedom in afghanistan and george w. bush’s repeated claim that ‘the advance of human freedom […] now depends on us’ (bush, ). but if this dubious rhetoric of ‘freedom’ impels the irony of apex, by the time the underground railroad was published a decade later in , the conversation around freedom in the united states had changed. two events stand out, both of them bearing significantly on the lives of african americans. the election of barack obama to the presidency in seemed to many at the time to mark ‘the symbolic culmination of the black freedom struggle’ (gates : ). this moment of promise for black americans contrasted with the tragic events of the second term of the obama presidency, events that contributed to the formation of the black lives matter movement. the killings of trayvon martin, eric garner, michael brown, tamir rice and numerous other black citizens by white law enforcement officers brought renewed attention to the precarious status of african american lives in us society. this attention supplemented a growing popular awareness—exemplified by the commercial and critical success of michelle alexander’s the new jim crow ( ) and ava duvernay’s documentary film th ( )—of the implications for black citizens of the policies of whitehead’s first post- / publication was not a novel but a book of short linked prose poems, the colossus of new york ( ). less a political work than a celebration of ordinary life in the city, colossus alludes to / only once, when the speaker laments, ‘i never got a chance to say good-bye to some of my old buildings. some i lived in, others were part of a skyline i thought would always be there’ ( : ). kelly: freedom to struggle mass incarceration. indeed, given that the mass incarceration era is co-extensive and co-implicated with the neoliberal turn—an argument made most forcefully by loïc wacquant in punishing the poor ( )—the notion of ‘freedom after neoliberalism’ has arguably taken on a particularly urgent and concrete meaning for black citizens of the united states. this is the context into which the underground railroad was published in august . the novel tells the story of cora, who begins life as a slave on a georgia plantation in what appears to be the mid-nineteenth century, and escapes via an elaborate yet secret system of underground tunnels that have been constructed by black hands. ‘who built it?’ cora asks when she is shown an underground station for the first time. ‘who builds anything in this country?’ is the reply ( : ). in subsequent chapters of the novel, cora continues her flight from slavery—and from the diabolical slave-catcher ridgeway—through different states, each of which is ‘a state of possibility, with its own customs and way of doing things’ ( ). these ‘customs’ include, in south carolina, a mass sterilization programme for former slaves; in north carolina, a fierce slaughter of blacks to rid the state of them; in tennessee, a massive fire that has denuded the landscape and led to several outbreaks of disease; and in indiana, a potential utopian community on a black-owned farm. each of these ‘states of possibility’ draws on material from a different episode in black life in the time since slavery: the tuskegee syphilis experiment of – ; the kkk lynchings of the late nineteenth and twentieth century; debates about integration and separatism from the civil rights era; and so on. the novel ends with a brief chapter titled ‘the north,’ with cora still fleeing her captors in what the reader has come to infer might well be an interminable manner. whitehead’s reworking of the bondage-and-freedom tropes of the classic slave narrative caught the attention of many reviewers. in the new york review of books, julian lucas observed that ‘in whitehead’s hands the runaway’s all-american story— grit, struggle, reward—becomes instead a grim voltairean odyssey, a subterranean journey through the uncharted epochs of unfreedom’ ( : ). the underground railroad thus plays down the trope of negative freedom in favour of ‘the positive kelly: freedom to struggle freedom many enslaved people actually sought’; this latter brand of freedom is, according to lucas, ‘less easily assimilable to “universal” narratives of individual striving—stories often said to “transcend race”’ ( : ). in contrast with this praise for the ‘quietly radical’ quality of whitehead’s novel, one of the few negative notes was sounded by thomas chatterton williams in the london review of books. williams compared the underground railroad unfavourably with whitehead’s sag harbor ( ), lamenting that the earlier novel’s refusal to repeat the clichés of racial unfreedom, its project to remove ‘the contemporary black american experience […] entirely from the realm of extremes,’ had given way in the later book to what whitehead himself once ironically dubbed the ‘southern novel of black misery’ (williams, ; whitehead, ). alluding to the highly charged social and political context of the novel’s appearance, williams offered at best faint praise for the underground railroad as ‘an accomplished concession to the mandates of wokeness,’ granting whitehead the ironic title of ‘woke black artist of the year.’ williams overstates the extent to which the underground railroad represents a new departure in whitehead’s depiction of ongoing racial oppression. in apex hides the hurt, for instance, the protagonist finds himself pondering ‘one particular issue of singular vexation that was timeless, whether it was the s or the s: how to keep white folks from killing you’ ( : ). yet what has changed in the underground railroad is that the mostly flippant and ironic tone of apex—and of whitehead’s earlier novels more generally—has been replaced with a new tone, one for which the term ‘irony’—or at least ‘postmodern irony’—does not sit altogether comfortably. this change is evident in the novel’s treatment of freedom, a word and concept given far more weight in railroad than in apex. perhaps the most powerful instance of this new weightiness is the moment, in the penultimate chapter of the novel, when cora’s mother mabel decides to abandon her escape from the randall plantation and return to her daughter: many critical readings of the intuitionist also emphasise the constant sense of threat to the protagonist lila mae watson that stems from her blackness. lauren berlant, for instance, highlights the novel’s depiction of ‘the nervous system of transracial contact in the era of white supremacy’ ( : ). kelly: freedom to struggle on the bed of damp earth, her breathing slowed and that which separated herself from the swamp disappeared. she was free. this moment. she had to go back. the girl was waiting on her. this would have to do for now. ( : ) part of the power of this moment is that it satisfies the common intuition that freedom is a feeling, an experience or state of psychological plenitude. moments like this are traditionally crucial to slave narratives—frederick douglass’s reaction to his fight with the slave-master covey is the paradigm example—because such moments are not only vivid for the reader but serve to model the kind of freedom that will flow outwards from the life of the individual protagonist into the collective future of the race. but when we put it this way, we can see that mabel’s moment works differently. if part of its power comes from a feeling of freedom as full being, the other part comes from the reader’s knowledge—since mabel never returns to the plantation but is instead bitten and killed by a snake—that her feeling of freedom will not be shared, not with other enslaved persons and specifically not with cora, who we already know has grown up to hate her mother for abandoning her. because mabel’s chapter comes at the end of the novel rather than its beginning—and is folded into a text whose temporal structure seems to refuse at every turn the notion of progress—much of its power stems, in other words, from whitehead’s ironic depiction of her moment of freedom. yet the irony here is no longer rhetorical, cynical, or postmodern; it is structural, dramatic, and tragic. while mabel’s moment of freedom is not directly shared with any other characters in the underground railroad, it nevertheless resonates outwards, not only through the novel’s aesthetic infrastructure but also in analogy with the infrastructural project within it, the incredible sequence of underground tunnels built by the work of black hands. reflecting on the grand and mysterious construction of this network, cora compares it to the labour of cotton-picking in the fields, labour of which the slave could never be proud because it had been ‘stolen from them. bled from them’ ( : ). embodied in the railroad itself, therefore, is another vision of freedom kelly: freedom to struggle in the underground railroad: the utopian vision of free and unalienated productive activity in the marxist sense. this form of free activity is not the overcoming of struggle—after all, building an underground railroad in secret must be no easy task, either physically or mentally—and yet freedom lies in recognizing oneself in the means and ends of the task undertaken. ‘who are you after you finish something this magnificent,’ cora wonders to herself towards the novel’s end, ‘in constructing it you have also journeyed through it, to the other side’ ( – ). this ‘other side’ is clearly meant both literally and figuratively, with the figure standing most obviously for the other side of oneself. but it is also a figure, i want to argue, for a wholly other way of life connected to a wholly other mode of production; this gesture towards a utopian future takes whitehead’s novel beyond even the ‘quietly radical’ concern with positive freedom praised by lucas in his review. whereas marx ( : – ) placed free productive activity in opposition to wage labour under capitalism, the slave remains a further stage removed from such freedom, existing in the capitalist relation as property rather than as the owner of her own labour power. as a result, the journey to self-ownership as well as property ownership has typically been a crucial trope of the slave narrative and novel of slavery. this trope emerges at various points in the underground railroad as a goal for figures like cora and her grandmother ajarry. nevertheless, the novel also appears at other moments to question whether self-ownership—with its assumption that the language and practice of property rights mark a natural state of autonomous being rather than acting as a support for the capitalist system—should constitute the horizon of possibility for the enslaved person. it is notable that mabel’s moment of the theme is prominent, for instance, in narrative of the life of frederick douglass ( ) and narrative of william w. brown ( ), as well as in ishmael reed’s flight to canada ( ) and toni morrison’s beloved ( ). ‘she owned herself for a few hours every week was how she looked at it,’ ajarry reflects as she tends to her small plot of land and ‘glare[s] at anyone planning incursions on her territory’ ( : ). this is not to suggest that the move from slavery to self-ownership does not constitute a significant amelioration in the life of a formerly enslaved person. it is simply to take seriously the historical point—made by afro-pessimists like hartman and scholars of the ‘new history of capitalism’ like beckert—that the continued thriving of capitalism in the nineteenth century was enabled by the absorption of enslaved persons into the system of wage labour and surplus value. the ambiguity of kelly: freedom to struggle freedom, for instance, is not conveyed as a moment of autonomous self-ownership, but as a moment of inseparability from nature, when ‘that which separated herself from the swamp disappeared’ ( : ). elsewhere, in the indiana section, the notion that the black community might be able to move directly from enslavement to a form of utopian socialism is floated in the many debates held on the valentine farm concerning the future of black freedom. yet it is also here that the inescapability of the capitalist system asserts itself most tellingly. not only is the connection between the farm and the surrounding white community mediated through the market—‘half the white stores depended on [the farm’s] patronage; valentine residents filled the squares and sunday markets to sell their crafts’ ( )—but the farm’s operations are shown to be dependent on a broader financial world: ‘john valentine wanted to take advantage of the big harvest to renegotiate their loan’ ( ). moreover, the underground railroad shows this capitalist world to be fully global, and to be underpinned by the cotton trade. terrance randall, the owner of cora’s plantation, ‘made new contacts in new orleans, shook hands with speculators backed by the bank of england. the money came in as never before. europe was famished for cotton and needed to be fed, bale by bale’ ( : ). cotton connects all the characters in the novel: not only masters and slaves, but also professionals such as cora’s racially enlightened employer in south carolina, mr. anderson, who as a lawyer ‘worked on contracts, primarily in the cotton trade’ ( ). ‘cotton had made him a slave, too,’ cora thinks to herself at one point ( ). cora’s own first feeling of freedom in south carolina is the ‘thrill’—darkly ironic for the reader—of wearing a cotton dress ( ). ‘as with everything in the south, it started with cotton,’ reads a later passage. ‘the ruthless engine of cotton required its fuel of african bodies. crisscrossing the ocean, ships brought bodies to work the land and to breed more bodies’ ( ). in these passages, whitehead is entering a debate that, according to manisha sinha, ‘still shapes southern and u.s. history: were slavery and the antebellum south capitalist, precapitalist, or even anticapitalist?’ ( : ). the position the novel takes in this the word ‘own’ is significant here, as it provides the means through which a capacity to freely lead one’s life becomes conflated with the logic of property ownership. kelly: freedom to struggle debate seems very clear. indeed, whitehead’s emphasis on the crucial role of the capitalist ‘empire of cotton’ (beckert ) in the advent and maintenance of slavery is evident from as early as the opening scene of the novel. the underground railroad begins with the story of ajarry, cora’s grandmother, a choice that situates the reader not in america but on the african slave coast. these opening paragraphs adopt a matter-of-fact narrative tone that highlights the economic underpinnings of the vast global network that allowed (and allows) for the circulation of property and people, and people as property. on her journey to the port, cora’s grandmother was, the reader is told, ‘sold a few times’ for shells and beads, ‘was part of a bulk purchase’ for rum and gunpowder, a trajectory that makes ‘an individual accounting difficult’ ( : ). following this initial sale, we hear that in america she is bought for ‘two hundred and twenty-six dollars. she would have fetched more but for that season’s glut of young girls’ ( ). later again we learn that ‘ajarry was another asset liquidated by order of the magistrate. she went for two hundred and eighteen dollars in a hasty exchange, a drop in price occasioned by the realities of the local market’ ( – ), and a few lines later that ‘ajarry spent three months as the property of a welshman who eventually lost her, three other slaves, and two hogs in a game of whist. and so on’ ( ). throughout this lengthy (though not exhaustive) depiction of ajarry’s experience as an object of exchange, whitehead’s prose remains remarkably unadorned. in place of the revelatory truth-telling found in brown’s and douglass’s antebellum slave narratives, or the heightened and poetic register that toni morrison brought to the story of slavery in beloved, here we have the recounting of dry, hard facts in the apparently neutral language of the market, the language of price and exchange. whitehead does not fail to draw attention to the horrific violence that such familiar language typically hides—‘the survivors from her the novel even goes so far as to suggest in certain passages that white supremacy itself is driven primarily by financial considerations. for instance, the most racist of the states depicted is north carolina, but the argument put forward at the state council for adopting its tyrannical new race laws is explicitly economic: ‘a financial reckoning was inevitable, but come the approaching conflict over the race question, north carolina would emerge in the most advantageous position of all the slave states’ ( : ). kelly: freedom to struggle village told her that when her father couldn’t keep the pace of the long march, the slavers stove in his head and left his body by the trail’ ( )—but this ‘accounting’ too is quite unadorned. where beloved was driven by ‘unspeakable thoughts, unspoken’ (morrison : ), in the underground railroad everything can be spoken in the language of the market, something that serves to bring out the horror and alienation of social relations all the more forcefully. as ajarry adapts to her new life in the us south, she internalises the market conception of her value, and learns to manipulate it as best she can. ‘ajarry made a science of her own black body and accumulated observations,’ the reader is told. ‘each thing had a value and as the value changed, everything else changed also’ ( : ). in response to the dominance of value by economic factors—‘if you were a thing—a cart or a horse or a slave—your value determined your possibilities. she minded her place’ ( )—ajarry becomes what jane elliott calls a ‘suffering agent’: rather than her oppression serving as a total restriction on her agency, her brief narrative shows her as a person for whom ‘choice is experienced as a curse without simultaneously becoming a farce’ ( : ). this quality of suffering agency—for elliott, a recurring mode in the representation of neoliberal personhood as human capital—is likewise present in cora’s own journey throughout the remainder of the novel. for instance, when cora and caesar are about to take the railroad for the first time, the railroad agent presents them with the choice of taking the coming train or the one after, simply saying ‘it’s up to you’ ( : ). since the fugitives and the reader never learn what the consequence of taking the other train would have been, the effect is simply to add to cora’s sense of burdened agency and responsibility. in an earlier scene, cora and caesar likewise imagine themselves responsible for the capture of their fellow fugitive, lovey: ‘they didn’t speak for hours. from the trunk of their scheme, choices and decisions sprouted like branches and shoots’ ( ). in beloved, the tree on sethe’s back became a symbol of her pain and her possible redemption through organic healing. in the underground railroad, by contrast, we have the for an outline of human capital theory, see becker ( ), foucault ( : – ), and feher ( ). kelly: freedom to struggle decision tree, a neoliberal figure that imagines the chooser as abstractly responsible for all the consequences of their actions, since the calculation of risk is axiomatically understood to be within the province of the rational subject. in importing the language of a present-day ‘market-political rationality’ (brown, : ) to the novel of slavery, whitehead is bringing a deliberately anachronistic vision to the reworking of this venerable genre. for williams ( ), this experimentation with genre precludes taking seriously the author’s newfound ‘wokeness’: the matter-of-factness of whitehead’s prose allows him to have his southern novel of black misery and stand ironically apart from it too. one can’t avoid the impression that, for whitehead, the subject matter is always in service of the intellectual and narrative dexterity on the page. it’s all so theoretical and cerebral, the book could come with a disclaimer: no author was harmed in the making of this novel. while williams’s objection is difficult to refute on its own terms—since it rests on assessing the emotional commitment involved in whitehead’s approach to his ‘material’—i would suggest that it misunderstands the work on genre undertaken in the underground railroad. if we understand literary genre, after fredric jameson ( ), as the sedimentation of social contradictions, then a self-conscious engagement with genre forms part of the work of reframing those contradictions. within the broader genre of the novel of slavery that offers the underground railroad its narrative template, then, each of whitehead’s chapters takes up stylistic and generic material as part of his critical project, signifying on this material in order to make formal arguments that go beyond the postmodern work on language carried out in apex hides the hurt. perhaps the most striking example of this approach comes in the tennessee chapter, where the fiction of cormac mccarthy offers a clear intertext. the burned- out landscape that cora and the slave-catcher ridgeway pass through cannot help but bring to mind the road ( ), while the key literary precursor for ridgeway kelly: freedom to struggle himself is the figure of judge holden in blood meridian ( ). described on his first appearance as ‘a man of intense concentration and flowery manner of speech’ ( : ), ridgeway is evidently modelled on the villain in mccarthy’s bleak epic, with both men embodying a nietzschean might-makes-right philosophy that ridgeway dubs ‘the american imperative’ ( ). in the memorable final scene of blood meridian, the judge—whose grandiose metaphysical discourses seem consistently to be underscored rather than contradicted by the equally baroque language of mccarthy’s narration—emerges victorious. we leave him ‘dancing, dancing’ and fiddling on stage, having dispensed with his rival, the kid, in an outhouse behind a saloon ( : ). in the parallel scene in the underground railroad the inflection is significantly different. as cora uses a saloon outhouse while her antagonist waits outside, the manic fiddling that accompanied the judge’s dance of triumph is replaced by music that is ‘slow now. couples coming together to hold each other, to sway and twist. that was real conversation, dancing slow with another person, not all these words’ ( : ). where the judge’s garrulous embrace finally destroys the kid in mccarthy’s novel, emphasising the victory of his philosophy, cora’s perspective on ridgeway’s linguistic excesses affords ambivalence. as he informs her through the toilet wall that he represents ‘the name of punishment’ and ‘a notion of order,’ she reflects: ‘maybe everything the slave catcher said was true […]. and maybe he was just a man talking to an outhouse door, waiting for someone to wipe her ass’ ( ). by refusing to underscore ridgeway’s dominance over cora through either the plot or the narrative voice of the novel, whitehead declines to identify the white man’s power with any metaphysical thesis about the workings of the universe. mccarthy’s western is here taken to naturalise such a thesis; whitehead’s rewriting of the finale of blood meridian suggests that such naturalisation must be overcome before new social relations can emerge. the operative logic throughout the underground railroad is not metaphysical but materialist: indeed, even the professional slave-catcher is shown to be responsive to economic concerns. when ridgeway brutally kills the slave jasper, he ‘explain[s] his reasoning’ through a detailed cost accounting that is judged ‘right’ by his black assistant, homer, after he has ‘checked his boss’s figures’ ( ). this thoroughgoing economic focus suggests that, if it is true that whitehead is kelly: freedom to struggle ‘woke’ in in a way that was not the case in , what he seems ‘woke’ to is not the ongoing nature of racial oppression, since that reality was never opaque to him. it is in fact the oppressions of capitalism—particularly in its neoliberal manifestation, where the adoption of a market morality replaces questions of right with cost-benefit analyses of interest—that constitute the nightmare to which whitehead is asking the reader to awake. what, then, would freedom after neoliberalism look like for colson whitehead? despite the contemporaneity of this question, it nonetheless resonates with earlier moments in the black literary tradition when the issue of freedom was placed centre stage. one such moment arrives at the end of ralph ellison’s invisible man ( ), a novel whose influence on whitehead’s fiction has been noted by many critics. ‘but what do i really want,’ ellison’s narrator asks himself as he searches for a conclusion to his story. ‘certainly not the freedom of a rinehart or the power of a jack, nor simply the freedom not to run. no, but the next step i couldn’t make, so i’ve remained in the hole’ ( : ). ellison’s mastery of irony in the depiction of his narrator’s struggle to launch black consciousness onto a new stage of freedom has been justly celebrated by critics. but whitehead’s ironic dialectic in the underground railroad is not that of ellison, with the latter’s hegelian focus on issues of consciousness and recognition over questions of redistribution and modes of production. perhaps fittingly, given that whitehead’s primary research for the novel came in reading slave narratives collected in the s, the underground railroad instead resurrects the marxist commitments of ellison’s predecessor richard wright. in ‘how “bigger” was born,’ his introduction to his blockbuster novel native son ( ), wright outlined his leise is among those who compare the unnamed protagonist of apex hides the hurt with the unnamed protagonist of invisible man, adding further that ‘both novels undermine the presumption of intraracial solidarity’ ( : ). for two important recent accounts of irony in invisible man, see stratton ( : – ) and konstantinou ( : – ). importantly, and in contrast to the whitehead of apex, ellison’s irony in invisible man does not extend to cynicism about the idea of freedom itself, which remains the basis of the narrator’s protest and the primary goal of his quest. the question in invisible man is never whether freedom is a worthy goal but rather what freedom should be understood to mean. on ellison’s hegelianism, see greif ( : – ). for an account of the revisions ellison undertook to drafts of invisible man, which removed traces of his earlier marxist commitments, see foley ( ). kelly: freedom to struggle growing understanding through the s and s ‘that the southern scheme of oppression was but an appendage of a far vaster and in many respects more ruthless and impersonal commodity-profit machine. trade-union struggles and issues began to grow meaningful for me. the flow of good across the seas, buoying and depressing the wages of men, held a fascination’ ( : ). writing from a perspective informed by four decades of neoliberal policy and practice, whitehead in the underground railroad has developed a similar fascination with collective struggle and global trade, even if he declines to marry this fascination fully with the naturalist aesthetics that ellison, along with wright’s other key protégée james baldwin, would come to criticise in wright’s work. whitehead does not refuse such an aesthetics entirely, however; as we have seen, he instead combines a naturalist prose style and naturalist themes with the speculative conceit of bringing together ‘states of possibility’ from different historical moments into the life of a single fugitive slave. this combinatory project is consistent with whitehead’s earlier novels, but it also develops further his fiction’s already distinctive engagement with temporality. critics have identified the importance of time in the author’s writing but have disagreed on how best to interpret it. for daniel grausam, whitehead’s depiction of a ‘multi-temporal’ present is underpinned by in ‘everybody’s protest novel’ ( ), baldwin famously rebuked wright’s naturalism, arguing that bigger thomas, the protagonist of native son, ‘accepts a theology that denies him life’ and so fails to gain any ironic distance on the categories that contain him ( : ). it was only the african american’s individual awareness of double consciousness, baldwin wrote in a later essay, that ‘sets him in any wise free and it is this […] which lends to negro life its high element of the ironic’ ( – ). for wright, by contrast, individual freedom went hand in hand with collectivist politics. ‘it is through a marxist conception of reality and society,’ he wrote in his ‘blueprint for negro writing,’ ‘that the maximum degree of freedom in thought and feeling can be gained for the negro writer’ ( : ). ellison’s own position on wright’s politics and aesthetics changed across his career. see ellison ( a and b). for an analysis of the speculative elements of the novel, see dischinger ( ). the consistency with whitehead’s earliest fiction can be glimpsed with reference to ramon saldívar’s comment on the intuitionist: ‘[p]oised between irony and sincerity, the metaphor of vertical transport drives the narrative up and down between the narratival levels of the naturalistic protest novel of race and the metafictional postmodern imaginative novel of ideas’ ( : ). for an account of the underground railroad that stresses the book’s difference from whitehead’s earlier fiction, thus complementing my own approach, see konstantinou ( ). kelly: freedom to struggle the author’s understanding of economic shifts rooted in ‘the neoliberal revolutions of the reagan/thatcher era’ ( : – ). for mathias nilges, by contrast, whitehead’s fiction explores history and time through ‘forms of discontinuity and non-contemporaneity that arise […] out of the temporal dimension of racism and racialization’ ( : – ). the dichotomy between class and race that we saw introduced in wilson’s work of the s is here re-constituted in the critical terrain around whitehead. against this background, the underground railroad can be understood to refuse the choice between a racial analysis and an economic one. by working within the novel of slavery, whitehead heightens his engagement with race by addressing black american experience through its most prestigious literary genre. this move has been warmly received, as demonstrated by the novel winning both the national book award and the pulitzer prize and being selected for the oprah winfrey book club. but whitehead also brings to the novel of slavery a fresh attention to economic concerns, importing into the literary canon the insights of a recent wave of scholarship on the interweaving of global capitalism and global slavery (baptist, ; johnson, ; beckert, ). conversely, to this scholarship whitehead brings the insistence that capitalism continues to produce forms of unfreedom that frustrate any chronological or linear historical account, since the accession to self- and property- ownership that traditionally marks the advent of freedom from slavery is shown to lead only to new forms of unfreedom. neoliberal thought, which ties human freedom more explicitly than ever before to economic structures, becomes a lens with which we can view the underpinning economic truths of earlier periods. freedom after neoliberalism, from this vantage point, begins to look possible only as freedom after capitalism. under cover of the novel of slavery, whitehead has written his most marxist novel yet and one of the most marxist novels in the mainstream literary landscape. the enthusiastic embrace of the underground railroad by the cultural establishment thus suggests something potentially very interesting about the fragility of both narrowly neoliberal and broadly capitalist freedoms in our present day. competing interests the author has no competing interests to declare. kelly: freedom to struggle references arendt, h the human condition. chicago: university of chicago press. baldwin, j notes of a native son. london: corgi books. baptist, e e the half has never been told: slavery and the making of american capitalism. new york: basic books. becker, g investment in human capital: a theoretical analysis. journal of political economy, : – . doi: https://doi.org/ . / beckert, s empire of cotton: a global history. new york: knopf. berlant, l intuitionists: history and the affective event. american literary history, ( ): – . doi: https://doi.org/ . /alh/ajn berlant, l cruel optimism. durham, nc: duke university press. doi: https:// doi.org/ . / blassingame, j w the slave community: plantation life in 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fish. london review of books, ( ) november: – . winthrop, j little speech on liberty. in: frohnen, b (ed.), the american republic: primary sources, pp. – . indianapolis, in: liberty fund. wright, r native son. london: vintage. wright, r blueprint for negro writing. in: gates, h l and mckay, n y (eds.), the norton anthology of african american literature. nd edition, pp. – . new york: norton. kelly: freedom to struggle how to cite this article: kelly, a freedom to struggle: the ironies of colson whitehead. open library of humanities, ( ): , pp.  – , doi: https://doi.org/ . / olh. published: october copyright: © the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (cc-by . ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. open access open library of humanities is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by open library of humanities. 	the ironies of freedom 	freedom hides the struggle 	irony underground 	competing interests 	references shifting discourse on climate and sustainability: key characteristics of the higher education fossil fuel divestment movement sustainability article shifting discourse on climate and sustainability: key characteristics of the higher education fossil fuel divestment movement dylan gibson * and leslie a. duram school of earth systems and sustainability, southern illinois university, carbondale, il , usa; duram@siu.edu * correspondence: djgibson @siu.edu received: november ; accepted: december ; published: december ���������� ������� abstract: in the last decade, the fossil fuel divestment (ffd) movement has emerged as a key component of an international grassroots mobilization for climate justice. using a text analysis of facebook pages for campaigns at higher education institutions (heis), this article presents an overview and analysis of the characteristics of the higher education (he) ffd movement in the us. the results indicate that campaigns occur at a wide array of heis, concentrated on the east and west coasts. primarily student led, campaigns set broad goals for divestment, while reinvestment is often a less clearly defined objective. campaigns incorporate a mixture of environmental, social, and economic arguments into their messaging. justice is a common theme, used often in a broad context rather than towards specific populations or communities impacted by climate change or other social issues. these insights contribute to the understanding of the he ffd movement as ten years of campus organizing approaches. in particular, this study illustrates how the movement is pushing sustainability and climate action in he and in broader society towards a greater focus on systemic change and social justice through campaigns’ hardline stance against fossil fuels and climate justice orientation. keywords: fossil fuel divestment; higher education; social movements; climate change; climate justice; key characteristics . introduction replacing fossil fuels with renewable energy will be a critical strategy for keeping global warming below internationally recognized targets of . degrees celsius and two degrees celsius above pre-industrial levels [ – ]. governments have recognized the need for urgent efforts to reduce greenhouse gas emissions yet have failed to implement strategies that explicitly challenge continued fossil fuel extraction and production [ ]. instead, focus has often been on market-based solutions like carbon trading and the promise of unproven technological fixes like carbon capture and storage, approaches which uphold current economic and political structures [ – ]. international climate accords, including the paris agreement, while establishing ambitious goals for transnational efforts to curb emissions, have ignored the issue of directly limiting fossil fuel extraction and production in favor of allowing countries to reduce emissions in ways that are less disruptive to the economic status quo like purchasing carbon offsets from emissions-reducing projects in developing countries [ – ]. faced with global crises like climate change, higher education institutions (heis) have the potential to act as agents of change to influence society towards greater sustainability [ ]. many heis have sought to take up a leadership role in the climate crisis, for example through integrating climate change education into curricula, climate change research, efforts to reduce campus greenhouse sustainability , , ; doi: . /su www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability http://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability http://www.mdpi.com http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /su http://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability sustainability , , of gas emissions, and incorporating climate change into strategic planning through commitments like the american college and university presidents’ climate commitment (acupcc) [ – ]. however, sustainability discourse and action in higher education (he) has often embodied a reformist, green economy approach that fails to challenge the root causes of crises like climate change [ , , ]. at the institution level, strategies to reduce greenhouse gas emissions are internally-focused and incremental. for example, signatories of the acupcc have committed to becoming carbon neutral, a goal that many heis do not anticipate achieving until near-midcentury and is understood to likely require the purchase of carbon offsets which have questionable benefits for the climate due to challenges of ensuring that funds go towards projects that result in legitimate emissions reductions [ ]. students at heis are often engaged in sustainability initiatives narrowly focused on individual behavior change, such as addressing personal carbon footprints [ , ]. meanwhile, education for sustainable development has broadly presented an uncritical, often idealistic view of sustainable development that neglects to question hegemonic structures underpinning many sustainability problems, like neoliberalism, globalization, and the economic growth imperative [ , ]. this approach to sustainability in he not only misframes the climate crisis as a problem that can be solved without radical economic and political change, but also often presents climate change independent of intersectional issues of environmental justice [ , ]. at the heart of these issues may be he’s increasing alignment with a neoliberal agenda which has led heis to have an increased focus on institutional finances and competition with other heis [ , ], presenting a challenge to the ability of sustainability in he to incite transition away from current unsustainable paradigms [ , ]. within the last ten years, the he fossil fuel divestment (ffd) movement has emerged as a challenge to mainstream climate action and sustainability in he and broader society by asking heis to explicitly cut ties with the fossil fuel industry through divestment of financial holdings in fossil fuel companies. the movement was initiated in when students at swarthmore college in pennsylvania started a campaign to persuade their school to divest from coal companies in solidarity with appalachian communities impacted by mountaintop removal mining [ , ]. several other coal divestment campaigns were launched at us heis in and more campaigns soon followed with the call expanding to divestment from all fossil fuels [ ]. in , bill mckibben published the popular article “global warming’s terrifying new math” and embarked on the do the math tour with his climate advocacy organization .org, promoting institutional ffd [ , ]. mckibben and .org, along with other organizations, subsequently worked to support the development of hundreds of ffd campaigns at heis in the us and internationally [ , , ]. though campaigns at some heis were met with stern rejection by administrators, ffd commitments from heis soon began rolling in [ ]. ffd also soon expanded beyond he to become a global movement of institutions, including faith-based organizations, philanthropic foundations, cities, and pension funds, committing to not invest in fossil fuels [ ]. in , the major organizations promoting he ffd in the us, including .org, scaled back on their support to he campaigns and the movement on us campuses began to lose steam. to fill the gap, non-profit better future project launched the program divest ed in , which aimed to provide coaching and community to student ffd campaigns across the country [ ]. supported by divest ed, the us he ffd movement saw a resurgent wave of escalation and successes in and early , including notable commitments from the university of california system and georgetown university, and a national day of action in february [ ]. there are currently over us heis that have committed to at least partial divestment from fossil fuels, ranging from small liberal arts colleges to large public university systems [ , ]. signs point to the movement continuing with its momentum despite challenges presented by the covid- pandemic, with many campaigns turning to online tactics to continue organizing and putting pressure on administrators [ ]. ffd diverges from conventional reformist approaches to climate action and sustainability by explicitly seeking to put an end to continued fossil fuel extraction and production. by using divestment to take a moral stand against fossil fuel companies, the main aim of the movement is to create a sustainability , , of social stigma against the fossil fuel industry, thereby generating political and economic pressure for a societal transition away from fossil fuels [ , , ]. this strategy has precedent in previous divestment movements, including those against companies doing business in apartheid south africa and the tobacco industry [ ]. ffd therefore politicizes sustainability to achieve systemic change through collective action, a rebuke of mainstream greening approaches to sustainability which focus on incremental and individualized change [ , ]. divestment also entails the complementary step of reinvestment, in which divested money is reallocated towards more desirable investments. calls for sustainable reinvestment are often made by he ffd activists. this may take the form of demands for reinvestment into “climate solutions,” such as clean and renewable energy. some campaigns and organizations have emphasized the need for reinvestment in communities, such as funding community-owned renewable energy projects [ , ]. divest ed encourages campaigns to work towards reinvestment in local economies led by marginalized communities, through investment in community development financial institutions or other means, to ensure an equitable reallocation of resources [ ]. however, heis may simply reinvest into alternative investments based on the financial needs of their portfolio, such as non-fossil fuel companies and funds that perform similarly to fossil fuel investments [ ]. unlike mainstream sustainability approaches that focus on environmental impacts of resource use, ffd is rooted in concerns for human wellbeing and social justice. the movement can be thought of as an extension of the environmental justice movement that began in the us in the s with concerns over the disproportionate exposure of communities of color and low-income communities to toxic waste [ , ]. environmental justice combines notions of environmental sustainability with social justice considerations, calling for equitable distribution of environmental risks and benefits and fair and inclusive decision-making on environmental issues. the concept of climate justice emerged naturally out of this framework [ ], highlighting the disproportionate risks climate change poses to poor people, people of color, and indigenous peoples and the need for a “just transition” to a post-carbon economy that ensures fairness and equity in outcomes and procedural processes [ , ]. climate justice activists have often been critical of market-based and consumerist approaches to climate mitigation, seeing them as catering to wealthy elites at the expense of vulnerable communities, and have insisted on keeping fossil fuels in the ground as a primary response [ , ]. a recent form of climate justice activism termed “blockadia” has seen increasing resistance to fossil fuel and other extractive projects using direct action tactics and is often led by frontline communities who are at risk from these projects [ ]. ffd extends climate justice concerns and demands and applies them to institutional finance in a blockadia-style attempt to cut off the social and financial support for fossil fuels. climate justice has been central to the narrative of the he ffd movement, with campaigns and organizations often highlighting the disproportionate impacts of climate change and fossil fuel extraction on historically marginalized populations and seeking to show solidarity with frontline communities that bear the brunt of their impacts [ , , , ]. with over institutions worth more than $ trillion now committed to ffd [ ], the ffd movement has had significant global impacts. ffd has succeeded at its goal of placing a stigma on the fossil fuel industry as a key perpetrator of the climate crisis, putting fossil fuel companies on the defensive and forcing them to justify their value to the public and investors [ , ]. the movement has also begun to represent a legitimate problem for the business of the fossil fuel industry, with international fossil fuel companies like shell and peabody citing ffd as a major financial challenge [ ]. the troubles may be particularly deep for the struggling coal industry, as goldman sachs notes that ffd was a key driver of the coal sector’s % de-rating between and [ ]. beyond its impact on the fossil fuel industry, ffd has had the broader effect of reshaping discourse on climate change and sustainable finance. as the movement emerged, it introduced the radical idea to mainstream climate change discourse that fossil fuel companies must be immediately stopped to ensure a just and livable future for the planet. empirical research has suggested this shifted the center of public climate change discourse in the early years of the movement resulting in liberal policy ideas sustainability , , of that were previously seen as far reaching, such as a carbon tax and carbon budget, receiving increased attention and legitimacy. meanwhile, the radical ideas presented by the ffd movement infiltrated conventional thinking in the finance world through increased attention to concepts describing risks of high carbon investments, like stranded assets and the carbon bubble [ ]. the elevated concern around investments in fossil fuels has led to changes such as the increase in funds available to investors that do not have fossil fuel holdings and the questioning of traditional notions of fiduciary duty that have focused on maximizing short-term returns [ ]. despite the importance of heis in the initiation and continued advancement of the ffd movement and the unique arena the he context provides for shifting discourse on climate change and sustainability, scholarly work on ffd in he has been limited [ , , ]. research has explored the movement through focus on campaigns at a limited number of heis [ , , ], or has focused on narrow elements of the movement such as rationales used by divesting heis and the role of faculty in campaigns [ , ]. with the exception of maina et al., ( ), who recently completed a study of all he ffd campaigns in canada [ ], there has been little research that has explored the extent of the movement or its characteristics using data from a large portion of heis involved in the movement. this paper seeks to fill this gap with a focus on the us, examining the locations and types of institutions where campaigns occur, the stakeholders involved in campaigns and the goals they adopt, and the themes campaigns use in their messaging. presented as ten years of organizing for ffd at heis approaches, this study provides an overview and analysis of the us he ffd movement. the results contribute to a better understanding of the movement’s characteristics, demands, and how it fits within the broader context of sustainability and climate change discourse and action in he and beyond. particularly, this study illustrates how the he ffd movement is pushing sustainability towards a greater focus on systemic change and social justice through campaigns’ hardline stance against fossil fuels and climate justice orientation. finally, this study offers an opportunity for critical reflection on the he ffd movement itself and suggestions are discussed for how the movement may continue to be developed. . materials and methods this study seeks to assess several factors that have been underexplored in the literature on the he ffd movement in the us. first, the spatial distribution of campaigns and the type of heis where these campaigns occur is assessed. second, the types of stakeholders involved in campaigns and common goals of campaigns are identified. this includes identification of campaigns’ goals for reinvestment, which has scarcely been explored in academic research. third, common themes used in campaigns’ messaging are identified. this includes an examination of how campaigns address the notion of justice. though climate justice has been heralded as a key tenet of the he ffd movement [ , , ], examination of how campaigns frame arguments around the notion of justice has been limited. this provides an important opportunity to assess the intersectionality of the movement, particularly as movements addressing race and diversity, such as black lives matter and immigrants’ rights movements, have also found support from student activists at us heis in recent years [ ]. to address the research objectives, ffd campaigns at us heis were analyzed, using a text analysis of facebook pages associated with these campaigns. social media has played an increasingly important role in social movements in recent years, facilitating instant communication and information-sharing among activists and between activists and other societal stakeholders [ – ]. this includes student activism, which has embraced social media as a new tool for campaigning and protesting [ , ]. other research indicates that over % of ffd campaigns at heis in north america have a facebook page and a host of other social media platforms are commonly used by campaigns [ ]. this study exploits the ubiquitous use of social media in contemporary student movements to collect and analyze data on the characteristics of ffd campaigns at us heis from campaign facebook pages. the sample was identified from records on active and inactive campaigns throughout the us provided by divest ed. the first phase of this study took place between may and august , sustainability , , of and sought to identify facebook pages associated with campaigns. if a facebook page was not listed within the records for a campaign, then an online search was conducted with the keywords “divest,” “fossil free,” and “fossil fuel divestment” along with the name of the hei where the campaign was located. for any campaign where multiple facebook pages were discovered, the most relevant page was selected based on criteria favoring pages with the most recent posts and pages with the most information on the campaign associated with them in their “about” section. a campaign at the authors’ home institution was excluded to maintain objectivity. this process generated a total sample of ffd campaigns, each at a separate hei. table s provides a list of all heis with campaigns used in this study and urls of the facebook pages used for each campaign. the records from divest ed provided general information on the heis, including location and public or private designation of each institution. the spatial distribution of campaigns was assessed by totaling the number within each of the u.s. census bureau’s nine divisions [ ], a system of regionality widely used for research [ , ]. the analysis of the facebook pages first involved extracting all the text from the “about” section for each page, which occurred between january and january . the text for each page was then coded to identify types of stakeholders involved in campaigns, goals stated by campaigns, and themes campaigns used in their discussion of why they were organizing. themes were organized under the three major categories of environmental, social, and economic, based on the three “pillars of sustainability” that are commonly used in the sustainability field [ – ]. the way that campaigns addressed justice was considered within the social category. a reference to justice was considered any direct mentions of the concept through the words “justice” or “just,” references to disproportionate harms or deprivations being imparted on particular groups of people, or references to efforts to right such disproportionate harms or deprivations. though justice was not only considered within the environmental context, this conception of justice is tied closely to the notion of equity at the root of the environmental justice movement, that injustice occurs from an unfair distribution of environmental costs and benefits across different groups of people [ ]. . results . . us heis with ffd campaigns the ffd campaigns in this study were located at a variety of heis throughout the country, from small liberal arts colleges to large research universities. of these heis, % are private and % are public (figure ). public higher education systems comprised % of the heis. in some cases, there were campaigns at both the campus and system level. an example is the university of california system, which committed to full divestment in after over six years of activists running both a collaborative, system-wide campaign and campaigns at the individual universities within the system [ ]. this study included both the university of california system-wide campaign and campaigns at six of the universities within the system. among other characteristics of the heis with campaigns in the sample, % are religiously affiliated, % are women’s colleges, and all eight ivy league institutions were present. campaigns are concentrated in the states along the east and west coasts of the us, particularly in the northeast (table , figure ). the four divisions located along the east and west coasts (new england, middle atlantic, south atlantic, and pacific) contained % of campaigns in the sample. new england and middle atlantic, the two divisions in the northeast us, contained the two highest numbers of campaigns of any division, with a combined share of % of all campaigns. the two divisions comprising the south central us, east south central and west south central, contained the two lowest numbers of campaigns of any division, with a combined share of % of all campaigns. sustainability , , of figure . location of us private and public higher education institutions (heis) with fossil fuel divestment (ffd) campaigns from sample of campaigns. each dot represents an hei with a campaign, though not all heis are distinguishable due to clustering in some areas. figure . spatial distribution of he ffd campaigns among us census bureau divisions from sample of campaigns. numbers correspond with divisions listed in table . each dot represents one campaign, though not all campaigns are distinguishable due to clustering in some areas. sustainability , , of table . total higher education (he) ffd campaigns per us census bureau division from sample of campaigns. numbers in the first column correspond with the division numbers in figure . number division campaigns percent new england . middle atlantic . east north central . west north central . south atlantic . east south central . west south central . mountain . pacific . . . campaign stakeholders and goals sixty-one percent of campaigns described types of stakeholders that were involved with their efforts in their facebook “about” sections. of these campaigns, % mentioned having students involved. the next most common stakeholder types mentioned were faculty and alumni, each mentioned by % of campaigns describing stakeholders. the involvement of “community members” was mentioned by % of campaigns describing stakeholders, though it was unclear how this was defined by each campaign. six percent of campaigns describing stakeholders mentioned having staff from each of their heis involved. the goals described by campaigns revealed some key commonalities (table ). in general, campaigns were broadly asking their heis to divest from all types of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas). nineteen percent of campaigns specified that their heis should divest from the top fossil fuel companies, likely in reference to the carbon underground (cu ) list of the top coal companies and top oil and gas companies, ranked by the carbon emissions potential of their reserves [ ]. this list has often been used as a guide for ffd by heis and is considered a standard for ffd by .org [ , ]. campaigns rarely extended the call for divestment to other harmful industries and investments beyond fossil fuels. among the % of campaigns that did call for other types of divestment in addition to ffd, targets included the arms industry, prisons, sweatshops, and holdings in puerto rico’s debt. if campaigns specified whether their heis should divest direct investments in fossil fuel companies, indirect investments in fossil fuel companies (i.e., fossil fuel holdings tied up with other investments in externally managed funds, such as mutual funds), or both, they almost always called for both direct and indirect divestment. campaigns commonly set a deadline by which they wanted their heis to complete divestment. this was most often within five years, a demand given by % campaigns. table . common goals of ffd campaigns at us heis. goal • divestment from all types of fossil fuels (coal, oil, and natural gas) • divestment from the top fossil fuel companies • divestment of both direct and indirect investments in fossil fuel companies • completion of divestment within five years • reinvestment into more sustainable or just alternatives to fossil fuel investments each goal was mentioned by at least % of campaigns in sample. likely in reference to the carbon underground [ ]. reinvestment goals were mentioned by % of campaigns. campaigns tended to call generally for reinvestment into sustainable or socially just funds, solutions, or other alternatives to fossil fuel investments, without giving specific demands about which funds, companies, industries, or projects sustainability , , of they desired their heis to target for reinvestment. however, % of campaigns specified that their heis should reinvest into renewable or clean energy. only % of campaigns emphasized that reinvestment should be directed towards their local area or community. goals mentioned by campaigns were not limited solely to divestment and reinvestment. other goals were mentioned by % of campaigns. the most common of these was educating the public about climate change and environmental issues, mentioned by % campaigns. six percent of campaigns called for greater investment transparency or disclosure of investments by their heis. some campaigns were also advocating for other climate or energy actions beyond divestment. this included % of campaigns that were calling for clean energy or emissions reductions on campus, and % of campaigns that mentioned advocating for climate action outside of their hei, such as in state or national policy. . . themes used in campaign messaging all three of the major sustainability themes of environmental, social, and economic were commonly used by campaigns in their messaging. environmental themes were the most common, being used by % of campaigns, followed by social themes, used by % of campaigns, then economic themes, used by % of campaigns. these themes were often used in combination with each other, with % of campaigns using all three major themes. further exploration of themes revealed some key commonalities (table ). table . common themes used in messaging by ffd campaigns at us heis. themes • combination of environmental, social, and economic themes • the need to address climate change and its impacts on humans • justice for people most impacted by climate change and other societal problems • financial benefit to heis from ffd • ffd as a tool for moving towards a more sustainable society • ffd reflects the values of heis each item was used by at least % of campaigns in sample. sixty-nine percent of campaigns used environmental themes related to climate change. this was often in regards to the negative impacts of climate change, such as rising sea levels, worsening droughts, and increases in devastating hurricanes, on communities and society. in this way, climate change often formed the frame around which social and economic factors were discussed. although some campaigns discussed the impacts of fossil fuels on the wellbeing of the environment, such as effects on biodiversity and ecosystem health, environmental themes were more often used to connect fossil fuels to problems affecting the wellbeing and prosperity of humans. social themes were a far-ranging category that included discussion on how fossil fuels impact human wellbeing and how divestment can contribute to the mitigation of these impacts. this included the effects of climate change on community wellbeing, human health, and the wellbeing of students after they graduate. social themes often reflected a justice perspective, with % of campaigns using themes related to justice. justice-related themes were frequently used directly in the context of environmental problems, namely climate change, and often described disproportionate impacts on certain groups of people, such as frontline communities. a small percentage of campaigns made connections to broader intersectional issues of justice. for example, % of campaigns connected ffd to issues of racial justice. this included campaigns that cited inspiration from the south african apartheid divestment movement. disproportionate impacts of climate change and fossil fuels on communities of color were also recognized, though only by a few campaigns. issues of economic justice were mentioned by % of campaigns, for example by discussing disproportionate environmental impacts on the poor. there were also % of campaigns that drew connections to issues of gender and sex-based justice, stating their support for movements sustainability , , of against gender discrimination, against sexual assault, and for the advancement of women. despite the connections made by some campaigns to intersectional issues of justice, there were some marginalized groups that received very few mentions, including african americans, indigenous peoples, immigrants, and lgbtq+ people. also of note, there were no campaigns that directly referenced local environmental justice issues, such as local communities impacted by fossil fuel projects or climate change. campaigns used economic themes to discuss both considerations for the economy as a whole and economic factors affecting their heis. seventeen percent of campaigns emphasized the financial benefits of ffd to their heis, often making arguments about the risky nature of fossil fuel investments and that divestment could help protect their endowments from financial losses. more broadly, campaigns advocated for ffd as a means to help the economy, such as by addressing financial costs to the country from climate change and encouraging new clean energy development. several campaigns also described ffd as an opportunity to help build a new economy centered on justice and sustainability, and move away from the extractive, inequitable economy upheld by the fossil fuel industry. beyond the frames of the three “pillars of sustainability,” campaigns saw sustainability itself as an important theme, with % of campaigns using the words “sustainability” or “sustainable.” in this context, fossil fuels and the industry behind their use are deemed as inherently unsustainable, and ffd is seen as a tool for creating a more sustainable society not reliant on them. as another overarching theme, % of campaigns argued that ffd was in line with the values of their heis. for example, campaigns expressed that higher education has a responsibility to be a leader in responding to major problems like climate change. some campaigns also argued that ffd was in line with their hei’s mission, religious values, or established commitment to sustainability. . discussion the results provide a window into the he ffd movement in the us, revealing some important insights about the characteristics of campaigns that have been involved. fifty-six percent of campaigns in the sample are at private heis, including all eight of the ivy league institutions. analysis of us campaigns in scholarly literature have often focused on private heis, such as harvard university [ , , ], american university [ ], and pitzer college [ ]. campaigns at ivy league heis have been a staple of the movement, with high profile standoffs with administrators and disruptive protests that have garnered international media attention [ , ]. however, % of campaigns in the sample were found to be at public heis. this is similar to the breakdown of all degree-granting heis in the us, of which % are private and % are public [ ]. campaigns at public heis have the potential to build multi-campus coalitions and to achieve big divestment wins when operating within a he system, as several campaigns were found to be. the university of california system divestment was deemed historic for the university’s size and $ billion portfolio it impacted [ ]. campaigns at such prominent institutions, however, only represent a portion of a movement occurring at a wide range of heis big and small. campaigns were found to be concentrated in the states along the east and west coasts of the us, particularly in the northeast. there are many factors that may contribute to this distribution. this includes the large number of heis in these areas, with % of all degree-granting heis in the us located in the census divisions on the east and west coasts and % located in the divisions in the northeast [ ]. the high concentration of population and social activity near the us coasts [ , ], as well as strong liberal political attitudes in the northeast and on the west coast [ , ], may be additional factors. it should also be noted that divest ed is based in massachusetts, which may contribute to the number of campaigns existing in the northeast and may also bias the sample to include more campaigns in the northeast, due to the connections the program has in this region. though the high number of campaigns on the east and west coasts may arise naturally from such factors as high population levels and favorable political attitudes, the stark absence of campaigns elsewhere raises interesting questions about how such a distribution may impact the efficacy of the movement. for example, there are areas of the country known for heavy fossil fuel production where sustainability , , of campaigns are largely absent. most notable is the west south central division, which contains a hotbed of oil and natural gas production within the states of texas, oklahoma, and louisiana [ , ], yet had only one campaign in the sample. to the north, wyoming, which accounted for % of us coal produced in [ ], and major fracking state north dakota both contained no campaigns in the sample [ , ]. the noticeable absence of campaigns in the south is also of note due to the fact that the southeastern us is projected to be hardest hit by many impacts of climate change, exacerbating disproportionately high poverty levels in this area [ – ]. if location of campaigns matters to the ability of the he ffd movement to take on the fossil fuel industry and address the injustices of climate change, the distribution that exists does not seem to be as well poised as it could be to doing so. campaigns that mentioned stakeholder types overwhelmingly recognized students as being involved with their efforts. this is not surprising given he ffd’s general acceptance as primarily a student-led movement [ , , , ]. however, the results shed light on the common participation of other he stakeholders, including alumni, faculty, and staff, which has been less recognized. these stakeholders have been noted as playing important supportive roles to student campaigns. for example, faculty may serve as mentors to student campaigns or sign on to letters to administrators endorsing ffd [ , ]. alumni may leverage their standing by committing to not donate to their former hei until it has divested or organizing concurrent initiatives to support student calls for ffd [ , ]. the goals campaigns stated for ffd were generally broad, such as divestment from all types of fossil fuels, a wide contingent of the top fossil fuel companies (i.e., the cu ), and of both direct and indirect investments. this consensus does not reflect how heis always act when pursuing divestment. divestment strategies used by heis include divestment from all fossil fuel companies, divestment from the cu , and divestment from specific sectors, such as coal or tar sands; and heis may choose to divest from direct or both direct and indirect holdings [ , , ]. of us heis that have committed to ffd, % have committed to less than full forms of divestment as categorized by .org, including % of divesting heis that have committed solely to divestment from coal or coal and tar sands [ ]. this suggests that campaigns generally advocate for the broadest form of ffd possible, while heis often choose more selective forms of ffd to actually pursue. in these cases, activists may continue to put pressure on heis for more extensive divestment [ , , ]. results show that calls for reinvestment are common among campaigns, but these were also found to be generally broad, rather than specific of where heis should reinvest. as was advocated for by some campaigns in the sample, reinvestment in clean energy has been among the calls made by activists since the beginning of the movement to redirect resources towards climate solutions [ ]. however, a common narrative on what reinvestment should look like does not seem to have developed within the movement. research has suggested that reinvestment has not had as much focus in the movement as divestment because it may be strategically disadvantageous to demand it as an additional step and because of beliefs among activists that it is technically more difficult and that there are not enough appropriate funds to reinvest into [ ]. however, by not incorporating specific demands for reinvestment, campaigns risk heis reallocating money towards greenwashed alternatives, rather than solutions that build a more just society [ ]. for example, research has indicated that ffd could move investment towards sectors of the economy that still have substantial exposure to greenhouse gas emissions, even when investing in “fossil free” funds [ , ]. the additional goals mentioned by nearly a quarter of campaigns, such as educating the public and advocating for climate action beyond the institution, demonstrate that groups working on ffd are not motivated solely by divestment and reinvestment and contribute in other valuable ways. this may reflect the multitude of ways in which students engage with sustainability movements on campus and within society [ ]. campaigns often used a combination of environmental, social, and economic themes in their messaging, reinforcing the notion of ffd fitting within the realm of sustainability, which can be described as the intersection of these areas [ , ]. fossil fuels were presented as a key driver of sustainability , , of environmental, social, and economic problems, namely climate change and its impacts on humans. ffd was seen as a tool to incite a transition away from fossil fuels and thus create a more sustainable society. campaigns often saw it as the duty of their heis to help facilitate this transition because of their institutional values and important position within society. this aligns with the position of scholars who view ffd as a necessary direction for he sustainability in the era of climate change that embraces more outward, transformative action, grounded in principles of equity and social justice [ , , , , ]. true to the common narrative of he ffd being a movement for justice, nearly half of campaigns incorporated language that framed their motivations around issues of justice, often in relation to the disproportionate impacts of climate change on certain groups of people. some campaigns went beyond simply framing ffd as a justice issue and connected it to broader intersectional issues, such as racial or economic justice. however, there was still a lack of intersectionality in terms of connecting ffd to issues faced by specific marginalized groups, such as african americans and indigenous peoples. interestingly, while less than % of campaigns in this study directly addressed indigenous issues, maina et al. ( ) found that nearly % of canadian he ffd campaigns incorporate site-specific messaging addressing concerns of indigenous groups, suggesting that canadian campaigns have developed stronger connections with indigenous groups than have campaigns in the us [ ]. it is worth mentioning that, whereas the leadership of minority groups like african americans, indigenous peoples, and latinos have been important to the development of the environmental justice movement [ , ], research has noted the difficulty some us he ffd campaigns have experienced in building diverse participant bases, perhaps due in part to he ffd activists coming predominantly from backgrounds of relative privilege rather than from environmental justice communities [ , , ]. this is reflected in the fact that no campaigns in this study mentioned specific local environmental justice issues. the focus of campaigns on the broad, global notion of “justice” rather than specifically who is effected by the injustice (e.g., local communities of color) that the findings point to may be a limitation for the movement in creating solidarity with impacted communities, building diverse bases of support, and developing a strong moral argument for divestment. however, this should not detract entirely from the strident focus on justice many campaigns in the movement have adopted that has been important in reframing climate change as a social justice issue in he and broader public discourse [ , , ]. campaigns’ arguments mostly rested on the moral imperative of acting to mitigate societal crises, but a practical case was also often made on the grounds that ffd could benefit heis financially, such as by avoiding losses due to the riskiness of fossil fuel investments. the argument of fossil fuel companies being risky investments is often associated with the ffd movement, particularly the idea that fossil fuel stocks will become obsolete, or “stranded assets,” as increased regulations require fossil fuels to be kept in the ground to mitigate climate change [ , , , ]. campaigns may showcase these arguments to appease concerns of administrators, who have been shown to commonly cite the financial benefits or risks to their heis in decisions committing to or rejecting ffd [ , , ]. it should be emphasized that campaigns have not developed their goals and messaging in isolation but have likely been highly influenced by each other and the narratives presented by organizations supporting ffd. maina et al., ( ) found “patterns of imitation” in the canadian he ffd movement in which campaigns borrowed messaging and tactics from each other in accordance with what was needed for the local context of their heis. they were also influenced by organizations such as .org, who provided online or in-person “sites of encounter” where ideas and resources were shared and disseminated among activists [ ]. this phenomena of diffusion of ideas and practices among movement actors has been well documented within past social movements [ – ]. the commonalities seen in this study among campaign’s goals and the themes they used likely to some degree reflect a similar process of adopting objectives and messaging of other campaigns and organizations in the movement. for example, the request promoted by .org for heis to “immediately freeze any new investment in fossil fuel companies, and divest from direct ownership and any commingled funds that include fossil fuel public equities and corporate bonds within years” sustainability , , of became the baseline demand from campaigns early in the movement [ ]. this was repeated almost word for word by a number of campaigns in this study and reflects the common goals of divestment from all types of fossil fuels, divestment of both direct and indirect fossil fuel investments, and completion of divestment within five years. though campaigns arise and organize in a decentralized fashion, they still seem to form a unified movement with common goals and messaging through imitation and the influence of organizations. . conclusions this study provides an overview and analysis of the characteristics of us he ffd campaigns, focused on the locations and types of institutions where campaigns occur, the stakeholders involved in campaigns and the goals they adopt, and the themes campaigns use in their messaging. presented as ten years of campaigns organizing for ffd at heis approaches, this offers an important contribution, allowing an understanding of the nature of campaigns so far. however, there are still directions for future research that could be useful for better understanding the movement in the us. there is a lack of clarity on how campaigns engage with and are influenced by the communities and regions in which they are located. unlike actors in the grassroots environmental justice movement that the he ffd movement takes inspiration from [ ], the findings reveal that campaigns are not highly focused on pollution or inequities in their own areas. for example, no campaigns referenced local environmental justice issues and few demanded reinvestment into their local communities. however, this study was limited by only looking at short descriptions on campaigns’ facebook pages, and there are certainly nuances to how campaigns interact with their local contexts that were not observed. whether campaigns are inspired to organize by local environmental issues, how campaigns build solidarity with local disenfranchised communities, and whether campaigns or ffd commitments at heis have a reputational or financial impact on fossil fuel companies with operations in their respective regions would all be useful questions to explore. for example, these would help to better explain the spatial pattern of campaigns and whether campaigns could be more strategically located throughout the us. reinvestment is also an area that has received very little study. there are few sources of information that describe where heis have reinvested or committed to reinvest after ffd, beyond broad generalizations and a few mentions of specific cases. a comprehensive examination of where heis are reinvesting could be particularly insightful now, as some of the earlier divesting heis have had time to reallocate divested funds and research could help to understand where this money has gone. though this study has suggested that campaigns do not tend to include specific targets for reinvestment in their demands, further exploration of how campaigns engage with the notion of reinvestment would be of interest to better understand the role it plays in campaigns and how activists are articulating a pathway for just reallocation of money currently invested in the fossil fuel industry. finally, most scholars have considered he ffd from an isolated perspective in regard to other social movements. the results of this study pointed to some intersections between he ffd and other social movements, such as with campaigns tying ffd to racial or economic justice issues. however, there is still a need to examine how he ffd has been influenced by past social movements and interacts with current ones. particularly, as movements addressing race and diversity like black lives matter have found support from student activists in recent years [ ], further study of the connections between these movements and he ffd would be illuminating to the understanding of how it fits in with the broader sphere of progressive activism at heis. it is clear from the analysis of campaigns’ goals and messaging that the he ffd movement is pushing sustainability and climate action towards a greater embrace of systemic change and social justice. nowhere is this more evident than within he itself, where heis are being challenged to uphold their duty as influential societal actors by moving beyond incremental campus greening and engaging in a broader political arena of sustainability action with climate justice as the goal. he professionals should take note of what campaigns are demanding and consider critically how the approach to sustainability , , of sustainability at their own heis can better work to encourage the just economic transition needed to address climate change at the scale and speed necessary, through actions like ffd. the results point to some ways in which the us he ffd movement could be further developed to better confront the power of the fossil fuel industry and build capacity for a movement away from the extractive economy based in solidarity with impacted communities. for example, he ffd organizers could work to build connections in areas that have not seen much activity, particularly in states with heavy fossil fuel production like texas and north dakota, to encourage and support the development of campaigns at heis there. as more heis commit to ffd and proceed with the divestment process, more focus may need to be devoted towards developing a consistent narrative within the movement around reinvestment to ensure that money is reallocated towards a more just economy, and not simply into greenwashed alternative investments. finally, greater emphasis may need to be applied to solidarity with frontline and marginalized communities to develop the movement’s focus on justice. in particular, campaigns developing relationships with such communities within the localities of their heis may provide opportunities to draw needed attention to specific cases of injustice and even to support the prosperity and self-determination of these communities through community reinvestment initiatives. through wide-spread mobilization, a hardline stance against investments in the fossil fuel industry, and a propensity to focus on justice for the people most impacted by the climate crisis, he ffd campaigns in the us have initiated a movement that has helped define an insurgent international wave of climate activism and has challenged embedded notions of sustainability. led primarily by students, the movement is also empowering young people to engage in collective action for sustainability with aims that are radical and global in scope. at the beginning of a new decade, the movement continues to grow and hold significant power to undermine the dominance of the fossil fuel industry, shape narratives around climate change and sustainability, and ultimately drive a transition to a more just society. it is in the hands of future generations of activists, heis, and others involved in the movement to determine the impact he ffd will have in the coming years. supplementary materials: the following are available online at http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / /s , table s : higher education institutions with fossil fuel divestment campaigns in study sample and url of facebook page used for each campaign. author contributions: conceptualization, d.g. and l.a.d.; methodology, d.g. and l.a.d.; investigation, d.g.; writing—original draft preparation, d.g.; writing—review and editing, d.g. and l.a.d.; supervision, l.a.d. all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. funding: this research received no external funding. acknowledgments: the authors thank jon bathgate for contributing to the gis mapping. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. references . ipcc. summary for policymakers. global warming of . ◦c. an ipcc special report on the impacts of global warming of . ◦c above pre-industrial levels and related global greenhouse gas emission pathways, in the context of strengthening the global response to the threat of climate change, sustainable development, and efforts to eradicate poverty; ipcc: geneva, switzerland, . . peters, g.p.; andrew, r.m.; canadell, j.g.; fuss, s.; jackson, r.b.; korsbakken, j.i.; le quéré, c.; nakicenovic, n. key indicators to track current progress and future ambition of the paris agreement. nat. clim. chang. , , – . 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kmblck @gmail.com * correspondence: manyu.li@louisiana.edu received: september ; accepted: november ; published: november ����������������� abstract: the recent surge in acts of violence motivated by intergroup biases in the united states are of great concern. if allowed to progress, these conditions could create an unwelcoming atmosphere and could foster further division within the united states. based on previous culture-related studies, multiculturalism is a possible solution to reducing intergroup biases, as it positively affects implicit and explicit cultural attitudes, perceptions, as well as behaviors. the current study developed a virtual multiculturalism intervention as a means to improve intergroup relations and combat cultural biases within the undergraduate student population. specifically, undergraduate students were randomly assigned to the intervention condition and the control condition. results showed that participants in the intervention condition had a significantly higher improvement in multiculturalism scores, supporting the incorporation of a virtual multiculturalism intervention in higher education. this study calls for the implementation of a better framework of understanding of how changes in multicultural events are perceived and how this can be used to create a more empathetic population who are more comfortable and understanding with one another. this inexpensive and timesaving model holds the possibility of being used in the future to aid in overcoming cultural differences between student populations and varying ethnics groups alike. keywords: multiculturalism; intergroup relations; intervention; cultural sensitivity; diversity awareness “we all should know that diversity makes for a rich tapestry, and we must understand that all the threads of the tapestry are equal in value no matter what their color.”—maya angelou . introduction this study aims at developing a virtual multicultural intervention for college students to reduce intergroup conflicts on race/ethnicity issues and to increase multiculturalism. in , within the united states (us), a total of hate crimes were reported to the federal bureau of investigation. about % of single-bias hate incidents recorded were racially motivated [ ]. according to the sentencing project [ ], african-americans and latinos make up % of the us population but comprise % of the us prison population. other racial disparities can be found in a study observing police–civilian interactions via body cameras. the results showed that during routine traffic stops, officers were seen to speak significantly less respectfully to black community members compared to their caucasian counterparts [ ]. racially motivated acts of prejudice are widespread, making up . % of all discrimination charges [ ]. another form of cultural bias that is not reflected in criminal data is cultural appropriation, which is defined in the literature as the adoption and misuse of symbols, artifacts, genres, rituals, or technologies associated with a particular culture or subculture [ ]. as the us continues to grow in population, its racial profile and overall diversity are expected to grow. the us is projected to become a plurality of racial and ethnic groups—with non-hispanic caucasians behav. sci. , , ; doi: . /bs www.mdpi.com/journal/behavsci http://www.mdpi.com/journal/behavsci http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /bs http://www.mdpi.com/journal/behavsci https://www.mdpi.com/ - x/ / / ?type=check_update&version= behav. sci. , , of no longer being a majority [ ]. in order to prepare individuals for a more global, pluralistic society, multiculturalism should be incorporated into the teaching curriculum. implementing multiculturalism is pertinent “to reduce the misunderstandings across subcultures” and to foster a sense of respect for those with other identities unlike our own [ ] (p. ). the multicultural intervention developed in this study addressed issues such as hate crime and also implicit biases, such as cultural appropriation. . . definition of multiculturalism multiculturalism can be defined as “a social-intellectual movement that promotes the value of diversity as a core principle and insists that all cultural groups be treated with respect and as equals” [ ] (p. ). in this definition of multiculturalism, cultural groups are not limited to ethnicity and race. according to the north american psychological association’s multicultural guidelines, group identities also include disability, age, gender, religion/spirituality, sexual orientation, and social class [ ]. in this study, intervention methods were used to expose participants to multiculturalism educational materials. intervention studies are programs that draw attention to specific behaviors or attitudes and then build up other behaviors or attitudes. although the intervention developed in this study mostly concerns racial/ethnic groups, the intervention materials will also briefly cover other group identities. . . multiculturalism intervention cultural groups are not limited to ethnicity and race. this study uses a more multicultural approach when employing intervention studies. multicultural intervention studies are intervention studies that draw primary focus to concerns regarding racial and ethical issues. previous studies have analyzed the effects of multiculturalism interventions on various populations, ranging from primary education to social work professionals [ ]. these studies all displayed the positive effects of teaching multiculturalism. for example, smith’s [ ] two-group intervention study analyzed the impact of “culture school” on registered nurses’ levels of cultural competency. the culture school was based on a transcultural assessment theoretical model that emphasizes cultural awareness, acknowledging personal biases, and recognizing diversity issues. subjects’ cultural knowledge and cultural self-efficacy were assessed pre-intervention and post-intervention, as well as weeks after the study. the findings of this experiment suggested that educational, multiculturalism-based interventions can significantly increase cultural competency. warring et al. [ ] tested the effectiveness of comprehensive multicultural training on prospective educators and school psychologists. the course objectives included: understanding the customs of different cultural groups, recognizing prejudices and acts of discrimination, respecting diversity, and developing inclusive behaviors. students enrolled in the course were given a pretest and a posttest to measure possible changes in multiculturalism. specifically, this study focused on changes in awareness of personal attitudes towards racial and ethnic minorities, knowledge about racial and ethnic minorities, and developing skills to effectively work with racial and ethnic minorities. a significant increase in levels of awareness, knowledge, and skill was observed amongst participants, which support the incorporation of multicultural courses in the school curriculum. multiculturalism interventions have benefits aside from increased levels of multicultural awareness. a study conducted by turner and brown [ ] evaluated the effects of an intervention designed to improve elementary students’ attitudes toward refugees. the program, entitled the friendship project, aimed to teach students about the culture, lifestyle, and experiences of refugees [ ]. important dimensions of the program were developing knowledge about refugees, encouraging respect and empathy towards refugees, and gaining skills to detect biases and prejudices. students were required to complete attitude measures before and after the implementation of the program. participation in the friendship project resulted in positive, short-term attitudes towards refugees. the findings of this study demonstrate the beneficial effects of multiculturalism on attitudes and perceptions. behav. sci. , , of an experiment conducted by hayes et al. [ ] demonstrated the impact of multiculturalism on counselor burnout and stigmatizing attitudes towards substance abusers. the subjects were randomly assigned to one of the following conditions: acceptance and commitment training (act), multicultural training, or educational control. individuals in the multicultural condition were exposed to multiculturalism ideology, emphasizing cultural diversity, cultural competence, and awareness of personal values and biases. assessments were completed before the training, after the training, and at a -month follow-up. the multicultural training condition was found to have a positive impact on stigmatizing processes [ ]. carter et al. [ ] demonstrated that even a brief multiculturalism intervention could be beneficial in medical care. the program utilized in the study, the cultural proficiency workshop, was a three-hour workshop implemented during a family medicine clerkship. the workshop focused on health disparities, enhancing cross-cultural awareness, and developing cross-cultural communication skills. participants’ cultural attitudes and beliefs were assessed pre- and post-workshop, revealing an overall positive effect on participants’ cultural attitudes. results indicated a positive change in self-awareness of cultural bias, as well as a greater awareness of culture’s role in medical care. the effects of an interactive multicultural intervention on international students were examined by sakurai, mccall-wolf, and kashima [ ]. after the implementation of the multicultural program, participants developed more friendships and strengthened their orientation toward the local culture [ ]; whereas non-participants showed a decrease in both of these factors and developed stronger home cultural orientation. the findings of this study suggest that similar interventions can be used to enhance social engagement among international students and can also be beneficial in building intercultural links between international and local students [ ]. overall, the studies above imply that teaching multiculturalism is an efficient way of addressing and combatting culturally based problems. the current study extended these previous intervention studies to develop an up-to-date, low-cost, and easy-to-administer virtual intervention specifically targeting college students. . . multiculturalism components the components of attaining multiculturalism are similar across cultural competency and multiculturalism literature. they emphasize acknowledging biases, inclusive behaviors, and cultural awareness. the common goal is to develop the necessary multicultural awareness, knowledge, and skills to respectfully engage with other cultural groups. this study will specifically utilize carroll’s [ ] multicultural flashpoints for change to develop a brief virtual multicultural training for college students. according to carroll [ ], the necessary skillsets for achieving multiculturalism include awareness, acknowledgment and knowledge, advocacy, and action. awareness, the first step towards multiculturalism, is pertinent in communication and developing respect for other cultures [ ]. this stage involves awareness of personal values and recognizing oneself as a cultural being but is not limited to the awareness of self and personal beliefs. it also includes the awareness of others and their multiple cultural identities, systemic cultural bias issues, and future implications of relational cultural identities. in other words, learners in multicultural training must be aware of the existence of various cultures. another dimension is the acknowledgment and knowledge dimension. it is a two-stage cognitive process, which is ultimately affected by personal worldviews and one’s cultural self-awareness [ ]. acknowledgment involves the realization and acceptance of important cognitions regarding multiculturalism. it also involves the acquisition and reconsideration of knowledge. acknowledging where one lacks in multicultural competence and seeking to gain more knowledge on the issue would be an example of applying this component. the next stage towards transformational change in multiculturalism is advocacy. carroll [ ] described advocacy as “a process that takes one’s awareness, beliefs, knowledge, and acknowledgment and transforms them into a plan for effecting change” (p. ). an example of advocacy relevant to our college intervention study would be promoting individuals’ advocacy actions in daily activities, behav. sci. , , of such as standing up for a minority student who was teased because of their cultural background or promoting policy change in the university. taking action is the final multicultural flashpoint for change. this is the point where one becomes proactive in practicing multiculturalism. carroll [ ] considered action to be a broader set of events when compared to advocacy. it involves “a conscious, intentional, and deliberate act or activity” (p. ) with widespread outcomes that benefit the lives of many and not just the individual. although carroll’s [ ] flashpoints are specific to school professionals and personnel, our study aims at extending their application to university students. as detailed in section . , these flashpoints will serve as the foundation of the multiculturalism intervention in this study. . . study design and hypotheses this study developed a virtual multiculturalism intervention and assessed how such intervention might improve individuals’ overall multicultural competence. the ultimate goal of this study was to have a positive effect on multiculturalism in university students and provide evidence of the benefits of incorporating multiculturalism in higher education. to achieve this, an intervention was developed and tested to assess if a virtual, multicultural-based task affects university students’ levels of multiculturalism. it was expected that in comparison to the control group, students’ multiculturalism score in the intervention group would increase after the intervention (hypothesis ). in addition, the effectiveness of the multiculturalism intervention was also examined across race/ethnicities, genders, and years in college. levels of multiculturalism have been shown to differ among races/ethnicities. for example, pope-davis et al. [ ] examined multicultural counseling competence in psychology students. results indicated that ethnic minorities demonstrate higher levels of self-perceived multicultural competence in comparison to caucasians. this study suggested potential racial differences in levels of multiculturalism in the present study. another experiment conducted by chao [ ] supported the influence of race on multiculturalism. specifically, a significant interaction between multicultural training and race/ethnicity was found to predict individuals’ levels of multicultural awareness. therefore, it was expected that race would moderate the intervention’s effect on multiculturalism (hypothesis ). specifically, it was predicted that racial minorities would have higher pre-intervention scores of multiculturalism compared to caucasians, potentially creating a ceiling effect. consequently, the intervention effect might be observed in caucasians, instead of the racial minority sample. in addition to race/ethnicity, gender is important to consider when examining multicultural competence. nieto and zoller booth [ ] analyzed the effects of cultural competence on international students. a significant difference in intercultural sensitivity among genders was observed—with females scoring higher on the sensitivity scale than males. this suggests the possibility of gender differences in multiculturalism in the current study. it was predicted that females would have higher multiculturalism levels pre-intervention compared to males. however, due to the possibility of a ceiling effect in females, the intervention may produce a more measurable change in males and not females (hypothesis ). similarly, it was expected that college experiences would moderate the intervention’s effect on levels of multiculturalism (hypothesis ). it was expected that the longer a student has been in college, the more exposure they would have to the university’s diversity office and other culture-related information. therefore, higher pre-intervention multiculturalism scores were expected to be observed in students who have been in college longer. due to the possibility of a ceiling effect in upper-class students, the intervention effect might be observed in students with less college experience. in summary, the current study attempted to examine the following research questions: . do college students in the virtual multiculturalism intervention condition show greater improvement in multicultural competence, compared to college students in the control group? (hypothesis ) behav. sci. , , of . do race, gender, and years spent in college moderate the impact of the virtual multiculturalism intervention on college students’ multicultural competence? (hypothesis – ) . materials and methods the institutional review board (irb) of the university of louisiana at lafayette approved the research under the approval number fa - psyc, “the effects of multicultural competence in university students”. both the pilot study and the main study were approved under the same approval number. . . intervention materials and pilot study the virtual intervention was designed using carroll’s [ ] multicultural flashpoints for change: awareness, acknowledgment and knowledge, advocacy, and taking action. it was administered using qualtrics. the intervention materials consisted of five major sets of activities, which were as follows: a diversity awareness quiz, “my multicultural self”, cultural sensitivity scenarios, educational videos on microaggressions, cultural appropriation, and implicit bias, and scenarios demonstrating advocacy and taking action. a pilot study was conducted to establish validity for the intervention materials. a total of students who were comparable to the target sample of the main study (i.e., college students who are – years old) were recruited through the psychology department sona participant pool. using a -point likert scale (strongly disagree to strongly agree), they were asked to rate each intervention material based on the material’s comprehensibility and overall effectiveness at meeting its main objective. to be included in the final intervention, an average rating of or above in every aspect was required. the final intervention materials are as follows. . . . diversity awareness quiz in this intervention, awareness was taught by utilizing the diversity awareness quiz, which was administered to facilitate awareness of systemic issues. the diversity awareness quiz [ ] was intended to make participants aware of their lack of multicultural competence. . . . my multicultural self awareness was also taught using an activity called “my multicultural self” [ ]. this activity was administered to facilitate awareness of one’s own culture, of others’ multiple cultural identities, and stereotypes associated with cultural identities. in the pilot study, participants were presented with the “my multicultural self” activity. . . . cultural sensitivity scenarios awareness was also taught utilizing a cultural sensitivity scenario. this scenario aimed to enhance one’s cultural sensitivity and increase awareness of how individuals and their cultures can be misunderstood [ ]. . . . multiculturalism educational videos the objective of the acknowledgment and knowledge dimension was for participants to acknowledge their lack of cultural competency and increase their knowledge of systemic cultural issues. three cultural issues were covered in the intervention, including microaggressions, implicit biases, and cultural appropriation. videos were approximately – min long. . . . advocacy and taking actions advocacy and action are closely related concepts, as taking actions involves putting advocacy into practice [ ]. therefore, they were combined in our intervention and were taught by providing behav. sci. , , of scenarios illustrating microaggressions, implicit biases, and cultural appropriation. participants were asked to choose the best way to respond to each scenario. scenarios came from oswald’s [ ] situational judgment inventory (sji) measures and carroll’s [ ] chapter on multiculturalism. . . sample a total of undergraduate students were recruited. only students who were to years old were included in the final sample. after excluding participants who spent less than s ( min) on the task, participants were included in the final sample. participants were randomly assigned to two groups (experimental or control). a total of participants was assigned to the experimental condition ( %), and participants were assigned to the control condition ( %). the average age of participants was . years (sd = . ). out of the final sample, participants ( %) identified as female, participants identified as male ( %), and participant identified as non-binary ( %). participant race/ethnicity included caucasian (n = , . %), black (n = , . %), hispanic (n = , . %), asian (n = , %), native americans (n = , . %), and multi-ethnic (n = , . %). for analytic purposes, black, hispanic, asian, and multi-ethnic participants were categorized into one group (i.e., the racial minority group). in addition, subjects were classified as freshmen ( %), were sophomores ( %), were juniors ( %), and were seniors ( %). most participants were non-immigrants ( %). . . procedure prior to the study, students were randomly assigned to either the experimental or control group. random assignment was executed by participants drawing a slip of paper. the slips of paper were numbered from to . participants who drew a slip of paper with an even number were assigned to the experimental condition. those who drew an odd number were assigned to the control condition. then, students were presented with the consent forms. students’ multicultural competence was assessed before the virtual intervention or the control activity (i.e., pre-test). after the pre-test was completed, students in the experimental condition were directed to complete the virtual multiculturalism intervention. participants in the control condition instead completed a min survey that was unrelated to multiculturalism. after the intervention or the control activities, students’ multicultural competence was measured again (i.e., post-test). after the study, the participants were debriefed. . . measurements the students’ level of multiculturalism was assessed pre- and post-intervention with the -item munroe multicultural attitude scale-questionnaire (masque) [ ]. the masque was tested for internal consistency and was found to be reliable (cronbach’s alpha = . ). participants were asked to respond to these statements on a -point likert-type scale, ranging from (strongly disagree) to (strongly agree). sample items were “i realize that racism exists” and “i am emotionally concerned about racial inequality”. these responses were averaged to obtain a mean multiculturalism score for each participant. gender, race/ethnicities, immigrant status, years in college, and age were included in the pre-test (i.e., before the multicultural intervention). the demographic information was used to examine whether there were significant group differences in multiculturalism improvement after the intervention. . . data analysis repeated measures anova was used to test the hypotheses. for testing hypotheses and (conditions: intervention vs. no intervention) × (time: pre- vs. post-test), a two-way repeated measures anova was used to assess the difference in student multicultural competence before and after a virtual multiculturalism intervention in comparison to a control group. a significant interaction effect would indicate a significant intervention effect, and further pairwise comparisons would be behav. sci. , , of conducted to unfold the pattern of the interaction. for testing hypotheses to , three-way repeated measure anovas were conducted on race, gender, and years in college to determine the effect of each on the impact of the intervention (vs. control) on multicultural competence scores. . results . . results of hypothesis a × repeated measures anova was conducted using jmp pro to assess differences in multicultural competence between the experimental and control conditions across time, as shown in table . the interaction effect of time by condition was found to be significant, f ( , ) = . , p = . . specifically, for those in the intervention condition, overall post-test scores (m = . , sd = . ) were significantly higher than overall pre-test scores (m = . , sd = . ), f ( , ) = . , p < . . however, for those in the control condition, pre-test (m = . , sd = . ) and post-test (m = . , sd = . ) scores were not significantly different f ( , ) = . , p = . . results of the significant intervention effect are presented in figure , and the means and standard deviations are presented in table . for the main effects, the main effect of time, f ( , ) = . , p < . , was significant, but the main effect condition was not significant, f ( , ) = . , p = . . in other words, participants’ average multiculturalism scores in the intervention condition were not different from the scores of participants in the control condition. the results are in support of hypothesis , which expected participants in the experimental condition to have a significant difference in multicultural competence scores pre- and post-intervention. table . the × repeated measure anova results testing the intervention effect. f p condition . . time . < . condition × time . . figure . significant intervention effect (pre- and post- overall multiculturalism scores by conditions). behav. sci. , , of table . means and standard deviations of multiculturalism scores by time (pre- and post-), and f-statistics of the post-hoc analysis. pre-score post-score m (sd) m (sd) f p intervention condition . ( . ) . ( . ) . < . control condition . ( . ) . ( . ) . . . . results of hypothesis a three-way repeated measures anova was conducted using jmp pro to assess the moderating effect of race/ethnicity on the intervention effect. the interaction of condition by race, f ( , ) = . , p = . , and the interaction of all three factors (time, condition, and race), f ( , ) = . , p = . was also found to be non-significant. therefore, race/ethnicity did not moderate the effect of condition or time or condition across time on the overall score of multiculturalism. the results did not support hypothesis of the current study, which expected racial minorities to have higher pre-intervention scores of multiculturalism compared to caucasian participants. results also showed that neither the main effects of condition, f ( , ) = . , p = . , or the main effects of race, f ( , ) = . , p = . were significant. . . results of hypothesis a three-way repeated measures anova was conducted to assess the moderating effect of gender (female vs. male) on the intervention effect. the interaction of all three factors (time, condition, and gender) was also found to be non-significant, f ( , ) = . , p = . . therefore, contrary to hypothesis , gender did not moderate the effect of condition or time, or condition across time on the overall score of multiculturalism. results also revealed that the main effect of condition f ( , ) = . , p = . , and the interaction effect of condition by gender, f ( , ) = . , p = . were both non-significant. however, the main effect of gender was found to be significant, f ( , ) = . , p < . . specifically, females (mpre = . , sd = . ; mpost = . , sd = . ) scored higher than males (mpre = . , sd = . ; mpost = . , sd = . ). . . results of hypothesis a three-way repeated measures anova was conducted using jmp to assess the moderating effect of college experience (upperclassmen vs. lowerclassmen). the interaction of all three factors (time, condition, and college experience) was found to be non-significant, f ( , ) = . , p = . . therefore, college experience did not moderate the effect of condition or time, or condition across time on the overall score of multiculturalism. results also revealed the main effect of condition, f ( , ) = . , p = . , and the interaction effect of condition by college experience to be non-significant, f ( , ) = . , p = . . however, the main effect of college experience was found to be significant, f ( , ) = . , p = . . specifically, upperclassmen (mpre = . , sd = . ; mpost = . , sd = . ) scored higher than lowerclassmen (mpre = . , sd = . ; mpost = . , sd = . ). . discussion the present study aimed at developing a brief, online multiculturalism intervention for college students. the ultimate goal of this study was to have a positive effect on levels of multiculturalism in university students. it was hypothesized that in comparison to the control group, students’ multiculturalism score in the intervention group would increase after the intervention. the main significant findings of the study support the original hypothesis—with the intervention effect being observed only in participants in the intervention condition. these findings are consistent with previous intervention studies that have demonstrated the effectiveness of multiculturalism (i.e., [ – ]). behav. sci. , , of in addition to the main hypothesis (hypothesis ), contradictory to hypotheses – , no moderating effects were found for race/ethnicity, gender, or college experience. it was hypothesized that the intervention would produce a more measurable change in certain groups of individuals (i.e., lowerclassmen, males, and caucasians). however, the null findings of the current study suggest that the intervention is generally effective for all college students tested. although none of the hypothesized moderators were significant, some interesting significant main effects were observed. for example, the main effect of race was found to be marginally significant (p = . ). specifically, racial minority participants scored higher than their caucasian counterparts. similar effects were observed with the main effect of gender and college classes. specifically, females scored significantly higher than males on average multiculturalism scores. finally, in comparison to those with less college experience (lowerclassmen), those with more college experience (upperclassmen) scored higher in the average scores of multiculturalism. therefore, it appears that college education, in general, may help college students to gain knowledge in multiculturalism. although the main significant finding was relatively small, the current intervention is still beneficial to the college population, as it has shown to produce a measurable change in levels of multiculturalism. this intervention is very timely and useful to college students, as the us is in the midst of a global pandemic (i.e., covid- ). many occupational and educational tasks are now being implemented virtually. being that this low-cost multiculturalism intervention is administered online, it can be easily adopted and accessed by individual students and universities alike. along with the covid- pandemic, more awareness is being brought to the “black lives matter” movement due to the increase in exposure to police brutality against black american citizens. the mission of the “black lives matter” movement is to bring awareness to anti-black racism and state-sanctioned violence against black americans [ ]. this movement exhibits a need for awareness of cultural differences in the us. the current multiculturalism intervention could be beneficial in increasing the awareness and acceptance of cultural differences. this could be a very useful tool for individuals and organizations in search of a cost-efficient tool to increase multiculturalism and raise awareness of systemic injustices without the need to have in-person diverse experiences. limitations and future directions it should be noted that the present study is limited in some respects. the study’s generalizability is limited, as most study participants were caucasians and african americans, and over half identified as female. the observed gender identity and ethnicity disparities do not provide an accurate representation of the diverse us population and could have possibly been resolved if more participants were recruited. future studies should take sample size and its possible effects to external validity into consideration when developing a virtual intervention. the current study could also be expanded longitudinally to gain a better understanding of assessing multiculturalism in college students. instead of administering the intervention and assessing participants within the same day, the assessment and intervention processes could be carried out across longer periods (i.e., days or weeks). giving participants more time to complete the intervention and delaying the pre- and post-assessments could result in higher attentiveness to the material presented. it can be expected that this would ultimately provide a more accurate representation of the intervention’s effects on multiculturalism. another possible limitation of the present study is related to the intervention being administered using an online-only platform. prior research has demonstrated the effectiveness of in-person interactions on intergroup relations [ ]. specifically, properly structured contact between members of different cultural groups has been shown to improve intergroup attitudes, as well as reduce bias and conflict [ , ]. therefore, the present intervention may not have been as effective as an intervention involving personal interactions. future virtual multiculturalism intervention studies could incorporate activities that facilitate imagined intergroup contact, which has also been shown to be an effective strategy for improving intergroup relations [ ]. incorporating imagined contact behav. sci. , , of activities would be pragmatic for a virtual intervention because it is timesaving and is as effective as direct intergroup contact. . conclusions this study attempted to develop a virtual multiculturalism intervention that increased levels of multiculturalism in college students. ultimately, the intervention had a small significant effect on overall multiculturalism—with an increase in multiculturalism scores in only the experimental condition, yielding results that fall in line with this study’s hypothesis. this shows that there is a possibility of educating about multiculturalism within a university setting. future interventions should also be conducted across a longer period of time by allowing more time for either the intervention or the assessment. activities that involve intergroup contact (e.g., imagined intergroup contact) should also be incorporated to facilitate diverse experiences. this study contributes to the very limited literature on online multiculturalism interventions in undergraduate education and supports the incorporation of multiculturalism in higher education. it also demonstrates applicability to the current social and pandemic-related events occurring in the us. author contributions: conceptualization, k.b. and m.l.; methodology, k.b. and m.l.; formal analysis, k.b. and m.l.; investigation, k.b. and m.l.; data curation, k.b. and m.l.; writing—original draft preparation, k.b.; writing—review and editing, k.b. and m.l.; visualization, m.l., supervision, m.l.; project administration, k.b. all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. funding: this research received no external funding. acknowledgments: the authors would like to thank mike mcdermott and theresa wozencraft for their helpful comments on the research study. the authors would also like to thank nadia turki for her help in editing the final version of the manuscript. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. references . federal bureau of investigation. hate 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[crossref] publisher’s note: mdpi stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . /j. - . . .x http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.ijintrel. . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / - . . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /j. - . . .x http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/quiz/quiznew.pdf http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/quiz/quiznew.pdf http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/activities/circlesofself_handout.html http://www.edchange.org/multicultural/activities/circlesofself_handout.html https://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/wp-content/uploads/pdf_activities/group/ia_cultural_sensitivity.pdf https://iris.peabody.vanderbilt.edu/wp-content/uploads/pdf_activities/group/ia_cultural_sensitivity.pdf http://dx.doi.org/ . / - . . . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / - . . . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	definition of multiculturalism 	multiculturalism intervention 	multiculturalism components 	study design and hypotheses 	materials and methods 	intervention materials and pilot study 	diversity awareness quiz 	my multicultural self 	cultural sensitivity scenarios 	multiculturalism educational videos 	advocacy and taking actions 	sample 	procedure 	measurements 	data analysis 	results 	results of hypothesis 	results of hypothesis 	results of hypothesis 	results of hypothesis 	discussion 	conclusions 	references jm-jabf .. commentary the changing face of primary care research and practice-based research networks (pbrns) in light of the covid- pandemic hazel tapp, bsc, phd the covid- outbreak is a stark reminder of the ongoing challenge of emerging and reemerging dis- ease, the human cost of pandemics and the need for robust research. for primary care, the advent of covid- has forced an unprecedented wave of practice change. in turn, practice-based research networks (pbrns) must rapidly pivot to address the changing environment and the critical challenges faced by primary care. the pandemic has also impacted the ability of pbrns to deploy traditional research methods such as face-to-face patient and provider interactions, practice facilitation, and stakeholder engagement. providers need more relevant, patient-centered evidence and the skills to effect change. these skills will become more important than ever as primary care practices evolve in response to the current covid- pandemic and the disparities in health outcomes highlighted by covid- and the global black lives matter social movement for justice. throughout this issue, authors detail the work conducted by pbrns that demonstrate many of these evolving concepts. articles explore how pbrns can evaluate covid- in primary care, the role of pbrns in quality improvement, stake- holder engagement, prevention and chronic care management, and patient safety in primary care. ( j am board fam med ; : – .) the covid- outbreak is a stark reminder of the ongoing challenge of emerging and reemerging dis- ease, the human cost of pandemics and the need for robust research. for primary care, the advent of covid- has forced an unprecedented wave of practice change. in turn, practice-based research networks (pbrns) must rapidly pivot to address the changing environment and the critical chal- lenges faced by primary care. the pandemic has also impacted the ability of pbrns to deploy tradi- tional research methods such as face-to-face patient and provider interactions, practice facilitation, and stakeholder engagement. key new areas for evalua- tion are the move to virtual visits, the health impact of covid on practice staff, providers and patients (including racial disparities in outcomes), and prac- tice business functions. pbrns have traditionally played a role in trans- lation of research into practice, and more recently in the implementation and evaluation of quality improvement efforts. – since , when congress asked the agency for health care research and quality to identify and support primary care research, pbrns have become a resource for accelerating the translation of research into practice with research generated by pbrns shown to improve outcomes for patients and practices. pbrns can also be thought of as able to help iden- tify problems in daily practice, demonstrate whether treatments are effective and sustainable in real- world settings, and provide the “laboratory” for test- ing system improvements. primary care physicians are more motivated than ever to incorporate evidence-informed decision making into everyday practice particularly in com- bination with patient engagement techniques such as shared decision making. unfortunately, physi- cians are still hampered by the need for more rele- vant, patient-centered evidence and the need to acquire the skills to effect change. pbrns incorpo- rate community-engaged research, participatory implementation research, quality improvement and implementation science initiatives, continuing from the department of family medicine, atrium health, charlotte, nc. funding: funding for this work was supported by atrium health. conflict of interest: the author has no conflicts of interest. corresponding author: hazel tapp, bsc, phd, atrium health, vail av, charlotte, nc (e-mail: hazel.tapp@atriumhealth.org). doi: . /jabfm. . . commentary co p yrig h t. o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y h ttp ://w w w .ja b fm .o rg / j a m b o a rd f a m m e d : first p u b lish e d a s . /ja b fm . . . o n s e p te m b e r . d o w n lo a d e d fro m mailto:hazel.tapp@atriumhealth.org http://www.jabfm.org/ education, and the training of future generations of translational investigators. pbrns use quality improvement and implementation science to inform and quantify improvements. in addition, sustained collaborations with providers, patients, and other relevant stakeholders such as local and national advocacy groups and community-based organizations are used to enhance the work of pbrns. currently, quality improvement and implemen- tation science knowledge are still predominantly in the domain of researchers within pbrns. these skills need to be translated to user-friendly tools that are accessible and readily used by health care practitioners. integration of new skills into prac- tice is not easy because it often requires new kinds of relationships, conceptual frameworks, and even languages for clinicians, patients, researchers, aca- demic institutions, and funding agencies. an emerging role for pbrns is both traditional pri- mary care research and collaborative learning com- munities that can identify, disseminate, and integrate new knowledge. these skills will become more important than ever as primary care practices evolve in response to the current covid- pan- demic and the disparities in health outcomes high- lighted by covid- and the global black lives matter social movement for justice. throughout this issue, authors detail the work conducted by pbrns, which demonstrate many of these evolving concepts. articles explore how pbrns can evaluate covid- in primary care, the role of pbrns in quality improvement, stake- holder engagement, prevention and chronic care management, and patient safety in primary care. pbrns are critical laboratories for studying the implementation of evidence-based practices in real- world settings. devoe et al describe how the cur- rent pandemic and primary care’s response to it are among the most impactful natural experiments in our lifetime, presenting an opportunity to demon- strate pbrns’ power and value in supporting dis- semination and implementation science. the collaboration between a community health care cen- ter pbrn and implementation scientists are being leveraged to evaluate how community health care centers across the country are responding to the covid- pandemic. researchers will use medical record data, telemedicine trainings, and qualitative interviews with practices over a -month period to identify practice adaptation to delivery of care. two articles illustrate how pbrns facilitate advancements in quality improvement. project echo (extension for community health care outcomes) uses case-based telementoring to sup- port community clinicians to deliver best-practice care. mcdonnell elder et al describe how pbrn has created a statewide network for echo programs. the pbrn facilitated a unique funding stream for the echo programs by partnering with payers and health care systems. using examples of tobacco cessation, chronic pain and opioid prescrib- ing, and diabetes management, the authors describe how the collaboration enhanced practice recruit- ment and retention and improve financial stability. practice facilitation is an effective approach to implementing quality improvement in primary care. regular facilitator-practice interactions are necessary for successful facilitation. ye et al sought to identify practices facilitation barriers using a time series analysis to evaluate facilitation activities across multiple practices. while most facilitation activities occurred at regular practice- specific tempos, nearly all practices experienced at least delay with facilitation, ultimately showing that number of facilitation delays correlated with lower intervention completion. pbrns frequently engage community members and clinic staff through community advisory boards and patient advisory councils. additional strat- egies such as virtual solutions are now needed as pbrns consider how to facilitate longitudinal engagement of stakeholders and the needs for vir- tual engagement created by covid- . engster et al describe the creation of a virtual parent panel to engage parents remotely and use their input for child health research. the authors utilized an existing research study on pain management during routine child vaccinations to develop regular communica- tion with a group of parents/patient stakeholders to provide feedback on research ideas. although not meeting the definition of full community-based par- ticipatory research, given the large geographic area the pbrn serves, and barriers associated with bringing together in-person meetings, this strategy represents a pragmatic move forward in patient engagement, particularly in the light of covid- . additional approaches to patient engagement were described by dickinson et al, where practice facilitation combined with patient engagement enhanced implementation of new models of care. mungia et al discuss years of dental practitioner jabfm september–october vol. no. http://www.jabfm.org co p yrig h t. o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y h ttp ://w w w .ja b fm .o rg / j a m b o a rd f a m m e d : first p u b lish e d a s . /ja b fm . . . o n s e p te m b e r . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.jabfm.org/ engagement activities within a national dental pbrn. this network used a broad range of activ- ities to engage community practitioners showing success in sustaining a high level of practitioner engagement in research that was relevant to every- day clinical practice. nagykaldi et al describe using stakeholder partnerships to show commu- nity-wide health improvement across a rural pbrn. the healthier together study aimed to implement and evaluate a sustainable, community- based preventative care patient outreach model. stakeholders included community-based wellness coordinators, primary care providers, county health departments, local hospitals, and health informa- tion exchange networks. prevention and chronic disease management is a large part of the work of primary care. support and evaluation of prevention and chronic disease by pbrns offers robust evaluation of current practice, new innovations and best practices. , krist et al point out that while barriers to preventive screening, such as colon cancer screening, are well documented, less is known about the relative importance of patient, clinician, health system, and communication factors associated with recommended screening, particularly for vulnerable populations. based on the results of a large patient survey, the authors were able to show that having a long-term relationship with a primary care clinician and sharing decisions are key drivers to ensure evidence-based preventive care for underserved populations. in another study focusing on vulnerable populations, heintzman et al examined potential disparities in care provided to latino children com- pared with non-hispanic white children and showed that in this multistate network of clinics, latino chil- dren were less likely to have their asthma entered on their problem list than non-hispanic white children, but otherwise did not receive inferior care. the authors suggest that asthma disparities experienced by this population may occur at other stages of care such as initial diagnosis or not actually filling the prescrip- tion medication filling, rather than at the stage of appropriate prescribing. kwan et al used mixed- methods qualitative research to compare different models of diabetes shared medical visits. researchers used surveys, interviews, and observation to assess practice contextual factors, such as practice size, loca- tion, payer mix, change and work culture, motivation to participate, and clinical and administrative capacity. registries are foundational elements for the chronic care model and the patient-centered medical home. previous research has demonstrated that registries are effective for improving clinical guideline adherence for care of patients with type diabetes. however, registry implementation has typically relied on intensive support (such as practice facilitators) for practice change and care improvement. sabo et al showed that a remotely delivered, low-intensity peer mentoring intervention can support the use of diabe- tes registries in primary care, reducing the intensity of support needed. primary care obesity management has many barriers for providers including the reality of managing patients’ expectations. brooks et al used a qualitative approach to discover what motivated pri- mary care clinicians to take part in an obesity research intervention. providers felt that the research project provided a concrete plan to address their ongoing clin- ical care need for effective obesity treatment and man- agement, offered help to frustrated physicians who felt a deep professional duty to care for all their patients’ problems, and because it demonstrated their commit- ment to improving the health of the broader commu- nity. team-based approaches to disease management continue to be important areas of study. clinical phar- macists provide important services in patient care and have the time to devote to more granular dietary and medical management. norton et al showed that col- laboration of pharmacists and physicians in the pri- mary care setting is associated with improved diabetes outcomes and substantially reduces costs. patient safety in primary care is a priority. issues such as overprescribing medications, diag- noses, transitions, referrals, and inappropriate testing are emerging areas of concern. lai et al discovered that providers and patients prefer function-based conceptualizations such as not causing harm and viewing patients’ needs holisti- cally, that better reflect front line personnel and patients’ experiences rather than domain-based conceptualizations, such as overprescribing med- ications, which are favored by experts. going forward, the physical, psychological, and societal consequences of covid- will need to be considered in all aspects of primary care and associated practice-based research needs. the author would like to acknowledge the assistance of sylvia tapp in the preparation of this manuscript. to see this article online, please go to: http://jabfm.org/content/ / / .full. doi: . /jabfm. . . commentary co p yrig h t. o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y h ttp ://w w w .ja b fm .o rg / j a m b o a rd f a m m e d : first p u b lish e d a s . /ja b fm . . . o n s e p te m b e r . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://jabfm.org/content/ / / .full http://jabfm.org/content/ / / .full http://www.jabfm.org/ references . fauci as, lane hc, redfield rr. covid- — navigating the uncharted. n engl j med ; : – . . mays gp, hogg ra, castellanos-cruz dm, hoover ag, fowler lc. public health research implementation and translation: evidence from practice-based research networks. am j prevent med ; : – . . nagykaldi z. practice-based research networks at the crossroads of research translation. j am board fam med ; : – . . tapp h, dulin m. the science of primary health- care improvement: potential and use of commu- nity-based participatory research by practice- based research networks for translation of research into practice. exp biol med (maywood) ; : – . . fagnan lj, simpson mj, daly jm, 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care: conceptual meanings to patients and the health care team. j am board fam med ; : – . doi: . /jabfm. . . commentary co p yrig h t. o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y h ttp ://w w w .ja b fm .o rg / j a m b o a rd f a m m e d : first p u b lish e d a s . /ja b fm . . . o n s e p te m b e r . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.jabfm.org/ wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p 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this editorial reflects on the state of jmla in by describing our editorial team and volume of submissions, highlighting recent initiatives that strengthen the journal’s position in the profession, and sharing future plans to enrich jmla’s content and promote open science. committed to ending structural racism and other inequities in the field, we also issue an ongoing call for submissions pertaining to social justice and critical perspectives on health sciences librarianship. in , the journal of the medical library association (jmla) continues to be the premier journal in health sciences librarianship. this appears to be due to a virtuous cycle. we actively strive to improve the experiences of our readers, authors, and reviewers; enforce increasingly high standards for the work we publish; and adopt policies and practices that keep the journal at the cutting edge of scholarly publishing. in return, authors continue sending us their best work, which allows us to set the bar even higher. to acknowledge the vast number of people who contribute to the journal’s success and to shine light on some of our internal functions, we reflect on the past four years of jmla’s publishing activity and initiatives and offer some glimpses into the journal’s future. editorial team presently, the jmla editorial team includes an editor-in-chief, two associate editors, a managing editor, nine section editors, a social media editor, and an approximately twenty-five-member editorial board. apart from the managing editor, who is employed by the medical library association (mla), all members of the jmla editorial team are volunteers and do not get paid for their work. for the editor-in-chief and associate editors, this work includes screening submitted manuscripts, selecting and communicating with peer reviewers, synthesizing peer-reviewer comments, making editorial decisions, and often conducting additional rounds of editorial review to improve the writing and the presentation of data. for the section editors, the work includes soliciting manuscript submissions, working with authors to produce manuscripts that meet jmla guidelines, and writing their own pieces. for editorial board members, this includes carrying a heavy peer-review load, providing feedback on journal administrative and policy decisions, and serving on task forces dedicated to improving key aspects of the journal. without the extensive efforts of this volunteer team, jmla in its current form would not exist. new publishing platform in , jmla began publishing via the open journal system (ojs) journal management and publishing platform, hosted by the university of pittsburgh, to take advantage of its relatively easy and robust work flows for manuscript submission, peer review, editorial decision making, and copyediting. overall, we have been pleased with this platform and customer support and appreciate that its features have improved the efficiency and transparency of the review and publishing processes and enhanced the reading experience. all jmla articles, including those published before , continue to be available through pubmed central. a k e r s e t a l . doi: dx.doi.org/ . /jmla. . journal of the medical library association ( ) october jmla.mlanet.org number of submissions and acceptance rate between and , jmla received an average of approximately unsolicited manuscripts per month, with a trend toward an increasing submission rate over time (figure ). interestingly, shortly after the covid- virus infiltrated north america, we experienced a notable increase in the number of submissions, with an unprecedented manuscripts received in june . fewer than half (~ %– %) of submitted manuscripts are ultimately accepted after peer and/or editorial review (figure ). published issues of jmla comprise approximately % peer-reviewed articles (i.e., knowledge syntheses, original investigations, case reports, special papers), % book and resource reviews, % commentaries and editorials, and % other articles (e.g., virtual projects, history matters, obituaries, mla association records). figure number of submitted manuscripts per month across years figure percentage of submitted manuscripts that are accepted, declined, or pending an editorial decision across years expansion of peer-reviewer pool we have drastically expanded jmla’s peer-reviewer pool to include expert librarians and information professionals, information scientists, and health professionals regardless of their role with the journal or their membership in mla. at present, the jmla peer-reviewer database contains nearly individuals. deeply appreciative of their time and thoughtfulness, we publicly recognize our reviewers in annual editorials, the most recent of which reports that individuals reviewed for jmla in [ ]. we believe this expansion of the jmla peer- reviewer pool has markedly improved the rigor with which submitted manuscripts are evaluated. to support this group of reviewers and meet a desire for peer-reviewer training for health sciences librarians, we presented an mla webinar, “everything you ever wanted to know about peer review: for reviewers and authors,” in june [ ], and additional resources and training opportunities for building peer reviewers’ skills and confidence are currently being planned. implementation of data sharing policy to increase the rigor and reproducibility of research, enable data reuse, and promote open science, jmla instituted a data sharing policy in that requires authors of original investigations, case reports, and special papers to place their underlying data in a repository and include a data availability statement in their manuscript [ , ]. this step forward served to make jmla the first journal in librarianship to adopt a firm data sharing policy. as expected, some authors have needed reminders or extra guidance toward complying with this policy, but, overall, we have been pleased with how quickly jmla authors have incorporated data sharing into their scholarly publishing work flow. alignment with medical library association domain hubs the recent transformation of mla communities defined seven domain hubs organized by areas of professional practice—clinical support, education, global health & health equity, information management, information services, innovation & research practice, and professionalism & leadership—to enable mla caucuses to collaborate on activities and programs of interest. as part of this transformation, seven members of the jmla e d i t o r i a l doi: dx.doi.org/ . /jmla. . jmla.mlanet.org ( ) october journal of the medical library association editorial team volunteered to serve as liaisons to each mla domain hub. in addition, other members of the editorial team are currently conducting an analysis of the degree to which jmla articles published over the last ten years align with the mla domain hubs. the results of this analysis will be described in a future editorial and used to inform future calls for submissions or other jmla initiatives. social media presence aided by successive social media editors, jmla’s social media presence has grown substantially over the last years: from to twitter (@jrnlmedlibassn) followers and from to , facebook (@mlajournal) followers. we continue to contemplate strategies for utilizing social media to enrich jmla’s reader and author experiences, such as hosting twitter chats or online journal clubs centered on recently published jmla articles. journal impact factor historically, jmla’s impact factor (clarivate analytics) has tended to hover around . in recent years, however, our impact factor has crept upward, reaching all-time highs of . and . in and , respectively (figure ). at the risk of succumbing to “impact factor mania” [ ], we take pride in this indicator, because it suggests that the work we publish is exerting more influence on scholarly discourse and may be having a correspondingly larger impact on the practice of health sciences librarianship. figure the journal of the medical library association’s (jmla’s) impact factor (clarivate analytics) across years looking forward we are happy with the progress that jmla has made over the past four years and are excited about the future. in the coming year, we plan to create and share new guidelines and resources for peer reviewers, release a call for submissions on topics pertaining to underrepresented mla domain hubs, implement the credit taxonomy for authors to specify contributors’ roles in articles, and establish approaches to increasing the diversity of our editorial team and peer reviewers. in light of national conversations around black lives matter and health equity in response to systemic racism, police violence, and health disparities in the covid- pandemic, we believe it is important to affirm jmla’s commitment to promoting equity in health sciences librarianship and information science. we want to publish articles recognizing and addressing social injustices; attempts to achieve diversity, inclusion, and equity among our workforce and user populations; and other critical perspectives on health sciences librarianship. acknowledging our positionality as white women who are serving as jmla editors, we believe it is crucial to use our privileged positions to solicit and publish submissions on these topics, particularly those authored by our black, indigenous, and people of color (bipoc) colleagues. this is an ongoing call for submissions rather than an intention to compile a special issue because we believe that these topics should be steadily woven throughout our thoughts, conversations, research, writing, and practice. we strive to ensure that jmla continues to reflect the cutting edge of theory and the realities of practice while advancing health sciences librarianship in new directions and look forward to bringing you a valuable resource for many years to come. acknowledgments we sincerely thank our present and past editorial board members, section editors, and susan c. t. talmage, managing editor, for shaping each issue of jmla and its overarching trajectory. we thank our authors for sending us their best work and our reviewers for their generous time and commitment to improving the quality of the articles we publish. a k e r s e t a l . doi: dx.doi.org/ . /jmla. . journal of the medical library association ( ) october jmla.mlanet.org references . akers kg. thank you to the journal of the medical library association reviewers in . j med libr assoc. apr; ( ): – . doi: http://dx.doi.org/ . /jmla. . . . medical library association. everything you ever wanted to know about peer review: for reviewers and authors webinar [internet]. the association; jun [cited jul ]. <https://www.mlanet.org/p/ca/vi/sid= >. . read kb, amos l, federer lm, logan a, plutchak ts, akers kg. practicing what we preach: developing a data sharing policy for the journal of the medical library association. j med libr assoc. apr; ( ): – . doi: http://dx.doi.org/ . /jmla. . . . akers kg, read kb, amos l, federer lm, logan a, plutchak ts. announcing the journal of the medical library association’s data sharing policy. j med libr assoc. oct; ( ): – . doi: http://dx.doi.org/ . /jmla. . . . casadevall a, fang fc. causes for the persistence of impact factor mania. mbio. ; ( ):e - . doi: http://dx.doi.org/ . /mbio. - . correction: doi: http://dx.doi.org/ . /mbio. - . authors’ affiliations katherine g. akers, jmla@journals.pitt.edu, https://orcid.org/ - - - , editor-in-chief, journal of the medical library association jill barr-walker, jbwjmla@gmail.com, https://orcid.org/ - - - , associate editor, journal of the medical library association kathleen amos, ahip, kamos@phf.org, associate editor, journal of the medical library association received july ; accepted july articles in this journal are licensed under a creative commons attribution . international license. this journal is published by the university library system of the university of pittsburgh as part of its d-scribe digital publishing program and is cosponsored by the university of pittsburgh press. issn - (online) http://dx.doi.org/ . /jmla. . https://www.mlanet.org/p/ca/vi/sid= http://dx.doi.org/ . /jmla. . http://dx.doi.org/ . /jmla. . http://dx.doi.org/ . /mbio. - http://dx.doi.org/ . /mbio. - http://dx.doi.org/ . /mbio. - mailto:jmla@journals.pitt.edu https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:jbwjmla@gmail.com https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:kamos@phf.org https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://www.library.pitt.edu/ http://www.pitt.edu/ http://www.library.pitt.edu/d-scribe-digital-collections http://www.library.pitt.edu/d-scribe-digital-collections http://upress.pitt.edu/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . /us/ 	katherine g. akers; jill barr-walker; kathleen amos, ahip 	see end of article for authors’ affiliations. 	as the premier journal in health sciences librarianship, the journal of the medical library association (jmla) continuously strives to publish high-quality work that advances research and practice and to provide irreplaceable value for readers, authors, and reviewers. this editorial reflects on the state of jmla in by describing our editorial team and volume of submissions, highlighting recent initiatives that strengthen the journal’s position in the profession, and sharing future plans to enrich jmla’s content and promote open science. committed to ending structural racism and other inequities in the field, we also issue an ongoing call for submissions pertaining to social justice and critical perspectives on health sciences librarianship. 	editorial team 	new publishing platform 	number of submissions and acceptance rate 	expansion of peer-reviewer pool 	implementation of data sharing policy 	alignment with medical library association domain hubs 	social media presence 	journal impact factor 	looking forward 	acknowledgments 	references 	authors’ affiliations 	katherine g. akers, jmla@journals.pitt.edu, https://orcid.org/ - - - , editor-in-chief, journal of the medical library association 	jill barr-walker, jbwjmla@gmail.com, https://orcid.org/ - - - , associate editor, journal of the medical library association 	kathleen amos, ahip, kamos@phf.org, associate editor, journal of the medical library association 	received july ; accepted july genealogy article black lives matter! nigerian lives matter!: language and why black performance matters abimbola a. adelakun african and african diaspora studies, university of texas at austin, w. th street, mailcode e , austin, tx , usa; adelakun@austin.utexas.edu received: march ; accepted: april ; published: april ���������� ������� abstract: this essay explores performance as a language by looking at its appropriation by other cultures, and the associated history of the crafted phrases that are borrowed along. i start by noting that to create awareness of the massacres that have recently occurred in some parts of nigeria, commentators, both in and out of the country, and activist-cum-protesters created the term “nigerian lives matter.” they appropriated from “black lives matter,” the american-originated advocacy movement that campaigns against violence and brutality against black people. i show that these forms of lexical interchange are possible because of non-americans’ familiarity with america’s racial history, and black performance liberation expressivity, which they have been acculturated into as a result of their long exposure to american culture. beyond phrases however, i argue that black performance itself is a language that has a global resonance among minorities. to illustrate this further, i do a close reading of this is nigeria, a recent music video released by nigerian lawyer turned artist, folarin falana (falz), alongside a version of the original production, this is america, also recently released by donald glover (childish gambino). both songs continue in the older tradition of african and african american transatlantic political relations through music, the shared understanding of the similarities of anti-black oppression, and the formation of aesthetics that mediate the advocacy of black liberation. the songs are also a pointer to how black advocacy might continue to unfold in contemporary era. keywords: performance; language; black lives matter; nigerian lives matter; black liberation to create awareness for the massacres that have recently occurred in some parts of nigeria, commentators, activists, and protesters, both in and outside of the country, have created the term “nigerian lives matter.” they appropriated the phrase from “black lives matter,” an advocacy movement that originated in the usa and which campaigns against violence and brutality against black people. black lives matter (henceforth, blm) began in the united states as a drive against anti-black violence, another wave of pushback that was energized in the wake of the trayvon martin killing. more than sloganeering, blm functions as a dense political statement that encodes the urgency of acknowledging black humanity, the decades of history of advocating for it, and the yet-to-be-resolved issues that continue to give the declaration of black humanity currency. while the primary focus of the blm movement has been on the afterlife of slavery—systemic racism, racialized criminal justice system, racial violence, and particularly, police brutality —the campaign has had a resonance with ethnic and racial minority groups outside the us. the intensity of the statement, blm, reverberates across locales outside the us. from the united kingdom to canada, australia, ghana, israel, nigeria (and (jegede ; wilson). see also the social media pages dedicated to the nigerian lives matter projects. (clare ; davary ; edwards ). (hartman ). genealogy , , ; doi: . /genealogy www.mdpi.com/journal/genealogy http://www.mdpi.com/journal/genealogy http://www.mdpi.com http://dx.doi.org/ . /genealogy http://www.mdpi.com/journal/genealogy https://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= genealogy , , of its diasporas), blm is an anthem of resistance that has been variously diffused with local angst and which has spawned different versions that articulate different issues to different audiences. this essay is an argument that black performance in its ramifications is a language, and a universal one at that. this factor makes it open to mimesis by other cultural agents who use it to transcend the babel of advocacy efforts into a singular tongue. when black performance is appropriated for social activism, the associated history of the crafted phrases and aesthetic actions are borrowed as well. the dialogical and convivial artistic exchange that occurs spawn social formations across disparate black cultures. not merely titular, nigerian lives matter is wrought from a cultural stencil that samples the black american protest semaphore, compresses the political economy in the universal nature of usa socio-political and socio-cultural performances, and re-presents it within the frame of nigerian politics. nigerian lives matter also illustrates how the globally circulated aesthetics of black american performances surpasses ideo-spatial bounds, animates resistance practices of other cultures, and impregnates them with social and semantic resources to mobilize against oppressions and injustices in their local communities. black performance is ontologically political, and it authorizes the codes that provoke the articulation of deeply sedimented attitudes and world views, particularly among subaltern populations. these codes construct the social world and make both situations and the framed responses to them mutually comprehensible. my analysis will focus on this is nigeria, a recent music video released by nigerian lawyer turned artist, folarin falana (falz), and the original production, this is america, also recently released by donald glover (childish gambino) and to critical acclaim. i focus on the phenomenality of the hip-hop culture and contemporary music scene that foregrounded—and continues to sponsor—some of these socio-political critiques and aestheticized resistance engagements in non-usa cultures. the songs by childish gambino and falz continue in the older tradition of african and african american transatlantic political relations through music, the shared understanding of the similarities of anti-black oppression, and the formation of aesthetics that mediate the advocacy for black liberation. this symbiotic artistic exchange and political negotiations of black identity was particularly visible in the s representations between black artists and activists, such as john coltrane and babatunde olatunji, miriam makeba (particularly in the light of her marriage to the proponent of the black power movement, stokely carmichael), and maya angelou and her sojourn through africa. also, the role of afrobeat creator, fela anikulapo-kuti, is quite significant in this regard. his musical career and politics was a key bridge through which the black power movement and other racial, social movements not only traveled to africa, but also were translated into a local social dialect that captured the intricacies of politics in postcolonial africa. fela made the black power movement popular within africa because his music expanded the historical consciousness of the average african to the global black struggle. by connecting the dots of the ongoing intellectual exchange of the pan africanist movements of the era in his songs, and by using the iconic black power symbol of the raised fist, he created a legacy of resistance that was both racial and national in outlook. see articles: “black lives matter needed in uk” by bbc and youtube video on protest against police brutality in israel.“black lives matter needed in uk.” august . british broadcasting corporation. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk- (accessed on september ).“protest against racist police brutality in israel.” youtube.com. january . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erfw pprawy#t= (accessed on september ). this is america was released on may and this is nigeria followed on may . as (shonekan ) pointed out in her analysis of the connection of music and black lives matter protests, every generation and its black liberation struggles have been backgrounded with the sound of the music of its times. for a related analysis, also see (maultsby ). (feldstein ; fleming ; sizemore-barber ). (botchway ). also see: (olaniyan ). in , nigerians, along with counterparts in other countries, began their own version of mass protest in the fashion of the arab spring ( ) and the “occupy” movement that had taken off in the usa ( ). the protests began as a pushback against the planned removal of the fuel subsidy by the government of dr. goodluck jonathan, and the consequent multiplier effects it. would have on consumer goods. what is interesting about the aesthetics of this protest is that the logo that was created was the raised black power fist, popularized by fela whose music also was the background sound of the protests. https://www.bbc.com/news/uk- youtube.com https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=erfw pprawy#t= genealogy , , of in a similar vein, both this is nigeria and this is america are performance narratives where one copies the other. mimesis as a strategic selection of human performances is a theatrical art that, according to elin diamond, could lead to the cognition of “ethical universals.” in this context, mimesis provides a frame for two related elements: ( ) juxtapositions of anti-black circumstances across cultures and ( ) popular culture performance as a facilitator of the translatability of one culture’s social narratives through the semiotics inscribed by another’s artistry. translatability galvanizes disparate interest groups across various world cultures that converge along the highways and byways that contemporary performances travel—social media—to share stories due to the grid-like formation of the medium. these diverse cultures potentially understand phenomenal events about each other, not only because performance has a universal purchase for creating meaning, but because these events are also accorded a shorthand language that summarizes the issues at stake within the familiar paradigmatic history of anti-blackness. by saying “nigerian lives matter,” rather than any other locally generated expression, the violence against nigerian groups not only becomes more amplifiable, but also allows us to shape the ideals that connect black histories across space and time. the socio-cultural and socio-political formation that are put together by these resonances of racial dignity across national borders reflects some of the reality of black internationalism in the contemporary era. first, due to the ubiquity of global communication technology, the language with which we challenge anti-blackness might be culture and history specific, but it is also spoken with a global accent. second, this cosmopolitanization of the struggle re-translates local angst and gives it a resonance that is galvanizing because most of its local audience was socialized within a broader global culture. to say nigerian lives matter is to appropriate the conscientization embedded in the sonic gravity that blm carries, and understand oneself as a black subject connected to historical struggles elsewhere. third, despite the immense potentials of framing issues within a global explanatory paradigm, the contours of the contemporary wave of black social movements is only still emerging. for now, the proponents of racial dignity across national borders have yet to consciously connect as comrade-advocates to produce a grand narrative of global black liberation similar to previous black self-determination groups such as the black consciousness movements, independence and african nationalism movements, pan-africanism movement, and negritude movements. there is also no grand hero in the mold of kwame nkrumah, george padmore, malcolm x, marcus garvey, steve biko, and martin luther king jr. in place of a global manifesto that has express political goals, and employs social, aesthetic, and economic means to achieve them, what we currently have are pockets of resistance that occasionally erupt as a result of a buildup of tensions and resentments in different contexts. this level of the diffusion of the struggle is largely a product of the times. the world is fragmented, the imperatives driving the agenda of black liberation across space and time vary radically, identities are in flux, and unlike before, global networking can take place without a physical convergence of bodies or even a set of agendas to be ticked as they are achieved. . the intellectual context the vast body of scholarship that has explored black internationalism movements across the globe has touched on the transnational transfer of affects, ideology, bodies, and the ways blacks and people of color have risen to the challenges of the time to assert their human dignity amidst denigrating conditions that range from slavery to colonialism. from c.l.r. james’ a history of pan african revolt to recent works in the field that are exploring how the shades of identities also impacted black social this showed the resilience of the legacy of these movements. for more on #occupynigeria, and especially the role played by the social media in advancing the pushback, see: (chiluwa ; egbunike and olorunnisola ; hari ; ibrahim ). (diamond ). in translation and globalization, cronin ( ) critically explores how the changes globalization has wrought–modern technology, automation, capitalism, cultural power, institutional forces- have affected language translation. while i rely on his insights to define translation, i do not quite mean it in the literal sense of expressing the text of one language into another. what is being translated here are history and affects, as they are mediated by blackness. genealogy , , of movements, these studies have mostly been historical, casting lights on the roads that those movements have traveled in the past. this paper leans on them for critical insights, and will look at history from the lens of the past to speculate on how the politics of black internationalism might develop from now to the nearest future and what role digital technology might play in the evolution of these movements. these varied texts include colored cosmopolitanism: the shared struggle for freedom in the united states and india, where nico slate finds the ideological links and social visions that bind the transnational struggles of “colored peoples” against white supremacy in the different corners of their world. he shows how people abjured particularistic differences, considered their struggles analogous, and built a transnational network to assert the humanity of the black subject. from toussaint to tupac: the black international since the age of revolution is an equally illuminating compendium of black histories which internationalize the struggle within the historical contexts of the enlightenment, the haitian revolution and its fallouts, the world wars, the nationalist and anti-colonial movements in africa and elsewhere, the cold war, the great migration, and the civil rights movement. the book illustrates the conscious connections of local struggles to global paradigms of black liberation, which has at its core “the ideal of universal emancipation, unbounded by national, imperial, continental, or oceanic boundaries—or even by racial ones.” more recent texts like keisha blain’s set the world on fire: black nationalist women and the global struggle for freedom have highlighted the role played by black women in the organization of black liberation movements, and the ideological musts that drove their passion as activists and organizers. her works provide a counter-balance to similar narrations that have focused on the roles played by mostly male actors in the global movements. more specifically, ingrid monson’s freedom sounds: civil rights call out to jazz and africa interrogates how the transnational black politics of the s intersects with the struggle for civil rights, the cold war, and the anti-colonialist/nationalist movement; and how these factors were blared out in the trumpeted notes of jazz by artists like louis armstrong. in the spirit of looking back to see ahead, other writers like krystal strong have decried the thawing of the black internationalism that lit the s aglow and called for synchronization of resistance efforts by non-usa black cultures under the umbrella of the blm movement. these aspects of black transnationalism have been uneven, ideologically inconsistent, and variously impacted by the evolution of world histories. while there are questions of what such a global liberation movement can—or needs to—achieve even if the past golden eras can be reignited, one also runs against the question of the tools that have the potential to provide a global language that can synthesize issues, ideologies, and different anxieties to which everyone can relate. as michael west et al. noted, organizational efforts to launch similar waves of political revolution that once captured the world and changed historical formations significantly have not quite taken off the same way as they did in the past. however, that does not mean there are no more black formations. the areas where the connections of black identity have emerged have shifted from the overt politics and the intellectual traditions created to tackle them, to the arena of the hip hop movement and its various offshoots in the areas of film, fashion, and media. the contemporary music scene is providing the ideology of transnational and transcendental black liberation that matches the rhythms of the times, and they have managed to spread this consciousness through new media technology. (james ). also see: (clarke ; grant ; thompson and davidson ). (slate ). (west et al. ). also see: (azaransky ). (blain ). (gaines ; meriwether ). (monson ). (strong ). (kelley ). west et al. ( ). genealogy , , of . this is america and this is nigeria!: this is a critique of anti-black violence since the same repressive conditions that imperil human lives are also the ones that press the human creative impulse into making the art that critiques and resists them, this is america comes across to the viewer as a juxtaposition of violence and entertainment. the song and the choreographed dances feature a combination of artistic traditions that range from african melodies and moves, african american music traditions that include the hip hop culture, and the contemporary traditions of cyber-generated “viral” performances. this is america features a bare-torso childish gambino dancing through a warehouse while episodic series of violence and chaos are enacted behind and around him. childish gambino is accompanied by a group of dancers in school uniform who perform different dances, including the south african gwara gwara. the dances are punctuated with violence, such as childish gambino shooting a man sitting on the chair in the back of his head with a handgun, while assuming the iconic pose of the figure caricatured in jim crow era performances. childish gambino soon graduates to an automatic weapon which he uses on a church choir, a reference to the tragic shooting in a black church in charleston, south carolina, in . the video is laden with symbolic references to current political events and instances of anti-black violence in the usa such as fatal shootings and arrests by police at traffic stops, racist history, drug cartels amidst the hysteria about “undocumented” mexican immigrants, the hyper-capitalist obsession with guns and patriotic pretensions of gun ownership despite the culture of violence it has perpetrated, and overall pessimism about the irresoluble circumstances that surround black lives within the context of american history. throughout the video, and amidst the chaos, smoke, flashing hazard lights, and the persecution of black people, childish gambino’s exposed body reminds us of the vulnerability of the black bodies that exist in the mix of the racist circumstances of the usa. on the one hand, this is america pushes us to see a united states where the prevailing ideology of violence treats black bodies as fungible and subjects them to gratuitous violence. on the other hand, this is america’s emphasis on dance also subtly indicts black america—as a subset of the larger nation—in the violence that imperils black lives. childish gambino shows that the resilience of black culture, its resoluteness in the face of wanton violence, and the unattenuated cheerful spirit that continues to affirm black humanity are acts of self-misrepresentation of pain. the disquieting nature of the pessimism with which gambino opens and closes the curtains on this is america notwithstanding, many people found the narrative gripping enough for the video to quickly garner mass online viewership. within hours of its online release, million people had watched the video and as of october , five months after its release, more than million people had viewed it from all over the world. one of the attributes of the internet age is the dizzying speed with which artistic productions like this is america “go viral,” and worm their way into global circulation routes where the spectacular nature of the content eventually takes preeminence over the context that produced it. this is america, as it “landed” in different parts of the world, hatched an array of responses that used its content of socio-political critique as a formula to address local situations; the volume of their voices enhanced by the loudness of the bang with which the video hit the internet. the narrative frames of the video were taken apart and reconstructed into parodies, mimicry, memes, twitter commentary, hashtags, and playful re-interpretations of the intent of the original video. this is america thus became a wellspring of artistic imaginations that sought to formulate the critique of different local situations through a depiction of an essentialized definition of the united states. four days before nigeria’s democracy day on may, and shortly after the release of this is america, falz launched this is nigeria. he capitalized on the attention that this is america had generated and quickly used it to launch a blistering critique of the nigerian situation. the song falzvevo. “this is nigeria.” youtube.com. may . accessed september . https://www.youtube.com/ watch?v=uw_xeqcwrm ; donald glover. “this is america.” youtube.com. may . accessed september . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyojwns cmy. youtube.com https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw_xeqcwrm https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uw_xeqcwrm youtube.com https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vyojwns cmy genealogy , , of used the original version as a template to formulate critiques about the state of the nigerian nation, translating a chain of local phenomena with the artistic scaffold constructed by this is america. falz, son of famous lawyer and human rights activist, femi falana, preempts the video with the voice of his father stating that nigeria operates a “predatory neo-colonialist capitalist system” established on corruption, and which reproduces corruption. falz himself appears in the video with his torso equally bare, while he makes his way through a warehouse where a series of actions are taking place just as it was in this is america. the video goes on to dramatize the nigerian catalogue of woes that are not redressed: infrastructure deficit, corruption and the cynical ways it sometimes operates, incompetent leadership, religious and ethnic violence, insecurity, electoral malpractices and violence, miracle preachers, ineffective leadership, sexual assault, opioid epidemic, cultism, and the workings of a neoliberal economy that makes women resort to prostitution. while this is america featured schoolchildren in uniform, this is nigeria featured school-age girls in hijab doing the popular shaku shaku dance. the girls’ dance alludes to the terrorist violence that saw to the abduction, forced islamic conversion, and marriage of girls in chibok, borno state in , and yet another incident of girls kidnapped from their boarding school in dapchi, yobe state in . the release of this is nigeria was timely; it preempted the nigerian state’s annual rituals of reading a litany of democracy day speeches and a performance of activities that are supposedly intended to boost the collective sense of nationalism. on these occasions, the president typically engages in one-way communication with the citizenry, to state the (meager) achievements of their administration before they go on to make more promises for the future. instead, this is nigeria ambushed the process by combusting the gilded surface of the official narrative to reveal the unflattering reality. this is nigeria, and its timing also gave nigerians a space to express their dissent with the things wrong with their country. the video created so much attention among both local and international audiences, especially after it was shared by hip hop star, sean combs (puff daddy), which only expanded its reach. days after its release, a group called muslim rights concern (muric) demanded the withdrawal of the video because they thought it portrayed muslims and the ethnic group represented in the video as murderers (part of the real-life situations that created the “nigerian lives matter” movement) in an uncomplimentary manner. they described the video as “thoughtless, insensitive and highly provocative” and threatened to sue the artist if he did not withdraw the video and apologize to muslims. given nigeria’s history of eruptions of mindless violence and massacres in islamic-dominated regions of the country because some vagabond muslims took offense at the representation of their religion, muric’s warning was taken seriously. the actual threat, everyone knew, was not to resort to litigation as they warned, but the senseless violence vengeful muslims could unleash on innocent victims. eventually, a series of behind the scene manipulations led to the song being banned from being played on radio stations. . speaking in blackness: of musical performance and interconnected black politics studies of the rhizomatic nature of the contemporary music scene—the global hip hop culture and its elements—have explored the aesthetics of language and the deterministic politics that inform the choices performers make on how they communicate to arrive at complex, but informed destinations on the aural enterprise that surround music performance communication. their multi-discursive thesis on the dynamics of language in contemporary music performance culture can be broadly categorized into two mutually overlapping categories: ( ) those that treat language as a linguistic discourse. they primarily explore the inventiveness that occurs in different contexts when the language in which hip hop is expressed–english– interfaces with diverse local ones in other cultural settings. these scholars analyze language in hip hop and popular culture theoretical filters that also gauge how different sets of political and identity concerns, that span different locations, are manifested and resolved (or not). language is treated as the intense negotiations of identity and subjectivity that occur alongside the domiciliation of black american lyricism, standardized english language, and their interfaces with local tongues and dialects. genealogy , , of in works such as global pop, local language, global englishes and transcultural flows, the languages of global hip hop, language, localization, and the real: hip-hop and the global spread of authenticity, global englishes, rip slyme, and performativity, and global linguistic flows, scholars broadly examine the multivariate dimensions of language in global hip hop culture. they cover the range of cultural complexities that are tickled when music comes to us through our politically processed aural faculties that hears, discerns, and compels the body to respond in its own way. these include the broad and nuanced spectrum of music lyrics, diction, dialects, multilingualism, syntactic formations, interpretations, and other processes that are stimulated through music, and describe a comprehensive set of practices that effectively signposts hip hop as a giant overflowing basket of practices filled up with histories, cultures, and genetic mutations of aesthetic practices that cuts across locales. following j.l. austin, we know that language does not merely describe or label situations but is performative as well; it can inscribe and institute practices. the language of music performance is compelling; they circulate through cultures where they instigate more performances. they also enact networks of social relations within local scenes and set the terms of the institutions’ memberships. sequel to the politics of language in popular music performance they examined is also comprehensibility, both in the sense of what is known and that which might be unknown, but whose meaning is manufactured to fulfill a defined set of longings. for instance, in swag’ and ‘cred’: representing hip-hop in the african city, caroline mose demonstrates how the transcultural interchange of the hip hop culture is mobilized by kenyan artists who navigate their urban spaces in an increasingly globalized culture by adopting racialized epithets such as “hood, swag, cred, nigga, and ghetto” to highlight their local experiences. their hip hop narratives and descriptive terms start as mimetic by identifying with its double elsewhere until it develops its unique aura and essence. in capturing their local histories and their performative agencies within black american terms and expressions, these cultural producers demonstrate a creative insight into an nderstanding of blackness and the racial/cultural terminologies that are used to label racialization. in the second category of the scholarship are those that inquire not just about the verbal portion of a hip hop performance, but the contemporary music of black cultural productions as a commentary with an evocative message that universally speaks to individual local contestations of identity, marginality, and oppression, particularly among the youth demographic. in this category, black performances and its hypervisibility of bodies that demand that its humanity be acknowledged inspire other subaltern populations of the world to consciously align with the black identity and black american history to confront their situations. halifu osumare described the resonances of political awareness and pushback through appropriations of politically charged aesthetic acts across hip hop cultures as “connective marginalities,” and it takes on different colorations of oppressions such as race, gender, class, generations, and other forms of peripheral status. even when the issues at stake were particularistic black american intramural discourses, they have resounded through transnational, transcultural, and cybercultural spaces where they acquired nuances of meaning within layered arcs of history and culture. whether they are youths in urban spaces in tanzania, consciously identifying with the aesthetics of the usa’s hip hop cultures, or arab-american hip hop artists constituting their immigrant experience within the racialized ones of african americans by claiming “arab” is the new “black”, hip hop has initiated a cultural semantic of awareness, identity, and liberation ethos. (alim et al. ; berger and carroll ; pennycook ; pennycook ; pennycook ; saucier ; terkourafi ). (austin ). (mose ). (mbembé ). (morgan ; richardson and pough ). (osumare ). (clark ; kelley et al. ; saucier ; condry ). (dolan ; weiss ). genealogy , , of ela greenberg, for instance, writes about a palestinian crew called g-town who adopted black american hip hop culture to sensitize others about their local circumstances of occupation. they have lived in refugee camps alongside its social problems of drugs and violence, and thus the racialized urban settings of the american ghettos and the “‘hood” reverberates with them. they devolved towards rap music as an experience which creates meaning, because they consider the disempowerment caused by their social conditions similar to that of african americans. like their black american counterparts, hip hop divines their condition and also provides them with aesthetics and social rituals to validate their humanity and redefine the conditions of their existence. these palestinian artists use the late tupac shakur and his gangsta image—that is, the “menacing” black hyper-male—as their emblematic model to shore up their masculinities degraded by the occupation of their land. such examples of appropriating black culture to articulate local struggles thus construe black identity as a position of resistance, and black performance as a methodology for resisting oppressive ideologies of whiteness. dexter thomas’ study of hip hop culture among conservative right-wing factions in japan presents a somewhat more complicated category where black culture and performances are admired enough to make “niggas” correspond to “japs,” but otherwise does not constitute the expansive liberalism that black culture has facilitated elsewhere. while these japanese conservative groups become “black” to critique their victimization, they are—in another context—the oppressors. this essay teases out another fold over in the imbrication of performance and language using this is america/this is nigeria as an illustration: one that considers black performance as a radical praxis that shapes ideological language and a universally apprehensible system of signs whose cross-cultural relatability reflects the glossological transcendence potential of performance traditions. for definition, my conception of “black performance” alludes to patrick johnson’s argument that black performances have always been a central part of liberationist struggles. johnson’s references primarily index african americans’ staging of culture and history, political aesthetic, spontaneous and disruptive eruptions of the norm, reflexive practice, embodiment, a dialogical engagement with its local american society, but i also note that black performance and its radical aesthetic are a lexicon that has crisscrossed cultures. by “language,” i mean an inscriptive system of racial and visual imagery, embodied acts, and perceptions with the potential of transcultural and trans-temporal comprehensibility rather than a set of syntactic or lexical customs being appropriated, authenticated, and calibrated into local forms. this idea of performance as a language is boosted by an acculturated understanding of the usa culture and is adaptable according to contextual imperatives. as the various examples of local appropriations of blm (and recently, this is america/this is nigeria) show, non-american cultural performances find it easier to borrow the language of black performance because of their prolonged exposure to american cultures through its pervasive media. the rate of the contact has created in them an instinctual understanding of hierarchies of (racial) identity; a familiarity, along with a somewhat savvy apprehension of the social mechanisms that power social inequalities; and a semiological and hermeneutic competence of the black american experience enough to constitute those experiences as a paradigm to re-narrate theirs. by “performance,” i also mean a mega discursive frame that captures theatricality, embodied engagements, spectacles, and social cultures. i assert that performance in itself is an expressive act of optimism, a stressor of oppressive structures, an assertion of the political conviction that even the conditions of social death and vulnerability can be challenged through the articulation of power of performing bodies. that is, the ability of the body to state the specificity of its situations of “imperiled livelihood, decimated infrastructure, and accelerated precarity through its sheer indexical force.” (greenberg ). (thomas ). (johnson ). (butler ). genealogy , , of hip hop scholar, thomas f. defrantz, has explored the notion of the black dancing body and its ability to index “narratives of transcendence” based on its kinetic virtuosity. the black body in creative action carries a double desire that is locked into its tenuous history and which is released in dance. he engages in arguments that frame the communicative function of black performance as a code that is multivalently understandable to different racial audiences based on their level of cultural competence or “literacy”—a terminology that underscores the argument that performance can be read like a material text. rather than characterize black performances as a language, defrantz renders them as analogous to verbal language and explores the circuit of communication that uses the body’s movement, musical instruments, and social history to convey meaning. he says, “dance movements convey speech-like qualities which contain meaning beyond the formal, aesthetic shapes and sequences of movements . . . ”. defrantz also analyzes the “theoretical/kinetic africanist assumption that dance music—music which can provoke and sustain dance—carries performative qualities like those of language” (emphasis mine). he also generated the concept of “corporeal orature” to describe the alignment of movement with speech and state the ability of black social dance to incite action. in my conception, the polarity of the performing body and the language that subtends it does not matter when the audience viscerally absorbs them because both bleed into each other. performances and their various dimensions—songs, dances, and social actions—are in themselves a language that transcends linguistic borders. performances can catalyze social changes because they are accessible as a visual-rhetoric force rather than linguistic or language-like forms. theatre scholar, rebecca kowal’s study of dance in the postwar usa has shown that we cannot only do things with words—following austin’s concept of performatives—but can also do things with dance performances. the creative appropriation of the language of african american resistance culture by nonmetropolitan blacks (and other ethnic minorities) for their self-narrations is premised on what scholar of visual culture and black history, nicole fleetwood, describes as their iconicity or the ways in which singular images or signs come to represent a whole host of historical occurrences and processes. the ability of iconic practices to travel on the interstate routes of american-dominated media, and arrive at local cultures to translate local narratives to even a local audience, shows how much world citizens are already situated at the interface of global and local cultures. as osumare stated, global hip hop rode on the combined force of “the collision and collusion between two powerful globally pervasive forces; transnational media and capital and african american popular culture that remains steeped in africanist expressive modes.” in the moments of these linkages and dispersals of black performance culture, and its subsequent conjoining with local inventiveness and artistic imperatives, even those who are not racially black enrobe themselves in transcendental blackness to ride the world on the political and aesthetic paths cleared by the worldwide reach of black/american culture. the global travel of black performance popular culture acts through the ubiquitous american media, and its evolution of a transculturally discernable lingua franca of socio-political critique makes black american popular performance a node that interconnects different sites and locales of social confrontations. thus, whether we say, nigerian lives matter in nigeria or on the streets of the uk, our reference connects to the history of anti-blackness and anti- anti-blackness in the us as a jump-off point for essentially saying black lives do matter. when initiatives of resistance outside the usa appropriate the intangible structures of culture, values, and the activist ethic afforded by black american performances, they create a translocal community of resistance across spaces. the re-narration of local oppressive circumstances engendered through the global echo effect of blm (defrantz ). (kowal ). (fleetwood ). (osumare ). (perry ; santos ). (morgan and dionne ). genealogy , , of and this is america facilitate an international communal humanist ethos that sees white supremacy as a global ruling ideology and a common enemy. their borrowing of graphic and catchy language that highlights their issues in local forms might not acknowledge american provenance, but it still demonstrates how performance kindles an ethical stance in us across space and time. as shana redmond argues in anthem: social movements and the sound of solidarity in the african diaspora, what makes the black songs that were deployed towards political resistance in the th century compelling was not just the sheer force of its artistry or the charisma of the performers. rather, it was the inherent capability of those performances to formulate an audience of both the listeners and the political public that shared a sociopolitical stance. the political anthems were not just songs, but performative acts that generated a collective spirit of humanism in those who gathered to sing them. participating in the performances required people to subscribe to a belief that in turn formulated the spirit of the assembly, that is, the faith that their desires can be achieved through the power of our collective human will. similarly, the interchange of lexical subjectivity, such as nigerian lives matter, that links different significations of aesthetic practices’ negotiations for social change in different locales shows the potential of the decussation of language and performance to form an audience in multiple spaces and for those multifarious political acts to add up into a tessellated pattern of globalized resistance culture. from their different corners of the globe, and at ongoing periods of history, local actors are stimulated to test the tensile strengths of the repressive structures that shape their lives using the socio-political language that performance can enunciate. as both this is america and this is nigeria show, when performances translate one other’s situations, they form a web of political critique against oppressive social conditions even when the historical and social processes that hazard black lives in both contexts differ. . conclusions: black lives matter, nigerian lives matter, black performances matter to capture the worldwide links, complex processes, performative acts, and social connections that webs black identity in the st century, scholar of theatre/dance, nadine george-graves provides us with an apt term, “spidering.” borrowing from ghanaian folktale traditions where anansi, the trickster figure, is frequently depicted as a spider, she uses the term to chart the black diasporic cosmopolitan path where identity is allowed to be nuanced, complex, and its accretion through multiversal layering acknowledged. indeed, “spidering” reminds us that the nodes that connect us do not emerge from a singular or unique location, but rather the formation of black identity and the concomitant cultural issues they tackle are dispersed and diverse. “spidering,” to me, is also an evocative term that not only agglomerates the global dispersing and continuous expansion of black identities but also captures the lightness of the connections that people make when they forge these subaltern cosmopolitanisms. however, these formations are neither permanent nor sustained but in the moment while they last, they spark the social imagination and create a mode of speaking about oneself and one’s history within a symbolic ensemble that has the potential to impinge on the system of intersubjective relations between people as they narrate their histories within global paradigms. these are all made possible by black performances because they are created based on the images of black bodies depicted in different social situations. these images evoke an instinctive familiarity that speaks to people who also bear not just black skin, but black history, and that is why black performances matter. however, if these performances that take off from each other in different parts of the world have not yet risen to the point of rupture and propelled the drastic changes that are nostalgically conjured when we speak of different eras of black internationalism, particularly the golden age of the s, (redmond ). (redmond , pp. – ). (george-graves ). genealogy , , of it is partly because efforts are currently being slanted towards raising awareness for immediate local problems rather than a larger and collective angst. for now, it might be too early to conclude how these contemporary connections might turn out. my conclusion, however, is that the global black formations of these times will continue to be fashioned as aesthetic practices but directed towards tackling political issues. the aesthetic will be the crucible for the forging of an ideologically-based nationalism that challenges the discounting of black lives everywhere. at the core of the issues of race, racism, and white supremacy is the differentials of life and what they are worth based on the color of the skin that embodies them. it is instructive that the anti-racism speak of these performances aims straight at the heart of the matter: life, and particularly that of black people. the contemporary black social movements that aim to topple down this pernicious ideology have struck on the language, both spoken and enacted, that challenges global white supremacy through an ethical summation of what is at stake: our lives matter. the dispersed nature of this movement, on the one hand, means that its proponents cannot build the critical mass necessary to galvanize collective energy to push back against factors that imperil black lives everywhere. on the other hand, these discrete assemblies also mean that the house that racism built is being tested in many places and will eventually weaken through the political activism to which music and other aesthetic practices are oriented. the language of black dignity and liberation will continue to provoke images and consciousness that will shape the ideology which the political agenda needs to thrive. for now, the seismic waves that are being generated are induced by the larger consciousness that our lives, as citizens of any country matter, and it should matter in spite of the larger ideological powers that detract from them based on the notion of color. in conclusion, i also want to add that the waves of global black migration will also critically contribute to the dynamics of these black social movements. for instance, just as i was completing this essay, news came in that a nigerian-american poet, chinedu okobi, had been tasered to death in millbrae, california. the details of his death are still foggy and currently being investigated by the police at the time of writing this essay, but the news of his tragic death shook everyone who knew him within the nigerian community. one of his close friends said on facebook, “until now, i have supported the black lives matter movement on a low-key, but this one cuts so close to home. we nigerians, regardless of where we live, now ought to join black americans to say, “black lives matter.” with that mindset that acknowledges that despite the artificiality of national borders and the ways they separate us, color still unites black people across locations, there might be a hastening of consciousness of global black identity and anti-blackness. while the constitution of the black identity in the st century will still be fraught with historical and cultural complexities, the idea of a global black still goes back to george-graves’ notion of “spidering.” that is, the composition of black identity in an increasingly shrinking world of cross-migrations and cosmopolitanism means that neither nigerian lives matter nor this is nigeria are mere subsets of black lives matter or this is america. instead, the project those performances fulfills is the encapsulation of a historical problem of anti-blackness within smaller packages that not only bring them closer to home, but also translate back to the larger world with a lingua franca everyone understands. each person that encounters violence, whether in an american racist or postcolonial african context, serves as a visceral reminder that one way or the other, our fates as black subjects are interlinked not only by a history that is past but also an ongoing one as well. because we are affectively touched by others’ situations, our bodies are stimulated to respond to the voice of performance with embodied actions of our own. when we need to make sense of local situations, we borrow inspirations from the spectacular kinetic performances of one culture and re-narrate it to explain our circumstances because artistic expressions are a language that affectively touches our humanity. this is nigeria narrated the nigerian condition using the performance frame of this is america, and also relied on the ground clearing work the latter had done to enhance the chronicles. though the anti-black violence in the usa is almost seamlessly transposed into the nigerian context (or vice versa), the historical trajectories and sociological issues that imperil black lives in the usa and nigeria wildly differ. that is why the genealogy , , of meditations on the cultural transactions embedded in both songs go beyond the mimesis of the lyrics, dance, and even the socio-political critique of this is nigeria. the synchronism of the politics of both videos reflect how the vast frame of reference the usa gifted the cultures it has dominated over the years through its global media distribution, creative enterprise, and concomitant “soft power” that emerged to the usa’s benefit, have generated a hip hop consciousness among the millennial generation and which continues to invite resistance against social conditions. the sense of identifying with blackness through artistic cultural practices, harnessed and pressed into the service of political agency in other local contexts, fashions a visual-performative vernacular that also challenges the global inequity perpetrated by american cultural hegemony. the suffusion of disparate black performances into other cultures has led non-americans to find black american performances and resistance practices 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[crossref] pennycook, alastair. . global englishes and transcultural flows. new york and london: routledge. pennycook, alastair. . language, localization, and the real: hip-hop and the global spread of authenticity. journal of language, identity, and education : – . [crossref] perry, marc d. . global black self-fashionings: hip-hop as diasporic space. identities: global studies in culture and power : – . [crossref] redmond, shana l. . anthem: social movements and the sound of solidarity in the african diaspora. new york: nyu press, pp. – . richardson, elaine, and gwendolyn pough. . hiphop literacies and the globalization of black popular culture. social identities : – . [crossref] santos, jaqueline lima. . hip-hop and the reconfiguration of blackness in sao paulo: the influence of african american political and musical movements in the twentieth century. social identities : – . [crossref] saucier, paul khalil, ed. . native tongues: an african hip-hop reader. new york: africa world press. shonekan, stephanie. . black mizzou: music and stories one year later. in black lives matter and music: protest, intervention, reflection. edited by portia k. maultsby. bloomington: indiana university press. sizemore-barber, april. . the voice of (which?) africa: miriam makeba in america. safundi : – . [crossref] slate, nico. . colored cosmopolitanism: the shared struggle for freedom in the united states and india. cambridge: harvard university press. straubhaar, joseph d. . beyond media imperialism: assymetrical interdependence and cultural proximity. critical studies in media communication : – . [crossref] strong, krystal. . do african lives matter to black lives matter? youth uprisings and the borders of solidarity. urban education : – . [crossref] terkourafi, marina, ed. . the languages of global hip-hop. new york: continuum. thomas, dexter l. . niggers and japs: the formula behind japanese hip-hop’s racism. social identities : – . [crossref] thompson, vincent bakpetu, and basil davidson. . africa and unity: the evolution of pan-africanism. london: longman. weiss, brad. . street dreams and hip-hop barbershops: global fantasy in urban tanzania. bloomington: indiana univ. press. west, michael oliver, william g. martin, and fanon che wilkins, eds. . from toussaint to tupac: the black international since the age of revolution. chapel hill: univ. of north carolina press, vol. . wilson, stephanie. “nigerian lives matter.” dazed digital. available online: http://www.dazeddigital.com/ artsandculture/gallery/ / /nigerian-lives-matter (accessed on september ). © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . /j. - . . .x http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/gallery/ / /nigerian-lives-matter http://www.dazeddigital.com/artsandculture/gallery/ / /nigerian-lives-matter http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	the intellectual context 	this is america and this is nigeria!: this is a critique of anti-black violence 	speaking in blackness: of musical performance and interconnected black politics 	conclusions: black lives matter, nigerian lives matter, black performances matter 	references wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/   open peer review any reports and responses or comments on the article can be found at the end of the article. research article  you are my death: the shattered temporalities of zombie time [version ; peer review: approved] martin o'brien department of english and drama, queen mary, university of london, london, e   dw, uk abstract this essay considers the relationship between the experience of life shortening chronic illness and the current covid-  crisis. martin o’brien uses his experience of living with cystic fibrosis to interrogate the temporal experience of living within a global pandemic. he returns to his concept of zombie time, the temporal experience of living longer than expected, in order to understand the presence of death as a way of life. the essay uses some of o’brien’s own art practices, and an analysis of his own sick, coughing body in order to think through what it means to live with cystic fibrosis during a pandemic, which mimics much of its features. o’brien argues that we are currently occupying a widespread zombie time, which frames other people as carriers of death, and that we must find ways of being together in order to survive. keywords death, zombie, cystic fibrosis, performance, art, time, cough   this article is included in the waiting and care in  collection.pandemic times   this article is included in the coronavirus  collection.(covid- )    reviewer status   invited reviewers  version  jun    report report , university of southernamelia jones california, los angeles, usa , plymouth university, plymouth,alan bleakley uk    jun  ,  :  first published: https://doi.org/ . /wellcomeopenres. .    jun  ,  :  latest published: https://doi.org/ . /wellcomeopenres. . v page of wellcome open research , : last updated: jun https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/ - /v https://orcid.org/ - - - https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/collections/waitingtimes https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/collections/waitingtimes https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/collections/waitingtimes https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/collections/covid https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/collections/covid https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/collections/covid https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/ - /v https://orcid.org/ - - - https://doi.org/ . /wellcomeopenres. . https://doi.org/ . /wellcomeopenres. . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /wellcomeopenres. . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - -    martin o'brien ( )corresponding author: m.obrien@qmul.ac.uk   : conceptualization, writing – original draft preparation, writing – review & editingauthor roles: o'brien m  no competing interests were disclosed.competing interests:  waiting times is funded by the wellcome trust [ ].grant information: the funders had no role in study design, data collection and analysis, decision to publish, or preparation of the manuscript.  ©   o'brien m. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the  , whichcopyright: creative commons attribution license permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.  o'brien m. how to cite this article: you are my death: the shattered temporalities of zombie time [version ; peer review: approved] wellcome open research  ,  :   https://doi.org/ . /wellcomeopenres. .    jun  ,  :  first published: https://doi.org/ . /wellcomeopenres. . page of wellcome open research , : last updated: jun http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://doi.org/ . /wellcomeopenres. . https://doi.org/ . /wellcomeopenres. . 	 this	 used	 to	 be	 the	 most	 optimistic	 city	 in	 the	 world.	 now	 the	 sun	 never	 rises.	 the	 shops	 are	 never	 open.	 the	 birds	 never	 sing.	 the	 streets	 are	 always	 empty.	 cars	 lie	 abandoned,	 buildings	 crumble	 or	 stand	 as	 empty	 shells.	 this	 city	 is	 full	 of	 places	 where	 flowers	 don't	 grow,	 gravel	 and	 dirt	 places,	 underpasses,	 places	 that	look	as	though	they’ve	come	straight	from	a	horror	 film,	 places	 that	 are	 always	 empty,	 places	 that	 seemed	 to	 be	 made	 to	 walk	 through	 at	 night,	 places	 you	 would	 never	 take	 a	 first	 date,	 long	 passages,	 tunnels,	 non- places,	 dilapidated	 places,	 places	 where	 you	 would	 expect	 to	 be	 taken	 by	 a	 murderer.	 perhaps	 this	 place	 used	 to	 be	 beautiful	 but	 this	 place	 seems	 as	 though	 it	has	experienced	the	apocalypse.                                              text from the	unwell,  my artist studio is full of coffins at the moment. they are stacked  up  on  top  of  each  other,  still  covered  in  bubble  wrap.  there  are  nine  of  them  in  total. these  were  to  be  the  materials  for  my  new  performance  the	 last	 breath	 society	 (coughing	 coffin)  at  the  institute  of  contemporary  arts  (ica),  london.  the  work  was  due  to  be  performed  at  the  end  of  march.  it  was  exploring  ideas  of  community,  closeness  and  loneliness  in  sickness  and  dying.  this  work  couldn’t  happen  but  seems  more  relevant  now  than  it  has  ever  been.  a  few  weeks  ago,  as  the  new  pandemic  rav- aged  throughout  the  world,  i  called  a  friend  who  was  involved  in  the  performance  to  let  her  know  that  it  was  cancelled.  the  first  thing  she  said  was  ‘martin,  it’s  like  the  whole  world  has  caught  cf’.  i  was  diagnosed  with  cystic  fibrosis  (cf)  when  i  was  six  weeks  old,  and  my  friend  is  the  artist  sheree  rose,  whose  partner,  bob  flanagan,  died  from  cf  in  .  her  asser- tion  was  startling  for  me,  and  i  started  to  think  about  the  experience  and  aesthetics  of  the  pandemic,  and  the  ways  in  which they mimic a life lived with cf. i began to think about the  ways  in  which  the  experience  of  cf  management,  and  our  pecu- liar  survival  strategies  were  being  taken  up  by  a  wider  popu- lation.  gloves  and  masks  are  a  regular  part  of  cf  experience,  and  social  distancing  is  a  very  familiar  term  for  anyone  with  the  disease,  as  i  will  discuss  in  this  writing.  the  symptoms  of  covid-   are  also  part  of  cf  experience:  coughing,  shortness  of breath, and exhaustion. this  piece  of  writing  is  an  attempt  to  do  two  things.  firstly,  to  use  cf  experience  to  think  through  the  current  pandemic  and  tease  out  what  a  wider  population  might  understand  about  ill- ness,  mortality,  and  isolation  by  looking  at  life  lived  with  cf;  secondly,  to  consider  what  it  means  to  be  sick  in  a  time  when  everyone is suddenly becoming aware of their own mortality. growing  up  with  cf  means  a  constant  facing  of  your  own  mortality.  my  older  cousin  died  from  the  disease  aged  ,  when  i  was  eight  years  old.  this  was  the  first  time  i  under- stood  death  as  part  of  life.  this  was  the  first  time  i  knew  that  i  would  not  live  to  see  my  hair  turn  grey.  this  was  the  first  time  i  began  to  understand  existence  and  temporality  under  the  con- ditions  of  disease.  the  life  expectancy  for  someone  born  in    with  cf  is    years  old;  this  information  was  plastered  all  over  charity  appeals  for  the  cf  trust.  i  was  sure  i  would  die  at  .  the  temporal  movement  towards  this  age  was  the  defin- ing  condition  of  growing  up  for  me.  death  was  an  obsession.  i  reached and surpassed  . death did not come for me. in attempt- ing  to  understand  what  it  means  to  live  longer  than  expected,  i  formulated  the  notion  of  zombie  time.  this  is  the  temporal  experience  of  living  on  when  death  was  supposed  to  happen.  i have previously written about zombie time as being:   […]  a  different  relationship  to  death  and  life  […]  it’s  a  form  of  enduring  life  when  death  is  no  longer  the  certainty  it  once  was.  it  is  no  longer  linear,  it’s  full  of  breaks  and  ambushes.  in  zombie  time,  you  keep  moving  but  not  towards  anything,  just  for  the  sake  of  moving.  no  goals,  only  desires.  no  plans,  only  reactions.  the  only  constant  is  the  presence  of  death  but  not  in  the  way  it  once  was,  for  the  zombie  knows  death  and  breathes  in  death.  death  is  in  me,  instead  of  somewhere else.                                   (o’brien & bouchard,  :  ) zombie  time  offers  a  way  of  conceptualizing  a  changing  rela- tionship  to  mortality.  the  temporal  experience  in  my  child- hood  and  early  adulthood  was  one  of  moving  towards  a  death  date.  as  lauren  berlant  would  have  it,  it  is  ‘the  embodiment  toward  death  as  a  way  of  life’  (berlant,  :  ).  zombie  time  insists  on  a  different  temporal  proximity  to  death.  like  the  hollywood  zombie  which  holds  within  it  a  paradox,  in  that  it  is  both  dead  and  alive,  those  of  us  living  in  zombie  time  experi- ence  death  as  embodied  in  life,  rather  than  berlant’s  move- ment  towards  death.  we  had  come  to  terms  with  the  fact  that  we  are  about  to  die,  and  then  we  didn’t.  this  necessitates  a  fundamental  change  in  how  we  imagine  death  and  our  posi- tion  in  relation  to  it.  in  the	 birth	 of	 the	 clinic,  foucault  pro- poses  that  the  sick  living  body  is  the  anticipation  of  the  corpse  it  will  become  (foucault,  :  ).  perhaps,  though,  zombie  time  offers  us  a  way  of  conceptulising  sick  life,  not  as  an  antic- ipation,  but  as  already  a  corpse,  one  with  new  life  breathed  into  it.  the  end  of  life  is  now  ambiguous.  death  is  keenly  felt  as  lived  experience  but  not  as  something  in  an  imagined  future,  rather  something  we  are  constantly  living  through.  there  is  no  grim  reaper  anymore;  death  is  not  external  but  exists  within  a  person,  as  the  experience  of  living.  i  want  to  suggest  that  the  temporal  experience  of  living  in  this  pandemic  might  be  some- thing  akin  to  zombie  time  in  that  it  is  necessitating  a  changing  relationship  to  sickness  and  mortality  for  large  portions  of  the  population.  as  i  will  argue,  the  virus  means  that  the  previously  healthy  are  thrust  into  a  contiguity  with  sickness  and  death,  which  means  they  are  forced  to  face  their  own  mortality.   zombie  time  helped  me  understand  my  own  experience  of   temporality  and  the  way  in  which  death  functioned  as  part  of  life.  it  offered  an  articulation  of  something  which  i  was  unable   to  find  elsewhere.  perhaps  it  might  be  useful  for  trying  to  describe  the  temporality  of  the  pandemic  and  the  ways  in  which  people  are  forced  to  become  acutely  aware  of  death  as  part  of  their  own  life.  there  is  a  wide  spread  imagination  of  what  death  might  look  like  for  each  individual  and  our  families.  it  seems  as  though  we  are  living  in  a  temporary  global  page of wellcome open research , : last updated: jun zombie  time,  one  which  shatters  the  temporalities  of  healthy   living.  these  shards  of  temporal  experience  may  well  be  put  together  again,  but  for  now  we  exist  in  a  liminal  temporal  space.  the imagined futures are being changed fundamentally and much  rhetoric is around surviving this crisis, ‘no goals, only desires, no  plans, only reactions’ (o’brien & bouchard,  :  ). the	 last	 breath	 society	 (coughing	 coffin)  is  indicative  of  much  of  my  practice.  my  work  has  consistently  used  the  mate- riality  of  my  disease  (breath,  mucus,  coughing)  to  explore  what  it  means  to  be  born  with  a  life  shortening  illness.  i  had  often  insisted  on  the  isolation  of  dying  young,  as  a  lonely  process,  as  one  which  renders  a  person  outside  of  the  domi- nant  experiences  of  life.  indeed,  the  experience  of  living  with  cf  can  be  solitary.  those  of  us  with  the  disease  are  unable  to  be  in  a  room  with  any  others  who  share  the  condition.  we  must  remain  six  feet  apart  from  one  another  when  outdoors.  those  who  best  understand  the  feelings  of  cf  are  unable  to  be  together,  unable  to  talk  about  survival  strategies,  unable  to  hug,  kiss  or  have  sex.  but  my  feelings  about  the  loneliness  of  sick- ness and dying are changing. the last breath society is, in some  ways, a gathering of my horde. the  last  breath  society  is  a  semi-fictional  group.  it  is  a   gathering  of  those  living  in  zombie  time  and  others  who  are  forced  to  consider  what  death  is  because  of  their  proximity  to  it.  perhaps  now,  my  neighbors  and  co-workers  should  all  be  part  of  the  society.  perhaps  now,  the  politicians,  who  underfunded  our  health  service,  and  the  footballers  should  be  part  of  the   society.  perhaps  now  the  doctors  and  post  people,  the  nurses  and  the  drag  queens,  the  police  and  the  deep-sea  divers,  should  all  be  part  of  the  society.  the  explorers  and  the  singers,  the   cleaners  and  the  stadium  announcers  should  join  the  society.  the  young  should  now  join  the  old  in  the  last  breath  society.   perhaps  you  should  be  part  of  the  society.  the  grim  reaper  stands  outside  all  of  your  doors  now,  and  there  is  no  way  to  ignore  the   knocking. his skeletal face peers through your window and watches  you  sleep,  and  it’s  terrifying.  he  has  become  a  friend  to  me,  but a friend that will one day betray me. i know not to trust him. 	 time	 has	 ended	 here.	the	 sun	 has	 vanished.	 everything	 remains	 as	 it	 was	 but	 now	 the	 pavements	 and	 subways	 lie	 silent.	 the	 shops	 are	 full	 of	 dog	 food	 but	 there	 are	 no	 dogs	 to	 eat	 it.	 the	 machines	 still	 run	 but	 they	 no	 longer	 serve	 a	 purpose.	 the	 lights	 remain	 on,	 burning	 bright	but	they	will	eventually	fade	to	darkness. but	 something	 still	 remains	 here.	 there	 is	 movement	 in	 this	 city.	 something	 moves	 slowly	 through	 the		 darkness.	they	have	replaced	human	life.	they	resemble	 us	 but	 they	 are	 not	 us.	 they	 fill	 the	 city	 with	 an	 unwell	 sound.                                              text from the	unwell,  as  an  artist,  my  work  has  often  imagined  worlds  in  which  only  the  sick  can  survive.  my  film,  made  in  collaboration  with  suhail  merchant,  the	 unwell  was  shot  in    and  first  shown  in  .  it  is  set  in  a  city,  in  which  it  is  always  night,  human  life  has  been  replaced  by  the  unwell.  these  are  b-movie  style  zombies  are  always  seen  alone  (i  play  all  of  them)  staggering  through  an  empty  city,  coughing.  the  opening  of  the	 unwell  is  a  series  of  empty  streets,  roads  and  buildings  at  night.  watching   it  back  now,  seems  eerie,  as  i  look  out  of  my  window  at  the  empty  london  streets.  the  film  imagines  a  new  form  of  life,  we  never  see  how  the  city  became  over  run  by  zombies,  just  the  aftermath.  as  such,  very  little  happens.  the  film  uses  the  aes- thetics  of  a  dystopian  apocalypse.  now  though,  as  we  enter  into  a  strange  shattering  and  reforming  of  our  everyday,  the  fig- ures  in  the  film  might  be  read  as  standing  in  for  all  of  us  who  exist  in  zombie  time.  unlike  the	 last	 breath	 society	 (coughing	 coffin),  which  is  attempting  to  bring  people  together,  to  com- bat  the  loneliness  of  temporalities  that  put  barriers  in  the  way  of  closeness,  the	 unwell  demonstrates  the  distance  between  bodies and experiences. there  is  never  more  than  one  unwell  figure  in  any  shot.  they  stand  or  walk  alone,  solitary  and  ambling,  coughing  and   bleeding.  in  my  work,  the  cough  is  a  symbol  of  hope,  a  symbol  of  the  future  and  a  symbol  of  change.  the  cough  functions  as  a  sick  language  of  sorts,  as  these  unwell  beings  speak  out  to  no  one  but  themselves.  the  coughs  become  a  soundscape  of  the   city,  ringing  out  through  the  night.  i  want  to  think  about  the  fig- ure  of  the  solitary  cougher,  and  its  importance  in  understanding   zombie  time.  in  essence,  this  is  the  enduring  image  of  zombie   time.  the  lonely  figure,  coughing,  afraid  of  infecting  others  or   making  life  worse  for  themselves.  but  how  might  we  become   the  last  breath  society?  how  can  we  stand  together  in  zombie  time? as  someone  with  cf,  i  have  coughed  all  my  life.  although  my  regular  coughing  fits  have  often  caused  worry  in  public  places,  never  have  i  so  keenly  felt  the  disgust  and  fear  towards  me  as  during  the  beginnings  of  the  spread  of  covid-   in  london.   simon  bayly  suggests  that  the  ‘cough  is  the  “creature  voiced”,  but  also  what  molests  the  vocal  organs,  barely  fit  for  thought,  let  alone  philosophy.  philosophy  has  sought  to  erase  the  cough,  to  eradicate  its  interruptive  force’  (bayly,  :   - ).  he  highlights  ‘aristotle’s  rejection  of  the  cough  as  merely  the  impact  of  the  breath’  (ibid:  )  and  husserl’s  ‘con- signment  of  all  paralinguistics  or  kinesis  expression  to  the   category  of  the  meaningless’  (ibid:  )  as  examples  of  ‘phi- losophy’s  repulsion  for  the  organic  process  of  vocalization’   (ibid:  ).  it  is  difficult  to  ignore  the  philosophical  importance  of  the  cough  now,  though.  as  one  of  the  most  common  symp- toms  of  covid- ,  a  focus  on  the  cough  has  become  one  of  the   enduring  legacies  of  the  pandemic.  for  steven  connor  ‘the   cough  is  voice  coerced  by  breath,  not  breath  tuned  and  tutored  into voice.’ (connor,  ). the cough functions as a form of non- propositional  language,  this  is  a  reflexive,  interruptive  language,   in  which  ‘the  air  is  not  expressed,  pressed  out  into  audibil- ity,  impressed  into  audible  shapes  and  postures,  but  seems   rather  to  be  escaping,  as  though  through  a  rent  or  gash’  (connor,  ).  david appelbaum  suggests  that  a  ‘cough  is  the  detonation  of  voice’  (appelbaum,  :  ).  i  have  explored  the  philosophy  of  the  cough  elsewhere,  in  which  i  develop  appelbaum’s  work   by  thinking  through  the  ways  in  which  the  cough  functions   as a vocalisation of illness: page of wellcome open research , : last updated: jun   if  the  cough  is  the  detonation  of  voice,  though,  it  is  equally  the  forceful  establishment  of  a  different  voice,   one  which  does  not  adhere  to  language-  the  voice  of  illness. the cough interrupts, it is something that cannot  be  contained  and  demands  its  right  to  be  heard.  it  functions as a disordering of the voice and of the breath.                                                          (o’brien,  :  ) zombie  time  is  constantly  ruptured  by  the  excessiveness  of  coughing  fits.  they  function  as  a  marker  of  sickness. appelbaum  continues thinking about the nature of the cough:   it  is  duller  than  the  pierce  of  a  cry  which  goes  to  the  heart.  on  the  terminal  ward,  one  hears  the  cries  first.  but the coughs penetrate more deeply, into the compact  soma  of  the  body.  there  they  contact  an  organic  memory  which  reminds  us  of  death  and  life  as  facts  unembellished  by  feelings.  if  the  world  were  cured  of  the  common  cough,  we  would  be  less  prepared  for  our  earthly passage.                                                         (appelbaum, :  ) if  the  cough  ‘reminds  us  of  death  and  life’  (ibid:  )  then  it  is  something to be avoided as it reminds us of the potential of death  within  life.  the  sound  of  the  cough  ‘seems  to  initiate  our  deep- est  bodily  identification.  it  is  as  if  the  cough  speaks  directly  to  the  flesh  of  others,  like  a  warning  siren,  triggering  bodily  memories  of  illness’  (o’brien,  :  ).  just  as  foucault  discussed  the  living  sick  body  as  anticipation  of  corpse,   appelbaum  thinks  of  the  cough  as  preparation  for  death.  some- how,  in  the  sound  of  the  cough  lies  the  memory  of  death.  the  cough  is  an  opening  into  zombie  time.  it  ruptures  our  stable  temporal  experiences,  and  thrusts  us  into  the  peculiar  shadow  temporality of zombie time. for  someone  with  cf,  the  cough  has  always  been  a  marker  of  identity.  i  can  recognise  a  cf  cough  anywhere,  the  raspy,  moist,  phlegm  filled  sound  which  vibrates  through  the  floor.  the  cough  of  another  cf  sufferer  has  a  strange  impact,  a  sense  of  shared  experience  with  another,  but  also  fear.  this  cough  has  the  potential  to  make  me  very  ill.  but  now,  in  the  zombie  time  of  covid- ,  the  cough  represents  the  virus  and  acts  as  a  reminder  of  mortality,  not  just  for  the  cougher  but  for  all  who  hear  it  too.  the  cough  is  now  synonymous  with  the  virus.  it  is  a  reminder  of  the  dangers  of  the  outdoors,  of  surfaces,  and  more  significantly,  the  dangers  of  other  humans.  your  own  death  is  potentially  in  the  lungs  of  another.  the  cougher  holds  your  mortality in their chest, and you hold theirs in yours. in  the	 last	 breath	 society	 (coughing	 coffin),  which  we  are  still  waiting  to  perform,  people  will  enter  into  a  dark  space.  the  opening  image  will  be  a  series  of  coffins,  closed,  laying  on  the  ground.  from  within  them,  the  sound  of  coughing  emerges.  the coffins are sealed shut, and the bodies are inside. in this instance  though,  the  cough  serves  as  a  confirmation  of  life.  the  corpse  does  not  cough.  if  the  coughing  body  acts  as  a  momento	 mori,  it  is  also  a  reminder  of  breath,  and  of  life.  the  last  breath  society  is  about  coming  together  to  remember  we  will  die,  but  it  is  also  a  celebration  of  life,  a  defiant  gathering  for  the  sake of survival. 	 they	 stand	 on	 two	 feet	 and	 wear	 our	 clothes	 but	 they	 are	 not	 us.	 do	 they	 eat	 and	 sleep?	 do	 they	 dream	 or	 even	 recognise	 their	 own	 reflections?	 their	 actions	 seem	 to	 serve	 no	 purpose,	 they	 amble	 through	 this	 urban	 wasteland	 coughing	 and	 spluttering.	 their	 steps	 are	 laboured	 and	 clumsy.	 their	 garments	 are	 covered	 in	 blood,	 the	 faces	 with	 great	 wounds	 and	 then	 the	 eyes.	 they	 witness	 but	 they	 do	 not	 comprehend,	 they	 are	 blank	 and	 without	 personality.	 the	 empty	 eyes	 gaze	 straight	 ahead	 but	 towards	 what	 future?	 what	 do	 they	 remember?	 their	 coughs	 ring	 out	 all	 over	 the	 city.	 these	 bodies	 are	 like	 factories,	 mass	 producing	 mucus.	 they	 seem	 to	 breathe	 but	 we	 don’t	 know	 if	 their	 hearts	 beat.	 do	 they	 have	 the	 capacity	 to	 learn?	to	feel	emotions?	the	only	thing	we	can	be	sure	 of	is	that	they	are	profoundly	unwell. they	 wear	 clothes	 that	 could	 define	 them	 but	 whoever	 they	 used	 to	 be	 no	 longer	 matters.	 they	 are	 simply	 unwell.	 they	 move	 alone	 but	 together	 they	 inhabit	 the	 entire	 city.	 do	 they	 interact	 with	 one	 another?	are	 they	 ever	 lonely?	 do	 they	 understand	 the	 nature	 of	 their	 existence?	the	meaning	of	all	of	this?	do	they	have	the	 capacity	 to	 love?	 to	 hate?	 they	 smell	 like	 death.	 they	 thrive	in	the	dark,	they	thrive	in	the	cold.	they	know	no	 masters.	they	own	this	city	which	was	once	ours.                                              text from the	unwell,  in  both  cf  and  in  the  time  of  covid- ,  closeness  is  prohib- ited.  over  the  last    years  or  so,  research  into  cross  infection  in  cf  has  meant  that  i  should  avoid  anyone  else  with  the  disease.  all  cultural  representations  of  cf  have  focused  on  this  aspect  of  the  illness  in  recent  years.  there  is  an  episode  of  the  popu- lar  american  hospital-based  television  series  grey’s	 anatomy  (american  broadcasting  company,  )  based  on  a  patient  with  cf.  he  is  a  young  man  who  comes  into  hospital  for  a  lung  transplant.  the  doctors  soon  discover  that  his  girlfriend  also  has  cf.  the  doctors  say  he  is  ‘committing  suicide’  and  they  will  not  perform  the  lung  transplant  unless  he  and  his   girlfriend  break  up  as  he  would  be  ‘wasting  the  lungs’.  in    hollywood did cf with the film five	feet	apart:	(baldoni,  ).  it  told  the  story  of  two  cf  sufferers  who  fall  in  love,  they  break  the  six  feet  apart  at  all  times  rule  by  ‘stealing  a  foot’.  these  two  examples  are  soppy,  romanticised  versions  of  sickness,  and  the  tragedy  of  separation  plays  so  well  into  the  hollywood  trope  of  forbidden  love.  however,  they  do  highlight  something  signifi- cant.  the  characters  in  these  two  fictions  are  looking  for  con- nection  with  someone  like	 them.  the  disease  prevents  them  from  having  a  physical  relationship.  remembering  my  own   childhood,  before  cross  infection  was  discovered,  playing  with  the  other  children  with  cf  in  the  hospital  reminds  me  of  the  comfort  of  being  around  others  that  understand.  it  is  star- tling  to  watch  footage  in  the  documentary  about  bob  flanagan  and  sheree  rose,  sick:	 the	 life	 and	 death	 of	 bob	 flanagan,	 supermasochist (dick,  ), in which flanagan would be a leader  for  an  annual  camping  trip  for  children  with  cf.  the  footage  page of wellcome open research , : last updated: jun shows  them  sat  together  around  the  camp  fire  singing,  creating  community through physical closeness. the  implication  of  our  inability  to  be  together  is  that  in  our  vio- lent cf coughs there exists the potential for harm towards another.  on  our  fingers,  and  even  in  our  breath,  there  exists  dangerous   bacteria  that  might  make  someone  else  very  ill  or  even  shorten  their  life.  in  staying  away,  we  are  helping  someone  else  but  also  helping  ourselves.  physical  closeness  is  craved  but  dan- gerous.  in  her  book  cruel	 optimism,  critical  theorist  lauren   berlant  suggests  that  ‘[a]  relation  of  cruel  optimism  exists  when  something  you  desire  is  actually  an  obstacle  to  your  flourishing.’  (berlant,  :  ).  closeness  in  cf  is  a  form  of  cruel  optimism.  this  can  be  extended  to  understand  the  current  situation.  we  long  to  be  together  with  friends  and  loved  ones,  but  that  close- ness  that  we  desire  is  not  simply  an  obstacle  to  an  individual  flourishing but to a population battling to survive a pandemic. now  the  position  of  the  last  breath  society  seems  significant.  how  can  we  be  together  when  we  clearly  cannot  be  together?   the  multitude  of  online  options  cannot  replace  touch,  or   closeness.  zombie  time  holds  within  its  nature  a  cruel  optimism.  we  are  united  through  a  temporal  experience  but  cannot  form   important  and  necessary  friendships,  or  communities.  our  cf  bodies,  which  are  failing,  are  left  to  do  so  alone.  the  people  we   worry  about  as  the  virus  spreads,  are  disembodied  voices  on  the  end  of  a  phone. what  we  would  give  to  hold  the  people  we  love   now.  what  we  would  give  to  love  the  people  that  share  our   experience. the  zombie  time  of  covid- ,  as  well  as  cf,  frames  the  other  as  danger,  as  carrier  of  your  death.  it  also  imposes  upon  you  the  responsibility  of  other  people’s  lives.  that  is  the  impossibility   of  closeness  in  times  of  infection.  the  shattering  of  tempo- ral  experience  means  that  zombie  time  is  defined  in  relation  to  our  own  mortalities  and  the  place  of  others  in  this.  inher- ent  within  the  make-up  of  zombie  time  is  the  need  for  survival,  to  continue.  the  zombie  is  driven  only  by  the  desire  to  survive,  both  as  an  individual  and  a  species.  the  zombie  knows  nothing  but  desire  for  human  flesh;  it  bites  in  order  to  feed  and  this  pro- duces more zombies. zombie time is living with death inside you,  and  that’s  what  we  are  all  doing  now.  so,  welcome  to  the  last  breath society, a place where we can decay together. 	 this	 used	 to	 be	 the	 most	 optimistic	 city	 in	 the	 world.	 now	 it’s	 full	 of	 darkness	 illuminated	 by	 the	 fading	 street	 lamps.	 out	 of	 this	 darkness	 stumbles	 life	 quite	 different	 from	 us.	 the	 unwell	 negotiate	 this	 landscape	 in	 a	 way	 we	 could	 not.	 there	 is	 no	 war	 in	 this	 city,	 no	 poverty,	 no	 crime,	 nothing	 to	 fear.	 there	 is	 only	 sickness	 and	 this	 sickness	 is	 itself	 a	 form	 of	 existence,	 a	 way	 of	 seeing	 and	 being,	 a	 way	 of	 breathing	 and	 moving.	 this	 is	 life.	 they	 do	 not	 fear	 death	 because	 death	is	already	behind	them.	they	are	not	motivated	by	 material	 things.	 to	 witness	 the	 unwell	 is	 to	 understand	 all	of	our	fears	but	our	fears	mean	nothing	to	them.	this	 city	 used	 to	 be	 our	 future	 but	 now	 the	 future	 belongs	 to	 the	unwell.                                               text from the	unwell,  data availability all  data  underlying  the  results  are  available  as  part  of  the  article and no additional source data are required. author information martin  o’brien  is  an  artist,  thinker,  and  zombie.  he  works  across  performance,  writing  and  video  art  in  order  to  examine   what  it  means  to  be  born  with  a  life  shortening  disease.  his  writing  also  reflects  on  the  experience  of  illness  and  the  ways  in  which  other  artists  have  addressed  it. a  book  of  writings   about  martin,  survival	 of	 the	 sickest:	 the	 art	 of	 martin	 o’brien  was  published  in    by  the  live  art  development  agency.  his  performance  work  has  been  shown  throughout  the  uk,  europe,  us,  and  canada.  his  writing  has  been  published  in  books  and  journals  on  performance,  art,  and  the  medical  humani- ties.  martin  is  currently  lecturer  in  performance  at  queen  mary  university of london. references 	 appelbaum	d: voice, albany: state university of new york press. . reference source 	 baldoni	j: five feet apart. usa: cbs films. . reference source 	 bayly	s: a pathognomy of performance. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. . reference source 	 berlant	l: cruel optimism. durham and london: duke university press. . publisher full text 	 connor	s: whisper music. stevenconnor.com, viewed: / / . . reference source 	 dick	k: sick: the life and death of bob flanagan, supermasochist. usa lions gate. . reference source 	 foucault	m: the birth of the clinic. london: routledge. . 	 grey’s anatomy. series , episode, , american broadcasting company. . reference source 	 o’brien	m: ‘cough, bitch, cough: reflections on sickness and the coughing body in performance’. in performance and the medical body. ed. gianna bouchard and alex mermikides, london and new york: bloomsbury methuen drama. ; - .. reference source 	 o’brien	m,	gianna	b: ‘zombie sickness: contagious idea in performance’. in routledge companion to the medical humanities. ed. alan bleakley, london: routledge. ; – . 	 o’brien	m,	suhail	m: the unwell. uk: suhail merchant. . reference source page of wellcome open research , : last updated: jun https://archive.org/details/voice appe https://www.rottentomatoes.com/m/five_feet_apart https://www.palgrave.com/gp/book/ http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://www.stevenconnor.com/whispermusic/ https://www.rogerebert.com/reviews/sick-the-life-and-death-of-bob-flanagan-supermasochist- https://edition.cnn.com/ / / /entertainment/greys-anatomy-season-finale-coronavirus/index.html https://books.google.co.in/books?id=shsmcwaaqbaj&pg=pa &lpg=pa &dq=cough,+bitch,+cough:+reflections+on+sickness+and+the+coughing+body+in+performance&source=bl&ots= wmraq-p p&sig=acfu u uxtft cytffucnfd iwq-qaa&hl=en&sa=x&ved= ahukewib agprlxpahwzoekkhsx b yq aewahoecaoqaq#v=onepage&q=cough, bitch, cough: reflections on sickness and the coughing body in performance&f=false https://www.martinobrienart.com/the-unwell.html   open peer review current peer review status: version june reviewer report https://doi.org/ . /wellcomeopenres. .r © bleakley a. this is an open access peer review report distributed under the terms of the creative commons , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the originalattribution license work is properly cited.  alan bleakley faculty of health, peninsula school of medicine, plymouth university, plymouth, uk the criteria for scientific papers do not apply – this is a discursive arts piece (and welcome). i have followed martin o’brien’s work for some time and he is amongst the foremost performance artists and commentators globally who have turned their symptoms into their life’s work as a commentary on the pathologizing of natural phenomena. martin literally embodies a ‘third state’ of being between life and death that challenges traditional conceptions of temporality, as a suspended ‘zombie’ time. this article puts his work into the context of the fears of pathologizing brought by the current coronavirus pandemic. he argues, originally, that this crisis forces us to re-think what it is to live together contra optimistic models (i am thinking of roland barthes’ how to live together, and ivan illich’s tools for conviviality). martin points to the uncanny resemblance between covd-  behaviour and cf precautions, that can be read as a performance piece in itself, partly scripted by ‘the science’, but improvised and moulded by circumstance: wearing gloves and mask, distancing for fear of catching an infection. this is living in “zombie time” – but this is neither suspension of time, ‘flatlining’, nor emptiness; it is, rather, full of “breaks and ambushes” – sudden, startling surprises. my thought when i first read this was: ‘this is not living in a bubble, but in a hedge, a thicket, a tangle of thorns’. this is thanks to the literary element in martin’s writing – an idiosyncratic mix of tragic and lyrical genres. more, besides offering an insight into a different way of living in time, martin also describes an identity construction that offers resistance to ‘medicalizing’ - that fetishizes life at all costs. in contrast is the “zombie time” that martin describes as ‘dystopian’, but i think he means ‘atopian’ – a-topos, a ‘nowhere’ space. yet, as noted above, this is a space full of “breaks and ambushes”. but i must clarify this observation, where martin makes the distinction between, say, a performance space with a public, and the contradictory ‘meeting space’ of cf sufferers only, where ‘meeting’ is impossible in terms of intimacy, tenderness, skin-to-skin, breath-to-breath contact. here, in the cf community, people are literally ‘passing through’. but through the idea of a common “the last breath society”, we are, in covid-time, all embraced by “zombie time”. this is an important and exceptional model of empathy or what hardt and negri call “the commons” (a common wealth as a properly democratic world).   in martin’s a-topian vision, “the cough” becomes chief signifier, and here martin has contributed greatly to page of wellcome open research , : last updated: jun https://doi.org/ . /wellcomeopenres. .r https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /   in martin’s a-topian vision, “the cough” becomes chief signifier, and here martin has contributed greatly to semiotics in the tradition of roland barthes, where universal embodied signs (coughs, phlegm, bodily fluids) become both symbols and concrete language. (p.  on has a brilliant phenomenology of the cough, developing a previous theme in martin’s work). in zombie-time, the greeting is the cough and splutter. paradoxically, what frightens people and keeps them apart in covid-time – and why we are masked against it – serves precisely the opposite function in zombie-time: of greeting, bonding and signification of a common love (“the cough becomes the soundscape of the city”). perhaps, as in china miéville’s the city and the city, two cities – ‘the well’ and ‘the sick’ – are superimposed on each other, so that citizens live side-by-side but are forbidden by law and strict censure, to not acknowledge or even glance at each other. to do so can mean being infected and dying at the hands of the police who control the ‘borders’. more, each city has an idiosyncratic aesthetic. each city then retains its identity through the coded ways in which it rejects the existence of the other city. i see this same idea running through martin’s work.   the piece is absorbing and focused, with original contributions to the literature. my only suggestions are that i would like to see some comment on politics. just as covid-  ‘science’ has become politicized, so “zombie time” surely asks questions about the relationships between illness and power. those with cf are experts in their own conditions and thus form active resistance against ‘medicalizing’. just look at martin’s own power to diagnose his own state of being through the body, just as medical students are taught to palpate, percuss and auscultate. martin’s descriptions show foucault’s ‘biopower-as-resistance’ in full flow.               further, it's not just somatic suffering that creates “zombie time” or suspended states, but many mental illnesses do this too – what are the corresponding mental states to bodily suspension as zombie?   finally, giorgio agamben’s idea of zoe, or bare life (rather than bios, or a ‘qualified’ or full life affording an identity), as an excommunication, a prisoner of war, an outcast (leprosy), and so forth, is worth exploring in relation to “zombie time” as an identity.   timely and extraordinary piece of writing.         is the work clearly and accurately presented and does it cite the current literature? yes is the study design appropriate and is the work technically sound? yes are sufficient details of methods and analysis provided to allow replication by others? yes if applicable, is the statistical analysis and its interpretation appropriate? not applicable are all the source data underlying the results available to ensure full reproducibility? no source data required are the conclusions drawn adequately supported by the results? yes  no competing interests were disclosed.competing interests: page of wellcome open research , : last updated: jun   reviewer expertise: psychological medicine, medical education, medical humanities i confirm that i have read this submission and believe that i have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard. june reviewer report https://doi.org/ . /wellcomeopenres. .r © jones a. this is an open access peer review report distributed under the terms of the creative commons , which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the originalattribution license work is properly cited.    amelia jones roski school of art and design, university of southern california, los angeles, ca, usa let me say that all of the questions on the wellcome form about “data” are not relevant. this is a humanities/arts essay beginning with the personal experience of suffering from cystic fibrosis and extending this experience to the current covid-  situation. there is no call for outlining of “methods” (other than o’brien’s very clear statement of the premise and goals of the article on page   of the pdf), nor, in this kind of research/writing, are “conclusions drawn” to be considered “adequately supported by… results.” this kind of work is fluid, poetic, but deceptively simple in that there is a strong underlying argument about our relationship to death, which is compellingly played out throughout with the author’s personal examples as well as some citations of (highly appropriate) theorists who have written about illness, death, or related topics.   this is a wonderful, deeply moving essay.  , with possiblenothing major needs fixing or changing exception of the larger suggestion below. the essay is a textured exploration of our current global situation that toggles successfully between stories of o’brien’s experience as a cf sufferer and covid- ’s viral reminder of potential imminent mortality.   my one larger suggestion: given the massive protests for black lives matter globally but especially in the us in the past weeks (certainly after o’brien would have finished this essay), it feels odd in making any revisions not to deal with the specific issue of what kinds of people are more vulnerable to covid- . and is this paralleled by cf? are less advantaged people, or certain ethnic groups, more likely to inherit the disease? i’d guess economic class is not relevant for cf, but it would be interesting to raise these points. people of color in the us, due to well document “weathering” for african americans in particular, the lower quality of health care for poc in general (in the us especially), and the likelihood of poc being forced to continue working in proximity with others in blue-collar jobs. poc in the us and uk (and probably beyond) are dying in vastly disproportionate numbers to white middle-class folks, from what i have read. i mention this because the initial terror we all felt has dropped off for many white middle-class people with the increasingly apparent advantage we have in avoiding dying of covid- . so the parts of the essay addressing our fear in fact apply more to o’brien and to those of lesser economic status in places like the uk and us than they do to white people such as myself with fewer or no pre-existing conditions. this shifts the overall feeling—palpably in the last two weeks in the us, we have (absolutely rightly) all come to be more aware of these disparities.   vis à vis the phrase “memory of death”: this is extremely provocative as an idea and could be elaborated. that is, most of us think about the “anticipation” of death, not a “memory” of it (which would imply it page of wellcome open research , : last updated: jun https://doi.org/ . /wellcomeopenres. .r https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://orcid.org/ - - -   that is, most of us think about the “anticipation” of death, not a “memory” of it (which would imply it occurred already in the past). o’brien could connect this memory of death idea to zombie time—doesn’t it activate a kind of scrambling or reversal of temporality, which he suggests is the experience of cf sufferers?   is the work clearly and accurately presented and does it cite the current literature? yes is the study design appropriate and is the work technically sound? yes are sufficient details of methods and analysis provided to allow replication by others? yes if applicable, is the statistical analysis and its interpretation appropriate? not applicable are all the source data underlying the results available to ensure full reproducibility? no source data required are the conclusions drawn adequately supported by the results? yes  no competing interests were disclosed.competing interests: reviewer expertise: art history, cultural studies, performance studies, gender/sexuality studies i confirm that i have read this submission and believe that i have an appropriate level of expertise to confirm that it is of an acceptable scientific standard. page of wellcome open research , : last updated: jun [pdf] quantifying the power and consequences of social media protest | semantic scholar skip to search formskip to main content> semantic scholar's logo search sign increate free account you are currently offline. some features of the site may not work correctly. 	doi: . / corpus id: quantifying the power and consequences of social media protest @article{freelon quantifyingtp, title={quantifying the power and consequences of social media protest}, author={deen freelon and c. mcilwain and meredith clark}, journal={new media & society}, year={ }, volume={ }, pages={ - } } 	deen freelon, c. mcilwain, meredith clark 	published 	sociology, computer science 	new media & society the exercise of power has been an implicit theme in research on the use of social media for political protest, but few studies have attempted to measure social media power and its consequences directly. this study develops and measures three theoretically grounded metrics of social media power—unity, numbers, and commitment—as wielded on twitter by a social movement (black lives matter [blm]), a counter-movement (political conservatives), and an unaligned party (mainstream news outlets) over… expand view on sage charltonmcilwain.com save to library create alert cite launch research feed share this paper citationshighly influential citations background citations methods citations view all figures, tables, and topics from this paper 	 table 	 figure 	 table 	 figure 	 table 	 figure 	 figure 	 figure view all figures & tables 	social media 	unity 	commitment scheme paper mentions news article education / journal of applied communications, "crowdsourcing change: an analysis of twitter discourse on food waste and reduction strategies." the free library may citations citation type citation type 	all types 	cites results 	cites methods 	cites background has pdf publication type author more filters more filters filters sort by relevance sort by most influenced papers sort by citation count sort by recency twitter, social movements, and claiming allies in abortion debates 	k. hunt 	sociology 	 save alert research feed unpacking the political effects of social movements with a strong digital component: the case of #idlenomore in canada 	emmanuelle richez, vincent raynauld, abunya c. agi, a. b. kartolo 	political science 	 	 	 save alert research feed whose tweets? the rhetorical functions of social media use in developing the black lives matter movement. 	denise j. wilkins, andrew g. livingstone, m. levine 	psychology, medicine 	the british journal of social psychology 	 	 	pdf save alert research feed trump, twitter, and news media responsiveness: a media systems approach 	chris wells, dhavan v. shah, j. lukito, ayellet pelled, jon c. w. pevehouse, junghwan yang 	political science, computer science 	new media soc. 	 	 	pdf 	view excerpts, cites background save alert research feed what kind of movement is black lives matter? the view from twitter 	alvin b. tillery 	sociology 	the journal of race, ethnicity, and politics 	 	 	pdf 	view excerpts, cites background and methods save alert research feed twitter makes it worse: political journalists, gendered echo chambers, and the amplification of gender bias 	n. usher, jesse holcomb, j. littman 	political science 	 	 	view excerpt, cites background save alert research feed committed participation or flashes of action? mobilizing public attention to climate on twitter, – 	k. thorson, l. wang 	political science 	 	highly influenced 	view excerpts, cites background and methods save alert research feed student participation and public facebook communication: exploring the demand and supply of political information in the romanian #rezist demonstrations 	d. mercea, t. burean, viorel proteasa 	political science 	 	pdf save alert research feed black americans and the “crime narrative”: comments on the use of news frames and their impacts on public opinion formation 	jenn m. jackson 	political science 	 	 save alert research feed attention and amplification in the hybrid media system: the composition and activity of donald trump’s twitter following during the presidential election 	yini zhang, chris wells, s. wang, k. rohe 	political science, computer science 	new media soc. 	 	 	highly influenced 	view excerpts, cites background save alert research feed ... ... references showing - of references sort byrelevance most influenced papers recency social media participation in an activist movement for racial equality 	munmun de choudhury, shagun jhaver, benjamin sugar, ingmar weber 	computer science, sociology 	icwsm 	 	 	pdf 	view excerpts, references background save alert research feed the paradox of media power 	james curran, n. couldry 	political science 	 	 	view excerpts, references background and results save alert research feed the political power of social media: technology, the public sphere, and political change 	c. shirky 	economics 	 	 	pdf 	view excerpt, references background save alert research feed grievance-based social movement mobilization in the #ferguson twitter storm 	r. lefebvre, c. armstrong 	sociology, computer science 	new media soc. 	 	 	highly influential 	view excerpts, references results and background save alert research feed #ferguson: digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the united states 	yarimar bonilla, j. rosa 	sociology 	 	 	view excerpts, references results and background save alert research feed the interdependency of mass media and social movements 	r. vliegenthart, s. walgrave 	political science 	 	 	pdf 	view excerpts, references background and results save alert research feed images of protest: dimensions of selection bias in media coverage of washington demonstrations, and 	j. mccarthy, c. mcphail, j. smith 	sociology 	 	 	view excerpt, references background save alert research feed hijacking #mynypd: social media dissent and networked counterpublics 	s. jackson, b. f. welles 	sociology 	 	 	pdf 	view excerpt, references background save alert research feed social media , mediation and the arab revolutions 	m. aouragh 	 	 	pdf 	view excerpt, references background save alert research feed the complex agenda-setting power of protest: demonstrations, media, parliament, government, and legislation in belgium, - 	s. walgrave, r. vliegenthart 	sociology 	 	 	pdf save alert research feed ... ... related papers 	abstract 	figures, tables, and topics 	paper 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http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcsm notes on reconstructing “the popular” gilbert b. rodman to cite this article: gilbert b. rodman ( ) notes on reconstructing “the popular”, critical studies in media communication, : , - , doi: . / . . to link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . published online: nov . submit your article to this journal view related articles view crossmark data http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rcsm http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rcsm http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showcitformats?doi= . / . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rcsm &show=instructions http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rcsm &show=instructions http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - notes on reconstructing “the popular” gilbert b. rodman department of communication studies, university of minnesota, minneapolis, mn, usa abstract drawing on stuart hall’s influential “notes on deconstructing ‘the popular’” [hall, s. ( ). in r. samuel (eds.), people’s history and socialist theory (pp. – ). london: routledge and kegan paul.], this essay maps out some of the major shifts in cultural studies’ relationship to popular culture over the past several decades. it concludes with a call for cultural studies to find ways to work from the terrain of the popular, rather than merely studying that terrain, or trying to “translate” its scholarly analyses for popular audiences. this is a necessary path to fulfilling its mission as a political project. article history received august accepted august keywords cultural studies; politics; popular culture; stuart hall; theory this essay began as a much shorter paper that i gave at the “cultural studies and the popular” conference at the american university of paris in , and it retains much of the semi-informal tone of that oral presentation. this approach to writing—i.e. com- posing for the ear, even when the finished text will be consumed by the eye—is one of the many valuable lessons i learned from reading stuart hall. many of hall’s most influ- ential “essays” are actually transcripts of talks, lectures, and interviews that he gave (e.g. , , , a, b, c, a, b). and, arguably, much of the rhetori- cal power of those pieces lies not just in the force of hall’s considerable intellect (though that’s not to be minimized), but in the way that the affective charge of his speaking voice comes through, even in print. more crucially, the oral character of much of hall’s writing embodies what he saw as one of the major responsibilities of cultural studies: to commu- nicate the knowledge that we have (or that we produce) to people “who do not belong, professionally, in the intellectual class” ( a, p. ). i do not pretend to have hall’s gift for oratory (that’s a very high bar to clear), but the implicit lesson set by his example has guided my own work over the years. my title is intended to suggest two things. the second of these is that this essay is struc- tured more as a series of notes and fragments than as a conventional journal article. this is in keeping with an unavoidable characteristic of studying “the popular”: i.e. the inevitable incompleteness of any given research project. there is no definitive popular culture canon, no easily delimited set of textual artifacts, no final point at which an analysis has accounted for everything that needs to be considered. there is always a new episode, another album, a surprising twist to a star’s career, or some other fresh development that expands the scale of one’s chosen research object. the most exhaustive effort to wrap one’s arms around the © national communication association contact gilbert b. rodman rodman@umn.edu department of communication studies, university of minnesota, church st se, minneapolis, mn , usa critical studies in media communication, vol. , no. , – http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . mailto:rodman@umn.edu http://www.natcom.org/ http://www.tandfonline.com “full” body of work will inevitably fail (allor, ; grossberg, ; radway, ; rodman, , pp. – ; rodman, , pp. – ; rodman, ). we always work with nothing but notes and fragments—always. the essay at hand simply fore- grounds that reality. the first thing my title is intended to suggest, however, is that i’m revisiting hall’s influ- ential essay, “notes on deconstructing ‘the popular,’” in what i hope are productive ways. this is an agenda that would have been obvious to the audience at the paris confer- ence, where the room was filled with long-time cultural studies practitioners who would have picked up on my allusion on their own, and where the conference call for papers had invoked “notes” with an explicit request for presenters to consider its relevance to the current moment. my agenda in this essay is not quite the same as hall’s. he was interested in mapping out a particular history of “the popular”—what the term encompassed, how it had been (mis)used, what it meant to whom, etc.—as part of an argument for how and why it was something that the left needed to take seriously as a major site of political struggle. i, too, am interested in the history of “the popular”—and its relevance to contemporary political struggles—but, unlike hall, i’m not writing in a context where “the popular” is widely assumed to be unworthy of serious intellectual or political attention. thirty-five years later, it almost goes without saying that “the popular” is a site where “the political” happens—and that ‘the political,’ even in the most narrow sense of the term (i.e. govern- mental and electoral politics), is deeply invested in “the popular.” as such, i’m interested in the question of how shifts in the relationship between “the popular” and “the political” in the decades since “notes” have reshaped cultural studies as a project—or, more pre- cisely, how those shifts should have (but, sadly, haven’t always) led cultural studies to reshape itself. note # : one of the few constants for academic publishing over the past years or so has been the notion that theory sells and travels much better than grounded analysis or empirical research. in part, this truism is a function of the relatively small size of most dis- ciplinary markets. given the constrained economics of academic publishing (which seem to grow more precarious with every passing year), many scholarly presses see theory- centric books as safer bets to generate big sales than most discipline-specific research monographs. a smart book on, say, african american newspapers during world war ii may be one that a publisher can sell to journalism historians and media scholars, but probably not to too many other folks. on the other hand, a smart—or even not-so- smart—book on foucauldian or deleuzean theory is a title that same publisher can com- fortably flog all over the humanities (and even across a respectable chunk of the social sciences) with some success. the notion that theory travels well is also driven, in part, by publishers’ desires to reach international markets and the difficulties that research-centered projects often have cross- ing (some) international borders. that parenthetical “some” is shorthand for the fact that us-centric research can (and does) flow profitably and more easily to the rest of the english-speaking world, while comparable traffic in the reverse direction is a much rarer phenomenon. between its oversized market and its extensive economic and political power, the us manages to bend the global market in academic publishing in unusual and problematic ways (rodman, , pp. – ). critical studies in media communication on the surface, then, theory looks like it travels incredibly well—the “big names” who are likely to be recognized by humanities scholars around the world, after all, are more likely to be theorists than empirical researchers—but most theory actually travels very poorly indeed. what makes any particular chunk of theory good, after all, is its ability to provide a helpful map of real world phenomena: i.e. it functions as a sort of magical decoder ring that renders a complex reality more understandable, navigable, and/or malle- able. as such, the contexts in which theory has the potential to travel well—i.e. where it can sell well, even if it doesn’t always work well—are those where the relevant real world phenomena at each end of that journey seem to be the same. those apparent simi- larities, however, often mask crucial cultural and contextual differences that undermine those theories’ usefulness as maps of their new locations. an ethnomusicologist studying peruvian panpipe players, for instance, is likely to recognize that she needs to provide her non-peruvian readers with relevant cultural, historical, and political backstories. a cultural theorist, on the other hand, can easily overlook the fact that many of his supposedly “uni- versal” concepts—culture, media, power, etc.—can (and do) actually differ quite signifi- cantly from one context to another. the fact that theory travels poorly should be—but regrettably isn’t—one of the core tenets of cultural studies. theory is not a worthy end unto itself. in a interview, stuart hall made precisely this point when he claimed, “i am not interested in theory [with a capital t], i am interested in going on theorizing” ( , p. ). what makes any particular theory valuable, at least in the context of cultural studies, is its ability to get us somewhere better than we currently are with respect to the specific sociopolitical struggles we happen to be facing. in other words, to what extent does a theory offer a useful map of whatever terrain we’re covering? and, as bob dylan almost sang, you don’t use a weather map to know which way the road goes. in this vein, i would put a slight twist on hall’s oft-quoted conclusion to “notes” and claim that the real significance of theory lies in its use value in specific real world political struggles. that is why theory matters. otherwise, to tell you the truth, i don’t give a damn about it. note # : the year is . i’m years old. like most us children of my generation, i’ve been exposed to a steady diet of popular culture ever since i was old enough to make sense of the sights and sounds emanating from the fancy electronic boxes in the living room. as such, popular culture is not new to me, but this is when i have my earliest cul- tural-studies-like insight about “the popular.” the person responsible for this epiphany is my junior high school music teacher, though i’m sure that she hopes to teach a very differ- ent lesson than the one i actually learn. presumably, she wants to teach a gaggle of unruly adolescents how to care about music, not as a source of mindless entertainment, but as a serious artform. to this end, for one week—and one week only—she breaks from her traditional lesson plan and asks us to bring music we like to class (i.e. rock, pop, and soul) so that she can help us consider these “simple” texts as aesthetic compositions. and so we spend a week paying attention to the ellington-inspired horn riffs in stevie wonder’s “sir duke,” examining how the chord changes in the beatles’ “help” reinforce the meaning of the lyrics, mapping out the intricacies of the beach boys’ vocal harmonies in ‘good vibrations,’ and so on. to be clear, my teacher is not engaged in some sort of independent reproduction of the birmingham school’s early work, since she’s definitely not borrowing the critical tools tra- ditionally used to analyze high culture in order for us to take popular culture seriously in g. b. rodman its own right. after a week with our music, she returns to teaching us about her music—i.e. “real” music, classical music—in ways that make it clear that what we were supposed to have learned the previous week was a mode of critical listening that would open our eyes (and our ears) to the indisputable “fact” that bach and stravinsky and wagner are aesthetically superior to the beatles and the stones and the who. in this endeavor, she fails miserably with all of us. what makes this my first cultural-studies-like moment is that this is when i become aware that the distinction between “high culture” and “popular culture” has significant sociopolitical ramifications. the school in question is a very tiny private school in washington, dc, and though i did not come from a family steeped in wealth and privilege and power—not by washington’s standards anyway—this was still the kind of school where those families sent their children. in , such institutions were still trying despe- rately to keep culture-with-a-capital-c alive and well and at the center of the world. they failed, of course. badly. by this late date, the pop culture barbarians had already cleared the gates and were busy redecorating the hallowed halls of the university, and so my school’s attempts to hold on to some sense of the old hierarchy were very much a rearguard effort. but this didn’t prevent them from trying anyway. at the tender age of , i understand none of this in any detail. nonetheless, despite— or perhaps because of—the legitimizing frame provided by our teacher, my classmates and i still recognize that this particular encounter between “the popular” (i.e. our music) and “the dominant” (i.e. the forms of culture embodied and sanctioned by our school) is a major transgression of some sort: that we have gotten away with something big because we were allowed (even briefly) to play rock ‘n’ roll on school grounds. note # : jump ahead a few decades to any of various classrooms where i currently teach undergraduate courses on popular culture and media studies. by now, i’ve been doing this long enough to have developed a reliable sense of which concepts will confound my students, and which will go down relatively easily. they’ll think they understand the political economy of the media, but they’ll embrace the notion that “profits matter” far too reductively and uncritically. they’ll gradually get the mechanics of semiotics, though many of them still think that we’re “reading too much into” the media texts in question. they’ll claim to believe all the critiques of technological determinism that i make them read, but then still write papers claiming that mobile phones have singlehandedly rendered an entire nation incapable of having face-to-face conversations. and so on. i know where all these pedagogical stumbling blocks are, and i’ve developed a range of techniques for helping my students get past them. or so i think. over the past several years, one basic concept that used to be second nature to my students has started to baffle them—and the concept in question is one of the last that i thought would cause such problems. surprise! the term “popular culture” now routinely confuses them. moreover, contrary to raymond williams’s famous claim that culture “is one of the two or three most complicated words in the english language” ( , p. ), the difficult bit for them is not “culture”: it’s “popular.” it’s not that they somehow think the word carries no meaning whatsoever, or that they think that everything counts as “popular.” quite the contrary: their “common sense” understanding of the term is that it refers exclusively to contemporary blockbuster-level success. so chart-topping mega-star taylor swift is popular culture (at least for now). madonna, with a new album out in , might once again be popular culture—except critical studies in media communication that that album flopped so, at best, she’s only sort of popular. meanwhile, britney spears, whose last (also poor selling) album dates all the way back to , isn’t popular culture at all anymore. not to my undergraduates anyway. where my students have a really hard time, however, even after we work through more nuanced senses of what “popular culture” might be, is seeing how the distinction between “the popular” and anything else actually matters. they recognize that opera and hip-hop (for example) are different kinds of music, rooted in and speaking to different commu- nities, and with different aesthetic codes and traditions. but the sociopolitical weight of that difference—i.e. the once-dominant notion that classical music is something that one is supposed to value and appreciate, while pop music is just disposable fluff— simply isn’t strong enough in the us anymore to be a common, ordinary part of my stu- dents’ worldview. perhaps the best evidence for this shift are those students—and there’s still at least one in every class—who want to defend the old high/low hierarchy. as little as fifteen years ago, when these adorno wannabes appeared in my classroom, they still came across as mouthpieces for the “common sense” values that we all knew were prevalent in the broader culture around us (even if not all of us accepted those values ourselves). in resist- ing my pedagogical efforts to treat “the popular” as a worthy cultural sphere in its own right, they weren’t “speaking truth to power” so much as they were echoing the unassail- able “truths” that power had already taught them. today, on the other hand, those same students are an endangered species, and when they appear, they come across as awkward anachronisms: people who are badly out of step with the world around them, rather than people who know that their tastes and values are already aligned with those of the political and economic elites who have real power in this world. more significantly, in many ways they know this. once upon a time, such students felt fully entitled to speak up in class to defend art and literature as the culture that we should all enjoy and respect. today, however, those students are more likely to hide the light of their cultural elitism under a bushel. they’ll reveal them- selves in conversations they have with me during office hours, or in the context of papers they know only i will see, but they’ll often feel too shy—or too intimidated—to voice their opinions out loud in class because they worry that they’ll be roundly criticized (or laughed at) by their peers. to the extent that the bulk of my students have “culture clash” stories to tell that come anywhere near my experiences in that junior high school music class, their tales are not about distinctions between “the high” and “the low” (opera vs. hip-hop): they’re about distinctions within the realm of the popular (e.g. my students listen to daft punk or kendrick lamar, while their parents and teachers listen to lyle lovett or u ). note # : the stories i’ve just told illustrate some of the ways that many of the claims about “the popular” from “notes” don’t necessarily travel well, across space or time. for example, hall asserts that there is an obvious (if complicated) relationship between “popular culture” and “the working classes.” we speak of particular forms of working-class culture, but we use the more inclusive term, “popular culture” to refer to the general field of enquiry. it’s perfectly clear that what i have been saying would make little sense without reference to a class perspective and to class struggle. but it is also clear that there is no one-to-one relationship between a class and a par- ticular cultural form or practice. ( , p. ) g. b. rodman what is “perfectly clear” to hall in britain in , however, has never been obvious in the us. for that matter, it’s never been true in the us: not even in the complicated, non- reductive fashion that hall outlines for the british case, and not even at prior moments in us history when one might have been able to make a case that there was a distinct form of culture that the working classes could recognize and embrace as their own. as close as it ever came (maybe) was the over-romanticized fetishization of folk culture: i.e. the (supposedly) authentic, noncommercial art-with-a-small-a that (supposedly) flowed naturally from appalachian storytellers and rural blues singers. that sort of naive cele- bration of “the folk,” however, largely disappeared about the same time that “high” culture lost its stranglehold on the hegemonic center of us culture. whatever class- based politics were on display in that folk-ist discourse—and there were certainly plenty of those—they were still a far cry from the proto-socialist working-class culture of hall’s essay. if what gets lost when “notes” crossed the atlantic is the class-based nature of “the popular,” what gets lost—or at least muddled—with the passage of time is hall’s definition of “the popular” as the form of culture that lies outside of, and is actively opposed to, “the culture of the power-bloc” ( , p. ). this sense of “the popular” would have survived the transatlantic crossing to the us in with minimal difficulty. ronald reagan’s b-movie pedigree notwithstanding, the major political and economic power-brokers of the era lived and moved in circles that lay far from the center of popular culture. when it was somehow a scandalous revelation—and it was—that a us presidential candidate enjoyed listening to bob dylan (as was the case for jimmy carter in ), it’s clear that “the culture of the power-bloc” did not (or at least should not, by what were then the prevailing standards of what we might call “cultural correctness”) intersect with “popular culture” in any comfortable fashion. and yet, today, this oppositional sense of “the popular” makes no sense at all in the us, where “the power-bloc” is hard to imagine as something removed from the sprawling, ubi- quitous terrain of “the popular.” at different moments, and in different contexts, the con- temporary power-bloc might set itself in opposition to particular strands of “the popular”—e.g. gangsta rap, video games, pornography—but it will rarely (if ever) do so from a position that is visibly outside of “the popular.” in sharp contrast to the political landscape hall describes with respect to s britain, the last thing that “the power- bloc” wants to do in the us today is to openly lay claim to the values and/or practices of “the elite.” in this sense, hall is precisely right to claim that “the popular” is not only an important site of struggle: it’s also a vital site for struggle. rather than being the enemy to be defeated and/or exiled, it is the prize to be won. or one of them, anyway. one example of this struggle over and for “the popular” comes from mike huckabee (former arkansas governor, former fox news talk show host, and wannabe republican presidential candidate), who appeared on the daily show in january (the daily show, ) to promote his book, gods, guns, grits, and gravy ( ). that interview devolved into a surreal argument with host jon stewart about the cultural values rep- resented by beyoncé. in short, huckabee’s book claims that the us is divided into two cul- tures—the “bubbles” of the urban coastal elites and the “bubbas” of the small-town heartland—and that the real problem with the us today is that the people of the “bubbles” simply don’t understand (or care about, or respect) the “bubbas.” stewart chal- lenges this characterization as simplistic and inaccurate, and presses huckabee particularly critical studies in media communication hard on his claim that beyoncé is an example of the overly permissive, quasi-pornographic values of “bubble” culture. huckabee doubles down on his argument, simultaneously suggesting that beyoncé’s fans are children who want their very own stripper poles and that this sort of licentious permissiveness is somehow facilitated and promoted by (of all people) “the harvard faculty.” it’s a bundle of incredibly audacious and problematic articulations—and stewart swiftly (and correctly) calls him out on it. but huckabee works very hard to take the specific fraction of “the people” who are his political base and make them into the only people who deserve to be recognized as the core of the national vision of “the people” as a whole. huckabee’s use of “harvard faculty” as a slur is his way of trying to distance himself from the cultural elite (despite his own positions of prominence in both politics and media), while his diss of beyoncé allows him to place feminists and people of color somewhere outside “the people” in one easy step. huckabee’s version of “the people” simply has no room in it for folks who “fail” to embrace the gun-toting, god-fearing, grits-and-gravy, conservative masculinity that he sees as the very heart of the nation. note # : over the past decade or so, in his efforts to articulate a new vision for cul- tural studies, larry grossberg has taken up hall’s arguments from “notes” in important ways. as is usually the case with grossberg, his argument has a lot to recommend it. but as is sometimes the case with grossberg, i also want to resist key pieces of his argument. in his keynote speech at the “crossroads in cultural studies” conference, gross- berg claimed that “the popular,” “culture,” and “the media”—i.e. phenomena that cul- tural studies has long recognized as pivotal sites of (and for) political struggle—have shifted enough that cultural studies must rethink its investment in them (grossberg, ). grossberg’s argument is rooted in one of cultural studies’ most distinctive fea- tures: what he refers to as its “radical contextualism” ( , pp. – ). put too simply, radical contextualism implies (among other things) that cultural studies can’t take anything—its research objects, its political positions, its theoretical commitments —for granted, since all these things shift over space and time in significant ways. and so grossberg argues (correctly) that the role “culture” plays within cultural studies can’t—or at least shouldn’t—be understood to be the same in the us today as it was in britain in . grossberg even goes so far as to suggest that our collective failure to respond adequately to these changes has made cultural studies “fucking boring” ( , p. ). so far, so good. “culture” isn’t what it used to be. nor is “the popular.” or “the media.” grossberg is also right to claim that, taken as a whole, cultural studies has lost much of its mojo over the past decade or so (rodman, , ). where grossberg takes a wrong turn, however, is in his suggestion for how cultural studies should work its way out of its current malaise. he claims that because culture is no longer a particularly effective site of (or for) political struggle, that cultural studies needs to refocus its energies on those dis- ciplinary corners of the university where the proverbial “cultural turn” has never really taken hold. in particular, he suggests that we need to turn our attention to economics and (to a slightly lesser extent) political science ( , pp. – ). again, he’s right that cultural studies could profit from expanding its disciplinary orbit, and economics and pol- itical science are strong choices for such a move. but there are two parts of his argument that still don’t quite work. g. b. rodman first, he sells short the degree to which culture still matters. he’s certainly right that its role in broader political struggles has changed, but he’s wrong to suggest that cultural studies’ continuing efforts to see culture as a crucial site of political struggle in the us are necessarily ineffective. representational politics (for example) may not matter in quite the same way today that they did (or seemed to) in, say, the s, and it’s true that the likes of the tea party and fox news are working overtime to reshape the economy for the benefit of their billionaire sponsors and owners. but the terrain on which they’re waging much of that war remains largely a cultural one. donald trump, for instance, did not become the republican nominee for the presidential election on the strength of his legislative triumphs (he has none), his insightful public policy pro- posals (ditto), or his economic genius (double ditto). he has, however, successfully tapped into the xenophobic, homophobic, logic-phobic cultural values of the us far right. second, even if grossberg is right to argue that cultural studies needs to get over its single-minded focus on “culture,” it’s not clear that the most effective route out of this dead end involves repositioning cultural studies’ disciplinary boundaries. to be clear, making cultural studies into a richer academic practice is a fine thing to do. but it’s also not enough. this can—and should—be a “both-and” issue, rather than an “either- or” one. because unless we want to pull a page from the ronald reagan playbook and promote a sort of “trickle down” model of the relationship between intellectual and pol- itical work—i.e. where some brilliant reworking of a theoretical concept eventually finds its way from the dusty journal of arcane thinking and into the “real” world—simply transforming cultural studies as an academic project isn’t going to do very much to help us succeed in the political struggles that ostensibly motivate our work. note # : as i’ve already suggested, contemporary mainstream critiques of “the popular” aren’t so much about defining and defending culture (high vs. low, elite vs. common, etc.) as they are about (re)defining the people: i.e. who does—and doesn’t—get to count as a person, as a citizen, as someone who belongs, as someone whose life matters, as someone worthy of the state’s protection and of society’s favor. this is where a different oft-quoted passage of hall’s is worth citing at length. speaking at the “cultural studies: now and in the future” conference at the university of illinois in , hall asked: against the urgency of people dying in the streets, what in god’s name is the point of cultural studies? what is the point of the study of representations, if there is no response to the ques- tion of what you say to someone who wants to know if they should take a drug and if that means they’ll die two days later or a few months earlier? at that point, i think anybody who is into cultural studies seriously as an intellectual practice, must feel, on their pulse, its ephemerality, its insubstantiality, how little it registers, how little we’ve been able to change anything or get anybody to do anything. if you don’t feel that as one tension in the work that you are doing, theory has let you off the hook. ( a, pp. – ) when people quote this passage, this is often where they stop (e.g. sardar & van loon, , p. ) in ways that make it seem as if hall has given up entirely on both cultural studies and the politics of representation—even though his next few sentences make it quite clear that the exact opposite is true: on the other hand, in the end, i don’t agree with the way in which this dilemma is often posed for us, for it is indeed a more complex and displaced question than just people dying out there. the question of aids is an extremely important terrain of struggle and con- testation. in addition to the people we know who are dying, or have died, or will, there are critical studies in media communication many people dying who are never spoken of. how could we say that the question of aids is not also a question of who gets represented and who does not? ( a, p. ) swap out the stuff about aids and medicines, replace it with language about police brutal- ity and racial profiling, and hall’s -year-old comments could just as easily describe both the current sociopolitical crisis in the us (or one of them anyway) and cultural studies’ ideal response to that crisis. hall’s main question—“who gets represented and who does not?”—points directly to the struggle over who gets to count as “the people” and who does not. when folks on the political right talk about the need to “take our country back,” they’re invoking a vision of the nation as the home of (and as belonging to) a tiny fraction of the actual popu- lation. according to mike huckabee, the “bubble” people on the coasts don’t know the heartland “bubbas” who constitute the “real” america, and they don’t want to. none of which makes any sense when one looks at, say, ferguson, missouri—which is definitely in the heartland, but completely erased from huckabee’s simplistic vision of two cultures. the black lives matter movement that has blossomed in the wake of ferguson (and staten island, and cleveland, and north charleston, and baltimore, and chicago, and minneapolis, and the depressingly ever-expanding list of places where police have killed unarmed african americans) has been quite explicit about the connections it sees between black people dying in the streets and the larger culture’s systemic failure to rep- resent and/or see black folks as legitimate examples of “the people.” this is perhaps the most obvious—but far from the only—example of why “the popular” remains a matter of life-and-death importance today, and why we still need to give a very large damn about it. note # : so what now? if “culture” and “the popular” and “politics” and “cultural studies” (and so on) have all changed in significant ways since “notes” was written, and if it’s not enough for us to simply graft another disciplinary branch or two onto cultural studies’ family tree, what do we do next? it’s a big question, of course, and i’m not going to pretend to have all the answers—or even necessarily the best one—but let me offer one tentative suggestion for where we might start. in spite of all those bits of “notes” that don’t travel so well anymore, one of the lessons that i still take from it is hall’s insistence, as someone who knows his structuralism, that our definition of “the popular” at any given point in space and time depends less on a “fixed inventory” of what’s inside the category, and more on understanding what’s outside of and opposed to the category. when i sat down to write the first version of this essay for that paris conference, i tried to offer a few speculative thoughts about what the popular’s new “significant other” might be, given that the old answers—“high culture” and “the culture of the power-bloc”—no longer seem to fit the bill. what i quickly realized, though, is that i was asking the wrong question. the real question here isn’t how we might reconstruct the popular to fit within cultural studies: it’s how we need to reconstruct cultural studies to fit within the popular. after all, it’s the popular—not cultural studies—that still serves as a crucial site for social and pol- itical struggle. the nature and shape of that struggle, of course, is not the same today as it was in , but if our efforts are limited to trying to reconstruct our theoretical models of “the popular” for the purposes of scholarly analysis, then we’re not being sufficiently self- reflexive about our own practices as critics, as intellectuals, and as potential agents of social and political change. g. b. rodman put simply, cultural studies is not—or at least it should not be—an exclusively intellec- tual enterprise, and it needs to start imagining itself not as a new quasi- inter- multi- anti- (pick your favorite prefix) disciplinary entity such as sociology or communication or history, but as something more akin to feminism or marxism: i.e. a broad, heterogeneous range of projects that operates both inside and outside of the university. both marxism and feminism have long managed to encompass a variety of different spheres of activity within their normal scope of operations: critical theory, scholarly research, “popular” cri- ticism and commentary, classroom-based pedagogy, community activism, grassroots organizing, public policy work, etc. cultural studies can and should do the same. more pointedly, cultural studies needs to start working from the terrain of the popular, rather than simply writing/theorizing/teaching about the popular from within the univer- sity, or trying to “translate” its scholarly analyses for popular audiences. it needs to find ways to inhabit and operate within popular culture, rather than continuing to position itself as one of the popular’s others. this isn’t an entirely new argument, of course— bérubé ( ) and penley ( ), among others, offered important versions of it more than two decades ago—but it’s still an agenda that most cultural studies practitioners haven’t embraced with any real enthusiasm. no doubt, much of that resistance derives from the fear that a popularized cultural studies would inevitably be intellectually and politically weaker than academic cultural studies has been. instead of serving as a critical force in opposition to the disneys and foxes and googles of the world, cultural studies would try to play their game on their turf—and presumably lose. its rigorous, nuanced analyses of the intertwined cultural/ social/economic/political spheres would be reduced to simplistic, media-friendly sound- bites. the force of its political critiques would be blunted by its need to appeal to popular audiences. it would become the servant of rapacious global capitalism, rather than its righteous foe. or so the argument goes. i don’t want to pretend that such dangers aren’t real, but i also don’t accept that cultural studies’ job is to play things safe. speaking in about the very real risks he saw with what was then cultural studies’ institutionalization within the uni- versity, hall noted that “dangers are not places you run from but places you go towards” ( a, p. ). popularizing cultural studies is a dangerous proposition. but the political benefits of doing so in the current conjuncture outweigh the risks involved—especially since not taking those risks leaves cultural studies firmly entrenched in the university. and the university is no longer the politically oppositional space it once was (or at least that it was often imagined to be). put a slightly different way, those of us in cultural studies frequently try to distinguish our work from more traditional disciplinary endeavors by claiming that what we do is necessarily both an intellectual and a political project—and yet, too often, we talk the talk much better than we walk the walk. not because, as individuals, many of us don’t already engage in all sorts of work—activism, organizing, community-building, public pedagogy, etc.—that is unmistakably political in nature. we do. but we also too frequently reserve the “cultural studies” label just for the theory and research (and, slightly less often, the teaching) that we do when we’re being professional academics. while we may still value all that activism and organizing, we too frequently assign it to some categorical box that lies outside of what we take to be the “proper” orbit of cultural studies. at which point, our occasional pretty words to the contrary notwithstanding, the actual critical studies in media communication practice of cultural studies makes it into nothing more than an intellectual project that merely imagines itself to be political. and that, my friends, is “fucking boring.” references allor, m. ( ). relocating the site of the audience. critical studies in mass communication, , – . bérubé, m. ( ). bite size theory: popularizing academic criticism. in public access: literary theory and american cultural politics (pp. – ). new york: verso. the daily show. ( ). mike huckabee. retrieved from http://www.cc.com/video-clips/ccr m / the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-mike-huckabee grossberg, l. ( ). wandering audiences, nomadic critics. cultural studies, ( ), – . grossberg, l. ( ). cultural studies: what’s in a name (one more time). taboo: the journal of culture and education, , – . grossberg, l. ( ). does cultural studies have futures? should it? (or what’s the matter with new york?): cultural studies, contexts and conjunctures. cultural studies, ( ), – . hall, s. ( ). notes on deconstructing “the popular”. in r. samuel (eds.), people’s history and socialist theory (pp. – ). london: routledge and kegan paul. hall, s. ( ). the narrative construction of reality: an interview with stuart hall. southern review, ( ), – . hall, s. ( ). on postmodernism and articulation: an interview with stuart hall. journal of communication inquiry, ( ), – . hall, s. ( ). old and new identities, old and new ethnicities. in a. king (ed.), culture, globaliza- tion, and the world-system (pp. – ). london: macmillan. hall, s. ( a). cultural studies and its theoretical legacies. in l. grossberg, c. nelson, p. a. treichler, l. baughman, & j. m. wise (eds.), cultural studies (pp. – ). new york: routledge. hall, s. ( b). race, culture, and communications: looking backward and forward at cultural studies. rethinking marxism, ( ), – . hall, s. ( c). what is this “black” in black popular culture? in g. dent (ed.), black popular culture (pp. – ). seattle: bay press. hall, s. ( a). interview with stuart hall. communication and critical/cultural studies, ( ), – . hall, s. ( b). stuart hall interview— june . cultural studies, ( ), – . huckabee, m. ( ). gods, guns, grits, and gravy. new york: st. martin’s press. penley, c. ( ). from nasa to the club (with a detour through hollywood): cultural studies in the public sphere. in c. nelson. & d. p. gaonkar (eds.), disciplinarity and dissent in cultural studies (pp. – ). new york: routledge. radway, j. ( ). reception study: ethnography and the problems of dispersed audiences and nomadic subjects. cultural studies, ( ), – . rodman, g. b. ( ). elvis after elvis: the posthumous career of a living legend. new york: routledge. rodman, g. b. ( ). race … and other four letter words: eminem and the cultural politics of authenticity. popular communication, ( ), – . rodman, g. b. ( ). cultural studies is ordinary. in m. seidl, r. horak, & l. grossberg (eds.), about raymond williams (pp. – ). new york: routledge. rodman, g. b. ( ). cultural studies and history. in n. partner, & s. foot (eds.), the sage hand- book of historical theory (pp. – ). los angeles: sage. rodman, g. b. ( ). why cultural studies? malden, ma: wiley blackwell. sardar, z., & van loon, b. ( ). introducing cultural studies. new york: totem books. williams, r. ( ). keywords: a vocabulary of culture and society (revised ed.). new york: oxford university press. g. b. rodman http://www.cc.com/video-clips/ccr m /the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-mike-huckabee http://www.cc.com/video-clips/ccr m /the-daily-show-with-jon-stewart-mike-huckabee 	abstract 	references tourism and social media in the world: an empirical investigation simplice a. asongu nicholas m. odhiambo working paper / december simplice a. asongu department of economics university of south africa p. o. box , unisa , pretoria south africa emails: asongusimplice@yahoo.com / asongus@afridev.org nicholas m. odhiambo department of economics university of south africa p. o. box , unisa , pretoria south africa emails: odhianm@unisa.ac.za / nmbaya @yahoo.com unisa economic research working papers constitute work in progress. they are papers that are under submission or are forthcoming elsewhere. they have not been peer-reviewed; neither have they been subjected to a scientific evaluation by an editorial team. the views expressed in this paper, as well as any errors, omissions or inaccurate information, are entirely those of the author(s). comments or questions about this paper should be sent directly to the corresponding author. © by simplice a. asongu and nicholas m. odhiambo unisa economic research working paper series http://www.unisa.ac.za/cmsys/staff/contents/resources/images/staff-online-unisa-logo.jpg mailto:asongusimplice@yahoo.com mailto:asongus@afridev.org mailto:odhianm@unisa.ac.za% /% nmbaya @yahoo.com mailto:odhianm@unisa.ac.za% /% nmbaya @yahoo.com tourism and social media in the world: an empirical investigation simplice a. asongu and nicholas m. odhiambo abstract the study examines the relationship between tourism and social media from a cross section of countries with data for the year .the empirical evidence is based on ordinary least squares, negative binomial and quantile regressions. two main findings are established. first, there is a positive relationship between facebook penetration and the number of tourist arrivals. second, facebook penetration is more relevant in promoting tourist arrivals in countries where initial levels in tourist arrivals are the highest and low. the established positive relationship can be elucidated from four principal angles: the transformation of travel research, the rise in social sharing, improvements in customer service and the reshaping of travel agencies. this study explores a new dataset on social media. there are very few empirical studies on the relevance of social media in development outcomes. keywords: social media; tourism jel classification: d ; o ; z ; z . introduction two main factors motivate this study, notably: the contemporary relevance of social media and gaps in the tourism literature. the factors are substantiated in chronological order. first, there is a growing role of social media in economic development, notably, it: (i) enables discussions that boarder beyond geographically circumscribed communities and editorial projects at scales that were recently unimaginable; brings potential rivals together, gives voice and serves as an organizational tool (parkyn, ) and (ii) improves macroeconomic corresponding author[senior researcher]; department of economics, university of south africa, p.o. box , unisa , pretoria, south africa. email: asongusimplice@yahoo.com professor; department of economics, university of south africa, p.o. box , unisa pretoria, south africa. email: odhianm@unisa.ac.za mailto:asongusimplice@yahoo.com mailto:odhianm@unisa.ac.za development outcomes such as tourism marketing and management in various domains of the tourism industry (zeng & gerritsen, ). second, the bulk of the literature on the determinants of tourism has not engaged the dimension of social media (sönmez et al., ; seddighi et al., ; pizam & fleischer, ; kingsbury & brunn, ; sönmez & graefe, ; saha & yap, ; alvarez & campo, ; mehmood et al., ). moreover, the few studies that have assessed the relationship between tourism and social media have been exploratory (leung et al., ; zeng & gerritsen, ). the sparse empirical literature on the nexus between social media and tourism is partly traceable to lack of data. to the best of our knowledge, only three studies have used a recent dataset on facebook penetraton to proxy for social media (jha & sarangi, ; jha & kodila-tedika, ; kodila-tedika, ). jha and kodila-tedika ( ) have investigated whether social media promotes democracy, jha and sarangi ( ) have assessed if social media affects corruption while kodila-tedika ( ) has examined whether social media matters in natural resource governance. this study complements this new strand of literature by using the new dataset on facebook penetration to assess the relationship between social media and tourist arrivals. this positioning is consistent with recent surveys of the literature on the relationship between social media and tourism which have recommended the need for literature discourses and exploratory studies to be substantiated with empirical validity because research on the nexus between social media and tourism is still in its infancy (leung et al., ; zeng & gerritsen, ). moreover, a recent world bank report on digital dividends has concluded that there is not much evidence on the effect of social media on development outcomes (world bank, ; tchamyou, a, b; tchamyou et al., ). in the light of above, the macroeconomic literature on the consequences of social media has not sufficiently explored the tourism sector because of lack of data. as far as we have reviewed, the extant literature has focused on: the relevance of social media in the “black lives matter” movements in the united states of america (freelon et al., ); the consequences of producing and consuming information via social media (stone & wang, ); the importance of social media in marketing and influencing investors (felix et al., ; ramanathan et al., ; cade, ; colicev et al., ) and the role of social media in politics and governance (udupa, ; engesser et al., ; hampton et al., ; enikolopov et al., ). recent surveys of the literature maintain that the theoretical underpinnings on the investigated relationship are largely dominated by the theory of reasoned action (tra), theory of planned behavior (tpb) and technology acceptance model (tam) which are used to explain the phenomenon of social media in travel, tourism and hospitality (nikiforova, ; cusick, ; lee & lowry, ). consistent with corresponding literature (yousafzai et al., ; asongu et al., ), a common denominator among the theories is that the adoption of information technology is multifaceted and complex because, it entails two main dimensions: (i) a framework from managers of information and developers of systems which are articulated not on the influence of attitudes but on the formation of customers’ belief and (ii) relevant features which entail composite considerations such as customers’ behavioural, utilitarian, psychological, social and personal aspects. the tra developed by bagozzi ( ), ajzen and fishbein ( ) and fishbein and ajzen ( ), is founded on the supposition that when it comes to acknowledging the implications of their actions, customers are rational. ajzen ( ) has extended the tra to the tpb by emphasising the absence of variations between customers who control their actions consciously and those that do not. in the tam developed by davis ( ), the assumption is that the process in which customers adopt a given technology can be elucidated by the voluntary intention of the customer to accept and use the technology. factors from the above theories motivate the use of social media by both tourists and those engaged in tourism marketing and management. the ways tourist companies communicate and market their services have been fundamentally transformed by social media, which is equally used by tourists in their decision making processes about tourists destinations. in essence, the use of facebook by the hospitality and travel sectors has substantially revamped travel marketing. accordingly, the manner in which tourists search for potential destinations depends on how tourism companies use social media (especially facebook) to influence tourists’ choice of destinations. the study assesses the nexus between social media and tourism in a cross section of countries with the data for the year , using three estimation strategies, notably: ordinary least squares, negative binomial and quantile regressions. two main findings are established. first, there is a positive relationship between facebook penetration and the number of tourist arrivals. second, facebook penetration is more relevant in promoting tourist arrivals in countries where initial levels in tourist arrivals are the highest and low. the rest of the study is organized as follows. the data and methodology are discussed in section whereas section presents the empirical results and corresponding discussion. we conclude in section with implications and future research directions. . data and methodology . data this paper investigates a cross section of countries with data for the year from multiple sources, namely: qualitative assessments by the economic intelligence unit (eiu) analysts’ estimates; the uppsala conflict data program (ucdp) battle-related deaths dataset; the institute for economics and peace (iep); the united nations office on drugs and crime (unodc) surveys on crime trends; the operations of criminal justice systems (cts); the international institute for strategic studies (iiss), the united nations committee on contributions and quintly. the geographic and temporal scopes of the data are limited by data availability constraints. specifically, the data on social media in terms of facebook penetration is only available for the year . accordingly, in order to measure social media, the study uses the share of the population using facebook. this facebook penetration data is sourced from “quintly” which is a social media benchmarking and analytics solution company . the data on social media has been used in recent literature on the consequences of social media (jha & sarangi, ; jha & kodila-tedika, ; kodila-tedika, ). the outcome variable is the number of tourist arrivals which is log-transformed to be consistent with some empirical strategies employed by the study (asongu & nwachukwu, ). for example, given that count data is not consistent with a normal distribution, it important to log-transform the data before applying the ordinary least squares and quantile regressions estimation strategies. conversely, the negative binomial regression can be employed for count data without log-transformation. four non-dummy and three dummy variables are adopted as control variables in order to account for determinants of tourism and the unobserved heterogeneity. the non-dummy variables include: access to weapons, homicide rates; incarcerations rate and violent demonstrations. the dummy variables are: europe and central asia; south asia and english common law. hence is assigned to a country that belongs to these groups of countries and zero, otherwise. these control variables are consistent with the literature on tourism determinants (sönmez et al., ; seddighi et al., ; pizam & fleischer, ; kingsbury & brunn, ; sönmez & graefe, ; saha & yap, ; alvarez & campo, ; mehmood et al., ). concerning the expected signs, we anticipate that access to weapons, homicides and violent demonstrations should be negatively related to the number of tourist arrivals whereas incarcerations should have the opposite relationship. the opposite nexus is expected from the number of the data was accessed from its website (http://www.quintly.com/facebook-countrystatistics?period= year ). http://www.quintly.com/facebook-countrystatistics?period= year incarcerations because it reflects policy efforts devoted to reducing perceived risks. conversely the other three positive factors logically translate perceived risks on the part of tourists. it is important to note that an increase in perceived risk should discourage tourist arrivals. table : definitions and sources of variables variables definition of variables and sources tourism the number of tourists arrivals facebook penetration facebook penetration ( ), defined as the percentage of the total population that uses facebook. quintly. access to weapons ease of access to small arms and light weapons qualitative assessment by eiu analysts homicides number of homicides per , people united nations office on drugs and crime (unodc) surveys on crime trends and the operations of criminal justice systems (cts); eiu estimates incarceration number of jailed population per , people world prison brief, international centre for prison studies, university of essex violent demonstrations likelihood of violent demonstrations qualitative assessment by eiu analysts uppsala conflict data program (ucdp). the institute for economics and peace (iep). the economic intelligence unit (eiu). united nations peacekeeping funding (unpkf). gdp: gross domestic product. the international institute for strategic studies (iiss). table : summary statistics and presentation of countries panel a: summary statistics variables mean standard dev. minimum maximum obsers tourist arrivals . . . . facebook penetration . . . . access to weapons . . . . homicides . . . . incarceration . . . . violent demonstrations . . . . panel b: sampled countries ( ) “albania; algeria; angola; argentina; armenia; australia; austria; azerbaijan; bahrain; bangladesh; belarus; belgium; benin; bhutan; bolivia; bosnia and herzegovina; botswana; brazil; bulgaria; burkina faso; cambodia; cameroon; canada; chad; chile; china; colombia; costa rica; croatia; cyprus; czech republic; democratic republic of the congo; denmark; djibouti; dominican republic; ecuador; egypt; el salvador; estonia; ethiopia; finland; france; georgia; germany; ghana; greece; guatemala; guinea; guyana; haiti; honduras; hungary; iceland; india; indonesia; iraq; ireland; israel; italy; jamaica; japan; jordan; kazakhstan; kenya; kuwait; kyrgyz republic; laos; latvia; lebanon; lesotho; lithuania; macedonia (fyr); madagascar; malawi; malaysia; mali; mauritius; mexico; moldova; mongolia; montenegro; morocco; mozambique; namibia; nepal; netherlands; new zealand; nicaragua; niger; nigeria; norway; oman; pakistan; panama; papua new guinea; paraguay; peru; philippines; poland; portugal; qatar; republic of the congo; romania; russia; rwanda; saudi arabia; senegal; serbia; sierra leone; singapore; slovakia; slovenia; south africa; south korea; spain; sri lanka; swaziland; sweden; switzerland; tajikistan; tanzania; thailand; the gambia; togo; trinidad and tobago; tunisia; turkey; uganda; ukraine; united arab emirates; united kingdom; united states of america; uruguay; uzbekistan; venezuela; vietnam; yemen and zambia”. standard dev: standard deviation. obsers: observations. table : correlation matrix weapons homicides incarcerations demonstrations facebook tourists . . - . . - . - . weapons . . . - . - . homicides . - . . . incarcerations . - . - . demonstrations . . facebook . tourists weapons: access to weapons. homicides: homicide rate. incarcerations: incarceration rate. demonstrations: violent demonstrations. facebook: facebook penetration rate. tourists: tourists arrivals. the definitions and sources of variables are provided in table whereas table discloses the summary statistics (in panel a) and sampled countries (in panel b). a correlation matrix is provided in table . the purpose of the correlation matrix is to limit concerns about multicollinearity that could affect the signs of estimated coefficients when independent variables are characterised by a high degree of substitution. from the summary statistics, it is apparent that the variables are comparable from the perspective of mean values. moreover, based on the corresponding standard deviations, the variations indicate some confidence that reasonable estimated linkages will emerge from the regressions. . methodology . . ordinary least squares this study adopts an ordinary least squares technique which is in accordance with the cross- sectional nature of the data structure. the adoption of the empirical strategy is consistent with recent literature with cross-sectional data, notably, in: inclusive development (andrés, ), mobile phone penetration (asongu, a) and financial development (kodila-tedika & asongu, ) studies. equation below examines the correlation between tourism and social media. iiii xsmt   , ( ) where i t ( i sm ) represents the “tourists arrivals” (social media) indicator for country i ,  is a constant, x is the vector of control variables, and i  the error term. x contains: access to weapons, homicide rate; incarcerations rate; violent demonstrations; europe and central asia; south asia and english common law. . . negative binomial regressions a negative binomial estimation strategy is employed because it is consistent with count data. this strategy has been employed on count data in recent empirical literature (choi & luo, ; choi, ). in the regression, the mean of y is determined by the exposure time t and a set of k regressor variables (the x’s). the expression relating these quantities is presented in equation ( ): 𝜇𝑖 = 𝑒xp (ln(𝑡𝑖) + 𝛽 𝑥 𝑖 + 𝛽 𝑥 𝑖 + ⋯ + 𝛽k𝑥k𝑖), ( ) where, 𝑥 ≡ and β is the intercept. β , β , …, βk correspond to unknown parameters to be estimated. their estimates are symbolized as b , b , …, bk. the fundamental negative binomial regression model for an observation i is written as in equation ( ):   i y i i ii i ii y y yy                             ) ()( ),pr( , ( ) where,  ii t and    in the generalised poisson distribution which includes a gamma noise variable with a mean of and a scale of  . the parameter μ represents the mean incidence rate of y per unit of exposure or time. hence, μ is the risk of a new occurrence of the event during a specified exposure period, t (ncss, ; asongu et al., ). . . quantile regressions the two previous estimation approaches report parameter estimates at the conditional mean of tourism. while these mean effects are relevant, this study improves the estimation approaches by using quantile regressions which accounts for initial levels of tourism in the modelling exercise. hence, contrary to ordinary least squares (ols) and negative binomial regressions, the quantile regressions (qr) technique articulates countries with low, intermediate and high initial levels of tourists’ arrivals. it is also important to note that while estimation techniques such as ols are founded on the assumption that error terms of tourism are distributed normally, such an assumption does not hold for qr. hence, with the adopted approach, estimated parameters are obtained from multiple points of the conditional distribution of tourism (koenker & bassett, ). in order to complement other estimation approaches and increase the policy relevance of studies, the qr estimation approach is increasingly being employed in development literature, notably, in: finance (asongu, a), health (asongu, b) and corruption (billger & goel, ; okada & samreth, ; asongu, b) studies. the  th quantile estimator of inclusive development is obtained by solving for the following optimization problem, which is presented without subscripts in eq. ( ) for the purpose of simplicity and readability.                      ii i ii i k xyii i xyii i r xyxy :: ) (min , ( ) where   ,  . contrary to ols which is fundamentally based on minimizing the sum of squared residuals, with qr, the weighted sum of absolute deviations is minimised. for example the th or th quantiles (with  = . or . respectively) by approximately weighing the residuals. the conditional quantile of tourism or iy given ix is:  iiy xxq )/( , ( ) where unique slope parameters are modelled for each  th specific quantile. this formulation is analogous to ixxye )/( in the ols slope where parameters are assessed only at the mean of the conditional distribution of tourism. for eq. ( ), the dependent variable iy is the number of tourist arrivals while ix contains: a constant term, access to weapons, homicide rate; incarcerations rate; violent demonstrations; europe and central asia; south asia and english common law. . empirical results . presentation of contemporary results table presents contemporary ols and negative binomial regressions on the left-hand side and right-hand side, respectively. from the table, it is apparent that there is a positive relationship between facebook penetration and the number of tourist arrivals. this relationship is both significant in the univariate regression as well as in regressions including the conditioning information set. we notice that the magnitude of the relationship and degree of significance slightly decrease with the inclusion of more variables in the conditioning information set. this is logical because the coefficient of determination also increases concurrently with an increase of variables in the conditioning information set. moreover, the magnitude of facebook penetration decreases while the coefficient of adjustment increases because in the real world, the number of tourist arrivals is explained beyond the levels of facebook penetration. the negative binomial regressions are consistent with ols regressions. the significant control variables also emerge with the anticipated signs. table : ordinary least squares and negative binomial regressions (contemporary) dependent variable: tourist arrivals ordinary least squares (ols) lntourist negative binomial regression (nbr) tourist constant . *** . *** . *** . *** . *** . *** . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) facebook penetration . *** . *** . ** . * . *** . *** . *** . ** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ( . ) access to weapons --- - . - . - . --- - . ** - . * - . ** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) homicides --- - . * - . *** - . ** --- - . - . *** - . *** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) incarcerations --- --- . *** . *** --- --- . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) demonstrations --- --- - . - . --- --- - . - . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) europe and central asia --- --- --- . --- --- --- . ( . ) ( . ) south asia --- --- --- - . --- --- --- . ( . ) ( . ) english common law --- --- --- - . --- --- --- - . * ( . ) ( . ) fisher . *** . *** . *** . *** adjusted r² . . . . log likelihood - . - . - . - . likelihood ratio (lr) chi-square . *** . *** . *** . *** likelihood ratio (lr) for alpha . *** . *** . *** . *** observations ***,**,*: significance levels at %, % and % respectively. as discussed in the data section, the dependent is only log-normalised for ordinary least squares (ols). table : quantile regressions (contemporary) dependent variables: ln tourist arrivals q. q. q. q. q. constant . *** . ** . *** . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) facebook penetration . . ** . ** . * . ** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) access to weapons - . - . - . * - . - . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) homicides - . . - . * - . *** - . * ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) incarcerations . . . * . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) demonstrations - . - . - . - . - . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) europe and central asia - . - . . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) south asia - . - . - . . . * ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) english common law - . . - . - . - . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) pseudo r . . . . . observations *, **, ***: significance levels of %, % and % respectively. ols: ordinary least squares. r² for ols and pseudo r² for quantile regression. lower quantiles (e.g., q . ) signify nations where tourist arrivals are least. the qr results in table are also consistent with findings from ols and negative binomial regressions with the exceptions of the following: (i) the relationship between facebook penetration and tourists arrivals is significant from the th quantile to the th quantile and (ii) in terms of magnitude, the significance of the relationship is highest in the th and th quantiles. hence, it follows that facebook penetration is more relevant in promoting tourist arrivals in countries where initial levels in tourist arrivals are the highest and low. . robustness checks with non-contemporary regressions table and table respectively present robustness checks for table and table . consistent with recent literature (see mlachila et al., ; asongu et al., ), the independent variables are lagged by one year in order to increase control for endogeneity. the established findings are broadly consistent with those in tables - . table : ordinary least squares and negative binomial regressions (non-contemporary) dependent variable: tourist arrivals ordinary least squares (ols) lntourist negative binomial regression (nbr) tourist constant . *** . *** . *** . *** . *** . *** . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) facebook penetration (- ) . *** . *** . ** . * . *** . *** . *** . ** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) access to weapons (- ) --- - . - . - . --- - . * - . * - . ** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) homicides (- ) --- - . * - . *** - . ** --- - . - . *** - . ** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) incarcerations (- ) --- --- . *** . *** --- --- . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) demonstrations (- ) --- --- - . - . --- --- - . - . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) europe and central asia --- --- --- . --- --- --- . ( . ) ( . ) south asia --- --- --- - . --- --- --- . ( . ) ( . ) english common law --- --- --- - . --- --- --- - . ( . ) ( . ) fisher . *** . *** . *** . *** adjusted r² . . . . log likelihood - . - . - . - . likelihood ratio (lr) chi-square . *** . *** . *** . *** likelihood ratio (lr) for alpha . *** . *** . *** . *** observations ***,**,*: significance levels at %, % and % respectively. table : quantile regressions (non-contemporary) dependent variables: ln tourist arrivals q. q. q. q. q. constant . *** . *** . *** . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) facebook penetration (- ) . . ** . ** . . ** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) access to weapons (- ) - . - . - . - . - . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) homicides (- ) - . . - . * - . * - . * ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) incarcerations (- ) . . . ** . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) demonstrations (- ) - . - . - . - . - . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) europe and central asia - . . . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) south asia - . - . - . - . . ** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) english common law - . . - . - . - . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) pseudo r . . . . . observations *, **, ***: significance levels of %, % and % respectively. ols: ordinary least squares. r² for ols and pseudo r² for quantile regression. lower quantiles (e.g., q . ) signify nations where tourist arrivals are least. . concluding remarks and future research directions this study has examined the relationship between tourism and social media from a cross section of countries with data for the year . the empirical evidence is based on ordinary least squares, negative binomial and quantile regressions. two main findings have been established. first, there is a positive relationship between facebook penetration and the number of tourist arrivals. second, facebook penetration is more relevant in promoting tourist arrivals in countries where initial levels in tourist arrivals are the highest and low. it what follows we discuss attendant policy implications. in this study, the established positive relationship between facebook penetration and tourism can be elucidated from four principal angles: the transformation of travel research, the rise in social sharing, improvements in customer service and the reshaping of travel agencies (carnoy, ). the points are substantiated in chronological order. first, facebook penetration has substantially transformed travel research because of inter alia: online reviews have been democratized; travelers rely to the facebook pages of tourism companies to search for accommodation and future travel destinations and, potential tourists also rely on online peer exchanges on facebook for travel inspiration and validation. second, the rise of social sharing through facebook enables, inter alia: the possibility of potential tourists to have insights from past tourists into the experiences that they can expect in the destination site or country. accordingly, the content of facebook for a given travel destination is considerably influential and accessible because it can either inspire potential guests to book for destinations or put them off, contingent on how users share their experiences. such sharing is done by means of videos and photos during travels. according to carnoy ( ) as high as % of millennials share videos and photos related to the travel via social media platforms such as facebook, hence, peer-to-peer online web content influences potential guests. it is in this light that many resorts and hotels are using social media campaigns and contests to leverage on the social activity of their guests. third, facebook penetration enhances customer service in the tourism industry. this is essentially because customer satisfaction and services have also been improved by the social media. it is for this reason that many brands use facebook to increase awareness and clarify confused and unsatisfied customers. tourism companies also use facebook to address complains in a genuine and sincere manner as well as to develop a solid reputation among potential and current customers. accordingly, timely responses to questions and complaints from current and potential tourists by tourism companies through facebook can help to better inform future customers. fourth, facebook penetration is increasing tourists’ arrivals because it is also reshaping travel agencies. accordingly, the rapid diffusion of information through social media has obliged travel agencies to adapt in the transition to digital agencies from traditional brick-and-mortar agencies. these digital agencies which depend on their facebok pages for publicity now account for a considerable percentage of airline booking, package bookings and cruise bookings. a caveat of the study is that, we have established relationships which cannot be extended to causality. as more data become available, it will be worthwhile to improve the study to establish causality for more robust policy implications. moreover, with the availability of data, fixed effects estimations can be used to effectively estimate the impact of regional dummies and overcome the problems related to accounting for geographical factors. references ajzen, i., ( ). “the theory of planned behaviour.” organizational behavior and human decision processes, ( ), pp. - . ajzen, i., & fishbein, m. 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( ). “influence of terrorism risk on foreign tourism decisions.” annals of tourism research, ( ), pp. - . stone, c. b., & wang, q., ( ). “from conversations to digital communication: the mnemonic consequences of consuming and producing information via social media”, topics in cognitive science. doi: . /tops. . tchamyou, v. s., ( a). “education, lifelong learning, inequality and financial access: evidence from african countries”. contemporary social science. doi: . / . . . tchamyou, v. s., ( b).“the role of information sharing in modulating the effect of financial access on inequality”. journal of african business: forthcoming. tchamyou, v.s., erreygers, g., & cassimon, d., ( ). “inequality, ict and financial access in africa”, technological forecasting and social change. doi: . /j.techfore. . . . udupa, s., ( ). “gaali cultures: the politics of abusive exchange on social media”, new media & society, ( ), pp. - . yousafzai, s. y., foxall, g. r., & pallister, j. g., ( ). “explaining internet banking behavior: theory of reasoned action, theory of planned behavior, or technology acceptance model?” journal of applied social psychology , ( ), pp. - . zeng, b., & gerritsen, r., ( ). “what do we know about social media in tourism? a review”, tourism management perspectives, (april), pp. - . world bank ( ). “world development report : digital dividends”, the world bank http://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr (accessed: / / ). http://www.worldbank.org/en/publication/wdr how can we talk about race in the classroom? summer pennell and emily stobbe how can we talk about race in the classroom? about the author summer pennell is an assistant professor of english education at truman state university. her teaching and research interests include social justice education, teacher education, queer theory and pedagogy, and young adult literature. she can be reached via email at spennell@truman.edu or found on twitter @summerpennell. emily stobbe is a graduate student pursuing her master of arts in education at truman state university. her teaching and research interests include social justice education, critical race education, and culturally sustaining pedagogy. she can be reached via email at enstobbe@gmail.com or found on twitter @stobbeemily or instagram @booksfightback. citation pennell, s. & stobbe, e. ( ). how can we talk about race in the classroom? currents, ( ), - . http://dx.doi.org/ . / currents. . . about currents the national center for institutional diversity (ncid) currents publication connects scholarship in diversity, equity, and inclusion to practice and public discourse. currents is a scholarship to practice journal that translates cutting-edge research into concise, accessible discussions to inform researchers, practitioners, leaders, policymakers, and the broader public conversation. all papers undergo a two part review process including a review by content experts and review for public accessibility. copyright © by regents of the university of michigan access to this publication online at www.ncidcurrents.org how can we talk about race in the classroom? introduction race and racism are topics that should be discussed in all classrooms. however, some see such topics as outside of the standard curricula that must be aligned to state or national standards. curriculum standards are a frequent topic in the media, but much coverage depicts them as rigid rather than as a flexible tool that skilled teachers can use to their advantage to justify teaching rich, complex lessons. research shows that “teachers’ views of standards … depend on how multidimensional or flexible they perceive the standards to be” (darling-hammond & wise, , p. ). furthermore, avila and moore ( ) stated that “the crucial aspect is for educators to apply a critical literacy lens to the standards” (p. ). thus, if teachers do not see the flexibility the standards provide and are not sure how to read standards with a critical eye—particularly in regards to racial justice—they may stick to “safe” topics, and students may have little opportunities to discuss current events. this research sought to answer the primary question: how can missouri teachers align their lessons to state standards while teaching about race and racism in contemporary america? to answer this question, the researchers first conducted a content analysis (krippendorff, ) of the – missouri learning standards (https:// dese.mo.gov) for all grade levels and school subjects using a framework of critical race methodology (crm) (solórzana & yosso, ). crm stems from critical race theory (crt), which focuses on the experiences of people of color and in education “foregrounds and accounts for the role of race and racism ... and works towards the elimination of racism” (solórzano & yosso, , p. ). crm allows researchers to focus research methods, in our case the content analysis of state standards and ...if teachers do not see the flexibility the standards provide and are not sure how to read standards with a critical eye— particularly in regards to racial justice—they may stick to “safe” topics, and students may have little opportunities to discuss current events. how can we talk about race in the classroom? a teacher survey, explicitly on race and racism. for the second phase, researchers facilitated a teacher workshop in which participants learned (a) tenets of critical race theory, (b) how the tenets applied to state standards in their grade(s) and content(s), and (c) practiced critical reflection on topics of race both inside and outside of the classroom (using a tool from pennell & cain, ). participants completed a reflective survey at the end of the workshop. significance for teachers and education researchers racial justice is particularly relevant to teachers in missouri, where the research took place. the state is under national scrutiny due to the violent treatment of african americans and other people of color by the police. in , the black lives matter movement grew from protests of the killing of michael brown in ferguson, missouri, by a white police officer. teachers in missouri must talk about these topics in their classrooms; however, some hesitate to discuss any topic that might seem “controversial” due to fear of backlash from students, parents, and administrators. this research can help alleviate this stress, as it provides teachers with a means to justify their lessons through content standard alignment. although the standards analyzed were particular to missouri, the implications can be applied nationally. furthermore, this research can offer a model to teacher educators and researchers for training teachers on this issue as all content standards can be viewed and taught through a crt lens, emphasizing racial justice. findings: content analysis and teacher workshop primary findings related to the content analysis of the missouri learning standards. these findings were then shared with missouri teachers in a workshop (described above). participants completed a post-workshop survey, which is analyzed briefly at the end of this section. we coded the standards for eight crt elementsracism, institutional power, challenge to dominant ideology, commitment to social justice, experiential knowledge, majoritarian story, transdisciplinary perspective, and counter- narrative (see tables and ). we also coded for references to crt standards that were both explicit and implicit. standards coded as “explicit” made how can we talk about race in the classroom? table . counts of critical race theory tenets found in missouri state standards by subject how can we talk about race in the classroom? table . counts of potential critical race theory tenets found in missouri state standards by subject how can we talk about race in the classroom? specific references to race, using words such as “race,” “diversity,” “culture,” or the names of specific racial groups. standards coded as “implicit” did not directly name race but could still be used to that end. not counting the crt elements of racism, majoritarian stories, and institutional power, counseling had the most explicit crt elements present, followed by social studies and english language arts (ela). social studies, ela, and visual arts standards had the highest amount of implicit, or potential, crt elements. commitment to social justice was the most explicitly represented crt element, largely due to standards in both counseling and social studies. the most implicitly represented crt element was counter-narrative. most standards that potentially aimed at specific learning around race instead used euphemisms such as “diversity,” “diverse,” and “multicultural.” still, for specific mentions of “diversity” or “culture,” these standards were coded as explicit and often also coded with crt elements such as counter- narrative, experiential knowledge, and challenge to dominant ideology. for example, physical education’s standard efficiency of human movement and performance a includes, “show appropriate sportsmanship and sensitivity to diversity and gender issues”; it is interesting that the writers of this standard felt comfortable naming gender as a specific issue but lumped other issues––including, potentially, race––under the term “diversity.” use of words such as “diversity,” “multicultural,” and “diverse” were often generally concentrated in standards for elementary students, with the exception of courses like music. both health and social studies did explicitly use the word “ethnic” on occasion. for example, the health standard functions and interrelationships of systems c read, “analyze ways individuals can respond to the various needs and characteristics of diverse people including those with different abilities, chronic diseases, different ethnic and cultural backgrounds.” visual arts mentioned “race” once, in the standard ap a: “discuss how people might respond differently to specific american artworks based upon their sub group (e.g., race, gender, attitude toward the environment, business, immigrant group, age, religion, economic status, or level of education).” social studies had the highest number of standards with crt elements of racism, majoritarian stories, and institutional power, followed by visual how can we talk about race in the classroom? arts and music. considering social studies deals largely with american history and government, which is fraught with racism and institutional power, it is logical that its standards would have the highest amount of those three elements. one example of this in missouri, united states and world history af, includes, “analyze the cultural interactions among these groups: a. native americans, b. immigrants from europe, c. africans brought to america.” this standard is racist because it euphemizes “slaves” or “enslaved peoples” with “africans brought to america.” this euphemization softens the realities of the slave trade. some standards present unique opportunities for intentional discussions about race. for example, the world language standard v . b reads, “interview target-language speakers to gain insights into sociological and cultural issues such as life in france or life in internment camps in the us for japanese americans during world war ii.” likewise, visual arts’ standard ap a reads, “discuss how different cultures have different concepts of beauty. explain how responses (feelings or ideas) to artworks from various cultures are based on both personal experience and group beliefs.” see tables and for more details on the coded state standards. it is important to note that a single standard might have been coded with multiple crt elements rather than just one per standard; however, if a standard was coded with an explicit mention of an element, it would not then be coded with an implicit mention as well. during the teacher workshop, participants were given time to examine selected standards for the grade levels and subjects they taught as well as an introduction to crt practice reflecting on incidents of racism in schools. in a post-workshop survey, participants indicated they found the time to reflect with like-minded colleagues useful and were ready to re-enter their classrooms energized and better prepared to tackle these conversations with their students. important for our purposes, participants indicated the workshop “strengthened my ideas on [how to] proactively plan and not just most standards that potentially aimed at specific learning around race instead used euphemisms such as “diversity,” “diverse,” and “multicultural.” how can we talk about race in the classroom? react to current events,” “improved the probability of talking about race in a deeper fashion,” and increased confidence “in being able to connect discussions of race to learning outcomes and standards.” implications this study shows that all content areas and grade levels offer rich opportunities for classroom lessons and discussions on racial justice if educators can apply a crt framework to their application of curriculum standards. this crt lens allows teachers to not only discuss race and racial justice on the surface level but also examine systemic inequalities that create racial injustice. this can also be empowering for students of color as it allows them to see that the system, not they as individuals, are to blame for difficulties in society. providing teachers with tools including vocabulary, standards aligned to crt tenets, and a reflection template also gave them the confidence to begin, or continue, lessons on race in their classrooms with a renewed sense of purpose. future research can continue to work with teachers on analyzing curriculum standards with critical lenses to approach difficult subject matter. references avila, j., & moore, m. ( ). critical literacy, digital literacies, and common core state standards: a workable union? theory into practice, ( ), – . doi: . / . . darling-hammond, l., & wise, a. e. ( ). beyond standardization: state standards and school improvement. the elementary school journal, ( ), – . doi: . / krippendorff, k. ( ). content analysis: an introduction to its methodology ( rd ed.). los angeles, ca: sage. pennell, s., & cain, j. m. ( ). adorned: moving from decoration to disposition in social justice. in j. diem (ed.), the social and cultural foundations of education: a reader (pp. – ). san diego, ca: cognella academic publishing. solórzano, d. g., & yosso, t. j. ( ). critical race methodology: counter-storytelling as an analytical framework for education research. qualitative inquiry, ( ), – . doi: . / lsa.umich.edu/ncid university of michigan school of education building east university avenue ann arbor, mi - microsoft word - introduction.en_vignola.docx la	
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  of	
  existence.	
  following	
  deleuze’s	
  logic	
  of	
  sense,	
  but	
  also	
   projecting	
  it	
  onto	
  the	
  present	
  (hence	
  in-­‐‑actualizing	
  it),	
  the	
  commodification	
  of	
  existence	
   occurs	
  first	
  in	
  chronological	
  time,	
  which	
  is	
  why	
  one	
  says,	
  “time	
  is	
  money”.	
  this	
  is	
  the	
   time	
  of	
  consumption,	
  time	
  that	
  literally	
  consumes	
  itself,	
  but	
  it	
  is	
  also	
  the	
  time	
  in	
  which	
   we	
  consume	
  and	
  consume	
  ourselves.	
  with	
  incomparable	
  style,	
  deleuze	
  opposed	
  to	
  that	
   sort	
  of	
  metaphysical	
  hourglass,	
  i.e.	
  chronos,	
  the	
  flashing	
  of	
  another	
  temporality,	
  the	
  one	
   of	
  aion:	
   	
   in	
  accordance	
  with	
  aion,	
  only	
  the	
  past	
  and	
  future	
  inhere	
  or	
  subsist	
  in	
  time.	
  instead	
   of	
  a	
  present	
  which	
  absorbs	
  the	
  past	
  and	
  future,	
  a	
  future	
  and	
  past	
  divide	
  the	
  present	
   at	
  every	
  instant	
  and	
  subdivide	
  it	
  ad	
  infinitum,	
  in	
  both	
  directions	
  at	
  once.	
  or	
  rather,	
  it	
   is	
  the	
  instant	
  without	
  thickness	
  and	
  without	
  extension,	
  which	
  subdivides	
  each	
  pre-­‐‑ sent	
   into	
  past	
  and	
  future,	
  rather	
  than	
  vast	
  and	
  thick	
  presents	
  which	
  comprehend	
   both	
  future	
  and	
  past	
  in	
  relation	
  to	
  one	
  another…	
  whereas	
  chronos	
  expressed	
  the	
  ac-­‐‑ *	
   prometeo	
  researcher,	
  yachay	
  tech.	
  this	
  publication	
  was	
  sponsored	
  by	
  the	
  prometeo	
  project	
  of	
  the	
   secretariat	
  for	
  higher	
  education,	
  science,	
  technology	
  and	
  innovation	
  of	
  the	
  republic	
  of	
  ecuador. la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  online	
  journal	
  of	
  philosophy	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  and	
  the	
  mirror tion	
  of	
  bodies	
  and	
  the	
  creation	
  of	
  corporeal	
  qualities,	
  aion	
  is	
  the	
  locus	
  of	
  incorporeal	
   events,	
  and	
  of	
  attributes	
  which	
  are	
  distinct	
  from	
  qualities.	
  whereas	
  chronos	
  was	
  in-­‐‑ separable	
  from	
  the	
  bodies	
  which	
  filled	
  it	
  out	
  entirely	
  as	
  causes	
  and	
  matter,	
  aion	
  is	
   populated	
   by	
   effects	
   which	
   haunt	
   it	
   without	
   ever	
   filling	
   it	
   up…	
   always	
   already	
   passed	
  and	
  eternally	
  yet	
  to	
  come,	
  aion	
  is	
  the	
  eternal	
  truth	
  of	
  time:	
  pure	
  empty	
  form	
   of	
  time,	
  which	
  has	
  freed	
  itself	
  of	
  its	
  present	
  corporeal	
  content	
  and	
  has	
  thereby	
  un-­‐‑ wound	
  its	
  own	
  circle	
  (deleuze	
   :	
   ).	
   	
   it	
  is	
  indeed	
  from	
  aion’s	
  point	
  of	
  view	
  that	
  the	
  becomings	
  of	
  carroll’s	
  alice	
  are	
  to	
  be	
   understood,	
  aion	
  being	
  the	
  extra-­‐‑corporeal	
  and	
  ineffectual	
  modality	
  of	
  time	
  itself,	
  split	
   between	
  past	
  and	
  future,	
  escaping	
  for	
  this	
  reason	
  from	
  the	
  trap	
  of	
  identity.	
  if	
  it	
  is	
  with	
   chronos	
  that	
  one	
  can	
  tell	
   the	
  story	
  of	
  what	
  happens	
  to	
  him	
  and	
  of	
  his	
  gestures	
  as	
  a	
   succession,	
  it	
  is	
  only	
  aiôn	
  that	
  allows	
  us	
  to	
  deal	
  with	
  the	
  events	
  happening	
  on	
  another	
   plane,	
   that	
  of	
  thinking,	
  which	
  experiments	
  with,	
  counters	
   the	
  effects	
  of	
  and,	
  by	
   this,	
   extracts	
  the	
  sense	
  of,	
  our	
  actions	
  and	
  passions	
  within	
  that	
  which	
  occurs:	
  “the	
  event	
  is	
  in	
   what	
   happens”.	
   furthermore,	
   as	
   the	
   logic	
   of	
   sense	
   teaches	
   us,	
   this	
   thought	
   moves	
   through	
  paradoxes,	
  that	
  is,	
  by	
  overcoming	
  opinion,	
  common	
  sense	
  and	
  all	
  the	
  images	
   imposed	
   or	
   suggested	
   by	
   philosophy,	
   politics,	
   science,	
   power	
   (from	
   religion	
   to	
   the	
   market,	
  from	
  the	
  state	
  to	
  culture).	
  these	
  are	
  the	
  images	
  that	
  indicate	
  to	
  us	
  how	
  to	
  think	
   and	
  how	
  to	
  watch	
  ourselves	
  in	
  the	
  mirror.	
   in	
  this	
  sense,	
  la	
  deleuziana	
  desires	
  to	
  think	
  alice’s	
  becoming	
  as	
  a	
  becoming-­‐‑woman	
   both	
  in	
  its	
  a-­‐‑chronological	
  theoretical	
  paradoxicality	
  and	
  in	
  the	
  political	
  paradoxicality	
   that	
  is	
  expressed	
  in	
  actuality.	
  aware	
  of	
  and	
  enthusiastic	
  about	
  the	
  inseparability	
  of	
  the	
   two	
   dimensions	
   (theoretical	
   and	
   political)	
   within	
   deleuze’s	
   writing	
   and	
   thought,	
   the	
   journal	
  suggests	
  a	
  pathway	
  to	
  sense	
  the	
  entrance	
  to	
  which	
  resides	
  in	
  the	
  most	
  general	
   recognition	
  of	
  becoming,	
  as	
  the	
  movement	
  of	
  thought	
  unfolding	
  through	
  its	
  conceptual	
   personae.	
  it	
  deals	
  with	
  a	
  particular	
  entrance,	
  or	
  a	
  precise	
  paradox,	
  inasmuch	
  it	
  immedi-­‐‑ ately	
  opens	
  onto	
   that	
  middle	
  ground	
  between	
  philosophy	
  and	
   literature,	
   from	
  which	
   comes	
   deleuze’s	
   alice	
   herself.	
   it	
   is	
   indeed	
   in	
   the	
   interstices	
   between	
   concepts	
   and	
   writings,	
  from	
  which	
  “one	
  comes	
  back	
  with	
  red	
  eyes”	
  (deleuze	
   ),	
  that	
  there	
  occurs	
   both	
   the	
   becomings	
   (becoming	
   woman,	
   child,	
   animal,	
   imperceptible,	
   etc.)	
   and	
   the	
   creation	
  of	
  conceptual	
  personae.	
  hence	
  the	
  front	
  door	
  to	
  becoming	
  allows	
  us	
  to	
  enter	
   the	
  outside,	
  to	
  “breathe	
  some	
  possibility”,	
  that	
  is,	
  to	
  feel	
  and	
  observe	
  the	
  lines	
  of	
  flight	
   that	
   deleuzian	
   thought	
   makes	
   available	
   confronted	
   with	
   a	
   present	
   that	
   it	
   wishes	
   to	
   elude,	
  but	
  only	
  so	
  as	
  to	
  be	
  able	
  to	
  survey	
  and	
  overfly	
  it,	
  and	
  in	
  this	
  way	
  to	
  invent	
  strate-­‐‑ gies	
  capable	
  of	
  critiquing	
  it.	
   why	
   alice?	
   because	
   she	
   becomes	
   both	
   young	
   girl	
   (jeune-­‐‑fille)	
   and	
   woman	
   at	
   the	
   same	
  moment.	
  it	
  should	
  be	
  remembered	
  that,	
  amongst	
  all	
  the	
  becomings,	
  for	
  deleuze	
   and	
  guattari	
  becoming-­‐‑woman	
  is	
  the	
  pre-­‐‑condition	
  and	
  the	
  unavoidable	
  starting	
  point	
   of	
  the	
  entire	
  process	
  of	
  minoritarian	
  becoming.	
   the	
  reasons	
  for	
  such	
  an	
  incipit	
  are	
  essentially	
  political,	
  and	
  they	
  refer	
  to	
  the	
  phallogo-­‐‑ la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  online	
  journal	
  of	
  philosophy	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  and	
  the	
  mirror centric	
  valency	
  inscribed	
  in	
  the	
  constitution	
  of	
  western	
  subjectivity.	
  the	
  man	
  (male)	
  is	
   indeed	
   “the	
   privileged	
   referent	
   of	
   subjectivity,	
   the	
   standard-­‐‑bearer	
   of	
   the	
   norm/law/logos	
   [that]	
   majority	
   represents,	
   the	
   dead	
   heart	
   of	
   the	
   system”	
   (braidotti	
   :	
   ).	
  consequently,	
  the	
  masculine	
  can	
  be	
  nothing	
  but	
  a	
  site	
  for	
  deconstruction	
  and	
   critique	
   –	
   becoming	
   is	
   only	
   minoritarian	
   –	
   and	
   moreover	
   becoming-­‐‑woman	
   is	
   to	
   be	
   understood	
   as	
   “a	
   fundamental	
   step	
   in	
   the	
   process	
   of	
   becoming,	
   for	
   both	
   and	
   for	
   all	
   sexes”.	
   it	
   is	
   in	
  this	
  sense	
  that,	
  according	
  to	
  deleuze	
  and	
  guattari,	
  “even	
  women	
  must	
   become-­‐‑woman”,	
  while	
  today,	
  from	
  the	
  alps	
  to	
  the	
  pyramids,	
  from	
  the	
  manzanares	
  to	
   the	
  rhine,	
  it	
  seems	
  that	
  the	
  trend	
  is	
  that	
  of	
  becoming	
  young	
  girls	
  –	
  and	
  of	
  selfies,	
  or	
  the	
   self-­‐‑/auto-­‐‑exposing	
  use	
  of	
  subjectivity’s	
  digital	
  showcase,	
  with	
  facebook	
  representing	
   the	
  symptoms	
  of	
  this	
  “infantility”.	
   certainly	
  la	
  deleuziana,	
  a	
  woman	
  and	
  young	
  girl	
  within	
  the	
  same	
  becoming	
  as	
  alice,	
   does	
  not	
  intend	
  to	
  lash	
  out	
  either	
  at	
  a	
  mass	
  phenomenon	
  or	
  at	
  the	
  tendencies	
  of	
  a	
  gender	
   that	
  would	
  also	
  include	
  her	
  –	
  not	
  to	
  mention	
  the	
  fact	
  that	
  she	
  is	
  on	
  facebook	
  as	
  well…	
   thus	
   the	
   moment	
   has	
   come	
   to	
   explicate	
   the	
   sense	
   of	
   being	
   a	
   young	
   girl	
   today,	
   by	
   returning	
  to	
  tiqqun’s	
  theory	
  (conceived	
  at	
  the	
  end	
  of	
  the	
  last	
  century),	
  for	
  whom	
  the	
   “jeune-­‐‑fille”	
  is	
  a	
  sort	
  of	
  updating	
  of	
  this	
  anthropomorphosis	
  of	
  capital	
  (cesarano	
   ),	
   which	
  is	
  the	
  result	
  of	
  a	
  phenomenological	
  description	
  that	
  concerns	
  the	
  anthropophizing	
   and	
  anthropopoietic	
  process	
  of	
  capital.	
  the	
  latter	
  makes	
  itself	
  human,	
  incarnates	
  itself	
   in	
  it,	
  and	
  by	
  this	
  makes	
  every	
  man	
  a	
  part	
  of	
  itself	
  –	
  building	
  the	
  human	
  starting	
  from	
  its	
   axioms.	
  in	
  this	
  sense,	
  we	
  feel	
  obliged	
  to	
  add,	
  we	
  must	
  also	
  investigate,	
  at	
  a	
  conceptual	
   level,	
  the	
  paradoxical	
  feminization	
  of	
  work,	
  which	
  colors	
  or	
  affects	
  and	
  abuses	
  cognitive	
   capitalism	
  beyond	
  and	
  within	
  any	
  gender	
  distinction.	
  moreover,	
  and	
   in	
   line	
  with	
   the	
   “postscript	
  on	
  the	
  societies	
  of	
  control”,	
  the	
  jeune-­‐‑fille	
  best	
  allows	
  us	
  to	
  understand	
  the	
   valorization	
  of	
   individual	
  differences	
  by	
  marketing	
  and	
  data	
  behaviourism	
  (rouvroy	
   ),	
   inasmuch	
  as	
   they	
  are	
  objects	
  of	
  promotion	
  and	
  exploitation,	
  as	
  used	
   in	
  post-­‐‑ disciplinary	
  societies.	
   why	
  the	
  jeune-­‐‑fille?	
  first,	
  because	
  “she”	
  is	
  not	
  a	
  sexuated	
  or	
  generational	
  concept	
   (and	
  thus	
  to	
  be	
  confined	
  within	
  a	
  singular	
  social	
  figure,	
  precisely	
  that	
  of	
  the	
  young	
  girl),	
   inasmuch	
  as	
  she	
  can	
  be	
  identified	
  with	
  every	
  subject	
  –	
  in	
  primis	
  the	
  male	
  –	
  that	
  embod-­‐‑ ies	
  the	
  becoming-­‐‑commodity	
  of	
  human	
  being.	
  because,	
  therefore,	
  she	
  “is	
  only	
  the	
  model	
   citizen	
  such	
  as	
  commodity	
  society	
  has	
  defined	
   it	
   since	
  world	
  war	
  one,	
  as	
  an	
  explicit	
   response	
  to	
  revolutionary	
  threats	
  against	
  it”	
  (tiqqun	
   :	
  iii).	
  because,	
  definitely,	
  as	
  a	
   product	
  of	
  the	
  valorization	
  of	
  difference,	
  the	
  jeune-­‐‑fille	
  becomes	
  a	
  singularity	
  perpetual-­‐‑ ly	
   in	
   the	
  mirror,	
  and	
  she	
  “would	
  be	
  that	
  being	
  that	
  has	
  no	
  more	
   intimacy	
  with	
   itself	
   except	
  as	
  a	
  value,	
  and	
  all	
  of	
  whose	
  activity,	
  in	
  all	
  of	
  its	
  details,	
  will	
  finally	
  come	
  down	
  to	
   self-­‐‑valuation”	
  (ivi:	
  v).	
  here	
  it	
  is	
  thus	
  the	
  selfie,	
  as	
  the	
  current	
  mirror	
  of	
  the	
  jeune-­‐‑fille,	
   the	
  contemporary	
  screen	
   that,	
   in	
   the	
  auto-­‐‑valorization	
  of	
   the	
  user,	
   gives	
  vent	
   to	
   the	
   symptom	
  of	
  presence’s	
  and	
  the	
  present’s	
  neurosis,	
  a	
  neurosis	
  that	
  marries	
  the	
  symbolic	
   misery	
  generated	
  by	
  the	
  hypertrophy	
  of	
  communication	
  grown	
  on	
  social	
  networks	
  and	
   la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  online	
  journal	
  of	
  philosophy	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  and	
  the	
  mirror through	
  their	
  communicative	
  models.	
   unlike	
  tiqqun,	
  we	
  do	
  not	
  think	
  (ourselves)	
  from	
  the	
  height	
  of	
  a	
  theoretical	
  and	
  politi-­‐‑ cal	
  community,	
  as	
  adamantine	
  revolutionary	
  subjectivities ,	
  because	
  we	
  are	
  conscious	
  of	
   the	
  milieu	
  of	
  capitalistic	
  control,	
  the	
  one	
  of	
  the	
  digital	
  screens	
  where	
  our	
  unconscious	
   lives.	
  we	
  must	
  also	
  be	
  aware,	
  as	
  veronique	
  bergen	
  emphasizes,	
  of	
  the	
  tendential	
  capture	
   of	
  aion,	
   i.e.	
  of	
  becomings,	
  by	
  the	
  market:	
  aion	
   is	
   increasingly	
  reterritorialized,	
  hence	
   chronologized.	
  nevertheless,	
  or	
  maybe	
  precisely	
  for	
  this	
  reason,	
  we	
  can	
  desire	
  aion	
  only	
   because	
  we	
  are	
  dangerously	
   immersed	
  in	
  this	
  chronological	
  present	
  that	
  offers	
  to	
  us	
   only	
  sterilized	
  differences	
  and	
  nomadisms.	
  and	
  it	
  is	
  for	
  this	
  same	
  reason	
  that	
  becoming	
   is	
  possible	
  and,	
  firstly,	
  revolutionary	
  becoming.	
  to	
  ignore	
  our	
  immersion	
  in	
  this	
  present	
   would	
  be	
  to	
  be	
  worthy	
  only	
  of	
  what	
  happens	
  to	
  others.	
  therefore,	
  we	
  have	
  no	
  need	
  to	
   cry,	
   nor	
   to	
   hope,	
   but	
   let	
   us	
   try	
   to	
   find	
   new	
   weapons	
   –	
   following	
   deleuze’s	
   parodic	
   suggestion	
  of	
  an	
  art	
  of	
  control:	
  	
   	
   television	
  is	
  the	
  form	
  in	
  which	
  the	
  new	
  powers	
  of	
  “control”	
  become	
  immediate	
  and	
   direct.	
  to	
  get	
   to	
  the	
  heart	
  of	
   the	
  confrontation	
  you’d	
  almost	
  have	
  to	
  ask	
  whether	
   this	
  control	
  might	
  be	
  reversed,	
  harnessed	
  by	
  the	
  supplementary	
  function	
  opposed	
  to	
   power:	
  whether	
  one	
  could	
  develop	
  an	
  art	
  of	
  control	
   that	
  would	
  be	
  a	
  kind	
  of	
  new	
   form	
  of	
  resistance.	
  (deleuze	
   :	
   )	
   	
   yesterday	
  the	
  television,	
   today	
  the	
  selfie	
  and	
  the	
  social	
  network:	
   these	
  are	
  almost	
   incompossible	
   words	
   for	
   some	
   martian	
   attempting	
   to	
   learn	
   english,	
   but	
   they	
   are	
   nevertheless	
  functional,	
  each	
  in	
  relation	
  to	
  the	
  other,	
   for	
  the	
  capitalist	
  exploitation	
  of	
   relationships	
  (stiegler	
   )	
  and	
  paired	
  together	
  by	
  his	
  holiness	
  communication.	
  the	
   fact	
   that	
   the	
   selfie,	
   as	
   a	
   monadography	
   of	
   the	
   st	
   century,	
   has	
   captured	
   so	
   much	
   territory	
   as	
   to	
   become	
   the	
   most	
   used	
   practice	
   on	
   social	
   networks	
   gives	
   pause	
   for	
   thought.	
  perhaps	
  it	
  is	
  a	
  kind	
  of	
  reaction	
  to	
  something	
  that	
  no	
  longer	
  exists.	
  and	
  precisely	
   because	
  this	
  is	
  what	
  it	
  lacks,	
  capitalism	
  –	
  which	
  is	
  an	
  artist	
  of	
  lack	
  –	
  flaunts	
  its	
  presence.	
   deleuze,	
  following	
  klee,	
  already	
  said	
  long	
  ago	
  that	
  “the	
  people	
  are	
  missing”;	
  today	
  one	
   could	
  say	
  that	
  “the	
  social	
  is	
  missing”.	
  the	
  social	
  of	
  digital	
  technology	
  seems	
  indeed	
  to	
  be	
   substituting	
  itself	
  for	
  the	
  social	
  itself,	
  emptying	
  it	
  of	
  its	
  meaning,	
  to	
  the	
  point	
  that	
  psychic	
   and	
  collective	
  individuation	
  (simondon	
   )	
  gets	
  lost	
  in	
  the	
  cracks	
  of	
  individualization,	
   while	
  “taking	
  care	
  of	
  the	
  self	
  and	
  of	
  others”	
  (foucault	
   )	
  –	
  without	
  which	
  there	
  can	
   be	
  neither	
  complicity	
  nor	
  solidarity	
  –	
  degenerates	
  into	
  taking	
  care	
  of	
  selfies	
  and	
  avatars.	
   this	
   is	
   the	
  ground	
  zero	
  of	
   sociality,	
   in	
  which	
  one	
   is	
   tied	
  with	
  another	
  only	
   in	
  being	
   driven	
  to	
  adhere	
  to	
  what	
   is	
  offered	
  to	
  us,	
  as	
  monads	
  that	
  can	
  touch	
  each	
  other	
  only	
   through	
  screens	
  –	
  it	
  is	
  not	
  even	
  a	
  matter	
  of	
  profile,	
  but	
  of	
  profiling.	
   if	
  the	
  mirror,	
  like	
  that	
  composed	
  of	
  water	
  within	
  which	
  narcissus	
  is	
  entombed,	
  was	
   the	
  first	
  screen,	
  in	
  the	
  case	
  of	
  the	
  myth	
  it	
  was	
  neither	
  a	
  selfie	
  nor	
  stupidity,	
  because	
  the	
   	
   for	
  a	
  critique	
  of	
  tiqqun’s	
  position	
  see	
  consigliere,	
  paravagna	
   . la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  online	
  journal	
  of	
  philosophy	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  and	
  the	
  mirror two,	
  as	
  we	
  know	
  them,	
  are	
  products	
  of	
   the	
  most	
  soporific	
  of	
  powers,	
   i.e.	
   capitalism,	
   which	
  today	
  stirs	
  up	
  the	
  drives	
  to	
  annihilate	
  desire.	
  the	
  jeune-­‐‑fille	
   in	
  selfie	
  and	
  per	
   selfie	
  thus	
  expresses	
  regression	
  to	
  the	
  drive	
  to	
  commodify	
  the	
  process	
  of	
  subjectiviza-­‐‑ tion,	
   which	
   works	
   like	
   a	
   kind	
   of	
   walled	
   path	
   dedicated	
   to	
   an	
   essentially	
   blind	
   and	
   entropic	
  jouissance,	
  inasmuch	
  as	
  it	
  is	
  entirely	
  flattened	
  into	
  consumption.	
   if	
  desire	
  is	
  for	
  deleuze	
  and	
  guattari	
  a	
  productive	
  social	
  power,	
  negentropic	
  and	
  vital,	
   it	
   is	
  not	
  by	
  chance	
  that	
  tiqqun	
  describes	
  the	
  jeune-­‐‑fille	
  as	
  a	
  corpse	
  wearing	
  flawless	
   makeup	
  –	
  and	
   this	
   is	
  even	
  more	
   true	
   thanks	
   to	
   the	
   filters	
  and	
   tweaks	
  of	
   instagram,	
   photoshop	
  or	
  smartphone	
  apps.	
  instead,	
  alice,	
  even	
  in	
  front	
  of	
  a	
  mirror,	
  has	
  no	
  need	
  for	
   makeup,	
  or	
  for	
  sexy	
  or	
  cheeky	
  poses,	
  or	
  tags	
  and	
  sharing;	
  nor	
  does	
  she	
  need	
  an	
  identity	
   or	
  a	
  nickname,	
  her	
  becoming	
  escapes	
  from	
  cookies	
  and	
  profiling,	
  and	
  she	
  has	
  no	
  need	
  to	
   login,	
  because	
  she	
  already	
  has	
  her	
  “intensity	
  card”.	
  hence	
  we	
  would	
  love	
  to	
  suggest	
  that	
   alice,	
  between	
  her	
  becomings,	
  also	
  becomes	
  la	
  deleuziana,	
  and	
  vice	
  versa.	
   furthermore,	
  with	
  this	
  issue	
  we	
  would	
  like	
  to	
  attempt	
  to	
  concretize	
  what	
  we	
  wrote	
  in	
   the	
  manifesto	
  of	
  this	
  journal:	
  	
   	
   la	
  deleuziana	
  is	
  above	
  all	
  a	
   figure	
  of	
  thought,	
  or	
  a	
  conceptual	
  character:	
  a	
  girl,	
  a	
   woman,	
  or	
  even	
  a	
  becoming-­‐‑woman	
  –	
  of	
  concepts,	
  of	
  authors,	
  of	
  a	
  century	
  that	
  oth-­‐‑ erwise	
  will	
  never	
  be	
  deleuzian.	
  as	
  a	
  woman,	
  la	
  deleuziana	
  is	
  a	
  response	
  to	
  the	
  jeu-­‐‑ ne-­‐‑fille	
  of	
  capitalism,	
  who	
  is	
  the	
  commodified	
  subjectivity	
  through	
  which	
  desire	
  is	
   systematically	
  addressed,	
  which	
  means	
  destroyed,	
  in	
  favour	
  of	
  the	
  algorithmic	
  com-­‐‑ putation	
  of	
  behaviours.	
  if	
  one	
  must	
  dare	
  once	
  in	
  life,	
  we	
  hope	
  that	
  la	
  deleuziana	
   would	
  be	
  a	
  bit	
  like	
  l’anti-­‐‑Œdipe	
  of	
  this	
  age:	
  l’anti-­‐‑jeunefille	
  that	
  tries	
  to	
  trace	
  a	
  line	
  of	
   flight	
  from	
  the	
  sad	
  passions	
  to	
  which	
  thought	
  is	
  often	
  led. 	
   	
   hence	
  we	
  dare,	
  even	
  if	
  only	
  for	
  a	
  moment,	
  and	
  with	
  those	
  who	
  desire	
  it,	
  to	
  unleash	
  a	
   barrage	
   of	
   concepts	
   that	
   attempt	
   to	
   incise	
   the	
   present.	
   in	
   short,	
   it	
   seems	
   that	
   the	
   moment	
  has	
  come	
  for	
  la	
  deleuziana,	
  too,	
  like	
  (the)	
  woman,	
  to	
  become	
  deleuzian.	
   why,	
  finally,	
  do	
  we	
  choose	
  woman?	
  because	
  the	
  only	
  weapon	
  that	
  we	
  hold,	
  that	
  is,	
   critical	
  sense	
  as	
  the	
  power	
  of	
  creation,	
  can	
  be	
  shaped	
  only	
  by	
  writing	
  –	
  in	
  any	
  form,	
  even	
   digital	
  –	
  and	
  for	
  deleuze	
  to	
  write	
  is	
  to	
  become-­‐‑woman,	
  “a	
  becoming-­‐‑woman	
  that	
  could	
   be	
  obtained	
  only	
  through	
  a	
  fight”	
  (deleuze,	
  guattari	
   )	
  against	
  the	
  forces	
  attempting	
   to	
   degrade	
   and	
   dissolve	
   us	
   into	
   the	
   ever-­‐‑increasing	
   current	
   of	
   stupidity	
   and	
   micro-­‐‑ fascism.	
  and	
  the	
  woman	
  can	
  be	
  everything,	
  but	
  not	
  fascism.	
  more	
  generally,	
  the	
  vital	
  and	
   emancipatory	
  gesture	
  of	
  writing	
  consists	
   in	
  conjugating	
  the	
  molecular	
  fluxes	
  crossing	
   the	
   subjects	
   and	
   their	
   identitarian	
   segments	
   (genders,	
   species,	
   ethnic	
   groups,	
   ages,	
   classes,	
  etc.)	
  in	
  order	
  to	
  bring	
  them	
  to	
  the	
  thresholds	
  of	
  dis-­‐‑identification,	
  which	
  alone	
   allows	
  for	
  revolutionary	
  alliances	
  to	
  form	
  between	
  minorities.	
  and	
  one	
  can	
  be	
  sure	
  that	
   as	
  long	
  as	
  there	
  is	
  life,	
  there	
  is	
  minority.	
  furthermore,	
  the	
  becoming-­‐‑woman	
  of	
  writing	
  –	
   that	
  is,	
  being	
  in	
  the	
  minority	
  even	
  if	
  in	
  front	
  of	
  one’s	
  own	
  identity	
  and	
  that	
  deleuze	
  sees	
   	
   http://www.ladeleuziana.org/manifesto/ la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  online	
  journal	
  of	
  philosophy	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  and	
  the	
  mirror in	
  many	
  writers	
  (kafka,	
  james,	
  lawrence,	
  miller	
  and	
  virginia	
  woolf	
  herself)	
  –	
  does	
  not	
   consist	
  in	
  “writing	
  as”	
  a	
  woman	
  (just	
  as	
  becoming-­‐‑animal	
  is	
  not	
  reached	
  by	
  “imitating”	
   the	
  animal),	
  but	
  in	
  making	
  alliances	
  with	
  those	
  who	
  suffer	
  the	
  effects	
  of	
  a	
  majority.	
   so	
  here,	
  then,	
  is	
  a	
  first	
  step	
  towards	
  rebuilding	
  the	
  “social	
  that	
  is	
  missing”:	
  writing	
  as	
   the	
  tracing	
  of	
  a	
  line	
  that	
  dis-­‐‑identifies	
  us	
  and	
  as	
  the	
  encounter	
  with	
  an	
  other	
  with	
  whom	
   we	
  would	
  be	
  able	
  to	
  join.	
  and	
  for	
  this	
  reason,	
  too,	
  woman	
  seems	
  to	
  us	
  the	
  name	
  to	
  give	
   to	
  the	
  strategies	
  of	
  transformation	
  and	
  counter-­‐‑effectuation	
  of	
  the	
  torrent	
  of	
  events	
  that	
   is	
  annihilating	
  critical	
  thought.	
  woman	
  as	
  greece,	
  as	
  lampedusa,	
  as	
  the	
  moon	
  and	
  the	
   earth,	
  as	
  (geo)philosophy.	
   	
   	
   contents	
   	
   we	
  decided	
  to	
  open	
  this	
  second	
  issue	
  of	
  the	
  journal	
  with	
  a	
  sort	
  of	
  present	
  that	
  ve-­‐‑ ronique	
  bergen	
  sent	
  to	
  the	
  editorial	
  board	
  after	
  reading	
  the	
  call	
  for	
  paper	
  of	
  this	
  issue:	
  a	
   portrait	
   of	
   la	
   deleuziana,	
   which	
   the	
   reader	
   can	
   find	
   in	
   french	
   (original	
   version),	
   in	
   english	
  and	
  in	
  italian.	
  such	
  a	
  portrait,	
  which	
  is	
  generous	
  and	
  critical,	
  bright	
  and	
  vision-­‐‑ ary	
  at	
  the	
  same	
  time,	
  represents	
  for	
  us	
  a	
  kind	
  of	
  second	
  manifesto,	
  for	
  which	
  we	
  will	
  try	
   to	
  becoming	
  worthy.	
   as	
  in	
  the	
  previous	
  issues,	
  la	
  deleuziana	
  proposes	
  a	
  meaningful	
  path	
  through	
  its	
  ses-­‐‑ sions,	
   in	
  order	
   to	
  disclose	
   the	
  key	
  elements	
   that	
  have	
  been	
  suggested	
   in	
   the	
  call	
   for	
   papers.	
  hence,	
  within	
   the	
   “necessity/concepts”	
   category	
   the	
   reader	
   could	
   find	
   three	
   different	
  insights	
  of	
  what	
  alice’s	
  point	
  of	
  view	
  might	
  mean	
  for	
  our	
  present.	
  rosi	
  braidot-­‐‑ ti’s	
  vitalismo	
  –	
  materia	
  –	
  affermazione	
  (transcription	
  of	
  a	
  lesson	
  given	
  in	
  bologna	
  on	
   	
   oct.	
   ),	
  focuses	
  on	
  several	
  contemporary	
  issues,	
  such	
  as	
  digital	
  ‘second	
  life’,	
  genet-­‐‑ ically	
   modified	
   food,	
   advanced	
   prosthetics,	
   robotics	
   and	
   reproductive	
   technologies.	
   thanks	
  to	
  her	
  deep	
  engagement	
  in	
  women’s	
  studies,	
  braidotti	
  brings	
  the	
  reader	
  to	
  a	
   fundamental	
  question	
  for	
  the	
  present	
   issue	
  of	
  la	
  deleuziana:	
  “is	
  woman	
  anthropos?”.	
   this	
  question	
  involves	
  a	
  radical	
  inquiry	
  about	
  the	
  phallocentrism	
  behind	
  the	
  meaning	
   and	
   the	
  postures	
  of	
  western	
  civilization	
  –	
   to	
  which	
  braidotti	
  has	
  dedicated	
  her	
  own	
   work.	
  	
  	
   elonora	
  de	
  conciliis’	
  il	
  divenire	
  donna	
  dell’idea	
  e	
  la	
  verità	
  della	
  jeune-­‐‑fille	
  grabs	
  from	
   another	
  angle	
  the	
  philosophical	
  issue	
  about	
  woman,	
  gender	
  and	
  capitalism.	
  starting	
  with	
   a	
  deep	
  reading	
  of	
  derrida’s	
  deconstruction	
  of	
   the	
   image	
  of	
  woman	
   in	
   the	
  history	
  of	
   philosophy	
  and	
  in	
  western	
  civilization,	
  de	
  conciliis	
  suggests	
  using	
  this	
  very	
  thesis	
  for	
  a	
   diagnosis	
  of	
  tiqqun’s	
  “jeune-­‐‑fille”	
  as	
  a	
  valid	
  concept	
  to	
  describe	
  the	
  anthropomorphiza-­‐‑ tion	
  of	
  capital.	
  while	
  the	
  female,	
  according	
  to	
  tiqqun,	
  seems	
  to	
  become	
  the	
  image	
  of	
   contemporary	
  capitalism,	
  de	
  conciliis,	
  passing	
  through	
  lacan,	
  derrida	
  and	
  baudrillard,	
   indicates	
  woman	
  as	
  the	
  subject	
  capable	
  of	
  escaping	
  both	
  from	
  philosophy’s	
  traditional	
   phallogocentrism	
  and	
  from	
  neoliberal	
  capitalism.	
  	
   la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  online	
  journal	
  of	
  philosophy	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  and	
  the	
  mirror on	
  this	
  emancipatory	
  path,	
  gianluca	
  de	
  fazio’s	
  article	
  (etica	
  delle	
  composizioni.	
  sul	
   divenire-­‐‑donna	
  e	
   le	
   linee	
  di	
   fuga	
  della	
  corporeità)	
  could	
  represent	
  a	
  useful	
   tool	
   in	
   its	
   description	
  of	
  deleuze’s	
  concept	
  of	
   ‘becoming-­‐‑woman’.	
  as	
   the	
  author	
  explains,	
   if	
   this	
   concept	
  can	
  be	
  thought	
  at	
  the	
  crossroads	
  of	
  two	
  key	
  deleuzian	
  issues,	
  the	
  body	
  and	
  the	
   event,	
  the	
  becoming	
  as	
  movement	
  of	
  social	
  transformation	
  also	
  indicates	
  its	
  ethical	
  and	
   political	
  actuality.	
  	
   the	
  section	
  “symptomatologies”	
  hosts	
  two	
  articles	
  focusing	
  on	
  deleuzian	
  “becoming-­‐‑ woman”	
  as	
  well,	
  but	
  their	
  purposes	
  are	
  more	
  focused	
  on	
  “what	
  is	
  happening	
  to	
  us”.	
  in	
   particular	
  stefano	
  dughera,	
  with	
  the	
  article	
  per	
  una	
  lettura	
  deleuziana	
  del	
  capitalismo	
   cognitivo.	
   sul	
   divenire-­‐‑donna	
   del	
   lavoro	
   contemporaneo,	
   proposes	
   to	
   use	
   becoming-­‐‑ woman	
  as	
  a	
  lens	
  to	
  investigate	
  the	
  transformation	
  of	
  contemporary	
  work	
  within	
  the	
  so-­‐‑ called	
   cognitive	
   capitalism.	
   the	
   broad	
   field	
   of	
   authors	
   dughera	
   involves	
   allows	
   the	
   reader	
   to	
   develop	
   a	
   deep	
   understanding	
   of	
   both	
   the	
   contradictory	
   movement	
   that	
   characterizes	
   contemporary	
   capitalism	
   and	
   the	
   relationships	
   between	
   deleuzian	
   becoming	
  and	
  the	
  social	
  and	
  political	
  production	
  of	
  the	
  common.	
   the	
  second	
  article,	
  written	
  by	
  Öznur	
  karakaş	
  (la	
  petite	
  fille	
  de	
  la	
  surface	
  comme	
  fig-­‐‑ ure	
  de	
  la	
  dissolution	
  du	
  soi)	
  investigates	
  the	
  possible	
  traces	
  of	
  the	
  jeune-­‐‑fille	
  contained	
   in	
  the	
  logic	
  of	
  sense,	
  whose	
  contemporary	
  symptoms	
  have	
  been	
  described	
  by	
  tiqqun.	
   after	
  a	
  recognition	
  of	
  the	
  key	
  concepts	
  involved	
  to	
  describe	
  the	
  feminine	
  in	
  the	
  logic	
  of	
   sense,	
  karakaş	
  emphasises,	
  with	
  the	
  help	
  of	
  luce	
  irigaray,	
  the	
  fundamental	
  difference	
   between	
   the	
   jeune-­‐‑fille	
   and	
   the	
   becoming-­‐‑woman:	
   while	
   the	
   former	
   represents	
   the	
   result	
   of	
   the	
   capitalist	
   apparatus	
   of	
   capture,	
   the	
   latter	
   calls	
   for	
   a	
   conception	
   of	
   the	
   feminine	
  to	
  fight	
  against	
  any	
  patriarchal	
  symbolic,	
  political	
  and	
  economic	
  system.	
  	
   the	
  section	
  “regions”	
  hosts	
  the	
  italian	
  translation	
  of	
  theresa	
  senft’s	
  article,	
  the	
  skin	
   of	
  the	
  selfie	
  (la	
  pelle	
  del	
  selfie),	
  which	
  reflects	
  upon	
  the	
  political	
  stakes	
  of	
  aisthesis	
  in	
  the	
   age	
  of	
  touch-­‐‑screens	
  and	
  the	
  selfie.	
  at	
  the	
  centre	
  of	
  the	
  essay	
  there	
  is	
  the	
  public	
  dissemi-­‐‑ nation	
  of	
  selfies	
  featuring	
  the	
  face	
  of	
  sandra	
  bland,	
  an	
  african	
  american	
  activist	
  with	
  the	
   group	
  black	
  lives	
  matter,	
  who	
  was	
  imprisoned	
  after	
  a	
  routine	
  traffic	
  stop.	
  sandra	
  bland	
   died	
  in	
  prison,	
  leaving	
  us	
  with	
  the	
  traces	
  of	
  her	
  life	
  on	
  social	
  networks.	
  starting	
  from	
  this	
   fact,	
  senft	
  has	
  developed	
  a	
  meaningful	
  discourse	
  on	
  public	
   images	
  of	
  private	
   life	
  and	
   individual	
  death	
  that	
  calls	
  for	
  a	
  reconfiguration	
  of	
  the	
  relation	
  between	
  aesthetics	
  and	
   politics.	
  for	
  senft	
  this	
  new	
  political	
  relation	
  to	
  aisthesis	
  should	
  focus	
  on	
  the	
  surface	
  of	
   our	
  existences,	
  that	
  is	
  on	
  their	
  and	
  our	
  skins.	
   the	
  “red	
  eyes”	
  session	
  presents	
  two	
  articles	
  focused	
  on	
  deleuze	
  and	
  literature,	
  which	
   is	
  also	
  the	
  starting	
  point	
  of	
  this	
  issue.	
  valentina	
  maini’s	
  article	
  (“io	
  sono	
  grande	
  e	
  piccola	
   insieme”:	
  divenire	
  amelia	
  rosselli),	
  suggests	
  a	
  parallelism	
  between	
  the	
  work	
  of	
  the	
  italian	
   poet	
  amelia	
  rosselli	
  and	
  deleuze’s	
  alice.	
  such	
  a	
  parallelism	
  is	
   found	
  by	
  maini	
   in	
   the	
   common	
  tension	
  towards	
  that	
  paradoxical	
   form	
  of	
  becoming,	
  by	
  which	
  both	
  the	
  poet	
   and	
  deleuze’s	
  conceptual	
  character	
  express	
  their	
  unsettled	
  identities:	
  becoming	
  bigger	
   and	
  littler	
  at	
  the	
  same	
  time.	
  this	
  kind	
  of	
  paradoxical	
  tendency	
  concerns	
  all	
  the	
  political	
   la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  online	
  journal	
  of	
  philosophy	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  and	
  the	
  mirror questions	
  raised	
  by	
  the	
  essay	
  of	
  the	
  present	
  issue,	
  thus	
  testifying	
  to	
  the	
  strong	
  relation	
   between	
  politics	
  and	
  literature	
  that	
  inspired	
  deleuze’s	
  writing.	
  	
   olga	
  lópez’s	
  article,	
  proust-­‐‑deleuze:	
  les	
  signes	
  des	
  jeunes-­‐‑filles,	
  analyses	
  the	
  becoming	
   woman	
  in	
  the	
  work	
  of	
  marcel	
  proust.	
  following	
  a	
  deleuzian	
  suggestion,	
  lópez	
  shows	
   that	
   proustian	
   aesthetics	
   cannot	
   be	
   separated	
   from	
   a	
   tension	
   towards	
   the	
   becoming	
   woman	
  through	
  which	
  the	
  affects	
  seem	
  to	
  be	
  created	
  in	
  À	
  la	
  recherche	
  du	
  temps	
  perdu.	
   describing	
  this	
  kind	
  of	
  artistic	
  methodology,	
  lópez’s	
  work	
  at	
  the	
  same	
  time	
  develops	
  a	
   singular	
  point	
  of	
  view,	
  or	
  more	
  precisely,	
  its	
  own	
  singular	
  methodology	
  in	
  relation	
  to	
  the	
   present	
  issue	
  of	
  the	
  journal.	
  if	
  most	
  of	
  the	
  articles	
  of	
  this	
  issue	
  describe	
  the	
  becoming-­‐‑ woman	
  either	
  in	
  general	
  or	
  from	
  the	
  point	
  of	
  view	
  of	
  this	
  woman,	
  even	
  if	
  written	
  by	
   men,	
   lópez	
   attempts	
   to	
   provide	
   a	
   paradoxical	
   alternative,	
   in	
   the	
   wave	
   of	
   the	
   whole	
   issue:	
  as	
  woman,	
  describing	
  the	
  becoming-­‐‑woman	
  of	
  a	
  male	
  writer.	
  	
   in	
  the	
  section	
  “new	
  weapons”	
  the	
  reader	
  will	
   find	
  angela	
  balzano’s	
  article	
  tecno-­‐‑ corpi	
  e	
  vie	
  di	
  fuga	
  postumane	
  and	
  the	
  reason	
  is	
  immediately	
  evident.	
  by	
  reviewing	
  both	
   the	
   theoretical	
   assumptions	
   of	
   post-­‐‑structuralism	
   (deleuze	
   and	
   foucault)	
   and	
   the	
   contributions	
  of	
  neo-­‐‑materialist	
   feminism,	
   the	
  essay	
  describes	
   the	
  metamorphosis	
  of	
   subjectivities	
  in	
  the	
  age	
  of	
  biotechnologies.	
  with	
  the	
  help	
  of	
  rosi	
  braidotti	
  and	
  donna	
   haraway,	
  balzano	
  tries	
  to	
  develop	
  a	
  theoretical	
  and	
  political	
  path	
  based	
  on	
  the	
  political-­‐‑ transformative	
  dimension	
  of	
  the	
  cyborg	
  and	
  nomadic	
  subjectivity.	
  the	
  goal	
  is	
  then	
  to	
   trace	
   the	
  condition	
  of	
  possibility	
  of	
   the	
   invention	
  of	
  new	
  critical	
  weapons	
   for	
  a	
  non-­‐‑ anthropocentric	
  and	
  non-­‐‑phallocentric	
  subjectivity	
  –	
  a	
  subjectivity	
  still	
  to	
  come.	
  	
  	
   daniel	
  ross	
  article,	
  touch/screen,	
  is	
  the	
  content	
  of	
  the	
  section	
  “anomalies”,	
  through	
   which	
   la	
   deleuziana	
   attempts	
   to	
   approach	
   the	
   major	
   questions	
   of	
   the	
   issue	
   from	
   a	
   different	
  point	
  of	
  view.	
  if	
  the	
  screens	
  are	
  one	
  of	
  the	
  key	
  points	
  of	
  the	
  present	
  issue,	
  what	
   has	
  not	
  been	
  so	
  clearly	
  declared	
   is	
   the	
  question	
  of	
   cinema	
  and	
  of	
   tele-­‐‑technology	
   in	
   relation	
  to	
  subjectivity,	
  desire	
  and	
  becoming.	
  nevertheless,	
  such	
  a	
  question	
  is	
  unavoida-­‐‑ ble	
  in	
  order	
  to	
  understand	
  most	
  of	
  the	
  causes	
  that	
  brought	
  us	
  to	
  deal	
  with	
  the	
  jeune-­‐‑ fille,	
  the	
  selfies	
  and	
  other	
  troubles	
  for	
  subjectivity	
  signalled	
  in	
  the	
  call	
  for	
  papers.	
  ross	
   develops	
   a	
   genealogical	
   critique	
   of	
   such	
   causes,	
   in	
   order	
   to	
   show,	
   with	
   the	
   help	
   of	
   bernard	
  stiegler,	
  how	
  cinema,	
  television	
  and	
  contemporary	
  screens	
  not	
  only	
  describe	
  or	
   even	
  pervert	
  our	
  desire,	
  but	
  essentially	
  participate	
  in	
  the	
  constitution	
  and	
  possibility	
  of	
   this	
  very	
  desire.	
  understanding	
  this	
  might	
  allow	
  the	
  development	
  of	
  that	
  deleuzian	
  art	
   of	
  control	
  signalled	
  above,	
  an	
  art	
  that	
  became	
  possible	
  precisely	
  in	
  the	
  aftermath	
  of	
  the	
   invasive	
  effects	
  of	
  television.	
   in	
  the	
  last	
  section	
  “precursors”	
  we	
  will	
  find	
  alexander	
  wilson’s	
  text,	
  comment	
  choisir	
   ce	
  qui	
  aura	
  été	
  ?	
  réflexions	
  sur	
  l’optimisme	
  prométhéen	
  contemporain.	
  this	
  section	
  hosts	
   essays	
  different	
  from	
  the	
  general	
  subject	
  of	
  the	
  present	
  issue	
  that	
  call	
  for	
  the	
  next	
  one.	
  in	
   this	
  regard,	
  wilson’s	
  article	
  represents	
  a	
  sort	
  of	
  bridge	
  from	
  the	
  “anomalous”	
  ross’	
  text	
   and	
  the	
  issue	
   	
  of	
  the	
  journal.	
  indeed,	
  wilson	
  posits	
  two	
  movies	
  on	
  the	
  backcloth	
  of	
  his	
   reflections	
  about	
  pessimism	
  and	
  optimism	
  for	
  climate	
  change	
  and	
  technological	
  acceler-­‐‑ la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  online	
  journal	
  of	
  philosophy	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  and	
  the	
  mirror ation:	
   von	
   trier’s	
   melancholia	
   and	
   nolan’s	
   interstellar.	
   the	
   opportunity	
   disclosed	
   by	
   those	
  movies	
  is	
  thus	
  to	
  reflect,	
   following	
  contemporary	
  philosophers	
  such	
  as	
  deleuze	
   and	
   stiegler,	
   but	
   also	
   with	
   leibniz,	
   upon	
   a	
   fundamental	
   question:	
   what	
   could	
   living	
   without	
   a	
   compossible	
   future	
   in	
   relation	
   to	
   climate	
   change	
   mean?	
   how	
   can	
   we	
   live	
   within	
  the	
  risk	
  of	
  a	
  generalized	
  death,	
  not	
  (only)	
  of	
  human	
  being,	
  but	
  of	
  the	
  very	
  earth?	
   the	
   goal	
   of	
   thought	
   becomes,	
   once	
   again,	
   “not	
   to	
   cry,	
   not	
   to	
   hope,	
   but	
   to	
   find	
   new	
   weapons”.	
   	
   	
   	
   bibliography	
   	
   braidotti,	
  r.	
  ( )	
  “degli	
  insetti	
  e	
  delle	
  donne”.	
  in	
  vaccaro,	
  s.	
  (ed.),	
  il	
  secolo	
  deleuziano.	
   milano:	
  mimesis.	
  pp.	
   -­‐‑ .	
   cesarano,	
  g.	
  ( ).	
  manuale	
  di	
  sopravvivenza.	
  torino:	
  boringhieri.	
   consigliere,	
  s.,	
  paravagna,	
  s.	
  ( ).	
  “da	
  dentro:	
  relazioni	
  con	
  il	
  possibile”.	
  in	
  coppo,	
  p.,	
   consigliere,	
  s.,	
  paravagna,	
  s.	
  il	
  disagio	
  dell’inciviltà.	
  milano:	
  colibrì.	
  pp.	
   -­‐‑ .	
   deleuze,	
  g.	
  ( ).	
  the	
  logic	
  of	
  sense.	
  london:	
  athlone	
  press.	
   deleuze,	
  g.	
  ( ).	
  negotiations	
   -­‐‑ .	
  new	
  york:	
  columbia	
  university	
  press	
  	
   deleuze,	
   g.	
   ( ).	
   essays	
   critical	
   and	
   clinical.	
   minneapolis:	
   university	
   of	
   minnesota	
   press.	
  deleuze,	
  g.,	
  &	
  guattari,	
  f.	
  ( ).	
  a	
  thousand	
  plateaus:	
  capitalism	
  and	
  schizo-­‐‑ phrenia.	
  minneapolis:	
  university	
  of	
  minnesota	
  press.	
   foucault,	
  m.	
   ( ).	
  the	
  care	
  of	
   the	
  self.	
  history	
  of	
  sexuality	
   .	
  new	
  york:	
  pantheon	
   books.	
  	
   rouvroy,	
   a.	
   ( ).	
   “the	
   end(s)	
   of	
   critique	
   :	
   data-­‐‑behaviourism	
   vs.	
   due-­‐‑process”,	
   in	
   hildebrandt,	
  m.	
  &	
  de	
  vries	
  e.,	
  (eds.).	
  privacy,	
  due	
  process	
  and	
  the	
  computational	
  turn.	
   philosophers	
  of	
  law	
  meet	
  philosophers	
  of	
  technology.	
  london:	
  routledge.	
   simondon,	
  g.	
  ( ).	
  l’individuation	
  psichique	
  et	
  collective.	
  paris:	
  aubier.	
   stiegler,	
  b.	
  ( ).	
  la	
  société	
  automatique	
  i.	
  l’avenir	
  du	
  travail.	
  paris:	
  fayard.	
   tiqqun	
  ( ).	
  raw	
  materials	
  for	
  a	
  theory	
  of	
  the	
  young	
  girl.	
  http://younggirl.jottit.com/	
   review - moody by engelhardt [ ] - proof.pdf global labour journal, , ( ), page book review kim moody ( ) on new terrain: how capitalism is reshaping the battleground of class war. chicago: haymarket books. isbn: . pp. $ . (paperback). reviewed by anne engelhardt, kassel university, germany kim moody’s book provides an impressive breadth of knowledge on the changes within both the working class in the united states (us) and its capitalist antagonist, challenging the narrative that class struggles have vanished. he puts forward the well-founded thesis that the working class has changed greatly since the s, both regarding its composition and the size of the specific sectors in which it is involved. he decodes and refutes current myths and takes a critical look at current trade union strategies. the first third of the book is therefore highly recommendable and reads very fluently. after that, however, the text loses its stringency, which may be due to a lack of theoretical sharpening. in consequence, the second part of the book reads like a different book, focusing on the origins and transformation of the democratic party, highlighting how more and more capital enters party politics and election campaigns, and why a new workers’ party is necessary. however, both sides seemed to be linked by the term “terrain”. in the following, i would therefore like to discuss a few theoretical considerations concerning the terrain, the state and social reproduction that could strengthen the findings brought forward in on new terrain. the strength of moody’s book lies in the detailed and well-thought-out analysis of the us working class. the following aspects should be highlighted: first, according to moody, there was not only a global shift of industry to the global south from the united states, but also an enormous increase in the productivity of us industry, which was achieved through the development of technology, automation and the introduction of “lean production” – that is, the organisation and monitoring of every single step. this and the offshoring of jobs resulted in massive job losses. second, moody proves that the working class has historically tended to be precariously employed and that the share of temporary and part-time contracts has not changed significantly in the united states compared to the s. even the often-discussed “gigariat” which has gained prominence in academic discourse in recent years – that is, employees who either receive their jobs via online platforms or are recruited by companies with online contracts – represents a negligible and hardly growing share of the working class. what has increased in the united states, however, is unemployment, which rose during the economic crisis of – . in addition, pensions, health insurance and other social benefits have been reduced enormously, leading above all to an increase in old-age poverty, debts due to hospital stays and an overall decline in the provision of care to the working class in recent years. third, the book analyses that, due to the globalisation of production and the current accumulation strategies, the logistics sector – in particular distribution and warehousing – has gained importance. moreover, sectors this goes against trump’s and other conservatives’ argument that there was a decline in us productivity, while in fact productivity rose due to automation and other factors, and workplaces were destroyed rather than offshored. global labour journal, , ( ), page organising the reproduction of labour and capitalist infrastructures (cleaning, building management, waste disposal) have grown. historically, these sectors have been dominated by low-paid and poorly organised women, afro-americans and latin-american workers. as women have been pushed more into the labour market due to the downward spiral in industrial and mainly male wages, the proportions of women, latin americans and afro-americans in important sectors of late us capitalism have increased. this also has an impact on us trade union membership and specific class struggles, which are increasing in the care, education and other service and/or low-wage sectors. moody’s analysis provides a basis to explain why feminism and movements such as black lives matter have gained momentum among the working class. although the book analyses the us working class very carefully, it does not answer what is meant by “terrain”, what is new about it today and where exactly class struggles have shifted. is terrain merely an abstract category and in a figurative sense to be understood in relation to “sector” or “subject”? this is supported by the fact that both the growing sectors of services, logistics and maintenance/cleaning are addressed as well as the new composition of the working class, and therefore issues such as racism, sexism and homophobia are brought more into the focus of class struggle as well as the changes in party politics. if moody were to use the term terrain exclusively in this metaphorical way, a further definition would be superfluous. but as the text progresses, the question arises as to whether moody also understands terrain as a material category, as the physical ground on which struggles – especially in the logistics sector and on distribution routes – can be fought. by not introducing the term, his analysis runs the risk of being more superficial than it should be. it is true that, due to the global value chain, capitalism has become more vulnerable to strikes and interruptions, especially in the fields of distribution and labour reproduction. but these struggles do not take place in a vacuum; they are channelled and often suppressed by the state. considerations of industrial disputes that attempt to occupy the terrain – logistical hubs, supply routes, and so on – are frequently affected by specific police forces and specific legislation. the safeguarding of the circulation both through the construction of infrastructure and the concentration of fixed capital, as well as the safeguarding of the circulation of goods by employees, is organised and reproduced by state structures. terrain and the state are therefore closely interwoven and can be well grasped by a materialist theory of the state, which understands the state as the crystallisation of past class struggles and a constant further development by means of prevailing power relations. with regard to his understanding of the state, moody oscillates between an absent state and the all-embracing “police state”. the former is now being discovered by capital for the commodification and financialisation of social and political areas (such as the party politics of democrats and republicans), and the latter is expanding prisons and promoting massive surveillance and repression, especially against afro-americans. these observations are important in themselves, but they assume that the capitalist state somehow “normally” acts neutrally and independently of economic events in capitalism. however, the processes of austerity, financialisation, privatisation and repression cannot be considered separately, but are part of contradictory and interdependent dynamics that can be traced back to the capitalist and crisis- prone accumulation strategies organised within and throughout the capitalist state. unfortunately, however, the book concentrates solely on the working class in the united states with a tendency to generalise the developments therein, while overlooking how the expansion of us companies to foreign markets changed labour, labour struggles and accumulation strategies there. in this way, moody obstructs himself from giving a more detailed perspective on international labour struggles and processes of solidarity. global labour journal, , ( ), page moody underlines that there have been changes in the reproduction of fixed capital (and thus also circulating capital) and variable capital (the working people). thus, he addresses the growing commodification of reproductive work, the growth of care work, and the low productivity and therefore the high necessity of variable capital – that is, of a large number of working people, compared to sectors in which machines gradually destroy jobs. he also addresses the growing pressure on workers from lean production and surveillance, stress and increased exploitation rates. what is missing is a link between the two. here the social reproduction theory (srt) developed by susan ferguson and others might help. from this perspective, the themes of the growing exploitation of workers through lean production and the expansion of the care sector and education sector could be more strongly linked. lean production has revolutionised not only the world of work and production, but also reproduction. many people are working in sectors in which the workload has increased, and women have been pushed into low-paid jobs, thus losing their position in the household army, so that no resources are free within the working class to take over the reproduction of the labour force. the care work organised by the state in increasingly commodified form and the expansion of food chains are closely linked to the concentration of labour. as the importance of these sectors for capitalism grows, so does the demand for variable capital for better pay and better working conditions. the analysis of changes in reproduction conditions is also closely interwoven with the state. moody runs the risk of depicting the market and capitalist companies as operating outside the state, and snatching the reproductive sectors from it, so to speak, in order to organise them into markets. this perspective overlooks the fact that the state is a capitalist state and also develops the market processes. particularly in times of crisis, financial interests on the one hand and an authoritarian implementation of accumulation strategies on the other increase. the book is absolutely worth reading as there are helpful answers regarding “new class politics” and solidarity in struggle, the role of lean production and the myth of the precariat. moody, however, often remains descriptive and unclear in the analysis of the “terrain” itself, the social reproduction and its impact on the understanding of labour struggles in certain sectors and in the capitalist, neo-liberal and increasingly authoritarian state. biographical note anne engelhardt is an associated phd fellow at the international center for development and decent work (icdd) at kassel university. she graduated with a ba in politics and public management at the university of potsdam and with a ma in politics at the university of kassel. her current work focuses on strikes in the logistics sector, mainly at “choke points” of port and airport terminals in portugal and brazil and their potential to contest casualisation and to support local social movements. [email: engelhardt @gmail.com. as moody himself correctly describes, donald trump, for example, is not just a mistake of history, but an expression of a specific capitalist and state-like dynamic that throws all democratic and juridically developed norms overboard and reveals an increasingly brutal class struggle from above that no longer cares for compromise and social partnership. << /ascii encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles true /autorotatepages /none /binding /left /calgrayprofile (dot gain %) /calrgbprofile (srgb iec - . ) /calcmykprofile (u.s. web coated \ swop\ v ) /srgbprofile (srgb iec - . ) /cannotembedfontpolicy /error /compatibilitylevel . /compressobjects /tags /compresspages true /convertimagestoindexed true /passthroughjpegimages true /createjobticket false /defaultrenderingintent /default /detectblends true /detectcurves . /colorconversionstrategy /cmyk /dothumbnails false /embedallfonts true /embedopentype false /parseiccprofilesincomments 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/monoimageresolution /monoimagedepth - /monoimagedownsamplethreshold . /encodemonoimages true /monoimagefilter /ccittfaxencode /monoimagedict << /k - >> /allowpsxobjects false /checkcompliance [ /none ] /pdfx acheck false /pdfx check false /pdfxcompliantpdfonly false /pdfxnotrimboxerror true /pdfxtrimboxtomediaboxoffset [ . . . . ] /pdfxsetbleedboxtomediabox true /pdfxbleedboxtotrimboxoffset [ . . . . ] /pdfxoutputintentprofile () /pdfxoutputconditionidentifier () /pdfxoutputcondition () /pdfxregistryname () /pdfxtrapped /false /createjdffile false /description << /ara <feff a e f f f a b f a a a f c a c f a b a a d b a e f f f f e f a d f b e f e f a d f b e> /bgr <feff f e b d e a c a f e a c d c c a c b d e f e d e a e a d f f f d f e e e a e a d e a c d c e e f f f e b e> /chs <feff f f fd e b bbe b a b efa f e e ad d cf d a ef ee f f f c f e ee ca f ad c f b efa > /cht <feff f f e b a d f e efa acb f ef bc ad c cea d a ef ee f f f c f e ee ca f ad c f b f df efa acb ef > /cze <feff f e e ed f e a b e e ed f b d e f f c b e e a c e f ed f b c e ed b e f e e f b d e d f e e e f ed f d f f e e f b a ed e> /dan <feff e c c e e c f f d f b d e c e c d b e e f a b c e f d f b d e b e e e f c c f e f e e> /deu <feff e e e c c e e a d c c e f e f d f b d e e c f e e e f d b a e d f e e c c d f b d e b f e e e d f e f e f f f e e e> /esp <feff c f e f e f d e f f f d f e d f c c c e e f d e f f f e f c f e f e f f e> /eti <feff b e e b c fc b c e d a f b f c b f d f b d e c f f d b e c f f d f b d e f d d f e e f e a d f f e e d a> /fra <feff c a f f e e e f d e f f e c e d f e e e c f d e e e e ea f e f c e f e f e c e e> /gre <feff a c b c b bc bf c bf b ae c c b b c c ad c c b c c c b bc af c b b c b b b bd b b b bc b bf c c b ae c b c b ad b b c b c b f c bf c b af bd b b ba b c b be bf c ae bd ba b c ac bb bb b bb b b b b c c bf d b ba c c c c c b ba ad c b c b b c af b c c c b bb ae c c bf b cc c b c b c e a b ad b b c b c b c bf c ad c b c b b b bc b bf c c b ae c b b bc c bf c bf cd bd bd b b bd bf b c c bf cd bd bc b c bf f c c bf f e ba b b bc b c b b b bd ad c c b c b c b ba b cc c b b c e> /heb <feff d e ea de e d d d d d e d ea d dc d db d d dc d e d e de e de db d f d de d ea d de d dd dc d d e e ea e d dd d d e d e d d db d ea d ea e de e de db d e e d e e d e d ea e d dd dc e ea d d d d d de e e d ea f d d f e d d e e d d ea de ea e d de d ea d d ea e e d de d dd dc d f d c e d d e d d de d e d da dc de e ea de e e dc f e de e de db d e e d e e d e d ea e d dd dc e ea d d d d d de e e d ea f d d f e d d e e d d ea de ea e d de d ea d d ea e e> /hrv (za stvaranje adobe pdf dokumenata najpogodnijih za visokokvalitetni ispis prije tiskanja koristite ove postavke. stvoreni pdf dokumenti mogu se otvoriti acrobat i adobe reader . i kasnijim verzijama.) /hun <feff b e c f d e e e f d c b e a ed e f d e f a c e b e d c c f f b d e d f b a b b c e c c ed e f b b c b e a ed e c e f a f f b d e d f b a f e a f e c a f c b e a f b b c e f b d e> /ita <feff c a a d f a f e f d e f f e d c c e e f d e f f e f f e f f e f e e> /jpn <feff ad c cea a d ea d ec b fa b f f e f c b f f e e a d b a f c c f d a a eb f f a f e ee d b f c d e e a d b a b f d a f c e cb fbc f c fc > /kor <feffc c c c c acc a d c ec ace d c c c dcd d c c c c d ac c a c d d c f bb c cb c c c d b c b e e c b ac c c c b c bb c cb f bc f f e c c c c d c c c f c c c b b c b e e> /lth <feff e f b f d e f d b f f b d e c b c b b f b f b e e d e d e b f b d e c b f d f f e c e d a f d e> /lvi <feff a d e f a f b a d c c f f f b d e c b b d f b c d e b e a f a f b d e c b f f e f e c b b f a e b d a d e> /nld (gebruik deze instellingen om adobe pdf-documenten te maken die zijn geoptimaliseerd voor prepress-afdrukken van hoge kwaliteit. de gemaakte pdf-documenten kunnen worden geopend met acrobat en adobe reader . en hoger.) /nor <feff b e e c c e e c e f f d f b d e f d e f f b b b f b c e d f b d e e b e e e f c c f e c c e e> /pol <feff e f f a e f b d e f a a e a f e f b f f b a a b f b e f b d e d f c e f f d f f e e f a d e> /ptb <feff c a f e e f f d f d e f f d f e d d f c c e f f d e f f f d f f d f f f f e f f f e> /rum <feff c a e f d e f e c f e f d e c f f c f e f e c c f e> /rus <feff f e b c d d b d e a b f e d f e a c d e f c c a c b c d e f e e f b f b e a e a d d e e e f d e e b e e e d d b d e a c d b c e d e e a b c f e c e c e f f e e b f e d e> /sky <feff f e e f e e e e f b d e f f c b f e e a c f e b c e fa c d e f e e f b d e d f e e e f f f d f f f e e f ed e> /slv <feff e f a a e a f b d e f f c b f e a d e a a b b f f e f b e a f e b e a e f b d e a d f f d f a f e f e e e f a d e> /suo <feff b e e e e e b c b e c f c e e e e e e b e c d c f f e f f d f b d e a e c f d f b d e f e f c c a f e a c c a d d c c e> /sve <feff e e e e e e c c e e e f d c c b f d f b d e f d e c e d c f d b d f b c e b d f b d e b e f e f f f e f e e> /tur <feff fc b b b c c f e a d b e e c b f c c f c f d b e e c b c c e e e f c f c e c c f f e f e e b fc fc d c c e c c e> /ukr <feff a e e f c b f e d d f e a c d f c f a d a f e f c b f e a e f a d e e f a e e e a e e d e a c d c e d a f f e e f d e e> /enu (use these settings to create adobe pdf documents best suited for high-quality prepress printing. created pdf documents can be opened with acrobat and adobe reader . and later.) >> /namespace [ (adobe) (common) ( . ) ] /othernamespaces [ << /asreaderspreads false /cropimagestoframes true /errorcontrol /warnandcontinue /flattenerignorespreadoverrides false /includeguidesgrids false /includenonprinting false /includeslug false /namespace [ (adobe) (indesign) ( . ) ] /omitplacedbitmaps false /omitplacedeps false /omitplacedpdf false /simulateoverprint /legacy >> << /addbleedmarks false /addcolorbars false /addcropmarks false /addpageinfo false /addregmarks false /convertcolors /converttocmyk /destinationprofilename () /destinationprofileselector /documentcmyk /downsample bitimages true /flattenerpreset << /presetselector /mediumresolution >> /formelements false /generatestructure false /includebookmarks false /includehyperlinks false /includeinteractive false /includelayers false /includeprofiles false /multimediahandling /useobjectsettings /namespace [ (adobe) (creativesuite) ( . ) ] /pdfxoutputintentprofileselector /documentcmyk /preserveediting true /untaggedcmykhandling /leaveuntagged /untaggedrgbhandling /usedocumentprofile /usedocumentbleed false >> ] >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [ ] /pagesize [ . . ] >> setpagedevice [pdf] perspectives in primary care: family medicine in a divided nation | semantic scholar skip to search formskip to main content> semantic scholar's logo search sign increate free account you are currently offline. some features of the site may not work correctly. 	doi: . /afm. corpus id: perspectives in primary care: family medicine in a divided nation @article{romano perspectivesip, title={perspectives in primary care: family medicine in a divided nation}, author={max j. romano and k. grumbach}, journal={the annals of family medicine}, year={ }, volume={ }, pages={ - } } 	max j. romano, k. grumbach 	published 	medicine 	the annals of family medicine on november , , family physicians went to work across the united states caring for patients. some patients wore caps emblazoned “make america great again” and others had buttons declaring “i’m with her.” as on any other day, the task was to care for each patient with respect and  view on aafp annfammed.org save to library create alert cite launch research feed share this paper citations view all topics from this paper 	family medicine (field) 	community 	occupations 	united states public health service 	geography 	fear (mental process) 	movement one citation citation type citation type 	all types 	cites results 	cites methods 	cites background has pdf publication type author more filters more filters filters sort by relevance sort by most influenced papers sort by citation count sort 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https://www.unilim.fr/trahs - issn : - from private struggle to parentscholar solidarity: collective organizing during a pandemic to humanize the academy mary candace raygoza saint mary’s college of california moraga, california, usa https://orcid.org/ - - - marycandaceraygoza@gmail.com michael j. viola saint mary’s college of california moraga, california, usa viola.michael@gmail.com emily b. klein saint mary’s college of california moraga, california, usa emilyklein @gmail.com raina j. león saint mary’s college of california moraga, california, usa https://orcid.org/ - - - raina.leon@gmail.com url : https://www.unilim.fr/trahs/ doi : . /trahs. licence : cc by-nc-nd . international abstract: this article details our pathway in forming an activist caregiver collective at our institution in response to the unsustainable conditions of concurrently working, parenting, and caregiving during a pandemic. through a parentscholar collaborative autoethnography, we interrogate structures deeply embedded in higher education that perpetuate existing inequities and invisibilize the labor of dr. raygoza is assistant professor of education. her research explores education for a more just and humanizing world, particularly in secondary mathematics education. dr. viola is associate professor of justice, community & leadership and an advisory board member of ethnic studies. he is a critical educational studies scholar working on a book manuscript centering filipino/a american activism and anti-imperialist solidarities. dr. klein is associate professor of english. she is a feminist theatre and performance scholar with a focus on popular th and st century political productions for the street, stage, and screen. dr. león is full professor of education. she is a poet, writer, and scholar with a focus on critical pedagogy and humanizing educational practice. trayectorias humanas trascontinentales mailto:marycandaceraygoza@gmail.com mailto:viola.michael@gmail.com mailto:emilyklein @gmail.com mailto:raina.leon@gmail.com trahs n° | : narrativas de maestras (os) y normalistas en el giro decolonial https://www.unilim.fr/trahs - issn : - caregiving faculty--structures which have been made more visible with the coronavirus pandemic. the narratives documented here were all written in the midst of a global health crisis and a global reckoning for a more just world, and have enabled us to process our personal relationships to the dominant business model of higher education, also referred to as the “neoliberal university.” as caregiving academics, educators, and activists, we believe it crucial to enunciate our stories of struggle and joy in dialogue with the important interventions and conceptual maneuvers of the “decolonial turn.” we write with the following intentions: ( ) to center caregivers as agents of change in the interrelated projects to decolonize both schools and society; ( ) to document our voices and experiences as living curriculums that others may draw upon, extend, or even recreate for their specific contexts; and ( ) to identify how our lived experiences, shaped by larger social forces, have enabled us a particular way of seeing/being that recognizes the critical relationship between decolonizing and caregiving. keywords: caregiving, parentscholar, faculty activism, autoethnography, neoliberal university resumen: este artículo detalla nuestro camino para formar un colectivo de cuidadores activistas en nuestra institución en respuesta a las condiciones insostenibles de trabajar como cuidadores durante una pandemia global. a través de una autoetnografía colaborativa entre parentscholar, interrogamos a las estructuras profundamente arraigadas en la educación superior que perpetúan las desigualdades existentes e invisibilizan la labor de los profesores que brindan cuidados, estructuras que se han hecho más visibles con la pandemia del coronavirus. las narrativas documentadas aquí fueron escritas en medio de una crisis de salud global y un ajuste de cuentas global para un mundo más justo, y nos han permitido procesar nuestras relaciones personales con el modelo empresarial dominante de la educación superior, también conocido como el modelo de "universidad neoliberal." como académicos, educadores y activistas que brindan cuidados, creemos que es crucial enunciar nuestras historias de lucha y alegría en diálogo con las importantes intervenciones y maniobras conceptuales del “giro decolonial.” escribimos con las siguientes intenciones: ( ) centrar a los cuidadores como agentes de cambio en los proyectos interrelacionados para descolonizar las escuelas y la sociedad; ( ) documentar nuestras voces y experiencias como currículos vivos que otros pueden aprovechar, ampliar o incluso recrear para sus contextos específicos; y ( ) identificar cómo nuestras experiencias vividas, moldeadas por fuerzas sociales más amplias, nos han permitido una forma particular de ver / ser que reconoce la relación crítica entre descolonizar y cuidar. palabras clave: cuidadores, parentscholar, activismo de la facultad, autoetnografía, universidad neoliberal résumé : cet article expose en détail notre chemin dans la formation d’une coopérative des personnels soignants activistes à notre campus universitaire en juin quand les conditions insoutenables de travail des personnels soignants pendant la pandémie sont arrivées au point de crise pour beaucoup des travailleurs chez notre institution. À travers une autoethnographie parentscholar collaborative, nous interrogeons les structures fortement impliqué dans l’enseignement supérieur qui perpétuent les inégalités et qui rendent invisible le travail de la faculté de soins -- les structures rendues plus visibles par la pandémie de coronavirus. les récits documentés ici ont tous été écrits au milieu d’une crise sanitaire mondiale et un appel global pour une monde plus juste, et ils nous ont permis de réfléchir sur nos relations personnelles avec le modèle économique de l'enseignement supérieur -- trahs n° | : narrativas de maestras (os) y normalistas en el giro decolonial https://www.unilim.fr/trahs - issn : - aussi appelé “l'université néo-libérale.” en tant qu'universitaires, éducateurs et activistes, nous croyons qu'il est crucial d'articuler nos histoires de lutte et de joie dans le dialogue avec les interventions importantes et les manœuvres conceptuelles du “tournant décolonial.” nous écrivons avec les intentions suivantes: ( ) centrer les soignants comme agents de changement dans les projets interdépendants visant à décoloniser les écoles et la société; ( ) documenter nos expériences pour qu’ils puissent être des programmes vivants que d’autres peuvent s’inspirer, s'étendre ou même recréer pour leurs contextes spécifiques; et ( ) identifier comment nos expériences vécues, influencées par des forces sociales plus larges, nous ont permis une manière particulière de voir / d'être qui reconnaît la relation cruciale entre décoloniser et soigner. mots clés : soignants, parentscholar, activisme de la faculté, autoethnographie, université néolibérale resumo: neste artigo, descrevemos o nosso processo de criar um grupo coletivo e ativista de professorxs-pais no nosso campus universitário em junho de quando as condições insustentáveis de trabalhar como professorxs universitárixs, que cuidam de crianças em plena pandemia global, atingiram um ponto de crise. por meio de uma autoetnografia colaborativa como acadêmic@s-genitorxs, interrogamos algumas estruturas profundamente enraizadas no sistema universitário que perpetuam as desigualdades atuais e invisibilizam o trabalho feito pel@s professorxs-genitorxs, que tornou-se mais visível no contexto da pandemia. todas as nossas narrativas foram escritas durante a crise global de saúde e a autorreflexão global para criar um mundo mais justo, facilitando a reflexão sobre as nossas próprias relações com o modelo universitário empresarial, a chamada “universidade neoliberal.” como acadêmic@s, educadorxs e ativistas que se ocupam de crianças, achamos essencial enunciar a relação entre as nossas histórias de luta e de alegria em diálogo com as importantes intervenções e manobras conceituais do “giro decolonial.” escrevemos com os seguintes objetivos: ( ) centrar @s genitorxs como agentes de mudança nos projetos interligados de descolonizar tanto as escolas como a sociedade; ( ) documentar nossas vozes e nossas experiências como currículos vivos para outr@s acadêmic@s usarem, alargarem ou mesmo recriarem nos seus próprios contextos; e ( ) identificar como as nossas experiências vividas, moldadas por forças sociais, facilitaram um modo particular de ver/ser que reconhece a relação crítica entre descolonizar e cuidar. palavras chave: cuidadorxs, parentscholar, coletivo e ativista de professorxs, autoetnografia, universidade neoliberal trahs n° | : narrativas de maestras (os) y normalistas en el giro decolonial https://www.unilim.fr/trahs - issn : - introduction in june , the conditions of working as caregivers during a pandemic became unsustainable for many faculties on our campus. we had just wrapped up an unprecedented semester marked by the sudden transition to online teaching while k- schools and daycares shut their doors. while we taught and reformatted our courses, we cared for vulnerable family members, homeschooled our children, and attended to baby and toddler needs at the same time. as we attempted to look ahead and piece together arrangements for managing summer and fall workloads and childcare while we sheltered in place, many of us began asking questions about contingency plans for parents dealing with the ongoing crisis. but at a college with no parental leave policy, no childcare center, and a culture that has either individualized or ignored the concerns of employee caregivers, it was not a surprise when the responses we sought were passed up the chain of command or indefinitely delayed like so many of our other prior requests. we could no longer wait for long promised improvements. we began to organize in the spirit of alignment with our institution’s mission and its proclamations of inclusivity, concern for economic and social injustice, and a commitment to the poor and marginalized. once our own emergent group of parentscholars started to find one another and share our private struggles, we soon realized that our individual experiences were not only being replicated across departments and schools, but they were also consistent with emerging research studies and news reports documenting the pandemic’s effects on caregiving scholars without institutional accommodation (cohenmiller, ). as the title of one such article declared: “faculty parents are once again being asked to perform a miracle” (flaherty, , aug ). as early as may, the guardian was already reporting a sharp decline in women’s academic research publication rates, while men’s increased nearly %, a trend experts attributed to the disproportionate “burden of homeschooling falling on women” during the pandemic (fazackerley, , may ). dozens of articles and preliminary studies have shown that, statistically, parenting responsibilities during the pandemic dramatically and unevenly impact the lives of women-identified workers, and bipoc women workers to an even greater extent (e.g. fazackerley, , may ; highwood, , april ; kitchener, , april ; perelman, , july ). these intersectionally gendered effects open up more opportunities for employers to (intentionally and unintentionally) discriminate against and penalize their employees, while ignoring their own role in reproducing the patriarchal, misogynistic, and racist workplace norms that already plagued academia long before the pandemic. the first response by many institutions, including ours, was to offer the option to stop the clock on tenure, a practice that delays job security and the financial gains that come with promotion, and has been shown to negatively impact women and bipoc faculty in particular (flaherty, , june ). these inequities are also emblematic of the larger structure and logic of what has been called the neoliberal university (giroux, ; munshi & willse, ; we employ the term parentscholar in recognition of and as an extension (to parents of all genders) from matias and nishi’s ( ) conceptualization of the term motherscholar, originally coined by matias in a american educational research association presentation. matias and nishi explain the lack of space or hyphen between mother and scholar is intentional, representing “the inseparable identities of being both mother and scholar; both-and and not, either-or” (p. ). they argue that we cannot engage in scholarship without engaging our roles as parents, and we cannot engage in parenting without engaging our roles as scholars. trahs n° | : narrativas de maestras (os) y normalistas en el giro decolonial https://www.unilim.fr/trahs - issn : - chatterjee and maira, ). the neoliberal university is a term that describes the incorporation and reproduction over the past few decades of so-called, free market ideals within higher education. the coronavirus pandemic has not only exposed but accelerated the precarious nature of this business model for higher education that has led to diminished possibilities for long-term stable jobs (e.g. tenure track positions); eroded faculty voice in shared governance; increased the number of high paying administrative positions; and escalated tuition costs imposing historic amounts of student debt upon an entire generation. despite these pervasive inequities intensified in the time of the pandemic, academic workplaces still have the capacity to transform in becoming more equitable and inclusive for parentscholars. inspired by various mobilizations around the country affirming the need for collective action to not simply intersect our identities, but more so our struggles, our group began to dialogue with one another in the hope of transforming our working conditions and exploring the ways higher education could be reimagined beyond further austerity measures. using old parent email lists that various faculty members had crowdsourced in the past for help with finding preschools and babysitters, we quickly assembled a working group and determined that our isolated experiences would inform our collective action. we started organizing weekly video meetings, either late at night after our children’s bedtimes or during the day when babies and children made frequent appearances. over cameras and across virtual platforms, we cooed at one member’s newborn and laughed when an eavesdropping seven-year-old burst onscreen to ask if it was ok to use curse words to decry racism and patriarchy. our check-ins and personal storytelling at the start of our meetings became a foundational source of connection, wholeness, and community. our virtual meetings where we could get advice, express our frustrations, and most importantly, hear and see each other’s loved ones served as constant reminders as to why we needed to struggle. over the course of the summer we surveyed our caregiver colleagues, analyzed the data, held multiple brainstorming sessions as a collective, and then wrote up a formal letter with ten demands for immediate policy and practice changes in response to covid- and three demands for the long-term institutionalization of an inclusive family-centered work culture that we sent to campus leaders and the faculty listserv (see appendix a for the caregiving collective letter and demands). with the pandemic disproportionately impacting communities of color in the u.s. and elsewhere, we wanted to be intentional in acknowledging that being a parentscholar during the pandemic is even more challenging for racialized scholars (scholars of color). therefore, we opened our letter by expressing solidarity with black faculty, staff, and students who had already shared formal black lives matter and black student union demands to transform the dehumanizing and anti-black conditions they face at [institution’s name]; included in those dehumanizing conditions is the issue of invisibilized caregiving. we echoed our campus’ black lives matter committee’s demand for “radical change addressing the root causes of the systemic oppression,” by asserting that we cannot shift the culture of our college without shifting the institution’s treatment of faculty, staff, and students with caregiving roles. “our work is grounded in the shared struggle that inspires our colleagues’ and students’ calls,” our letter attests, “and we believe that positive institutional change will come when we honor and follow the leadership of those most impacted by structural violence, inequities, and silence.” before delivering the letter and demands to administration, we circulated them amongst faculty and staff. over individuals at our small liberal arts college trahs n° | : narrativas de maestras (os) y normalistas en el giro decolonial https://www.unilim.fr/trahs - issn : - (about half of our or so ranked faculty) and departments, committees, and campus groups signed the letter. as we engaged in this work, our labor was increasingly grounded in the unplanned process of learning more about one another and gaining reverence for each other’s lived experiences. free of hierarchies, based on consensus, and attendant to the family demands and professional precarities of each of our constituents, our group was building the kind of decolonized professional space we hope our whole institution could one day become. we offer the stories that follow as examples not only of the personal struggles that drew us to this work, but also of the affirmation and hope that we gain from it. although our campus agitation and activism is far from complete, we hope our ongoing practice can serve as a promise of possibility for other faculty facing similar predicaments and inspire others to imagine what a decolonized academy could be - one that is more just, humanizing, and sustaining than the one we currently occupy. the struggle of our group is informed, in part, by decoloniality’s oppositional framework. decoloniality seeks to dismantle relations of power that “foment the reproduction of racial, gender, and geo-political hierarchies that came into being or found new and more powerful forms of expression in the modern/colonial world” (maldando-torres, ). the emergence of decoloniality as a conceptual term gained important traction during the first decade of the st century as a swarm of oppositional movements that include but are not limited to occupy wall street, the arab spring, idle no more, and #blacklivesmatter galvanized into an eclectic and militant response to the demise of the neoliberal global project (viola, ). scholars within and beyond the academy would engage the collective resistances of aggrieved populations and advance new themes, methods, and questions as well as reflect upon the shortcomings of dominant theoretical paradigms circulating within higher education (viola, saranillio, pegues, and day, ; viola and klein, ). in doing so, theorists from a mosaic of different anti-colonial knowledge projects and critical disciplinary perspectives would extend their conceptual orientations. as caregiving academics, educators, and activists we believe it crucial to enunciate our stories of struggle and joy during a global pandemic in dialogue with the important interventions and conceptual maneuvers of the “decolonial turn.” we also see the decolonial turn as a theoretical approach equipped to foreground the structural racism that permeates all aspects of universities and academia. as such, we write with the following intentions: ( ) to center caregivers as agents in the interrelated projects to decolonize both schools and society; ( ) to document our voices and experiences as living curriculums that others may draw upon, extend, or even recreate for their specific conditions; and ( ) to identify how our lived experiences, shaped by larger social forces, have enabled us a particular way of seeing that recognizes the peculiar relationship between decolonizing and caregiving. methods toward these goals, we have written a parentscholar collaborative autoethnography. ellis and bochner ( ) define autoethnography as “autobiographies that self- consciously explore the interplay of the introspective, personally engaged self with cultural descriptions mediated through language, history, and ethnographic explanation” (p. ). within composing ethnography ( ), ellis admits that ethnography cannot be separated from language, that in the creation of texts, an ethnographer necessarily invents a particular reality influenced by that ethnographer’s subjectivity. rather than deny that fact, ellis and bochner seek ways trahs n° | : narrativas de maestras (os) y normalistas en el giro decolonial https://www.unilim.fr/trahs - issn : - to provide a space for admission. there are obviously critiques, that the research will be lost to relativism and that facts will be supplanted by memory and imagination. ellis ( ) responds: “the idea of blurring genres of inquiry may help obscure the boundaries between science and literature, but it doesn’t obliterate the responsibility to try to be faithful to our experiences in the field” (p. ). as a collective of caregiving academics, we have committed to writing an evocative autoethnography, by which is meant that we do not ignore the emotional implications of actions; rather we seek, in our narrative revelations, to evoke a response and a connection to our struggle and advocacy work. we are informed by sotirin’s ( ) conceptualization of evocative autoethnographic mother-writing specifically, which involves “introspective inquiry into the emotional depths of personal experience, resonances of significance moving from personal to cultural relations and back again” (p. ). in the ethnographic i: a methodological novel about autoethnography, ellis ( ) writes that autoethnography “refers to the process as well as what is produced from the process” (p. ). within her autoethnographies, she focuses on the telling of the story, particularly those stories that are emotionally resonant for her: “in autoethnography, we’re usually writing about the epiphanies in our lives and by doing so, we open ourselves up for criticism about how we’ve lived” (pp. - ). in our work, we follow this pattern, laying bare the delights and devastations of caregiving while holding space for the learning of students and also negotiating ever shifting capitalistic demands of an academic institution. we foresee a reckoning in this time of consciousness raising in that there will be a breaking point in regards to the separation between work and caregiving; in our narratives, we explicitly agitate towards a practice that centers the important work of nurturing our futures. ethnography allows for the observation of a phenomenon as well as explorations of the self in the spirit of critique and questioning, particularly when using autoethnography. one might say that to understand the movements within our society, we must situate our individual experiences within collective and collaborative narratives confronting the ongoing legacies and structures of colonial oppression. in our collaborative work, we additionally draw on the framing of heewon chang, faith ngunjiri, and kathy-ann c. hernandez, collaborative autoethnography ( ). chang, et al successfully argue that collaborative autoethnography can elucidate an understanding of a particular subjectivity of the self through the catalyst mechanism of group study. we as a group share a particular social location as caregiving faculty members, and we live varied intersectional identities. through our individual narratives, we reveal a collective struggle; through our collaborative autoethnographic work we reveal hidden, dehumanizing, and hegemonic structures. while recognizing our shared struggles and our convergence around them, we also bring radical specificity (sotirin, ) to our writing, highlighting our unique lived experiences— from one another and all parentscholars. our collaborative autoethnography serves as a writing practice of expression and resistance as well as a methodology of solidarity where one’s voice is cast upon systems of power and exclusion. articulating our personal struggles as caregivers in a context of austerity, gentrification, and racial violence cannot be done without a critical orientation to larger collective predicaments of capitalist exploitation and systems of colonial domination. as a result, the narratives we offer in these pages are not limited to an individual subject overcoming harsh life circumstance, but rather evoke a collective polyphony of caregiving voices, circumstances that are actively critiquing our existing order of things, while at the same time preparing a future generation of trahs n° | : narrativas de maestras (os) y normalistas en el giro decolonial https://www.unilim.fr/trahs - issn : - youth with the necessary skills to recreate schools, societies, and even themselves in beautiful new ways. parentscholar autoethnographies penalty & privilege: navigating motherhood and visible non-masculinity in the academy emily b. klein i was the first woman in my department to have a baby. it was . my first job out of graduate school. tenure track at a small liberal arts college. my first doctoral advisor had told me that i’d never get a job because my interest in feminist theory was passé, so it felt good knowing that the choice to drop him and find a female- identified mentor with kids had been the right way to go. she had advised me well, focused on pragmatic tips for professional navigation and survival, and now, here i was—living the dream! but when i looked around the department meeting at my colleagues stuffed into those metal classroom chairs with the attached flip-up desks, i wondered how long my swelling pregnant abdomen would fit into that cramped space. and then it dawned on me that i was almost certainly the first person in the room to ever think that thought. though i remembered feeling reassured during my initial campus visit when i noted that the little department of ten or so was pretty evenly split between men and women, that reassurance started to fade once i was hired. i soon realized that almost all the men in the department had children, but not a single woman did. when i broadened my view to the whole humanities building, i discovered that there were only two other tenure track women with children. i was about to become a member of a very small, unpopular club. it started to seem fitting then, that the day my pregnancy test had turned blue was the same day that my inbox lit up with my first book contract emailed from the publisher. my double joy—two gifts i could hardly believe were mine—became my double panic; the thrill of gratitude twinned with the daunting fear that i was not up to this tandem challenge. i was used to the infantilizing pressures of academia’s relentless cycles of evaluation and judgement, but now more than ever i felt i would have to produce research that evidenced my scholarly competence—and it would have to be enough to outweigh my new status as—that word for a non-professional woman—a mother. unlike fatherhood, which seemingly has no effect on the status of men’s identity in higher education, motherhood at this precarious stage of my career, i feared, would mark me as non-serious and perhaps, non-tenurable. the subtext, of course, is that pregnancy and motherhood would also mark me in a hyper- visible way as non-masculine—a dangerous thing to be in an institution and a field another grad student advisee and more work for her; less for him, and so the story goes… see social sciences feminist network research interest group. “the burden of invisible work in academia: social inequalities and time use in five university departments.” humboldt journal of social relations, vol. , , pp. - . jstor, www.jstor.org/stable/ and joya misra, jennifer hickes lundquist, elissa holmes, and stephanie agiomavritis. “the ivory ceiling of service work” american association of university professors. january-february . https://www.aaup.org/article/ivory-ceiling- service-work#.x kyrul mqa. http://www.jstor.org/stable/ https://www.aaup.org/article/ivory-ceiling-service-work% .x kyrul mqa https://www.aaup.org/article/ivory-ceiling-service-work% .x kyrul mqa trahs n° | : narrativas de maestras (os) y normalistas en el giro decolonial https://www.unilim.fr/trahs - issn : - in which white masculinity in terms of style, affect, and persona is both the gold standard and the invisible norm. thus, by what i perceived as necessity, my maternity leave also became my research leave. instead of sleeping when the baby sleeps like the cozy parenting manuals recommend, i outlined new chapters. on a summer trip to introduce the baby to friends and family back home, i wrote drafts at a stranger’s kitchen table; kind neighbors of my parents generously gave us their house key while they were gone so that i could work there uninterrupted while my partner watched the baby. i wrote for my professional survival, and i wrote for my child. the book i was laboring into birth--“my second born,” i joked-- was the currency on which i could trade up for a better job for me, and a better life for my child. it was a struggle, but it was such a good one to have, i kept reminding myself. i was privileged to have this struggle. a struggle borne of good fortune and good health and hard work and love? i had no choice but to embrace it all. yet, now, looking back on that embraced struggle at my old institution, i also see the structural problems that i helped to normalize. i knew that academia was built by and for people without family caregiving responsibilities, but i didn’t want to seem ungrateful for my tenure track opportunity, so i kept quiet. now, when aspiring graduate students at my current college ask me about balancing parenting and academia, i hate it that my answers make my voice drop an octave. i go from enthusiastic to furtive, strategic, survivalist. i reluctantly describe the invisible emotional labor of student support work, the myths around “stopping the tenure clock,” the institutionalized exploitation of adjunct instructors. why do i keep working in a field that has always reserved special subtle and not-so-subtle penalties not only for women, but for women of color and especially caregiving women of color most of all? i guess it’s because of hope. i have hope that the more of us that stick around and find each other, the more change we can make together. i have hope that in the very programs and departments where we teach students to critically examine intersecting structures of power, systemic forms of built-in oppression, the effects of politics on their lived experience, and the value of reclaiming silenced and forgotten histories, we can also do the work to decolonize and decorporatize our own institutions. this year, as the first sabbatical of my career was obliterated by covid- , i was reminded of the urgency of this collective work. at a time when i wanted nothing more than the solitude to finally glimpse that fantasy professor life—maybe not with the pipe and beard and elbow patches—but to focus on my research, burrow into archives, and observe the objects of my study, my time for scholarship evaporated. homeschooling and various forms of parenting and caregiving rushed in to take its place. navigating the crushing loss of research time while constantly soothing my lonely first grader bereft of friends and normalcy took me back to those first bleary months of motherhood when i was similarly scared and exhausted and torn between parenting and publishing. in this case, when i asked my campus administrators what i could do to convert, delay, or extend my thwarted leave i was met with silence. my sabbatical had already been delayed by two years because of what a colleague called “the gender tax” when the administrator who hired me wouldn’t count my previous years of academic work toward my entry status in the same way he had for previously hired men. even though it was almost immediately obvious that my decade-long wait for a first sabbatical was all for naught and my research agenda was decimated, i struggled for weeks to talk myself out of the academic-lady internal monologue that i had rehearsed and learned so well: “don’t bother them; they’re busy. don’t be selfish; we’re in a pandemic. your problems don’t matter. your trahs n° | : narrativas de maestras (os) y normalistas en el giro decolonial https://www.unilim.fr/trahs - issn : - research doesn’t matter. moms don’t matter.” it took a group of other struggling academic caregivers to rouse me from the cycling scripts of self-defeat. on our first mid-pandemic video call, there was immediate meaning and power just in the resistant act of finding each other. we realized that despite being siloed in our separate departments and committees, we all had the same language for what we had been through: “expected to go about business as usual,” “unacknowledged,” “forgotten,” “ignored,” and “invisibilized.” bell hooks’ famous reference to catharine mackinnon rang in my ears: “we know things with our lives and we live that knowledge, beyond what any theory has yet theorized” (hooks, ). we discussed not only the sad state of affairs on our campus before covid- (no child care center, no parenting or family resources, and still after years of internal studies, task forces and negotiations, no parental or maternity leave policy), but we also theorized the ways that toxic elements of our institutional culture were playing out during intersecting global crises. this was our old-fashioned twenty-first century consciousness raising moment. over the weeks, many of us marched with our children in support of the #blacklivesmatter uprising by day only to come home to dinner and bedtime duty, followed by caregiver organizing sessions at night. during the heightened strain of the pandemic and the global protests for racial justice, our needs as faculty caregivers sharpened into focus. the global health crisis became a kind of tipping point for moving us toward the collaborative work of decolonizing our campus culture. though we were more physically isolated than ever, our endeavor was grounded in a shared source of growth and joy. during these endless quarantine days when our children saw all that we did--constant little witnesses to our work and play--i think we felt a greater sense of responsibility to model and be the world we wanted for them. we had each struggled for our families before. now it was just a matter of turning that individual practice into collective action. to hold close, we plan and fight raina j. león (written in the wee hours of the night while baby and toddler sleep) to have children, my partner and i require significant medical interventions. my son was the result of nearly three years of tests, sole allocation of our collective savings, and nearly a thousand pages of medical records for me alone. i planned implantation day after having read the report of three colleagues on parental leave where they compared leaves at comparable universities and delineated case studies from faculty at the university where heinous disregard for their health and finances had occurred. they even created a calendar that noted how the week you had your baby could have very different effects on receiving a humane parental leave at our institution. i timed implantation, praying on success, and a full term baby to be born during one of the weeks demarcated in green. my partner and i would often leave the house at about am to be in two hours of traffic for ultrasounds after the implantation yielded a growing fetus, two to three times a week. after that, i would drive across the bay bridge again to start a day that would often include hours of meetings and classes as a faculty person and director of my program. what i learned as i grew into a new mother body was that i could not take parental leave and be on sabbatical, so my year-long sabbatical at half-pay, became months of leave at about % of my yearly pay over two years. to be assured of a parental leave at all, i informed my university of my pregnancy only seven or eight weeks into it, which was already a significant risk considering how many interventions trahs n° | : narrativas de maestras (os) y normalistas en el giro decolonial https://www.unilim.fr/trahs - issn : - were necessary to become pregnant. it took me months of negotiations and meetings to ultimately have a plan in place. while on my parental leave/sabbatical, i recall thinking of my colleagues who had used their sabbaticals to just read or take up an instrument or rest. i never rested. i took on teaching gigs to make up the money i lost for the leave and took on a bevy of activities, creatively joyous and some purely functional, more and ever more, while also caretaking for my son until he went to daycare at months. in the weeks before my return to work at the university, i began to feel two pulls: dread at my return and a desire to welcome our second child. “why are you here so soon?” the fertility doctor asked. “you have all the time in the world.” i thought that he must not work with many academics, or at least none at my university. i was , up for promotion to full professor, with so many side gigs that i often lost (and lose) count. returning to academia after a birth, parental leave, sabbatical, i knew applying for full professor might be sabotaged for at least years if i was not successful in the first application. getting pregnant again so soon might mean that, should i not be successful, there would be too much time between the last time that i taught to have viable teaching evaluations; at a college that emphasizes them, the stronger move would be to delay adding to my family yet again. still, i did not want my family planning to be undermined by career goals and an acceptance of patriarchal and racist systems that seek to control the body of the child-bearing and -rearing black woman. time and health were not on my side biologically for getting pregnant and carrying a baby to term. i had already had one miscarriage after my son’s birth. many of my peers returning from sabbatical spoke to feeling refreshed and ready to engage in the comradery of intellectual exchange in hallways and classrooms. i looked at it as a precipice: so much at stake at the edge. it was hard to remember the first bright days as a professor. in those early days, i did not associate the whiteness of the buildings with whiteness, nor the hallowed halls as held up by the exposed beams of patriarchy. those days did not last long; my primary reprieve became the classroom, learning with my students, though even there, i was not safe. still, i looked forward to supporting the work of teachers, because i believe in the liberatory power, shared and collective-rising, of education. “i’m getting old,” i think i said to the doctor. i know he brushed it off, but what i meant was not just my age. it was my perception of a growing cementedness in what i feared about academia and the daily struggles within it as an afro-boricua woman. one of my great celebrations in becoming a mother is how much i must model myself on water: it moves ever onward, finding a way from no way. it has its own mission to fulfill, it’s own makings. it is shaped, but it is shapeless and so unable to be controlled. it changes with the seasons and remains ultimately water. it carries and teaches us to let go. as with my son, i planned my daughter’s rooting, and i went on the job market again. during my sabbatical, while my son was an infant and with a deep understanding of the financial cost of having another child without the sick days that parental leave relies on at my university, i applied for a job at another university. the job was truly perfect for me. i got a campus interview and flew from my sabbatical location of italy at the time to attend it. i got the job. ultimately, it wasn’t a fit for my family trahs n° | : narrativas de maestras (os) y normalistas en el giro decolonial https://www.unilim.fr/trahs - issn : - – while there would be dynamic possibilities for me, my partner’s career would be deeply undermined – i was able to use my job offer to negotiate three course releases and a small salary increase for three years. i also secured the ability to use two course releases in a semester. at our university, one needs three years of accumulated sick leave to be assured a parental leave for a semester and that comes with a minimum $ , pay cut. by my calculations, i would have enough sick time accumulated for one course release and with the ability to take the two additional course releases, i would not have to suffer another pay cut. if i took leave without the benefit of those course releases, my income could be cut up to $ , . considering that i was returning from having years of income at a cumulative % of my salary, i knew i could not take an even more drastic pay cut for the same and often increasing work, because i choose to mother. when i was negotiating, a hitch for a time was that i insisted on being able to use two course releases in a semester. i explained to the dean that this was what i needed for parental leave and was told that the provost had relayed to her that a parental leave policy would be instituted so this would not be necessary. knowing that colleagues have fought for years for such a policy, i did not believe and held on to having my request honored. the college agreed, but it took months for me to receive my retention offer confirmation, months after i had already told the other university that i could not take the position. i discussed with my partner what might happen if they did not honor the agreement, that it was better to leave the university and be unemployed than to stay with no security of my parental leave being honored. i have had to become resolved to leave in order to stay. i went on the job market again before i returned and negotiated an additional year of the salary bonus to replace the k pay cut that i took with my son and the ability to use one of my course releases when i would return to campus as faculty and the director of my program, with new students, around months pregnant and limited in my movement capacities, mothering a toddler while in a school that was in the midst of vast changes in faculty, staffing, student numbers … and knowing i would have to go on leave three weeks before the semester would end. i also negotiated a parental leave that was not dependent on using the course releases i had secured. i was again told that a parental leave policy would be in place making this assurance in my retention offer moot. that i insisted on this being stated in my retention offer is the only reason that i did not have to use course releases from my first retention offer to ensure that i would not suffer another pay cut. that i have a parental leave now is the result of having planned my mothering journey over the last three years, having gone on the job market twice and developing a comfort with leaving a university where i was faculty, staff, and a student at one point so that i could be with my newborn daughter as long as possible. my return to campus was not all happy days, though in the first weeks, i did find myself joyous at seeing old friends and being welcomed back by new faces who smiled often as they said, “i’ve heard so many good things about you. i am so glad to meet you.” beautiful affirmations for my work at the university were extended, and i found my fears supplanted by my emerging confidence in my leadership, capacity as an educator, and ability to hold space for the intersecting communities of which i am a part. i put the promotion decision at the back of my mind. trahs n° | : narrativas de maestras (os) y normalistas en el giro decolonial https://www.unilim.fr/trahs - issn : - none of us could have imagined the pandemic, the limitations on movement and constant concern of illness, the vast changes to medical care. additionally, i did not expect to also return to a sustained conflict with a colleague, infused with (micro)aggressions, who had power over my promotion as she had years ago when i went up for tenure. i did all the right things to shield myself, saw all the right people. ultimately, as far as i know, nothing was ever done to protect me. “if this is what i came back for, it would have been better to leave,” i said once to my mother, a former full professor herself. she said, “you can’t look back. you have to live with your decisions and look forward.” i listened and settled into gratitude for a job, for my child coming, for the parental leave to be with her. i had worked so hard just to be with her, tried to anticipate every barrier. in the months since i started my leave, i was welcomed as a full professor, only the third black person (all of us black women) at my university and the first afro-latina. while i am not the first latina, i may be the fifth and eighth full professor of latinx descent of at least the last years, but possibly the full -year history of the university. in all of who i am, in looking at numbers from the most recent national center for education statistics study of the american professoriate, i represent less than . % of the entire professoriate: full professor, femme-identified, person of or more races (national center for education statistics, ). i received the news of my promotion in march, a deadline i had negotiated in my retention offer. i was asked by the dean why, and answered honestly: “if i am not promoted to full professor, then that gives me enough time to give the university notice and for you to run a search for my program; it also gives me time to determine next steps for going on the job market in the fall again.” i had resolved to be with my children during a parental leave of at least three months, no matter the cost. i had chosen to leave and look for other opportunities for employment rather than work in an environment that sought to dehumanize me as if i was just a teaching automaton, a cog in the machine with my family as small grooves in the turning wheel. my resolution around my children continues to be essential and impacted even in my birth story. i ultimately needed an emergency birth at a hospital and was placed in an isolation room while suspected of suffering from the novel coronavirus. ultimately, it was determined that i did not have the novel coronavirus, but in the crisis, over and over again, i had to say, “you will not take my daughter. she’s staying right here with me.” not to be resuscitated outside of a room; not for any testing; not to a nicu to isolate her out of an overabundance of caution; not to a nursery for warming or to be fed or to be changed; not for anything would i or will i allow my daughter (or children) to be taken. this is an resolution in ancestral alignment; it is also an important statement in this present moment. two days later, george floyd was killed, and a mother who was already ancestor welcomed her son, a son who was taken from the world. this is all linked. the fight to stay close, to stay human, to have my humanity honored, the stake of my life and that of my children, the systems that seek to control and will kill you if they can’t, the extraordinary work that must be done in hope, rooted in love, with no guarantees of survival. as the caregiving faculty rose up to write our demands for a campus climate change, i joined them. how could i not? at stake is nothing less than our lives and that of our children, whether in pandemic or not. in each meeting, while we shared our dreaming of health and wellness and thriving in an academic environment and fashioned those dreams into demands, we also cultivated a healing and centered community in which we celebrated our parenting trahs n° | : narrativas de maestras (os) y normalistas en el giro decolonial https://www.unilim.fr/trahs - issn : - selves and commiserated in the struggles, too. my daughter has attended most of the meetings with me. my caregiving colleagues and friends have witnessed her transform in the magical way that babies do, seeming to grow exponentially before us. oftentimes, i have bounced her while my son played in the background. my children, the youngest of our collective, seem to energize our work and me in our shared aim: an academic space in which we can be whole and human, teaching and engaging in scholarly practice, while also centering our beloved commitments as parents to raise whole and healthy human beings. i am in a constant state of becoming as mother, scholar, collaborative agitator, and organizer, and my children witness this becoming. this is the example i want to live, and i celebrate, that their paths, too, might be written towards community flourishing. the sweet scent of rose mary candace raygoza as a brand new (very excited, eager) high school teacher in my early s, i participated in a training on trauma-informed, restorative justice pedagogies and practices for teachers at the echo center in los angeles. we learned about how trauma manifests in the body, how to connect with young people through a trauma- informed lens, and how to challenge dominant paradigms of punishment that exacerbate the school-to-prison pipeline. we were introduced to a long list of human needs and emotions such as joy, connection, hope, solidarity, affection, and wonder; and were encouraged to understand how young people’s behavior is a communication of their human needs, how we can strive to support those needs to be met as teachers. it was a life-changing experience for me as a teacher and as a person. i came home from the training to my then-boyfriend and said: we have to go to echo’s classes for parents when we have our own children! fast forward years and there i was, waddling into echo, super pregnant in my third trimester (again: very excited, eager), sitting next to my husband at echo’s parenting series. i wanted to (and had the privilege to) be in this space before becoming a parent. it was an educational experience for me, but more than that it was an act of resistance, of intervening on my own intergenerational childhood trauma, starting with when my baby was in the womb. i carried a baby, and i carried a deep sense of unwillingness to accept or perpetuate childhood trauma, as a mother and educator. logistically, we also needed to take the class at echo when i was still pregnant because we were about to move away from the area for my first academic job as a teacher education professor. i became a mother exactly days before i became a professor. within the span of two weeks, i defended my dissertation (nothing like braxton hicks contractions at weeks along to make you drive your dissertation findings home!), graduated with my phd, birthed my first born, and started an academic job. at new faculty orientation, i pumped breastmilk behind the projector screen so i could still hear the session introducing us to the rank and tenure process. navigating pumping breastmilk to succeed as a professor was not in the slideshow i could not see, but there i was, trying to listen diligently over the rhythm of the buzzing pump. also, the first person on campus i asked about where to pump had suggested the bathroom, an all-too-common story across higher education and beyond, so there was that. when i was initially offered the job, an academic mentor whom i turned to during my job search advised me not to ask for a later start date, that it could jeopardize the offer and that if my daughter was born at the end of june but classes did not start until august, i should be just fine, so i did not ask directly for a later start date— this was my dream job. i was terrified. and i told everyone i was expecting and what trahs n° | : narrativas de maestras (os) y normalistas en el giro decolonial https://www.unilim.fr/trahs - issn : - my due date was, so i figured if starting later was possible, someone would have offered it, or at least mentioned it. in the last few years, it has since been communicated to me it would have been my responsibility to try to individually arrange a later start date. years later, i am still grieving the lost time with my daughter in her infancy. i made every moment count as a mother, in the classroom, and in my scholarship. but i should not have had to extend myself as i did, to the detriment of my mental health and wellbeing. i work at an institution presently without a parental leave policy. we are still fighting for that, so that leave does not consist of individual arrangements of sick time that amount to a version of leave. so, i need to consider this if i have another child. in an eerily parallel situation, when i was a year-old high school teacher, an administrator told me not to take days off (referring to not using the sick days teachers are allotted for a whole school year) because i should “bank” them for when i have a child—without knowing anything about my reproductive history or plans, and of course with no business to know those things or advise on that. i vividly remember, with fury in my body, saying to her: ‘that is not appropriate.’ why was my year-old untenured teacher self put in a position to have to tell her that? why, as a professional who works with children and the teachers who teach them, do i not have parental leave or access to or support for childcare from my places of work for my own children? the message i have received as an educator, both in k- and higher education, is that having a child is not something to be normalized as part of a professional’s life trajectory or something to be accommodated for without question- as in, of course people have babies and of course we support you to bond with your babies. this is why i organize for and with parentscholars. it is resistance as love— love for children and caregivers and families and for what our educational institutions can become. i organize to intervene on trauma, both the intergenerational childhood trauma i know viscerally at the personal level, and the systemic trauma against families intersecting with many forms of oppression— so much of which i do not know from my own lived experience. i am a white, middle-class, cisgender woman, and i now work at a catholic institution with the name mary to top it off. i walk the world with unearned privilege and seek to recognize how in most facets of my lived experience, from the healthcare system to the education system, i benefit. in the time of the pandemic, i know many caregiving faculties are faced with many more layers of oppression than myself, and i strive to do what i can to use my privilege to interrupt that. teaching, both in k- and higher education, and parenthood are deeply integrated parts of my identity. at the core of my philosophies of teaching and parenting is that our systems should be designed to support educators and parents to foster young people’s human needs – joy, connection, hope, solidarity, affection, wonder, and so much more – and to challenge all forms of oppression. i am driven by a deep sense of unwillingness to be complicit in a society that doesn’t do everything it can to love children and caregivers and families. because how can we meet everyone’s human needs if we don’t? where is our humanity if we don’t? we need caregiving-friendly policies in higher education, but this work is not inherently an issue of policy, it’s an issue of humanity. see raygoza, m.c., león, r., lee, c., junsay, c., norris, a., & niermann, g. ( ). social justice in teacher education: it’s not just a course. in ccte span research monograph (pp. - ). san francisco, ca: california council on teacher education. trahs n° | : narrativas de maestras (os) y normalistas en el giro decolonial https://www.unilim.fr/trahs - issn : - i connected with my colleagues to organize after we were hit with a new reality of suddenly having childcare yanked from underneath us, now expected to simultaneously parent and work full-time as if this crisis of childcare had not happened. it seemed that k- and higher education institutions far and wide were not viewing this dilemma as their dilemma but rather one that individuals must quietly figure out. it was not surprising, but it was jarring. this time feels so very similar to my newborn mother phase of caring for my child and working around the clock all over again, again at the expense of my mental health and wellbeing. i organize with my colleagues in the time of covid because, as activist grace lee boggs reminds us, “movements are born of critical connections rather than critical mass.” we share a deep connection as caregiving faculty, and we are driven in our work as part of larger social movement to decolonize education. i organize with my colleagues because our storytelling of our children’s joyous moments and the more challenging times seamlessly weave into our advocacy, our writing, our strategizing, and our persistence to somehow keep showing up to post-bedtime meetings exhausted; and that’s beautiful. organizing with fellow caregiving faculty is healing. the tremendous outpour of campus support and solidarity since we sent out our letter and demands is uplifting. the swift, positive responses and actions from a number of college leaders is affirming and gives me hope for continued justice- driven work at our institution, one with social justice at the heart of its mission. i organize because now during the pandemic at zoom meetings and classes, with my year-old daughter often on my lap, nestling up on my chest, i can smell the sweet scent of rose (my daughter’s name), giving me life to keep on “teaching the big kids” (as she understands my job) and to advocate for my fellow caregivers. we are here to write another story for caregiving faculty at our institution and beyond. caregiving and teaching demand a pedagogy of the heart michael j. viola there are moments in life when one understands what it means to serve as a bridge between a history not of our own choosing and a futurity we have a small role in creating. one of those moments occurred on march , . i was walking home with my two children and their dearest friend from a trip to the nearby ice cream store in east oakland when i received an email that i had been granted tenure at my institution. as i paused with immense gratitude, i soon realized that this news was received exactly years to the day when my father, who had been struggling for many years with congestive heart failure had passed away in his sleep. i was transported to the early morning of march , when i was awakened to the news that my father’s heart had pumped its last beat. i was holding my youngest daughter, named in my father’s honor, who at the age of two would oftentimes crawl into bed with me at sunbreak. i brought my daughter closer in an embrace saddened with the realization that at her tender age, she would no longer create new memories with her grandfather. rather, she would come to know him only through the stories that would be told of his life. the world has transformed dramatically since the morning of my father’s passing. in fact, it is unrecognizable from that afternoon walk with my children when i received notice of my tenure. on march , , six counties in the san francisco bay area announced a “shelter in place” order that restricted all residents to their homes in response to the global coronavirus pandemic. in the months that followed we have: witnessed the united states comprising nearly a quarter of the world’s covid- deaths despite having less than a % of the world’s population; experienced the accelerated effects of global climate change as wildfires consume trahs n° | : narrativas de maestras (os) y normalistas en el giro decolonial https://www.unilim.fr/trahs - issn : - the entire west coast resulting in plumes of smoke so large they obstructed the light of the sun for days on end; and confronted the deeply entrenched patterns of anti- blackness in our country with the unjust killings of breonna taylor, ahmaud arbery, george floyd, and rayshard brooks. such events have led my faculty colleagues as well as educators throughout the nation to question, to reflect upon, and to remember why we have dedicated our lives to the teaching profession. the latin american poet, eduardo galeano reminds us that the act of remembering, which in spanish is “recordar,” comes from the latin, re-cordis, and means: “to pass back through the heart” (galeano, ). in this time between reaction and radicalism, caregiving educators must ask ourselves: what kind of world are we educating our students and our children to live in? this question is especially important in the courses that i teach to prepare future teachers. in my courses i understand that i’m contributing to the intellectual development of future educators so they can be equipped in grasping the interrelated relationships between schools and the larger systems of power. yet, teaching is not just an act of the mind but of our hearts. as such, i do my best to expand our collective ability to feel more deeply with their hearts so that my students have a greater sense of urgency, anger, as well as hope to participate alongside their own future students in the calls for racial, economic and environmental justice. i teach my pre-service students with the imagination that they will have my two children in their future classrooms someday. for my daughters are part of a generation of youth, akin to the generations that have come before them, that must be positioned by the care of their parents, wider community, and their teachers to, in the words of james baldwin, “use the tremendous potential and energy which [these children] represent. because if our country’s schools and broader institutions do not “find a way to use that energy, it will be destroyed by that energy” (baldwin, ). during the duration of the coronavirus pandemic, i have seen glimpses of the kinds of destruction my own children can bring upon the structures my partner and i have tried to establish and co-create in our home. such chaos has ensued not out of ill will, but because i have lacked the necessary time to channel our children’s abundance of potential and energy in creative and engaging ways as i carry on with the teaching, scholarship, and service required of my work. i cannot fathom how single mothers within the academy and beyond it are able to sustain this kind of life imbalance. in fact, i’m convinced it is untenable as i parent with my partner in addressing the everyday needs of our young daughters who spend each hour of their day under our supervision. the pandemic has exposed the ways in which the architecture of higher education and its hierarchical structures have not been created from the “locus of enunciation” that understands let alone embraces the lived experiences of caregivers. as a father in the academy, i recognize that i am afforded many privileges that my women colleagues do not have. for instance, i can bring my children to campus with me and be viewed as a good parent as opposed to unprofessional or not committed to my work. i understand the immense research that has shown how being a father in the academy has not actually hindered my ability toward tenure but actually benefited me, especially considering the ways my own life partner has struggled to find secure employment as an academic as she carries so much of the gendered and emotional labor unjustly normalized as the work of mothering. we have been able to keep our heads afloat in these times because of the strength of our community both within the college and beyond. i do not have the space in these pages to talk about the radical families who contribute in the raising of my daughters. yet, within the academy, i have the privilege of being a part of an academic program (with supportive faculty colleagues) grounded in the ideals of social justice and the trahs n° | : narrativas de maestras (os) y normalistas en el giro decolonial https://www.unilim.fr/trahs - issn : - collective good. toward those ends, we have co-created a culture of care and a recognition for the need of finding some semblance of balance. even before the coronavirus pandemic, our program collaborated on our teaching schedules to ensure that faculty members were accommodated. such dialogues were essential in recognizing that faculty involvement in social justice struggles were not contained solely to the institution and that other aspects of our life required nourishment to bring us joy, fulfillment, and a greater sense of purpose. as i learned from other faculty colleagues across academic programs and departments, it was clear that my colleagues outside of my specific academic program were not treated with the same culture of dignity and respect. as such, the caregiving collective that emerged this summer would recognize that change can only occur with institutional policies and a broader campus culture led by those most impacted by long standing inequities. i participated with this collective recognizing that the efforts to pump new life into existing systems and dream into being the kind of larger institution that our hearts yearn for requires ongoing struggle and solidarity. my understanding of struggle and solidarity has evolved over the years as i become more aware of the precariousness of life both as a parent and as a son who continues to mourn the loss of his father. such experiences have enabled me to see the world in new, interconnected, and more complex ways. i believe that it will only be through struggle and solidarity with our students and fellow faculty colleagues (both tenure stream and adjunct faculty alike) that we will be able to move beyond the longstanding and unsustainable corporate trends embraced in higher education. such struggle and solidarity has been represented in various social movements with the raised fist to indicate the power of individuals working collectively with the understanding that each of our individual struggles are bound together with others against common structures that perpetuate injustice and inequity. for my children, their fists are the same size as their hearts. yet, for a typical adult, the heart grows to become the equivalent of two human fists. this is a fitting way to think about why caregivers offer an important curriculum in the decolonization of schools and society. caregiving struggles are always motivated by the collective. in other words, caregivers are not merely the sum of individual efforts to transform who they are, but rather they struggle with their loved ones in mind so their children may inherit institutions that will enable them to direct their immense potential and energy for a better world. this is the link between teaching and caregiving, as both require a pedagogy that is not simply animated in critique but more so fueled by the radical love that resides deep within our hearts. discussion the process of developing our collective autoethnography foregrounded several unexpected themes: the importance of being rooted in love to fuel our solidarity work; the detriment of individualism in addressing our needs as it undermines the possibility of real and consistent institutional change; the recognition that organizing is aligned with our pedagogical work and commitment to our familial and academic communities; the understanding that our narratives can serve as an agitation and even dismantling of untenable university structures for the good of all. last but not least, a shared sense of healing emerged through our collaboration. finding each other, sharing our stories, and organizing as a collective has turned out to be a process of healing we did not know we needed. vijay prashad states, “if you listen to [...] social movements around the world, you will find that they have lessons to teach us about how the system should be reorganized during this crisis” (prashad, ). building upon prashad’s insights, trahs n° | : narrativas de maestras (os) y normalistas en el giro decolonial https://www.unilim.fr/trahs - issn : - our central premise is that caregiving educators can provide institutions crucial strategies for resisting the dehumanization of the neoliberal university. such a reorganization would actively de-link from the toxicities of individualism, careerism, and profiteering toward an alternative logic of care, radical love, and healing that benefits students and employees alike. the narratives documented here were all written during a period of crisis and pandemic, enabling us to reflect aloud about our unhealthy relationship to the business of higher education. more voices must be cast upon these institutions that have devalued labor and invisibilized communities. in this contemporary moment, race continues to constitute a dividing line that traverses various power relations including class, gender, and sexual identity (grosfoguel, oso & chrisou, ). drawing upon the work of fanon, grosfoguel, et al helps to explain how racialized bodies are marked differently within “zones of being” and “zones of non-being.” in “zones of non-being” or heterogenous spaces that are organized and informed by colonial projects and histories of appropriation and dehumanization, people are racialized in a manner that either erases their very humanity or views their existence with contempt and disdain. as such, racialized people in “zones of non-being” are viewed as sub or non-human and their calls for change are too often met with acts of physical and psychological violence. we do not write from such a space. as tenure track and tenured faculty residing within “a zone of being” in a north american college, we have access to particular norms, codes, and laws of political negotiation that protect our basic humanity. we know that our calls for change will not be received with physical violence or abuse. yet, organizing within such a zone does not mean that for particular bodies, especially black ones, we are exempt from such moments where we may fear for our safety and the safety of our children. in what ways can future scholarship foreground the experiences and struggles of racialized bodies to create generative dialogues and coalitions within these two distinct zones? such efforts are needed in a political moment where a global pandemic is expanding the “zones of non-being”, further threatening black lives as well as undocumented immigrants along our border. in regards to the specific objectives of this manuscript, in what ways could the inclusion of voices of indigenous, queer, single parents; caregivers of children with special needs; and caregivers of elders offer new ways of thinking, learning, and working within the north american academy? more scholarship in this domain grounded in the experiences of caregiving activism and collective organizing is needed. we recognize that what we have written here may come across as “complaining” or “ungrateful.” on the contrary, we view this collective activism as the most earnest form of campus service, emerging from a place of radical love to push our institution of higher learning to fully realize its promise of providing quality education that is inclusive and just. over the course of six months, we have been reminded that social distancing cannot mean we are to distance ourselves from one another’s struggles, hopes, and lived realities. through a radical love that fuels our efforts to decolonize the institution, we have secured victories that range from ensuring faculty preference for teaching modality during this pandemic; protecting course releases for heavy-load committee work; having the ability to step away from elected service committees for the school year; including a covid- statement that the promotion and tenure committee will review in its deliberations; securing future course release time for interrupted trahs n° | : narrativas de maestras (os) y normalistas en el giro decolonial https://www.unilim.fr/trahs - issn : - sabbaticals, and observing humanizing meeting etiquette (including normalizing having children at virtual meetings and stepping away to attend to them). while we are proud of these concrete victories for caregiving faculty at our institution, perhaps our greatest victory is modeling for our children activism birthed from our radical love - for them and for all children, families, and caregivers. as teachers, we know that our work often entails planting seeds we may not bear witness to the growth of immediately, and that the same is true of parenting. what seeds did post-bedtime pandemic parentscholar organizing plant? we will find out as our children, the next generation, (continue to) create their own paths of dreaming and realizing a more humanizing world. acknowledgements we gratefully acknowledge the caregiving collective of faculty members who were drawn together because of our love and commitment to our families, children, and academic community. of that larger collective we are especially grateful to drs. claire williams, aeelah soine, and makiko imamura for their vision and leadership. we also hold sacred the support of our children, our respective partners, and the allyship of well over individual, program, and departmental signatories to our initial demand letter. in the process of sharing our stories, we learned that we are not alone, that there were more commonalities than there were divergences. over the weeks of visioning and enacting change, we found healing and allyship that defeated our isolation, endemic to our experiences both before and after the start of the pandemic. our collective meetings, though often at the ends of long days caring for our families and educating the change makers of today and tomorrow, often were spaces of solace and solidarity. so much has happened at our university over the span of a few short months because of all of us, working together and truly seeing one another for our full human selves. declaration of interests statement the authors declare no competing interests. references baldwin, j. 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( , may ). “hunger gnaws at the edges of the world” the tricontinental. https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/ - -famine/ raygoza, m.c., león, r., lee, c., junsay, c., norris, a., & niermann, g. ( ). social justice in teacher education: it’s not just a course. in ccte span research monograph (pp. - ). san francisco, ca: california council on teacher education. raygoza, m. c.; león, r. j., norris, a., junsay, c., & lee, c. ( ). humanizing online meetings. https://digitalcommons.stmarys-ca.edu/school-education- faculty-works/ scheiber, noam. ( , september ). “pandemic imperils promotions for women in academia.” the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /business/economy/pandemic- women- tenure.html?fbclid=iwar g h ya_iqyite syp uzow qij tuytx_qgvs zzp calps-hsibum sotirin, p. ( ). “autoethnographic mother-writing: advocating radical specificity.” journal of research practice, ( ), m viola, m. ( ). “decoloniality and critical pedagogy, a reflective-theoretical dialogue.” teaching critical pedagogy: encyclopedia of teacher education. springer, singapore. viola, m. & klein, e. ( ). “to ethnic studies – love hard, fight beautifully: boots riley in dialogue with michael viola and emily klein.” critical ethnic studies. ( - ). viola, m., saranillio, d., pegues, j., & day, i. ( ). “introduction to solidarities of nonalignment: abolition, decolonization, and anticapitalism.” critical ethnic studies. ( - ). annexes appendix a: caregiving collective letter and demands the below letter, including demands, appendix a , and endnotes is what we sent verbatim to our campus leaders and faculty listserv. july , dear [campus leaders]: we write to you as faculty who are caregivers and community allies. to start, we want to express our solidarity with black faculty, staff, and students who have made concrete demands to transform the dehumanizing and anti-black conditions they face at [institution’s name] and society at large; included in those dehumanizing conditions is the issue of invisibilized caregiving. our work is grounded in the shared struggle that inspires our colleagues’ and students’ calls and we believe that specifically, black lives matter co-founder, alicia garza explains: “the problem is that care work is often hidden, and as a result of it being hidden, it’s not valued, it’s not respected, and it’s not dignified in the way that it should be.” see: institute for policy studies: a care for all town hall. ( , april ). https://ips-dc.org/domestic-workers-care-for-all-town-hall/ https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/ - -famine/ https://www.thetricontinental.org/newsletterissue/ - -famine/ https://digitalcommons.stmarys-ca.edu/school-education-faculty-works/ https://digitalcommons.stmarys-ca.edu/school-education-faculty-works/ https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /business/economy/pandemic-women-tenure.html?fbclid=iwar g h ya_iqyite syp uzow qij tuytx_qgvs zzp calps-hsibum https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /business/economy/pandemic-women-tenure.html?fbclid=iwar g h ya_iqyite syp uzow qij tuytx_qgvs zzp calps-hsibum https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /business/economy/pandemic-women-tenure.html?fbclid=iwar g h ya_iqyite syp uzow qij tuytx_qgvs zzp calps-hsibum https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /business/economy/pandemic-women-tenure.html?fbclid=iwar g h ya_iqyite syp uzow qij tuytx_qgvs zzp calps-hsibum https://ips-dc.org/domestic-workers-care-for-all-town-hall/ trahs n° | : narrativas de maestras (os) y normalistas en el giro decolonial https://www.unilim.fr/trahs - issn : - positive institutional change will come when we honor and follow the leadership of those most impacted by structural violence, inequities, and silence. in keeping with item on childcare in the [institution’s name] black lives matter committee’s statement, we echo the demand for “radical change addressing the root causes of the systemic oppression,” as our work asserts that we cannot shift the culture of this college without shifting the institution’s treatment of faculty, staff, and students with families. background: institutional history and new practices in the wake of covid- historically, [institution’s name] has not recognized or responded to the inequitable and discriminatory college-wide practices that impact caregiving employees, whether we are raising young children and homeschooling, or caring for elderly, sick, or medically vulnerable family members. this intersectional issue affects the entire college campus in large and small ways, but it unevenly disadvantages junior, female-identified, and bipoc employees. though these problems have been brought to the attention of college administrators by the faculty women’s group, the faculty welfare committee, the black lives matter committee, applicants to the academic growth and innovation fund, the campus chapter of the american association of university professors, and other committees, the college has continued to ignore it. as caregiving faculty and community allies, we can no longer accept that our catholic, lasallian institution, grounded in the values of inclusiveness and social justice, has not structurally adapted to meet the needs of st century families. the college undermines its own core values of respect for all persons and honoring the dignity of all individuals when it ignores the needs of families and the work of employee-caregivers. most recently, since the outbreak of covid- , the college has not acknowledged that its caregiving employees all lost access to childcare in early march; instead, it was simply assumed that employees would continue business as usual (albeit from remote locations). on april , we finally heard from the provost about the interim academic policy for tenure-track faculty that includes an option to stop the tenure clock, a practice that has been shown to negatively impact women and people of color in particular. then, after a long silence, on june , human resources sponsored a workshop titled, “work & life management during shelter in place as a parent,” which reproduced the myths of meritocracy focused on effective multitasking approaches. caregiving employees do not need workshops on how to become better multi-taskers. despite the concerns about institutional practice raised during this workshop, no meaningful insights have been offered as to how the college administration is attempting to create better systems and a more inclusive culture grounded in an equitable approach to supporting caregiving employees. finally, on june , provost [name] informed pre-tenure faculty that they could as included in the list of demands from the past and present co-chairs of the black lives matter sub-committee of the college committee on inclusive excellence: develop “on-campus childcare, potentially using space in the recreation center as it was originally earmarked, open to use by faculty, staff, and undergraduate and graduate students with families. (recruitment enhancement, student/faculty/staff retention).” see “blm committee statement & policy platform | the uprising for black lives” sent by [name], ph.d. to the [institution’s name] faculty email list on june , . flaherty, c. ( , june ). gender, race, covid- and the case against tenure-clock stoppages. inside higher ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/ / / /gender-race-covid- -and-case- against-tenure-clock- stoppages?fbclid=iwar ihvirteqjs_ _pxcfjgh byfsef agb glhe tzrcxqml_f vdl l c https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/ / / /gender-race-covid- -and-case-against-tenure-clock-stoppages?fbclid=iwar ihvirteqjs_ _pxcfjgh byfsef agb glhe tzrcxqml_f vdl l c https://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/ / / /gender-race-covid- -and-case-against-tenure-clock-stoppages?fbclid=iwar ihvirteqjs_ _pxcfjgh byfsef agb glhe tzrcxqml_f vdl l c http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/ / / /gender-race-covid- -and-case-against-tenure-clock-stoppages?fbclid=iwar ihvirteqjs_ _pxcfjgh byfsef agb glhe tzrcxqml_f vdl l c http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/ / / /gender-race-covid- -and-case-against-tenure-clock-stoppages?fbclid=iwar ihvirteqjs_ _pxcfjgh byfsef agb glhe tzrcxqml_f vdl l c http://www.insidehighered.com/quicktakes/ / / /gender-race-covid- -and-case-against-tenure-clock-stoppages?fbclid=iwar ihvirteqjs_ _pxcfjgh byfsef agb glhe tzrcxqml_f vdl l c trahs n° | : narrativas de maestras (os) y normalistas en el giro decolonial https://www.unilim.fr/trahs - issn : - access the college’s temporary reduced services (tres) program in response to the likelihood that [institution’s name] employees will have their children at home (often without external care) while attending to work and teaching responsibilities in the coming academic year. it is neither equitable nor reasonable for the college to invite us to sacrifice our incomes as the institutional response to our struggles. ultimately, it appears that the functioning of the college continues to rely upon the imagined invisible labor of a work-at-home or high-earning spouse, which does not reflect principles of equity or reality in the year . moreover, the institution’s choice to ignore the untenable demands of caregiving while working from home is also a choice to invisibilize women. dozens of articles and preliminary studies published in the wake of covid- have shown that statistically, parenting responsibilities during the pandemic dramatically and unevenly impact the lives of female-identified workers, and bipoc female workers to an even greater extent. these intersectionally gendered effects open up more opportunities for employers to (intentionally and unintentionally) discriminate against and penalize their female employees, while turning a blind eye to their own role in reproducing the patriarchal and misogynistic workplace norms that already plagued academia long before covid- . institutional structures of power that require radical change helen lewis reports in the atlantic, a pandemic magnifies all existing inequalities [...] but one of the most striking effects of the coronavirus will be to send many couples back to the s. across the world, women’s independence will be a silent victim of the pandemic. [...] for too long, politicians have assumed that child care and elderly care can be “soaked up” by private citizens—mostly women—effectively providing a huge subsidy to the paid economy. this pandemic should remind us of the true scale of that distortion.(lewis, h. [ , march ]. the coronavirus is a disaster for feminism. the atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/ / /feminism-womens-rights- coronavirus-covid / /). see the following articles for further analyses of the gendered effects of covid- on parent- workers in the academy and beyond: perelman, d. ( , july ). in the covid- economy, you can have a kid or a job. you can’t have both. new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /business/covid-economy-parents-kids-career- homeschooling.htm; kitchener, c. ( , may ). ‘i had to choose being a mother’: with no child care or summer camps, women are being edged out of the workforce. the lily. https://www.thelily.com/i-had-to-choose-being-a-mother-with-no-child-care-or-summer- camps-women-are-being-edged-out-of-the- workforce/?fbclid=iwar lwwixpfasxvqvjvr i dgdhct pmu- jljszaezpe h o _aqo mibq; fazackerley, a. ( , may ). women's research plummets during lockdown - but articles from men increase. the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/education/ /may/ /womens-research-plummets- during-lockdown-but-articles-from-men- increase?fbclid=iwar gr_wei bwv umllhyiha bckdnr__eeplctauws- y anohukshl s ia; ferguson, d. ( , may ). ‘i feel like a s housewife’: how lockdown has exposed the gender divide. the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /may/ /i-feel-like-a- s-housewife-how- lockdown-has-exposed-the-gender-divide; highwood, e. ( , april ). why covid- might lead to even greater gender inequality amongst professors, and how to avoid it. linkedin. https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/why-covid- -might-lead-even-greater-gender- amongst-how-highwood/; kitchener, c. ( , april ). women academics seem to be submitting fewer papers during coronavirus. the lily. https://www.thelily.com/women- academics-seem-to-be-submitting-fewer-papers-during-coronavirus-never-seen-anything- like-it-says-one-editor/?fbclid=iwar dfzsr s rzm- jqmzwehygm pr fgcgq gsybj bfzyeldpwp_a ukg http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/ / /feminism-womens-rights-coronavirus-covid / / http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/ / /feminism-womens-rights-coronavirus-covid / / http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /business/covid-economy-parents-kids-career-homeschooling.htm; http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /business/covid-economy-parents-kids-career-homeschooling.htm; http://www.thelily.com/i-had-to-choose-being-a-mother-with-no-child-care-or-summer-camps-women-are-being-edged-out-of-the-workforce/?fbclid=iwar lwwixpfasxvqvjvr i dgdhct pmu- jljszaezpe h o _aqo mibq http://www.thelily.com/i-had-to-choose-being-a-mother-with-no-child-care-or-summer-camps-women-are-being-edged-out-of-the-workforce/?fbclid=iwar lwwixpfasxvqvjvr i dgdhct pmu- jljszaezpe h o _aqo mibq http://www.thelily.com/i-had-to-choose-being-a-mother-with-no-child-care-or-summer-camps-women-are-being-edged-out-of-the-workforce/?fbclid=iwar lwwixpfasxvqvjvr i dgdhct pmu- jljszaezpe h o _aqo mibq http://www.thelily.com/i-had-to-choose-being-a-mother-with-no-child-care-or-summer-camps-women-are-being-edged-out-of-the-workforce/?fbclid=iwar lwwixpfasxvqvjvr i dgdhct pmu- jljszaezpe h o _aqo mibq http://www.thelily.com/i-had-to-choose-being-a-mother-with-no-child-care-or-summer-camps-women-are-being-edged-out-of-the-workforce/?fbclid=iwar lwwixpfasxvqvjvr i dgdhct pmu- jljszaezpe h o _aqo mibq https://www.theguardian.com/education/ /may/ /womens-research-plummets-during-lockdown-but-articles-from-men-increase?fbclid=iwar gr_wei bwv umllhyiha bckdnr__eeplctauws-y anohukshl s ia https://www.theguardian.com/education/ /may/ /womens-research-plummets-during-lockdown-but-articles-from-men-increase?fbclid=iwar gr_wei bwv umllhyiha bckdnr__eeplctauws-y anohukshl s ia http://www.theguardian.com/education/ /may/ /womens-research-plummets-during-lockdown-but-articles-from-men-increase?fbclid=iwar gr_wei bwv umllhyiha bckdnr__eeplctauws-y anohukshl s ia http://www.theguardian.com/education/ /may/ /womens-research-plummets-during-lockdown-but-articles-from-men-increase?fbclid=iwar gr_wei bwv umllhyiha bckdnr__eeplctauws-y anohukshl s ia http://www.theguardian.com/education/ /may/ /womens-research-plummets-during-lockdown-but-articles-from-men-increase?fbclid=iwar gr_wei bwv umllhyiha bckdnr__eeplctauws-y anohukshl s ia http://www.theguardian.com/education/ /may/ /womens-research-plummets-during-lockdown-but-articles-from-men-increase?fbclid=iwar gr_wei bwv umllhyiha bckdnr__eeplctauws-y anohukshl s ia https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /may/ /i-feel-like-a- 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http://www.thelily.com/women-academics-seem-to-be-submitting-fewer-papers-during-coronavirus-never-seen-anything-like-it-says-one-editor/?fbclid=iwar dfzsr s rzm-jqmzwehygm pr fgcgq gsybj bfzyeldpwp_a ukg http://www.thelily.com/women-academics-seem-to-be-submitting-fewer-papers-during-coronavirus-never-seen-anything-like-it-says-one-editor/?fbclid=iwar dfzsr s rzm-jqmzwehygm pr fgcgq gsybj bfzyeldpwp_a ukg http://www.thelily.com/women-academics-seem-to-be-submitting-fewer-papers-during-coronavirus-never-seen-anything-like-it-says-one-editor/?fbclid=iwar dfzsr s rzm-jqmzwehygm pr fgcgq gsybj bfzyeldpwp_a ukg trahs n° | : narrativas de maestras (os) y normalistas en el giro decolonial https://www.unilim.fr/trahs - issn : - the current covid- crisis has laid bare the ways in which these academic structures and culture do not recognize the daily lived realities of employees who have families and caregiving responsibilities. [institution’s name] employees include caregivers in two-working parent families, single-income families, single- parent families, under-employed families, multi-generational families, families with children with special needs, and/or families without childcare. we are experiencing physical and emotional fatigue, professional uncertainty, and frustration. some of us also fear mentioning workload and caregiving challenges to administrators and supervisors. we are overtasked and need systemic and cultural changes from the administration, not just temporarily in the time of covid- , but also permanently so that [institution’s name] can attract and retain caregiving employees as full and equal members of an inclusive and humane workplace. specifically, we have identified three structures of power at [institution’s name], which continue to challenge parenting faculty and staff: ) the lack of a clear and equitable parental leave policy, ) inequalities and oversights within the r&t process, and ) a college culture that lacks respectful and reasonable work-life flexibility and boundaries. ) parental leave policy: we are reminded now more than ever that babies and sickness do not wait for policy changes. new parents at the college continue to be denied adequate parental leave benefits as provost [name] and associate vice president & chief human resources officer [name]s promised policy completion date was postponed from january , to april , , and then passed by without comment. we call upon provost [name] and associate vice president [name] to instate an inclusive parental leave policy. ) r&t: our current r&t process reflects outmoded evaluative practices that are built on the faulty assumption that faculty's teaching effectiveness, scholarship productivity, and service contribution are achieved externally to and independently from our personal lives. while we appreciate the empathetic intentions in the provost’s april covid-related adjustments to this year’s r&t process, we find them insufficient in light of well-documented best practices in higher education. peer reviewed research shows that “stopping the clock” exacerbates gender and other social inequities of rank and salary. in addition, the temporary suspension the california state university system’s temporary paid administrative leave (cpal) policy is one example of a proactive institutional response to the challenges presently facing caregiving employees. see, for example, san josé state university. (april , ): temporary paid administrative leave update (cpal). https://www.sjsu.edu/healthadvisories/campus- messages/ -paid-administrative-leave/index.php. the guidance to faculty from the provost (april , ) and the rank & tenure committee (april , ), both highlighted three primary strategies aimed at helping ranked faculty to overcome the challenges of the covid- pandemic: ) an option to “stop the clock,” ) temporary suspension of required documentation of teaching effectiveness (course evaluations, peer and chair observations), and ) an assurance of “flexibility and compassion” and an opportunity to explain how the pandemic has affected their work. these strategies are inadequate in some cases and dangerous in others; most of all, they are not consistent with the institutional best practices laid out in the studies listed in endnote . jaschik, s. ( , june ). unintended help for male professors. inside higher ed. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/ / / /stopping-tenure-clock-may-help-male- professors-more-female-study-finds; https://www-chronicle-com.stmarys- ca.idm.oclc.org/article/is-it-time-to-stop-stopping/ malisch, j. l. et al. ( , june ). opinion: in the wake of covid- , academia needs new solutions to ensure gender equity. proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the http://www.sjsu.edu/healthadvisories/campus-messages/ -paid-administrative-leave/index.php. http://www.sjsu.edu/healthadvisories/campus-messages/ -paid-administrative-leave/index.php. https://www.insidehighered.com/news/ / / /stopping-tenure-clock-may-help-male-professors-more-female-study-finds https://www.insidehighered.com/news/ / / /stopping-tenure-clock-may-help-male-professors-more-female-study-finds http://www.insidehighered.com/news/ / / /stopping-tenure-clock-may-help-male-professors-more-female-study-finds http://www.insidehighered.com/news/ / / /stopping-tenure-clock-may-help-male-professors-more-female-study-finds https://www-chronicle-com.stmarys-ca.idm.oclc.org/article/is-it-time-to-stop-stopping/ https://www-chronicle-com.stmarys-ca.idm.oclc.org/article/is-it-time-to-stop-stopping/ https://www-chronicle-com.stmarys-ca.idm.oclc.org/article/is-it-time-to-stop-stopping/ trahs n° | : narrativas de maestras (os) y normalistas en el giro decolonial https://www.unilim.fr/trahs - issn : - of required documentation for teaching effectiveness does not change the evaluation process itself, but it puts the responsibility on faculty r&t candidates to somehow demonstrate teaching effectiveness in other ways since this category remains as a criterion. we need to do better to support our pre-tenure colleagues. similarly, post-tenure caregiving faculty on disrupted research sabbaticals and faculty working toward promotion to full professor have also been negatively impacted by covid- and the college’s insufficient response. when the college ignores the scholarship and professional development needs of caregiving faculty it deepens and affirms structural inequities. we call upon the provost to work with the r&t taskforce to implement the specific changes to the r&t process and the faculty handbook laid out in our demands below. ) culture of respect and care for families: working remotely poses significant challenges of time, space, and resources. our bay area homes are not big enough to provide adequate office and school work spaces for all the members of our families; children do not recognize abstract boundaries between parent work time and availability; instructors’ identity code switching or integration is mentally taxing; but most of all, there are just not enough hours in the day to be a full-time (now online) teacher, productive scholar, effective advisor and committee administrator, responsive community member, homeschool facilitator, and ever-present parent. having a family is not a “deficiency” and offering workshops on multi-tasking and time management is not a solution; it is a continued effort at devaluing and silencing the labor stay-at-home parents and paid caregivers have always done. as we look toward returning to campus in the fall, while our children will largely still be schooling from home, this situation is going to get worse, not better. we call upon the provost, deans, and department chairs to institutionalize, enforce, and practice the new workplace norms related to meeting and course scheduling and workload flexibility laid out here. demands guiding principles: given the double burden faced by employee-caregivers during the covid- pandemic,  we are called upon to reject the false organizational meritocracy of “doing it all;” to resist the need to apologize for or justify workday disruptions and distractions due to caregiving demands; and to assert the right to decline or postpone non-essential work duties.  our [institution’s name] community is called upon to recognize and normalize the dual roles of colleagues and caregivers and to change institutional expectations and culture accordingly. immediate policy and culture shift in response to covid- united states of america. https://www.pnas.org/content/early/ / / / ?fbclid=iwar uv uqbb ex tdtgpwww idhunal d iypxafenlop xxdn hh-i-vq mala htun suggests, “now is the time to develop strategies to mitigate the inequitable effects of the quarantine”: a) review of up to the best years of candidate’s record, not the last years, b) a required covid- impact statement that explains what teaching, research, and service plans were able and unable to be done, and c) emphasis on holistic and qualitative assessments in addition to quantitative evaluation standards. htun, m. ( , june ). tenure and promotion after the pandemic. science, ( ), . https://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / http://www.pnas.org/content/early/ / / / ?fbclid=iwar uv uqbb extdtgpwww idhunal d iypxafenlop xxdn hh-i-vq http://www.pnas.org/content/early/ / / / ?fbclid=iwar uv uqbb extdtgpwww idhunal d iypxafenlop xxdn hh-i-vq https://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / https://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / trahs n° | : narrativas de maestras (os) y normalistas en el giro decolonial https://www.unilim.fr/trahs - issn : - . protect faculty choice of course modality in the fall semester and allow all online or by-appointment only office hour options for faculty teaching in any modality. . protect planned course releases for time intensive administrative labor. . renew the spring covid r&t accommodations for the fall including optional submission of student feedback forms, and suspending required teaching observations. . recognize participating in and/or leading online planning sessions, workshops, trainings, and experiments with new teaching technologies and pedagogies as evidence of teaching effectiveness in r&t reviews. . give faculty significantly impacted by covid- the option to request a one year service exemption, reduction, or postponement facilitated by school deans and the senate committee on committees, and the choice to remove themselves from the ballot for high workload committee election without consequence to salary or rank and tenure considerations. . observe new meeting etiquette: default to online meetings, follow a clear agenda and adhere to a time frame that is shared in advance, utilize asynchronous correspondence, and expect and accept disruptions and absences. privilege the availability of employees with caregiving responsibilities when determining meeting times and scheduling events. . permit faculty on research sabbaticals disrupted or voided by the pandemic to reapply for leaves to be taken during academic year - . . establish clear and fair benchmarks for scholarly productivity in light of challenges such as travel restrictions, lab and archive closures, conference and performance cancellations, the % cut to faculty development funds, closure of research and art production venues, inability or limited ability to conduct human subjects research, publication delays, and systemic closures of schools/childcare. publicly-engaged scholarship responding to and supporting impacted people in society should be evaluated through alternative metrics than peer-review. . include a formal prompt in the form a template asking all candidates to reflect on the ways in which the covid- pandemic impacted (or did not impact) their work. . recruit former members of the r&t committee to mentor candidates on decisions about promotion, stopping-the-clock, or writing form as. institutionalization of an inclusive family-centered work culture . implement an equitable parental leave policy. . establish a child care center and school break camps on-campus. . integrate caregiving realities into the [institution’s name] community, its culture, and decision-making (see appendix a ). see raygoza, m.; león, r. j., norris, a., junsay, c., & lee, c. ( ). humanizing online meetings. https://digitalcommons.stmarys-ca.edu/school-education-faculty-works/ see, for example, two child care-related academic growth and innovation fund applications trahs n° | : narrativas de maestras (os) y normalistas en el giro decolonial https://www.unilim.fr/trahs - issn : - while this petition centers the experiences and needs of caregiving ranked faculty at [institution’s name], it is our hope that this petition, as an act of solidarity, also leads to broader support of caregiving staff, contingent faculty, and students. given the timely and urgent nature of these concerns, we request the following of the academic senate: ) endorse the philosophy of this letter (p. - ); ) accept our demands as a starting point for immediate discussion and action; ) form a taskforce to work on the institutionalization of an inclusive family-centered work culture. we call on campus leadership included in this letter to act and respond to the areas under their purview. appendix a : recommendations for institutional best practices . the rank & tenure taskforce, in partnership with the vp of faculty affairs and senior diversity officer, must implement established best practices in supporting parents and caregivers on the tenure track, and propose faculty handbook language on the rights and accommodations of caregiving faculty, including but not limited to how to present a gap in teaching, research, or service due to the birth or adoption of a child or unusual need to become a full-time caregiver. . the college must investigate and implement new course scheduling practices that allow for more humane and flexible hours for caregivers. two-day and one-day per week class meeting times must replace [institution’s name]’s outdated model of relying predominantly on -day per week classes. caregivers must not be required to teach courses that meet three days a week, a practice that is both pedagogically unsound for many disciplines, but also increases commuting hours and costs as well as childcare needs for faculty and students alike. caregivers with young children who teach in graduate programs cannot be required to have an evening-only teaching schedule; they must be permitted to teach some of their classes during daytime hours. . training must be instituted for department chairs and program directors, staff supervisors, school deans, and the rank & tenure committee. training by an external expert should include legal requirements and institutional best practices for best practices guidelines of how institutions must immediately address inequities in the wake of covid- see gonzales, l.d., & griffin, k.a. ( ). supporting faculty during & after covid- : don’t let go of equity. washington, dc: aspire alliance. https://www.mtu.edu/advance/resources/articles-books/supporting-faculty-during-and- after-covid.pdf; and malisch, j. l. et al. ( , june ). opinion: in the wake of covid- , academia needs new solutions to ensure gender equity. proceedings of the national academy of sciences of the united states of america. https://www.pnas.org/content/early/ / / / ?fbclid=iwar uv uqbb ex tdtgpwww idhunal d iypxafenlop xxdn hh-i-vq former [institution’s name] professor, [name] spoke to this in her outgoing email to the college. she wrote: "family leave- at [institution’s name] i was given one semester off from teaching with a -unit course release. that meant that i would return to teach units over jan term and spring. in my program that could be - courses mostly taught in the evenings (sometimes until pm). i was unwilling to leave my newborn - nights a week from january to may. so i left [institution’s name] at months pregnant and started another position where i was given a fair maternity leave and ample time to bond with my newborn." see [name] “exiting [institution’s name]” email sent to the all faculty email list on july , . http://www.mtu.edu/advance/resources/articles-books/supporting-faculty-during-and-after-covid.pdf http://www.mtu.edu/advance/resources/articles-books/supporting-faculty-during-and-after-covid.pdf http://www.mtu.edu/advance/resources/articles-books/supporting-faculty-during-and-after-covid.pdf http://www.pnas.org/content/early/ / / / ?fbclid=iwar uv uqbb extdtgpwww idhunal d iypxafenlop xxdn hh-i-vq http://www.pnas.org/content/early/ / / / ?fbclid=iwar uv uqbb extdtgpwww idhunal d iypxafenlop xxdn hh-i-vq trahs n° | : narrativas de maestras (os) y normalistas en el giro decolonial https://www.unilim.fr/trahs - issn : - for equity and inclusion (including recognition and accommodation of caregiving faculty and staff) within and beyond the context of the covid- pandemic. . the college must conduct assessments of campus leaders with faculty and staff supervisory responsibilities to assess how they support caregiving employees. this could be demonstrated, for example, in a publicly reported performance review in which supervising administrators receive feedback on and must account for this dimension of their work. 	from private struggle to parentscholar solidarity: collective organizing during a pandemic to humanize the academy 	introduction 	methods 	parentscholar autoethnographies 	penalty & privilege: navigating motherhood and visible non-masculinity in the academy emily b. klein 	to hold close, we plan and fight raina j. león (written in the wee hours of the night while baby and toddler sleep) 	the sweet scent of rose mary candace raygoza 	caregiving and teaching demand a pedagogy of the heart michael j. viola 	discussion 	references 	annexes 	appendix a: caregiving collective letter and demands 	appendix a : recommendations for institutional best practices risk and sacrament: being human in a covid‐ world risk and sacrament: being human in a covid- world by ziba norman and michael j. reiss abstract. in this article we examine the changing relationship to risk as revealed by the covid- pandemic and the ways this has, and may in future, alter sacramental practice, considering the radical effects this could have on traditional christian practice. we consider the cultural trends that may lie behind this developing approach to risk, examining this in the context of an emergent transhuman identity that is technologically moderated and seeks to overcome risks of human mortality. keywords: covid- ; homo transhumanus; pandemic; risk; sacrament; transhumanism for all our technological prowess, the vulnerabilities of embodied life can- not be fully controlled, yet it seems we are more anxious than ever to do just that. in a post-enlightenment world, we are ill-suited to an acknowl- edgment of the limitations under which we operate and, it seems, equally ill-equipped to fully grasp the transcendent theological offerings of reli- gious belief. our perception of pathogenic risk, now impacting all aspects of our lives, has altered radically as a result of the covid- pandemic. pathogenic risk was once a concern largely limited to specific environments, for example, hospitals and surgeries, and particular groups, for example, immunosuppressed individuals and the elderly; the new normal, however, involves weighing up the risks of contamination in almost every physical space into which we might enter. indeed, government information cam- paigns in the united kingdom warn us to “stay alert, control the virus,” suggesting that we can be in “control” and that it is somehow a failure if we allow any form of bodily breach. such campaigns represent a new way of relating to disease or rather the potential for contracting a disease—some might argue that greater awareness of pathogenic risk was overdue and ziba norman is an honorary research fellow associate at university college london, uk; e-mail: z.norman@ucl.ac.uk. michael j. reiss is professor of science education at ucl institute of education, university college london, uk, and president of the international society for science and religion; e-mail: m.reiss@ucl.ac.uk. [zygon, vol. , no. (xxxx )] www.zygonjournal.org c© the authors. zygon r© published by wiley periodicals, inc. on behalf of joint publication board of zygon issn - this is an open access article under the terms of the creative commons attribution license, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . % fzygo. &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - zygon entirely rational in a globally integrated world in which highly dangerous pathogens can be transmitted within hours from diverse corners of the earth. more fundamentally, covid- may prove to alter significantly our understanding of what it means to be human. although humanity has lived through the emergence of new diseases and pandemics before, covid- is proving to be different to previ- ous outbreaks of newly identified viral illnesses such as sars, mers, or hiv/aids. these differences have biological and social consequences. in the initial stages, as with the recently evolved viruses just listed, we had neither immunity nor medications proven to be effective against it. how- ever, covid- differs in a number of respects, including that it is highly contagious with almost everyone at risk of infection; in a few months, it has spread to every corner of the globe. none of us can truly see ourselves as outside its biological frame of influence, with the possible exception, though still unproven, of those who have succumbed to infection (whether or not they know this) and survived and those with natural immunity. its mechanisms of action, at least initially, were poorly understood, and de- spite massive international efforts and research, many biological unknowns will remain for a considerable period. this itself is a cause of fear that has prompted huge changes in the way in which societies operate, and with these, great changes to religious practices. it seems very possible that the unknowns regarding covid- will leave a legacy that is likely to persist long after we have (hopefully) found effective means for combatting the disease itself, with a new approach to human embodied life becoming normative. even though the bill & melinda gates foundation, a number of highly reputable professional societies and others warned of such an event, gov- ernments and others, with political powers and responsibilities somehow imagined (presumed) that we would be in control, that the who could provide, as in the past, sufficient warning for all of us to be spared the worst. this just isn’t the type of thing was meant to happen in the twenty-first century; most of those in power imagined the warnings about zoonotic pandemics of unknown origin were overblown. and yet a pandemic, not unlike that described by science fiction writers such as stephen king in the stand and dean koontz in the eyes of darkness arrived, leaving most governments, multinational companies and individuals stunned and un- prepared. accommodating to the early stages of this new reality has brought with it a new approach to risk, which we suggest is culturally based and reflective of modernist societies that are data-driven; it is this combination of factors that is changing how we understand ourselves as humans. the radical changes we are now witnessing in the way we negotiate risk have profoundly affected religious practices, including sacramental christian practice, integral to the traditional institutional christian faith for some two millennia. in the catholic tradition the seven sacraments are ziba norman and michael j. reiss baptism, confirmation, eucharist, penance, anointing the sick, marriage and holy orders; in most protestant denominations there are just baptism and the eucharist; the quakers and some other traditions hold that there are none. whatever their number, most christian denominations understand the sacraments as they were defined by augustine: outward signs of an inward grace (davison ). as a result of covid- , major religious festivals—pessach, easter, vaisakhi, navratri, buddha purnima, and ramadan—were all celebrated under lockdown in the spring of . sacramental forms of worship con- sidered core to the life of the worshipping christian community were halted entirely in many countries, in a way that wars and previous pandemics had never done. when the emperor diocletian published his first edict against the christians on february , , ordering the destruction of chris- tian scriptures and places of worship across the empire, and prohibiting christians from assembling for worship, there were many who continued to receive holy communion in secret. in , a group of christians, the martyrs of abitinae, were found guilty of the practice and tortured to death. one of those who hosted the services, emeritus, was asked why he had violated the emperor’s command. he replied “sine dominico non possumus”—“without the lord’s day, we cannot live” (imbelli ). reactions to the suspension of regular corporate worship as a result of covid- have varied from the stoical to the rebellious. in a number of countries, including france, germany, and the usa, legal action has been taken by religious groups who believe their rights to worship have been violated illegally. the theological implications have become a source of anxiety for many, perhaps especially traditional roman catholic believers and clergy. for example, the sacrament of viaticum and the associated last rites, offered to those at the point of death, have been suspended because of possible contagion—seen by some as a direct clash between belief in the importance of the sacrament for the eternal life of the soul and the preservation of the body in this temporal life. even in christian denominations that do not have as strong a focus on sacrament, there has also been a sudden sense of loss. it can feel as though the foundations on which the life of communities and beliefs have stood are being swept away, almost overnight. the very nature of the advice being given for social distancing makes sacramental practice contrary to governmental guidelines, and in some cases actually in contravention of the law itself. it is as if we have all been told “noli me tangere” (“do not touch me”) in response to our cry “they have taken my lord away.” in the clash between what is considered necessary to control the spread of contagion and the routine of religious practice, the latter has become subservient to the former. churches, mosques, synagogues, and temples are not considered essential, unlike supermarkets, pet shops, hardware stores, news agents, and dry cleaners—all of which have been permitted to remain open in the zygon uk. in some u.s. states, liquor stores and gun shops have remained open while places of worship have been shut for months. the changes wrought by covid- have been equally disruptive for those of a secular persuasion. the unbounded confidence that many placed in science, to keep them safe and secure, to keep the economy on track and the world as we know it in motion, for answers and assurances, has been weakened. the lesson from other global epidemics over the past years is that they significantly reduce confidence in scientists and the benefits of their work (aksoy, eichengreen, and saka ). an rna virus, which bears considerable similarity to the common cold, is unravelling some of the structures on which our highly advanced civilization rests. and it is happening at great speed. in the case of the believer and nonbeliever alike, these changes may offer an opportunity to recalibrate their understanding of both science and religion and may yet come to be seen as an opportunity for the essential interconnectedness of these two domains to be understood as it becomes ever more apparent that neither is sufficient in itself. the loss experienced by those who identify strongly with only one of these will perhaps lead to an awareness that both are required for the fullness of human life and a flourishing civilization and that such an accommodation is not just desirable but necessary for human advancement. we need both scientific insight and spiritual wisdom for human flourishing (briggs and reiss forthcoming). against this backdrop, we examine the possible origins and implica- tions of this new understanding of risk and counterbalance it with the role of sacramental practice in the preservation of the distinctiveness of christianity. to explore the possibilities for reconnecting these two more fully, we offer some insights and an analysis of sacramental practice and, through this, examine what may be at stake if it were to be sidelined in a post-covid- world. in doing so, we will examine the theology of disclosure and consider the concept of interruption in history, on which the entire christian story is based, from the incarnation onward. we begin by considering what may be leading this changed relationship to risk. homo transhumanus: risk perception transhumanism is a movement that argues we should make full use of technology to enhance humanity through surgical and other interventions to increase our intelligence and other features. the movement has some of its roots in science fiction (e.g., mary shelley’s frankenstein and aldous huxley’s brave new world) and, to this day, some of the most insightful analyses of what it is to be human and of the risks and potential benefits of becoming homo transhumanus continue to be explored through science ziba norman and michael j. reiss fiction, whether in novels (e.g., margaret atwood’s oryx and crake and its successors) or films (e.g., avatar, elysium, lucy, robocop). by now there is a burgeoning academic field of transhumanism with its own journal, journal of posthuman studies, and increasing links with other academic fields. notable theological contributions, after the remarkable, early, and controversial the phenomenon of man by pierre teilhard de chardin (written in the s but only published posthumously in ), have been made by celia deane-drummond and peter scott ( ), ronald cole-turner ( ), michael burdett ( ), and jacob shatzer ( ). central themes explored in this literature include the place of human hope in the search for perfection, technological dreaming, visionary approaches to technology, utopias, the incarnation, human identity, and god’s promises. one way of understanding transhumanism is to see it as an attempted response to risk—the risk of getting old, the risk of not being smart enough, the risk of becoming diseased, and the risk of dying. there are many different approaches to risk, and though some of them may be able to explain partially what we are observing now in the time of covid- , it seems as if new premises are being adopted, ones that are suggestive of a different understanding of ourselves in embodied human form. are these transhumanist ideas altering the premises on which we have operated to date? is this now happening at an accelerated rate as a result of the covid- pandemic? is a new archetype emerging, one in which the primary consideration of all good is associated with the maintenance of the body? and what might we identify as some of the hallmarks of homo transhumanus that are pertinent to our response to covid- ? we propose the following as relevant identifying characteristics: . the body as a machine to be maintained and augmented . reification of data, with quantification of information replacing qual- itative judgments . comfortable in virtual spaces . inability to accept death, accompanied by an oscillation between fear of extinction and confidence at its avoidance . expectation of control, with a reluctance to accept the normal risks associated with being human. the speed of change in daily life and the pervasive use of technologies so readily embraced may be traced to a largely unacknowledged, emergent transhuman identity. in the broadest sense, this considers death a kind of misfortune, a relic of our evolutionary history that can, or soon will, be controlled and is marked by a merging of humans with machines and their technology (cf. the cyborgs of haraway ). it places less reliance on zygon the need for physical contact, even as the body has become sacred, though not in a religious or sacramental sense of the term. achieving immortality in cyberspace is an example of the way technology is being used to alter our understanding of death, through uploading one’s memories, so that these persist should one die, and avatars being used to assist those who are grieving (bourke ). even our four-footed friends are being replaced by robotic counterparts (nalewicki ). events have revealed just how closely connected we have become in virtual space; the connectivity offered by our technologies is being adopted everywhere to enable both social and economic activity to continue, while reducing physical contact to levels unimaginable at any other time in his- tory. the changed relationship to risk, in combination with the availability of technologies that enable us to interact virtually, we suggest, will be transformative. it isn’t difficult to imagine virtual reality replacing travel to actual destinations or zoom marriages and graduations becoming com- monplace. virtual safaris have become vastly more popular as a result of lockdowns and there are wildlife benefits from less human disturbance. covid- is acclimatizing us to these new kinds of life in a virtual reality, moderated by our technologies. whilst these changes might be considered a natural development, perhaps even positive—less travel to distant places means fewer co emissions—we cannot but recognize that such developments present a challenge both to the ways in which we have traditionally expressed our- selves as humans and to our relationships with others. and it is, at its core, based on fear, and a new way of calibrating risk. john adams, a risk theorist, explains that there are different approaches to risk, and acknowledges there are many different theoretical frameworks. on the one side, we have the scientific and managerial (“hard”) approaches that attempt to quantify risk; on the other, we have (“soft”) approaches that understand risk as culturally constructed, where issues like the control that i believe i have over the risk are of central importance—so i may be far less afraid about the chances of my dying as a result of my cigarette smoking habit than i am about my chances of dying from covid- , even though a statistician would argue that the chances of the former are far greater than of the latter. in his best-known book, risk, adams discusses how agreement on these approaches isn’t achievable: “i have no illusions that my effort to bridge the divide between the “hard” and “soft” approaches to risk will satisfy everyone—indeed cultural theory warns that everyone will never agree about risk” (adams , xi). it seems though that we are reaching a higher degree of convergence than one might have thought possible in respect of the risk of pandemic. opinion polls in many countries have indicated that the majority even of those who anticipate that the response to covid- will have a detrimental effect on them personally, for example, on their finances ziba norman and michael j. reiss or family life, have been willing to comply with stringent limitation on their freedoms. in the uk, lockdown regulations were supported by some % of the population when first adopted on march , (smith a). by june , support in the uk for government actions had slipped and there were big international variations in the percentage of people “who think the government is handling the issue of coronavirus “very” or “somewhat” well”—with the top two places of countries sur- veyed occupied on june – by vietnam ( %) and malaysia ( %) and the bottom two by mexico ( %) and the united states ( %) (smith b). adams utilizes the archetype homo prudens, describing him as the zero- risk man “[s]triving continually, if not efficaciously to avoid accidents. whenever he has an accident it is a ‘mistake’ or ‘error’” (adams , ). but, post-adams, is there a new archetype emerging: homo transhumanus? in this new archetype, death is not acknowledged as a necessary part of the cycle of life; in a sense, the approach is an extension of adams’s homo prudens: one of zero-risk of death itself. of course, a zero-risk result is in practice impossible, though we are somehow led to believe, through the rhetoric, that this is the aim; the reality is that we are talking about the medical prolongation of life not immortality (reiss ). there is an implicit understanding that asks us to attempt to control as many variables as we can to eliminate risk, leaving the poor human to contend with a dizzying amount of data when taking even the most mundane decisions, such as leaving one’s own front door. data, our android friend in star trek: the next generation, would be easily suited to making such calculations, but we humans are simply not. mary douglas, the well-known anthropologist who co-authored works on risk with aaron wildavsky (douglas and wildavsky ), explains the phenomenon of culturally mediated approaches to risk and differentiates them from psychological phenomenon: [t]he psychologists who analyzed public opinion polls simply assumed one basic kind of human person with personality quirks which accounted for changes in attitudes to risk. adding the cultural element meant looking for organizational pressures on opinion. it meant not treating attitudes to risk as free-floating psychic items liable to change capriciously, but supposing that attitudes to the long term, or attitudes to loss and gain, would be affected by the social environment. (douglas , xxviii) transhumanism is, in these terms, a new social environment which is changing our relationship to biological risk and therefore our understand- ing of ourselves as humans in embodied form. zygon risk, longevity, and the virtual as new normal the new approach to risk, with its presumption that it may be possible to avoid it altogether, may be rooted in quests for ever greater longevity, which are a pervasive aspect of twenty-first century western culture, with natural, physical death seen as a kind of misfortune that must be avoided or, in the case of uploading one’s memories, managed through cyber immortal- ity, referred to above. early (indeed, still extant) technological attempts at immortality relied on crude freezing, leading the astronomer royal, martin rees, to remark, in his reith lectures, “for my part, i would much rather end my days in a wiltshire churchyard than a californian refrigerator” (rees ). humanity+ is a movement and platform for these transhumanist ideas. its founder zoltan istvan’s campaign for the republican party’s nomi- nation in the u.s. presidential election is evidence of the first inklings of a political movement (humanity+ ). this new conceptualization of risk, we suggest, may be related to the widespread existential presump- tion, in an age of increasing secularity, that if (when) our mortal life comes to an end, we lose much more than simply a few additional years—it is our existence that terminates. it is this largely unacknowledged change to the way individuals view themselves sub specie aeternitatis that may explain why alterations to daily life in a time of covid- , with its threats to life, have been so readily adopted, and supported by so many. and this can be considered a cultural change, the slow, incremental changes to behavior observable before now, currently fast-forwarded by the pandemic. death is increasingly seen not as a pathway to “a better country” (hebrews : ) but as extinction. the technologies humanity has developed, and is increasingly updating, are becoming the masters of our social space, and even seen as vehicles for our salvation, in a kind of secularized eschatology. the development of covid- apps for tracking even chance and transient encounters—at any other time in human history ones that would pass silently, unrecorded and lost—will now become part of the data that we can collect in an attempt to manage our fate through a sort of citizen science, crowdsourced model. the approach is seductive in that it leads to a belief that somehow all vari- ables can be controlled, if only they could be traced and known, a resurgence of the optimism of francis bacon that science would allow us to achieve do- minion over nature. these tools may be very useful, even necessary, if the re- production rate for covid- is to be kept to below without even longer lockdowns being imposed. our point is not to dismiss the importance of such tools, but rather to point out how the presumption that so much can be known, indeed must be known for us to remain safe, shapes emergent conceptions of risk and, ultimately, how humans and human civilization evolve. ziba norman and michael j. reiss it would perhaps be difficult to overstate the implications that a new approach to risk in the light of covid- may have. economic and social structures could change radically, in some case predictably; it is difficult to imagine that the previous, apparently inexorable growth in international travel will continue, whether for work (virtual alternatives may not always work quite as well but they are far cheaper and will now be seen as safer) or for holidays (the days of cheap flights may be numbered and it is difficult to see cruise ships being as popular for at least some time to come). but in some cases it is seems more difficult to forecast consequences; it might be that multigenerational families become rarer, for fear of the risk of living together, or it might be that they become more common in those countries where people often relied on care homes for elderly relatives, given the high mortality rates in such homes in many countries, and the fact that they may become even more expensive now. if this new approach to risk is emblematic of an emergent posthuman identity—marked by a myopic focus on the body as fragile and always in danger—it will certainly change the way we experience pleasure. covid- has seen a big jump in sales of human-like sex robots (e.g., merrifield ) and as these become more (hyper)realistic, it seems likely that their popularity will only increase—they may not meet martin buber’s “i-thou” criterion but, for some people, they are easier to (not) talk to, fail-safe and come with no risk of sexually transmitted infections (cf. danaher and mcarthur ) or issues to do with consent. it seems clear that what covid- is doing is largely to accelerate trends already in process, whether the ones we have considered here or more familiar ones frequently discussed in the media (the move to on- line shopping, more working from home, etc.). one might say we were prepared, ready to take the path, and that the pandemic only hastened the processes. as we all know, the technologies we had adopted in the twenty-first century had already brought changes to the way we inter- acted socially, through such social media as facebook, twitter, youtube, whatsapp, snapchat, pinterest, and reddit and the various video confer- encing apps—skype, zoom, google hangouts, microsoft teams, face- time, and so on. to give one final example, fitbits are a clear example of how our new understanding of the body is being shaped by our tech- nology, relaying real-time information about blood pressure, temperature, our physical activities, and sleep patterns. the body, as part of this emer- gent transhuman culture, is becoming a machine that can be optimally calibrated, with a degree of self-regulation that foucault could only have imagined (foucault ). but covid- is not only accelerating these trends, it is disrupting the ways we work, socialize, and relate to one another. zygon sacramental space there is a rapidly expanding literature on covid- and religion but most of it is to do with issues of public health and whether religion helps or hinders (barmania and reiss ; wildman et al. ). our focus here is rather on the implications of covid- for the sacraments. christian religious and sacramental life holds the body to be sacred, to be cherished, and enjoyed, though this is never viewed as an end in itself. this concept of the body as an end in itself, however, appears to be one of the main factors in the approach to risk which has emerged so acutely during the covid- pandemic. the secularists, and even those who practice religions that are not dependent on sacramental practice, view the risks involved, for example, in celebrating the eucharist within a worshipping congregation, to be unnecessary, even reckless, during a time such as this. to understand the disruptive qualities of this new approach to risk, and the effects it may have on christianity in a transhuman context, we begin with an analysis of the sacramental rituals. sacramental rituals have been described as effecting a kind of interruption—the term “interruption” being used to express the pierc- ing of our temporal reality that allows for a connection between the visible and divine (boeve , ). “interruption” expresses an understanding of sacrament, where sacrament is not viewed merely anthropologically. a reductive anthropological understanding fails to do justice to christian- ity, inasmuch as it treats sacrament as a magical practice and does not fully acknowledge this interruptive quality, characteristic of christianity in its narrative tradition as well as in ritual and sacramental practice. to understand the importance of this interruptive quality is key to appre- ciating the significance of the diminishment of the sacramental, and its importance in understanding ourselves as fully human, capable of tran- scendence expressed and experienced through ritual practice. boeve goes further, describing “interruption” as a concept to express the point at which “continuity and discontinuity meet each other” (boeve , ), sug- gesting that merely holding the christian narratives at the more general anthropological level is to miss what christianity is, as expressed in revela- tion: “god who has made godself known in history through jesus christ” (boeve , ). by way of example, looking at the historical aspects of christianity, the easter festival is viewed as categorically different from other spring festivals because it is “radically transformed by a perception of history in which history is divinely interrupted” (boeve , ). easter is thus moved out of a secular anthropological realm, expressing what makes christianity so very different. sacrament can be seen as the visible and repeatable manifestation of that interruptive quality, which is integral to the narrative on which christianity is based. though sacramental practice may appear ziba norman and michael j. reiss to some to be purely a human construct (and therefore easily suspended in a time of pandemic, just as we can do without a professional haircut for a few months), the many aspects of christianity when viewed in concert makes such a separation of the quotidian and the transcendent impossible. the words “sacrament” and “mystery” themselves invoke what has been described as a “transcendent reality, invisible in itself, but manifested in ways that belong to the earth” (schillebeeckx and willems , – ). for many christians, sacramental acts allow for the mundane and the transcendent to conjoin. such acts are not simply perceived as symbolic; in particular, almost all eucharistic prayers contain an anamnesis, a litur- gical statement which not only reminds congregants of what happened at the last supper but enables them to participate in its memorial re- enactment, whether this is understood as the real presence of christ in the consecrated elements or more figuratively. any nontheologically informed anthropological analysis of these rites as rituals that fails to appreciate their significance for those participating in them and only focuses on the visible part of what is happening fails to understand their significance. exactly the same point, of course, holds for an analysis of baptism that sees water only as a symbol of washing and for an analysis of a wedding that sees the exchange of vows and rings as being no more important than the bride’s dress or the party that follows the wedding. for many christians, sacraments are viewed as transformative (not merely functional); thus, to be deprived of them, however pressing the reasons, even in a time of pandemic, will be deeply disruptive. this is per- haps particularly the case for funerals (even if these are not seen formally as sacraments) as these, unlike weddings, baptisms and the eucharist, can- not be postponed more than a week or two. at the time of writing (june ), covid- has already meant that hundreds of thousands of peo- ple, secular and religious alike, have had dismal funeral services where only a handful of relatives, friends, and others have been able to be present, with no one supposed to give anyone present a hug or other physical support, unless they are from the same household. the spaces within which funerals are taking place are fractured as those present participate more individually (sometimes virtually) and less communally. sacrament, through its inherent materiality, offers the possibility of interruption into the temporal realm, in ways that are impossible to de- scribe with language alone. attempts have been made to move beyond both historicism and rationalism, in search of a new means of describing the sacramental space. robert sokolowski, who writes on the theology of disclosure, suggests that there may be a “third way” of relating to chris- tian experience. much of christian experience, and the manifestation of christian belief, emerges out of the experience of absence and the presence that is found within it. the eucharistic sacrament is an enactment that brings the absent sacred into presence. in this sense, it is interruptive of the zygon temporal; on this reading it is essential, linking the historical narrative to the mediating presence of christ, present for the believer through sacrament (sokolowski ). perhaps unsurprisingly, there are reports of congregations in which sacramental practice, particularly the eucharist, has gone underground. this may contravene public health regulations—as the black lives matter protests in may and june contravened public health regulations. but then, for all that physical health is a good, few people with any spiritual sensibilities see it as the overriding good. the language of dom gregory dix’s writing on the eucharist may be dated, but the core message remains: was ever another command so obeyed? for century after century, spreading slowly to every continent and country and among every race on earth, this action has been done, in every conceivable human circumstance, for every conceivable human need from infancy and before it to extreme old age and after it, from the pinnacles of earthly greatness to the refuge of fugitives in the caves and dens of the earth. men have found no better thing than this to do for kings at their crowning and for criminals going to the scaffold; for armies in triumph or for a bride and bridegroom in a little country church; for the proclamation of a dogma or for a good crop of wheat; for the wisdom of the parliament of a mighty nation or for a sick old woman afraid to die; for a schoolboy sitting an examination or for columbus setting out to discover america; for the famine of whole provinces or for the soul of a dead lover; in thankfulness because my father did not die of pneumonia; for a village headman much tempted to return to fetich because the yams had failed; because the turk was at the gates of vienna; for the repentance of margaret; for the settlement of a strike; for a son for a barren woman; for captain so-and-so wounded and prisoner of war; while the lions roared in the nearby amphitheater; on the beach at dunkirk; while the hiss of scythes in the thick june grass came faintly through the windows of the church; tremulously, by an old monk on the fiftieth anniversary of his vows; furtively, by an exiled bishop who had hewn timber all day in a prison camp near murmansk; gorgeously, for the canonization of st. joan of arc – one could fill many pages with the reasons why men have done this, and not tell a hundredth part of them. and best of all, week by week and month by month, on a hundred thousand successive sundays, faithfully, unfailingly, across all the parishes of christendom, the pastors have done this just to make the plebs sancta dei – the holy common people of god. (dix , – ) if dix had lived long enough to witness the apollo mission, he might even have added a mention of buzz aldrin’s celebration of the eucharist on the moon (even if strictly speaking it wouldn’t fit into dix’s own eu- charistic theology). the celebration occurred before armstrong or aldrin even set foot on the moon’s surface, and before the words “that’s one small step for man, one giant leap for mankind” were transmitted around the world. the event has even resulted in the addition of a yearly celebra- tion, known as lunar communion sunday, and celebrated at the webster ziba norman and michael j. reiss presbyterian church, where aldrin and many of his fellow astronauts wor- shipped (cresswell ). conclusion the human being in embodied form exists in a state of perpetual risk. this is true for all organisms; the difference for us is that we are aware of this and an acceptance of death is part of this. the pandemic we now face is changing the way we relate to risk, particularly biological risk, and this has a disruptive quality. covid- is furthering our integration with technology, characterized by an emergent transhuman identity that seeks to surpass bodily limitations and, ultimately, even death itself. sacramental practice presents a direct conflict with the taking of biologically appropriate measures to stem the spread of covid- . while this may be necessary at this particular moment, if in the longer-term christian practice were to become separated from its sacramental roots, it would radically alter christianity as it has been understood for two millennia. the incarnation itself opened humanity to the transcendent through the physical manifestation of christ; the material and the transcendent are thus linked, united in one whom christians see as fully human and fully god. the trinity itself provides the fullest realization we can grasp of this interrelationship, perichoretic in its expression. thus, sacrament holds open the mysteries of christianity, which cannot easily be separated from the sacramental. the current time, characterized by an ever greater merging between humans and machine, and a blurring of boundaries between the virtual and the real, offers a moment to reflect on christian mysteries, as we ensure our technological civilization avoids hubris and remains open for the fullest realization of human life, with its capacity to participate in the transcendent. references adams, john. . risk. london: ucl press. aksoy, cevat g., barry eichengreen, and orkun saka. . revenge of the experts: will covid- renew or diminish public trust in science? london: the lon- don school of economics and political science systemic risk centre. http://www. systemicrisk.ac.uk/sites/default/files/downloads/publications/dp- _ .pdf. barmania, sima, and michael j. reiss. . “how religion can aid public health messaging during a pandemic.” nature india may . https://www. natureasia.com/en/nindia/article/ . /nindia. . . boeve, lieven. . “the sacramental interruption of rituals of life.” heythrop journal : – . bourke, joanna. . “how the internet is transforming death.” prospect magazine march . https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/die-online-technology-death-hospice- how-to-changing. briggs, andrew, and michael j. reiss. forthcoming. human flourishing: scientific insight and spiritual wisdom in uncertain times. oxford: oxford university press. burdett, michael. . eschatology and the technological future. london: routledge. http://www.systemicrisk.ac.uk/sites/default/files/downloads/publications/dp- _ .pdf http://www.systemicrisk.ac.uk/sites/default/files/downloads/publications/dp- _ .pdf https://www.natureasia.com/en/nindia/article/ . /nindia. . https://www.natureasia.com/en/nindia/article/ . /nindia. . https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/die-online-technology-death-hospice-how-to-changing https://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/die-online-technology-death-hospice-how-to-changing zygon cole-turner, ronald. . transhumanism and transcendence: christian hope in an age of technological enhancement. washington, dc: georgetown university press. cresswell, matthew. . “how buzz aldrin’s communion on the moon was hushed up.” guardian september . https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ belief/ /sep/ /buzz-aldrin-communion-moon. danaher, john, and neil mcarthur eds. . robot sex: social and ethical implications. cam- bridge, ma: mit press. davison, andrew. . why sacraments? london: society for promoting christian knowledge. deane-drummond, celia, and peter m. scott, eds. . future perfect? god, medicine and human identity. london: continuum. dix, dom gregory. . the shape of the liturgy. london: dacre press, adam & charles black. douglas, mary. 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( ) . the phenomenon of man. new york, ny: harper. wildman, wesley j., joseph bulbulia, richard sosis, and uffe schjoedt. . “religion and the covid- pandemic.” religion, brain & behavior ( ): – . https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/ /sep/ /buzz-aldrin-communion-moon https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/belief/ /sep/ /buzz-aldrin-communion-moon https://humanityplus.org https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/sine-dominico-non-possumus https://www.commonwealmagazine.org/sine-dominico-non-possumus https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/coronavirus-lockdown-seen-demand-human- https://www.mirror.co.uk/news/uk-news/coronavirus-lockdown-seen-demand-human- https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/singapore-using-robotic-dog-enforce-proper-social-distancing-during-covid- - / https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/singapore-using-robotic-dog-enforce-proper-social-distancing-during-covid- - / https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/singapore-using-robotic-dog-enforce-proper-social-distancing-during-covid- - / https://www.bbc.co.uk/programmes/b sp https://yougov.co.uk/topics/health/articles-reports/ / / /public-overwhelmingly-backs-governments-new-measur https://yougov.co.uk/topics/health/articles-reports/ / / /public-overwhelmingly-backs-governments-new-measur https://yougov.co.uk/topics/health/articles-reports/ / / /public-overwhelmingly-backs-governments-new-measur https://://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/ / / /approval-government-handling-coronavirus-sinks-low https://://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/ / / /approval-government-handling-coronavirus-sinks-low https://://yougov.co.uk/topics/politics/articles-reports/ / / /approval-government-handling-coronavirus-sinks-low apollo: twitter stream analyzer of trending hashtags: a case-study of #covid- mehwish alam , , manuel kaschura , and harald sack , fiz karlsruhe – leibniz institute for information infrastructure, germany karlsruhe institute of technology, institute aifb, germany {mehwish.alam,harald.sack}@fiz-karlsruhe.de, manuel.kaschura@student.kit.edu abstract. this poster introduces a new tool named apollo which an- alyzes textual information in the geo-tagged twitter streams of trending hashtags using sliding time window. it performs sentiment analysis as well as emotion detection of the opinions of the masses about a trend- ing world wide topic such as #covid- , #climatechange, #black- livesmatter, etc. based on knowledge graphs. apollo currently pro- vides an interactive visualization of the analysis of the trending hashtag #covid- . copyright © for this paper by its authors. use permitted under creative com- mons license attribution . international (cc by . ). introduction social media has become one of the most effective ways for the populations to voice their opinions about ongoing major political, health, or any other kind of phenomena. twitter is one of the popular social media channels where the users utilize hashtags for increasing the presence of their opinions about ongoing situations such as #covid- , #blacklivesmatter, #climatechange, etc. the current global challenge faced by humanity is the covid- pandemic. a huge amount of tweets are published each day targeting the related topics such as death rates, recovered cases, mental health issues, etc. these streaming twit- ter data can be used for many purposes such as monitoring mental health of the people during the lockdown, sentiments of the people suffering/recovering from the pandemic, agitation towards the measures taken by the governmental authorities for covid- prevention, etc. this paper particularly focuses on introducing a tool apollo which analyses the stream of english tweets related to #covid- . so far many other efforts have been put forth for analyzing the twitter data. one of the early datasets [ ] contains about million tweets related to covid- , however, it only consists of the raw data. tweetkb [ ] is another knowledge-base which performs sentiment analysis, entity linking, etc. of the tweets from october, to april, over http://covid-twitter-stream.fiz-karlsruhe.de/ http://covid-twitter-stream.fiz-karlsruhe.de/ million tweets. in [ ], the authors perform sentiment classification using deep learning methods over tweets. however, none of the above reported studies have taken into account the stream of tweets. due to huge amount of tweets being posted every minute all over the world, it is a challenge to process and analyze this information manually. this leads to the compulsion of introducing novel algorithms for automated analysis. apollo processes these twitter streams using sliding time window, retrieves geo-referenced tweets on the run and performs knowledge-aware sentiment anal- ysis and emotion detection of the masses about the pandemic as well as frame detection over tweets using framester [ ]. knowledge-aware twitter stream sentiment analysis handling twitter streams. in order to handle twitter streams, time-based sliding window was used. a sliding window defines a time span with a fixed duration which goes back in time for this defined time span starting from current time. for instance, a sliding window of two minutes includes any events that have occurred in the past two minutes. this work uses twitter stream api for obtaining twitter stream pertaining to particular hashtag such as #covid- and variations of this hashtag such as “corona”, “coronavirus”, etc. the time span used for the current implementation is minutes. the reason behind choosing minute window is that it is extremely expensive to stream and process data over larger sliding time windows. pre-processing tweets. in the preprocessing step, hashtags were processed using word segmenter . if the hashtag consists of multiple words, e.g., #black- livesmatter, it was segmented into “black lives matter”. the user mentions as well as urls were removed because they are not used in the current analysis. for the retweets, the prefix “rt:” was removed. emojis were mapped to the appropriate emotions manually. these mappings are available online . processing geo-tagged tweets. the locations of the tweets were converted to their co-ordinates using geopy which were later on used for plotting the emo- tions on the globe. for minutes of streaming, more than , tweets were retrieved out of which mentioned a place, mentioned their co-ordinates, and contained location information. only . % of the tweets had their co-ordinates which led to the necessity of using external service such as geopy. however, one of the bottle necks of geopy is that it has limited number of requests per minute and for each request it takes - seconds which led to delays in the computation. in future, apollo will use paid services for better performance. another problem encountered was that most of the tweets did http://docs.tweepy.org/en/latest/streaming_how_to.html https://pypi.org/project/wordsegment/ https://github.com/ise-fizkarlsruhe/twitterstreamanalysis https://geopy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ http://docs.tweepy.org/en/latest/streaming_how_to.html https://pypi.org/project/wordsegment/ https://github.com/ise-fizkarlsruhe/twitterstreamanalysis https://geopy.readthedocs.io/en/stable/ not contain location information, or had locations such as planet earth, parallel universe, the emoticon of a globe, etc. processing full text. full text of each of the tweets was processed by per- forming word sense disambiguation (wsd). several algorithms have been pro- posed so far but apollo currently uses lesk algorithm. other algorithms such as ukb and babelfy will be used for future releases. after obtaining the word- net synsets, framester was used for linking the tweets to the whole linked data resources (linguistic or otherwise) contained in framester. framester is a large linguistic linked open data including about million rdf triples acting as a hub between framenet, wordnet, verbnet, babelnet, predicate matrix, etc. it leverages this wealth of links to create an interoperable and homogeneous predicate space formally represented using frame semantics. framester uses a mapping between wordnet, babelnet, verbnet and framenet at its core using detour based approach, expands it to other linguistic resources transitively, and represents all of this formally. it further links these resources to important external ontological and linked data resources such as dbpedia, yago, dolce-zero, schema.org, nell, etc. further links to deepknownet topic signatures, as well as sentiwordnet [ ] and depechemood [ ] mood map- pings, are also available. framester has been successfully used in downstream task such as knowledge reconciliation using frame embeddings [ ]. fig. . framester - linguistic linked data hub visualizing people’s sentiments and emotions. the mappings contained in framester about sentiwordnet were used to assign sentiment scores to the tweets. the overall score for the whole sentence was computed by averaging in- dividual sentiment scores. in the presence of an emoji, a score of + . or - . was added to the numerator of the average and the denominator was increased by (in case of one emoji). similarly, for emotion detection the mappings between wordnet and depechemood (unique to framester) were used. finally, the aggre- gated score for each co-ordinate was visualized on -d globe which provides an interactive interface including zoom-in, zoom-out, etc. figure shows the final visualization of the sentiments in apollo. the legends on the left side describe the sentiments or emotions. the current version of apollo only considers the english tweets which causes some parts of the globe to be darker meaning that there is only small amount of data to be analyzed due to higher frequencies of non-english tweets. (a) sentiments of masses about covid- (b) emotions of masses about covid- fig. . interface of apollo for visualizing sentiments (+ve and -ve) and emotions of the masses around the globe for a minutes sliding window about #covid- word frame disambiguation. currently, apollo also enables the downloads which include the mappings of the tweets to framenet frames according to the transx mappings between wordnet and framenet as provided by framester (using skos:closematch). this further connects the tweets to other external resources in framester such as dbpedia, dolce, etc. this process is referred to as word frame disambiguation. further mappings can be obtained by crawling framester which is available through sparql endpoint . future directions in future, apollo will be able to automatically extract trending hashtags. dif- ferent wsd algorithms such as ukb or babelfy will be implemented. twitter stream classification using machine learning algorithms for providing real-time analysis over larger time spans will also be implemented. references . alam, m., recupero, d.r., mongiov̀ı, m., gangemi, a., ristoski, p.: event-based knowledge reconciliation using frame embeddings and frame similarity. knowl. based syst. , – ( ). https://doi.org/ . /j.knosys. . . , https://doi.org/ . /j.knosys. . . http://etna.istc.cnr.it/framester /sparql https://doi.org/ . /j.knosys. . . http://etna.istc.cnr.it/framester /sparql . baccianella, s., esuli, a., sebastiani, f.: sentiwordnet . : an enhanced lexical re- source for sentiment analysis and opinion mining. in: calzolari, n., choukri, k., maegaard, b., mariani, j., odijk, j., piperidis, s., rosner, m., tapias, d. (eds.) proceedings of the international conference on language resources and evalua- tion, lrec , - may , valletta, malta. european language resources association ( ) . chen, e., lerman, k., ferrara, e.: tracking social media discourse about the covid- pandemic: development of a public coronavirus twitter data set. corr abs/ . ( ), https://arxiv.org/abs/ . . dimitrov, d., baran, e., fafalios, p., yu, r., zhu, x., zloch, m., dietze, s.: tweetscov - a knowledge base of semantically annotated tweets about the covid- pandemic. corr abs/ . ( ), https://arxiv.org/abs/ . . gangemi, a., alam, m., asprino, l., presutti, v., recupero, d.r.: framester: a wide coverage linguistic linked data hub. in: blomqvist, e., ciancarini, p., poggi, f., vitali, f. (eds.) knowledge engineering and knowledge management - th interna- tional conference, ekaw , bologna, italy, november - , , proceedings. lecture notes in computer science, vol. , pp. – ( ) . li, i., li, y., li, t., álvarez-napagao, s., garćıa, d.: what are we depressed about when we talk about covid : mental health analysis on tweets using natural lan- guage processing. corr abs/ . ( ), https://arxiv.org/abs/ . . staiano, j., guerini, m.: depeche mood: a lexicon for emotion analysis from crowd annotated news. in: proceedings of the nd annual meeting of the association for computational linguistics, acl , june - , , baltimore, md, usa, vol- ume : short papers. pp. – . the association for computer linguistics ( ). https://doi.org/ . /v /p - , https://doi.org/ . /v /p - https://arxiv.org/abs/ . https://arxiv.org/abs/ . https://arxiv.org/abs/ . https://arxiv.org/abs/ . https://arxiv.org/abs/ . https://doi.org/ . /v /p - 	apollo: twitter stream analyzer of trending hashtags: a case-study of #covid- the new career of jim crow robinson, stephen ( ) the new career of jim crow. reviews in american history, ( ). pp. - . downloaded from: http://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/ / the version presented here may differ from the published version or version of record. if you intend to cite from the work you are advised to consult the publisher's version: http://muse.jhu.edu/article/ research at york st john (ray) is an institutional repository. it supports the principles of open access by making the research outputs of the university available in digital form. copyright of the items stored in ray reside with the authors and/or other copyright owners. users may access full text items free of charge, and may download a copy for private study or non-commercial research. for further reuse terms, see licence terms governing individual outputs. institutional repository policy statement ray research at the university of york st john for more information please contact ray at ray@yorksj.ac.uk https://www.yorksj.ac.uk/ils/repository-policies/ mailto:ray@yorksj.ac.uk access provided by york st john university ( sep : gmt) https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ the new career of jim crow stephen robinson stephanie cole and natalie j. ring, eds. the folly of jim crow: rethinking the segregated south. college station: texas a&m university press, . xi + pp. notes and index. $ . . robert cassanello. to render invisible: jim crow and public life in new south jacksonville. gainesville: university press of florida, . xv + pp. notes, bibliography, and index. $ . (cloth); $ . (paper). stephen a. berrey. the jim crow routine: everyday performances of race, civil rights, and segregation in mississippi. chapel hill: university of north caro- lina press, . xiii + pp. notes, bibliography, and index. $ . (paper); $ . (e-book). audrey thomas mccluskey. a forgotten sisterhood: pioneering black women educators and activists in the jim crow south. lanham, md.: rowman & little- field, . x + pp. notes, chronology, bibliography, and index. $ . (cloth); $ . (e-book). william e. o’brien. landscapes of exclusion: state parks and jim crow in the american south. amherst: university of massachusetts press, . xv + pp. notes and index. $ . . ruth thompson-miller, joe r. feagin and leslie h. picca. jim crow’s legacy: the lasting impact of segregation. lanham, md.: rowman & littlefield, . xvi + pp. notes and index. $ . (cloth); $ . (paper); $ . (e-book). the scholarship on the jim crow south has had a long career. dating back to c. vann woodward’s path breaking book, the strange career of jim crow ( ), historians have sought to understand when and why de jure segrega- tion was rolled out across the south. woodward argued that it was the loss of restraining forces by the s—southern liberalism, radicalism, and northern intervention—that enabled white southern lawmakers to find a new way of enforcing strict racial hierarchies. the flexibility and experimentation in race reviews in american history ( ) – © by johns hopkins university press reviews in american history / september relations evident in the s gave way to a more rigid system in the s. path breaking though this book was, it did not take into account earlier forms of segregation, nor did it contain any serious analysis of african americans’ agency—a lacuna that was filled in part by howard rabinowitz’s insightful race relations in the urban south ( ). over the last fifteen years or so, schol- ars have sought to extend the contours of the debate. the essays collected in jumpin’ jim crow: southern politics from civil war to civil rights ( ), edited by jane dailey, glenda gilmore, and bryant simon, fundamentally reshaped our approach to the jim crow south. rather than interpreting this period from the s to the s through a white lens—and thereby implying that the maintenance of white supremacy was the fixed component—these scholars instead argued that it was black resistance to jim crow that was continuous. it was white resistance to black political activism (and, later, to desegregation) that was in a constant state of flux. the books under review in this essay build on the work of dailey et al. each explores the fruitful scholarly path of black resistance, and a white counter- resistance that was ever changing. jim crow, it seems, had many careers, and was forced to change as a result of the persistence of african americans’ resistance to it. the folly of jim crow: rethinking the segregated south, edited by stephanie cole and natalie j. ring, is a collection of essays that emerged from a conference on the segregation era. this collection reveals that jim crow from the very beginning was not a fixed entity. as a result, the contributors argue that the old debate over timing is ultimately a folly. indeed, the essays in the folly of jim crow expand on this essential point. a particular strength of this work—and one that informs to some extent the scholarship that fol- lows—is that it takes the long perspective on jim crow. as with scholarship on the modern civil rights movement or, more recently, the reconstruction era, the chapters in this collection do not simply focus on the early years of jim crow, or the period of legal desegregation. instead, they reframe the story: back into reconstruction and forward into the post– s era. as a result, we get a better sense of how jim crow evolved over time, how the color line was constantly challenged by african americans, and how later activism built on earlier efforts. mia bay’s chapter on ida b. wells, for instance, emphasizes, quite rightly, the imperative of placing african americans at the center of any analysis of jim crow. in so doing, bay reveals the gendered ways by which elite african american women protested against jim crow on the railroads. this, in turn, underscores the need to explore the nexus of race, class, and gender in order to fully understand the discrimination faced by black americans on public transportation. along with placing african americans at the center of the jim crow nar- rative, the chapters in the folly of jim crow explore another issue that is of contemporary resonance: marriage rights. indeed, two particularly percep- robinson / the new career of jim crow tive essays by peter wallenstein and jane dailey focus on how the issues of education and marriage laws interacted and intersected to reveal a fluid color line that varied across time and space. daily, for instance, argues that antimiscegenation laws were “the critical legal foundation” of the jim crow south, based on a “miscegenation anxiety” that “assumed a new centrality” in the white mind (p. ). both of these chapters demonstrate that the scholar- ship of jim crow has always been informed by contemporary concerns. for woodward, writing in the s, it was to demonstrate how segregation had not been an inevitable consequence of emancipation but a product of the late nineteenth-century south. by contrast, dailey’s essay is directly informed by recent debates over marriage equality and the continued debate over the meaning of civil rights in contemporary america. pursuing another line of enquiry, theda perdue’s chapter forces us to think much more broadly about the impact of segregation on all southerners and to look beyond the typical black/white binary. yet it was the aim of the segrega- tionists to create a biracial world—one that for them was at once easier and more challenging to define and sustain. indeed, the issue of definition, in particular “whiteness,” is an important sub-theme in the book. mixed-race people were always a “challenge” to white supremacists. along with the concomitant fear of racial passing, methods of racial classification were constantly remade. as natalie ring’s chapter reveals, the health of “whiteness” became crucial to the health of jim crow, resulting in the increase in public funding for white schools in order to sustain white supremacy. the biracial nature of jim crow had a significant impact on indians, argues perdue, for jim crow reassigned them as “colored” and created a situation whereby they were “denied their culture and history” (p. ). a particular strength of perdue’s essay is to track the role of american indians across time. in so doing, we are forced not only to think beyond the black-white binary but to rethink the dynamics of jim crow as a system that was attuned to the significance of place. robert cassanello’s to render invisible: jim crow and public life in new south jacksonville, is one recent book that takes up this challenge of understanding the significance of place to jim crow. building on the work of scholars such as paul ortiz, cassanello explores the meaning of the color line in jackson- ville, florida, from reconstruction through the s. he does this by using nancy fraser’s notion of “counter public spheres” (itself an adaptation of jürgen habermas’ notion of the public sphere) to argue that, while african americans were excluded from the democratic public space created during reconstruction, a “black counterpublic” emerged in the s and s that informed the everyday acts of resistance to jim crow. this counterpublic oper- ated both within public and private spaces, which are dealt with in separate chapters. chapter six provides a fascinating account of how african ameri- cans organized to challenge segregation in public transportation, which adds reviews in american history / september to the scholarship on the early civil rights activity of black activists that has been identified throughout the rest of the state and region. one may question whether a distinction of public and private spaces is as clear-cut as this book seems to suggest. however, cassanello’s book does good service in reinforc- ing the point that black political activity did not simply stop with the end of reconstruction, but continued in response to the changing nature of jim crow. indeed, a particular strength of this book is to trace the emergence of labor and women’s counterpublics that ran alongside and intersected with the black counterpublic. the election is marked as a particularly important moment when white fears over the black counterpublic became clear, especially over the prospect of black women voting. the significance of place is explored in a different context, using an alterna- tive theoretical approach of performance, in stephen a. berrey’s the jim crow routine: everyday performances of race, civil rights, and segregation in mississippi. through an extensive use of the oral histories of the civil rights movement, manuscript collections, and newspapers, berrey explores jim crow mississippi between the s and s to uncover how white and black mississippians followed a racialized script of expected behaviors. in so doing, berrey reveals how the jim crow “routine” was re-learned over time. indeed, berrey is keen to identify the origins of “the performances of public protest” we associate with the modern civil rights movements within the “daily performances and narratives” that can be traced back into the s and s (p. ). berrey therefore situates his study within the perspective of what is termed the “long civil rights movement,” from the s through the s. an important feature of this book is to broaden the definition of surveil- lance to include not only acts of official surveillance, but also of the forms of everyday surveillance by members of a local community. the book posits that the “local means of watching black people has deep roots in the jim crow system” (p. ). berrey reveals how performance was regulated at the local level, which, by the s, had to adjust to another form of surveillance: the national media. indeed, most of this excellent book concentrates on the s, a crucial decade in the history of jim crow, berrey contends, when the “routine” was forced to change as a result of civil rights activism in the south and me- dia attention from outside. the result was “a more formal system” of control whereby law enforcement officials would “assume a greater role” in policing racialized relations (p. ). berrey tracks this move beyond the jim crow era in his insightful epilogue, which challenges the reader to think about how the “narratives of both racial harmony and black criminality” evident during the jim crow era “continue to justify and produce racist practices” (p. ). robinson / the new career of jim crow for all the insights that can be gained from these single-state monographs, comparative studies still have something to offer, particularly in the case of assessing specific individuals’ roles in challenging jim crow. audrey thomas mccluskey’s a forgotten sisterhood: pioneering black women educators and activists in the jim crow south is an excellent example of the comparative ap- proach. this study is built around the careers of four black women educators who were influential leaders at the local, state, and, in some cases, national level: lucy craft laney, mary mcleod bethune, charlotte hawkins brown, and nannie helen burroughs. as a result, a forgotten sisterhood reveals the significance placed on education as a means of challenging jim crow. indeed, this book expands on mccluskey’s earlier co-authored work with elaine m. smith on bethune, mary mcleod bethune: building a better world, essays and selected documents ( ): a work that brought much needed attention to this overlooked and influential black leader. a forgotten sisterhood builds on an existing scholarship on the crucial role played by black teachers in asserting black agency during jim crow. furthermore, the focus on these four women leaders also moves the scholarship beyond the key black spokesmen. as the title of this book suggests, mccluskey considers these four leaders to be part of a “forgotten sisterhood”: a larger network of black women in positions of what the author notes as “activist leadership” (p. ). the book looks at each leader separately before turning its attention to the larger networks and relationships created and, finally, the legacies of these leaders. indeed, the final chapter sug- gests a possible avenue for future research—exploring the legacies of african american leaders in their respective communities, and, in the case of bethune, more nationally. the commemoration of these women, whether in the form of public memorials or other forms of recognition, reveals the challenge facing any kind of commemoration that focuses on specific individuals. mccluskey notes that these black leaders “defy easy categorization” (p. ), and while public commemoration can place them “within an idealized, one-dimensional public space,” this need not be restrictive and can spark further discussion (p. ). lucy craft laney, for example, concentrated on the “collective uplift of family and race,” and in so doing “revised the nineteenth-century ideal for white women” that focused on purity and submissiveness (p. ). the legacies of the jim crow era inform the final two books under review. william e. o’brien’s wonderfully illustrated book, landscapes of exclusion: state parks and jim crow in the american south, focuses on the segregated national parks that emerged in the u.s. south in the s and continued in many areas until the late s. the book charts the history of the southern parks and theorizes how their emergence during the new deal as segregated facilities was the result of the broader compromise made to assuage southern democrats in the s over matters of race. o’brien does an effective job of reviews in american history / september connecting the ambivalent approach of franklin roosevelt’s new deal toward issues of race with the desire to provide leisure facilities for all americans, also explaining what ultimately emerges on the ground. he demonstrates how segregated parks arose as a result of local concerns, reinforcing the significance of place to understanding the extent of jim crow. as a result, approximately half the national parks in the region were separate parks in a different location; the other half were what o’brien calls “dual-type”—with a separate area for nonwhites in an existing “white” park. o’brien expands on the well-known narrative of the naacp’s legal fight against school segrega- tion in the world war two era by revealing how this challenge to jim crow extended to the southern national parks. chapter five traces this story from the late s through the s, when the naacp became involved in cases relating to equal access to state parks, which were considered the weak point of the jim crow system because of their relatively recent introduction. the southern parks thus became a contested site over the very meaning of jim crow “separate but equal”—a campaign that formed an integral part of the larger “massive resistance” of southern whites against desegregation during the modern civil rights movement. o’brien’s book reiterates the important point that public landscapes are never simply neutral spaces but are infused with meaning that is contingent on specific historical circumstances and contexts. chapter six explores the legacies of the southern parks’ segregated past and highlights the silences that surround this history, which is only now beginning to be fully acknowledged. the legacy of all this is that visitors to national parks in the south remain predominantly white (a trend that can be traced to other parks in the country), in large part because of the discrimination encountered in the past (p. ). in some areas in the south, national parks and forests are associated with vio- lence; certain remote areas have a lasting resonance because they are precisely the sites where memories of lynchings are at their rawest. legacies such as these are perceptively explored in the sociological work jim crow’s legacy: the lasting impact of segregation. the authors of this work—ruth thompson- miller, joe r. feagin and leslie h. picca—have produced a book that takes the scholarship on jim crow in a new direction. basing their conclusions on ninety-two interviews with african americans between the ages of and , jim crow’s legacy reveals the significance of what they term “segregation stress syndrome” (p. ) to those africans americans who live with the memory of jim crow. indeed, the key point of the book is to reveal the significance of “intergenerational transmission of racial oppressive [sic] and its countering strategies” (p. ). the book seeks to understand four key areas: the realities of jim crow; the coping mechanisms adopted by african americans; the long-term impact of jim crow, psychological or otherwise; and the impact of trauma that is passed down through generations. robinson / the new career of jim crow jim crow’s legacy begins with the historical origins of jim crow before turn- ing to its legacies of systemic economic inequality between white and black americans—an issue that is returned to in the final chapter’s discussion of reparations. the bulk of the book, however, focuses on the two major means of white control that underpinned jim crow—surveillance and violence—that feature heavily in the memories of the interviewees. the book makes effec- tive use of the interviewees’ recollections, which adds depth to this book in its exploration of the surveillance, control, and abuse of african americans during the segregation era. this emphasis challenges the still-dominant white discourse over the legacy of jim crow, in which the extent and depth of oppression faced by african americans during the segregation era is still downplayed—including in school textbooks. indeed, the extent of jim crow’s “violent sexual reality” (p. ) has only recently begun to be explored by historians to the extent that it needs to be. another particular strength of this book is to trace the historical origins of the contemporary issues of racial profiling, violence, and segregated space—reinforcing the fact that, while laws might change, attitudes take longer to follow suit. jim crow’s legacy suggests the direction that now needs to be taken in studies of the segregation era. as we move further away from the s, we need to assess the moment of legal desegregation in its historical context. and if woodward’s work was informed by the modern civil rights movement that was emerging around him, then scholarship today cannot help but be informed by the “black lives matter” campaign currently taking place. there are signs that the civil rights struggle today—of which marriage equality is but one facet—is beginning to inform our understanding of past struggles, as dailey’s chapter in the folly of jim crow and berrey’s work on jim crow’s performance reveals. taking our cue from the many local studies of slavery, reconstruction, and the modern civil rights movement, perhaps now is the time to explore further the legacies of jim crow since the s, both in the south and elsewhere. as a result, we might better understand the long history of race in the united states, and thus find ways to fully acknowledge that past and move forward. stephen robinson is lecturer in american studies at york st. john university, u.k. he is currently working on a book project entitled the jim crow south in history and memory. . for a seminal essay on the central role played by african americans in everyday forms of resistance to jim crow, see robin d. g. kelley, “‘we are not what we seem’: re-thinking black working-class opposition in the jim crow south,” journal of american history (june ): – . see, also, blair l. m. kelley’s excellent right to ride: streetcar boycotts and african american citizenship in the era of plessy v. ferguson ( ). . paul ortiz, emancipation betrayed: the hidden history of black organizing and white violence in florida from reconstruction to the bloody election of ( ). reviews in american history / september . nancy fraser, “rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy,” in habermas and the public sphere, ed. craig calhoun ( ), – . . this turn in the scholarship was influenced by jacqueline dowd hall’s essay: “the long civil rights movement and the political uses of the past,” journal of american history (march ): – . . for an excellent example of the possibilities provided by a comparative approach, see r. volney riser, defying disfranchisement: black voting rights activism in the jim crow south, – ( ). . see, for example: adam fairclough, a class of their own: black teachers in the segregated south ( ). . see especially danielle l. mcguire, at the dark end of the street: black women, rape, and resistance—a new history of the civil rights movement from rosa parks to the rise of black power ( ). [pdf] divergent discourse between protests and counter-protests: #blacklivesmatter and #alllivesmatter | semantic scholar skip to search formskip to main content> semantic scholar's logo search sign increate free account you are currently offline. some features of the site may not work correctly. 	doi: . /journal.pone. corpus id: divergent discourse between protests and counter-protests: #blacklivesmatter and #alllivesmatter @article{gallagher divergentdb, title={divergent discourse between protests and counter-protests: #blacklivesmatter and #alllivesmatter}, author={ryan j. gallagher and a. j. reagan and c. danforth and p. dodds}, journal={plos one}, year={ }, volume={ } } 	ryan j. gallagher, a. j. reagan, + author p. dodds 	published 	computer science, political science, medicine 	plos one since the shooting of black teenager michael brown by white police officer darren wilson in ferguson, missouri, the protest hashtag #blacklivesmatter has amplified critiques of extrajudicial killings of black americans. in response to #blacklivesmatter, other twitter users have adopted #alllivesmatter, a counter-protest hashtag whose content argues that equal attention should be given to all lives regardless of race. through a multi-level analysis of over , tweets, we study how these… expand view on pubmed journals.plos.org save to library create alert cite launch research feed share this paper citationshighly influential citations background citations methods citations results citations view all figures, tables, and topics from this paper 	 figure 	 figure 	 figure 	 figure 	 figure 	 figure 	 figure 	 figure 	 figure 	 figure 	 figure b 	 figure b 	 figure b 	 table i 	 table ii view all figures & tables 	hashtag 	multilevel model 	entity name part qualifier - adopted 	advocate (person) citations citation type citation type 	all types 	cites results 	cites methods 	cites background has pdf publication type author more filters more filters filters sort by relevance sort 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haperen 	 	 	pdf save alert research feed ... ... references showing - of references sort byrelevance most influenced papers recency beyond the hashtags: #ferguson, #blacklivesmatter, and the online struggle for offline justice 	deen freelon, charlton d. mcilwain, m. clark 	political science 	 	 	view excerpt, references background save alert research feed #ferguson: digital protest, hashtag ethnography, and the racial politics of social media in the united states 	yarimar bonilla, j. rosa 	sociology 	 	 	highly influential 	view excerpts, references background save alert research feed #ferguson is everywhere: initiators in emerging counterpublic networks 	s. jackson, brooke foucault welles 	sociology 	 	 	pdf 	view excerpt, references background save alert research feed hijacking #mynypd: social media dissent and networked counterpublics 	s. jackson, b. f. welles 	sociology 	 	 	pdf save alert research feed all lives matter, but so does race 	nikita carney 	sociology 	 	 save alert 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article: tate, sa and bagguley, p ( ) building the anti-racist university: next steps. race, ethnicity and education, ( ). pp. - . issn - https://doi.org/ . / . . © informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group. this is an accepted manuscript of an article published by taylor & francis in race, ethnicity and education on th december , available online: http://www.tandfonline.com/ . / . . eprints@whiterose.ac.uk https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ reuse items deposited in white rose research online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. they may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. the publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. this is indicated by the licence information on the white rose research online record for the item. takedown if you consider content in white rose research online to be in breach of uk law, please notify us by emailing eprints@whiterose.ac.uk including the url of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. mailto:eprints@whiterose.ac.uk https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ building the antiracist university: next steps shirley anne tate paul bagguley university of leeds, uk introduction: first steps this special issue emerged out of the continuing concern with how best to deal with institutional racism in heis that we have long shared as colleagues in the centre for ethnicity and racism studies (cers) at the university of leeds, as discussed by ian law in this volume. the conference ‘building the anti-racist university: next steps’ was focused on looking forward to what needed to be done now in the st century drawing on th / st century experience of institutional gains followed by their attrition in some cases and fundamental institutional inertia in others. both of these responses to addressing institutional racism worked against organizational change even as equality and diversity policies aimed at changing the face of universities were instituted. the papers in this special issue are the results of the thinking instantiated by the call for papers and the transdisciplinary, transnational theoretical and practice based discussions at the conference on experiences of institutional racial equality change processes and strategies as both partial successes and abject failures. we take both successes and failures forward as lessons learned into the new arena for anti-racist work in which we find ourselves, the neo-liberal, ‘post-race’ university which by and large still caters for national/ international elites, where some knowledge is commodified on a global scale and others continue to be erased. what is distinctive about this special issue is the international character of the collection demonstrating common political concerns globally about racism in higher education. yet there remain some puzzling absences – no contribution from mainland europe, the caribbean or australia and new zealand for example. this may perhaps reflect our networks, how we framed the conference or be an indication that racism in higher centre for ethnicity and racism studies, school of sociology and social policy, university of leeds, leeds, ls jt. email: s.a.tate@leeds.ac.uk education does not get much attention in these contexts in which anti-black and anti- indigenous racisms persist. notwithstanding these absences, one goal of this special issue is to further expand the global debate on racism and anti-racism in universities. the papers highlight a multiple range of issues regarding students, academic staff and knowledge systems but all seek to challenge the complacency of the ‘post-race’ present that is dominant in, north west europe and north america, brazil’s mythical ‘racial democracy’ and south africa’s post-apartheid ‘rainbow nation’. the papers also originate from a variety of disciplines – sociology, economics, pyschology, education, and youth and community work. for the countries represented by the papers- brazil, south africa, canada, the usa and the uk – what is clear is that we are not yet past the need for antiracist institutional action. what these nations share in common is that they were all touched by the machinations of european empire whether as colonized or colonizer. this has led to the instantiation of european whiteness as superior and abjection of the difference of racialized others. from within this colonial psyche which still exists in the st century these nations actively deracinate politics, subjectivities, political economy and affective relationalities when they re- imagine themselves to be ‘post-race’ states where all citizens can have a share in the good life because now only class matters. universities have also taken on the mantle of upholding societal ‘post-race’ status through those very same equality and diversity policies and strategies which have not been effective (ahmed ). frances henry et al’s article on higher education in canada foregrounds racism as a critical variable shaping racialized and indigenous peoples' lives and experiences. this issue is pronounced in canadian universities, where employment equity, diversity, and other policies aimed at equality amount to no more than well-worded mission statements and some minor cosmetic changes which leave structural racial inequality intact. in canada inequality, indifference, and reliance on outmoded conservative traditions characterize the modern neoliberal university which continues to work on racial lines. whether one examines representation in terms of numbers of racialized and indigenous faculty members and their positioning within the system, their earned income as compared to white faculty, their daily life experiences of racism within the university as workplace irrespective of status, or interactions with colleagues and students, the results are that racialized and indigenous faculty and the disciplines or areas of their expertise are, on the whole, low in numbers and even lower in terms of power, prestige, and influence within the higher education institutions (heis). from the viewpoint of the usa, ryan p. adserias, lavar j. charleston and jerlando f.l. jackson assert that implementing racial diversity agendas within decentralized, loosely-coupled, and change-resistant institutions such as colleges and universities is a global challenge. they see a shift in organizational culture as imperative in order to produce the change needed for a diversity agenda to thrive. this article synthesizes the literature on proven strategies and offers case studies of how a variety of leadership styles has and can fuel much needed racial diversity efforts or lead to institutional inertia. more work needs to be done into the st century because of, not in spite of, the ‘post-race’ consensus in order to develop a maximal, transformative approach to institutional change, rather than a minimal meeting of legal obligations in those countries where an anti- discrimination framework exists. in the uk progress in the field of anti-racism in heis has slowed and has dissipated across the sector within a proliferation of policy statements on equity, diversity and harassment as well as ethnic monitoring of staff and student access and progression, for example. these approaches have been inadequate and do not reflect the necessary institutional effort required to establish real and lasting anti-racism in the uk higher education sector, or indeed, in canada, the usa, brazil and south africa built on a foundation of innovative and effective policy and practice. this special issue draws together the foci emerging from the debates within each paper on curriculum, pedagogy, access, policy, process, experience, outcomes, racialization and racism in heis in canada, the usa, the uk, brazil and south africa to help in crafting an agenda for building the global anti- racist university into the ‘post- race’ st century. to aid in this endeavour, the papers in this special issue look at the following key themes in their locally contextualized debates and research on institutional racism in heis in canada, brazil, south africa, the uk and usa: ) institutional whiteness: how is it produced and reproduced through affect, structures and processes? how might it be resisted and transformed? ) transforming organizational cultures: what are the challenges of such transformation? what are the conflicts and contradictions of transforming heis ‘from within’? are our efforts always destined to be turned into another managerial process? what role does intersectionality play in transforming organizational cultures? ) the black and minority ethnic (bme) and indigenous presence and experience in heis: how can we best map these in terms of both staff and students? can we draw in meaningful ways on these experiences to produce change in heis’ approaches to curriculum, pedagogy, recruitment, retention and progression? ) developing curriculum interventions: what can be done to enable anti-racism within a context of professional autonomy, disciplinary inertia and organizational resistance? ) widening participation and organizational change: what does widening participation mean in the context of anti-racism? should anti-racism be a part of the outcomes of higher education curricula? ) future directions for racial equality and diversity in a ‘post-race’ era; what are the implications and symptoms of ‘post-race’ for heis? what impact does ‘post-race’ have on the possibility for the development of anti-racist strategies? institutional whiteness is shared across all of the papers in the issue so let us turn next to briefly look at whiteness and institutional racism in contemporary university spaces in the ‘post-race’ uk. whiteness, institutional racism and universities as ‘post-race’ spaces we began the debate within racism studies about whether or not we are yet ‘post-race’ societies some time ago (goldberg ). whatever side of the debate on which we fall what this special insists is that institutional racism is still very much a part of the fabric of the university spaces we inhabit, texturing our experiences and this is the case no matter how much we might wish that it were otherwise. academia is an institution in which faculty and administration continue to be predominantly white especially at professor, vice chancellor and top management levels and the curricula continue to be unashamedly white as well. continuing dissatisfaction with this state of affairs led to the emergence of student- led campaigns in the uk on ‘why is my curriculum white?’ (http://www.nus.org.uk/en/news/why- is-my-curriculum-white/) and ‘why isn’t my professor black?’ (http://www.dtmh.ucl.ac.uk/isnt- professor-black-reflection/). these concerns with the lack of change in terms of racial justice transformation have led over the last few years to the mobilization of thousands of students to public meetings in universities across the country and their political attachment to other global campaigns such as ‘#black lives matter’ in the usa and ‘rhodes must fall’ in south africa. much of this public debate and campus based campaigning has emerged since our conference, yet they indicate its political timeliness. the uk student mobilizations became more apparent after a historic panel at the ucl on th march, entitled ‘why isn’t my professor black?’ the members of the panel were professor michael arthur president and provost (ucl), dr. deborah gabriel (founder and ceo of black british academics), dr. lisa palmer (newman university), dr. shirley anne tate (university of leeds), dr. william ackah (birkbeck college, university of london) and dr. nathaniel adam tobias coleman (ucl) who organized the panel. the event was ‘sold out’ within days and a bigger venue had to be arranged in order to seat the hundreds of people who attended. the ucl panel is widely seen to have been the catalyst for anti-racist student campaigns and student calls to decolonize the university in the uk. at this panel the vice chancellor of ucl asserted that that university would develop the first black studies programme in the uk to show its commitment to this area of academic endeavour globally. http://www.dtmh.ucl.ac.uk/isnt-professor-black-reflection/ http://www.dtmh.ucl.ac.uk/isnt-professor-black-reflection/ however, this has not yet materialized at ucl and progress on this achievement seems to have dissipated. in south africa and the uk there has also been the ‘rhodes must fall’ campaign and in south africa the ‘fees must fall’ campaign. all of these student-led mobilizations have been a call to action for anti-racist change not just within universities but also societally. cynically, uk universities have responded with once yearly well-publicized black history month events as part of their equality and diversity strategies, part of a public demonstration of their commitment to anti-racist change. these are sometimes run as public events by their public relations offices to show ‘there is no racism here’, irrespective of the fact of the shameful bme employment statistics within uk heis at present and the prevailing issue of bme student lack of achievement. there continues to be under-representation of bme staff even while there has been a year on year increase in bme students (equality challenge unit, http://www.ecu.ac.uk/publications/equality-higher-education-statistical- report- / accessed st august, ). the numbers of bme staff has increased from . % in / to . % in / (ecu ). further, black staff members continue to be low paid and low status in comparison with white colleagues (ecu ). whilst much previous work in the uk focused on racial inequalities in access to university (mcmanus et al ; connor et al ; bagguley and hussain ) more recent work has revealed a significant ‘attainment gap’ between white, black and ethnic minority students. data from the united kingdom’s equality challenge unit (http://www.ecu.ac.uk/guidance-resources/student-recruitment-retention-attainment/student- attainment/degree-attainment-gaps/accessed st august ) showed that in / . % of uk-domiciled bme students received an upper second class or first class degree, compared with . % of white british students. this is what the ecu refers to as an attainment gap of . %. whilst the gap varies between minority ethnic groups, . % of self-classified ‘black other’ students achieved a higher class of degree - a gap of . % compared to white students. such an attainment gap should make universities ponder what it is about what happens within their walls, classrooms and curricula that suppresses the http://www.ecu.ac.uk/publications/equality-higher-education-statistical-report- / http://www.ecu.ac.uk/publications/equality-higher-education-statistical-report- / http://www.ecu.ac.uk/guidance-resources/student-recruitment-retention-attainment/student-attainment/degree-attainment-gaps/accessed http://www.ecu.ac.uk/guidance-resources/student-recruitment-retention-attainment/student-attainment/degree-attainment-gaps/accessed emergence of bme student excellence. students have already highlighted those aspects of university life which impact their experiences negatively in terms of the campaigns mentioned above, that is, continuing institutional racism, curricula which continue to be euro- centric and faculty which do not reflect the uk’s demographic diversity. these very issues were raised in terms of schooling by bernard coard’s ( ) how the west indian child is made educationally subnormal in british schools and maureen stone’s ( ) the education of the black child in britain: the myth of multi-racial education. one could say then that the uk education system has not moved past race and, indeed, is configured to maintain the dominance of those racialized as white. this dominance is also maintained through a second feature of the university landscape in the uk that has been receiving increasing attention. that is, the lack of progression of black and ethnic minority students into the academic workforce. for example at the time of writing there were only black women full professors in the uk (the times higher / / ). one particular paradox here is that whilst black and ethnic minority students are more likely than white students to study for a taught masters, they are less likely to move on to a phd (http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/year/ / /) which is the first step towards an academic career in the uk. in contrast, white graduates were almost twice as likely as bme graduates to go on to a research degree soon after graduating. this research by the government’s higher education funding council demonstrates some level of official concern, but this contrasts with the lack of real action for change within universities, such as student mentoring and scholarship possibilities. indeed, if the majority of uk bme students attend non-russell group universities this already means that they stand less chance of getting an esrc/ahrc scholarship than their russell group counterparts. the organization of scholarship funding through the doctoral training centres/ partnerships model potentially could be the location of unwitting racial exclusion even though on the face of it the system seems to be operating on a meritocratic basis. such enduring inequalities at the heart of uk higher education institutions supposedly built upon those long-held eurocentric http://www.hefce.ac.uk/pubs/year/ / / virtues of fairness and meritocracy reveal an ongoing monumental structural racial inequality and ongoing racist practices. ‘post-race’ we are not (goldberg ) indeed, nor are we in the grip of eduardo bonilla- silva’s ( ) ‘colour-blind racism’. racism is not colour blind nor is ‘race’ ‘post’. in his paper ian law addresses this issue by firmly locating the work of cers within the long sociological tradition placing ‘race’ and racism at the centre of the making of western modernity, from du bois, cooper, césaire and fanon to contemporary theorists including hall, hesse, collins, goldberg, glissant and winant. for him it is important to keep the spotlight on racism as a primary field of research and practice in order to enable the global transformation of heis. at the curriculum level, this necessity is also highlighted by ronelle carolissen and vivienne bozalek’s paper which draws on an interdisciplinary, inter-professional teaching, learning and research project set up across a historically disadvantaged (black) and a historically advantaged (white) hei in cape town, south africa, and across differently valued professions (psychology, social work and occupational therapy) in order to address the historical and current racial inequities caused by apartheid’s instantiation of racial difference and unquestioned white privilege irrespective of class. as these papers show, ‘post-race’ and ‘colour-blind’ are pervasive institutional discourses which provide us with ways in which we can understand the insidious neo-liberal racialization within which we find ourselves in the societies from which the papers in this issue draw. pete harris, chris haywood and mairtin mac an ghaill’s article explores this neo-liberal racialization by exploring the experiences of black and muslim students by looking at how ‘teaching otherwise’ can create an alternative representational space. this space in turn enables a transformation in perspectives of self through pedagogy which is much needed in the future in uk heis if neo-liberal racialization is to be effectively tackled. neo-liberal racialization continues to be difficult to deal with because it is catalysed by whiteness or ‘whiteliness’ (yancy ; ) which are discursive and non-discursive aspects of institutional life which […] becomes a deeply political, existentially lived, social category that shapes the subjectivities and future racialist/ racist practices of whites. whiteness is a way of performing both one’s phenotypic white body / one’s subjectivity structured around a specific white racist epistemic orientation (yancy , ). the social body as skin, subjectivity and epistemology are central to whiteness. as such, whiteness continues to be the motor of the egregious institutional racism which continues unabated even in the face of affirmative action programmes. joaze bernardino-costa and ana elisa de carli blackman look at the theme of the struggle against racism in brazil and the adoption of affirmative action policies through the public universities of the nation because of the anti-racist actions of the ‘movimento negro’ (black rights movement). affirmative action sprang from a supreme federal court ruling in on the constitutionality of racially targeted policies in the university of brasilia and the subsequent national congress approval of quotas to be adopted by all federal universities in brazil. however, even after much public debate, campaigning and law making the article shows that much still needs to be done, such as the adoption of affirmative action in postgraduate schools and in the contracting of teachers as well as the reconfiguration of the curriculum and of the research agendas of brazilian universities. from the viewpoint of the usa, gary a. dymski looks at the institutional and specific disciplinary uptake of the diversity imperative and its successes and failures at the university of california riverside (ucr) through its outreach, student support and ‘pipeline’ programmes. the strong performance of ucr in attracting and retaining students of colour in led to its being ranked first in a poll of us universities meeting the “obama criteria” of access/diversity/affordability/success. however, dymski shows that much more still needs to be done into the future at both discipline and institutional levels as well as within political economy if students of colour are to succeed in entering the professions. the necessity for affirmative action policies illustrates that whiteliness is the bedrock of organizational culture and is embedded within institutional structures and processes as well as knowledge production and canonization which in combination enable racism ‘to melt into thin air’ (gordon ). whiteness works through a governmental (foucault ) process of subjectification motivated by self-interest, personal benefit and entitlement to undisputed privilege which charles mills ( , ) makes clear in the racial contract both globally and within particular nations, then, white people, europeans and their descendants, continue to benefit from the racial contract, which creates a world in their cultural image, political states differentially favouring their interests, an economy structured around the racial exploitation of others, and a moral psychology (not just in whites sometimes in nonwhites also) skewed consciously and unconsciously toward privileging them, taking the status quo of differential racial entitlement as normatively legitimate, and not to be investigated further. whiteliness is at the centre of our putatively ‘post-race’ world and indeed has mythologized ‘post-race’ as a new form of ‘racialized governmentality’ which rules black, minority ethnic and white psyches, social spaces and institutions alike. this is a racialized governmentality in which those racialized as non-white can be accused of racism against those racialized as white in a sleight of hand and perversion of knowledge and history which refuses white power and privilege as foundational to a description of racism. this is illustrated in diane watt’s pedagogical focus on those ‘difficult conversations’ on racism aimed at enabling students to develop a critical understanding of the significance of anti-oppressive thought and practices. she found that when reflecting on anti-oppressive practices was made a core part of the curriculum this faced resistance from some white students who sought to undermine classroom debates about these issues effectively silencing those white students who wish to actively engage with anti-racist theory and practices. british black and south asian students also felt marginalised by this resistance having to defend their experiences, or sometimes strategically avoiding the debates for fear of adversely affecting their relationships with some white students. watt’s paper powerfully illustrates the potentially contradictory outcomes of attempts at anti-racist practice within university teaching environments. of course, this racialized governmentality is very little different from the evasive racism which ruth frankenberg’s ( ) white women race matters: the social construction of whiteness described in the th century. ‘anyone can be racist’ underlies racialized governmentality and must be critiqued as well as opposed as a mind-set or perspective on the world if we are to change universities into workplaces which are not zones of toxic shock for faculty as well as into places of study in which students do not feel alienated. what is interesting is that the pervasive power of whiteliness continues to be denied and indeed is balked at, remaining unsayable within universities. this regime of unsayability allied with the deniability of white power and privilege is why anti-racism has not worked. we cannot ameliorate something which we think does not exist because it is unsayable and deniable. further, if we do notice and say ‘this is racism’ our acknowledgment is always tied to an individual failure or pathology on the part of both bme students and faculty and their white anti-racist allies. this culture of blame making means that we continually refuse institutional accountability for failure to address racism. moreover, and much more insidiously, since the problem is constructed as that of those racialized as not-white and their allies racialized as white who continue to say that whiteliness is the root of the problem of continuing racial inequalities in universities, this claim falls on deaf ears. such falling on deaf ears brings to mind gayatri spivak’s ( ) subaltern who could never be brought into the scene of representation as recognizable political subject. beyond the body racialized as black or minority ethnic, subalternity also continues to be the circumscribed space of antiracist thought, practice and knowledge systems within uk universities. anti-racism has not worked as we can see in the continuing struggles for racial equality represented in the papers in this volume in societies in which ‘race’ continues to matter even though we might wish it were otherwise. mark christian’s contribution highlights this persistence and its impacts at the level of the individual. his article speaks to black british male experience in us colleges and universities. it is an autoethnographic study in terms of relating, witnessing, and noting both learning and teaching experiences. the paper highlights the need for greater access and opportunity for black scholars to teach and study without stress and strain on their minds and bodies especially for those facing the daily reality of teaching and researching within the context of africana or black studies in higher education. christian notes that academia should be a place where liberal arts of all genres and their teachers are accepted and respected but there is still a long way to go before we can attest to the affirmative of this point of view. although saying anti-racism has failed fills us with feelings of political despondency, especially in the current uk context of brexit, failure must be acknowledged in order to build possible futures from the materials at hand in each country represented in this volume. the local is important to bear in mind because there cannot be a one size fits all approach to change even though we can say that we can learn from successes, failures and hopeful shoots of change in each context. what we are talking about here we must remember is a very specific understanding of racism which has very specific black atlantic foci and approaches to its amelioration as we see from mills ( ) above. what can we say though about anti-racism’s failure within neo-liberal institutions and neo-liberal racialization? anti-racism’s failure within universities what institutionalized anti-racist policy and practice within institutions has done is to seek institutional transformation through changing structures and processes which militate against equality of access, process and outcome because of the impact of whiteliness. this has basically been a liberal inclusive approach based on a commitment to diversity which has not taken on board the pervasiveness of the racial contract. the contract’s pervasiveness is assured by the intensity of the affective attachment to privilege of those who benefit from it. it is further embedded within the psychic life of institutions and those who occupy and build them so that they can continue to occupy a world of instutitionalized racial inequality while chanting the ‘post-race’ mantra. in fact, to speak of being ‘post-race’ denies racism’s contemporary existence (goldberg ) and relegates it to a best forgotten past. it is interesting how one can say that racism does not matter while watching the events unfold which led to the ‘black lives matter’ campaign in the us, or the shooting of mark duggan and its aftermath in the uk, or the continuing under-representation of indigenous people in universities in brazil and canada, or the ‘rhodes must fall’ campaign in south africa. how can this will to silence continuing racism through asserting ‘post-race’ status in uk universities be explained? by way of explication, let us turn again to the racial contract and the process of becoming white. this latter ‘has nothing to do with a so-called genetic racial substratum, but everything to do with what happens at the level of social constitutionality, how the human being comes to be the white self that is both constituted by and constitutes white racism’ (yancy , ). the process of becoming white is linked to the contract which itself is based on keeping european and european descent white superiority in place for its signatories at the levels of political economy, culture, psyche and epistemology. this ensures the continuation of racial exploitation and a normative position in which white privilege need not be questioned. racism is silenced through what mills ( , ) calls ‘epistemologies of ignorance’. however, ‘ignorance’ does not mean ‘unknowing’ as we would expect from its etymology. rather, what we have instead are ‘white misunderstanding, misrepresentation, evasion and self- deception on matters related to race’ (mills , ). in the st century what mills’ white ‘mis’ means is not that we live with white understandings, representations, evasions and deceptions which are abnormal, bad, wrong or divergent, all of which would be the normal understandings of ‘mis’. rather, what walks amongst us and stalks the halls of academic life is a knowing ignorance of whiteness and its racist impacts so that whiteness remains innocent of racism and un-problematically claims that space because of its ‘unknowledges’. whiteliness and white supremacy do not need to be defended against the charge of racism because of ‘unknowledges’. ‘sometimes these “unknowledges” are consciously generated, while at other times they are unconsciously generated and supported (…) [but] they work to support white privilege and supremacy’ (sullivan and tuana , ). ‘unknowledges’ are linked to pervasive institutional racism through helping to maintain racism’s deniability. these deniability regimes are crucial to the continuation of whiteness in universities through its racial affective economies and cultures of disattendability (tate ), curricula and interpersonal relationalities which lead to promotion or lack of it, student/staff experiences of racial privilege/ disprivilege and denial of access to the institution in the first place (gutíerrez rodríguez ; ). this is the weight of whiteliness which anti-racism has not managed to erase or even ameliorate even with all of the equality and diversity paperwork which exists in the different contexts examined in the papers here. this is its failure. it is not a failure produced by anti-racists but is one that was a direct result of its institutionalization and colonization as ‘equality and diversity’ after it had been stripped of its potential for critique and action. after all, it is impossible to allow unfettered institutional access to something which has such a fundamental critique of that from which you benefit and that which ultimately is not in your interest to change. we continue to struggle to name racism and to act against it within the university sector because of ‘equality and diversity’ as the preferred approach to racial inequity and institutional transformation. recognizing the basis of institutional inertia around racism or the erasure of past anti-racist changes leads us to now think about how to re-engage with the continuing necessity for anti- racist action in ‘post-race’ times. the question for the conference was ‘building the anti- racist university: what next?’ as it is for all of those who strive for racial intersectional equality. that ‘next’ is an important, indeed a vital shift, which will takes us into thinking about how we can take forward the student campaign’s call to decolonize the institution as our future option in the face of anti-racism’s failure to make lasting and fundamental anti- racist changes to uk heis. decolonizing the university in ‘post-race’ times what is it that we mean when we use this buzzword, what is it to decolonize this whiteliness and white supremacy to which even those living with and through racial dis-privilege can ascribe because of the pervasiveness of the racial contract? let us begin from looking at what Édouard glissant ( ) tells us about epistemological, societal and self- liberation within his take on creolization as a rhizomatic movement which disrupts identitarian politics as it produces new subjectivities, a new ‘common’ ( hardt and negri ) which recognizes white supremacy and racism as we break away from knowing unknowledges. glissant locates the caribbean archipelago as a zone of diversity which separates it from continental thought based on the one of universalism. his work makes us see the ‘poetics of relation’ within the decolonial moment as a break from the ‘one of the west’ (glissant). the ‘one of the west’ here is whiteliness whether read as psyche, institution, process, structure, affect or political economy, for example. let us begin to think the university as a contact zone, a zone of creolization which still continues to imagine itself as the place of imperial whiteness. glissantian creolization is an ongoing relational process which inscribes the principle of non-hierarchical unity with a relation of equality with and respect for the other as different from oneself within a natural openness to other cultures. the principle of equality and respect for the other as different not inferior is crucial to the decolonial moment as it is through this that we can begin to prise open what bob marley ( ) calls ‘mental slavery’, what fanon ( ) would term the ‘colonial psyche’ and what mills ( ) has called ‘a moral psychology’. this lays out the necessity for psychic and epistemological decolonization which both looks at whites’ and at racialized others’ complicity in keeping the status quo in place because of the benefits that they feel they gain. creolization, like decolonial thinking, does not universalize itself unlike the one of the west but ‘brings into relation’ hitherto disparate constituencies (glissant , ). relation produces new identities through erranty, a psychic mode of affirming racial identities as an antidote for and in opposition to exile which can potentially erode one’s identity (glissant , ). errantry builds a new racialized and racializing common as it includes both collective and individual in knowing that ‘the other is within us and affects how we evolve as well as the bulk of our conceptions and the development of our sensibility’ (glissant , ). this recognition of the fact of whiteliness within us as individuals and communities is essential in decolonizing racialized psyches whether those are black, indigenous, people of colour or white as we build what glissant describes above as a non-hierachical unity. a unity which for our purposes is an anti-racist common. decolonizing epistemology is an essential aspect of the work of decolonization and it is not a happy coincidence that uk students have this firmly in their sights with the campaign ‘why is my curriculum white?’ this question has been a long time coming but is a significant one especially if one thinks about the ‘post-race’ context. that is, if ‘race’ does not matter then why is there still a blinding whiteness in terms of what counts as knowledge, in terms of what has become the canon, what gets taken up and what remains erased? what we now need is a necessary re-reading of ‘post-race’ which sees it as pointing only to the construction of a present and future time and space in which whiteness as ‘race’ power and privilege is erased, in which the anti-black/people of colour/indigenous racism it generates ceases to exist. for the first time in uk history and that of europe, there is a black studies degree in a university- birmingham city university. this did not emerge at ucl-home of the galton collection and galton lecture theatre in memory of the man who first coined the term ‘eugenics’ in - even though its promise began there. this development is quite momentous and must be applauded as a response to the issue of the white curriculum. this does not take away from all the work which has been engaged in for years by colleagues at other uk institutions but begs the question of why the russell group as a whole did not make a similar response. similarly, it is important to ponder why this innovation came from a new university in a multi-racial city like birmingham with its rich black intellectual and activist history, including being the home of the now defunct centre for contemporary cultural studies at the university of birmingham. this makes us note the affects attached to white epistemology across the university sector where even now very few courses which look in a sustained and in-depth way at racism and black studies exist and those that do are currently being dismantled. these whitely affective attachments create a connection between the white body irrespective of gender, class, sexuality, age and location and the white epistemological tradition constructed as superior, whatever the discipline. both bodies and epistemology attain value because of this connection so, of course, it is clear that a black studies programme already sets into train a destabilization of these certainties. this inherent critique of the value of whiteness as body and knowledge is perhaps what led to the demise of many black studies programmes in the ‘post-race’ us and what has led to the demise/diminution of those few courses that there were in the uk. what has changed in the higher education sector to now enable the emergence of a black studies programme at undergraduate level in the uk? perhaps it is that very same neo- liberal racialization and commodification of knowledge to be sold to niche international and national markets which has enabled this development. perhaps everything is related to political economy in the end as the profit imperative in marketized uk universities necessitates the development of an international/national market in students willing to pay for a ‘british education’. ironically, marketization might be the motor which drives the development of curricula which attempt to be non-eurocentric as it ‘brings into relation’ previously disconnected constituencies. it continues to be necessary to draw together the issues emerging from the debates throughout the articles in this special issue on curriculum, pedagogy, access, policy, process, experience, outcomes, subjectivities, racialization and racism in heis in brazil, south africa, canada, the usa and the uk to craft an agenda for building the anti-racist university into the ‘post- race’ st century in contexts where white privilege and power remain. these must be ‘the next steps’ but ones which are continuously reiterated and re- inscribed as racism morphs because white privilege will continue to be maintained in the face of future decolonial assault. references ahmed, sara. on being included: racism and diversity in institutional life. durham: duke university press bagguley, paul and yasmin hussain. the role of higher education in providing opportunities for south asian women. bristol: the policy press. bonilla-silva, eduardo. . racism without racists: color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in america th edition. plymouth: rowman and littlefield coard, bernard. . how the west indian child is made educationally sub-normal in the british education system connor, helen, claire tyler, tariq modood and jim hillage. . ‘why the difference? a closer look at higher education minority ethnic students and graduates’. research report no. . institute for employment studies. fanon, frantz. . black skins white masks. london: pluto press foucault, michel. . power knowledge: selected interviews and other writings - , edited by c. gordon. brighton: the harvester press frankenberg, ruth. . white women, race matters: the social construction of whiteness. minneapolis: university of minnesota press glissant, Édouard. . the poetics of relation, trans. betsy wing. ann arbour: university of michigan press goldberg, david theo. . are we all post-racial yet? cambridge: polity gordon, lewis ricardo. . her majesty’s other children: sketches of racism from a neo-colonial age. lanham: rowman and littlefield gutiérrez rodríguez, encarnación. . ‘sensing dispossession: women and gender studies between institutional racism and migration control policies in the neo-liberal university’. women’s studies international forum, july, : - gutiérrez rodríguez, encarnación. . ‘decolonizing post-colonial rhetoric’, decolonizing european sociology, edited by gutiérrez rodríguez, encarnación. manuela boatca and sergio costa, - . abingdon: ashgate hardt, michael and negri, antonio. . commonwealth. cambridge: harvard university press mcmanus, i c et al. . ‘factors affecting likelihood of applicants being offered a place in medical schools in the united kingdom in and : a retrospective study’. british medical journal : - marley, bob. . ‘redemption song’. uprising album modood, tariq and m. shiner. . ‘ethnic minorities and higher education – why are there different rates of entry?’ london: psi spivak, gayatri. . ‘can the subaltern speak?’ colonial discourse and post-colonial theory: a reader, edited by p. williams and l. chapman, - . simon and schuster international group, hemel hempstead stone, maureen. the education of the black child in britain: the myth of multi-racial education. london: fontana sullivan, shannon and nancy tuana. . ‘introduction’. race and epistemologies of ignorance, edited by sullivan, shannon and n. tuana, - . albany: state university of new york press tate, shirley anne. . ‘racial affective economies, disalienation and “race made ordinary”’ ethnic and racial studies, , : - yancy, george. . look a white! philosophical essays on whiteness. philadelphia: temple university press yancy, george. . black bodies, white gazes: the continuing significance of race. lanham: rowman and littlefield wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty 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medicine vol. xx, no. x • xxxx editorial t he year has been marked by his- toric protests across the united states and the globe sparked by the deaths of george floyd, ahmaud arbery, breonna tay- lor, and so many other black people. the pro- tests heightened awareness of racism as a public health crisis and triggered an antira- cism movement. racism is a pervasive and sys- temic issue that has profound adverse effects on health. , racism is associated with poorer mental and physical health outcomes and neg- ative patient experiences in the health care system. , as evidenced by the current coro- navirus pandemic, race is a sociopolitical con- struct that continues to disadvantage black, latinx, indigenous and other people of col- or. , , , the association between racism and adverse health outcomes has been discussed for decades in the medical literature, including the family medicine literature. today there is a renewed call to action for family medicine, a specialty that emerged as a counterculture to reform mainstream medicine, to both con- front systemic racism and eliminate health dis- parities. this effort will require collaboration, commitment, education, and transformative conversations around racism, health inequity, and advocacy so that we can better serve our patients and our communities. the editors of several north american fami- ly medicine publications have come together to address this call to action and share resources on racism across our readerships. we acknowl- edge those members of the family medicine scholar community who have been fighting for equity consistent with the black lives mat- ter movement by writing about racism, health inequities, and personal experiences of prac- ticing as black family physicians. while we recognize that much more work is needed, we want to amplify these voices. we have com- piled a bibliography of scholarship generat- ed by the family medicine community on the topic of racism in medicine. the collection can be accessed here: https://www.annfammed.org/ content/shared-bibliography-systemic-racism- and-health-disparities while this list is likely not complete, it does include over published manuscripts and demonstrates expertise as well as a commit- ment to addressing these complex issues. for example, in , dr j. nwando olayiwola, chair of the department of family medicine at ohio state university, wrote an essay on her experiences taking care of patients as a black family physician. in january of , fam- ily medicine published an entire issue devoted systemic racism and health disparities: a statement from editors of family medicine journals sumi m. sexton, md; caroline r. richardson, md; sarina b. schrager, md, ms; marjorie a. bowman, md; john hickner, md, msc; christopher p. morley, phd, ma; timothy f. mott, md; nicholas pimlott, md, phd; john w. saultz, md; barry d. weiss, md (fam med. xx; x(x):pp-pp.) doi: . /fammed. . published online first october , from american family physician (dr sexton); annals of family medicine (dr richardson); fpm (dr schrager); journal of the american board of family medicine (dr bowman); the journal of family practice (dr hickner); primer (dr morley); fpin/evidence based practice (dr mott); canadian family physician (dr pimlott); family medicine (dr saultz); and fp essentials (dr weiss). xxxx • vol. xx, no. x family medicine editorial to racism in education and training. dr ed- uardo medina, a family physician and pub- lic health scholar, coauthored a call to action in for health professionals to dismantle structural racism and support black lives to achieve health equity. his recent article builds on that theme and describes the dis- proportionate deaths of black people due to racial injustice and the covid- pandemic as converging public health emergencies. , in the wake of these emergencies a fundamental transformation is warranted, and family phy- sicians can play a key role. we, the editors of family medicine journals, commit to actively examine the effects of rac- ism on society and health and to take action to eliminate structural racism in our editorial processes. as an intellectual home for our pro- fession, we have a unique responsibility and opportunity to educate and continue the con- versation about institutional racism, health in- equities, and antiracism in medicine. we will take immediate steps to enact tangible advanc- es on these fronts. we will encourage and men- tor authors from groups underrepresented in medicine. we will ensure that content includes an emphasis on cultural humility, diversity and inclusion, implicit bias, and the impact of racism on medicine and health. we will recruit editors and editorial board members from groups underrepresented in medicine. we will encourage collaboration and accountabil- ity within our specialty to confront systemic racism through content and processes in all of our individual publications. we recognize that these are small steps in an ongoing pro- cess of active antiracism, but we believe these steps are crucial. as editors in family medicine, we are committed to progress toward equity and justice. acknowledgments: the authors thank renee crichlow, md, byron jasper, md, mph, and victoria murrain, do for their insightful comments on this editorial. references . institute of medicine (us) committee on understanding and eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in health care, smedley bd, stith ay, nelson ar, eds. unequal treatment: confronting racial and ethnic disparities in health care. washington, dc: national academies press; . . bailey zd, krieger n, agénor m, graves j, linos n, bassett mt. structural racism and health inequities in the usa: evidence and interventions. lancet. ; ( ): - . . ben j, cormack d, harris r, paradies y. racism and health service utilisation: a systematic review and meta-analysis. plos one. ; ( ):e . . paradies y, ben j, denson n, et al. racism as a determinant of health: a systematic review and meta-analysis. plos one. ; ( ):e . . american academy of family physicians. institutional rac- ism in the health care system. published . accessed sept. , . https://www.aafp.org/about/policies/all/insti- tutional-racism.html . yaya s, yeboah h, charles ch, otu a, labonte r. ethnic and racial disparities in covid- -related deaths: counting the trees, hiding the forest. bmj glob health. ; ( ):e . . egede le, walker rj. structural racism, social risk factors, and covid- - a dangerous convergence for black americans. [published online ahead of print, jul ]. n engl j med. ; ( ):e . . centers for disease control and prevention. health equity considerations and racial and ethnic minority groups. up- dated july , . accessed sept. , . https://www. cdc.gov/coronavirus/ -ncov/community/health-equity/ race-ethnicity.html . stephens gg. family medicine as counterculture. fam med. ; ( ): - . . olayiwola jn. racism in medicine: shifting the power. ann fam med. ; ( ): - . . . saultz j, ed. racism. fam med. ; ( , theme issue): - . . hardeman rr, medina em, kozhimannil kb. structural racism and supporting black lives - the role of health profes- sionals. n engl j med. ; ( ): - . . hardeman rr, medina em, boyd rw. stolen breaths. n engl j med. ; ( ): - . simultaneously published in american family physician, annals of family medicine, canadian family physician, family medicine, fp essentials, fpin/evidence based practice, fpm, journal of the american board of family medicine, the journal of family practice, and primer. book review notices of the american mathematical society volume , number emille davie lawrence is a term associate professor of mathematics and statistics at the university of san francisco. her email address is edlawrence@usfca.edu. communicated by notices book review editor stephan ramon garcia. for permission to reprint this article, please contact: reprint-permission @ams.org. doi: https://dx.doi.org/ . /noti a variety of courses with the essays and modules written by math faculty who have experience on the topic. i was happy to see that the authors took the time in the introduction to describe exactly what is meant by “teaching mathematics for social justice”: all mathematics instruction that aims to improve human well-being. who could possibly deny the importance of improved human well-being!? this preemp- tively thwarts any social justice eye-rolling as well as sets the tone for the book. they also give the reader advice on how to use the text and extend an invitation to reach out to the contributing authors directly. the first essay is by kira hamman, and she is the only contributor who has both an essay and a module in the book. in “mathematics in service to democracy” she out- lines how she had an aha moment after seeing people’s reaction to social disparities in new orleans after hurricane katrina. she writes that she came to a personal realization that teaching mathematics must be about more than teaching students the chain rule, for example. we have a responsibility to help build an informed, civically engaged society. as a result, she developed courses on mathematics and democracy and quantitative information in the media. she spares all detail of the courses; rather, she stresses the importance of quantitative literacy in the k– system. dave kung makes a similar case for designing a math class to promote a mindful citizenry in “math for social justice: a last math class for responsible citizens.” he is guided by the question, “what mathematics do i want the person next to me in the voting booth to understand?” (motivated by an exchange in an obama-mccain political debate). my favorite essay is from victor piercey. in “quantitative ethics,” piercey describes his experiences in developing courses surrounding the moral and societal implications of how we use quantitative information. piercey writes that in his course he challenges the students to place themselves into the decision-maker role instead of the consumer role by posing should questions: should lenders reveal the implications of continually making only the minimum mathematics for social justice: resources for the college classroom by gizem karaali and lily s. khadjavi i think we can all agree that we are currently living in a time of tectonic social and political shifts. movements like #metoo and black lives matter have rightfully increased popular awareness of issues of inequity and marginal- ization. in the immortal words of bob dylan, “the times, they are a-changin’.” and for good reason. i’ve noticed some similar shifts in mathematics over the past few years. not that connecting mathematics and social justice is a new concept, as this book attests by paying homage to bob moses’s radical equations: math literacy and civil rights in its first sentence. but one can also not deny the recent swell in scholarly activity surrounding the subject, which is why mathematics for social justice: resources for the college classroom is such a timely and important tool. the cover of the book woos you, with its array of fists of different hues holding pencils in front of a backsplash of mathematical equations. the sheer brilliance of this image, which conjures resistance, unity, and mathematical rigor all at once, should not be lost on anyone. the contents of the book are divided into three parts: an introduction to the book by the authors, five essays that make the case for introducing topics of social justice into the math curricu- lum, and fourteen course modules that can be adopted into mathematics for social justice reviewed by emille davie lawrence a m s/ m a a p re ss , , s o ft co ve r, p ag es . is b n : - - - - book review april notices of the american mathematical society you will find suggestions for homework assignments, worksheets, group projects, discussion topics, paper topics, final projects, and much more throughout. the book is also full of outside resources like readings, videos, websites, and such to make it easier to expand the modules in different or deeper directions. the utility of mathematics for social justice: resources for the college classroom is undeniable. with this book, the editors and contributors have provided the mathematics community a toolkit for challenging students to use math- ematics to improve our world from many different angles. i would have liked to see a module focusing on overpolicing and criminal justice, since khadjavi herself is versed in this topic, but perhaps that will come in the second volume that karaali and khadjavi are working on, mathematics for social justice: focusing on quantitative reasoning and statistics. the current volume effectively makes the case that courses that include social justice themes should be a part of the curric- ulum in every math department in our country. i, for one, am personally energized and excited to implement these ideas at my institution. with this book as a guide, we can not only teach our students how to do math but also how to use math for the common good. credits author photo is courtesy of the author. payments on credit card debt? should effective annual interest rates be required by law to be disclosed to consum- ers? should environmental impacts to the community be considered when a company opens a store? how should the government intervene in ponzi schemes? students learn how questions like these are informed by data analysis and mathematical modeling. this ethical point of view feels to me like a fresh spin on things. even the term quantitative ethics juxtaposes two ideas that i’d never before realized were compatible. reading his essay gave me that “of course this works” feeling, like eating peanut butter and jelly for the first time. of all the essays, lisa marano’s essay is the one i didn’t realize that i needed. she outlines in great detail how she has over the years dealt with student resistance to uncom- fortable topics. since finding dy/dx is pretty noncontrover- sial, most math professors are unpracticed in dealing with issues in the classroom that stir up emotion. she gives class- room policies, assignment suggestions, and other general management strategies in preparation for “vocal, silent, and absent” resistance from students. most effective is her use of real-life anecdotes to suggest how to guide students in heated discussions. one powerful example was how she dealt with some students’ personal trauma surrounding credit card debt. she explains that as the conversation began to unfold, she scrapped her planned discussion and yielded to the needs of the students. this is a reminder that since emotions can run high when digging in to social issues, being in the moment is key. then come the modules. these are prepackaged and ready-to-go lesson plans that can be implemented in the classroom. i was really happy to see such a nice array of topics. there were definitely some usual suspects, such as modules on voting methods and electoral districting. how- ever, the majority of the topics feel cutting-edge and mod- ern, ranging from the graph theory of human trafficking to modeling the rise in acceptance of same-sex relationships. although on different themes, every module has the same structure. each starts with an abstract and is then divided into six sections: mathematical content, context/back- ground, instructor preparation, the module, additional thoughts, and an appendix. having this uniformity is quite helpful to the reader who wants to compare one module to another. however, i would have also liked to see some note on the intended duration of each module right up front, perhaps in each abstract. some modules seem more appropriate for just a handful of class meetings, while others could be implemented over the course of an entire academic term. readers are left to figure this out for them- selves. the cherry-picking reader will be happy to know that in the postscript the modules are sorted by mathematical content, such as college algebra, quantitative reasoning, and introductory statistics, and then again by social justice themes, such as finance, environmental justice, and labor. the content of each module is pedagogically thorough. emille davie lawrence history and class: a response to palmer history and class: a response to palmer mao mollona published online: september # the author(s) keywords class . history. political economy. culture . marxism . gramsci palmer’s inspiring piece considers the challenge of producing a working-class history attuned to the heterogeneous, subjective and sensuous forms of class struggle including their uncon- scious and affective dimensions. i admire the fluidity of the form of palmer’s narrative, its multidimensionality and personal involvement. the shift in canadian labour history he describes—towards identitarian, aestheticised, affective and embodied forms of class analy- sis—reflects a well-known global trajectory, party associated to the global shift in political economy and the new complexity of contemporary forms of class articulation, and partly to the neo-liberalisation of academia. i am captured by how palmer reframes this shift by focusing on the political unconscious. bhow to turn the political unconscious of researching, writing and interpreting class into amore material conscious future in the field?^ bhow to turn the unknown, affective dimension of politics into a form of class consciousness—shared by scholars and activists?^ bhow to bridge political analysis and activism?^ the issue of intersectionality looms large in palmer’s analysis and i want to focus on it. i am particularly interested in the historically entanglement between class struggle and struggles for self-representation and in the deeply emotional, subjective and often unconscious processes of identification, dis-identification and stigma attached to them. i am interested in the grey zone where eric wolf’s bpeople without history^ ( ) meet spivak’s ( ) voiceless sati women and in the possible forms taken by their coming together in solidarity. looked at from the perspective of the long durèe, (wolf ; wallerstein ) capitalism is structurally entangled with the movement of colonisation and exploitation of the colonies and of physical and moral annihilation of the primitive other. the bourgeoisie’s dream to live the aristocratic life by extracting surplus labour from inferior bothers^ and its self-perception of being bcaste-like^ (balibar ) is asserted through violence in the colonies—and neo- colonies. but bat home^ capitalist profit is reproduced through the institutions of the factory and the (semi-proletarianised) household where rents are extracted in the form of surplus labour performed by racially or sexually inferior labourers. thus, the international capitalist dialectical anthropology ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - - * mao mollona m.mollona@gold.ac.uk department of anthropology, goldsmiths university of london, new cross, london se , uk http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf mailto:m.mollona@gold.ac.uk division of labour—between the productive work performed by the bcore^ and unproductive or domestic labour performed in the bperiphery^—within the national borders materialises itself in the split between factory work and domestic labour (mies ; federici ). in this context, surplus extraction is made possible by racist and sexist ideologies that push the informal, domestic or black labourers outside history and render them voiceless. bringing together devalued domestic labourers and only partially commodified wage- workers, proletarianisation happens bdespite^ the capitalist and not because of them. thus, the strength of capitalism is to reconcile the logic of slavery and the logic of the market—social death (patterson ) and partial proletarianisation—by constructing an idea of bpersonhood^ that obscures and precludes class identification. because of the entanglement of economic exploitation and political marginalisation—as racial minorities under the colonial system or ethnic and sexual minorities under modern nation-states—proletarian struggles are as much economic as they are struggles for self-representation. this is an important method- ological and conceptual issue. the history of class struggle cannot be understood without an appreciation of how marginal constituencies struggle to represent themselves as unique people and to be agents of self-determination. this is the lesson that we learn from the bproletarian histories^ of the early rancière ( ) or more recently, of ross ( ). italian philosopher antonio gramsci describes this link between class struggle and self- representation as a tension, contradictory and multi-layered, between class and culture. on the one hand, culture is hegemonic, because it presents the interests of the dominant classes as interests of the whole of society and ossifies them around a shared bcommon sense^. but culture has also a special plastic property—an ability to outflow and expand beyond the material conditions in which it originates, connect to other social relations and encompass the point of view of bthe other^ (gramsci ). in this light, culture is counter-hegemonic, that is constitutes a political movement away from economically specific locations—a jump from structure to superstructure which allows for novel forms of relationality to emerge. in its propensity to seek connections, mend separations and feel and experience the point of view of bthe other^—bridging economic divides and cutting across classes—culture is a revolutionary weapon of the subaltern classes. indeed, class and culture are two central and antagonistic dimensions of the experience of capitalism—as of any social relation. their relationship is temporally and spatially contingent on the broader structural context. historically, industrialisation, nationalism, mass-production and state centralisation fostered the articulation of peoplehood along class lines. whereas the financialisation of the economy, the flexibilisation of production, the deregulation of labour and the dissolution of the wage-contract within the global context of uneven development, contributed to the decline of class politics and the return of identitarian, nativist and cultural forms of political identification. intended to valorise those human relations that are not contained within the rigid realm of wage-work, identity politics in fact, naturalised personhood within the rigid and timeless boundaries of bculture^ while at the same time, reproduced the logic of capital—through medicalising discourses, bio-technology or sheer racism—within the very micro-texture of the individualised body. for some reason gramsci proved more popular among post-marxist bsouthern^ scholars than among western marxists. the historiography of the bheirs of gramsci^ (guha, laclau and hall—perry anderson )—was meant to challenge the ethnocentrism of western marxism proposing a broad socialist project which both valorised and encompassed cultural differences, including different narratives of class struggle. undoubtedly this diasporic historiography (hall, laclau and guha were exiled academics to the uk) was liberating. but, the cultural m. mollona critique of capitalism anticipated and perhaps even triggered the neo-liberal shift of the s. (boltanski and chiapello ; meiksins wood ). by looking at the historical tensions between class and culture, we can make sense of the dramatic political transformations in recent years, namely the triumph of neo-liberalism and the recent populist turn. in a controversial article written on marxism today ( ) just a few months before margaret thatcher become the leader of the tory party, jamaican scholar stuart hall denounces the bmoral panic^ of the white working-class about youth revolt, union activism and black immigration. but racism was not the only value that aligned the working-class with the petty bourgeoisie. they were both deeply disaffected with the bureau- cratic and controlling statism and collectivism of the ruling labour party. thatcher would soon tap into this generalised culture of fear and discontent and discoursively frame her opposition to the labour party as a struggle of bthe people^ against the technocratic and centralist state. referring to gramsci’s notion of bpassive revolution^, hall ( ) described the new capitalism of the s as a project of bregressive modernisation^ which combined beconomical^ and bcultural^ aspects. for instance, thatcher understood that by constructing a new economic narrative she could trigger a radical political change and that monetarism, the extreme version of free market economy proposed by milton friedman (at the time relatively unknown), could be used as an ideology for radical change. already at the beginning of the s, when very few people in the uk could predict the seismic shifts caused by the big-bang in the city of london, thatcher understood that the ideology of monetarism would play a central political role—in breaking the trade unions, legitimising privatisation, attracting global finance—and built a new popular imaginary that wove together the contradictory positions and components of torysm (family, authority and patriarchalism) with those of neo-liberalism (individualism, mobility, success, anti-statism, economic deregulation and global finance). using the example of thatcher’s ideological appropriation of monetarism, hall argued that the economy is a political and cultural construct—which caused him to clash with some of his comrades within the new left review (nlr) group. after all, was not the idea that economics is just a technical matter at the heart of the right-wing ideology of thatcherism? but in his book, resistance through rituals, hall and jefferson ( ) shows that youth sub-cultures within the working-class resisted cooptation into petty bourgeois values. indeed, as in the case of the struggles of operaismo in italy in the s, young immigrants were the most resilient section of the working-class in the uk, precisely because they struggled against capitalism on two fronts: one of cultural recognition and one of economic redistribution. according to perry anderson, hall understood that modernity: bwould have to be fought out across the whole space of civil society, as well as over the state, and could not afford to lapse into postures of indifference or disdain towards areas and issues traditionally regarded as less than political: gender, race, family, sexuality, education, consumption, leisure, nature as well as work, wages, taxes, health, or communication.^ (anderson ). the issue of cultural difference looms large in the recent raise of left-wing populism in europe. in a conversation with the errejon (the leader of podemos) mouffe and errejon ( ) argues that right-wing politicians have always been better gramscians than left-wing ones, who continues to focus on class struggles. in that piece mouffe and errejon congratulate themselves for having prefigured and even enacted a new gramscian political imaginary in spain. sadly, in the course of just two years, things have radically changed. podemos lost touch with the grassroot movements and working-class constituencies that propelled it to the deregulation of the credit market in the city of london. history and class: a response to palmer power and ended up supporting the corrupted socialist party (psos) in the latest governmental reshuffle (a painful reminder of the syriza experience in greece). a racialised and morally loaded class discourse was re-appropriated by right-wing populists. but there are some reasons for hope. the most important political movements emerged in the past years—the m movement in europe, indigenous activism against multinational corporations in canada and black lives matter in the us—combine economic demands and demands for cultural recognition and self-determination and in the process, generate new mew modes of grassroot theorising and historiography. for instance, marisa perez ( ) from the fundación de los comunes in spain, describ- ing the feminist demonstration of the th of march (which brought million people in the street in spain) as a bfeminists’ strike^ proposes a new mode of address for feminism, reconnecting it to broader anti-capitalist struggles. how would a world without the reproduc- tive labour of women look like? what kind of class solidarities would such form of address allow across sexes and genders? what consequences would have the de-commodification of domestic labour for labour struggles in general? philosopher chantal mouffe (mouffe and errejon ) argues that passion is a central dimension of contemporary politics. but, as i have showed, passion is not antithetic to the capitalist logic of interest (hirschman ) because capitalism entitlements to profits are constructed along lines of race, sexuality, ethnicity and nationality that cut deep into our sense of humanity, undermine self-respect and preclude the empathic movement of culture that lead to class consciousness. the gap between a growing underpaid, precarious and informalised working-class and an increasingly caste-like capitalist class has been widening for some time. according to sociol- ogist streeck, capitalism is heading towards its own dissolution because is unable to sustain the polanyian compass between profit and social redistribution ( ). indeed, capitalist privilege today is so exclusive that neither cultural hegemony nor social redistribution can obscure or legitimise it. instead, such regime is enforced through generalised state violence and overt racism and sexism. in such context where economic dispossession goes with the extreme devaluation of human lives, the experiences, both historical and present, of brutal marginalisation of people of colour, billegal^ migrants and women, are (even more) symptomatic of the broader human condition. an historiography attuned to the layered fault-lines of race, gender and ethnicity along which capitalism operates and constructs its narratives and to the intimate affects and raw passions that fuel capitalist interest can contribute to bthe realisation of class as an active, conscious agent of struggle^ as palmer advocates, and to a new solidarity between the immanent agents of working-class history and those who continue to struggle to find a voice and presence in it. open access this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and repro- duction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons license, and indicate if changes were made. references anderson, p. . the heirs of gramsci in new left review. . balibar, e. . class racism. in race, nation, class. ambiguous identities, ed. e. balibar and i. wallerstein. london: verso. boltanski, l., and e. chiapello. . the new spirit of capitalism. london: verso. m. mollona federici, s. . revolution at point zero. housework, reproduction and feminist struggle. ap press. gramsci, a. . in selections from the prison notebooks, ed. q. hoare and g. nowell-smith. london: lawrence and wishart. hall, s. . thatcherism a new stage? in marxism today. hall, stuart, and tony jefferson, eds. . resistance through rituals: youth sub-cultures in post-war britain. london. hirschman, a. . the passion and the interest. political arguments for capitalism before its triumph. princeton university press. meiksins wood, e. . the retreat from class. a bnew^ true socialism. london: verso. mies, m. . the lacemakers of narsapur, indian housewives produce for the world market. london: zed books. mouffe, c., and i. errejon. . podemos, in the name of the people. london: lawrence and wishart. patterson, o. . slavery and social death. cambridge: harvard university press. perez, m. . spain’s feminist strike. in new left review, vol. , – . rancière, j. . proletarian nights. the workers’ dreams in nineteenth-century france. london: verso. ross, k. . communal luxury. the political imaginary of the paris commune. london: verso. spivak, g. . can he subaltern speak? in marxism and the interpretation of culture, ed. c. nelson and l. grossberg, – . basingstoke: macmillan education. streeck, w. . how will capitalism end? london: verso. wallerstein, i. . historical capitalism. london: verso. wolf, e. . europe and the people without history. berkeley: university of california press. history and class: a response to palmer 	history and class: a response to palmer 	references s jrv .. forum: new perspectives innovation in a crisis: rethinking conferences and scholarship in a pandemic and climate emergency sam robinson, megan baumhammer, lea beiermann, daniel belteki, amy c. chambers, kelcey gibbons, edward guimont, kathryn heffner, emma-louise hill, jemma houghton, daniella mccahey, sarah qidwai, charlotte sleigh, nicola sugden and james sumner* it is a cliché of self-help advice that there are no problems, only opportunities. the rationale and actions of the bshs in creating its global digital history of science * sam robinson, department of history and philosophy of science, university of cambridge, uk. email: samrobinsonphd@gmail.com. megan baumhammer, department of history, princeton university, princeton, nj, usa. lea beiermann, department of history, faculty of arts and social sciences, maastricht university, po box , md maastricht, the netherlands. dániel bélteki, royal museums greenwich, greenwich, uk. amy c. chambers, department of english, manchester metropolitan university, manchester, uk. kelcey gibbons, hasts, massachusetts institute of technology, ma, usa. edward guimont, department of history, university of connecticut, ct, usa. kathryn heffner, department of history, university of kent, canterbury, uk. emma-louise hill, department of history, university of kent, canterbury, uk. jemma houghton, centre for the history of science, technology and medicine, university of manchester, manchester, uk. daniella mccahey, department of history, texas tech university, lubbock, tx, usa. sarah qidwai, institute for the history and philosophy of science and technology, university of toronto, toronto, canada. charlotte sleigh, department of science and technology studies, university college london, london, uk. nicola sugden, centre for the history of science, technology and medicine, university of manchester, manchester, uk. james sumner, centre for the history of science, technology and medicine, university of manchester, manchester, uk. the authors would like to thank dr tim boon for being so trusting and a great towering strength of support and lucy santos for aiding expertly and ably with the administration of the festival. we would also like to thank to all the festival participants for making it the success that it undoubtedly was. bjhs ( ): – , december . © the author(s), . published by cambridge university press on behalf of british society for the history of science. this is an open access article, distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. doi: . /s first published online november https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at mailto:samrobinsonphd@gmail.com http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog?doi= . /s &domain=pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core festival may be a rare genuine confirmation of this mantra. the global covid- pandemic of meant that the society’s usual annual conference – like everyone else’s – had to be cancelled. once the society decided to go digital, we had a hundred days to organize and deliver our first online festival. in the hope that this will help, inspire and warn colleagues around the world who are also trying to move online, we here detail the considerations, conversations and thinking behind the organizing team’s decisions. despite its rapid gestation, the festival emerged as one of the society’s largest-ever events. in total, we hosted over , participants from fifty-nine countries, who took part in fifty- four different sessions across five days. the programme blended formal academic meetings with social activities and provided opportunities to informally socialize at a distance with colleagues from around the world. this unprecedented globality aided us in our central pro- gramming aim, which was to foster british history of science’s developing inclusion of post- colonial, indigenous and other marginalized knowledge communities. we planned from the outset for the festival to be ‘born digital’, built from the ground up in response to the oppor- tunities and challenges of the online environment. after all, you wouldn’t try to re-create a digital environment in the ‘real’ world, so why would you try and replicate a physical con- ference online? this principle became our guiding ethos. this article is divided into three sections. first, we outline the philosophical, political and cultural considerations that led the bshs to begin thinking about sustainable con- ferencing well before covid- forced our hand. second, we explain how the online festival worked at the practical level and the reasons for our decisions. what we provide here is not a step-by-step technical guide to our chosen software or communica- tion platforms – the current urgent pace of development will probably render most of the specifics obsolete before long – but a set of principles and considerations which we found important and think will be applicable for other organizations. in the final section, we consider the lessons learned, note what we would like to have done differently, and reflect on the opportunities we see for the future. we should probably start at the beginning. to do so, we must go back to a time before the covid- outbreak, and revisit some of the conversations that have been taking place both formally and informally in recent years regarding the global purpose and future role of our society, as we reflect on the many facets of the political, intellectual and environmental impacts of our activities as a learned society. opportunity: the new normal? following the ipcc’s call for the world to reach net-zero emissions by , the bshs has been exploring strategies for ensuring its activities meet this target. conferencing is intensely carbon-hungry. a short-haul flight emits on average around kg carbon dioxide equivalent (co e), while an intercontinental visit can emit in february the society organized an online twitter conference. more information about this event can be found at www.bshs.org.uk/bshs-twitter-conference. the ipcc’s report can be found at www.ipcc.ch. sam robinson et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.bshs.org.uk/bshs-twitter-conference https://www.ipcc.ch https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core , kg co e for a single researcher. for those who have travelled by more sustain- able means, the highest impact of a conference is typically accommodation and its asso- ciated activities – a high turnover of bed linen and so forth. it and other electrical activities are also problematic. in the long term, one can hope that conference venues will turn to passive methods of heating and cooling and use renewable power for these requirements, but at present their impact on the climate emergency remains high. the climate emergency is, of course, also closely related to the current pandemic (at time of writing, it is september ). years before the current outbreak, health researchers were drawing attention to the likely role of human-made ecological and climate change in the increasingly frequent appearance of unfamiliar viral diseases. in figure . artwork by alona bach (@bachwards). short-haul based on flight from london to rome, long-haul london to new york city; see www. theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/ /jul/ /carbon-calculator-how-taking-one-flight-emits-as- much-as-many-people-do-in-a-year. for a more detailed consideration see sarvenaz sarabipour, benjamin schwessinger, fiona n. mumoki, aneth d. mwakilili, aziz khan, humberto j. debat, pablo j. sáez, samantha seah and tomislav mestrovic, ‘evaluating features of scientific conferences: a call for improvements’, biorxiv, doi: https://doi.org/ . / . . . . see also http://flyinglessresourceguide.info. julien arsenault, julie talbot, lama boustani, rodolphe gonzalès and kevin manaugh, ‘the environmental footprint of academic and student mobility in a large research-oriented university’, environmental research letters ( ) , at https://doi.org/ . / - /ab e . jonathan sleeman and hon ip, ‘global trends in emerging viral diseases of wildlife origin’, in institute of medicine, emerging viral diseases: the one health connection: workshop summary, washington, dc: the national academies press, , at https://doi.org/ . / . forum: new perspectives https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/ /jul/ /carbon-calculator-how-taking-one-flight-emits-as-much-as-many-people-do-in-a-year http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/ /jul/ /carbon-calculator-how-taking-one-flight-emits-as-much-as-many-people-do-in-a-year http://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/ /jul/ /carbon-calculator-how-taking-one-flight-emits-as-much-as-many-people-do-in-a-year https://doi.org/ . / . . . https://doi.org/ . / . . . http://flyinglessresourceguide.info http://flyinglessresourceguide.info https://doi.org/ . / - /ab e https://doi.org/ . / - /ab e https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core this sense, covid- was not a coincidental circumstance that enabled the bshs and others to focus on possible responses to the climate emergency – it is itself a product of the climate emergency. but it is the pandemic that has provided the necessary impetus for many organizations, as well as the bshs, to think about online activity as an alternative to carbon-intensive forms of travel and interaction. anecdotal evidence suggests that academics are conflicted about this change of practice. most accept that carbon emissions from travel need to be cut, but many colleagues object that ‘it just isn’t the same’ if they cannot meet colleagues in person. this may very well be true, but it does not represent a reasoned argument against a shift to online networking. after all, even in person, we can no longer greet old friends with a hug, or shake hands with a new acquaintance – but this is a change we have collectively agreed to make in response to new circumstances. the climate emergency provides an even more serious and longer-lasting context and set of reasons to agree to behavioural change. until a later generation can figure out zero-carbon travel, we are now at the very beginning of figuring out how to research and conference without flying. it is also worth noting another apparent coincidence in the context of the climate emer- gency, the pandemic and the digital shift. the climate emergency has been produced by global inequalities in resources, and continues (with some countercurrents) to exacerbate those inequalities. access to academia and its resources, both tangible and intangible, and in particular to conferences and archives, continues to be very difficult for scholars and would-be scholars in the global south. as states in the global north become more concerned about protecting their resources, visa restrictions tend to become more restrictive, even for those scholars from the south who can afford to travel. there is a growing danger that our conferences will even become occasions of privilege as immigra- tion barriers become more impermeable. however, a digital meeting can go some way to overcoming these physical, economic and political barriers to participation. facilitating this became a major aim of the festi- val. of course, the digital approach is not a panacea. as the historians of technology in our community will appreciate, access to hardware and the internet is not universal but constrained by cost, geography and political control; and, as morgan ames argued in the charisma machine, information technology does not in and of itself produce partici- pation in learning. but at the very least, making the festival financially completely free to access was a very deliberate policy regarding participation. for us, the fact that any scholar – or, indeed, member of the public – was free to attend and participate in the fes- tival was almost as important as its digital nature. besides enjoying the company of scholars from the global south, the bshs – especially as a british scholarly society – wanted to create a space in which to listen to, and hear, the intellectual perspectives of post-colonial and indigenous participants. these perspectives are crucial to the continued growth of our historical understanding of science as a cross- cultural set of practices. they are essential in demonstrating how the history of science morgan g. ames, the charisma machine: the life, death, and legacy of one laptop per child, cambridge, ma: mit press, . sam robinson et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core can help communities think differently about future possibilities. a world that mitigates and adapts to the climate emergency will need scholarship that rethinks both science and politics in a multivocal and consensual manner. as we sought to facilitate this, news of the police killing of george floyd in the united states broke. the global response to this, in the form of protests led by the black lives matter movement, was another manifestation of these bigger issues, and of the need to challenge the taken-for-granted assumptions of society in the uk. we were very con- scious, as we prepared for the event, of the many ‘heroes’ and contentious issues within the history of science that need to be academically and publicly recontextualized. to a degree, white and western scholars in the history of science are already well equipped to critique lazy narratives of heroism, though recent critiques suggest that this work needs to go further (and certainly can be further advanced in the public arena). at the same time, the baby must not be thrown out with the bathwater. consensual science needs to be defined – using the historical methods of seeing how it can be otherwise – and defended as a tool in such pressing areas of concern as climate and epidemiology. with these political issues in mind, the question of intellectual leadership came to the fore as another aspect of festival planning. it was important to the bshs council that early-career scholars be given the freedom to define the agenda of the festival. though not always younger in demographic terms, early-career researchers (ecrs) are typically more attuned to the political and ecological priorities of the coming generation. but we also need to note that the bshs decision to facilitate leadership from ecrs was a creation of virtue from necessity: the volunteers who developed the festival were, with only a couple of exceptions, postgraduate students or working in junior, precarious aca- demic roles. this is a telling state of affairs. the motivation of ecrs to volunteer is prob- ably a mixture of enthusiasm and idealism, but is also somewhat born of desperation – a linda tuhiwai smith, decolonizing methodologies: research and indigenous peoples, dunedin: university of otago press, ; prakash kumar, projit mukharji and amit prasad, ‘decolonizing science in asia’, verge: studies in global asias ( ) ( ), pp. – ; sadiah qureshi, peoples on parade: exhibitions, empire, and anthropology in nineteenth-century britain, chicago: the university of chicago press, ; kapil raj, relocating modern science: circulation and the construction of knowledge in south asia and europe, – , houndmills: palgrave macmillan, . this problem has been long identified but change has been slow. see simon schaffer, ‘scientific discoveries and the end of natural philosophy’, social studies of science ( ) , pp. – ; david wade chambers and richard gillespie, ‘locality in the history of science: colonial science, technoscience, and indigenous knowledge’, osiris ( ) ( ), pp. – ; sujit sivasundaram, ‘sciences and the global: on methods, questions, and theory’, isis ( ) , pp. – ; suman seth, ‘colonial history and postcolonial science studies’, radical history review ( ) , pp. – ; andrew s. curran, the anatomy of blackness: science and slavery in an age of enlightenment, baltimore: johns hopkins university press, . see ludmilla jordanova, ‘on heroism’, science museum group journal (spring ), at http://dx.doi. org/ . / ; rebekah higgitt, ‘challenging tropes: genius, heroic invention, and the longitude problem in the museum’, isis ( ), at https://doi.org/ . / ; anna maerker, ‘hagiography and biography: narratives of great men of science’, in anna maerker, simon sleight and adam sutcliffe, history, memory and public life: the past in the present, london: routledge, , pp. – . naomi oreskes, why trust science?, princeton, nj: princeton university press, ; andrew pickering, the mangle of practice: time, agency, and science, chicago: the university of chicago press, ; thomas s. kuhn, the structure of scientific revolutions, chicago: the university of chicago press, . forum: new perspectives https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core desire to earn cv points that may (or may not) ultimately pay off in the search for secure academic work. established scholars are (mostly) ensconced in employment situations that post-docs, bouncing from short contract to short contract, can only dream of inha- biting. the traditional conference exists to support a particular model of academic employment and career advancement, and as such shapes both the content and the form of research that is valued and rewarded. it is an odd and arguably unsustainable state of affairs that established scholars should have their modes of research maintained for them, in conference form, by junior colleagues who are mostly unlikely to attain similar modes themselves. the context for academic work in the coming generation is different, and historians of science, above all, appreciate that context determines the content of research. it did not escape the notice of many of us how strong the reflexive link is between what we study and our own professional lives and practice. the history of science is about how knowledge is produced – the affordances, practices and systems that make it possible. the same issues bracket our labour as academics – indeed, much of the science that we research was produced within a university context itself. new con- texts (climate, pandemic, black lives matter, academic precarity) should become new priorities. within the context of a ruthless academic world, itself critically weakened by neo- liberal economic and political forces, it was important to bshs that our labour practices should reflect the best possible ways of working. the festival organizers hoped to create a positive and collegial working model that resisted the sector’s demand for atomized measurable outputs, valued within a particular and short time frame. concepts such as ‘slow scholarship’ and ‘care-ful’ academic working have been gaining traction and these implicitly inspired our activities. on top of this, we were very aware of the increased levels of anxiety that exist amongst postgraduates and new scholars today, and with that their (reasonable) concerns about identity-based marginalization. we wanted to make it possible for all the organizers to feel that they could make any sophie a. jones and catherine oakley, ‘the precarious postdoc: interdisciplinary research and casualised labour in the humanities and social sciences’, working knowledge/hearing the voice, durham university, uk, at www.academia.edu/download/ /wkps_precariouspostdoc_pdf_interactive.pdf, accessed september ; ucu ( ), ‘counting the costs of casualisation in higher education: key findings of a survey conducted by the university and college union’, at www.ucu.org.uk/media/ /counting-the-costs-of-casualisation-in- higher-education-jun- /pdf/ucu_casualisation_in_he_survey_report_jun .pdf, accessed september . alison mountz, anne bonds, becky mansfield, jenna loyd, jennifer hyndman, margaret walton- roberts, ranu basu, risa whitson, roberta hawkins, trina hamilton and winifred curran, ‘for slow scholarship: a feminist politics of resistance through collective action in the neoliberal university’, acme: an international journal for critical geographies ( ) ( ), pp. – ; yves rees and ben huf, ‘training historians in urgent times’, history australia ( ) , pp. – ; yvonne hartman and sandy darab, ‘a call for slow scholarship: a case study on the intensification of academic life and its implications for pedagogy’, review of education, pedagogy, and cultural studies ( ) , pp. – . thirty-seven per cent of phd students have sought help for anxiety or depression caused by phd study; per cent of phd students feel they have been bullied and per cent believe they have witnessed bullying; per cent of phd students feel they have been discriminated against and per cent believe they have witnessed discrimination. bethan cornell, ‘phd life: the uk student experience’, hepi report number , june , higher education policy institute, at www.hepi.ac.uk/ / / /phd-life-the-uk-student-experience, accessed september . sam robinson et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.academia.edu/download/ /wkps_precariouspostdoc_pdf_interactive.pdf http://www.ucu.org.uk/media/ /counting-the-costs-of-casualisation-in-higher-education-jun- /pdf/ucu_casualisation_in_he_survey_report_jun .pdf http://www.ucu.org.uk/media/ /counting-the-costs-of-casualisation-in-higher-education-jun- /pdf/ucu_casualisation_in_he_survey_report_jun .pdf https://www.hepi.ac.uk/ / / /phd-life-the-uk-student-experience https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core criticism or suggestion and have it positively received, and to take account, as far as pos- sible, of ideological and practical concerns from organizers and participants alike. we became acutely aware of the enormous unpaid labour (time expended) that our organi- zers put into the festival. some colleagues (who were not themselves volunteering) did explicitly critique this mode of production. what’s particularly interesting, though, is that, while the financial model of the festival as we ran it did not make it possible to pay our volunteers, what would have changed if we had monetized the process? if it had been possible to pay our organizers for their time, would that have changed the will- ingness of the society to hand over the festival’s intellectual leadership (to the society’s ‘employees’), and compromised the feeling of collegial working? could it be that events such as this can form part of an alternative economy within academia, one that is not based upon the monetary concerns that have done so much damage to the univer- sity sector? the desideratum of full involvement extended to our attendees, whom we regarded as co-participants in a shared intellectual enterprise. to this end, questions surrounding accessibility were centrally important to the committee and stretched from asking potential presenters to rethink their session structures to facilitate active participation, to questions such as overall scheduling. what kinds of event should we put in which time zones? britain is conveniently placed between the americas and europe/asia, but, even so, it was not possible to put everything at a time when everybody could attend. we were aware that having keynote events in the evening, as is conventional for a conference, made them accessible to the americas but not to asia. live sessions are expected, but could we easily make them available to participants afterwards? the capacity to facilitate asynchronous attendance – something that is almost impossible in a physical conference – was an early point in favour of the digital world. could the opportunity to record events also help avoid the awkward desire to be in two sessions at the same time? we also wanted to create time and space for face time between participants. digital media provide an opportunity for mediation and intentional manipulation of social interactions, avoiding the conference phenomena whereby one only speaks to one’s existing friends, or to people who unconsciously seem one’s own ‘type’. they are an opportunity to mix up different types of people and different levels of seniority, in ways that are refreshing and can breed unexpected outcomes. culturally speaking, we spent considerable time considering how to brand our evening social slot – should we call it the ‘pub’? for some, this would be exclusionary; to others, it would be impossible to imagine a conference that did not, at some point, involve a visit to a pub. accessibility for all types of ability was another priority. we wanted to ensure that those for whom english is not their first language, those with visual or hearing impair- ments, would all find a welcoming space at the festival. it soon became clear that while the digital could be a profoundly enabling space, it could also impose unexpected limits. all of these questions of accessibility connect to the importance of ensuring the partici- pation and input/critique/agenda-setting by a full range of scholars. our plans, however, became even more ambitious. in making the festival completely free to access, we hoped for audience engagement beyond our academic fields, and even forum: new perspectives https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core beyond academia itself. we adopted active strategies for this, reaching out to parents and teachers, for example, through offering online child-friendly activities during a lock- down. in the long term, however, achieving a bigger and more diverse audience would require the development of a careful, organic strategy of outreach. but the digital space does seem to make this possible if given a longer preparation and planning timeline. remember: we only had a hundred days. fundamentally, creating an online festival of science led us to reconsider the nature and purpose of academic conferences, run by scholarly societies. this ‘taken-for- granted’ activity needs re-examination. in an era where university jobs are becoming harder to find, and more precarious and short-term when found, the notion of confer- ences funded by and for securely employed scholars becomes somewhat anomalous. we have already raised the climate emergency and global inequity problems posed by the traditional conference format. but even if we only consider the needs of scholars working within the united kingdom, conferences need to be reformed if they are to be fairly accessible in a rapidly changing world. making academic events open to wider audiences – most easily done online – is potentially a double benefit, taking our scholarship into wider circles, as well as extending its financial support base. this does not have to mean paying for attendance, either: other models, such as the guardian’s donation-based system, or commercial sponsorship, are also possibilities. note, however, that adopting these in the medium to long term would require consider- able thought and planning. similar sets of questions emerge concerning journals and open access, of course. learned societies, which have traditionally relied on income from their journals (such as this one), must, in the medium term, face the loss of that income in the move to open-access publication. problematic though this transition may be in some respects, it must be faced squarely and used to the advantage of scholars and scholarship. rather than doing the same things as before, we could seize the oppor- tunity to do something else with our content – something that could better reflect our responsibilities as scholars and citizens in a democratic society. the history of science has an unparalleled ability to help us see how science, technology and society have been – and therefore can be – configured otherwise. as such, it is potentially of great value to a wide audience. finally, it is notable that almost everything that provoked the development of the digital festival – climate, virus, structures of intellectual institutions – has been or is itself a focus of research in the history of science. as such, it is fitting that as an academic community we wish to embody this reflexivity in our scholarly and professional practice. but still, even as all that was solid melted into air around us, we had to consider how we were going to run something in the digital sphere. in the next section, we outline the more practical side of the festival, as we examine the technical decisions and considera- tions involved in running a large global online history-of-science event. how we did it: approaches and systems our most crucial early decision was that this would not be a matter of adapting the can- celled annual conference to take it online. instead, the festival would be a distinct sam robinson et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core venture, designed from the ground up around the opportunities and constraints of the new medium. though members who had been planning sessions were understandably keen to salvage as much of their work as possible, we saw that a straight translation would simply not work for the audience. the necessary but problematic experience of hastily converting taught courses from physical to online delivery in the spring of meant that some of us were familiar with the pitfalls at first hand. for this reason, we dispensed entirely with the conventional backbone conference format of two-hour sessions featuring four panellists talking through slide shows. such sessions are exhausting to watch attentively as a video stream, in a way they would not be with the same four panellists in the room. we set a standard session length of one hour and favoured the formats we felt audiences could best engage with over that duration: single-paper keynotes, series of short ‘lightning’ talks, and relatively informal discussions. similarly, we did not refer to the typical annual-conference struc- ture of four or five simultaneous session tracks running over two to three days: this depth of parallel tracking would have been both unmanageable, given the limited size of our tech support team, and pointless, given our new-found freedom to spread to additional days without venue charges or travel complications. we also needed to recognize that our audience was not as captive as usual: attendees might vanish instantaneously at the end of any session to attend to childcare, admin, or another online conference hosted on the other side of the world. the welcome flipside of this situation was that we could include visitors in individual sessions without expecting them to invest heavily in the overall event, bringing novel opportunities for engagement with current non-members. social media, particularly twitter, helped to promote the fes- tival in ways that would not have been possible for a physical event: presenters and other interested people could promote individual sessions to followers on the very day of the session, and there would still be time for prospective audiences to sign up. such promo- tion may well have been responsible for a large proportion of the festival’s , + digital attendees. with this opportunity came the challenge of building a sense of community among participants. this, in the end, proved to be one of the strongest innovations of the festi- val, again driven as it was by necessity. networking, one of the most important aspects of any conference, takes place almost entirely outside the formally organized sessions, and often outside the conference venue and schedule altogether. our priority was to keep this in mind in building engagement opportunities as far as possible online: in place of social distancing, distant socializing. the social programme was one area where we did take inspiration from physical annual conferences, more as a best first focus for development than with any specific expectations. each day, two informal drop-in video chat sessions, the morning (uk time) ‘coffee house’ and late evening ‘public house’, allowed the kinds of chance inter- action that bshs regulars might expect from breakfast at the venue and the post-session pub respectively (participants, of course, being responsible for providing beverages as appropriate for their inclinations and time zones). social activities from past bshs meet- ings also inspired the evening social events before the public house: a trivia quiz, film forum: new perspectives https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core night, and historical tour of the internet, explicitly presented as a substitute for the guided walks we might provide around a physical host city. the public house format explored an opportunity provided by the zoom platform: the tech volunteer looking after the session would reassign participants randomly to new ‘digital tables’ – groups of around six participants each – every twenty minutes. this proved useful in helping participants to meet new people, breaking down the social barriers posed by the attendees’ different career stages and creating connections across disciplinary boundaries. but the most effective aspect of online ‘distant socialization’ was the facility for audi- ence members to discuss the sessions while they were going on, using the text chat feature of the crowdcast platform used for session delivery. the chat, which on a typical screen display appears to one side of the presenter video and updates in real time, allows con- versation and reflection, open to all audience members, at a level that could never be tol- erated at a physical conference. far beyond whispering occasionally to the person in the next seat, the digital audience could comment, joke or add in links to relevant resources, enriching the panellists’ talks – which the moderators could then pass on to the panellists too. another crowdcast feature allowed the audience to vote on a choice of options, with the results displayed automatically: this added greatly to the effect of the call my bluff game show, with the viewers pitting their wits against the panellists to deter- mine the right answers. it also provided support. although many technical tasks can be performed using free or nearly free software, this approach generally leaves it down to the individual user to resolve any problems they encounter. given the bshs’s generosity in funding the festival, it made sense to use a paid service offering direct specialist support to make sure the public side of the festival worked reliably. in the event, there were relatively few issues that we could not resolve for ourselves, but these things are best not left to chance. more generally, several individual session organizers made creative use of the oppor- tunities of a ‘born-digital’ event. tim boon’s ‘text film’ played around with the medium by revisiting a talk given by his early bshs presidential predecessor, frank sherwood taylor, in , re-creating taylor’s text in audio and offering reflections with the aid of extensive video editing. james sumner’s tour of the internet incorporated playful use of multiple cameras, which received immediate acclaim in the chat from viewers. other sessions were built around particular tools or exhibitions accessible online, includ- ing a computer simulation of the medieval cosmos as described in robert grosseteste’s de sphaera, the medea-chart database of medieval and early modern nautical charts, and the royal society/met office library and archive collaboration to redevelop a planned physical exhibition on weather and climate science into six digital ‘stories’. a further benefit, as compared to physical conferences, was that – subject to the par- ticipants’ consent – all sessions were recorded and available afterwards for those who had missed them or wanted to recap. it was also possible to add to the text chat discus- sions so that conversations could potentially continue for weeks afterwards. nonetheless, the festival had, to the majority of attendees, the feel of a distinct real- time event – to the extent that, the morning after the closing session, more than one person involved felt the effect of the sudden transition from festival time to post-festival sam robinson et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core time (albeit without the hotel-lobby suitcase forests commonly found at the end of phys- ical meetings). as we noted earlier, however, considerations of accessibility – in its many different senses – strongly informed our planning. online delivery creates many access challenges while resolving or significantly reducing others. most obviously, video conferencing and the absence of a registration fee opened the possibility of involvement to people who might never be able to attend a physical bshs conference owing to lack of funds, work- place or care responsibilities, illness or disability, or geographical separation. this had the effect of making those barriers that remained more visible to the organizers, particu- larly around disability. although the very short development time meant we could not put into effect all the responses we identified as potentially useful, we encouraged organ- izers to provide subtitles for the pre-recorded sessions where possible (jaipreet virdi’s subtitles for her keynote session being a particular highlight) and had automatic tran- scription from the otter service available for all sessions. the discussions with disabled audience members that resulted from the festival will prove useful for future planning, particularly around visual impairment, for which we were less well prepared: in future, we will be advising presenters to describe important slide visuals and to avoid the ‘as you can see here …’ formulation. the other main accessibility consideration that informed our technical planning was the drastic disparities in internet access between users in different geopolitical and per- sonal circumstances, whether due to governmental restriction policies or the vagaries of connection speeds. though our opportunities for addressing these were limited, we at least ensured that our chosen delivery system was largely unrestricted (see below) and that the content could be accessed at some level with the poorest connections, even if only by downloading the recordings rather than watching live. it is worth summarizing the technical arrangements and the thinking behind them: the particular systems available to future organizers will no doubt change rapidly in the months and years ahead, but some of the principles will hold. central to our planning was the early decision to use two different products to manage different elements: speakers gave their talks, took part in discussions, and responded to audience ques- tions using zoom, the video telephony service which grew rapidly in the early stages of the pandemic to become the most familiar system for workplace and informal calling in much of the world. audience members experienced the sessions, commented and submitted questions in their web browsers via crowdcast, a commercial service originally geared to sup- porting corporate ‘webinars’ and other live video events online, which in has been notably widely used by large international festivals such as the hay literary festival. otter.ai is a spoken-voice transcription service. more details available at otter.ai. see https://zoom.us. see www.crowdcast.io. forum: new perspectives https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://zoom.us https://zoom.us https://www.crowdcast.io https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core the two platforms were carefully compartmentalized: audience members never had access to the zoom calls, and speakers and chairs never needed to use crowdcast. the interconnections between the two – transmitting the zoom discussion to crowdcast, and relaying audience questions from crowdcast back into zoom – were managed entirely by the festival tech team. this required a great deal of work from the volunteers, both in pre-planning and throughout the festival, but had several major advantages. most importantly, it meant that our sessions were digitally secure. compartmentalizing made it virtually impossible for malicious intruders to derail the session or distract the speakers. this was high on our list of concerns given the relative ease of online as com- pared to physical intrusion in general, and the specific – and often horrific – spate of zoom-bombing incidents that became notorious during zoom’s early growth. though we were careful to password-protect, our ultimate line of defence against zoom hijacking was to keep zoom entirely away from the public side of the festival. since only the identified speakers, chairs and tech hosts had any business even knowing that the zoom call was available to join, any intruder would have been highly noticeable and swiftly ejected by the tech host responsible for monitoring. had they got as far as sharing offensive content before removal, it would not have reached the audience: the video stream from zoom into crowdcast imposed a time delay of around seconds, within which the tech hosts could stop the broadcast. the only real option for intrusion, then, was to join as an ordinary audience member via crowdcast, which required registration using an email address, and where opportun- ities for mischief were limited to posting offensive messages in the text chat. this, again, was monitored throughout by a member of the tech team, armed with a facility to ban and remove individual users built into crowdcast – which turned out to be necessary only once during the whole course of the festival. the speakers, in any case, would not have seen any of the crowdcast text chat unless the tech team specifically forwarded it for their attention. second, this combination meant that our sessions were technically stable. video con- ference calls involving large numbers of participants have a notorious tendency to glitch, suddenly lose audio/video quality, or cut out altogether, sometimes affecting different users to differing extents. we avoided this problem as far as possible by keeping the dir- ectly interacting participants in one small zoom call and making sure that most people were viewing the session through crowdcast, a paid-for service designed primarily for the reliable one-way delivery of video over the web. our impression, confirmed by atten- dees’ feedback, was that the result was generally delivered smoothly and in consistently high quality, displaying as well as possible for users with slower connections and older machines. of course, the output could only be as good as what was fed into it from the speakers’ computers, and there were occasional glitches here – but any problems would show up identically for the whole audience, making it relatively easy for the tech team to diagnose and fix them. see www.vice.com/en_uk/article/m je y/zoom-bombers-private-calls-disturbing-content, accessed september . sam robinson et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.vice.com/en_uk/article/m je y/zoom-bombers-private-calls-disturbing-content https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core third, the sessions were globally accessible. we were concerned to make sure that the widest possible public audience could access the sessions with no specific software beyond a standard web browser. we were also mindful that some well-known platforms which tend to be thought of as default options in europe and north america are restricted or prohibited in many parts of the world – notably, the question of how far and under what terms zoom is permitted in china is complex and still evolving at the time of writing. although there is no perfect solution to this problem, crowdcast was, as far as we could establish, preferable to many alternatives. finally, one further benefit of the compartmentalized set-up – which, fortunately, did not come into play – was redundancy. theoretically, we could have kept much of the fes- tival going in the event of a major global failure, such as the one that hit zoom in august : this would have been a matter of switching the participants to a different video-con- ference platform and streaming into crowdcast as before. (note, though, that if the crowdcast site itself had failed, we would have had no such protection; organizers who feel the cost is worth it can protect themselves from this kind of problem by signing up for an alternative streaming platform and being ready to manage a quick transfer.) equally important to this largely prearranged set-up was the extensive dialogue that took place between the tech team and most of the participants in the two weeks leading up to the festival. this was managed largely through ‘training’ sessions, organ- ized over zoom. at a minimum, these sessions served the purpose of taking the par- ticipants through the reasons behind the overall approach and made sure they knew what to do on the day, but they also provided crucial opportunities for the contributors to test their connections, their equipment and the effectiveness of their slides or other visuals in the intended setting, while also allowing the tech volunteers to test how their equipment performed while hosting. having a sense of the participants’ varying pre-existing technical expertise, access to facilities, and working environments while pre- senting was particularly valuable to the organizers in shaping the guidelines sent out to contributors and the approaches to session management taken by the tech volunteers. what did we learn? following the festival, we sent a survey by email to all of the more than , partici- pants from fifty-nine countries who had watched any session via crowdcast. we received nearly two hundred responses. in this section, we will examine the answers given to those questions most closely related to either our biggest concerns before the festival or those areas where we feel we learned the most. a key consideration was how global participants would engage with the festival. our support team was not sufficiently globally distributed to run sessions at times that would work for participants in australia and asia, europe and africa, north and south see https://technode.com/ / / /zoom-will-be-local-version-only-for-chinese-users, accessed september . see www.theguardian.com/technology/ /aug/ /zoom-apologises-after-being-hit-by-partial-global- outage, accessed september . forum: new perspectives https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://technode.com/ / / /zoom-will-be-local-version-only-for-chinese-users https://technode.com/ / / /zoom-will-be-local-version-only-for-chinese-users https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ /aug/ /zoom-apologises-after-being-hit-by-partial-global-outage https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ /aug/ /zoom-apologises-after-being-hit-by-partial-global-outage https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core america alike. but early on, we realized that operating on uk time would allow us to span a global audience across the course of the day – and one of the features of crowdcast is that recordings would be available to access afterwards. we didn’t know how many people would utilize this feature since it is certainly not something that could be offered by an in-person conference. whilst per cent of respondents indi- cated that they had only watched sessions live, per cent had to some extent made use of the re-watch capabilities. when asked why they did so, a variety of reasons were offered. some did so simply because they had missed a session. others were fitting the conference around other work or caring commitments. still others found that the ability to watch sessions whilst utilizing the otter transcript made things easier to follow, and again, as mentioned earlier, the ability, and encouragement, of others to put links to resources in the chat (that crowdcast also made available afterwards) meant that some attendees would pause presentations to follow up those links, and would return to the presentation enriched by their wider reading. this flexibility in how, where and when an audience member might engage with content is something to consider, along with the extent to which the replay facility makes online events more globally accessible. another question was just how much of the event our audience members would consume. most participants at a physical conference feel an unspoken obligation to maxi- mize their session attendance, extracting as much value from the financial and time invest- ment as they can. this inevitably leads to what is commonly referred to as conference fatigue. now, whilst there was festival fatigue for members of the tech team, as we ran multiple events over five long days, the experience was different for attendees. there is something about attending a conference whilst going home to your bed each night that seemed to make the next-day recovery somewhat quicker. most of our respondents ( per cent) attended two to five sessions – roughly equivalent to attending for a day or picking up a few sessions over the week. but what it also shows is that most people, having attended one session, were sufficiently encouraged to stay for another. as for the per cent of respondents who stated that they had only attended one session, it seems likely that the online environment makes dipping an academic toe into a conference in an adjacent field both possible and attractive. at the very least, those attracted by a twitter hashtag could follow up their interest, rather than simply being told about what they had missed. from the survey, we know that many of these visitors had never previ- ously attended any history-of-science conference, and would be unlikely to do so in person. numbers attending for one session were smaller than those who attended for between six and twelve sessions (that is, an attendance level more in line with what might be expected for an in-person conference). but of most interest for the bshs – and, indeed, potentially for scholarly societies more generally – is the response to the question “have you ever attended a bshs event before?” fifty-one per cent of responders stated that they had never done so, and only per cent said they were regularly involved in participating in bshs events. we succeeded, we think, in widening our audience base. finally, it is worth reflecting on the content of the festival, its global aim and ambition. to this end, we asked three questions and asked respondents whether they strongly agreed, agreed, disagreed, or strongly disagreed with the following statements: sam robinson et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core . ‘the festival showcased new, creative and challenging ideas.’ . ‘there was something at the festival that encouraged me to think differently or try something new.’ . ‘overall, the festival was well organized.’ the responses to all these questions were overwhelmingly positive. in all cases, over per cent of respondents agreed or strongly agreed with the statements. these responses suggest to us that the online-festival concept has something to recommend it beyond the immediate necessity of the pandemic and the ongoing necessity of the climate emergency. it also suggests that our very basic ambition to put something together that would be enjoyable was met, and probably exceeded. we think we succeeded. but we still think we can do better. the bshs festival was faced with an extraordinary opportunity to meet challenges faced by the pandemic as well as broader issues of academic conduct within in-person conferences. there is still work to be done to ensure that academic space within the history-of-science community is intellectually, institutionally and spatially inclusive. the bshs festival showed that this is possible in a digital arena. we acknowledge that closer engagement with critical race, gender and class frameworks is needed, and that this means we still have improvements to make in the future. it is important to engage with presenters concerning questions of appropriate language and verbal signposting such as providing cues for content warn- ings. while much of the presentation and performance of academic papers falls beyond the control of the organizers, such measures are important for consideration in academic arenas, especially those that seek to be global, inclusive and open. while there is still much to do for the future, we want to end on a familiar note. one of the unexpected outcomes of the digital space was how it opened up the discipline to friends and loved ones in a way that the traditional conference normally does not figure . photo credit: sarah qidwai. forum: new perspectives https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core allow us to do. while professional conferences expect a degree of prior engagement with, and investment in, the field, attendees could join our festival for any session with no prior knowledge of the subject. the virtual environment made the academic space more open and inviting. the pandemic has meant that our working lives are even more embrangled with our personal lives. our online festival meant that our families could see us explain- ing what we were researching and why we were doing it – and could see how the wider world responded to us. taking a community-oriented approach to building the field might be the very best way forward. there is no better way to end this article than with this picture (figure ) – one very proud grandmother, engaging with an international history-of-science conference in a way none of the organizers (or the presenter) foresaw. perhaps our greatest achievement, certainly our happiest. sam robinson et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core 	outline placeholder 	opportunity: the new normal? 	how we did it: approaches and systems 	what did we learn? the algorithmic rise of the “alt-right” contexts.org the algorithmic rise of the “alt-right” by jessie daniels http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . % f &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - w i n t e r c o n t e x t s on a late summer evening in , members of the far-right descended on charlottesville, virginia with tiki-torches held up in defense of confederate general robert e. lee’s statue in what was dubbed a “unite the right” rally, which had been organized mostly online. the next day, august , white nationalists rallied again and violently clashed with counter protestors. one drove his car into a multiracial crowd, killing one and seriously injuring others. as it has turned out, the events in charlottesville were a watershed moment in the algorithmic rise of white nationalism in the u.s. white nationalism has gone “from being a conversation you could hold in a bathroom, to the front parlor,” according to william h. regnery ii. a multimillionaire, regnery has spent a significant sum of his inherited wealth pushing his “race realist” agenda via a publishing house and the national policy institute, a think-tank. when his protégé and grantee, richard spencer, coined the new term “alt-right” in , few took notice. back then, jared taylor, publisher of the white nationalist site ameri- can renaissance, said he thought of his own efforts as “just making a racket,” but now he sees himself as part of an ascen- dant social movement, with spencer in a lead role. he, along with jason kessler, helped organize the rally in charlottesville. “i think tuesday was the most important day in the white nationalist movement,” derek black told a new york times reporter. black, a former white national- ist, was referring to the tuesday following the charlottesville rally, when the current occupant of the white house repeated white nationalist talking points defending the statues of america’s founding slavehold- ers. in that new york times interview, black went on to describe his shock, “… tuesday just took my breath away. i was sitting in a coffee shop and i thought the news from this was done when i read that he had come back and he said there were good people in the white nationalist rally and he salvaged their message.” it’s certainly not the first time that a sitting president has openly heralded white supremacy from the oval office, but it is the first time that the ideology of white supremacy from both extreme and mainstream sources has been spread through the algorithms of search engines and social media platforms. there are two strands of conventional wisdom unfolding in popular accounts of the rise of the alt-right. one says that what’s really happening can be attributed to a crisis in white identity: the alt-right is simply a manifestation of the angry white male who has status anxiety about his declining social power. others contend that the alt-right is an unfortunate eddy in the vast ocean of internet culture. related to this is the idea that polarization, exacerbated by filter bubbles, has facilitated the spread of internet memes and fake news promulgated by the alt-right. while the first explanation tends to ignore the influ- ence of the internet, the second dismisses the importance of white nationalism. i contend that we have to understand both at the same time. for the better part of years, i have been working with emerging technology and studying white supremacy in various forms of media. in the s, i examined hundreds of printed newsletters from extremist groups and found that many of their talking points resonated with mainstream popular culture and politicians, like pat buchanan and bill clinton. after that, i left academia for a while and worked in the tech industry, where i produced online coverage of events like the presidential recount. when i returned to academic research, i did a follow- up study tracking how some of the groups i’d studied in print had—or had not—made it on to the internet. i spent time at places like stormfront, the white nationalist portal launched in the mid- s, and found that some groups had gained a much more nefarious presence than in their print-only days. and, i interviewed young people about how they made sense contexts, vol. , issue , pp. - . issn - , electronic issn - . © american sociological association. http://contexts.sagepub.com. doi . / . the rise of the alt-right is both a continuation of a centuries-old dimension of racism in the u.s. and part of an emerging media ecosystem powered by algorithms. contexts.org of white supremacy they encountered online. about the time i finished my second book in , social media platforms and their algorithms began to change the way white nationalists used the internet. now i look at the current ascendance of the alt-right from a dual vantage point, informed both my research into white supremacy and my experience in the tech industry. the rise of the alt-right is both a continuation of a centuries- old dimension of racism in the u.s. and part of an emerging media ecosystem powered by algorithms. white supremacy has been a feature of the political landscape in the u.s. since the start; vigilante white supremacist movements have been a constant since just after the confederacy lost its battle to continue slavery. the ideology of the contemporary alt-right is entirely consistent with earlier manifestations of extremist white supremacy, with only slightly modifications in style and emphasis. this incarnation is much less steeped in christian symbolism (few crosses, burning or otherwise), yet trades heavily in anti- semitism. even the islamophobia among the alt-right has more to do with the racialization of people who follow islam and the long history of connecting whiteness to citizenship in the u.s. than it does with beliefs about christendom. movement members aim to establish a white ethno-state, consistent with every other extremist, white nationalist movement and more than a few mainstream politicians. this iteration is newly enabled by algorithms, which do several things. algorithms deliver search results for those who seek confirmation for racist notions and connect newcomers to like-minded racists, as when dylan roof searched for “black on white crime” and google provided racist websites and a com- munity of others to confirm and grow his hatred. algorithms speed up the spread of white supremacist ideology, as when memes like “pepe the frog” travel from chan or reddit to mainstream news sites. and algorithms, aided by cable news networks, amplify and systematically move white supremacist talking points into the mainstream of political discourse. like always, white nationalists are being “innovation opportunists,” finding openings in the latest technologies to spread their mes- sage. to understand how all this works, it’s necessary to think about several things at once: how race is embedded in the internet at the same time it is ignored, how white supremacy operates now, and the ways these interact. building race into the “race-less” internet the rise of the alt-right would not be possible without the infrastructure built by the tech industry, and yet, the industry likes to imagine itself as creating a “race-less” internet. in a ad from a now-defunct telecom company, the internet was touted as a “place where we can communicate mind-to-mind, where there is no race, no gender, no infirmities… only minds.” then narration poses the question, “is this utopia?” as the word is typed out. “no, the internet.” in many ways, the ad reflected what was then a rather obscure document, written by john perry barlow in . barlow, a recently deceased co-founder of the electronic frontier foundation, wrote a declaration of the independence of cyberspace, a manifesto-style manuscript in which he conceives of the internet as a “place,” much like the imaginary ameri- can frontier in a hollywood western, that should remain free from control by “gov- ernments of the industrial world,” those “weary giants of flesh and steel.” he ends with a grand hope for building “a civiliza- tion of the mind in cyberspace. may it be more humane and fair than the world your governments have made before.” while the giddy notion of a “mind-to-mind” utopia online may seem quaint by the standards of today’s “don’t-read-the- comments” internet, barlow’s view remains, more than years later, foundational in silicon valley. and it informs thinking in the tech industry when it comes to the alt-right. when several tech companies kicked alt-right users off their platforms after charlottesville, they were met with a vigorous backlash from many in the industry. matthew prince, ceo and co-founder of cloudflare, who reluctantly banned virulently racist site, the daily stormer, from his service, he fretted about the decision. “as [an] internet user, i think it’s pretty dangerous if my moral, political or economic whims play some role in deciding who can and cannot be online,” he said. the electronic frontier foundation issued a statement that read, in part, “we believe that no one—not the government and not private commercial enterprises—should decide who gets to speak and who doesn’t,” closely echoing barlow’s manifesto. even as the dominant discourse about technology followed the “race-less” imaginary of the sales pitch and the ideology, robust critiques that centered alternative, afrofuturist visions emerged from scholars such as alondra nelson. critical writing about the internet has followed, demonstrating the myriad ways race is built into digital technologies. the dos commands of “master” disk and “slave” disk prompt, anna everett points out, reinscribe the master/slave narrative into the level of code. recent concerns about digital surveillance technologies draw much from pre-digital technologies developed to control enslaved peoples, simone browne has explained. racial categories are coded into drop-down menus and the visual culture of nearly white nationalists see the “race-less” approach of platforms and the technological innovation of algorithms as opportunities to push the “overton window,” the range of topics tolerated in public discourse. w i n t e r c o n t e x t s today’s “whitelash” is algorithmically amplified, sped up, and circulated to other white ethno- nationalist movements around the world, ignored all the while by a tech industry that “doesn’t see race” in the tools it creates. every platform, lisa nakamura observes. the nearly ubiquitous white hand-pointer acts as a kind of avatar that, in turn, becomes “attached” to depictions of white people in advertisements, the default “universal” internet user at the keyboard that becomes part of the collective imagination, michele white notes. ideas about race are inextricably linked with the development of tech products, such as “blackbird” (a web browser) or “ms. dewey” (a search tool), andré brock and miriam sweeney have written. the $ billion digital video gaming industry has race coded into its interfaces and has enabled the alt-right, kishonna gray observes. the algorithms of search engines and their autocom- plete features often suggest racism to users and direct them to white supremacist sites, safiya noble documents. and it goes on. yet despite all this evidence that race is coded into these platforms, the ideology of color-blindness in technology—both in the industry and in popular understandings of technology— serves a key mechanism enabling white nationalists to exploit technological innovations. by ignoring race in the design process and eschewing discussion of it after products are launched, the tech industry has left an opening for white nationalists—and they are always looking for opportunities to push their ideology. white nationalists as innovation opportunists the filmmaker d.w. griffith is recognized as a cinematic visionary who helped launch an art form and an industry. his signature film, birth of a nation ( ), is also widely regarded as “disgustingly racist.” indeed, white supremacists seized upon it (and emerging film technology) when it was released. at the film’s premiere, members of the klan paraded outside the theatre, celebrating its depiction of their group’s rise as a sign of southern white society’s recovery from the humiliation of defeat in the civil war. when griffith screened the film at the white house for woodrow wilson, who is quoted in the film, the president declared birth of a nation “history writ with lightening.” capitalizing on this new technology, the kkk created film compa- nies and produced their own feature films with titles like the toll of justice ( ) and the traitor within ( ), screening them at outdoor events, churches, and schools. by the middle of the s, the klan had an estimated five million members. this growth was aided by white supremacists’ recognition of the opportunity to use the new technology of motion pictures to spread their message. almost a century later, another generation saw that same potential in digital technologies. “i believe that the internet will begin a chain reaction of racial enlightenment that will shake the world by the speed of its intellectual conquest,” wrote former kkk grand wizard david duke on his website in . duke’s newsletter, the naawp (national association for the advancement of white people), was part of my earlier study, and he was one who made the transition from the print-only era to the digital era. duke joined forces with don black, another former kkk grand wizard, who shared a belief in new tech- nologies for “racial enlightenment.” together, they helped the movement ditch klan robes as the costume de rigueur of white supremacy and trade them for high-speed modems. don black created stormfront in . the site hosted a podcast created by duke and pushed to more than , registered users at the site. don black’s son recalled in a recent interview that they were a family of early adopters, always look- ing for the next technological innovations that they could exploit for the white nationalist movement: “pioneering white nationalism on the web was my dad’s goal. that was what drove him from the early ’ s, from beginning of the web. we had the latest computers, we were the first people in the neighbor- hood to have broadband because we had to keep stormfront running, and so technology and connect- ing people on the website, long before social media.” part of what i observed in the shift of the white supremacist movement from print to digital is that they were very good, prescient even, at understanding how to exploit emerging technologies to further their ideological goals. a few years after he launched stormfront, don black cre- ated another, possibly even more pernicious site. in , he registered the domain name martinlutherking.org, and set up a site that appears to be a tribute to dr. king. but it is what i call a “cloaked site,” a sort of precursor to today’s “fake news.” cloaked sites are a form of propaganda, intentionally disguising authorship in order to conceal a political agenda. i originally discovered this one through a student’s online search during a class; i easily figured out the source by scrolling all the way to the bottom of the page where it clearly says “hosted by stormfront.” but such sites can be deceptive: the url is misleading and most of us, around %, never scroll all the way to the bottom of a page (all confirmed in interviews i did with young people while they surfed the web). so we see that white nationalists, as early adopters, are constantly looking for the vulnerabilities in new technologies as spots into which their ideology can be inserted. in the mid- s, it was domain name registration. the fact that contexts.org a site with clunky design can be deceptive is due in large part to the web address. one young participant in my study said, “it says, martin luther king dot org, so that means they must be dedicated to that.” to him, the “dot org” suffix on the domain name indicated that a non-profit group “dedicated to dr. king” was behind the url. white supremacists like don black understood that the paradigm shift in media distribution from the old broadcast model of “one-to-many” to internet’s “many-to-many” model was an opening. the kind of propaganda at the site about dr. king works well in this “many-to-many” sharing environment in which there are no gatekeepers. the goal in this instance is to call into question the hard won moral, cultural, and political victories of the civil rights movement by undermining dr. king’s personal reputation. other cloaked sites suggest that slavery “wasn’t that bad.” this strategy, shifting the range of the acceptable ideas to discuss, is known as moving the “overton window.” white nationalists of the alt-right are using the “race-less” approach of platforms and the technological innovation of algorithms to push the overton window. the anything-goes approach to racist speech on platforms like twitter, chan, and reddit means that white nationalists now have many places beyond stormfront to congregate online. these platforms have been adept in spreading white national- ist symbols and ideas, themselves accelerated and amplified by algorithms. take “pepe the frog,” an innocuous cartoon char- acter that so thoroughly changed meaning that, in september , the anti-defamation league added the character to its database of online hate symbols. this transformation began on chan, moved to twitter, and, by august , it had made it into a speech by presidential candidate hillary clinton. “turning pepe into a white nationalist icon was one of our original goals,” an anonymous white supremacist on twitter told a reporter for the daily beast in . the move to remake pepe began on /r k/, a chan board where a wide variety of users, including hackers, tech guys (and they were mostly guys), libertarians, and white supremacists who migrated from stormfront gathered online. the content at chan is eclectic, or, as one writer put it, “a jumble of content, hosting anything from pictures of cute kittens to wildly disturbing images and language.” it’s also one of the most popular websites ever, with million unique visitors a month, according to founder chris- topher “moot” poole. “we basically mixed pepe in with nazi propaganda, etc. we built that association [on chan],” a white nationalist who goes by @jaredtswift said. once a journalist mentioned the connection on twitter, white nationalists counted it as a victory—and it was: the mention of the chan meme by a “normie” on twitter was a prank with a big attention payoff. “in a sense, we’ve managed to push white nationalism into a very mainstream position,” @jaredtswift said. “now, we’ve pushed the overton window,” referring to the range of ideas tol- erated in public discourse. twitter is the key platform for shaping that discourse. “people have adopted our rhetoric, sometimes without even realizing it. we’re setting up for a massive cultural shift,” @jaredtswift said. among white supremacists, the think- ing goes: if today we can get “normies” talking about pepe the frog, then tomorrow we can get them to ask the other questions on our agenda: “are jews people?” or “what about black on white crime?” and, when they have a sitting president who will re-tweet accounts that use #whitegenocide hashtags and defend them after a deadly rally, it is fair to say that white supremacists are succeeding at using media and technology to take their message mainstream. networked white rage cnn commentator van jones dubbed the election a “whitelash,” a very real political backlash by white voters. across all income levels, white voters (including % of white women) preferred the candidate who had retweeted #whitegenocide over the one warning against the alt-right. for many, the uprising of the black lives matter movement coupled with the putative insult of a black man in the white house were such a threat to personal and national identity that it provoked what carol anderson identifies as white rage. in the span of u.s. racial history, the first election of president barack obama was heralded as a high point for so-called american “race relations.” his second term was the apotheosis of this symbolic prog- ress. some even suggested we were now “post-racial.” but the post-obama era proves the lie that we were ever post-racial, and it may, when we have the clarity of hindsight, mark the end of an era. if one charts a course from the civil rights movement, taking (brown v. board of education) as a rough starting point and the rise of the black lives matter movement and the close of obama’s second term as the end point, we might see this as a five-decades-long “second reconstruction” culminating in the presidential election.. taking the long view makes the rise of the alt-right look less like a unique eruption and more like a continuation of our national story of systemic racism. historian rayford logan made the persuasive argument that retrenchment and the brutal reassertion of white supremacy through jim crow laws and the systematic violence of lynching was the white response to “too much” progress by those just a generation from slavery. he called this period, – , the “nadir of american race relations.” and the rise of the alt-right may signal the start of mostly white liberal writers, scholars, and journalists report as if racism is a “bug” rather than a “feature” of the system. w i n t e r c o n t e x t s a second nadir, itself a reaction to progress of black americans. the difference this time is that the “whitelash” is algorithmically amplified, sped up, and circulated through networks to other white ethno-nationalist movements around the world, ignored all the while by a tech industry that “doesn’t see race” in the tools it creates. media, technology, and white nationalism today, there is a new technological and media paradigm emerging and no one is sure what we will call it. some refer to it as “the outrage industry,” and others refer to “the mediated construction of reality.” with great respect for these contribu- tions, neither term quite captures the scope of what we are witnessing, especially when it comes to the alt-right. we are certainly no longer in the era of “one-to-many” broadcast dis- tribution, but the power of algorithms and cable news networks to amplify social media conversations suggests that we are no longer in a “peer-to-peer” model either. and very little of our scholarship has caught up in trying to explain the role that “dark money” plays in driving all of this. for example, rebekah mer- cer (daughter of hedge-fund billionaire and libertarian robert mercer), has been called the “first lady of the alt-right” for her $ -million underwriting of brietbart news, helmed for most of its existence by former white house senior advisor steve bannon, who called it the “platform of the alt-right.” white nationalists have clearly sighted this emerging media paradigm and are seizing—and being provided with millions to help them take hold of—opportunities to exploit these innovations with alacrity. for their part, the tech industry has done shockingly little to stop white nationalists, blinded by their unwillingness to see how the platforms they build are suited for speeding us along to the next genocide. the second nadir, if that’s what this is, is disorienting because of the swirl of competing articulations of racism across a distracting media ecosystem. yet, the view that circulates in popular understandings of the alt-right and of tech culture by mostly white liberal writers, scholars, and journalists is one in which racism is a “bug” rather than a “feature” of the system. they report with alarm that there’s racism on the internet (or, in the last election), as if this is a revelation, or they “journey” into the heart of the racist right, as if it isn’t everywhere in plain sight. or, they write with a kind of shock mixed with reassurance that alt-right proponents live next door, have gone to college, gotten a proper haircut, look like a hipster, or, sometimes, put on a suit and tie. our understanding of the algorithmic rise of the alt-right must do better than these quick, hot takes. if we’re to stop the next charlottesville or the next emanuel ame church massacre, we have to recognize that the algorithms of search engines and social media platforms facilitated these hate crimes. to grasp the st century world around us involves parsing different inflections of contemporary racism: the overt and ideologically committed white nationalists co-mingle with the tech industry, run by boy-kings steeped in cyberlibertarian notions of freedom, racelessness, and an ethos in which the only evil is restricting the flow of information on the internet (and, thereby, their profits). in the wake of charleston and charlot- tesville, it is becoming harder and harder to sell the idea of an internet “where there is no race… only minds.” yet, here we are, locked in this iron cage. recommended resources christopher bail. . terrified: how anti-muslim fringe orga- nizations became mainstream. princeton, nj: princeton univer- sity press, . a sharp, data-driven take on how the brand of extremism that specifically targets muslims has moved to the center. yokai benkler, et al. . “study: brietbart-led right-wing media system altered broader media agenda,” columbia jour- nalism review (march ). the discussion of filter bubbles is beset by an unfortunate both-sides-ism; this piece offers a valu- able critique with its empirical take on the predominance of the right-wing. alice marwick and rebecca lewis. . “media manipulation and disinformation online,” data & society research institute. an important and wide-ranging attempt to understand a variety of online platforms and how they have been manipulated by bad actors. david neiwert. . alt-america: the rise of the radical right in the age of trump. brooklyn, ny: verso books. thorough reporting and concise prose provide a compelling look at the very american nature of the “alt-right.” safiya u. nobel. . algorithms of oppression: how search engines reinforce racism. new york: new york university press. a crucial look at the way search engines and the algorithms that power them reproduce whiteness and discriminate against peo- ple, especially women, of color. whitney phillips. . this is why we can’t have nice things: mapping the relationship between online trolling and main- stream culture. cambridge, ma: mit press. although phillips now eschews the term “trolling,” this is a valuable critique and exploration of the portion of internet culture that provided fertile ground for the rise of the ‘alt-right.’ samuel c. woolley and phillip k. howard. . “political com- munication, computational propaganda, and autonomous agents,” international journal of communication : - . an analysis of the manipulation of information by politi- cal bots and the politics of an era in which people encounter information architecture through devices and over the internet of things. jessie daniels is in the sociology department at hunter college and the graduate center, city university of new york. she is the author of white lies and cyber racism. conference review: achs futures . th association of critical heritage studies biennial conference. university college london, th august— th august book, conference and exhibition review open access conference review: achs futures . th association of critical heritage studies biennial conference. university college london, th august— th august plácido gonzález martínez the fifth biennial conference of the association of crit- ical heritage studies (achs), entitled achs : fu- tures, took place in london from august thru august . as part of the regular scientific meeting programs of the achs, this can be deemed as the most important event in the field of critical heritage studies, whose significance has been unexpectedly affected by the current pandemic situation. the conference was chaired by professor rodney har- rison of the ucl institute of archaeology in association with the arts and humanities research council (ahrc) heritage priority area. being harrison’s ucl group one of the most active in the field of critical heritage studies, there were great expectations about the conference, understood as an invitation to broaden their recent pro- ject ‘heritage: futures’ to an international, massive de- bate. not coincidentally, one month prior to the conference, ucl published the outcomes of their re- search programme (harrison et al. ), in a timely manner to add to the discussions for the conference. adding to this, it is necessary to highlight how despite the original plans to celebrate the conference as a face- to face event, the course of the covid- epidemic raised the question within the organizers during the first months of about its future. according to rodney harrison, among the alternatives considered were its cancellation; its postponement; or its change of format. this led to the decision taken in april to shift to a fully virtual conference. this decision, which initially led to a situation of uncertainty for its complex technical implications, finally showed as the most appropriate, and will definitely determine the ways these events will be planned in the future. considering these two exceptional issues, the review of the conference needs thus to point at them separately. the first one is a conceptual one; and it is to reflect to what extent the contents of the conference have an- swered to the aims of the call for papers and the scope of critical heritage studies that gather international scholars in the achs. the second one is a formal one; and it is to evaluate to what extent the change of format of the conference has contributed to the aims of the achs as an organization and to the definition of new approaches for scientific meetings of the achs in the future. conference theme: futures the conference aimed to provide a critical perspective beyond a frequently stated aim of heritage, which is its capacity to influence the life of future generations. ac- cording to the call, the debate was posed differently, as an invitation to think how the idea of ‘futures’ deter- mines the ways heritage is valued, documented, con- served and promoted. this engages with current open discussions like sustainable development, social justice and gender equality, among others: situations of conflict in contemporary societies, triggered by diverging visions about the future, that determine our current appreci- ation of the past. by means of stirring these discussions, the conference also aimed to pose questions about the future of critical heritage studies: questions, whose answers may come from an overview of the themes and sub-themes of pre- vious four conferences of the achs. for instance, is- sues of power have represented a constant concern since © the author(s). open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's creative commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article's creative commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. correspondence: placido@tongji.edu.cn college of architecture and urban planning, tongji university, siping road, yangpu district, shanghai , china built heritagegonzález martínez built heritage ( ) : https://doi.org/ . /s - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://orcid.org/ - - - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / mailto:placido@tongji.edu.cn they were explicitly formulated in the first conference in gothenburg ; whereas discussions on intangible cul- tural heritage have traditionally offered an exceptionally contested realm. this is no less than the conservation of the built environment, also a continued conceptual thread which in the last years has been matched by dis- cussions on the natural environment. the london conference has also evidenced new ad- vancements from the previous hangzhou conference. needless to say, that as a conference for international scholars engaged in cultural, social and polit- ical discussions, they have been symptomatic of recent major turns in international policy, particularly from the us. whereas the main topic in hangzhou, ‘borders’, evi- denced the global consequences of the first divisive deci- sions of the trump administration (e.g. the construction of the border wall with mexico and the overly xenopho- bic tone of new legislation on immigration), the general spirit of the london conference has been greatly deter- mined by the last, no less divisive latest legacy of trump (e.g. the inflammatory response to the black lives matter movement, and governmental inaction against the pan- demic crisis). adding to this determinant fact for the future geneal- ogy of critical heritage studies, this review aims to point out at how the discussion on the future itself was a most challenging question. an especially pertinent one, in a field that crosses different disciplines, in a wide variety of cultural and political contexts, witnessing the en- hanced role of heritage in contemporary societies. the presentations grouped together across sub-themes; many of them included in the scope of the ucl’s ‘heri- tage: futures’ project: ‘arts and creative practice’, ‘fu- ture policies and politics of heritage’, ‘environmental change and the anthropocene’, ‘digital futures in and for heritage’, ‘folklore and intangible cultural heri- tages’, ‘heritage and foodways’, ‘conflict heritage and conflicted heritages’, ‘urban heritage futures’, ‘future methods and approaches to critical heritage studies’, ‘future landscapes of heritage’, ‘the future museum: collections and collecting’, ‘heritage and time’, ‘the futures of heritage’, ‘mobilities and migration’. due to their ambition and diversity, the definition of sub-themes was representative, and at the same time, an- swered to the high expectations that the members of the achs had for the conference. in total, the sub-themes incorporated oral sessions, with over submis- sions accepted and over presentations delivered. these numbers, which speak of the success of the call and the interest that critical heritage studies rise among the scholarship, were also corresponded by the quality of the presentations and the subsequent discussions. an important statement of the orientation of the con- ference was the selection of all-female keynote speakers: karen salt; sharon macdonald; kavita singh and dolly jorgensen. this can be interpreted as a gesture from the organizers to rectify the omission of gender balance among the keynotes in the last achs conference in hangzhou . lectures from the keynote speakers also reflected on key issues of current critical heritage discussions. salt’s address pointed at the issues of race, colonialism and the heritage of refusal, echoing the intense debate sparked by george floyd’s killing and the widespread re- actions from the black lives matter movement in the summer of , first in the us and later extended through the western hemisphere. a discussion that con- tinues raising questions about power and the continuity of structural racism that haunt multiple authorized heri- tage discourses. macdonald’s keynote focused on the awareness about how heritage practices may constitute an important av- enue to consolidate the breach between society and the environment, by means of legitimizing and celebrating a history of human exploitation of resources and the con- sequent separation between culture and nature. this ap- proach, which derives from the ucl project ‘heritage futures’ of which macdonald is a member, aims to pro- vide theoretical and practical alternatives to make heri- tage a vehicle toward sustainability. singh delivered her lecture on the topic of belonging, pointing at the future challenges of heritage where the process of secularization that gave birth to the modern con- ception of heritage is currently being reversed. such reversal leads to a new scenario that challenges the notion of out- standing universal value itself, and many of the conventions supporting the heritage discourse in the last years. jørgensen’s lecture elaborated on the theoretical no- tions developed in macdonald’s lecture, with a view on the specific issues to be found in nature related to the frequently understated phenomenon of animal ex- tinction. ethical and technical considerations about how to deal with the remnants of vanishing animal species, particularly those from the recent modern eras, shed light on wider discussions about the en- gagement of the heritage sector with the ongoing ex- tinction crisis. the attractiveness of sessions and presentations made the election where to surf in the program difficult. even if the presentations were made available several days in advance of the conference, time limitations continued to apply for what has been as massive scientific event: with choices multiplied, attendees finally focused on themes by means of affinity. the interest of this reviewer focused on the urban heritage futures sub-theme, as well as in presentations related to urban and architec- tural heritage conservation which were dispersed in other sub-themes. gonzález martínez built heritage ( ) : page of to this extent, it is important to highlight how scholars in architecture and the built environment have developed conceptual and methodological approaches that advance from the backward position to which these disciplines were relegated by waterton and watson ( ) in the field of critical heritage studies. presenta- tions like piazzoni’s ( ) showed how the study of the monumental city of rome can be completely subverted by means of introducing the perspective of migration and the transnational connections of bangladeshi street vendors; very much in the line of wulff’s ( ) studies on islamic communities in southern italy. even if dealing with ‘traditional’ built heritage matters, the variety of presentations in sessions like pendlebury and wang’s on adaptive reuse, pointed at important ques- tions in force in current specialised literature (wang and wang ; liu et al. ; pendlebury and wang ). among them, issues of authenticity seemed to keep their relevance, as it still remains a valid and contested notion around which issues of power and narratives revolve. re- ferring to the main question of the conference, ‘futures’, most of the presentations reflected on the agency that heritage has to produce images of the future (veldpaus and fava ), instead of answering to the question of how the definition of the future may be determining heri- tage processes today. also in the same theoretical line, the approaches to reconstruction in presentations like avra- mi’s ( ) for the hidden stories of slavery in monticello; or ishizawa’s ( ) on the re-creation of the ancient cap- ital of rwanda, showed how authenticity is still deemed a powerful tool to achieve either purposes of justice and aims of developmentalism. these remarks are just a sample of the presenta- tions related to the field that this reviewer could attend. moreover, the discussions on urban heritage conserva- tion showed a breach between official approaches such as unesco’s historic urban landscape (hul) (unesco ), and their critical interpretation. it was surprising, for example, to see how the hul recom- mendation was absent in most of the presentations and debates. an interesting omission, when we are ap- proaching years since the recommendation was passed, and in an international situation where hul is still deemed as a key for management and conservation, and intensively used by unesco as a valuable training tool: are the ‘futures’ that the conference aimed to dis- cuss about, so detached from the course of international organizations? conference format: moving towards an online future? it might be coincidentally, but the breakthrough that the sub-themes proposed at the theoretical level has been deeply conditioned to the epidemic situation and the digital format towards which the conference had to evolve. due to the conference submission calendar none of the presentations had the chance to elaborate about the pandemic; neverthe- less, the whole conference was embedded in an exceptional situation and the comments on the epidemic stood at the forefront in many of the discussions. even if the organizers met many challenges and there were doubts about the celebration of the event itself, it is necessary to highlight how they overcame the difficul- ties and made this an opportunity to critically rethink the format of future conferences. this deserves a par- ticular comment, because it affects the nature of these academic discussions beyond the diversity of its topics. due to the change of format to virtual and the subse- quent reduced registration fee, the conference could be appropriated by a wider community of scholars, particu- larly those coming from less affluent contexts, who ini- tially had discarded to travel to london, one of the most expensive cities in the world. thanks to a smart and well thought plan of transition to digital, the chosen format enabled for a better appre- ciation of the discussions, as the contents were uploaded and made available online, leaving time for their careful study and evaluation. as they need to be prepared, it is this reviewer’s guess that the degree of satisfaction of the presenters with their performance has grown. also, the physical scenario of lecture halls, which frequently func- tions as a highly pervasive environment where hierarch- ies are highlighted and discussions are prevented rather than encouraged, gave way to a virtual space which allowed for a more direct, horizontal interaction. it may also be argued that on the other hand, there were things that were lost, and the direct, immediate face to face contact that so frequently gives way to other opportunities for networking and interaction, was not possible, especially for non-digital natives. also, it is ne- cessary to remind how barriers for digital inclusiveness like national firewalled networks, or insufficient broad- band internet connection, remain in force for many scholars. but it is this reviewer’s contention that the ben- efits have overpassed the difficulties, and that the digital model is here to stay. it is now an open current discussion within the achs for the format to adopt for the coming two conferences in santiago and maryland : most probably, an intermediate mode will be the optimal solution, as it could conjugate the benefits of interaction and inclusive- ness. hopefully, once in the times to come the internet may become universally accessible, we will look back at the london conference as the turning point where the critical heritage sphere could definitely spread beyond the richest, most affluent societies in the world. what the heritage futures will look like then will be part of an- other discussion. gonzález martínez built heritage ( ) : page of acknowledgements the author wishes to thank the two anonymous reviewers for their insightful comments. author’s contributions the conference review was written by the author with support from two anonymous reviewers. the author read and approved the final manuscript prior to publishing. funding eastern scholarship program – shanghai municipal education commission. availability of data and materials not applicable. competing interests no competing interests apply. received: december accepted: december references avrami, e. . reconstruction, spatial reclamation and restorative practice. presentation held at the achs: futures conference. harrison, et al. . heritage futures. comparative approaches to natural and cultural heritage practices. london: ucl press. ishizawa, m. . idealizing the past, reconstructing the future: the re-creation of a royal capital in rwanda. presentation held at the achs: futures conference. liu, m., y.w. wang, and c. nolf. . creative chinese countryside? township- village enterprises as incubators. built heritage : – . https://doi.org/ . /bf . pendlebury, j., and y.w. wang. . what distinguishes ‘adaptive reuse’ from ‘reuse’? presentation held at the achs: futures conference. piazzoni, f. . visibility as justice: immigrant street vendors in the heritage landscapes of rome. presentation held at the achs: futures conference. unesco ( ). recommendation on the historic urban landscape. veldpaus, l., and f. fava. . the ethics and aesthetics of adaptive reuse. presentation held at the achs: futures conference. wang, y.w., and x. wang. . industrial heritage valorisation and creative industry proliferation in shanghai’s urban regeneration. built heritage : – . https://doi.org/ . /bf . waterton, e., and s. watson. . framing theory: towards a critical imagination in heritage studies. international journal of heritage studies ( ): – . wulff, f. . intercultural nodes as heritage re-activators. presentation held at the achs: futures conference. publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. gonzález martínez built heritage ( ) : page of https://doi.org/ . /bf https://doi.org/ . /bf https://doi.org/ . /bf 	conference theme: futures 	conference format: moving towards an online future? 	acknowledgements 	author’s contributions 	funding 	availability of data and materials 	competing interests 	references 	publisher’s note pps_ .. context of decades of neoliberal restructuring, and even when they reject neoliberal “globalism,” they have often imbibed its competitive and speculative logic. brown, feher, and balibar all zone in on these novel features of our present: for brown, contemporary popu- lism has absorbed the neoliberal animosity to both the social and the political and manifests as a nihilistic moral system built on “rancor, reproach, negation, and even revenge” (p. ). for feher, the new right is best con- ceived within the speculative logic of a financialized capitalism that has turned us all into portfolio managers investing in our own material and human capital. con- sistent with this logic, rather than in reaction to it, feher depicts the new right as motivated by the desire to “dispose of the discredited” (notably migrants) and reval- orize “native” capital, thereby bringing about a mutation in standard right-wing discourses. for Étienne balibar, we are witnessing the rise of “abso- lute capitalism,” which replaces the national sovereignty and political antagonism of “historical capitalism” with the quasi-sovereignty of global financial markets and general- ized extreme violence. “neoliberalism,” balibar suggests, is extreme capitalism’s subjective face. subjectivity is also central to salzinger’s contribution, which draws on ethno- graphic work among traders in new york and mexico city to illuminate how the myth of an asocial, self-interested homo economicus is performed, albeit in a hypermasculinized guise. for balibar, however, extreme capitalism unmakes subjectivities and undoes the possessive individualism of lockean liberalism. extreme capitalism, balibar insists, is an extremely unstable complex. as an imaginary restoration of classical liberalism in the wake of socialism, it is a postsocialist formation that destroys the commons even while “it must keep alive (even if starving) what it destroys continuously” (p. ). for newfield, too, capitalism is increasingly reliant on a mass intellectuality that neo- liberal “innovation” disrupts and erodes. here, it is socialism that appears as the zombie that stalks our neoliberal present. for elyacher, neoliberalism emerged in the course of the socialist calculation debate of the s and s, as figures like ludwig von mises and hayek battled against a socialism they depicted as primitive irrationalism. for rofel and moodie, scholars of neoliberalism have tended to underestimate “the legacies of socialism and the cold war,” assuming that the latter is over and the former buried. but both china and india, they argue, reveal unstable amalgams of neoliberalism and socialism, while socialism’s legacy still animates popular conceptions of a good life. the editors endorse stuart hall’s contention that challenging neoliberal “populism” requires a “social- ism which is without guarantees” (p. ). taken together, the chapters ask us to consider whether socialism can also mutate in ways that enable it to thrive again, on the left rather than the right, or whether the materials of the “political rupture” with neoliberalism that the book’s subtitle heralds must come from within the beast itself, by taking up its own vocabulary and premises in altered form. reclaiming patriotism. by amitai etzioni. charlottesville: university of virginia press, . p. $ . paper. doi: . /s — yael tamir , oxford university yulit@beitberl.ac.il reclaiming patriotism is an excellent and thought- provoking book. its author amitai etzioni, one of the founders of communitarian thinking, needs no introduc- tion. his books, the spirit of community: rights respon- sibilities and the communitarian agenda ( ) and the new golden rule: community and morality in a demo- cratic society ( ), are cornerstones of this movement. when other political philosophers and sociologists were tilting toward liberal individualism, etzioni kept the com- munitarian spirit alive. true to his preaching, etzioni is not only a theoretician but also a social activist. in the early s he established the communitarian network as a vehicle to disseminate his ideas and introduce them into the public discourse, and it remains active today. his new book follows in the same spirit and ends with a call for action. sketching a new social contract that would allow for the revival of social and political trust, etzioni asks us to realize that we are entering a “post affluent” era: indeed, this is one of the most important messages of the book. it looks the meager reality of the twenty-first century straight in the eye and admits that scarcity is here to stay. dreams of economic progress and material prosperity are fading, replaced by a pursuit of nonmaterialistic sources of happiness and satisfaction. there could not be a more relevant description of a century in which most of us (the %) are going to have less. the coronavirus pandemic turned this call into a neces- sity. the “c generation” is going to search for protection and salvation, and they will not be looking to the global arena for help. instead, they will be turning to their own nation-state that has suddenly become more relevant to them than ever. when the pandemic erupted, borders closed one after the other, and people were forced to realize that their prospects of receiving proper medical treatment and sufficient economic support depend on their nation- state. the test of economic success is no longer the pace of growth or the percentage of national debt (by these stand- ards we are all losers now), but the level of national investments and the ability to kickstart the market, increase buying power, and create new jobs. the “invisible hand” has vanished. we are back to the age of the active nation-state that intervenes internally and march | vol. /no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://doi.org/ . /s https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:yulit@beitberl.ac.il https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core externally to offer better jobs and life prospects for its workers. under these conditions, nationalism can no longer be ignored. nevertheless, etzioni shies away from using the term “nationalism,” which, i argue, is a mistake. the book’s motto, taken from charles de gaulle, stresses the difference between nationalism and patriotism: “patriotism is when the love of your country comes first; nationalism, when hate for people other than your own comes first.” in reality, the difference between these two concepts is far smaller than claimed, and etzioni’s own book is the best evidence of this. once he makes a claim for patriotism, etzioni diverts to nationalism every step of the way: his major focal points are the nation-state and the national community. the title of the introduction “good nationalism—saving democracy through national community building” and the ending paragraph of the book speak for themselves: “the patriotic movementneedstoachieve more than merely reuniting usby reinforcing the national community to contain—but not suppress—differences. it must figure out what we are all seeking to accomplish together, above and beyond our varying personal and subgroup pursuits, and what kind of future we envision for the nation” (p. ). no nationalist could have phrased it better. the tendency to identify good nationalism with patri- otism is widespread, but its theoretical grounds are flimsy. nationalism and patriotism are family members: both are “affinity-bound obligations”; namely, obligations based in particular relationships. grounded in love, parenthood, friendship, and national loyalty, such obligations could be taken to the extreme. obsessive lovers are probably as dangerous as extreme nationalists, and oppressive parents can bring great harm to their children as much as zealot nationalists can bring great harm to their nations. yet we do not have different concepts for good and bad parents or for moderate and obsessive lovers. why should we have one for good or bad nationalists? some may think this is a petty semantic debate. i beg to differ. by surrendering the notion of nationalism into the hands of extremists, we deprive ourselves of its extraor- dinary recruiting power. right-wing conservative leaders like donald trump are quick to harness nationalism for their purposes. “a globalist,” trump argues “is a person who wants the globe to do well, not caring about our country so much…. we’re putting america first…. i’m a nationalist, okay? i’m a nationalist.” but what about us members of the progressive camp? i am a nationalist. i dare say etzioni and other defenders of the american spirit, supporters of black lives matters, and guardians of the constitution are also nationalists (hidden nationalists). attempts to override nationalism, etzioni admits, “will continue breeding alienation and populism in the foreseeable future” (p. ). so, rather than hiding nationalism, patriots should openly endorse the national stance and join the struggle to redefine the greatness of nations. in other words, rather than worrying why trump is a nationalist, we should worry why many progressives weaken themselves by claiming they are not. loyal oppositions are taking to the streets all over the globe. in india, israel, ukraine, france, and the united states, people march waving their national flags as a statement of belonging. much in the spirit of etzioni’s recommendations, they aspire to establish a new social contract. for etzioni, this contract is grounded in a set of untidy compromises between rights and duties, personal freedoms and national security, as well as between con- sumerism and the good life. this leads to etzioni’s most important point: we ought to change not only our politics but also our preferences, seeking happiness and spiritual contentment rather than accumu- lating material commodities and wealth. people should limit their future consumption and use their free time and resources to gain contentment from other sources. namely, contentment will be derived from sources that are neither labor nor capital intensive, but are ones that are sustainable and more amenable to distribution. these include cultivat- ing intimate relations and engaging in public service (e.g., volunteering) and transcendental activities (p. ). can we rewrite a new social contract when social schisms are deepening and social trust continues to decline? i would like to end with a word of optimism. the social, health, and economic crises characteristic of the beginning of the twenty-first century force more and more people to realize they are on the side of the vulnerable, exposed to dangers they cannot manage on their own. this kind of vulnerability brings them closer together. today’s needy (the infected, the elderly, and the unemployed alongside low-income work- ers), as well as the needy of the future, are exposed to an endless list of unknown dangers (from global warming to future pandemics). searching for a decent level of security, they seek to establish a post-affluent coalition. its essence is simple. as etzioni writes, it “ensures that everyone has their basic needs well met” (p. ). under these unusual condi- tions the traditional divide between right and left is dead. leaders seek to converge on patriotism, restrained con- sumerism, and environmentalism to create a livable society. will such a convergence dominate the future politics of the united states? no responsible analyst will take the risk of predicting what will happen, but some signs of conver- gence are emerging. in june , the new york times, well entrenched in neoliberalism, deviated from its eco- nomic credo and published a series of articles under the title “the america we need,” calling for a more humane capitalism. businessmen and mega-companies are calling for a move from a shareholders’ to a stakeholders’ economy, advocating a certain degree of protectionism. joe biden’s campaign reflected these new attitudes, urging people to “buy american,” create more jobs, and protect the envir- onment. the coronavirus and its effects may have achieved what many good theoreticians failed to do: it has changed the nature of social, moral, economic, and political perspectives on politics book reviews | political theory https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core discourse. for those who wish to step into this new era of post-affluence with an arsenal of good ideas, etzioni’s book is a great place to start. foretelling the end of capitalism: intellectual misad- ventures since karl marx. by francesco boldizzoni. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, . p. $ . cloth. doi: . /s — james chamberlain , mississippi state university jac @msstate.edu foretelling the end of capitalism provides a sweeping intellectual history of political economy, focusing on myr- iad attempts to prophesize the end of capitalism—made by supporters and detractors alike—that are as old as capital- ism itself. but francesco boldizzoni’s ambitions do not stop at documenting the twists and turns of thought trying to keep pace with social transformations, and even (in many cases) struggling to bend them toward emanci- patory ends. in fact, the author wagers that the history of failed prophecies of the impending collapse of capitalism can teach us about capitalism itself, including how and why it manages to survive each successive crisis. the lessons learned from this study, boldizzoni claims, show that any contemporary attempt to “‘overthrow the system’ is lost from the start” and risks “delegitimizing the reformist politics that are needed” (p. ). however, although the intellectual history is deep and engaging, the broader conclusions that boldizzoni draws from it are questionable. the book consists of an introduction, which lays out its central argument and provides an overview of the remain- der of the book, followed by six chapters. each of the first four chapters focuses on a broadly defined period and its key thinkers and debates: from the first use of the word “capitalism” in the middle of the nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, from the eve of world war i to the close of war world ii, the postwar period up until the end of s, and the s to the present. the fifth chapter is more conceptual in orientation: it seeks to understand why so many prophecies of the end of capit- alism have failed. finally, chapter introduces boldizzo- ni’s account of the persistence of capitalism, which then motivates his plea for a reformist politics that aims for the “renewal” of social democracy (p. ). boldizzoni declares that the “book is aimed at a general readership,” particularly those with an interest in “social justice” (p. ). indeed, a clear strength of the book is its accessibly written narrative of the evolution of political economic thought from marx to the present day. in itself, this makes for rewarding reading, as boldizzoni skillfully weaves together the analyses of dozens of thinkers while placing them into the broader socioeconomic context of their times. it is also worth emphasizing that boldizzoni does not focus exclusively on marxist and other radical thinkers but also devotes significant attention to the writings of john stuart mill, max weber, john maynard keynes, joseph schumpeter, daniel bell, and a cast of other lesser-known figures who each identified tendencies in capitalism that pointed to the limits of its further growth, if not its eventual demise. in this sense, the first four chapters of the book serve as an excellent primer on political economy, because boldizzoni provides succinct summaries of the positions developed by these thinkers and the relations between them. chapter is particularly compelling in its discussion of the third way project, which emerged at a time when “capitalism was asserting itself as the only viable system” (p. ) and sought to combine not socialism and capitalism but neoliberalism and social democracy. perhaps inevitably for a work of such vast scope, however, the book is sometimes lacking in analysis of the individual thinkers: where boldizzoni does critique a given argument, space dictates that the engagement remains brief. to some readers, this may appear as a strength, however, because it means that the discussion of each thinker remains largely neutral and descriptive, without the author imposing his views onto theirs. more- over, it should be recalled that what motivates boldizzoni’s discussion of so many thinkers is the attempt to discern the cause of capitalism’s persistence from their failed predic- tions about its demise. given this, a detailed critique of each argument would be redundant, because what really matters to boldizzoni is that “these prophecies never came true” (p. ). yet this raises the broader question of how (or when) to determine whether prophecies about the end of capitalism have (not) come true. for example, boldizzoni notes that “marx did not offer actual dates” for the abolition of private property, although he “did provide a precise indi- cation of the sequence of necessary preconditions” (p. ). at what point in time can we say that marx’s general prediction about the overcoming of capitalism has been either falsified or verified? similarly, boldizzoni acknow- ledges that herbert marcuse “harbored no illusions about a rapid victory” of the new left in his counterrevolution and revolt, ending that book instead with the vague claim that “‘the final crisis of capitalism’ may take all but a century” (qtd. on p. ). to be sure, capitalism is alive and kicking in . but because marcuse’s book was published in , there still remains a half-century for this prediction to be falsified. chapter offers an “autopsy” of the various prophecies and to that end groups them into four typologies, centered on the dynamics and causal factors that they theorize: “theories of implosion, exhaustion, convergence and cultural innovation” (p. ). then, on the basis of this concep- tualization, boldizzoni considers a range of factors that explain the failure of forecasts, the most important of which for his purposes concerns the “underestimation of march | vol. /no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://doi.org/ . /s https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:jac @msstate.edu https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core alone in the crowd: appropriated text and subjectivity in the work of rirkrit tiravanija san jose state university from the selectedworks of liz linden july , alone in the crowd: appropriated text and subjectivity in the work of rirkrit tiravanija liz linden, university of wollongong available at: https://works.bepress.com/liz-linden/ / http://www.sjsu.edu https://works.bepress.com/liz-linden/ https://works.bepress.com/liz-linden/ / liz linden alone in the crowd: appropriated text and subjectivity in the work of rirkrit tiravanija much has been made of the interactivity and relationships generated in rirkrit tiravanija’s work, most often used to exemplify the ‘convivial’ relational aesthetics mode described in nicholas bourriaud’s influential book relational aesthetics. (tiravanija’s work was also depicted on its cover.) tiravanija’s work has been presented, and re-presented, by critics of all stripes as they review and revise bourriaud’s original claims for relational practices, most often re-interpreting the stakes of such interactive art using bourriaud’s main reference, tiravanija, as their own cardinal point around which to orient their digressions from bourriaud’s path. as a result, tiravanija’s work has become absolutely emblematic of the practice. and while tiravanija’s practice is indeed exemplary of a number of notable aspects of interactive art, that interactivity is just one of two salient characteristics of relational work named by bourriaud. in postproduction, bourriaud’s ‘continuation’ of his arguments commenced in relational aesthetics, bourriaud makes a case for the significance not only of interactivity to relational work, but also appropriation. of these practices that take on the nicolas bourriaud, relational aesthetics, simon pleasance and fronza woods, trans, les presses du réel, dijon, p nicolas bourriaud, postproduction: culture as screenplay: how art reprograms the world, caroline schneider, trans, jeanine herman, ed, lukas & sternberg, new york, p liz linden constructs of existing social environments, use is an act of micropirating that constitutes postproduction.… starting with the language imposed upon us (the system of production), we construct our own sentences (acts of everyday life), thereby reappropriating for ourselves, through these clandestine microbricolages, the last word in the productive chain…. appropriation is indeed the first stage of postproduction. thus bourriaud presents relational works, literally and figuratively, as a long chain of mixed-metaphors, set in motion by appropriation. in this paper, i will look at tiravanija’s relationship to appropriation (the other side of the relational coin) since, like interactivity, it is a cornerstone of his practice, manifesting in his installations, videos, prints, paintings and, notably, in his work with text. one immediate complication to understanding tiravanija’s practice as appropriation, and perhaps an explanation for why the interactivity of his relational work is more widely discussed, is related to the way appropriation itself has been theorised. ‘appropriation art’ generally refers to practices theorised in relation to postmodernism, which characterise appropriation’s recontextualisation of an element from an external site into the frame of an artwork as a critical engagement with authorship. but while appropriation has had a long and varied history in many diverse cultures, from the reverent linmo practice in traditional chinese painting to the ‘mimesis…of ancestral ibid, pp – , emphasis in the original eva kit wah man, issues of contemporary art and aesthetics in chinese context, springer, berlin, heidelberg, p liz linden designs as a form of sympathetic magic’ in the work of australian aboriginal artists, the postmodern frames for appropriation nonetheless came to define the practice in western art discourse. this is primarily due to the writings of a small group of new york-based critics publishing on the topic in the late s and early s in the pages of the journal october, writing prompted by a small group exhibition in new york’s artists space titled ‘pictures’, curated by october editor douglas crimp. crimp and the october writers traced appropriation’s precursors not to its variety of ancient manifestations but to european traditions ranging from renaissance painting to dada collage to the french surrealists to, ultimately, the rise of photography. while crimp and his peers wrote eloquently on the role of appropriation in a number of works in the ‘pictures’ exhibition, their foundational essays on appropriation tended to focus on the operation of images in the works. as i have discussed elsewhere , this focus on imagery as the primary element of appropriation was ironic because, while these writers used literary theory (semiotics, deconstruction) to make sense of how the art operated, their writing tending to ignore any text present in the artworks they were discussing. as a result, invoking the term ‘appropriation’ today still calls forth richard prince’s marlboro men instead of his joke paintings, and jack goldstein’s barking dog instead of his boldly labeled records displayed on the wall. ian mclean, 'post-western poetics: postmodern appropriation art in australia', art history, vol , no , , p liz linden, 'reframing pictures: reading the art of appropriation', art journal, vol , no , , pp - liz linden this persistent emphasis on western art-historical precedents and image-based appropriation does a disservice to the diversity of contemporary artists working with appropriation today, artists for whom appropriation is not purely a postmodern, or image- based, operation, nor is it originating from a singular source: not new york, or china, or australia. indeed tiravanija’s appropriations are a product of their time, with its globalised economy and its multiplicity of places. in tiravanija’s work with text, his longstanding engagement with appropriation is made plain, not only because found language has for so long served as a cornerstone of his practice, but also because the way he uses appropriated language underscores broader political operations of his work that are often concealed in the rhetoric of relationality. ** in relational aesthetics, bourriaud specifically identified the interactivity of tiravanija’s practice as exemplary of contemporary art practices in which ‘…the role of artworks is no longer to form imaginary and utopian realities, but to actually be ways of living and models of action within the existing real, whatever the scale chosen by the artist’ . for bourriaud, this pragmatism is what is radical about these artworks because, in any context, ‘the relationship between people, as symbolised by goods or replaced by them, and signposted by logos, has to take on extreme and clandestine forms, if it is to bourriaud, relational aesthetics, op cit, p liz linden dodge the empire of predictability,’ and, for bourriaud, relational work such as tiravanija’s produces these ‘hands-on utopias’ in which free relations may be possible. bourriaud’s claims for tiravanija’s work became so overdetermining that the vast majority of writing on his work (this included) either mentions bourriaud and the term ‘relational aesthetics’ explicitly or describes the work using bourriaud-favored short- hands such as ‘utopian’ , ‘companionable’ , ‘hospitable’ or ‘generous’ . relational aesthetics was further established as the theoretical frame for tiravanija’s work when, ibid, p ibid, p see, as just a few among a great many examples: andrew berardini, ‘everything is tiravanija's, but it's also yours’, x-tra, vol , no , , http://x- traonline.org/article/everything-is-tiravanijas-but-its-also-yours/ (accessed on july ); gregory galligan, 'follow the screenplay', artasiapacific , , p ; pamela m. lee, new games: postmodernism after contemporary art, routledge, london and new york, , p . adam welch, 'review: fear eats the soul', ceramics: art and perception , , p ; janet kraynak, ‘the land and the economics of sustainability’, art journal, vol , no , , p anthony downey, 'towards a politics of (relational) aesthetics', third text , vol , no , , p faye hirsch, 'passport, please', art in america, vol , no , , p joshua decter, ‘review: rirkrit tiravanija, gavin brown's enterprise’, artforum, vol , no , , p ; janet kraynak, 'tiravanija's liability', documents , , p liz linden two years after bourriaud’s text was translated in english, claire bishop published her own influential essay on the topic, ‘antagonism and relational aesthetics’, in the pages of october. bishop’s text functions both as a criticism of bourriaud’s book and a secondhand critique of the work bourriaud describes, since she is essentially taking issue with those works as characterised by bourriaud. liam gillick, the only artist other than tiravanija on which bishop focuses her critique, famously rebuked bishop (and october) for this armchair criticism, writing that in her essay ‘a set of artists has been shoehorned into a battle about intellectual territory that merely compounds the problems inherent in relational aesthetics’ , and that bishop further arms these artists for this metaphorical battle with words and concepts that are not their own. gillick explains, ‘bishop extensively quotes museum guides, pamphlets, and mainstream art criticism in relation to tiravanija and me, as if these reflect our ideas and ideology’ . ironically the highly public inter-critic tussle over accuracy and relevance between bourriaud and bishop, and later bishop and gillick, only further confirmed relational aesthetics as the lens through which art around the turn of the millennium would be viewed. while the tale of critical infighting surrounding relational aesthetics may seem tangential to my primary focus on tiravanija’s use of appropriated text, it is important to consider because bishop’s essay and these critical revisions contain useful insights into the political stakes of relational work and how community is constituted within it. bishop points out that bourriaud framed these interactive practices as liam gillick and claire bishop, 'letters and responses', october , , p ibid, p liz linden superior to optical contemplation of an object, which is assumed to be passive and disengaged, because the work of art is a ‘social form’ capable of producing positive human relationships. as a consequence, the work is automatically political in implication and emancipatory in effect. holding these relational works up to this standard, bishop identifies a number of flaws in bourriaud’s argument, questioning for example his focus on the interactive structure of the work as its source of meaning, rather than the content contained within it, pointing out that ‘what tiravanija cooks, how and for whom, are less important to bourriaud than the fact he gives away the results of his cooking for free’ . this question of who gets to participate in the ‘micro-communities’ so celebrated by bourriaud is at the heart of bishop’s critique for whom ‘relational art is entirely beholden to the contingencies of its environment and audience’ for its perceived success. but as much as bishop’s essay was critical of what she perceived as tiravanija’s work’s reliance on ‘an ideal of subjectivity as whole and of community as immanent togetherness’ in order for his work to function, tiravanija’s work is precisely about divided subjectivities. on this, tiravanija is explicit: recalling his childhood in thailand attending an american catholic school he recalls thinking ‘i am growing up in this claire bishop 'antagonism and relational aesthetics', october , , p ibid, p , emphasis in the original bourriaud, relational aesthetics, op cit, p bishop, ‘antagonism’, op cit, p ibid, p liz linden contemporary modern structure to be fragmented, influenced, and subconsciously colonised’ and says that as an artist he has dedicated his practice to addressing this fragmented subjectivity, explaining, ‘all the things i have been doing are about getting myself back’ . thus while many, like bishop, see tiravanija’s work as lacking political ‘friction’ , others identify the perceived amiability of his installations as a trojan horse, disguising the more critical operations inside. tiravanija’s longtime dealer, gavin brown, characterises tiravanija’s practice by its ‘melancholia’, explaining: rirkrit’s story seems well known: shit-eating grin and a friend to all. his name and practice have become so naturally ubiquitous that one doesn’t even question what occupied the historical space before him. it’s so familiar and comfortable. rice & curry—feels good in the tummy. but is that really the story here? of course there is still a heartening thrill in eating a meal in a gallery. one has that elusive real moment. but in the end i always leave rirkrit’s work feeling depressed. where was the hope and feeling of community? brown’s discomfort with the ‘“friendship” culture’ so many critics link to tiravanija’s practice belies the authoritarian aspect of tiravanija’s constructed situations, in which the brainard carey and delia bajo, ‘art in conversation: rirkrit tiravanija’, brooklyn rail, february , http://www.brooklynrail.org/ / /art/rirkrit-tiravanija (accessed on july ) bishop, ‘antagonism’, op cit, p rirkrit tiravanija, supermarket, dap, new york, p bourriaud, relational aesthetics, op cit, p http://www.brooklynrail.org/ / /art/rirkrit-tiravanija liz linden viewer is, by definition, in the artist’s control. brown reminds us that ‘in the end we are within his structure, his world—a frame generally made from the cheapest plywood’ . in short, the ‘equality’ identified by some as valorised in relational work ignores the circumscribing hierarchy and artifice around it. for example tiravanija’s untitled (shall we dance?) from consisted of a room in new york’s gallery installed with a record player, a single record (the soundtrack from the king and i) and the artist himself. when visitors entered the room, tiravanija would play the song ‘shall we dance?’ and invite them to join him in a waltz, immediately implicating them in the absurdly revisionist historical romance between gertrude lawrence as ‘an english school teacher’ and yul brenner in blackface as ‘the “uncivilized” siamese king’ . further his now-iconic untitled (pad thai) ( ), in which the artist cooked and gave away a pad thai meal to visitors on the opening night of his exhibition at the paula allen gallery, was not only assumed to be catering by many of the gallery’s visitors, but points to ongoing misunderstandings and biases triggered by his works with giveaway food. one art dealer who visited a tiravanija installation, for example, embeds his after-the-fact critique of the ‘disingenuousness’ of the community in tiravanija’s works with a telling misrepresentation, recalling, ‘the only people that came in [to tiravanija’s exhibition] were people trying to get a free lunch, like unpaid critics tiravanija, supermarket, op cit, p dominique gonzalez-foerster quoted in bourriaud, postproduction, op cit, p record sleeve text by th century fox film corporation from rodgers and hammerstein, the king and i, e.m.i. limited, australia, liz linden who would go in twenty-five times to get spring rolls’ . that tiravanija has never served spring rolls in his work exposes, among other things, the speaker’s disengagement from the cultural specificity of the elements in that artwork and also echoes bishop’s critique of bourriaud’s own lack of critical interest in what tiravanija cooks. raimar stange calls these cultural elisions and oversights between thailand and the west ‘the real questions’ explored in tiravanija’s work, questions that, for tiravanija, manifest most explicitly in text. tiravanija has explained that, from the outset of his practice, ‘it was all about language and identity’ , and indeed his engagement with text was evident early on from texts etched in glass (on the face of an empty vitrine, on eyeglasses) to a collaborative dual-language magazine (ver) to his early postcards. like the glasses (an edition for parkett from ) or ver (a magazine tiravanija has published in collaboration with other thai artists since ), tiravanija’s early works with text were often created as editions, made to circulate more widely than his unique works, therefore mobilising language as a way to communicate the imperatives inherent in his other projects. for example, a poster tiravanija made in collaboration with sculptor mark di suvero (figure ) was created as a complement to their collaborative peace vito acconci, kenny schachter and lilian pfaff, art becomes architecture becomes art: a conversation between vito acconci and kenny schachter, springerwien, new york, , p raimar stange, ‘interview: rirkrit tiravanija’, spike art quarterly , vienna, , http://www.spikeartmagazine.com/en/articles/interview-rirkrit-tiravanija (accessed on december ) carey and bajo, ‘art in conversation’, op cit http://www.spikeartmagazine.com/en/articles/interview-rirkrit-tiravanija liz linden tower ( ) project in that year’s whitney biennial. the poster was distributed as a fold out component of the biennial’s catalog and presents a front page of the los angeles free press newspaper from , which describes preparations for the original peace tower, a massive public artwork originally created by di suvero and other artists in los angeles to protest the war in vietnam. over this found newspaper describing the original artwork that he and di suvero have recreated, tiravanija has stenciled the text ‘come together’, in white letters that disappear into the color of the newsprint. the appropriated phrase, ‘come together’, brings with it a long chain of references. john tain explains: …the textual intervention is identifiable as tiravanija’s from both the layout and the slogan form, similar to that of other pieces…. and yet, of course, we would also recognize the words not as tiravanija’s at all, but taken from john lennon’s lyrics for the beatles song of the same name (which itself was inspired in turn by timothy leary’s gubernatorial campaign against ronald reagan). one consequence of the phrase’s familiarity is that it appears simple, a platitude from the past reappearing in the present. but the historical specificity of these s era pop cultural references (the original peace tower in watts, john lennon, californian culture-clash politics) introduced into the milieu of post / new york city (the city marked as a site, and justification, for violence— including as the site of lennon’s assassination) resonate with a complex warning. john tain, ‘peace tower as commonplace: relational aesthetics' lieux de mémoire’, public art dialogue , , p liz linden often making multiple paintings of the same slogan, presented against a background of contemporary newspaper spreads, tiravanija is able to amplify these resonances over time, recontextualising the recurring appropriated texts into new political dialogues depending on the backing newspaper. for example, his painting untitled (the days of this society is numbered/september , ) ( ) presents spreads from the september st edition of the new york times, painted over with an orange text written in the same uppercase helvetica typeface he tends to use in many of his other text-based works (figure ). in this case, the painted text is a clumsy translation of a quote from guy debord, leader of the situationist international and author of society of the spectacle. the dual appropriation of the warning of the french post-war political theorist with the contemporary american newspaper headlines combines to create an atmosphere of post-globalised dread. the chaotic background is dominated visually by the colorful presence of advertisements for airlines, men’s department stores and expensive jewelry cheering consumption in the wake of the global financial crisis, while the more sober tones of the editorial content recede into the background. against this, debord’s quote reads as an explicit damnation of our unquestioning, passive acceptance of consumer culture, made all the more urgent for its massive orange presence; as tall as a person, the canvas overwhelms the viewer. by contrast another variant of the work, untitled (the days of this society is numbered/december , ) ( ), pairs the same text appropriated from debord painted over a thai paper from detailing the thai king’s illness (figure ). while the overall effect of this work to earlier (and subsequent) versions is obviously related (newspaper backgrounds, same painted phrase, same ‘default’ typeface), the overall liz linden signification of the work is changed through the implication of thai national politics, the significantly more blue hue to the overall color of the newspaper background, the translucent black (opposed to solid orange) paint, and the changed line breaks of the phrase itself. while the earlier version reads, ‘the/ days/ of/ this/ society/ is/ numberered’, the later one reads, ‘the/ days/ of/ this/ society/ is numberered’, letting ‘is’ and ‘numbered’ settle together at the bottom of the canvas where the fatalistic verdict stands alone. in the context of the ongoing, iterative nature of this work, with the same phrase reproduced over the course of many canvases and prints, the ‘is numbered’ portion of the phrase also becomes self-referential, alluding to the inner-workings of art editions as well as the potentiality of the luxury market itself in a moment characterised by the occupy wall street movement. this art-world institutional critique further points to the multivalent signification of the phrase in the various architectures it is deployed, re-signifying not only based on the newspapers which bear it, but also in respect to the gallery or collection wall on which it hangs. these temporal and contextual slippages are not the only mix-ups present in this work. quentin bajac, a french curator working at the museum of modern art, which owns untitled (the days of this society is numbered/december , ), explains of the debord reference that, ‘it mistranslates it, in bad international english that i and a lot of people are practicing’ . this issue of translation, specifically as it relates to globalisation and the internationalism of the art world, is one that tiravanija repeatedly takes up, andy battaglia, ‘moma takes a fresh look at new art’, the wall street journal, march , , http://www.wsj.com/articles/moma-takes-a-fresh-look-at-new-art- (accessed on july , ) liz linden perhaps unsurprisingly given his own background. born in argentina to thai parents (his father was a diplomat, his mother an oral surgeon), tiravanija was schooled in thailand, ethiopia, the us and canada. he remains peripatetic and polyglot, traveling and moving between homes frequently, with studios in bangkok, new york and berlin. he has referred to his international upbringing as formative for his work, explaining in an interview in that, ‘all the work that i have ever made is about the position i am in the western world, which i was trying to understand’ . and tiravanija’s work is as much about understanding his place in the west as it is about considering his place in thailand. writer doryun chong explains how tiravanija’s life-size plastic sculpture of a pad thai dish, young man, if my wife makes it…, received its title (figure ): the title comes from an interaction [tiravanija] once had with a senior thai artist, who on the occasion of the younger artist’s lecture on his earlier cooking performance ‘pad thai,’ uttered those derisive words to question its status as art. tiravanija recalls: ‘there were at the time questions concerning the authenticity of my thainess, and [whether] i was using thainess (culture) as an exotic flavour, for which [it] became in the western context a successful work of art.’ the question—a dilemma shared by many non-western contemporary artists— stayed with him. carey and bajo, ‘art in conversation’, op cit doryun chong, ‘rirkrit tiravanija’, walker art center website, http://www.walkerart.org/collections/artists/rirkrit- tiravanija?gclid=cobxyvvt c cfqwwvqod-ccn g (accessed on july ) liz linden while the appropriated text in this case appears in the title of tiravanija’s work and is therefore not visible in the form of the sculpture itself, it nonetheless sets the trap for tiravanija’s critique of identity, alluding to the status of the sculpture as a facsimile of something ‘real’. tiravanija’s work evinces further personal insights into the broader politics of translation and globalisation, both in the art world specifically and beyond, by appropriating text to bring previously unlikely cultural elisions into view. in tiravanija’s text-paintings and elsewhere, linguistic slip-ups and misfires recur with some regularity. for example, one component of his exhibition, fear eats the soul at gavin brown’s enterprise in new york, was untitled (t-shirt, no t-shirt), a freestanding print shop silk-screening white t-shirts with various awkwardly constructed phrases immortalising such cultural collisions (figures and ). for twenty dollars, visitors could order a shirt screenprinted with a phrase chosen from a variety of improbable options, ranging from the unlikely (‘make a monkey out of clay’) to the uncomfortable (‘iran irag ikea i am busy’) to the openly hostile (‘we don’t mix’) to the outright bigoted (‘asians must eat rice’). tiravanija’s linguistic appropriations point to the ways in which speech is power, because the verbal tics and subconscious elisions that are expressed in spoken language expose the assumptions embedded within its constituent parts. unlike the appropriations of the s and s with their implied critique of authorship, tiravanija’s appropriations of racist language, such as his ‘asians must eat rice’, do not so much interrogate the origins of such language as put these words in others’ mouths (and on their bodies), effectively mobilising these viewer-participants into an ironic army of post-colonial liz linden political critique for the anthropocene age. in other words, tiravanija’s appropriated texts operate differently than those texts appropriated in ‘pictures’-era artworks with their postmodern concerns, and tiravanija has confirmed that ‘i am not interested in authorship’ . instead, in cases such as his reinscription of racist tropes onto the bodies of paying participants, tiravanija appropriates not for postmodern, or reverential, or mimetic reasons, but for a literally of-the-moment one: to introduce political questions about who is speaking these words now. while art theory has thus far had little to say on the operations of appropriated language in contemporary art, literary theory addresses the politics of appropriated language explicitly in contemporary writing on conceptual poetry, meaning practices that are ‘a form of copying, recycling, or appropriation’ , in which ‘the idea becomes a machine that makes the text’ . such conceptual writing has been widely discussed as a st century avant-garde in which citational and appropriative strategies have yielded new insights into the recontextualised material by structuring it into new forms. but increasingly such formal framings of conceptual poetry’s appropriation of language have been challenged, both because these linguistic appropriations are seen as ‘a racist tradition… ignoring major swaths of innovators—namely poets from past african american literary movements—whose prodigious writings… avant-gardists have stange, ‘interview’, op cit marjorie perloff, unoriginal genius: poetry by other means in the new century, the university of chicago press, chicago and london, p kenneth goldsmith, 'kenneth goldsmith and conceptual poetics', open letter: a canadian journal of writing and theory, vol , no , , p liz linden usurped without proper acknowledgement’ , thus rendering appropriation simply a ‘formalist white-gaze gesture’ , and also because conceptual poetry’s rejection of authorship seems predicated on ‘the specious belief that renouncing subject and voice is anti-authoritarian, when in fact such wholesale pronouncements are clueless that the disenfranchised need such bourgeois niceties like voice to alter conditions forged in history’ . poet cathy park hong identifies these criticisms as emerging out of ‘a new movement in american poetry, a movement galvanized by the activism of black lives matter, spearheaded by writers of color’ , characterising this ‘new movement’ as operating in two ways, either by ‘fueling a raw politics into personal lyric’, or by cathy park hong, ‘delusions of whiteness in the avant-garde’, lana turner: a journal of poetry and opinion , , http://www.lanaturnerjournal.com/ /delusions- of-whiteness-in-the-avant-garde (accessed on july ) john keene, ‘on vanessa place, gone with the wind, and the limit point of certain conceptual aesthetics’, j's theater, may , http://jstheater.blogspot.com.au/ / /on-vanessa-place-gone-with-wind-and.html (accessed on july ) hong, ‘delusions’, op cit, emphasis in the original cathy park hong, ‘there's a new movement in american poetry and it's not kenneth goldsmith’, the new republic, october , , https://newrepublic.com/article/ /new-movement-american-poetry-not-kenneth- goldsmith (accessed on july ) http://www.lanaturnerjournal.com/ /delusions-of-whiteness-in-the-avant-garde http://www.lanaturnerjournal.com/ /delusions-of-whiteness-in-the-avant-garde http://jstheater.blogspot.com.au/ / /on-vanessa-place-gone-with-wind-and.html https://newrepublic.com/article/ /new-movement-american-poetry-not-kenneth-goldsmith https://newrepublic.com/article/ /new-movement-american-poetry-not-kenneth-goldsmith liz linden ‘redefining’ avant-garde appropriation . hong describes how such poets are making writing that is multivalent in its forms and its references, increasingly: …minstrelized, digitalized, theatricalized artifice, speaking in a mélange of offshoots, with multiple entryways and exits through the soaring use of aberrant vernaculars. the form is code-switching: code-switching between languages, between englishes, between genres, between races, between bodies. this is the code-switching evidenced by tiravanija’s texts, and framed by his efforts to understand his upbringing between thailand and elsewhere. his appropriation of language is therefore an act of reclamation, of ‘getting himself back’, exploring subjectivity by using texts that are specifically as divided and contingent as tiravanija’s multilingualism itself. tiravanija’s appropriated texts use such ‘code-switching’ not to critique originality and authorship, but to reanimate and then repossess. he explains that rather than wanting to explore authorship as originating from a single, monolithic voice, ‘i am interested in the possibilities that can be arrived at when people put their ideas together. there are ideas that have been released into the world of culture that i find important to quote, re-present or re-address’ . yet tiravanija does not see this polyphony of voice as inherently utopian, explaining that, ironically, the very collectivity of his work so often characterised as hong, ‘new movement’, op cit hong, ‘delusions’, op cit stange, ‘interview’, op cit liz linden ‘emancipatory’ was actually supposed to spur opposing thoughts of responsibility in the viewer: when i started to cook and serve food… i quickly realised that viewers (readers, critics) were interpreting the work as performance in a beuysian sense, as a staged situation, which meant that viewers had a certain distance to it. i felt that this distance represented the gap in western thought between ‘subject’ and ‘object,’ which i needed to attack and dismantle – the ‘doubt’ about the author, or the ‘doubt’ about the subject’s position or positioning. so, in order to confuse the positions, i implicated the viewer. as in many of the appropriated elements of his works, the language tiravanija re- presents to the viewer is not specifically his (or anyone’s), but all of ours together, for which we are each accountable. ** that tiravanija is not commonly called an appropriation artist, or a text artist, exposes the critical biases both in how ‘appropriation’ was originally theorised and towards other, more of-the-moment theoretical frameworks. while he is most certainly a noteworthy creator of participatory, immaterial works, the ‘convivial’ label applied to that relational work continues to overshadow the actual imperatives of his practice. he is stewart martin, 'critique of relational aesthetics', third text , vol , no , , p stange, ‘interview’, op cit liz linden increasingly exhibiting fabricated static objects (sculptures, prints, paintings, videos, drawings, etc.), as indeed he has always done, while the more interactive installations are, if not rarer, at least often complemented or outnumbered by traditional works and editions in a given exhibition. in short, his works take on many guises, and many create a political critique through appropriation. tiravanija’s appropriations incorporate historical references beyond those texts from politics and pop culture considered above, as he also borrows widely from the worlds of film, fashion and literature, as well as architecture. works by noted architects including philip johnson, friedrich kiesler, r. m. schindler and others appear throughout his practice. tain explains that, ‘in reclaiming these [architectural] pieces, and “animating” the artwork as a site for the building of social relations, tiravanija cannily transforms the act of institutional critique from something that the artist reveals into something in which the viewer participates directly’ . and this transformation of something historically iconic into something with imminent use value is equally true of his textual appropriations, which ‘reclaim’ certain language and make the viewer interpret or, in other words, use it. his text-works therefore operate as a bridge between the language’s original significance and its multiplicity of present-day readings, the foundation of which is laid by the artist, and its connections made by the viewer. it is this implication of the viewer’s individual subjectivity (her assumptions, her politics, her references) that is precisely the innovation of tiravanija’s work; the interactivity of the tain, ‘peace tower’, p liz linden work makes each individual critically responsible for her own reading. while this may appear ‘sociable’ to some, in the end you are simply alone in the crowd. bourriaud, relational aesthetics, p 	san jose state university 	from the selectedworks of liz linden 	july , 	alone in the crowd: appropriated text and subjectivity in the work of rirkrit tiravanija 	by contrast another variant of the work, untitled (the days of this society is numbered/december , ) ( ), pairs the same text appropriated from debord painted over a thai paper from detailing the thai king’s illness (figure ). while the ... prediction and severity ratings of covid- in the united states disaster medicine and public health preparedness © society for disaster medicine and public health, inc. . this is an open access article, distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. doi: . /dmp. . prediction and severity ratings of covid- in the united states liping yue; taotao tu, phd ; xiuyuan geng abstract objectives: the objectives of this study is to predict the possible trajectory of coronavirus disease (covid- ) spread in the united states. prediction and severity ratings of covid- are essential for pandemic control and economic reopening in the united states. method: in this study, we apply the logistic and gompertz model to evaluate possible turning points of the covid- pandemic in different regions. by combining uncertainty and severity factors, this study con- structed an indicator to assess the severity of the coronavirus outbreak in various states. results: based on the index of severity ratings, different regions of the united states are classified into categories. the result shows that it is possible to identify the first turning point in montana and hawaii. it is unclear when the rest of the states will reach the first peak. however, it can be inferred that % of regions will not reach the first peak of coronavirus before august , . conclusion: it is still essential for the majority of states to take proactive steps to fight against covid- before august , . key words: covid- , prediction, severity rating the coronavirus disease (covid- )pandemic has caused major disruption to theglobal economy. according to centers for disease control and prevention (cdc), the total number of confirmed covid- cases reached , , on july , , in the united states, which ranks first in the world. on march , , san francisco began to adopt a lockdown measure, which aims to contain the spread of coronavirus. after that, most states have imposed similar measures restricting gathering and social contact. the lockdown measures are essential for virus containment. however, they hurt people’s livelihoods and brought chaos to the labor market and economic activity in the united states. according to the us bureau of labor statistics, total nonfarm payroll employment fell by , , in april , and the unemployment rate rose to . %. the coronavirus epidemic has devas- tated the national economy, with some million americans seeking unemployment benefits between march and april . the economic forecasting company goldman sachs predicted that the us gross domestic product (gdp) will fall by . % in , with growth falling % in the second-quarter gdp, and the unemployment rate expected to rise to . - % in the coming quarters. according to a report released by congressional budget office (cbo), real (inflation- adjusted) consumer spending fell by % from february to april, as social distancing reached its peak. in april, car and light truck sales were % below the monthly average. mortgage applications fell by % in april compared with the same period in . loosening coronavirus measures and reopening the economy have become the top priority for many states. however, to ease restrictions and resume business, it is crucial to know when covid- cases in the united states will peak. therefore, it makes sense to predict coronavirus trajectories in different states. review of the literature shows that the compartment model is the most widely used model, which can predict the characteristics of disease spread, such as the degree of the epidemic, and the duration of the outbreak. the susceptible-infected-recovered (sir) model is one of the simplest compartment models, which has under- lying assumptions. first, the total population of a city is constant. second, the health status of the commu- nity can be divided into categories, namely suscep- tible, infected, and recovered. third, the population is immobile, ie, no patients flow into or out of the city. fourth, infected patients under strict isolation will no longer infect others. the sir model can compute the theoretical number of people infected with coronavirus in a closed population over time. however, sir is only applicable to some acute infectious diseases that do not have an incubation period. to overcome this limitation, the susceptible-exposed-infectious-recovered (seir) model further takes into account a group of people who have the disease but are not yet infectious. original research https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /dmp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://orcid.org/ - - - https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /dmp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core the seir model enables analysis of disease spread, taking into account incubation periods. by adding a group of peo- ple with maternally derived passive immunity and another group having the disease but not yet infectious, seir model can be extended into an immunity-susceptible-exposed- infectious-recovered (mseir) model. it should be pointed out that the accuracy of the prediction relies on the basic reproduction number r for the above mod- els. the basic reproduction number, r , is the most critical parameter to determine the intrinsic transmissibility, which is the average number of secondary infectious cases generated by an index case in a completely susceptible population with- out any interventions. during the outbreak of an epidemic, the actual r is dynamic, which depends on the containment measures and governance patterns. for example, studies have found that r is different at various stages of the coronavirus epidemic (table ). - therefore, it is entirely reasonable to obtain different predictions of r for various research (table ). because r is changing in different stages of the outbreak, it may be difficult to make a precise prediction on the spread of infectious disease using compartment models. to avoid the difficulties of r estimation, we intend to use the logistic and gompertz models to predict coronavirus trajectories in dif- ferent states. one advantage of the types of models is that they can make full use of the historical data of coronavirus cases, thus taking into account the real-time information of the infection number. based on the prediction result of the models, we aim to put forward a methodology to identify the turning point in the spread of coronavirus in the united states. we will also introduce a grading index to measure the severity ratings of covid- in different regions of the united states. methods identification of the turning point to avoid the prediction difficulties caused by fluctuation of the basic reproduction number r , we use the logistic and gompertz function to predict confirmed covid- cases in the united states. to increase the robustness of prediction, we will apply models based on logistic and gompertz func- tions (see table ). a logistic function is a typical “s” shape (sigmoid curve), while the gompertz function is an asymmet- ric sigmoid shape (see figure ). in other words, the logistic model has the property of being symmetrical about the inflec- tion point, while gompertz curve is asymmetrical about the inflection point. in logistic and gompertz functions, y represents the evolution of the epidemic in the united states, which is the cumulative confirmed cases of covid- . t stands for time. both log and log are logistic functions: log is a logistic function with inter- cept term b , and log is the logistic function without an inter- cept term. both gom and gom are gompertz functions: gom is the gompertz function with intercept term b , and gom is the gompertz function without an intercept term. b is the curve’s maximum value. b is the steepness of the curve. b is the t-value of the sigmoid’s midpoint. the trajectories predicted by models represent paths that may appear in covid- ’s transmission. as external condi- tions change, the cumulative number of confirmed cases may follow either trajectory. examining the peaks of the paths will help identify the turning point of covid- in the united states. based on the models in table , pathlog , pathlog , pathgom , and pathgom are the predicted trajectories. suppose paths table prediction of the basic reproduction number of covid- author country sample period data sources r pan et al. china december to march , municipal notifiable disease report system . - zhao et al. china january to january , wuhan municipal health commission and national health commission of china . - . torres-roman et al. peru march to march , peruvian ministry of health . zhuang et al korea january to march , public information calculation . and . italy february to march , national statistics porta . and . choi and ki korea january to march , korea centers for disease control and prevention . table logistic and gompertz functions name of the model function mefinition log y = b þ b /( þ exp(-b *(t-b ))) log y = b /( þ exp(-b *(t-b ))) gom y = b þ b *exp(-exp(-b *(t-b ))) gom y = b *exp(-exp(-b *(t-b ))) predict peak of covid- in each state of the united states disaster medicine and public health preparedness https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /dmp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /dmp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core reached their peak at time t , t , t , and t , respectively, which needs to meet the following conditions. Δpatht log < . , Δpath t log < . , Δpath t gom < . , Δpatht gom < . ( ) the meaning of constraint equation ( ) is that the daily increase of confirmed cases at the peak must be less than . . in other words, the cumulative confirmed cases of covid- at the peak of predicted trajectories would remain stable. however, it is difficult to claim that the pandemic will reach a maximum if there is significant divergence among t , t , t , and t . to confirm the turning point for a specific state in the united states, the predicted trajectories need to con- verge. after identifying t , t , t , and t based on equation ( ), the time interval between the turning point of the highest path and the lowest path is defined as follows. periodi ¼ maxðt ,t ,t ,t Þ � minðt ,t ,t ,t Þj j ( ) therefore, the following constraint must hold for an identified turning point. periodi � ( ) when the constraint equation ( ) holds, the time interval between the most pessimistic and optimistic turning points is less than or equal to wk. then it can be inferred that the predicted trajectories would converge under constraint equation ( ). as a result, we can claim with confidence that the identified turning point lies between minðt ,t ,t ,t Þ and maxðt ,t ,t ,t Þ. if the constraint equation ( ) does not hold, we can conclude that it is still too early to deter- mine the turning point based on the historical data of cumu- lative confirmed cases of covid- . however, it should be mentioned that the models used here rely on a closed non- mobile population. since the death of george floyd, the black lives matter movement, which began on may , has led to large scale protests in the united states. therefore, the model might apply to the period before may . severity ratings of covid- to rate the severity of covid- spreading in the states, we take into account crucial factors, namely the uncertainty of the outbreak and the gravity of the current circumstances. we collected data of covid- outbreak in the united states from wind data service, which is a market leader in china’s financial information services industry. we selected the sample period from january to may , , to make prediction, since black lives matter protests across the united states hap- pened after may . as noted before, the model used in this study depends on a closed nonmobile population. thus, we apply the model to make estimation using the sample before may . to have a better view of the severity of covid- , turning points for states and washington d.c. are predicted. ( ) construction of uncertainty index as is shown in equation ( ), periodi is the time interval between the turning point of the highest path and the lowest path, which represents the uncertainty of the epidemic trend. there will be less uncertainty about the epidemic trend if the value periodi is smaller. we further standardized them to elimi- nate the influence of the dimension as below. periodstdi ¼ periodi � min �j�n periodj � � max �j�n periodj � � � min �j�n periodj � � ( ) ( ) the severity of the epidemic we use the number of existing confirmed cases to measure the severity of the current situation, which is defined as follows. figure logistic and gompertz curve. predict peak of covid- in each state of the united states disaster medicine and public health preparedness https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /dmp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /dmp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core patienti ¼ confirmedi � deathi � curedi ( ) as is shown in equation ( ), the total number of existing con- firmed cases in state i (patienti) equals the cumulative number of confirmed cases (confirmedi) minus the cumulative number of deaths (deathi) and the cumulative number of recovered cases (curedi).the data provider of the indicators is wind data service. to minimize the effect of dimension, we calcu- lated the proportion of existing confirmed cases as below. ratioi ¼ patienti pn j¼ patientj ( ) as is shown in equation ( ), ratioi can be used to measure the severity of the epidemic in state i. as ratioi becomes larger, coronavirus spread in state i is more severe. ( ) index of severity ratings for covid- combining information on uncertainty and severity, we con- struct the index of severity ratings as below. leveli ¼ periodstdi � ratioi � ( ) as mentioned above, a larger value of periodstdi means greater uncertainty, while a larger ratioi means more severe of the epi- demic in terms of existing confirmed cases. therefore, as the index of severity rating leveli increases, the severity ratings for state i will rise accordingly. the severity index in equation ( ) takes into account both uncertainty and severity informa- tion, which can provide a reasonable evaluation of severity rat- ings for covid- in the united states. according to the estimation value of leveli, it is possible to divide different regions of the united states into categories based on severity degree (table ). using the information on first, second, and third quartile, we can identify regions with high risk, medium-high risk, medium-low risk, and low risk. to be more specific, if leveli lies between first and third quar- tile, then region i can be identified as medium risk areas. the second quartile is used to separate medium-high risk from medium-low risk areas. if leveli lies below first quartile or above third quartile, then region i can be identified as low risk area or high risk area. furthermore, by identifying outliers with the . × iqr rule, it is possible to distinguish extremely high-risk and extremely low-risk areas within high risk and low risk areas, respectively. to be more specific, if leveli is greater than q þ . � iqr, then region i can be classified as extremely high-risk region within high risk group. if leveli is less than q � . � iqr, then region i can be classified as extremely low-risk areas within low risk group. there are possibilities. first, there are no outliers for the index of severity rating. in this case, there is no extremely high-risk or extremely low-risk areas. second, there might be only high outliers. in this case, we can distinguish extremely high-risk areas within high risk group. third, there might be only low outliers. in this case, we can dis- tinguish extremely low-risk areas within low risk group. fourth, there might be both high and low outliers. in this case, we can distinguish both extremely high-risk and extremely low-risk areas within high risk group and low risk group, respectively. results result analysis using data of the number of confirmed cases from january , , to may , , in the united states, we derive the peak of trajectories. as is shown in equation ( ), to identify a turning point, the time interval between the most pessimistic and optimistic turning points should be less than or equal to . further analysis shows that only montana and hawaii sat- isfy this condition (see figure ). therefore, it is only possible to identify the first turning point for the states using the sam- ple data. the first turning point of montana lies between may , , and may , . and the first turning point of hawaii lies between may , , and may , . for the rest of the regions of the united states, the time interval between the most pessimistic and optimistic turning points is larger than wk. thus, there is still great uncertainty of pre- dicting the first turning point for other states. for instance, the estimated intervals for arizona, california, illinois, minnesota, north carolina, north dakota, texas, virginia, and wisconsin are larger than , as is shown infigure . in other words, there is significant uncertainty of the covid- spreading in the above states. although we cannot derive the exact first turning point for the majority of states, it can still be inferred from figure that % of regions will not reach the peak of coronavirus before august , . based on equation ( ), we derive the index of severity ratings for covid- . it is found that there are only high outliers, which include illinois, california, and new york (see figure ). therefore, among high-risk group, illinois, california, and new york are extremely high-risk areas. as shown in figure , the colors of different states are categorized according to the severity of the outbreak. as the color switches from green to red, severity ratings for covid- will become more and more severe. we can see that illinois, california, and new york have the deepest red colors; that is, the outbreak in these states are the most severe. table severity rating of covid- value of leveli severity ratings q < leveli high risk q < leveli < q medium-high risk q < leveli < q medium-low risk leveli < q low risk note: q , q , q are the first, second, and third quartile respectively. inter- quartile range is the distance between the first and third quartiles. predict peak of covid- in each state of the united states disaster medicine and public health preparedness https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /dmp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /dmp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core figure time interval between the most pessimistic and optimistic turning points. predict peak of covid- in each state of the united states disaster medicine and public health preparedness https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /dmp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /dmp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core according to severity rating (see table ), there are high- risk regions: illinois, california, new york, new jersey, maryland, virginia, pennsylvania, massachusetts, texas, georgia, arizona, north carolina, and florida. twelve states are medium-high risk areas: indiana, colorado, connecticut, wisconsin, minnesota, ohio, alabama, tennessee, washington, nebraska, michigan, and mississippi. washington dc and states are medium- low risk areas. fourteen states are low-risk areas. robustness test to test the robustness of the methodology in this study, we change the sample size and evaluate its impact on the predic- tion of the turning point. to be more specific, the start date of sample data for forecasting is fixed in this study, which is january , . and the end date of sample data ranges between april , , and june , . as is shown in figure , the interval between optimistic and pessimistic turn- ing points is relatively high when the end date of the sample data is april , . as the end date of sample data approaches may , , the interval is shrinking steadily. the implication is that uncertainty of the coronavirus pan- demic is fading away in both montana and hawaii before may , . however, uncertainty decreases at different rates for montana and hawaii. for montana, it is possible to identify the first turning point of coronavirus in montana ever since april , (see figure ). for hawaii, it is not until may , that we can identify the first turning point. it should be noted that the black lives matter movement, which began on may , , did have an impact on predic- tion of coronavirus in the united states. as is shown in figure , it is becoming more difficult to identify the turning point of coronavirus in montana and hawaii after june , , and june , , respectively. this shows both the validity and lim- itations of the method suggested in this study. because we are able to identify the first turning point for both montana and hawaii using different sample sizes, this proves the validity of the method. however, as mentioned before, the models used here depend on a closed nonmobile population. due to the large-scale protests in the united states, the model does not apply to the period wk after the death of george floyd. in other words, the model suggested here is able to predict the first turning point of coronavirus, but might fail if there is a second wave of coronavirus caused by large scale protests. further analysis shows that the prediction of the turning point is very stable. as is shown in figure , using sample data between january , , and april , , the predicted turning point for montana lies between may , , and may , . using sample data between january , , and may , , the predicted turning point for montana lies between may , , and may , . when the end date of sample data ranges between may , , and may , , the predicted turning point for hawaii remains the same, which lies between may , , and may , . therefore, it can be concluded that the prediction of the turn- ing point for montana and hawaii is robust. the intuition behind the analysis is that predicted trajectories of covid- should converge when the pandemic reaches its first peak in a specific state. as is shown in figure , the opti- mistic and pessimistic turning point converges to a stable inter- val, which provides a basis for judging the actual turning point of the epidemic in the united states. however, it should be noted that when the end date of sample data is chosen wk after george floyd’s death, the estimated optimistic and pessimistic turning point does not converge to a figure box plot diagram to identify outliers. new york california illinois d eg re e of s ev er ity table classification of regions based on the severity rating of covid- severity ratings regions high risk illinois, california, new york, new jersey, maryland, virginia, pennsylvania, massachusetts, texas, georgia, arizona, north carolina, and florida medium-high risk indiana, colorado, connecticut, wisconsin, minnesota, ohio, alabama, tennessee, washington, nebraska, michigan, and mississippi medium-low risk washington d.c., iowa, rhode island, new mexico, utah, missouri, kentucky, kansas, south carolina, delaware, arkansas, louisiana low risk new hampshire, north dakota, oregon, nevada, maine, oklahoma, south dakota, west virginia, idaho, wyoming, vermont, alaska, hawaii, montana predict peak of covid- in each state of the united states disaster medicine and public health preparedness https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /dmp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /dmp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core figure severity rating of different regions in the united states. figure selection of sample size and its impact on interval prediction. interval= death of george floyd able to identity turning point / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / end date of sample data montana interval= death of george floyd able to identity turning point / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / / end date of sample data hawaii in te rv al b et w ee n op tim is tic a nd p es si m is tic tu rn in g po in t predict peak of covid- in each state of the united states disaster medicine and public health preparedness https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /dmp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /dmp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core stable interval. in other words, the model suggested here is valid in determining the first turning point when lockdown countermeasures did not change much. once lockdown mea- sures become ineffective due to nationwide protests in the united states, the model is invalid in predicting the second turning point of coronavirus. discussion under the stress of economic stagnation, many states in the united states have reopened their economies. however, from the analysis of this study, the outbreak has not been sufficiently controlled. based on the real pandemic data, it is estimated that only montana and hawaii have reached their first peaks. it is still too early to forecast the first turning points for the majority of states. in addition, using data of the number of confirmed cases from january , , to may , , in the united states, it is predicted that % of regions will not reach the first peak of coronavirus before august , . furthermore, mass protests have caused the pandemic to rebound and made it more diffi- cult to forecast the second turning point of coronavirus. therefore, covid- will continue to last for a while in the united states. local governments need to be cautious if there is a timeline for further work resumption. conclusions using the logistic and gompertz models, we put forward a methodology to detect the possible turning point of the coro- navirus pandemic in the united states. the method takes into account the real-time information of the confirmed cases, which can provide a plausible prediction of the first turning point. by changing the sample size of projection, we also proved the robustness of the methodology mentioned above. this methodology can provide a credible prediction of the actual turning point for different regions in the united states. this study may be further extended to forecast the outbreak in other countries. however, it should also be noted that the model proposed here is valid for a closed nonmobile population. therefore, the model is valid in predicting the first turning point of coronavirus using sample data before may , which is the starting date for black lives matter movement. but it might fail in predicting the second turning point of coronavirus caused by the nationwide protests in the united states. figure selection of sample size and its impact on prediction of optimistic and pessimistic turning points. death of george floyd able to identity turning point / / / / ap r ju l tu rn in g po in t / / / / / / / / / / / / optimistic turning point pessimistic turning point end date of sample data montana death of george floyd able to identity turning point / / / / m ay se p tu rn in g po in t / / / / / / / / / / / / optimistic turning point pessimistic turning point end date of sample data hawaii predict peak of covid- in each state of the united states disaster medicine and public health preparedness https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /dmp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /dmp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core the implication is that the coronavirus pandemic in the united states is out of control in most regions. the reason is that the pandemic has not peaked in most regions. although montana and hawaii used to reach their first peaks, there is a rebound of the pandemic in the states due to mas- sive protests. for the majority of states, people need to keep countermeasures in place, at least through august , . because the pandemic has not peaked in most regions of the united states, it is still crucial to take essential social distanc- ing rules while reviving the economies. the model in this study is valid for a closed nonmobile population. thus, it can be used to forecast the second turning point of coronavirus for states that are closing again. about the authors college of economics and management, huazhong agricultural university, wuhan, hubei province (miss yue, dr tu, miss geng). correspondence and reprint requests to taotao tu, department/institution: college of economics and management, huazhong agricultural university , no. shizishan street, wuhan, hubei province (e-mail: tutaotao_hust@ .com). funding statement this study was funded by the national natural science foundation of china (no. , no. ), and project jgpy supported by the fundamental research funds for the central universities. author contributions taotao tu designed the experiment and wrote the sections of method and robustness test. liping yue and xiuyuan 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https://doi.org/ . /dmp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core 	prediction and severity ratings of covid- in the united states 	methods 	identification of the turning point 	severity ratings of covid- 	( ) construction of uncertainty index 	( ) the severity of the epidemic 	( ) index of severity ratings for covid- 	results 	result analysis 	robustness test 	discussion 	conclusions 	references 	funding statement 	author contributions 	conflicts of interest 	references durham research online deposited in dro: november version of attached �le: accepted version peer-review status of attached �le: peer-reviewed citation for published item: anderson, b. ( ) 'emergency futures : exception, urgency, interval, hope.', sociological review . further information on publisher's website: http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/ . / - x. publisher's copyright statement: additional information: use policy the full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro�t purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in dro • the full-text is not changed in any way the full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. please consult the full dro policy for further details. durham university library, stockton road, durham dh ly, united kingdom tel : + ( ) | fax : + ( ) http://dro.dur.ac.uk http://www.dur.ac.uk http://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/ . / - x. http://dro.dur.ac.uk/ / http://dro.dur.ac.uk/policies/usepolicy.pdf http://dro.dur.ac.uk emergency futures: exception, urgency, interval, hope emergency as a descriptor, technique and legal-political device has become a taken- for-granted way of apprehending and governing events and situations. in this paper, i explore the temporality of emergency, through reflections on the use of declarations of emergency in relation to us-based black lives matter protests. i do so in the context of claims and counter claims about contemporary transformations in what rheinhart kosselleck ( : ) terms the ‘expected otherness of the future’. arguing for changes in the form of the ‘expected otherness of the future’ rather than its simple loss, disappearance or absence, i describe how emergency operates around a temporality of exceptionality, urgency, and interval. formal and informal declarations of emergency are, in addition, imbued with hope: the hope that time remains and action can make a difference to events. what the use of declarations of emergency by black lives matter activists does is disrupt the geo-historically specific divide between the everyday and emergency by naming conditions that mix the endemic and the evental as emergencies. in the spark of hope that is the act of declaring that ongoing conditions should be treated as emergencies, the ‘otherness of the future’ folds into and becomes part of the present. keywords: emergency, futures, black lives matter, everyday, declarations of emergency emergency futures: exception, urgency, interval, hope introduction: ‘in’ an emergency two activists take the stage and interrupt a netroots nation townhall meeting in phoenix, arizona. part of a coalition of organisations concerned with racial justice (‘black lives matter’, ‘dream defenders’, ‘black alliance for just immigration’), the action draws attention to the slow and fast state violences that damage and destroy black lives. on taking the stage, patrisse cullors – one of the co-founders of black lives matter – spoke of death with urgency, indignation and rage: ‘let’s be clear - every single day folks are dying, not, not being able to take another breath … we are in a state of emergency. we are in a state of emergency. and if you don’t feel that emergency, you are not human’. in an interview some weeks later, cullors talked about the action, including her declaration of emergency: ‘when i went on stage and i said, ‘this is a state of emergency’ – i am not using that as hyperbole. any other racial group whose symbols are being burned down and homes are being burned down; whose community members are being killed on a daily basis; who are completely dying of starvation, have the high unemployment rates and infant mortality rates - any other community this would be seen as an opportunity to support and uplift and try and deal with the crisis. that’s actually not what’s happening in the black community, so i think the iteration that we are in a state of emergency, and we want elected officials to treat it as such, is so important’i. on the one year anniversary of the shooting of michael brown in ferguson, missouri, u.s.a that is credited with sparking the black lives matter protests and movement, a state of emergency is issued by st. louis countyii. issued by the county executive officer on the th august, , the order legitimises a range of exceptional actions. they include that: ‘the superintendent of the st. louis county police department shall exercise all powers and duties necessary with respect to preservation of order, prevention of crimes and misdemeanours, apprehension and arrest, conserving the peace and other police and law enforcement functions.’ the declaration is legitimised by the county executive officer through reference to a near past of actual disorder and a potential future of harm: ‘in light of last night’s violence and unrest in the city of ferguson, and the potential for harm to persons and property, i am exercising my authority as county executive to issue a state of emergency, effective immediately’.iii what does it mean to live ‘in’ a state of emergency? in patrisse cullors’ emergency statement, naming a state of emergency is to recognise and interrupt an already existing condition of existence that mixes the endemic and evental as enduring racist violence intensifies and is reproduced in scenes of police repression, and other forms and processes of state violence become ordinary. in the second emergency statement, st louis county declare a temporary but in the present open- ended suspension of ordinary law that legitimises extraordinary powers and actions that long ago became ordinary as techniques of government. the declaration depends on and reproduces a fictitious line between emergency and a normality that has been in the past, and should be and can be returned to in the future. for those already living in emergency conditons, there is no such line. emergency is the present and the past and, unless interrupted, will be the future. for black lives, it is a condition of existence bound up with slow and fast deaths (berlant ) and forms of endurance (povinelli ). and, yet, there is hope in naming enduring conditions as an emergency: the hope for a future response that would bring to an end the unbearable present of systematic and evental harms. there is also a hope, though, in the state’s declaration of a state of emergency: the hope for a future in which the disruption and energies of present protest named as ‘violence and unrest’ have been brought to order, ended, and a pre-emergency normality returned to - a pre- emergency normality that remains an emergency for black lives. in the early twenty-first century, the term ‘emergency’ is used in relation to multiple events or situations across different domains of life and across different functional sectors (anderson ). although a genealogy of the term remains to be written, what is assumed to be common across the events or situations named as emergencies today is a particular quality. it is a quality of unpredictable, rapid change and the time of a turning point. typically, an event or situation is named as an emergency if urgent, time-limited action is deemed necessary to forestall, stop or otherwise affect some kind of undesired future. central to uses of the term emergency is, then, a sense that something valued (life, health, security) is at risk and, importantly, a sense that there is a limited time within which to curtail irreparable harm or damage to whatever it is that has been valued. beginning with emergency in the black lives matter movement reminds us that emergency has never only been a technique of the state, even if critical inquiry has, in the main, focused on intensifications of sovereign power in emergency situations (on which see agamben ; neal ; adey, anderson, graham ). progressive organisations orientated towards social justice frequently make strategic use of the term emergency to generate urgencies with the hope of translating un- or barely- bearable conditions into ethical or political scenes demanding response. consider, for example, mobilisation of the idea/affect that we are ‘in’ a ‘climate emergency’ by climate change activists as a counter to the deferrel of action to an ever receding horizon (see, for example, sutton and spratt ). or, for another example, consider movements for prison reform that name mass incarceration as a present emergency in a bid to interrupt the replacement of the welfare state by the penal state and its forms of violence (gilmore ). emergency is, then, one of a number of geo- historically specific ‘modes of eventfulness’ (berlant ; anderson ) that constitute the affective-ideational resources available to make sense of how existing states of affairs fall apart as harms, damages and losses materialise. co-existing with other modes such as disaster, apocalypse, collapse, shock, incident and crisis, emergency involves particular ways of relating past, present and future as well as specific assumptions about the occurrence, impact and end of events. if emergency is a now ubiquitous resource for apprehending, diagnosing and living in the present, what distinguishes emergency from other modes of eventfulness? and what does understanding the temporality specific to emergency contribute to the current concern in sociology and elsewhere with futures? i pose these questions in the midst of contradictory, dissonant accounts of the future today and the novelty of transformations in relations between present and future. what various accounts share is a sense of a crisis in what kosselleck ( : ) terms the ‘expected otherness of the future’ that underpinned historical temporality. the supposed crisis, and i will have cause to question these claims below, involves the absence, loss or disappearance of the future as unanticipatable novelty. claims are made that the affective experience of the present combines a sense of repetition alongside the absence of a sense of the possibility of historical transformation. being a crisis though, the otherness of the future is still held on to, even as it frays. lauren berlant ( ), for example, tracks how people just about hold on to fraying good life fantasies that partly depend on the continuation of ideas of progress. in the midst of the diagnosis of a loss of the idea and promise of the otherness of the future, what to make of the ubiquity of emergency and its particular ways of folding futures into the present? or, to put the question differently, how has emergency become a means of relating to the presence or absence of the ‘expected otherness of the future’? the paper addresses this question in three parts. in section one, i summarise claims about transformations in the relation between present and future, in particular diagnoses of the loss or disappearance of the otherness of the future, and introduce the concept of ‘styles’ (anderson ) of relating to the future. the following section argues that the emergency as a technique is organised around four temporalities - exceptionality, urgency, interval and hope. section three then returns to the tension between the two ways of being ‘in’ emergency that i began with and argues that the emergency declarations can be acts of hope that produce a particular kind of ‘emergency present’. in conclusion, i summarise what becomes of the relation between present and future in disruptions to the geo-historically specific distinction between emergency and everyday. section one: emergency and the loss of the future a range of critical diagnoses of the politics and culture of the neoliberal present revolve around claims of transformations in relations with futurity. work has stressed how faith in the future as radically new has waned or ended. beradi ( ), for example, writes of the ‘slow cancellation’ of the future, in which modernist faith in the transformatory powers of the future, a faith that was always unevenly distributed and only ever available to some, has ended. in similar terms, fisher ( ) writes of how faith in the future is interrupted by lost futures, futures that have failed to happen, that return to haunt the present. what is lost, so fisher argues, is a sense of the future’s disruptiveness, of its potential to become otherwise. this sense of the absence of the otherness of the future is produced, in part, through ways of delegitimising other futures as unrealistic in the midst of structures of feeling marked by apathy, resignation or acquiescence to a present that harms. the best example of this is what fisher ( ) describes as ‘capitalist realism’ – defined by him as a pervasive sense of the inevitability of current ways of arranging economy (‘there is no alternative’) and the linked loss of hope in alternatives. it involves the absence of the imagination for something different or, put differently, the absence of the possibility of evental ruptures in the continuity of experience, of untimely events that are ‘out of joint’ and threaten or promise something new. developing from fisher’s account, gilbert ( : ) diagnoses ‘disaffected consent’ as a neoliberal structure of feeling that involves a closing of the possibility of other futures through a combination of ‘a profound dissatisfaction with both the consequences and ideological premises of the neoliberal project’, that might generate forms of dissent, and ‘a general acquiescence with that project, a degree of deference’ together with ‘a belief that it cannot be effectively challenged’. this diagnosis of the loss of the otherness of the future is frequently accompanied by a claim that the character of the present changes, with the emergence of what rosa ( ) calls a ‘frenetic standstill’ ( ). cunningham ( , no pagination, emphasis in original) summarises this claim: ‘cut loose from historical narrative, the felt experience of the present is one of an ongoing state of transition, which tends to present itself less as a sense of possibility of the truly new than as a paradoxically frenzied sense of repetition’. of course, we can question cunningham’s assertion that there is a single ‘felt experience’. nevertheless, what this work shows is the looping of relations with futures into the tones, habits, infrastructures and practices of the present. however, even within the limited parameters of understanding contemporary western neoliberalisms, and little is said about relations with futures in the majority world, this now familiar story of the end of the future can be nuanced. other work has attempted to move beyond a narrative of loss, disappearance and absence by describing the emergence of new, specific relations with futures. here the claim is that, first, otherness has been domesticated through constant anticipation and, second, otherness takes one dominant form - the catastrophic or apocalyptic. focusing on the nexus between (new)media and state practices of anticipation in relation to events including terrorism and climate change, grusin ( ) tracks multiple ways in which futures are anticipated – or premediated – before they happen. premediation does not involve a definitive prediction of what the future will be. instead, it involves a multiplication of the possibilities surrounding a future event. bringing multiple ‘premediated’ futures into the present is understood, by grusin, as a way of attempting to eradicate the event that cannot be comprehended, the event that escapes its frame, the event that catches unaware and opens a radically new future. instead, the present is saturated by possibilities of what could happen; possibilities that may be felt through tones of resignation, familiarity, nervousness and fatalism rather than shock or surprise. in the midst of shifts in thresholds of expectation and anticipation, actual disruptive events become as blends of the already anticipated and the unanticipated, felt through complex mixtures of shock and familiarity, excitement and boredom, disbelief and confirmation. at the same time, other work argues that the otherness of the future has been reduced to one dominant form – the catastrophic or apocalyptic (see calder williams ; aradau & van munster ). by reference to the end as terminus (with or without the revelatory moment of the apocoplyptic), the present become a prefiguration of the future disaster. a figure of otherness, given that catastrophe involves an overturning of what is that breaks with continuity, reducing futures to the catastrophic simultaneously generates continuities. from terrorism to trans- species epidemics, future catastrophes are governed as if present in embryonic form in the present. neoliberal order is secured through organising attention to what povinelli et al ( , no pagination) name as ‘”the end” (terminal futures, finitude)’. as with premediation, catastrophic futures become part of an already tensed present. focusing on climate change, hulme ( ), for example, connects the repetition of catastrophic scenes of destruction to apathy, indifference, and other modes of non- or inaction that enact a sense of the inevitability of “the end”. how, then, to understand invocations of emergency in the midst of this widespread sense of some form of transformation in the otherness of the future? we could, for example, understand emergency as a legal-political tool orientated to the continuation of the present and the erasure of the future as otherness. consider, for example, how ‘state of emergency’ legislation exists as a now normal legal-political tool typically used for the ending of some kind of threatening future. to declare an emergency is, on the one hand, to recognise that something that threatens to bring about a different and undesired future is emerging and, on the other, to mobilise resources to ensure that a now categorised event does not come to pass. we see this double recognition and containment of the otherness of the future in the integral role of ‘state of emergency’ legislation in managing dissent and revolt in colonialism. as hussein ( ) shows, declarations of a state of emergency were a key technique for the maintenance and continuation of colonial regimes. the ‘state of emergency’ was a means of ending anticipated futures of disorder and change. today, the claim that the ‘state of emergency’ has become the norm captures a doubled sense of the becoming routine and unsurprising of a legal-political technique and the way in which the exceptional and unexceptional fold with one another and become indistinct. the making of emergency statements and the use of emergency techniques becomes a way of attempting to ensure the perpetual continuation of present arrangements in a linear time of before, during and after. however, whilst the extension of the ‘state of emergency’ may attempt to ensure that disruptive futures may never come to pass the diagnosis of the loss of the otherness of the future does not quite fit with uses of emergency. relating to the future as an occasion for emergencies that have not yet happened introduces a sense of contingency into the present arrangement of things. the present is full of anticipated and actual disruptions, that bring with them a sense that the present is changing, and the future might be otherwise unless government happens. of course, those future emergencies are named, categorised and rendered governable, but there is simultaneously a sense of the capacity of events as emergencies to surprise. emergency is an occasion, perhaps, when government is brought into contact with that which is outside it and that which threatens to exceed its capacities. by which i mean that there is always the possibility that events governed as emergencies may exceed attempts to bring them to an end. consider all the work needed to reproduce the (always-already unequally attached to and for many long ago lost) aura and promise that the state is in control when faced by events. for example, state sovereignty is enacted through images of heroic emergency response or the presence of elected politicians in the midst of scenes of destruction, damage and loss. exceptional scenes of emergency provide occasion for contemporary forms of mediatised, diffuse, acclamation and glorification (and their opposite). we might also understand emergency exercises and inquiries as governmental techniques that stage possible future emergencies or actual past emergencies in order to repeat and sustain the fragile promise that government will be able to meet the next event. so the time of emergency cannot quite be made to fit the narrative of the loss of the future and the contemporaneous production of a ‘time without time’, or an ‘ever more congealed and futureless present’ (crary : ). and, whilst often collapsed in practice and analysis, the otherness of the future takes a different shape in emergency than it does in the form of the apocalyptic or catastrophic. in the remainder of the paper i diagnose the style (or styles) of relating to the future that are common across enactments of emergency as technique and term. a style is a geo- historically specific form of relation between past, present and future, examples include time as linear, as cyclical, as evental or as pre-destined. the concept downplays ontological claims about what the future is or is not in favour of attending to the manner through which ‘the future’ eventuates (as surprise, as continuity, as un-anticipatable, as repetition and so on). it is a means, then, of attending to the multiple, specific forms of relations between past, present, future and other temporal categories without presuming that form before analysis. how, then, to characterise the style(s) of relating to the future that characterise emergency? let’s start with how emergency typically functions as one resource amongst others – catastrophe, crisis and so on – for governing the present. section two: emergency times as a term of and for governance, emergency is typically used to name a discrete event that breaks with, interrupts, or overturns a supposedly stable everyday. for example, the use of the term ‘emergency’ by the emergency services of europe and north america (such as the uk fire and rescue service) signifies a punctual event happening at a single or set of connected sites that is governed by being responded to within a temporary, demarcated ‘scene’ (or set of ‘scenes’). in many respects, the services deal with what might be called ‘everyday emergencies’: expected occurrences that happen predictably as part of the life of distributed, dynamic infrastructures (such as fires or traffic accidents). however, even if the event is of a named and known type and even if protocols and other techniques of preparation preexist the event, in the scene of emergency ordinary life is shattered and something disassembles, to paraphrase Žižek ( ) on the event. if seen only from the perspective of emergency as a term of and for governance, the first typical temporality of emergency is of the exception. the most significant treatment of emergency as exception is by carl schmitt ( ) in the context of his infamous definition of sovereignty: ‘sovereign is he who decides on the exception’ (agamben ). we might interpret the declaration of a state of emergency by st louis county in this context – as a periodic intensification of sovereign power based on a decision that an emergency is happening or will happen and a decision on the exceptional measures that can be used (by services, military troops, legislatures, etc.) to handle the actual or potential emergency. yet in the background to some of schmitt’s ( : ) comments on constitutional liberalism in political theology is the idea that the event itself provides the exception (an exception that both pre-exists the sovereign decision and is intensified and transformed by the decision). whilst events governed as emergencies may be felt through registers in addition to surprise and relate in complex ways to ordinary life, starting with the exception reminds us that governing through emergency involves a (contestable) claim that some kind of event has happened, is happening, or will happen. the category of emergency does not, however, name only an exception. if we stay a little longer with uses of the term in efforts to govern events and life we find that it is inseperable from a series of other temporalities. to designate an event or situation as an emergency is to demand an urgent response: the claim is that action is necessary immediately in order to meet the event that becomes the exception. indeed, we could say that emergency is counter to the suspended time of waiting. folded into the term is a sense of urgency: an insistent force that compels action to forestall or end some form of harm, damage or loss (see, for example, Žižek ( ) on the ‘war on terror’ and ‘all pervasive sense of urgency’). the sense of urgency that is part of emergency involves two interrelated temporalities in addition to exceptionality. first, it involves the presence of (or construction of a sense of) an on-rushing future that severs the present from the past and compresses the time for decision and action. the first time, then, is the time of an omnipresent present: there is no time except the time of now that requires some form of urgent action. there are resonances here with nowotny’s ( : ) discussion of an ‘extended present’, in which the future “is increasingly overshadowed by the problems which are opening up in the present”. the urgency of the temporary event necessitates and calls forth similarly urgent action, in a manner that is slightly different to the extension of the horizon of planning that nowotny diagnoses as central to the emergence of the ‘extended present’ and loss of ‘the future’. by contrast, in emergency the time to act is compressed, and pauses in action supposedly become luxuries that threaten delay. delay is a risk. there is no time to wait. elaine scarry ( ) has illustrated this by showing how ‘claims of emergency’ function through an affect of urgency that forestalls processes of deliberation and dissensus. democratic procedures and habits become impediments to timely action, since ‘the unspoken presumption is that either one can think or one can act, and given that it is absolutely mandatory that an action be performed, thinking must fall away.’ (ibid. ). an example would be the justification for pre- emptive decisions in the context of the us-led war on terror. as massumi ( : ) puts it in his summary and analysis of george bush’s decision making: ‘a trustable decision is not made in any dangerously deliberative way. a confident decision strikes like lightening. it happens’. emergency is characterized by a stretching or extending of the present and a temporary suspension of the transition to a future, even as a threatening future becomes present. the second temporality connected to the sense of urgency is, then, the interval: the gap or break during which emergency action can still make a difference. if action is decisive and happens at the correct time, then the emergency can be brought to an end without loss, harm or damage. like the state of exception that is the emergency, the interval is an interruption to linear time: it defines a space-time for action in-between the onset of something new and the temporary stabilization of a changed present. to govern emergencies and through emergency is to enact and act within ‘intervals’. the quality of urgency that is inseparable from emergency, and the attendant opening up of an interval of and for action, distinguishes emergency from other terms that offer resources for sensing and relating to events. for example, catastrophe differs from emergency by the absence of the faith that action can make a difference. in a catastrophe, intense destruction and damage have materialized; life has been ‘overturned’. because the catastrophic event is on the edge of what is governable, catastrophe does not function as an “attribute of management” (‘catastrophe management’) nor does it “name a profession” (‘catastrophe planners’) (compare with ‘emergency management’ and ‘emergency planners’) (aradau and van munster : ). rather, catastrophe induces a sense of limits; the limits of existing ways of governing and the limits of knowledge (ibid. ). by comparison, emergencies involve a demand for immediate, urgent action without delay. as anderson ( ) puts it, in an emergency there is no time, except the time of now, a time that is running out. emergencies are, in this sense, activating: they are events or situations where action can still make a difference. we could thus say that inseparable from the category of emergency is a species of hope: though the outcome of an event or situation is uncertain, correct action may make a difference, and that which is threatened might be averted. in a situation of emergency, the future is alterable, even as it looms over a suspended present. a world of emergencies is far away from a world of pre-ordained fate in which the future is already given. in an emergency, some kind of harm, damage or loss to something that must be protected is in the midst of emerging, as is a new spatial and temporal arrangement that will form through and after the emergency. but hope remains. for what is also emerging in an emergency, or at least is demanded in situations where a responsibility to protect and an imperative to act remains, is action taken to stop, halt or otherwise affect the emergency. emergency and the response to an emergency emerge together, both becoming with the tangle of scenes, trajectories, objects and other things that compose people’s everyday lives. section three: emergency hope let’s return, then, to the declarations of emergency that i started with and trace how they enact and/or disrupt the geohistorically specific distinction between emergency and the everyday that the term is founded upon and reproduces. the sovereign declaration of a ‘state of emergency’ by st louis county interrupts the smooth, continuous progression from past to present to future. it names an anticipated and/or actual exception to the normal state of affairs. there is a presumption that harm or damage may emerge and that exceptional action in a time limited interval is needed now in order to end the exception. nevertheless, it incorporates the promise of return in the future to a pre-emergency normality. other ways of managing emergencies without a formal declaration of emergency incorporate a similar mix of interrupted, linear and cyclical temporalities. consider, for example, the apparatus of ‘uk civil contingencies’ (anderson & adey ). governing any actual event involves moving through linear ‘stages’ of ‘response’ and ‘recovery’, with the promise being that appropriate action will result in a return to normality. at the same time, government involves perpetual cycles of response- recovery and preparation, with past preparatory activities (and the techniques developed there) folding into future response-recovery actions. the sovereign declaration of a state of emergency to govern protest was met by intense, activist contestation about what counted as an emergency. patrisse culler’s statement that i began the paper with is one attempt to mobilise action by disrupting what counts as an emergency whilst still using the language of emergency to generate a sense of urgency and so mobilise action. echoing culler’s statement that life is lived in emergency conditions for too many black people in the u.s.a., on social media and in public protests activists redescribed what had become ordinary conditions that harm and damage as the real emergency (complementing activists’ ways of rendering visible and generating political feeling about the harassment and killing of black men and women in scenes of police violence). for example, a twitter hashtag ‘#whichemergency’ was used more than , times on the day of st louis county’s declaration of a ‘state of emergency’. people re- described various distributed urban systems (health care, the penal state, work and welfare policy) as conditions that generated emergencies that damaged black lives. in addition to dispersed, frequently repeated scenes of police violence, what was politicised under the name of emergency were various spatially and temporally extended processes of ‘slow death’ that, in berlant’s ( : ) terms, involve ‘the physical wearing out of a population and the deterioration of people in that population that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence’. an example: “#whichemergency the one where schools are underfunded, our neighborhoods are over policed, and our access to resources are slim to none”. in the act of politicising processes of slow death, the temporality of emergency coexisted and folded with the temporality of the endemic. typically, the endemic is counter to the exceptionality, urgency, and interval that in the previous section i argued characterises uses of emergency to govern. the endemic is what endures and is more or less adjusted to without scenes of impact (berlant ). renaming the endemic as a series of emergencies interrupts this dispersal of impact. it disrupts the line between the endemic and the evental, through a call that response is necessary as damages and harms are in the midst of happening (or in this case a redistribution of state response and concern from the policing of street protest to addressing endemic conditions of harm and damage). there is also, at the same time, a sense that these emergencies are not punctual events and there is not a stable normality, a non-emergency time, to be returned to. in this respect, activist contestation of what counted as emergency politicised conditions that mix different temporalities (and are currently being redescribed through terms such as expulsion (sassen ) and abandonment/endurance (povinelli ), as well as slow death (berlant )). this becoming indistinct of the endemic and evental, or the structural and the impactful, produces a specific type of ‘emergency present’. forms of harm and damage repeat in a non-evental time made through institutional repetitions that gather to form what povinelli ( ) terms ‘conditions of endurance’. the present is made through accumulations that become the seemingly stable background to be lived with; the effects of which are made present in harmful outcomes. there is no non-emergency normality to return to, nor are emergencies interruptions or eruptions that emerge unexpectedly and take by surprise. divisions between event and non-event have collapsed. one mechanism for producing this indistinction is the folding of a sense of emergency into the mode of operation of the very systems and infrastructures that, for some, once produced a sense of stability (and thus shifting concern and the demand for action from conditions to individual symptoms). poppendieck ( ) tracks how in the usa the systems that once promised security have become organised around temporary, time limited, conditional emergency provision. at the same time, she shows how marginalised lives are lived in movements between those systems – in passages between emergency healthcare, emergency shelter and emergency food provision, and in the gaps between them. whilst the terms are a little different, this extended ‘emergency present’ is anticipated in a range of new descriptors for understanding the temporality of the present. consider how the term precarity offers a way of diagnosing a shared but always varying and often inchoate sense of “predictable unpredictability” (southwood ) across diverse, differentiating circumstances and scenes. what is understood to characterise precarity is perpetual background instability where what is ever present is the possibility of some kind of emergent disruption, in part because the present is constituted by the afterlives of previous actual and almost-not-quite disruptions (lorey ). precarity is but one example of other emergency times that follow from collapsing the distinction between the times of emergency and the times of the everyday (see also taussig ( ) on the ‘nervous system’). one example of where lines have blurred is in the seemingly paradoxical phenomenon of a ‘permanent state of emergency’ in which states of war and peace blur with one another. the claim is that a temporary measure or paradigm—the state of emergency—is now a normal part of contemporary liberal-democratic states, something revealed and intensified in the context of the ‘war on terror’ (armitage ; agamben ). we might think of the regularity in which ‘state of emergency’ legislation has been used to police protests, including black lives matter protests, as an example of this blurring. whilst a formal state of emergency has not been in force for the entire period, the policing of protest at the level of states has involved the production of something like an atmosphere in which a declaration of emergency is always possible. however, this blurring of peace and war is not new and cannot be reduced to a post / phenomenon. as well as the becoming ordinary of emergency legislation in colonialism (hussain ), simone browne ( ) shows how the contemporary surveillance practices that underpin and animate the normalisation of emergency emerge from long trajectories of anti-black racism in the united states. but of course states are constantly drawing the line between emergencies and a normal state of affairs in ways that reaffirm the equation between emergencies and exceptional time and attempts to hide forms of endemic harm and damage. the declaration of the state of emergency by st louis county in response to the governing of protest as disruption is one such occasion. but even there the lines between emergency time and other times blur. the declaration is an operational technique that mobilises exceptional police response. however, that response has been rehearsed in exercises that, in part, attempt to entrain particular habits of response to protest governed as riot. parts of apparatuses of distributed preparation for events, exercises function by bringing future emergencies into the here and now through techniques that stage and perform events (anderson ). they reproduce and enact the hope that through preparation in the rehearsed present of an ‘as if’ emergency, action in the actual emergency can meet the event, bring it to an end and return life to a non-emergency everyday. exercises stage and perform the promise of the emergency state: that a non-emergency normality exists and can be protected. back to the contestation of what counted as an emergency by black lives matter activists. we can understand it, first, as an expression of the inseparability of emergency times and everyday times and, as a consequence, the breaking down of the term emergency. the distinction between everyday and emergency has only ever been available to some and is produced at the cost of making life into a perpetual emergency for others. but, second, it also expresses a political use of emergency as a pragmatic-contextual intervention in the present that aims precisely to disrupt what has already become normal. what is claimed is not that time is insecure or unstable, but that processes of harm, damage, suffering and loss have become endemic and everyday. naming the everyday as an emergency is, in part, a bearing witness to and making present how otherwise invisible, silent, violences result in black lives not mattering. it is because a distinction between emergency and the everyday is refused and that it is not only the state that is called upon to adjudicate the claim of emergency, that the use of a technique and vocabulary of emergency interrupts rather than reproduces existing effects and configurations of power (compare with brown’s ( ) argument regarding the contradictory effects of oppositional political projects using the tools of the state to seek redress for forms of injury). to claim a situation as an emergency is in the case of the black lives matter protests and potentially other cases an affirmation and an act of hope. what is affirmed is that whatever is threatened in the emergency matters and that urgent action is necessary in order to save, protect or enable that life. bearing witness to the ordinary as an emergency that has never been responded to as such becomes one way (amongst a number) of affirming that black lives matter. it places hope in emergency as a term that demands and galvanises action, despite the extent to which emergency as technique has been central to enactments of state power. and it keeps alive the hope that action can make a difference and the situation is transformable (as well as the hope that other definitions of the situation are possible). the hope in emergency as tool of mobilisation folds another sense of the future into emergency, or at least it does if we stay a while with the event of declaration. writing on hope, ernst bloch ( ) describes it around the temporality of the ‘not-yet’. pivotal in his attempt to shift the orientation of knowledge from ‘what has become’ to an open world, the term ‘not yet’ has a doubled meaning in bloch’s work (as well as being internally divided into the ‘not-yet conscious’ and the ‘not-yet become’). something is ‘not-yet’ in the sense that it is ‘still not’ and may never happen. and something is ‘not-yet’ in that undetermined futures become with a present full of hopeful moments: ‘turning points’ (bloch : ) that constitute a crack in linear continuity. this means that hope is without guarantees, its ground is not-yet: ‘[h]ope must be unconditionally disappointable ... because it is open in a forward direction, in a future-orientated direction; it does not address itself to that which already exists. for this reason, hope – while actually in a state of suspension – is committed to change rather than repetition, and what is more, incorporates the element of chance, without which there can be nothing new’. (bloch : ) staying awhile with the hopeful event and structure of the call to recognise this as the emergency allows us to think again about the ‘emergency present’. declaring that conditions are emergencies opens up the possibility of a future otherwise in which slow and fast anti-black violences are interrupted and end. it presupposes and produces the possibility of the future becoming differently. but, at the same time, it changes the character of the now emergency present. declaring that un- or barely- bearable conditions are emergencies and that response is necessary because black lives matter and time remains produces the present as opening. to paraphrase taussig ( ), similarly concerned with the indistinctions between emergency and normality, it is an act that produces a ‘spark of hope’ … or hopes to. conclusion: being in emergency declaring that life is an emergency is one way a spark of hope may be generated from within the ‘crisis ordinariness’ (berlant ) of anti-black violence. there is much more to be said about how such sparks of hope become with the other political affects that surface as black lives matter connects intense scenes of police brutality to other quieter but no less devastating forms of violence. staying awhile with the hopeful moment of taking exception to harmful conditions that have become normal allows us to think again about the styles of relating to the future that are now folded into emergency. it also reminds us that a different politics of emergency might emerge if we start from the use of emergency by non-state and non-sovereign actors to disrupt systems of rule. critical work has taken exception to emergency (and in particular the equation between emergency and the legal-political technique of the state of exception) on the basis, partly, that invocations of emergency produce the effect of continuation, of closing futures. emergency statements or claims or measures, on this account, can be understood as another set of mechanisms for ensuring disruptive futures, futures that might become otherwise than the present, do not come to pass and existing arrangements repeat and endure (albeit in the context of their disruption and possible dissolution). not least, because invocations of emergency with its attendant sense of urgency are taken to foreclose the thinking-feeling habits and practices (such as deliberation and dissensus) supposedly necessary for the opening of futures and initiating something different. this is, though, to understand uses of emergency prospectively – from the promise of ending an unwanted future that it is inseperable from – and retrospectively – from the position of a future that remains the same as the present was before the emergency. in this paper, i have tried to stay awhile with what becomes of the present as emergency statements, claims and acts are made and how iterations of emergency enact a particular style – or form – of relation between past, present and future. what characterises emergency is a simultaneous sense of a time outside of what is recognised and felt as everyday time (exceptionality), of a hopeful time for action, where the materialisation of damage is temporarily suspended (omnipresent present and interval), and the time of a present becoming. emergency involves, then, a specific relation with ‘the future’ that cannot be smoothly incorporated into narratives of the loss of the otherness of the future. the use of the vocabulary of emergency and state of emergency in some black lives matter actions enacts this emergency temporality, but it also brings its implicit separation between emergency and the everyday into question by connecting racialised police violence to material conditions that unevenly distribute value and vulnerability as race intersects with gender, class and sexuality. compare this with the formal declaration of a state of emergency by st louis county. governing protest through this legal-political measure depends on a spatial and temporal demarcation of both the possible emergency and of the state of emergency. by contrast, the declaration that life is a state of emergency attempts to make dispersed conditions that are inseperable from ordinary life into an event. food poverty, unemployment, mortality rates and so on constitute the measured traces of a state of emergency that is normally without a single scene of visible impact. but it does so without demarcating the site of emergency in separation from the everyday, precisely because the emergency is the everyday and the everyday is an emergency, albeit one that goes unrecognized by many and so requires naming. declaring ongoing conditions to be emergencies is a hopeful act in that it aims to interrupt those conditions by making what has become ordinary into an exception. the declaration that life is an emergency is an attempt to halt conditions, to step out of the continuous time of the linear reproduction of the emergency/everyday. because it is propelled by a sense of necessity rather than of the ‘right time’, the declaration is not the time of cairos – ‘the abrupt and sudden conjunction where decision grasps opportunity and life is fulfilled in the moment’ (agamben : ). life is not ‘fulfilled’ in the moment of patrisse cullors declaring that ‘this is a state of emergency’; far from it. the hoped for future is not-yet. acknowledgments my thanks to rebecca coleman and richard tutton for their invitation and comments, nicky gregson for her engagement with the paper and the discussion of ideas, and one referee in particular for their generosity and attention. writing the paper was supported by a leverhulme trust prize and a leverhulme trust network grant on the theme of ‘governing emergencies’. references adey, p. anderson, b. and graham, s., ( ), ‘governing emergencies: beyond exceptionality’, theory, culture and society, : - . agamben, g., ( ), ‘time and history: critique of the instant and the continuum’, in agamben, g. infancy and history: the destruction of experience, london: verso: - . agamben, g., ( ), state of exception. chicago: university of chicago press. anderson, b., ( ), ‘preemption, precaution, preparedness: anticipatory action and future geographies’, progress in human geography, : - . anderson, b., & adey, p., ( ), ‘governing events and life: ‘emergency’ in uk civil contingencies, political geography, : - . anderson, b., ( ), ‘governing emergencies: the politics of delay and the logic of response’, transactions of the institute of british geographers : - . aradau, c. and van munster, r., ( ), politics of catastrophe: genealogies of the unknown london: routledge. armitage, j., ( ), ‘state of emergency: introduction, theory, culture and society ( ): - . beradi, f., ( ), after the future, london: ak press. berlant, l., ( ), slow death: sovereignty, obesity, lateral agency’. critical inquiry, : - . berlant, l., ( ), cruel optimism, london: duke university press. bloch, e., ( ), ‘can hope be disappointed?’ in literary essays. translated by joron, a. stanford, ca: stanford university press, – . browne, s., ( ) dark matters, durham and london: duke university press. brown, w., ( ), states of injury: power and freedom in late modernity, princeton: princeton university press. calder williams, e., ( ), combined and uneven apocalypse, winchester, uk: zero books. calhoun, c., ( ), ‘contemporary states of exception’, in fassin, d. and pandolfi, m. (eds) contemporary states of emergency: the politics of military and humanitarian interventions, new york: zone books, - . cunningham, d., ( ), ‘a marxist heresy? accelerationism and its discontents’. radical philosophy, , may/june (no pagination) crary, j., ( ), / : late capitalism and the ends of sleep. new york: verso. fisher, m., ( ), capitalist realism, london: zero books. fisher, m., ( ), ghosts of my life. writings on depression, hauntology and lost futures, winchester: zero books. gilbert, j., ( ), ‘disaffected consent: that postdemocratic feeling’, soundings ( ): - . gilmore, r., ( ), golden gulag: prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing california, california: university of california press. grusin, r., ( ), premediation: affect and mediality after / london: palgrave macmillan. hulme, m., ( ), why we disagree about climate change cambridge: cambridge university press. hussein, n., ( ), the jurisprudence of emergency: colonialism and the rule of law. ann arbor: the university of michigan press. kosselleck, r., ( ), futures past: on the semantics of historical time. trans. tribe, k. new york: columbia university. lorey, i, ( ), state of insecurity. government of the precarious, london: verso. massumi, b., ( ), ‘the future birth of the affective fact’ in conference proceedings: genealogies of biopolitics. available at: http://browse.reticular.info/text/collected/massumi.pdf. (last accessed . . ) neal, a., ( ), ‘foucault in guantanamo: towards an archaeology of the exception’. security dialogue : - . nowotny, n., ( ), time: the modern and postmodern experience, london: polity press. poppendieck, j., ( ), sweet charity? emergency food and the end of entitlement, new york: penguin. povinelli, e., ( ), economies of abandonment: social belonging and endurance in late liberalism, durham and london: duke university press. povinelli, e., aranda, j., wood, b., vidokle, a., ( ), ‘editorial: ‘quasi-events’’. e- flux . available at: http://www.e-flux.com/journal/editorial%e % % quasi- events/ (last accessed . . ) rosa, h., ( ), social acceleration: a new theory of modernity, new york: columbia university press. sassen, s., ( ), expulsions: brutality and complexity in the global economy. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. scarry, e., ( ), thinking in an emergency, new york and london: w.w norton. schmitt, c., ( ), political theology: four chapters on the concept of sovereignty, trans. george schwab. chicago: the university of chicago press. southwood, i., ( ) non-stop inertia, london: zero books. sutton, p., and spratt, d., ( ), climate code red: the case for emergency action. london: scride. taussig, m., ( ), the nervous system london: routledge. taussig, m., (with zournazi, m,), ( ), ‘carnival of the senses’, in zournazi, m. (ed) hope: new philosophies for change, sydney: pluto press, - . Žižek, s. ( ) ‘jack bauer and the ethics of urgency’ in: these times. available at: http://inthesetimes. com/article/jack_bauer_and_the_ethics_of_urgency (accessed august ). Žižek, s., ( ), event: philosophy in transit, london: penguin books. i interview by jamil smith, a senior editor at the new republic with patrisse cullors in new republic http://www.newrepublic.com/article/ /blacklivesmatter-co-founder-we-are-state-emergency) ii executive order, st louis county. available at: http://www.stlouisco.com/portals/ /executive% order% criminal% unrest.pdf iii st louis county executive office steve stenger quoted in ‘st louis county executive issues state of emergency’. available at: http://www.stlouisco.com/community/news/article/ /st-louis- county-executive-issues-state-of-emergency goodwin | roman archaeology in lockdown | theoretical roman archaeology journal 	news 	articles 	issues 	submissionsarrow_drop_down 	aboutarrow_drop_down 	login 	register 	news 	articles 	issues 	submissionsarrow_drop_down 	aboutarrow_drop_down 	login 	register menu 	submissions 	author guidelines 	start submission 	about 	contact 	become a reviewer 	research integrity 	editorial team 	submissions 	author guidelines 	start submission 	about 	contact 	become a reviewer 	research integrity 	editorial team editorial roman archaeology in lockdown editorial roman archaeology in lockdown 		 		 abstract the third issue of the theoretical roman archaeology journal (traj) provides the opportunity to assess the structural issues in academia detailed in the previous editorials of the journal. the articles, and their authors, included in this volume were each affected by the worldwide pandemic. throughout this period, however, the world has also become the theatre that enacted a renewal of social movements that amplified marginalised voices and experiences. lack of representation was a key theme through trac and was emphasised by the conference’s keynote speaker, zena kamash. this editorial examines the contemporary context of roman archaeology, its engagement with social justice, along with the struggles and opportunities afforded to it by covid- . also included is an introduction to the diverse range of subjects discussed throughout traj volume , that moves beyond the traditional analysis of ancient italy and other anglophone countries. keywords trac, traj, roman archaeology, decolonialism, covid- how to cite goodwin k. & chavarria s., ( ) “roman archaeology in lockdown”, theoretical roman archaeology journal ( ). p. . doi: https://doi.org/ . /traj. views downloads roman archaeology’s engagement with social justice the world has experienced great change since the theoretical roman archaeology conference (trac) was held in canterbury between the th to th april . the covid- pandemic has defined a lengthy period that has seen a great loss of lives, the temporary closure of most international borders, and heightened political and social tensions around the globe. worldwide lockdowns have placed higher demands and stresses on many segments of the populations. the isolation felt by people throughout this period has, however, also given rise to renewed social, ethical, and political movements. these were fuelled by compassion, a critical awareness of social injustices, and the need to listen and learn from marginalised voices. the worldwide black lives matter protests whose epicentre concentrated on the usa, is just one prominent example of this movement, with other collective efforts to highlight injustices including the hong kong human rights protests in and . it is against this backdrop that this editorial reflects on trac and its discussions, roman archaeology’s continued growth as a field, and this resultant edition of the theoretical roman archaeology journal. trac had hoped to build upon calls to action from previous conferences and editorials of traj. in its first edition, emily hanscam and jonathan quiery ( : – ) had noted the lack of ethnic diversity and gender representation in the field of roman studies. in the following volume, lucia michielin, kathleen o’donnell, and martina astolfi ( : ) had further identified the need for trac to push towards better levels of international contributions and attendance. unfortunately, the conference did not show a positive progression on both issues. roman archaeology still requires better engagement with social justice and actions on infrastructures that inhibit accessibility (hanscam and quiery : ). while institutions from different countries were represented by speakers and session organisers, most individuals came from european universities. these topics were discussed at length during trac , with zena kamash’s keynote lecture providing an insightful and thorough analysis of the current state of roman archaeology. for instance, she has made a powerful case to highlight how men were twice more likely to organise sessions than women (further discussed in kamash forthcoming). she further criticised the discipline for its current lack of action towards decoloniality and inclusivity. two datasets — an assessment of speakers and topics included in the roman archaeology conferences (rac) and theoretical roman archaeology conferences from to , and kamash’s roman archaeology teaching survey — were used to reveal these key trends. kamash (forthcoming) clearly demonstrated a need for roman archaeology to diversify, with weight placed on the need to improve the representation of individuals from minority ethnic groups in the uk and other western countries. another issue presented was the need to diversify topics discussed at trac and rac, beginning with a move away from sessions focused on britain and italy. this was also highlighted by emily hanscam and jonathan quiery in their editorial for traj ( : ), in which they similarly emphasised the need to examine narrative constructions of the past, and issues that relate to accessibility, inclusivity, and other injustices impeding the field’s growth. on these topics, trac made significant contributions, through both its sessions and papers, as well as its workshops on researcher self-reflexivity, multivocality, and the diversification of reading lists. this is further illustrated by the geographical scope of the articles selected for this volume. a particularly insightful point made by kamash (forthcoming), that came from the roman archaeology teaching survey, was the identification of a reciprocal cycle. in this self-sustained loop, the research interests of roman archaeologists stem from topics learnt as undergraduates that then become integral to what is then taught by the same teaching staff. as such, this then contributes to another cohort of students, and potential roman archaeologists, who are then exposed to traditional topics and concepts discussed throughout the field of roman studies. in this sense, scholars and teaching staff contribute to the solidification of an academic habitus that establishes set patterns that influence the behaviour, tastes, and meaning in the subject field (decoteau : ). in the education of archaeology, ancient history, and classics at universities, this is done through the integration of subject-specific skills training in the classroom that instils standard practice into student behaviour and academic identity (goodwin and quinlan : – , ). as defined by peruvian sociologist aníbal quijano ( : – ), coloniality represents the perseverance of oppressive hegemonies throughout the modern world. the cyclical pattern formed through the education of roman archaeology speaks to the situatedness of coloniality within the discourses that surround the field. in this regard, diversities of experiences and histories are shaped by western hegemonies that control outputs (oyedemi : – ; de loney : ; vawda : ). the consequence of these outputs was seen in zena kamash’s data and analysis, that demonstrated a homogeneity in both the topics discussed at trac and those who present on these topics. this was particularly noticeable at trac that had a visibly white audience. a core theme was, therefore, established and ran through discussions of trac — namely, the need for individuals in the field of roman archaeology, individually and as a collective to actively engage with action to make the field more accessible for diverse audiences. within similar conferences to trac, there has also been a recognised effort to emphasis self-reflexivity. there was, for example, a roundtable event at the international association for classical archaeology conference in that discussed issues of gender and racial diversity alongside aspects of social justice such as disability and care (mol and lodwick ). this year has also witnessed the establishment of new groups such as the european society of black and allied archaeologists, a united cohort of anti-racist archaeologists led by women of colour. these discussions and groups, therefore, engages with foundational ideas introduced by early postcolonial theorists (e.g. spivak ; bhabha ; said [ ]) and modern societies across the world that have become more adept to decode social situations through what paolo freire ( : ) defines as a critical consciousness. furthermore, these actions and the formation of new groups shines a spotlight on where roman archaeology is now, and where people want to take it in the future. the reflexive characteristic of the discipline and individuals within it is, therefore, extremely important to demonstrate ways in which archaeologists listen, interact, and learn from others in society. the multiculturalism, race and ethnicity in classics consortium’s solidarity statement and action plan in response to the black live matter protests and associated movements just another example of this engagement that needs to continue. in this issue this issue of traj aims to illustrate roman archaeology’s continued progression towards the embodiment of a self-aware and critical field that is inclusive of many voices and regions. included in this edition are nine articles that discuss a variety of regions, including syria, romania, slovenia, russia, italy, spain, belgium, france, and britain, through several archaeological approaches and perspectives. three main themes can be identified across these articles, namely the identities of researchers, ancient individuals, and regions. two articles in this edition (stemberger and van thienen) follow on from the trac session who am i? and if so, how many? that focused on the relationship between researcher-identity and that of ancient individuals. kaja stemberger gave a presentation in this session that analysed the historiography of roman archaeology in slovenia. in stemberger’s paper, historical, political, and subsequent ideological shifts are discussed in relation to their impact on the perception of the roman period and its research. vince van thienen’s paper furthers these perspectives and uses flemish archaeology as the case study. collectively, these articles reveal how archaeological theory, particularly applied to the study of the roman period, reflects and resonates with concepts in vogue in modern society, as well as broader contemporary academic trends (sunstein : ). in extension to the previous theme, four papers (haeussler and webster, moat, power, and rodriquez) pay particular attention to the development of identities for ancient individuals. miller power’s article, for example, provides an insight into the archaeology of non-binary and intersex identities in roman london with a case-study focusing on the harper road burial. his paper is well-connected with the first theme where roman archaeology is placed under the scrutiny of critical perspectives to become more inclusive, especially about ideas concerning the ongoing discussion between past lives and the modern voices which examine them. elsewhere, ralph haeussler and elizabeth webster’s article emphasises the use of creolage — a blend of creolisation and bricolage — to examine the intricacies of ancient identities and how they are perceived by modern archaeologists. stephanie moat and gretel rodriquez both follow on from this theme to explore ancient identities with a focus on marriage in the roman provinces for the first one and incised motifs from gallia narbonensis (southern france) for the second author. the third theme, which again draws connections with the approaches exploited in the first and second themes, can be broadly described as discussions looking at the intricate identities of sites and regions. this includes four papers (baird, trentacoste, castro garcia along with tentea and olteanu) which examine specific areas of the roman world such as the city of dura-europos on the syrian euphrates, the colonia ulpia traiana in the province of dacia, the ancient guadalquivir river in spain, and the agro-economy of italian territories during the first millennium bc. jen baird’s paper on the ruination of dura-europos (this issue) in particular, examines the treatment of the city through times by various groups such as the roman army or more recently the ‘islamic state’, and reveals the complex links between archaeologists, their evaluation of the loss of archaeological data, and the destruction of archaeological evidence itself. geographically closer, ovidiu tentea’s and bianca cristiana olteanu’s article offers an illuminating picture of the multiple functions granted to a unique location throughout time by both its inhabitants and passers-by. looking at a different province, maria del mar castro garcia’s paper presents an initial review of the ligustar project which develop innovative approaches to the study of the ancient lacus ligustinus in iberia. finally, angela trentacoste’s article develops an alternative approach to the examination of identity in ancient italy through the study of agriculture, husbandry, and urbanism. the papers included in this issue of traj, therefore, focus on and perpetuate some of the key interests of roman archaeologists and academics in the study of identity. this crucial research agenda has continued to gain prominence in the discipline since the s, and as highlighted by martin pitts ( : ), has developed into a major concept that unifies the humanities. what this present issue specifically showcases, however, is the diverse range of topics, approaches, and theories that roman archaeology has recently encompassed, on its journey to become a more diverse research field. covid- by way of concluding this editorial, we felt it appropriate to acknowledge the recent difficulties that have challenged the field of roman archaeology in academia, but also the heritage and contracting sectors, due to the ongoing worldwide covid- pandemic. almost overnight, everyone around the globe has had to face a sudden transition in their daily life with confinement policies being applied in most countries. for researchers, their workplace and other institutional facilities became suddenly closed, including libraries, museums and archives, while fieldwork activities were paused. coupling the aftermaths of the pandemic with the long-lasting economic changes expected from brexit, the future of academia in the united kingdom, in particular, seems rather gloomy. while the impact of these phenomena on people’s work-life balance remains to be fully investigated, the transition to work from home had led to noticeable adjustments in our research activities. teaching staff, for example, were instantaneously expected to switch much of their undertakings from face-to-face to online. while the epidemic has undermined our ability to carry on with regular tasks, researchers have had to adapt and sometimes delay their work projects. in our case, the th theoretical roman archaeology conference, due to be held in split (croatia) between the th and th of april , has had to be postponed to spring , leaving a three-year gap with the precedent event. this conference would have offered a great platform for discussions on a broader range of voices and subjects in line with the plea for more diversity in the field of roman archaeology by trac keynote speaker (kamash forthcoming). it is worth noting that the extended adjournment of trac/rac lines up with a list of conferences in the field of archaeology that have either been cancelled or further pushed back (such as the limes conference, the international congress on the archaeology of the ancient near east, and the annual meeting for the society of american archaeology). in addition to changes in our routine, the pandemic has created new issues that have stressed divisions created by existent inequalities. no economic and social sector has been left unharmed by the effects of this global health crisis (corbera et al. : ). as a consequence, university budgets have been squeezed, threatening jobs and research funding in the context of growing resistance from scholars to the neo-liberalisation of education (corbera et al. : ; the lancet ). the overly competitive field of archaeology in britain — as reminded to us by weekes (et al. ) — has not been left undamaged. the disparities between research-based archaeology and commercial archaeology have been heightened, particularly through the pausing of local and international research projects. last spring, the aia ( ) had already warned about the hardships that the covid- crisis would create for institutions employing archaeologists all around the world. finally, the lockdown measures widely adopted by countries around the world are already leading to high unemployment rates that continue to increase social inequalities, while fuelling the socio-economic divisions from the recent years (vieten and poynting : ; corbera et al. : ). we ought to acknowledge that not all of us have a safe and supportive home-working situation. factors such as status, gender or race may influence how the confinement measures have been experienced through aspects such as changes to earnings and support structures (corbera et al. : ). furthermore, this pandemic has placed a spotlight on the privileges experienced by certain segments of society, intersecting systems of oppression that affect others, and heightens stress that can threaten the inclusion of equity initiatives within decision-making (malisch : ). despite this, it has been argued that the pandemic could provide academia in particular with an ‘… opportunity to foster a culture of care, help us refocus on what is most important, redefine excellence in teaching and research, and in doing so make academic practice more respectful and sustainable.’ (corbera et al. : ) similar arguments have also been seen in the field of museums studies. elizabeth crooke ( : ) has argued that the pandemic in combination with the rise in social consciousness, evidenced by the black lives matter protests and prediction of further austerity, requires museums to rethink their roles for society. academia, and roman archaeology ought to rethink their practices, roles within society, and treatment of those inside and out of the field. this may be particularly valuable within an economic climate that currently forces institutions, and subdivisions of them, to justify their right to acquire funds and remain functional. it also advances a culture of care, however, that centres issues of social justice, equality, equity, and inclusion that is sustainable. one of the surest positive outcomes of this epidemic, however, is its environmental repercussions from a restriction on travel. the reduced economic and social activity caused by localised and global lockdowns has prompted people to develop new ways of collecting and disseminating data through ‘environmentally sustainable and inclusive research practices’ (the lancet ). this was a key discussion point in trac ’s unconference session roman approaches to nature organised by jay ingate and matthew mandich. with the advent of covid- came a need to retain widespread communication that corresponds with calls for trac to facilitate international engagement without the resultant burden on the environment that plane travel for instance may inflict. a high number of workshops and conferences have hence been moved online, using various platforms. filling the gap left by the delayed conference, trac has, for example, announced the running of a webinar series on tuesday evenings from november onwards. its first keynote was delivered by chiara bonacchi over zoom and concerned an insightful examination of contemporary populist nationalism and its connection to roman myths. moving such events online can further counter and circumvent some of the structural issues related to the organisation of research events, such as access to funds and the obtention of visas (as detailed in kamash forthcoming regarding trac). this difficult period, therefore, offers plenty of stimuli to reflect upon many aspects of roman archaeology and its study, approaches to engagement and dissemination of research, and our responsibility towards the planet and one another. consequently, we would like to acknowledge and thank the authors, editors and reviewers of this volume for contributing to this traj and joining us in the continuation of the introspection and development of roman archaeology in such exceptional circumstances. notes 	view the trac programme here: http://trac.org.uk/wp-content/uploads/ / /trac- -digital.pdf [last accessed on november ]. [^] 	view the solidarity statement and action plan by the multiculturalism, race and ethnicity in classics consortium here: https://multiculturalclassics.wordpress.com/ [last accessed on november ]. [^] acknowledgements both authors/editors would like to thank several groups whose contribution was vital to the success of traj’s third issue: 	the traj editorial committee (katherine crawford, lisa lodwick, matthew mandich, francesca mazzilli, blanka misic and sarah scoppie) 	the traj advisory committee 	the open library of humanities we would also like to thank the remaining members of the trac local organising committee who contributed to a successful conference: philip smither, jay ingate, jo stoner, and david walsh. competing interests the authors have no competing interests to declare. references archaeological institute of america. archaeological institute of american statement on archaeology and covid- , april . available at https://www.archaeological.org/archaeological-institute-of-america-statement-on-archaeology-and-covid- / [last accessed november ]. https://www.archaeological.org/archaeological-institute-of-america-statement-on-archaeology-and-covid- / bhabha, homi k. . the location of culture. london: routledge. corbera esteve, anguelovski isabelle, honey-rosés jordi and ruiz-mallén isabel. . academia in the time of covid- : towards an ethics of care. planning theory & practice ( ): – . doi: [doi: . / . . ] crooke, elizabeth. . communities, change and the covid- crisis. museum & society ( ): – . doi: [doi: . /mas.v i . ] freire, paulo. . education for critical consciousness. (translated) m. b. ramos ( ) london: continuum. goodwin, karl a. and quinlan kathleen m. . how do we integrate skills and content in classics? an inquiry into students’ use of sources. arts and humanities in higher education: – . doi: [doi: . / ] hanscam, emily and quiery, jonathan. . editorial: from trac to traj: widening debates in roman archaeology. theoretical roman archaeology journal ( ): – . doi: [doi: . /traj. ] kamash, zena. forthcoming. rebalancing roman archaeology: from disciplinary inertia to decolonial and inclusive action. theoretical roman archaeology journal ( ). de loney, marguerite l. . agents of coloniality: capitalism, the market, and my crisis with archaeology. historical archaeology : – . doi: [doi: . /s - - -x] malisch jessica l. et al. . in the wake of covid- , academia needs new solutions to ensure gender equity. proceedings of the national academy of sciences ( ): – . doi: [doi: . /pnas. ] michielin, lucia, o’donnell, kathleen, and astolfi, martina. . editorial: increasing international perspectives in theoretical roman archaeology. theoretical roman archaeology journal ( ): – . doi: [doi: . /traj. ] mol, eva and lodwick, lisa (eds) . aiac-round table discussion. diversity in the past, diversity in the present? issues of gender, whiteness, and class in ‘classical’ archaeology: panel . : archaeology and economy in the ancient world – proceedings of the th international congress of classical archaeology, cologne/bonn , vol. . heidelberg: propylaeum. doi: [doi: . /propylaeum. ] oyedemi, toks. . (de)coloniality and south african academe. critical studies in education ( ): – . doi: [doi: . / . . ] pitts, martin. . the emperor’s new clothes? the utility of identity in roman archaeology. american journal of archaeology ( ): – . doi: [doi: . /aja. . . ] quijano, aníbal. . coloniality and modernity/rationality. cultural studies ( ): – . doi: [doi: . / ] said, edward w. . orientalism. . london: penguin. spivak, gayatri c. . can the subaltern speak?. in: c. nelson and l. grossberg (eds). marxism and the interpretation of culture. urbana: university of illinois press: – . sunstein, cass r. . on academic fads and fashions (with special reference to law). michigan law review ( ): – . doi: [doi: . / ] the lancet. . research and higher education in the time of covid- . the lancet ( ): . doi: [doi: . /s - ( ) - ] vawda, shahid. . museums and the epistemology of injustice: from colonialism to decoloniality. museum international ( – ): – . doi: [doi: . / . . ] vieten, ulrike m. and poynting, scott. . contemporary far-right racist populism in europe. journal of intercultural studies ( ): – . doi: [doi: . / . . ] weekes, j., watson, s., wallace, l., mazzilli, f., gardner, a. and alberti, m. . alienation and redemption: the praxis of (roman) archaeology in britain. theoretical roman archaeology journal ( ): – . doi: [doi: . /traj. ] share authors karl goodwin (university of kent) sophie chavarria (university of kent) download 	 download xml 	 download pdf issue 	 • volume dates 	submitted	 - - 	published	 - - licence creative commons attribution . peer review this article has been peer reviewed. file checksums (md ) 	 xml: fc fbc bd beb b b d 	 pdf: dbf d d d d d table of contents non specialist summary this article has no summary close | - | published by open library of humanities | privacy policy | contributors have reset the terms for marlowe studies in terms of performance and book history, but the implicit disagreements across the volume about who marlowe was and what he wrote perhaps also point the way forward for the future of marlowe scholarship. andy kesson, university of roehampton doi: . /rqx. . last acts: the art of dying on the early modern stage. maggie vinter. new york: fordham university press, . viii + pp. $ . last acts provides an abundance of evidence for the entanglement of secular and reli- gious arts of dying and for drama’s engagement with early modern debates about what it means to achieve “a good death.” vinter argues that drama consistently shows us polit- ical subjects playing an active role in their own deaths, contradicting the more modern idea that dying entails a loss of agency. like many scholars of martyrology, she main- tains that early modern attitudes toward death did not compartmentalize weakness and strength, action and inaction. dying is work, she asserts, and sometimes that work looks like passivity, even somnolence, but it always involves choice. within this broader framework, vinter’s arguments are both rigorously historical, tracking the struggles within and controversy over various artes moriendi (arts of dying) manuals, and densely theoretical, engaging most deeply with the work of giorgio agamben and robert esposito. she brings all of these materials to bear on new readings of canonical plays, making a compelling case that dramatists were aware of the artes moriendi as a genre and were carefully mining it for material. although her syntax is most often directed at the minutiae that separate her claims from those of other scholars, such as michael neill and julia reinhard lupton, it occa- sionally crystalizes into exceptionally lucid formulations. in her discussion of allusions to cain and abel in richard ii, for instance, she writes that “death, even from the start, was always mimetic” ( ). in fact, mimesis is perhaps the central term linking her chapters, which are elegantly arranged in a kind of daisy chain. doctor faustus, she proposes, represents a broader meditation on imitation (both the imitation of christ and the imitation carried out by professional actors). her next chapter moves on to edward ii; it focuses mainly on the political crisis provoked by the king’s abdication, but also engages thoughtfully with the representation of sovereign death. her reading of richard ii brings together her earlier discussion of imitatio christi with the analysis of political action from the marlowe chapter, arguing that richard’s christlike posturing “illuminates a range of early modern political institutions that struggle to incorporate individuals into larger communities” ( ). finally, she turns to volpone for a deeper dive into esposito and jean-luc nancy’s concept of the unpayable debt at the center of christian models of communitas. reviews downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog?doi= . /rqx. . &domain=pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core under the umbrella of this broader structure, each chapter makes several subtle turns that are occasionally hard to track. the clearest and most pointed of these readings, from my perspective, is her meditation on political theology and political imagination in edward ii, which also contains some of her most exciting insights about perfor- mance. in response to the puzzle of what to do with an absence of information about early modern staging, she offers an intriguing solution—two possible stagings of the hearse supposedly containing edward’s dead body, including a detailed explana- tion of the implications of each one. does the stage object hide the body (the actor feigning death), or should the actor lie on top, as in a tomb effigy? although perfor- mance is, for the most part, not the focus of vinter’s book, this struck me as a model worth pursuing, and i would have liked to see her treatment of theatrical mate- riality more fully integrated into the book as a whole. in keeping with the compendious approach that characterizes the rest of the book, vinter eschews the typical coda containing a single point of contemporary relevance. instead, her epilogue tackles a multitude of cultural artifacts: the duchess of malfi, elizabeth jocelin’s mother’s legacie, clarissa, a david bowie video, the famous droeshout engraving of john donne in his winding sheet, and photos by hannah wilke and david wojnarowicz. although vinter finds several compelling parallels— especially between the visual pieces—on the whole this large assortment of texts does a disservice to her individual readings. it does a particular disservice to the black lives matter movement by including a mere three sentences on activists’ ongoing attempts to give meaning to unbearably brutal deaths. on the whole, however, this book is deeply researched and skillfully put together. it offers a valuable contribution to the scholarship on death and dying in post- reformation england. elizabeth williamson, evergreen state college doi: . /rqx. . unknowing fanaticism: reformation literatures of self-annihilation. ross lerner. new york: fordham university press, . pp. $ . the title of ross lerner’s book captures its intertwined imperatives: we must “unknow” postsecular notions of fanaticism in order to appreciate the “unknowing” or ambiguous quality of fanaticism in reformation literature. rejecting the binary of fanatical religion and rational politics, lerner aims to show how early modern poets “participate in or resist reformation polemics about religious fanaticism” ( ). by distinguishing his key term from enthusiasm (the platonic notion of possession by a god), lerner is able to analyze fanaticism as a child of the reformation central to the birth of modern politics, rooted in the thought of thomas müntzer and the s german peasants revolt. renaissance quarterly volume lxxiii, no. downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ arts editorial the past and the future are now sascha t. scott ,* and amy lonetree ,* department of art and music histories, syracuse university, syracuse, ny , usa history department, university of california, santa cruz, ca , usa * correspondence: sscott @syr.edu (s.t.s.); lonetree@ucsc.edu (a.l.) received: july ; accepted: july ; published: july ���������� ������� on june , crescencio martinez (ta’e), a painter and pottery designer from san ildefonso pueblo, died of influenza. he was thirty-nine years old. indigenous communities in the southwest were ravaged by the global pandemic, dying at far higher rates than their white counterparts. while the epidemic was particularly deadly for native peoples, it was also an intensification of a complex matrix of health crises that had long ravaged indigenous communities. the fate of many artists born at san ildefonso around the turn of the twentieth century offers a glimpse of this reality. one of the earliest pueblo painters on paper, alfredo montoya, is reported to have died of influenza in at the age of twenty-one. awa tsireh (alfonso roybal), who was crescencio martinez’s nephew, lost his wife and infant son in , also to influenza. he was never the same after these devastating losses. tonita peña (quah ah), who was born at san ildefonso in , was sent to live with her aunt martina vigil montoya and uncle florentino montoya at cochiti pueblo in after her mother and little sister succumbed to influenza. peña lost her first husband, juan rosario chavez, after a short illness in , her aunt martina in , and her uncle florentine, who died of influenza around . in , her second husband felipe herrera died in a mining accident, and in december she lost a baby. tragedy was part of the everyday lives of pueblo peoples, the result of social inequities and structural racism wrought by centuries of colonialism, violence, and oppression. this fact is brought into sharper focus by the current health crisis spurred by covid- , which is, once again, infecting and killing indigenous people and other people of color at disproportionately high rates. on crescencio martinez’s death, see edgar l. hewett. . “crescencio martinez—artist.” el palacio : – . on alfredo montoya’s death, see bertha p. dutton. . “alfredo montoya—pioneer artist.” el palacio : – . gregory schaaf. . pueblo indian pottery: artist biographies, c. -present. american indian art series. santa fe: ciac press. p. . claims montoya died in “the flu epidemic of ,” but provides no citation. on the death of awa tsireh’s wife, see letter from lansing b. bloom to edgar l. hewett, june , edgar l. hewett collection, fray angélico chávez history library, santa fe, box , folder . bloom explains to hewett that awa tsireh’s wife had died the week before; he does not mention awa tsireh’s son. dunn describes awa tsireh as someone who carried a profound sense of “grief and loneliness” after the loss of his wife and infant son; see dorothy dunn. . “awa tsireh: painter of san ildefonso.” el palacio : . on tonita peña moving to cochiti and the deaths of her first husband, aunt, and uncle, see samuel l. gray. . tonita peña: quah ah – . albuquerque: avanyu publishing, inc., pp. – . on martina and florentino montoya’s deaths, also see jonathan batkin. . “martina vigil and florentino montoya: master potters of san ildefonso and cochiti pueblos.” american indian art magazine : . on the death of peña’s baby, see alice corbin henderson. . the development of modern indian painting. typescript of a paper read at the colorado spring art center, , located in the william penhallow henderson paper, archives of american art, washington, dc, box . indian country today has provided extensive news coverage of how the covid- crisis is impacting native communities. see, for example, “arizona: percent of the covid- deaths are native americans.” april , . available online: https://indiancountrytoday.com/news/arizona- -percent-of-covid- -deaths-are-native-americans-b- n zynsgugfhifszpzpxg (accessed on june ). on the crisis within indigenous communities, also see dana hedgpeth, darryl fears, and gregory scruggs. . “indian country, where residents suffer disproportionately from disease, is bracing for coronavirus.” the washington post, april . available online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate- environment/ / / /native-american-coronavirus/ (accessed on june ); “coronavirus in indian country: latest case counts,” ucla american indian studies center. available online: https://www.aisc.ucla.edu/progression_charts.aspx; nicholas kristof. . “the top u.s. coronavirus hots spots are all on indian lands.” new york times, may . available arts , , ; doi: . /arts www.mdpi.com/journal/arts http://www.mdpi.com/journal/arts http://www.mdpi.com https://indiancountrytoday.com/news/arizona- -percent-of-covid- -deaths-are-native-americans-b-n zynsgugfhifszpzpxg https://indiancountrytoday.com/news/arizona- -percent-of-covid- -deaths-are-native-americans-b-n zynsgugfhifszpzpxg https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/ / / /native-american-coronavirus/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/climate-environment/ / / /native-american-coronavirus/ https://www.aisc.ucla.edu/progression_charts.aspx http://dx.doi.org/ . /arts http://www.mdpi.com/journal/arts https://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= arts , , of society at large may be just awakening to widespread structural racism, mapped by a swell in public support for the black lives matter movement, but people of color have never had the luxury of ignorance or denial. indigenous men are three times more likely to be killed by police than white men. indigenous women are at least . times more likely to experience violence than any other demographic. oil pipelines continue to be built on and pollute reservation lands. indigenous people, along with other people of color, have less access to healthcare, and, when they do receive treatment, they are often subject to racial profiling and implicit bias. native people are underrepresented at universities, and, once there, faculty and students must navigate a system that, paradoxically, is both discriminatory and overburdens faculty of color as it struggles to address this discrimination. the depth of public indifference toward the united states’ brutal history of conquest is evinced by infringements on native lands, the continued popularity of “playing indian” and of mythologized versions of u.s. history, widespread support for racist mascots, the celebration of tyrants and murderers in the form of statues and a public holiday, and the list goes on. online: https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/sunday/coronavirus-native-americans.html (accessed on june ); and gregory d. smithers. . “covid- has been brutal in indian country—just like past epidemics were.” the washington post, may . available online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/ / / /covid- -has-been-brutal-indian-country- just-like-past-epidemics-were/ (accessed on june ). the top five demographic groups killed by police, according to data collected between and , are african american age – ( . per million population per year), native american age – ( . ), native american age – ( . ), african american age – ( . ), and native american – ( . ); see mike males. . “who are police killing?”, center on juvenile and criminal justice.” august . available online: http://www.cjcj.org/news/ (source of data, centers for disease control and prevention, national center for health statistics). on police use of lethal force against native americans and failures in the media to cover these deaths, see jean reith schroedel and roger j. chin. . “whose lives matter: the media’s failure to cover police use of lethal force against native americans.” race and justice : – . on rates of sexual violence against native women and the challenges of collecting and analyzing this data, see sarah deer. . the beginning and end of rape: confronting sexual violence in native america. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, pp. – . for statistics on violence against native women, see andré b. rosay. . “violence against american indian and alaska native women and men: findings from the national intimate partner and sexual violence survey.” in national institute of justice research report. u.s. department of justice, office of justice programs, national institute of justice, may . the recent ( ) controversy surrounding energy transfer partners’ dakota access pipeline (dapl) was widely covered in the press and protested by the #nodapl movement. transcanada corporation’s keystone pipeline, whose extension triggered protests at standing rock, has repeatedly leaked oil; see sarah gibbens and craig welch. . “keystone pipeline spills , gallons of oil.” national geographic, november . available online: https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/ / /keystone-oil-spill-south-dakota-spd/ (accessed on june ); and max cohen. . “portion of keystone pipeline shut down after , -gallon oil leak in north dakota.” usa today, november . available online: https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/ / / /keystone-pipeline-leak-oil-spilled- north-dakota/ / (accessed on june ). there have been many oil spills on indigenous lands; see, for example, ethan lou and alastair sharp. . “canada oil pipeline spills , liters on aboriginal lands.” reuters, january . available online: https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-pipeline-leak/canada-oil-pipeline-spills- -liters-on- aboriginal-land-iduskbn uj. health disparities felt by native americans are documented by the indian health service; for the october “fact sheet,” see https://www.ihs.gov/newsroom/factsheets/disparities/. on implicit bias and health care, see khiara m. bridges. . “implicit bias and racial disparities in health care.” human rights magazine , no. . special issue on the state of healthcare in the united states; available online: https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/ human_rights_magazine_home/the-state-of-healthcare-in-the-united-states/racial-disparities-in-health-care/ (accessed on june ). on how this issue affects native people, see jennie r. joe. . “the rationing of healthcare and health disparity for american indians/alaska natives.” in unequal treatment: confronting racial and ethnic disparities in health care. edited by brian d. smedley, adrienne y. smith, and alan r. nelson. washington: the national academies press, pp. – . see bryan mckinley jones brayboy, jessica a. solyom, and angelina e. castago. . “indigenous peoples in higher education.” journal of american indian education : – ; patricia a. matthew. . “what is faculty diversity worth to a university.” the atlantic, november . available online: https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/ / / what-is-faculty-diversity-worth-to-a-university/ / (accessed on june ); and social sciences feminist network research interest group. . “the burden of invisible work in academia: social inequalities and time use in five university departments.” humboldt journal of social relations : – . special issue on diversity and social justice in higher education. on the history of “playing indian” and mythologizing american history, see philip j. deloria. . playing indian. new haven: yale university press. on mascots, see jason edward black. . “the ‘mascotting’ of native america: construction, commodity, and assimilation.” american indian quarterly : – ; elizabeth m. delacruz. . “racism american style and resistance to change: art education’s role in the indian mascot issue.” art education : – ; suzan shown harjo. . “just good sports: the impact of ‘native’ references in sports on native youth and what some decolonizers have done about it.” in for indigenous eyes only: a decolonization handbook. edited by waziyatawin angela wilson and michael yellow bird. santa fe: school for advanced research press, pp. – . https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/sunday/coronavirus-native-americans.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/ / / /covid- -has-been-brutal-indian-country-just-like-past-epidemics-were/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/ / / /covid- -has-been-brutal-indian-country-just-like-past-epidemics-were/ http://www.cjcj.org/news/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/news/ / /keystone-oil-spill-south-dakota-spd/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/ / / /keystone-pipeline-leak-oil-spilled-north-dakota/ / https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/nation/ / / /keystone-pipeline-leak-oil-spilled-north-dakota/ / https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-pipeline-leak/canada-oil-pipeline-spills- -liters-on-aboriginal-land-iduskbn uj https://www.reuters.com/article/us-canada-pipeline-leak/canada-oil-pipeline-spills- -liters-on-aboriginal-land-iduskbn uj https://www.ihs.gov/newsroom/factsheets/disparities/ https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/the-state-of-healthcare-in-the-united-states/racial-disparities-in-health-care/ https://www.americanbar.org/groups/crsj/publications/human_rights_magazine_home/the-state-of-healthcare-in-the-united-states/racial-disparities-in-health-care/ https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/ / /what-is-faculty-diversity-worth-to-a-university/ / https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/ / /what-is-faculty-diversity-worth-to-a-university/ / arts , , of as millions around the world are currently marching against structural racism and as monuments to oppressors begin to fall, it is crystal clear that the past has everything to do with the present. the past is now. as is highlighted by the address by sičáŋǧu lakota artist dyani white hawk polk included in this special issue, contemporary indigenous artists are creating powerful work that speaks to, and pushes back against, the history and legacy of colonialism. their work also highlights native resilience. in so doing, contemporary artists are building on a long tradition of “survivance”—a term advanced by anishinaabe theorist gerald vizenor that offers a framework for understanding native survival and resistance. the art of survivance is that of cultural pride and continuance. it is an art that dismisses outright and/or actively resists dominant constructions of authentic indianness, which serve to simultaneously exploit and disenfranchise real native people. the art of survivance is created for one’s self and one’s community. it is a mode that emphasizes native visual sovereignty, a concept theorized by the tuscarora artist, art historian, and curator jolene rickard. rickard writes that visual sovereignty is part of a larger movement that detaches sovereignty from western legal meaning and instead uses the concept to pronounce indigenous peoples’ right to assert their worldviews, to self-represent, to resist colonial interference and constructions, and to live, create, and pray as they see fit. while the terms “survivance” and “visual sovereignty” were coined during the late twentieth century, the ideas and activism that stand behind them have a much longer history, as is underscored in both vizenor’s and rickard’s work. native strategies of survivance and visual sovereignty reach back to the early years of european invasion and occupation. this special issue is comprised of essays that feature acts of indigenous survivance and declarations of visual sovereignty from the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. the authors address how indigenous people have mobilized images and objects in order to transform, accommodate, revise, and resist dominant structures, asserting native peoples’ right to self-representation, self-determination, and self-governance. these stories are told through careful analyses of a wide range of topics, including drums and paintings by a hunkpapa/yanktonai holy man (see david w. penney); the production and circulation of lakota regalia for wild west performances (see emily c. burns); basketry created by native peoples in southern california, which rebuffed assimilation (see yve chavez); the use of the american flag by the alaska native brotherhood to articulate tlingit and haida sovereignty (see emily l. moore); tactics of “refusal” by san ildefonso pueblo laborers and artists that protected knowledge (see sascha t. scott); paintings by and the collection of early twentieth-century haudenosaunee artists (see scott manning stevens); the midi badi clan of the hidatsa tribe’s successful negotiation for the return of a scared bundle in (see jennifer shannon); and t. c. cannon’s formation of an indigenous modernism (see philip j. deloria). the essays in this special issue highlight something else too—native people are “cocreators of the heuristic category the west calls modernity,” to quote philip deloria. they have shaped the past, they shape the present, and they will continue to shape the future. that future is now. it must be. social justice and basic human rights can be delayed no further. over the last several decades, the decolonizing movement has gained traction and is now fully in the public spotlight. a critical mass of indigenous scholars—among them linda tuhiwai smith, sonya atalay, waziyatawin, michael yellow bird, eve tuck, amy lonetree, cutcha risling baldy, maile arvin, james riding in, susan miller, nick estes, melanie yazzie, jennifer o’neal, and jo-ann archibald, just to name a few—are calling for the dismantling and restructuring of colonial institutions. see gerald r. vizenor. . manifest manners: postindian warriors of survivance. hanover: university press of new england; and gerald r. vizenor. . native liberty: natural reason and cultural survivance. lincoln: university of nebraska press. see jolene rickard. . “sovereignty: a line in the sand.” in strong hearts: native american visons and voices, aperture. no. . new york: aperture, pp. – ; jolene rickard. . “visualizing sovereignty in the time of biometric sensors.” south atlantic quarterly : – ; and jolene rickard. . “diversifying sovereignty and the reception of indigenous art.” art journal : – . see rickard. “visualizing sovereignty in the time of biometric sensors.” – . philip j. deloria. . becoming mary sully: toward an american indian abstract. seattle: university of washington press, p. . arts , , of these calls have been extended to museums. gone are the days when museums could rest on the myth that they are the guardians of “vanishing” indigenous cultures. some museums—an institution built on histories of theft and violence—are reaching out to native communities for feedback and guidance on their collections and exhibitions, resulting in exhibitions that are more ethically produced and more accurate in their historical framing and cultural content. museums that do not meaningfully engage with indigenous communities when exhibiting native objects and telling native stories are under ever greater scrutiny. at the same time museums are being reshaped, indigenous cultural centers are now widely recognized as innovative and important sites of community engagement. objects that once lay dormant in storage spaces and glass cases are being activated and honored. bastions of static knowledge worship are being replaced with dialogue and meaningful partnerships. collaborative stewardship, for example, offers a promising path forward for both museums and cultural institutions, as cynthia chavez lamar discusses in her essay for this issue. we see a great deal of promise in how the study of indigenous visual and material culture has been reshaped by the flourishing field of native american and indigenous studies. there is an ever-growing number of indigenous scholars. there is long overdue pressure on universities and museums to hire native american faculty and curators and to implement ethical standards for the study and collection of indigenous culture. it is understood that journals, conferences, symposia, and other platforms for discussing indigenous art can no longer exclude indigenous voices, and that scholarship must acknowledge and address indigenous ways of knowing and remembering. the anonymous, authoritarian scholarly voice is no longer assumed to be the standard, as scholars recognize the importance of critical self-reflection and first-person narration. while we recognize there has been movement in the right direction, we must also underscore the considerable work that is still needed to truly dismantle the power imbalances that remain in the academy, museums, and the art world. these changes are all part of movements to both decolonize and democratize knowledge. one central component of democratizing knowledge is accessibility. we were drawn to working with arts on this special issue because it is a reputable journal with a rigorous, blind peer-review process, but, as importantly, because it is open access. the high cost of monographs, anthologies, and journal subscriptions results in a narrowing of our audiences, too often excluding the very communities foregrounded in our scholarship. because arts is an open-access journal, anyone can download the essays in this special issue for free at anytime from anywhere. this accessibility is critical for reaching wider publics, but also for reaching students, since many students do not have the funds to buy the expensive textbooks and anthologies assigned for classes. we would like to end by reflecting on the generosity that made this special issue possible. we thank the authors for their thoughtful essays, as well as the dozens of blind peer reviewers who offered critical feedback. these reviewers came from a wide-range of fields, including art history, indigenous studies, visual studies, history, anthropology, museum studies, american studies, and so on. each essay was blind reviewed by at least two, but sometimes three, scholars. a good many of these scholars are leaders in their respective fields. arts asks scholars to review papers within two weeks. much to our surprise given the multiple demands on scholars’ time, a significant number of the papers were reviewed within a month, and, despite the quick turnaround, the feedback was typically incisive and extensive. this dedication and generosity to the study of native visual and material culture gave us a good deal of hope for the field’s future. it is encouraging to see this support. it speaks to the importance of fostering collaborative efforts to share scholarship about the vibrant and diverse to give just two of the many recent examples, see andrew r. chow. . “walker art center delays opening of sculpture garden following controversy.” new york times, may . available online: https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /arts/design/walker-art-center-sculpture-garden-dakota.html; and, steve johnson. . “art institute postpones major native american pottery exhibit over cultural insensitivity concerns at the last minute.” chicago tribune, april . available online: https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/museums/ct-ent-art-institute-postpones-native-american- pottery-exhibition- -story.html (accessed on june ). https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /arts/design/walker-art-center-sculpture-garden-dakota.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /arts/design/walker-art-center-sculpture-garden-dakota.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/museums/ct-ent-art-institute-postpones-native-american-pottery-exhibition- -story.html https://www.chicagotribune.com/entertainment/museums/ct-ent-art-institute-postpones-native-american-pottery-exhibition- -story.html arts , , of work of native artists for current and future generations. it is also promising to see the ongoing efforts to understand how nineteenth- and twentieth-century artists influence and shape our understanding of the dynamic artistic production of contemporary indigenous people. the future is now. © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. religions article black deaths matter earning the right to live: death and the african-american funeral home candi k. cann baylor interdisciplinary core, baylor university, waco, tx , usa; candi_cann@baylor.edu received: june ; accepted: july ; published: july ���������� ������� abstract: black deaths matter: earning the right to live—death and the african-american funeral home recounts the history of black funeral homes in the united states and their role in demanding justice for bodies of color and the black community. through funeral pageantry and vigilant support for local communities, the african american funeral home has been central to ensuring that not only do black lives matter, but black deaths count and are visible to the larger community. this paper is a slightly expanded version of the plenary talk for the centre for death and society’s politics of death conference at the university of bath on june . this research and talk were supported by the louisville institute under the project grant for researchers. keywords: death; african american funeral homes; african american deathways; george floyd; emmett till; black lives matter; funeral home “the trouble with us is we are always preparing to die. you ask a white man early monday morning and ask him what he is preparing to do . . . he is preparing to start a business. you ask a colored man . . . he is preparing to die.” booker t. washington “the death of black subjects or the invisibility of blackness serves to ward off a nation’s collective dread of the inevitable. someone else bears the burden of the national id; someone else—always already—dies first.”. sharon patricia holland . introduction at : a.m. on sunday, september , a bomb exploded in the basement of the sixteenth street baptist church in birmingham, alabama. afterward, at the funeral, the caskets were kept closed, as the mourners grieved the continuing violence against people of color—even children, and “claude wesley’s refusal to open his daughter’s casket to the public reflected a deeper shift in the psyche of the national civil rights campaign. the price of the “non-violent” struggle was getting too high and the deaths (and closed caskets) of wesley, mcnair, collins, and robertson symbolized that cost as nothing else could have.” the bombing of african american churches was not new, nor were the deaths of innocent african americans. what was new that day, though, was the mixture of innocence, childhood, and christianity in such a way that white americans could no longer turn a complacent eye towards the violence directed towards black bodies. when emmett till was brutally murdered and his body thrown in the tallahatchie river, some tried to excuse the violence with salacious rumors of a youthful flirtation initiated by till. in contrast, the bombing in birmingham could not be excused or lied away. the girls were young, dressed for church, and serving as acolytes that day, and they (washington , p. ). (holland , p. ). (renata n.d.). religions , , ; doi: . /rel www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - x http://dx.doi.org/ . /rel http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions https://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= religions , , of were the only casualties in the birmingham bombing. their bodies sealed tightly in closed caskets for their burials symbolized a refusal to place black bodies on display. closed caskets signalled that this funeral was both figuratively and literally a closed affair, meant for those who belonged in the circle of mourning family and community. black bodies—lynched, mutilated, chopped up, on display and serving as testimony and witness to injustice and cruelty—but also, often the spectacle and specter of white violence inflicted on bodies of color—were now hidden in closed caskets, mourned by their families as little girls and not, like emmett till, as symbols. open caskets and closed caskets were symbolic—and spoke—through display on the one hand, and inaccessibility on the other. deaths served as witness to lives, but sometimes bodies could be sacred. the black lives matter movement would again, sixty years later, insist on the agency of black lives through corpses, spotlighting death to recover the value of life. the erasure of cemeteries of enslaved people through the burying of bodies without tombstones or burial markers so that their histories, contributions, and names would be forever lost, the segregation of cemeteries and the refusal to care for the upkeep of the burying grounds, the prohibitions, and laws that outlawed funerals where families and communities could mourn the deaths of their loved ones, the hiding away of black bodies in funeral homes that were only utilized by communities of color so that the epidemic of murders and the mutilation of bodies could continue to go unseen and unacknowledged and hidden away and denied—all of these show just how much black deaths matter. enduring under incredible oppression, the story of the african american funeral home is also a story of resilience, of strength, and of power, fortunes, and identity formations, as the funeral home became a place of fortitude, character, and community. . deathcare segregation and burial societies nowhere is the continued and persistent segregation in the contemporary united states still as evident as in the deathcare industry. first separated along racial lines during american slavery, both the funeral home and the undertaker mirrored the segregation found in houses of worship and the community at large. because enslaved people were initially prohibited from gathering in groups, it was difficult for african americans to host and hold a funeral for their loved ones when they died, and many early graves of those who died were unmarked or simply left untended. bodies of the enslaved were often buried without any kind of religious ritual or ceremony, but in some households, the enslaved were permitted to gather to bury and mourn their dead, just as they were occasionally allowed to worship congregationally. tiffany stanley writes that “from their earliest incarnations, black funerals were political, subversive—a talking back to the powers that be. particularly in the th and th centuries, if slaves were allowed to bury their own dead and craft their own rituals, away from the overseeing eyes of whites, they could plan for their freedom, spiritually and physically.” funerals were symbolic of alternate worlds in which blacks could imagine a world with freedom—whether in this life or the next. free blacks in the north formed burial societies through their churches, and the undertaker quickly became an esteemed and important member of the black community. funeral historian suzanne e. smith argues that the funeral became a venue for african-americans to honor the dead in a way that they had not been honored in life, while also providing an opportunity to gather anna belle kaufman writes that “the very fact of being boxed shows us that the contents are important to someone in some way: whatever is inside is being protected, collected, saved.” (kaufman ). open and closed caskets hold significance to the grieving—they are intentionally used to reveal or to hide and conceal. (massey and denton ) for more on racial segregation in churches. the negro act in , passed in the state of south carolina and quickly enacted elsewhere, made it illegal for enslaved people to gather in groups, earn money, raise food, or learn to write, and also gave slave owners the right to kill those viewed as rebellious. this made it quite difficult for enslaved people to gather for funerals. for more, see (olwell ). (arnold ). arnold is creating the first database on enslaved americans, and documenting all known burial sites of enslaved people. http://www.memorializeamericanslavery.com/, last accessed april . (stanley ). http://www.memorializeamericanslavery.com/ religions , , of and discuss freedom from slavery. the limited opportunities to gather may also have helped lead to the practice of sitting with the body prior to its burial, and the importance of the participation of the corpse in the funeral itself, still found in contemporary black funerals. extending the mourning time through extended care of the body allowed the black community to come together and strengthen social bonds and kinship ties, under the guise of mourning. azella valentine reinforces this observation through her study of the contemporary african american funeral home industry and the contemporaneous emergence and popularity of the american black church and the formation of christian burial societies. she writes, “black churches began forming burial societies. they collected money from church members to pay for their funerals, coffins, and graves. (this is a forerunner to what we now know as pre-need funeral plans, where a person can pay, in advance, monthly towards funerals). black funeral homes began opening their doors at this time because there was no money to support these businesses.” the first african american burial society was founded in in philadelphia, other societies soon followed suit, and in , the free african society in philadelphia purchased land in potter’s field so that the society could bury their dead. these burial societies ensured a good burial, the purchase of cemetery land enabled by collective donations, and sometimes, a small stipend for widows and children left behind. burial societies were not exclusive to the black community but were popular among various other ethnic communities across the united states who sought to bury their dead with traditional customs. when people came from europe, they banded together with people from their towns, says florence marmor, , a woman who studies jewish genealogy and had her own run-in with a burial society—in her case, over her own grave. she explains that burial societies sprouted up as one way to keep people together. “they didn’t register with the government. they had to bury their dead, and they wanted to bury them among their own people.” as time passed, burial societies literally took over some cemeteries—controlling up to percent of the land, particularly in jewish cemeteries. “in effect, the burial society land is a cemetery within a cemetery,” says joel barkin, a spokesman for the office of the secretary of state, which oversees cemeteries. it was no different in the african american community, where cemeteries were purchased for the burial of african americans, and the rise of both the insurance business and the african american funeral home business were some of the few businesses that black americans were allowed to own and run. due to the refusal of whites to take care of black bodies, even in death, burial societies were often first to emerge in communities of africans, both free and enslaved. in fact, the first known sickness and burial organization, the “free african society” was founded in philadelphia in by richard allen, the founder of mother bethel african methodist episcopal church and absolom jones, an episcopal preacher. these insurance societies were no small business. usually, they met weekly, and collected dues ranging based on one’s salary. these dues were then distributed according to the need for sickness and/or death. dubois, in , wrote of the impact of burial societies in philadelphia: by there were such small groups [sickness and burial organizations], with members, in the city. they paid in $ , , gave $ , in benefits, and had $ , on hand. (homegoings ). (valentine n.d.). (rayman ). burial societies continue to be of great importance in africa today, and are sometimes seen as having competing interests with the church, as many burial societies have their meetings on sundays at the same time as local churches. however, burial societies function not only to provide the community with good burials, but also often serve to actually nourish and feed the living through their elaborate funeral feasts. thus, the meetings, during which refreshments and food are served, also function to provide sustenance to the community, and unfortunately, many churches find that their spiritual sustenance is no competition for the physical sustenance provided by the burial societies. for more on this, see (semenya ). religions , , of ten years later about members belonged to such societies. seventy-six of these had a total membership of . they contributed usually cents to / cents a month; the sick received $ . to $ . a week and death benefits of $ . to $ . were allowed. the income of these societies was $ , . ; families were assisted. this was no small amount. by today’s standards, $ , would be equal to somewhere between $ , and $ million dollars, and the collected totals allowed for large amounts of capital to be pooled to help the community in philadelphia while providing needed resources for the sick, dying and dead. these early burial societies were able to generate large amounts of capital, making the early rise of the burial insurance society—and later the funeral home—one of the more important and profitable businesses. like the emergence of the african american hotel, black bodies generated income for the black community, since they were the ones responsible for their own well-being. . a brief case study of early burial societies: mother bethel african methodist episcopal church mother bethel african methodist episcopal church in philadelphia is the first african methodist episcopal church established in the colonial united states and contains a rich repository of historical archives that document the importance of the early burial societies. the records of the united daughters of tapisco – , for example, reveal a female church society that met weekly, collected dues, provided relief for the sick, and helped organize funerals for the dead. women had a valuable and visible role both in the community, one that later continued in the funeral home, providing the funeral business with both finances and labor. a survey of this society and others revealed an initial preoccupation with burial and purchase of land for internment, but records reveal that as years went by, sickness and life circumstances and needs seemed to figure a larger role. various fines were imposed on society members for being late to church, coming late to the meetings, not attending church, talking too loudly, etc., and in this way, burial societies also functioned as keepers of morality in addition to precursors of insurance for burial. societies were thus not only early precursors to the later boom of successful insurance companies, but also functioned as informal networks and enforcers of community identity and values. one of the very first tasks of the societies at mother bethel was to raise the funds to purchase a burying ground for africans, both free and enslaved, living in colonial philadelphia. due to restrictions on burying bodies of color within the city limits of philadelphia, the initial burying ground was located outside of philadelphia proper, in the land directly across from the church and extending half a mile beyond in an area known as southwark, and more than five thousand graves are believed to have found their final resting place in the burying ground between the years of and . when richard allen purchased the burying ground in , the church societies were finally able to utilize society funds for other things besides burial and funeral ceremonies, and the direction of these early church societies shifted from concern for the dead to concern for the living. society records reflect this shift, with financial records reflecting donations and society dues going to help those who were sick in the community or in need of temporary aid, rather than funding the burying ground. church society records gradually shifted over time from burial societies to relief societies, reflecting a movement from a preoccupation of burial to a desire to better help the living. following the civil war, the burial societies were replaced by the insurance industry (the societies themselves stayed in existence though their purpose had shifted), which would help provide for burials of african americans (dubois , p. ). see measuringworth.com, (measuring worth website n.d.) for various estimates of currency values between and . https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/uscompare/relativevalue.php, last accessed july . the smaller number is the real price value, which only takes into account annual inflation rates, while the larger number reflects the percentage value of the entire economy; in other words, the income generated through burying societies was not insignificant and represented a fair proportion of the economy in the united states at that time. african american hotels were another successful black-owned business, since people of color were not allowed to stay in white-owned and patronized businesses. for more on this, see (armstead ). measuringworth.com https://www.measuringworth.com/calculators/uscompare/relativevalue.php religions , , of who could not trust white insurance societies known for lynching or murdering its black clients. the insurance industry, along with the funeral industry, then became another substantial source of revenue within the early african american community. no longer associated with specific churches, the insurance industry would provide burials for those in the community who died, while churches busied themselves with the problems of life. . insurance: the business of insurance and the african american market burial societies can be seen as the precursor to the thriving insurance business that eventually emerged, and insurance societies were not merely financial, but social as well. when a member of the insurance society died, all members were required to attend the funeral, ensuring that the deceased’s social network was represented, revealing both their status and kinship associations. each burial society had special uniforms and badges which they wore to the funeral to distinguish them from other attendees. funeral attendance was strict: the only excused absences were when a member was seriously ill. thus, the insurance was not merely financial but communal and served to reinforce networks of affinity. however, the insurance business thrived out of necessity; from an economic standpoint, many had few other options. john sibley butler states, “the idea of economic detour is that afro-americans, especially in the period following the civil war, were restricted by law from operating their business enterprises in an open market.” butler [goes on to] argue that the us department of commerce in recognized “a separate afro-american market,” and that blacks were expected to operate their business “only within their own group,” while this expectation was never true for other groups such as the japanese or chinese [living in the united states]. that insurance societies were one of the more successful businesses to emerge out of economic detour, and the funeral home after that is no mystery—when they had little other business opportunities available to them. by the end of the s, it was clear that the insurance business was a deeply profitable one, with over a billion dollars invested, and a minimum of $ , in liquid funds. since funeral home directors had first access to these funds, they quickly became the wealthiest people in the community, and often emerged as casual lenders, providing a sort of neighborhood banking system that supported the community. african american church burial societies—and later black-owned insurance companies—were thus essential to the foundation, and later success of, the contemporary funeral home which would become the nexus of the black community—both living and dead. . civil war and early american deathcare another important influence in the formation of the black funeral home came from the american civil war. though technically fighting the war as freed men, black union soldiers in the civil war were assigned the less desirable duties of removing the dead from the battlefields, recording losses, embalming the bodies, and shipping them back to their families, providing the perfect training ground for contemporary preservation and embalming practices. similarly, the newly freed african-american community in charleston, south carolina (many of whom were formerly enslaved) honored the fallen dead by erecting a graveyard for union soldiers. twenty-eight african-american men, all from local charleston churches, erected a wall surrounding the racecourse in order to properly bury the bodies of dead union soldiers, culminating in a ceremony that many today recognize as the first celebration there are several noted instances in which white insurance salesmen would sell policies to african americans and then turn around and lynch them in order to profit from the policies. for more on black-owned insurance companies and white racist policies, see (chapin ). (butler , p. ). (ibid., pp. – ). though there is not much written on the african american funeral industry and its rich history, arzella valentine writes some lovely web-published pieces on the african american funeral industry. see (valentine n.d.; cann ) for more on the history of embalming and the role of both refrigeration and train transport in the transformation of the death care industry in the united states from the civil war period to the present day. religions , , of of memorial day. newspaper accounts from that day write that there were as many as ten thousand people who brought flowers and attended the many sermons and prayers recited that day over the graves of the union soldiers. ministers from the various african american churches in charleston gathered to honor those they believed had fought for their freedom in the civil war. historian david w. blight writes, the official dedication ceremony was conducted by the ministers of all the black churches in charleston. with prayer, the reading of biblical passages, and the singing of spirituals, black charlestonians gave birth to an american tradition. in so doing, they declared the meaning of the war in the most public way possible—by their labor, their words, their songs, and their solemn parade of roses, lilacs, and marching feet on the old planters’ race course . . . thus, in what many believe to be the predecessor of the contemporary memorial day in the united states, the african american church and deathcare industry demonstrated their continued close affiliation even after the popularity of burial societies had diminished and been replaced by insurance companies. the memorializing of the dead also revealed a need to continue the deathcare practices developed in the civil war and the african american funeral home industry, like the insurance business along with it, grew and blossomed. as kami fletcher writes, utilizing the carpentry skills learned from and exploited by whites through slavery, now black men were using this knowledge to make coffins and properly prepare the deceased of their community for the afterlife at an economic gain for themselves . . . understanding that death, but more so the ceremonial prepping and sending off to the afterlife, was of high priority, undertakers were able to capitalize and fulfill a greatly needed service in the black community. once slavery was abolished and blacks experienced the spatial freedom that comes from the absence of slavery, they immediately sought to take part in elaborate death ceremonies for their kin . . . now during this reconstruction era with economic prosperity on the horizon, african americans (who were adopting some western cultural funerary norms) used expenditures as a way to signify their immense love for their deceased kin. everything was extravagant and top-notch, mainly the casket and the hearse. at the turn of the twentieth century, hearses and high-class funeral carriages were where patrons were spending their money and where african american undertakers were receiving dividends hand over fist. because of segregation and economic detour, the funeral home emerged as not only one of the more successful black businesses, but also a creator and cementer of identity. . the african american funeral home as funeral homes popped up across the united states, they became safe spaces for people of color. since funerals were one of the legal times in which the enslaved were allowed and encouraged to gather, and since white funeral homes did not want to treat bodies of color, funeral homes later became safe spaces for blacks to gather and commune. funerals were not the only events held in funeral homes. since funeral homes were often centrally located and had large open halls as part of their architectural layout, they also held community events such as dances, fundraisers, and community meetings. since funeral homes held such an important space within their communities, they quickly began to function as makers of identity. funerals allowed african americans to reclaim their narrative in a space wholly undefined and not controlled by whites. this allowed for funeral homes to express their identity in ways that could not be expressed in other areas of shared social space. (blight , p. ). (fletcher , pp. – ). for more on reading on this, see my bibliography with oxford on african american deathways: (cann ). religions , , of funeral homes were also recoverers of dignity—funeral homes allowed families to recover their dignity in shared social spaces in which blacks were usually silenced, erased, not heard or valued. as the african american church, the funeral home offered a place where black identity mattered. one of the more obvious, yet often underappreciated aspects of the funeral home was its role as a tradition maker. many ceremonies utilized songs passed down in the community and employed traditions that bonded the community (particular outfits for burial society, scripted gender roles for community members, etc.). the national funeral directors and morticians association (nfdma), was initially established because the national funeral directors’ association (nfda)—a largely white funeral home association—did not welcome black funeral home members. eventually, the nfdma became the cornerstone of the black community, publishing a magazine that became central to black american identity, and regularly sponsoring community events, educational scholarships, and discussed black identity. the nfdma magazine even had monthly articles about pan-african identity, and followed the travels of a group of funeral home directors in their travels in africa, encouraging dialogue between africans and african americans as a way to hold on to and cement their identity. as the funeral home industry grew in importance, its sources of capital also grew both in size and importance. similar to the earlier discussion on the growing importance of the insurance industry in the united states, black funeral homes held vast amounts of liquid capital resources and were often the first place black travelers went to when they needed help, money for their sick family, or even bail bonds. funeral homes also frequently operated as banking resources for local communities who often had few places in which to invest their money. in addition to providing capital for the community, they functioned as centers of resources. funeral homes, because they offered both safe gathering spaces and access to liquid assets, were one of the primary providers of resources for the community—whether it was a phone to call family and friends, a place to stay (and money to stay there), information on the local community (such as safe restaurants or hotels) for travelers, or money, the funeral home could be counted on to be a community resource. funeral homes were expected to help the community, and in return, the community would purchase their burial services at the funeral home, often utilizing the same home for generations within a family. along these same lines, funeral homes also operated as network hubs, connecting people across the country, and across the community. according to butler, funeral home directors prided themselves on what they called service leadership, a style of leadership in the community that centered on serving that community and becoming indispensable within it. service leadership, with its christian undertones, was a successful business model within the african american funeral home and promoted what dubois called self-help. in line with this, the funeral home industry (and the fdma itself) regularly offered scholarships to its brightest members in the community with the hope being that those who received scholarships would become educated and return with a profession that could aid the community. finally, the funeral home was a hub of transportation, transporting both the living and the dead. from local dances, transportation around town to taking the ill to hospitals. in my interviews with mr. chestnut, the owner of chestnut funeral home—one of gainesville’s oldest businesses, and believed to be the first african american funeral home in florida, he recounted his days as both funeral director and paramedic, trying to help not only the bereaved families through his care of the dead but also providing services for the living. he was trained in the administration of oxygen and told me stories about trying to gauge whether he was visiting a home to pick up a living sick person or a dying (and soon to be dead) person. he said that it was the insurance laws implemented in one important difference between the two organizations apart from race, is that the nfdma included morticians in their membership, while the nfda only included funeral home directors. thus, there is an implied class distinction between the two organizations, in that the nfdma recognizes the trade of embalming, where the nfda only recognizes ownership and funeral directing. (chestnut funeral home website n.d.). the chestnut funeral home was established in as hughes & chestnut funeral home. charles chestnut sr. has been called the grandfather of black funeral service in alachua county—his grandson (charles iii) and great-grandson (charles iv) continue to run the business today. religions , , of that prevented him from continuing to help the sick since insurance companies refused to continue to insure combination ambulance/hearses. so, his role changed dramatically at that point since he was charged only with caring for the dead, and no longer responsible for caring for those who were sick. another funeral home i researched, the j.f. bell funeral home in charlottesville, virginia, was the precursor to the first integrated taxi company since its director initially offered rides to the community in its limos and hearses. eventually, one of the founders of the funeral home decided to found a taxi company, which led to the foundation of charlottesville’s first taxi company that served both the populations of people of color and whites. in short, the funeral home was not merely a business opportunity but served as a nexus of community coalition and resource building that became central to black identity in the united states. the importance and role of the african american funeral home would continue to demonstrate its centrality in the american civil rights era. . funeral homes in the civil rights era in the civil rights era, funeral homes continued to provide a safe haven for both individuals and their communities, expanding on their earlier role as resource providers. funeral homes supplied transportation for civil rights leaders, in part because they had the resources, but also to protect them and keep them safe (few people thought to search or stop hearses since it was generally assumed they were only transporting the dead). funeral homes also provided transportation to and from poll booths so people could vote. in this vein, funeral homes provided tents, chairs, and tables for voter registration in predominantly black neighborhoods to aide in the registration of voters. often funeral homes would also provide bail bonds for protestors who had been jailed in protests. they also continued to furnish combination ambulances, cars that functioned both as ambulance and hearse, with funeral directors trained in rudimentary first aid and transporting oxygen to people who had no way to either get to hospitals or receive emergency treatment. since many hospitals continued to have quotas on treating bodies of color due to the continued existence of jim crow laws, these combinations were often the first (and sometimes the only) step in emergency healthcare. funeral homes provided their tables, folding chairs, and tents to assist in voter registration and to mobilize activists for the community. in my interviews with the great-nephew (now a university of virginia professor and doctor of medicine) of j.f. bell funeral home’s founder, he told me how his great-uncle had been central to the integration of voting rights in charlottesville, explaining how j.f. bell used to bring the funeral home’s tables and chairs to the polling booths so that people could register to vote. later, his great-uncle would serve on the local school board and help integrate the school system in charlottesville. funeral homes provided their spacious halls for meetings and auxiliary clubs in the community and were regular sponsors of educational scholarships for college, offering large financial grants to encourage education. essentially, black funeral homes in the civil rights era provided sanctuary (money, food, transportation, and shelter) in times of crisis, in addition to the traditional services for the dead and providing comfort to the community. poole funeral chapels, the funeral home responsible for conducting the funerals for two of the girls murdered in the sixteenth street baptist church bombings, also provided funds and other resources for activities that benefitted the community, sponsoring youth baseball teams, giving people rides to and from doctors’ (j.f. bell funeral home website n.d.). john ferris bell was born in and educated in petersburg, virginia, and upon graduation, taught tailoring for four years. he then trained as a funeral director and mortician in chicago, illinois. dr. john a. jackson, his cousin from petersburg who had become a dentist in charlottesville, pointed out the city’s need for a mortician. mr. bell moved from chicago to organize the j.f. bell funeral home which continues today as the oldest family-run funeral home in central virginia and the area’s oldest existing business owned by people of color. the american civil rights era is generally thought to be the time period between the s and s, and was highlighted by the struggle for social justice for people of color. though key legislation passed in this era advocated for the desegregation of schools and society, systemic racism continues to remain an issue, largely evidenced through unfair and predatory lending practices, and the continued practice of arresting and incarcerating people of color at much higher rates than whites. (poole funeral chapels website n.d.). religions , , of offices, buying shoes and school books for underprivileged children, and sponsoring gospel programs. in addition, funeral home facilities were used for community meetings, gospel singing group’s practices, community programs, and church services for several local congregations. young people in the neighborhood were allowed to practice music lessons on the poole funeral chapel’s piano and organ. african american funeral homes offered important social spaces, helped consolidate identity, served both the living and the dead, and helped forge a path for black lives through black deaths. these funeral homes served the living through their care of the dead. funerals, themselves, were also an opportunity to affirm black identity in a society that sought to erase it. they brought the community together and provided a safe space for outrage regarding oppression. funerals in the civil rights era were politically charged and sometimes served as platforms for speaking against oppression and white supremacy. some core issues emerged in these funerals such as integration in cemeteries, the corpse as protest, the corpse as sacred and private, the funeral as spectacle, and the funeral as a protest march, and funeral directors were at the center of both setting the stage and organizing the ceremonies in a very public eye and in an extremely dangerous time. due to the economic success and the abundance of resources, both in-network and financial capital, many of the leaders that emerged during and after the civil rights period had ties to the funeral home: robert c. henry, the first black mayor of springfield, ohio was a funeral home director, the first black mayor of fayette, mississippi—charles evers, elected in —was a funeral home director. in of the first three african americans elected to the south carolina general assembly since reconstruction, two of them were funeral directors, the first and only black mayor of raleigh, nc elected in was a funeral director, in , the ford brothers, whose father owned a funeral home, were elected to the us congress, the tennessee state senate, and the memphis city council. many prominent leaders found their origins in the funeral home and the business of death. . the national funeral directors and morticians association the national funeral directors and morticians association, inc. (nfdma) began its days as the independent national funeral directors association in before undergoing several name changes, and merging with both undertakers and embalmers, finally adopting its current name in . the nfdma represents approximately two thousand african american funeral homes and sees itself as not merely the representative of the black deathcare business, but also the protector of its interests, particularly since it emerged in its current incarnation in the middle of the american civil rights era. though officially and legally integrated, segregation in the funeral home industry continues today, even in the ongoing commercialization of the funeral industry and the buyout of small mom-and-pop funeral home operations. traditionally black funeral homes still continue to serve the black population even when the funeral home has been bought out by one of the large multi-national funeral industry conglomerates, partly explaining why corporate death industry workers are looking to train their personnel in cultural competence. reginald mckinney, the owner of the mckinney family funeral home in jacksonville, florida, states that when he first began working, he saw the effects of racial segregation first-hand. “in the funeral home that i interned in, the case-load was percent black,” he reflected. now, mckinney has years of experience as a funeral director, but he can still count the beyond the scope of this article but in need of further study is the economic relationship between the african american funeral home and the emergence of black leaders whose origins stem from either or both the insurance industry or the funeral home business. just this brief listing of leaders whose families had ties to these businesses reveals the essential importance of the african american funeral home to american culture. as mentioned earlier, the nfdma includes the role of morticians/embalmers in its title heading, thus acknowledging the role and equal importance of those preparing the body, and not simply managing the funeral home itself. (national funeral directors & morticians association, inc. website n.d.). there are varying estimates of the actual number of black funeral homes—though most estimate a total number of four thousand funeral homes that cater specifically to african american communities, the nfdma represents about of these. however, the corporatization of the deathcare industry may lead to shifting demographics in the funeral home industry (though on a very slow scale), so these changes should be tracked for future study. religions , , of number of white families he has served in the last year on two hands. “out of that i serviced last year, i would say eight were actually white families,” he said. the leadership of the deathcare industry is still largely segregated at the national level as well. the national funeral directors association did not integrate its membership until the early s, and remains mostly white in its membership, while the national funeral directors and morticians association, inc., now integrated, remains mostly black. the survival and future of the black funeral home are threatened by various factors—from corporate buy-outs of smaller mom-and-pop funeral homes to churches trying to stake out a claim for their constituents through commercial alliances, making deathcare precariously fraught. regarding a deal made in the late s between the national baptist convention (nbc) and the loewen group, in which members of nbc churches would receive a ten percent discount on graves, vaults, tombstones, and other death accouterments, the nfdma claimed that the national baptist convention did not value the personal care or the close historical association with black identity associated with nfdma funeral homes that large corporations such as loewen could not and would not provide. andrew w. nix jr., owner of the andrew nix funeral home in philadelphia and the treasurer of nfdma at the time, argued, “rev. lyons and those black preachers are doing nothing but taking their pieces of silver like judas did with christ.” the religious rhetoric employed by nix reveals the close association of both the church and the funeral home to reinforcing african american identity within american society, and the level of betrayal felt by nix over the american baptist convention’s alignment with a corporate entity without a vested interest in african american identity. it is in part because of the high homicide rates among young african americans that the black funeral home industry is still considered to be one of the more profitable industries left in the african american community, and may in part be responsible for the large corporate buyouts of smaller black funeral homes. homicides require added security, with guards and monitoring equipment, both of which can be built into the costs of funeral services and goods. additionally, bereaved families of those who die young often purchase expensive funeral packages, investing the money they might have put towards their loved one’s life, upgrading funeral goods and services (such as expensive caskets, and casket add-ons). finally, african americans tend to opt for funerals in which the body plays a significant role, diverging from the trend among white communities towards cremation or “green” burials. funeral homes typically consider embalmment the cornerstone of the funeral package, as embalming the deceased generally means that visitation will be held in addition to the funeral service, and other funeral goods and services can be added on when the body is embalmed. a visitation requires not only embalming, but also funeral home rental, purchase of a casket (or at the very minimum a rental casket for the viewing), transportation from the funeral home/church to the graveyard, and refrigeration of the body. with the service of embalming usually costing two to three thousand dollars, funerals that opt to embalm are considered the most profitable. the wall street journal reports that, federal statistics showing high mortality rates among young blacks and industry surveys showing that most blacks reject low-cost cremations in favor of high-markup burials have made them an attractive target to the industry’s big players. but for the nation’s estimated , mostly family-owned black funeral homes, and the communities they serve, more than dollars are at stake. african-american funeral homes grew out of the ugliness of segregation to become mainstays of black community and culture. in many places, they remain among the last black-owned institutions catering to and supported almost exclusively by african-american consumers. some funeral-home directors worry that, should they be forced aside by chains—or bought out by white-owned companies—the blow to the (long ). (henderson ). for more on this, see (cann ). religions , , of african-american community will be enormous. “it actually frightens me,” says o’neil d. swanson sr., owner of two funeral homes in detroit and another in pontiac, mich. “before integration, every major city had a black hotel that we could be proud of. and all of those businesses were just killed off by chains. that just might happen to us.” the funeral home industry has created one of the more profitable and successful industries for african americans in the united states, an industry that has been key in establishing, maintaining, and reinforcing black identity in a society that continues to ignore the inequities of its healthcare system, and disregards the murder of its young african american men. ironically, many feel that integrating the funeral home industry may actually undermine black identity in a time when black deaths have been largely ignored. adonnica toler, a historian of ritz theater and museum in jacksonville, florida, says, “they [members of the white community] didn’t want to live with you when you were alive, and they didn’t want to spend eternity with you.” the black funeral home, then, offered a respite from a society that simultaneously wanted to separate itself, yet profit from, black lives and bodies. not only are black deaths invisible, but the african american deathcare industry, itself, seems to be largely ignored and understudied even in academia where it is, at best, an afterthought or a contrasting point. as adkins asserts, the black funeral home continues to be presented and studied through the guise of tokenism, rather than an important part of the history—or counter-history—of the united states. this, in turn, allows the white funeral home to remain the primary documented (and studied) form of deathcare. this depiction of deathcare in the u.s., as discussed in the majority of both academic and popular literature reveals a highly monolithic and static understanding of dying, death, grief and deathcare, when the makeup of the american population is in flux and highly diverse. dr. ronald k. barett, the recently deceased former head of the psychology department at loyola marymount university and a specialist in death and dying among the african american community, wrote in the mid-nineties that “the more i became involved with the literature of death and dying, the more disturbed i became at what seemed a conspicuous absence of published research on the african-american experience.” not much has changed in the twenty years since he wrote these observations: death—particularly in non-white communities—remains highly segmented and a largely undocumented experience, with most of the literature on non-white death and dying relegated to ethnic studies, or included as a token differential to the mainstream white experience. what would they say, then about the current black lives matter movement? . black lives matter and the contemporary funeral home the founders of the black lives matter (blm) movement describe it as “an ideological and political intervention in a world where black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise . . . a call to action and a response to the virulent anti-black racism that permeates our society.” the blm movement, much like the civil rights movement of the s and s and the death of emmett till, was sparked by the death of trayvon martin. many have called martin the emmett till of our time, drawing parallels between the two because of the closeness in age and the circumstances that led to their violent deaths. martin’s death, like till’s, led the nation to reexamine the issues of race and (henderson ). (long ). the segregation of the funeral home industry is rarely addressed in the academy and most books and articles discussing deathcare are actually studies of the death industry in white american culture, with occasional mentions of other diasporas as the outliers. gary laderman’s popular and seminal book, rest in peace: a cultural history of death and the funeral home in twentieth-century america, (laderman ) for example, discusses the elevated status and the positive reception of the black undertaker in the african american community in comparison to that of the white undertaker, arguing that in comparison, the white undertaker is often viewed with some suspicion or possibly even disgust. (adkins , pp. – ). (barrett , pp. – ). (garza ). (jackson ). religions , , of race relations while igniting youth-led movements. beyond both of these cases is the fact that they entrusted the black funeral director with the handling of the remains. “trayvon martin’s body was entrusted to roy mizell of roy mizell and kurtz funeral home in fort lauderdale, florida. during the course of the investigation, martin’s body was autopsied, and the medical examiner’s official report showed a fatal gunshot wound and broken skin on his knuckles suggesting a fight. in contrast to that report, though, roy mizell, himself an activist and active member of the naacp, gave an interview stating that “as far as his hands and knuckles, i didn’t see any evidence that he had been fighting anybody.” another funeral director at the roy mizell and kurtz funeral home, richard kurtz, argued that “the story just does not make sense that trayvon martin was in this type of scuffle or fight,” “in dressing the body we could see no physical signs like there had been a scuffle,” he said. “i didn’t see any knuckles’ bruises and what have you, and that is something we would cover up if it would have been there. i did not see any signs of any cuts on his neck or face.” funeral directors (and the funerals they orchestrate) become witnesses of injustice performed on bodies of color in the same way they offered witness to black bodies in the civil rights movement. the death of freddie gray at the hands of the baltimore city police was equally problematic. with his services entrusted to the funeral directors of vaughn c. greene funeral services in baltimore , the funeral was orchestrated in such a way that dignity and respect would be given to gray and his loved ones while displaying evidence of injustice available for the public to see. gray’s funeral, as well as those of mike brown and eric garner, served as platforms that fueled the black lives matter movement. similarly, george floyd’s funeral in june of served as a catalyst for widespread protest against police brutality towards bodies of color, with the black lives matter movement finally gaining the traction it has long deserved. floyd’s funeral and memorial services took place in three locations over the course of six days—all handled by prominent african american funeral home, fort bend memorial planning center. the first funeral was in the location of floyd’s death—minneapolis, minnesota, and the second one was held on june , in raeford, north carolina, where much of floyd’s family lives. the last funeral was held on june , in houston, texas, where floyd lived for much of his life before moving to minnesota a few years before his death, and where fort bend memorial planning center is located. fort bend’s funeral homeowner remarked that the one request made regarding floyd’s funeral was that it be grand: “we were contacted by the family a day after mr. floyd passed away to conduct the services and facilitate the services for his celebration of life,” fort bend memorial planning center owner bobby swearington said. swearington said floyd’s family asked that the funeral service be grand. “not an easy thing to do with the magnitude and the amount of visitors that we are expecting to embark upon houston when his services commence,” swearington said. “it’s just so much that we are having to put together, we want to make sure that we are able to exercise social distancing, so we had to find a facility . . . we’ve had just an outpouring of support from so many people,” swearington said. “people wanted to send carriages and doves and arrangements to the family. artists, monument makers, just everyone is finding an avenue to commemorate mr. floyd.” similarly, associate professor of african and american history at albright college, dr. kami fletcher, remarked on floyd’s gold casket on twitter, “y’all see the gold casket right? george floyd is (roy mizell and kurtz funeral home website n.d.). (jackson ). (ibid.) (vaughn greene funeral services website n.d.). (fort bend memorial planning center n.d.). (willis ). religions , , of memorialized with the highest of honor and respect. african americans have always used death material culture to resist, using last rites as a tool to subvert the racist, stereotypes caricature of thug and brute.” the grandiosity of the funeral in floyd’s funeral is thus not only intentional but viewed as an act of resistance that demonstrates materially how much black lives do, in fact, matter. the open casket of emmett till, the closed caskets of the victims of the birmingham bombing, and the gold casket of george floyd all signal that black deaths matter, and will continue to matter until black lives matter more. just as emmett till’s body was the burden of proof to convict jim crow, the bodies of trayvon martin, tamir rice, george floyd, and others unjustly slain prove that jim crow’s decedents—more covert forms of racism that plague our justice system are alive and well in the twenty-first century. the african american funeral home continues to play an important role in american culture, and though its very existence, argues against racist policies and practices evident in the high mortality rates of blacks in the united states. . tokenism, erasure, and white-washing: the whitening of death studies what does this mean for death studies and the field of thanatology? it is important to recover the diversity of american history and realize that much of the published work today on deathcare in the united states is one-sided and written primarily from a white and mostly protestant perspective. during the s there were well over black funeral homes in the u.s., and today it is estimated that there are somewhere between and , yet they have been written about in history as a token phenomenon and not a valuable and integral part of american death culture and history. histories of death in the united states write about the white experience as the dominant cultural experience or tend to offer the african american experience of death as an interesting aside, as opposed to a core part of american death culture. the national funeral director’s and morticians association (nfdma) is generally mentioned as an aside rather than one of two major organizations representing the death industry, and yet the nfdma has consistently published vibrant records of their organization and members that rarely get mentioned or examined. important details of racism and death (combinations, segregated and unfair insurance policies, segregated cemeteries, etc.) have been forgotten or minimized while contributions by african americans have been white-washed or forgotten. the hand-written records at mother bethel, for example, remain undigitized and unphotographed, with one librarian responsible for the management of their records. this is the oldest ame church in the united states, with one of the most important repositories on early american burial societies. even today the african american funeral home continues to be a valuable yet ignored resource, while as claudia rankine notes, “the condition of black life is one of mourning.” so what can death scholars do to offer a corrective to the historical gaps in scholarship and the silences in thanatology? the entire story must be told. thanatologists must not, though their own complicity, continue to forget and to be silent. the us health and human services of minority health states that african americans today have the highest mortality rate of any racial and ethnic group for all cancers combined, the death rates for all major causes of death are higher for blacks than for whites, and african american babies have an infant mortality rate twice that of non-hispanic whites. black lives matter, but black deaths are simply not mattering enough. as eldridge cleaver once said, “you don’t have to teach people how to be human. you just have to teach them how to stop being inhuman.” (fletcher ). an example of this can be found in the way that the aids epidemic was written about in the s or even the current work published on the opioid epidemic. (rankine ). (cleaver and geismar ). religions , , of funding: this research was funded by the louisville institute project grant for researchers, grant number # . conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. references adkins, latrese evette. . and who has the body?: the historical significance of african american funerary display. ph.d. dissertation, michigan state university, east lansing, mi, usa. armstead, myra b. young. . revisiting hotels and other lodgings: american tourist spaces through the lens of black pleasure-travelers, – . the journal of decorative and propaganda arts : – . arnold, sandra a. . why slaves’ graves matter. new york times. april . available online: http://www. nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/sunday/why-slaves-graves-matter.html?_r= (accessed on april ). barrett, ronald k. . contemporary african-american funeral rites and traditions. in the path ahead: readings in death and dying. edited by lynne ann despelder and albert l. strickland. mountain view: mayfield. blight, david w. . beyond the battlefield: race, memory & the american civil war. amherst: university of massachusetts press. butler, john sibley. . entrepreneurship and self-help among black americans: a reconsideration of race and economics. albany: suny press. cann, candi k. . virtual afterlives: grieving the dead in the twenty-first century. lexington: university press of kentucky. cann, candi k. . mapping religious beliefs through consumer death goods . in the routledge handbook of death and the afterlife. london: routledge. cann, candi k. . african american deathways. in oxford bibliographies in african american studies. edited by gene jarrett. new york: oxford university press. chapin, christy ford. . “going behind with that fifteen cent policy”: black-owned insurance companies and the state. journal of policy history : – . 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[crossref] laderman, gary. . rest in peace: a cultural history of death and the funeral home in twentieth-century america. new york: oxford university press. http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/sunday/why-slaves-graves-matter.html?_r= http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/sunday/why-slaves-graves-matter.html?_r= http://dx.doi.org/ . /s https://www.chestnutfh.com/ https://twitter.com/kamifletcher /status/ ?s= &fbclid=iwar ww ns l_sr fpllt xyp jje su fzsrr ev ie efm tcfpbru https://twitter.com/kamifletcher /status/ ?s= &fbclid=iwar ww ns l_sr fpllt xyp jje su fzsrr ev ie efm tcfpbru https://twitter.com/kamifletcher /status/ ?s= &fbclid=iwar ww ns l_sr fpllt xyp jje su fzsrr ev ie efm tcfpbru https://www.fortbendmemorialpc.com/ https://thefeministwire.com/ / /blacklivesmatter- / http://www.angelohenderson.com/articles/articles-by-angelo/ -death-watch-black-funeral-homes-fear-a-gloomy-future-as-big-chains-move-in http://www.angelohenderson.com/articles/articles-by-angelo/ 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masters, slaves, & subjects: the culture of power in the south carolina low country, – . ithaca: cornell university press. poole funeral chapels website. n.d. available online: https://www.poolefuneralchapel.com/ (accessed on june ). rankine, claudia. . the condition of black life is one of mourning. available online: https://www.nytimes. com/ / / /magazine/the-condition-of-black-life-is-one-of-mourning.html (accessed on june ). rayman, graham. . how century-old burial soceities were taken over by black market speculators. village voice. april . available online: http://www.villagevoice.com/news/how-century-old-burial- societies-were-taken-over-by-black-market-speculators- (accessed on november ). renata, cherlise. n.d. black archives. available online: http://www.blvckvrchives.com/homegoing/ (accessed on july ). roy mizell and kurtz funeral home website. n.d. available online: https://www.mizellandkurtzfuneralhome.com/ (accessed on may ). semenya, david k. . burial society versus the church in the black society of south africa: a pastoral response. academic journal of the centre for ministerial development. april . available online: http: //www.ve.org.za/index.php/ve/article/view/ / (accessed on november ). stanley, tiffany. . the disappearance of a distinctively black way to mourn. the atlantic. january . available online: https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/ / /black-funeral-homes-mourning/ / (accessed on august ). valentine, arzella j. n.d. the history of african-american funeral service. woods valentine mortuary. available online: http://www.woodsvalentinemortuary.com/the_history_of_african-american_funeral_service_ .html (accessed on november ). vaughn greene funeral services website. n.d. available online: https://vaughncgreene.com/ (accessed on may ). washington, booker t. . up from slavery. new york: oxford university press. willis, kelcie. . george floyd: memorial service, funeral details emerge. the atlanta-journal constitution. june . available online: https://www.ajc.com/news/national/george-floyd-memorial-service-funeral-details- emerge/whziazybr hlzmj ijrkkp/ (accessed on june ). © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://www.firstcoastnews.com/story/news/local/ / / /segregation-jacksonville-cemetery-death-burials/ / http://www.firstcoastnews.com/story/news/local/ / / /segregation-jacksonville-cemetery-death-burials/ / www.measuringworth.com http://www.nfdma.com/contact.html http://www.nfdma.com/contact.html https://www.poolefuneralchapel.com/ https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /magazine/the-condition-of-black-life-is-one-of-mourning.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /magazine/the-condition-of-black-life-is-one-of-mourning.html http://www.villagevoice.com/news/how-century-old-burial-societies-were-taken-over-by-black-market-speculators- http://www.villagevoice.com/news/how-century-old-burial-societies-were-taken-over-by-black-market-speculators- http://www.blvckvrchives.com/homegoing/ https://www.mizellandkurtzfuneralhome.com/ http://www.ve.org.za/index.php/ve/article/view/ / http://www.ve.org.za/index.php/ve/article/view/ / https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/ / /black-funeral-homes-mourning/ / https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/ / /black-funeral-homes-mourning/ / http://www.woodsvalentinemortuary.com/the_history_of_african-american_funeral_service_ .html http://www.woodsvalentinemortuary.com/the_history_of_african-american_funeral_service_ .html https://vaughncgreene.com/ https://www.ajc.com/news/national/george-floyd-memorial-service-funeral-details-emerge/whziazybr hlzmj ijrkkp/ https://www.ajc.com/news/national/george-floyd-memorial-service-funeral-details-emerge/whziazybr hlzmj ijrkkp/ http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	deathcare segregation and burial societies 	a brief case study of early burial societies: mother bethel african methodist episcopal church 	insurance: the business of insurance and the african american market 	civil war and early american deathcare 	the african american funeral home 	funeral homes in the civil rights era 	the national funeral directors and morticians association 	black lives matter and the contemporary funeral home 	tokenism, erasure, and white-washing: the whitening of death studies 	references quantifying use of lethal zncl on black lives matter demonstrators by united states homeland security juniper l. simonis dapper stats, portland, oregon, united states of america simonis@dapperstats.com orcid: - - - short title: us homeland security uses lethal gas on demonstrators mailto:simonis@dapperstats.com abstract law enforcement’s use of chemical weapons is a threat to human and environmental health, exemplified during racial justice protests in portland, oregon, usa. in july, us department of homeland security (dhs) agents used an exceptionally toxic and unknown weapon to quell free speech in support of black lives and against federal presence. with significant help from the community, i combined first-hand accounts, videos and photos of munitions, primary literature, and analytical chemistry to identify the weapon as gaseous zncl from hexachloroethane (hc) “smoke” grenades. using hierarchical bayesian methods, i estimated that dhs deployed ( – ; % ci) hc grenades. given the toxicity of zncl , that many canister could have killed hundreds of people. although no fatalities were reported, the exposed population experienced acute, delayed, and persistent health issues. dhs’s wanton use of zncl will have lasting impacts and was identified through a community standing up for racial justice. introduction “the use of poison in any manner, be it to poison wells, or food, or arms, is wholly excluded from modern warfare. he that uses it puts himself out of the pale of the law and usages of war.” general orders no. , article , signed president abraham lincoln following the killing of george floyd by minneapolis police officers in minnesota on may , black lives matter (blm) protesters took to the streets around the world to demand justice . in solidarity with minneapolis, blm demonstrations in portland, oregon began on may and continued for over a hundred days, only interrupted by hazardous wildfire smoke , . in response to these protests, city, county, state, and federal law enforcement agencies deployed a variety of chemical weapons such as - chlorobenzalmalononitrile (cs), oleoresin capsicum (oc) and caustic munitions smokes , - , building upon a legacy of chemical weapons usage by portland police bureau . indeed, since the start of the blm protests, portland has not only had the most number of publicly reported instances of police violence at blm protests among us cities ( of , ; . %) but also over a third of all such instances involving chemical weapons ( of ; . %) , despite only having . % of the total us population (fig. ) , . seattle, washington ( . times the population of portland) had the next most number of incidents involving chemical weapons by police at blm protests: , which is less than % of portland’s such incidents (fig. ) chemical weapons were outlawed for american wartime use by abraham lincoln via the lieber code in and internationally in the hague conventions of and , and the geneva protocol of , yet they have a long history of domestic use by law enforcement against civilians to quell unrest - . this is despite chemical weapons being fundamentally indiscriminate, often deployed against specifications, and lethal - . in the united states, the use of chemical weapons exacerbates systemic inequities and limits constitutionally protected expression of speech and assembly , , . in portland, oregon, law enforcement has a well-documented history of only deploying chemical weapons to prevent free speech in support of black lives and racial justice; no such actions are taken against gatherings of recognized white supremacist hate groups , even when occurring on the same day . during the second half of july, as interest in portland’s blm protests was resurging and focused particularly on federal presence (fig. ; dataset s ) , agents of the us department of homeland security’s (dhs) new protecting american cities task force (pactf) , deployed deadly gaseous zinc chloride (zncl ) via hexachloroethane (hc) smoke grenades (figs. , s -s ) during operation diligent valor . at the time, zncl was not a familiar weapon to demonstrators nor were hc cans among any munitions recovered in the previous two months of protests (fig. s ). and as such, concerning new heath symptoms (severe headache, sudden vomiting, chemical skin rash, loss of hair and nails, etc.) that began appearing at the same time could not be attributed to a causal agent. indeed, it took an incredible effort (summarized herein) by frontline journalists, scientists, community leaders, legal observers, medics, and protesters to document the munitions so that mass severe health symptoms could be definitively tied to hc used by dhs, and produced by defense technology (dt), a subsidiary of the safariland group (fig. s ). hampering this connection were [ ] dhs’s lack of admission to using hc during disclosure of their arsenal to the city of portland, when answering journalists, and in response to freedom of information act (foia) requests (e. holmes, personal observation) , and [ ] dt’s failure to mention zncl or its human and environmental health impacts on its product specification page (fig. s ) or safety data sheet . hexachloroethane is a munitions “smoke” developed in the early s by the us army chemical warfare service that was understood by the mid- s to be a poisonous chemical agent - and which has since been replaced throughout the us armed services . hc itself is listed as hazardous by the international agency for research on cancer, and the us environmental protection agency, department of transportation, occupational safety and health administration, american conference of governmental industrial hygienists, national institute for occupational safety and health, and national toxicology program and has significant human and environmental health consequences . a more dire result of the use of hc grenades, however, is that they produce a high volume (> % of all products w/w) of gaseous zncl , a lethal vapor, during the focal reaction - : 𝐶 𝐶𝑙 + 𝑍𝑛𝑂 → 𝑍𝑛𝐶𝑙 + 𝐴𝑙 𝑂 + 𝐶 (eq. ). indeed, despite being called hexachloroethane smoke grenades, the goal in using them is to produce gaseous zncl , which refracts light and thus creates a “smoke”. additionally, due to the high heat energy of the reaction ( – c), many noxious gaseous byproducts are created, most notably carbon monoxide (co), phosgene (cocl ), hexachlorobenzene (c cl ), tetrachloroethene (c cl ), carbon tetrachloride (ccl ), hydrogen chloride (hcl), and chlorine (cl ) - . hundreds of cases of toxicity from hc smoke have been documented across the intervening decades since its development, showing a range of significant symptoms including immediate dyspnea, coughing, lacrimation, chest pain, vomiting, nausea, and mucosal irritation; delayed and prolonged inflammation of skin and internal organs as well as tachycardia; chronic genotoxicity of the bronchial epithelium; and an average fatality rate of % among case clusters . hc smoke has further significant effects on the environment, including defoliation and long-term reduction in tree growth , and stunted development, scale deterioration, skeletal weakness, and bioaccumulation in fish - . this is of particular note, as hc grenades were deployed in the catchment of portland’s untreated stormwater system that outfalls directly into nesting and rearing habitats of salmonids. given the lethality of its products, the wanton use of hc by dhs in portland is alarming and warrants significant further investigation. the goal of this study was therefore to quantify use of hc by dhs to provide a basis for estimating human and environmental impacts. to accomplish this, i combined multiple data streams of observations (visual/photographic confirmations, recovered canisters) on hc use into a single bayesian hierarchical model - fit using a gibbs sampler . i then sampled the protest environment (soil, plants, clothing, canisters, ground, tent) for signatures of hc use (zinc, hexachloroethane, other chlorinated hydrocarbons) using standard analytical chemistry methods. such an exercise would not be necessary if dhs were to release actual chemical weapons deployment data. given the lack of transparency regarding chemical weapons use by all law enforcement agencies in portland, however, including retrieval of canisters to prevent identification and shooting those who touch canisters , estimation is a critical starting point on the road to understanding the scope and scale of hc’s impacts. results over the course of july , dhs deployed an estimated ( - , % posterior interval) grenades of hexachloroethane in the focal protest area in downtown portland oregon, specifically in the immediate vicinity of the wyatt federal building and hatfield federal courthouse (fig. , table ). twenty grenades were recovered, five more were observed being deployed by agents but not recovered (figs. s -s , table s ), and ( – , % posterior interval) was estimated to not have been observed or recovered. the estimated rate of hc grenade deployment (λ) by dhs during july was . grenades per hour of federal agents on the street ( . – . , % posterior interval; fig. , table ). the rate of recovery (ρ) was . ( . – . , % posterior interval), notably higher than the visual observation rate (ν; . , . – . , % posterior; table ). the gibbs sampler efficiently sampled and effectively searched the joint posterior distribution (eqs. - ). convergence was high among the parallel chains: the potential scale reduction factors (psrf, a.k.a. gelman-rubin statistic) being all ~ . (table ). all parameters exhibited very small mcmc autocorrelations (~ . ) and had resultingly large effective sample sizes (table ). translation of the total estimated hc deployment to zncl gas produced , using published lethal doses and weights shows that hundreds of fatalities could have occurred (median: , % posterior interval: – ), although there was large uncertainty due to imprecise ld measurements and weight variation among individuals. while the canisters were deployed outside, which certainly prevented many deaths, diffusion was limited by crowds of thousands of people (fig. ), closed tree canopies, cars, and tents (simonis, personal observation). indeed, the off-gassing zncl presented significant risks to individuals in the vicinity as evidenced by high levels of zinc in environmental samples (dataset ) ; immediate , , delayed , , and chronic , health symptoms; and odors detectable miles away . of particular note from the environmental chemistry samples was a hexachloroethane canister recovered after deployment by dhs (figs. (b,c,d), , s , video s ), from which i sampled solid residue. ion chromatography and gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (gc-ms) identified that the residue was % zinc w/w and contained hexachloroethane, identifying that the munition was not fully spent (dataset s ). the grenade also contained tetrachloroethene, benzene, toluene, phthalic anhydride, chromium, and lead (dataset s ), all of which pose significant human and environmental health risks , . the spread of zncl through the protest area and beyond was shown through all environmental samples having significant concentrations of zinc (dataset s ). perhaps the most notable of which was the organic vapor filter worn by a medic outside of the plume on the far side of the protest area (~ yd or m from the main release points) which contained zinc (made gaseous as zncl ), yet no chromium or lead (neither of which were made gaseous), as well as phthalic anhydride, toluene, and xylene (dataset s ). discussion under ideal conditions in a wide-open field at night, the concentration of zncl produced by a typical hc grenade is high enough that an unmasked individual yd (three city blocks in portland, m) from detonation has a maximum of min of safety before significant acute health symptoms appear . an individual a , yd ( . km) away is still at risk and only has . h it is unclear how zncl dissipates through a densely-gassed, tree-lined urban landscape within a river valley like portland , but reported signs and symptoms indicate that it spread widely, entered the stormwater system that flows to the willamette river, and passed through or around protective equipment worn by journalists, protesters, medics, legal observers, and bystanders - . the impact of zncl ’s novelty cannot be overstated, as both veteran and newer demonstrators, press, medics, and legal observers were unprepared for this weapon specifically. virtually all existing chemical weapons seen prior to hc’s use produced liquid or solid particles, despite being called “tear gas”, that could be removed from air using particle filters such as respirators. as such, many individuals had insufficient filtration to remove gaseous zncl . only those with filters designed for gases were able to limit inhalation, as evidenced by the zinc found on the medic filter (dataset s ) and first-hand accounts of individuals with gas masks being less affects (simonis, personal observation). even when using a properly fitting gas mask, however, zncl is absorbed into the body via dermal uptake - , . further, given its capacity to bioaccumulate and cause delayed severe inflammation responses, zncl exposure is measured cumulatively over d , , a significant departure from other presently used chemical weapons - . despite these life- threatening differences with hc, the public was never informed of dhs’s use of the weapon by any agency (federal or otherwise). indeed, dhs has continued to deny using hc (e. holmes, personal observation), despite overwhelming evidence to the contrary (figs. s - , video s , dataset s ) , and even a more recent ( october ) deployment of hc by dhs in front of a property rented by immigrations and customs enforcement (ice) in south portland , , which again caused severe health symptoms in the exposed population . as a highly mobile and poisonous gas that lacks an odor itself, zncl poses a significant risk to humans as well as the environment , , , . building upon a legacy of resistance to excessive police force , , a community of protesters, activists, journalists, legal observers, and scientists standing up for black lives documented its use and are just beginning to understand its impacts on the residents and environment of portland. human health and environmental impact studies are urgently needed to grasp the full impact of dhs’s literal salting of the earth using hexachloroethane smoke grenades in portland, or. methods incidents of police brutality at blm protests i collected all incidents from the police brutality database , which collates publicly reported events of police violence associated with the black lives matter (blm) protests. i used their restful api (https://api. policebrutality.com/api/incidents) via r v . . with the httr v . . and jsonlite v . . packages. i collected all incidents during the may to december interval, and specifically filtered portland, oregon incidents. i also filtered the total and portland incidents by chemical weapons tags using entries marked “gas”, “marking-round”, “pepper-ball”, “pepper-spray”, “spray”, “tear-gas”, or “tear- gas-canister”, and then simply divided to determine ratios. portland protest data i used timestamps from videos and augmented them with time-stamped or time-noting tweets as needed, to calculate the amount of time each night during july that the federal agents were outside of their buildings , . individual jaunts by federal agents are detailed in dataset s and collated daily-level data are in dataset s . i used crowd size estimates provided by the news and social media aggregating site the recompiler, which has a project (re: portland) that has collected documents of the portland blm protests since the end of june , prior to the arrival of the dhs agents . on nights where a range of crowd sizes was given, the midpoint was used. see dataset s for data used in analyses. munition identification protesters, concerned civilians, medics, legal observers, trash cleaners, scientists, and neighbors have been collecting munitions (e.g., figs s - ) since the beginning days of the protest. i leveraged this specifically to address the uncertainty around hexachloroethane (hc) usage by connecting with the network of individuals already collecting and documenting munitions and notifying them of the particular can types of interest. in addition, i put out specific calls publicly for submissions of photos via twitter and the chemical weapons research consortium website (https://chemicalweaponsresearch.com) via secure email and secure form, which have yielded dozens of submissions, but no additional hc cans beyond those included (simonis, personal observation). the avenues remain open to submissions and i will update the dataset used here with any further hc cans. i also watched dozens of hours of footage , and read through aggregated news and tweets to investigate potential other deployments. because hc cans are so distinctive when deploying and afterwards (figs. , s -s , but note fig. s ; video s ), it was possible to retroactively evaluate documentation and collections of munitions to enumerate the hc cans. if a can spewed sparks, off-gassed white/grey/black “smoke”, and glowed and burned hot and long (~ minutes), it was considered an hc can, due to the distinctive nature of its incendiary aspects (fig. s ). further, if any recovered can was so corroded to be illegible and was of the distinctive size of the hc cans (figs. s - ), it was considered as such. in the instance of the grenade in fig. s , it was identified as hc due to its clear labeling. bayesian model having evaluated a large volume of photographic, video, and print media, i identified deployments of hexachloroethane (hc) grenades and recovery of munitions during july (figs. s -s ). i also estimated the time federal agents were out of their buildings and crowd size for each day from the media compilation (fig. , datasets s ,s ). i combined the visual confirmation of hc deployment and recovery of hc canisters with the time federal agents were out of their buildings using a hierarchical bayesian model to infer the underlying unknown number of canisters deployed by the department of homeland security (dhs) on a given day (𝑑𝑖 ) and over all days (𝐷 = ∑ 𝑑𝑖 ) - , where the 𝑖 subscript represents day. the hourly rate of deployment for that day (𝜆𝑖) is a log-linear (to handle poisson response) function of the raw intercept (𝜆∗) and stochastic error term (ε𝑖), and is weighted by the time dhs agents were on the street/out of their buildings each night (ft𝑖) . the number of canisters deployed each day is then a poisson distribution with rate 𝜆𝑖 ft𝑖 truncated at the minimum by the known cans deployed on that day (𝑐𝑖): ε𝑖 ~ normal( , 𝜎 ) 𝜆𝑖 = 𝑒 𝜆∗+ε𝑖 (eq. ). 𝑑𝑖 ~ poisson(𝜆𝑖 ft𝑖 )c𝑖 deployed grenades were then subjected to each detection process via binomial distributions: observation (regardless of recovery) is governed by rate 𝜈 to give daily observed cans 𝑜𝑖 and by recovery (regardless of observation) by rate 𝜌 to generate daily recovered cans 𝑟𝑖. the processes are joined using a third, constrained binomial describing the number of grenades that were both observed and recovered (𝑜𝑟𝑖) by applying the recovery process to observed grenades and capping the number at the total grenades recovered , . both rates are fit on the logit scale: 𝑜𝑖 ~ binomial(𝜈, 𝑑𝑖 ) 𝑟𝑖 ~ binomial(𝜌, 𝑑𝑖 ) 𝑜𝑟𝑖 ~ binomial(𝜌, 𝑜𝑖 ) 𝑟𝑖 (eq. ). 𝜈 = logit− (𝜈∗) 𝜌 = logit− (𝜌∗) this model therefore assumes no false positives, a fair baseline assumption, given the distinctive burn pattern and resulting canister (figs. , s - ) . i used generally uninformative priors on the raw scales: 𝜆∗ ~ normal( , ) 𝜈∗ ~ normal( , ) (eq. ). 𝜌∗ ~ normal( , ) 𝜎 ~ uniform( , ) i fit the model using jags (just another gibbs sampler, v . . ) via the runjags v . . - package in r . i used four mcmc chains with varying starting values for parameters and ran each for , adaptation, , burn-in, and , , final samples thinned to , per chain to total , samples across chains. i evaluated chain convergence using the autocorrelation, sample size adjusted for autocorrelation, and gelman-rubin statistic for each parameter. all code is included within datasets s ,s . i then converted the estimated number of cans deployed each day to the potential number of human fatalities from zncl . a standard military style can contains oz of hc mix type c , there are . g in an oz, and assuming no loss of mass, g of type c mix generates g products. zncl constitutes . w/w of all products , which translates to . g zncl per grenade. it is difficult to gauge specifically the lethal dose or concentration of zncl , given the limited data on humans and multiple modes of uptake (inhalation, orally, dermally) , . thus, for a simple approximation, i used a log-normal distribution based on the eight studies included in pubchem that report ld values for mammal models ( , , , , , , , mg/kg) , which has a log-scale mean of . and standard deviation of . , generating a back-transformed mean of mg/kg. for human sizes, i used the most recent ( - ) us national health and nutrition examination survey with available data and combined the data across genders to construct a log-normal distribution with a back-transformed mean of kg (log-scale mean: . , sd: . ). thus, an average ld is g/person and an average grenade contains enough zncl to kill . people. to incorporate the ld and weight uncertainty in estimating the number of potential fatalities, i treated the total zncl from each mcmc iteration as a resource pool and individuals consumed the zncl represented by their personal ld values, which were drawn separately for each iteration. all code used is included within datasets s and s , including full r session information and package versions. chemical analyses i collected environmental samples from a variety of sources around the areas of hexachloroethane deployment (fig. , dataset s ): [ ] medic filter: filter medium from a niosh organic vapors dma filter set worn by a medic only on - - , - - , - - in the area of sw th and main. medic only brought out mask when chemical weapons were used and always positioned themselves outside of the visible plume to treat individuals as they came out. [ ] hc can: dust/particle residue from inside defense technology hexachloroethane (hc) smoke can deployed and recovered post “completion” on - - night into - - (figs. , s ; video s ). [ ] a’s backpack: cut out from a black jansport backpack that was worn by a protester the night of - - and prepped for sampling thereafter. [ ] rd avenue and salmon street plants: shrub within the fence at the federal courthouse and tree at the corner of lownsdale, samples taken - - night after a bleach smell was noticed and - - during the following daytime. [ ] lownsdale surface soil at rd avenue and salmon street: scoop of topsoil from the ne corner of the park taken - - midday. [ ] sw rd avenue: samples of paper and other refuse on the street in front of the federal courthouse on rd near salmon from immediately after a bleach smell was noticed - - into - - . [ ] e’s shirt: water taken from a soak of a shirt worn by a protester on - - into - - , with noticeable bleach-like smell and visible loss of coloration. [ ] green smoke can: dust/particle residue from inside defense technology green smoke canister deployed and recovered post “completion” on - - into - - . [ ] s’s leggings: water taken from a soak of leggings worn by protester recovering spent canisters - - into - - . [ ] witches’ tent: passive sample taken from existing cotton rounds, paper towels, etc that were present in a medical tent in lownsdale (run by medics known as the witches) the night when the tent reeked of bleach - - . [ ] spicy bucket scrape: residue scraped from inside of a home depot -gallon bucket used to cover smoke and gas canisters during - - and - - nights. samples were stored frozen in -l glass jars until submitted to specialty analytical in clackamas, oregon. each sample was tested using standard epa methods for volatile organic compounds (sw d, e d); semi-volatile organic compounds (e e); and zinc, chromium, and lead (sw b) (dataset s ). data availability all data used herein are included in datasets s to s . acknowledgements this work would not have been possible without a large community standing up despite the wanton use of chemical weapons to say that black lives matter. front-line journalists including alissa azar, garrison davis, robert evans, mariah harris, laura jedeed, jacob hanning, melissa lewis, sergio olmos, mac smith, tuck woodstock and many individuals who have chosen to remain anonymous due to continuing tensions with law enforcement provided invaluable documentation. additional contributions to the dossier are cited in the supplementary information. substantial thank you to the don’t shoot portland team for documenting, researching, and organizing around use of chemical weapons in portland; sarah riddle for life-cycle documentation; the recompiler magazine for aggregated protest news; and eric greatwood for particularly useful standardized video footage. mason fidino gave helpful feedback on the model and nelson hairston jr. and sandy simonis provided editing support. references . f. lieber & a. lincoln. the lieber code. general order no. . article . available at https://avalon.law.yale.edu/ th_century/lieber.asp ( ). accessed october . . a. morman, z. williams, d. smith., & a. c. randolph. riot control agents: systemic https://avalon.law.yale.edu/ th_century/lieber.asp . reassessment of adverse effects on health, mental stability, and social inequities. don’t shoot pdx, portland, or. available at https://www.dontshootpdx.org/wp- content/uploads/ / /dspfinal-rcareport socialchange-am.ar_.zw_.ds-.pdf ( ). accessed october . . @proudbulba. tweet. https://twitter.com/proudbulba/status/ . accessed october . . e. campuzano, b. hebert, b. nakamura, d. killen, & m. graves. days of protests in portland. the oregonian, september . https://www.oregonlive.com/portland/ / / -days-of- protests-in-portland.html. accessed october . . a. zielinski. good morning, news: smokey skies, police overtime costs, and days of portland protests. portland mercury, september . https://www.portlandmercury.com/blogtown/ / / / /good-morning-news- smokey-skies-police-overtime-costs-and- -days-of-portland-protests. accessed october . . pb team. police brutality during the george floyd protests. available at https://github.com/ pb/police-brutality. accessed january . . e. weizman, r. trafford, i. j. brown, e. farooqui, l. karmode, z. ioannidis, l. brown, l. starr, n. elçi, s. nankivell, c. varvia, o. ferwati, c. godart, n. waters, a. mossou, g. fiorella, e. alder, r. barron, n. boyle, r. cavanaugh, a. dhillon, m. ficarelli, k. mager, m. nieto, i. piper, s. reeves- dyer, & a. weizman. police brutality at the black lives matter protests. forensic architecture. https://forensic-architecture.org/investigation/police-brutality-at-the-black-lives-matter-protests. accessed january . . united states census bureau. population estimates v (july , ). https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/us/pst . accessed january . hague peace conference. declaration on the use of projectiles the object of which is the diffusion of asphyxiating or deleterious gases. available at https://avalon.law.yale.edu/ th_century/dec - 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(wadsworth & brooks/cole, ). https://twitter.com/arunindy/status/ https://twitter.com/iwriteok/status/ https://twitter.com/hungrybowtie/status/ https://twitter.com/hungrybowtie/status/ https://twitter.com/juniperlsimonis/status/ https://www.r-project.org/ https://cran.r-project.org/package=httr https://arxiv.org/abs/ . https://www.facebook.com/ericgreatwood/videos https://pdx.recompilermag.com/about https://twitter.com/cascadianphotog/status/ https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=us-or- &q=protests,black% lives% matter,federal https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=us-or- &q=protests,black% lives% matter,federal tables table . statistical fit results and diagnostics from the bayesian estimator of hexachloroethane grenade use. lower median upper mean sd mode mc err mc % of sd ss eff ac psrf d . . λr - . - . - . - . . . . - . . νr - . . . . . . . . . ρr . . . . . . . . . σ . . . . . . . . . r indicates untransformed (raw) scale mcmc diagnostics are not included for d, a state variable, just the parameters. mc err: mcmc standard error; mc % of sd: mcmc standard error as a percentage of the standard deviation of the posterior distribution; ss eff: effective sample size; ac : autocorrelation at mcmc steps (ac for the thinning interval of used); and psrf: potential scale reduction factor (gelaman-rubin statistic; ). figures figure . total and chemical-weapons-based incidents of police brutality during the george floyd black lives matter protests through the end of the year for all us cities with at least incidents . city population sizes are depicted via the points and the secondary y-axis (see also dataset s ). figure . top: time series of general interest (normalized google search term trends ) for the portland metro area in “protests” (orange), “black lives matter” (red), and “federal” (purple) during the george floyd black lives matter protest period to september. bottom: july-focused time series of crowd size (purple) and the number of minutes federal agents were out (red) each night. lines in both portions were fit using local polynomial regression (loess) . grey box points connected by grey line show the number of hexachloroethane (hc) grenades used each night, based on observations and collections combined. figure . hexachloroethane (hc) / zinc chloride smoke grenade canisters: (a) unexploded ordnance clearly marked as “military style maximum smoke hc” from “defense technology” (fig. s ); (b) hc ordnance off gassing zinc chloride mid-deployment; (c) same canister from (b) after reaction stopped, showing charred remains of the label that matches the canister in (a); and (d) three exploded hc canisters, including the one from (b) and (c) in the middle. photos (a) and (d) are from the author, (b) and (c) are from sarah riddle and used with permission. the canister in (b), (c), and (d) was sampled in dataset s (fig. , s ), and its deployment is shown in video s . figure . sample locations and pictures for the environmental chemistry samples taken around the downtown area of portland, or. [ ] medic filter, [ ] hc can (video s ), [ ] a’s backpack, [ ] rd ave and salmon st plants, [ ] lownsdale surface soil, [ ] sw rd avenue, [ ] e’s shirt, [ ] green smoke can, [ ] s’s leggings, [ ] witches’ tent, [ ] spicy bucket scrape. blue lines on the street map show the streets drained by the stormwater system that empties unfiltered into the willamette river. figure . posterior distributions for the number of hc grenades deployed (left) and the rate of grenade deployment (grenades per hour) (right). loving transgressions: queer of color bodies, affective ties, transformative community full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=wjls journal of lesbian studies issn: - (print) - (online) journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wjls loving transgressions: queer of color bodies, affective ties, transformative community aimee carrillo rowe & francesca t. royster to cite this article: aimee carrillo rowe & francesca t. royster ( ) loving transgressions: queer of color bodies, affective ties, transformative community, journal of lesbian studies, : , - , doi: . / . . to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / . . published online: sep . submit your article to this journal article views: view related articles view crossmark data citing articles: view citing articles https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=wjls https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/wjls https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showcitformats?doi= . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=wjls &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=wjls &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/ . / . . #tabmodule https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/ . / . . #tabmodule introduction loving transgressions: queer of color bodies, affective ties, transformative community aimee carrillo rowea and francesca t. roysterb acommunication studies, california state university, northridge, ca; bdepartment of english, depaul university, chicago, il abstract this introductory article considers the importance of queer woman of color theorizations of affect in thinking more fully the recent interdisciplinary turn to affect. the affective turn has vitally invited culture and feminist critics to interrogate emotion beyond the individual to examine the political and cultural production of emotion. even as women of color are often associated with excessive affect, the theoretical contributions women of color make to the field of affect studies are often overlooked. our introduction and this special issue more broadly examine how this solipsism shapes projects invested in critical knowledge production, as well as the stakes of centering a queer woman of color genealogy. for instance, we argue for the importance of retaining u.s. third-world feminist concepts—like interpellation, oppositional consciousness, and the generative force of negative affects—even as they fall out of favor within affect studies. centering theory that emerges from the vexed spaces of queer women of color lived experiences generates a vital interdisciplinary conversation that contributes to the ongoing political task of mobilizing affect for social action as a critical praxis. in the articles that follow we see this critical praxis at work in the form of community organizing, music, poetry, and performance art. keywords affect theory; queer theory; women of color feminism; resistance; embodiment; community within the context of u.s. settler colonial culture, queer women of color bear the bur- den of affect, saturated by the colonial gaze with emotional excess: angry, hyper-sexual, depressed, dysfunctional. if, as sara ahmed has so persuasively argued, “happiness involves a way of being aligned with others,” queers and women of color are neoliber- alism’s party poopers—what she describes as “feminist killjoy,” “unhappy queer,” and “melancholic migrant.” indeed, the fate of sandra bland, pulled over july , for failing to signal a lane change, and found hanging in a texas jail cell, an alleged “sui- cide,” gives us pause in thinking about the ways that the image of women of color as excessively emotional has been conveniently used by state forces as a mask for its own operations of power. sheriffs’ reports promptly picked up and amplified by the national contact aimee carrillo rowe aimee.carrillo@csun.edu nordhoff st., manzanita hall, room , northridge, ca - , usa. © taylor & francis journal of lesbian studies , vol. , no. , – http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . media, emphasized bland’s past struggles with depression, helping to frame her unex- plained death in the custody of the police as a suicide. this “evidence” of bland’s exces- sive affect positions her as always-already guilty—as misaligned with the law’s juridical morality. “because the law is presumed to be both ethical and irreproachable,” writes lisa marie cacho, “the act of law-breaking reflects poorly on a person’s moral charac- ter. if following the law (legitimate or not) determines whether a person is moral or immoral, it is all but impossible for people assigned to certain status categories to repre- sent themselves as moral and deserving.” so bland was guilty and thus killable prior to her arrest as the evidence of her immorality was marked on her body and assigned to her emotional status. this might be why coroner’s reports corroborated the claim that bland was “depressed,” while the family disputed this claim. the answers to bland’s death remain inconclusive, at this printing. but as many acti- vists of color have pointed out, this depiction of her psychic as well as physical death deflects our attention away from unanswered questions about her treatment (as well as the justice of her arrest in the first place), and also casts a pall on her political activism and outrage at the very police brutality to which she was subjected. moreover, it con- firms the ongoing idea of the black body as already dead, socially, psychically, and phys- ically/materially. in this way, bland’s life and death are inherently queer, and deeply tied to her identity as a black woman. as jeffrey mccune has written in his essay on fergus- son, “to be a ‘death-bound subject’ is to be a queer subject, always in danger of being destroyed. psychically. spiritually. representationally.” at the same time, naming sandra bland’s death as an example of police violence has helped refocus movements against police brutality, such as the black lives matter movement, and to make more visible the bodies of black women, as well as other women of color, at the hands of police. in many ways, the emotional responses of outrage, sadness and grief unleashed by this case, as well as others, might be seen as example of the productive use of feeling as a form of activism and reflection central to this special issue of jls. for a poignant example of this pro- ductive use of feeling, see janelle monae and wondaland’s powerful performance of the song “hell you talmbout” (https://soundcloud.com/wondalandarts/hell- you-talmbout), first performed at a philadelphia black lives matter rally, then on the today show, naming and honoring the loss of black lives, including bland, eric garner, treyvon martin, emmet till, and others. “say his name, shawn bell, won’t you say his name … ayana jones, say her name, won’t you say her name!” men’s and women’s voices chant commands, their voices laden with a sense of urgency, as if their own lives were on the line. the chants repeat and resound to the beats of the drum marching giving the feeling that guerrilla warriors are taking over the street. militant beats are overlaid with gospel voices raising the souls of the fallen to the heavens, resounding sacred sounds, chants, and rituals of a long history of african american survival and reverberating the chants with a sense of possibility—like god herself might just raise up the fallen innocent and touch survi- vors with the healing vibration of their own souls. as we listen, we are transformed by its righteousness, its outrage and, yes, its room still for creativity and even joy. a. c. rowe and f. t. royster https://soundcloud.com/wondalandarts/hell-you-talmbout https://soundcloud.com/wondalandarts/hell-you-talmbout the song’s powerfully vital concoction of booming bass, drums and the shout-sing is a direct counter against death and other forms of inaction. what if we held on to our critique of the use of bland’s emotions as smoke screen while also recasting depression (bland’s as well as our own) as a legitimate and understandable response to injustice? here, we might draw from ann cvetko- vich’s work on depression as a public feeling, when she writes: what makes it possible for people to vote for bush or to assent to war, and how do these political decisions operate within the context of daily lives that are pervaded by a combi- nation of anxiety and numbness? how can we, as intellectuals and activists, acknowledge our own political disappointments and failures in a way that can be enabling? where might hope be possible? to address questions like those posed by cvetkovich, we seek to generate in this spe- cial issue a mindful conjecture between the turn to affect in the humanities and social sciences and queer women of color theory. as it is generally conceived in queer theory, the concept of affect derives from the philosophy of baruch spinoza, henri bergson, gilles deleuze, felix guattari, and brian massumi, emphasizing bodily intensities related to feelings like joy, pain, love hate, hope, fear, envy, and desire. affect studies and the turn to affect has been inspired by interdisciplinary conversations across the humanities and the sciences, including psychoanalysis, theories of the body and embodiment, poststructuralism, political theory, and queer theorizations of melancholy and trauma. affects are “bodily capacities to affect and be affected or the augmentation or diminution of a body’s capacity to act … such that autoaffection is linked to the self- feeling of being alive—that is, aliveness or vitality.” this special issue considers the multiple ways in which the “affective turn” provides opportunities for queer women of color to claim the authority earned through this asso- ciation with affective excess. indeed, u.s. third world feminisms have long been theo- rizing our complex affective lives, excavating through poetry, theory, and criticism, such feelings as anger, shame, loss, and the erotic produced through the ongoing coloniza- tion and multiple displacements that shape queer women of color’s lives. we follow the lead of jose mu~noz, who acknowledges the importance of third world feminism in theorizing disidentification, noting “identities-in-difference emerge from a failed interpellation within the dominant public sphere.” this conjuncture might entail a sustained attention to the competing and converging forces of affect and interpellation, even as the latter seems to be out of fashion within affect studies, displaced by the “pre- conscious” intensities of our affective lives. yet for queer women of color, organizing and leveraging what chela sandoval refers to as an “oppositional consciousness” remains vital to our survival and indeed vitality. the task of mobilizing affect for social action remains a critical praxis. in this special issue we explore the stakes for thinking and feeling our way through the messy affects of political living by (re)grounding affect studies within a queer women of color genealogy. for instance, audre lorde’s still powerful, still poignant thinking on the uses of the erotic and anger as well as other foundational journal of lesbian studies women of color feminisms that we see modeled an embrace of difficult and often uncomfortable truths, the intelligence of pleasure, the theoretically possibilities of collective creativity. as eve tuck and wayne yang argue in their reading of lorde, “freedom is a possibility that is not just mentally generated; it is particular and felt.” for lorde feelings—especially what ahmed would call “bad feelings” —are a tremendous political resource. for instance, her pairing of “uses of” with bad feelings like “anger” and “the erotic” signal how these ugly emotions become a means to action. or better said, bad or taboo feelings are the fire that fuel the flames of just and righteous response to the various dehumanizations that u.s. women of color navigate on a daily basis. indeed, for chela sandoval, it is the mul- tiple displacements that u.s. women of color navigate across contexts—always on the margins of social movements—that enable the tactical shifting across forms of consciousness (and we would add, feeling and belonging) that is captured in her concept of the differential. let us consider the stakes of “uses” in relation to affect, then, as a political resource. in her essay, “uses of anger: woman responding to racism,” lorde uses aggressive, active, even militaristic metaphors to describe anger: “every woman has a well-stocked arsenal of anger potentially useful against those oppressions, personal and institutional, which brought that anger into being. focused with precision it can become a powerful source of energy serving progress and change.” emotions like anger might be used like a weapon, especially one that is “focused with precision,” for naming and challeng- ing “personal and institutional” oppressions. language is not merely a means of com- municating, but a tool for social change, fueled by a “well-stocked” arsenal of bad feelings, here recast as the very tools we might use to fight for freedom. she quips, “if i speak to you in anger, at least i have spoken to you: i have not put a gun to your head and shot you down in the street…” signaling the rightness of anger wielded with intention. lorde underscores the danger of moving too quickly to good feelings, noting that the point of using anger is not simply to “switch of positions” or temporarily lessen “tensions, nor the ability to smile or feel good.” she cautions about emotions that deflect and defer action, like guilt (not a response to anger, but rather “to one’s own actions or lack of action”) and defensiveness (“a device to protect ignorance and the continuation of things the way they are, the ultimate protection for changelessness”). when she likens uses of anger to “the approaching storm that can feed the earth as well as bend the trees,” lorde anticipates the turn to inhumanisms in queer theory. dana luciano and mel chen bring together “queer inhumanisms,” not so much to “declare an identity” as to stage “an encounter … expands the term queer past its conventional resonance as a container for human sexual nonnormativities.” we might read lorde, anzald�ua, moraga, and other queer u.s. third world feminist theorists through and against the emerging theories within affect studies, to generate a more reflexive genealogy that accounts for vari- ous forms of settlement and colonialism. jodi byrd points out the stakes of unre- flexively appropriating the poststructuralist genealogy of affect studies: “as derrida and deleuze are evoked within affect theories, the ‘indian’ and ‘tattooed a. c. rowe and f. t. royster savages’ remain as traces. any assemblage that arises from such horizons becomes a colonialist one, and it is the work of indigenous critical theory both to rearticulate indigenous phenomenologies and to provide (alter) native interpretative strategies through which to apprehend the colonialist nostalgias that continue to shape affec- tive liberal democracy’s investment in state sovereignty as a source of violence, remedy, memory, and grievability.” we see and feel the grief of the state apparatus in monae and wondaland’s recursive chant, “hell you talmbout” as the savageness assigned to blackness is mobilized through the sacred reclamation of the philadelphia black lives matter rally, then actively interrupting the daily lives of american viewers of the today show. such defi- ant acts recast violence, memory, and grief as the rightful inheritance of black lives, enacting a reparative gesture in line with queer theory’s “reclaiming and repairing lost histories and ongoing practices of delegitimization.” we can also read this moment of grace cho’s notion of “transgenerational haunting” as “the secretive, spectral nature of that conflict, particularly in the paradoxically hypervisible and invisible yang- gongju —the ‘western princess,’ [and which] broadly refers to a korean woman who has sexual relations with americans.” cho argues that the yanggongju is “an embodi- ment of the losses of korea’s colonial and post-colonial history—the deracination from indigenous language and culture under japanese imperialism, the loss of autonomy under u.s. military dominance since , the decimation of the peninsula and its peo- ple during the korean war, and the deferral of the war’s resolution—the yanggongju is the embodiment of the accumulation of often unacknowledged grief from these events.” she reads the murder of yun geum-i, a korean sex worker, who was murdered by a u.s. service man/client, as “unleash[ing] the traumatic effects of coloni- zation and war that had been accumulating in the korean diasporic unconscious for years. the surfacing of ghosts yielded an intensification of haunting in which the yanggongju became overinvested with conflicting feelings of grief, hope shame and rage.” in a similar vein, sharon holland describes her memory of an experience of everyday racism in an oakland, california safeway parking lot, as a kind of haunting. when holland and a niece refuse to interrupt an intimate conversa- tion about the death of tupac to help a white woman carrying her groceries, the woman interjects, “and to think i marched for you.” holland’s answers the woman, “you marched for yourself,” but still feels rattled by the exchange. she muses, “in my mind, we hover there touching one another with the lie of dif- ference and nonrelation balancing precariously between us … the psychic vio- lation of that moment in the parking lot haunts me still; but it is the intimacy of that moment that arrests me. that woman expected something from me—one usually does not expect anything from strangers.” she suggests that racism, in its intimacy and in its ordinariness, is used as a way of protecting boundaries of home, memory, and belonging. “racism,” she says, “is the emotional life- blood of race; it is the ‘feeling’ that articulates and keeps the flawed logic of race in its place.” she calls for an antiracist analysis and practice informed by journal of lesbian studies “the call by queer theory to take care of the feeling that escapes or releases when bodies collide in pleasure and in pain.” in this special issue we seek to tease the tensions between utopic possibilities and dystopic conditions of “debility” and what lauren berlant has so provocatively called “slow death.” these tensions are necessary to a queer u.s. women of color theory of affect: we want to acknowledge and delve into the incredible losses and depths of the traumas that shape our experiences, both in this life and in those we inherit, while also answering the urgent call to survive, and perhaps even thrive as we leverage emotion to shape a future. for theorists like jos�e esteban mu~noz, an ongoing investment in the “not yet” of a queer and antiracist vision is a commit- ment to collectivity, relationality, and the possibilities of the imagination: “queer- ness is a longing that propels us onward, beyond romances of the negative and toiling in the present. queerness is that thing that lets us feel that this world is not enough, that indeed something is missing.” for tuck and yang, this entails the messy work of “relinquishing settler futurity” by enacting an ethic of “incommen- surability,” a radical displacement of settler innocence. the futurity we envision does not necessarily feel good. and the path we travel as we move forward may even feel “unfriendly.” as we stand on the shoulders of poet warriors, we reach, sometimes painfully, for futures in which freedom is indeed felt. summary of articles the articles in this journal generate multiple points of entry that point to such felt futu- rities. each author begins with her own location and set of relations, orienting readers to the various affective lives through which we might apprehend through their grounded approaches to the politics of emotion. they thoughtfully disrupt the some- times disembodied theoretical conversations about affect, offering direct and embodied activisms of the imagination: performance, poetry, music and community engagement. we open with claudia garcia-rojas’ article, “(un)disciplined futures: women of color feminism as a disruptive to white affect studies.” garcia-rojas offers a criti- cal reading of the “structure of feeling” that underwrites “white affect studies.” for gar- cia-rojas this structure of feeling, “formalized through the enslavement and genocide of black peoples and native indigenous populations,” becomes institutionalized through white affect studies, perpetuating the ongoing eradication of queer women of color. in this way, white affect studies erases “the wide body of us women of color literature on the politics of emotion like anger, mourning, and the erotic.” building an alternate genealogy, garcia-rojas excavates the methods of queer women of color theorists to identify a “language of the self” that “reorients our understanding of affective econo- mies” to “institute new concepts about the complex interactions between bodies, geog- raphies, and structures.” this embodied and experiential language of self empowers queer women of color to expose “systems of power and oppression, hegemonic knowl- edge structures, and dominant economies of affect,” providing a powerful resource for “an ethics of survival.” a. c. rowe and f. t. royster in her article, “building a translengua in latina lesbian organizing,” lourdes torres explores the gap between the possibilities for community and the lived experience of lin- guistic difference among differently located latina lesbians. she points to the “highly fraught issue” of english-, spanish-, and bilingual speakers coming together in activist settings “across nationalities, generations, classes, and other differences.” torres argues for the importance of a “translengua,” or multiple and translating tongue, to acknowl- edge power differentials among latina lesbians and commit “to translating meaning, strategies, identities, and power across geographic and contextual spaces.” yet her close reading of flyers, minutes, and newsletters from two chicago-based latina lesbian organizations, as well as interviews with members from those organizations, points to the intensive and often conflicting affects surrounding linguistic identity. it turns out that the labor of translation involves tremendous—and unseen—affective labor, as those capable of translation feel exhausted, worn out, and otherwise over- whelmed by the act of translation. indeed torres argues that spanish is an “important marker of national or ethnic” identity for first generation, migrant latina lesbians, even as the inability to speak spanish can become a pointof shame for second-generation lat- inas.further,whilespanglishcanbeasourceofprideorsolidarityforsecond-generation latina lesbians, the mestiza language can come across as improper. these vexed affects pileontotheactoftranslation,freightingitwiththeweightofculture,identity,andpower. torres parses out how these affects are mapped onto larger cultural, geopolitical, and national formations within the context of the hegemony of linguistic terrorism of the u.s. english-only movement, on the one hand, and a desire for “prestigious” castellano spanish on the other. these wider forces, as well as the confrontation with otherness within the context of latina lesbian organizing, place such a burden on the act of translation that group cohesion is undermined. further, linguistic subtleties do not always translate, so meanings are lost and shared experiences are stifled. as torres writes, “first generation spanish speakers were hurt when con- versations turned to english and no one was translating. second generation lat- inas/os were often embarrassed and ashamed of not speaking spanish or of not speaking it fluently. attempts at providing translations did not satisfy everyone.” in ann russo’s article, “brokenheartedness and accountability,” she writes as a white thinker, teacher, and activist working against the “anesthetic aesthetic” of whiteness. russo deepens garcia-rojas’ “structure of feeling” of white affect stud- ies, drawing on her own lived experience to demonstrate how the anesthetic aes- thetic “avoids, minimizes, distances, and evades pain and suffering in order to maintain its domination and entitlement,” revealing how “such avoidance of feel- ing works as a tool to realign even progressive activism with white heteronormative power systems.” russo explores the particular examples of disciplining of feeling as a means of undercutting the lived realities of queer people of color, taking as exam- ples, the “‘it gets better’ campaign,” and the politics of whiteness studies and women’s studies in academic settings, and in the language of “ally” versus “co-sur- vivor” in grassroots activism. a manifesto of feeling as activist praxis and feeling, russo suggests an embrace of “brokenheartedness,” a position that combines journal of lesbian studies emotional vulnerability and the willingness to be changed, as a critical tool against white privilege: “resisting the gravitational pull (chris crass) of the hegemonic mandate toward glossing over differences between, turning away from harm, evad- ing deeply considering what is in front of me—and on my own oppression and innocence in relation to the ways it is connected to the harm against others (razazck), a praxis of accountability and brokenheartedness asks for a deep recog- nition of how we are actively related to the ongoing production of power differen- ces between myself and women and trans/queer people of color.” francesca t. royster’s article, “black edens, country eves: listening, perfor- mance and black queer longing in country music,” explores the power of musical performance and fandom, here, black queer country music listening, performance and fandom, as a source of pleasure, nostalgia, and longing for black listeners. country music can be a space for alliance and community, as well as a way of accessing sometimes repressed cultural and personal histories of violence: lynching and other forms of racial terror, gender surveillance and disciplining and contin- ued racial and economic segregation. for many black country music listeners and performers, the experience of being a closeted fan also fosters an experience of ideological hailing, as well as queer world-making. royster suggests that through black queer country music fandom and performance, “we see at work performative interventions and negotiations of the constraints of history and identity in african american culture that’s creative, risky and inherently ‘soulful.’” using tina turn- er’s solo album, tina turns the country on! ( ) as a flashpoint, she complicates the idea of musical performance as inherently emotionally transparent, and con- siders the example of country music’s history as an example of “hidden regimes of racial, sexual, gendered and class disciplining,” as well as resistance. conjuring the creative, misty de berry’s performance poem, little sister: an afro- temporal solo-play, offers a mythobiography and memory-scape that explores the pos- sibilities of spiritual, psychological, and collective healing of the structural and affective violence against queer women of color. in the poem, little sister, a time-traveling ghost- girl from the slave era, haunts and inhabits the very real body of a contemporary queer black woman performance and demands audience: and then this spirit voice start showing me things-/just image after image-/aint none of them be a single memory of mine-/yet i recalled them clear as day./spirit be… little girl-/ somebody’s twin…/baby- baby girl-/four, five… uh-huh— /maybe six./heart be woman though./like she done seen the comings and goings of things/well past me and you- and her and him- them and everybody in between and beyond. evocative of toni morrison’s beloved, little sister brings her host pleasure, knowl- edge as well as pain. here, deberry explores the potential of a historically and spiritually informed embodied performance to negotiate the difficult histories of enslavement, rac- ism, and erasure. using the tools of the theatrical jazz aesthetic, deberry brings together lyrical poetry-prose, gesture, breath, and movement “in order to make plain the notion of simultaneous truths and possibilities, which the aesthetic centers.” a. c. rowe and f. t. royster we close this special issue with a special treat. we invite you to engage with queer xicana-ind�ıgena, two-spirit multi-genre activist artist, writer, performer, director, and producer, adelina anthony within the fluid genre of the interview. her performances stage “a theory in the flesh,” drawing on the “physical realities of our lives” to help audiences feel the stakes of our emotional-political lives. anthony’s performances stage queer indigenous-identified xicana theory, expressed through artistic embodiments that are grounded in indigenous spiritual- ity. her work is situated within a broader queer xicana archive of plays and staged performance; various art forms; spirit dances and sacred ceremony; novels, mem- oirs, and poetry; blogs, websites, film, and popular culture. anthony’s queer xicana work reworks cultural intimacies, confounding traditional binaries: good and bad affects, past and present, here and there, sacred and profane. adelina brings to the stage and more recently to film the lived experiences of queer women of color, so often erased and ignored in our culture. her portrayals of queer lov- ers, mexica spirituality, and dysfunctional family life are tender, but not precious, ani- mating marginal subjectivities with subversive and sacred life. adelina’s work invites us to reclaim our affective and spiritual power by bringing us into our collective wound to embrace the hidden aspects of our affective messiness: our longings, dysfunction, fragil- ity, and intelligence. she invites us to recognize ourselves in her characters, to engage in these buried feelings collectively so that we might feel together, and heal together. notes . sarah ahmed, the promise of happiness. durham, nc: duke university press, . . lisa marie cachao, social death: racialized rightlessness and the criminalization of the unprotected. new york university press, , . . jeffrey mccune, “the queerness of blackness,” qed: a journal of queer world-making . ( ), . . ann cvetkovich, depression: a public feeling. durham: duke university press, , . . patricia ticineto clough, “introduction.” in patricia ticineto clough and jean halley (eds), the affective turn: theorizing the social. durham, nc: duke university press, , . . chela sandoval, methodology of the oppressed. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, . . jos�e esteban mu~noz, disidentifications: queers of color and the performance of politics. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. . . as jasbir puar notes in “coda: the cost of getting better: suicide, sensation, switchpoints,” glq, , – . june , dana luciano and mel chen, eds., “there is a shift underway, from althusserian interpellation to an array of diverse switchpoints of the activation of the body.” . eve tuck and wayne young, “decolonization is not a metaphor,” decolonization, indige- neity, education and society, . ( ), . . ahmed notes that feminists are accused of “killing joy,” associated with the “origin of bad feeling,” but we might consider how feminist work is doing the uncomfortable work of exposing “the bad feelings” that are erased under “public signs of joy.” sara ahmed, the promise of happiness. duke university press , . . audre lorde, sister outsider: essays and speeches. freedom, ca: crossing press feminist series, ten speed press. kindle edition, , . journal of lesbian studies . audre lorde, sister outsider: essays and speeches. freedom, ca: crossing press feminist series, ten speed press. kindle edition, , . . audre lorde, sister outsider: essays and speeches. freedom, ca: crossing press feminist series, ten speed press, kindle edition, , . . audre lorde, sister outsider: essays and speeches. freedom, ca: crossing press feminist series, ten speed press. kindle edition, , . . audre lorde, sister outsider: essays and speeches. freedom, ca: crossing press feminist series, ten speed press. kindle edition, , . . dana luciano and mel chen note this movement as unified by “a conviction that the ‘human’ (at least as traditionally conceived) has unjustly dominated and unduly limited the horizon of critical thought,” “introduction: has the queer ever been human?” glq, , – . june , . . dana luciana and mel y. chen, “introduction: has the queer ever been human?” glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies, , – , june , pp. iv– , . . jodi a. byrd, the transit of empire: indigenous critiques of colonialism (first peoples: new directions indigenous). minneapolis: university of minnesota press. kindle edition, , . . lauren berlant and lee edelman, sex, or the unbearable. durham, nc: duke university press, , xiii. . grace m. cho. haunting the korean diaspora: shame, secrecy, and the forgotten war. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, , . . grace m. cho. haunting the korean diaspora: shame, secrecy, and the forgotten war. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, . . grace m. cho. haunting the korean diaspora: shame, secrecy, and the forgotten war. minneapolis: university of minnesota press, , . . sharon holland, the emotional life of racism. durham, nc: duke university press, , – . . sharon holland, the emotional life of racism. durham, nc: duke university press, , . . sharon holland, the emotional life of racism. durham, nc: duke university press, , . . puar argues that neoliberalism constitutes a dynamic relationship between “capacity and debility” as “seeming opposites generated by increasingly demanding neoliberal formula- tions of health, agency, and choice—what i call a ‘liberal eugenics of lifestyle program- ming’—that produce, along with biotechnologies and bioinformatics, population aggregates.” puar notes in “coda,” . . slow death occurs within “a zone of temporality … of ongoingness, getting by, and living on, where the structural inequalities are dispersed, the pacing of their experience intermit- tent, often in phenomena not prone to capture by a consciousness organized by archives of memorable impact.” lauren berlant, “slow death (sovereignty, obesity, lateral agency),” critical inquiry ( ): – , . . jos�e esteban mu~noz, cruising utopia: the then and there of queer futurity. new york: new york university press, , . . eve tuck and k. wayne yang, “decolonization is not a metaphor.” decolonization: indige- neity, education & society ( ), , – . . cherr�ıe moraga and gloria anzald�ua, “entering the lives of others: theory in the flesh.” this bridge called my back: writings by radical women of color, moraga and anzald�ua, eds. new york, ny: kitchen table press, , . . see laura p�erez, chicana art: the politics of spiritual and aesthetic altarities. (durham, nc: duke university press ) for a reading of chicana art. anthony’s work intersects with a body of plays by cherr�ıe moraga, with whom anthony studied and collaborates (see http://www.cherriemoraga.com/index.php?optiondcom_content&viewdcategory&layout dblog&idd &itemidd ). sacred ceremony and spirit dances are wide-spread xicana activity that serves diverse communities. the film la mission ( ) treats the intersection a. c. rowe and f. t. royster http://www.cherriemoraga.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id= &itemid= http://www.cherriemoraga.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id= &itemid= http://www.cherriemoraga.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id= &itemid= http://www.cherriemoraga.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id= &itemid= http://www.cherriemoraga.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id= &itemid= http://www.cherriemoraga.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id= &itemid= http://www.cherriemoraga.com/index.php?option=com_content&view=category&layout=blog&id= &itemid= of the political and the sacred, as do a host of novels, including alicia gaspar de alba’s des- ert blood, carla trujillo’s what night brings, and reyna grande’s dancing with butterflies. notes on contributors aimee carrillo rowe is professor of communication studies and co-director of the civil dis- course and social change initiative at california state university, northridge. her teaching and writing focus on human and inhuman processes and performances of becoming as relational, embodied, and fluid across contexts, including u.s. popular culture, indian workplaces, and u.s. latino/a performing arts communities. her books include power lines: on the subject of feminist alliances (duke university press, ), answer the call: virtual migration in indian call centers (university of minnesota press, ), and silence, feminism, power: reflections at the edges of sound (palgrave, ). carrillo rowe is currently working on a book entitled queer xicana: performance, affect, and the sacred, which examines the vexed politics of healing, longing, and indigenous erasure in queer xicana performance. francesca t. royster is a professor of english and chair of the english department at depaul university, where she teaches courses in critical race theory, gender and queer theory and african american literature, shakespeare and early modern literature. she received her phd in english from university of california, berkeley in and is the author of sounding like a no-no: queer sounds and eccentric acts in the post-soul era (university of michigan press, ), which honorable mention for the modern language association of america’s william sanders scarborough prize for an outstanding scholarly study of african american literature and culture. she is also the author of becoming cleopatra: the shifting image of an icon (pal- grave/macmillan in ). her creative and scholarly work has been published in biography, shakespeare quarterly, shakespeare studies, performance research international, women in performance, as well as the huffington post, chicago literati and windy city times, among others. she has trained and volunteered as a counselor for the chicago rape crisis hotline and has served on non-profit boards such as women and girls can and beyondmedia education, a past organization focusing on grassroots media activism for women and youth. her other interests include activism through writing, performance and other forms of art, and learning to play jazz on the upright bass. journal of lesbian studies 	abstract 	summary of articles 	notes 	notes on contributors protesting to protect “us” and/or “them”? explaining why members of third groups are willing to engage in collective action university of groningen protesting to protect "us" and/or "them"? explaining why members of third groups are willing to engage in collective action klavina, liga; van zomeren, martijn published in: group processes & intergroup relations doi: . / important note: you are advised to consult the publisher's version (publisher's pdf) if you wish to cite from it. please check the document version below. document version publisher's pdf, also known as version of record publication date: link to publication in university of groningen/umcg research database citation for published version (apa): klavina, l., & van zomeren, m. 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( ) – © the author(s) article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions doi: . / journals.sagepub.com/home/gpi when russia annexed ukrainian territory in , ukrainians went to the streets to protest against this act of aggression. social-psychological expla- nations of why people protest typically are restricted to such two-group contexts in which members of a disadvantaged group jointly act against the advantaged group in order to improve the living conditions of their group (i.e., the iden- tity management strategy of collective action; wright, taylor, & moghaddam, ). however, what may be less known is that not only ukrainians protested in response to the russian aggression, protesting to protect “us” and/or “them”? explaining why members of third groups are willing to engage in collective action liga klavina * and martijn van zomeren * abstract in three studies we test whether three key predictors of collective action (i.e., group identification, anger, and efficacy) also predict whether and how members of third groups are willing to undertake collective action. little is known about this, particularly about whether and how third-group members may engage in collective action to protect their own group and/or to protect an outgroup in need. in three studies that employed different three-group contexts, we found that the three predictors contributed to third-group members’ collective action intentions aimed at protecting the ingroup as well as those aimed at protecting the outgroup. study found this among latvians (n = ) in response to the russian annexation of ukrainian territory; study found this among residents of a dutch village (n = ) located nearby a gas-extraction-related earthquake region, in response to authorities’ inadequate protection of the residents of that region; and study found this among latino americans (n = ) in response to police brutality against black americans. moving beyond replication and application of previous work, our set of studies show first evidence for ingroup and outgroup protection as motives of third-group members’ collective action. we discuss the implications of our findings for the broader social psychology of collective action literature. keywords anger, collective action, efficacy, group identification, third groups paper received april ; revised version accepted july . university of groningen, the netherlands *both authors contributed equally. corresponding author: liga klavina, heymans institute for psychological research, department of psychology, university of groningen, grote kruisstraat / , groningen, ts, the netherlands. email: l.klavina@rug.nl gpi . / group processes & intergroup relationsklavina and van zomeren research-article article https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/journals-permissions https://journals.sagepub.com/home/gpi mailto:l.klavina@rug.nl https://doi.org/ . / http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . % f &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - klavina and van zomeren but there were also marches in nearby latvia. this country was not directly affected by the russian annexation of ukrainian territory, yet it clearly is in the potential russian sphere of influence. the occurrence of these marches raises the question of why these individuals engaged in such collec- tive action—did they want to help protect the ukrainians? did they want to protect themselves against the potential threat of broader russian actions? or both? the main aim of this article is to answer the question of what motivates members of third groups to engage in collective action. this is important for at least two reasons. first, the social-psychological literature on collective action overwhelmingly focuses on explaining collective action among members of disadvantaged groups (e.g., those facing structural discrimination in society). we therefore know little about what motivates third groups to act collectively, despite the potential of allied minorities to improve each other’s situation through their solidarity and col- lective action (see dixon et al., ). second, studying third groups uniquely enables testing individuals’ (in the same sample and context) motivation to engage in collective action to protect their own group (e.g., as the russian aggression against ukraine may signal that other countries around russia, such as latvia, might be next) and/or to protect the disadvantaged outgroup (i.e., ukrainians). these different aims of collective action are difficult to study in conjunction when focusing only on members of disadvantaged groups, given that their collective action is assumed to revolve around ingroup protection (wright et al., ). furthermore, studying advantaged group members’ motivation to engage in collective action typically goes against the interests of the ingroup and is thus assumed to revolve around outgroup protection (van zomeren, postmes, spears, & bettache, ). in fact, we are not aware of any study that has tested whether and how third-group members engage in collective action to protect “us,” “them,” or both. we conducted and report three studies that specifically apply the three key predictors of the social identity model of collective action (simca; van zomeren, postmes, & spears, ) to third-group members’ collective action intentions. although the simca was originally developed to explain why members of disadvan- taged groups engage in collective action, it has been successfully applied and extended to mem- bers of advantaged groups (cakal, hewstone, schwär, & heath, ; van zomeren et al., ; see also reimer et al., ), allied minority groups (cakal, van zomeren, nadhmi, chauhan, & dixon, ; see also dixon et al., ), and voters in national elections (van zomeren, saguy, mazzoni, & cicognani, ). this broad scope suggests that the three key predictors that this model identifies (i.e., ingroup identification, ingroup efficacy beliefs, and anger at the advantaged outgroup) provide a good point of departure for under- standing why third-group members engage in collective action. more specifically, we expect that these three predictors apply to third-group members, but that their motivation for collective action to protect “us” and/or “them” will depend on which group they identify with (and, by extension, believe in their efficacy, and feel anger on its behalf). in what follows, we introduce the simca, outline how we extend this model by focusing on third-group members’ motivation for collective action to protect “us” and/or “them,” and report three empirical studies that used different third groups and contexts to test the simca predic- tors’ applicability. extending the simca to third groups in a meta-analysis, van zomeren et al. ( ) found across a diverse set of groups, contexts, and collective disadvantages that individuals’ ingroup identification (i.e., individuals’ sense of membership and/or belonging to a social group), their experience of group-based injustice (i.e., per- ceptions of group-based discrimination and/or feelings of group-based anger), and their ingroup efficacy beliefs (i.e., beliefs that the group can achieve its goals through joint action) each uniquely pre- dicted their support for, intentions for, and group processes & intergroup relations ( ) engagement in collective action (e.g., klandermans, ; mummendey, kessler, klink, & mielke, ; van zomeren, spears, fischer, & leach, ). on this basis, they developed the simca, which revolves around the notion that individuals’ group identification predicts their engagement in collective action directly, but also indirectly through their group-based anger (which should be stronger for highly identified individu- als) and efficacy beliefs (which should also be stronger for high identifiers with the group). simca, thus, holds that collective action is, in essence, motivated by individuals’ identification with a contextually relevant group (for a review, see van zomeren, ). it is important to note that the simca is based on social identity and self-categorization theories (tajfel & turner, ; turner, hogg, oakes, reicher, & wetherell, ), which implies that, under conditions conducive to collective action (ellemers, ), disadvantaged group mem- bers will get involved in this identity management strategy when they self-categorize as, and identify with, this group, thus turning a group into a psy- chological ingroup. the simca extends and moves beyond this analysis by suggesting that dis- advantaged group members who self-categorize and identify as part of their group will also expe- rience stronger group-based anger and efficacy beliefs, each of which will also increase individu- als’ engagement in collective action (e.g., cakal et al., ; cakal et al., ; tabri & conway, ; van zomeren, postmes, & spears, ). other research suggests that the simca also applies to advantaged group members’ willingness to engage in collective action. van zomeren et al. ( ), for example, found that the three simca predictors also applied to the collective action intentions of members of the advantaged group (e.g., dutch citizens), such that their identification with the disadvantaged group (e.g., dutch muslims) predicted their collective action intentions directly, but also indirectly through their group- based anger and efficacy beliefs. importantly, they found that advantaged group members’ iden- tification with the disadvantaged outgroup (rather than with their ingroup) was crucial in understanding and explaining their collective action intentions (see also reimer et al., ), with anger and effi- cacy beliefs again predicting unique variance in these intentions. thus, research suggests that the simca holds for advantaged group members’ willingness to engage in collective action to pro- tect the disadvantaged outgroup as long as the contextually relevant social identity reflects that outgroup. how does this line of thought apply to third- group members? in line with the simca’s focus on group-based injustice, dixon et al. ( ) found that the perception of outgroup discrimination was important for members of one minority group to act in solidarity with another minority group. however, in our definition and view (see endnote ), third groups are not necessarily already allies of a disadvantaged group (as in dixon et al., ), but in the context of a broader threat or actions of an advantaged group (e.g., the threat of russian invasion, such as in the opening example) this may certainly be or become possi- ble. as a consequence, third-group members may want to engage in collective action to protect their ingroup when they identify with it, but they may also want to do so to protect the disadvan- taged outgroup when they identify with this out- group as well. as such, a focus on third-group members’ willingness to engage in collective action enables us to study the different goals that members of third groups may have (i.e., to pro- tect “us,” “them,” or both) and how these relate to the group they identify with, believe in their efficacy, and feel anger on its behalf. the current research in the three present studies, we tested an “ingroup- oriented” simca that is similar to the original simca for disadvantaged group members (revolv- ing around ingroup identification; van zomeren et al., ), and an “outgroup-oriented” simca that is similar to the model’s extension to advan- taged group members (focusing on outgroup iden- tification; van zomeren et al., ), in order to explain third-group members’ collective action intentions to protect “us” and/or “them.” the klavina and van zomeren former model thus predicts that ingroup identifica- tion and ingroup efficacy beliefs together with group-based anger against the advantaged out- group, predict collective action aimed at protecting the ingroup (hypothesis ). the latter model pre- dicts that outgroup identification (i.e., with the disad- vantaged outgroup) and efficacy beliefs together with group-based anger against the advantaged outgroup, predict collective action aimed at protect- ing the outgroup (hypothesis ). this effectively means that we expect the very same simca pre- dictors and processes (group identification, anger, and efficacy) to be relevant for understanding third-group members’ willingness to engage in col- lective action, but that the key difference is which underlying social identity is contextually relevant for them. conceptually, however, the “outgroup-ori- ented” simca requires an explanation of what individuals’ identification with a disadvantaged outgroup entails. this is because such identifica- tion is unlikely to include strong self-categoriza- tion as a member of that group—when latinos identify with blacks in the context of police bru- tality, for example, they cannot factually claim being black. because this should hinder “top- down” identity formation (based on conforming to social categories), we therefore wanted to explore why individuals identify with disadvan- taged outgroups (“bottom-up” identification through interpersonal relations and interaction with ingroup members; postmes, spears, lee, & novak, ). specifically, we took a relational approach that explains identification through relational, interaction-based processes (van zomeren, ; van zomeren, susilani, & berend, ), such as intergroup contact (pettigrew & tropp, ; see also dixon et al., ). indeed, one may identify with an outgroup because of positive and frequent contact with members of that group (pettigrew & tropp, ) and/or a relational model of solidarity (coined communal sharing by fiske [ ]) or of allyship (coined equality matching; fiske, ) with that group. more concretely, this would mean that positive and frequent intergroup contact (islam & hewstone, ) and/or the experience of communal and/or equality relational models between the groups (wermser, van zomeren, pliskin, & halperin, ) should positively pre- dict identification with the disadvantaged out- group. although these ideas were explorative at first (i.e., before study ), our multistudy set-up allowed for later confirmatory tests of them in studies and . similarly, we initially explored the potential added value of the notion of shared efficacy beliefs, which reflects individuals’ beliefs in the joint effi- cacy of the ingroup and a disadvantaged out- group. we included shared efficacy beliefs because the notion of minority allyship (dixon et al., ) may suggest that shared efficacy beliefs are more predictive of collective action than ingroup efficacy beliefs alone, presumably because there is a stronger “power in numbers” to suggest a stronger belief in shared efficacy (cakal et al., ). this would mean, for instance in the case of latinos acting collectively to pro- tect themselves from police brutality, that their shared efficacy beliefs (that latinos and blacks together can achieve their goals) would predict their intentions to engage in collective action more strongly than their ingroup efficacy beliefs would. because this logic made sense particularly in the three-group contexts we wanted to study, we explored this possibility in study and ran confirmatory tests in studies and . the three studies tested our hypotheses among third-group members in different real-life contexts (see figure ). in study , we surveyed latvians (study , n = ) about the russian annexation of ukrainian territory, testing whether and how they were motivated for collective action. in study , we surveyed inhabitants of a village nearby a dutch gas-extraction-related earthquake region (study , n = ), testing whether and how they were motivated for collec- tive action in response to authorities’ lack of response to protect those in that region. in study (n = ) our predictions were tested with a larger sample size in the context of police brutal- ity against blacks in the us, surveying latinos about their willingness to protest to protect “us,” “them,” or both. group processes & intergroup relations ( ) study method participants. participants were ( men, women, four not specified) residents of latvia. seventy-eight of the participants identified them- selves as latvian, as russian (note that russians are an ethnic minority in latvia), as jewish, and did not specify their nationality. the average age of the participants was . years (sd = . ). participants were approached in a univer- sity and asked if they wanted to volunteer in a study investigating students’ opinions about cur- rent events in ukraine; % of the participants were psychology students, the rest were either not students or students from a different discipline. materials. the questionnaire contained an informed consent form (which all participants signed), the questionnaire items, and a debriefing form. in line with our research questions, the questionnaire included measures of ingroup and outgroup identification, group-based anger, (ingroup, outgroup, and shared) efficacy beliefs, collective action intentions to protect the ingroup, collective action intentions to protect the disad- vantaged outgroup, intergroup contact, and com- munal relational models (see supplemental materials). specifically, five items were adapted from questions used to assess group identification (kessler & hollbach, ). each item was adjusted to measure identification with the ingroup, the disadvantaged outgroup (ukrainians), and the advantaged outgroup (the russians; see supplemental materials). for example, one of the items measuring identification with the ingroup was “i feel a bond with latvians.” the items were assessed on a -point likert scale ( = strongly disagree, = strongly agree). cronbach’s alpha was . for ingroup identification, . for identifica- tion with the disadvantaged outgroup, and . for identification with the advantaged outgroup. two items measuring anger towards the advantaged outgroup on behalf of the disadvan- taged outgroup were adapted from mackie, devos, and smith ( ). an example of the items is “i feel furious at the russians for violating ukraine’s sovereignty.” participants indi- cated to what extent they agreed with the items on a -point likert scale ( = strongly disagree, figure . third-group members’ intentions to engage in collective action to protect their ingroup or to protect the disadvantaged outgroup, with specific groups for each of the three studies. klavina and van zomeren = strongly agree). both items correlated highly (r = . , p < . ). two items adapted from van zomeren et al. ( ) measured ingroup, outgroup, and shared efficacy beliefs. for example, an item measuring ingroup efficacy was “i think latvians as a group can maintain and protect their nation’s sover- eignty,” and an item measuring shared efficacy was “i think together ukrainians and latvians can successfully maintain and protect ukraine’s sovereignty.” participants indicated to what extent they agreed with the items on a -point likert scale ( = strongly disagree, = strongly agree). the items correlated highly for efficacy of the ingroup (r = . , p < . ), for efficacy of the disadvan- taged outgroup (r = . , p < . ), and for shared efficacy (r = . , p < . ). the main dependent variables were different collective action intentions. the items were adapted from brunsting and postmes ( ) and shi, hao, saeri, and cui ( ). five items were included to assess ingroup-oriented collective action inten- tions (e.g., “i am willing to sign a petition in support of maintaining and protecting latvian sover- eignty”). the same five items were modified to assess outgroup-oriented collective action intentions (“i am willing to sign a petition in support of maintaining and protecting ukrainian sovereignty”). cronbach’s alphas were . for ingroup-oriented and . for outgroup-oriented collective action intentions. seven items assessed intergroup contact between the ingroup and the disadvantaged out- group (adapted from islam & hewstone, ). for example, “i regularly interact with ukrainians” ( = strongly disagree, = strongly agree) and “on average, how positive or negative have your inter- actions with ukrainians been?” ( = very negative, = very positive). cronbach’s alpha was . for contact with ukrainians. three different relational models between latvians and ukrainians were assessed based on relational models theory (fiske, ): six items (haslam, ; wermser et al., ) reflected communal sharing, equality matching, and authority ranking (a relational model based on hierarchy; see supplemental materials). we report communal sharing and equality matching across the studies as the most relevant relational models, as these conceptually fit with solidarity and ally- ship relationships, respectively. for example, an item assessing communal sharing relationship was “if one group needs something, the other will give it without expecting anything in return”; an item assessing equality matching relationship was “both groups have a right to equal treat- ment.” participants indicated to what extent they agreed with the statements ( = strongly disagree, = strongly agree). cronbach’s alphas were . for communal sharing and . for equality matching. results descriptive statistics. on average, individuals’ will- ingness to engage in ingroup-oriented collective action was higher (m = . , sd = . ) than their willingness to engage in outgroup-oriented action (m = . , sd = . ). similarly, ingroup identification (m = . , sd = . ) was higher than identification with the advantaged outgroup (m = . , sd = . ) and disadvantaged out- group (m = . , sd = . ). these results sug- gest that, as expected, latvians identify less with both outgroups than with their ingroup. on aver- age, group efficacy with regard to the ingroup (m = . , sd = . ) was higher than that of the disadvantaged outgroup (m = . , sd = . ), and both were higher than shared group efficacy (m = . , sd = . ). anger towards the advantaged outgroup (russians) was rather high (m = . , sd = . ). further- more, participants reported to have a lot of con- tact with russians (m = . , sd = . ), which is in line with the distribution of ethnic minorities in latvia. they also perceived their relationship with ukrainians as characterized by communal sharing (m = . , sd = . ), which fits a soli- darity-based relationship. equality matching was also perceived as descriptive of the relationship between latvians and ukrainians (m = . , sd = . ), which fits with the idea of allied minorities that are in the same boat together. group processes & intergroup relations ( ) table . correlations between the main variables, study . key variables, means, and standard deviations correlations . . . . . . . . . . . ingroup identification m = . , sd = . . identification (disadvantaged outgroup) m = . , sd = . . . anger (advantaged outgroup) m = . , sd = . . ** . . ingroup efficacy m = . , sd = . . ** . * . . efficacy (disadvantaged outgroup) m = . , sd = . . ** . * . . ** . shared efficacy m = . , sd = . . ** . ** . ** . ** . ** . ingroup-oriented collective action m = . , sd = . . ** . * . ** . ** . * . ** . outgroup-oriented collective action m = . , sd = . . ** . ** . ** . . * . ** . ** . cs relationship (disadvantaged outgroup) m = . , sd = . . . ** . * . . . ** . ** . ** . em relationship (disadvantaged outgroup) m = . , sd = . < −. . * . . . . ** . . ** . ** . contact (disadvantaged outgroup) m = . , sd = . −. . ** −. * . ** . * . * . . . ** . note. cs = communal sharing, em = equality matching. *p < . . **p <. . hypothesis testing. we tested hypothesis that posits that ingroup identification, anger towards russians, and ingroup efficacy beliefs uniquely and positively predict intentions for ingroup-ori- ented collective action. the regression model explained % of the variance. both ingroup identification and anger towards russians were indeed statistically significant and positive predic- tors. ingroup efficacy beliefs, however, was not a significant and unique predictor, despite its posi- tive and significant bivariate correlation with the action measure (r = . , p = . ; see table ). shared efficacy beliefs, however, was a positive and significant predictor of ingroup action when entered into the model, increasing the explained variance to % (see table ). thus, hypothesis received support for its ingroup identification and anger predictors, but mixed support for the relevant efficacy predictor. indeed, participants’ shared efficacy beliefs predicted their intentions to engage in collective action more strongly than their ingroup efficacy beliefs. , next, we tested hypothesis that posits that outgroup identification, anger, and efficacy beliefs predict outgroup-oriented collective action. the results showed that outgroup identifi- cation (i.e., with ukrainians) and anger towards russians were significant and positive predictors, explaining % of the variance. outgroup effi- cacy (i.e., of ukrainians) did not predict out- group-oriented collective action, despite positive bivariate correlations between these measures. in klavina and van zomeren fact, it was again shared efficacy beliefs that, when entered, uniquely and significantly pre- dicted such collective action, with the model explaining % of the variance (see table ). exploring predictors of outgroup identification. what does outgroup identification entail for third- group members? we explored which relational variables predicted outgroup identification by testing whether such identification was predicted by contact with this outgroup (i.e., ukrainians) and by communal and equality models regarding this outgroup (while controlling for ingroup iden- tification), with the model explaining % of the variance. as can be seen in table , the key pre- dictor of outgroup identification was contact with that outgroup, with an additional trend for commu- nal rather than equality relationships. discussion findings of study show first evidence of the applicability of the simca predictors to ingroup- oriented and outgroup-oriented collective action intentions among third-group members in three- group contexts. indeed, ingroup identification, anger towards russians, and shared (rather than ingroup) efficacy beliefs predicted collective action to protect the ingroup, whereas outgroup identification, anger towards russians, and shared (rather than outgroup) efficacy beliefs predicted collective action to protect the outgroup. intriguingly, ingroup efficacy beliefs did not predict ingroup-oriented collective action, but shared efficacy did; similarly, outgroup efficacy did not predict outgroup-oriented collective action, but shared efficacy again did. given this preliminary pattern of findings, we first wanted to replicate it in studies and before interpret- ing it further. similarly, study also explored potential antecedents of outgroup identification, which was predicted by positive and frequent contact with the outgroup, and by perceiving the relationship as part of a communal (rather than equality) model, all of which are indicators or outcomes of relational, interaction-based pro- cesses. nevertheless, we refrain from interpreting these findings until we can confirm these effects in studies and . we conducted follow-up studies to avoid reli- ance on single studies. indeed, critics may argue that the study context might be rather unique and even rare (as it involved a military invasion by a major power). as such, the findings may be valid only within the idiosyncrasies of this par- ticular context and thus may not easily generalize to other contexts. we therefore conducted study in a different three-group context, reasoning that replicating support for hypotheses and while seeking confirmatory tests of the impor- tance of shared efficacy beliefs and relational pre- dictors of outgroup identification would provide more generalizable support for our line of thought. study study used a unique context in the northern region of groningen, the netherlands, in which light but damaging earthquakes have become more and more common due to the extraction of natural gas. within this region, a clear differentia- tion has arisen between the affected areas (where earthquakes have damaged houses, which results in their lower value) and the nonaffected areas (such as the city of groningen and the nearby town of haren). collective action is relevant in this context because there is a lot at stake for all parties involved. the groningen gas field is the largest gas field in europe and it is managed by the private petroleum company nederlandse aardolie maatschappij (nam). when the gov- ernment decided to allow nam to increase their drillings and gas production, the frequency of earthquakes increased. about , homes are within the earthquake zone and nearly , have had serious damages. this caused public protest in the affected areas, but initially without much effect. at the same time, there are towns and vil- lages in the province of groningen that are not directly affected by the earthquakes, but could be affected if the extraction area is expanded. this context, thus, includes an advantaged outgroup (the gas company), a disadvantaged outgroup group processes & intergroup relations ( ) (inhabitants of the affected areas), and a third, at present unaffected but potentially affected, ingroup, which makes it structurally comparable to the study context. method participants. participants were ( men, women, two not specified) residents of haren, a town south of the city of groningen, that is, third-group members. . % of the participants were dutch (m = . years, sd = . ); % had higher education (university or university of applied sciences); . % had a household monthly income higher than € , , . % between € , and € , , . % between € , and € , , . % between € , and € , (the rest preferred not to share this infor- mation); . % were homeowners. in order to select a random sample of resi- dents, an aleatory sample of streets was gener- ated from a complete list of the streets in haren. every third house was surveyed. if there was no response or the resident declined to participate, the house next to it was selected. five partici- pants withdrew from the study upon agreeing to complete the questionnaire: one participant was unsatisfied with the formulation of the question- naire; two participants did not manage to find the time and no longer wanted to participate; and two participants believed they did not know enough about the topic to provide useful answers and therefore left the questionnaire blank. materials. as in study , the questionnaire con- tained an informed consent form (which all par- ticipants signed), the questionnaire items and a debriefing form. we measured the same con- structs with similar items that were, where needed, adapted to the current context (see sup- plemental materials). the same items as in study were used to measure ingroup identification, identification with the disadvantaged outgroup, and identifica- tion with the advantaged outgroup. for example, one of the items measuring identification with the ingroup was “i feel a bond with haren residents” (see supplemental materials). the items were assessed on a -point likert scale ( = strongly disagree, = strongly agree). cronbach’s alpha was . for ingroup identifi- cation, . for identification with disadvantaged outgroup, and . for identification with the advantaged outgroup. in study , we developed separate sets of the items to measure anger on behalf of the ingroup and anger on behalf of the disadvantaged outgroup. for example, “i feel furious at nam for causing earthquakes and their consequences for haren resi- dents” and “i feel furious at nam for causing earthquakes and their consequences for the resi- dents of the affected areas” (see supplemental materials). participants indicated to what extent they agreed with the items on a -point likert scale ( = strongly disagree, = strongly agree). both items correlated highly for anger on behalf of the ingroup (r = . , p < . ) and for anger on behalf of outgroup (r = . , p < . ). as in study , ingroup, outgroup, and shared efficacy beliefs were measured. for example, an item measuring shared efficacy was “i think the affected residents and haren residents together can protect the interests of the affected areas.” participants indicated to what extent they agreed with the items on a -point likert scale ( = strongly disagree, = strongly agree). cronbach’s alpha was . for perceived shared efficacy, . for perceived efficacy of the outgroup, and . for perceived efficacy of the ingroup. as in study , there were separate sets of items for collective action intentions on behalf of the ingroup and for collective action inten- tions on behalf of the outgroup. examples of ingroup- and outgroup-oriented collective action intentions are: “i am prepared to sign a petition to support and protect hareners” and “i am pre- pared to sign a petition to support and protect people in the affected areas,” respectively. cronbach’s alpha was . for action intentions on behalf of the ingroup and . for action inten- tions on behalf of the outgroup. intergroup contact was assessed the same way as in study . examples of these items are “i have many friends/acquaintances in the affected klavina and van zomeren areas” ( = strongly disagree, = strongly agree) and “generally, how positive or negative are your interactions with residents of the affected areas?” ( = very negative, = very positive). cronbach’s alpha was . for contact between ingroup and outgroup. relational models were measured as in study . cronbach’s alpha was . for communal shar- ing and . for equality matching between ingroup and disadvantaged outgroup. procedure. participants were reached at their homes and asked if they wanted to volunteer in a study about their opinions of effects of earthquakes from gas extraction. participants were approached by students of university of groningen who completed this task as a part of their research project. participants were told that they could complete the questionnaire, which would take about minutes, alone and in their own time and that it would be picked up at a later time of their choosing. upon agreeing to take part, participants received an envelope containing the informed consent form (which all signed) and the questionnaire; they were assured of the anonymity of their responses. finally, participants were debriefed via a university-approved debriefing form that included additional information about the study. results descriptive statistics. as in study , individuals’ will- ingness to engage in collective action was rather high. this was the case for ingroup-oriented col- lective action intentions (m = . , sd = . ) but also for outgroup-oriented collective action intentions (m = . , sd = . ), which was even higher than the former. participants also reported more anger towards the advantaged outgroup on behalf of the disadvantaged out- group (m = . , sd = . ) than on behalf of their ingroup (m = . , sd = . ). further- more, individuals identified the least with nam (m = . , sd = . ) and less with people liv- ing in the affected areas (m = . , sd = . ) than with their ingroup (m = . , sd = . ). on average, ingroup efficacy (m = . , sd = . ) and disadvantaged outgroup efficacy (m = . , sd = . ) were lower than shared group efficacy (m = . , sd = . ). furthermore, contact with members of the disadvantaged outgroup was high (m = . , sd = . ). communal sharing and equality matching described their relationship with the disadvantaged outgroup best (m = . , sd = . ; m = . , sd = . ). hypothesis testing. first, we tested whether, in line with hypothesis , ingroup identification, anger towards nam, and ingroup efficacy beliefs uniquely and positively predicted ingroup-oriented collective action intentions. in line with study , ingroup identification and anger on behalf of the ingroup were positive and significant predictors of ingroup-oriented collective action intentions. also as in study , ingroup efficacy did not correlate with and did not predict ingroup action but shared efficacy did (see table ), increasing the explained vari- ance of the model from % to % (see table ). these findings effectively replicate those of study in a very different (yet structurally comparable) three-group context. next, we tested whether, in line with hypothesis , outgroup identification, anger, and efficacy beliefs predicted outgroup-oriented collective action intentions. in line with study , the results showed that outgroup identification and anger on behalf of the outgroup were sig- nificant predictors of outgroup action. also as in study , outgroup efficacy did not signifi- cantly predict collective action, but shared effi- cacy did, with the model explaining % of the variance (see table ). together, these findings replicate support for both hypotheses in a dif- ferent context, now confirming what initially were preliminary findings regarding shared effi- cacy beliefs. predicting outgroup identification. as in study , we tested whether contact with the outgroup as well as communal sharing and equality match- ing relationships, when controlling for ingroup group processes & intergroup relations ( ) t ab le . c or re la tio ns b et w ee n th e m ai n va ria bl es , s tu dy . k ey v ar ia bl es , m ea ns , a nd s ta nd ar d de vi at io ns c or re la tio ns . . . . . . . . . . . . i ng ro up id en tif ic at io n m = . , s d = . . i de nt ifi ca tio n (d is ad va nt ag ed o ut gr ou p) m = . , s d = . . * * . a ng er (a dv an ta ge d ou tg ro up ) o n be ha lf of in gr ou p m = . , s d = . . * * . * * . a ng er (a dv an ta ge d ou tg ro up ) o n be ha lf of di sa dv an ta ge d ou tg ro up m = . , s d = . . . * . * * . i ng ro up e ff ic ac y m = . , s d = . . . − . . . e ff ic ac y (d is ad va nt ag ed o ut gr ou p) m = . , s d = . . . . . . * * . s ha re d ef fic ac y m = . , s d = . . . * * . * * . * * . . . i ng ro up -o rie nt ed c ol le ct iv e ac tio n m = . , s d = . . * * . * . * * . * * − . − . . * * . o ut gr ou p- or ie nt ed c ol le ct iv e ac tio n m = . , s d = . . . * * . * * . * * . . . * * . * * . c s re la tio ns hi p (d is ad va nt ag ed o ut gr ou p) m = . , s d = . . * . * * . * * . * . . . * * . * * . * * . e m r el at io ns hi p (d is ad va nt ag ed o ut gr ou p) m = . , s d = . . * . * * . * * . * . . * . * * . * * . * . * * . c on ta ct (d is ad va nt ag ed o ut gr ou p) m = . , s d = . . . * * . * . * * . . . * * . * * . * * . * * . * n ot e. c s = c om m un al s ha rin g, e m = e qu al ity m at ch in g. *p < . . * *p < . . klavina and van zomeren identification, predicted outgroup identifica- tion (see table ), with the model explaining % of the variance. replicating study , inter- group contact with the outgroup was a signifi- cant and unique predictor of outgroup identification. communal sharing was another significant and unique predictor of outgroup identification, but this was not the case for equality matching. discussion. findings of study replicated those of study , which corroborates support for the application of the simca to third-group members’ ingroup- and outgroup-oriented col- lective action intentions. not only did the study findings support hypotheses and , they also confirmed what were initially prelimi- nary findings for shared efficacy beliefs, inter- group contact, and communal (rather than equality) relational models. although study was conducted in a different context than study , the pattern of findings across the studies was very similar, which increases their external validity. at the same time, it could be argued that a common weakness of both stud- ies was that sample sizes were small, which was partly due to the difficulty of data collection (i.e., hard-to-reach samples). we therefore decided to conduct a third study with a larger sample size and a different context to boost the external validity of our findings. study the police brutality context in the us is often associated with the black lives matter meme and movement (see leach & allen, ). we chose the police as the advantaged outgroup in this particular u.s. context and blacks as the disadvantaged outgroup while focusing on latinos as the third group (i.e., the ingroup). the reason for this was that although incidents of police brutality may often involve black vic- tims, media reports suggest that this may become or already be a reality for u.s. latinos as well (see e.g., florido, ). as compared to studies and , we decided to use a larger sample to test the simca predictors of collective action to protect the ingroup (latinos) and/or the disadvantaged outgroup (blacks). method participants and procedure. we used amazon’s mechanical turk to specifically recruit latinos. participants were latinos ( men, women, one preferred not to say; mage = . , sd = . ). the sample also included non- latinos, the data of whom were not analyzed. we determined sample size based partly on a power analysis, after which we decided to over- sample this study (but within the limits of the budget) to cope with potential dropouts and have more statistical power. in fact, study included more participants than studies and combined. materials. as in studies and , the questionnaire contained an informed consent form (which all participants signed), the questionnaire items, and a debriefing form. we measured the same con- structs with similar items that were, where needed, adapted to the current context (see sup- plemental materials). we thus measured identifi- cation with the ingroup (cronbach’s alpha = . ), the disadvantaged outgroup (cronbach’s alpha = . ), and the advantaged outgroup (cronbach’s alpha = . ); we included separate sets of the items to measure anger on behalf of the ingroup (r = . , p < . ) and anger on behalf of the disadvantaged outgroup (r = . , p < . ); we measured ingroup efficacy (r = . , p < . ), outgroup efficacy (r = . , p < . ), and shared efficacy beliefs (cronbach’s alpha = . ); we included measures of collective action intentions on behalf of the ingroup (cronbach’s alpha = . ) and on behalf of the outgroup (cronbach’s alpha = . ); we measured contact between ingroup and outgroup (cronbach’s alpha = . ); finally, we measured communal sharing and equality matching relational models between these groups (cronbach’s alphas = . and . , respectively). group processes & intergroup relations ( ) results descriptive statistics. as in studies and , individu- als’ willingness to engage in collective action was rather high. this was the case for ingroup-oriented collective action intentions (m = . , sd = . ) and for outgroup-oriented collective action inten- tions (m = . , sd = . ). participants identi- fied less with the police (m = . , sd = . ) and with blacks (m = . , sd = . ) than with their latino ingroup (m = . , sd = . ). par- ticipants also reported high anger towards the advantaged outgroup on behalf of the disadvan- taged outgroup (m = . , sd = . ) and on behalf of their ingroup (m = . , sd = . ). on average, ingroup efficacy (m = . , sd = . ) and disadvantaged outgroup efficacy (m = . , sd = . ) were similar to shared group efficacy (m = . , sd = . ). furthermore, contact with members of the disadvantaged outgroup was high (m = . , sd = . ). indeed, communal shar- ing described the relationship with the disadvan- taged outgroup best (m = . , sd = . ) and better than equality matching (m = . , sd = . ; see table for correlations between the variables). hypothesis testing. first, we tested whether, in line with hypothesis , ingroup identification, anger towards the police, and ingroup efficacy beliefs uniquely and positively predicted ingroup-ori- ented collective action intentions. in line with studies and , ingroup identification and anger on behalf of the ingroup were positive and sig- nificant predictors of ingroup-oriented collec- tive action intentions. moreover, as in studies and , ingroup efficacy did not predict ingroup action but shared efficacy did, with the model explaining % of the variance (see table ). these findings replicate those from studies and in yet another three-group context while using a larger sample size. next, we tested whether, in line with hypothesis , outgroup identification, anger, and efficacy beliefs predicted outgroup-oriented collective action inten- tions. in line with studies and , the results showed that outgroup identification and anger on behalf of the outgroup were significant predictors of out- group action intentions. furthermore, as in studies and , outgroup efficacy did not significantly pre- dict collective action, but shared efficacy did, with the model explaining % of the variance (see table ). these findings replicate those from studies and in yet another three-group context while using a larger sample size. predicting outgroup identification. we tested whether contact with the outgroup as well as communal sharing and equality matching models predicted outgroup identification (see table ) while con- trolling for ingroup identification, with the model explaining % of the variance. as in studies and , intergroup contact and communal sharing (rather than equality matching) with the outgroup predicted outgroup identification. discussion. the study findings replicated those of studies and . study further confirmed the importance of shared efficacy beliefs for both types of action and, moreover, confirmed the importance of intergroup contact and communal relational models in predicting outgroup identifi- cation. as study employed a larger sample size as compared to previous studies and in another highly relevant political context—different, yet, structurally comparable to the contexts used in studies and —this study’s results increased the external validity of our findings. general discussion across three empirical studies we found broad and consistent support for the three simca pre- dictors (group identification, efficacy, and anger) as applied to third-group members’ ingroup- and outgroup-oriented collective action intentions. in study , latvians’ ingroup identification, anger towards russians, and shared efficacy beliefs predicted their collective action intentions to protect their ingroup; while their outgroup identification (with ukraine), anger towards russians, and shared efficacy beliefs predicted their collective action intentions to protect the ukrainian outgroup. in study , hareners’ klavina and van zomeren t ab le . c or re la tio ns b et w ee n th e m ai n va ria bl es , s tu dy . k ey v ar ia bl es , m ea ns , a nd s ta nd ar d de vi at io ns c or re la tio ns . . . . . . . . . . . . i ng ro up id en tif ic at io n m = . , s d = . . i de nt ifi ca tio n (d is ad va nt ag ed o ut gr ou p) m = . , s d = . . * * . a ng er (a dv an ta ge d ou tg ro up ) o n be ha lf of in gr ou p m = . , s d = . . * * . * * . a ng er (a dv an ta ge d ou tg ro up ) o n be ha lf of di sa dv an ta ge d ou tg ro up m = . , s d = . . * * . * * . * * . i ng ro up e ff ic ac y m = . , s d = . . . . − . . e ff ic ac y (d is ad va nt ag ed o ut gr ou p) m = . , s d = . . . * . * . * . * * . s ha re d ef fic ac y m = . , s d = . . * * . * * . * * . * * . * * . * * . i ng ro up -o rie nt ed c ol le ct iv e ac tio n m = . , s d = . . * * . * * . * * . * * . * * . * * . * * . o ut gr ou p- or ie nt ed c ol le ct iv e ac tio n m = . , s d = . . * * . * * . * * . * * . * . * * . * * . * * . c s re la tio ns hi p (d is ad va nt ag ed o ut gr ou p) m = . , s d = . . * * . * * . * * . * . * . * . * * . * * . * * . e m r el at io ns hi p (d is ad va nt ag ed o ut gr ou p) m = . , s d = . . * * . * * . * * . * . . . * * . * * . * . * * . c on ta ct (d is ad va nt ag ed o ut gr ou p) m = . , s d = . . * * . * * . * * . * * . . . * * . * * . * * . * * . * n ot e. c s = c om m un al s ha rin g, e m = e qu al ity m at ch in g. *p < . . * *p < . . group processes & intergroup relations ( ) ingroup identification, anger towards the petro- leum company nam, and shared efficacy beliefs uniquely and positively predicted their intentions for collective action to protect their ingroup; while their outgroup identification (with those in the affected areas), anger toward nam, and shared efficacy beliefs were significant predictors of their intentions for collective action to protect table . predictors of ingroup-oriented collective action intentions, studies , , and . study β t p ingroup identification . . <. anger (advantaged outgroup) . . . ingroup efficacy <−. − . . shared efficacy . . . study β t p ingroup identification . . . anger (advantaged outgroup) on behalf of ingroup . . <. ingroup efficacy −. − . . shared efficacy . . . study β t p ingroup identification . . <. anger (advantaged outgroup) on behalf of ingroup . . <. ingroup efficacy . . . shared efficacy . . <. note. boldfaced results represent statistically significant values. table . predictors of outgroup-oriented collective action intentions in studies , , . study β t p outgroup identification . . . anger (advantaged outgroup) . . <. shared efficacy . . . efficacy (disadvantaged outgroup) –. – . . study outgroup identification . . . anger (advantaged outgroup) on behalf of disadvantaged outgroup . . . shared efficacy . . . efficacy (disadvantaged outgroup) <–. – . . study β t p outgroup identification . . <. anger (advantaged outgroup) on behalf of disadvantaged outgroup . . <. shared efficacy . . <. efficacy (disadvantaged outgroup) –. – . . note. boldfaced results represent statistically significant values. klavina and van zomeren that outgroup. finally, in study , latinos’ ingroup identification, anger towards the police, and shared efficacy beliefs predicted their inten- tions for collective action to protect their ingroup; while their outgroup identification (with blacks), anger toward the police, and shared efficacy beliefs predicted their intentions for collective action to protect that outgroup. this consistent pattern of findings across multiple studies with different contexts provides first yet solid evidence that the simca predictors can be extended to third-group members’ willing- ness for collective action to protect their ingroup and/or a disadvantaged outgroup. in fact, this reflects the first contribution of our findings to the broader social-psychological literature on col- lective action. indeed, whereas the simca origi- nated from studies among members of disadvantaged groups (e.g., cakal et al., ; van zomeren et al., ) and was later extended to members of advantaged groups (e.g., cakal et al., ; tabri & conway, ; van zomeren et al., ), the current set of studies suggests that the very same psychological variables and processes (revolving around group identity, anger, and effi- cacy beliefs) are relevant in predicting the collec- tive action intentions of third-group members. more specifically, we found that these predictors were relevant for explaining individuals’ inten- tions to engage in collective action to protect their ingroup and/or the disadvantaged outgroup. the second contribution of our findings lies in identifying the importance of shared efficacy beliefs in the three-group contexts we studied. in line with cakal et al. ( ), we consistently found across the three studies that, for third- group members, their belief in the efficacy of both ingroup and disadvantaged outgroup was more predictive of their collective action inten- tions to protect either group. although initially considered preliminary, the two later studies con- firmed these findings. we interpret them in rela- tion to the strategic calculation of “power in table . predictors of outgroup identification in study , study and study . study β t p ingroup identification . . . contact (disadvantaged outgroup) . . <. cs relationship (disadvantaged outgroup) . . . em relationship (disadvantaged outgroup) . . . study β t p ingroup identification . . <. contact (disadvantaged outgroup) . . . cs relationship (disadvantaged outgroup) . . . em relationship (disadvantaged outgroup) . . . ingroup identification . . <. study β t p contact (disadvantaged outgroup) . . <. cs relationship (disadvantaged outgroup) . . . em relationship (disadvantaged outgroup) . . . note. boldfaced results represent statistically significant values. cs = communal sharing, em = equality matching. when dropping em from the model (as it does not explain unique variance in the model), the same findings hold (for contact: β = . , p < . ; for ingroup identification: β = . , p = . ), while cs becomes a stronger predictor (β = . , p = . ). cs and em were positively correlated (r = . , p < . ), which may explain the weaker findings for these models in the equation when entered simultaneously. indeed, when removing em from this equation, cs becomes a significant and unique predictor: β = . , t = . , p = . . because cs was endorsed more by participants at the mean level, we decided to inter- pret the findings favoring cs as the relevant relational model, which is consistent with studies and . group processes & intergroup relations ( ) numbers”—when multiple groups fight for the same cause and against the same foe (cakal et al., ; see also tawa, ). for example, when latinos realize that police brutality might also affect them, they may think not just about their own group’s efficacy, but about the efficacy of latinos and blacks together. this line of thought fits with dixon et al.’s ( ) suggestion for future research to focus more on efficacy beliefs in the study of collective action among allied minorities, where such power in numbers may certainly be relevant. the third contribution of our paper is that we successfully and consistently identified rela- tional, interaction-based predictors of outgroup identification. this is important because, con- ceptually, the notion of outgroup identification does not exist from the perspective of social identity theory—this theory only explains iden- tification with ingroups (van zomeren et al., ). moving beyond previous work, our rela- tional approach was able to explain (and later predict) why third-group members identify with outgroups: such identification was consistently and positively predicted across our three studies by more positive and frequent contact with mem- bers of that outgroup (dixon et al., ; pettigrew & tropp, ) and by the experience of a communal rather than equality relational model with that outgroup (fiske, ; wermser et al., ). these findings are novel and intriguing, as they support the idea that out- group identification among members of third groups, which seems difficult to explain from a “top-down” category basis, has an important “bottom-up” relational basis (van zomeren, ; van zomeren et al., ; see also postmes et al., ). perhaps the difference between identification with ingroup and outgroup is really a difference of how much can be inferred about the outgroup from the social category itself (which should be a stronger basis for ingroup identification) vis-à-vis what can be inferred from interpersonal interactions and relationships with outgroup members. an important implication of the current set of findings is that third-group members’ willingness to engage in collective action requires knowing what is the contextually relevant group (van zomeren, ), given that both ingroup protection and outgroup protection may be relevant aims for them. in this respect, this set of studies revealed that these motiva- tions to protect the ingroup or the disadvan- taged group definitely do not seem mutually exclusive: across the studies, the different col- lective action measures were highly positively correlated. this may not be surprising given that the items for each were identical except for the specific target of protection (i.e., ingroup or disadvantaged outgroup). at the same time, we found clear evidence that participants dif- ferentiated between the different targets (see endnote ). on this basis, we interpret our findings as suggesting that third-group mem- bers’ motivations to protect their ingroup and outgroup through collective action are cer- tainly not mutually exclusive. future research can examine this relationship more closely. future research can also elaborate on what third-group members’ predictors of outgroup identification entail. our studies provided useful pointers toward an intriguing answer, namely that such identification is likely based on individuals’ social relationships with members of that group. across the studies, we found that outgroup iden- tification was predicted by more positive and fre- quent contact with members of that outgroup and by the experience of a communal relation- ship with its members. this fits with the broader notion that knowing, interacting, and more gen- erally relating with people from an outgroup pro- vides meaning to outgroup identification, which in turn invites the interpretation of feeling anger, efficacy, and intentions to engage in collective action on their behalf as based on relationships with people rather than representations of that group as a social category. the findings also have practical implications in terms of the development of strategies to mobilize third-group members for collective action. our findings suggest that one way to mobilize them is by communicating the need for ingroup protection, which should increase ingroup klavina and van zomeren identification and anger toward the advantaged outgroup. another, not mutually exclusive, way to mobilize third-group members is to communi- cate the need for outgroup protection (i.e., the disadvan- taged outgroup), which should increase their identification with the disadvantaged group and their anger toward the advantaged outgroup. our findings also suggest that, perhaps particularly for third groups in three-group contexts, it is impor- tant to communicate shared efficacy beliefs that remind individuals that they may have allies that could increase their power. finally, for third- group members it may not hurt to communicate both the need for ingroup protection as well as for outgroup protection. our set of studies of course also has limita- tions that warrant some caution in interpreting the results. first, all three studies are correlational and hence do not allow for causal conclusions about the relationships between the variables studied. note that we did not design the studies to have a strong internal validity, as we relied on both van zomeren et al.’s ( ) meta-analysis and primary studies that experimentally manipulated the simca predictors to find effects on collective action intentions (for a review, see van zomeren, ). thus, our basis for interpreting the rela- tionships between the simca predictors and col- lective action intentions as flowing in that particular causal direction is in line with that con- ceptual model and the empirical support behind it. against this backdrop, our studies were designed to be strong on external validity, a goal that we feel we achieved given that we managed to replicate our findings across very different real-life contexts. furthermore, a second limitation of our studies is that we did not assess actual behavior of activists, but their intentions. although intentions are good proxies for behavior in this context (van zomeren et al., ), this means that our claims are restricted to third-group members’ motivation and willingness to engage in collective action to protect their ingroup, the relevant outgroup, or both. therefore, assessing actual behavior would be a good next step for research on social psychol- ogy of third-group members’ collective action intentions. conclusion the current set of studies is the first to test the applicability of the simca predictors to the col- lective action intentions of third-group members in three-group contexts. examining this in three very different real-world settings enabled us to answer the questions of whether and how third- group members are willing to undertake collec- tive action to protect their ingroup and/or the disadvantaged outgroup. whereas the former was predicted by ingroup identification, anger felt toward the advantaged group, and shared efficacy beliefs (i.e., belief in the efficacy of the ingroup and the outgroup in need), the latter was pre- dicted by identification with the outgroup in need, felt anger toward the advantaged outgroup, and again shared efficacy. outgroup identifica- tion was predicted in all three studies by rela- tional, interaction-based variables (intergroup contact and communal relational models). as such, the current studies stretch the scope of the simca further to include third-group members’ willingness to engage in collective action to pro- tect “us,” “them,” or both. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. supplemental material supplemental material for this article is available online. notes . we define third groups as groups that are not directly involved in the intergroup relationship between an advantaged and a disadvantaged group, but could potentially find themselves in the same situation as the disadvantaged out- group. in study , we asked whether latvians would engage in collective action in the context of the russian annexation of part of ukraine; in study we asked whether residents of an area nearby an earthquake-sensitive region in the netherlands would engage in collective action against gas extraction, which could affect their own living area; and in study , we asked group processes & intergroup relations ( ) whether latinos in the us would engage in col- lective action against police brutality towards blacks (and potentially also against latinos). this focus on third groups that could poten- tially be disadvantaged in the future differen- tiates the current work from other studies on disadvantaged and advantaged groups (e.g., cakal et al., ; reimer et al., ). . a number of measures related to perceived threat, threat-related emotions, attitudes towards intergroup cooperative and romantic relationships, and acceptance of immigration were included as explorative variables in studies and . given that these variables did not fea- ture in our hypotheses and also did not inform any explorative research questions, we did not analyze and report them. the supplemental materials describe all measures included in each study. . in all three studies, we reran the key regression analyses while controlling for identification with the other target group. in study , when predicting ingroup-oriented collective action while controlling for out- group identification (β = . , p = . ), we found that ingroup identification (β = . , p < . ), anger on behalf of the outgroup (β = . , p < . ), and shared efficacy beliefs (β = . , p = . ) contributed to explaining % of the vari- ance. ingroup efficacy beliefs did not contribute to this percentage (β = −. , p = . ). when pre- dicting outgroup-oriented collective action while control- ling for ingroup identification (β = . , p = . ), we found that outgroup identification (β = . , p = . ), anger on behalf of the outgroup (β = . , p < . ), and shared efficacy beliefs (β = . , p = . ) contributed to explaining % of the vari- ance. outgroup efficacy beliefs was not a significant predictor of this variable (β = −. , p = . ). in study , when predicting ingroup-oriented collective action while controlling for outgroup identification (β = . , p = . ), we found that ingroup identi- fication (β = . , p < . ), anger on behalf of the ingroup (β = . , p < . ), and shared efficacy beliefs (β = . , p = . ) contributed to explain- ing % of the variance. ingroup efficacy beliefs did not contribute to this percentage (β = −. , p = . ). when predicting outgroup-oriented collective action while controlling for ingroup identification (β = . , p = . ), we found that outgroup identification (β = . , p < . ), anger on behalf of the outgroup (β = . , p = . ), and shared efficacy beliefs (β = . , p = . ) contributed to explaining % of the variance. outgroup efficacy beliefs was not a sig- nificant predictor of this variable (β = . , p = . ). in study , when predicting ingroup-oriented collective action while controlling for outgroup identification (β = . , p < . ), we found that ingroup identification (β = . , p = . ), anger on behalf of the ingroup (β = . , p < . ), and shared efficacy beliefs (β = . , p = . ) contributed to explaining % of the variance. ingroup efficacy beliefs also con- tributed to this percentage as it also positively predicted this variable (β = . , p < . ). when predicting outgroup-oriented collective action while con- trolling for ingroup identification (β = . , p = . ), we found that outgroup identification (β = . , p < . ), anger on behalf of the outgroup (β = . , p < . ), and shared efficacy beliefs (β = . , p < . ) contributed to explaining % of the vari- ance. outgroup efficacy beliefs was not a significant predictor of this variable (β = −. , p = . ). . given the high intercorrelations between the col- lective action measures across the three studies, we conducted analyses aimed at evaluating construct validity. across the three studies, each measure was statistically reliable but factor analyses on the items of the two measures offered a mixed picture. we therefore conducted new analyses to address the core question whether participants noticed the different targets in the questions at all (which, we should add, were very explicitly labeled in the ques- tions). thus, rather than gauging construct validity from factor analysis, we looked for other ways to test the assumption that these measures had dif- ferent meaning for participants. these analyses offered clear indication that the targets of the oth- erwise same collective action items were certainly noticed by the participants. in study , which had the largest sample size, this was visible when pre- dicting the two single items that we felt embody our argument best: the collective action item about willingness to participate in a blacks-focused black lives matter demonstration (for outgroup-oriented collective action), and willingness to participate in a latino-focused “stop police brutality” demonstra- tion (for ingroup-oriented collective action). for the outgroup-oriented item, outgroup identification (β = . , p < . ) rather than ingroup iden- tification (β = −. , p = . ), anger on behalf of the outgroup (β = . , p = . ) rather than the ingroup (β = . , p = . ), and shared effi- cacy beliefs (β = . , p < . ) were significant klavina and van zomeren predictors. for the ingroup-oriented item, ingroup identification (β = . , p < . ) while controlling for outgroup identification (β = . , p = . ), anger on behalf of the ingroup (β = . , p = . ) rather than the outgroup (β = . , p = . ), and shared efficacy beliefs (β = . , p < . ), were significant predictors. this rep- licates the findings for the full scales and thus shows the same support for our predictions; fur- thermore, it is difficult to explain these findings without assuming that participants indeed noticed the different targets for the collective action meas- ures (and assigned a different meaning to them). we note that there are other clear patterns in the data of study that support this interpretation, for example, in the identification items. in study , when we predict outgroup identification from the three contact measures that we included (with ingroup, outgroup, and police), only the outgroup contact measure was a significant predictor. but we found similar patterns for the other two iden- tification and contact measures, with only the relevant target group for contact predicting iden- tification with that target group. specifically, for outgroup identification, only outgroup contact was a significant predictor (β = . , p < . vs. β = . , p = . for ingroup contact and β = −. , p = . for contact with the police). for ingroup identification, only ingroup contact was a significant predictor (β = . , p < . vs. β = . , p = . for outgroup contact and β = −. , p = . for contact with the police). for 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( ). responding to membership in a disadvan- taged group: from acceptance to collective pro- test. journal of personality and social psychology, , – . doi: . / - . . . transversal and postmodern feminist praxis in everyday politics all rights reserved © mount saint vincent university, ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d’auteur. l’utilisation des services d’Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d’utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l’université de montréal, l’université laval et l’université du québec à montréal. il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. https://www.erudit.org/fr/ document généré le avr. : atlantis critical studies in gender, culture & social justice Études critiques sur le genre, la culture, et la justice transversal and postmodern feminist praxis in everyday politics jenny roth et lori chambers volume , numéro , fall uri : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar doi : https://doi.org/ . / ar aller au sommaire du numéro Éditeur(s) mount saint vincent university issn - (numérique) découvrir la revue citer cet article roth, j. & chambers, l. ( ). transversal and postmodern feminist praxis in everyday politics. atlantis, ( ), – . https://doi.org/ . / ar résumé de l'article feminist praxis is usually a conscious, reflexive process of moving from theory to application in order to create transformation. we want to expand the scope of feminist praxis, however, to include moments in which feminist theory explains political transformations that may not be deliberate but that result in a feminist outcome: the pursuit of gender equality through personal and political transformation. this paper uses a dataset of online comments generated after the supreme court of canada decision in r. v. n.s. as a case study, and it sits in conversation with postmodern and transversal feminist theorists, particularly the recent work of patricia hill collins ( ) that builds on nira yuval-davis ( ) and others, to argue that political action is most effective when transversal practice is layered onto intersectional politics and that, despite hill collins' concern that political practice has yet to move to effective transversalism ( , ), transversal feminist praxis can be found in examples of everyday politics which offer hope for social transformation. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/atlantis/ https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar https://doi.org/ . / ar https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/atlantis/ -v -n -atlantis / https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/atlantis/ atlantis journal issue . / research transversal and postmodern feminist praxis in everyday politics jenny roth is a professor in women's studies at lakehead university. she publishes in discourse ana- lysis, law, literature, and cyber-/technofeminism. her current work focuses on bram stoker's dracula, gender, technology, and artificial intelligence. jenny teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in femin- ist theory, science fiction, horror films, law and liter- ature, and gender and technology. lori chambers is a professor in women's studies at lakehead university. she publishes on a range of legal issues related to equity and diversity. her current work is on domestic terrorism and the response of police and courts. lori teaches women's legal history, current legal issues, queer theory, and graduate courses in feminist theory and activism. abstract: feminist praxis is usually a conscious, re- flexive process of moving from theory to application in order to create transformation. we want to expand the scope of feminist praxis, however, to include mo- ments in which feminist theory explains political transformations that may not be deliberate but that result in a feminist outcome: the pursuit of gender equality through personal and political transforma- tion. this paper uses a dataset of online comments generated after the supreme court of canada de- cision in r. v. n.s. as a case study, and it sits in con- versation with postmodern and transversal feminist theorists, particularly the recent work of patricia hill collins ( ) that builds on nira yuval-davis ( ) and others, to argue that political action is most effective when transversal practice is layered onto intersectional politics and that, despite hill collins’ concern that political practice has yet to move to effective transversalism ( , ), transversal feminist praxis can be found in examples of everyday politics which offer hope for social transformation. keywords: transversal feminism, postmodern femin- ism, praxis atlantis journal issue . / introduction: praxis and postmodern transversal politics feminist praxis is usually a conscious, reflexive, pro- cess of moving from theory to application in order to create transformations (see, for example, allen ; archer mann ; cho, crenshaw, and mccall ; de reus, few, and balter blume ; evans ; hesse-biber ; naples ; and sharp et al. ). we want to expand the scope of feminist praxis, however, to include moments in which femin- ist theory explains political transformations that may not be deliberate, but that result in a feminist out- come: the pursuit of gender equality through personal and political transformation. finding these moments is important at a time when, politically, it seems that anti-equality movements are gaining ground. this paper uses a dataset of online comments generated after the supreme court of canada decision in r. v. n.s. as a case study. it sits in conversation with post- modern and transversal feminist theorists, particularly the recent work of patricia hill collins ( ) that builds upon the previous work of nira yuval-davis ( ) and others, to argue that political action is most effective when transversal practice is layered onto intersectional politics. further, we argue that despite hill collins’ concern that political practice has yet to move to effective transversalism ( , ), transversal feminist praxis can be found in examples of everyday politics which offer hope for social trans- formation. postmodern and transversal feminist theories explain people’s political transformations. in the current anti- intellectual political climate, we want to illustrate how layering theory onto everyday political transforma- tions reveals that transformative praxis can be found around us, even when it is not consciously deliberate. that is, transversal and postmodern feminist theories, which challenge the false binaries that divide people into oppositional political positions, do not just ex- plain the roots of gender inequality but also illumin- ate the pathways to politics that can be identified as feminist in their outcomes (see, for example, kolmar and bartkowski , - ; and lorber ). postmodern feminist praxis challenges rigid identity boundaries between “self” and “other,” nationally and individually, and produces points of connection across identity groups. it “undermines foundational categories by insisting that bodies, identities, and statuses are contingent—time-bound, situational, and culturally shaped” (lorber , ). feminist postmodern theorists argue that the sex-gender binary is a false construct produced by cultural beliefs and practices at particular moments in time and place. the intersectional postmodern approach extends the binary beyond sex-gender to multiple categories, al- lowing analysis along different valences to undermine fixed binaries like “black/white,” “gay/straight,” “abled/disabled,” “young/old,” etc. transversal feminist praxis developed during the same period as postmodern feminism in the late twentieth century and emerged from coalition-building groups where women worked “not just with different others but with … enemies” (bastian , ; also see cockburn ; yuval-davis , - ; and yuval-davis ). transversal feminism recognizes that “politics based on a homogenous notion of iden- tity is spectacularly unable to deal with the problem of working toward peace” (bastian , ). in- stead, the theory argues that “by questioning how one understands one’s sense of identity, by reducing de- fensive reactions and attempting to broaden one’s point of view, less aggressive responses to conflict can become more than a naïve hope” (bastian , ). the processes of opening up identity to en- gage fluidly with similarity in others is embedded in postmodern feminism, and transversal processes based on shifting one’s identity position diffused many arguments in our dataset, in part because transversal praxis allowed people to “keep one’s own perspective on things while empathizing and respect- ing others” (yuval-davis , ). methods we explore possibilities for transformation using the online comments that appeared after the supreme court of canada’s decision on women’s right to veil atlantis journal issue . / in the courtroom in r. v. n.s, as a case study. the canadian supreme court case r. v. n.s. considered the right of a muslim woman to wear a niqab while testifying as a victim in a sexual assault trial. the court determined the case involved a conflict between the religious rights of n.s., protected under s. of the canadian charter ofhuman rights andfreedoms (charter), and the s. charter rights of the accused to a full and fair defense, which lead to an ambiguous decision: that muslim women could veil in court so long as the presiding judge did not see that as an im- pediment to the trial process. the very ambiguity of the decision prompted legal commentary. critics have asserted that the decision will not permit wo- men to veil in court, as most judges will deem that the inability to see the face, and therefore to assess the credibility of the witness, constitutes an impediment to a fair trial and a full defence (chambers and roth , ). the case divided the court and sparked intense pub- lic debate. speaking for the majority in r. v. n.s., chief justice beverley mclachlin admitted that the issue of “effective cross-examination and accurate as- sessment of a witness’s credibility” was hotly disputed. she asserted that “provisions of the criminal code … and judicial pronouncements” presume that the “ability to see a witness’s face is an important feature of a fair trial” and that “this common law assumption cannot be disregarded lightly” (r. v. n.s., [ ], scr , para ). although she noted that “if … women are required to remove the niqab while testi- fying against their sincere religious belief they will be reluctant to report offences and pursue their prosecu- tion” (r. v. n.s., [ ], scr , para ), she also asserted that the interests of the accused and “safeguarding the repute of the administration of justice” were more compelling in this case since “no less is at stake than an individual’s liberty” (r. v. n.s., [ ], scr , para ). concurring, canadian supreme court justices lebel and rothstein asked whether wearing niqab in any trial was compatible “with the constitutional values of openness and reli- gious neutrality in contemporary democratic, but di- verse, canada” (r. v. n.s., [ ], scr , para ). we found islamophobia and orientalist sexist dis- course at the heart of the majority’s decision and we have argued that the decision ultimately legitimized racist and sexist stereotypes that deny muslim wo- men’s full participation in canadian society (cham- bers and roth , - ). only justice abella, in dissent, considered the structural discrimination the anonymized n.s. faced as a muslim woman, and asserted that “the harm to a complainant of requiring her to remove her niqab while testifying will generally outweigh any harm to trial fairness” (r. v. n.s., [ ], scr , para ). the majority found that a judge would have to make a decision in each individual case as to whether or not a niqab would be allowed, and provided a framework for such decisions (r. v. n.s., [ ], scr , para ). this ambi- guity led to a large amount of online debate. for ex- ample, in response to statements that the supreme court should have prohibited the niqab in all cases to protect canada from “foreign ways,” one commenter interjected: “breaking news just now … : supreme court of canada kills canada” (artistenow ). another less acerbic writer added: “this is a tough one, with sound charter arguments on both sides. it could go either way, and—whichever way they rule—they’ll be wrong. // glad i’m only a lowly huffpost commenter today, and not a supreme court justice” (anonymous ). in online comments, people debated the decision and its future application from their own perspectives on human rights and the law, which provided a breadth and depth of data we could draw on to illustrate how postmodern and transversal feminist theory can be applied to everyday encounters and personal trans- formation. we examined discussions on three main- stream canadian media sites, maclean’s magazine, huffington post, and the national post, where the most substantive and responsive commentary oc- curred. these sites provided us with over discus- sion and comment entries from which to draw examples of praxis in everyday interactions. trans- versal and postmodern feminism explain how dis- cussants moved from positions of political opposition to build peace, understanding, and bridges. although atlantis journal issue . / the discussants may or may not have deliberately used feminist approaches in their attempts to re- align oppressive attitudes—given the nature of on- line discussion, it is impossible to know what people do not divulge—it is clear that transversal and post- modern feminist praxis, deliberately or unknowingly brought into being, were at the heart of peace-build- ing praxis. the political context ofpersonal posi- tions: islamophobia in the economic north the oppressive binary of us/them identity politics appeared in r. v. n.s., in both the court’s decision and the online debates; a brief contextualization of the political context of the case is therefore useful. it seems unnecessary to write that muslims in non- muslim countries have faced increasing surveillance and islamophobia since / . we have no interest in examining how islamophobia is perpetuated online: our focus is on feminist praxis in everyday encoun- ters. we certainly join other cultural critics to de- nounce islamophobia as oppressive (see for example: arat-koc ; awan ; cammaerts ; carr ; haque ; kahn and kellner , , - ; love , - ; and razack , ) and we recognize that the intersection of sexism and is- lamophobia produces particular outcomes. for ex- ample, media reports from the united kingdom suggest islamophobic violence is often gendered, with women who veil in any way (hijab, niqab, or burqa) bearing the brunt of verbal and physical at- tacks (vidal ; see also perry ). many schol- ars and activists have documented how veils have become symbols of both the threat of fundamentalist extremism and, paradoxically, women’s vulnerability to abuse and subordination under purdah patriarch- ies (see for example, mcdonough , - ; and simpson, james, and mack ). in their brief to the court in r. v. n.s. , for example, the canadian council on american-islamic rela- tions wrote: “[i]n popular discourse they [niqab- wearing women] are either vilified as fanatics who refuse to integrate, or infantilized as victims who are prevented from seeing their own oppression” (qtd. in chambers and roth , ). leaf, the women’s legal education and action fund in canada, simil- arly argued as intervenors in r. v. n.s. : although the small number of women who wear the niqab in canada are not a new phe- nomenon, various national and international events … have changed the political climate in which they are viewed.… the niqab is per- ceived as belonging to a culture/religion/value- system which is stereotyped as extremist and inimical to western cultures and values. in this context, the niqab has become emblematic of an irreconcilable “clash ofcultures.” ( ) at the heart of “clashes of cultures” are the national and individual identities people use to situate them- selves, their nation, and their perceived nation- al/identity values in relation to others. these identity-based politics have proven difficult to over- come, as hill collins points out ( , ), but postmodern and transversal theories show how the barriers created by entrenched identity politics can be transformed through praxis into feminist outcomes. postmodern feminism: identity permeabil- ity and feminist praxis as noted above, postmodernism challenges the tradi- tional modern narratives about contained and care- fully bounded identity-subjects. in the debates produced by r. v. n.s. , the primary binaries invoked were cultural: west/non-west, non-muslim/muslim, canadian/foreigner, liberated/oppressed. that the debates engendered by r. v. n.s. centred around the question of controlling women’s bodies—what wo- men are or are not allowed to wear—makes these de- bates gendered. like homi bhabha’s “third space” ( ), online comments sections are liminal because they require active identity production. they usually lack the visual and aural signifiers that are often used to produce identity, thus revealing that identity posi- tions, including gender, are performative: they must be named in an online space and are not inherent or intrinsic (lorber , ). in our dataset, there is atlantis journal issue . / ample textual evidence of how people construct themselves in relation to other nationalities or com- munities, and in relation to those whom they perceive to be, and define as, outsiders. as postmodern femin- ist judith butler has argued, “bodies” are “a kind of materialization governed by regulatory norms”; she probes how the “materialization of the norm in body formation produce[s] a domain of abjected bodies” that are perceived to be “less-than” those who are “normative” (butler , - ). critic shahnaz khan has further argued that liminal third spaces are places where contradictions in identity construction can eschew colonial authority to produce postmod- ern, transnational subjects who are more likely to re- cognize the shared foreignness of identity positions ( ). at minimum, the online comments sections in our dataset were places where multiple “authentic” canadian identities existed simultaneously, thus dis- rupting any claims to one authentic cultural or na- tional identity through the very existence of pluralism. this pluralism allowed the ideology of canadian multiculturalism to support a more fluid postmodern identity. if not in practice, at least ideologically, mul- ticultural canada has the possibility to be plural, porous, and encompassing. since , canada has been formally multicultural and multiculturalism was enshrined legally in the charter ofhuman rights and freedoms in . in one definition, canadian multi- culturalism encourages and supports cultural plural- ism, diversity, and equality for all. in practice, as many critics have noted, it has been a political tool aimed at social control and the containment of inter- ethnic violence (see, for example, allahar , - ) and is often used to silence cultural dissent by obfuscating racist and xenophobic structures. unfor- tunately, therefore, in practice it usually creates a “discourse of diversity” wherein those who are “mul- ticultural … are merely … tolerated, but not accepted as ‘real’ citizens” (james , - ; see also ban- nerji ). thus, critics argue that multiculturalism is an effective eurocentric tool because it defines people as being “multicultural” in relation to an in- visible core group of “real” citizens who are, in canada, normalized to be of white british and french settler descent (jiwani , ; see also simpson, james, and mack ). the multiculturalism invoked at the grassroots level in our dataset, however, appealed to the ideal of ca- nadian multiculturalism: a society that seeks and re- spects cultural diversity, that works against racism and xenophobia, and that espouses the benefits of a diverse community. as anton allahar writes, al- though multiculturalism does little to address struc- tural racism, “[w]here it works … multiculturalism is a very effective form of resistance to racism” ( , - ). for canada’s national identity construc- tion, multiculturalism is the “canadian way” (driedger , ) and is often used to differenti- ate canada from the united states (allahar , ). when this form of multiculturalism is invoked, it appeals to a canadian identity that is not culturally fixed, except insofar as it is culturally proliferous. the challenges that multiculturalism has made to domin- ant systems of authority and its connections to the postmodern undermining of grand narratives have been articulated in literary theory (see for example: caton ; kamboureli ; mohanty ; and poster ; and yanyu , among others), which argues that a cultural identity of multiply-located cultures is democratisation that reflects the fluidity of postmodern identities. this is not to say that identi- fying permeability is the same as easily overcoming racist structures. as sarah ahmed ( ) has warned, permeability is easily “achievable for those whose ex- periences of race are not lived as a barrier to entering of even inhabiting certain spaces. for those who are marginalised by the racial norm [of whiteness] , racial identity means living with constraint and fixity” ( ). it is the case, however, that multiculturalism was of- ten invoked by commenters who identified as muslim and/or racialized in a call to the permeability ofwhat it is to be canadian. samira kanji and azeezah kanji, for example, noted in their nationalpost article that the supreme court decision “provides a timely opportunity for some much-needed reflection on the way we talk about the atlantis journal issue . / niqab in canada.” they call for “multicultural re- spect” and cite s. of the charter which states that rights must be “interpreted in a manner consistent with the preservation and enhancement of the mul- ticultural heritage” of canada ( ). many others argued similarly. in a debate that took place on huffington post (huffpost), nellie_niqabi wrote: “i demand respect because that’s what i have been promised when i came here. … and by respect, i mean having the freedom to dress the way i want, and be myself” ( a). overt enigma asked of readers: “what do you deem more important, pro- tecting the charter of rights and freedoms and work- ing with the communities to find a … solution, or to embrace paranoia ... and portray this one ruling as the ‘end of times’” ( b). brian argued the benefits of a culturally diverse canada in his com- ment back to right-wing journalist barbara kay’s article in the national post: “we are a multicultural country where all cultures and traditions are equally honored and respected. … you are stuck in the past where canadian meant western or european. it doesn’t anymore. today it means all cultures and tra- ditions” ( ). cindy zheng, commenting on mike blanchfield’s maclean’s article, similarly wrote: “i think the court was wise to avoid a simple rule that is a one-size-fits-all approach. since we live in a multi-cultural society, we must be prepared to ac- commodate others, whether that be in the courtroom or at the office” ( ). and, in response to novabird’s statement that muslim women who “do not wish to respect canadian laws … can return to their countries of origin” ( ), cindy v. asked, “where are they supposed to go if they were born in canada?” ( ). these commenters draw on the fluid, postmodern national identity of multicultural- ism to argue for personal and political transforma- tion. in doing so, they eschewed a rigid, single definition of “canadian” in favour of cultural pluralism, and thus embodied a liminal and postmodern worldview where different cultural practices sit comfortably to- gether. in such everyday political views, veiling was often described as a choice made in a free and democratic multicultural country. for example, mike t., in response to some commenters’ arguments that allowing veiled women in court would change the very nature of canada, asked: “where does it say ‘we’ have to change? no one is forcing anyone to change. where does it say that canadian women have to wear the niqab while testifying. it’s a choice” ( b). similarly, nicholas t adopted a comfortable post- modern position in relation to national identity when he wrote: if you bothered to ask the women themselves, you might find that they … wear the niqab by choice. if so, to tell them they can’t wear one is to take away their freedom to decide, and that would be an act of oppression, would it not? how is it any of your business to push your in- terpretation on her and brand it as the accepted ‘canadian’ one? ( ) in support of nicholas t, and in answer to arguments that women who veil are oppressed, nellie_niqabi responded that she feels “totally liberated,” and argued that veiling allows women to be “judged” for their minds, “not the way we look” ( ). for those who employed an everyday personal politics of postmodern multiculturalism, the gendered aspect of the case was important. some commenters made arguments for n.s.’s rights as a woman who must un- veil in front of her alleged assailants after years of sexual assault. liz_wilson_ wondered “what is more important in this situation, to prosecute the men that have assaulted her—giving justice and access to legal recourse for islamic women in canada or to force her to appear unveiled?” ( a). mike t. argued that the context of the rape trial is important: “to force her to figuratively disrobe in front of the alleged rapists is really disturbing” ( a). mike t.’s use of cultural relativism (whether conscious or not) revealed the ef- fects of postmodernism at work: disrobing was un- derstood differently on the basis of cultural differences. when novabird accused mike t. of hy- perbolizing because “[m]any thousands of north american women face their accusers in court without covering their faces” ( ), they missed mike t’s point about postmodern cultural pluralism, which he atlantis journal issue . / reiterated: the women who appear unveiled in court, he responded, have “been brought up in an atmo- sphere where showing their face is a normal, everyday happening. this woman wasn’t. it’s just a basic hu- man kindness to a traumatized woman” ( c). other responses to novabird’s position that women must unveil in court also reveal the strength of post- modern multiculturalism in relation to the law. rk wrote, “read the decision—according to canadian law, wearing a niqab is acceptable. women who wear it while testifying are respecting canadian laws” ( ). overt enigma argued: “forcing any group of people to conform to your understanding and system of values is contrary to multiculturalism, tolerance and the values upon which canada was founded” ( a). although torontosaurous de- nounced veiling in general, he also wrote, “[f]rom a legal stand point [sic] ,as [sic] long as the judge rules that this is indeed the woman that is the accuser,and [sic] not an imposter,and [sic] those charged agree that the woman is who she says she is,i [sic] see no problem” ( a). all of these commenters’ argu- ments illustrate a strong, if unconscious, commitment to postmodernity: in order for them to make claims that canadians occupy multiple, relative, cultures, they must adopt a comfortable postmodern position in which national identity is permeable and diverse. that they do so in order to defend a woman’s right to dress as she chooses illustrates that postmodern fem- inist praxis can be found in unlikely places. it is not apparent that any of the commenters were con- sciously working from a position of feminist politics, which is our point: there are hopeful signs of cultural change in this wider appearance of what is very likely unconscious postmodern feminist praxis. while some commenters did not immediately espouse a postmod- ern view and began their discussion with a fixed, bounded definition of what it is to be “canadian,” when they changed their view, their changes can be explained by transversal feminist praxis: the process that allows the movement from a fixed to a permeable identity and which is closely connected to the post- modern aims of complicating identity politics. as pa- tricia hill collins argues, “analysis is important, yet action also matters,” and “transversal politics [is] a form of political engagement that ha[s] important implications for understanding organized political resistance” ( , ). postmodern theory to transversal praxis: rooting and shifting in our study, transformations in people’s personal political views often occurred when discussants made empathetic connections between islamophobic op- pression and their own experiences, leading them to articulate similarly-held outsider positions. this moved them from a fixed identity position to post- modern permeability, and on to transversal praxis. nira yuval-davis, arguably the most prolific writer on transversal praxis, explains that transversal politics “developed as an alternative to the assimilationist ‘universalistic’ politics of the left, on the one hand, and to identity politics, on the other hand” ( , ). transversal feminism is “dialogical standpoint epistemology … a recognition that from each posi- tioning the world is seen differently, and thus any knowledge based on just one positioning is ‘unfin- ished’” ( , ; see also harding ; and sto- etzler and yuval-davis ). like postmodernism, transversal feminism recognizes that identities are complex: people who identify themselves as belonging to the same collectivity or social category can ac- tually be positioned very differently in relation to a whole range of social locations (e.g., class, gender, ability, sexuality, stage in life cycle). at the same time, people with similar positionings and/or identities can have very different social and political values. (yuval-davis , ; see also yuval-davis , , and yuval- davis and stoetzler ) recently, patricia hill collins reflected on her article “the tie that binds,” where she argued that combating race-based violence required “a more sophisticated transversal politics that took intersecting power relations into account,” because “intersectional atlantis journal issue . / analyses, on their own, are unlikely to yield … effect- ive political solutions to violence” ( , - ). she noted that “action matters … transversal politics [is] a form of political engagement that [has] import- ant implications for understanding organized politic- al resistance” ( , ). drawing on the work of yuval-davis, hill collins examines coalition-building within and outside of historically constructed group identities ( , - ) and argues that the black lives matter movement shows how the “flexible solidarity honed through black women’s politics” can work with “transversal politics as a framework for co- alitions among groups that inform anti-violence initi- atives” ( , ). coalition building is important: as yuval-davis poin- ted out, the result of mid-twentieth century hege- monic constructions of feminist politics was “identity politics.” from an intersectional perspective, the con- structions of anti-racist politics in the civil rights movement shared the same outcomes (see also moghadam ). yuval-davis explains that in such politics all the members of the op- pressed social category are constructed as ho- mogenous; all dimensions of social location are reduced into the primary one. thus there is no differentiation in this approach between cat- egorical locations, social identities, and politic- al values … identity politics conflates individual and collective identities, therefore assuming that any member of any social cat- egory or identity can speak for all the other members of that category … “as a woman,” “as a black,” and so forth. ( , ) she argues that early corrections of the gender hege- mony in the mainstream feminist movement only continued to reify essentialist constructions of iden- tity by simply fragmenting and multiplying descriptors: i.e. “as a disabled woman,” “as a lesbian asian,” etc., “rather than a rejection of that model of identity politics itself” ( , , ). integrative feminist analysis, formed contemporaneously with poststructuralist and postmodern feminist theories, tries to address the fragmentation produced by iden- tity politics’ essentialism (yuval-davis , ). transversal feminism has been used effectively for co- alition-building between different women’s groups (see yuval-davis , ) because in taking a dia- logical standpoint people no longer “speak for” their constituencies in an essentializing way but are rather messengers engaged in political dialogue, bringing with them “the reflective knowledge of their own po- sitioning and identity. this is the rooting” (yuval- davis , ). rooting, the first stage in trans- versal feminist practice, is when participants do the deep work of thinking about their own identity posi- tions—how they define themselves—and recognize that they cannot speak in an essentializing way “as a…” due to the complexity ofintersectionality; rather, they bring partial knowledge from their own complex positions. the second stage in transversal feminist practice is shifting: when participants “put themselves in the situation of those with whom they are in dia- logue and who are different from them” (yuval-davis , ). transversal feminism assumes that people are capable of empathy and that the shifting process involves a careful examination of the “compatible val- ues” that “cut across differences in positionings and identities” ( , ). as yuval-davis points out, “[t]he struggle against oppression and discrimination might (and mostly does) have a specific categorical focus, but it is never confined just to that category” ( , ). for example, when hill collins writes about the transversal roots of the success of the black lives matter movement ( , ) and argues for the need to move towards transversal political action in more meaningful ways, she describes how multiple groups came to align themselves with the black lives matter movement. hill collins argues that transversal politics is the ne- cessary but “as yet unrealized future” of political act- ivism ( , ). the challenge, in terms of praxis, is likely that, on the one hand, decades of feminist and other critical evidence has shown that identities like sex, race, and class, are social constructions and therefore “false:” there is no natural, biologically-de- termined identity to embody. further, experts have shown that these identities have been, and are, im- posed through relations of power and domination atlantis journal issue . / (the extensive and “scientific” imperial classification and invention of different races in the nineteenth century is an example, see for example hill collins ; hooks ; lorde ; and mcclintock ). for this reason, postmodern, transversal, post- structuralist, and intersectional feminist theorists ar- gue that equality can be pursued by showing how the false hegemonic binaries of male/female, white/black, straight/gay, etc. crumble under scrutiny. however, on the other hand, the constructed “false- ness” of hegemonic identities exists alongside the ma- terial lived effects of those constructions so that decades of evidence in feminist and other critical dis- ciplines also shows that statements like “women are the majority of victims of spousal abuse” and “indi- genous women in canada are more likely to suffer sexual violence than non-indigenous women” are not only valid but, in a society of inequalities created by false binaries, they are also politically expedient and necessary (see, for example, butler , - ). soci- ety is not yet in a position where it is simply a matter of recognizing the falseness of either/or identity con- struction and its historical connections to power rela- tions and domination to dissolve inequality. identities remain important and this, perhaps, is why hill collins ( ) writes that the future possibilities provided by transversal feminism are as yet unmet. similarly, yuval-davis has pointed out that transversal feminist practice is difficult because both the rooting and shifting stages need to remain fluid, not “straight- forward or fixed” ( , ). the purpose of root- ing in one’s identity is “not to imagine oneself just in relation to the social category of the other but also in other ways through which different kinds of relation- ships with the partners in the transversal dialogue may be developed” ( , ). hill collins notes that “the process of shifting must maintain the multi- plicity of perspectives both within a group and across groups. this is the difficult challenge, one that recog- nizes that some coalitions may not be possible” ( , ). despite the difficulties, however, many mo- ments of transformation in online commenters’ polit- ical views illustrate transversal feminist praxis in process. both yuval-davis and hill collins argue that intersectionality provides multiple identity meeting points (roots) from which people can connect and shift. for many in canada, one shared identity point is that ofsettler. when commenter rattler wrote that a “creeping ac- ceptance of cultures alien to canada has reached a saturation point. ... the [immigration] ‘welcome’ mat is no longer at my door” ( ), for example, yasmin responded: “i’m sure the first people would agree with you, and would be more than happy to help you pack your goods so that you can move back to europe. alien culture indeed” ( ). yasmin invokes rattler’s shared otherness with women who veil as a non-indigenous settler, suggesting that rattler’s per- ceived right to be in canada should extend to muslim canadians who are, similarly, settlers on someone else’s lands. julia kristeva’s now-germinal work on the construction of foreignness is helpful here: kristeva ( ) argued that “the foreigner” is formally one who holds a different nationality. in canada, transna- tional politics and identity formations produce mul- tiple “foreign” identities (e.g., african american, italian-canadian). this holds true even in the dis- cursive construction of first peoples, who are often represented as “ethnicized” in relation to white settlers to support the myth of white indigeneity and entitle- ment to the land (see for example bohaker and iacov- etta ). kristeva argued that postmodern identities allow for multiple points of recognition be- cause we are no longer “fixed” in terms of the rela- tionships between nation-state and self, thus illustrating the link between postmodernism and transversal praxis: when people recognize shared for- eignness, outsiders cease to exist because all become outsiders ( , ). sara ahmed’s ( ) work on “the stranger” similarly notes that the stranger is both “familiar and strange” because of their “proximity.” the stranger’s very posi- tioning in a shared space is what produces people as strangers in the first place: “[t]he strangers come to be seen as figures (with linguistic and bodily integrity) when they have entered the spaces we call ‘home’” atlantis journal issue . / ( ). in this sense, all non-indigenous canadians have, at one time or another, occupied the position of stranger who becomes incorporated into the home lands ( ). in our study, the shared identity location of settler-outsider was often invoked by commenters to try to create moments of connection across iden- tity locations, a move that reflects transversal praxis’ deliberate rooting and shifting. for example, nellie_niqabi shared why she veils and her unhappiness with a society that treats her as a foreigner. her language suggested she was upset when she wrote that “these brainwashed masses are trying to teach us what our religious requirements are. they are trying to ‘liberate’ us by passing us snide comments in public and and [sic] trying to tug our veils off. … the impression that all women who wear the veil are oppressed is completely stereotype” ( a). mike_in_ottawa responded with a trans- versal shift: he recognized and named their shared settler identity boundary and moved the conversation towards empathy and coalition-building: nellie, i have an issue with your statement “i demand respect because that’s what i have been promised when i came here.” my family were immigrants to this country as well. they didn’t demand respect and italians were looked down upon for years in this country. we earned respect through hard work and becom- ing canadian…. be patient and the respect and understanding will come. ( ) in response, nellie_niqabi’s tone becomes more con- versational. she thanks mike_in_ottawa for being “understanding” and “open minded,” and acknow- ledges that “respect won’t come on demand” but she also continues to name her experience with islamo- phobia as different from that of mike’s italian-cana- dian heritage. she writes that anti-veiling attitudes are not “the same thing as another race or another culture. … for us, we have no reason not to have re- spect. we do contribute to society. our face veils don’t really make a difference. it isn’t that the niqab is new here [as mike_in_ottawa suggested]. it’s a whole different thing.” she hopes, in her final sen- tence directed at mike, “that someday, people might look at niqabi women as people, and not as symbols of oppression :)” ( b). nellie_niqabi’s change in tone from argument to discussion, and her smiley emoticon illustrates a shift towards negotiation and understanding. establishing a shared identity location also led to res- olution in an argument on huffpost: janice_rosen called for a canadian nation-state that rejects its past racist practices, such as the internment of japanese- canadians during world war ii, and which instead shows “[f]lexibility and understanding and a willing- ness to extend this understanding to cultural differ- ences” ( ). in response, alisoncarnie, who had initially posted “[t]his is canada … adapt or go home” ( a), writes “i was wrong and you are right … you explained it brilliantly.” alisoncarnie went on to disclose: “i dated a man in the s in toronto whose parents were born in vancouver and were of japanese descent … they were in an internment camp during wwii … not one of canada’s proudest mo- ments” ( b). alisoncarnie’s turn to her past ex- perience, directly after an admittance of wrong-thinking, illustrates that her attitudinal shift was related to her own close personal relationship with someone who had experienced the negative ef- fects of being treated as an outsider. one aspect of her identity (former girlfriend of japanese canadian man) allowed her to find a common link and move to em- pathy and transformation. adding to kristeva’s theories about shared outsider status, a number of theorists suggest that building in- terpersonal connections can move people to better understand others’ experiences, part of the rooting process in transversal politics. in her exploration of the tensions between white and racialized women’s coalition building, maría lugones ( ) notes: [t]he only motive that makes sense to me for your [privileged women] joining us … is the motive of friendship. … i see the “out of friendship” as the only sensical motivation for this … because the task at hand for you is one of extraordinary difficulty. … i do not think atlantis journal issue . / that you have any obligation to understand us. you do not have an obligation to abandon your imperialism, your universal claims, you reduc- tion ofus to your selves. ( ) both lugones and elizabeth spelman, with whom she writes, articulate the importance of dialogue that undoes insider/outsider binaries: at first sight it may appear that the in- sider/outsider distinction disappears in the dia- logue, but it is important to notice that all that happens is that we are now both outsider and insider with respect to each other. the dialogue puts us both in position to give a better ac- count of each other’s and our own experience. ( , ) self-interest or a sense of obligation does not engage members of a dominant group in others’ struggles long-term. personal connection, “the motive of friendship,” is “both the only appropriate and under- standable motive for” the dominant group, they ar- gue: “[y]ou may be moved by friendship to undergo the very difficult task ofunderstanding the text ofour cultures by understanding our lives.… this learning calls for circumspection, for questioning of yourselves and your roles in your own culture” ( , ), which is the process of rooting, and of recognizing the many ways that we, individually, might define ourselves. although identity-markers are often cited in feminist intersectional scholarship as race, gender, class, ability, age, etc., they can and do encompass a number of ways that individuals identify themselves, including more mundane connections such as links to popular culture. one such example in our dataset illustrated that, in rooting, there are many ways to make con- nections and shift. when liz_wilson_ wondered “what is more important in this situation, to prosec- ute the men that have assaulted her—giving justice and access to legal recourse for islamic women in canada or to force her to appear unveiled” ( a), gerry k. initially responded: if they allow this then it sets a precedent. should we let religious beliefs push back cana- dian law? what’s next … jedi was recently ac- credited as a recognized religion, what if they say they can’t testify without light sabres on the stand, or their yoda puppets? where is the line drawn? ( a) instead of a counter-attack, liz_wilson_ writes: “how did you know i had a light saber and a puppet :o)” ( b). she then again shares her concern “that this is also a way of intimidating this particular wo- man and could result in her choosing not to testify or to be so uncomfortable that her testimony is affected” ( b). commenter dipl added in response to gerry k.: “[i]f yoda you wish on your legal team, sit he must at the counsel table” ( ), mimicking yoda’s speech syntax. the identity marker shared by these commenters is that of star wars fan: all three commenters know enough about the star wars fran- chise, and its relation to cultural movements like the jedi religion in the uk, to make playful gestures to- wards it. rooting out this shared identity marker pro- duced a shift in gerry k.’s tone and view: “i agree, and i really hope this is not an intimidation tactic” ( b). this example points to the fluidity yuval- davis argues is required when rooting to find a shared point of contact with those positioned in opposition. if rooting produces identity considerations that are embedded only in black/white, straight/gay, man/woman, young/old, etc., then it is still simply “recognizing the self via the relationship with the sig- nificant other,” whereas “the whole point of trans- versal politics is to transcend the binary divisions of those who are in different positionings in the dia- logue” (yuval-davis , ). the jedi-based hu- mour used by the star wars fans in this particular example illustrates that rooting and shifting can be playfully serious work. the work of kristeva, spelman and lugones, ahmed, and transversal feminism moves away from the iden- tity-based essentialism that leads to political infight- ing and towards adopting dialogic standpoint bridge building between groups and individuals. this work explains why the transformations that happened dur- ing the online discussions in our dataset are examples atlantis journal issue . / of transversal praxis in practice and effect, if not in- tent. transversal feminist theorists have heralded the efficacy of “dialogic” consciousness-raising and anti- oppressive work “as a means of creating difference- and diversity-sensitive feminist solidarity across na- tional and regional borders” (lykke , ; see also stoetzler and yuval-davis , - ; yuval-davis ; yuval-davis and stoetzler ). that work was apparent in our dataset when some commenters made connections between their own lives and the lives of others, whether those connections were made consciously or not. conclusion: postmodern and transversal theory and conflict resolution feminist praxis is conceived of as a deliberate process, both in research and in personal development (see hesse-biber ). sumi cho, kimberlé crenshaw, and leslie mccall, for example, outline three ap- proaches to achieve intersectional feminist praxis. elizabeth evans notes that making the “transition from theory to practice” is a process of “application” ( , ). elizabeth sharp et al. ( ) recount how their work translates “scholarship to action” ( ) be- cause they were intentionally “guided by feminist praxis” to move from “frustration and anger into ac- tion” ( ). similarly, katherine allen ( ), and lee ann de reus, april few, and libby balter blume ( ) note that praxis is the process of putting the- ory into action. nancy naples, in her reflections on the transformation of political theory into everyday politics, notes that “feminist praxis incorporates a commitment to self-reflexivity” that is necessary to transform experience into knowledge ( , - ). while feminist praxis does rely on reflexive and conscious transformation, which could explain why, given the tenacity of identity politics, hill collins ( ) noted that transversal feminist praxis is not yet met, we found evidence in our dataset that people can and do transform their everyday politics through the processes of rooting and shifting identified by transversal feminism, even if they are not consciously doing so. these moments would not be possible without the permeability of postmodern identity positions. in her work, connecting donna haraway’s postmodernism to transversal theory, michelle bastian points out that postmodern subjects are better able to reach points of empathy and respect than the fixed subject of mod- ernity; that is, postmodern subjects are better able to engage in transversal praxis. bastian draws attention to haraway’s argument that identity “is always con- structed and stitched together imperfectly and there- fore able to join with another, to see together without claiming the other” (qtd. in bastian , ). the everyday politics of identity work that took place when discussants recognized that their own identities were permeable and which allowed them to “join with another, to see together” diversely and move towards understanding, empathy, and resolution are examples of transversal praxis in action (also see pryse , - ). these transformations led discussants to 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andpsychologyreader, edited by kum- kum bhavnani and ann phoenix, - . london: sage. _____. . gender&nation. london, sage. _____. . “human/women’s rights and feminist transversal politics.” in globalfeminism: transnationalwomen’sactivism, organizing, and humanrights, edited by myra marx ferree, and aili mari tripp, - . new york: nyu press. yuval-davis, nira and marcel stoetzler. . “imagined boundaries and borders: a gendered gaze.” theeuropean journalofwomen’s studies ( ): - . zheng, cindy. december , : a.m., , comment on “supreme court in split decision rules niqab ok in court in some cases,” macleans http://www.macleans.ca/general/supreme-court-in- split-decision-rules-niqab-ok-in-court-in-some-cases/. wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . 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e r  june – https://black livesmattervancouver.com/vancouver- dismantle-systems-of-violence/ george floyd nina pop d’andre campbell breonna taylor regis korchinski-paquet abdirahman abdi ahmaud arbery abdi gani mahamud hirsi tony mcdade david mcatee andrew loku samwel uko these are just a few of the names of black lives claimed by state violence and neglect in recent years. their lives mattered. all black lives matter! each of them should be here now, that is why we work to ensure that the systems that failed them do not claim another life. each of these violent killings cuts deep, but we remain unbroken. instead, they have (once again) brought us together in the streets, and online, to reaffirm what we’ve always known; there can be neither justice, nor peace, within a police state. black lives matter centres the lived experiences of black people who are queer, trans, non-binary, live with disability, and/or do sex work because these community members have too often been left to the margins of social movements or altogether erased from history. in prioritizing the voices of our most vulnerable, we address the needs most critical to community safety. for many of you acknowledging – for the first time – that #blacklives- matter, this comes with a pang of guilt: a realisation of complacency and complicity in the face of ongoing state-sanctioned violence you thought was in the past. for others, this simple statement is an affirmation of bc studies no. , autumn bc studies our existence, and our deserving to live and thrive. black lives matter vancouver exists to hold police accountable for violence against black people. we do so while standing in solidarity with the indigenous people on the traditional, ancestral and unceded territory of the xʷməθkʷəyə̓m (musqueam), sḵwxw̱ú mesh (squamish), and səl ̓ílwətaʔ/selilwitulh (tsleil-waututh) first nations currently known as vancouver. cultural amnesia allows us to think that canada’s, and british columbia’s history sits atop a moral high ground, and many people assume that canada is “not as bad” as the united states. let it be known that a nation built upon stolen lands and enslavement can only do so under implicit threat of violence. land dispossession and brutal violence are the underpinnings of our shared history within this particular police state. the punitive justice model employed by the vancouver police department (vpd) is harming our communities, and creates unsafe conditions because of increased police surveillance. we cannot move forward without a shift to community-based models of security and safety.  a restorative justice model will allow good to come from harm, and stifle the cycle of pain, abuse, and racial violence at the root of policing. we stand in solidarity with our people in the united states, but we will not allow canadians to use the struggle of black people to the south as a tool to distract from the ongoing police violence against, and state-sanctioned oppression of black lives in canada, british columbia, and vancouver. simply put, the distinctions between the ways black folks were used to generate wealth for the economies of colonial north america do not change the racist and white supremacist opinions and institutions that founded our two countries. the city of vancouver has recently spoken up against anti-black racism, but it was long overdue. it is imperative that the city acts in continuous collaboration with the black community  to address the long-standing institutional racism that exists within its policies and practices. we vehemently oppose the violence enacted on black bodies by police, and the state, as well as the undergirding conditions which facilitate and justify this violence. our freedom is not and should have never been up for negotiation, and so black lives matter vancouver issues the following demands and calls to action: this space here • the city of vancouver must redirect financial resources from the vancouver police department towards initiatives that demonstrably support long-term community safety. this includes child care support, education, comprehensive mental health intervention and social support, local restorative justice services, employment programs, access to recreational facilities, community-directed public investment, peer-based programming, culturally-led policies and more. • the city of vancouver must commit to improving social conditions across the city with a commitment to the goal of eventually abol- ishing police and prisons, as they serve the primary purpose of oppressing marginalized communities and protecting the riches of the wealthy minority of denizens. • the city of vancouver must condemn the actions taken by colonial police forces with respect to silencing and violently suppressing black voices and demands for systemic change. • the city of vancouver must address the past and current harms that the destruction of the hogan’s alley neighbourhood has caused to black and indigenous people and other marginalised communities of colour. • the city of vancouver must follow through with its policy to redress the past displacement of vancouver’s only black neighbourhood by enabling the establishment of a black-led non-profit community land trust on the former hogan’s alley block within the northeast false creek area. • the vancouver pride society must cut ties with the vancouver police department, and exclude all police officers (in and out of uniform) from participation in the pride parade itself in any official capacity. • the vancouver police department must demilitarise, and make a commitment to work towards officers not carrying firearms. • the vancouver police department must undergo an upheaval in the manner in which it collects and reports data from arrests/police interactions with civilians to be more thorough and transparent. we need accurate numbers for our missing and murdered trans sisters and brothers. • the b.c. association of chiefs of police and the ministry of public safety and solicitor general’s police services division must strip the awards of valour given to constables ann fontaine, albert lu and greg parkes for their involvement in the killing of abdi gani mahamud hirsi. bc studies • the vancouver school board must acknowledge its dismissal of several incidents of blatant anti-black racism, including hate speech and systemic practices, and commit to an anti-racism policy in col- laboration with black and indigenous community organizations. as we call on the above state bodies to act, here are some actions you and your families can and need to take. this handy resource can be used to guide you: https://docs.google.com/document/d/ dlqh d stndad vi cncbfymt k ulhghsesnsh pjgw/edit. contact the city officials/councillors to demand that the city of vancouver defund the vpd and redirect funds to helpful initiatives. mayor – kennedy.stewart@vancouver.ca city councillors christine.boyle@vancouver.ca rebecca.bligh@vancouver.ca pete.fry@vancouver.ca adriane.carr@vancouver.ca michael.wiebe@vancouver.ca colleen.hardwick@vancouver.ca sarah.kirby-yung@vancover.ca lisa.dominato@vancouver.ca jean.swanson@vancouver.ca melissa.degenova@vancouver.ca city manager – sadhu.johnston@vancouver.ca vancouver police board – office@vancouverpoliceboard.ca minister of public safety and solicitor general – pssg.minister@gov.bc.ca bc association of police chiefs – engagement@bcacp.ca chief constable of the vancouver police department and president of the canadian association of chiefs of police – adam.palmer@vpd.ca vancouver pride society board of directors charmaine desilva (co-chair) cdesilva@vancouverpride.ca michelle fortin (co-chair) mfortin@vancouverpride.ca darius maze (treasurer) dburbidge@vancouverpride.ca john whistler (secretary) jwhistler@vancouverpride.ca azza rojbi (director) azza@vancouverpride.ca nicola spurling (director) nspurling@vancouverpride.ca catherine jenkins (director) cjenkins@vancouverpride.ca ahmad danny ramadan (director) dramadan@vancouverpride.ca abdollah fooladkha (director)i afooladkhai@vancouverpride.ca andrea arnot (executive director) aarnot@vancouverpride.ca comillas journal of international relations | nº | - [ ] [issn - ] carmen lucía alarcón gubert estudiante de e – derecho y relaciones internacionales de icade the borders of dominicanidad. race, nation and archives of contradiction lorgia garcía-peña . durham, london: duke university press. . páginas. isbn: el presente libro es una obra en inglés de la escritora y académica estadounidense de orígenes dominicanos lor- gia garcía-peña, profesora adjunta de lenguas romances y literatura e historia de la literatura en la universidad de harvard y ganadora de premios literarios como el que otorga la asociación nacional de estudios de mujeres gloria anzaldúa en o el premio isis duarte en es- tudios haitianos y dominicanos en . the borders of dominicanidad es un proyecto surgido de su tesis doctoral que ha crecido con investigaciones más desarrolladas concernientes, sobre todo, al estudio de las comunidades latinas y afrodescendientes de ee. uu. finalmente, ha supuesto, como ella misma describe, un “viaje largo, profundamente personal e increíblemente gratificante” (p. xi). en esta obra, garcía-peña realiza un estudio del impac- to de las historias (stories and histories) en la identidad nacional y racial de un pueblo, tanto de la población afrodescendiente en república dominicana, como de la comunidad dominicana en ee. uu. ofrece la expe- riencia dominicana para comprender cómo los actos de exclusión, unidos a las tensiones entre el deseo colonial y la aspiración a la independencia política, cuyo impacto se refleja en la sociedad actual, conforman la identidad de un país a la vez que crean marginalidad racial. según la autora, el impulso intelectual que ha guiado esta investigación deriva de su preocupación por el silencio al que se somete la pluralidad de historias de dominicanos por parte de los archivos dominicano y estadounidense. con el término “archivo” garcía-peña se refiere a los do- cumentos históricos, a los textos literarios, a los monu- mentos y a las representaciones culturales que conforman una identidad e ideología nacionales (p. ). este imagina- rio discursivo se presenta como una estructura opresiva de las minorías étnicas y los sujetos colonizados o racializados que se ven excluidos de la historia y de la cultura, tanto del país en el que viven, como del país del que proceden. en este libro, garcía-peña habla de la “producción de la dominicanidad, en casa y en el extranjero” (p. ) a través las contradicciones que se oponen a las dicciones hege- mónicas, que ella titula dominicanidad en mayúsculas (por ser el discurso oficial) frente a la dominicanidad, en minúsculas, de esas historias paralelas. con el objetivo de demostrar cómo las dicciones oficiales son cuestiona- das y redefinidas a través de las contradicciones, la autora se pregunta cómo el sujeto racializado en el exilio contra- dice esas historias que continúan silenciándole violen- tamente desde el “archivo” de dos naciones con las que carga y entre las que tiende puentes (p. ). para comprender esta opresión, se presenta la negritud como una frontera que, aunque invisible, se puede “nom- brar, cruzar e incluso borrar” (p. ). ser negro es una fron- tera para el cuerpo que ostenta tal característica y se tradu- ce en la exclusión civil, política y económica que impide la movilidad social, ya sea en república dominicana, donde comillas journal of international relations | nº | - [ ] [issn - ] el negro es automáticamente identificado como haitiano, ya sea en ee. uu., donde la etiqueta de dominicanyorks es impuesta a cualquier cuerpo afrolatino. la autora propone la contradicción de esta exclusión usando el cuerpo de la dominicanidad popular como un sitio para renegociar las narrativas de raza, género y pertenencia cultural que con- forman las fronteras invisibles de una nación. garcía-peña acusa a ee. uu., durante las ocupaciones de - y , de haber ayudado a definir una frontera geográfica y social entre república dominicana y haití, siendo el miedo a esta última (por ejemplo, debido el asesinato del líder afrorreligioso olivorio mateo) el ele- mento fundacional de las nociones estadounidenses de raza y ciudadanía. este miedo es compartido con la élite criolla dominicana que ha construido la dominicanidad como una raza híbrida, diferente a la haitiana, contribu- yendo a la violencia contra los grupos afrodominicanos, los migrantes haitianos, sus descendientes o los rayanos (habitantes de los territorios próximos a la frontera). garcía-peña utiliza el relato de cinco momentos que fue- ron importantes para la construcción, tanto de ideologías fundacionales de esa dominicanidad oficial, como fuen- tes de la contradicción de ese discurso hegemónico. si bien por límites de extensión de esta reseña no podemos entrar a analizar cada uno de esos eventos, sí debemos explicar dos mitos fundacionales de la identidad nacional dominicana, que coadyuvaron, a través de la literatura, a la consolidación de la hispanofilia y el antihaitianismo. por un lado, los asesinatos en de las hermanas an- dújar, conocidas como las “vírgenes de galindo”, durante la unificación haitiana de la isla de la española, a las que la poesía dominicana de la segunda mitad del siglo xix ha presentado como mujeres blancas, violadas brutalmente por hombres negros, blanqueando el cuerpo de mujeres dominico-haitianas, a la vez que se excluye del relato histó- rico a la comunidad racializada y se libera de culpa a la élite criolla (p. ). por otro lado, el asesinato del líder religioso afrodominicano olivorio mateo (p. ), en , proyecta el pavor que producían la cultura y la religión afrohaitianas en las fuerzas de ocupación estadounidenses, trasladando este miedo a las élites blancas dominicanas. en , la masacre de más de . personas étni- camente identificadas como haitianas y afrodominicanas en los territorios fronterizos del norte de la isla durante la dictadura de trujillo fue determinante para la construc- ción de las estructuras de opresión e invisibilización que aún perduran hoy en día. sin embargo, la autora explica el cambio que se ha producido entre los ataques hacia el cuerpo racializado dominicano y haitiano-descendiente de aquella época frente a los ataques actuales, en compa- ración con la rampante impunidad de los actos genocidas de trujillo en menos de un siglo. en efecto, desde el terremoto que devastó haití y partes de la región suroeste de república dominicana en enero de , se ha visto una progresión hacia la contradic- ción del discurso dominante. garcía-peña recoge eventos subversivos de la literatura, el arte y la cultura general, como el cuerpo de la mujer rayana sonia marmolejos o las canciones de rita indiana hernández, que refutan la idea de la diferenciación natural radical entre haitianos y dominicanos. también la poesía (cantos de la fronte- ra, ) y los relatos que el político dominicano juan bosch, opositor de la dictadura trujillista, escribió desde el exilio, son ejemplos de una subcultura que revuelve el discurso hegemónico de segregación racial y cultural, tanto en la isla como fuera de su territorio y que son ma- neras de redefinir las realidades actuales. así, se va conformando, según la autora, una solidaridad “intraisleña”, apoyada en la conciencia rayana que, se- gún la bailarina y dramaturga josefina báez, pasa por el cuerpo (de los dominicanyork), en un lugar llamado el nié (un espacio inventado que existe en el underground neoyorkino y en los márgenes de república dominicana y ee. uu., p. ), y a través del idioma dominicanish (una especie de dialecto del spanglish). garcía-peña concluye su libro relacionando esa solida- ridad revolucionaria en la que se basa la contradicción con la contestación actual frente al cambio en las leyes de nacionalidad en república dominicana, que han de- jado desde la sentencia - del tribunal constitucio- nal (p. ) a millones de dominicanos de ascendencia haitiana sin documentos, abocándoles a la exclusión y la vulnerabilidad frente al abuso. estos movimientos y otros como el black lives matter son, para la autora, muestras de que el rechazo al cuerpo negro, afrodescendiente o ra- cializado, ya no es un discurso impune, sino que la identi- dad nacional oficial empieza a tambalearse frente a estas nuevas narrativas que pretenden representar de manera más leal la realidad actual tanto en ee. uu. como en república dominicana y haití. reviews francis b. nyamnjoh . #rhodesmustfall: nibbling at resilient colonialism in south africa. bamenda, cameroon: langaa rpcig. x + pp. there is hardly a more fitting statement regarding the timing of the book under review than the one by sanya osha, one of its reviewers, saying that “francis nyamnjoh’s book couldn’t have come at a more appropriate time.” indeed, the theme of the book, focusing on the wider context of the current student protests engulfing many south african universities, particularly liberal, elite institutions such as the university of cape town (uct) or wits, calling for “real” decolonisation in post-apartheid south africa, could not be more topical. currently professor of social anthropology at the university of cape town, south africa, francis b. nyamnjoh, a highly prolific scholar who widely published on globalisation, citizenship, media and the politics of identity in africa, offers a volume capturing the context in which the current calls for decolonisation are articulated, focusing on the rhodes must fall (rmf) student protest movement at uct, in order to raise critical questions of race, identity, belonging, and citizenship. the book revolves around the key question about the root causes of the student protest movements, which are gaining momentum after more than twenty years of south african democracy, despite the triumph of political freedom in , and the subsequent efforts at truth and reconciliation and nation-building under the former president nelson mandela. it reminds us that the legacy of colonialism and apartheid is far more resilient than initially appeared in the new south africa. from the era of the enthusiastic demise of apartheid, followed by the intoxication over the newly acquired political freedom, many south africans have begun to question the very nature of the transformation and raise unpleasant questions concerning the meaning of the post-apartheid development. unsurprisingly, the issue of “race” is again on the table; this time, however, the majority of the “discussants” does not come from the historically disadvantaged social classes – poor, destitute, unqualified modern africa: politics, history and society | | volume , issue south africans who would have every right to challenge the post- apartheid transformation because the quality of their lives has improved either negligibly or not at all (some would even say that it got worse). south africa is arguably the most unequal society in the world. the country, trapped in racialised poverty, an ever increasing socio-economic inequality, and worsening race relations, seems to turn back to those who impede “real” transformation – in this case, the statue of rhodes viewed as a symbol of oppression and white privilege. mandela’s reconciliation and rainbowism is seen by many black people, especially the young generation, including influential public figures such as julius malema, the founder of the political party eef (economic freedom fighters), as too modest. their rhetoric sounds revolutionary – the time is ripe for angry, radical, and sometimes inevitably violent reactions. the outrage is directed both against the makwerekwere, i.e., black people coming to south africa from other parts of africa in the quest for greener pastures, and against the symbols of colonialism and apartheid that epitomise the unfinished business of post-apartheid transformation in higher education. the discourse of race has been taken up by the young, educated generation of south africans, the so-called born-frees, university students many of whom are far from destitute. organised student protests that have engulfed many south african universities tend to challenge the very nature of the transformation. their requirements are directed in a different way: they accentuate the issues that have been until now rather implicit and covert. public discourse is replete with slogans like “black lives matter,” originally a slogan from the usa. the protests reflect south africa’s unfinished business and their demand of “real” transformation. as nyamnjoh rightly argues, the issues emphasising identity, belonging, and citizenship enable to engage both significant figures of the colonial era, such as rhodes, and current xenophobic manifestations of violence against black immigrants from other parts of africa. nyamnjoh sees the processes both as “parallel but complementary protests” (p. ), and as attempts to unfold correlations that are not immediately obvious. a red thread that goes through the discussion and connects the apparently non-linkable issues is human mobility, which relentlessly tests the boundaries of citizenship and belonging. reviews nyamnjoh’s assumption that south africans are all makwerekwere, starts with the author’s focus on sir cecil john rhodes, an exemplary and extraordinarily powerful makwerekwere, who managed to define and confine the erstwhile “host” society and turn the natives into settlers in their home country, unlike today’s makwerekwere who come from other parts of africa (p. – ). the fact that rhodes conquered south africa culturally had elevated him to a position of an imperial hero cherished by colonial and apartheid elites. the imposition of western forms of knowledge production, which mudimbe ( ) called “epistemic domination,” is particularly salient in education. hence, it is not surprising that the youth’s anger has turned on rhodes, a symbol of colonialism, i.e., the subjugation, inferiority and marginalisation of the black population in south africa, which resulted in the ultimate removal of his statue from the uct campus in , which, surprisingly, was met with little resistance from the side of the official university bodies. the cardinal question nyamnjoh raises in his book, why rhodes had to fall, is approached from diverse perspectives. basically, as the author writes, rhodes fell because of a (costly) illusion of the rainbow nation. there are two mutually intertwined reasons behind this that refer to the present-day south african transformation as unfinished business. first, the socio-economic situation that severely affects the masses of the historically disadvantaged south africans, primarily black; and second, the unresolved “race” issue. for both, the “guilt” resides primarily in the legacy of colonialism and apartheid. by deploying ngugi wa thiong’o’s appeal for “decolonising the mind” ( ), nyamnjoh primarily turns his attention to the latter issue, how whiteness can be demythologised if whitening up is an aspiration for many black people in south africa (and elsewhere). as he rightly points out, whiteness as the embodiment of modernity has not stopped to attract africans, even in the “new” south africa. what lessons can be learned from the rmf protest, asks nyamnjoh in one of the book chapters. first, one should view it as an opportunity to carry out the bold task of transformation, both socio-economic and mental, in order to mitigate wider societal dissatisfaction. despite this is a derogatory slang word used to denote current illegal immigrants coming to south africa from other parts of africa. it refers to the allegedly unintelligible language these people use in communication with “native” south africans. modern africa: politics, history and society | | volume , issue the multiple, seemingly unbridgeable divides present-day south africa is facing, nyamnjoh argues for conviviality, characterized by open-mindedness, open-endedness, and the spirit of togetherness as the essential ingredients of identity that stand in sharp contrast to “completeness.” this seems to be the strongest argument of the book. however, the burden of such a daunting task lies primarily on whites, as the author claims: “change can come about only if whites and whiteness as epitomes of privilege and supremacy in south africa move … to substantive gestures of inclusivity” (p. ), through three r’s: restitution, reparation, and redistribution. it reads to me as if the “failure to enforce greater integration beyond elite circles” combined and “ignorance and arrogance” (p. ) comes solely under the eight-percent minority, though powerful and largely privileged. whites, however, cannot be blamed for both the “slow socio-economic transformation and [the] slow reconfiguration of attitudes, beliefs and relationships” (p. ). the necessary redress must entail all social categories of south africans to combat narrow nationalism, violence and intolerance and fulfil the ideal of a truly democratic, inclusive society. as nyamnjoh aptly points out at the very end of his book, these challenges require a productive and inclusive leadership with political vision and carefully articulated policies, tenacity, commitment and open-mindedness. this hope is immediately followed by a sceptical concern on how feasible the aim to implement “real” transformation is; that is, to accomplish a mental decolonisation. the author does not seem to be sympathetic with those voices expressing the idea that a complete sociological renewal is not possible within one generation. the key question i would raise in extension of his argument is who blocks or hinders the “exchange” between the two epistemic “cultures” (white and african). if it was only the elite, it would be easy to overthrow it “overnight” – but, as nyamnjoh persuasively shows in his book, it is being supported by the masses of most impoverished south africans, irrespective of their skin colour – the gain of material wealth that will guarantee dignity and real human rights. the author has succeeded in providing readers, both those concerned with present-day south africa, and those interested in global issues of belonging and citizenship, with a coherent, meaningful volume that convincingly demonstrates that wider processes such as south africa’s transformation are never completed. he paints an intricate reviews and evocative picture of the recent processes. although the focus is on south africa, it would be a good read for anyone interested in the complexity and global dynamics of social change in other parts of the world. yet, despite the indisputable breadth and appeal of the text, there are some weaknesses in the main argument and certain aspects that remain rather unexplored. in spite of nyamnjoh’s frequent appeals for a universal black humanism, including the role of whites in africa (p. ix), which would allow for a “flexible citizenship” (articulated primarily in the last chapter), and his insistence on the hierarchy of blackness (particularly in chapter titled “not every black is black enough”), his juxtaposing of “black pain” and “white privilege” tends to essentialise the allegedly frozen categories and thus ignores the fact of a more than twenty years struggle of south africa into democracy, under black political dispensation. the usage of the concepts of “black pain” and “white privilege” loosely links to a discursive strategy popularised as “strategic essentialism,” which is deployed positively in those instances in which the motivations are morally justified in the struggle for equality as opposed to those cases in which strategic essentialism, in the hands of whites under apartheid, leads to oppression, exploitation, dispossession, and domination. i argue that any kind of strategic essentialism is dangerous, particularly in such an explosive milieu as current south africa because it bears the risk of being abused by those who become powerful. as stephanie rudwick ( ) argues, race discourse based on essentialism, currently framing the decolonisation discourse in south africa, have a propensity to freeze “population groups” as was the case in the colonial and apartheid periods, instead of bringing the coveted multicultural, inclusive society. the “decolonising” attempts to reject whiteness in its entirety – individual, societal, and institutional – tend to reinforce colonial and apartheid racial identities. more ethnographic consideration could be given to the descriptions and interpretations of key concepts, such as white privilege at universities. the only specific privileges mentioned in the book include outside aspects, such as the affluent suburban backgrounds, or well- resourced schools, but otherwise only “less obvious aspects” of white advantage are mentioned (p. ). in the same vein, lamentations over the current neoliberal culture of academia, which privileges science modern africa: politics, history and society | | volume , issue over humanities and social sciences, have often little to do with “race.” a tendency to minimise the costs of higher education is part and parcel of neoliberalisation processes taking place at universities in literally every corner of the globe. the same applies to the complaint of an associate professor of sociology at uct (now full professor) to the vc about how he finds it “racially offensive” that the issue of standards always come in when a promotion is discussed (p. ). to deploy race in situations which happen elsewhere in academia seems rather opportunistic. moreover, the issue of “standards” is always ambiguous. manifold statements on white privilege at universities in south africa are rather vague and nebulous. how can one understand the statement that “many black students have had to come to terms with the fact that, despite their relative privilege at universities, they do not benefit from the structures of the academy in the same way as white students” (p. ). pointing to the often “invisible structures and mechanism that sustain institutional racism” (ibid) is inadequate, once there is a genuine urge to change things. what does the grievance about the “failure of universities to take seriously the financial, social and academic conditions of black students or to take black students seriously” mean (ibid)? how can it be translated into meaningful actions? the accusations that a “deep-seated, institutional and systemic form of racism … is swept under the carpet,” are lacking empirical evidence and support, which is, largely missing in the book under review. in the same vein, statements such as “there has been very little effective transformation for twenty years,” “non-supportive environment,” a “sense of alienation, marginalisation, exclusion” (p. ) reveal very little about the reality of institutional racism and white arrogance that the author frequently evokes in the text. intangible propositions also deal with the way a transformed curricula should emerge: they should “aim to activate and bring into critical conversations and dialogues sensitivities and sensibilities informed by african life-worlds, experiences and predicaments” (p. ). how can one come to terms with the statement that “african academics are often schooled largely in western traditions of knowledge production, which they are expected to reproduce uncritically” (p. )? critical thinking must be at the core of the intellectual equipment of every academic, and not at the service of elite interests. the scholarship that reviews uncritically reproduces taken-for-granted dichotomies and teleology has no place in universities, neither south african nor beyond. there are other aspects in the book that remain largely unexplored or lack supporting evidence. it is not clear is the profile of the student protesters is, or which study programmes they are enrolled in. are these predominantly humanities and social sciences? what are their specific proposals to change curricula to “incorporate” africa? how can, say, the study of medicine be changed to accommodate such demands? what is lacking is the emic perspective one would expect to find in a book written by a social anthropologist. more attention could have been paid to the relation between decolonisation and the current processes of africanisation enforced from the top. from time to time, the author evokes the ills narrow nationalism post-apartheid south africa has inherited but he is rather silent on recent attempts to invocate racial difference within the anc political programme. he is more or less silent about the role of the anc as one of the major actors in shaping the overall atmosphere in south africa, apart from scant insinuations on its incompetence and corruption. in particular, what does the current political dispensation do to mitigate the effects of neoliberalisation that have such a severe grip on the functioning of universities? the above comment is inseparable from the question of the extent of institutional autonomy for universities. what is the role of today’s academic institutions in south africa? how complicit are they in perpetuating white epistemic culture? despite its limitations, the book is of great value since it provides a highly competent image of the complexities of a belated transformation in the new south africa. what remains is to grasp the issue of a possible roadmap or the scenario of a transformation in higher education in south africa which the author is outlining. what does it mean to decolonise higher education in general and in specific disciplines? what should the africanised tertiary education involve? how could it be transformed to comply with the “local” needs? what does it mean to radically transform curricula? what will be the nature, form and contents of decolonised curricula look like? last but not least, what is “a truly african university”? (p. ). this constitutes a daunting agenda. how can the culture of “togetherness, modern africa: politics, history and society | | volume , issue interprenetration, interdependence and intersubjectivity” (p. ), which nyamnjoh proposes, assert itself in south african tertiary institutions which need to be competitive internationally? the present-day global neoliberal culture, of which universities are part, is merciless. as a czech female academic, i tend to symphatise with most of the grievances the author mentions regarding today’s south african academia – the pressure to publish in international impact- factor journals rather than promote local publishing; international ratings; audit culture; the emphasis on achievement. i could equally complain about the pressure of academic standards – those who reach the most lucrative posts in academia are often those who have captured the neoliberal culture complex in the best way. if the author’s assumption that whiteness does not refer to skin colour is correct, then the world is replete with unfulfilled dreams of whitening up. it would be equally easy to replace “african” with czechs, poles, or hungarians in the following sentence: “some africans would rather graduate from oxford, harvard or the sorbonne” (p. ). therefore, to me it is an exaggeration to understand such an ideal, when not fulfilled, as culminating an “internalised sense of inferiority and inadequacy,” which produces “disillusioned” and “incomplete” africans (p. ). the shopping list of a post-apartheid transformation in higher education includes the “promotion of black lecturers and enrolment of more students from disadvantaged communities” (p. ). nyamnjoh, however, challenges the very idea of transforming south african universities by making radical demographic changes in order to increase national and racial diversity on campus, through recruiting more black students and staff from south africa and the rest of africa. he writes that “co-optation of blacks by a powerful hyper-capitalist appeal to consumption” is not realistic (p. ). and if, ideally, or ultimately, south african tertiary institutions utterly changed its epistemic culture, how could they survive – how would they attract african scholars and students who tend to worship the ideal of whitening up? how can scholarship be africanised while simultaneously keeping english as the main language of instruction? and where do universities find resources to implement such a radical change? by and large, there are more doubts, challenges and questions than answers. what has become clear, though, is that the eradication of one epistemic structure and replacing it with another is an insurmountable task, as nyamnjoh himself anticipates in this reviews book. this is perhaps the greatest contribution of this book, which will inevitably attract a wider readership than a strictly anthropological or african(ist) audience. hana horáková references mudimbe, v.y. . the invention of africa: gnosis, philosophy, and the order of knowledge. bloomington: indiana university press. rudwick, s. . afropolitanism at uct and why rhodes had to fall. unpublished paper presented at the conference africa of the past, africa of the future: the dynamics of global conflicts, peace and development held at prague, – may. fiala, vlastimil, prouza jan, skalník petr. . politické stranictví v západní africe (sierra leone, burkina faso a kamerun) [political partisanship in western africa (sierra leone, burkina faso and cameroon)]. hradec králové: university of hradec králové – Ústí nad orlicí: oftis, pp. within the research project “political partisanship in western africa” three africanists attached to the faculty of philosophy, university of hradec králové, have extended the series of similar studies concerning other african countries published so far. while the previous volumes concentrated mostly on one african country, this annotated book covers three countries with different colonial history and diverse geostrategic positions. burkina faso, a former french colony (haute-volta) in the interior part of western africa, sierra leone, a former british coastal colony and protectorate founded for liberated slaves, and cameroon situated on the gulf of guinea with a complicated german colonial heritage and french and british mandate administration represent different historical, geographical and population cases. surprisingly, however, when analysed after (mostly during the latest three decades) by using the theories of political science all three countries seem to have been passing a very similar political development. a deeper analysis of such evidence of global impact would have exceeded the framework of the research of the working class in a deindustrialized world intentionally wrought by neo- liberal globalization. these material-structural underpinnings of our politics illuminate another task for public theology in addition to necessary debates about fear, scape- goating, and racism. we must also seek out and support technical policy pro- posals that can create a world where solidarity and the common good are not simply heroic moral commitments, but principles that are supported by and practicable in society. vincent j. miller university of dayton public theology as “bridge building” introduction guest: when is it going to end, pete? pete: what do you mean? guest: when’s it all going to end? the poverty. the homelessness. i’m about out of hope. pete: i don’t know. guest: you all do what you can and you all are lifesavers. but it doesn’t look good from out here. pete: i know. this exchange between ethicist peter gathje and one of the guests of manna house of hospitality (memphis, tennessee) points to the task of the public theologian. gathje serves at manna house, sharing meals and prayers with its guests. through his blog radical hospitality he echoes and responds to the theology of the people he serves, and their deep questions about justice in our world. in this dialogical movement he enters the locations where he serves meals and prays with his “public,” who in turn ask for a justice that seems all too elusive from their vantage point. his “public,” the guests and others who pass through manna house, are sources for theological mt dávila is associate professor of christian ethics at andover newton theological school. her main interests are the intersections of class identity formation and christian ethics in the us context. she has published in the areas of the option for the poor, latino\a ethics, the ethics of the use of force, racism, immigration, and public theology.  peter gathje, “love and the specter of poverty and death,” radical hospitality–a blog of manna house of hospitality, june , , http://radical-hospitality.blogspot.com/. h o r i z o n s  terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /hor. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /hor. . &domain=pdf http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /hor. . &domain=pdf http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /hor. . &domain=pdf http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /hor. . &domain=pdf http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /hor. . &domain=pdf http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /hor. . &domain=pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /hor. . https://www.cambridge.org/core imagination and critical questioning, shaping the way gathje organizes his vision of the christian story and the liberating truth it seeks to relate to the world. the task of public theology is inherently dialogical, where human experi- ence is considered as source so that it can enter the dialogical conversation with tradition and scripture. in a class titled “public theology in the twentieth century and today: reinhold niebuhr, dorothy day, jim wallis, and cornel west,” philip clayton defined the task of public theology as “bridge building.” for clayton, “the public theologian is today’s missionary, immersed in the task of translation and communication. … public theology is in reciprocal relationship with the other.” as such, it builds on knowing the other’s space, leaving our comfort zones, engaging in a task that is not proc- lamation but rather, listening, without being constrained by the rules of or- thodoxy of one’s tradition. this essay focuses on four insights on bridge building that arose from my course “public theology in the th century and today,” which brought in ten contemporary public voices alongside those of niebuhr, day, west, and wallis. the resulting conversations contributed to defining four marks of public theology as bridge building: encounter, authenticity, spiritual ground- ing, and risk taking.  timoteo gener, “with/beyond tracy: re-visioning public theology,” evangelical review of theology , no.  (april ): –, , and .  philip clayton, “public theology in the twentieth century and today: reinhold niebuhr, dorothy day, jim wallis, and cornel west,” remarks as invited guest, “public theology in the th century and today,” course taught by prof. mt dávila, andover newton theological school, spring ).  ibid.  ibid.  in addition to reading works of the four figures listed, students in the course were exposed to a variety of expressions of public theological discourse including blogs, opinion pieces, videos, and sermons. ten contemporary public figures were also invited to share their thoughts on their role as public theologians: lisa cahill (professor, boston college); philip clayton (professor, claremont school of theology); marcia mount shoop (pastor, grace covenant presbyterian church, north carolina); robyn henderson-espinosa (activist and theologian); kate ott (assistant professor, drew divinity school); elías ortega (assistant professor, drew divinity school); tim snyder (phd candidate, boston university); elí valentín (political consultant, pastor of iglesia evangélica bautista); alex mikulich (assistant professor, loyola university new orleans); karen leslie hernández (interfaith educator and activist, berkeley, california). all of the guest speakers have granted permission for the content of their conversations in the course to be discussed and quoted in this essay. where appropriate, i include citations of their work for further study.  t h e o l o g i c a l r o u n d t a b l e terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /hor. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /hor. . https://www.cambridge.org/core encounter lisa cahill spoke about the task of revisiting the ethics of the just war tradition for new generations of christian thinkers. she focused on the impact that the catholic peacebuilding network has had on her thought on this issue. as a consultant for its work, she has been able to meet people who are doing peace building at the community level to increase understanding, negotiate in times of conflict, and engage in peace initiatives. these discussions opened her eyes to new ways of identifying needs, such as safety and education, for communities under the constant threat of violence. cahill’s encounters with community peace builders generated a more profound understanding of conflict, christian commitment, and those to whom theology needs to be accountable to on a daily basis. pope francis has emphasized encounter as central to christian identity, essential to the human spirit, and therefore a task for the christian life. our humanity unfolds in the encounter with the other, one that both chal- lenges and completes us. encounter as a mark of bridge building speaks to location. for mario aguilar, the location of the theologian determines the content of the “public,” which, in his case, is the peripheries of latin american societies. theologizing in the public of the peripheries is the utopian act of reflecting from kingdom values on the injustices of a state that will not change. it is proclaiming a just, active, and present god in a place where misery is an everyday staple. encounter suggests that solidarity is a concomitant practice of public the- ology. alex mikulich and marcia mount shoop both engage public theology as white theologians working on white privilege and racism, grounding their work on the particular suffering of african american communities.  lisa cahill, remarks as invited guest, “public theology in the th century and today,” course taught by prof. mt dávila, andover newton theological school, spring .  thomas eggleston, “what pope francis means by a culture of encounter,” houston catholic worker—a publication of casa juan diego, july , , http://cjd.org// //what-pope-francis-means-by-a-culture-of-encounter/.  pope francis, “vigil of pentecost with the ecclesial movements,” may , , http://w. vatican.va/content/francesco/en/speeches//may/documents/papa-francesco__ veglia-pentecoste.html; cited in eggleston, “what pope francis means.”  mario aguilar, “public theology from the periphery: victims and theologians,” international journal of public theology  (): .  for more on their work, see alex mikulich, “mapping ‘whiteness’: the complexity of racial formation and the subversive moral imagination of the motley crowd,” journal of the society of christian ethics , no.  (spring–summer ): –; mikulich, the scandal of white complicity in u.s. hyperincarceration: a nonviolent spirituality of white resistance (new york: palgrave mcmillan, ); marcia mount shoop, touchdowns for jesus and other signs of the apocalypse: lifting the veil on big h o r i z o n s  terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /hor. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /hor. . https://www.cambridge.org/core encounter with others opens the spaces and provides the language and questions through which the hope of the christian message must first make sense. authenticity elías ortega asked the class: “are you willing to die for my kids?” the question came as a response to white allies who wanted to take part in black lives matter protests and activism. for ortega, public theology on race is about real lives, positively transformed or negatively affected by theo- logical and political positions. ortega wondered what his responsibility as a person of color is to white sensibilities and fear while he simultaneously communicates theology shaped by being tired of injustice toward black and brown bodies. he questioned his possible complicity with the forces of that very oppression as he recognized the real possibility that he might be killed tomorrow coming home after teaching an evening class. authenticity became a mark by which students in the class measured each of the presenters, flowing from their sincere desire to engage in ways that have them bearing some of the weight of those particular issues. authenticity also involves the integrity to reject a potential public if this public is not able to enter the difficult task of encountering real human beings and their ultimate questions, as kate ott shared with the class. ott has had to reject invitations to speak and has had invitations rescinded because it is often difficult for parents and church staff to see eye to eye on the very thorny topic of the sexual education of children. authenticity leads ott to ask: who has access to speak on a particular issue? what is the network of support for those who can or cannot speak? how do we translate our speech into transformative pedagogies? time sports (eugene, or: cascade books, ); mount shoop and mary mcclintock fulkerson, a body broken/a body betrayed: race, memory, and eucharist in white- dominant church (eugene, or: cascade books, ).  elías ortega, remarks as invited guest, “public theology in the th century and today,” course taught by prof. mt dávila, andover newton theological school, spring .  ibid.  ibid.  see, for example, kate ott, sex + faith: talking with your child from birth to adolescence (louisville, ky: westminster john knox press, ).  kate ott, remarks as invited guest, “public theology in the th century and today,” course taught by prof. mt dávila, andover newton theological school, spring .  ibid.  t h e o l o g i c a l r o u n d t a b l e terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /hor. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /hor. . https://www.cambridge.org/core spiritual grounding eli valentín, who works with local politicians in new york city, notes a strong need to be spiritually centered. music, prayer, and family are his deepest sources of spiritual grounding, of nourishing the spirit which is often confronted by the cynicism of local politics. as someone often called to play a centering role in progressive christian venues where extreme posi- tions find themselves at odds and their adherents sometimes unable to coop- erate, robyn henderson-espinosa depends on meditation and communion for spiritual grounding. attending to the personal and the communal di- mensions of the spirit is essential for sustaining a life that often calls for “sitting in the shards” of people hurt by multiple and intersecting oppres- sions. those often asked to sit with and navigate difference resort to the still- ness of their center as spiritual practice to prepare for the task of entering others’ stories of suffering and longing. few of the sources i have considered on public theology make reference to the theologian’s practices of spiritual grounding. this area of study is urgent and full of possibilities. understanding the spiritual grounding of public theo- logians opens a window to notions of the self-communication of the holy at the personal and corporate level as it relates to the call to engage difficult social questions and the publics for whom this matters. when one considers public theology as bridge building, spiritual grounding becomes that sacred home for the sojourning, migrant theologian. risk taking public theology interrupts and disrupts the various ways in which theologians engage with power and the structures that support it. when one’s public lives on the margins of existence, like the guest at manna house, one is pulled beyond the comfort zone of the academic handling and production of knowledge. for marcella althaus-reed, “the first task, … needs to be … ‘the reconstruction of the social power of the popular classes’ … a serious disruption and redistribution of power, and of strategic institutional thinking … by providing a space for the people who are  elí valentín, remarks as invited guest, “public theology in the th century and today,” course taught by prof. mt dávila, andover newton theological school, spring .  it is important to note that henderson-espinosa uses the term “communion” inclusively, meaning sacramental communion, shared meals in community, and communal theologizing.  robyn henderson-espinosa, remarks as invited guest, “public theology in the th century and today,” course taught by prof. mt dávila, andover newton theological school, spring . h o r i z o n s  terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /hor. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /hor. . https://www.cambridge.org/core integrities in dissent at the margins to engage in a network of thinking and sharing experiences.” risk taking indicates the ways in which the task of public theology can place the theologians on the margins of the places in which we hold power. for mount shoop, adaptive skills and risk taking are especially needed in her antiracism and white privilege work within the church. there are situa- tions with great power imbalances where cultivating trust is hard work: “anti-racism work is soul work, and that is a very scary place to be” for a com- munity. karen leslie hernández feels the risks of her work educating christian communities on intimate partner abuse, nonviolence, and interfaith cooperation, specifically muslim-christian relations. hernández has received threats and been attacked because she is perceived as too welcoming to muslims. often the public theologian works in emerging areas not yet recognized as necessary or urgent by the academy, as was, and in some cases continues to be, the case of white privilege and interfaith cooperation. institutional support may also waver when one’s work is considered to be a threat to the financial stability of the institution. the labor of building bridges also re- quires building alliances, collaborations in which one’s commitments to par- ticular liberative theological visions can find safe and encouraging harbor. this space might not be within the academy, as althaus-reed and aguilar suggest, but, rather, on the peripheries that call and challenge us to cross borders. conclusion this brief exposition only touches on the four marks of public theology as bridge building that arose from dialogue with students and public theolo- gians over one semester. certainly these marks could be expanded signifi- cantly; we could consider, for example, the ways in which they influence each other. identifying these four marks allows us to expand the conversation on the tasks of public theology beyond the classical expositions of martin marty, jürgen habermas, and david tracy.  marcella althaus-reed, “in the center there are no fragments: teologías desencajadas,” in public theology for the st century: essays in honor of duncan b. forrester, edited by william f. storrar and andrew r. morton (new york: t&t clark, ), –.  marcia mount shoop, remarks as invited guest, “public theology in the th century and today,” course taught by prof. mt dávila, andover newton theological school, spring .  t h e o l o g i c a l r o u n d t a b l e terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /hor. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /hor. . https://www.cambridge.org/core on a personal level, public theology as bridge building involves bridging two often-distant worlds: those of the academy and the poor. mario aguilar argues: european public theology is aimed at engagement with the educated public and starts with the professional theologian, whereas a latin american public theology arises out of the communitarian reflections of the ecclesial communities … and ultimately discusses the bare minimum aspirations of the poor. this essay assumes that public theology is first and foremost attentive to suf- fering and injustice as the call that moves one to cross to the other side of the road (luke :-), and, therefore, it is inherently an act of solidarity. the integrity of public theology has to do with the theologian’s willingness to become present in our own experiences of suffering or another’s. public the- ology demands to be shaped by questions borne out of anguish mingled with hope so that it listens to the various plights that beckon the intellect and spirit. as a result, we speak from a grounded position that seeks to build trust and relationships in the hope of transforming the world. public theology, in the end, is essentially an incarnational task, inhabiting the migrant identity of a journeying jesus who has no place to rest his or her head. mt dÁvila andover newton theological school  aguilar, “public theology from the periphery,” .  clayton, remarks as invited guest. h o r i z o n s  terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /hor. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /hor. . https://www.cambridge.org/core the need for stronger and broader patient-perpetuated harassment policies in us academic medical centers invited commentary | medical education the need for stronger and broader patient-perpetuated harassment policies in us academic medical centers virginia a. brown, ma, phd; rené salazar, md; elizabeth a. jacobs, md, mpp we live in an era of profound cultural change. during the past several years, the #metoo movement has brought attention to how women are harassed across society, and unfortunately, academia is no exception. frequent calls for change and a growing body of empirical literature have focused on gender discrimination and sexual harassment against women academics by other academics, including the covert ways in which women are denied opportunities for advancement. most recently, the coronavirus disease (covid- ) pandemic and the deaths of george floyd and breonna taylor, as well as riah milton and dominique “rem’mie” fells, both transgender women of color, have laid bare the discrimination and harassment that black, latinx, asian, and lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer or questioning, and intersex (lgbtqi) communities experience. racial/ethnic discrimination and harassment are common in academia as well; asian health care professionals have recently reported being spat on by patients and being told to go back to china, and the black lives matter movement inspired the sharing of the frequent macroaggressions and microaggressions that black health care professionals and academic professionals experience at #blackintheivory. viglianti and colleagues investigated whether hospitals affiliated with the association of american medical colleges address patient-perpetrated sexual harassment in patient bills of rights and responsibilities and how clear and targeted the language is regarding harassment. the authors empirically affirmed that the right of patients “to receive care free of harassment” was foundational across the hospital patient bills of rights sampled. however, the authors found that “the same emphasis on zero tolerance of harassment toward health care workers was rarely included in the patients’ responsibilities.” despite the numerous calls for action and the delineation of specific recommendations academic institutions can take to end the harassment that women, people of color, and lgbtqi individuals experience, the findings of viglianti and colleagues underscore how far we still have to go to undo the structures of racial/ethnic and gender discrimination so that actionable and enforceable policies can be put in place. they also raise important questions. first, how can we say our academic hospitals are places where patients can be treated with respect and be free from harassment when only those who seek care can expect that treatment? is it not more powerful and convincing to state to our patients and colleagues that harassment in any form will not be tolerated? second, how can we increase the diversity of the medical profession when we allow the types of behavior that create a hostile environment for health care professionals who are women, individuals of underrepresented races/ethnicities, and lgbtqi go unaddressed? only % of active physicians in the us are from racial/ethnic groups that are historically underrepresented in medicine. moreover, discrimination and harassment toward health care workers based on their race/ethnicity or gender identity has become a substantial barrier to making the medical profession more diverse and inclusive. as medical schools and academic medical centers across the us work to increase the diversity of their workforce, they must prioritize creating inclusive workspaces that take into account the many elements of identity, including race/ethnicity, abilities, gender identity, and sexual orientation. clear policies and procedures including zero tolerance of harassment toward health care workers is a step that academic medical centers must take toward developing an inclusive, diverse, and respectful work environment. the wielding of power by any group is morally wrong and ethically + related article author affiliations and article information are listed at the end of this article. open access. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc-by license. jama network open. ; ( ):e . doi: . /jamanetworkopen. . (reprinted) september , / downloaded from: https://jamanetwork.com/ by a carnegie mellon university user on / / https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamanetworkopen. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamanetworkopen. . unacceptable. the need to ensure that all individuals are free from such assaults, including verbal, physical, and psychological abuse, demands institutional restructuring and expansion of protection for all to be free from such discrimination and harassment. ethical conduct is professional conduct. as the american medical association code of medical ethics states, physicians are obligated to “respect the rights of patients, colleagues, and other health professionals.” organizations need to support and encourage ethical conduct by all individuals. article information published: september , . doi: . /jamanetworkopen. . open access: this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc-by license. © brown va et al. jama network open. corresponding author: elizabeth a. jacobs, md, mpp, dell medical school, the university of texas at austin, trinity st, room . , austin, tx - (liz.jacobs@austin.utexas.edu). author affiliations: dell medical school, the university of texas at austin. conflict of interest disclosures: none reported. references . johnson pa, widnall se, benya ff, eds. sexual harassment of women: climate, culture and consequences in academic sciences, engineering, and medicine. the national academies press; . doi: . / . chen ha, trinh j, yang gp. anti-asian sentiment in the united states—covid- and history. am j surg. published online may , . doi: . /j.amjsurg. . . . @drshardedavis. #blackintheivory. june , . accessed august , . https://twitter.com/drshardedavis/ status/ ?s+ . viglianti em, meeks lm, oliverio al. patient-perpetrated harassment policies in patient bills of rights and responsibilities at us academic medical centers. jama netw open. ; ( ):e . doi: . / jamanetworkopen. . . association of american medical colleges. diversity in medicine: facts and figures . accessed august , . https://www.aamc.org/data-reports/workforce/interactive-data/figure- -percentage-all-active- physicians-race/ethnicity- . osseo-asare a, balasuriya l, huot sj, et al. minority resident physicians’ views on the role of race/ethnicity in their training experiences in the workplace. jama netw open. ; ( ):e . doi: . /jamanetworkopen. . . american medical association. ama principles of medical ethics. updated june . accessed august , . https://www.ama-assn.org/about/publications-newsletters/ama-principles-medical-ethics jama network open | medical education the need for stronger and broader patient-perpetuated harassment policies in us academic medical centers jama network open. ; ( ):e . doi: . /jamanetworkopen. . (reprinted) september , / downloaded from: https://jamanetwork.com/ by a carnegie mellon university user on / / https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamanetworkopen. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamanetworkopen. . https://jamanetwork.com/journals/jamanetworkopen/pages/instructions-for-authors#secopenaccess/?utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamanetworkopen. . mailto:liz.jacobs@austin.utexas.edu https://dx.doi.org/ . / https://dx.doi.org/ . /j.amjsurg. . . https://twitter.com/drshardedavis/status/ ?s+ https://twitter.com/drshardedavis/status/ ?s+ https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamanetworkopen. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamanetworkopen. . https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamanetworkopen. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamanetworkopen. . https://www.aamc.org/data-reports/workforce/interactive-data/figure- -percentage-all-active-physicians-race/ethnicity- https://www.aamc.org/data-reports/workforce/interactive-data/figure- -percentage-all-active-physicians-race/ethnicity- https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamanetworkopen. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamanetworkopen. . https://jama.jamanetwork.com/article.aspx?doi= . /jamanetworkopen. . &utm_campaign=articlepdf% utm_medium=articlepdflink% utm_source=articlepdf% utm_content=jamanetworkopen. . https://www.ama-assn.org/about/publications-newsletters/ama-principles-medical-ethics “we” are in this together, but we are not one and the same symposium: covid- “we” are in this together, but we are not one and the same r. braidotti received: july /accepted: august # the author(s) abstract the covid- pandemic is a man-made disaster, caused by undue interference in the ecological balance and the lives of multiple species. paradoxically, the contagion has resulted in increased use of technolo- gy and digital mediation, as well as enhanced hopes for vaccines and biomedical solutions. it has thereby inten- sified humans’ reliance on the very high-tech economy of cognitive capitalism that caused the problems in the first place. this combination of ambivalent elements in relation to the fourth industrial revolution and the sixth extinction is the trademark of the posthuman condition. this essay explores this condition further, offering both critical and affirmative propositions for moving forward. keywords covid- . anthropocene . posthumanism . postcolonialism . feminism . intersectionality . indigenous theories the covid- pandemic is a man-made disaster, caused by undue interference in the ecological balance and the lives of multiple species. paradoxically, the contagion has resulted in increased use of technology and digital mediation, as well as enhanced hopes for vaccines and biomedical solutions. it has thereby inten- sified humans’ reliance on the very high-tech economy of cognitive capitalism that caused the problems in the first place. this combination of ambivalent elements in relation to the fourth industrial revolution and the sixth extinction is the trademark of the posthuman condition. the underlying mood during this pandemic is affec- tive. it involves complex and internally contradictory alternation of emotions—that mark what i have called the posthuman convergence (braidotti , ). an intense sense of suffering alternating with hope, fear unfolding alongside resilience, boredom merging into vulnerability. excitement and exhilaration in view of the advanced technologies that drive the fourth industrial age, flip into anxiety and fear at the thought of the huge costs and damages inflicted by the sixth great extinc- tion, on both the human and non-human inhabitants of this planet. although climate change has come to repre- sent this danger in an almost emblematic manner, and the nuclear threat is far from abated, in the current state of emergency, the centre of all concerns is the covid- pandemic. even before the rigours of the lockdown, the closing of the borders and the rising death toll, the intensity and spread of that negative affective economy was palpable. exhaustion and fatigue—a recurrent sense of hopeless- ness or impossibility—have become prominent features of the contemporary psychic landscapes, across the ur- banized over-developed world. they are witnesses to the daily and nightly struggles to come to terms with what our world has become and the complexities of our historical context. bioethical inquiry https://doi.org/ . /s - - - r. braidotti (*) utrecht university, achter de dom , jputrecht, the netherlands e-mail: r.braidotti@uu.nl; gw.braidottiass@uu.nl http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://orcid.org/ - - - it is not easy to address these issues. words, in so many ways, falter and fail. one can only talk about fear, sorrow, and exhaustion in a language reduced to its ossified minimal components, a language that has reached the edge of what it can express, approximating silence but not falling into it just yet. spiritual fatigue almost longs for a neutralized style that has perfected ways of de-linking from the grand statements of high theory. it would be obscene and unethical to theorize about the epidemiological catastrophe that is unfolding under our very eyes. this is not a time for grandiose theorizing but for collective mourning, affective resis- tance, and regeneration. we need to mourn the dead, humans and non-humans and not build theories on their dead bodies—that would be a shameless abuse of intel- lectual power. but over and above all else, we also need to develop different ways of caring, a more transversal, relational ethics that encompasses the non-humans. there is so much that we need to both embrace and resist: the wave of collective and personal despair at the loss of lives, the hardship of the socio-economic conse- quences of this man-made disaster, the awareness of all that was wrong with the old world and which has now become manifest. so the first challenge is to find the appropriate language for such an endeavour, a language that remains critical but in a modest capacity. we need to understand and account for the pain of the world, for what this damaged planet is going through, but such knowledge production has to remain de-linked from the pretentions of some sovereign idea of the thinker, the scholar, and the writer as the master signifier. the affective and social climate we are in calls for humility, cooperation, and is antithetical to syntheses and to au- thoritarian anthropocentric injunctions. the thoughts that come to mind in attempting to account for our predicament have almost the form of fragments of meditation upon the sorrowful present. to begin with: viruses born of human interference with animals and environmental sources, such as covid- , are anthropogenic and hence discriminate just as much as humans do. they act as indicators of massive social inequalities, which dominant neo-liberal political classes were intent on denying. now the horrid truth about the consequences of their austerity policies is hitting them in the face: public health is an intensely political issue. if it is undeniable that the “capitalocene”—the greed of consumers’ society—is responsible for the abuse of animal life that produced the infections of the bats and generated covid- , it is equally true that neoliberal governance has laid the foundations for the spread of the contagion by exacer- bating socio-economic power differences. secondly, not all humans are equal and the human is not at all a neutral category. it is rather a normative category that indexes access to privileges and entitle- ments. appeals to the “human” are always discrimina- tory: they create structural distinctions and inequalities among different categories of humans. humanity is a quality that is distributed according to a hierarchical scale centred on a humanistic idea of man as the mea- sure of all things. this dominant idea is based on a simple assumption of superiority by a subject that is: masculine, white, eurocentric, practicing compulsory heterosexuality and reproduction, able-bodied, urban- ized, speaking a standard language. this subject is the man of reason that feminists, anti-racists, black, indig- enous postcolonial and ecological activists have been criticizing for decades. exposing the power-ridden assumptions of the dom- inant category of the human also results in relocating the subjects who have come to represent the dialectical opposites and opponents of this dominant and norma- tive vision of the human. these are the less-than-human others, dehumanized or excluded from full humanity— these qualitatively minoritarian subjects actually very often are quantitively the majority. historically, they have been the sexualized others (women, lbgtq+); the racialized others (non-europeans, indigenous); and the naturalized others (animals, plants, the earth). in a concomitance of events that marks the extraor- dinary period we are going through, the voices, experi- ences, and perspectives of these multiple others are exploding all around us. the power of viral formations has become manifest in the pandemic, stressing the agency of non-human forces and the overall importance of gaia as a living, symbiotic planet. but at the same time a global revolt again endemic—and indeed viral— racism has also exploded in this fateful june , led by the “black lives matter” movement. as these mul- tiple crises unfold, the politics of the sexualized, racial- ized, naturalized others are moving centre stage, push- ing old anthtropos off-centre. thirdly, it is important to keep in mind that the binary distinctions between nature and culture, humans and non-human have been foundational for european thought since the enlightenment and that many cultures on earth do not adopt such a partition (gibson, rose, and fincher ). this is the strength of the insights bioethical inquiry and understandings that can be learned from indigenous epistemologies and cosmologies, postcolonial and decolonial thought and african philosophy. many of them pose a “multinatural” continuum across all species, all of which partake of a distributed idea of humanity. this means that all entities are considered as being endowed with a soul, which assumes a commonly shared human nature that includes the nonhumans. to call this approach “animism,” as colonial powers did, is to miss the point, adding to this ignorance an uncommon dose of epistemic violence. when it comes to human/ non-human relations, it is time to start learning from the south. fourthly, some critical self-restraint may be needed. a pandemic on the scale of covid- , brings home to the western world an ancient truth: that “we” are all in this planetary condition together, whether we are humans or others. but it is also high time for this heterogeneous and collective “we” to move beyond the eurocentric humanistic representational habits that have formatted it. dislodging also the philosophical anthropocentrism they entail and enforce. this shift of perspective inaugurates critical posthuman thought. nowadays we can no longer start uncritically from the centrality of the human—as man and as anthropos—to uphold the old dualities. this acknowledgment, howev- er, does not necessarily throw us into the chaos of non- differentiation, nor does it awaken the spectre of extinc- tion. it rather points in a different direction, towards some other middle-ground, another milieu, which expressed the awareness that “we”—all living entities—share the same planetary home. yes, we are connected, that is to say ecologically interlinked through the multiple interconnections we share within the nature-culture continuum of our terres- trial milieu. but we differ tremendously in terms of our respective locations and access to social and legal enti- tlements, technologies, safety, prosperity, and good health services. the posthuman subjects of today’s world may be internally fractured, but they are also technologically mediated and globally interlinked. it is important to stress the materially embedded differences in location that separate us but also to stress the shared intimacy with the world that creates a sense of belonging together, within webs of ever-shifting relations. fifth insight: feminist theory is of great assistance to think equality with difference, multiple belongings and power rifts, because it stresses the embodied, embedded, and sexed roots of all material entities, humans included, and their unexplored resources. the relevance of femi- nist thought in times of crisis is to emphasize the mul- tiple perspectives that emerge from attention to embodi- ment and lived experience. but is also adds an intersec- tional approach that stresses the inclusion of axes of analysis such as race, age, class, and able-bodiedness. stressing corporeality, embodiment, and inter- connection is one of the strengths of feminist philoso- phies, which have replaced discriminatory unitary cate- gories, based on eurocentric, masculinist, anthropocen- tric, and heteronormative assumptions, with robust al- ternatives. the embedded and embodied empiricism at work in feminist theory acts as the source of counter knowledges, methods, and values. they are needed more than ever today. sixth insight: post/de-colonial and indigenous theo- ries have a great deal to teach us. not only do they stress that for most people on earth, the nature-culture distinc- tion does not hold but also that the fear of death and extinction is an integral part of colonized cultures. for many indigenous people on earth, epidemics, disposses- sion, and environmental devastations were the mark of the colonial conquests and of the europeans’ appropri- ation and destruction of first nations cultures. catastro- phes on this scale are for many people on earth an everyday reality—whether we think of climate change, inter-generational transmission, or public health issues. europeans have a lot to answer for. political economy of affects in light of these insights, i would reach a preliminary conclusion that we need to be lucid about the affects involved in our current predicament and relativize them a bit as well. we need to resist with equal lucidity the pull of apocalyptic thinking as well as the abyss of self- pity: this is a time to organize, not to agonize. the current crisis can make us more intelligent about what we are ceasing to be and who we are capable of becom- ing. it enables subtler and more complex cartographies of powers and discourses at work in our societies, that is to say a more adequate rendition of where we are at (braidotti and hlavajova ). these accounts have to start by questioning who “we” might be to begin with and whose anxiety is taking centre-stage in public de- bates about the crisis. accepting our shared exposure to environmental and public health man-made risks is the starting point for a bioethical inquiry process of assessing these risks and dealing with them collectively and socially. this approach expresses a sort of epistemological humility that reiterates the never- ending nature of the processes of becoming-humans. an adequate response to a crisis on the scale of covid- calls for community-based, experiments to see how and how fast we can transform the way we live. that means facing up to the negative conditions, the social and environmental inequalities and the collective responsibility towards exposed or vulnerable popula- tions. this praxis of forging communal solutions through the confrontation of uncomfortable truths is central to the ethics of affirmative ethics. it is a praxis that promotes action and critical self-knowledge, by working through negativity and pain. this pro-active activism manifests the living beings’ shared ability to actualize and potentiate different possibilities. this transformative energy is the core of affirmative ethics, which stresses the inexhaustible potential of all living organisms—humans and non-humans—to gener- ate multiple and yet unexplored interconnections. this is the immanence of a life that can only be co- constructed and jointly articulated in a common world. what is inexhaustible is not some transcendental and abstract notion of life with capital letters but rather the more patient task of socially co-constructing one’s life, alongside so many others. just one life, following the formula of the ancient stoics, can only be predicated in a constant, friendly companionship with pain and suffering. this in turn means that ethics is the practice of extracting knowledge and wisdom from the reworking of pain. pushed to the extreme, it brings us face to face with mortality, the extreme manifestation of vulnerability. death is the painful event par excellence, but it is also the event that marks our inscription into the time of our life. we need to make friends with death. at the level of awareness, it is the event that has always already happened, because to be born means to become mortal. as such, it is a strangely impersonal event. death marks the outer boundary of the limited time we have at our disposal. being aware of this limit can be an energizing thought, not a catastrophe. affirmative ethics encourages us to train for making the most of one’s powers and capabil- ities, so as to become the most affirmative possible version of what one could be, through the pain and the acknowledgment of mortality. posthuman resistance must mobilize for the compo- sitions and collective construction of affirmative forms of action and solidarity and can activate their own generative force. many lives today are the object of biopower’s thanato-politics, doomed to ethnic cleansing or slaughter, to being killed without their killer being held accountable. think of the refugees dying on the edges of fortress europe or on manus island. we are vulnerable to viruses and other illnesses, to the effects of climate change and other devastations—many of these exposed lives are not human. but our shared life as an inhuman, non-anthropocentric force (which i call zoe)—exceeds these negative conditions, because zoe exists independently of humans. many of us are struck about how, in the middle of this pandemic, spring is advancing, flowers are bloom- ing, the earth keeps on growing—regardless. humans are not the centre of creation. this is the greatness of affirmative thought as a secular, materialist philosophy of becoming. it is an inexhaustible genera- tive force that potentially can transmute lives into sites of resistance—all lives, also the non-human. life is a generative force beneath, below, and beyond what we humans have made of it. zoe/geo/techno-perspectives at the core of this heterogeneous definition of life are sites of resistance. they provide multiple alternatives to the devastations of necropolitics and the entrapment of biopolitical management of life as capital. but what a huge task that is! fatigue, fear, and despair overlap and accumulate to produce a feeling of utter impotence. this closing down of the horizon of possible actions is the symptom of the negativity of our times. negativity expresses itself in a social and psy- chological dimming of a sense of possibility, which triggers a systemic fragmentation and a shattering of our relational capacity. this weakening of the desire to act often feeds an appeal to external powers to take over the task of organizing how to live our lives. this nega- tivity ultimately brings about a shrinking of our ability to take in and on the world that we are in, simply because it hurts too much to take it in and on. we have to dose how much of it we can take, till it gets too much. too-much-ness is one of the sources of exhaustion, which marks so much of or current predicament. what is inexhaustible, however, is our desire to per- severe in living, against all odds. this is the innermost essence or potentia of all living entities: the life in me that does not answer to my name. this vital sense of life is not to be taken for granted or to be sacralized in religious terms. it remains materialist and secular. “just a life” expresses a deep sense of belonging to a common bioethical inquiry world, the one world we have in common. the desire to get on with it, is the fragile yet irrepressible bond that interconnects all living entities. this produces a roar of energy that is mostly unperceived and imperceptible, yet indispensable. what is inexhaustible is our capacity, our power even, to differ within ourselves, as well as between us. we can extract ourselves from this sad state of affairs, work through the multiple layers of our exhaustion, and co-construct different platforms of becoming. this transformative praxis can only be enacted collectively, together, as transversal subjects of posthuman times. shared exhaustion actually unfolds upon a deeper wisdom about what it is exactly that one knows, when one is facing momentous changes in unfamiliar terri- tories. one knows that life lives on regardless of human pretensions and expectations. “we” can only intervene in this as transversal ensembles, acting collectively: “we”-who-are-not-one-and-the-same-but-are-in-this- convergence-together. melbourne artist patricia piccinini ( ) made this point clearly with her new public art campaign about the bat-boy are we capable of becoming this kind of posthuman caring hearts? are we prepared to steer this path togeth- er? to become a “we”—the missing people? open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's creative com- mons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article's creative com- mons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. references braidotti, r. . the posthuman. cambridge: polity press. braidotti, r. . posthuman knowledge. cambridge: polity press. braidotti, r., and m. hlavajova. . posthuman glossary. london: bloomsbury academic. gibson, k., d.b. rose, and r. fincher (eds). . manifesto for living in the anthropocene. brooklyn, new york: punctum books. piccinini, p. . embracing the future. arken useum of modern art and institut fur kulturaustausch, tubingen. publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. bioethical inquiry https://doi.org/ 	“we” are in this together, but we are not one and the same 	abstract 	political economy of affects 	references black twitter: a response to bias in mainstream media $ € £ ¥ social sciences article black twitter: a response to bias in mainstream media latoya a. lee department of sociology, state university of new york at oswego, mahar hall, route , oswego, ny , usa; latoya.lee@oswego.edu academic editors: jenny l. davis and david a. banks received: october ; accepted: march ; published: march abstract: this paper seeks to shed light on the ways people of color, in the united states, are using social media to challenge racial bias. as part of this investigation, this paper draws on critical race theory, feminist theory, and digital new media studies to examine the extent to which social media, while seen as a place for ‘play’ can also operate as a digital homespace, a space used as a tool for black women and men to (re)construct their bodies and identities, challenging the “controlling images” widespread in mainstream media and society at large. this paper employs the methods of content analysis and participant observation and find that these social media forums are not transformative by themselves but instead have little moments that make for resistance and a digital homespace. keywords: battleground; black twitter; digital homespace; playground; textual poaching . introduction in the past couple of years, the united states has experienced an intense level of social unrest, mass protest, and riots partly due to the war on black bodies by police and state officials. on july , eric garner, a -year old father of six was choked to death by a new york city police officer attempting to subdue him. as garner laid on the sidewalk with officers’ knees in his back and a chokehold around his neck he gasped for air and repeated, “i can’t breathe”. although the tactic of using a chokehold is illegal, a staten island grand jury voted not to indict the officer responsible for garner’s death. less than thirty days later, on august , in ferguson, missouri, michael brown, an unarmed black teenager was shot and killed by darren wilson, a police officer in ferguson. brown’s death incited many protests in the immediate and surrounding areas. local people in the neighborhood were upset with the strong-arm tactics of the police and the state geared towards people of color in that neighborhood. after months of police investigation, the grand jury voted not to indict darren wilson. thousands of people flooded the streets, in new york city, ferguson, and around the country, for days of protests, blocking bridges and highways in anger at the verdicts. days following the deaths of garner and brown, news reports of the incidents characterized brown as a thug, gang member, and lawbreaker. garner was characterized as a repeat offender with news reports discussing his criminal history. news reports also made reference to the height and body size of both brown and garner, using fear-mongering labels such as “giant” and “huge” to make brown and garner seem super-human, dangerous, and therefore needing to be tamed. what are we to make of these cases? what are we to make of the grand jury verdicts? more importantly, what are we to make of the news reports that seem to justify the murder of these black men, through the labels of criminal and deviant? to engage these questions, this research builds on an analysis of textual poaching and social media. textual poaching explores how fans purposefully create their own communities to express adoration or fascination, but also antagonism and frustrations with their favorite media content, including movies soc. sci. , , ; doi: . /socsci www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci http://www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci http://www.mdpi.com http://www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci soc. sci. , , of and television shows, such as star trek, and the walking dead, to name a few [ ]. building on this concept, this article is interested in the textual poaching that occurs in social media, specifically black twitter, for purposes of challenging and resisting dominant degrading narratives placed on black and brown bodies through mainstream news coverage. through an investigation of black twitter, studies show that a disproportionately large number of young african americans use twitter: % of – year olds are active on the site compared to % of whites [ ]. black twitter, a subculture within the twitter platform, materializes through the creation of hashtags. these hashtags or “blacktags” tend to comment on black culture and society-at-large [ ]. meredith clark, a scholar researching black twitter, and kimberly elise, author of the bombastic brilliance of black twitter, argue that black twitter can be a space for jokes, for social viewing of a television series, and as a space where people can voice anger and frustration [ ]. according to elise, black twitter is one of the most largely interconnected and tightly interwoven subcultures, more so than any other subculture on twitter. she argues that black twitter’s power comes from its participatory democratic nature—the idea that users, through the creation of ironic, yet cutting-edge hashtags, create a space to address social issues of racial bias and discrimination. indeed, this forum allows for textual poaching as resistance, where the user produces content that challenges dominant (oppressive) cultural ideologies and norms, including racial bias [ , ]. for instance, the popular black twitter hashtag #apheadlines is a great example of textual poaching as resistance. this hashtag was created in response to the associated press’ tweet of the conviction of the detroit man who shot renisha mcbride. mcbride was a young woman of color who was looking for help after a car accident. however, mcbride’s life was cut short when a homeowner, behind the screen door of his home, shot her in the head because he “feared for his safety”. the tweet, “suburban detroit homeowner convicted of second-degree murder for killing woman who showed up drunk on porch” seem to place the blame on mcbride for her murder. black twitter users quickly responded with “ap headlines” of their own [ ]. for example, one user with the twitter handle, @phil_lewis_ tweeted, #apheadlines millions of africans complain after free cruise to the americas; slave traders find them ‘ungrateful’ [ ]. another user with the handle, @latoubabnoire tweeted, homeless blasphemer from low-income nazarene family, low on stamina, fails to survive crucifixion. #apheadlines [ ]. another user with the handle @cmartinezclass tweeted, children flee tourist locations in latin america in hunt for government handouts and comfy beds in deportation centers. #apheadlines [ ]. this hashtag is a demonstration of textual poaching as resistance; through facetious comedy and jokes twitter users were able to create a space that allowed them to voice their anger about the lack of consideration and concern black bodies receive by mainstream news press and coverage, even after someone’s demise. soon after the hashtag “#apheadlines” went viral, the associated press changed the caption of the mcbride story and tweeted, “jury convicts michigan man in killing of unarmed woman on his porch”, rewording the language from the previous tweet three hours after the original twitter message was posted. consequently, the hashtag #apheadlines also demonstrates the power of twitter, particularly black twitter, in exposing implicit bias and changing the narrative. it is important to note that one does not need to be black to participate in black twitter. in this digital space, black men and women include those who self-describe/identify. therefore, those who engage in black twitter also engage in what gayatri spivak calls strategic essentialism [ ]. strategic essentialism can be useful for building coalitions and organizing; the hashtag #blacklivesmatter serves as a key example of essentializing for purposes of creating awareness and coalition building. consequently, throughout this article, the term “black” is used strategically without ignoring the multiplicity of “black” people in the united states and abroad. ultimately, it is through the exploration of social soc. sci. , , of media and textual poaching as resistance that this paper seeks to explore the possibilities black twitter provides in challenging racial bias portrayed in mainstream mass media and systemic violence and oppression that places black and brown bodies at the margins. . background there are many contemporary examples of news bias in the united states when reporting on black and brown bodies, the examples of michael brown and eric garner included. however, these contemporary examples have a long history stemming back to the surveillance of enslaved populations in the united states and early media representations of black bodies. to understand the need and purpose of these resistant spaces, we first have to explore the formation of the dominant and often unconscious rhetoric of the black body, and thus black people, as delinquent and criminal. . . perceptions of blackness and criminality according to christian parenti ( ) the construction of the black body being labeled as criminal and classified as problematic harks back to the th century with the fear of social insubordination and the disruption of capitalist norms and accumulation. specifically, ethno-racial populations, including laborers, slaves, and to some extent indentured servants (folks who could disrupt the operations of capitalist businesses), were the targets of surveillance throughout the united states. since mobility was a crucial source of power for slaves, knowing where enslaved persons were, what they were doing, as well as being able to identify persons, was of the utmost importance for better control of these populations. slave passes, manumission papers, and slave hire badges, a form of identification for enslaved and “free” black men and women located in the south and north of the united states, are classic examples of how these populations were controlled and identified. another classic form of surveillance during this time were the runaway notices that were posted in the local newspapers. however, more importantly, the slave patrols or “patrollers”, working in conjunction with/reinforcing the slave passes and manumission papers, played a paramount role in the surveillance and identification of enslaved populations. the patrollers were often paid by slave owners to be bounty hunters for runaway slaves as well as to “be in the know” of the plantation activities of those enslaved [ ]. the surveillance of these populations continued with the scientific construction of “criminals” and “problem populations” in the th and th centuries [ ]. these scientific constructions of inferior, superior, and biological notions of criminals were based on older (racist) notions of differences between white and black races [ ]. however, this explicitly biased pseudo-science was used to justify and give credence to the continued need to control and surveil this “problematic” population by law enforcement [ ]. this rendering of the black body as problematic is important in understanding how our institutions were constructed to respond to black bodies. for instance, our law enforcement agents were directed to surveil and “patrol” this racialized group that was deemed prone to criminality. the local newspapers often reinforced these notions of criminality and inferiority with the “for sale” and “wanted” advertisements and posters displayed in the paper [ ]. in addition, the blackface [minstrel] performances during this time were also manifestations of the explicit belief that black people were associated with inferiority and negative attributes. blackface, usually performed by white actors, represented and constructed blackness through the white gaze and act of performance. these blackface actors constructed blackness, in performance, as “childish, primitive, contented and endowed with great mimetic capacities” [ ]. the explicit bias portrayed in minstrel and blackface performance continued in the th century, in mainstream media with the popular and long-running radio program, amos and andy. this radio program, written and performed by two white men, is an example of aural blackface and relied heavily on racist stereotypes [ ]. this popular radio broadcast, later becoming a popular television sitcom with a black cast, was a staple in black households as well as white households. this reinforcement of black identity as foolish, imbecile, and primitive, propagated through mainstream media in the early th century, continues in the st century with the limited soc. sci. , , of and stereotypical roles for black actors and actresses in hollywood. furthermore, the construction of blackness through the practices of enslavement, scientific racism, and blackface performances (historically and present-day) work to naturalize race (along with these stereotypical beliefs) and make it appear as if it has always existed; making race an absolute marker of status or condition, with blackness coming to be identified with enslavement and inferiority and whiteness coming to be identified with having rights and privilege. the moynihan report on black poverty and the so-called “black matriarchy” or households headed by black women ( ) is another example of the naturalization of racial bias in the late- th century [ ]. the report entitled, the negro family: the case for national action criminalized and demonized the black [matriarchal] family because it was deemed the opposite of the “thriving” white [patriarchal] family. daniel moynihan, the assistant secretary of labor for president lyndon b. johnson (at the time of writing this report) explored the “tangle of pathology” within the black family and community(ies), arguing the black family was in a state of disarray due to centuries of white supremacy, including institutional racism and inequality. however, president lyndon b. johnson and the mass media, highlighting moynihan’s section on the disruptive black matriarchal family and culture of poverty, used the report to cite the high crime rates and imprisonment rates and consequently justify state violence against black bodies. the moynihan report ( ) is important because it is yet another moment (building on the rhetoric of blackness as inferior, primitive, and needing to be surveilled) where the black family and black community(ies) were being constructed in mainstream media as a problem due to the “culture” in these communities. while this report dates back to the s and s, we can see evidence of this bias towards black bodies in the present moment with the acute criminalizing and victimization of young men and women of color without addressing the structural problems, shaped by the history of slavery, the jim crow era, and the naturalization of racial bias, which are embedded in the fabric of society [ , ]. take for example, the murder of trayvon martin that became more of a discussion about “urban” culture (code word for black) than it was about his murder in the mainstream media. consequently, it became an alibi where the adolescent essentially was blamed for his own death because he was a youth of color wearing a hoodie. more importantly, this long-standing bias towards black bodies and blackness justified for george zimmerman, a local auxiliary officer, as well as to the jury (who did not indict zimmerman for trayvon martin’s murder) the need for the “patrol” of black bodies. another example is mike brown who was criminalized by the media and local police because he lived in an impoverished and drug-infested area of st. louis [ ]. therefore, we see in the present moment this continued need to redefine blackness outside of the familiar social scripts and (un)conscious attitudes and beliefs about race and otherness. much of how people come to understand what it means to be a man, woman, black, white, asian, latina, masculine, feminine, rural, and urban is shaped and produced by mainstream media [ – ]. ultimately, the media is central to what comes to represent many people’s social realities and also central to the spread of ideas worldwide. most importantly, the media that comes to represent social realities are shaped by histories of colonization, slavery, and imperialism; histories that were shaped by and have shaped white supremacy, racism, and sexism in our society today. consider for example, the news coverage of hurricane katrina, the tropical storm that hit the gulf coast of the united states in , causing levees to break, mass flooding, and the displacement of many residents in louisiana, mississippi, and alabama, but, in particular, new orleans, a predominantly black parish of louisiana. sommers et al. ( ), exploring the way news coverage of the displaced residents in new orleans shaped public perceptions of the survivors and the crisis, argue that racial bias played a role in media depictions [ ]. using an example from hurricane katrina let us explore a picture taken of a black man in floodwater carrying food and drinks in comparison to a white couple carrying food and drinks. the picture with the black man had the caption “a young man walks through chest deep flood water after looting a grocery store...” [ ]. whereas, the caption for the white couple reads, “two residents wade through chest-deep water after finding bread and soda from a local grocery store...” [ ]. what are soc. sci. , , of we to make of this discrepancy in captions for two similar images? why does the black youth get the unspoken and spoken labels of deviant, criminal, and “looter”, while the white couple gets the unspoken and spoken labels of survivors, resilient, and “finders”? this example demonstrates how the mainstream media can and have shaped representations and perceptions of black bodies. even when there is no crime committed, the black body gets criminalized by default. another example of mainstream media reinforcing perceptions of blackness and criminality can be seen in the news coverage of three white men and four black men who were arrested for committing the same crime of burglary. the abc iowa news station used the mug shots of the four black men with the headline, “coralville police arrest four in burglary investigation” [ ]. whereas, for the three white men, a school picture was used with the headline, “three university of iowa wrestlers arrested; burglary charges pending” [ ]. both of these stories were reported on the same day, by the same news station and written by the same journalist. the choice of pictures used by the journalists and broadcast by the news station speak for itself; the black men in the mugshot appear disheveled and unhappy, while the school picture of the three white men display them in uniformed dark-colored jackets, white collared shirts, with yellow ties. the picture of the three white men not only shows them smiling but it also displays some sort of wealth and class, as they would only be wearing that type of uniform at a private or preparatory school. this is another example of the black body getting the label of criminal and deviant, while the white men who were arrested for the same crime get the unspoken label of smart and good. the news reports of the hurricane katrina survivors and the men arrested for burglary are ten years apart, yet both reports expose the problem of bias in mainstream news media, while also indicating the need for spaces that can challenge these biased narratives. . . constructing an alternative theory in an effort to explore the racial bias in news coverage as systemic, covertly integrated into societal institutions, this paper seeks to explore alternative spaces and textual poachers that attempt to expose these patterns. susan bordo’s ( ) [ ] concept of battleground/playground and bell hooks’ ( ) [ ] concept of homeplace is useful in analyzing the digital space of black twitter and textual poaching. by placing these scholarships in dialogue with each other, this article will be able to ( ) move away from the idea that oppressive conceptions of the body have to overdetermine our relationship to it (specifically, women and men who do not let the attempt to oppress and regulate their body be more significant than the counter-disciplinary possibilities); and ( ) explore [digital] spaces, purposefully created for collective action and resistance, that often get overlooked. for bordo, the metaphor of the body as a “battleground” ([ ], p. ), borrowed from foucault’s discipline and punish, captures how the body is directly involved in a political field with power relations having an immediate hold on it, creating a “perpetual battle” for self-determination ([ ], p. ). in other words, bordo argues that the body is never void of history, politics, or culture, and therefore the body is an important site that is constantly under attack for control, whether it be by institutions, technology, doctors, and/or the media. for bordo, the “perpetual battle” is marked by the individual’s or communities’ struggle to fight for the control of their own body(ies). bordo’s ( ) metaphor of “playground” is quite the opposite of the “battleground”. if the “battleground” is where resistance takes place, then the “playground” logic works to destabilize the resistance struggles of the “battleground”. bordo argues that the playground emerges within postmodern conversation or technological advances and is ahistorical, apolitical, acultural, and a space “where anything goes” ([ ], p. ). therefore, this article seeks to reclaim the “playground logic”, arguing that while the playground may be a space for play and “where anything goes” it is not always void of culture, history, and politics. rather, this article embraces fanon’s analysis that “black subjects”, understanding their body as a battleground and the ways racism works, will adopt and alter dominant ideologies for their own needs and purposes [ , ]. consequently, this article considers the ways social media, often operating as a playground, can transform into a battleground. however, soc. sci. , , of the question becomes, what conditions allow for such a transformation? to engage this question, this research builds on bell hooks’ concept of homeplace. in homeplace, bell hooks explores a place where one can seek shelter, comfort, and nurture for their soul; a place where one learns dignity and integrity, along with faith ([ ], p. ). when hooks discuss homeplace, she is talking about a specific location, a home, which is run by women and usually a site for family and close friends to seek safe harbor. however, although hooks is thinking about it within the context of a physical home, it does not have to be restricted to that. while hooks is primarily concerned with black women’s senses of home and safety, homeplace can broadly be considered as any “place” that provides shelter, etc., for black women. the concept of digital homespace, put forth in this article, brings together the concepts of battleground, playground, and textual poaching, thus becoming a space created by marginalized and oppressed persons of color, on the world wide web that serves to (re)shape and (re)create individuals’ sense of self through redefinition, sharing of testimonials, collective action, and building communities. since marginalized and oppressed groups often face oppression on a daily basis through dominant mainstream media, which often portray stereotypical and degrading images and roles of these groups, spaces that celebrate and embrace these marginalized groups become necessary. the hashtag #apheadlines, explored in the first section of this paper, is a good example of the creation of a digital homespace through the playground and battleground logic and textual poaching, an exercise where users create their own communities to express adoration or frustration with specific media content, exposing racial bias in mainstream news coverage. therefore, digital homespaces serve to (re)create and (re)define individuals’ sense of self by exposing bias news coverage, and through the sharing of testimonies, obstacles, struggles, and triumphs that oppressed folks on the margins face on a day-to-day basis, while building coalitions and communities. these spaces seem to be on-going, with no finite end or beginning date or time. also, while these spaces may begin on the internet, they are not limited to that space, and can move beyond the digital sphere. accordingly, for this article, the black body is read as a battleground site where there is a “perpetual battle” for control, specifically combatting dominant ideologies of racial bias around blackness. the battlefield is social media, and textual poaching in black twitter is the main weapon/tool used to confront and challenge both implicit and explicit bias, thus creating a digital homespace for marginalized groups/persons. . methods for this research, a content analysis of the corporate news media and black twitter was performed; this analysis spans from to early . a lexis nexis search was performed on the most trusted news stations and newspapers, which in a recent study by the pew research center were named as cnn, abc news, nbc news, cbs news, fox news, the new york times, usa today, and the wall street journal [ ]. the analysis specifically focused on the news and black twitter content surrounding the murders of mike brown, eric garner, jordan davis, trayvon martin, tamir rice, and renisha mcbride. the lexis nexis search consisted of published news reports from the date of the incident to a month after the incident, and reports after any legal action took place (such as an arrest, grand jury decision, or trial). there were a total of news articles populated for the six murder victims; out of the news articles, a total of articles were from the top-trusted news sources. each news report was hand-coded, by one person, and scrutinized for similarities and differences in reporting, including biased key words, phrases, content, and headlines. for the purpose of this study, much attention was paid to the descriptions and characterizations of the victims in the news reports. the analysis of black twitter consisted of an archived content search, performed through the twitter platform, on six popular hashtags that emerged after news broke of the deaths of the six murder victims and jury verdicts. the hashtags included #apheadlines, #iftheygunnedmedown, #dangerousblackkids, #icantbreathe, #crimingwhilewhite, and #alivewhileblack. these hashtags are important to this research because they began to “trend” on twitter within hours of an incident and often shaped the popular online attitudes about said incident. the analysis of these hashtags was shaped by participant soc. sci. , , of observation and mainstream news reports, therefore, the hashtags under investigation were tracked in real-time. furthermore, an archived search was performed on all of the mentioned hashtags using the advanced search tab on the twitter platform. the advanced search tab on twitter allows for a search of specific hashtags and keywords within certain parameters; search filters included specific dates, twitter accounts, and location. in addition, news coverage of the hashtags is also included in this research. news coverage usually appeared the same day or within a day or two of the emergence of the trending hashtag. due to the transient nature of these digital spaces, a -h snap-shot was performed (beginning from the creation of the hashtag), which highlighted the most popular/retweeted messages. while twitter is a public space, it is important to acknowledge the prevalence of surveillance in these digital spaces (by the state and by other local actors) for purposes of intimidation and/or to silence dissent. it is for this reason that the popular hashtag messages shared in this research fall into one or more of the following categories: ( ) they were the most retweeted messages; ( ) they were tweeted by popular twitter users (including social/political activist) and ( ) they were tweets that have been publicized in mainstream media; these tactics were used in an effort to reduce harm to users. this analysis is qualitative; however, quantitative statistical data is used to illustrate the impact of the hashtags under investigation. foucault’s ( ) understanding of genealogy as a method was helpful for the analysis of black twitter [ ]. genealogy is a method that records singular events that seem to have no history because the events are often understood as unrelated and not linear. therefore, genealogy allows for discoveries of events masked as other or different, events that are often silenced by history because they are not linear and differ from traditional historical studies, to be brought to the surface for investigation. this methodology is extremely useful in this investigation of user responses on black twitter, which due to the medium, can oftentimes be regarded as ahistorical or unrelated to social and political events in the mainstream news or society at-large. while recognizing that no single approach is sufficient in exploring the complexities of the internet, everett’s ( ) methodology allows for the framing of the findings on blackness in social media as a “snapshot or moment-in-time approach.” this method allows for some useful information about this topic to be ascertained, while also appreciating the fluidity and the ephemeral nature of these spaces ([ ], p. ). therefore, the analysis of black twitter includes -h snap shots of the most retweeted hashtags, along with heavily circulated memes, photo statements, and videos. notably, these methods expose the challenges of exploring online environments and the limitations of traditional methods of conducting research due to the fleeting nature of the information found in these online forums. . findings the questions that emerge through the investigation of twitter and black twitter are: what are the spaces and activities on black twitter that challenge dominant, oppressive, and biased narratives of the black body found in mainstream news reporting? what do these spaces look like, and are they always present? in the cases of garner, brown, davis, martin, and rice, the findings demonstrate that social media users have created digital homespaces through textual poaching as resistance, aimed to “define and encourage a new consciousness among black people” ([ ], p. xvi). this consciousness encourages pride in blackness and stimulates communal responsibility among all people of color for one another and for the purpose of challenging implicit and explicit racial bias. reviewing the case studies, there are three specific ways that black twitter has behaved as a digital homespace for black bodies: ( ) redefinition; ( ) enforcing counter-narratives, testimonials; and ( ) organizing and building communities. . . redefinition the act of redefinition is important, as the constantly reinforced and constructed definitions of inferior, animalistic, brute, and thug continue to be used to justify the oppression and war on black bodies [ ]. therefore, in an attempt to recover/redefine and love blackness, after the murder of mike brown in st. louis, the hashtag “iftheygunnedmedown” emerged on black twitter. soc. sci. , , of this hashtag marked the way mainstream news sources were portraying mike brown, as a gang member, and had previously criminalized other black victims of police murder and violence [ – ]. the #iftheygunnedmedown hashtag was an effort for people to voice their discontent with the media’s portrayal and stereotyping of victims who had been killed or injured at the hands of the police and vigilantes. consider, for example, after michael brown’s murder, news stations searched brown’s facebook for photos and used images of brown wearing a red jersey and holding up a peace sign, which was later construed as a gang symbol by news reporters [ – ]. another photo that surfaced in news outlets was of brown staring menacingly into the camera while wearing headphones. these pictures were used to assault brown’s character, along with news reports about brown being in a gang and living in a neighborhood that was ridden with poverty and high drug usage [ ]. little or no attention was given to the fact that brown had recently graduated from high school and was about to begin college in a couple of days. black twitter users tweeted and retweeted the picture of mike brown in his high school graduation cap and gown, the photo his family publicized after his death, instead of the photos the mainstream media were circulating. similarly, in the case of trayvon martin, the news media searched his facebook account and circulated a photo of martin glaring into the camera, wearing a baseball cap, and sticking up his middle finger, which blocks the bottom half of his face. however, the martin family circulated a photo of martin smiling without a hat or anything else blocking his face. in both cases, the photo circulated by the news was used to characterize both brown and martin as trouble-makers needing to be surveilled or “patrolled”, and in many ways justifying the violence and murder of brown and martin. consequently, the “blacktag” “#iftheygunnedmedown” asked the question, ‘what picture from my social media account would the news use to portray me if i were gunned down?’ through textual poaching as resistance, users posted pictures they thought framed them in a compromising light for mainstream viewers and then juxtaposed this with pictures from their daily life. this hashtag was named one of the most trending hashtags for , signifying the conscious effort black twitter users put forth to expose the bias in mainstream media in addressing the issue of violence against black bodies [ ]. for example, one user with the handle @tydrizzyy posted two photos, one photo of a young guy sitting across a bed wearing all black with pants sagging, and another photo of the same young guy from the previous picture, in a classroom, wearing a military uniform, reading a storybook to young children [ ]. there were many pictures of this nature posted on twitter and other social media forums. another tweeter with the handle @revrenddoctor posted two photos, one photo with a friend and @revrenddoctor doing a hand sign for his fraternity. the other photo is of @revrenddoctor behind a podium, wearing a cap and gown, at a morehouse college graduation ceremony [ ]. this hashtag was powerful because not only did it start a national conversation about racial bias in mainstream news media, but it also forced many news media outlets to respond, similar to the hashtag “apheadlines”. the hashtag “iftheygunnedmedown”, challenging the narrative put forth in news outlets, was reported in four of the eight trusted news sources explored in this research, including usa today, ny times, abc news, and the washington post, demonstrating its significance [ – ]. similarly, the “blacktag” #dangerousblackkids also emerged after a judge declared a mistrial in the case of jordan davis, a -year old, who was shot and killed at a gas station by michael dunn, a white patron, who objected to the loud music coming from the vehicle davis and his friends were driving and “feared” for his life. this hashtag also emerged as a way to shed light on the murder of tamir rice, a -year old boy who was shot by ohio police while playing with a toy gun in a community park. this hashtag challenged the way mainstream news sources were portraying young black children as dangerous and deviants [ ]. for instance, one user with the handle @antoinejlowery posted a picture of a boy smiling and riding piggy-back on a man’s back with the caption, “practicing his choke-hold #dangerousblackkids” [ ]. another user with the handle, @odotjdot tweeted a picture of two small children in a red wagon with the caption, “young black criminals in their getaway car. careful! #dangerousblackkids” [ ]. these examples demonstrate the playground and battleground soc. sci. , , of aspects of black twitter. although the users are being flippant, they are responding to a very real concern, the criminalization and demonization of black bodies. ultimately, through textual poaching, black twitter users took to the battlefield and created a digital homespace to fight for the control to define their own bodies by being very critical of mass media’s representations of black bodies. in many of these cases, the news media responded by changing headlines and reporting on the hashtag response. however, redefining the black body is only one step in challenging racial bias and oppression; changing the narrative is also very important in this process. . . power of testimonials—enforcing counter-narratives activists and protestors made it their task to challenge the mainstream narrative of ferguson and mike brown by tweeting and re-tweeting counter-narratives of the events taking place in ferguson. this is another method of reclaiming the body/fighting for self-determination and creating a digital homespace. in the case of michael brown, twitter users pre-supposed the narrative of michael brown’s friend, dorian johnson, who was an eyewitness over the police’s take of events. the police and news media were trying to undermine johnson’s account of events [ ]. take for example, when reports came out that michael brown did not have his hands up when he was shot; however, black twitter continued to side with dorian johnson’s account of the events leading to the death of michael brown, creating the hashtag, “#handsupdontshoot,” which also became a popular chant with protesters. the use of this hashtag in protests is an example of textual poaching moving beyond the space of social media. in the case of eric garner, social media users shared the video of garner being placed in a chokehold by police with the hashtag, #icantbreathe. as such, while the police and mainstream news sources attempted to posit a narrative of a “big” guy who refused to listen to the police, black twitter responded by reinforcing a counter-narrative of abusive police tactics with the hashtag and popular protest chant, “i can’t breathe”. the hashtag “#icantbreathe” was also named one of the most trending hashtags on twitter for the year , as well as the hashtag “#iammikebrown” [ ]. take for example, one user with the handle @sweetannie who retweeted, massive sit-in takes over times square #handsupdontshoot #icantbreathe [ ]. another user with the handle @charinanadura tweeted, in front of #nypd station in times square yelling #handsupdontshoot & #icantbreathe [ ]. a user with the twitter handle @sifill_ldf tweeted, black men do not have to perfect for their lives to have value [sic]. #ericgarner is not on trial. he is a homicide victim. #icantbreathe [ ]. in addition, there were more than million tweets about the hashtag, “#ferguson”, in august of [ ]. according to a twitter analysis of the hashtag “#ferguson”, these twitter posts surrounded the events of the mike brown case, the ensuing protests, and cases of police brutality [ ]. according to that same report, the hashtag “#blacklivesmatter”, which is used to create awareness and share cases of police violence, was tweeted more than million times in [ ]. these popular hashtags affirm the power of black twitter in sparking [national] conversations of racial bias and systemic violence against black bodies. prior to these hashtags, conversations of police violence and systemic racism often occurred on a local level. the response from the public, with the help of citizen journalists, is another demonstration of the power of black twitter. citizen journalists are the people on the ground filming and sharing cell-phone recordings of the protests, police violence, and citizen-police interactions. consider, for example, the ferguson protestors who were live-streaming (sending out the link via twitter), sharing on vine, and tweeting their first-hand accounts with the militarized st. louis police officers and the national guard that were attempting to control the protest and enforce soc. sci. , , of a curfew. one video, in particular, that was circulated on twitter and vine, a social media platform that allows you to share ten seconds of video, was of an officer yelling at protestors saying he was going to “shoot” if the protestors did not back up. this video was picked up by mainstream news outlets, which resulted in the removal of this officer from the ferguson detail (as reported on twitter). however, for protestors, this officer was just one in many that abused their powers and faced little to no punishment. however, more importantly, the world was seeing first-hand what was taking place in ferguson, with the help of citizen journalists, through a different perspective. images of police with body shields and body armor throwing smoke grenades at protestors, emptying cans of mace in protestors’ eyes, and the huge armored military tanks with loud-speakers driving down the streets flooded twitter and other social media platforms during the ferguson protests. lastly, the sharing of personal testimonies was also a powerful tool used on social media. users sharing their own experiences with local police in their respective locations, across the country, validated the counter-narratives being shared of the mike brown and eric garner case. take, for example, the twitter hashtag #crimingwhilewhite, which sparked the black twitter hashtag #alivewhileblack. the “criming while white” hashtag was created by jason ross, a writer for the tonight show starring jimmy fallon, after the grand jury decided not to indict the new york city police officer responsible for eric garner ’s death. ross shared his own story of ‘criming while white’ to mark the racialized double-standard of our criminal justice system, and encouraged other white folks to share their stories of “under-punished f-ups” [ ]. this hashtag, which was named one of the most trending hashtags for , demonstrated an unequal justice system and a racial double standard [ ]. for instance, one user with the handle @skalakattack tweeted, got pulled over for a brake light out. underage and drinking and blew over the limit. cop let me walk to my friend’s apt. #crimingwhilewhite [ ]. another tweet by a user with the handle @cardsgirl stated, when i was , i stole a pack of cigs, cop prayed with me and made me promise i wouldn’t do it again. #crimingwhilewhite [ ]. another user with the handle @oceana_roll stated, in high school i got in a car wreck that might have been my fault. the cop told me it was ‘illegal alien’s fault’. #crimingwhilewhite [ ]. these examples demonstrate the power of testimony in highlighting discrepancies between police interaction and race and violence. however, while the #crimingwhilewhite hashtag may have been a way to mark these disparities with counter-narratives, many people thought these narratives were glorifying white privilege; consequently, a twitter user, jamilah lemieux, a senior digital editor for ebony.com, started what became the popular black twitter hashtag #alivewhileblack [ ]. lemieux tweeted, got raped+robbed. police took forever to interview me, mentioned that women sometimes lie to hide “gambling, overspending” #alivewhileblack [ ]. another example of the #alivewhileblack hashtag included a tweet by user francesca ramsey with the handle @chescaleigh, i was mugged after dropping a friend off late at night after work. the cops harassed me & asked why i was “really there” #alivewhileblack [ ]. another tweeter with the handle @akilahobviously stated, y/o—drove to kroger to get my mom nyquil. pulled over unexplained. asked why i was in my neighborhood. backup cop cars. #alivewhileblack [ ]. soc. sci. , , of the purpose of this hashtag was not to glorify “under-punished f-ups”, but instead to highlight the ways people of color have a difficult time just staying alive in regular day-to-day activities, such as driving to work. here, patricia turner’s analysis of rumors is relevant. turner argues that rumor in african-american communities operate as a tool of resistance, a vital mechanism, in which one uses to protect oneself from continued harm and degradation [ ]. this analysis of rumors helps to explain how and why the testimonials and counter-narratives spread so quickly and became popular on black twitter (regardless of whether the testimonies were true or not). these testimonies and counter-narratives, all examples of textual poaching as resistance, shared different experiences and stories while shedding a light on the disparities of race and inequality across the united states, and giving a voice to the often voiceless; but more importantly, they began a national and global conversation about institutionalized racial inequalities in america. . . healing through organizing and building community continuing the work of redefinition and enforcing counter narratives, this section explores the ways twitter organizers used their forum to take the next step to challenge and reduce bias, racism, and oppression towards black bodies and other oppressed groups. the organizations explored in this section have gained popularity through social media. these organizations stand out because they embrace tactics from the non-violent civil rights struggle and also tactics from the more-militant black power struggles, they also have an active presence both online and offline and have created a list of demands for change on the state and federal level. in addition, these organizations created many of the textual poaching hashtags on black twitter. these groups, black lives matter, ferguson action, this stops today, million hoodies movement for justice, hands up united, black youth project in chicago, leaders of the beautiful struggle in baltimore, and we charge genocide in chicago, are all a part of the movement for black lives, and are similar in that they explore the problem of police officers acting without impunity as a systemic issue rooted within a long history of systematic racism. these groups are also very influential through their use of social media. social media forums, such as black twitter, facebook, and blogs were instrumental tools in organizing beyond the space of social media. these groups using these tools spread the word of meet-up times and dates of demonstrations, publicized demands of elected officials, and provided updates to the general public. one example of these organizations challenging systemic injustice through social media was the organized mass boycott of black friday. similar to the montgomery bus boycott, the objective of the boycott and mass protest of black friday, one of the biggest shopping days of the year in the united states, was a way of hitting the state and nation, where it hurts, their pockets. the intention was to show that if the state continued to demonstrate that black lives do not matter by the continual systemic oppression and abuse of black people then they will not support the economic structure of this racist state. the movement of “black out black friday” emerged with people sharing meet up times and boycott locations across the nation through twitter. the blacktags “#blackoutblackfriday” and “#notonedime” were also named the most trending/popular twitter hashtags in [ ]. this hashtag sent protestors out in droves to boycott black friday shopping across the united states. many stores in various cities cited the loss of sales due to the protestors who occupied malls, forcing them to close [ – ]. for instance, in downtown seattle, protestors disrupted the tree lighting ceremony causing the westlake center mall to close three hours early on one of the busiest shopping days of the year [ ]. another example of these organizations challenging systemic injustice through social media was the protestors shutting down highways and bridges. this demonstration addressed who has access to walk on the streets (think about mike brown being stopped because he was walking in the street or eric garner who was harassed because he was standing on the street corner or jordan davis who was at the convenience store or trayvon martin who was walking home from the store). the protestors performed die-ins (having historical ties to sit-ins), however, die-ins took place in main intersections and on bridges, demonstrating the loss of mike brown’s life and how he was left to lay soc. sci. , , of in the middle of the street for four hours before his body was taken to the coroner’s office. many of these protests were organized in-person, but spread through twitter and other social media outlets. an example of the power of black twitter, during many of the protests, as events changed (such as police arrests or blockades), protestors were able to stay in the loop with each other by sending out a tweet and reconvening at another location within minutes. this caused an increase in surveillance of twitter. some twitter users even tweeted photos of an unmarked van they believed was scrambling their network, making them unable to make calls and access social media. more recently, it has been exposed that the department of homeland security used social media to gather intelligence on the social justice protests in ferguson, missouri, and also in baltimore. researchers have warned activists using twitter and other social media platforms that the department of homeland security has stated that social media ‘is a constant provider [of intelligence] and is fairly reliable’ [ ]. continuing this argument, a former central intelligence agency [cia] agent of the united states, john kiriakou, who was charged and imprisoned for sharing classified information with a reporter (who never reported on the information shared), told the real news network that the government collects emails, phone calls, and facebook and twitter posts on every american citizen [ ]. this speaks to the very real threat that surveillance poses to social actors who challenge the system through social media. while the groups may differ on a few demands, what remain consistent are the real-life consequences and results of these movements. first, with the flourish of trending hashtags circulating around twitter, including but not limited to #blacklivesmatter, #handsupdontshoot, #thisendsnow, #shutitdown, and #icantbreathe, they were able to ( ) create coalitional spaces through social media; ( ) expose racial bias, spread awareness, and spark national conversations of the issues at hand through blacktags and textual poaching; ( ) allow people to voice concerns of police brutality; ( ) reclaim control over defining the black body; ( ) assist in the organizing of demonstrations nationwide; and ( ) slow down commerce, by disrupting black friday shopping across the country. however, these organizations have not stopped there; instead, organizers have continued building coalitions both locally and globally—another example of textual poaching and the creation of digital homespaces moving beyond social media. organizers in black lives matter, dream defenders, and various ferguson anti-police brutality protestors took a solidarity trip to palestine. the purpose of the ten-day trip was to connect with activists living under israeli occupation, show a link between oppressions, and build relationships. this was a powerful trip, with one activist stating, in the spirit of malcolm x, angela davis, stokely carmichael and many others, we thought the connections between the african american leadership of the movement in the us and those on the ground in palestine needed to be reestablished and fortified. ~ahmad abuznaid, the legal and policy director of the dream defenders. there were also tweets from people in other countries supporting and assisting protestors who were in ferguson, by providing pictures and videos of how to defend oneself against tear gas, as well as photos of people marching in the streets holding posters that read “brazilian people in solidarity with #ferguson #blacklivesmatter” and “tokyo stands with ferguson”. lastly, what was most interesting about the digital spaces and movements was the creation of a digital homespace through textual poaching, which reaffirmed humane notions of blackness, undermined implicit and explicit racial bias in mainstream news reports through testimonials and counter-narratives, and lastly the built coalitions which grew beyond the internet. most importantly, these digital spaces became sites for the spread of knowledge and history, a particular history usually located in academic spaces. . discussion as laid out in this paper, we see a clear need for spaces of encouragement and upliftment within black communities. social media forums, while often understood as a playground, can also operate as soc. sci. , , of a battleground—a space that actively undermines the attempts to oppress black bodies. twitter and black twitter are crucial in the awareness it provides to people around the nation. it was though these forums that many protests were organized and that information was spread. social media is most useful for the tools it provides to organizers. the idea that one can send out a tweet or a post and share it with millions of people within seconds is an easy way to recruit and disseminate. similar to mainstream mass media, social media also has the power to shape attitudes and beliefs of the masses. in this case, black twitter worked to undermine implicit and explicit bias in mainstream news, while also uniting folks in these spaces through self-identification and a redefining/reclaiming of blackness. while these spaces are useful, it can also be determined from this research that these spaces are not transformative by themselves. in other words, these spaces provide little moments that make for resistance. for example, while observing black twitter, there were some cases of police harassment/abuse that did not receive a popular hashtag or receive the same public attention as other cases. take for example, the lack of attention the marissa alexander case received on black twitter versus the trayvon martin case. marissa alexander is an african american woman who was arrested for shooting a warning shot in the air to protect herself from her abusive husband. alexander used the same “stand your ground” defense as trayvon martin’s murderer, george zimmerman, and while her warning shot did not result in a murder, she was originally sentenced to years in prison. this case did not receive the same amount of attention on black twitter as the trayvon martin case, which was interesting, since both cases represented a national fear of black bodies. alexander’s case speaks to a number of limitations with black twitter: ( ) it marks the types of bodies that are believed to be at risk for violence; ( ) it signifies which black lives matter; and ( ) it marks the tensions and limitations of essentializing. consequently, while there are some cases that people can easily rally around, there are other cases that do not receive as much attention. this leads to the investigation of “accepted truths”. for example, in society we easily accept the idea that black men are constantly under attack, therefore, people can easily rally around those bodies in question. however, black women, queer, transgender, and immigrant bodies, to name a few, do not seem to receive the same attention. as such, it is quite ironic that the hashtag #blacklivesmatter, created by queer black women, is not often used to bring attention to violence against queer black women. the power of accepted truths seems to be at play in these cases. consequently, kimberly crenshaw and other activists/scholars deemed it necessary to publish a study on the institutional discrimination and oppression against black women, while also creating the hashtag #sayhername [ ]. the hashtag #sayhername emerged as a response to the lack of attention being paid to black women (including queer and transgender folks) who face similar oppressions as black men. therefore, while these spaces are useful when they operate as tools to challenge oppression, spread awareness, and assist in organizing counter-actions, they also tend to be short-lived and sparked by the power of accepted truths. acknowledgments: the author would like to extend sincerest gratitude to the following people whose critical questions and engaged dialogue made these reflections possible: gladys jiménez-muñoz, kelvin santiago-valles, bill martin, anna everett, xhercis méndez, and zhana 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/index.php?itemid= &id= &jumival= &option=com_content&task=view#newsletter http://static .squarespace.com/static/ f d e b b d c/t/ a d e b f f / /aapf_smn_brief_full_singles.compressed.pdf http://static .squarespace.com/static/ f d e b b d c/t/ a d e b f f / /aapf_smn_brief_full_singles.compressed.pdf http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	background 	perceptions of blackness and criminality 	constructing an alternative theory 	methods 	findings 	redefinition 	power of testimonials—enforcing counter-narratives 	healing through organizing and building community 	discussion nimbusromno l-regu this is an open access document downloaded from orca, cardiff university's institutional repository: http://orca.cf.ac.uk/ / this is the author’s version of a work that was submitted to / accepted for publication. citation for final published version: manji, ambreena and harrington, john . the limits of socio-legal radicalism: social and legal studies and third world scholarship. social and legal studies ( ) , pp. - . . / file publishers page: https://doi.org/ . / <https://doi.org/ . / > please note: changes made as a result of publishing processes such as copy-editing, formatting and page numbers may not be reflected in this version. for the definitive version of this publication, please refer to the published source. you are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite this paper. this version is being made available in accordance with publisher policies. see http://orca.cf.ac.uk/policies.html for usage policies. copyright and moral rights for publications made available in orca are retained by the copyright holders. the limits of socio-legal radicalism social and legal studies and third world scholarship john harrington and ambreena manji abstract in this review to mark the th anniversary of social and legal studies, we offer an assessment of the evolution of socio-legal scholarship on the third world. we seek to locate the journal in the broader history of socio-legal studies and legal education in the uk and to consider its engagement with the work of third world scholars. in order to do this, we recall the founding commitment of the journal’s first editorial board to non-western perspectives on law, and locate this commitment both historically and biographically. we explore a number of important interventions concerned with socio-legal studies in the third world, but also point to significant gaps and omissions since . to end, we argue for a reassertion of sls’s founding commitments to anti-imperial scholarship and the challenges posed by critical, non- western perspectives. keywords socio-legal studies; legal education; anti-imperialism; law and development; law and postcolonialism. now and then: introduction and overview at its foundation in social and legal studies committed to publish work on the third world and by scholars from outside the western academy. the journal’s th anniversary is a good time to review this commitment, to think about the circumstances in which it was made, the extent to which it was honoured and the manner of its reinterpretation since then. where did it come from and what has been made of it? we ask this not in the abstract, but in a new conjuncture when race, exploitation and empire again frame urgent questions for citizens, students and scholars. professor of global health law, centre for law and global justice, cardiff university, wales, uk. professor of land law and development, centre for law and global justice, cardiff university, wales, uk. we are grateful to christina adelakun, josephine hebestreit and elizabeth willmington for their invaluable assistance in the preparation of this review. we follo su dhya pahuja i preferri g third world to such co o ly used ter s as de elopi g or no - i dustrialized cou tries. u like the it co notes a political relationship, not a set of demographic or economic facts. we share her ie that the third world as ot a place. it as a project … [a d the ehicle through hich the] peoples of africa, asia a d lati a erica drea ed of a e orld (pahuja : quoting prashad : xv). our paper is organised as follows. first, we consider the historical moment in which the journal was brought into being and explore how this affected the intellectual perspective of its first editors and their founding commitments. we argue that the place occupied by social and legal studies must be understood by exploring the biographies and especially the mobility of legal academics in the preceding decades, their own self-understanding and the considerable personal and political influences of third world scholars and anti-imperialist ideas on their thinking. then we examine the journal’s contribution to promoting third world perspectives over the past twenty-five years and trace the main areas in which it has published interventions. we consider the extent to which it has succeeded in realizing its early objectives and also note the significant gaps, areas of third world scholarship which we might have expected to see represented in the archive, but don’t. in accounting for these gaps, we are drawn to a volume edited by issa shivji on the th anniversary of the law faculty at dar es salaam whose title we have adapted for our own review. contributors were called on to document but also to probe the limits of the legal radicalism which the faculty had nurtured and which, as we shall see, played an essential if neglected role in the emergence of british socio-legal studies (shivji : ). in conclusion, we consider how the journal’s founding values of critical engagement, political internationalism and cosmopolitan scholarship can be refurbished and mobilized for new times. conjunctures and founding commitments in the first issue of social and legal studies the editors set out their reasons for founding a new journal. included among their four main ambitions was ’the promotion of non-western perspectives on law, regulation and criminology’. the journal would, they said, ‘promote a greater knowledge and understanding of work being carried out in developing countries, eastern europe, and the less dominant western countries. we are of the firm belief that exciting and innovating work is being produced yet remains at risk of invisibility on the international scene, leaving dominant western traditions and perspectives unmoved by their potential challenge.’ ( : , - ) this was more than a plea for generic diversity, a simple demand to refresh the stock of socio-legal knowledge in european and north american academies. it needs to be read in its time. roughly marks the halfway point between today and the independence of ghana in , the first of a wave of decolonisation that ended formal imperialism on the african continent. the creation of new law schools had played a part in the contested project of building new nations which took place over that period. but by , the aspiration to sustain independent centres of knowledge production in and about the countries of the third world had been thwarted by the reassertion of the economic and political supremacy of the western powers and the international financial institutions (ifis) which they dominated (paliwala ). an insurgent alliance of states across the global south, seeking to achieve a new international economic order, had been defeated and pushed back. domestically nationalist movements based on top-down state control had run out of the popular legitimacy which many enjoyed in the early years of independence. unsustainable debt forced the capitulation of formerly assertive regimes to the world bank and imf. hegemonic neo- liberalism worked its way out from the central banks and finance ministries reshaping social sectors including higher education. with university staff dependent on private practice and consultancies to scrape a living, legal scholarship became increasingly oriented to the priorities of the ifis (majamba ; adelman and paliwala ). as a result of this material transformation distinctive voices in and about the third world were marginalized by the new orthodoxy. with the fall of the soviet union in , non-aligned states lost the strategic capacity to operate between east and west. the founding of the journal was an act of hope, then, a defensive, but also a defiant gesture. for a socio-legal review of the impact of adjustment on tanzania’s health sector, see harrington ( ). who and where? some origins context explains the founding commitment, but so does biography. among the journal’s first editors were sol picciotto and peter fitzpatrick, who had spent a significant part their early careers in dar es salaam and papua new guinea respectively. both this choice of starting point and their subsequent moves to the uk were part of a broader pattern of academic mobility which had challenged the parochialism of british legal education (harrington and manji a). in the late s and early s, staff for newly founded universities across the commonwealth were recruited in britain by the inter-university council (harrington and manji b). young scholars took up their first posts at law schools in sudan, nigeria, zambia, kenya, tanzania and elsewhere. they found themselves in countries marked by wide and deep legal pluralism, insecure political leaderships and a popular desire for development as the fruit of independence. but the insular doctrinal focus and magisterial lecturing style of english law schools were clearly inappropriate for teaching and research in this setting. as william twining put it ‘one did not have to be very alert or sensitive to realize that, despite british influence, law in east africa … was radically different from law in england and wales and that many of the differences can only be explained by reference to what is vaguely labelled ‘context’ – history, culture, economic conditions and politics.’ (twining interview: atienza and gama : ). they rebelled against the constraints of their own legal education, seeking alliances first with ex-patriate american colleagues, themselves inspired by legal realism, who were working overseas with ford foundation support (sugarman ; krishnan ). deeper engagement also followed with local colleagues and particularly students (fimbo ). undergraduate campaigns at dar es salaam and accra, in the mid- s, challenging government authoritarianism and enduring neo-colonialism, were an important vector of political struggle both within and beyond the universities. harsh official responses called forth the active sympathy of some expatriate law teachers. they also provided the impetus for a radical reform of the law school curriculum in the name of social relevance and critical awareness. at dar es salaam an interdisciplinary first-year foundation course on ‘economic and social problems of east africa’ was developed first in the law faculty, and then taught across the university (picciotto ; twining ). expatriate scholars returned to the uk to play a significant part in the founding of a ‘radical generation’ of law schools in the s. they were subsequently joined for longer or shorter periods by former colleagues and students from east africa and elsewhere, sustaining a web of exchange and influence which has endured notwithstanding the depredations of the intervening decades. the new british law schools were nodes in this network, some of them succeeding in breaking with the blackletter outlook associated predominantly with oxford and cambridge, innovating in teaching and assessment methods, expanding the range of scholarly inquiry into and around the law. we can confidently add that the movements for law and society and critical legal studies were forged jointly in the new universities of the third world (twining interview: atienza and gama : ). the law in context book series, the journal of law and society and, as we have seen, social and legal studies all emerged to a significant degree from this partnership. the tangle of biographies which we have gestured at here casts further light on the editorial board’s re-affirmation that its ‘commitments to feminism, to minority voices, to those marginalised by structures of social, economic and political power were advanced in the context of challenging the traditions, orthodoxies and perspectives available in academically dominant western countries.’ (sls : - ) this is surely more than a programmatic statement of values. it also acknowledges an intellectual and political debt, recognizing locations like dar es salaam, lusaka, port moresby and accra as essential points of origin for british socio-legal studies. interventions and achievements on the journal’s sixth anniversary in , the editors reiterated their founding commitment in stronger terms and with greater urgency. ‘we are aware’, they said, ‘that there are significant social and economic forces operating, more powerfully than ever, to impose western intellectual traditions and orthodoxies on an international scale. we live in a world in which the ’globalization’ of a particular neo-liberal agenda can be broadcast at socio- legal conference plenaries and this threatens to stifle alternative voices and critiques. we accordingly recognize the need to encourage and stimulate socio-legal work from those who seek to understand critically the sometimes beguiling persuasiveness of western orthodoxies.’ (sls : - ). ‘others will judge how far we have achieved these different and layered objectives’, they added and indeed the record for that period is creditable. the journal had carried articles dealing with law in brazil, canada, chile, china, india, japan, mexico, mozambique, nicaragua, sri lanka, south africa and zimbabwe. in this section, we revisit a selection these papers. they provide evidence of the journal’s early efforts to develop an international - and internationalist – perspective. they also index some of the most important trends within third world legal scholarship at the time, in response to the weakening of nation states and the imposition of neo-liberalism, noted by the editors in the quote above. however, unlike the field of gender and the law, discussed elsewhere in this anniversary issue, we cannot say that sls succeeded in making a sustained contribution to legal scholarship on and from the third world. for one thing, we discern a falling off in the attention paid to non-western perspectives, as the journal’s early commitment was eclipsed by a preponderance of output focussed on the anglo-american sphere. for another we find that the range of themes addressed is rich, but heterogeneous. most important among these were law, class and the state; popular justice and postcolonialism; gender justice; and land rights, customary law and legal pluralism. we briefly review key papers on each, accepting that there are considerable overlaps in their themes and theoretical perspectives. law, class and the state these themes are common to the work of two scholars based in the third world published in sls in its early years. boaventura de sousa santos’s article on urban struggles in the brazilian city of recife is less well known than his s study of ‘pasargada law’ (de sousa santos - ). but it encapsulates many of the key debates amongst sociologists of law in the early s, exploring the use of state legality by the residents of squatter settlements to defend their rights to adequate housing. whereas the pasargada research focussed on the internal legality of the settlements, in recife santos studied how conflicts were collectivized as the struggle went on (de sousa santos : ). this was a period of intense conflict between workers and industrial capital in sao paulo, between peasants and landowners in rural brazil, and between urban squatters on one hand and developers and the state on the other. with the city unable to deal with growing inward migration either in ‘production terms (employment)’ or in ‘reproduction terms (housing)’ there was increased pressure on land being occupied by ‘the popular classes’ (de sousa santos : , ). focussing on the ‘microphysics of political legality’ he showed that these small-scale social struggles were a prism for more general strategic questions about the state, land and orthodox property rights in contemporary society (de sousa santos : ). effective defence of challenges to land occupations required that the dispute be reconstructed in political and social terms before the legal system ‘got a grip’ (de sousa santos : ). only where politicization preceded legalization could popular demands be adequately aired and addressed. santos is concerned in this paper with the nature of the state, with the malleability of legality and illegality, with the workings of legal strategy, with class struggle and state power, and with the use of principles of private property to block socio-economic claims. all questions preoccupying third world scholars in this period, they are echoed with different emphases in two sls papers by another leading scholar based in the third world, issa shivji. in ‘the rule of law and ujamaa in the ideological formation of tanzania’ ( ), shivji also asks what strategic role law might play in popular struggles and in constructing counter- hegemonic ideologies. can social movements anchored in rights politics be effective or are law and rights better viewed as a ‘class project’ reinforcing capitalist inequality and best held at a distance (shivji : )? like santos, shivji explores law in popular struggle writing from the concrete circumstances of the periphery. by , under pressure of structural adjustment policies prescribed by the international financial institutions (ifis), tanzania’s ruling party had abandoned the socialist-communitarian doctrine of ujamaa in favour of a largely orthodox neo-liberal line which fed through to conceptions of law and its role in state- citizen relations. where ujamaa was a broadly popular, though not uncontested ideology, now ascendant ‘rule of law’ values failed to resonate in the same way (shivji : ; fouéré ). the failure of orthodox scholars to understand the role of legal ideology in legitimating political rule was keenly felt by academics, activists and intellectuals in tanzania and elsewhere in africa (shivji : - ). he built on this analysis in the later paper, challenging the engagement of human rights discourse with impoverishment which was ‘the life-condition of the large majority in the countries of the south’ (shivji : ). he extended this excoriating critique with an assessment of the public interest litigation strategies then emerging in india and set to have a significant impact on third world scholars and activists in coming years. popular justice and postcolonialism the journal published three important papers on popular justice in the early s in keeping with the radical outlook of the s and s when debates on popular justice were still current. . in a paper on revolutionary nicaragua, mcdonald and zatz ( ) explore popular participation in judicial decision-making and the creation of sandinista legal institutions. they argued that the pre-revolutionary legal order was thought to express the ‘entrenched class- based nature of nicaragua under conditions of dependent capitalism’ ( : ). for the authors, the country constituted an important site for ideological struggles over how mechanisms for resolving conflicts are chosen. the government created revolutionary legal structures and encouraged popular participation in order to foster a new ‘sandinista legality’. echoing santos’s ( ) discussion of politicization and legalization reviewed above, the paper argues that this new model came under attack by those with ‘a strict professional-legal orientation’ who viewed the popular tribunals experiment as a ‘dangerous departure from western judicial norms and due process guarantees’ ( : ). gundersen similarly describes mozambique’s attempt to depart from a class-dominated legal system, of colonial origin, and to replace it with one democratic and popular in character ( ). at its heart were local tribunals (fustíça popular). mediation was the main function of the lay judges who staffed these tribunals and they functioned between so-called formal and informal legal systems. the paper explores the ideology of popular justice in the mozambican context and argues for close attention to be paid to relationship between form and content, using a legal pluralist framework to explain the meshing of state and local law in the work of the tribunals. alan norrie drew on gundersen’s study to explore the ‘conceptual failure at the heart of popular justice’ ( : ). he challenges the use of the label ‘informal law’ for such initiatives, arguing that it reproduces and solidifies a binary distinction which privileges bourgeois, western law as the embodiment of pure form and fairness. to this he for a literary treatment see sembene ousmane’s les bouts de bois de dieu ( ) explored in manji ( ). counterposed a dialectical reading of both official and popular law, which sees each as mutually constituted. for norrie, formal law cannot escape the ‘substance’ of its political context and historical time. equally, as gundersen had shown, popular justice is shaped by revolutionary and official legality, alongside grassroots normativity. norrie’s contribution formed part of a special issue on postcolonialism edited by eve darian-smith ( ). in her introduction, she distinguished two usages of that term. one, associated with optimistic expectations of a break with the colonial, marked off two blocks of time divided by the grant of formal independence. the other, more pessimistic, suggested enduring influence beyond and in spite of notional political freedom. the continuity is traced for international law in dianne otto’s retrospective engagement with the new international economic order, mentioned above ( ). decolonization had re- produced the western state form across the global south with effects diagnosed by the indian subaltern studies movement: the stifling and silencing of individuals and groups outside the nationalist elite. jeannine purdy went further turning the critique against legal postcolonialism itself ( ). she argued that scholarship in that mode tended to obscure the deep contemporary entanglement of law and violence as the latest phase of capitalist globalization was constructed and policed around the third world ( ). gender and the law gender justice has perhaps been the most consistent area of strength in the journal’s third world archive. shirin rai explored women’s relationship to the postcolonial state in a paper of . her detailed investigation of disputes involving women pavement traders and the metropolitan authorities in new delhi between and shares many of the concerns aired in the pieces by santos and shivji discussed above. for rai, the ‘splintered complexity of the postcolonial state’ means that official institutions ‘figure only marginally’ in the lives of ‘lower and upper class’ indian women (rai : ). beyond the reach of regulatory authorities women needed to develop innovative strategies to defend their interests (rai : ). in another contribution of the same year, ann stewart documented one such strategy in the case of three indian legislative proposals on sexual violence, the regulation of sex work and the political representation of women. each was sponsored, not by established law reform institutions, but by an alliance of gender activists and lawyer intellectuals. stewart’s aim was to explore the strategic engagement of feminists with the state, to assess how they framed their proposals and by drawing on similar feminist legal initiatives in zimbabwe and kenya, to urge a rethink of western assumptions about third world activism for gender justice. she summed up the latter as ‘western feminism theorizes, women in postcolonial societies suffer and act’ (stewart : ). later papers would supplement these accounts of third world judicial and legislative activism (see manji ). green and lim ( ) developed a similar critique of universalist notions of gender justice investigating how female genital mutilation (fgm) had become what they call ‘the ’obvious’ site upon which to explain to university students conflicts and tensions surrounding claims to the universalism of human rights’ (green and lim : ). seeking not to evaluate the rights and wrongs of fgm, but to use it to hold up a mirror to the legal academy, they argued that those teaching about cultural relativism versus universalism could not do so ahistorically, ignoring the role of empire in subjection and relying on an ‘exotic other’ as the basis of their pedagogy (green and lim : ). in a prescient essay kapur explored the ‘cultural wars … being fought out in india in the legal domain’ ( : ). her focus is threefold: on a legal challenge to the sodomy laws in the indian penal code, a legal challenge to satellite broadcasting and an attempt to decriminalise prostitution. kapur shows how claims to authentic indian tradition are mobilised in relation to gender, sex and sexuality in law. faced with the early stages of the rise of the hindu right, she urged critics to theorise ‘desire and pleasure as an important political project within postcolonial india’ ( ). papers on sexual exploitation, trafficking and sex work have appeared in the journal through the years. doezema ( ) explored the struggle over the definition of prostitution and of consent during debates on the un trafficking protocol in . she paid particular attention to the interventions of sex workers in proposing alternative conceptions of ‘sex work’ and this shaping the debate. bradley and szablewska ( ) also critiqued the idea of the third world sex worker as victim of trafficking for sexual exploitation. they argued that legal reform in cambodia was counterproductive, leading to a decrease in sex workers’ autonomy, aggravating the incidence of abuse, and denying cambodian women their right to marry foreigners. land rights, customary law and legal pluralism sls has also hosted a sustained engagement with land rights and agrarian change in the third world, and specifically on customary land law and legal pluralism. this is not surprising, since the early s, when the journal was founded, marked the beginning of a wave of land law reform in the third world sponsored by the ifis (mcauslan ; mcauslan ). the treatment of these themes in their national and global contexts by sls contributors changed considerably over the period. mcdonald and zatz’s paper ( ), discussed above, includes a discussion of the agrarian tribunals set up in revolutionary nicaragua in . on establishing that land had been abandoned or was being insufficiently farmed, they were empowered to redistribute it from the existing landowner to small scale and peasant farmers and to determine whether compensation was payable to the landowner by the government. drawing on fieldwork in east africa, o’rourke explored the evolution of customary law and the use of tradition by men and women in relation to land claims and the negotiation of access to productive resources ( ). tshuma, writing in , took a similarly historical approach, investigating the colonial roots of customary land tenure and its evolution in postcolonial zimbabwe ( ). both are very much of their time, mobilizing perspectives from legal anthropology and legal pluralism to resist the disparagement by the world bank at that time of customary land relations. similar resources were deployed to clarify the implications of the convention for the elimination of discrimination against women for land law, particularly as determined and enforced in third world courts (see stewart ). later years saw a shift away from this dual emphasis on legal anthropology and national contexts, in favour of a concern with international land policy which dealt more squarely with the output of the world bank, itself changing in emphasis (mcauslan ; fortin ). dancer’s recent paper on women’s land claims in northern tanzania, for example, revives the earlier focus on legal pluralism, but now in a changed context where the value of customary land tenure regimes is accepted and, indeed co-opted by the global regime (dancer ; huizenga ). in sum, early contributions on the third world bear the mark of transition. a series of papers thematise this directly, offering for instance a conspectus of the local government and privatization in the later years of pinochet’s chile (parraguez ), and reviewing the role of popular justice in socialist construction under the sandinista government, not long after it had lost power in nicaragua (mcdonald and zatz ). but the sense of change was also evident at the level of theory in the greater traction of wider new left approaches, as opposed to orthodox marxist perspectives on law in the third world which had foregrounded the state, anti-colonialism and political economy. by the early s, scholars were responding to the less favourable political conjuncture by widening their theoretical and thematic focus. santos’s paper discussed above, for example, ranked struggles over land and housing rights on an equal footing with those between capital and labour, which would have been given primacy by more orthodox marxist approaches. there was also a growing willingness to unpick unified models of the state. feminist interventions, like those of rai and stewart, establishing gender as a cross-cutting and independent focus of analysis were most important in this. otto and purdy drew on postcolonial theory, and its critics, to challenge authoritarian developmentalism and nationalism. finally, the strategic need to engage with law presented itself forcefully, as the need to engage with political liberalism and its models of the rule of law displaced earlier simpler concerns with models of state formation and development. though exhibiting different degrees of scepticism about the return of the juridical, both santos and shivji were careful to argue for the continued relevance of the political in widening social and legal contests. gaps and omissions along with these significant contributions there are a number of gaps and omissions in the journal’s coverage of third world scholarship. there is, for instance, little or no explicit engagement in the journal with the theoretical debates over the meaning, purpose and direction of law and development. whilst it is certainly true that many articles published in sls come from within this broad tradition (o’rourke ; stewart ; manji ; harrington and manji ; mcauslan ), they are not centrally concerned with debating the history and contours of the field as such (an exception is de souza ). this is surprising for two reasons one biographical, one conjunctural. first, the original iteration of law and development had been a key frame for much of the scholarly work in and on the third world in the s. ford-funded us scholars and their british peers worked through, challenged and ultimately repudiated the canons of law and development mark i. trubek and galanter’s widely cited essay ‘scholars in self-estrangement’ served as confiteor for the generation of ex-patriate scholars in britain, as well as north america (see de souza ). second, law and development was revived by the world bank in the decade from as it responded to the social and political chaos which had followed its structural adjustment programmes. expanding beyond its narrow focus on fiscal and monetary policy, the bank used loan conditionalities to force the wider reconstruction of third world states. fashionable institutional economics prescribed well-funded rule of law programmes in the name of restarting economic growth. but law and development mark ii made scant appearance in the pages of the journal. why? most importantly it was the north american academy, not the british, which dominated this second wave of scholarship (daniels and trebilcock ; carothers ). well-resourced centres like harvard law school, nyu and wisconsin-madison were better placed to attract influential policy makers from the ifi’s which are headquartered in washington. the pattern of academic mobility also shifted with students and staff from around the third world increasingly moving in much larger numbers to american universities than to those based in the old imperial metropole. where it existed, british engagement was considerably more critical of the new law and development. warwick law school, in particular, carried on the dar es salaam tradition of anti-imperialist scepticism about us-led orthodoxies (see the essays collected adelman and paliwala ). nevertheless, the most prominent challenge to western legal perspectives in the s came from the third world approaches to international law movement, originating at harvard law school and with major contributions from us-based nigerian, kenyan and indian scholars (gathii ). while anghie’s ( ) excavation of the colonial origins of international law through the role of francisco de vitoria is a key point of reference for the movement it was not followed by further related contributions. the second significant gap we have identified is in relation to legal education in the third world. this is also surprising given the political importance attached to curriculum content and teaching practice by the journal’s founders and their erstwhile colleagues in african and other law schools. as we have seen, student demands had crystallized ex-patriate dissatisfaction with the then dominant british style. law in context and critical legal studies, both inspired by this encounter, were and still are about teaching in the first instance. paliwala ( ) offers the plausible explanation that by many third world law schools had been hollowed out by slashed budgets, salary cuts and staff shortages imposed by structural adjustment programmes. the nation-building function which leaders like kwame nkrumah, kenneth kaunda and julius nyerere had ascribed to them was no more. ‘the money men’ had walked ‘away from legal education and law schools’ (paliwala : ). this scarcity of resources was not relieved by the revival of law and development in the s, which concentrated on governance and institutional reforms, to the exclusion of legal education. third world law schools were no longer the venue for lively struggles over the form and substance of legal pedagogy. sls has reviewed a reasonable number of monographs authored by third world scholars. but when it comes to full-length papers we are struck by the relative invisibility of scholars based in the global south. issa shivji was a rare exception and, even then, his paper, which we discussed above, appeared during a two-year visiting professorship at warwick law school. this shortcoming is replicated even in the uk’s area studies journals. thus, a recent study showed that the percentage of papers by africa-based authors published in the journal of modern african studies and african affairs had declined between and . astonishingly acceptance rates had fallen, though submissions were increasing (briggs and weather ). even where published, these authors are cited less often than their western-based counterparts, and while the former focus on specific countries, the latter are more likely to generalize across regions and sectors. this pattern should challenge editors and reviewers in all journals to move beyond ostensibly neutral pre-conceptions of what constitutes world-leading or authentically socio-legal work and to correct for unconscious bias. again, area studies offer insights and remedies, with the review of african political economy recently shifting the venue and leadership for a number of its workshops to the african continent. past futures, present futures in - the ‘e ie ill co e e orkshops o structural tra sfor atio i africa i accra, johannesburg and dar es salaam: http://roape.net/ / / /structural-transformations-africa-today- interventions-left/ (accessed july ). http://roape.net/ / / /structural-transformations-africa-today-interventions-left/ http://roape.net/ / / /structural-transformations-africa-today-interventions-left/ the current tasks of socio-legal studies are influenced by three related developments: the departure of britain from the european union; the attendant impetus to renew contact with the territories of the old empire; and the return of race and colonialism as concerns for legal educators. membership of the common market absorbed the attention of scholars in the years from , especially as it extended its purview beyond narrow questions of trade and commerce. it is an irony of brexit that the process itself will demand academic and policy engagement at the same, if not greater levels over the coming years. however, diplomatic efforts are already intensifying across the commonwealth and other countries of the third world. this will expand opportunities for advisory work already opened-up by the legislative commitment to spend . of gni on development aid (manji ) and its academic outlet, the global challenges research fund. the abundance of resources has already unleashed a wave of programmatic work on the third world by a cohort of new and sometimes less experienced scholars (manji ). new partnerships and pathways of mobility are being forged, as in the early post-independence years. while provincializing europe in the minds of british academics may be a useful side-effect of brexit, it cannot be denied that xenophobia and a certain imperialist nostalgia were integral to the campaign and its ugly aftermath (chakrabarty ; el-enany ). the violence and abuse directed at new and old immigrants suggested that british racism and supremacism hadn’t gone away with the end of empire. the constraints on black and minority ethnic staff in universities and their notably low numbers at senior levels provides further evidence. inspired by the ‘black lives matter’ and ‘rhodes must fall’ movements, students also demand a curriculum that takes seriously the deep implication of colonial practices and thought in british and indeed european law. these were not the precise challenges faced by the founders of sls in , nor those concerning african and ex- patriate law teachers in the s. nonetheless, as we have seen, the journal’s archive, its on the enduring traces of colonial forms and anxieties in european and national citizenship law, see harrington ( ). founding values and the traditions on which it builds can undoubtedly illuminate present controversies and injustices. texts like shivji’s intellectuals at the hill, jk kanywanyi’s ‘decolonizing and demystifying legal education’, as well as walter rodney’s how europe underdeveloped africa and cheche, the magazine of radical tanzanian students, can offer some guidance to today’s critical race theorists and students of transnational law and global justice. conclusion in this review to mark twenty-five years since the founding of social and legal studies, we have sought to locate the journal in the broader history of socio-legal studies and legal education in the uk and to consider its engagement with non-western or third world scholarship. we have shown how the journal recognised that the production of critical knowledge about law depends on a recognition of the deep implication of colonialism and imperialism in its creation and evolution. william twining gave this a positive formulation in his book-length appraisal of the work of francis mading deng and abdullahi an-na’im (sudan), yash pal ghai (kenya) and upendra baxi. he argued that a ‘just international order and a healthy cosmopolitan discipline of law need to include perspectives that take account of the standpoints, interests, concerns, and beliefs of non-western people and traditions. the dominant western scholarly and activists discourses about human rights have developed largely without reference to these other standpoints and traditions. claims to universality sit uneasily with ignorance of other traditions and parochial or ethnocentric tendencies (twining : ). while sls has made considerable progress in fulfilling the radical promise of its early mission statements, these have not been fully realised. significant jurists in the third world tradition and their broader intellectual contexts are still little known by their peers in the uk, nor are they read by our students. the juristic canon remains largely unchanged, though the need for change is great. the journal’s current editors offer some hope, recalling recently that sls ‘was born out of a commitment to feminist, anti-colonial and socialist economic perspectives to the study of law’ ( ). more defiant than defensive now, this articulates the political and epistemic strands of the journal’s best traditions when both are again in demand. 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profession ( - ): - . thomas, p ( ) the journal of law and society at : history, work, and prospects journal of law and society. twining w ( ) mcauslan in context: early days in dar and warwick. in: zartaloudis t (ed) land law and urban policy in context: essays on the contributions of patrick mcauslan. london: birkbeck law press, pp. - . twining w ( ) introduction. in: twining w (ed) human rights, southern voices. cam- bridge: cambridge university press, pp. - . introduction: frederick douglass’s rhetorical legacy jonathan p. rossing gonzaga university john r. mckivigan indiana university purdue university, indianapolis this symposium, inspired by the th anniversary of douglass’s birth as a slave on maryland’s eastern shore, provides an occasion for a careful reconsideration of douglass’s rhetorical legacy—both his written work such as autobiographies and editorials as well as his acclaimed oratory. a runaway slave who rose to become one of the nation’s leading reformers, frederick douglass ( - ) was primarily and perhaps most importantly a public communicator whose transformative power emerged from his powerful oratory and eloquent writing. over the course of a public speaking career beginning in and ending with his death in , he delivered over , known addresses, ranging from well-prepared lectures on behalf of numerous reform causes, lyceum lectures repeated to paying audiences across the nation, convention floor debates, political campaign stump addresses, memorial orations for figures such as abraham lincoln and john brown, to impromptu talks when solicited by his many admirers. douglass’s writings included thousands of editorials in the four periodicals he edited, a prolific assortment of journalistic pieces for other publications, and of course his three iconic autobiographies. ___________________________________________________________________ this is the author's manuscript of the article published in final edited form as: rossing, j., & mckivigan, j. r. ( ). frederick douglass’s rhetorical legacy. rhetoric review, ( ), – . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . nineteenth-century americans recognized douglass for the power of his public speaking, and his oratory was always at the center of his work as a political activist and agitator. douglass, as diane barnes ( ) argues, was the “most familiar african american in the nineteenth century” and remains an “american icon.” (pp. , ). the agitator and abolitionist spoke and wrote prolifically for over half a century on almost every significant social issue of the nineteenth century connected to a struggle for freedom, equality, and justice—slavery, woman’s suffrage, immigration, the post-emancipation rights of black citizens, education, and much more. throughout this powerful career in social reform, douglass’s “rhetorical brilliance” both as an orator and author, established him not only as a vital public figure of the s, but also as “one of the most enduring and consequential public voices in american history” (lampe, , pp. - ). another inspiration for this symposium was the five-volume series of douglass’s speeches published by yale university press and edited by the frederick douglass papers under the direction of the eminent african american historian john w. blassingame. long out-of- print, these volumes have recently been placed on the internet by the frederick douglass digital edition. a single-volume critical paperback edition of the twenty most representative and influential of these addresses is due out from yale university press in to coincide with his th anniversary. such works are part of the proliferating scholarship in many disciplines on douglass and his legacy. historians have long used douglass’s public testimony for insights into conditions under slavery, the long struggle for emancipation, and the tragic setbacks african americans faced in their quest for equal rights. political scientists and philosophers have come to take douglass’s thought seriously, and not just on issues of race and reform. literary scholars have explored douglass’s autobiographies and other works as highly influential milestones in the development of racially-conscious writing. communication scholars analyze douglass’s oratory as a powerful exemplar of eloquence and transformative public discourse. all of these disciplines acknowledge that as the most famous african american leader of the nineteenth century, douglass formed a template for later black leaders. the symposium includes an interdisciplinary group of scholars and teachers of who consider how frederick douglass’s rhetorical contributions continue to shape and animate contemporary conversations about public address, social justice, rhetorical education, public deliberation, and other salient topics to rhetoric and composition studies. together, the authors featured in this symposium showcase douglass’s rhetorical legacy across contemporary disciplines and issues. these essays contribute to the ongoing, interdisciplinary conversations to better understand both douglass’s significance in the life of the nation as well as his continuing relevance to the cultural, social, and political struggles of our present and future. first, professor granville (g.) ganter (department of english, st. john’s university) revisits frederick douglass’s narrative and the famous portrait of himself as a young slave addressing the white sails of passing ships on the chesapeake bay, a scene of his “oratorical birth.” he argues that this dramatized moment of coming-to-voice is both one of the most enduring elements of douglass’s story about his acquisition of literacy and an american meme for the disclosure of selfhood. douglass’s speech illustrates his careful manipulation and repackaging of popular images of black oratory. specifically, ganter demonstrates the influence of the amistad slave rebellion on douglass’s narrative. douglass, he argues, appropriates the exploits of self-emancipated slave cinqué, leader of the creole slave revolt aboard la amistad. ganter’s analysis exemplifies douglass’s savvy navigation of print and performance culture where he blends theater and reality in order to construct both new public identities for himself as an orator and new civic possibilities for african americans generally. following granter’s analysis of douglass’s coming-to-voice, the remaining essays shift attention to a douglass’s mature and seasoned voice and his rhetorical interventions in key public issues following the civil war. as kurtz suggests in this symposium, scholars of douglass “seem not yet to have accounted fully for the ranging significance of douglass’s oratorical legacy, particularly after the civil war.” the remaining essays remind us to see douglass as more than the runaway slave who critiqued the “peculiar institution” in his first autobiography or the abolitionist orator of his brilliant “what to the slave is the fourth of july?” who highlighted the hypocrisy of a free slave nation. in “‘so soon as they are worthy’: frederick douglass and the rhetoric of educational exclusion,” professor michael j. steudeman (communication studies at the university of memphis) examines douglass’s strong advocacy of emancipated americans rapidly obtaining education and reveals how it was influenced by the era’s racially-influenced politics. steudeman seeks to remind modern-day scholars what douglass knew too well, that lack of education has often been used as a rationale to deny or remove rights such as suffrage. steudeman shows douglass, in a significant number of public addresses to both black and white audiences, attempting to advocate for educational attainment while at the same time making clear that it was not a valid prerequisite for citizenship. steudeman concludes ““to manage the double-edged sword of educational emancipation and exclusion, douglass left modern-day rhetorical scholars with a perspective that navigates between the poles of peril and promise. a person’s education can be denigrated, undermined, and delegitimized, he knew. but, he counseled, it must be pursued anyway.” in “taking their rights during reconstruction: susan b. anthony’s and frederick douglass’s performances of identity” professor julie husband (department of languages and literatures at the university of northern iowa) explores “the interplay between performance and word and between repertoire and archive” in frederick douglass’s advocacy of african american citizenship rights movement during the reconstruction era. husband’s analysis benefits from her comparison of douglass to the contemporary efforts of susan b. anthony in her efforts to win recognition of women’s rights. studying both their speeches and editorial writings in the decade following the civil war, husband finds that both reformers “self- consciously used their bodies and scripted their speech acts to advance their causes.” the essay gives special attention to how their contrasting “performative styles” affected the highly contentious public battle between the two reformers over passage of the fifteenth amendment when douglass proved more politically influential. husband concludes that “anthony’s and douglass’s public personas, in print and performance, provided guides for future activists and means of projecting and protecting these activists’ felt identities.” next, this symposium includes two pieces that examine one of douglass’s most controversial but rarely studied post-civil war addresses, his speech on may , , at the dedication ceremonies for a statue of john brown at storer college in harpers ferry, west virginia. the first essay, “all lives matter?: frederick douglass’s “john brown” address and the challenge of hidden racism,” is by professor gary s. selby (ministerial formation at emmanuel christian seminary, milligan college). selby shows that douglass used this address not only to praise brown’s courage in his october attack on the federal arsenal at harpers ferry, but also to force his predominantly white listeners to become aware of their own unconscious racism in a manner similar to the strategy of today’s black lives matter movement. he shows how douglass skillfully drew this audience into a series of ironic reversals that exposed the hypocrisy behind their view of brown’s raid as a needlessly violent manner to attempt to abolish slavery. selby concludes that the address highlighted “the potential of irony for provoking self-awareness among reluctant listeners” and “held out the possibility that his society still had a conscience susceptible to being pricked by images of black suffering and injustice.” in “frederick douglass’s john brown problem,” professor jeffrey b. kurtz (department of communication at denison university) examines the difficulty that frederick douglass faced in assessing the violence of john brown’s harpers ferry raid while memorializing john brown. kurtz explains that his essay’s goal was “to encourage students of douglass and social justice to critically examine how douglass remembered john brown, and what these efforts suggest for a contemporary vocabulary with which to work through the challenges of advocacy on behalf of social justice.” kurtz contextualizes douglass address on brown “against the full-throated terror of reconstruction’s shadow, a terror that exposes our own contemporary anxieties about reform, violence, and the debilitating complacency of liberalism.” douglass, kurtz contends, sought “to redeem brown’s vision and to craft a space in which audiences might reflect on that vision as the racist heat of the blistering nineteenth-century continued unabated.” it is douglass’s example of how to remember the past in ways most useful to advance causes such as equality, democracy, human dignity, that makes his speech on john brown still relevant to modern-day readers. professor glen mcclish (department of rhetoric and writing studies, san diego state university) considers the “sage ethos” douglass performed near the close of his career—a character most powerfully marshalled in his anti-lynching oration “the lessons of the hour” ( ). this sage ethos, mcclish argues, both constitutes african american civic consciousness and reveals the pressures and possibilities for the construction of rhetorical character afforded traditionally marginalized rhetors. mcclish first explores this sage ethos in context of the late nineteenth century as douglass distanced himself more from the role of the direct witness to specific events and scenes of struggle that characterized his early career. instead, douglass “adopts the strategy of explicitly framing the debate over lynch law as a trial featuring competing evidence, marshaling metadiscourse to provide a larger recognizable rhetorical structure that he has deliberately imposed on the controversy.” douglass’s performance modeled an approach to african american activism that carefully positioned himself as an intellectual, civic, and moral peer in the context of his white audience’s prejudicial tendencies and the challenging social conditions of the late nineteenth century. in conclusion, mcclish explores the implications of douglass’s sage ethos for twenty-first century speakers of color such as barack obama. his analysis highlights the important and far-reaching constitutive effects of douglass’s masterful attention to ethos. professor robert fanuzzi (associate provost, st. john’s university) effectively bridges the two phases of douglass’s career as abolitionist and then as civil rights advocate in his essay “frederick douglass’s ‘ever-living now’.” fanuzzi aligns douglass’s project of abolition and racial justice with the beginning of radical black studies and alternative composition and rhetoric pedagogies to claim that “douglass’s rhetorical legacy lies within a nexus of institutionalized racism, formal pedagogy, and expressive performance that has opened both the public sphere and the space of the university to memories and expressions of pain, anger, defeat, and power.” he pushes us to recognize that douglass’s “rhetorical legacy grows more radical with each passing year that fails to achieve the promise of abolition” and offers a powerful challenge to continue douglass’s work on our campuses as we struggle against the histories of enslavement and racial capitalism in higher education that continue to characterize the “ever-living now” of racism. professor emeritus c. james trotman (department of english and founding director, frederick douglass institute, west chester university) provides the concluding assessment of douglass’s contribution to the african american oratorical tradition. trotman argues that a recurring theme of douglass’s speeches was its focus on events that needed to be remembered collectively. the act of remembering, argues trotman, became douglass’s “prophetic witness.” reviewing a sampling of douglass’s key addresses over his half-century career as a public orator, trotman argues that douglass consciously adopted a pose inspired by old testament prophets and repeatedly rebuked the hypocrisy of all types of american institutions in failing to live up to the stated principles. trotman’s conclusion regarding douglass are among the most optimistic in the collection: “his use of language and rhetorical devices enabled a nation to continue a long but inevitable journey toward justice by overcoming the ‘noise’ of bigotry, bias, slavery and racism. as a man of faith who was profoundly spiritual, he drew from language and rhetorical strategies a vision of truth and life.” ____________________ taken together, this collection of essays invites us to recognize douglass’s continuing contributions to contemporary struggles for freedom and justice. several authors in this symposium observe that the bicentennial of douglass’s birth coincides with another moment of heightened socio-political discord and fracturing. we need not strain to observe parallels between our moment in history to that of douglass, especially during the post-reconstruction era where long held principles seem threatened by a renewal of some of the worst aspects of american politics. at the end of his career, douglass fought despair about the social and political issues that have not been resolved, particularly as free black citizens suffered significant threats to their rights, well-being, and lives. once again, gains for racial equity made in recent decades seem to be unraveling. the brief fantasy of a post-racial america encouraged by president barrack obama’s election in appears all the more ill-conceived. several contributors elaborate on these parallels between douglass’s experience at the end of reconstruction and today when the advances in black rights seem threatened by a hostile political and cultural climate. yet, in this moment, the authors in this collection find hope in douglass’s legacy. as robert fanuzzi notes in this collection, the work and struggles of douglass’s century are “not over and his job is not done.” several authors highlight douglass’s rhetoric in comparison to modern day proponents of civil rights such as the black lives matter movement and former president obama. douglass provides hope for our time through the fact that his rhetorical interventions in civic life helped move the nation toward greater equity and freedom on our long journey toward perfecting our union. his rhetoric points out the way to guide the nation back to its high regard for human dignity and equal rights covid- : us sees record rise in cases covid- : us sees record rise in cases janice hopkins tanne on june anthony fauci, director of the national institute of allergy and infectious diseases, told the senate health committee that he wouldn’t be surprised if the us saw new cases a day unless the nation got the virus under control. on july there were new cases, the largest daily increase since the pandemic began. on july there were at least another cases, according to the washington post database. as of july, the us had recorded cases and deaths, by far the highest rates in the world. cases were increasing rapidly in southern and western states, most of which had reopened their economies early and had not required mask wearing. florida reported more than new cases on july. on july, texas reported new cases, california ll, arizona , georgia , and south carolina . these outbreaks account for about half of the nation’s new infections. around half the new cases were reported in people under , and cases were trending upward in states on july. hospitals were preparing for an increase in admissions. fauci said that the nation needed to act quickly to control the infection’s spread because the new outbreaks put the entire country at risk. later, in an interview with the journal of the american medical association, he said that the recently reported mutation of coronavirus published in cell might make the virus more infectious. searching for coronavirus tests at drive through or walk in centres, residents lined up for hours in the heat. a striking photo from austin, texas, showed lines of cars snaking through a parking lot in a temperature of °c. temperatures throughout the region were high, ranging from °c in miami, florida, to °c in phoenix, arizona. testing availability varies by state, and even by location within a state. the increase in testing does not, however, explain the rise in cases, as president donald trump had suggested. brett giroir, assistant secretary of health, told a congressional committee on july, “there is no question that the more testing you get the more infections you will uncover, but we do believe this is a real increase in cases.” the increase, particularly among younger people, is thought to be related to their socialising indoors in bars, which have reopened in many states. fauci asked states to close indoor bars, where he called crowds “bad news.” even large groups in the open air, such as the black lives matter protests, are thought to be less risky. governors responded to the surge in cases and to the three day july holiday this weekend when many people will get together for parties and barbecues. they began cutting back on reopening measures and reinstituting restrictions. governor greg abbott of texas mandated that people in most of the state must wear masks in public, cannot gather in groups larger than , and must stay m apart. governor doug ducey of arizona closed bars, gyms, movie theatres, and water parks. california governor gavin newsom ordered businesses with indoor operations—such as bars, restaurants, and theatres—to close in the largest of the state’s counties. governor ron desantis of florida ordered bars and some beaches to close but has not required people to wear masks in public. president trump, who has resisted wearing a mask, made a u turn on july and said he would have “no problem” wearing a mask at events where social distancing was not possible. the apparent turnabout was surprising, because mask wearing has become political, suggesting that the wearer is anti-trump, while not wearing a mask suggests the wear is a trump supporter. trump told fox business that he was “all for masks” and thought they were good, although he thought the virus would eventually disappear. fox j, mayes r, schaul k, shapiro l, berkowitz b. at least people have died from coronavirus in the us. www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/ /na- tional/coronavirus-us-cases-deaths/?itid=lk_inline_manual_ &itid=lk_inline_manual_ covid- dashboardbythecenter forsystemsscienceandengineeringat johnshopkinsuniversity.https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/in- dex.html#/bda fd b e ecf . coronavirus: tracking the global outbreak. new york times. . www.nytimes.com/interactive/ /world/coronavirus-maps.html. korber b, fischer w, gnanakaran w, et al. tracking changes in sars-cov- spike: evidence that d g increases infectivity of the covid- virus. cell. . www.cell.com/cell/pdf/s - ( ) - .pdf. conversations with dr bauchner. coronavirus update with anthony s fauci, md. july . www.youtube.com/watch?v=m l ugs ngc. best p. trump “all for masks,” looked like “lone ranger” in one. july . www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/trump-all-for-masks-looked-like-lone-ranger-in- one. the bmj | bmj ; :m | doi: . /bmj.m news new york, usa cite this as: bmj ; :m http://dx.doi.org/ . /bmj.m published: july o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b m j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j.m o n ju ly . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/ /national/coronavirus-us-cases-deaths/?itid=lk_inline_manual_ &itid=lk_inline_manual_ http://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/ /national/coronavirus-us-cases-deaths/?itid=lk_inline_manual_ &itid=lk_inline_manual_ https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda fd b e ecf https://gisanddata.maps.arcgis.com/apps/opsdashboard/index.html#/bda fd b e ecf http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/ /world/coronavirus-maps.html http://www.cell.com/cell/pdf/s - ( ) - .pdf http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=m l ugs ngc http://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/trump-all-for-masks-looked-like-lone-ranger-in-one http://www.foxbusiness.com/lifestyle/trump-all-for-masks-looked-like-lone-ranger-in-one https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /bmj.m &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /bmj.m http://www.bmj.com/ teaching the introduction to american studies course: a dialogue teaching the introduction to american studies course: a dialogue michael mark cohen, grace wang american quarterly, volume , number , june , pp. - (article) published by johns hopkins university press doi: for additional information about this article [ this content has been declared free to read by the pubisher during the covid- pandemic. ] https://doi.org/ . /aq. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ https://doi.org/ . /aq. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ | teaching the introduction to american studies course the american studies association teaching the introduction to american studies course: a dialogue michael mark cohen and grace wang for education among all kinds of men [and women] always has had and always will have, an element of danger and revolution, of dissatisfaction and discontent. —w. e. b. dubois, the souls of black folk t he introduction to american studies undergraduate survey course remains the public face of our field. wherever it is taught, even in the most traditional of university settings, such a course is always a challenge. the intro is a challenge to the students who must complete the requirements; to the professor who designs, delivers, and performs the class; to the disciplinary boundaries of the university; and, if you are doing it right, to common sense understandings about race, nation, class, gender, and sexuality in the united states of america. these challenges are only compounded by the ongoing crisis of neoliberal austerity, the decline of the humanities, and the debt-fueled anxieties of undergraduates who are pressed to see their education as an “investment” in future employment. how can we reflect on these challenges to revitalize how we teach american studies now? how do we draw from the evolving demands of the present to continually ask and re-ask, what is at stake in teaching the intro to american studies course? how do we draw on the radical legacy of the field to engage students in productive debates around racism, sexism, and social justice in an era of renewed activism and anxiety on campus? this challenge imposes a considerable burden on the american studies professor, because unlike traditional academic disciplines, there is no textbook, template, or even ideal approach to teaching the intro to american studies course. not confined to teaching literature, history, politics, art, or pop culture, our interdisciplinarity opens up the widest horizons, where almost any mate- rial that touches on some aspect of the united states is fair game for such a class. there might not even be consensus on what exactly we are introducing students to—a mode of inquiry, a set of critical thinking and reading skills, a series of intersecting themes, or historical narratives. | american quarterly the differences in our approaches reflect the challenges of teaching an open- ended course that is often at cross-purposes with what students want, namely, a “fun” class that allows them to watch movies, “learn about america,” and fulfill university requirements. the intro course therefore attracts the greatest possible range of skills and attention in our students. the challenge, then, is how to make the field accessible to a wide swath of students in ways that encourage critical interrogation but do not overwhelm their abilities or political sensibili- ties. in our institutional contexts, this diversity includes (but is not limited to) community college transfer students, nontraditional students, multilingual learners, international students, low-income students, first-generation college students, underrepresented minorities, the formerly incarcerated, student par- ents, student veterans, student athletes, as well as large numbers of traditional students who are prepared to succeed in the college classroom. every approach to teaching the intro course is unique in its own way. here, we offer a small part of our running dialogue on the pains and pleasures of teaching the intro to american studies class. michael mark cohen: every version of the intro taught at berkeley takes an interdisciplinary approach to a different topic. we offer intro to american studies courses on food, the frontier, hollywood, consumerism, california, education, memory, and more. i teach (or co-teach) versions on race and one on work. but the one i want to talk about here is called culture wars. i take the term culture wars as metaphor to consider the history of cultural conflict since the civil war. we begin by reading a selection of theoretical excerpts from raymond williams, karl marx and friedrich engels, matthew arnold, and antonio gramsci. once we have discussed their ideas about culture, difference, power, and hegemony, we watch the “singin’ in the rain” number and subject it to interrogative readings from all four thinkers. despite the fact that gene kelly’s solo dance presents itself as an innocent and plea- surable number, we quickly uncover all three layers of william’s definition of culture (a process of cultivation, an anthropological way of life, an exemplary work of art); through marx we see the capitalist mode of production of the classical hollywood style; we pause to consider the importance of criticism (wherein british film institute ranks singin’ in the rain as the tenth greatest movie of all time), all before a baton-twirling cop on the beat appears to silence the music and chase away the dancing fool. after opening with our theoretical toolbox, my next lectures are about the haymarket bombing, gender and jim crow, emma goldman, and so on up to muhammad ali, the birth of hip-hop, and pat buchanan. each lecture provides | teaching the introduction to american studies course the needed historical background for the longer readings while offering a dif- ferent model each day of how to do cultural criticism. typically, we start with an event or a text—such as claude mckay’s sonnet “if we must die” from the red summer of or the postmodern pop performance “life during wartime” by the talking heads from , for example—which leads us back into the historical struggles that shaped this conjuncture. so when i return to the starting point, some three-quarters of the way through the lecture, we can press through to the end of the story with a fully realized understanding of what was at stake in this skirmish of the culture wars. any interdisciplinary course has to be tech-savvy and multimedia in its presentation. and every slide performs the same work as the lecture overall. each provides a historical illustration of a particular narrative point that can, as needed, become an object of interrogation in its own right. by applying this method to the traditional historical survey structure, we encounter years of textual analysis, from the paintings of charles sheeler and lynching photography, prison architecture and census maps, hollywood musical num- bers and charts of economic data. at semester’s end, we even analyze my own syllabus as a text, critical of the myriad choices and ideological assumptions that went into its construction. the lesson is simple: everything is open to political interpretation and nothing should escape our intellectual scrutiny. grace wang: at uc davis, we have cycled through several different models of teaching the intro. we moved toward a model engaging a more thematic approach, rooted in critical keywords in american studies. some colleagues structure the course as an interdisciplinary exploration built on a historical chronology. i organize my intro around a set of themes revisited throughout the quarter: conquest and empire, citizenship and belonging, and globaliza- tion. i start the class by interrogating the idea of “america” and discuss how the analytic frameworks we use to understand the nation—whether conquest, settler colonialism, slavery, and empire, among others—fundamentally affect the kinds of knowledge produced about it. if there’s a message i keep repeating to students, it is that the stories we tell changes depending on whose perspective, values, and logics we place at its center. so in the unit on citizenship and belonging, we read ian haney- lopez’s white by law to understand how legal constructions of whiteness buttress racial logics about who embodies the ideal citizen subject. from there we move to gish jen’s novel typical american, which satirizes narratives about being “self-made” to reveal the racial and gendered bias that prevents certain racialized identities from being understood as fully belonging in the nation. | american quarterly rather than have students read williams and gramsci (which i fully applaud you for doing), i lecture on such concepts as culture, ideology, and hegemony. but like you, i want students to have a theoretical toolbox that they can apply to their analysis of cultural texts and their understanding of moments when culture and politics intersect. we do a study of cultural resistance beginning with a documentary on the zoot suit riots to understand why the zoot suit came to be such a fraught racial signifier during world war ii. i add scholarly works by robin kelley and eric lott to show how these writers use hegemony to provide multiple interpretations of resistance that demonstrate how fashion and music represent politics by other means. i find the academic readings useful in providing a model for how scholars in the humanities make an argument and use evidence to support their claims. while i want the intro to expose students to different modes of under- standing the nation, i also see the course as a chance to practice certain skills. so i take time in lecture to do “nuts and bolts” exercises like differentiating between facts, opinions, and arguments or unpacking the ideologies circulat- ing in whatever our object of analysis, whether a schoolhouse rock! video or a gil scott-heron song. as much as possible, i want lecture to be a space for active student engagement. obviously you cannot lead a -person lecture course as a discussion (and students have sections with their tas for that), but breaking up lecture to problem solve, invite comments, and work in smaller groups helps students see the knowledge as contestable, as taking place through dialogue. in terms of applying concepts to test learning, i require class blogs (managed by sections) that give students an opportunity to pick a concrete object or cultural text from their everyday lives and analyze it vis-à-vis class topics. although they can vary in quality, the very best examples can yield fascinating connections and unexpected gems. mmc: for my part, i keep the scholarship to myself to use in lectures. i want the students to encounter american studies as a set of questions posed by artists and activists and not as a field of academic work (i save that stuff for a senior seminar). for culture wars, i give my students only original sources to read, which for this class includes james weldon johnson’s autobiography of an ex-colored man (a fast-paced and seemingly encyclopedic survey of black life along and across the color line); the birth of a nation (in which we screen only part ); red emma speaks (a stirring collection of radical feminist writings by emma goldman); red harvest, by dashiell hammett (gangsters! wobblies! hardboiled detectives!); charlie chaplin’s modern times (still funny despite deindustrialization); allen ginsberg’s howl (which, in its city lights edition, | teaching the introduction to american studies course gives us both beat sexuality and a book of poetry once put on trial by the state); the fire next time (because james baldwin); as well as blade runner and kindred, by octavia butler (both versions of the neo-slave narrative). the one place i cheat is susan douglas’s where the girls are, which is a pitch-perfect blend of american studies methodology and baby-boomer personal memoir. i think the greatest crime we can commit in teaching american studies—in a field so lacking in hardened disciplinary or genre prejudices—is to be bor- ing and, worse still, to assign boring reading. i believe that american studies should be fun. but i also think that it must remain somewhat dangerous, to which end i use the dubois line quoted above as a kind of “trigger warning.” gw: i don’t think i assign my students boring readings, but they may disagree. and while i assign a variety of primary, popular, and scholarly texts, there is value in having students struggle with the structure and complexity of academic arguments. i want to expose students to an array of sources that will help them make connections between culture, politics, history, and their everyday lives. the importance of teaching american studies at uc davis really hit home when i started teaching about what we call “pepper spray u”—that moment in when media coverage and internet memes thrust uc davis into the national and global spotlight. i teach this at the end of a broader unit on globalization, so by then we have spent time discussing cultural and economic dimensions of global capitalism. while many students know that the “pepper-spray incident” occurred, it is for them, by now, an artifact of the past. i use it as a self-reflexive exercise to historicize the present moment, to make tangible issues about privatization, flexible labor, surveillance, and beliefs about the “public good.” i challenge students to come up their own meanings about the event, to reflect on their own understanding of the role of higher education and public universities, and to make their own connections, whether about rising tuition rates or the increased use of contract laborers and adjuncts to teach their courses. ameri- can studies offers tools to help students understand the contexts that have led them to this university and to the broader debates—about public education, militarization, privatization, and student debt—that affects their everyday lives. contextualizing being a student within an understanding of global neo- liberalism, austerity, and the financial crisis has, in part, been in response to changes in the field, an attention to transnationalism that calls for decentering the united states and situating the nation within the global flows that produce it. but, perhaps most important, by teaching the controversy sparked by stu- dent activism, we can see concretely how it is that we are all affected by this | american quarterly crisis and engaged in the contested global project of creating our own history. teaching the intro shows us how the choices that we make in the world matter. mmc: i agree absolutely. i want to assert my belief that teaching—and teach- ing the intro course in particular—may well be the most politically relevant thing we do as academics. this is due partly to the fact that teaching is itself an interdisciplinary practice that requires the adoption of four fundamental roles: the curator, the scholar, the performer, and the public intellectual. writing a syllabus is a curatorial project, selecting works, topics, and stories, and arranging them across the academic year like a gallery. most of our students will not remember much of what we say in class after they graduate. but they will remember reading kindred, or learning about the astor place riots, or watching the birth of a nation. those choices, to show a student something brilliant (or awful) to read or watch, are the foundational work of how we create lifelong learners. furthermore, as curators, we are active participants in the ongoing canon wars that have been central to american studies since its founding. as scholars, we accept the role of what gramsci calls the traditional intel- lectual, the credentialed intellectual worker employed by colleges, universities, high schools, or online diploma mills. the role of the teaching scholar means that we are expected to be the master of facts and interpretations, to take our work with the utmost seriousness, and to be always up-to-date with the lat- est research. consequently, no intro course can ever be taught the same way twice. if, for example, you are still using the oj simpson trial to introduce issues of race and not black lives matter or “ask a slave” in your lectures, then the material will feel less immediate and relevant, the significance of race needlessly relegated to the past. the art of teaching is therefore a living practice, especially if you are lecturing to hundreds of students at a time (as we both do). lecture halls are unambigu- ously built to look like theaters, with a stage, dramatic lighting, and rows of seats bolted to the floor. sure, you can read your lectures off yellowing pages, or you can adopt the role of what mel brooks called “the stand up philosopher.” abundant energy, a clear voice, and a quick joke go a long way, especially in a lecture about ford factories or the new right. if we love american studies, it is our emotional and professional responsibility to express that joy to our stu- dents. after all, most of what student evaluations really measure is not learning outcomes or pedagogical design but the enthusiasm of the performer onstage. lastly, in doing the intro course, we fulfill a critical role as public intellectu- als. a few years ago, before berkeley shut down this avenue of public access, i | teaching the introduction to american studies course put my entire culture wars course on youtube and itunesu for free. while i got lots of hate in the comments (don’t read the comments), i also got e-mails from eager autodidacts from alabama to iran. publishing popular (and unpaid) articles online or having thousands of twitter followers is great, and i have had some surprising successes working in this arena myself, but teaching a room full of young people (along with large numbers of not-quite-as-young com- munity college transfer students) who are brimming with potential can be so much more. perhaps this is easier to recognize for those of us who work at large, diverse public universities, but teaching american history and culture from the vantage point of american studies is inescapably a form of public intellectual activism. the classroom is where we face the public, explore unpopular ideas, and set out the origins of the present crisis. teaching is where we expand the intellectual universe of generations, one lecture, one course at a time. gw: as teachers, most of us strive to reproduce in the classroom our own most formative pedagogical experiences. i’m the product of a small liberal arts college, so i was most thrilled by the engagement and interactivity of a tightly run seminar, the professor less as performer than skillful guide. that continues to influence my approach to teaching, even in large lecture courses. it may be that the traditional lecture format is best suited for reaching those students already primed to succeed in the classroom. and broadly speaking, i wonder, too, whether the charismatic “sage on the stage” is not necessarily a role that students confer as readily to women and people of color. teaching the intro well should, ideally, provoke some cognitive dissonance in our stu- dents, whether in received knowledge or common sense. so much of what we teach highlights structures of violence and inequity foundational to the nation. this can be challenging for some students, who may find it easier to displace some of that discomfort onto the instructor. and public intellectual activism can sometimes translate as ideological doctrine, a “personal gripe,” “too nega- tive,” or “hatred of america,” particularly when the instructor’s authority is more easily dismissed because of race, gender, and other categories of identity (although it is a variation of a student comment that i suspect most of us who teach the intro have received). that said, it is hard to dispute that passion, enthusiasm, and humor go a long way in the classroom and that teaching the intro can feel like a constant project of revision. there are always new perspectives, readings, examples, and technologies that can be added. i sometimes experience teaching this course as a process of always coming up a bit short because there are inevitably questions and experiences that remain unaddressed in a ten-week quarter. but i also take | american quarterly heart that for some students, the intro opens up modes of asking questions, thinking critically, and using evidence—skills they can continue to develop, whatever their path in life. notes michael mark cohen would like to thank julie sze for organizing this forum, grace wang for the conversation, david gross and jean-christophe agnew for providing the best possible models, kathleen moran for team teaching, and all the teachers i’ve ever had who showed me the power of this noble profession. grace wang thanks julie sze and michael cohen for ongoing, engaged conversations about teaching (and beyond), and to the many teachers who have inspired her through their passion and example. . “california’s upward-mobility machine,” new york times, september , , www.nytimes. com/ / / /upshot/californias-university-system-an-upward-mobility-machine.html?_r= . . selections from the cultural resistance reader, ed. stephen duncombe (new york: verso, ). . conducted every ten years since , the british film institute’s sight & sound greatest film poll of world film critics from put singin’ in the rain at number . by the poll it had dropped, sadly, to number . see explore.bfi.org.uk/sightandsoundpolls/ /critics. . sunaina maira and julie sze, “dispatches from pepper-spray university: privatization, repression, and revolt,” american quarterly . ( ): – . . “ask a slave” is a webseries performed by azie mira dungey based on her experiences working as lizzie mae, housemaid to george and martha washington, at the living history museum at george washington’s mount vernon. see www.askaslave.com. . introduction to american studies ac, www.youtube.com/watch?v=vf wkqvhgea&list=pl d b ee. . in october i published an article on medium.com that grew directly out of my teaching on race. the essay got picked up by gawker.com (who still hasn’t paid me for it) and instantly seemed to “go viral.” the essay, “douchebag: the white racial slur we’ve all been waiting for,” got well over a million hits in less than three days, leading to more than a million posts on facebook (followed by a string of unfriendings), instant sub-reddits, a claim in the guardian that i had definitively redefined the term, and my first e-mail death threat (accompanied by my picture appearing on stormfront.org), all of which are various measures of public intellectual success. but it did lead me to think that american studies scholars should try to translate more of their teaching work into popular, even humorous writing. see human.parts/douchebag-the-white-racial-slur-weve-all-been-waiting-for-a f d;gawker. com/douchebag-the-white-racial-slur-we-ve-all-been-waiti- ?trending_test_d&utm_ex- pid= - ._dvndezyqh s k zsnkcw. &utm_referrer=https% a% f% fwww. google.com% f. . a recent new york times opinion piece by anne murphy paul asks, “are college lectures unfair?” (september , ). in it, she cites studies conducted by scholars at the university of washington and the university of texas at austin that suggest that the lecture format puts women, minorities, low- income, and first-generation college students at a disadvantage. specifically, she asks if lectures “biased against undergraduates who are not white, male and affluent?” see also gabriella gutierrez y muhs, yolanda flores niemann, carmen g. gonzalez, and angela p. harris, eds., presumed incompetent: the intersections of race and class for women in academia (logan: utah state university press, ). for an annotated bibliography of gender and its impact on student evaluations, see www.crlt.umich. edu/sites/default/files/resource_files/gsebibliography.pdf. race, violence and neoliberalism: crime fiction in the era of ferguson and black lives matter pepper, a. ( ). race, violence and neoliberalism: crime fiction in the era of ferguson and black lives matter. textual practice, ( ), - . https://doi.org/ . / x. . published in: textual practice document version: peer reviewed version queen's university belfast - research portal: link to publication record in queen's university belfast research portal publisher rights copyright taylor and francis. this work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. please refer to any applicable terms of use of the publisher. general rights copyright for the publications made accessible via the queen's university belfast research portal is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. take down policy the research portal is queen's institutional repository that provides access to queen's research output. every effort has been made to ensure that content in the research portal does not infringe any person's rights, or applicable uk laws. if you discover content in the research portal that you believe breaches copyright or violates any law, please contact openaccess@qub.ac.uk. download date: . apr. https://doi.org/ . / x. . https://pure.qub.ac.uk/en/publications/race-violence-and-neoliberalism-crime-fiction-in-the-era-of-ferguson-and-black-lives-matter( bc c d- cb - d - c-d e ).html race, violence and neoliberalism: crime fiction in the era of ferguson and black lives matter andrew pepper, queen’s university belfast abstract: this paper uses recent instances of police killings of african-american men, and of the retaliatory violence that has flared up in cities across the us (e.g. ferguson, baltimore, baton rouge), and of the emergence of black lives matters since , as a starting point to think about how well crime fiction can help us to make sense of the larger problem of political violence in the contemporary us. crime fiction is well-placed to offer insight into the problem of race, drugs, poverty and policing but by paying close attention to the wire, walter mosley’s always outnumbered, always outgunned and chester himes’s plan b, i argue that the issue of depicting police violence in a form where the law must also be validated and of accommodating the destructive potentiality of black political violence in a form narratively orientated towards rational explanation and resolution requires very careful consideration. what is different about our contemporary moment is not simply that young black men are being killed by the police or that violent retaliation inevitably follows but rather that these circumstances are also tied to the precariousness experienced by poor black people under neoliberalism. the issue at stake is how exemplary crime fictions make sense of, and critically interrogate, the relationship between race, violence and neoliberalism. keywords: race, violence, neoliberalism, crime fiction, the wire; ferguson, black lives matter author address: dr andrew pepper school of arts, english and languages queen’s university belfast bt nn a.pepper@qub.ac.uk corresponding author: as above mailto:a.pepper@qub.ac.uk race, violence and neoliberalism: crime fiction in the era of ferguson and black lives matter what is at stake for contemporary crime fiction following the police killings of unarmed african-americans in the united states and the reprisal killings of police officers by armed african- american men? this article does not seek to address this question head-on. it does not try to consider what can crime fiction tell us specifically about the killing of michael brown by a white policeman in ferguson, missouri, in august , an event that sparked a violent uprising and brought to national and international prominence the work of black lives matter – an activist group founded in to draw attention to and campaign against police violence targeting black people in the us. nor does it ask what light can crime fiction shed on the death of freddie gray, after his arrest in baltimore in april , and the rioting that unfolded there or, indeed, the killing of seven police officers by micah johnson, an african-american us army reserve veteran, in dallas in july . instead it considers whether or to what extent crime fiction can help to make sense of the larger ‘problem’ of political violence in us society, i.e. the ongoing state violence perpetrated against black communities and the retaliatory violence exercised by black people in pursuit of political ends. in one sense, crime fiction is well-placed to offer instructive insight into such complex and fraught issues. after all, a particular kind of us crime fiction (e.g. the wire, richard price’s clockers) is already grounded in the urban realities of crime, drugs, poverty and quasi-militarised policing, and crime fiction has always tried to ‘show how the various spaces of a city are connected through acts of violence, and how these connections indicate the spatializations of power within the city.’ but, as i’ll argue in this article by paying close attention to the hbo-tv series the wire ( - ), walter mosley’s always outnumbered, always outgunned ( ), and chester himes’s unfinished novel plan b ( ), the issue of what is at stake when trying to depict police brutality in a form where the law must also be validated, or indeed when trying to accommodate the open-endedness and destructive potentiality of black political violence in a form narratively orientated towards rational explanation and closure, requires careful consideration. these examples are very much not post-ferguson or post-black lives matter. indeed one could argue that the crime fiction of ferguson and black lives matter, that is to say, crime fiction that specifically references and engages with these events and the activism they set in motion, is still being written. still, the fact that my examples were produced at an earlier moment or in relation to a different set of contexts, and yet are still able to speak to or about the current crisis, suggests a kind of historical continuum. as ta-nehisi coates puts it, ‘in america, it is traditional to destroy the black body’ and that ‘the destroyers are merely men enforcing the whims of our country, correctly interpreting its heritage and legacy’. insofar as coates is able to acknowledge to his son that, ‘your life is so very different from my own’ while at the same time situating the killings of ‘eric garner, renisha mcbride, john crawford and tamir rice’ as part of a continuum going back to slavery and ‘the pillaging of life, liberty, labor, and land’, i would like to extend this logic to my treatment of crime fiction. that is to say, i want to argue that my exemplary crime stories depict and negotiate a set of experiences that are part of this racist continuum but that they also speak to what is distinctive about the contemporary moment: not simply that young black men are being killed by the police, or violent retaliations inevitably follow, but rather how the precarity unleashed by capitalism in its neoliberal phrase is disproportionately affecting poor, black lives. as lester k spence argues in his ground-breaking book, knocking the hustle: against the neoliberal turn ( ), racism alone cannot ‘explain why there are some black populations we as black men and women are all too willing to fight for, while there are other black populations we are willing to let die.’ rather, the answer also lies in ‘the gradual embrace of the general idea that society (and every institution in it) works best when it works according to the principles of the market.’ the first part of this article examines the wire, notably the third season, as a response to this precarity and poses its highly nuanced reading of the effects of the de-industrialisation of inner- city baltimore and the correlative rise of the drug trade against its more problematic account of the police and black violence. taking the baltimore riots as a starting point, and the public denunciation of the rioting by the wire’s co-creator david simon, my discussion frames simon’s denunciation, and the wire’s depiction of the baltimore police force, in relation to a more general unwillingness to characterise black violence as anything except symptom of the drug trade, analogised as capitalism in its neoliberal phase. i argue that simon’s move, following hannah arendt, to separate the spheres of politics and violence – that is, to argue that violence has no place in the political process – means that he cannot come to terms with the political significance of what took place in ferguson and baltimore. instead, as a disillusioned arendtian who passionately believes in ‘the ideal of politics as action in the public sphere’ but who has witnessed the degradation of this ideal by civic politicians and their capitalist paymasters, simon leaves himself with nowhere to go, or rather he depicts ‘politics’ in the wire as having no forum or outlet for meaningful exchange. as someone who repeatedly and despairingly emphasises the triumph of the free market, meanwhile, he remains handcuffed to a structuralist vision of power that in turn allows no agency for a black population oppressed by capitalism. arendt’s on violence ( ) was partly written in response to franz fanon’s defence of violence in the wretched of the earth ( ) and the second section of this article opens by considering fanon’s claims, i.e. that politics and violence are necessarily intertwined and that violent resistance is an important route to political emancipation. it finds affinity between fanon’s understanding of the ethical potential of embodied violence and the defence of the ferguson rioters offered by black scholars like frank b. wildersson iii who claimed, ‘it’s that mass of black youth in ferguson, and not the speeches of black politicos and certainly not black ministers that is causing a response.’ this is the jumping off point for my consideration of mosley’s always outnumbered, always outgunned, a collection of linked short stories featuring ex-convict socrates fortlow. if simon is too dismissive of the transformative potential of black violence and presents the disintegration of baltimore as tragedy for which there is no cure, and the ‘black youth of ferguson’ as characterised by wildersson, following fanon, see violence as redemptive and potentially even revolutionary, mosley’s stories offer a more ambiguous account of the usefulness of violence and of the capacity for crime fiction to intervene in and help to order the world it seeks to depict. in response to neoliberalism’s emphasis on autonomy, freedom, progress and by extension on the ability of resilient individuals to shape their future, mosley’s stories emphasise fortlow’s fear, anxiety, suffering and hesitancy and as such show that emotional and bodily ‘affect’ does not easily equate to political agency. rather than giving us a surrogate detective who solves problems and arrives at clear-cut answers, who uses violence for redemptive ends, and who in turn produces a narrative that moves inexorably towards resolution and closure, mosley’s emphasis on fragmentation and vulnerability (whereby violence produces its own problems and insecurities) enables him to strip down and reassemble the crime novel in such a way that allows him to identify and offer counter-positions to the logic of economic neoliberalism and the precariousness it induces. mosley pointedly does not condemn violence, but nor does he celebrate it as a pathway to revolutionary change. in the conclusion i return to fanon’s the wretched of the earth which, as frazer and hutchings observes, ‘begins as the celebration of revolutionary violence’ but ‘ends up by drawing attention to the corrupting and debilitating effects of violence, whether reactionary or revolutionary, on both perpetrator and victims.’ this mirrors the move we see in himes’s plan b, which he started in the late s but didn’t finish and which was first published in france in . in an opening eerily reminiscent of the killing of seven police officers in dallas in july , a black sniper – enacting himes’s claims about the efficacy of organised violence (‘if there must be violence, i believe it should be organized violence’ ) – shoots and kills a number of new york cops before ‘the police deploy an even more powerful weapon to retaliate and end his killing spree’. as the violence spreads and the tit-for-tat retaliations intensify, the result is not revolution but a bloody orgy that destroys everything in its path. himes may end up in the same place as fanon but in getting there he shows us how the crime novel, with its historic links to the state, though well-suited to the task of mapping the violence perpetrated by the state on poor black people, struggles to cope when this violence is re-directed, via orchestrated political action, at the state and its proxies. the wire – after the baltimore uprising it was perhaps inevitable that, following the baltimore uprising in which the death of freddie gray, a young black man, in police custody in april led to spontaneous acts of rioting, looting, destruction to property and anti-police violence, media and political commentators would turn to the wire. the hbo-tv series had already made baltimore infamous as the setting for its portrait of the struggle between drug dealers and the police and by extension of the racial and class cleavages ravaging inner city america, and the violence had flared on the same streets where the tv-series had been filmed. more than this, david simon, the co-creator of the wire, took to social media on the first night of disturbances to urge the rioters to ‘turn around’ and ‘go home’ and during the aftermath, was widely interviewed by print and online media condemning the violence. for simon, the riots underscored his arendtian assertion about the futility and counter- productiveness of violence as a means of achieving political ends: ‘the anger which brings mass civil disobedience into the streets, or the anger and selfishness that co-opts that movement into burning a senior center site and a looted liquor store…i value one and i cringe at the diminished authority and moral force of the other.’ violence, for simon and indeed arendt, is not just morally wrong; it may be harmful to the real cause of reform insofar as it mobilizes a counter-revolutionary backlash, and leads a cycle of disinvestment and urban blight. in response to simon’s various assertions, some commentators, like dave zirin in the nation, offered a critical reappraisal of the wire in light of police violence in the city, arguing that its portrait of ‘baltimore’s finest was almost comically kind’, while coates, in the atlantic, offered a damning assessment of preaching non- violence in the face of ongoing police brutality: when nonviolence is preached as an attempt to evade the repercussions of political brutality, it betrays itself. when nonviolence begins halfway through the war with the aggressor calling time out, it exposes itself as a ruse. when nonviolence is preached by the representatives of the state, when the state doles out heaps of violence to its citizens, it reveals itself to be a con. for the purposes of this article, i am most interested in thinking about how or to what extent the riots in baltimore bring to the fore incipient tensions already present in the wire (rather than using the riots as a stick to beat the wire with the benefit of hindsight). on the one hand, these include its careful delineation of the effects of neoliberal capitalism on the poorest and most vulnerable citizens (who are, un-coincidentally, mostly black) and its desire to connect the resulting precarity with a set of political decisions taken at a city, state and federal level. on the other hand, they include an unwillingness to depict the kind of police brutality that led to gray’s death or alternatively a desire to limit criticisms of the police to institutional failings and to the damaging effects of the ‘war on drugs’; a missed opportunity to focus on grassroots mobilisations from within black communities; and an absolute refusal to sanction black violence as anything other than a symptom of the drug trade. in this part of the article, i would like to disentangle these various claims and show how they are the product of what i want to call an arendtian liberalism aligned to a marxist structuralism – both of which we can trace back not just to simon but also to a set of assumptions or a series of tensions that we might see as characteristic of crime fiction in general . certainly the wire has much to say about the anger and despair of being poor and black in the twenty-first century american city. specifically it addresses the issue of how the restructuring of the us economy and the loss of ‘good’ manufacturing jobs to cheaper competitors and attendant shifts in the priorities of federal, state and city officials under the auspices of neoliberal reforms (e.g. the diversion of public and private resources away from welfare provision and social security spending towards private developments) is felt hardest by the poorest, most vulnerable citizens. in doing so, the wire offers what kinkle and toscano call a map of ‘the dynamics of the contemporary uneven and combined geographical development of capitalism.’ hence it shows us not just how ‘the evaporation of working class jobs leads young men into the drug trade’ but also how men like reginald ‘bubbles’ cousins and dennis ‘cutty’ wise, who eschew the drug trade, are compelled to hustle for a living, and are given little or no support from the state (e.g. in season five, bubbles must self-treat his addiction, and in season three, cutty must seek private funding for a gym he is trying to set up for ‘ghetto’ kids). if, as spence puts it, ‘under the neoliberal turn, cities and individuals alike are forced to become more and more entrepreneurial bearing the responsibility and risk for a range of actions’, this entrepreneurialism is a ‘byproduct of particular social and political forces’ that in turn ‘hollow out’ industrial capacity and ‘leave behind’ the poor, black population that cannot follow wealthier white people to the suburbs. elsewhere i argue that crime fiction is capable of similarly penetrating critiques of public power and that ‘the intertwining of public and private interests, of state institutions and commercial businesses, has a long and complicated history.’ but this critique is typically set against an acknowledgement of the public good of an effective judicial system and that, as a result, ‘crime fiction tends to produce a contradictory account of the state as both necessary for the creation and maintenance of collective life and central to the reproduction of entrenched socio-economic inequalities.’ the notion that crime fiction operates in a field of tension between what we might call liberal and marxist accounts of the state and of power finds its correlative in simon’s anti- capitalist vision of social and political collapse on the one hand, and on the other, his robust defense of both the police and the political process. ‘i believe in governance. i believe in good governance as being a goal,’ he claimed in one post-uprising interview, echoing arendt’s defence of political participation over revolutionary violence in on revolution ( ). in another interview, he reiterated his general support for law-enforcement as a ‘thick’ public good, over and above any acknowledgement that large parts of the black population in the us, especially post-ferguson, would have valid reasons not to concur: ‘a lot of people would say that any time the police win a fight, it’s police brutality. i would not. any fight that does happen, the police are supposed to win it, not lose it.’ simon’s commitment to both positions means that he, as a bona fide public intellectual, and the wire as primarily his creation, struggles to accommodate two related counter-positions, both of which assume an important racial complexion. first, the idea that the police force is institutionally racist and hence fundamentally implicated in what lisa miller calls ‘racialized state failure’: i.e. the militarisation of policing and police violence is directly linked to ‘other deeply racialized deadly risks in american society’ and hence to the ‘relentless attack’ on civil rights process, welfare provisions and public services, moves that disproportionately affect black lives. and second, the notion that black violence as a form of politicized agency might not be reducible to the effects of capitalism as analogised by the drug trade, and may have some role to play in the wider political process. turning firstly to the wire’s depiction of the police, i should point out that the series is by no means sympathetic to the police as an institution. for example, it shows how crime prevention effectively equates to shifting the blame from institutions to individuals while requiring middle managers to ‘duke the stats’ in order to prove that crimes rates are falling (see, for example, series , episode , hereafter : ). however, in light of the deaths of young black men like michael brown and freddie gray at the hands of the police and the post-ferguson militarisation of the police (‘officers clad in kevlar vests, helmets and camouflage, armed with pistols, shotguns, automatic rifles, and tear gas’ ), we might ask whether the portrayal of the rank-and-file police in the wire reflects what kinkle and toscano call the show’s ‘nostalgic valorization of the moral economy of work and craft’. there are two significant incidents of state violence exercised against black people in the third season and both end up exonerating the police force as a whole by playing down the racial dimension. the first involves a drug ‘bust’ in the western district where officer dozerman is shot by a ‘gangbanger’ when the ‘bust’ goes wrong ( : ). in the subsequent episode ( : ) the black perpetrator is found and beaten by dozerman’s colleagues, an act that is justified – morally if not legally – by the confession the police elicit. in the second incident, roland ‘prez’ pryzbylewski, a white police detective, mistakes a black undercover cop for a suspect and shoots him ( : ). though prez is unable to determine with any certainty whether race was a factor in influencing his decision to fire his gun, he takes full responsibility for his actions and resigns. the incident doesn’t further inflame racial sensitivities either within the police department or in the wider city, and prez is rehabilitated in the fourth season when he becomes a teacher in an inner city school. we certainly don’t see evidence of the kind of incendiary police brutality that led to the deaths of gray and brown, nor even do we see the few ‘bad apples’: cops who use derogatory racist language and subject black people to random, gratuitous, indiscriminate beatings. this led some bloggers, in the aftermath of the baltimore uprising, to question whether simon and his co-producer, ed burns, a former baltimore cop, might be too close to elements within the baltimore police department. spence makes the point that the neoliberal turn has been marked not just by urban disinvestment and savage cuts to welfare spending and social programs but also by the militarization of the police – and he suggests that the move to secure urban space via military means and using a ‘military mindset’ (‘often seeking to use violent methods of policing first as opposed to non-violent ones’) may have ‘helped generate the recent wave of anti-black police violence.’ the wire is certainly willing to point a finger at the failure of the ‘zero tolerance’ policy adopted by baltimore mayor martin o’malley (which, as spence notes, resulted in , arrests between and , roughly the period that the wire ran ): countless episodes show the pointlessness of arresting street-level dealers, only to see them bailed and back on their ‘corners’ within hours. but the only evidence of the baltimore police department patterning itself on a military unit comes at the end of the third season when a decision is taken to close down a ‘free-zone’ colloquially known as ‘hamsderdam’ where the sale of drugs has been unofficially tolerated. in this episode ( : ) the military iconography and rhetoric are intensified to absurdist levels – deputy commissioner bill rawls dispatches his ‘troops’ with the phrase ‘over the top, gentleman’ and plays a version of ‘ride of the valkyries’ on a portable cd player (an obvious reference to its use in apocalypse now). but crucially this encroaching militarisation and references to ‘winning the war’ and ‘taking back the streets’ is limited to the effects of the ‘war on drugs’ which in the wire’s and indeed in simon’s view explains policing failure and increased racial tensions far more than what miller calls more general ‘racialized state failure’. in an interview given after the baltimore uprising, simon offered the following insight into gray’s death and the response to it: ‘the part that seems systemic and connected is that the drug war…was transforming in terms of police/community relations, in terms of trust, particularly between the black community and the police department.’ simon is not necessarily playing down the racialised context of neoliberalism but by explaining the recent wave of anti-black police violence primarily or even solely through the ‘war on drugs’ as system, he effectively situates this violence within the larger context of the free market where racism is less to blame than the generalised application of market principles. for example, the military incursion by the police at the end of the wire’s third season does not provoke a violent response on the part of those african-americans whose territory has been invaded, precisely because the raid is orchestrated as part of the war against drugs, which of course has a racialised dimension but where the police violence is not presented in explicitly racialised terms. accusations of appeasement are perhaps harsh in light of the wire’s ferocious indictment of neoliberalism elsewhere but herein lies the rub. in so far as the wire, according to simon, ‘depicts a world in which capital has triumphed completely, labor has been marginalized and monied interests have purchased enough political influence to prevent reform’ the police or at least the rank-and-file police who want to do ‘good’ are as much victims of the system as the people they are tasked with policing. this is where simon’s marxist structuralism plays out most fully – i.e. where the scope for individuals to institute meaningful change is almost entirely contained by their institutional and systemic contexts. hence dreier and atlas’s observation that the wire as a whole is ‘much better at describing the various forms of inequality and injustice in society than at identifying the political opportunities that make mobilizations and reform possible.’ drier and atlas focus primarily on the wire’s failure to pay more attention to the successful efforts of black baltimoreans in the ‘real’ world to ‘push powerbrokers to change policies and institutions’ and ‘make the city more humane and livable.’ however, their definition of political mobilisation could be widened to include the kind of violent insurrection witnessed in ferguson and baltimore and that is wholly absent from simon’s despairing vision of urban tragedy and collapse. indeed one could argue that this despairing vision necessarily precludes any instance of politicised black agency or to put this another way, it is hard to imagine how, in the wire, individual acts of resistance might coalesce into something more threatening to the status quo, i.e. the kind of collective movements that spontaneously organised in response to the police killings in ferguson, baltimore and elsewhere. there are of course countless examples of black violence in the wire – drug dealers killing one another as literal embodiment of dog-eat-dog capitalism – but at no point in the five seasons is this violence directed outwards at the markers of black oppression (e.g. the police, politicians, multi-national corporations). violence and power, as arendt argues, are related only in an inverse or negative sense: so that ‘violence appears only where power is in jeopardy’ and that while ‘violence can destroy power’ as we see when drug kingpin russell ‘stringer’ bell is assassinated at the end of the third season ( : ), ‘it is utterly incapable of creating it.’ simon’s and indeed arendt’s denunciation of violence as anti-politics stands in stark contrast to fanon’s conceptualization of individual violence ‘as a cleansing force’ and of collective violence as an inevitable product of domination and, potentially at least, as means of remaking the world. as such, simon’s defense of the old models of nonviolent protest (as ‘epic and good’ ) borne of the civil rights movement and continued in the form of peaceful marches and stirring speeches by black figureheads (and which are implicated in arendt’s definition of ‘man as a political being’: getting together with his peers, acting in concert ) is starkly at odds with what eddie s. glaude witnessed in ferguson. namely, ‘a mode of organizing that called to mind a more complex picture of black struggle’ and a portrait of ‘the power of black political actors long thought apathetic and uninformed: young people, tattooed, with fitted hats, angry, fiercely intelligent and organized.’ this last description brings to mind figures like ‘stringer’ bell, avon barksdale and marlo stanfield from the wire, but their anger, organisational prowess and intelligence are only ever wielded in pursuit of self-interest and to maximise profit. even a more complex and ambiguous figure like omar, who in some senses resembles eric hobsbawm’s ‘social bandit’ – i.e. a ‘pre-political’ figure who instinctively lashes out against the wealthy – directs his violence only against the drug gangs rather than at the markers of white, capitalist power. simon’s liberalism, following arendt, makes it difficult for him to acknowledge the political potential of violence per se, and his structuralist vision of the world (aligned to a marxist account of capitalism’s totality) makes it hard for him, in different ways, to think about what individuals and collectivities can do to confront power. however, the problem may also be symptomatic of crime fiction more generally. that’s to say, it may be replicated in the genre’s difficulties when trying to accommodate violence that may in one sense be criminal (insofar as it results in damage to property and even loss of lives) but that is premised on the call for social and political upheaval, and which cannot be contained by the state and law. if crime fiction’s political vision remains tied, always awkwardly and unwillingly, to the state because it cannot, in the end, ever fully escape its securitizing tendencies, the issue of what to do with political violence will always be fraught. in asking what crime fiction might look like if it permitted revolutionary violence, we are given a terrifying answer in himes’s plan b (which i will address in the conclusion). but in the next section, i want to look at mosley’s always outnumbered, always outgunned (hereafter referred to as outgunned) in order to think about how best to tackle the accompanying problem of black political agency. always outnumbered, always outgunned – after the la riots it is unfair to compare mosley’s outgunned as a response to the la riots of with the wire’s relationship to the baltimore uprising of , given mosley’s text enjoys the advantage of hindsight. but, given this hindsight, and the fact mosley chose, very deliberately, to set his linked stories in los angeles in , it is instructive that the collection as a whole deals with the riots themselves so cursorily. the only story to feature the rioting is ‘history’ in which socrates fortlow, a convicted murderer and rapist who is trying to rebuild his life and atone for past mistakes, refuses to participate in the violence, and remains indoors ‘for three days watching the tiny black and white tv screen’, despite the fact that: every scar on his body and curse in his ear, every sour stomach and sleepless night, every minute in prison, every white girl on a magazine cover, every image in his mind for twenty-seven years of incarceration wanted out in that street. mosley’s unwillingness to address the riots directly – that is, his refusal to give fortlow the chance to exert agency and deploy violence as a means of righting perceived wrongs – offer a useful way into the problem of black political violence and agency that lie at the heart of this article. on first glance there would seem to be a considerable distance between mosley’s careful ambivalences and fanon’s endorsement of violence as a cleansing force and violent insurrection as a means of bringing about the end of oppression. but as frazer and hutchings point out there is also considerable unease in fanon’s work, especially the final chapter of the wretched of the earth, about the bodily effects of violence on both oppressor and oppressed: ‘the idea that using violence may be a way to escape being in violence is countered by case after case in which people remained trapped in the violence they have inflicted and suffered.’ this unease, as it is manifest in parts of fanon’s work and throughout mosley’s outgunned, allows us to think about political agency and embodied violence in a different way: not as products of ordered rational minds or as ways of instrumentally achieving a clearly delineated set of political ends but rather in ways that emphasise their imbrication with the ‘negative’ affects of fear, anxiety, rage, grief, and confusion – what sianne ngai calls ‘the predicaments posed by a general state of obstructed agency with respect to other human actors or the social’. if neoliberalism as a social and political project is modeled upon understandings of subjectivity in which the values of entrepreneurship and creativity in turn create the conditions for autonomy, freedom and progress and provide the basis for a rationalist conception of resistance, this kind of focus challenges the logic informing such a project in a number of important ways. first, the precarity which is the inevitable product of neoliberal economics and the ‘negative’ effects of this precarity on already marginalised individuals and groups can be made fully visible and scrutinized. second, mosley’s decision to place ‘negative’ affects like fear, anxiety and rage, which don’t easily translate into recognizable forms of agency, at the heart of his narrative, allow us to see these not as blockages or impediments (to a healthier self) but rather as necessary attributes that allow fortlow to negotiate the unpredictability of los angeles in the early s. this has considerable implications for the crime fiction genre which has traditionally endorsed a more rationalist, positivist model of political agency (i.e. that an ordered, enquiring mind and the capacity to wield violence instrumentally will lead to positive outcomes). fortlow is both a product of and, in his past at least, an inflictor of violence. convicted for murder and rape, and having served a twenty-seven year sentence, he describes himself alternatively as ‘the worst you ever seen’ (p. ), a violent man who’d ‘come up hard and gave as good as he got’ (p. ) and someone who ‘was afraid of what his hands could do’ (p. ). his violence may, in part, be explained by his environment but it is not reducible to it, nor does it constitute him in the present. contra fanon, it is not a ‘cleansing force’ or a means of confronting and overturning oppression – characterised in the stories by the ever-present police and the intrusive noise of the police helicopter, so that ‘socrates could feel the breeze from the rotors come in through the poorly insulated roof’ (p. ). for fortlow, then, the issue is to understand his own capacity for violence (and its relationship to circumstance): hence his observation, while contemplating killing a dog, that it was just the ‘habit of twenty-seven years behind bars out of fifty-eight’ (p. ). fortlow is willing to exercise violence and is highly competent in this regard – for example in ‘midnight meeting’ where he viciously beats and threatens to kill a black man who himself has terrorised the neighbourhood. but even here his violence is best understood as ‘affective’ – in this instance, of hate and perhaps self-hate (‘socrates stood there a good long while staring. he hated petis. hated him’ p. ) – rather than the product of reason whereby cause and effect are directly correlated. without the detective’s raison d’être and indeed capacity to follow a dedicated line of inquiry and draw the necessary conclusions and with no faith in the revolutionary potential of violence – one reason he avoids joining ‘the raging black men’ (p. ) while la burns, despite knowing ‘he was on a path to violence’ (p. ) – fortlow must negotiate a precarious, imperfect world in a piecemeal manner and come to terms with his own vulnerabilities and limitations. certainly violence is sometimes necessary and even desirable, as fortlow tells darryl, a wayward black adolescent he has taken under his wing, when discussing a gang called the young africans: ‘they got their code an’ their colors. they ready to go to war. an’ that’s fine. sometimes you got to go to war. but most of the times you should be helpin’’ (p. ). but violence, for mosley and indeed fanon, is always embodied, i.e. it is situated ‘in the immediate physical experiences of inflicting and suffering violence, and in ongoing bodily existence and orientation.’ in other words, it is not characterised as instrumental or cathartic and rarely leads to favourable outcomes for fortlow or indeed darryl, his young charge. some of the most insightful sections of the collection relate to fortlow’s exchanges with darryl; feeding him and helping him to sleep, encouraging him to come to terms with his own mistakes, showing him the value of fighting and indeed not fighting. ‘first you got to survive,’ he tells darryl, ‘then you got to think; think and dream’ ( ). while fanon’s insights into the bodily effects of violence, and embodied notions of political agency, are grounded in the long revolutionary struggle against colonialism, mosley’s are the product of the precarity arising from the confluence of racism and neoliberal economics. subject to police harassment, bouts of sickness and insomnia, gang violence and bearing all the risks and responsibilities for his actions (as state support is either eroded or withdrawn), fortlow’s response is neither to enact the kind of positive expressions of individual agency we have come to expect of crime fiction protagonists nor to yield to the political pessimism we see in the wire. rather his instincts are always communitarian (e.g. to seek help and sustenance from within the black community) and to offset the precariousness of his situation with the dignity of waged employment; in this case, as an assistant at the bounty supermarket where he quickly earns the respect of his fellow workers and bosses. this is not acquiescence – i.e. ceding to the disciplinary norms of the workplace – but rather trying, in halting, not always successful ways, to construct or recreate what spence calls a usable ‘counterpublic’ whereby the individualizing imperatives of neoliberalism are countered by initiatives within black communities emphasising grassroots activism, education, engagement with public institutions and a general anti-respectability grounded in ‘an attempt to fight for a uniquely black right to the city.’ it is here where mosley’s collection comes closest to articulating – and perhaps therefore foreshadowing – the larger concerns of the black lives matter movement. his efforts to safeguard darryl from the ravages of gang violence require the support of friends and neighbours – a loose alliance of individuals committed to supporting black lives, rather than perpetuating or turning a blind eye to the cycle of black-on-black violence whereby, as fortlow puts it, ‘i thought i knew what i was doin’…killin’ my own people was just part’a the rules’ ( ). here a black-owned bookshop run according to educational and communitarian rather than market principles that fortlow visits during the aftermath of the la riots is presented as embodying an alternative form of revolutionary agency, at least in relation to straightforward political violence: as fortlow tells the owner, ‘you started that store, made room for black men and women, and didn’t take no collection and didn’t tell ’em what to think…that’s revolution, brother, rebellion against the rules’ ( ). flanked by power on all sides – and by the ill-effects of racism and neoliberal capitalism – fortlow invests no real faith in what luc boltanski calls the left’s traditional ‘quest for total revolution’ (i.e. revealing and opposing that which ‘impedes the full realisation of humanity in order to radically transform social conditions so as to allow the appearance of a new, wholly human person’ ). rather he is a disruptive figure precisely because of this dismissal of absolutes and because of mosley’s characterisation of him in terms of what ngai calls ‘ugly feelings’ like frustration, shame, envy and irritation that ‘do not lead to or culminate in some kind of purgation or release’ but are ‘good for diagnosing states of suspended agency’. fortlow has killed and raped; he tries to seduce his friend’s wife; he sells evidence to the police for profit; he turns down the offer of work out of pride. as such, he embodies the ‘anti-respectability’ at the heart of the black lives matter movement. but he is also a good mentor (to darryl), a loyal friend, a hard-worker, and someone who has paid a heavy price for the violence he’s wielded but who has somehow found a way of carrying on regardless. in this sense, the battered, beaten black dog of the story ‘black dog’ that fortlow rescues from a hit-and-run accident after assaulting the driver of the car, and that saves fortlow from a return to prison, because its owner is prepared to testify on his behalf, is testament to this imperfection. this in turn speaks to the kind of agonistic politics or what giorgio agamben terms ‘means without end’ or perhaps politics without ends that most appropriately characterises the black lives matter movement (i.e. where politics is characterised as a series of ongoing struggles against state violence and oppression and where there is no obvious end-point and where the struggle constitutes the politics). it also speaks about the circumscribed agency that mosley associates with a more equivocal, less totalizing form of politics and indeed rebellion: ‘i’m lucky i made it this far. me an’ this black dog here. shit. me an’ this black dog’ ( ). it is here that the form of the linked short story collection perfectly suits its larger political ambitions. the space-time co-ordinates of much crime fiction create an inexorable move towards recovery, knowledge, order and resolution, even this move is only partly achieved or successful. outgunned is situated in los angeles in and around but insofar as each of the stories has its own linearity (i.e. whereby the overall trajectory of the crime story from crime to investigation to solution is disrupted) and because shifts in the physical setting do not correspond to developments in the narrative (i.e. as the detective seeks to ‘solve’ the case), the collection as a whole does not, and cannot, make generalised claims about racism, the law, justice, economic opportunity, politics, violence and rebellion. rather the loosely connected, episodic structure whereby each of the stories has its discreet subject and focus but where characters and concerns from previous stories are sometimes revisited enables mosley to resist straightforward notions of closure and in turn allows forlow to respond more ambivalently to his precariousness – acknowledging that, as a poor black man, he is subject disproportionately to the ill-effects of police violence, economic injustice and racism but underscoring that this doesn’t preclude reclaiming for himself and others a black right to the city. in ‘the wanderer’ he exerts this claim by walking for miles along the beach from santa monica to malibu and beyond, and while as readers we might expect this move beyond south central la into wealthier parts of the city might be checked by the police, and develop into ugly confrontation, in actuality he meets an army veteran and his girlfriend and is able to reflect on, and come to terms with, his own violent history. fortlow may be one step away from poverty and destitution and subject to police arrest and arbitrary imprisonment but as he says at the end of the final story about his dying friend, ‘he don’t need no police car or hospital…he don’t need none’a that shit. and neither do i’ ( ). back to the future – himes’s plan b, after dallas if mosley’s outgunned begins to address the question of what crime fiction in the era of ferguson and black lives matter might look like, its ambivalence towards the use of violence even as a political weapon and its complex depiction of politics as ongoing and agonistic give it a muted, circumscribed quality that sits uneasily alongside the mobilisations called for in the wake of continuing police violence against black people. paradoxically this is where chester himes’s plan b ends up, even though it would seem to endorse organised black violence and agitate for revolutionary change. himes started plan b in the mid- s, at the time of the watts riots, but he never completed it and it was published, unfinished, in france in and not until in the us. in contrast to the wire and indeed outgunned, plan b begins by openly endorsing the claims of black political violence, so long as it is organised and effective (effective because it is organised), even if himes himself was pessimistic about the capacities of art to meaningfully intervene in politics. ‘i don’t believe writers have any effect on politics,’ he stated in an interview in . but having said this, he added, ‘i think writing should be a force in the world’ even if he did not actually believe it was. plan b is very much a force in the world, largely because himes, for the first time, directly embraced the logic of revolutionary violence: ‘of course, in any form of uprising, the major objective is to kill as many people as you can, by whatever means you can kill them.’ the revolution in plan b is organized by tomsson black, who having secured funding from a white philanthropic organization for a project to put african-americans back to work on a pig farm in the us south, uses this money to send rifles to every black man in the country to use in the cause of ‘freedom’. here, then, is a crime novel that directly embraces the logic of black political violence but more importantly shows us its devastating consequences. in a move eerily reminiscent of the killing of seven police officers in dallas in july by micah johnson, a nameless black sniper overlooking new york city’s eighth avenue opens fire with dead-eye precision at a police cruiser, ‘puncturing the roof, shattering the side windows, pounding the drooping blonde heads into splinters of bone and blobs of soft gray brain tissue’ (p. ). the backlash by the authorities is swift and equally violent as a ‘ mm canon’ lays waste to the upper floors of the tenement building where the sniper has hid himself and white cops ‘suddenly rose up from their hiding places and began shooting the fleeing black people down’ (p. ). later in the novel, the logic of this scene is repeated when a funeral procession for the slain police officers is attacked by another black sniper. this time the violence – informed by ‘the humiliations and hurts imposed on [the sniper] and all other blacks by whites’ (p. ) – produces an even more spectacular, and violent, response but by this juncture the problem has mutated across the entire country. in light of the more contained uprisings in ferguson and baltimore, and following dallas and further disturbances in baton rouge and elsewhere, it hard to know what to do with the organised violence of plan b or indeed how seriously himes wants us to take his novel as comment on the race riots of his own era. in one sense and given how far the violence escalates beyond its initial scene, it is difficult to see it as anything more than a cultural fantasy. but himes’s reflections on responses to the ‘problem’ of black political violence shed interesting light on what is at stake when riots occur: ‘the white community gets very upset about the riots, while the black people haven’t seriously undertaken in advance to commit any great amount of violence; it’s just been forced on them. what little violence they have done is actually for protection.’ in this sense, himes’s observations, and thematisations of these observations in plan b, find common ground with coates’s contention that white commentators who condemned the riots in baltimore by starting ‘the clock with the violence on tuesday’ necessarily fail to comprehend the extent to which this violence is, and has always been, intimately connected to ‘state-backed violence’ orchestrated against african-americans but falsely characterised as legitimate because it is ‘committed by the law.’ what plan b demonstrates is the consequences of what would happen if state-backed violence against african-americans was countered not just with violence for the sake of protection or motivated by spontaneous anger but rather in the manner envisaged by fanon. what it worries about, as fanon does, is the effects of this escalating violence on all parties. as himes put it, ‘i’ve tried to imagine what would happen, and write it as a documentary. but i’ve had to stop. the violence shocks even me.’ a more immediate problem for himes was how to assimilate this violence back into the parameters of the crime novel, once it had been unleashed and allowed to run its course. plan b opens with himes’s two police detectives, coffin ed johnson and grave digger jones, looking into a death in harlem but quickly they disappear from the narrative, seemingly irrelevant in the face of the violence unleashed by black and countered by the police. at the end of the novel, they return, to solve the question of who is arming of the black population, and their enquiries lead them to black, at which point the narrative stops, with himes unable or too unwell to finish it. in interviews and notes, himes made it clear what he intended: i originally envisioned a general conflict between the races, but in the final scene coffin ed and grave digger shoot at each other. one of them takes the side of the race brothers, while the other one chooses to uphold the law, not because he feels any loyalty to whites, but because the political and social implications of the rebellion are too much for him. in the first us edition, which first appeared in , the editors michel fabre and robert skinner make it clear where the manuscript ends and that ‘the following pages are reconstructed from a detailed outline found with the rest of the manuscript’ ( ). but without himes’s guiding hand, the conclusion where his two police detectives turn on one another is handled too quickly and schematically for its full implications to make themselves felt. rather what we are left with is another version of the same problem i have been trying lay out in this article: namely that the genre, with its historical links to the state, though better suited to the task of mapping the consequences and effects of the violence perpetrated by the state against the black urban poor, struggles to cope when this violence is re-directed, via orchestrated political action, at the police. perhaps this was one reason why himes couldn’t finish plan b and remarked that his ending ‘amounted to a kind of literary suicide.’ if the wire cannot acknowledge that orchestrated police violence against african- americans has become, and perhaps has always been, the norm, rather than the result of an exceptionalism produced by the ‘war on drugs’ and doesn’t want to legitimise the idea of black retaliatory violence, or sanction a formulation of black political agency centrally founded upon violence, himes’s plan b willingly endorses both of these claims and assimilates them into its narrative, but having done so, struggles to make it cohere as a crime novel. despite their significant political differences, both texts are, willingly or unwillingly, handcuffed to their object of enquiry – the machinery of justice, however unjust, inept, biased and violent it might be. only mosley’s outgunned which shifts its focus from the police and state to the lived experiences of socrates fortlow and which reconfigures the crime story as a series of inter- related but discreet episodes whereby any push towards resolution or any end-point is resisted, is able to investigate what violence, black or otherwise, really means (its effects and consequences, both in a positive and negative sense) and whether or what to extent the suspended agency produced by embracing ambivalent or contradictory positions produces the kind of agonistic politics without ends theorised by agamben. ultimately mosley seems to imply that fortlow’s quiet subversions constitutes a more effective, or indeed a more pragmatic, form of political action in the face of the state’s violence but it is a form bound to and defined by its ongoing-ness and hence it is unlikely to produce positive or at least clear-cut outcomes in the fight against this violence. notes david schmid, ‘imagining safe urban space: the contribution of detective fiction to radical geography,’ antipode, : ( ), p. . - . examples of post-blm (crime) fiction might, paradoxically, include ben winters’ underground airlines which reimagines the us as a place where the civil war never happened and where slavery in some states is still practiced (paradoxically because the contemporary is being interrogated through the lens of a counter-factual history); and other contemporary novels where the contemporary legacies of slavery and other systems of racial oppression are explored (e.g. paul beatty’s the sellout and colson whitehead’s the underground railroad) and where racial struggles are violent, agonistic and, most importantly, ongoing (i.e. where no ‘good’/post- racial end-point has been reached). ta-nehisi coates, between the world and me (melbourne, australia: text publishing, ), p. , p. . coates, between the world, p. , p. . lester k. spence, knocking the hustle: against the neoliberal turn in black politics (brooklyn, ny: punctum books, ), p.xxiii, p.xxiv. see arendt, on violence (new york: harvest, ). ‘“we’re trying to destroy the world”: anti-blackness & police violence after ferguson an interview with frank b. wilderson iii’. http://sfbay-anarchists.org/wp- content/uploads/ / /frank-b-wilderson-iii-were-trying-to-destroy-the-world-antiblackness- police-violence-after-ferguson.pdf [date accessed: august ). mosley’s more conventional detective novels featuring la private investigator easy rawlins function along these lines, despite the fact that violence is not unproblematically redemptive, rawlins does not achieve all the answers and ‘closure’ or ‘resolution’ is only ever partial. elizabeth frazer and kimberly hutchings, ‘on politics and violence: arendt contra fanon’, contemporary political theory, ( ), p. . - . conversations with chester himes, ed. michel fabre and robert e. skinner (jackson: university press of mississippi, ), pp. - . see andrew pepper, ‘chester himes' unfinished crime novel is an unsettling portent of dallas shootings,’ the conversation, july . https://theconversation.com/chester-himes- unfinished-crime-novel-is-an-unsettling-portent-of-dallas-shootings- [date accessed: august ]. see, for example, scott timberg, ‘you won’t learn everything you need to know about baltimore from “the wire,” but it’s a start’, salon, april . http://www.salon.com/ / / /you_wont_learn_everything_you_need_to_know_about_balti more_from_the_wire_but_its_a_start/ [date accessed: august ]. david simon wrote: ‘but now – in this moment – the anger and the selfishness and the brutality of those claiming the right to violence in freddie gray’s name needs to cease.’ ‘the audacity of despair,’ (blog), april , http://davidsimon.com/page/ / [date accessed: august ]. see arendt, on violence. simon, ‘the audacity of despair’. see sonia saraiya, ‘you tell me that the riots are a good thing?’ salon, august . http://www.salon.com/ / / /you_tell_me_that_the_riots_are_a_good_thing_fck_you_com e_to_baltimore_and_say_that_david_simon_on_police_brutality_the_legacy_of_the_wire_and_t he_future_of_american_cities/ [date accessed: august ]. dave zirin, ‘“the game done changed”: reconsidering the wire amidst the baltimore uprising’, the nation, may , http://www.thenation.com/article/game-done-changed- reconsidering-wire-amidst-baltimore-uprising/ [date accessed: august ]. ta-nehisi coates, ‘nonviolence as compliance’, the atlantic, april , http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/ / /nonviolence-as-compliance/ / [date accessed: august ]. http://sfbay-anarchists.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /frank-b-wilderson-iii-were-trying-to-destroy-the-world-antiblackness-police-violence-after-ferguson.pdf http://sfbay-anarchists.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /frank-b-wilderson-iii-were-trying-to-destroy-the-world-antiblackness-police-violence-after-ferguson.pdf http://sfbay-anarchists.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /frank-b-wilderson-iii-were-trying-to-destroy-the-world-antiblackness-police-violence-after-ferguson.pdf https://theconversation.com/chester-himes-unfinished-crime-novel-is-an-unsettling-portent-of-dallas-shootings- https://theconversation.com/chester-himes-unfinished-crime-novel-is-an-unsettling-portent-of-dallas-shootings- http://www.salon.com/ / / /you_wont_learn_everything_you_need_to_know_about_baltimore_from_the_wire_but_its_a_start/ http://www.salon.com/ / / /you_wont_learn_everything_you_need_to_know_about_baltimore_from_the_wire_but_its_a_start/ http://davidsimon.com/page/ / http://www.salon.com/ / / /you_tell_me_that_the_riots_are_a_good_thing_fck_you_come_to_baltimore_and_say_that_david_simon_on_police_brutality_the_legacy_of_the_wire_and_the_future_of_american_cities/ http://www.salon.com/ / / /you_tell_me_that_the_riots_are_a_good_thing_fck_you_come_to_baltimore_and_say_that_david_simon_on_police_brutality_the_legacy_of_the_wire_and_the_future_of_american_cities/ http://www.salon.com/ / / /you_tell_me_that_the_riots_are_a_good_thing_fck_you_come_to_baltimore_and_say_that_david_simon_on_police_brutality_the_legacy_of_the_wire_and_the_future_of_american_cities/ http://www.thenation.com/article/game-done-changed-reconsidering-wire-amidst-baltimore-uprising/ http://www.thenation.com/article/game-done-changed-reconsidering-wire-amidst-baltimore-uprising/ http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/ / /nonviolence-as-compliance/ / this is where simon’s marxism is brought most heavily to bear on the wire and it is striking how closely the marxist geographer david harvey’s appraisal of the slow death of baltimore mirrors what takes place in the wire. see harvey, spaces of hope (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, ), pp. - . jeff kinkle and alberto toscano, cartographies of the absolute (winchester uk: zero books, ). kinkle and toscano, cartographies. spence, knocking, p. andrew pepper, unwilling executioner: crime fiction and the state (oxford: oxford university press, ), p. . pepper, unwilling, p. . this is where simon’s marxism is brought most heavily to bear on the wire and it is striking how closely the marxist geographer david harvey’s appraisal of the slow death of baltimore mirrors what takes place in the wire. see harvey, spaces of hope (edinburgh: edinburgh university press, ), pp. - . see chotiner, ‘everything’; hannah arendt, on revolution (new york: viking, ). saraiya, ‘you tell me’. lisa miller, ‘racialized state failure and the violent death of michael brown’, theory & event, : supplement ( ). james bouie, ‘the militarization of the police’, slate, august . http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/ / /police_in_ferguson_military_ weapons_threaten_protesters.html [accessed august ]. kinkle and toscano, cartographies. see simon, ‘the audacity of despair’. spence, knocking, p. . spence, knocking, pp. - . bill kellner, ‘david simon on baltimore’s anguish’, the marshall project, april , https://www.themarshallproject.org/ / / /david-simon-on-baltimore-s-anguish [date accessed: august ]. spence, knocking, p. . david simon, ‘introduction’, in rafael alvarez, the wire: truth be told (edinburgh: canongate, ), p. . peter dreier and john atlas, ‘the wire: bush-era fables about america’s poor?’ in the wire: race, class, and genre, liam kennedy and stephen shapiro, eds. (ann arbor mi: university of michigan press, ), p. dreier and atlas, ‘the wire’, p. . arendt, on violence, p. . franz fanon, the wretched of the earth, trans. constance farrington (london: penguin, ), p. saraiya, ‘you tell me’. arendt, on violence, p. . eddie s. glaude jr., ‘a requiem for michael brown/a praisesong for ferguson’, theory & event, : supplement ( ). e.j. hobsbawm, primitive rebels; studies in archaic forms of social movement in the thy and th centuries (manchester: manchester university press, ). walter mosley, always outnumbered, always outgunned (london: serpent’s tail, ), . all subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text and refer to this edition. frazer and hutchings, ‘on politics’, p. . sianne ngai, ugly feelings (cambridge ma and london: harvard university press), p. . see rachel greenwald-smith, affect and american literature in the age of neoliberalism (cambridge: cambridge university press), pp. - . frazer and hutchings, ‘on politics’, p. . spence, knocking, pp. - . http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/ / /police_in_ferguson_military_weapons_threaten_protesters.html http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/politics/ / /police_in_ferguson_military_weapons_threaten_protesters.html https://www.themarshallproject.org/ / / /david-simon-on-baltimore-s-anguish luc boltanski, ‘the left after may and the longing for total revolution’, thesis eleven, (may ), p. , p. . - . ngai qtd. in debbie lisle, ‘waiting for international politics sociology: a field-guide to living in-between’, international political sociology (forthcoming). spence notes that mobilisations by blm ‘on behalf of those who have been far from respectable’ is an important part of the movement’s mission. see knocking, pp. - . agamben puts it as follows: ‘what is in question in political experience is not a higher end but…being-into-a-mean as an irreducible condition of human beings…politics is the sphere neither of an end in itself nor of means subordinated to an end.’ means without end: notes on politics, trans. vincenzo binetti and cesare casarino (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, ), pp. - . conversations, pp. - . conversations, pp. - . chester himes, plan b, ed. michel fabre and robert e. skinner (jackson: university press of mississippi, ). all subsequent citations are given parenthetically in the text and refer to this edition. conversations, pp. - . ta-nehisi coates, ‘the clock didn’t start with the riots’, the atlantic, april , http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/ / /ta-nehisi-coates-johns-hopkins- baltimore/ / [date accessed: august ]. conversations, p. . conversations, p. . conversations, p. . http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/ / /ta-nehisi-coates-johns-hopkins-baltimore/ / http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/ / /ta-nehisi-coates-johns-hopkins-baltimore/ / and painting in de visione dei, cusanus’s highly original multimedia work. thomas izbicki provides a comprehensive analysis of indulgences granted by cusanus during his legation in germany, foreshadowing grievances that would give shape to luther’s agenda. noting the lack of evidence that luther was influenced by cusanus, knut alfsvåg nevertheless identifies important parallels in the theological and philosophical issues they engaged with, as well as the neoplatonic thinking they expressed in strik- ingly similar passages. not all essays are about cusanus. christopher bellitto, for example, considers the transition from reform to reformation in his examination of the reform treatise libellus ad leonem decimum. michiel decaluwé proposes that church councils can be fruitfully studied as cultural—not just political—phenomena, drawing attention to the human aspect of delegates interacting in a concentrated space, in and outside of formal meetings. to write about cusanus or about the councils of the fifteenth century without quot- ing a work edited or written by gerald christianson has become no easy task. this fest- schrift is, therefore, a fitting tribute to christianson, a former president of the american cusanus society and a continuing driving force behind its activities. the essays are no introduction to cusanus, or an overview of his life and work; they assume a familiarity with the person and his times. cusanus scholars will acquire new insights throughout these chapters, which, in total, discuss some fifteen major works along with a number of his sermons. in addition, students of church councils, church reform, the reformation, and neoplatonism will find papers of value here. maarten halff, new york, ny doi: . /rqx. . mystiker, mittler, mensch: jahre niklaus von flüe. roland gröbli, heidi kronenberg, markus ries, and thomas wallimann-sasaki, eds. zurich: theologischer verlag, . pp. € . . niklaus von flüe is a controversial figure. at the age of fifty, the swiss farmer, husband, and father of five children traded the domesticity of a farmstead for the frugality of a hermitage. but, while choosing the life of a hermit, he was far from being an anchorite. inhabiting a cell a stone’s throw away from his family home, he served as a spiritual advisor for a great number of people visiting him daily (roland gröbli, ). he engaged in the social and political debates of his time, functioning as a policy advisor. niklaus was of great interest for both confessions during the reformation and served as an icon against modernism and liberalism during the kulturkampf of the nineteenth century. right-wing politicians also used him against the accession of switzerland to the league of nations in (hannes steiner, ); at the same time he was a symbol reviews downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog?doi= . /rqx. . &domain=pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core of peace and reconciliation (urs altermatt). to do justice to this highly complex figure, mystiker, mittler, mensch gathers a number of essays by diverse authors—political sci- entists, historians, catholic, protestant, and islamic theologians, and artists and writers. the book is thus of interest for a broad audience. rather than pursuing a single line of argument, it enables its readers to gain an awareness of the interconnectedness of historical, cultural, and political developments, and to engage in a critical dialogue with the swiss patron saint. roland gröbli succeeds in providing a detailed yet concise introduction followed by a number of essays investigating and scrutinizing the political and diplomatic (thomas wallimann-sasaki, cornelio sommaruga) and the theological and ethical (klara obermüller, pirmin meier) heritage of niklaus. subsequently, the book tackles the influ- ence of the saint in historic and current debates on music and art. angelo garovi explores the fascinating interconfessional history of switzerland by highlighting the artistic demar- cation and mutual influences of a chorale attributed to niklaus von flüe that was redis- covered in bologna in . silvia henke dean offers an interesting insight into the work of the video artist judith albert, who managed to grasp the controversial saint by using rosaries and medallions for her video installation, provoking a debate on religious utility art (“religiöse gebrauchskunst,” ) and christian devotional practices. in addition, the book challenges the reader’s view of medieval society regarding the role of women and the notion of gender. thus, the life of dorothee wyss, niklaus’s wife, plays an important role in a number of essays (klara obermüller, christian petit, christina sasaki). the authors stress that she released niklaus from his duties as a father and husband, and that it was also dorothee who wove the cloth for his habit (gabriela lischer), both key elements on his path to becoming a hermit and, even- tually, a saint. nicolaj van der meulen and jörg wiesel see the garb as an act of com- munal work between klaus and dorothee that exceeds traditional gender patterns ( ). most interesting in this respect is the interview by gröbli with maria-baptista kloetzli, the only female hermit in tschütschi of the parish schwyz. furthermore, the anthology gives an informative insight into church politics, institutional power structures (josef mayer), and canonization practices (daniel sidler). the book also tack- les the debate on celibacy (stefan hartmann), an issue widely discussed outside and within the catholic church recently, and a subject of great interest for the amazon synod in the fall of . the large number of short articles (more than sixty) is the volume’s strength, but it is also its weakness. due to the brevity of the papers, the reader will not find detailed anal- yses of topics that deserve more elaborate thought—e.g., the interconfessional approach to an abecedarium (cod. , stiftsbibliothek einsiedeln) by urban federer. the essay by markus ries, which provides the reader with a deeper understanding of the fifteenth- century policy of peace that was essential to the diplomatic work of brother klaus, deserves more attention as well. however, the authors’ reflections on niklaus von flüe, his life, spirituality, and his diplomatic influence prepare the ground for further renaissance quarterly volume lxxiii, no. downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core research. the book is a much-needed and timely intervention that sets an example for interdisciplinary approaches to history and religion in an increasingly diverse society. jenny körber, humboldt-universität zu berlin doi: . /rqx. . saintly women: medieval saints, modern women, and intimate partner violence. nancy e. nienhuis and beverly mayne kienzle. routledge studies in medieval religion and culture . london: routledge, . xvi + pp. $ . social movements, most notably me too and black lives matter, have fought to draw attention to the pervasive violence of systemic inequalities. these forms of resistance have coincided with a rise in the blatant visibility and political support of misogyny, racism, and religious intolerance across the world. in response to the state of our domes- tic and global scenes, scholarly communities have challenged each other to engage a public audience and to use our research for social change. saintly women is a crucial contribution to that effort. nancy e. nienhuis and beverly mayne kienzle confront the complicity of religious traditions in providing theological justifications for intimate partner violence (ipv). while the authors recognize current efforts of religious leaders and practitioners from diverse faith traditions to end abuse, they also reveal that historical studies rarely accom- pany such critical work. their book thus focuses on archival narratives of violence to chal- lenge the continued “misuse and misapplication of religious and cultural beliefs” to excuse batterers and work against survivors’ attempts to find safety ( ). saintly women analyzes hagiographies of medieval and early modern christian saints and martyrs that cultivated theologies of suffering, subordination, and ownership through the sanctification of domestic abuse victims. the staying power of these oppressive theologies, in fact, derives precisely from turning the records of victims into sacred texts to be emulated by survivors from our past and in our present. the strength of the book lies in its accessibility, which makes it a teachable text for students, non-academic audiences, and especially for groups who offer resources, guid- ance, and support to survivors of ipv. the first chapter defines ipv and gives an overview of its ubiquity, affecting people of all religious backgrounds, genders, races, and sexual orientations. a detailed justification for their methodologies follows with an explanation of the important perspectives gained through literary analyses guided by feminist criticism and ethics to dismantle rather than uphold kyriarchal systems. saintly women contextu- alizes hagiographic accounts, uncovers the patterns and attitudes that enable violence, reads for silences and gaps in narratives, and underscores that oppressive systems of power have authorized certain voices to be heard, remembered, and extolled over others. reviews downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core countermarketing alcohol and unhealthy food: an effective strategy for preventing noncommunicable diseases? lessons from tobacco pu ch -freudenberg ari march : countermarketing alcohol and unhealthy food: an effective strategy for preventing noncommunicable diseases? lessons from tobacco p. christopher palmedo, lori dorfman, sarah garza, eleni murphy, and nicholas freudenberg school of public health, city university of new york, new york, ny ; email: nick.freudenberg@sph.cuny.edu berkeley media studies group, berkeley, california annu. rev. public health . : – the annual review of public health is online at publhealth.annualreviews.org https://doi.org/ . /annurev-publhealth- - copyright c© annual reviews. this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution- sharealike . (cc-by-sa) international license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium and any derivative work is made available under the same, similar, or a compatible license. see credit lines of images or other third-party material in this article for license information. keywords tobacco control, alcohol, beverages, health communications, industry practices abstract countermarketing campaigns use health communications to reduce the de- mand for unhealthy products by exposing motives and undermining mar- keting practices of producers. these campaigns can contribute to the pre- vention of noncommunicable diseases by denormalizing the marketing of tobacco, alcohol, and unhealthy food. by portraying these activities as out- side the boundaries of civilized corporate behavior, countermarketing can reduce the demand for unhealthy products and lead to changes in industry marketing practices. countermarketing blends consumer protection, media advocacy, and health education with the demand for corporate accountabil- ity. countermarketing campaigns have been demonstrated to be an effective component of comprehensive tobacco control. this review describes com- mon elements of tobacco countermarketing such as describing adverse health consequences, appealing to negative emotions, highlighting industry manip- ulation of consumers, and engaging users in the design or implementation of campaigns. it then assesses the potential for using these elements to reduce consumption of alcohol and unhealthy foods. click here to view this article's online features: • download figures as ppt slides • navigate linked references • download citations • explore related articles • search keywords annual reviews further a nn u. r ev . p ub li c h ea lt h . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . s ee c op yr ig ht f or a pp ro ve d us e. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/ . / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/ . / https://doi.org/ . /annurev-publhealth- - http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/full/ . /annurev-publhealth- - pu ch -freudenberg ari march : introduction the world health organization has identified tobacco, alcohol, and processed food as leading causes of noncommunicable diseases ( ) and the primary contributors to global premature deaths, preventable illnesses, and national and international inequalities in health ( ). each year, the tobacco, alcohol, and food industries spend billions of dollars marketing their products ( ), which increases the number of people who consume these products and the amount of product they consume ( , ). public health professionals have used multiple strategies, including taxation, product reformu- lation, mandates, regulation, and public education, to reduce the consumption of tobacco, alcohol, and unhealthy food and beverages ( , , ). although these interventions have been effective, they often encounter powerful industry opposition. evidence-based strategies that educate people about the harms of specific products and the practices involved in marketing them can enhance the impact of comprehensive approaches to reducing the consumption of these harmful products ( ). in this review, we examine the potential for countermarketing (cm) to reduce the consumption of alcohol and unhealthy food products (including beverages), drawing on lessons learned from tobacco control. although cm has been used in the public health literature to define a wide range of activities, from risk reduction education ( ) to organized boycotts of selected products ( ), we define cm as communications strategies designed to reduce the consumption of unhealthy prod- ucts by exposing the motives of and denormalizing marketing activities initiated by the producers of these products ( ). in tobacco, denormalization has been defined as activities that “shift the focus from individual smokers’ judgment to corporate misbehavior showing how the industry has ‘operated outside the boundaries of civilized corporate behavior’ by marketing a deadly product” ( , p. ). thirty years of research has shown that mass-media campaigns that rely on cm have been effective in reducing tobacco use ( , , , , , , , ). although public health and advocacy groups have launched various initiatives to apply the cm approach to alcohol and un- healthy food, no systematic evaluations of such campaigns have been reported. in this article, we identify eight key components of successful tobacco cm campaigns and assess their relevance for campaigns against alcohol and unhealthy food and beverages. our broader goal is to advance public health practice and research on cm. toward a common understanding of countermarketing the term demarketing was first introduced by kotler & levy ( ) in to define how marketing firms can discourage the demand for their own products. the term has subsequently been used in behavioral economics and social marketing to describe strategies for reducing consumption to achieve a social good, such as energy conservation or reduced illicit drug use ( ). our definition of cm distinguishes it from demarketing ( , ) by its specific intention to expose and thus counter the practices that marketers use to sell unhealthy products. exposing the definition of countermarketing countermarketing campaigns use health communications strategies to reduce the demand for unhealthy products by exposing the motives of their producers and portraying their marketing activities as outside the boundaries of civilized corporate behavior. palmedo et al. a nn u. r ev . p ub li c h ea lt h . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . s ee c op yr ig ht f or a pp ro ve d us e. pu ch -freudenberg ari march : marketing of unhealthy products as irresponsible has also been referred to as “adbusting” ( ) and “counter-advertising” ( , ). precursors of cm as mass media began to play a stronger role in society early in the twentieth century, several public concerns about corporate influence over community well-being served as precursors for cm. in the s and s, various federal laws set standards for corporate broadcasters to operate in the public interest ( , ). in , the federal communications commission (fcc) required broadcasters to cover controversial issues of public importance in a fair and balanced manner ( ). the fairness doctrine required tv stations to give equal time to political candidates from different parties and was one of the few limitations placed over the power that corporations had to shape public culture ( ). in , the fcc ruled that the fairness doctrine applied to cigarette advertising, thus requir- ing radio and television stations that ran cigarette commercials to donate airtime to antismoking messages in order to balance coverage ( , , ). this regulation ended with the ban of radio and television cigarette advertisements in . as an early precursor to cm, antitobacco ads reduced the rates of smoking in the united states more than tobacco advertising increased them ( ). soon after, supreme court rulings tilted speech rights back toward advertisers and called into question the constitutionality of the fairness doctrine ( ). by , the fairness doctrine was eliminated completely and in the fcc formally withdrew it ( ). during the s and s, a rising consumer movement argued that government efforts to regulate advertising were not sufficient to protect health and safety ( , ). citizen organizations explored their role in countering an underregulated corporate environment. rising consumer ( ), environmental ( ), and social ( ) movements addressed the role of advertising and marketing in health and social equity. as the government withdrew public protections against the unscrupulous marketing of harmful products, citizen groups began to take on responsibilities that governments were forfeiting ( ). in , a british citizen organization published “the baby killer,” a pamphlet that docu- mented swiss-based food company nestlé’s aggressive international marketing of powdered milk as a substitute for breastfeeding ( ). this effort led to a worldwide campaign in to boycott nestlé products ( ). global boycotts thus became a new tactic within the evolving practice of cm. the early s saw the rise of “culture jamming” ( ), a practice of transforming corporate advertising through parodying advertisements and hijacking billboards in order to transform the messages on these advertisements ( ). the practice captured an emerging anticorporate attitude among young activists who used cm to fuel their outrage, “targeting transnational corporations particularly those with very high brand-name recognition” ( , p. ii). billboard utilising graffitists against unhealthy promotions, an australian-based graffiti movement, used this approach by removing or defacing billboards for tobacco, alcohol, and unhealthy food products ( ). in the united states, african american community and church group leaders also defaced or removed billboard alcohol ads, arguing that targeted marketing of unhealthy products to their communities constitutes another form of racism ( ). cm and tobacco: from california to truth in , the california department of health services tobacco control program launched a -month $ . million tobacco education campaign funded by a statewide tobacco tax ( ). the advertising campaign directly attacked the tobacco industry on the basis of its planners’ www.annualreviews.org • countermarketing alcohol and unhealthy food a nn u. r ev . p ub li c h ea lt h . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . s ee c op yr ig ht f or a pp ro ve d us e. pu ch -freudenberg ari march : understanding of the role of advertising in promoting tobacco use. this campaign was credited with contributing to tripling the rate of decline of cigarette consumption in california over the next eight years ( ). in , the state of florida received an $ . billion settlement from the tobacco industry, allocating $ million for antitobacco youth education. in , the state of florida launched the first statewide truth pilot ( ). on the basis of state-level success and using available funding through the master settlement agreement, the american legacy foundation launched a national truth campaign in . truth sought to elicit angry emotions triggered when personal freedom is seen to be threatened by corporate industry manipulation or deception. this was a central and consistent messaging strategy of the truth campaign from the beginning ( ). commercial marketers have long known that the goal of any campaign is to engage emotions ( , ). tobacco companies elicited the desires for socialization and rebelliousness in order to market cigarettes to young people and women ( , , , ). the truth campaign sought to engage these same feelings by exposing industry efforts to manipulate emotions and deceive consumers. the campaign consciously sought to engage the same emotions, such as rebelliousness, that tobacco companies were using to sell their products to young people ( , ). in fiscal year – , funding appropriated from the master settlement agreement for tobacco control in california was eliminated when the funds were securitized to address a state budget deficit, a trend followed in other states ( ). nevertheless the success of the california department of health services and the subsequent truth campaigns in using cm to reduce youth smoking rates raises the question of whether this strategy may be applied to other products such as alcohol and the unhealthy food and beverages that also contribute to noncommunicable disease. the rise of digital and social media the emergence and growth of digital and social media in the s created new opportunities for marketers of tobacco, alcohol, and unhealthy food—and also for cm. for decades, tobacco marketing drew from research indicating that social environments encouraged cigarette consump- tion ( ). compared with traditional mass media, these new media offered several advantages in shaping these environments: they were less expensive, more suitable for market segmentation and targeted marketing, easier to use to interact with potential consumers, and more immune to parental supervision and government oversight ( ). consequently, social media have been used to market tobacco ( ), alcohol ( , , ), food ( , ), and sugary beverages ( ). moreover, research shows that well-funded industry marketing campaigns designed to create and engage new users reach many more consumers than do health promotion messages that seek to counter the effects of these industry campaigns ( ). nevertheless, social media provide opportunities for cm to gain access to social networks and disseminate messages that challenge industry marketing practices. millions of viewers have watched videos that are critical of food industry practices ( ), as social media enable individuals to share their disapproval of corporate practices ( ). social media have also played an important role in the new politics of dissent as seen in movements such as the arab spring, occupy wall street, and black lives matter. online platforms provide opportunities for like-minded groups and large populations who are skeptical of corporate hegemony to congregate and communicate across the globe ( , , ). media advocacy and media literacy cm can be used to reach individual consumers and also regulators, influencers of public policy, journalists, investors, and corporate executives. in this way, cm can intersect with media advocacy palmedo et al. a nn u. r ev . p ub li c h ea lt h . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . s ee c op yr ig ht f or a pp ro ve d us e. pu ch -freudenberg ari march : and campaigns to hold corporations accountable. media advocacy, the strategic use of mass media to support community organizing and advance healthy public policy ( ), seeks to shift the locus of intervention upstream from individual behaviors to social policies. consistent with beauchamp’s ( ) formulation of public health as social justice, media advocacy aims to strengthen community organizing efforts by creating news around core issues that identifies public officials or bodies responsible for enacting or enforcing relevant policies and using the influence of the media to hold decision makers accountable for creating healthier, more equitable environments ( ). media advocacy, like cm, seeks to reframe public perceptions of issues so that the public health perspective is evident. it thus shares with cm the goal of exposing the role of corporations and their allies in marketing unhealthy products ( ). cm strategies can intersect with media advocacy to generate news coverage and reach the general public ( ). successful tobacco cm campaigns suggest that media advocacy may complement campaigns aimed primarily at individual behavioral change ( ). promoting media literacy, the capacity to critically analyze and understand media ( ), can also intersect with cm as media literacy programs educate youth about the media’s influence on knowledge and attitudes ( ). media literacy has been used effectively as a public health strategy for reducing tobacco and alcohol use ( ) where it can provide young people with a sense of agency ( , ). because media literacy helps youth to question the social norms portrayed in media, these programs may serve as effective components of a comprehensive cm strategy. race and ethnicity-specific countermarketing campaigns because tobacco, alcohol, and unhealthy food and beverage marketers target their advertising campaigns at specific population segments ( ), some cm campaigns have used the same strategy to undermine these targeted appeals ( ). recent research has already demonstrated that infor- mational campaigns exposing embedded racism in communities of color have resulted in improved health outcomes within those communities ( ). this success indicates that exposing racially tar- geted marketing campaigns may be a promising avenue for cm. the national debate on racism and racial profiling provoked by the police shootings of unarmed african americans brought to light by the black lives matter movement in the united states ( ) may indicate an interest in cm cam- paigns that describe targeted marketing of unhealthy products to specific vulnerable populations as a type of ethnic profiling. in the s, a successful effort by the stop uptown coalition to block rj reynolds from test marketing a new brand of mentholated cigarettes to african americans in philadelphia shows the potential for mobilizing communities to resist commercial exploitation of racial identities ( ). african americans in the united states have also led a prolonged campaign to eliminate menthol flavoring for tobacco, built on considerable evidence that compared with unflavored cigarettes, mentholated ones are more addictive and harmful for african americans ( ). more recently, puerto rican groups in new york protested the use of ethnic imagery when coors beer used the puerto rican flag on its beer cans as part of a promotional campaign linked to the puerto rican day parade ( ). methods to chart developments and identify emerging opportunities in research and practice on cm, we conducted a systematic review of peer-reviewed and other sources to identify descriptions, evaluations, or planning studies for cm initiatives on tobacco, alcohol, or unhealthy food. be- cause several previous reviews have evaluated the quality of the evidence for the use of cm in tobacco control communications campaigns and established its effectiveness as one component of www.annualreviews.org • countermarketing alcohol and unhealthy food a nn u. r ev . p ub li c h ea lt h . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . s ee c op yr ig ht f or a pp ro ve d us e. pu ch -freudenberg ari march : comprehensive tobacco control, particularly for youth and young adults ( , , , , , , , ), this review assesses the relevance of this body of work to cm for alcohol and unhealthy food. search strategy our search starts with the first reports of the california tobacco cm and the truth campaign in florida in , and it ends with reports published by june . we included articles that provided empirical evidence on the design, planning, implementation, or evaluation of cm ini- tiatives for tobacco, alcohol, and unhealthy food in the united states and other english-speaking countries. we searched pubmed, scopus, google, and google scholar using a variety of search terms, including each product category (i.e., tobacco, alcohol, food and beverages), and variants of the following words: counter-marketing, counter advertising, demarketing, social marketing, and health advocacy. our initial screen yielded articles that warranted further review. an examination of refer- ences of the included articles yielded another relevant studies. of the studies, focused on tobacco, on alcohol, and on food. these are listed in supplement (follow the supple- mental material link from the annual reviews home page at http://www.annualreviews.org). of the articles, were empirical studies: for tobacco, for alcohol, and for food. the alcohol and food empirical studies were needs assessments, elicitation research, or experimental studies and not evaluation studies of field-based cm campaigns. on the basis of the lack of empirical evaluations of cm campaigns for alcohol and unhealthy food, we expanded our search to look for descriptions of cm activities on alcohol or food using such search engines as google and lexis/nexis as well as communications with colleagues working in the field. we included projects for which sufficient information was available to determine whether activities met our definition of cm, identifying projects on alcohol and on food. our aim was to assess whether the evidence-based practices identified in the evaluation studies of tobacco cm could generate additional practice-based evidence that could advance the study of cm for alcohol and unhealthy food ( ). characteristics associated with success from the reviews of tobacco communications campaigns we identified common characteristics of cm campaigns that were associated with success, as listed in table ; the sources for this table are available in supplement (follow the supplemental material link from the annual reviews home page at http://www.annualreviews.org). we define below each of these characteristics and assess their use in the major tobacco cm campaigns. in the second part of our review, we determine whether the projects that used cm to counter alcohol and food marketing included these eight key elements of the tobacco cm initiatives. our main goal was to explore the extent to which lessons learned in cm tobacco were applied to cm projects targeting other products. our findings are shown in table . findings key components of tobacco cm campaigns our process for identifying recurring themes from tobacco cm studies is consistent with our definition of cm. the criteria for our eight common elements of antitobacco campaigns are defined below (see table ). not every campaign included all eight elements, but together these characteristics define cm and distinguish it from other approaches to tobacco communication. palmedo et al. supplemental material a nn u. r ev . p ub li c h ea lt h . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . s ee c op yr ig ht f or a pp ro ve d us e. http://www.annualreviews.org http://www.annualreviews.org http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/suppl/ . /annurev-publhealth- - pu ch -freudenberg ari march : t ab le c h ar ac te ri st ic s o f m aj o r t o b ac co c o u n te rm ar ke ti n g c am p ai gn s c am p ai gn ta il o re d n am e o f ca m p ai gn / in te rv en ti o n h ea lt h co n - se q u en ce s in d u st ry m an ip u la - ti o n o f co n su m er s a p p ea ls to n eg at iv e em o ti o n s c am p ai gn d is p ar ag es ex is ti n g b ra n d b y ra ce / et h n ic it y b y ge n d er b y ag e c am p ai gn cr ea te d it s o w n b ra n d c am p ai gn cr it ic iz ed in d u st ry - ta rg et ed m ar ke ti n g p ar ti ci p an ts en ga ge d in ca m p ai gn d es ig n , as sp o ke sp er so n , an d /o r in m es sa ge d el iv er y r ef er en ce s (a va il ab le in s u p p le m en t ) n at io na lt ru th ca m pa ig n y es y es y es y es y es n o y es y es n o sp ok es pe rs on an d m es sa ge de liv er y n at io na lt ru th – f lo ri da t ru th ca m pa ig n n o y es y es y es n o n o y es y es y es a ll f lo ri da t ru th – c al if or ni a t ob ac co c on tr ol p ro gr am n o y es y es n o n o n o y es y es y es sp ok es pe rs on an d m es sa ge de liv er y c al if or ni a – m as sa ch us et ts y es y es y es u nc le ar n o n o n o y es u nc le ar sp ok es pe rs on an d m es sa ge de liv er y m as sa ch us et ts – m ix ed m ar ke ts in m ul ti pl e st at es y es y es y es y es n o y es y es y es y es sp ok es pe rs on an d m es sa ge de liv er y m ix ed m ar ke ts c om m un e y es y es y es y es n o y es y es y es y es sp ok es pe rs on an d m es sa ge de liv er y c om m un e t ot al w it h c ha ra ct er is ti c / / / / / / / / / d es ig n [ ] sp ok es pe rs on [ ] m es sa ge de liv er y [ ] www.annualreviews.org • countermarketing alcohol and unhealthy food a nn u. r ev . p ub li c h ea lt h . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . s ee c op yr ig ht f or a pp ro ve d us e. pu ch -freudenberg ari march : t ab le c h ar ac te ri st ic s o f al co h o l an d fo o d an d b ev er ag e co u n te rm ar ke ti n g ca m p ai gn s p ra ct ic e- b as ed al co h o l co u n te rm ar ke ti n g in te rv en ti o n s in te rv en ti o n in cl u d ed el em en ts o n th is th em e: y es ,n o ,i n su ffi ci en t in fo rm at io n c am p ai gn ta il o re d o rg an iz at io n (c it at io n ) c am p ai gn d es cr ip ti o n h ea lt h co n se - q u en ce s in d u st ry m an ip u - la ti o n o f co n - su m er s a p p ea ls to em o ti o n s b y ra ce / et h n ic it y b y ge n d er b y ag e c ri ti ci sm o f in d u st ry ta rg et in g b y d em o - gr ap h ic s c am p ai gn d is p ar - ag es ex is ti n g b ra n d c am p ai gn cr ea te d it s o w n b ra n d a u d ie n ce en ga ge d in d es ig n ,a s sp o ke sp er - so n ,a n d /o r in m es sa ge d el iv er y c en te r fo r so ci al c ha ng e at th e m ar yl an d in st it ut e c ol le ge of a rt ,b al ti m or e y ou th an d o liv er y ou th c ou nt er a d g ro up (u s) ( ) b ee r an d a lc oh ol r ui ns f ut ur es (b a r f ) an d #s ip pe n- st up id n ew m ed ia an d so ci al m ed ia ca m pa ig ns de si gn an d ac hi ev e be ha vi or al ch an ge th ro ug h pe er -t o- pe er ed uc at io n y es y es y es y es n o y es in su ffi ci en t in fo rm a- ti on y es y es a ll c en te r fo r sc ie nc e in th e p ub lic in te re st (u s) ( ) c am pa ig n fo r a lc oh ol - f re e sp or ts t v p ol ic y- dr iv en ca m pa ig n th at co nc en tr at es on re m ov al of al co ho la ds fr om co lle ge sp or ts y es y es y es n o n o y es y es n o y es in su ffi ci en t in fo rm a- ti on a lc oh ol c on ce rn an d y ou th a lc oh ol a dv er ti si ng c ou nc il (u k ) ( ) it ’s t he d ri nk t al ki ng y ou th , – ye ar s, le ad ne w m ed ia ca m pa ig ns to re gu la te al co ho l m ar ke ti ng th ro ug h po lic y ch an ge y es y es y es n o n o y es y es in su ffi ci en t in fo rm a- ti on y es a ll a lc oh ol ju st ic e (u s) ( ) st op a lc op op s c ou nt er - m ar ke ti ng yo ut h m ov em en t th at de di ca te s ef fo rt s to ba nn in g th e sa le s an d m ar ke ti ng of a lc op op s n o y es y es n o y es y es y es y es y es a ll palmedo et al. a nn u. r ev . p ub li c h ea lt h . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . s ee c op yr ig ht f or a pp ro ve d us e. pu ch -freudenberg ari march : t he a m er ic an m ed ic al a ss oc ia ti on a lc oh ol p ol ic y ( ) g ir lie d ri nk s p os te r ca m pa ig n th at ex po se s th e al co ho l in du st ry de lib er at e m ar ke ti ng to yo un g gi rl s w it h “g ir lie dr in ks ” an d “a lc op op s. ” t he po st er m es sa ge ta rg et s pa re nt s w ho ca n ad vo ca te fo r al co ho l m ar ke ti ng po lic y ch an ge y es y es y es n o y es y es y es y es y es d es ig n an d m es sa ge de liv er y b al an ce (u k ) ( ) m in im um u ni t p ri ce v id eo ca m pa ig n an d pe ti ti on se ek s an in cr ea se of al co ho lm u p ; an d re gu la te s th e pr ic e an d pr om ot io n of al co ho l. y es y es y es n o n o y es y es n o y es m es sa ge de liv er y b al an ce (u k ) ( ) se e w ha t sa m se es p ho to gr ap hy an d vi de o ca m pa ig n th at pr es en ts th e al co ho l m ar ke ti ng en vi ro nm en t fr om a yo ut h va nt ag e po in t. t he ca m pa ig n ta rg et s ad ul ts w ho ca n ad vo ca te fo r al co ho l m ar ke ti ng po lic y ch an ge y es y es y es n o n o y es y es n o y es m es sa ge de liv er y (c on ti nu ed ) www.annualreviews.org • countermarketing alcohol and unhealthy food a nn u. r ev . p ub li c h ea lt h . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . s ee c op yr ig ht f or a pp ro ve d us e. pu ch -freudenberg ari march : t ab le (c on ti n u ed ) p ra ct ic e- b as ed fo o d an d b ev er ag e co u n te rm ar ke ti n g in te rv en ti o n s in te rv en ti o n in cl u d ed el em en ts o n th is th em e: y es ,n o ,i n su ffi ci en t in fo rm at io n c am p ai gn ta il o re d o rg an iz at io n (c it at io n ) c am p ai gn d es cr ip ti o n h ea lt h co n se - q u en ce s in d u st ry m an ip u - la ti o n o f co n - su m er s a p p ea ls to em o ti o n s b y ra ce / et h n ic it y b y ge n d er b y ag e c ri ti ci sm o f in d u st ry ta rg et in g b y d em o - gr ap h ic s c am p ai gn d is p ar - ag es ex is ti n g b ra n d c am p ai gn cr ea te d it s o w n b ra n d a u d ie n ce en ga ge d in d es ig n ,a s sp o ke sp er - so n ,a n d /o r in m es sa ge d el iv er y u ni ve rs it y of c al if or ni a sa n f ra nc is co c en te r fo r v ul ne ra bl e p op ul at io ns at sa n f ra nc is co g en er al h os pi ta la nd co lla bo ra ti on w it h y ou th sp ea ks ,a no np ro fi t sa n f ra nc is co –b as ed or ga ni za ti on ( ) t he b ig ge r p ic tu re m ix ed -m ed ia ca m pa ig n th at ed uc at es yo ut h on so ci al an d en - vi ro nm en ta l fa ct or s co nt ri bu ti ng to ty pe di ab et es an d en co ur ag es co ns um pt io n be ha vi or ch an ge .s ho rt fi lm s ca ll at te nt io n to in du st ry pr ofi ts fr om un he al th y pr od uc ts y es y es y es y es n o y es y es y es n o a ll c en te r fo r sc ie nc e in th e p ub lic in te re st ( ) c ha ng e th e t un e m us ic vi de o w it h an ad ap te d c oc a- c ol a jin gl e th at co un te rs c oc a- c ol a’ s “s od a is h ap pi ne ss ” m es sa ge .t he vi de o ca lls at te nt io n to co ns um pt io n be ha vi or ch an ge y es y es y es n o n o n o n o y es n o n on e palmedo et al. a nn u. r ev . p ub li c h ea lt h . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . s ee c op yr ig ht f or a pp ro ve d us e. pu ch -freudenberg ari march : f ou nd ed by pe di at ri ci an k ev in st ro ng (m ai ne ) ( ) d un k th e ju nk a m ul ti m ed ia ca m pa ig n dr aw in g on po pu la r cu lt ur e in tr od uc es th e sl og an “d ef ea t so da t ro n, ” th e ev il so da m on st er ,a nd en co ur ag es yo ut h to re be l ag ai ns t un he al th y fo od s an d be ve ra ge s y es y es n o n o n o y es n o y es y es a ll c an ce r c ou nc il n sw (a us tr al ia ) ( ) ju nk b us te rs m ul ti m ed ia ca m pa ig n ed uc at es pa re nt s to ta ke ac ti on ag ai ns t un he al th y fo od m ar ke ti ng th at ta rg et s ch ild re n. t he ov er ar ch in g go al is in cr ea se d re gu la ti on of un he al th y fo od m ar ke ti ng y es y es y es n o n o y es y es y es n o m es sa ge de liv er y c al if or ni a c en te r fo r p ub lic h ea lt h a dv oc ac y ( ) k ic k th e c an w eb si te pr ov id es in fo rm at io n on na ti on al ca m pa ig ns th at ad vo ca te fo r re du ct io n of su ga r- sw ee te ne d be ve ra ge co ns um pt io n an d co un te r be ve ra ge in du st ry ta ct ic s y es y es y es n o n o n o y es y es n o n on e (c on ti nu ed ) www.annualreviews.org • countermarketing alcohol and unhealthy food a nn u. r ev . p ub li c h ea lt h . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . s ee c op yr ig ht f or a pp ro ve d us e. pu ch -freudenberg ari march : t ab le (c on ti n u ed ) p ra ct ic e- b as ed fo o d an d b ev er ag e co u n te rm ar ke ti n g in te rv en ti o n s in te rv en ti o n in cl u d ed el em en ts o n th is th em e: y es ,n o ,i n su ffi ci en t in fo rm at io n c am p ai gn ta il o re d o rg an iz at io n (c it at io n ) c am p ai gn d es cr ip ti o n h ea lt h co n se - q u en ce s in d u st ry m an ip u - la ti o n o f co n - su m er s a p p ea ls to em o ti o n s b y ra ce / et h n ic it y b y ge n d er b y ag e c ri ti ci sm o f in d u st ry ta rg et in g b y d em o - gr ap h ic s c am p ai gn d is p ar - ag es ex is ti n g b ra n d c am p ai gn cr ea te d it s o w n b ra n d a u d ie n ce en ga ge d in d es ig n ,a s sp o ke sp er - so n ,a n d /o r in m es sa ge d el iv er y d ew ey & a ss oc ia te s in co lla bo ra ti on w it h pu bl ic sc ho ol s (t am pa b ay , f l ) ( ) k id z b it e b ac k d es ig ns yo ut h- le d co un te rm ar - ke ti ng ca m pa ig ns w it h br an d ap pe al th at em ph as iz es co ns um pt io n be ha vi or ch an ge . y es y es n o n o n o y es y es y es y es a ll sh ap e u p sa n f ra nc is co ( ) o pe n t ru th m ul ti m ed ia ca m pa ig n ex po se s so da in du st ry m ar ke ti ng ta ct ic s ai m ed to w ar d yo ut h an d co m m un it ie s of co lo r. o pe n t ru th pr om ot es ch an ge of co ns um pt io n be ha vi or an d in du st ry m ar ke ti ng po lic y y es y es y es y es n o y es y es y es n o sp ok es - pe rs on palmedo et al. a nn u. r ev . p ub li c h ea lt h . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . s ee c op yr ig ht f or a pp ro ve d us e. pu ch -freudenberg ari march : c en te r fo r sc ie nc e in th e p ub lic in te re st ( ) t he r ea l b ea rs a ni m at ed he al th sa ti re of c oc a- c ol a’ s po la r be ar s th at re ve al s lo ng -t er m he al th co ns eq ue nc es of dr in ki ng so da .t he m e so ng “s ug ar ” is pe rf or m ed by po pu la r ar ti st s ja so n m ra z an d m c f lo w y es y es y es n o n o n o y es y es y es n on e p re ve nt io n in st it ut e ( ) w e’ re n ot b uy in g it m ul ti m ed ia ca m pa ig n th at re ve al s de ce pt iv e m ar ke ti ng to ch ild re n, ex po se s in du st ry co un te r cl ai m s, an d pr ov id es fa ct s w it h in te nt io ns of ch an gi ng co ns um pt io n be ha vi or an d po lic y y es y es n o n o n o n o y es y es n o n on e (c on ti nu ed ) www.annualreviews.org • countermarketing alcohol and unhealthy food a nn u. r ev . p ub li c h ea lt h . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . s ee c op yr ig ht f or a pp ro ve d us e. pu ch -freudenberg ari march : t ab le (c on ti n u ed ) p ra ct ic e- b as ed fo o d an d b ev er ag e co u n te rm ar ke ti n g in te rv en ti o n s in te rv en ti o n in cl u d ed el em en ts o n th is th em e: y es ,n o ,i n su ffi ci en t in fo rm at io n c am p ai gn ta il o re d o rg an iz at io n (c it at io n ) c am p ai gn d es cr ip ti o n h ea lt h co n se - q u en ce s in d u st ry m an ip u - la ti o n o f co n - su m er s a p p ea ls to em o ti o n s b y ra ce / et h n ic it y b y ge n d er b y ag e c ri ti ci sm o f in d u st ry ta rg et in g b y d em o - gr ap h ic s c am p ai gn d is p ar - ag es ex is ti n g b ra n d c am p ai gn cr ea te d it s o w n b ra n d a u d ie n ce en ga ge d in d es ig n ,a s sp o ke sp er - so n ,a n d /o r in m es sa ge d el iv er y a lc oh ol to ta ls / / / / / / / / / a ud ie nc e en ga ge d in de si gn [ / ], as sp ok es pe r- so n [ / ], an d in m es sa ge de liv er y [ / ] f oo d an d be ve ra ge to ta ls / / / / / / / / / a ud ie nc e en ga ge d in de si gn [ / ], as sp ok es pe r- so n [ / ], an d in m es sa ge de liv er y [ / ] palmedo et al. a nn u. r ev . p ub li c h ea lt h . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . s ee c op yr ig ht f or a pp ro ve d us e. pu ch -freudenberg ari march : communicating the adverse health consequences of smoking. evaluations of public educa- tion campaigns from as far back as have demonstrated the effectiveness of highlighting the health consequences of tobacco use ( ). although the core messaging strategy of the califor- nia department of health services and florida truth campaigns was to expose deception and manipulation by the tobacco industry ( ), subsequent cm campaigns in tobacco, notably the nationwide truth campaign, clearly communicated the health consequences of smoking within an anti-industry context. the truth television advertisement featuring body bags being deposited outside tobacco company headquarters and the marlboro label substituting for a corpse toe tag in a magazine ad illustrate this theme. industry manipulation of consumers. messages that highlight deceptive or predatory tobacco industry practices are central to the cm campaigns and have been shown to reduce smoking intentions and behaviors ( ). practices that cm campaigns have targeted include industry denial that tobacco is addictive, distortion or obfuscation of scientific findings on the harms of tobacco, and targeted marketing to youth and other vulnerable populations. the early truth billboard that read “no wonder tobacco executives hide behind sexy models” and featured a tobacco executive wearing a bikini illustrated this industry manipulation message. appeal to negative emotions. seeking to elicit emotions such as outrage and resistance to manipulation has been a successful component of cm tobacco campaigns, especially those focusing on youth ( ). truth magazine ads showing stitched eyes, ears, and mouths of youth convey the message that tobacco companies seek to prevent young people from seeing, hearing, and telling the truth about industry marketing practices. disparagement of specific brands. campaigns used messages and images that challenged, mocked, or undermined corporate brand images. a post–master settlement agreement ad run by the california department of health services in featured one marlboro man telling the other, “bob, i’ve got emphysema.” another showed the marlboro man’s horse dead from exposure to secondhand smoke. tailoring campaigns by demographics or psychographics. substantial empirical evidence indicates that tailoring campaigns by race and ethnicity ( ) and “peer crowd” ( , p. ) can be effective in reaching population segments. the commune campaign, which reduced smoking among young-adult hipsters in san diego, is an example of successful psychographic tailoring to reach a segmented audience ( ). criticizing industry targeting of vulnerable populations. some campaigns highlight mar- keting that targets vulnerable populations such as children, blacks, or immigrants. for example, truth ads stated that “[t]obacco gives black males % more lung cancer than white males.” establishment of cm campaign brand. some cm includes design elements such as a logo, which differentiates the brand from its competitors ( ). the truth campaign featured a clear and deliberate strategy to market its antismoking anti-industry message as a brand with a logo and specific color schemes ( ). postcampaign reviews have listed nike ( ), abercrombie ( ), sprite ( ), and burton snowboards ( ) as models for the truth brand. although there are no universally accepted criteria for what constitutes a brand, one simple measure is whether the campaign has been given a name, such as for truth and recent commune and havoc ( ). www.annualreviews.org • countermarketing alcohol and unhealthy food a nn u. r ev . p ub li c h ea lt h . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . s ee c op yr ig ht f or a pp ro ve d us e. pu ch -freudenberg ari march : engaging users in all phases of the campaign. evidence from tobacco cm studies indicates that target audience engagement through all phases of a campaign may contribute to success. three stages of engagement are described: (a) meaningful input on campaign design, (b) peers as spokespeople for the campaign, and (c) interactive peer participation in message delivery. social- cognitive theory, which places a strong value on self-concept and social influence, specifically connects the role of peer influence on transitions in smoking behavior ( ). however, the truth and commune campaigns went beyond merely showcasing youth and young adults in their cam- paigns by engaging their audiences throughout campaign development and execution ( , , , , ). as shown in table , each of the major tobacco cm campaigns used four of these eight elements (industry manipulation of consumers appeals to negative emotions, creation of its own brand, and engagement of users in the campaign) and five of six also tailored the campaign by age. these five elements constituted core components of the major tobacco cm campaigns. on average, these six campaigns employed . of the elements. use of key elements from tobacco cm in projects to address alcohol and unhealthy food and beverages the second step of our review considered cm projects that targeted alcohol and unhealthy food and beverages. for the projects that we identified, we evaluated for the presence of the eight key elements from our review of the tobacco cm literature. as shown in table , we found that many of these projects implemented key elements of the tobacco cm campaigns. alcohol countermarketing a review of counteradvertising for alcohol found some evidence of effectiveness, although some alcohol industry–sponsored public service announcements designed to reduce youth drinking were found to encourage risky drinking ( ). in general, the studies described in this review did not meet our definition for cm because they did not expose or seek to denormalize industry marketing practices. two studies examined alcohol industry marketing practices to inform future alcohol cm campaigns. the first analyzed internal alcohol industry marketing documents to identify ways that alcohol advertising in the united kingdom violated industry codes, e.g., by implicitly promoting drunkenness or targeting young girls ( ). as with tobacco, these insights provide possible targets for denormalization. the second study examined the role of alcohol industry messages on social media, finding that intentions to share alcohol industry messages predicted intentions to consume alcohol, suggesting possible intervention points for social media alcohol cm ( ). as shown in table , all alcohol cm campaigns employed at least four of the successful elements identified from tobacco cm campaigns. food and beverage countermarketing most of the peer-reviewed studies on food and beverages we identified described food industry marketing, not cm (see supplement ; follow the supplemental material link from the annual reviews home page at http://www.annualreviews.org). two experimental studies assessed whether exposure to counteradvertising messages could reduce the susceptibility of australian children (mean age ) ( ) and parents of australian children aged – ( ) to front-of-package promotions of unhealthy food. the authors found that both children and parents rated the promotional messages as less believable and the product as less healthy after palmedo et al. supplemental material a nn u. r ev . p ub li c h ea lt h . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . s ee c op yr ig ht f or a pp ro ve d us e. http://www.annualreviews.org http://www.annualreviews.org/doi/suppl/ . /annurev-publhealth- - pu ch -freudenberg ari march : viewing the counteradvertising message. however, children who misunderstood the counter messages rated the unhealthy product more favorably after viewing the counter ads, which suggests that misunderstood ads may have unintended negative consequences. two other studies sought to expose food industry use of social media to promote unhealthy food. they found that children and youth were highly engaged with these advertisements ( , ), suggesting, as with alcohol, that cm campaigns for unhealthy food that disrupt engagement may reduce the influence of such advertising. of the nine food and beverage cm projects ( in the united states and in australia) shown in table , all employed of the key elements from tobacco cm campaigns and – projects included the other elements. insufficient information was available to assess whether these projects targeted by race/ethnicity, age, or gender, although most seemed aimed at either youth or parents. these projects included, on average, . of the key elements we assessed. implications of lessons from tobacco cm for food and alcohol because there is no universally recognized database of all food and alcohol cm campaigns, the projects we reviewed may not be representative of all cm initiatives on alcohol or food. neverthe- less, this dissemination of elements of evidence-based practice into other domains suggests that those working to reduce the consumption of tobacco, alcohol, and unhealthy food are exchanging information on cm. similar exchanges among those using strategies such as regulation, taxes, and litigation have also been documented ( , , ). several decades of evaluation—and advocacy—have established tobacco cm campaigns as an evidence-based practice. by systematically studying unhealthy food and alcohol cm and inte- grating evidence-based practice and practice-based evidence, those in public health may be able to accelerate the translation of these strategies into interventions that can reduce the burdens of noncommunicable diseases. our review of cm activities for tobacco, alcohol, and unhealthy food showed important simi- larities and differences described here for each of the essential elements. addressing health consequences. before the florida truth campaign, formative research in- dicated that knowledge levels among youth about the dangers of tobacco were high ( ). this preknowledge allowed the campaign to leverage that understanding into messages that unveiled, vilified, and otherwise undermined industry practices. later tobacco cm campaigns incorporated the health effects of smoking into messages about the manipulation of cigarette production to include ammonia and concealment of knowledge about nicotine addiction. dissemination of these facts informed the call to action among youth to rebel against and resist deceptive tobacco industry messages and practices ( ). can these processes be applied to campaigns for unhealthy food and beverages? surveys show that levels of understanding of the dangers of binge drinking and unhealthy foods and beverages vary considerably among different population groups ( , , , ), which suggests the im- portance of population-specific tailoring. for tobacco, public understanding of the harmful effects of the product took place over decades. the levels of knowledge among children and youth about unhealthy food and beverages are not now at the levels that they were for tobacco when truth was introduced ( , , ). however, increased media coverage of the harmful effects of sugary bever- ages and the role of the soda industry in distorting and manipulating science ( , ) may set the stage for effective cm campaigns. more research on the associations between health literacy and receptivity to specific anti-industry messages may inform effective cm campaigns for unhealthy food. www.annualreviews.org • countermarketing alcohol and unhealthy food a nn u. r ev . p ub li c h ea lt h . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . s ee c op yr ig ht f or a pp ro ve d us e. pu ch -freudenberg ari march : some analysts have argued that criticizing the food or alcohol industries is more challenging than criticizing the tobacco industry ( , ). food and alcohol are ubiquitous in our society and are perceived to have health benefits; however, messages highlighting adverse health consequences of alcohol have been shown to reduce urges to drink alcohol among young people ( ). further research is necessary to determine whether cm campaigns will be more effective than traditional health campaigns that target individual behavioral change. given the intense and variable relationships that individuals, families, and cultures have with alcohol and food, participatory research is warranted ( ). in general, cm campaigns that rely on eliciting fears about the health consequences of using a particular product must take into account the population’s level of knowledge about its health effects. elicitation research that maps the beliefs of various populations is a critical formative research area for food and alcohol cm. criticism of industry manipulation. criticism of industry practices is a fundamental component of cm campaigns in tobacco that has been used in several alcohol and food and beverage cm projects. research should assess whether anti-industry messages enhance positive health behavior change as has been demonstrated with tobacco ( ) for alcohol and unhealthy food and beverages. although such research has been conducted in the realm of sugar-sweetened beverage policy change ( ), studies of the effects of such messaging on health behavior are less developed. appeals to emotions. although truth and its successors appealed to youths’ need to assert their independence and individuality by triggering rebelliousness, other cm campaigns can engage dif- ferent types of emotions. for example, emotions related to young women’s desire not to be gender stereotyped or parents’ fears for their children’s well-being can be activated in cm campaigns that challenge marketing of alcohol to girls or manipulation of children to influence their desire for sugary breakfast cereals. although the research that led to truth was specific to tobacco ( ), the success of these campaigns in reclaiming the same emotions used by tobacco companies to engage with potential consumers may guide countermarketers of alcohol and unhealthy food. by providing alternative means to fulfill similar psychosocial needs, cm can appeal to values such as rebelliousness and socialization but also friendship (cm for alcohol), community (for alcohol and unhealthy food), or aspirations for being a good parent (for unhealthy food) ( ). emotions relating to pride and heritage frequently used by soda companies to market to latinos, for example, can also be used for cm campaigns to expose and undermine these industry practices. tailoring and segmentation. market segmentation or specifically tailoring campaign elements to subpopulations ( , , ) has shown promise in some tobacco cm that includes messages on industry manipulation ( , ). the national truth campaign evolved into a multiethnic cam- paign with special components tailored to appeal to african american, latino, and asian youth, a characteristic identified as a key to its success ( ). however, some research has suggested that truth did not speak clearly to latino youth ( ). given that patterns of alcohol and unhealthy food consumption vary by class, race/ethnicity ( ), gender ( ), and other characteristics, cm can enhance effectiveness by tailoring messaging to subpopulations. campaigns may also need to be segmented by other characteristics, including psychographic and cultural factors such as values, activities, aspirations, or lifestyle ( ). recent success using components of cm strategies to reduce smoking rates among the young adult hipster population ( ) indicates that psychographic segmentation is a promising area for tobacco cm and perhaps alcohol and food as well. palmedo et al. a nn u. r ev . p ub li c h ea lt h . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . s ee c op yr ig ht f or a pp ro ve d us e. pu ch -freudenberg ari march : criticizing industry demographic targeting. the exposure of racial and ethnic targeting is a current area of focus for cm campaigns about sugar-sweetened beverages ( , ). for example, upon passage in of a . -cent-per-ounce increase on sugar-sweetened beverages in philadelphia, when the industry contended that the tax disproportionately affects poorer people, the mayor stated that these arguments were “hypocritical frankly because big soda companies have been marketing to poor neighborhoods for generations” ( ). disparaging specific brands. because people are often more likely to be aware of the corpo- ration behind well-known brands, cm efforts should look for opportunities for increasing the vulnerability of unhealthy consumer brands. our review of recent food and alcohol campaigns found that this was a common practice especially for those campaigns seeking to reduce individual consumption. creation of a countermarketing brand. because brands seek to build relationships with individ- uals, peer-to-peer identity can be an important component of any brand, as truth demonstrates. in fact, evidence from truth ( , , , ) and more recently commune ( ) tobacco control campaigns indicates that a brand with a strong peer-driven focus may contribute to these cam- paigns’ success in reducing smoking rates. in recent years, tobacco, alcohol, and food marketers have used social media, viral marketing and other strategies to create “brand ambassadors” ( ) and “brand communities” ( ). these users view themselves as a tribe of consumers organized around the lifestyle and ethos of the brand and a hashtag. for marketers, the rationale is that brand community members buy more, remain loyal, and reduce marketing costs through word- of-mouth support. to what extent and in what ways cm campaigns on alcohol and food can offer alternative communities with as much or greater appeal will require additional research and field tests. similarly, research will need to determine whether public criticism of industry efforts to create “brand communities” around products associated with premature death and preventable illness can generate the outrage that was an important part of truth’s appeal ( ). user engagement. the peer-driven component of truth reflects evidence from both com- mercial marketing ( ) and demarketing of alcohol ( ) that peer-to-peer communication is a critical component of successful cm. because peer influence is greater in products with high social involvement, the role of relatable peers as part of the brand can be a critical influence over the brand’s effectiveness ( , , ). strong peer-to-peer components within a branded food or alcohol cm campaign may contribute to its success, a process that warrants further research. meaningful audience interaction throughout the campaign can play an essential role in peer- to-peer cm engagement processes. with truth, this included such tactics as the “truth truck” ( ) engaging with youth at concerts. the commune campaign featured events with significant local artist involvement and brand ambassadors who interacted directly with their audiences ( ). conclusions upstream interventions affecting health environments can be regarded as prerequisites for a society replete with healthy choices ( ). indeed, cm campaigns may be most effective if they consider both individual and policy-level interventions. in some cases, individual interventions may not be warranted. for example, in the united kingdom, research indicates that responsible drinking campaigns are inherently ineffective, given the existing marketing and policy environment ( ). while cm may be able to modify that, a policy approach might be the more effective approach. www.annualreviews.org • countermarketing alcohol and unhealthy food a nn u. r ev . p ub li c h ea lt h . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . s ee c op yr ig ht f or a pp ro ve d us e. pu ch -freudenberg ari march : by integrating cm with other public health strategies and expanding potential audiences to include policy makers and advocates as well as consumers, this strategy may make multiple contri- butions to health ( ). for alcohol, for example, a regulatory-based campaign directed at policy makers to communicate the dangers of binge drinking and the potential for policies to restrict industry marketing and retail practices may be an effective approach. for food cm efforts, parents of young children vulnerable to the harms of these products may constitute the most receptive audience. media advocacy represents a promising area for cm where the goal is not just individual be- havior change but also regulation or policy change. through the use of earned media, this strategy can be a critical method to overcome this financial barrier to fair and balanced health communi- cation. a recent example is the incorporation of the message into news stories reporting that soda companies such as coca-cola are “hispandering,” targeting hispanics, in their advertisements ( ). for tobacco control, denormalization of the health-damaging practices of the industry helped to change public opinion and set the stage for wider policy changes to support prevention ( , ). by shifting public opinion on the acceptability of the food and alcohol industries’ targeted marketing, appeals to children and youth, and obstruction of public health regulation, alcohol and food countermarketers may similarly be able to accelerate reforms in other prevention policy domains such as taxation, limits on advertising, and pricing. cm efforts in tobacco, alcohol, and food face several challenges. one of these is the phe- nomenon of corporate social responsibility campaigns, which serve as a countervailing force to the promise of cm. from the nestlé boycott during the s and s ( ) to the tobacco reduction campaigns before, during, and after truth ( ), industry opposition to cm has been aggressive, sustained, and creative. one component of the industry’s strategy has been corporate social responsibility campaigns used to oppose tobacco regulation and cm and now widely used by processed food and beverage companies to influence public opinion and government policy away from policies such as taxes, warning labels, and procurement regulations ( ). an important goal of these industry campaigns, one that could be contested by cm, is to reframe the public debate, e.g., the soda industry’s efforts to downplay the role of soda in obesity and diabetes while emphasizing the importance of physical activity. despite the promise that social media holds for community-organized and peer-driven cam- paigns, research indicates that alcohol, tobacco, and processed food companies often have a reach that far exceeds the capacity of community-organized grassroots health-focused social media ( ). campaigns such as “defeat sodatron” and “dunk the junk” center on youtube videos with views that number in the hundreds, whereas corporate food company commercials often generate millions of viewers. perhaps the most significant challenge for alcohol and food cm is the issue of scale. numerous analyses have indicated that the success of truth would not have been possible without “real money,” i.e., the two-year $ million advertising campaign employed in florida beginning in and the master settlement agreement funds used for the national truth campaign ( ). whether the public health community and elected officials will be able to generate the resources needed to bring cm to scale remains an open question. in some jurisdictions, local officials are using revenues from soda taxes to fund public education campaigns as a possible strategy for the future ( ). others have proposed a prevention fund with multiple streams of support as a possible revenue source ( ). cm campaigns on alcohol and food can reach scale when they are part of organized multi- sectoral efforts, including those of government agencies, community organizations, and advocacy groups that seek to shape and sustain responses to the threat of unhealthy industry practices, a palmedo et al. a nn u. r ev . p ub li c h ea lt h . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . s ee c op yr ig ht f or a pp ro ve d us e. pu ch -freudenberg ari march : goal achieved with tobacco during the s and early s. the american stop smoking in- tervention study for cancer prevention (assist) program, a partnership between the national cancer institute and the american cancer society, which supported tobacco control for state health departments, is an example of the coordinated effort that occurred around tobacco control ( ). our review has shown that food and alcohol cm campaigns can apply the lessons learned in tobacco control. to sustain and expand these efforts, these campaigns will need to coordinate more seamlessly with upstream policy efforts. to achieve their full potential, they must be integrated with sustained and coordinated multisectoral efforts to reduce and counter the marketing of alcohol and unhealthy food, which are among the primary contributors to global premature deaths, preventable illnesses, and national and international inequalities in health. disclosure statement the authors are not aware of any affiliations, memberships, funding, or financial holdings that might be perceived as affecting the objectivity of this review. acknowledgments for providing thoughtful feedback on an earlier draft of this article, the authors thank michael bakal of the berkeley media studies group and anonymous reviewers from the annual review of public health. no funding was involved in the research and production of this paper; the views presented herein represent those of the authors alone. literature cited . agostinelli g, grube j. . alcohol counter-advertising and the media. alcohol res. health ( ): – . alcohol concern. . it’s the drink talking: giving young people a voice on alcohol. alcohol concern, london. http://www.itsthedrinktalking.co.uk/ . alcohol justice. . stop alcopops. san rafael, ca. https://alcoholjustice.org/campaigns/stop- alcopops . alhabash s, mcalister ar, quilliam et, richards ji, lou c. . alcohol’s getting a bit more so- cial: when alcohol marketing messages on facebook increase young adults’ intentions to imbibe. mass commun. soc. 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( ): – . yach d, hawkes c, gould cl, hofman kj. . the global burden of chronic diseases: overcoming impediments to prevention and control. jama ( ): – . youth speaks. . the bigger picture campaign. youth speaks, san francisco. http://youthspeaks. org/thebiggerpicture/about/ palmedo et al. a nn u. r ev . p ub li c h ea lt h . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . s ee c op yr ig ht f or a pp ro ve d us e. http://www.cdc.gov/tobacco http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /business/media-business-advertising-tough-anti-smoking-effort-aims-cigarette-marketers.html http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /business/media-business-advertising-tough-anti-smoking-effort-aims-cigarette-marketers.html http://youthspeaks.org/thebiggerpicture/about/ http://youthspeaks.org/thebiggerpicture/about/ pu -frontmatter ari february : annual review of public health volume , contents epidemiology and biostatistics an overview of research and evaluation designs for dissemination and implementation c. hendricks brown, geoffrey curran, lawrence a. palinkas, gregory a. aarons, kenneth b. wells, loretta jones, linda m. collins, naihua duan, brian s. mittman, andrea wallace, rachel g. tabak, lori ducharme, david a. chambers, gila neta, tisha wiley, john landsverk, ken cheung, and gracelyn cruden � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � bias analysis for uncontrolled confounding in the health sciences onyebuchi a. arah � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � natural experiments: an overview of methods, approaches, and contributions to public health intervention research peter craig, srinivasa vittal katikireddi, alastair leyland, and frank popham � � � � � � � � public health surveillance systems: recent advances in their use and evaluation samuel l. groseclose and david l. buckeridge � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � the changing epidemiology of autism spectrum disorders kristen lyall, lisa croen, julie daniels, m. daniele fallin, christine ladd-acosta, brian k. lee, bo y. park, nathaniel w. snyder, diana schendel, heather volk, gayle c. windham, and craig newschaffer � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � social environment and behavior an appraisal of social network theory and analysis as applied to public health: challenges and opportunities thomas w. valente and stephanie r. pitts � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � countermarketing alcohol and unhealthy food: an effective strategy for preventing noncommunicable diseases? lessons from tobacco p. christopher palmedo, lori dorfman, sarah garza, eleni murphy, and nicholas freudenberg � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � obesity in low- and middle-income countries: burden, drivers, and emerging challenges nicole d. ford, shivani a. patel, and k.m. venkat narayan � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � viii a nn u. r ev . p ub li c h ea lt h . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . s ee c op yr ig ht f or a pp ro ve d us e. pu -frontmatter ari february : smoking, mental illness, and public health judith j. prochaska, smita das, and kelly c. young-wolff � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � surveillance systems to track and evaluate obesity prevention efforts deanna m. hoelscher, nalini ranjit, and adriana pérez � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � environmental and occupational health assessing the exposome with external measures: commentary on the state of the science and research recommendations michelle c. turner, mark nieuwenhuijsen, kim anderson, david balshaw, yuxia cui, genevieve dunton, jane a. hoppin, petros koutrakis, and michael jerrett � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � climate change and collective violence barry s. levy, victor w. sidel, and jonathan a. patz � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � climate change and global food systems: potential impacts on food security and undernutrition samuel s. myers, matthew r. smith, sarah guth, christopher d. golden, bapu vaitla, nathaniel d. mueller, alan d. dangour, and peter huybers � � � � � � � � � informatics and data analytics to support exposome-based discovery for public health arjun k. manrai, yuxia cui, pierre r. bushel, molly hall, spyros karakitsios, carolyn j. mattingly, marylyn ritchie, charles schmitt, denis a. sarigiannis, duncan c. thomas, david wishart, david m. balshaw, and chirag j. patel � � � � � � organic food in the diet: exposure and health implications anne lise brantsæter, trond a. ydersbond, jane a. hoppin, margaretha haugen, and helle margrete meltzer � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � toward greater implementation of the exposome research paradigm within environmental epidemiology jeanette a. stingone, germaine m. buck louis, shoji f. nakayama, roel c.h. vermeulen, richard k. kwok, yuxia cui, david m. balshaw, and susan l. teitelbaum � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � public health practice and policy engagement of sectors other than health in integrated health governance, policy, and action evelyne de leeuw � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � evaluating the health impact of large-scale public policy changes: classical and novel approaches sanjay basu, ankita meghani, and arjumand siddiqi � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � contents ix a nn u. r ev . p ub li c h ea lt h . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . s ee c op yr ig ht f or a pp ro ve d us e. pu -frontmatter ari february : generalizing about public health interventions: a mixed-methods approach to external validity laura c. leviton � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � macro trends and the future of public health practice paul campbell erwin and ross c. brownson � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � strengthening integrated care through population-focused primary care services: international experiences outside the united states rene loewenson and sarah simpson � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � public health surveillance systems: recent advances in their use and evaluation samuel l. groseclose and david l. buckeridge � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � health services china’s health reform update gordon g. liu, samantha a. vortherms, and xuezhi hong � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � impact of provider incentives on quality and value of health care tim doran, kristin a. maurer, and andrew m. ryan � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � moving from discovery to system-wide change: the role of research in a learning health care system: experience from three decades of health systems research in the veterans health administration david atkins, amy m. kilbourne, and david shulkin � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � the affordable care act’s impacts on access to insurance and health care for low-income populations gerald f. kominski, narissa j. nonzee, and andrea sorensen � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � the impact of trauma care systems in low- and middle-income countries teri a. reynolds, barclay stewart, isobel drewett, stacy salerno, hendry r. sawe, tamitza toroyan, and charles mock � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � strengthening integrated care through population-focused primary care services: international experiences outside the united states rene loewenson and sarah simpson � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � indexes cumulative index of contributing authors, volumes – � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � cumulative index of article titles, volumes – � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � � errata an online log of corrections to annual review of public health articles may be found at http://www.annualreviews.org/errata/publhealth x contents a nn u. r ev . p ub li c h ea lt h . : - . d ow nl oa de d fr om w w w .a nn ua lr ev ie w s. or g a cc es s pr ov id ed b y c ar ne gi e m el lo n u ni ve rs it y on / / . s ee c op yr ig ht f or a pp ro ve d us e. 	annual reviews online 	search annual reviews 	annual review of public health
online 	most downloaded public health
reviews 	most cited public health
reviews 	annual review of public health
errata 	view current editorial committee 	all articles in the annual review of public health, vol. 	epidemiology and biostatistics 	an overview of research and evaluation designs for dissemination
and implementation 	bias analysis for uncontrolled confounding in the health sciences 	natural experiments: an overview of methods, approaches, and
contributions to public health intervention research 	public health surveillance systems: recent advances in their use
and evaluation 	the changing epidemiology of autism spectrum disorders 	social environment and behavior 	an appraisal of social network theory and analysis as applied
to public health: challenges and opportunities 	countermarketing alcohol and unhealthy food: an effective strategy
for preventing noncommunicable diseases? lessons from tobacco 	obesity in low- and middle-income countries: burden, drivers, and
emerging challenges 	smoking, mental illness, and public health 	surveillance systems to track and evaluate obesity prevention efforts 	environmental and occupational health 	assessing the exposome with external measures: commentary on the
state of the science and research recommendations 	climate change and collective violence 	climate change and global food systems: potential impacts on food
security and undernutrition 	informatics and data analytics to support exposome-based discovery
for public health 	organic food in the diet: exposure and health implications 	toward greater implementation of the exposome research paradigm
within environmental epidemiology 	public health practice and policy 	engagement of sectors other than health in integrated health
governance, policy, and action 	evaluating the health impact of large-scale public policy changes:
classical and novel approaches 	generalizing about public health interventions: a mixed-methodsapproach to external validity 	macro trends and the future of public health practice 	strengthening integrated care through population-focused primarycare services: international experiences outside the united states 	public health surveillance systems: recent advances in their useand evaluation 	health services 	china’s health reform update 	impact of provider incentives on quality and value of health care 	moving from discovery to system-wide change: the role of research in a learning health care system: experience from three
decades of health systems research in the veterans health administration 	the affordable care act’s impacts on access to insurance and health
care for low-income populations 	the impact of trauma care systems in low- and middle-income countries 	strengthening integrated care through population-focused primary
care services: international experiences outside the united states s jra .. symposium on the biden administration and the international legal order a human rights agenda for the biden administration sarah h. cleveland* the biden administration has much to do to restore the united states’ credibility as a human rights leader and to strengthen the human rights system in an era of rising right-wing nationalism, authoritarianism, and com- petition for global power. in doing so, it needs to lead by example by putting its own house in order, and act with both courage and humility in the face of deep global skepticism and distrust. specifically, the administration should pursue five stages of engagement on human rights: reverse and revoke measures taken by the trump admin- istration, reaffirm the united states’ traditional commitments to human rights at home and abroad, rebuild the state department and diplomatic corps, reengage with international and regional mechanisms through bilateral and multilateral diplomacy, and reconceptualize the united states’ twenty-first century relationship to human rights. all of the other topics addressed in this symposium—climate, health, elections, migration, structural racism, and trade—implicate human rights. none can be adequately addressed without a robust u.s. human rights agenda. the challenge the outgoing administration badly stained america’s human rights reputation and abdicated leadership in the international human rights realm. while some countries stepped into the vacuum to preserve the system, others worked to undermine it. neither group will step aside because the united states says, “we’re back.” but the biden administration cannot reenter this space timidly. the administration should make the protection of human rights at home and abroad a central pillar of u.s. foreign policy. the united states unquestionably has a mixed record in respecting human rights. but promotion and protection of universal human rights is a founding ideal of the united states and has been a distinctive hallmark of our foreign policy. the united states’ combination of values and power has led the world to expect u.s. human rights leadership. when the united states announces its position with moral clarity, sympathetic states listen. historically, there was a parallel strategic aspect to the united states’ engagement on human rights in the cold war era. given the new rivalry with china, which is attempting to reframe normative issues into a “development frame” rather than a rights frame to shield its authoritarian model from criticism (external and internal), there is a new strategic rationale for reengagement on human rights. * louis henkin professor of human and constitutional rights, columbia law school, new york city, new york, united states; un human rights committee ( - ); counselor on international law to the legal adviser, u.s. dept. of state ( - ). doi: . /aju. . © sarah h. cleveland . this is an open access article, distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / in pursuing that reengagement, the administration will be constrained by acutely divided u.s. domestic politics and a sharply divided senate. internationally, longstanding regional and international human rights mechanisms are severely underfunded, in need of structural reform, and under attack. this is not the time to develop shiny new human rights mechanisms. the biden administration should focus on strengthening the effectiveness of the exist- ing regime and securing it for twenty-first century challenges. reverse and revoke restoring u.s. credibility and leadership on human rights starts at home. the trump administration abandoned the goal of closing guantánamo, revoked restrictions on targeted killings, reversed the ban on anti-personnel mines, and supported the saudis’ atrocity-riddled war in yemen. the administration reinvigorated the federal death penalty, privileged religion over reproductive health, and reversed litigation positions regarding protections for transgender and other lgbt persons, health insurance, reproductive rights, and corporate human rights responsibility. the administration eased civil rights oversight of discriminatory police departments. its zero- tolerance immigration policy, inter alia, banned entry from muslim-majority countries, separated families, and slashed the annual refugee admission quota. overseas, the administration claimed power to sanction international criminal court (icc) personnel and launched a broad-based assault on gender rights—expanding the “global gag rule” on organizations providing reproductive health services, opposing un resolutions, and eliminating reproductive health from the annual state department human rights country reports. quick reversal of these positions is an essential first step toward rehabilitating the united states’ credibility as a nation that practices what it preaches. reaffirm in the past four years, millions took to the streets to demand their human rights in the united states and abroad. rather than support such movements, the outgoing administration attacked free speech, the free press, free elec- tions, and judicial independence at home; coddled dictators; ignored assaults on the rule of law abroad; and failed to press for meaningful accountability, including for the saudi murder of jamal khashoggi. through the bravado of its “unalienable rights commission,” the administration purported to redefine human rights narrowly and unilaterally for the international system, including by elevating religion over other rights. the incoming administration must signal that it stands with rights defenders, not dictators. it should publicly reaffirm the united states’ commitment to human rights—particularly the values on which the united states traditionally has led. these include the freedoms of expression, press and assembly; judicial independence; democ- racy and the rule of law; equality and nondiscrimination (including for racial, ethnic, religious, and sexual minorities and persons with disabilities); and the rights of refugees and migrants. the administration should reject the hubris of the unalienable rights commission and reaffirm the universality and indivisibility of all internationally recog- nized human rights. exec. order no. , fed. reg. , (may , ). brief for the united states as amicus curiae supporting neither party at , jesner v. arab bank, plc, s. ct. (june ) (no. – ). ed pilkington, trump’s scrapping of obama-era reforms hinders police reform, guardian (june , ). proclamation no. , fed. reg. , (sept. , ). exec. order no. , fed. reg. , (june , ). ajil unbound vol. https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/ / / / - /promoting-free-speech-and-religious-liberty https://www.scotusblog.com/case-files/cases/jesner-v-arab-bank-plc/ https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ /jun/ /police-consent-decrees-trump-administration-oversight https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/ / / / - /enhancing-vetting-capabilities-and-processes-for-detecting-attempted-entry-into-the-united-states-by https://www.federalregister.gov/documents/ / / / - /blocking-property-of-certain-persons-associated-with-the-international-criminal-court rebuild effective engagement in international diplomacy and institutions requires a knowledgeable and skilled diplo- matic staff. president trump’s isolationist tack assaulted the state department: hundreds of state department personnel were either fired or quit on principle. the knowledge base of the u.s. diplomatic corps thus has been severely compromised. the biden administration must rebuild the u.s. diplomatic corps and modernize state department methodol- ogies. the administration needs to appoint highly qualified and diverse personnel for positions ranging from the un permanent representatives in new york and geneva, to the state department’s legal adviser and assistant secretary for democracy, human rights and labor, to the human rights officers in embassies and bureaus throughout the government. it should resurrect a revamped, high-level interagency working group on human rights under the direction of a senior director at the national security council of proven human rights reputation, to help ensure that human rights awareness is integrated through all domestic and foreign policy branches of the government. the administration also must rebuild relations with civil society organizations, essential partners in promoting human rights compliance at home and abroad. such openness will also help restore the united states’ global leadership in promoting robust civil societies and transparency in governments. reengage the last administration, inter alia, withdrew from the un human rights council and unesco, cut funding for the un population fund and the un relief and works agency for palestinian refugees, and attacked the icc. the united states should reengage in promoting human rights through these and other regional and international mechanisms, as well as through bilateral and multilateral diplomacy. the united states should re-join the un human rights council. although the trump administration withdrew from the council abruptly in , it nevertheless appeared for the council’s third universal periodic review of the united states in november , reaffirming universal participation. the biden administration will now have an important early human rights signaling opportunity when it reports back to the council in march on whether the united states accepts the resulting recommendations. unquestionably, the council is an imperfect institution. but as the political human rights arm of the united nations, the council is the un’s primary and most powerful human rights body. often the council, including its special rapporteurs and other special procedures, is the only forum to address human rights issues that partic- ularly concern the united states—including in syria, iran, north korea, venezuela, and myanmar. while the council warrants reform, including on election procedures and the israel agenda item, the united states can accomplish change only by engaging. withdrawal from the council, and removing the full-time u.s. ambassador dedicated to it, simply ceded that space to dictators and autocrats. the united states could also demonstrate leadership on transparency by adopting an open-door policy for special rapporteurs. while party only to some mechanisms, the united states generally has been a strong supporter of the indepen- dence of the un treaty bodies, which monitor state compliance with human rights treaty obligations, as well as of the overall inter-american human rights system. one notable measure of the collapse of the united states’ human rights reputation has been its loss of an unprecedented number of elections to such bodies in the last four years. see, e.g., walking the talk: blueprints for a human rights-centered u.s. foreign policy, hum. rts. first ( ). rupa shenoy, at the un review of us human rights, the trump administration gets an earful, world (nov. , ). keith harper & stephen pomper, on the u.n. human rights council, quitters are losers, foreign pol’y (jan. , ). a human rights agenda for the biden administration https://www.humanrightsfirst.org/campaigns/ -policy-blueprints https://www.pri.org/stories/ - - /un-review-us-human-rights-trump-administration-gets-earful https://foreignpolicy.com/ / / /on-the-u-n-human-rights-council-quitters-are-losers/ the united states now has no member on any un treaty body (the human rights committee, the committee against torture, or the committee on the elimination of racial discrimination) or on the inter-american commission on human rights. the trump administration also failed to submit reports to any treaty body. the biden administration should reengage constructively with international and regional human rights mech- anisms by promoting the nomination and election of highly qualified independent experts; submitting overdue u. s. reports; ensuring institutions have the resources, infrastructure and independence to fulfill their mandates; respecting their decisions; and contributing to ongoing efforts to strengthen and modernize these systems. the united states is not a party to the rome statute establishing the icc. nevertheless, the bush and obama administrations constructively supported the court, consistent with u.s. interests in promoting international jus- tice. domestic politics and intra-governmental resistance will impede reengagement, given the court’s needed reforms and pending investigation of the united states. but a well-functioning icc would solve problems the united states lacks the time or energy to address. the biden administration should reaffirm the u.s. signature and its intent not to violate the object and purpose of the rome statute, and resume cooperation with the court on matters of mutual concern. beyond human rights mechanisms, the united states should work to ensure that human rights are a primary concern of multilateral and regional fora, both to help fill the leadership vacuum on human rights and to prevent other states from diluting the human rights impact of those organs. any position the united states takes has ripple effects. for example, the trump administration’s threat to veto an annual un resolution on conflict-related sexual violence diluted the resolution and allowed russia and china to secure even worse changes. similarly, in its dip- lomatic and aid relationships, the united states should act in concert with other states and regional mechanisms to prevent backsliding and strengthen democracy and the rule of law in fragile democracies such as tunisia and guatemala, and in states that are trending authoritarian, such as hungary, poland, india, and turkey. reconceptualize many of the steps above would largely restore the status quo ante. but the greatest challenge is to recalibrate and reconceptualize the nation’s engagement with human rights in a world where the united states is no longer the hegemon. gone are the days when the united states could muscle through its position. the international land- scape is more fragmented, with less consensus on human rights. reconceptualizing u.s. engagement on human rights will involve many steps. here are four good places to begin: building creative alliances and solutions: coalition building, engaging new allies, and creative use of all available tools and fora should form a core part of u.s. reengagement on human rights. only with the support of others will the united states be able to pose an effective bulwark against russia and china’s efforts to redefine interna- tional norms. only through creative alliances will the united states be able effectively to shore up democracy, the rule of law, and human rights against creeping autocracy. one way the trump administration contributed positively to human rights accountability was through the use of targeted sanctions against human rights violators under the global magnitsky act of and similar authorities. these have included sanctioning officials for china’s xinjiang policies and banning goods made with uighur forced labor. while selectively imposing sanctions undermines their credibility, properly deployed, targeted sanc- tions can be an important means for ensuring that gross human rights violations are condemned and human rights norms affirmed. strategic confrontation is an essential part of human rights leadership. smart use of sanctions, harold hongju koh, international criminal justice . , yale j. int’l l. , – ( ); john bellinger, the international criminal court and the trump administration, lawfare (mar. , ). jamille bigio, controversy over sexual violence in conflict at the un security council, council on foreign rel. (may , ). ajil unbound vol. https://digitalcommons.law.yale.edu/fss_papers/ / https://www.lawfareblog.com/international-criminal-court-and-trump-administration https://www.lawfareblog.com/international-criminal-court-and-trump-administration https://www.cfr.org/blog/controversy-over-sexual-violence-conflict-un-security-council especially in coordination with other states, helps respond to atrocities, avoid impunity, and isolate perpetrators across a wide range of human rights concerns. creative twenty-first century engagement needs to recognize the essential role of non-state actors and soft law norms. america best leads with ideas, and the best often come from outside the government. creative engagement through public-private alliances with civil society organizations, religious and youth groups, corporations, and other stakeholders will maximize both credibility and impact, on issues ranging from internet freedom to redress- ing civilian harms in armed conflict. rethinking u.s. positions on human rights: some u.s. positions on human rights may warrant reconsideration if the united states is to be an effective leader in alliance with others, including the extraterritorial application of human rights treaties, and economic, social, and cultural rights. in the face of senate opposition to treaty ratification, rethinking human rights engagement also means using executive branch tools to comply with important unratified treaty norms. senator biden’s support for the americans with disabilities act and the violence against women act helped inform global norms on these issues, now reflected in the disabilities convention and the convention on elimination of discrimination against women. the biden administration can use these and other treaties as models for executive branch standards, as obama did with the landmines convention, and support their adoption by state and local governments. institutional reform: the biden administration should join efforts to address existing weaknesses in international human rights institutions. reform conversations are underway from the un treaty bodies to the regional human rights systems but have lacked strong leadership by states seeking constructive reform. common concerns include methods for electing participants, backlogs in processing human rights complaints, antiquated and cumbersome working methods, and insufficient “connectivity” among the various mechanisms. reform is no simple matter: concerted engagement is needed to build consensus among states and within institutions. nevertheless, severe financial challenges, reform threats by hostile states, and the covid pandemic’s disruption of established working methods may present a unique opportunity to achieve meaningful reform. to participate credibly in those con- versations, the biden administration must earn its seat at the table, matching constructive ideas with meaningful resources and demonstrated staying power, in partnership with like-minded states, civil society groups, and other stakeholders. expressive freedoms: to meaningfully address any of the substantive areas discussed in this symposium, the administration should make freedom of expression, press, and association an anchor of its international diplo- macy. shrinking civil society space, attacks on media freedom, and restrictions on online speech accelerated glob- ally in the past few years, inflamed by the white house’s “war on truth.” repression of these expressive rights is the first indicator in a move from democracy to autocracy, and thus an early warning for growing illiberalism, from which other human rights violations also flow. by engaging on these issues, the biden administration can both counter illiberalism abroad and advance america’s interests at home. freedom of association and assembly are high level panel of legal experts on media freedom, report on the use of targeted sanctions to protect journalists ( ). this position is not monolithic. see sarah h. cleveland, the united states and the torture convention, part i: extraterritoriality, just security (nov. , ). gillian macnaughton & mariah mcgill, economic and social rights in the united states: implementation without ratification, northeastern univ. l.j. ( ). joann kamuf ward & sarah alshawish, if the us wants to lead on human rights, we must shift to the state and local level, just security (dec. , ). sarah h. cleveland, human rights connectivity: the future of the treaty body system, in the future of human rights (n. bhutal ed., forthcoming ). v-dem inst., democracy report , at . a human rights agenda for the biden administration https://www.ibanet.org/media-freedom-sanctions-report-launch- .aspx https://www.justsecurity.org/ /united-states-torture-convention-part-i-extraterritoriality/ https://www.corteidh.or.cr/tablas/r .pdf https://www.justsecurity.org/ /if-the-us-wants-to-lead-on-human-rights-we-must-shift-to-the-state-and-local-level/ https://www.v-dem.net/media/filer_public/de/ /de af - bc - - ae-fb dcc dba/democracy_report.pdf core u.s. constitutional rights that resonate in the black lives matter protests at home and pro-democracy protests abroad. likewise, the united states’ voice is sorely needed in global conversations regarding online speech, includ- ing censorship, surveillance, and misinformation, which implicate core u.s. values and interests. conclusion the past four years have badly damaged america’s reputation for commitment and competence. but for this same reason, the biden administration must not under-correct. in order to right the ship of state and persuade the world that a values-based america is back, the administration should turn the page boldly. ajil unbound vol. 	a human rights agenda for the biden administration 	the challenge 	reverse and revoke 	reaffirm 	rebuild 	reengage 	reconceptualize 	conclusion bulletproof love ken derry/daniel white hodge/laurel zwissler/ stanley talbert/matthewj. cressler/jon ivan gill bulletproof love: luke cage( ) and religion abstract there are many ways to think about religion and popular culture. one method is to ask where and when we see what might be commonly understood as “religious tradition()” explicitly on display. another is to think about superhero narratives themselves as “religious”, using this term as a conceptual tool for categorizing and thereby better understanding particular dimensions of human experience. this article takes a variety of approaches to understanding religion in relation to the recent tel¬ evision series luke cage(netflix, us ). these approaches take their hermeneuti ¬ cal cues from a range of disciplines, including studies of the bible; hip hop; gender; black theology; african american religion; and philosophy. the results of this analysis highlight the polysemic nature of popular culture in general, and of superhero stories in particular. like religious traditions themselves, the show is complex and contradic¬ tory: it is both progressive and reactionary; emphasizes community and valorizes an individual; critiques and endorses christianity; subverts and promotes violence. de¬ pending on the questions asked, luke cage( ) provides a range of very different answers. keywords african american, superhero, violence, marvel, popular culture, gender, television, netflix biographies ken derry is associate professor, teaching stream, in the department of historical studies at the university of toronto, canada. his academic work explores the rela¬ tions between religion and violence, particularly in literature and film. ken has pub ¬ lished essays on subjects ranging from the epistle of barnabas to the wizard of oz to the work of indigenous writer thomas king to the use of humor in teaching religion. he is married and has three cats. www.jrfm.eu , / , – doi: . / .: .. bulletproof love: luke cage ( ) and religion| | ken derry et al. www.jrfm.eu , / , – daniel white hodge is the director of the center for youth ministry studies and asso- ciate professor of youth ministry & popular culture at north park university in chica- go. currently, his research and community engagement explore the intersections of faith,	critical	race	theory,	justice,	hip	hop	culture,	and	emerging	multi-ethnic	millenni- al culture. his three current books are heaven has a ghetto: the missiological gospel & theology of tupac amaru shakur (vdm ), the soul of hip hop: rimbs, timbs, & a cultural theology (ivp ), and hip hop’s hostile gospel: a post soul theologi- cal exploration (brill, academic ). he is currently working on a co-authored book with irene cho (fuller youth institute) titled, between god & kanye: youth ministry in a post-civil rights era (ivp academic ). laurel zwissler is an assistant professor of religion at central michigan university, usa. her forthcoming book, religious, feminist, activist: cosmologies of intercon- nection	(university	of	nebraska),	focuses	on	global	justice	activists	and	investigates	 contemporary intersections between religion, gender, and politics, relating these to theoretical debates about religion in the public sphere. she is now building on this work with ethnographic research within the north american fair-trade movement, as well as occasional visits with contemporary witchcraft communities. stanley talbert is a ph.d. student at union theological seminary in the city of new york where he studies systematic theology and african american studies. he is the	author	of	“unveiling	radical	love:	a	theological	reflection	on	radical	love	in	 the age of ferguson,” in reconciliation reconsidered (abilene christian university press,	 ).		he	has	published	articles	on	theology,	race,	and	culture	in	the	huff- ington post, ebony, and the african american lectionary. stanley hopes to leave a legacy of radical love that witnesses to god, his family, and the profound traditions of	freedom	fighters.	 matthew j. cressler is assistant professor of religious studies at the college of charleston,	south	carolina.	his	first	book,	authentically	black	and	truly	catholic:	 the rise of black catholicism in the great migration (forthcoming nyu press, no- vember ), tells the story of african americans who converted to catholicism in the	first	half	of	the	twentieth	century	and	then,	beginning	in	the	late	 s,	initi- ated a revolution in catholic identity and practice as they participated in the black power	movement.	his	teaching	interests	include	african	american	religions;	religion	 in	america;	black	nationalism;	american	identity;	race,	religion	and	politics;	and	the- ory in the study of religion. jon ivan gill is an avid scholar of whiteheadian process thought, metaphysics, cultural studies, aesthetics, existentialist philosophy, and constructive & secular theology. his creative tangent ranges from underground hip-hop culture to cryptic lyrics he pens in	rap,	poetry,	journal	refereeing,	book	reviews,	and	academic	essays	&	critiques.	he	 earned his phd. candidate in “philosophy of religion and theology” at claremont graduate university. jon’s staunch support of a truly philosophical and theological trans-disciplinary discourse involves the inclusion of everything from aesthetic athe- ism and religious pluralism to subversive use of the arts. bulletproof love: luke cage ( ) and religion | www.jrfm.eu , / , – annual conferences of large academic societies are typically, by their very na- ture, slow to respond to current events. the logistics in putting together such meetings are incredibly complex, the result being that the planning of sessions begins up to a year before the meeting takes place. to its credit, the american academy of religion (aar) has been sensitive to this issue, and has endeav- ored	to	open	up	ways	in	which	scholars	can	offer	analyses	of	more	recent	phe- nomena. at the november meeting of the aar in san antonio, texas, for example,	several	sessions	were	offered	in	response	to	the	results	of	the	u.s.	 presidential	election	that	had	taken	place	just	slightly	more	than	a	week	earlier. with this sense of timeliness in mind, members of the aar’s religion, film, and visual culture (rfvc) group approached the director of the annual meet- ing, dr. robert puckett, about scheduling a last-minute roundtable discussion of	the	first	season	of	the	superhero	series	luke	cage	(netflix,	us	 ),	released	 in october . 	not	only	is	luke	the	first	black	superhero	to	be	featured	in	his	 own comic book and	his	own	television	show,	but	the	netflix	portrayal	of	him	in	 a	hoodie,	being	shot	at	by	police	(fig.	 ),	was	clearly	meant	to	resonate	instantly	 with critically important, and deeply troubling, of-the-moment occurrences. he is, in the words of rolling stone’s	rob	sheffield,	“the	first	black	lives	matter	 superhero”. in this regard the authors would like to thank dr. syed adnan hussain (of st. mary’s university in hali- fax), one of the members of the religion, film, and visual culture group, for the inspiration to propose this session. 	 sheffield	 . fig. : film still, “dwyck”, luke cage ( ), s /e , : . | ken derry et al. www.jrfm.eu , / , – puckett, a self-proclaimed marvel nerd, agreed to the session, which came to feature six scholars from several groups within the aar in addition to rfvc: anthropology	of	religion;	black	theology;	critical	approaches	to	hip-hop	and	 religion;	and	religion	and	popular	culture.	many	of	the	participants	had	never	 encountered one another before, and so the roundtable became an opportu- nity to cross disciplinary lines, to bring together a diverse range of voices and perspectives, and to meet some seriously excellent people. the	diversity	of	our	roundtable	panel	fit	well	with	one	of	our	broad	criti- cal aims, which was to demonstrate that there are many ways to think about religion and popular culture. one starting point is to ask where and when we see what might be commonly understood as “religious tradition(s)” explicitly on display. regarding superhero narratives, this question invites us to analyze ostensibly religious images and tropes in various media incarnations including comics,	film,	and	television.	such	analysis	could	include,	for	instance,	identifying	 characters	modeled	on	religious	archetypes,	such	as	jewish	messianic	figures,	 buddhist arhats, or anishinaabe tricksters. it could also include allusions to reli- gious texts such as the qur’an, the bhagavad gita, or the bible. another direction we might take would be to think about superhero narra- tives themselves as “religious” in some way. following after theorists such as jonathan z. smith, talal asad, and tomoko masuzawa, if we regard “religion” as a conceptual tool that scholars use to categorize and thereby better under- stand particular dimensions of human experience, we can begin to recognize the ways in which superhero narratives (and the worlds they create) may serve some of the functions typically reserved for “the religious”. this hermeneutic can illuminate aspects of such narratives that might otherwise go unnoticed. this article takes a variety of approaches to understanding religion in rela- tion to luke	cage ( ). doing so highlights the polysemic nature of popular culture in general, and of superhero stories in particular. like religious traditions themselves, the show is complex and contradictory: it is both progressive and reactionary;	emphasizes	community	and	valorizes	an	individual;	critiques	and	 endorses	christianity;	subverts	and	promotes	violence.	depending	on	the	ques- tions you ask, luke	cage	( )	provides	many,	many	different	answers. “sensational origin issue!” the character of luke cage was created in by two white men, archie good- win	and	john	romita,	sr.,	in	the	spirit	of	the	blaxpoitation	films	of	the	time.	he	 first	appeared	in	luke cage, hero for hire	# 	(fig.	 ),	written	by	goodwin	and	roy	 thomas, and drawn by george tuska. born carl lucas, luke is framed by his old 	 smith	 ;	see	also	asad	 ;	masuzawa	 . bulletproof love: luke cage ( ) and religion | www.jrfm.eu , / , – friend willis stryker, ending up in seagate prison. he is tormented by a sadis- tic white guard, albert “billy bob” rackham, and volunteers for an experiment run by dr. noah burstein in exchange for early release. rackham sabotages the experiment	in	an	effort	to	kill	carl,	causing	an	explosion.	but	as	is	the	way	in	 comics, things go bizarrely awry – rackham is killed instead and carl emerges from the wreckage with super strength, breaking out of prison and changing his name to luke cage. cautious about whom he can trust, he makes few close friends;	an	early	one	is	claire	temple,	who	helps	luke	when	he’s	hurt	and	who	 dates him for a while. all	of	these	details	are	repeated	in	the	 -episode	netflix	series,	which	unlike	 the original comics was made by black artists, including creator and showrun- ner cheo hodari coker. despite some of the big picture similarities to luke’s original incarnation, these artists made many changes to his character, bringing him into the st century and out of white stereotypes. he is much quieter, and more	thoughtful	and	reserved;	instead	of	shouting	bombastically	and	punching	 supervillains, he reads books and eschews violence. pointedly unlike his comic book	self,	the	netflix	luke	refuses	to	be	paid	for	helping	people,	preferring	to	 earn	his	living	as	a	janitor	in	pop’s	barbershop.	changes	were	also	made	to	his	 childhood: no longer raised in harlem by a police-detective father, luke is now from georgia and the son of a philandering preacher. in the television show, therefore, he is an outsider in harlem, working to help people he has only re- cently come to know and love. claire, too, undergoes important shifts as her character is translated from the comics: she is now a hispanic nurse, instead of a	black	doctor	(fig.	 ). fig. (l.): john romita sr., cover artwork, luke cage, hero for hire # (june ) © marvel comics. fig. (r.): george tuska, interior artwork, luke cage, hero for hire # (august ) © marvel comics. | ken derry et al. www.jrfm.eu , / , – the reasons why harlem needs luke’s help are laid out in two main story arcs: the	first	seven	episodes	of	the	series	focus	on	local	gangster	cornell	“cotton- mouth” stokes and his cousin mariah dillard, a corrupt local councilwoman. together	they	unsuccessfully	attempt	to	recover	first	from	the	betrayal	of	an	 underling during a weapons deal with a rival gang, and then from the crippling damage	that	luke	inflicts	on	cornell’s	organization.	as	luke’s	vigilante	activities	 against	harlem’s	criminal	world	gather	steam,	he	finds	himself	the	focus	of	a	 police investigation, led by detective misty knight. the second arc of the series begins when mariah kills cornell in a rage over his	accusation	that	she	“wanted”	the	sexual	abuse	she	suffered	as	a	young	girl.	 at this point the mysterious “diamondback” – cornell’s powerful unseen sup- plier – emerges from the shadows. he reveals himself to be willis stryker, who is not only luke’s childhood friend and betrayer but also, it turns out, his half- brother.	during	the	final	six	episodes	mariah	gradually	steps	into	her	dead	cous- in’s crime-boss shoes, while diamondback repeatedly tries to kill luke for what he sees as the unforgiveable sin of being the publically “accepted” son, rather than	the	one	whose	origin	was	a	shameful	secret.	luke	finally	defeats	a	super- suited diamondback in a street battle, and ends the series by giving himself up to the police as an escaped convict. “dishwasher lazarus” our consideration of religion and luke	cage ( ) begins with this question: what kind of a hero is luke? the second time that we see him use his powers, it is to protect a young boy when one of cornell’s henchmen, tone, shoots up	pop’s	barbershop	(e ;	fig	 ). when the shooting is done, luke does not charge	out	of	the	shop	to	punish	the	gunman;	he	instead	stays	to	help	the	 injured	and	check	on	pop,	who	tragically	has	been	killed.	much	of	luke	cage ( ) focuses on the lead character’s transformation from escaped convict to hero, as he is pushed and inspired by circumstances and people (particularly pop and claire temple) to emerge from hiding and use his powers to help oth- ers. but even as this emergence takes place, luke continues to help by shield- ing victims to prevent harm, as much as (if not more than) he hits villains to inflict	harm:	he	stands	in	front	of	the	injured	corrupt	police	detective,	rafael	 scarfe,	when	cornell’s	men	try	to	run	him	over	(e );	he	protects	misty	from	 being	shot	during	the	hostage	crisis	at	harlem’s	paradise	(e – );	and	he	cov- ers	a	police	officer	with	his	body	when	that	man’s	partner	starts	firing	at	luke	 (fig.	 ). all references to luke	cage	are	to	the	first	season	of	the	series,	which	as	of	this	writing	is	the	only	 season that has aired. bulletproof love: luke cage ( ) and religion | www.jrfm.eu , / , – there	are	other	ways	in	which	luke	submits	to	violence	of	different	types,	rath- er	than	leading	with	his	fists.	when	his	landlords	are	being	threatened,	he	first	 asks the four men to stop being disrespectful, and then stands still while one of them hits luke in the face and shatters his own hand (e ). after cornell threatens to expose luke as a fugitive, he decides to leave harlem, before claire convinces	him	to	stay	and	fight	back	(e ).	he	tells	the	two	officers	who	stop	 him	that	he	just	wants	to	walk	and	mind	his	own	business	(e ).	despite	his	in- nocence he does not resist being taken back to prison at the end of the series (e ). even during his climactic battle with diamondback, who is wearing a suit that makes him at least as strong as luke, he simply decides to stop trading blows: “i’m not doing this any more. . . . you want me dead? then kill me” (e ). this is unusual behavior for a superhero. we are used to seeing these charac- ters – despite their ostensive commitment to peace – embracing violence with much more enthusiasm than luke does. as robert jewett and john shelton lawrence have argued in several works, superheroes most often embody a troubling perspective – derived originally from certain biblical responses to cri- sis – that they have termed “zealous nationalism”. this perspective is rooted in moral	dualism,	as	a	lone	savior	driven	by	a	commitment	to	justice	is	faced	with	 	 this	is	in	fact	the	first	time	that	we	see	luke’s	powers	in	action. as it turns out luke is employing a rope-a-dope strategy, letting diamondback wear his suit out beating on him before being dispatched by our hero with three quick hits. still, the fact is that luke wins by submitting to violence. see, e.g., jewett/lawrence , , , and . for a concise account of both zealous nationalism and prophetic realism (which is discussed below), and the biblical origins of each perspective, see jewett/lawrence , – . fig. : film still, “code of the streets”, luke cage ( ), s /e , : . | ken derry et al. www.jrfm.eu , / , – corrupt	and/or	ineffective	laws	and	so	becomes	a	vigilante	in	order	to	save	the	 community by destroying the evildoers who threaten it. there are some ele- ments of this perspective in luke	cage ( ), especially regarding problems with	the	police	and	luke’s	justification	for	using	violence	to	make	harlem	saf- er. but luke never directly or even inadvertently kills anyone, and even after seeing	cornell	let	out	of	jail	(e )	he	still	hands	diamondback	over	to	the	au- thorities	when	their	fight	is	done	(e )	–	and,	again,	he	gives	himself up to the police in the end. in many ways, in fact, luke	cage ( ) appears to represent the oppos- ing worldview – also biblically rooted – which jewett and lawrence refer to as “prophetic realism”. instead of wishing for a solitary hero who ignores the law to save everyone from evil, this perspective recognizes human complexity and valorizes communities working together to improve their situation using due process. this focus on community is evident throughout the series, from the importance of pop’s barbershop as a refuge and meeting place, to the fact that luke has no mask or “superhero” identity: he is always luke cage and he openly helps, and often needs the help of, the people around him. he also tries to understand the people who are hurting harlem, and the series itself slowly peels	off	the	masks	of	the	villains	–	cornell	stokes,	mariah	dillard,	willis	stryker	 – to show us the painful histories that have shaped their current identities and actions. examples of american cinematic superheroes who embody zealous nationalism include the protago- nists of batman (tim burton, us ), spider-man	(sam raimi, us ), superman	returns	(bryan singer, us ), iron	man (jon favreau, us ), the	dark	knight	rises	(christopher nolan, gb/us ), and man	of	steel	(zack snyder, gb/us ). in this regard one of the most zealous moments in the series comes after pop’s funeral (e ), when misty is upbraiding luke for antagonizing cornell and saying that she will get him “the right way”, that “the system will win”. luke is having none of it: “forget the system. arrests lead to indictments, and indictments	lead	to	pleas.	there’s	always	a	bigger	fish.	a	bigger	angle.	a	slap	on	the	wrist.	and	boom.	 right back in business. i ain’t going for that.” this conversation is an example of the wonderfully com- plex, shifting dynamics of luke	cage ( ), given that luke as noted below does end up trusting the “system” in several respects, while misty moves further into vigilante territory: she attacks claire dur- ing	an	official	interrogation	(e )	and	circumvents	police	protocol	when	trying	to	protect	a	key	witness	 against mariah, which leads to the witness’s death and mariah’s freedom (e ). 	 in	his	eulogy	for	pop,	luke	admits	that	he	used	to	be	“selfish”	in	his	responses	to	violence,	and	that	 pop taught him a critical lesson: “if we try to protect only ourselves, without looking out for those people	closest	to	us,	then	we	lose”	(e ).	he	concludes	the	eulogy	by	affirming,	“i	don’t	believe	in	har- lem. i believe in the people who make harlem what it is.” this faith is returned at several points in the series, notably when many of harlem’s people put on hoodies with holes in them to help luke evade the	police,	and	when	they	all	start	chanting	“luke!	luke!	luke!”	during	his	final	fight	with	diamondback	 (e ). pop too worked to understand the value and humanity of all people, regardless of their past. as luke notes in his eulogy, “pop saw the shine in everyone that walked into his barbershop. . . . he made them feel better about the world, and themselves. we have to strive on a daily basis to do the same for each other” (e ). the most striking way in which luke	cage ( ) fails to do this very thing involves willis stryker, who is portrayed as cartoonishly evil. the attempt to understand his horrifying behavior is weak and unsatisfying;	simply	having	a	thoughtless	and	hypocritical	father	hardly	accounts	for	stryker’s	murder- ous	rampages.	and	the	parental	indifference	he	experienced	in	no	way	comes	close	to	the	horrors	 bulletproof love: luke cage ( ) and religion | www.jrfm.eu , / , – one other feature of luke’s character stands out as unique in a way that is connected	to	prophetic	realism:	his	role	as	a	christ-figure.	while	a	great	many	 superheroes	also	symbolize	jesus,	they	do	so	while	waving	the	flag	of	zealous	 nationalism. there are by no means any universally agreed parameters for iden- tifying	cinematic	christ-figures,	but	lloyd	baugh’s	influential	imaging the divine ( )	offers	a	useful	starting	point. and while he does not even mention su- perheroes, almost all of his criteria are in fact part of standard superhero tropes: they	are	saviors	with	mysterious	origins;	they	perform	miracles;	they	suffer	and	 bleed;	they	have	devoted	followers	or	helpers;	and	they	are	committed	to	jus- tice,	which	often	leads	to	conflicts	with	authorities.	in	addition	many	heroes	are	 often scapegoated, and it has become increasingly common for them to die and resurrect,	sometimes	literally.	in	film	the	christ-like	nature	of	these	(literal	or	 figurative)	deaths	is	often	indicated	by	showing	the	hero	in	a	crucifixion	pose. luke	meets	all	of	these	christ-figure	criteria.	initially	no	one	knows	who	he	is	 or where he is from. he has miraculous strength and seems impervious to harm, although	he	suffers	and	bleeds	when	shot	by	the	judas	bullet.	he	is	helped	by	 several people, including pop, claire, misty, and (in a great cameo) method man.	his	sense	of	justice	is	what	compels	him	to	finally	step	out	of	the	shadows	 to protect the community. he struggles against several authorities including the police, mariah, and cornell. he is falsely accused of killing both cornell and a police	officer.	he	is	not	prone	to	crucifixion	poses,	although	he	possibly	appears	 in one after he has been shot by diamondback and is helped by claire and dr. burstein,	his	arms	across	their	shoulders	(fig.	 ).	more	directly,	after	his	eulogy	 for	pop	he	is	shown	walking	with	a	neon	crucifix	over	his	shoulder	and	a	street	 lamp	halo	(fig.	 );	during	the	opening	a	crucifix	is	projected	onto	luke’s	back	 (fig.	 );	and	at	the	very	end	of	the	series,	as	luke	is	being	driven	out	of	new	 york	by	the	police,	he	passes	by	a	brightly	lit	“jesus	saves”	cross	(fig.	 ).	finally,	 we see luke “resurrected” at least twice: after dr. burstein’s seagate prison suffered	by	cornell	and	mariah,	who	are	shown	to	us	as	infinitely	more	complex,	conflicted,	and	inter- esting adults than stryker. that said, to its credit the series remarkably does not end with the standard climactic/apocalyptic superhero battle between mimetic enemies. it certainly appears to be going in this direction, especially when the penultimate episode ends with diamondback in a super-suit con- fronting	his	half-brother	luke.	but	this	fight	is	actually	quite	brief	and	ends	very	near	the	start	the	final	 episode, leaving a great deal of time for people to simply have conversations about what is next for themselves, for others, and for the community. 	 the	criteria	for	identifying	christ-figures	listed	in	this	paragraph	come	specifically	from	chapter	six	of	 baugh’s	text	(“essential	dimensions	and	typical	guises	of	the	christ-figure”).	there	are	of	course	any	 number	of	criteria	not	mentioned	by	baugh	that	could	be	used	instead;	see,	e.g.,	kozlovic	 .	also,	 as	noted	below,	many	objections	have	been	raised	regarding	the	ways	in	which	christ-figures	are	gen- erally	identified	and	interpreted. 	 the	one	criterion	mentioned	by	baugh	that	appears	least	often	in	superhero	films	is	prayer,	although	 this is not unheard of (e.g., superman’s very gethsemane-esque visit to a church in man	of	steel [ ]).	in	keeping	with	this	pattern,	prayer	is	arguably	the	one	christ-figure	requirement	from	baugh’s	 list	that	luke	does	not	clearly	fulfill	–	although	he	does	give	a	eulogy	for	pop	in	a	church	(e ).	 referring to his role as the savior of harlem, angelica jade bastién ( ) says that she has come to think of luke as “hood jesus”. | ken derry et al. www.jrfm.eu , / , – experiment explodes, giving luke his powers and leading everyone to think he is	dead	(e ); and when he appears to actually die for a moment while being treated for the judas wounds but is brought back to life when claire throws a live electrical hot plate into the acid bath that contains him (e ). this moment also represents the death of carl lucas as an identity. as luke angrily tells dr. burstein after his post-judas resurrection, “i’m luke. carl died at seagate” (e ). fig. : film still, “dwyck”, luke cage ( ), s /e , : . fig. : film still, “just to get a rep”, luke cage ( ), s / e , : . fig. : film still, “you know my steez”, luke cage ( ), s /e , : . fig. : film still, opening credits, luke cage ( ). bulletproof love: luke cage ( ) and religion | www.jrfm.eu , / , – luke	cage	 ( )	contains	several	other	possible	christ-figure	elements	not	 mentioned by baugh. luke is poor, and his submission to the police at the end	is	a	“willing	sacrifice”. he has a dual nature, “one fantastic and the other mundane”, beautifully captured by the name that cornell gives him: “dish- washer	lazarus”	(e ).	he	is	betrayed	by	a	judas-figure, his old friend willis stryker who – in a move that is unbelievably on the nose – shoots luke with the judas bullets. as for pop, in both his encouragement of luke and his death he can	be	seen	as	analogous	to	john	the	baptist,	someone	who	“identifies	and/or	 points	the	way	to	the	christ-figure,	and	fades	away”. it is even possible to see luke’s hoodies as a gesture towards the “popular image of jesus in his iconic white	robes”	(see	fig.	 	and	 ). and then, of course, the show several times goes out of its way to tell us directly that	luke	is	a	christ-figure.	when	he	confronts	cornell	after	surviving	the	mis- kozlovic , par. . kozlovic , par. . kozlovic , par. . kozlovic , par. . kozlovic , par. . 	 kozlovic	 ,	par.	 .	the	hoodie	appears	to	evoke	the	image	of	jesus	specifically	as	shepherd,	as	 taking	care	of	others,	which	fits	luke’s	reference	to	luke	 : 	(discussed	below).	in	fact	the	first	time	 he	wears	a	hoodie	in	the	series	is	also	the	first	time	he	uses	his	powers,	when	he	protects	his	landlords	 from	cornell’s	men	(e ).	when	the	fight	is	done,	mrs.	lin	says	that	she	wants	to	pay	luke	to	help	 them, and he replies, “i’m not for hire. but you have my word ma’am: i’ve got you.” and then he pops his	hood	(fig.	 ).	 fig. : film still, “moment of truth”, luke cage ( ), s /e , : . fig. : film still, jesus of nazareth (franco zeffirelli, gb/it ). | ken derry et al. www.jrfm.eu , / , – sile attack, he is advised to consider his next actions carefully: “[it] costs to be a savior. ask jesus” (e ). and when shades tells cornell about the judas bullet, he points out, “if you wanted to kill jesus, that’s the bullet you’d use” (e ). as	many	critics	have	noted,	simply	labeling	a	character	as	a	“christ-figure”	 is not in itself all that meaningful, as it begs the question: “so what?” in most superhero narratives, i would argue, presentation as a messiah is used to sup- port the perspective of zealous nationalism. this perspective depends heavily on	claiming	the	moral	authority	to	decide	who	is	good	and	who	is	evil;	align- ing your hero with christ conceivably can do a good deal of work towards this end. luke	cage ( ), however, explicitly tells us that luke will be a very dif- ferent kind of savior when he recites luke : and re-names himself after the gospel writer: “the spirit of the lord is on me, because i have been anointed to preach good news to the poor. he sent me to proclaim freedom for the prison- ers, and recovery of sight for the blind. to release the oppressed” (e ). luke will thus be a savior more interested in helping people in need than in defeating evil. this is a much more down-to-earth mission, a more human mission, than we see in most superhero stories. in this regard, while luke is clearly special in many ways, the show also works to humanize him. this is evident in his fear of being recognized and sent back	to	jail,	and	his	determination	to	earn	a	living	with	honest	work,	whether	 sweeping up hair, washing dishes, or tending bar. there is also the simple but important fact that he can be physically hurt: he is shot by diamondback, he bleeds, he almost dies. when cornell facetiously comments that people act as if luke “can walk on water”, shades asks in all seriousness, “can he?” (e ). this question, along with mariah’s suggestions for killing luke – drowning, burning, poisoning (e ) – points to the vulnerabilities that he shares with the rest of humanity. this shared connection is movingly underscored when men in the community wear hoodies with holes in them, risking their own safety to 	 see	campbell	 	for	a	theological	discussion	of	the	ways	in	which	luke	functions	as	a	christ-figure	in	 comparison to matt murdock from daredevil	(netflix,	us	 ,	 ).	campbell	argues	that	each	hero	 represents	very	different	aspects	of	the	christian	messiah’s	salvific	role,	with	matt	as	the	suffering	je- sus and luke the risen christ. he contrasts the fact that matt’s “body is broken time and time again for the sake of those he seeks to save” with the understanding that luke is “indestructible”: “freed from death and physical pain, after his resurrection, luke cage is able to tackle oppression in harlem fear- lessly. mostly.” while campbell makes many good points, his use of “mostly” here is, i would argue, an	understatement.	unlike	daredevil,	who	is	in	fact	called	“the	man	without	fear”,	luke	is	filled	with	a	 great deal of anxiety – and (arguably) fear – about taking on oppression. and while he is certainly much less susceptible to physical harm than matt murdock, luke	cage	( ) makes the point in several ways noted below that luke is far from indestructible. 	 see,	e.g.,	deacy	 ;	derry	 ,	 – ;	jasper	 ;	lyden	 ,	 ;	plate	 ,	 ,	 	n.	 . 	 it	is	thus	not	surprising	that	most	superhero	films	end	with	a	huge,	enormously	destructive	fight.	the	 protagonist	essentially	becomes	the	savior	figure	of	revelation,	triumphing	in	an	apocalyptic	battle	 against evil. bulletproof love: luke cage ( ) and religion | www.jrfm.eu , / , – make	it	harder	for	the	police	to	find	and	capture	luke	(e ). as he becomes us, in other words, we become him: ordinary/special, criminal/hero, human/di- vine: dishwasher lazarus. “who’s gonna take the weight?” the use of hip hop culture throughout luke	cage	( ) is pervasive. from the soundtrack to the location of luke’s community, hip hop culture is prevalent and provides a foundational grounding for the series and for the character of luke.	his	connection	to	the	community,	the	father	figure	in	pop,	the	oversized	 picture	of	biggie	smalls	in	cornell’s	office,	and	the	underground	aura	give	luke	 cage	( )	a	strong	connection	to	a	culture	much	larger	than	just	its	music. as	scholars	have	asserted,	hip	hop	is	much	more	than	just	music	videos,	lyr- ics, and “bling”. it is a culture by which those who have been disinherited can find	identity,	space,	place,	and	being. moreover, hip hop is a contextual manu- facturing of those oppressed and cast aside into djing, rhythms, mcing, dance, language, street entrepreneurialism, street fashion, knowledge and spirituali- ty. thus, luke	cage	( )	and	the	themes	within	the	first	black	comic	book	 hero present a reassertion of black narrative and theology. luke	cage	( ) is a secular articulation of the spiritual reimagined within a hip hop context and ethos. to that end, luke takes on three of hip hop’s theological concepts: ( ) a theology of social action, ( ) god of the profane, ( ) a theology of community. jon michael spencer’s theomusicology provides a framework that allows us to better comprehend luke’s connection to hip hop, its culture, and its the- ology. 	theomusicology	is	defined	as	“a	musicological	method	for	theologiz- ing about the sacred, the secular, and the profane, principally incorporating thought and method borrowed from anthropology, sociology, psychology, and philosophy”. it is, as cheryl kirk-duggan and marlon hall state, “music as spir- itual practice … hear[ing] the challenges and evils in the church and the world 	 a	television	news	report	on	this	community	action	highlights	the	iconic/religious	significance	of	luke’s	 hoodie by referring to him as “the ‘hole-y’ hero” (e ). 	 dyson	 ;	hodge	 ,	 ;	johnson	 ;	miller/pinn	 ;	miller/pinn/freeman	 . forman , – . hodge , – . hodge , – . while the central premise of this framework focuses on music, i have expanded its use to also explore cultural phenomena within black and city contexts along with adding symbolic imagery and cultural mores – all of which are a part of luke	cage ( ). spencer , . | ken derry et al. www.jrfm.eu , / , – as the music reveals.” theomusicology is distinguished from other methods and disciplines such as ethnomusicology: its analysis stands on the presupposition that the religious symbols, myths, and can- on of the culture being studied are the theomusicologist’s authoritative/normative sources. for instance, while the western music therapist would interpret the healing of the biblical patriarch saul under the assuagement of david’s lyre as a psychophysi- ological phenomena, the theomusicologist would first take into account the religious belief of the culture for whom the event had meaning. the theomusicological meth- od	is	therefore	one	that	allows	for	scientific	analysis,	but	primarily	within	the	limits	of	 what is normative in the ethics, religion, or mythology of the community of believers being studied. the theomusicologist is thus concerned with multi-level data within the con- text of the people they study, and subsequently analyzes the material within the time, culture, and context in which it was created – something that luke	 cage	( ) provides a particularly good space for, and precisely what is needed when examining hip hop culture within the series. luke is a hero suitable for the post–civil rights context in which hip hop finds	itself.	his	use	of	violence,	often	as	a	last	resort	as	when	protecting	his	 landlords,	is	a	just	use	of	that	force	when	seen	through	the	hip	hop	lens	of	rules	 of engagement. in other words, force should be used only when necessary and to protect those whom you love. in one sense, luke focuses primarily on his own community to do the work of a hero – much unlike other superheroes who take on a more meta-savior role to “save the world” or to save humankind from some	far-off	evil.	in	luke’s	sense,	this	far-off	evil	is	present	in	the	local	and,	with	 advice from pop, can create a space for heroic measures. kirk-duggan/hall , . 	 there	is	no	universal	or	singular	definition	of	ethnomusicology,	as	william	darity	states;	several	words	 come to mind for ethnomusicology such as sound, music, performance, context, and culture. for some, it is the study of music in culture, or, more broadly, the study in context (darity , – ). spencer , – . theomusicology broadens the discussion of religion within hip hop contexts and asks the question “what is the hip hop community saying in the context in which the music, the art, the album, and the artist were created?” this reference is to the generation of young adults born during the post-soul era ( – ), raised on a transmediated diet, disconnected from previous generations both locally and ideologically, and currently with non-binary issues to contend with in a post- / society and living in western society. this generation does not have the binary issues to contend with that the civil rights generation did (e.g. more blacks in leadership or the right to vote). while those issues are still present, they manifest themselves in a matrix of problems, which involve police brutality, sexuality, sexual orientation, socio- economics, transgender, class, and race. hodge , – . i would note that there is still a strong patriarchal feel within luke	cage ( ), and that this continues to	be	one	of	hip	hop’s	major	flaws.	gender	and	sexuality	tend	to	favor	men	and	heteronormative	 standards, leaving little to no room for lgbtq and other variances to that norm. in this regard even bulletproof love: luke cage ( ) and religion | www.jrfm.eu , / , – when interpreting a character like luke in terms of religion and hip hop, we might consider three guiding categories: ) the sacred: not only for those elements within a society that are set apart, and forbidden, for ritual, but also for those elements within the given society and culture that aspire for both the adoption of a pious stance and the search for deity. ) the secular: for those items designated by a given society and culture as having little to no connection with a form of deity. ) the profane: for those areas in a society labeled or designated outside given morals, codes, ethics, and values established as “good” and/or “right” by the society and culture being studied. with these understandings in mind, we can see luke as a sacred, secular, and profane hero. an example of this trinary perspective is provided when he speaks at	pop’s	funeral	(e ;	fig.	 ).	luke	is	in	a	conventionally	sacred	space,	a	church,	 in front of a sign that connotes transcendence. but while he is the son of a min- ister,	he	himself	is	not	ordained;	he	is	as	secular	as	his	suit,	and	a	key	part	of	the	 message he delivers in this moment is very much about this world, about the community of harlem. the profane is all that luke embodies of the streets and his	invoking	of	violence	for	good,	his	secular	jacket	covering	the	profane	bullet	 holes in his shirt. the angle of this shot also suggests that luke commands re- though luke’s use of his power is communal, he is still cis gendered and attracted to women, as in the case with his sexual encounters with misty. fig. : film still, “just to get a rep”, luke cage ( ), s /e , : . | ken derry et al. www.jrfm.eu , / , – spect	and	those	who	follow	must	listen;	the	subtext	could	mean	he	possesses	 something of deity himself, rooted in the sacred, secular, and profane. the notion of a secular, sacred, and profane hero is not a foreign concept for those within the hip hop community. heroes come in all forms, shapes, genders, and sizes. take biggie, for example, a hero who embodied an apothe- osis approach to god and faith, yet was in all manner still “secular” and “pro- fane”. for the hip hop community, the good outweighs the bad, and biggie is representative of an ongoing debate about god’s connection to pimps, thugs, baby-mammas, and “niggas”. biggie provided that sacred, secular, profane con- nection to god and re-articulated it in his music, poetry, and work with his com- munity. someone like luke is that conduit as well, as a person able to utilize their context and to begin to create a “better way” without using conventional methods. the hip hop community regularly experiences violence, death, nihilism, and war-like conditions. one might argue that this reality is at the center of most of hip hop’s social critique of dominant societal structures and systems. equality, justice,	fairness,	impartiality	in	the	law,	and	a	social	voice	is	where	many	hip	 hoppers	–	especially	the	underground	community	in	which	luke	finds	himself	 – push towards and to which they give a lot of their energy. thus, luke, a re- luctant	hero	at	first	and	not	originally	from	harlem,	roots	himself	into	his	space	 and	place	and	rises	to	give	that	voice	back	to	the	community.	this	arc	fits	well	 with a messianic narrative or a hip hop jesuz that the outlawz or even kendrick lamar describes. luke is not too perfect, not too saintly, not too connected to divinity;	a	hero	that	the	post-civil	rights	hip	hopper	can	connect	with	and	to.	 “luke” is the answer to the question posed by the title of the gang starr track (and of episode ), “who’s gonna take the weight?” this is worthy of notice and, especially in the image of a strong black man in luke, something that is much	more	complex	than	just	all	good	or	all	evil.	 “that’s the last time you will ever call me a bitch.” constructions of masculinity and femininity inevitably implicate each other. when we approach any discussion of gender and sexuality, intersectional theory, formulated by kimberlé williams crenshaw and further championed by patricia hill collins, is crucial. it becomes even more crucial when we con- sider gender in a series like luke	cage	 ( ), which actively wrestles with race and class stereotypes, often using christian tropes to do so. the charac- ters struggle within a context that bell hooks has named “imperialist white- crenshaw and . collins , , and . bulletproof love: luke cage ( ) and religion | www.jrfm.eu , / , – supremacist capitalist patriarchy”. 	that	is,	the	show	is	not	just	about	race,	 not	just	about	gender,	but	is	about	these	identity	markers	as	interconnected	 ways of distributing power within our social context, in combination with re- ligion, sexuality, material dis/advantage, etc. characters’ responses to their histories	of	violence	flow	down	gendered	lines.	this	section	highlights	three	 themes:	absent	parents,	that	is,	a	lack	of	constructive	gender	models;	sex;	 and the relationship of gender to power. from the beginning of the series, the issue of absent parents surfaces. as pop is explaining why it is important to create a safe space for the young men of the neighborhood, luke says, “everyone has a gun, no one has a father” (e ). the link between a lack of positive male role models and community violence is	made	explicit.	pop’s	approach	to	the	boys	of	the	neighborhood	also	reflects	 what patricia hill collins has called “other-mothering”, the practice, common in stressed communities, of “taking in strays”, taking responsibility for under- parented or neglected children and integrating them into non-biological kin net- works. this practice is something we see not only with pop, but also with mama mabel and then mariah (e ). here begins a gendered split between the constructed parenting provided by pop and that provided by mama mabel. pop, on one hand, gives emotional support and mentoring, consciously creating sanctuary space free from vio- lence. mabel, on the other hand, brings abandoned children, cornell and ma- riah, into her world of hustle and violence. mariah further takes on the role of “other mother” to cornell. though she tries to provide him with a kind of care different	from	that	provided	to	them	by	mabel,	in	the	end,	she	cannot	help	but	 reproduce the violence of her past, bringing death rather than life. this parallels the role she plays for her neighborhood: her dream is to uplift, but in the end she cannot help but consume. mariah’s collapse into devouring mother connects to the series’ meditations on sexual violence. even in episode one, luke assists a co-worker, candace, who is uncomfortable serving the vip room alone, for fear of harassment or assault. the show acknowledges sexual violence as one of the multifaceted forms of violence it addresses, one that swirls around with and refracts other forms of violence, including structural violence. when misty is speaking with a counselor after her attack on claire (e ), he suggests that she needs to acknowledge her adolescent guilt over the murder of her cousin, who was abducted and raped (e ).	in	 juxtaposing	the	exploitation	and	destruction	of	this	body	–	young,	 black, and female, characteristics interpreted by her assailants and by the police as evidence of its disposability 	–	misty’s	narrative	offers	a	contrast	with	luke’s	 hooks , . collins . see crenshaw , especially – . | ken derry et al. www.jrfm.eu , / , – invulnerable body. however, this contrast also highlights that while vulnerabil- ity to physical and structural violence is shared across disadvantaged communi- ties	of	color,	it	affects	men	and	women	in	different	ways. there is also the tragedy and complexity of mariah’s childhood sexual abuse, for which cornell ultimately pays. her crazed reaction to cornell’s accusation that she “wanted it” is multivalent (e ). on one hand, her powerful denial of the	accusation	offers	a	clear	demonstration	of	how	inaccurate	and	self-serving	 the cultural commonplace of blaming victims is. on the other hand, her actions afterward also reinforce the stereotype that abused women are crazy and dan- gerous. further, her character arc does not challenge the trope, fodder for exploitation	films	galore,	that	requires	that	women	be	raped	before	they	are	 socially sanctioned or morally excused for mobilizing their own power as physi- cal	violence.	finally,	there	is	also	the	last	scene	with	shades,	who	has	just	fallen	 in love with mariah as a result of her violence, when she echoes her words to cornell, “i did not want this”, and shades replies, “i think you did.” what do we do	with	the	juxtapositions	that	such	an	assault	narrative	provides	in	the	context	 of rape culture? any discussion of sexuality in luke	cage	 ( ) must consider the forms of sexuality	that	are	visible	and	those	that	are	invisible.	it	is	not	difficult	to	take	 a queer reading to the relationship between luke and cornell. they are both 	 merry	 ;	levy	 . on queer theory and the academic study of religion, see wilcox . fig. : mariah ascending. film still, “you know my steez”, luke cage ( ), s /e , : . bulletproof love: luke cage ( ) and religion | www.jrfm.eu , / , – as smooth as protagonists from seventies’ soul cinema, showing each other up,	engaging	in	repartee	parallel	to	that	between	luke	and	the	major	female	 characters,	and	vying	for	the	soul	of	their	fictional	harlem.	through	the	male- desiring gaze, they can be read as competing suitors, the tragically luciferian cornell and the reluctantly messianic luke, but also, therefore, as completing each other. the homoeroticism between the two must remain subtext, however. this message is reinforced by the continued rhetorical use of the term “bitch” as an insult for men, angrily ascribed, for example, not only by cornell (e ), but also by	misty	(e )	and	turk	(e ).	the	word’s	repression	specifically	of	women	is	 symbolically subverted by the clear inclusion in the series of powerful women, is made light of when claire successfully recovers her bag from a mugger, and is explicitly challenged when mariah tells shades, “that’s the last time you will ever	call	me	a	bitch”	(e ).	yet	the	word’s	specifically	homophobic	power	is	 never challenged, whether subtly or directly, as it would be by the visible pres- ence of openly lgbtq characters. the foreclosure of latent desire between cornell and luke comes not only as cornell is removed, but also with the simultaneous arrival of diamondback, with his old testament rules and punishments. an erotically charged story of rival brothers is overwritten with a literal one of rival brothers, explicitly pre- sented in the show as a cain and abel story. however, behind this story of hate and fratricide is also an isaac and ishmael story, sons of the same man by dif- ferent women. as delores williams has deftly demonstrated, peering behind the androcentric and patriarchal narrative actually gets us to a story of two women, mothers to sons from the same man, that is, to the shadows of hagar and sarah. in williams’ analysis, hagar’s story is the story of african american women’s historical experience. hagar’s appearance here only as back-story in the	conflict	between	two	powerful	men	is	consistent	with	the	historical	andro- centrism of christianity, shared by the black church, that womanist theologians such as williams deconstruct. predictably then, the shadow mothers also set up some “yo mama” insults (e ). finally, consideration of gender and sexuality in the series would be incom- plete without a meta-view about the place of the show in its broader social context.	the	series	features	numerous	significant	roles	for	people	of	color	and,	 more	specifically,	for	women	of	color.	in	a	media	landscape	in	which	roles	for	 actors of color are often both deliberately and unconsciously limited, luke	 williams . 	 i	am	thinking	here	of	critiques	of	“white	washing”	characters	as	other	media	forms	are	adapted	to	film,	 of	the	marketing	concern	that	more	than	one	significant	character	of	color	will	pigeon-hole	a	show	 (e.g., as dramatized in “indians on tv”, master	of	none	[netflix,	us	 ],	s /e ),	and	of	the	lack	 of recognition for actors of color who do manage, in spite of systemic racism, to land important roles (#oscarssowhite). | ken derry et al. www.jrfm.eu , / , – cage	( ) provides an important exception. it is resplendent with beautiful women	of	color,	of	various	ages,	whose	characters	represent	different	avenues	 of agency, empowerment, and choice, even if the writing does not always do them	justice. it is also refreshing that sexuality is represented as a normal part of	adult	life;	the	series	skips	the	cheap	will-they/won’t-they	plot	points;	misty	 and claire don’t have to compete over a man, but instead come to admire each other through cooperation in the trenches. further, while the series attends to sexual	violence,	as	discussed	above,	it	is	significant	that	the	sexual	encounters	 actually depicted on-screen are consensual, in great contrast to many compet- ing series, though consistent with jessica	jones	(netflix,	us	 ),	which	intro- duced luke’s character. “i’m not a monster.” in the tenth episode of luke	cage	( ), luke reenters the acidic waters of baptism whence his salvation comes (e ). luke undergoes his initial baptism as	a	scientific	experiment	at	seagate	prison	(e ;	fig.	 ).	he	dies	as	carl	lucas	 and becomes a new creature. when claire confronts dr. burstein for transform- ing luke cage, he responds, “i … i’m not a monster (e ).” burstein’s response offers	a	crucial	point	of	departure	for	evaluating	the	theological	significance	of	 luke	cage	( ). indeed dr. frankenstein burstein and his creation confront us with an interesting paradox. who is the monster? bastién . fig. : baptism/rebirth. film still, “step in the arena,” luke cage ( ), s /e , : . bulletproof love: luke cage ( ) and religion | www.jrfm.eu , / , – luke	cage	( ) opens us up to a particular moment in the united states and elsewhere when militarism, racism, and economic exploitation have crippled black	and	brown	lives.	the	show	invites	theological	reflection	and	interroga- tion because of its themes of freedom, art, and humanity. black theology and womanist	theology	offer	unique	vantage	points	for	engaging	luke	cage	meth- odologically. because both theologies are grounded in the reality of black lives, these theological frameworks are relevant in regard to luke and the harlem community. for james cone, the parent of black liberation theology, black experience, black history, black culture, revelation, scripture, and tradition en- compass the sources for black theology. concern for the community and lib- eration in light of jesus’ gospel guides the theological norm or hermeneutical principle in black theology. womanist theology concerns itself primarily with the liberation of black women and the family, establishing a positive quality of life for women and the family, and forming political alliances with other margin- al groups struggling to be free of the oppression imposed by white-controlled american institutions. for understanding the concept of a monster, james baldwin is useful. in the documentary take	this	hammer (richard moore, us ), baldwin says, “i’m not describing you when i talk about you. i’m describing me . . . we invented the nigger. i didn’t invent it. white people invented it.” baldwin articulates that the creation of the monster (nigger) emerged from white supremacist fears imposed on blacks. in democracy matters, cornel west describes niggerization as the act of american terrorism on black people, treating them as niggers for over	 	years,	making	them	“feel	unsafe,	unprotected,	subject	to	random	vio- lence, and hated”. like the tuskegee syphilis experiments in the late th cen- tury, dr. burstein takes luke’s black body without any concern for his human- ity.	burstein	objectifies	luke	into	a	thing	that	can	benefit	u.s.	imperialism	and	 militarism. for centuries, the white gaze has invented slaves, sambos, welfare queens, jezebels, hulks, and even animals out of black bodies. these catastrophic mis- nomers are made possible by what emilie townes calls “the fantastic hegem- onic	imagination”.	townes	says,	“the	fantastic	hegemonic	imagination	traffics	 in peoples’ lives that are caricatured or pillaged so that the imagination that creates the fantastic can control the world in its image.” in this way, we may understand luke cage’s impenetrable black body as a result of white suprema- cist fantastic hegemonic imagination. the creation of luke cage emerges from the imagination of dr. burstein and not from luke himself. luke’s impenetrable cone [ ], – . williams , . west , . townes , . | ken derry et al. www.jrfm.eu , / , – body raises questions about how the united states sees itself concerning black bodies. does the united states understand itself to be impenetrable like luke because of its military power? does fear within the psyche of the white gaze perpetuate police brutality, harsh punishment, and the disproportionate impris- onment of black bodies in the prison-industrial-complex due to false concep- tions of the black body? who is the monster? in the future of ethics, willis jenkins articulates the ways in which the earth is connected to women’s bodies. in particular, jenkins evokes womanist voices to demonstrate how earth’s vulnerability relates to the vulnerability of women. the penetrable bodies of women in luke	cage	( ) – of candace, mariah, and misty’s cousin – contrast with luke’s normally impenetrable male body. when luke too is pierced, his insides ravaged by the judas bullets, this gender distinc- tion breaks down somewhat. jenkins also helps us to go beyond the binary of female/male, as well as that of human/non-human, considering all those who are susceptible to harm. in this regard we remember that the united states continues to assert its imperial self not only through patriarchy and racism, not only through war and colonialism, but also through fracking, polluting, razing, and drilling. what is luke’s response to his tragic condition and paradoxical self? he an- swers the niggerization imposed on his body like emmett till’s mother, who responded to the murder of her -year-old son by saying, “i don’t have a min- ute	to	hate.	i’ll	pursue	justice	for	the	rest	of	my	life.” out of love, baldwin tells	his	nephew	that	he	does	not	have	to	confine	himself	to	the	definitions	of	 the white world. with these two formulations, we may understand luke cage’s pursuing	love	and	justice	as	a	response	to	the	various	cages	in	which	he	exists.	 when luke chooses his name, he quotes luke : (e ), a central text in black theology. in regards to luke : , cone says, “jesus’ work is essentially one of liberation.” like the jesus of black liberation theology, luke cage is anointed to bring liberty to the oppressed. as jesus enters the human condition of those who experience systemic violence, luke steps into the experience of those who are economically exploited, those who encounter police brutality, and those who encounter gang violence. when	two	police	officers	stop	luke,	many	viewers	may	have	people	in	mind	 like sandra bland, tamir rice, renisha mcbride, trayvon martin, mike brown, and many others. police inquiries have resulted in the deaths of too many black and brown people in the united states. however, the scene presents liberative tones	when	the	bullets	bounce	off	luke	(e ).	this	scene	is	very	similar	to	kend- rick lamar’s music video alright (colin tilley, us ), where kendrick’s body jenkins . west , . cone [ ], . bulletproof love: luke cage ( ) and religion | www.jrfm.eu , / , – levitates against the gravity of state-sanctioned violence. even in the face of the	monstrosity	of	police	brutality,	luke	shields	the	one	police	officer	from	the	 bullets of the other. he demonstrates a central claim in the thought of baldwin and black theology – the liberation of the oppressed is tied to the liberation of the oppressor. “no one can cage a man if he truly wants to be free!” in	his	brief	yet	influential	introduction	to	the	subject,	eddie	s.	glaude	jr.	argues	 that if “african american religion” is to have any analytical purchase, it must mean more than simply the religious life of people who happen to be black. he insists, instead, that we understand it as a religious formation that “emerges in the encounter between faith, in all its complexity, and white supremacy”. afri- can american religion responds to the political and social context of the united states in three ways. it represents a “sign of difference”, insofar as it “explicitly rejects,	as	best	as	possible,	the	idolatry	of	white	supremacy”.	african	ameri- can religion operates as a “practice of freedom”, wherein the “black religious imagination is used in the service of opening up spaces closed down by white supremacy”. and it “insists on its open-ended orientation”, meaning “african american	religion	offers	resources	for	african	americans	to	imagine	themselves	 beyond the constraints of now”. we have already seen the ways in which luke cage, our “dishwasher la- zarus”, stands as a sign of difference with regard to the traditional superhero story. if we take the archetypal comic book superhero who doles out violence in his (or occasionally her) quest to redeem the masses as an embodiment of the	white	savior	–	the	figure	who	takes	up	the	white	wo/man’s	burden	to	save	 those who cannot save themselves – then we can read luke cage’s reluctance to	do	harm	and	commitment	to	protecting	the	vulnerable	as	a	rejection	of	one	 logic of white supremacy. to	this	sign	of	difference	we	can	add	that	the	show	opens	up	spaces	closed	 down by white supremacy by reclaiming the image of the black man in a hood- ie	which	figures	so	prominently	in	the	racist	fantasies	of	the	collective	ameri- can subconscious in recent memory. cheo hodari coker, the show’s creator, brought to life a bulletproof black man who shields other black and brown bod- ies from harm at a time when for viewers of color their bodies are as vulnerable as they have ever been. nothing is more indicative of the show’s birth in the black lives matter moment than coker’s choice to dress luke cage in an array glaude , . glaude , – (emphases in the original). | ken derry et al. www.jrfm.eu , / , – of hoodies. here coker directly intervenes in the demonization and criminaliza- tion of black bodies. responding to the grim reality that a hoodie could, in the eyes of a vigilante like george zimmerman, condemn trayvon martin to death, coker reclaims the hoodie and opens an imaginative space wherein “heroes could wear hoodies, too”. in many respects luke	cage ( ) can also be understood as a practice of freedom. this is, after all, the meaning behind the titular character’s name. free- dom is a central theme of the show, which is oriented around the wrongful conviction of a man who has escaped from prison. “no one can cage a man if he truly wants to be free”, luke states as he explains his adopted surname (e ). he demonstrates this ideal repeatedly as he escapes an impressive array of both figurative	and	literal	confinements,	including	seagate	prison,	his	father’s	low	 expectations, his own fears and anxieties, and the rubble that he is buried under when	cornell	shoots	him	with	a	missile	(e – ;	fig.	 ).	as	for	“luke”,	he	takes	 his	first	name	from	the	gospel	where	jesus	proclaims	he	has	come	to	“preach good news to the poor … freedom for the prisoners, and recovery of sight for the blind” (e , luke : ). nowhere does the show exemplify the features of african american religion more poignantly than in its open-ended orientation. luke	cage ( ) achieves something	that	has	long	remained	a	defining	feature	of	african	american	reli- gion: the creation of an imaginative space in and through which black people can	conjure	worlds	beyond	the	violence	and	degradation	of	daily	life	in	a	racist	 	 kim/shifflet,	 . fig. : luke’s fist breaks free of the rubble and symbolizes solidarity with black liberation movements. film still, “step in the arena”, luke cage ( ), s /e , : . bulletproof love: luke cage ( ) and religion | www.jrfm.eu , / , – society.	david	walker	prophesied	that	god	would	wipe	white	supremacy	off	the	 face of the earth in wrath. the exodus story of slaves set free by plagues and the parting of seas served as the mythic model for the liberation of the enslaved in the south and, later, for a second exodus out of jim crow in the great migra- tions. martin luther king jr. insisted that african americans “as a people will get to the promised land”, even if he also admitted, on the eve of his assassi- nation no less, that he might “not get there with you”. and luke	cage ( ) brings a world into being where a black man in a hoodie is impervious to the bullets	of	police	officers	and	gangsters	alike,	where	that	hoodied	hero	unites	his	 beloved community (harlem) against the death-dealers set out to destroy them from without and within. coker	characterizes	this	open-ended	orientation	as	a	sort	of	wish	fulfillment,	 noting	“superheroes	to	a	certain	extent	are	always	wish	fulfillment”. another way to think about the show, though, would be as an example of what robin d.	g.	kelley	calls	“freedom	dreams”.	reflecting	on	the	significance	of	the	im- agination in the black radical tradition, kelley quips, “call me utopian, but i in- herited my mother’s belief that the map to a new world is in the imagination, in what we see in our third eyes rather than in the desolation that surrounds us”. when we view luke	cage ( ) through the lens of african american religion, we begin to see the ways in which black superhero narratives can function as religion, especially in the present moment when one must insist that black lives matter in the face of a society that too often insists otherwise. “always forward, forward always.” the content of luke	cage ( ) demonstrates what one could call an “ulti- mate concern” in the tillichian sense. it looks through the unconditional as- pects of the existential situation of the context within which it is situated and subtly and overtly voices the situation through summarizing its multiplicity into themes/questions/problems that can be addressed. in other words, we enter into the dynamic social, political, economic, racial, and other dilemmas of the new york city where the story is set without an explanation of those problems as problems, but with a heideggerian “thrownness” right in the middle of the “action” from which the concerns that need to be addressed emanate. luke cage’s role in this context is one of synthesis: he embodies the ulti- mate concern as displayed in the whole of the fucked-up situation manifested king [ ], . 	 kim/shifflet,	 . kelley , – . tillich , – . heidegger [ ], . | ken derry et al. www.jrfm.eu , / , – in the struggle that ensues between cornell and the drug kingpin colon (e ), the political maneuvering of mariah as a disguise for her own balancing act between	the	legal	and	the	illegal	for	personal	benefit	(e ),	and	the	campaign	 of extortion of local businesses executed by both cornell and mariah (e ). in the embodiment and synthesis of this multiplicity, luke cage becomes a god	in	the	whiteheadian	sense,	a	deity	that	is	both	involved	with	and	affected	 by temporal processes. he does not create an answer ex nihilo, but takes the jagged	bricks	of	his	context	and	theopoetically	makes	a	house	of	liberation	in	 which harlem residents “relocate” and experience a transformation of their understanding of themselves, their worth, and their potential for greatness, even in the midst of the multifaceted oppression plaguing them. in the words of jerome stone, this might be thought of as “minimalist transcendence”, a humanistic response/intervention that replaces the need for a divine response, or	at	least	the	affirmation	that	transcendence	described	in	this	way	is	more	 logically defendable due to an empirical experience and location of such trans- formation. luke represents the “creative transformation” that john cobb describes as “the call forward”, a notion echoed by pop’s sacred mantra/dy- ing words: “always forward” (e ). one of the most interesting themes of luke	cage ( ) that goes large- ly unstated is that of the “world within a world”. the harlem as presented has autonomous existence in the way that indigenous communities in north america have a sort of sovereignty: it is dependent on the world from which it comes in a peripheral way, yet operates on its own rules. it has its presi- dents and its pawns, its members with social capital and those without. this is whiteheadian interconnectivity. the parent world’s racism, poverty, classism, sexism, and other deities of white supremacy that converge in the “event” of harlem all play a role in how harlem functions. but the blatant existence of this parent world and its diseases are rarely made explicitly evident. one key example	is	cornell’s	 identification	of	what	in	his	exegesis	is	the	curse/bless- ing of the underestimation of afro-diasporic individuals in the parent world of the united states in his statement, “it’s easy to underestimate a nigga. you never see them coming” (e ). another is the recurring appeal to literary works written by people of afro-diasporic descent born in the united states as a source/instance of reclamation of identity, such as those of langston hughes and walter mosley (e ). the liberation strategy here is processual, emphasiz- ing in glimpses how the humanistic wise use of the thematic background of a whitehead [ ], . stone , – . coleman , . massumi , – . bulletproof love: luke cage ( ) and religion | www.jrfm.eu , / , – context (even the background that is virtually inaccessible) can set a brighter future for even the darkest situation. another theme of the series is “switzerland”, or pop’s barber shop. in this rhizomic	meeting	place,	the	hierarchical	tensions	of	key	influential	people	in	 the harlem world become nonfactors, as all who enter this shrine of the bar- bershop lose the stance of competitor and become colleagues. this is not the cancellation	of	difference,	but	the	acceptance	of	the	contrast	of	multiplicity,	 so	that	difference	is	not	solved	but	courageously	engaged	within	this	beautiful	 mess, this chaosmos, many times uncomfortably (e ). the role of space is im- portant in luke	cage ( ) as a process liberation philosophy, for switzerland is a freeze frame of the moment of decision. in switzerland, there are no deci- sions but only possibility. in switzerland, entities are presented with choices that could lead to their progressive liberation if they enact them outside the harlem world. pop’s barber shop is a prime liberating thematic instance of the secular transcendence that afred north whitehead alludes to and jerome stone clearly spells out. the pinnacle of this liberating process/secular transcendence unearthed by luke cage is the notion of secular gods that shows up in the background of the series, sometimes literally. there are allusions to the transcendent gods of classical christian theism, such as the funeral service for pop (e ) and the biblical recitations of luke’s nemesis diamondback (e ). but either these are figureheads	which	symbolize	empty	religiosity	or	they	use	religion	subversive- ly, even perversely. these gods, in other words, are dead. the “true religion” of the harlem world of luke	cage ( ) lies elsewhere. you don’t get much more religious than having a picture of the notorious b.i.g. on your wall as the focal point of honor. the mcs are some of the gods of harlem, along with the drug lords. these are the people who many of the residents of the city – like shameek,	done	in	by	hubris	and	cornells’s	fists	–	aspire	to	be.	they	set	the	 tone of the town. so does luke cage. while the drug lords take the position of disconnected	coercion	to	influence	harlem,	luke	presents	a	different	way	of	 life that is interconnected persuasion. in the poetry of his godhood, he takes the vileness of the world and creatively transforms it to a beautiful mess that influences	the	dwellers	of	harlem	to	follow	his	modest	whispers	of	liberation,	 whispers infused with a contagious renewed sense of hope and power. whitehead [ ], – . stone , – . nietzsche [ ], – . walker , – , , – . | ken derry et al. www.jrfm.eu , / , – “do what you can, kid.” so where does all this get us? what is the point of this shared rumination on luke	cage	( ),	which	is,	in	the	end,	just	a	netflix	series	based	on	some	comic	 books? why should scholars of religion care? why should anyone care? circling back to jonathan z. smith, he has theorized religion as a way of envi- sioning how the world should be, in contrast to how it is, and acting out ways to reconcile that gap. creating a show, watching its episodes, participating in its fan culture, even ragging on it through criticism can be analyzed as part of this practice. after all, disappointment only makes sense in comparison to a better what-could-be. in a sense this idea speaks to the tension within the concept of the superhero itself: it is an imperfect response to the problems of the world in which we live, the envisioning of a solution that is not only impossible but also itself problematic. in the words of method man as he concludes his ode to luke, “bulletproof love”: “people say we don’t need another hero, but now we got one” (e ). our initial roundtable discussion and this ensuing article analyze, and ulti- mately	contribute	to,	the	meta-process	of	a	culture	reflecting	on	itself	through	 its own products. we are excited about working in collaboration to allow for a richer sense of context than any of our individual approaches to luke	cage	 ( ) could provide on its own. rather than a single scholarly take, this article smith . fig. : conflicting theologies: shameek swaggers, luke sweeps. film still, “moment of truth”, luke cage ( ), s /e , : . bulletproof love: luke cage ( ) and religion | www.jrfm.eu , / , – is	intended	to	provide	a	kaleidoscope	of	different	perspectives,	each	lens	allow- ing us to see new pieces and shifting our vision of the whole. the sections of this article share what can be read in smith’s formulation as a dialectic of hope and disappointment. in its conscious engagements, the show	has	potential	to	offer	subversive	alternatives	to	the	expected	messages	 of mainstream entertainment. luke is a more thoughtful, more human christ- figure	than	usually	found	within	superhero	narratives,	yet	the	genre’s	default	 to purifying violence ultimately proves impossible to completely escape. the series introduces not one, but several compelling characters who are women of color, but also at times disempowers them in conventional and therefore perplexing ways. the image of a righteous black man in a hoodie, immune to bullets, is a messianic dream in this moment in which “black lives matter” is a supposedly controversial statement. yet the image can also be twisted into white-supremacist sadism. the harlem of the show represents an autonomous alterity, but does so by appropriating a real, thriving african american commu- nity	into	a	fictional	vision	largely	of	deprivation.	there	are	so	many	ways	that	 the show is invigorating, entertaining, and inspiring and so many ways in which it inevitably falls short. discussing together is part of the way we reconcile the gap. tracing religious elements within the show, putting the series in relationship to	cultural	phenomena	with	which	it	is	in	dialogue,	and	considering	its	trajecto- ries	of	influence	demonstrate	that	luke	cage	( ) wrestles with some of the fig. : misty tries to see the whole picture. film still, “manifest”, luke cage ( ), s /e , : . | ken derry et al. www.jrfm.eu , / , – major	issues	of	our	cultural	moment	–	racism,	violence,	sexuality,	and	power	 – issues with which, as scholars of religion, we must also engage. in the end, there is no single answer or meaning. the show is multivalent, as are the best scholarly conversations. bibliography asad, talal, , the construction of religion as an anthropological category, in: asad, talal (ed.), 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(ed.), international encyclo- pedia of the social sciences, vol. , detroit: macmillan reference usa, – . deacy,	christopher,	 ,	reflections	on	the	uncritical	appropriation	of	cinematic	christ-figures.	 holy other or wholly inadequate?, journal of religion and popular culture , . http://dx.doi. org/ . /jrpc. . . . derry, ken, , believing is seeing. teaching religion and violence in film, in: pennington, brian (ed.), teaching religion and violence, new york: oxford university press, – . bulletproof love: luke cage ( ) and religion | www.jrfm.eu , / , – dyson, michael eric, , holler if you hear me. searching for tupac shakur, new york: basic civi- tas. forman, murray, , the ’hood comes first. race, space, and place in rap and hip-hop, middle- town, ct: wesleyan university press. glaude, eddie s., jr., , african american religion. a very short introduction, oxford: oxford university press. heidegger, martin, [ ], being and time, translated by joan stambaugh, albany: state uni- versity of new york press. hodge, daniel white, , heaven has a ghetto. the missiological gospel & theology of tupac amaru shakur, saarbrucken: vdm verlag dr. müller. hodge, daniel white, , the soul of hip hop. rims, timbs and a cultural theology, downers grove: inner varsity press. hodge, daniel white, , hip hop’s hostile gospel. a post-soul theological exploration, boston: brill. hooks, bell, , the will to change. men, masculinity and love, new york: atria. jasper, david, , on systematizing the unsystematic. a response, in: marsh, clive/ortiz, gaye (eds.), explorations in theology and film. movies and meaning, oxford: blackwell, – . jenkins, willis, , future of ethics. sustainability, social justice, and religious creativity, balti- more: georgetown university press. jewett, robert/lawrence, john shelton, , the american monomyth, garden city: anchor press. jewett, robert/lawrence, john shelton, , the myth of the american superhero, grand rapids: eerdmans. jewett, robert/lawrence, john shelton, , captain america and the crusade against evil. the dilemma of zealous nationalism, grand rapids: eerdmans. jewett, robert/lawrence, john shelton, , heroes and superheroes, in: lyden, john (ed.), the routledge companion to religion and film, london/new york: routledge, – . johnson, andre e. (ed.), , urban god talk. constructing a hip hop spirituality, lanham: lexing- ton books. kelley, robin d. g., , freedom dreams. the black radical imagination, boston: beacon press. kim,	james/shifflet,	jonathan,	 ,	why	‘luke	cage’	creator	made	his	superhero	costume	a	hood- ie, the frame, september. http://www.scpr.org/programs/the-frame/ / / / /why- luke-cage-creator-made-his-superhero-costume-a [accessed january ]. king, martin luther, jr., [ ], i see the promised land ( april ), in: washington, james m. 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(eds.), , the hip hop and religion reader, new york: rout- ledge. miller, monica r./pinn, anthony b./freeman, bernard “bun b” (eds.), , religion in hip hop. map- ping the new terrain in the u.s., new york: bloomsbury. nietzsche, friedrich, [ ], the gay science, translated by peter fritzsche, in: fritzsche, peter (ed.), nietzsche and the death of god. selected writings, boston: bedford/st. martin’s, – . plate, s. brent, , the re-creation of the world. filming faith, dialog , – . sheffield,	rob,	 ,	“luke	cage.”	meet	the	first	black	lives	matter	superhero.	rolling	stone.	 	oc- tober. http://www.rollingstone.com/tv/news/luke-cage-meet-the-first-black-lives-matter-super- hero-w [accessed march ]. smith, jonathan z., , imagining religion. from babylon to jonestown, chicago: university of chicago press. smith, jonathan z., , to take place. toward a theory in ritual, chicago: university of chicago press. spencer, jon michael, , theological music. an introduction to theomusicology, new york: greenwood. stone, jerome, , the minimalist vision of transcendence. a naturalist philosophy of religion, albany: state university of new york press. tillich, paul, , systematic theology, vol. , chicago: university of chicago press. townes, emilie, , womanist ethics and the cultural production of evil, new york: palgrave mac- millan. walker, theodore, , mothership connections. a black atlantic synthesis of neoclassical meta- physics and black theology, albany: state university of new york press. west, cornel, , democracy matters, new york: penguin. whitehead, alfred north, [ ], adventures of ideas, new york: the free press. whitehead, alfred north, [ ], process and reality, new york: the free press, corrected ed. wilcox, melissa, , queer theory and the study of religion, in: boisvert, donald/johnson, jay emerson (eds.), queer religion, vol. . lgbt movements and queering religion, westport: praeger, – . williams, delores, , sisters in the wilderness. the challenge of womanist god-talk, maryknoll: orbis. bulletproof love: luke cage ( ) and religion | www.jrfm.eu , / , – williams, delores, , the color of feminism. or speaking the black woman’s tongue, in: daly, lois k. (ed.), feminist theological ethics. a reader, louisville: westminster john knox. filmography alright	(colin tilley, us ). batman	(tim burton, us ). daredevil	(tv	series,	netflix, us , ). iron	man	(jon favreau, us ). jessica	jones	(tv	series,	netflix,	us	 ). jesus	of	nazareth	(franco	zeffirelli,	gb/it	 ). luke	cage	(tv	series,	netflix,	us	 ). man	of	steel	(zack snyder, gb/us ). master	of	none	(tv	series,	netflix,	us	 ). spider-man	(sam raimi, us ). superman	returns	(bryan singer, us ). take	this	hammer (richard moore, us ). the	dark	knight	rises	(christopher nolan, gb/us ). 	seite 	seite 	seite 	seite 	seite 	seite 	seite 	seite 	seite 	seite 	seite 	seite 	seite 	seite 	seite 	seite 	seite 	seite 	seite 	seite 	seite 	seite 	seite 	seite 	seite 	seite 	seite 	seite 	seite 	seite 	seite 	seite 	seite candice delmas: a duty to resist: when disobedience should be uncivil this is a repository copy of candice delmas: a duty to resist: when disobedience should be uncivil. white rose research online url for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ / version: accepted version article: greenwood reeves, j ( ) candice delmas: a duty to resist: when disobedience ‐ should be uncivil. journal of law and society, ( ). pp. - . issn - x https://doi.org/ . /jols. © the author. journal of law and society © cardiff university law school. this is the peer reviewed version of the following article: "greenwood reeves, j. ( ), ‐ candice delmas: a duty to resist: when disobedience should be uncivil. journal of law and society, : - ", which has been published in final form at https://doi.org/ . /jols. . this article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with wiley terms and conditions for use of self-archived versions. eprints@whiterose.ac.uk https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ reuse items deposited in white rose research online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. they may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. the publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. this is indicated by the licence information on the white rose research online record for the item. takedown if you consider content in white rose research online to be in breach of uk law, please notify us by emailing eprints@whiterose.ac.uk including the url of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. mailto:eprints@whiterose.ac.uk https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ book	review	submission	 a	duty	to	resist:	when	disobedience	should	be	uncivil	by	candice	 delmas	(new	york:	oxford	university	press,	 ,	 	pp.,	hb	£ . )	 james	greenwood-reeves*	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 																																																								 *	university	of	leeds	–	 	arley	street	leeds	ls 	 pd	 lawjgr@leeds.ac.uk	 	 a	duty	to	resist:	when	disobedience	should	be	uncivil	by	candice	 delmas		 (new	york:	oxford	university	press,	 ,	 	pp.,	hb	£ . )	 	 civil	 disobedience	 has	 been	 a	 stale	 topic	 for	 legal	 theorists	 in	 recent	 decades.	 john	rawls’	classical	formulation,	with	its	requirements	for	publicity,	 nonviolence	and	the	acceptance	of	legal	punishment	on	behalf	of	the	dissenter,	is	 old	 rope	 in	 countless	 academic	 tugs-of-war	 between	 traditionalist	 and	 more	 expansionist	 approaches,	 without	 much	 distance	 being	 made	 on	 any	 side. 	 nowadays,	a	more	interesting	approach	has	been	to	examine	disobedience	writ	 large.	in	the	context	of	anti-fracking	activism	in	the	uk,	the	gilets	jaunes	protests	 in	france	and	occupy	movements	 internationally,	 the	politics	of	disobedience	 are	as	relevant	now	as	they	were	during	rawls’	time,	in	the	era	of	the	us	civil	 rights	movement	and	anti-vietnam	war	protests.	the	theoretical	groundwork	for	 framing	 these	 modern	 protests,	 however,	 needs	 to	 catch	 up	 with	 their	 transnational	and	antagonistic	potential.	candice	delmas’	 theory	 for	 justifying	 ‘principled	 resistance,’	 which	 may	 include	 secrecy,	 evasiveness	 and	 even	 violence,	is	therefore	a	welcome	contribution	that	reinvigorates	the	topic,	drags	 it	into	the	 st	century,	and	indeed	threatens	to	turn	it	on	its	head	entirely.		 fundamentally,	delmas	asks	why	we	obey	the	 law	in	the	first	place.	she	 identifies	several	grounds	of	political	obligation	that	generate	moral	duties	of	 obedience	to	law	and	authority.	she	samples	four	recurring	arguments	for	the	 ‘duty	to	obey,’	which	feature	throughout	western	political	theory:	namely,	these	 are	duties	to	justice,	duties	to	fairness,	the	‘samaritan	duty’	to	those	in	need,	and	 the	duty	to	preserve	dignity	within	our	political	association	(p.	 ).		 each	ground	for	obligation,	she	argues,	can	generate	duties	to	obey	the	law:	 but,	should	those	moral	grounds	be	threatened	by	an	unfair	or	unjust	law,	they	 conversely	 generate	 duties	 of	 disobedience	 and	 resistance	 to	 that	 law.	 the	 ground	of	fairness,	for	example,	leads	us	to	obey	laws	of	a	fairly,	democratically- elected	 legislature;	 the	 same	 principle,	 however,	 might	 require	 passive	 disobedience	should	a	law	prove	unfair	in	its	treatment	of	minorities.	the	moral	 duty	 to	 obey	 is	 therefore	 defeasible.	 the	 us	 civil	 rights	 movement	 has	 historically	 been	 considered	 the	 epitome	 of	 this	 reasoning,	 with	 relation	 to	 peaceful	civil	disobedience.		 but	 further,	 delmas	 argues,	 the	 fundamental	 requirement	 of	 fairness	 creates	duties	to	actively	disobey	and	resist	such	laws,	even	to	pursue	‘uncivil	 disobedience,’	 and	 to	 break	 ancillary	 laws	 to	 do	 so.	 where	 for	 example	 ice	 agents	 seek	 unjustly	 to	 gather	 undocumented	 migrants	 and	 subject	 them	 to	 appalling	conditions,	citizens	are	duty-bound	to	assess	what	action	they	must	 take,	 which	 may	 include	 direct	 unlawful	 action	 and	 ‘principled	 disobedience’	 such	as	providing	sanctuary	or	deceiving	enforcement	agents.	the	very	grounds	 for	 obedience	 are	 used	 to	 justify	 disobedience	 in	 pursuit	 of	 the	 same	 fundamental	 moral	 imperatives.	 delmas	 thus	 creates	 a	 coherent	 theory	 for	 political	obligations	to	resist	unjust	laws	and	social	structures.		 the	elegance	of	her	argument	is	that	it	takes	received	understandings	of	 political	obligation,	and	detaches	them	from	an	uncritical	presumption	towards	 duties	of	obedience,	which	has	been	the	legacy	of	rawls’	model	for	decades.	the	 																																																								 	j.	rawls,	a	theory	of	justice	( ,	rev.	ed.)	 	 four	fundamental	grounds	for	obligation	she	explores	in	the	main	body	of	her	 book	(and	she	accepts	 that	 there	may	be	others	 to	consider)	are	reasons	 for	 action	 per	 se,	 not	 merely	 reasons	 for	 obedience	 or	 dissent.	 her	 four	 main	 chapters	(chapters	 - )	detail	each	moral	ground,	its	role	in	civil	disobedience,	 and	its	role	in	principled	resistance,	giving	historical	examples	ranging	from	the	 attica	 prison	 uprising	 through	 to	 edward	 snowden’s	 data	 leaks	 and	 whistleblowing,	to	illustrate	her	reasoning.	 delmas	 avoids	 unnecessary	 semantic	 pedantry	 and	 cuts	 directly	 to	 the	 substance	of	what	moral	obligations	must	entail.	these	broad	moral	concepts	are	 inescapably	debatable	in	definition	and	scope	–	delmas	does	not	waste	any	time	 trying	 to	 pin	 down	 ‘justice’	 (p.	 ).	 however,	 by	 looking	 instead	 to	 received	 understandings	 of	 what	 might	 evidently	 be	 called	 injustices,	 such	 as	 official	 misconduct	or	deliberate	disrespect	for	the	equality	of	citizens,	delmas	drives	a	 persuasive	 and	 relatable	 argument	 through	 what	 might	 otherwise	 be	 treacherously	broad,	hazy	territory.			 delmas	 preempts	 several	 potential	 criticisms,	 including	 concerns	 that	 principled	disobedience	is	undemocratic,	threatens	social	order,	and	endangers	 the	 civility	 that	 ‘binds	 society	 together’	 (p.	 ).	 these	 are	 not	 uncommon	 criticisms	 against	 even	 peaceful	 civil	 disobedience,	 but	 are	 particularly	 acute	 where	uncivil	and	even	violent	action	may	be	initiated	by	aggrieved	individuals	 and	groups.	recent	commentary	on	the	gilets	jaunes	protests	suggests	this	‘social	 fabric’	 argument	 is	 as	 pertinent	 in	 europe	 now	 as	 it	 was	 in	 ’s	 america.	 however,	again,	 she	adroitly	 turns	 these	concerns	on	 their	heads.	unjust	and	 unfair	laws	threaten	a	healthy	democracy,	possibly	more	than	subsequent	acts	of	 resistance	can.	principled	disobedience	may	well	contribute	to	strengthening	the	 rule	of	 law	and	civic	society,	under	a	 just	and	fair	democratic	regime.	indeed,	 purely	 peaceful	 disobedience	 may	 be	 ineffective	 at	 communicating	 dissent,	 pursuing	change,	effecting	democratic	dialogue,	or	preventing	immediate	harms	 resulting	from	egregious	state	policy.		uncouple	the	fundamental	moral	reason	 for	action	 from	a	dogmatic	duty	 to	obey,	and	one	can	apply	 it	 just	as	well	 to	 duties	to	disobey.		 in	 another	 deviation	 from	 traditional,	 tired	 debates	 on	 disobedience,	 delmas	 expressly	 sidesteps	 thorny	 questions	 as	 to	 what	 renders	 a	 state	 a	 legitimate	or	 illegitimate	authority	(p.	 ).	her	 focus	 is	on	 fidelity	not	 to	 just	 institutions	or	governments,	or	even	to	law,	but	solely	to	the	four	moral	reasons	 for	action.	notwithstanding	this	sidestep,	it	is	possible	to	draw	some	powerful	 contrasts	between	her	thesis	and	established	theories	of	legitimacy,	such	as	raz’s	 service	 conception	 of	 authority. 	 briefly	 stated,	 raz	 conceives	 of	 authority	 as	 being	legitimate	to	the	extent	that	it	is	based	on	pre-existing	reasons	for	action	 (which	could	 include	 justice,	 fairness	and	 the	 rest),	 and	 that	 the	authority	 in	 question	is	best	placed	to	facilitate	those	reasons	for	action.	where	this	is	the	 case,	a	law	becomes	a	‘content-independent,’	pre-emptive	reason	for	action,	even	 if	 misguided	 or	 itself	 morally	 questionable.	 the	 law	 then	 displaces	 the	 ‘background’	moral	reasons	for	action	that	would	otherwise	for	delmas	demand	 resistance,	according	to	individual	conscience. 		 																																																								 	j.	raz,	the	morality	of	freedom	( ),	 - 	 	id.	 delmas	does	not	depend	upon	a	conception	of	 legitimacy	 in	order	to	be	 persuasive:	 for	 her,	 the	 obligation	 to	 the	 fundamental	 moral	 reason	 is	 paramount,	and	legitimate	authority	begins	and	ends	with	it.	it	would	however	 be	a	fascinating	exercise	to	contrast	this	theory	with	delmas’	more	pronounced	 breakaway	 from	the	presumption	of	obedience.	 in	part,	 this	 contrast	matters	 because	 it	 informs	 how	 real-life	 social	 movements	 can	 conceive	 of	 their	 justifications.	 the	 ‘legitimation	 discourse’	 of	 protesters,	 and	 state	 responses,	 depends	upon	coherent	claims	being	made	as	to	what	renders	authority	morally	 intelligible. 	 if	delmas	has	short-circuited	this	cycle	of	 legitimation	claims	and	 counterclaims,	 creating	 a	 solid	 argument	 for	 disobedience	 to	 specific	 policies	 notwithstanding	 whether	 the	 state	 is	 ‘mostly	 just,’	 it	 is	 a	 remarkable	 achievement	 and	 a	 powerful	 encouragement	 for	 social	 movements	 internationally.		 there	are	further,	more	practical	considerations	she	addresses	regarding	 systemic	injustices	and	our	‘samaritan	duties.’	these	duties,	she	argues,	require	 us	to	assist	those	in	need,	but	not	merely	those	we	literally	walk	past:	it	includes	 those	 of	 whose	 plight	 we	 are	 aware,	 wherever	 they	 may	 be	 (p.	 ).	 this	 stretches	the	received	understanding	of	 the	duty	to	 include	non-proximate	or	 structurally-generated	 instances	 of	 harm,	 rather	 than	 those	 with	 which	 one	 makes	direct	contact. 	could	wide-ranging	duties	to	combat	all	such	injustices	 prove	 onerous,	 if	 not	 impossible,	 for	 citizens	 to	 fulfill?	 where	 structural	 injustices	abound,	or	reach	overseas,	or	are	founded	on	a	colonial	history,	what	 level	 of	 resistance	 is	 expected	 from	 ordinary	 people	 to	 address	 these	 imbalances?	examples	readily	spring	to	mind	of	climate	change	injustice	and	its	 differential	 effect	 on	 poorer	 populations. 	 in	 an	 increasingly	 globalised	 and	 interdependent	economy,	with	greater	knowledge	than	ever	of	the	consequences	 of	our	connectivity,	it	can	seem	a	significant	task	for	individual	citizens	to	be	able	 to	coherently	address	innumerable,	overlapping	social	injustices.	 delmas	concedes	that	the	difficulties	attached	to	duties	of	resistance	may	 indeed	 be	 burdensome,	 but	 insists	 that	 this	 does	 not	 extinguish	 the	 duties	 themselves.	rather,	they	require	fortitude,	collective	action	and	perseverance	in	 the	 face	 of	 systemic	 injustice	 (p.	 ).	 the	 law	 also	 generates	 onerous	 obligations,	but	we	expect	obedience	notwithstanding	those	burdens	due	to	the	 importance	of	the	underlying	moral	reasons	for	action:	why	not	apply	the	same	 logic	to	acts	of	resistance?	these	too	are,	after	all,	‘defeasible’	duties	(p.	 )	in	a	 wider	moral	enquiry,	she	argues:	a	duty	to	fight	injustice	may	well	be	defeated	 by	other	pressing	moral	and	practical	concerns,	and	may	not	create	a	constant	 and	 overbearing	 obligation	 to	 ‘take	 on	 the	 system’	 in	 its	 entirety,	 alone.	 conversely,	 it	 is	 only	 by	 encouraging	 transnational	 social	 movements	 that	 democratic	 dialogue	 can	 be	 empowered.	 in	 the	 face	 of	 ‘democratic	 deficits’	 perceived	 in	 globalized	 neoliberal	 governance,	 environmentalist	 and	 social	 justice	 movements	 identify	 these	 broader	 duties	 and	 aim	 to	 gather	 solidarity	 																																																								 	n.	sultany,	law	and	revolution:	legitimacy	and	constitutionalism	after	the	arab	 spring	( )	 	j.a.	simmons	‘the	duty	to	obey	and	our	natural	moral	duties’	in	c.	h.	 wellman	and	a.	j.	simmons	(eds.),	is	there	a	duty	to	obey	the	law?	( )	 	e.a.	posner	and	d.weisbach,	climate	change	justice	( )	 transnationally. 	it	is	not	extraordinary	to	state	that	these	duties	do	exist	and	do	 matter.	 delmas	 reflects	 the	 claims	 and	 narratives	 of	 these	 movements	 in	 her	 theory,	 and	 prises	 open	 simplistic,	 state-centric	 conceptions	 of	 protest	 to	 embrace	these	modern	challenges.		 there	is	the	perennial	question	throughout	of	how	to	decide	what	is	‘right.’	 nobody	 is	 ronald	 dworkin’s	 metaphorical	 hercules. 	 the	 individual,	 as	 adjudicator	of	their	moral	duty,	is	bound	to	make	mistakes:	potentially	grievous	 ones,	 in	 the	 event	 of	 violent	 action	 taking	 place.	 delmas	 suggests	 that	 this	 difficulty	does	not	repudiate	the	duty	itself,	no	less	than	the	onerous	nature	of	 law-abidance	does	not	itself	morally	justify	illegality.	that	the	individual	may	err	 is	unavoidable	when	engaging	in	moral	enquiry.	it	is	better,	she	argues,	that	the	 enquiry	be	informed	and	sincere,	if	imperfect,	rather	than	abandoned	altogether	 in	favour	of	what	would	otherwise	be	morally	arbitrary	obedience.		 linked	 to	 this	 is	 the	 question	 of	 methods,	 and	 degree,	 of	 retaliatory	 resistance.	the	 ‘constraints’	 that	delmas	suggests	 for	resistors’	actions	should	 include	respecting	the	interests	of	other	individuals,	including	life	and	physical	 integrity;	respecting	pluralism	and	non-denomination,	and	the	equal	standing	of	 all	 citizens	 regardless	 race,	 faith,	 and	 so	 on;	 and	 a	 respect	 for	 the	 system	 of	 fundamental	 rights	 within	 the	 constitutional	 order	 (p.	 ).	 this	 begs	 the	 question,	 what	 violence	 (if	 any)	 might	 be	 tolerable	 given	 these	 constraints?	 delmas	 claims	 that	 ‘incivility	 does	 not	 necessarily	 violate	 people’s	 basic	 interests’	(p.	 ).	beyond	this	is	scope	for	violence	necessary	and	proportionate	 to	addressing	the	 injustice	 identified.	any	violence	should	not	be	 inconsistent	 with	the	foundational	moral	reasons	for	action.	this	might	exclude	violence	to	 the	 person	 in	 most	 circumstances,	 but	 may	 include	 sabotage	 of	 property	 or	 police	equipment	in	others.	delmas	would	not	be	the	first	writer	to	argue	that	 use	 of	 violence	 may	 be	 a	 rational	 and	 morally	 justifiable	 tactic,	 when	 used	 proportionately	 for	 the	 public	 good. 	 there	 might	 arguably	 be	 a	 parallel	 to	 dworkin	after	all,	in	that	the	action	taken	must	cohere	with	the	‘integrity’	of	the	 wider	political	public	morality,	notwithstanding	a	more	local	inconsistency	with	 the	broken	law	in	question.	the	question	of	what	violence	can	‘fit’	into	a	western	 democracy,	that	aspires	towards	purely	peaceful	dialogue,	is	more	than	merely	 of	theoretical	interest	given,	for	example,	parisian	riots	of	 .		 that	actions	should	be	proportionate	to	the	injustice	addressed,	with	the	 least	harm	being	employed	to	attain	the	required	result,	is	an	injunction	which	is	 nevertheless	bound	to	raise	consequentialist	concerns.	notably,	arendt	wrote	of	 the	unpredictability	of	 long-term	outcomes. 	violence,	or	 leaking	confidential	 information,	could	easily	have	unforeseeable	adverse	effects	on	the	safety	and	 wellbeing	of	citizens,	either	immediately	or	further	in	the	future.	this	is	certainly	 a	 feature	 of	 the	 commentary	 on	 whistleblowing	 activists,	 such	 as	 assange	 or	 snowden.	delmas	re-opens	these	debates	within	a	fresh,	contemporary	setting	 while	reminding	us	that,	though	we	may	not	foresee	the	future	harms	caused	by	 																																																								 	d.	markovits,	‘democratic	disobedience’	( )	 	yale	law	journal	 	 	r.	dworkin,	law’s	empire	( )	 	j.	schwazmantel,	‘democracy	and	violence:	a	theoretical	overview’	( )	 	 ( )	democratization	 ,	at	 	 	h.	arendt,	on	violence	( )	 uncivil	resistance,	neither	can	we	predict	the	 long-term	harms	of	deferring	to	 unfair	and	unjust	policies.	 the	 thesis	 also	 opens	 up	 possibilities	 to	 explore	 beyond	 the	 individual	 dissenter’s	 obligations,	 to	 address	 what	 the	 state	 must	 do	 to	 accommodate	 principled	disobedience.	moral	 justification	rarely	translates	directly	into	legal	 justification.	 delmas	 freely	 admits	 that	 this	 may	 be	 beyond	 the	 scope	 of	 her	 work,	and	subject	to	enormous	variation	across	regional	and	social	contexts:	she	 tentatively	 suggests	 a	 willingness	 on	 the	 part	 of	 the	 police,	 prosecutors	 and	 judges	to	drop	prosecutions	against	acts	of	justifiable	resistance,	or	perhaps	the	 implementation	of	defences	based	on	the	grounds	of	the	obligation	in	question	–	 ‘dignitary	 defences’,	 for	 example	 (p.	 ).	 the	 sincere	 moral	 convictions	 of	 defendants	 do	 seem,	 officially	 or	 otherwise,	 to	 be	 considered	 by	 judges	 at	 sentencing.	 the	 recent	 case	 of	 the	 ‘stansted	 ’	 activists	 in	 the	 uk,	 who	 unlawfully	 obstructed	 deportation	 flights	 leaving	 the	 airport	 in	 ,	 demonstrates	the	public	interest	in	these	concerns	within	contemporary	protest.	 disobedience	is	necessarily	a	crossover	point	between	social	justice	claims	and	 criminal	justice	demands.	delmas	leaves	open	the	ongoing	debate	on	how	much	 the	 state	 can	 justify	 punishing,	 or	 penalizing,	 these	 dissenters:	 and	 whether	 protesters	 who	 can	 demonstrate	 moral	 grounds	 for	 disobedience	 should	 willingly	accept	any	such	sanction. 		 the	book	presents	a	robust	but	simple	moral	reasoning	for	uncoupling	our	 political	obligations	from	a	presumed	duty	to	obey	–	and	one	strongly	relevant	to	 our	 times.	 the	 text	 is	 peppered	 with	 potent	 examples	 where	 uncivil	 disobedience	 has	 contributed	 to	 the	 pursuit	 of	 justice,	 from	 countless	 social	 movement	 groups	 in	 the	 th	 century	 through	 to	 contemporary	 black	 lives	 matter	protests.	we	are	reminded,	in	a	postscript	relating	her	theory	to	‘the	age	 of	 trump,’	 of	 the	 powerful	 relevance	 and	 urgency	 to	 her	 claims,	 beyond	 philosophical	 armchair	 experimentation	 (p.	 ).	 she	 asks	 us	 to	 identify	 the	 injustices	around	us,	and	apply	her	theory	to	the	question	of	what	now	must	be	 done	in	the	face	of	horrendous	inequalities	around	us:	not	just	relating	to	the	 trump	administration,	but	elsewhere	across	the	us,	the	eu,	and	beyond.	it	is	a	 fitting	epilogue	to	an	innovative	theory,	grounding	it	in	a	very	real,	modern	and	 daunting	setting,	and	asking	us	what	actions	we	must	take	to	counter	immediate	 injustice.		 	 	 	 	 																																																								 	k.	brownlee,	two	tales	of	civil	disobedience:	a	reply	to	david	lefkowitz	 biron - birkbeck institutional research online hodson, dermot ( ) the politics of documentary photography: three theoretical perspectives. government and opposition , issn - x. (in press) downloaded from: http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/ / usage guidelines: please refer to usage guidelines at https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/policies.html or alternatively contact lib-eprints@bbk.ac.uk. http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/ / https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/policies.html mailto:lib-eprints@bbk.ac.uk the politics of documentary photography: three theoretical perspectives dermot hodson, reader in political economy, department of politics, birkbeck college, university of london. email: d.hodson@bbk.ac.uk abstract: photographers are often inspired by politics but can they influence it? drawing on the study of public policy and the history of photography, this article considers three ways in which documentary photographers enter the policy process. it considers the photographer as: a bureaucrat working within government networks to achieve individual and institutional aims; an advocate working with likeminded actors to advance shared political beliefs; an expert working within an epistemic community driven by a shared policy enterprise. these roles highlight the institutional channels through which photographers seek and sometimes secure political change and the contradictions and constraints they face in so doing. these contrasting perspectives are discussed with reference to the work of canonical and contemporary photographers engaged in national and international politics from to today. key words: documentary photography; politics; history of photography mailto:d.hodson@bbk.ac.uk in september , nilüfer demir photographed the body of alan kurdi, a three-year old boy who drowned off the coast of turkey as his family fled the war in syria. within hours, a selection of demir’s images had been viewed more than million times on twitter (vis and goriunova ), piling pressure on politicians to act (tharoor ). after seeing the photos french president françois hollande phoned his turkish counterpart recep erdoğan to broker a european response to the refugee crisis. the following day, uk prime minister david cameron announced plans to resettle , of the most vulnerable refugees from syria by , having previously promised to take only ‘several hundred’ (home office : ). in canada, prime minister stephen harper’s tearful but defensive reaction to demir’s photographs may have helped to propel justin trudeau to power weeks later (pammett and dornan ). such reactions hint at the political power of photographers and yet they invite the question of why this image by this photographer at this time resonated as much as it did. the political impact of photography depends on how images and those who take them interact with the political process. as david d. perlmutter ( ) argues, we often assume, without supporting evidence, that photographs affect politicians and the public in the same way that they have affected us. this can be seen in overblown claims that nik ut’s iconic image of a young girl fleeing a napalm strike altered the course of the vietnam war (wollacott ). historians of photography swing from optimism to pessimism over the idea of photography as a force for positive political change. susan sontag ( : ) is at her ambivalent best when she writes: ‘photographs of an atrocity may give rise to opposing responses. a call for peace. a cry for revenge.’ ‘photographs may be…instruments of the imagination, tools for morals’, replies alex danchev ( : ). in spite of their differing views, both authors see the photographer as operating at one remove from politics. their appraisal of don mccullin’s work is remarkably similar in this respect, with sontag ( : ) describing the war photographer as an ‘impassioned witness, bringing back his news from hell’ and danchev ( : ) seeing him as capturing and conveying what political actors (in this case, soldiers) cannot. many contemporary scholars of photography have a similar view, as in christopher carter’s ( ) depiction of photographs as rhetorical devices, which through their depiction of social class and spaces, can expose contradictions in the capitalist system. politics, from this viewpoint, is as an amorphous realm that the photographer can observe but not enter. where are the people who do politics in these accounts? where are the institutions in which they operate? can photographers gain access to these institutions and influence those who control the levers of power? how, if at all, can photographers bring attention to issues that politicians would not otherwise address? political science is well placed to address such questions but comparatively few scholars in this field have taken an interest in photographs and those who take them. danchev’s wide- ranging discussions of art and politics (see also danchev and lisle ) is one of few exceptions. campbell ( ) also uses war photography to show how the political power of images depends on inter-textual context and the committed politics of the photographer. bleiker and kay ( ) argue that a humanist approach to photography can raise awareness of, but also blunt responses to, societal challenges using the portrayal of hiv/aids in africa as a case study. j. johnson ( ) suggests that documentary photography can direct attention away from the suffering of individuals to the populations or ‘aggregates’ that they represent. and yet, hutchison, bleiker, and campbell ( ) warn that the depiction of migrants in groups lends itself to the framing of migration as a security challenge rather than a humanitarian one. insightful though these studies are, they invite further reflections on the institutions through which politics play out and the role that photographers potentially play within this process. the focus of this investigation is on documentary photography, which, broadly speaking, deploys visual documents of events, places, objects and persons to demonstrate the need for social change (schulz ). other genres of photography, including photojournalism and war photography, are set to one side for simplicity’s sake, even though the boundaries between them and documentary photography are often blurred (becker ). the analysis that follows draws general conclusions from the work of a sample of classic and contemporary documentary photographers engaged in national and international politics from to today, including activestills, giles duley, walker evans, lewis hine, dorethea lange, susan meiselas, pete souza, jacob riis, arthur rothstein and sebastião salgado. rather than offering a single theoretical take, this article draws on different theoretical perspectives to conceptualise three ways in which photographers enter the political process. this categorization does not exhaust the political roles that photographers potentially play and nor is it applied to anything more than a sample of documentary photography but it allows us to identify in a more systematic and generalizable way the channels through which photographers seek to influence politics and the contradictions and constraints they encounter as a result. the first perspective sees the photographer as a bureaucrat who can play a powerful role in articulating the aims and effects of public administrations. in this role, the photographer faces frustrations, compromise and competition, all of which sit uneasily with the sense of autonomy that is so important to documentary photography. the second views the photographer as an activist working with likeminded actors to uphold shared values. here the photographer must confront awkward questions over their right to advocate on behalf of their subjects. the third sees the photographer as an expert working with other specialists to develop arguments and evidence in support of social change. such efforts can bring significant influence but they must address concerns over the photographer’s credibility, independence and impartiality. taken together, these perspectives show that photographers influence politics not simply through the power of their images but through their ability to navigate complex policy processes. opportunities for political engagement, moreover, vary over time. bureaucracies are less welcoming to documentary photographers than they once were, it is concluded, while photographers’ claims to expertise face periodic challenges. documentary photography, in contrast, occupies a crucial place in evolving efforts at transnational advocacy. the golden age of progressive photography may be over but a new generation of activists are working with photographers and photography for social change. three theoretical perspectives three caveats and a word on methodology are warranted at this juncture. first, not all documentary photographers are interested in politics and those that are do not necessarily seek to influence politics directly. for instance, diane arbus’s grotesque images of society’s marginalised raise political questions and yet reject the idea of progressive photography (coleman ). second, documentary photography must contend with, what judith goldman ( : ) called, ‘the gap between intention and effect’. the political impact of a photograph may be quite different than the photographer intended and such impacts vary between individuals and groups over space and time. the rapid reaction to nilüfer demir’s photo of alan kurdi exemplifies the power of viral images in the age of social media. and yet, demir had been photographing border crossings in this region for more than a decade before this image broke through (griggs ). third, some forms of political photography are not captured in this article, as in the role of citizen and non-citizen photographers (azoulay ). in this sense, the theoretical perspectives considered are a starting point for thinking more systematically about the relationship between politics and photography. no photographs are re-produced in this article. this is consistent with j. johnson ( ), who in turn cites the textual tradition of photographic analysis favoured by sontag ( ). links to photographs are nonetheless provided, where possible. photographers as bureaucrats andrew parsons, a british photographer, came to public prominence in when he photographed david cameron driving a dog-sled over a melting glacier to highlight the politician’s concerns over global warming (wintour ). four years later, cameron appointed parsons as a civil servant. the controversy over this decision was curious as the british government has hired photographers since the victorian era, as in thomas bigg’s appointment in as government photographer to the bombay presidency (hannavy ). today, photographers are employed by public administrations worldwide. no high-level handshake or meeting is overlooked or un- tweeted. instances in which documentary photographers are employed by governments to do documentary photography are rarer. the historical section of the united states resettlement administration – later the farm security administration – provides the best-known historical example. established in , the resettlement administration was a government agency set up by franklin d. roosevelt to administer programmes and policies to address urban and rural poverty and miscellaneous environmental objectives during the great depression. the historical section hired some of the country’s leading documentary photographers with the aim ‘not only [of] keeping a record of the administration’s projects, but also [of] perpetuating photographically certain aspects of the american scene which may prove incalculable in time to come’ (resettlement administration : ). over the next decade, these photographers took some of the best known images not only of the great depression but in the history of documentary photography. the historical section has been criticised for being self-serving and partisan (carlebach ) but such charges merely underline photographers’ power to document the aims and effects of public administrations. public reaction to the historical section’s photo exhibitions was mixed, exemplifying the gap between the intention of the photographers and the impact of their work. some politicians, rather than being spurred to action, moved to supress photographs of their districts (curtis, ). and yet, there is little doubt that the photographs reached a broader public than purely textual reports or press releases could have done. the historical section distributed nearly , images per month to publishers such as survey graphic and life, which were sympathetic to the aims of the roosevelt administration, as well as providing more than , prints for government publications. beadle’s ( : ) claim that today’s welfare policies in the united states trace their origins to such images is overblown but the historical section’s photographers certainly played a part in sustaining one of roosevelt’s most controversial policies. the goals and purposes of bureaucratic organizations, as b. guy peters ( : ) tells us, are determined by officials who sometimes lose sight of their political masters’ aims. this tendency can be seen in the work of arthur rothstein, the first photographer recruited to the historical section. rothstein’s early fieldwork rested uneasily with the aims of the resettlement administration. the assignment in question documented appalachian communities being moved to make way for shenandoah national park, the government acting in this case as the displacer and in some cases the incarcerator of people rather than their defender (currell ). unintended consequences are a common feature of bureaucracies (pierson and skocpol ) and the historical section was not immune to this phenomenon. this is evidenced by the furore created over rothstein’s the skull ( ), a photograph of a steer skull against an arid background taken in in the south dakota badlands (huang ). rothstein probably saw the skull as a contribution to the roosevelt administration’s efforts to tackle drought conditions in the region but it undermined government policy and the reputation of the historical section. the problem was that the photo was staged by rothstein, who shot the skull in several locations. ‘it’s a fake’ responded the fargo forum (hurley : ). bureaucrats are subject to institutional constraints designed to prevent drift (mccubbins, noll and weingast ). while such constraints can keep officials in check they stifle creativity and for the individuals concerned they can become, what bruce adams describes as, one of the great ‘frustrations of public service’ (adams ). the photographers of the historical section faced no shortage of constraints and their fair share of frustrations. stryker provided his photographers with detailed briefings on the economic, social and political conditions they were likely to encounter in the field and even shooting scripts (hurley : ). those who did not meet the standards expected were reprimanded by stryker and in some cases transferred from the historical section, as in the case of theodor jung (hurley : ). perhaps the most serious creative constraint on photographers was the expectation that photographs be processed in washington, approved by stryker, as director, and their negatives stored in the historical section archive. some photographers worked within these constraints, as in rothstein, but others chaffed against them, as in walker evans, who took a leave of absence from the historical section to shoot let us now praise famous men for fortune (agee and evans ). the result was a landmark work of documentary photography, which would almost certainly not have been permissible under stryker’s charge, however much bureaucratic leeway the head of the historical section afforded evans. a case in point is bud fields and his family at home ( ), a photograph of an impoverished sharecropper and his family. the family’s dirty clothes and feet and their blank expressions contrast with the pensive determination of florence thompson in dorothea lange’s migrant mother ( ), the latter showing an impoverished but resolute woman comforting her distressed children in what became the historical section’s best-known image. in the end, the most consequential bureaucratic battled occurred not between stryker and the photographers who worked under him but between the historical section and other parts of government. stryker won a number of important early battles, including convincing the head of the resettlement administration to put all matters relating to photography under the historical section’s control, a move that brought resources and the arrival of walker evans and ben shahn from other parts of the agency (hurley : ). beneficial too was the resettlement administration’s absorption into the united states department of agriculture, a move that loosened bureaucratic and budget constraints on the historical section. ultimately, stryker and his photographers were overtaken by bureaucratic forces empowered by the outbreak of the second world war. in , the historical section was absorbed into the office of war information, greatly reducing stryker’s influence and the importance attached within the section to documentary photography. before he stepped down, stryker circumvented plans to destroy the historical section’s archive by arranging for the transfer of its , photographs to the library of congress (hurley : ). documentary photography on the scale of the historical section would never flourish again within us bureaucratic structures. the closest comparator is documerica, a photographic project run by the us environmental protection agency that started in and to which arthur rothstein served as a consultant. although it produced more than , images by politically-minded photographers such as arthur tress and ken heyman, documerica achieved nowhere near the same success as the historical section. whereas the latter wrestled with bureaucratic politics, the former succumbed to it, ceasing its activities in after budget cuts made it impossible to hire any photographers (shubinski : ). today, there are numerous examples of photographers working as bureaucrats but governments’ preoccupation with ‘image control’ provides fewer opportunities for documentary photographers to flourish in this environment. perhaps the most high profile bureaucratic position in political photography is the post of official white house photographer. for the most part, presidential photographers are content – or constrained – to reproduce stock images of life in the white house. telephone conversations are a recurring motif in photographs of john f. kennedy – as in jacques lowe’s lumumba ( ), which recorded kennedy’s reaction to hearing the news by telephone that congolese leader patrice lumumba had been assassinated – and they have helped to forge the president’s reputation as a leader at the centre of world events. so much so, in fact, that it is now standard operating procedure during international crises for governments to publish photographs of prime ministers and presidents calling other world leaders. if the message of such photographs is that events are in hand then the myth is that policy is made by, and between, heads of state or government with little need for advisors, experts and, it would seem, operational decisions. that this myth is wearing thin is suggested by the derision that greeted uk prime minister david cameron’s ‘selfie’ of his stern-faced conversation with barack obama over ukraine in march (haynes ). the power imbalance between presidential photographers and presidents clearly constrains the former. chief official white house photographer shealah craighead was criticised for releasing no photographs during the first fifty days of the trump presidency and, when her first batch of images was released, of portraying the president, his family and staff in a way that was stiff, staged and remote (o’kane ). trump, it later transpired, had chosen to keep photos of himself with family and friends for his private archive (flock ), preferring perhaps to be the sole star of his political reality show. but bureaucratic photographers can evade, whether intentionally or not, the tightest of institutional constraints. the situation room ( ), a photograph by craighead’s predecessor, pete souza, shows barack obama and key advisors monitoring the raid on osama bin laden’s compound. most of those gathered around the table were well known, but a partial glimpse of an unnamed cia operative provided more information than the photographer or white house may have intended (miller ). today, international public administrations provide the most nourishing bureaucratic environment for documentary photographers, perhaps, because international organizations face a significant ‘knowledge gap’ (dellmuth ). a case in point is the office of the united nations high commissioner for refugees (unhcr), which is a prolific commissioner and producer of images of migrants. since its foundation in , the unhcr has used images of refugees to draw attention to the plight of displaced people, albeit in ways that sometimes undermine its bureaucratic imperatives. ‘by the end of the s’, heather l. johnson ( : ) notes, ‘the image of the refugee had begun to shift from the political individual fleeing the soviet bloc to masses from the global south’, with the latter adding to the sense that europe was being overwhelmed by migration. a more recent project, unhcr tracks, challenges this tendency by providing images and long-form reports of people fleeing war or persecution. unhcr’s refugees media is more traditional in this respect but it provides a useful way to counteract the polarising portrayal of migrants in the media. images from this archive are made available to journalists free of charge sometimes within minutes of their being filed in the field (laurent ). media outlets that want such images are bound to use them accurately and on stories related to unhcr-supported projects, thus allowing a modicum of bureaucratic oversight over the photographic representation of migrants. documentary photographers who engage with the unhcr in this way receive not only assignments that are lengthy by today’s limited standards (laurent ) but also significant creative leeway. they ‘gave me the greatest brief a photographer can be given: ‘follow your heart’’, said giles duley of his work with the unhcr on the european refugee crisis, a collaboration that produced i can only tell you what my eyes see (duley ), a collection of photographs that stands out for their individual and family portraits of refugees (wadi ). photographers as advocates although the idea of photographer as advocate recalls cornell capa’s concept of the concerned photographer, capa’s vision was essentially a personal rather than a political one. he had in mind photographs ‘in which genuine human feeling predominates over commercial cynicism or disinterested formalism’ (capa and edelson ). the photographer as advocate looks to the wider role played by documentary photographers in advocacy networks, which bring together individuals from trade unions, churches, governments and international organizations among other groups to pursue political aims that they cannot achieve alone. what distinguishes advocacy networks from economic or expert networks, margaret e. keck and kathryn sikkink ( : ) suggest, is the ‘centrality of principled ideas and values in motivating their formation’. this emphasis on ideas over interests also distinguishes advocacy networks from bureaucratic networks, with the latter treating participants in the policy process as being driven by individual or institutional self- interest (keck and sikkink : ). jacob riis, who has been described as america’s first documentary photographer (szasz and bogardus ), provides a classic example of the photographer as advocate. how the other half lives ( ), in particular, exemplifies how photographers working outside government and government officials can make common cause (riis ). the book’s one hundred photos of slum conditions in new york city are widely viewed as a catalyst for social reform in the united states and beyond (szasz and bogardus : ). but can we really say, as michelle bogre has argued, that riis ‘proved the potency of activist photography to persuade viewers and legislators through graphic, direct imagery of real conditions’? (bogre : ). powerful though riis’s photographs are, there is a danger of exaggerating their influence during a period in which progressive politics and politicians flourished (nugent ). to the extent that riis influenced this political movement – and its influences were manifold – it was by harnessing the power of advocacy networks. the most important alliance riis formed was with theodore roosevelt. in , roosevelt, then a new york city police commissioner, arrived in riis’s office and announced that he had read how the other half lives and ‘was here to help’ (riis : ). ‘no one ever helped as he did’, riis noted, ‘for two years we were brothers in mulberry street’ (riis : ). an example of the riis-roosevelt relationship can be seen in relation to the city’s policy on police-lodgings. in the late th century, the police provided a range of social services, including temporary housing for the homeless and destitute. riis had used police lodgings when he first arrived in the united states, and his experience convinced him that the abolition of such accommodation was a key priority for social reform. later riis took roosevelt on a night visit to the same police lodgings and recounted his story. ‘i will smash them tomorrow’, replied roosevelt, who subsequently closed all police lodgings in the city (riis : ). lewis hine’s work with the national child labor committee offers another classic example of photographers working in advocacy networks. established in , the committee brought together an eclectic array of clergymen, politicians, academics and activists with a shared belief in ‘promoting the rights, awareness, dignity, well- being and education of children and youth as they relate to work and working’. as a salaried employee of the national child labor committee, lewis had a strong self- interest in advancing its cause, a fact that sits uneasily with conceptions of him as an advocate driven by principled beliefs. but the personal risks that hine took on his photographic assignments for the committee suggest otherwise. those who ran factories were often opposed to the aims of the national child labor committee and so hine chose to pose as an insurance agent, bible salesman or fire inspector. this speaks to a major difference between bureaucratic and advocacy networks. whereas the former, by definition, trade on their insider access, the latter are often forced to work outside established power structures to advance their cause. in this sense, hine’s photographs can be viewed as a form of ‘information politics’ designed to draw attention to issues not otherwise in the public domain (keck and sikkink : ). successful advocacy depends not only on information politics, keck and sikkink ( : ) contend, but also on the politics of symbolism and leverage. hine was scrupulous about the accuracy of his photographs, arguing against the retouching and faking of images, but he accepted concerns over the photographer’s capacity to convey the truth. ‘photographs may not lie’, he contended, but ‘liars may photograph’ (hine ). hine’s response to such concerns was two-fold and not entirely consistent. as a social scientist, he argued that ‘several hundred photos…backed with records of observations, conversations, names and addresses’ made it impossible to deny the existence of child labour (hine : ). as an artist, he looked beyond photography’s claims to truth to its deeper symbolism when he wrote: ‘whether it be a painting or a photograph, the picture is a symbol that brings one immediately into close touch with reality…in fact, it is often more effective than the reality would have been, because, in the picture, the non-essential and conflicting interests have been eliminated’ (hine : ). leverage politics describes the efforts of advocacy networks to persuade those who are in power to further the political causes of the network (keck and sikkink : ). for all his efforts at information and symbolic politics, hine played little discernible role in such activities. unlike jacob riis he enjoyed few personal connections with high-level policy-makers. instead, it fell to other members of the national child labor committee to leverage the support of policy-makers, as in the campaign to establish a federal children’s bureau. a report on the history of this bureau, published in , emphasises the advocacy efforts of committee members, such as edward devine, rather than hine (us department of labor ). this is not to diminish the importance of hine’s photography but it does call for a revaluation of the role he played in realising social reforms. among contemporary documentary photographers, few can claim to have shaped political outcomes more than susan meiselas. having made her name photographing women who performed striptease in small us carnivals, meiselas travelled to cuba in to begin a radically different series of documentary projects on latin america. in el salvador she photographed the exhumation of four american missionaries from maryknoll who had been tortured, raped and killed by members of the military. locals were aware of these events but meiselas, and other journalists present, broke the story in the international media. meiselas’s photographs added to pressure on the us government, which temporarily suspended aid to el salvador, and on the salvadoran military to investigate the atrocity (danner ). a year later, meiselas documented the el mozote massacre, which saw roughly villagers killed by the american trained salvadoran army. her pictures made the front page of the new york times and were used as evidence in a congressional debate about aid to el salvador. a decade later, four national guardsmen and their superior officer were convicted of murder. no arrests were made in relation to el mozote but a truth commission accepted that there was ‘full proof’ that the event had taken place (betancur et al. : ). meiselas herself gave testimony to this body. meiselas’s work in latin america played out on two levels. she was there as a photojournalist dependent on the sporadic support of newspapers and magazines to cover expenses and purchase her photographs. at the same time, she was drawn, as a documentary photographer, into the long-term efforts of transnational advocacy networks committed to the idea of human rights in latin america. these networks encompassed social movements in the region, organizations such as amnesty international and us pressure groups, including artists call against us intervention in central america. during this period meiselas also engaged with photographic networks. meiselas co-edited el salvador, work of photographers to highlight us involvement in this country’s civil war (meiselas et al. ). the book included images by eugene richards, eli reed, james nachtwey, and john hoagland; hoagland’s contribution and that of two others were posthumous, these photographers having lost their lives at the hands of salvadoran soldiers. in chile from within, meiselas collaborated with a group of chilean photographers who recorded human rights abuses committed by the pinochet regime (meiselas et al. ). meiselas’s ( ) involvement with international advocacy networks deepened further with kurdistan: in the shadow of history. this documentary project arose from an invitation by human rights watch to photograph evidence of the anfal campaign in which a reported , kurdish civilians were murdered by members of saddam hussein’s regime. this was meiselas’s most explicit involvement in advocacy politics. human rights watch’s aim was to gather evidence of human rights abuses by iraqi forces through an international team of photographers, lawyers, forensic anthropologists, geographers, ballistics and firearms analysts and local contacts. their collective efforts produced more than -pages of detailed evidence, analysis that played a significant role in raising awareness of the anfal campaign (human rights watch ). meiselas’s photographs featured prominently in the report and they would eventually be used as evidence in the trial of saddam hussein (bui ). in reflecting on her work, meiselas defends the political influence of documentary photography while making clear that such influence depends on collaboration between the photographer and other actors. ‘i don't go into the field as an advocate. i go into the field to make a discovery. i don’t start with the mission i start with what is going on, the question: what is going on? what i can see? what can i show and convey through the photographs? and then its with whom can i partner if that seems appropriate for that work to have an additional life, which could be a life of advocacy or life tied to an issue targeted in a very particular way whether it is to policy-makers or to a public.’ ngo-centric networks, of the kind that susan meiselas has worked so closely with, embody an approach that w. lance bennett ( ) describes as first generation transnational activism. second generation transnational activism is altogether more flexible, bennett suggests. such flexibility extends to the principled beliefs that bind political actors together, their lack of hierarchical structure and their reliance on social media to inform members and inspire public protests. what role documentary photography might play in this second generation remains to be seen. some commentators see new possibilities, as in david levi strauss who contrasts mainstream media’s slow response to occupy wall street (ows) – a form of second generation transnational activism par excellence – with the millions of images of this movement made by ‘professional journalists, amateurs and tourists, and the ows legions themselves’ (levi strauss : ). ‘the next revolution will not only be televised; it will be instantly disseminated far and wide on stationary and mobile devices’, he writes (levi strauss : - ). and yet, as bennett argues, the unanswered question for second-generation activists – and by extension documentary photographers – is whether political influence persists when public protests disband. it remains to be seen what this new generation of activists can achieve but early signs suggests that documentary photography has a crucial role to play. a case in point concerns photography of black lives matter, another exemplar of second-generation activism. a prominent image in this regard is jonathan bachman’s unrest in baton rouge ( ), which shows armour-clad officers from louisiana state police running towards and unarmed and preternaturally calm protestor, ieshia evans. the speed with which new and old media picked up on this photograph and hailed it as iconic speaks to the political potential of the photograph in the viral age. advocacy networks can be politically effective under certain conditions but are they ever legitimate? scholars such as keck and sikkink take the legitimacy of such networks for granted but, as alan hudson notes, these groups face serious problems in justifying their right to advocate for particular causes on behalf of others (hudson ). such problems are acute in relation to political photography. jacob riis has been criticised for marginalising those people whom he purported to help by reinforcing the otherness of new york’s slum dwellers (twigg ). worse still, aubert ( : ) suggests, is riis’s ‘utter lack of concern for the privacy of the immigrant workers and families he claims to be interested in, and his unfortunate tendency to set tenement flats on fire with his flashlight’. lewis hine has, likewise, been criticised for his portrayal of child labourers as unnamed victims that serve as political and social archetypes rather than individuals in need of support (dimock : ). jonathan bachman’s right as a white free-lance photographer covering his first political protest to represent black lives matter is also open to question. susan meiselas acknowledges the contradictions that surround the photographer as advocate when she says of her early work in latin america: ‘at one point…someone confronted me with a bullet made in the u.s.a. and asked me what i was doing there, which side was i on. it went beyond the question of “why am i taking photographs?” or “who am i taking pictures for?” it was a pivotal moment’ (meiselas ). meiselas’s response to these questions – that she had a responsibility as a us citizen to look at ‘american power relations’ (jobey ) – is not entirely convincing because it fails to acknowledge the she, as an american photographer, is part of this power relationship. more promising, in this respect, is meiselas’s project reframing history, in which she returned to nicaragua after twenty five years to seek out the people she had photographed and to display her images as murals in the communities in which they were taken. a similar attempt to legitimate documentary photography can be seen in the work of activestills, a collective of israeli, palestinian and international photographers established in to protest against oppression, racism and violations of freedom. attempting to go beyond the media and other traditional vehicles for photography, activestills combines traditional reportage with street exhibitions and, what maimon and grinbaum ( : ) refer to as, ‘visual activism’. this approach to activism sees photographers as part of the communities that they represent and is perhaps best encapsulated by the title of basel alyazouri’s ( ) essay learning to photograph while running. now international in its scope, activestills’ powerful photo diary of london’s grenfell tower fire and the protests that followed illustrate the enduring ability of documentary photographers to raise awareness of, and advocate for, social issues (ziv ). photographers as experts experts play a visible if contested role in politics through their ‘authoritative claim to policy-relevant knowledge’ (haas ). can photographers be considered part of such epistemic communities? the idea of photographers as experts is perhaps the most difficult to square with documentary photography. none of the photographers whose work we have discussed in detail so far can claim deep expertise of the political phenomenon they sought to capture; jacob riis, joined bureaucratic networks because he lacked an understanding of social policy; roy stryker briefed members of the historical section before they went into the field because many lacked a basic understanding of the us agricultural sector; susan meiselas’s most influential documentary projects began by her own admission without clear expectations of what she might find. other photographers can more plausibly be considered as seeking to influence politics through their participation in expert networks. dorothea lange and sebastião salgado are representative in this regard. as a member of the historical section, dorothea lange fits the frame of photographer as bureaucrat. but her work can also be viewed as part of an epistemic community composed chiefly of progressive economists. lange had no formal training as an economist or, it would seem, much interest in the subject matter until the great depression. having run a portrait studio in san francisco, lange turned to documentary photography in the s to record the devastating economic conditions around her. an early photograph in this project, white angel breadline ( ), which predates her work for the historical section, featured in a photography exhibition attended by paul schuster taylor. professor of economics at the university of california berkley, taylor was a leading authority on migration, who had included his own photographs in his monograph mexican labor in the united states (taylor ). seeing scope for collaboration, taylor hired lange as a member of his research team for a project on migrant labourers funded by the california state emergency relief administration. lange and taylor, who married in , advanced a joint research agenda that encompassed both economics and photography. taylor accompanied lange on several of her fieldtrips for the historical section, which she joined in the second half of , and she cites her husband as a key influence on her work. lange, in turn, made a significant contribution to taylor’s research on the economics of migration. this collaboration culminated in the publication of an american exodus (lange and taylor ). rightly remembered as a major work of documentary photography, it was not intended as such. ‘this is neither a book of photographs nor an illustrated book, in the traditional sense’, wrote lange and taylor, ‘we use the camera as a tool of research’ (lange and taylor ). for haas, four types of shared belief bind members of an epistemic community together: normative beliefs, policy enterprise, causal ideas and notions of validity (haas : ). normative beliefs and policy enterprise are clearly discernible in american exodus, a work motivated by the authors’ shared commitment to progressive politics and their specific belief in the need for government intervention to alleviate the plight of migrant workers. so too are causal ideas and notions of validity. in american exodus, lange and taylor sought not only to document but also to diagnose mass migration in the united states in the s. their diagnosis highlights the impact of technology, industrial collapse and societal change as the principal driving factors of this phenomenon. lange’s photographs serve as visual hypotheses by contrasting the ‘hoe culture’ in the old south with ‘plantation under the machine’. these hypotheses were not strikingly original but lange and taylor’s interrogation of their validity using photographic techniques broke new ground. the use of photography as a research method was a recurring interest of labour economists in the s. roy stryker and rexford tugwell had first worked together at columbia on american economic life, an economics textbook that incorporated photographs. whereas stryker and tugwell’s experiments with photography as research petered out (hurley : ) it flourished with american exodus. economists and political scientists were not much impressed with lange and taylor’s research method but it influenced a future generation of scholars to explore the link between the sociological and the visual (becker ). today, visual sociology is a thriving field with its own journal, academic society and degree programmes dedicated to the visual study of society (harper ). how much dorothea lange’s photography influenced politics is difficult to say. for one thing, it is not easy to disentangle the impact of her work with taylor from that of the epistemic community of progressive labour economists to which they belonged. epistemic communities, moreover, do not always succeed because policy- makers’ openness to expertise varies over time and across issue area. lange’s work certainly got a hearing from policy-makers; she herself suggested that the research arising from the california state emergency relief administration project served as inspiration for the establishing of the resettlement administration (riess ). perhaps it still resonates. lange’s photography featured prominently in coverage of the global financial crisis, policy responses to which sought, with varying degrees of success, to learn from the great depression. there might just be trace elements of white angel breadline ( ) in us treasury secretary timothy geithner’s self- justification over the - global financial crisis: ‘but we did do the essential thing, which was to prevent another great depression, with its decade of shantytowns and bread lines. we put out the financial fire, not because we wanted to protect the bankers, but because we wanted to prevent mass unemployment’ (geithner ). contemporary documentary photographers are uneasy with truth claims and, in the age of digital photography, more vulnerable to accusations of fakery. for these reasons, perhaps, postmodern documentarians challenge the epistemic underpinnings of their own work, as in sherrie levine’s after walker evans in which she re- photographed evan’s iconic depression-era images. today, sebastião salgado comes closest to the idea of the photographer as expert. trained as an economist in his native brazil and later france, salgado took up photography in when recuperating from illness and began small reportage projects during his doctoral studies. a year later, he moved to london to work for the international coffee organization, where he collaborated with officials from the world bank and the united nations organization for food and agriculture (fao) on development projects in africa (salgado : ). salgado took photographs on work visits to africa and, in , he left the international coffee organization to become a full- time photographer. of this decision, salgado would later write: ‘during my journeys to rwanda, burundi, zaire, kenya and uganda, i realized that the photos i was taking made me much happier than the reports that i had to write on my return’ (salgado : ). but there was more to this decision than the personal satisfaction derived from taking photographs. ‘my training as an economist’, salgado wrote, has enabled me to covert this pleasure of the moment into [photographic] projects that are more long-term’ (salgado : ). economic ideas permeate many of salgado’s projects. for sahel, l'homme en détresse ( ), he worked with médecins sans frontières to document poverty, famine and migration in mali, ethiopia, chad and sudan (salgado et al. ). workers: an archaeology of the industrial age ( ) was a more explicitly economic project still (salgado ). the book is structured like an economic report, each chapter focused on a different sector in a different country, including sugarcane in brazil, titanium and magnesium in kazakhstan and oil in kuwait (salgado ). an extraordinary feat of documentary photography – it took salgado six years to complete forty reportages in -countries – the book nonetheless lacks the economic rigour of american exodus. but workers can nonetheless be read as a work of comparative political economy in which salgado seeks not only to document but also understand the impact of industrial change on workers across the world. whilst lange and taylor combined images and textual analysis, the photographs in workers come without captions; and yet salgado’s work is no less replete with visual hypotheses. one such concerns the globalization of supply chains, a key issue in contemporary economic research which the book explores through its juxtaposition of ship building in poland and france with ship breaking in bangladesh to recycle precious metals (salgado : ). thinking about photographers as experts allows us to understand the channels through which some photographers seek to influence politics. it also exposes such photographers to debates about the politics of expertise. critics of the epistemic communities approach question whether experts’ claims to knowledge can be authoritative when they are driven by normative beliefs and policy aims. is there not a danger, as lawrence susskind ( ) puts it, of turning experts into ‘expert witnesses’? such concerns are valid in relation to salgado’s ( ) project the scent of a dream: travels in the world of coffee. with this book, which documents coffee production worldwide, salgado returns to the issues he explored as an economist for the international coffee organization. in this earlier role, salgado had considered how the liberalization and modernization of coffee production could benefit workers in developing economies. a similar idea prevails in the scent of a dream, with its images of proud and empowered coffee workers in china, colombia, guatemala, ethiopia, india, brazil and costa rica. consistent though salgado is on these points, he is open to criticism for his partnership on this project with illy, a coffee producer that is committed to higher wages for coffee producers but opposed to fair trade certification (datoo ). this was not the first occasion on which salgado faced such charges. in , an exhibition of his work on global environmental issues at the natural history museum in london was sponsored by a brazilian mining company that has been criticised for its contempt for the environment and human rights (haines ). ‘the problem is not the oil companies or mining companies, but the system of life we’ve created’ replied salgado (haines ), thus underlining rather than addressing concerns over the credibility, independence and impartiality of the photographer as expert. dorothea lange is not immune from such criticism. migrant mother ( ) was to a certain degree staged as well as being used without the consent of its primary subject florence owens thompson (lauck ). that said, lange’s later work for the war relocation authority demonstrated her fierce independence as a documentary photographer. a critic of internment, lange nonetheless agreed to document japanese-american internment camps and, in spite of considerable interference from the us military, produced a rich account of one of the most controversial policies enacted by the us government. the photos gained limit traction at the time but came to prominence in executive order , an exhibition of lange’s work and that of other war relocation authority photographers organised by the california historical society in . the exhibition toured the united states, raising awareness of internment and efforts to seek redress for it. four years later president gerald ford acknowledged mistakes made by the roosevelt administration, paving the way for the reparations granted to interred japanese americans in . conclusion photographers can both communicate and ‘prick the conscience’, giving them significant sway in the political domain, argues alex danchev ( : ). but photographers not only seek political influence by conveying information and eliciting moral responses from those who view their work in galleries or the media. they can be participants in politics – not just observers of it – and their reach depends in such cases on their ability to navigate the constraints and contradictions that accompany this political process. drawing insights from public policy and the history of photography, this article has sought a more systemic understanding of the conditions under which photographers can influence politics. the three perspectives considered are not exhaustive. nor is the survey of classic and contemporary works of documentary photography. but the conclusions drawn provide general insights into and invite further reflection on the institutional context in which politically-minded photographers operate. the photographer as bureaucrat works within government networks to articulate the aims and effects of government policy and must overcome inter-institutional struggles to succeed in this role. the photographer as advocate must decide with whom to partner with to promote social change and what role images can play in the politics of information, symbolism, leverage and accountability. the photographer as expert must engage with actors from other disciplines to produce evidence and analysis in support of or against specific policies. entry into these arenas comes at a price. bureaucracies provide photographers with unrivalled access and resources but they can be stifling. the photographer as advocate must defend his or her legitimate right to advocate on behalf of others. epistemic communities can tarnish the independence, impartiality and credibility of photographers who join them. can photographers influence politics? taken together, the three perspectives set out in this paper offer a qualified yes. this qualification depends, in part, on the ability of photographers to harness the power of bureaucracies, advocacy networks and epistemic communities to which they sometimes belong. it also depends on the extent to which photographers can manage the contradictions inherent in the political process, be it the unintended consequences of bureaucratic activities or concerns over the legitimacy of activists and the credibility of experts. not all arenas, finally, are equally inviting to photographers at all times. public administrations afford fewer opportunities’ for documentary photographers these days, with the exception of international organizations like the united nations. dorothea lange’s vision of photography as a conventional research method did not come to pass, although the emergence of visual sociology as a subfield suggests that it might yet do (harper ). the contradictions of political advocacy are not easily resolved but strategies are available to bring photographers closer to the people that they seek to represent. none of this suggests that photographers will not find their work ‘blown by the whims and loyalties of diverse communities’, as sontag ( : ) puts it, but it encourages political scientists to think of the diverse and sometimes influential roles that photographers can and do play in these communities. daily sabah with agencies ( ) ‘french president calls erdoğan over images of drowned syrian boy, calls for common eu refugee policy’ daily sabah, september. as of march , the uk had resettled around , people from syria, calling into question its commitment to a target that was low to begin with (home office : ) image available at: http:// photos.time.com/photos/nick-ut-terror-war on the wider question of how social psychology shapes individuals’ responses to political images, see rosenberg, kahn and tran ( ). the ability of viral images to shape policy is one successor to the cnn effect, a term coined in the s to describe new pressures placed on government from -hour news coverage of conflict and humanitarian crises (gilboa et al. : ). image available at: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ /apr/ /uk.conservatives see, for example, virgie corbin, blue ridge mountain girl. this girl who is about sixteen has the mentality of a child of seven. she has never advanced beyond the second grade, shenandoah national park, virginia ( ). image available at: https://www.loc.gov/item/ / image available at: https://www.moma.org/collection/works/ image available at: https://www.loc.gov/resource/fsa. c / image available at: http://loc.gov/pictures/resource/fsa. b / selected images available at: https://www.archives.gov/research/environment/documerica- highlights.html image available at: https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/photography-blog/ /sep/ /john- f-kennedy-jacques-lowe-photography image available at: http:// photos.time.com/photos/pete-souza-situation-room see: tracks.unhcr.org/ see: www.unhcr.org/uk/media-centre.html for selected images, see: https://www.icp.org/browse/archive/constituents/jacob-riis see: http://www.loc.gov/pictures/collection/nclc/background.html images available at: 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( ). grenfell tower fire: a photo diary from activestills, london: pluto books. medical education to enhance critical consciousness: facilitators’ experiences zaidi, z., vyaas, r., verstegen, d., morahan, p., & dornan, t. ( ). medical education to enhance critical consciousness: facilitators’ experiences. academic medicine, ( s), - . https://doi.org/ . /acm. published in: academic medicine document version: peer reviewed version queen's university belfast - research portal: link to publication record in queen's university belfast research portal publisher rights © the association of american medical colleges. this work is made available online in accordance with the publisher’s policies. please refer to any applicable terms of use of the publisher. general rights copyright for the publications made accessible via the queen's university belfast research portal is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. take down policy the research portal is queen's institutional repository that provides access to queen's research output. every effort has been made to ensure that content in the research portal does not infringe any person's rights, or applicable uk laws. if you discover content in the research portal that you believe breaches copyright or violates any law, please contact openaccess@qub.ac.uk. download date: . apr. https://doi.org/ . /acm. https://pure.qub.ac.uk/en/publications/medical-education-to-enhance-critical-consciousness-facilitators-experiences( d -f - a e- b - cb f ).html medical education to enhance critical consciousness: facilitators’ experiences zareen zaidi m.d, rashmi vyas m.d, mhpe, danielle verstegen ph.d., page morahan ph.d. and tim dornan ph.d. biographical note: dr. zaidi is an associate professor in the division of general internal medicine, department of medicine, university of florida, gainesville, fl. dr. vyas is an assistant vice president, faimer education with faimer, philadelphia, usa. dr. verstegen is an assistant professor, department of educational research and development at maastricht university. dr. morahan is professor emerita, drexel university college of medicine, philadelphia, pa, usa. dr. dornan is professor, queen’s university, belfast ireland. contact information: corresponding author: zareen zaidi orcid: http://orcid.org/ - - - zareen.zaidi@medicine.ufl.edu twitter: @zareenmd division of general internal medicine department of medicine po box sw th street, suite gainesville, fl phone: - - fax: - - key words: emancipatory pedagogy; critical consciousness; cultural hegemony; transformative learning; critical research mailto:zareen.zaidi@medicine.ufl.edu medical education to enhance critical consciousness: facilitators’ experiences abstract purpose: to analyze educators’ experiences of facilitating cultural discussions in two global health professions education programs and what these experiences had taught them about critical consciousness. method: a multicultural research team conducted in-depth interviews with sixteen faculty who had extensive experience facilitating cultural discussions. they analysed transcripts of the interviews thematically, drawing sensitising insights from gramsci’s theory of cultural hegemony. collaboration and conversation helped the team self- consciously examine their positions towards the dataset and be critically reflexive. results: participant faculty used their prior experience facilitating cultural discussions to create a ‘safe space’ in which learners could develop critical consciousness. during multicultural interactions they recognized and explicitly addressed issues related to power differentials, racism, implicit bias and gender bias. they noted the need to be ‘facile in attending to pain’ as learners brought up traumatic experiences and other sensitive issues including racism and the impact of power dynamics. they built relationships with learners by juxtaposing and exploring the sometimes-conflicting norms of different cultures. participants were reflective about their own understanding and tendency to be biased. they aimed to break free of such biases while role modeling how to have the courage to speak up. conclusions: experience had given facilitators in multicultural programs an understanding of their responsibility to promote critical consciousness and social justice. how faculty without prior experience or expertise could develop those values and skills is a topic for future research. [w]ith the question of the importance of telling the truth, knowing who is able to tell the truth, and knowing why we should tell the truth, we have the roots of what we could call the ‘critical' tradition in the west michel foucault present times have been described as ‘globalization . ’, a technology-driven era with ‘flattening’ of the globe. - increasing connectivity has led to new partnerships in health professions education between north america, europe and developing countries. - in the article ‘international medical education and future directions: a global perspective’ harden warns of the dangers of viewing international education in such partnerships through a narrow lens or as a form of colonialism. in the amee guide ‘teaching diversity to medical undergraduates: curriculum development, delivery and assessment’ dogra et al., note that many educational approaches are ‘rooted in the historical context of white domination of disadvantaged minorities and are very race or ethnicity focused’. this narrow focus, they propose, is attributable to positivist thinking. belief in absolute objective truths discourages cultural or philosophical thinking and encourages pigeon-holing of individuals. these authors advocate a social constructivist approach, which recognises that different individuals ‘construct their own version of their culture dependent on the various social discourses of which they are aware or in which they participate’. social discourses about culture are constructed by groups in power who dictate assumptions which then serve as ‘common-sense understanding’ for all. the ‘dominant discourses’ of groups in power implicitly becomes the accepted way of looking or speaking about culture. gramsci’s theory of ‘cultural hegemony’ describes the power of a dominant class to present one authoritative definition of reality or view of culture. he also describes the concept of ‘subalternity’, which involves marginalization or a lack of autonomy among groups with alternative views. subaltern social groups, which in modern times could be defined by identifying with gender, religion or ethnicity, experience negation of their experiences and subsequent redefinition of their needs into activities promoted by those in power. , therefore, hegemony is usually not a declarative or aprioristically determined act; rather, it is an insidious process built into sociocultural landscapes. other sociocultural theorists like bakhtin , freire and giroux link individual dialogue, language and lived experiences of individuals to social projects with an emphasis on empowerment. giroux proposes examining racism in society by ‘insurgent multiculturalism’, which focuses on unequal distribution of power rather than a deficit-based approach focusing on ‘subaltern’ groups. this so-called ‘emancipatory pedagogy’, which builds on the works of freire and giroux, invites students and teachers to look critically for social inequity. education, according to this theory, plays a fundamental role in creating a just and democratic society. , both students and educators take on new roles as ‘transformative intellectuals’ and ‘cultural workers’. over the past two decades there have been growing calls for medical education to develop ‘power awareness’ and to ‘democratize’. - it is not realistic to expect all stakeholders in medical education to become expert critical theorists but they should, at least, be aware of different ways they theorize power. wear suggests using giroux’s theory of insurgent multiculturalism to help students and faculty examine their biases, and recognise how power and privilege operate in medical education. deep cultural discussions about sensitive issues like race, gender and power do not begin spontaneously. to the contrary, ‘educational cultural hegemony’ discourages bringing in personal cultural context unless discussion leaders consciously encourage it. there are three main reasons why we need to counter these hegemonic trends, foster democratization of educational environments, and promote insurgent multiculturalism. first, training health professionals to take care of diverse populations is associated with improved patient satisfaction. , second, literature shows that ‘color-blind’ institutional policies disadvantage minority groups. they impact recruitment, promotion and retention - and increase depression, anxiety, pain conditions, addiction and hypertension. - third, prevailing ideologies about power privilege and disparities in society are fostered within the walls of our institutions. it is particularly important -- in the wake of the orlando gay nightclub shooting rampage, the black lives matter movement, the refugee crisis, and innumerable terrorist attacks -- for educators to create safe spaces to discuss these issues within their institutions. - though health professions educators do think it is important to discuss cultural backgrounds and prevent educational cultural hegemony, they lack skills to facilitate cultural discussions. this study explores how cultural discussions can be skillfully facilitated to help participants understand issues related to power, privilege and critical consciousness. emancipatory pedagogy is based on the concept that education should play a fundamental role in creating a just and democratic society by emphasizing critical consciousness, which is a reflective awareness of power and privilege. the theory of emancipatory pedagogy, which is itself within the critical theory paradigm, provides a conceptual framework. our research questions are: . how do facilitators encourage cultural discussions? . how do facilitators and participants of those discussions co-construct an understanding about power and privilege in society? methods: educational setting and participants we selected two medical education-training programs as the setting for the interviews. one, the foundation for the advancement of international medical education & research (faimer), is a medical education fellowship program for international health professions educators (hpe) from over forty countries. the other, maastricht university’s school of health science education (she), offers masters and ph.ds. in health professions education to learners across the globe. both programs have onsite learning components as well as distance learning. the faimer institute, established in - , provides -year part time fellowships. these develop cohorts of mid-career health professions faculty from latin america, africa, the middle east and asia to act as educational research scholars and change agents within a global community of practice. the faimer institute curriculum includes two ( - and -week) residential sessions a year apart in philadelphia and two -month e-learning periods conducted via a listserv. during the total immersion residential sessions, fellows are encouraged to share information about their culture, particularly during structured ‘learning circle’ activities , which foster inter-relational groups that care about the development of each individual. the listserv is used for formal e-learning modules, alumni-designed community conversations, and as an informal resource network and social support network for fellows. the maastricht school of health professions education (she) has more than years of experience with education, research and innovation. the school offers a wide range of courses in health professions education, from short courses and certificate courses to master of science and phd degree programs. she reinforces internationalization through its research, education and collaborations in health professions education. the master of health professions education (mhpe) program gives participants the knowledge and skills required for a career in health professions education and research. it is a two-year program taught in english. it is largely based on distance learning, with a maximum of three short periods in maastricht. the mhpe attracts an international group of professionals from a variety of educational, professional and cultural backgrounds who have acquired university degrees in one of the health professions in their native country (e.g.: health sciences, medicine, nursing, physiotherapy, dentistry, pharmacy, speech therapy). these two programs were purposefully selected for this research because faculty have the experience of teaching in diverse multicultural settings. in , we invited sixteen faculty for interviews; five u.s faculty from faimer; five dutch faculty from she; and six faimer alumnae with faculty appointments at faimer as global faculty advisors. they are involved with faimer’s regional teaching institutes in india, brazil and china. we sampled purposefully, identifying faculty with the most experience in multicultural learning settings in their home countries as well as abroad as visiting health professions education faculty. as an example, faimer and she faculty teach in health profession education courses in the u.s. and netherlands but also travel to asia, middle east, africa and south america. we purposefully invited a sample of people who were heterogeneous for age, gender, country of origin and qualifications i.e. clinician educators, basic scientists, masters in health professions education and doctorate (in medical education). demographic characteristics of the interviewees are available in table . epistemology and methodology qualitative researchers consciously take an ‘epistemological stance’. this reflects the values and theory of knowledge that underpins their inquiry. the value underpinning this research was a quest to distribute power and opportunity equally within society. the underpinning theory of knowledge was that language, or discourse, both reflects and influences the distribution of power. this placed the research within the ‘critical’ paradigm. , there are many different critical discourse methodologies, from ‘microlinguistic’ analysis of individual sentences to the identification of social discourses in huge textual archives. this research was guided by fairclough’s contention that discourse is not limited to text; there is an interaction between people, which involves producing and interpreting text and results in social action. , the purpose of this research was to enhance social justice so the research team interacted with research participants and then analysed the data from a critically reflexive position (see below). data collection: we recruited interviewees via an email invitation, which explained the study and participants’ potential contribution to it. we reinforced that participation was purely voluntary before obtaining informed consent. z.z. and r.v. conducted in-depth, open-ended, semi-structured interviews enquiring about participants’ experiences facilitating cultural discussions (see table ). at the start of the interview to sensitize participants and encourage open communication we discussed cultural scenarios that we had personally encountered while facilitating discussions where culture was explicitly brought up. we also read out a definition of critical consciousness and asked participants to describe their experiences of highlighting power and privilege and how they interpreted their role while facilitating such discussions. interviews, which lasted - minutes, were conducted face-to-face with u.s faculty. all other interviews were conducted using skype®. we audio-recorded interviews, which a professional transcriptionist transcribed. we reviewed the transcripts for errors before proceeding to analysis. critical reflexivity: in keeping with critical research practice , we employed critical reflexivity to self-consciously explore our own positions on the data set. the first two authors are faimer fellows who have held academic positions in pakistan and u.s (z.z.), and india and u.s (r.v.). d.v. and t.d. are faculty of maastricht university who work with international students. t.d. has extensive experience in qualitative research and critical discourse analysis. p.m., the founding director of faimer, has extensive experience of academic leadership development involving gender and ethnic minority participants. to prevent implicit bias, we used skype® calls and emails to explore how our perspectives on culture had been shaped over years of interaction with learners from different backgrounds; we commented on documents, and helped identify pre- conceptions that might have impacted data analysis. analytic procedures: in order to organize and index the dataset, two of us (z.z. and r.v.) initially coded the data using braun and clarke’s framework of latent thematic analysis. following the six phases described by braun and clarke, we independently analyzed the data and identified themes, focusing on patterns and richness of responses rather than the number of responses, and assigned comments to themes. once we had organized the coding into themes, we used a critical analytical approach to conduct the discourse analysis. attention was paid to the genealogy or the evolution of discourse , studying how apparently “self-evident” discourses were linked to historic policies or practices. we read the transcripts, searching systematically for the ‘situated,’ or contextual, meaning of words, identifying typical stories or figured worlds that invited readers or listeners to enter into the world of a social or cultural group, looking beyond what contributors were saying to identify what their discourse was ‘doing,’ and exploring how metaphors were used. we worked independently of one another, highlighting material of interest and annotating them with marginal comments. we also exchanged and discussed comments to identify and explore areas of agreement and disagreement. z.z. kept notes on the discussions, archived them into a single dataset, and maintained an audit trail back to the original data. she then wrote the narrative of results, proceeding from description to interpretation to explanation while constantly comparing these explanations to the original textual materials. the other authors contributed their reflexive reactions, critically examining and commenting on the emerging interpretation. results: addressing our first research question, participants spoke about practical behaviors that helped them facilitate discussions in multicultural settings. as these were based on actual experiences, we grouped them under a single theme: ‘the experiential lens and culture’. key comments, selected on the basis of richness and comments that captured the essence of the theme have been used as quotes. participants also spoke in more abstract terms about influences on multicultural interactions such as power dynamics and racism, which we grouped into a second theme: ‘discourses of power, race, and culture’. the experiential lens and culture participants reflected on their past experiences of being facilitators of multicultural discussion groups. they made use of learners' diverse heritages and allowed discussions to “arrive at a slightly different place from what might have been intended”. asking the right question at the right time, understanding they have a “responsibility to latch on” to multicultural experiences, using an effective “trigger” to generate conversation and building trust were at the core of facilitating multicultural discussions. this was noted to be difficult as facilitators had to challenge the groups to move out of their comfort zones for true learning to occur. participants attempted to create “emotional safe spaces”, where learners could feel safe discussing issues they may not have otherwise brought up; this was noted to be immensely important. in smaller group settings like learning circles in the faimer institute program, facilitators noted that a climate of trust and ground rules such as never violating anonymity and privacy resulted in deep, reflective discussions: “i am always amazed at the level of intimacy that can occur and to see the level of intimacy that can occur between either one other person or small group of people when you have the power to set the climate for safety.” the context of multicultural discussions was important in both face-to-face and online settings. the inherently political nature of these discussions called for facilitators sometimes to step-in and “speak up for victims”. examples given were when groups discussed gender issues and men from male-dominated societies took the position that “‘i am the man and you are the woman and therefore i have more freedom and deserve more respect than you.’” one study participant explained, “one majority comment or one judgmental comment by the people in your group or by the facilitator can kill that environment.” using silence: the participants commented that there were many reasons for learners to remain silent in multicultural discussions including understanding the need to handle political dimensions of group interactions and to keep a watchful eye on relationship building. for example, an “overarching norm among learners was that when they experience something that is disconcerting or potentially painful they resort to the ethical standards of ‘do no harm.’ so “if in doubt” or “fearful of showing ignorance” they chose to remain silent. some may not know “quite how to engage in a way that will make positive difference”. others may simply not participate because “the culture they grew up in encouraged respectful silence” or did not “empower them to speak out and have their voice heard”. if the “topic does not have relevance for learners in a group they may chose to remain silent”. another example provided was that learners could be silent in situations where they may have experienced similar events: “there was actually a week where the topic for discussion was about ‘rape and abuse’ because doctors have to handle rape survivors and victims of abuse and students had to learn what the correct way to do that is. but some of the students actually had experienced it themselves and they felt very uncomfortable in that environment and in some cases it brought back very traumatic feelings” discourses of power, race, and culture participants reflected on how they addressed racism, power, and multiculturalism in discussions they facilitated. blind spots & racism: they expressed somewhat “monolithic” assumptions about contrasts between their own culture and other ones. speaking of implicit bias, a participant noted the importance of “realizing that there are … ‘intrinsic assumptions’ (about) … our own cultures that we don't necessarily recognize”. another participant noted an “unconscious tendency to stereotype individuals”. yet another voiced, “it's a level of consciousness and awareness that can open up those blind spots”. asking “why” and “how” questions expanded everyone’s understanding of the genealogy of their own cultures and “peeled away assumptions” about other cultures. suspending one’s own assumptions and engaging in a discussion on banning of head scarves in france, for example, or asking why thousands of students decided to protest against a government, could bring contrasting assumptions into discussions. in the following examples, participants spoke of how a hidden curriculum in academia made faculty very conscious of hierarchy and careful about what they said, which impacted discussions about sensitive topics: “some people may feel awkward at expressing an opinion because of the racism… you know, the extreme racism in our past. people might feel that something they say may be construed in a way, which is not understood by others in the group, and what they say may be construed as racist. so they don't want to go into that territory, or they may be concerned of offending”. participants struggled to free themselves from blind spots and stereotypes and help learners do the same, as the comments about banning headscarves in france and navigating hierarchy exemplify. participants looked for ways of expressing opinions that did not express a dominant discourse that others might find offensive. power differential: participants tried to decrease the power distance between themselves, as facilitators, and learners. they traced power dynamics back to the language and social practices of group participants’ countries of origin. it was particularly difficult to teach learners from countries with authoritative regimes such as china where learners had a “sort of blank stoicism”; from malta where learners are not used to active learning and communicating in class; and from saudi arabia where educational hierarchy determined the rules governing curricula. these put barriers in the way of asking questions whereas western facilitators were used to environments where “asking questions was the norm” and critical thinking was encouraged. a participant commented that “in the dutch culture, we really value critical reflection…. which is very difficult for some of our international students who are not used to being critical.” another said that “in an eastern culture, people maintain hierarchy, while in the western culture they are very open. many times they are very open to asking questions, they are open to critique - which is not so in an indian or the african setting and that is the first difference that needs to be understood.” one participant noted that students from developing countries might find facilitators from the west condescending, which promoted a “superior-inferior kind of thinking”. faculty setting course work or deadlines did not always take into account challenges in developing countries like power outages, or non-availability of internet. western facilitators might be insensitive towards more subtle power issues that result in government mandated top-down curriculum initiatives like a course called ‘islamic studies’ in the middle east, a block on military knowledge under repressive regimes, not everyone (in singapore) having “the right to read the document describing the whole curriculum”, or people not speaking the dominant language being at a different “power level” from the ruling class. this contrasted with the west where, for example, a student could walk into a dean’s office and have a lengthy discussion about the curriculum. facilitators used group discussions to construct relationships between themselves and ‘others’ amidst the sometimes-conflicting norms of their own culture and those of their learners. to do so, they had to enter discourses of power and navigate cultural norms in their own culture as well as learners’ cultures. cultural lens: “developing a cultural lens” helped participants navigate cross- cultural discursive boundaries. this stemmed from personal interest in cultural topics (particularly social injustice), exposure through cultural interactions, and travel. they reported “facile facilitators” were able to feel and attend to the “pain” that learners commonly experienced in multicultural settings. they focused their cultural lenses by being critically reflexive and having their sensitivity sharpened by experience. facile facilitators dealt skillfully with gender issues and minority issues. in the interviews, such facilitators were noted to have a research interest in critical theory and dealing with social injustice issues. for example one participant, a male facilitator from the u.s, noted that he sometimes did not quite know how to respond to difficult situations and wondered if it was part a ‘gender piece’, related to his myers briggs orientation, or his (in)ability to attend to pain. the participant commented: “i think that, as a white man, i am often perhaps a little blind to what the need is, what the possibility is, what the judgment is that might be taking place. i think i am probably more aware than most white men but probably not as aware as i could be if i was a person that had some sort of minority status or status where i had been discriminated against for some reason, whether, it was a woman or person color or whatever” discussion: principal findings and meaning there are two main findings regarding how facilitators encourage cultural discussions and co-construct an understanding about power and privilege in society, with participants. first, health professions educators working in multicultural settings encourage discussions around sensitive topics by creating a ‘safe space’, where these topics can be discussed and silence is respected. second, during multicultural interactions they recognized and explicitly addressed issues related to power differentials, racism, implicit biases and gender bias. they also noted the need to be better trained to be facile in attending to pain, racism and power issues. though the world is flattening secondary to technological advances, there are millions of disempowered people who live in the flat world without access to the tools or skillset to participate in a meaningful way. emancipatory pedagogy invites both learners and educators to critically analyze political and social issues and the consequences of social inequity. the faculty interviewed in this study took us into the figured world of an international facilitator facing the challenges of emancipatory medical education. they owned the responsibility to address cultural issues and delve into deeper reflective discussions. they encountered power dynamics, which they noted were not just limited to individuals but could be traced up to institutional and government levels. they struggled with their own monolithic understanding of other cultures and tried to break free of stereotyping others, encouraging their learners to do the same. relationship to other publications: monrouxe and others have highlighted the need for narrative, interactional safe space or pedagogical space for sociocultural discussions. - learning circles , wisdom circles , conversation circles and simple conversations are examples of pedagogical safe space approaches that stem from a clear recognition that participants in any long- term activity or group benefit from intentional conversations to process human feelings and develop relationships. we have previously described the use of ‘identity text’ by health professions educators, which engages learners by asking them to describe the influence of culture on their identity through creative writing or other multimodal forms of cultural production. our study showed that creating a safe space and being facile to pain is key to encourage cultural discussion and create an understanding about power and privilege in society. recently kumagai et al., have advocated for the need to purposefully introduce cognitive disequilibrium or a situation/conflict where the learners are forced to critically reflect on their past experiences and current positions on the topic for transformative learning experience to occur. drawing on the foucauldian idea of ‘parrhesia’ i.e. speaking boldly and fearlessly , we do find descriptions in the literature voicing the need for learners and teachers to have the courage to speak up and critique institutions and individuals who control power, knowledge or technology. , in our research facilitators discussed situations when they role-modeled such ‘parrhesia’ for example ‘speaking up for the victims’ or ‘breaking away from dominant discourse’ and ‘asking learners to explore their underlying assumptions regarding banning headscarves in france’. their descriptions corroborated other literature emphasizing the need to let go of objectivity and to acquire skills to “make the invisible visible”. they also agreed that a lack of skills and training to facilitate cultural discussions could have an adverse effect. limitations and strengths since we invited faculty who had expertise in facilitating cultural conversations, they had an understanding of critical theory, critical consciousness and awareness about the role of educators in promoting social justice. their background in education and conversations with educators over the years may have made them more attentive to critical consciousness. it is possible that facilitators who do not have such experience may have provided different and perhaps not very reflective responses. however, for the purpose of our study, as it is the first to directly inquire if facilitators are able to address critical consciousness, our sample served well. our purposeful sampling of facilitators for the interviews aimed to include faculty who had experience in face-to-face and on-line cultural interaction but we did not delve into differences between the two modalities during the interviews. it is likely that facilitations in both areas have their own set of challenges. though the faculty facilitators we interviewed are well-travelled and used to teaching internationally it would have been interesting to have asked them for critical reflexive statement regarding their own backgrounds and positions on multicultural discussions. we were limited by facilitators availability for the interviews and therefore were not able to balance gender and background qualifications (our sample had more women and fewer clinical faculty with advanced medical education training). on the other hand, our sample may be representative of typical health professions education programs with more ph.d. trained faculty and less clinically trained faculty with additional degrees. the strengths of the study include sampling of faculty facilitators involved in international medical education from two institutional leaders in the field i.e. faimer and she. our sample size is not large but we did not consider this to be a limitation as the faculty interviewed have facilitated conversations in developing as well as developed countries and gave us thoughtful detailed responses to the questions, which should be generalizable to other international health professions educators. the deliberate inclusion of american (north and south) and european facilitators as well as facilitators from the developing world provided us with a range of different views. implications for future research in this era of internationalization of education where we have moved “from a curriculum taught by local teachers to local students, to a model where there is greater mobility and either international students or international teachers, the future lies in a transnational curriculum with international teachers and international students”. in this context the focus of the curriculum needs to be on globally agreed learning outcomes with carefully planned learning experiences. the characteristics and skills needed to be a transnational teacher will need to be mapped out. how many training sessions are required and in what skills will they need to be proficient are questions that require further research. the transnational teacher plays a unique role in the process of transformative learning experiences by discussing with others the “reasons presented in support of competing interpretations, by critically examining evidence, arguments, and alternative points of view”. altering the frame of reference, which is composed of ‘points of view’ and ‘habits of mind’ is an important educational achievement. habits of mind or ethnocentrism are hard to change but points of view can change with critical reflection. our research paves the way for others looking to explore how to counter educational cultural hegemony, promote transformative learning and emancipatory pedagogy. funding: this work was supported by the gatorade trust through funds distributed by the department of medicine, university of florida, gainesville, usa, and by the medical education travelling fellowship awarded by asme to the first author. ethical approval: irb approval through foundation university, pakistan other disclosure: none reported references: . foucault m. fearless 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( ). health professionals for a new century: transforming education to strengthen health systems in an interdependent world. the lancet, ( ), – . table : participant demographics participant country of origin age gender educational qualification p u.s male m.d. m.s.ed. p u.s female m.s. p u.s male ph.d. p netherlands female ph.d. p u.s female ph.d. p india male m.b.b.s, ms, mhpe p south africa female bsc hons, med, ph.d. p malaysia female m.b.b.s, mrcgp, mphil hse p u.s male ph.d. p china female m.s, m.s.ed. p pakistan female rn, b.sc.n, mph p brazil female m.d, ph.d. p netherlands female ph.d. p netherlands male ph.d. p netherlands female ph.d. p netherlands male m.s.ed table : the guiding questions for the interviews . when you come across a cultural discussion scenario like the samples we provided what do you tend to do and how do you react? (additional probe (ap) # , , ) . we are interested in the presence of ‘silence’. we have found that often when a cultural topic is brought up the discussion is very superficial or the comment does not generate any response, in other words there is ‘silence’. why do you think this happens, what could the possible reasons be? and how do you handle that? (ap # ) . a. do you feel facilitators have a role in moving the cultural discussions from superficial to deeper level discussions (going beyond just asking participants to give an example of their culture) e.g. there was a discourse about the arab springs. how could facilitators have used this as a learning moment for others to create awareness about the social and personal impact of a country transitioning from autocracy to democracy? pause- explain further by saying: b. how can facilitators help turn that discussion into creating an opportunity for development of an understanding of power relationships. and how can facilitators work to develop a sense of critical consciousness (i.e. understanding the role as an educator in helping create awareness about cultural and power issues)?) what can facilitators say or do? (ap # ) additional probes (ap): . looking at the scenarios provided do you recognize any patterns or have you personally encountered similar situations / discussions? . what factors facilitate multicultural discourse (including factors that help provide a safe environment both for online and face-to-face sessions)? . thinking about your personal experiences what factors serve as barriers to multicultural discourse? . can you give us an example of when you encountered silence and how did you deal with it? . can you think of an instance/example where you felt that the discussion about culture could have been used as a learning moment for participants and yourself to generate a broader understanding about cultural issues, power relationships? continuing conjure: african-based spiritual traditions in colson whitehead’s the underground railroad and jesmyn ward’s sing, unburied, sing religions article continuing conjure: african-based spiritual traditions in colson whitehead’s the underground railroad and jesmyn ward’s sing, unburied, sing james mellis guttman community college, west th st., new york, ny , usa; james.mellis@guttman.cuny.edu received: april ; accepted: june ; published: june ���������� ������� abstract: in and , colson whitehead’s the underground railroad and jesmyn ward’s sing, unburied, sing both won the national book award for fiction, the first time that two african-american writers have won the award in consecutive years. this article argues that both novels invoke african-based spirituality in order to create literary sites of resistance both within the narrative of the respective novels, but also within american culture at large. by drawing on a tradition of authors using african-based spiritual practices, particularly voodoo, hoodoo, conjure and rootwork, whitehead and ward enter and engage in a tradition of african american protest literature based on african spiritual traditions, and use these traditions variously, both as a tie to an originary african identity, but also as protection and a locus of resistance to an oppressive society. that the characters within the novels engage in african spiritual traditions as a means of locating a sense of “home” within an oppressive white world, despite the novels being set centuries apart, shows that these traditions provide a possibility for empowerment and protest and can act as a means for contemporary readers to address their own political and social concerns. keywords: voodoo; conjure; african-american literature; protest literature; african american culture; whitehead; ward; american literature; popular culture and we are walking together, cause we love one another there are ghosts at our table, they are feasting tonight. –alexandra scott, stranger future scholars of african-american literature will surely note that and marked an unusual moment in american life and letters: in consecutive years, two novels by younger african-american writers were met with extraordinary critical and commercial success, including but not limited to winning the national book award for fiction. those two works were colson whitehead’s the underground railroad ( ) and jesmyn ward’s sing, unburied sing ( ). in being awarded the national book award for fiction, whitehead and ward join the ranks of notable african-american authors ralph ellison (invisible man, ), alice walker (the color purple, ), and charles johnson (middle passage, ). in addition to the national book award, whitehead’s fantastical tale of the escaped slave cora’s harrowing journey northward and ward’s road trip-cum meditation on the reaping of generational violence and racism were both showered with other, innumerable accolades. for instance, the underground railroad won the pulitzer prize for fiction, was named to the new york ward previously won the national book award for her novel salvage the bones, making her the first african-american author to win the award twice. religions , , ; doi: . /rel www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /rel http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions religions , , of times best books list, was selected for oprah’s book club, won the arthur c. clarke award, and was longlisted for the man booker prize. sing, unburied, sing was shortlisted for the women’s prize in fiction, named as one of barack obama’s best books, and selected as a book of the year by the new york times and the new york times book review, among other honors. an additional facet of these novels’ importance to african-american cultural and literary history, beyond their many accolades and “crossover appeal”, is recognizing that both authors draw on a long tradition of african-based spiritual traditions in african-american literature. set centuries apart, these works are nevertheless similar in that they both explore the legacy and repercussions of the african diaspora and its effects, although in very different ways. in these explorations, both authors mine their own imaginations as well as practices of african-based spiritual and religious traditions as manifest in both works by earlier african-american authors and the historical record, and in doing so perpetuate a discrete tradition within african-american life and literature. they do this not only to propel their respective plots and characterizations, but also to interrogate what it means to be black in america both historically and in the present. while doing so, the novels examine the ways in which african-based spirituality and supernaturalism can serve as a locus for power, protection and protest in a racially oppressive society. of course, there is a long and storied tradition of african-american authors using their work to protest oppression in america. from the poetry of phillis wheatley, to the slave narratives of oudallah eqiano, frederick douglass, harriet jacobs and others, through the abolitionist essays and speeches of david walker, sojourner truth and henry highland garnet to the sociological work of w.e.b. du bois and the fiction, speeches, plays and poetry of the writers of the harlem renaissance to james baldwin, richard wright, martin luther king, jr., amiri baraka and june jordan to the more recent work of ta-nehisi coates and beyond, african-american authors have used their writing to overtly advocate, agitate, beg, demand and scream for equality. a close examination of african-american literature over the last two hundred and fifty years will show that, within this tradition of “protest” literature, there exists a second tradition of authors invoking african-based spiritual traditions variously: as a literary trope, a tie to originary african identity, and most importantly for this essay, as a means of empowerment for characters to control or punish, or as protection from and resistance to a racially oppressive society. as such, colson whitehead and jesmyn ward are some of the most recent african-american writers whose work draws on african-based spiritual traditions resulting in literary and political sites of resistance to an oppressive, hegemonic-driven white cultural impulse. in doing so, these novels speak to a new generation looking for historical and literary models in which political and cultural resistance can be found. many critics, and even whitehead and ward themselves, perhaps thinking of the fantastical elements of the two novels, have tended to refer to the underground railroad and sing, unburied, sing as works of “magical realism”. in a new york times profile of whitehead, for example, jennifer schuessler prompts whitehead to claim, “i went back and reread [gabriel garcia marquez’s] years of solitude and it made me think about what it would be like if i didn’t turn the dial up to , but kept the fantasy much more matter-of-fact” (schuessler ). this reflection indicates whitehead’s conscious decision to create the novel in the “magical realist” genre with the addition of elements and language of conjure and hoodoo that are interspersed throughout the novel. additionally, in an interview in nylon, jesmyn ward is asked, “sing was your first foray into magical realism, how did you go about “african-based spiritual traditions” refer to the practices of voodoo, conjure, rootwork and hoodoo as practiced in the united states. based on western african religions, these practices have been defined variously by different practitioners and scholars as they adapted from african practice to life in the caribbean and the north american mainland, evolving into different regional and cultural practices. see albert raboteau, slave religion: the “invisible institution” in the antebellum south, yvonne chireau, conjure and christianity in the nineteenth century: religious elements in african american magic and jeffery e. anderson, the voodoo encyclopedia: magic, ritual and religion, conjure in african-american society and hoodoo, voodoo and conjure: a handbook for more detailed definitions of the terms and how they have evolved practically and linguistically in the americas. religions , , of approaching that world? was it intimidating?” she replies, “it was definitely intimidating. i did a lot of reading about voodoo and hoodoo, and i did a lot of reading about that spiritual tradition because that’s what mam practices. and some of that is informing richie’s experience of the afterlife” (bryant ). this response indicates that ward, while asserting the importance of voodoo, hoodoo, conjure and rootwork in the novel, is nevertheless subsuming these beliefs and practices within the generic characterization of magical realism put forth by the interviewer, an impulse shared by whitehead in interviews about the underground railroad. i argue, then, that these characterizations of both novels lack nuance and are incomplete. rather, it is more accurate to recognize and characterize both novels as part of the body of african-based spiritualist fiction, rather than as works of magical realism. for while “magical realism” has certainly broken free of geographical constraints and is used by authors worldwide, it is generally associated with latin american authors such as gabriel garcia marquez, isabel allende, alejo carpentier, jorge amado and jorge luis borges, though african american authors like toni morrison, octavia butler and charles johnson have also written within the genre. african-based spiritual fiction is defined here as african-american realist fiction with african-based spiritual and religious elements (particularly voodoo, hoodoo, conjure and rootwork) incorporated into the universe of the work. this genre deserves recognition as a distinctly african-american literary tradition whose origins in the americas predate the founding of the united states. using the aforementioned spiritual traditions as a means and model for resisting physical and psychological violence, cultural annihilation and institutional racism in the americas has been present since the first slaves were transported to the new world via the middle passage. these beliefs and practices were an important part of both slaves’ lived experience and of the african-american literary tradition they initiated soon after their forced arrival. both the underground railroad and sing, unburied, sing clearly draw on earlier works by african-american authors who themselves reference african-based spiritual practices and, in doing so, consciously continue a tradition that reaches back hundreds of years. in perpetuating this tradition, whitehead and ward provide differing perspectives and prescriptions for ways that african-based spiritualism, emerging from an historic context requiring urgent and collective resistance to institutionalized racism, can lead to black liberation, albeit in very different ways. one indicator of the underground railroad’s place within this tradition can be found in a series of interviews that colson whitehead gave surrounding the release of the underground railroad. in them, many interviewers, and whitehead himself, highlight the research that he conducted in preparation for writing the novel. for example, whitehead explains to jason parham from fader: the actual slave narratives served as the foundation for the book, some of the most famous ones being frederick douglass’s and harriet jacobs’s. harriet jacobs was a slave in north carolina and hid seven years in an attic until she could get safe passage out. that was the inspiration for the north carolina section [of the book]. the u.s. government paid writers to interview former slaves in the s. these were people who had been on the plantation when they were kids or teenagers. writers collected these oral testimonies—some of them are a paragraph long, some are ten pages—and they gave me a real foundation with regard to the variety of slave life. (parham ) similarly, in conversing with oprah winfrey after the underground railroad was selected to be part of her eponymous book club, whitehead responds to winfrey’s assertion of, “you took a lot of that detail from the slave narratives you read in the library of congress” with “yes, and i didn’t exaggerate. in the s, the government paid writers to interview - and -year-old former slaves, and i read those accounts. i came away realizing—not surprisingly—that many slave masters were see (rucker ). religions , , of sadists who spent a lot of time thinking up creative ways of hurting people.” (winfrey ). these are only two assertions (of many) attesting to the historical accuracy regarding the portrayals of slavery that whitehead and his interviewers make about the novel. in fact, on the acknowledgments page of the underground railroad, whitehead thanks: “franklin d. roosevelt for funding the federal writer’s project, which collected the life stories of slaves in the s, frederick douglass and harriet jacobs, obviously” as well as “the work of [historians] nathan huggins, stephen jay gould, edward e. baptiste, eric foner, fergus bordewich and james h. jones was very helpful” (whitehead ). the concerted efforts to meld the historical accuracy of descriptions in the novel with the fantastical idea of a literal underground railroad that carries the teenaged cora from the randall plantation in georgia through the horrors of whitehead’s imagined america is indicated by both photographs of enslaved people, and of plantations that were published as part of his interview with oprah winfrey. additionally, each chapter of the novel begins with a facsimile of a notice for a runaway slave, which lends additional verisimilitude to the novel. as a metaphor, cora’s underground transit allows whitehead to show “that the story of slavery is fundamentally the story of america, and he uses cora’s journey to observe our nation” (schulz ). and this observation is terrifying, for as the railroad conductor lumbly tells cora, “‘if you want to see what this nation is all about, you have to ride the rails. look outside as you speed through, you’ll find the true face of america’ [however] ... there was only darkness outside the windows on her journey, and only ever would be darkness” (whitehead , pp. – ). one question the novel asks then is if all is “darkness” for people of african descent in the america, how can resistance and light be found? it is interesting to note that in the published interviews that whitehead has given about the novel, african-based religious and spiritual practices are barely mentioned, though both he and some interviewers make direct connections with both past and current civil rights protests, which do touch on african-based spiritual practices. for all of the literary and historical references that showcase his deep research into the antebellum south on which incidents and characterizations in the novel are based, the lack of public discussion around african-based spiritualism in the novel is a curious and glaring omission. while seemingly neither central to the plot nor necessary for the operation of the metaphor-cum-machinery of the railroad itself, strands of african-based spiritual beliefs and practices are nevertheless important elements to both the story of the underground railroad and in the stories and lives of the figures, such as frederick douglass and harriet jacobs, that whitehead points to as inspirations for the novel. in yvonne chireau’s black magic: religion and the african-american conjuring tradition, she notes, “[despite] african religious heritage [being] dramatically attenuated ... the gods did not die. while africans were unable to replicate their religious institutions, they usually created new, sometimes clandestine traditions that served their collective needs” (p. ). in the underground railroad, these traditions, based on whitehead’s acknowledged research, are apparent and pervasive both on the randall plantation and in cora’s consciousness, though whitehead makes their efficacy ambiguous. as the novel opens, cora is a teenaged motherless slave on the randall plantation in georgia. her mother, it is believed, escaped shortly after cora’s birth and disappeared into legend as the only slave to have successfully escaped the randall plantation despite the efforts of the notorious slavecatcher ridgeway, who later obsessively pursues cora during her own escape. though we are told that “randall forbade religion on his plantation to eliminate the distraction of deliverance” (p. ), african-based spirituality and practices are nevertheless present and practiced amongst the enslaved population. in the description of the harsh life on the randall plantation, the first mention of the in a new york magazine interview with whitehead by kachka ( ), whitehead is asked, “you must have been starting your research just as michael brown was shot in ferguson. did that, and subsequent shootings, fuel the story in any way?” to which whitehead reminisces about the killings of yusaf hawkins, michael stewart and eleanor bumpers while growing up in new york city. religions , , of supernatural is a casual allusion to a dispute between two women in “the hob”, the slave cabin where the mentally, physically and psychically damaged slaves are exiled, and in which cora resides: the hob women were seven that year. mary was the oldest. she was in hob because she was prone to fits. foaming at the mouth like a mad dog, writhing in the dirt with wild eyes. she had feuded for years with another picker named bertha, who finally put a curse on her. old abraham complained that mary’s affliction dated back to when she was a pickaninny, but no one listened to him. by any reckoning, these were nothing like those she had suffered in her youth. (whitehead , p. ) this curse, while not particularly relevant to cora’s later journey, is important in that it establishes african supernaturalism as an everyday part of randall plantation life. and bertha’s curse of mary, the effectiveness of which is doubted by old abraham, demonstrates that african-based spiritual practices at times “articulated hostilities within black americans’ own communities” (chireau , p. ). this is significant because it establishes a separate belief system from that of the white power structure on the plantation which “forbade” religion. the enslaved population nevertheless rebelliously persist in their spiritual practices as a way of life outside of the parameters set by the randalls. old abraham’s doubts about the curse are dismissed as the community concludes that, despite mary’s previous physical afflictions, bertha’s curse certainly had the effect of making it worse. in this episode, whitehead is drawing, despite the ambiguity made present by old abraham’s doubts, on the tradition of what yvonne chireau calls “harming magic.” she writes, “the use of the supernatural for causing affliction ... was well known among african american slaves and, later, among their descendants” (p. ). indeed, a perusal of slave narratives and wpa interviews will bear out the pervasive belief and practice of both “harming magic” as well as the use of african-based supernaturalism as a means of protection and healing within plantation communities. and, as whitehead indicates, it is not only the enslaved population or free blacks who utilized these “harming” practices. in the wake of cora’s mother, mabel’s escape, some years before the novel begins (“cora fell asleep nestled against her mother’s stomach and never saw her again”) (whitehead , p. ), no effort is spared in her retrieval: “the bills and fliers circulated for hundreds of miles. free negroes who supplanted their living catching runaways combed through the woods ... patrollers and posses of low whites harassed and bullied ... but the hounds came up empty, as did their masters” (p. ). in addition to these secular methods of attempting to recapture his property, old randall attempts to appropriate and make use of african american magic to prevent the escape of any additional slaves: randall retained the services of a witch to goofer his property so that no one with african blood could escape without being stricken with hideous palsy. the witch woman buried fetishes in secret places, took her payment, and departed in her mule cart. there was a hearty debate in the village over the spirit of the goofer. did the conjure apply only to those who had an intention to run or to all colored persons who stepped over the line? a week passed before the slaves hunted and scavenged in the swamp again. that’s where the food was. (p. ) first, it is important to note here that the witch woman, presumably black, is hired and reimbursed for her “fetishes” by the white plantation owner randall. the novel doesn’t indicate if randall is a true believer in “goofering” or is instead counting on the belief of his slaves to help prevent their according to jeffrey anderson in conjure in african american society: “conjure terminology with african origins was rare outside of the latin cultural area. goopher, used in such combinations as gopher doctor or gopher dust, was the exception to the rule. employed in coastal georgia and the carolinas to designate items derived from the dead or persons dealing with them, it most likely developed from the kongo word kufwa, meaning “to die” (p. ). in addition, from chireau in black magic: “remarkably, as late as the s, some black american conjurers were conducting african-based rituals such as animal sacrifice. even the lexicon that came to be associated with conjuring in the united states included terms like ‘toby,’ ‘goopher,’ and ‘mojo,’ which emanated from west and central african linguistic antecedents” (p. ). religions , , of escape, but that the curse would affect only those with “african blood” would indicate the while the latter is probable, the former is possible. that the slaves on randall plantation debate whether the goofer will afflict only those who leave the property in attempting to escape, or for any reason whatsoever, speaks to randall’s and by extension, all slave owners’ attempts to control their enslaved populations physically, mentally and psychologically. however, that the fear only lasted a week before the randall slaves ventured into the swamps to supplement their meagre portions indicates that the physical impulse towards survival overcomes any fear they may have of the witch woman’s curse and, by extension, the law of the plantation and all of the white institutional social, cultural and legal powers it represents. in this case, the white power structure’s attempts at appropriating african american spiritual beliefs and using them for their own ends (seen later in the example of ridgeway and his father) is defeated by the oppressed population’s drive for survival. this is exemplified not only by the escape of cora, caesar and lovey from randall plantation, but also by the earlier escape attempt of big anthony who “braved the witch woman’s goofer without incident and made it twenty-six miles before he was discovered snoozing in a hayloft” (p. ). although eventually caught, that big anthony was not intimated by the goofer, nor struck with palsy, would seem to indicate that whitehead views the efficacy of the goofer with some suspicion. though the goofer ’s lack of power might be also explained by it originally emanating from a white source—the witch woman hired by old randall, acting as his proxy. whitehead’s use of the term “goofer” and the appearance of a witch woman hired to protect the economic health of the randall plantation is an obvious echo of charles chesnutt’s conjure stories, particularly “the goophered grapevine.” in chesnutt’s story, first published in the atlantic monthly in , the ex-slave uncle julius attempts to prevent john and annie, northern carpetbaggers coming south to invest after the civil war, from purchasing and cultivating a vineyard on the former mcadoo plantation in north carolina. uncle julius does this, in part, by telling them a tale of “the goophered grapevine.” as he tells it, the slaves on the mcadoo plantation were so fond of the scuppernong grapes grown there that “ole mars dugal’ fix’ up a plan ter stop it” by hiring aunt peggy who “could wuk de mos’ powerfulles’ kin’ er gopher-could make people hab fits, er rheumatiz, er make ‘em des dwinel away en die ...” (chesnutt , pp. – ). the ritual performed by aunt peggy has the desired effect of the slaves leaving the vines alone, except for the unfortunate henry, who eats the cursed grapes and waxes and wanes in season as the vineyard ripens and withers. robert stepto writes that, “‘the goophered grapevine’ establishes the point that whites and blacks both may seek the services of the conjure woman” (stepto xii), pointing to a literary precedent for whitehead’s witch-woman. unlike aunt peggy’s curse, however, uncle julius’ story is not effective, and john and annie purchase the mcadoo plantation, discovering that uncle julius had been living on the property, and “derived a respectable revenue from the product of the neglected grapevines ... though whether it inspired the gopher story i am unable to state” (chesnutt , p. ). although not mentioned by whitehead in any interviews or on the acknowledgements page as inspiration, the similarities between “aunt peggy” of “the goophered grapevine” and the “witch woman” of the underground railroad are striking. additionally, both texts have white plantation owners attempt to use african-based religious belief to their own benefit, only to have these attempts ultimately fail. like the witch woman’s curse in the underground railroad, uncle julius’ relation of the curse also fails to have the desired effect, bringing into question the efficacy of these beliefs in these two stories. this indicates that when spirituality, whether african-based or not, is used against an oppressed black population, the drive for survival and self-sufficiency are more powerful, and rejecting the appropriation of spirituality when used as a means of repression by a white power structure can be a driving impulse towards physical and psychological liberation. chireau notes that though “...belief in the power of black conjure practitioners transcended racial boundaries. this would not be strange. given that similar traditions had also circulated among segments of the anglo american population...fears of malevolent spiritual harming were still prevalent among whites in the antebellum era” (p. ). religions , , of this notion is repeated in the second mention of “goofer” in the novel, which occurs when cora is at the utopian valentine farm in indiana. there, finally beginning to feel free, cora attends school and spends time reading in valentine’s library. in describing two “eager runaways more ignorant than she was ... [who] ran their fingers over the books as if the things were goofered, hopping with magic” (p. ), whitehead again references african spiritual beliefs, while seemingly questioning their veracity. here, the belief is positively associated with literacy and education, rather than sickness and punishment, and comes immediately after a discussion cora has with her teacher about the declaration of independence and the promise it holds. the reverent handling and wonderment of the books by the two unnamed runaway slaves is reminiscent of the trope of the “talking book” initiated by james gronniosaw in a narrative of the most remarkable particulars in the life of james albert ukawsaw gronniosaw, an african prince, as related by himself ( ) and repeated by olaudah equiano in the interesting narrative of the life of olaudah equiano as well as in other slave narratives. the respect for education and realization of its vital importance to liberation in this scene seems to be a reference to frederick douglass, who, on valentine farm, appears thinly veiled as the abolitionist speaker elijah lander. according to historian manisha sinha, however, lander represents not merely douglass, but an amalgam of abolitionists: the figure of elijah lander, whose lecture at valentine’s farm is a highpoint, does not just represent the great black abolitionist frederick douglass, as many reviewers have speculated, but the entire interracial abolitionist movement ... lander like the abolition movement is interracial, like david walker he has published an appeal, like william lloyd garrison he has authored a “declaration of the rights of the american negro”, run afoul of maryland law, and been nearly lynched in the streets of boston, and like douglass, whom he most resembles, he is a skillful orator famous on the abolitionist lecture circuit. (sinha ) if, for all intents and purposes, lander “most represents” douglass, it should be noted that the fictional biography that whitehead gives lander is absent of any african-based supernaturalism. this is important because in his narrative of the life of frederick douglass, an american slave, one of the most important scenes in the autobiography, indeed in douglass’ own mythos, is the young douglass’ physical altercation with the slave-breaker edward covey. as douglass tells it, he is given a talisman by sandy, an older slave who tells douglass that if he keeps the talisman, a “certain root” (douglass , p. ), on his right side, no harm will come to him. as douglass recounts, he returns to battle with covey and defeats the slave-breaker, predicating the momentous victory by telling his audience, “you have seen how a man was made a slave; you shall see how a slave was made a man” (p. ). in this instance, african supernaturalism is a key factor is not only douglass’ physical victory, but also his sense of identity, as he is liberated from his identity of “slave”, and embraces the role of “man”, helped along by the wisdom and power bestowed by the old conjurer sandy. the dichotomy presented on the valentine farm, that of african-based spirituality being subsumed within the american impulse presented in the novel (a complicated admixture of belief in manifest destiny, thrift, self-sufficiency, meritocracy, racism, the promise of “liberty” and the reality of slavery) is foreshadowed by the removal of any allusion to douglass’ african magically-based battle with covey, that is so central to douglass’ legacy in whitehead’s fictional account of lander’s youth, he is a precocious scholar, a musical prodigy, and no mention is made of any african-based education, religious or otherwise. therefore, yet again, whitehead provides a somewhat ambiguous take on african-based spirituality on the valentine farm. here, it seems, while allusions to african spiritual beliefs exist as a frame of reference for cora and other runaway slaves from the south; a way to perceive and make sense of a foreign item, true “magic” lies in the promise of an educated, interracial society living in harmony. however, whitehead shows that, in america, this dream is temporary and seemingly futile. through the ultimate destruction of valentine farm by a group of white farmers (possibly tipped off by mingo, an upwardly mobile member of the community who preaches a booker t. washington-like gospel of thrift and economic advancement), who murder elijah lander and cora’s almost-lover royal, religions , , of whitehead shows that the dream of equality predicated on the promises of the founding fathers in america is a futile one, undone time and again by racism and its associated violence. this subsumption of african spirituality into the “american imperative” is exemplified in the novel by the slavecatcher ridgeway, who pursues cora throughout her escape. described as hulking and six-and-a half feet tall, ridgeway is given a brief biography that describes his evolution from blacksmith’s son to patroller to slave–catcher extraordinaire. in his example, whitehead transposes attributes of african spirituality into the elder ridgeway’s forge, appropriating the language and imagery of voodoo and conjure into a distinctly american iteration. for example, we are told of ridgeway’s father, “the sunset glow of molten iron bewitched him, the way the color emerged in the stock slow and then fast, overtaking it like an emotion, the sudden pliability and restless writhing of the thing as it waited for its purpose. his forge was a window into the primitive energies of the world” (whitehead , p. ). the descriptive language of the forge here could easily be a description of damballah, the most important of the vodoun loas who in vodou theology is usually rendered as serpent-like and is the primordial giver of life. instead of his “fire god” being used towards beneficial ends, however, the elder ridgeway worships the utility of the metal that comes from the earth, rather than the material itself: “blacker than an african devil [from soot] ... it was his mission to upset, mash, and draw out the metal into the useful things that made society operate: nails, horseshoes, plows, knives, guns. chains. working the spirit, he called it” (whitehead , p. ). the appropriation of the term “working the spirit” by the elder ridgeway (who takes and reimagines it from the native american idea of a “great spirit” he picked up from a “half-breed”) is telling here. it cannot be coincidental that this term shares the title of joseph murphy’s book-length study of african diasporic religions that considers haitian vodou, candomble in brazil, santeria, revival zion and the black church in the us, and is very close to houston baker’s study of afro-american women’s writing, workings of the spirit (the second chapter of which is entitled: “working of the spirit: conjure and the space of black women’s creativity”). by having the irish-american ridgeway take the language and imagery from african spirituality and repurpose them to make knives, guns and chains, and promise his son, the budding slave-catcher, that he, too, would one day, “find his spirit”, whitehead is indicating that the power of african spirituality in america is being actively “repurposed” into oppressive anti-black ends. this repurposing, it would seem, necessitates the eradication of african-based spiritual beliefs. ridgeway tells cora: “i prefer the american spirit, the one that called us from the old world to the new, to conquer and build and civilize. and destroy that what needs to be destroyed. to lift up the lesser races. if not lift up, subjugate. and if not subjugate, exterminate. our destiny by divine prescription—the american imperative” to which cora replies, “i have to visit the outhouse” (p. ), an utterance in of itself a minor rebellion against white appropriation of an african-based spiritual heritage. however, this neither means that all is lost for people of african descent in america nor that african-based spirituality has no redemptive value as a source of political and social resistance. for despite cora’s journey through an american hell-scape full of betrayal and death, she ultimately does escape and we learn that her mother did not abandon her to her fate on the randall plantation. the next-to-last chapter of the novel, “mabel”, in which we learn that cora’s mother had planned to return to her daughter on the randall plantation but was killed by a snake in the swamps, is followed by an imitation-runaway notice for cora that resembles the authentic ones that appear elsewhere in the novel. this bulletin asserts that cora “ran away from her legal but not rightful master ... she has stopped running ... she was never property” (p. ). after the massacre at valentine farm, cora is captured by ridgeway. in the final chapter, however, she manages not only to escape, but also to severely injure the slave-catcher in the process. as she powers her way “into northness” down a final tunnel in a handcar, leaving a dying ridgeway asking his underling to “let me start again”, cora leaves ridgeway’s “american imperative” behind (p. ). ultimately, the track ends and cora emerges from the underground and is picked up by ollie, an “older -negro man” (p. ) with kind eyes who is part of a wagon train going first to st. louis, and then to california. religions , , of the novel ends with cora wondering, “where he escaped from, how bad it was, and how far he traveled before he put it behind him” (p. ). here, then, is whitehead’s view of liberation in the underground railroad. like cora, ollie is a former slave and that he picked her up while the previous wagons driven by whites did not speaks to a message of community and racial solidarity that would seem to lean towards whitehead’s model of resisting racism in america. while african-based spirituality may be weakened through appropriation and mis-used as a liberationist theology in the underground railroad, there is a sense that no matter how it is utilized, it is part of a shared history. and this historic community (indicated by ollie’s horseshoe-shaped brand on his neck and the revelation that mabel didn’t escape and abandon cora but was instead killed in the swamp by a snake), can overcome oppression if it stays together. as ollie and cora head to st. louis, “or, perhaps, ferguson, mo., present-minded readers might find themselves thinking” (schuessler ), the ability to resist and even retain hope, partially informed by african-based spirituality, remains possible. or, perhaps, we can look at the words of the author himself who, “when accepting the national book award, [encouraged] his audience to, ““be kind to everybody, make art, and fight the power”—a phrase he said could be remembered with a mnemonic device: b.m.f., or bad motherfucker” (da costa ). for characters in the underground railroad, the potency of voodoo, hoodoo, conjure and rootwork on their own terms is questionable, but are nevertheless part of a liberation based on shared experience. however, for the family of ward ( ) sing, unburied, sing, there is no doubt of the reality and power of these practices. in presenting mam, pop, jojo, kayla and leonie, ward shows how african-based supernaturalism can serve to protect and heal even the most traumatized and dysfunctional communities. sing, unburied, sing tells the story of leonie, her children jojo and kayla and her white friend misty as they travel from bois sauvage, mississippi, to parchman prison in the northern part of the state to pick up michael, jojo and kayla’s white father, upon his release for drug-related crimes. as they journey, the family literally faces its past, as the ghosts of ritchie, a young boy whom pap knew (and mercifully killed before he could be horrifically tortured during an attempted escape) at parchman years earlier, and given, leonie’s murdered brother, appear and interact with leonie, jojo and kayla. the story of richie and given being helped “across the waters” to their eternal “home” is one thread of the supernatural narrative in the novel: one used extensively by ward and is related to the strands of voodoo, conjure, rootwork and hoodoo that are presented in the rest of the novel. for as they journey to pick up michael, the family comes face to face with racism, police brutality and their past, and reveal how african-based spiritual practices can empower them in a racist society and help create and maintain familial ties, fostering a sense, for most of the characters, of communal belonging. based upon on their names (mam’s given name is philoméne, for example) and some of their worship, readers can surmise that the family is partially of haitian french or creole backgrounds. despite living in contemporary mississippi, and being very much of their distinctly american time and place, there are multiple african-based spiritual traditions presented throughout the course of the novel. leonie, for example, the daughter of mam and pop and mother of jojo and kayla, is physically and emotionally abusive to her children and abuses drugs. despite her struggles, her early education in african-based religious and healing traditions never leave her, and when she practices them, she “becomes” a part of the family. in an early scene between leonie and mam, who is cancer-stricken and bed-ridden, mam recounts a childhood memory of midwife marie-therese telling mam that she, “had the seed of a gift. with my mama panting in the other room, marie-therese took her time, put her in “hoodoo in america,” zora neale hurston writes: “at present time there is another influence which is evident in negro hoodoo in certain districts. this is spiritualism. the dead, and communication with the dead, play traditionally a large part in negro religions. wherever west african beliefs have survived in the new world, this place of the dead has been maintained ... and is often closely combined with hoodoo practices” (hurston , p. ). the names philoméne, marie-therese, and references to marie laveau, loko (the loa of healing and plants in haitian vodou) and the “mystére,” all indicate that mam is practicing a form of haitian vodou, most likely emanating from new orleans and practiced in mississippi and the gulf south. religions , , of hand on my heart, and prayed to the mothers, to mami wata and to mary, the virgin mother of god, that i would live long enough to see whatever it was i was meant to see” (ward , p. ). in this example, the syncretic worship of an african female water deity with the catholic virgin mary speaks to the duality of the central characters who are themselves struggling between two worlds: black and white, impoverished and affluent, imprisoned and free, leaving and remaining home. ultimately, ward suggests, african-spiritual practices offer characters in the novel protection, relief and the key to discovering a sense of identity through their usage. mam tells leonie that the ability to “see” and “hear” what most do not, including the thoughts of animals and internal voices of both people and ghosts, “runs in the blood, like silt in river water ... rises up over the water in generations ... it skips from sister to child to cousin. to be seen. and used” [emphasis mine] (p. ). for mam, pop, jojo and kayla, the use of their supernatural abilities and african-based spiritual practices to protect their loved ones and create a space for healing and homecoming is vital in sustaining them amidst poverty and heartbreak. for leonie, riven by anger and loss, these practices are powerful enough to draw her back into her spiritual heritage in order to perform the deathbed ritual for mam, but are not strong enough to keep her there, as, immediately following mam’s death, she absconds with michael, leaving jojo and kayla in pop’s care. one facet of protection (and indicator of leonie’s tense relationship with her spiritual heritage) in sing, unburied, sing is found in the use of the natural world to heal. as chireau writes, “many african americans saw the roles of ‘natural’ healers and supernatural doctors as overlapping, even as they drew a distinction between natural and supernatural forms of illness” (chireau , p. ). the “overlapping” role of healer is tested as the family drives to parchman to pick up michael. as leonie, misty, jojo and kayla drive north, the toddler kayla becomes sick and vomits repeatedly. for leonie, despite her struggles with drugs, her violence towards her children and troubled relationship with michael, her early education in the healing power of rootwork remains. after pulling their car over after a vomiting spell, leonie muses that, “mama always told me that if i look carefully enough, i can find what i need in the world” (p. ). a rendering of her education complements this memory: starting when i was seven, mama would lead me out in the woods around the house for walks, and she’d point out plants before digging them up or stripping their leaves and telling me how they could heal or hurt ... that right there is cow parsnip...you can make a decoction for cold and flu. and if you make them into a poultice, you can ease and heal bruises, arthritis, and boils...on our way back to the house with the day’s haul, she quizzed me” (pp. – ). leonie’s recollection here is followed by her searching for milkweed, only coming away with less effective wild blackberries to ease kayla’s upset stomach. leonie concludes, “this is the kind of world it is. the kind of world that gives you a blackberry plant, a doughy memory, and a child that can’t keep nothing down” (p. ). the bitterness and disappointment articulated by leonie in the “world” and the lack of healing offered by it is later redeemed at mam’s deathbed. however, this episode does show that the tradition of rootwork is both contemporaneously used and, while not perfect, is nevertheless remains. and if this tradition, existing outside of the modern medical world, can’t solve every problem, there is no denying its potency and power. if mam has instructed leonie in rootwork as a way of both passing on traditions and giving her a way to protect and heal in the modern world, pap serves as a similar mentor to jojo. early in their journey, as jojo is searching for a dry shirt in his bag after being caught in a downpour, he finds, “a small bag, so small two could fit in the palm of my hand ... it’s smooth, and warm, soft to my touch. feels like leather, and it’s tied together with a sinewy leather strip.” inside the bag, he discovers: a white feather smaller than my pinkie finger, tipped with blue and a slash of black. something that at first looks like a small chip of white candy, but when i pick it up and hold it close to my face, it’s some kind of animal tooth, lined with black in the chewing grooves, sharp like a canine. whatever animal it came from knew blood, knew how to tear knotty muscle. then i see a small gray river rock, a perfect little dome. i swirl my pointer finger into the dark of the sack, searching, and pull out a piece of paper, rolled thin as fingernail. in slanted, shaky script, in blue ink: keep this close (pp. – ). religions , , of this gris-gris bag, given to jojo by pop, has its first trial when leonie and misty decide to visit a drug dealer and buy methamphetamine on their way to pick up michael. when they arrive, a barking dog in the yard unnerves jojo, and as he wanders the property, he “fingers” the bag in his pocket, “wondering if that tooth is a raccoon’s. if it makes me so quiet and quick that even the dog won’t hear me when i circle around to the front of the house and ease inside” (p. ). here, jojo channels the power of the objects inside the gris-gris bag for protection, and, in this instance, it works and he is not molested by the dog. the power of the gris-gris bag is tested a second time in a scene that speaks to the high-visibility instances of police brutality that have occurred against black people in recent years. after picking michael up from prison, the group’s car is pulled over by a white police officer. in a panic, leonie swallows the bag of methamphetamine that they had purchased earlier before the officer can search the car. the officer makes everyone get out the car and leonie watches: it’s easy to forget how young jojo is until i see him standing next to the police officer ... he’s just a baby. and when he starts reaching in his pocket and the officer draws his gun on him, points it at his face, jojo ain’t nothing but a fat-kneed, bowlegged toddler. i should scream, but i can’t ... i blink and i see the bullet cleaving the soft butter of him. i shake. when i open my eyes again, jojo’s still whole. now on his knees, the gun pointing at his head” (pp. – ). while this is happening, jojo is thinking: the man telling me sit, like i’m a dog. “sit”. so i do, but then feel guilty for not fighting, for not doing what kayla is, but then i think about richie and then i feel pop’s bag in my shorts, and i reach for it. figure if i could feel the tooth, the feather, the note, maybe i could feel those things running through me. maybe i wouldn’t cry. maybe my heart wouldn’t feel like it’s a bird, ricocheted off a car midflight, stunned and reeling. (p. ) this terrifying encounter with the police is reminiscent of the tragic deaths of michael brown, tamir rice, freddie gray, philando castile and dozens of other young black men killed by police officers in high-profile incidents in recent years, and that inspired the black lives matter movement. in this scene, however, jojo is uninjured, saved perhaps by the power of the ghosts that haunt the family and the gris-gris bag. the tense encounter ends when kayla, after silently communing with given-not-given, the ghost of her deceased uncle, vomits on the police officer while the apparition looks on applauding. afterwards, “michaela crawls to jojo, and the officer yanks at jojo’s pocket, pulls out a small bag jojo had, and looks within it before shoving it back in jojo’s face like it’s a rotten banana peel ... ‘go home’, he says ... ‘boy had a damn rock in his pocket” (p. ). the drastic misunderstanding displayed here, reminiscent of so many real-life encounters, thankfully ends with no physical violence. however, that jojo is not only unarmed, but that his protective talisman is regarded as a “damn rock” by the potentially deadly agent of the state, speaks to the wide cultural differences between jojo, pap, leonie, kayla and the deadly white power structure they must survive within, here embodied by the young police officer. later, after they return home, pop asks jojo if he found the bag and asks, “did it work? it’s a gris-gris bag.” jojo’s response of “i think so. we made it. got stopped by the police though” speaks to the efficacy of the bag. like with frederick douglass’ example, jojo’s gris-gris bag, coupled with, or perhaps inspiring his bravery and defiance in the face of a deadly white entity, prevents physical injury and even death. in addition, pop adds, “it’s the only way i could send a little of me with ya’ll” (p. ), indicating, like with mam’s earlier instruction to leonie, pop’s african-based spiritual traditions are not mere metaphors, but a way to protect, resist and survive in a hostile world. one of the culminating and most heart-wrenching scenes in the novel is the death of mam. after returning from parchman, and a violent altercation with michael’s racist and disapproving father, the family returns home to find mam near death from her cancer. she tells leonie that, despite all her efforts; “brewed all the herbs and medicines. opened myself up to the mystére. for saint jude, for marie laveau, for loko” (p. ), she is dying and wants to leave this world while there is still religions , , of something left of her. leonie asks to be allowed to try to save her, but is told she cannot as, “i didn’t teach you enough. you won’t be able to appease them” (p. ). and while mam knows that leonie can’t save her from death, she does allow that leonie can help her die, “like i drew the veil back so you could walk into this life, you’ll help me draw it back so i can walk into the next” (p. ), and meet “the last mystére. maman brigitte. let her come into me. possess me. she is the mother of the dead. the judge. if she come, maybe she take me with her” (p. ). she instructs leonie to help her die by building an altar of cemetery rocks, cotton, cornmeal and rum. as mam struggles with her last breath and the ghosts of given and ritchie descend on the house, ward combines elements of voodoo and “magical realist” spiritualism into a syncretic and chaotic explosion or sound and fury: “say it,” mama says. she lets her hands fall. “the litany,” she says again, and her breath rattles in her throat ... there’s no time. the moment done ate it all up: the past, the future. do i say the words? ...“mama, i choke, and it’s as weak and wanting as a baby’s. “mommy.” my crying and mama’s entreaties and michaela’s wailing and given’s shouting fill the room like a flood”. (p. ) despite jojo’s doubts, leonie performs the litany: “grande brigette, judge. this altar of stones is for you. accept our offerings,” i say. mama’s eyes are steady rolling, steady rolling to the ceiling, where the boy with smooth face hovered, needy and balled up like a baby. “shut up. leonie. please,” jojo says. “you don’t see”. mama’s eyes steady rolling to the wall where given has stopped thrashing. they turn to me, beseeching. “enter,” i say (p. ). as mam dies, the family is reunited in grief (“we cry in chorus”), bonded by their shared loss, but also by their love. jojo is angry with leonie, but she rationalizes, “he doesn’t understand what it means, to have the first thing you ever done right by your mama be to usher in her gods” (p. ). and, in performing this ritual, leonie re-enters into an old tradition, one that she’s lost through the haze of drugs and blinded by her love of michael, realizing “i want to tell jojo, we a family” (p. ), though the loss of mam is too much for her and she reacts violently, attacking jojo before fleeing with michael. ultimately, there isn’t a perfect resolution in sing, unburied, sing, but there is a sense of redemption for leonie in performing the ritual accompanying mam’s death, and, with it, a sense of relief for the family as a communal body. despite mam’s death and leonie’s flight, the final scene in the novel is one of release, as michaela sings the ghosts haunting the family away to a final rest. one day, after mam has died, jojo and kayla are walking the property and encounter both the ghost-child ritchie and a tree full of ghosts. “go home” kayla orders as she begins to sing, “ ...and the multitude of ghosts lean forward, nodding. they smile with something like relief, something like remembrance, something like ease ...home, they say. home (pp. – ). the concept of “home” here, invoking a sense of rest and comfort facilitated by ancestral knowledge and a sense of community, informs my concerns in both novels. for a population brought to america in chains, treated as second-class citizens after emancipation, and forced to navigate a society where racism is built into the very institutions that uphold it, the notion of a stable and peaceful “home” where one can feel “something like relief, something like remembrance, something like ease” is fraught and complex. in conjure in african american society, jeffrey anderson points out that, “since reconstruction, interest in conjure has generally followed a wavelike pattern of increasing and decreasing interest”. noting upsurges of interest in the mid- s, the s and the s (anderson , p. ). these “waves” that anderson notes, coinciding with reconstruction, the great migration, the harlem renaissance and the black power and black arts movements, indicate that, when significant social and political trends are affecting african americans, there is a cultural turn to african spiritual traditions. maman brigitte is the loa of death in haitian vodou. religions , , of it would seem that american culture is in the midst of another wave of interest in african-based supernaturalism. the cultural milieu of the united states has frayed in the first decades of the twenty-first century, having witnessed the very public rise of white ethno-nationalism from both individuals and emanating from centers of power in washington. the public protests by black lives matter activists and high profile athletes like colin kaepernick, roughly coincided with the rise and election donald trump and the accompanying nativism, xenophobia, racism and seeming embrace of white nationalism by prominent administration officials, advisors, hangers-on and some sitting congressmen. the rise of “trumpism” speaks to the (temporary and retrospectively naïve) dashed hope that the election of barack obama in may have ushered in a society more accepting of racial and ethnic diversity and open to increased power-sharing amongst its populace. the thinly-veiled-to-open racism, seemingly encouraged and embraced by the president himself and embodied by his long dreamt-of symbolic wall on the southern border and attempts to ban muslims and people from african “shithole countries” from entering the united states, has helped to foster a climate of anger and fear for many people of color in america. it is within this crucible of deferred dreams and protestations that whitehead and ward are adding their work. with the way paved by popular television shows like hbo’s “true blood” and “american horror story”, and sobered by the reality that young black men, particularly, are at risk of having their lives taken by police and broadcast across the internet, african-americans seem to be turning to traditional african spirituality and traditions as a means of both protection, power and identity. this phenomena is certainly recognized by the national book foundation. in the judge’s citation for the underground railroad, they note that, “he has given us an electrifying narrative of the past, profoundly resonant with the present” (national book foundation ) likewise, the citation for sing, unburied, sing praises the novel as “mov[ing] beyond the road into the bigger story of what it means to be an american in the rural south both now and decades before this moment” (national book foundation ). it appears that the reach of these works will continue to expand, as amazon is planning a barry jenkins-directed limited television series based on the underground railroad, and ward’s literary star continues to rise with a novel about the slave trade in new orleans and a children’s book in progress in fulfillment of a newly signed two-book deal with scribner. finally, both novels offer readers who are looking for a way to negotiate and survive an often hostile and violent world a means to do so. the popularity and praise of both works at this particular cultural moment speak to the desperate desire for healing, hope, and, ultimately, a safe haven to call home, and indicate that, perhaps, for those looking for healing and community in america, the way forward may be to look to and embrace the past. funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. references anderson, jeffrey. . conjure in african american society. baton rouge: louisiana state up. this is perhaps best exemplified (though there are sadly many possibilities in recent years) by the unite the right white nationalist march in august in charlottesville, va. after initial refusing to condemn the march, president trump tepidly condemned the neo-nazi organizers, and subsequently walked back criticism of the white nationalist marchers by asserting there was “hatred, bigotry, and violence on many sides,” and that there were “very fine people on both sides” (thrush and haberman ). in “the witches of baltimore” by sigal samuel (samuel ) writing for the atlantic, the author reports on the third annual black witch convention in baltimore, where the celebrants, “the hundreds of young black women who are leaving christianity in favor of their ancestors’ african spiritual traditions, and finding a sense of power in the process,” call out as part of their ritual, “no one’s going to protect us but who?” “us!” religions , , of bryant, taylor. . jesmyn ward on her new novel and how the south really won the civil war. nylon. september . available online: https://nylon.com/articles/jesmyn-ward-sing-unburied-sing-interview (accessed on february ). chesnutt, charles. . the conjure stories. edited by robert stepto and jennifer rae greeson. new york: w.w. norton and company. chireau, yvonne. . black magic: religion and the african american conjuring tradition. oakland: university of california press. da costa, cassie. . “make art, and fight the power”: a historically black national book awards. the new yorker. november . available online: https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/joy-is-an-act-of- resistance-a-historically-black-national-book-awards (accessed on january ). douglass, frederick. . narrative of the life of frederick douglass, an american slave. written by himself. edited and introduced by deborah e. mcdowell. oxford: oxford up. hurston, zora neale. . hoodoo in america. the journal of american folklore : – . [crossref] kachka, boris. . in conversation with colson whitehead. new york magazine, august . national book foundation. . judge’s citation: the underground railroad. available online: https://www. nationalbook.org/books/the-underground-railroad/ (accessed on february ). national book foundation. . judge’s citation: sing, unburied, sing. available online: https://www. nationalbook.org/books/sing-unburied-sing/ (accessed on march ). parham, jason. . colson whitehead on writing, slavery, and the true origins of america. fader. august . available online: https://www.thefader.com/ / / /colson-whitehead-the-underground-railroad- interview (accessed on february ). rucker, walter. . conjure, magic and power: the influence of afro-atlantic religious practices on slave resistance and rebellion. journal of black studies : – . [crossref] samuel, sigal. . the witches of baltimore. the atlantic, november . schuessler, jennifer. . colson whitehead on slavery, success and writing the novel that really scared him. the new york times, august . schulz, kathryn. . the perilous lure of the underground railroad. the new yorker. august . available online: https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/ / / /the-perilous-lure-of-the-underground-railroad (accessed on march ). sinha, manisha. . the underground railroad in art and history: a review of colson whitehead’s novel. the journal of the civil war era. november . available online: https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/ / /underground-railroad-art-history-review-colson-whiteheads-novel/ (accessed on january ). thrush, glenn, and maggie haberman. . trump gives white supremacists an unequivocal boost. the new york times. august . available online: https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/trump-charlottesville- white-nationalists.html?mcubz= (accessed on august ). ward, jesmyn. . sing, unburied sing. new york: scribner. whitehead, colson. . the underground railroad. new york: doubleday. winfrey, oprah. . oprah talks to the underground railroad author colson whitehead. available online: http: //www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/oprahs-interview-with-colson-whitehead (accessed on january ). © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). https://nylon.com/articles/jesmyn-ward-sing-unburied-sing-interview https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/joy-is-an-act-of-resistance-a-historically-black-national-book-awards https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/joy-is-an-act-of-resistance-a-historically-black-national-book-awards http://dx.doi.org/ . / https://www.nationalbook.org/books/the-underground-railroad/ https://www.nationalbook.org/books/the-underground-railroad/ https://www.nationalbook.org/books/sing-unburied-sing/ https://www.nationalbook.org/books/sing-unburied-sing/ https://www.thefader.com/ / / /colson-whitehead-the-underground-railroad-interview https://www.thefader.com/ / / /colson-whitehead-the-underground-railroad-interview http://dx.doi.org/ . / https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/ / / /the-perilous-lure-of-the-underground-railroad https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/ / /underground-railroad-art-history-review-colson-whiteheads-novel/ https://www.journalofthecivilwarera.org/ / /underground-railroad-art-history-review-colson-whiteheads-novel/ https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/trump-charlottesville-white-nationalists.html?mcubz= https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/trump-charlottesville-white-nationalists.html?mcubz= http://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/oprahs-interview-with-colson-whitehead http://www.oprah.com/oprahsbookclub/oprahs-interview-with-colson-whitehead http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	references blue solidarity: police unions, race and authoritarian populism in north america https://doi.org/ . / work, employment and society , vol. ( ) – © the author(s) article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions doi: . / journals.sagepub.com/home/wes blue solidarity: police unions, race and authoritarian populism in north america mark p thomas york university, canada steven tufts york university, canada abstract with a focus on police unions in the united states and canada, this article argues that the construction of ‘blue solidarity’, including through recent blue lives matter campaigns, serves to repress racial justice movements that challenge police authority, acts as a counter to broader working class resistance to austerity and contributes to rising right-wing populism. specifically, the article develops a case study analysis of blue lives matter campaigns in north america to argue that police unions construct forms of ‘blue solidarity’ that produce divisions with other labour and social movements and contribute to a privileged status of their own members vis-a- vis the working class more generally. as part of this process, police unions support tactics that reproduce racialised ‘othering’ and that stigmatise and discriminate against racialised workers and communities. the article concludes by arguing that organised labour should maintain a critical distance from police unions. keywords blue lives matter, institutionalised racism, police unions, right-wing populism introduction in august , a group of academics, business leaders, writers and politicians in the united states wrote an open letter to then president barack obama condemning police corresponding author: mark p thomas, department of sociology, york university, keele street, toronto, on m j p , canada. email: mpthomas@yorku.ca wes . / work, employment and societythomas and tufts research-article article https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/journals-permissions https://journals.sagepub.com/home/wes mailto:mpthomas@yorku.ca http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . % f &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - thomas and tufts violence against african american and latino communities. prompted by the killing of michael brown, an unarmed african american teenager who was shot by a police officer in ferguson, missouri, and whose death sparked local uprisings against police violence, the letter called upon the us administration to take action to change police tactics and conduct, and to improve police accountability. one of the signatories to the letter was richard trumka, president of the american federation of labor and congress of industrial organizations (afl-cio), whose endorsement of this position produced sharp criticism from sam cabral, president of the international union of police associations (iupa). this dispute in the us was reminiscent of tensions present in toronto, canada, where sid ryan, then president of the ontario federation of labour (ofl), had drawn criticism from mike mccormack, president of the toronto police association (tpa), for his critique of policing tactics during toronto-based g protests in and for the killing of sammy yatim in toronto in (gheciu, ; toronto star, ). more than simply ‘wars of words’ between labour officials, these disputes raise much deeper questions about police unions, including in regard to the role of police unions in contrib- uting to current tensions related to racism and policing. these interventions also point to the tensions related to practices of solidarity both within police unions themselves and between police unions and broader labour movements. this article contributes to this discussion through an examination of police unions in north america with a particular focus on the current conjuncture characterised by high levels of political polarisation generated through the neoliberal politics of austerity, the rise of right-wing authoritarian populism and the emergence of anti-austerity and left- populist counter movements such as occupy wall street and the fight for $ and fairness. building upon several decades of neoliberalism, and driven by the global financial crisis of and the ensuing great recession, austerity measures have been undertaken in many national and sub-national contexts, though unevenly, to reduce gov- ernment expenditures, reorganise public sector work and redesign labour laws and labour policies (albo et al., ). in this same context, populist movements and populist politi- cians have risen in many countries, including in north america, on both the right and left of the political spectrum (thomas and tufts, ). alongside these developments, and sometimes intertwined with anti-austerity and left-populist movements such as those referenced above, social justice movements, most notably black lives matter, have sought to challenge police violence against racialised communities in both the united states and canada. the article argues that, in this context, the construction of solidarity within police unions serves to undermine and criminalise movements that contest police violence against racialised communities and to more broadly counter working class resistance to austerity and right-wing authoritarian populism. following a brief review of literature on trade union solidarity, the article constructs a theoretical argument that situates police unions within the class relations of capitalism, and also establishes connections between police unions and forms of institutionalised racism. the article then develops a case study analysis of blue lives matter campaigns in the united states and canada to argue that police unions construct forms of ‘blue solidarity’ that produce divisions with other labour and social movements. as part of this process, police unions support tactics that discriminate against racialised workers and communities and that reproduce racialised work, employment and society ( ) ‘othering’ that stigmatises communities. the article concludes that the solidarity con- structed through the practices of police unions undermines and impedes broader working class mobilisation and solidarity. in recognition that the current structures of police unionism are not compatible with working class mobilisation that could counter austerity and right-wing authoritarian populism, the article concludes by arguing that organised labour should maintain a critical distance from police unions. solidarity and police unions ‘solidarity’ is a key concept for studies of worker collective action. at a very general level, wilde ( : ) defines solidarity as ‘the feeling of reciprocal sympathy and responsibility among members of a group which promotes mutual support’. while the term connotes support and collectivity, it contains a dual meaning, as it may also involve practices of boundary construction that are simultaneously exclusionary and antagonistic towards those defined as outsiders (kapeller and wolkenstein, ). in this study of police unions, understanding the exclusionary dimensions of solidarity is key. within the fields of labour studies, industrial relations and the sociology of work, soli- darity is generally considered to reflect awareness of common interests arising from a shared experience of work, as well as the collective intention on the part of workers to confront the power of employers and to advance common interests and/or address wrongdoing (see kelly, ). doellgast et al. ( : ) define worker solidarity as ‘adherence to principles and patterns of behaviour that support mutual aid and collective action’, noting that solidarity is not automatic, but rather is a process emerging in spe- cific contexts that create common interests and common understandings of ‘the appropri- ate remedial action to take’. in discussing working class struggle, fantasia ( ) captures this understanding of solidarity by noting that ‘[s]olidarity is created and expressed by the process of mutual association’ (p. : emphasis in original), involving the ‘values, practices, and institutional manifestations of mutuality’ (p. ). practices of solidarity may or may not take formal/institutionalised forms and include but are not limited to forming trade unions. with respect to unions, lee ( : ) states: ‘solidarity . . . is the core source of labour unions’ power and social leverage’. lee identifies two forms of trade union solidarity: internal solidarity, which is that between co-workers within a workplace; and external solidarity, which is that between union members and non-unionised workers. as per solidarity in general, solidarity in the workplace may also take exclusionary forms. for example, with respect to trade union practice vis-a-vis immigrant workers, alho ( : ) argues that ‘the lay distinction between “us” and “them” in terms of nationality still shapes trade union strategy in a way that can be labelled as selective soli- darity’. with the rise of precarious work, some unions reinforce insider strategies that protect members (particularly full-time, permanent workers) but that exclude or offer secondary forms of protection for members with lower seniority or those on precarious contracts (doellgast et al., ). durazzi et al. ( ) note the role of unions in con- structing exclusionary forms of solidarity, especially through employer-friendly, ‘busi- ness union’ strategies, which are reinforced by north american labour relations frameworks that emphasise legalistic approaches to trade unionism and that undermine thomas and tufts orientations towards broader forms of working class solidarity (schirmer, ). bernaciak ( ) documents exclusionary tendencies among european unions in the years following the financial crisis through the adoption of nationalist oriented strategies in response to the crisis. though tensions between exclusionary nationalist interests and internationalist approaches to trade union solidarity are longstanding (thörnqvist, ), the current context of right-wing populism has invigorated forms of exclusionary solidarity among the working class, including through nativism and racism (bergfeld, ; doellgast et al., ). with regards to police unions and solidarity, some scholars argue that police unions hold the potential to become progressive agents of social reform by establishing solidar- istic connections with social justice groups and wider labour movements (adams, ; marks and fleming, ). as will be discussed in what follows, however, the practice of solidarity within police unions through blue lives matter demonstrates a highly exclusionary form of solidarity by constructing the interests of police unions as distinct from those of external groups, and by seeking to undermine the interests of such groups. while acknowledging the need to recognise the heterogeneous character of police unions, including through the presence of associations of racialised officers, such as the national black police association (nbpa) in the us (discussed below), this article raises critical questions regarding the potential for broader forms of solidarity from police unions in the current conjuncture. police unions as contradictory worker organisations police unions are institutions that are simultaneously workers’ organisations within the class relations of contemporary capitalism and part of the institutional framework of the capitalist state. trade unions in general hold a contradictory position within capitalist economies. on the one hand, they exist to advance workers’ interests in improving con- ditions of work; at the same time, however, they do so while enmeshed in an institutional framework (which varies by national context) that ultimately limits their capacity to fully resist labour exploitation and undermines any willingness to do so. in the united states and canada, this institutional framework includes labour laws that, while providing (most) workers with the right to unionise and engage in collective bargaining, at the same time limit the scope of trade union action, embedding unions within legal frameworks that discipline their activities (moody, ; panitch and swartz, ). moreover, these legal frameworks largely facilitate workplace-level collective bargaining, supporting and entrenching occupational and industry-based divisions within the labour movement (jackson and thomas, ). given the unique role of policing in capitalist society (dis- cussed further below), the legal right to unionise, engage in collective bargaining and undertake industrial action (including going on strike) for police officers is typically further constrained through legal restrictions that are frequently more extensive than those applied to other essential service workers, though such restrictions vary according to national context. the contradictory nature of police unions is further complicated by the nature of policing itself. insofar as police do not own the means of production and are employed through contracts that involve the sale of labour power in exchange for a wage/salary, work, employment and society ( ) police can be seen as falling within the broad category of the working class. like other workers in the public sector, their work is subject to managerial control over core ele- ments of their working conditions, including working time, assignment of duties, promo- tions and pay. as with many other members of the working class, including those within the public sector, unionisation provides the means to exert some control over these aspects of their work. given that the majority of workers in both the us and canada do not belong to unions, unionisation also contributes to situating police in a privileged seg- ment of the working class. police are nevertheless distinct from other workers in the public sector given their primary responsibility for the enforcement of laws, and in that they are subject to an authoritarian, command-and-control regime based on a military hierarchy, as opposed to a system of civilian managerial authority (see hodgson, ). as such, the police con- stitute a coercive arm of the state, along with the military as well as the prison system. as a core institution within a racially ordered capitalist society, police are intimately con- nected to the role of the state in producing and reproducing the conditions of capital accumulation. one of the primary manifestations of this is in the role of the police in both regulating and suppressing working class movements. in a study of police unions in the uk, reiner ( ) identifies their central contradiction as emanating from their role as organisations that fight for better working conditions for those who work to maintain social order. in the us, police forces and policing practices developed in conjunction with the disciplining of working class dissent in the th century, as professionalised forms of policing contributed to a more stabilised industrial capitalist order (mitrani, ). in canada, the formation of the royal canadian mounted police, which consisted of a merger between the north west mounted police and the dominion police from eastern canada, arose (partly) out of the canadian government’s desire for a federal police force following the events of the winnipeg general strike. police continue to play a role in governing capitalist labour relations through the sur- veillance of picketing and strikes (hall and de lint, ). while these aspects of polic- ing are largely normalised within the everyday working of capitalism, the repressive role of policing is revealed in instances of mass protests, whereby police forces often imple- ment highly militarised tactics and severely constrain the civil liberties of demonstrators (martin, ). in their role of protecting the interests of police officers, police unions become institutions that thereby contribute to the enforcement and regulation of capital- ist social relations and the suppression of movements of opposition, with the contradic- tory nature of this relationship vis-a-vis other members of the working class acknowledged by police unions themselves (burgess et al., ). as inferred above, through their role in defending and advancing the interests of their members, police unions contribute to entrenching police as a (relatively) privileged sec- tor of the working class. this can be seen through the impact of police unions on the material conditions of police work, including officer pay and benefits, as well as the protective role police unions play in terms of officer discipline. police unions may thereby become a source of socio-economic advancement, a site of concentrated, coer- cive class power, a tendency present even under harsher neoliberal market policies, whereby police unions may shelter police forces from the budget cuts of governments implementing neoliberal policies (hill, ). though this tendency is uneven and varies thomas and tufts across and within national contexts, it reflects both the power of police unions as well as the fact that a well-funded police force is consistent with a neoliberal policy programme (deukmedjian, ). in the current era of austerity and right-wing populism, this ten- dency may be enhanced as right-wing populist leaders with authoritarian tendencies seek to bolster policing (stöss, ). policing, race and capitalism building on an existing body of scholarly literature on race, racism and policing, this article also links the role of police unions to the racial ordering of contemporary capital- ism. the early work of the scholars at the centre for contemporary cultural studies (cccs) in the uk is foundational in illustrating interconnections between policing, institutionalised forms of racism and capitalism (see cccs, ), highlighting in par- ticular how the criminalisation of racialised communities in the uk in the s and s provided legitimation for racist policing practices, which themselves served to reinforce a racialised social and economic hierarchy (gilroy, ; hall, ). these practices took place in the context of the neoliberal recalibration of the british welfare state whereby social policy was rendered subservient to the economy and welfare bene- fits redesigned with a workfarist orientation (rhodes, ), highlighting the intercon- nections between racism, policing and capital accumulation. in the us context, connections between race, racism and mass incarceration have been widely researched, with research linking the gross overrepresentation of african americans in the us prison system to historical and ongoing racial oppression (alexander, ). policing practices disproportionately target african american communities through surveillance, arrests, beatings, shootings and the broader repression of civil rights movements (hirschfield, ). the same practices contribute to systems of labour control as the threat of incarceration serves as a mechanism to channel african americans into low-wage employment (stuart, ). recent accounts of policing in canada have emphasised that, in conjunction with its role in capitalist accumulation, policing arose as a specific form of state violence to oppress and discipline black and indigenous populations. maynard ( ) argues that the history of policing in canada is driven by state-sanctioned anti-black violence that can be traced back to the country’s slave era. whether through the criminalisation of racial- ised peoples in ways that facilitate their relegation to precarious urban labour markets (see peck and theodore, ), or suppressing forms of dissent that threaten capital accumulation such as indigenous resistance to extractive economies (coulthard, ), policing is central to processes of racialised economic marginalisation in canada. with its focus primarily on race, racism and policing, this literature leaves the role of police unions largely unexamined. with regard to race and trade unions, critical race scholars note longstanding and ongoing patterns of racism within unions, as well as efforts to transform unions through anti-racist politics (see fletcher and gapasin, ; larson, ), a thorough review of which is beyond the scope of this article. like the literature on race and policing, however, the literature on race and trade unions gives lit- tle attention to the question of police unions. in what follows, this article examines blue lives matter campaigns to illustrate the ways in which forms of ‘blue solidarity’ through work, employment and society ( ) police unions contribute to the abovementioned dynamics of racial ordering within neo- liberal capitalism. development of police unions in north america police unions have a long history in both canada and the united states, with fraternal police associations dating to the s. following a broader pattern among the industrial working class in both countries, by the late th and early th centuries police officers began to attempt unionisation to improve wages, hours and working conditions. early efforts were met by strong opposition from business communities and public authorities due to fears that unionised police would not prevent other workers from striking and that police forces themselves would strike (fisk and richardson, ). in the us, a strike of police officers in boston, massachusetts in , which was suppressed by the state and met with public condemnation, is considered a pivotal early moment (slater, ). in canada, in may , a royal commission rejected the rights of police to form unions in response to early attempts at police unionism in toronto (marquis, ). there was a resurgence in police unionisation in the post-second world war era, as public sector workers more generally began to win collective bargaining rights in north america. as police unions began to be recognised, however, the ability of unionised police to withdraw their labour was restricted by legislation in the name of public safety. in the us, a wave of police unionism occurred in the s and s, in part in opposi- tion to pressures for greater civilian oversight from the civil rights movement (rushin, ). the international union of police associations joined the afl-cio, the largest trade union federation in the us, in , while the national association of police organizations (napo) and the fraternal order of police (fop), the largest police union, remain independent. as the number of black police officers grew in the us, associations of black police officers such as the nbpa formed to better represent the interests of black officers (fisk and richardson, ). in canada, the canadian police association (cpa), which represents nearly , police officers, is not affiliated with the central labour federation, the canadian labour congress. existing studies of police unionism tend to focus on the impacts of police unionism on police wages, and the role of police unions in negotiating working conditions and in shielding police against discipline, termination and civilian oversight. police unions impact aspects of work, including personnel standards, assignment of officers, organisa- tional innovation, bargaining unit determination, officer discipline and accountability, organisational tenure, personnel development and pay (walker, ). the presence of police unions may also secure greater police enforcement powers and discretion over their use for rank-and-file officers, including in the use of deadly force (magenau and hunt, ). while police unions and police collective agreements are at times seen as obstacles to implementing organisational change in police forces, research indicates that the position of police unions on organisational change is variable, with resistance most likely encountered when reforms may have perceived implications for officer safety or working conditions (skogan, ). in terms of their financial impact, police unions not only protect police forces against budget cuts, but have also secured increased state fund- ing at times when other public sector workers were experiencing cutbacks (hill, ). thomas and tufts police unions may also contribute to shaping police subcultures, particularly the ‘code of silence’ among officers (walker, ). beyond collective bargaining and advocating on behalf of individual members, police unions are often involved in broader forms of political activity, including lobbying and campaigns (huey and hryniewicz, ), though the form and extent of politicisation of police unions varies across national context. in the realm of public policy, police unions often act as political interest groups, seeking to influence elections by endorsing ‘law- and-order’ candidates and opposing candidates that support higher levels of civilian oversight (walker, ). they have also engaged in litigation (e.g. by contesting limita- tions imposed on their activities by the courts), as well as in media relations (e.g. by criti- cising civil society groups that are critical of the police, such as the american civil liberties union and black lives matter) (fisk and richardson, ). in the us, police unions have opposed training programmes designed to promote community policing (skogan, ), as well as the organisation of independent citizen oversight bodies (wilson and buckler, ). in moving beyond workplace-based activities, police unions often mimic the strategies of other labour and social movements (delord et al., ), at times adopting tactics similar to those of civil rights organisations, including organising interest groups, picketing, lobbying and undertaking litigation, as was the case with police unions in the us during the civil rights era (walker, ). going beyond ensuring due process for officers facing disciplinary measures, such tactics serve to reinforce the racialised dynamics of policing discussed above, whether through shielding officers from accountability for racist policing practices or resisting initiatives to improve police–community relations. the blue lives matter campaigns discussed below are illustrative of these tendencies. methodology research conducted for this article involved a qualitative content analysis of: (i) organi- sational documents from unions, community organisations and government agencies; and (ii) reports from media outlets. all of the documents were publicly available and retrieved using online databases. the documents were searched on a regional basis focusing primarily on contemporary issues pertaining to police unions in toronto, canada and multiple locations in the united states where high-profile cases of police use-of-force have come to light. documents selected for review outlined the structure of police unions, the central values and priorities of police unions and related organisations, and the ways in which police unions are presented and represented to the public. the documents were thematically coded and the codes were organised into charts that were arranged by region and date. although initial searches focused on contemporary issues (police use-of-force, black lives matter, police racism), the codes that emerged (union corruption, police misconduct, austerity, anti-police rhetoric) facilitated additional searches that dated back to , producing resources that also contributed to the devel- opment of an historical account of police unionism. despite the public availability of news media and most labour organisational docu- ments, internal union databases located on the individual websites of many police organ- isations were private and only accessible to rank-and-file members. as a result, content work, employment and society ( ) analysis was restricted to police statements within the news media and documents that were issued directly to the press. blue solidarity: blue lives matter the blue lives matter campaign arose as part of the police union reaction to the black lives matter movement in both the us and canada. black lives matter itself emerged in response to police violence against african americans and black canadians. the rise of blue lives matter demonstrates how the construction of an exclusionary form of soli- darity through police unions may come into conflict with and undermine other expres- sions of solidarity within the working class and how such solidarity may be connected to racialised oppression within capitalism. founded in the us in december , blue lives matter constructs a ‘reverse dis- crimination’ discourse to cast police as victims, a wider tactic that has been adopted by police unions in other contexts (see marshall, ). invoking the notion that ‘blue lives’ are not valued and presenting the police as being under attack through the same rhetori- cal device used by the black lives matter movement, constructs an equivalency between these movements, thereby undermining critiques of racialised violence committed by the police. adopting the discursive strategy of a contemporary social justice (re: civil rights) movement demonstrates the determination of police unions to suppress dissent related to struggles against anti-black racism and the racial ordering of american society. by the fall of , there were over blue lives matter billboards in the us (logan, ). one of the most concrete manifestations of the movement is evidenced by the emergence of blue lives matter legislation. in may , the state of louisiana passed house bill , the blue lives matter bill of republican state representative lance harris. the new law added police to the list of groups protected by hate crime statutes. in , blue lives matter laws similar to those in louisiana were passed in other (predominantly republican) states and proposed in an additional nine (table ). president trump, who supported blue lives matter throughout his election campaign, signed a number of blue lives matter executive orders in february that enhanced police powers (lind, ). the legislative gains for police were expected given the support trump had received from police unions during his presidential campaign. the fop was one of the earliest endorsers of trump’s presidential bid, and during the election campaign had been highly critical of hillary clinton. after the democratic national convention allowed black lives matter representatives to speak, john mcnesby, president of fop lodge in philadelphia, invoked the blue lives matter ‘police as victims’ discourse, stating: ‘we will not soon forget that the democratic party and hillary clinton are excluding the widows and other family members of police officers killed in the line of duty who were victims of explicit and not implied racism’ (quoted in allen, ). blue lives matter extended beyond legislative reform and electoral politics, inserting itself into the cultural realm as well. for example, in february , beyoncé was fea- tured in the national football league’s (nfl) super bowl half-time show. claiming that the performance paid tribute to the black panthers, michael mchale, president of napo, adapted the ‘police as victims’ discourse in a letter to nfl commissioner roger goodell: thomas and tufts you’ve done your part to make trendy and acceptable the symbols of kidnapping and murder of american police officers. [. . .] on the same night that hundreds of officers gave up their evenings with their own families to protect you and your players and fans, you honor them by promoting song and dance celebrating cop-killers. (mchale, ) the police union backlash against the nfl continued through – in relation to colin kaepernick, quarterback of the san francisco ers at the time, who refused to stand for the us national anthem as a sign of protest against racist police violence. in the ensuing public debate, police unions were among the most vocal critics. in early september , the santa clara police officer’s association, which represents officers who police the ers games, threatened to withdraw from stadium security (perez, ). the police protest of kaepernick continued in following the announcement of his table . blue lives matter us state bills, – . introduced california (ab ) new jersey (a ; s ; s ; a ) new york (s ) texas (hb ) illinois (hb ; hb ) maryland (sb ) missouri (hb ) new mexico (hb ) new york (a ; ab ) pennsylvania (hb ; hb ) south carolina (h ) washington (hb ; sb ; sb ) wisconsin (ab ) passed by senate new york (sb ) became law louisiana (hb ) arizona (sb ) arkansas (sb ) connecticut (hb ) georgia (sb ) kansas (sb ) kentucky (hb ) mississippi (hb ) nevada (ab ; sb ) north dakota (sb ) tennessee (hb / sb ) texas (hb ) west virginia (hb ) failed/repealed/ withdrawn alabama (hb ) delaware (sb ) new mexico (hb ) new york (a ) pennsylvania (hb ; sb ) virginia (hb ) maryland (sb ; hb ; hb ) mississippi (sb ; hb ; bh ; hb ; hb ; hb ; sb ; sb ; hb ; sb ) tennessee (sb ) virginia (sb ) note: a/ab, assembly bill; hb, house bill; sb, senate bill. sources: craven ( ), guha ( ). work, employment and society ( ) involvement in nike’s just do it campaign. a statement from napo called for a boycott of nike products, claiming that ‘mr kaepernick is known, not as a successful athlete, but as a shallow dilettante seeking to gain notoriety by disrespecting the flag for which so many americans have fought and died’ (mchale, ). the racialised attacks on the black lives matter movement through the blue lives discourse is not universalised across police associations, however. in recent years, organ- isations of black police officers have contested the public positions taken by napo and fop, with some even indicating support for black lives matter (fisk and richardson, ). in the case of the colin kaepernick–nike endorsement deal, a statement from the nbpa criticised the call for the nike boycott, indicating that the nbpa understood kaepernick’s protest to be consistent with the right to freedom of speech under the first amendment to the us constitution, and that ‘the nbpa supports any person or group who exercises their right to peacefully protest against any form of social injustice, includ- ing police brutality and racism’ (pruitt, ). the position of the nbpa presents a cau- tionary note to homogenising accounts of race and racism in relation to police unions. insofar as the discursive practices of blue lives matter aim to cast police as victims of violence and shield the members of police unions from public accountability for their own violence against racialised communities, collective agreements negotiated by police unions (as well as blue lives matter laws passed by state legislatures) reinforce these discursive practices by providing protection against investigatory and disciplinary meas- ures for officer misconduct. reviews of police union collective agreements conducted by both academic researchers (rushin, ) and civil rights advocates (mckesson et al., ) identify provisions that prevent anonymous complaints regarding police miscon- duct, place excessively restrictive conditions on the interrogation of police regarding misconduct, limit the capacities of civilian oversight bodies and prevent the retention of information regarding previous investigations and disciplinary history. it is through such provisions that the symbolic and discursive protests of blue lives matter are concretised in material conditions that serve to limit police accountability for officer misconduct and violence. as is the case in general when police regulate protests and picket lines, the politics of blue lives matter has brought police unions into conflict with other trade unions. for example, in july , at the american federation of teachers’ conference held in minneapolis, minnesota, teachers joined black lives matter activists protesting the kill- ing of philando castile by a minnesota police officer. two local police union leaders – saint paul police federation president dave titus and police officers federation of minneapolis president lieutenant bob kroll – issued a joint statement condemning teacher involvement in the protest, concluding that: ‘educators should demonstrate more common sense than rushing to judgment along with radical activists hell-bent on desta- bilizing our communities’ (cbs minnesota, ). in addition to demonstrating a vic- timhood discourse – where in this case it is the entire community that is under threat by the actions of black lives matter, not just the police – this example also illustrates a police union attempting to discipline another union, indicating the ways in which ‘blue solidarity’ conflicts with, and aims to undermine other forms of solidarity present within the working class. thomas and tufts practices of ‘blue solidarity’ that echo blue lives matter in the us have emerged in canada as well, notably around the decision not to allow uniformed police to march in toronto’s pride parade, a decision that had been initiated by the activism of black lives matter-toronto (blm-to). community activism around racial profiling and police violence in racialised communities had escalated during the mayoral term ( – ) of right-wing populist rob ford, precipitating the emergence of the black lives matter movement in the city. ford himself had maintained a largely supportive relation- ship with the tpa – the union representing toronto police officers – and expenditure on policing continued to rise during ford’s tenure, even while the mayor pursued an auster- ity agenda that included privatisation and spending reduction initiatives across the broader municipal workforce (thomas and tufts, ). in july , members of blm-to temporarily disrupted the city’s annual pride parade to protest uniformed police presence and official police floats. the protesters called for an official local com- munity meeting to discuss pride’s relationship with the black lgbtq community, with a key demand being that toronto police service (tps) officers not be allowed to march in uniform in the parade (walcott, ). in early , with the lgbtq community divided over the issue of police participation in the parade, toronto chief of police mark saunders announced the withdrawal of tps participation. the backlash against black lives matter from the tpa was swift. tpa president mike mccormack, who had actively spoken out against black lives matter prior to their protest at the pride parade, advocated that the city withdraw its funding for the parade. using a social justice/civil rights frame, mccormack adopted a discourse of ‘police victimisation’ to protest the call to exclude uniformed officers from the parade, articulating the notion that police were being marginalised by this exclusion. in january , mccormack stated: ‘pride organizers have played right into black lives matters’ hands [. . .] the message is clear, we are not welcome’ (quoted in levy, ). mccormack also made public statements on behalf of lgbtq officers in the tps who cast themselves as victimised by the city’s intention to fund the parade, asking: ‘how can we possibly feel appreciated by our employer while they sponsor an event that its own employees have been disinvited from participating in’ (quoted in janus, ). when tps officers were invited to march in uniform at the new york city pride parade, mccormack again articulated the toronto situation as exclusionary, stating: ‘i think it’s sad toronto couldn’t be that progressive and that inclusive’ (quoted in lalani, ). in framing the resistance to having uniformed officers march in the parade as exclusionary, the tpa, like blue lives matter, constructed an image of their own victimisation, thereby obfuscating the real marginalisation of black lives, this time in the canadian context. debate over the issue of the inclusion of uniformed police in the toronto pride parade remains contentious at the time of writing (june ). in october , the pride plan- ning organisation announced an end to the two-year ban, producing an outcry from com- munity members – including the no pride in policing coalition (nppc, ) – that resulted in a community vote in january to continue to uphold the ban (casey, ). while police unions continue to advocate for inclusion in pride, police presence is connected to a broader mainstreaming of the event itself (see walcott, ), creating divisions within the queer community and disciplining more radical and racialised queer voices. work, employment and society ( ) conclusion building on a larger literature that links policing practices with forms of institutionalised racism in the context of neoliberal capitalism, this article identifies ways in which police unions contribute to such processes through contemporary campaigns such as blue lives matter. as a practice of solidarity among unionised police officers, the case of blue lives matter reveals how forms of ‘blue solidarity’ constructed through the statements and practices of police unions, while protecting the interests of police union members, serve to repress and undermine broader working class organising, particularly among racialised communities. blue lives matter campaigns invoke the language of social jus- tice/civil rights movements, in effect, casting police as victims and thereby rendering invisible the marginalisation of racialised populations. this is evident in the explicit claims of victimisation made by blue lives matter in the us, as well as in the invocation of marginalisation by the tpa in response to its exclusion from toronto pride in . moreover, collective agreement provisions negotiated by police unions act as shields against accountability mechanisms for officer misconduct and violence against civilian populations. overall, while police unions improve working conditions for union mem- bers, they support the repressive role of policing within capitalism, and construct a privi- leged status for police union members derived from their role to ensure that working class dissent is contained on behalf of the local or national state. with regards to broader practices of labour solidarity, these tensions with police unions confront labour movements facing neoliberal austerity and rising right-wing authoritarian populism. through campaigns such as blue lives matter, police unions maintain symbiotic relationships with right-wing authoritarian populist politicians, who defend police against calls for greater police accountability and who support increased expenditure on police forces while implementing austerity measures for other public sector workers. at the current juncture, this article thus advocates that organised labour maintain a critical distance from police unions. such a position acknowledges that all workers have the right to organise, but that any union that actively limits the mobilisa- tion of the working class and positions itself above other workers does not hold promise as an ally in the practice of working class solidarity. dissenting voices within police unions such as the nbpa notwithstanding, broad-based solidarity from police unions is highly unlikely given the oaths their members take to uphold property rights and law and order in the face of dissent. only when the roles of policing and the legal regimes that accord police their authority substantially change should labour movements recon- sider relationships with police unions. advancing proposals for alternative modes of policing is beyond the scope of this article. leaving that agenda for future research, it can be concluded here that such alternatives are only likely to emerge when labour and social movements are able to disrupt the current order that police unions are designed to uphold. acknowledgements we would like to thank amanda salerno (graduate program in sociology, york university) for research assistance for this article. thomas and tufts funding the authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/ or publication of this article: research for the article was supported by social science and humanities research council (canada) insight grant # - - . notes . available at: http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/ad/public/static/letter/index.html. . this article utilises a definition of populism as a discursive strategy organised around broad appeals to the interests of ‘the people’ and articulated against the interests of ‘elites’ (laclau, ). left-populist movements are those that employ populist discourse through heterog- enous demands in democratic struggles that contest neoliberal capitalism (mouffe, ). . this formulation draws from miliband’s ( ) theory of the state in capitalist society, whereby the core institutions of the state system are defined as the government, the adminis- tration, the military and police, the judicial branch, and sub-national government assemblies. the article focuses on police in the public sector and does not include a discussion of forms of private sector security. . for a fuller discussion of this concept, see goldfield ( ). . within this literature, body-gendrot’s ( ) attention to connections between institutional- ised racism and police unions in france is a notable exception. . see, however, larson’s ( ) discussion of the us labour movement and black lives matter, which discusses the mass incarceration of african americans as a form of institutionalised racism and calls upon the labour movement to act in solidarity with black lives matter. . iupa represents , members, napo , and fop , . delord and york ( ) estimate that over % of police are unionised in the us, well above the public and pri- vate sector average. in canada, the cpa represents police personnel from organisations. . the movement defines itself as follows: ‘rooted in the experiences of black people in this country [us] who actively resist de-humanization, #blacklivesmatter is a call to action and a response to the virulent anti-black racism that permeates our society.’ available at: http:// blacklivesmatter.com/about/. . trump has been supportive of and supported by a number of unions in building trades and law enforcement (greenhouse, ). . this position may be easier for some unions to adopt than others. firefighters and emergency worker unions, for example, often have long-standing relationships with police unions. as well, some unions have significant memberships in the prison–industrial complex that argu- ably should also be subject to critical distance. . see rushin ( ) and fisk and richardson ( ) 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politics and international relations ( ): – . wilson s and buckler k ( ) the debate over police reform: examining minority support for citizen oversight and resistance by police unions. american journal of criminal justice: ajcj ( ): – . mark p thomas is associate professor in the department of sociology at york university (toronto, canada). he is former director of the global labour research centre at york and has been a visiting professor at the institute of political economy, carleton university (ottawa, canada) and a visiting researcher at institut de recherches sociologiques, université de genève. thomas is the author of regulating flexibility: the political economy of employment standards (mcgill-queens, ), co-author of work and labour in canada: critical issues, rd edition (canadian scholars press, ), and co-editor of several volumes, including change and continuity: canadian political economy in the new millennium (mcgill-queen’s university press, ). https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/ /national-black-police-association-letter-to-nike.pdf https://assets.documentcloud.org/documents/ /national-black-police-association-letter-to-nike.pdf https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/g / / / /police_union_calls_for_sid_ryan_to_resign_over_inflammatory_comment.html https://www.thestar.com/news/gta/g / / / /police_union_calls_for_sid_ryan_to_resign_over_inflammatory_comment.html http://theconversation.com/black-lives-matter-police-and-pride-toronto-activists-spark-a-movement- http://theconversation.com/black-lives-matter-police-and-pride-toronto-activists-spark-a-movement- https://nowtoronto.com/news/pride-toronto-toronto-police-racism/ https://nowtoronto.com/news/pride-toronto-toronto-police-racism/ work, employment and society ( ) steven tufts is associate professor in the department of geography at york university (toronto, canada). his research interests are related to the geographies of work, workers and organised labour. current projects include the use of strategic research by labour unions and labour union renewal in canada, the integration of immigrants in urban labour markets, labour market adjust- ment in the hospitality sector, the impact of climate change on hospitality work, and the intersec- tion between labour and growing populism. he has recently published in antipode, labor studies journal, the economic and labour relations review, and labour/le travail. date submitted november date accepted june appendix list of abbreviations afl-cio – american federation of labor and congress of industrial organizations blm-to – black lives matter-toronto cccs – centre for contemporary cultural studies cpa – canadian police association fop – fraternal order of police iupa – international union of police associations napo – national association of police organizations nbpa – national black police association nfl – national football league nppc – no pride in policing coalition ofl – ontario federation of labour tpa – toronto police association tps – toronto police service op-tahr .. manu goswami gabrielle hecht adeeb khalid anna krylova elizabeth f. thompson jonathan r. zatlin andrew zimmerman ahr conversation history after the end of history: reconceptualizing the twentieth century participants: manu goswami, gabrielle hecht, adeeb khalid, anna krylova, elizabeth f. thompson, jonathan r. zatlin, and andrew zimmerman over the last decade, this journal has published eight ahr conversations on a wide range of topics. by now, there is a regular format: the editor convenes a group of scholars with an interest in the topic who, via e-mail over the course of several months, conduct a conversation that is then lightly edited and footnoted, finally appearing in the december issue. the goal has been to provide readers with a wide-ranging and accessible consideration of a topic at a high level of ex- pertise, in which participants are recruited across several fields. it is the sort of publishing project that this journal is uniquely positioned to take. the initial impulse for the conversation came from a mellon sawyer seminar on “reinterpreting the twentieth century,” held at boston university in – . that seminar, convened by andrew bacevich, brooke bower, bruce schulman, and jonathan zatlin, invited participants to “challenge our assump- tions about the twentieth century, its ideologies, debates, divides, and more,” in a broad-based effort to “create new chronologies and narratives that engage with our current hopes and struggles.” for the ahr, this is a departure from previous conversation topics, in that it is chronologically bounded rather than thematically defined. that said, the editor made a concerted effort to assemble a group of scholars working in myriad subfields and drawing on a diverse range of “area studies” paradigms (though no doubt many of them would reject that very con- cept). the result, while inevitably leaving some very important regions out of the discussion (china comes to mind!), proved enriching and thought-provoking and should be of interest to readers interested in historical questions far beyond par- ticular regional specializations or even the twentieth century itself. “reinterpreting the twentieth century: a mellon sawyer seminar series,” boston university department of history, http://www.bu.edu/history/news-events/conferences/sawyer/. vc the author(s) . published by oxford university press on behalf of the american historical association. all rights reserved. for permissions, please e-mail journals.permissions@oup.com. http://www.bu.edu/history/news-events/conferences/sawyer/ the conversation was led by the – interim editor, alex lichtenstein. joining him are manu goswami, a historian of south asia from new york uni- versity; gabrielle hecht, a specialist in the history of technology and african his- tory at the university of michigan; adeeb khalid, a scholar of modern central asian history from carleton college; anna krylova, a historian of modern russia at duke university who is also interested in questions of theory and methodology of historical writing; elizabeth f. thompson, a historian of the middle east at american university; jonathan zatlin, a scholar of modern germany at boston university and one of the conveners of the original sawyer seminar at bu; and andrew zimmerman from george washington university, a scholar of nine- teenth-century transnational and comparative history with a strong theoretical bent. lichtenstein opened the conversation by asking participants to respond di- rectly to charles maier’s millennial assessment, “consigning the twentieth cen- tury to history,” published in the ahr in june . in that essay, maier de- ployed some key concepts that he believed could help historians organize their understanding of the century just past: “moral narratives,” “structural narratives” (the two often out of sync), and, especially, “territoriality.” from there, a very broad discussion ensued, touching on multiple forms of political power, questions of human agency, notions of subjectivity, and the competing narrative forms that we imagine allow us to make sense of the recent past—and thus our present. on this latter point, many of the participants throw into doubt the linear narratives of historical progress that so many theories of diachronic change seem to share. the conversation will continue with members of the audience at a panel at the aha annual meeting in denver in january , with krylova, lichtenstein, and zatlin as participants. we invite all those who read this and have remarks of their own to join us there. ahr editor (alex lichtenstein): the topic of this year’s conversation is somewhat unusual, in that it focuses on an epoch rather than a trans-temporal theme. neverthe- less, my hope is that all historians, whatever their interests, will be drawn to a discussion of how we might understand the most recent century. if nothing else, this forces us to reckon with how human beings attempt to create narrative coherence from a past that remains in living memory. how do we imagine and mark an epoch at its fading? how does each successive generation of historians craft a temporal framework out of their own past, and that of their parents and grandparents? what kinds of methodologies can historians in different fields bring to bear on defining an epoch? which events and developments stand out, and why? how might this differ according to the particular re- gional or topical expertise a historian brings to the table? surely, for example, the twen- tieth century looks dramatically different from either side of the berlin wall, or across the north-south divide. moreover, a historian of gender, a marxist scholar, or a histo- rian of technology (not that these are mutually exclusive categories) may see things quite distinctively. as charles maier asked in the pages of the ahr in , “will the twentieth century cohere as a historical epoch?” charles s. maier, “consigning the twentieth century to history: alternative narratives for the modern era,” american historical review , no. (june ): – . ibid., . ahr conversation american historical review december with these questions in mind, i would like to invite each of you to begin by addressing from your own particular field’s perspective what kind of “moral narratives” and “struc- tural narratives”—to rely on the terms maier favored in his essay—might be avail- able as we assess the twentieth century. maier, for his part, aimed at “periodizing mod- ern history” around the concept of “territoriality.” is this sufficient? gabrielle hecht: i’m still working out whether i agree with the thrust of maier’s es- say: namely, that territoriality can serve as a primary periodization tool, defining a his- torical epoch that begins around and ends in the s. but his analysis is cer- tainly good to think with. taking the history of technology as a starting point, maier’s case for beginning a new period around is compelling. infrastructural technologies such as railroads and telegraphs laid down corridors of power in metropoles and empires, facilitating conquest, extending landscapes, and enabling at least some measure of administration (often quite a large measure). we could think about this as an upscaling of capacity, a fundamental shift in elite technopolitical power that shaped states and corporations. historians have spent a great deal of energy unpacking the progress ideologies that ac- companied such infrastructural extensions. doing so inevitably produces moral narra- tives. most obviously, the twentieth century (however defined) saw a massive increase in the capacity to kill: tools of colonial conquest, such as machine guns and aerial bombing, spread to other battlefields; industrialized slaughter accounted for the terrify- ing efficiency of the holocaust; atomic bombs made apocalyptic imaginaries materially plausible. yet can such moral narratives be clearly distinguished from structural ones? the more you dig, the harder it becomes to disentangle these two types of chronicles. par- ticularly when you juxtapose the immediate violence enacted (or conjured) by such de- velopments with the “slow violence” of infrastructural expansion. as we begin this con- versation, lead contamination in flint, michigan (some fifty miles north of where i sit), is hitting the u.s. national media. this poisoning of flint residents comes from the en- counter between old pipes and untreated water. it also comes from a long series of de- cisions and non-decisions having to do with deferred maintenance, as well as from the structural manifestations and intersections of poverty and race. such technopolitical entanglements turn state and corporate apparatuses into toxic infrastructures, not just in flint but around the world. these dynamics help us see why periodizing the recent past is so charged: the act of periodization itself can activate politics of accountability, adjudications of blame, claims for compensation, assertions of rights. (these politics of ibid., – . one example among many: michael adas, machines as the measure of men: science, technology, and ideologies of western dominance (ithaca, n.y., ). a particularly compelling rendition of this trend can be found in sven lindqvist, a history of bombing (new york, ). rob nixon, slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor (cambridge, mass., ). there is a wide range of work on similar themes, including michelle murphy, sick building syndrome and the problem of uncertainty: environmental politics, technoscience, and women workers (durham, n.c., ); nancy langston, toxic bodies: hormone disruptors and the legacy of des (new haven, conn., ); brett l. walker, toxic archipelago: a history of industrial disease in japan (seattle, wash., ). this dynamic is illuminated by histories of risk and disaster management, such as scott gabriel knowles, the disaster experts: mastering risk in modern america (philadelphia, ); and arwen p. mohun, risk: negotiating safety in american society (baltimore, ). history after the end of history american historical review december periodization emerge particularly clearly in debates around the anthropocene, about which i’ll probably say more later on in the conversation.) with all this in mind, let me return briefly to territoriality. might we deepen its ana- lytic work by thinking about verticality? territoriality, as deployed in maier’s essay, is primarily about two-dimensional extensions in space, whether land or maritime; he doesn’t exclude the third dimension, but he doesn’t focus on it, either. pondering power “volumetrically” doesn’t just take us to aerial or submarine warfare. going up makes us consider skyscrapers, satellites, and outer space. going down makes us contemplate cables, tunnels, and mines. verticality matters to the forms of power enacted by such technopolitical assemblages. how can thinking in three dimensions shape our under- standing of the twentieth century? andrew zimmerman: i like how maier both distinguished structural from moral nar- ratives of the twentieth century and also posed the question of their articulation. he seemed to predict the decline of the moral narrative that yokes together the holocaust and the gulag as a warning against any large-scale, radical social change. that narra- tive, along with the concept of “totalitarianism” underlying it, was brilliantly skewered by slavoj �zi�zek in his did somebody say totalitarianism? maier’s prediction of the decline of the totalitarian narrative was bold (and in my view optimistic) in , at the end of the ’ s, when the market-based (or “civil society”) politics of neoliberalism still seemed hegemonic. maier predicted the increasing relevance of more radical politi- cal narratives, based in the struggles against colonialism, other forms of global inequal- ity, and associated forms of oppression existing in the global north as well as the global south. in a way, the recent democratic primary contest between hillary clinton and bernie sanders revealed a heightened conflict between these two narratives, and reflected an at least partial delegitimization of the neoliberal narrative. the neoliberal anti-“totalitarian” moral narrative continues to flourish, but, as maier predicted, the anticolonial narrative also grows stronger, and not just inside history departments. maier worried that the decline of territoriality (the structural narrative he outlined) would make it difficult for the moral narrative of anticolonialism to become politically effective. the playing field, in my view, remains level, however, since the decline of ter- ritoriality has also weakened the politics of neoliberalism, whose dependence on territo- rial state power was perhaps less obvious fifteen years ago. i like gabrielle’s suggestion to add a vertical dimension to the structural narrative of territorialization, especially as a way to think about environmental justice concerns, from flint to global climate change. we could speak here of a new round of enclosures, as the rich seize the air, water, climate from the poor as dumping grounds for toxic waste and/or sources of accumulation by dispossession. jason moore has developed a powerful analytic for thinking about capitalism as an ecology that is relevant here. the question then becomes how this structural narrative, the three-dimensional narra- stuart elden, “secure the volume: vertical geopolitics and the depth of power,” political geog- raphy (may ): – ; eyal weizman, hollow land: israel’s architecture of occupation (london, ); nicole starosielski, the undersea network (durham, n.c., ). slavoj �zi�zek, did somebody say totalitarianism? five interventions in the (mis)use of a notion (london, ). jason w. moore, capitalism in the web of life: ecology and the accumulation of capital (london, ). ahr conversation american historical review december tive of slow violence and toxic infrastructures that gabrielle highlights, articulates with the two moral narratives of the twentieth century that maier identified: neoliberal anti- “totalitarianism” and radical anti-imperialism (and critiques of associated inequalities of race, gender, and class). neoliberals were the ones to proclaim an end of history in the s, but in it seems to be the anti-imperialists who are concerned about the end of history, albeit in a far more dystopian sense than the neoliberals had been. manu goswami: published some sixteen years ago, maier’s essay serves as a strong riposte to frameworks that reduce historical temporality to chronology and those that treat historical periodization in formalistic terms as simply establishing and emending timelines. like gabrielle, however, i find the hard-and-fast binary between moral ver- sus structural narratives too sharply drawn to sustain. i agree with andrew that the es- say boldly, if controversially, questions the conflation of regionally grounded normative reckonings centered on the catastrophes of the holocaust and the gulag with the global scale as such. this conflation arguably helped buoy an “anti-totalitarian” consen- sus narrative that saturated the post-’ era, amid cold war triumphalism and the spread of market-disciplinary neoliberal creeds. here i want to raise two linked con- cerns about the substantive claims of maier’s essay—first, its view of territoriality as something amenable to a “rise and fall” metric, and second, its treatment of anti-impe- rialism as merely a moral narrative. maier’s conception of territoriality is overwhelmingly tied to a state-centered and state-directed understanding of infrastructures of power and institutional capacity. i was struck by how much this narrative—of the intensive territorialization of state power—synthesizes a specifically weberian tradition of historical sociology. i am think- ing here of michael mann’s multiple-volume work on the sources of social power that developed an argument about the infrastructural powers of the modern state and an- thony giddens’s conception of the modern state as a “bordered power container.” this is a powerful line of inquiry. yet it also presupposed the nation-state as its default unit, bracketing both imperial state formations and the specifically imperial scale of capitalism across the long nineteenth century. against the limits of this tradition, it might be useful to recall the work of the heterodox marxian social philosopher henri lefebvre for its distinct treatment of the articulation of state, capital, and territoriality. lefebvre’s work on social space, elaborated amid the diverse political and economic cataclysms of the s, sought to account for the survival of capitalism, for its astonish- ing persistence despite multifarious contradictions and accelerating social, ecological, and political costs. one of the answers that lefebvre develops across the production of space and the multivolume work on state space centers on how capitalism, along with the state, relies upon the continual production and management of a diverse and maier, “consigning the twentieth century to history,” . charles tilly, coercion, capital and european states, ad – , revised ed. (cambridge, mass., ); michael mann, the sources of social power, vol. : the rise of classes and nation-states, – (cambridge, ); anthony giddens, a contemporary critique of historical materialism, vol. : the nation-state and violence (cambridge, ), . henri lefebvre, the production of space, trans. donald nicholson-smith ( ; repr., oxford, ); lefebvre, the survival of capitalism (london, ); lefebvre, state, space, world: selected essays, ed. neil brenner and stuart elden, trans. gerald moore, neil brenner, and stuart elden (min- neapolis, ). history after the end of history american historical review december hierarchically ordered ensemble of spaces. lefebvre’s conception of capitalist space- time as simultaneously global, hierarchical, and fragmented is pertinent precisely be- cause of its emphasis on a multiform and contradictory order. its focus on produced spaces rather than a pre-given or fixed realm of territoriality cannot be assimilated to a unilineal periodization—the “rise and fall”—of territoriality. from this vantage, the post- s era of state/capital relations entailed less the decomposition and dissolution of territoriality than a dynamic rescaling—a simultaneous reterritorialization and deter- ritorialization—of national state power, sectors of capital, and modes of collective sub- jectivity. the “end-of-territoriality” thesis that underwrites maier’s essay unwittingly re- iterates the state-decline thesis and utopian projections of a borderless, friction-free world that have been key elements of neoliberal globalism. the absence of capitalism as an organizing category of analysis leads, i think, to an unduly flat and static concep- tion of territoriality, one that glosses over such distinct political forms as empire and nation as well as internal caesuras within twentieth-century capitalism. my point here is less to disagree with maier’s emphasis on a growing territorial alignment between governance and collective identity—what he terms “decision space” and “identity space”—across the temporal period of to . rather, in order for this large-scale temporalization to have global purchase, it must be qualified in rela- tion to shifting conjunctures and scales of capitalism, distinct political forms, and count- erhegemonic internationalist projects. until the mid-twentieth century, the dominant scale of governance, capitalism, and techno-institutional assemblages was, for instance, that of empire and not the bounded nation form. anti-imperialism and the multiple projects of decolonization it spawned across distinct conjunctures cannot then be con- fined to a moral or normative domain. they had profound cumulative (if not irrevers- ible) consequences for the substantive reconfiguration of capital and sovereignty, on the one hand, and the articulation of collective institutions and modes of politics, on the other. consider, for instance, the animating goals of the new international economic order led by third world states (under the leadership of latin american countries whose decolonization had preceded that of asia, africa, and the middle east), which sought to wrest effective territorial and institutional sovereignty over economic re- sources and strategies of development in the decade that maier sees as marking the be- ginning of the end of the age of territoriality. this was a robust counter-imperial proj- ect of political-economic sovereignty that extended territoriality in the vertical direction that gabrielle asks us to consider, insofar as they foregrounded questions of the owner- ship and management of “natural” resources from rare-earth minerals to fossil fuels. it popular neoliberal globalist works include kenichi ohmae, the end of the nation-state: the rise of regional economies (new york, ); ohmae, the borderless world: power and strategy in the inter- linked economy (new york, ); thomas l. friedman, the world is flat (new york, ). for a strong critique, see neil brenner, “beyond state-centrism? space, territoriality, and geographical scale in globalization studies,” theory and society , no. ( ): – ; and david harvey, the limits to capital (oxford, ). maier, “consigning the twentieth century to history,” . samir amin, “self-reliance and the new international economic order,” monthly review , no. ( ): – ; amin, “after the new international economic order: the future of international eco- nomic relations,” journal of contemporary asia , no. ( ): – ; greg grandin, empire’s work- shop: latin america, the united states, and the rise of the new imperialism (new york, ), chap. ; vanessa ogle, “state rights against private capital: the ‘new international economic order’ and the struggle over aid, trade, and foreign investment, – ,” humanity: an international journal of human rights, humanitarianism, and development , no. ( ): – . ahr conversation american historical review december is hard to imagine the subsequent global immanence of neoliberal economic creeds and modes of governance without reference to the orchestrated defeat of this project. maier’s essay forces us to acknowledge that even as histories of major events, strug- gles, and artifacts of the twentieth century proliferate—from mass revolution and total war to liberal internationalism and human rights discourses—basic temporal and spatial considerations remain contested. since the essay first appeared, some shifts within the still-vital genre of “histories of the twentieth century” are already apparent. if the de- nouement of communism and the cold war dominated the first wave of post- reckonings with the twentieth century, historical assessments set nearer the millennium fronted questions of globalization and sovereignty, civil society and cosmopolitanism. more recently still, following speculative boom-and-bust cycles across world regions, the political-economic transcripts of intensifying social inequality, ecological and racial dispossessions, and the imperilment of democratic institutions have animated expand- ing waves of historical and historically minded research. we should expect, in other words, the twentieth century—both “what happened and what was said to have hap- pened,” to borrow the haitian historical anthropologist’s michel-rolph trouillot’s gloss on historical practice—to continually mutate. jonathan zatlin: maier’s essay was well timed, well considered, and well written. it raises important questions about the historical coherence of the twentieth century at its chronological close. perhaps more importantly, it throws into relief the perils of period- ization, warning against imposing present concerns onto the recent past. it also usefully disentangles structural from moral narratives. but as an attempt to offer a working al- ternative to existing periodicity, i don’t find maier’s notion of “territoriality” compel- ling. manu has provided us with a powerful critique of its state-centered narrative. both gabrielle and andrew commented insightfully, if skeptically, on the conceptual “breadth” of territoriality. gabrielle’s suggestion for “lengthening” it and andrew’s for including its exclusions enhance the flexibility of maier’s period. but i want to argue that this very flexibility is the problem. to construct a discrete historical division in time that is also capacious enough to incorporate the intellectual diversity of current inquiry, maier is forced to dilute the conceptual features of his periodic framework. he does so in part, as manu notes, by removing capitalism from his equation. but the more rele- vant he makes “territoriality” to the proliferation of histories that are now possible to imagine, the more he must sacrifice theoretical imagination and analytical rigor, which are what lend periodization its explanatory power. c. a. bayly, the birth of the modern world, – : global connections and comparisons (cambridge, ); sudipta kaviraj and sunil khilnani, civil society: history and possibilities (cam- bridge, ); jürgen osterhammel and niels p. petersson, globalization: a short history, trans. dona geyer (princeton, n.j., ); manuel castells, the rise of the network society (malden, mass., ); jürgen habermas, the postnational constellation: political essays, trans. and ed. max pensky (cam- bridge, mass., ); michael hardt and antonio negri, empire (cambridge, mass., ). wendy brown, undoing the demos: neoliberalism’s stealth revolution (cambridge, mass., ); david harvey, spaces of capital: towards a critical geography (new york, ); frederick cooper, “what is the concept of globalization good for? an african historian’s perspective,” african affairs , no. ( ): – ; charles tilly, durable inequality (berkeley, calif., ); thomas piketty, capital in the twenty-first century, trans. arthur goldhammer (cambridge, mass., ). michel-rolph trouillot, silencing the past: power and the production of history (boston, ), . history after the end of history american historical review december i’m not suggesting that maier’s proposal is without utility, or that we should return to older ideas such as “modernity.” nor do i think “the twentieth century” will suffice even as a placeholder, not least because it is the product of a christological reckoning with time that is hardly accepted throughout the world. rather, i detect at the heart of maier’s proposal the urge to construct a common narrative, a need that is itself con- structed by the transitional period we’re living in. the economic and technological forces that are bringing the world closer together are at the same time driving people further apart, as differential vulnerabilities to cultural uniformity, environmental pollu- tion, and income inequality widen existing gulfs. for professional historians, this dialec- tic has meant among other things a fleeting nostalgia for unifying narratives amid the polysemic din. yet the growing integration of peoples, places, and things into new his- torical narratives necessarily disrupts intellectual consensus, while the proliferation of histories collaborates in the growing fragmentation of older and established hierarchies of meaning. it isn’t enough, i think, merely to insert capitalism or to replace the state with the market—even if i very much like the idea based on my own intellectual preoc- cupations. instead, i want to focus on the tale itself, which is one of declension and decentered meaning. maier’s distinction between structural and moral narratives is useful, but ne- glects the ways in which narratological choices overdetermine the way that we recount history. those choices, when left unanalyzed, make it possible to ignore the cultural embeddedness of the background against which they’re told (such as presenting “the twentieth century” as a mere arithmetic division in time). the growing desire to sell books to a public that prefers narrative to argument has only aggravated existing ten- maier’s article, for example, presents territoriality as a kind of least common denominator to which historians working in various fields can all subscribe. at its finest, marxist history generates a simi- lar sensation of coherence despite its preoccupation with the state (eric hobsbawm, the age of extremes: the short twentieth century, – [new york, ]), while economic history remains committed to overarching explanations of economic growth (see most recently the fascination with the intergenera- tional transmission of various kinds of capital, from carmen m. reinhart and kenneth s. rogoff, “growth in a time of debt,” american economic review , no. [ ]: – , and piketty, capital in the twenty-first century, to maristella botticini and zvi eckstein, the chosen few: how education shaped jewish history, – [princeton, n.j., ]). significantly, works that strike historians as “bad” are often perceived as such because the master narrative they advocate lacks causal flexibility (daniel jonah goldhagen, hitler’s willing executioners: ordinary germans and the holocaust [new york, ]) or critical distance (arno j. mayer, why did the heavens not darken? the “final solution” in his- tory [new york, ]). but perhaps the interest in master narratives has simply become a left-wing or liberal lapsus. whatever the case, mark mazower manages to subordinate a larger argument about the weakness of interwar social compacts to the larger story of european destruction in his breathtaking syn- thetic work dark continent: europe’s twentieth century (new york, ), a feat he did not achieve in hitler’s empire: how the nazis ruled europe (new york, ). in addition to hayden white’s work (particularly “the fictions of factual representation,” in anna green and kathleen troup, eds., the houses of history: a critical reader in twentieth-century his- tory and theory [manchester, ], – , and “the value of narrativity in the representation of reality,” in white, the content of the form: narrative discourse and historical representation [baltimore, ], – ) and the work of jacques derrida (particularly “white mythology: metaphor in the text of philosophy,” in derrida, margins of philosophy, trans. alan bass [chicago, ], – ), i’m thinking of f. r. ankersmit’s attempt to make sense of historicity (see especially “historicism: an attempt at synthesis,” history and theory , no. [ ]: – ), amos funkenstein’s brilliant ruminations on the construction of historical narrative (perhaps most powerfully in “history, counterhistory, and narrative,” in saul friedlander, ed., probing the limits of representation: nazism and the “final solution” [cambridge, mass., ], – ), and slavoj �zi�zek’s conceptualization of narrative as authorial enact- ment ( �zi�zek, “the truth arises from misrecognition,” in ellie ragland-sullivan and mark bracher, eds., lacan and the subject of language [new york, ], – ). ahr conversation american historical review december sions between analysis and storytelling inherent in historical work. those tensions also shape the rift between our research and our teaching; it seems to me that they were felt even more strongly when undergraduate enrollments in history fell after the collapse of european communism had subsided and the capitalist world could return to its “work.” whatever the periodization we construct, however broadly it might appeal, it must mind these gaps. elizabeth f. thompson: i wish to engage the conversation on maier’s use of territo- riality to define an epoch, roughly to . gabrielle, andrew, manu, and jona- than have raised compelling criticisms about the limits (two-dimensional) of the con- cept, about the linkage of its demise to weakness of moral claims, about delinking the history of the nation-state from that of capitalism, and about dilution of the concept to the point that it loses explanatory power. i find most compelling manu’s reference to henri lefebvre’s the production of space, which, she notes, argues that “capitalism, along with the state, relies upon the continual production and management of a diverse and hierarchically ordered ensem- ble of spaces.” indeed, as manu suggests, the normative political unit for much of the world’s population through remained empire, not nation-state. moreover, most of the globe’s peoples have since still largely failed to secure the level of national sover- eignty that maier claims defined his century. while maier nods to historians of non- europe, his argument remains fundamentally eurocentric. like gabrielle and andrew, i also question maier’s decoupling of analytical and structural narratives. from the viewpoint of the middle eastern societies i study, the two narratives are tightly conjoined in what i would call the long twentieth century. world war i opened an era of global mass politics, in which non-europeans have strived for equal rights with europeans and north americans. the century is defined by the latter’s effort to relegate those peoples to a lesser rung of humanity, civilization, race, beginning with the treaties imposed after world war i. it is this struggle that has underpinned the major conflicts and mass murders of the century, as well as its brightest moments of hope—for example, at the united nations in , in the united states in , and in south africa in . the arab spring uprisings of were all animated by peoples seeking the dignity of human rights and equal portions of bread—a dignity denied them in the very transnational world system that assured unequal access to global markets and capital and that forced them to live under externally supported dicta- torships, whether in the colonial or cold war eras. the peoples of the middle east did not feel the passing of an era in the late twenti- eth century, contrary to maier’s or eric hobsbawm’s view. for them, territoriality has remained a long-deferred dream, not a memory. like so many across the less industri- alized world, arabs have been fighting “distributive social conflicts” since the s, michael goebel, anti-imperial metropolis: interwar paris and the seeds of third world nationalism (new york, ); elizabeth f. thompson, justice interrupted: the struggle for constitutional government in the middle east (cambridge, mass., ); adria k. lawrence, imperial rule and the politics of nation- alism: anti-colonial protest in the french empire (new york, ); marilyn lake and henry reynolds, drawing the global colour line: white men’s countries and the international challenge of racial equality (new york, ); erez manela, the wilsonian moment: self-determination and the international origins of anticolonial nationalism (new york, ). hobsbawm, the age of extremes. history after the end of history american historical review december not since the s, as maier would have it. non-europeans recall many more moral atrocities than those committed under stalin and hitler: those of the young turks in , of hiroshima in , of the repeated famines in british india, of algeria, and the bloodletting of proxy wars in vietnam and southwest africa, and so on. in this per- spective, today’s collapse of arab states and flow of migrants into europe appear to play out in terms of european-american hegemony reasserted so problematically in paris in . is the long twentieth century soon to end? adeeb khalid: maier is absolutely right to question the value of periodizations based simply on chronology and presents us with the notion of “territoriality” as marking a period that would be of help in understanding key structural transformations of mod- ern history. while i agree in large measure with maier’s point, i don’t see how territori- ality is the only feature for analyzing history, or indeed if we can be so sure of its pass- ing. true enough that contemporary states cannot see the control of territory as quite so fundamental a part of their resources, but surely the archipelago of u.s. military bases around the world and its flotillas of satellites and drones have something to do with the control of space, a control that structures the contemporary world order. we can also find vectors other than territoriality that would lead to other conceptualiza- tions of time frames for understanding the world we live in. and i agree with those who have called into question the sustainability of the dis- tinction between “moral” and “structural” narratives that maier posits. in this vein, elizabeth thompson is quite right to point out that maier’s “argument remains funda- mentally eurocentric.” the history of non-western peoples trying to assert their pres- ence in the world is perhaps a fundamental feature of the recent past. whether it took the form of state-centric efforts such as those launched at bandung in or, perhaps more significantly, of counter-state radical movements such as socialism and (other) “national liberation movements,” the search for equality and for overturning the order imposed by empire is a defining feature of the era. it has taken many forms and pro- duced different kinds of results, both noble and ignoble. it has taken different paths, whether those of emulation (“mimicry”) or rejection of europe (and the consequent search for “authenticity”), or of anything in between. surely this is where we might search for a “constellation of events” that had major significance for large numbers of actors in the recent past and that can be seen to constitute a distinct era. whether that era is past is a different question, and a difficult one to answer. cer- tainly in teaching american undergraduates, it is clear that the worlds of proletarian or- ganization, third-worldism, import substitution, and the search for alternatives to the (neo)liberal order are long gone. they appear to my students to be as distant and as ex- otic (if not more so) as those of the middle ages. yet, as elizabeth reminds us, the questions of human and national dignity are still very salient to many peoples in the world today, even if the answers today are posed differently. mass utopia, indeed, has passed (as susan buck-morss pointed out a decade ago). the literature on national movements, nation-state building, and decolonization is vast. pankaj mishra’s recent work from the ruins of empire: the revolt against the west and the remaking of asia (london, ) provides an admirable synthesis and overview. susan buck-morss, dreamworld and catastrophe: the passing of mass utopia in east and west (cambridge, mass., ). ahr conversation american historical review december anna krylova: maier’s essay happens to resonate with me much more strongly in than when i first read it more than a decade ago. what resonates is not maier’s attempt at creating what gabrielle so fittingly characterized as “a primary periodization tool”—the master concept of “territoriality”—with which maier hoped to resist persis- tent “moral stories” about the twentieth century as well as the moralizing propensity of the historian’s craft itself. though i cannot help but admire the intellectual boldness of such an undertaking, i also share andrew’s, gabrielle’s, and jonathan’s reservations about its analytical purchase. i wonder whether an intellectual agenda aiming at creat- ing a “primary tool” of historical periodization and narration even for one epoch can ever be anything but an invariably limiting and vulnerable analytical undertaking, as manu and elizabeth have argued. what resonates with me is not maier’s proposed solution to the “metaphorical sug- gestiveness” (which, i believe, we are to read as analogical, descriptive, and shallow) of moral narratives, but his critique of the moralizing narrative itself as a consistent prob- lem of historiography, the problem that is worth, i think, reconsidering and reformulat- ing in relation to our current historiographies of the twentieth century. building on alex’s remarks, i wonder if we could turn the question of whether the twentieth century will “cohere as a historical epoch” into a question of what has been happening to the “twentieth century” in our respective fields over the past fifteen years. what narratives (moralizing or not so moralizing) have cohered? what old metaphors—these discursive anchors around which moral stories congeal—have proven indispensable? what new metaphors have become warranted? it seems to me that one can productively pursue these questions without falling into maier’s rather problematic treatment of moral and structural narratives as countering modes of analysis. ahr editor: as i read your initial responses to the maier article, i found myself won- dering how we could think more about the innovations in techniques of power (gabri- elle uses the term “technopolitical”) that marked twentieth-century lives. attention to such techniques—theorized as “biopower,” “high modernism,” or “the production of space,” to name but three influential examples—may help get us beyond state-centered and mere geographic explanations of “territoriality.” this more diffuse approach may move us instead toward the kinds of issues some of you gesture at: “verticality,” the definition, control, and movement of populations, the archipelagic ability to dominate non-contiguous territories, alternative narratives or “emplotment.” yet attention to such repertoires of power still permits the construction of both moral narratives and structural explanations, though perhaps in novel registers. could each of you speak to how, from the perspective of developments in your own field and/or research, historians have explored or defined such emergent techniques of power to come to grips with the twentieth century? michel foucault, security, territory, population: lectures at the collège de france, – , ed. michel senellart, trans. graham burchell (new york, ); foucault, the birth of biopolitics: lectures at the collège de france, – , ed. michel senellart, trans. graham burchell (new york, ); james c. scott, seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed (new haven, conn., ); lefebvre, the production of space. history after the end of history american historical review december andrew zimmerman: the emergence of techniques of power as a topic distinct from political movements is not only an optic through which to consider the twentieth cen- tury but also an artifact of the late twentieth century. this perspective, whose most im- portant theorist was foucault, is closely related to the neoliberal moral narrative that maier discussed: power is always suspect, always on the side of the oppressor, and lib- eration consists in individuals avoiding this power but not exercising their own (except in the market or “civil society”). agamben’s notion of homo sacer, in which the modern political subject is bare life, in fact only an object of politics, is perhaps the perfected form of this misarchism. hannah arendt, who was, i think, agamben’s best theoreti- cal source, had a better model of power, which emphasizes the creative politics of the insurgent people, with state, capital, and other forms of oppression as depoliticizing forces. and for arendt, the great political technique, which can only be exercised by this insurgent power, is the workers’ council, for example in the soviets of the russian revolutions (particularly before kronstadt) and in the hungarian revolution. coming to the twentieth century from my own area of specialty—the nineteenth cen- tury—i would trace this technique of power in europe to the paris commune (so bril- liantly analyzed by kristen ross in her recent book) and, centuries before europeans caught on, to the variety of maroon and other political forms created by people of afri- can descent within and against slavery and racial capitalism—forms my colleague jes- sica krug terms “fugitive modernities.” elizabeth f. thompson: a brief sociopolitical look at the middle east reveals a re- gion where it is difficult to displace the state’s overwhelming assertion of power in the twentieth century. from the perspective of state techniques of power, the twentieth century makes sense as a distinct and tragic historical period. world war i and the sub- sequent colonization in the arab world initiated a new era. by the turn of the century, the former ottoman state had developed a rudimentary intelligence network of spies, who funneled data to istanbul through telegrams and photos. in retrospect, its methods of surveillance and repression were both quaint (sultan abdulhamid loved sherlock holmes stories) and simply brutal (as in massacres of bulgarians and armenians). in the decade of war from to , however, the turks systematized methods of con- trol and repression so as to engineer a genocide of armenians and to keep the half- starved populations of rural anatolia and the arab provinces subservient. contrary to europe, there were no outright mutinies in the army, only a growing tide of desertion. as in europe, the wartime state became a terrible dictatorship, ruthless in its repres- sion and highly centralized in controlling national resources. the state appropriated private property at will, and quarantined noncompliant elites. it used terror to quash giorgio agamben, homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life, trans. daniel heller-roazen (palo alto, calif., ). the term “misarchism” is from friedrich nietzsche, on the genealogy of morality, ed. keith ansell-pearson, trans. carol diethe (cambridge, ), ii: . hannah arendt, on revolution ( ; repr., new york, ). kristen ross, communal luxury: the political imaginary of the paris commune (london, ); jessica a. krug, “‘they glorify in a certain independence’: the politics of identity in kisama, angola, and its diasporas in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries” (ph.d. diss., university of wisconsin– madison, ); krug, “social dismemberment, social (re)membering: obeah idioms, kromanti identi- ties, and the trans-atlantic politics of memory, c. –present,” slavery and abolition , no. ( ): – . ahr conversation american historical review december opposition, as with the mass executions of arab notables at beirut and damascus in and . unlike europe, liberal political forces were permitted little room for a corrective af- ter the armistice. the threat and then reality of european occupation extended militarized governance into the postwar era. most remarkable among arab mandates established from remnants of the ottoman empire was the fusion of state administra- tion with intelligence from the inception of the regimes. as martin thomas has shown in syria, even health and education ministries funneled data directly to secret police. as priya satia has shown in iraq, the british adopted cost-cutting measures of carpet- bombing resistant populations. as i and others have demonstrated, the royal air force developed techniques in “peacetime” iraq that would be perfected at dresden in world war ii. even after iraq won nominal independence in , the british re- tained control of internal security apparatuses, which practiced torture at abu ghraib prison in the s. iraq’s only truly national political party, the iraqi communist party, developed only because its leader had learned techniques of underground organizing in moscow. the party gained a following of more than a million members by the time of the coup that finally chased the british from the country. the british used simi- lar methods in palestine against arabs, in the – revolt, initiating the tactic of bombing homes of suspected activists that was later used by israel. independent arab regimes established in the second half of the twentieth century adopted this militarized/colonial dna to produce the regimes of terror under saddam hussein, hafez al-assad in syria, muammar qaddhafi in libya, and gamal abdel- nasser in egypt. historical sociologists and political scientists like david waldner, ste- ven heydemann, lisa wedeen, tim mitchell, hanna batatu, and joseph sassoon have shown how postcolonial arab states harnessed their colonial legacy to the new technol- ogies of one-party rule, hollowing out what remained of an independent, law-abiding, civilian bureaucracy. to establish and maintain power, these military dictatorships im- posed heavy control over agricultural and industrial production as well. the arab spring of rose up against the cancerous growth of secret police and brutality in these states, and against their consequent intolerance of the free markets that would foster economic development. a most optimistic view of the current chaos in the arab world is that it represents the unraveling of techniques of power born a century ago. m. talha çiçek, war and state formation in syria: cemal pasha’s governorate during world war i, – (new york, ); erik j. zürcher, the young turk legacy and nation building: from the otto- man empire to atatürk’s turkey (new york, ); u�gur €umit €ungör, the making of modern turkey: nation and state in eastern anatolia, – (new york, ). martin thomas, empires of intelligence: security services and colonial disorder after (berke- ley, calif., ); priya satia, spies in arabia: the great war and the cultural foundations of britain’s covert empire in the middle east (new york, ); elizabeth f. thompson, “déj�a vu in the middle east: the not so new face of war,” paper presented at historians against the war national confer- ence, towson, md., april – , . thompson, justice interrupted, chap. . david waldner, state building and late development (ithaca, n.y., ); steven heydemann, authoritarianism in syria: institutions and social conflict, – (ithaca, n.y., ); lisa wedeen, ambiguities of domination: politics, rhetoric, and symbols in contemporary syria (chicago, ); timo- thy mitchell, rule of experts: egypt, techno-politics, modernity (berkeley, calif., ); hanna batatu, the old social classes and the revolutionary movements of iraq: a study of iraq’s old landed and com- mercial classes and of its communists, baithists, and free officers (london, ); joseph sassoon, sad- dam hussein’s baith party: inside an authoritarian regime (new york, ). history after the end of history american historical review december gabrielle hecht: andrew’s observation about the twentieth-century origins of “tech- niques of power” is particularly apt for the history of technology—even though the ge- nealogy of that subdiscipline largely bypasses foucault. the field emerged in the s, in part to counter the history of science’s epistemological privileging of dematerialized knowledge production, and in part in responding to anxieties pervading cold war engi- neering education. the first generation of technology historians sought to challenge technological determinism in multiple venues (including historical scholarship, engi- neering practice, and popular discourse). thomas parke hughes’s study of electrifica- tion in germany, britain, and the u.s. was particularly influential in pushing historians to think about industrial technologies in a “seamless web” of politics, hardware, institu- tions, and geography. in the s, his study of sociotechnical systems gained traction among sociologists and others in the emerging field of science and technology studies (sts). while tightly coupled systems (such as railroads and telegraphs) had their origins in the nineteenth century, it was the twentieth century that witnessed the rapid spread and dense interconnection of sociotechnical systems, and that’s where the bulk of re- search has concentrated. over time, scholars have explored sociotechnical systems (along with “assemblages” and “infrastructures”) in order to address broad historical themes such as nation-building, war, the making of europe, expertise and democracy, gender, and much more. one especially interesting strand—relevant to our discussion of territoriality and verticality—concerns the forms of governance and modes of politi- cal contestation produced by the emergence of “cosmopolitan commons” such as air- space, radio waves, or undersea oil reserves. in these conversations, sts scholars are particularly interested in the stuff of poli- tics. can technology be understood as “politics by other means”? that formulation as- sumes that politics and technology influence each other but remain ontologically dis- tinct. another view—which i gloss as technopolitics—sees particular technological forms and practices as ontologically inseparable from (a) the political negotiations that produce them and/or (b) the politics that they enact or permit. in an early analysis along these lines, sociologist donald mackenzie offered a radical reinterpretation of cold war nuclear strategy, arguing that policies such as mutually assured destruction, counterforce targeting, and other aspects of deterrence resulted not from high-level de- cision-making by policymakers, but rather from an accumulation of small choices made for a history of the field, see bruce e. seely, “shot, the history of technology, and engineering education,” technology and culture , no. ( ): – . debates about technological determinism are captured in leo marx, ed., does technology drive history? the dilemma of technological determin- ism, ed. merritt roe smith and leo marx (cambridge, mass., ). thomas p. hughes, networks of power: electrification in western society, – (baltimore, ). subsequent debates played out in volumes such as wiebe e. bijker, thomas p. hughes, and trevor j. pinch, eds., the social construction of technological systems: new directions in the sociology and history of technology (cambridge, mass., ); wiebe e. bijker and john law, eds., shaping technology/building society: studies in sociotechnical change (cambridge, mass., ). on the role of technological systems in modern european history, see the palgrave macmillan se- ries “making europe: technology and transformations, – ,” including ruth oldenziel and mikael hård, consumers, tinkerers, rebels: the people who shaped europe (new york, ), and per högselius, arne kaijser, and erik van der vleuten, europe’s infrastructure transition: economy, war, nature (basingstoke, ). on gender, see nina e. lerman, ruth oldenziel, and arwen mohun, eds., gender and technology: a reader (baltimore, ), among many other works. nil disco and eda kranakis, cosmopolitan commons: sharing resources and risks across borders (cambridge, mass., ). ahr conversation american historical review december by weapons designers striving toward greater missile accuracy. inspired by his analysis, i made a similar argument concerning france’s nuclear program, showing how its atomic bombs took shape in the cores of its earliest reactors, years before french politi- cians made a “decision” to develop a nuclear weapons program. french nuclear insti- tutions pursued contrasting technopolitical regimes, which enacted different visions of national identity, expert rule, labor, and democracy. historians have also used this ap- proach to deprovincialize the cold war, gaining insight into such topics as the “net- worked empire” of u.s. island military bases, the technopolitics of dissent in saudi arabia’s oil/water complex, or zimbabwe’s anticolonial struggle. technopolitics became a privileged mode of state power in the twentieth century— not just in metropoles, but also in empires and postcolonies—because it could be an ef- fective tool of depoliticization, displacing negotiation and struggle into technical realms where few could claim authority. timothy mitchell (whom elizabeth also invoked) ana- lyzed the “rule of experts” in egypt by exploring the aswan dam and other large-scale endeavors; the genealogy of his “technopolitics” passes through foucault more than it does sts. but technopolitical power isn’t hegemonic, nor is it limited to the state, and the displacements it effects can be challenged. brian larkin examines media in ni- geria, showing how the state, colonial subjects, and postcolonial citizens used radio and other media as technopolitical instruments, shaping strategies, outcomes, and experi- ences. workers and other citizens who confront technopolitical power in their daily lives have themselves developed technopolitical modes of survival, resistance, and claims-making. uranium miners in namibia deployed their own technopolitical strate- gies when linking their unionization efforts to the broader national liberation struggle. indeed, technopolitical strategies played an important role in the international anti- apartheid movement—both in the implementation of sanctions against military and computer equipment, and in specific operations of sabotage and communication. jonathan zatlin: marked by the collapse of an empire and the failure of a demo- cratic state, two world wars and two dictatorial regimes, germany’s tumultuous twen- tieth century has provided unusually fertile grounds for thinking about techniques of power. it is no accident, for example, that german-speaking social scientists were among the most significant contributors to totalitarianism theory, perhaps the most in- fluential product of cold war political thought. from karl popper and hannah arendt donald mackenzie, inventing accuracy: a historical sociology of nuclear missile guidance (cam- bridge, mass., ). gabrielle hecht, the radiance of france: nuclear power and national identity after world war ii (cambridge, mass., ). see also sara b. pritchard, confluence: the nature of technology and the remaking of the rhône (cambridge, mass., ). ruth oldenziel, “islands: the united states as a networked empire,” in gabrielle hecht, ed., entangled geographies: empire and technopolitics in the global cold war (cambridge, mass., ), – ; toby craig jones, desert kingdom: how oil and water forged modern saudi arabia (cambridge, mass., ); clapperton chakanetsa mavhunga, transient workspaces: technologies of everyday innova- tion in zimbabwe (cambridge, mass., ). mitchell, rule of experts. brian larkin, signal and noise: media, infrastructure, and urban culture in nigeria (durham, n.c., ). gabrielle hecht, being nuclear: africans and the global uranium trade (cambridge, mass., ); paul n. edwards and gabrielle hecht, “history and the technopolitics of identity: the case of apart- heid south africa,” journal of southern african studies , no. ( ): – . history after the end of history american historical review december to carl friedrich and karl dietrich bracher, the various iterations of the theory shared an emphasis on the malleability of populations through ideological mobilization, puni- tive surveillance, and bureaucratic rationality that bore all the marks of their encounter with national socialism even as it served to defend the liberal state from its illiberal op- ponents. in contrast, historians focused on periodization as a way to work through the trau- matic consequences of national socialism and a genocide that, at first, received only oblique mention. the direct experience of german fascism led many to invert previ- ously positive narratives of german exceptionalism (as either a more progressive or a more national state than its british, french, and russian competitors) and view ger- man history instead as moving along a disastrous “special path” (sonderweg) to hitler. as a result, much scholarship after the war recruited all sorts of evidence to explain the inevitability of . the organizing clarity and conceptual distortions of this approach are perhaps most obvious in hans-ulrich wehler’s brilliant synthetic history the ger- man empire, – ( ), which succeeds in reducing nineteenth-century ger- man history to a tale of incomplete modernization and charismatic dictatorship, bis- marckian carpe diem to hitler ante portas, and to , as if weimar were a mere rest stop on the way to the real destination. even excursions into comparative history were organized by this teleology of aberrance. more direct challenges to the sonderweg sought to wrest german history from the grip of exceptionalism only to reinscribe the centrality of the state as a source for organizing their narrative. perhaps for this reason, peter pulzer, one of the more astute historians of german politics, could conclude in a statement of dialectical defiance that “all german regimes have been attempts to counter the mistakes of the previous one.” by the s, however, historians had begun to look beyond the state for clues about german society. the mounting challenge to the sonderweg was most famously captured by david blackbourn and geoff eley’s peculiarities of german history ( ), which attacked the concept of german deviance by undermining the normative status of germany’s putative developmental other, great britain, and shifting focus away from electoral politics to civil society for evidence of democratic practice. if the book k. r. popper, the open society and its enemies (london, ); hannah arendt, the origins of totalitarianism (new york, ); arendt, eichmann in jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil (new york, ); carl j. friedrich and zbigniew k. brzezinski, totalitarian dictatorship and autocracy (cam- bridge, mass., ); karl dietrich bracher, die auflösung der weimarer republik: eine studie zum prob- lem des machtverfalls in der demokratie (stuttgart, ). hans ulrich wehler, das deutsche kaiserreich, – (goüttingen, ). before , the notion of a special german path was positioned positively. see, for example, the fascinating attempt by heinrich von sybel, an influential prussian historian and nationalist politician who would be appointed by bismarck to oversee the prussian state archives, to make the new german empire seem democratic to the british public: sybel, “the german empire,” fortnightly review, new series, , no. (january , ): – . after the creation of the “third reich,” however, nazi aggression was widely located by many non-germans in longer historical trends. see, for example, lewis bernstein namier’s brilliant lec- tures on the revolution of , : the revolution of the intellectuals (london, ); and a. j. p. tay- lor, the course of german history: a survey of the development of german history since (london, ). fritz fischer was among the first german historians to provide clear evidence of predatory conti- nuities in german foreign policy across imperial, weimar, and nazi germany, undermining attempts to treat the nazis as a deviation; fischer, griff nach der weltmacht: die kriegszielpolitik des kaiserlichen deutschland, / (düsseldorf, ), which appeared in english as germany’s aims in the first world war, trans. hajo holborn and james joll (new york, ). peter pulzer, german politics, – (oxford, ), . ahr conversation american historical review december failed to banish the specter of german exceptionalism from the historiographic stage, it and more empirical work of the period freed historians up to view society beyond the state as worthwhile avenues for historical study. it was at this juncture, i would argue, that growing discomfort with totalitarianism theory combined to lead german historiography down a very different path. perhaps most immediately, the collapse of german communism provided scholars access to ar- chival sources and stimulated renewed interest in the difference between power and au- thority. studies of the east german regime, from catherine epstein’s work on the communist leadership and andrew port’s analysis of dissent to paul betts’s brilliant look at intimacy under dictatorial conditions and my own attempt to demonstrate the limits of communist control over economic practice, challenged standard depictions of communist power as complete. around the same time, a reappraisal of the nazi ter- ror apparatus demolished the myth of a secret police whose omniscience and omnipo- tence rendered resistance impossible. scholars such as klaus-michael mallmann and eric johnson emphasized not only how small, but how entrepreneurial the gestapo was—that gestapo agents relied on denunciations, but were also encouraged to act on their own initiative and according to their own prejudices. andrew’s comment about arendt as a source for foucault is very insightful. but at least when it comes to the stasi and the gestapo, i think arendt is being proven wrong and foucault irrelevant. from a very different perspective, one that integrates the experience of victims as well as perpetrators, recent work in economic history has opened new space for histori- cal research by understanding the state as a significant and sometimes dominant, but never conclusive actor. the work of jonathan wiesen on the mental constructs inform- ing nazi economic practice, pamela swett on advertising and sales in the “third reich,” christoph kreutzmüller on the nazi destruction of the jewish commercial presence in berlin, and malte zierenberg on black markets in the “third reich” has changed our understanding of the relation between profit and prejudice, cementing the focus on non-state actors, widening the circle of culpability, and embedding economic practice in cultural history. as the peculiarities of german history give way to its particularities, moreover, his- torians have begun to contextualize local idiosyncrasies by attending to transnational developments. andrew’s excellent book alabama in africa: booker t. washington, the german empire, and the globalization of the new south joins recent work by timothy david blackbourn and geoff eley, the peculiarities of german history: bourgeois society and poli- tics in nineteenth-century germany (oxford, ). catherine epstein, the last revolutionaries: german communists and their century (cambridge, mass., ); andrew i. port, conflict and stability in the german democratic republic (cambridge, ); paul betts, within walls: private life in the german democratic republic (oxford, ); jonathan r. zatlin, the currency of socialism: money and political culture in east germany (cambridge, ). klaus-michael mallmann, gestapo und widerstand (st. ingbert, ), as well as klaus-michael mallmann and gerhard paul, eds., die gestapo: mythos und realit€at (darmstadt, ); eric a. johnson, nazi terror: the gestapo, jews, and ordinary germans (new york, ). see also frank bajohr’s superb dismantling of our perception of the nazis as ruthless and efficient, parvenüs und profiteure: korruption in der ns-zeit (frankfurt am main, ), which has, lamentably, yet to find an english translation. s. jonathan wiesen, creating the nazi marketplace: commerce and consumption in the third reich (cambridge, ); pamela swett, selling under the swastika: advertising and commercial culture in nazi germany (stanford, calif., ); christoph kreutzmüller, final sale in berlin: the destruction of jewish commercial activity, – (new york, ); malte zierenberg, berlin’s black market, – (new york, ). history after the end of history american historical review december brown, michael meng, quinn slobodian, and a younger generation of scholars working on the gdr in connecting german history with larger trends in a way that makes it possible to think more clearly about specifically german problems. to my mind, what remains is a thoroughgoing consideration of the conceptual assumptions that continue to organize the narratives of german history along the lines of anna krylova’s work, which has laid bare the continued and subtle projection of liberal subjectivity onto non- liberal subjects. among the many other developments in other subfields, german histo- rians have a great deal to learn from the discussion around subjectivity in soviet his- tory. anna krylova: in the field of modern russian history, the introduction of the concept of “power” in the mid- s was indeed immediately allied with the conversation and theorization of the concept of “subjectivity.” learning how to use these two terms, the field underwent its cultural turn and, as a result, updated its methodological ap- proaches and master narratives. in fact, given the particular formulation of “power” that the field embraced—“power” as a meaning-giving system of domination, that is, an ideology, culture, or discourse now understood as an inescapable system of signifi- cation embedded in state institutions and people’s minds—it was impossible to invoke “power” without at once posing the question about the relationship between the bol- shevik project and the individual—its subject. stephen kotkin’s reconceptualiza- tion of the prewar stalinist period along these lines played a defining role in shaping the field’s analytics not only for the stalinist years but, as i have argued elsewhere, for the entire soviet period. the understanding of stalinism, in particular, produced by a generation of social historians of the s and s, as a period overcome by unruly social forces un- leashed by the soviet state, barely coping with the social ramifications of its moderniz- ing projects (according to moshe lewin, for example, even stalinist purges and extreme punitive measures carried out by the state had to be considered in the context of the state’s failure to control the situation)—this vision was critiqued for its disregard of ideological and cultural dimensions of history. the new scenario offered an innovative concept of “soviet modernity” as an actualization of the overpowering logic of the bol- andrew zimmerman, alabama in africa: booker t. washington, the german empire, and the glob- alization of the new south (princeton, n.j., ); timothy scott brown, west germany and the global sixties: the antiauthoritarian revolt, – (cambridge, ); michael meng, shattered spaces: encountering jewish ruins in postwar germany and poland (cambridge, mass., ); quinn slobodian, foreign front: third world politics in sixties west germany (durham, n.c., ). anna krylova, “the tenacious liberal subject in soviet studies,” kritika: explorations in russian and eurasian history , no. ( ): – . see also jochen hellbeck, revolution on my mind: writing a diary under stalin (cambridge, mass., ); igal halfin, red autobiographies: initiating the bolshevik self (seattle, wash., ); and alexis peri’s forthcoming book the war within: diaries from the siege of leningrad (cambridge, mass., ). stephen kotkin, magnetic mountain: stalinism as a civilization (berkeley, calif., ); anna kry- lova, “soviet modernity: stephen kotkin and the bolshevik predicament,” contemporary european his- tory , no. ( ): – . moshe lewin, the making of the soviet system: essays in the soviet history of interwar russia (new york, ); ronald grigor suny, the making of the georgian nation (bloomington, ind., ); sheila fitzpatrick, education and social mobility in the soviet union, – (cambridge, ); fitzpatrick, the cultural front: power and culture in revolutionary russia (ithaca, n.y., ); stephen kotkin, “ and the russian revolution: sources, conceptual categories, analytical frameworks,” journal of modern history , no. ( ): – . ahr conversation american historical review december shevik ideological ideal. in this new historical drama, no one, except ideology/culture upgraded to the status of a system, was in control, and everyone and everything was a product and a tool, that is, a subject. thus, not only “ordinary soviet citizens” but also state and party leaders together with state and party institutions were, at the fundamen- tal level, entrapped within the cultural tenets of bolshevik modernity. bolshevik moder- nity informed state policies and penetrated individuals’ deepest layers of self-awareness and modes of self-expression. the resultant master narrative is by no means deprived of considerations of change. in fact, it has generated an impressive list of studies whose authors investigate shifts and modifications of the soviet ideological project and its indi- vidual appropriations and misappropriations but do not question the project’s and its subjects’ presumed grounding in the bolshevik ideal. the problem with this model (which, of course, is not unique to the recent histori- ography on soviet socialism) that i want to foreground in light of our discussion is not only its treatment of the historical subject with all its imperfections and misappropria- tions as fundamentally a product of some ideological-cultural project. my dissatisfaction with the model is akin to jonathan’s and andrew’s. it has to do with the fact that it ren- ders the theorization of the agency category as well as of the power-agency relationship irrelevant. the concept of subjectivity, a valuable analytical acquisition, does enable his- torians to analyze production, maintenance, and reproduction of desired subjects. but it does not offer much help when we are faced with such enigmatic phenomena, as far as our theoretical corpus is concerned, as resistance, insurgency, protest, and, most im- portantly, in my opinion, the possibility of critique and/or action outside of dominant cultural paradigms. in fact, ever since the concepts of power and subjectivity became operational, historians in and outside the russian field have been questioning the treat- ment of the individual as a simple effect of power, but they have not always directly ad- dressed the theoretical significance of their findings. the question that i am struggling to articulate is not about the possibility of historical agency. it is about how we as histo- rians can account for historical agency without giving up on the concept of power and without giving in to ideological narratives featuring autonomous individuals living and willing their lives despite cultural systems and social circumstances. adeeb khalid: alex asks whether attention to new repertoires of power might help get us beyond state-centered explanations of “territoriality.” it seems to me that in large parts of the world, the new techniques of power have been created and imple- mented by states themselves and cannot be understood independently of them. as eliz- abeth points out, “the state’s overwhelming assertion of power” is difficult to displace in the middle east, and not just there. we need to remember that many in the colo- nized world actually envied new techniques of power and wished to possess them them- selves for the sake of “progress,” “overcoming backwardness,” or achieving equality and dignity in the world. anticolonialism was tied intimately to the search for new re- gimes of power that might bring to the colonized what made the colonizer so strong. kotkin, magnetic mountain; igal halfin, from darkness to light: class, consciousness, and salva- tion in revolutionary russia (pittsburgh, ); oleg kharkhordin, the collective and the individual in russia: a study of practices (berkeley, calif., ); hellbeck, revolution on my mind. for an analysis stressing uneven mechanisms of individual internalization of bolshevik-soviet ideology, see miriam dob- son, khrushchev’s cold summer: gulag returnees, crime, and the fate of reform after stalin (ithaca, n.y., ). history after the end of history american historical review december these aspirations produced quite awful results in many cases, but the solid (and often well-deserved) critique of third world nationalisms and their derivative discourses has perhaps overshadowed our understanding of the centrality of notions of catching up in twentieth-century nationalisms. a balanced view of the twentieth century should ac- knowledge the states’ achievements in human development alongside the critique of their dictatorial tendencies. i come to this from my study of central asia in the era of the russian revolution. the collapse of the russian autocracy in the midst of a world war opened up new pos- sibilities for all sorts of groups. nationalizing elites saw in the revolution an opportunity for their societies to achieve the dignity that colonial conquest had denied them. this seemed to require the same kinds of power that “advanced” societies already pos- sessed. for them, the revolution was a postcolonial moment that would undo the work of colonialism. russian settlers sought to preserve their privileges and, as marco but- tino and others have shown, used soviets (pace arendt as quoted by andrew) primarily to dispossess the natives of their land and food supplies. eventually, the soviet state imposed its version of socialism, which had little space for anticolonialism as it had been imagined in the years of the revolution. but the soviet period also saw massive transformations in the mobilization of populations, the productivization of space, the crystallization of national consciousness, and so on. it accomplished, albeit on its own terms, many of the tasks that many developmentalist national states have aspired to. manu goswami: during the s (with some earlier exceptions), historians of colo- nial india elaborated a conceptually sophisticated and widely influential literature on colonial governmentality. this literature was more or less explicitly oriented by the work of foucault. it generated profound insights about the interlock between colonial epistemologies and modes of rule and the proliferation of techniques of disciplinary power. and it also helped underscore the tragic continuities, as elizabeth thompson suggests, between colonial and postcolonial forms of power and state domination. but this literature also carried the limits of foucault’s untenably static, undifferentiated conception of modernity, one that understood modern subjectivity exclusively in terms of instrumental rationality, scanted the transformative and universalist possibilities of popular struggles, and bracketed questions of political economy. ironically, some of the best insights of the early subaltern studies school about insurgent political practice were jettisoned. my own prior work sought to overcome some of the impasses generated by this literature through an account of the spatial and infrastructural logics of colonial state power and the relational dynamic between the lived experience of colonial capital- ism and the forging of historically novel popular conceptions of a national space and adeeb khalid, making uzbekistan: nation, empire, and revolution in the early ussr (ithaca, n.y., ). marco buttino, la rivoluzione capovolta: l’asia centrale tra il crollo dell’impero zarista e la forma- zione dell’urss (naples, ). bernard s. cohn, colonialism and its forms of knowledge: the british in india (princeton, n.j., ); partha chatterjee, the nation and its fragments: colonial and postcolonial histories (princeton, n.j., ); dipesh chakrabarty, habitations of modernity: essays in the wake of subaltern studies (chi- cago, ); gyan prakash, another reason: science and the imagination of modern india (princeton, n.j., ); david scott, “colonial governmentality,” social text (autumn ): – . see also timothy mitchell ed., questions of modernity (minneapolis, ). ahr conversation american historical review december national economy. among the more promising developments in histories of twentieth- century india is the renascence of political, intellectual, and institutional histories atten- tive to what andrew zimmerman, following arendt, calls the creative politics of insur- gent peoples amid large-scale socioeconomic shifts. how this emergent literature will reorient and recast conventional narratives of india’s twentieth century is, as yet, not entirely clear. but nationalism and the nation-state are no longer the principal horizons of inquiry. instead, the lineages and practices of democracy and capitalism are explicit objects of critical scholarship. ahr editor: i am pleased that manu has injected “subaltern studies” into the discus- sion, for whatever one may think of this orientation, it certainly should help us address some of the questions raised by the last few comments. when we try to look beyond or beneath the new “techniques of power” of the twentieth century, as all-pervasive as they appear, our favored narratives frequently come up against an impasse. many of you have gestured to the need to explore in new ways the dynamics of resistance and liberation that remain possible within the interstices of the growth of the state, surveil- lance, technology, and the biopolitical that together seem to corral twentieth-century subjectivities. gabrielle alludes to the “cosmopolitan commons”; andrew and others (myself included, i confess) remain interested in what was once called “working-class self-activity”; anna, as i take it, seeks to locate new forms of “resistance, insurgency, protest, and . . . critique . . . outside of [the] dominant cultural paradigms” of bourgeois individualism; and manu inquires into “the creative politics of insurgent peoples.” so, that brings me to my next question: what forms of “creative politics of insur- gent peoples” did the emergent conditions of the twentieth century make possible? how have these creative politics shifted over time and place? and, most of all, what kind of subjectivities do they presume? as anna puts it, how can we retain an emphasis on the historical agency of individuals without (a) giving up on the concept of power, and/or (b) giving in to a predetermined form of subjectivity? andrew zimmerman: i would start by turning alex’s excellent question around: not “what forms of ‘creative politics of insurgent peoples’ did the emergent conditions of the twentieth century make possible?” but rather “what forms of twentieth-century power did ‘the creative politics of insurgent peoples’ make possible?” that is, how have various types of state, capital, and institutionalized (e.g., university) knowledge consti- tuted themselves by appropriating varieties of plebeian practices, including politics? are the forms of knowledge and power peculiar to the twentieth century (fordism and post-fordism/neoliberalism, state communism, fascism, the welfare state, the military- centered research university, the culture industry, etc.) unique responses to an ever- present threat of democracy against hierarchy, or are they responses to new and manu goswami, producing india: from colonial economy to national space (chicago, ); goswami, “rethinking the modular nation form: toward a sociohistorical conception of nationalism,” comparative studies in society and history , no. ( ): – . partha chatterjee, lineages of political society: studies in postcolonial democracy (new york, ); nivedita menon, recovering subversion: feminist politics beyond the law (urbana, ill., ); anupama rao, the caste question: dalits and the politics of modern india (berkeley, calif., ); kalyan sanyal, rethinking capitalist development: primitive accumulation, governmentality, and post- colonial capitalism (london, ). history after the end of history american historical review december uniquely twentieth-century forms of insurgent, plebeian politics? here we can follow the work of mario tronti and others working in the tradition of operaismo. how, for example, in elizabeth’s case, did the police states that appeared in the interwar middle east borrow from the specific forms of plebeian politics they emerged to suppress? how has this dialectic continued since the new round of uprisings in the arab spring? did the technopolitics of namibian miners that gabrielle discusses re- flect a prior technopolitics of state and capital, or did state and capital draw its techno- politics (including the workers’ knowledge of how to mine, how to survive mining) from these workers? the post-totalitarian models of state power that jonathan dis- cusses suggest similar processes: a gestapo built from, and not just eliciting, the mutual recriminations of populations; a stasi that does not simply observe, but is itself an ap- propriation (sometimes through physical imprisonment) of “the lives of others.” or in the case adeeb discusses, soviet power emerges in central asia as a kind of cross- product of the entitlement of russian settlers and the political and economic aspira- tions of national elites and populations. i agree with anna that we need to reconsider agency to grasp power, not from the perspective of its elite appropriators, but rather from those who produce it in the first place. i agree with manu that subaltern studies, above all as practiced by ranajit guha (and inspired by—perhaps even appropriat- ing—the peasant insurgencies going on around him), remains a very good place to start. such a reversal might prompt a reperiodizing of the twentieth century around waves of popular insurgency rather than institutional maneuvers by state, capital, university, and other institutional formations. just to take one example from a text i have been thinking about a lot lately, should we structure a history of the twentieth-century global south (or at least the twentieth-century u.s. south) around what clyde woods calls “blues epistemology” rather than around the plantation complex? this would mean privileging the forms of worker political, economic, and cultural self-organization that the plantation, from atlantic slavery to mass incarceration, has not merely oppressed, but lived from, vampire-like. a standard objection to such a bottom-up account is that it ignores power, the responsibility of those “in” power for various forms of op- pression. i would say the top-down account, however, ignores a more important form of power, which is the always-present power of the popular classes to, as the wobblies sang, “dump the bosses off your back.” jonathan zatlin: i really enjoyed andrew’s reversal of alex’s question. turning alex’s causality on its head—or rather, setting it back on its feet, as marx did with hegel’s dialectic—opens up creative avenues for historical inquiry. but as important as alex’s question and andrew’s inversion of it are, i want to draw attention to the ground for a classic statement, see mario tronti, “lenin in england,” https://www.marxists.org/reference/ subject/philosophy/works/it/tronti.htm, originally published as “lenin in inghilterra,” classe operaia, no. (january ): , – . for a recent assessment, see tronti, “our operaismo,” new left review, no. (january–february ): – . das leben der anderen (the lives of others), dir. florian henckel von donnersmarck (dvd, mu- nich: buena vista home entertainment, ). clyde woods, development arrested: the blues and plantation power in the mississippi delta (lon- don, ). loı̈c wacquant, “from slavery to mass incarceration: rethinking the ‘race question’ in the us,” new left review (january–february ): – . ahr conversation american historical review december https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/it/tronti.htm https://www.marxists.org/reference/subject/philosophy/works/it/tronti.htm on which they stand—to their assumptions about writing the history of the twentieth century. first, no matter which direction the causality runs, emphasizing “the creative poli- tics of insurgent peoples” depends on resuscitating the two unitary subjects of lib- eral political fantasy: a powerful state and a disempowered people. to paraphrase horkheimer, who was himself borrowing from wittgenstein, whoever wants to speak about defiance cannot remain silent about dictatorship. even when expressed as a dia- lectic, however, this dichotomy is as conceptually impoverished as it is empirically wrong. to give an example that illustrates some of its pitfalls: the courageous protest- ers who brought about the collapse of european communism in insisted they were the “people” that the “people’s democracies” claimed to represent. but the “peo- ple” is an imagined community, one the protesters understood as the mirror opposite of the totalizing states they opposed. it is also a hypostatization that has no structure or permanence. within a short time, the social solidarity created by decades of repression in poland, east germany, czechoslovakia, bulgaria, romania, and yugoslavia gave way to a cacophony of competing political, economic, and cultural interests. second, as i argued in the last answer, this binary construct not only flirts with ideo- logical obfuscation, but also focuses the historian’s gaze on government to the exclusion of economic activity, cultural production, and social relations. at least when it comes to commerce, it’s worth remembering that the forces of need and greed always find their way around state-imposed obstacles. in the twentieth century, for example, new forms of transnational trade emerged that sidestepped the most imposing techniques of state control, from smuggling in the soviet bloc to the drug trade in the americas. to be clear, i’m not proposing we expand the “state/people” dichotomy by adding “economy” to the mix; turning to trinitarian formulas won’t rescue this kind of political geometry. on the contrary, the dispersal of power in twentieth-century societies requires a suit- ably nuanced analytical approach that has—as andrew suggests—its feet firmly planted on local ground. third, focusing on “the creative politics of insurgent peoples” forces historical cau- sality into an emancipatory ambit. that is, it subsumes the task of writing history into the work of repairing the world. but because equating insurgency with agency is both a political statement and a narrative preference, i don’t think we’d find a consensus for this position in our post-historicist profession. at the same time, valorizing the history of “insurgent peoples” holds out the hope of uncovering repressed histories by linking agency with defiance. as a historical cate- gory, defiance is a rich topic (and one that has received much attention, i think, be- cause of that most twentieth-century of experiences: genocide). microhistorians from carlo ginsburg to alf lüdtke have placed efforts to defend individual or group auton- omy from encroachment by religious, state, or commercial power at the heart of their analysis. whether it is the refractory conduct of difficult personalities, such as gins- burg’s heretical hero menocchio, the more organized noncompliance of lüdtke’s fac- max horkheimer’s dictum “wer aber vom kapitalismus nicht reden will, sollte auch vom faschi- smus schweigen” (“whoever does not wish to speak of capitalism should also be silent about fascism”) seems a play on the famous last sentence of ludwig wittgenstein’s classic tractatus logico-philo- sophicus: “wovon man nicht sprechen kann, darüber muss man schweigen” (“whereof one cannot speak, thereof must one be silent”). see horkheimer, “die juden und europa,” zeitschrift für sozialfor- schung , no. – ( ): – , here . history after the end of history american historical review december tory workers under nazi rule, or even the contumacious peasants of james c. scott’s books, analysis of social recalcitrance promises insights into the constellation of social forces that shape individual behavior as well as the individual behavior that disrupts the social norms that assign meaning to our actions. it is the reason that harriet tubman has pushed andrew jackson to the back of the buck. but the difficulty with defiance is that the defiant are not always the heroes of his- tory. sometimes they are its villains. after all, the nazis of “the first hour” defied a state—the weimar republic—that they viewed not merely as oppressive but also as foreign imposition. yet there was nothing emancipatory about the nazis, unless you be- lieve that their goal of liberating the world of jews was a gruesome distortion of the enlightenment project. in the u.s., moreover, defiance has been co-opted by the very authorities who should elicit the greatest resistance. on the one hand, the american psychiatric associ- ation pathologizes recalcitrant behavior as “oppositional defiant disorder” to facilitate the efforts of law enforcement to identify, healthcare workers to rectify, and insurance companies to circumscribe liability for noncompliant behavior. on the other hand, he- roic insubordination is sold as a palliative in books, on the screen, in politics, and on management floors, presumably as compensation for the very real and personal defeats that life brings. but socially acceptable defiance has become both an autonomous cate- gory of political analysis and an organizing narrative for cultural production not simply because it provides a clear and comforting explanation for a more complex causality, but also because it resonates with the founding mythology of the american state. it is the reason that american politicians mindlessly inveigh against the “state” in one breath and apostrophize the “people” in the next. it is also the reason that grounding historical analysis in “cultural systems and social circumstances,” as anna puts it, is so important. for without analyzing the ground on which we stand, there is no way to identify what has been turned on its head or which end is up. gabrielle hecht: the apartheid museum in johannesburg, south africa, features a wall covered with some plaques, each corresponding to a law legitimating discrimi- nation and segregation. when you first confront this display, craning your neck to read the uppermost inscriptions, you feel the overwhelming power of the apartheid state— its ruthlessness, its meticulousness, its relentlessness. but as you continue to stare, tak- ing in the dates and titles of each provision, you realize that the list also represents “the creative politics of insurgent peoples”—their determination, their imagination, their re- lentlessness. the wall narrates how, over time, the state turned to increasingly specific (and occasionally absurd) legitimations of violence, precisely because people found ways to resist, circumvent, and just plain refuse compliance. this, for me, embodies the dynamics that andrew and jonathan invoke in their responses: power as a messy, ever- carlo ginzburg, the cheese and the worms: the cosmos of a sixteenth-century miller (baltimore, ); alf lüdtke, “cash, coffee-breaks, horseplay: eigensinn and politics among factory workers in germany circa ,” in michael hanagan and charles stephenson, eds., confrontation, class con- sciousness, and the labor process: studies in proletarian class formation (westport, conn., ), – ; lüdtke, “what happened to the ‘fiery red glow’? workers’ experiences and german fascism,” in lüdtke, ed., the history of everyday life: reconstructing historical experiences and ways of life, trans. william templer (princeton, n.j., ), – ; james c. scott, weapons of the weak: everyday forms of peasant resistance (new haven, conn., ). ahr conversation american historical review december changing outcome of struggle and structure. of course these laws are instruments of power, quintessentially so, but they also reflect and respond to economic activity (from large-scale industry to smuggling), land, liquor, sex and love, urinating and defecating . . . and everywhere, always, race and its classifications. yet laws fail to contain; there is always excess; and in that excess we locate the complex multidirectionality of power. but i’d like to pivot away from the languages of power, and back toward its stuff. the twentieth century saw massive scalar shifts in the rearrangement of earthly mate- rials—shifts that many today gloss under the sign of the anthropocene. of course these shifts began before the twentieth century: there’s (hyper)active debate about the origins of the anthropocene (nineteenth-century industrialization? sixteenth-century colum- bian exchange?); there’s outrage at the silences engendered by the term itself, not to mention its claims to novelty; and there are a proliferation of proposals for alternative designations (the capitalocene?) that would better signal historical power dynamics. but there can be little doubt that the twentieth century saw the consolidation and mag- nification of the biological, geological, and atmospheric transformation of our planet and our bodies. there has certainly been “creative insurgence” in response to all this, from environmental movements and other sources. but it’s fair to say that we have barely begun to come to grips with the conditions of political possibility that propel and respond to these transformations. south african courts recently declared that former mineworkers, living with silicosis and tuberculosis after decades in the mines (during and after apartheid), could move forward with a class-action lawsuit against mining companies. tens of thousands of workers are potentially involved. how do we under- stand such lawsuits as forms of collective politics? as performances of subjectivity? as modes of historical accounting? these are some of questions that form the legacy of the twentieth century. anna krylova: i share jonathan’s concern about conceptual pitfalls that the project of looking for historical agency in the midst of historical circumstances not of our choosing, to paraphrase marx, entails. the difficulty indeed arises the moment one in- vokes the concept of a “structure” or a “system” (be it state, social, economic, institu- tional, cultural, discursive, linguistic), to which one ascribes a logic of its own and into which one inserts the historical subject. the more recent concept of “power” encom- passes (at least in theory) all of the above: it claims a variegated complexity, totality, and, as i have argued earlier, further encourages a treatment of historical subjectivity as an effect of historical circumstances. rescuing the subject from the structure/power predicament, so to speak, has been a persistent theoretical and ethical problem. i also agree that what jonathan calls the defiant subject—historians’ standard de- vice to remedy the effacement of historical agency in studies inspired by structuralist and poststructuralist analytics—falls short of giving back to the historical subject its role as an agent of history. here, of course, much depends on how one defines and theo- for excellent introductions and challenges to debates about the anthropocene among historians, see christophe bonneuil and jean-baptiste fressoz, the shock of the anthropocene: the earth, history, and us (london, ); and julia adeney thomas, “history and biology in the anthropocene: problems of scale, problems of value,” american historical review , no. (december ): – . karl marx, the eighteenth brumaire of louis bonaparte (new york, ), . ronald grigor suny, “back and beyond: reversing the cultural turn?,” american historical review , no. (december ): – . history after the end of history american historical review december rizes agency—the question that i am presently grappling with. in its most recent rendi- tions informed by lacanian poststructuralist psychoanalytic theory, the defiant subject has been reconfigured as transgressive or subversive. my problem with this construct (which i articulate elsewhere) is that the defiant/transgressive subject does not presup- pose a beyond, that is, an actual articulable position situated outside the presumed to- tality of a system of domination. thus, the defiant subject in our studies defies (or dis- rupts) the social norms but does not remove them, and does not attempt to articulate an alternative. likewise, the transgressive subject, as conceptualized by joan scott in the fantasy of feminist history, transgresses the restraints of the norm, thanks to his/ her psyche’s unconscious desires and urges, but still has no other ground to come back to, except the one being transgressed. however, i believe that the subject that alex and andrew want us to consider (and i am on board with this agenda) is different from the defiant/transgressive one. i take it that in “creative politics of insurgent peoples,” “creative” is as important as “insur- gent.” what is at stake in alex’s question and andrew’s reversal of it is the authorship of the very terms and forms of political struggles and, consequently, undergirding no- tions of political subjectivity and social justice. the creative/insurgent subject implicit in their questions does not simply disrupt. it authors alternatives (even if those alternatives are later appropriated and deprived of their radical content); it inhabits and embodies an articulable beyond; it exposes the falsity of the totality that a dominant regime of sig- nification and domination claims to itself; and in andrew’s reconfigured question, we are invited to consider granting “insurgent peoples” history-making powers. twentieth-century russian and european history contains numerous examples that help explicate the difference between these two forms of being a subject and relating to dominant regimes of power. one can consider, for example, the demoralized worker of stalinist industrialization, resisting state-imposed and ever more intense tempos of pro- duction and exploitation, on the one hand, and the self-organizing worker of the and russian revolutions, forming workers’ councils (brought up already by andrew), on the other. the former (explored by andrew sloin in his recent article on deep socioeconomic mechanisms of working-class soviet antisemitism) relies on anti- semitic explanatory scenarios and engages in violence against jewish workers. the lat- ter introduces and (dare we say) authors a new mass form of radical governance, which caught contemporaries by surprise and was nearly immediately theorized by lenin as the embodiment of the proletarian creative energy to make history and to offer new forms of political and administrative governance to the world. i do not advocate that we follow the bolshevik leader and begin to idealize the rus- sian proletariat. i would also caution us against narrating the history of the workers’ anna krylova, “gender binary and the limits of poststructuralist method,” gender and history , no. ( ): – . joan wallach scott, the fantasy of feminist history (durham, n.c., ). the concepts of unsta- ble, mutable, and conflicted identity and transgressive subjectivity played a cardinal role in the making of gender history, where scholars drew on now-classic works: judith butler, gender trouble: feminism and the subversion of identity (new york, ); elizabeth grosz, sexual subversions: three french feminists (boston, ); denise riley, “am i that name?” feminism and the category of “women” in history (london, ); slavoj �zi�zek, the plague of fantasies (london, ). andrew sloin, “theorizing soviet antisemitism: value, crisis, and stalinist ‘modernity,’” critical historical studies , no. ( ): – ; laura engelstein, moscow, : working-class organization and political conflict (stanford, calif., ). ahr conversation american historical review december councils by relying on nineteenth-century liberal ideals of “independent will,” “voli- tion,” “self-determination,” which walter johnson critiqued so devastatingly and per- suasively in his “on agency.” but together with alex and andrew, i do want to sug- gest that to begin to acknowledge and account for the radically different ways of con- ducting oneself in history that the two examples foreground is a productive starting point to rethink, theorize, and reclaim the category of agency for the historical profes- sion. at the very least, we will be forced to begin to detail what we mean when we say “agency.” the notion of the creative/resurgent subject as discussed above undoubtedly grants our historical subjects a possibility to gain a critical distance in relation to power regimes that claim them as their subjects. are we comfortable granting this skill to our historical actors, and how can we justify this assertion theoretically? after all, why should we not grant our historical subjects what we grant ourselves? it seems to me that one way to move forward is to question the very way we talk about “agency,” that is, as an a priori property that we can grant or deny. a better way that this conversation suggests and that i have been thinking about is to view agency not as an a priori property but as what i will tentatively call here a historical condition. then, the question that we might want to pose would be: under what historical condi- tions does a historical subject become an agent who gains a critical perspective, that is, recognizes that the totality of a dominant regime is only claimed and is never there? elizabeth f. thompson: i write from beirut, where there is no strong government, and where micro-movements proliferate to protect parks and open schools for syrian refugees, but where an oligarchy of rival elites assures immobility in governance. next door is the country i have long studied, syria. in and beyond, citizens’ committees mushroomed to organize local resistance and community support as nonviolent protest was co-opted by the state and foreign-fed militias into civil war. the central problem for much of the globe in the twentieth century has been the lack of a political arena, an absence of sovereignty—or to put it another way, how to live in a society where the strings of power extend far beyond one’s reach, in imperial capitals of europe and north america. only later in the century did europeans and north americans recog- nize they faced a similar dispersion of power beyond the reach of a local, sovereign po- litical arena they could hope to conquer. alex has posed a huge question that cannot be properly answered in a few para- graphs. to start, i embrace anna’s project of distinguishing the “defiant subject” from the “creative insurgent” as a way of thinking about how and where arab people have asserted agency against these global processes. i will also briefly respond to andrew’s query about how the arab spring continued a dialectic of strategic borrowing between the state and non-state movements. over the course of the twentieth century, arab political strategies at one time ex- pressed a kind of creative politics, only to fall into pointless defiance, and vice versa. an example: by the turn of the century, opposition leaders in the middle east began to appeal to parliaments and public opinion in imperial metropoles: they sent petitions and delegations to protest the policies of colonial ministries and their lackeys in cairo, constantinople, beirut, damascus, tunis, etc. in the egyptian revolution, peti- walter johnson, “on agency,” journal of social history , no. ( ): – ; lynn m. thom- as, “historicising agency,” gender and history , no. ( ): – . history after the end of history american historical review december tioning embassies became a new ritual of protest, as well as sending flurries of tele- grams to the u.s. congress. syrians seeking independence adopted these same tactics. both failed. palestinian arabs tried the same, to little effect. but they and algerians learned a new way of gaining imperial attention: violence. it is quite clear they learned this from a rival trend: eastern european anarchists. armenians adopted terror to at- tract international attention by taking over the central bank in istanbul before world war i. zionists brought these techniques to bear in ousting britain from palestine in the s. the algerians adopted it in the famous battle of algiers, which finally brought the un in to pressure france. but the palestinian plo failed in a similar use of the tactic. arafat brought both a gun and olive branch when he finally was permitted to speak at the un in . palestinian terror, however, had by then devolved into what anna would call a pointless politics of defiance without a constructive alterna- tive—for reasons too complex to explain here. the arab spring was heir to this repertoire. it appealed at first, nonviolently, to the world media. taking over a central square, waving signs, staging events, all were de- signed to draw international pressure on the local dictator—in tunis, cairo, the various cities of syria. they drew both on gene sharp’s modular modes of protest and on local micropolitics of mutual aid and resistance. they also drew on a long history of “youth” resistance in the middle east, which emerged in the s as a cultural protest against politicians who collaborated with colonial powers. (in baghdad in , a million peo- ple camped in city parks and staged a parade, where they tossed flowers and sang folk songs about peace—in praise of the new government that had overthrown the monar- chy the previous july. descriptions of it remind one of woodstock!) so too in cairo a stage filled with musicians, comedians, poets, and so on. but the arab spring hitched too much on the old repertoire of international petitioning. the young people and their parents who had lived under dictatorships that permitted little political organizing had little more than slogans about returning to constitutional government. there was no civil organization. only in tunis did the labor union still wield autonomous power. here, finally, i must place the rise of islamism in this context. it qualifies, i believe, as a creative insurgency. when arabs were let down at the paris peace confer- ence, and left in the hands of colonial powers despite their massive service to the entente during the war, islamism grew as an alternative to european liberalism. excluded from the family of nations and rights under the international law promoted by woodrow wilson, local political leaders and professionals turned to the project of creating a separate justice, distinct from the so-called international liberal project con- trolled by europe for european benefit. from the s onward, islamists built not only an ideology, but a movement that perpetuated itself through community work— building mosques, schools, clinics, etc. some branches of the movement, however, turned to violence under the same influences that palestinian movements did. it was also co-opted by the financial help of governments, turned into a puppet of regional ri- valries. and so entered the arab spring as a conflicted actor. thompson, justice interrupted, chap. . see also the memoirs of a polish-born israeli leader of a terror group: menachem begin, the revolt, revised ed. (new york, ); and of a palestinian leader in the plo: abu iyad, my home, my land: a narrative of the palestinian struggle, trans. linda butler koseoglu (new york, ). thompson, justice interrupted, chap. ; gene sharp, the politics of nonviolent action (boston, ). ahr conversation american historical review december a final thought about the dialectic of state: dictatorships have co-opted movements of liberation—especially in the mid-twentieth century—through classic methods of cor- poratism. labor unions were incorporated into the state; so too were peasant, islamic, and women’s movements. there is a relationship between that phase of corporatism and the proliferation of what we would call defiant movements in the later twentieth century. we live now in a depressing period when faith in creative insurgency is at a low ebb, while foreign governments keep pumping weapons into syria, used to kill syr- ians of all political persuasions. until the killing stops, and it won’t stop until outsiders decide to do so, it is difficult to speak of agency. for a while, agency came through walking—on the legs of hundreds of thousands of refugees. but foreigners have put up a new wall—penning syrians into their war zone. in , arabs were denied sover- eignty and excluded from the family of peoples who would enjoy full human rights. as w. e. b. du bois said, the problem of the twentieth century was the problem of the color line. a century later, we are replaying the same process of exclusion and denial of agency. adeeb khalid: i also share jonathan’s discomfort with the juxtaposition of powerful states and disempowered populations that is implied in the question, where agency is to be found in insurgency. but the history of the twentieth century is also the history of consenting populations, whether the consent was manufactured or not, of citizens align- ing their egos along particular visions of the social. nor is all defiance necessarily politi- cal. smuggling, corruption, and informal economies are all ways of bypassing the states without necessarily a political motive. in the soviet union, the shadow economy, func- tioning on the basis of blat, actually allowed the official economy to continue to func- tion. finally, in valorizing defiance and subversion, we should remember that they can come (and usually come) from the strong and the dominant as much as from the weak and the marginalized. to jonathan’s example of the nazis during the weimar, we can add any number of movements throughout the course of the twentieth century of angry stakeholders who felt their control ebbing away and who used all means at their dis- posal, from violence on down, to wrest control back. (the recent presidential campaign in the u.s. offers a pertinent example from the early twenty-first century.) anna’s in- sightful comments on the nature of agency point to a way forward in this regard, and i look forward to seeing her ideas fully articulated in the near future. i also wonder if the focus on (state) power is sufficient to understand all that the twentieth century was about. women’s movements have often operated through and across the instruments of state power, and i do not believe that patriarchy can simply be subsumed into the state. the twentieth century saw many projects of “state femi- nism” that sought to reorder the place of women in society and took on established forms of patriarchy. they faced backlashes in the name of religion, honor, or tradition. as i write this, my native land (pakistan) is roiled by controversy over the passage of a protection of women against violence bill by the government of punjab. the mild- ness of its provisions (women can now file legal complaints against abusive husbands, who may be arrested and prosecuted; women will also have recourse to emergency phone numbers and shelters) did not prevent an outcry from conservative religious groups, who have challenged the legality of the bill and threatened mass mobilization against it. were that mobilization to succeed, the resulting insurgency would be neither history after the end of history american historical review december very creative nor emancipatory. it will bank on a claim to some sort of authenticity, in this case premised on a peculiarly localized modern reading of islam. the search for authenticity—whether of nation, culture, or religion—is a key feature of twentieth-cen- tury politics. to be sure, it is thoroughly imbricated in relations of power and is often as much a product of fear as of strength. authenticity is attractive precisely it compen- sates for the diminution of sovereignty and loss of control over the economy. but the appeal of claims to authenticity cannot be denied. i am afraid my musings have carried me away from some of our core themes, so i would like to return to gabrielle’s point about turning back to the “stuff” of power. during the twentieth century, the population of our planet increased fourfold (despite the century’s unprecedented violence and devastation), we used up large parts of the earth’s mineral deposits (fossil fuels in particular), and urban (and slum) life became the lot of most of us. how do we convey the enormity of these changes and their con- nection to regimes of power (and resistance to it)? these might be key questions for twenty-first-century historians of the twentieth. manu goswami: given the rich discussion that has unfolded on agency as a histori- cally variable condition, it seems pedantic to point out that the phrase “the creative pol- itics of insurgent peoples” was andrew zimmerman’s gloss on hannah arendt’s much- debated conception of politics. i referenced his usage to note an affinity between this improvisational and practice-oriented conception of politics and recent efforts by histo- rians and historically minded social scientists to rethink the political contours of india’s twentieth century. put broadly, there is growing empirical and conceptual attention to the variegation of popular politics across and within specific historical conjunctures, spanning universalistic movements that emerged in late colonial india—for example, the abolition of indentured labor, the emancipation of dalit groups, the unexpected in- ternationalist projects incubated by colonial subjects—to ongoing efforts to radicalize political and economic democracy in more recent decades. there is no single concep- tual orientation that organizes this line of inquiry. yet three aspects of this emergent literature stand out in relation to our wider discussion. first, and most obviously, this emergent literature upends the nominalist schema of periodization that conventionally seizes upon the – moment (the emergence of two nation-states, india and pa- kistan) to partition the colonial from the postcolonial era and that has tended to see na- for distinct readings of arendt, see hanna fenichel pitkin, the attack of the blob: hannah arendt’s concept of the social (chicago, ); seyla benhabib, the reluctant modernism of hannah arendt, new ed. (lanham, md., ); patchen markell, “the rule of the people: arendt, archê, and democracy,” american political science review , no. ( ): – . rachel sturman, “indian indentured labor and the history of international rights regimes,” american historical review , no. (december ): – ; mrinalini sinha, “premonitions of the past,” journal of asian studies , no. ( ): – ; sinha, “suffragism and internationalism: the enfranchisement of british and indian women under an imperial state,” indian economic and social history review , no. ( ): – ; rosalind o’hanlon, caste, conflict and ideology: mahatma jotirao phule and low caste protest in nineteenth-century western india ( ; repr., cam- bridge, ); rupa viswanath, the pariah problem: caste, religion, and the social in modern india (new york, ); maia ramnath, haj to utopia: how the ghadar movement charted global radicalism and attempted to overthrow the british empire (berkeley, calif., ); manu goswami, “imaginary futures and colonial internationalisms,” american historical review , no. (december ): – ; michael levien, “the politics of dispossession: theorizing india’s ‘land wars,’” politics and soci- ety , no. ( ): – . ahr conversation american historical review december tionalism as exhaustive of the political. second, india’s twentieth century is rendered less as a fixed, objective datum than as a necessarily relational historiographical project, inextricably part of wider regional, trans-imperial, and global formations. and, finally, what seems especially generative is an emphasis on the interplay between shifting con- ceptions of the possible (a nodal condition of politics as such) and specific historical conjunctures. from this vantage, political actions can create, in a kind of “regulated im- provisation” (to use bourdieu’s parsing of the structure/agency question), unanticipated historical conjunctures, and they can spawn, not just passively reflect, new “horizons of expectations.” the joining of collective politics with historical temporality is an embedded artifact of the global twentieth century. it is not, in other words, just a timeless methodological conundrum. even the constellation of terms that we use to distinguish historical time from mere chronology, terms such as conjuncture, crisis, revolution, event, were born and borne across world regions (and linguistic zones) by twentieth-century anti-systemic political and social movements. it is not surprising, then, that so many conceptual reck- onings with the twentieth century have tended to foreground the question of the politi- cal. i am thinking here of the macrohistorical and historical-sociological vein of eric hobsbawm’s age of extremes and giovanni arrighi’s the long twentieth century, on the one hand, and the explicitly philosophical and partisan diagnostic offered by susan buck-morss’s dreamworld and catastrophe and alain badiou’s the century, on the oth- er. considered together, these works illustrate why we must grapple, in tandem, with both the sheer political dramaturgy and the large-scale systemic continuities that char- acterize the global twentieth century. (they also highlight, along the way, the heteroge- neity of historical materialist traditions, long caricatured as a monolithic economism.) from this vantage, gabrielle’s vivid injunction to attend not only to “the languages of power” but “its stuff” has special urgency. in the age of the capitalocene, any effort to rethink “the political” for a specific world region and conjuncture must pay equal heed to entrenched inequalities and persistent hegemonies. ahr editor: to close the conversation, let’s return to the question we began with, and that manu has pointed us back to: narrative and temporality. so far, we have con- sidered the nature of the “moral narratives” available to historians of the twentieth cen- tury, the novel techniques of political domination and social power deployed by states and elites, and the forms of “creative” politics from below that have pushed forward pierre bourdieu, outline of a theory of practice (cambridge, ), ; reinhart koselleck, “‘space of experience’ and ‘horizon of expectation’: two historical categories,” in koselleck, futures past: on the semantics of historical time, trans. keith tribe (stanford, calif., ), – . giovanni arrighi, the long twentieth century: money, power, and the origins of our times (lon- don, ); hobsbawm, the age of extremes; buck-morss, dreamworld and catastrophe; alain badiou, the century, trans. alberto toscano (cambridge, ). arrighi’s long twentieth century does begin, of course, in the fourteenth century. but its explanatory schema—how recurrent crises of accumulation manifest as financialization and, in turn, signal shifts in hegemonic orders—bears the imprimatur of twentieth-century geopolitical struggles associated with the s and s. in this respect, it shares more ground than it might appear, at first glance, with hobsbawm’s famously “short” twentieth century. both buck-morss and badiou emphasize the modes of self-reflexivity they see as constitutive of the twen- tieth century as a philosophical category and the expansive, collective, and long-run temporal horizons bequeathed by twentieth-century modernisms. only arrighi and badiou substantively reckon with decol- onization (and indeed regions beyond europe) as a structuring event of the twentieth century, an aston- ishing absence that only underlines the perspicacity of maier’s essay. history after the end of history american historical review december new possibilities and subjectivities. yet, as i think jonathan’s last answer implies, these discourses tend to presume a linear, even progressive, narrative of history, whether marxist, liberal, or postmodern. but what if “time’s arrow” fails to move in a straight line? what if the illusion that it does so is merely an artifact of the conceptual tools we use to impose order on the recent past, as manu points out? what if the true legacy of the twentieth century is, for example, the ever-steeper declining slope of the downside of the anthropocene, as gabrielle and adeeb hint? what if our current epoch, shaped ineluctably by twentieth-century developments, represents the decomposition of sover- eignty, as elizabeth notes? what if most forms of political expression and action tend to the mimetic rather than the dialectical, as proposed by andrew? these thoughts are prompted, in part, by a moving performance of lorraine hans- berry’s play a raisin in the sun that i attended last year in johannesburg. in a line that surely must have struck home for an increasingly cynical post-apartheid south african audience, the protagonist skeptically asks her anticolonial african suitor about the future of an independent continent. “what about all the crooks and thieves and just plain idiots who will come into power and steal and plunder the same as before— only now they will be black and do it in the name of the new independence . . . ? . . . don’t you see there isn’t any real progress,” she concludes, “there is only one large cir- cle that we march in, around and around, each of us with our own little picture in front of us—our own little mirage that we think is the future.” to this, her idealistic african paramour (remember, this was , the eve of ghanaian independence) replies, “it isn’t a circle—it is simply a long line—as in geometry, you know, one that reaches into infinity. and because we cannot see the end—we also cannot see how it changes.” to formulate this as a discrete question: does the twentieth century lend itself to a linear historical narrative with an uncertain end, a circular march driven by the chasing of a mirage, or some other historical geometry altogether? gabrielle hecht: i’d suggest that the twentieth century—both as a time period and as a historiographic frame—teaches us about the insufficiencies of geometric metaphors. don’t get me wrong: geometry is great. it helps us describe shapes and patterns; it en- ables us to measure and navigate; it gives us tools for projecting one set of dimensions onto another. as historians, we engage in all these practices, and secretly enjoy the ex- planatory distillations that they afford. yet the prolific historiographers of the twentieth century have identified variations, disjunctures, and inequalities far more intricate even than the shapes analyzed by, say, differential geometry (which deals with curved space). this conversation has offered a wide range of such complexities; for example, as adeeb noted most succinctly in the last round, some insurgencies are emancipatory, while others crave the yoke of authen- ticity. in explaining such dynamics, lines and circles just don’t cut it. but refusing the premises of geometric thinking is tantamount to defying the epistemological order in- stantiated during the twentieth century in many parts of the world, an order in which state power was predicated upon—or at least legitimated by—the predictive promises of statistics and other mathematical regularities. as historians, we’ve observed how such order has functioned as both resource and target for insurgency; to each other, we lorraine hansberry, a raisin in the sun (new york, ), – . ahr conversation american historical review december rail against the heresies of simplification, explain that linear time is a cultural product, delight in fine-grained analysis filled with exceptions. but when we venture into other circles, we crash into the expectations imposed by a twentieth-century epistemological order that privileges rules and predictions, vectors and direct causality. when asked by students or journalists to foretell the future, most of us hem and haw. “it’s compli- cated,” we sigh. “history is not a predictive science,” we sniff, with total conviction but also some embarrassment. what other metaphors can twentieth-century history put at our disposal? the bur- geoning literature on the anthropocene has drawn our attention to geology, a quintes- sentially historical science. sedimentation (already a favorite among theory-heads) ac- quires materiality, and new meanings. stratigraphic layers anchor continuity, while fault lines propel discussions of rupture. and then there’s the endpoint of so much geologi- cal practice: extraction, which explodes and juxtaposes temporalities, recycling the re- mains of organisms dead for millennia into the fuel of contemporary need and greed, propelling planetary exhaustion in the rush toward the horizons of expectation set dur- ing the twentieth century. how can the exponential scaling-up of physical sedimenta- tion and extraction (and their associated wastes and toxins) help us frame and explain the massive scaling-up of processes such as urbanization, migration, and demographic growth (and their associated violence)? these are nonlinear developments, with nonlin- ear dynamics, causalities, and temporalities. the mathematics that emerges from twen- tieth-century history is not just one of statistics and aggregates—it’s also a mathematics of logarithms and exponents. adeeb khalid: my first thought was to state the obvious: that we can write history any which way we want. i read the prompt in kashgar, in the xinjiang uyghur autono- mous region of the people’s republic of china, a place the very narrative of whose history is deeply contested between the chinese state and the bulk of the uyghur popu- lation. is the city kashi, part of the western regions that have been part of the great chinese homeland since time immemorial (as the official line goes), or is it kashgar, a central asian oasis city with a turkic muslim population and a history connected to the steppe and to the muslim world? and is its twentieth-century history one of libera- tion by the communist party of china and the chinese people’s army or one of re- peated failed attempts at national statehood? i am sure we can all think of examples of such deeply contested histories from our own areas of expertise, and they encompass some fundamental features of history-writing. answering the question in the spirit in which it was asked—how do we professional historians conceptualize the history of the twentieth century?—is not much easier, since the answer depends not just on the historian but on what aspect of history one is con- cerned with. after all, the one thing we have all grown less fond of are totalizing grand narratives. the twentieth century was indeed dumb for reasons suggested by andrew, and among its casualties were notions of linear (or dialectical) progress—not just those entertained on the left but also their conservative counterparts. in the early twentieth century, “backwardness” and the necessity of “catching up” were central concepts for douglas northrop, “earthquakes on the edge: border spaces and empire making along the eur- asian frontier,” lecture to the eisenberg institute for historical studies, university of michigan depart- ment of history, september , . history after the end of history american historical review december states and intellectuals outside of europe, producing what we might call a discourse of comparative backwardness. socialism appealed to many, being it promised a way for- ward. after world war ii, discourses of “development,” “green revolution,” and the like sought to co-opt the quest to overcome backwardness to the global status quo. they have all passed from the lexicon of the day, and only the all-american (and self-delusionary) search for a “more perfect union” continues to feature in public discourse today. as i said in my last post, the twentieth century has seen enormous, unprecedented transformations in the natural world. it has also seen the passage of empire and the rise of formal sovereignty, so that today most of the world’s people are not formal im- perial subjects. yet the limits of formal sovereignty are all too clear. and the twentieth century has seen greater resources devoted to war than at any time in the past. how do we subsume all of this into a single global pattern for the whole century? jonathan zatlin: alex has raised an important question, one that has made me won- der, once again, why historians today seem comparatively uninterested in the construc- tion of historical time. we often describe our work as focused on “change over time.” in practice, however, we treat this formula not as an equal relation between two vari- ables, but as if controlling for time frees us up to investigate transformation. to judge from recent scholarly publications, historians are more invested in identifying disconti- nuities than analyzing temporalities. so i find myself wondering why alex’s question is so “timely.” one clue about our preference for change over time is embedded in the displacement of temporal symmetry by temporal succession as the dominant construction of social time. cyclic time apprehends every new event as a repetition or reenactment of previous occurrences, which imbues it with deeply ahistorical tendencies. to give a contemporary example, traditional (halakhic) jews often view the shoah as the recurrence of previous catastrophes, most notably the destruction of the first and second temples, the destruc- tion and dispersal of palestinian jewry by the romans, and to a lesser extent the expul- sion from spain and the khmelnytsky massacres of – . on this view, the unique qualities of each catastrophe are of less interest than their similarities. indeed, whatever the historicity that is lost to cyclic time, the organization of social time as repetition helps mitigate the terror of catastrophic events while generating collective meanings that ap- pear to stand outside time. it is this creation of social meaning through repetition that goes some way toward explaining the gap between history and memory. in stark contrast, linear time demands that each event be treated as singular and without precedent. as a product of christian eschatology, it slowly supplanted notions of cyclic time in the west, eventually giving rise to a scientific inquiry focused on tem- poral succession and a literary genre distinct from chronicles or poetry. of course, this displacement was incomplete. the cyclic organization of history survived in different forms, surfacing in such places as hegel’s repetition, which marx coyly apostrophized as tragedy and farce, even if this recurrence remained in service to linear progression. by the end of the nineteenth century, however, the cyclic organization of time was in- creasingly invoked as a form of resistance to the temporality of “progress.” we see glimmers in nietzsche’s declaration of the “death of god” and his notion of eternal re- currence, and in freud’s repetition compulsion, which after made him doubt the trajectory that ends in therapeutic cure. ahr conversation american historical review december but it required the genocidal rage of the twentieth century to break the promise of progress. the incomplete disenchantment and dechristianization of the western world has voided developmental time of its redemptive content, yet left us with its teleological form. the unrestrained violence of the twentieth century, together with its panglossian in- sistence on progress even in the face of the environmental destruction that gabrielle men- tions, has generated a crisis in the construction of historical time. and yet, popular culture continues to embrace the retrenchment of linear time embedded in santayana’s moralis- tic construction that “those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.” to the extent that progressive time is collapsing as an organizing principle, it has freed us up to think more clearly about the history we write. for example, it is increas- ingly possible to imagine different constructions of historical time as coexisting simulta- neously in one place. i keep thinking of adeeb’s idea of “comparative backward- ness”—or the generation, through colonial occupation and imperial predation, of de- velopmental time, in which an anxiety over “falling behind” a western present directs excavation of the past. similarly, anxieties over historicity draw attention to other dis- junctions—between individual and collective psychology and between the participant in and the observer of the past. as alex suggested, the temporal concepts that informed historical actors are hardly identical to the chronometric assumptions of historical ana- lysts. moreover, narratological demands impose their own constraints, which are often at odds with the timeliness of the history we wish to recount. i have no answers to this question, but i do hear marvell’s “winged chariot drawing near.” my worry is that we have world enough, but not the time. anna krylova: gabrielle’s critique also resonated with me, but i am finding it difficult to navigate through different connotations of the “linear” that our conversation has in- voked. i also wonder whether it is paramount or possible to refuse “linear” thinking in all its applications in historical analysis and in our narration of historical constructs such as the “twentieth century.” i am afraid that for the sake of the argument we have ended up with a far too nar- row notion of a linear conception of history. the critique that linear thinking averages out and deletes historical complexities, irregularities, and variations presupposes that linear models, by definition, are antithetical to nuanced and contextually grounded analysis. however, this is hardly the case even with the tirelessly critiqued marxist model, this accepted archetype of linear and progressive thinking about history. far from antithetical to historical complexities, marxist linear dialectics as a historical method is not only inclusive of but predicated on the presumption of historical contra- dictions, cyclical and spiral repetitions, lasting leftovers of the past, irregularities, and farcical recurrences. this is not to say that the marxist model does not produce gaps and omissions, does not “emplot,” and does not moralize (otherwise we would not call it “marxist”), but this does remind us that we should not make our task of critiquing linear models easier than the task needs to be. most importantly, the example of linear dialectics seems to underline profound interdependencies of linear, cyclical, spiral, ir- regular, farcical modeling of history. far from incompatible, they belong to the same rather complex modern epistemic system, and one cannot give it up by simply rejecting its fragments. in other words, a pursuit of a historical narrative that privileges a study of the cyclical, or the spiral, or the irregular, the variable, the absurd, would still presup- history after the end of history american historical review december pose some concept of the linear. maybe the challenge that we face is to learn how not to automatically privilege or reject one mode of analysis over another and how to ac- complish such a task in a historical narrative of the twentieth century? this question, i believe, stands particularly acutely in relation to the field of modern russia as it continues to interrogate the emplotment of the soviet encounter with so- cialism into a master narrative of “stagnation” and “collapse” in its “tragic” variation, to borrow from hayden white’s classification of historical-literary genres. at the level of fundamental aspirations, this still-dominant story equates the soviet modern project with bolshevism. put into practice in the s, during stalinist industrialization, the bolshevik socialist alternative, in this account, continued to define soviet modernity af- ter the war and survived the continuous cycle of ultimately futile revisions and reforms of its original premises. as a result, the story makes the “collapse” and “return” into the imperfect world of capitalism seem inevitable. the need to work out a new set of analytics to approach postwar soviet socialism also seems unnecessary. paradoxically (from the standpoint of the existent critique of linear thinking), it is precisely social changes that, in demographic calculations, form what looks like a line— the dramatic, continuous, and irreversible growth of soviet urban population between the s and s, for example, that could help historians to escape the story of stag- nation and begin to build a more nuanced and uneven historical narrative of soviet so- cialism. to clarify, i consider linear developments observable on a relatively short time scale to be rare and exceptional historical occurrences. for this reason, periods that form trajectories of rapid linear growth point to unprecedented and profound social transformations in the lives of historical subjects, which require a close historical analy- sis and which could hardly fit a narrative of stagnating society. andrew zimmerman: at the end of the twentieth century, a number of thinkers in europe and the united states—foucault, lyotard, fukuyama, for example—de- manded that the left give up a linear temporality aiming toward a more perfect state, hayden white, metahistory: the historical imagination in nineteenth-century europe (baltimore, ). for agenda-setting formulations and narrations of the soviet experiment that privilege tropes of undergirding continuity (including non-linear) and/or stagnation, see kotkin, magnetic mountain; ste- phen kotkin, armageddon averted: the soviet collapse, – (oxford, ); katerina clark, pe- tersburg: crucible of cultural revolution (cambridge, mass., ); david l. hoffmann, “was there a ‘great retreat’ from soviet socialism? stalinist culture reconsidered,” kritika: explorations in russian and eurasian history , no. ( ): – ; hoffmann, stalinist values: the cultural norms of soviet modernity, – (ithaca, n.y., ). the paradigm of “uneven development” might work better to capture diverging trajectories of so- cial, economic, political, and cultural change in the soviet twentieth century and create room for scholar- ship that parts ways with the master narrative of stagnation and fundamental cultural continuity of the soviet socialist project. moshe lewin, the gorbachev phenomenon: a historical interpretation (berkeley, calif., ); ronald grigor suny, “obituary or autopsy? historians look at russia/ussr in the short twentieth century,” kritika: explorations in russian and eurasian history , no. ( ): – ; susan e. reid, “toward a new (socialist) realism: the re-engagement with western modernism in the khru- shchev thaw,” in rosalind p. blakesley and susan e. reid, eds., russian art and the west: a century of dialogue in painting, architecture, and the decorative arts (dekalb, ill., ), – ; benjamin na- thans, “soviet rights-talk in the post-stalin era,” in stefan-ludwig hoffmann, ed., human rights in the twentieth century (cambridge, ), – ; michael david-fox, crossing borders: modernity, ideol- ogy, and culture in russia and the soviet union (pittsburgh, ); alexey golubev, “desirable things of ogoniok: the material face of a soviet illustrated magazine from stalin to brezhnev,” soviet and post- soviet review , no. ( ): – . ahr conversation american historical review december that is, communism. but had the twentieth-century left been as bound to linear tem- porality as these end-of-the-century offers to free us from it seemed to suggest? cer- tainly most liberals remain as wedded today as they were in the nineteenth century to gradual, patient progress toward “a more perfect [national] union.” yet thinkers on the left have long characterized history not as linear progress but rather as inexorable repe- tition—of injustice, of oppression, of exploitation. that repetition was what made “our dumb century,” as the onion aptly characterized the twentieth century, so very dumb. certainly the linear temporality of national liberal historians offered one way to imagine—and only to imagine—breaking repetition. but liberal temporality became a less and less plausible alternative to the repetition of injustice and oppression as liber- alism itself became a global hegemon, with its gruesome excesses from the paris june days of to the so-called war on terror today. marx and engels, for example, begin the communist manifesto, with its otherwise lin- ear temporality, with a reminder that it is repetition, not linear progression, that rules history: “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.” (after , marx and engels would largely abandon the linear temporality of this very early work.) freud, contemplating the trauma of the first world war, similarly mar- veled at the compulsion to repeat traumatic experiences unconnected to any source of pleasure, leaving him to wonder at the possibility of higher human development. freud, no revolutionary, resolved this problem as best he could in his beyond the pleasure principle. others have since followed freud, as well as marx, in thinking of repetition as a political problem. perhaps the greatest left critic of linear temporality was walter benjamin, who, in his theses on the philosophy of history, excoriated revisionist social democrats for their complacent faith in inevitable progress, and called, in sympathy with the communist party of germany, for revolution. the discipline of history shares—or at least should share—with popular politics a problem with temporality: how to conceptualize social and political change, how to dis- rupt repetition, without proposing as a false alternative a linear conception of history that is equally on the side of power, finally part of the repetition characteristic of the michel foucault makes this point in many places, and with special clarity in “afterword: the sub- ject and power,” in hubert l. dreyfus and paul rabinow, michel foucault: beyond structuralism and hermeneutics (chicago, ), – ; jean-françois lyotard, the postmodern condition: a report on knowledge, trans. geoff bennington and brian massumi (minneapolis, ); francis fukuyama, the end of history and the last man (new york, ). the onion presents our dumb century: years of headlines from america’s finest news source, ed. scott dikkers (new york, ); lyotard, the postmodern condition. marx and engels, manifesto of the communist party ( ), available online at https://www.marx ists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/manifesto.pdf. see, above all, the opening pages of marx, the eighteenth brumaire of louis bonaparte ( ), available online at https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/ works/download/pdf/ th-brumaire.pdf. more broadly, see kevin b. anderson, marx at the margins: on nationalism, ethnicity, and non-western societies (chicago, ). freud, beyond the pleasure principle ( ), vol. of the standard edition of the complete psy- chological works of sigmund freud (london, ). see, for example, slavoj �zi�zek, repeating lenin (zagreb, ), available online at http://www. lacan.com/replenin.htm; and alain badiou, being and event, trans. oliver feltham (london, ; origi- nal french ed. ). walter benjamin, “on the concept of history,” in selected writings, vol. : – , ed. how- ard eiland and michael william jennings, trans. edmund jephcott et al. (cambridge, mass., ), – . this was translated earlier as “theses on the philosophy of history,” in illuminations, ed. hannah arendt, trans. harry zohn (new york, ), – . history after the end of history american historical review december https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/manifesto.pdf https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/manifesto.pdf https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/ th-brumaire.pdf https://www.marxists.org/archive/marx/works/download/pdf/ th-brumaire.pdf http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm http://www.lacan.com/replenin.htm “dumb” century. black lives matter—the movement and the slogan—offers a possibil- ity of repetition against repetition, a dialectical, counterhegemonic repetition. as a slo- gan, “black lives matter” seems only to repeat the obvious rather than articulating a demand for the future. but in repeating the obvious as a demand, it highlights the ways that power will not or cannot recognize this obvious fact. the statement “black lives matter” is thus repetition as dialectical negation. the hap- less retort “all lives matter” seeks simply to return this dialectic to an abstract notion basic to liberalism. attempts to force this dialectic into the linear temporality of dialogue and re- form are equally committed to the status quo. in fact, not just recent u.s. history but “the history of all hitherto existing society” in much of the world has repeated again and again its opposite, that black lives—and indeed the lives of any group not defined as “white”— do not matter to ruling elites. i am reminded of the brilliant portrayal of the power of counterhegemonic repetition in the dogme group film the celebration. i would make a similar point about the slogan “we are the %” from the occupy movement. history shares with such counterhegemonic, dialectical repetition a goal of psycho- analysis, articulated by freud in beyond the pleasure principle: “to force as much as pos- sible into the channel of memory and to allow as little as possible to emerge as repeti- tion.” the trick of historians interested in doing what might be called policy-relevant work for popular politics will be to come up with forms of writing commensurate with not only the content but also the form of black lives matter. ahr editor: as i bring this conversation to a close, i must say that i am struck by the degree to which my questions have, quite accidentally, provoked extraordinary flights of theory, from agamben to �zi�zek and much in between. yet i am also thrilled by how this high level of conceptual engagement has been rooted in very deep historio- graphic and empirical ground. collectively, i think the historiography invoked, the con- crete examples given, and the theoretical models alluded to point to a very old ques- tion, and yet one that took on quite new dimensions in the historical context of the cen- tury just past: what is politics? the effort of hannah arendt, frequently referenced in our exchanges, to come to grips with the marxist tradition and its historical legacy re- mains one of the most acute registers in which this question has been posed. for her part, arendt tended to assume that “historical consciousness” and secular notions of time—the idea that “strictly speaking, repetitions cannot occur”—accompanied one an- other. but our discussion leaves me wondering how we can grasp an epoch which, in jonathan’s apt words, has “generated a crisis in the construction of historical time,” whether driven by the exterminatory events of the twentieth century or the looming ex- istential finitude of the present one. and yet i can’t help but observe that we—as col- lective humanity—still have a history, and one that still needs to be reckoned with, even if only in a sisyphean effort to overcome the past by substituting memory for com- pulsive repetition. my one regret is that our conversation only rarely touched on that key constituent element in reconceptualizing the recent past: how it is shaped by the the celebration, dir. thomas vinterberg (denmark, ; distributed in the u.s. by october films). freud, beyond the pleasure principle, . see hannah arendt, the promise of politics, ed. jerome kuhn (new york, ). hannah arendt, “the concept of history: ancient and modern,” in the portable hannah arendt, ed. peter baehr (new york, ), – , here – , quote from . ahr conversation american historical review december disruptive, dynamic, contested process of memory. raphael samuel, in his classic theatres of memory, observed that professional historians’ imposition of historical nar- rative reduced the past to a “dream-thought,” “producing images far clearer than any reality could be.” such repression and displacement, he maintained, could only be overcome through an appeal to “unofficial history” and practices of popular memory in all its myriad forms. perhaps this is a conversation to be revisited at the aha meeting in denver in january . manu goswami is associate professor of history at new york university. she is the author of producing india: from colonial economy to national space (uni- versity of chicago press, ). she is currently finishing a book on the political and economic futures envisioned by a variety of twentieth-century international- isms. along with mrinalini sinha, she is editing a volume on the political imagi- naries of india’s twentieth century. she is a former fellow of the school for social science, institute for advanced study, princeton university. in – , she will be a fellow at the wissenschaftskolleg zu berlin, working on a project about the co-evolution of the british empire and classical and neoclassical economic doctrines and methods. she serves on the editorial boards of critical historical studies, public culture, and the american historical review. gabrielle hecht is professor of history at the university of michigan, where she has also directed the program in science, technology, and society and served as associate director of the african studies center. she is the author of two award- winning books—being nuclear: africans and the global uranium trade (mit press, ; french edition, seuil, ) and the radiance of france: nuclear power and national identity after world war ii (mit press, and ; french editions, la découverte, and )—and editor of entangled geog- raphies: empire and technopolitics in the global cold war (mit press, ). hecht earned a bachelor’s degree in physics from mit and a ph.d. in history and sociology of science from the university of pennsylvania. she has held visit- ing positions in australia, france, the netherlands, norway, south africa, and sweden. she is currently working on two books: an essay collection, toxic tales from the african anthropocene, and a pedagogical survey on technology and power in africa (under contract with cambridge university press). adeeb khalid is jane and raphael bernstein professor of asian studies and his- tory at carleton college in northfield, minnesota, where he has taught since . he works on central asia in the period after the russian conquest of the nineteenth century, with thematic interests in religion and cultural change, na- tionalism, empires, and colonialism. the centrality of central asia brings a trans- national dimension to his work and puts him in conversation with work on soviet as well as middle east history. he has received fellowships from the guggenheim foundation, the carnegie corporation, and the john w. kluge center at the library of congress. he is the author of the politics of muslim cultural reform: jadidism in central asia (university of california press, ), islam after com- munism: religion and politics in central asia (university of california press, ), and making uzbekistan: nation, empire, and revolution in the early ussr raphael samuel, theatres of memory: past and present in contemporary culture, revised paperback ed. (london, ), xxiii. history after the end of history american historical review december (cornell university press, ). he is currently working on a general history of central asia in the modern age. anna krylova is associate professor of modern russian history at duke univer- sity. she works on twentieth-century russia and the challenges posed in envision- ing and building a socialist alternative in the age of industrial and postindustrial modernity and globalization. questions of historical theory and gender theory propel her work on contemporary historiography. she is the author of soviet women in combat: a history of violence on the eastern front (cambridge uni- versity press, ), which was awarded the herbert baxter adams prize of the american historical association. her second book project, provisionally ti- tled imagining socialism in the soviet century, aims to make possible a new cul- tural history of soviet russia by historicizing the ways in which normative conceptions of socialist society, sociality, and individuality evolved in russia from the revolution of to gorbachev’s half-decade of perestroika. she is also preparing a historiographical manuscript, the practice of history in the twenty- first century, featuring essays assessing what has happened to the practice of his- tory since the theoretical and epistemological turmoil of the s– s. most recently, she is the author of “gender binary and the limits of poststructuralist method,” gender and history , no. ( ): – . she has been a fellow at the national humanities center; george kennan member at the institute for advanced study, princeton, new jersey; a fellow at the davis center for russian and eurasian studies at harvard university; and a visiting scholar at the institute for eastern european history and area studies at eberhard karls universit€at in tübingen, germany. her work has been supported by a mellon faculty book manuscript workshop fellowship, the social science research council (ssrc), and irex. elizabeth f. thompson, until recently professor of history at the university of virginia, is now farsi chair of islamic peace at american university in washing- ton, d.c. she is a scholar of imperialism, citizenship, and social movements, par- ticularly concerned with how leaders of middle eastern political movements have sought to avoid political violence in favor of peaceful resolutions of conflict. her most recent book, justice interrupted: the struggle for constitutional govern- ment in the middle east (harvard university press, ), looks at struggles for justice in the middle east against the growth of tyranny, inequality, and foreign intervention since the late nineteenth century. it demonstrates that islamic move- ments share a history of liberal politics with secular movements. her first book, colonial citizens: republican rights, paternal privilege, and gender in french syria and lebanon (columbia university press, ), examined the gendered con- struction of political space and the consequent distancing of female citizens from direct access to the state. it won two national history prizes. with support from the carnegie corporation and the woodrow wilson international center for scholars, thompson is currently working on a third book, after lawrence: wood- row wilson and the promise of islamic democracy in syria. jonathan r. zatlin is associate professor of history at boston university and associate director of the arvind and chandan nandlal kilachand honors col- lege. along with his colleagues andrew bacevich, brooke blower, and bruce schulman, he organized the mellon foundation sawyer seminar series in / around the topic “reinterpreting the twentieth century.” he has written widely on the history of german communism, from marxist economic theory, economic planning, socialist consumer policy, the east german automobile in- dustry, and the socialist production and consumption of women’s lingerie to pop- ahr conversation american historical review december ular opinion under communism, the east german secret police, racism in soviet- style regimes, and the politics of german unification. he is the author of the currency of socialism: money and political culture in east germany (cambridge university press, ), and co-editor, with pamela e. swett and s. jonathan wiesen, of selling modernity: advertising in twentieth-century germany (duke university press, ). his current research investigates the link between race and economy in modern european history, focusing on the experience of ger- man jews. together with christoph kreutzmüller, he is co-editor of disposses- sion: plundering german jewry, – (under contract at university of michigan press) and is currently working on a monograph titled fantasies of jew- ish wealth in germany, – . andrew zimmerman is professor of history at the george washington univer- sity. his research focuses on empires and revolutions in europe, the united states, and west africa and seeks to create dialogues between theory, especially marxism and psychoanalysis, and transnational archival research. he is the au- thor of anthropology and antihumanism in imperial germany (university of chi- cago press, ) and alabama in africa: booker t. washington, the german empire, and the globalization of the new south (princeton university press, ). he has also edited karl marx and friedrich engels, the civil war in the united states (international publishers, ). he is currently writing a history of the american civil war as a transnational revolution against slave labor and wage labor. his next project will be an intellectual history of rural insurgency from the global french revolution to global maoism. history after the end of history american historical review december 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn 	art -fn meta-analysis of field experiments shows no change in racial discrimination in hiring over time meta-analysis of field experiments shows no change in racial discrimination in hiring over time lincoln quilliana,b, , devah pagerc,d, ole hexela,e, and arnfinn h. midtbøenf adepartment of sociology, northwestern university, evanston, il ; binstitute for policy research, northwestern university, evanston il ; cdepartment of sociology, harvard university, cambridge, ma ; dkennedy school of government, harvard university, cambridge ma ; esciences po, observatoire sociologique du changement (osc), cnrs, paris, france; and finstitute for social research, n- oslo, norway edited by douglas s. massey, princeton university, princeton, nj, and approved august , (received for review april , ) this study investigates change over time in the level of hiring discrimination in us labor markets. we perform a meta-analysis of every available field experiment of hiring discrimination against african americans or latinos (n = ). together, these studies represent , applications submitted for , positions. we focus on trends since (n = studies), when field experi- ments became more common and improved methodologically. since , whites receive on average % more callbacks than african americans, and % more callbacks than latinos. we ob- serve no change in the level of hiring discrimination against african americans over the past years, although we find modest evi- dence of a decline in discrimination against latinos. accounting for applicant education, applicant gender, study method, occupational groups, and local labor market conditions does little to alter this result. contrary to claims of declining discrimination in american society, our estimates suggest that levels of discrimination remain largely unchanged, at least at the point of hire. discrimination | labor markets | field experiments | race | ethnicity the american racial landscape has changed in fundamentalways since the civil rights movement of the s. during that time, sweeping legal and social reforms reduced the barriers facing african americans in many important domains ( , ). a rising african american middle class and a growing acceptance of the prin- ciples of inclusion led some to conclude that racial discrimination had declined to the point that it was no longer a primary determinant of life chances for african americans and latinos ( , ). supporting this perspective, a variety of indicators pointed toward a reduction of discriminatory treatment. surveys indicated that whites increasingly endorsed the principle of equal treatment re- gardless of race ( ). rates of high school graduation for whites and african americans converged substantially, and the black–white test score gap declined ( , ). large companies increasingly recognized diversity as a goal and revamped their hiring to curtail practices that disadvantaged minority applicants ( ). with the election of the country’s first african-american president in , many concluded that the country had finally moved beyond its troubled racial past ( ). despite clear signs of racial progress, however, on several key dimensions racial inequality persists and has even increased. for example, racial gaps in unemployment have shown little change since ( , ), and the black–white gap in labor force parti- cipation rates among young men widened during this time ( ). recently, the black lives matter movement shone a spotlight on the ongoing struggles with racism and discrimination experienced by people of color in interactions with law enforcement. the election of donald j. trump as the th president of the united states with the support of antiimmigrant and white nationalist groups high- lighted the persistence of racial resentment ( ). in light of persistent racial gaps in key social and economic indicators, some scholars have challenged prevailing assumptions about waning discrimination. indeed, while expressions of ex- plicit prejudice have declined precipitously over time, measures of stereotypes and implicit bias appear to have changed little over the past few decades ( – ). in this view, far from disappearing, racial bias has taken on new forms, becoming more contingent, subtle, and covert ( – ). what can we reliably say about trends in discrimination over time? has the role of race appreciably diminished across the board, or are there important domains in which little racial progress has been achieved? answers to these questions are important for un- derstanding the sources of persistent racial inequality. in this study, we examine trends in racial and ethnic discrim- ination in american labor markets based on a meta-analysis of every available field experiment of hiring discrimination (with fieldwork dates through december ). meta-analysis is a body of formal methods to synthesize data from a population of existing studies. field experiments of hiring discrimination are experi- mental studies in which fictionalized matched candidates from different racial or ethnic groups apply for jobs. these studies include both resume audits, in which fictionalized resumes with distinct racial names are submitted online or by mail (e.g., ref. ), and in-person audits, in which racially dissimilar but other- wise matched pairs of trained testers apply for jobs (e.g., ref. ). the field experimental method is a design with high causal (internal) validity because it benefits from aspects of experimental design. the experimenter carefully manages the application pro- cess, which provides control over many potential confounding variables. the exact basis of causal inference across the two main forms of field experiment, resume and in-person audits, is some- what different. in the typical resume audit, clues indicating race (such as a racially identifiable name) are randomly assigned to other- wise similar resumes, allowing for treatment and control groups to be equated through randomization. in in-person audits, matched significance many scholars have argued that discrimination in american society has decreased over time, while others point to per- sisting race and ethnic gaps and subtle forms of prejudice. the question has remained unsettled due to the indirect methods often used to assess levels of discrimination. we assess trends in hiring discrimination against african americans and latinos over time by analyzing callback rates from all available field experiments of hiring, capitalizing on the direct measure of discrimination and strong causal validity of these studies. we find no change in the levels of discrimination against african americans since , although we do find some indication of declining discrimination against latinos. the results document a striking persistence of racial discrimination in us labor markets. author contributions: l.q. designed research; l.q., o.h., and a.h.m. performed research; l.q. and o.h. analyzed data; and l.q., d.p., o.h., and a.h.m. wrote the paper. the authors declare no conflict of interest. this article is a pnas direct submission. freely available online through the pnas open access option. see commentary on page . to whom correspondence should be addressed. email: l-quillian@northwestern.edu. this article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental. – | pnas | october , | vol. | no. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /pnas. &domain=pdf mailto:l-quillian@northwestern.edu http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. pairs of trained testers who differ on the basis of race but are otherwise similar apply for jobs; the between-race contrast is grounded in matching pairs of applicants to make them as similar as possible in all employment-relevant characteristics except race. both resume and in-person audit methods provide a strong basis from which to draw conclusions about hiring discrimina- tion, particularly relative to the nonexperimental methods widely used in the literature, including by all prior studies of discrimi- nation trends over time (ref. and si appendix, section ). we use meta-analytic techniques to investigate change in hiring discrimination over time based on all existing us field experi- mental studies of labor market discrimination. our procedure follows three basic stages: first, we identified all existing studies, published or unpublished, that use a field experimental method and that provide contrasts in hiring-related outcomes between equally qualified candidates from different racial or ethnic groups. second, we coded key characteristics of the studies into a database for our analysis based on a coding rubric. this produced studies containing estimates of discrimination against african americans and latinos since , together representing , ap- plications submitted for , positions. finally, we performed a random-effects meta-regression to identify trends over time. we assess discrimination for each study using the ratio of the proportion of applications that received “callbacks”—or invitations to interview—by white applicants relative to african-american or latino applicants. we calculated the proportions based on counts of the number of callbacks received by each group (white/african american/latino) within each study. this discrimination ratio measured at the study level is the outcome in our meta-regression. other methods of calculating hiring disparities between groups produced substantively similar results (si appendix, section ). we analyze the relationship of discrimination ratios to years in which the data were gathered to provide an estimate of the trend in discrimination. specifically, we regress the log of the discrimi- nation ratio on year of survey, with controls for key characteristics of the studies, using meta-regression. meta-regression is a pro- cedure similar to standard regression, except covariates are mea- sured at the level of the study rather than the level of the individual, and the outcome is an effect from the study of interest (in our case, the outcome is the estimate of discrimination against african americans or latinos). methods and materials discusses further methodological and modeling details. results to explore trends over time, we estimate a series of meta-regressions. we take the natural log of the discrimination ratio (our outcome variable) to account for skew. in the simplest meta-regression models, the only covariate is the time trend. in later models, we include a more extensive set of predictors to control for other factors that might confound the time trend. to capture sources of variability not covered by the covariates, we use a random effects specification ( ). random effects incorporate a variance com- ponent capturing variation in outcomes across studies that are due to unobserved study-level factors (methods and materials). our core analysis focuses on studies that conducted their field- work from to , allowing us to observe trends in discrim- ination over the past years. for some supplementary analyses, we also add four field experiments conducted before , although these studies use less standardized methodologies. on average, white applicants receive % more callbacks than equally qualified african americans ( % confidence interval of – % more), based on random-effects meta-analysis of data since , repre- senting a substantial degree of direct discrimination. white appli- cants receive on average % more callbacks than latinos ( % confidence interval of – % more). for more detailed results, see si appendix, section and figs. s and s . do we find evidence of change over time in rates of hiring discrimination? with respect to african americans, the answer is no. fig. plots estimates of discrimination by year, with linear trends of best fit and % confidence regions (detailed estimates are in si appendix, section and table s ; in fig. , we expo- nentiate predictions to present predicted values as discrimina- tion ratios rather than less interpretable log discrimination ratios). the solid line captures the trend since . the dashed line extends this time trend back to , adding four resume audits conducted from to . the size of the symbol is proportional to the weight it is given in the meta-analysis. the line of best fit for studies since is close to flat, sloping slightly upward, suggesting no change in the rate of discrimination over the past years. the longer time series includes studies that use a more heterogeneous set of procedures (methods and materials), but even here we see no clear change over time in the level of hiring discrimination against african americans. is there sufficient power based on studies to conclude that discrimination against african americans did not decline? the confidence interval of the annual change provides a way to answer this question. the % confidence interval of the slope – is − . to . . [this is the confidence interval of the slope of “year” (our time trend variable) with the log discrimination ratio outcome. the regression is shown in si appendix, table s .] the lower end of this interval indicates a decline in the discrimination ratio of . % per year. if we take this number as the smallest slope consistent with the data based on the confidence interval, this sug- gests only a slight decline in discrimination each year. we conclude that this evidence rules out all but a slow decline in discrimination— with the most likely estimate being the point estimate, which indi- cates no decline in discrimination at all. fig. presents the trend for latinos (as with fig. , model predictions have been exponentiated to allow interpretation as discrimination ratios rather than log ratios). here, we see the line slopes downward, indicating a possible decline in discrimi- nation, although this trend is outside of conventional levels of significance (p = . ). the point estimate suggests a decline from whites receiving % more callbacks than latinos in to % more callbacks in ( . vs. . ). because of the small number of latino field experiments (n = ), there is high uncertainty in characterizing this trend. (using the difference in proportions or the odds ratio as outcomes, rather than the dis- crimination ratio, results in downward slopes in discrimination against latinos over time that are statistically significant at the p < . level; see si appendix, section and table s . however, sensitivity checks that modified the outcome sample counts slightly result in nonsignificant year coefficients of the difference in pro- portion or odds ratio, see si appendix, section and table s ). is it possible that key aspects of study design changed over time, influencing our estimates of changes in discrimination? to consider this question, we estimate a meta-regression model of discrimination rates as a function of a time trend plus other study characteristics. we discuss only models for african americans, because the number of studies with latinos (n = ) is too small to produce reasonable precise estimates in a meta-regression model with multiple covariates. fig. graphs estimates of change over time when the outcome discrimination ratio is modified and when controls are added. full coefficients of the models are shown in si appendix, table s , with additional discussion in si appendix, section . the coefficients can be interpreted as the one-year percentage change in the discrimination ratio. [because the outcome is logged, and exp(b) ≈ + b for b < . , coefficients with values less than about . can be multiplied by to closely approximate percentage changes with a one-unit change in x.] the first coefficient graphed shows the annual percentage change in discrimination from to , corresponding to solid line in fig. . the second shows the annual change for the longer time period – , corresponding to the dashed line in fig. . quillian et al. pnas | october , | vol. | no. | so c ia l sc ie n c es se e c o m m en ta r y d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. .sapp.pdf http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. .sapp.pdf http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. .sapp.pdf http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. .sapp.pdf http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. .sapp.pdf http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. .sapp.pdf http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. .sapp.pdf http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. .sapp.pdf http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. .sapp.pdf http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. .sapp.pdf the next few models alter the dependent variable to see if this changes our results (using our base sample of – ). in one modification, we use “job offer” in place of callback as the outcome for studies for which the job offer outcome is available (n = ), retaining callbacks as the outcome for studies in which the measure of job offer is not available. this makes the outcome variable less uniform across studies, although closer to the outcome of greatest substantive interest, getting a job. with this modification, the trend line for african americans slants more downward, but is still close to zero (− . ) and statistically nonsignificant. a second modifi- cation eliminates applicant profiles that included either a fictitious criminal background (n = ) or a disability (n = ). this limits the applicant profiles to those with more mainstream job backgrounds and credentials. the modified results show the trend line slanting slightly more upward, providing less evidence to support a down- ward trend than the results including a more heterogeneous set of applicant characteristics. a third modification uses only resume audit studies, discarding in-person audits. this results in an almost perfectly flat line (− . ). the next estimates are based on models that add controls for applicant attributes, region and area unemployment rates, and occupational categories to the baseline time-trend model. the “applicant attributes” model introduces covariates representing applicant characteristics (e.g., gender, education) and study design (resume or in-person audits). the “ue & regions” model adds controls for the unemployment rate of the local metropolitan area and dummy variables for region. the “occupations” model in- cludes controls for occupational categories of blue collar, office- focused, and restaurant occupations. finally we present the co- efficient from a trimmed model in which only the predictors with the largest t ratios from prior models are included. in each case, we see coefficients for the time trend that are close to zero—ranging from an estimated increase of . % per year ( . ) to an increase of . % per year ( . ) —suggesting little change in the level of discrimination facing african americans over time. notably, then, we find evidence of stability, not change, in hiring discrimination against african americans. few of the measured covariates in our analysis (si appendix, table s ) demonstrate a clear relationship to patterns of dis- crimination. this likely is in part due to the relatively small overall sample of studies (n = for african americans since ), which limits our ability to detect statistical significance. however, even looking at the point estimates we find no large differences in magnitude across categories. this result is consistent with the findings within individual audit studies that suggest relative stability in measured discrimination across job types, applicant gender, and skill levels (e.g., refs. and ). (we also note that a meta-analysis designed to look specifically at effects of many of fig. . no reduction in hiring discrimination facing african americans over time. | www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. quillian et al. d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. .sapp.pdf http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. .sapp.pdf www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. these covariates would use within-study variability—such as con- trasting male and female auditors in the same study—which could provide more power to discern effects. within-study variability cannot be applied to understand change over time since studies are generally conducted over the span of just a few months.) as a final check on the influence of covariates, we tested for time trends among our study-level and individual-level characteristics, finding no evidence of systematic change (si appendix, section and table s ). this suggests that covariates are unlikely to influence the observed time trend for discrimination among either the african- american or latino samples. in relation to our estimate of changes in discrimination over time, the inclusion of study-level and applicant-level character- istics has little impact. in all models, we see little evidence of a reduction in hiring discrimination against african americans over time. fig. . modest evidence of a reduction in hiring discrimination facing latinos over time. fig. . alternative estimates of change in hiring discrimination against african-americans. quillian et al. pnas | october , | vol. | no. | so c ia l sc ie n c es se e c o m m en ta r y d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. .sapp.pdf http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. .sapp.pdf a potential concern of any meta-analysis is publication bias. in the present case, publication bias may entail studies that show no discrimination being less likely to be published and, thus, included in our study. we sought to address this issue by seeking out and including all nonpublished field experiments available (n = ). their inclusion did little to affect our estimates. finally, in si ap- pendix, section and table s , we show that studies in which racial discrimination was the focus of the analysis (and for which there may be more pressure to demonstrate a positive effect) show no more discrimination than studies in which other characteristics were the main focus (with race included as an secondary or incidental cova- riate), further reducing concerns over publication bias for our results. discussion contrary to widespread assumptions about the declining signif- icance of race, the magnitude and consistency of discrimination we observe over time is a sobering counterpoint. we note that our results do not address the possibility that hiring discrimina- tion may have substantially dropped in the s or early s, during the civil rights era when many forms of direct discrimi- nation were outlawed, as some evidence suggests ( ). further, we note that our results pertain only to discrimination at the point of hire, not at later points in the employment relationship such as in wage setting or termination decisions. social psychological the- ories would predict hiring to be most vulnerable to the influence of racial bias, given that objective information is limited or un- reliable ( – ). likewise, from an accountability standpoint, discrimination is less easily detected, and therefore less costly to employers, at the point of hire ( ). it may be the case, then, that more meaningful reductions in discrimination have taken place at other points in the employment relationship not measured here. what our results point to, however, is that at the initial point of entry—hiring decisions—african americans remain substantially disadvantaged relative to equally qualified whites, and we see little indication of progress over time. these findings lead us to temper our optimism regarding racial progress in the united states. at one time it was assumed that the gradual fade-out of prejudiced beliefs, through cohort replacement and cultural change, would drive a steady reduction in discriminatory treatment ( ). at least in the case of hiring discrimination against african americans, this expectation does not appear borne out. we find some evidence of a decline in discrimination against latinos since . the small number of audit studies including latinos limits our ability to include controls and the precision of our estimates—the decline is marginally significant statistically (p = . ). more evidence is needed to establish the trend in hiring discrimination against latinos with greater certainty. our results point toward the need for strong enforcement of antidiscrimination legislation and provide a rationale for continuing compensatory policies like affirmative action to improve equality of opportunity. discrimination continues, and we find little evidence in regards to african americans that it is disappearing or even grad- ually diminishing. instead, we find the persistence of discrimination at a distressingly uniform rate. materials and methods our procedure follows three basic stages: first, to identify all existing field experiments of hiring discrimination; second, to develop a coding rubric and to code studies to produce a database of their results; and third, to perform a statistical meta-analysis to draw conclusions from the combined results. we discuss each of these steps in turn. identifying relevant studies. we aimed to include in our meta-analysis all existing studies, published or unpublished, that use a field experimental method and that provide contrasts in hiring-related outcomes between different race and ethnic groups in the united states. this includes both in- person audit studies and resume studies (or correspondence studies). we also required that contrasts of hiring outcomes between race or ethnic groups were made for groups that were on average equivalent in their labor market relevant characteristics, since otherwise discrimination estimates are con- founded with the difference in nonracial characteristics. we used three methods to identify relevant field experiments: searches in bibliographic databases, citation searches, and an email request to corre- sponding authors of field experiments of race-ethnic discrimination in labor markets and other experts on field experiments and discrimination. we began with a bibliographic search. our search covered the following bibliographic databases and working paper repositories: thomson’s web of science (social science citation index), proquest sociological abstracts, proquest dissertations and theses, lexis nexis, google scholar, and nber working papers. we searched for some combination of “field experiment” or “audit study” or “correspondence study” and sometimes included the term “discrimination,” with some variation depending on the search functions of the database. we also searched two french-language indexes, cairn and persée, and two in- ternational sources, iza discussion papers, a german working paper archive, and ilo international migration papers. our second technique for identifying relevant studies relied on citation search. working from the initial set of studies located through bibliographic search, we examined the bibliographies of all review articles and eligible field studies to find additional field experiments of hiring discrimination. the last technique used was an email request of authors of existing field experiments of discrimination. from our list of audit studies identified by bibliographic and citation search, we compiled a list of email addresses of authors of existing field experiments of discrimination. to this we added the addresses of authors of literature review articles on field experiments. our email request asked for citations or copies of field discrimination studies published, unpublished, or ongoing. we also asked that authors refer us to any other researchers who may have recent or ongoing field experiments. the email requests were conducted in two phases. in the initial wave, apparently valid email addresses were contacted. we received responses. we also sent out a second wave of e-mails which consisted of additional authors identified from the initial wave of surveys and some corrected email addresses. we received responses to this second wave of email surveys. overall, our search located studies that were us-based field experiments of hiring, included contrasts between white and nonwhite applicant profiles that were on-average equivalent in their labor-market relevant characteristics (e.g., education, experience level in the labor market). six studies were excluded for various reasons, as explained in si appendix, section . our remaining studies yielded estimates of discrimination against african americans and against latinos relative to whites. coding and selection of analysis period ( – ). we coded key charac- teristics of the studies into a database for our analysis. coding was based on a coding rubric, which listed each potentially relevant characteristic of the research and included coding instructions. to develop the rubric, we initially read several studies and, based on this, developed an initial coding rubric of factors we thought might influence measured rates of discrimination. the initial rubric was reviewed and updated by all authors of this study for completeness. it was subsequently refined as coding progressed. each study was coded independently by two raters, with disagreement resolved by the first author. see si appendix, section for more discussion of coding pro- cedures. a list of coded characteristics for the – studies are shown in the si appendix, tables s and s . studies have fieldwork periods range from to for african americans and to for latinos. for most analyses in this paper, we focus on the period – . we focus on this period because the data are sparse before this period (only four studies before ) and because our reading of the early studies indicates key methodological differences among these early studies that may affect their results. resume audits typically signal race by using race-typed names on resumes, but the pre- studies either indicated race directly on the resume [mcintyre et al. ( ) put “race: black” on the minority resumes and nothing about race on the “white” resumes] or attached photos to resumes (a procedure used by newman; ref. ). excluding the early studies leaves us with estimates of discrimination against african americans and nine against latinos from studies (six studies include esti- mates of discrimination against both african americans and latinos). the meta-analysis model. a meta-analysis aggregates information from across studies to produce an estimate of an effect of interest ( ). in this study, our basic measure of discrimination is the discrimination ratio. this is the ratio of the percentage of callbacks for interviews received by white applicants to the percentage of callbacks or interviews received by african americans or latinos. formally, if cw is the number of callbacks received by whites, and cm is the number of callbacks received by african americans or latinos, and nw is the number of applications submitted by white applicants, and nm is the | www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. quillian et al. d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. .sapp.pdf http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. .sapp.pdf http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. .sapp.pdf http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. .sapp.pdf http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. .sapp.pdf www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. number of applications submitted by african american or latino applicants, then the discrimination ratio is (cw/nw)/(cm/nm). ratios above indicate whites received more positive responses than african americans or latinos, with the amount above multiplied by indicating the percentage higher callbacks for whites relative to the minority group. because audit studies equate groups on their nonracial characteristics either through matching and assignment of characteristics (in-person audits) or through random as- signment (most resume audits), no further within-study controls are re- quired. si appendix, section discusses potential alternative measures of discrimination using the difference in proportions and the odds ratio, and presents alternative results using these measures. our basic result—no de- cline in discrimination against african americans over time—holds using both of the alternative measures, whereas evidence of a decline in dis- crimination for latinos appears somewhat stronger with the difference in proportions or the odds ratio. the goal of a meta-analysis is to combine information across studies. this requires measuring the information each study contains about discrimination against a group. the information each study provides is inversely pro- portional to the square of the se of the discrimination ratio. we calculate the se of the ratio from counts reported in each study, accounting for audit pairs in the design when possible. in cases where information on paired outcomes is available from the study (counts of pairs in which both the white and the nonwhite tester receive a callback, white yes nonwhite no, white no nonwhite yes, neither get a callback), we calculated ses of discrimination ratios accounting for the pairing (see si appendix, section for details and formulas). for studies that are not paired between whites or nonwhites or where paired outcomes are not reported, we use formulas for the se for unpaired groups. this formula will slightly overestimate the se of the effect for studies that are paired but we treat as unpaired due to lack of information about the outcomes at the pair level, underweighting these studies a bit in computing the overall effect, and slightly inflating the overall cross-study se. of course field experiments vary in their characteristics, such as the geographic area they cover, the exact job sectors covered, and details of their methodology. to account for this variability in understanding the time trend, we use two procedures. first, we include controls, discussed further below, for many study characteristics. second, to capture sources of variability not covered by the covariates, we use a random effects specification ( ). random effects incorporate a variance component capturing variation in outcomes across studies that are due to unobserved study-level factors. random ef- fects are recommended whenever there is reason to believe that the effect in question is likely to vary as a function of design features of the study, rather than representing a single underlying effect that is constant over the whole population. this is surely the case in our analysis, as we expect that the level of racial discrimination may depend on the year of the study, the situation the study considers (e.g., the occupational categories), the skill level of the applicants, and so on. the random effect increases the ses of estimates to correctly account for variabilities among studies in drawing inferences about overall trend. more formally, random-effects meta-analysis allows the true effects of race on the callback rate in each situation estimated by each study, θi, to vary between studies by assuming that they have a normal distribution around a mean effect, θ. if yi is the discrimination ratio in the ith study, then the meta- analysis model is as follows: ln  ðyiÞ = θ + ui + ei, where  ui ∼ n � , τ � and  ei ∼ n � , σ i � . here, τ is the between-study variance, estimated from between-study var- iance as part of the meta-analysis model, while σi is the variance of the log response ratio in the ith study, estimated from study counts as described above. following standard practice in the meta-analysis literature, we log the response ratio to reduce the asymmetry of the ratio. meta-regression allows that the rate of discrimination is a function of a vector of k characteristics of the studies and effects, x, plus (in the random effects specification) residual study-level heterogeneity (between study variance not explained by the covariates). the model assumes the study-level heterogeneity follows a normal distribution around the linear predictor: ln  ðyiÞ = xiβ + ui + ei, where  ui ∼ n � , τ � and  ei ∼ n � , σ i � , where β is a k × vector of coefficients (including a constant), and xi is a × k vector of covariate values in study i (including a for a constant). estimation is by restricted maximum likelihood. for details, see si appendix, section . to explore trends over time, we include covariates for the year of fieldwork of the study. in the simplest models, the only covariate is this time trend. in later models, we include a more extensive set of predictors to control for other factors that might confound the time trend. these additional controls include resume audit vs. field audit as the study method, gender and education level of the fictitious applicants, occupations tested, unemployment rates at the field sites used for testing, criminal background of some fictitious applicants, and region of the country. for discussions of why these controls were selected, see si appendix, section (see si appendix, tables s and s for descriptive statistics on the controls; for a discussion of trends in covariates, see si appendix, section ). acknowledgments. we thank anthony heath, fenella fleischmann, matthew salganik, frank dobbin, andrás tilcsik, donald green, david neumark, hedwig lee, two anonymous pnas reviewers, and the editor for comments; larry hedges for methodological advice; and jim cheng chen and joshua aaron klingenstein for excellent research assistance. we have received financial support for this project from the russell sage foundation and the institute for policy research at northwestern university. . donohue j-j, heckman j ( ) continuous versus episodic change: the impact of civil rights policy on the economic status of blacks. j econ lit : – . . 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borenstein m, hedges l-v, higgins j-p-t, rothstein h-r ( ) introduction to meta- analysis (john wiley & sons, chichester, uk), p . quillian et al. pnas | october , | vol. | no. | so c ia l sc ie n c es se e c o m m en ta r y d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. .sapp.pdf http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. .sapp.pdf http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. .sapp.pdf http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. .sapp.pdf http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. .sapp.pdf http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. .sapp.pdf http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. .sapp.pdf http://www.epi.org/publication/unfinished-march-overview/ s x xjra .. antidemocratic and exclusionary practices: covid- and the continuum of violence summer forester carleton college cheryl o’brien san diego state university the global coronavirus pandemic has reified divisions, inequity, and injustices rooted in systems of domination such as racism, sexism, neoliberal capitalism, and ableism. feminist scholars have theorized these interlocking systems of domination as the “continuum of violence.” building on this scholarship, we conceptualize the u.s. response to and the consequences of the covid- pandemic as reflective of the continuum of violence. we argue that crises like pandemics expose the antidemocratic and exclusionary practices inherent in this continuum, which is especially racialized and gendered. to support our argument, we provide empirical evidence of the continuum of violence in relation to covid- vis-à-vis the interrelated issues of militarization and what feminists call “everyday security,” such as public health and gender-based violence. the continuum of violence contributes theoretically and practically to our understanding of how violence that the pandemic illuminates is embedded in broader systems of domination and exclusion. keywords: intersectionality, violence, gender, feminist security studies, militarization a s states started introducing plans to contain the covid- pandemicin early , feminist activists and scholars, among others, began sounding the alarm about the deleterious effects that the pandemic would have on women, communities of color, and other oppressed groups (see, e.g., enloe ; un women ). these warnings proved prescient: during the last few weeks of march, calls to a published by cambridge university press - x/ $ . for the author(s). © the author(s), . published by cambridge university press on behalf of the women, gender, and politics research section of the american political science association. this is an open access article, distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. doi: . /s x x politics & gender, ( ), – . terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core vancouver domestic violence hotline increased by % (daya and azpiri ). in the united states, native american and black communities face the highest hospitalization rates for covid- (cdc ). simply put, the pandemic has intensified divisions, inequity, and injustices rooted in systems of domination such as racism, sexism, neoliberal capitalism, and ableism. these interlocking systems of domination characterize what feminist scholars call the “continuum of violence” (cockburn , ; kelly ; moser ; wibben ). the continuum of violence alerts us to how different manifestations of violence, from the international arena to the most intimate spaces, are interconnected. it lays bare the futility of drawing stark demarcations between peace and war, security and insecurity. we conceptualize the u.s. response to and the consequences of the covid- pandemic as reflective of the continuum of violence. we argue that crises like pandemics expose the antidemocratic and exclusionary practices inherent in this continuum, which is especially racialized and gendered. we provide empirical evidence of the continuum of violence in relation to covid- vis-à-vis the interrelated issues of militarization and what feminists call “everyday security,” such as public health. the continuum of violence contributes theoretically and practically to our understanding of how the violence that the pandemic illuminates is embedded in broader systems of domination and exclusion. during and beyond this pandemic, deconstructing the continuum of violence demands systemic changes to cultivate more just and democratic societies. the continuum of violence feminist antiwar activists were among the first to highlight different forms of violence, from wife battering to nuclear war, as interconnected and existing on a continuum (cockburn ). this continuum of violence blurs the stark divisions between war and peace, between conflict abroad and militarization at home, and it emphasizes how systemic power differentials are productive forces behind myriad forms of violence (cockburn ; enloe ). while much feminist research on the continuum of violence centers on women’s experiences, it recognizes that gender(ed) experiences are not universal and that experiences are shaped and affected by multiple intersecting identities (cockburn ; collins ; crenshaw ; antidemocratic and exclusionary practices terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core wibben ). as such, an intersectional understanding of the continuum of violence requires us to pay attention to systems and the violence that they produce, and how these systems are mutually reinforcing and engender forms of violence that differentially affect vulnerable communities (true ; wibben ). in short, the continuum of violence shows us how structures of violence that dramatically limit people’s lives and potential produce a continuity of effects, not episodic cases. taking these lessons seriously, we contend that the violence being witnessed as the pandemic ebbs and flows cannot be divorced from broader systems of violence and their intersecting manifestations of oppression and power. militarizing covid- militarism and militarization are functions of the continuum of violence. they reinforce and impart martial values such as domination, hierarchical chains of command, and an obsession with force and firepower into civilian spaces (cohn ; enloe ), and “a militarized society is necessarily undemocratic” (cockburn , ). as such, militarizing covid- requires an antidemocratic, authoritarian logic and approach to addressing the myriad consequences of the pandemic. although feminists have warned against treating covid- like a war (enloe ), the u.s. response to the coronavirus, in both rhetoric and action, has indeed been militarized. for instance, in may , president donald trump said “i view the invisible enemy [coronavirus] as a war,” and he called the virus an attack worse than the bombing of pearl harbor and / (bbc news ). meanwhile, minnesota’s governor created a “battle plan” for contending with covid- in long- term care facilities and called in the national guard to conduct testing (minnesota public radio ). militaristic responses to covid- purportedly enhance national security. in practice, however, militarism engenders greater insecurities, and these are pronounced among intersectionally marginalized communities (parashar ; rogers ). one example of how militarization differentially affects dominant and marginalized groups is the reaction to protests in the united states during the pandemic. in michigan, minnesota, texas, and elsewhere, protests to “open up the economy” were arguably violent, given that some protesters brandished guns. yet trump tweeted multiple encouraging messages, such as summer forester and cheryl o’brien terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core “liberate virginia, and save your great nd amendment. it is under siege!” these protesters were predominantly white, and many of their messages equated quarantine with tyranny, while reopening the economy signaled freedom and patriotism (jeffrey ). notably, we did not witness police violence in response to these protests. surges in activism supporting the black lives matter (blm) movement have been met, however, with breathtaking brutality and repression by state and federal police officers (dewan and baker ). since may , amnesty international ( ) has documented incidents of police violence aimed at antiracism protesters in states. in contrast to the “open up the economy” protests, trump has referred to blm protesters as thugs and terrorists, and he threatened to send in troops to “dominate” and suppress these more racially diverse protests (wise ). hypermilitarized responses to blm protesters — but not to armed protesters demanding states “reopen the economy” despite ongoing coronavirus concerns — speaks to how racism and militarism are mutually constitutive and violent toward nondominant groups (see rogers ). exploring the fallout from militarizing covid- exposes the inconsistencies, tensions, and power imbalances inherent to a militarized response. rhetoric of patriotism and battle-ready strategies chafe against weak and underdeveloped policy responses and the haphazard enforcement of lockdown requirements. moreover, militaristic language is used strategically and selectively, and always in ways that bolster dominant groups: instead of a “war on racism,” blm protests are framed as a “war on cops.” everyday security the continuum of violence is not only reflected during the pandemic in the racist militarization in the united states, it is also highlighted in what feminists call “everyday security.” everyday security rejects the idea that states should be the central security concern and instead centers on the well-being of individuals and communities within states (wibben ). . donald trump (@realdonaldtrump), “liberate virginia, and save your great nd amendment. it is under siege!,” twitter, april , , https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/ ( june ). antidemocratic and exclusionary practices terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/ https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/ https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core a continuum of violence and its systemic racism is thus evidenced by undemocratic health outcomes during the pandemic. in the united states, in comparison with their white counterparts, people of color — especially black people — have experienced disproportionately high rates of covid- infections, hospitalizations, and deaths, and they continue to suffer disproportionately from this pandemic’s economic fallout (cdc ; rogers ). while race-based discrimination in health care has existed for decades (cunningham et al. ; mays, cochran, and barnes ), the pandemic exacerbates these ongoing disparities. similar to people of color in the united states, indigenous populations worldwide experience exclusion from public health care during and beyond this coronavirus pandemic (curtice and choo ). like racism, gendered oppressions, such as patriarchal control over women’s bodies, showcase the continuum of violence and its exclusionary, antidemocratic practices. the continuum of violence prevents women from controlling their own lives through gender-based violence and a lack of reproductive rights (wibben ). in addition to increased (risks of) domestic violence and other forms of violence against women during the pandemic (godin ; pfitzner, fitz- gibbon, and true ), women’s reproductive rights have been attacked under the guise of protecting medical personnel from covid- by conservative u.s. governors who “have ordered or supported the cessation of” medication and/or surgical abortion (bayefsky, bartz, and watson ). such rescinding of abortion access in times of health system crises frames women’s constitutional rights, autonomy, and health care needs as “expendable” (bayefsky, bartz, and watson ). during a pandemic, access to abortion remains essential, as access to contraception may be reduced under quarantine, financial hardships increase, and unplanned pregnancies still occur. considering the interlocking economic, gendered, and racist systems of oppression, poor women of color are especially disadvantaged in public health care. conclusion the covid- pandemic exposes a multidimensional continuum of violence that comprises authoritarian, exclusionary practices, and hierarchical relations that undermine democracy and the everyday security of nondominant groups. we have shown that, despite an emphasis on securing the nation through well-formulated battle plans summer forester and cheryl o’brien terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core and war-tested policy maneuvers, the united states has categorically failed to protect vast swaths of the population. ripple effects of the pandemic — such as increases in domestic violence and food insecurity — are part and parcel of systems of structural violence — not just structural inequality — that are predicated on the oppression and subordination of women and people of color. to dismantle this continuum, we need a multipronged global approach that includes a shift in the culture of policing away from militarization to nonhierarchical community engagement and stronger, more robust democratic policies and processes that invest equitably in education and health care and actively ameliorate systemic violence. feminist contributions on intersectionality and the continuum of violence highlight the antidemocratic forces that threaten our security in many ways and call us to justice, peacebuilding, and inclusion of diverse peoples, across all continents, to combat global crises like pandemics and climate change as well as more intimate types of violence. summer forester is assistant professor of political science and middle east studies at carleton college: sforester@carleton.edu; cheryl o’brien is associate professor of political science at san diego state university: cobrien@sdsu.edu references amnesty international. . “usa: end unlawful police violence against black lives matter protests.” june . https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/ / /usa-end- unlawful-police-violence-against-black-lives-matter-protests/ (accessed august , ). bayefsky, michelle j., deborah bartz, and katie l. watson, . “abortion during the covid- pandemic — ensuring access to an essential health 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https://www.cambridge.org/core 	antidemocratic and exclusionary practices: covid- and the continuum of violence 	the continuum of violence 	militarizing covid- 	everyday security 	conclusion 	references . /primer. . systemic racism and health disparities: a statement from editors of family medicine journals sumi m. sexton, md | caroline r. richardson, md | sarina b. schrager, md, ms | marjorie a. bowman, md, mpa | john hickner, md, msc | christopher p. morley, phd | timothy f. mott, md | nicholas pimlott, md, phd | john saultz, md | barry d. weiss, md primer. ; : . published: / / | doi: . /primer. . the year has been marked by historic protests across the united states and the globe sparked by the deaths of george floyd, ahmaud arbery, breonna taylor, and so many other black people. the protests heightened awareness of racism as a public health crisis and triggered an antiracism movement. racism is a pervasive and systemic issue that has profound adverse effects on health. racism is associated with poorer mental and physical health outcomes and negative patient experiences in the health care system. as evidenced by the current coronavirus pandemic, race is a sociopolitical construct that continues to disadvantage black, latinx, indigenous and other people of color. the association between racism and adverse health outcomes has been discussed for decades in the medical literature, including the family medicine literature. today there is a renewed call to action for family medicine, a specialty that emerged as a counterculture to reform mainstream medicine, to both confront systemic racism and eliminate health disparities. this effort will require collaboration, commitment, education, and transformative conversations around racism, health inequity, and advocacy so that we can better serve our patients and our communities. the editors of several north american family medicine publications have come together to address this call to action and share resources on racism across our readerships. we acknowledge those members of the family medicine scholar community who have been ^ghting for equity consistent with the black lives matter movement by writing about racism, health inequities, and personal experiences of practicing as black family physicians. while we recognize that much more work is needed, we want to amplify these voices. we have compiled a bibliography of scholarship generated by the family medicine community on the topic of racism in medicine.  the collection can be accessed here: https://www.annfammed.org/content/shared-bibliography-systemic- racism-and-health-disparities while this list is likely not complete, it does include over published manuscripts and demonstrates expertise as well as a commitment to addressing these complex issues. for example, in , dr j. nwando olayiwola, chair of the department of family medicine at ohio state university, wrote an essay on her experiences taking care of patients as a black family physician. in january of , family medicine published an entire issue devoted to racism in education and training. dr eduardo medina, a family physician and public health scholar, co-authored a call to action in for health professionals to , , , , , . /primer. . of dismantle structural racism and support black lives to achieve health equity. his recent article builds on that theme and describes the disproportionate deaths of black people due to racial injustice and the covid- pandemic as converging public health emergencies. in the wake of these emergencies a fundamental transformation is warranted, and family physicians can play a key role. we, the editors of family medicine journals, commit to actively examine the effects of racism on society and health and to take action to eliminate structural racism in our editorial processes. as an intellectual home for our profession, we have a unique responsibility and opportunity to educate and continue the conversation about institutional racism, health inequities, and antiracism in medicine. we will take immediate steps to enact tangible advances on these fronts. we will encourage and mentor authors from groups underrepresented in medicine. we will ensure that content includes an emphasis on cultural humility, diversity and inclusion, implicit bias, and the impact of racism on medicine and health. we will recruit editors and editorial board members from groups underrepresented in medicine. we will encourage collaboration and accountability within our specialty to confront systemic racism through content and processes in all of our individual publications. we recognize that these are small steps in an ongoing process of active antiracism, but we believe these steps are crucial. as editors in family medicine, we are committed to progress toward equity and justice. simultaneously published in american family physician, annals of family medicine, canadian family physician, family medicine, fp essentials, fpin/evidence based practice, fpm, journal of the american board of family medicine, the journal of family practice, and primer. acknowledgments the authors thank renée crichlow, md, byron jasper, md, mph, and victoria murrain, do for their insightful comments on this editorial. corresponding author sumi m. sexton, md author aaliations sumi m. sexton, md - american family physician caroline r. richardson, md - annals of family medicine sarina b. schrager, md, ms - fpm marjorie a. bowman, md, mpa - journal of the american board of family medicine john hickner, md, msc - the journal of family practice christopher p. morley, phd - primer timothy f. mott, md - fpin/evidence based practice nicholas pimlott, md, phd - canadian family physician john saultz, md - family medicine barry d. weiss, md - fp essentials references . institute of medicine (us) committee on understanding and eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in health care, smedley bd, stith ay, nelson ar, eds. unequal treatment: confronting racial and ethnic disparities in health care. washington, dc: national academies press; . , . /primer. . of . bailey zd, krieger n, agénor m, graves j, linos n, bassett mt. structural racism and health inequities in the usa: evidence and interventions. lancet. ; ( ): - . doi: . /s - ( ) -x . ben j, cormack d, harris r, paradies y. racism and health service utilisation: a systematic review and meta-analysis. plos one. ; ( ):e . doi: . /journal.pone. . paradies y, ben j, denson n, et al. racism as a determinant of health: a systematic review and meta- analysis. plos one. ; ( ):e . doi: . /journal.pone. . american academy of family physicians. institutional racism in the health care system. published . accessed sept. , . https://www.aafp.org/about/policies/all/institutional-racism.html . yaya s, yeboah h, charles ch, otu a, labonte r. ethnic and racial disparities in covid- -related deaths: counting the trees, hiding the forest. bmj glob health. ; ( ):e . doi: . /bmjgh- - . egede le, walker rj. structural racism, social risk factors, and covid- - a dangerous convergence for black americans. [published online ahead of print, jul ]. n engl j med. ; ( ):e . doi: . /nejmp . centers for disease control and prevention. health equity considerations and racial and ethnic minority groups. updated july , . accessed sept. , . https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus / -ncov/community/health-equity/race-ethnicity.html . stephens gg. family medicine as counterculture. fam med. ; ( ): - . . olayiwola jn. racism in medicine: shifting the power. ann fam med. ; ( ): - . doi: . /afm. . . saultz j, ed. racism. fam med. ; ( , theme issue): - . . hardeman rr, medina em, kozhimannil kb. structural racism and supporting black lives - the role of health professionals. n engl j med. ; ( ): - . doi: . /nejmp . . hardeman rr, medina em, boyd rw. stolen breaths. n engl j med. ; ( ): - . doi: . /nejmp . copyright © by the society of teachers of family medicine . /primer. . of s jra .. symposium on authoritarian international law: is authoritarian international law inevitable? the limits of authoritarian international law chibli mallat* tom ginsburg’s concept of “authoritarian international law” (ail) is as important as the one it references, thomas franck’s “right to democratic governance.” it underlines how the promise carried by franck was betrayed in the bitter turn of history that ended the emerging hope for democracy ruling all nations in the world after . this hope had developed by fits and starts as the slow fulfilment of the kantian project for “perpetual peace” amongst a world federation of democratic republics on which the league of nations and the united nations were built. to the now-universal acknowledgment of the grave domestic setbacks to human rights and democracy, ginsburg’s article adds an account of the international setbacks which followed. its chief importance is in raising the question of the emergent authoritarian traits of international law in the wake of these setbacks. with my appreciation of ginsburg’s formidable treatment, including a title that will mark, like franck’s, an important moment in the field, i will challenge some of his conclusions and offer counterpoints in the present essay. in particular, i will ( ) suggest the irrelevance of the three “evils of ail”; ( ) highlight the significance of as the date when ail started rising; ( ) emphasize the importance of u.s. isolationism in the rise of ail; and ( ) argue that the better investment to counter that rise is in nonviolence. on ginsburg’s “three evils of ail” let me start with a critique of the article’s assertion that the normative trend of the emergent ail involves “active identification of the ‘three evils’—terrorism, separatism and extremism”—with “the sco [shanghai cooperation organization] as harbinger.” while ginsburg identifies these evils as the most coherent self-expression of authoritarian regimes, his anticipation of what ail hijacks from the terrain of ideas carries with it (a) a blurred taxonomy; (b) a misunderstanding of its “fig-leaf ” dimension; and (c) a wrong approach on how to fight it. (a) blurred taxonomy. these “three evils” are shared so closely with “liberal” or traditional international law that these categories are either wrong or insufficient. the line must be drawn elsewhere. * presidential professor of law emeritus, university of utah. principal, mallat law offices, beirut. tom ginsburg, authoritarian international law?, ajil , ( ). thomas m. franck, the emerging right to democratic governance, ajil ( ). see fernando r. tesón, two mistakes about democracy, asil proc. ( ) and discussion in franck, supra note , at – . see tom ginsburg & aziz s. huq, how to save a constitutional democracy ( ) ginsburg, supra note , at . doi: . /aju. . © chibli mallat . this is an open access article, distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. https://doi.org/ . /ajil. . https://www.jstor.org/stable/ ?seq= https://www.jstor.org/stable/ ?seq= https://www.jstor.org/stable/ ?seq= https://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/h/bo .html https://doi.org/ . /ajil. . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / starting from the third category, the fight against extremism was coined in the late period of u.s. secretary of state condoleezza rice’s tenure to avoid the use of “islamism” or “radical islam.” fighting extremism, islamist or otherwise, is not the authoritarian’s characteristic. neither is the concept of terrorism, in particular in interna- tional law, where it continues to defy a workable definition, and undermines the far more cohesive concept of “crime against humanity.” as for separatism, i believe that its rejection is the correct attitude to salvage interna- tional law in its current configuration of nation-states. de jure separatism—secession, self-determination or inde- pendence, all four words covering in my understanding here the same concept—creates far more problems than it solves. on separatism, the sho declaration accords with traditional/mainstream/non-authoritarian interna- tional law. with few exceptions best defined by unfinished colonialism and/or the canadian supreme court, there is no room for another candidate to the present un roster of nation-states. (b) the fig leaf dimension. ginsburg is right in anticipating the way authoritarian states are redrawing the intellectual map, but the article fails to identify the fog of authoritarianism in international law for what it really is—non-law. in the retreat of liberal international law, as opposed to its authoritarian nemesis, law disappears by giving way to ad hoc rule-less positions peddled by the larger authoritarian states. authoritarianism does not believe in law, whether domestic or international. ail is at best opportunistic, at worst a constructed lie. it cannot be allowed to dictate its own erratic agenda. (c) the wrong way to fight ail. since the article blurs the emerging categories of ail because some are shared with liberal international law, and misses the use of law as a fig leaf covering authoritarian regime exercise (or, in another analogy, it misses the fact that the vaunted “new order” is as empty as a legal concept as its infamous predecessor in the s), then we should consider an alternative approach by which to oppose the rise of ail. the approach shifts ginsburg’s approach in a number of ways developed in the next three sections, first with revisiting “ ,” when a number of democratizing movements started getting pushed back or repressed by authoritarian regimes, then by noting the absence of the role of the united states in the rise of ail, and, in the last section, by opening a vista on nonviolence as the nemesis of ail. i agree with the choice of as the start of the downward trend for democracy and human rights. but why that particular year, and why is this starting point significant? if the turn to the worse is situated correctly in – , what happened then that made this turn so disturbing to international law that it was then set on a steady autho- ritarian path? transcript: rice discusses political strategy of war against terrorism (national security advisor addresses need to confront islamic extremism) (aug. , ). see chibli mallat, philosophy of nonviolence: revolution, constitutionalism, and justice beyond the middle east ( ). or less, i.e., a configuration with less nation-states when, like the two germanies or the seven unlinked previous emirates in the arab gulf fusing in the federal republic of germany and the united arab emirates respectively. when not physically coerced, these fusions are beneficial to international law. the argument is elaborated best in donald l. horowitz, the cracked foundations of the right to secede, j. democracy ( ) (showing how ethnic conflicts get exacerbated rather than solved by secession, and how public international law doctrine remains oblivious to this reality). on colonialism and self-determination, see franck, supra note , at – . canada supreme court judgment, reference re secession of quebec, [ ] scr . ginsburg, supra note , at . ajil unbound vol. https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/bush/usip.htm https://www.mtholyoke.edu/acad/intrel/bush/usip.htm https://global.oup.com/academic/product/philosophy-of-nonviolence- ?cc=is&lang=en& https://www.journalofdemocracy.org/articles/the-cracked-foundations-of-the-right-to-secede/ https://www.jstor.org/stable/ ?seq= https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/ /index.do https://scc-csc.lexum.com/scc-csc/scc-csc/en/item/ /index.do https://doi.org/ . /ajil. . strikes a personal chord. it is the year when syria’s dictatorship and its main allies in lebanon started to prevail over the cedar revolution—in which i participated actively, on the streets and in the leadership during my presidential campaign—to remove (unsuccessfully) the pro-syrian president who had remained at the helm in lebanon despite the immense tide of the revolution. the cedar revolution, one may recall, was, until , the largest non-violent demonstration in history in a middle eastern country. it was triggered by the assassination of former lebanese prime minister rafik hariri on february , . within a month, the revolt brought half the active population of lebanon to the streets, demanding “truth and justice” and the departure of syria’s troops from the country. by the end of april, these troops had departed, and a un investigative committee was being set up on the model of the yugoslav and kosovo investigations and the subsequent tribunals. the cedar revolution, clamoring for nonviolence and jus- tice, developed over the next year. it was ultimately defeated when the war started by hizbullah in july halted the process to remove the lebanese president that the syrian dictator had forced onto the country. while people continued their resistance, the tools of repression increased; control by authoritarian protagonists also deepened. in may , hizbullah occupied beirut militarily. it has since tightened its grip on the country. syria’s allies are back in the saddle, running lebanon. in light of the above, let me propose the following periodization to explain how the retreat of international law started in . that year, lebanese leaders of the non-violent revolution were killed one after the other, with the suspects left undisturbed. in , as iraq was emerging from its sectarian wars, and a decent government was stabilizing, the obama administration decided to pull out from the country, leaving it wide open to iran and to an ugly sectarian backlash across the region. in , hopes for democracy rose again, when a middle east-wide revolution started. in syria, the eight months of a dominantly non-violent revolution met with immense repression between march and august-september . the syrian scene soon morphed into a brutal civil war between extremes, and an unprecedented geopolitical battle. syria turned into the fulcrum of world violence. a third of the syrian population fled. fear spread in europe, resulting in the rise of rightwing islamophobic/xenophobic governments, and led in turn to the secession of britain from the eu, followed by the victory of donald trump and a dozen other similar leaders across the planet. during this time, the authoritarian rules of chinese leader xi jinping and russian president vladimir putin also entrenched. what broke in ? in my view, the cedar revolution failed when the two main tools conceived by interna- tional law in the fight for the right to democratic governance—international criminal law, and the responsibility to protect (r p)—were slowly undermined. in the retreat of liberal international law, the criminal accountability dimension is probably the most striking. hundreds of books and thousands of articles attest to the intellectual and practical growth of “international crim- inal law,” including the establishment of a dozen local/regional international/mixed tribunals, as well as the international criminal court, now all but moribund with its exclusive indictment of african leaders. this was also mirrored in the lebanese cedar revolution, when the international criminal process, which the lebanese revolutionaries sought to bring down the killers, was smothered by the slow and ineffective work of the special tribunal for lebanon. the other promise of liberal international law, r p, culminated in the international commission on intervention and state sovereignty set up by canada in september . r p soon turned into an increasingly chibli mallat, march : lebanon’s cedar revolution- an essay on non-violence and justice ( ). michael young, the ghosts of martyrs square ( ). mallat, supra note , at – (discussing r p and international criminal law). id. at – . id. the limits of authoritarian international law https://collections.lib.utah.edu/details?id= https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/the-ghosts-of-martyrs-square/michael-young/ https://www.simonandschuster.com/books/the-ghosts-of-martyrs-square/michael-young/ https://global.oup.com/academic/product/philosophy-of-nonviolence- ?cc=is&lang=en& https://global.oup.com/academic/product/philosophy-of-nonviolence- ?cc=is&lang=en& https://global.oup.com/academic/product/philosophy-of-nonviolence- ?cc=is&lang=en& empty doctrine, downgraded from “responsibility” to “duty” to “right.” after the downgrading, r p was shunted aside by the veto of a single security council authoritarian member—russia. since the libyan intervention in – , the concept has been mostly theoretical. isolationism there is in ginsburg’s article a seemingly conscious oblivion to u.s. isolationism in the rise of ail, and its appli- cation during the presidency of donald trump. isolationism in international law is, arguably, a uniquely american trait. there was never in history a single superpower on the planet before , while u.s. foreign policy has always oscillated, in deep waves, between isolationism and interventionism. in this secular cycle, despite a template of global governance grounded in the second world war and the postwar institutions which the united states has shaped and led, isolationism has become increasingly dominant. isolationism predates the trump presidency. u.s. leadership, a central peg of international law since world war ii, was marked by several retreats of democracy and human rights in the international sphere since . it started with the clinton presidency allowing the killing fields of rwanda to happen, and refusing to stand up vigorously against the rule of saddam hussein in iraq despite its signal defeat in —thereby freezing the whole middle east in the impossibility of removing the worst dictator, in a region full of them. the iraq invasion in went in the opposite direction, by going to war where it might not have been necessary, and preventing the rapid transfer of sovereignty to iraqis. but it came after / , another turning point which, from my perspective, ruined the chances of international criminal law by making war rather than justice the dominant response to “terrorism.” one can multiply examples after where change towards democracy was frustrated, and where in so many countries sliding back into autocracy stood unchallenged by the united states as the “indispensable power” on the international scene. regardless of necessary nuances, such as the fiasco in the somalia r p intervention, u.s. isolationism remains a growing trend. the trump presidency adds to the isolationist trend the erratic behavior of a lawless president (in the sense that trump’s life and statements show that he does not believe in human rights or democratic governance, which gets expressed in a manifest disdain for law, domestic and international). this results in the disturbing attitudes to inter- national law detailed in harold koh’s book, but it also has occasionally positive results, such as the determined standing up to iranian expansionism in the middle east. this is a paradox which we need not get into here. if trump continues in power for a second term, it will further undermine the “law” in international law and correspondingly augment the rise of ail. a trump defeat, however, will not necessarily halt the deep wave of u.s. isolationist policy that started around , and its extreme manifestations in syria. the failure of an “orphaned” non-violent revolution in syria under barack obama’s watch froze the rest of the region into increased on isolationism in the u.s. tradition, see chibli mallat, democracy in fin-de-siÈcle america – ( , original arabic ). chibli mallat, the original sin: “terrorism” or “crime against humanity”?, case w. res. j. int’l l. , – ( ). i put “ter- rorism” in brackets because the world still lacks a definition of the term in international law, plagued as it remains with its two century-long beliers: the right to bear arms against dictatorship (one’s terrorist is the other’s freedom fighter), and the line between violence carried out by the state against civilians and the one carried out by non-state actors, be they individuals or groups. harold hongju koh, the trumpadministration and international law ( ) (on the systematic pattern of breaches to treaties and other basic pillars of international law). i have previously presented some arguments on the occasionally correct measures taken by donald trump, such as the reaction to the use of chemicals by the syrian government against its civilian populations. see mallat, boussole et autres journalismes ( ). ajil unbound vol. https://books.google.is/books/about/democracy_in_fin_de_si&percnt;c &percnt;a cle_america.html?id=cg dwaaqbaj&redir_esc=y https://scholarlycommons.law.case.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article= &context=jil https://global.oup.com/academic/product/the-trump-administration-and-international-law- ?cc=is&lang=en& https://www.lorientlitteraire.com/article_details.php?cid= &nid= authoritarianism, comforted by an active russian military foothold in syria and iranian expansionism in iraq, yemen, and lebanon. this does not mean that military interventionism is the solution to ail. the foreign influence of the richer and more powerful countries is inevitable, and a better question has always been about the nature of influence and intervention. in this sense, non-intervention as policy, i.e. u.s. isolationism, and the trump presidency’s twist on it, are sorely missing in ginsburg’s article. nonviolence the argument i developed in philosophy of nonviolence is that the world is witnessing a signal change where dictators are brought down by nonviolence. let me summarize this “emerging right to nonviolence.” any transborder activity of authoritarianism must be understood as the projection of domestic politics by inter- national means. we have not made much progress on kant’s zum ewigen frieden since it was published in . the dictator’s main concern is to remain in power at any cost, and to project his model onto neighboring countries and further afield in order to bolster his position inside. the cooperation of dictators is brutal and systematic. its full gamut now runs from intensive exchanges in technology-based intelligence against dissent to support of like- minded political leaders and movements (military strong men or civilians, usually from the far right of the spec- trum, weighing in to pervert elections), unpunished targeted assassinations of opponents abroad, and outright military repression inside and outside. granted, matters of historic importance do not move in a straight line. ginsburg notes, for instance, how malaysia operated quickly in turning up hope (and, since he wrote, returning somewhat to the ancient authoritarian mode), and how people continue to resist in hong kong. there is a new spirit blowing in the middle east, with some success in sudan, algeria, and lebanon, and even in syria as i write. this creates a reprieve in inter- national law for the liberal/traditional mode, but there is more to it than a reprieve. non-violent resistance antic- ipates, provokes, and undermines ail’s fuzzy norm(s). it was unfolding again on the streets of major american cities in “black lives matter” demonstrations competing with an electoral process to change the incum- bent presidency, as well as in hong kong, chile, and across the middle east in other forms of check to authoritarianism. the response to ail, i contend, rests in thinking through the meaning of the non-violent movement across the globe. if nonviolence is key to defeating authoritarian domestic rule and ail in its wake, the streets of the world are way ahead of us. the projection onto international law of the canons of nonviolence as they unfold on the domestic scene, requires urgent fleshing out. “peace and international law” is as old as international law. “nonviolence and international law” remains mostly virgin territory. ziad majed, al-thawra al-yatima (“the orphaned revolution”) ( ) (on the western and arab abandonment of syria to unprecedented repression). see also, jane mansbridge et al., a strategy for syria under international law, harv. int’l l.j. ( ). mallat, supra note , at – . examples abound. of course, dictators also fight in wars against each other, which brings us back to the kant-derived proposal that “democracies do not go to war against each other.” the limits of authoritarian international law http://www.harvardilj.org/ / /online_ _mallat_et_al/ https://global.oup.com/academic/product/philosophy-of-nonviolence- ?cc=is&lang=en& 	the limits of authoritarian international law 	on ginsburg's “three evils of ail” 	 	isolationism 	nonviolence uc santa barbara journal of transnational american studies title transnational black politics and resistance: from enslavement to obama: through the prism of permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ r w jz journal journal of transnational american studies, ( ) authors obenland, frank sawallisch, nele west, elizabeth j. publication date license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / . peer reviewed escholarship.org powered by the california digital library university of california https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ r w jz https://creativecommons.org/licenses/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . // . https://escholarship.org http://www.cdlib.org/ 	 	 introduction: transnational black politics and resistance: from enslavement to obama: through the prism of frank obenland, nele sawallisch, and elizabeth j. west guest editors four centuries after the arrival of forty africans to jamestown, marking the birth of us slavery, the year reminds us that the presence, triumphs, and struggles of african-descended people in the atlantic world represent a history whose roots extend deep and long into the transnational origins of the so-called new world. the english settler john rolfe famously reported the arrival of “ . and odd negroes” at point comfort in virginia at the end of august . as historians have established, these africans were the survivors of a transatlantic passage on the portuguese slave ship são joão bautista. sailing under captain manuel mendes da cunha, the transport was part of a commercial arrangement between a portuguese investor from lisbon who had contracted an asiento with the spanish crown for an annual payment of , ducats. off the coast of cuba, approximately fifty prisoners were again captured from the portuguese slaver by two english captains who then transported their human cargo to virginia in the summer of . these captives for the most part lived in a state of bondage with english settlers in virginia, even though hereditary or racial slavery had not been legally introduced there at the time. while is pointed to in the imagination of many in the us as an origins moment of blackness across the white settler landscape, this vision obscures the more than century-old presence of blacks—free and enslaved—throughout the americas by the time the forty africans enter the seventeenth-century world of jamestown. at the close of the presidency of barack obama, few would have predicted that we would enter the four hundredth year–mark of the jamestown forty on the heels of obenland, sawallisch, and west | special forum introduction	 	 unprecedented public pronouncements and acts of antiblack sentiment. in the social climate in the us was clearly turning to eerie reminders of jim crow america, but there was still president obama’s rhetoric of hope emanating from the corners of us liberal rhetoric. even after the end of his presidency, barack obama, the first black and arguably transnational american president, remains a contested symbol for a supposedly post- racial and cosmopolitan america. in his first speeches as future contender for the presidency, obama himself carefully constructed the image of a public persona that navigates, contains, and resolves the multifaceted conflicts and antagonisms riveting american society at the beginning of the twenty-first century. as early as his speech to the democratic national convention in , the political hopeful appealed to an ideal of national unity expressed in the nation’s appellation as “the united states of america.” moreover, in his now famous campaign speech at independence hall in philadelphia in , the senator from illinois countered the political, social, and racial divisions in the united states with his fervent declaration of hope and belief in the founders’ vision of “a more perfect union.” in light of the media scandal surrounding his then pastor, rev. jeremiah wright, obama’s speech on racism in america looked back to the preamble of the constitution as well as to the histories of the abolitionist and civil rights movement to defend his belief in the inherent ability of american society “to narrow that gap between the promise of our ideals and the reality of their time.” echoing the emancipatory rhetoric of the abolitionist and civil rights move- ments, obama developed a narrative of racial healing that pictured the racial divides as being replaced by a new sense of national belonging. for obama, the united states’s long history of immigration has transformed the nation into a multiethnic, multireligious, and multicultural society, providing a home and a sanctuary for ethnic groups from all over the world. in his inauguration address of , obama invokes this “patchwork heritage” of american society to assure his audience of his belief that “we cannot help but believe that the old hatreds shall someday pass; that the lines of tribe shall soon dissolve; that as the world grows smaller, our common humanity shall reveal itself; and that america must play its role in ushering in a new era of peace.” with his hopeful rhetoric, obama placed himself in the tradition of a prophetic rhetorical mode, the african american jeremiad, that was powerfully employed by leaders and activists such as frederick douglass and martin luther king, jr. to address continuing racial and social injustice. however, obama’s inaugural address also illustrates the conflicts and complex- ities that his speeches attempted to navigate and reconcile. as he himself acknowl- edges on the opening pages of his autobiography dreams from my father, written at the age of , even he with his cosmopolitan and interracial background cannot escape the “tragedy” of american racial discourse. echoing du bois’s concept of an african american “double consciousness” that describes the formation of an african american identity as a struggle with america’s “contempt and pity” for its “seventh son,” obama presents himself as subjected to the “ghostly image of the tragic mulatto journal of transnational american studies . (summer ) 	 trapped between two worlds.” confronted with denigrating racialized stereotypes from america’s troubled past, obama holds fast to his own “incurably naïve” expectation that american society as a whole is ready to recognize the continuing racial divide that is regularly exhibited “on the nightly news for all to see.” in his autobiography, obama counters “the tragic cycle” of american racial realities with his ingenuous hope and belief in the nation’s unity to move beyond long-entrenched racial categories. telling the story of the “skinny kid with a funny name,” he explores his own family’s connection to kenya, indonesia, and hawai‘i in order to establish the united states as a transnational community of immigrants. this shows how obama, as a “racialized, transnational child … of globalization,” problematizes the intersection of national and racial identities in a globalized world. obama’s form of black cosmopolitanism differs markedly from previous forms of black internationalism such as w. e. b. du bois’s pan-african congresses, marcus garvey’s universal negro improvement association, or the revolutionary black internationalism of the s. peniel e. joseph observes that upon obama’s return from his visit to kenya, obama embraced neither the anticolonial politics nor the spirit of international racial solidarity that has informed these earlier forms of international black resis- tance. with his more universalistic and humanist cosmopolitanism, obama also shies away from a structural analysis of a transnational condition that is characterized by displacement, migration, the expansion of a globalized market economy and the emergence of new transnational diasporic identities across national boundaries in the twenty-first century. obama’s autobiographical project also sits uneasily with a transnational literary tradition of black resistance that paul gilroy has characterized as being motivated by “a desire to escape the restrictive bonds of ethnicity, national identification, and sometimes even ‘race’ itself.” as dreams from my father suggests, obama rather moves back and forth between race and nation, offering a primarily individualistic account of how he negotiates both his racial and national belonging. by citing the possibility of his own success as a sign of the nation’s progress with regard to race relations, obama has sparked a critical debate over competing new directions of black intellectual discourse, as the recent debate between ta-nehisi coates and cornel west, among others, has shown. next to his speeches and writings, it was obama’s winning of the presidency that reignited searches for new ways of conceptualizing racial identities and racial relations. inspired by his election victory, some black intellectuals adopted the idea of “post-blackness,” a transcendence of traditional and constricting definitions of blackness. as touré has argued, obama personifies this new sensibility in setting an example for how african americans can be “like obama: rooted in but not restricted by blackness.” in the alleged “post-black era” inaugurated by obama’s presidency touré finds that african americans can now choose from a “limitless” number of “identity options” that allows for embracing the “dynamic hyper-creative beauty of modern individualistic blackness.” such euphoric celebrations of “post-blackness” have been openly contested. ta-nehisi coates points to the circumstances surrounding the presidential obenland, sawallisch, and west | special forum introduction	 	 election to demonstrate the “limits of his optimism.” while coates defends obama against allegations of not having directly addressed the rampant structural racism in american society, citing “the exceptional nature of his presidential victories,” he identifies a somewhat lighthearted misrecognition of more fundamental racial barriers in the united states: “only obama, a man who emerged from the best of white america, and thus could sincerely trust white america, could be so certain that he could achieve broad national appeal. and yet only a black man with that same biography could underestimate his opposition’s resolve to destroy him.” for pundits like cornel west, a former obama supporter during the campaign, the shortcomings of obama’s presidency consist in the economic policies adopted in the wake of the financial crisis of and his unwillingness to embrace the revolutionary christian tradition that west sees as constitutive for the african american intellectual tradition. for many like west who believe that policies must show themselves through benefits for the people, obama’s idealism seemed to primarily serve the white status quo. keeanga-yamahtta taylor has harshly criticized the illusion of “postrace” as the celebration of a small number of successful african americans in stark contrast to the us’s past and present “endemic” structural racism. the rhapsodies of a postracial america, according to taylor, are at the heart of the “political crisis” unleashed by the “spectacle” of police violence against black bodies. in this light, the obama presidency has again raised urgent questions about the persistence of black radical politics of resistance in the context of a national american political discourse. his winning of the presidency has been variously celebrated as the culmination and final victory of the black struggle against segregation and discrimination, and thus stands in the tradition of the civil rights movement as well as more radical forms of resistance. as joseph has observed, obama’s candidacy represented an idiosyncratic synthesis of civil rights and black power ideologies. while the former is readily apparent in obama’s soaring appeals to racial inclusion, citizenship, and democracy, the latter may seem, at first blush, a bit of a stretch … . obama’s willingness to seek the nation’s highest office after barely two years on the national political scene embodies the boldness and politics of self-determination that were a hallmark of black power- era politics. this precarious continuity between the civil rights movement, the black power era, and the obama presidency is captured provocatively in barry blitt’s cover image for the new yorker magazine for july , , “the politics of fear.” the drawing offers a satirical response to the outrage in right-wing media about michelle and barack obama exchanging a fist bump during a campaign rally, which a commentator from fox news understood to be a secret greeting exchange by islamic terrorists. the cover shows barack and michelle obama standing in the white house again journal of transnational american studies . (summer ) 	 exchanging a fist bump, with osama bin laden looking on from a painting in the background and the stars and stripes smoldering in the chimney. in the middle of these displays of “an anti-american sentiment,” michelle obama is presented as donning an afro hairstyle, wearing camouflage trousers and an assault rifle over her back, echoing attempts to libel her as a militant adherent of black power politics. on the other side, her husband barack is shown wearing middle eastern clothing. the drawing obviously references the attempt of his political opponents to undermine obama’s legitimacy as candidate because of his alleged muslim background. as the image suggests, the widespread conspiracy theory of birtherism, which was then readily embraced by obama’s presidential successor, and allegations of obama being a closeted muslim need to be understood in the context of america’s “war against terror.” in this sense, the image illustrates the limits and paranoid counterpoint to obama’s more transnational and cosmopolitan political vision. at the same time, the satirical depiction of michelle obama as a militant black panther activist raises the more intricate question about these kinds of connections drawn between the obama years and the black radicalism of the s and s. as margo natalie crawford has suggested, the cover image frames the tradition of black militant resistance as the figment of a paranoid, conservative “politics of fear” instead of a viable political option. the “politics of fear” thus aims at eclipsing a substantial part of the history of black radical resistance. however, the depiction of michelle and barack obama as a conflation of a throwback to the black power era and barack as osama bin laden points back to the (transnational) alliances between black people in the us and across the globe in the s and s; for example, black muslim american malcom x, who later moved from being considered a singular threat as a black agitator, to his global affiliation with islam after his break with nation of islam and his pilgrimage to mecca. another critical strand that (re)emerged in the obama years is black pessimism (or afropessimism), particularly in the “age of ferguson.” the cluster of essays in american literary history in april represents, while not exclusively so, critical scholarly, writerly, and activist discussions on black modes of expression today. it is interesting, therefore, to see this cluster included in an issue of the eminent journal dedicated to security studies and the representation of a “contemporary hyperbolic articulation of security” in literature. in this context, julius b. fleming, jr.’s reflections on the deaths of freddie gray, philando castile, alton sterling, and the forty-nine victims of the pulse nightclub shooting, which accompanied the composition and publication process of the issue, is a bitter comment also on what david watson identifies in his introductory remarks as “the withdrawal of care from parts of the population” in a society obsessed with security—more so, it becomes a state of absent or non-security that is awarded them; according to houston a. baker, a “national abjection.” obenland, sawallisch, and west | special forum introduction	 	 the essays acknowledge that the end of the obama presidency and the abrupt transition into a new administration has been characterized by the tension and simul- taneous existence of optimist and pessimist artistic forms of expression. fleming’s question “[w]hat does it mean to ‘write black’ in the age of ferguson” then prompts answers that center, first and foremost, around the challenges of a return of “black pessimism.” without directly referring to the school of afropessimism, harvey young describes the impression of a rollback of a “sociopolitical progress” that is also “stalled” as a significant lens for contemporary black drama, for example. the “twoness,” or simultaneity, of hopeful and pessimistic imaginaries is not only crucial for literary expression as a sense-making process (see fleming), it is also the most important “challenge” for the “scholar–critic” today. dana a. williams is perhaps most critical when she considers “writing b(l)ack” as furthering “a new racial mythology,” or a “fictioning of blackness,” that cannot overcome the systematic racism as long as it does not liberate itself from the pitfalls of neoliberalism, an ideology which upholds the racist fiction that sees black men as “ontologically criminal.” a powerful strategy to counter the traps and challenges for black scholarly and creative writers seems to lie in the question of affect. young proposes to focus on writing an “affective blackness” that recognizes the “continuum” between optimistic and pessimistic affective states. for fleming, the question of black writing today is related to the recognition of its multiplicity and diversity, for one, and the “love” and care it deserves. this constitutes an important overlap with houston a. baker’s proposed reading list, from ta-nehisi coates to elizabeth hinton, that for him gestures to “a more profoundly equitable and caring american future.” this remark harks back to the initial frame of literary security studies in which his and the other essays have been placed. we see here that these authors formulate a pushback against the withdrawal and absence of care, and propose a more effective, a more affective, approach to writing in the age of ferguson. in light of this complex legacy of the obama years, a core concern of the present jtas special forum is to pay tribute to such care and the continued importance of diverse forms of black political activism and resistance through time, particularly in the present moment of the first post-obama administration, which candice m. jenkins has described as “a deeply conflicted and contradictory one, beset both by hope and nihilistic despair, the splintering and fracturing of community and that community’s expansion, an increasing sense of repression as well as new and shifting avenues for resistance.” as we have witnessed the resurgence of and open support for populist, racist, and sexist discourses, as well as the strategic use of mis- and disinformation, it is important to focus on the enduring force of black self-organization in countering such dynamics. this often bottom-up organization has by now translated into the age of digital and social media, as the emergence of the black lives matter movement in and and its development into a remarkable “global network of more than chapters” has shown. journal of transnational american studies . (summer ) 	 the context of “local power” administered through blm in communities on the ground can also serve as a frame in which to read the relaunch of frederick douglass’s the north star in february by shaun king and others. it builds on international support by “nearly , founding members from all states and countries all over the world” and a multimodal broadcasting strategy, including a podcast, news website, social media presences, and its own television studio. the relaunch forcefully illustrates how this “modern media company for a new generation” builds on a genealogy of resistance whose core values, according to the paper’s mission statement, are valid for activists today: “our mission and focus remain the same [as in the original north star]: we are unapologetic freedom fighters committed to speaking truth to power. we cover a range of topics, including police brutality, mass incarceration, white supremacy, and immigration with the passion, context, nuance, and expertise they deserve.” this jtas forum brings into dialogue two scholarly symposia held at georgia state university, atlanta and the obama institute, mainz, germany in and , respectively: “the post-obama ethos: the transnational u.s. in the aftermath of hope” and “from abolition to black lives matter: past and present forms of transnational black resistance.” both conferences addressed the history and legacy of black american political transnationalism in the face of a rollback of central obama policies since the presidential election of . this shift in the american political landscape also provoked a revival of black activism that not only addresses social and economic grievances in the us but also continues transnational trajectories of black resistance. this forum explores the complex interrelation between (institutionalized, government) politics and (grassroots, cultural) resistance. how does the obama presidency demarcate a watershed between previous and current forms of transnational black resistance? what does the future of black transnationalism look like in the aftermath of obama’s presidency and a us constituency that seeks to overturn his influence and policies? in this light, the contributions highlight exemplary moments of challenges and transitions in the history of black transnational politics and resistance, from the abolitionist movement of the long nineteenth century to the global impact of obama in the twenty-first century. in doing so, they contribute to the critical debates around the entangled chronologies and settings of black opposition. obenewaa oduro-opuni’s reading of die negersklaven (the negro slaves; ) by german playwright august von kotzebue in “german abolitionism: kotzebue and the transnational debate on slavery” aims at revising the common perception that germans did not participate in the culture of transatlantic abolitionism. her contribution, which brings together approaches from the field of transatlantic slavery studies and black studies, brings to the fore how kotzebue’s play takes up and participates in transatlantic abolitionist discourses of the late eighteenth century. in “restructuring respectability, gender, and power: aida overton walker performs a black feminist resistance” veronica jackson discusses vaudeville performer and entertainer aida overton walker’s embodiment of black racial uplift obenland, sawallisch, and west | special forum introduction	 	 around the turn of the twentieth century. jackson focuses on overton walker’s feminist politics of affirmative representations of black americans, particularly through the performance of the cakewalk, bridging divides along the lines of class, race, and gender. overton walker’s transformative performances offer a transnational form of black resistance by means of her indirect and imagined connections with the african continent, great britain, and america in the context of an emerging modernity. in the next essay, “a transatlantic slavery narrative,” rafael ocasio reads barack obama’s internationally televised havana speech against impressions of cuba conveyed in works by little-known nineteenth-century american sugarcane merchant george howe. ocasio underscores their similar message of paradoxical denial on the part of both the us and cuba that their collaborative economic interests in the sugarcane industry fostered almost seamless borders that were connected through the exploitation of enslaved africans—who built the wealth for this transnational empire. gabriele linke’s “radical resistance: constructions of a transnational self in angela davis’s and cynthia mckinney’s memoirs” takes on political activist memoirs and invites readers to consider the value of a transnational angle in reviewing such twentieth-century activist lives, particularly in their discussions of internationalism, foreign policy, and the constructions of their autobiographical selves, “resistant,” “public,” and “political.” the final essay, “visualizing protest: african (diasporic) art and contemporary mediterranean crossings” by cheryl finley, leigh raiford, and heike raphael-hernandez, examines the photography and installations of contemporary diasporic black artists as a transnational and collaborative form of resistance to western political discourses. building on paul gilroy’s notion of the black atlantic, the contributors explore the chronotope of the ship as an important visual marker for conveying the “long memory” of previous migrations as well as for contesting current nativist responses in europe (and beyond) to transcontinental migrations that give rise to new diasporic identities. notes david a. price, love and hate in jamestown: john smith, pocahontas, and the heart of a new nation (new york: knopf, ), – ; engel sluiter, “new light on the ‘ . and odd negroes’ arriving in virginia, august ,” the william and mary quarterly , no. , (april ): – ; john thornton, “the african experience of the ‘ . and odd negroes’ arriving in virginia in ,” the william and mary quarterly , no. (july ): – . the ship had been en route to vera cruz in mexico, transporting three hundred and fifty african captives taken on board in luanda, angola. these africans most likely were prisoners of war from an armed conflict between the portuguese and their african allies and the kingdom of ndongo. journal of transnational american studies . (summer ) 	 	 	 price, love and hate in jamestown, . while one hundred forty-seven captives arrived in vera cruz on board the são joão bautista, one hundred forty captives remain unaccounted for in the historical records, which suggests that these individuals had probably perished during the ordeal of the middle passage across the atlantic. see price, love, . barack obama, “keynote speech to democratic national convention,” , accessed may , , https://www.politico.com/story/ / /dnc- -obama-prepared- remarks- . barack obama, “a more perfect union,” the new york times, march , accessed may , , https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/ text-obama.html. obama, “a more perfect union.” barack obama, inaugural address, , accessed may , , https://obamawhitehouse. archives.gov/blog/ / / /president-barack-obamas- inaugural-address. barack obama, dreams from my father (edinburgh: canongate, ), xv. w. e. b. du bois, the souls of black folk, ed. henry louis gates and terri hume oliver (new york: w. w. norton & company, ), , ; obama, dreams from my father, xv. obama, dreams, xv. obama, dreams, xv. obama, dreams, xv. robert l. allen, “barack obama and the children of globalization,” the black scholar , no. (winter ): . peniel e. joseph, dark days, bright nights: from black power to barack obama (new york: basic civitas books, ), . paul gilroy, the black atlantic: modernity and double consciousness (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, ), . touré, who’s afraid of post-blackness? what it means to be black now (new york: free press, ), . touré, who’s afraid, . it is important, however, to acknowledge that “postrace” as a concept is not new among african americans. arguably, zora neale hurston is exploring a “postblackness” ideology in “how it feels to be colored me” ( ) where she announces that blackness is not a sustained condition of misery and discontent. see zora neale hurston, “how it feels to be colored me,” in norton anthology of american obenland, sawallisch, and west | special forum introduction 	 	 	 literature – , th ed., ed. mary loeffelholz (new york: w. w. norton & company, ), – . it is also what langston hughes critiques in “when the negro was in vogue,” in the big sea: an autobiography (new york: hill and wang, ), – . there are historical and social moments—especially when white americans are doing well economically—in which black people are extended opportunities typically not extended to them in political, economic, or social policies. in these moments, when “the negro is in vogue” as it were, blacks flirt with the idea that they are free of the constraints of blackness. see also the south in the age of obama, ed. alfred hornung, special issue of american studies journal, no. ( ), and the recent obama and transnational american studies, ed. alfred hornung (heidelberg: universitätsverlag winter, ). that a “celebration” of postblackness was ever a social reality is questionable. on the ground, debates on benefits of the obama presidency persisted in and outside black communities. this is what fueled in great part the eventual criticisms from cornel west. ta-nehisi coates, we were eight years in power: an american tragedy (new york: one world, ), . coates, we were eight years in power, , . cornel west, prophesy deliverance! an afro-american revolutionary christianity (louisville, ky: westminster john knox press, ). keeanga-yamahtta taylor, from #blacklivesmatter to black liberation (chicago: haymarket books, ), . joseph, dark days, – . blitt, barry. “the politics of fear.” cover image. the new yorker, july . accessed may , . https://www.npr.org/ / / / /im-just-trying-to-make-myself- laugh-new-yorker-artist-shares-his-cover-stories. margo natalie crawford, black post-blackness: the black arts movement and twenty- first-century aesthetics (urbana: university of chicago press, ), . julius b. fleming, jr., “shattering black flesh: black intellectual writing in the age of ferguson,” american literary history , no. (winter ): – . david watson, “introduction: security studies and american literary history,” american literary history , no. (winter ): . fleming, jr., “shattering,” ; watson, “introduction,” ; and houston a. baker, jr., “the black bottom line: reflections on ferguson, black lives matter, and white male violence in america,” american literary history , no. (winter ): . journal of transnational american studies . (summer ) 	 	 	 fleming, jr., “shattering,” ; harvey young, “pessimism and the age of obama,” american literary history , no. (winter ): . young, “pessimism,” . young, “pessimism,” . dana a. williams, “racial mythologies, neoliberal seductions, and the fictioning of blackness: an sos from ‘old lem,’” american literary history , no. (winter ): . young, “pessimism,” . fleming, “shattering,” . baker, “black bottom line,” , emphasis added. candice m. jenkins, “black refusal, black magic: reading african american literature now,” american literary history , no. (winter ): – . “herstory,” accessed may , , https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/herstory/. “herstory,” https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/herstory/. shaun king, “relaunching the north star,” black america web, accessed may , , https://blackamericaweb.com/ / / /shaun-king-relaunching-the-north-star/. “about the north star,” accessed may , , https://thenorthstar.com/about. du bois qtd. in gilroy, the black atlantic, . selected bibliography “about the north star.” the north star, accessed may , . https://thenorth star.com/about. allen, robert l. “barack obama and the children of globalization.” the black scholar , no. (winter ): – . https://www.jstor.org/stable/ . baker, jr., houston a. “the black bottom line: reflections on ferguson, black lives matter, and white male violence in america.” american literary history , no. (winter ): – . https://doi.org/ . /alh/ajw . coates, ta-nehisi. we were eight years in power: an american tragedy. new york: one world, . crawford, margo natalie. black post-blackness: the black arts movement and twenty-first- century aesthetics. the new black studies series. urbana, il: university of chicago press, . obenland, sawallisch, and west | special forum introduction 	 	 	 du bois, w. e. b. the souls of black folk, edited by henry louis gates, jr. and terri hume oliver. new york: w. w. norton & company, . fleming, jr., julius b. “shattering black flesh: black intellectual writing in the age of ferguson.” american literary history , no. (winter ): – . https://doi.org/ . /alh/ajw . gilroy, paul. the black atlantic: modernity and double consciousness. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, . “herstory.” black lives matter.com. accessed may . https://blacklivesmatter.com/about/herstory/. hornung, alfred, ed. obama and transnational american studies. heidelberg: universitätsverlag winter, . ———. the south in the age of obama. american studies journal ( ). http://www.asjournal.org/ - . hughes, langston. “when the negro was in vogue.” . reprinted in the big sea: an autobiography, – . new york: hill and wang, . hurston, zora neale. “how it feels to be colored me.” . reprinted in norton anthology of american literature – . th ed. edited by mary loeffelholz, – . new york: w. w. norton & company, . jenkins, candice m. “black refusal, black magic: reading african american literature now.” american literary history , no. (winter ): – . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ . joseph, peniel e. dark days, bright nights: from black power to barack obama. new york: basic civitas books, . king, shaun. “relaunching the north star.” black america web. february , . accessed may , . https://blackamericaweb.com/ / / /shaun-king- relaunching-the-north-star/. maxwell, william j. “born-again, seen-again james baldwin: post-postracial criticism and the literary history of black lives matter.” american literary history , no. (winter ): – . https://doi.org/ . /alh/ajw . obama, barack. dreams from my father. edinburgh: canongate, . price, david a. love and hate in jamestown: john smith, pocahontas, and the heart of a new nation. new york: knopf, . sluiter, engel. “new light on the ‘ . and odd negroes’ arriving in virginia, august .” the william and mary quarterly , no. (april ): – . journal of transnational american studies . (summer ) 	 	 	 taylor, keeanga-yamahtta. from #blacklivesmatter to black liberation. chicago: haymarket books, . thornton, john. . “the african experience of the ‘ . and odd negroes’ arriving in virginia in .” the william and mary quarterly , no. (july ): – . touré. who’s afraid of post-blackness? what it means to be black now. new york: free press, . watson, david. “introduction: security studies and american literary history.” american literary history , no. (winter ): – . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ . west, cornel. prophesy deliverance! an afro-american revolutionary christianity. louisville, ky: westminster john knox press, . williams, dana a. “racial mythologies, neoliberal seductions, and the fictioning of blackness: an sos from ‘old lem.’” american literary history , no. (winter ): – . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ . young, harvey. “pessimism and the age of obama.” american literary history, , no. (winter ): – . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ . reassessing the inculcation of an anti-racist ethic for christian ministry: from racism awareness to deconstructing whiteness religions article reassessing the inculcation of an anti-racist ethic for christian ministry: from racism awareness to deconstructing whiteness anthony reddie , regent’s park college, the university of oxford, oxford ox lb, uk; anthony.reddie@regents.ox.ac.uk philosophy, practical and systematic theology, the university of south africa, pretoria , south africa received: august ; accepted: september ; published: september ���������� ������� abstract: this paper outlines the means by which candidates training for christian ministry are encouraged to engage with the deontological positionality of anti-racism as a substantive element of christian praxis. the first part of the paper provides some brief historical reflections on what was then the conventional approach to teaching an anti-racist ethic for christian ministry, namely, the practice of “racism awareness”. following these reflections, the author proceeds to outline the epistemological change that has occurred in his own ethical teaching, moving from the focus on racism awareness to a more critical, postcolonial deconstruction of whiteness and its concomitant links to mission christianity. mission christianity, the religion that underpinned the british empire, is identified as the repository that helped to institutionalise the existence of “white supremacy” and racism within the body politic of colonialism and the rise of notions of “manifest destiny”. in switching the modus operandi for an anti-racist ethic within christian ministry, this paper seeks to reframe the ways in which the ethical basis for opposing and resisting racism is effected within christian theology keywords: anti-racist ethic; mission christianity; racism awareness; whiteness; christian ministry . historical background my scholarly development has always existed in a series of dialectics. the primary ones of relevance in this paper are the constructive tensions between scholarship and ministry and practical theology and black theology. in terms of the latter, my scholarship has sought to utilise radical, liberative models of transformative education as a conduit for undertaking black theology. this thematic and methodological form of scholarly engagement is for the ultimate purpose of the conscientisation and christian formation of predominantly laypeople for the purposes of radical, anti-racist forms of christian discipleship. my participative approach to undertaking black theology is one that seeks to use models of experiential learning, such as exercises and games, role-play and drama, as an interactive means of engaging with adult learners in order that they can be impacted by, learn from, and contribute to the development of new knowledge concerning the theory and practice of black theology. whilst the bulk of this participative research has been focused on engagement with predominantly black transformative education is a form of knowledge construction that challenges the dominant theories and paradigms that constitute normative frames of epistemology. it proceeds from a critical, dialectical inquiry into the very basis of what constitutes knowledge and truth. one of the most instrumental texts in my own intellectual development is (banks ). black theology is a theology of liberation whose point of departure is the existential struggles of black people of african descent seeking to interpret their lives’ experiences in dialogue with the god, revealed in jesus christ, whom they believe represents the source and framework for their attempts to resist oppression and marginalization. the first black theology text was (cone [ ] ). see also (reddie ). extensive examples of this work can be found in (reddie , a, ). religions , , ; doi: . /rel www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /rel http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions religions , , of laypeople, an alternative strand has focused on working with predominantly white people training for ordained ministry. this form of pedagogical and research engagement once took the form of “racism awareness raising workshops” for predominantly white theological education and ministerial training students in various institutions across the country. this work took the form of being a consultant in black theological studies for the methodist church . the term “race” is in inverted commas as in strict terms, it does not exist. the notion of “race” as a set of unproven frameworks for indicating the notion of fixed categories of biological (and hierarchical) differences between differing groups of people is an invention or fiction of the era of modernism . racism is the outworking of the concept of “race”, which results in behavioural, procedural, policy, systemic and practical forms of discrimination based on the prejudices and stereotypes that arise from this construct. this essay is not seeking to offer a substantive genealogy on the ongoing constructive discourse surrounding the phenomenology of “race”. rather, it seeks to synthesise aspects of this continuous discourse for the specific purpose of rethinking the current discourse and praxis of ministerial training as pertains to inculcating an anti-racist ethic. in effect, this work is less about the specifics of “race” as a conceptual category and is more concerned with the application of the latest thinking on this phenomena as a theological problem, particularly as it pertains to theological education and ministerial training. . racism awareness “racism awareness training” has become an ingredient within british theological education over the last forty or so years. this form of training in theological education was pioneered by the british methodist church, arising out of the landmark report a tree god planted: black people in british methodism, in which the term “institutional racism” was first coined within the context of church life, some fourteen years before the government instituted the macpherson report that looked into the death of stephen lawrence, which gave legitimacy to the concept and the term. racism awareness training was for many years compulsory for all persons training for public authorised ministry within the methodist church and in many of her ecumenical partner churches. this training sought to conscientise ministerial students to become knowledgeable on the historical “racism awareness raising” approaches to ministry arose out of the wider context of anti-racism approaches to experiential models of informal education and learning that seek to inculcate within participants an increased understanding and a heightened awareness of the existence and ramifications of oppressive forms of action based on the construct of “race”. racism awareness training first emerged in the uk as a form of anti-oppressive training in professional development in occupations such as housing, social work, youth and community work, and probation work. for more details on this, please see (tamkin et al. ). between september , and august , i worked as a consultant in black theological studies, based at the queen’s foundation for ecumenical theological education in birmingham. this role involved working part time while undertaking postdoctoral research in black theology and christian education based at queen’s. the other “half” of the role saw me travelling across methodist theological institutions and ecumenical ones in which methodist students’ training for authorised, public ministry is located, working as a theological consultant. in working as a consultant, my role was to work as a guest lecturer, teaching black theology, postcolonial theologies, liberation hermeneutics and, most typically, leading “racism awareness days”. the latter were for the purpose of conscientising ministerial students, equipping them to be anti-racist practitioners in the respective ministries. a number of scholars have demonstrated the specious nature of such discourse and the ways in which it seeks to create untenable and unstable boundaries between groups of humanity. the concept of “race” is a misnomer as it strictly does not exist, as there is only one “race”, the human race. racism, however, does exist, as forms of discriminatory action based on the grounds of “race” are very real. see (barndt ) and (west ). see also (hopkins ). see also (carter ; jennings ; douglas ; eze ). for an excellent distillation of the construct of “race” and racism in the context of christian discipleship and ministry, see (ackroyd et al. ). see (walton et al. ). stephen lawrence was a seventeen-year-old black african caribbean young man who was brutally murdered on the streets of south london in a frenzied and unprovoked racially motivated attack. the metropolitan police in london (the overarching authority for investigating crime and policing the streets of london) was roundly attacked in the media and within black communities in britain for their racist-inspired neglect and inefficiency in investigating the case. no one was initially convicted for stephen lawrence’s murder. the public outcry in response to the negligence of the metropolitan police service gave rise to the macpherson report. for further details on the macpherson report, see (macpherson ). religions , , of manifestation of the conceptual idea of “race” and its dangerous offspring, namely, “racism”. this form of enacted pedagogical practice was undertaken by means of informal workshops over the course of one- or two-day teaching and learning events. these were described as “racism awareness days”, although they were also termed “racial justice training days” or “exploring anti-oppressive practice”. the emphasis of this was not simply to assist predominantly white students to become “more aware” of the conceptual frameworks of “race” and racism. rather, the learning outcomes of these days focused on developing anti-racist models of ministry in order to assist students in combatting and resisting racism in all its forms. the underlying ethical basis of these training days was to challenge white ministerial students to develop action plans for the enactment of praxiological, anti-racist models of christian ministry that would see such individuals acting as “white allies” in supporting the work of anti-racism in the church and beyond. my involvement was often that of a guest lecturer, charged with engaging with a group of predominantly white students training for ordained ministry in a variety of theological institutions, from mainly the methodist, anglican, baptist, and urc denominations. these sessions were focused on “theological anthropology”, inviting participants to reflect on the nature of their identity; namely, what are the constituent parts of their human constructions? in this pedagogical approach to “black participative theology”, i used a variety of exercises and activities for enabling participants to explore their feelings and emotions in a safe space. the exercises allowed them to adopt imaginary roles and to “park” their sometimes “extreme” feelings within a comparatively safe “rest area” where they could notionally ascribe responsibility for their anger, frustration, or sense of tension to the fictional persona of the character they had adopted in the exercise. a participative approach to black theology, linked with transformative christian education, for the purposes of encouraging adult learners to engage in anti-racial models of christian discipleship and ministry, is one that uses martin luther king jnrs notion of the “beloved community” as its central heuristic. the use of exercises and drama represents an invitation for adult learners to reflect within the hospitable and safe space of the workshop. in this context, they can explore and commit themselves to working for and becoming a part of the collective spiritual and psychological journey of the christian church, towards the “promised land” of racial justice, what, in effect, i would describe as the “reign of god” or “gods gracious economy”. in the various exercises, participants, by means of conversation and interaction, have the opportunity to reflect on their actions within the context of a central activity and to assess their agency and responses to it for their truthfulness to gods gracious activity in jesus christ when juxtaposed with the historical and contemporary experience of racism and oppression. the participative element of the work challenges learners to decide how they will inhabit particular spaces and places in order to assess the ways in which they are playing out learnt pathologies that are often informed by the specious binaries of “them” and “us”. what would happen if participants were enabled to take on the persona of the “other” in order to live out their realities and experiences within a participative exercise? to what extent would these experiences change their subjective self and their concomitant consciousness? ultimately, in what ways would the resultant change in consciousness inform their future praxis as ministers in public, authorised ministry? the journey towards the beloved community is one in which the process is as important as the destination that is reached. in the context of performative action, one is constantly challenging see (baldwin ). i am very much indebted to my friend and colleague michael n. jagessar for the latter term or phrase for naming the eschatological hope of god’s justice and equity for all persons that constitutes our futuristic hope within the christian faith. see (jagessar ). see (andrews , pp. – ). african american womanist theologian kelly brown douglas demonstrates the extent to which binary notions of “in groups” and “out groups” within christian communities can be traced back to the notion of a “closed monotheism” within judaeo-christian theologies of the hebrew bible and the new testament. see (douglas ). religions , , of participants to question their assumptions about what is deemed to be “normative” and that which is termed as “aberrant” or “transgressive”. the modus operandi of this approach to undertaking participative black theology is for the purpose of offering participants new models of being christian in a context where white nationalism and racism are on the rise. the purpose of this approach to undertaking black theology lies in the belief that internalised change (spiritual and psychological) can be a conduit for externally verified changes in behaviour and practice. both of these modes provide the subjective, experiential basis for liberation at an individual, interpersonal, communal, and ultimately systemic level. this model of liberative, pedagogical work is predicated on a participative teaching and learning process. the natural corollary of this pedagogical approach is a model of liberative theological reflection that is undertaken by means of participative exercises through which new theories and concepts for christian praxis are enacted. it is my belief that christian ministry remains the central context in which ordinary christians and ministers can seek to use the insights of black theology in order to become signs of hope and models of change for the liberation of all people who are presently marginalised and oppressed. whilst building on my past work, these sessions, nevertheless, represent something of a slight departure from my previous scholarship. the problems with racism awareness training were many, but in brief, i will summarise these ways. first, in its operation as a stand-alone, non-assessed initiative, the work was always envisioned as an atypical form of educational provision separate from the substantive curriculum work of ministerial training and theological education. in the failure to integrate racism awareness into the substantive heart of ministerial training and theological education, the work of anti-racist educators, such as myself, was fatally undermined, as these initiatives were being perceived as barely tolerable encumbrances to the “serious” and “proper” work of ministerial formation. i remember one memorable occasion when leading a racism awareness training day in a particular methodist institution during which a ministerial student verbally abused me and other members of the class, kicked over tables, and stormed out of the room in anger and disgust at my teaching. when the student returned, unrepentant and unreflective on their antisocial and wholly inappropriate behaviour, i challenged them by saying, “if you can tell me at what point in your future pastoral ministry your behaviour would ever be acceptable, then i will shut up and never teach these days again.” this ministerial student walked out again and did not return. i mention this incident because my assumption was that this extreme, inappropriate behaviour might be an impediment to the individual being accepted into the methodist ministry, but it was not. in fact, my opinion was not sought in terms of the fitness of the person for ministry, because by inference, my running of this atypical, non-assessed, one-off adjunct form of enterprise was simply a tick-box exercise that had no major bearing on the formation of candidates for ministry. showing distain for and behaving badly in the one educational input focused primarily on racism and white supremacy, was not an impediment to their being engaged in authorised, public methodist ministry. this epistemological lacuna reminds me of the great charge james cone has levelled against white, euro-american theological ethics. namely, that christian theology has developed a penchant for observing in minute details many forms of theological abstraction, but has largely refused to observe the visceral and palpable nature of racism within the body politic of white majority societies and the churches located within them. see the following website where the then leader of ukip, nigel farage, clearly invokes a cultural interpretation of christianity as a means of promoting a reactionary, homogeneous construct of britain. http://www.secularism.org.uk/news/ / / nigel-farage-calls-for-muscular-defence-of-christianity-in-the-uk (national secular society ). journalists have noted the rise in racist attacks and right wing nationalism. see (booth ) for further details. at the time of writing, these “one-off days” were non assessed and were not integrated into the main curriculum of theological training and formation. this situation may no longer be the case. see (cone ). http://www.secularism.org.uk/news/ / /nigel-farage-calls-for-muscular-defence-of-christianity-in-the-uk http://www.secularism.org.uk/news/ / /nigel-farage-calls-for-muscular-defence-of-christianity-in-the-uk religions , , of the second problem with these days was the failure to ground them in the epistemological heartland of the theological curricula that underpinned the ministerial training and formation of methodist ministers. by focusing on the concept of “race” and concomitant manifestations of racism, as opposed to the underlying frameworks of the theological construction of white western christianity, this approach enabled the reification of the opacity around the continued flourishing of white supremacy. in focusing on abstractions of “race” separated from the centrality of christian theology as expressed within the curriculum of theological training, this led to the continued diminution in the veracity of racism awareness training and the significance with which it was perceived as an essential component in the ontological development of ministerial students training for ordained ministry. in critiquing racism awareness, i need to acknowledge the limitations of my own practice. the institutional and epistemological frameworks i have described were ones i readily agreed to work within, in that i agreed with the belief such forms of operative pedagogy were entirely reasonable. working as a practical black theologian, i saw this work as an adjunct to my more normative work as a theological educator and not a trainer and facilitator for racism awareness in stand-alone, one-off, day-long activities. . unconscious bias and equalities, diversity, and inclusion in the years since this work came to an end, the emphasis has moved on from an analysis of racism to one of “unconscious bias”. unconscious bias is a social identity theory that seeks to enable individuals to deconstruct their embedded world views and the ways in which these impact on their perceptions and outlooks as they engage with others in the world as historical subjects. the shift in culture in how an anti-racist ethic is inculcated within the wider formation for ministry within the methodist church has coincided with the shift in the corporate policy, moving from anti-racism or “racial justice” to one of equalities, diversity, and inclusion (edi) and moving from the queen’s foundation in birmingham to the susanna wesley foundation, based within roehampton university in south london. the national policy of unconscious bias has been ensconced within a research project that seeks to rethink models of diversity and inclusion within the methodist church and how notions of difference are handled within the context of wesleyan ecclesiology. this shift from a black-theology-inspired ethic for anti-racism to one of unconscious bias has, as i will demonstrate in the final section of this article, serious implications for how we understand the challenges posed by systemic racism that have been revealed by the coronavirus pandemic and the death of george floyd, leading to the resurgence of the black lives matter movement. does the individualisation and ahistorical, epistemological framing of unconscious bias enable participants to come to terms with and deconstruct the worst excesses of white supremacy and the privileging of whiteness that has underpinned the concept of “race” and the realities of racism over the past years? it is important to assert the significant impact of unconscious bias as a form of transformative learning pedagogy that seeks to conscientise participants in a variety of social and institutional settings. my critique of unconscious bias does not extend to the utility and efficacy of this philosophical and pedagogical approach in principle. although there are queries directed at the effectiveness of for the basics of “unconscious bias” and its related training, see (wikipedia ). unconscious bias training continues to use experiential and progressive modes of pedagogy that seek to enable individuals to access their affective domain as a means of instituting behaviour change. in supporting individuals in responding to their emotional states, as the means by which substantive consciousness-raising modes of change can be enacted, this form of pedagogy relates to the broader developments in transformative education and learning in which my work has been located. in short, i am not suggesting any substantive divergences in the pedagogical approaches of my previous work in racism awareness and the contemporary use of unconscious bias forms of pedagogy within the methodist church. rather, my critique lies in the epistemological underpinnings of the latter and the developing approach to anti-racism that i am detailing in the second half of this paper. for details on the susanna wesley foundation, see (the susanna wesley foundation ). one can see examples of this in the research project that has given rise to the main outputs detailed in (the susanna wesley foundation ). religions , , of “unconscious bias” training in terms of diversity and equalities strategies as they pertain to corporate management, my concerns with its utility are located solely in terms of inculcating ethical forms of ministry as it relates to christian ministry. my problem with this new model is the lack of any serious analysis of the wider socio-cultural and political construction of empire and the ways in which the embedded nature of whiteness has formed a world in which notions of manifest destiny and white exceptionalism have given rise to a toxic reality built on white supremacy. african american black religious scholar stephen ray has demonstrated how the construct of whiteness amongst the white settler colony of the us, building on their european roots, reifies the means by which white christianity represents the sublimated superstructure that underpinned the ethical basis of modern america. the conflation of the cross, white supremacy, and notions of white manifest destiny creates the theological frameworks that enshrine whiteness as the regulatory norm for what constitutes righteousness and belonging. the individualising of the tenets of unconscious bias enables the wider systemic means by which whiteness constructs a socio-cultural and political platform on which white supremacy is enacted to go unnoticed. african american womanist ethicist emilie townes has written about the cultural construction of evil via the media depictions of blackness and how the toxic ephemera of the media exacerbates this hegemonic dynamic of white supremacy. townes’ penetrating analysis of the cultural production of western life reminds us of the embedded ways in which blackness is fixed in the popular imagination. the wider constructs by which whiteness has enveloped the christian project are summarily ignored as the church focuses on individual oversights and wrestles with ways in which visible minorities might be integrated into the white socio-cultural framing of normality. in , can it really be the case that a religio-cultural framing for an ethical approach to justice-making should adopt as its modus operandi a focus on integrating minorities as opposed to deconstructing inherited, systemic, white epistemological norms? conversely, my own developing work draws on the brilliant insights of willie james jennings. jennings explores the construct of “race” within the body politic of christianity in exemplary fashion using several generative stories of how the world of europeans collided with that of africans, and it is in this combustible nexus that the new, toxic order of christian thinking emerges. the creation of this alternative approach to creating an anti-racist ethic for those training for christian ministry is predicated on a critical rereading of christian tradition and the concomitant development of white eurocentric theology. this developing work i am describing is an acute critique of the racism awareness work i used to undertake and its successor that is framed within the intellectual frameworks adopted by unconscious bias training. . telling an under-told story: the role of christianity in creating anti-black racism the development of an alternative pedagogy for effecting an anti-racist ethic for christian ministry commences with a historical deconstruction of the role of white christianity in the transatlantic slave trade. i am arguing that there existed (and continues to this day) an underlying framework that enabled many christian churches to construct an ideology, based upon an incipient, racist theology, that assisted them in supporting black chattel slavery, which was unhindered by any faith in god. for details on some of the criticisms directed at unconscious bias training, see (noon , pp. – ). see (reddie ). see (ray ). (ray ). see (townes ). (townes , pp. – ). see (jennings ). for an incisive and critical interrogation of the corruption of christianity by notions of “race”, which assisted in the theological construction of chattel slavery, see (carter ). religions , , of to understand the churches’ role in slavery, we need to look back to the early church fathers and ideas derived from greek antiquity. it is in this much earlier period in the first four centuries of the “common era” (ce) that ideas of black people as the negative “other” first begin to surface in christian thinking. the later period of european expansion around the time of the crusades and the violent conflict with african (black) moors (muslims) lead to the intensifying of ideas around christianity=europe(christendom)=white versus non-christians=africa(barbarians)=black. black people became the other. the aforementioned is exacerbated by the fact that white christianity is a violent religion. it is based upon a form of “closed monotheism”—i.e., the “christian god” is a jealous and competitive god who will not tolerate rivals and the “other” who worship such god(s), —which in turn is conflated with white exceptionalism, privilege, and power. therefore, the conflation of white christianity and the hermeneutics of power leads to forms of aggressive social-political praxis that are often predicated on violence. this can be seen in a number of hebrew bible texts, in which a “competitive” god instructs the people of israel to commit genocide on others who inhabit the “promised land” (see the book of exodus, chapter , verses – and the list of peoples overthrown in the book of joshua, chapter ). in invoking the term “violent religion” in regard to white christianity, i am speaking towards the wider judeo-christian tradition, which, when allied to notions of white supremacy, becomes the hermeneutical lens for rereading the aforementioned texts in exodus and joshua on which “christian genocide” is enacted. this view is explicated in the work of robert warrior, who reflected on the manifest destiny of white settler communities in the us, whose use of the “closed monotheism” of christianity enabled the justification for the usurping of native american land. warrior ’s claim about the violent impulses of white christianity that have helped to fuel white supremacy that underpinned european imperialism is amplified in the work of a number of international scholars and activists from the global south. these scholars and activists have demonstrated the means by which white christianity has been able to colonise the judeo-christian tradition in order to dominate and subjugate others, often people of darker skin, across the world. when you combine the questionable attitude to blackness with the sense of competition with people who are not like you (i.e., black), you have a potent cocktail for an underlying theology of “them” (black people or the other) and “us”. you know who the “them” are, because they do not look like you. they are not “of god” (not “his people”) and therefore “all bets are off” in terms of how you treat them. when european traders, particularly in the elizabethan age, began to engage with africans on a prolonged basis, mainly through trade, it did not take much imagination to see that the underlying notions of “otherness” made black africans ripe for exploitation. the tensions between religion, faith, ethnicity, and nationality are then exploited by means of “specious” biblical interpretation—the main text that resolved the issue of justifying the enslavement of africans within a christian framework came from genesis : – —the curse of ham. noah punishes his son ham by cursing his own grandson canaan (the son of ham), condemning him and all his descendants to slavery. since there was a widely perpetuated belief that africans/dark-skinned peoples were the descendants of ham, this so-called “curse of ham” was used as biblical evidence that the enslavement of african people see (hood [ ] ). (douglas ). for a critical rereading of the exodus narrative, which offers an anti-imperialist, anti-hegemonic hermeneutic, see (warrior , pp. – ). for a wider discussion on the destruction consequences of the book of joshua, see (bridgeman et al. , pp. – ). see (warrior , pp. – ). see (hopkins and lewis ). see (gerzina ). see (johnson ). religions , , of was actually willed and sanctioned by god. there was also a similar but less well-known argument based on the biblical story of cain and abel (gen : – ), where the “mark of cain”, punishment for the murder of his brother, is interpreted as representing black skin. again, people of african origin are somehow identified as cursed by god for some past wrong. here, any notions of blame are removed from the slave owners, since it can be said that the condition in which the africans find themselves as slaves is due to the sins their ancestors have committed in the past, for which god is punishing them. their black skin is seen as proof of their sinful condition. proponents of the atlantic slave trade constructed such wild and fantastical forms of interpretation of the bible (in support of slavery) because of the presence of pre-existing views of africans as “other” and as being “cursed by god”. the aforementioned was ameliorated after the haitian revolution at the end of the th century. the charge to “christianise” enslaved africans was undertaken on a number of biblical and theological terms. there was a dichotomy between the body and the soul. this dualism is a particular outworking of pauline theology. salvation is achieved solely by faith in jesus christ. in the theological construction of pauline theology, salvation is not dependent on praxis, but on faith in the saving work of jesus. this means that if you are a christian slave owner, you can have faith in christ and still own slaves, as god is only interested in your soul, which is preserved through faith in jesus. your actions on earth are another matter. for the enslaved africans, faith in this same jesus guaranteed salvation in heaven but not material freedom here on earth for the same reason as that given for the justification of the actions of slave masters. in the theological construction of slave holding economies, africans could be saved. given that this underlying framework of european superiority still held sway, however, even when both black and white were members of the same religious code (the body of christ), it is no surprise that after the abolition of the slave trade and later slavery itself, europeans continued to oppress africans. it is interesting to note that the “dash for africa” in the mid th century came soon after slavery was finally abolished in the british empire. the existence of racism in britain today, as we speak, is testament to the continuance of the underlying eurocentric judeo-christian framework that has always caricatured africans as “less than” and “the other”, i.e., not one of “us”. so why am i still within the christian church trying to effect an anti-racist ethic in christian ministry? i remain a practising christian because there is another story to be told. one that lies in the heart and mind of such luminaries as sam sharpe, a baptist deacon who initiated the largest rebellion in jamaica against slavery, in the christmas period of . for sharpe as well as other enslaved africans, jesus was the liberator who came to bring freedom to the captives. texts like luke : – or matthew : – from the gospels became “proof texts” that god as reflected in the life, death, and resurrection of jesus was on the side of the oppressed and the suffering and against the perpetrators of the slave trade. this black radical tradition in christianity continues in the present day. black people have continued to re-interpret the meaning of christian faith in order to challenge illegitimate white power (and black power, also, when it should be called to account) and to proclaim freedom for all people, a freedom that speaks against the continued realities of racism and white supremacy. . deconstructing of mission christianity building on the critical rereading of church history and christian tradition, i want to locate the thrust for an anti-racist ethic as one that moves beyond the framing of my previous modalities of this work, as outlined in the first section of this article. this development has moved from a see (hood [ ] ). see (douglas ). see (reddie ) for a more in depth analysis on this issue. (douglas , pp. – ). see (reddie b). religions , , of focus on the minutiae of delineating the formulations of “race” and the manifestations of racism in britain and across the world to one that seeks to explore the internalisation of white supremacy within the phenomenological edifice that is mission christianity. in using this term, i am speaking of a historical phenomenon in which there existed (and continues to this day) an interpenetrating relationship between european expansionism, notions of white superiority, and the material artefact of the apparatus of empire. this form of christianity became the conduit for the expansionist paradigms of eurocentric models of christianity in which ethnocentric conceptions of whiteness gave rise to notions of superiority, manifest destiny, and entitlement. central to the development of mission christianity has been the framing of whiteness as the signifier for notions of righteousness and axiomatic tropes of regulatory patterns of christian discipleship. james perkinson demonstrates how whiteness provides the superstructure on which enlightenment rationality is predicated, with which mission christianity happily colluded as a means of constructing notions of normality versus deviance in the application of the faith across the “new world”. perkinson argues that “whiteness was born of the european encounter with people, places, and things that fit no clear category on the map of christian cognition”. the aforementioned work, in terms of both the racism awareness training i led or the later development of unconscious bias training i have named, for all its attempts at instituting a liberative pedagogical ethic, is nevertheless predicated on an assumption of the normativity of the christian faith as an inviolate guarantee for non-racialised discourse and praxis. one cannot ignore the reality that the bible has been used to justify slavery, colonisation, rape, and homophobic violence. it has been used as a weapon against black people. ideological biblical scholars such randall bailey and oral thomas talk about the need to read against the text. in fact, bailey, who i would identify as the doyen of socio-political, ideological readings of the bible, asserts the importance of an ideological mode of interpretation that is commensurate with one’s own religio-cultural bias. without the robust deconstructive work as i have described, there is a danger that the radical pedagogy underpinning racism awareness training, or the later iteration of an anti-racist ethic that is enshrined in unconscious bias training, effectively becomes a de facto white-controlled discourse much like the more centrist “classical theology” and biblical studies that have shaped western christianity. one of the perennial problems with the racism awareness work i used to undertake lies in its reliance on the normative frameworks of christian discourse and the failure to name the white, privileged, androcentric inherited norms that have underpinned christianity since the epoch of colonialism. it has been this unexplored, embedded nature of whiteness that has enabled western christianity to all too easily collude with racism and the subterranean tropes of white supremacy. the development of the equalities framework within the national life of the methodist church has been distilled within the equalities, diversity, and inclusion (edi) toolkit, in which the commitment to justice-orientated ministry is enshrined within the various units and workplans constructed by the connexional (national) committee. within the material developed in the edi toolkit, one can see clear mission christianity is the form of christian faith that went hand in hand with the british empire. london missionary society evangelist and explorer david livingstone is reputed to be the author of the infamous cs: commerce, christianity, and civilisation. for further details, see (nkomazana ). for a helpful dissection of this model of christianity, particularly the british version of it, see (gorringe ). see also (hull ). see (perkinson , pp. – ). (perkinson , p. ). the bible was a key tool in justifying the enslavement of african people. two amongst the many texts in this area are (haynes ). see also (johnson ). see (bailey , pp. – ; bailey , pp. – ). see also (thomas ). (bailey , pp. – ). see (cone ). details of the edi toolkit can be found in (the methodist church n.d.a.). the edi toolkit has become the new normative training resource for demonstrating the ethical approach to justice-making and equity within the methodist church. the toolkit is comprised of a number of modules that cover differing aspects of equalities, diversity, and inclusion from a religions , , of evidence of a commitment to wrestling with historic, theo-cultural frameworks of whiteness and the embedded, historic constructs of white supremacy that have defined christianity as the religion of empire. the toolkit has a section on “race” (module ), which includes the generative work of peggy mcintosh that addresses white privilege and the normativity of whiteness as an unmarked form of human subjectivity. now, to be clear, mcintosh’s pedagogical activism is hugely significant, and the inclusion of this work demonstrates a level of radicality that reveals the substantive ethical intent to address racism and white privilege within the body politic of the church and wider society. the failure of the edi strategy adopted by the methodist church lies in its failure to engage with the radical “theological” deconstruction of whiteness that is employed by james perkinson. in his pioneering text, white theology, perkinson, a white, euro-american theologian, wrestles with the phenomenology of whiteness in order to deconstruct the economic positionality of whiteness and critically challenge the worst forms of theo-anthropological obfuscation that often underpin the existing modalities of anti-racism found in my earlier racial justice work or the more recent edi framework adopted by the methodist church. one cannot casually remove christianity from the contaminating stain of whiteness as if the problems of white supremacy exist solely beyond the parameters of the christian faith itself and have not become embedded within the very epistemological framing of the phenomenon of christianity across its history. in wrestling with the colonial hinterland of mission christianity and the emblematic ways in which whiteness is embedded within it, this developing approach towards an anti-racist ethic in terms of christian ministry is one that seeks to help white people connect with their unnamed whiteness. how does one enable white people to reflect critically on their developing christian discipleship and ministry in a manner that is informed by their surreptitious and usually unstated whiteness, which in christian theology has been as much a hindrance as it has been a help? in christian theology, one often witnesses studious attempts to avoid engaging with embodied difference. when i was an undergraduate student in church history at the university of birmingham many years ago, we spent a great deal of time looking at the writings of great luminaries such martin luther, john calvin, et al. at no point were they ever racialised, i.e., ever described as “white authors” or “white thinkers”. these individuals were simply “authors” or simply “thinkers”. their ideas were generic and most importantly, they had universal implications for all peoples. whiteness operates as an overarching construct, which assumes a central place in all epistemological and cultural forms of production, thereby relegating other positions or perspectives as “other”. i should, at this juncture, make the point that i am not seeking to traduce all white people, nor am i constructing this discourse on the pejorative understanding that whiteness is aberrant or wholly without legitimacy. it is also important that i make the point that feminism and gender studies add a particular piquancy to this debate, because they contextualised and complicated the nature of this discourse, as whiteness has to be contextualised in terms of other overarching vistas such as class, sexuality, patriarchy, and androcentrism. as i have indicated in a previous work, this form of generic universalism is one that seeks to mask the presumption that the default positionality in how we understand humanity is predicated legal and a faith-based perspective. unconscious bias provides the underlying intellectual basis for the various exercises and units that comprise the toolkit. in effect, there is a clear intellectual link between unconscious bias and the practical pedagogical resource that is the edi toolkit, which includes a plethora of fine and intelligent experiential learning resources that seek to conscientise participants in undertaking anti-oppressive forms of christian ministry and activism. see (sugirtharajah ). for details of this work, see (mcintosh ). see (perkinson ). see also (perkinson ). see also (cassidy and mikulich ). a classic example of this can be found in (mcfarland ). see (webster , pp. – ). by this i mean how white authors write and speak in an alleged universal language and whose work then has universal applicability. see (reddie a, pp. – ). religions , , of on whiteness. my critique is of whiteness as macro epistemological framework for privilege and superiority, sometimes even triumphant supremacy. this first conversation is principally about the development of ideas and discursive practices as opposed to the subjectivities and positionalities of white people per se. i am not arguing that every white person is imbued with either power or privilege, particularly of the economic kind in terms of the latter. however, what i am interested in and trying to assert in this exploratory paper are the ways in which whiteness operates as a tacit, concealed form of normative framing, what we have come to know as truth, especially that which contains a universal posture to its ideological claims for itself. in more recent times, a branch of scholarship entitled “critical white studies” has begun the task of naming and unmasking the privileged construct that is “whiteness”. the power of this process, if undertaken with due consciousness to exposing the truth, is one that will be an unflinching and unsparing critique of the hypocrisy of white christianity, particularly that which has emerged from euro-american evangelicalism. the notion of the church as a body that is united under the lordship of jesus christ is one of the enduring truths of the christian faith. this sense of unity that is so boldly proclaimed as central to the self-understanding of the church itself has often proved more illusionary than real. while the body of christ has been fractured by arguments over doctrine, denomination, and issues of class, gender, and sexuality, perhaps the most ongoing challenge and indeed the most persistent scourge has been that of racism. our present epoch has witnessed the continued idolatrous nature of aspects of white american evangelicalism, for example, that it has always preferred worshipping white supremacy than the jesus who tells us to love our neighbours, irrespective of ethnicity or culture or “race”, including those who are black. the recent upsurge in white nationalism in the us in the wake of the presidency of donald j trump and his excoriating rhetoric aimed at those who are deemed the other is a sad reminder of the singular importance of this paper. the continued growth of white nationalism across the world is a reminder of the ongoing challenge of resisting white supremacy. in britain, we have had to deal with our own experience of white supremacy. the brexit vote clearly demonstrated the barely concealed exceptionalism and sense of entitlement of predominantly white english people. the clear xenophobia underpinning the leave campaign reminded many of us that “true britishness” equals whiteness and that those who are deemed the “other”, be it “migrants” living in the uk or “foreigners” from europe, are distinctly less deserving in the eyes of many white british people. it can be argued that the romantic push for the nostalgia of the past (when britain had the biggest empire the world has ever seen) is predicated on the intrinsic value of britain being superior to others, often seen in terms of groups such as “britain first” or other groups on the political right who want to “make britain great again”. to quote the black british social commentator gary younge, “not everyone, or even most of the people who voted leave were driven by racism. but the leave campaign imbued racists with a confidence they have not enjoyed for many decades and poured arsenic into the water supply of our national conversation.” it is important to note the contested nature of the aforementioned discourse, often focusing on the divergent positionality of black and postcolonial scholars when juxtaposed with more centrist ones seeking to offer a more emollient reading of our post-brexit milieu. the latter, often writing from appreciative perspective of seeking to offer ameliorative hermeneutics for the rise in white british nationalism, will argue that the rise in intolerance to the conspicuous socio-cultural difference of see (reddie , pp. – , – ). some of the key texts in this emerging discourse: see (perkinson ). see also (perkinson ; cassidy and mikulich ; harvey ). see (harvey ). see (reddie , pp. – , – ). for an insightful left-wing critique of brexit that challenges class based notions of privilege and explores notions of white entitlement and racism, see (younge ). religions , , of multiculturalism and immigration can be understood more in terms of fear and alienation than in the frameworks afforded by race analysis as adopted by scholars such as myself. clearly, the rise of predominantly white british nationalism has many facets, and i am in no doubt that fear, alienation, and dissatisfaction with the current socio-political milieu that is modern britain had an important role to play in why so many poorer white people in the former industrial heartlands of the traditional labour party voted for brexit. however, to assert that the resurgence of nationalism has nothing to do with notions of race or white exceptionalism stretches all the normal boundaries of credulity. let me end this section with a recent conversation i had with my -year-old father who lived in britain from october until august . he came as a part of the windrush generation. he worked in factories in his entire time in the uk. he was an ardent trade unionist, a member of the general and municipal workers union or the gmwu. he was a shop steward for several years and a works convener. when i informed him of the prominent white anglicans “speaking up for ordinary working-class people” who voted for brexit, my father retorted, “why is that when people talk about the working class in britain, they only mean white people? i worked for over years in britain in a factory and was a member of a trade union. i was working class. but i bet these people are not standing up for me?” . an anti-racism ethic in practice the existence of racism in britain today, as we speak, is testament to the continued legacy of mission christianity that has always caricatured africans as “less than” and “the other”, i.e., not one of “us” in terms of the construct of whiteness. slavery is long gone, but anti-black racism has long outlived the institution that helped to breathe it into life. in our contemporary era, the underlying framework of blackness, which is still symbolically seen as representing the problematic other, now finds expression in a white police officer placing his knee on the neck of a black man; despite the plaintive pleas of “i can’t breathe”, the police officer remains unmoved and maintains his violent posture until this black man dies. one cannot understand the futility of this death unless you understand that this is no new phenomenon. white power has viewed black flesh as disposable for the past years. for those who want to believe that such events as the death of george floyd could never happen in the uk, let me recall the death of clinton mccurbin, an african caribbean man who died of asphyxia at the hands of the police in wolverhampton on the th february , having been arrested for using a stolen credit card. eye witness accounts spoke of seeing mccurbin gasping for breath as white officers pinned him to the floor and crushed the air out of his body. later that year, despite the cautionary words from my very law-abiding, hyper-religious, and respectable parents to focus on my studies, i nevertheless travelled to wolverhampton along with thousands of others to protest the death of clinton mccurbin. that was my very first march. no officers were ever charged with his death. life in my local church continued without any recourse to the death of a black man of dubious character. i cannot recall many occasions in which racism within the church and the wider society was ever addressed in the methodist church i attended at the time. for an excellent example of this, see (chaplin and bradstock ), where a number of the contributors offer supportive accounts of the rise of white english nationalism (skirting over the rise in racist attacks and xenophobia) in terms of the sense of displacement, fear, and sense of being “left behind” felt by many white working class communities in the britain. see also (girma , pp. – ; nixon ). in , he retired early on health grounds, and he and mother returned to jamaica to live in retirement. my mother died in february . of particular note are the chapters by philip north “brexit: competing visions of nation”, pp. – , and sam norton, “patriotism and theology will have to come together again: royal consciousness and the church of england”, whose work argues in defence of white working-class people. at no point do either of them identify black and asian migrants as also belonging to the working class and having also suffered from economic deprivation. both essays are to be found in (chaplin and bradstock ). for further details on the death clinton mccurbin see (flash and hyatt ). religions , , of it is my contention that succeeding generations of ordained methodist ministers and “local preachers” have been trained to ignore the social reality of racism. whilst previous iterations of the training process for preachers have stressed the importance of social justice as a key element in the methodist kerygmatic tradition, i am convinced that little exists in the way of an explicit anti-racist ethic that asserts the necessity of deconstructing the toxicity of white normality, entitlement, and privilege. this brings me to the curious case of the toppling of the statue of edward colston in bristol as part of a black lives matter protest on the th june this year. it can be argued that the pulling down or removal of statues has become a distraction against the wider issues of systemic racism that need to be addressed more than the removal of historic artefacts often ignored by most people in their daily activities. that is correct if the focus is solely on statues in and of themselves. however, let us consider the point of the black lives matter movement in first place. the black lives matter movement emerged in order to counter the patently obvious fact that black lives do not matter. this is not just a question of economics or materiality; it is also about seemingly “ephemeral matters” like the impact on our psyche and associated questions of representation and spirituality. it has been interesting observing the concern of many white christians for the ethical matters of law and order, governance, and property when it comes to the tearing down of the colston stature in bristol. black people, many of whom are the descendants of enslaved peoples, have lived in that city with the sight of a statue built in honour of a slave trader. polite petitions to move these and other statues were ignored. long before a so-called mob tore this one down, activists asked for it to be moved to a museum where those who deliberately wanted to see it could while saving those of us who did not the ignominy of having the lives of our oppressed ancestors constantly insulted. white authority ignored our claims, because black lives and our resultant feelings do not matter. black lives do not matter in the face of white complacency and disregard. just as our pleas for justice for clinton mccurbin went unheeded, because our feelings did not matter either. therefore, i find it interesting that following the pulling down of a statue, we had the usual furrowed brow of some white christians sharing their ethical concern for law and order and the dangers of mob rule. one wonders how many of these complainants were supportive of blm prior to its sudden resurgence since the death of george floyd? for some respectable white christians, their ethical concern is focused on property and not black lives disfigured by racism. delroy wesley hall speaks of black people living in britain struggling with a form of existential crucifixion. we are mired in our continued “holy saturday” following our social and collective crucifixion, but with no “easter sunday” on the horizon. therefore, at this moment in history, i am not going to thank white people for issuing apologies, “taking the knee”, writing statements, and going on marches that do not cost them anything when we are dealing with forms of existential crucifixion that lead to us being more likely to struggle with mental ill health issues such as schizophrenia. local preachers are non-ordained “lay” people on whom is conferred the authority to preach within the circuit in which they are authorised. for further details on the office of a local preacher, see (the methodist church n.d.b.). for details on the pulling down of edward colston statue, see (jannesari ). for a helpful distillation of the black lives matter movement see (black lives matter ). see also (lightsey ). lightsey’s work seeks to examine the plural and intersectional nature of the black lives matter movement, which includes black lgbtqi+ people, in order to reassert the primacy of all black bodies mattering and not just respectable, heteronormative, church-going ones. this comment is reflective of the push-back of “some” white christians on social media responding to the threat to law and order and property. it is important to acknowledge the many black christians who have also shared their disquiet at the dangers of mob rule and the desecration of public monuments. i am forced to acknowledge that there are obvious dangers of untrammelled “violent” direct action of this sort. my comments are not an absolute endorsement of this action, but a criticism of the complicity of the authorities in the city to side with the blandishments of white supremacy that is exemplified in the maintenance of statue of edward colston in the first place. (hall ). for an excellent exploration of the ways in black christian faith has been an essential means of dealing with the environmental features of systemic racism that leads to disproportionate levels of mental ill health amongst african caribbean people in britain, see (willis ). religions , , of i am not going to “educate” white people on how to deal with their discomfort and emotions when i and countless black people are afraid to go out of our houses lest we end up as part of the disproportionate numbers who are stopped, detained, and questioned by our supposedly benign police force for violating the changeable rules on social distancing post-lockdown that see white people congregating with impunity. thinking back to , when i asked my white christian colleagues and friends to support me in mounting a campaign to mark the callous killing of clinton mccurbin, i was met with complete indifference. mccurbin’s death did not resonate with them because the death of another anonymous black man was no big deal. however, every black person knows that in and of itself, george floyd’s death is not remarkable. systemic racism did not start with george floyd’s death, nor will it end with white people wringing their hands in liberal guilt, telling us how sorry they are for the racism that blights our lives and not theirs. the bitter truth is that black lives have not mattered for a very long time, and the church has long been complicit in this. i have used the iconic toppling of the colston statue as a microcosm for the wider black lives matter movement and the indifference of some white christians to our pleas for justice. the frustration of the protestors that led to the toppling and disposal of the statue reminds me of the very human anger and frustration of jesus in turning out the money changers in the temple (matt. : – , mark : – , luke : – and john : – ). it seems like it is alright for a “white jesus” as depicted in western iconography to be angry and destroy property, but not unruly black people! an anti-racist ethic in christian ministry is one that most support black lives matter if white christians are serious about seeking to be in solidarity with black people as we wrestle with the continued realities of systemic racism. . conclusions this article has sought to outline the development in my own scholarship, ministry, and activism, one that has moved from racism awareness to a theological deconstruction of whiteness and its relationship to mission christianity. this work has also challenged the contemporary predilection for the conceptual framing of unconscious bias and equalities and diversity when juxtaposed with the emphasis on racial justice and anti-racism. deconstructing whiteness and its relationship to mission christianity represents, i believe, a radical and robust means of developing an anti-racist ethic that can inform and radicalise those training for public, authorised ministry. i have yet to develop a means of converting this work into a pedagogical framework that can be delivered in a training context for those undertaking ministerial formation in the context of theological education within the “common awards” framework. this work is a tentative heuristic that is incomplete. additional pedagogical and curriculum work is needed for the effective implementation of this proposal for rethinking how churches undertake the task of ordinands for a life of an anti-racist ethic in their public ministry. given the neo-colonial construct of patronage on which many churches continue to operate, where epistemological power resides in the hands of white authority figures who are imbued with the referential power of hierarchy, i am not holding my breath that there will be many takers for this radical theo-ethical approach to anti-racism. conversely, we are experiencing a seemingly seismic breakthrough in the recognition of systemic racism by hitherto blithely unaware white institutions and their custodians, so we may be witnessing a kairos moment in the long-awaited breakthrough in repulsing the historic manifestations of racism. as i am not possessed of special powers of prescience, an example of this can be found in (dearden ). for arguably the most comprehensive appraisal for the epistemological frameworks that have given rise to the predominance of a white jesus, see (kelley ). common awards is a church of england led, but ecumenical, validating mechanism for those for ordained and authored lay ministry in the major historic churches in england. for more details see (durham university ). religions , , of history will be the ultimate judge on whether this is a moment of substantive change or if it simply a momentary blip in the ongoing remorseless march of white supremacy. i will leave the final word to one of the great thinkers on the challenges of converting white people to an ethic of anti-racism, namely, james baldwin. baldwin opines: “not everything that is faced can be changed. but 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[crossref] younge, gary. . after this vote the uk is diminished, our politics poisoned. the guardian. june . available online: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /jun/ /eu-vote-uk-diminished-politics-poisoned- racism (accessed on may ). © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . /blth.v i . http://dx.doi.org/ . /blth v i . https://www.methodist.org.uk/for-churches/guidance-for-churches/equality-diversity-and-inclusion/edi-toolkit/ https://www.methodist.org.uk/for-churches/guidance-for-churches/equality-diversity-and-inclusion/edi-toolkit/ https://www.methodist.org.uk/for-churches/local-preachers-and-worship-leaders/local-preachers/local-preacher-faqs/ https://www.methodist.org.uk/for-churches/local-preachers-and-worship-leaders/local-preachers/local-preacher-faqs/ https://susannawesleyfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /diversity-booklet-v -bw.pdf https://susannawesleyfoundation.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /diversity-booklet-v -bw.pdf https://susannawesleyfoundation.org/ https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/unconscious_bias_training http://dx.doi.org/ . /blth. . . . https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /jun/ /eu-vote-uk-diminished-politics-poisoned-racism https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /jun/ /eu-vote-uk-diminished-politics-poisoned-racism http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	historical background 	racism awareness 	unconscious bias and equalities, diversity, and inclusion 	telling an under-told story: the role of christianity in creating anti-black racism 	deconstructing of mission christianity 	an anti-racism ethic in practice 	conclusions 	references disrupting st-century in/security full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=ycas comparative american studies an international journal issn: - (print) - (online) journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ycas disrupting st-century in/security benita heiskanen & samira saramo to cite this article: benita heiskanen & samira saramo ( ) disrupting st-century in/ security, comparative american studies an international journal, : - , - , doi: . / . . to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / . . published online: dec . submit your article to this journal article views: view related articles view crossmark data https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=ycas https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/ycas https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showcitformats?doi= . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=ycas &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=ycas &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - comparative american studies an international journal, vol. , nos. – , – http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . disrupting st-century in/security benita heiskanen and samira saramo john morton center for north american studies, university of turku, turku, finland abstract this thematic issue probes into twenty-first-century security concerns in the united states, canada and mexico, and their transnational implications. in particular, it explores three tensions that characterise contemporary security concerns: national security vs. human security, policy measures vs. grassroots activism and scholarly discourses vs. artistic interventions. the 'war on terror' launched by president george w. bush marked the beginning of the century with issues of violence and insecurity, with major human rights ramifications. grassroots activists, however, have resisted the imposition of security policy and stood up to the insecurities they face. this thematic journal issue discusses questions of in/security around a robust people-centred framework that delineates questions of insecurity as a complex nexus that intertwines policy-making, everyday experiences, cultural representations and formal and informal communication networks. this focus presents an alternative to more conventional approaches that examine issues of societal in/security solely from the viewpoint of nation states and law enforcement. the collection’s case studies address the ways in which ordinary people in a transnational north american context experience questions of insecurity. the articles highlight the central position of gender, race, class and sexuality in both strengthening and challenging danger, uncertainty and liminality. this thematic issue probes into twenty-first-century security concerns in the united states, canada and mexico, and their transnational implications. in particular, it explores three tensions that characterise contemporary security concerns: national security vs. human security, policy measures vs. grassroots activism and scholarly discourses vs. artistic inter- ventions. a century that began with terrorists hijacking commercial airliners and crashing them into the world trade center in new york and the pentagon in washington, dc – the most powerful symbols of us economic and military might – would have consequences of inconceivable magnitudes. the ‘war on terror’ launched by president george w. bush was a powerful metaphor that turned public opinion for the war in afghanistan and iraq, despite no evidence of connections to al-qaeda, the / attacks, or weapons of mass destruction. the imposition of the patriot act by the us congress in october , with power to spy on citizens, install wiretaps, listen to phone calls and read emails without the subjects’ keywords transnational north america; grassroots activism; art activism; human rights; insecurity; the body; space social media © informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group contact benita heiskanen benita.heiskanen@utu.fi mailto: benita.heiskanen@utu.fi http://www.tandfonline.com b. heiskanen and s. saramo knowledge, created a sense of insecurity among citizens that was comparable to the s red scare. the distrust between policy-makers and ordinary people was heightened by the fact that us citizens could be detained indefinitely as enemy combatants. the department of homeland security, created in , took as its mission to prevent ‘terrorism and enhancing security; managing [us] borders; administering immigration laws; securing cyberspace; and ensuring disaster resilience’ (https://www.dhs.gov/our-mission). the department’s col- our-coded system of different levels of terrorism threat was used by local, state and federal agencies to signal security alerts at airports and other public facilities. the guantánamo bay detention camp (gtmo) became the infamous military prison housing terrorism suspects on the us naval base in cuba. the united states saw a paradigm shift in border security policy, when the us immigration and customs enforcement (ice) created the national fugitive operation program (nfop) under the department of homeland security. this resulted in increasing militarisation of the us–mexico border, complete with miles of fencing erected along the border and an agenda to locate and apprehend undocumented and ‘terrorist’ aliens (ackleson ; andreas ; winders ). while the rationale for the securitisation of the border was to make people feel ‘safer’, as a result of the policy change, immigrants in the united states became targets of state-level search and seize operations for alleged links with terrorism (heiskanen ). the us–mexico border region, in particular, became an area where national security interests led to human rights violations on both sides of the border. in mexico, reconsiderations of national security strategies led to the formulation of the national security law in . although the purpose of the law was to grant protection and rights to citizens, in practice, it focused on migrants in the context of the mexico–us border (calleros ). this border securitisation agenda effectively undermined the development of human security goals, such as those established by the organization of american states’ declaration on security in . the conflict between state-centred security and its human dimension has been at the crux of us–mexico security concerns (buscaglia ; garcía and marquez ). the issue of security intensified again in both mexico and the united states at the begin- ning of , escalating in , when the mexico–us border region saw a wave of vio- lence emerge because of a turf war between drug trafficking cartels (barry ; bowden ; campbell ; heiskanen ; bunker ). both the united states and mexico responded to the violence primarily as a national security issue. the united states focused on securing the border against a possible spillover of violence; in mexico, military forces were sent to the troubled regions. citizens of both nations were also impacted by increasing use of drones for surveillance. as a result of these security threats, the united states saw the most fervent reactionary backlash resulting in the curtailing of both immigrant rights and citizenship rights in the united states (cornelius ; cornelius and lewis ). on the mexican side of the border, the reorientation of national security and migratory policies had a great impact on citizens, as the focus on border security was steered towards ‘anti-terrorist’ measures at the expense of human rights (castillo ). various grassroots organisations were forged to express disapproval of these measures as well as the use of drones to the detriment of border residents. the us ‘war on terror’ also extended directly into canada. once known as the world’s longest unprotected border, canadians now require passports to enter the united state and face tough security scrutiny. however, in their efforts to defend borders, canadian and us https://www.dhs.gov/our-mission comparative american studies an international journal intelligence services have moved beyond national borders, allowing customs and intelligence officers to work in both countries to screen potential terrorism (beyond the border action plan ). after , the canadian government, under the leadership of stephen harper, designed its own powerful counter-terrorism surveillance mechanisms. these have included the controversial anti-terrorism act (bill c- .) the act, comparable to the patriot act, expanded the powers of the canadian security intelligence service (csis) to gather and share information, enabling law enforcement to make arrests without warrant, when terrorist plotting was suspected (béchard et al. ). human rights critics continue to fear that, in practice, bill c- targets environmental and indigenous activism that challenge the government’s economic priorities (bronskill ; diabo ; palmater ). on global and local levels, measures related to the ‘war on terror’ resulted in racial profiling, conflation of immigrants and terrorists and curtailing of individual rights, with major ramifications on freedom of speech and assembly, policy-making, immigration laws and inter- and intra-group tensions. people, however, have resisted the imposition of security policy and stood up to the insecurities they face. in this issue, we want to discuss questions of in/security around a robust people-centred framework that delineates questions of inse- curity as a complex nexus that intertwines policy-making, everyday experiences, cultural representations and formal and informal communication networks. this focus presents an alternative to more conventional approaches that examine issues of societal in/security solely from the viewpoint of nation states and law enforcement. the collection’s case stud- ies address the ways in which ordinary people in a transnational north american context experience questions of insecurity. the articles highlight the central position of gender, race, class and sexuality in both strengthening and challenging danger, uncertainty and liminality. the articles of heide, heiskanen and saramo, in particular, cause us to reflect on the ways that people defy restrictions on mobility, be it due to national borders, organised crime, or gender, class and racially inscribed social zoning. instead, people utilise their individual and collective agency to (re)claim space, resisting the imposition of in/security. in many of the examples used, the body becomes a locus of power relations and a site within which questions of in/security are contested. stephanie sparling williams discusses the appro- priation of the female body for military deployment and artistic intervention. saramo, heiskanen, chernega and whitney call attention to the body as a site of physical violence. in heide’s article, ‘repossessing border space’, we see the powerful ways that artists have embodied border spaces, transforming political security discourses into lived experiences, by representing people’s border crossings. a tension between state measures and grassroots interventions is a central dynamic in such experiences. grassroots movements, including occupy, black lives matter, idle no more, as well as civil disobedience movements, such as women in black, not one more, movement for peace with justice and dignity and we are all ayotzinapa, have directly challenged the inequity and violence of political, economic and societal structures, and have had a significant impact in bringing awareness of issues on insecurity on a grassroots level in north america. as we see in the articles by saramo, heiskanen and chernega, there is a sense of urgency and that people are fed up with waiting for the government to act on their concerns and to enact real security. various forms of social movements, then, ranging from citizen activism to art activism are at the crux of finding ways to challenge insecurity and to effect change. the north american examples analysed here can be seen in light of broader global grassroots movements, often led by women, countering gender, racial, environmental, b. heiskanen and s. saramo economic and inter/national insecurities (banaszak ; macgregor ; rocheleau, thomas-slayter, and wangari ; zobl and drüeke ). while chernaga, for exam- ple, highlights highly public demonstrations against racialised police violence, heiskanen’s research reveals the more intimate, perhaps less obvious daily resistances employed, in this case, by residents on the mexico–us border. in this collection, sparling williams employs the concept of ‘speaking out of turn’ to analyse artist coco fusco’s parallel critique of the us military’s use of women in interrogation and the art world’s refusal of feminism. ‘speaking out of turn’, or what sparling williams defines as a ‘grassroots methodology of those ren- dered silenced and invisible’, resonates with the diverse causes, activisms and disruptions analysed by the collection’s articles. an examination of grassroots activism also reveals the multitude of emotional responses to insecurity, including frustration, grief and guilt. delving into the complex negotiations of emotion, place and power, the articles here contribute new perspectives to the expanding study of activism’s affective dimensions (for example brown and pickerill ). the organisation of this thematic issue underscores the intersecting questions of every- day experiences and artistic representations/performance. the artistic forms utilised vary greatly, including solo and direct address performance, sculpture, poetry, installation, pho- tography and handicraft. art-activism and ‘craftivism’ serves as an important modus of polit- ical intervention in urban space, one which not only has both tangible social consequences, but which also transforms physical space (see for example buszek and robertson ). the articles problematise a range of contemporary security crises from the perspectives of national security and human security. the point of departure is that contemporary societal crises should not be narrowly viewed as issues of national security, as they always necessarily entail questions of local/global human rights as well. consequently, policy-making alone can never explain ongoing security crises; it is necessary to complement such measures by human security considerations. activist art is an important grassroots form of visual intervention to influence public opinion about societal crises that actions by nation states alone fail to resolve; it also exposes multiple linkages between the grassroots realities, public responses and cultural expressions in the spatial contexts within which they are exhibited. as the activist statements spread through social media, they quickly reach a global audience and significance. the articles delineate the ways in which various groups of people – citizens, scholars and artists – experience and conceptualise the significance of activist art in public space and various geographic contexts. we also call attention to the ways in which various groups of people appropriate urban public space for the politics of representation and activist agendas. finally, the specific case studies examine the theoretical conceptualisation of security crises and their responses in north america, with ramifications on a global scale. with these examples, the issue demonstrates activist art as an important modus of political discourse in crises zones that have tangible social consequences for millions of people locally and globally. this visual-spatial focus elucidates public space as a symbolic and de facto battleground for various, often conflicting, agendas. various groups making statements about security crises may appropriate public space to call attention to the ongoing events. the activist artistic statements serve multiple purposes: to express outrage and solidarity towards the victims of the crises; as personal interventions to bring visibility for one’s agenda; or to present a collective refusal of silencing vis-à-vis existing power relations. the case studies shed light comparative american studies an international journal on questions regarding the politics of representation, individual and collective agency and experiences of social space. social media has become a key tool for grassroots activism globally (gerbaudo ), and plays a vital role in the movements analysed here. through its connective power, online networks allow social movements to gain visibility and momentum. through the creation of spreadable content (jenkins et al. ), such as images and hashtags, social media has facilitated the emergence of new ‘virtual cosmopolitanism’ and ‘cosmopolitan solidarity,’ (sobre-denton ) joining together activists and supporters from far and wide. social media functions as a platform for protest and activism, through the proliferation of hash- tag campaigns, online petitioning and message spreading, but social media also facilitates on-the-ground manoeuvring. this complementary intersection of online and offline organ- isation and demonstration have changed the dynamics of grassroots activism. as argued by jeffrey juris: ‘it is clear that new media influence how movements organize and that places, bodies, face-to-face networks, social histories, and the messiness of offline politics continue to matter’ (juris , ). the collection’s articles show how this operates in the daily lives of people in the el paso-ciudad juárez region, and for black lives matter and canadian #mmiw activists, organising vigils and protests. social media expands the local, bringing the disruptive/activist work of visual and performance artists, such as susan harbage page, coco fusco, ricardo dominguez, dynasty handbag and m. lamar, to broad audiences. heide, sparling williams and whitney’s articles are examples of such disruptive/activist work. social media can also serve as a site for mourning and commemoration, bridging mass activism and intimate connections to injustice. this journal issue demonstrates some of these personal-public functions of social media on the grassroots level. the thematic issue provides six case studies, three focused on grassroots activism and three on artistic interventions, which collectively demonstrate people’s power and creativity in disrupting the varied insecurities they confront in their daily lives. stephanie sparling williams examines performances of insecurities through coco fusco’s direct address art and interrogation in the ‘war on terror’. sparling williams uses fusco’s – multimedia performance art piece, a room of one’s own: women and power in the new america, as an entry point for analysing ‘power, surveillance, silence, and the making and performances of particular kinds of citizens/subjects/enemy combatants/art objects/interrogators/artists’. fusco’s work challenges us to think about the use of women in military interrogation at the same time as considering the place of women, especially women of colour, in the us art world. in doing so, fusco and sparling williams’s article demonstrate the entanglement of art, visual culture and us military security discourses. the article calls attention to the relationships between race and national security, national security and feminism, as well as race and feminism. markus heide’s ‘repossessing border space: security practice in north american border art’ examines how formal security surveillance, people’s encounters with the border, and art intersect. analysing works by annie han, daniel mihalyo, susan harbage page and ricardo dominguez, the article considers varying artistic representations of border space and how art ‘interrupts border security practices and their rituals’. analysing ricardo dominguez and the electronic disturbance theater’s transborder immigrant tool (tbt), which used gps-mapped experimental poetry to lead undocumented immigrants to drinking water in the us–mexico borderlands, heide demonstrates how they, much like coco fusco, cause us to question the lines between security policy/practices and the art establishment. b. heiskanen and s. saramo the article shows how, collectively, these artistic interventions ‘symbolically repossess’ the border for migrants, highlighting the danger and humanity of border crossing. samira saramo’s article examines grassroots activism surrounding the crisis of missing and murdered indigenous women, girls and two-spirit people in canada. though esti- mates vary, over the last years, – first nations, inuit, or métis women were murdered in canada, and more than are still missing. however, the canadian gov- ernment has not addressed the economic, social and environmental colonialism that has allowed this violence to become naturalised. focusing on activism during the years of the conservative harper government, this article examines how these grassroots initiatives challenge canadian politics, reclaim streets and liminal zones, and make space for sacred commemoration. specifically, twitter campaigns, meme-ing, and the art installation projects redress project and walking with our sisters are studied. engaging with scholarship that analyses spaces of violence, saramo contributes a discussion of how activism can unsettle violence by transforming physical, virtual and affective spaces. benita heiskanen’s ‘“we were all involved”: the “great violence of – ” on the el paso-ciudad juárez border’, draws on interviews and written testimonies to dis- cuss border residents’ experiences with violence. heiskanen argues that the intersection of spatiality and agency is central in conceptualising experiences of security/insecurity. the physical sites border residents had access to – or were denied entrance to – had a funda- mental significance for their everyday existence. by the same token, the refusal to succumb to spatial restrictions, or claiming space for oneself despite ongoing atrocities, served as an empowering way to deal with the threat of violence. the article demonstrates how spatial strategising provided tools with which the various parties involved exercised their agency in imposing, coping with and countering violence. the discussion concludes by problema- tising the intersecting issues of agency, involvement and complicity as broader ethical and epistemological questions invoked by the study of violence. jennifer chernega’s article provides a timely overview of black lives matter (blm) activ- ism in the united states. beginning with the events surrounding the august shooting of -year-old michael brown in ferguson, missouri, ‘black lives matter: racialized policing in the united states’ examines grassroots activism and the increased media scrutiny of police interactions with people of colour in the united states. chernega employs social movement theory to assess the nature of the black lives matter movement in contrast to the earlier civil rights movement. the article considers the central role that social media and the hashtag #blacklivesmatter played in drawing national and international attention to racialised police violence. this demonstrates how blm grassroots activism has successfully made visible long-standing insecurities in black communities across the united states. elizabeth whitney’s ‘the dangerous real: queer solo performance in/as active disruption’ frames queer solo performers as ‘artistic activists’, who challenge the imagined us national identity through queering. as whitney writes, ‘like all radical community endeavors, queer performance in the united states has been shaped through resistance to restrictive ideologies’. whitney utilises the s ‘indecency wars’ and the case of the nea four to situate her study of three contemporary artists, dynasty handbag, m. lamar, and erin markey. first, analysing the concepts of ‘queer’, ‘solo’ and ‘performance’, the article goes on to examine the ‘dangerous real’ – the precarity and vulnerability – of queer solo perfor- mance. through studies of the three disparate artists, whitney asks how their work disrupts us insecurities concerning intersections of sexuality, gender identity, race and religion. comparative american studies an international journal note . thanks to nadia nava contreras for pointing us to these sources. disclosure statement no potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. notes on contributors benita heiskanen is director of the john morton center for north american studies at the university of turku, finland. she received her phd in american studies at the university of texas at austin in . her areas of interest include transnational american studies, us-mexico border region, us-cuba détente, race and ethnicity in the united states and popular culture studies. her recent work has dealt with experiences and representations of violence on the el paso-ciudad juárez border region. she also writes in finnish. samira saramo is post-doctoral researcher at the university of turku’s john morton center for north american studies and holds a ph.d. in history from york university in toronto, canada. saramo’s research examines violence and activism in varied historical and contemporary contexts, including among the early-twentieth century north american immigrant left, in soviet karelia and in contemporary us and canadian politics. saramo examines issues in ethnic, gender, childhood and family histories, as well as uses of memory, emotion and representation in life writing. references ackleson, j. . “constructing security on the u.s.-mexico border.” political geography : – . andreas, p. . “a tale of two borders: the u.s.-mexico and u.s.-canada lines after / .” ccis, working paper no. : – . banaszak, l., ed. . the u.s. women’s movement in global perspective. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield publishers. barry, t. . border wars. cambridge, ma: mit press. béchard, j., tanya dupuis, christine morris, holly porteous, and dominique valiquet. . “legislative summary of bill c- .” parliament of canada. http://www.lop.parl.gc.ca/about/parliament/ legislativesummaries/bills_ls.asp?language=e&ls=c &mode= &parl= &ses= &source= library_prb#a . bowden, c. . murder city: juárez and the global economy of killings. new york: nation books. bronskill, j. . “bill c- : environmental activists, aboriginals fear legislation will tread on rights.” huffington post, march . http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/ / / /reject-flawed-anti- terror_n_ .html. brown, g., and j. pickerill. . “space for emotion in the spaces of activism.” emotion, space and society : – . bunker, r. j., ed. . narcos over the border: gangs, cartels, and mercenaries. london: routledge. buscaglia, e. . vacíos de poder en méxico. [vacuum of power in mexico]. el camino de méxico hacia la seguridad humana mexico: debate. buszek, m. e., and k. robertson. . craftivism, special issue of utopian studies. durham: duke university press. calleros, j. c. . “el vínculo entre seguridad humana y migración en méxico [the link between human security and migration in mexico].” revista mexicana de política exterior : – . campbell, h. . drug war zone: frontline dispatches from the streets of el paso and juárez. austin: university of texas press. castillo, m. a. . “fronteras, migración y seguridad en méxico [borders, migration and security in mexico].” alteridades : – . http://www.lop.parl.gc.ca/about/parliament/legislativesummaries/bills_ls.asp?language=e&ls=c &mode= &parl= &ses= &source=library_prb#a http://www.lop.parl.gc.ca/about/parliament/legislativesummaries/bills_ls.asp?language=e&ls=c &mode= &parl= &ses= &source=library_prb#a http://www.lop.parl.gc.ca/about/parliament/legislativesummaries/bills_ls.asp?language=e&ls=c &mode= &parl= &ses= &source=library_prb#a http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/ / / /reject-flawed-anti-terror_n_ .html http://www.huffingtonpost.ca/ / / /reject-flawed-anti-terror_n_ .html b. heiskanen and s. saramo cornelius, w. . “controlling ‘unwanted’ immigration: lessons from the united states, – .” journal of ethnic and migration studies ( ): – . cornelius, w., and j. lewis, eds. . impacts of border enforcement on mexican migration: the view from sending communities. la jolla: california center for comparative immigration studies. diabo, r. . “harper’s bill c- vs. section of the constitution act .” idle no more, february  . http://www.idlenomore.ca/re_harper_s_bill_c_ _vs_section_ _of_the_constitution_act_ . garcía, r., and h. marquez. . “méxico: violencia en inseguridad. hacia una estrategia de desarrollo y seguridad humana [mexico: violence and insecurity. towards a strategy of development and human security].” nómadas. revista crítica de sciencias sociales y jurídicas. special issue: américa latina: – . gerbaudo, p. . tweets and the streets: social media and contemporary activism. new york: pluto press. heiskanen, b. . “a day without immigrants.” european journal of american studies, special issue on immigration, article [online]. december . heiskanen, b. . “living with the narcos: the ‘drug war’ in the el paso-ciudad juárez border region.” american studies in scandinavia ( ): – . jenkins, h., x. li, a. d. krauskopf, and j. green. . “if it doesn’t spread, it’s dead (part one): media viruses and memes.” aca-fan. http://henryjenkins.org/ / /if_it_doesnt_spread_its_ dead_p_ .html. juris, j. s. . “reflections on #occupy everywhere: social media, public space, and emerging logics of aggregation.” american ethnologist ( ): – . macgregor, s. . beyond mothering earth: ecological citizenship and the politics of care. vancouver: ubc press. palmater, p. . “canada: anti-terrorist bill c- to criminalize thoughts of indigenous peoples.” global research, march . http://www.globalresearch.ca/canada-anti-terrorist-bill-c- -to- criminalize-thoughts-of-indigenous-peoples/ . rocheleau, d., b. thomas-slayter, and e. wangari, eds. . feminist political ecology: global issues and local experiences. new york: routledge. sobre-denton, m. . “virtual intercultural bridgework: social media, virtual cosmopolitanism, and activist community-building.” new media & society ( ): – . winders, j. . “bringing back the (b)order: post- / politics of immigration, borders, and belonging in the contemporary u.s. south.” antipode ( ): – . zobl, e., and r. drüeke, eds. . feminist media: participatory spaces, networks and cultural citizenship. bielefeld: transcript. http://www.idlenomore.ca/re_harper_s_bill_c_ _vs_section_ _of_the_constitution_act_ http://henryjenkins.org/ / /if_it_doesnt_spread_its_dead_p_ .html http://henryjenkins.org/ / /if_it_doesnt_spread_its_dead_p_ .html http://www.globalresearch.ca/canada-anti-terrorist-bill-c- -to-criminalize-thoughts-of-indigenous-peoples/ http://www.globalresearch.ca/canada-anti-terrorist-bill-c- -to-criminalize-thoughts-of-indigenous-peoples/ 	abstract 	note 	disclosure statement 	notes on contributors 	references notices of the american mathematical society volume , number william yslas vélez is an emeritus professor at the university of arizona, tucson. his email address is velez@math.arizona.edu. for permission to reprint this article, please contact: reprint-permission @ams.org. doi: https://dx.doi.org/ . /noti opinion accountability: federal research grants should be tied to diversity outcomes william yslas vélez note: the opinions expressed here are not necessarily those of notices. this article calls for the reexamination of diversity as it pertains to the historical people of the united states. it also outlines a plan to intentionally align federal funding awards with diversity goals. people of color. we see this everywhere. who is this describing? are there people who have no color? even white is a color. hardware stores carry white paint. are we the only country in the world, besides south africa, that uses the term “color” to distinguish a group of people? there are characteristics of individuals that do separate populations and impact their career paths: access to resources, quality schools, a safe neighborhood, drug habits, modes of dress, culture [ ]. by looking at a person’s color, can we ascertain these characteristics? nonsense. “people of color” is a term that is now used to group together populations that have lived in the united states for generations as well as those who have recently arrived in the country. it is a sort of whitewash. recent immigration patterns have brought in many different cultural/ethnic groups. blending these new populations into american society has not always worked well. being the only ethnic/racial minority in a classroom can lead to discrimination, as so many recent immigrants have found. as a nation of immigrants, the united states continues its efforts to integrate new populations into the educational system. english as a second language programs exist to fa- cilitate the integration of these students into our schools. financial aid programs for college help new immigrants afford an education. even programs that were initially aimed at increasing minority participation in stem have representatives from these new populations. the annual meeting of the society for the advancement of chicanos and native americans in science (sacnas) is an example of the diversity of the american workforce. but there is a counterpoint to the support we give to new immigrants. these could be described as english as the only language programs. in the last century, reservation schools did their best to eradicate not only the language of the native american children but also their culture. in the southwest, mexi- can-american children were discouraged from speaking spanish in their schools. as we formulate plans to encour- age new immigrant populations to pursue stem careers, it is important to remember that there is still an underrepre- sentation of minority populations in the stem workforce. for decades the underrepresentation of the mexi- can-american (chicano), native american, native hawai- ian and pacific islanders, and african american populations in stem careers has been recognized, and efforts have been made to increase representation. these are not immigrant populations, however, as they have had a presence in the united states for centuries. i will refer to these four popu- lations as the traditionally excluded american minorities (team). it is painful to reflect on the past and confront the atroc- ities that invading europeans inflicted upon the team. but this past forms the present reality, and team populations opinion september notices of the american mathematical society departments saw little benefit in hiring team faculty. as a result, team faculty are almost invisible among faculty in mathematics departments, especially in the top twenty departments. given this lack of progress, the word “tra- ditional” began to disappear, and the word “underrepre- sented” began to encompass larger populations with the expectation that some progress could at least be recognized. toward the end of the last century us demographics began to change. the term hispanic or latinx now encom- passes a rich milieu of cultures from many different coun- tries. it is no longer just mexico exporting large populations to the united states. it would be impossible to try to differ- entiate among this population, nor is it desirable. in fact, the number of hispanics who are majoring in mathematics is growing. part of this is due to the sheer growth in the hispanic population. minority organizations like sacnas have also formed to increase interest in stem fields among hispanics. us-born hispanics are different from hispanics educated abroad, as poverty is still one of our birthrights. it is a sad commentary that if you are a hispanic in one of our top twenty mathematics departments, you are proba- bly foreign born. team representation in the top twenty departments is almost nonexistent, and the fact that we are not there makes us invisible to the educational concerns of these departments. diversity efforts had little impact on team individuals going into careers leading to the professorate. (in i was the first chicano mathematician hired in a tenure-track position in the mathematics department at the university of arizona. when i retired in , i was also the last.) with situations like this describing the failure of these efforts, something had to be done. the solution that came out was to downplay the roles that these team populations have in the history of the united states and instead whitewash the issue. the term “people of color,” though not defined, came into vogue, and departments could now at least claim that there was some color among their faculty. one hears announcements that the first “person of color has been appointed to a position.” it is likely that this person is not a team member. problem solved. or so it appears. “people of color” in fact has marginalized the most underrepre- sented members of this group. i believe that this serious underrepresentation of team members in the mathematical enterprise has much to do with the fact that there are so few team graduate stu- dents and faculty in the top twenty departments. if these departments are not producing team phds, where are these departments going to find team faculty? very few team mathematicians have earned a phd at princeton or harvard. given that these two institutions appear to have so little interest in educating team members, why is the federal government continuing to support these two insti- tutions with grants? for many years the national science foundation has been very explicit that increasing diversity is one of its strategic goals. the white house strate- confront this painful dichotomy daily. let me say a few words about this history. the ancestors of african americans were brought to this country as slaves. segregation in the early s was accepted, and the civil rights of the african american were greatly curtailed. their experiences have recently been portrayed very powerfully in many movies, such as the help and twelve years a slave. these movies have brought at least a certain consciousness to the plight of the african american community. that it is necessary to mention that black lives matter tells us something about the current cul- ture. relative to stem, a recent article [ ] in the new york times described the experiences of an african american mathematician in a research department. the genocide that europeans inflicted upon the native american community is perhaps less in the public mind. how difficult must it be for native americans to see prominent institutions, like amherst college, named after an individual, lord jeffrey amherst, whose goal was to extinguish the native american population by any means necessary, including giving native americans blankets that were contaminated by smallpox [ , pp. – ]. those that survived extermination were relegated to reservations often far from their ancestral homes. sherman alexie has written very poignantly about life on the reservations [ ]. the united states stole half of mexico’s land in the mid- s with the treaty of guadalupe hidalgo and the gads- den purchase. because of that action, mexican americans became a conquered people living in a conquered land. my parents were born in the state of sonora in mexico, making me a first-generation american in a nation of immigrants. but i am not a first-generation american. my parents were not immigrants. i can trace my lineage to a soldier at the presidio de tucson in . our families lived in the ari- zona-sonora desert for generations and moved through this region freely. the border created this artificial separation between us and our land [ , ]. the impact of this violence brought poverty and lack of resources to the team. as the united states entered the sputnik age in the s, team populations did not have access to a level playing field in education. prior to the supreme court decision that desegregated schools, the policy of separate but equal schools produced schools for african americans that were separate but certainly not equal. it would take more than ten years before desegre- gation would become a reality. however, since schools are often funded by property taxes, team members continue to attend lesser-quality schools and continue to be sorely underrepresented in stem fields. in president kennedy issued executive order , which used the words “affirmative action.” by the s this term was often referenced in academic circles with regard to the hiring of team members. but given the lack of team stem students in the pipeline, team stem faculty were in short supply, and, in my opinion, stem opinion notices of the american mathematical society volume , number available for a mathematically prepared student. and to go along with this, faculty need to answer the question, what would a student do with an undergraduate degree in mathematics? in answering this question, departments need to update their own undergraduate programs of study to prepare students for tomorrow’s jobs [ ]. mathematics departments are not service departments. the best tool that we have to interest students in mathe- matics is the material that we teach, as long as we present it in an entertaining and interesting form. there should be no dead-end courses. the central purpose of a math- ematics course should be to convince the student to take the next mathematics course. new teaching techniques are being developed, and departments should invest efforts to determine which would work best for their faculty and student body. mathematics departments are not research institutes. they are part of a university, and as such the vision state- ment of the department should support the goals of the university. a university needs much more than good re- search faculty. effective teaching, motivating and mentoring students, and performing outreach to the community are all important tasks. the announcements for faculty posi- tions should reflect the departmental vision and how the department is meeting the goals of the university. finally, departments should utilize the opportunities available to meet team mathematicians at national meetings and to talk to them about possible job open- ings. currently both the math alliance and the national association of mathematicians provide opportunities to meet new team phds at the jmm. getting to know team mathematicians would be an important step towards di- versifying your faculty. references . voces: (voices) a profile of today’s latino college stu- dents, excelencia in education, october . available at https://www.edexcelencia.org/media/ . harmon a, for a black mathematician, what it’s like to be the ‘only one,’ new york times, february , . . dunbar-ortiz r, an indigenous people’s history of the united states, beacon press, . . alexie s, the absolutely true diary of a part-time indian, little, brown and company, . . acuña r, occupied america, the chicano’s struggle towards liberation, canfield press, . . rivero s, lynch mobs killed latinos across the west. the fight to remember these atrocities is just starting, new york times, march , . . vélez wy, flexibility in the mathematics major program would benefit students and society, notices of the ams, volume , number , october , – . gic plan, charting a course for success: america’s strategy for stem education, lists three goals, including to “increase diversity, equity and inclusion in stem.” a careful examination of graduate education needs to occur in this country. how is it that we have graduate programs that are not accessible to us citizens? graduate programs create artificial barriers, such as gre scores, that limit the number of applicants. in the united states we demand that students have a liberal arts education. that typically means that us students take one or two mathe- matics courses per semester. international students have an entirely different system of education. when applying to universities, students are accepted into a program of study, like mathematics. these students take four or five mathematics courses per semester. when they graduate they essentially have a master’s degree knowledge of mathematics. it is no wonder that they score better than us students on the gre. are these international students destined to become better researchers than us students? in conversations that i have had with departments that are limiting the number of international students in their graduate program, they report that us students produce doctoral theses on a par with international students. there are many qualities that are essential to completing a phd: determination, curiosity, creativity, and a basic knowledge of mathematics. the gre measures only the last item. we value creativity, yet when we admit students, we evaluate only their knowledge. increasing diversity is explicit in the goals of the federal government and its funding agencies. if departments dis- play no interest in supporting these goals they should not be funded with research grants. mathematics departments, particularly those that receive funding from the federal government, have a responsibility to this country. it is not enough that they are creating new knowledge. the better the research potential of a department, the more responsi- bility it has to bring team members into that environment. let’s envision what the faculty will be like in twenty years. given that there are so few team graduate students in the top twenty graduate programs, the number of team faculty in these departments will not change. moreover, are these departments part of the problem or part of the solu- tion? if these departments are not graduating substantial numbers of team undergraduates, then they are part of the problem. in selecting the “best” students for graduate programs, programs should also answer the question, what is best for this country? how should the mathematical community move for- ward to address the serious problem of underrepresentation of women and team members among our faculty? part of the answer rests on our doorstep: the undergraduates in their first year of study. these students do not select mathematics as a major because they know of only one profession with that major. departments need to reach out to these students to inform them of the many career paths opinion september notices of the american mathematical society credits author photo is courtesy of the author. william yslas vélez cav rectangle http://www.aimath.org/research/ canadian journal of law and society / revue canadienne droit et société, , volume , no. , pp. – . doi: . /cls. . mainstream media and the f-word: documentary coherence and the exclusion of a feminist narrative in the fifth estate coverage of the ashley smith case charissa crépault and jennifer m. kilty abstract this article offers a narrative analysis of the two cbc fifth estate investigative docu- mentaries about ashley smith (“behind the wall,” ; “out of control,” ) and juxtaposes the documentary narratives against claims made by feminist criminolo- gists with respect to women’s corrections. examining the coherent ‘through narra- tive’ that is constructed in each documentary, we claim that the fifth estate uses dominant medicalized conceptualizations of mental illness and mental health treat- ment to frame the smith case, leaving questions about the gendered nature of her criminalization, imprisonment and mistreatment unasked. considering the socio- political context of neoliberal and post-feminist individualism, we argue that the fifth estate presents the case in a way that maintains the status quo and may resonate with their national audience, but which also reinforces the pathologization of women prisoners and upholds gendered stereotypes. keywords: feminist criminology, ashley smith, narrative, investigative documentary, mental illness, women’s corrections résumé cet article comprend l’analyse de deux documentaires d’enquête portant sur ashley smith (“behind the wall,” ; et “out of control,” ) réalisés par l’émission de la cbc, the fifth estate. l’article juxtapose l’élaboration des documentaires aux prétentions de criminologues féministes à l’égard des établissements correctionnels pour femmes. après avoir examiné le fil narratif de ces deux documentaires, nous posons que the fifth estate a eu recours à des conceptualisations dominantes de la maladie mentale et du traitement en santé mentale pour mettre en scène l’affaire ashley smith et a laissé de côté le caractère genré de sa criminalisation, de son emprisonnement et des mauvais traitements qu’elle a subis. compte tenu du con- texte socio-politique de l’individualisme néolibéral et post-féministe, nous posons que the fifth estate présente l’affaire ashley smith de façon à préserver le statu quo et à susciter davantage l’intérêt de son public, ce qui a pour conséquence de renforcer la pathologisation des femmes détenues et les stéréotypes genrés. mots clés : criminologie féministe, ashley smith, fil narratif, documentaire d’enquête, santé mentale, centres correctionels pour femmes terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /cls. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /cls. . https://www.cambridge.org/core charissa crépault and jennifer m. kilty introduction ashley smith’s mistreatment while incarcerated and her eventual death inside a segregation cell at the grand valley institution for women in kitchener, ontario demonstrate a number of the injustices that continue to plague canadian women’s prisons. for decades several feminist criminologists have problematized the use of solitary confinement as a standard response to women who self-injure or who are deemed mentally ill (dell, fillmore, and kilty , ; kilty , ; martel , ). smith engaged in chronic self-injurious behaviour and, as a result, was illegally held in permanent segregation throughout her time in federal custody. in order to contravene the correctional policy that limits the length of time a pris- oner may be held in isolation, the correctional service of canada (csc) trans- ferred smith seventeen times in eleven months, restarting the “segregation clock” each time she was transferred. while incarcerated, smith was subject not only to extra-punitive forms of seclusion and restraint, but also to multiple instances of tasering, involuntary injections of psychotropic medications, gassing, and pepper spray. on october , , smith tied a ligature around her neck and laid face down on the floor between her bed and the wall. under orders from management not to intervene until smith had passed out from ligature use, correctional staff failed to respond to the medical emergency, resulting in her death. in the months and years that followed, the case received a great deal of media attention, including the production of two hour-long investigative documentaries released by the cbc’s the fifth estate that show video evidence of smith’s mistreat- ment and feature interviews with key figures and witnesses. together, these two episodes construct a particular narrative about smith’s incarceration and death. the first episode, “out of control” (january ), describes smith’s life prior to incarceration, her time spent inside both youth and adult correctional facilities and the incidents surrounding her death, advancing the argument that smith’s life was “taken from her.” the second episode, “behind the wall” (november ), builds on the conclusions in “out of control” and uses the case as a springboard to engage in a broader discussion of how prisoners with mental illness are (mis) treated in canadian prisons. in a behind-the-scenes episode entitled secrets of the fifth estate ( ), a senior producer identified “the desire to expose injustice [and] expose abuse of power” (harvey cashore) as the driving force behind the show. the fifth estate’s commitment to exposing injustice is certainly evident in its coverage of the smith case, which expressly condemns her (mis)treatment and identifies some of the very real problems with mental health care in the prison system (e.g., lack of staff training, the use of physical and chemical restraints, and inadequate resources). contending with csc’s efforts to keep video evidence from the public eye, the fifth estate exposed the mistreatment of mentally ill prisoners and the lack of accountability permeating canadian prisons, earning them the governor general’s michener award in . recognizing the fifth estate’s laudable work to bring the michener award celebrates journalism deemed unbiased, professional, impactful, and benefi- cial to the public. terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /cls. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /cls. . https://www.cambridge.org/core mainstream media and the f-word attention to abuses and injustices in the prison system, we nonetheless think that it is useful to closely and critically examine how the documentarians narrativize smith’s mistreatment and the discourses that they draw upon to do so. while the fifth estate decries csc’s failure to provide smith with appropriate care, they do so in a way that largely conceptualizes mental illness as an individual pathology, which obscures how structural barriers, conditions of confinement, and institu- tional power relations create emotional distress (kilty , ; , – ; pollack , ) and how punishment, notably the use of segregation, is gendered (pollack and kendall , ). we suggest that some of the ways that the fifth estate references smith’s gender contribute to sensationalizing the case by uphold- ing representations of hegemonic femininity and the notion that women who “misbehave” must be “fixed” (dell, fillmore, and kilty , ). by offering a critical feminist critique of the fifth estate documentaries, this paper draws atten- tion to how mainstream media coverage—even that which was directly critical of csc’s practices—eclipsed considering structural factors in favour of discourses that individualize and pathologize smith’s behaviour . especially in light of their failure to adequately recognize how carceral practices produce material experiences of emotional distress and suffering, we problematize, question the value of, and largely oppose dominant correctional and psychiatric pathologization discourses. some scholars suggest that media outlets can help to hold criminal justice institutions accountable by shining a spotlight on injustice (cooke and sturges , ; culhane , ; geraghty and velez , , )—a “watchdog” role that the fifth estate certainly exudes. we contribute to this conversation by providing a specific example of how media representations may reveal and con- demn particular institutional practices while simultaneously reproducing the dis- courses upon which those practices rest. our purpose is not simply to point out what the fifth estate documentaries leave out; like other stories and interpreta- tions, including the one we provide, documentaries have angles that require high- lighting and excluding various avenues of inquiry. instead, we argue that the particular angle taken up in the documentaries and the specific discourses they marginalize align with pathologizing and individualizing discourses that under- pin and legitimize the very correctional system that they critique. in this sense, it is not that the fifth estate prioritized a mental health angle in their storytelling that is problematic, but rather that they primarily frame the issue as an exposé of how carceral institutions that should provide psychiatric care fail to do so because of a lack of adequate resources and accountability. as a result, the documentaries do not question the practice of incarceration or the correctional representation of unruly women as psychologically maladjusted. in critiquing the documentaries, we do not suggest that the fifth estate deliberately upheld indi- vidualizing or pathologizing discourses. instead, we agree with jewkes ( , ) who eschews notions of journalistic conspiracy and points out that journalists may “shar[e] the same ideological values as the majority of their audiences” (emphasis in original). it is not our aim to speculate on what the documentarians’ intentions may or may not have been, but rather to trace the discourses they mobilize as they create narratives that they think will “matter to canadians” (cbc’s the fifth estate website). terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /cls. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /cls. . https://www.cambridge.org/core charissa crépault and jennifer m. kilty revealing the results of a detailed narrative analysis of “out of control” (oc) ( ) and “behind the wall” (bw) ( ), we juxtapose the narratives about the smith case produced by the fifth estate against the claims made by feminist crimi- nologists with respect to women’s corrections. in particular, we argue that the fifth estate documentaries align with neoliberal and post-feminist notions of indi- vidualism and gender neutrality that obscure the structural context in which pris- oner mistreatment takes place. to do so, we begin by outlining key feminist critiques of women’s corrections and discussing how these claims may be countered and undermined by neoliberal and post-feminist individualism. introducing the con- cept of “through narrative,” we then provide a methodological discussion of how each documentary uses monologues, interview clips, and video evidence to weave together a coherent narrative about the case. next, we consider how these coherent narratives uphold dominant medicalized conceptualizations of mental illness and mental health treatment. finally, we discuss the fifth estate’s reliance upon gendered stereotypes and its failure to consider how smith’s status as a “misbehaving” woman prisoner contributed to her brutal treatment. while the fifth estate undoubtedly critiques csc’s practices and the egregious mistreatment of prisoners, they do so in a way that fails to challenge the gendered nature of prison practices that rein- force smith’s pathologization. feminist critique in the age of “equality” far from being a unitary body of scholarship, feminist criminologies engage a multitude of theoretical perspectives and substantive areas (comack , – ; moore , ; snider , ). for example, feminist criminologists have problematized male-centred correctional approaches and research, asserted the particularities of women’s experiences in prison, privileged women’s experiential knowledge, examined the diverse power relations in the criminal justice system, and interrogated dominant truth claims about women’s involvement in crime (comack , – ; moore , – ). furthermore, ongoing disagreements permeate feminist scholarship, as exemplified by debates about whether poststruc- turalism’s movement away from notions of patriarchy and centralized state power might undercut political action (moore , ; smart , – ) and in the tensions between feminist efforts to reform women’s prisons and feminist critiques of reform (snider , – ). we draw upon the work of feminist criminologists who critique issues relevant to the smith case, namely the gendered nature of punitive carceral practices (e.g., segregation, strip-searching) and the mobilization of mental health dis- courses that pathologize criminalized women. in particular, we consider the fol- lowing problems: the use of psychiatry and psychology to “tame” and control women prisoners (pollack and kendall , ; kilty , ); the gendered expectations that serve to justify the extra-punitive treatment of criminalized women (dell, fillmore, and kilty , ; hannah-moffat , ); and the use of segregation for self-injuring women and those deemed mentally ill (dell, fillmore, and kilty , ; kilty , ; martel , ). these concerns feature as the primary focal points in our juxtaposition of the fifth estate narra- tives against feminist critiques. terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /cls. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /cls. . https://www.cambridge.org/core mainstream media and the f-word within correctional discourse, women’s offending is often individualized as either “the outcome of poor choices” (hannah-moffat , ) or the result of a psychologically damaged mind (pollack , ; rose , – ), both of which obscure the social, cultural, political, and economic contexts of criminalization. individual women prisoners are seen as in need of being “fixed,” often through therapeutic approaches that encourage them to internalize the notion that they have an inherently “criminal personality” (pollack , ), “low self-esteem” (cruikshank , – , – ) or “something wrong on the inside” (mccorkel , ). as a result, social factors such as gender and racial discrimination, poverty and other forms of marginalization are affixed to individual women as mental health needs that constitute them as “risky” subjects (pollack and kendall , ; snider , ). criminalized women who, like smith, engage in self-harming behaviour or are deemed violent are constituted as “unfeminine, ‘misbehaved’ women” who are especially deserving of punitive treatment because they break both the law and traditional gender roles (dell, fillmore, and kilty , ). in order to be seen as “recovering,” women prisoners are expected to adhere to a gendered script of passivity, dependency, and non-violence (dell, fillmore, and kilty , ). those women who refuse or fail to comply with correctional interventions and gendered scripts of recovery are seen as “difficult to manage,” “dangerous,” and even “unempowerable” (hannah-moffat , )—discursive framings that csc embraces to justify the use of punitive restraints and practices in the name of maintaining institutional security. chief among these practices is segregation, despite research that identifies its “emotionally devastating consequences” (arrigo and bullock , ). for instance, martel ( , ) found that the loss of spatio-temporal referencing that is encountered in segregation causes women to have difficulty perceiving themselves as “being” in the world. kilty ( , ) argues that segregating women who self-injure demonstrates how institutional security is valued above their personal safety and security. although these feminist critiques shed light on the gendered nature of incar- ceration and help explain why smith, as a “misbehaving” and “difficult” female prisoner, was subjected to punitive treatment, they must be considered within the context of a purportedly “post-feminist era” (chunn , ), wherein the femi- nist movement is often seen as no longer necessary, feminism is reduced to notions of individual choice and self-empowerment, and critiques of structural inequality gain less traction (anderson , – ). emphasizing the “superficial empow- erment of the individual and her choices” (anderson , ), post-feminist rationality intertwines with neoliberalism , which upholds ideals of free and fair competition, formal equality, individual responsibility, and self-determination of course, the individualization of behaviour is not specific to women; neoliberal rationalities reduce social conditions to individual qualities and choices for men as well. although we focus our analysis on particular dimensions of neoliberal rationality, it is important to recognize that different political rationalities co-exist, as o’malley ( , – ) demonstrates in his discussion of how the “new right” simultaneously relies on ideals from neoconservativism and neoliberalism. amable ( , – ) also explains that neoliberalism did not ‘replace’ or ‘debunk’ welfarism, and there are ways that these two rationalities converge. terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /cls. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /cls. . https://www.cambridge.org/core charissa crépault and jennifer m. kilty (amable , , – ). within this context, efforts to “level the playing field” and notions of “equality of opportunity” act as substitutes for substantive equality (amable , – ), reframing and justifying social inequalities by attributing them to “irresponsible,” “failed” subjects. neoliberal and post-feminist privileging of the (genderless) individual rational actor undermines the very grounds on which feminists and other equality-seeking groups stake their claims. in effect, neoliberalism limits the discursive space in which issues of substantive inequality between different social groups can legitimately be raised, replacing it with a dis- course that erodes the relevance of gender by “constructing both men and women as genderless individuals and, optimally, as self-sufficient market actors in pursuit of self-interest, freedom, and choice” (brodie a, ). in this context, formal equality is valued over substantive equality and women’s self-empowerment and freedom of choice is seen as synonymous with gender equality. despite feminist claims about the persistence of substantive gender inequality in canadian society (brodie b, ) and gendered oppression in canadian prisons (dell, fillmore, and kilty , ), notions of achieved formal equality that reduce equality to “gender neutrality” and “identical treatment” abound (chunn , ). moreover, the post-feminist idea that “we are all equal now” (brodie b, ) portrays feminists and other equality seeking groups as “self- interested lobby group[s]” (brodie , ) that work against the needs of “ordi- nary” canadians (chunn , ; sawer , ). at the same time, there are anti-feminist sentiments that regard feminists as threats to men’s rights, health and safety (menzies , – ) such that, for some, feminism may constitute “the new ‘f’ word” (brodie , ). as a comparative example of how social justice movements can be reframed as somehow working against “equal” treatment, the growing black lives matter movement, which seeks to draw attention to the systemic devaluing of black lives, has been perceived by some as an exclusionary affront to other racial and social groups, such as white citizens and police officers. asserting that “all lives matter,” those challenging the black lives matter move- ment have mobilized the language of “sameness” and “identical treatment” to per- petuate the problematic invisibility of white privilege. discourses that reduce equality to superficial notions of “neutral treatment” obscure the reality of sys- temic privilege, undermine calls for structural and substantive change to amelio- rate the material experiences of disadvantaged groups, and reframe equality seeking groups as unfairly and selfishly privileging the needs of a special interest group over the interests of “all lives.” while the substantial defunding of women’s organizations over the past decade (johnson , ) makes anti-feminist sentiments seem particularly acute, it is important to keep in mind that these challenges are neither new, nor are they all- encompassing and uniform (chunn, boyd and lessard , ). in fact, recent political and cultural occurrences demonstrate the complexity of how feminism is at once applauded and contested. for example, in , canadian prime minister justin trudeau introduced the first gender-balanced cabinet and along with notable celebrities like beyoncé and emma watson, proudly declares himself a feminist. a resurgence of feminist organizing was also witnessed globally in early by protest demonstrations and marches in response to the inauguration of us president terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /cls. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /cls. . https://www.cambridge.org/core mainstream media and the f-word donald trump. despite recent public celebrations of feminism , post-feminist sentiments that proclaim the feminist accomplishment of gender equality and question why women should receive “special treatment” persist. in the context of women’s experiences in the penal and correctional systems, where feminist efforts to highlight the particularities of women’s material needs are often reconstituted through the therapeutic language of self-transformation and self-esteem building (cruikshank , – , – ) and are sometimes met with hostile claims that women are treated with leniency in comparison to men (snider , – ), it is particularly important to interrogate media constructions of criminalized women as emotionally or mentally unstable. despite critiquing csc’s ability to provide adequate mental health treatment, the fifth estate relies upon correctional discourses that situate smith’s continued self- injurious behaviour as a key indicator of her mental illness, lack of self-esteem, and inability to self-govern (cruikshank , – , – ), which systematically decontextualizes her resistant actions and by extension, those taken up by other women in prison. the fifth estate’s coverage of the smith case thus offers a poignant opportunity to examine how mainstream media may perpetuate post-feminist and neoliberal notions of individual responsibility and achieved gender equality, obscuring the structural factors that underpin and reproduce gendered punishment. in the next section, we provide a methodological discussion of our approach to narrative analysis and describe how the two fifth estate episodes discursively constructed a coherent and relatable narrative about the smith case that, while critical of correctional practices, effectively upholds gendered constructions of the pathological criminal woman. weaving a coherent narrative documentary films require an internal organizing logic that often takes a narrative form (nichols , ). not only does a narrative organize the documentary by providing a coherent storyline, it also advances and “supports an underlying pro- posal, assertion, or claim about the historical world” (nichols , ). although narratives are often presented as though they are simply uncovered through investi- gation, they are constructed or imposed because “real events do not offer themselves as stories” (white , ). recounting events in narrative form necessarily involves a process of selection, whereby certain events, details, and pieces of information are included, organized, and interpreted in a particular way, while other events or details are excluded (riessman and quinney , ; white , ). imposing a narra- tive structure upon real events imbues them with significance, moral meaning, and a degree of closure (white , ). in the fifth estate documentaries, the smith case is organized, evaluated, and infused with particular meanings by what we term a “through narrative.” we conceptu- alize the through narrative as a figurative thread and needle that punctures each inter- view segment, narrator monologue, and video surveillance clip, drawing out and focusing on certain aspects or issues among many in order to connect each particular scene to the overall storyline and themes being explored. while each scene may include while there has been a recent resurgence in the women’s movement and feminist self-identification, the documentaries predate this renewal (both airing in ). terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /cls. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /cls. . https://www.cambridge.org/core charissa crépault and jennifer m. kilty different details or claims, documentarians edit, frame, and position it within the docu- mentary to give it meaning that advances the through narrative. this necessarily leaves unexplored many comments, issues, or details that are mentioned but not drawn out as significant to the through narrative. for instance, the fifth estate host hana gartner mentions that smith was initially sentenced to the new brunswick youth centre, which was “a two-hour drive from home” (oc), but fails to provide any further commentary on the harms associated with geographic dislocation for prisoners. instead, the through narrative in “out of control” focuses almost exclusively on whether the detention cen- tre was safe and therapeutic. the way the through narrative threads across the scenes upholds particular conclusions and arguments about the case and creates a narrative coherence that gives the fifth estate’s account the appearance of fullness despite the issues, content, and interpretations that were excluded or marginalized. in our analysis, we drew upon the work of socio-linguist william labov, specifically his work on narrative structure. defining narrative as “a particular way of retelling past events” ( , ), labov ( , – ; , – ) suggests that many narratives contain some or all of the following elements: the abstract, which summarizes the story and indicates what it is about; the orientation, which describes the setting; the complicating action, which relates the temporally ordered chain of events (i.e. “what happened”); the result, which indicates the outcome of the action; the evaluation, which provides commentary and attributes meaning to aspects of the narrative; and the coda, which ends the narrative by commenting on how things are now. while the abstract is usually offered at the beginning of the narra- tive and the coda at the end, these narrative elements can be dispersed at various points throughout a narrative. using labov’s model, our analysis involved: a detailed exami- nation of each scene, including the arguments made, the scene’s setting, the way ques- tions were posed/answered, language used, and visual content; consideration of each documentary’s overall narrative structure by analysing each scene’s narrative function (i.e. abstract, orientation, action, result, evaluation, or coda) relative to the rest of the documentary; and juxtaposition of the overall arguments made in the documentaries against the aforementioned feminist claims regarding women’s corrections. with respect to narrative structure, we found that each documentary begins with a two- to three-minute abstract, followed by several scenes of orientation, and then is primarily organized around a back and forth sequence between the compli- cating action and evaluation elements. in particular, the following pattern emerges in each “through narrative”: description of a complicating action (e.g., smith being sent to the regional psychiatric centre in saskatoon) → several evaluation scenes commenting on that action (e.g., an interview clip with smith’s mother; a mono- logue by the narrator, hana gartner) → a description of the next complicating action (which is framed within the previous actions and evaluations) → several evaluation scenes. although they both follow this action/evaluation pattern, the documentaries are organized in slightly different ways. notably, “out of control” often presents evaluative scenes that conflict with one another, whereas “behind the wall” primarily offers evaluative scenes that support and complement one another. to facilitate analysis, both documentaries were transcribed verbatim. evaluations are typically provided through either interview clips or comments by the narrator. terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /cls. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /cls. . https://www.cambridge.org/core mainstream media and the f-word for instance, “out of control” recounts the complicating action of smith being sent to the new brunswick youth centre (nbyc), then offers the following evalua- tions: the nbyc “describe[s] itself as a safe and secure environment for youth,” while an interview clip shows bernard richard describing it as “a very hard reality.” since the documentarians cannot create a coherent “through narrative” while simultane- ously advancing opposing arguments, the evaluation conflict must be resolved. this is done by presenting them in a way that undermines or discredits one evaluation and supports the other. in the previous example, the documentary resolves the con- flicting evaluations by revealing that the nbyc’s description as a “safe and secure environment” is “double speak” (richard) to try to soften the institution’s image. supported evaluations frame and contextualize subsequent actions and connect with the key themes and arguments of the through narrative. figure provides a visual representation of this pattern. richard was the new brunswick ombudsman and investigated smith’s treatment at the nbyc. kim pate was the executive director of the canadian association of elizabeth fry societies, a network advocating for women in prison. conflicting evaluations help create the impression that the conclusions drawn were “found” by weighing the evidence of competing interpretations. by including evaluations that conflict (often through interview clips with terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /cls. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /cls. . https://www.cambridge.org/core charissa crépault and jennifer m. kilty different informants) and then framing one as more legitimate, the supported evaluation becomes part of the “through narrative” while conflicting evaluations are dismissed. organizing the documentary around conflicting evaluations is thus a powerful technique for creating a credible and seemingly self-evident narrative argument. advancing its through narrative in a slightly different manner, “behind the wall” primarily presents complementary evaluations and constructs a sur- rounding narrative that frames and corroborates the documentary’s main nar- rative. rather than offering conflicting evaluations, “behind the wall” primarily relies on evaluations that build upon one another to advance a key point about a particular action that supports the through narrative. for example, interview clips with julian falconer, the smith family’s lawyer, and howard sapers cor- roborate and complement one another to emphasize the illegality and inhu- manity of csc’s use of segregation. furthermore, “behind the wall” contains two intertwined plotlines: the main narrative, which recounts what happened “behind the wall,” and the surrounding narrative, which tells a story about the fifth estate’s investigation. the main narrative describes csc’s use and cover- up of abusive prison practices; its complicating actions include events such as smith’s overall mistreatment (e.g., illegal institutional transfers, permanent isolation, multiple uses of force against her), the comparative example of fellow prisoner justine winder’s restraint on a pinel board, and the effects of an unwritten correctional code of silence. the surrounding narrative recounts the difficulty that the documentarians experienced when seeking answers about canadian prisons; it consists of events such as the fifth estate investiga- tors being prevented from accessing the regional psychiatric centre and csc nurse cindy stating over the phone that she is too afraid to do an on-camera interview. while the main narrative is the focus of the documentary, the surrounding narrative corroborates and illustrates aspects of the main narrative. for exam- ple, assertions that csc’s lack of transparency facilitates the continuation of abusive practices are corroborated by an event in the surrounding narrative: after attempting to contact prison staff, gartner receives a phone call from a csc communications officer who indicates that she should speak to a csc spokesperson. as in this example, most of the complicating actions in the sur- rounding narrative are shown as they happen (e.g., footage of gartner being denied entry to the regional psychiatric centre), which emphasizes csc’s cover-up efforts and the obstacles the fifth estate encountered while conduct- ing their investigation. figure illustrates how complementary evaluations and these intertwining narratives are used to advance the “through narrative” in “behind the wall.” we use the term ‘complementary evaluations’ to refer to evaluations that interpret the action from a similar angle and position. justine winder is referred to as “another inmate in crisis” (gartner). she was incarcerated after “a fight with her boyfriend turned ugly” (gartner) and like smith, she began to self-injure while in federal custody. terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /cls. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /cls. . https://www.cambridge.org/core mainstream media and the f-word the differences in how the two documentary narratives are constructed likely stems from the fact that “behind the wall,” the second documentary, is built on the conclusions drawn in “out of control.” organized around complicating actions and conflicting evaluations, the “through narrative” in “out of control” constructs smith as “a troubled young girl who cried out for help and never got it” (gartner) and builds toward the following conclusions: “they [csc] took her life” (coralee smith ); csc poses a threat to youth with mental illness; and the public is largely unaware of this threat and should be informed. since “behind the wall” is a follow-up episode on the case, there was no need to reiterate conflicting evaluations that were previously resolved, such as whether or not the treatment smith received was punitive. john torella was a csc supervisor who was charged with assaulting smith while she was choking herself. cindy was the nurse on duty when smith was assaulted by torella; she initially filed a false report and then three days later came forward to report torella’s actions. coralee smith is ashley’s mother; she adopted ashley when she was five days old. terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /cls. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /cls. . https://www.cambridge.org/core charissa crépault and jennifer m. kilty instead, “behind the wall” begins from the position that it was and that smith’s life was taken by asking “who did that to ashley?” (coralee smith). through comple- mentary evaluations and intertwined main/surrounding narratives, “behind the wall” expands on the pre-established argument that csc poses a threat to prisoners suffering from mental illness. building on the “through narrative” presented in “out of control,” it advances the following conclusions: csc and the correctional workers involved “let her die” (gartner); federal prisons are concealing the ways in which abusive practices are used against mentally ill prisoners like smith; and what hap- pened to smith could happen to “anybody’s child” (coralee smith). although they do so in slightly different ways, both documentaries gradually walk viewers through ashley smith’s story, advancing arguments and producing an inter- nally coherent “through narrative” via description and evaluation of certain incidents and practices. by drawing out and emphasizing certain issues at the expense of others, the documentaries also marginalize and exclude issues or points of discussion that could have been raised to interpret and attribute meaning to the story. as white ( , ) argues, the coherence and clarity produced in a narrative “is and only can be imag- inary.” real events do not present themselves in the structured coherence of a narrative and consequently any attempt to present them as such involves a process of selecting, deleting, emphasizing, marginalizing, and tilting various details, events, and evalua- tions (riessman and quinney , ; white , ). the “through narratives” in “out of control” and “behind the wall” represent many different decisions about how to frame and present the smith case. in the next two sections, we argue that the through narratives draw upon psy discourses (rose , – ) that pathologize prisoner behaviour, obscure structural oppressions and institutional power relations, and fail to consider the gendered nature of carceral practices. framing the smith case: mentally ill prisoners and the lack of care inside as stated on the cbc website, the fifth estate is concerned with providing “in-depth investigations that matter to canadians.” in keeping with this focus, both documentaries feature interview clips emphasizing that “canada should know” (coralee smith, oc) and that “every canadian … has a vested interest in knowing what goes on inside a place like this [prison or psychiatric centre]” (don davies , bw). the smith case is used as a foundation for discussing broader issues, namely, “how kids with mental health and behavioural problems are treated behind bars in this country” (gartner, oc) and “how canadian prisons punish the mentally ill” (gartner, bw). by making these claims, the fifth estate echoes the critiques offered by feminist criminologists and scholars in the “mad movement” who argue that correctional responses to those experiencing mental distress are often puni- tive in nature (e.g., arrigo and bullock , ; dej , ; kilty , ; menzies, lefrançois, and reaume , , ; pollack , ). at the same time, however, the documentaries rely on a narrative of mental illness that aligns with neoliberal notions of individualism and the need to “fix” misbehaving indi- viduals who transgress cultural (and gendered) behavioural expectations. don davies is an ndp member of parliament and was “vice-chair of a parliamentary committee studying mental health care in [canadian] penitentiaries” (gartner, bw). terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /cls. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /cls. . https://www.cambridge.org/core mainstream media and the f-word critiquing csc’s treatment of smith and prisoners “like her,” “out of control” highlights how “isolating inmates with mental disorders is unsafe and inhumane” (gartner). the smith case is described as “a classic model of the failure of our … corrections system to adequately care for the mentally ill in society” (peter van loan ) and it is revealed that there are “young people in jail for minor infractions, for mental … conditions not being treated” (coralee smith). similarly, “behind the wall” focuses on “the shocking truth” that “canadian prisons punish the men- tally ill” (gartner). both documentaries emphasize how the abuse of mentally ill prisoners is not limited to the one case; smith’s story of “cr[ying] out for help and never g[etting] it … is not unique” (gartner, oc). in “behind the wall,” interviewees discuss how there are “many cases of physical and more perhaps emotional, psychological abuses” (atkinson ) in which patients “are being punished for being mentally ill” (gartner). this point is corroborated by: csc nurse bonnie bracken’s discussion of “a male patient that was a lot like ashley” whom she witnessed being beaten; by the discussion of justine winder, who was physically restrained in the same manner as smith; and by davies’s reference to an incarcerated woman he saw who was restrained for three months. these testimonies highlight that csc punished smith “instead of treating her” (gartner, bw) and that this is a common occurrence. failure to provide mental health care is presented as a standard problem across prisons and existing punitive practices (e.g., the use of taser guns, pepper spray, segregation, and restraints) are identified as harmful to an especially vulnerable population. furthermore, the fifth estate identifies several systemic problems in csc’s mental health care: csc “ignores its own rules and breaks the law” (gartner, bw), “spends less than two percent of its [operating budget] on mental health care for inmates” (gartner, bw), and only provides correctional workers with a “two-hour online mental health course” (gartner, bw). as these quotes demonstrate, the fifth estate’s coverage of the smith case offers a valuable critique of mental health care in canadian prisons. highlighting the lack of mental health care in both the community and the carceral setting, the documentaries show how the prison system has become “a de facto mental health facility” (richard, oc)—one in which workers are “assessing, diagnosing, and prescribing medication [but] they’re not doing any counselling whatsoever” (davies, bw). this reflects scholars’ efforts to critique the use of isolation in response to mental health distress and the prison’s failure to provide adequate care (arrigo and bullock , – , ; haney , – , ; kilty , , – ). moreover, the fifth estate depicts smith as “caught in the divide between security and treatment” (gartner, bw). kilty ( , , ) similarly critiques the correctional prioritization of institutional security, arguing that it undermines therapeutic practices and reduces psy treatment primarily to the administration of psychotropic medication. in this way, the fifth estate documentaries identify key peter van loan is a conservative member of parliament and was the minister for public safety, a position that includes the responsibility of overseeing canada’s federal prison system. linda atkinson is a social worker who previously worked as a guard. bracken was a nurse for twenty-five years at the regional psychiatric centre and interacted with smith on many occasions. terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /cls. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /cls. . https://www.cambridge.org/core charissa crépault and jennifer m. kilty problems in how prisons respond to mental health issues. through interviews with key informants and surveillance video footage of smith’s mistreatment, the fifth estate offers an emotional critique of abusive prison practices and demands “significant improvements” (gartner, oc) in correctional mental health care. that said, the fifth estate relies on a medical model interpretation of mental illness that pathologizes emotional distress and obscures the socio-economic and structural factors, such as sexism, racism, and poverty, that are linked to criminal- ization and imprisonment (pollack , ; , ; pollack and kendall , ). notable feminist criminologists and “mad” scholars contend that medicalized approaches to care are often degrading for those who are diagnosed or constructed as mentally ill and problematically reduce a host of multifarious historical, social, and institutional factors to questions of how individual inadequacies might be managed (dej , ; menzies, lefrançois, and reaume , , ; pollack , ). by presenting the smith case primarily as an issue of inadequately treated mental illness, not only do the documentaries uphold the notion that “the problem and the solution to the problem, lie within the individual woman herself ” (pollack , ), they also fail to problematize the incarceration of mentally ill people, instead suggesting that it is the lack of resources that is at issue. repeatedly emphasizing smith’s need for psychiatric care, the documentaries advance the idea that prisoners “like smith” are “transformative risk subject[s]” that are “amenable to targeted therapeutic interventions” (hannah-moffat , ). smith is characterized as one of the “kids with mental health and behavioural prob- lems … behind bars” (gartner, oc) and her “out of control” behaviour is framed as stemming from csc’s failure to provide psychiatric assessment and treatment. gartner makes a series of statements to this effect: smith “never had a comprehen- sive mental health assessment” (oc); “no one knew how to handle ashley because no one knew what was wrong with her” (oc); “she was never fully assessed or mean- ingfully treated” (oc); “there was nothing in the guards’ two-hour online mental health course that prepared them for ashley smith” (bw); “instead of treating her, they punished ashley’s behaviour with pepper spray and restraints” (bw). as discussed above, these comments critique csc’s failure to provide mental health care in a way that assumes smith had something inherently “wrong” with her prior to incarceration. indicating that smith’s story begins “not as you might predict, but in a nice neat home with parents who really care” (gartner, oc), the fifth estate reveals that “the trouble started” when “ashley began to change” from “a sweet, playful girl” to a teenager demonstrating “defiant, disrespectful, and disruptive” (gartner, oc) behaviour. immediately after recounting this change, the fifth estate shows that smith’s parents attempted to have her diagnosed but “there had been no real follow-up” (gartner, oc). while we do not wish to dismiss the possibility that smith may have benefited from psychological care or that she was experiencing emotional distress, the fifth estate’s presentation of “when the trouble started” presents psychological maladjustment as the only explanation for smith’s initial (and continued) disruptive behaviour. the documentaries repeatedly show that, instead of treating her, “prison made ashley worse” (gartner, oc), which underscores that smith had pre-existing mental and emotional problems that were aggravated by her experiences inside. terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /cls. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /cls. . https://www.cambridge.org/core mainstream media and the f-word in emphasizing the lack of mental health care, the documentaries leave unquestioned what constitutes helpful therapeutic treatment. in “behind the wall,” for example, gartner describes the regional psychiatric centre in saskatoon as “the only psychiatric hospital in the country with a therapeutic healing program designed for women offenders” although it has “only twelve beds for women.” these comments suggest that the main problem is that prisons do not provide enough treatment to women, the solution to which is to provide more of the same therapeutic approaches that feminists have long identified as problematic. for example, correctional therapies for women have been found to be wrought with coercion (kilty , ; pollack , , ), to problematically encourage women to see themselves as having a “criminal personality” (pollack , ), and to engage treatment techniques such as distress tolerance, which emphasizes skilfully coping with pain and “encourage[s] women to accept and internalize their oppression” (pollack and kendall , ). these approaches primarily serve the purpose of “‘taming’ women whose unruly emotions may interfere with the smooth operation of the prison” (pollack , ) and have the potential to undermine women’s resistance to abusive prison practices, such as segregation, physical and psychotropic restraints, and strip-searching. the notion of mental illness is used in the fifth estate documentaries much like a “public image,” which hall et al. ( , ) describe as “a cluster of impres- sions, themes and quasi-explanations gathered or fused together” that are drawn from dominant ideologies and “stop short of serious, searching analysis.” when used to explain an event or phenomenon, public images keep the discussion within “the boundaries of a dominant ideological field” and any analysis offered “seems to collapse into the image” (hall et al. , ). critiques of smith’s mistreatment continually return to an image of mental illness that aligns with neoliberal indi- vidualism and the pathologization of mental distress and resistant behaviour. stopping short of questions about what constitutes mental illness, the fifth estate works from the presumption that smith’s behaviour was indicative of a mental disorder. in this way, the critique offered in the documentaries collapses into an image of untreated mental illness: significant changes need to be made in prisons so that prisoners suffering from mental distress can be assessed and treated without excessive isolation and uses of force. although the notions of vulnerability and a desperate need for help that are associated with this image of mental illness allow the fifth estate to create an emotionally charged discussion of smith that con- demns csc’s actions, reliance on this public image also focuses on the individual as the site for therapeutic interventions and obscures some of the structural, and perhaps more controversial, problems revealed by this case. in the next section we examine this exclusion more closely by considering how the “through narratives” in the two fifth estate episodes fail to consider the way that smith’s mistreatment was structured by gendered expectations and practices. avoiding the “f-word”: the missed opportunity to provide a gendered analysis as white ( , ) explains, “every narrative, however seemingly ‘full,’ is con- structed on the basis of a set of events that might have been included but were left terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /cls. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /cls. . https://www.cambridge.org/core charissa crépault and jennifer m. kilty out.” not only is content inevitably left out during the process of compiling, edit- ing, and producing the documentaries, there are also issues raised and statements made within each documentary that could have been presented as significant but were instead left unexplored. the fifth estate uses the themes of mental illness and lack of mental health care to explain the events of the case and to draw connections across various scenes, thereby generating a coherent “through narrative” organized around a main issue. in so doing, however, they downplay the importance of other issues that are only briefly mentioned, such as the geographic dislocation smith experienced during her incarceration or the repeated strip-searching to which she was subject. like the documentarians, we also provide a particular “through nar- rative” to highlight how the fifth estate reinforces pathologizing discourses and overlooks the gendered practices that contributed to smith’s mistreatment; as such, ours is not the only story that could be told about the documentaries. for instance, the extensive media coverage surrounding the smith case, juxtaposed against the negligent attention given to the death of edward snowshoe, an indigenous man who similarly died in a segregation cell in , demonstrates the white privilege that shapes whose experiences “matter to canadians” (cbc’s the fifth estate website ). the fifth estate portrays smith as representative of “what’s happening to our young people” (coralee smith, oc), “to kids with mental health and behavioural problems” (gartner, oc) and to “the mentally ill” (gartner, bw). in this way, the imprisonment and mistreatment of a young, white woman is pre- sented as an issue that should matter to viewers because she could have been “anybody’s child” (coralee smith, oc). at the same time, the racialized experi- ences of prisoners such as edward snowshoe remain unconsidered. while this paper focuses on gender and the fifth estate’s representation of femininity, the media attention following the smith case also points to the ways that racializa- tion shapes “newsworthiness” (jewkes , ). although the fifth estate mentions smith’s gender and shows interview clips with kim pate , the executive director of “a national organization advocating for women in prison” (gartner, oc), no critique is offered of the ways that gender shaped correctional interpretations of, and responses to, smith’s behaviour. instead, we found that the episodes draw upon certain essentialized stereotypes of femininity and girlhood that further sensationalize the case. for example, at the beginning of “out of control” smith is described as “a troubled young girl who cried out for help and never got it” (gartner) and an interview with coralee smith showing ashley’s “girly” doll collection narrates her as having been a “sweet, playful girl” (gartner). these references to gender present smith as initially adhering to standard tropes of hegemonic femininity, which schippers ( , ) describes as “the characteristics defined as womanly that … guarantee the dominant position of men and the http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/about/. although the inclusion of interview clips with kim pate might suggest the presence of a gendered analysis, the fifth estate uses the clips primarily to reveal the conditions of smith’s confinement and to show csc’s lack of mental health care. they are edited to highlight what pate saw as “one of the few visitors ashley was allowed” (gartner) and to show that “when [she] last saw ashley [she] asked a number of people to intervene right up to the regional and national level and … nobody did” (pate). terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /cls. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core http://www.cbc.ca/fifth/about/ https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /cls. . https://www.cambridge.org/core mainstream media and the f-word subordination of women,” including physical vulnerability, passivity, domesticity, and compliance. after presenting smith as adhering to feminine stereotypes as a child (e.g., “sweet” and “girly”), gartner states that there is “not one clue [in her home environment] as to how everything went so terribly wrong.” inherent in these comments is the implication that if smith had been violent or unfeminine as a child, rather than “sweet,” “playful,” and “girly,” it would have helped explain why things “went wrong”—and would have perhaps made the case less shocking. although introduced in “out of control” as a “young girl” and a “girly” child, smith is primarily identified in both documentaries as one of the “kids with mental health and behavioural problems” (gartner, oc) and an example of “how canadian prisons punish the mentally ill” (gartner, bw). in fact, as we mentioned in the previous section, mental illness is presented as the reason smith changed from a “sweet, playful girl” to being “on the verge of being out of control” (coralee smith, oc). after describing smith’s normative girlhood, the fifth estate suggests that “ashley began to change” (gartner, oc) when she was around thirteen or fourteen (e.g., breaking rules; getting expelled from school) and that the psychological help her parents sought was insufficient. the documentaries overlook questions of gendered punishment and craft a “through narrative” around the public image of mental illness despite the fact that the policies and practices in women’s corrections are “inherently gendered and punitive in nature” and rely upon “traditional patriarchal conceptions of feminin- ity” (dell, fillmore, and kilty , ). correctional discourse juxtaposes the “unfeminine misbehaved woman prisoner” (dell, fillmore, and kilty , ) against stereotypes of hegemonic femininity in order to justify the use of force against women seen as “misbehaving.” several feminist scholars identify segrega- tion as a common correctional response to women who are deemed “difficult to manage”—often due to self-injurious behaviour or presumed mental illness (kilty , ; martel , ). although the fifth estate mentions smith’s “reputa- tion for being the most difficult female inmate in the system” (gartner, bw), there is no consideration of how being seen as a “difficult” and “misbehaved” female prisoner may have impacted her behaviour and treatment. by constructing a through narrative that portrays csc’s treatment of smith as a series of inhumane responses to mental illness, the documentaries obscure the gendered aspects of carceral control practices, like the fact that women are more likely to be sentenced to time in segregation for less serious institutional infractions and self-injury than are men (office of the correctional investigator ). this failure to consider gender is somewhat surprising given that the fifth estate broke the story of women at the prison for women in kingston (p w) being forcibly removed from their segregation cells and illegally strip-searched by a male institutional emergency response team. the fifth estate’s coverage of this event garnered the attention of both the canadian public and policy makers, trig- gering a federally commissioned public inquiry (arbour ) that condemned the conditions of women’s corrections. despite the parallels between the correc- tional responses to smith and the women in p w, the fifth estate does not mention its coverage of the cell extractions, missing the opportunity to demonstrate the historical continuity of women’s carceral mistreatment. terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /cls. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /cls. . https://www.cambridge.org/core charissa crépault and jennifer m. kilty in fact, women’s corrections is characterized as a place where smith could and should have been treated. in “out of control,” the grand valley institution for women is described as having been “built with female inmates in mind, ha[ving] a more home-y look and offer[ing] a mental health program tailored especially to women” (gartner). gartner then states that grand valley provides “the kind of help ashley could have used, but the warden locked her in segregation the minute she got [t]here.” as aforementioned, in “behind the wall,” the regional psychiatric centre in saskatoon is problematized for having “over patients, but only beds for women offenders” (gartner). although smith was sent to the regional psychiatric centre to “get a diagnosis and a treatment plan” (gartner), the docu- mentary recounts how this did not occur because she was subject to constant iso- lation. these comments characterize mental health programs “tailored especially to women” as inherently positive and suggest that the failure occurred in denying smith access to them. in this way, prison is problematized only in so far as it does not provide enough treatment for mentally ill prisoners and “women-centred” cor- rections is problematically presented as creating a “home-y” environment. the discussion of justine winder in “behind the wall” further exemplifies the fifth estate’s problematic failure to consider feminist claims regarding women’s experiences of imprisonment. when it is revealed that winder began self-injuring in prison, she is described as being “like so many women offenders [in that] [she] turned her anger inward [and] she started cutting her arms and choking herself ” (gartner). while this discussion suggests that the prison was “transforming her” (gartner), and by extension other women prisoners, there is no critical discussion of women’s self-injury in prison or penal responses to it. on the contrary, winder’s inwardly turned anger is presented as the reason she self-injures “like so many women offenders” (gartner), which attributes women’s self-injury in prison to an irrational misdirection of anger and reflects csc reports that claim women self- injure “as a means of coping with negative emotions” (power and usher , ). while these “negative emotions” may result from incarceration, csc research and the fifth estate documentaries are both devoid of any discussion of women’s self- injury as a meaningful response to isolation and mistreatment, relying instead on pathologizing discourses that attribute the behaviour to emotional and psycho- logical maladjustment. this ignores feminist arguments that view self-injury as a response to the powerlessness created by oppressive prison environments and sug- gest that self-injury “may represent an attempt to resist the power of the prison and to demonstrate personal agency” (kilty , ; see also pollack and kendall , ; robert, frigon, and belzile , ). the fifth estate uses smith’s gender and youth to heighten the “newsworthiness” (jewkes , ) of the case, suggesting that the story is particularly shocking because smith was a “troubled young girl” (gartner, oc) who was “sweet” and “playful” prior to her incarceration. at the same time, the documentaries do not question the gendered implications of the different carceral practices (e.g., strip- searching, medicalization, and forced psychotropics) used to contain smith, instead advancing “through narratives” organized around the theme of mental illness. in so doing, the documentaries uphold stereotypical images of femininity and reproduce correctional discourses that pathologize criminalized women. while the fifth estate terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /cls. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /cls. . https://www.cambridge.org/core mainstream media and the f-word reveals serious problems in correctional mental health care, it also relies upon neo- liberal and post-feminist notions of individualism that primarily root smith’s self- injurious and resistant behaviours in her flawed psyche rather than her conditions of confinement and the chronic abusive prison practices to which she was subject. in this way, the smith case is not used to elucidate women’s mistreatment in the federal correctional system, but to discuss how “mentally ill inmates” (gartner, bw) are mistreated and denied psychiatric care, which problematically reinforces a veneer of gender equality or neutrality regarding canadian prison practices. conclusion using a novel approach to documentary analysis drawn from narrative inquiry and socio-linguistics that contributes to the methodological advancement of the disci- plines of criminology and media studies, we hope this research will push criminolo- gists to adopt more innovative analytic practices. by critically examining the fifth estate’s narration of the ashley smith case, we explored how mainstream media coverage that is expressly critical of csc may nonetheless reproduce some of the assumptions and modes of thought upon which correctional practices rest. in par- ticular, the documentaries uphold correctional discourses that locate criminality and resistant behaviour within the disordered minds and thinking patterns of indi- vidual women. both episodes construct “through narratives” that position smith as mentally ill and the lack of therapeutic resources in prison as the underlying sys- temic failure that led to her death. while the fifth estate condemns csc’s treatment of smith and prisoners like her, their adoption of the medical model interpretation of mental illness engages neoliberal notions of individualism, leaving intact and reproducing pathologizing discourses that continue to underpin women’s correc- tions. even as they reveal and critique the “shocking truth” (gartner, bw) and indis- putable mistreatment of mentally ill prisoners, the fifth estate draws upon some of the same discourses that sustain and justify the correctional system they critique. failing to consider smith’s “out of control” behaviour as a rational or meaning- ful response to her powerlessness and experiences of being segregated, strip- searched, and restrained, the fifth estate highlights that “prison made ashley worse” (gartner, oc), thus presuming that she was inherently disordered to begin with. moreover, the episodes do not question what constitutes treatment in women’s corrections and thus ignore feminist concerns about coercive therapeutic practices that can encourage women to accept oppressive conditions and internalize nega- tive characterizations of the self (pollack and kendall , ). in fact, the fifth estate uncritically accepts women-centred mental health programming as “the kind of help ashley could have used” (gartner, oc), suggesting that more treat- ment would improve corrections. this brings to mind foucault’s ( , ) claim that “a transformation that remains within the same mode of thought … can merely be a superficial transformation.” by working from the presumption that prisoners like smith have something wrong with them that can be fixed through better access to (augmented) mental health programming, the fifth estate sug- gests improvements that would leave structural oppressions untouched, which ultimately legitimizes incarceration and some of the problematic carceral practices to which smith was subjected. terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /cls. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /cls. . https://www.cambridge.org/core charissa crépault and jennifer m. kilty eclipsed by the focus on mental illness are questions of how smith’s sta- tus as a difficult and misbehaving woman prisoner impacted her punishment. interest-oriented media processes tend to go hand in hand with content and as the fifth estate aims to reach a broad national audience, taking up the critical language and vocabulary of feminism and a direct analysis of the gendered nature of punish- ment might risk alienating potential viewers that either deny the continued need for feminism or who openly reject that identity. instead, the fifth estate frames the case within the confines of individualism and thus in a way that maintains the status quo and may resonate with a wider audience. in so doing, however, they overlook the gen- dered aspects of correctional punishment and 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the value of narrativity in the representation of reality. in the content of the form: narrative discourse and historical representation, – . baltimore, maryland: johns hopkins university press. charissa crépault doctoral candidate department of criminology university of ottawa cweir @uottawa.ca jennifer m. kilty associate professor department of criminology university of ottawa jkilty@uottawa.ca terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /cls. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core http://www.csc-scc.gc.ca/research/ - - -eng.shtml mailto:cweir @uottawa.ca mailto:jkilty@uottawa.ca https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /cls. . https://www.cambridge.org/core s x jed .. frontispiece . excavations during summer at roque del die, east of capendu, aude department, in south-western france. investigations in advance of construction have identified three monumental tombs, forming part of a much larger cemetery, previously investigated in . the circular features are – m in diameter and composed of sandstone blocks. indications of wall facing and courses suggest that each circle supported an earthen mound. at the centre of each enclosure is a slab-built chest. one of these has yielded bones from at least two individuals, probably a child and a woman, as well as personal ornaments of shell and bone dating to the early bronze age (c. – bc). photograph © pascal druelle, inrap. frontispiece . an aboriginal stone arrangement located in the country of the mithaka aboriginal people in the desert channels region of central australia. a stone-lined curvilinear pathway leads into two closed circles, forming part of a much more extensive stone arrangement. according to ethnohistorian alice duncan kemp (an early twentieth-century archivist of the mithaka), these were places where aboriginal people asked for the influence of the spirits. in mithaka country, such arrangements may be associated with initiation ceremonies, exchange of marriage partners and cult rituals, as well as trade and exchange. the main structure is approximately m in length. the site was located by mithaka traditional owner josh gorringe with retired surveyor ian andrews in early , and photographed by a quadcopter drone © mithaka aboriginal corporation. editorial noughts and crosses the end of each year offers a moment to look back on the previous months. the end of a decade provides the occasion to reflect on a more substantial slice of time, to see beyond events and to differentiate the signal from the noise. there is also the opportunity to look ahead and to hope for a prosperous and healthy future. duly, the end of was marked by the perennial—and decennial—ritual of looking both back and forward. twelve months on, has not turned out as hoped or expected. even though the threat of covid- had been identified well before the start of the new year, few predicted the speed and scale of events. combined with the other great social and political movement of the past year, the black lives matter protests, feels like a tumultuous start to the s. but has the third decade of the twenty-first century already begun? the calendrical purists may beg to differ: if the first decade of our era runs from ad – and the second from – , and so on, then the end of the s is not but . numerical neatness has long since seen the decades and centuries shifted forward by a year—the millennium bug, for example, focused on the rollover from – , not – . nonetheless, many would welcome the opportunity to restart the decade in . today, one system dominates the way in which the world organises time: the gregorian calendar, labelling years reckoned from the birth of christ. although sometimes rendered as the common era, a name that can be traced back years to johannes kepler, the global dominance of the anno domini scheme is a function of one continent’s religious, scientific and military expansion; its commonness belies the power structures that brought it to univer- sality. the reckoning of years in relation to the nativity is attributed to dionysius exiguus, a scythian monk based in rome c. ad . the purpose of dionysius’ scheme was to establish the timing of that most calendrically troublesome of christian celebrations, easter. two hun- dred years later, in a distant corner of a foggy island off the north-west coast of europe, a monk was still working on the same problem—when should the faithful mark the resurrec- tion of christ? but it was that monk’s use of the anno domini system as the chronological framework for his historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum, or ecclesiastical history of the english people, that laid the foundations for the system used so widely today (figure ). that distant corner of a remote foggy island was north-east england, the setting for the twin monasteries of st peter and st paul (monkwearmouth and jarrow) and home to the ‘father of english history’, the venerable bede. satirised in yeatman and sellar’s and all that as the ‘venomous bede’ —the name by which he was always known during my undergraduate days in nearby newcastle—bede was the greatest scholar of the © the author(s), . published by cambridge university press on behalf of antiquity publications ltd sellar, w.c. & r.j. yeatman. . and all that: a memorable history of england, comprising all the parts you can remember, including good things, bad kings and genuine dates. london: methuen. antiquity vol. ( ): – https://doi.org/ . /aqy. . https://doi.org/ . /aqy. . anglo-saxon world and his scholarship has had an enduring impact on the reckoning of time. nonetheless, in his native north-east england, bede was much less of a local medieval celeb- rity than his near contemporary and patron saint of northern england, st cuthbert or ‘cuddy’. indeed, for several centuries the venerable monk’s remains were interred within cuthbert’s lavish tomb in durham cathedral before finally being relocated to his own figure . manuscript of bede’s historia ecclesiastica gentis anglorum from the first half of the ninth century. photograph © the british library, cotton ms tiberius c ii (https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/bedes-ecclesiastical- history-of-the-english-people). editorial © the author(s), . published by cambridge university press on behalf of antiquity publications ltd https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/bedes-ecclesiastical-history-of-the-english-people https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/bedes-ecclesiastical-history-of-the-english-people https://www.bl.uk/collection-items/bedes-ecclesiastical-history-of-the-english-people tomb in . in turn, that tomb and the shrine that developed around it were dismantled during the reformation and replaced with the simple chest-tomb still to be seen in the cathe- dral’s galilee chapel today. appropriately, for a figure who has wielded such influence on the reckoning of time, bede’s tomb and his mortal remains have been the subject of long-running archaeological interest. in , the antiquarian and cathedral librarian james raine took it upon himself to open the tomb of st cuthbert—where bede had once been interred—recovering an aston- ishing series of finds. in addition to the well-preserved remains of st cuthbert was another skull, attributed to the northumbrian king oswald, and an assemblage of children’s bones passed off, raine claimed, by the monks as “relics of children slain by herod”. he also found cuthbert’s original seventh-century wooden coffin, his gold-and-garnet pectoral cross and a wealth of other objects, many of which are today on show in the cathedral’s ‘open treasure’ exhibition. perhaps hoping for further sensational finds, in raine dismantled bede’s chest-tomb and, excavating ft down, discovered a coffin. in contrast to the opulence of cuthbert’s bur- ial, however, this coffin was found to contain only an incomplete and poorly preserved set of human bones and a finger ring. raine’s precise motives in opening the tomb remain unclear, for he declared no interest in the question of whether these really were the remains of bede and the bones were briskly reinterred and the chest-tomb reassembled. before reburial, how- ever, raine took a cast—in fact, three—of the top of the skull, including the brow, on account of its ‘most peculiar’ form. as recently as , a search could find no trace of any one of the three casts until, quite by chance, one was discovered a few years ago in the duckworth laboratory collection in the leverhulme centre for human evolutionary studies at the university of cambridge. raine had given one of the casts to john thurnam, a medical doctor and antiquary with a keen interest in skulls, and it was his personal collec- tion that would go on to form the core of the duckworth laboratory’s collection. thurnam was co-author of the six-fascicule volume crania britannica ( – ), and a keen pro- ponent of the idea that the characteristics of skulls could allow individuals to be categorised into a hierarchy of ‘races’. in their investigation of the rediscovered cast in the duckworth collection, story and bailey relate how thurnam considered the skull to lack the expected characteristics of an ‘anglo-saxon’ cranium, an observation at odds with both bede’s identity and thurnam’s association of anglo-saxon ancestry with superior intellect. this led him in turn to question whether the bones discovered by raine really were those of the venerable monk. given the emphasis put on different ethnic groups in bede’s histories—britons, picts, scots, irish, angles and others—there is a certain irony that his mortal remains should have become the subject of the racialised science of skull measuring. but were the bones found by raine and studied by thurnam actually those of bede? story and bailey’s review of the documentary evidence leads them to the conclusion that the remains unearthed in can be plausibly traced back at least to the early twelfth century. hence, even if the raine, j. . a brief account of durham cathedral with notices of the castle, university, city churches, &c: . newcastle: blackwell. story, j. & r.n. bailey. . the skull of bede. the antiquaries journal : – . https://doi.org/ . / s . editorial © the author(s), . published by cambridge university press on behalf of antiquity publications ltd https://doi.org/ . /s https://doi.org/ . /s https://doi.org/ . /s bones interred in durham cathedral today are not those of the venerable bede, they have nonetheless been venerated as such for at least nine centuries. bede may have lived and died well over a millennium ago, but his life-story makes him a man of our own time. as a teenager, in ad , he survived a plague that claimed the lives of the majority of his community. he lived a monastic life—a type of self-imposed isolation or social distancing—but he was far from parochial; through his library, the internet of its day, he was well connected to the wider world and sought to engage with and understand it. if covid- has played with our sense of time over the past year, it was bede who helped to establish the way in which we reckon time in the first place. fire and flood whether the end of the s or the start of the s, the past year has brought a striking range of disasters, from the global pandemic to swarms of locusts that have eaten their way across swathes of east africa and parts of south asia. fires and floods in particular have been in the news throughout the year, indeed from its very start: on january, while unpre- cedented wildfires burned across large parts of new south wales and victoria in australia, much of the indonesian capital of jakarta began the year underwater. in more recent months, the worst floods in a generation have swept down the yangtze river, record-breaking water levels have been recorded on the blue nile, and wildfires have raged around the arctic circle, in amazonia and along the u.s. pacific coast. all of these fires and floods have led to loss of life and property and devastated wildlife, landscapes and economies. they have also threa- tened, damaged or destroyed cultural heritage. flooding at the pyramids at meroe in sudan was narrowly averted and the citadel of mycenae in greece had a lucky escape from wildfires burning through the surrounding hills. such well-known sites, however, are only the tip of the (melting) iceberg. the damage to wider archaeological landscapes is enormous. each year, forest fires, coastal storms and melting glaciers may reveal many archaeological sites and objects—but unknowable numbers are also lost without record. the irony of such losses is that the archaeological record forms a critical part of the archive of past climate and environmental change. as our weather grows increasingly erratic, we have become accustomed to news that the previous month or year has been the hottest, wettest—insert relevant superlative here—‘on record’. in practice, this usually means formal meteorological records stretching back several decades, or perhaps a century at most. but archaeological and palaeoenvironmental data offer a much longer record against which to understand our changing climate and environment, the impact of natural events on human societies and the responses to them, and, crucially, the active role of people in shaping these events and processes. several papers in the current issue focus on these themes. around bp, a huge underwater landslide off the coast of southern norway sent out a tsunami into the north atlantic and south into the north sea. for mesolithic communities living in coastal areas, and especially in the extensive lowlands known as doggerland that now lie beneath the southern north sea, the storegga tsunami was a sudden and unexpected event in a period already characterised by rapidly changing climate and environment. several meso- lithic sites have been identified beneath deposits laid down by the tsunami, feeding into both scholarly and popular accounts of the impact of the event, the latter including margaret editorial © the author(s), . published by cambridge university press on behalf of antiquity publications ltd elphinstone’s ‘pre-historical’ novel, the gathering night. the effects of the tsunami on doggerland, however, have to date been difficult to assess—did the wave sweep over land occupied by mobile groups, drowning the inhabitants and permanently submerging the area? or had humans more or less abandoned the region prior to the tsunami? perhaps the low-lying land had already been largely submerged by rising sea levels? direct evidence from beneath the southern north sea has been limited to date. in this issue, walker et al. review the competing hypotheses about the impact of the storegga tsunami and present new evidence from cores taken km off the current coastline of britain. deposits dated to the time of the storegga event demonstrate the localised impact of the tsunami, reflecting the influence of topography in either blocking or amplifying the wave, while sedimentary adna suggests the recovery of terrestrial plant species following the event. the authors conclude that the tsunami was not ‘universally catastrophic’ and that parts of doggerland survived, only finally succumbing to the inexorable sea-level rise at a later date. short of running for the high ground, the mesolithic communities of the north sea coasts had limited options in their immediate response to a sudden and unprecedented event. climate change unfolding over decades, centuries or millennia, however, allows for adaptation, whether relocating settlements to avoid flooding or taking advantage of newly available ecological niches. in their article on hellenistic and roman greece, bonnier and finné combine the results of regional field survey with modelling of climate proxies to identify a correlation between a period of drier climate and the reorganisation of agricultural production. the authors observe that political and military events are often assumed to have shaped the changing landscapes of classical antiquity, but here they demonstrate that the effects of climate and environmental change should not be underestimated. moreover, in the same way that the evidence emerging from beneath the north sea for the impact of the storegga tsunami indicates very localised effects, so the modelling for ancient greece also points to micro-regional patterns of climate change and adaptation. humans, however, not only adapt to environmental and climate change—they also create it, in particular through the use of fire, whether clearing forest for agriculture or burning fossil fuels for power. the american southwest has just experienced the worst ‘megadrought’ in over a millennium, and a recent study attributes half of the explanation to anthropogenic causes. the effects of such prolonged drought have been all too obvious during . fires have ravaged more than km of california, oregon and washington, renewing questions about the role of fire in ‘natural’ and managed landscapes. specifically, have forestry management practices intended to prevent fires exacerbated the scale and ferocity of such events? a recent study of archaeological ceramics from the jemez mountains in new mexico uses osl dating of pottery sherds to demonstrate that the most recent twenty-first-century fire event was more intense than fires over the previous millennium, probably because of the elphinstone, m. . the gathering night. edinburgh: canongate. park williams, a. et al. . large contribution from anthropogenic warming to an emerging north american megadrought. science : – . https://doi.org/ . /science.aaz editorial © the author(s), . published by cambridge university press on behalf of antiquity publications ltd https://doi.org/ . /science.aaz https://doi.org/ . /science.aaz build-up of fuel through fire-prevention strategies. indeed, a growing consensus is emerging, drawing on the results of palaeoecological studies and the traditional knowledge of indigen- ous groups about the use of fire in maintaining healthy and less combustible forests. such ‘braiding’—to use sonya atalay’s metaphor—of western and indigenous sciences is devel- oping as a critical means of advancing both the responsible stewardship of ecological resources and wider social justice. the intersection of climate change and fire, this time in western amazonia, is the subject of another article in this issue. earlier studies have interpreted the presence of charcoal in the regional palaeoenvironmental record as an indicator of increased fires resulting from a drier climate during the early holocene. pärssinen et al., however, present evidence from beneath geoglyph sites near the brazil/bolivia border that points towards an anthropogenic explan- ation for the burning of vegetation through small-scale, periodic fires. as the evidence accu- mulates for the early peopling of south america and the role of humans in creating a ‘cultural forest’, the identification of anthropogenic soils resulting from active landscape management during the early holocene will require a rethinking of both human and climate history in the region. two timely new exhibitions also explore aspects of the connections between human soci- eties, environmental disasters and climate change. at the moesgård museum in denmark, ‘after the apocalypse’ examines the effects of the laacher see volcanic eruption c. years ago on the communities of prehistoric europe and their responses to this disaster (fig- ure ). the second part of the exhibition then advances forward to ad and examines the potential effects of such an event playing out across the europe of tomorrow, asking: can we learn something from the past about disasters that may impact us in the future? meanwhile, the british museum’s latest exhibition, ‘arctic: culture and climate’, exam- ines years of human history in the far north. adapting to the extreme arctic envir- onment has required innovation and ingenuity. sadly, such human creativity and resourcefulness have not been applied to the issue of climate change, which is impacting dis- proportionately on the high-latitude regions. temperatures are rising at two or three times the global average, threatening the local human populations, the ecosystems they rely on and their cultural heritage. already holds the unwanted record—another one—for the latest for- mation of the annual sea ice in the laptev sea and predictions for the first ice-free arctic summer point to a date within the next few decades. the whole planet will experience the effects of less polar ice, but the most immediate impacts are being felt far from the fossil- fuel-consuming regions that continue to drive global warming. appropriately, given the roos, c.l., t.m. rittenour, t.w. swetnam, r.a. loehman, k.l. hollenback, m.j. liebmann & d. drake rosenstein. . fire suppression impacts on fuels and fire intensity in the western us: insights from archaeological luminescence dating in northern new mexico. fire ( ): . https://doi.org/ . /fire mason, l. et al. . listening and learning from traditional knowledge and western science: a dialogue on contem- porary challenges of forest health and wildfire. journal of forestry : – . https://doi.org/ . /jof. - atalay, s. . indigenous science for a world in crisis. public archaeology: – . https://doi.org/ . / . . hollesen, j. et al. . climate change and the deteriorating archaeological and environmental archives of the arctic. antiquity : – . https://doi.org/ . /aqy. . editorial © the author(s), . published by cambridge university press on behalf of antiquity publications ltd https://doi.org/ . /fire https://doi.org/ . /fire https://doi.org/ . /jof. - https://doi.org/ . /jof. - https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . /aqy. . https://doi.org/ . /aqy. . exhibition’s subject matter, the museum’s usual carbon-based corporate sponsor has been replaced. ‘arctic: culture and climate’ runs until february . in this issue elsewhere in this issue, we return to the classic site of glastonbury lake village and a new study of its chronology. we also have an article on the ongoing work at gjellstad in norway: the jell mound is one of the largest nordic iron age funerary mounds in scandinavia, but to date the site has appeared to stand in splendid isolation. geophysical work, however, has now figure . ‘after the apocalypse’ at moesgård museum focuses on the interaction of climate change and extreme events in revealing societal vulnerabilities. the exhibition contrasts a documented volcanic eruption c. years ago with a hypothetical future event in indexed to ipcc-projected climate change across the same region. the curators ask: kan vi lære noget af fortiden, når katastrofen rammer os i fremtiden? or, can we learn something from the past about disasters that may impact us in the future? poster design: tina gylling møller, moesgård museum. editorial © the author(s), . published by cambridge university press on behalf of antiquity publications ltd identified extensive activity in the surrounding area, which gustavsen et al. interpret here as a high-status central place featuring a possible feasting hall and early viking ship burial. indeed, subsequent investigations of the latter have now confirmed the presence of a wooden vessel; they have also revealed significant problems with fungal decay, leading to the allocation of norwegian government funding for urgent excavations over the past summer. we also feature a noah’s ark of animals. fallow deer are not indigenous to northern eur- ope and first appear in the archaeological record of the region as isolated bones that suggest the consumption of venison joints during the roman period. here, pigière et al. present the first example of an articulated fallow deer skeleton from the northern roman provinces. the ancient dna and isotope analyses suggest that the animal was translocated to northern gaul, rather than raised in the region, and, combined with the depositional context, may represent an animal imported for prestige and display rather than as a source of food or horn. meanwhile, valdez et al. take us to the andes and new evidence for inca sacrifice. the team’s excavations have recovered a series of llama offerings inserted beneath buildings at the site of tambo viejo on the southern coast of peru. sacrifices such as these served to materialise and legitimise the power of the inca state across its conquered provinces. after human beings, the most valued inca sacrifices involved llamas and the authors demonstrate the careful sequence of ritual and symbolic steps followed in preparing the animals for death and deposition. meanwhile, eric tourigny examines animal death in a very different context —the loss and commemoration of pets. through an analysis of gravestones and memorials in nineteenth- and twentieth-century pet cemeteries in britain, the author opens a discussion about historical and contemporary human-animal relations and our attitudes to bereavement and the mourning of pets. finally, we also have two articles on different aspects of colonial encounter. the first takes us to wyoming where scheiber and burnett report on the results of fieldwork at Êngkaho- novita ogwêvi, or red canyon, that has sought to break down the dichotomies that have traditionally shaped the study of the american west: indigenous vs settlers, prehistory vs his- tory, cultural change vs tradition. by studying the remains of a nineteenth-century stagecoach station occupied by swedish immigrants, a tipi ring campsite of the local shoshone commu- nity and a series of petroglyphs, the authors identify the entangled histories of the people who lived in this area and how they engaged with one another’s material cultures and the histories previously written into the landscape. also on the theme of colonial relations, fernández- götz et al. open a debate on the ‘dark side’ of the roman empire, asking whether the recent emphasis on object agency and post-humanism has led scholars to neglect the role of human beings in facilitating the violent expansion of the roman world. the authors argue for a new view of the roman state as a ‘predatory regime’. four respondents explore this proposition, including lori khatchadourian who turns to the current pandemic as a means of contrasting the agency of people vs things and differentiating between causation and culpability. and on that timely theme it remains only to thank everyone who has supported the journal over the past year and to wish you all a safe, prosperous and peaceful . robert witcher december editorial © the author(s), . published by cambridge university press on behalf of antiquity publications ltd 	editorial 	noughts and crosses 	fire and flood 	in this issue microsoft word - def paddy farr __ the cry of of the body without organs.docx la	deleuziana	–	online	journal	of	philosophy	–	issn	 - 	 n.	 	/	 	–	rhythm,	chaos	and	nonpulsed	man	 	 	 the	 cry	 of	 the	 body	 without	 organs:	 a	 schizoanalysis	 of	 ed	 bland’s	critical	race	theory	of	jazz	 by	paddy	farr	 	 	 	 abstract	 	 through	an	analysis	of	the	film	the	cry	of	jazz,	the	afro-futurism	of	ed	bland	is	contrasted	 with	the	schizoanalysis	of	deleuze	and	guattari	to	demonstrate	both	the	application	of	schizoanal- ysis	to	jazz	theory	and	the	application	of	afro-futurism	to	schizoanalysis.	in	the	first	part,	bland’s	 critical	race	theory	of	jazz	is	outlined	through	the	dialogue	provided	by	the	protagonist	alex	in	 the	cry	of	jazz	demonstrating	the	dialectical	hegelianism	of	bland’s	analysis.	bland’s	theory	of	 jazz	is	sifted	through	a	reading	of	deleuze’s	difference	and	repetition	as	a	critique	of	hegelianism.	 through	an	elaboration	of	jazz	theory,	the	deleuzian	concepts	of	difference	and	repetition	develop	 further	bland’s	jazz	theory	leading	to	the	death	of	jazz	and	the	potential	becoming	of	a	new	amer- ica.	the	survival	of	the	spirit	of	jazz	after	death	is	demonstrated	through	the	body	without	organs.	 here,	bland’s	afro-futurist	critical	race	theory	comes	into	focus	as	a	pure	affectivity	that	decom- poses	the	boundaries	of	musicality	and	the	social	condition	simultaneously.		 	 	 	 in	 ,	the	sex	pistols	released	their	hit	single,	rising	to	number	 	on	the	uk	singles	 chart,	«god	save	the	queen».	in	the	song,	singer	johnny	rotten	roared,	«don’t	be	told	 what	you	want;	don’t	be	told	what	you	need;	there’s	no	future;	no	future;	no	future	for	 you».	this	sentiment	that	the	future	was	lost	and	that	the	present	repeated	without	eter- nally	was	felt	across	the	world	as	politics	became	more	conservative	and	social	change	 began	a	regression.	at	the	same	time,	the	sex	pistols	as	invented	by	malcolm	mclaren	 were	never	meant	to	be	anything	larger	than	a	commodity	fetish	to	be	consumed	by	a	 desperate	youth	faced	with	no	future.	it	was	for	this	reason	that	in	 ,	the	punk	rock	 band	crass	declared	that	«punk	is	dead».	in	the	song,	steve	ignorant	calls	out,	«i	see	the	 velvet	zippies	in	their	bondage	gear;	the	social	elite	with	safety-pins	in	their	ear;	i	watch	 and	understand	that	it	don’t	mean	a	thing;	the	scorpions	might	attack,	but	the	systems	 stole	the	sting».	unlike	the	sex	pistols,	crass	was	self-consciously	political	in	their	revolt	 against	capitalism.	for	them	and	the	anarcho-punk	current	which	followed,	the	death	of	 punk	meant	the	rise	of	a	different	form	of	art	and	protest	where	social	and	cultural	change	 became	the	driving	force	for	rebellion.	nearly	 	years	prior,	and	for	very	similar	reason,	 ed	bland	had	pronounced	the	same	fate	to	jazz:	«jazz	is	dead»	(hill,	kennedy	&	bland	 ).	 la	deleuziana	–	online	journal	of	philosophy	–	issn	 - 	 n.	 	/	 	–	rhythm,	chaos	and	nonpulsed	man	 	 	 in	 ,	jazz	underwent	a	transformation	in	music	through	the	impact	of	miles	davis’	 kind	of	blue,	dave	brubeck’s	time	out,	charles	mingus’	mingus	ah	um,	and	ornette	cole- man’s	the	shape	of	jazz	to	come.	meanwhile,	instituting	a	transformative	politics	through	 an	afro-futurist	critical	race	theory	of	jazz	music,	ed	bland,	released	his	documentary	 film	the	cry	of	jazz	(hill,	kennedy	&	bland	 ).	bland,	a	black	american,	jazz	composer,	 and	cultural	theorist,	fashioned	his	film	as	a	manifesto	of	black	critique	that	placed	jazz	 music	at	the	apex	of	black	intellectual	development	and	at	the	crux	of	the	movement	for	 black	liberation	(rogers	 ).	although	understated	and	obscure,	the	cry	of	jazz	as	 black	critique	is	one	of	the	most	important	pieces	in	jazz	history.	this	was	affirmed	in	 	when	the	library	of	congress	placed	the	film	in	national	film	registry	to	be	pre- served	as	a	centrally	significant	film	of	american	culture,	aesthetics,	and	history	(barnes	 ).	and	yet	still	underappreciated	for	its	complexity	and	eloquence,	ed	bland’s	film	 remains	s	crystal	ball	peering	into	all	afro-futurism	and	critical	race	theory	which	fol- lowed	it.	 in	the	following	essay,	bland’s	film	is	analyzed	first	through	the	critical	race	theory	im- plicit	within	jazz	theory.	second,	through	the	early	work	of	gilles	deleuze	( )	in	his	 doctoral	thesis	published	as	difference	and	repetition,	the	jazz	theory	leading	to	bland’s	 critical	race	theory	is	used	as	a	medium	for	grasping	the	restraining	elements	of	jazz	lead- ing	to	the	futureless	future	while	attending	to	the	freeing	elements	of	jazz	leading	to	the	 recreation	of	life.	finally,	the	death	of	jazz	and	the	possibility	of	reviving	its	spirit	are	in- vestigated	through	the	body	without	organs.	here,	the	body	without	organs	becomes	the	 mode	in	which	the	spirit	jazz	can	«become	alive	by	[black	people’s]	construction	of	amer- ica’s	 future»	 (hill,	 kennedy	 &	 bland	 ).	 this	 construction	 continues	 to	 this	 day	 through	black	lives	matter	as	a	revolt	against	cyclical	repetition	of	police	violence,	the	 rise	of	white	nationalism	and	the	regrowth	of	political	authoritarianism.	jazz	is	dead,	but	 its	spirit	lives	on.	 	 	 bland’s	critical	race	theory	of	jazz	 	 the	cry	of	jazz	is	set	in	chicago	in	a	social	group	of	black	and	white	intellectuals	and	 musicians	who	have	come	together	in	appreciation	of	jazz	music.	in	conversation	on	the	 theory	of	jazz,	bruce,	played	by	gavin	macfadyen,	asserts	that	«jazz	is	merely	the	negro’s	 cry	of	joy	and	suffering»	which	immediately	causes	an	uproar	from	the	white	participants.	 bruce’s	assertion	is	taken	up	by	the	lead	character	alex,	played	by	george	waller,	who	 restates,	reiterates,	and	elaborates	the	justification	and	meaning	behind	«the	negro’s	cry	 of	joy	and	suffering».	over	the	course	of	the	following	 	minutes,	alex	leads	the	white	 participants	through	a	socratic	interlocution	on	the	theory	and	practice	of	jazz	music	as	 black	critique.	the	groundwork	of	bland’s	theory	is	laid	through	a	development	of	jazz	 theory	connecting	affective	experience	of	black	people	to	the	fundamental	elements	of	 la	deleuziana	–	online	journal	of	philosophy	–	issn	 - 	 n.	 	/	 	–	rhythm,	chaos	and	nonpulsed	man	 	 	 jazz	music.	as	such,	bland	places	affect	as	the	central	building	block	of	a	politics	that	cul- minates	in	a	critical	race	theory	extracted	from	form,	harmony,	melody	and	rhythm.		 as	an	affective	politics,	the	cry	of	jazz	begins	with	affect	as	a	political	voice	manifested	 through	«the	negro’s	cry	of	joy	and	suffering»	(hill,	kennedy	&	bland	 ).	within	the	 affects	of	 joy	and	suffering,	black	survival	within	a	white	supremacy	depends	on	the	 successful	navigation	between	dangers	while	simultaneously	holding	on	to	the	underlying	 joy	of	life.	according	to	the	protagonist	alex,	because	«a	negro	is	potentially	capable	of	 experiencing	everything	that	all	americans	experience	plus	negros	have	to	go	through	the	 hazard	of	being	negro,»	the	cry	of	joy	and	suffering	«resides	in	having	to	accept	all	the	 hazards	of	being	negro	and	simultaneously	to	triumph	over	these	hazards»	(hill,	kennedy	 and	bland	 ).	as	such,	through	an	affective	challenge	to	white	supremacy	in	the	form	 of	music,	«jazz	is	the	musical	expression	of	the	triumph	of	the	negro	spirit»	(hill,	kennedy	 and	bland	 ).	although	the	interlocution	begins	with	the	assertion	of	black	affect,	«the	 cry	 of	 joy	 and	 suffering,»	 jazz	 as	 a	 theoretical	 device	 moves	 to	 contradiction	 and	 resolution.		 bland’s	critical	theory	is	based	in	a	hegelian	dialectic	that	begins	with	opposition,	an	 identity	and	negation,	between	the	restraint	of	black	people	and	the	inherent	freedom	of	 the	black	spirit.	the	protagonist	alex	states	that	«the	negro	cry	of	joy	and	suffering	in	jazz	 is	based	on	a	contradiction	…	between	freedom	and	restraint»	(hill,	kennedy	&	bland	 ).	the	two	moments	of	freedom	and	restraint	within	the	dialectic	form	the	backdrop	 of	bland’s	theory	of	jazz	as	a	critical	theory	of	black	liberation,	and	as	such,	require	eluci- dation	as	hegel’s	master-slave	dialectic	(hegel	 :	 - ),	i.e.	dialektik	der	herr	und	 knecht.	within	this	dialectic,	«melodic	presentation	and	rhythmic	conflict	are	the	joyful	 freeing	and	present	oriented	aspects	of	jazz	while	form	and	the	changes	are	the	suffering	 restraining	and	futureless	aspects	of	jazz»	(hill,	kennedy	&	bland	 ).	 first,	bland	characterizes	restraint	in	the	form	and	the	harmonies	of	jazz,	otherwise	 known	as	the	chorus	and	the	changes.	this	restraint	in	jazz	is	connected	directly	to	the	 affect	of	suffering	and	becomes	the	experience	of	the	futureless	future.	the	restraint	and	 restriction	forced	by	white	supremacy	onto	black	people	becomes	a	repetition	of	every- day	suffering.	at	this	moment	of	the	dialectic,	bland	demonstrates	the	musical	reflection	 of	the	first	moment	of	slavery	within	hegel’s	master-slave	dialectic.	the	restraint	of	white	 supremacy	becomes	a	mode	of	control	and	domination	that	 finds	musical	expression	 within	the	cycles	of	the	musical	form	and	harmonies.	the	basic	musical	form	of	jazz	hap- pens	through	the	chorus,	most	often	consisting	of	 	bars,	which	«repeats	itself	endlessly	 without	getting	anywhere»	(hill,	kennedy	&	bland	 ).	within	the	chorus,	structure	is	 based	around	a	particular	set	of	materials	and	their	patterns,	i.e.	harmonies,	of	which	«the	 jazz	man	calls	them	changes»	(hill,	kennedy	&	bland	 ).		 where	the	chorus	as	form	develops	the	cycle	of	repetition,	the	changes	structure	a	pat- tern	that	«is	repeated	over	and	over»	(hill,	kennedy	&	bland	 ).	alex	explains	that	 la	deleuziana	–	online	journal	of	philosophy	–	issn	 - 	 n.	 	/	 	–	rhythm,	chaos	and	nonpulsed	man	 	 	 «the	two	restraining	elements	in	jazz	are	the	form	and	the	changes…	[which]	are	restrain- ing	because	of	their	endless	repetition»,	and	as	an	endless	repetition,	the	chorus	and	 changes	are	«a	reflection	of	a	denial	of	the	future	to	the	negro	in	the	american	way	of	life»	 (hill,	kennedy	&	bland	 ).	thus,	the	restraint	of	black	people	is	explicit	within	jazz	 form,	according	to	alex,	for	just	as	jazz	is	an	endless	repetition	as	a	reflection	of	the	affect	 suffering,	«the	negro	experiences	the	endless	daily	humiliation	of	american	life	which	be- queaths	him	a	futureless	future»	(hill,	kennedy	&	bland	 ).		 second,	bland	argues	that	freedom	is	expressed	through	improvisation	and	electrifica- tion,	otherwise	known	as	melody	and	rhythm.	at	this	moment	of	the	dialectic,	bland	con- structs	the	liberation	theory	inherent	within	jazz	where	freedom	reigns	despite	the	re- straining	power	of	white	supremacy.	this	freedom	in	jazz	is	connected	to	the	affect	of	joy	 as	a	resistance	to	the	futureless	future	of	the	repetition	of	suffering.	like	hegel’s	master- slave	dialectic	(hegel	 :	 - ),	through	the	realization	of	freedom	within	the	con- fines	of	restraint,	 the	 jazz	musician	realizes	themselves	as	potentially	 free	within	the	 rhythms	and	improvisations	of	everyday	suffering.	both	of	these	facets	of	jazz	are	ana- lyzed	separately.	 on	the	one	hand,	regarding	improvisation,	alex	states	that	as	an	«eternal	recreation	of	 the	present…	new	ideas	are	born	by	improvising	through	the	restraints	of	the	form	and	 the	changes»	(hill,	kennedy	&	bland	 ).	alex	continues	his	explanation	to	his	interloc- utors,	«melody	is	one	element	that	can	be	used	in	improvisation…	through	elaborating	on	 various	details	of	the	changes».	thus,	where	the	chorus	and	changes	represent	the	suffer- ing	and	humiliation	of	 the	futureless	 future,	 this	repetition	provides	a	space	through	 which	the	soloist	can	create	freely	in	the	present	melodies	that	are	unbound	by	the	repe- tition.	as	such,	improvisation	allows	for	cracks	within	the	restraining	present	to	break	 open	into	the	potentialities	of	a	future	unbound.	accordingly,	«the	negro	as	man	and	or	 jazz	man	must	be	constantly	created	for	that	is	how	he	remains	free,»	for	without	this	 constant	freeing	creation,	«the	dehumanizing	portrait	america	has	drawn	of	him	will	tri- umph»	(hill,	kennedy	&	bland	 ).	 on	the	other	hand,	regarding	rhythm,	alex	states	that	«for	the	negro	each	present	mo- ment	must	be	electric	full	of	meaning	and	seething	with	life…	[of	which]	rhythm	electrifies	 each	present	moment	in	jazz».	alex	continues	that	«this	electrification	is	born	of	the	con- flict	of	 two	 types	of	 rhythm	which	exist	simultaneously	 in	nearly	every	bar	of	 jazz…	 namely	one	of	stress	and	one	of	swing	[that]	is	characteristic	of	negro	music	all	over	the	 world»	(hill,	kennedy	&	bland	 ).	the	conflict	is	thus	on	the	stress	of	the	down	beat	 and	the	swing	of	the	polyrhythms	crossing	through	the	cadence.	together,	the	stress	and	 swing	or	the	cadence	and	polyrhythm,	the	restraint	of	the	chorus	is	cut	through	by	the	 freedom	of	the	music,	and	hence	«the	american	negro	produces	an	oblique	musical	prod- uct	and	a	damaging	commentary	on	the	human	wastelands	of	america»	(hill,	kennedy	&	 bland	 ).	in	just	this	way,	the	restraint	of	white	supremacy	is	challenged	and	the	mu- sician	begins	a	liberation	movement.	 la	deleuziana	–	online	journal	of	philosophy	–	issn	 - 	 n.	 	/	 	–	rhythm,	chaos	and	nonpulsed	man	 	 	 ed	bland’s	critical	race	theory	of	jazz	can	be	summed	up	as	first	and	foremost,	a	musical	 representation	of	an	affective	politics	of	joy	and	suffering.	here,	joy	and	suffering	arises	 as	an	expression	of	the	restraint	and	freedom	of	black	phenomenology	inherent	within	 the	context	of	american	society.	restraint	as	suffering	is	expressed	as	a	futureless	future	 through	the	chorus	and	the	changes,	i.e.	the	form	and	harmonies.	freedom	as	joy	is	ex- pressed	as	a	celebration	of	the	present	through	improvisation	and	swing,	i.e.	the	melodies	 and	rhythms.	altogether,	 the	expression	of	 joy	and	suffering	becomes	a	critical	 force	 against	white	supremacist	domination	and	oppression	of	black	people	through	the	musi- cal	theory	of	jazz.	however,	as	will	become	apparent,	these	moments	of	the	dialectic	are	 portrayed	within	an	affective	politics	of	difference	and	repetition.	bland’s	film	provides	 an	aesthetic	analysis	of	jazz	music	that	is	echoed	in	the	work	of	deleuze.	bland	has	alex	 sum	this	theory	up:	 	 melodic	presentation	and	rhythmic	conflict	are	the	joyful	freeing	and	present	ori- ented	aspects	of	jazz	while	form	and	the	changes	are	the	suffering	restraining	and	 futureless	aspects	of	jazz…	negro	life	then	as	created	through	jazz	is	a	contradiction	 between	worship	of	the	present	freedom	and	joy	and	the	realization	of	the	futureless	 future	restraint	and	suffering	which	the	american	way	of	life	has	bestowed	upon	the	 negro.	the	cry	of	joy	and	suffering	in	jazz	is	then	based	on	the	ever	present	contra- diction	between	freedom	and	restraint.	the	feeling	of	freedom	is	based	on	the	negro’s	 view	of	what	life	in	america	should	be	while	the	feeling	of	restraint	is	based	on	the	 actual	inhuman	situation	in	which	the	negro	finds	himself.	(hill,	kennedy	and	bland	 )	 	 	 deleuze’s	difference	and	repetition	as	jazz	theory	 	 bland’s	elucidation	of	jazz	music	as	a	contradiction	of	freedom	and	restraint	acts	as	 dialectical	concepts	that	provide	an	expression	of	and	movement	toward	black	liberation.	 these	concepts	find	a	correlate	in	gilles	deleuze’s	concepts	of	difference	and	repetition.	 like	bland’s	concepts	of	freedom	and	restraint,	difference	and	repetition	signify	the	rela- tionship	between	improvisation	and	rhythm	on	the	one	side	and	form	and	harmonies	on	 the	other.	to	grasp	this	transformation	of	philosophy	from	identity	to	difference	and	from	 cycle	to	repetition	requires	an	analysis	of	the	ways	in	which	deleuze	uses	these	words	as	 critique.	according	to	deleuze,	his	concepts	of	difference	and	repetition	are	formed	as	an	 anti-hegelian	critique	of	the	dialectical	philosophy	through	which	deleuze	connects	di- rectly	his	concepts	to	hegel’s.	however,	like	marx’s	turning	of	hegel	on	his	head,	deleuze	 reworks	hegel’s	concepts	as	a	critique.	explaining	the	terms	difference	and	repetition,	 deleuze	states,	«difference	and	repetition	have	taken	the	place	of	[hegel’s	dialectical	con- cepts]	 identical	 and	 the	 negative,	 of	 identity	 and	 contradiction»	 (deleuze	 :	 ix).	 deleuze	focuses	how	hegel	in	his	dialectic	placed	identity	and	contradiction	at	the	center	 la	deleuziana	–	online	journal	of	philosophy	–	issn	 - 	 n.	 	/	 	–	rhythm,	chaos	and	nonpulsed	man	 	 	 of	his	philosophy,	and	it	is	at	this	place	in	hegel	that	deleuze	realizes	difference	as	a	fun- damental	difficulty	within	dialectical	theory	as	such.	deleuze	further	notes	that	although	 negation	implies	difference,	the	primacy	of	identity	«defines	the	world	of	representation»,	 «modern	thought	is	born	of	the	failure	of	representation»,	and	just	as	«man	did	not	sur- vive	god	[…]	the	identity	of	the	subject	[did	not]	survive	substance»	(deleuze	 :	ix).	 together,	difference	and	repetition	provide	a	deep	insight	into	how	a	dialectical	philoso- phy	fundamentally	fails,	and	this	failure	connects	to	the	concepts	provided	by	bland	of	 freedom	and	restraint.	 first,	repetition	has	two	opposing	forms,	a	false	form	grasped	through	cyclic	movement	 and	a	true	form	grasped	through	the	freedom	inherent	within	the	repetition	(parr	 ).	 these	two	forms	have	their	correlates	within	bland’s	theory.	on	the	hand,	there	is	the	 cyclical	repetition	of	jazz	music,	the	repeating	chorus	and	changes	that	give	jazz	its	re- straining	quality.	as	cited	by	bland,	this	form	of	repetition	is	restraining	in	that	it	forces	 life	into	a	cyclical	pattern	that	never	goes	anywhere.	repetition	in	this	light	also	forms	the	 basis	for	the	continuing	suffering	of	the	futureless	future	where	no	matter	how	much	time	 passes	the	possibility	of	change	is	precluded.	in	jazz	music,	this	is	expressed	through	the	 chorus	and	the	changes,	in	white	supremacy,	this	is	expressed	through	«the	endless	daily	 humiliation	of	american	life	which	bequeaths	him	a	futureless	future»	(hill,	kennedy	&	 bland	 ).	this	form	of	cyclical	action	is	representative	of	the	hegelian	account	of	his- tory	(hegel	 ),	perhaps	best	expressed	through	the	neoliberal	post-structuralism	of	 frances	fukuyama	( ):	we	are	at	the	end	of	history.	and	yet,	on	the	other	hand,	repe- tition	provides	an	opposing	force	through	which	life	expresses	the	eternal	return.	accord- ing	to	deleuze,	there	is	something	missed	within	the	cyclical	view	of	repetition	that	misses	 an	essential	aspect	of	the	nietzschean	and	kierkegaardian	critique	of	the	dialectic.	listing	 the	similarities	between	the	two	in	their	critiques	of	the	hegelian	dialectic,	deleuze	lists	 «the	principal	propositions	[of	nietzsche	and	kierkegaard]	which	indicate	the	points	on	 which	they	coincide:»	 	 . make	something	new	of	repetition	itself:	connect	it	with	a	test,	with	a	selec- tion	or	selective	test;	make	it	the	supreme	object	of	the	will	and	of	freedom.		 . in	consequence,	oppose	repetition	to	the	laws	of	nature.	kierkegaard	de- clares	that	he	does	not	speak	at	all	of	repetition	in	nature,	of	cycles	and	seasons,	ex- changes	and	equalities.	 . oppose	repetition	to	moral	law,	to	the	point	where	it	becomes	the	suspen- sion	of	ethics,	a	thought	beyond	good	and	evil.	 . oppose	repetition	not	only	to	the	generalities	of	habit	but	also	to	the	partic- ularities	of	memory	[bullet	points	added	to	quotation].	(deleuze	 :	 )	 	 these	four	points	common	between	nietzsche	and	kierkegaard	demonstrate	a	deep	 connection	between	the	two	forms	of	repetition	on	the	one	side	and	freedom	and	restraint	 la	deleuziana	–	online	journal	of	philosophy	–	issn	 - 	 n.	 	/	 	–	rhythm,	chaos	and	nonpulsed	man	 	 	 on	the	other.	for	nietzsche	and	kierkegaard,	according	to	deleuze,	repetition	is	not	cycli- cal:	for	nietzsche,	repetition	liberates	«the	will	from	everything	which	binds	it	by	making	 repetition	the	very	object	of	willing»,	and	for	kierkegaard,	repetition	«is	rather	a	matter	 of	acting,	of	making	repetition	as	such	a	novelty;	that	is,	a	freedom	and	a	task	of	freedom»,	 (deleuze	 :	 ).	it	is	exactly	this	liberation	in	repetition	described	through	the	nie- tzschean	will	and	the	kierkegaardian	freedom	that	bland	is	describing	in	his	analysis	of	 the	cry	of	joy	through	improvisation	and	rhythm.	although	appearing	cyclical,	jazz	music	 becomes	continually	created	anew.	thus,	the	restraining	aspects	and	the	freeing	aspects	 of	jazz	both	require	the	repetition	in	order	to	move	and	affect	the	listener.	at	this	point,	 deleuze	and	bland’s	theories	converge	as	two	different	but	related	concepts	of	repetition:	 cyclical	repetition	as	restraint	and	repetition	as	will	and	freedom.	 the	second	concept	of	repetition	as	will	and	freedom	requires	difference	in	order	for	 the	listener	to	register	and	the	present	to	be	created	anew.	hence,	second,	difference	too	 has	two	distinct	forms,	namely	difference	from	the	same	and	difference	over	time	(parr	 ).	these	two	forms	of	difference	play	heavily	within	deleuze’s	conception	of	repeti- tion	as	a	mode	of	will	and	freedom	and	likewise	demonstrate	bland’s	concept	of	freedom	 as	the	continuous	creation	anew	within	the	futureless	future.	to	begin	with,	difference	 from	the	same	provides	the	freedom	inherent	within	jazz	with	space	for	improvisations	 and	counter-rhythmic	swing.	in	this	sense,	countering	the	restraining	repetition	of	cycli- cal	chorus	and	changes,	difference	from	the	same	is	connected	to	bland’s	concept	of	free- dom	in	jazz.	however,	contrary	to	bland’s	concept,	difference	from	the	same	is	the	defin- ing	characteristic	of	otherness	and	as	such	is	necessary	for	the	implementation	of	white	 domination	and	oppression	over	black	people	within	american	society.	in	this	way,	dif- ference	becomes	the	fulcrum	point	of	the	enactment	of	the	futureless	future.	as	such,	dif- ference	from	the	same	becomes	the	mode	of	oppression	and	domination	while	simultane- ously	becoming	the	mode	through	which	will	and	freedom	takes	shape.	this	is	in	exact	 contradiction	to	the	hegelian	notion	of	identity	and	negation	as	contradictory	elements.	 deleuze	writes:	 	 there	is	a	false	profundity	in	conflict,	but	underneath	conflict,	the	space	of	the	play	of	 differences.	the	negative	is	the	image	of	difference,	but	a	flattened	and	inverted	im- age,	like	the	candle	in	the	eye	of	the	ox	-	the	eye	of	the	dialectician	dreaming	of	a	futile	 combat?...	it	is	not	difference	which	presupposes	opposition	but	opposition	which	 presupposes	difference,	and	far	from	resolving	difference	by	tracing	it	back	to	a	foun- dation,	opposition	betrays	and	distorts	it.	our	claim	is	not	only	that	difference	in	itself	 is	not	‘already’	contradiction,	but	that	it	cannot	be	reduced	or	traced	back	to	contra- diction,	since	the	latter	is	not	more	but	less	profound	than	difference.	on	what	condi- tion	is	difference	traced	or	projected	on	to	a	flat	space?	precisely	when	it	has	been	 forced	into	a	previously	established	identity,	when	it	has	been	placed	on	the	slope	of	 the	identical	which	makes	it	reflect	or	desire	identity,	and	necessarily	takes	it	where	 identity	wants	it	to	go	–	namely,	into	the	negative.	(deleuze	 :	 )	 la	deleuziana	–	online	journal	of	philosophy	–	issn	 - 	 n.	 	/	 	–	rhythm,	chaos	and	nonpulsed	man	 	 	 next,	difference	over	time	is	ever	present	in	jazz	music	as	the	cyclical	repetition	of	the	 chorus	and	the	changes	appear	to	never	go	anywhere,	always	returning	to	the	same	point,	 but	develops	the	space	through	which	the	movements	of	melody	and	rhythm	find	creation	 anew.	within	jazz	music,	the	chorus	and	changes	repeat,	however,	through	time	there	is	a	 clearly	marked	difference	through	the	chorus	to	the	improvisation.	here,	the	chorus	tran- sitions	from	a	standard	 	bar	pattern	to	improvisation	over	the	 	bar	pattern.	the	dis- tinction	within	the	arrangement	is	felt	by	the	listener	through	a	perceived	resolution	 within	the	appearance	of	cyclical	repetition,	but	this	becomes	differentiated	by	the	tran- sition	from	restraint	in	repetition	to	freedom	in	repetition	by	way	of	the	difference	of	im- provisation	time	over	the	chorus.	however,	as	asserted	by	bland,	the	repetition	cyclical	 appearance	of	the	song	is	«a	reflection	of	a	denial	of	the	future	to	the	negro	in	the	ameri- can	way	of	life»	(hill,	kennedy	&	bland	 ).	hence,	although	freedom	and	restraint	are	 simultaneously	present	within	the	difference	and	repetition	of	the	music,	the	cry	of	joy	 and	suffering	as	affective	expression	through	repetition	and	difference	over	time	is	forced	 into	a	stalemate.	even	through	difference	in	time,	jazz	remains	a	mimesis	of	the	futureless	 future	wherein	the	domination	and	oppression	of	black	people	is	expressed	as	both	the	 cry	of	joy	and	the	cry	of	suffering	simultaneously.	the	difference	over	time	of	the	chorus	 through	improvisation	and	rhythm	becomes	a	corpse.	as	stated	by	alex	in	the	film,	«jazz	 is	dead».	and	yet,	from	the	corpse	of	jazz,	a	body	without	organs	provides	a	mode	of	be- coming	through	a	deleuzian	difference	and	repetition.	 	 	 the	jazz	corpse	and	the	body	without	organs	 	 bland	develops	a	critical	race	theory	of	jazz	through	black	critique	of	white	supremacy	 and	the	impossibility	of	the	future	of	jazz	leading	to	bland’s	provocative	thesis	that	«jazz	 is	dead».	these	moments	within	the	film	establish	a	frame	for	analysis	of	race,	aesthetics	 and	liberation	through	a	dialectical	analysis	of	contradiction,	confrontation	and	the	fu- ture.	alex	explains	that	«the	inherent	reasons	for	the	death	of	jazz	center	around	the	re- straining	elements	of	jazz…	[i.e.]	the	form	and	the	changes:	if	any	efforts	are	made	to	de- velop	the	form	and/or	the	changes	the	swing	and/or	the	spirit	of	jazz	is	lost»	(hill,	ken- nedy	&	bland	 ).	following	from	this	statement,	jazz	is	dead	for	three	primary	rea- sons:	first,	«the	changes	cannot	evolve	and	retain	the	form»,	second	«the	form	cannot	 evolve	and	retain	the	swing»,	and	third	«both	the	form	and	the	changes	cannot	evolve	 simultaneously	and	have	jazz»	(hill,	kennedy	and	bland	 ).	if	any	one	of	these	were	 to	change,	jazz	would	not	be	jazz.	furthermore,	just	like	the	futureless	future	of	black	peo- ple	in	america,	jazz	can	also	have	no	future	and	cannot	change.	the	cyclical	repetition	thus	 becomes	the	telling	of	the	same	story	of	joy	and	suffering	over	and	over	of	black	domina- tion	and	oppression	where	jazz’	«dead	body	stands	as	a	monument	to	the	negro	who’s	 supposed	to	die	in	the	american	scheme	of	things:	any	attempts	to	develop	the	form	or	 la	deleuziana	–	online	journal	of	philosophy	–	issn	 - 	 n.	 	/	 	–	rhythm,	chaos	and	nonpulsed	man	 	 	 changes	of	jazz	gives	us	only	a	circular	seesaw,	a	circular	seesaw	which	leads	america	or	 the	negro	nowhere»	(hill,	kennedy	&	bland	 ).	it	can	only	repeat	the	form	and	changes	 that	are	already	developed.		 the	result	of	jazz’	inability	to	progress	outside	of	the	perpetual	creation	of	the	present	 within	a	futureless	future	is	that	jazz	is	dead.	and	the	repetition	of	the	futureless	future	 becomes	the	ultimate	fate	of	both	jazz	and	black	people	unless	a	shift	is	made	to	the	amer- ican	way	of	life.	bland	states	that	«jazz	is	dead	because	in	a	way	the	strangling	image	of	a	 futureless	future	has	made	the	negro	a	dead	thing	too	[and]	the	negro	can	only	become	 alive	by	the	construction	of	america’s	future»	(hill,	kennedy	&	bland	 ).	in	this	way,	 the	death	of	jazz	is	connected	to	the	recreation	of	life	for	black	america:	from	the	jazz	 body	comes	a	revolt	against	american	domination	and	oppression	of	black	people.	as	a	 correlate	to	bland’s	critical	race	theory	of	jazz,	deleuze	and	guattari	propose	becoming	a	 body	without	organs	in	order	to	empower	the	capacity	for	perpetual	creation.	in	logic	of	 sense	(deleuze	 ),	anti-oedipus	(deleuze	&	guattari	 )	and	then	in	a	thousand	 plateaus	(deleuze	&	guattari	 ),	the	body	without	organs	is	defined	as	arising	through	 the	spinozean	theory	of	affect.	as	shall	become	apparent,	this	connection	of	affect	to	the	 body	without	organs	also	forms	a	similar	concept	to	the	futureless	future	of	jazz	within	 the	cry	of	joy	and	suffering.		 according	to	brian	massumi,	deleuze	and	guattari	posit	that		 	 neither	[affect	nor	affection]	denotes	a	personal	feeling	(sentiment	in	deleuze	and	 guattari)…	[but	rather	à	la	spinoza]	is	an	ability	to	affect	and	be	affected…	[as]	a	 prepersonal	intensity	corresponding	to	the	passage	from	one	experiential	state	of	the	 body	to	another	and	implying	an	augmentation	or	diminution	in	that	body's	capacity	 to	act.	(massumi	 :	xvi)	 	 massumi	continues	that	«l’affection	(spinoza’s	affectio)	is	each	such	state	considered	 as	an	encounter	between	the	affected	body	and	a	second,	affecting,	body	(with	body	taken	 in	its	broadest	possible	sense	to	include	“mental”	or	ideal	bodies)»	(massumi	 :	xvi).	 the	jazz	body	is	no	different	in	that	it	holds	the	capacity	to	affect	and	to	be	affected.	in	this	 sense,	the	cry	of	joy	and	suffering,	although	affective	as	sentiment	also	represents	a	body	 that	can	be	affected	and	can	affect	american	society.	it	is	exactly	this	requirement	that	 must	be	met	in	order	for	the	spirit	of	jazz	to	survive	the	death	of	jazz.	and	yet,	there	is	a	 further	requirement	for	the	spirit	of	jazz	to	survive:	america’s	future	must	be	constructed	 by	black	people.	in	order	to	get	from	here	to	there,	jazz	must	become	the	body	without	 organs.	 what	is	the	body	without	organs?	the	concept	originates	in	the	writing	of	antonin	ar- taud	who	stated	that	«we	must	make	up	our	minds	to	strip	him	bare	in	order	to	scrape	off	 that	animalcule	that	itches	him	mortally,	god,	and	with	god	his	organs…	when	you	will	 have	made	him	a	body	without	organs,	then	you	will	have	delivered	him	from	all	his	au- tomatic	reactions	and	restored	him	to	his	true	freedom»	(artaud	 ).	from	this	final	 la	deleuziana	–	online	journal	of	philosophy	–	issn	 - 	 n.	 	/	 	–	rhythm,	chaos	and	nonpulsed	man	 	 	 piece	by	artaud,	deleuze	and	guattari	develop	a	theory	of	liberation	wherein	becoming	a	 body	without	organs	disengages	the	body	from	the	imprisoning	confines	of	modernity.	a	 body	without	organs	is	a	body	of	pure	affect	wherein	the	capacity	to	affect	and	be	affected	 take	on	a	drive	to	both	destroy	and	create	anew,	to	affect	the	world	and	to	be	affected	 without	restraint.	deleuze	and	guattari	explain	that	in	order	to	become	a	body	without	 organs,	 	 lodge	yourself	on	a	stratum,	experiment	with	the	opportunities	it	offers,	find	an	ad- vantageous	place	on	it,	find	potential	movements	of	deterritorialization,	possible	lines	 of	flight,	experience	them,	produce	flow	conjunctions	here	and	there,	try	out	continua	 of	intensities	segment	by	segment,	have	a	small	plot	of	new	land	at	all	times	[because]	 it	is	through	a	meticulous	relation	with	the	strata	that	one	succeeds	in	freeing	lines	of	 flight,	causing	conjugated	flows	to	pass	and	escape	and	bringing	forth	continuous	in- tensities	for	a	bwo.	(deleuze	&	guattari	 :	 )	 	 through	the	body	without	organs,	jazz	can	die	while	simultaneously	enlivening	the	 spirit	of	black	critique.	writing	in	 ,	felix	guattari	makes	a	very	similar	point	about	 jazz	which	relates	it	back	to	the	body	without	organs:	 	 jazz,	for	example,	is	simultaneously	nourished	by	its	african	genealogy	and	by	its	re- actualizations	in	multiple	and	heterogeneous	forms.	as	long	as	it	is	alive	it	will	be	like	 that.	but	like	any	autopoietic	machine,	it	can	die	for	want	of	sustenance	or	drift	to- wards	destinies	which	make	it	a	stranger	to	itself.	here	then	is	an	entity,	an	incorpo- real	ecosystem,	whose	being	is	not	guaranteed	from	the	outside;	one	which	lives	in	 symbiosis	with	the	alterity	it	itself	contributes	to	engendering;	which	is	threatened	 with	disappearance	if	its	machinic	essence	is	damaged	by	accident	–	the	good	and	the	 bad	encounters	between	jazz	and	rock	–	or	when	its	enunciative	consistency	is	below	 a	certain	threshold.	it	is	not	an	object	“given”	in	extrinsic	coordinates	but	an	assem- blage	of	subjectivation	giving	meaning	and	value	to	determinate	existential	territo- ries.	this	assemblage	has	to	work	in	order	to	live,	to	processualise	itself	with	the	sin- gularities	which	strike	it.	all	this	implies	the	idea	of	a	necessary	creative	practice	and	 even	an	ontological	pragmatics.	it	is	being’s	new	ways	of	being	which	create	rhythms,	 forms,	colours	and	the	intensities	of	dance.	nothing	happens	of	itself.	everything	has	 to	continually	begin	again	from	zero,	at	the	point	of	chaosmic	emergence:	the	power	 of	eternal	return	to	the	nascent	state.	(guattari	 :	 - )	 	 guattari	points	out	that	jazz	can	live	or	die	depending	on	how	it	is	nourished.	if	nour- ished	through	the	black	experience	and	reactualizations,	then	jazz,	according	to	guattari	 will	flourish,	but	if	it	is	alienated	from	the	black	experience	and	reactualization,	then	jazz	 will	die.	this	point	strikes	a	chord	with	bland.	it	is	exactly	this	that	bland	is	saying.	the	 question	becomes,	how	then	can	jazz	reactualize	itself?	according	to	bland,	this	can	only	 happen	through	construction	of	a	new	future.	jazz	cannot	survive	the	futureless	future	in	 la	deleuziana	–	online	journal	of	philosophy	–	issn	 - 	 n.	 	/	 	–	rhythm,	chaos	and	nonpulsed	man	 	 	 its	form,	but	it	can	survive	in	spirit:	«jazz	is	dead	because	the	restraints	and	suffering	of	 the	negro	have	to	die;	jazz	is	alive	because	the	negro	spirit	must	endure»	(hill,	kennedy	 &	bland	 ).	«jazz	is	dead	because	in	a	way	the	strangling	image	of	a	futureless	future	 has	made	the	negro	a	dead	thing	too»,	however,	it	can	«become	alive	by	[black	people’s]	 construction	of	america’s	future»	(hill,	kennedy	&	bland	 ).	bland	is	asserting	that	 unless	jazz	takes	on	a	reactualization	of	black	power	in	america,	then	the	spirit	of	jazz	 cannot	survive.	through	this	reactualization,	bland	makes	a	statement	that	is	in	line	with	 the	body	without	organs:	the	pieces	making	up	the	corpse	of	jazz	must	be	discardedand	 the	body	must	be	filled	with	pure	affective	intensity.	jazz	is	dead,	but	the	war	machine	 that	energized	its	body	moves	on	in	directions	untold	leading	to	the	total	annihilation	of	 white	supremacy	and	the	recreation	of	america.	together,	the	cry	of	joy	and	suffering	cuts	 through	the	restraining	cyclical	rhythms	of	white	supremacy	with	the	freedom	of	the	body	 without	organs.	 	 	 conclusion	 	 reframing	bland’s	critical	race	theory	of	jazz	as	a	deleuzian	difference	and	repetition	 and	as	a	deleuzo-guattarian	body	without	organs	poses	an	important	question	regarding	 the	place	and	function	of	the	present	within	the	process	of	futurism.	shall	the	future	be	 abandoned	as	the	eternal	present	of	oppression	and	domination	leaving	only	room	for	 attempts	at	survival	through	counter-rhythm	and	improvisation?	or	shall	the	death	of	jazz	 fill	the	void	for	an	eternal	return	and	by	extension	become	a	non-pulsed	future	that	ex- plodes	the	pulsing	rhythms	and	cyclical	repetitions	of	modernity?	when	bland	directed	 and	produced	his	film	with	nelam	hill	and	mark	kennedy,	jazz	music	was	at	the	cusp	of	 the	 s	black	movements	that	changed	the	face	of	america.	it	was	this	that	marked	its	 death.	through	the	mourning	process,	american	broke	with	the	tradition	of	allowing	the	 cyclical	repetition	to	continue	without	protest.	however,	the	death	of	jazz	remains	unre- solved	and	the	stench	of	the	corpse	continues	to	fill	the	air	as	its	organs	bloat.	since	the	 s,	the	rise	of	hip	hop	culture	provided	some	reprieve	from	the	repetition	cycle.	and	 yet,	hip	hop	has	also	become	commodified	in	the	same	way	that	was	jazz.		 today,	in	 ,	america	is	at	the	cusp	of	a	new	becoming.	faced	with	the	cyclical	rep- etition	of	police	violence,	the	rise	of	white	nationalism	and	the	regrowth	of	political	au- thoritarianism,	the	message	of	bland	rings	a	new	discordant	harmony	over	forms	of	life.	 beginning	in	with	the	acquittal	of	george	zimmerman	in	the	fatal	shooting	of	black	youth	 trayvon	martin,	america	is	faced	with	a	new	rise	of	energy	against	white	supremacy.	this	 energy	took	on	a	powerful	momentum	with	the	protests	following	the	fatal	police	shoot- ing	of	michael	brown	in	ferguson	missouri	and	the	strangling	of	eric	garner	in	new	york	 city.	the	hashtag	#blacklivesmatter	became	a	rallying	cry	in	protests	across	the	us	in	 la	deleuziana	–	online	journal	of	philosophy	–	issn	 - 	 n.	 	/	 	–	rhythm,	chaos	and	nonpulsed	man	 	 	 revolt	against	«the	endless	daily	humiliation	of	american	life	which	bequeaths	[black	peo- ple]	a	futureless	future»	(hill,	kennedy	&	bland	 ).	here,	within	these	protests,	the	 death	of	jazz	is	remembered	through	the	endless	repetitions	of	domination	and	oppres- sion,	of	white	supremacy	and	of	colonization.	however,	as	the	spirit	jazz	can	«become	 alive	by	[black	people’s]	construction	of	america’s	future»	(hill,	kennedy	&	bland	 ),	 black	lives	matter	becomes	the	resurrection	of	the	spirit	of	jazz.	here,	the	construction	of	 a	new	future	becomes	the	body	without	organs,	and	the	cry	of	joy	and	suffering	of	jazz	 becomes	the	anger	and	rage	of	revolt.	 	 	 	 bibliography	 	 artaud,	a.	( ).	“to	have	done	with	the	judgement	of	god”.	in	selected	writings,	(trans.	 by	h.	weaver,	ed.	by	s.	sontag).	new	york,	ny:	farrar,	straus	and	giroux.	 barnes,	m.	( ).	“‘empire	strikes	back’,	‘airplane!’	among	 	movies	named	to	national	 film	 registry”.	 the	 hollywood	 reporter,	 december	 ,	 .	 retrieved	 from:	 https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/empire-strikes-airplane- -movies- 	 bland,	 e.	 ( ).	 “the	 cry	 of	 jazz”.	 film	 culture,	 ,	 - .	 retrieved	 from:	 http://www.edblandmusic.com/filmculture .htm	 deleuze,	g.	( ).	difference	and	repetition.	(trans.	by	p.	patton).	new	york,	ny:	colum- bia	university	press.	 deleuze,	g.	( ).	the	logic	of	sense.	(ed.	by	c.v.	boundas,	trans.	by	m.	lester	&	c.	sti- vale).	new	york,	ny:	columbia	university	press.	 deleuze,	g.,	&	guattari,	f.	( ).	anti-oedipus.	(trans.	by	r.	hurley,	m.	seem	&	h.r.	lane).	 new	york,	ny:	viking	press.	 deleuze,	g.,	&	guattari,	f.	( ).	a	thousand	plateaus.	(trans.	by	b.	massumi).	minneap- olis,	mn:	university	of	minnesota	press.	 fukuyama,	f.	( ).	the	end	of	history	and	the	last	man.	new	york,	ny:	free	press.	 guattari,	f.	( ).	chaosmosis.	(trans.	by	p.	bains	&	j.	pefanis).	bloomington	and	indian- apolis,	in:	indiana	university	press.	 hegel,	 g.w.f.	 ( ).	 the	 phenomenology	 of	 spirit.	 (trans.	 by	 a.v.	 miller,	 ed.	 by	 j.n.	 findlay).	oxford:	clarendon	press.	 hegel,	g.w.f.	( ).	the	philosophy	of	history.	(trans.	by	h.b.	nisbet).	london:	cam- bridge	university	press	 hill,	n.	(producer),	kennedy,	m.	(producer),	&	bland,	e.	(producer	and	director)	( ).	 the	cry	of	jazz	[motion	picture].	anthology	film	archives.	usa.	 massumi,	b.	( ).	“translator’s	note”.	in	deleuze	and	guattari	( ),	xvi-xix.	 la	deleuziana	–	online	journal	of	philosophy	–	issn	 - 	 n.	 	/	 	–	rhythm,	chaos	and	nonpulsed	man	 	 	 parr,	a.	(ed.)	( ).	the	deleuze	dictionary	revised	edition.	edinburgh:	edinburgh	uni- versity	press.	 rogers,	m.	( ).	“in	time:	ed	bland	transcended	the	moment	with	music	and	film”.	 wax	poetics	 ,	december	 ,	 ,	 - .	retrieved	from:	https://umdrive.mem- phis.edu/ggholson/public/ed% bland-wp.pdf.	 growing food, growing a movement: how structural racism affects immigrant farmers journal of agriculture, food systems, and community development issn: - online https://www.foodsystemsjournal.org volume , issue / summer growing food, growing a movement: how structural racism affects immigrant farmers review by claire hutkins seda, migrant clinicians network * review of the new american farmer: immigration, race, and the struggle for sustainability, by laura-anne minkoff-zern. ( ). mit press. available as paperback and ebook; pages. publisher’s website: https://mitpress.mit.edu/books/new-american-farmer submitted june , / published online september , citation: seda, c. h. ( ). growing food, growing a movement: how structural racism affects immigrant farmers [book review]. journal of agriculture, food systems, and community development, ( ), – . https://doi.org/ . /jafscd. . . copyright © by the author. published by the lyson center for civic agriculture and food systems. open access under cc-by license. ost u.s. farmers and farm owners are white, while most farmworkers are latinx immi- grants. this timely book uncoils the history, insti- tutions, and politics that racialize farming in america and the growing number of immigrant farmers—primarily small-scale and mexican—who have climbed the agricultural ladder despite the crushing barriers they face. author laura-anne minkoff-zern deftly spells out the social, political, and cultural influences that built racism and anti- immigrant practices directly into the structure of american agriculture. she then enriches the picture with the stories of interviewed immigrant farm- ers who operate within this structure; excerpts from her interviews are spotlighted throughout the book. additional interviews with agricultural sup- port and outreach programs emphasize how immi- grant farmers are often excluded from start-up capital, land access, and farmers market access. the storytelling element, paired with minkoff-zern’s first-person perspectives and reactions, enliven m * claire hutkins seda is a writer focused on social and envi- ronmental issues. she is senior writer and editor for migrant clinicians network, a national nonprofit focused on health justice that creates practical solutions at the intersection of vulnerability, migration, and health. she can be reached at the migrant clinicians network; p.o. box ; austin, tx usa; cseda@migrantclinician.org journal of agriculture, food systems, and community development issn: - online https://www.foodsystemsjournal.org volume , issue / summer each chapter and extricate the book from a purely scholarly work into an engaging read on immigra- tion, race, and agriculture. the book starts off with a snapshot of immi- grant farmers in america, followed by a short pref- ace on how minkoff-zern found the farmers she interviewed, from california’s central coast, the northern neck of virginia, the “black dirt” region of new york’s hudson valley, northwestern and central washington state, and southeastern minne- sota. the second chapter, “sharecroppers, brac- eros, and ‘illegals’: racializing the agricultural ladder,” explores the links in the chain from the unfulfilled promise of “ acres and mule” after emancipation, to the bracero program, “operation wetback” and deportation, and their legacies evi- dent in “the structural conditions encouraging low- paid immigrant labor and criminalizing the people who perform it” (p. ). she then shows how structural racism perpetuates itself through poor census counts, as many immigrant farmers, perhaps due to low literacy and english proficiency or fear of exposing immigration status, decline to com- plete the census form, which in turn affects policy priorities and funding. institutions designed to support farmers rou- tinely ignore latinx immigrant farmers, as reported in the third chapter. for example, the u.s. depart- ment of agriculture (usda) was sued in the s for structurally discriminating against farmers of color, and it continues to lack consistent methods for interaction with and outreach to immigrant farmers. minkoff-zern found that farmer support networks and groups like the farm service agency often did not have staff that spoke spanish. latinx immigrant farmers, for their part, had few records of their farming practices—which is critical to applying for various programs and services. eng- lish language proficiency and literacy rates varied among farmers, erecting another potential barrier to them working with support organizations and completing paperwork. finally, many of the support programs, includ- ing from the usda, are built with large-scale farmers’ needs in mind. the mismatch in support mechanisms continues when farm products are ready for sale. minkoff-zern argues that small-scale immigrant farmers are “de-prioritized” in the grow- ing farmers market movement, shutting them out of much-needed market mechanisms like direct-to- consumer sales (p. ). in the fifth chapter, “food, identity, and agricultural practice: re-creating home through the family farm,” the farmers’ stories at last dominate the conversation instead of augmenting it, as minkoff-zern explores why, in the face of extreme racial exclusions, farmers push forward. the stories of farmers wishing to create a recuerdo, or memory, of their former agricultural lifestyles in mexico—providing healthy food for their families and communities, and reclaiming a sense of self and place after migration—enriched the picture of small-scale immigrant farming in america today. however, minkoff-zern notes that not all the farmers she interviewed fit the tidy and idyllic small-scale, diversified, low-chemical-input family farm label; some of the farmers she interviewed, mostly orchardists in washington state, operated large industrial operations. in the sixth chapter, entitled “shifting the means of production,” she also notes that those who needed to hire workers outside the family struggled with the same financial restraints that larger farms do, and even family labor “does not imply an inherently better or more equitable labor system, and by no means ensures labor justice on the farm” (p. ). it is in the sixth chapter that minkoff-zern finally approaches the legacy of colonialism, inter- national development, food policy, and globalism that forced many of these farmers off their home farms and induced them to migrate to the u.s. in the first place. this is important context that felt missing from the first half of the book. she goes on to frame a conversation about generations-long mexican small-scale farmers’ resistance to dispos- session, farmers’ love of farming, and their value of independence over profit. the seventh and final chapter of the book encourages better literacy around the social and political factors that underpin agriculture in order to address the structural racism that confronts immigrant farmers, noting that “only by looking closely at the differences in lived experiences between racialized groups of food producers, and appreciating both their race- and citizenship-based obstacles as well as their unique offerings and journal of agriculture, food systems, and community development issn: - online https://www.foodsystemsjournal.org volume , issue / summer skills, can we begin to form a new theory of agrar- ian change” (p. ). the farmer profiles provide a useful blueprint for agriculture institutions to pin- point and begin to dismantle racial disparities. at times, this book felt like a companion reader to the news. in the spring of , covid- pummeled rural america, with massive out- breaks at farms and meatpacking houses that pri- marily employ low-wage immigrant latinx workers. contradictorily, farmworkers were designated as “essential” workers, providing services that amer- ica cannot go without, while toiling in an exploita- tive system that cannot or will not provide the health and safety measures necessary to keep them safe on the job. simultaneously, beginning in may , black lives matter protests erupted in cities and towns across the u.s. in response to the killing of george floyd by police in minneapolis. the killing and the protests in response held up a mirror up for amer- icans, exposing the deep-seated racism embedded within our most basic systems. this book provides a useful backdrop for these headlines, for aca- demics and agriculture advocates alike, describing how our agricultural systems came to be and how such basic structures rigidly maintain hierarchies of class, race, and citizenship. the book also exposes the barriers that immi- grant farmworkers (not just farmers) face, includ- ing fear of exposing immigration status, deep poverty, and cultural and linguistic barriers. these help explain why, amid the coronavirus pandemic, farmworker health needs are not being met by regulatory systems, and how their ability to advo- cate for their health is stifled. the farmers profiled in this book illustrate that, contrary to the domi- nant story of agriculture and in spite of numerous barriers, some immigrant farmers are disrupting the agricultural norm, challenging its racist and classist underpinnings. their vivid stories unleash a vision of america where racist structures are superseded, and where latinx farmers’ hard work paves the way for a new, more equitable and sustainable agricultural system, which—as evidenced from current events—is much needed. 	growing food, growing a movement: how structural racism affects immigrant farmers this is the accepted version of an article first published online mar by sage in ​critical sociology​. published version available from: ​https://doi.org/ . / accepted version downloaded from soas research online: ​http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / ngos, social movements and the neoliberal state: incorporation, reinvention, critique feyzi ismail soas, university of london, uk sangeeta kamat university of massachusetts amherst, usa introduction as the global financial crisis turns a decade old, economic and political polarisation has intensified. the nature of neoliberalism as a mode of accumulation that penetrates virtually all aspects of economic, political and social life has meant that the global financial crisis is, of course, not limited to the economy. it has come to be accompanied by full-scale political and social crises in both the global north and south (cahill and konings, ; mirowski, ), and a crisis of neoliberalism itself (saad-filho, ). despite the intellectual vacuity of neoliberalism as a system capable of explaining the world, and its declining legitimacy the world over, the neoliberals themselves appear to have no alternative to neoliberalism, except authoritarianism. the question is whether the managers of the system are capable of containing the crisis – or otherwise allowing the emergence of even more reactionary, xenophobic forces to assume power – or whether the crisis will be resolved through mass opposition to the neoliberal state. a progressive opposition will include the range of social movements, trade unions and political parties, and the building of alternative institutions, throwing neoliberalism into further crisis. within this frame, what makes ngos distinct is their ambivalence: the fact that they are, on the one hand, a ‘favoured institutional form’ (kamat, : ix) of the neoliberal state and, on the other, capable of building alliances against neoliberalism, particularly in times of polarisation and crisis (beinin, ; dauvergne and lebaron, ). in a global context where ngos are subject to further subsumption as ideological weapons of the state and ‘material complicity with capital’ (choudry and kapoor, : ), and yet where there is growing class conflict and an increasing rejection of the status quo, we cannot assume their political affinities and affiliations; instead we must consider whether and how exactly they engage in oppositional politics and under what conditions. the neoliberal venture of the past four decades has been devastatingly successful in reinforcing the transfer of wealth and power from public to private, from poor to rich and from labour to capital. in the process, this phase of capitalism has brought forth deepening financialisation and commodification, intensified planetary destruction and war, including the threat of nuclear war. racism, repression and the strengthening of borders are on the rise in some contexts, with associated far-right, nationalist and authoritarian trends (ahmad, ; bruff, ; davidson and saull, ). as austerity politics have realised a renaissance and intensified neoliberal policies, one factor that has been given less attention – the wild card that has proven difficult for governments, commentators and financial markets to predict – is the popular response to austerity and persistent crisis. this is the weakness of neoliberalism: it has given rise to a generalised political consciousness, mounting research and analysis over its disastrous effects, and growing protest (bailey, ; cox and nilsen, ). at the electoral level, with the collapse of the so-called extreme centre (ali, ; anderson, ; chomsky, ) in many parts of the world, right-wing parties are on the rise, but left-wing parties are also making gains. it is in this turbulent (and in the case of trump, unrestrained) global climate that ngos are analysed. the special issue presents case studies from zimbabwe, bangladesh, nepal, india, china and the united states, contributing to an examination of processes of contestation and co-optation and providing insights into the challenges facing left struggles and social movement politics today. together, the articles advance three arguments. first, that the crisis of neoliberalism has made ngos liable to further incorporation into the neoliberal fold, whereby they occupy a structural position – through ideological and material means – of neutralising dissent. second, that an analysis of the balance of class forces in society, including the interaction between domestic politics and global geopolitics, enables an understanding of the role of ngos. finally, that where ngos dominate a particular political and social culture, the left needs a strategy for how to deal with ngos.   authoritarian states and the crackdown on ngos https://doi.org/ . / http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / this is the accepted version of an article first published online mar by sage in ​critical sociology​. published version available from: ​https://doi.org/ . / accepted version downloaded from soas research online: ​http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / if neoliberalism was a response to the working-class struggles of the post-war decades, a means of restructuring class relations, restoring the conditions for capital accumulation and reinforcing class power (harvey, ; panitch and gindin, ), then the ‘authoritarian fix’ (bruff, : ) in certain neoliberal states has partly been a response to increased resistance and aspirations for alternatives to neoliberalism and imperialism since the financial crisis. authoritarian neoliberalism has expressed itself in at least three principal ways, with palpable implications for ngos. first, the non-market institutional forms employed by the neoliberal state have often taken the guise of a reactionary nationalism, accompanied by the use of a rhetoric around opposing so-called antinational elements: the ‘terrorist threat’, corruption and the dominance of foreign ngos. the fear of economic insecurity, held by the vast masses as a result of liberalisation, has been transferred to fears around national security, which the state can control and regulate. this new incarnation of nationalism, while it plays out in different ways in different national contexts, emphasises an aggressive entrepreneurialism, mobilising populations on the basis of division and chauvinism. the donations and activities of ngos in an increasing number of countries – egypt, ethiopia, hungary, india, kenya, pakistan, poland, russia, turkey, venezuela and elsewhere – have come under greater scrutiny as they have worked to expose government misconduct. second, the reconfiguring of the state under authoritarian neoliberalism has involved the shift towards constitutional and legal mechanisms and the shift away from seeking consent (ahmad, ; bruff, ), serving to undermine democracy. the ruling classes under authoritarian neoliberalism are arguably ‘less interested in neutralizing resistance and dissent via concessions and forms of compromise that maintain their hegemony’ (bruff, : ); rather, exclusion and marginalisation of the poor, people of colour, dalits and others – including those who dissent – is legislated. ostensibly democratic institutions have further institutionalised social relations based on class power and dominant identities. there is also evidence to suggest that where governments are fighting competitive elections, the outcomes of which could risk political survival or strengthen opposition to authoritarian rule, restrictive legal mechanisms against ngos in particular have increased (dupuy et al., ). ngos are seen by authoritarian governments as part of wider civil society opposition. finally, the unpopularity of regimes imposing austerity in different forms, as a result of failures to deliver on economic promises, has led to a general crackdown on resistance and dissent. examples include outlawing spaces for protest, arbitrary arrests on spurious grounds and disproportionate responses to peaceful protest. the targeting of ngos as part of this familiar crackdown is indicative not necessarily of the progressive political orientation of ngos, but how neoliberal regimes are turning authoritarian in response to even moderate demands. in several cases, the crackdown has worked: in india, modi’s hindu nationalist government was successful in banning the ford foundation and greenpeace from continuing operations, serving to warn other ngos to fall into line. under these circumstances, ngos need a more co-ordinated and collective strategy to contest the advances of neoliberalism and authoritarianism. there are contradictory processes at work. accompanying the crackdown is the unabated growth of ngos, and both the current deployment of and crackdown on ngos by the neoliberal state demonstrates their continued relevance as vital aspects of capitalism and for stabilising the neoliberal order. on the one hand, governments have the right to scrutinise ngo funding: the use of funds for the spread of anti-communist propaganda and projects has been widely recognised and documented. with the backing of imperial powers, ngos have at times been participants in attempting to persecute, weaken or oust left-wing or previously non-aligned governments across the developing world. funding that furthers the aims of imperialism and war is perhaps the most egregious use of ngos (petras, ), and governments have the right to political control (dupuy et al., ). on the other hand, authoritarian regimes work with particular ngos that further the interests of the right, either in terms of nationalism or conservatism but almost invariably combined with austerity policies. as the centre ground attempts to reconstitute itself in response to political and social polarisation (anderson, ), those ngos that are willing to support or co-operate with authoritarian or centrist regimes, or work with corporate, financial and political elites, are consolidated. in this sense, they can be understood as forming part of the extreme centre, as it struggles to find new forms of rule (ali, ). yet where the neoliberal state vilifies ngos that are working at some level to expose the excesses of the state, and in which they avoid being instrumentalised, then ngos must be defended. the contradictory space of the ngo sector must be consistently negotiated – sometimes from within, sometimes from without – but always with the aim of trying to develop a hegemonic strategy of opposition.   ngos, social movements and the left https://doi.org/ . / http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / this is the accepted version of an article first published online mar by sage in ​critical sociology​. published version available from: ​https://doi.org/ . / accepted version downloaded from soas research online: ​http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / over the past years, as the global ngo sector has grown in size and diversity (lewis and schuller, ), the left and social movements broadly speaking have developed more nuanced positions towards ngos. whereas left parties tended to see ngos as ‘agents of imperialism’ – in latin america, asia, africa and the middle east – they have developed a more complex reading of ngos in line with the complexity of the sector. social movements have at times allied with ngos, especially international human rights and advocacy ngos, to gain domestic political leverage. the dalit movement in india is an important example, successfully using this strategy to mobilise political pressure for dalit rights at national and global levels, as well as to sustain the movement at home (waghmore, ). social movement activists, feminists and the left have also used the ‘ngo form’ (bernal and grewal, : ; alvarez, ) as a method of survival during times of repression. in the current conjuncture, it is unclear to what extent such tactical alliances made by the left with the ngo sector will be viable. as erstwhile democratic states adopt more authoritarian measures, emboldening the far right within their borders, the extent to which international ngos will be able to support national ngos and movements against the state is an open question. moreover, while progressive ngos are being demobilised and declared anti-national, ngos that partner with businesses and multinational companies through ‘corporate social responsibility’ and ‘public-private partnerships’ constitute a growth sector. the balance of forces has shifted significantly, placing ngos allied with popular struggles at significant risk, particularly in the global south. the growth of the ngo sector as a pillar of the neoliberal state has been established by a number of scholars (bernal and grewal, ; elyachar, ; jalali, ; kamat, ; rankin, ; schuller, ; sharma, ). at a basic level, the state’s retreat from welfare creates the conditions for ngos to serve as providers of services that people desperately need. this in itself has come to justify the ubiquitous presence of ngos, particularly in the face of humanitarian crisis (edmonds, ; klein, ; krause, ; schuller, , ). in times of economic precarity, ngos appear as relatively stable sources of employment and ngo experts represent the ‘intellectual leadership’ of an instrumental and technocratic variety (moore and moyo, this issue). the corporatised, professionalised and specialised ngo reframes movements and struggles to fit within an apolitical ‘global policy language’ (mannan, ; see also kapoor, ; karim, this issue). left activists working in movement organisations with a mass base recognise the contradictory space of the ngo sector and can resist being absorbed into the bureaucratic structures of ngos, as the maoists in nepal and the dalit ngos in india testify, albeit with different implications for their struggles (ismail, this issue; jaoul, this issue). it is in this context that the term ‘ngoisation’ has gained popularity and it is not uncommon for left activists, who may be employed in ngos, to recognise the effects of ngoisation and be discomfited by it. this marks a shift from the first generation of ngo studies when such self-reflexive insider critiques were uncommon. in these cases, as in the analyses of labour ngos in china and worker centres in the us (pringle, this issue; frantz and fernandes, this issue), important contextual factors include the movement histories and backgrounds of the leadership and their intellectual formation in left organisations. while taking various forms, ngos themselves are thus a contradictory set of institutions: the disjuncture between their funding streams and the social spheres from which they draw their support and in which they operate makes them peculiarly open to abuse by powerful interests that want to instrumentalise them to influence social developments or opinion on the ground. the influence of ngos can lead to the corruption of genuine mass movements through the ngoisation of their leadership or the distortion of their political aims. left organisations and mass movements must, therefore, approach ngos with caution and clarity. they must understand ngo dynamics and work out ways in which their operations can be scrutinised and, where possible, controlled by mass, democratic, organisation. that us-based movements such as occupy wall street and black lives matter, which represent a radical yet broad political spectrum, are unequivocal in their rejection of the ngo form, reflects an understanding of what the political stakes are in building effective resistance against the violence of the state. ngos may be theorised as one more institutional form of civil society through which class relations are contested and reworked. despite the material and ideological constraints imposed by funding, ngos do possess a degree of agency that can influence the conditions in which they operate: the decisions they make can either further class struggle or undermine it. how political alternatives are crafted depends on national conditions, which are influenced by the balance of class forces, including the strength of the neoliberal state but also the strength of the left.   conjunctural analyses for a left strategy https://doi.org/ . / http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / this is the accepted version of an article first published online mar by sage in ​critical sociology​. published version available from: ​https://doi.org/ . / accepted version downloaded from soas research online: ​http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / the articles in this issue contribute to an understanding of how ngos are positioned in the current conjuncture, how they are part of shaping this conjuncture, and how the resistances that develop within and against ngos are part of broader oppositional politics. the overall aims are to further theorise ngos as part of the balance of class forces that impact oppositional politics at national and international levels, put ngo agency at the centre of this theorisation and consider whether and how ngos in different contexts can be won over to being part of the project of resistance to neoliberalism. the articles are, therefore, not studies of ngos per se but conjunctural analyses that foreground the political economy of particular national contexts with the purpose of clarifying left strategy and advancing left politics (flohr and harrison, ; cox and nilsen, ). ngos interact with the neoliberal state and deepening inequality in distinct ways, given the vastly different politics of each national context. at the same time, ngoisation and depoliticisation are shared concerns, and the case studies reveal how these processes are negotiated, mediated and resisted by political actors within and outside ngos. further, as critical scholarship on ngos suggests, including the cases discussed here, it is important to scrutinise the ways in which ngos have contributed to the demobilisation of radical politics and undercut opposition to neoliberalism. what ngos do in response to the crisis of neoliberalism is significant, and makes a difference to how the crisis will be resolved. the contributions consider the contradictions of state–ngo relations under weak and/or authoritarian regimes such as those in zimbabwe and bangladesh; the influence of both funding and ideology on the party and non-party left, as in nepal and india; and finally, the adoption by ngos of neoliberal rationalities, which undermine more militant forms of organising, but which under other conditions are resisted, and interventions forged that further workers’ rights and confrontational politics, such as in the cases highlighted in china and the us. where there exists a class-conscious leadership within an ngo, one that seeks to promote the principles of solidarity, worker-led agency and resistance from below, contributions towards social justice are possible, as the examples in the us, china and india show. where there is a corporate orientation, one that is sustained by donor funding and a refusal to challenge the ideological premises of capitalist expansion, as in the examples in the us, zimbabwe and to some extent nepal, oppositional politics is curtailed. the deepening crisis of the neoliberal state has thus produced on the one hand, ngos that are willing to contest the status quo in different ways and, on the other, ngos that are used by the state to destabilise and demoralise forces that could present serious threats to the status quo, such as the organised left and wider social movements. what are the factors that influence the political direction that ngos take? how are they being situated by the neoliberal state in the growing class conflict? are there examples of ngos reinventing themselves to maintain or pursue radical politics, and are they adopting new ideas and ideologies in the current conjuncture? both the objective conditions – liberalisation, democratisation and the nature of the regime in power – and subjective factors, including the political orientation of the leadership of the ngo and the capacity to develop strategies under given political constraints, are crucial. as politics polarises, political consciousness has heightened across the broad left, including amongst ngos. yet for ngos reliant on external funding, the chronic dilemma is whether to be pragmatic and focus on material survival, or whether to pursue a strategy that could risk funding, but make social and political gains. ngos today straddle both the imperialist and neoliberal ambitions of the aid regime and the popular mobilisations – in both coherent and distorted forms – in opposition to them, and which at times dominate the political landscape. this means not limiting our analysis to ngos but focusing on strategic questions that will further anti-neoliberal and anti-capitalist struggle and, where ngos are involved, whether and how they further or undermine this struggle. while the special issue is by no means representative, the articles represent diverse national contexts and provide insights into the distinct trajectories of ngos in each context. in each case, the spectre of economic crisis looms large and ngo dynamics are theorised as part of a contested terrain of class conflict, state power and global geopolitics. david moore and zenzo moyo develop a gramscian analysis of the convergence between ngo–state interests under conditions of extreme precarity. the authors make a compelling case for situating state–ngo dynamics within national and global contradictions and the resulting crisis. they elaborate an original and insightful analysis of state–ngo relations in zimbabwe. by focusing on the subnational scale and recasting ngo workers and state workers in the countryside as ‘rural intellectuals’ who exercise a certain kind of moral leadership in a crisis-ridden situation, moore and moyo are able to explain the discrepancy between a national government that expresses a virulent antipathy toward ngos and the understated forms of state–ngo co-operation and mutuality that prevail in the countryside. as the crisis in zimbabwe enters a new phase with the end of mugabe’s regime, whether ngos will reinvent themselves to further a more progressive and democratic politics remains to be seen. https://doi.org/ . / http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / this is the accepted version of an article first published online mar by sage in ​critical sociology​. published version available from: ​https://doi.org/ . / accepted version downloaded from soas research online: ​http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / lamia karim highlights how changing state–ngo relations in bangladesh, which are dependent on the particular government in power and its relative strength or weakness, have undergone dramatic shifts since the early s. when bangladesh began to develop its manufacturing base in garments for export, it could rely less on foreign aid, creating leverage for the state to become more autocratic and reclaim power over ngos that had become well-funded and influential power brokers at national and international levels. she describes how smaller, independent community-based ngos inspired by leftist and feminist ideologies are quickly disciplined and contained by an assertive state, while powerful and controversial ngos such as the grameen bank are skilfully brought within the ambit of the state, attenuating ngo agency and capacity for engagement in official politics. under conditions of an increasingly authoritarian government, working within the acceptable limits of development – of which microfinance is one of the main preoccupations in bangladesh – ensures the continued existence of ngos. those ngos that resist these constraints and develop autonomy from the state and corporate sector risk survival. feyzi ismail traces the history of donor intervention in nepal over the past half-century, a major strategic aim of which has been to subvert communist struggle, ever since the establishment of the communist party of nepal in . from the s, ngos emerged as indispensable participants in the anti-communist project, despite – or rather because of – the fact that the maoist’s people’s war had clearly resonated with large sections of the population for a time. the tragedy is that as ngos became increasingly influential in nepal’s political culture, the left parties were contained, even at the height of their popularity. although they had recognised how embracing ngos and ngo ideology could contradict the prospects for revolution, the maoists neglected to think through the implications of the dominance of ngos. ismail suggests that this was as much to do with the influence of ngos as it was to do with the maoists’ revolutionary theory, which is based on a theory of stages. not only did the maoists become incorporated into the parliamentary system, but the ngo industry consolidated itself in nepal, particularly after the war and the earthquakes in . the maoists, conversely, once a revolutionary force that threatened the status quo, have been disarmed, in literal and figurative ways. this experience points to the necessity for the left to develop strategies for dealing with ngos. nicolas jaoul speaks to the importance of social movements being able to resist the culture of ngoisation while also appropriating the ngo space to advance a political cause. chronicling dalit struggles for dignity and self-respect, which are accomplished partly by establishing dalit-led ngos to participate in international fora and gain support for the dalit cause and partly by resisting ngoisation, he reveals how dalit activists straddle neoliberal modes of functioning required by a professionalised and corporatised aid regime while remaining committed to political organising and movement building. the capacity for navigating this terrain draws on a long and established history of dalit activism in india and experience organising within left parties that is embedded in a rich tradition of dalit resistance. this informs the dalit ngos’ political sensibilities to actively resist professionalisation and donor dependency. resisting ngoisation is paramount, since it allows dalit ngos to maintain a political connection with the daily struggles of the dalit community. jaoul points to an experience that cuts against the traditional critiques: how donor funding could be diverted towards more radical political work in previously politicised contexts. contrary to the depoliticising pattern of the professionalisation of ngos in india, the dalit movement in uttar pradesh made tactical adjustments that fulfilled the terms required by funders under the label of women’s empowerment, but were ultimately engaged in radical local experiments that developed confidence among dalit women. tim pringle also presents a case that diverges from traditional critiques. a survey of the literature reveals the breadth of the ongoing debate about labour ngos in china, which encompasses critiques arguing that labour ngos are an ‘anti-solidarity machine’ and endorsements arguing that labour ngos have been effective in community organising. the argument put forward by pringle is that labour ngos in guangdong, which emerged in the early s, have been able to concentrate on aspects of labour organising that are within the bounds of the law (and the restrictions imposed by the state-sanctioned all-china federation of trade unions (acftu)), but have managed to advance working-class interests. they have done this through engaging in collective negotiations, legal activism, building solidarity networks and transnational campaigning. these activities, pringle argues, have been crucial to supporting the nascent labour movement because they have prioritised worker-led agency. although labour ngos have not been able to develop into trade unions under the repressive labour regime in china, they have developed sophisticated interventions that directly benefit working-class interests. courtney frantz and sujatha fernandes highlight contrasting examples of non-profits in the us. they describe how worker centres, which evolved in the context of a declining welfare state and weakening trade union organisation in the us, were expected to challenge exploitative working conditions, but instead embraced https://doi.org/ . / http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / this is the accepted version of an article first published online mar by sage in ​critical sociology​. published version available from: ​https://doi.org/ . / accepted version downloaded from soas research online: ​http://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / neoliberal rationalities. in return for being able to obtain strategic funding from foundations, worker centres at the national level are ultimately less inclined to engage in contentious politics. those that continue to work at local levels and develop alternative funding sources are able to maintain confrontational positions. even as they accommodate the ngo form, activists are alert to the ways in which the professionalised and corporatised requirements by funders conflict with direct action, political organising and a leadership that is accountable to its members. questions of funding, leadership, scale and political orientation are significant issues in determining the political positions of organisations, but these are decisions in which ngos exercise a degree of agency.   conclusion dissent is on the international agenda and continues to grow, whether in the form of the populist right or social democratic left, and serious prospects of an alternative to neoliberalism herald the possibilities of systemic change. while the neoliberal system has a remarkable capacity to survive and reinvent itself in the face of crisis (cahill and konings, ; crouch, ) and incorporate dissent, it also contains a structural weakness: the experience ​of neoliberalism can force people to organise against it. the relationship between ngos and states, parties and movements continues to be negotiated in this era of protest (bailey, ; cox and nilsen, ). the contention here is that the existence of an organised left makes a difference, shaping both the political history and the political space that is occupied by ngos. the extent to which movements can influence wider politics also depends on the relative strength, organisation and consciousness of the left and its ability to promote an alternative – however tentative – that can reach the mass of the population, and begin to break entrenched ideas. opposition of all forms is needed more than ever, especially where neoliberalism confronts a potential existential crisis. while the role of ngos will not necessarily be decisive, the political space they decide to occupy can influence the extent to which this crisis is resolved towards the left, rather than the right. the process of resolving the crisis, through both electoral means and non-electoral movements, could give rise to possibilities and forms of social organisation beyond a post-neoliberal world.   acknowledgements we thank david fasenfest for his support and encouragement in putting together this special issue.   funding this research received no specific grant 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practice, policy, & editorials *for correspondence: joseph. hartland@ bristol. ac. uk twitter: @hartlandjoseph competing interest: the authors declare that no competing interests exist. received: september accepted: september published: november this article is open access: cc by license (https:// creativecom- mons. org/ licenses/ by/ . /) author keywords: inequalities, medical humanities, ethnic groups copyright © , the authors; doi: . /bjgpo. . decolonising medical education and exploring white fragility joseph hartland *, eva larkai university of bristol medical school, bristol, uk introduction on august , the bbc journalist smitha mundasad published a carefully researched article exploring the actions of the university of bristol medical school (brms) as it seeks to decolonise its curriculum and challenge structural forms of racism. in the subsequent days, this story was adapted and reproduced online by multiple news outlets , who chose to preserve quotes from the only white male member of staff interviewed, exposing an important bias within the media. this article explores the subsequent abuse brms members experienced following these publications, why we believe this occurred, and why — despite this — we firmly stand by our commitment to confronting racism in medical education. key concepts the work taking place at brms focuses on two key concepts that we believe are integral to achieving a curriculum that is fair to our students and staff, and serves the needs of a modern and diverse nhs. the first of these is ‘decolonisation’, first appearing in academic discourse in and stemming from the s drive to create more inclusive curricula. championed by students organising the ’why is my curriculum so white’ protest, it was predominantly driven by the humanities, and has only more recently been applied to the field of medical education. decolonisation seeks to examine and restructure curriculums that were designed within a colonial mindset, which centralises the white, eurocentric male’s narrative above all others. a decolonisation approach to medical curriculums asks us to reflect on the ways we discuss and present race within our teaching, and how to achieve authentic representation; for example, the absence of darker skin in the teaching of clinical signs and dermatology. the second key concept is that of ’anti- racism’. anti- racism asks us to acknowledge that racism occurs all around us and takes various forms in our everyday life, from interactions between individuals to societal forms of structural racism that govern the opportunities a person has access to. being anti- racist is a choice that we make every moment of every day, to challenge ourselves and the systems in which we work and teach. within education, this may manifest as counteracting stereotypes in learning material, challenging students to consider racial bias in their clinical thinking, or reflecting on the attitudes and behaviours that students will pick up via the ‘hidden curriculum’. this is especially relevant following the events of the summer of . with increased attention to the black lives matter movement, and the concept of racism as a public health issue entering mainstream medical academic discussions, it is more important than ever that all medical schools make a conscious choice to challenge racism inherent in their curriculums and organisations. the controversy a lot of the controversy following the news articles stemmed from this belief that medical curricula have racism inherently built into them. numerous readers agreed with the importance of teaching clinical signs in darker skin, but highlighting this structural racism was where we ’lost‘ them in our argument to decolonise our teaching. subsequently this was used as a justification to misrepresent the work, and even used to excuse online racism and aggression against the authors. racist abuse was aimed at the black student interviewed for the news article, and both the white lecturer and black https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/open_access https://creativecommons.org/ https://doi.org/ . /bjgpo. . mailto:joseph.hartland@bristol.ac.uk mailto:joseph.hartland@bristol.ac.uk https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / hartland j and larkai e. bjgp open ; doi: . /bjgpo. . of race and racism call: practice, policy, & editorials student’s intelligence and credentials were targeted to discredit the argument. national publications sought to bring into question the motivation for the work, claiming the authors were attempting to weaponise words to ‘promote a progressive agenda’. both authors experienced threats of violence. despite this backlash, the authors still believe that changes to images and lecture content in isolation are not sufficient to truly embed an anti- racist approach or decolonise a curriculum. we must also examine the underlying culture that has given rise to teaching that excluded the representation of black people’s health from the mainstream narrative, inevitably perpetuating the existing health inequalities within black, asian, and ethnic minority (bame) communities. if you doubt this ethnocentric impact on the medical consciousness, take a moment to perform an online image search for the rash associated with meningococcal meningitis. how many examples of this life- threatening clinical sign do you see demonstrated on skin that is not white? as a student, or even a parent, what message does this send? if medical education is to ever create sustainable change, it must challenge the underlying power structures and systemic racism that has silenced these conversations until now. we urge you to consider how powerful a statement it is to exclude black skin from medical education, and what narrative this supports. white fragility the overt racism that followed the publication of the news articles was clearly indefensible, and while we cannot underestimate the impact this can have on those who experienced it, the more subtle forms of discreditation and aggression are harder to challenge and are good examples of ’white fragility’. coined by robin diangelo, this theory deals with the emotional and behavioural response that white people exhibit when challenged with their participation in, and how they benefit from, racism. diangelo explains how these responses are all subconsciously designed to silence conversations around race and maintain the comfortable, white status quo. the threats, discreditation, and aggression we received were designed to do exactly that: stop us discussing racism in medical education and our failure to already have a racially diverse medical curriculum. for many readers, it was acceptable for us to want to diversify our curriculum content, but by framing this within a conversation about racism we had crossed a line. however, the feeling of discomfort that elicits white fragility also means we are examining the right systems, challenging the right concepts, and asking ourselves the right questions to confront racism. final thoughts despite the backlash following publication of these news articles, we are more committed than ever to decolonising our curriculum and strengthening our anti- racist approach. clearly the racism that followed the publication is more than simple fragility, but the attempts to discredit the authors and belittle the work are specific acts designed to silence the very discussions we need to have if we are ever going to make a sustainable change in medical education. white fragility exists and is powerful, but if you choose to undertake this work be assured that you are not alone. we cannot allow these behaviours to hinder our drive towards long- term institutional culture change. the time for white medical educators to stand alongside their colleagues who experience racism is long overdue. together we must challenge racism and look for the voices lost from our curriculums. although this article discusses the negative feedback resulting from the media attention, it is important to note this work has already inspired others and we have received fantastic feedback from the public. we leave you with this example from a black mother who wrote to us, demonstrating why we will continue this fight, and why we encourage others to join us: ’as a mother reading medical advice and it never being relevant for my daughter’s dark skin [this] has always been a problem and a source of worry. this is really necessary, thank you!’ references . mundasad s. the medical school trying to become anti- racist. bbc news [online]. aug ; https://www. bbc. co. uk/ news/ health- (accessed nov ). https://doi.org/ . /bjgpo. . https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health- https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/health- of race and racism call: practice, policy, & editorials hartland j and larkai e. bjgp open ; doi: . /bjgpo. . . bodkin h. medical training such as watching for patients going blue 'inherently racist', medical school says. the telegraph [online]. aug ; https://www. telegraph. co. uk/ news/ / / / medical- training- watching- patients- going- blue- inherently- racist/ (accessed nov ). . kelly h, patel b. doctors’ training 'is racist as it warns of patients turning blue'. mail online [online]. aug ; https://www. dailymail. co. uk/ news/ article- / doctors- training- racist- warns- patients- turning- blue- medical- school- claims. html (accessed nov ). . charles e. decolonizing the curriculum. insights ; ( ). doi: https:// doi. org/ http:// doi. org/ . / uksg. . university college london. why is my curriculum white? dismantling the master’s house [online]. ; http:// www. dtmh. ucl. ac. uk/ videos/ curriculum- white/ (accessed nov ). . lokugamage au, ahillan t, pathberiya sdc. decolonising ideas of healing in medical education. j med ethics ; ( ): – . doi: https:// doi. org/ . / medethics- - . national museum of african american history and culture. being antiracist. ; https:// nmaahc. si. edu/ learn/ talking- about- race/ topics/ being- antiracist (accessed nov ). . godlee f. racism: the other pandemic. bmj ; : m . doi: https:// doi. org/ . / bmj. m . henderson m. the woke generation will stop at nothing to find language that offends them. the telegraph [online]. aug ; https://www. telegraph. co. uk/ news/ / / / woke- generation- will- stop- nothing- find- language- offends/ (accessed nov ). . crear- perry j, maybank a, keeys m, et al. moving towards anti- racist praxis in medicine. lancet ; ( ): –. doi: https:// doi. org/ . / s - ( ) - . diangelo rj. white fragility : why it’s so hard for white people to talk about racism. london: allen lane, an imprint of penguin books; . https://doi.org/ . /bjgpo. . https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ / / /medical-training-watching-patients-going-blue-inherently-racist/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ / / /medical-training-watching-patients-going-blue-inherently-racist/ https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article- /doctors-training-racist-warns-patients-turning-blue-medical-school-claims.html https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article- /doctors-training-racist-warns-patients-turning-blue-medical-school-claims.html https://doi.org/http://doi.org/ . /uksg. http://www.dtmh.ucl.ac.uk/videos/curriculum-white/ http://www.dtmh.ucl.ac.uk/videos/curriculum-white/ https://doi.org/ . /medethics- - https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/being-antiracist https://nmaahc.si.edu/learn/talking-about-race/topics/being-antiracist https://doi.org/ . /bmj.m https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ / / /woke-generation-will-stop-nothing-find-language-offends/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ / / /woke-generation-will-stop-nothing-find-language-offends/ https://doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - 	decolonising medical education and exploring white fragility 	introduction 	key concepts 	the controversy 	white fragility 	final thoughts 	references international journal of environmental research and public health article the relationship between just world beliefs and life satisfaction warren g. harding, jasmin tahmaseb mcconatha * and v. k. kumar department of psychology, west chester university of pennsylvania, west chester, pa , usa; warhar @gmail.com (w.g.h.); kkumar@wcupa.edu (v.k.k.) * correspondence: jtahmasebmcconatha@wcupa.edu; tel.: + - - - received: july ; accepted: august ; published: september ���������� ������� abstract: an important and often unexplored factor shaping life satisfaction is one’s perception of the world as a “just” place. the “just world hypothesis” is predicated on the idea that the world works as a place where people get what they merit, an idea that often serves as a means for people to rationalize injustices. the research addressing just world beliefs has expanded into a four-factor model that categorizes just world beliefs for self and others into subcategories of distributive and procedural justice. distributive justice involves evaluations of the fairness of outcomes, allocations, or distribution of resources, while procedural concerns evaluations of the fairness of decision processes, rules, or interpersonal treatment. this study explored the relationship between the four just world beliefs subscales and overall satisfaction with life and examined their associations with demographic variables including ethnicity, age, gender, religion, and social class. the relationships of demographic factors with justice beliefs and life satisfaction generally yielded very small effect sizes. however, respondents who identified themselves as middle and upper class reported higher levels of life satisfaction than those who identified themselves as lower class, with a medium effect size. consistent with the results of earlier research, regressing life satisfaction on the four justice beliefs subscales indicated that the two self-subscales (distributive and procedural) were significantly predictive of life satisfaction, but the two other subscales (distributive and procedural) were not. keywords: belief in a just world; life satisfaction; self; others; distributive; procedural . introduction the belief that in life people get what they deserve is widespread. believing that the world is a just place enables people to tolerate and cope with injustices experienced by themselves and others. such a belief can rationalize an acceptance for social inequality, lack of access to health care, poverty, and the mistreatment of others by the system. holding a view of the world as just or unjust can also lead to social activism and motivate people to take action, as the recent “black lives matter” movement has done in the united states. it is possible that believing that the world is fair and just will likely lead to less anxiety and greater life satisfaction. . . just world beliefs belief in a just world (bjw) is predicated on the idea that the world is a just place and that people get what they deserve. this belief can also serve to rationalize perceived injustices [ , ]. people rely on the comfort of the belief in a “just world” and understand their own and others’ experiences accordingly. there are, however, personal and social implications associated with such a view. correia and dalbert [ ] discussed three primary functions of just-world beliefs: they (a) influence members of a society to act fairly believing that they, in turn, will be also be treated fairly; (b) promote greater social trust and cohesion; and, (c) provide a way to assign meaning to one’s life circumstances. the world int. j. environ. res. public health , , ; doi: . /ijerph www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /ijerph http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph https://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= int. j. environ. res. public health , , of can be understood as “just” for oneself (bjw-self) or others (bjw-others). bjw-self is associated with greater well-being, and bjw-others is associated with social and cultural connections [ ]. bjw-others has been found to have a negative association with altruistic behavior, and bjw-self is correlated positively with altruistic behavior [ ]. bartholomaeus and strelan [ ] found bjw-self to be positively correlated to forgiveness. in the last decade, two other justice beliefs have been added to beliefs about self and others: distributive and procedural justice [ ]. distributive justice beliefs concern evaluating the fairness of outcomes, allocations, and distribution of resources, and procedural justice concerns evaluating the fairness of decision processes, rules, and interpersonal treatment [ ]. lucas et al. [ ] indicated that support for policies that restrict immigrants is exclusively associated with belief in distributive justice for others (i.e., thoughts about fair outcomes for other people). more specifically, the tendency to believe in distributive justice for others was found to be associated with greater support for a policy proposing to further restrict immigrant job seekers’ capacity in the united states. moreover, priming thoughts about justice in a sample of u.s. police officers increased their support for a policy that mandated stricter policing of illegal immigration. a strong belief in distributive justice for others appears to lead to potentially greater support for discriminatory policies. belief in a just world can also lead to a culture of victim-blaming. stronger beliefs in a just world have been found to be associated with viewing social inequality, prejudice, and poverty as deserving or as a result of a lack of hard work or effort [ ]. rationalizing that people, in general, deserve what they get reinforces the belief that the “world”, in general, treats people justly [ ]. such rationalization has widespread consequences; for example, it can affect how people view those with disabilities or disorders. rüsch et al. [ ] found that such beliefs may enable people to hold prejudices and stigmatize those with disabilities. such views can also foster prejudice against those who are victimized and oppressed—that they somehow “got what they deserved”. studies have identified five independent sources to which people ascribe arbitration of justice in a just world: god, nature, other people, self, and chance. these sources are generally construed as responsible for allocating justice and for shaping perceptions and responses in the face of unjust events [ ]. a person might rationalize that the “unjust” treatment being received is somehow deserved. religion, or spirituality, is also associated with viewing the world as a just place. jost et al. [ ] found that “religion provides an ideological justification for the existing social order, so that prevailing institutions and arrangements are perceived as legitimate and impartial, and therefore worthy of obeying and preserving” (p. ). they found that religion often serves the epistemic (achieving predictability and control), existential (managing anxiety, fear, and threat), and relational (affiliating with others and group solidarity) needs of a population. those with high religiosity might, therefore, be less open-minded, less tolerant of ambiguity, and have a higher need for control. religiosity may, therefore, be associated with higher belief in a just world by providing a comforting, stress-reducing function, and making people feel more satisfied and/or tolerant of injustices. reviewing the work of marx [ ], jost et al. noted that church attendance and religious convictions blunted “support for civil rights” despite the efforts of martin luther king (p. ); their results suggested religiosity is positively correlated with system justifying, rather than system challenging, views. personal demographic factors such as ethnicity, socioeconomic status, gender, and age may also be related to the view that the world is a just place. hunt [ ], comparing african americans, latinos, and whites, found that latinos indicated the strongest beliefs in a just world, and african americans the weakest. more importantly, significant differences were also found by sex and socio-economic status (ses), with the greatest support for just world beliefs found among men and those with low ses. hunt, however, noted that the effect of being latino was reduced to about half (although still significant) when ses was included in the regression model, suggesting that the variance associated with being latino was largely due to ses, i.e., “the inverse effect of ses among latinos appears to be disproportionately a function of relative support for the idea of a just world among lower-status latinos” (p. ). in contrast, “the inverse effect of ses among blacks is due more to the higher-status class int. j. environ. res. public health , , of blacks rejecting the belief in a just world than to lower class viewing the system as legitimate” (p. ). the finding concerning the inverse relationship between ses and justice beliefs led hunt to suggest that just world beliefs may help some people adapt to difficult social and economic living circumstances. . . life satisfaction/subjective well-being life satisfaction is an essential component of overall well-being. it focuses on the way people evaluate their lives and how they feel about their opportunities for the future [ ]. gaining an understanding of life satisfaction involves continuous assessment of how individuals view their lives as a whole, rather than focusing on current attitudes and feelings. life satisfaction is determined by the intersection of multiple influences including income, education, health, relationships, stress, neighborhood, community, and culture [ ]. well-being (swb) is a multidimensional construct, influenced by personal, social, and cultural factors [ ]. health and social relationships have beneficial effects on swb, and interventions can facilitate swb. studies have also identified a positive relationship between religiosity and life satisfaction [ ]. some research suggests that religious people are more satisfied with their lives because of the relationships between religious attendance and community. kahneman and deaton [ ], in an analysis of more than , responses to the gallup-healthways well-being index and its relationship with income, found that income and education were connected to emotional well-being (emotional quality of an individual’s everyday experience) and life evaluation (thoughts people have about their life when they think about it). income and education were more closely related to life evaluation, with emotional well-being rising with income to a certain point, beyond an annual income of usd ≈ , [ , ]. a global study by morrison, tay, and diener [ ] found that national satisfaction was a positive predictor of life satisfaction, with the relationship moderated by household income, household conveniences (e.g., appliances), residential mobility, country gdp per capita, and region (western vs. non-western country). national satisfaction was also related to greater life satisfaction. the results indicate that in more individualistic, well-off societies, people tend to rely more on factors such as personal health, social support, and living conditions in judging life satisfaction. in more collectivist cultures, on the other hand, people rely more on social conditions as a measure of life satisfaction. gerstorf et al. [ ] examined the role of age, social orientation, and social engagement with life satisfaction. they relied upon social variables at the behavioral level (self-ratings of social participation) and the motivational level (valuing social and family goals). the researchers applied single and multiphase growth models on -year annual longitudinal data from deceased participants of the nationwide german socio-economic panel study. their results suggest that leading a socially active life and prioritizing social goals in late life were associated with higher late-life well-being, less pronounced late-life decline in life satisfaction, and later onset of terminal decline in physical health. . . the relationship between just world beliefs and life satisfaction lucas et al. [ ] discussed just world beliefs and its’ relationships with various aspects of life including, but not limited to, income, health, and family, and life satisfaction, stressing that it is important to examine satisfaction in various life domains, an approach known as the bottom-up theory [ ]. the bottom-up theory in relation to just-world beliefs suggests that people are more likely to support the notion of a just world when they are satisfied in various life domains. lucas et al. [ ] suggested that the tendency to believe in the prevalence of justice is associated with personal happiness and well-being. they found individual-level beliefs in justice for both self and for others to be more strongly associated with life satisfaction and health when people expressed strong beliefs in justice for others. higher levels of individual-level beliefs in distributive justice were more strongly associated with self-rated health in high distributive justice climates and in low procedural justice climates. these int. j. environ. res. public health , , of cross-level interactions suggest that higher-order justice climates may moderate the relationships between individual-level justice beliefs and personal well-being. lucas et al. [ ] found the two self-justice subscales to be more strongly correlated with life satisfaction than the two other subscales. they also found the two self-justice subscales, but not the two other subscales, were predictive of life satisfaction in a multiple regression analysis. these results were replicated in cross-cultural studies. across all four cultures, the correlations of bjw subscales with life satisfaction were somewhat higher for the two self-subscales than the two other subscales. when life satisfaction was regressed on the four bjw subscales, the analyses revealed distributive justice for self (dj-self) was significantly predictive of life satisfaction in all four cultures, but procedural justice for self (pj-self) was predictive only in canada and china. the two other scales were not predictive of life satisfaction in any of the four cultures. the results suggest that justice for self with its emphasis on personal identity and pro-self-values may relate to well-being. whether or not age shapes views of the world as a just place is an important area of investigation. age certainly has been shown to influence personal and social views shaping life satisfaction [ ]. the studies cited above support a relationship between views of the world as a just place with well-being and life satisfaction. this study explored this connection with a further analysis of views of the world as a just place for oneself and for others both distributively and procedurally. the study also explored the relationships between just world beliefs, life satisfaction, and demographic factors including white/non-white racial identity, age, self-reported social class, gender, and religious affiliation. based on a review of literature, it would appear that individuals from a self-perceived higher social class were more likely to view the world as a just place for the self and for others on both distributive and procedural beliefs. the study also explored attitudes regarding religion and spirituality, as well as just world views and life satisfaction. . method . . participants volunteer participants were recruited via the snowball sampling method from undergraduate psychology classes, a local church, a senior center, and a social networking site. participants ranged in age from to (with a mean age of ). surveys were administered individually, in small groups, or posted on a personal social media site to be completed anonymously by volunteers. a total of paper surveys and online surveys were completed for a total number of participants. the overall sample (n = ) consisted of females and males. education levels ranged from high school to advanced degrees, with most participants having some level of higher education. the participants were divided only into two categories, white (n = ) and non-white (n = ), because few respondents identified themselves in other ethnic categories. this division is reflective of u.s. national demographics [ ]. participants were divided into social class categories based on their self-reported responses to an open-ended, free-response, one-item measure of perceived social class: upper-class (n = ), middle-class (n = ), lower-class (n = ), and working-class (n = ); the participants who identified themselves as working-class were excluded from further analysis because it was not possible to categorize them into one of the three aforementioned categories. . . instruments participants were administered a survey including demographic questions (age, ethnic identity, gender, education, self-identified social class) and items on religious/spirituality, a life satisfaction measure (swl), and a measure of beliefs in a just world (bjw). the satisfaction with life scale (swl) is a five-item likert-type scale developed by diener et al. [ ]. the swl has been shown to be a valid measure of life satisfaction and includes statements such as “in most ways, my life is close to my ideal.” and “the conditions of my life are excellent”. the seven-point scale uses the following anchor points: int. j. environ. res. public health , , of = strongly disagree, = strongly agree. the belief in a just world scale (bjw) [ ] consists of items rated on seven-point likert scales: = strongly disagree to = strongly agree. four subscales are included in the instrument: (a) distributive justice for others (dj-others) with items such as “i feel that people usually receive the outcome they are due”; (b) procedural justice for others (pj-others) with items such as “people are generally subjected to processes that are fair”; (c) distributive justice for self (dj-self) with items such as “i usually receive the outcomes i deserve”; and (d) procedural justice for self (pj-self) with items such as “people usually use fair procedures in dealing with me”. the scale has been shown to be valid and reliable in previous research, with cronbach α for all of the subscales ≥ . [ , ]. religious affiliation was measured on a binary scale that grouped religious participants (people who identified with any religion or spiritual practice) in contrast to non-religious participants (people who had no religious affiliation). . results . . reliability mean scores, standard deviations, and cronbach alphas are presented in table . the cronbach alphas for the scales used in the study were at . and above, suggesting acceptable reliability values. given that % of the respondents completed the questionnaires on paper and % online, multivariate analysis on swl and the four bjw subscales indicated f ( ) = . , p = . , suggesting there was no effect of participation format. table . descriptive statistics and internal consistency reliability of the scales used in the study. scale n m sd cronbach α distributive others . . . procedural others . . . distributive self . . . procedural self . . . satisfaction with life . . . . . demographic characteristics and just world beliefs the relationships of demographic characteristics with bjw subscales were examined using multivariate and univariate analyses. scheffè’s post hoc test was used as required. a type error probability of . was used to determine significance in all analyses. the only exception to this analytic strategy was with age, which was correlated with the bjw subscale scores. sex, ethnicity, age, religion/spirituality, and bjw. a multivariate analysis on the four bjw subscales revealed a multivariate f ( ) = . , p = . , suggesting no significant differences due to sex. ethnicity was classified as white (n = ) and non-white (n = ). initial multivariate analysis indicated a significant difference due to ethnicity on the four bjw subscales, f ( ) = . , p = . . the follow up anova on each of the subscales indicated a significant difference between the two groups, pj-self: f ( ) = . , p = . , η = . (small effect size), with whites (m = . ) scoring higher than non-whites (m = . ). f values did not reach significance at the . level for the other subscales; η values were . or lower, suggesting trivial effect sizes. age had a small (r = . , p = . ), but significant, correlation only with the bjw’s procedural-other subscale. in order to explore the relationship between religion/spirituality and bjw, we classified participants into two categories: (a) those who reported an affiliation with a religion (n = ) and (b) those who stated that they were neither religious nor spiritual (n = ). a multivariate analysis on the four subscales revealed a significant difference due to religious affiliation/spirituality: f ( ) = . , p = . . further univariate anovas revealed significant differences on two subscales: (a) distributive-others: f ( ) = . , p = . , η = . (small effect size); people who identified with a religion/spirituality (m = . ) scored higher than people who did not identify with a religion/spirituality (m = . ); int. j. environ. res. public health , , of (b) procedural-others: f ( ) = . , p = . , η = . (small effect size); people who identified with a religion/spirituality (m = . ) scored higher than people who did not identify with a religion/spirituality (m = . ). . . social class and just world beliefs the participants grouped into three categories of low, middle, and upper classes were examined for differences on bjw scales. an overall significant difference was found across the four bjw subscales: multivariate f ( , ) = . , p = . . further univariate anovas revealed significant f values on the procedural subscale of both self and others: pj-other, f ( ) = . , p = . , η = . ; pj-self, f ( ) = . , p = . , η = . (small effect size). post-hoc analysis on these variables using scheffè’s procedure indicated a significant difference in pj-others, with the lower-class category differing from the middle-class (upper-class m = . ; middle-class m = . ; lower-class m = . ). for the pj-self, there were no significant pairwise differences found among the three classes (upper-class m = . ; middle-class m = . ; lower-class m = . ) at the . level, but there was a marginal difference between the upper class and lower class at the p = . level. analysis for age found a positive significant relationship with the pj-other scale (r = . , p = . ) and the swl (r = . , p = . ) (see table ). table . correlations of age with belief in a just world (bjw) and life satisfaction measure (swl) and between bjw and swl. scale n age r p swl r p distributive others − . . . . procedural others . . . . distributive self − . . . . procedural self . . . . satisfaction with life . . . . sex/ethnicity and satisfaction with life scale an independent sample t-test revealed a marginal significant difference between males (n = , m = . ) and females (n = , m = . ) on the swl scale: t ( ) = − . , p = . , η = . (small effect size). women reported somewhat greater satisfaction with their lives than men on average. an independent sample t-test revealed a significant difference between whites (n = , m = . ) and non-whites (n = , m = . ) on the swl scale: t ( ) = . , p = . , η = . (small effect size). white participants reported being more satisfied with their lives than non-white participants. . . religion, social class, and satisfaction with life scale significant differences were found between religiously affiliated (n = , m = . ) and non-affiliated (n = , m = . ) individuals on the swl scale: t ( ) = . , p = . , η = . (trivial effect size). the religiously affiliated reported being be more satisfied with their lives more than non-adherents. a one-way anova was used to test differences among the upper, middle, and lower classes. the anova indicated a significant f ( ) = . , p = . , η = . (medium effect size). post-hoc analysis revealed the upper (m = . ) and middle (m = . ) classes significantly differed from the lower class (m = . ) at the . level of significance. . . correlation between satisfaction with life and belief in a just world subscales given the large number of demographic variables tested and with most differences being not significant with small effect sizes, we did not examine the moderating effects of the demographic variables on the relationship between bjw and swl subscales. the correlations of bjw with swl subscales shown in table were as follows: dj-others = . , pj-others = . , dj-self = . , and pj-self = . (all p = . ). a multiple regression analysis revealed that although the two self int. j. environ. res. public health , , of subscales (distributive and procedural) were significantly predictive of life satisfaction, the two other (distributive and procedural) subscales were not (see table ). these results are consistent with the finding by lucas et al. [ ]. table . prediction of life satisfaction by bjw subscales. scale b β p distributive others − . − . . procedural others − . − . . distributive self . . . procedural self . . . . discussion the findings support prior research suggesting that the people who believe that the world is a just place for themselves and others are also more likely to be more satisfied with their lives. the relationships were more pronounced for just world beliefs for the self than for just world beliefs for others. furthermore, the two self-subscales (distributive and procedural) were significantly more predictive of life satisfaction than the two other subscales (distributive and procedural) in a multiple regression analysis. these findings replicate those of lucas et al. [ ] and are consistent with their theorizing that perceptions of the world being fair to oneself should be related to perceptions of life satisfaction. lucas et al. [ ] reviewed other literature that suggested that the “belief that the world is fair to one’s self have been shown to strongly predict measures psychological adjustment and well-being” (p. ). analysis of age and social class found a small positive relationship between age and procedural belief in a just world for others (pj-others). this domain of just-world beliefs has been found to be related to social attitudes involving the evaluations of the fairness, altruistic behavior, and forgiveness by other investigators [ , , ]. it would seem possible that with age there is an increase in a prosocial orientation. social class analysis indicated that middle-class participants scored significantly higher on procedural belief in a just world for others (pj-others) than lower-class participants. oldmeadow and fiske [ ] suggested that when perceiving members of a different social class, high-status out-groups (in this case, middle-to-upper-class participants) tend to be stereotyped as competent, while low-status groups (lower-class participants) tend to be stereotyped as incompetent, which is consistent with the notion that people who have a higher belief in a just world for others may also have harsher social attitudes. the findings, though consistent with the literature, cannot be representative of the general outlook of members of these social classes. ethnicity is an important consideration when discussing beliefs in a just world, particularly given the contemporary social and political climate—white participants scored significantly higher than non-whites in procedural belief in a just world for the self, suggesting that the white participants were more likely to believe that they are being treated fairly. hunt [ ] suggested that research on views of the world as a just place reflects a white experience. given the historical, political, and economic hardships faced by non-whites in the united states, the differences in belief in a just world from this study between whites and non-whites are reflective of those influences that could have played a part in the difference and should be acknowledged. however, given hunt’s [ ] finding that latinos expressed greater belief in a just world than whites, caution is needed in generalizing to all non-white ethnic groups because the non-white group in the current study included a variety of ethnic groups. belief in a just world is a fundamental force in determining perceptions of and responses to unjust life events, and people believe the sources of those beliefs are god, nature, other people, self, and chance [ ]. jost et al. [ ] hypothesized that religion provides an ideological basis for justifying existing social order and its institutions and arrangements that are seen as legitimate and impartial and, therefore, worthy of conforming to and preserving. the results of the study appear to be consistent with that framework inasmuch as people with a religious affiliation scored higher on both “other” int. j. environ. res. public health , , of (distributive and procedural) subscales than those who did not. the results also suggest that religious people may have a greater social identity and prosocial way of thinking. the overall findings of this study, consistent with prior research, suggests that a positive relationship exists between just world beliefs and life satisfaction, although the relationship is more pronounced for bjw self subscales than other subscales. demographic factors such as white/non-white racial identity, age, religion, and gender appear to also be related to life satisfaction, but this relationship warrants further exploration. social class and age were also found to be related to life satisfaction and views of the world as a just place, with upper- and middle-class participants scoring higher. religiosity was also found to be related to just-world beliefs for others, both distributive and procedural. an exploration of views of the world as a just place and well-being is an important area that warrants further investigation. in this study, the four subscales of belief in a just world indicated a significant relationship with life satisfaction. given the political and social climate, research related to how people perceive the world is important. an awareness of such beliefs can help bridge the gaps in people’s understandings of how the world works, how people tend to think it works, and the ways in which such views may impact well-being. such research has the potential to challenge expectations of fairness and justice in the world in the hopes of creating a more compassionate society. continued explorations of the social mechanisms that perpetuate beliefs in the world as a just place can help foster an increased understanding of social justice and injustice. . conclusions the present study provides evidence that justice beliefs are predictive of life satisfaction, and thus justice beliefs may be important to one’s feelings of well-being. however, when life satisfaction was regressed on the justice belief subscales, the two beliefs subscales about justice for “self” (procedural and distributive) were more strongly predictive of life satisfaction than the two beliefs susbscale about justice for “others.” these findings suggest the primacy of how one perceives the world is just for self than over others in predicting life satisfaction, a finding possibly reflective of our strong individualistic values. the demographic factors of ethnicity, sex, age, and ses yielded either no significant effects or very low effect sizes when significant on certain variables with either justice beliefs or life satisfaction. although the voluntary nature of the present study’s sampling limits the generalization of the results, the study does add to the extant literature inasmuch as it supports the results of earlier studies concerning the relationship between justice beliefs and life satisfaction. author contributions: w.g.h. conceptualized the study under the supervision of j.t.m. and v.k.k. for his master’s thesis. w.g.h. gathered the data and prepared the initial draft. w.g.h., j.t.m. and v.k.k. contributed to the analysis, final preparation, and revision of the manuscript. all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. references . lerner, m.j. the belief in a just world: a fundamental delusion; perspectives in social psychology: new york, ny, usa, . . lucas, t.; zhdanova, l.; alexander, s. procedural and distributive justice beliefs for self and others: assessment of a four-factor individual differences model. j. individ. differ. , , – . 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[crossref] © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.paid. . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /pops. http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.paid. . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /journal.pone. http://dx.doi.org/ . /a http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . /cap http://dx.doi.org/ . /pnas. http://dx.doi.org/ . /a http://dx.doi.org/ . /pspp http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . /pag http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . / - . . . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - - https://www.census.gov/library/publications/ /dec/c br- .html https://www.census.gov/library/publications/ /dec/c br- .html http://dx.doi.org/ . /s jpa _ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /ejsp. http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	just world beliefs 	life satisfaction/subjective well-being 	the relationship between just world beliefs and life satisfaction 	method 	participants 	instruments 	results 	reliability 	demographic characteristics and just world beliefs 	social class and just world beliefs 	sex/ethnicity and satisfaction with life scale 	religion, social class, and satisfaction with life scale 	correlation between satisfaction with life and belief in a just world subscales 	discussion 	conclusions 	references emerald_edi_edi .. libraries on the frontlines: neutrality and social justice amelia n. gibson school of library and information science, university of north carolina at chapel hill, chapel hill, north carolina, usa renate l. chancellor department of library and information science, catholic university of america, washington, district of columbia, usa nicole a. cooke school of information sciences, university of illinois at urbana, champaign, illinois, usa sarah park dahlen master of library and information science program, st catherine university, st paul, minnesota, usa shari a. lee division of library and information science, st john’s university, queens, new york, usa, and yasmeen l. shorish research & educational services, james madison university, harrisonburg, virginia, usa abstract purpose – the purpose of this paper is to examine libraries’ responsibility to engage with and support communities of color as they challenge systemic racism, engage in the political process, and exercise their right to free speech. many libraries have ignored the black lives matter (blm) movement, citing the need to maintain neutrality. despite extensive scholarship questioning the validity of this concept, the framing of library neutrality as nonpartisanship continues. this paper examines librarianship’s engagement with, and disengagement from black communities through the lens of the blm movement. it also explores the implications of education, engagement, and activism for people of color and libraries today. design/methodology/approach – the authors have engaged the topic from a critical race perspective as a practice in exercising voice – telling stories, presenting counterstories, and practicing advocacy (ladson-billings, ). findings – the assertion that libraries have been socially and politically neutral organizations is ahistorical. when libraries decide not to address issues relevant to people of color, they are not embodying neutrality; they are actively electing not to support the information and service needs of a service population. in order for libraries to live up to their core values, they must engage actively with communities, especially when those communities are in crisis. originality/value – as a service field, librarianship has an ethos, values, and history that parallel those of many other service fields. this paper has implications for developing understanding of questions about equitable service provision. keywords social justice, libraries, neutrality, library as place, african americans, black lives matter paper type viewpoint . introduction on september , , dr carla d. hayden was the first woman and first african american to be sworn in as the th librarian of congress. considering her achievement, it would not be implausible to think that the field of librarianship had succeeded in attaining equity in diversity, but just as the election of the first african american president of the usa did not equality, diversity and inclusion: an international journal vol. no. , pp. - © emerald publishing limited - doi . /edi- - - received november revised march june accepted august the current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on emerald insight at: www.emeraldinsight.com/ - .htm libraries on the frontlines signal a “post-racial” america, the appointment of dr hayden does not signal a post-racial american library system and culture. libraries are organizations that present themselves as gateways to knowledge, providing access to information and services to all americans, and although they are ubiquitous in most local communities in the usa, they are infrequently addressed in organizational science literature. the american library association (ala), the professional organization that provides guidance for many types of libraries (e.g. public, academic, school), and lists democracy, access, diversity, social responsibility, and the public good among its core values (american library association, ). taken together with various position statements concerning censorship and inclusivity (american library association, ), it is unsurprising that many librarians consider social justice work central to librarianship. unfortunately, many librarians operate within political and organizational structures that do not prioritize active anti-racism work among their core values. the construct of the library as a neutral entity limits the work that is necessary to truly provide responsive, equitable, and inclusive access to information, skill development (such as social media use, information creation, data, and media literacy), community conversations, and other library services for communities dealing with crises or social unrest. this construct (neutrality) limits libraries to a passive “diversity” designed to ensure (at best) basic universal access to already-existing space and resources (through collection development), and a path to librarianship for aspiring students of all backgrounds. it does not encourage the library to actively engage with community issues unless those issues are “apolitical,” and does not obligate the librarian to seek out and attempt to ameliorate conditions within local communities. while diversity (ely and thomas, ; thomas and ely, ) is important, and has framed much organizational work in useful ways, it manifests differently from anti- racism, and anti-oppression work (such as that done by black lives matter (blm)) in libraries. an active, critical approach to engaging with community needs that explicitly acknowledges the influence of social, cultural, financial, and political power on information access and information behavior is necessary for librarianship to confront limitations to freedom of speech and informed citizenship (especially in black communities). trumpeting neutrality ignores the core values of librarianship, and allows inequality to persist as status quo (jensen, ). this might explain why there have been few rigorous, systematic studies documenting libraries’ anti-racism work in communities (hudson, ), or interventions related to blm (cf. seale, ; pagowsky and wallace, ), despite an extensive body of work on general issues of “multiculturalism,” “tolerance,” and “diversity” in the collections and in library services (e.g. bowker and star, ; honma, ; olson, ). the values and challenges of librarianship align with those of the blm movement. the blm movement affirms the value and dignity of black lives and works toward reversing the systematic devaluation of black lives (black lives matter, n.d.). while there is a difference between the #blacklivesmatter organization and the blm movement (which lacks the same level of organizational structure), the two share broad goals. the #blacklivesmatter organization has stated the goal of black affirmation and has framed the movement as an intentional intervention. the core values of librarianship – public good, social responsibility, and democracy – support these goals. within one week, in july , delrawn small, alton sterling, and philando castile were killed by police officers (tracy, ). while their deaths prompted an outrage across the country, a popular online community of librarians was conspicuously silent with respect to the pain, anxiety, and grief of the nation. instead, many of the online posts focused on pokemongo! and how libraries might capitalize on the traffic that the game generates. in that moment, the invisibility of librarians of color, our struggles, and our realities was edi , made all too clear. however, this unfortunate illustration did provide the authors with an opportunity. in august , during the national diversity in librarianship conference in los angeles, california, we engaged a group of our peers in a town hall discussion about the tensions facing libraries, and society. the town hall, called “caught in the crossfire: a conversation on libraries and communities in distress,” began what we hope will be an ongoing discussion about the role of libraries in moving beyond abstract discussions on “diversity” into transformative action, affirming people of color in librarianship and library spaces. what follows in this paper is an in-depth treatment of the topics discussed in that session. the authors have engaged this piece of scholarship from a critical race perspective – as a practice in exercising voice, telling stories, presenting counterstories, and practicing advocacy (ladson-billings, ) – that we hope will speak to researchers, practitioners, and students in library and information science (lis), but also to other research and professional fields that serve various publics. individually, each author addresses a different topic related to libraries and communities in distress, collectively, we make a case against neutrality (defined as disengagement from issues relating to the black community) in lis practice, research, and pedagogy; examine the historical and present costs, benefits, and complications of engaging in work that affirms the value of black lives; and offer strategies for researchers, instructors, and professionals engaged in this work. . the fallacy of neutrality neutrality is just being what the system asks us to be (horton and bell, , p. ). libraries are not, and have never been, socially or politically neutral institutions (jaeger and fleischmann, ; jensen, ). as community anchors (morales et al., ), libraries (and librarians) actively influence their communities, and are constantly making choices that shape informed citizenship through public access to information. a large portion of lis research and practice focus on deconstructing past information behavior in order to inform construction of new information spaces and systems. embedded into those information spaces and systems are particular epistemological and ontological assumptions, personal and social values, and ways of knowing and being generated by researchers and practitioners (brook et al., ). these embedded values influence how members of various publics can access and interact with library services and information systems. as a result, seemingly “neutral” libraries are often those that ignore the specific concerns of marginalized groups and address those of racial, social, and political majorities. the very question of access is a political one; the placement of library branches and allocation of resources, programming choices, and content of library collections all represent social and political interests (iverson, ). as a field, lis has acknowledged the power of the librarian as creator – literally and figuratively behind screens – building systems and nudging “users,” “patrons,” and now communities to action. the field has have examined and affirmed its dedication to using this power for some conception of social good (american library association, ). despite this, directly confronting racial oppression has, for a long time, presented special difficulty for lis, as it has for other fields (kumasi and manlove, ; gay, ). despite libraries’ continued popularity as important community institutions (horrigan, ), american librarianship has long had a difficult relationship with actively engaging communities of color. in many ways, the social structure of racial tensions in librarianship have mirrored larger public battles over race and racism, with national governing bodies pushing local library systems to be more inclusive (knott, ). while the ala took public positions against racial segregation as early as , local libraries in the southern usa had official policies against serving black patrons well into the late twentieth century (crosswell, ). this was library neutrality in action; by following local and federal law, local libraries chose to deny service to libraries on the frontlines millions of black americans. it is not clear how much the field has progressed in this regard. at last count, almost percent of librarians in the usa were white (american library association, - ), and still, lis struggles to address issues of diversity, inclusion, or social justice in consistent ways (subramaniam and jaeger, ). many individual librarians and lis researchers have begun to promote transformative social justice and to challenge the concept of neutrality, positioning it as a practice in embedded whiteness (e.g. bourg, ; hathcock, ; vinopal, ), despite reticence (within many institutions) to openly address structural racism in lis (e.g. in admissions, hiring, tenure, library placement, and library behavioral policies). this paper frames neutrality as a practice in structural oppression of marginalized groups, as it is characterized by disengagement from (as opposed to active engagement with) crises within communities of color. when libraries frame disengagement as neutrality, they excuse themselves from engaging with social movements like blm. from this perspective, choosing neutrality (or disengagement) in time of conflict is choosing to maintain status quo at the expense of one portion of a community. . blm and so does free speech history despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived but if faced with courage, need not be lived again (maya angelou). throughout the us history, free speech has represented both the protections enshrined by the first amendment of the united states (u.s. constitution, amendment , n.d.) and the larger ethos of free expression that pervades the american culture. it has played a major role in every successful push by marginalized groups to have a voice in the struggle to secure civil rights, fight against prejudice, and move toward greater equality (strauss, ). since its adoption into the us law in , the amendment, which prohibits congress from making laws “respecting an establishment of religion, prohibiting the free exercise of religion, infringing on the freedom of speech and infringing on the freedom of the press” (us const. amend. i), has strived to guarantee the basic freedoms of american citizens and has seemingly served as a hallmark for an open society. without free speech, the efficacy of social movements like blm would be undermined. to fully understand the intersection of blm and the freedom of speech as it relates to lis, it is first important to examine it within the broader historical context of civil rights in america. the civil rights movement of the s and s is arguably one of the greatest social movements in american history (alexander, ; lawson, ). the movement had as its origins nearly years of slavery, segregation, and discrimination experienced by black people in the usa (franklin and moss, ). slavery was largely outlawed after the civil war, and equal rights for black americans were seemingly guaranteed by the ratification of the th amendment. however, there was an exception to the amendment that allowed for slavery to continue as punishment for those who were convicted of crimes (franklin and moss, ), nonetheless, discrimination, harassment, lack of opportunity, and poverty after the civil rights movement had a perennial effect on african americans continuing into the twenty-first century. reconstruction laws, which were implemented as part of the reorganization of the post-civil war south, attempted to define the conditions under which white southerners (who had largely favored secession) and black americans (who were newly recognized as citizens) would coexist, and the degree to which they could participate in social and political processes (smith, ). with the overwhelming rejection of reconstruction by white americans, social, political, and economic conflicts between the two groups intensified. the anti-black legislation enacted in legalized segregation through jim crow laws, mandating that business owners and public institutions keep black and white clienteles edi , separated. plessy vs ferguson ( ) codified race relations by providing legal justification for a country (and a library) that was “separate but equal.” it was not until nearly years later in , that brown vs board of education set a precedent for widespread integration (figa and macpherson, ). still, libraries remained segregated. despite the passage of the civil rights act of , discrimination in public spaces (including libraries) continued. this presented a problem for the ala, as a national association that prided itself on promoting the core principles of democracy. several southern library associations refused membership to black americans until activist librarian e.j. josey forced the ala to stand by its stated values by successfully passing a resolution that led to the integration of southern chapters of the ala (chancellor, ). josey described it as “the beginning of a revolution in the ala to make the association responsive to all its members” ( josey, , p. ). now, in the twenty-first century, we still wrestle with the same civil rights issues as generations past. african americans are still being racially profiled, efforts to restrict voting are ongoing, and incarceration rates for african americans are still high. according to the national prisoner statistics program, , black men were either in federal prison or in local jails in (porter, ). this is characterized by michelle alexander ( ) as the new jim crow. alexander contends that by targeting black men (most recently through the war on drugs), the us criminal justice system has become a modern system of racial control akin to jim crow. it follows that the blm movement is an extension of the american civil rights movement of the s and s. blm protests of police brutality against unarmed african americans are modern examples of citizens exercising their right to free speech and assembly. public and academic libraries have also found themselves at the center of questions about free speech in library spaces. news stories about students using library space for protest and organizing at dartmouth college (favors, ) and the university of houston (dwyer, ) have reignited debates about the appropriate role of the library as a space for exercising free speech. throughout the american history, black people have challenged the infrastructures at the nuclei of their oppression by claiming the constitutional right to free speech, even when de jure recognition of that right was not granted by american law. this promise of free speech provided an often-restricted gateway to political action, but black americans continued to protest for racial justice, even as efforts to claim their constitutional rights were repressed. libraries have an ongoing responsibility to help educate their communities, and serve as defenders of intellectual freedom and free expression. without the exercise of free speech, there would be few opportunities to bring attention to the most critical issues facing the american society in the twenty-first century. systemic and institutional racism are defining civil rights and social justice issues of our time. we have come to understand that to be silent about the violence and threats to lives and well-being of black people is to be complicit in that violence and those threats” (cohen and greenfield, ). . from rhetoric to reality: the public library as safe space traditionally, public libraries have presented themselves as safe spaces for civil engagement and public discourse. drawing on habermas ( ), alstad and curry ( , p. ) concludes that “as a physical place, the public library exemplifies the public sphere.” these public spaces continue to serve as settings “for debate, the exercise of rights as citizens, and a place where people of diverse backgrounds can meet as a community” (staeheli and thompson, , pp. - ). however, for many individuals, the public library as a physical space has been more. a public library is free, non-judgmental, and safe. it has open evenings and weekends, centrally located, open to all ages, socioeconomic backgrounds, political and sexual libraries on the frontlines orientations, and interests. it is a true public space and an ideal setting for expression of diverse opinions on political and social issues (alstad and curry, , p. ). this perception of the library as a physical space that remains open for all members of the community, in times of turmoil, reflects a broader understanding of the library as fulfilling its social responsibility through protection of equal physical and intellectual access to information. here, neutrality is framed as disengagement from community crises, and is defined in opposition to active engagement with community in times of crisis. this differs from a concept of neutrality that is defined in opposition to partisanship (or preferences for one group over another). in choosing to remain open and actively supporting the community with space and information through crisis (rather than closing and avoiding conflict altogether), a library may choose to remain non-partisan, but to actively engage with the community during difficult times. an excellent example of this is evident in archie dick’s ( ) analysis of the role libraries played during south africa’s struggle to end apartheid. contrary to the belief that public libraries on the cape flats were “inadequate, passive, and politically indifferent to social change in south africa in the s,” township libraries were, in fact, “places for ideas and debate, spaces [emphasis added] in working-class areas with low levels of literacy where the books, as props, supported oral discourse” (dick, , p. ). they facilitated meetings, covert actions, and became safe places for political education and meetings in addition to providing traditional library services. the residents used these libraries “and invested them with meaning and identity to cope with memories of forced removals, to confront state-imposed violence, and to foster a sense of community” (dick, , p. ). as a result, these public libraries became shared, though contested, safe spaces. this was also true of the ferguson municipal public library (fmlp) following the police shooting death of an unarmed african-american teenager, michael brown. during the weeks-long protests and civil unrest that ensued, fmlp stayed open (berry, ). when the grand jury failed to indict the white police officer that shot brown, the series of (sometimes violent) protests that followed increased demands on the library. in response, fmpl did not simply increase its services, but specifically tailored these to meet the immediate needs of the community. in addition to programs and entertainment for children, the library provided space for students when schools delayed fall openings; services for local businesses needing government aid; as well as emotional healing materials that included information on civil rights and mental health services. the director scott bonner said the library became a safe haven for all (berry, ). see foster and evans ( ) for library projects related to ferguson. on april , , freddie gray died from injuries sustained while in the custody of baltimore police. a series of protests against police brutality followed with several erupting in violence. carla hayden, then ceo of the pratt library, decided to keep the libraries open. the decision of whether or not to open the pennsylvania avenue branch was left to the discretion of the director, melanie townsend-diggs, with the understanding that they would lock the doors if in the event of potential danger to staff and patrons. they would, nonetheless, allow patrons to remain in the library for safety. when the community and the police clashed violently following gray’s funeral, the library stayed open, even as the cvs pharmacy across the street burned. the pratt library followed the fmpl service model. if libraries are to continue to actively engage and support their communities in times of crisis, then we must train future librarians to respond to these needs. it is simply not enough to tell them to hope for the best while preparing for the worst. they need to know, ahead of time, how to foster a safe physical environment during emergencies and times of immediate turmoil, but also how to address the longer term information and service needs of a community in crisis. these types of courses are not typically offered in lis programs. nevertheless, many lis programs currently offer courses in which facets of this topic could be edi , constructively incorporated. for example, foundations courses, which often discuss the role of the library in local communities, should explore the notion of the library as safe space, what this means in the blm era, and how to move this from rhetoric to reality (drawing examples from ferguson and other libraries that have exemplified this ideal). many programs have at least one course that addresses information services to culturally diverse communities. within this course, students could explore how human spatial relations and perceptions are influenced and shaped by culture, how different cultural groups relate to the library space, and how this knowledge might be used to meet community needs and enhance user experiences in times of crises. in a young adult services course, students could explore the design of library spaces that meet the needs of teens, and function as safe spaces for teens in times of crises. communities experience crises, whether libraries and librarians are prepared or not. hayden warns, “you may not be fighting, but you’re in the fight” (cottrell, b, para. ). if we want to arm our students to support their communities, we can no longer overlook their training. . reading and teaching for racial justice: a classroom narrative in the usa, the majority of white and black people do not have close friends outside of their race (cox et al., ). literature is one way to close this social distance. for example, graphic novelist gene luen yang ( ) communicated (in his “glare of disdain” comic) that reading about people whose experiences differ from our own – reading through windows – can help us understand each other. the growth of the blm movement, and increased awareness about racial violence against black people in the usa has encouraged more libraries and librarians to include blm in library discourse (eckert, ) and in library work (parrott, )[ ]. lis faculty are responsible for ensuring that students understand the relevance of social movements like blm. faculty have begun to publish more on pedagogy that explicitly addresses social justice, civil rights, and inclusion from an active (rather than historical) perspective (e.g. cooke and sweeney, ; mehra and rioux, ). this has prompted a slow shift toward explicit discussion of these issues in the classroom, but the continued development of pedagogy related to anti-racism in librarianship is largely done ad hoc by few professors, at few institutions. the extent to which these teaching strategies work, and to which library students and librarians are willing or able to facilitate these types of discussions in their communities, remains to be seen. students in children’s and young adult librarianship courses (who go on to work with children and youth) are expected to master competencies set by the association for library service to children and the young adult library service association in areas such as literacy, selection and promotion of materials, and community outreach. during the panel, dahlen described the efforts made over two semesters to develop and refine blm-related course assignments. in the spring of , she assigned reynolds and kiely’s ( ) award-winning young adult novel, all american boys: a novel, as required reading for a course in services for children and young adults (which focuses on serving children, young adults, and their families in public libraries). all american boys addresses race and police brutality from the perspectives of two characters (one black, and one white). readers engage with both perspectives, and are confronted by the complexities of the larger social context within which the story occurs. students were asked to read the novel and do their own research to develop an understanding of the cultural, economic, and institutional context of the novel. they would use this knowledge of context to develop culturally relevant library programming (as they would in a community or library setting). despite their research training, several students had trouble finding resources and planning library programming that would facilitate conversations around the issues presented in the text. libraries on the frontlines dahlen repeated the assignment in the fall semester with her library materials for children course, but sought institutional support in developing the course. this time, she assigned black lives matter (edwards and harris, ), a non-fiction children’s book addressing the historical and contemporary aspects of the blm movement, along with a few chapters from a good time for the truth: race in minnesota (shin, ). dahlen also arranged (with institutional support) a guest lecture by harris (who is a legal scholar, professor, and chair of american studies at macalester college). students responded positively. one student said dr harris’ talk gave them “a much longer view of current events.” others shared that they had suggested their institutions to purchase black lives matter for their students. these two exercises demonstrated the need for lis instructors to abandon the assumption that strong research skills are enough for students (and librarians) to educate themselves on issues of social justice. social justice work is not always intuitive, and it is sometimes necessary to give students additional context and guidance as they explore issues that might be new to them. additionally, recognition and acknowledgment of local context matters. incorporating a good time for the truth: race in minnesota into the second assignment highlighted local issues, and helped students connect the text to their own communities. two black men (jamar clark and philando castile) had recently been killed in the twin cities area. at the time, the state of minnesota was considered (by at least one ranking) the second worst state in the usa for black residents (the huffington post, ). librarians in minnesota (and elsewhere) needed to understand contextual factors in order to provide local communities with resources for learning and spaces for programming and discussions. in the aftermath of the murder of trayvon martin, elliott ( ) criticized the publishing industry for failing to publish books that depict young black men as fully human. she quoted brent staples, who wrote “society’s message to black boys – ‘we fear you and view you as dangerous’ – is constantly reinforced.” elliott ( ) concluded that “trayvon martin was killed by a very old idea that will likely take generations and an enormous cultural transformation to dislodge”. lis faculty have the responsibility to train future librarians how to select and promote literature that shows the full humanity of black people, rather than the often-limited portrayals seen and read in much of today’s media. . choosing battles and self-care caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare (audre lorde). activism is collective, but it is also personal. librarians, instructors, researchers, practitioners, students, and community members all need to decide, for themselves, what battles to take on, and how to engage in those battles. there must be room for creativity, individuality, and self-care within activism. differences in context – social, cultural, and institutional variations – matter when making decisions about engaging in activism (jennings and andersen, ). social norms differ among communities, and assessments of effectiveness and risk should be made with thorough understandings of local contexts. for example, on the university of illinois at urbana champaign campus, physical marching and boycotting are the norm for activism, and are rewarded through formalized award programs (cooke, ). at some universities, physical marching is frowned upon, and the expectation is that activists contact local government officials directly, organize their communities, and engage in more cerebral activities. from an institutional perspective, it is important to note that these norms and implicit rules of engagement can alienate people whose preferred modes of engagement do not match local culture. from a personal perspective, it is important that we participate the ways that best suit us personally – physically, spiritually, and emotionally. edi , in addition to the contextual and personal considerations that accompany advocacy and activism, there are numerous practical considerations. during stalled contract negotiations in , librarians and faculty at long island university, brooklyn campus, were locked out of their offices by university administration. before these professionals could stage a protest and walk the picket line, they first had to secure a permit to use a bullhorn (drabinski, ). although it seems like a minute detail, failure to secure this permit could have resulted in citations or other sanctions, and detracted from the work at hand. responsive teaching and research also require attention to mundane practicalities. responding to current events through new course development or research requires awareness of course approval and human subjects requirements. keeping tabs on practical lessons is useful for replicating activist work. as a result of practical lessons learned from various protests, the american civil liberties union ( ) and other organizations have developed apps and lists of best practices to assist protesters in asserting and protecting their rights. social media has proved a powerful tool for activism – even for those who cannot walk a picket line. this list could go on indefinitely, but the takeaway here is that activists should be smart and plan ahead. forethought and planning are also important tools for action. stress, racial battle fatigue, and deleterious health effects are always dangers when protesting and advocating for racial justice. the authors of this paper all work in higher education, have teaching responsibilities, and deeply and frequently consider issues of racial equity in their workplaces and in their classrooms. discussing these topics in the workplace can cause tension, isolation, and can unearth cognitive dissonance, resistance, and resentment, especially in groups of people from different cultures and belief systems. the constant energy spent trying to promote equality can result in racial battle fatigue, which can be encapsulated by the following anecdote: if you can think of the mind as having ergs of energy, and the average man uses percent of this energy dealing with the everyday problems of the world – just general kinds of things – then he has percent more to do creative kinds of things that he wants to do. now, that’s a white person. now, a black person also has ergs. he uses percent the same way a white man does, dealing with what the white man has [to deal with], so he has percent left. but he uses percent fighting being black, [with] all the problems being black and what it means (senior black male professor, as quoted in smith, , p. ). battle fatigue can also result from microaggressions that are experienced in everyday life. microaggressions, which are “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, or environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults toward people of color” (sue et al., , p. ), can affect students of color (harwood et al., ; harwood et al., ) and faculty of color (closson et al., ; smith et al., ; sue et al., ). the cumulative effects of physical stress, battle fatigue, and microaggressions can have serious implications on our mental health (gutiérrez et al., ; mereish et al., ; nadal and haynes, ; ong et al., ). the fifth edition of the diagnostic manual of mental disorders has expanded its discussion and diagnosis criteria for post-traumatic stress disorder to factor in the cumulative effects of racism and race-based trauma (williams, ). developing, maintaining, and using personal voice is important, as is respecting one’s own preferences for community advocacy. while there are several general resources for self-care for librarians (e.g. min librarian; barrientos, ), there is little research or writing specifically focused on the intense stress than can result from racial battle fatigue (smith, ) in what is a largely monocultural field (brook et al., ). learning to incorporate self-care and balance and the pros and cons of tackling tough and taboo topics in the classroom takes a great deal of internal and external work. it takes introspection and reflection, and building a collaborative network of people with similar goals and libraries on the frontlines sensibilities. this process also requires the development of physical and mental s afe spaces (alfred, ) in order to have the “freedom to think out loud” (fries-britt and kelly, , p. ) and have the ability to be vulnerable with like-minded friends and colleagues. this section began with a quote by poet, activist, and librarian audre lorde, who told us that the “personal is political.” it ends with another statement that demonstrated her understanding of the issues and environments with which we struggle, even decades later. she stated, “you cannot, you cannot use someone else’s fire. you can only use your own. and in order to do that, you must first be willing to believe that you have it” (lorde in byrd et al., , p. ). we have it. let us use it. . conclusion since the conception of the modern american public library, librarianship has struggled with consistently standing against racial injustice (tucker, ). instead, libraries have clung to a color-blind philosophy of neutrality that has allowed for disengagement from communities of color. over the past - years, the field has made efforts to improve responsiveness to these issues. we note similar trends in the broader field of organizational science (plaut et al., ) and other professional service fields such as education (diem and carpenter, ; gillborn, ), medicine (burgess et al., ; kumagai and lypson, ), nursing (boutain, ), and social work (vera and speight, ). but there is more to do. librarians and others in the field have begun to engage in public and private debates about the role of libraries as community organizations in responding to events that cause community crises (e.g. mclain, ), asking whether libraries should continue to aim for “neutrality” in issues involving civil rights, and what neutrality means for the library and the community. we propose that neutrality is not an option. ignoring racial context glosses over the history of racial injustice in the usa and in american libraries, and dooms us to repeat the mistakes of the past. openly addressing the blm movement by hosting community forums, invited speakers, displays, and programming can help community members understand the issues involved, and give them a larger context for understanding citizens’ rights, and the role and history of protest in the us libraries can provide spaces for discussion, investigation, and activism as part of promotion of informed citizenship. as a field that claims to hold social responsibility, public good, diversity, and democracy at its core (american library association, ), librarianship has a moral responsibility to address the needs of communities. we can do this by educating ourselves about historical and current social contexts, by doing the extra work required to engage our students with social justice in the classroom, engaging with communities in library spaces during times of crisis, and by taking and teaching the practical steps needed for activism on behalf of our communities. in the short term, avoidance of discussions about racism and police brutality might seem to be the best way to manage potentially explosive community tensions, but this runs counter to the values of the field. this avoidance de-prioritizes the safety and rights of people of color. if librarianship supports the intellectual growth of the public, and upholding an informed democracy, then libraries’ refusal to stand for black lives is participation in the maintenance of a second class. this is not neutrality, and history will not judge it kindly. if libraries are to remain relevant in the next century, cowardice is a luxury we cannot afford. note . in the aftermath of philando castile’s murder in july of , hennepin county librarian chelsea couillard-smith developed three blm reading lists. edi , references alexander, m. 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( ), “intellectual freedom, libraries and democracy”, libri, vol. no. , pp. - . corresponding author amelia n. gibson can be contacted at: angibson@email.unc.edu for instructions on how to order reprints of this article, please visit our website: www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/licensing/reprints.htm or contact us for further details: permissions@emeraldinsight.com edi , http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/google-search-hyper-visibility-as-a-means-of-rendering-black-women-and-girls-invisible/ http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/google-search-hyper-visibility-as-a-means-of-rendering-black-women-and-girls-invisible/ www.ramseycounty.us/content/black-lives-matter-series-ramsey-county-library-roseville www.ramseycounty.us/content/black-lives-matter-series-ramsey-county-library-roseville http://ir.lib.uwo.ca/fimspub/ www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/sunday/young-black-male-and-stalked-by-bias.html religions article trauma-informed pedagogy for the religious and theological higher education classroom darryl w. stephens lancaster theological seminary, west james street, lancaster, pa , usa; dstephens@lancasterseminary.edu or dws@darrylwstephens.com received: august ; accepted: august ; published: september ���������� ������� abstract: this article promotes a wider understanding of trauma-informed pedagogy for the higher education classroom, whether in-person or virtual, focusing on undergraduate and graduate teaching in religious studies and theological education. trauma is not confined to individual experiences of single horrifying events—trauma can be collective (community-wide, e.g., covid- ), epigenetic (inherited or intergenerational), social-cultural (e.g., racism), or vicarious. drawing on religious education literature and recent insights from psychology, neuroscience, and public health studies, this article provides a shared basis for further development of trauma-informed pedagogy by religious and theological educators. a principle feature of this article is bibliographic, portraying the state of scholarship at the intersection of religious education and trauma and pointing to resources necessary for further development. it offers a brief survey of extant literature, presents a basic definition and description of trauma, introduces the features of a trauma-informed community approach, and discusses the core values guiding trauma-informed pedagogy. the article also explores religious aspects of trauma and discusses care for instructors, who deal with their own traumatic pasts as well as the secondary effects of encountering, teaching, and supporting traumatized individuals in the religious education classroom. this article concludes with a call for further research. keywords: psychic trauma; trauma-informed pedagogy; trauma-sensitive pedagogy; trauma-informed education; embodiment; secondary traumatization; vicarious trauma; higher education; religious education; theological education . introduction “what’s wrong with you?” when one of my students is habitually distracted, inattentive, or disruptive, this question might surface in my mind. if vocalized, this response to undesired behavior in my classroom, at best, might suppress outward disruption so that class can continue as “normal.” yet, it could perpetuate a cycle of shame and blame, exacerbating the underlying issue and contributing to an ongoing public health crisis. over the past thirty years, our societal understanding of trauma has opened up a different way to address these presenting issues. instead of confrontation, i focus on care. now, i know to ask instead, “what has happened to you?” (salasin , p. ). this shift from confrontation to care is the crux of a new paradigm in public services, a trauma-informed approach. as educators, we are part of a community of service providers with the power to contribute to or detract from this circle of care. furthermore, our understanding of trauma (or lack thereof) significantly impacts our pedagogical effectiveness and ability to nurture the best learning in our students. we enter the classroom uninformed about trauma at our own peril—and to our students’ detriment. the importance of bringing a trauma-informed approach to undergraduate and graduate teaching in religious studies and theological education cannot be overestimated. this article promotes a wider understanding of trauma-informed pedagogy for the higher education classroom, whether religions , , ; doi: . /rel www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /rel http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions https://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= religions , , of in-person or virtual. drawing on religious education literature and recent insights from psychology, neuroscience, and public health studies, this article provides a shared basis for further development of trauma-informed pedagogy by religious and theological educators. a principle feature of this article is bibliographic, portraying the state of scholarship at the intersection of religious education and trauma and pointing to resources necessary for further development. it offers a brief survey of extant literature, presents a basic definition and description of trauma, introduces the features of a trauma-informed community approach, and discusses the core values guiding trauma-informed pedagogy. the article explores religious aspects of trauma and concludes with a discussion of care for instructors, who deal with their own traumatic pasts as well as the secondary effects of encountering, teaching, and supporting traumatized individuals in the religious education classroom. . new recognition of an existing paradigm trauma-informed practices have become a community standard among many social service providers, and there are many resources and training materials available for early childhood, primary, and secondary education professionals. higher education classroom pedagogy has lagged behind. as recently as , trauma-informed pedagogy was still being “proposed” as essential to higher education classrooms (carello and butler ). this “risky teaching” practice, as described by neil harrison and colleagues, is no longer optional; the question is how to engage it effectively (harrison et al. ). since the worldwide social and economic disruption of covid- and, subsequently, the resurgence of the black lives matter movement in may , the topic of trauma and pedagogy has risen in priority for many instructors in higher education. while higher education resources had previously been available (e.g., carello ; davidson ; trauma informed oregon ), many professors scrambled to understand the paradigm of trauma-informed practices. a blog post by cathy davidson warning, “online learning this fall will be wasted if we do not begin from the premise that our students are learning from a place of dislocation, anxiety, and trauma,” quickly circulated among professors in higher education (davidson ). webinars and online resources began to multiply (center for faculty development and excellence, emory university ). among these resources, the literature on trauma-informed pedagogy from a religious education perspective is relatively recent in development. over the past years, the concept of trauma has made its way into the discourses of various disciplines of religious instruction, particularly pastoral care, systematic theology, biblical studies, and practical theology. select illustrations establish the growing influence of the paradigm of trauma in multiple disciplines of theological study. scholars addressing sexual violence took an early lead (cooper-white ; west ). the alban institute published a book by jill hudson for ministerial leaders dealing with congregational trauma (hudson ). attention to trauma soon became widespread within the field of pastoral care, for example, cooper-white ( , ) (doehring ; hunsinger ; mcclintock ; sullender ; thomas ). the imaginatively constructive work of rambo ( ) has been especially influential in several theological disciplines, particularly biblical studies, (e.g., frechette and boase ; groenewald ). the literature on trauma-informed readings of the bible is now extensive. other theological treatments of trauma include the work of beste ( ), jones ( ), baldwin ( ), and soto albrecht and stephens ( ). in the field of practical theology, works include studies in womanist discourse (wallace ), lived religion (ganzevoort and sremac ), as well as disaster relief response (brenner et al. ; hudson ; koenig ; warner et al. ) (roberts and ashley sr [ ] ). however, subject matter expertise does not necessarily equate to pedagogical practice. janice carello, and lisa butler warned, “teaching trauma is not the same as trauma-informed teaching” (carello and butler ). what had been seen as a “useful lens for biblical interpretation” (frechette and boase ), a contributor to prophetic studies (groenewald ), a way of understanding liturgical practices (grundy ), and a shaper of theological discourse (rambo ) became a tool religions , , of with much more immediate application for classroom instructors during the multiple, worldwide crises of . building on its blog series, “teaching and traumatic events,” (e.g., lewis ; mcgarrah sharp ), the wabash center for teaching and learning in religion and theology featured another timely series of blog posts in , “teaching and learning during crisis,” some of which featured trauma-informed teaching practices (lee ; oredein ; rideau ; silva-mccormick ). the publication inside higher ed ran a blog post with twelve principles for “crisis-informed pedagogy” (mintz ). resources on teaching holocaust studies through the lens of trauma (gubkin ; roth et al. ) as well as articles addressing trauma and pedagogy in relation to peace, justice, and conflict studies (stoltzfus ), moral injury (antal and winings ), sexual trauma (crumpton ; procario-foley ), and legacies of abuse by noted scholars and public figures guth ( , ) took on new, broader relevance for instructors in religious and theological studies. an edited volume by stephens and ott ( ) combined embodied learning (lelwica ), perspective transformation (ott ), and trauma-sensitive pedagogy (crumpton ) to undergird a trauma-informed approach to many aspects of teaching theology and religion in higher education, including transnational feminist pedagogy (pae ) and digital pedagogy (doehring and arjona ). the concept of trauma is now recognized as a tool to apply not only within one’s academic discipline but also to one’s everyday, classroom pedagogy—and not just reserved for class sessions discussing trauma or traumatic events. arguing that “this topic should be more than a niche area of interest, becoming a regular part of the reflective lenses of all religious educations scholars and practitioners,” callid keefe-perry and zachary moon proposed a trauma-informed approach to religious education that is not nominally “safe” but courageously risk-taking (keefe-perry and moon , pp. – ). they noted an “implicit engagement with trauma already present in existing literature” in religious education and built upon it (keefe-perry and moon , p. ). while they focused on adult education within congregational contexts, their insights are germane to the higher education classroom. drawing on their insights and the best of existing resources, this article seeks to promote this kind of risk-taking by providing a conceptual basis for trauma-informed pedagogy in religious instruction, based on recent insights from psychology, neuroscience, and public health studies. . trauma simply put, psychological trauma is the result of an experience that is too much to handle. judith herman, a pioneering researcher in the modern understanding of trauma, stated that “traumatic events . . . overwhelm the ordinary human adaptations to life” (herman [ ] , p. ). trauma engages psychic, physiological, and neurological survival mechanisms when a person feels disempowered to respond to a grave threat. trauma involves a loss of agency and a profound sense of powerlessness. yet, a trauma victim is also a survivor, coping with overwhelming danger in ways too deep to fathom. the result is often some variant of post-traumatic stress disorder (ptsd). the effects touch the core of being and reside deep in the body. a central feature of trauma is that it disrupts one’s personal narrative, interfering with one’s sense of self and experience of the world. traumatic memories interrupt the present in ways unbounded by chronology. a traumatic memory can be neither coherently articulated nor forgotten. it is an unspeakable response to horror, a response that refuses to be integrated into the past even as it haunts the present . besser van der kolk, another pioneering researcher in the field, described it this way: “trauma is not just an event that took place sometime in the past; it is also the imprint left by that foregrounding the language of “survivor ” over “victim” is an intentional aspect of a trauma-informed response. see glossary of terms in (samhsa b, pp. xvi–xix). herman called this “the dialectic of trauma”: being “caught between the extremes of amnesia or of reliving the trauma” (herman [ ] , p. ). shelly rambo explored the narrative disruption of trauma as a site for theological exploration and meaning (rambo ). religions , , of experience on mind, brain, and body” (van der kolk , p. ). a traumatized person relives their terror again and again, triggered involuntarily by sensory reminders. because trauma overwhelms the normal coping mechanisms, the experience is fragmented rather than integrated into a person’s experience. one result is popularly known as a “flashback,” for example, when a war veteran with ptsd responds viscerally to the sound of a car backfiring, as if the noise indicated a mortal danger. for a person with ptsd, the trigger brings the past trauma into the present moment, and they relive the original experience, engaging in survival response to the stimulus. traumatic memories can be triggered by emotions, sights, smells, noises, and many other somatic reminders of the original traumatic experience. the work of recovery involves practices of mind and body designed to empower a person to integrate their traumatic memories into their sense of self, reducing the past’s hold on their present reality. in , the substance abuse and mental health services administration (samhsa) provided the following definition of individual trauma to serve as a common reference point among various sectors of public service provision: individual trauma results from an event, series of events, or set of circumstances that is experienced by an individual as physically or emotionally harmful or life threatening and that has lasting adverse effects on the individual’s functioning and mental, physical, social, emotional, or spiritual well-being. [original emphasis] (samhsa a, p. ) this definition highlights what samhsa referred to as “the three e’s of trauma”: events, experiences, and effects (samhsa a, p. ). an event can be traumatic in a single occurrence or over a series of incidents. traumatic life events include military combat, natural disaster, life-threatening accident, sexual assault, abandonment, death of a loved one, and many other psychologically overwhelming situations. trauma can also result from prolonged exposure to threat, including domestic violence, bullying, poverty, abuse, and racism (davidson , p. ). encountering negative biases through microaggressions based on race, gender, sexual orientation, and other identity markers can also be experienced as traumatic (nadal ; see also wallace , p. ). nevertheless, it is important to remember that trauma is not the event but rather the wound resulting from the event (baldwin , p. ). thus, trauma can result from a variety of events, depending on how the event is experienced by the individual within their community. the experience of trauma is personal, resting on a combination of factors. not every adverse experience is traumatic; yet, the same event might be experienced as traumatic by one person and not by another. researchers use the term “potentially traumatic event (pte),” since the experience of the event (as traumatizing or not) will vary from person to person (galatzer-levy et al. ). personality, social support network, developmental health, previous experiences, and other complex factors shape whether any particular event is experienced as traumatic. these factors contribute to a person’s degree of resilience, defined as “the capacity to bounce back from adversity.” (van der kolk ). a landmark study in the late s examined the relationship between “childhood abuse and neglect and household challenges and later-life health and well-being” (centers for disease control and prevention ). the adverse childhood experiences (ace) study clearly showed that “adverse childhood experiences are common and they have strong long-term associations with adult health risk behaviors, health status, and diseases” (felitti et al. ). more to the present point, “early exposure to aces is associated with traumatic stress reactions and subsequent exposure to trauma in adult years” (samhsa b, p. ). thus, the experience of trauma varies by person and is shaped by previous social, psychological, developmental, and cultural factors. samhsa’s definition includes single horrifying events as well as a series of events or set of circumstances experience by an individual as traumatic. religious educators keefe-perry and moon described these aspects of trauma as temporal and structural: trauma is an experience that is not readily assimilated or accommodated into a sense of normalcy, overwhelming a person’s beliefs, values, behaviors, and/or meaningful religions , , of relationships. traumatic experiences have features that are both temporal (occurring in a certain moment of a traumatic event) and structural (occurring as a result of ongoing systemic social and economic inequalities). trauma leaves a person grasping for new, functional coping strategies meant to facilitate survival, including ways in which to re-develop meaningful relationships. (keefe-perry and moon , p. ) this definition also emphasizes the communal and relational impact of trauma. trauma is a complex and multifaceted concept—it can be collective (community-wide) (institute for collective trauma and growth ), epigenetic (inherited or intergenerational) (yehuda and lehrner ), social-cultural (e.g., racism), or vicarious. regardless of the type of trauma, its effects on persons and relationships are real and noticeable. in classroom teaching, what is most evident are the effects of trauma. a. hoch and colleagues presented this list of effects observable in postsecondary learners: • difficulty focusing, attending, retaining, and recalling • tendency to miss a lot of classes • challenges with emotional regulation • fear of taking risks • anxiety about deadlines, exams, group work, or public speaking • anger, helplessness, or dissociation when stressed • withdrawal and isolation • involvement in unhealthy relationships (davidson ) some of these effects were evident in my classroom during the spring semester, in the first months of societal response to covid- . many of my students suffered from distraction, inability to concentrate, and short attention spans. they exhibited the effects of trauma (though most of them were unaware of this connection). furthermore, students of color seemed to be the most affected (oredein ). the long-term trauma of racism compounds the effects of aces and other potentially traumatic events, contributing, for example, to the well-documented disproportionate impact of covid- on black and latinx communities in the u.s. (samhsa ). furthermore, the resurgence of the black lives matter movement, sparked by the murder of george floyd on may , , compounded trauma upon trauma for many students, their families, and communities. in these circumstances, how can we, as instructors in higher education, contribute to the health and success of our students? . trauma-informed approach a trauma-informed approach signals a recent culture-shift in public services, of which education is one part (wilson et al. ). it is a community-wide effort involving social work, public health, policing, law, education, ministry, and other sectors of public service. while some sectors provide trauma-specific services or interventions, many do not. thus, it is not the responsibility of a classroom instructor to provide mental health services but rather to partner with mental health and other service providers by becoming part of a trauma-informed community (samhsa ). becoming a trauma-informed institution is a campus-wide effort, involving student services, academic affairs, administration, athletics, and all areas of the student experience. “samhsa defines any setting as ‘trauma-informed’ if the people there realize how widespread trauma is, recognize signs and symptoms, respond by integrating knowledge into practice, and resist doing further harm” (samhsa ; see also samhsa a, p. ). this four-fold description (realize, recognize, respond, and resist) provides guidance for classroom instructors to contribute to a community of trauma-informed care. realizing the widespread impact of trauma is essential. for example, “by the time they reach college, to percent of youth report lifetime traumatic event exposure, with many reporting for an example analysis of a specific geographic area, see (nowlin et al. ). religions , , of multiple exposures” (davidson , p. ). this is one of many statistics aggregated by shannon davidson of education northwest on the prevalence of trauma. the aces study revealed that adverse childhood experiences are disturbingly prevalent in u.s. society. the point is, trauma is not an unusual experience, and many people bear the effects of trauma in their everyday lives. furthermore, students bring “their whole-messy selves” to the classroom, including past experiences of trauma (lelwica ). thus, a trauma-informed approach does not view the student exhibiting the effects of trauma as the exception. rather, “trauma-informed care is initiated by [the] assumption that every person seeking services is a trauma survivor” (salasin , p. ). a trauma-informed approach to pedagogy is for the benefit of every student. recognizing the signs and symptoms of trauma is essential, as is understanding the causes. common external indications of trauma, listed above, can often be observed in students by classroom teachers. it is important to understand that these behaviors are adaptive. trauma overwhelms a person’s normal stress-response and elicits a survival-based alarm system. the effects of trauma include adaptive behaviors essential to survival, including fight, flight, or freeze responses. however, when traumatic memories are triggered (often with no conscious awareness by the survivor), the body responds as if the original threat were still present. the very behaviors that ensured survival in the first instance become ineffective and inappropriate when triggered at other times and places. the response is individualized: “resilience and recovery look different for each individual. thus, what educators often identify as maladaptive behaviors are really misapplied survival skills” (davidson ). the classroom teacher, recognizing the signs of prior trauma in students, can then learn to respond in appropriate and helpful ways. responding as a trauma-informed organization involves more than strategies for immediate intervention. a trauma-informed institution “responds by fully integrating knowledge about trauma into policies, procedures, practices” (samhsa a, p. ). thus, a set of classroom pedagogical techniques is but one part of an overall, organizational response, the purpose of which is to “promote a culture based on beliefs about resilience, recovery, and healing from trauma” (samhsa a, p. ). in higher education, it is just as important for administrative assistants, administrators, housing directors, and athletic coaches to become trauma-informed as it is for classroom instructors. for example, the association of title ix administrators identified “failing to understand and use trauma-informed investigations and questioning” as the first of “the seven deadly sins of title ix investigations” (henry et al. ). for classroom teachers, this means we are partners with all of the other offices on campus contributing to any aspect of the student experience in our institution in responding to the effects of trauma. resisting doing further harm is the fourth aspect of a trauma-informed approach. failing to realize, recognize, and respond appropriately to a survivor of trauma can do harm. re-victimization can easily occur when i fail to shift from an attitude of blame, “what’s wrong with you?” to a stance of care, “what has happened to you?” this shift in perspective, to a trauma-informed approach, allows the classroom instructor to become a partner in recovery and resilience for survivors of trauma. . trauma-informed pedagogy a trauma-informed approach requires not only knowledge of trauma but also commitment and action. “the foundation for effective trauma-informed classroom practice is the educator ’s grasp of how trauma impacts students’ behavior, development, relationships, and survival strategies” (davidson , p. ). however, subject matter knowledge is not the essence of trauma-informed pedagogy. samhsa cited the aces report as one of two studies significantly influencing the development of the trauma-informed care model (samhsa b, p. ), the other being (samhsa ). according to this whitepaper, title ix investigations should include four trauma-informed components: understanding the impact of trauma, promoting safety and support, proactively avoiding retraumatization, and promoting choice and empowerment of the trauma survivor (henry et al. ). religions , , of teaching about trauma is not the same thing as using trauma-informed pedagogy and educators should aim to reduce the risk of retraumatization (triggering or reactivating trauma-related symptoms originating from earlier life events) and secondary traumatization (experiencing trauma-related symptoms from learning others’ stories) when exposing students to potentially sensitive material. (davidson , p. ) i would hasten to add that trauma-informed teaching is not reserved for “potentially sensitive material” but rather recognizes that many of our students arrive in the classroom already dealing with past traumatic experiences (carello and butler , p. ). a trauma-informed pedagogy is guided by five core values: safety, trustworthiness, choice, collaboration, and empowerment (fallot and harris , p. ). each of these values can guide classroom pedagogy and practices, allowing classroom instructors to contribute to a community of trauma-informed care. safety is a high priority—not only physical but also psychological. a person dealing with the effects of trauma must feel safe in order to de-escalate their physiological survival-response, allowing them to regain some sense of control in the present. while the need for safety pertains to all aspects of a survivor’s life, in the classroom, safety may involve clearly marked exits, nearby restrooms, and the ability to leave the classroom at any time. the level of commitment to and awareness of safety is communicated from the first contact. trigger warnings are one way to provide classroom safety (crumpton ). how might a commitment to safety shape the kind of welcome and introduction activity used in one’s classroom? trustworthiness is also necessary for a trauma-informed approach. many traumatic experiences are due to a person in authority abusing their power over someone more vulnerable. re-establishing trust is imperative for many survivors. in order to lessen perceived threats and to provide a conducive environment for recovery, classroom teachers must be clear and transparent about policies, procedures, expectations, professional boundaries, and roles—including self-disclosure in the classroom (crumpton , pp. – ). how might a commitment to trustworthiness shape the way one presents the course syllabus and assignments? choice is important for survivors of trauma. trauma robs a person of agency and exposes a deep sense of helplessness. providing adequate information about their rights and responsibilities and offering choices, when appropriate, can help restore a sense of agency to trauma survivors. for example, stephanie m. crumpton developed a classroom “covenant of presence” for this purpose, assuring not only a degree of safety and trust but also choice and control (crumpton , pp. – ). how might a commitment to the value of choice change the way one shapes assignments, deadlines, and forms of communication with students? collaboration is essential to becoming a trauma-informed community. resilience from trauma is greatly increased by a social support network, and for this to work to the survivor’s benefit, the survivor must have agency in the process. the event of trauma is something that happens to a person, overwhelming them; healing and recovery is a process that happens with a person, inclusive of them. how might a commitment to the value of collaboration change the way one understands teaching and learning in the classroom? empowerment underlies all of the above values. restoring voice, choice, and agency to a survivor is key to recovery. empowerment means helping the student discover and develop their own capacities. trauma-informed classroom teachers are part of the community that acts on the belief that “trauma-affected students can learn self-efficacy and social-emotional skills” needed to transcend the grip of the past and live fully into their present potential (davidson , p. ). as classroom instructors, we are in a privileged position to assist trauma-survivors. there are few things more samhsa provides guidance for professionals to help empower survivors to return to the present and to regain focus when such triggering occurs (samhsa b, p. ). trigger warnings in higher education have prompted no shortage of debate, see for example (siegel ). religions , , of empowering than education. how might a commitment to the value of empowerment change the way one teaches in the classroom? . theological implications the above sections on trauma, trauma-informed approach, and trauma-informed pedagogy drew primariy from well-researched, secular resources. what does a faith commitment and religious context contribute to these secular insights? keefe-perry and moon provided five markers of trauma-informed religious education: . actively acknowledge the widespread impact of trauma and recognize potential signs and markers of trauma in congregants, families, staff, and community members; . integrate knowledge about trauma into policies, training, and pedagogy; . explicitly seek to resist re-traumatization, even while knowing this is a challenge that [religious education offerings] may fail to meet in every case. . understand that there are responses that encourage spaces supportive of courageous risk-taking and provide participants with healthy means to consider the potential value of taking a risk on deepening relationships with others and god. . incorporate practices that emphasize interpersonal identity, embodiment, and the importance of the imagination for flourishing and healing. (keefe-perry and moon , p. ). their first three markers (acknowledge, recognize, integrate, and resist) correspond to samhsa’s fourfold definition of a trauma-informed setting (realize, recognize, respond, and resist). their last two markers are fruitfully compared to (though not identical with) the five core values of trauma-informed pedagogy (safety, trustworthiness, choice, collaboration, and empowerment) presented by fallot and harris ( , p. ). keefe-perry and moon intentionally prioritize “a space co-created by those present” over a facilitator-dependent sense of “safe” space (keefe-perry and moon , p. ). through this approach, they locate trustworthiness as an attribute of the entire classroom community, not just the instructor, and emphasize the value of courageous risk-taking as an expression of choice, collaboration, and empowerment. thus, they claim, “religious education spaces, among others, can support life-giving processing, courageous meaning-making, and trust building” (keefe-perry and moon , p. ). indeed, this form of courageous risk-taking animates their vision for trauma-informed religious education, with the potential for “deepening relationships with others and god” (keefe-perry and moon , p. ). regardless of one’s location on the spectrum of classroom safety and risk-taking, it is apparent that trauma-informed pedagogy in religiously affiliated higher education classrooms shares much with secular contexts, drawing on the same insights from psychology, neuroscience, and public health (e.g., carello and butler , pp. – ). furthermore, as religious educators, we have the advantage of being equipped to talk about god. for instructors in theological education and religious studies, it is important to remember that trauma is a spiritually disruptive experience. trauma affects mind, body, and soul, causing the survivor to reassess who they are and who god is. trauma disrupts narrative and engages the body in ways too deep for the mind to process. rambo explored this reality through holy saturday, a theology of remaining hovering between life and death, and the witness of the holy spirit in the midst (rambo ). jones examined its impact on our understanding of grace and the cross (jones ). beste wrestled with its implications for human freedom and divine grace (beste ). baldwin reexamined everything she had been taught about god and the human condition (baldwin ). whether viewed through the lens of theopoetics (rambo ), reformed theology (jones ), a revision of rahnerian theology (beste ), or the crucible of one’s own faith journey (baldwin ), trauma interrupts and reframes faith. it changes the way we think about god, sin, and salvation. previously held theologies of atonement and redemption may prove unhelpful or even false. as classroom instructors, we do not have to become experts on these theological loci—and it is beyond the scope of this article to explore the many and deep theological dimensions of trauma. nor is it our role to provide a therapeutic space or psychological counseling. yet, keefe-perry and moon religions , , of asserted that religious education can appropriately become a place to “establish a bond” (keefe-perry and moon , p. ). this is true not only in congregational settings but also undergraduate and graduate classrooms in religious and theological contexts. noting “how trauma can impede the ability of the survivor to develop new relationships with ideas, people, and god,” keefe-perry and moon emphasized the relationship-building potential of religious education (keefe-perry and moon , pp. – ). trauma-informed pedagogy contributes to this potential through its core values, which nurture a supportive learning community in which students can risk sharing and hearing experiences that may not make rational sense. thus, keefe-perry and moon also emphasized the affective and embodied experiences of learning as important features of trauma-informed pedagogy: “embodied, aesthetic, and theopoetic knowledges are lifted up as important as rational, propositional discourse” (keefe-perry and moon , p. ). ott and i emphasized a similar combination of pedagogical lenses through our study of teaching sexuality and religion: perspective transformation draws on affective learning to increase empathy and embodied learning attends to the whole person in the classroom (stephens and ott , p. ). combined with trauma-sensitive pedagogy, we described our approach as “a holistic endeavor bringing many challenges and potential benefits to classroom pedagogy about religion” (stephens and ott , p. ). trauma-informed pedagogy is indeed a risky and courageous venture. . care for instructors classroom instructors are on the front lines of community support and are potentially exposed to many survivors and their trauma histories. the more one practices trauma-informed pedagogy, the more attuned one becomes to the survivors of trauma who surround us daily, including one’s own self. practicing trauma-sensitive classroom techniques may prompt a more conscious awareness of one’s own unhealed traumatic wounds. furthermore, the more reliably one upholds the core values of trauma-informed pedagogy, the more students will perceive one to be safe, trustworthy, and empowering, thus prompting more frequent divulging of the traumas that are already present within their lives and one’s classroom. trauma is remarkably prevalent, and the increased awareness of and proximity to this reality can itself become traumatic. the experience of vicarious or secondary trauma (sometimes accompanied by compassion fatigue) is a real and present danger. secondary trauma refers to the physiological, emotional, and mental effects of being exposed to the primary trauma of another person, either as a witness to the traumatic event itself or bearing witness to the traumatic effects on that person. it is important that classroom instructors take time to debrief with colleagues, pastors, counselors, and other professionals about the emotional, spiritual, and physical toll that such work demands (davidson , pp. – ). being aware of trauma helps us through this journey, but the vicarious effects are no less intense and no less real. it is important to remember that a trauma-informed approach is the work of an entire community of support. . conclusions this article has set forth an argument for the importance of trauma-informed pedagogy, particularly for higher education instructors in religious and theological settings. the existing literature at the intersection of religious education and trauma-informed pedagogy is in its infancy. thus, a principle feature of this article was bibliographic, portraying the state of scholarship at the intersection of religious education and trauma and pointing to resources necessary for further development. the article promoted further development of this literature by providing a shared, conceptual basis for trauma-informed pedagogy in religious instruction, based on recent insights from psychology, neuroscience, and public health studies. the article defined and described trauma, introduced the features of a trauma-informed community approach, and discussed the core values guiding trauma-informed pedagogy. the article also explored religious aspects of trauma and the danger of secondary trauma for classroom instructors, especially those with a heightened attunement religions , , of to the indicators of trauma history. this article raised significant points of debate within the study of trauma-informed pedagogy and implied avenues of further research. significant points of debate within the study of trauma-informed pedagogy include the following. first, trauma-informed pedagogy has been presented as a mode of teaching, yet trauma-informed practices also are used as scholarly tools in specific disciplines as well as a subject of study in their own right, serving as content for classroom discussion. how are these different uses and purposes distinguished in trauma-informed teaching? second, much of the conversation revolves around safety and risk in education. if trauma-informed pedagogy should be seen not as an accommodation to some learners’ needs but rather a standard classroom practice for all learners, how does one negotiate or issue trigger warnings when teaching about trauma or assigning potentially sensitive material in a classroom assignment? third, trauma is present in the classroom whether we address it or not. when practicing trauma-informed pedagogy, how should the instructor navigate between sensitivity to trauma-laden subject matter in the classroom and the pre-existing trauma histories that students (and instructors) bring with them to the classroom? fourth, trauma involves experiences that cannot be adequately shared through words yet manifest themselves in our bodies. how do affect and empathy enter into the perspective transformation we may desire of our students? finally, trauma-informed pedagogy causes us to reevaluate the very nature and goal of religious education. does our pedagogy have mainly to do with content delivery, skills development, relationship-building, or some necessary combination of all of these aspects of learning? this article also implied avenues for further research. more research needs to be done on how this model of pedagogy works in practice, such as the three-year study by harrison et al. ( ). future research should attend to carello and butler’s proposals for trauma-informed teaching (carello and butler , pp. – ), particularly in relation to the five markers proposed by keefe-perry and moon ( , p. ). furthermore, each of the elements of trauma-sensitive teaching presented in this article need illustration and example in a variety of institutional contexts. trauma-informed pedagogy, despite the risk it entails, is no longer an optional means of instruction; it is a necessary and essential tool for religious educators in higher education. furthermore, the analysis of theoretical discourse presented in this article is very important for any kind of education, not limited to religious education. as classroom instructors in higher education, it is imperative that we equip ourselves with the tools of trauma-informed pedagogy and contribute as helping professionals to a trauma-informed community of support. funding: this research received no external funding. acknowledgments: i would like to thank james s. evinger, consultant with the faithtrust institute, for introducing me to the significance of trauma-informed care. thank you, also, to leah r. thomas for her thoughtful feedback on an earlier version of this article and to zeke a. stephens for his bibliographic assistance and technical facility in preparing this manuscript in latex. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. abbreviations the following abbreviations are used in this manuscript: ace adverse childhood experience cdc centers for disease control and prevention mdpi multidisciplinary digital publishing institute pte potentially traumatic event ptsd post-traumatic stress disorder samhsa substance abuse and mental health services administration one such effort is an issue of spotlight on teaching in religious studies news, a publication of the american academy of religion, on the topic “trauma-informed pedagogy,” planned for fall . https://rsn.aarweb.org/spotlight-on/teaching. https://rsn.aarweb.org/spotlight-on/teaching religions , , of references antal, chris j., and kathy winings. . moral injury, soul repair, and creating a place for grace. religious education : – . 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http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	new recognition of an existing paradigm 	trauma 	trauma-informed approach 	trauma-informed pedagogy 	theological implications 	care for instructors 	conclusions 	references science journals — aaas review false equivalencies: online activism from left to right deen freelon , *, alice marwick , , daniel kreiss , digital media are critical for contemporary activism—even low-effort “clicktivism” is politically consequential and contributes to offline participation. we argue that in the united states and throughout the industrialized west, left- and right-wing activists use digital and legacy media differently to achieve political goals. although left-wing actors operate primarily through “hashtag activism” and offline protest, right-wing activists manipulate legacy media, migrate to alternative platforms, and work strategically with partisan media to spread their messages. although scholarship suggests that the right has embraced strategic disinformation and conspiracy theories more than the left, more research is needed to reveal the magnitude and character of left-wing disinformation. such ideological asymmetries between left- and right-wing activism hold critical implications for democratic practice, social media governance, and the interdisciplinary study of digital politics. a ctivism is a fixture of contemporary politics, both democratic and otherwise. at its core is the drive to enact or pre- vent political, cultural, and/or social changes by a range of means. although nonelite citizens have advanced activist claims against the powers that be for millennia ( ), in the st century, digital media offer un- precedented tools for activists around the world to help realize their sociopolitical visions. in this review, which focuses on the united states but also incorporates evidence from other countries, we argue that both the ideological left and right use the ad- ditional channels and low-cost parti- cipation afforded by digital media to reach potentially sympathetic publics. however, despite some similarities, re- cent research indicates that left and right differ sharply in how they use di- gital media. whereas the left generally combines on- and offline protest ac- tions with transmedia branding, an ap- proach known as “hashtag activism” ( ), the right tends to eschew offline protest (notwithstanding a few prominent excep- tions), preferring instead a combination of “trolling” or manipulating mainstream me- dia, protest against and even strategic exit from platforms owned by “big tech,” and cooperation with ideologically friendly me- dia outlets. moreover, available evidence suggests that the right has invested far more than the left in disinformation and conspiracy theories as core components of its activist repertoire, although a lack of sim- ilar research on the left makes comparisons difficult. these asymmetric trends hold im- portant implications both for scholarship and for democratic practice. low cost, high benefit: clicktivism and political participation since the start of social media’s diffusion throughout western societies, concerns have been raised about its efficacy for political par- ticipation. one prominent early objection was that “slacktivism” or “clicktivism,” low-cost sym- bolic actions such as sharing, “liking,” changing one’s profile image, and generally posting ac- tivist content on social media, projects an impression of efficacy without actually being effective ( ). the two assumptions underlying this objection are, first, that such digitally mediated symbolic behaviors are generally not consequential in and of themselves and, sec- ond, that they substitute for more impactful actions such as voting or offline protest. later, we will turn to recent research on how digital activism can be highly impactful on its own, contributing to phenomena such as disinfor- mation. meanwhile, empirical research has consistently failed to support the proposition that digital action substitutes for offline action ( – ). that is, people who are strongly inte- rested in politics tend to express that interest through both online and offline behaviors. dig- ital political activities–including low-cost ones– are a complement to, not a substitute for, their offline counterparts. inversely, those who are uninterested in politics tend to avoid it both online and offline. specifically, lane et al. found that sharing information about politics on social media predicted offline political ac- tivities such as attending political meetings, contacting public officials, and donating money to political campaigns ( ). de zúñiga et al. ( ) found that the use of social media to address community problems, which they call “social media social capital,” predicted the propensity to engage in similar activities offline. and a meta- analysis of survey studies of young people's civic and political use of digital media in > countries found thatthe use of digital media for political purposes was positively correlated with offline political and civic engagement ( ). the unanimity of the literature on this point has led some to declare that the clicktivism debate is conclusively settled ( ). however, this conclusion is premature given several im- portant questions that lack solid empirical answers. one of the most pressing begins with the observation that political engage- ment is issue specific: an individual can be engaged with one or more issues and disen- gaged from others. the clicktivism question then evolves from whether low-cost digital ac- tivities exhaust one’s engagement with politics in general to whether such activities may do so for specific issues that lie beyond the person’s usual interests. for example, whereas liking, sharing, and posting memes about environ- mental topics may be just one of many ways an environmentalist engages with her pet issue, it may be the only way she does so for, say, black lives matter when that movement is trending nationally on twitter. the pat- tern of punctuated equilibrium that typ- ifies social movement activity on social media implies that some variant of this will be true at least some of the time. to continue with the black lives matter example, a study that tracked related tweets over a -year period overlapping the movement’s birth showed a few sharp peaks of interest (most prominently in august, november, and december of and in april and may of ) separated by lengthy periods of much lower activity (fig. ) ( ). this is typical of such movements’ social media activity and indeed of social me- dia in general ( ). logically, the bursts of attention that create such peaks must be provided by people (or bots, a non-negligible possibility) who engage for a short time and then depart, leaving a com- mitted core of activists to sustain the baseline conversation. whether such participation is considered clicktivism is more a question of philosophy than empiricism. on the one hand, the degree of individual commitment is un- doubtedly low, but on the other, the aggregate crests of attention generated by thousands or millions of such actions can catapult a protest movement from obscurity to international pro- minence ( ). as freelon et al. document ( ), grassroots attention on social media played a substantial role in spreading the initial pub- lic awareness of black lives matter’s existence and goals, which was an essential precursor to its widespread acceptance by the american democracy in the balance freelon et al., science , – ( ) september of “digital political activities–including low-cost ones–are a complement to, not a substitute for, their offline counterparts.” hussman school of journalism and media, university of north carolina at chapel hill, chapel hill, nc, usa. center for information, technology, and public life, university of north carolina at chapel hill, chapel hill, nc, usa. department of communication, university of north carolina at chapel hill, chapel hill, nc, usa. *corresponding author. email: freelon@email.unc.edu o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ public in mid- ( ). our hypothetical en- vironmentalist may not have engaged with black lives matter at all if low-cost online actions were unavailable; thus, rather than substituting for higher-cost street-level activ- ism, online actions broaden symbolic support for movements ( ). our main arguments on clicktivism can be summarized thusly: there is a continuum of online activist participation ranging from post- ing and liking content to high-level decision- making as a full-time activist. even more, as the remainder of this review clearly reveals through the lens of recent empirical research, low-cost digital activities can sum to sub- stantial effects ranging from publicizing movements for mass audiences to circulating disinformation that undermines democratic deliberation and processes. a number of american activist movements have substan- tially furthered their goals through digital means over the past decade, including oc- cupy wall street, black lives matter, #metoo/ #timesup, far-right anti-immigration advo- cates, and the mens’ rights movement. sim- ilar results have been observed outside of the united states ( , , ). to add a right-wing example to the black lives matter case de- tailed above, benkler et al. explain how far- right media, activists, and social media users successfully introduced the term “globalist,” an anti-semitic dog whistle, into the journal- istic mainstream ( ). this effort began with white nationalist sites such as vdare and continued through breitbart (a far-right site that avoids explicit white nationalism), fox news, and the trump administration after the election, finally ending up as a synonym for “neoconservative” in the new york times. the online-only media outlets at the begin- ning of this chain rely heavily on social media sharing to boost their messages ( ). in the united states, this is the main way they attract the attention of fox news, which is more di- rectly networked with more traditional media outlets and the trump administration. over- all, this example demonstrates how far-right actors can insert their preferred terminology and ideas into more “respectable” outlets that would otherwise try to avoid such associa- tions. other studies have demonstrated that sites such as breitbart (and their european counterparts) serve similar “bridging” func- tions between far-right and legacy media ( , ). in these and other ways, slacktivism has been a consequential component of con- temporary social movements and will likely continue to be so in the future. the empirical record has very little to say on the question of ideological asymmetries in slacktivism, mostly because left-wing protests have been studied far more than right-wing protests ( ). based on what we know about how most areas of life typically work online, we might expect that right-wing actors would use online and offline means to pursue their interests similarly to the way that those on the left do. one survey-based study found that for american respondents with low political interest, “easy political behaviors [such as liking and commenting on social media] can be gateway behaviors to more significant po- litical activities,” but that ideology was not a significant predictor of this tendency ( ). left- and right-wing digital strategies and ecosystems one of digital media’s most important contrib- utions to activism is how they have opened new pathways to reach target audiences. be- fore the digital age, protesters who wished to project their messages nationally or interna- tionally had only one viable option: attracting the news media’s attention, which they usually did through street protests. mailing lists and alternative media extended their reach only moderately. today, digital media afford activ- ists across the political spectrum two general methods of promoting their causes. the first is to circumvent the news media entirely and appeal directly to digital platform users. this method offers the advantage of placing mes- sage control mostly in the hands of activists and sympathetic partiesbut by definitionmostly reaches people who are already platform users. second, activists use digital platforms to attract journalists’ attention (because most use social media extensively as a gauge of public opin- ion and as a source of stories) ( ) in the hopes that they will cover their movement. the ad- vantage here is that news outlets can reach in- dividuals outside of the digital spheres within which activists operate, as well as those who are not digitally active at all, but may also alter activist messages in ways that are not always favorabletomovements( ). these twomethods are not mutually exclusive; many of the best- known activist movements in recent years have used both ( , , ). although activists on both sides use digital media to reach audiences directly and indi- rectly through the news media, the left and the right have each evolved their own dis- tinct style of doing so. the dominant style on the left has been labeled hashtag activism ( , , ) and bears three main distinguish- ing characteristics. the first and foremost of these is the creation of a declarative hashtag to serve as the movement’s unifying slogan; e.g., #blacklivesmatter, #metoo, and #fightfor became shorthand for a host of demands and priorities. the limited amount of attention that most people decide to allocate to news in general and activist appeals in particular gua- rantees that only a few protest hashtags will attain national or international prominence. such hashtags often come to the public’s at- tention through news coverage of shocking and disruptive events, such as michael brown’s death at the hands of police officer darren wilson in ferguson, mo (#blacklivesmatter), the disclosure of harvey weinstein’s decades- long history of sexual predation (#metoo), and a series of american fast-food worker strikes in – (#fightfor ). second, such hash- tags are buoyed by the widespread engage- ment of nonelites, ordinary citizens who relate to the hashtag’s core message or simply want to declare their support. this is what causes them to “trend” on social media and thereby trigger the third element: attention and support from elite third parties. most prominent among these are mainstream news outlets, which are often thefirstelitestopublicizeactivisthashtags.others include celebrities, businesses, and politicians, all of whom hold disproportionate power to direct attention to movements. examples in- clude hip-hop artists talib kweli and common (#blacklivesmatter), ice cream company ben & jerry’s (#blacklivesmatter), actress alyssa milano (#metoo), and senator bernie sanders (#fightfor ). although much hashtag activism research is u.s. focused, the phenomenon has alsobeenobservedincountriessuchasargentina ( ), bangladesh ( ), france ( ), and india ( ). the right engages with these dual pathways very differently. several fundamental differ- ences with the left explain this. first, american conservatives’ mistrust of the mainstream news media has been intensifying for decades ( , ), a pattern that seems to be common on the right across europe and india as well ( – ). the sense that traditional news out- lets are irredeemably biased against con- servatives is one of the driving factors in the establishment of right-wing media ecosystems, the roots of which in the united states reach back at least to the s ( ). second, con- servatives have more recently developed an analogous belief that “big tech,” a pejorative term for the companies that produce and main- tain the internet’s most widely used commu- nication platforms and hardware, including facebook, google, twitter, apple, and amazon, is also biased against them ( ). these two beliefs have led the right to interact with the news media and tech platforms in more radi- cally oppositional ways than the left despite the latter’s critiques of those institutions. dis- taste for (and being deplatformed from) big tech has prompted some far-right users to de- camp to platforms more accepting of their politics, including telegram, gab, and voat ( ). third, since , the center-right’s pres- ence on social media has diminished substan- tially ( , , ), leaving the far right as the dominant conservative presence. together, these short- and long-term trends have shifted the right into a world apart from the left and center, and its activist tactics reflect that re- ality. figure quantifies this phenomenon by depicting the percentages of “fragmented” freelon et al., science , – ( ) september of o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ users that retweeted media outlets along the ideological spectrum in . outlets with pre- dominantly far-right audiences attracted nearly four times more fragmented users (those that disproportionately retweeted within one parti- tion) than the second most fragmented partition. conservative mistrust of the mainstream media has inspired two distinctive tactics for interacting with two kinds of media outlets. those that lack an explicitly conservative out- look often find themselves targeted by media manipulation, an umbrella term that refers to a repertoire of bad-faith tactics intended to attract journalistic attention ( ). one of the most prominent of these, known as “trading up the chain,” involves planting a sensation- alistic hoax, conspiracy theory, or extreme viewpoint in a small or local news outlet that may not fact-check it ( , ). this story may then be repeated by larger outlets, either be- cause of its content or because an elite (such as donald trump) has endorsed it. whether the underlying claim is presented as true or debunked, the goal of spreading it further is fulfilled. by contrast, right-wing activists’ in- teractions with ideologically friendly outlets are understandably far less contentious. what benkler et al. have called the american “right- wing media ecosystem” is a densely interlinked region of the media network that stands far apart from other media in terms of digital, professional, and ideological connections ( , ). its reach on social media platforms is extensive, in most cases larger than its left- wing equivalent ( ). the ostensibly more journalistic outlets in this network, such as fox news and the daily caller, regularly le- gitimize content surfaced by the more radical outlets, which include infowars, gateway pundit, and breitbart. the right-wing media ecosystem’s favored topics during the trump administration have prominently included un- compromising opposition to non-western im- migration, the evils of the so-called “deep state,” and attacks on the legitimacy of the mueller investigation ( ). two other tactics used disproportionately by right-wing actors are specific to social plat- forms. the first is the strategic manipulation of platform algorithms to increase attention to desired messages. much as the gatekeep- ing function of legacy journalism shaped the norms, practices, and patterns of news cov- erage of social movements, social platforms’ emphasis on user engagement affects what information is displayed to individual users, for example, by giving greater reach to emo- tionally charged content, videos, and visual graphics over text ( ). thus, successful online activists must understand how social plat- forms algorithmically sort content to ensure that their own is given priority. although both left- and right-wing actors engage in such tactics, preliminary evidence suggests that the right has been more successful. for instance, platforms such as youtube have recommen- ded increasingly extreme far-right content to viewers of more moderate right-wing channels to maximize user engagement with the site ( ). similar techniques include optimizing search engine keywords so that interested parties will more readily find ideologically biased results ( ) and the use of fake accounts and bots to imply widespread consensus on social media ( ). because journalists often rely on engagement metrics such as twitter’s “trending topics” to determine which stories should be covered and how they should be framed, successful algorithmic manipulation may help to set legacy media agendas ( ). second, in response to deplatforming, shadow banning, and content moderation by big tech, some right-wing actors have migrated to “alt- tech” equivalents that offer more permissive moderation. these include social media sites dedicated to right-wing communities, such as chan and chan, the twitter alternatives parler and gab, and the youtube alternative bitchute, as well as more ideologically neutral platforms such as discord and telegram ( ). although alt-tech platforms are much smaller than their mainstream counterparts, they al- low partisan and fringe communities to exist without opposition from alternative viewpoints. studies have demonstrated a high prevalence of hate speech on chan ( ), gab ( ), and bitchute ( ), which is typically moderated on more mainstream social platforms. these spaces allow more extreme viewpoints to thrive, whereas mainstream social media pri- marily host less extreme content designed to reach wider audiences ( ). the most relevant implications of the dif- ferences between how left- and right-wing ac- tivist networks reach their respective audiences derive from their very different relationships with the platforms they use. the left largely engages directly with traditional and social media, using them as primary communication venues to develop and distribute activist mes- sages. these outlets and platforms present themselves as what cass sunstein called “gen- eral interest intermediaries” ( ), information environments that admit a wide range of per- spectives. consequently, left-wing ideas tend to connect with individuals and institutions along a much broader range of the ideological spectrum than the right, including much of the center ( ). by contrast, the right has created and used its own ideologically exclusive media ecosystem and digital platforms even as it continues to engage with the best-known tech platforms and news outlets out of necessity. these developments in turn (along with other nondigital factors) fuel what scholars have called “asymmetric polarization,” the proposition freelon et al., science , – ( ) september of june july august september october november january february march april maydecember tw ee ts p os te d pe r da y . . . . . . . . . . million initial protests after michael brown was shot and killed by police officer darren wilson in ferguson, missouri death of freddie gray in police custody in baltimore, maryland decision to not indict new york city police officer daniel pantaleo, whose chokehold killed eric garner decision to not indict darren wilson fig. . daily tweets about police violence and black lives matter, june to may . reproduced with permission from ( ). see ( ) for the data and code used in creating this figure. democracy in the balance o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ that conservatives have grown more extreme over the past few decadesthanliberals( , , ). asymmetric polarization’s broader consequences include less common ground between opposing political sides, increasingly extreme policies when conservatives are elected, and more opportunities for ideologically branded mis- and disinformation to spread on the right, which we discuss further in the next section. emerging research on asymmetric disinformation since the u.s. and u.k. brexit elections, scholars, the news media, and international publics have become increasingly concerned with the problem of false and misleading political content ( , , , ). this general pheno- menon has multiple variants with a variety of labels, including the ubiq- uitous and ambiguous “fake news,” which we avoid. here, we will focus on disinformation, which we define as “all forms of false, inaccurate, or misleading information designed, pre- sented and promoted to intentionally cause public harm or for profit” ( ). unlike misinformation, which refers to misleading content spread inadver- tently, disseminators of disinformation knowtheirmessagesaredeceitful.actors behind such deceptive content seek to spread conspiracy theories, false rumors, hoaxes, and inflammatory opinions to promote their ideological viewpoints, decrease trust in mainstream insti- tutions, and recruit others to their causes ( ). the relevant literature offers three types of evidence in support of the proposition that disinformation is more prevalent on the right than on the left, although to our knowledge this has not been directly tested. first, evidence from psychological studies indicates that conserva- tive individuals are more likely than liberals to prefer the kinds of closed media environ- ments (sometimes called “echo chambers”) that facilitate the spread of mis- and disinfor- mation ( ), believe conspiracy theories when cued by official denials of conspiratorial causes ( ), and tolerate the spreading of disinforma- tion by politicians ( ). second, analyses of false news diffusion on social media have generally shown a tendency for conservatives to share such content more than liberals ( , ). third, the most visible mainstream news media out- lets, upon which the left relies much more heavily for political information than the right, have a long history of fact-checking norms that largely prevent disinformation from thriv- ing there ( ), which is why understanding how the news industry operates helps individ- uals avoid disinformation ( ). existing research provides numerous exam- ples of conservative-targeted disinformation, in which right-wing media ecosystems around the world are often centrally implicated ( , , ). in the united states, the alt-right, unapologetic white nationalists, and others on the rightmost fringe attract relatively small audiences and must rely on media outlets at higher levels of the ecosystem to help circulate their disinformation and other extreme ideas broadly ( ). the fringes are not always suc- cessful; in particular, conspiracy theories im- plicating a washington, dc, pizza parlor as the center of a democrat-controlled pedophilia ring and accusing a left-wing activist of mur- dering a counterprotester at the unite the right rally were not endorsed by the ecosys- tem’s upper echelons ( , ). the ranks of disinformation stories that achieved greater notoriety include the seth rich conspiracy, in which a hillary clinton staffer was allegedly murdered because of what he knew about her emails. (rich was killed in washington, dc, on july by unknown assailants, but no credible evidence links his death to clinton.) the story originated among fringe ecosystem users on twitter and reddit in the weeks after rich’s death ( ). sean hannity covered the conspiracy multiple times in on his eponymous fox news program, although the network eventually retracted the story. more recently, our analysis shows thatthe top ranks of the twitter network discussing the debunked documentary plandemic (which makes unsubstantiated and scientifically unsound allegations about covid- ) in april and may of prominently includes right-wing media ecosystem members such as gatewaypundit (@gatewaypundit) and commentators for fox news (@greggutfeld) and infowars (@liberty- tarian) ( ). in this way, the right-wing media ecosystem circulates sensationalistic content to an ideologically friendly audience free of the sorts of editorial practices that would prevent the spread of false information. the goal, as with much disinformation, is to support the in- group and denigrate the outgroup, even at the expense of verifiable truth. perhaps because of the implications of the research reviewed above, very few studies have directly investigated online left- wing disinformation or conspiracy theories at scale. the studies show- ing a conservative-leaning asymmetry in social media false news sharing largely draw their data from before the election ( , ). if liberals have changed in their susceptibility to dis- information in the ensuing years, pos- sibly because of incentives introduced by strong anti-trump animus, we do not yet know. this could be a case of failing to find that which is not sought. the implications of such research are highly relevant to democratic practice: for one, they will help us understand the extent of the problem, who is most acutely affected, and under what con- ditions. understanding the ideological and psychological antecedents of dis- information susceptibility is an impor- tant first step in targeting interventions to counteract it. to the extent that we as citizens value a democracy free of fraudulent attempts at opinion manip- ulation, we should investigate all con- texts in which it might lurk. two existing studies, along with our own analysis of recent twitter data, offer some evidence that left-leaning disinformation may not be as rare as the literature suggests. first, research published by buzzfeed in october found that although conservative facebook pages posted nearly double the proportion of false or partly false content as liberal pages, such content garnered much higher median shares per post on left-wing pages than on right-wing ones ( ). (we should note that this report only analyzed six facebook pages in total, its data were not made public, and it is possible that false content on right-leaning pages accrued more shares in total given that there was more of it.) second, a recent study found that tweets posted by russian disinfor- mation agents masquerading as left-wing african american activists attracted more attention on a per-tweet basis than either those by conservative identities or non-black left-leaning identities ( ). this demonstrates a level of vulnerability to disinformation on freelon et al., science , – ( ) september of far left center left center center right far right p er ce nt ag e of f ra gm en te d us er s , / , / , , / / , , , / , / , , / / , , / , , / , / , , , / , , / , / , , / , fig. . percentages of fragmented users retweeting media outlets across five ideological partitions. the denominator for each percentage is the number of users who retweeted (shared content from) at least one media outlet in that partition, whereas the numerator is the number of users for whom at least % of their retweets were of outlets in that partition (i.e., “fragmented” users). this figure depicts the behavior of the . million unique twitter users in the dataset who retweeted three or more media accounts. the dataset upon which this figure is based comes from ( ) and contains > million tweets about six major news issues throughout . media outlets and corresponding ideological classifications come from ( ). see ( ) for the data and code used in creating this figure. o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ the left that is not often acknowledged. third, we find that tweets mentioning the key words “anonymous” and “trump” posted between may (when the anonymous hacktivist collective released a cache of documents pur- porting to prove, among other accusations, that donald trump was involved in child sex trafficking) and june were retweeted > . million times, more than double the total retweet count for plandemic in our analysis above ( ). in contrast to the plandemic net- work, the most-retweeted users on this topic are overwhelmingly nonelites with few fol- lowers (except for @youranoncentral, which is ostensibly controlled by anonymous), not well- known liberals or mainstream news outlets. we acknowledge that these findings are pre- liminary and raise pressing validity questions— many of the attention metrics boosting these stories could have been generated by bots, for example—but we include them here for lack of more rigorous research on the matter. taken together, we believe that they suffice to justify further investigation into disinfor- mation aimed at the left. conclusion and future research this review offers three main sets of conclu- sions. first, people participate in online activ- ism along a wide spectrum of commitment levels, from liking and sharing content, to the back-and-forth of political discussion, to involvement as core movement leaders. low- cost online actions do not harm activist goals; on the contrary, they help to boost activist topics and concerns to the levels of public visibility necessary to enact or prevent change. both the left and right benefit from this basic dynamic of online activism. however, there is still much to learn about how clicktivism op- erates; for example, we still do not know how frequently hashtag-based conversations or signal-boosting extreme perspectives change people’s minds or behaviors. second, the left and right generally engage in two distinct styles of online outreach: hashtag activism and online advocacy spearheaded by the right- wing media ecosystem, respectively. the iso- lation of the far right from the rest of the ideological spectrum results in asymmetric polarization and complicates the process of governing ideologically diverse polities. key areas for future research here include mea- suring the relative capacities of these two styles in reaching, persuading, mobilizing, and antagonizing elites and nonelites on both sides. third, disinformation distribution ap- pears to be one of the key functions of right- wing media ecosystems. however, the marked lack of research on left-wing disinformation leaves many questions about how it operates, who is most at risk, and how serious a problem it is, making such research an urgent priority. the very limited number of studies on right- wing online protest and activist hashtag use is similarly glaring. moving forward, research- ers should endeavor to discover whether our current empirical understanding of left- and right-wing activism online represents reality faithfully or is a product of systematic gaps in case selection. references and notes . c. tilly, l. j. wood, social movements – (routledge, ). . s. j. jackson, m. bailey, b. f. welles, #hashtagactivism: networks of race and gender justice (mit, ). . e. morozov, the net delusion: the dark side of internet freedom (publicaffairs, ). . d. s. lane, d. h. kim, s. s. lee, b. e. weeks, n. kwak, soc. media soc. , ( ). . h. g. de zúñiga, m. barnidge, a. scherman, polit. commun. , – ( ). . s. boulianne, y. theocharis, soc. sci. comput. rev. , – ( ). . d. karpf, in a research agenda for digital politics, elgar research agendas, w. h. dutton, ed. 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( ). acknowledgments we gratefully acknowledge the research assistance of k. adams and m. reddi. funding: the empirical analysis shown in fig. was supported by grant no. from the spencer foundation. the empirical analysis shown in fig. was supported by grant no. gr- - from the john s. and james l. knight foundation. author contributions: d.f. wrote the initial draft of this review and conducted all original empirical analyses. a.m. and d.k. contributed to writing and editing the review. competing interests:the authors declare no competing interests. data and materials availability: all data, code, and documentation used to conduct the original empirical analyses in this review (fig. , fig. , and the “plandemic” and “anonymous trump” analyses) are available on the harvard dataverse ( ). . /science.abb freelon et al., science , – ( ) september of democracy in the balance o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://doi.org/ 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http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / #bibl http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/about/terms-service http://science.sciencemag.org/ a springboard for new citizens: universal basic capital and a citizen’s day le grand j. a springboard for new citizens: universal basic capital and a citizen’s day. lse public policy review. ; ( ): , pp.  – . doi: https:// doi.org/ . /lseppr. research a springboard for new citizens: universal basic capital and a citizen’s day julian le grand marshall institute, london school of economics, uk j.legrand@lse.ac.uk in recent years there have been several proposals from academics, think tanks, and politicians for a universal grant of basic capital (ubc) to be awarded to every citizen. there has been one ubc programme that was actually implemented: the british child trust fund, started in by a labour government and abolished by a coalition government in . this paper discusses the case for a ubc, focusing attention on its potential for helping young people to attain long-term positive outcomes in several dimensions of life, from employment to health. by looking at the experience of the child trust fund, the paper also highlights lessons for how a ubc should be implemented in practice. it proposes a citizen’s day: a coming-of-age occasion, marked by a ceremony at which a substantial ubc is awarded, along with the right to vote. jel number: i keywords: wealth inequality; basic capital; basic income the idea behind a universal grant of basic capital (ubc) is simple. the state makes a one-off grant of a sum of money or other financial asset to every citizen. the grant is made at birth, at the age of majority, or at some later point in their young adult lives. the ubc may be the same for all, or a minimum amount plus a top-up for citizens who are on low incomes, have low wealth holdings or who are otherwise disadvantaged. it is financed either from general tax revenues or by a form of wealth tax, such as a tax on inheritances or on wealth-holdings. ubc is a relatively old idea. it originated with thomas paine, who proposed that everyone reaching the age of should receive £ out of a national fund financed from a tax on inheritances [ ]. however, i think i can claim to be the first to introduce it into modern policy discourse, when, in several publications over the course of the s, i proposed that a grant of £ , should be awarded to every citizen on his or her attaining the age of majority, funded by inherit- ance taxation [ , , ]. another version of ubc was put forward in by gavin kelly, of the institute of public policy research (ippr), a progressive policy think tank. imaginatively titled a ‘baby bond,’ this was a grant awarded to every citizen at birth that would be invested in a savings account or in some other savings vehicle, the accumulated funds from which could be used by the recipient on attaining the age of [ ]. this version of the ubc idea formed the basis of the child trust fund, a policy introduced in the united kingdom in but abolished in . the ippr has recently returned to the basic ubc idea with their commission on economic justice proposing a ‘universal dividend’: a grant of £ , to year-olds financed by the income generated from a sovereign wealth fund [ ]. and, in his last book, the distinguished economist tony atkinson proposed a capital endowment of £ –£ , for every young adult, financed by a lifetime capital receipts tax [ ]. the idea was not confined to the uk. in the united states in , bruce ackerman and anne alstott proposed a ‘stakeholder grant’ of $ , for everyone at the age of with a high school diploma and no criminal record, financed by a wealth tax [ ]. hillary clinton flirted with the idea of a ubc in the presidential primaries, and in , cory booker, us senator and candidate in the democratic primaries for the presidential election, advocated a baby bond-type scheme developed by darrick hamilton and william darity to correct racial inequalities in wealth [ , ]. in the mid- s i proposed a similar scheme for the european union, a ‘bambini bond’ [ ]; and in his most recent book on capital, thomas piketty has argued for a grant of € , to be made to every french citizen at the age of , financed by a wealth tax [ ]. https://doi.org/ . /lseppr. https://doi.org/ . /lseppr. mailto:j.legrand@lse.ac.uk le grand: a springboard for new citizensart.  , page  of ubc and ubi a currently fashionable idea is that of a universal basic income (ubi): a basic income given by the state to every citizen, every year [ ]. ubi and ubc are best viewed as different forms of the same type of policy, rather than mutually exclu- sive alternatives, given that one can be readily converted into the other. the ubc could be invested for a positive return or used to buy an annuity, thus generating a ‘basic’ annual income; while the universal basic income could be used to fund the annual repayments of a mortgage-type loan of capital. so, if policy-makers do want to go down a route of providing a universal grant of some form, the choice is essentially between that of giving citizens a small amount of money periodically, as with ubi, or giving it to them as a larger amount at the beginning of their adult lives, as with ubc. here i argue that it would be better to give people capital at the start of their adult lives that has the potential of propelling them to the heights, rather than an annual income to support them if they fell on hard times: a springboard instead of a safety net. why a ubc? in all societies, every citizen on attaining the age of majority will do so with endowments of capital, but of different kinds and amounts, and taking both positive and negative forms. all will have human capital – physical and intellec- tual abilities and skills- acquired partly through their genes and partly through their upbringing and education. some will also have access to financial and property wealth, either directly through gifts or inheritance, or indirectly via the bank of mum and dad. although all these forms of capital are unequally distributed, policymakers’ efforts to enhance equality differ vastly by the type of capital under consideration. with human capital, most societies, through social and educational policies, try to ensure that all have the opportunity to acquire the skills and knowledge needed to enhance their stock. such levels of government intervention rarely extend to financial and property capital, however, with most societies doing little to affect its distribution, other than enacting the occasional tax on inheritances (usually limited in scope and often avoided or evaded). the absence of any meaningful policies in pursuit of greater equality in financial or property capital is particularly striking given the massive degree of inequality in the distribution of such capital in most developed societies. a few inherit vast sums before or at the age of majority, but most people begin their adult lives with little or none at all. indeed, some even start their adult lives with ‘negative’ amounts of such wealth – large debts, ironically often acquired through trying to enhance their stock of human capital through higher education. the basic facts about wealth inequality are startling. for statistical purposes in the uk, wealth is defined in terms of net property wealth (value of property, net of mortgage debt), net financial wealth (financial investments, including savings accounts, net of non-mortgage debt), private pension wealth, and physical wealth (household contents, vehicles and other possessions and valuables). the latest figures for great britain show that, in , the top % owned close to half of total wealth ( %) while the bottom % of the population owned just %. the bottom % have virtually zero wealth, with, on average, negative financial and property wealth only just offset by modest physical wealth and even more modest pension wealth [ ]. there are a number of factors affecting these inequalities, including age, household structure, education, income and – of particular relevance for our purposes – the receipt of inheritance and gifts, especially by the young. the office of national statistics provides data on the distribution of inheritance, gifts, and loans in great britain by income, wealth and age group in the period – [ ]. unsurprisingly, the already wealthy are significantly more likely to receive an inheritance. the wealthiest quintile (the top %) of those aged – – with wealth defined before inheritance – were three times more likely to receive an inheritance than their counterparts in the bottom quintile. further, the mean value of the amount the lucky recipients received in the wealthiest quintile (£ , ) was nearly eleven times larger than that received by recipients in the lowest quintile (£ , ). so, not only were there many more people receiving inheritances at all among the already wealthy, the inheritances in question were generally also substantially larger than those received by the least wealthy. there are similar patterns for gifts and loans. in the united states, the statistics are even more alarming. the latest figures show that in the top % owned over a third of all wealth ( . %), and the top % over three quarters ( . %); while the bottom % had . % [ ]. of particular interest in light of the black lives matter movement is the extent of racial inequality. as hamilton and darity point out in their article advocating a ubc, the median household net wealth of white families is fifteen times that of black families, and more than ten times that of hispanic families. even for households in the bottom income quartile, the inequality between races is striking, with black households having just % of the wealth of white families [ , p. ]. again, inheritance and gifts are important; as hamilton and darity note, ‘careful economic studies… demonstrate that inheritances, bequests and intrafamily transfers account for more of the racial wealth gap than any other demographic and socio-economic indicators, including education, income and household structure’ [ , p. ]. given this, in terms of social justice alone, there seems to be a strong case for a move towards a more equal distribu- tion of the ownership of wealth, particularly among the young. but why not simply do this by the traditional route of taxation – inheritance taxes, a lifetime capital receipts tax (to capture gifts as well as inheritances), as advocated by atkinson [ ], or a straightforward tax on wealth? certainly, some type of wealth taxation should form part of any strat- egy for redistribution, and indeed most ubc advocates have suggested financing the ubc through that route. the intro- duction of a more effective tax regime could alone do much to remedy the inequality of inherited wealth, by lowering le grand: a springboard for new citizens art.  , page  of the amounts given in the top quintiles. however, simply to rely upon taxation would mean missing a key benefit of the ubc – one that may constitute as important an argument for the policy as the rectification of social injustice. this benefit arises from the impact that a ubc can have on the life-time of the individuals themselves, and not only the recipients of their eventual wealth. evidence from longitudinal studies in britain show that young adults’ owner- ship of financial assets has a significant impact on their subsequent lives and livelihoods. the simple fact of possessing assets at has been shown to improve young people’s prospects, in terms of employment, earnings and health, at the ages of and . nor is this likely to be mere correlation, with the relationships remaining even when controlling for confounding factors, such as income, class, and personality type [ , ]. in passing, it is worth noting that recent lse research in partnership with brac (an ngo based in bangladesh) on the ultra-poor in the developing world has also found dramatic ‘asset effects.’ an asset transfer of around us$ to ultra-poor individuals with no assets appears to enable them to lift themselves out of poverty and to stay out of poverty by their own agency [ ]. there appears to be a universal message here, one that should be of interest to policy-makers concerned with inequality and poverty in developing as well as in developed countries. there are several routes through which these asset effects could make its impact. the ownership of financial assets may increase individuals’ independence and their capacity for agency, which is likely to be beneficial both psychologi- cally and materially. it may help them to start a business, to pay for college, to put a down payment on a house, or even to start a pension, all of which are likely to have favourable long-term effects. in short, it should act as a springboard for young people, enabling them to make the most of their adult lives. the existence of an asset effect is a powerful supporting argument for a ubc. the politics of ubc: the child trust fund so there are good arguments in favour of a ubc scheme of some kind. but is such a scheme administratively and politically feasible – especially in a post-pandemic world? is it possible, not only to introduce such a scheme but, more importantly, to sustain it – particularly at a time when competing demands on public spending are likely to be even more intense than usual? the experience of the uk’s child trust fund (ctf) provides some useful lessons. the ctf was introduced in by tony blair’s labour government. it gave every child born since september a voucher worth at least £ with which to open a ctf account in their own name. low income families and families with a child with a disability received £ . at the age of seven, the government gave a second voucher again worth £ or £ . investments could be in the form of shares, bonds or cash savings accounts. parents, grandparents, or family friends could save into the account up to £ a month, and the account was exempt from income or capital gains tax. finally, no-one could withdraw money from the account until the child reached and then it could only be accessed by the (now young adult) account-holder. in , a coalition government was formed with david cameron as prime minister. committed to a programme of austerity in an attempt to reduce the economic damage done by the financial crisis of , one of the new govern- ment’s first acts was to abolish the ctf. from august , payments at birth were reduced and payments at seven stopped, with all payments ending in january . so, what does this – rather sad – tale tell us about the administrative and political feasibility of ubc schemes? in terms of administration and operation, the ctf was a success story. all children born in the uk between september and december now have a savings account. the parents of three quarters of eligible children opened a ctf account, while central and local governments opened the rest. parents, other family members, and friends did contrib- ute to the accounts as the policy intended: on average they added £ every year to each account between and . by the amount held in the accounts exceeded £ billion [ ]. unsurprisingly, the ctf was popular with parents, especially the poorer families, most of whom, perhaps more surprisingly, welcomed that fact that it was locked away until the child reached [ ]. of course, we will not be able properly to assess the ctf’s overall impact until the existing accounts have matured (the first ones mature this year: ). even then we will not be able to assess its longer-term effects on wealth inequality and on individual life-courses until much later in the beneficiaries’ life-times. however, what we can say is that it was imple- mented successfully and, in its own short lifetime at least, achieved some of the outcomes that its proponents hoped. given that it had been implemented successfully, that it was working in the way it was intended, and that it seemed relatively popular, why was the ctf abolished in ? one of the explanations lies in the adversarial and erratic nature of politics. the ctf was a policy that owed its existence solely to the labour government, who launched it with some fanfare. the launch took place at no. , fronted by the prime minister, tony blair, the chancellor of the exchequer, gordon brown, and the secretaries of state for education and work and pensions, david blunkett and alistair darling, respectively. in contrast, neither the conservatives nor the liberal democrats – the partners in the coalition government that replaced labour in power in – were committed to the policy, or even to the underlying concept [ , ]. indeed, the liberal democrats, the junior coalition partner, had even included the abolition of ctf in their manifesto. given this, and the austerity-driven agenda of the new chancellor, george osborne, it was not surprising that ctf was one of the first policies to be cut in pursuit of lower public spending. le grand: a springboard for new citizensart.  , page  of what is perhaps more surprising is that so few rose to the ctf’s defence. at the launch, with the exception of some right-wing columnists complaining about yet another government hand-out, the policy was well received in the media. yet there was little public or press outcry at its demise, not even from the middle class: the traditional defenders of universalist programmes. the most fundamental reason for the lack of protest was that few people perceived themselves to be losers from the policy’s removal [ , ]. of course, there were losers: specifically, anyone born after jan st , who would no longer have a ctf account to access when they were . obviously they were not around at the time of the policy change to protest; but even their parents, who were around, would not lose any money directly. the parents would indeed miss any personal satisfaction they might have derived from knowing that their children had ownership of a savings account; but such indirect loss was unlikely to form the basis for substantial opposition to the policy’s termination, while children directly affected by it were too young to meaningfully protest. such apathy was also likely due to the relatively limited size of the individual amounts in play. the initial endowment of £ at birth invested in a savings account would not create a very large sum at , even allowing for the magic of compound interest: at % interest yearly, for instance, it would amount to £ . even with the extra £ added by the government at the age of and with £ per month put in by parents, grandparents, and family friends (the aver- age deposited between and ), the total at age based on % interest p.a. would be around £ . this is a non-trivial sum, especially for those on low incomes, but it is small relative to the £ , that i and others have pro- posed for the uk, or the $ , proposed for the us by ackerman and alstott; it is also small relative to middle class incomes. even if parents had not made such precise calculations, it is likely that many perceived the sums involved as being insubstantial and hence their (or their children’s) loss perhaps not worth resisting. for proponents of ubc seeking to learn from the ctf experience, the principal lesson should be that any ubc policy needs to be organized in such a way that, if it were abolished, there would be significant losers – especially among the middle classes. alongside this, the fact of the loss should be large, obvious and immediate: not a vague sense of a small loss some eighteen years in the future. all of this suggests that a sizeable grant at the age of maturity would be a better scheme for the long-term, rather than a small grant at birth, as with the baby bond or ctf. a further argument for a large grant at maturity might be called the doolittle effect. in bernard shaw’s play pygmalion, the dustman alfred doolittle turns down a gift of £ on the grounds that such a large sum ‘makes a man prudent- like’ and he would not be able to spend it on ‘one good spree.’ the problem with relatively small sums such as those generated by the ctf is that they are more likely to be spent on a good spree than invested in such a way as to create long-lasting returns. a ubc of £ , or more, on the other hand, is an amount that, for those on low incomes or with low wealth-holdings, could be life-changing and therefore much less likely to be misused. dangers of misuse would remain, of course, including exploitation by others (for instance, pressure to pay off family debts). however, these could be mitigated by education in financial literacy and in citizens’ rights – perhaps as part of the run up to the citizen’s day, a proposal with which we conclude. conclusion: ubc and a citizen’s day the experience of the child trust fund supports the case for a ubc scheme that awards a substantial grant at the age of maturity rather than a tiny one at birth. alongside this, the importance and significance of the grant could be enhanced by awarding it through a public ceremony, rendering it more politically salient and less susceptible to being removed or reduced. if the grant was to be awarded at , coinciding with the age at which people can vote, and the age they become eligible for jury service, it could be presented as part of a ‘citizen’s day,’ when a young person becomes a fully-fledged adult citizen and is endowed with both the rights and responsibilities that come from being a member of the community. given the increased demands on public expenditure in the immediate future, it will not be easy for any government to introduce a ubc (or indeed a ubi). but the problems that the policy is intended to address – especially those of inequality in wealth and the absence of an ‘asset effect’ on long-term outcomes for the less well-off – will remain; and indeed may be exacerbated by the pandemic. if the ubc is packaged well, such as with a citizen’s day, it could become both a symbol of coming-of-age and a powerful instrument for the young to revitalize the economy and to rejuvenate the wider society. competing interests the author has no competing interests to declare. references . paine t. agrarian justice, opposed to agrarian law and to agrarian monopoly. https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ecc o/ . . / : ?rgn=div ;view=fulltext. . le grand j. markets, equality and welfare. in: le grand j, estrin s (eds.), market socialism. oxford: oxford university press; . . le grand j. spreading it around. fabian review. ; ( ). . nissan d, le grand j. a capital idea: start-up grants for young people. london: fabian society; . https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ecco/ . . / : ?rgn=div ;view=fulltext https://quod.lib.umich.edu/e/ecco/ . . / : ?rgn=div ;view=fulltext le grand: a 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unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. lse public policy review is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by lse press. open access https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . /s - - - https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/cory-booker-wants-a-baby-bond-for-every-us-child-would-it-work/ / / / f -b b- e -bad - f bfd f_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/cory-booker-wants-a-baby-bond-for-every-us-child-would-it-work/ / / / f -b b- e -bad - f bfd f_story.html https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z /dataviz/dfa/distribute/table/ https://www.federalreserve.gov/releases/z /dataviz/dfa/distribute/table/ https://doi.org/ . /acprof:oso/ . . https://doi.org/ . /acprof:oso/ . . https://voxdev.org/topic/it-time-rethink-poverty-policy https://voxdev.org/topic/it-time-rethink-poverty-policy https://doi.org/ . /j. - x. . .x https://gavinkellyblog.com/the-child-trust-fund-comes-of-age- deff d https://gavinkellyblog.com/the-child-trust-fund-comes-of-age- deff d https://doi.org/ . /lseppr. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / 	ubc and ubi 	why a ubc? 	the politics of ubc: the child trust fund 	conclusion: ubc and a citizen’s day 	competing interests 	references s .. celebrity and politics samantha majic , daniel o’neill, and michael bernhard the presidential address o ur first issue each year begins with the publica- tion of the presidential address from the pre- vious year’s apsa annual meeting. this year we have the pleasure of publishing “what good can political science do? from pluralism to partnerships” by rogers smith. rogers smith was the president of the american political science association for – and is the christopher h. browne distinguished professor of polit- ical science at the university of pennsylvania. he works in the areas of constitutional law and american political thought, with a focus on how race, ethnicity, and gender affect citizenship. he has been elected to the american academy of arts and sciences ( ), the american academy of political and social science ( ), and the american philosophical society ( ). his many notable publications include political peoplehood: the roles of values, interests, and identities (university of chicago press, ), still a house divided: race and politics in obama’s america (with desmond king, princeton uni- versity press, ), stories of peoplehood: the politics and morals of political memberships (cambridge university press, ), the unsteady march: the rise and decline of racial equality in america (with philip klinkner, univer- sity of chicago press, ), civic ideals: conflicting visions of citizenship in u.s. history (yale university press, ), citizenship without consent: the illegal alien in the american polity (with peter schuck, yale university press, l ), and liberalism and american constitutional law (harvard university press, l ; rev. ed., ), several edited collections, and innumerable articles and book chapters. “what good can political science do?” begins by taking inventory of the state of the world and the discipline. the picture is not pretty. dictatorship is on the march globally and public support for political science is declining, with the value neutral pursuit of knowledge under assault in a highly politicized and polarized national environment. the issue of whether the discipline produces anything useful has resurfaced as it does periodically. questions arise as to whether we have become too specialized, abstract, and insular to contribute the kind of knowledge that is of use in our current political debates or in solving our many nagging problems. smith calls for greater practical engagement of the discipline with worldly questions. we need to make our results more relevant to practical political questions and synthesize our knowledge so that it helps society focus on “big picture” questions. for instance, we must use what we know about identity formation to understand the resurgence of nationalism and the hardening of deep social divisions. he also calls for more civically engaged research to both strengthen our understanding of community and to contribute more directly to it. finally, he urges the discipline to recommit to teaching as one of its central missions and to focus on ways to improve the transmission of knowledge and society’s understanding of politics. he believes that in this way political science as a discipline can make a contribution to resolving malaise rather than becoming a casualty of the antipathy it generates. celebrity and politics in airports and grocery store lines, you’ve likely passed displays of us weekly, star, hello!, in touch, and people. they scream out with headlines such as “jenn and angie: dumped at the same time” or “beyonce to jay-z: it’s over!”; you might thumb through or even purchase these magazines. sometimes, you read them more often than you read this important scholarly journal. but we are not here to judge. instead, this special issue of perspectives on politics places what some may dismiss as a guilty pleasure—celebrities—at the forefront of political science analysis. why? because these individuals—defined broadly as persons well known for their work in entertainment, sports, and a range of other fields––are increasingly visible players in american and global politics, doing everything from endorsing electoral candidates to protesting policy devel- opments. and with their massive fan bases and media reach, celebrities have a vast platform to advance their issues and views, and they are often granted access to national and international governing bodies such as the u.s. congress and the united nations. when they engage in political activities, then, they potentially shape opinions and outcomes, but they are not subject to traditional mechanisms of democratic accountabil- ity such as elections. doi: . /s © american political science association march | vol. /no. from the editors https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core in light of this, we agree with dan brockington that “the study of celebrity is not a shallow or trivial exercise. critics may bemoan the intellectual content of much celebrity news, but that does not make it off-limits to the academe” (brockington , ). to expand the study of celebrities within our particular academic realm––political science—in the fall of we issued a call for papers to consider celebrity and politics, broadly defined. we re- ceived nearly forty submissions and publish here a wide- ranging group of articles representing a diverse range of scholars, subfields, and methodological approaches. this introduction contextualizes these articles by first defining “celebrity” and situating celebrities’ political activity historically. next, we sketch the broad contours of their contemporary political work, considering here what exist- ing scholarship tells us about celebrities’ power to shape political debates and policy outcomes, among other things. in closing, we summarize the articles in this special issue, which reflect perspectives’ particular approach to political science: by prizing interesting work on a topical issue from multiple fields, they offer new and innovative ways to think of celebrity and political power both theoretically and empirically. context in the age of social media, almost anyone may achieve celebrity status. however, scholars from a range of fields indicate that specific features define this category of person, the first and most general of which is that they are widely known. the term “celebrity” has roots in the latin “celebritas” (fame) and “celeber” (frequented), and thus a person of celebrity is known for his “known-ness” (boorstin ) and has a name that “needs no further identification” (mills , - ). generally, this “known-ness” comes from an individual’s musical talent, acting skills, or athletic prowess, but in an ever-expanding media environment, it can come from any number of activities, as indicated by the rise of celebrity chefs, fashion designers, and even politicians, among others. however, known-ness is not an inherent quality but a process (drake and higgins ), and so another general feature of celebrity is its production through the ongoing interaction of texts (e.g., television shows), producers (e.g., publicists), and audiences (those who encounter and use their images) over time (gamson , rojek ). by extension, then, ongoing public and media recognition is another key element of celebrity (marshall ). effectively, “media exposure is the oxygen that sustains the contemporary celebrity,” meaning that celebrities are widely followed and recognized in the mainstream media (television, newspapers), social media (instagram, facebook, etc.) and other online media (e.g., the blogosphere) (drake and miah , ). additionally, celebrities are also a commercial phenom- enon in that their presence or the activity for which they are known is commodified and marketized in some way. with the rise of social media technologies, almost anyone may become known and recognized, and so fame alone is more democratized and less valuable (turner ). what sets celebrities apart is their capacity to use their fame to draw attention to and promote the consumption of a particular product, be it a television show, album, sporting match, or other consumer good that is associated with their activities, talents, or images. in short, this commercial element is what distinguishes celebrities from the merely famous. altogether, celebrity is a highly contingent and un- stable status that can change overnight (drake and miah , ; see also driessens ). this contingency is also related to fans’ preferences and national context. regarding the former, soccer fans, for example, may recognize lionel messi and cristiano ronaldo (the subject of the article by chris anderson and his coauthors in this issue) as celebrities, whereas american football fans may not. and while celebrity status is often associated with individuals from the global north, as zainab alam’s piece in this issue indicates, the fact that individuals such as nollywood (“nigerian hollywood”) actor genevieve nnaji has starred in over eighty nollywood movies and has over six million followers on instagram indicates that celebrity (and the production thereof) is not the sole purview of hollywood and the american media industries. in addition to their work on screen, in the ring, or on stage, celebrities develop and deploy their fame by engaging in politics. while donald trump’s election to president of the united states may be the most recent and high-profile example, scholars have documented celebri- ties’ political participation regarding a range of issues including (but not limited to) conservation and lgbt rights; both democratic and republican electoral cam- paigns and get-out-the-vote efforts; and international diplomacy and development (meyer and gamson ; payne, hanlon, and twomey ; nolan and brookes ; choi and berger ; biccum ; brockington ). but this political engagement did not occur over- night; instead, a range of factors facilitated this, one of which was structural shifts in the entertainment industry. prior to the mid-twentieth century, celebrity entertainers’ work in politics was constrained by their contractual agreements with hollywood studios, which were on the defensive against government accusations of communism (gamson , demaine ). during the s, however, the hollywood studio system declined and mounting social turmoil in the united states set the stage for celebrity entertainers to become politically active; many embraced this enthusiastically such as actors jane fonda, charlton heston, and paul newman (demaine ). alongside the decline of the hollywood studio system, the “mediatization” of society also fueled celebrities’ perspectives on politics from the editors | celebrity and politics https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core political ascendance. according to jesper stromback and frank esser, the invention of the television, followed by computers and the introduction of the internet, cell phone technologies, multi-channel cable networks, and personal electronic devices have facilitated a social change process (mediatization) in which the media has become deeply integrated and increasingly influential in different spheres of society (stromback and esser ; see also van elteren and turner ). in this context, a growing number of images, voices, and sounds compete for viewers’ attention, and celebrities, who are often charismatic performers and highly skilled communicators, are espe- cially adept at capturing media attention for various issues and for presenting themseleves as concerned spokespeople for a range of issues (demaine ). alongside mediatization, the sites and patterns of political power and engagement have also shifted in ways that facilitate celebrities’ political participation. techno- logical developments in travel, computing, and commu- nication, alongside processes of economic globalization and the rise of migration in response to wars and environmental disasters, have lessened the significance of national borders while increasing the range of non- geographical constituencies emerging from gender, race, the environment, global trade, etc. (urbinati and warren ; saward ). in response, a wide array of local, national, and international groups such as the united nations, the world bank, globalized corporations, non- profits, and advocacy groups have emerged to attend to their non-residential/geographical concerns (saward ). while these issue-based and policy driven networks of organizations and stakeholders may give new voice to underrepresented groups, they have also enhanced partic- ipation among the corporate elite and highly organized political advocacy groups that lack the traditional, electoral representative accountability to those affected by decisions (urbinati and warren ; strolovitch ). in this context, powerful individuals have ascended to potentially and significantly influence the political agenda. of course, this “power elite” (mills ), from the robber barons of the early twentieth century to the hedge fund titans of today, have always had an outsized capacity to engage in and influence politics and policy. but now these individuals and the highly organized groups representing their interests contribute record amounts to political campaigns and step in to ameliorate public problems at unprecedented rates (goss ). as a result, political authority is increasingly delegated to private, elite actors in both u.s. and global governance as leaders of governing bodies increasingly rely on them to deal with an increasingly complex world and to even serve as proxies for the masses (partzsch ; brockington ). as lena partzch documents, celebrities are among the most newly visible and significant individuals in this constellation of elite, non-state agents (partzsch ; see also goss ). their power rests on financial resources, relationships with other (often wealthy) elites who seek their company, and most significantly, their “celebrity (or fame) capital”—an achievement of public exposure that affords them valuable political, economic, cultural, or social-psychological currency that they can spend to draw attention to socio-political issues and to promote change, among other things (gunter ; see also driessens ). this currency is strengthened by their perform- ances, which create an emotional response among their adoring fans (rojek ). as a result, then, not only do many believe that angelina jolie is heroic on screen, as an adventurer (in lara croft: tomb raider) or as a crusading journalist (in a mighty heart), they also often believe that she is heroic in real life. in short, because celebrities are uniquely positioned to capitalize on and mobilize their resources and media expertise, they can engage in politics and convince the public that they have the answers to the problems they face (bang ; hart and tindall ; brockington ). often, “the prestige-generating power of success makes celebrities special and gives them the power to exert normative influence” (lindenberg, joly, and stapel , ). but once they have captured public attention about an issue, celebrities’ capacity to directly shape how people think or act is more difficult to discern. if one looks to research in marketing and communications, there is evidence that celebrity endorsements may shape public behavior. as johannes knoll and jörg matthes found in their recent meta-analysis of studies that experimentally tested the impact of celebrity endorsements on endorsed objects, while there was “a zero overall effect of celebrity endorsements on consumers’ responses,” they found some strong effects under some conditions (knoll and matthes , ). for example, they found that male celebrity endorsers had stronger endorsement effects on consumers than their female counterparts, and that actors elicited stronger celebrity endorsement effects when compared to other types of celebrities such as models, musicians, athletes, or television hosts. of course, a celebrity’s endorsement of and its sub- sequent impact on perfume or cereal sales is not equivalent to her endorsement of a particular political cause or position, and research about celebrities’ influence on political opinions shows mixed results, drawn often from small-n, regionally specific experimental studies. for example, craig frizzell conducted an experiment to test whether a statement by bono (of u fame) regarding a fictional foreign policy crisis would influence public opinion more than one from a traditional political elite. he found that despite predictions in existing literature that the public should agree with celebrity statements, “in the case of foreign policy the respondents were more likely to adopt the non-celebrity position than the celebrity posi- tion” (frizzell , ). the main reason for this was march | vol. /no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core that “respondents did not generally consider bono to be a trusted source of information.” however, these results were also a function of party identification: “for repub- licans and independents, the respondents were more likely to adopt the position of the non-celebrity than the celebrity. while this may be due to those respondents assuming that the non-celebrity was ideologically similar to themselves, [the results] indicate that celebrities cannot increase support in comparison to other elites even when the respondents disagree with the elites” (frizzell , ). beyond public opinion, celebrities’ power to shape electoral preferences and outcomes is also mixed. for example, andrew pease and paul r. brewer tested whether the “oprah effect”—the media mogul and celebrity’s massive fan base and considerable influence endorsing products ranging from books to cars––would translate to electoral influence. specifically, they considered her endorsement of barack obama for the democratic presidential nomination and whether voters would use this as an informational cue for evaluating candidates. their experiment, conducted shortly after the announce- ment (where participants read different news stories about her endorsement and then answered questions about their opinions about obama), revealed that oprah’s endorse- ment did not actually influence the extent to which participants held favorable opinions toward obama or saw him as likable. however, they found that reading about the endorsement “did lead participants to see obama as more likely to win the nomination and to say that they would be more likely to vote for him” (pease and brewer , ). in the policy realm, celebrities’ power to shape out- comes is also unclear. scholars have documented that elected officials increasingly invite celebrities to offer testimony and other feedback on policy, even when they have little professional, scholarly, or other expertise with the issue. linda demaine, for example, documented that “during the years through , celebrity enter- tainers testified before the united states congress on social issues unrelated to their professions times in front of congressional committees and subcommittees . . . [and] the frequency of these appearances more than doubled between the first five years of the study, – , and the last five years of the study, – ” (demaine , ). furthermore, their testimony was quite narrowly focused: while they addressed a broad range of social issues, these were mainly within the realm of health and crime, and the political orientation expressed in celebrity entertainers’ testimony leaned “toward the liberal side of the spectrum” (demaine , ). but even as celebrities may now occupy prominent positions in the contemporary polity, their actual political power to shape policy outcomes and resource distribution remains unclear. for example, despite claiming to know nothing about the complicated and controversial issue of human trafficking until her daughter, then age , told her that she learned about it in school and wanted to do something about it, actor jada pinkett smith testified before the senate foreign relations committee on july , to support the reauthorization of the traffick- ing victims protection act (tvpa). although the tvpa was reauthorized, it is impossible to attribute this to pinkett smith’s testimony. as scholars have documented, numerous celebrities have testified before congress about this issue over many years, and a confluence of factors such as the growth of the anti-human trafficking movement and the issue’s ascendance in popular discourse and culture have also shaped this legislation and its repeated reautho- rization (see, e.g,. bernstein ; peters ). if we do attribute public opinion and policy change to celebrities, even to a minor degree, questions arise whether we should be concerned about this influence. on the one hand, some have argued that celebrities’ political activity is (overall) benign, given that they often take up uncontroversial issues and positions in an effort to please their fans and maintain their celebrity brand, to say nothing of their product and other endorsements (vesey ). on the other hand, there are legitimate reasons to be concerned about their political activities, even if their impacts are difficult to discern. after all, celebrities’ high profiles afford them access to prominent political spaces like the u.s. congress, and they are often less knowledge- able about the issues they take on, prone to dramatization, and unaccountable for the policy solutions they propose (choi and berger ; van elteren ). regarding human trafficking, dina haynes ( ) found that celebrities who testified on it before the u.s. congress tended to focus on dramatic stories of the sex trafficking of women and girls by criminal gangs and non-western/non- white men, and they commonly promoted law-and-order solutions that emphasized punishment over prevention. and they did this even though labor trafficking into other sectors of the economy is arguably more prevalent, and large numbers of men, boys, and transgender persons are also at risk (unodc ). as a result, haynes argues, “celebrity activism is not significantly advancing the eradication of human trafficking and may even be doing harm by diverting attention from aspects of the problem and solution that sorely require attention” (haynes , ). altogether, it is clear that celebrities are active in political life, speaking for various issues and populations in the ever-expanding media-scape, while legislators in- creasingly grant them access to governing bodies. given that the study of politics is centrally concerned with power, this special issue builds on existing celebrity and politics scholarship to question and assess their roles and impacts in the polity. certainly, the articles in this issue do not resolve debates about whether celebrities actually perspectives on politics from the editors | celebrity and politics https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core influence political discourse and policy outcomes, among other things, but they do break new ground as they interrogate celebrity power from a variety of theoretical and methodological perspectives. the special issue articles we begin this issue with pieces that offer theoretical and conceptual tools for examining the relationship between celebrity and political power. given that celebrities are highly visible in political life but also subject to criticism, alfred archer, amanda cawston, benjamin matheson, and machteld geuskens’s “celebrity, democracy, and epistemic power” considers celebrity involvement in politics and its potential implications for democratic theory and practice. they argue that celebrities possess epistemic power, understood in terms of the ability to influence what others believe, think, or know, and to enable and disable others from exerting epistemic in- fluence by either giving credence to or discrediting others. although many individuals may possess this power, celebrities’ epistemic power is noteworthy because it comes from their ability to attract attention, despite their lack of relevant political or other issue expertise. archer et al. argue further that existing democratic theory fails to recognize celebrities’ epistemic power and its risks, including its illegitimate ability to set political agendas, relative immunity from familiar checks on power, and its undermining of democracy’s epistemic qualities. however, they conclude that celebrities’ power may be mitigated by, for example, demanding that the media correct misinformation that celebrities often promote. celebrities have exercised significant epistemic power in the humanitarian realm, and to help scholars specify and further interrogate this activity, lisa-ann richey and dan brockington’s “celebrity humanitarianism: using tropes of engagement to understand north/south rela- tions” understands celebrities’ humanitarian work as transferring issue interpretations from the perspective of the global north to the global south. arguing that studies of celebrity humanitarianism must go beyond focusing on individual celebrities and must be interpreted through the broader cultural, political, and economic systems of which they are a part, they offer a series of tropes through which celebrity humanitarianism is fre- quently conducted. this heuristic typology refocuses celebrity research away from its northern emphasis and helps scholars identify the politics and political solutions advanced by current forms of celebrity humanitarianism. building from these more theoretical pieces, the next two articles consider celebrities’ exertions of power and the implications thereof. in “caffeinated solutions as neo- liberal politics: how celebrities create and promote partnerships for peace and development,” alexandra budabin studies george clooney’s and ben affleck’s efforts to promote peace and development in south sudan and the eastern congo through their respective partner- ships with nespresso and starbucks. using these cases, she examines how celebrities exert power and influence through their mobilization of financial and political capital and their circulation of narratives promoting market-based approaches to humanitarianism and development. she argues that clooney’s and affleck’s efforts reinforce neo- liberal politics, which have significant impacts for de- mocracy. not only do they increase the access and influence of elite private actors in the humanitarian realm, despite their lack of expertise and other formal qualifica- tions, they also promote public-private partnerships that often escape public scrutiny. while budabin’s piece considers the power and poten- tial influence of celebrities from the global north, zainab alam’s “do-it-yourself activism in pakistan: the case of celebrity qandeel baloch” shifts our attention to the global south. in alam’s study of the late pakistani social- media celebrity qandeel baloch, her feminist analysis of those social-media postings reveals that baloch deployed them to create new forms of public space and to challenge dominant social norms and political practices. through what alam terms “do-it-yourself activism,” baloch cri- tiqued long-established norms governing gender, class, and sexuality, and she expanded the boundaries of national belonging in pakistan to include women like herself–– namely, culturally rebellious women of limited economic means. this article indicates that while celebrities may indeed reinforce hierarchies and elite politics, they may also use their position to illuminate and politicize injus- tices. building on these articles, which theorize and illustrate celebrity exertions of political power, the following four articles variously study the impact of celebrities’ political activity on various populations. to begin this examina- tion, chris anderson, luc arrondel, andré blais, jean- françois daoust, jean-françois laslier, and karine van der straeten’s “messi, ronaldo, and the politics of celebrity elections: voting for the best soccer player in the world” offers an innovative examination of celebrities’ power to move opinion. using historical election results and an original survey of soccer fans to assess players’ success in the ballon d’or (the high profile election of the world’s best player), they find that players from top teams in striker positions (like lionel messi and cristiano ronaldo) are significantly more likely to win the ballon d’or, all of which suggests a clear and growing hierarchy in the competition for soccer celebrity. in making this argument, anderson et al. expand the study of celebrity and politics to an ostensibly non-political election, which is important because “in an age when a reality tv star can be elected president of the united states, understanding what drives people’s affinity for one icon over another matters” (p. ). march | vol. /no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core in addition to considering how celebrities may shape individual opinions, nyron crawford, christopher tow- ler, and robert bennett’s “shut up and play: black athletes, protest politics and black political action” examines the extent to which celebrities can mobilize populations to act, particularly those who are underrepre- sented in mainstream american society. using the black voter project pilot study to examine the relation- ship between race, celebrity, and social movements, they ask whether colin kaepernick’s protest of police violence mobilized black americans to political action. focusing specifically on african american political engagement in the election, they find that african americans who strongly approve of kaepernick’s protest engaged in politics at elevated rates, even after accounting for alter- native explanations. moreover, approval for kaepernick also moderated other forces rooted in group identity, such as identification with the black lives matter movement. in the end, they argue that kaepernick and the protest movement he leads offer a powerful mobilizing force for african americans. in addition to potentially influencing large portions of the population, celebrities also reach and shape the work of journalists. here, amber boydstun and regina law- rence’s “when celebrity and political journalism collide: reporting standards, entertainment, and the conun- drum of covering donald trump’s campaign” explores how the press covered donald trump’s presidential campaign. while earlier research predicts that he would have received “clown coverage”––that is, de- risive, dismissive press coverage due to his career in reality television and lack of conventional political experience— his fame, wealth, and campaign’s entertainment value challenged this. drawing from qualitative interviews with journalists and other political insiders and a content analysis of news coverage of trump at key points throughout the campaign, they argue that a collision of entertainment-infused politics with traditional journalism practices challenged the press’s ability to cover the campaign coherently. ultimately, the press responded to this dilemma by giving trump as much clown-like coverage as it did serious coverage through the primary and the general election. the final article turns to consider how celebrities’ political activities may potentially impact a celebrity’s own status. in “don’t republicans tweet too? using twitter to assess the consequences of political endorsements by celebrities,” jan zilinsky, cristian vacarri, joshua a. tucker, and jonathan nagler consider the risks that celebrities take when talking about politics on social media. through an analysis of approximately , tweets from eighty-three celebrities who chose to endorse presidential candidates, the authors assessed whether celebrities pay a political penalty for discussing presidential candidates, and whether celebrities behave similarly to other campaign surrogates by “going negative.” by doc- umenting how often celebrities with distinct political preferences tweeted about donald trump, bernie sand- ers, and hillary clinton, they find that followers of opinionated celebrities do not withhold engagement when they become politically vocal and often go negative. and in a departure from previous research that indicates the public is more interested in celebrity gossip than serious news, they find that political content from celebrities is actually more popular than their typical lifestyle tweets in a number of cases. final thoughts on celebrity and politics certainly, the articles in this issue are not the final, definitive publications on the topic of celebrity and politics; instead, they advance a large and growing body of scholarship from a range of scholarly fields. altogether, we hope this special issue will spark more scholarly consideration of celebrities in political science, and indeed the pieces here point to directions for future research. while much research has considered celebrities in north america and parts of europe, it is clear that more work is needed regarding the political activities and impacts of celebrities from the global south. we also need to expand the range of methods for testing celebrities’ actual impact on the public, broadly defined. but for now, we thank the authors for their contributions and the many reviewers who played such an important role in helping them sharpen their work. other content in this issue we publish two other items in this issue, an additional article and a reflection. the article, “accountability by the numbers: introducing a new transitional justice dataset – ,” is by genevieve bates, ipek cinar, and monika nalepa, and as the title suggests, it provides an overview of the most ambitious dataset for the study of transitional justice generated to date. its novel facets include a time-series cross-national setup and the inclusion of both post-conflict and post-authoritarian cases in the same dataset. the authors develop three new measures to qualify transitional justice issues relating to personnel––severity, urgency, and polarization. at the same time they build up their own measures from data collected at a highly granular level, allowing other researchers who do not share their conceptual priors to use the data to build their own measures as well. they close the piece with some simple regressions to test whether transitional justice measures obstruct the efforts of authoritarian elites to preserve their power following episodes of democratization. finally, the issue also includes a reflection by peter hall: “the electoral politics of growth regimes.” in a wide-ranging account, hall discusses how the economic and social policies used by developed democracies to pursue perspectives on politics from the editors | celebrity and politics https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core economic growth were constrained by and evolved in response to electoral concerns. he traces this over the period of immediate postwar prosperity ( – ), the subsequent era of liberalization ( – ), and the contemporary era of the knowledge-based economy. the account shows how policy is not only a product of the development of the economy and technology, but of new and emergent electoral cleavages created by electoral strategies that tip the balance of power to specific actors at specific points in time. the piece concludes with a consideration of the new possibilities inherent in the current period of knowledge-based economic development. bigger, better perspectives for the anacharonistics, luddites, and antediluvians among you who are physically holding the copy that you are reading, you may sense something different about this issue of perspectives. from this issue onward, we have expanded from to pages. previously we have devoted pages to the introduction, articles, and reflections, and the same allocation to the book reviews. we have now added twenty-six pages ( total) to the front end, while keeping the book review section at its current size. this will allow us to publish approximately two more articles or reflections in each issue. keep those submissions coming. with some extra space, perhaps the rate of acceptance will go up. notes samantha majic, associate professor of political science at the john jay college of the city university of new york, served as guest editor for this celebrity and politics special issue. samantha conceived of the project, wrote the call for papers, and served as the lead editor on all submissions to the special issue. the editors wish to express our gratitude for her diligent work and inspired intellectual leadership. sample article headlines from in touch, july , . for a discussion of celebrity politicians, see street . references bang, henrik. . “parties in the swing: between democratic representation and communicative management.” unpublished manuscript, department of political science, university of copenhagen. bernstein, elizabeth. . “carceral politics as gender justice? the ‘traffic in women’ and neoliberal cir- cuits of crime, sex, and rights.” theoretical sociology ( ): – . biccum, april. . “marketing development: celebrity politics and the ‘new’ development advocacy.” third world quarterly ( ): – . boorstin, daniel j. . the image : a guide to pseudo- events in america. th anniversary ed. new york: vintage books. brockington, dan. . “the production and con- struction of celebrity advocacy in international de- velopment.” third world quarterly ( ): – . choi, chong ju and ron berger. . “ethics of celebrities and their increasing influence on st century society.” journal of business ethics ( ): – . demaine, linda. . “navigating policy by the stars: the influence of celebrity entertainers on federal lawmaking.” journal of law and politics ( ): – . drake, philip and michael higgins. . “lights, camera, election: celebrity, performance and the uk general election leadership debates.” british journal of politics and international relations ( ): – . drake, philip and andy miah. . “the cultural politics of celebrity.” cultural politics ( ): – . driessens, oliver. . “celebrity capital: redefining celebrity using field theory.” theory and society ( ): – . frizzell, craig. . “public opinion and foreign policy: the effects of celebrity endorsements.” social science journal ( ): – . gamson, joshua. . claims to fame: celebrity in contemporary america. berkeley: university of cali- fornia press. goss, kristin. . “policy plutocrats: how america’s wealthy seek to influence government.” ps: political science and politics ( ): – . gunter, barrie. . celebrity capital: assessing the value of fame. new york: bloomsbury. haynes, dina f. . “the celebritization of human trafficking.” annals of the american academy of political and social science ( ): – . knoll, johannes and jörg matthes. . “the effective- ness of celebrity endorsements: a meta-analysis.” journal of the academy of marketing science ( ): – . lindenberg, siegwart, janneke f. joly and diederik a. stapel. . “the norm-activating power of celeb- rity: the dynamics of success and influence.” social psychology quarterly ( ): – . marshall, p. david. . celebrity and power: fame in contemporary culture. nd ed. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. meyer, david and josh gamson. . “the challenge of cultural elites: celebrities and social movements.” sociological inquiry ( ): – . mills, c wright. [ ]. the power elite. rev. ed. new york: oxford university press. nolan, david and stephanie brookes. . “populism in theory and practice: analysing celebrity politics.” media asia research ( ): – . partzsch, lena. . “powerful individuals in a global- ized world.” global policy ( ): – . march | vol. /no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core payne, j. gregory, john p. hanlon, and david p. twomey iii. . “celebrity spectacle influence on young voters in the presidential campaign: what to expect in .” american behavioral scientist ( ): – . pease, andrew and paul r. brewer. . “the oprah factor: the effects of a celebrity endorsement in a presidential primary campaign.” international journal of press/politics ( ): – . peters, alicia. . responding to human trafficking: sex, gender, and culture in the law. philadelphia: univer- sity of pennsylvania press. rojek, chris. . celebrity. london: reaktiob books. saward, michael. . “authorisation and authenticity: representation and the unelected.” journal of political philosophy ( ): – . street, john. . “do celebrity politics and celebrity politicians matter?” british journal of politics and in- ternational relations ( ): – . strolovitch, dara z. . affirmative advocacy : race, class, and gender in interest group politics. chicago: university of chicago press. stromback, jesper and frank esser. . “mediatization of politics: transforming democracies and reshaping politics.” in mediatization of communication, ed. knut lundby, – . boston: de gruyter mouton. t’hart, paul and karen tindall. . “leadership by the famous: celebrity as political capital.” in dispersed democratic leadership: origins, dynamics, and impli- cations, ed. paul ’t hart, john kane, and haig patapan, – . oxford: oxford university press. turner, graeme. . understanding celebrity. d ed. los angeles: sage. united nations office on drugs and crime (unodc). . global report on trafficking in persons. vienna: united nations office on drugs and crime. https:// www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/glotip/ _global_report_on_trafficking_in_persons.pdf urbinati, nadia and mark e. warren. . “the concept of representation in contemporary demo- cratic theory.” annual review of political science ( ): – . van elteren, mel. . “celebrity culture, performative politics, and the spectacle of ‘democracy’ in america.” journal of american culture ( ): – . vesey, alyxandra. . “putting her on the shelf: pop star fragrances and post-feminist entrepreneurialism.” feminist media studies ( ): – . perspectives on politics from the editors | celebrity and politics https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/glotip/ _global_report_on_trafficking_in_persons.pdf https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/glotip/ _global_report_on_trafficking_in_persons.pdf https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/glotip/ _global_report_on_trafficking_in_persons.pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core statement of mission and procedures perspectives on politics seeks to provide a space for broad and synthetic discussion within the political science pro- fession and between the profession and the broader schol- arly and reading publics. such discussion necessarily draws on and contributes to the scholarship published in the more specialized journals that dominate our discipline. at the same time, perspectives seeks to promote a complemen- tary form of broad public discussion and synergistic under- standing within the profession that is essential to advancing scholarship and promoting academic community. perspectives seeks to nurture a political science public sphere, publicizing important scholarly topics, ideas, and innovations, linking scholarly authors and readers, and pro- moting broad refl exive discussion among political scien- tists about the work that we do and why this work matters. perspectives publishes work in a number of formats that mirror the ways that political scientists actually write: research articles: as a top-tier journal of political sci- ence, perspectives accepts scholarly research article sub- missions and publishes the very best submissions that make it through our double-blind system of peer review and revision. the only thing that differentiates perspectives research articles from other peer-reviewed articles at top journals is that we focus our attention only on work that in some way bridges subfi eld and methodological divides, and tries to address a broad readership of political 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wealth: the effect of covid- response stringency international journal of environmental research and public health article trading health for wealth: the effect of covid- response stringency megan cross , shu-kay ng and paul scuffham * g griffith health centre, menzies health institute queensland, gold coast campus, griffith university, parklands drive, gold coast , australia; m.cross@griffith.edu.au (m.c.); s.ng@griffith.edu.au (s.-k.n.) * correspondence: p.scuffham@griffith.edu.au received: october ; accepted: november ; published: november ����������������� abstract: international governments’ covid- responses must balance human and economic health. beyond slowing viral transmission, strict lockdowns have severe economic consequences. this work investigated response stringency, quantified by the oxford covid- government response tracker ’s stringency index, and examined how restrictive interventions affected infection rates and gross domestic product (gdp) in china and oecd countries. accounting for response timing, china imposed the most stringent restrictions, while sweden and japan were the least stringent. expected gdp declines range from − % (japan) to − . % (uk). while greater restrictions generally slowed viral transmission, they failed to reach statistical significance and reduced gdp (p = . ). timing was fundamental: governments who responded to the pandemic faster saw greater reductions in viral transmission (p = . ), but worse decreases in gdp (p = . ). thus, response stringency has a greater effect on gdp than infection rates, which are instead affected by the timing of covid- interventions. attempts to mitigate economic impacts by delaying restrictions or decreasing stringency may buoy gdp in the short term but increase infection rates, the longer-term economic consequences of which are not yet fully understood. as highly restrictive interventions were successful in some but not all countries, decision-makers must consider whether their strategies are appropriate for the country on health and economic grounds. keywords: covid- ; stringency index; gdp; infection rate . introduction the significant impact of the covid- pandemic highlights the need for swift, proactive responses to a rapidly evolving situation. most mitigation strategies involve reduced human mobility (travel restrictions and mandatory quarantine), closures (of schools, businesses and public spaces), and changes to health policy (including testing regimes). the stringency of international government responses has varied substantially. while sweden eschewed movement restrictions entirely [ ], south africa’s lockdown went further and included bans on the sale of alcohol and cigarettes [ ]. overall, most government interventions have slowed infection rates to varying degrees. however, closures and restrictions have ruinous effects on labor markets and the global economy [ , ], and the social and psychological consequences of lockdowns are profound [ – ]. as the cost of ‘flattening the curve’ pressures governments to relax restrictions, researchers are questioning which strategies have most effectively curbed viral transmission [ , ]. comparisons of the overall efficacy of international responses have been difficult, given the heterogeneity of both the restrictions themselves and their specific political and social contexts. fortunately, the need for a universal measure to compare the strictness of international responses was met by the oxford covid- government response tracker (oxcgrt) [ ], which assimilates data on indicators (including closures and policy changes) to track governments’ pandemic int. j. environ. res. public health , , ; doi: . /ijerph www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - x http://dx.doi.org/ . /ijerph http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph https://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= int. j. environ. res. public health , , of responses. the oxcgrt’s stringency index (si) is a composite score from to that considers the strictness of containment strategies (closures, movement restrictions) and information campaigns [ ]. it is particularly useful because it allows direct comparisons of countries’ responses to the pandemic. when examined with epidemiological and economic data, it enables an investigation of the relationships (or lack thereof) between response stringency and both economic and infection outcomes. this allows us to consider whether the most stringent government restrictions have been the most effective responses to covid- . given the potentially devastating economic consequences of strict lockdowns, this work investigates the effect of intervention stringency on infection rates and gross domestic product (gdp, which is the best measure of the total output produced within a jurisdiction). by examining the stringency indices, case rates and predicted gdp changes in countries with both similar and different socioeconomic situations, we aim to verify whether, as predicted, more stringent responses are more effective than lenient ones in reducing viral transmission. similarly, we investigate whether stricter responses do indeed inflict greater economic damage. as governments work to balance economic and human health amid the feared, and actual, ‘second wave’ of infections, this analysis provides information for decision-making on future stringency [ ]. . materials and methods . . data sources stringency index data covering january to july were downloaded from the oxcgrt [ ]. the complete covid- dataset from the oxford martin school is updated daily and was downloaded on july [ ]. countries’ predicted annual gdp growth was obtained from the organisation for economic co-operation and development’s (oecd’s) real gdp double-hit scenario forecast [ ], which considers all goods and services produced in a year and accounts for both the global economic climate and that of the individual country. . . . analysis timeframes on january , there were confirmed covid- cases; by june, there were . million [ ]. seven weeks later, on july, this had more than doubled to . million [ ]. thus, to account for the geographic spread of covid- , we considered data spanning both the first seven months of the pandemic ( january to july ) and a shorter timeframe, arguably at the height of the pandemic ( june to july ). this narrower timeframe was selected to both account for the geographic spread of covid- and to avoid biasing the analysis away from those countries whose stringency indices remained low (or at zero) because the virus had not yet reached them in the earlier months. . . . countries of interest for simplicity, we first considered the stringency indices of the oecd countries and china, then focused on at least one country from each major geographic region. since the vast differences in healthcare, political systems and socioeconomics complicate comparisons, we included three nordic countries in this shortlist. although they are distinct nations, sweden, finland, and norway are culturally, politically and economically more similar than other nations with a shared geography and benefit from comparatively high-quality healthcare [ , ]. thus, their inclusion supports a stronger interpretation of the effects of different stringency responses. . . statistical analysis statistical analyses were performed in stata/se . (statacorp, college station, tx, usa). we considered the following measures to describe the characteristics of response stringency: (a) maximum stringency index score (simax); (b) time to respond to the pandemic (days from january to si > ); (c) time to respond to first local case (days); (d) time to (first) maximum score (days since int. j. environ. res. public health , , of january to reach the (first) simax if there is more than one mode); (e) response escalation (days since si > to reach the (first) simax); (f) speed of escalation (simax divided by response escalation); (g) number of days at maximum score; (h) area under curve of si time graph (auc; quantifies stringency strength and duration); (i) average stringency strength (aucav; equals auc divided by the response duration). different multilevel models were used for analyzing data of different variable types. multilevel mixed-effects negative binomial regression models were used on country-level data to explore the association between response stringency and infection rates, with the assumption of random continental effect and each country’s population treated as an exposure factor. to explore the association between response stringency and the impact of covid- on gdp, we adopted multilevel mixed-effects linear regression models, assuming random continental effect, to analyze changes in annual gdp for – forecast under a double-hit scenario of covid- [ ]. likelihood-ratio tests were used to assess the significance of continental heterogeneity in infection rates or gdp impact and to compare multilevel negative binomial versus multilevel poisson models for modelling the number of infections. . results . . stringency indices of china and oecd countries detailed results are available in table a in appendix a. maximum stringency indices (simax) for the oecd countries plus china, january to july , range from to out of , with a mean of (tables and a ). on average, countries took days from january to respond to the developing pandemic and many implemented precautionary restrictions before local cases were confirmed. nevertheless, response initiation and escalation varied, as did the time each country spent under its strictest restrictions. for example, while canada spent only three days at simax, the usa was there for days. further, table a shows a significant continental effect for time to maximum score (icc = . ; % ci: . – . ), which indicates that the between-continent variability accounts for . % of the overall variation here. continents also differ in both time to maximum stringency (p < . ) and response escalation (p < . ). table . characteristics of oxford stringency index for the focus countries from january to july . country max. score # days to respond to first local case # days to max. a # days at max. response escalation b (days) auc c aucav d asia china , japan − europe finland − norway − sweden uk america usa colombia − , australasia australia statistics e median range – − – – – – – , – iqr f icc g < . < . . . . * < . < . a number of days since january ; b response escalation is the time taken to reach max si after a response was initiated; c area under curve (auc) quantifies the stringency level and duration of each pandemic response; d aucav = auc/duration of response; is a measure of average stringency in a response period; e statistics were calculated for data from the focus countries (see table a for china and oecd countries); f interquartile range (iqr); g intra-cluster correlation coefficient (icc) measures the extent of correlation within continents (* p < . ). data were downloaded from [ ]. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of the auc and aucav (tables and a ) consider average stringency over january–july of the pandemic and each country’s response, respectively. higher auc values indicate restrictions that were both more stringent and active for longer periods. both timeframes are useful, given the continental effect observed, the staggered detection of first cases in various regions, and the unique situation in each country. . . . highest stringency responses given that the virus was first detected in china, it is unsurprising that the chinese government’s response was both the fastest and the longest (tables and a ). while its stringency was moderate (simax = ), china’s interventions escalated relatively rapidly ( days to simax; table a ) and maximum levels were maintained for a quarter of the total response period. thus, china had the greatest overall stringency when duration was considered (auc = , ) and the second-highest average daily stringency (aucav = ; table a ). new zealand imposed the most stringent restrictions (simax = ), but took longer to reach simax and spent a shorter period there. thus, its overall stringency is moderate (auc = ). in south america, chile and colombia are notable. both countries had highly stringent responses (simax and , respectively), but while chile waited days to respond, colombia acted faster ( days). both took longer than average to reach simax and spent fewer days there, but diverged in response duration: colombia’s strict response spanned an extended period, and thus it is the second-most stringent overall (auc = , ). . . . lowest stringency responses sweden’s response to the pandemic received much scrutiny [ ]. the country has the lowest maximum stringency (simax = ) and one of the shortest responses. although sweden waited days to act, days of its -day response were spent at simax. while it has the lowest overall stringency (auc = ), its average daily stringency is not the lowest—nor is it in the bottom three (sweden aucav = ; lowest value is japan: aucav = ). (see the following table ). . . stringency indices and infection rates at least one country from each geographic region was selected for further analysis. these included the usa and colombia from the americas, china and japan from asia, australia from oceania, and the uk, sweden, finland and norway from europe. figure and table examine the rates of new cases for one-month periods surrounding each country’s time at simax. overall, case numbers in most countries decrease during or shortly after maximum stringency, given a lag in lockdown efficacy. exceptions include sweden, colombia, australia, where a double-hit scenario is observed, and the usa. although infections in the usa decreased slightly under maximum restrictions (figure ), its relaxation from si to coincides with a rapid increase in cases. the country reported a daily average of . cases per million before restrictions escalated, . cases per million at simax, and ~ per million by the end of july (table ). int. j. environ. res. public health , , of int. j. environ. res. public health , , x for peer review of figure . stringency index and infection rates. the rate of new cases is shown in black for periods of one month before and one month after a period at maximum stringency index (si) [ , ], which is highlighted in red. si over the same period is overlaid in blue and scaled from to in all plots to enable comparisons. table . average number of daily cases per million people before, during and after periods at maximum stringency. average daily cases per million people before max si a at max si b after max si a usa . . . colombia . . . uk . . . sweden . . . finland . . . norway . . . china c . . . japan . . . australia c . . . case data were downloaded from the oxford martin school [ ]; a daily case rates averaged over a -day period; b daily case rates averaged over the duration of each country’s period at maximum si; c case rates are presented for the first period at maximum si. . . risk factors and cumulative infections we examined the risk factors potentially associated with the number of cumulative infected cases up to july , using the full sample of countries. to account for the progression of the pandemic, the statistical analysis considered a shorter period: june to july (table ). here, the figure . stringency index and infection rates. the rate of new cases is shown in black for periods of one month before and one month after a period at maximum stringency index (si) [ , ], which is highlighted in red. si over the same period is overlaid in blue and scaled from to in all plots to enable comparisons. table . average number of daily cases per million people before, during and after periods at maximum stringency. average daily cases per million people before max si a at max si b after max si a usa . . . colombia . . . uk . . . sweden . . . finland . . . norway . . . china c . . . japan . . . australia c . . . case data were downloaded from the oxford martin school [ ]; a daily case rates averaged over a -day period; b daily case rates averaged over the duration of each country’s period at maximum si; c case rates are presented for the first period at maximum si. . . risk factors and cumulative infections we examined the risk factors potentially associated with the number of cumulative infected cases up to july , using the full sample of countries. to account for the progression of the pandemic, the statistical analysis considered a shorter period: june to july (table ). here, int. j. environ. res. public health , , of the infection rate is higher when governments’ times to respond to the pandemic (rr = . ; % ci: . – . ; p = . ) and reach simax (rr = . ; % ci: . – . ; p = . ) are longer. thus, those who respond faster and implement stringent interventions sooner appear most likely to reduce infection rates. table . results of negative binomial regression models on total infections in countries from june to july . risk factor a rate ratio ( % ci) p-value gdp (per usd ) ˆ . ( . , . ) . democracy index ˆ . ( . , . ) * . average temperature (jan–mar) . ( . , . ) . average temperature (jan–jun) . ( . , . ) . population density ˆ . ( . , . ) . median age . ( . , . ) * . aged > . ( . , . ) . aged > . ( . , . ) . variable related to oxford stringency index §: maximum scoreb . ( . , . ) . time to respond (to pandemic) ˆ . ( . , . ) * . time to respond (to first local case) b . ( . , . ) . time to maximum score c . ( . , . ) * . response escalation b . ( . , . ) . period at maximum score b . ( . , . ) . auc ˆ . ( . , . ) . aucav b . ( . , . ) . data were downloaded from the oxford covid- government response tracker [ ]. ˆ negative binomial mixed-effect model (with significant continental effect); * p < . ; § si measures up to may ; a univariate analysis unless otherwise stated; b multivariate analysis: adjusted for median age; c multivariate analysis: adjusted for gdp and median age. . . stringency indices and gdp forecast countries’ annual gdp growth rates for – were estimated by the oecd’s real gdp forecast [ ], which reports annual growth compared to the previous year, allowing comparisons as a relative percentage. multilevel mixed-effect linear regression models examining the change in predicated growth for the countries (figure a; table a ) found that higher simax (p = . ) and auc (p = . ) are related to greater reductions in gdp. similarly, faster responders are linked to decreasing growth (p = . ). when response duration is considered, china was the most stringent overall and its economy is expected to decrease by an average of . % (figure b). similarly, colombia responded early, and its highly stringent restrictions linked to a . % decrease. the greatest change in gdp is the . % decrease predicted for the uk, which initiated a response two days after its first confirmed case (table ). while the usa escalated restrictions to approximately equal stringency to the uk (figure b), its predicted gdp decrease is . %. the annual growth rates of japan (– %) and australia (– . %) are expected to change the least. notably, both countries responded rapidly to the pandemic (figure c). the three nordic countries have predicted gdp declines of . – . %. finland responded to the pandemic first (figure c) and its gdp is predicted to decrease the most. while the slowest responder, sweden, introduced low-stringency interventions, norway’s were the most stringent and its gdp is predicted to change the least (– . %). int. j. environ. res. public health , , of int. j. environ. res. public health , , x for peer review of (a) (b) (c) figure . the effect of covid- responses on annual gdp growth rates. annual gdp growth rates were estimated by the oecd. (a) results of multilevel mixed-effect linear regression models of change in annual growth rate – per interquartile range (iqr) due to a double-hit scenario ( countries; multivariate analyses adjusted for gdp). error bars show % confidence intervals; * p < . . the difference between the and growth rates is shown against (b) response stringency and duration (area under the curve; auc) and (c) the time for each country to respond to the pandemic (stringency index > ); this includes both preventative restrictions that may have preceded confirmed cases in those countries. figure . the effect of covid- responses on annual gdp growth rates. annual gdp growth rates were estimated by the oecd. (a) results of multilevel mixed-effect linear regression models of change in annual growth rate – per interquartile range (iqr) due to a double-hit scenario ( countries; multivariate analyses adjusted for gdp). error bars show % confidence intervals; * p < . . the difference between the and growth rates is shown against (b) response stringency and duration (area under the curve; auc) and (c) the time for each country to respond to the pandemic (stringency index > ); this includes both preventative restrictions that may have preceded confirmed cases in those countries. . discussion international responses to covid- have been diverse. while strategies that suppress human movement and close public spaces generally decrease infection rates, their economic effects are int. j. environ. res. public health , , of immediate and severe. thus, this work examined whether more stringent restrictions are linked to lower infection rates and what effect stringency has on gdp. . . rapid responses are related to decreased infection rates a geographic effect was observed in how rapidly countries escalated their responses (tables and a ). generally, european countries increased their stringency faster, likely because the pandemic’s geographic origins allowed some nations more time to consider their strategies. indeed, many countries implemented interventions before local cases were confirmed (table a ). infection rates were higher where governments were slower to initiate and escalate restrictions; however, no significant relationship exists between stringency and case rate. instead, infection rates are related to response timing and escalation. . . rapid responses affect gdp the importance of timing is also highlighted by the gdp data, which link faster and more stringent responses to lower annual growth rates. this is likely to be a direct result of business closures and workforce immobilization. in the short term, the imposition of strict restrictions halts economic productivity, but where governments allow businesses to remain open, the economy is allowed to function ‘normally’ for a longer period (assuming that there is consumer demand). the gdp data were published on june and thus, the impact on gdp does not account for the knock-on long-term economic effects of delayed responses: waiting too long to impose restrictions increases infection rates, which affects the workforce and healthcare system and could impact the economy if critical workers (or a significant proportion of the workforce) succumb to the virus [ , ]. beyond the loss of human capability to covid- mortality [ ], higher infection rates could prolong the increased pressure already placed on healthcare systems. this has economic implications, particularly for countries with state-subsidized medical services (e.g., medicare in australia), which will be required to divert increased funding to bolster healthcare. further, the emergence of ‘long covid’ [ ] suggests that a subset of the global population will require longer-term care for chronic side-effects of the virus, which will further impact states’ medical funding models. in addition, % of long covid sufferers report lower quality of life and significant ongoing health problems [ ], which could affect their participation in the workforce and the state’s economic productivity. thus, while delayed responses may support economic stability in the short term, the detriment to human health may have a knock-on effect in the long term that ultimately affects the financial position of the state. further, the economic success of countries that rely on exports is arguably vulnerable regardless of their internal covid- status. these states depend on international borders remaining open to shipments and on there being staff to receive goods and process payments. if a country does not impose restrictions, thus allowing production to continue and the local economy to continue unchanged, it may still face economic difficulties in the longer-term if goods for export cannot be delivered because client states’ borders are shut to mitigate infection [ ]. this highlights the interconnectedness of the global economy and the potential longer-term consequences of delayed lockdowns for global trade. this analysis also does not consider governments’ economic stimuli, which vary between jurisdictions [ ]. thus, given the complexity of the international economy, it is challenging to consider the relationship between gdp and stringency in a short-term vacuum. rapid, highly stringent responses decrease infection rates, thus easing the healthcare burden and allowing the resumption of ‘normal’ activity sooner. however, this approach depends on rapid population compliance and the capabilities of the supporting infrastructure. it is affected by each nation’s individual circumstances—its population and the nature of its labor market, social structure and health care system. thus, to account for these differences, we considered nordic countries, where national commonalities support a more even assessment [ ]. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . . nordic covid- responses despite the attention it received for an apparently laissez faire response, sweden’s strategy was carefully considered and of a similar average daily stringency to finland’s (aucav of and , respectively) [ ]. finland responded the fastest and had the lowest case rate under simax; sweden’s average rate was triple that and increased over this period (figure ). thus, as expected by critics [ ], the country’s low-stringency intervention was ineffective in slowing transmission and the number of cumulative infections in sweden remains higher overall [ ]. the swedish approach was touted to avoid the economic fallout of lockdowns [ , ]. however, its economy is predicted to suffer more than that of norway (figure ), which implemented the most stringent restrictions of the three countries. as sweden’s cumulative mortality was almost times those of its neighbors ( per million vs. and per million in norway and finland, respectively, july ) [ ], the ultimate success of this strategy remains questionable, given the potential longer-term effects on the workforce. further, given the highly interconnected nature of the global economy, national gdp may inevitably be affected by fluctuations in other countries and thus, the benefits of prioritizing local economic damage control may not balance the cost to human life. . . trading human vs. economic health the weighting of human versus economic health is complex. the emerging consensus is that the long-term effects of coronavirus mortality will outweigh the shorter-term economic impacts of lockdowns [ – ]. however, these conclusions are challenged by the inherent difficulty of modelling unknown outcomes: rather than mortality, the modelling of deaths averted is required to support solid conclusions. without this baseline, validation of current progress remains uncertain. further, deaths and their impacts will vary under a range of hypothetical scenarios with competing risks; thus, it is difficult to conclude whether governments have made the ‘right’ decisions. learnings from previous pandemics reveal one fundamental factor: human behavior [ ]. indeed, there is little point keeping businesses open if customers stay home—and restrictions are only effective at curbing transmission if citizens comply. . . stringency in context sweden’s response relies on social responsibility and the willingness of citizens to follow government recommendations [ , ]. opposition to highly stringent lockdowns may emerge in response to the economic and sociological consequences and it is notable that we initially linked higher democracy indices to increased infection rates (table ). given recent debates on covid- restrictions and civil liberties [ ], this prompts discussion of the public’s role in the success of pandemic interventions. si is a composite measure that does not account for nuances in sub-national government responses and our analysis is challenged by the reality that government policy may not automatically receive compliance from the populace. obvious examples include the emergence of the ‘anti-masker’ movement in the usa and the progression of black lives matter protests despite social distancing restrictions [ ]. these highlight the need for public ownership and behavior change, which is arguably more likely if the strategy is appropriate for the country in question [ – ]. thus, beyond responding rapidly, governments must also select interventions that are appropriate for their specific social, health, cultural and economic reality [ – ]. amid a second wave of infections, the importance of response timing is critical. the global community now has access to significant data and research, which should (in theory) support the mobilization of more effective responses to the pandemic. although questions remain and prophylactics and treatments are still being trialed, each country is better equipped to understand which measures have (or have not) been effective. the data here suggest that countries facing a second wave should implement stringent interventions when infection rates begin to rise. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . . study limitations and further considerations the oxcgrt stringency index is a ‘low resolution’ composite measure that does not account for nuances in sub-national government responses, which may be significant where state-level measures vary widely between jurisdictions (e.g., in the usa). while this large-scale data aggregation may mitigate the over- or misrepresentation of certain indicators, it may also fail to capture important data because it cannot account for variations in local contexts or the specific effects on the implementation of high-level policy changes. this work assumes that measures imposed by governments are successfully implemented and result in real action on the ground, which may not be the case in certain regions. further, it relies on the accurate reporting of both restrictions and infection rates. however, case detection might vary between jurisdictions and depend on various factors, including the type of test used, how the samples were analyzed, whether mass screening was implemented and how often people were tested. we are also unable account for barriers to compliance and/or the activation of a response because these factors are also unique to each country and thus, too diverse for the general analysis performed here, particularly given the composite nature of the stringency index and sub-national variation between jurisdictions within each state. finally, the sample countries are distributed across both hemispheres and thus, the data analysis included countries experiencing both the height of summer and the depth of winter (june–july). the potential effects of seasonality on viral transmission and human behavior were not examined but may be significant, particularly during summer, when social gatherings, vacations and outdoor activities may influence people to gather in public spaces despite social distancing rules. however, our analysis found no significant relationships between average temperature, infection rates and gdp (table and appendix b). the effect of climate on viral transmission is under investigation by others but reports thus far are conflicting [ , ], and hence we would be cautious in interpreting any connections between climate and transmission until further information is available. . conclusions covid- pandemic responses require governments to maintain a delicate balance between physical and fiscal health. highly restrictive interventions may reduce infection rates, but have an immediate economic impact. stringency has a greater effect on gdp than on transmission in the short term and this work demonstrates that the timing of the response matters more than how stringent it is. it is now becoming clear that the covid- pandemic is not a short-term phenomenon. thus, in balancing human and economic health, governments implementing highly stringent restrictions (or not!) must consider the long-term implications of their policies. trading human for economic health by delaying interventions may benefit a country in the short term, but impose long-term burdens on healthcare systems, global trade and workforce stability. unfortunately, one size does not fit all, and responses must be suitable for their contexts: stringency is not inversely proportional to infection rates and low-stringency responses may not mitigate economic damage. these data emphasize the importance of timing, particularly since the longer-term consequences of the pandemic are yet to be fully realized. for now, governments that take appropriate action swiftly are more likely to decrease transmission—provided that their responses are both appropriate for the unique reality of the country and supported by its populace. author contributions: conceptualization, p.s. and s.-k.n.; methodology, p.s. and s.-k.n.; software, s.-k.n.; formal analysis, s.-k.n. and m.c.; data curation, s.-k.n. and m.c.; writing—original draft preparation, m.c. and s.-k.n.; writing—review and editing, all authors; visualization, m.c.; supervision, p.s.; project administration, p.s. all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. funding: p.s. is supported by an australian national health and medical research council fellowship (srf- b # ). acknowledgments: the authors thank son nghiem, whose background work on the topic supported this paper. the analysis was made possible by the work of the oxcgrt team at oxford university. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of appendix a table a . characteristics of oxford stringency index for china and oecd countries from january to july . country max. score # days to respond # days to max. a # days of response # days at max. response escalation b (days) escalation speed c (si/day) auc d aucav e to pandemic a to first local case asia china , israel − . , japan − . korea . turkey − europe austria − . belgium − . czech republic − . denmark . estonia . finland − france − . germany − . greece − . hungary − . iceland − . ireland − . italy − . , latvia − . lithuania − luxembourg . netherlands . norway − . poland − . portugal − . slovak republic − . slovenia − . spain − . int. j. environ. res. public health , , of table a . characteristics of oxford stringency index for china and oecd countries from january to july . country max. score # days to respond # days to max. a # days of response # days at max. response escalation b (days) escalation speed c (si/day) auc d aucav e to pandemic a to first local case sweden . switzerland − . uk . north america canada − . mexico − . usa . south america chile . colombia − . , oceania australia . new zealand − . statistics median . − . . . . . . range – – − – – – – – . – . – , – iqr f . icc g < . . < . . * . . . * . . . a number of days since january ; b response escalation is the time taken to reach max si after a response was initiated; c escalation speed = max score/response escalation; considers the rate at which each country increased its stringency; d area under curve (auc) quantifies the stringency level and duration of each pandemic response; e aucav = auc/duration of response; is a measure of average stringency in a response period; f interquartile range (iqr); g intra-cluster correlation coefficient (icc) measures the extent of correlation within continents (* p < . ). data were downloaded from [ ]. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of appendix b to explore the association between response stringency and the impact on gdp due to covid- , we adopted multilevel mixed-effects linear regression models with the assumption of random continental effect to analyze changes in annual gdp growth rates ( – ) that were forecast under a double-hit scenario [ ]. likelihood-ratio tests were used to assess the significance of continental heterogeneity in gdp impact (table a ). table a . results of linear regression models on change in annual growth rate – due to a double-hit scenario ( countries). risk factor increase in gdp in % ( % ci) p-value gdp (per $ ) ˆ . ( . , . ) * . democracy index ˆ . (− . , . ) . average temperature (jan–mar) ˆ − . (− . , . ) . average temperature (jan–jun) ˆ − . (− . , . ) . population density ˆ . (− . , . ) . median age ˆ − . (− . , . ) . aged > ˆ − . (− . , . ) . aged > ˆ − . (− . , . ) . variable related to oxford stringency index §: maximum score ˆ − . (− . , − . ) * . time to respond (to pandemic) ˆ,a . ( . , . ) * . time to respond (to first local case) ˆ . ( . , . ) * . time to maximum score ˆ,a . (− . , . ) . response escalation ˆ − . (− . , . ) . period at maximum score ˆ,a − . (− . , . ) . auc ˆ − . (− . , − . ) * . aucav ˆ,a − . (− . , . ) . note: ˆ linear mixed-effect model (with significant continental effect); * p < . ; § si measures up to july ; univariate analysis unless otherwise stated; a multivariate analysis: adjusted for gdp; data were downloaded from [ , ]. references . habib, h. has sweden’s controversial covid- strategy been successful? bmj , , m . 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[crossref] [pubmed] publisher’s note: mdpi stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - -z http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . / https://ssrn.com/abstract= https://theconversation.com/megacity-slums-are-incubators-of-disease-but-coronavirus-response-isnt-helping-the-billion-people-who-live-in-them- https://theconversation.com/megacity-slums-are-incubators-of-disease-but-coronavirus-response-isnt-helping-the-billion-people-who-live-in-them- http://dx.doi.org/ . /w https://theconversation.com/south-africa-is-failing-on-covid- -because-its-leaders-want-to-emulate-the-first-world- https://theconversation.com/south-africa-is-failing-on-covid- -because-its-leaders-want-to-emulate-the-first-world- http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.scitotenv. . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.scitotenv. . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	materials and methods 	data sources 	analysis timeframes 	countries of interest 	statistical analysis 	results 	stringency indices of china and oecd countries 	highest stringency responses 	lowest stringency responses 	stringency indices and infection rates 	risk factors and cumulative infections 	stringency indices and gdp forecast 	discussion 	rapid responses are related to decreased infection rates 	rapid responses affect gdp 	nordic covid- responses 	trading human vs. economic health 	stringency in context 	study limitations and further considerations 	conclusions 	 	 	references postdigital politics: or, how to be an anti-bourgeois theorist gary hall part : on the commons and the crisis of representative democracy what does postdigital mean and why is it important? i want to begin with a proposition. a lot of work in the arts, humanities and social sciences of late has been taken up with the commons. it’s a fascination that is only likely to increase following the coronavirus pandemic that began in late , early . attention will understandably be paid over the next few years to the manner in which communities all over the world spontaneously self- organised to fill the gaps in care left by the state and market. they did so by collectively providing those in need with critical resources: everything from information and accommodation, through medical supplies (masks, hand sanitizer, gloves, goggles, gowns), to financial aid packages, emergency childcare, free meals for children, even companionship during periods of lockdown and quarantine, be it by telephone or video call. as we know from the creating commons project of cornelia sollfrank, shuhsa niederberger and felix stalder, the commons, put very simply, can be understood as non-proprietary shared spaces and resources – both material and immaterial – along with the collective social processes that are necessary for commoners to produce, manage and maintain them and themselves as a community. my proposition, then, is this: if we want to help transform society by actually creating such commons, we need to work, act and think very differently from the ways in which most of us do now. and i include in this ‘us’ many of those who are well known in the fields of art and culture for writing about community, collectivity and the commons. i’m thinking here not just of authors who address the issue from within the liberal tradition of garrett hardin, elinor ostrom and yochai benkler. i also have in mind radical theorists and philosophers such as isabelle stengers, judith butler, michael hardt and antonio negri. how can we do this? how can we act differently with a view to transforming society through the creation of more commons-oriented ways of being and doing? it’s this question that i’m going to endeavour to answer in what follows, as it’s one that together with a number of collaborators i have been engaged with for some time. like the last group of writers on the commons i mentioned, a lot of those i work with, as well as being media artists, activists or practitioners, identify as being radical theorists. however, we’re theorists who are also exploring ways of reimagining theory and what it means to be a theorist. we’re doing so by challenging some of the taken-for-granted categories and frameworks concerning what critical theory is considered to be, especially the highly individualistic, liberal-humanist model that’s performed by most theorists and philosophers today, regardless of whether they’re marxists, post-marxists, feminists, new materialists, posthumanists or accelerationists. instead, we’re endeavouring to work, act and think in terms of the commons by experimenting with the invention of what can be called – rather teasingly, i’ll admit – ‘anti-bourgeois theory’. this is theory that, in its ‘habits of being’, to borrow a phrase from bell hooks, is: ) more consistent with the kind of progressive politics many of us in the arts, humanities and social sciences espouse. it is important to be aware that neoliberalism is not directly opposed to liberalism. rather neoliberalism is a version of it, as its name suggests, the wider historical tradition of liberalism having provided the discursive framework of modern capitalism. the singularized neoliberal homo oeconomicus is not necessarily always struggling against the liberal-humanist rights and values that the vast majority of theorists continue to adhere to in practice, then. consequently, while most critical theorists position themselves as being politically on the left – some even writing books and articles about the importance of equality, solidarity and the radical redistribution of wealth and power – many end up operating as rampantly competitive, proprietorial individuals nonetheless. driven by a goal- fixated instrumentalism, what’s important to them are the number of books published, grants captured, keynote lectures given, followers acquired, or likes and retweets gained. (elsewhere i’ve associated this behaviour with being a ‘micro-entrepreneur of the self’. ) ) in tune with the changing political zeitgeist, especially the shift from representative to direct forms of democracy. in the u.k. this shift can be traced at least as far back as the horizontal groundswell against the ‘old politics’ of the liberal and neoliberal establishments that was such a prominent feature of the scottish independence referendum. more recently, it’s been apparent in the decentralised manner in which the extinction rebellion movement operates: the refusal of top-down hierarchal organisation in favour of bottom-up ‘affinity groups’. it’s not just a progressive phenomenon (in a leftist sense), though. the move to more direct, participatory forms of democracy is apparent in the rapid rise to a position of political influence of the u.k. brexit party (now rebranded as reform u.k.) under the leadership of nigel farage immediately prior to the general election. in large part this rise was achieved through the adoption of the digitally savvy electoral strategy of the five star movement (m s) in italy, which entered government in , having become the largest individual party in the italian parliament. it used data gathered from the online activity of members to help shape m s’s direction and policy. so successful was the brexit party’s adaptation of this electoral strategy that in the run up to the election the ostensibly more mainstream, one-nation conservative politician boris johnson found himself forced to take up many of its more radical right-wing ideas and forms of rhetoric (albeit on occasion in detoxified form). and this in spite of the fact farage himself has never won election to parliament in the seven attempts he’s made over a span of two and a half decades. ) a more appropriate mode of engagement for today’s postdigital world than are printed and closed-access books and journal articles. we arguably find ourselves in the midst of a fourth great transformation in communications technology. crudely put, if the first transformation involved the development of speech and language, the second writing, and the third print, the fourth entails the change from analogue to digital that is associated with the emergence of facebook, google and twitter (not to forget weibo, baidu and wechat in china). in fact, it can be said that we are already living in a postdigital era, if we take this term to name ‘a technical condition that… is constituted by the naturalization of pervasive and connected computing processes… in everyday life’, to the extent that ‘digitality is now inextractable from the way we live while its form, functions and effects are no longer necessarily perceptible.’ historically, such transformations have often been followed by social and political upheaval and unrest, even war. the development of printing was at the heart of the protestant reformation in sixteenth century europe, for example, resulting in the breaking of the religious monopoly of the catholic church. a key figure was martin luther with his ninety-five theses. however, although many book historians regard print as having subsequently led to the renaissance, the enlightenment and the development of modern science and democracy, we need to remember that print has its dark side, too. given the anti-semitic attack at a synagogue in the east german town of halle in october , it’s worth recalling that shortly before his death in luther published a pamphlet called ‘warning against the jews’. nor was this a one-off. ‘we are at fault for not slaying them’, luther proclaimed in an earlier , -word treatise titled ‘on the jews and their lies’. the latter text was exhibited publicly in the s during the nuremberg rallies. (so it’s not that the disruption brought about by print is good, while that inflicted by digital media is bad.) we’re all probably going to be long gone before anyone knows if we’re currently living through a period of change as profound as the reformation – although some have heralded the sars-cov- outbreak, to give the virus its proper name, as a sign that we are. this is because of the high degree of interconnectivity of global capitalism in terms of travel, trade, tourism, migration, the labour market and supply chains, all of which depend on postdigital information processing. together with the associated destruction of biodiversity accelerated by the climate emergency and human population growth, such interconnectivity is held as having created the conditions for new, infectious, zoonotic diseases such as sars, bird-flu and covid- to cross over from wildlife to humans as a result of their greater proximity to one another. nevertheless, it’s important to make an effort to come to terms with the shift from analog to postdigital, not least for political reasons, as the above examples drawn from german history suggest. of course it’s questionable to what extent the traditional political division between left and right is still applicable. (the origins of this divide can be traced as far back as and the revolutionary assembly in paris, where the antiroyalists were physically located on the left side of the chamber.) the situation is complicated today by the fact this division has been overlaid, at the very least, by that between populist nativism and elitist cosmopolitanism. both the u.k. conservative party under david cameron, and the labour party under tony blair, gordon brown and david miliband were socially liberal, for example. cameron has said that the passing of the law enabling same-sex marriage in by the conservative-led coalition government was one of his most significant achievements in office. the main difference between the two parties was that the conservatives were even more economically neoliberal than new labour. this is why the rejection of significant elements of both in the european union referendum as primarily representing the interests of the metropolitan liberal establishment came as such a shock to many commentators. it revealed that the electorate was no longer voting largely out of loyalty to either party on the basis of their class position, with the working-class, and large parts of the midlands and north, traditionally selecting labour. people were voting on the basis of whether they were nativist or cosmopolitan too. actually, what the general election made clear is that if you’re poor, working class, older and less educated in england you’re increasingly likely to vote conservative. it’s going to be interesting to see what changes there are to the public mood post-coronavirus. will the populist backlash against the liberal establishment continue, fuelled by the economic fallout from the pandemic: mass unemployment, large-scale public debt, and austerity in all but name? or will a loss of trust in figures such as boris johnson and his cabinet of all the brexiteer talents see it being replaced by a newfound respect for scientists and journalists, and for institutions such as the nhs and bbc? johnson’s charismatic performance – the blundering, the laziness, the flippant frivolity, the obvious lack of preparedness right down to the crumpled suit and unkempt hair – may be effective in setting him apart from the business-as-usual politicians of the eu. yet a certain level of kier starmer-like – or indeed joe biden-like – sober seriousness and attention to issues of professional competence (rather than the big transformative questions facing society in starmer’s case) begins to look rather appealing when there’s a national emergency and its fall-out to deal with. then, again, it was the desire for something different to the professional political class and their adoption of a centrist third way between left and right in order to champion a modernizing neoliberal consensus that led many people to vote for johnson – and donald trump – in the first place. retaining the left/right political distinction for the time being, however, we can say that it’s mainly those on the populist, nativist right who, to date, have realised the possibilities created by the new communication technologies. it’s as if they’ve read their gramsci and figured out that if you want to change politics, you need to begin by changing culture. to return to an international frame for a moment, recent years have provided us with examples such as: trump, who was deemed a twitter genius (until he was eventually banned from using it) and the first meme president of the united states; jair bolsonaro, the first president of brazil elected using the internet, google’s youtube especially, as his main means of communication; and the vote leave campaign in the uk and its sophisticated exploitation of facebook data to intervene in the e.u. referendum, as revealed by the cambridge analytica scandal. what the actors behind these developments have done is create a new model of political communication by seizing on the opportunities created by the fourth great transformation in media technology to precipitate the cultural crisis in representative politics. for populist politicians this new model has two important features. the first is that it allows those who don’t already have control over their state media (à la jarosław kaczyński and mateusz morawiecki in poland and viktor orbán in hungary) to sidestep the old, established forms of political communication that rely on the major newspapers and influential tv and radio programmes. they have thus avoided being held to account by journalists, even when they have fabricated, lied, doctored blogs and videos and rebranded fake ‘fact-checking’ websites. consider boris johnson’s keeping of his live interview appearances to a minimum during the u.k. election campaign; and, once in power, the attempt of his government to select which news outlets were allowed to cover it by barring critical journalists from official briefings and boycotting leading bbc news programmes such as newsnight and today. until the need to keep the population informed about covid- made such a rigid stance untenable, that is. the second important feature of this new model is that it nonetheless provides populists with a means of overcoming the apparent disconnect between professional politicians and ‘the people’ – the latter being constructed antagonistically as a self-identical and essentialised mass that is prevented from reaching its full potential by an establishment elite, also homogenised, which of course doesn’t include these populist politicians themselves. the nativist right have overcome this disconnect by using the repetition of slogans – most famously ‘make america great again’, ‘take back control’, ‘get brexit done’, ‘levelling up’, ‘build back better’ – to link the grievances of a number of different sections of society. these are grievances that have arisen over a long period, stretching from the so-called ‘migrant crisis’ of , through the financial crash, at least as far back as the / attacks in the u.s.. they include a sense of abandonment and betrayal by elites, resentment against women, muslims, immigrants and the ’woke’, along with a general lack of control over their lives felt by many of those living through late-stage capitalism together with an anxiety about the future. (trump’s stronger than predicted showing in the us presidential election indicates that these are still the important issues for nearly half of all americans.) by articulating such sentiments with a patriotic pride and sense of cultural nostalgia and loss – consider the fake reports that rule, britannia! and land of hope and glory were to be dropped from the bbc’s ‘black lives matter proms’ as result of pressure from movements for racial justice – the radical right have been able to create chains of equivalence across those parts of the population that have been adversely affected by the results of neoliberal globalization. in this way populist politicians have managed to mainstream their ideas by tapping into those affective forces – those drives, desires, fantasies and resentments – that motivate people to become part of a group such as precisely ‘the people’, and constitute the basis of collective forms of identification. reactionary nativists have been aided and abetted in the creation of this new model of political communication by silicon valley companies. the latter are aware it’s not logical reasoning and verified information and evidence but extreme displays of dopamine-generating emotion that keep audiences hooked, and so drive their profits by maximising attention. not only do facebook, twitter and youtube render indistinct the difference between making carefully thought- out comments on the current issues of the day, and hastily announcing one’s unconsidered feelings about them, they actively amplify and reward expressions of anger, hatred, insecurity and shame. contributions to these platforms don’t need to be true to get a reaction and go viral, just hugely captivating. being controversial, intrusive, crude, vulgar, moralistic, narcissistic, sentimental, contradictory all works. similarly broadcast media often prefer adversarial debates. in the u.k., the bbc regularly invites speakers with explicitly opposing views to discuss a given topic. it does so partly out of an attempt to provide journalistic balance (although what it frequently ends up delivering is false equivalence: just because someone is on the opposite side of an argument doesn’t make them qualified to speak about it). but the corporation also opposes contributors in this fashion because reputable professional journalism outlets and other high-quality mainstream sources such as sky news and the guardian constitute only a low percentage of where the public receives its information in the era of smartphones and social media. the situation is similar in the u.s. where two thousand local newspapers have closed in recent years. so the issue is not just russian interference or false news. it’s that the mediascape is now highly diverse and disordered. what are needed therefore are combative debates that can cut through the chaos to be heard and get attention. (piers morgan’s entire career as a presenter on itv’s good morning britain has been built precisely on his ability to offer provocative opinions, be they about racism, gender fluidity, meghan markle or the response of the u.s. to covid- , in contrast to the more nuanced, easy going approach of his co-host, suzanna reid.) all of which goes some way toward explaining how small numbers of people have been able to use communication technologies to move large numbers of others in the direction of nativist forms of populism characterised by an emphasis on authority, group insecurity and an exclusionary nationalist pride. how much any of trump, bolsonaro, johnson et al actually understand the implications of the shift from analogue to postdigital media is another question. no matter, they have certainly profited from it. indeed, such was the impact of trump’s presidency that almost immediately after his defeat commentators were already labelled this new way of conducting politics trumpism. of course, in a situation of chaos and confusion there’s often a desire for a strong authoritarian leader who doesn’t play by the rules and who can get things done regardless. yet the media’s emphasis on hyper-emotionalism has played straight into the hands of the reactionary right, which defines itself negatively against those it considers ‘the other’. hence the rise in sexism, racism and white supremacism we’ve experienced in recent times, both online and off, together with the presentation of the coronavirus as a ‘wartime’ (johnson) or ‘invisible enemy’ (trump), and description of it as the ‘chinese disease’ (trump again). (even a pandemic is seen as national emergency, not an international one.) indeed, those on the anti-liberal right have been so successful in making their ideas acceptable – many produce brilliant viral videos and memes, often containing language and images that are full of humour, irony and ambiguity as well as ‘frightened bitterness’ – that they can be said to have completely transformed the political landscape. as a result, we find ourselves living in a ‘post-truth’ world of ‘alternative facts’, ‘deepfakes’, holocaust deniers, climate-breakdown deniers, pandemic minimizers, lockdown sceptics, covid-truthers, q-anon social activists and people who are anti-immigration, anti-lgbt+ rights and (albeit indirectly perhaps) anti-diversity in terms of the biosphere too. if we can have disaster capitalism, why can’t we have emergency marxism? granted, the left has its own affective-emotional themes and tropes. (when it comes to theory you just have to say words like ‘commons’, ‘collaborative’, ‘anthropocene’, ‘environment’, ‘material’ or even ‘affect’ at an arts event such as transmediale to realise this.) yet whereas the right has succeeded in using affect as a mobilizing political force, the (non-neoliberal) left has been conspicuously bad at turning its representations into actions that are compelling enough to make different people, especially those in the mainstream of society, want to constitute themselves as a group – a ‘we’, an ‘us’ – around issues such as community and the commons. sure, both before and during the coronavirus outbreak a spate of large-scale youthful street protests unfolded in places such as hong kong, chile, ecuador, lebanon, iraq, egypt, barcelona and poland, orchestrated by ‘the children of the financial crisis of ’, as they have been called. some have gone so far as to claim there have been more mass movements calling for radical change in the period since than at any time since wwii. little of this rebellious energy has fed into a mainstream political change of the kind the populist right have achieved, though. on the contrary, research shows that far right parties in europe have tripled their share of the vote in the last three decades, with one in six choosing them at the polls. (meanwhile, in countries across europe ‘social democratic parties that once commanded over percent of votes have collapsed to the low twenties, teens, or lower’.) even the impact of the extinction rebellion (xr) protests, greta thunberg and the global wave of friday school climate strikes have so far been mainly cultural. xr has yet to achieve its goals of getting the u.k. government to tell the truth about the climate and ecological emergency, commit to reaching zero net carbon emissions by , and set up a citizens assembly to provide leadership on the issue. (while parliament has convened a citizens assembly on climate, there is as yet no clear means by which its suggestions can be turned into policy.) nor have the school strikes translated into ‘real action’ from governments, according to thunberg, speaking in . in effect they have ‘achieved nothing’, she insists, greenhouse gas emissions actually rising % in four years after the paris accord was signed. (again, it’s going to be interesting to observe how much anything changes in this respect following covid- , given that pollution levels in cities such as bangkok, beijing and bogotá dropped dramatically thanks to the lack of traffic and closing of industry and airports during lockdown. the election of biden and his signing of an executive order to pause and review all fossil fuel activity on public land and offshore waters also seems to bring some hope.) don’t get me wrong: the left has its memes. witness the one-time popularity of the ‘oh, jeremy corbyn’ chant in the u.k., and the fact terms like ‘gammon’, ‘centrist dad’ and ‘bullshit jobs’ have now entered the language. the pink pussy hats, handmaid’s tale-style cloaks and un violador en tu camino (a rapist in your path) performance piece adopted by various groups of feminist protestors around the world are also worth mentioning in this context. still, there’s arguably been no really successful progressive equivalent of the kind of forceful play found on ‘white boy internet’ platforms such as chan, chan and reddit. the left has been conspicuously lacking in such politically effective ‘meme magic’. it seems significant that, as yet, neither the #metoo nor the black lives matter movements have led to considerable reforms of the law, for instance. by contrast, trump as president signed an executive order enabling protesters who damage a public statue to be jailed. perhaps this is not surprising. generally speaking, the left is less concerned about the kind of extremes of emotion that drive the reactionary right, and more about social justice, hospitality and mutual aid. because it’s starting point is the position that things need to change, radically, it’s also harder for the left to convince large numbers of voters it understands their existing values and beliefs, let alone shares them. moreover societies are so diverse, pluralistic and fragmented these days it’s far easier to unite people nationally and internationally around what they are not than around what they are. the protests in hong kong, for instance, after initially calling for the withdrawal of an extradition bill introduced by china, were widened to a demand for democratic reform, and subsequently to push back against the chinese government’s introduction of a new national security law during the pandemic. the demonstrations in chile, however, started after an increase in metro fares and subsequently took in a broad range of demands for ‘better pensions, education, health, a minimum wage; but also water rights and action on environment degradation’. meanwhile, those in tunisia and algeria were about price and tax rises; those in beirut about a tax on users of messaging apps such as whatsapp; and those in poland about a patriarchal and religious state introducing a near-total ban on abortion. in barcelona the protests were different again: there they were about independence for catalonia from spain. the problem is, unless these different passions, and the heterogeneous demands and conflicts they give rise to, have a legitimate democratic means of expressing themselves – which is precisely what did not happen in the period of austerity, during which many social groups felt ignored and ‘left behind’ by the city-dwelling, multi-cultural, liberal elites – there is a danger that a ‘confrontation between essentialist forms of identification or non- negotiable moral values’ will take their place, with all the attendant negative consequences. the latter is what we have seen with the rise of populist right- wing political figures and parties in many countries: not just trump in the u.s. and johnson in the u.k., but geert wilders and thierry baudet and the forum for democracy in the netherlands, marine le pen and the national rally in france, beppe grillo and the five star movement in italy, along with matteo salvini, former deputy prime minister and leader of the far-right league there. indeed, as timothy garton ash notes, for the first time in the st century ‘there are now fewer democracies than there are non-democratic regimes’ when it comes to those countries with populations of over a million. radical right politicians also lead or have led three of the world’s four largest democracies: the u.s., brazil and india. they are at the head of two members of the european union: poland and hungary. the third largest parties in a further two – alternative für deutschland (afd) in germany and vox in spain – are also far right, with populist parties having entered government in almost twelve european countries all told. each of these contexts is of course different and needs to be analysed in its specificity. authoritarian nationalism is combined with neoliberalism in some more than others. orbán, for example, used the coronavirus breakout to assume ‘emergency’ powers that enable him to rule hungary as an autocrat by decree. meanwhile it was perhaps only trump’s inconsistent coupling of authoritarianism with libertarianism that prevented his politics from descending into fascism proper. we also need to remain alert to the difficulty those of us who are european have with reading any political script other than the one with which we have traditionally translated the world. it’s a trait that often leaves us blind to the need for a new political language and ‘radical transformation of the regime of knowledge’ when it comes to understanding ideas and events generated outside the ‘global north’. (i’m placing this term in quotation marks as i’m aware it’s not without problems.) nevertheless, i want to take the risk of saying that something of a global trend does seem to be at play here. for these are all parties and politicians that by one means or another are placing liberal democracy under threat, along with its values of truth, civil rights and rule of law. taken together, what this shows is that the election of boris johnson in the u.k. cannot be attributed simply to the shortcomings of jeremy corbyn and the labour party (e.g. the failure to deal with anti-semitism, to unite both the left and centre of the party, or to a form a collation with the lib dems, greens and snp): the phenomenon is larger and more international than that. could we even go so far as to suggest that, trump’s narrow defeat notwithstanding, those on the nativist right have been successful in utilising communication technologies to transform the political landscape in recent years, ironically, by acting as many on the progressive left say people should: that is by operating as cosmopolitan communities with the shared goal of collectively redistributing knowledge and ideas in order to build alliances and coalitions? (while there has not been just one form of nativist response to covid- anymore than there is just one form of populism, there was nevertheless a period in when trump, salvini and farage all seemed to be working to deflect blame for the coronavirus pandemic onto the chinese government.) it’s certainly interesting that, almost in a reverse of the situation with new labour under blair and the conservatives under cameron, many of these governments are combining right-wing cultural polices with left-wing economic ideas such as nationalisation and welfarism. this is true of poland’s law and justice party, and was increasingly the case with regard to the johnson government in the u.k., even before sars-cov- rendered (temporarily) uncontroversial the kind of state interventionism, deficit spending and general veneration of welfare and the public sector that would previously have been condemned as marxist. part : infrared fuck business as usual how are those of us who are on the left to challenge this dominance by the populist right? can we employ communication technologies for more radical purposes that are attuned to today’s rapidly changing political landscape? as we’ve seen, over the decades the left has found it difficult to devise collective forms of identification that are able to successfully counter the two main kinds of neoliberalism dominant in much of the west: the global technocratic neoliberalism of barak obama, david cameron, angela merkel, emmanuel macron and joe biden, which depends on a rule of law-based system of economic governance; and the libertarian neoliberalism associated with donald trump and boris johnson that wants to destroy much of this rules-based system, as embodied by the e.u., nato and who, in order to generate new, disruptive business opportunities free from regulation out of the ensuing chaos and confusion. ‘fuck business’ here means fuck the existing business. of late, however, there have been signs that a practical and relevant left alternative, capable of capitalising on the possibilities created by the fourth great transformation in media technologies to shift toward more direct forms of democracy, may (just may) be beginning to emerge. as reasons for optimism we can point to phenomena such as the grassroots upsurge against the political establishment associated with alexandria ocasio-cortez in the u.s. and her use of social media, the rise of the platform cooperativism movement, and calls for the monopolies of google and facebook to be broken up and for people and communities to control their own data. the latter idea is being explored in barcelona by housing-activist-turned-city-major ada colau. nor is barcelona the only city interested in engaging its population in mass participatory politics. places as different as porto alegre in brazil, preston in the u.k. and reykjavik in iceland are experimenting with forms of municipal socialism, many aspects of which are made possible by online tools such as open consultation forums for citizens. more recently still, there have been the self-organised collective responses to the coronavirus epidemic, as i say. these have included a hackerthon held in germany in late march under the title #wirvsvirus (us v. virus). , participants collaborated remotely for hours to come up with different technological innovations for combating the virus. popular themes included: ‘how can we organise neighbourhood assistance through helper platforms?’ (# projects); ‘how can food be provided to all citizens?’ (# projects); and ‘how can we support local businesses and protect them from insolvency?’ (# projects). it’s with this kind of emphasis on engaging with postdigital technologies for purposes grounded in principles of social responsibility, solidarity and mutual care coupled to the collective redistribution of knowledge and resources that my collaborators and i align ourselves. and since a number of us are theorists, as i say, one of the issues we’re interested in as part of this is reimagining theory in the aftermath of the digital. in contrast to the worlds of music, film, tv and even politics, it seems to us that the transition from analogue to postdigital has really only just begun as far as many of the practices of the arts, humanities and social sciences are concerned. in this respect, one of the questions we’re raising with our work is: might exploring new modes of authorship, ownership and reproduction that are more in tune with this fourth great transformation in communications technology have the potential to lead to non-neoliberal – but also (and this is extremely important) non-liberal – ways of being and doing as theorists? ways that are more consistent with the kind of progressive politics many radical theorists advocate, in their writings on community, collectivity and the commons especially? over the last twenty years we’ve been involved in a number of bottom-up projects for the production and sharing of free resources, infrastructure and knowledge (objects). to briefly take my own trajectory as an example: in dave boothroyd and i launched culture machine, one of the first open access journals of critical and cultural theory. in an attempt to avoid limiting the geopolitics of our work to that of the global north, this journal has recently been relaunched out of mexico, under the editorship of gabriela méndez cota and rafico ruiz, complete with a redesign by the hackerspace el rancho electrónico. in culture machine became a founder-member of open humanities press (ohp). directed by myself and two colleagues based in australia, sigi jöttkandt and david ottina, this initiative involves multiple semi-autonomous, self-organising groups around the world, all of them operating in a non-rivalrous fashion to make works of contemporary theory available on a non-profit, free/gratis open access basis using creative commons licenses. open humanities press currently has twenty-one journals, forty plus books distributed across nine book series, as well as experimental, libre texts such as those in its liquid books and living books about life series. ohp in turn became a founder member of the radical open access collective, a community of international presses, journals and other projects formed after the radical open access conference. now consisting of over seventy members, this collective seeks to build a progressive alternative ecosystem for publishing in the humanities and social sciences, based on experimenting with a diversity of non-profit, independent and scholar-led approaches. meanwhile, in the centre for postdigital cultures (cpc) at coventry university, we’re working on reinventing knowledge infastructures, especially those involved in the production and sharing of theory. since its launch in , the cpc has brought together many people involved in such ‘aesthetic’ practices. they include myself and janneke adema from ohp, and samuel moore who works with us as part of the radical open access collective. the latest of these initiatives is the community-led open publication infrastructures for monographs (copim) project, which emerged in out of a consortium of six open access presses called scholarled. an international partnership involving universities and libraries as well as infrastructure and technology providers, copim is designed to realign open access book publishing by moving it away from the surveillance capitalism model of competing commercial service providers. its aim is to respond to the fact that companies such as elsevier and springer are increasingly looking to monetize not just academic content, but the ‘entire knowledge production workflow, from article submissions, to metrics to reputation management and global rankings’ and the related data extraction. copim represents an alternative, more horizontal and collaborative, knowledge-sharing approach. here the scholarly community collectively owns, manages and governs infrastructures, systems and revenue streams for the common good in such a fashion as to enable a diversity of initiatives – including small, non-profit, independent and scholar-led presses – to become part of the publishing ecosystem. how to be an anti-bourgeois theorist hopefully, the activities i have described go some way toward explaining how and why my collaborators and i are trying to operate differently to the individualistic, liberal humanist ways of working and acting traditionally associated with being a theorist in the fields of art and culture, especially of the ‘star’ variety. there are a number of further dimensions to this mode of practicing commons-oriented, anti-liberal, anti-neoliberal, anti-bourgeois theory (abt) we’re experimenting with. i don’t have space to go into any of the related projects in depth. besides, engaging with these ventures in their contextual site-specificity is actually the most interesting way to understand and experience them. but i would like to quickly sketch a few here, albeit more in the spirit of an artist’s talk than a full-blown philosophical argument. abt is post-literary in the era of youtube, instagram and zoom, ‘gutenbergian’ media technologies such as the written and printed text are no longer the natural or normative means by which knowledge is necessarily generated and research communicated. accordingly, while my collaborators and i still publish conventional print books and journal articles, our theory might not take the form of a piece of writing at all. we are increasingly involved in opening knowledge and research up to being not just postdigital, but post-grammatological or post-literary too. we’re doing this by creating, publishing and sharing work in the form of films, videos and virtual, augmented and immersive media environments. take oliver lerone schultz et al.’s collectively produced after.video. published by ohp in , this is a collection of annotated digital video essays that explore the future for theory after both books and video. it does so in two different instantiations: a freely available online version; and an offline version produced as a distinct physical object in its own right: namely, an assembly-on-demand video book stored on a raspberry pi computer and packaged in a vhs (video home system) case. after.video is therefore both an analogue and digital object manifested, in a scholarly gesture, as a ‘video book’. after.video also points to another way in which my collaborators and i are endeavouring to open theory to being post-grammatological: this is through the reinvention of hardware, software and network infrastructures. included in this reinvention are facilities concerned with the production and circulation of research on a radical open access basis: books and journals, for example, as with open humanities press and copim. but we are involved in cultural/artistic projects that operate at a larger scale, too, such as museums, galleries and archives. let me provide an example of one such initiative that can be copied and reproduced relatively easily (unlike after.video perhaps, which requires a certain amount of technical know-how). mandela is a website and digital platform created in by jacqueline cawston and her partners for the robben island museum in south africa. included in the project is a hybrid physical/digital diy exhibition of the prison cell in which mandela was held for the majority of his years on the island. the exhibition consists of a few pieces of standard wood and plywood, arranged to form the exact dimensions of the space, together with a bucket, blanket, bench, plate and cup – the items the prisoners were allowed to have with them in their cells. the wood frame is also used to hold ten specially designed posters addressing topics such as colonialism and apartheid, along with a number of screens linked to the digital platform and its content. the latter features an interactive cultural map of europe and south africa, a -degree experience of the prison, images from the uwc robben island museum archives, video interviews with a former political prisoner and a prison guard, a crowd-sourced timeline and a digital game about life in robben island prison. the original mandela diy exhibition has toured south africa, the u.k. and europe and has been visited by over , people. however, cawston and her colleagues also put together a kit containing details of how to construct the diy exhibition, and made it available on an open access basis, along with the contents of the digital platform and the ten posters. because the physical materials are extremely low cost (all that’s needed really is some wood, a bucket and a blanket), this means any school or community can create their own pop-up version of the mandela diy exhibition easily and cheaply – they don’t need to travel to a traditional bricks-and-mortar museum or art gallery to experience it. what after.video and the mandela diy exhibition both show is that, as far as we are concerned, postdigital culture does not necessarily come after the digital in any simple temporal sense. open access and the postdigital are not just to be associated with online communication technologies and the ‘digital commons’, for instance. it’s important that they are understood as being potentially physical, offline and analogue – as well as hybrid combinations thereof – too. abt is low key another dimension of our anti-bourgeois mode of theory is apparent from the way in which, although my collaborators and i may identify (or be identified) as radical theorists, we don’t always function as virtuoso individual authors. in a period when the self-organizing, leaderless mobilizations of the gilets jaunes (yellow vests) and hong kong protesters have experimented with new forms of subjectivity and social relations, isn’t the cult of the highly individualistic ‘rock star’ theorist or philosopher coming to an end? even if it isn’t, shouldn’t it be – especially after covid- has made a shared sense of social responsibility, solidarity and collaboration within a common struggle not so much a matter of political persuasion but of survival for many people? in keeping with this notion, we often refuse to occupy centre stage, preferring to operate in a more low-key, at times anonymous manner as part of collectives and communities of thinking and doing, such as the radical open access collective and wemake. the latter is a makerspace fablab in milan, with whom our fellow members of the centre for postdigital cultures at coventry, valeria graziano and maddalena fragnito, have been investigating the relationship between open technologies and healthcare. abt builds, develops, maintains and repairs in fact, our activities as theorists frequently don’t involve authoring at all. along with affective labour such as supporting, encouraging and inspiring, they can on occasion involve operating in the background to build, develop, maintain and repair more than actually author – as with the work of another collaborator as system administrator for the file-sharing shadow libraries aaaaarg and ubuweb. this is because we see theory not just as a means of imagining our ways of being in the world differently. it is a means of enacting them differently too. (staying in the shadows can of course also serve as a ‘defence mechanism’ that enables a given project to ‘thrive and prevents its destruction’, as the design collective kaspar hauser write of these and other digital libraries such as monoskop and library genesis. ) abt is performative and pre-figurative many of our projects are similarly performative, in the sense they’re concerned not only with representing the world, but also with intra-acting with it in order to make things happen. some have referred to this kind of approach as hacking the situation or context. however, our theory-performances can also be understood in terms of the pre-figurative practices graziano has written about: of ‘being the change we want to see’. as i say, this often involves us in experimenting with the form of scholarly communications in the shape of books and journals, and also lectures, seminars, conferences, even the very gestures of reading and writing. when clare birchall, joanna zylinska and i wanted to explore the theory of books being liquid and living, for instance (rather than finished and frozen or dead), we didn’t just write about it. we actually made some liquid and living books that could be continually rewritten and republished: two series’ worth, in fact. janneke adema and i took a similar intra-active approach to editing ‘disrupting the humanities: towards posthumanities’, a issue of the journal of electronic publishing (jep). what we wanted to do there was take on, as theorists, some of the implications of the idea that a presentation isn’t simply a re-presentation of the written, text-on-paper argument delivered by the author. it’s rather a relational and processual meshwork of presenter, event organizers, facilitators and audience, along with the associated cultural practices, technologies, institutions, buildings, materials, tools, infrastructure and so on, all of which contribute to the presentation in its becoming. so we produced an edition of jep consisting of a selection of video-presentations/articles cum theory-performances. heavily annotated using the interlace open source software program developed by robert ochshorn, these were designed to break down the divisions between the research and presentation, as well as between the ‘real time’ and online or ‘virtual’ audience. other projects we are engaged in concentrate on pre-figuratively reinventing the museum, gallery, archive, library or university in a postdigital context. public library: memory of the world, for example, launched by marcell mars and tomislav medak in , is an ‘artist-run’ online shadow or pirate library that currently contains more than , titles that it makes sure remain widely accessible without charge and without any other restrictions, including those associated with copyright law. it consists of a network of private libraries that, although independent and maintained locally by a community of ‘amateur librarians’, are connected with the project’s server through the ‘let’s share books’ software developed by mars. the software allows people to search all the collections in memory of the world, discover a title they want and import it directly to their own virtual library that, like the others, is organized using a version of the calibre open source software for managing digital books. abt is concerned with infrastructure memory of the world, the mandela diy exhibition and copim are all also examples of our development of radically open and inclusive knowledge infrastructures in support of commoning. infrastructure is particularly important to us in this respect because, as leslie chan emphasizes, it concerns the power (otherwise hidden) to: set agendas and decisions – which are never neutral but embedded with ideological assumptions and biases; mobilize and accumulate resources; set standards and norms; set boundaries of participation; discriminate – or not, hopefully; and control what gets built, what’s possible. given the controversial nature of memory of the world, it’s perhaps helpful to say a little more about why, as anti-bourgeois theorists, we’re interested in something like piracy (although memory of the world can also be understood as a material enactment of the guerrilla open access manifesto attributed to internet hacktivist aaron swartz). quite simply it’s because one thing even the left finds it hard to question these days is the idea of private property. yet it’s private property that helps to construct and shape our subjectivities as both possessive individuals and members of the bourgeoisie. so-called piracy thus provides my collaborators and i with one starting point from which to develop an affirmative critique of private property and bourgeois subjectivity that is designed to help us be more consistent with the kind of radical politics many theorists espouse (but don’t necessarily perform themselves) when writing about the commons. having said that, memory of the world, like a number of our other projects, does not, as sollfrank points out, itself constitute a ‘commons in the strict sense of involving not only a non-market exchange of goods but also a community of commoners who negotiate the terms of use among themselves’ as equals in a voluntary, unforced, non-hierarchical fashion. that, in her words, ‘would require collective, formalized, and transparent types of organization’. it would also, i might add, require governance, including the establishment of rules for resolving conflicts between individuals, the community and society at large, and the agreeing of sanctions for those commoners who do not comply. moreover, most of the books that are made publicly accessible by memory of the world are ‘privately owned and therefore cannot simply be transferred to become commons resources.’ as sollfrank suggests, such projects are perhaps best understood instead as a ‘preliminary stage’ in which commoning is performed in an emergent, participative manner. they are moving us toward a horizon of ‘culture as a commons’, while at the same time providing the kind of ‘experimental zone needed to unlearn copyright and relearn new ways of cultural production and dissemination beyond the property regime.’ certainly, one of the shared aims of our pre-figurative projects is to disarticulate the existing playing field and its manufactured common sense of what it means today to be a theorist, a philosopher, an academic, an artist or a political activist. they seek to foster instead a variety of antagonistic spaces both inside and outside of states and capital – spaces that contribute to the development of institutions and environments that are able to counter the hegemony of the traditional, liberal, public institutions such as the university on the one hand, and private, for-profit companies such as elsevier, linkedin and academia.edu on the other. this is the reason for our interest in the commons and commoning. creating commons is one way we have chosen to describe our work producing, managing and maintaining such alternative, emergent spaces that are neither simply liberal nor neoliberal, public nor private. the fact of the matter is, ‘coming prior to adequate legislation, we currently lack even a vocabulary to talk about’ the commons in this sense, as the philosopher roberto esposito acknowledges. ‘it is something largely unknown, and even refractory, to our conceptual categories’. (and that includes communism, i would add.) nevertheless, as esposito insists, the struggle for an alternative ‘must start precisely by breaking the vise grip between public and private … by seeking instead to expand the space of the common’. the coronavirus event, with the huge systemic shock and suspension of business as usual it has delivered, provides us with a significant strategic opportunity to do just this, if only we can take it. after all, covid- has made it clear that, as the climate emergency develops and we continue to face health crises and other disasters, neither (globalist nor libertarian) neoliberalism nor an highly individualistic liberal humanism is going to be fit for purpose. now more than ever it is important to experiment with ways of working, acting and thinking that are different to both. for us, this is precisely what an (symbolic/functional) entity such as the centre for postdigital cultures, or indeed a university, is for. one of the purposes of a university is to create a space where society’s common sense ideas can be examined and interrogated, and to act as a testing ground for the development of new knowledges, new subjectivities, new practices and new social relations of the kind we are going to need post-pandemic, but which are often hard – although not impossible – to explore elsewhere. we’re not necessarily going back to arguing from evidence anytime soon, deal with it i want to make two points that i realise some may find counter-intuitive. for all my emphasis on enactment, pre-figuration and the performance of theory, i would not like the commons-oriented initiatives my collaborators and i are involved with to be positioned in terms of concrete, material practices as distinct from, say, immaterial theory. in articulations like this it’s often forgotten that the practices that produce theory are always already concrete, while the theory that privileges the concrete and the material is often very weak. although i can understand the temptation to do so, we should also take care when it comes to understanding such enterprises as ‘aesthetic practices’, no matter how much they may occupy the intersection between the commons and art, and for all art is another field with the potential to create such a space where new realities can tested and constructed. to be sure, we need to interrogate the manner in which art and culture in the twentieth century became, as intellectual historian françois cusset puts it, ‘on the one hand, the most thriving industry of the new capitalism, if not its laboratory of ideas; and, on the other, a collection of devices and situations that were mostly disconnected from the social and political field, a kind of refuge cut off from the exterior world’. research commissioned by the art fund in , for instance, shows that one of the main reasons those in britain under thirty years of age give for visiting an art gallery or museum is ‘specifically to “de-stress”’. but this should only encourage us to ask: even if our commons-supporting projects can be perceived as expanding conceptions of aesthetics, so the two discourses (i.e. the commons and aesthetics) come into close contact and can potentially create something new, might there still be something conservative about interpreting the likes of after.video and memory of the world primarily in artistic terms? isn’t there a danger in doing so of going along too much with the belief that the right is interested in politics and power, while what the left cares about is art and (self-)expression? nor is this an issue that can be resolved by ‘challenging established notions of contemporary aesthetic practice’ through the adoption of the kind of ‘truth and evidence’ approach that has been proposed as a means for artists to resist post- truth politics. media artist and activist david garcia offers as an example the ‘evidentiary realism’ of lawrence abu hansen, trevor paglen, lev manovich and !mediengruppe bitnik. the ‘gold standard’ of evidentiary realism as far as garcia is concerned, however, are the investigations into cases of state violence and human rights violations conducted by the forensic architecture art and knowledge research group at goldsmiths, university of london. yet when it comes to engaging with postdigital political issues such a pro-evidence, pro-data stance is not without difficulties of its own. in response to a question as to whether ‘identifying their outputs as art might... “take the edge off the truth he is trying to show”’, garcia quotes eyal weizman, leader of forensic architecture, countering as follows: think about it. when the most important piece of evidence coming from battle fields world wide are video graphic. you need video makers to make sense of it… and to understand how one piece of video might relate to another. indeed aesthetic sensibilities. the sensibilities of an architect an artist or a film maker are very useful in figuring out what has taken place. weizman is surely missing the point here, though. the problem is not whether forensic architecture needs to include aesthetic sensibilities in their truth- seeking investigations – and let’s not forget their public art installations and exhibitions they put together using charts, diagrams, infographics, models, audio- visual installations, digital imaging and so on, which are arguably what they are best known for nowadays. the problem is that in positioning what they do in terms of art and aesthetics, forensic architecture get all the advantages that accrue from that, in terms of being nominated for the turner prize and so on. however, they get the disadvantages too. not least among the latter is that forensic architecture’s projects are indeed vulnerable to being considered just art. nowhere is this danger more apparent than in the main example garcia gives of ‘the role evidentiary realism can play in countering politically motivated obfuscation’: forensic architecture’s report to the parliamentary commission investigating the role of a state intelligence agent in the murder of halit yozgat in an internet café in kassel, germany. the day before they were due to submit this report germany’s christian democratic party (cdu) published a counter-report. the aim was to ‘de-legitimize’ forensic architecture’s findings on the grounds it was the ‘work of artists’ and, accordingly, ‘should not be taken seriously as evidence’. and, to be sure, the risk of de-legitimation is very real for aesthetic practices and sensibilities, no matter how much they may show truth to power, nor how reflexive their relationship may be to the complex systems we inhabit. this is one of the reasons the projects of my collaborators and i constitute a plurality of forms of intervention that are responding to particular issues across a number of different sites: forms of intervention associated not just with aesthetics and with the practices of artists, or even theorists, but also (where appropriate) with those working in the fields of activism, education, business, politics, technology or the media. a further concern with evidentiary realism’s pro-data approach relates to the way in which the liberal establishment has found the politics of figures such as trump and johnson difficult to deal with on the basis of the agreed facts. now there is a perfectly good explanation for this difficulty: it’s because these right- wing populists are not actually operating on the level of consistent, reasoned argument. consider trump’s description of first the climate crisis and then the coronavirus as a ‘hoax’ – hardly an evidence-based response to the science and data on his part. (bolsonaro likewise accused large parts of the media of ‘tricking’ the people over the dangers of the coronavirus, which he likened to a ‘little flu’.) nevertheless, it’s a challenge to knowing – what, borrowing a phrase from the rand corporation, barak obama has referred to as ‘truth decay’ – that a lot of commentators still find hard to accept. instead, they continue to insist that the anti-liberal right can be contested on a truth-seeking level. witness the spectacle of alan rusbridger, ex-editor-in-chief of the guardian, arguing that the way to counter johnson’s evasions and lies is with good, responsible, ‘independent and decently crafted’ journalism, in which the ‘lines between truth and falsehood; facts and propaganda; openness and stealth; accountability and impunity; clarity and confusion; news and opinion’ are retained rather than blurred. similarly, many scientists and journalists resort to evidenced-based information and facts to counter false rumours and conspiracy theories: that g networks lower people’s immune system to covid- , for example, a false claim that led to numerous mobile phone masts being set on fire in the u.k. and elsewhere. yet as we’ve seen with anti-vaxxers and climate-breakdown deniers, such an approach has repeatedly been found to be futile, counterproductive even, in that it often only succeeds in eroding social trust further. the trouble is, the roots of the current crisis in both epistemology and democracy lie much earlier than the rise to power of the likes of trump and johnson: they stretch back, through the failure of the political class to hold those responsible for the financial crisis of to account, at least as far as the refusal to heed the protests against the invasion of iraq. both events left large numbers of people feeling they could no longer rely on professional politicians, the liberal establishment (to which rusbridger, now head of an oxbridge college, is a fully paid up member), or the institutions of state to arrive at the correct decisions based on the evidence – as opposed to, say, dodgy dossiers about weapons of mass destruction being ‘ready within minutes of the order to use them’. it is this collapse of confidence in the processes of representative democracy and its valuing of truth and justice that the nativist right have capitalised on. they have thus been quite prepared to undermine any attempts to question their authority that privilege facts over opinion. this includes those that have come from the direction of good journalism – or indeed science, the media, academia and the judiciary. one way populists and their supporters have done so is by dismissing such challenges as hailing from the very partisan, city-dwelling liberal elite they denounce as being the ‘enemy of the people’; a people for whom they of course are speaking. another is to undermine the veracity of the challenge by producing ‘alternative facts’. as late as february , trump was publicly claiming the total number of covid- cases in the u.s. would be ‘close to zero’. ‘on february , trump said that coronavirus will “disappear” like a “miracle”.’ he then predicted that the forthcoming spring weather would kill it off and prevent its spread. together with the disbanding in of the national security council pandemic unit established by obama – and indeed a deeply rooted antipathy toward both government intervention and systems of public health, welfare and infrastructure that is quite characteristic of the radical right – it’s an attitude that led to an astonishing sluggishness to mobilise against covid- on the part of the trump administration. (some have gone so far as to call it inept, incompetent and downright dangerous.) ‘i think the . %’, the world health organization’s calculated death rate for those with covid- , ‘is really a false number’, trump told fox news in march . ‘now, this is just my hunch’, he said, privileging his own guesswork over the expert research of the medical and public health professionals. ‘i think that that number is very high… personally, i would say the number is way under %’. to be sure, it’s effectiveness with regard to the coronavirus outbreak is highly questionable, to say the least. witness the reaction to trump’s april suggestion that injecting disinfectant could kill it, or his may revelation that he was taking the antimalarial drug hydroxychloroquine as a preventive. indeed, for some, the november presidential election revealed the coronavirus to have been one opponent that trump could not defeat by tweet. nevertheless, the general strategy behind producing alternative facts is not so much to offer a counter-truth or even disinformation. it’s rather to spread confusion in order to convey the overall message that no truth can be believed. (that trump subsequently claimed he knew about the threat posed by the virus very early on but deliberately lied about it to prevent creating panic among the american people only added to the confusion. even when trump tested positive for covid- in october , the statements given out by the white house about his health were conflicting and contradictory. the threats and lawsuits about the election having been stolen issued by trump after he lost to biden and his failure to concede had a similar effect.) in the words of hannah arendt: ‘if everybody always lies to you, the consequence is not that you believe the lies, but rather that nobody believes anything any longer’. or as journalist kai strittmatter put it recently with regard to authoritarian leaders in both china and the west: ‘if you’re a liar and a cheat, there’s no way for you to win in a world that is repelled by these things, a world that differentiates between truth and lies.’ what you need to do is ‘make everyone else a liar and a cheat, too. then you will at least be their liar.’ (so strongly did trump’s supporters feel this to be the case some of them stormed the u.s. capitol building in a bid to prevent biden’s election victory from being certified. it was an act of political violence that trump characteristically both encouraged and condemned.) dissembling like this and getting away with it has the further advantage of making such authoritarian figures look strong, confirming their dominance and status. they lie and cheat and break the law because they know they can. the rules apply to everyone else – they don’t apply to them. only little people are held responsible for the consequences of their actions. the appeal of such calculated displays of transgression explains why trump was able to continue in his role as president, despite having made what the washington post calculated to be , false or misleading claims in his first , days in office; and how he got million votes in regardless. that’s almost half of all those cast. it also explains why the attempt to counter johnson’s constant fabrications during the election campaign with endless fact checking did little to prevent his ultimate victory. indeed, it can be argued that the reason many people vote for such populist politicians is not because they actually believe their lies, or because they are necessarily right-wing nativists. it’s because they know doing so is the best way to get back at a cosmopolitan liberal establishment that has ignored them for so long. it thus remains to be seen whether over the longer term it’s the libertarian neoliberalism of trump and johnson that turns out to have been the blip, or the return to the global neoliberal orthodoxy represented by biden and starmer (as compared to corbyn). having said all that, none of this is an either/or (more of a deleuze-and- guattarian ‘“and… and… and”’). anti-fake digital literacy initiatives, such as that set up in finland to teach people ‘how to counter false information designed to sow division’ by recognising and adopting a critical attitude to fake news, are incredibly valuable. (a study of thirty-five countries has ranked the population of finland as the most resistant to anti-knowledge politics). this is especially the case in a time and space of contagion when rumours are rife (e.g. that sars-cov- was engineered in a lab by bill gates so he could profit from a vaccine, or by the chinese government as a bioweapon). also important are the projects and investigations of forensic architecture and others associated with the evidentiary realism movement in art. i’m thinking in particular of the former’s reconstruction of the events of august , , when israel launched , bombs, rockets and shells against the palestinian city of rafah. forensic architecture’s investigation contributed to a subsequent change in policy on the part of the israeli government and military: namely, the withdrawal of the ‘hannibal directive’, whereby the israeli army was authorized to kill any of its soldiers taken prisoner ‘with maximum available firepower’, rather than risk them being used as hostages. still, the above concerns go some way toward articulating why, in the present postdigital conjuncture, many of my collaborators and i have taken the decision not to focus on resisting the hyper-emotionalism of post-truth politics by opposing it with empirically-based evidence presented aesthetically. when it comes to our anti-bourgeois theory-performances, we are more interested in tapping into some of the left’s own affective-emotional themes and tropes – encapsulated by words such as ‘commons’, ‘community’, and ‘collective’ – in order to help create specific institutional and infrastructural projects that are capable of acting as a political force. this involvement on our part with actuating some of those ‘left’ affective forces that motivate people to become part of a group and form the basis of collective forms of identification, is also why i wouldn’t want any of what i’ve said to be taken as somehow shifting the focus from an emphasis on community to an emphasis on the provision of shared knowledge objects and resources. the majority of the resources i’ve pointed to are created and maintained by communities working collectively. in fact, i’d argue these communities are among the most import ‘resources’ we produce. one of the motivations behind our production of free, radical open access or ‘pirate’ resources and infrastructures is to encourage other initiatives and movements around the world by showing what can be achieved – how things might look if the transformed habits of being and doing i’m talking about were accepted. another is to make it possible for chains of equivalence to be established between our projects and a diversity of other struggles locally, nationally and internationally. in addition to those i drew attention to earlier (platform cooperativism, municipal socialism etc.), these struggles include those for a four-day working week, green new deal, unconditional basic income and flatpack democracy. there are also those featured in our pirate care project, the last of our initiatives i’m going to mention. we use the term ‘pirate care’ to refer to two processes that are particularly prevalent today. first, to the way in which basic requirements for care of a kind that were once regarded as essential to society – such as public libraries, which in the u.s. are now not allowed to buy digital books – have been driven towards illegality thanks to the commercialisation of social services. second, we use pirate care to refer to those ‘technologically-enabled care networks’ that have sprung up ‘in opposition to this drive toward illegality’ around a range of issues, from housing and healthcare provision to education and income support. some of these networks deliberately run the risk of being considered unlawful. to confine myself to those that took part in our pirate care conference, i can mention in this context: seawatch, which tries to save as many people as possible from drowning in the mediterranean in defiance of european border policy which criminalizes both migrants and rescuers; planka.nu, a group of organizations in sweden that pays the fines of any of its members caught ‘fare- dodging’ as a means of advocating for free public transport for all; and the docs not cops campaign group of healthcare workers in the u.k., who refuse to enforce immigration checks and charges on patients. other such ‘pirate’ networks have decided to operate in the ‘narrow grey zones’ of ambiguity ‘left open between different technologies, institutions and laws’ in order to expound care as a collective political practice: for instance, in greece, where the bureaucratic measures imposed by the troika decimated public services, a growing number of grassroots clinics set up by the solidarity movement have responded by providing medical attention to those without a private insurance. in italy, groups of parents without recourse to public childcare are organizing their own pirate kindergartens (soprasotto), reviving a feminist tradition first experimented with in the s. in spain, the feminist collective gynepunk developed a biolab toolkit for emergency gynecological care, to allow all those excluded from the reproductive medical services – such as trans or queer women, drug users and sex workers – to perform basic checks on their own bodily fluids. part of the idea behind the pirate care project is to offer these practices ‘some degree of protection by means of visibility’. it’s not a bug, it’s a feature i would like to end by bringing us back once again to the commons. notwithstanding our endeavours to establish chains of equivalence between our anti-bourgeois theory-performances and a diversity of other struggles, it’s important for this network of networks to remain multi-polar, antagonistic and, to a certain extent, messy. ‘more often than not, the commons is allegorized as a mythical ideal governed by principles of sharing, access and collaboration that was lost after the first enclosure movement’, intellectual property expert lawrence liang writes regarding the ‘metaphor of the modern commons’ and the danger it is held to face from the ‘limitless expansion of intellectual property’. a warning is then issued ‘against a similar enclosure movement in the realm of information ecology that threatens to privatize every aspect of information, thereby threatening creativity’. yet contrary to the impression that is given in a lot of work on the commons, achieving some kind of mythical unity, harmony or ‘oneness’ – a kantian perpetual peace, as it were – is not what creating commons is actually about, regardless of whether its the natural, social, civil, cultural, knowledge or intellectual commons that’s being referred to. there is no common understanding of the commons. the open access, creative commons, free software, open source, copyfarleft and anti-copyright pro-piracy movements all have very different and conflicting conceptions of the commons. that said, we have learnt from political theorist chantal mouffe that the making of a decision in such an undecidable terrain – the refusal, in this case, to take the commons as a given and decide what it is in advance of intellectual questioning – is actually what politics is. just as facebook has data points that it uses to target ads at its users, so the left has data or datum points of its own; and often these givens take the form of the very affective-emotional fantasies and desires that constitute the basis of collective forms of left identification. does saying the kind of words that underpin most accounts of the commons – democracy, human, freedom, sharing, caring, cooperation – not produce something of a dopamine rush in us? my collaborators and i are aware challenging petrified positions around community, collectivity and the commons (and also around our ideas of writing, the book, the author, the seminar, university, library, museum, art gallery, copyright, private property and so on) is difficult. the tendency is to lapse back into what seems self-evident, taken-for-granted, common sense – for all one may be aware doing so maintains the bourgeois, liberal humanist status quo, as gramsci makes clear. retaining a degree of plurality, multi-polarity and antagonism is therefore important. such diversality ensures no single project, platform or conception of the commons becomes the one to rule them all. at the same time, it provides affective drives and resentments with a means of expressing themselves that helps avoid the kind of conflict between essentialist, non-negotiable identities and values that, as we’ve seen, has led to the rise of the populist right in so many countries around the world. this is why it is crucial to keep the question of how to create non-proprietary shared spaces and resources, along with the collective social processes that are necessary to manage and maintain them, radically open. doing so enables the collaborative means of creating commons we're engaged in to remain political, now and in the future. an earlier and shorter version of ‘postdigital politics’ was published in cornelia sollfrank, shuhsa niederberger and felix stalder, eds, aesthetics of the commons (zurich: diaphanes): https://www.diaphanes.com/titel/aesthetics-of-the-commons- david bollier, for example, was doing so as early as march , . for him, such actions can be understood as commoning rather than ‘”volunteering”’ because they are ‘more deeply committed and collective in character than individual “do-gooding”” (david bollier, ‘commoning as a pandemic survival strategy’, david bollier: news and perspectives on the commons, march , : http://www.bollier.org/blog/commoning-pandemic-survival-strategy. similarly, by june marina sitrin and colectiva sembrar had already published their edited collection, pandemic solidarity: mutual aid during the covid- crisis (london: pluto, ). for more details, see ‘flatten the curve, build the care’: http://syllabus.pirate.care/topic/coronanotes/. this is part of the pirate.care.syllabus collective response to the coronavirus crisis offered by my colleagues valeria graziano, tomislav medak, marcell mars, maddalena fragnito and others: https://syllabus.pirate.care. i will come back to say more about pirate care below. at the same time we need to remember there were also displays of racism against south east asian people during this period, along with sporadic instances of looting, violence and theft. and that’s without mentioning the extensive use of the #covidiot hastag to publicly ‘corona-shame’ those not adhering to the advice about social distancing. this definition of the commons is derived from the creating commons research project, run by cornelia sollfrank, shuhsa niederberger and felix stalder. launched in january , creating commons is based at zurich university of the arts: http://creatingcommons.zhdk.ch. for more on the concept of the commons as used in the context of this research project, see felix stalder, ‘the notion of the “commons”’, creating commons, july , : http://creatingcommons.zhdk.ch/the-notion-of-the-commons/. in ‘learning from shadow libraries’, her keynote talk at the launch of the centre for postdigital cultures at coventry university on february , , corneila sollfrank provided the following list of radical theorists of the commons: isabelle lorey, michael hardt and toni negri, paolo virno, isabell stengers, donna haraway, judith butler, roberto esposito, maurice blanchot, giorgio agamben, denise ferreira da silva, gilles deleuze and félix guattari, as well as fred moten and stefano harney. to sollfrank’s list i would add, at the very least, the names of david bollier, massimo de angelis, and pierre dardot and christian laval. if the liberal approach focuses on the normative frameworks and principles of governance and self-organisation that best allow a shared pool of spaces and resources to be managed and maintained as a specific property regime, radical theory is less concerned with associating the commons with things – land, sea, water, air, music files, digital books, software, code – and more with the social relations of commoning; with constructing the commons on the basis of shared political activities, practices and principles. for a recent account of the differences between liberal philosophy and radical theory when it comes to the commons, see marek korczysnki and andreas wittel, ‘the workplace commons: towards understanding commoning within work relations’, sociology - , . duncan bell is just one of many political theorists to have developed an argument to this effect. in ‘what is liberalism?’, a history of how liberalism has been variously understood as a category of political analysis, he insists: “‘thomas nagel is surely right to proclaim that “… most political argument in the western world now goes on between different branches of [the liberal] tradition.” … most inhabitants of the west are now conscripts of liberalism: the scope of the tradition has expanded to encompass the vast majority of political positions regarded as legitimate … and most who identify themselves as socialists, conservatives, social democrats, republicans, greens, feminists, and anarchists have been ideologically incorporated, whether they like it or not’ (duncan bell, ‘what is liberalism?’, political theory, vol. ( ), : ; citing thomas nagel, ‘rawls and liberalism’, the cambridge companion to rawls, ed. samuel freeman (cambridge: cup, ) ). i developed the concept of anti-bourgeois theory, in part, through a critical (in the foucauldian sense) engagement with a text by the theorist mckenzie wark called ‘on the obsolescence of the bourgeois novel in the anthropocene’, verso (blog), august , : https://www.versobooks.com/blogs/ -on-the-obsolescence-of-the-bourgeois-novel-in-the- anthropocene). wark’s text was published on the blog of verso books as an addition to the collection of critical appreciations she provides in general intellects: twenty-one thinkers for the twenty-first century (london: verso, ). for more, see my 'anti-bourgeois theory', media theory, vol. , no. , december, : http://journalcontent.mediatheoryjournal.org/index.php/mt/article/view/ . bell hooks, ‘postmodern blackness’, postmodern culture, vol. no. (september, ). gary hall, the uberfication of the university (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, ). see darren loucaides, ‘where farage learned his digital tricks’, the guardian, may , . maik fielitz and nick thurston, post-digital cultures of the far right: online actions and offline consequences in europe and the us (bielefeld: transcript verlag, ). in the u.k, minister for the cabinet office michael gove has in fact been quoting gramsci in his speeches for some time. see, for one recent example, ‘the privilege of public service’ given as the ditchley annual lecture, july , : https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/the- privilege-of-public-service-given-as-the-ditchley-annual-lecture. gove begins this lecture with the following quote from gramsci’s prison notebooks: ‘the crisis consists precisely of the fact that the inherited is dying – and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.’ of course some populist authoritarians don’t have this problem: both viktor orbán in hungary and jarosław kaczyński and mateusz morawiecki in poland having more or less gained control over their nation’s media. how significant is it as far as its understanding of postdigital communications is concerned that the boris johnson government is lead by journalists? johnson famously wrote for the telegraph, gove for the times. http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-uberfication-of-the-university for more in this context, see chantal mouffe, for a left populism (london: verso, ). luke winkie, ‘i was a teenage chan troll – until i learned to change my ways’, daily dot, august , : https://www.dailydot.com/via/ chan-troll-white-boy-internet-sexism/. an early version of ‘postdigital politics’ was presented as part of the creating commons: affects, collectives, aesthetics panel at the transmediale festival, berlin, february , . this panel was hosted and organised by sollfrank and stalder on behalf of the creating commons @zurick zhdk research project. matthijis rooduijn, stijn van kessel, caterina froio, andrea pirro, sarah de lange, daphne halikiopoulou, paul lewis, cas mudde & paul taggart, the populist . : an overview of populist, far right, far left and eurosceptic parties in europe ( ): www.popu-list.org. giacomo benedetto, simon hix and nicola mastrorocco, ‘the rise and fall of social democracy, - ’, american political science review, : - , . greta thunberg, speaking at the un climate change talks, madrid, december , ; see ‘irresistible greta thunberg meets immovable un climate talks’, climate home news, december , : https://www.climatechangenews.com/ / / /irresistible-thunberg-meets- immovable-un-climate-talks/. luke winkie, ‘i was a teenage chan troll’. in how to be an anti-capitalist in the st century, erik olin wright explains that ‘this is why the names for social protest movements so often have the prefix “anti.” antiwar mobilizations oppose a war. anti-austerity protests oppose budgets cuts. antiglobalization protests oppose the neoliberal policies of global capitalist integration with rules favorable to multinational corporations and global finance. and even when a movement is named by its positive aspirations – the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, the women’s movement – the demands are often frames primarily as the end to something: the end to jim crow laws; the end to housing discrimination; the end to racial profiling by the police; the end to fracking; the end to gender discrimination in employment; the end to restrictions on marriage for homosexual couples’ (erik olin wright, how to be an anti-capitalist in the st century, (london: verso, ) ). that it’s easier to be anti and unite people around what they are not than be affirmative and unite people around what they are also helps explain why the populist right have been so good at campaigning to win power, but (with the exception of orbán and kaczyński) so bad at governing once they have actually achieved it. instead, they have preferred to operate as if they are still in campaign mode. that it’s not easy to govern if you’re anti- most of the established elements of government that might prevent you from doing exactly what you want – the civil service, judiciary, the legal system and so forth – doesn’t help. maisa rojas, ‘the climate crisis plus inequality is a recipe for chaos’, the guardian: opinion, december , . chantal mouffe, on the political (london: verso, ) . timothy garton ash, ‘the future of liberalism’, prospect, winter special, , . hamid dabashi, can non-europeans think? (london: zed books, ) . my thanks to priya rajasekar for pointing me in the direction of dabashi’s book. ‘fuck business’ was an aside made by boris johnson at a private reception. see robert shrimsley, ‘boris johnson’s brexit explosion ruins tory business credentials’, financial times, june , : https://www.ft.com/content/ e c- - e - e - e a c . the http://www.popu-list.org/ libertarian neoliberal disruption of existing business is accompanied by assaults on institutions such as universities, the civil service and the supreme court that, from a liberal perspective, are designed to serve as a check on political power precisely by remaining separate from it. as early as the new frontiers foundation thinktank, then directed by johnson’s former chief adviser dominic cummings, was calling for rightwing politicians to challenge the standing of the bbc, for example. this was with a view to creating a u.k. equivalent to fox news in the u.s. that would not be constrained by rules such as those concerning broadcasting impartiality. for more, see the platform cooperative consortium: https://platform.coop. for a brief introduction to platform cooperativism and its history, see maira sutton, cat johnson and neal gorenflo, ‘what is a platform co-op? a shareable explainer’, shareable, august , : http://www.shareable.net/blog/a-shareable-explainer-what-is-a-platform-co-op. https://decodeproject.eu. for another example of a project designed to allow citizens to retain control of their own data, see the mydata global project in finland: https://mydata.org/about/ michel bauwens, vasilis kostakis and alex paziatis take barcelona as a case study of radical municipalism in peer to peer: the commons manifesto (london: university of westminster press, ). for more examples of municipal socialism, see barcelona en comú, eds, fearless cities: a guide to the global municipalist movement (oxford: new internationalist, ). see those resources for citizen engagement made available by the belgian ‘digital inclusion’ start-up citizenlab: https://www.citizenlab.co/resources. https://www.bundesregierung.de/breg-de/themen/coronavirus/hackathon-der-bundesregierung- . dietmar gattwinkel, ‘fight against covid- : germany organised "we vs virus" hackathon’, joinup, march , : https://joinup.ec.europa.eu/collection/innovative-public- services/news/covid- -we-vs-virus-hackathon-de. https://culturemachine.net; https://ranchoelectronico.org. http://openhumanitiespress.org. http://radicaloa.disruptivemedia.org.uk. https://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/areas-of-research/postdigital-cultures. https://scholarled.org. leslie chan, ‘platform capitalism and the governance of knowledge infrastructure’, digital initiative symposium, university of san diego, april - , : https://zenodo.org/record/ #.xncus- fr ta,% consultado% % de% mayo% de% . https://copim.pubpub.org. copim is funded in large part by research england, as the project has as one of its aims to show how open access books – and not just journal articles – can be included in the u.k.’s ref exercise. again, it seems indicative of the changing zeitgeist that research england have chosen to fund a decentered, horizontally organized, community-led and owned project, rather than the kind of the top-down, ‘one platform to rule them all’ approach most funders have supported in the past. for more on copim, see the interview conducted with janneke adema and myself by paula clemente vega for the open library of the humanities blog: 'community-led open publication infrastructures for monographs: an open insights https://culturemachine.net/ https://ranchoelectronico.org/ https://zenodo.org/record/ #.xncus-fr ta,% consultado% % de% mayo% de% https://zenodo.org/record/ #.xncus-fr ta,% consultado% % de% mayo% de% interview with janneke adema and gary hall', open insights, january , : https://www.openlibhums.org/news/ /. oliver lerone schultz, adnan hadzi, pablo de soto and laila shereen sakr, eds, after.video (london: open humanities press, ): http://www.openhumanitiespress.org/books/titles/after-video. https://www.mandela .com. a video of one of the exhibitions, held at the delft civic centre, cape town in , is available here: https://livecoventryac- my.sharepoint.com/:v:/g/personal/aa _coventry_ac_uk/esealqjjuftmomu ywu d bge_u nvcumlbmf ozhrlsq?e=agtuff. https://www.mandela .com/assets/downloads/mandela % diy% exhibition% - % building% instructions.pdf. http://wemake.cc. see also valeria graziano, zoe romano, serena cangiano, maddalena fragnito, francesca bria, rebelling with care: exploring open technologies for commoning healthcare (milan, italy: we make, ): http://wemake.cc/digitalsocial/cure-ribelli/. operating like this is actually closer to the etymological origins of the word ‘author’. as eva weinmayr makes clear, derived from the ‘latin "augere", to increase, to augment, the "auctor," "autour," "autor" was somebody "who causes to grow, a promoter, producer, father, progenitor, an instigator, maker, doer – a responsible person, or a teacher, a person that invents or causes something"’’ (eva weinmayr, noun to verb: an investigation into the micro-politics of publishing through artistic practice, thesis submitted for the degree of doctor of philosophy in artistic practice at hdk-valand – academy of art and design, faculty of fine, applied and performing arts, university of gothenburg, : http://wiki.evaweinmayr.com/index.php/ _analysis:_micro-politics_of_publishing#cite_note- etymology_author- ). kaspar hauser, ‘the comforting shadow of knowledge’, migrant journal, , , . mark amerika, remixthecontext (new york: routledge, ). valeria graziano, ‘prefigurative practices: raw materials for a political positioning of art, leaving the avant-garde’, in lilia mestre and elke van campenhout eds, turn, turtle! reenacting the institute (berlin: live art development agency & alexander verlag, ). for the latter, see janneke adema and kamila kuc unruly gestures ( ): http://www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se/v /a /unruly_gestures.mp ; and janneke adema and kamila kuc, ‘unruly gestures: seven cine-paragraphs on reading/writing practices in our post- digital condition’, culture unbound: journal of current cultural research, ( ) : http://www.cultureunbound.ep.liu.se/article.asp?doi= . /cu. . . . clare birchall and gary hall, eds, liquid books (london: open humanities press, ): http://liquidbooks.pbwiki.com; and clare birchall, gary hall, and joanna zylinska, eds, living books about life (london: open humanities press, ): http://www.livingbooksaboutlife.org. janneke adema and gary hall, eds, disrupting the humanities: towards posthumanities’, journal of electronic publishing, vol. , no. , fall, : https://quod.lib.umich.edu/j/jep/ . . *?rgn=full+text. http://www.journalofelectronicpublishing.org/ with regard to the university, see the account of coventry university’s open media classes provided in pauline van mourik broekman, gary hall, ted byfield, shaun hides and simon worthington, open education: a study in disruption (london: rowman & littlefield international, ). these classes were also featured in: lou mcgill and tim gray, open media classes at coventry university, jisc, july , http://repository.jisc.ac.uk/ / /jr _open_education_report_v .pdf; and to a lesser extent, massive open online courses: higher education’s digital moment?, universities uk, may http://www.universitiesuk.ac.uk/policy-and-analysis/reports/pages/massive-open- online-courses.aspx. marcel mars and tomislav medak, public library: memory of the world: https://www.memoryoftheworld.org/blog/ / / /repertorium_public_library/. this list concerning the hidden power of infrastructure is taken and adapted from leslie chan, ‘platform capitalism and the governance of knowledge infrastructure’, digital initiative symposium, university of san diego, april - , : https://zenodo.org/record/ #.xncus- fr ta,% consultado% % de% mayo% de% . my title for part two, ‘infrared’, is also linked to the importance infrastructure has for us. ‘infra’ is taken from infrastructure and ‘red’ refers to the way in which my collaborators and i align our work with the politics of the left, as i say. a different although related take on ideas of the subject and the private can be found in the work of our cpc colleagues adrienne evans and miriam de rosa on how the distinction between the public, the domestic and the familial is changing with the transformation in media communications technology from analogue to postdigital. see, for example, their ‘domestic, private, familial’ event, held at coventry university on january , ; and also adrienne evans and sarah riley, ‘“he’s a total tubecrush”: post-feminist sensibility as intimate publics’, feminist media studies, volume , issue , . here, tubecrush and phenomenon such as the #metoo campaign show how aspects of subjectivity, sexuality and gender inequality that were once kept private are now being revealed on a public scale, thanks to the likes of twitter and facebook. cornelia sollfrank, ‘the surplus of copying—how shadow libraries and pirate archives contribute to the creation of cultural memory and the commons’, in michael kargl and franz thalmair, eds, originalcopy: post-digital strategies of appropriation (berlin: de gruyter, ). roberto esposito, ‘community, immunity, biopolitics’, angelaki, volume , number , , . for more, see my treatment of new materialism in pirate philosophy (cambridge, ma: mit press, ). françois cusset, how the world swung to the right: fifty years of counterrevolutions (california: semiotext(e), ) - . art fund, calm and collected: museums and galleries: the uk’s untapped wellbeing resource?, : https://www.artfund.org/assets/national-art-pass/artfund_calm-and-collected- wellbeing-report.pdf. http://creatingcommons.zhdk.ch/about/; tatiana bazzichelli, truth-tellers: the impact of speaking out, th event of the disruption network lab, studio , berlin, november - , : https://www.disruptionlab.org/truth-tellers. https://zenodo.org/record/ #.xncus-fr ta,% consultado% % de% mayo% de% https://zenodo.org/record/ #.xncus-fr ta,% consultado% % de% mayo% de% david garcia, ‘beyond the evidence’, new tactical research (blog), september , : http://new-tactical-research.co.uk/blog/beyond-the-evidence- /. according to garcia, the term ‘evidentiary realism’ originates with the artist and curator paolo cirio and his group exhibition of the same name: evidentiary realism, fridman gallery, new york, february – march , : https://paolocirio.net/press/show_evidentiary-realism_nyc.php. for an earlier engagement on my part with the work of lev manovich, see ‘there are no digital humanities’, pirate philosophy (cambridge, massachusetts: mit press, ). eyal weizman quoted in david garcia, ‘beyond the evidence’ (punctuation as in garcia’s original post). josephine harvey, ‘obama says trump has accelerated “truth decay” in america’, huff post, november , : https://www.aol.com/obama-says-trump-accelerated-truth- .html?guce_referrer=ahr chm ly zzwfyy guewfob uy tlw&guce_referrer_si g=aqaaahrvtwhhtrdinmip nakbg fkktcm yxhge qmwa _ ogj- dwqtrpwdtj cn ukrm bmdfu-di klixklp amzgww ukgon yiydzjl_jk chdix- wxc hchepjnxu ehz qxnvm skngjthtzlxxsbbkbvysk rum_-s &guccounter= . alan rusbridger, ‘the election in the media: against evasion and lies, good journalism is all we have’, the observer, december , , . a further academic variation on the theme has come from the social sciences. it concerns the idea that ’public faith in expert knowledge can only be regained not through reasserting the authority of facts but by rediscovering ways of knowing-in-common’ in order to make the case for what noortje marres – taking notions of both ‘democracy’ and the ‘public’ as her datum points in doing so (see below) – refers to as ‘knowledge democracy’. eva haifa giraud and sarah-nicole aghassi-isfahani, ‘post-truths, common worlds, and critical politics: critiquing bruno latour's renewed critique of critique’, cultural politics, volume , number, march ); noortje marres, ‘why we can't have our facts back’, engaging science, technology, and society, , . social science in humanitarian action, ‘social dimensions of the novel coronavirus (ncov) outbreak and response: meeting report’, roundtable at the wellcome trust, london, february , : https://opendocs.ids.ac.uk/opendocs/bitstream/handle/ . . / /sshap_social_dime nsions_ncov_outbreak_response_meeting_report_feb .pdf. katelyn burns, ‘trump’s worst statements on the coronavirus outbreak’, vox, march , : https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/ / / / /trumps-worst-statements- coronavirus. hanna arendt, in roger errera, ‘hannah arendt: from an interview’, the new york review of books, , , . kai strittmatter, we have been harmonised: life in china’s surveillance state (exeter: old street publishing, ) . glenn kessler, meg kelly, salvador rizzo and michelle ye hee lee, ‘the fact checker’s ongoing database of the false or misleading claims made by president trump since assuming office’, washington post, may , : https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/?. at the same time, a lot of those on the nativist right seem to believe that the establishment rules don’t apply to them too. which is why they’re not overly concerned if a populist government, say, prorogues parliament or violates international treaties on behalf of ‘us’, ‘the people’. what’s https://www.aol.com/obama-says-trump-accelerated-truth- .html?guce_referrer=ahr chm ly zzwfyy guewfob uy tlw&guce_referrer_sig=aqaaahrvtwhhtrdinmip nakbg fkktcm yxhge qmwa _ ogj-dwqtrpwdtj cn ukrm bmdfu-di klixklp amzgww ukgon yiydzjl_jk chdix-wxc hchepjnxu ehz qxnvm skngjthtzlxxsbbkbvysk rum_-s &guccounter= https://www.aol.com/obama-says-trump-accelerated-truth- .html?guce_referrer=ahr chm ly zzwfyy guewfob uy tlw&guce_referrer_sig=aqaaahrvtwhhtrdinmip nakbg fkktcm yxhge qmwa _ ogj-dwqtrpwdtj cn ukrm bmdfu-di klixklp amzgww ukgon yiydzjl_jk chdix-wxc hchepjnxu ehz qxnvm skngjthtzlxxsbbkbvysk rum_-s &guccounter= https://www.aol.com/obama-says-trump-accelerated-truth- .html?guce_referrer=ahr chm ly zzwfyy guewfob uy tlw&guce_referrer_sig=aqaaahrvtwhhtrdinmip nakbg fkktcm yxhge qmwa _ ogj-dwqtrpwdtj cn ukrm bmdfu-di klixklp amzgww ukgon yiydzjl_jk chdix-wxc hchepjnxu ehz qxnvm skngjthtzlxxsbbkbvysk rum_-s &guccounter= https://www.aol.com/obama-says-trump-accelerated-truth- .html?guce_referrer=ahr chm ly zzwfyy guewfob uy tlw&guce_referrer_sig=aqaaahrvtwhhtrdinmip nakbg fkktcm yxhge qmwa _ ogj-dwqtrpwdtj cn ukrm bmdfu-di klixklp amzgww ukgon yiydzjl_jk chdix-wxc hchepjnxu ehz qxnvm skngjthtzlxxsbbkbvysk rum_-s &guccounter= https://www.aol.com/obama-says-trump-accelerated-truth- .html?guce_referrer=ahr chm ly zzwfyy guewfob uy tlw&guce_referrer_sig=aqaaahrvtwhhtrdinmip nakbg fkktcm yxhge qmwa _ ogj-dwqtrpwdtj cn ukrm bmdfu-di klixklp amzgww ukgon yiydzjl_jk chdix-wxc hchepjnxu ehz qxnvm skngjthtzlxxsbbkbvysk rum_-s &guccounter= https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/politics/trump-claims-database/ important is that these politicians should continue to apply the rule of law with full vigour to ‘them’, those considered to be the enemy ‘other’: the eu, minorities, migrants, left-liberal elites. gilles deleuze and félix guattari, a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia (london: athlone, ) . eliza mackintosh, ‘finland is winning the war on fake news. what it’s learned may be crucial to western democracy’, cnn, may : https://edition.cnn.com/interactive/ / /europe/finland-fake-news-intl/. forensic architecture, the bombing of rafah, july , : https://forensic- architecture.org/investigation/the-bombing-of-rafah. for more, see eyal weizman, ‘hannibal in rafah’, forensic architecture: violence at the threshold of detectability (new york: zone, ). significantly, weizman begins this book with a warning drawn from history, namely the libel trial launched by david irving against the historian deborah lipstadt and her publisher, penguin books for calling him a holocaust denier. weizman’s warning is that ‘an independent forensics analyst challenging officially sanctioned truths with the typically limited means afforded to activists is not a guarantee of progressive politics’ ( ). ‘flatpack democracy . – how the independents for frome triggered a british and global wave of community empowerment’, the alternative uk, october , : https://www.thealternative.org.uk/dailyalternative/ / / /flatpack-democracy-two-zero. marcell mars, ‘public library’, interviewed by cornelia sollfrank, artwarez, berlin, february , : http://artwarez.org/projects/gwydh/mars.html. for example, in june it was reported by brewster kahle that ‘four commercial publishers chose to sue the internet archive during the global coronavirus pandemic’. this forced them to close early the temporary national emergency library (https://blog.archive.org/national- emergency-library/) the internet archive had set up to ‘provide books to support emergency remote teaching, research activities, independent scholarship, and intellectual stimulation’ over the course of the covid- outbreak. for kahle, it is a complaint that ‘attacks the concept of any library owning and lending digital books, challenging the very idea of what a library is in the digital world’ (brewster kahle, ‘temporary national emergency library to close weeks early, returning to traditional controlled digital lending’, internet archive blogs, june , : http://blog.archive.org/ / / /temporary-national-emergency-library-to-close- -weeks-early- returning-to-traditional-controlled-digital-lending/. in this context it becomes easy to see why, for sollfrank, ‘the emergence of pirate libraries has to be considered as a systemic symptom, as the materialisation of social and economic flaws... the global demand for learning and scholarship is not being met by the contemporary publishing industry, all over the world, but especially in latin and south america, in china, in eastern europe, in africa and in india’ (cornelia sollfrank, ‘learning from shadow libraries’, centre for postdigital cultures, coventry university, february , ). https://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/about-us/research-news/ /pirate-care/. https://sea-watch.org/en/. https://planka.nu/. http://www.docsnotcops.co.uk. https://www.coventry.ac.uk/research/about-us/research-news/ /pirate-care/. http://blog.archive.org/ / / /temporary-national-emergency-library-to-close- -weeks-early-returning-to-traditional-controlled-digital-lending/ http://blog.archive.org/ / / /temporary-national-emergency-library-to-close- -weeks-early-returning-to-traditional-controlled-digital-lending/ for more on pirate care, see valeria graziano, ‘pirate care - how do we imagine the health care for the future we want?’, medium, october , : https://medium.com/dsi eu/pirate- care-how-do-we-imagine-the-health-care-for-the-future-we-want-fa f a a ; and also the pirate care project, a series of exhibitions, talks and reading groups organized by valeria graziano, marcell mars and tomislav medak: https://pirate.care/pages/concept/; as well as ‘introduction to pirate care’, pirate.care.syllabus: http://syllabus.pirate.care/topic/piratecareintroduction/. valeria graziano, marcell mars and tomislav medak, ‘pirate care: against the crisis’, kunsthalle wien, march-may, : https://kunsthallewien.at/en/pirate-care-gegen-die-krise/. lawrence liang, ‘beyond representation: the figure of the pirate’, in lars eckstein and anja schwarz, postcolonial piracy: media distribution and cultural production in the global south (london: bloomsbury, ) - . see gary hall, pirate philosophy (cambridge, ma: mit press, ). caitlin dewey, ‘ personal data points that facebook uses to target ads to you’, washington post, august , . t-shirted turmoil: a look at the power of the slogan t-shirt and how one can land you in trouble with the law c re d it: e pa /r itch ie b . to n g o end note yellow t-shirts are a legitimate national security concern, a court in malaysia has ruled. the decision, related specifically to shirts with a bersih slogan, came in february after a group of citizens called for a review on the government’s countrywide ban of the clothing. “the home minister has effectively ‘criminalised’ thou- sands of malaysians who wore and still own the bersih t-shirt,” said campaign leaders in a statement released shortly afterwards. “it is more than just a piece of cloth. the t-shirt represents our rights, freedom and expression.” six months earlier, the street of kuala lumpur and other malaysian cities turned yellow as they filled with protesters from bersih campaign, a nationwide protest movement for more transparent governance (bersih meaning clean in malay). ahead of a few letters on cotton clothing shouldn’t provoke fear within great state machines, but sometimes they do. vicky baker looks at why slogan shirts are more than a fashion statement ( ): / | doi: . / t-shirted turmoil end note . indexoncensorship.org _ - .indb / / : : http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . % f &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - opposite: malaysian protesters march wear- ing yellow t-shirts with the bersih slogan during a rally in kuala lumpur in august . the shirts, which demonstrators wore while campaigning for more governmental transparency and prime minister najib razak’s resignation, were banned by the state it was the wording on his t-shirt that caught the authorities’ attention … hussein was jailed immediately ➔ a series of rallies, the home minister banned the shirts. thousands of malaysians defied him, and the press and social media spoke of a new-found xanthophobia, a fear of the colour yellow. activist ivy josiah, who attended the ber- sih demonstration in kuala lumpur, said the fear initially ran both ways. she told index that many participants turned up with their t-shirts hidden in their bags. “once they realised no arrests were taking place, they quickly changed. overwhelmingly, the vast majority of protesters wore the bersih t-shirts in defiance,” she said. “the govern- ment got disturbed because a people’s move- ment this large could upset the status quo.” in countries where people are unable to speak freely, letting your chest do the talk- ing is a bold step. it shows how you stand by your opinions publically and resolutely. but it comes with risks. two years have now passed since egyp- tian student mahmoud hussein was ar- rested in cairo, aged , while walking home from a peaceful commemoration of the tahrir square uprising. it was the wording on his t-shirt that caught the authorities’ attention: “nation without tor- ture”. on the back was a picture of a police officer torturing a citizen. hussein was jailed immediately. he’s been in prison ever since, despite not being for- mally charged with a crime. and he’s been tortured himself. last year amnesty interna- tional reported alleged electric-shock treat- ment to his face, testicles, back and hands. his brother, tarek, told index that the state has broken its own criminal code laws by overstepping the two-year maximum for pre-trial detention. “i do not know why mahmoud is kept locked up all this period,” he said. “the fear, in my opinion, is not from the t-shirt, but from the dream on the t-shirt: a nation without torture, a nation where nobody gets offended, a nation in which all sectors from different political ide- ologies and religions are respected.” indonesian author eliza vitri handayani staged her own t-shirt protest last year after her book launch was cancelled at ubud writers and readers festival in bali. festival organisers had come under pressure from local police to cancel a variety of events – mostly those related to the mass killings of communist civilians and party members in - following an attempted coup, but, as a police chief told cnn indonesia, there were also concerns over sessions related to “ethnicity, religion and race”. handayani didn’t see her coming-of-age novel, from now on everything will be different, as particularly subversive, but her event was among those struck off. other authors in the same position responded by putting on their own fringe events in near- by cafes, but handayani was worried she couldn’t guarantee the safety of her guests and so came up with an alternative plan. she printed five t-shirts, each carrying a dif- ferent, politically critical excerpt from the novel, and she wore a different one to the festival each day. “i wanted to promote the book and also highlight what was going on, so i thought: maybe i can wear my work?” she told index. “it created an excuse to talk to people. i sold all the copies i took with me and i also got interviewed by the press. i hope that cover- age put pressure back on to the authorities to protect citizens’ freedom of expression.” she said she’d do it again if she needed to. she has already fashioned a dress from her book proofs, which she wore to an event in norway. “what women wear in indonesia is already subject to a lot of restrictions. e n d n o t e indexoncensorship.org _ - .indb / / : : perhaps this a way to kill two birds with one stone?” footballers have also long been drawing attention to causes – from burning social is- sues to matters of their own egos – by lift- ing up their shirts to reveal a message to the crowds. the international football as- sociation board formally banned statements on undershirts in , ahead of the world cup in brazil. but this didn’t stop russian footballer dmitri tarasov making a show of support for president putin during a match in turkey in february. “most polite presi- dent” were the words emblazoned on his front; tensions between the countries have been fraught since turkey shot down a rus- sian jet last november. but can a provocative slogan transform into hate speech? this is an issue currently under debate in south africa. in february, a black student at university of the wit- watersrand wore a plain, white t-shirt, on which he’d scrawled, “being black is shit” on one side and “fuck white people” on the other. he told south africa’s the times, “i was feeling hatred because it was times of financial exclusion.” the univer- sity condemned the shirt and the student is due to appear before the south african human rights commission on charges of hate speech. since then a university of cape town student has been photographed in an- other t-shirt bearing a hand-written inscrip- tion: “kill all whites.” howard besser, a professor of cinema studies at new york university in the usa, has been collecting slogan t-shirts since the s. he estimates he has around , of them, of which have been catalogued online (besser.tsoa.nyu.edu/t-shirts/). among recent additions is the “hands up, don’t shoot” shirt worn during the black lives matter protests, which was sparked by an unarmed black teenager, trayvon martin, being shot dead by a neighbourhood watch coordinator. “unlike a leaflet or an ad on tv, someone cannot fully avoid seeing the slogan on a t- shirt,” said besser. “slogans are quick, and if they’re clever and/or surrounded by nice col- ours or graphics, they can be very effective. year-round, i average about one person per day stopping me to discuss the topic on my t-shirt. with some shirts i’ll get more than half a dozen people stopping me in a single day.” whether the aim of a slogan t-shirt is to shock, amuse or inspire, they are designed to be talking points. that doesn’t mean that all of them have something worthwhile to say. but for those that choose their clothing to display defiant, unspoken messages, the me- dium is as powerful as ever and no passing fashion will change that. vicky baker is deputy editor of index on cen- sorship magazine. she tweets @vickybaker but can a provocative slogan transform into hate speech? this is an issue currently under debate in south africa ➔above: indonesian author eliza vitri handayani wearing quotes from her novel on her t-shirt after her book launch was cancelled because of police concerns over its subject matter e n d n o t e . indexoncensorship.org _ - .indb / / : : s jra .. essay roundtable christianity and human flourishing: the roles of law and politics david n. hempton dean, john lord o’brian professor of divinity, and mcdonald family professor of evangelical theological studies, harvard divinity school keywords: christianity, law, human ourishing, violence, peacebuilding, enlightenment, religious freedom, justice this essay was presented as a mcdonald distinguished scholar lecture at the center for the study of law and religion, emory university. introduction: three threats to human flourishing if i were to ask of any group to identify the three most dangerous threats to human ourishing in the twenty-rst century, i am sure that i would get a wide variety of answers. for many of these threats—from climate change and looming ecological disasters to the structural inequalities of the global economic system, and from the disturbing prevalence of both nuclear and the new auton- omous weapons to the continuing possibility of interstate warfare—i have no particular expertise to draw on beyond that of any concerned citizen in the world’s most powerful democracy. in order to address the topic of christianity and human ourishing, i speak from my own perspective as a western christian who grew up in a deeply divided and violent society in northern ireland during the troubles and who now nds himself dean of one of the world’s most religiously diverse divinity schools. from those perspectives, i identify what i see as the three most dangerous threats to human ourishing. first, although i basically agree with many of my colleague steven pinker’s conclusions in his book our better angels that, however counterintuitive it might seem, the world is less violent now than at any stage in its history, nevertheless i regard violence, especially intrastate or civil wars, which are often internationalized, as primary threats to human ourishing. my own expe- rience in belfast; the unspeakable suffering in afghanistan, iraq, syria, and south sudan; and the resultant, heartbreaking refugee crises, make this threat abundantly clear. although pinker’s treat- ment of religion is perhaps the least satisfactory part of his book, one can easily see why many cognitive scientists and behavioral and social psychologists in the western academy see religion see generally steven pinker, the better angels of our nature: why violence has declined (new york: penguin, ). pinker’s articulation of the violence of some parts of the hebrew bible and the history of christendom is appropri- ate, but less convincing is his assessment of the role of religion in conicts such as the thirty years’ war in europe and the troubles in northern ireland, or in paying at least some tribute to the role of religion in peacebuilding in many different conicts. journal of law and religion , no. ( ): – © center for the study of law and religion at emory university doi: . /jlr. . journal of law and religion at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /jlr. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /jlr. . https://www.cambridge.org/core itself as a, or even the, primary threat to human ourishing. this is an argument that needs to be taken seriously. second, i see a major threat to human ourishing in the emergence of global fundamentalist movements in many of the world’s religious traditions, often intersecting with exclusivist and angry political movements to produce a deadly mixture of political and religious intolerance. this threat is most acute in places that have suffered from the legacies of euro-american colonial- ism, religiously infused ethno-nationalism, and deeply sectarian interpretations of sacred texts. this problem may get worse, if, as the recent pew survey on global religious trends predicts, the west becomes more religiously unafliated (probably more secular), while the rest of the world, espe- cially the global south and east, becomes more competitively religious primarily as a result of demographic trends. the growing religious illiteracy of the west, especially the well-documented case of the united states, is itself a dangerous reality. finally, a third threat to human ourishing, more difcult to diagnose than the rst two, ema- nates from the long-term dynamics of what i might call the enlightenment project in the western academy. scientic rationalism, functionalist utilitarianism, technological innovation, and the decline of the humanities has resulted in a separation of head and heart and a diminution of empa- thy, emotional intelligence, and vigorous educational debates about questions of meaning or the well-lived life. i am the dean of a divinity school in an elite institution celebrating its two hundredth birthday. one interpretation of our school’s founding, as with many other university divinity schools, was to remove theological and religious studies from the main preoccupations of the mod- ern research university so that those universities could get on with the real business of generating new knowledge and producing scientic and technological improvement. in the last several years, our colleges and universities have been roiled by complex structural and moral issues in our society: from race and “black lives matter” to shocking statistics about the prevalence of sexual assault and harassment on college campuses, and from deep concern about growing economic inequality and the use of university endowments to the depressing state of our political discourse. it is not at all clear, however, that the curriculum of the modern university is well placed to deal with issues relating to ethics, meaning, and purpose. what contribution can christianity make to address these threats to human flourishing? i begin with a historical case study. i am not a lawyer and have no legal training, but for a couple of years in my career i worked intensively on legal history for a book i was writing. in the course of my research, i came across a letter written in from the justices of the peace in the west of england to the anglican bishop of exeter. in the early modern period most european states had established churches with serious legal penalties against those who dissented from those churches—in other words churches were part of the theory and practice of governing and were regarded as instrumental in securing political loyalty, social stability, and communal harmony. dissent from established churches was either tolerated within very strict boundaries, as in england; subject to serious penal codes, as in ireland; or ruthlessly suppressed, as in various parts of continental europe. such repression often led to enforced migrations from intolerant pew research center, “the future of world religions: population growth projections, – ,” april , http://www.pewforum.org/ / / /religious-projections- - /. david n. hempton journal of law and religion at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /jlr. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available http://www.pewforum.org/ / / /religious-projections- - / http://www.pewforum.org/ / / /religious-projections- - / http://www.pewforum.org/ / / /religious-projections- - / http://www.pewforum.org/ / / /religious-projections- - / http://www.pewforum.org/ / / /religious-projections- - / https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /jlr. . https://www.cambridge.org/core confessional states, as with the notorious case of the salzburg protestants, many of whom fetched up in the north american colony of georgia in the early eighteenth century. this context of con- fessional states with legally privileged established churches helps explain the letter from the justices of the peace in the west country of england in the late s. this is what they wrote: a set of people who stile themselves methodists have infus’d their enthusiastick notions into the minds of vast numbers of the meaner sort of people in the western part of this county; they are strenuously endeav- ouring to propagate themselves all over it: several have assembled frequently within this fortnight in the par- ish of saint ewe in which we live; and the preacher they are so very fond of, is not better than a mean illiterate tinner, and what is more surprising, but a boy nineteen years old. doubtless your lordship has heard much of these poor deluded creatures . . . who for the most part are ignorant men, and have been noto- riously wicked, but now under pretence of being both reform’d and inspired, they, and even women of the same stamp are adored preachers: it is sufcient to say that many poor wretches have been drove to despair thro’ their means, and multitudes of his majesties subjects have been made useless in every station of life, by being persuaded, that unless they are drones and cowards they cannot be saved. as we are in the commission of the peace, we have endeavour’d to convince them of their errors by reason: which not having the least effect, we told them that we must put the laws in effect against them. what the justices of the peace were protesting, essentially, was the fact that ordinary men and women, without ecclesiastical authorization or legally obtained licenses, were propagating religious opinions outside the discipline and control of the established church and hence posed a real threat to political control and social stability. fast-forwarding half a century, this new religious movement, the methodists, played a major role (and i mean major role) in expanding religious toleration and freedom in england, advocating for the separation of church and state and religious equality in the united states, and in petitioning against the end of the atlantic slave trade in and the abolition of slavery within british colo- nial dominions in . the message here is that a once disparaged religious movement, over time, displayed the capacity to advocate for and legally help secure three of the most important legal and humanitarian transformations in the history of the modern west: the separation of church and state; the rise of religious toleration, and later, religious equality; and the end of state-sponsored slavery. at the risk of eulogizing or romanticizing this populist evangelical religious movement, it is also possible to argue that popular evangelicalism of all stripes also made a signicant contribution to many other humanitarian and emancipatory causes in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries from protecting animals from cruelty to rolling back enforced ecclesiastical taxation, and from pioneer- ing working-class education through the ubiquitous sunday schools to prizing open the many inherited privileges of elite supported established churches. my gloss on this would be to suggest that christian movements have always been at their best when their agendas are about expanding human freedom, protecting the vulnerable, and ghting against injustice. there was, of course, a this remarkable story is told by w. r. ward, the protestant evangelical awakening (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), – . west austell jps to g. lavington, bishop of exeter, may , lambeth palace library manuscripts, secker papers, (methodists), folios – . for a fuller treatment, see david hempton, the religion of the people: methodism and popular religion c. – (london: routledge, ), – . see david hempton, “popular evangelicalism and the shaping of british moral sensibilities, – ,” in british abolitionism and the question of moral progress in history, ed. donald a. yerxa (columbia: university of south carolina press, ), – . christianity and human flourishing journal of law and religion at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /jlr. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /jlr. . https://www.cambridge.org/core darker side to these movements: a nasty sectarian anti-catholicism, and what i would call an emboldened moral majoritarianism in trying to enforce sabbatarianism, temperance, and the colo- nial export of christianity, commerce, and civilization, which has produced such a bitter legacy in the world. when religious movements move from a freedom and justice agenda to an exclusivist sectarian or moral coercion agenda, what charles dickens in hard times called trying to make people religious by main force, bad things almost always follow. when christianity, or indeed any religion, so infuses political culture as to build a harmony of interests against other competing interests—for example the fusion of paisleyite fundamentalism and unionist politics in northern ireland, or the culture wars and their republican and democratic party formulations in the united states—politics often become a zero-sum game in which one side can only prosper at the expense of the other. zero-sum games take the elasticity and exibility out of political culture and inexorably make political culture angrier, more intolerant, and more destructive of human ourishing. in a recent new york times editorial, david brooks called this the “antipolitics ten- dency.” quoting bernard crick’s dictum that “politics is a way of ruling divided societies without undue violence,” he wrote that “antipolitics people don’t accept politics as a limited activity. they make soaring promises and raise ridiculous expectations. when those expectations are not met, vot- ers grow cynical and, disgusted, and turn even further in the direction of antipolitics.” this is not new wisdom, but is essentially the same advice given by the prophet jeremiah to the exiled children of israel in babylon, “seek the welfare of the city where i have sent you into exile, and pray to the lord on its behalf, for in its welfare you will nd your welfare . . . for i know the plans i have for you, says the lord, plans for welfare and not for evil, to give you a future and a hope.” discovering welfare and hope in the midst of human exile and conict is perhaps one of the best denitions of human ourishing we can come up with. religion, violence, and peacebuilding it was partly acknowledging the historical reality that religious movements of all kinds can have immensely positive impacts on society, along with my opposite experience of religion as a contrib- utor to violence and conict when i was growing up and studying in belfast during the worst of the troubles, that we started the religions and the practice of peace initiative at harvard two years ago. the aim was to bring the intellectual resources of harvard divinity school, in association with other schools at harvard, to bear on the great issues of our time with respect to religion, violence, and peacebuilding. what we are trying to do is closely aligned with the views expressed in rabbi jonathan sacks’s recent book, not in god’s name: confronting religious violence. this book is designed to refute three common arguments made about the relationship between religion and violence and war: . religion is the major source of violence in our world and needs to be marginalized or eliminated. . although religion can be used by manipulative leaders to motivate people to wage wars out of a desire for sectarian dominance or purity, religion itself basically teaches us to love and charles dickens, hard times (london, ), chapter , “the key note.” david brooks, “the governing cancer of our times,” new york times, february , . jeremiah : – (revised standard version). jonathan sacks, not in god’s name: confronting religious violence (new york: schocken books, ). david n. hempton journal of law and religion at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /jlr. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /jlr. . https://www.cambridge.org/core forgive, not ght and hate. (this view actually piles the blame on to political leaders and gives religion a pass.) . the idea that “our” religion is peaceful but “theirs” is intolerant and violent. (whatever the religion and culture, history seems to show that under conditions in which normal constraints are removed humans have the same capacity for cruelty and barbarity.) sacks disagrees with all of these views. his view is that religion shows no signs of diminishing in importance in our world, and contributes more than we like to think to what he calls “altruistic evil.” his suggestion is that we must all do hard theological work to diminish the inuence of the worst aspects of religious extremism and promote the best of what religion has to offer the world. in his words, “we must raise a generation of young jews, christians, muslims, and others to know that it is not piety but sacrilege to kill in the name of the god of life, hate in the name of the god of love, wage war in the name of the god of peace, and practice cruelty in the name of the god of compassion.” in the two years of the existence of the religions and the practice of peace initiative, we have partnered with many other american universities, state and voluntary organizations, and on-the-ground practitioners to promote peacebuilding efforts. along the way we have learned three things in particular: . religious peacebuilding needs to be brought into close conversation with new expertise on global development and ecological sustainability. we also need to support efforts by interna- tional lawyers and human rights activists to make wars of aggression into war crimes, if we are really serious about reducing the incidence of violence and warfare. . in the developing arts of peacebuilding, we need to nd more space for the creative work of women (wars are primarily male events) and also what john lederach calls the cultivation of “the moral imagination.” . religious traditions, of all kinds, have within them deep practices of spirituality and conict mediation. we need to drill deeply into those traditions and construct a new narrative and a new pedagogy about the role of religion in the twenty-rst-century world. using the construc- tive power of religious traditions and universities (both of which are global institutions) to get behind the cumulative international treaties and declarations against the illegal use of force is something worth advocating for. war and violence are the absolute opposites of human ourishing, and they always produce the nadir of human behavior, yet sixty years after the nuremburg war trials and the universal declaration of human rights, we still struggle to build international commitment to human rights, international law, and the illegal use of force. despite our slow progress, however, there is some evidence to suggest that historical efforts to use law to limit war and human rights abuses have made a difference to the use of force in the twentieth century. is it possible that new developments in the laws of war such as the rome statute of the international criminal court and the kampala amendment will produce further gains in the twenty-rst century? jonathan sacks, “how to defeat religious violence” wall street journal, october , . john paul lederach, the moral imagination: the art and soul of building peace (new york: oxford university press, ). this is the argument of kathryn sikkink, federica d’alessandra, and aroop mukarji, “has international law diminished the illegal use of force?,” unpublished paper, carr center for human rights, harvard university, . christianity and human flourishing journal of law and religion at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /jlr. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /jlr. . https://www.cambridge.org/core in a book with the great title to make the earth whole, marc gopin makes a case for the art of citizen diplomacy in an age of religious militancy. some of that diplomacy will be exercised by governments, state departments, and professionals. but, let us be honest, their record has not been entirely stellar, and gopin urges all of us to be involved in building a global contract of peace and sustainability. many “citizen diplomats” will be secular humanitarians, which is all to the good, but gopin makes a special plea for those he calls “spiritual peacebuilders.” he writes, the best of the peacemakers recognize our common humanity and they harmonize this with spirituality, making them true heirs to the future. they are spiritual, but not coercive; they live with their eyes on the sacred . . . they know how to weave peace and justice together without violence in a unique way that enters into the hearts of average people of faith. they have taken the best of religious inspiration and wedded it to nonviolence. they are trained in radical empathy, trained in visualizing the whole. there can be no better description of how spiritual and religious sensibilities, at their most compel- ling, bring special qualities to peacebuilding that social scientic methods and theories, however necessary they are, cannot achieve alone. conclusion the english novelist george eliot, a disenchanted evangelical christian turned secular humanist wrote, “religious ideas have the fate of melodies, which, once set aoat in the world are taken up by all sorts of instruments, some of them woefully coarse, feeble or out of tune, until people are in danger of crying out that the melody itself is detestable.” we live in a world, indeed in a nation, where religious ideas have been taken up by out-of-tune instruments, and many in the west, especially under the age of thirty, now believe the melody itself is detestable. the time is urgent to think afresh about christianity and human ourishing and how politics and law can help compose a more harmonious melody. the themes of that melody should be about campaign- ing for greater human freedom from prejudice and oppression; about building international resis- tance to wars of aggression and war crimes; about advocating for social justice and human dignity; about pressing for ecological sustainability; and about educating our students how to think about things bigger than themselves and their own material well-being. in sum, we need to make our earth whole. humans ourish when human ourishing is top of the agenda, and they shrivel in the spaces occupied by war, violence, and ruthless self-interest. blessed indeed are the peacemakers for they will be called the children of god. marc gopin, to make the earth whole: the art of citizen diplomacy in an age of religious militancy (lanham: rowman & littleeld, ). see also marc gopin, between eden and armageddon: the future of world religions, violence, and peacemaking (new york: oxford university press, ). gopin, to make the earth whole, . george eliot, “janet’s repentance,” in scenes of clerical life (london: blackwood and sons, ). david n. hempton journal of law and religion at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /jlr. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /jlr. . https://www.cambridge.org/core 	christianity and human flourishing: the roles of law and politics 	introduction: three threats to human flourishing 	what contribution can christianity make to address these threats to human flourishing? 	religion, violence, and peacebuilding 	conclusion wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ cjmc ( ) pp. – intellect limited crossings: journal of migration & culture volume number © intellect ltd article. english language. doi: . /cjmc. . . _ www.intellectbooks.com abstract migration raises many existential problems, not least, questions of identity. over time, migrants settle and form a diaspora in a new land but does dislocation from their geographical ‘home’ inevitably subvert their sense of self? can representation through the diasporic media mitigate this loss? the african union considers the diaspora the sixth region of africa and the news media helps foster amongst exiles an ‘imagined diaspora’ (anderson), connecting them to their country of origin. in the social media age, this ‘diaspora of the internet’ (tettey) can be seen at work, often acting as a mirror for division and disharmony in the country of origin. taking a case study approach of three countries in west africa and interpreting conflict in its broadest senses, this article seeks to examine the ways in which the news-related media of the west african diaspora has influenced understandings of identity. introduction being african is an increasingly complex identity. as someone who has been told she is too black to be british, and too british to be african, i am strongly against the notion that identity can be policed by some external standard. (hirsch ) keywords diaspora media conflict identity west africa migration jon silverman the university of bedfordshire mediating identity: the west african diaspora, conflict and communication cjmc crossings: journal of migration & culture intellect . /cjmc. . . _ © intellect ltd articles . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . cjmc_ _ .indb -may- : : pm fir st pr oo f l ay ou t © int ell ec t l td no t f or dis tri bu tio n jon silverman crossings: journal of migration & culture the journalist and author, afua hirsch, has good reason to consider notions of identity and belonging. she was born in britain to a black ghanaian mother and white british father, whose own father was a jewish exile from nazi germany. those seeking to pigeon-hole might describe her as an ‘afropolitan’, an african born in the diaspora or an african who identifies with both their african and european heritage. (there are various academic contestations of the term ‘afropolitan’, which are beyond the remit of this article.) another commentator who straddled two cultures, the american-born james baldwin, who found his unique voice in paris during the s, was far less nuanced in his analysis of racial identity: ‘all you are ever told about being black in this country (the united states) is that it is a terrible thing to be’ (baldwin and troupe ). the reason for beginning this article with quotes about identity from two writers of different generations is to point up the transformation of the diasporic public sphere in the intervening decades. baldwin’s undoubted influence on american identity politics was shaped by his writing and public speaking, his views sharpened in his formative years by physical distance from his country of origin. in the twenty-first century, hirsch has a far greater range of communicative tools at her disposal as well as the advantage of occupying a liminal deterritorialized space. when she lived and worked in ghana for a number of years she was still able to engage regularly, both in british identity debates and issues around african migration and culture, by blogging. it is the influence of this public space on notions of identity, which is the subject of this article. diaspora media acts as a kind of hinge between two continents and two heritages and can be highly influential especially in its representation of conflict and upheaval. yet, at a time when its impact is potentially more far-reaching than ever, the role of this media has been under-researched. oyeleye ( : ) makes the point that, as an umbrella term, ‘media of the diaspora’ elides importance differences between the ‘professionalism’ and ethics of journalism and the more free-flowing social media ecology, which has opened up new spaces of communication. tettey describes the latter as the ‘diaspora of the internet’ ( ) and this article is a response to the ‘need to problematize the liminality of diasporic engagement with politics and identity in order to be able to analyze the relationships between home and diaspora …’ (oyeleye : ). this inquiry focuses on west africa because of the geographical proxim- ity of the countries which provide case studies and the similar historical/social divides in two of them and because of the author’s own research experiences in that region. whereas there has been extensive research into the influence of the diaspora on conflict and upheaval in the horn of africa, especially eritrea and somalia (chama ), comparatively little has been done on the other side of the continent. through a series of interviews, supplemented by a reading of secondary sources, it aims for a qualitative assessment of diasporic commen- tary on inter alia, party political and ethno-regional divides in sierra leone, liberia’s enduring legacies from the nineteenth century, the image of nigeria abroad and coverage of a war crimes trial and other human rights issues. african diaspora, identity and conflict the relationship between diaspora and peace/conflict has been much debated. one strand of argument is that diasporas can play a beneficial role in conflict . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . cjmc_ _ .indb -may- : : pm fir st pr oo f l ay ou t © int ell ec t l td no t f or dis tri bu tio n mediating identity www.intellectbooks.com resolution and peace building through access to donor agencies (lyons ). on the other hand, brinkerhoff sees the potential for diaspora communities to ‘raise money to support continuing warfare, promote public opinion and interventions in support of their cause’ (brinkerhoff : ). while anderson describes as ‘long distance nationalism’ the temptation of the disaffected diaspora member ‘to play identity politics’ in the conflicts of his homeland (anderson : ). georgiou argues that it is time to move beyond such ‘utopian/dystopian’ distinctions ( : ), but this contested ground offers a useful frame in which to analyse the relationship of the media of the african diaspora to iden- tity formation. a helpful starting point in this quest is palmer’s definition of the modern african diaspora as consisting of: … the millions of peoples of african descent living in various socie- ties who are united by a past based significantly, but not exclusively, on ‘racial’ oppression and the struggles against it; and who […] share an emotional bond with one another and with their ancestral continent; and who also, regardless of their location, face broadly similar problems in constructing and realizing themselves. (palmer : ) however, this definition does not include that element of diaspora conscious- ness captured by benedict anderson’s ‘imagined community’. in other words, the element coming from within the perceptions of the community itself. ‘it is imagined (original emphasis) because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion’ (anderson : ). it is an image fostered and magnified by media representation, in oyeleye’s words: ‘helping to sustain diaspora formations and to enhance a sense of diaspora consciousness’ (oyeleye : ). in his study of democracy in africa, nic cheeseman writes that, although such pressures as elections inevitably aggravate tensions between communi- ties, ‘the politics of belonging was not equally pronounced across the conti- nent […] they (sic) were most pronounced in more diverse countries where governments had actively favoured some ethnic groups and discriminated against others’ (cheeseman : ). although generally sound, this formula does not hold for all african states. rwanda is one of the least diverse countries in africa, with a unitary language (kinyarwanda) and only three tribal groups, hutu, tutsi and twa. here, the construction of a mythic diaspora by hutu supremacists and supported by government, was a necessary component of the decades of propaganda, which led ultimately to the genocide of . the story that the tutsi were a nilotic people who migrated to central africa and imposed a despotism over the indigenous hutu and twa was woven into the fabric of prejudice, which animated radio rwanda and the infamous private station, radio télévision libre des milles collines (prunier ; melvern ). some might see an irony in the fact that it was the military force of a genuine diaspora, rwandan exiles living in uganda and tanzania, which overthrew the hutu regime and ended the genocide. the unashamed partisanship and low ethical standards of much african- based media, whether on the side of government or opposition, one tribal group or another, are accepted as the facts of life in many parts of the . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . cjmc_ _ .indb -may- : : pm fir st pr oo f l ay ou t © int ell ec t l td no t f or dis tri bu tio n jon silverman crossings: journal of migration & culture continent. in the case of sierra leone for example, the post-war truth and reconciliation commission observed that: some newspapers are in danger of becoming little more than scandal sheets, relying on proactive and, at times, dishonest headlines in order to promote sales. (truth and reconciliation commission report : ) so, the research questions underpinning this article are these: when it comes to the lens trained on africa by the media of the diaspora, does distance lend objectivity, even impartiality? or is the freedom afforded by a home, however temporary, in another country or on another continent, ‘conferring the privi- lege of being able to intervene in certain domestic debates without fear of retribution’ (wai : ), regarded as a safe space in which to fight identity battles with even more partiality? methodology this is a qualitative study, taking an inductive approach, with the data derived from a small number of semi-structured interviews and a close reading/inter- pretation of secondary texts. the interviewees are media representatives whose country of origin is either liberia, sierra leone or nigeria and whose work has, in different ways, been shaped by the conflicts in that west african region, whether conflict defined as war or as internal political upheaval and ethnic contestation. they were asked to reflect principally on the issue of identity, interpreted flexibly in a number of different ways: attachment to and under- standing of tribal/ethnic affiliation, political/party grouping and the interests of the nation and/or africa as a continent. some of the ground covered also embraces the various strands of relationship forged in the host country which, in the social media age, create what has been called ‘the connected migrant’ (diminescu ). the interview transcripts and the texts – news dispatches, opinion pieces, blogs and reports – were subjected to thematic analysis, drawing patterns of meaning from the discursive construction of media, conflict and identity, and seeking to elicit common themes in the three case studies. this is a small-scale inquiry done in a short time-scale, with the interviewees chosen only on the basis of freely available published material, so it makes no large claims about being representative of diaspora intervention in the three countries. as stated earlier, this is relatively an un-researched terrain so more extensive investiga- tion is called for. data analysis sierra leone dr zubairu wai (quoted above) is a sierra leonean scholar who migrated to canada. his birth country was lacerated by a decade-long civil war in the s and during that period, diaspora journalists and campaigners saw it as their responsibility to publicize in foreign policy circles the issues dividing their homeland. ‘the media and internet became part of the diasporic communi- cative spaces and avenues for networking. these spaces helped the diaspora articulate certain views and opinions regarding the conflict, while allowing them to keep in touch with events back home’ (wai : ). as an example, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . cjmc_ _ .indb -may- : : pm fir st pr oo f l ay ou t © int ell ec t l td no t f or dis tri bu tio n mediating identity www.intellectbooks.com the internet discussion forum, leonenet, founded in / at the start of the violence, helped demystify the origins and character of the rebel force, the revolutionary united front (ruf) ‘at a time when information about the conflict and the insurgents was limited and misleading at best’ (wai : ). the online newsletter, focus on sierra leone, published by ambrose ganda in the united kingdom, where the largest expatriate sierra leonean community lived, not only carried regular updated news and opinion on the conflict but became a valuable conduit for advocacy and lobbying for a negotiated settle- ment after ganda established contacts with the ruf. and following the coup, which overthrew the slpp government and brought in the short-lived armed forces revolutionary council, two exiled sierra leoneans, who found refuge in neighbouring guinea, set up a radio station, fm . , as a diasporic mouthpiece for the ousted president, ahmed tejan kabbah (wai : ). wai believes that focusing on whether diasporas play a positive or nega- tive role is a ‘false binary that is both problematic and self-limiting’ (wai : ), but others, both inside and outside the media, take a different view. and some appear conflicted about their role. sanpha sesay, who blogs under the sobriquet, ‘the texas chief’ from dallas, swapped a position as press attaché to the secretary of state for development and economic planning in freetown for that of assistant editor-in-chief of the salone monitor. he left a devastated country behind when he sought asylum in the united states in and joined some sierra leoneans in the dallas metro area: journalism in the diaspora is about coming together. i see my main goal as promoting political and social change in sierra leone. the country is so divided into supporters of the two political parties [the governing all people’s congress and the opposition sierra leone people’s party] that its national identity is seriously compromised. i want to change this polarisation because it brings no economic value to sierra leone. (sesay ) as an illustration of his self-proclaimed mission, sesay posted this blog in after learning that some opponents of the government were refusing to play an active role during the ebola crisis, accusing the president of siphoning off funds intended for the health service: for us in the diaspora, we have the duty to educate our people about the consequences of this ebola virus and avoid politicizing it. it is not a disease brought by apc or slpp; neither had it come from north, south, west nor east region, as the president [ernest bai koroma] spelt out clearly … help! help! it is your duty and responsibility. god bless sierra leone. (sesay ) however, sesay’s call for a non-partisan diaspora response to sierra leone’s problems is rather undermined by his admission that he is a member of the apc: i was neutral, unaligned when i was living and working in sierra leone but in , a friend here in the us influenced me to join the apc. most prominent sierra leone journalists, whether at home or in the diaspora, are associated with one of the parties. that’s the way it’s always been. (sesay ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . cjmc_ _ .indb -may- : : pm fir st pr oo f l ay ou t © int ell ec t l td no t f or dis tri bu tio n jon silverman crossings: journal of migration & culture sanpha sesay’s apparently contradictory views offer a revealing insight into what might be called sierra leone’s ‘identity crisis’. the term, ‘ethno-regional divide’, was used in the introduction to this article and it requires some eluci- dation here. like liberia, modern (i.e. post-eighteenth century) sierra leone was shaped by the influx of former or freed slaves from the americas and west indian colonies. this cohort, known as krios, settled in and around freetown and henceforth, occupied an elevated social status, in comparison with the indig- enous tribal population. according to the judge and media scholar, abou bhakarr muhammed binneh-kamara, as late as the s it was almost impossible for a non-krio to be appointed to a judicial position even though many amongst the country’s largest single ethnic group, the mende, were known to have acquired a good level of education and vocational experience (binneh-kamara ). in many respects, sierra leone remains a country fractured along ethnic and regional lines and its domestic media reflects these divisions (see silverman and binneh-kamara ). as an example, the sierra leone telegraph published an unashamedly partisan account of a political rally held in london addressed by a putative presidential candidate for the sierra leone peoples party, brigadier julius maada bio, in december . the language in the report was a world away from the journalistic ideal of impartiality: he was passionate, confident and assuring as he addressed hundreds of sierra leoneans at the prestigious royal regency hall in london. […] with his usual humility after delivering his statement, rtd.brigadier bio went table  after table  thanking the guests for gracing the fundraising dinner as a sign of confidence in his leadership […]the show of love and affection towards bio continues to demonstrate his huge popularity at home and abroad. (thomas ) and for good measure, his wife, mrs fatima bio, is described as ‘beautiful and elegant’. the byline on the report is that of abdul rashid thomas, editor and proprietor of the newspaper, yet it is hard to discern the input of a professional journalist in his copy. perhaps the clue lies in a declaration at the foot of the page, ‘article written by the slpp information, media and communications committee’. in sierra leone, political allegiance and ethnicity are deeply intertwined. of the two dominant tribal groups, the mende of the south and east have traditionally supported the slpp, while the temne of the north vote for the apc. preferment in many professions, including the media, is often depend- ent on which party is in power. such a lack of fluidity in affiliation is often mirrored in diaspora groups and it is understandable that some scholars argue that ‘diasporas often frame conflicts in ways that are uncompromising and categorical’ (lyons : ). this appears to be true of many of the communi- cative spaces occupied by the sierra leonean diaspora: when i go on facebook or twitter, i am acutely aware of the divisive and often hateful language when discussing politics used by people, whether they live in toronto or london or freetown. i am a temne from the north of my country and my name immediately gives away my ethnic and regional origin. so, a mende social media user will pick up on that and treat me with hostility. and there is no way of regulating this kind of discourse. (binneh-kamara ) . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . cjmc_ _ .indb -may- : : pm fir st pr oo f l ay ou t © int ell ec t l td no t f or dis tri bu tio n mediating identity www.intellectbooks.com since the turn of the millennium, western media has engaged in a protracted internal debate about its portrayal of african states such as sierra leone. the economist headlined its opinion piece of may , while the war was still raging, ‘hopeless africa’ ( may ). by the second decade, the same jour- nal was writing about ‘a hopeful continent’ (august ). but the economist’s gaze is an exterior one. the same examination of progress or regression goes on in the media of the diaspora and tends to validate tettey’s assertion that within the mediascape of the internet, africans are actively engaging in politi- cal and policy discourse in their country of origin (tettey ). sanpha sesay, blogging from texas, is a good exemplar of this interventionism, even at the cost of portraying his country in a negative light: what is specifically necessary for us to do in our various destinations in the diaspora is very critical. in the first place, we have to use our influ- ence by informing big economic powers and donor agencies about the daunting problems that rage in our country. it is our responsibility to cry to the world about problems such as electricity and water supply so that people will come to our aid. the western world respects journalists, therefore our news reporting could create a positive impact if we keep reporting about our difficulties that need external help. (sesay ) liberia if sierra leone’s fractured identity is reflected back by the diaspora media, then the same is true of liberia, whose history is entwined with that of its neighbour. the diasporic writer, emmanuel dolo, argues that the enduring fissures in liberian society explain the ‘absence of a cohesive national identity’ and that ‘ethnic bigotry and class discrimination’ have caused a ‘national identity crisis’ (dolo : xx). so, what are these fissures? the support given by liberia’s charles taylor to the ruf rebels who attacked sierra leone in , was a catalyst for the vicious war of the follow- ing decade. as stated earlier, both states grew from the reintroduction of freed slaves from north america into their territories in the nineteenth century. in liberia’s case, too, this influx and its relationship to the indigenous population has had social, economic and political consequences, which are still being felt in the twenty-first century. the so-called americo-liberians (sometimes known as congo town liberians) formed a dominant diasporic elite, whose influence has been so potent that, until the election of george weah in , only one president, samuel doe, an ethnic krahn, had come from outside this community. indeed, the coup instigated by doe in has been interpreted as a revolt of the politically marginalized against the hegemony of the advantaged americo- liberians. in the wake of the political turmoil of the s, many liberians sought exile abroad, fostering: ‘the idea that the liberian middle class sat out the war in the united states, and that its return will shape liberia’s future …’ (steinberg : ). the diaspora media in the united states did little to dispel this notion, and in the first free elections after the war’s end, in , many reports pointed out the disparity between the qualifications of ellen johnson-sirleaf, a former . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . cjmc_ _ .indb -may- : : pm fir st pr oo f l ay ou t © int ell ec t l td no t f or dis tri bu tio n jon silverman crossings: journal of migration & culture world bank economist, and her ill-educated challenger, george weah. however, the election of africa’s first democratically elected female president was not, in itself, a panacea for liberia’s ills. steinberg’s research into one of the largest liberian communities in the united states, on staten island, new york, illustrates how the diaspora of a country at war becomes a kind of mirror of the conflict. as the war was ending in and the political actors in liberia were competing for power and influence, a struggle broke out for control of the elected body representing staten island’s liberians. reports in the staten island advance, fuelled by partisan commentary from the various factions, attest to the bitterness of the rupture: it is no stretch to suggest that what was being enacted here was a proxy or a metaphor; that a community abroad was playing out its fears about the situation at home.[…] it is tempting to conclude that the staten island protagonists were stand-in figures, and that the stage on which they fought was erected by collective anxiety about the uncertain peace back home. (steinberg : ) the largest liberian diaspora population in the united states is in minnesota and it took an active part in the election that weah won. according to community activist, abdullah kiatamba: minnesota is not just an observer or a sideline cheering squad. people are involved here as much as people on the ground in liberia. minnesota is shaping and influencing things. people are literally living in two worlds around this election. (covington ) much of this involvement came through social media platforms, described as a ‘gamechanger’ by broadcaster, al-hussein fadiga, whose online station radio africa attracted thousands of new listeners throughout the campaign. ‘you cannot successfully win elections in liberia without huge support from the diaspora community’, according to wynfred russell, who runs a non- profit organization. however, that also means that familiar tropes of liberian practice are just as prevalent, with the remittance payment used as leverage. ‘people will say openly, “look, if you don’t support my candidate, you can rest assured i’m not going to send you money for christmas”. proverbially, you cannot bite the hand that feeds you’ (covington ). but the thematic evidence informing this article does not run in one direc- tion only. the african union’s description of the diaspora as ‘the sixth region of africa’ (the others being north, south, east, west and central africa) is not merely an acknowledgment of the benefit brought to the continent by the remittance economy. it also recognizes the ability of the diaspora to harness citizen engagement in a myriad other ways. like sierra leone, liberia suffered horribly from the regional ebola outbreak of and , as already thread- bare health services buckled under the strain. the initial response of the world health organisation was inadequate and research has shown that the dias- poras of both countries provided a measure of medical relief in response to media-led publicity. reports in the liberian publication, frontpage africa ( and ), cited by robtel neajai pailey, describe shipments of relief materi- als, paid for and organized by diasporan liberians in the united states and . it is worth noting that accusations that some of the exiles financed the military campaign, which triggered the start of the civil war, were investigated by liberia’s truth and reconciliation commission. the trc took evidence in the united states and recommended the lustration of johnson-sirleaf. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . cjmc_ _ .indb -may- : : pm fir st pr oo f l ay ou t © int ell ec t l td no t f or dis tri bu tio n mediating identity www.intellectbooks.com europe. she argues that this opened up a ‘third humanitarian domain’ (horst et al. ) sending the same kind of assistance that the diaspora provided during the armed conflicts of the s. but she goes further, positing that the relief effort was an assertion of identity, in that it not only eased the burden on the government in monrovia but ‘also enabled liberian diasporas to practise citizenship from afar, thereby expanding the spatial contours of the state and public authority “outside” (author’s quotation marks) of its geographic ambit’ (pailey : ). a similar ‘expansion’ took place during the years – , in a different context, when a small cohort of journalists from liberia and sierra leone provided daily radio reports from the hague on the war crimes trial of the former liberian president, charles taylor. the journalists were natives of the countries they were broadcasting to but ‘over the lifetime of the project became a temporary diaspora in the heart of europe’ (silverman : vii). one of the liberian reporting team was joseph cheeseman, who lived through the liberian conflict, which ended only in . he reflects on the psychological difference brought by geographical separation from the homeland: i felt i had a kind of dual identity when i was living and working in the hague. obviously i was from africa, but i simply saw myself as part of an international press corps, as a journalist among equals, without any perception of being an african subject to the kind of ethno-political pressures we experience at home. objectivity was always my watch- word. however, at some points of the trial, when witnesses alleged that taylor and others had indulged in cannibalism, i was greatly embar- rassed, especially when a lady from the democratic republic of congo, sitting near me in the press gallery, asked if there were no animals in liberia, that we (liberians) had to resort to eating humans. (cheeseman ) the ‘pressures at home’ are another indication of the divide between the ‘americo-liberian’ elite, of which cheeseman is a member (one of his ances- tors, joseph james cheeseman, was the twelfth president of liberia, serving between and ) and the indigenous majority. he accepts that the historical/cultural connection is a significant part of his own identity, which he does not seek to deny. by contrast, the celebrated liberian-born journal- ist, helene cooper, who works for the new york times, found it hard openly to confront her identity for many years: ‘i travelled all over the world, writ- ing about wars and conflict and all sorts of things – everything except liberia which i basically embedded in my head’ (cooper ). nigeria as the case studies of sierra leone and liberia have demonstrated, the deterri- torialized space occupied by the media of the diaspora has undoubtedly had an impact on perceptions of african identity. it is possibly less true of west africa than east africa, but social media platforms, such as facebook, have allowed the diaspora to intervene in ‘real time’ in political contestation at home. however, as the uk-based african media academic, dr george ogola, observes: …while digital technologies, such as social media, have now been widely adopted in africa, millions remain unconnected to the internet. this . the project was run by the charitable arm of the bbc, bbc media action, under the umbrella title ‘communicating justice’. the author was the consultant/mentor. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . cjmc_ _ .indb -may- : : pm fir st pr oo f l ay ou t © int ell ec t l td no t f or dis tri bu tio n jon silverman crossings: journal of migration & culture means that these new platforms are inaccessible to the masses. traditional media – particularly radio – therefore remain an important platform for public engagement. at election times, these kinds of legacy media formats are critical in enabling the public to make informed choices. (ogola ) with the pace of technological change becoming ever faster, television prob- ably counts as ‘legacy media’ for some, especially the young. but its influence should not be discounted. the nigerian diaspora channel, ben television (ben standing for bright entertainment network), based in london, had an image of itself as an avatar of ‘afropolitanism’ when it began broadcasting to audiences both in the host country and nigeria in . nigerians make up the largest african diaspora in the united kingdom. as the channel’s own prospectus put it: ben television is a black-oriented, urban, diverse and cosmopolitan family channel introducing new, cultured programmes to european taste […]. it also includes a range of cultured programming to empower, trans- form and challenge the conventional perception of africa and africans. (ben television www.bentelevision.com ) nigerian media scholar, abiodun adeniyi, suggests that the prospectus held the promise that: a new element in transnational communication is coming because the programmes are no longer going to be entirely african; neither are they going to be reproducing white, liberal eurocentrism. […]through a consumption of ben tv programmes therefore, the migrant may acquire a new worldview, one that is not entirely african. (adeniyi : ) this vision speaks to diaspora media being a ‘lateral’ connecting factor for many second-generation diaspora africans, linking them, not so much with people from the ancestral homeland, but with other black citizens of the country in which they live and the concerns that animate them, such as the ‘black lives matter’ movement. but ben tv’s founder and chair, alistair soyode, explains that early aspiration has had to give way to financial reality: when we started, we wanted to reach the black community in the united kingdom as well as the african diaspora. but we do not have the money to put on ambitious original programming or hire our own reporters. and in any case, black british viewers would compare us with mainstream british television and find us wanting so we have had to fall back on unpaid ‘community correspondents’ and ‘free’ content from africa’s largest network, nta (nigerian television authority), which runs stations all over africa. (soyode ) with more consistency than sanpha sesay in texas, soyode admits that his guiding philosophy is to present images of positivity about his home- land. in soyode’s case, to counter the stereotype of nigerians as ‘lawless and constantly perpetrating fraudulent schemes’. ben tv offers a fairly traditional . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . cjmc_ _ .indb -may- : : pm fir st pr oo f l ay ou t © int ell ec t l td no t f or dis tri bu tio n mediating identity www.intellectbooks.com format, with studio discussion (one weekly programme, dealing with migra- tion and resettlement issues, is called ‘in diaspora’ and connects viewers/ listeners in nigeria with a panel in london), regular segments of christian evangelism, paid for by different ministries, and news from nta, delivered in the style familiar to sub-saharan audiences, that is, a fairly unrelenting diet of poorly-edited reports on the policy announcements of politicians addressing conferences. as adeniyi comments, ‘stories are official and have a government leaning’ (adeniyi : ). soyode acknowledges that viewers see ben television as a ‘nigerian chan- nel’ but argues that its longevity has earned it a credibility in addressing issues of concern to second-generation viewers, such as deaths in police or prison custody and diversity, or the lack of it, in british institutions. despite financial constraints, some per cent of its live programmes deal with british domestic matters and senior police officers and politicians, including the mayor of london, have partic- ipated in studio-based interviews and discussions. the hybrid identity of the station is mirrored by soyode’s assessment of his own status: i see myself as a hyphenated british-nigerian, comfortable in both loca- tions. i imagine i will go back to nigeria to live at some point, because the country needs its best professionals, to repair its image. i would like to enter politics, and if truth be told, my ambition is to run for president in . by contrast, my two children have made their lives in the united kingdom. my son is studying ppe (philosophy, politics and economics) at oxford and my daughter works for the national health service. they have both been to nigeria and know about their heritage but they see themselves as british. (soyode ) diaspora activism, migration and identity ben television’s mediated course between two cultural outlooks is, of course, a world away from the brand of activism practised by transnationalist ‘advo- cacy’ media, which has made its mark on nigerian affairs, first during the dictatorship of sani abacha in the s and, more latterly in the twenty-first century, by exposing social, economic and political conflict and the growth of terrorism. what shola olabode calls the ‘exploitation of guerrilla or under- ground activism using electronic media, especially radio’(olabode : ) did not deter the abacha regime from committing human rights abuses, such as the execution of the writer/environmental campaigner, ken saro-wiwa, but it may have helped pave the way for a return to democracy. the more recent upsurge in citizen journalism, exploiting the ‘heteroge- neous nature of the tools of the new media’ (olabode : ) has lent a truly global dimension to campaigns such as the ‘bring back our girls’ (bbog) movement, formed after the kidnap of hundreds of young women from chibok in north-eastern nigeria in april . that the majority of the three million or so tweets, using the hashtag #bbog, emanated from the united states may not be unconnected with the fact that one of the most influential diaspora citizen media websites, saharareporters.com is based in new york city. citizen activism, allowing global audiences to view unfolding crises and conflicts in real time, has undoubtedly helped shrink the world of conflict and transform conceptions of identity. as olabode points out, . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . cjmc_ _ .indb -may- : : pm fir st pr oo f l ay ou t © int ell ec t l td no t f or dis tri bu tio n jon silverman crossings: journal of migration & culture at rallies and demonstrations in big cities across nigeria, activists were seen collecting both audio and visual documentation of protests – published on saharareporters.com, their own personal facebook pages and twitter, and pictures, also published on flickr. (olabode: ) there is, of course, another side to this social media phenomenon, and that is the extraordinary seductive power of the imagery to draw those experiencing political upheaval, war or straightforward poverty in africa towards the prom- ise of a better life in europe. if people in nigeria, chad, mali or libya believe, or are told, that their identity no longer has to be confined to a bounded national space but can be recast in a global context, the pressure to migrate becomes irresistible. western (and indeed world) mainstream media has reported on the flow of peoples northwards through africa and across the mediterranean from a number of perspectives: as a humanitarian catastrophe, a potential immigra- tion problem for western nations or a troubling source of terrorism. but the nigerian diaspora magazine, the african courier, published in germany since , has opted for a different approach. in august , it announced an infor- mation campaign under the rubric, ‘know the facts’, to warn of the dangers and challenges of irregular migration. the magazine has partnered with the african-german information center and the migration enlightenment project in nigeria to work with media, civil society and government agencies to dissuade people from taking illegal routes to europe. it is an example of diaspora media neither acting as a mouthpiece for the government ‘at home’ nor adopting an oppositional stance but taking what might be called a social responsibility approach, giving ‘a realistic picture of the situation of irregular migrants in europe while also encouraging youths to look at positive alternatives to emigration available in nigeria’ (the african courier ). whether any would-be migrants have consulted the african courier before embarking on their perilous journey towards europe is, of course, another matter. conclusion this article has sought to problematize the multifarious roles played by west african diaspora media in addressing conflict in its broadest sense, not merely armed hostilities but political rivalries emanating from the ‘homeland’ and the challenges faced by those forced to leave their country of origin, or who leave by choice, to adapt to unfamiliar identity ‘re-formulations’. the thematic anal- ysis has shown that it is a mutable process, which defies simple categorization: in effect, migrants are straddling two or several socio-cultural spaces, which, in turn, leads them to form hybrid identities in an ongoing, complex process of cross-fertilization, of shifting balances of power, within the self, and of fluctuating relationships with various communities. (diminescu and loveluck : ) an examination of the diaspora media of both sierra leone and liberia has shown that political and ‘ethno-regional’ differences that undermine each country’s sense of unity are reflected and highlighted by those based abroad. in nigeria’s case, the global impact of campaigns, such as ‘bring back our . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . cjmc_ _ .indb -may- : : pm fir st pr oo f l ay ou t © int ell ec t l td no t f or dis tri bu tio n mediating identity www.intellectbooks.com girls’, illustrates tettey’s ‘diaspora of the internet’ in action. but like sierra leone and liberia, albeit on a far larger canvas, nigeria’s geographical, ethnic and political divisions are as likely to be magnified by diaspora media inter- vention as healed by it. the interviews indicate that, as the world shrinks through new media affor- dances, many diasporic occupants of the deterritorialized space are comfortable with a ‘hyphenated’ identity, having a foot in both camps as it were. sanpha sesay has lived and worked in texas for nearly twenty years and acquired american citizenship in . does he see himself as an african american?: i prefer the description, ‘sierra leonean-american’ because it distin- guishes us from those black people born in the united states. unfortunately, on official forms, there is no box you can tick which iden- tifies you as ‘sierra leonean american’. but as a -year-old, i identify with africa in a way that young sierra leoneans living here do not. many do not want to go there because of all the negative images they see on the media. (sesay ) understanding the dynamic relationship between diaspora media, conflict and identity involves an epistemological quest and many questions. can we find any empirical measurements to assess changed identities over time in response both to relocation and media representation? how do we discover what role media has played in the mass movement of peoples from the african continent to europe as distinct from the filtering back of experiences of other people from the same village or town? how do we judge at what point migrants become a diaspora? one thing that can be said with some degree of confidence is that the african diaspora is now populating the online sphere in ever greater numbers, using twitter and facebook to influence the global debate about international development. it may not yet be true that the diaspora, through its media, is having the impact on elections and political change in africa that it is having on development projects and advocacy, but that day may not be too far away. references adeniyi, a. ( ), ‘the media of nigerian diaspora in britain: a study of priorities and preferences’, new media and mass communication, : , pp. – . african courier ( ), ‘nigerian diaspora to launch campaign for safe migra- tion in lagos’, www.theafricancourier.de/migration/nigerian-diaspora- to-launch-campaign-for-safe-,migration-in-lagos/. accessed october . anderson, b. ( ), imagined communities: reflections on the origins and spread of nationalism, london: verso. ——— ( ), ‘the new world disorder’, new left review, i/ , may–june, https://newleftreview.org/i/ /benedict-anderson-the-new-world-disor- der. accessed november . baldwin, j. and troupe, q. 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( ), ‘from broadcasting to narrowcasting: middle eastern dias- pora in los angeles’, middle east reports, , pp. – , https://www. scholars.northwestern.edu/.../from-broadcasting-to-narrowcasting- middle-eastern-diaspora-in-los-angeles. accessed december . ogola, g. ( ), ‘why the role of the media is so important to free and fair elections in africa’, the conversation, may, https://www.theconversa- tion.com/why-the-role-of-the-media-is-so-important-to-free-and-fair- elections-in-africa- . accessed july . olabode, s. ( ), ‘veterans of diaspora activism: an overview of ict use amongst nigerian migrant networks’, in a. karatzgiami, d. nguyen and e. serafinelli (eds), the digital transformation of the public sphere: conflict, migration, crisis, london: palgrave macmillan. oyeleye, a. ( ), ‘diaspora journalism and conflicts in transnational media circuits’, in o. ogunyemi (ed.), media, diaspora and conflict, cham: palgrave macmillan, pp. – . pailey, r.  n. ( ), ‘liberia, ebola and the pitfalls of state-building: reimagining domestic and diaspora public authority’, african affairs, : , pp. – . palmer, c. ( ), ‘defining and studying the modern african diaspora’, proceedings of the american historical association, september, seattle, wa. cited in perspectives on history, the news magazine of the american historical association, https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/pers- pectives-on-history-september /defining-and-studying-the-modern- african-diaspora. accessed november . prunier, g. ( ), the rwanda crisis: history of a genocide, london: c. hurst. sesay, s. ( ) ‘sierra leone diaspora journalists: what are our challen- ges?’, sierra express, www.sierraexpressmedia.com/?p= . accessed august . sesay, s. ( ), ‘diasporans should support president koroma in the nation’s lock-down instead of romanticizing and politicizing the issue’, www.salo- nemonitor.net/diasporans-should-support-president-koroma-in-the- nations-lock-down-instead-of-romanticizing-and-politicizing-the-issue. accessed july . ——— ( ), telephone interview, dallas, july. silverman, j. andbinneh-kamara, a. ( ), ‘newspaper coverage of a sierra leone war crimes trial: “a continuation of conflict by other means”’, african journalism studies, : , pp. – . silverman, j. ( ), foreword to media, diaspora and conflict (ed. o. ogunyemi), cham: springer, pp. v–xi. soyode, a. ( ), in person interview, london, august. steinberg, j. ( ), ‘a truth commission goes abroad: liberian transitional justice in new york’, african affairs, : , pp. – . tettey, w.  j. ( ), ‘transnationalism, the african diaspora and the deterri- torialized politics of the internet’, in o.  f. mudhai, f. tettey and f. banda (eds), african media and the digital public sphere, new york: palgrave macmillan. thomas, a. r. ( ), ‘it will not be business as usual – bio assures diaspora’, sierra leone telegraph, december, https://www.sierraleonetelegraph. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . cjmc_ _ .indb -may- : : pm fir st pr oo f l ay ou t © int ell ec t l td no t f or dis tri bu tio n https://www.scholars.northwestern.edu/.../from-broadcasting-to-narrowcasting-middle-eastern-diaspora-in-los-angeles https://www.scholars.northwestern.edu/.../from-broadcasting-to-narrowcasting-middle-eastern-diaspora-in-los-angeles https://www.scholars.northwestern.edu/.../from-broadcasting-to-narrowcasting-middle-eastern-diaspora-in-los-angeles https://www.theconversation.com/why-the-role-of-the-media-is-so-important-to-free-and-fair-elections-in-africa- https://www.theconversation.com/why-the-role-of-the-media-is-so-important-to-free-and-fair-elections-in-africa- https://www.theconversation.com/why-the-role-of-the-media-is-so-important-to-free-and-fair-elections-in-africa- https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history-september /defining-and-studying-the-modern-african-diaspora https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history-september /defining-and-studying-the-modern-african-diaspora https://www.historians.org/publications-and-directories/perspectives-on-history-september /defining-and-studying-the-modern-african-diaspora www.sierraexpressmedia.com/?p= www.salonemonitor.net/diasporans-should-support-president-koroma-in-the-nations-lock-down-instead-of-romanticizing-and-politicizing-the-issue www.salonemonitor.net/diasporans-should-support-president-koroma-in-the-nations-lock-down-instead-of-romanticizing-and-politicizing-the-issue www.salonemonitor.net/diasporans-should-support-president-koroma-in-the-nations-lock-down-instead-of-romanticizing-and-politicizing-the-issue https://www.sierraleonetelegraph.com/it-will-not-be-business-as-usual-bio-assures-diaspora/ jon silverman crossings: journal of migration & culture com/it-will-not-be-business-as-usual-bio-assures-diaspora/. accessed january . truth and reconciliation commission report ( ), witness to truth: report of the sierra leone truth and reconcilation commission vol ii, freetown: sierra leone truth commission. wai, z. ( ), ‘conflict and peacebuilding in sierra leone: the role of the sierra leone diasporas’, in t. zack-williams (ed.), when the state fails: studies on intervention in the sierra leone civil war, london: pluto press, pp. – . suggested citation silverman, j. ( ), ‘mediating identity: the west african diaspora, conflict and communication’, crossings: journal of migration & culture, : , pp.  – , doi: . /cjmc. . . _ contributor details jon silverman is professor of media and criminal justice at the university of bedfordshire and co-director of the centre for international media analysis, research and consultancy (cimarc). he is a former bbc home affairs correspondent, – and before that, he was bbc europe reporter, based in paris, – . he is an acknowledged authority on international and post-conflict justice, having covered the trials of slobodan milosevic and charles taylor in the hague and reported from the ictr in arusha. his current research interest is the relationship between africa and the international criminal court. contact: media and criminal justice, the university of bedfordshire, luton campus, park square luton, bedfordshire lu ju, uk. e-mail: jon.silverman@beds.ac.uk jon silverman has asserted his right under the copyright, designs and patents act, , to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was submitted to intellect ltd. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . cjmc_ _ .indb -may- : : pm fir st pr oo f l ay ou t © int ell ec t l td no t f or dis tri bu tio n https://www.sierraleonetelegraph.com/it-will-not-be-business-as-usual-bio-assures-diaspora/ mailto:jon.silverman@beds.ac.uk “information has value”: the political economy of information capitalism – in the library with the lead pipe 		 		 				 			 				 					 						skip to main content 						 					 				 				 					 						chat .webcam					 				 				 			 		 		 		 		 			 				 				 					 											 					open menu	home 	about 	awards & good words 	contact 	editorial board 		denisse solis 	ian beilin 	jaena rae cabrera 	kellee warren 	nicole cooke 	ryan randall 	emeritus 	announcements 	authors 	archives 	conduct 	submission guidelines 	lead pipe publication process 	style guide 	search 				 				 					home 	about 	awards & good words 	contact 	editorial board 		denisse solis 	ian beilin 	jaena rae cabrera 	kellee warren 	nicole cooke 	ryan randall 	emeritus 	announcements 	authors 	archives 	conduct 	submission guidelines 	lead pipe publication process 	style guide 	search 	 		 				 			 		 		 	 	 	 			 			 			 				 							 	 		 	 			 		 		 			 				 					 										 						 						 	 				 		 		 			 				 					 					aug 					 				 				 					dave ellenwood					/ comment 				 											“information has value”: the political economy of information capitalism 								 					 				 				 			 			 		 			 in brief information capitalism dominates the production and flow of information across the globe. it produces massive information institutions that are as harmful to everyday people as they are powerful. to this point, information literacy (il) educators do not have a theory and pedagogy of information capitalism. this article appraises the current state of political economy in il and begins to build a foundation for teaching a political economy of information capitalism. introduction these are economically and politically tumultuous times. the great recession of - , the rise of right-wing populism across the globe, a life-threatening/altering global pandemic, and the threat of species-ending climate change have left many feeling uneasy about the present, let alone the future. one bright spot is the unprecedented number of people who have poured into the streets to demand that black lives matter, but this was sparked by horrifying police brutality filmed and circulated online. in the meantime, the day to day operations of librarianship continue, permeated by these anxieties. in this context, libraries have seen the impact of increased corporate domination, budget shortfalls, and the corporatization of higher education. we are gouged by publishers like elsevier who offer package subscriptions with exponentially increasing costs while they rake in exceptionally high profits. elsevier had a . % profit margin in amounting to about $ billion (elsevier fact sheet, ). many corporate library vendors have consolidated to further ensure market power and control, a process which has often rewarded the largest companies. these companies are positioned to potentially consolidate further during the covid- pandemic. this is in part because they have the resources to further entrench their products in libraries by offering services that are free in the short term, but convert to high cost in the long term. while companies like elsevier make record profits, library workers of all types face increasingly precarious work arrangements and they serve students who are anxious about affording skyrocketing tuition as well as outrageous textbook prices. students are facing an information climate in which it is difficult to know which sources to trust because of an abundance of political information and disinformation. simultaneously, their data is being extracted by numerous social media sites (likely owned by facebook or google) and library vendors and publishers (lamdan, ), and their behavior is being manipulated by corporate algorithms seeking profits and political power. in the midst of these challenges, each term, teaching librarians get the opportunity to teach students information literacy (il). how can librarians use this opportunity to work locally with students to think through and have an impact on these massive political and economic problems? in her blog post information literacy’s third wave, barbara fister argues that we are entering a third wave of il education, a wave that focuses on the systems that structure our information environment. the first wave involved teaching students to answer questions through navigating library resources. the second consisted of teaching students how to maneuver the rise of the internet as an unwieldy site of information circulation. the third wave, she argues, needs to respond to the vast commodification of the internet. she demands that we “have to think about the economics underlying both the distrust of institutions and these new institutions of capital that depend on gathering and analyzing the minutia of our lives for predictive and persuasive purposes….” librarian scholars are piecing together new ways to understand and teach about information structures. librarians aptly describe the neoliberal foundations of il and make a strong case for how learners should be aware of knowledge construction in media (nicholson, ; drabinski, ; seale, ; enright, ; eisenhower and smith, ; haggerty and scott, ; bussell, ). but, to this point, the conversation has not fully developed into a coherent analytical force that describes the hierarchies that guide the flow of money in information systems. the field of political economy (of communication) can provide answers to some of these challenges, and tie them together in a theory that we cannot ignore.   the “information has value” frame of the association of college & research libraries’ (acrl) framework for information literacy is a starting point for developing a political economic approach to il. the goal of this essay is to recruit marx and subsequent political economists of communication/information to sketch out a basic political economy of information capitalism. ultimately, this article seeks to understand the dynamics of information capitalism so that through our teaching we can use this understanding to mount credible, comprehensive challenges to the system itself. library workers and students need to think and act democratically and collectively in order to address the problems posed by information capitalism. this article will introduce the opportunities presented by the value frame, appraise the strengths and weaknesses of current political economic thinking in il education, and expand on the concept of political economy and what it offers il. i will then present a basic theory of information capitalism which includes the concepts of value, commodification, commodity fetish, concentration of ownership, labor, and surveillance. i conclude with recommendations for teaching information capitalism and alternatives, including ways to transform the system individually and collectively. information has value the “information has value” frame provides a welcome opening to discuss information capitalism, including the commodification of information, information labor, concentration of ownership, and audience data extraction/surveillance. the value frame is part of the framework for information literacy for higher education produced by the acrl ( ). it evolved from the previous information literacy (il) “standard” that urged students to “understand the economic, legal, and social issues surrounding the use of information, and access and use information ethically and legally.”  while the standard shied away from critical analysis of information structures and simply demanded that we act ethically and legally within existing information structures, the value frame prompts us to teach economic dimensions of il more critically. although many might not interpret it through a marxist lens, the new frame recognizes that information “production and dissemination” is influenced by “legal and socioeconomic interests”.  it notes that expert researchers should understand that “value may be wielded by powerful interests in ways that marginalize certain voices”, but that this value may also be used by “individuals and organizations to effect change and for civic, economic, social, or personal gains”. while the frame implores researchers to understand their “rights and responsibilities” when participating in information communities, it also recommends that researchers thoughtfully “comply with” and “contest current legal and socioeconomic practices concerning the value of information”. in other words, it not only asks us to understand the rules of information communities, but also to challenge unjust structures. and while it includes some of the tone of the standard by centering source citation, those of us seeking to understand and transform our current information structures can use the value frame as an entryway. it is not perfect, but it provides an institutionalized opportunity to explore and teach how information is bought, sold, and produced through labor. this political economy approach is rooted in marxist theory and the analysis of subsequent political economists of communication, which seek to comprehensively understand and challenge information capitalism. information literacy as a neoliberal project to this point, librarians have not fully outlined a political economy of information literacy (il) education, and the majority of the political economic discussion in libraries has been dedicated to showing the ways that information literacy has a neoliberal capitalist orientation. neoliberal capitalism is a global political project initiated in the mid- ’s by members of the capitalist class (those with ownership stakes in large businesses and corporations). they had the political backing of powerful government officials and the intellectual backing of chicago school economists and the austrian-british economist friedrich hayek. they had two primary goals: ( ) converting as much of human activity as possible into market-based exchange; ( ) transferring wealth to economic elites— and while this second goal was not explicit, when these two goals were in conflict, the second goal was to take precedence (harvey, ). this capitalist class effort was in response to difficulties in making profit. limits on capital’s ability to realize profit included corporate taxes, the falling rate of profit, and decolonization efforts in the global south that threatened capital’s exploitation of labor and resources from these areas. in many economies across the globe, neoliberals were successful at privatizing or eliminating government-provided social services (e.g. food, health, housing, and education). many scholars (smyth et al, ; o’sullivan, ) have shown that neoliberalism has influenced universities by turning higher education into a commodity as opposed to a fundamental right. for example, the massive increases in tuition and fees for public institutions, the stripping of tenure through the stark increase in adjunct faculty, etc.  in the last decade, librarians have paid considerable attention to the influence of neoliberalism on information literacy. both enright ( ) and seale ( ) argue that information literacy under neoliberal capitalism aimed to produce perfect neoliberal individuals. these imagined atomized individuals do not think collectively, but instead are able to use information to successfully navigate markets in order to better themselves and to be productive employees. nicholson ( ) argues that libraries are being swept into the corporatization of the university and that il is primarily about preparing people to compete in the international market. this results in the corporate culture-like quantitative assessment permeating il practice. eisenhower and smith ( ) are concerned that the higher education classroom in the neoliberal era is too commodified and entrenched in social and economic hierarchies to effectively challenge capitalism. they are even skeptical that librarians can use critical pedagogy without our efforts being co-opted by the corporate university. drabinski ( ), in a strategic twist, argues that il emerged from the context of neoliberalism, but nonetheless provides an opening for librarians. librarians now have a seat at the curricular table and we can use the opportunity to implement changes that benefit librarians and students in their local contexts. drabinski’s argument is an example of political economy thinking in that she roots il in history, but leaves room for struggle and change in the analysis. i hope to build on these arguments, recognizing that il teaching practices are shaped by a capitalist context, but also recognizing that we can take il in a direction that challenges information capitalism. that is where a political economic approach to teaching il enters the picture.  political economy for il a political economy lens for analyzing information creates many opportunities for teaching librarians and students alike. some define political economy simply as the relationship between democracy (how decisions are made about fundamental aspects of our daily lives) and the economy (how we sustain and reproduce ourselves materially) (mcchesney, ). a central question in political economy is: who has decision-making power and control over the production and dissemination of the materials humans need to sustain daily life? a political economy approach to information undoes the ideological damage wrought by mainstream economics. mainstream economics attempted to naturalize the laws of capitalism as though they are universal truths and the only way to conduct economic activity, as if capitalist economics were a natural science (mosco, ). this approach to economics forecloses the possibility for everyday non-elite people to change the structure of the economy to be more just. political economy has been around much longer than the modern discipline of economics. it is a long-standing intellectual tradition that maintains that the way in which humans provide life’s necessities is not natural or inevitable, but is something that can be altered through political struggle.  mosco ( ) describes four central features of a political economy analysis. ( ) a commitment to history. library workers’ economic analysis should understand the way in which historical transformation and social change occurs. in marx’s view, history is shaped by class struggle or the conflict over the fruits of human labor in any given society. for example, in our capitalist society, history is shaped by the conflict between those who own the means of production (capitalist class) and those of us who have to sell our labor for a living (working class). ( ) the social totality. rejecting the fragmentation of political and social realities, political economy reveals the big picture of our social and economic life. in other words, political economy asks: “how are power and wealth related and how are these in turn connected to cultural and social life” (p. )? ( ) moral philosophy. political economy is concerned with the underlying values and beliefs that are emphasized in economic systems (e.g. self-interest, collective well-being, or liberation from exploitation, etc.). ( ) social praxis. this is the unity between thought/theory and action. political economy theorizes our current world and possible future worlds and helps us do the work of moving towards those worlds.  additionally, a political economy of information enables us to understand the material basis for information production and dissemination. people make money by commodifying information which in turn consolidates power into elites’ hands. the political economy of information unveils how information producers are exploited for the profit of a few. in this sense, it helps us sharpen our identification of elites with concentrated power. this is particularly useful when the current popular discourse describes a wide range of people as “liberal elites” (e.g. academics, college students, media workers, etc.), which muddies the collective understanding of who is elite. political economy exposes the problems of commodifying information and identifies trends across multiple information markets like textbook, scholarly communication, and news media markets. it reveals similarities and contrasts between information markets and other kinds of commodity markets that library workers can use to, among other things, connect broader anti-capitalist struggles to anti-information capitalist struggles.  finally, a political economy of information capitalism sparks our imagination around avenues for resistance. since information capitalism is the dominant system, and has complex defense mechanisms, we need to devise comprehensive ways to push back against co-optation of our creative capacities. using the social praxis described above, how can teaching librarians work with our students to challenge information capitalism in impactful ways? teaching economic dimensions of il: toward more than source evaluation there are several promising attempts within the library literature to think about information literacy through an economic lens, but these largely emphasize individual solutions like source evaluation. some scholar-practitioners have applied critical media literacy (cml) to teaching information literacy in ways that work to help students think analytically about media production. cml is a pedagogical framework for a variety of educational contexts and age ranges, that comes out of cultural studies (bussell ). cml focuses on teaching students how to critically read and understand the media as well as participate in alternative media production. brayton and casey ( ) combine cml and il to teach their credit course. in this method, they have students identify ideology and propaganda in news sources. they also have students reflect on the capitalist paradigm by asking questions about info commodification such as: should information even be sold? lastly, they have students reflect on collective intelligence by having them encounter wikipedia.  hilary bussell ( ) also uses cml to support il teaching in a credit context. she applies the cml framework to the value frame because it provides an opportunity to discuss the socioeconomic and cultural underpinnings of information. bussell’s approach emphasizes understanding how meaning is made through news production and includes a component on media ownership and structure. bussell’s cml teaching practice critically culminates in a project in which students make their own media, an empowering way to have students engage with the issues addressed by cml.  haggerty and scott ( ) use media and information production to teach the legal dimensions of current information economics. in their chapter on teaching copyleft in credit courses, they discuss the way in which copyright was originally designed to spur creativity and was much more limited than the copyright policies we have today. breaking from its origins, copyright has evolved to primarily benefit corporations, which actually dissuades creativity (mcchesney ). in their view, it is important to teach the limitations of copyright and to enlighten students about alternatives like copyleft which is defined as: “a movement responding to the constraints of traditional copyright by allowing the licensed work to be used, modified, and distributed as determined by the work’s creator” (haggerty and scott, p. ). like other librarian scholars discussed earlier, they advocate student production of sources to teach the value of information.  these additions to the conversation are helpful, but they also present certain limitations. their strength is in the interpretive and ideological side of the information economy. in order for students to understand the dynamics of information capitalism we have to provide them with a theory that helps them interpret the system across multiple sites. the narrow focus of copyleft and cml cannot do this alone.  they also do not center capitalism, which weakens their analysis of the system of source production. this article seeks to build a more comprehensive approach. focusing on capitalism is necessary for improving our understanding of ideology and interpretation. however, despite these shortcomings, the teaching activities presented by these authors fit well into a broader political economic approach and should be consulted going forward.  char booth ( ) begins to address this more comprehensive picture under the banner of information privilege. their concept is very influential. so much so that it appears in the official information has value frame under the dispositions: “learners who are developing their information literate abilities…are inclined to examine their own information privilege.” information privilege is the notion that people have different access to information sources based on their position in society and institutional affiliations. for example, students at an institution of higher education have temporary privileged access to proprietary databases and the thousands of scholarly journal articles that they contain. students might not notice this privilege until they get out of school and experience various paywalls when attempting to access sources. part of teaching the concept of information privilege is uncovering these underlying issues and injustices. booth also hopes to encourage more open forms of information creation, critique of profit motives (although they do not elaborate on this in their original blog post) and to examine personal and institutional privilege. they have students think about the profit drivers beneath paywalls, the value of the openness of publications, and how to help those without information privilege circumvent strict licensing agreements.  in a talk for oclc, booth ( ) presents an even more comprehensive view of information privilege. they connect fighting white nationalism, advocating for higher wages for workers, eliminating overdue fees, and food and housing insecurity all to paywalls. booth also points to attempts by for-profit companies to co-opt the open access movement. they make mention of collective action in supporting the efforts to challenge information privilege by fighting for information justice. booth’s work pushes us towards a political economy analysis of information and i want to build from their information privilege concept towards a more comprehensive understanding of information capitalism. i suggest that we supplement the term information privilege with the term information capitalism because, as keeanga-yamahtta taylor argues, the concept of privilege without an analysis of capitalism muddies the overall picture of the political world. it obscures our ability to identify the elites and those who have power in a capitalist society, i.e. the capitalist class (taylor, ). this is not to say that privilege does not exist across or within classes, because it certainly does, but the phrase tends to focus on individuals who are not necessarily the owners of the means of information production and distribution, but are granted privileges by those owners. the process of granting privileges to certain groups is an essential capitalist strategy for maintaining power and avoiding a change in the overall social and economic structure. while individual students certainly have power, the vast majority are not members of the capitalist class and do not own the databases to which they have access. they are merely granted temporary access with their institutional affiliation. an information capitalism approach may alienate some students who are part of the capitalist class, or who strongly identify with this class. however, this approach gives members of these groups the opportunity to examine the issue structurally so they may see how inequality is produced. it is possible for members of this class to become allies of working class struggles. an example of this is resource generation, an organization that helps people who have inherited wealth funnel that wealth towards grassroots movements. this structural, information capitalism approach opens up collective inquiry and action as opposed to a focus on information privilege which emphasizes individual inquiry. foundations of information capitalism the current dominant global economic system is capitalism, a system that also dominates the production and distribution of information. capitalism is complex, but we can most simply define it as an economic system that includes strong private property protections, private ownership of the means of production, and a strong emphasis on markets for the distribution of goods and selling of one’s labor. i use the term information capitalism to describe our information economy because it largely fits into capitalist parameters. the fundamentals of capitalism apply to information capitalism and information markets in many ways, but information capitalism includes some complexities that require further exploration. key areas of focus are commodification of information, ownership, labor, and audience data extraction and surveillance. value the il frame states that information has value, but how does the political economy tradition define value? when defining value, marx is a fruitful starting place because value is a concept he spent a great deal of time and care developing. the marxian political economy tradition is central because his project sought to describe and disrupt capitalism and this inquiry is seeking to understand and challenge capitalist information relations. keep in mind, marx dedicated much of his work to describing capitalism from the inside, so he did not intend for his categories of value and beyond to be universal truths. instead, they are descriptions of the way that each concept works within capitalism. these concepts, like value and labor, can exist outside of capitalism, but they would take a different form (henderson, ).  in his enduringly influential work capital, marx ( ) began his inquiry into value, and capital itself, by examining the most basic unit of the system: a single commodity. commodities are goods that are produced for sale on markets. they may seem simple, but when examined closely, they have many sides: use-values, exchange-values, and values.  first, value is a foundational dimension of a commodity. to marx, value is a socially constructed category, because the value of commodities is in their relationships with one another and the people that produce and desire them. value in capitalism is contingent on labor and social relations in complex ways. therefore labor is a central category for marx, which we will explore further below.  second, commodities have use-values or something that makes it useful to someone. for example, a toothbrush is useful for keeping one’s teeth clean, avoiding cavities, and controlling breath odor. an information-based example would be a highly-cited scientific scholarly article published by elsevier. the article is useful because it provides unique insights on a scientifically important topic. all commodities have a use-value because if they cease to have a use-value then they are no longer commodities and are no longer available on the market.  finally, the last dimension of the commodity is the exchange-value. this is essentially the price that a producer can obtain by selling the commodity. a toothbrush might sell for something like $ - us dollars. the highly-cited scientific scholarly article published by elsevier might sell for something like $ - . in this way, all commodities are exchangeable through money. if something is not exchangeable for money it ceases to be a commodity on the market. ownership and exploitation most basically, we can delineate two major categories in capitalism: ( ) those who own the means of production (or communication) and ( ) those who do not. the non-owners or the working class tend to be what marx calls “doubly free”: “freed” from owning the means of production, and “free” to sell their labor as the only way to sustain their lives. this is often under coercive and exploitative conditions. the owners purchase workers’ labor in order to keep their profits flowing, which helps them reproduce themselves in their role as owners. there are owners of the toothbrush factory and then there are the workers who make the toothbrushes. there are owners of publishers like elsevier and there are (paid and unpaid) workers like copy editors and scholars who produce the published content.  owners exploit labor by paying workers less than what they produce in value. this is called surplus value or profit, which is one of the primary subjects of class struggle. since profits are created on the backs of productive workers, they are alienated from the products of their labor. this is central to the productive function of capitalism or how it is ever expanding. people always get paid less than they are worth. this coincides with outright theft, primitive accumulation, or accumulation by dispossession (harvey, ), which is how “free laborers” came into to being. examples of this are slavery and the outright theft of land from native americans. this also coincides with gendered reproductive labor that women traditionally do: activities like housework in factory-worker homes in which women did not get direct remuneration. a more just vision of political economy calls for democratic control and ownership over the surplus value and labor conditions. to be clear, capitalist exploitation is deeply intertwined with racism and patriarchy. cedric robinson ( ), who popularized the term racial capitalism, argued convincingly that capitalism always required racial differentiation and exploitation to function. silvia federici ( ) and others prove the same for gendered exploitation. the primary manifestations of racial and gender differentiation in capitalism are the production of racist and sexist ideologies, differentiated work arrangements across racial and gender identities, and disparities in the flow of material resources, i.e. varying degrees of exploitation. capitalists exploit these socially produced hierarchies in order to drive wages down and control workers. this uneven exploitation is evident in academia where women and people of color are rendered more vulnerable to the exploitative scholarly publishing process. it is difficult to take risks by publishing outside of the mainstream commodified journals when you are already under scrutiny based on marginalized identities. in this sense, being anti-capitalist also requires being anti-racist and anti-patriarchal. commodity fetish another concept from marx is the commodity fetish. capitalism fetishizes commodities in the circulation process by obscuring the social relations (hierarchies) involved in producing a commodity across space and time. we don’t see the factory conditions, how much the workers are paid, or the profits made by the owners of the toothbrush company when we purchase a toothbrush. we don’t see the struggle or ease through which the author was able to write their scientific scholarly article. nor do we see their paycheck, working/living conditions, and the profits elsevier makes when they sell the article. the commodity fetish also makes the process of exchange appear as though it creates profit for capitalists instead of the exploitation of workers. this false notion allows capitalists to claim to be the creators of profit because they circulate commodities. instead, workers created the surplus-value and profit, and are paid less than what they produced, if at all. they also have no democratic say over the fruits of their labor. the cycle of a scholarly journal article commodity  commodified information has a similar cycle to other commodity forms, with some variations. as a transition to examining the peculiarities of information capitalism, take the commodity cycle of a scholarly journal article as an example. this is a process that many library workers are familiar with, but its perniciousness becomes more clear in the context of examining information capitalism. a scientist, who is employed at a public university in the united states, wants to share their findings from a study they conducted. they write a scientific paper and send it to a top journal in their field. the journal editor accepts the submission, sends it out to several peer-reviewers, collects their feedback, and returns it to the scientist for changes. after they make changes, the scientist resubmits the paper and it goes through a final editing process. the journal is published by elsevier and elsevier provides excellent editing for this particular journal. the scientist approves of the edits and signs their copyright over to elsevier to circulate the article. elsevier then sells the article through database package subscriptions or through online article purchases by non-institutionally affiliated individuals. the scientist receives no remuneration for the sale and distribution of their work. instead, they may receive accolades from their colleagues, credit towards tenure, or the social satisfaction of sharing their research with the scientific community.  elsevier makes unparalleled profits off the sale of the scientists’ (and other scholars’) work. many scholars may condone this practice because they feel as though elsevier and other companies provide them with a service, but a growing number of faculty are dissatisfied and want to see their work shared more equitably (mckenzie, ).  again, this process makes scholars with precarious work arrangements and marginalized identities more vulnerable since they will likely be pressured to publish as much as they can in the most prestigious journals possible. these scholars have very little power and are easily exploited in these scenarios.  how did we arrive at a situation in which scholars gift their intellectual production to a massive corporation with no monetary compensation? in brief, the answer to this question is found in the power dynamics of scholarly publishing over the last - years (young, ). there was more competition in publishing at the beginning of this period, but the unique qualities of journals caused prices to rise at a high rate year after year. this became unsustainable for library budgets and major companies like elsevier started to claim that they could save libraries money by switching to digital publishing and selling libraries large packages of bundled journals. their promises of savings never came to fruition and instead prices continued to rise while competition shrank as major publishers bought up smaller publishers and scholarly associations.  this is a common story in information markets and the following exploration of the peculiarities of information capitalism help explain the construction and vulnerabilities of this commodity cycle. commodification of information, concentration, and oligopoly  the commodification of information may seem mundane and natural, but when examined closely the process presents many political economy problems. information is a “peculiar” commodity in that it does not get used up during its consumption. this is sometimes called a non-rival or non-excludable good. non-rival goods are different from most commodities,  which are exhausted in their consumption. for example, a toothbrush has a fairly short life, or at least that’s what my dentist says. in contrast, information remains usable after it is consumed and more than one person can consume the same information simultaneously. the contents of our scientific scholarly journal article remain after a patron reads them. furthermore, information of this sort is extremely inexpensively copied, especially in the internet era. in fact, some have called the internet “the largest copy machine” (kelly, ). but abundant goods do not have high exchange values, therefore information capitalists have to develop an artificial scarcity in information markets in order to increase exchange values. copyright laws and paywalls are erected around all types of digital information. as library workers and allies continue to build a politics of anti-information-capitalism, we need to know that information is an abundant resource. for examples of information abundance we can look to anti-information-commodification projects like wikipedia, oer, and free alternative news media. when information is commodified and sold on markets, this produces powerful ownership concentrations. political economists of information have documented the tendency for information markets to produce monopolies and oligopolies (mosco, ; fuchs, ; hardy, ). this type of concentration is endemic to information markets. currently, it is observable in textbook, scholarly communication, and news media markets.  in scholarly communication, the percentage of publications published by the top publishers increased dramatically over the last years in the social sciences.  for example, the top publishers published % of psychology publications in and that number steadily grew to over % in (larivière et al, ).  % of total textbook sales in went to companies (senack and donoghue, ). the top companies are currently pearson, cengage, and mcgraw-hill. in , according to their respective annual reports, these three companies controlled a combined % of the higher education textbook market with pearson at %, mcgraw-hill at %, and cengage at %. furthermore, in mcgraw-hill and cengage embarked on a bid to merge their two companies and further concentrate ownership in the market. two of the major problems associated with this concentration are the stark increase in textbook prices and the limited representation of people of color and women as both authors and subjects.  and lastly, there is concentration across print news and broadcast media. in the uk, for example, the top three newspaper companies controlled . % of the market in (hardy, , p. ), a trend which was stable for over ten years. a similar scenario exists in the us (abernathy, ). while these three examples are not exhaustive, they demonstrate that information markets have a consistent feature of ownership concentration.  this tendency exists in information markets for several reasons. first, markets tend toward concentration of ownership as marx observed, but info markets are particularly vulnerable because media is a public good and, in order to commodify it, a significant amount of legal and social effort must go into building the infrastructure that prevents copying and distributing it freely. for this reason, any market advantage is crucial because power players get to set the parameters that ensure their survival in the market (garnham, ). also, when a company gets a majority of advertising market shares, they can use the power of advertising to direct more traffic to themselves. this makes it very difficult for new companies to enter into competition. the barriers to entry are vast. (herman and chomsky, ) the ramifications of such an oligopolistic system are severe. political economy of communication scholar christian fuchs ( ) provides a non-exhaustive outline of the consequences of market concentration which is worth quoting at length: 	ideological power: corporations that produce or organise content have the power to provide material that aims to influence what people consider as correct and valuable views of reality and as truth. corporate monopolies hence have an ideological function; they can potentially lead to the simplification of complex realities.  	labour standards: monopoly corporations can set low labour standards (especially concerning wages) in their industry sector. 	political power: in capitalism, money is entangled with political power; hence monopolies enable huge political influence of a small group of people.  	control of prices: monopolies have the economic power to control prices of goods and services. 	control of technological standards: monopolies have the power to define and control technological standards. 	dependency of customers: controlling the power to define technological standards also means that the need of customers to buy evermore media technologies in order to remain up to date can be generated. hence a potential result is an increasing dependency on commodities produced by one corporation and increasing monopoly profits.  	economic centralization: monopoly capital deprives others of economic opportunities.  	quality: a monopolist might care less about quality because there are no alternatives to choose from for consumers.  	consumer surveillance and censorship: if content and applications are monopolized—that is, most users have to rely on certain products of single media companies—operations of surveillance (i.e., monitoring, statistically evaluating, and recording audience and user behaviour, which content they create and consume, and how and what they communicate) and censorship can be carried out easier and more completely than in the case of several competing companies. this concerns especially communication technologies, such as phones and the internet. (p. ) noble ( ) additionally demonstrates that information oligopolies can have devastating results for cultural content and reproduce racialized and sexist stereotypes (i.e. racist search results in google). also, in her exploration of the proliferation of fake news and disinformation, cooke ( ) describes the ways in which media concentration over the last several decades led to the weakening of information vetting practices and altered the construction of truth. for these reasons, the politics of anti-capitalist library workers includes challenging the commodification of information, the selling of information on markets, and its subsequent concentration of power into a few hands. labor and exploitation labor and exploitation are crucial starting places for teaching students about information capitalism because they are components with which students will likely relate. there are two primary forms of exploited labor in information capitalism: waged labor and unpaid prosumer (someone who is simultaneously a producer and consumer) labor. waged laborers have an arrangement that resembles that of traditional factory workers. they produce a product for a wage, but the owner pays them less than the worth of what they produce. the boss appropriates the surplus profit. there are laborers in this category that work across the range of jobs available in the information capitalist job market. for example, there are miners in regions of africa who extract minerals that are essential for modern computing (coltan, cobalt, etc). without them, many of our mainstream information technologies like cellphones and computers would not function. there is extensive documentation showing that these workers are super-exploited (exposed, ). there are also programmers that work for companies like amazon and facebook who make well over $ k per year and have a relatively privileged lifestyle. despite their relative privilege, these workers are paid less than the amount of value that they produce and are by definition exploited. tech companies appropriate the surplus profit these workers produce through software development.  students might particularly see themselves in the second category of unpaid prosumer laborers. this is the everyday social media user or even cell phone owner. people who through using a particular app or platform produce value without receiving payment. for example, facebook users do not get paid, but if all users decided to stop using the platform,  the company would be unable to make money. some scholars point to the similarity between this labor relationship and marxist feminist critiques of gendered labor (terranova, ). in industrial-era gendered labor arrangements, women performed the daily tasks of taking care of men so that they could fill the factories and produce commodities. this is called reproductive labor. their care work was not paid, but was essential for producing value. while there is a qualitative difference between the experiences of reproductive work in these two eras, the industrial era being associated with hard physical labor and the facebook era being associated with entertainment/leisure, the arrangement is comparable. both groups were/are essential to the process of producing profit through social interaction and care, and both did/do not get directly paid for their work. the prosumer arrangement raises questions about alternative forms of value, since value is created through everyday activities of everyday people. here, the autonomist marxist tradition argues that value is created through human social relations, highlighting one of marx’s concepts outlined in the grundrisse: the general intellect. this is the notion that human knowledge is collective and there are contradictions involved in privatizing it. the value created through human social relations should be shared with all! however, in capitalism, the general intelligence is easily integrated into the capitalist ownership structure. the task at hand is to revolutionize those relations so that the fruits of our labor can be shared. (terranova, ; hardt and negri, ) surveillance technology companies’ data collection and surveillance practices are now a powerful force in information capitalism, an additionally relatable issue for students. in order to understand the origins of tech surveillance we can go back to print news media that was dependent on ad revenue. to sell ad space and compete in the news market, a news media company needed to know as much as possible about its readers. the more a company knows about a user group, the more they can target them with ads that are geared towards them. in the internet age this evolved to emphasize gathering data on individual users as opposed to groups in interfaces like google and facebook, etc. in order to target individuals for ads. mosco ( ) calls this process of commodifying personal information, which is spurred by the necessities of market competition, immanent commodification.  further, the competition and the level of data gathered by companies have morphed into what zuboff ( ) calls surveillance capitalism, which is an economy that relies on the secret production of data profiles of individuals to urge them to act in certain ways. this enables tech companies and other elites to manipulate behavior in massive and alarming ways. one example of this was the cambridge analytica scandal in which a political firm accessed comprehensive data on million facebook users in order to manipulate their vote in the us election. sarah lamdan’s ( ) work demonstrates that surveillance capitalist logic applies to library resources as well. for example, thomas reuters sells user data to united states immigration and customs enforcement (ice). this form of information capitalism raises an alarm about human autonomy as companies and governments can have unprecedented sway over individuals. and for this reason, and reasons raised above, library workers need to undermine information capitalism. moving forward in the il classroom and beyond there are two primary components of an anti-information capitalism pedagogy that library workers can use moving forward. first, teaching about information capitalism, and second, organizing against information capitalism for what char booth calls information justice. an information capitalism il curriculum should focus on three categories outlined above. these are ( ) the commodification of information, ( ) information labor, and ( ) surveillance and privacy. a critical pedagogy rooted in student experience and liberation compliments each of these areas. students have myriad experiences with these areas. they have paid for expensive textbooks and hit paywalls for scholarly articles; they produce value through social media and databases search activity; and they have heard about personal data surveillance or experienced intrusive advertising. these common experiences make it easy to spark passionate student-centered conversations in the il classroom.  the energy, passion, and outrage generated by conversations about the harms of information capitalism can be directed towards organizing for information justice. in this sense, our il teaching expands beyond the walls of the literal classroom. library workers can pivot from conversations in which students sharpen their analysis of information economy to action that challenges the system. this action should be collective and organized. in credit-bearing classes, for example, students can work together on a campaign raising awareness of corporate media bias and ways to support alternative media. in one-shot instruction contexts, teaching librarians can channel righteous student anger about the high costs of textbooks towards grassroots campus oer initiatives. or, make room for students to direct the course of action. what do they think would be the most impactful ways to redress the harms of information capitalism and transform the system? additionally, library workers should continue to build their own ongoing anti-information capitalism organizing efforts. the most important organizing effort is for library workers to support the organization (union and otherwise) of information laborers of all types. organized workers can use their power to oppose the commodification of information and support alternatives, and pressure surveillance capitalists to stop extracting personal data. there is a wide variety of approaches to challenging information capitalism, but social praxis is central to any approach. engaging in theorizing the information economy landscape, taking action to change the unequal power relations, reflecting on the action, and repeating the process. conclusions the current form of information capitalism presents a range of significant problems, but it would be too bleak to only explore the problems without presenting alternatives and potential avenues for resistance. part of the pedagogy for information capitalism is to provide space for students to work towards transforming the system. in order to transform the system we can ask ourselves the question that the organizing collective movement generation asks as they develop strategy: “how can we come up with alternatives that starve the system?” (brown and brown, ). this first starts by understanding the system in order to avoid inadvertently reinforcing it in our acts of rebellion. one method for resistance is the individual strategy of evaluation. knowing the possibility of financial conflicts of interest that information producers have can help analyze the claims made by different outlets. how do the financial relationships of news organizations impact their coverage of certain topics? for example, how does the advertising support of big oil companies impact coverage of the climate crisis? students can use their understanding of information capitalism as well as these questions to guide their choice of sources for class assignments and other needs.  however, political economy approaches ask us to go beyond this narrow individual approach to think systemically and act collectively. again, political economy imagines that our economic arrangements are not natural or permanent, but constructed and changeable based on political organizing. this organizing should come from everyday people, workers (paid and unpaid) and our allies, and should challenge the social relations of information capitalism. in other words, organizing should move towards building power for the people who do the work and create the value, not economic elites or information capitalists. it means tearing down paywalls that block the flow of information that was created by the general intellect.  some alternatives that have the potential to build power and challenge information capitalism are open education (oe), open access publishing, and alternative media. in the oe movement, educators who believe that education is a human right realized that commodified textbooks are a barrier or burden to accessing education for many students. while the movement is producing real challenges for the textbook oligopoly, there are still debates about whether textbook commodities are appropriate, even when they have oe components. these decisions will be made in the coming years and educators with a political economic analysis should weigh in on this debate. but when working with students to challenge information capitalist social relations, the following questions are starting places: how can students and educators partner to support oe, open access publishing, collectively generated knowledge like wikipedia, and alternative media? how can they partner to challenge social media data extraction and surveillance with campaigns like wages for facebook? government regulation of tech company products, including racist search engine results is another option that noble proposed ( ). given the fact that governments have largely been captured by capitalist interests, can they be potential allies in anti-information capitalism struggles? what forums can we use to urge governments to regulate extractive tech companies, if any? working with students on these questions will assuredly produce exciting projects! acknowledgements writing this article was more of a collective than an individual project and i would like to acknowledge the incredible group of people that supported me in writing and publishing it. romel espinel and ian beilin’s formal peer-reviews were essential to polishing and clarifying my ideas. thank you to ryan randall for his expert editorial guidance throughout the process. several colleagues helped me develop and teach with the framework presented in this article. thank you to caitlan maxwell, katy dichter, lynn kanne, the librarians at uw bothell and cascadia college and the librarians at seattle central college. and thank you to christian anderson, emily drabinski, becca meredith, ben ellenwood, and vincent mosco for providing feedback on earlier drafts of the paper. bibliography  abernathy, p. m. 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( ). the neoliberal library. in l. gregory & s. higgins (eds.), information literacy and social justice: radical professional practice. sacramento, ca: library juice press. senack, e., & donoghue, r. ( , february). covering the cost: why we can no longer afford to ignore high textbook prices. retrieved from uspirg website: https://uspirg.org/sites/pirg/files/reports/national% -% covering% the% cost.pdf smyth, john, bottrell, dorothy, & manathunga, catherine. ( ). resisting neoliberalism in higher education volume i: seeing through the cracks (palgrave critical university studies). cham: springer international publishing. taylor, k.-y. ( , may ). picking up the threads of struggle (interview by d. denvir) [transcript]. retrieved october , , from jacobin website: https://www.jacobinmag.com/ / /black-lives-matter-baltimore-obama-racism-freddie-gray-election-whitelash  terranova, t. ( ). free labor: producing culture for the digital economy. social text, ( )( ), - . retrieved from google scholar database. young, p. 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relationality as responses to education in times of crisis original articles radical flexibility and relationality as responses to education in times of crisis george veletsianos & shandell houlden accepted: september /published online: october # the author(s) postdigital science and education ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - - abstract as educational institutions negotiate numerous challenges resulting from the current pandemic, many are beginning to wonder what the future of education may look like. we contribute to this conversation by arguing for flexible education and considering how it can support better—more equitable, just, accessible, empowering, imaginative—educational futures. at a time of historical disorder and uncertainty, we argue that what we need is a sort of radical flexibility as a way to create life-sustaining education, not just for some, but for all, and not just for now, but far into the future. we argue that such an approach is relational, and centers justice and trust. furthermore, we note that radical flexibility is systemic and hopeful, and requires wide-ranging changes in practices in addition to the application of new technologies. keywords radical flexibility . flexible learning . online learning . education in crisis introduction we are living in times of multiple and multiplying crises, some apparently slow and later, and maybe abstract, others fast and tangible and now. in the immediacy of yesterday and today, the novel coronavirus moves quickly through some of our communities, unevenly striking folks down, disproportionately killing elderly kin, essential workers, and black people, indigenous people, and people of color (bipoc). in the future, or in a place that feels like somewhere else, somewhere at least a little bit distant for now, until it does not, the crisis of the climate emergency, of biodiversity loss and extinction, of people displaced due to climate catastrophe, and of ecological collapse, moving at a pace that for many somehow registers as never too late to address—or else, something yet to be addressed, no doubt just in time. * george veletsianos george.veletsianos@royalroads.ca school of education & technology, royal roads university, victoria, canada http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:george.veletsianos@royalroads.ca postdigital science and education ( ) : – these two crises—the current pandemic and the climate emergency—appear to many to be distinct from each other, to be separate disasters moving at different speeds in different places. it seems that one can be addressed now, and the other later. but there is no coronavirus pandemic, at least not as we are seeing it today, without the same activities at the root of ongoing and increasingly dire climate disasters (kolinjivadi ), those anthropogenically induced planetary changes so vast as to necessitate their own geologic category of the anthropocene (crutzen ). the anthropocene—the epoch characterized by the significance of human impact on our planet—is everywhere, including in our educational institutions, which are negatively impacted by the disasters that now characterize our world, while these same institutions simultaneously fail in fundamental ways to adequately grapple with their role in its perpetuation. what this moment demands of higher education researchers, practitioners, and administrators is meaningful and just response. that response must be manifested in a willingness to navigate and adapt to unpredictable and shifting circumstances that impact people in profoundly uneven ways. it must be about imagining, and then enacting, better futures— meaning imaginative, equitable, accessible, sustainable, and decolonial—for higher education. such a response needs to be deeply flexible, and flexible across social, cultural, and material differences. this need has been made painfully clear throughout the far-reaching disruptions flowing from the coronavirus pandemic. the topic of flexible education—that is education that is responsive to learner and societal needs, available in multiple formats, through multiple delivery modes, in multiple timeframes and locations—has perhaps never been so salient, so immediately tangible to the lives of so many people. as various degrees of lockdown in places across the world have closed brick and mortar doors at educational institutions of all levels and kinds, and educational institutions negotiate numerous challenges, many researchers and commentators are turning their attention to the future of education, pondering what it might look like (e.g., selwyn and jandrić ; walsh ; and witze among many others). in this paper, we contribute to the conversation about the future of education at this particular moment, by arguing for radical flexibility and considering how it can support better—more equitable, just, accessible, empowering, imaginative—educational futures. to examine these issues with particular attention to flexible digital education at a time of historical disorder and uncertainty, we draw on our shared knowledges and experiences as educators and non-indigenous researchers located in the settler colonial context of north america, where one of us is well established in his field of education and learning technologies, and one of us has recently completed her doctoral degree in cultural studies. we proceed by describing the context in which we situate our analysis. next, we present a theoretical framework to guide our analysis of radical flexibility, and finally, we discuss how radical flexibility may look like in practice, drawing attention to issues of trust and relationality. context prior to the pandemic, the anticipated or predicted future of education was already often described as flexible, or as needing to be flexible (barnett ; gordon postdigital science and education ( ) : – ). this question of flexibility has developed in itself as a field of inquiry, with increasing attention paid to it in the previous years (houlden and veletsianos , ; selwyn ; sheail ), though related research has been ongoing for decades (e.g., daniel ; edwards ; evans ; veletsianos and houlden ). no longer thought simply in terms of access to education at ‘anytime’ from ‘anywhere’, the breadth of how we might make education more flexible has expanded in scope to include everything from shifts in entrance and completion requirements (e.g., flexible admissions policies via prior-learning assessment), and multiple modes of access that provide learners with hybrid choices between in-person and online learning, as well as choice in curriculum and assessment better suited to learners’ needs, for example. in other words, beyond the conventional interpretation of flexibility as being about time and space, flexibility has come to be understood as about making many educational practices malleable and responsive to students and markets (naidu ). today, the overall ideals of flexible education are to increase the student-centered and empowering aspects of education, thereby improving not just access, but also equity, diversity, inclusion, retention, completion, and satisfaction (houlden and veletsianos ). still, flexible and online education is not without its critics and cautions, and this too has become more apparent, and more widely discussed, currently as the effects of the pandemic reverberate through every aspect of our education systems. many practitioners for example have recently argued that online learning comes with a whole host of drawbacks, including concerns around accessibility, security, and quality (fain ; herman ; xie et al. ), while researchers have often noted that inequities and technological determinism beleaguer the field of digital education (e.g., reich in press; veletsianos ). but what is clear to many scholars studying online education, especially those who have been studying it prior to the pandemic, is that a distinction needs to be drawn between the education that was delivered in the spring and summer of , or what has aptly been called emergency remote teaching, and the skillful and well-researched methods of online education (hodges et al. ). what we are bearing witness to now—not just the rapid transition in february and march of , but also the use of online and hybrid options for fall and beyond—is flexible digital education deployed in haste, driven by an immediate need to adapt to rapid changes in delivery, namely as suddenly other than face-to-face, all amidst the threat and uncertainty of a widely circulating, poorly understood pathogen. it is in this specific ongoing context, set against the backdrop of the existential crisis of the climate emergency, that a certain kind of flexible education should emerge, one capable of addressing the crisis at hand and those on the horizon. in this paper therefore, we ask: & in what do we need to ground this flexibility such that it is capable of responding to the circumstances in which we find ourselves, circumstances which dissolve our false sense of a stable, secure, and reliable future, and underscore the precarity of our globalized infrastructures and networks? & how to do so without minimizing the under-critiqued and underthought tendencies and mechanisms of flexible education? postdigital science and education ( ) : – theoretical framework rather than begin with a set of ostensibly flexible solutions (e.g., new platforms or tools) that may either prove unviable or in fact make education more inflexible or less effective for whatever purpose it is intended to serve, institutions require the adoption of a radical approach to flexibility. radical flexibility is not just about making the logistics of education practices easier or more flexible (e.g., providing students with a menu of assignments to choose from), but means taking seriously the nature and purpose of learning itself at the fundamental level of human life, where human life is understood to be enmeshed relationally with all that goes on around, with, and through it. in other words, radical flexibility is a backdoor into thinking not just about how to deliver education equitably, but to ask what kind of education, what kind of university, do we want—which is in turn to ask, what kind of life, what kind of future do we want, and for whom? these are the kinds of questions that education theorists worthy of the crises of the pandemic, climate change, and global racial and colonial injustice are asking (allen et al. ; bozkurt et al. ; costello et al. ). this means that rather than proposing solutions to a series of complex problems, radical flexibility is an invitation to imagine and turn to the tools, mechanisms, and systems needed in order to create life-sustaining education, not just for some, but all, and not just for now, but far into the future. which is to say that radical flexibility is not a structure but is an orientation, one defined by its openness, to how we think about the problems made legible by the pandemic. to imagine life-sustaining education means beginning with a more just paradigm of who the learner is and can be, or, in other words, that to be flexible is to begin by interrogating assumptions about who the learner is and what tools and capacities they have at their disposable. elsewhere, we argue (houlden and veletsianos ) that conventional forms of flexible education that are sometimes reducible to ‘anytime, anyplace’ discourses (i.e., where flexibility is seen through the lens of things such as flexible pacing and the capacity to work from anywhere) are often limited by a structurally implicit orientation to an ideal learning subject, what mcmillan cottom ( ) calls the ‘roaming autodidact’. this is the learner who has the wherewithal to make or access the capital, time, and space for learning in spite of all the other obligations that they have. mcmillan cottom argues that such an orientation inevitably favors white, able-bodied male learners of particular socio-economic status by virtue of the significant privileges that often come with occupying that identity space. research into the challenges of flexible education for female and bipoc students, for example, supports this thesis (mcmillan cottom ; selwyn ; simon et al. ). in contrast, the imagined ideal learner is the learner as a good liberal humanist subject (houlden and veletsianos ), he who is independent and above all has fully internalized responsibility as being entirely located in and oriented to the individual (houlden and veletsianos ). this is the model learner: the one who is self-directed, can command resources, skills, space, and time; the one who has choices and options, and faces far fewer systemic obstacles. this is a learner divorced from the messy and cacophonous reality that the majority of the world faces. taking the latter version of the learner to be how we orient our educational systems is to reinforce anti-relational capitalist ideologies and systems that tend to enforce a hierarchy of life according to cis-heteropatriarchic and racial logics postdigital science and education ( ) : – (melamed ; gilmore ). it is also to perpetuate structures that disavow the relational nature of life and subjectivity, which is to what radical flexibility has the potential to respond. in other words, instead of developing education for the so- called roaming autodidact, or the learning subject of neoliberal market economics, radical flexibility begins with the principle of the relational nature of all things, a perspective which has a rich and varied theoretical history in a number of critical traditions, including posthumanist thought (e.g., braidotti ; haraway ; wolfe ) and ecofeminist thought (e.g., gaard ; plumwood ), and which was long preceded by indigenous thought and cultural systems (e.g., atleo ; todd ; wilson ). what unifies some aspects of these diverse perspectives is an ethical orientation guided by an understanding of the relational nature of existence, where all of us are reliant upon and thus responsible to the beings and the worlds in which we live. with this relational ethical frame in mind, radically flexible education is grounded on the recognition that all learners are embedded in multiple communities and webs of obligations and shared responsibilities that figure deeply into any learning such an individual can do. this kind of education takes its learners to be rich, and complex beings, with deep inter-generational histories of both joy and suffering that impact how and what they both desire and need to learn. to be clear, the responsibility that shapes radical flexibility is in distinct contrast to neoliberal or biopolitical forms of responsi- bility to which the roaming autodidact is normatively oriented. this latter form of responsibility, seen through foucault’s ( ) insight into the ways in which govern- able subjects are taught to internalize their circumstances as wholly their own respon- sibility, alludes to the learner as being responsibilized. the responsibilized learner is the individual who accepts their need for growth and education as a responsibility they have to perform, a duty even, and in a way that meets the narrow parameters of their own already circumscribed desires (peters ). in doing so, they sustain dehumanizing neoliberal logics that assert that the individual is a distinct, self- determining unit, and that their social and economic status is strictly determined through their own actions rather than through systemic factors that constrain or support their activity (houlden and veletsianos ). in contrast, radical flexibility approaches responsibility in a far more holistic sense, where responsibility is moved first by the capacity to respond in a life-sustaining and life-supporting way, whether that be to respond to one’s own fundamental needs and desires, the needs and desires of one’s community and broader ecological environment, and even the needs and desires of one’s ancestral and future kin, human and otherwise. this is responsibility understood as a tending of relations. as potowatomi scholar whyte ( : ) explains: to be in a relationship is to have responsibilities toward the others in the relationship. responsibilities refer to the reciprocal (though not necessarily equal) attitudes and patterns of behavior that are expected by and of various parties by virtue of the different roles that each may be understood to play in a relationship. systems that inhibit capacities to respond to relationships in this way are actually antithetical to radically flexible education. what’s more, radically flexible education takes its learners to have capacities that shift in meaningful ways throughout the postdigital science and education ( ) : – duration of their institutional learning according to the ebbs and flows of everything from their very bodies, to their home lives, to their access to resources, to the effects of violence sustained by broader social and cultural systems that, for example, over-police black and racialized people, or celebrate white nationalism, or deny the lasting impacts of colonial genocide, or disproportionately harm working class or elderly people, as has so often been the cases with the coronavirus pandemic (center for disease control ; eldeib et al. ; garcía de müeller et al. ). in other words, radical flexibility in education begins with the recognition that learners are relational beings and must be honored and collaborated with as such. this also means that radically flexible education accounts for present materialities, i.e., it is responsive to the circumstances people live with on a day-to-day basis, why people are doing the work of learning and developing new skills, and who they are doing the work for and with. to begin with, learners understood in this way means flexibility becomes a value or principle that shapes educational infrastructure and pedagogical practices. here, education is guided by adaptability, suitability, responsiveness, and creativity, all of which fall under the umbrella of justice, or as hooks ( ) calls it, education as the practice of freedom. while some educational technologies may prove beneficial in support of this, they are not the solution. they are the means by which flexibility is mobilized and enacted, or how education is made more responsive and more relational. if this core value is obscured—the relational nature of justice—then there is a serious risk of relying on solutions that create more problems than they purport to solve. for example, in the name of permitting students to take exams at home, institutions might insist that they use test-proctoring technology that relies on invasive forms of surveillance, thereby formalizing distrust and deepening dehumanization in our pedagogical methods (flaherty ; swauger ). those in positions to make decisions—especially administrators such as deans, directors of centers of teaching and learning, and many others in positions of institutional power, and even faculty with power over the technologies they use and lobby for at their institutions—would do well to seriously and continuously consider what problems are being addressed by educational technology interventions, and what values are inherent in the solutions being offered. practice key shifts are needed in order to enact this kind of radical flexibility. bayley ( : ) argues that in crises, ‘[w]e need to find practices to stay with the trouble stirred up by late capitalism in the anthropocene moment – a moment where “scholarship committed to the refusal if not the undoing of a world riven by new kinds of warcraft, injustice and exploitation” requires the courage of action’. such practices are not inseparable from the theory of relationality articulated above, because as hooks ( ): ) observes: [w]hen our lived experience of theorizing is fundamentally linked to processes of self-recovery, of collective liberation, no gap exists between theory and practice. indeed, what such experience makes more evident is the bond between the two – that ultimately reciprocal process wherein one enables the other. postdigital science and education ( ) : – fundamentally, because radically flexibility is grounded in relationality, it is a process of self-recovery and collective liberation. perhaps to the dismay of some (e.g., educa- tional technology advocates and those who have much to gain from the expanded use of technology in education, ranging from silicon valley startups to educational tech- nology consultants), this process, and the practices that come with them, does not by necessity involve inserting new technology into education (though, once again, care- fully vetted new technology may prove helpful in cultivating and supporting the approaches we outline here). the shifts radical flexibility may require, however, are not dependent upon anything so facile. what follows are some suggestions into radically flexible education (though no doubt there are many more) which center relationality, both in theoretical and practical terms. trust to engage with students as relational beings, designers, administrators, and practi- tioners could consider eliminating the mechanisms and ideologies that reinforce the institution's and learner-educator’s suspicion of the learner (fawns and ross ). to ground education on the notion that learners must prove themselves is potentially dehumanizing and reduces all the complexities addressed above to a footnote to how learners are expected to participate in their learning, rather than as the very means by which they arrive to their learning. in practice, this means to trust learners—which, in abstract terms is something that many can agree upon, but in practical terms may confound or elicit resistance. in practical terms, trust could mean no more doctor’s notes, no more demand for proof that a family member died or that a learner has actually been diagnosed with covid- . it could mean accepting digital copies of reference letters and transcripts while building the digital systems to maintain the privacy and security of such documents (which is where educational technology can actually be useful). it could mean developing sustainable and holistic assessment practices, practices such as having students write critical reflections of their own work, which as stommel ( ) notes, require releasing ‘attachment to accuracy’ and objectivity to ‘give way to a dialogue – one that is necessarily emergent and subjective’. it means avoiding or abandoning technologies that engender distrust (ross and macleod ), such as plagiarism detection tools. it may also mean considering that certain foundational elements of established practice may be antithetical to trust, and potentially begin the process of reconsidering and rejecting them. there are too many elements to list here, but to illustrate they may include various principles of instructional design, such as designing instruction ground- ed on predetermined performance objectives or evaluating outcomes around criterion- referenced assessments. this process may be difficult, not only due to sedimentation around practices that have long been recognized as ‘good’, but also because in the face of crisis, relying on familiar tools/approaches can provide comfort and a sense of stability in the face of uncertainty. central here is the recognition that dialog is intrinsically relational, and relationality reinforces trust, which is to say that trust is itself an emergent practice. trust is not something one gives, but something one does, and the reciprocal nature of it means that it works both ways, that both institution and faculty, as well as learners, can practice trust. trust is not something that can be granted through statements or declarations postdigital science and education ( ) : – without meaningful action, which partially explains why so many individuals in the academy are so skeptical of both pandemic reopening plans that do not have realistic attitudes toward health and safety (e.g., welch ), and of equity and diversity statements in the wake of ongoing efforts to dismantle colonization (doharty et al. ) and ongoing anti-police and black lives matter protests (howard ; melaku and beeman ). counterarguments to the educational practices of trust, such as the argument that some of these adjustments mentioned above are unfair to other students in a class, return to the zero-sum scenario in which justice only looks one way, and thus lose track of the relational nature of education. importantly, relational approaches are not ap- proaches that disavow accountability. accountability in relational settings multiplies and manifests in non-prescriptive ways, which is to say, ways that are actually accountable to the complex moving parts of education—the learner, the learner-edu- cator, and the broad ecologies and networks in which both of these beings are embedded. accountability, for example, might be better enacted in terms of collabo- rative roles learners occupy and are responsible for together, or by emphasizing a learner’s education in relation to their community responsibilities, but always specific to what their role and responsibility are to their specific community. trust also means listening to and responding to the needs of learners, based on their experiences as relational beings enacting, but not reducible to, the role of learners. this could mean, for example, building in accessibility through universal design and the understanding that disability is not something to be overcome or to be treated as a deficit as ableist structures would have it, but is instead ‘a valued part of identity’ (ban ). it also reflects another opportunity to do away with the frame of suspicion that demands proof of disability in the cases of less readily apparent disabilities like chronic or mental illness, for example, and instead ‘views students through a holistic lens and trusts students as people who are experts on their own lives rather than assigning expertise to a third party with medical authority’ (evans et al. : ). the effect of this will be to reduce the risk inherent to disclosure of disability, as well as to reduce the labor learners are required to put in with respect to being seen and responded to as their needs dictate, which in turn will permit them to put their labor into their learning. this same shift away from suspicion to trust also needs to occur for educators, faculty and staff. for example, does a faculty member, adjunct instructor, or graduate student working as a teaching assistant prefer or need to teach online rather than face to face during a pandemic? demanding they provide narrow forms of evidence of immunocompromise for themselves or members of their household, or urging and requesting them to teach face to face as has been the case for many in the usa, is a failure to respect not only the privacy, expertise, and labor of an individual, but also their relational nature. in practice, what radically flexible education may look like is better support for all academic workers—many of whom are far more unfavorably resourced and precariously positioned than others, irrespective of location—which includes ev- erything from reasonable and sustainable working hours, support in technical skills and pedagogy development, support for parental leave, and adequate care during times of illness and disability, for example. more broadly still, it means actively dismantling the institutional forces that contribute to illness and disability, like racism, sexism, and transphobia, and given the lack of supports for anti-oppressive pedagogies and practices (e.g., valcarlos et al. ), expanding supports for them, specifically in the context of postdigital science and education ( ) : – postdigital efforts. in the case of disability, for example, this means refiguring the ways by which ‘excellence’ is anchored in individualistic notions of self-reliance and inde- pendence, given that too often disabled scholars are expected to perform such a circumscribed form of excellence in spite of their disabilities (merchant et al. ). this logic of excellence as the purview of the individual, rather than as being a collaborative way of being, is exemplary of the norms of suspicion within anti- relational systems, as excellence here is defined by the notion that one does it alone. what follows from this is that radical flexibility is a systemic approach. it does not arise solely through the application of new technologies, partnerships with big tech companies, or semi-nouveau ideas like ‘openness’ or ‘upskilling’ or ‘moocs’ or ‘learning analytics’ or ‘learning dashboards’. rather, it means that those with power, namely privileged faculty and administrators—and the institutions they work within— cannot treat one group in a system relationally while managing another as cogs in a machine. this creates a divide between those who are treated as human beings and those who are not, thereby undermining attending to relationality itself. conclusion what this pandemic makes abundantly clear is the pressing need not just to build resilient and adaptable ways of designing, developing, and delivering education, but also to subvert the marriage of capitalism and postdigital education in order for education to become a place for the practice of freedom. this is where flexible education becomes radical: it is simultaneously practice and politics, even if education has always been both of those things. what this amounts to is an educational environment in which the people participating and supporting education are understood to be and thus treated as holistic beings, and the digital tools used are meant to facilitate the process of enabling and encouraging the complex relationality of each individual learner and their life. doing so means attending to the reality of larger circumstances in which we can no longer disavow late capitalism’s racist and imperialist environmental impacts (heglar ; holthaus ; mckibben ; nixon ), especially as they are bound up with the effects of anthropogenic climate change (e.g., alexander ; randall and gray ). conse- quently, radically flexible education as an orientation to relationality needs to be far more accountable to the history of education itself than conventional education currently is. by ‘history’ here, we are not alluding to the history of the use of technology in education and the lessons embedded within it. instead, we are referring to the histories of violence in which a vast majority of western education systems and institutions are imbricated. such histories include legacies of slavery and white supremacy (crawley ), which still shape and impact access to education along racialized divides (reece and o’connell ), with white supremacy, which advantages white people while disadvantaging bipoc, remaining a structural issue across western academic institutions (gillborn ; tate and bagguley ). this also includes attending to histories of indigenous genocide and colonization, and specifically in settler colonial north america, the role of the land grant system enacted through the morrill act of , which ‘turned indigenous land into college endowments’, and which to this day materially sustains many major academic institutions in north america (lee and ahtone ; stein ). such histories are important if we are to meaningfully respond to the ongoing legacies of postdigital science and education ( ) : – colonization that currently amount to significant inequality for indigenous and racialized faculty and students in higher education (henry et al. ) and in racial divides within education more broadly. without centering these histories in our education institutions, a relational orientation to the future, one predicated on the sustainability of life itself on a finitely resourced planet is nearly impossible, given the direct relationship between the history of unsustainability and the academy (carp ), and the relationship between histories of violence and the production of academic knowledge. pertinent examples of this are readily visible across the academy: consider the discipline of geography, whose extended engagement with militarism has been argued to be directly tied to settler colonialism and white supremacy (inwood and bonds ), or the discipline of english which has a long colonial history tied to language and canon (ngũgĩ ; said ), or the history of instructional design and technology which is tied to militarism and war (reiser ). this is to say that if radical flexibility begins with the premise of life as relational, that relationality must extend to the awareness that all are materially bound to the earth and the resources drawn from the earth, as well as to each other, and as such, sustainable futures are inherently connected to that reality and the histories and legacies that shape its future. we are doubtful that the university as it existed before the pandemic was capable of enacting the kind of radically flexible education outlined above in a robust way. with respect to the climate emergency, carp ( : ) questions whether it is even possible for the academy today to become ecologically sustainable, even though he notes the inevitability of change, that ‘we will either help to shape it and learn to ride it, or we will be inundated by it’. but abrupt and likely permanent change has already arrived in the form of the pandemic, a crisis which hall ( : ) argues will not find its solutions in academia, as ‘[t]he capitalist university cannot save us, because it is driven by short-term economic interests, rather than the long-term conditions of life’. but perhaps it is within this crisis that those of us willing to might make something more out of our circumstances, that especially in this darkness and uncertainty, that we might find hope and the strength to change, to reimagine, and collectively bring into being something new in a way that has long been necessary. solnit ( ) urges us to remember that ‘[o]rdinary life before the pandemic was already a catastrophe of desperation and exclusion for too many human beings, an environmental and climate catastrophe, an obscenity of inequality’, and this was in many ways as true in the halls of education as anywhere else. but she further reminds us that hope ‘offers us clarity that, amid the uncertainty ahead, there will be conflicts worth joining and the possibility of winning some of them’. if, out of this struggle, we ground our hope in attention to the relational nature of the many worlds in which we all live together, then perhaps we can achieve the radical flexibility truly liberatory education deserves. funding this research was undertaken, in part, thanks to funding from the canada research chairs program and the commonwealth of learning research chairs program. compliance with ethical standards conflict of interest the authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. code availability not applicable. postdigital science and education ( ) : – open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's creative commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article's creative commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. references alexander, b. 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black and non-black. however, honestly that time never came. we cannot recall a time during the production of this special issue when there was not a case of anti-black intimidation, violence, or harassment, nor a time in which we were not affected as individuals and as faculty. the weekend we finally set aside time to write was the weekend of the charlottesville assault on humanity and human sensibility. the ku klux klan, neo-nazis, and others from the alt-right movement converged on charlottesville and the university of virginia to protest the removal of a statue of confederate general robert e. lee while being protected by an armed militia. diversity advocates came to wage a counter-protest but ultimately there was violence, and heather hyer was killed as a -year-old neo-nazi drove directly into the crowd. so far, subsequent protests have not resulted in the same tragic outcome, but the growing visibility of the alt-right makes the relevance of blm even more significant. however, attention to the blatant hate of the klan and neo-nazis should not distract us from the persistent ongoing systemic and more insidious ways in which black lives seem not to matter. reality dictates that we address both. in this commentary, we first provide a brief history of the blm movement, then outline numerous domains in which we see its relevance, and finally give an overview of the scholarship presented in this special issue. readers will see that social science researchers continue to reveal ways in which blacks encounter access and treatment discrimination (goff et al., ; greenhaus et al., ; morris and perry, ; pascoe and smart richman, ; williams and collins, ). these studies demonstrate that, in addition to anti-black bias guiding policing and the justice system, evidence of anti-black racism appears within educational contexts, workplaces, and healthcare settings; and such sentiments affect children as well as adults. history of blm blm is a chapter-based national organization founded on july , , by patrisse cullors, opal tometi, and alicia garza (“a herstory,” ). the organization’s name originated from a hashtag that was posted to social media shortly after the nation gathered to bear witness to the murder of trayvon martin, a -year-old black teenage boy. trayvon was shot and killed by george zimmerman, a -year-old white man, who was later arrested and acquitted of all charges. three queer, black women took to social media to express their rage and intolerance of the taking of an innocent black life by using what was then just a popular twitter handle. #blacklivesmatter quickly spread among black people and allies as a statement of solidarity, and has now evolved to mean much more. the garnered attention from mainstream media, political figures, cultural workers, artists, and social activists has since transformed outcries for justice into a nationally recognized black liberation movement (“a herstory,” ). the blm organization raises awareness of the violations against the human rights of black persons in this country, whether they be adult or child, free or incarcerated; man, woman, or gender neutral, cis, queer, or trans; citizen or undocumented. and as incidents equality, diversity and inclusion: an international journal vol. no. , pp. - © emerald publishing limited - doi . /edi- - - edi , of exclusion, mistreatment, violence, and other threats to black life rise, so do the visibility, support, and efforts of blm. through various strategies, blm mobilizes large numbers of black people and allies around the country, and globally, who then take action to address social injustices. these actions take the form of rallies, town hall meetings, conferences with elected officials, calls for legislative reform, boycotts, and other methods of protest. the aim is to fight anti-black racism, encourage dialogue among black people, and encourage social action and engagement (“a herstory,” ). tired of existing in a nation whose history and present practices carry strong evidence suggesting the insignificance of black bodies, the originators of #blacklivesmatter created a movement that has now inspired millions to become agents of change. the social and behavioral sciences document the need for change throughout almost every societal domain including the policing and the justice system, education, workplaces, and even healthcare settings. policing and justice anti-black biases affect every aspect of the criminal justice system, from policing to sentencing. social cognition research reveals that people automatically associate weapons more with blacks than with whites (payne, ), and they are more inclined to “see” guns mistakenly when a black person holds an innocuous object (e.g. cell phone) than when a white person holds such objects (correll et al., ). mock jurors (levinson et al., ) and defense attorneys (eisenberg and johnson, ) alike associate more negative words with blacks than with whites. furthermore, the more implicitly biased they are against blacks, the more mock jurors interpret ambiguous evidence as indicative of guilt (levinson et al., ). until we come to understand the pervasiveness of anti-black racism, we will continue to see black children like tamir rice perceived as older than they are and therefore less innocent (goff et al., ), have their actions perceived as more threatening and violent (okonofua and eberhardt, ) which legitimizes violence toward them, even at the hands of the police. education in educational environments, there are lower expectations of black students regarding their academic potential (boser et al., ), and one study from the netherlands found that lower expectations stemmed from teachers’ implicit racial biases against students of color (in this case, turkish and moroccan students) and contributed to the racial achievement gap (van den bergh et al., ). such racial bias is evident in classroom discipline as well. teachers deliver harsher evaluations of black students’ behavior and perceive a greater need for their suspension from school (okonofua and eberhardt, ). these biases persist beyond the elementary school classroom; they also affect academic scholarship in higher education. for example, one study found that black applicants were percentage points less likely than white applicants to be awarded funding from the national institutes of health (ginther et al., ). these findings were obtained after controlling for relevant factors such as educational background, previous research awards, and publication records. given the importance of external funding for promotion and tenure in many institutions, these data suggest that blacks, and their scholarship, will continue to be underrepresented in higher education. for black graduate students, there exist disparate experiences between them and their white peers, with minority students expressing feelings of isolation, tokenism, and perceived discrimination. factors contributing to these feelings are the racial disparities in top graduate programs, such as lack of minority representation in the student body, few minority faculty and mentors, and the omission of diverse perspectives in the assigned curriculum (gildersleeve et al., ; grapin et al., ). when black graduate guest editorial students voice their concerns and discuss frameworks relevant to their identity as students of color to compensate for its absence in their coursework, they are often met with discouragement and opposition for deviating from materials that push the social narrative of the majority race (dowdy et al., ). this resistance signals lack of acceptance and disregard of one’s racial narrative and reality, and perpetuates the exclusionary status quo in higher education. black faculty members are not exempt from negative race-based experiences in higher education. making up roughly percent of the professoriate, both males and females combined (national center for education statistics, ), black faculty members are . times more likely than their white colleagues to report high levels of stress due to discrimination (eagan and garvey, ). not only do they report little support and negative interracial interactions with colleagues, students contribute to negative experiences and outcomes for black faculty members as well. students of the majority race often question their knowledge and level of expertise, contributing to feelings of isolation and oppression among black professors (eagan and garvey, ). for blacks who have attained the highest levels of education, the rewards for these faculties are inadequate given that they do not extinguish their exclusion and perceived inferiority in higher education institutions. workplace the mistreatment of black lives in organizations is an old tale, with numerous studies showing discrimination at various stages of the talent management process. organizations with low minority representation in their recruitment materials coupled with messages of colorblindness rather than multiculturalism create distrust and discomfort among black applicants (purdie-vaughns et al., ). at the selection phase, job applicants with stereotypically black names receive call-backs from recruiters at substantially lower rates than applicants with traditionally white names (bertrand and mullainathan, ). with regard to performance appraisal, blacks are evaluated less favorably and are perceived to be less promotable than whites, but do not exhibit behaviors warranting stagnation (greenhaus et al., ). in terms of organizational climate, black men are harassed for not being “man” enough, which is interpreted as not “white” enough (berdahl and moore, ). just last year, an organization rescinded a job offer to a black woman because of her dreadlocks, and was backed by the ruling of a circuit court judge (greene, ). indeed, blacks and other minorities are all too often targets of overt discrimination and harassment. like clockwork, the beginning of each calendar year welcomes enforcement and litigation data published by the equal employment opportunity commission (eeoc). each report details the types of workplace discrimination charges filed nationwide and their percentage breakdowns. in , of the , racial discrimination charges filed, percent of the plaintiffs were african americans (eeoc releases fiscal year , enforcement and litigation data, ). following the trends of previous years, in race discrimination was again the most common allegation under title vii, totaling . percent of the , filings and outnumbering all other categories (e.g. disability, sex age, national origin, religion, etc.; eeoc releases fiscal year enforcement and litigation data, ). it can be assumed that an overwhelming majority of these complaints came from african americans as well. in a nation where the workplace continues to welcome racial minorities at high rates and emphasizes a mantra of diversity and inclusion, the number of black employees claiming workplace injustice should raise speculations. is the term “diversity” inclusive of black bodies? while members of the eeoc and other organizations continue the fight for employment rights afforded to black employees under title vii of the civil rights act, black lives now edi , tackle the more subtle acts of discrimination at work known as racial microaggressions (sue et al., ). such discrimination is harder to detect and regulate given the ambiguity of perpetrators’ intent, yet its deleterious effects on turnover intentions and health outcomes are clear (lim et al., ). healthcare despite the well-documented health-related consequences of experiencing overt and subtle forms of discrimination, blacks continue to receive poorer healthcare than whites. perhaps the last institution in which one might expect evidence of how blm less is in healthcare given the oath of physicians and nurses to “do no harm.” however, the literature on racial disparities in healthcare provides numerous examples of ways in which black lives seem not to matter. for example, a presentation at the meeting of society for investigative dermatology suggested that percent of dermatologists surveyed indicated that they were not trained to detect skin cancer, one of the fastest growing types of cancer, in black skin. buster et al. ( ) have further called for a significant review of medical school curriculum to be more inclusive of black and brown skin in order to ultimately save more black and brown lives. hoffman et al.’s ( ) study of students in a prestigious medical school further illustrates this point. these medical students perpetuated numerous racial myths related to biological differences between blacks and whites that subsequently reinforce racial health disparities. these students believed that blacks had thicker skin, experiences less pain, and subsequently these students intended to provide less pain relief to blacks relative to whites who reported the same self-assessments of their pain levels. these unfortunate findings reflect the “superhuman” bias attributed to blacks by whites in a series of studies conducted by waytz et al. ( ). the superhuman qualities blacks are expected to possess also make them more vulnerable to pain and lessen their opportunity to actually be treated for pain by health providers. the bias that blacks do not feel pain in the same way as whites has been documented in children as young as seven, and is reliably documented by age ten (dore et al., ). these anti-black treatments occur across the lifespan until death. a recent ethnographic study found that racial biases in the treatment of blacks and whites extend to the very end of life (elliott et al., ). these researchers observed that physicians treated white patients who were elderly and dying with more care, more communication, and physical toughness than their treatment of black patients who were also near death. intersectionality the blm movement has called our attention to the realities of the diversity of anti-black bias and mistreatment. black women’s realities are now coming to be more fully understood by social scientists as unique to those of black men. for example, katz et al. ( ) demonstrated that black women are particularly vulnerable when their lab study demonstrated that white female bystanders were unlikely to help an incapacitated black female victim as compared to a victim who was white and female. white participants appeared to simply not identify with black women as women and thus left them vulnerable. white participants also made attributions about black women that called into question their consent and experience of the attack as pleasurable. indeed, black undergraduate women report more experiences with sexual objectification than white undergraduate women, and they are more fearful for their safety than white women (watson et al., ). these findings also extend to black girls. epstein et al. ( ) found that black girls as young as five are perceived as less innocent and less in need of protection from adults. it is no wonder then that even black female adolescents seem to suffer from the same type guest editorial of avoidance. holland’s ( ) study of racial integration demonstrates that black girls experience more social distancing than their male counterparts who appear to have more social capital afforded to them given their involvement in sports as well as their more physical embodiment of hip-hop culture. this pattern of unique discrimination toward black girls and women occurs over the lifespan as evidenced by fewer opportunities to lead despite leading every demographic in the pursuit of higher education, and they encounter persistent pay discrepancies relative to all men and white and asian women (us department of education, ; bibler, ; daly et al., ). given this brief review of all of the ways in which black lives seem to matter less across every major institution, we find it challenging that the #blm hashtag and the mere label itself continues to attract so much resistance and denigration. perhaps resistance to #blm is a function of ignorance of its principles which include, diversity, globalism, engagement, restorative justice, collective value, empathy, queer affirming, trans affirming, intergenerational, and a commitment to black women, black families, and black villages (http://blacklivesmatter.com/guiding-principles/). it is difficult to understand how the all lives matter campaigns and its various spin-offs could truly be against these value systems, yet our research in anti-black racism suggests that it may be the promotion of these values by and for blacks (and black women in particular) that might be at the root of the resistance. the current issue therefore, this special issue seeks to elevate these values and demonstrate how our peers across the academy are incorporating #blm into their classrooms, scholarship, and practice. we open this special issue with a paper by opie and roberts that provides a brief history of employment discrimination faced by african americans. these authors adapt a restorative justice framework from the criminal justice literature to describe ways organizations can repair the relationships damaged by this history. opie and roberts first outline the harmful effects racism has on black employees, suggesting that black lives do not matter in organizations historically or currently. they then identify various challenges individuals must overcome to embrace diversity truly (rather than provide it lip service), and they offer some concrete suggestions for change. specifically, they advocate for more perspective-taking and thoughtful leadership, and they provide specific strategies for organizational change at multiple levels such that black lives will indeed one day matter at work. this special issue then ventures into specific organizational settings that, traditionally, receive limited attention in the organizational science literature. first, leopold and bell provide a critical analysis of media coverage of blm, highlighting the media as an understudied organization in the management literature. with examples from news coverage of blm, the authors’ analysis demonstrates how the media’s framing of protest movements serves to undermine the protest’s goals, delegitimize the movement, and perpetuate outgroup stereotypes and also an “us vs them” or “good guys vs bad guys” mentality. they then apply best practices from the human resources management literature to offer suggestions for decreasing bias in the media. next, cole examines the field of education by conducting a critical analysis of educational practices with a focus on culturally sustaining pedagogy that embraces pluralistic ideology and rejects colorblindness – a message that is supported empirically in the organizational science literature as well (e.g. plaut et al., ). culturally sustaining pedagogy involves not only checking one’s own biases but also challenging others’ biases, consistent with the literature on allyship (ashburn-nardo, ). indeed, cole calls on non-black people to accept responsibility for changing education and being true allies to edi , http://blacklivesmatter.com/guiding-principles/ people of color by challenging social injustices. she offers specific examples of pedagogical practices that use blm to change normative discourse and highlight groups that are typically portrayed as “other.” these examples promise to be of benefit not only for educators in college classrooms, but also for practitioners more broadly, including human resources personnel and diversity trainers and educators. gibson et al. likewise focus on a seldom-studied organization in the management literature: public libraries. as public institutions, libraries must be all-inclusive, representing both dominant and disadvantaged social groups. their paper discusses the important role that libraries can have in educating the public about the blm movement and in providing a safe, democratic space for public discourse. through these functions, public libraries can be an instrument of voice for people with less power in society. like cole ( ), gibson et al. explicitly reject colorblind ideology. libraries historically have strived for neutrality with regard to political issues, but given their role as social change agents, gibson et al. argue that remaining neutral and colorblind is no longer an option for public libraries. importantly, the authors stress the necessity of self-care for those of us doing diversity work. they remind readers that the battle against institutional racism (and other “isms”) is cognitively taxing and emotionally draining, and that people cannot be effective allies, advocates, or activists on behalf of others if they fail to take care of themselves first. the special issue concludes with a contribution by mccluney, bryant, king, and ali, who use blm and the example of “calling in black” – much like “calling in sick” – to underscore the points about racial battle fatigue raised by gibson et al. ( ). mccluney et al. provide a multilevel framework for understanding how traumatic events external to organizations (e.g. biased news coverage revealed by leopold and bell, ) can serve as signals of identity threat for employees of color. such events communicate meaning about the value of black employees’ social identity (steele et al., ), suggesting perhaps that black lives do not really matter. their model then describes the responses that individuals and organizations take to restore feelings of identity safety and psychological safety within the workplace, thereby establishing a research agenda for organizational scientists for years to come. leslie ashburn-nardo department of psychology, indiana university – purdue university indianapolis, indianapolis, indiana, usa, and kecia thomas and aspen j. robinson department of psychology, university of georgia, athens, georgia, usa references a herstory ( ), “a herstory of the #blacklivesmatter movement”, available at: https:// blacklivesmatter.com/about/herstory/ (accessed september , ). ashburn-nardo, l. 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( ), girlhood interrupted: the erasure of black girls’ childhood. center on poverty and inequality, georgetown law, washington, dc. gibson, a.n., chancellor, r.l., cooke, n.a., park dahlen, s., lee, s.a. and shorish, y.l. ( ), “libraries on the frontlines: neutrality and social justice”, equality, diversity and inclusion: an international journal, vol. no. , pp. - . gildersleeve, r.e., croom, n.n. and vasquez, p.l. ( ), “ ‘am i going crazy?!’: a critical race analysis of doctoral education”, equity & excellence in education, vol. no. , pp. - . ginther, d.k., schaffer, w.t., schnell, j., masimore, b., liu, f., haak, l.l. and kington, r. ( ), “race, ethnicity, and nih research awards”, science, vol. no. , pp. - . goff, p.a., jackson, m.c., di leone, b.a.l., culotta, c.m. and ditomasso, n.a. ( ), “the essence of innocence: consequences of dehumanizing black children”, journal of personality and social psychology, vol. no. , pp. - . grapin, s.l., lee, e.t. and jaafar, d. ( ), “a multilevel framework for recruiting and supporting graduate students from culturally diverse backgrounds in school psychology programs”, school psychology international, vol. no. , pp. - . greene, d.w. ( ), “splitting hairs: the eleventh circuit’s take on workplace bans against black women’s natural hair in eeoc v. catastrophe management solutions”, university of miami law review, vol. , pp. - . edi , www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economic-letter/ /september/disappointing-facts-about-black-white-wage-gap/ www.frbsf.org/economic-research/publications/economic-letter/ /september/disappointing-facts-about-black-white-wage-gap/ www .eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/ - - .cfm www .eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/ - - .cfm www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/ - - a.cfm www.eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/ - - a.cfm greenhaus, j.h., parasuraman, s. and wormley, w.m. ( ), “effects of race on organizational experiences, job performance evaluations, and career outcomes”, academy of management journal, vol. no. , pp. - . hoffman, k.m., trawalter, s., axt, j.r. and oliver, m.n. ( ), “racial bias in pain assessment and treatment recommendations, and false beliefs about biological differences between blacks and whites”, proceedings of the national academy of sciences, vol. no. , pp. - . holland, m.m. ( ), “only here for the day: the social integration of minority students at a majority white high school”, sociology of education, vol. no. , pp. - . katz, j., merrilees, c., hoxmeier, j.c. and motisi, m. ( ), “white female bystanders’ responses to a black woman at risk for incapacitated sexual assault”, psychology of women quarterly, vol. no. , pp. - . leopold, j. and bell, m.p. ( ), “news media and the racialization of protest: an analysis of black lives matter articles”, equality, diversity and inclusion: an international journal, vol. no. , pp. - . levinson, j.d., cai, h. and young, d. ( ), “guilty by implicit racial bias: the guilty/not guilty implicit association test”, ohio state journal of criminal law, vol. , pp. - . lim, s., cortina, l.m. and magley, v.j. ( ), “personal and workgroup incivility: impact on work and health outcomes”, journal of applied psychology, vol. no. , pp. - . morris, e.w. and perry, b.l. ( ), “the punishment gap: school suspension and racial disparities in achievement”, social problems, vol. no. , pp. - . national center for education statistics ( ), “fast facts: race/ethnicity of college faculty”, september , available at: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id= okonofua, j.a. and eberhardt, j.l. ( ), “two strikes: race and the disciplining of young students”, psychological science, vol. no. , pp. - . pascoe, e.a. and smart richman, l. ( ), “perceived discrimination and health: a meta-analytic review”, psychological bulletin, vol. no. , pp. - . payne, b.k. ( ), “weapon bias: split-second decisions and unintended stereotyping”, current directions in psychological science, vol. no. , pp. - . plaut, v.c., thomas, k.m. and goren, m.j. ( ), “is multiculturalism or color blindness better for minorities?”, psychological science, vol. no. , pp. - . purdie-vaughns, v., steele, c.m., davies, p.g., ditlmann, r. and crosby, j.r. ( ), “social identity contingencies: how diversity cues signal threat or safety for african americans in mainstream institutions”, journal of personality and social psychology, vol. no. , pp. - . steele, c.m., spencer, s.j. and aronson, j. ( ), “contending with group image: the psychology of stereotype and social identity threat”, advances in experimental social psychology, vol. , pp. - . sue, d.w., capodilupo, c.m., torino, g.c., bucceri, j.m., holder, a., nadal, k.l. and esquilin, m. ( ), “racial microaggressions in everyday life: implications for clinical practice”, american psychologist, vol. no. , pp. - . us department of education ( ), “institute of education sciences, national center for education statistics”, september , available at: https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id= (accessed september , ). van den bergh, l., denessen, e., hornstra, l., voeten, m. and holland, r.w. ( ), “the implicit prejudiced attitudes of teachers: relations to teacher expectations and the ethnic achievement gap”, american educational research journal, vol. no. , pp. - . watson, l.b., marszalek, j.m., dispenza, f. and davids, c.m. ( ), “understanding the relationships among white and african american women’s sexual objectification experiences, physical safety anxiety, and psychological distress”, sex roles, vol. nos / , pp. - . guest editorial https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id= https://nces.ed.gov/fastfacts/display.asp?id= waytz, a., hoffman, k.m. and trawalter, s. ( ), “a superhumanization bias in whites’ perceptions of blacks”, social psychological and personality science, vol. no. , pp. - . williams, d.r. and collins, c. ( ), “racial residential segregation: a fundamental cause of racial disparities in health”, public health reports, vol. no. , pp. - . further reading eeoc releases fiscal year enforcement and litigation data ( ), “us equal employment opportunity commission”, september , available at: www .eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/ - - .cfm (accessed september , ). solorzano, d., ceja, m. and yosso, t. ( ), “critical race theory, racial microaggressions, and campus racial climate: the experiences of african american college students”, journal of negro education, vol. nos / , pp. - . edi , www .eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/ - - .cfm www .eeoc.gov/eeoc/newsroom/release/ - - .cfm munich personal repec archive monopoly capital and capitalist inequality: marx after piketty lambert, thomas northern kentucky university january online at https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/ / mpra paper no. , posted feb : utc monopoly capital and capitalist inequality: marx after piketty by thomas e. lambert assistant professor of public administration northern kentucky university highland heights, ky lambertt @nku.edu - - (cell) abstract this paper proposes that one major explanation of growing inequality in the united states (us) is through the use of the concept of economic surplus. the economic surplus is a neo-marxian term which combines the traditional marxian tenet of surplus value with other ways that surplus value can be invested in a mature, advanced capitalist economy. a rising economic surplus that is not absorbed through growing consumer spending, luxury spending or government spending results in stagnant wages and growing inequality via higher levels of underemployment and greater monopoly and monopsony power among a decreasing number of huge, powerful corporations. therefore, the politics surrounding the growth of inequality in the us has to be understood first by understanding over accumulation of the economic surplus by those at the top of the us capitalist class. this research note gives estimates of the rising economic surplus over the last several decades in the us as well as how these correlate with the level of inequality. the growth of the economic surplus gives rise and form to the politics of inequality and austerity. as time goes by, the politics of inequality and austerity in the us will be manifested by greater corporate influence in the political system, greater political polarization, less government mailto:lambertt @nku.edu effectiveness, and more debates about welfare spending, corporate taxation, taxes on upper income households, and taxes on wealth. keywords: alienation, economics, fascism, inequality, monopoly capital, occupy movement, political science, socialism, tea party introduction according to a recent, nationwide opinion poll, approximately % of united states (us) survey respondents indicated that us wealth and income differences should be more equally distributed (newport ). in many political discussions and discourse in the us, the topic of economic inequality is growing in importance, especially as one major candidate for us president has made it a cornerstone of his campaign (talbot ). additionally, the notoriety of thomas piketty’s capital in the twenty-first century ( , english edition) has added grist to the debate since one of piketty’s main points is that a large degree of economic inequality is the norm in a capitalistic system, not the exception. piketty contends that some degree of inequality has been driven by the large increases in managerial and ceo pay over the years (p. ), although a lot of research has failed to show a link between a management team’s pay and corporate performance (collins , chemi and giorgio ). add to this his assertion that rates of return on wealth and assets, or r, are greater than economic growth, or g, then in any society, most of national income tends to accumulate with the investor class, and part of this income becomes more assets and wealth. his central equation, r > g, explains why great concentrations of wealth yield even more wealth concentration as time goes by, especially if r is far above g. finally, with large concentrations of wealth, inherited wealth becomes more and more important in skewing the wealth toward those in the top income ranges, especially if inheritance and income taxes are kept low by national governments. one solution to extremely skewed wealth distribution would be an international tax on wealth and/or inheritances, but piketty believes these unlikely to come into effect. therefore, despite astute analysis of why inequality persists and even becomes worse, piketty’s recommendations to address it are tenuous given political power imbalances in most societies and the inability of nation-states to coordinate actions to solve problems. nonetheless, piketty is at least concerned about the long term impacts of extreme inequality in most nations whereas some mainstream economists do not see it as a big problem if a problem at all. instead, according to these economists, income and wealth inequalities within a society can be explained mostly by differences in labor productivity and educational attainment differences among those in the labor force (feldstein ). on the other hand, critics of extreme inequality claim that too much income and wealth inequality can result in greater political and social alienation or even turmoil on the part of the citizenry, possibly due to the development of a static class structure or rule by oligarchy (solt , newman, johnston and lown ). one school of neo-marxist thought, the “monopoly capital” point of view (baran and sweezy , foster among others), posits that modern inequality exists because of traditional marxist explanations of worker exploitation and because of the power of land owners in the past and in modern times (a rentier class) and mostly because of the political and market powers of large, modern day corporations (i.e., many oligopolistic and monopolistic consumer markets and monopsonistic labor markets). market concentration allows for restricted output (excess capacity), which in turn yields high markups on product prices. restricted output lessens the demand for labor, which along with monoposonistic labor markets (in which workers are limited with regard to employer choices) limit the earnings of workers and raises the unemployment rate beyond what it would be otherwise. in the monopoly capital school of thought, piketty’s observation of r > g can be easily explained by the degree of corporate and upper class dominance in a society in that market concentration and power in product and labor markets yields higher returns and profits than in competitive markets relative to what workers can earn in wages (foster and yates , andrews ). with wages stagnant or not increasing fast enough to keep up with inflation, this makes the degree of labor exploitation even stronger (piketty , lambert and kwon a). finally, since innovation and the resulting products from innovation usually reach a peak in sales and market share, g is usually low, and so the economy usually tends toward stagnation. that is, according to the monopoly capital point of view, the product life cycle of rapid growth, slow growth, and then peak sales occurs with all products, and if no further innovations are forthcoming to keep an economy growing, then slow or negative growth occurs. this is compounded by the fact that as many industries cease to grow as rapidly as they have in their early stages, jobs are eventually shed as labor saving techniques are introduced, and this can exacerbate any unemployment and inequality problems. finally, slow growing or declining sales in existing product markets and a lack of new products or markets in which to invest lead to fewer investment outlets for the upper capitalist class. this causes the “economic surplus” of a society to rise, which can be manifested in over accumulation of surplus or under consumption of goods and services. according to baran and sweezy ( ), the economic surplus is the amount over and above what is required to produce a given level of output and is normally considered as comprised of things such business profits, property rents, interest payments, and wasteful expenditures on such things as luxury items, advertising, retailing, research and development , finance, and military programs. using piketty’s equation (or inequality), since r > g, the surplus of the wealthier classes rises faster than what it can invest in productive investment or assets. hence, in order to use the excess surplus that is accumulated, the result is spending on many wasteful items according to baran and sweezy. wasteful and non-wasteful activities are seen from a traditional marxian perspective these that uses a non-productive and productive dichotomy for classifying economic activity and labor. productive activity or labor includes those activities such as agriculture, manufacturing, mining, utilities, construction, transportation, and some forms of government activity such as education, sanitation, and emergency services (baran and sweezy , shaikh and tonak , mohun and among others). these activities and labor are considered productive because they produce surplus value and add value in that they satisfy the consumer needs of food, clothing, shelter, education, etc. those economic sectors that are classified as unproductive add little or no value and are only ancillary to the productive sectors of the economy. yet, the unproductive sectors are necessary in order to provide an outlet for accumulated surplus that cannot be channeled into productive sectors if the latter are not growing (baran and sweezy ). for baran and sweezy ( ) this combination of surplus value obtained from worker exploitation (where workers produced output greater than their wages) and expenditures for non- productive labor and activities made up their concept of the economic surplus. therefore, as wages remain stagnant or decline as prices and profits rise (which would cause r to increase even according to them, most research and development revolves around product re-design or re-branding rather than new product development, which is often not fruitful. some marxist writer and scholars do not believe that the dichotomy exists or is important (houston , laibman ) more relative to g in piketty’s equation) and as non-productive sectors grow, then a nation’s economic surplus would grow. along with this growth in economic surplus, as wages are stagnant or declining, one would expect to see rising inequality due to rising labor exploitation, and so there should be a high degree of correlation between the economic surplus and inequality. this research note proceeds as follows. next is a section in which the methods of evaluating the argument that the economic surplus and inequality are linked are discussed. then a results section summarizes the findings. finally, a discussion and conclusion elaborate on the research results and offers recommendations for further research. methods this paper uses time series, least squares regression to predict the levels of income inequality (top % income share, including capital gains) and wealth inequality (net private wealth as a portion of all income ) in the us from to using the monopoly capital concept of economic surplus as a percentage of gdp. this is a method similar to that used by lambert and kwon ( a) in which they predicted the percentage change in top income shares over a similar time period using different concepts of surplus and other variables. the top % income share and wealth to total income numbers come from the world wealth and income database, a database created by piketty and other researchers of inequality (alvaredo, atkinson, piketty , saez, and zucman ). the economic surplus as a portion of us gdp was used by baran and sweezy ( ) to illustrate the level of exploitation occurring in the us over time. in an appendix by joseph d. phillips, the surplus as a portion of gdp is constructed as the sum of business profits, rent, property income, interest, dividends, depreciation, and the value of the this is piketty’s “beta” concept, which is a nation’s wealth, or capital, over its income. he uses this as a measure of wealth concentration for each nation, and the greater beta is, the greater the degree of wealth inequality. in the us, this has generally ranged from to % from the s to (piketty , figure . , p. . the data for this paper shows the same pattern. “wasteful” sectors of the economy (e.g., finance, insurance, real estate, services, government etc.) divided by gdp. later, shaikh and tonak ( ) fine-tuned the economic surplus concept as a portion of gdp that is basically the value of gross domestic product less the value of the wages and salaries in the productive sectors of the economy. this paper adapts their concept, which has also been used by other authors (wolf , lambert and kwon a and b). the source of the data is from the us bureau of economic analysis (bea) national economics accounts tables website, http://www.bea.gov/national/index.htm , and more specifically table . . , gross domestic product and table . a, compensation of employees by industry. this paper contends that there should be a high degree of correlation between the economic surplus and two variables, income and wealth inequality, since capitalist wealth and income are extracted by high rates of labor exploitation and the wasteful investment of surplus into productive and non-productive activities. results figures and show that the economic surplus concept and the income and wealth shares are highly correlated and have strong, direct and positive relationships. table , model , shows the economic surplus as a percentage of gdp to be a statistically significant predictor of the income shares of the top %, and it explains about % of the variation in top % income shares. a one percent increase in economic surplus is associated with around a % increase in top % income share on average. in model , a % increase in economic surplus as a share of gdp predicts a % increase in the wealth to income percentage on average. model shows the economic surplus variable to be statistically significant and explains about % of the variation in wealth to income. in using ordinary least squares analysis, the durbin-watson the world wealth and income database has us data from to , but only the years to are used in this paper because bea data only goes back to for the data needed. http://www.bea.gov/national/index.htm statistic is less than the lower critical value at α < . for both models indicating positive serial correlation, so newey-west standard errors to correct for any autocorrelation or serial correlation are used in both models (studenmund , pages - ). discussion and conclusion the regression results support the hypotheses advanced by this paper. the bulk of the gains made by the upper classes in us society appear to have occurred because of increases in us economic surplus, which grew as a result of stagnant wages to labor (or greater labor exploitation) and greater investment in what baran and sweezy ( ) would characterize as “waste”---the unproductive sectors of the us economy (lambert and kwon a). politically, greater labor exploitation and greater inequality in both wealth and income make for a potentially volatile situation according to piketty ( ). toward the end of his book the theory of capitalist development ( ( original), set in the us during the great depression and on the eve of its entry into world war ii, paul sweezy speculates on the question of whether fascism is inevitable in a society which has suffered and continues to suffer a major economic crisis. similar to the nations that suffered trauma during and after world war i because of economic hardships, military defeat and/or subsequent economic crisis (e.g., germany and italy), the us was dealing with high unemployment and excess industrial capacity, although the us had come out of world war i stronger than any other nation in the world. sweezy believes that a nation which has embarked in imperialist ventures in the past (i.e., has had colonies or territories) and has a capitalist economy, although a faltering one, and has suffered some type of national trauma (war, depression, etc.) is a good candidate for a fascistic takeover of the government. he rejects this as inevitability for the us during the time of his writings for the book, but leaves open the possibility for a later date should circumstances change. have circumstances changed enough since then? other writings on fascism and socialism offer some clues as to possible future scenarios. the us has possibly suffered the greatest economic crisis since the great depression due to the - great recession and its aftermath. subsequent economic growth after the recession’s “end” in has been very slow, with stagnant wages, a great number of people dropping out of the labor force, an increase in the official poverty rate, and now an apparent slowdown in the global economy, which could spell more trouble for the us economy (greenhouse and leonhardt , foster and magdoff , lambert , mongiovi , patnaik ). although illegal immigration has declined during this time period, there still persists a common belief among the working classes that a large number of illegal immigrants are harming the working class (goo ). additionally, the aftermath of wars in afghanistan and iraq and continued problems with terrorist groups such as al queda and isis have put the nation almost on a perpetual war time footing since . recently, a watchdog organization that monitors hate groups and hate crimes in the us, the southern poverty law center, issued a report stating that the number of hate groups that exist in the us rose % from to , mostly due controversies over immigration, newly legalized same-sex marriage, terrorism, and a counter movement against an african-american protest movement (“black live matter”) against police brutality (chokshi ). many of these groups are claimed to have an extreme rightward orientation, although some consist of african- american separatist groups. the southern poverty law center also reported that the us federal bureau of investigation (fbi) noted an increase in hate crimes against muslims in . fascism has been generally defined as a political and economic system which arises from national political and/or economic turmoil and wherein capitalism is seen as chaotic and has to be managed by a strong, nationalistic government led by elites which seeks to unite labor and upper class interests rather than try to exploit class struggle. the capitalist class, however, is allowed to retain its property rights and business interests, although it now has to submit to a “managed” form of capitalism in which industry is organized into large and cooperative cartels (sabine and thorson , carsten , renton , amin ). in return for full and steady employment, labor gives up its unions and a large number of its rights, which assists with an austerity efforts to balance national budgets and pay off debts. such a compromise goes a long one in managing social spending that cannot keep up with the chaos (economic downturns), unemployment, poverty, and inequality brought about due to capitalism’s excesses (o’connor ). piketty ( ) acknowledges that much of the austerity movement in developed and developing countries has emanated from the fact that most bondholders are from the world’s wealthy and upper classes, and therefore, austerity is imposed to make sure that the debt is properly serviced and paid, even if it means harsh conditions for debtor nations. fascism does seem plausible in other nations that are undergoing austerity due to having to repay debts to the imf or other financial institutions. repressive regimes could arise when faced with labor and working class strife arising from a negative reaction to austerity measures. although there is a more remote chance in the us since many of its financial institutions hold such debt, it is not entirely out of the question. this is due to the possibility of chronic deficits and a debt level at % of gdp which the nation does not seem capable of adequately addressing in the current political climate. inaction with regard to increasing taxes or significantly decreasing spending seems to be the norm now, although this may change if the economy becomes very bad in the future. o’connor ( ) speculates that greater and greater levels of social spending are necessary in a monopoly capitalist economy due to capitalist interests being able to shift more and more social problems on to the government (spending on unemployment, welfare, and job training, for example). yet at the same time, capitalist interests resist greater levels of taxation. with the resistance to higher taxes and a rising budget defiti and debt level, austerity and cutbacks are the next option, which in turn could lead to a working class revolt. the reaction to such a revolt, could lead to some type of politically and economically repressive regime. this is a grim but possible scenario unfortunately. table : times series, least squares model : dependent variable is us top % income shares including capital gains, to b (newey-west standard errors) 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jewish collective memory: "trapped in history" in america precarious pasts and jewish collective memory: "trapped in history" in america caroline light journal of jewish identities, volume , number , january , pp. - (article) published by johns hopkins university press doi: for additional information about this article [ access provided at apr : gmt from carnegie mellon university ] https://doi.org/ . /jji. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ https://doi.org/ . /jji. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ january , ( ) precarious pasts and jewish collective memory: “trapped in history” in america caroline light, harvard university people are trapped in history and history is trapped in them. james baldwin, “stranger in the village” ( ) the past does not exist independently of the present. michel-rolph trouillot, silencing the past ( ) an alarming wave of antisemitism kicked off , leaving many amer- ican jews longing for stability, for a sense of identitarian coherence amidst mayhem. the anti-defamation league documented an percent increase in antisemitic incidents—including bomb threats, cemetery and synagogue desecrations, and general harassment—compared to the same period in . white nationalist and neo-nazi mobilization has become increasingly visi- ble nationwide. against this menacing backdrop, enter dc-comics inspired wonder woman—the first major superhero movie directed by a woman and featuring a female lead—in june . the title character, played by israeli beauty queen and former israeli defense forces (idf) soldier gal gadot, was everything one could want in a twenty-first-century jewish action figure: in- telligent, righteous, beautiful, and more powerful than any man. it was easy to imagine wonder woman’s appearance in american movie theaters as an answer to many prayers: as a beacon of justice and defender of the innocent in a troubled world; as a figure of feminine power and self-determination after the defeat of democratic presidential candidate hillary rodham clinton by a man who bragged about his non-consensual exploits with women; as a sym- bol of jewish strength and dignity amidst a disquieting surge of antisemitism. wonder woman’s arrival in movie theaters and the spike in antisemitism together sparked often heated discussions over the nature of jewish identity, with commentators from a variety of social media and news outlets debating gadot’s race, and jewish race identity more generally. some insisted on jew- ish whiteness and racial privilege, while others asserted that jewish people are anything but white. in response to criticism that the film’s producers did not cast a non-white lead, comic book authority matthew mueller insisted that journal of jewish identities ( ), ( ) precarious pasts and jewish collective memory journal of jewish identities gadot, as an israeli, is in fact a “person of color.” others took this argument further, claiming that jewish people—regardless of nationality—should not be characterized as white. in forward, joel finkelstein and blogger dani ishai behan argued that to call jewish people “white” is to deny their historical subjugation and to downplay the persistence of antisemitism. according to finkelstein, “the poisonous narrative [of jewish whiteness] forcibly decou- ples jewish identities and legitimate suffering from the causes of all other oppressed persons of color.” others countered that, while american jews have been and continue to be targeted by antisemitism, they are often benefi- ciaries of racial privilege. noah berlatsky, also writing in the forward, point- ed to the contemporary visibility and acceptance of jewish actors as leads in mainstream films, compared to the relative scarcity of lead roles for black ac- tors. feminist theologian sarah emanuel opined, “even if we recognize the racialized otherness of jews historically, jews with light-toned skin have still, in many instances, benefitted from systems of white supremacy, particularly in the united states.” while berlatsky’s and emanuel’s arguments empha- size current privileges and access to representational power, finkelstein and behan address a past of “legitimate suffering” that creates a natural alliance between jewish people and other “oppressed persons of color.” both insights carry ethical weight and historical resonance, but they stand at odds regarding jewish access to race privilege, as if racial identities were fixed in time, or race privilege—and the relative security that comes with it—could not coexist with “legitimate suffering,” past or present. what might appear at first blush an argument over semantics offers a lens on the role histories of subjugation play in the contemporary construction of jewish coherence. amidst a backdrop of rampant antisemitism, growing mil- itarization of american culture, and persistent assaults on racial justice, ar- guments exempting jews from white privilege often embrace the similarities between antisemitism and other systems of exclusion without closely inter- rogating their points of divergence. fifty years ago, james baldwin, novelist and social critic wrote in a controversial new york times essay, “one does not wish, in short, to be told by an american jew that his suffering is as great as the american negro’s suffering. it isn’t, and one knows that it isn’t from the very tone in which he assures you that it is.” his point was not to deny the endurance or intensity of antisemitism, but rather to question the appeals to fellowship and commonality from those who participate in or benefit from racial injustice. our contemporary moment demands that we take baldwin’s critique se- riously by interrogating the historical and political terms by which jewish american identities are solidified, often around testimonies of past subju- gation and appeals to political innocence. this summer’s feminist superhero blockbuster offers a poignant lens on the contemporary contours of collective memory in the service of jewish coherence. in the film, wonder woman ar- rives in london during world war i, having played no role in creating the car- nage; her violence is purely defensive against an enemy who has threatened to obliterate mankind. wonder woman’s representational power as a force of caroline light january , ( ) righteous, defensive violence depends on her innocence of human-generated history as well as her absence of complicity in instigating violence. her hero- ism derives persuasive power in large part from her political insouciance—she had no hand in creating the bloodshed she seeks to resolve—and her historical knowledge encompasses only greek mythology. in this contemporary revi- sionist fantasy, war is the creation not of human beings but of ares, the ma- levolent god of war. wonder woman’s lethal attack on ares and his german allies is justified both by her historical innocence and the violent encounter’s utopic outcome: a world without war, without genocide. how do claims to jewish minority identity depend on collective memories that anchor jewish coherence in a past of subjugation and slavery? time-worn histories of jewish coherence often depend upon silences in the process of his- tory itself, masking the power structures that make such claims resonate with twenty-first-century audiences. how might we rethink our attachments to co- herence and historic intelligibility as terms by which we solidify our collective identity as jewish people and as citizens of an intractably incoherent world? in a nation polarized around conflicting appeals to social vulnerability and to the legacies of—and resistance to—white supremacy, historical testimonies of violence multiply in the service of complex, sometimes competing identity claims. when it comes right down to it, jewish coherence often depends upon shared appeals to the past that obfuscate alternative, ambivalent narratives, some of which challenge the neat and tidy categories into which we place self and other, jew and non-jew. the variegated histories of subjugation on which these claims for coherence are based reveal that the identity politics of today are inextricably entangled with the past, and that the past, in fact, is far from behind us. incoherent testimony: the silence in the archive merriam-webster defines “coherence” in two seemingly incongruent reg- isters: “(a) systematic or logical connection or consistency” and “(b) integra- tion of diverse elements, relationships, or values.” the first emphasizes a preexisting internal logic or stability while the second addresses the process required to unify “diverse elements.” appeals to shared history help gather a multiplicity of politically and culturally “diverse elements” into an intelli- gible community, even as american jewish identity remains stubbornly het- erogeneous. as historian eric goldstein and others have demonstrated, this process of meaning-making often depends on the assembly of a shared histo- ry by which jewish people—in all their cultural, linguistic, political, and yes, even racial diversity—are known as a legible collectivity, one subject to unique forms of exclusion and violence. a shared past of vulnerability and struggle for social inclusion thus becomes a vehicle of coherence by which american jewish identity claims are realized. for joel finkelstein and others, to call jews “white” is to negate that shared history, to place jewish people alongside oth- er light-skinned people who have—to varying degrees—benefitted historical- ly from and participated in white supremacist power structures. precarious pasts and jewish collective memory journal of jewish identities trained as a cultural historian, i look for insight into contemporary ap- peals to historical coherence as outcomes of a particular historical process, one where power-infused silences shape collectively circulated narratives. i am in- debted to the late haitian anthropologist michel-rolph trouillot, who illumi- nated the ways in which silence inevitably shapes the multilayered process of historical knowledge-production. as humans live and as their actions affect others and the world around them, so do they narrate the terms of what will become their past. but historical actors do not have equal access to the power of testimony, and not all testimonies carry the same weight or resonance in what eventually becomes “history.” trouillot’s work demonstrates how the stories that comprise historical truth are always at the mercy of human biases, mistakes, errors of memory, and above all, imbalances of power. testimony from people who witness or take part in significant events shapes the histor- ical record, but those from powerless and silenced individuals are less likely to find purchase in the traditional archive, and therefore exert less impact in shaping what becomes known as historical truth. the silencing of certain testimonies is not a matter of deliberate individual control or domination. rather, we collectively participate in the active ma- nipulation of historical narratives by producing knowledge about the past that reflects prevailing needs, anxieties, and ambitions in the contemporary moment. as trouillot cautions, “the past does not exist independently from the present.” as we summon the histories that resonate for us in the pres- ent—that help us concretize our collective identities—we necessarily forget (or downplay) those that might challenge our ethical authority. our collective identities depend upon the shared memories that are meaningful and intelli- gible to us, and the shared rituals, celebrations, and memorials that invoke the past help bond and solidify communities. especially as contemporary jewish- ness stubbornly resists (ethnic, religious, political, etc.) coherence, our collec- tive belonging as jewish people requires historical common ground. jewish intelligibility therefore depends on the capacity to make disparate elements cohere around a shared past of precarity, and our contemporary processes of historical meaning-making retroactively shape what we are able to remember. the testimonies that substantiate mainstream histories of jewish coherence depend on the way we make sense of the archival traces left behind by histor- ical precursors. whose testimony matters in the archives of jewish coherence? how do archives from the deep past, as well as from our contemporary mo- ment, reflect the creation of collective historical memory in the name of jewish coherence, and the dependency of that legibility on identification with subju- gation? we might observe the ways in which figures of abjection and alteri- ty—of unfreedom and slavery—haunt our most cherished appeals to jewish coherence-as-freedom and transcendence. for trouillot, history is a “sociohistorical process” that leaves material trac- es in the form of archives, which then provide sources for our efforts to narrate the past, to pass down stories that will lodge themselves in the memories of our children, and our children’s children. silences inevitably permeate this process, from the moment that a historical act takes place to the point at which caroline light january , ( ) it becomes sedimented in collective consciousness as “history.” trouillot fo- cuses on four moments in historical production: ) fact creation or the creation of sources; ) fact assembly, or the creation of archives; ) fact retrieval, the production of narratives; and ) retrospective significance, the production of historical “truth.” temporal distance from the past grants increasing pres- tige to the narratives created by those in possession of the power not only to testify, but to be heard or witnessed by those around them—to be “legible” or coherent—in a given moment. those testimonies that resonate the most, that are coherent to the most influential audience, tend to be the stories that best conform to the urgent needs and ontologies, the ready-made categories by which the world is organized, for those interpreting the past from the present. attending to silences in the process of historical meaning-making enables us to consider the stubborn incoherence of historical truth, in the service of new ways of theorizing identity formation. our confidence in historical truth influences the production of contempo- rary identities, just as it depends on the sources informing that truth. those who assemble the archive itself—that which contains the very matter of histo- ry and the material evidence by which the stories congeal into the historical record—are implicated in selecting which experiences are included in that ar- chive, and which are left out. this failure is sometimes one of memory, but more often one of ontology: those collecting history-as-chronology can imag- ine as historically worthy those facts that validate an accepted or naturalized worldview. in other words, we see and internalize only that which is legible, or coherent, to us. we are also creatures of mimicry and habit, repeating tales that were told to us as children, but only the stories that catch in our consciousness as legi- ble reflections on the ideological spaces we inhabit. histories of heroism and resistance, of triumph over oppression, hold particular sway during times of upheaval. popular fantasies manipulate history itself, as when wonder wom- an’s fictional character slays ares, the god of war, just in time to prevent the future genocide that we as twenty-first-century viewers know to be looming. in this case, the superhero succeeds as a figure of historical revision and res- cue, channeling collective longings into an alternate ending, where war as we know it ends and millions of jewish lives are spared. incredible witness: the slave as figure of unfreedom such a revisionist fantasy answers an archive plagued by violence and loss with a narrative of empowerment and rescue. as gadot’s wonder woman un- leashes her self-possessed, righteous fury on the german army, she forecloses the eventuality of nazi genocide. in sharp contrast to this empowered jewish superhero, contingency and disempowerment haunt the conceptual framing of many of the narratives and histories that legitimize jewishness as a bound and intelligible collectivity, recognized from within as well as without. from the deep past to the present, the fetishized figure of the slave has helped con- precarious pasts and jewish collective memory journal of jewish identities cretize the boundaries differentiating jews from non-jews. a simultaneously knowable and unknowable figure that resurfaces in the crucial texts used to trace and reaffirm jewish genealogies, the slave serves often as a symbol of unfreedom against whom jews might know themselves to be free. we might observe, for example, how the figure of the slave appears as one of three iden- tity-delineating boundaries in the blessings, dating back to antiquity, that ob- servant jewish men have recited daily upon waking: blessed are you, god, our lord, king of the universe, who has not made me a gentile. blessed are you, god, our lord, king of the universe, who has not made me a woman. blessed are you, god, our lord, king of the universe, who has not made me a slave. if knowing ourselves by what we are not is vital to the practice of coher- ence, the way in which “disparate elements” may cohere into a recognizable collectivity depends upon the boundaries separating us from others, those who constitute the outer limits of subjectivity. these oft-repeated blessings invoked the slave, the woman, and the gentile as recognizable archetypes of otherness against which jewishness cohered around free and sovereign mas- culinity. in his historical analysis of the “three blessings,” reform rabbi and religious scholar yoel kahn argues that the blessings evinced “the ongoing desire to establish authenticity” by naming the various categories of humanity against whom jewish manhood defined itself. the slave in these instances of ritualized jewish coherence is one of intersectional alterity, a figure defined more by its alienation and difference than its distinct personhood. jewishness as freedom-from-bondage, particularly the freedom to worship god, rather than an earthly ruler, gains coherence from its presumed masculinity in juxta- position to the feminized subordination of enslavement. similarly gendered contrasts—wherein masculinity signifies freedom and sovereignty in contrast to feminized subservience—appear in legal archives as well. in antiquity, jewish courts defined a viable witness as male, free, and properly jewish, while excluding slaves, women, apostates, and other pre- sumably untrustworthy individuals from providing legal testimony. ac- cording to feminist talmud scholar judith hauptman, “the lack of distinction between a male and a female slave makes clear that ‘slave’ status, not gender, was the issue that could disqualify or qualify them” as witnesses in a partic- ular case. but what if social status itself is gendered? although “women” are differentiated from credible witnesses by their non-masculine gender, and “slaves” are distinguished by their non-freedom, each is similarly excluded from the capacity to offer credible testimony based upon their social subordi- nation and lack of sovereignty. the traditional exclusion of women and slaves from testimony suggests a gendered epistemology of incoherence by which jewish authenticity coheres in sovereign masculinity. caroline light january , ( ) i invoke the figure of the slave not to suggest an ahistorical or universal- izing narrative of slavery, or to presume all forms of slavery politically and economically equivalent. on the contrary, i ask that we think self-critically about the ways in which the enslaved person has been fetishized as an object of historical instrumentality—as a figure of alienation and alterity, of unfree- dom—in naturalized narratives of jewish coherence, many of which persist today. the silences around certain power-infused sources of historical testi- mony, and the resulting archival absences, must be at the center of critical interrogations of jewish coherence. in “venus in two acts,” feminist literary scholar saidiya hartman writes “at the limit of the unspeakable and the unknown” to address the absence of any “autobiographical narrative of a female captive who survived the middle passage.” she mines the archives of transatlantic slavery, attending to the silences and lacunae, the erasures that pose the enslaved woman as an un- named object of sexual violence: “no one remembered her name or recorded the things she said, or observed that she refused to say anything at all. hers is an untimely story told by a failed witness.” called “venus,” after the roman goddess of love, by those who possessed and exploited her, the girl about whom hartman writes could not testify to her experience, and those who caused and bore witness to her suffering and untimely death did not consider hers a loss worth grieving. rather, her death appears cursorily in the archive because of the property loss it occasioned, and the possibility of legal malfea- sance due to the ship captain’s abuse. we receive “no picture of her everyday life, no pathway to her thoughts”; the violence she suffered recorded as crimes against property. as hartman’s work demonstrates, the absence of testimony—the words of millions whose lives often ended violently and anonymously in the holds of slave ships, or on whose reproductive labor this nation’s political and econom- ic dominance depended—obfuscates the lived experiences of enslaved wom- en. the absolute absence of firsthand testimony from these historical actors creates a void that gets filled by default depictions of the enslaved by those who owned them. in the case of “venus,” we witness the invention—by gener- ations of white, male, historical truth-tellers—of a perpetually receptive object of sexual depravity. the figure of the enslaved woman thus gains coherence through her reproduction as the eroticized site of multiplying violence, with catastrophic consequences for contemporary epistemologies of personhood. hartman’s effort to speak to an unrecoverable testimony points to the bru- tal implications for trouillot’s fourth layer in the historical process, the cre- ation of retrospective significance of the past. the absence of testimony from “venus,” the resulting incoherence of an archive in which we cannot access the lived experiences, words, and daily thoughts of millions of enslaved wom- en brutalized in the middle passage, reverberates forcefully in the present. hartman attends to the “afterlife of property . . . the detritus of lives with which we have yet to attend, a past that has yet to be done, and the ongoing state of emergency in which black life remains in peril.” the past still lingers, is not quite past, and the missing matter of history has grim implications for precarious pasts and jewish collective memory journal of jewish identities those living at the volatile intersections of structural and epistemological vio- lence today. if our historic archives are by design constructed around willful, power-in- fused silences, then what takes shape as historical truth depends on the rela- tion of the “truth-tellers” to larger structures of power. in trouillot’s analysis, the composition of archives depends on the deliberate curation of testimo- nies, those that appear (to the curator) worthy of inclusion. further, identitar- ian frames and logics of difference invest the process of archive-construction with power in multiple ways. the voices and circumstances of enslaved peo- ple—including the young girls and women who experienced untold violence aboard transatlantic slave ships—were rarely documented directly, nor were their stories deemed worthy of inclusion in what counts as “real history,” un- less they were implicated in legal controversy, providing testimony in matters of concern to white power. it is in these rare instances we might glimpse the enslaved person’s testimony in the historical record, but even then, their voice is ciphered through the language of those with authority to document what they deem relevant and to leave out that which they deem irrelevant. or incoherent. archival assembly has always depended upon someone’s judg- ment about what makes sense to include, a quest for coherence that inevitably leaves gaping wounds. the history trapped in us perhaps ours is not a world in which slavery has ceased to exist; rather, it is one in which dehistoricized gestures to slavery help us tidily and coherent- ly delimit the boundaries of justice. in reply to an english woman’s descrip- tion of her work as a secretary, wonder woman quips, “where i come from, that’s called slavery.” hers is a convenient shorthand by which contempo- rary american audiences may imagine the antithesis of the liberated woman. wonder woman, representing an earlier era in which greek slavery prevailed, addresses her twenty-first-century audience from a film set one hundred years ago. we might imagine “venus”—or, in the greek case, aphrodite—as a har- ried administrative assistant dashing to deliver her boss’s coffee. if women’s liberation from patriarchal power—the core mission of modern liberal fem- inism—is the antithesis of a historically, geographically, and culturally in- determinate state of slavery, how do we account for the intersecting power structures by which many are excluded from the benefits and protections of full citizenship, and those for whom the binaristic compulsions of normative gender are always-already cross-cut with racialized violence? our feminist heroine obliterates patriarchal power in the form of a proto-nazi german army; as novelist robert rath writes in the popular culture blog, waypoint, “it’s hard to hate a movie where a jewish actress rams a sword through a prominent nazi.” our spectacle of nazi-killing feminist fury leaves the less visible, normalized traces of contemporary white supremacy comfortably, co- herently in place. caroline light january , ( ) the film’s contortions of history evince the facility with which we borrow the moral authority of the powerless and silenced even as we resist close inter- rogation of our own complicity in regimes of domination. appeals to precar- ity-based coherence appear and become naturalized in our performative rit- uals. we might consider the seder, the jewish annual celebration of liberation from egyptian slavery. our leftist, queer, and feminist haggadah revisions notwithstanding, what political work is done in the service of jewish coher- ence when we celebrate our collective freedom by comparing it to a remote past of unfreedom, characterized in a dehistoricized figure of the slave? the slave looms large in the varied retellings of this ages-old story of subju- gation and oppression, of resistance and liberation. in fact, one is hard pressed in the process of multiple retellings across the ages, to particularize the figure of the slave, to ground the slave in a past beyond her biblical abstractions. according to jewish studies scholar catherine hezser, “the experience of slavery seems to have been such a familiar phenomenon in ancient jewish so- ciety that its terminology was also used metaphorically in the religious, social, psychological, and political realm.” what does this “familiar phenomenon” mean to us as jewish people today, and to which “experience of slavery” do our contemporary haggadot refer? more often than not, the seder’s retelling of the story of exodus naturalizes a decontextualized figure of slavery, one manufactured through the cascading silences of our persistently inadequate archive, a subjugated other whose unfreedom and archival invisibility made certain forms of liberation possible, but only for some. what historical legacies are made and unmade in this process of repeated, performative historical nar- ration, and what silences preserved? as hartman shows, the lack of coherent testimony from historical actors— those whose bodies were used for grueling menial and reproductive labor, and for sexual gratification, and whose value as commodities nullified their humanity—resonates in the present. for these historical actors, the archive is a mute, occasionally echoing cavern that reverberates in our contemporary world’s distorted depictions of black personhood as criminal and threatening, as effortlessly commodifiable, as not-entitled to full humanity. state-sanctioned violence in the service of “national security” and “public safety” continues to claim the lives of a growing multitude of people of color. while activists chal- lenge the state to make good on its hitherto rhetorical commitment to equal justice, insisting “black lives matter,” white counter-protesters divert atten- tion away from the historic precarity of blackness. the rejoinder “all lives matter” suggests that insistence on life and security for racially minoritized people undermines universal claims to humanity. the claim and subsequent counterclaim share a similar embeddedness in and reliance upon histories of collective vulnerability, but they are based on competing sources of testimo- nial evidence. perhaps more perniciously, the counterclaim obfuscates the im- pact of multilayered historical silence in american archives of precarity. the testimonies of jewish americans dating back to our nation’s settler colonialist roots echo through this archive, grounding the panoply of jewish experiences in historical evidence while concretizing the coherence of “jewish american.” precarious pasts and jewish collective memory journal of jewish identities how might hartman’s and trouillot’s exegesis of historical knowl- edge-production help address the complex relationship between histories of subjugation and contemporary debates about jewish race identity? what are the ethical implications of collapsing histories of racism and antisemitism, particularly in testimonies by which jewish people are imagined not only as subject to similar historic harms as african americans, but also as natural allies in ongoing struggles for racial justice? such potentially uncomfortable self-reflection is urgent when modern crusaders for intersectional justice in the united states seek common cause with palestinians while accusing the israeli government of “genocide” and “apartheid.” criticism of this rhetoric was swift and came from left-leaning as well as conservative jewish commen- tators, many of whom condemned the black lives matter platform as antisemitic. in his denunciation of the platform’s “vision for black lives,” tablet mag- azine senior writer and former idf soldier liel leibovitz invoked jewish pre- carity as the grounds for armed defensive militancy. in an online publication that disguises its corporate sustenance behind a veneer of hipster edginess, leibovitz described firearms as great equalizers, as levelers of socio-economic, ethnic, gender, and racial difference. about his multicultural group of idf trainees, leibovitz writes, “with guns in hand, we were so evidently and so beautifully equal.” here, lethal weapons provide a commonsense solution to two pressing issues: jewish vulnerability to antisemitic violence and the need for the otherwise elusive “level playing field” for all minoritized people. lei- bovitz thus frames armed self-defense as both a right and an urgent necessity for jewish people, as a shield against antisemitic violence and as evidence of a commitment to liberal multiculturalism. contra the claims of israel’s critics, particularly the framers of “a vision for black life,” leibovitz suggests that jewish self-defense in the present promises a brighter, more inclusive future, one grounded in a historic triumph over subjugation. one might picture an otherworldly, heroic wonder woman in wartime london: no one can ques- tion the nobility of her motives because she did not create the catastrophe she has been sent to repair. for leibovitz, idf soldiers are the heroic, armed “good guys” coming to the rescue of the weak; their “beautiful equality” a rejoinder to assertions of israeli complicity in palestinian suffering. the moral absolut- ism of this appeal to simultaneous jewish precarity and heroism silences what leibovitz dubs the “racist critics” who question the historical logic of militant self-defense and the testimony of jewish vulnerability on which it is based. might our idf-trained, jewish wonder woman use her golden lasso to help extract painful truths against a rising tide of “alternative facts” and stub- bornly widespread historical amnesia? could the heated discussions her vis- ibility has sparked lead us toward a more honest and forthright politics of remembrance? as an israeli, gadot is a foreigner in the united states, just as her on-screen avatar is a foreigner in london, a place she dubs “hideous.” in each location—the film world and the real—gadot’s/wonder woman’s exot- ic accent and ignorance of the cultural surround mark her as a stranger and non-citizen. she arrives in london mystified by the bloodshed and ignorant of caroline light january , ( ) human history; she has played no role in instigating the war, nor is she aware of its causes beyond the stratagems of a malevolent god whose engine of de- struction happens to be the german army. in fact, wonder woman’s capacity to serve as a savior, to mete out violence in the service of protection, not ag- gression, depends on her capacity to stand outside of history. wonder wom- an’s political and historical innocence may be her most resonant superpower, one that rubs off on the actual woman playing her so coherently as heroine whose righteousness is beyond question. this performance of heroic insouciance resonates in a time of stubborn in- coherence, where state-fueled aggression targets the most vulnerable in the name of security for the powerful few, masking the structures that naturalize the murder and criminalization of people excluded from the exonerating pow- er of whiteness. under these circumstances, what is the relationship of owning (or denying) one’s white privilege to owning (or denying) one’s complicity in these naturalizing structures? the quandary is by necessity a historical one. people whose ancestors were once excluded from what w.e.b. du bois fa- mously called “the public and psychological wage” of white privilege might enjoy significant access to those privileges today. great-grandchildren of european immigrants who fled pogroms and genocidal antisemitism to face literacy tests, discrimination, and poverty in the goldene medine (golden land) often take for granted the spoils of race privilege in the form of unquestioned voting rights, access to upward mobility, and genial treatment by law enforce- ment. yet jewish access to the “wages of whiteness” has been questioned time and time again, and we are reminded of that fragility when jewish ceme- teries and memorials, spaces of worship, and daycare centers are defaced and threatened, when white nationalist protesters wearing swastikas and crying “jews will not replace us” receive police protection and tacit presidential sup- port in the name of “free speech.” what kinds of historical testimony will we allow to legitimate our most urgent calls for action? as an epidemic of antisemitism threatens our security, how might we attend to the archival silences that displace alternative visions of social justice at a time when it is most tempting to cling to binaristic framings of “us” versus “them,” and when neofascist political assemblages compete for the attention of those caught up in the terror of spectacularized violence? it is precisely at these moments that the call to coherence rings out as a seductive promise of safety, of timeless belonging for those who feel vulnerable. as we explore and question difference and coherence, the slippery line separating “jew” from “non-jew,” we must return again to the past to revisit and decode our time-honored histories, to read into and beyond the gaping silences. and the methods for excavating them are by necessity complex, interdisciplinary, and disconcertingly inter-implicating. perhaps this moment commands us to rethink our privileged relation to testimony, to firsthand evidence from a living witness. we might note that not all testimony matters in the same way. notwithstanding technological ad- vances, such as iphones, that allow us to record in-the-moment atrocities as they are experienced, and then to project them endlessly to virtual audienc- precarious pasts and jewish collective memory journal of jewish identities es too numerous to count, much firsthand testimony remains inadequate to shift the wheels of justice. civilians continue to capture the visual evidence of police violence against african americans and to preserve them in a vast cyber-archive: eric garner’s death as a police officer crushed his windpipe even as he pleaded “i can’t breathe”; philando castile’s polite but futile efforts to comply with police commands to retrieve his license; the rough arrest of sandra bland after she refused to extinguish her cigarette. our audio-visual archive proliferates, shattering geospatial boundaries, and enlisting us all as witnesses in a seemingly endless cycle of black disposability, a recurring crisis in value. the testimonial proof of police violence against people of color circu- lates endlessly, spectacularizing black suffering in a world increasingly desen- sitized to, willfully unanchored from, and in denial of its ongoing investment in white supremacy. and justice for the murdered remains elusive. to return to trouillot, and to echo james baldwin, we are never more “trapped in history” as when we pretend otherwise. baldwin’s asser- tion marks a reciprocal entrapment—not only are we “trapped in history,” but “history is trapped in [us].” his was a call for a return to, and a meticulous taking stock of, not just a shamefully violent past; he called for self-critical rec- ognition, the antidote to collective white amnesia, of brutal legacies not quite past. he insisted on a return to the silence-infused archive to attend to the un- equal uses of testimony to shape historical truth claims and the reverberating effects of these claims in the volatile place and time in which he wrote. i cannot imagine a more fitting aphorism for today’s crisis of identitarian logic, and the pressing anxiety that drives many to rally under the seductive banner of exclusionary nationalism through draconian immigration restric- tions, cuts to social welfare, and multiplying appeals to militarized self-de- fense and armed citizenship. perhaps wonder woman’s success as a figure of feminist progressivism can be traced to her political naïveté and historical in- nocence, not to mention her ignorance of the circumstances that commanded her heroism. as new york times film critic a.o scott said of wonder woman, “her sacred duty is to bring peace to the world. accomplishing it requires a lot of killing, but that’s always the superhero paradox.” a similar paradox rests at the heart of contemporary american jewish claims to coherence, when they are based in shared histories of precarity that vindicate self-defensive violence in the service of peace. untangling that paradox requires that we take full stock of the ways in which our routine invocations of past vulnerability may blind us to our complicity with present injustice. my hope is that we might become, as trouillot suggests, more “suspicious of obvious genealogies,” par- ticularly those that impose a tidy coherence on a stubbornly complex, knotty, incoherent, and above all, uncomfortable past. notes “u.s. anti-semitic incidents spike percent so far in after surging last year, adl finds” anti-defamation league, april , , accessed july , https://www.adl.org/ news/press-releases/us-anti-semitic-incidents-spike- -percent-so-far-in- . ironical- caroline light january , ( ) ly, several of the bomb threats appear to have originated from a jewish israeli teen, michael kadar, who sold bomb threats for as little as $ apiece in an online forum. see kelly weill, “fbi: teen sold bomb threats against schools, jewish centers, on the dark web,” the daily beast, august , ; spencer sunshine, “the growing alliance between neo-nazis, right- wing paramilitaries, and trumpist republicans,” the daily beast, june , . noah berlatsky, “gal gadot’s wonder woman is white—let’s not pretend otherwise,” for- ward.com, june , ; see also, lara witt, “wonder woman is your zionist, white feminist action hero,” wear your voice, june , . matthew mueller, “wonder woman: there is a person of color in the lead role,” comicbook. com, june , . joel finkelstein, “are gal gadot and other ashkenazi jews white?” forward.com, june , . see also micha danzig, “anti-semitism in america is nothing new: don’t deny jew- ish history and culture by calling us ‘white,’” forward.com, december , ; dani ishai behan, “yes, ashkenazi jews (including gal gadot) are people of color, the times of israel, june , . berlatsky, “gal gadot’s wonder woman is white,” and noah berlatsky, “why do white people get mad when we call wonder woman ‘white’?” the forward, june , . sarah emanuel, “feminism, zionism, and the question of compatibility: a jew’s reflection on gal gadot’s wonder woman,” feminist studies of religion, august , . finkelstein, “are gal gadot and other ashkenazi jews white?” james baldwin, “negroes are anti-semitic because they’re anti-white,” new york times, april , . “coherence,” merriam-webster dictionary, accessed july , http://www.merriam-webster. com/dictionary/coherence. eric l. goldstein, the price of whiteness: jews, race, and american identity (princeton: princeton university press, ). see also beth wenger, history lessons: the creation of american jewish heritage (princeton: princeton university press, ). on the complex processes through which immigrant communities have gained access race privilege in the united states, see david roediger, the wages of whiteness: race and the mak- ing of the american working class (new york: verso, ); nell irvin painter, the history of white people (new york: w.w. norton, ); matthew frye jacobson, whiteness of a different color: european immigrants and the alchemy of race (cambridge: harvard university press, ); noel ignatiev, how the irish became white (new york: routledge, ); ian haney lopez, white by law: the legal construction of race (new york: new york university press, ). michel-rolph trouillot, silencing the past (boston: beacon press, ). ibid., . ibid., . ibid., . for additional insight on human incapacity to see the unintelligible, see james elkins, “on blindness” in the object looks back: on the nature of seeing (new york: simon & schuster, ). for a detailed discussion of the historic origins of these three figures, see yoel kahn, the three blessings: boundaries, censorship, and identity in jewish liturgy (new york: oxford uni- versity press, ). kahn locates the blessings in the babylonian talmud, in the mishna berakhot, but also investigates their non-jewish origins, – . kahn, three blessings, . there were some occasions in which women and slaves might provide testimony, as in the case of releasing an agunah (abandoned woman) from legal limbo so that she could remarry or inherit her deceased husband’s property. see rachel furst, “parameters of credibility: apostates, women, and the definition of ‘otherness’ in medieval rabbinic culture,” paper presented at “grammars of coherence” workshop, milwaukee, wisconsin, may – , . judith hauptman, rereading the rabbis: a woman’s voice (boulder, co: westview press, ), . saidiya hartman, “venus in two acts,” small axe (june ): , . ibid., . ibid. trouillot, silencing the past, . precarious pasts and jewish collective memory journal of jewish identities hartman, “venus in two acts,” . see for example melton mclaurin, celia, a slave (athens: university of georgia press, ); and wendy warren, “‘the cause of her grief’: the rape of a slave in early new england,” journal of american history : (march ): – . robert rath, “everything you need to know about the nazi villain from ‘wonder wom- an,’” waypoint, july , , accessed august , https://waypoint.vice.com. catherine hezser, jewish slavery in antiquity (new york: oxford university press, ), . last august, the over fifty organizations affiliated with the movement for black lives shared their platform statement, “a vision for black lives,” which criticized the u.s. government for its support of “the genocide taking place against the palestinian people,” and further asserted, “israel is an apartheid state with over laws on the books that sanction discrim- ination against the palestinian people. “a vision for black lives,” platform, august , accessed august , https://policy.m bl.org/platform/. see mazin sidahmed, “critics denounce black lives matter platform accusing israel of ‘genocide,’” the guardian, august , . see zachary braiterman, “why i don’t ‘like’ tablet online magazine—corporate money and the new read on jewish life,” jewishphilosophyplace.com, june , . liel leibovitz, “black lives matter to israel, not so much to its racist critics,” tablet maga- zine, august , . w.e.b. dubois, black reconstruction (new york: harcourt, brace & co., ), – . on the complex and contested nature of immigrant access to racial privilege, see eric gold- stein, the price of whiteness (princeton: princeton university press, ); karen brodkin, how the jews became white folks and what that says about race in america (new brunswick: rutgers university press, ); roediger, the wages of whiteness, painter, history of white people. dalia lithwack, “they will not replace us: white supremacists can march on my home- town, but they can’t win,” the atlantic, august , . al baker, j. david goodman, and benjamin mueller, “beyond the chokehold: the path to eric garner’s death,” new york times, june , ; mitch smith, “video of police kill- ing philando castile is publicly released,” new york times, june , ; abby phillip, “a trooper arrested sandra bland after she refused to put out a cigarette. was it legal?” washington post, july , . examples of law enforcement officers exonerated after killing black civilians abound; a few examples: timothy williams and mitch smith, “cleveland officer will not face charges in tamir rice shooting death,” new york times, december , ; erik eckholm and matt apuzzo, “darren wilson is cleared of rights violation in ferguson shooting,” new york times, march , ; ralph ellis and bill kirkos, “officer who shot philando castile found not guilty on all counts,” cnn, june , ; larry celona, kristan conley, and bruce golding, “cop cleared in chokehold death of eric garner,” new york post, december , ; carolyn sung and catherine soichet, “freddie grey case: charges dropped against remaining officers,” cnn, july , . james baldwin, “stranger in the village,” harper’s magazine, october , . a.o. scott, “‘wonder woman’ is a blockbuster that lets itself have fun,” new york times, may , . trouillot, silencing the past, xviii. w hen her danish colleagues first suggested distributing protec- tive cloth face masks to people in guinea-bissau to stem the spread of the coronavirus, christine benn wasn’t so sure. “i said, ‘yeah, that might be good, but there’s limited data on whether face masks are actually effective,’” says benn, a global-health researcher at the university of southern denmark in copenha- gen, who for decades has co-led public-health campaigns in the west african country, one of the world’s poorest. that was in march. but by july, benn and her team had worked out how to possibly provide some needed data on masks, and hopefully help people in guinea-bissau. they distrib- uted thousands of locally produced cloth face coverings to people as part of a randomized controlled trial that might be the world’s largest test of masks’ effectiveness against the spread of covid- . face masks are the ubiquitous symbol of a pandemic that has sickened million peo- ple and killed more than million. in hospi- tals and other health-care facilities, the use of medical-grade masks clearly cuts down trans- mission of the sars-cov- virus. but for the variety of masks in use by the public, the data are messy, disparate and often hastily assem- bled. add to that a divisive political discourse that included a us president disparaging their use, just days before being diagnosed with covid- himself (see page ). “people look- ing at the evidence are understanding it differ- ently,” says baruch fischhoff, a psychologist at carnegie mellon university in pittsburgh, pennsylvania, who specializes in public policy. “it’s legitimately confusing.” what the data say about wearing face masks the science supports that face coverings save lives, and yet they’re still endlessly debated. how much evidence is enough? by lynne peeples il l u s t r a t io n b y b e x g l e n d in in g | nature | vol | october feature © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. to be clear, the science supports using masks, with recent studies suggesting that they could save lives in different ways: research shows that they cut down the chances of both transmitting and catching the coronavirus, and some studies hint that masks might reduce the severity of infection if people do contract the disease. but being more definitive about how well they work or when to use them gets compli- cated. there are many types of mask, worn in a variety of environments. there are questions about people’s willingness to wear them, or wear them properly. even the question of what kinds of study would provide definitive proof that they work is hard to answer. “how good does the evidence need to be?” asks fischhoff. “it’s a vital question.” beyond gold standards at the beginning of the pandemic, medical experts lacked good evidence on how sars- cov- spreads, and they didn’t know enough to make strong public-health recommendations about masks. the standard mask for use in health-care set- tings is the n respirator, which is designed to protect the wearer by filtering out % of air- borne particles that measure . micrometres (μm) and larger. as the pandemic ramped up, these respirators quickly fell into short sup- ply. that raised the now contentious question: should members of the public bother wear- ing basic surgical masks or cloth masks? if so, under what conditions? “those are the things we normally [sort out] in clinical trials,” says kate grabowski, an infectious-disease epide- miologist at johns hopkins school of medicine in baltimore, maryland. “but we just didn’t have time for that.” so, scientists have relied on observational and laboratory studies. there is also indirect evidence from other infectious diseases. “if you look at any one paper — it’s not a slam dunk. but, taken all together, i’m convinced that they are working,” says grabowski. confidence in masks grew in june with news about two hair stylists in missouri who tested positive for covid- (ref. ). both wore a dou- ble-layered cotton face covering or surgical mask while working. and although they passed on the infection to members of their house- holds, their clients seem to have been spared (more than half reportedly declined free tests). other hints of effectiveness emerged from mass gatherings. at black lives matter pro- tests in us cities, most attendees wore masks. the events did not seem to trigger spikes in infections , yet the virus ran rampant in late june at a georgia summer camp, where chil- dren who attended were not required to wear face coverings . caveats abound: the protests were outdoors, which poses a lower risk of covid- spread, whereas the campers shared cabins at night, for example. and because many non-protesters stayed in their homes during the gatherings, that might have reduced virus transmission in the community. nevertheless, the anecdotal evidence “builds up the picture”, says theo vos, a health-policy researcher at the university of washington in seattle. more-rigorous analyses added direct evidence. a preprint study posted in early august (and not yet peer reviewed), found that weekly increases in per-capita mortality were four times lower in places where masks were the norm or recommended by the government, compared with other regions. researchers looked at countries, includ- ing mongolia, which adopted mask use in jan- uary and, as of may, had recorded no deaths related to covid- . another study looked at the effects of us state-government mandates for mask use in april and may. researchers estimated that those reduced the growth of covid- cases by up to percentage points per day. they cautiously suggest that man- dates might have averted as many as , cases, after controlling for other mitigation measures, such as physical distancing. “you don’t have to do much math to say this is obviously a good idea,” says jeremy how- ard, a research scientist at the university of san francisco in california, who is part of a team that reviewed the evidence for wearing face masks in a preprint article that has been widely circulated . but such studies do rely on assumptions that mask mandates are being enforced and that people are wearing them correctly. fur- thermore, mask use often coincides with other changes, such as limits on gatherings. as restrictions lift, further observational studies might begin to separate the impact of masks from those of other interventions, suggests grabowski. “it will become easier to see what is doing what,” she says. although scientists can’t control many con- founding variables in human populations, they can in animal studies. researchers led by micro- biologist kwok-yung yuen at the university of hong kong housed infected and healthy ham- sters in adjoining cages, with surgical-mask partitions separating some of the animals. without a barrier, about two-thirds of the unin- fected animals caught sars-cov- , according to the paper published in may. but only about % of the animals protected by mask material got infected, and those that did were less sick than their mask-free neighbours (as measured by clinical scores and tissue changes). the findings provide justification for the emerging consensus that mask use protects the wearer as well as other people. the work also points to another potentially game-chang- ing idea: “masking may not only protect you from infection but also from severe illness,” says monica gandhi, an infectious-disease physician at the university of california, san francisco. gandhi co-authored a paper published in late july suggesting that masking reduces the dose of virus a wearer might receive, resulting in infections that are milder or even asymp- tomatic. a larger viral dose results in a more aggressive inflammatory response, she sug- gests. she and her colleagues are currently analys- ing hospitalization rates for covid- before and after mask mandates in , us counties, to determine whether the severity of disease decreased after public masking guidelines were brought in. the idea that exposure to more virus results in a worse infection makes “absolute sense”, says paul digard, a virologist at the university of edinburgh, uk, who was not involved in the research. “it’s another argument for masks.” gandhi suggests another possible benefit: if more people get mild cases, that might help to enhance immunity at the population level without increasing the burden of severe illness and death. “as we’re awaiting a vaccine, could driving up rates of asymptomatic infection do good for population-level immunity?” she asks. back to ballistics the masks debate is closely linked to another divisive question: how does the virus travel through the air and spread infection? the moment a person breathes or talks, sneezes or coughs, a fine spray of liquid parti- cles takes flight. some are large — visible, even — and referred to as droplets; others are micro- scopic, and categorized as aerosols. viruses including sars-cov- hitch rides on these particles; their size dictates their behaviour. droplets can shoot through the air and land on a nearby person’s eyes, nose or mouth to cause infection. but gravity quickly pulls them down. aerosols, by contrast, can float in the air for minutes to hours, spreading through an unventilated room like cigarette smoke. what does this imply for the ability of masks to impede covid- transmission? the virus itself is only about .  μm in diameter. but because viruses don’t leave the body on their own, a mask doesn’t need to block particles that small to be effective. more relevant are the pathogen-transporting droplets and aerosols, which range from about .  μm to hundreds of micrometres across. (an average human hair has a diameter of about  μm.) the major- ity are –  μm in diameter and can linger in the air a long time, says jose-luis jimenez, an you don’t have to do much math to say this is obviously a good idea.” nature | vol | october | © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. environmental chemist at the university of colorado boulder. “that is where the action is.” scientists are still unsure which size of par- ticle is most important in covid- transmis- sion. some can’t even agree on the cut-off that should define aerosols. for the same reasons, scientists still don’t know the major form of transmission for influenza, which has been studied for much longer. many believe that asymptomatic trans- mission is driving much of the covid- pan- demic, which would suggest that viruses aren’t typically riding out on coughs or sneezes. by this reasoning, aerosols could prove to be the most important transmission vehicle. so, it is worth looking at which masks can stop aerosols. all in the fabric even well-fitting n respirators fall slightly short of their % rating in real-world use, actually filtering out around % of incom- ing aerosols down to .  μm. and, according to unpublished research, n masks that don’t have exhalation valves — which expel unfiltered exhaled air — block a similar pro- portion of outgoing aerosols. much less is known about surgical and cloth masks, says kevin fennelly, a pulmonologist at the us national heart, lung, and blood institute in bethesda, maryland. in a review of observational studies, an international research team estimates that surgical and comparable cloth masks are % effective in protecting the wearer. in unpublished work, linsey marr, an environmental engineer at virginia tech in blacksburg, and her colleagues found that even a cotton t-shirt can block half of inhaled aerosols and almost % of exhaled aerosols measuring  μm across. once you get to aer- osols of –  μm, almost any fabric can block more than % in both directions, she says. multiple layers of fabric, she adds, are more effective, and the tighter the weave, the better. another study found that masks with layers of different materials — such as cotton and silk — could catch aerosols more efficiently than those made from a single material. benn worked with danish engineers at her university to test their two-layered cloth mask design using the same criteria as for medi- cal-grade ventilators. they found that their mask blocked only – % of aerosols down to the .  μm mark, according to benn. but because most transmission is probably occur- ring through particles of at least  μm, accord- ing to marr and jimenez, the actual difference in effectiveness between n and other masks might not be huge. eric westman, a clinical researcher at duke university school of medicine in durham, north carolina, co-authored an august study that demonstrated a method for testing mask effectiveness. his team used lasers and smart- phone cameras to compare how well differ- ent cloth and surgical face coverings stopped droplets while a person spoke. “i was reassured that a lot of the masks we use did work,” he says, referring to the performance of cloth and sur- gical masks. but thin polyester-and-spandex neck gaiters — stretchable scarves that can be pulled up over the mouth and nose — seemed to actually reduce the size of droplets being released. “that could be worse than wearing nothing at all,” westman says. some scientists advise not making too much of the finding, which was based on just one person talking. marr and her team were among the scientists who responded with experiments of their own, finding that neck gaiters blocked most large droplets. marr says she is writing up her results for publication. “there’s a lot of information out there, but it’s confusing to put all the lines of evidence together,” says angela rasmussen, a virologist at columbia university’s mailman school of public health in new york city. “when it comes down to it, we still don’t know a lot.” minding human minds questions about masks go beyond biology, epidemiology and physics. human behav- iour is core to how well masks work in the real world. “i don’t want someone who is infected in a crowded area being confident while wear- ing one of these cloth coverings,” says michael osterholm, director of the center for infec- tious disease research and policy at the uni- versity of minnesota in minneapolis. perhaps fortunately, some evidence sug- gests that donning a face mask might drive the wearer and those around them to adhere better to other measures, such as social dis- tancing. the masks remind them of shared responsibility, perhaps. but that requires that people wear them. across the united states, mask use has held steady around % since late july. this is a substantial increase from the % usage seen in march and april, according to data from the institute for health metrics and evaluation at the university of washington in seattle (see go.nature.com/ n kxv). the institute’s models also predicted that, as of  september, increasing us mask use to % — a level observed in singapore and some other time-lapse images show how cough droplets spread from a person wearing an n mask that has a valve to expel exhaled air. s . v e r m a e t a l ./ p h y s . f lu id s | nature | vol | october feature © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. countries — could save nearly , lives in the period up to january . “there’s a lot more we would like to know,” says vos, who contributed to the analysis. “but given that it is such a simple, low-cost interven- tion with potentially such a large impact, who would not want to use it?” further confusing the public are controver- sial studies and mixed messages. one study in april found masks to be ineffective, but was retracted in july. another, published in june , supported the use of masks before dozens of scientists wrote a letter attacking its methods (see go.nature.com/ jpvxpt). the authors are pushing back against calls for a retraction. meanwhile, the world health organization (who) and the us centers for disease control and prevention (cdc) initially refrained from recommending widespread mask usage, in part because of some hesitancy about deplet- ing supplies for health-care workers. in april, the cdc recommended that masks be worn when physical distancing isn’t an option; the who followed suit in june. there’s been a lack of consistency among political leaders, too. us president donald trump voiced support for masks, but rarely wore one. he even ridiculed political rival joe biden for consistently using a mask — just days before trump himself tested positive for the coronavirus, on october. other world leaders, including the president and prime minister of slovakia, zuzana Čaputová and igor matovič, sported masks early in the pandemic, reportedly to set an example for their country. denmark was one of the last nations to man- date face masks — requiring their use on public transport from august. it has maintained generally good control of the virus through early stay-at-home orders, testing and contact tracing. it is also at the forefront of covid- face-mask research, in the form of two large, randomly controlled trials. a research group in denmark enrolled some , participants, asking half to use surgical face masks when going to a workplace. although the study is completed, thomas benfield, a clinical researcher at the university of copenhagen and one of the principal investigators on the trial, says that his team is not ready to share any results. benn’s team, working independently of benfield’s group, is in the process of enroll- ing around , people in guinea-bissau, randomly selecting half of the households to receive bilayer cloth masks — two for each fam- ily member aged ten or over. the team will then follow everyone over several months to com- pare rates of mask use with rates of covid-like illness. she notes that each household will receive advice on how to protect themselves from covid- — except that those in the control group will not get information on the use of masks. the team expects to complete enrolment in november. several scientists say that they are excited to see the results. but others worry that such experiments are wasteful and potentially exploit a vulnerable population. “if this was a gentler pathogen, it would be great,” says eric topol, director of the scripps research translational institute in la jolla, california. “you can’t do randomized trials for everything — and you shouldn’t.” as clinical researchers are sometimes fond of saying, parachutes have never been tested in a randomized controlled trial, either. but benn defends her work, explaining that people in the control group will still benefit from information about covid- , and they will get masks at the end of the study. given the challenge of manufacturing and distrib- uting the masks, “under no circumstances”, she says, could her team have handed out enough for everyone at the study’s outset. in fact, they had to scale back their original plans to enrol , people. she is hopeful that the trial will provide some benefits for every- one involved. “but no one in the community should be worse off than if we hadn’t done this trial,” she says. the resulting data, she adds, should inform the global scientific debate. for now, osterholm, in minnesota, wears a mask. yet he laments the “lack of scientific rigour” that has so far been brought to the topic. “we criticize people all the time in the science world for making statements without any data,” he says. “we’re doing a lot of the same thing here.” nevertheless, most scientists are confident that they can say something prescriptive about wearing masks. it’s not the only solution, says gandhi, “but i think it is a profoundly impor- tant pillar of pandemic control”. as digard puts it: “masks work, but they are not infallible. and, therefore, keep your distance.” lynne peeples is a science journalist in seattle, washington. . hendrix, m. j., walde, c., findley, k. & trotman, r. morb. mortal. wkly rep. , – ( ). . dave, d. m., friedson, a. i., matsuzawa, k., sabia, j. j. & safford, s. black lives matter protests, social distancing, and covid- nber working paper (national bureau of economic research, ). . szablewski, c. m. et al. morb. mortal. wkly rep. , – ( ). . leffler, c. t. et al. preprint at medrxiv https://doi. org/ . / . . . ( ). . lyu, w. & wehby, g. l. health aff. https://doi.org/ . / hlthaff. . ( ). . howard, j. et al. preprint at http://doi.org/ . / preprints . .v ( ). . chan, j. f. w. et al. clin. infect. dis. https://doi. org/ . /cid/ciaa ( ). . gandhi, m., beyrer, c. & goosby, e. j. gen. intern. med. https://doi.org/ . /s - - - ( ). . chu, d. k. et al. lancet , – ( ). . konda, a. et al. acs nano , – ( ). . fischer, e. p. et al. sci. adv. , eabd ( ). . marchiori, m. preprint at https://arxiv.org/abs/ . ( ). . bae, s. et al. ann. intern. med. , w –w ( ); retraction , ( ). . zhang, r., li, y., zhang, a. l., wang, y. & molina, m. j. proc. natl acad. sci. usa , – ( ). us baseball players wore masks while playing during the influenza epidemic. you can’t do randomized trials for everything — and you shouldn’t.” u n d e r w o o d a n d u n d e r w o o d /l if e i m a g e s c o l l e c t io n /g e t t y nature | vol | october | © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. amp -amp .. smaller organizations may exacerbate the risks of deploying new technology. as jonathan drake emphasized in his remarks, human rights organizations that have the ability to do this work must consider how to create sustainable interventions. further, it is not clear how to reconcile the different approaches to risk embedded in the culture and practices of human rights researchers on the one hand, and innovators on the other. innovation in silicon valley privileges failure as an essential mechanism of feedback and emphasizes the importance of moving quickly and fixing problems later. human rights, however, necessarily tol- erates less risk because of the potential impact on rights and on the security and safety of victims, witnesses, and investigators. how do we reconcile the desire for robust innovation with the need to ensure safety and protect rights? with the legal and ethical demands of fact-finding? even if attend- ing to these concerns means less innovation, the importance of considering the human rights impact of new technological developments before deployment cannot be overstated. all of these risks and opportunities are being generated in an environment in which human rights organizations, funders, and technology companies are encouraging technological solutions to doc- umentation and advocacy problems. yet the challenges that human rights documentation and advocacy face—from failures of political will to breakdowns in the rule of law—will not be solved by new technologies. the allure of “technological solutionism” should not lead us to “neglect the more traditional advocacy and grassroots mobilization strategies that are necessary to generate the political will required for social change.” the panelists considered these questions from the perspective of experts supporting interna- tional investigations, academics monitoring the rise and challenges technology, and justice sector officials who grapple with technology-generated data in court proceedings. brad samuels is a part- ner at situ research, a design firm in new york, where he heads a division specializing in the use of new technologies to document human rights abuses. jonathan drake is senior program associate in the geospatial technologies project at the american association for the advancement of science. rebecca hamilton is assistant professor of law at american university washington college of law. julian nicholls is senior trial attorney at the office of the prosecutor at the international criminal court. brittany benowitz is chief counsel at the center for human rights at the american bar association. remarks by jonathan drake* doi: . /amp. . since , the american association for the advancement of science (aaas) has been exploring the use of geospatial technologies in a human rights context. these efforts began ella mcpherson, risk and the pluralism of digital human rights fact-finding and advocacy, in new technologies for human rights law and practice, supra note , at , . land & aronson, supra note , at (“local groups do not have the resources they need to use technology effectively or safely in their work, and more powerful groups may appropriate the documentation they produce without providing any direct benefit in return.”). lea shaver, safeguarding human rights from problematic technologies, in new technologies for human rights law and practice, supra note , at , (arguing that the human right to share in the benefits of science means that “[t]he introduction of unproven and potentially dangerous technologies” should be subjected to safeguards similar to those that accompany the human subjects research). land & aronson, supra note , at . evgeny morozov, to save everything, click here: the folly of technological solutionism ( ). land & aronson, supra note , at . * american association for the advancement of science. asil proceedings, https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /amp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /amp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core under the auspices of the science and human rights program, and focused primarily on establish- ing whether and to what extent satellite imagery could be used to document human rights viola- tions resulting from armed conflict. in partnership with amnesty international, the project’s first applications of this technology involved using visible and near-infrared satellite imagery to inves- tigate reports of villages being burned in darfur, sudan. these efforts established the usefulness of satellite imagery as a tool that allowed investigators access areas that would otherwise be completely off-limits due to governmental restrictions, security considerations, remoteness, or some combination of all three. they likewise established a model of collaboration that has proven itself time and again in the application of these new tools to human rights responses. as a scientific organization, aaas lacks the sources of information, such as networks of con- tacts on the ground, which many human rights organizations rely on daily for information on the situation in areas of conflict. similarly, many human rights organizations lack the technical resources and expertise to evaluate geospatial intelligence in a scientifically valid context. by part- nering with actors in the ngo sector, aaas is able to lend its skills in this area of critical need, while in exchange taking advantage of the knowledge that human rights advocates possess regard- ing where and when violations are alleged to have taken place. this symbiotic relationship goes well beyond the sharing of information and analysis resources, however; it also increases the effec- tiveness of human rights advocates, in the spheres of both public opinion and law. because of its commitment to scientific integrity, aaas is obligated to follow the facts wherever they may lead, irrespective of whether they support a particular narrative. by consistently refrain- ing from making any value judgments regarding a given situation, and steadfastly refusing to engage in advocacy for any side in a conflict, aaas has established a reputation for impartiality that inoculates it from the charges of political or ideological bias that are often leveled, rightly or wrongly, at human rights advocates throughout the world. human rights organizations, however, will often cite aaas’s analysis in their reporting, thereby increasing the credibility and impact of their advocacy efforts and encouraging further information sharing. this separation of analysis from advocacy is critical, as there have been cases where geospatial evidence has been thrown out of court due to analysts engaging in advocacy activities that call into question their impartiality. this model has resulted in numerous success stories over the years, many of which go well beyond simple visual interpretation of “before and after” satellite imagery. for example, in , aaas partnered with both amnesty international and human rights watch to investigate reports of shelling in an area that had been designated a “civilian safe zone.” by analyzing the distinctive patterns on the ground made by artillery shells as they burst, aaas analysts were able to trace these shells to mortar positions located in territory outside the zone, apparently controlled by the sri lankan government. likewise, over the course of the conflict, analysts were able to observe a significant number of burials taking place within the zone, alongside thousands of make- shift structures that had apparently been erected by displaced persons. another case study where careful, quantitative analysis was key to understanding the true nature of a conflict took place during aaas’s investigation of the conflict in eastern ukraine. in the spring of that year, nato released an analysis of commercial satellite imagery which it claimed showed a large-scale military buildup in southwestern russia, near the ukrainian border. in response to this, the russian ministry of defense claimed that the images nato analyzed in fact depicted military exercises that had been held the previous summer, and which were therefore unrelated to the conflict in donbass. as part of its analysis, however, aaas had acquired the same commercial images that nato relied upon, as well as other images, acquired earlier, for compar- ison purposes. one such pre-conflict image, acquired during the same time period that russia claimed nato’s images had been, clearly showed trees in full leaf, as would be expected for new technologies https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /amp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /amp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core the height of summer. the images released by nato, and also analyzed by aaas, however, showed bare trees, as would be expected for early spring in the northern hemisphere. although the above example is essentially qualitative, similar competing claims have also been investigated quantitatively. during the same ukrainian conflict, for example, russian forces were alleged by many western governments to have downed a malaysian airliner, mh- , using a “buk” surface-to-air missile. the russian ministry of defense advanced a number of alternative theories regarding this incident, one of which centered on satellite imagery which they released purporting to show a similar missile launcher located in ukrainian-controlled territory, which they alleged could have shot down the aircraft. metadata released with this imagery included date and time stamps that corroborated the russian timeline. aaas conducted a careful investi- gation of the shadows of various features present in the image, however, which showed that the azimuth of the sun at the time that the images were acquired was inconsistent with the times marked on the images. this finding cast the timeline advanced by the russian ministry of defense into considerable doubt. not all of aaas’s research involves armed conflict. in nigeria, for example, aaas conducted a large study in partnership with amnesty international into the effects of environmental contami- nation on communities in the niger delta. this region, rich in petroleum resources, has been at the center of a long-running debate over allegations of corruption, impunity, and the rights of local people to benefit from development. for example, despite a government moratorium on “gas flar- ing,” in which excess methane extracted from oil wells is burned off in the atmosphere, reports alleged that the practice remained widespread. to investigate this, aaas researchers took advan- tage of the fact that such gas flares, due to their high temperature, must emit significant amounts of infrared radiation. by leveraging the modis satellite’s ability to detect these wavelengths, it was possible to quickly identify the likely locations of several dozen such clandestine gas flares over an extremely broad area, whose existence was subsequently confirmed by targeted acquisitions of high-resolution satellite imagery. beyond satellite imagery, aaas continues to develop new human rights applications of emerg- ing technologies. in recent years, a major focus of this initiative has centered around unmanned aerial systems (uas), colloquially known as drones. through partnerships with ngos including equitas and the guatemalan forensic anthropology foundation (fafg), aaas has pioneered the use of uas as a tool for documenting the exhumation of mass graves. this method, which relies on commercial, off-the-shelf technology to create detailed three-dimensional models of gravesites at all stages of excavation, allows the forensic team to visualize the grave from any vantage point, including many (e.g. from the sides or below) that are impossible to achieve in the real world. the new perspective afforded by this capability can reveal aspects of a grave, such as the spatial rela- tionships between successive skeletons superposed atop one another, that are not obvious to field investigators, whose perspective during an exhumation is limited to viewing one layer at a time. because the model is fully quantitative and georeferenced, it also allows investigators to return, virtually, to the site at any time, even after its real-world counterpart has been destroyed through exhumation, to perform additional measurements, should they be deemed necessary. by combin- ing the data derived from mapping using uas with historical, declassified satellite imagery of the same area, it is even possible to interpret twenty-first century exhumations in the context of the land-use and land-cover that prevailed at the site in the s, during which time the majority of such mass graves were created. the examples outlined above are just a few highlights of the work that aaas has conducted over the years in bringing these exciting new technologies to bear on critical problems at the inter- section of science and human rights. looking to the future, aaas intends to continue to innovate at this critical juncture, through initiatives to engage more with the vast reservoir of knowledge asil proceedings, https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /amp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /amp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core represented by the aaas membership, as well as explorations of other emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. as these and other technologies become increasingly widespread, great attention must also be paid to ensuring that they are applied in an ethical manner—an obligation that is all the more pressing when the applications involve the types of vulnerable populations that are often associated with human rights investigations. aaas is dedicated to ensuring that this obligation does not go unheeded, through activities dedicated to exploring the impacts, both positive and negative, that may be associated with these powerful new tools, in order to better fulfill the mandate of our organization’s motto: “advancing science, serving society.” new technologies in international criminal investigations doi: . /amp. . by rebecca j. hamilton* my current research looks at ways in which people and institutions are using technology to build the evidentiary record in international criminal litigation. in particular, i focus on the collection of, and reliance on, what i call user-generated evidence. this is footage that an ordinary citizen—the user—records on their smartphone, in an effort to achieve legal accountability. the collection of user-generated evidence is a phenomenon that the american public has become increasingly familiar with through the black lives matter movement, thanks to user recordings of police brutality. yet the phenomenon is a global one; with smartphones in the hands of an estimated . billion users, user-generated evidence is being captured worldwide. the united nations is working to secure evidence captured by local actors, even in the absence of courts with jurisdiction over the crimes in question. and organizations like the international bar association and the long-time video advocacy group, witness, have now developed user- generated evidence applications (“apps”) to enable users to record footage with sufficient metadata to satisfy evidentiary standards for authentication. the question of authentication is obviously a key challenge for digital evidence in an era when deepfake technology enables even those with minimal technical skills to create forgeries that are undetectable to the lay eye. but the authentication of evidence is hardly a new challenge; * american university washington college of law. see rebecca j. hamilton, user-generated evidence, colum. j. transnat’l l. (forthcoming, ). i consciously refer to the ordinary citizen who records this footage as a (smartphone) “user” rather than as a “citizen” in order to not exclude users who are stateless or do not have citizenship in the locations where they are filming. number of smartphone users worldwide from to (in billions), statista, at https://www.statista.com/ statistics/ /number-of-smartphone-users-worldwide. the international, impartial and independent mechanism (iiiim), established by the un general assembly in relation to the conflict in syria, is collating user-generated evidence for use in future prosecutions. see int’l bar ass’n, eyewitness v english subbed, vimeo (june , ), at https://vimeo.com/ (“as an initiative of the international bar association, we know the legal requirements for photos and videos to be admitted as evi- dence in court. recognizing the immense risks eyewitnesses take we believe these efforts should never be in vain and poten- tial evidence should always be admissible in a court of law.”); harlo holmes, making cameras count, youtube (oct. , ), at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzjoadhakwu (describing encryption and metadata features of the camerav app that enable authentication). see robert chesney & danielle citron, deep fakes: a looming crisis for national security, democracy and privacy?, lawfare (feb. , ), at https://lawfareblog.com/deep-fakes-looming-crisis-national-security-democracy-and-privacy (describing deepfakes as the “digital manipulation of sound, images, or video to impersonate someone or make it appear new technologies https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /amp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.statista.com/statistics/ /number-of-smartphone-users-worldwide https://www.statista.com/statistics/ /number-of-smartphone-users-worldwide https://www.statista.com/statistics/ /number-of-smartphone-users-worldwide https://vimeo.com/ https://vimeo.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzjoadhakwu https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzjoadhakwu https://lawfareblog.com/deep-fakes-looming-crisis-national-security-democracy-and-privacy https://lawfareblog.com/deep-fakes-looming-crisis-national-security-democracy-and-privacy https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /amp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core 	remarks by jonathan drake* 	new technologies in international criminal investigations “a new scholarly song”: rereading early modern race “a new scholarly song”: rereading early modern race peter erickson, kim f. hall shakespeare quarterly, volume , number , spring , pp. - (article) published by oxford university press doi: for additional information about this article [ access provided at apr : gmt from carnegie mellon university ] https://doi.org/ . /shq. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ https://doi.org/ . /shq. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ from the editors “a new scholarly song”: rereading early modern race these seven essays and the seminar in which they first circulated emerged in the wake of the shakespeare association of america (saa) meet- ing in toronto, which had as one of its unspoken focuses early modern race studies. two plenary sessions, three seminars, and a workshop engaged with the question of race in renaissance studies more than twenty years after the major wave of scholarship that appeared in the late s and early s. each day of this meeting gave interested observers the chance to ask what has changed and where the field is going in the context of comparative approaches to race studies. while some seemed to feel that this program- ming gave too much airtime to questions of race, the plenary sessions them- selves revealed that there had been very little transformation during the intervening decades in how we as a scholarly community think and learn about race. one plenary contained a paper featuring a strikingly offensive use of visual images and another paper that derailed a broadening of inquiry by suggesting, in an ill-defined way, that inadequate policing of our students’ sense of the past was “dangerous.” race-conscious attendees struggled— within the confines of the politesse that makes the saa both welcoming to newcomers and somewhat averse to political intervention—to suggest how the papers erased questions and epistemologies important to politically engaged scholarship, if not to the very humanity of black people. after public papers in years past alerting the saa to its race problem, the meeting the guest editors thank hannah ehrenberg, who helped organize the online compo- nent of the seminar and assisted in our work on this issue; the members and auditors of the “early modern race / ethnic / diaspora studies” seminar; saa trustee ayanna thompson, who suggested after the seminar that the time was ripe for a special issue on this topic; and shakespeare quarterly editor gail kern paster for her openness to a new intervention. the quotation in our title comes from derrick bell, faces at the bottom of the well: the permanence of racism (new york: basic books, ), . see peter erickson, “ the moment of race in renaissance studies,” shakespeare studies ( ): – . marked a profound and disillusioning moment of alienation for many people of color at the conference. even as the saa had one of its largest meetings ever, with a correspondingly larger gathering of people of color, the sense of belonging for longtime attendees was revealed as precarious, and our sense of progress was shattered. afterward, saa members tried to diagnose and address the problem, both individually and collectively. with the police shooting of michael brown in ferguson, missouri and the rise of the #blacklivesmatter movement, questions of race seemed too urgent to continue business as usual at the place some of us consider our scholarly home. there was some agreement that the meeting repre- sented a step back for the saa and that it revealed the recursiveness of early modern race studies, where the importance of race is either ignored altogether or subject to an unhealthy back-and-forth in which scholars focusing on race con- front the same (already addressed) questions and pushback from editors, read- ers, and audience members whose only investment in race seems to be discipli- nary. this can be attributed partially to the fact that the vanguard of critical race theory with which we are in dialogue takes place elsewhere and that our shakespeare interlocutors can’t be expected to be knowledgeable about the extensive body of race theory in the past fifty years. but after more than twenty years of scholarship in early modern studies, we can only conclude that these acts of refusal are also due to a pathological averseness to thinking about race under the guise of protecting historical difference. many scholars genially dismissive of shakespeare quarterly see, for example, margo hendricks, “‘i saw him in my visage’: problems with race studies in early modern english literature,” paper delivered as part of the presentation “black studies in the english renaissance” at the shakespeare association of america meeting, bellevue, wa, april . several papers in this issue point to the increasingly obvious erasure of race in scholarship and the absence of race as a visible frame at conferences, as, for example, in a recent “early modern futures” conference in which race, slavery, and empire were barely mentioned. while one might argue over race’s prominence as a recognized category, that slavery, empire, and an increasingly racialized world were in england’s future is beyond debate. the refusal to see race has been an ongoing issue in race studies; see, for example, ruth frankenberg, white women, race matters: the social construction of whiteness (minneapolis: u of minnesota p, ), – ; and toni morrison, playing in the dark: whiteness and the literary imagination (cambridge, ma: harvard up, ), . it was addressed in early modern race studies scholarship early on; see kim f. hall, things of darkness: economies of race and gender in early modern england (ithaca, ny: cornell up, ), – ; and francesca t. royster, “ the ‘end of race’ and the future of early modern cultural studies,” shakespeare studies ( ): – , esp. – . on post-racial ideology, particularly in the wake of barack obama’s election, see kyle grady in this issue. see also ian haney, “is the post in post-racial the blind in colorblind?,” cardozo law review . ( january ): – ; and eduardo bonilla-silva and david dietrich, “ the sweet enchantment of color-blind racism in obamerica,” annals of the american academy of political and social science . ( ): – . race know little of the extensive scholarship on race—in either its early modern or modern form. more alarmingly, there will be fewer of us doing the vital work of thinking about race then and now if graduate advisors and other mentors con- tinually discourage students from entering early modern race studies. after years of being on the forefront of questions of early modern race and colonialism in particular, the conversation in the world of shakespeare had clearly stalled. ignoring or disparaging race will not make it go away as a question for our— or shakespeare’s—time. we thus have set our sights on the next decade, using as a landmark by which to measure subsequent progress toward estab- lishing the field of early modern race studies with a stronger foundation through a wide spectrum of social issues, a broader scholarly framework, a larger academic audience, and deeper public engagement. it is important to begin by evoking the extraordinary seminar experience in which the essays selected for this special issue originated. the group gathered for “early modern race / ethnic / diaspora studies” at the saa conference in vancouver. the wide age range among the participants created a special sense of two gen- erations working together. this unusual degree of cross-generational spirit and energy inspired us to think in long-range terms about possibilities for the devel- opment and expansion of early modern race studies. a significant enhancement of this feeling of intellectual community came from the first scholars of color reception at the meeting and the announced commitment to make this event a regular feature of the annual saa meeting. in order to formulate a new critical direction, we start with an overall time frame consisting of four phases. in the pre- period, sierra leonean eldred durosimi jones represents the first segment of scholarship on race. his two books—othello’s countrymen: the african in english renaissance drama ( ) and the elizabethan image of africa ( )—exemplify the analysis of early modern conceptions of race using now-familiar visual images as well as literary texts. with an oxford education and an academic career in sierra leone, jones “a new scholarly song” in this we echo francesca royster’s earlier call in her essay “ the ‘end of race’ and the future of early modern cultural studies” for scholars to “negotiate the larger public’s suspicion of multiculturalism’s relevance to the past” ( ). although royster wrote this essay at the height of one form of the culture wars, her sense of the need for increased attention to race and its his- toricity in the face of attempts to “wipe the slate clean of the cultural and political conflicts and tensions engendered by past inequalities” ( ) remains salient. see n. eldred jones, othello’s countrymen: the african in english renaissance drama (london: published on behalf of fourah bay college, the university college of sierra leone by oxford up, ); and eldred d. jones, the elizabethan image of africa (charlottesville: published for the folger shakespeare library by up of virginia, ). in effect negotiates his own position between england and a west african british colony through othello. jones’s first title breaks othello’s cultural isola- tion by the author’s implicit claim to be one of othello’s countrymen. the difference between this earlier period of individual work and the emer- gence of the second phase of sustained collective moment in the s lies in the great increase in the number of scholars consciously engaging in a group effort and actively contributing to the collaborative project of building and val- idating the field of race studies in the renaissance. three books—ania loomba’s gender, race, and renaissance drama ( ); women, “race,” and writing in the early modern period ( ), edited by margo hendricks and patricia parker; and kim f. hall’s things of darkness: economies of race and gender in early modern england ( )—continue to stand out as key land- marks, while the overall related bibliography of work by others forms a sub- stantial body. from this core there is no turning back. the issue of early modern race will not go away. the only direction is going forward and the only question is how we can best move ahead. however, the third segment in our time line is the interim between and , which defines where we are in the present. during this fifteen-year period, there is no single methodological direction but rather a set of multiple directions that are not clearly coordinated. whatever is gained in overall growth through these varied explorations is accompanied by a sacrifice. dispersal creates a loss of concentrated collective energy and, in particular, a specific curtailment or aban- donment of political focus. in this mixed phase, intellectual perspectives, even when potentially innovative, can also readily shift toward an excessive academic caution in approaching race that effectively stifles or rejects race as a legitimate early modern issue. the seminar in vancouver began to restore this muted or missing political dimension by explicitly articulating the political implications of early modern race studies as a vital and central element in the analytic process. this renewal marks for us a turning point: a return to a more comprehensive commitment to the question of how we can develop additional aspects of the political significance of race in the early modern field. this prospect constitutes the fourth segment of the time line, to which we will return in due course. initial opposition to early modern race studies, associated primarily with new historicism, was encapsulated in the single word “anachronism” and infor- mally deployed as a scare tactic and conversation stopper. as an automatic reflex, this response too easily slides into blanket denial. overemphasis on shakespeare quarterly other writers on race in the s and following in the next decade include imtiaz habib, sujata iyengar, arthur l. little jr., joyce green macdonald, francesca t. royster, ian smith, and ayanna thompson, among many others. anachronism has run its course, and its persuasive power is now diminished. insufficient attention, however, has been given to the critical polar opposite— the motif of universality currently represented in kiernan ryan’s shakespeare’s universality. if new historicism has a tendency to insist on the early modern period as so different historically as to be cut off from our contemporary cul- ture, then universality imagines a period through line so smooth and similar that it connects the early modern and the contemporary with virtually no dis- ruptions or differences at all. ironically, both approaches produce the same result: the erasure of race. in such narrow historicism the early modern period has no recognizable link to race in our current lives, while universalism as prac- ticed by ryan characterizes shakespeare’s resolutions of the stress points and tensions of racial difference as readily carrying over and automatically applica- ble to the removal of race problems in our contemporary culture. in ryan’s presentation of shakespeare’s universality, the elimination of racial difficulty is clearly displayed as a disappearing act. believing in universality makes it unnecessary to consider race seriously because shakespeare has already demonstrated how to solve the problem. yet ryan’s streamlined portrait of shakespeare is constructed by minimizing and downplaying shakespeare’s com- plexities in advance to the point of disregarding the evidence. for example, the major case of othello is almost completely avoided, thus obviating the need to address the lead character’s individual racial identity, the consequences of which shakespeare crucially dramatizes in detail with deeply unsettling tragic results. black lives mattered even then. in ryan’s version of universality, there is no incen- tive to think about the specificity of race, despite the fact that we still are strug- gling today to recover from and to encompass othello’s racially specific fate. as an alternative to ryan’s wishing the problem of race away, early modern race studies places more emphasis on race, not less, and increases the opportunities for discussing race by focusing on new directions for analysis. we want to identify seven concerns that do not claim to be all-inclusive but are intended rather to motivate additional interpretive possibilities capable of further extending the crit- ical scope of our field. first, bringing together early modern literature and early modern visual culture makes it possible to go beyond the literary in pursuing his- “a new scholarly song” kiernan ryan, shakespeare’s universality: here’s fine revolution (london: bloomsbury arden shakespeare, ). a precursor to the book is ryan, “‘here’s fine revolution’: shakespeare’s philosophy of the future,” essays in criticism . ( ): – . ryan’s use of the key term “future” contrasts sharply with the view of the future to be proposed here in the context of early modern race studies. an example of a full elaboration of this point is peter erickson’s essay “concluding othello: contrasting endings by shakespeare and fred wilson,” shakespeare bulletin . (summer ): – . torically specific definitions of race for the early modern period. the visual field offers a further opportunity to create a stronger overall approach. after all, shakespeare’s theater is a visual, as well as a verbal, medium for performing racial identities. the term “cross-disciplinary” is appropriate for this approach because it involves combining, but not conflating, fields. we cross the boundary between two distinct fields that remain distinct. we go back and forth over the boundary but the boundary doesn’t go away. the analytic insights of this procedure have not been exhausted; there are still potential openings to be explored that could help us to create an expanded field for early modern race studies. second, race scholarship needs to continue to expand beyond the limits of england and its colonies, providing a wider european purview that combines different linguistic and national traditions. since this work is often isolated in separate language departments, there needs to be active collaborations across disciplines and geographies, thus sharing racial studies in progress across departmental lines. beyond this regional network, interactive geographies can be envisioned as shown by sandra young’s discussion in this issue of an exten- sive north-south dynamic. shakespeare’s imagination is not restricted exclu- sively to england as his frequent, far-afield dramatic engagement with the multiethnic mediterranean world testifies. in addition, shakespeare studies needs to foster collaborative and cross-national investigations into techniques of racialization. ian smith’s essay “othello’s black handkerchief ” ( ) came up frequently in the seminar as a model for both reexamining our assumptions about props and questioning the ubiquitous assumption of whiteness in our scholarship. early modern purveyors and consumers of theater had an inter- est in stagecraft and techniques across national borders, which raises questions about the economics and props of stagecraft—ranging from the possible appearance of people of color onstage, to the labor, materials, and commercial networks mobilized to create the appearance of racial difference. third, rejuvenation can come from proactively acknowledging the connec- tion between early modern and contemporary periods. these are not two com- pletely separate compartments to keep strictly disconnected. race studies cannot begin with the eighteenth or the nineteenth century. a comprehensive study of racial configurations and iconographies requires a longer historical time line. the conceptual formulation of early modern race studies necessitates that we go all the way back to consider the role of race in the medieval and shakespeare quarterly for this cross-national exchange, we are indebted to the “staging africans: race and representation in early modern theatres” conference, columbia university, new york, ny, october ; and the two-part session “slavery and race in europe before ” at the renaissance society of america meeting, new york, ny, march . ian smith, “othello’s black handkerchief,” shakespeare quarterly . ( ): – . renaissance eras. this emphatically does not mean using the same definition of race across the entire historical spectrum. rather, the challenge is to trace the variations as the idea’s significance changes over time, as well as to consider how our own historical moment shapes our questions. the term “cross-historical” enables us to ask new questions about the vast span that constitutes our legacy, to engage the full depth and intractability of the racial problems we are up against, and to understand why it is so hard to change. again, there is no con- flation of past and present. instead, two historical moments with distinct ideas of race are put in interpretive relation to produce a comparative perspective. this lengthened historical line has not yet been sufficiently traversed in either direction and therefore holds out opportunities for expanding the scope of early modern race studies in a manner that is more comprehensive. fourth, more work needs to be done in the area of early modern whiteness studies. the use of the term “race” to mean only black or “of color” is unsatisfac- tory even in the renaissance. the full complexity of the term becomes accessi- ble when whiteness as a racial category is also examined. whiteness studies is already a rich subfield within critical race studies and the collection white people in shakespeare, a project in progress edited by arthur little jr., suggests that this important focal point will now be the subject of major examination by early modern scholars. while recognizing what this immense and growing field has achieved, we caution that without commitment to a liberatory politics whiteness studies too has the potential to reinscribe rather than dismantle structures of power. arthur little’s essay in the present issue reveals the com- plexities that arise when racial whiteness becomes a source of attraction rather than a subject of analysis. fifth, we should continue expanding and theorizing the archive of race, seek- ing out new texts, questions, and vocabulary. the essays in this issue make clear that there is a race canon of sorts, an array of primary texts (othello, the merchant of venice, the white devil, documents surrounding queen elizabeth’s expulsion of the moors, george best’s narrative, etc.). the accompa- nying scholarship offers windows into certain aspects of early modern race for- mation, but also suggests much-needed enlargement and redefinition. as young notes in this issue, examinations of the rich vocabulary of bodily and cultural difference have been central to early modern race studies and can have impor- tant political purchase. equally significantly, urvashi chakravarty’s essay sug- gests that questions of similitude that underlie languages of “family” and “ser- vice” need to be reexamined in the context of early modern notions of the “a new scholarly song” see, for example, maulana karenga, “ whiteness studies: deceptive or welcome discourse?,” black issues in higher education . ( ): – ; and robyn wiegman, “whiteness studies and the paradox of particularity,” boundary . ( ): – . “strange.” recently, following the dominican republic’s implementation of its controversial denaturalization law (known as la sentencia), the cuny graduate center used keywords to uncover materials about the african pres- ence in early hispaniola in order to educate the public about the long history of african descended peoples in the dominican republic. yet scholars also need to be alive to the ways that terminology less obviously about bodily difference does some of the organizational work of race. exploring concepts of labor, freedom, and polity are also crucial in understanding their transformation in later eras. so too, we need continued historical and archival research into the presence of early modern people of color and the meanings of their lives, a task made complicated because both whiteness and racial formation are too often still invisible to historians of the period. in this sense one must note the role of imtiaz habib’s black lives in the english archives in pushing forward a conver- sation on black presence studies, archival practice, and race. race-conscious archival work must also understand the archive itself as produced out of colo- nial and racialized assumptions about which lives are deemed worth docu- menting. ideally this work would be in closer dialogue with historians work- ing on early modern race formation from a black/critical race/africana studies approach. so too, there must be a continued internal questioning of the grounding assumptions of our own work. emily weissbourd’s recent essay on elizabeth i’s expulsion orders challenges the early work of hall and loomba on those orders, suggesting that these edicts implicate elizabeth’s privy council shakespeare quarterly sixteenth-century la española: glimpses of the first blacks in the early colonial americas, cuny dominican studies institute, the city college of new york, new york, ny, may to september . see valerie traub’s discussion of “habit” in “mapping the global body,” in early modern visual culture: representation, race, and empire in renaissance england, ed. peter erickson and clark hulse (philadelphia: u of pennsylvania p, ), – , esp. – . see also sandra young’s discussion of the “global south” in this issue. see, for example, steven epstein, speaking of slavery: color, ethnicity, and human bondage in italy (ithaca, ny: cornell up, ), which suggests that the language italians use to think about race and labor is shaped by the language used in medieval italy. for more theorizing of the archive, particularly in the context of race and slavery, see sandra young’s essay in this issue; marisa j. fuentes, dispossessed lives: enslaved women, violence, and the archive (philadelphia: u of pennsylvania p, ); and yvette christiansë, “‘heartsore’: the melancholy archive of cape colony slavery,” in “rewriting dispersal: africana gender studies,” ed. christine cynn and kim f. hall, s&f online . ( ). herman l. bennett, colonial blackness: a history of afro-mexico (bloomington: u of indiana p, ); sharon block, rape and sexual power in early america (chapel hill: u of north carolina p for the omohundro institute of early american history and culture, ); and jennifer spear, race, sex, and the social order in early new orleans (baltimore, md: johns hopkins up, ). in a nascent slave trade. importantly, in our saa seminar, auditor lehua yim provoked the group to consider how using the terminology and structures of “race” occludes questions of native sovereignty and to ask whether we reproduce one structure of domination as we attempt to displace another. sixth, there needs to be more studies of race and performance that themselves theorize/critique race rather than simply document the activities of people of color in the service of proving shakespeare’s universality. shakespeare and latinidad emerged at the saa meeting as a significant new direction, sug- gesting the importance of culturally sensitive explorations of how communities of color engage with shakespeare and what ideas about race emerge in that inter- action. part of the nextgenplen panel, carla della gatta’s paper argued that latino adaptations of shakespeare are a booming business for the united states and suggested that monolingualism in such productions is a significant marker of whiteness. ruben espinosa’s essay in this issue suggests that latino/a stu- dents’ engagement with shakespeare “can shed light on both the promise and the failings of shakespeare studies amid the shifting demographic in america” ( ). seventh, the explicit linkage of two terms in another volume in process— shakespeare and social justice, edited by david ruiter—also signals a new arena of investigation that requires us to think about social justice in relation to shakespeare’s drama in his time and in our own. through the vast arena of ongoing theatrical production, shakespeare has a pervasive cultural and insti- tutional presence. regarding the continued relevance of his work, one of the major challenges is considering the vulnerabilities and limitations that univer- sality glosses over. part of the discussion concerns the prospect that “a new scholarly song” emily weissbourd, “‘ those in their possession’: race, slavery, and queen elizabeth’s ‘edicts of expulsion,’” huntington library quarterly . ( ): – . bonita lawrence and enakshi dua’s essay, “decolonizing antiracism,” which chal- lenged the ways “aboriginal people and perspectives are excluded within antiracism” ( ), and a later critique of this essay by nandita sharma and cynthia wright have been the basis for heated debate among scholars in native american/indigenous and immigration studies. see bonita lawrence and enakshi dua, “decolonizing antiracism,” social justice . ( ): – ; and nandita sharma and cynthia wright, “decolonizing resistance, challenging colonial states,” social justice . ( – ): – . the bba shakespeare (british black and asian shakespeare) project out of the university of warwick is collecting historical data and documenting contemporary black and asian artists’ performances of shakespeare while at the same time bringing awareness of questions of diver- sity and race in contemporary shakespeare performance. see http://www .warwick.ac.uk/ fac/arts/english/research/currentprojects/multiculturalshakespeare/; and @bbashakespeare on twitter. carla della gatta, “from west side story to hamlet, prince of cuba: shakespeare and latinidad in the united states,” paper delivered as part of the nextgenplen panel session at the shakespeare association of america meeting, vancouver, british columbia, april . a ver- sion of this paper is forthcoming in shakespeare studies ( ): – . shakespeare’s work cannot always adequately address current issues of racism and racial justice. even if the arc of our moral universe bends toward justice, it may be that shakespeare’s moral universe does not bend far enough to go the distance needed now. in a long-term perspective, shakespeare’s meaning is not fixed once and for all; it may change as we change. there is much is to be done here over the next decade. what will this dis- cussion look like when we reach ? looking forward to that time, we hope to see a revitalized, intellectually expansive, solidly established field for early modern race studies that attracts much larger audiences in both academic and public spheres. we also believe that new work within this field has the poten- tial to make a relevant contribution to change on a wider scale with respect to racial justice. going forward, early modern race studies requires ongoing adjust- ment to our grounding assumptions. one major critical move has been to fore- ground differences between early modern modes of race thinking and modern race and racism by establishing early modern racialism as “fluid,” with unstable and/or tenuous links between skin color, temperament, culture, and the body. ania loomba and jonathan burton warn that “it is important to remember that even when racial ideologies and racist practices became more entrenched and pernicious, there was no singular approach to or agreement about human dif- ference.” even within enlightenment texts that propose unified schemas of human difference, taxonomy and categorizations frequently break down, par- ticularly along the lines of gender, reproduction, and cultural mixture. although the latest work by lara bovilsky, sujata iyengar, and others operates in a less apologetic mode, the gesture toward fluidity nonetheless remains a way of iso- lating the past from the present, reifying a narrative that makes race the regret- table product of modernity. more dangerously, it leaves in place an unspoken assumption that contemporary racism (based on “real race”) is defined by pur- poseful prejudice and a rigidly taxonomic view of the world. to identify fluidity as a defining difference of early modern race produces contemporary race for- mation as stable, deliberate, and without contradictions, a misconception shakespeare quarterly ania loomba and jonathan burton, introduction to race in early modern england: a documentary companion (new york: palgrave macmillan, ), – , esp. . geraldine heng challenges modern race theory’s adherence to this narrative: “race theory is predicated on an unexamined narrative of temporality in the west: a grand recit that reifies modernity as telos and origin.” see “ the invention of race in the european middle ages i: race studies, modernity, and the middle ages,” literature compass . ( ): – , esp. . for the refusal of fluidity as an early modern property, see lara bovilsky, barbarous play: race on the english renaissance stage (minneapolis: u of minnesota p, ), . see also sujata iyengar’s discussion of the relationship of early modern race studies to the historiography of race theory in shades of difference: mythologies of skin color in early modern england (philadelphia: u of pennsylvania p, ), – . addressed by both vanessa corredera and kyle grady in this issue. the assumption that enlightenment racialism is the starting point for a fixed con- cept of race has become a battleground for scholars and contemporary activists who confront the power of race in policy, policing, and public life. in accepting such a sharp distinction between fluid and fixed formulations of race, early modern race scholars can privilege protecting a notion of historical difference over contributing the unique tools we have for showing how the fluidity of race in the past can help us understand its tenacity, fluidity, and power today. the narrow focus on fluidity can reinforce a tendency to approach race purely as an abstraction, thus ignoring the implications of living as a raced sub- ject then and now as well as the political urgency many of us feel in doing this work. in a forthcoming essay, historian jennifer l. morgan revisits the story of maria, “a proper negro wench” captured along with an unnamed man from a spanish ship during sir francis drake’s circumnavigation. while the pelican and its accompanying ships headed back to london, drake put maria, “gotten with child between the captain and his men pirates,” and two black men ashore on crab island, a deserted, uninhabitable place in the indonesian maluku archipelago. morgan powerfully argues that “maria’s fragmented story suggests the entanglement of race, birth, captivity and the perverse geography of a racialized public” already in place in the sixteenth century, indeed at the heart of one of england’s most enduring nationalist myths. her study is part of a larger collection of historiographical works on early modern atlantic slavery that, often in defiance of scholarly convention, explores questions of race, gender, and the subjectivities of people whose archival life is fragmentary and incomplete. this body of work suggests that using “fluidity” too freely can help gloss over the physical and psychological violence of race formation: as she watched the ship recede from the shores of the tiny island, overrun with crabs and freakishly large bats, the awareness of all that maria’s preg- nancy portended could not have escaped her. maria’s child signified no fluid- ity. her body had become the explanatory vector for the violence meted out upon her, and the visible pregnancy, also wrenched from any familiar meaning it would have elicited a lifetime ago, became the catalyst for their collective abandonment. drake’s pretense that maria would “populate the place” was stark in its unadulterated violence, but it was also prescient. it suggested that by the end of the sixteenth century, the connection between reproduction, a racialized notion of human disposability, and the possibilities of commodi- tized futurity were already accessible to drake and his crew. “a new scholarly song” jennifer l. morgan, “partus sequitur ventrem: slave law and the history of women in slavery,” unpublished paper presented at the “empires of capital: race across the atlantic and the pacific” symposium, university of washington, seattle, wa, may . all quotations are from this manuscript and appear with permission from the author. morgan’s discussion of maria should be a salutary reminder to early mod- ernists that in conceding fluidity as the defining difference of early modern race we may be implicitly reproducing past violence as well as allowing a social justice perspective, which would be attentive to the presence of, perspectives on, and violence against marginalized peoples, to stop at the archive doors. instead of insisting on fluidity as the defining difference between early modern race and now, scholars of early modern race should experiment with removing that concept from our critical repertoire and should insist that race, as an ide- ology that organizes human difference and power, is always protean and sticky, attaching to a range of ideologies, narratives, and vocabularies in ways both familiar and strange. at the beginning of drake’s voyage, one sees the protection of queen elizabeth i’s economic and political interests. in the face of well-documented performances of power by a queen whose iconography is already shaped by her whiteness and her defiance of reproductive norms, it is easy to forget maria, a woman of african descent, who had no control over her body, reproductively or geographically, almost half a world away and who was, despite that distance, still subject to ideologies of gender, reproduction, property, and race operating in elizabeth’s london. yet it is possible that she was not forgotten even in shakespeare’s time. for shakespeareans, maria’s clearly problematic pregnancy foreshadows the unnamed pregnant moor in the merchant of venice, a play that interweaves questions of economics, travel, and reproduction and that begins with the dangers of travel (for elite white men). to echo ian smith’s question about othello in this issue, what does it mean to identify with maria? perhaps it means noting that early moderns’ interest in, and then abandonment of, people of color who do not serve their needs is similar to contemporary schol- arship that asserts that “race” has had its day or to scholarship that silently leaves behind or erases concerns with race as soon as it becomes troublesomely (re)productive. in an earlier nod to the future of early modern race studies, ayanna thompson points out, “it is possible to detect a certain anxiety about the rela- tionship between early modern constructions of race, our own contemporary constructions of race, and the critics’ own identity politics through the employ- ment of prologues, forewords, afterwords, afterthoughts, and epilogues.” she argues that the literal marginalization of these concerns “renders them separate and negligible and communicates an uncertainty about the relationship between the subject being analyzed and the subject performing the analysis.” shakespeare quarterly ayanna thompson, “ the future of early modern race studies: on three ambitious (enough?) books,” the eighteenth century . ( ): – , esp. . our seminar attempted to shift these complex questions from margin to center. several of the papers answer thompson’s call for more theoretical work on early modern race, and we encourage senior scholars in particular to move the com- plex relationship between identity politics and constructions of race then and now to the forefront of our work. evoking w. e. b. dubois’s chapter on “sorrow songs” in the souls of black folk, derrick bell argues, “with what some of us are calling critical race theory, we are attempting to sing a new scholarly song—even if to some listeners our style is strange, our lyrics unseemly.” what you are hearing in this issue is a desire to sing a new scholarly song, to embrace our strange style and our unseemliness in the service of understanding how early moderns as well as con- temporary peoples “apprehend and engage in the historical relations of power and violence that permeate their particular everyday.” in pursuing thompson’s astute activating of “passing strange” and the term’s multivalent meanings in the early modern english and contemporary american lexicon, we can refuse a scholarship that passes, that continues to identify with the confining assump- tions of early modern scholarship, and that speaks only the language of our dominant culture. instead, we can move to a new phase where we set our own questions and chose methods that embrace strangeness, that refuse an artificial border between past and present, and that listen to the voices of people of color. which is to say, expect to see more of us embracing the strange. —peter erickson and kim f. hall “a new scholarly song” bell, faces at the bottom of the well, . see also w. e. b. dubois, the souls of black folk, ed. brent hayes edwards (oxford: oxford up, ), – . nada elia, david m. hernández, jodi kim, shana l. redmond, dylan rodríguez, and sarita echavez see, “introduction: a sightline,” in critical ethnic studies: a reader (durham, nc: duke up, ), . ayanna thompson, passing strange: shakespeare, race, and contemporary america ( ; repr., oxford: oxford up, ), – . free speech rhetoric and normalizing violence: setting higher standards for university guest speaker policies all rights reserved ©, madison mcdonald ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d’auteur. l’utilisation des services d’Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d’utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ cet article est diffusé et préservé par Érudit. Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l’université de montréal, l’université laval et l’université du québec à montréal. il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. https://www.erudit.org/fr/ document généré le avr. : atlantis critical studies in gender, culture & social justice Études critiques sur le genre, la culture, et la justice free speech rhetoric and normalizing violence: setting higher standards for university guest speaker policies madison mcdonald volume , numéro , uri : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar doi : https://doi.org/ . / ar aller au sommaire du numéro Éditeur(s) mount saint vincent university issn - (numérique) découvrir la revue citer cet article mcdonald, m. ( ). free speech rhetoric and normalizing violence: setting higher standards for university guest speaker policies. atlantis, ( ), – . https://doi.org/ . / ar résumé de l'article en réponse aux récentes manifestations à l’encontre de conférenciers externes controversés, de nombreuses universités canadiennes ont mis en œuvre de nouvelles politiques qui regroupent liberté universitaire et liberté d’expression. les politiques de liberté d’expression résultantes protègent souvent les conférenciers, quel que soit le contenu de leur discours; cet article discute l’importance d’interdire les discours qui normalisent les actes préjudiciables. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/atlantis/ https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar https://doi.org/ . / ar https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/atlantis/ -v -n -atlantis / https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/atlantis/ atlantis journal
 issue . / special section: speaking freely and freedom of speech research free speech rhetoric and normalizing violence:  setting higher standards for university guest speaker  policies madison mcdonald is a recent graduate of mcmas­ ter  university’s  gender  studies  and  feminist  re­ search m.a. program. her recent research focuses on  anti­feminist women and their unique relationship to  far­right politics. abstract: in response to recent protests against con­ troversial guest speakers, many canadian universities  have implemented new policies that conflate academ­ ic freedom and freedom of speech. e resultant free  speech policies often protect speakers regardless of the  content of their speech; this paper discusses the im­ portance  of  barring  speech  that  normalizes  acts  of  harm. keywords: academic  freedom, alt­right,  freedom of  speech,  guest  speaker  policies,  no­platforming,  uni­ versity policy recent protests against controversial guest speak­ers  have  reignited  debates  about  freedom  of  speech on canadian university campuses, raising the  question: what restrictions—if any—should there be  on  campus  speech?  many  defenders  of  free  speech  oppose  viewpoint­based  speech  restrictions,  while  others justify speech restrictions as a harm­prevention  measure and insist that certain speakers be refused a  platform  entirely,  a  move  sometimes  referred  to  as  ‘no­platforming’ (levy  ). a major challenge fac­ ing  proponents  of  no­platforming  is  the  lack  of  a  clear and consistent understanding of exactly which  types of speech should be considered seriously harm­ ful (and therefore be refused a platform). free speech  advocates  accordingly  critique  harm­based  restric­ tions  on  the  grounds  that  ethical  limitations  on  speech become arbitrary when they  fail  to  follow a  consistent principle (heinze  ,  ). according to  this  criticism,  restrictions  on  free  speech  risk  being  applied  inconsistently at best and become tools  for  political gain at worst. ough  there  are  varied  understandings  of  what  ought to be considered ‘seriously harmful,’ this paper  outlines  one  discernable  type  of  speech  that  causes  unquestionable harm and therefore should be restric­ ted  from campus platforms:  speech  that normalizes  acts of violence. e first two sections of this paper  discuss major themes in current debates about cam­ pus free speech and seeks to clarify points of ambigu­ ity.  after  outlining  the  ethical,  epistemic,  and  academic values underpinning both support for and  opposition to no­platforming, i closely examine the  meaning of harm. ‘harm’ is frequently referenced in  free  speech debates,  yet often  remains  ambiguously  defined (when defined at all);  in order to minimize  confusion  and  inconsistency,  i  propose  a  clear  and  nuanced definition of harm to inform no­platform­ ing  decisions.  e  following  two  sections  propose  atlantis journal
 issue . / specific criteria with which to assess university guest  speaker policies, grounded through recent examples  of controversial speakers and new campus free speech  policies. i outline a framework for identifying speech  that normalizes acts of violence, which i describe as  bridging rhetoric. i ground this terminology with ex­ amples,  including  trends  in heteroactivist,  far­right,  and  alt­right  discourses  that  strategically  conflate  anti­lgbtq+  and  free  speech  rhetoric. to  ground  my proposed  framework  for campus  speech restric­ tions,  i examine a  recent case of no­platforming at  mcmaster  university.  ough  jordan  peterson  has  been invited to speak at several canadian universities,  the mcmaster university case is examined here due  to  the  immediate  policy  outcome  triggered  by  his  campus  visit  in  march  .  persistent  protests  against peterson’s  appearance at  the university ulti­ mately blocked the speaking event from proceeding,  circumstances that spurred the creation of new free­ dom  of  expression  (foe)  policies  and  outlining  what would thereafter be considered acceptable forms  of protest according to the university. informed by a  close look at mcmaster’s updated foe guidelines, i  argue that campus free speech policies should go bey­ ond the legal limits on free speech. i propose restric­ tions  on  campus  free  speech  that  respect  both  academic freedom and an ethical responsibility to the  safety of all community members. i do not claim that  controversial or objectionable viewpoints should nev­ er  be  given  a  platform  for  fear  of  causing  offence.  rather, i argue that reasonable limitations on campus  speech  should  include  restrictions  on  speech  that  crosses  the  line  from offensive  to normalizing viol­ ence  and  that  thoughtful  discussions  of  campus  speaker policies should discern between the two. as  university campuses are  increasingly key sites where  equity politics  are debated  (nash, gorman­murray,  and browne  ), it is essential to nuance the cam­ pus free speech debate in order to meaningfully resist  oppressive ideologies. e campus free speech debate e free speech debate is often framed as a clash of  epistemic  reasoning against  an ethical obligation  to  harm­prevention. when a speaker is known to pro­ mote hate, prejudice, or otherwise violent ideologies,  protestors may demand a disinvitation from the insti­ tutions,  also  referred  to  as  ‘no­platforming.’  more  specifically, no­platforming is the attempt to deny a  platform to speech that will harm some or all of the  audience (levy  ,  ) and has become an import­ ant  consideration  in  university  free  speech  debates.  for the purposes of this paper, i use no­platforming  and  speech  restrictions  interchangeably  to  refer  to  viewpoint­based platform refusals and disinvitations. contemporary  defenders  of  no­platforming  justify  their position as one of harm­prevention, where harm  can refer to a range of outcomes: the proliferation of  further bias arising from biased speech and harmed  dignity (ben­porath  ); the reinforcement of un­ just  social  hierarchies  (simpson  );  and  an  in­ creased threat of violence for groups targeted by hate  speech (o’keefe  ). critics of no­platforming ob­ ject to harm­based restrictions for a number of reas­ ons.  given  the  fundamental  importance  of  free  speech rights to a liberal view on democracy, some ar­ gue  that  restrictions  on  freedom  of  speech  pose  a  threat to democratic health. heinze ( ,  ) argues  that any ban on speech based solely on viewpoint­se­ lective grounds is “always inherently anti­democratic,  even when adopted on legitimate security grounds.”  while for some, speech restrictions based on legitim­ ate security grounds may not be sufficiently justified,  other  defenders  of  free  speech  concede  that  harm­ based  restrictions  are  justified  in  certain  cases.  e  liberal  conception  of  free  speech  promotes  the  expression  of  ideas  and  opinions  without  coercive  institutional censorship, with the exception of speech  that is “seriously harmful or carries an imminent risk  of harm” (simpson and srinivasan  ,  ). e  principal criticism of harm­based restrictions accord­ ing to the liberal perspective, then,  is not that they  are inherently unjustified, but that the criteria for de­ termining what types of speech are considered seri­ ously  harmful  is  flawed.  one  charge  against  harm­based  speech  restrictions  is  that  they  include  speech  that  is  merely  offensive  or  not  considered  politically correct, neither of which ought to be con­ sidered seriously harmful according to this view. is  line  of  argument,  also  referred  to  as  the  ‘right  to  offend,’ is frequently employed in debates about aca­ demic freedom, itself a reflection of the broader free  atlantis journal
 issue . / iterations  of  free  speech  rights:  “unlike  the  broader  concept of freedom of speech, academic freedom must  be based on institutional  integrity, rigorous standards  for enquiry and institutional autonomy” (universities  canada  ). additionally,  academic  freedom must  be grounded in reasoned discourse and scholarly rigor,  and is additionally constrained by professional discip­ linary standards (universities canada  ). based on  the criteria dictated by academic freedom, free speech  on canadian university campuses is already restricted  based on epistemic quality. if university administration and faculty are committed  to academic freedom, do the same standards apply to  guest speakers on campus? ough singular instances  of speakers who base their claims on poor scholarship  will  not  define  the  integrity  of  a  given  department,  simpson and srinivasan argue that “the overall intellec­ tual and disciplinary culture of a university is shaped  by  all  of  the  public  speaking  activities  that  happen  within the institution” ( ,  ). in order to take its  epistemic purposes seriously, the university is justified  in  refusing a platform to  speakers who do not meet  disciplinary  standards  or  ground  their  arguments  in  rigorous scholarship.  while in some instances it will be evident whether a  speaker  adheres  to  the  academic  standards,  certain  cases  cannot  be  so  easily  determined.  disagreement  about  professional  standards  occurs  both  across  and  within disciplines; the resulting discord creates border­ line cases in which it is unclear if no­platforming can  be  justified  on  epistemic  grounds.  opinions  about  which  topics  are  inappropriate  for  academic  inquiry,  which linguistic conventions are no longer acceptable,  or whether a particular epistemic debate  is  settled or  remains contested may differ amongst scholars and cre­ ate  disagreement  about  which  disciplinary  standards  ought to inform speech restrictions.  e  recent  controversy  surrounding  rebecca tuvel’s   article “in defense of transracialism” is a prime  example of both interdisciplinary and intradisciplinary  rifts  over  professional  standards.  tuvel’s  article  was  published in april   in hypatia: a journal of fem­ inist  philosophy,  and  draws  parallels  between  trans­ gender and transracial identities; tuvel argues that the  speech debate. offence, it is argued, is not reflective of  a speech’s quality but instead characterizes the listener’s  reaction  and,  “the  mere  fact  that  what  i  say  causes  someone offence is not a sufficient reason to forbid me  to say it” (barrow  ,  ).   defenders of free speech also appeal to epistemic reas­ oning,  arguing  that  in  the  pursuit  of  truth,  the  strength of one’s argument can only be proven by en­ countering and refuting the views of one’s opponents.  especially in the context of the university learning ex­ perience,  exposure  to divergent perspectives  through  free and open dialogue presents the opportunity to re­ assess one’s own beliefs in the face of evidence­based  arguments (ceci and williams  ,  ). stripping  universities of all potentially offensive speech, it is ar­ gued, denies students the opportunity to practice de­ fending their ideas and encourages them to claim they  have been offended anytime their views are challenged  (dunt  ).  levy  ( )  argues  that  though  the  campus  free  speech/no­platforming  debate  has  been  largely  re­ garded as pitting appeal to reason against the duty to  prevent harm and other values, there has been a recent  turn  to epistemically­based defences of no­platform­ ing. simpson and srinivasan ( ) argue that in the  context of the university, both defenders and critics of  no­platforming  mistakenly  treat  the  debate  as  if  it  were about freedom of speech when it is more accur­ ately an issue of academic freedom. by virtue of being  a  specialized  institution  (governed  by  principles  of  academic  freedom),  content­based  restrictions  are  already  ubiquitous  in  universities  (simpson  and  srinivasan  ). in addition to legal  limitations on  free speech, the university’s commitment to academic  freedom imposes restrictions on speech that are differ­ ent from those that apply to the general public.  according to the   statement on academic free­ dom,  adopted  unanimously  by  canadian  university  presidents, academic freedom is “the freedom to teach  and conduct research in an academic environment …  [and] includes the right to freely communicate know­ ledge  and  the  results  of  research  and  scholar­ ship”  (universities  canada  ).  e  statement  explicitly distinguishes academic freedom from other  atlantis journal
 issue . / increasing  acceptance  of  sex  and  gender  transitions  should likewise apply to racial transitions and include  support  for  individuals  who  wish  to  assert  a  racial  identity  that  differs  from  their  birth  ( ). tuvel  refers  to  rachel  dolezal’s  self­presentation  as  black  (despite being born a white woman) as an entry point  for her discussion,  contrasting  the widespread back­ lash against dolezal’s transracial identity and the more  supportive public reception of caitlyn jenner’s trans­ gender  identity. e publication sparked a  frenzy of  reactions,  receiving  both  virulent  criticism  and  sup­ port  from  scholars  and  the  broader  media.  critics  claimed that  the article  included “egregious  levels of  liberal white  ignorance and discursive  transmisogyn­ istic  violence”  (quoted  in  mckenzie,  harris,  and  zamudio­suaréz  ), while supporters argued that  the vicious attacks directed at the author were akin to  a “modern­day witch hunt” (singal  ) and reflec­ ted  the  current  “era of outrage”  (oliver  ). e  hypatia staff themselves were divided in the wake of  the  erupting  controversy.  in  the  days  following  the  article’s  release,  an  apology  signed  on  behalf  of  the  “majority  of  associate  editors”  was  posted  on  face­ book, avowing  that “[c]learly,  the article  should not  have  been  published”  (quoted  in  mckenzie,  harris,  and zamudio­suaréz  ). hypatia’s editor­in­chief,  sally scholz, along with the journal’s board of direct­ ors, defended  the decision  to publish tuvel’s  article,  with scholz publicly affirming a belief that “hypatia  should publish on a wide array of topics employing a  wide  array  of  methodologies”  (quoted  in  weinberg  b).  philosophers  were  in  similar  disagreement  about the article. an open letter signed by hundreds  of academics, including philosophers alexis shotwell,  lori  gruen,  and  shannon winnubst,  called  for  the  article’s retraction. e letter claims tuvel’s work falls  short of scholarly standards, listing four principal cri­ ticisms including the use of language not in alignment  with current academic conventions (such as deadnam­ ing) and a failure to sufficiently engage with scholarly  work by women philosophers of colour (singal  ).  other  philosophers  defended  tuvel:  in  a  post  on  philosophy  site  e  daily  nous,  academic  justin  weinberg  claimed  that  the  criticisms  listed  in  the  open letter were “plain false,” unclear, or  insufficient  (weinberg  a). academics outside the philosoph­ ical  discipline  were  also  divided  in  the  debate  over  scholarly standards. suzanna danuta walters, editor of  signs: journal of women in culture and society and pro­ fessor of sociology, condemned hypatia’s associate edit­ ors for both insulting tuvel and undermining the peer  review process. blaming toxic academic call­out culture  for the widespread condemnation of tuvel’s article, da­ nuta walters defends tuvel’s work as that of a commit­ ted  feminist  philosopher  on  the  side  of  “progressive  social  justice”  (danuta walters  ). e deep  rifts  amongst academics in their responses to tuvel’s article  shows that consensus on scholarly conventions cannot  be taken for granted and therefore cannot be the sole  basis for determining campus speech restrictions. epistemic  standards  can  certainly  serve  as  a  starting  point for creating campus speech restrictions, however,  borderline cases may not be readily settled by this cri­ terion alone. rather than using epistemic or harm­pre­ vention  criteria,  i  argue  that  there  is  value  in  considering  both  when  creating  campus  speech  guidelines. in an effort to maintain the university’s in­ tellectual  and  disciplinary  culture,  guest  speakers  on  campuses should, at minimum, meet the standards of  reasoned  argument  and  rigorous  research  set  out  by  academic  freedom.  in  controversial  cases,  especially  those involving disputes over whether a speaker adheres  to  disciplinary  standards,  i  believe  that  there  is  still  value in using harm­prevention criteria to guide plat­ forming decisions. defining harm what  harms  are  being  referenced  by  harm­based  speech restrictions? e most powerful speech restric­ tions  in  canada  are  the  legal  boundaries  on  speech  defined by  the  criminal  code  of  canada. subsection   of  the  criminal  code prohibits hate propaganda  (also  referred  to  as  hate  speech),  which  includes  the  public  incitement  of  hatred  against  an  identifiable  group  “where  such  incitement  is  likely  to  lead  to  a  breach of the peace.” ough campus speech policies  must abide by these legal restrictions, these boundaries  on  speech  are  not  enough.  university  guest  speaker  policies  must  additionally  refuse  platforms  to  speech  that normalizes acts of violence given its ability to rein­ force systemic oppression. in an attempt to clarify ex­ actly  what  speech  these  restrictions  refer  to,  i  will  atlantis journal
 issue . / define “acts of violence” using intentional misgender­ ing as a  timely example of normalizing harm. mis­ gendering  can  refer  to  addressing  someone  by  the  incorrect gender pronoun or denying someone access  to  their  preferred  gendered  space,  including  wash­ rooms  (mclemore  ,  ).  while  misgendering  can certainly happen accidentally or unintentionally, i  will explain why intentional misgendering is an act of  violence.  in  their    “world  report  on  violence  and  health,” the world health organization defines viol­ ence as “the intentional use of physical force or power,  threatened or actual, against oneself, another person,  or against a group or community, that either results in  or has a high likelihood or resulting in injury, death,  psychological  harm,  maldevelopment  or  depriva­ tion” (krug et al.  ,  ). e authors explicitly re­ mark on their decision to define violence broadly and  include non­physical forms of violence: “is [defini­ tion] reflects a growing recognition among researchers  and practitioners of the need to include violence that  does  not  necessarily  result  in  injury  or  death,  but  nonetheless poses a substantial burden on individuals,  families, communities and health care systems world­ wide”  (krug  et  al.  ,  ).  acts  of  violence  can  therefore  refer  to  include  both  physical  and  non­ physical threats, including psychological violence.  intentionally misgendering trans people is a form of  psychological  violence. riley  j. dennis outlines  the  psychological effects that misgendering has on trans  people: [misgendering  is]  a  way  of  invalidating  their  identity.  it makes  them  feel disrespected,  iso­ lated,  and  uncomfortable,  and  hated  simply  because of their gender. it tells them that they  should  hide  who  they  really  are,  that  people  will  never  fully  accept  them.  misgendering  a  trans  person  causes  real  psychological  harm.  (dennis  ,  : ­ : ) in  a  study  on  trans  experiences  of  misgendering,  mclemore found that the highest proportion of par­ ticipants  ( . %)  reported  feeling  very  stigmatized  when they were misgendered ( ,  ). misgender­ ing  not  only  causes  psychological  harm,  but  also  affects an  individual’s physical wellbeing. misgender­ ing is known to cause anxiety and can lead to signific­ ant distress, causing harm that, over time, can lead to  suicide  (daley  );  statistics  from  the  canadian  mental health association report that  % of trans re­ spondents  in  an  ontario­based  survey  had  seriously  considered  suicide  and  %  had  attempt  suicide  (“trans mental health” n.d.). describing the  impact  that  repeated  misgendering  has  on  their  life,  one  genderqueer person discloses, “i felt erased, i felt like  the message that i consistently got was ‘you don’t exist,’  and for me that line between you don’t exist and you  shouldn’t  exist  can  feel  pretty  similar  a  lot  of  the  times” (bown­kai quoted in daley  ). given the  effects of misgendering on the lives and wellbeing of  trans and gender variant  individuals,  repeated  inten­ tional misgendering is unquestionably an act of viol­ ence. in the following section, i use this understanding  of violence to inform a case for restrictions on seriously  harmful speech; more specifically, speech that covertly  normalizes acts of violence. i use intentional misgen­ dering  as  an  entry  point  to  discuss  broader  trends  amongst heteroactivists and the far­right to normalize  violent  discourse.  using  freedom  of  speech  rhetoric,  speakers create a rhetorical bridge from anti­lgtbq+  ideologies to a defense of democratic rights, implicitly  justifying their oppressive stance.  i propose  the term  “bridging rhetoric” can be used to identify this partic­ ular type of harmful speech; additionally, i argue that  bridging rhetoric as a framework can subsequently in­ form decisions about which types of  speech are per­ missible on university campuses.  shifting the debate: bridging rhetoric  ough certain types of oppressive speech may be eas­ ily recognized,  in most cases harmful speech is more  challenging  to  definitively  discern.  in  order  to  resist  harmful ideologies, one must be able to identify them  and  suitable  language  is  required  to  do  so.  explicit  threats and slurs can be clearly categorized as harmful;  however,  implicit  oppression  may  need  a  more  nu­ anced framework for assessment. violent ideologies are  sometimes  reframed  within  more  widely  accepted  discourses, a type of oppressive speech that i refer to as  bridging rhetoric. rather than defend an act of viol­ ence  outright,  bridging  rhetoric  covertly  normalizes  atlantis journal
 issue . / acts of violence by aligning them with broader social  norms. consider jordan peterson’s stance on personal  pronouns  as  an  example.  e  university  of toronto  psychology  professor  gained  notoriety  in  september   for his three­part youtube series called “profess­ or against political correctness,” created in response to  the university’s new mandatory anti­bias training and  a federal amendment to add gender identity and ex­ pression to the canadian human rights act (lynskey  ). peterson states that his principal concern with  the amendment is the requirement to address people  by  the  pronouns  of  their  choosing;  this  “compelled  speech” is part of what peterson calls a “radical collect­ ivist left­wing game” in which compassion is used as a  guise to “gain linguistic supremacy in the area of pub­ lic discourse” (peterson  ,  : ­ : ). rather than  taking an explicitly anti­trans position, peterson uses  free speech rhetoric and claims about his own linguist­ ic rights to justify intentional misgendering. in a cbc  interview, when asked about referring to his trans non­ binary colleague using the correct pronouns, peterson  responds,  e mere fact that professor peet would like to  be addressed by a particular pronoun does not  mean that i am required to address him [sic] by  that pronoun. at doesn’t mean that i deny his  [sic]  existence  or  the  existence  of  people  who  don’t fit neatly in binary gender categories. i re­ serve the right to use my own language. (peter­ son  )  peterson strategically frames his resistance as a defence  of  his  own  democratic  rights  and  sidesteps  further  comment on the harm that misgendering causes trans  people. peterson does not  justify misgendering as an  act of violence but positions himself  instead as a de­ fender of  free speech, which,  in peterson’s words, “is  not just another value [but] the foundation of western  civilization”  (quoted  in  murphy  ).  peterson  bridges a discursive gap to present his arguments from  a  normatively  acceptable  position:  using  free  speech  rhetoric, peterson reframes his arguments away from a  defence of harm (a more challenging stance to take in  canada, where overt violence conflicts with the state’s  peaceful  self­image)  and  toward  a  defence  of  demo­ cratic rights (which are protected by law in the cana­ dian charter of rights and freedoms).  peterson’s reframing is characteristic of a broader trend  in anti­lgbtq+ resistive discourses: nash, gorman­ murray, and browne ( ) argue that heteroactivists  in canada, australia, and great britain—peterson in­ cluded—increasingly frame their oppressive discourses  as claims  to  freedom of  speech and  freedom of  reli­ gion.  heteroactivists,  who  seek  to  resist  lgbtq+  equalities and re­inscribe heteronormative gender rela­ tions, reposition their arguments within seemingly in­ tellectual  debates  about  rights,  rather  than  making  morality­based  claims  against  lgbtq+  equalities  (nash,  gorman­murray,  and  browne  ).  by  re­ framing the debate and employing bridging rhetoric,  anti­lgbtq+ discourses are grounded within claims  about  freedom  of  speech;  in  the  case  of  intentional  misgendering,  shifting  the  debate  away  from  attacks  on trans rights and towards broader free speech debates  functions to normalize this particular act of violence. ough  nash,  gorman­murray,  and  browne  ( )  remark that heteroactivist discourses are taken up by  individuals and groups across  the political  spectrum,  the co­optation of rights rhetoric and claims of harm is  also a tactic commonly employed by the far­right and  alternative right, or “alt­right.” lyons defines the alt­ right as:  [a]  loosely  organized  far­right  movement  that  shares a contempt for both liberal multicultural­ ism and mainstream conservatism; a belief that  some people are inherently superior to others; a  strong  internet  presence  […]  [it]  combines  white nationalism, misogyny, antisemitism, and  authoritarianism in various forms. ( ,  ) when their inflammatory speech is denied a platform,  alt­right  and  far­right  speakers  claim  that  their  free  speech  rights  have  been  infringed  upon,  co­opting  freedom  of  speech  rhetoric  from  leftists  as  a  shield —following  a  similar  pattern  as  the  aforementioned  heteroactivist discursive strategy. in  , milo yian­ nopoulos, right­wing provocateur and former editor at  alt­right outlet breitbart news, was scheduled to speak  at  university  of  california,  berkeley  until  protests  caused his talk to be cancelled. yiannopoulos is known  for  making  incendiary  remarks  against  trans  people,  muslims, black lives matter activism, feminism, and  queer people and writing columns with titles such as  atlantis journal
 issue . / “birth  control  makes  women  unattractive  and  crazy” and “would you rather your child had fem­ inism or cancer?” (bbc news  ). following the  cancellation  of  his  talk,  yiannopoulos  was  quick  to  frame  the  incident  as  an  attack  against  freedom  of  speech, claiming that “the left is absolutely terrified of  free  speech  and  will  do  literally  anything  to  shut  it  down” (quoted in dearden  ). much like the way  peterson sidesteps discussions about harm­prevention  in  favour  of  debating  democratic  freedoms, yianno­ poulos  strategically  shifts  the  conversational  focus  away from his own inflammatory rhetoric and instead  frames himself as a victim of leftist politics. in doing  so, the discussion is no longer about far­right violence,  focusing instead on a seemingly worthy debate about  free speech. is  rhetorical  defense  is  often  referred  to  as  the  ‘weaponization  of  free  speech,’  in  which  free  speech  and freedom of expression discourse is used to justify  bigotry  and  white  supremacy  (picazo  ;  scott  ; zine  ). is is particularly relevant to ca­ nadian universities, as campuses have increasingly be­ come  targets  for  alt­right  recruitment.  in  ,  the  cbc  reported  a  rise  in  right­wing  populist  paraphernalia on university campuses across the coun­ try, promoting a “white students union” and display­ ing  far­right  references,  slogans  like  “make  canada  great  again”  (zhou  ).  in  november  ,  posters were  found around the mcmaster university  campus  that  included  links  to alt­right websites and  messages  such as “tired of anti white propaganda?  you are not alone” (hastie  ).  using  similar  freedom  of  expression  discourse,  alt­ right speakers are invited to university campuses under  guises of free and open inquiry. in  , alt­right fig­ ure faith goldy was invited by the laurier society for  open  inquiry  to  present  a  talk  titled  “ethnocide:  multiculturalism and european canadian identity” at  wilfred  laurier  university  (paradkar  ).  goldy  has said the ‘fourteen words’ neo­nazi slogan on­air  and was fired from rebel media after appearing on a  white nationalist podcast during the   charlottes­ ville riots (brean  ; canadian anti­hate network  ).  when  asked  about  her  decision  to  invite  goldy, the society’s co­founder and president lindsay  shepherd told the cbc, “ese views are out there no  matter how despicable some people find them. actu­ ally, the best thing to do is air them out and let them  be publicly challenged” (quoted in lam and bueckert  ).  ere  is  a  significant  difference,  however,  between challenging racist and xenophobic views and  providing those views with a platform. no matter how  the invitation to speak is justified, the very fact of the  invitation suggests that the speaker’s ideas are worthy  of debate. challenging hate is essential to the pursuit  of  a  more  equitable  society,  nevertheless,  providing  platforms for harmful or violent viewpoints is not ne­ cessary to challenge them. freedom of speech rhetoric is used as a shield to pro­ tect the alt­right’s overt racism and bigotry and is like­ wise  employed  by  heteroactivists  to  more  covertly  normalize  acts  of  violence.  ough  the  two  groups  may share some values and not others, both the alt­ right and anti­lgbtq+ rights advocates oppose ad­ vances  in  equity  for  marginalized  groups.  i  propose  that bridging rhetoric can be used as a term to identify  speech that co­opts free speech discourse as a cover for  normalizing  violence.  as  demonstrated  above,  both  groups  see  canadian  university  campuses  as  viable  platforms for their violent and harmful discourse. in  light of these examples, i will now examine mcmaster  university’s policies as a case study and discuss why it  is  imperative  that  campus  speech  restrictions  go  beyond the limits required by law. bridging  rhetoric  and  university  speech  policies mcmaster  university’s  “freedom  of  expression:  fre­ quently asked questions” (faq) webpage outlines the  institution’s  current  restrictions  on  free  speech.  e  page references the legal boundaries on speech set out  by the criminal code of canada and the ontario hu­ man  rights  code,  as  well  as  the  university’s  own  “policy on discrimination and harassment” which re­ quires “all members of the university community” to  “respect the rights and freedoms of others” (mcmaster  n.d.). according to the faq page, all members of the  mcmaster community are free and encouraged to in­ vite speakers, with no further restrictions on the kinds  of speech that are permitted. e page explicitly states  atlantis journal
 issue . / that  the university administration does not endorse  the views of invited speakers and that, while they do  not tolerate hate speech, mcmaster is “committed to  freedom of expression” and does not shut down un­ popular  or  controversial  speaker  events  (mcmaster  n.d.).  one  such  event  was  jordan  peterson’s  invitation  to  speak at  the university  in  . although peterson  was met with chanting and musical fanfare upon his  arrival  to  the  mcmaster  university  campus,  it  was  not a celebratory reception. peterson was scheduled to  appear as part of a panel debate about free speech and  political  correctness  in  academic  settings;  however,  protestors’ persistent sonic disruptions ultimately pre­ vented him from speaking (beatty  ). in the wake  of  peterson’s  visit  to  campus,  mcmaster  formed  a  committee on protest and freedom of expression and  created  a  new  document  outlining  what  the  uni­ versity  deems  to  be  acceptable  methods  of  protests  against  guest  speakers  and  freedom  of  expression  guidelines. e university’s “freedom of expression,  protest and dissent: guidance  for event organizers  and participants” (foe) policy document was final­ ized in june   and remains the university’s most  up­to­date guest speaker policy (mcmaster  ). mcmaster’s  foe  document  includes  general  prin­ ciples and goals, as well as specific guidance for the  audience members, event organizers, and moderators/ facilitators of campus speaking events. ough a sub­ heading  is not  included  for guest  speaker guidance,  invited  speakers  are  referenced  in  the  guidelines  for  event organizers. event organizers “are responsible for  communicating this guidance and the expectations of  the university to invited speakers or performers and  for  securing  their  agreement  to  them  in advance of  the event” (mcmaster  ,  ). since the document  does not include explicit guidelines for invited speak­ ers,  it  must  therefore  be  inferred  that  the  guidance  and expectations to which this line refers are the doc­ ument’s “general goals and principles.” within this  section, there is no mention of speech restrictions for  visiting speakers, however, quite oppositely, the docu­ ment states  that  its policies are “intended to be ap­ plied without regard for the subject matter or content  of any particular speech, performance or event held on  mcmaster university property” (mcmaster  ,  ).  aside  from  the  legal  limitations on  free  speech out­ lined on their freedom of expression faq page, mc­ master university guidelines do not include additional  speech restrictions for invited speakers.  ough it may seem that mcmaster’s foe policy aims  to encourage open  inquiry  through unhindered free­ dom of expression, these types of open speech policies  can have unintended but harmful repercussions. open  speech policies often reinforce unjust social hierarchies,  as  the voices of  the most powerful or privileged are  those most  likely to be heard. conversely, dissenting  voices, especially those from marginalized groups, tend  to be read as insolent and defiant. as hofmann­kur­ oda ( ,  ) remarks, “when freedom of speech is  framed as a universal right—without regard to the spe­ cificities of race, class, and gender—it can in fact work  to consolidate  the power of  the  ruling majority  and  thus  reproduce  the  status  quo.”  university  speech  policies should reflect the ways that free speech rhetor­ ic is employed to bolster harmful and violent speech  that perpetuate systemic oppression. in order to mean­ ingfully  consider  how  open  speech  policies  reinforce  unjust social hierarchies, policies should include con­ tent­based speech restrictions that go beyond the legal  limits on hate speech and refuse platforms for bridging  rhetoric.  concluding remarks: why universities must take responsibility  for the outcomes of eir policies in canada, the responsibilities of the university are not  limited to upholding rigorous academic standards. ac­ cording  to  universities  canada’s  statement  on  aca­ demic  freedom,  the  institutional  responsibility  to  uphold  the  principles  of  academic  freedom  must  be  balanced with other ethical duties: universities must also ensure that the rights and  freedoms of others are respected, and that aca­ demic freedom is exercised in a reasonable and  responsible manner  […] faculty members and  university  leaders have an obligation  to ensure  that  students’  human  rights  are  respected  and  atlantis journal
 issue . / that they are encouraged to pursue their educa­ tion  according  to  the  principles  of  academic  freedom. (universities canada  ) in  order  to  uphold  their  commitment  to  human  rights, university policies should reflect the potential  impact  of  guest  speaker  events.  even  if  universities  claim that providing a platform for a particular speak­ er does not equate to approval of that speaker’s views,  the offer of a platform speaks for itself. e university  is a respected institution that plays a role in certifying  expertise;  as  such,  the very  fact of  invitation  signals  credibility and epistemic significance (levy  ,  ).  e authority afforded by a university platform ampli­ fies the impact of a given message. much in the way  that the academic integrity of an invited speaker con­ tributes to the university’s broader intellectual culture,  an  invited  speaker’s  covert  attacks  on  equality  func­ tions to re­inscribe broader oppressive structures. it is  therefore not enough to only refuse platforms to those  who  make  overt  calls  for  violence  or  hate  speech —taking inclusivity seriously requires a more refined  policy.  university  policies  should  additionally  refuse  platforms to speech that normalizes acts of violence,  in recognition of how open speech policies bolster the  status quo, including unjust social hierarchies. resist­ ing  oppressive  heteroactivist  and  alt­right  ideologies  requires a recognition of how free speech rhetoric  is  co­opted to advance covert attacks against marginal­ ized  groups.  by  introducing  nuanced  restrictions  to  guest speaker policies, it is possible to balance the val­ ues  of  academic  freedom,  free  expression,  and  the  safety of university community members.   references barrow, robin.  . “academic freedom: its  nature, extent and value.” british journal of  educational studies  , no.  :  ­ . https:// doi.org/ . /j. ­ . . .x. bbc news.  . “milo yiannopoulos: who is the  alt­right writer and provocateur?” bbc news,  february  ,  . https://www.bbc.com/news/ world­us­canada­ . beatty, dave.  . “mcmaster debate with  controversial professor jordan peterson disrupted by  activists.” cbc news, march  ,  . https:// www.cbc.ca/news/canada/hamilton/mcmaster­debate­ with­controversial­professor­jordan­peterson­ disrupted­by­activists­ . .  ben­porath, sigal.  . “free speech on campus  means universities must protect the dignity of all  students.” e conversation, october  ,  .  https://theconversation.com/free­speech­on­campus­ means­universities­must­protect­the­dignity­of­all­ students­ . brean, joseph.  . “how faith goldy became the  most dangerous woman not on the campaign  trail.” e national post, september  ,  . https:// nationalpost.com/news/politics/election­ /how­ faith­goldy­became­the­most­dangerous­woman­not­ on­the­campaign­trail. ceci, stephen j. and wendy m. williams.  .  “who decides what is acceptable speech on  campus? why restricting free speech is not the  answer.” perspectives on psychological science  , no.  :  ­ . https://doi.org/ . / . criminal code, rsc  , c c­ , s  . daley, dean.  . “misgendering, a not so silent  killer.” e chronicle, march  ,  . https:// chronicle.durhamcollege.ca/ / /misgendering­ not­silent­killer/.  atlantis journal
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 issue . / murphy, jessica.  . “toronto professor jordan  peterson takes on gender­neutral pronouns.” bbc,  november  ,  . https://www.bbc.com/news/ world­us­canada­ . nash, catherine j., andrew gorman­murray, and  kath browne.  . "geographies of intransigence:  freedom of speech and heteroactivist resistances in  canada, great britain and australia." social &  cultural geography  ­ . https://doi.org/ . / . . . o'keefe, eresa.  . "making feminist sense of  no­platforming." feminist review  , no.  :  ­ .  https://doi.org/ . /fr. . . oliver, kelly.  . “if is is feminism…” e  philosophical salon, may  ,  . https:// web.archive.org/web/ /http:// thephilosophicalsalon.com/if­this­is­feminism­its­ been­hijacked­by­the­thought­police/. paradkar, shree.  . “faith goldy’s talk at wilfred  laurier was cancelled. and a damn good ing,  too.” e star, march  ,  . https:// www.thestar.com/opinion/star­columnists/ / / / faith­goldys­talk­at­wilfred­laurier­was­cancelled­and­ a­damn­good­thing­too.html. picazo, alheli.  . “how the alt­right weaponized  free speech.” maclean’s, may  ,  . https:// www.macleans.ca/opinion/how­the­alt­right­ weaponized­free­speech/. peterson, jordan.  . “‘i’m not a bigot’ meet the u  of t prof who refuses to use genderless pronouns.”  interview by carol off. canadian broadcasting  corporation, september  ,  . https://www.cbc.ca/ radio/asithappens/as­it­happens­friday­edition­ . /i­m­not­a­bigot­meet­the­u­of­t­prof­who­ refuses­to­use­genderless­pronouns­ . . _____.  . “jordan peterson on why he refuses to  use special pronouns for transgender people ­ lbc.”  interview by maajid nawaz. lbc, may  ,  .  youtube video. https://www.youtube.com/watch? v=s_ubmazqx . scott, joan wallace.  . “e right has  weaponized free speech.” academe blog, january  ,  . https://academeblog.org/ / / /the­ right­has­weaponized­free­speech/. simpson, robert mark.  . “dignity, harm, and  hate speech.” law and philosophy  , no.  :  ­ . https://doi.org/ . /s ­ ­ ­z. simpson, robert mark and amia srinivasan.  .  “no platforming.” in academic freedom, edited by  jennifer lackey,  ­ . oxford: oxford university  press.  singal, jessie.  . “is is what a modern­day  witch hunt looks like.” new york magazine, may  ,  . https://nymag.com/intelligencer/ / / transracialism­article­controversy.html. e canadian anti­hate network.  . “who is  faith goldy?” last modified october  ,  .  https://www.antihate.ca/who_is_faith_goldy. e canadian mental health association. n.d.  “lesbian, gay, bisexual, trans & queer identified  people and mental health.” accessed november  ,  . https://ontario.cmha.ca/documents/lesbian­ gay­bisexual­trans­queer­identified­people­and­ mental­health/. tuvel, rebecca.  . “in defense of transracialism.”  hypatia  , no.  :  ­ .  https://doi.org/ . /hypa. . universities canada.  . “statement on academic  freedom.” last modified october  ,  . https:// www.univcan.ca/media­room/media­releases/ statement­on­academic­freedom/. weinberg, justin.  a. “philosopher’s article on  transracialism sparks controversy (updated with  response from the author.” daily nous, may  ,  . http://dailynous.com/ / / / philosophers­article­transracialism­sparks­ controversy/. atlantis journal
 issue . / _____.  b. “hypatia’s editor and its board  president defend publication of tuvel article.” daily  nous, may  ,  .  http://dailynous.com/ / / /hypatias­editor­ board­president­defend­publication­tuvel­article/. zhou, steven.  . “canadian campuses see an  alarming rise in right­wing populism.” cbc news.  january  .  https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/manitoba/opinion­ campus­right­wing­populism­ . . zine, jasmine.  . “e alt­right and the  weaponization of free speech on campus.” academic  matters, fall  ,  ­ .  _ - .indd articles philip a. cunningham emerging principles of a theology of shalom michael p. jaycox black lives matter and catholic whiteness: a tale of two performances james g. sabak, ofm ‘‘keeping vigil’’ and the response of a believer to grief and suff ering maureen l. walsh emerging trends in pregnancy-loss memorialization in american catholicism theological roundtable the reverend elizabeth a. eaton, catherine e. clifford, michael root, the reverend antje jackelÉn, carter lindberg luther’s ninety-five theses: ecumenical prospects on its quincentennial review symposium joseph o’leary, malcolm david eckel, s. mark heim, john makransky, won-jae hur buddhist nonduality, paschal paradox: a christian commentary on the teaching of vimalakı̄rti (vimalakı̄rtinirdeśa) review essay william j. collinge review of john m. rist, augustine deformed: love, sin, and freedom in the western moral tradition plus reviews of books cambridge core for further information about this journal please go to the journal website at: cambridge.org/hor v o l u m e • n u m b e r • d e c e m b e r h o r iz o n s published in association with villanova university volume , number , december the journal of the college theology society i s s n - horizons _ - .indd _ - .indd / / : am / / : am terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /hor. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /hor. . &domain=pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /hor. . https://www.cambridge.org/core horizons the journal of the college theology society horizons publishes award-winning peer-reviewed articles, roundtables, and book reviews across a wide range of topics in theology and religious studies. while rooted in a commitment to the long and deep catholic tradition of “faith seeking understanding,” that commitment also welcomes all original scholarship in theology and religious studies that contributes to its basic constructive focus. it is unique in content with its ecumenical view, wide range of methods and topics, and insightful analysis of belief interacting with culture. horizons publishes work by college and university professors with both active research profi les and teaching experience. horizons is produced in association with villanova university and is published by cambridge university press on behalf of the college theology society. horizons is included in the cambridge journals online service which can be found at http://journals.cambridge.org/hor. the journal is automatically available through membership in the college theology society: www.collegetheology.org. members should inform the cts secretary of any address changes. editor elena g. procario-foley iona college associate editors christopher denny st. john’s university, queens gerald j. beyer villanova university editorial board anthony j. godzieba editor emeritus, chair of the editorial board villanova university susie babka university of san diego nancy dallavalle fairfi eld university celia deane-drummond university of notre dame colby dickinson loyola university chicago michelle gonzalez maldonado university of miami angela kim harkins boston college school of theology and ministry david hunter university of kentucky natalia imperatori-lee manhattan college karen kilby durham university marianne moyaert vrije universiteit amsterdam cyril orji university of dayton paulinus odozor, cssp university of notre dame christopher pramuk regis university (denver) julie hanlon rubio st. louis university jonathan tan case western reserve university sandra yocum university of dayton book review editors colleen mary carpenter st. catherine university christopher mcmahon saint vincent college managing editor christine bucher editor emeritus walter e. conn villanova university © college theology society college theology society the college theology society is a professional organization of college and university professors of religion in the united states and canada. the purpose of the college theology society is to improve the quality of the teaching of religion: by stimulating and sharing scholarly research; by developing programs of theology and religious studies which meet student needs and interests; and by exploring, evaluating, and encouraging effective ways of teaching which are interdisciplinary and ecumenical. annual membership dues in the society are $ . 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(graduate student). membership in the society includes a subscription to horizons. contact dr. nicholas rademacher, department of religious studies, cabrini university, king of prussia road, radnor, pa - . phone: ( ) - . e-mail: nicholas.rademacher@cabrini.edu. guidelines for contributors manuscript submissions to the journal should be between and pages (about , words), not including notes. on rare occasions, the editors will give consideration to a lengthier submission of exceptional quality. the text and bibliographic documentation of the manuscript must conform to the chicago manual of style (cmos), th edition. we require that authors use endnotes rather than footnotes and that they double-space the entire manuscript. manuscripts must have a separate title page that includes the author’s name, affi liation, e-mail address, postal address, an abstract of no more than words, up to keywords, and an author vita of no more than words. the author’s name should appear nowhere else in the manuscript. all references to the author’s work in the text or notes should be in the third person. our editorial offi ce requires two copies, one digital and one hard copy. send your manuscript prepared in microsoft word to the journal’s e-mail address horizons@villanova.edu, and to the managing editor, christine.bucher@villanova.edu. send the hard copy, along with a cover letter, to this address: the editor, horizons, st. mary’s hall, villanova university, lancaster avenue, villanova, pa . for further information about the journal’s style guidelines, potential authors are strongly urged to review the complete set of instructions for contributors, available at http://cambridge.org/hor/ifc. subscriptions: horizons (issn: - ) is published biannually in june and december. the two parts form one annual volume. the subscription price for horizons volume is us$ (£ ) for print for individuals. institutional subscription prices for volume of horizons are us$ (£ ) for print plus electronic access and us$ (£ ) for electronic-only access. single parts are priced at us$ (£ ). for further information, visit www.cambridge.org/hor or contact customer services at cambridge university press e-mail subscriptions_newyork@cambridge.org (usa, canada, and mexico) or journals@cambridge.org (outside of usa, canada, and mexico). postmaster: send address changes in usa, canada, and mexico to horizons, journals fulfi llment department, one liberty plaza, floor , new york, ny ; or e-mail subscriptions_newyork@ cambridge.org. claims for missing issues will only be considered if made immediately on receipt of the subsequent issue. copyright and permissions: permission to copy is available from the copyright clearance center (usa), www.copyright.com, or from the copyright licensing agency, www.cla.co.uk. for all other use: permission should be sought from the cambridge university press. full details may be found here www.cambridge.org/about-us/rights-permissions. advertising: enquiries regarding advertising and inserts should be made to ad_sales@cambridge.org. _ - .indd _ - .indd / / : am / / : am terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /hor. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /hor. . https://www.cambridge.org/core horizons the journal of the college theology society published in association with villanova university volume  december  number  from the editor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v articles emerging principles of a theology of shalom . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . philip a. cunningham  black lives matter and catholic whiteness: a tale of two performances . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . michael p. jaycox  “keeping vigil” and the response of a believer to grief and suffering . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . james g. sabak, ofm  emerging trends in pregnancy-loss memorialization in american catholicism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . maureen l. walsh  theological roundtable luther’s ninety-five theses: ecumenical prospects on its quincentennial together on the way: can we not walk together another stretch of the road? . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the reverend elizabeth a. eaton  a joint commemoration of the reformation in  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . catherine e. clifford  ecumenism in a time of transition . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . michael root  ecumenism for the sake of the world . . . . . . the reverend antje jackelén  historical scholarship and ecumenical dialogue . . . . . carter lindberg  review symposium joseph s. o’leary, buddhist nonduality, paschal paradox: a christian commentary on the teaching of vimalakı̄rti (vimalakı̄rtinirdeśa) four perspectives . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . malcolm david eckel, s. mark heim, john makransky, won-jae hur  author’s response . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . joseph s. o’leary  college theology society presidential address reimagining the “america” in american catholicism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . william l. portier  cts convention report report of the sixty-third annual convention of the college theology society, june –,  . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . johann m. vento  terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /hor. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /hor. . https://www.cambridge.org/core review essay review of john m. rist, augustine deformed: love, sin, and freedom in the western moral tradition . . . william j. collinge  book reviews daniel p. scheid, the cosmic common good: religious grounds for ecological ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . erin lothes  catherine petrany, pedagogy, prayer, and praise: the wisdom of the psalms and psalter . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . lesley difransico  francis martin and william m. wright iv, the gospel of john . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . brian carrier  steven j. jensen, knowing the natural law: from precepts and inclinations to deriving oughts . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . carl a. vater  marc cardinal ouellet, mystery and sacrament of love: a theology of marriage and the family for the new evangelization . . . jason king  emily reimer-barry, catholic theology of marriage in the era of hiv and aids: marriage for life . . . . . . . . . . . . . bridget burke ravizza  joseph e. capizzi, politics, justice, and war: christian governance and the ethics of warfare . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . john kiess  colby dickinson, words fail: theology, poetry, and the challenge of representation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . david von schlichten  brian stiltner, toward thriving communities: virtue ethics as social ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . katherine a. greiner  joseph a. selling, reframing catholic theological ethics . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . daniel r. dileo  bonnie thurston, hidden in god: discovering the desert vision of charles de foucauld . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . alison downie  joeri schrijvers, between faith and belief: toward a contemporary phenomenology of religious life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . colby dickinson  cathleen kaveny, prophecy without contempt: religious discourse in the public square . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . julie hanlon rubio  caitlin smith gilson, the political dialogue of nature and grace: toward a phenomenology of chaste anarchism . . . . . . . mary doak  george b. connell, kierkegaard and the paradox of religious diversity . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . jonathan malesic  m. shawn copeland and jeremy d. wilkins, eds., grace and friendship: theological essays in honor of fred lawrence, from his grateful students . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . eric mabry  mary ellen konieczny, charles c. camosy, and tricia c. bruce, eds., polarization in the us catholic church: naming the wounds, beginning to heal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . kelly johnson  agnes m. brazal and maria teresa dávila, eds., living with(out) borders: catholic theological ethics on the migrations of peoples . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . elizabeth sweeny block  peter c. phan, the joy of religious pluralism: a personal journey . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . maureen l. walsh  angela d. sims, lynched: the power of memory in a culture of terror . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . katie grimes  ii h o r i z o n s terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /hor. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /hor. . https://www.cambridge.org/core grant kaplan, rené girard, unlikely apologist: mimetic theory and fundamental theology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . lucas briola  denise dombkowski hopkins, psalms: books – . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . catherine petrany  colleen m. conway, sex and slaughter in the tent of jael: a cultural history of a biblical story . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . david a. bosworth  glenn b. siniscalchi, retrieving apologetics . . . . . . . . . . . anthony mellor  aaron rosen, art + religion in the st century . . . . . . . . ryan stander  mark s. smith, where the gods are: spatial dimensions of anthropomorphism in the biblical world . . . . . . . . . . . eric m. trinka  david cloutier, the vice of luxury: economic excess in a consumer age . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . maureen h. o’connell  luke timothy johnson, the revelatory body: theology as inductive art . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . william l. portier  benjamin j. ribbens, levitical sacrifice and heavenly cult in hebrews . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . brian c. small  keith clements, dietrich bonhoeffer’s ecumenical quest . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . lori brandt hale  doris m. kieser, catholic sexual theology and adolescent girls: embodied flourishing . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . christine e. mccarthy  elizabeth boase and christopher g. frechette, eds., bible through the lens of trauma . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . jessica coblentz  patrick j. hayes, ed., the civil war diary of father james sheeran: confederate chaplain and redemptorist . . . . . . . . . . . karen a. kehoe  paul j. griffiths, the practice of catholic theology: a modest proposal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . robert j. ryan, jr.  kimberly vrudny, beauty’s vineyard: a theological aesthetic of anguish and anticipation . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . rebecca huskey  patricia beattie jung, sex on earth as it is in heaven: a christian eschatology of desire . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . kari-shane davis zimmerman  kati ihnat, mother of mercy, bane of the jews: devotion to the virgin mary in anglo-norman england . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . rene kollar  cathleen kaveny, a culture of engagement: law, religion, and morality . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . m. christian green  john t. mcgreevy, american jesuits and the world: how an embattled religious order made modern catholicism global . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . alison c. fleming  diarmuid o’murchu, religious life in the st century: the prospect of refounding . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . shannon schrein  jean porter, justice as a virtue: a thomistic perspective . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . kate ward  saul m. olyan, friendship in the hebrew bible . . . . . . . . paul j. wadell  andrew robinson, traces of the trinity: signs, sacraments, and sharing god’s life . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . joseph a. bracken, sj  reid b. locklin, ed., vernacular catholicism, vernacular saints: selva j. raj on “being catholic the tamil way” . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . francis x. clooney, sj  kevin w. irwin, the sacraments: historical foundations and liturgical theology . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . joseph martos  terry eagleton, materialism . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . daniel a. rober  h o r i z o n s iii terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /hor. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /hor. . https://www.cambridge.org/core books received . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  errata . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .  copyright ©  college theology society printed in the united states of america iv h o r i z o n s terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /hor. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /hor. . https://www.cambridge.org/core 	ofc.pdf 	ifc.pdf 	hor_ _ _contents.pdf << /ascii encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles false /autorotatepages /none /binding /left /calgrayprofile (dot gain %) /calrgbprofile (srgb iec - . ) /calcmykprofile (u.s. web coated \ swop\ v ) /srgbprofile (srgb iec - . ) /cannotembedfontpolicy /error /compatibilitylevel . /compressobjects /tags /compresspages true /convertimagestoindexed true /passthroughjpegimages true /createjobticket false /defaultrenderingintent /default /detectblends true /detectcurves . /colorconversionstrategy /leavecolorunchanged /dothumbnails false /embedallfonts true /embedopentype false /parseiccprofilesincomments true /embedjoboptions true /dscreportinglevel /emitdscwarnings false /endpage - /imagememory 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d e a e c f d f b d e f e f c c a f e a c c a d d c c e> /sve <feff e e e e e e c c e e e f d c c b f d f b d e f d e c e d c f d b d f b c e b d f b d e b e f e f f f e f e e> /enu (use these settings to create adobe pdf documents best suited for high-quality prepress printing. created pdf documents can be opened with acrobat and adobe reader . and later.) >> /namespace [ (adobe) (common) ( . ) ] /othernamespaces [ << /asreaderspreads false /cropimagestoframes true /errorcontrol /warnandcontinue /flattenerignorespreadoverrides false /includeguidesgrids false /includenonprinting false /includeslug false /namespace [ (adobe) (indesign) ( . ) ] /omitplacedbitmaps false /omitplacedeps false /omitplacedpdf false /simulateoverprint /legacy >> << /addbleedmarks false /addcolorbars false /addcropmarks false /addpageinfo false /addregmarks false /convertcolors /converttocmyk /destinationprofilename () /destinationprofileselector /documentcmyk /downsample bitimages true /flattenerpreset << 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b d e c e c d b e e f a b c e f d f b d e b e e e f c c f e f e e> /deu <feff e e e c c e e a d c c e f e f d f b d e e c f e e e f d b a e d f e e c c d f b d e b f e e e d f e f e f f f e e e> /esp <feff c f e f e f d e f f f d f e d f c c c e e f d e f f f e f c f e f e f f e> /fra <feff c a f f e e e f d e f f e c e d f e e e c f d e e e e ea f e f c e f e f e c e e> /ita <feff c a a d f a f e f d e f f e d c c e e f d e f f e f f e f f e f e e> /jpn <feff ad c cea a d ea d ec b fa b f f e f c b f f e e a d b a f c c f d a a eb f f a f e ee d b f c d e e a d b a b f d a f c e cb fbc f c fc > /kor <feffc c c c c acc a d c ec ace d c c c dcd d c c c c d ac c a c d d c f bb c cb c c c d b c b e e c b ac c c c b c bb c cb f bc f f e c c c c d c c c f c c c b b c b e e> /nld (gebruik deze instellingen om adobe pdf-documenten te maken die zijn geoptimaliseerd voor prepress-afdrukken van hoge kwaliteit. de gemaakte pdf-documenten kunnen worden geopend met acrobat en adobe reader . en hoger.) /nor <feff b e e c c e e c e f f d f b d e f d e f f b b b f b c e d f b d e e b e e e f c c f e c c e e> /ptb <feff c a f e e f f d f d e f f d f e d d f c c e f f d e f f f d f f d f f f f e f f f e> /suo <feff b e e e e e b c b e c f c e e e e e e b e c d c f f e f f d f b d e a e c f d f b d e f e f c c a f e a c c a d d c c e> /sve <feff e e e e e e c c e e e f d c c b f d f b d e f d e c e d c f d b d f b c e b d f b d e b e f e f f f e f e e> /enu (use these settings to create adobe pdf documents best suited for high-quality prepress printing. created pdf documents can be opened with acrobat and adobe reader . and later.) >> /namespace [ (adobe) (common) ( . ) ] /othernamespaces [ << /asreaderspreads false /cropimagestoframes true /errorcontrol /warnandcontinue /flattenerignorespreadoverrides false /includeguidesgrids false /includenonprinting false /includeslug false /namespace [ (adobe) (indesign) ( . ) ] /omitplacedbitmaps false /omitplacedeps false /omitplacedpdf false /simulateoverprint /legacy >> << /addbleedmarks false /addcolorbars false /addcropmarks false /addpageinfo false /addregmarks false /convertcolors /converttocmyk /destinationprofilename () /destinationprofileselector /documentcmyk /downsample bitimages true /flattenerpreset << /presetselector /mediumresolution >> /formelements false /generatestructure false /includebookmarks false /includehyperlinks false /includeinteractive false /includelayers false /includeprofiles false /multimediahandling /useobjectsettings /namespace [ (adobe) (creativesuite) ( . ) ] /pdfxoutputintentprofileselector /documentcmyk /preserveediting true /untaggedcmykhandling /leaveuntagged /untaggedrgbhandling /usedocumentprofile /usedocumentbleed false >> ] >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [ ] /pagesize [ . . ] >> setpagedevice doctors call for action on racism in wake of covid- and death of george floyd bma annual representative meeting doctors call for action on racism in wake of covid- and death of george floyd gareth iacobucci the uk government has a “moral imperative” to take firm action against racism and health inequalities that have been laid bare by the covid- pandemic and the black lives matter movement, the bma has urged. the association’s annual representative meeting, held virtually on september, passed a motion requesting concrete actions to tackle racism in the nhs and at a broader societal level. the meeting called for all nhs boards to reflect the ethnic make-up of the workforce of the organisation they manage, for more transparent recruitment and promotion systems in all nhs organisations, and for every person involved in nhs recruitment to receive training on diversity and unconscious bias. the nhs must also greatly improve its recording and analysis of ethnicity and should develop a mentorship scheme for black, asian, and minority ethnic managers and clinical leaders, the motion urged. the meeting called on the government to increase funding for public health to tackle ethnic, geographic, and gender inequalities in the uk. and it urged specific action based on culturally sensitive research to tackle the health, social, and educational problems caused to ethnic minority schoolchildren and to make recommendations to reduce these inequalities. barriers the bma council chair, chaand nagpaul, said, “the covid- pandemic and the black lives matter movement has clearly demonstrated the importance of addressing health inequalities and racism in the uk and the nhs. “this is not just making a few small changes; this is about changing the entire system for the better. a change that will mean doctors in years to come will not face the same barriers as many others have and continue to face. the government has a moral imperative to address these inequalities and act now.” sathish jayagopal, a surgeon from the bma’s salisbury division who proposed the motion, said that the death of george floyd in minneapolis, usa, had “made the world shout out, ‘enough is enough,’ and it’s time to change.” he added, “racism is sometimes so common around us that we are accepting it as the norm. the boards of nhs trusts should reflect the ethnic make-up of the workforce of the organisations which they manage. this is not just about doing or saying something derogatory. it is also stereotyping, prejudgment, and bias that exists.” sai pillarisetti, a medical student speaking in favour of the motion, said, “i strongly believe that unconscious bias training should be given greater importance in all aspects of medicine, and more specifically, be substantially integrated into medical schools’ curricula. “this will ensure that the next generation of newly qualified doctors are aware of the unconscious bias and, equally, [are] better equipped to recognise it taking place. i strongly believe that this step would go a long way in reducing inequality.” the bmj | bmj ; :m | doi: . /bmj.m news the bmj cite this as: bmj ; :m http://dx.doi.org/ . /bmj.m published: september o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b m j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j.m o n s e p te m b e r . d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /bmj.m &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /bmj.m http://www.bmj.com/ the role of individual differences in understanding and enhancing intergroup contact the role of individual differences in understanding and enhancing intergroup contact turner, r. n., hodson, g., & dhont, k. ( ). the role of individual differences in understanding and enhancing intergroup contact. social and personality psychology compass. https://doi.org/ . /spc . published in: social and personality psychology compass document version: publisher's pdf, also known as version of record queen's university belfast - research portal: link to publication record in queen's university belfast research portal publisher rights copyright the authors. this is an open access article published under a creative commons attribution license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the author and source are cited. general rights copyright for the publications made accessible via the queen's university belfast research portal is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. take down policy the research portal is queen's institutional repository that provides access to queen's research output. every effort has been made to ensure that content in the research portal does not infringe any person's rights, or applicable uk laws. if you discover content in the research portal that you believe breaches copyright or violates any law, please contact openaccess@qub.ac.uk. download date: . apr. https://doi.org/ . /spc . https://pure.qub.ac.uk/en/publications/the-role-of-individual-differences-in-understanding-and-enhancing-intergroup-contact( d bfc-cd - -aed -e b d).html a r t i c l e the role of individual differences in understanding and enhancing intergroup contact rhiannon n. turner | gordon hodson | kristof dhont school of psychology, queen's university belfast, belfast, uk department of psychology, brock university, st. catharines, ontario, canada school of psychology, university of kent, canterbury, uk correspondence rhiannon n. turner, school of psychology, queen's university belfast, belfast, uk. email: r.turner@qub.ac.uk abstract in a world characterized by divisive rhetoric, heightened xenophobia, and other forms of prejudice, it is increasingly important to find effective ways of promoting functional intergroup relations. research on the relationship between intergroup contact and individual differences substantially contributes to achieving this goal. we review research con- sidering the role played by individual differences in moder- ating the relationship between contact and prejudice and predicting contact, but also as an outcome of contact. we then outline potential directions for future research, includ- ing identifying underlying mechanisms, examining the role of context at an intergroup and societal level, and consider- ing how positive–negative contact asymmetry may be influenced by individual differences. we then call for a broader range of individual difference and contact out- comes to be explored and encourage utilization of new methodological advances in the study of intergroup contact. with the sharp rise of far-right movements across europe and latin america, and to some extent in the us and uk, discovering and documenting robust means of fostering functional intergroup relations is paramount. encouraging positive contact between members of different social groups can help to achieve this goal. since the “contact hypothesis” was proposed by allport ( ), over a thousand articles have been published on the topic, with an extensive evidence trail that positive intergroup contact reduces prejudice (pettigrew & tropp, ). we have learned much about the mechanisms underlying contact (e.g., reduced intergroup anxiety and threat; increased empathy and trust; pettigrew & tropp, ; turner, hewstone, & voci, ), and the different types of contact doi: . /spc . this is an open access article under the terms of the creative commons attribution license, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © the authors. social and personality psychology compass published by john wiley & sons ltd. soc personal psychol compass. ;e . wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/spc of https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/spc (e.g., cross-group friendships, extended contact, imagined contact, and online contact; davies, tropp, aron, pet- tigrew, & wright, ; crisp & turner, , ; mazziotta, mummendey, & wright, ; turner, crisp, & lambert, ; turner, hewstone, & voci, ; white & abu-rayya, ; wright, aron, mclaughlin-volpe, & ropp, ). however, one topic that has been relatively understudied (hodson, ), but on which research has recently flourished, is the role of individual differences in intergroup contact, particularly where that contact is posi- tive in valence. individual differences refer to between-person variability in the levels of psychological constructs, including per- sonality traits, ideologies, and constructs that influence information processing. historically, individual differences have been viewed as an obstacle to overcoming prejudice (hodson, , ; hodson, costello, & macinnis, ) that were overlooked by social psychologists favoring the study of contextual factors (see hodson & dhont, ). yet there has been increasing recognition that a “person x situation” approach may be critical in identi- fying who engages in intergroup contact, and how different people react to contact situations (hodson, , ; hodson & dhont, ; pettigrew, ). here, we highlight the important role individual differences can play in understanding intergroup contact. we begin this review by outlining the first wave of research on this topic which examines individual differ- ences as a moderator of the contact–prejudice relationship. the value of this research is in identifying for whom intergroup contact is most effective, and why, which may feed into the development of targeted interventions. we next examine work on individual differences as predictors of intergroup contact. this research is important in identifying who might be most likely to seek out contact, and what we can learn from this in terms of promoting intergroup contact (paolini, harwood, hewstone, & neumann, ; turner & cameron, ). finally, we con- sider recent findings which suggest that intergroup contact has the potential to change self-perceptions regarding personal traits. | individual differences as moderators of the contact–prejudice relationship studying individual differences in contact settings is important—if contact works among those characterized by higher prejudice (hp), this provides strong evidence for contact's practical value (hodson, turner, & choma, ). . | right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation right-wing authoritarianism (rwa; altemeyer, ) and social dominance orientation (sdo; pratto, sidanius, stallworth, & malle, ) are socio-ideological attitudes that are stable, endure over time, and influence how people view the social world (duckitt & sibley, , ). rwa relates to an individual's preference for traditional norms and submission to authority. people higher in rwa desire order, social cohesion, and conformity, to cope with per- ceptions that the world is dangerous/threatening, meaning their prejudice is triggered by groups threatening social norms. sdo reflects desire for hierarchical intergroup relations and social inequality. people higher in sdo see the world as competitive, seek dominance/power over other groups, and are prejudiced toward groups considered infe- rior or in direct competition. although individuals higher in rwa or sdo generally avoid outgroup interactions (dhont & van hiel, ; hodson, ; hodson, harry, & mitchell, ; pettigrew, ; pettigrew & tropp, ), they nonetheless bene- fit from contact. hodson et al. ( ), for example, found that contact was associated with less prejudice across a variety of outgroups for those lower and higher in sdo or rwa. moreover, some evidence suggests that contact works better for hps. hodson ( ) found that white british prison inmates who experienced contact with black inmates exhibited lower intergroup bias if higher (vs. lower) in sdo, an effect explained by increased outgroup of turner et al. empathy. in two flemish samples, dhont and van hiel ( ) found a stronger negative relationship between posi- tive contact with immigrants and racism toward immigrants among people higher in sdo or rwa. visintin, berent, green, and falomir-pichastor ( ) similarly found that swiss nationals' contact (and imagined contact) with immi- grants predicted greater multiculturalism support, but only among individuals higher in sdo. contact may be particu- larly effective among hps because it reduces intergroup anxiety and perceived threats while promoting empathy, trust, and inclusion of the other in the self (hodson et al., ; hodson, costello, et al., ). these outcomes directly correspond to factors underpinning biases among hps (dhont & van hiel, ). although some have argued that contact works among those higher in rwa but not sdo (asbrock, christ, duckitt, & sibley, ), sev- eral recent studies support contact benefits among higher sdos (kauff, schmid, lolliot, al ramiah, & hewstone, ), even when simultaneously considering rwa (kteily, hodson, dhont, & ho, ). . | need for closure need for closure (nfc) is a motivated cognitive style characterized by a desire for quick and definite answers, and a desire to protect obtained answers from contradictory information (roets, kruglanski, kossowska, pierro, & hong, ; webster & kruglanski, ). nfc predisposes prejudicial attitudes by promoting essentialist think- ing, a preference to see outgroup members as sharing defining characteristics, in order to form quick and stable inferences. it also predicts authoritarian beliefs, because imposing a clear hierarchy helps to satisfy higher nfc's psychological needs for order and predictability (roets & van hiel, ; van hiel, pandelaere, & duriez, ). dhont, roets, and van hiel ( ) found that those higher (vs. lower) in nfc were more likely to hold positive attitudes following an intergroup contact intervention, due to reduced intergroup anxiety. they argued that this is because such individuals desire familiarity and seize upon salient and easily accessible information during contact. . | conservatism conservatism is a generalized orientation toward resistance to change and acceptance of inequality (jost, glaser, kruglanski, & sulloway, ) that predicts hp toward various minority and low status groups (hodson & busseri, ; hodson, costello, et al., ). this is in part because conservatives employ legitimizing beliefs that justify the status quo and favor whites and elites (hodson & dhont, ). a number of studies have examined vari- ous aspects of conservatism as a moderator of the contact–attitude association, with mixed results. maoz ( ) examined a two-day intergroup contact program between israeli and palestinian adolescents classi- fied as “doves” (preferring negotiation and cooperation) or “hawks” (preferring tough-minded defense of ingroup interests). although doves were more open to contact, their positive attitudes did not improve more from contact. by contrast, hawks showed more favorable attitudes following contact. in a different context, graf and sczesny ( ) found that political orientation moderated the relationship between both positive and negative inter- group contact and self-reported support for african immigrants among a sample of swiss participants. while there was a stronger relationship between positive intergroup contact and supportive attitudes for right-oriented participants, negative intergroup contact was more strongly associated with less support for african immigrants among right-oriented (vs. left-oriented) participants. other studies have shown the reverse, that contact associations are stronger for left-oriented than right- oriented individuals. across two large surveys in the usa (n = , ) and germany (n = , ), homola and tavits ( ) found that although contact predicted reduced perception of immigrant-related threats for left- oriented individuals, contact either had no effect or slightly increased threat perceptions among right-oriented turner et al. of individuals. utilizing the european social survey (n = , from countries), thomsen and rafiqi ( ) found that while contact was associated with less opposition to immigrants among left- and right-oriented individ- uals, this relationship was considerably weaker for right-oriented individuals. the authors of both articles argue that people are motivated to favor arguments and evidence that support their existing views (kunda, ). accordingly, left-oriented individuals, who tend to be more open and tolerant, are likely to respond to contact by positively updating their views of immigrants in general, whereas right-oriented individuals are likely to reject attitude change in response to contact experiences because they contradict their existing negative attitudes. given these contrasting findings, it is important to identify what factors may explain when contact is effective (or indeed, more effective) among right-oriented individuals, and when it is less effective or ineffective. moreover, none of these studies consider mediating variables. studies examining conservatism as a moderator of contact– attitude associations should in future include measures that may explain why conservatism influences the effective- ness of intergroup contact. . | ingroup identification people meaningfully differ in the degree to which they identify with groups (see hodson, dovidio, & esses, ). hodson et al. ( ) found that for university students with higher (vs. lower) heterosexual identity, contact and friendship with gay people was associated with less prejudice. furthermore, studies conducted in northern ireland showed that contact between catholics and protestants positively predicted intergroup forgiveness but only among those more highly identified with their community (voci, hewstone, swart, & veneziani, ), and also predicted greater receptivity to cross-community relationships and more favorable attitudes toward the other community yet more strongly so among higher identifiers (paterson, turner, & hodson, ). . | agreeableness and extraversion theorists have proposed that there are five (costa jr. & mccrae, ; goldberg, ) or six (ashton & lee, ) major dimensions of personality. extraverts tend to be talkative and sociable; agreeable people tend to be warm and cooperative; people higher in openness to experience exhibit imagination and broad interests; conscien- tious people tend to be organized and dependable; neurotic individuals are anxious and insecure. of these five per- sonality dimensions, two are negatively correlated with generalized prejudice: openness to experience and agreeableness (ekehammar & akrami, ; sibley & duckitt, ). indeed, people higher in openness find expo- sure to different values and norms beneficial (not threatening), whilst agreeable individuals cooperate with others rather than focus on self-interests or competition (sibley & duckitt, ). although zero-order correlations between extraversion and prejudice have been found not to be significant (turner, dhont, hewstone, prestwich, & vonofakou, ), because extraverts desire smooth, successful social interactions and have more friends gener- ally, they may have more cross-group friendships. this, in turn, is associated with lower levels of prejudice. turner et al. ( ) found that white british students' friendships with south asians more strongly predicted positive out- group attitudes among those lower (vs. higher) in agreeableness or extraversion (with no moderation effects by openness). most studies reviewed above considered each individual difference variable in isolation. kteily et al. ( ) simultaneously examined the contact–attitude relationship at varying levels of ideological (sdo, rwa), cognitive style (nfc) and identity-based (group identification) indicators of prejudice proneness, across multiple criteria (e.g., racism; racial profiling). greater contact quality predicted lower intergroup hostility regardless of whether par- ticipants scored lower or higher on each individual difference measure. of turner et al. | individual differences as predictors of intergroup contact a lack of engagement in contact may be a fundamental reason why intergroup conflict and prejudice seem so com- monplace (paolini et al., ). to encourage contact, we need to understand why some people engage in contact, whereas others do not (hodson, ; pettigrew, ). although it often reduces prejudice among them, hp indi- viduals may be especially likely to avoid intergroup contact (dhont & van hiel, ; hodson, ; hodson et al., ; pettigrew, , ; pettigrew & tropp, ). the mere prospect of contact may trigger negative thoughts and emotions among hps, including expectations of communication uncertainty (plant & devine, ), and impending threat to cherished values (stephan & stephan, ). paolini et al. ( ) argue these reactions might be especially likely among those higher in nfc or rwa. . | the broader personality space jackson and poulsen ( ) proposed that people higher on openness or agreeableness are more likely to seek favorable intergroup contact experiences and behave favorably during those interactions. partially supporting this, openness predicted more frequent and more positive contact with black and asian people; agreeableness predicted contact quality but not frequency. the relationship between personality and outgroup attitude for each group was mediated by intergroup contact. a secondary analysis revealed that both agreeableness and openness predicted prej- udice when controlling for one another, through contact quality, but not contact quantity (hodson et al., ). cor- roborating this pattern in italy, vezzali, turner, capozza, and trifilleti ( ) surveyed italian and immigrant first year high school students, finding among both groups that agreeableness and openness at the start of the school year lon- gitudinally predicted more positive contact at year end. in addition to agreeableness and openness, turner et al. ( ) considered extraversion as a contact predictor. extraverts seek out friendships and tend to have more friends. this may increase the potential for cross-group friendships. moreover, their affiliation motivations may reduce cross-category boundaries. across two studies, white british students' extraversion predicted more south asian friends, which in turn predicted more favorable outgroup attitudes. openness and agreeableness, however, predicted outgroup attitudes directly rather than friendships. . | self-expansion motivation people vary in their motivations to acquire resources, perspectives, and identities that facilitate the achievement of desired goals (aron, aron, & norman, ). self-expansion can be achieved through meaningful relationships with outgroup members because they offer resources, perspectives, and identities that we do not possess (aron, steele, kashdan, & perez, ; wright, aron, & tropp, ). in australia and thailand, those who expected to experience self-expansion through relationships with others reported higher quality contact experiences, a relationship mediated by an increased interest in intergroup contact (paolini, wright, dys-steenbergen, & favara, ). similarly, migacheva and tropp ( ) found that having a learning orientation (seeking to obtain knowledge) rather than a performance orientation (seeking to certify one's abilities) predicted greater comfort and interest in contact, even controlling for past cross-group friendship experience. stürmer et al. ( ) examined the role of hexaco's six-factor structure of personality (ashton & lee, ) in predicting xenophilia, “a favorable attitude toward exploratory contact with individuals from other groups that are perceived as culturally different and unfamiliar on the basis of their language, ethnicity, habits, or customs” (p. ). three of the hexaco traits–extraversion, openness to experience, and conscientiousness—relate closely to self- expansion because they reflect investment in endeavors that bring benefits for the self, such as socializing and turner et al. of gaining new friends (for extraverts), learning and thinking (for open individuals), and generating material and eco- nomic gain (for conscientious people). the other three—honesty-humility (e.g., fairness, avoidance, modesty), emo- tionality (anxiety, fearfulness, emotional dependence), and agreeableness–reflect a tendency toward altruism and cooperation. across three studies, stürmer et al. ( ) found that endeavor traits were stronger predictors of xenophilia than were altruism and cooperation traits (controlling for individual differences in sdo, national identification, and moti- vation to control prejudice). importantly, although intergroup contact can bring benefits in terms of genetic variability and exposure to new people, knowledge, and resources, there are inherent risks given our lack of familiarity with outgroups. people higher in endeavor-related traits are willing to prioritize potential personal gains over risks, and are therefore keener to engage in intergroup contact, whereas those higher in altruism and cooperation may be less willing to potentially harm or impose costs on others. it is important to note, however, that stürmer et al. examined the unique predictive power of each endeavor-related trait rather than their concurrent predictive power, so the findings only provide indirect support for our argument that self-expansion predicts engagement in contact. . | cognitive abilities because intergroup interactions can be cognitively draining, they are theoretically more likely to be avoided by those with fewer mental resources at hand (hodson & busseri, ). cognitive abilities (e.g., abstract reasoning skills and verbal, non-verbal, and general intelligence) are also critical in forming individuated impressions of others and being open-minded and trusting (scarr & weinberg, ; sturgis, read, & allum, ). those with lower cognitive abili- ties may therefore gravitate toward more socially conservative right-wing ideologies that provide psychological sta- bility and order (jost et al., ; onraet et al., ), which are in turn associated with prejudice. indeed, hodson and busseri ( ) found that individuals lower in abstract reasoning abilities were more prejudiced toward gay peo- ple, in part through lower levels of contact with gay people, even when controlling for authoritarianism. | contact effects on individual differences one of the most recent, and perhaps most debated, developments concerns the examination of individual differ- ences as outcomes of intergroup contact. recently there has been recognition that contact can shape cognition, ide- ologies and personality traits. for instance, hodson, meleady, crisp, and earle ( ) argue that contact serves as an agent of cognitive liberalization, improving not only intergroup relations, but also the way people think about the world more broadly. synthesizing evidence that diversity experiences prompt individuals to inhibit existing, rigid thought patterns in favor of more flexible, open-minded ways of thinking (crisp & meleady, ; crisp & turner, ), they argue that, over time, intergroup contact can promote a disposition toward less structured and dogmatic thinking. . | social dominance orientation dhont, van hiel, and hewstone ( ) found that belgian high school students who interacted with moroccan stu- dents on a school trip subsequently reported lower levels of sdo and prejudice. in a longitudinal study of belgian adults over months they further found that contact at time predicted lower sdo at time (see also trifiletti et al., ; van laar, levin, sinclair, & sidanius, ). these findings leave us optimistic about the potential for contact to change people's attitudes toward group dominance and inequality. the effect of contact on sdo has par- allels with the secondary transfer effect (pettigrew, ; tausch et al., ); that is, contact results in a generalized of turner et al. orientation that represents an important social attitudinal basis of attitudes toward a range of outgroups not directly involved in the contact (dhont et al., ). indeed, white american students randomly assigned a roommate of a different race showed a significant decrease in sdo after the first term, which in turn promoted more positive atti- tudes toward several different outgroups (shook, hopkins, & koech, ; see also vezzali et al., ). contact also impacts outcomes via lowered sdo. meleady and vermue ( ) found that white participants' positive contact with blacks, and british participants' positive contact with immigrants, predicted increased support for the black lives matters movements and eu rights via lower sdo. moreover, meleady, crisp, dhont, hopthrow, and turner ( ) found, across several studies (one longitudinal), that positive contact predicted greater environ- mental concern and pro-environmental behaviors via lower sdo. individuals higher in sdo may be more willing to exploit the environment to maintain hierarchical social structures (stanley, wilson, sibley, & milfont, ), but by reducing sdo, positive contact attenuates these tendencies. . | additional individual differences sparkman and eidelman ( ) examined intercultural contact as a predictor of identification with humanity (mcfarland, brown, & webb, ). in two of three studies, americans' contact with members of other cultures (e.g., foreign travel, keeping in contact with people from other countries) predicted higher identification with human- ity, which in turn predicted lower prejudice toward five ethnic outgroups (africans, slavs, asians, arabs, and latin americans; measured as one combined scale) and greater concern for human rights. contact has also been examined as a predictor of big five personality traits. sparkman, eidelman, and blanchar ( ); study ) found that frequency of self-reported contact with people from other countries predicted lower prejudice via openness to experience (see also vezzali, turner, et al., ). in study , participants were exposed to images of culturally diverse regions. compared with control participants exposed to images of familiar regions, multicultural exposure caused more openness and less prejudice toward several foreign cultures, including those outside of the contact manipulation. it is important to acknowledge that brief exposure to images of cultural diversity, as in study , are unlikely to have a lasting change on personality. it is, however, plausible that people may perceive themselves as more open to experience after exposure to these materials. moreover, repeated exposure to outgroup members may lead to lasting changes in open-mindedness. finally, there is evidence that multicultural experiences reduce stereotype endorsement, symbolic racism, and discrimination via reduced nfc (tadmor, hong, chao, wiruchnipawan, & wang, ). individuals who experience contact may subsequently self-identify as being more open to ambiguity and divergent perspectives, which contra- dicts characteristics associated with nfc (i.e., discomfort with ambiguity; unwillingness to seek out divergent perspectives). | future directions there remain a number of potential avenues that have not yet been fully pursued. . | underlying mechanisms it is important to identify mechanisms underlying the relationship between contact and prejudice among hps because different mechanisms may be in operation for each trait (dhont & van hiel, ; hodson et al., ; kteily et al., ). for those higher in rwa and sdo we know much about how contact works. among higher rwas who feel threatened by outgroup values (duckitt, ; van hiel, cornelis, & roets, ), for example, turner et al. of contact works by reducing symbolic threat and promoting self-outgroup overlap and trust (dhont & van hiel, ; hodson et al., ). among higher sdos, who may have less positive outgroup feelings (duckitt, ), contact works by promoting empathy (hodson, ). an important next step is to develop and evaluate interventions targeting prejudice among those higher in certain traits. for example, threat-reduction interventions may be valuable among higher rwas, whereas empathy-based interventions may be effective among higher sdos. to date, there has been little systematic investigation of the full range of mechanisms underlying contact-based prejudice reduction for various individual difference measures. theorists have, for example, argued that contact might work for those higher in sdo because it promotes cooperation, reduces perceived outgroup competition, or increases the perception that contact might be personally beneficial (kteily et al., ; visintin et al., ), whereas for higher ingroup identifiers contact might work by promoting a common or dual identity (gaertner & dovidio, ; kteily et al., ). but these possibilities have not been tested. we also know relatively little about the mechanisms underlying the impact of broad personality factors (e.g., extraversion) or nfc, gaps that can be filled by future research. . | intergroup and societal contexts there has been no comprehensive investigation of whether the interaction between contact and individual differ- ences varies depending on the target outgroup, but initial evidence suggests its likelihood. maunder, day, and white ( ) looked at the contact–prejudice association in australia toward lesbians and gay men, indigenous australians, and people with schizophrenia. contact with lesbians and gay men was most effective among those higher in sdo or rwa, as this group may be threatening in terms of competition for status (for those higher in sdo) and traditional norms and values (for those higher in rwa), and contact works by reducing both types of threat. con- tact with indigenous australians was more effective among those higher in sdo only, perhaps because this group is perceived as getting privileges from its minority status (i.e., competition threat). by contrast, contact with people with schizophrenia was more effective among those lower in sdo or rwa. these findings highlight the importance of identifying and explaining outcomes in target groups that vary in group status, ease of establishing contact, and degree of marginalization. kteily et al. ( ) noted that the target and national context may help to explain why contact is stronger for those higher in sdo in some studies but not others. they point out, for example, that in asbrock et al.'s ( ) ger- man study concerning immigrants, contact worked for high rwas but not higher sdos perhaps because immigrants are perceived as culturally threatening in this context. by contrast, american studies examining whites and blacks, where the conflict is more about resource competition than cultural threat, contact is more effective for those higher in sdo than rwa. the interaction between individual differences and diversity at a neighborhood level is also relevant (van assche, roets, van hiel, & dhont, ). van assche, roets, dhont, and van hiel ( ) found that higher neighbor- hood diversity predicted less positive attitudes toward immigrants among those higher in authoritarianism, whereas it predicted more positive attitudes among those lower in authoritarianism. but there are mixed findings regarding contact seeking in diverse areas. brune, asbrock, and sibley ( ) found when living in areas with high proportions of asian immigrants, higher rwas spent more time with minority friends, but pettigrew ( ) found that higher rwa people avoided contact in multi-ethnic areas. future research might consider how neighborhood diversity and contact experiences influence when and why hp individuals avoid versus engage with contact (see van assche, asbrock, dhont, & roets, ). adding a dimension of complexity, recent research has considered intergroup context as an indicator of ideology. noting that some cultures are generally more egalitarian (e.g., the netherlands), whereas others are more hierarchical (e.g., india), kende, phalet, vanden noortgate, kara, and fischer ( ) reanalyzed pettigrew and tropp's ( ) con- tact meta-analysis after coding for country-level egalitarianism. in contrast to what is commonly found at the of turner et al. individual level, at a societal level kende et al. found that contact reduces prejudice more in egalitarian than in hierar- chical societies. these findings are an important reminder that structural inequalities may limit the success of inter- group contact (dixon, durrheim, & tredoux, ), and highlight the importance of examining the interplay between individual, intergroup, and societal factors. . | contact valence although positive contact is more prevalent than negative contact in both peaceful and post-conflict societies (barlow et al., ; dhont & van hiel, ; graf, paolini, & rubin, ; hayward, tropp, hornsey, & barlow, ; pettigrew, ), negative contact is sometimes a stronger predictor of higher prejudice than positive contact is a predictor of lower prejudice (barlow et al., ; graf & paolini, ; paolini & mcintyre, ). this may reflect its stronger associations with higher levels of category salience, giving it a generalization advantage over positive contact (paolini, harwood, & rubin, ). theorists predict that this positive–negative contact asymmetry will be accentuated for hps, such that positive contact will have a more positive effect, but negative contact will exert a more negative effect. for example, hodson et al. ( , pp. – ) point out that “future research would benefit from better understanding how contact valence matters as a function of various individual differences. it is possible (if not probable) that hps might benefit from more frequent and more positive contact…but be particularly susceptible to the negative impact of negative or inflamed contact.” (see also paolini et al., ). indeed, dhont and van hiel ( ) found that higher rwa and sdo's prejudice levels are lowered by positive contact experience but exacerbated by negative contact, with larger effects observed for negative contact, while graf and sczesny ( ) found that both positive and negative contact effects on outgroup attitudes (but not behaviors) were exacerbated for those right-wing in political orientation. fur- ther research in this area will assist the development of interventions to reduce the impact of negative contact. posi- tive contact can, for example, buffer people from negative cross-group experiences such as discrimination (bagci, kumashiro, smith, & rutland, ), and negative outgroup encounters (paolini et al., ). this buffering might be especially pronounced for hps. . | direct and indirect forms of contact indirect contact refers to approaches based on contact theory that do not involve face-to-face encounters, for exam- ple, extended contact (knowing ingroup members with outgroup friends; wright et al., ), imagined contact (crisp & turner, , ), simulated contact through video games (adachi, hodson, & hoffarth, ; adachi, hodson, willoughby, & zanette, ) and online contact (macinnis & hodson, ; white & abu-rayya, ). helping people prepare people for face-to-face contact (turner & cameron, ), such interventions may be espe- cially useful among hps. preliminary evidence offers promise. dhont and van hiel ( ) found that dutch adults' extended contact with immigrants predicted less anti-immigrant prejudice, an effect stronger among those higher in rwa. as extended con- tact changes perceptions of ingroup norms about contact (turner, hewstone, voci, & vonofakou, ), it may be especially effective among rwas (who are motivated to conform to such norms). considering imagined contact, it promotes more positive intergroup outcomes (e.g., less intergroup bias, greater contact intentions) among those higher (vs. lower) in rwa (asbrock et al., ). however, findings regarding sdo are mixed: asbrock et al. found that imagined contact did not promote positive intergroup outcomes for those higher (vs. lower) in sdo, whereas visintin et al. ( ) found that imagined contact was more effective among those higher in sdo at promoting multi- culturalism support. one fruitful line of work involves identifying when and how different types of contact are turner et al. of influenced by, or influence, individual differences, and how indirect contact can be utilized to increase uptake of con- tact among prejudice-prone individuals. . | developmental perspectives vezzali, di bernardo, et al. ( ) found that contact effects were mediated by lower sdo among italian primary school children, whilst vezzali, turner, et al. ( ) observed bidirectional longitudinal relationships between contact and agreeableness, and a longitudinal relationship between more contact and greater openness to experience among adolescents. however, many individual difference measures have not yet been considered among children, with little known about how traits develop and interact with contact in younger populations. this represents an interesting area of development given that during early to mid-adolescence children are particularly influenced by peers (brechwald & prinstein, ; van zalk, kerr, van zalk, & stattin, ). as rwa and nfc are often associated with adherence to societal norms, one might expect contact to be especially influential with those higher in these traits during adolescence. another line of research deserving further attention concerns parent-to-child transmission of prejudice. dhont and van hiel ( ) found that parental authoritarianism predicted adolescent's prejudice, but these relationships were weaker among adolescents with higher intergroup contact, suggesting that contact buffers adolescents from the potential impact of parental authoritarianism. . | expanding individual differences a number of variables, despite links to intergroup relations, have not yet been fully explored in relation to contact. . . | intergroup disgust sensitivity disgust aversion refers to a sensitivity to having contact with unsavory or contaminating others (hodson, choma, et al., ), reflecting desire to protect the ingroup from outgroup value systems and behaviors (cottrell & neuberg, ). disgust also has properties associated with danger and avoidance, like rwa, and superiority and hierarchy, like sdo (hodson & costello, ). hodson et al. found that intergroup disgust sensi- tivity (itg-ds) predicts prejudice toward muslims, foreigners, and ethnic minorities even after controlling for sdo, rwa, and intergroup anxiety. whereas experimentally induced intergroup disgust increases anxiety over intergroup contact (hodson, choma, et al., ), elaborated imagined contact involving relaxation and guided imagery weakens the link between itg-ds and prejudice (hodson, dube, & choma, ). future research might investigate how we can encourage contact among these individuals, and the effectiveness of contact among those higher in itg-ds. . . | race-based rejection sensitivity page-gould, mendoza-denton, and mendes ( ) found that the tendency to anxiously expect rejection from racial outgroup members was associated with greater stress-symptoms among black adults who reported fewer cross-group friends but not among those who had more race-based friends. this suggests that intergroup contact buffer the negative effects of being higher in race-based rejection sensitivity. these findings warrant further investigation. of turner et al. . . | sensation seeking people who search for experiences and feelings that are varied, novel, complex and intense, even if risks are involved, can be described as sensation seeking (zuckerman, ). as interacting with outgroup members might be described as varied and novel (see mendes, blascovich, lickel, & hunter, ), sensation seekers may be motivated to engage in contact, and to perceive it as a positive challenge rather than a threat. . | broader range of outcomes this review illustrates that contact researchers are becoming interested in outcomes beyond traditional self-report measures of attitudes (e.g., multiculturalism, xenophilia, receptivity to intergroup romance, collective action). out- comes that move beyond intergroup relations are also of increasing interest (meleady et al., ). hodson et al. ( ) point out how contact can drive cognitive liberalization, with consequences for creativity and problem solving among other outcomes. examining individual differences either as moderators or mediators of a broad range of outcome measures, both for intergroup relations and cognitive liberalization more broadly, represents an impor- tant area of future investigation. . | methodological considerations research in this area would benefit from a greater variety of methods for measuring intergroup contact, for example, diary methods like experience sampling (page-gould, ), social network analysis (wölfer et al., ), observation of non-verbal behavior and physiological responses (west & turner, ; west, turner, & levita, ), and gps tracking (dixon et al., ). these are more objective than self-reported measures and can enable us to observe how intergroup contact unfolds over time as a function of individual differences. it is also important to systematically examine the different forms of intergroup contact in relation to personal factors, considering their separate and interactive influence, given their different qualities. for example, cross-group friendship is more intimate, and occurs less frequently than less intimate forms of intergroup contact. although hodson et al. ( ) looked at friendship and regular contact separately and found similar patterns of results, future research should continue to explore whether similar patterns of results occur for contact depending on their valence, frequency, and level of intimacy. the research reported here is largely concerned with the relationships between personal factors and intergroup contact as they naturally occur in the field, hence the use of predominantly cross-sectional designs (see hodson, ). we would, however, encourage researchers to continue to examine contact longitudinally, to assess changes over time (trifiletti et al., ; vezzali, turner, et al., ), and experimentally, to establish cause and effect (dhont et al., ; hodson, ; sparkman et al., ). work in this area relies heavily on convenience samples. however, larger studies with representative samples often use insufficient numbers of items to assess individual difference variables (asbrock et al., ; thomsen & rafiqi, ). going forward, it would be valuable to see greater consideration of research using nationally represen- tative samples in both western and non-western contexts, provided that full individual difference measures are included in those surveys. such studies will provide broader evidence that the findings discussed in this article can be generalized. finally, we acknowledge that while many of the studies reported compare those higher or lower in these traits within a particular sample, they may not have high or low levels of those traits in absolute terms. meta-analyses should be employed across multiple samples to explore at what “level” individual difference traits influence the strength of contact–attitude associations. turner et al. of | conclusions early held pessimism about whether contact could be effective at reducing prejudice among hps coincided with a virtual absence of individual differences in the contact literature (see hodson, ; hodson, costello, et al., ). yet recent efforts to explore between-person differences in the propensity for contact, and its outcomes, has proven fruitful for intergroup researchers. what people bring to contact experiences, and how their individual psychologies shape contact and its outcomes, matter a great deal, as does the role of contact in shaping individual differences. where once there was pessimism the field now recognizes the opportunity and optimism about contact being “effec- tive” among prejudice-prone persons. orcid rhiannon n. turner https://orcid.org/ - - - gordon hodson https://orcid.org/ - - - kristof dhont https://orcid.org/ - - - further reading asbrock, f., sibley, c. g., & duckitt, j. 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( ). the extended contact effect: knowledge of cross-group friendships and prejudice. journal of personality and social psychology, , – . wright, s. c., aron, a., & tropp, l. r. ( ). including others (and groups) in the self: self-expansion and intergroup rela- tions. in j. p. forgas & k. williams (eds.), the social self: cognitive, interpersonal and intergroup perspectives (pp. – ). philadelphia, pa: psychology press. zuckerman, m. ( ). personality and sensation seeking. in g. j. boyle, g. matthews, & d. h. saklofske (eds.), the sage handbook of personality theory and assessment: vol. - personality theories and models (pp. – ). american psycho- logical association: los angeles, ca. author biographies rhiannon turner, dphil, is a professor of social psychology and founder and director of the centre of identity and intergroup relations at queen's university belfast. she investigates antecedents, underlying mechanisms, and consequences of different types of intergroup contact, including cross-group friendships and romantic rela- tionships, extended contact and imagined contact. she is co-author of the undergraduate textbook essential social psychology (crisp & turner, ), which is on its fourth edition. she is currently editor-in-chief of the european review of social psychology (ersp), associate editor of group processes and intergroup relations (gpir) and consulting editor for the journal of personality and social psychology (jpsp), journal of experimental social psy- chology (jesp) and the european journal of social psychology (ejsp). gordon hodson, phd, is a professor of psychology at brock university (canada). his research interests include stereotyping, prejudice, and discrimination, with a focus on ideology, intergroup contact/friendship, dehumaniza- tion, and speciesism. he has co-edited advances in intergroup contact (hodson & hewstone, ) and why we love and exploit animals: bridging insights from academia and advocacy (dhont & hodson, ), and presently serves as editor-in-chief at the european review of social psychology (ersp) and as associate editor at group pro- cesses and intergroup relations (gpir). he is a fellow of the association for psychological science (aps), society of experimental social psychology (sesp), and the society for personality and social psychology (spsp). kristof dhont, phd, is a senior lecturer in psychology at the university of kent (uk). he is founder and director of sharklab, dedicated to the psychological study of human intergroup relations and human–animal relations. he investigates the psychological underpinnings and ideological roots of speciesism, racism, and sexism, and the moral psychology of eating and exploiting animals. he has co-edited why we love and exploit animals: bridging insights from academia and advocacy (dhont & hodson, ) and currently serves as associate editor for the journal group processes & intergroup relations (gpir) and as consulting editor for the european journal of person- ality (ejp). how to cite this article: turner rn, hodson g, dhont k. the role of individual differences in understanding and enhancing intergroup contact. soc personal psychol compass. ;e . https://doi.org/ . / spc . turner et al. of https://doi.org/ . /spc . https://doi.org/ . /spc . 	the role of individual differences in understanding and enhancing intergroup contact 	 individual differences as moderators of the contact-prejudice relationship 	 . right-wing authoritarianism and social dominance orientation 	 . need for closure 	 . conservatism 	 . ingroup identification 	 . agreeableness and extraversion 	 individual differences as predictors of intergroup contact 	 . the broader personality space 	 . self-expansion motivation 	 . cognitive abilities 	 contact effects on individual differences 	 . social dominance orientation 	 . additional individual differences 	 future directions 	 . underlying mechanisms 	 . intergroup and societal contexts 	 . contact valence 	 . direct and indirect forms of contact 	 . developmental perspectives 	 . expanding individual differences 	 . . intergroup disgust sensitivity 	 . . race-based rejection sensitivity 	 . . sensation seeking 	 . broader range of outcomes 	 . methodological considerations 	 conclusions 	further reading 	references viewpoint corresponding author: stevan weine, md university of illinois at chicago, center for global health, w. taylor st., nd floor, chicago, il , us smweine@uic.edu to cite this article: weine s, bosland m, rao c, edison m, ansong d, chamberlain s, binagwaho a. global health education amidst covid- : disruptions and opportunities. annals of global health. ; ( ): , – . doi: https://doi.org/ . / aogh. abstract this viewpoint examines the impact of covid- travel bans and remote education on the global health education of students from high-income countries (hic) and low- and middle-income countries (lmic) and explores potential opportunities for strengthening global health education based upon more dispersed and equitable practices. global health is unique in the opportunities it can offer to students during the pandemic if programs can manage and learn from the pandemic’s many challenges. global health educators can: shift to sustainable remote engagement and mobilize resources globally to facilitate this; collaborate with partners to support the efforts to deal with the current pandemic and to prepare for its next phases; partner in new ways with health care professional students and faculty from other countries; collaborate in research with partners in studies of pandemic related health disparities in any country; and document and examine the impact of the pandemic on health care workers and students in different global contexts. these strategies can help work around pandemic travel restrictions, overcome the limitations of existing inequitable models of engagement, and better position global health education and face future challenges while providing the needed support to lmic partners to participate more equally. stevan weine maarten bosland chandrika rao marcia edison daniel ansong stacey chamberlain agnes binagwaho *author affiliations can be found in the back matter of this article global health education amidst covid- : disruptions and opportunities mailto:smweine@uic.edu https://doi.org/ . /aogh. https://doi.org/ . /aogh. https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - weine et al. annals of global health doi: . /aogh. the covid- pandemic has profoundly disrupted higher education across the world, in both high-income countries (hic) and low- and middle-income countries (lmic) [ , , ]. among all the higher education fields impacted, global health may be unique in the opportunities it can offer to students during the pandemic if programs can manage and learn from the pandemic’s many challenges. global health education programs are a relative newcomer to higher education across the globe and have expanded considerably over the past two decades, especially in the u.s. [ ]. today, global health students in schools of medicine, public health, nursing, and others are impacted by the pandemic in all the same ways as their schoolmates in other programs, but what uniquely disrupted their education has been the current inability to travel, especially for students from the global north. global health education often includes a field experience organized with partners locally or internationally, as well as interactions with visiting faculty and students from different global health settings, in most cases from hics to lmics, for educational and research collaborations [ ]. these experiences add value to what can be learned from lectures, readings, and classroom discussion. the prolonged suspension of these experiences presents serious challenges to global health education as it has been practiced. at the beginning of the pandemic in march , most u.s. universities imposed across-the-board travel bans for faculty and students, and many lmics countries, such as in africa, imposed the same for everybody by closing their airports [ , ]. they presumably did so to prevent a returning traveler spreading the infection to non-travelers. to date the pandemic rages on globally, especially in the u.s. which has had more infections than any lmic [ ]. most countries do not currently allow u.s. visitors because of the risks those travelers pose to their own populations [ ]. this is not the first time global health education travel has been disrupted. travel was temporarily shut down in many countries after the eruption of the volcano eyjafjallajökull, just after / [ ], proximate to other terrorist attacks and wars, and the west africa ebola outbreak of – [ ], but never on this global scale and for this duration. in prior situations, efforts were made by global health educators to engage students in education, volunteerism, or scholarship related to the very causes of disruption. however, the challenges of responding to the interruptions brought on by this pandemic have been made more complicated by several factors. the disruptions to education due to the covid- pandemic have been more profound compared to those caused by other global crises. in march , health care professions’ students in many countries, including the u.s., were temporarily removed from clinical clerkships [ , ]. this response was justified by concerns over the safety of students, faculty, and patients (e.g., because of lack of sufficient personal protective equipment). in some instances, this could have also reflected a limited capacity to adequately provide medical education in the face of the pandemic (e.g., due to overwhelming clinical duties or to inexperience with virtual education) [ ]. in summer , the health risks related to covid- were deemed more manageable, and most students returned to their clerkships in the u.s. [ , ]. however, students, faculty, and visitors at many universities are still unable to travel internationally, and that does not appear likely to change for the foreseeable future. another challenge is that covid- has brought forward major persistent health inequities associated with race and ethnicity in the u.s. and other countries [ ]. the deaths of george floyd and many others and the black lives matter protests have accelerated an overdue reckoning in global health regarding racism and colonialism [ ]. global health has a history of being rooted in tropical medicine, which was initially used to support western colonialism and continues to underlie inequities in global politics, economics, education, and health care [ ]. in light of these developments, the existing practice of u.s. students travelling abroad, previously critiqued for often being short-term, extractive, and excessively expensive, becomes even less defensible [ ]. although equity-focused best practice guidelines have been articulated, it has https://doi.org/ . /aogh. weine et al. annals of global health doi: . /aogh. been difficult for u.s. global health programs to develop feasible models in which students and faculty from lmics could have parallel exchanges involving travel to the u.s. and other hics [ ]. given the marked challenges of the present pandemic context, what can global health educators do to support the education of their students who are not able to travel abroad or have contact with visitors from abroad? no less important, what can be done to support students in lmics whose capacity for remote education can be impacted by limitations of wi-fi and internet bandwidth and electrical power, as well as internet and equipment cost obstacles? these are profoundly challenging questions. we believe global health educators and students can take steps to both enhance educational opportunities for hic and lmic students and to address some of the innumerable challenges of the pandemic to health and society in all countries. in particular, the pandemic raises many important issues related to disparities, inequity, and neocolonialism, which are central to the very definition of global health [ ]. for example, among racial and ethnic minorities in the u.s., covid- is more highly prevalent and lethal, economic pressures are higher, and access to a potential vaccine may be less compared to white and affluent populations [ ]. in lmics, access to testing, adequate treatments (e.g., oxygen), and vaccines is overall far less than in hics, and there are often great in-country inequities. for those very reasons, the pandemic presents opportunities for developing new approaches to global health education which depart from inequitable practices rooted in global health’s colonial past [ ]. here are several practical suggestions for what educators can do, some of which are already operational: . shift programs so students can engage remotely and regularly with academic, clinical, and community programs in different global health contexts. dispersion practices via digital platforms which enable businesses and universities from hics to maintain direct relationships with their clients and students during the pandemic can be used to sustain global health partnerships including students’ activities [ ]. by widely using available communication platforms such as zoom and webex, more popular in the u.s., and those more popular abroad, including whatsapp and moodle and remote learning platforms such as lecturio and scholarx, students from universities in hics and lmics can engage with partners in other countries and establish new partnerships, with potentially far greater continuity of involvement than short-term travels allows. although simply engaging online may be too obvious to deserve mentioning, changing the global health education paradigm from centering on periodic trips to continuous on-line engagement could be a profound transformation. for example, virtual didactics, trainings, and fellowships could be offered to those in both hics and lmics. in support of this development and mutual learning, lmics and hics need to engage in global mobilization for the provision of resources including, but not limited to, computers and internet access needed in lmics. . form student-to-student partnerships between health care professional students in lmics and hics to conduct equitable joint projects. some of these students could be open to joint bi-directional learning opportunities, sometimes referred to as twinning [ ], although there is a need to address obstacles due to wi-fi and internet bandwidth and electric power limitations, and the cost of computers and mobile data. one example is a collaboration between students in the university of illinois at chicago global medicine program and the federation of african medical students’ associations who are jointly developing an online mental health and psychosocial support intervention. industry, for example pharmaceutical firms, could further the partnerships between student and healthcare professionals by providing students in both lmics and hics with support or opportunities for practical experiences. . collaboratively develop training and best practice materials that can support lmic and hic partners as they cope with the pandemic’s current and future challenges. students and faculty in lmics and hics can collaborate in developing materials that can facilitate the training and best practices of medical and public health practitioners and policymakers in the face of the evolving https://doi.org/ . /aogh. weine et al. annals of global health doi: . /aogh. pandemic. these materials can address covid- relevant topics including vaccine distribution, clinical care management, workforce enhancement, disease surveillance and reporting, and psychosocial coping. for example, one such effort could entail developing public health education materials for primary and secondary schools on the coming vaccine, contributing to the fight against vaccine hesitancy. . engage in collaborative studies of pandemic-related global health disparities, especially related to race, ethnicity, and refugee and migrant populations. there is an urgent need to conduct collaborative research in these areas of disparities, presenting students in global health education programs worldwide with great opportunities to advance knowledge in ways that can speak to practice and policy. one example of a collaboration could be a mixed-methods study of the covid- experiences of migrant day laborers in both hics and lmics that would result in recommendations for action. . document and examine involvement of health care workers and students in responding to the pandemic in different countries. the stories of health care workers’ roles, strengths, vulnerabilities, and coping measures in response to the pandemic in many different contexts need to be told and understood. this also applies to covid’s impact on the education of students in hics and lmics and their participation in volunteerism. the knowledge gained from understanding the struggles and resilience of health professionals and students can inform future educational programs in many countries. for example, global health students could collect oral histories, conduct ethnographic studies of health care workers, or teach students to write opinion pieces. additionally, while global health educators in hics are working to create opportunities for their students at their home institutions, they can contribute to the global health field in several ways. educators can share best practices such as how to use distance technology or how to maintain mentorship networks across countries. educators can also conduct evaluations that measure the consequences of covid- and assess and compare the impact of innovative educational programs in hics and lmics. most importantly, global health educators should not see covid- as merely a temporary inconvenience but rather as an opportunity for them and their students – the future leaders of global health – to get smarter, stronger, and better prepared for adversities which the future may hold. this is not the first pandemic or disaster to disrupt global health education, and it will certainly not be the last. this pandemic may give us a new view of what is needed to establish or sustain the future global health workforce, which education programs can be addressing. global health education also needs to help its students to be more equitably engaged. thus, the pandemic presents an opportunity for de-colonizing global health education by overcoming its dependence upon short-term travel by student from hics. instead of relying on inequitable models of engagement with lmics, that are dependent on often prohibitively high travel costs, global health educators can devise more bi-directional educational practices that embody the value of equity and do not amplify disparities and neocolonialism. in conclusion, this is a time for openness, flexibility, innovation, and entrepreneurialism so as to develop novel models of partnership and educational engagement which can open a new and more equitable chapter in global health education. competing interests the authors have no competing interests to declare. author contribution all authors had a role in writing this manuscript. https://doi.org/ . /aogh. weine et al. annals of global health doi: . /aogh. author affiliations stevan weine orcid.org/ - - - university of illinois at chicago, department of psychiatry and center for global health, usa maarten bosland orcid.org/ - - - university of illinois at chicago, department of pathology and center for global health, usa chandrika rao orcid.org/ - - - ramaiah medical college, bangalore, india marcia edison orcid.org/ - - - university of illinois at chicago, department of medical education and center for global health, usa daniel ansong orcid.org/ - - - school of medicine & dentistry, school of medical sciences, kwame nkrumah university of science and technology, ghana stacey chamberlain orcid.org/ - - - university of illinois at chicago, department of emergency medicine; and center for global health, usa agnes binagwaho orcid.org/ - - - university of global health equity, rwanda publisher’s note this paper underwent peer review using the cross-publisher covid- rapid review initiative. references . pulsipher a. covid- accelerates disruptive trends facing higher education. . https://www. forbes.com/sites/scottpulsipher/ / / /covid- -accelerates- -disruptive-trends-facing-higher- education/#ccde dfd. accessed august , . . fernandez aa, shaw gp. academic leadership in a time of crisis: the coronavirus and covid‐ . journal of leadership studies. ; ( ): – . doi: https://doi.org/ . /jls. . al-balas m, al-balas hi, jaber hm, et al. distance learning in clinical medical education amid covid- pandemic in jordan: current situation, challenges, and perspectives. 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( ) blood, money and endless paper: slavery and capital in british imperial history. history compass, ( ). pp. - . issn - doi: . /hic . © john wiley & sons ltd this version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/ / available in lse research online: may lse has developed lse research online so that users may access research output of the school. copyright © and moral rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in lse research online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. you may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. you may freely distribute the url (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the lse research online website. this document is the author’s final accepted version of the journal article. there may be differences between this version and the published version. you are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it. http://dx.doi.org/ . /hic . http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/ / blood, money and endless paper: slavery and capital in british imperial history abstract the history of slavery in britain and the british empire has placed the legislative milestones of anti-slavery - the abolition of the slave trade in and the abolition of slavery in - at the centre of historical inquiry. this essay considers why the passing of anti-slavery laws, rather than the implementation of anti-slavery reforms, has been so pivotal in the historiography. it asks what the history of slavery in britain and the british empire would look like if turned toward the continuities between slavery and freedom, rather than emphasizing the bright line of emancipation. it places british approaches to the history of slavery into a wider historiographical context, and considers how renewed emphasis on the physical experience and everyday routines of slavery and anti-slavery and a rigorous rethinking of the archives might shape the future of the field. in , as the movement for the abolition of slavery in the british empire gained traction, a commission of inquiry appointed by parliament arrived in freetown, the capital of sierra leone. the small british crown colony on the west african coast was famous for its association with antislavery. the two commissioners were concerned that emancipation might cause the production of sugar and cotton in the west indies to bottom out, and wondered whether flying british capital might roost in africa. opinion in freetown was divided. one official reckoned that market gardeners might prosper but concluded that “cultivation on a large scale, by a capitalist would not succeed.” governor sir charles turner was more sanguine. he boasted, “every merchant in the place, besides capitalists in london with whom i am acquainted, [is] ready to establish plantations.” still, turner worried that without heavy investment, the more than , ‘liberated africans’ released from the slave trade and repatriated in the colony since report of commissioners of inquiry, evidence of d.m. hamilton, appendix c , records of the colonial office (co), the national archives, kew, co / . for recent work on the relationship between british abolitionists and sierra leone, see everill, abolition and empire; scanlan, “the rewards of their exertions.” dispatch from general sir charles turner to earl bathurst, january , published in great britain, parliament, house of commons, papers relating to liberated africans located in the colony of sierra leone, : . https://www.google.co.uk/maps/place/freetown,+sierra+leone/@ . ,- . , z/data=! m ! b ! m ! m ! s xf c b e : x b c c af c e https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=r g aqaamaaj&dq=sir% charles% turner% sierra% leone&pg=pa #v=onepage&q=sir% charles% turner% sierra% leone&f=false blood, money and endless paper – including , people in - – would “retrograde in the woods, into a state of nature and barbarism.” in britain and its empire in the nineteenth century, the imperial civilizing mission, the exponential growth of colonial and domestic bureaucracy and the explosive power of global capitalism all drew strength, shape and impetus from the abolition of colonial slavery. all these phenomena were visible in sierra leone in : the commissioners visited the colony to measure its ‘civilization,’ to document its population, governance, trade and integration into the wider empire, and to test the proposition that the colony might replace the west indies as a sugar bowl and investment portfolio. the debates about how to end slavery were also debates about the structure and pace of the imperial civilizing mission. early antislavery advocates in the s and s imagined ‘civilization’ as a pathway toward freedom, and hoped for a british empire of, as christopher brown puts it, “free black men and women vested with certain limited rights and liberties traditionally enjoyed by british subjects.” by the s, advocates for emancipation occupied a wide spectrum of positions regarding how much ‘civilization’ was necessary for emancipation. in counterpoint, most slave-owners replied that ‘civilization’ was not a prelude to freedom; it was a prerequisite. both sides generally agreed that emancipation would have to be gradual and incremental. in his remarks to the commissioners, governor turner was asking a question that made both sides of the debate about colonial slavery anxious: without the discipline of labour in capital-intensive plantation agriculture, would people of african descent in the west indies backslide into ‘a state of nature’? in the british imperial imagination, the black colonial subject – enslaved or free – was an imperial ward, subject to physical coercion if necessary. the sierra leone commission of ibid. brown, moral capital, . https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=byqpaaaaiaaj&dq=rowan% sierra% leone% commission% of% inquiry&pg=pa #v=onepage&q=rowan% sierra% leone% commission% of% inquiry&f=false blood, money and endless paper inquiry spoke for many britons when it concluded “that a mild and well-regulated system of coerced labour for a limited period, and exclusively with a view to the advantage of the negroes” would be the best practice for people freed from the slave trade and repatriated in sierra leone. by implication, a similar scheme could be established in the west indies. without force, formerly enslaved people might not work “to improve their condition beyond … their own idea of comfort, which includes little more than an abundance of food and sufficient shelter from the weather.” emancipation could foster civilization; civilization could be measured by the yield of cash crops for sale on the european market. this is the problem that thomas holt, writing about jamaica, called ‘the problem of freedom,’ of how “thoroughly [to reform] … ex-slaves’ culture so as to make them receptive to the discipline of free labour.” the commissioners were friendly to emancipation, in part because they agreed that even the most ‘backward’ enslaved people would ‘naturally’ organize their economic lives in the image of british folkways after emancipation: they would work to fixed schedules for fixed wages, save money, buy land, consume goods. as one abolitionist writer commented, “the negro likes his comforts fully as much as the white man… human nature is pretty much the same in all countries.” this well-meaning sentiment had sinister implications. abolitionists sometimes conceived of emancipation as ‘the great experiment,’ a test to prove the economic superiority of wage labour, but the ‘experiment’ was also a test of emancipated people’s ability to conform to british expectations. if a capitalist market economy rowan and wellington, “report of the commissioners of inquiry, part ,” . holt, problem of freedom, xxii. madden, twelvemonth’s residence in the west indies, . https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=byqpaaaaiaaj&dq=rowan% sierra% leone% commission% of% inquiry&pg=pa #v=onepage&q=rowan% sierra% leone% commission% of% inquiry&f=false https://history.uchicago.edu/directory/thomas-c-holt https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=imamaqaaiaaj&dq=the% great% experiment% emancipation&pg=pa #v=onepage&q=the% great% experiment% emancipation&f=false blood, money and endless paper was ‘human nature,’ then it followed that formerly enslaved people who ‘failed’ to emulate british economic life were at least deeply backward, and possibly less than human. in practice, ‘civilization’ was often represented in economic data, and indexed to morality. one of the early slogans of abolitionists in britain was ‘commerce, christianity and civilization.’ the market economy was a powerful metaphor in evangelical anglican theology from the late eighteenth through the mid-nineteenth centuries; souls ‘earned’ salvation and tested their mettle on an open and free market. participation in the market economy became a proxy for ‘civilization.’ abolitionism drew rhetorical power from the idea that enslaved people had been denied the chance to be saved and were part of an economically backward system of production. antislavery was capitalist. it posited the autonomous, liberal consumer as the basic unit of society both on earth and in heaven. although antislavery advocates insisted on its gruesome quaintness, violence and economic backwardness, slavery was also capitalist, and profoundly integrated into the global financial, commodity and labour markets of the early nineteenth century. in british history, the tendency has been to reify emancipation, to treat the abolition of the slave trade and the end of slavery in the empire as not only legislative achievements, but as the terminus of the shameful entanglement between the british empire and global systems of slave labour. and yet, as historians of slavery in the americas have shown again and again, slavery did not ‘end’ after every enslaved person in the empire had been legally emancipated. the emancipation of enslaved people in the british empire in was not the see hall, civilising subjects; hall, “‘from greenland’s icy mountains … to afric’s golden sand’.” porter, “‘commerce and christianity’”; schwarz, “commerce, civilization and christianity.” see especially hilton, age of atonement; hilton, a mad, bad, and dangerous people?, . see also campbell, middle passages, ; davidoff and hall, family fortunes, . holt, problem of freedom; holt, “the essence of the contract: the articulation of race, gender, and political economy in british emancipation policy, - ”; hahn, political worlds of slavery and freedom; scott, slave emancipation; scott, degrees of freedom; scott, “paper thin”; dubois, a colony of citizens; dubois, avengers of the new world. blood, money and endless paper happy conclusions of an enlightenment history of ‘moral revolution’ in britain. rather, it was a chapter in a longer history of coerced labour, capitalism, and bureaucratic sophistication and sprawl – of blood, money, and endless paper. . british abolitionists wrote a great deal about their achievements: thomas clarkson’s two- volume, thousand-plus-page history of the movement to end the british slave trade, first published in , set the pace for a movement that was never at a loss for words. the vast archives of abolitionism permit historians to take at face value the idea that the abolition of the slave trade in and the abolition of slavery in were watershed moments not only for activists in britain, but for the entire empire. because british abolitionists were confident that emancipation was not only morally right, but also economically sound, some historians have adopted the view that the economic consequences of both the end of the slave trade and the end of slavery have bearing on the moral probity of the abolitionists. the end of slavery is then framed as an empirical economic question with an odd and abstract moral corollary: did britain lose money? if it did, then british abolitionists should be praised. if it didn’t, then they were hypocrites. this has distorted the historiography in two ways. first, it has allowed historians uncritically to index the balance of trade to moral praise and blame, an idea smuggled into the present from the archives. second, because economic data flowed into britain from the empire, it has tended to make britain itself the geographic focus of histories of abolitionism. as catherine hall and her co-authors recently observed, “distance insulated metropolitan britain from the physical realities of slavery … and has continued to shelter british history from them since.” hall et al., legacies of british slave-ownership, .legaice https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=ieljaaaamaaj&dq=clarkson% history% of% the% rise&pg=pp #v=onepage&q&f=false https://www.ucl.ac.uk/history/people/academic-staff/catherine-hall/catherine-hall https://www.ucl.ac.uk/history/people/academic-staff/catherine-hall/catherine-hall blood, money and endless paper sustained public outcry against police brutality and widespread, systematic discrimination against african-americans in the past two years has finally pushed arguments about the open wound of slavery – arguments that activists, scholars and everyday people have been making since well before reconstruction – toward the centre of american life. concomitant with movements like black lives matter, historians of the united states have put forward new accounts of how black bodies were and are brutalized by a nation built on the principle of white supremacy and structured around the preservation of white privilege. for many historians of slavery and emancipation in the americas, this has meant a focus as much on the painstaking practices of actually transforming a slave society into a ‘free’ society as on the legislative struggle of building consensus around antislavery laws. in contrast, the history of british slavery is still framed around its legislative abolition. the end of slavery in the west indies serves as synecdoche for the end of imperial expansion based on the founding of new colonies and as point of transition to an empire of trade and trusteeship, echoing a bright line draw in domestic british history drawn by the great reform act of . consequently, the history of slavery in the british empire has been the history of british abolitionism, not british abolition: of explaining and evaluating how many britons came to reject slavery, not of explaining how – or if – slavery was taken apart. in general, this history has been written from one of two very broad positions. one position frames the end of british slavery as fundamentally altruistic. this position was partly invented by the abolitionists themselves. in the ‘altruist’ camp, historians argue that britons abolished slavery in spite of their economic interests, that they sacrificed wealth for the greater good. the second camp is the ‘self-interest’ camp; in the ‘self-interest’ camp, abolitionism – or at least elite abolitionism – was a cynical response to a changing economic and political situation, a wolf in saint’s clothing. eric http://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/ / /the-case-for-reparations/ / http://thepointmag.com/ /politics/after-ferguson http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/church-shooting-charleston-south-carolina http://blacklivesmatter.com/ http://www.pdavis.nl/legis_ .htm https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=uq uaaaaiaaj&pg=pa &redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/eric_williams blood, money and endless paper williams’ capitalism & slavery ( ) is a point of origin for this school. williams argued that abolition was made possible by capitalism, that the abolitionist movement hit its stride just as rich and powerful industrial capitalists no longer needed slavery to sustain their wealth. slavery bankrolled factories in britain, after which it was discarded. williams’ argument was sensational and influential, dovetailing with a broader critique of british colonialism and with anti-colonial nationalisms. in the s, historians like seymour drescher and roger anstey aimed to rehabilitate the abolitionists with a data-driven version of the altruist argument. drescher in particular returned to data about the value of the sugar industry to show how profitable the west indies sugar industry was at the time of abolition. in freedom burning, an account of the imperial dimensions of antislavery policy, told from the perspective of the foreign office, and broadly satisfied with british moral leadership, richard huzzey takes the ‘altruist’ argument to the wider empire. freedom burning celebrates the degree to which antislavery activities were a part of wider british foreign policy objectives, and scolds historians for critiquing antislavery from “anachronistic expectations,” insisting that the victorians did what they could with the ideological tools that they had. this division of the field is crude, and obscures a great deal of excellent work. but however blunt an instrument it might be, it shows how resolving why britain abolished its slave trade became the dominant heuristic in the literature. the most original and influential recent history of british abolitionism, christopher brown’s moral capital, reminded historians of the imperial dimensions of abolitionist ideology. brown shows how crucial the loss of the american colonies was to both the abolitionists and the british public. the loss of the ‘respectable’ slave anstey, atlantic slave trade and british abolition; drescher, econocide; drescher, “whose abolition? popular pressure and the ending of the british slave trade”; drescher, mighty experiment; drescher, “the shocking birth of british abolitionism.” huzzey, freedom burning, . see also mulligan and bric, global history of anti-slavery politics; huzzey, “minding civilisation and humanity in .” https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/eric_williams http://www.history.pitt.edu/faculty/drescher-cv.php http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/abs/ . / ?journalcode=fich https://www.liv.ac.uk/history/staff/richard-huzzey/ http://history.columbia.edu/faculty/brown.html blood, money and endless paper states of the american south, brown argues, made it easier to convince the public of anti-slave- trade and antislavery arguments. and yet, even brown is concerned largely with how abolitionists managed to transform discomfort with slavery into a formal abolitionist movement. brown’s history ends in , with the founding of the society for effecting the abolition of the slave trade, bracketing out the path from activism to the passage of the slave trade act of , and concealing the history of the implementation of imperial laws against slavery. . slavery was a complete political economy, and a system of violence and power that shaped every aspect of everyday life in the british empire long after emancipation. it was also connected to capitalism, not in opposition but in symbiosis. however, accounts of ‘capitalism’ that are over- preoccupied with defining the term and then finding case studies that conform to the definition tend to conceal the closeness this symbiotic relationship. weber famously insisted that one of the markers of ‘capitalism’ was “free labour. people must be available who are not only legally in the position to do so, but also economically compelled to sell their labour.” moreover, a capitalist society was one where “property takes on the form of negotiable paper.” the problem with this definition is that in the nineteenth century, slavery involved transforming people who could not sell their labour on the open market into pieces of negotiable paper – not only chattel, but securitized, insured chattel. rather than asking what global capitalism is, we might ask along with the anthropologist anna tsing, “why is global capitalism so messy?” brown, moral capital; brown, “empire without slaves.” weber, max weber on capitalism, bureaucracy, and religion, – . tsing, friction, . http://www.pdavis.nl/legis_ .htm http://www.pdavis.nl/legis_ .htm http://anthro.ucsc.edu/faculty/singleton.php?&singleton=true&cruz_id=atsing blood, money and endless paper a cohort of historians of the united states offer new answers to that question, a new ‘history of capitalism.’ their work, very broadly, emphasizes the history of the united states as told through the everyday operations of finance, tracing american history through the history of banking, insurance, investment and credit. enslaved people and their labour became the basis of new financial instruments that circulated among and within the north and the south, blurring the line between a ‘modern’ industrial north and a ‘backward’ south. slavery, of course, has never been far from the top of the agenda for historians of the united states, but the ‘history of capitalism’ has given a different impetus, attracting attention, money and graduate students. crucially for the purposes of british historians, it offers a way of thinking about ‘capitalism’ as a regime of everyday practices. as seth rockman writes, “too often capitalism appears as a synonym for market exchange and not as a political economy that dictated who worked where, on what terms, and to whose benefit.” in those terms, the line between the labour of enslaved people in in jamaica, and the work migrant labourers did for wages in the s is much murkier. wage labour did not abolish the practices of slavery. that is not to say that historians of the british empire ignore the place of commerce in its expansion and governance. whether the empire was made “in a fit of absence of mind” or by an “imperialism of free trade” or by “gentlemanly capitalists,” britain’s was a commercial empire. and yet, as alexander x. byrd reminds us, “the late eighteenth century british empire was overwhelmingly black.” historians of the british slave trade have done the demographic work see, among other works, zakim and kornblith, capitalism takes command; baptist, the half has never been told; beckert, the monied metropolis; beckert, “emancipation and empire”; beckert, empire of cotton; rosenthal, “from memory to mastery”; levy, freaks of fortune; levy, “accounting for profit and the history of capital”; mihm, a nation of counterfeiters; moreton, to serve god and wal-mart; rockman, scraping by. rockman, scraping by, . ‘see, very broadly seeley, the expansion of england; gallagher and robinson, “the imperialism of free trade”; cain and hopkins, british imperialism, - . byrd, captives and voyagers, . http://journalofthecivilwarera.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /final-rockman.pdf http://journalofthecivilwarera.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /final-rockman.pdf http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /education/in-history-departments-its-up-with-capitalism.html?_r= https://vivo.brown.edu/display/srockman http://history.rice.edu/faculty/alexander-x-byrd blood, money and endless paper to prove this point; historians of the british west indies have reconstructed the bleak world of the plantation. the challenge is to find ways to connect british and colonial histories in new ways, to understand and honour the lives of enslaved people while also tracking the origins and development of the everyday practices of governance in the colonies. in line with the surge in the united states of slavery and finance capital, university college london’s legacies of british slave-ownership database offers an easy-to-use, comprehensive and well-presented glimpse of how deeply slave-ownership was embedded in british society. in , after extended debate along with the emancipation of enslaved people in the west indies, the british government paid £ million to slave-owners as compensation for their lost ‘property’; the legacies database makes public and searchable the records of this transaction, “the largest single financial operation undertaken by the british state to date.” in his monograph on the compensation scheme, nicholas draper takes pains to show both how many britons leapt at the chance to identify themselves as slave-owners in order to claim compensation and how the compensation money was itself broken down into securities and other financial products. and yet, historians need to be cautious of relying overmuch on financial records to write a history of visceral suffering. the ‘history of capitalism’ risks shading into the history of capital itself, of a new set of financial abstractions with distant consequences. in river of dark dreams, walter johnson describes the lower mississippi in an opening scene told from the point of view of a man propelled high above the mississippi river amid the wreckage of an exploding steamship. before he died, he might have seen the american deep south as “land that had been promised to white yeoman farmers, but that was being worked by black slaves; land that had see, for example eltis and richardson, atlas of the transatlantic slave trade; dunn, a tale of two plantations. draper, price of emancipation, . draper, price of emancipation. https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/ https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/ https://books.google.co.uk/books?id= banaaaaqaaj&dq=compensation% slaves% &pg=pr #v=onepage&q&f=false https://www.ucl.ac.uk/history/people/academic-staff/nicholas-draper/nicholas-draper http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/walter-johnson https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/sinking_of_the_steamboat_brilliant_henry_lewis.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/f/fa/sinking_of_the_steamboat_brilliant_henry_lewis.jpg blood, money and endless paper been stripped bare by the cultivation of cotton; land in the united states of america that was materially subservient to the caprice of speculators in distant markets.” johnson takes particular care, and seems to stand quite deliberately apart from the cohort of ‘historians of capitalism,’ by emphasizing that although financial instruments were created by abstracting the labour of enslaved people into financial products, what matters is what happened to the people in bondage, and not to the people buying bonds. as johnson puts it, the history of the cotton kingdom is a history of “sun, water and soil; animal energy, human labor and mother wit; grain, flesh and cotton; pain, hunger, and fatigue; blood, milk, semen and shit.” the fluids, wit and pain of individual people in british colonies before and after emancipation may provide a way into more intimate imperial histories of the transition from slavery to freedom. for example, many historians acknowledge the common histories of british and american abolitionism, particularly in the eighteenth century, but few carry those histories forward past the abolition of slavery in the west indies. comparisons of life and work on plantations in the west indies and the american south have been powerful and fruitful works of history; natasha lightfoot’s recent work on antigua, troubling freedom, augurs for renewed interest in gradual emancipation among historians of slavery in the british empire. the day-to- day practices of the abolitionist north in the united states and the post-emancipation west indies offer another way of reuniting american and british abolitionism. quaker antislavery activism on both sides of the atlantic emphasized the slow, gradual path to economic and personal autonomy that follow manumission or emancipation. anthony benezet, perhaps the most important abolitionist quaker writer of the mid-eighteenth century, proposed that former johnson, river of dark dreams, . ibid., . see also johnson, soul by soul. see, most famously davis, problem of slavery; brown, moral capital; o’brien, “a transatlantic community of saints.” lightfoot, troubling freedom. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=e-_ci rkc&dq=cotton% kingdom&pg=pp #v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.co.uk/books?id= lmdaaaayaaj&dq=anthony% benezet&pg=pa #v=onepage&q&f=false blood, money and endless paper slaves work to pay off the cost of their manumission, while bound to designated farms and closely supervised. likewise, in the s and s, many northern states formally abolished slavery, but virtually all replaced it with programs of bonded labour for former slaves. gradual emancipation allowed abolitionists on both sides of the atlantic to put off designing a post-emancipation society, to preserve plantation economies, and to coddle politically powerful planters. abolitionists could instead embrace antislavery as a process of sentimental education, not a revolutionary act of liberation, a chance to remove “the stain of sin and the fear of just reprisal but retain the control.” in the british west indies, the preamble to emancipation was a series of laws demanding the registration of the names and locations of enslaved people in central repositories, and extensive regulations designed to ‘improve’ the condition of slavery, in order to make the transition to emancipation easier. sierra leone, for example, relied on the practices of gradual emancipation as best practices. in , the emancipation act called for five years of ‘apprenticeship’ before emancipation. apprentices were expected to continue to work for their former ‘owners’ for most of the week, and were expected to sell the rest of their time, either on the plantation or elsewhere. as diana paton has shown, while apprenticeship was not strictly ‘slavery,’ it was forced labour – and was, moreover, the catalyst for the construction of a substantial and powerful system of incarceration and judicial terror in the west indies. . zilversmit, first emancipation, . zilversmit, first emancipation; melish, disowning slavery; gigantino, ragged road to abolition; levine- gronningsater, “delivering freedom.” melish, disowning slavery, . paton, no bond but the law; green, british slave emancipation. blood, money and endless paper in addition to blood, semen and shit, the empire of ‘civilization’ and emancipation was made out of paper. both the new financial instruments invented to catalyse global capitalism and the data and religious and ethnographic hand-wringing required new, robust and globalizing empires of paper. ‘civilization’ and emancipation, as much as capitalism, required bureaucracy, and recent histories of slavery and capitalism dovetail with innovative approaches to understanding the organization and functioning of the british empire. perhaps the most influential working historian of american capitalism, sven beckert, models a research program that shares many features with the approach to british history pioneered by historical geographers in his empire of cotton. in american history, the connection between the development of bureaucratic and managerial capitalism has long been part of the research agenda, and “cotton had paced the transformation.” britain did not have slavery, but it had vast investments in the commodities produced by slave labour, and in the slave states of the americas. britain did not grow cotton, but its industrial economy virtually depended on it. beckert’s work emphasizes the connection between british cotton manufacturing and american cotton plantations, demanding more attention from historians to the relationship between britain and the complex and interdependent economy of slave labour and industrial production in the united states. beckert also emphasizes that this relationship was not solely a nineteenth-century phenomenon. it was made in part by what he calls ‘war capitalism: “slavery, the expropriation of indigenous peoples, imperial expansion, armed trade, and the assertion of sovereignty over people and land by entrepreneurs” – in short, the everyday business of british imperialism in the eighteenth century (and, minus official support for the slavery, in the chandler jr., visible hand, . http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/sven-beckert blood, money and endless paper nineteenth and twentieth). the ‘empire of cotton’ beckert describes bears a close resemblance to the empire described by the historian john darwin. the ‘empire’ of cotton did not have a centre; rather, it was “built by myriad actors with local and diverse connections often solving very local problems.” darwin, for his part, describes the british empire as “largely a private- enterprise empire: the creation of merchants, investors, migrants and missionaries, among many others.” as miles ogborn comments, “imperialism is constituted through its arrangement of spaces, places, landscapes, and networks of connection.” those networks, driven by local practices but connected to wider institutions and structures may be useful for managing the problem of scaling between individual lives and wider historical forces. the empire of cotton was also an empire of paper. the sun and blood of the cotton fields was abstracted out into the reams of paper needed to understand and control it. consequently, paperwork takes on more importance for historians working on the relationship between slavery and capitalism. social historians interested in american capitalism have written innovative histories of both printed forms, which “fed the paperwork addiction of managerial capital” and of the many thousands of writers and clerks who managed and filed the forms. as michael zakim writes, “the age of capital” was “overrun with scribbling men” trained in new-fangled techniques for speedy reading and writing taught by specialized schools and popular correspondence courses. a one-day workshop for early-career historians i organized at the center for history and economics at harvard university on the ‘new histories of paperwork’ showed just how pervasive, and how compelling and innovative, histories of bureaucracy have become in the age beckert, empire of cotton, xv. ibid., . darwin, unfinished empire, xi. ogborn, indian ink, . gitelman, paper knowledge, . michael zakim, “paperwork,” raritan , no. ( ): . http://www.history.ox.ac.uk/faculty/staff/profile/darwin/publications.html http://www.geog.qmul.ac.uk/staff/ogbornm.html http://www.tau.ac.il/humanities/personal_sites/m_zakim/index.htm?p=index.htm http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~histecon/ http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~histecon/ http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~histecon/paperwork/ blood, money and endless paper of digital sources. it is worth remembering that the british empire was also an empire of paper, of plantation ledgers and blue books and memoranda and letters. the history of slavery in the empire is ready for a social history of paperwork – of how bookkeepers, of in the employ of slave-owner, produced the statistics that abolitionists and their historians rely upon. slavery helped to create the instruments of bookkeeping, accounting and financial transparency that were instrumental in the integration of the atlantic economy. the tools built for slavery served antislavery just as well; the movement flourished as the british public demanded greater and greater transparency, auditing and oversight of its government. the muckraking entrepreneur john wade’s bestselling extraordinary black book, which laid bare the structures of old corruption by printing the salaries and sinecures of politicians and clerics, interspersed with polemic against the powerful, was published in the early s and went through dozens of editions, updates and printings. the black book conjured clarity and morality out of a published account of a bureaucracy. historians of the atlantic slave trade were among the first to rely on ‘big data’ and the massive accumulation and presentation of charts and tables – condemning the slave trade by representing it in all of enormity. the transatlantic slave trade database is perhaps the most impressive example of this kind of work. and yet, both historical and contemporary ‘audits’ of slavery and the slave trade ought to give pause. taking spreadsheets from the past, the compilers of the database did the titanic work of data entry and labelling, creating spreadsheets for the present. and yet, all of this amounts to an implied critique of capitalism that relies on the apparatus of capitalism. there is almost certainly no other option, and the world of scholarship would be much the poorer without the curation of big data for the use of other historians. but, as the historian of science theodore porter comments, see for example wennerlind, casualties of credit; hancock, citizens of the world. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=qnc aaaacaaj&dq=extraordinary% black% book&pg=pr #v=onepage&q&f=false http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces http://www.slavevoyages.org/tast/index.faces http://www.history.ucla.edu/people/faculty/faculty- /faculty- ?lid= blood, money and endless paper “quantification is a social technology.” the big data of atlantic history offers an opportunity to write social histories of data collection and measurement. as kirsten weld cautions in another context, “we must place archives – with their histories, their contingencies, their silences and gaps, and their politics – at the heart of our research questions rather than simply relegating them to footnotes and parentheses.” the data upon which historians of the slave trade and slavery rely has a social history worth exploring. finally, combining close attention to practices with careful attention to the contingencies of the production of paperwork and archives connects the history of emancipation to the histories of settler colonialism, racism and victorian schemes for imperial trusteeship. in the eighteenth century, images of human suffering like the famous print of the slave ship brookes were intended to persuade britons by forcing them to face the physical horrors of the slave trade. in the nineteenth century, economic data became more important; the great experiment required data to prove its success or failure. soon, opponents of emancipation, writing about the west indies, noted the falling production of sugar and coffee in british colonies. one critic noted that the only crop yield that increased after emancipation was allspice. but the author remarked that allspice thrived in fallow land, allowing “the negro women and children [to pick] the berries without the trouble of cultivation…these facts and statistics,” he concluded, “demonstrate the down-hill progress of jamaica.” accounts of the ‘decline’ of jamaica became, in the words of one contemporary writer, “the stalking horse of pro-slavery arguments.” porter, trust in numbers, . weld, paper cadavers, . see also stoler, along the archival grain. other contributions to the history of paperwork include vismann, files; raman, document raj; kafka, the demon of writing; gitelman, paper knowledge; hull, government of paper. van evrie, free negroism, . pringle, fall of the sugar planters, . http://history.fas.harvard.edu/people/kirsten-weld https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/ / /slaveshipposter.jpg https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/allspice blood, money and endless paper ‘commerce, christianity and civilization’ had been an enduring mantra for abolitionists. civilization became indexed to commerce, and the profusion of publically available commercial data gave opponents and proponents of various kinds of imperial reforms a means of showing the ‘development’ of british subjects, and a rhetoric for asserting why britain ought to control that development, for the good of her subjects. a lack of commerce – or rather, unwillingness to either trade with britain entirely, or unwillingness to produce for the market the things that britain needed – was taken as evidence of barbarism, and as a justification for further intervention. “a check upon commerce is a check upon civilization,” commented one american author. slavery was at the root of that discussion; in the abolitionist bestiary, where the slave- selling african king was near the very bottom of the ladder of civilization, the degree to which a society participated in the european market economy became a convenient gradient for measuring civilization. a society that did not trade was barely a society at all. haiti was presented as the best example of the phenomenon. in the s, one commenter wrote, “we behold the british colonies… [of the west indies] approaching the semi-barbarous condition of st. domingo.” even defenders of haiti agreed in principle that commerce was a clear indicator of civilization. when the bishop of oxford declared, “if the island were sunk, it would not, he believed, produce such an impression as the loss of one ship or one flag!” an indignant refutation also relied on export figures, pointing out that haiti exported , tons of coffee in , and , tons in . the mantra of ‘commerce, christianity and civilization’ assumed that the three were interconnected and would advance together, that the end of slavery would allow formerly enslaved people to participate in both the material and spiritual marketplace and in the process christy, lectures on african colonization, and kindred subjects, . davy, the west indies, before and since slave emancipation, – . blood, money and endless paper become more ‘civilized.’ the missionary impresario dandeson coates remarked, “christianity, when received by an uncivilized people, not only leads to the adoption of salutary laws for preserving the peace of the community and cultivating the virtues of social life, but it secures protection to the merchant and the mariner, and the greatest facilities for the extension of commerce.” the irony of the great experiment was that the expectations of capitalism in the british empire meant that as commerce was indexed to civilization, the west indies became the sort of place that couldn’t be civilized. by reckoning civilization in commercial terms, perversely, the west indies had been more ‘civilized’ in the days of slavery. material culture became a proxy for civilization. setting aside the preoccupation with emancipation as the end of the history of slavery in the british empire offers a new way of understanding the empire in the long nineteenth century. historians interested in the history of british humanitarianism after , and especially in histories of movements for ‘legitimate commerce’ in west africa and the protection of aboriginal people in the settler colonies recognize that those movements, which spanned the entire british world, drew their strength from the successes of abolitionism. organizations like the aborigines protection society not only included many abolitionists, but relied on the mixture of economic data and ethnographic description pioneered by abolitionists. the history of britain requires a new account of slavery, one that no longer pivots so heavily on legislative emancipation, and that recognizes that ‘emancipation’ did not mean – and was never intended to coates, christianity the means of civilization, . francis, “the ‘civilizing’ of indigenous people in nineteenth-century canada,” ; stocking, victorian anthropology, . see temperley, white dreams, black africa; heartfield, the aborigines’ protection society; everill and kaplan, “introduction: enduring humanitarianisms in africa”; lester, “humanitarians and white settlers in the nineteenth century”; lester and dussart, colonization and the origins of humanitarian governance. stocking, victorian anthropology, – . see also stepan, the idea of race in science. https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=rsrjaqaamaaj&dq=dandeson% coates&pg=pa #v=onepage&q&f=false https://books.google.co.uk/books?id= c naaaaqaaj&dq=aborigines% protection% society&pg=pr #v=onepage&q&f=false blood, money and endless paper mean – genuine autonomy for enslaved people. the fact that abolitionism was as much driven by the logic of capitalism as the plantations of the west indies hides in plain sight, but colours the whole bleak history of the british colonial empire. as the traveller and author mary kingsley complained in the s of west africa, “the labour problem has been imported with european civilisation. the civilisation has not got on to any considerable extent, but the labour problem has.” the ‘labour problem,’ of getting imperial subjects to dance to the tune of the market, was much a problem of slavery as a problem of ‘freedom.’ kingsley, travels in west africa, . http://www.oxforddnb.com/index/ / / blood, money and endless paper bibliography anstey, roger. the atlantic slave trade and british abolition, - . atlantic highlands, nj: humanities press, . baptist, edward e. the half has never been told: slavery and the making of american capitalism. new york: basic books, . beckert, sven. “emancipation and empire: reconstructing the worldwide web of cotton production in the age of the american civil war.” the american historical review , no. 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( ): – . porter, theodore m. trust in numbers: the pursuit of objectivity in science and public life. princeton, nj: princeton university press, . pringle, hall. the fall of the sugar planters of jamaica, with remarks on their agricultural management and on the labour question in that island. london, . raman, bhavani. document raj: writing and scribes in early colonial south india. chicago: university of chicago press, . rockman, seth. scraping by: wage labor, slavery, and survival in early baltimore. baltimore: johns hopkins university press, . rosenthal, caitlin c. “from memory to mastery: accounting for control in america, – .” enterprise and society , no. (december , ): – . rowan, james, and henry wellington. “( ) sierra leone. report of the commissioners of inquiry into the state of the colony of sierra leone. first part.” house of commons papers; reports of commissioners, . scanlan, padraic xavier. “the rewards of their exertions: prize money and british abolitionism in sierra leone, – .” past & present , no. (november , ): – . schwarz, suzanne. “commerce, civilization and christianity: the development of the sierra leone company.” in liverpool and transatlantic slavery, edited by david richardson, suzanne schwarz, and anthony tibbles, – . liverpool: liverpool university press, . scott, rebecca j. degrees of freedom: louisiana and cuba after slavery. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, . ———. “paper thin: freedom and re-enslavement in the diaspora of the haitian revolution.” law and history review , no. ( ): – . ———. slave emancipation and the transition to free labor in cuba, - . princeton, nj: princeton university press, . seeley, john robert. the expansion of england. london, . stepan, nancy. the idea of race in science: great britain, - . hamden, ct: archon, . stocking, george. victorian anthropology. new york: free press, . blood, money and endless paper stoler, ann laura. along the archival grain: epistemic anxieties and colonial common sense. princeton, nj: princeton university press, . temperley, howard. white dreams, black africa: the antislavery expedition to the river niger - . new haven, ct: yale university press, . tsing, anna lowenhaupt. friction: an ethnography of global connection. princeton, nj: princeton university press, . van evrie, j.h. free negroism: or, results of emancipation in the north and the west india islands, etc. new york, . vismann, cornelia. files: law and media technology. translated by geoffrey winthrop- young. stanford, ca: stanford university press, . weber, max. max weber on capitalism, bureaucracy, and religion: a selection of texts. edited and translated by stanislav andreski. london: allen & unwin, . weld, kirsten. paper cadavers: the archives of dictatorship in guatemala. durham, nc: duke university press, . wennerlind, carl. casualties of credit: the english financial revolution, - . cambridge, ma: harvard university press, . zakim, michael, and gary john kornblith, eds. capitalism takes command : the social transformation of nineteenth-century america. chicago: university of chicago press, . zilversmit, arthur. the first emancipation: the abolition of slavery in the north. chicago: university of chicago press, . 	scanlan_blood_money_and_endless_cover 	scanlan_blood_money_and_endless_author journal of pediatric rehabilitation medicine: an interdisciplinary approach ( ) – doi . /prm- ios press editorial editor-in-chief’s editorial to the special issue: covid- ’s impact on the practice of pediatric rehabilitation medicine as the world seemingly came crumbling down around us, in the san francisco bay area we went from unfettered travel to shelter in place (sip) on march , . we eagerly watched and read the news as it un- folded about this novel coronavirus that transformed our lives so quickly. following the initiation of sip, our in-person clinics moved to virtual video visits in a mat- ter of days. the silver lining of these telehealth visits was the ability to evaluate our complex medical patients in their home environment and to actually assess all of their equipment, not limited by what they could bring to the clinic. we thanked each and every family for allow- ing us to visit them in their home. our patient’s families were grateful to have a familiar medical team provide contact and coach them when many of their pt and ot services were cut during the pandemic. approximately half the families shared with us during these visits that virtual learning was working out well and they were not anxious for their child to return to school until they were more certain that it was safe to do so. throughout the past six months, every aspect of my life has been touched by covid- and the black lives matter movement. to sustain our households, we orga- nized to find flour and baker’s yeast to make homemade bread, tried to make our own sourdough starter, and fixed home appliances using youtube videos as our reference. our communities put up black lives matter signs and attended protests as part of the public outcry over the brutal killings of george floyd, breanna tay- lor, and ahmaud arbery. as one of many musicians in our neighborhood, we honored the legacy of marvin gaye as we belted out “what’s going on” at pm from our porches nightly. on the evening we sang amazing grace, dr. colleen wunderlich called from across the country to sing with us. we maintained hope as days turned into weeks and weeks turned into months. like many of our colleagues, we have appreciated conferences that were in-person in the past now em- bracing a virtual platform. in may i attended virtually the counsel for scientific editors (cse) meeting. this meeting was particularly informative emphasizing that the newer trend in medical journals is to have informa- tion in an understandable format for nonmedical readers as well. not leaving the confines of my home, i gave what was supposed to be an in person grand rounds on physician wellness and suicide, to a complementary virtual audience at mary free bed, in grand rapids, michigan. at the start of the pandemic, we were emotionally overwhelmed by the covid- numbers in new york city. we saw the disparity of care when the supply of hospital beds and ventilators did not meet the demand. then, weeks later, once sip was relaxed, our covid- numbers in california went up and surpassed those in new york. however, new york has almost twice the number of deaths than california with almost half the numbers of positive cases [ ]. urgent medical meetings took place across the country and some medical staff were re-purposed without adequate training. in addi- tion, we heard from colleagues that without much warn- ing pediatric rehabilitation units were housing adults ei- ther with covid- or other conditions. in july, , amnesty international reported medical workers worldwide being mistreated including some who were incarcerated and shamed for complaints of being re- quired to work without enough or proper personal pro- tective equipment (ppe) [ ]. as of september, after contracting covid- at least , health care workers have died from covid- globally [ ]. - / /$ . c© – ios press and the authors. all rights reserved e.l. pico / editorial to the special issue covid- ’s impact on the practice of pediatric rehabilitation medicine the recommendations on preventing the spread of the virus continued to evolve. at first we were told the virus was transmitted by touching various surfaces and how long the virus lasts on paper, versus plastic ver- sus cardboard and that masks weren’t really necessary. next, scientific evidence revealed masks were an im- portant item to wear to stop the spread of the virus [ ]. soon after the pandemic began, the multisystem in- flammatory syndrome in children (mis-c) surfaced and became a potential threat to our pediatric rehabil- itation patient population [ ]. we overnighted oxygen pulse oximeters to many and waited and prayed daily for our colleagues, loved ones, friends and patients that tested positive. in march , shortly after the sip was mandated in our county, it became apparent that jprm needed a covid- special themed issue. dr. christian vercler, a friend and colleague of the late dr. jacob neufeld and dr. matthew mclaughlin our pediatric rehabilita- tion colleague stepped up to the plate for this jprm covid- special issue that rapidly took on a life of its own. this special issue covers many aspects of covid- including the disparate influence on black, latinx and native american marginalized populations; a book review of a “thriller” somewhat predictive of the virus; and the telemedicine experience. it also includes an attorney-written article, as well as the impact of the pandemic on spasticity management, cerebral palsy, neuromuscular disorders, tracheostomies, and on those in medical training. through this jprm issue we are disseminating a wealth of information on covid- and the effect that it has on our pediatric rehabilitation care takers, providers and those with special needs. it is my belief that this type of worldwide outreach and ex- change of information is an essential part of the global solution to help mitigate the spread of this deadly virus. for example, we had a norwegian teacher as a peer reviewer, as norway’s strategy helped to successfully transition children back to in-person schools. addition- ally, we reached out to other industries for advice. we had a submission from the construction industry regard- ing a new school building and the safe return of children with special needs. because of the pandemic we of- fered authors whose manuscripts were accepted in what would have been the . open issue the opportunity to include covid- ’s impact on the subject matter of their article. each and every editorial, commentary and research paper was peer reviewed. in the midst of a global pandemic, the editorial of- fice has simultaneously been immersed in multiple spe- cial issues throughout . we started the year with an open issue, followed by the cerebral palsy special issue with drs. deborah gaebler-spira and michael green as our seasoned guest editors. following this covid- special issue we will culminate with our yearly spina bifida special issue featuring open ac- cess guidelines with guest editors drs. timothy brei, heidi castillo and jonathan castillo. a special thank you to our jprm managing editor, sara tinsley. on october , , in an interview on the pbs newshour, the director of the nih, dr. francis collins, talked about the likelihood and timing of the covid- vaccine. he remarked that if trials are successful, the vaccine will likely be widely available about a year from now. if it isn’t successful or if not enough of the population accepts the vaccine, we will be contending with the virus for a long time to come. immediately, i thought of the late dr. jacob neufeld (the founder of jprm) and his writings regarding dr. ignaz semmel- weis, a hungarian physician and scientist who was actu- ally ridiculed for proposing that those delivering babies wash their hands before doing so. dr. semmelweis, who died in an insane asylum, is known for the semmelweis effect and posthumously a medical school was named after him. many other physicians and scientists have proposed ground breaking treatment options, and have been ostracized and harshly criticized. this list includes dr. rene laennec who invented the stethoscope in and dr. emil j. freireich, a trailblazing oncologist who cured childhood leukemia, and received many threats to his medical career in the process [ ]. dr. anthony fauci, the director of allergy and infectious disease of the nih has received blatant threats and bullying for his altruistic efforts to reduce the number of covid- infections and resultant deaths that have touched all of our lives. john lewis our dear civil rights leader and senator had a famous slogan: “when you see something that is not right, not fair, not just, you have to speak up. you have to say something; you have to do something.” each time i see someone without a face mask in public, i fear for our medical and nonmedical community. wearing a mask helps all of us. using protective masks and placing our nose and mouth within these should not be any more controversial than following hiv precautions. as of , about , people have died from hiv/aids in the u.s. since the be- ginning of the hiv epidemic approximately years ago. in there were , deaths among those with hiv in the united states and dependent areas (american samoa, guam, the northern mariana is- lands, puerto rico, the republic of palau and the us e.l. pico / editorial to the special issue covid- ’s impact on the practice of pediatric rehabilitation medicine virgin islands). from to the annual num- ber of new hiv diagnoses decreased by % [ ]. in the months since the pandemic started, we have lost over , lives in the united states and . mil- lion globally [ ]. hiv precautions and protection are widely practiced; the numbers of those infected by hiv would not be as contained as they are today without this. there is no current effective vaccine for hiv and we do not know when the covid- vaccine will be widely available, and if it will be effective once it is. similar to hiv, there is no guarantee that once an in- dividual has covid- that there will be immunity or that a subsequent infection will have a better or worse clinical course. the nih reports that covid- “rep- resents the greatest medical challenge in decades” with cardiac sequelae as a potential serious side effect [ ]. in addition, our pediatric rehabilitation patients are at greater risk of mis-c [ ]. these are all good reasons to take covid- as seriously as we do hiv. during this global pandemic we lost supreme court justice ruth bader ginsberg who was a powerful ex- ample of someone who wasn’t afraid to voice her be- liefs. let’s stand up like the great john lewis, ruth bader ginsberg, drs. semmelweis, laennec, freireich, collins and fauci. let’s raise each other up like dr. neufeld did. our lives, livelihood and those we love and hold dearly are at stake in this unprecedented time. while embracing differences, our future depends on us working together to solve this world wide crisis. jprm engages a diverse group of experts and reaches out to al- most every country in the entire world ( countries). this journal is a wonderful vehicle for disseminating information in our commitment to improve the care we provide for those with complex medical care needs. references [ ] johns hopkins university & medicine. coronavirus resource center. available from: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/. [ ] global: health workers silenced, exposed and attacked. amnesty international. available from: https://www.amnesty. org/en/latest/news/ / /health-workers-rights-covid- report/. [ ] global: amnesty analysis reveals over , health workers have died from covid- . amnesty international. available from: https://www.amnesty.org/en/latest/news/ / /amnesty -analysis- -health-workers-have-died-from-covid /. [ ] anderson el, turnham p, griffin jr, clarke cc. consideration of the aerosol transmission for covid- and public health. risk anal. ; ( ): - . doi: . /risa. [ ] gladwell, m. david and golliath. underdogs, misfits, and the art of battling giants. new york: little brown and compan, . [ ] viner rm, whittaker e. kawasaki-like disease: emerging com- plication during the covid- pandemic. lancet. jun ; ( ): - . doi: . /s - ( ) - [ ] centers for disease control and prevention. basic statistics. available from: https://www.cdc.gov/hiv/basics/statistics.html. [ ] guzik tj, mohiddin sa, dimarco a, patel v, savvatis k, marelli-berg fm, et al. covid- and the cardiovascular sys- tem: implications for risk assessment, diagnosis, and treatment options. cardiovasc res. aug ; ( ): - . doi: . /cvr/cvaa sincerely yours, elaine l. pico, md, faap, faapm & r editor-in-chief e-mail: elaine.pico@ucsf.edu covid- : phe review has failed ethnic minorities, leaders tell bmj news analysis covid- : phe review has failed ethnic minorities, leaders tell bmj a government review promised to discover why covid- has a disproportionate effect on people from ethnic minorities, but advocacy groups say their input was ignored, gareth iacobucci hears gareth iacobucci the bmj medical and race equality organisations have told the bmj they are angry and frustrated that a review that set out to examine the disproportionate effect of covid- on people from ethnic minority groups produced no plan for protecting them from the disease. the review by public health england, published on june, promised to examine why people from ethnic minorities were more likely to contract and die from covid- and to make recommendations for “further action that should be taken to reduce disparities in risk and outcomes from covid- on the population.” but though it confirmed previous data showing that ethnic minorities were disproportionately affected (box ), it mentioned nothing about what could be done to reduce the disparities. box : key findings from phe’s review • black ethnic groups were most likely to have covid- diagnosed, with diagnoses per population among females and in males. the lowest diagnosis rates were in white ethnic groups ( per in females and in males). • death rates were highest among people in black and asian ethnic groups. when compared with previous years, all cause mortality was almost four times higher than expected among black males for this period, almost three times higher in asian males, and almost two times higher in white males. deaths were almost three times higher than expected in this period among black, mixed, and other females, . times higher in asian females, and . times higher in white females. • the risk of death among people of bangladeshi ethnicity was twice that among people of white british ethnicity, while people of chinese, indian, pakistani, other asian, caribbean, and other black ethnicity had a - % higher risk of death than white british people. accusations that the report was a whitewash grew after the health service journal reported that an earlier draft of the review that was shared within government had a section summarising responses from more than organisations and individuals who supplied evidence to the review, many of which suggested that discrimination was contributing to the increased risk from covid- . in a statement phe insisted that nothing had been removed from the report, and the government has appointed the equalities minister, kemi badenoch, to take forward the agenda and produce future recommendations. but whether or not the report was diluted, several organisations that contributed to the report told the bmj that they felt badly let down by its content, which they said did not reflect their recommendations (box ). box : ten recommendations that groups wanted to see in the review • it should be mandatory for nhs trusts to treat ethnic minority staff as “high risk and vulnerable” in regard to covid- (british international doctors’ association) • employers should urgently carry out stratified risk assessments so that healthcare workers are not unnecessarily put at risk (british association of physicians of indian origin, bida) • ethnic minority staff should be redeployed away from covid- areas in hospitals wherever possible (bida), and staff who have retired and returned should not be asked to work in high risk clinical areas (bapio) • an inquiry should be held into the deaths of healthcare workers (most of whom were from ethnic minorities) to help rebuild confidence in the system (bida) • data for covid- cases and deaths should be disaggregated to incorporate factors such as ethnicity, faith, profession, and wider socioeconomic risk factors (bapio, muslim doctors association, muslim council of britain) • research should be carried out into ethnic disparities and outcomes related to covid- that reflect the lived experience of people from ethnic minorities (bapio) • the government should seek to understand why inequalities exist and how racism and structural discrimination affect different facets of people’s lives and how these effects have contributed to the disproportionate death rate in bame communities (muslim council of britain) • health agencies should make a strong statement acknowledging the problems of racism and discrimination in the nhs and should have a clear action plan for how to tackle them and a commitment to implement change (muslim council of britain) • nhs england should look at changing the way in which ethnic minority staff are represented and included in decision making (muslim council of britain) • public health england should expand the workforce race equality standard to also assess the impact of racial inequalities on health outcomes (muslim council of britain) zubaida haque, interim director of race equality at the think tank the runnymede trust, a race equality expert group consulted for the report, told the bmj that race equality groups were “dismayed and angry” with the final report. she said, for personal use only: see rights and reprints http://www.bmj.com/permissions subscribe: http://www.bmj.com/subscribe bmj ; :m doi: . /bmj.m (published june ) page of news news o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b m j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j.m o n ju n e . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.bmj.com/permissions http://www.bmj.com/subscribe http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /bmj.m &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://www.bmj.com/ “people are upset, angry, astonished, and appalled. it’s completely lacking in any plan of action on how to save lives. “i was absolutely flabbergasted that there was not a single recommendation. at no point did they say ‘this review is part one.’ the impression was always that this would not only identify the factors that are likely to be contributing to higher risk of serious illness deaths in relation to covid- but find the answers.” she added, “these communities have been living in fear. there’s a lot of people who are feeling very hurt, very confused, and very frightened, because there’s nothing worse than telling people, ‘yes, it’s true that you are more likely to die,’ . . . and that that’s it.” haque, who is also a member of the independent sage group set up as an alternative to the government’s scientific advisory group for emergencies, said she was unhappy that only of the review’s pages focused on ethnicity, with the remainder looking at obesity, age, sex, and other factors. she said, “it was supposed to be a review about racial inequalities and covid- . at no point at the time did they say that only one eighth of the report would be on ethnicity.” the fact that phe’s analysis excluded variables that were likely to be contributory factors to the disproportionate effect on ethnic minorities, such as comorbidity and occupation, rendered the report “wholly inadequate,” haque added. “damp squib” ramesh mehta, chair of the british association of physicians of indian origin, agreed this was a major flaw in the “damp squib” of a report. “we were hoping this report would give us an idea of why the problem is there, but what it has told us is what we already knew. it didn’t discuss comorbidities. they’ve come up with a very bland review that is not much use. it is a washout.” the association wrote to phe, the chief medical officer, and nhs england outlining its concerns about the high number of ethnic minority people dying from covid- and was subsequently invited to discuss the issues with senior health leaders. but mehta said, “so far we haven’t seen much impact of our presence or comments apart from the letter from simon stevens [asking nhs trusts to risk assess ethnic minority staff ]. we expected our views to be represented.” on friday june the bma coordinated a meeting with representatives from organisations representing ethnic minorities, medical staff from overseas, and religious groups to discuss the disproportionate impact of covid- . chaand nagpaul, the bma’s chair of council, said, “the phe review failed to provide any answers as to why covid- is having such a catastrophic impact on bame [black, asian, and minority ethnic] healthcare workers—and crucially offered no recommendations on how to protect them right now. “the bma, along with all of the organisations in attendance, is calling on the government to take urgent action to protect our bame colleagues on the front line.” the british international doctors’ association was one of the groups at the meeting. chandra kanneganti, its national chairman, told the bmj that the association submitted five key recommendations to phe, which were not reflected in the report. “the report is lacking actions to protect the healthcare workforce. it’s a well known fact this is already happening. lives are at risk: we need action now,” he said. other groups that made recommendations to phe’s review included the muslim doctors association, the nhs religion equality advisory group, and the muslim council of britain. hina shahid, a gp in london and chair of the muslim doctors association said, “the failure to analyse systemic and structural factors, the exclusion of data on protected characteristics such as religion and disability as well as important insights from extensive stakeholder engagements that repeatedly highlighted the role of discrimination and disadvantage, and the lack of any practical recommendations are all deeply concerning and disappointing. our colleagues, relatives, and friends have died. it makes us feel as though our lives and contributions to society don’t matter.” harun khan, secretary general of the muslim council of britain, said, “to choose to not discuss the overwhelming role structural racism and inequality have on mortality rates and to disregard the evidence compiled by community organisations, while simultaneously providing no recommendations or an action plan, despite this being the central purpose of the review, is entirely unacceptable. it beggars belief that a review asking why bame communities are more at risk fails to give even a single answer.” haque drew parallels between the lack of action to protect ethnic minority groups from covid- and the black lives matter movement. “people separate it and think it’s different, but it’s not different at all. the reason people have been distraught at the tragic death of george floyd is because black and ethnic minority lives are treated as though they are second rate, as though they matter less. “all the data was coming out showing that bame people were much more vulnerable to covid- . to produce a report that has no recommendations about how you’re going to save the lives of those who are disproportionately dying is not only insensitive but essentially saying, ‘we think your life matters less.’ what else can you think? this is a matter of life and death. and they have shown a complete disregard for people’s lives.” phe’s john newton, who co-led the review, said, “there is a great deal of background and detailed information [in the report] we think will be helpful. what we would like to do is get a lot of discussion about all these with the various groups involved in responding to it. it is not easy to go directly from the analysis to making recommendations, and we need to get the report widely disseminated and discussed before deciding what needs to be done, but clearly there are some fairly obvious conclusions that can be drawn, even from the data we have.” badenoch insisted that the government was “taking seriously” the report’s initial findings. but she added, “however, it is also clear that much more needs to be done to understand the key drivers of the disparities identified and the relationships between the different risk factors. “that is why i am now taking this work forward, which will enable us to make a real difference to people’s lives and protect our communities from the impact of the coronavirus.” public health england. disparities in the risk and outcomes of covid- . jun . https: //assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/government/uploads/system/uploads/attachment_data/ file/ /disparities_review.pdf. rimmer a. covid- : disproportionate impact on ethnic minority healthcare workers will be explored by government. bmj ; :m . . /bmj.m iacobucci g. covid- : review of ethnic disparities is labelled “whitewash” for lack of recommendations. bmj ; :m . . /bmj.m moore a. exclusive: government censored bame covid-risk review. hsj. jun . https://www.hsj.co.uk/coronavirus/exclusive-government-censored-bame-covid-risk-review/ .article. government equalities office. race disparity unit, badenoch k. next steps for work on covid- disparities announced. jun . https://www.gov.uk/government/news/next- steps-for-work-on-covid- -disparities-announced. for personal use only: see rights and reprints http://www.bmj.com/permissions subscribe: http://www.bmj.com/subscribe bmj ; :m doi: . /bmj.m (published june ) page of news o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b m j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j.m o n ju n e . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://.article http://www.bmj.com/permissions http://www.bmj.com/subscribe http://www.bmj.com/ iacobucci g. covid- : nhs bosses told to assess risk to ethnic minority staff who may be at greater risk. bmj ; :m . . /bmj.m this article is made freely available for use in accordance with bmj's website terms and conditions for the duration of the covid- pandemic or until otherwise determined by bmj. you may use, download and print the article for any lawful, non-commercial purpose (including text and data mining) provided that all copyright notices and trade marks are retained. https://bmj.com/coronavirus/usage for personal use only: see rights and reprints http://www.bmj.com/permissions subscribe: http://www.bmj.com/subscribe bmj ; :m doi: . /bmj.m (published june ) page of news o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b m j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j.m o n ju n e . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.bmj.com/permissions http://www.bmj.com/subscribe http://www.bmj.com/ n pan american journal of public health rev panam salud publica , | www.paho.org/journal | https://doi.org/ . /rpsp. . editorial just societies: a new vision for health equity in the americas after covid- anna coates , arachu castro , michael marmot , oscar j mújica , gerry eijkemans , cesar g victora suggested citation coates a, castro a, marmot m, mújica oj, eijkemans g, victora cg. just societies: a new vision for health equity in the americas after covid- . rev panam salud publica. ; :e . https://doi.org/ . /rpsp. . this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivs . igo license, which permits use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. no modifications or commercial use of this article are permitted. in any reproduction of this article there should not be any suggestion that paho or this article endorse any specific organization or products. the use of the paho logo is not permitted. this notice should be preserved along with the article’s original url. pan american health organization, washington dc, united states of america tulane university school of public health and tropical medicine, new orleans, united states of america the significant challenges to equity in health in the region of the americas, as detailed in the report of the pan american health organization independent commission on equity and health inequalities in the americas ( ), gave original impetus to this special issue on equity in health by the pan american journal of public health. the report, just societies: health equity and dignified lives, analyzed a vast body of evidence that indi- cated the overwhelming inequalities in the region that relate to three factors: structural drivers, conditions of daily life, and governance for health equity (taking action). highlighting the continued realities of the interrelationship between social and health inequities in the americas is by no means new ( ). however, since early this interrelationship has been further exposed and exacerbated by the unprece- dented covid- pandemic, which is testing governments, communities, economies, and individuals in ways previously unimagined in their scope and intensity ( ). the crisis is expos- ing underlying inequalities in health and the cost of inaction to address this long-standing social injustice, and the covid- response is even reversing improvements in social and health indicators made in the last two decades ( , ). the pandemic is throwing into sharp relief existing inequal- ities in both its direct and indirect effects. emerging data from different corners of the world reveals the social gradient for covid- mortality to follow a similar trajectory to that of the social gradient in all-cause mortality. key data demonstrate inequities in covid- cases, underlying conditions, and mortality, from countries as different as the united states and brazil. household survey data analysis from brazil included in this special issue shows that socioeconomic and ethnic group inequalities are associated with risk of infection, with the high- est prevalence of cases among indigenous and afro-brazilians compared to others ( ). this is similar to the case of the united states, where deprivation and afrodescendance correlates strongly with mortality ( ). on the other hand, the equitable response to the pandemic in cuba, included in this issue, reflects the advantage of concerted national responses built on strong primary health care systems ( ). this demonstrates that, without concerted political will and dedicated efforts, a country’s overall wealth and state of economic growth do not by themselves provide the answer to addressing inequities in health. the case study from costa rica, in this issue, reinforces the point that, above a threshold, economic fortunes are not the key to health success ( ). the direct effects of covid- , however, are not the end of the story. the indirect effects are also exacerbating exist- ing health inequalities, as access to essential health services is threatened in the context of overwhelmed health systems ( ). decreased rates of immunization have already been noted, despite previous significant efforts to address inequities ( ). non-communicable diseases management is also facing chal- lenges. the latter is of especial significance to groups occupying lower socio-economic status who face profound inequities in access to money and resources that directly affect the condi- tions of their daily lives, and those facing discrimination, such as indigenous and populations of african descent, who already faced risks with regards to ncds ( ). concern over access to reproductive health services has also been expressed ( , , ), and services for survivors of violence against women are threat- ened ( , , ). the indirect effects of covid- beyond health are equally as disturbing for the possibilities of maintaining and acceler- ating gains in population health with an equity lens into the future ( ). the necessary containment measures have par- ticularly impacted upon the livelihoods of populations in situations of vulnerability. those in higher socioeconomic pos- itions are sheltered from the most severe repercussions of stay at home measures, being able to work from home and living in less crowded conditions. however, most of those engaged in employment with unstable, informal conditions without social institute of health equity at the university college london, london, united kingdom universidade federal de pelotas, pelotas, brazil http://www.paho.org/journal www.paho.org/journal https://doi.org/ . /rpsp. . https://doi.org/ . /rpsp. . https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . /igo/legalcode editorial coates et al. • health equity in the americas after covid- rev panam salud publica , | www.paho.org/journal | https://doi.org/ . /rpsp. . as gender-based discrimination. we now need to go further in developing an operational focus that goes beyond the targeted ‘vulnerability’ lens to specific population groups to one that truly addresses underlying structural drivers, in addition to other social and economic factors affecting access to resources for health, including explicit action against gender and ethnic discrimination and to end racism ( ). the variety of analysis that are expressed in this special issue’s diverse articles reflect this need for multiple consolidat- ing approaches to health equity. their focus ranges from the need for an equity focus in national health plans ( ), in pub- lic health infrastructure ( ), and in access to technology ( ); the urgency of action on the social determinants of health as well as on structural drivers, including gender inequality and structural racism ( , ); and intercultural approaches and traditional medicine ( ). they also demonstrate the import- ance of accountability mechanisms, such as the roles of civil society ( ) and collaborative research ( , ). using the rich wealth of such analysis, we currently have an unprecedented opportunity to rebuild better and to create a more inclusive and equitable reality out of the devastation of covid- , one that grapples with these complexities with renewed commitment and purpose. several elements will be crucial in our roadmap towards this ‘new normal’. we must, for example, address structural drivers through human rights approaches and, in particular, through inclu- sive governance, since where ‘institutions are not accountable, transparent, participatory, or coherent, we will be far less likely to see the policy change necessary to deliver health equity’ ( ). this requires going beyond community and civil society ‘partic- ipation’ towards an inclusive governance model that readjusts inequities in power and voice to address structural drivers, such as, amongst others, systemic racism and institutional discrimin- ation. diverse traditionally excluded groups must be made equal partners in governance, leadership, and decision making in a renovated approach to democracy ( ). the commission’s third general recommendation and its sub-recommendation related to including people of african descent and indigenous communities in law-making, service design and provision, and other decisions that affect their lives lays the groundwork for this radical new vision. indeed, it is more pertinent than ever given the realities of racial discrimination and ethnic dispari- ties laid bare by covid- ( ) and the black lives matter movement. however, this approach is not unique to the per- spective of ethnic and racial exclusion and discrimination and can be extended to inclusion and addressing discrimination from other perspectives. these include, amongst others, gen- der (with reference to women and girls’ empowerment, as well as the discrimination faced by lgbt groups), those living in situations of socio-economic vulnerability, migrant populations ( ), and/or those affected by other forms of discrimination, for example, those living with disabilities. inclusive governance also encompasses accountability for action and results. within the framework of the commission recommendation on making health equity a key indicator of societal development and establishing mechanisms of account- ability, generating and reporting of disaggregated data is fundamental. in line with the first essential public health function—surveillance of population health and well-being ( )—and the first impact indicator of paho’s current strate- gic plan ( ), ‘reduction of within-country health inequalities’, protection (many of whom are low-paid essential workers) do not have this luxury. for them, adhering to public health meas- ures is exceptionally challenging and overcrowded conditions increase risk of infection (as well as, for a significant number of women and girls, of the ‘shadow pandemic’ of violence against women) ( ) as does their need to leave their homes to gener- ate income, tackle food insecurity, and meet their family’s basic needs. loss of employment and income affects their wellbeing and the social determinants of their health for years to come, as pre-existing inequities are deepened and their social conditions worsened ( ). diverse groups are experiencing covid- itself, as well as the repercussions of its containment measures, in ways specific to their realities and cultures in ways that are only beginning to be captured. these difficulties not only ham- per effective national and local responses but also demonstrate the severity of risks to lives, even while communities and indi- viduals, in the absence of other protective mechanisms, such as adequate social protection and universal health, are fostering their own forms of resilience ( ). as with our understanding of the covid- virus itself, the data and analysis to show the full extent of inequalities in covid- and its impacts are still developing. as we grap- ple with understanding its full equity dimensions, a light has also been shone on another inequity in health – the gaps in our knowledge and thus our ability to hold governments to account for health equity because of a lack of sufficient disaggregated data. this issue includes a proposal for an approach that would retrieve more information that could inform health equity ori- ented policies ( ). this special issue reflects that the pandemic has, there- fore, added yet greater urgency to the need for heightened multi-sectorial action on equity in health ( ), including fully implementing the commission recommendations. this action is two-fold. on the one hand, it involves a broad spectrum of commitments from within the health sector, including primary health care and social protection in health to ensure both uni- versal coverage and access within a proportionate universalism framework ( ). on the other, it involves commitments to work beyond the health sector to address the social determinants of health, including action to improve the conditions in which people are born, grow, live, work and age, enacting comprehen- sive social protection and welfare system based upon solidarity, and realizing the redistributive potential of social spending to address the social determinants of health—as has also been addressed by the united nations secretary general ( ). new, deeper, approaches to health equity are also required. we find ourselves in one of perhaps the most significant and potentially sea change moments of our time for highlight- ing and acting upon health inequities in a sustainable and transformative way. attention to inequities in health not only resonates with the realities of current covid- inequities but also with political phenomena, such as the black lives mat- ters movement. as well as continuing to analyze and act upon the severe inequities in access to money and resources and in the living conditions that affect health, these have demon- strated that the complexity of addressing health inequities also requires different analyses and a renovated focus on struc- tural drivers. the commission findings and recommendations had already opened the door to these considerations with the explicit recognition of the need to reverse the health equity impacts of ongoing colonialism and structural racism, as well www.paho.org/journal https://doi.org/ . /rpsp. . n coates et al. • health equity in the americas after covid- editorial rev panam salud publica , | www.paho.org/journal | https://doi.org/ . /rpsp. . partners on the social determinants of health, based upon the understanding of their significance to reducing health ineq- uities. as evidenced in the health equity network for the americas (hena) ( ) and the movement for sustainable health equity discussed in this issue, collaboration between communities and actors at all levels will heighten potential for impact upon health inequities into the future. and, finally, but no less importantly in today’s increasingly polarized world, global and local cooperation between and within countries to advance a more equitable model for health and development is a moral imperative. this pandemic has, without doubt, worsened fractures and created new ones in our fragile social structure, but it has also given us a space and hopefully the will to repair them. if covid- allows for the creation of a renovated development model based upon ‘a new social compact’ with shared commitments and cooperation between countries and communities, there is a greater chance than ever before to redress past injustices and achieve equity in health in the americas. institutions need to invest in the capacity to not only spo- radically report health inequalities but to institutionalize monitoring within the health situation analysis. in this way, addressing inequities can be normalized as a parameter of suc- cess. furthermore, data needs to be used to inform policy action to increase its potential for impact. we need more research on the specifics of what works, as well as to make better use of the evidence we already have. transparency also forms the basis of inclusive and effective governance. evidence should be made publicly available, including on how evidence on inequities is being used in policy making and monitoring and, perhaps even more importantly, where the gaps are. a new equitable vision for the post-covid- world also requires reinforcing other ways of working ‘differently’. it necessitates cooperation, collaboration, and inclusive govern- ance at different levels. as well as working to address equity within its own direct significant sphere of societal influence, namely health policy, programs and services, the health sector needs to commit to intersectoral action with other government references . paho. just societies: health equity and dignified lives - report of the commission of the pan american health organization on equity and health inequalities in the americas. available at: https://iris.paho.org/handle/ . / . washington dc: pan american health organization; . . etienne c. achieving social equity. in: frenk j, hoffman sj, edi- tors. “to save humanity”: what matters most for a healthy future. oxford: oxford university press; . . eclac, paho. health and the economy: a 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https://apps.who.int/iris/han- dle/ / . geneva: world health organization; . . paho. strategic plan of the pan american health orga- nization - : equity at the heart of health. official document . available at: https://www.paho.org/en/ d o c u m e n t s / s t r a t e g i c - p l a n - p a n - a m e r i c a n - h e a l t h - o rg a n i z a - tion- - -equity-heart-health. washington dc: pan american health organization; . manuscript received on october ; not peer-reviewed. accepted for publica- tion on october . appreciation the journal appreciates the support of the editorial board, authors of this editorial, during the planning of the special issue and the selection of articles. their contributions helped make the manuscripts more interesting, more accurate, and more useful to our readers and all others who work to improve the health of the peoples of the americas. the journal acknowledges the contribution of the robert wood johnson foundation for its financial support to the pro- duction of this special issue. www.paho.org/journal https://doi.org/ . /rpsp. . https://doi.org/ . /rpsp. . https://doi.org/ . /rpsp. . https://doi.org/ . /rpsp. . https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/ / https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/ / https://www.paho.org/en/documents/strategic-plan-pan-american-health-organization- - -equity-heart-health https://www.paho.org/en/documents/strategic-plan-pan-american-health-organization- - -equity-heart-health https://www.paho.org/en/documents/strategic-plan-pan-american-health-organization- - -equity-heart-health on teaching kim’s convenience: asian american studies, asian canadian studies, and the politics of race in asian canadian theatre and performance studies all rights reserved ©, theatre research in canada / recherches théâtrales au canada ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d’auteur. l’utilisation des services d’Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d’utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. 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Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l’université de montréal, l’université laval et l’université du québec à montréal. il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. https://www.erudit.org/fr/ document généré le avr. : theatre research in canada recherches théâtrales au canada on teaching kim’s convenience: asian american studies, asian canadian studies, and the politics of race in asian canadian theatre and performance studies colleen kim daniher volume , numéro , uri : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar doi : https://doi.org/ . / ar aller au sommaire du numéro Éditeur(s) graduate centre for the study of drama, university of toronto issn - (imprimé) - (numérique) découvrir la revue citer cet article daniher, c. ( ). on teaching kim’s convenience: asian american studies, asian canadian studies, and the politics of race in asian canadian theatre and performance studies. theatre research in canada / recherches théâtrales au canada, ( ). https://doi.org/ . / ar résumé de l'article dans cet article, colleen kim daniher présente une justification critique de sa décision de mettre en pratique une méthode comparative axée sur un contenu asio-américain dans un cours sur les études du théâtre et de la performance asio-américains qu’elle a enseigné à l’université brown au printemps . daniher s’attarde notamment au jumelage d’une lecture de la pièce kim’s convenience d’ins choi ( ) avec le visionnement du téléfilm twilight: los angeles, ( ), d’anna deavere smith, diffusé sur les ondes de pbs, afin d’aborder le sujet du racisme envers les noirs tant au canada qu’aux États-unis à l’avènement du mouvement black lives matter. le cours et l’expérience d’apprentissage que décrit daniher ont eu lieu aux États-unis, mais cette dernière tisse des liens entre ses pistes d’interrogation et le nouveau « sous-domaine » des études du théâtre et de la performance canado-asia-tiques. comment devrait-on présenter le théâtre et la performance canado-asiatiques en salle de classe? À quelles fins et dans quels contextes pédagogiques enseigne-t-on les répertoires « minoritaires » racialisés du théâtre et de la performance au canada? sachant que les champs d’études asioaméricaines et canado-asiatique reposent sur des généalogies qui se recoupent, daniher souligne que nous devons de toute urgence faire preuve d’un engagement plus ferme à l’endroit des théories, des méthodes et des analyses critiques du pouvoir racial si les études du théâtre canado-asiatique souhaitent un jour être en mesure d’aborder les enjeux politiques et éthiques importants des « projets d’études canado-asiatique » au sens large. https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/tric/ https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar https://doi.org/ . / ar https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/tric/ -v -n -tric / https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/tric/ on teaching kim’s convenience: asian american studies, asian canadian studies, and the politics of race in asian canadian theatre and performance studies colleen kim daniher this article offers a critical overview and rationale for why and to what ends daniher put a comparative asian north american method into practice in her classroom on asian american theatre and performance studies at brown university in spring . in particular, daniher focuses on pairing ins choi’s play-text kim’s convenience ( ) alongside a viewing of the made-for-pbs broadcast of anna deavere smith’s twilight: los angeles, ( ) in order to broach the topic of anti-black racism in both canada and the us in the black lives matter moment. although daniher describes here a course and learning experience from within a us-american institutional setting, she directs the following emer- gent queries to the field of canadian theatre and performance studies in light of its recent inauguration of the new “sub-field” of asian canadian theatre and performance studies: how should we frame asian canadian theatre and performance in the classroom? for what purpose and under what curricular conditions do we teach racialized “minority” repertoires of theatre and performance in canada? drawing on overlapping genealogies of asian american and asian canadian studies, daniher contends that a more rigorous engagement with existing theories, methods, and critical analyses of racial power is urgently needed if asian canadian theatre studies hopes to coincide with the larger political-ethical stakes of “asian canadian studies projects” writ-large. dans cet article, colleen kim daniher présente une justification critique de sa décision de mettre en pratique une méthode comparative axée sur un contenu asio-américain dans un cours sur les études du théâtre et de la performance asio-américains qu’elle a enseigné à l’université brown au printemps . daniher s’attarde notamment au jumelage d’une lecture de la pièce kim’s convenience d’ins choi ( ) avec le visionnement du téléfilm twilight: los angeles, ( ), d’anna deavere smith, diffusé sur les ondes de pbs, afin d’aborder le sujet du racisme envers les noirs tant au canada qu’aux États-unis à l’avènement du mouvement black lives matter. le cours et l’expérience d’apprentissage que décrit daniher ont eu lieu aux États-unis, mais cette dernière tisse des liens entre ses pistes d’in- terrogation et le nouveau « sous-domaine » des études du théâtre et de la performance canado-asia- tiques.  comment devrait-on présenter le théâtre et la performance canado-asiatiques en salle de classe? À quelles fins et dans quels contextes pédagogiques enseigne-t-on les répertoires « minori- taires » racialisés du théâtre et de la performance au canada? sachant que les champs d’études asio- américaines et canado-asiatique reposent sur des généalogies qui se recoupent, daniher souligne que nous devons de toute urgence faire preuve d’un engagement plus ferme à l’endroit des théories, des on teaching kim’s convenience • pp - • / . • tric / rtac articles tric # x .qxp_tric' / / : pm page méthodes et des analyses critiques du pouvoir racial si les études du théâtre canado-asiatique souhait- ent un jour être en mesure d’aborder les enjeux politiques et éthiques importants des « projets d’études canado-asiatique » au sens large. s when i joined the department of theatre arts and performance studies at brown university as a diversity postdoctoral fellow in the fall of , i was thrilled to be given the opportunity to teach a course of my own design in the spring semester. a few years earlier, i had outlined a syllabus idea on “asian american theatre and performance in transnational contexts” that i thought would be perfect for the department. partly inspired by my own personal history of us-canada border crossing and partly inspired by a sudden groundswell in asian canadian theatre production and criticism coupled with the “transnational turn” in asian american studies, i wanted to see what kinds of critical conversations about race, nationhood, and citizenship would be possible in a classroom where “asian american” and “asian canadian” theatre historiographies, texts, and artists encountered each other. using the perspectives of critical race theory, postcolonial cultural studies, and transnational cultural critique, the operative questions that informed our class were the following: “what is asian american? where is asian america? and how do histories and practices of theatre and performance help us answer these questions?” implicit to the rationale for my course are debates about the critical utility of a transnational “asian north american” category of cultural and socio-political analysis that have now been circulating in asian canadian literary and cultural studies for close to twenty years. in their introduction to the edited collection, asian north american identities: beyond the hyphen, editors eleanor ty and donald goellnicht propose asian north america as a useful critical analytic because “asian subjects who reside in the united states and in canada face many of the same issues regarding identity, multiple cultural allegiances, marginalization vis-à-vis mainstream society, historical exclusion, and postcolonial and/or diasporic and/or transnational subjectivity” ( ). and indeed: overlap- ping histories of asian racialization vis-a-vis immigration, legal exclusion, internment, and post- s social movements in north america provided the structure to my course’s weekly topical themes. however, as scholars like henry yu and iyko day note in their respective contributions to amerasia journal’s groundbreaking special issue on “pacific canada: beyond the th parallel,” the relationship between asian america and asian canada is decidedly not just one of homogenizing similarity: important differences exist alongside striking similarities. the task of our class, then, would be that of what day describes towards the end of her essay as a “reconfigured comparativism”: that is, not just a ledger-accounting of similarities and differ- ences between asian american and asian canadian theatre and performance, but an inves- tigation of their mutual interactions and exchanges across time ( ). specifically: what kinds of interactions and exchanges can be tracked between canada and the us as racial states? how do asian american and asian canadian racial formations reveal “the history of asian alterity to the modern-state” (lowe, “the international” )? tric / rtac • . / • pp - • on teaching kim’s convenience colleen kim daniher tric # x .qxp_tric' / / : pm page colleen kim daniher on teaching kim’s convenience • pp - • / . • tric / rtac in this essay, i offer a critical overview and rationale for why and to what ends i put a comparative asian north american method into practice in my classroom at brown. in particular, i focus on the methodological and pedagogical challenges that arose in one week in particular, when i assigned students to read ins choi’s kim’s convenience ( ) alongside a viewing of the made-for-pbs broadcast of anna deavere smith’s twilight: los angeles, ( ).the pairing, i wagered, would enable us to talk about two theatrical representations of black-asian relations in canada and the us, respectively, and i had assigned two critical readings to help ground our conversation: claire jean kim’s “the racial triangulation of asian americans” ( ) and donald goellnicht’s “a long labour: the protracted birth of asian canadian literature” ( ). grouping the week’s assigned texts under the heading “divergent multiculturalisms and the model minority myth,” i hoped to engage students in a dynamic conversation on interracial racisms across borders, always an important topic, but seeming especially so in the spring of , after a fall of nation-wide campus protests in the us (including at brown university) and nearly two years of black lives matter mobiliza- tion in both canada and the us. although i describe here a course and learning experience from within a us-american institutional setting, let me be clear that i write now with an express purpose: to provoke further conversation within canadian theatre and performance studies about the kinds of critical methods and pedagogies that we have available to us to talk to students about race and racism in the classroom. while scholars in canada have been quick to “inaugurate” a new field of asian canadian theatre and performance based on a thriving (in some cities) contemporary theatre scene (aquino and knowles), this inauguration has occurred with very little sustained discussion or debate about how to teach asian canadian topics from the perspective of anti-racist cultural critique. how should we frame asian canadian theatre and performance in the classroom? for what purpose and under what curricular conditions do we teach racialized “minority” repertoires of theatre and performance in canada? while topical outline for “asian american theatre and performance in transnational contexts” week introduction to the course and its key terms week situating performance in transnational “asian/america” week exclusion acts i week exclusion acts ii week internment acts week stage realism & theatres of cultural citizenship in the civil rights era week midterm research projects: regionalism and asian north american theatre presenters week model-minority myths and divergent multiculturalisms week sex and asian/american screens week solo performance and experimental forms week intercultural theatre and performance week diversifying diasporas and performance beyond theatre week asian/american critique and the asian/american subject week final thoughts and state-of-research presentations figure . weekly themes for “asian american theatre and performance in transnational contexts” tric # x .qxp_tric' / / : pm page there is certainly no one right way to do asian canadian theatre studies as pedagogy, i suggest here that a more rigorous engagement with existing theories, methods, and critical analyses of not just ethnic or cultural difference but racial power is urgently needed if asian canadian theatre studies hopes to coincide with the larger political-ethical stakes of what guy beauregard has called “asian canadian studies projects”—a project and praxis of radical liberation that has never been easily disarticulated from asian america or from the inher- ently transnational social movements from which the latter stems. it is nearly impossible to discuss the workings of my class without first acknowledging how asian american and asian canadian studies have been differently institutionalized, and how this has impacted pedagogical practice. in what follows, i begin by surveying some of this institutional history in order to counter what i see as a prevailing nationalism in the tendency to cast asian canadian theatre as a “sub-field of canadian theatre” (li, “performing” ) without sufficiently grappling with the transnational and interracial politics of coalition that have considerably informed both asian canadian and asian american social movements. i then turn towards a more substantive analysis of kim’s convenience, outlining how the play’s (oft-overlooked) thematization of black-asian canadian relations invites not only a representational or symbolic analysis but a sociological critique of the racialization of asians as model minorities. drawing on the analytic frame of “racial triangulation,” a well- known comparative theory of asian american racial formation, i describe how emphasizing black-asian themes in kim’s convenience and anna deavere smith’s twilight los angeles, enabled a difficult but fruitful conversation that shifted our classroom conversation away from “identity” and “difference” writ-large to the operational logics of black and asian racisms in north america from the late s to the present blm moment. ultimately, i argue that the recent interest in asian canadian theatre and performance as a disciplinary field of study should and must go beyond preemptive celebrations of progress in the professional-class language of theatre “equity” and “diversity”: the large-scale success of a play like kim’s convenience offers canadian theatre scholars an important oppor- tunity to not only teach and learn asian canadian theatrical repertoires, but asian north american histories, politics, and socio-political modes of analysis that emphasize race, racism, and racialization. why comparison, take # : asian american studies and asian canadian studies in the shadow of us ethnic studies “asian canadian” is not a self-contained and naturally given category that derives from one’s cultural heritage; rather, it is a name/identity that some individuals or groups, after becoming conscious of their status as the “other” in canadian society, chose for themselves and brought into being through discursive practices and socio-political actions. to call oneself “asian canadian” is very much a political exercise—one that is also exerted by black and asian americans in their respective struggles. (li, voices ) in order to understand the stakes of asian canadian and asian american comparison in my class, one must first understand the institutional backdrop against which both have emerged as disciplinary sites of knowledge formation in the university. in contrast to the five-decades long institutional history of asian american studies—an academic and activist field of knowledge tric / rtac • . / • pp - • on teaching kim’s convenience colleen kim daniher tric # x .qxp_tric' / / : pm page production inextricably linked to the asian american movement and student-led struggle for the establishment of an ethnic studies curriculum in california in the late s—today, only two programs in asian canadian studies exist in canada: a minor at the university of toronto, launched in , and a minor at the university of british columbia, started in (goellnicht, “outside” - ). what this relative institutional absence has produced, argues cultural critic chris lee in a article in amerasia journal, is a condition not of asian canadian “emer- gence”—as some have optimistically claimed—but of characteristic “lateness” ( - ). in his theorization of asian canadian institutional lateness, lee joins a cohort of asian canadianist scholars—notably, most writing from within the disciplinary perspectives of history, literature, and cultural studies—to bring a comparative lens to the study of asian canadian culture and politics. central to this move is the acknowledgment that asian america is, among other things, a historically-situated political formation emerging out of converging and coalitional sites of social struggle: a history that asian canada does not share— or at least, does not share in the same way. in a much-cited article on “the protracted birth” of asian canadian literature, donald goellnicht historicizes and enumerates some of the many reasons why a large-scale, pan-ethnic asian american social movement took place in the us in the late s and not in canada. citing the mobilizing effects of othersignificant social movements—the civil rights movement, black radicalism, new left counter-cultural protest, and anti-imperialist, anti-vietnam war movements—on the asian american movement, goellnicht notes that s radicalism in canada was meanwhile centered on quebec separatism, with its bifurcated lines of english and french ethnicity, language, and culture (“a long labour” - ). critically, then, whereas the political landscape of the us in the s was definitively transformed by racial social justice struggle, led by first the civil rights movement and then black power, the political landscape in canada was defined by nationalist struggles over “culture” and “ethnicity,” here cut along french and english lines. while goellnicht is careful to point out that local acts of asian canadian activism did in fact occur throughout the s and s, they were often isolated, occurring under the sign of single issues and ethnic groups (such as in the chinese canadian struggle to preserve vancouver’s chinatown in the s, for example, or the case of japanese canadian redress in the s). xioaping li has since revised this historiography, meticulously documenting pan- ethnic asian canadian social organizing beginning in the s under the broad rubrics of a “cultural activism” that was itself significantly impacted by contact and exchange with asian american activists (li, voices - ). nonetheless, it remains true that “asian canadians never attained the status of a mass, panethnic social movement” (goellnicht, “a long labour” ) and relatedly, asian canadian studies never emerged as part of a grassroots, race-based demand for a decolonized curriculum, as it did in the case of asian american studies. here, it is important to note how closely aligned the asian american movement and asian american studies as a disciplinary field were from their start: it was, after all, the galva- nizing events of the student strikes at san francisco state college and the university of california, berkeley that precipitated the formation of national political organizations like the asian american political alliance, which “marked the first time that the term asian american [sans hyphen] was used nationally to mobilize people of asian descent” (espiritu ). as glenn omatsu recalls, the san francisco state strike was “the longest student strike in us history” and “the first campus uprising involving asian americans as a collective force”: colleen kim daniher on teaching kim’s convenience • pp - • / . • tric / rtac tric # x .qxp_tric' / / : pm page under the third world liberation front—a coalition of african american, latino, american indian and asian american campus groups—students “seized the time” to demand ethnic studies, open admissions, and a redefinition of the education system. although their five- month strike was brutally repressed and resulted in only partial victories, students won the nation’s first school of ethnic studies. ( ) scholars of the asian american movement agree that the san francisco state strike was significant not only because of its foundational role in the origin story of asian america, but because of the way it established the agenda of that movement as: ) class-based, ) coalitional among african american, latino, american indian, and asian american student groups, ) focused on questions of power and oppression not only in america but in places likes asia, africa, latin american, and the middle east, where third world revo- lutionary struggles and ideologies greatly informed the objective of the movement to establish “a new world consciousness” ( - ). the strike, in other words, was less about simple curriculum reform than it was about demanding the means through which to realize a new world order. canadian ethnic studies was also founded between - , but under decidedly different conditions. more concerned with questions of immigration, assimilation, and pluralism than in revolution, the field approached the study of ethnicity in deracialized terms, thereby aligning itself with the government’s policy of official multiculturalism and its benign yet “race-evasive” project of recognizing all forms of difference as one kind: “cultural” (beauregard, “what is at stake”). under these terms, european immigrant ethnic groups (that is, not french and not english) were the predominant focus of canadian ethnic studies, and when asian canadian topics were addressed, they were addressed through the analytics of ethnic difference, not racialization. as goellnicht and daniel coleman point out, it wasn’t until a convergence of events in the late s and early s—including the japanese canadian movement for redress, indigenous activist responses to the oka standoff and the shooting of dudley george, the controversies around the into the heart of africa exhibition and the writing thru race conference, to name just a few—that schol- arship on asian canadians began to develop against the specific backdrop of race and racial formation in canada (“race into” - ). i recite these admittedly provisional institutional histories to make a simple point: the asian american studies classroom is also a us ethnic studies classroom, with its explicitly activist, anti-racist agenda and now-fifty-years-long inheritance of curricular norms, critical vocabularies, pedagogical expectations, and protocols of behavior. the still-formulating asian canadian studies classroom, in contrast, has had a much more gradual and uneven history of institutional emergence. moreover, this unevenness has been decidedly discipli- nary, with the majority of research on both asian canadian and asian north american themes coming out of scholarship in literature and cultural studies—much of which i draw on here. while it exceeds the limits of the current paper to enumerate all of the debates, posi- tions, and subsequent implications surrounding asian american and asian canadian insti- tutional emergence that currently exist, suffice it to say that these comparative conversations do exist, they have existed for a while, and they should be taken into account as canadian tric / rtac • . / • pp - • on teaching kim’s convenience colleen kim daniher tric # x .qxp_tric' / / : pm page theatre studies makes its own pronouncements about the distinctiveness of a national canon of work and disciplinary field of study called asian canadian. institutional histories matter here because they impact our interpretive frames and our ability to think about these frames meta-critically. for example, against the larger canvas of asian canadian studies as a social formation emerging out of the various intellectual and social justice struggles that i have just outlined, asian canadian theatre studies does not merely exist as the once-missing now-found “other” to canadian theatre studies; rather, it exists in dialogue with a larger social formation of asian canadian identity, politics, and crit- ical discourses beginning in the s. therefore, we might ask: how does thinking about asian canadian theatre from the perspective of canadian theatre studies yield one set of questions? how does thinking about asian canadian theatre from the perspective of asian canadian studies yield another? are the epistemological, pedagogical, and political objec- tives of asian canadian studies and canadian theatre studies necessarily the same? while these questions might seem separate from the matter of asian canadian and asian american comparison, i am arguing that they are not if we understand asian american and asian canadian inquiry as converging at the point of their shared activist origins and investments in race-based social justice struggle and community-based critique. asian american and asian canadian comparison at the level of institutional emergence is thus useful to the degree that we recognize each not only as naturalized locations of study but as modes of study that necessarily implicate issues of social justice, social analysis, and social critique with issues of pedagogical practice. why comparison, take # : racial triangulation and the model minority myth in kim’s convenience in the fall of , questions of race, social justice, and pedagogy were exploding, and, from my vantage point as an asian canadian working within a us-american institutional context, they were exploding from multiple directions. the black lives matter movement was then two years strong and had forcibly placed issues of anti-black policing, incarceration, and black death at the front and center of us national and campus conversations about race and social justice. at the same time, concurrent debates over black lives matter demonstrations in canada were confronting canadians with difficult and long-suppressed histories of anti- black racism, too easily dismissed and renounced as a case of “importing racism” from the united states. as i put my syllabus together, addressing anti-black policing, surveillance, and incarceration in my asian american studies classroom—which, as i have described above, is also an ethnic studies classroom and thus an activist classroom—was not so much a question of “if” but of “how.” the opportunity presented itself in week eight of the class, after having taught students key moments in asian american and asian canadian racial formation. following a historical trajectory with previous weeks on chinese legal exclusions and restrictions around immi- gration and citizenship, japanese american and japanese canadian internment, and post- civil rights era cultural nationalisms and their artistic movements, it came time to address a more “contemporary” racial formation: the post- and post- liberal reforms to american and canadian immigration policy that would effectively shape what we now know colleen kim daniher on teaching kim’s convenience • pp - • / . • tric / rtac tric # x .qxp_tric' / / : pm page as the “model minority myth.” the two plays on deck were ins choi’s kim’s convenience ( ) and anna deavere smith’s twilight los angeles, ( ). kim’s convenience premiered in at the toronto fringe festival, where it won the best new play award. later, toronto’s soulpepper theatre produced an extended, sold-out run of the show that was so successful that kim’s convenience launched a nation-wide tour that was the first in the history of soulpepper. today, kim’s convenience is a nationally-syndicated canadian broadcasting corporation television series, having completed its first season in the spring of . the television adaptation features original theatrical cast members paul sun-hyung lee as appa and jean yoon as umma, while jung—who was played by playwright ins choi in the fringe and soulpepper productions—and janet are now played by simu liu and andrea bang, respectively. the play tells the story of a korean-canadian family who owns a convenience store in the gentrifying immigrant neighborhood of toronto’s regent park. much of the drama revolves around the kim family’s changing dynamics after appa, the family patriarch, is faced with an offer to sell his beloved convenience store. the other members of the family are umma, his wife, and janet and jung—his two adult children. janet is a photographer who still frequently stops by the store to visit her parents and help out with the store. jung, who is estranged from the family, is an offstage character for the majority of the play. his absence is explained by the other characters through allusions to his troubles with the law and unre- solved conflict with appa, and we see umma sneaking out of the house to meet with him at her church. eventually, jung returns home and reconciles with appa; instead of selling the store in order to retire comfortably, appa bequeaths the store to jung, who is struggling to support his young family. meanwhile, janet has just begun a romance with alex, a neighbor- hood police officer and childhood friend of jung’s. the play ends on this tentatively opti- mistic note of resolution for the kim family: jung has been integrated back into the family, janet’s romantic future looks bright, and umma and appa’s “legacy” seems secure, both in terms of their children and their business. notably, alex is black—just like all the other secondary characters in kim’s convenience that make up the cast: beyond alex, there is rich and mike, both patrons of the store, and mr. lee, a family friend and successful real estate agent who makes the offer of sale on the store. as indicated in the production notes of the published script by anansi press, each of these secondary characters should be played by a single black actor: in the debut produc- tion of kim’s convenience at the toronto fringe in , this was actor andre sills, while a subsequent run and touring production of the show with toronto’s soulpepper theatre featured actor clé bennett in the role (choi ). even this cursory summary suggests the ways that kim’s convenience might productively, even provocatively, be read against smith’s twilight: los angeles, , which debuted in la in . as some readers will already know, twilight: los angeles is a verbatim play by anna deavere smith that was commissioned by la’s mark taper forum in the wake of the inter- national media spectacle that ensued after the police beating of african american motorist rodney king and the subsequent trial and acquittal of the lapd officers who were caught on video beating him. while theatre scholars have written at length about the play’s formal properties at the level of scripting, casting, and genre, my own purpose in bringing this teaching text into the classroom was a matter of history, not form. after all, the la upris- tric / rtac • . / • pp - • on teaching kim’s convenience colleen kim daniher tric # x .qxp_tric' / / : pm page ings have become a signal moment from which to understand an event in us history where interracial conflict exceeded overly-schematic formulations of race and racism as black and white. as smith’s script and interviews clearly illustrate, this was a “multiethnic rebellion,” where members of the black and latino working poor made up the majority of the uprising’s participants and korean immigrant shopkeepers and property owners were the targeted recipients of the lootings, vandalism, and arson that broke out over two days (oliver, johnson, and farrell , - ). even more to the point, reporting on the riots shored up images of black-korean racial conflict, but deracinated from the important economic back- drop of urban poverty, white flight, and social spending cuts. in the aftermath of the rodney king uprisings, contemporary scholars of race and ethnicity have had to contend with the extent to which what was reductively presented as a “race” riot was in fact a racial- ized class uprising, forcing a more rigorous analysis of the ways in which political economies of race and class entangle, and entangle differently across racialized subject positions. as i will explicate shortly, numerous scholars agree that the seeds of a specifically black- korean american racial conflict narrative have been brewing since at least the s, but public consciousness around black-korean antagonisms flared up most spectacularly in the s, first with the new york city boycotts of korean-owned grocery stores from - , and then again with the trial over the shooting death of -year-old latasha harlins by soon ja du, a -year-old korean shopkeeper in la. the harlins case has been widely understood as a catalyst leading up to the events of april th. i wanted my students—almost all of whom were born after —to grapple with the historical legacy of the la uprisings and its spotlighting of black-asian racializations not least of all because of present-day circumstances. once again, all around us were stories and images of black criminality, policing, and civil unrest. moreover, the november shooting of akai gurley by nypd police officer peter liang had once again thrown radically polarized political representations of african americans and asian americans into public high relief. following gerald graff’s elegant injunction to “teach the conflicts,” i wanted to give my students the tools to dissect, analyze, and discuss the model minority myth as a far- reaching racial ideology inculcating not only asian americans and anti-asian racism, but african americans and anti-black racism. in brief, the model minority myth is a racial discourse that attributes asian american minority “success” to essentializing cultural traits, such as the seemingly natural propensity of “asians” as a group to work hard, to hold similar values rooted in education and the heteronor- mative nuclear family, and to achieve economic upward mobility in a relatively short amount of time without the help of social supports from the state. as a number of critics note, the myth first made its appearance in a number of news outlets in the mid s at precisely the same moment in which public discourses of black cultural pathology, black urban social ills, and the fear of insurgent black radical politics were circulating widely (c. kim - ; osajima; prashad - ). the moynihan report, the la watts riots, and stokely carmichael’s articulation of black power each contributed to this public discourse. moreover, the myth intersected with immigration reform policies in both the us (the immigration and nationality act of ) and canada (the adoption of a merit-based point system in ) that significantly impacted the demographic makeup of the immediate wave of post- asian immigrants to north america. these population-shaping policies made colleen kim daniher on teaching kim’s convenience • pp - • / . • tric / rtac tric # x .qxp_tric' / / : pm page it easy to single out asian north american immigrants as “models” in regards to broad cultural generalizations about education, class, familial status, and political leanings while effectively obscuring the hand that national immigration policy had in selectively producing an upwardly-mobile immigrant class of asians (chuh - ; sharma - ). as sociologist claire jean kim has stated succinctly, the model minority construct in the us has always been a comparative one, contrasting the perception of asian economic success and cultural assimilation with black social failure: “the model minority myth has always worked in tandem with explicit constructions of blacks as culturally deficient” ( ). in her article, “the racial triangulation of asian americans,” kim develops the idea of racial triangulation in order to argue that the racialization of asian americans is “profoundly interrelated” to black and white racialization, such that all three groups operate within a “field of [hierarchical] racial positions” together ( ). one of kim’s most potent analytic contributions through the racial triangulation concept is the notion of “relative valorization,” whereby a dominant racial-social grouping [whites] valorizes one minority racial-social grouping [asians] in order to subordinate another [blacks], effectively domi- nating both minority groups in the process ( - ). crucially, for kim, the model minority myth is one such mode of relative valorization, and thus should be understood as an expression of white supremacy’s divide and conquer tactics. by mobilizing naturalized discourses of black and asian racial and cultural “differ- ence,” the model minority myth reduces structured class and economic disparity drawn along racial lines to a set of dubious cultural traits, thus explaining away one racial group’s oppres- sion with another’s putative “success”—all the while erasing the presence of a white ruling class that continues to control the distribution of social resources along a racialized (and contingent) hierarchy of access. in my class, i used kim’s triangulation thesis to both draw out and raise questions about the thematization of black-korean interracial relations in kim’s convenience. like twilight: los angeles, kim’s convenience explores the daily social exchanges and economic transactions between korean immigrant store owners and black patrons in the economically-depressed, predominantly immigrant, multiracial, multicultural urban community of regent park. unlike twilight: los angeles, however, kim’s convenience takes place in present-day toronto and has been all but overlooked as a play about blackness in urban canada. a few key passages help to solidify these claims. in the play’s very first scene of spoken dialogue (“i am korean”), rich, (“a young black man”) comes into the store to buy a scratch- and-win card and a pack of cigarettes. rich is appa’s first customer of the day, but what begins as a passing economic transaction results in rich receiving a corrective history lesson on the differences between japanese and korean as distinct ethno-national categories, with their own longstanding histories of colonial antipathy (choi - ). moreover, appa—a former high school teacher—extends his lesson on things that “look same…but not same thing” ( ) when he spec- ifies rich’s blackness as seeming to be from kenya. early on, then, the play establishes a simple but effective meta-lesson on race and ethnicity for its viewing audience. importantly, we are asked to see bothappa and rich as not only racialized subjects (asian and black), but also ethnic ones (korean and kenyan). an homology is thus established between appa and rich that refutes the (tacit) racial logic of the model minority myth, which constructs asians as paragons of culture and blacks as paragons of race, in order to separate one from the other. tric / rtac • . / • pp - • on teaching kim’s convenience colleen kim daniher tric # x .qxp_tric' / / : pm page in another early scene titled “steal or no steal,” blackness is again highlighted in a vignette that alludes to the omnipresent criminalized racial surveillance of black bodies, especially as they move through urban sites of commerce. appa wants to give janet her first lesson on how to run the store should he retire. to her horror, this consists of what, at first blush, seems to be a game of racial profiling called “steal or no steal.” when mike, (“a jamaican canadian”) patron walks into the store, appa takes janet aside and says: appa: you see […] that guy? […] he is black guy, jean jacket. that combo is steal combo. you don’t know how to run the store, i teach you. this is training day. lesson number one, steal or no steal. every customer, have to know. steal or no steal (beat. pointing to a girl outside) see that girl? she is no steal. she is black girl, fat. fat black girl is no steal. (pointing to a guy outside). fat white guy, that’s steal. fat guy is black, brown shoes, that no steal. that’s cancel-out combo. janet: that is so awkwardly racist. appa: not racist…survival skill. ( - ) as appa and janet continue to debate mike’s potential culpability, the conversation becomes increasingly ludicrous as it is revealed that appa’s system of identifying thieves adheres to a logic that is more equal opportunity than initially presumed: appa: okay, brown guy, that’s steal. brown girl, that’s no steal. […] if you is the gay, that’s no steal. easy. the gay is never steal. if you is the lesbian, that is girl who is the gay, that’s steal, one hundred percent guarantee they is steal. but two lesbian, that’s no steal, cancel-out combo. janet: what about a black lesbian with long straight hair and a fat asian gay man with short hair together? steal or no steal? appa: that is impossible […] the gay asian is never fat. only skinny asian is the gay. that’s rule. ( - ) in production, the entire scene is played for laughs. but things take a serious turn again when appa, despite janet’s vehement protests, accuses mike of stealing. in response, mike pointedly asks, “’cuz me black, y’accusing me of teefin’?” ( ). a few moments later, it is revealed that mike has, in fact, pocketed a pack of toothpaste, along with the tub of vaseline he lawfully purchases. although from here the scene quickly diffuses by devolving into phys- ical pratfalls involving appa’s hapkido moves on mike, mike’s question hangs in the air, pointedly and poignantly left unanswered by the rather convenient plotting that mike did in fact steal some toothpaste. the specter of a specific historical genealogy of class-based conflict between korean merchants and black customers that this scene and the previous one hints at is returned to and clarified in scene , “who you go out with.” here, appa recounts the story of a family friend, “mr. chae,” to janet, who has just revealed that she will be going on a date with alex, the black cop: colleen kim daniher on teaching kim’s convenience • pp - • / . • tric / rtac tric # x .qxp_tric' / / : pm page appa: you remember mr. chae? […] yah. he is having store in south central l.a., california. lots of black people is living there too. one day black lady is come and ask five- dollar loan. so, he give loan five dollar. next week, she come and pay back. no interest. then she ask loan ten dollar. and he give and she pay back. and continue. they have good friend- ship. she tell all her friend, and they come and ask loan too. he is help all of them. then . rodney king l.a. riot happen. all korean convenience store is on fire and black people steal- ing. so he take shotgun and go to store. when he gets out of car, he see fire and smoke, people screaming, running, crazy and he look at store. he see all black people in front of store. so, he get gun, ready to shoot, then he stop. what he see is that black woman who he give to loan and all his black customer hold hand, make big wall, stop other people stealing his store. beat. janet: what are you trying to say, appa? appa: alex is not korean, but if you want to marry him, that’s okay with me. ( - ) for the canny reader of asian north american culture and history, this scene is complexly layered and multivalent. first, appa’s story illustrates the fact that the la riots—collectively remembered as sa-i-gu (april th) by korean and korean diasporic communities—was an inter- national event that projected images of black-korean american conflict into global public consciousness. correspondingly, the reporting on the event inculcated koreans across the diaspora. that appa draws on an anecdote from sa-i-gu to express to his daughter that he is “okay” with his daughter’s interracial romance with alex is significant because it sets up the expectation that appa will in fact notapprove of the relationship. of course, the tacit presump- tion of appa’s anti-black disapproval of janet’s dating choice is also part and parcel of the model minority myth: the unquestioned assumption that the “conservative” first generation would disapprove of any non-korean, but perhaps especially a black non-korean, as a dating partner. however, appa subverts this controlling generational narrative by telling an unexpected story of black-korean collaboration, not conflict, during the uprising. this moment simul- taneously expresses appa’s approval of the janet-alex pairing and his awareness of the imposed social expectation that he might not. in contrast, to the widespread media images of armed korean american militiamen on rooftops aiming at black and latino looters during the la conflict, appa’s second-hand, verbal testimony of black patrons forming a human shield around mr. chae’s storefront offers a vivid counter-memory to the master-narrative of black-asian racial antagonism made hypervisible during and after the riots. recalling that the model minority myth is not merely a harmless “cultural” compliment but a controlling racial stereotype, we can see that it is one that, in this scene, appa purposefully rejects. second, appa’s self-conscious reference to the la riots as the frame through which to express his approval of his daughter’s black boyfriend reads as significant because it distances narratives of black-korean urban conflict from the immediate space-time of toronto. specifically, it side-steps toronto’s own linked history to the rodney king uprisings, anti- black policing, and black justice unserved in the form of the yonge street riot, which occurred on may th, . as with debates over nomenclature surrounding the rodney king protests, “the yonge street riot” has also been called an uprising or a rebellion, most recently in it takes a riot: race, rebellion, reform, a documentary directed by howard grandison and produced in collaboration with ryerson university’s akua benjamin project. tric / rtac • . / • pp - • on teaching kim’s convenience colleen kim daniher tric # x .qxp_tric' / / : pm page as the documentary recounts, the yonge street rebellion began as a peaceful afternoon demonstration organized by the black action defence committee (badc) in solidarity with the protests expressing outrage over the king verdict, but also in local protest against two recent events: the police murder of twenty-two-year-old raymond lawrence of toronto, and the acquittal of two white peel region police officers for the shooting death of seventeen- year-old michael wade lawson. badc protestors gathered in front of the us consulate, staged a sit-in on the corner of yonge and bloor, and then marched to city hall. later that evening, however, demonstrations turned violent after the official protests had ended and renegade protestors, counter-protestors (including white supremacist groups), and police encountered each other on the streets. according to a maclean’scover story on the “riot,” at its peak, a crowd of over , took to the streets; property was damaged, stores were looted, and around thirty related arrests were made (deacon and brady; paradkar). remembering the yonge street uprising in relation to kim’s convenience raises all sorts of salient questions about the model minority myth, racial triangulation, and the disavowed history and ongoing present of anti-black racism in canada. many of these questions exceed the frame of the current analysis, including how, if, or to what extent korean canadians or other asian canadians were implicated in the rebellion. nonetheless, the play prompts further inquiry along these relational lines, not because black-korean american and black- korean canadian relations are necessarily identical, but because in their very incommensu- rability, they might tell us something important about the distinct yet still-related racial structures of canada and the us. in some ways, it is hard not to see kim’s convenienceas a textbook case study in the social phenomenon of racial triangulation. the play traffics in familiar racial tropes wherein hard- working asian immigrant merchants are juxtaposed against a less-developed backdrop of black urban life. however, to say that the play can be usefully illuminated by a theory of racial triangulation is not to say that kim’s convenience is racist or commits anti-black racism full-stop. on the contrary, i find the play’s representations of black masculinity to be quite nuanced, and not in spite of but because of the quadruple-casting device of the four black characters in the play. after all, to put the body of the same actor in the role of both youthful petty thief (rich) and love-interest police officer (alex), of both unaccented kenyan canadian (mike) and patois-speaking jamaican canadian (rich), and of both the ethnically- unmarked, class-ascendant black professionals mr. lee and alex, is to say something power- ful about the variable expressions of class, politics, and diasporic affiliation that black canadian masculinity can take on. in fact, i would argue that it is precisely because of the play’s exploration of how black and korean canadian lives become entwined through the intersections of global immigra- tion, urban commerce, housing policy, and racial minoritization that make it such a remark- able teaching text on contemporary race and racism in canada. as much as i concur that we should be critical of a multiculturalist ideology of romanticized race and ethnic relations, we should not forget that official multicultural policy is not only an ideology, and thus not only abstract in its effects. neighborhoods like the regent park of kim’s convenience actually exist, scenes of black canadian and korean canadian sociality actually exist, and they exist in part because of the shaping hands of federal immigration and multicultural policies dating back to the s. colleen kim daniher on teaching kim’s convenience • pp - • / . • tric / rtac tric # x .qxp_tric' / / : pm page tric / rtac • . / • pp - • on teaching kim’s convenience colleen kim daniher however, the play’s simultaneous representations of blackness and koreanness become more problematic when left uninterrogated through an analysis of race in canada; when, for example, kim’s conveniencebecomes little more than a representative or substitutable “ethnic minority” placeholder on a canadian theatre syllabus, with little investigation or socio- historical framing for students about what asianness or blackness represent racially within but also beyond the world of the play. while i do not think the play is racist, per say, i do think that the play’s all-asian, all-black cast of characters and assimilationist narrative of immigrant hard-work and individual success requires careful and critical scrutiny, informed by a rigorous understanding of transnational history, political economy, and contemporary racial formation theory. which is precisely why the question of how this play is brought into classrooms—and i think it should be—matters so much. conclusion: towards a pedagogy of entanglement as a matter of activist pedagogy, kim’s convenience necessitates a more robust arsenal of crit- ical tools and questions than “is this play racist or not?” the truth is, the answer to what is already a politically-circumscribed yes-or-no question may rest more on how we teach the play than on any singularly deterministic interpretation of the text. indeed, being able to articulate for our students which racisms, when, where, and against whom becomes part of the necessary work of responsibly re-representing this play and its reception in the class- room. so too is making the critical leap from “play” to “world”—because isn’t the larger issue of naming, critiquing, and dismantling a racist social order ultimately the more urgent task at hand than identifying this or that cultural text as racist? this pedagogical work is, of course, challenging and risky: when it came time to discuss racial triangulation as a critical capstone to our reading of kim’s convenience and our viewing of twilight: los angeles, my students were unusually reticent during discussion. while i had expected them to be challenged, i had also expected a dynamic conversation because of just how prescient the relationships among the model minority myth, anti-black-racism, and anti-black policing seemed to be. my lecture invited students—a cohort of ten undergraduates, all identifying as of asian- descent but not all as american—to make links between la in the early s and the black lives matter movement today. further, i asked them to consider this history in relation to an evolving political conception of asian north american activism and identity. what kinds of conversations are you (or are you not) having about blm in your on-campus communities, i wanted to know? does the history and language of the model minority myth give us a useful working vocabulary for understanding the perception of asian american conservatism and political apathy in the face of other racialized and specifically anti-black violence, and how might we challenge that perception in the blm era while still acknowledging that racism occurs within and between racialized groups? these questions were particularly important for me to raise in my role as a diversity postdoctoral fellow, knowing full well that institu- tionalized diversity projects—like institutionalized multicultural projects—too frequently become silo’d sites of confirming and affirming “difference” without really interrogating how difference is constituted, on whose terms, and for whose benefit. i was surprised when, after some prodding, i found out that the source of the students’ discomfort was what some of them perceived to be the questionable “appropriateness” of tric # x .qxp_tric' / / : pm page talking about blackness and anti-blackness within the parameters of our class, a class on asian american theatre and performance. what to me had seemed like an obvious link between our course material and the blm moment had, for my most activist-minded students in the course, risked appropriating black injury, and had for others simply crossed the expected threshold of what they thought they’d be asked to do in an asian american studies classroom in the age of the diversified (read: multicultural) university: that is, talk about “themselves.” with some hesitation, i offer this brief classroom anecdote not to single out or criticize my students, but to identify some areas of overlapping concern between my class dynamics and the nascent field of asian canadian theatre and performance studies as it continues to articulate its pedagogical goals, methods, and values. like my students, canadian theatre scholars and critics have seemed unwilling or unable to contend with the concurrent representations of koreanness and blackness in kim’s convenience. widely lauded as a “universal” fantasia on immigrant uplift, cultural adaptation, and ethnic assimilability across generations, reviews and promotional materials of the play have noticeably highlighted its ethnic and “immigrant family” plotline while substantially downplaying the fact that the play also features a number of black characters who remain outside of a singular ethnic immigrant family narrative. one notable exception to this trend is barry freeman’s analysis of the play in a chapter in his recent book, staging strangers: theatre and global ethics ( ). here, freeman offers a soft critique of the play for its “stereotyped” characterizations of blackness and asianness ( ), but ultimately undercuts what could be a promising line of inquiry by failing to substan- tiate his claims with a convincing reading of the play. the incisiveness of freeman’s analysis is perhaps further hindered by the fact that he places kim’s convenience alongside two other asian canadian plays (betty quan’s mother tongue and catherine hernandez’s singkil) with- out really addressing them as asian canadian plays. instead, in the chapter titled “domesticating the stranger,” he mobilizes concepts like immigration, the making and domestication of strangers, and the global flows of neoliberal capital as if these weren’t them- selves part and parcel of a very specific structure of asian north american racialization vacil- lating between the contrasting poles of alienated abjection and idealized assimilation. the popular and critical responses to the play help clarify, i think, some of the limits to the prevailing critical paradigms of canadian theatre and performance studies for dealing with “difference.” simply put: kim’s convenience is an asian canadian play that is about a korean-canadian family and about the disavowed presence—and thus, peripheral status— of blackness in canada. have the existing national, intercultural, “ethical,” and now indigenous/decolonial paradigms of theatre and performance studies in canada provided us as scholars and teachers with adequate tools to explain or describe anti-black and anti- asian racism in canada—let alone in the same breath? i think not. and so, anticipating the ongoing emergence of a “sub-field” of asian canadian theatre and performance studies, my purpose throughout this essay has been to generate some provisional notes and observations about what an entangled pedagogy of race and racism could look like. in “asians are the new …what?,” cultural critic kandice chuh offers this pedagogical formulation at the end of an article that positions the contemporary model minority as “a figure and lived subjectivity that emerges at the conjuncture of the rise colleen kim daniher on teaching kim’s convenience • pp - • / . • tric / rtac tric # x .qxp_tric' / / : pm page of global capitalism and us neoimperialism” ( ). for chuh, drawing on lisa lowe, peda- gogies of entanglement are necessary to understanding how asian racialization is a relational phenomenon, produced at the global interstices of settler colonialism, slavery, and transna- tional global trade and labour economies ( ). while i am not proposing a wholesale “import” of chuh or lowe’s vision, i am suggesting that “asian canadian theatre studies” can stand to sharpen its theoretical articulation of race and racism, as well as clarify its rela- tionship to a politicized, transnational project of asian canadian study, institutionalized or not. as i suggested from my class anecdote, pedagogies of entanglement at times entail risk and discomfort, but at their best they can challenge a still-dominant strain of multicultural thinking on both sides of the border that “was and is an idea that presents each racialized community as having been born in splendid isolation from all others and each having a largely separate existence” (sharma ). notes my thanks to organizers katherine zien, fiona ritchie, and myrna wyatt selkirk, and the partic- ipants in the “bodies in difference: race and performance in and beyond north america” sympo- sium at mcgill university in may , which provided me with the opportunity to express these thoughts in an earlier version of this work. for more on the transnational turn in asian american studies, see leong; hune; mazumdar; wong; and collet and lien. for more on transnational approaches to american studies, see kaplan; fishkin; stoler; and saldívar. for a brief overview of these debates as they have predominantly played out in asian canadian literary studies, see goellnicht, “a long labour” and “outside the us frame”; miki; beauregard, “what is at stake” and “asian american studies”; lee; and day, “lost in transnation” and “must all…” for a slightly different genealogy through the broader frame of “cultural activism,” see li, voices. see yu and day, “lost in transnation.” in their introduction to asian canadian theatre, aquino and knowles state that the collected volume “is intended to inaugurate a new scholarly field: asian canadian theatre and performance studies” (vii). the edited collection, loosely based on the genesis asian-canadian theatre conference proceedings held in may in toronto, could be understood to be the critical companion text to aquino’s two-volume edited anthology series, love + relasionships: a collection of contemporary asian-canadian drama ( ). while the editors list a number of provisional inter- pretive rubrics through which to understand the newly-enunciated field (the politics of recogni- tion/visibility, the politics of identity, the politics of scale, the politics of affect, and the politics of solidarity), noticeably absent from this list is the politics of race in canada. in “asian canadian studies: unfinished projects,” beauregard helpfully distinguishes “asian canadian studies projects” from “scholarship on asian canadian topics.” whereas asian canadian studies projects are scholarly works that attempt to “work out an awareness of the social move- ments, the cultural activism, and the intellectual histories that have enabled the category of ‘asian canadian’ to come into being” ( - ), scholarship on asian canadian studies topics takes up aspects of asian canadian history or culture or social formation with “a limited awareness of and engage- tric / rtac • . / • pp - • on teaching kim’s convenience colleen kim daniher tric # x .qxp_tric' / / : pm page ment with the social movements and the intellectual histories that have, since the early s, enabled ‘asian canadian’ topics to become visible as sites of knowledge production” ( ). by racial formation theory, i refer to michael omi and howard winant’s influential conceptual- ization of “the sociohistorical process by which racial categories are created, inhabited, trans- formed and destroyed” ( ). at the same time, i acknowledge that there may well be transnational limitations to both racial triangulation and racial formation models that should be explored further. li recounts that, in , “ron tanaka, an asian american activist who was teaching in the english department, introduced asian american activism to his chinese and japanese canadian students,” which led to the formation of two influential student groups, the wakayama and the ga hing, and an on-campus exhibit of asian canadian poetry, history, and photography ( ). this is not to say they were successful, exactly. for more on the limitations of the us ethnic studies project, see okihiro. in addition to those i have mentioned in note , see also kamboureli and pon, et al. see, for example, wente and wang. see also cole for a first-hand account of anti-black policing in toronto. much more could be said about the adaptation for television in regards to two things: the marked sanitization of the play’s focus on blackness, and the tv series’ asian pan-ethnic casting. while close analysis of the television series exceeds the purview of the current study, both should be noted. for more on the intricacies of asian pan-ethnic casting, see pao. throughout i will shift between “uprisings,” “riots,” “rebellion,” and “protests” to refer to the events of april to illustrate the contested terms of naming. for an excellent synopsis of the role that mediation played in representing the “black korean conflict,” see ju yon kim’s the racial mundane, - . see elaine kim’s explanation of the political significance of the renaming in her article, “home is where the han is,” as well as the documentary sa-i-gu, produced by christine choy, elaine kim, and dai sil kim-gibson. for more on grandison’s documentary, see black and paradkar. for example, see historian sean purdy’s article on the links between immigration and public hous- ing policy in regent park. i thank christine mok for a conversation that helped clarify the analogous relationship between multicultural and diversity projects. here, i draw on reviews by nestruck, schmidt, and wheeler, as well as albert schultz’s foreword in choi. the wheeler review title, in particular, is illustrative of the kind of universalizing immi- grant discourse surrounding kim’s that i am describing. in particular, freeman’s description of rich as “an uneducated black man who speaks in slang and has trouble understanding basic conversation” ( ) significantly glosses over nuances of dialogue where appa and rich both misunderstand each other, and collapses rich’s idiomatic speech with his educational level (which is nowhere identified). see, for example, lowe, immigrant acts; palumbo-liu; shimakawa, and day, alien capital. colleen kim daniher on teaching kim’s convenience • pp - • / . • tric / rtac tric # 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take-down information provided at http://kar.kent.ac.uk/contact.html citation for published version wrenn, corey ( ) trump veganism: a political survey of american vegans in the era of identity politics. societies, ( ). pp. - . issn - . doi https://doi.org/ . /soc link to record in kar https://kar.kent.ac.uk/ / document version publisher pdf societies article trump veganism: a political survey of american vegans in the era of identity politics corey lee wrenn political science & sociology, monmouth university, west long branch, nj - , usa; cwrenn@monmouth.edu received: august ; accepted: november ; published: november abstract: often stereotyped as being apathetic to the human suffering, the american vegan movement has historically failed to build alliances with other social justice movements. as intersectional feminism gains a foothold in the movement and external political crises challenge the movement’s frame of reference, the role that identity plays in movement progress has become a serious concern. using the election as a flashpoint, this article considers if the identity backlash characterized by the trump campaign finds parallels in the american vegan movement. a survey of american vegans finds limited evidence of trump veganism, defined here as a single-issue focus on speciesism that rejects the relevance of human-experienced systems of oppression. however, respondents do find that movement diversity efforts are insufficient, especially when controlling for race and gender. most respondents were ethically-motivated vegans, liberal voters, and intersectionally-oriented activists who reported multiple engagements with various leftist movements. only four percent of respondents voted trump, while % agreed with or were neutral about trump’s campaign promise to put “america first”. those who were vegan for reasons of self-interest and had been vegan for less than a year were significantly more likely to support trump’s conservative agenda and were slightly less likely to participate in other social movements. keywords: animal rights; identity politics; political attitudes; social movements; veganism . introduction comprising about % of the american population [ , ], vegans (those who eschew nonhuman animal products) tend to be middle-class, white, female-identified, educated, agnostic or atheist, and urban-dwelling [ ]. numerous studies have indicated that vegans are predominantly liberal or left-leaning [ – ]. a pew research center survey found that % of liberal democrats are vegan or vegetarian, as compared to only % of republicans [ ]. attitudinal research from the s found that % of nonhuman animal rights activists identified as democrats, while % identified as (mostly left-leaning) independents, and % identified as republicans [ ]. however, political affiliation alone does not accurately portray the vegan demographic. mcgarry and jasper [ ] emphasize that social movements must grapple with an “identity dilemma” as they struggle to find a balance between the important mobilizing capabilities of identity politics and the dangers of exclusion and exaggerated homogeneity. as is the case with other leftist movements [ , ], an ethic of liberalism that is apprehensive about identity politics and lacks a critical anti-capitalist analysis prevails in the professionalized american vegan movement. although vegetarianism and veganism have been closely associated with abolition, feminism, and other social justice movements for at least two centuries [ ], there lurks beneath the surface a streak of conservativism. specifically, vegan researchers have indicated that the american vegan movement frequently exhibits multicultural insensitivity [ , ]. external forces can shape a movement as much or more than internal ones, however, compelling an examination of the cultural influence that identity politics wield in wider societies , , ; doi: . /soc www.mdpi.com/journal/societies http://www.mdpi.com/journal/societies http://www.mdpi.com http://dx.doi.org/ . /soc http://www.mdpi.com/journal/societies societies , , of american society. notably, the election of conservative billionaire donald trump has created concerns that identity politics are divisive and multiculturalism is threatening. as citizenship and belonging have been shaped by whiteness [ ], the white-dominated american vegan movement may be adopting its praxis from these environmental trends by rejecting diversity and favoring isolationism. for those engaging the difficult work of intersectional consciousness-raising in vegan and nonvegan spaces, trump’s campaign tactics and their reception are familiar. breeze harper [ ], activist-scholar founder of sistah vegan, notes that trump’s rise was plainly predictable given the systematic resistance to critical race work she has observed in the vegan movement. intersectionally- minded activists who disrupt privilege mechanisms with identity politics are subject to trumpian “law and order” efforts to diminish the relevance and visibility of “the other”. at least one vegan organization, collectively free, experienced a serious threat to its organizational identity and conflict management policy when one of its organizers avowed his support for trump [ ]. although existing research supports the leftist tendencies of american veganism, current criticisms indicate that it may not be prudent to presume the vegan identity radically liberal, as many activists embrace alternate political leanings. while intersectional feminists have published extensively on conservatism in the movement, little empirical research has been conducted to map vegan understandings of race, class, and gender identity. demographic research on the vegan community is limited, dated, and is often subsumed within larger studies of dietary restrictions and vegetarianism (when compared to veganism, vegetarianism is more likely to be apolitical and its boundaries are more fluid). the research presented herein spotlights vegan political attitudes in the dawn of a new era of american conservativism. the vegan movement has a history of exploiting sexism, racism, and colonialism to promote its agenda and achieve resonance. the concern is that this dark legacy may be emboldened and rejuvenated by a st century of hyper-nationalistic, pro-capitalist populism (hereafter referred to as trumpism). this study explores the vegan movement’s contentious relationship with identity in light of the trumpian political climate and in the context of the movement’s institutional history. while ideologies that are tied to trumpism are certainly not new, the election brought the politicized nature of identity into the cultural consciousness, creating a useful window of opportunity for research. . literature review . . nonhuman animal advocacy as a project of white supremacist nationalism despite its historical association with social justice movements, the nonhuman animal rights movement (the progenitor of veganism), is rooted in colonialist and racist resistance to egalitarianism. following the abolition of slavery, concern for the welfare of nonhuman animals became a means of demonstrating white supremacy [ , ]. this was evidenced in early charity appeals as well as the american government’s targeting of the lower classes and people of color in anti-cruelty laws. nonhuman animal welfare was a symbol of black, brown, and celtic savagery, and it created a rationale for social control [ , ]. from the early s onward, humaneness would come to symbolize civility and the naturalness of class divisions. it would be an important component in the project of nationhood and empire. indeed, the goal of nonhuman animal “rights” itself banks on the language and symbolism of nationalism in its bid to grant nonhuman animals protection of their individual interests. it is an approach that has been criticized as both unrealistic and unnecessarily antagonistic [ , ]. the nonhuman animal rights movement and its vegan community would never fully come to grips with its oppressive legacy. as the movement entered its second wave in the mid- th century, racism, sexism, and disdain for immigrants and non-westerners continued to serve as fodder for campaigning [ ]. campaigns drew on the preexisting prejudices of the american populace with hopes of appealing to privilege and in-group solidarity. the strategic exploitation of stigma is exemplified in the vilification of “vain” women who wear “fur”, “barbarous” asians who consume dogs and cats, societies , , of and “savage” blacks engaged in dog “fighting”. as was the case in the th and th centuries, compassion for other animals in the st century became a conduit for american identity and perceived superiority. . . vegan feminism and nonhumans first identity politics would reach a boiling point in the mid- s as intersectional feminist theory began to infiltrate movement discourse. ecofeminism had been contributing these ideas to the anti-speciesist dialogue since the s [ ], and abolitionists of the late th [ ] and st centuries drew extensively on human rights frames, but it would find its second wind as a new generation of feminists began to apply these theories in third wave mobilization efforts. organizations such as the advocacy of veganism society (tavs), food empowerment project (fep), project intersect, sistah vegan, vegan advocacy initiative, vegan feminist network, vegan princess warriors attack, vine sanctuary, and other female-led grassroots collectives embraced intersectionality theories as fundamental to their mission. this new dialogue reflected the increasing platform that was granted to vegan feminists who had been critical of sexist and racist campaigning and movement dynamics, but it also reflected the increasing professionalization of the movement. as grassroots collectives moved towards nonprofitization, they grew more conservative in claimsmaking and tactics. intersectionality rhetoric offered a more palatable replacement to the more contentious and disruptive language of anti-speciesism. the singular focus on speciesism that once characterized leading organizations would give way to anthropocentric multiculturalism and its potential compatibility with plant-based eating. direct action vegans were some of the first to react to this changing focus, insisting that the movement commit to putting “nonhumans first”. the “nonhumans first declaration” promoted by the transnational collective life, for example, insisted that no activist be excluded due to their adversarial position on human justice (a number of direct action movement leaders had been criticized for their misogynistic and racist posturing), no tactic be excluded due to its conflict with human justice, and that humans must “free their own slaves” (a reference to speciesism) before seeking their own justice. in other words, the nonhuman animal rights movement should center nonhuman animals at all times, no matter the cost to others. for life, this abrasive position is justified by the immediacy of nonhuman suffering: “the non-human animals are in a situation of immediate emergency and need all the help they can get!” the “nonhumans first” campaign was fundamentally a backlash against feminist threats to white male privilege. the feminized nonhuman animal rights movement is dominated by white men who experience a glass escalator effect in quickly rising to become celebrity leaders and grassroots heroes. the feminist critique disturbs the vital flow of adoration that supports and motivates these activists, particularly in the direct action faction. the attack on identity politics was also a resistance to perceived deradicalization. although vegan feminist claimsmaking emerged from radical grassroots efforts, it was coopted for bureaucratic interests in an era in which multiculturalism sells. instead of attributing this appropriation to the pull of nonprofitization, radical activists would dismiss feminist theory itself. . . trump veganism the resistance to feminist goals in the vegan movement is therefore a longstanding source of tension. as identity trouble has simmered for decades, the present discomfort with efforts to diversify cannot be said to be a direct result of the more recent election of donald trump. yet, trumpian politics are relevant in that they reflect the general sentiment of a historically white-led patriarchal society that is begrudgingly coming to terms with a diversifying population that is emboldened with higher expectations of equal opportunity. this matters to movements because activists do not exist only in social movement spaces; they also inhabit trump’s america. research into voting patterns finds that poverty and unemployment do not necessarily correlate with support nationalism and populism. instead, it is related to racial isolation, restricted social mobility, and lower social capital [ ]. as the societies , , of vegan movement is white-dominated and predominantly middle-class, there is at least some reason to believe that trumpism is resonating. trump’s rise was partly made possible by his innovative construction of identity. in a world of increasing multiculturalism and disintegrating privileges for dominant groups, he was able to devise a new shared identity that is characterized by its resistance to assaults on traditional social structures [ ]. there is some evidence that resistance to diversity is formulating a new shared identity among traditionalist vegans as well. as inclusivity ideologies began to threaten the status quo of power and privilege in vegan spaces, they have been disparagingly reframed by some as “political correctness”. for anti-intersectionalist vegans, trigger warnings and hurt feelings are believed to disrupt an activist’s ability to do what is necessary to advocate for nonhuman interests. just as trump supporters reproach accusations of ethnocentrism and racism in their desire to increase national security and block immigration, for example, traditional vegans reproach these same accusations that emerge from plans to target minorities in campaigns and block minorities from movement participation. some activists, such as noted theorist and monied rutgers university professor gary francione, would go so far as to accuse vegan feminists of bigotry [ ] and “unabashed narcissism” for their criticisms of white male supremacy in the movement [ ]. identity politics, he warns, a-re the “moral rot of the animal movement”. resistance of this kind indicates a desire to defend movement boundaries from “others”, but not all resistance to diversity stems from a fear of threatened privilege. like trump voters, many vegans, too, are frustrated by years of stunted progress for “the forgotten”. activist impatience and dissatisfaction with the unrelenting suffering of other animals has long been the bane of american veganism. from this frustration, the second wave of nonhuman animal rights activism in the late th century embraced direct actions, such as street protest, illegal open rescues, vandalism, and extreme intimidation of employees in speciesist industries. at the time, this represented an important invigoration, as the post-war movement has been in a state of relative inactivity and bureaucratic stagnation [ , ]. however, direct action since then has declined in popularity, and today’s professionalized movement has withdrawn its support for this approach, as violent and illegal activism complicates resource mobilization [ ]. trumpian politics promise to cut through red tape and forge a shortcut to a better world [ ]. it is all too tempting to abandon cordiality in a no holds barred scramble for nonhuman rights. indeed, the discussion of theories and effectiveness are even stigmatized as counter to nonhuman animals who are “suffering right now” and “can’t wait”. “armchair activists” and “keyboard commandos” are portrayed as self-absorbed or even cowardly. this celebration of “doing something” and the dismissal of cooperative discussion are gendered and reflect the male dominance of the movement, but this is also a key component of trump’s campaign, based as it was on immediate action, consequences be damned. . . intersectionality and movement success fierce debate over tactics and frustration over the slowness of social change is nothing new for social movements, nor is the question of whether or not to pursue cross-movement alliance-building. resistance to intersectional frameworks is an unfortunate legacy of veganism and anti-speciesism, but the desire to incorporate these frameworks can be chronicled as well. first wave anti-speciesist mobilization was heavily entangled with anti-slavery efforts, women’s rights, children’s rights, and even india’s and ireland’s home rule movements [ , , ]. many activists were divided in their attention, lending their services to multiple causes at once. intersectionality was common in theory and practice. britain’s humanitarian league, which operated in the late th and early th centuries, was explicitly multi-issue in is focus on prison reform, labor rights, and secularism in addition to nonhuman animal rights. in america, there were projects such as fruitlands, a utopian anti-slavery community in which nonhuman animals were not to be exploited and egalitarian ideals could be enacted [ ]. the women’s christian temperance union (wctu), american humane association (aha), and society for the prevention of cruelty to animals (spca) were also deeply involved in societies , , of child welfare, prison aid, poverty relief, and more [ ]. this is not to characterize early intersections as without fault. for instance, the humanitarian league frequently drew connections between the various injustices and hosted collaborative meetings with other movements [ ], but it waivered in its support for suffragettes and avoided female professional or celebrity endorsement for its campaigns [ ]. in america, intersectional welfare organizations were hostile to labor organization and also aggravated communities of color by portraying gentile white women as the epitome of social justice praxis. meanwhile, the wctu became so distracted by its commitment to universal kindness that it gradually abandoned nonhuman animal interests. . . social movement structural constraints a collective’s awareness and reaction to identity is shaped by structural conditions. the single-issue focus that inhibits coalition-building for most movement entities is tied to the rise of neoliberalism in the late th century. the subsequent incorporation of social justice collectives into the state- and industry-supported nonprofit sphere has created intense competition and a need to specialize [ ]. legal restrictions on american nonprofit activities further discourage coalitions regarding electoral activities and labor unions [ ]. the result is a siloing effect, and movement ambivalence to the struggles of its competitors is a predictable consequence. for the vegan movement, this disincentive to engage other movements is amplified when disenfranchised demographics are stereotyped as antagonistic to other animals, or, when the interests of nonhuman animals are thought to be sidelined by the “distractions” of racism, sexism, and so on. as organizations professionalize, they also moderate and deradicalize their tactics and ideology [ ]. although it is a rational maneuver needed to access a larger pool of resources, this tactic comes at a cost. consider the feminist movement. dealt a serious blow following trump’s election, it was forced to take a hard look at the role identity politics played in repertoires and resonance. a writer for the new york times wisely observed that trump’s win on a platform of blatant misogyny, “[ . . . ] burst the bubble of cheery pop feminism, which had achieved its huge popularity at the expense of class consciousness and racial solidarity” [ ]. by appealing to the largest possible audience with a depreciated message, a movement risks trading in cultural currency for meaningful social change. for the american veganism, “cheery pop veganism” that lacks a critical engagement with intersections of race, class, and gender could find similar barriers to social justice. difficult though it may be, the effort invested in the construction of an intersectional vision is worthwhile, as alliance-building is critical for the success of social movements. well-allied movements experience and increase in protest, and the probability that they will create coalitions in the future is heightened [ ]. in a study of successful coalition building between movements engaging with environmentalism and peace, beamish and luebbers [ ] note that movements were able to overcome their positional variances regarding race, class, and so on by affirming one another’s interests, practicing reflexivity, and sharing tasks. researchers indicate that the american vegan movement is lacking in these abilities [ , ]. this deficiency could spur from the historical race and class privilege that is enjoyed by most vegan activists, which discourages their ability to identify positional variances and how to overcome them in a fair manner. while this study does not test this historical association, it does contribute findings from a survey of current vegan political attitudes and their perceptions of other social justice matters. as such, it can be ascertained as to whether or not fertile ground exists for future alliance making, and where trump-era veganism can be placed in the historical trajectory of the movement. . methodology . . sample are american vegans of the “nonhumans first” persuasion, or are they committed to intersectional connection? internet surveys were disseminated to ascertain the political attitudes societies , , of of current vegans given recent conservative trends in american politics and identity tensions erupting within the american vegan movement. veganism has many meanings and associations. it can refer to one’s diet, political philosophy, or a combination of the two. for instance, some identify as vegan because they have eliminated animal products from their diet for health or aesthetic reasons, while others identify as vegan because they are concerned about the disenfranchisement of nonhuman animals and avoid animal products of all kinds, including animal-based clothing and entertainment. some may or may not concern themselves with nonhuman animals, but they nonetheless understand their abstention from animal-based foods to be political in that it resists systemic racism, colonialism, or sexism. to account for this variation, vegans were asked to self-identify. participants must have been vegan for at least six months, be of adult age, and have resided in the united states for at least one year (citizenship was not questioned). . . design the survey asked participants to report their length of time as a vegan, their primary motivation for remaining vegan, and the strongest influence in motivating them to go vegan (supplementary materials file s ). basic demographic information was requested, such as gender, race, age, and state of residence. participants were asked to report their political affiliation, their presidential voting behavior, their level of activism and political engagement, and their affective response to donald trump’s election. respondents were also asked to rate their involvement with other social movements that share the arena with the vegan movement, such as the black lives matter movement and feminism. they were asked to rate how relevant these competing movements are to the vegan project and they were provided a series of questions intended to measure comfort level with diversity in the vegan movement. likewise, participants were asked to rate their level of contact with minority groups and people who differed from themselves, and how comfortable they would be with these people sharing the movement space. this electronic survey that took between and min to complete was created using qualtrics. responses were collected between march and april . the survey was advertised through various vegan facebook groups and facebook pages, starting with my own personal author account and vegan feminist network. it was also shared through h-animal (an academic listserv hosted by h-net) and the american sociological association’s animals & society section listserv. recipients were asked to share among their networks. this study is restricted to vegans with internet access, but, because vegans are a rather small and dispersed group in the population, convenience sampling of this kind was necessitated. another limitation is that, in my attention to attitudes about minorities, i failed to ask respondents to report their experiences with whites, heterosexuals, able-bodied persons, or other dominant groups. in doing so, i effectively normalized the dominance of privileged groups in vegan spaces. some respondents also expressed their dissatisfaction that their favorite social movements were not listed in the survey, although an “other” option was provided with an opportunity to fill-in-the-blank. . results . . demographics three hundred and sixty-four persons responded to the survey, of whom identified as a vegan who had resided in america for at least one year and were thus qualified to participate. half of respondents ( %) were long term vegans of five years or more, while % were vegan between one-five years and % were new vegans of less than one year. eighty-two percent indicated that nonhuman animal rights/welfare was the primary motivator for their veganism, while % indicated environmental concerns and % indicated personal health. there were a number of influences that inspired the respondents to become vegan. approximately one in four indicated that they figured it out on their own, while about a fifth indicated the influence of a friend or family member. societies , , of vegan documentaries and the efforts of nonhuman animal rights organizations or social media celebrities were also relatively influential. only % of the respondents chose to disclose their gender, and % of these identified as female, while % identified as male and % identified as nonbinary. sixty-five percent identified as heterosexual, % identified as bisexual, % identified as homosexual, and % identified as queer or another non-heterosexual identity. seventy-nine percent identified as white, while % identified as asian, % identified as mixed, % identified as latinx, . % identified as black, and % identified as native american. nine out of ten respondents identified as able-bodied. the largest religious identity was atheist and agnostic ( %), followed by christian ( %), and jewish ( %). the remaining % indicated “other”, most of which were variations of spiritualism. respondents were skewed younger, with % between the ages of and , % between and , % between and , and % between and . respondents were geographically dispersed, although half of the respondents resided in california, new jersey, and new york. about half were also urban-dwelling, while % were suburban, and % were rural. income was well distributed with % living in a household with an income of less than $ , , % between $ , and $ , , % between $ , and $ , , % between $ , and $ , , and % over $ , . . . political identity almost half ( %) of respondents identified as democrat, while . % identified as green, and just . % identified as republican. independents ( %), socialists ( . %), anarchists ( . %), and progressives ( . %) were also represented, however % of respondents reported having no party identification at all. sixty-five percent voted clinton in the election, % voted trump, % voted stein, and % did not vote at all due to abstention or eligibility restrictions. eighty-five percent reported that they considered themselves to be politically engaged, while % indicated that they considered themselves an activist. ninety-one percent reported feeling worried that social problems will increase with the election of trump, while % were hopeful that problems would decrease with the election of trump and . % were unsure. over % of respondents agreed with trump’s campaign promise to put “america first”, % were neutral, and % disagreed. length of time as a vegan was correlated with support of trump; % of those who had been vegan for less than a year indicated that they either agreed with or were neutral about trump’s campaign promise, when compared to just % of those who were vegan for more than five years (supplementary materials table s ). the pearson chi-square was . with a p value of . , demonstrating a modest strength in the relationship between length of time as a vegan and support for trump. sixteen percent of those who went vegan for reasons of personal health thought that social problems would decrease with trump’s election or were neutral, as compared to just % of ethics-motivated vegans and % of environmentally motivated vegans (supplementary materials table s ). likewise, % of health-motivated vegans agreed with or were neutral about trump’s campaign promise to put “america first”, as compared to % of ethics-motivated and % of environmentally motivated vegans (supplementary materials table s ). recall, however, that ethical vegans composed the majority of respondents, meaning that the pools of health and environmental vegans were much smaller and less generalizable. this is also the case with rural respondents. few ( %) identified as rural inhabitants, but % of them were neutral or hopeful about trump’s election, when compared to just % of urban dwellers. subsequently, the pearson chi-square scores for these relationships were weak. gender mattered, however. the pearson chi-square for gender by feelings about the election was . with p value of . , demonstrating a modest relationship between gender and support for trump (supplementary materials table s ). the same result surfaced when comparing sexuality by feelings about the election. societies , , of . . intersectional awareness and diversity about three in four respondents identified as an activist, and this was not a significant predictor of attitudes about the election. only % reported that they did not participate in social movements other than veganism. twenty-two percent reported involvement in disability rights, % in homelessness advocacy, % in fat acceptance/body positivity, % in prison abolition, % in labor rights, % in indigenous rights, % in black lives matter, % in lgbtq+ rights, % in feminism, and % in environmentalism. in addition, respondents indicated involvement with several other racial advocacy efforts, as well as education and food security. when controlled for political attitudes, those who were hopeful, unsure, or unopinionated about trump’s win were less involved, with an average involvement with . other movements. those who were worried about trump’s election averaged involvement with . other movements. however, an independent t-test presented a t score of . and a p value of . , suggesting that the relationship between feelings about trump’s election and social movement involvement was not a significant one (supplementary materials table s ). involvement was only slightly higher for respondents who indicated that they supported trump’s “america first” campaign or were unsure or unopinionated. these individuals were involved with an average of . other movements. those who disagreed with trump’s campaign, however, were involved with . other movements. again, an independent t-test did not find significance. respondents reported an average amount of contact with minorities, although they reported slightly more contact with lgbtq+ and lower income people, and slightly less contact with disabled persons. most reported much higher levels of comfort when asked about how they would feel about sharing space at a vegan social or political event with a person or persons from an oppressed group. when asked if they feel awkward in vegan spaces when in proximity with people from different backgrounds, the response averaged just (on a scale of to ), indicating little awkwardness. regarding their comfort level with sharing a vegan space with someone with a political position different than their own, respondents indicated considerable discomfort with an average of . when controlled for political party affiliation, democrats averaged slightly lower in comfort level that other affiliations (including those who claimed no affiliation) at . . respondents indicated a score of about on a scale of to in their opinion that black lives matter, prison abolition, indigenous rights, lgbtq+ rights, body positivity, disability rights, housing rights, and labor rights were relevant to veganism. religious advocacy was indicated as less relevant, while feminism was considered more relevant. environmentalism scored highest with an average . out of in perceived relevancy to veganism. respondents indicated low levels of belief that the vegan movement adequately addresses issues of ageism, ableism, racism, religious discrimination, discrimination based on political affiliation, and classism, but believed there to be average attention given to sexism and heterosexism. composite variables were created for questions relating to attitudes and actions that are related to diversity, and reliability was strong. the cronbach’s alpha statistic testing reliability for the measure of contact with minorities was . . for comfort with minorities, it was . . for belief that the vegan movement effectively handles diversity issues, it was . . finally, the cronbach’s alpha statistic for questions relating to how relevant other movements are to veganism was . . respondents averaged a response of just out of in belief that the vegan movement is dedicated to fostering diversity, dropping to . out of when controlled for race as racial minorities were less confident. when asked if the vegan movement has a climate that feels welcoming to them, respondents averaged . , but this dropped to when controlled for gender and . when controlled for race. when asked if they felt comfortable discussing diversity in the movement, the average was also . , indicating relative comfort. this indicator was not significantly impacted by race or gender. perceived political intelligence was high. respondents averaged a score of when asked if they felt informed about inequalities impacting humans, and was also the average indication for the belief that veganism should be involved with these inequalities (race and gender did not significantly impact this response). when asked if the vegan movement should put nonhumans first, the average score was . , and was not significantly impacted societies , , of by race or gender. this suggests that vegan activists are interested in an intersectional approach that addresses human inequalities, but perhaps not at the expense of nonhuman animals. in the question that recorded participant involvement in other social movements, many respondents utilized the “other” box to list “animal rights” even though the survey clearly presumed their veganism and the question specifically asked them to identify other movements. this may indicate a resistance to discussing social justice efforts in vegan spaces without centering nonhuman animals. while a cross tab analysis (supplementary materials table s ) found that % of those who agreed with trump’s america first campaign also agreed with putting nonhumans first, % of those who agreed with trump’s america first campaign did not agree with putting nonhumans first, indicating the relationship between the two was not significant. . discussion this study constructs an identify profile of the american vegan movement, which finds them to be an extremely liberal political group, with most turning to veganism for ethical reasons, identifying as atheist, voting left, and supporting diversity. these results support previous research that finds vegans to be left-leaning [ ] and concerned about equality and social justice [ ]. they also support observations that political ideology and environmental concern are correlated [ ]. identity politics have the potential to compress complex intersections of race, class, gender, and other distinctions, creating an artificial either/or framework [ ], but limited evidence in support of this potentiality surfaced in the survey. vegan intersectionalists are correct in their observation that patriarchal, antagonistic claimsmaking dominates nonhuman animal rights rhetoric [ , , , ], but they are incorrect to presume that the loudest opinions are necessarily the most common ones. fears that the identity politics that facilitated trump’s exclusionary agenda may be represented in this movement as well were weakly supported. to the contrary, the results demonstrate that vegan activists are highly involved activists, with most indicating participation in multiple other social movements. this counters the stereotype that vegans only care about nonhuman animals and neglect human issues. anti-intersectional perspectives in the american vegan movement are truly marginal, as american vegans define themselves as allies to many causes. francione’s [ ] accusation that intersectionality’s identity emphasis represents narcissism is ill-fitting given the high levels of volunteerism evidenced among participants. in an attitude survey of nonhuman animal rights activists conducted twenty-five years ago, researchers found considerable affinity with environmentalists and feminists [ ], and this study supports that the affinity remains strong today. in fact, this study supports an intersectional awareness that mirrors anti-speciesism activism of the th century. rothwell and diego-rosell [ ] find support for trumpian politics rooted not in poverty or working-class status, per se, but more specifically in racial isolation, low social capital, and low opportunities for social mobility. american vegans may experience racial isolation, but most do come from relatively privileged backgrounds, and, most importantly, they are usually well educated. gusterson [ ] identifies education as a key source of political disparity, with those lacking higher education more likely to be alienated in an increasingly service-oriented economy. education is also linked with greater support for liberal values. it is likely that, for vegans, education is creating a buffer to trumpian conservatism. another reflection of this educational correlation is found in the high rate of atheism, a trait that is little examined in previous attitudinal research. indeed, previous research has highlighted the movement’s distrust of science given its association with vivisection [ , ], but science strongly shapes the epistemologies of atheists. that said, social desirability bias was likely an influence on data regarding personal feelings toward the importance of other social movements and diversity. this survey could have been improved by incorporating open-ended questions that depict scenarios that activists might experience in real life. examples might include, “an american animal rights organization has created a campaign against dogfighting in black communities, is this a campaign you would support? why or why not?” open ended, example-oriented questions such as these would societies , , of allow for more nuance, as these are topics that are hotly debated in the informal collaborative spaces of vegan social media. there is reason to suggest that an improved question design would be fruitful. although just of the respondents voted for trump, attitudinal questions about trump’s campaign promises and potential impact on the future showed more conservativism amidst the sample. the rhetoric of donald trump has potency for a small, but significant portion of respondents, particularly those who were short term vegans of less than one year and those who went vegan for reasons of personal health. this correlation between veganism and political leanings may indicate that vegans experience political learning as they transition. alternatively, psychological research has confirmed that conservative vegans and vegetarians who adopt a plant-based diet for purposes of personal health rather than social justice are simply more likely to recidivate [ ]. sociality also matters. if the vegan identity is tightly constructed as far left, vital vegan networks may not be open to those aligned elsewhere on the political spectrum. liberal vegans in this study, who constituted the majority of respondents, were less comfortable in interacting with persons from different political affiliations. non-liberal new vegans may find the community unwelcoming, and, if so, would find veganism difficult to maintain given the importance of networks for attracting and sustaining vegans [ , ]. . conclusions the advancement of human justice need not come at the expense of other animals, and any suggestion to the contrary risks cultivating a false dilemma. in fact, holistic logics of equality are beneficial for all marginalized groups. this study depicts an american vegan movement that understands that the struggles for human and nonhuman liberation are not in conflict. in dismantling this false dilemma, however, activists and policy makers must also be cognizant of the potential for false equivalency. oppression is intersectional, but all oppressions are not identical in design or impact. suggesting that human inequality is on par with nonhuman inequality could diminish the tremendous suffering that is unique to the nonhuman experience. likewise, pulling on human frameworks to construct a grand narrative of suffering is likely to alienate disenfranchised human groups, especially as they have historically been likened to nonhuman animals in an attempt to naturalize their disenfranchisement. “species-blind” ideologies that reduce difference (“we’re all animals”) can distort and distract. the goal of diversity in claimsmaking and institution-building is not to erase difference in a “melting pot”, but rather to respectfully acknowledge differences in access, interests, and needs. respondents in the survey seem to understand this in their reluctance to disagree with the notion of putting “nonhumans first”, as well as the ambivalence toward trump’s campaign held by a small, but notable, percentage. that said, a number of limitations must be revisited. first, the sample appears to be skewed feminist based on the convenience sampling that targeted vegan feminist network and other intersectional internet spaces. that almost half of the respondents chose not to report their gender and % identified as non-heterosexual suggests a sample that has a higher than average consciousness to identity politics and oppression. second, this study focused primarily on comfort and familiarity levels with minorities, and did not measure comfort and familiarity levels with dominant groups. furthermore, the social desirability bias is likely at work, discouraging respondents from reporting true attitudes about socially undesirable values, such as racism and sexism. online surveys are also limited in their ability to measure the depth and nuance of political attitudes. additional qualitative interviewing could prove a fruitful avenue for examining this research topic. social movement isolationism is a tactic that is just as unsustainable and unrealistic as donald trump’s “america first” nationalistic campaign, but there is only limited support for its existence in this study. social movement researchers extoll the importance of coalition-building, but they also acknowledge that it is much easier to achieve for movements with shared histories and networks [ ] that are facilitated by ideological convergence [ ]. given the vegan movement’s history of antagonism to human justice causes, this coalition-building will be a difficult but necessary goal to achieve. societies , , of as previously discussed, there is evidence that this is a process that is well underway, and the recent growth of vegan intersectionality, if nurtured, could open the door for increased cooperation. respondents in this survey, at least, report having already incorporated this goal into their daily praxis. researchers have identified that localized political threats can inspire cooperation across movements [ ], and this was certainly the case following bush’s war in iraq [ ]. could the same hold true for trump’s presidency? while trump-era conservativism may be ideologically corrosive to social movements in encouraging them to retain a single-issue focus, the national resistance to the republican agenda is also creating a point of convergence for social justice movements. future research following the completion of trump’s tenure could provide a useful point of comparison, as would research 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pp. – , isbn . © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.appet. . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	literature review 	nonhuman animal advocacy as a project of white supremacist nationalism 	vegan feminism and nonhumans first 	trump veganism 	intersectionality and movement success 	social movement structural constraints 	methodology 	sample 	design 	results 	demographics 	political identity 	intersectional awareness and diversity 	discussion 	conclusions .. equity, diversity and inclusion a call to eradicate non-inclusive terms from the life sciences abstract since the black lives matter movement rose to mainstream prominence, the academic enterprise has started recognizing the systematic racism present in science. however, there have been relatively few efforts to make sure that the language used to communicate science is inclusive. here, i quantify the number of research articles published between and that contained non-inclusive terms with racial connotations, such as “blacklist” and “whitelist”, or “master” and “slave”. this reveals that non-inclusive language is being increasingly used in the life sciences literature, and i urge the global academic community to expunge these archaic terms to make science inclusive for everyone. aziz khan* historically, many terms are associated with racial connotations. in the tech world, the words “master” and “slave” are often used to refer to types of storages, circuits, databases or code, in which the slave type is subservient to the master. other commonly used terms are “blacklist” and “whitelist” — where the blacklists are the prob- lematic entities and whitelists are the good ones (alter et al., ). these, and several other archaic and non- inclusive terms, are also widely used in scientific manuscripts (baeckens et al., ; herb- ers, ; houghton and houghton, ). in publishing, the term “blacklist” is used to filter out predatory journals and publishers from non- predatory and more trustworthy journals that are added to the “whitelist” (houghton and houghton, ; silver, ). in the life sciences, the term “blacklist” is com- monly used to represent problematic genomic regions, variations, genes, or proteins which need to be filtered out as an artifact or noise (wimberley and heber, ; maffucci et al., ; collins et al., ; wilfert et al., ). for example, the encode blacklist regions are a curated list of non-coding regions in the genome, which is used by the gene regulation community – including myself – as an essential quality filter when analyzing genomic and epige- nomic data (amemiya et al., ). the terms “master” and “slave” are also fre- quently used in molecular biology to group tran- scription factors (tfs) or genes based on their function. for example, proteins that are at the top of the regulatory hierarchy and control key biological programs, such as determining a cell’s fate, are commonly named “master regulators” or “master tfs”. while some may argue that it is acceptable to use the term “master”, the prob- lem gets worse when some researchers intro- duce "slave tfs" (ocone and sanguinetti, ). use of non-inclusive terms in life sciences literature is growing to estimate the use of the terms blacklist/white- list and master/slave, i performed searches on the open-access repository europe pmc which contains millions of biomedical research articles. a search for articles containing blacklist/whitelist returned more than , articles published in more than journals between and (figure ), with blacklist appearing more often ( , articles) than whitelist ( articles). the first use of the term “blacklist” dates back to the seventeenth century and has a long history of being used in the labor market (weir, ). however, these terms started appearing in the biomedical literature around *for correspondence: azizk@stanford.edu competing interests: the author declares that no competing interests exist. funding: see page reviewing editor: julia deathridge, elife, united kingdom copyright khan. this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license, which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited. khan. elife ; :e . doi: https://doi.org/ . /elife. of feature article http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://doi.org/ . /elife. https://creativecommons.org/ https://creativecommons.org/ https://elifesciences.org/?utm_source=pdf&utm_medium=article-pdf&utm_campaign=pdf_tracking https://elifesciences.org/?utm_source=pdf&utm_medium=article-pdf&utm_campaign=pdf_tracking http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/open_access http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/open_access the mid-nineteenth century. in , an article in the journal the hospital suggested maintaining a “whitelist” of firms that treat their employees fairly instead of a “blacklist" of firms with a bad reputation (the hospital, ). since then, the use of these non-inclusive terms has continued to grow (figure ). the terms “master” and “slave” are also widely used in the scientific literature. a search for articles with both these terms found over , research articles published in more than journals between and (figure ). similar to blacklist and whitelist, the use of mas- ter and slave is growing with time. furthermore, a search for “master tfs” or “master regulators” found more than , articles from to , with their use increasing each year (fig- ure —figure supplement ). this suggests that non-inclusive terms are becoming increasingly pervasive, and possibly the norm in the life sci- ences literature. most of the papers with non-inclusive terms were published in well-known journals, including multidisciplinary journals (such as nature, nature communications, plos one, pnas and scien- tific reports) and journals with broad scopes within the life sciences and medicine (such as bmj, cell, cell reports and elife). in addition to these multidisciplinary and broad-scope journals, the journals that used the terms "blacklist" or "whitelist" most often were bmc bioinformatics, nature genetics and genome research, and the journals that used the terms "master" and "slave" most often were sensors, optics express, scientific world journal and bmc bioin- formatics. inevitably, larger journals (such as nature communications, plos one, pnas, sci- entific reports and sensors) tended to use these terms more often than small journals with fewer publications. let’s expunge non-inclusive terms to make science inclusive for all following the black lives matter protests the sci- entific community has spoken against the sys- tematic racism in science and called for action to make science more diverse and inclusive (barber et al., ; cell editorial team, ; eisen, ; nature, ; sanford, ; stevens et al., ; taffe and gilpin, ). yet, the growing use of such non- inclusive terms in scientific literature potentially reflects a racist research space that endorses and sustains the use of these terms. the more we use this language, the more it becomes a habit, and we need to act now to avoid passing this behavior on to future generations of scientists. some tech and governmental organizations, such as google, github, the uk national cyber security center, among others seele, , are already replacing such terms that reflect a racist culture (google, ; github, ; emm- a, ; seele, ; im, ). i urge the sci- entific community (including institutions, researchers, funders, learned societies, journals and others) to follow suit, and replace the terms blacklist/whitelist with excluded/included or deny/allow lists, and to use the terms primary and secondary instead of master and slave. there are several other examples of non- inclusive terminologies that are used in the life sciences and beyond. for example, there are growing concerns over terms with racial etymol- ogy, such as “slave-making ants” — a slavery metaphor to describe ant behavior (herb- ers, ; herbers, ), or the word “noos- ing” to describe catching lizards, which reminds people of the racial lynchings of black people in the united states (cahan, ). a number of . m . m . m year published n u m b e r o f a rt ic le s w it h n o n − in c lu s iv e t e rm s t o ta l n u m b e r o f a rtic le s in e u ro p e p m c (m illio n s ) total number of articles in europe pmc (right axis) articles with terms master and slave (left axis) articles with terms blacklist or whitelist (left axis) figure . the growth of non-inclusive terms in the life sciences literature. the number of articles on europe pmc containing the terms blacklist or whitelist (blue; left axis), containing the terms master and slave (orange; left axis), and the total number of articles on europe pmc (green; right axis) between and . the online version of this article includes the following figure supplement(s) for figure : figure supplement . the number articles in the life sciences literature that just contain the term "master" or "slave". khan. elife ; :e . doi: https://doi.org/ . /elife. of feature article equity, diversity and inclusion a call to eradicate non-inclusive terms from the life sciences https://doi.org/ . /elife. plant and animal species also have non-inclusive names or are named after people who were known for their racist rhetoric (shiffman, ). recently, the racially loaded term “quantum supremacy” was introduced to represent the power of quantum computers, which is now get- ting replaced by “quantum advantage” (pala- cios-berraquero et al., ; wiesner, ). additionally, in response to recent social unrest, the academic enterprise has started renaming academic buildings, programs and prizes, and removing monuments named after people who were known for their racist comments and ideol- ogy (cahan, ). now, it is time for us to also rethink the language we use to communicate science. language matters — it shapes the way we think, see and behave. the list of non-inclusive terms in science is long and widespread across multiple disciplines. as scientists, we have a responsibility to fix the problem and to use lan- guage that is inclusive to everyone. methods the research articles with specific terms were queried through europe pmc using the europepmc r package v . (ferguson et al., ). the search query was restricted to publi- cation year between january , , to december , . preprints were excluded from the search. the query used to search articles with terms blacklist and whitelist is as follows: ((blacklist or blacklisted or “black-listed” or “black-list” or blacklisting) or (whitelist or whitelisted or “white-listed” or “white-list” or whitelisting)) and (first_pdate:[ - - to - - ]) not (src:ppr). the query used to search articles with terms master and slave is as follows: (“master” and “slave”) and (first_pdate:[ - - to - - ]) not (src:ppr). the query used to search articles with master tf(s) or master regulator(s) is as follows: ("mas- ter tfs" or "master transcription factor" or "master regulator" or "master tf") and (first_pdate:[ - - to - - ]) not (src:ppr). all the figures were created using ggplot v . . wickham, with r v . . . the figures can be reproduced using the available code in the code and data availability section (wickham, ). code and data availability the source code and data used to generate fig- ures are available on github (https://github. com/asntech/inclusive-science) and also on zen- odo (khan, ). acknowledgements the author thanks drs. roza berhanu lemma, sarvenaz sarabipour, anthony mathelier and jaime abraham castro-mondragon for their use- ful comments and suggestions. aziz khan is a computational biologist in the stanford cancer institute, school of medicine, stanford university, stanford, california, united states. he is an ambassador for asapbio and elife ambassador for - . he often tweets about research practices, preprints, reproducibility in research and edi in science from @khanaziz azizk@stanford.edu https://orcid.org/ - - - author contributions: aziz khan, conceptualization, data curation, formal analysis, visualization, writing - original draft, writing - review and editing competing interests: the author declares that no competing interests exist. received december accepted january published february funding no external funding was received for this work. additional files supplementary files . transparent reporting form data availability the source code and data used to generate figures are available on github (https://github.com/asntech/inclu- sive-science; copy archived at https://github.com/asn- tech/inclusive-science/releases/tag/v . ) and also on zenodo (https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. ). the following dataset was generated: author(s) year dataset url database and identifier aziz k http://doi.org/ . /zeno- do. zenodo, . /zenodo. references alter al, stern c, granot y, balcetis e. . the "bad is black" effect: why people believe evildoers have darker skin than do-gooders. personality & social khan. elife ; :e . doi: https://doi.org/ . /elife. of feature article equity, diversity and inclusion a call to eradicate non-inclusive terms from the life sciences https://github.com/asntech/inclusive-science https://github.com/asntech/inclusive-science https://orcid.org/ - - - https://github.com/asntech/inclusive-science https://github.com/asntech/inclusive-science https://github.com/asntech/inclusive-science/releases/tag/v . https://github.com/asntech/inclusive-science/releases/tag/v . https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. http://doi.org/ . /zenodo. http://doi.org/ . /zenodo. http://doi.org/ . /zenodo. https://doi.org/ . /elife. psychology bulletin : – . doi: https://doi. org/ . / , pmid: amemiya hm, kundaje a, boyle ap. . the encode blacklist: identification of problematic regions of the genome. scientific reports : – . doi: https://doi.org/ . /s - - -z baeckens s, blomberg sp, shine r. . inclusive science: ditch insensitive terminology. nature : . doi: https://doi.org/ . /d - - -z, pmid: barber ph, hayes tb, johnson tl, márquez-magaña l, , signatories. . systemic racism in higher education. science : – . doi: https://doi. org/ . /science.abd , pmid: cahan e. . amid protests against racism, scientists move to strip offensive names from journals, prizes, and more. science :abd . doi: https://doi. org/ . /science.abd cell editorial team. . science has a racism problem. cell : – . doi: https://doi.org/ . /j.cell. . . , pmid: collins je, white rj, staudt n, sealy im, packham i, wali n, tudor c, mazzeo c, green a, siragher e, ryder e, white jk, papatheodoru i, tang a, füllgrabe a, billis k, geyer sh, weninger wj, galli a, hemberger m, et al. . common and distinct transcriptional signatures of mammalian embryonic lethality. nature communications : . doi: https://doi.org/ . /s - - -x, pmid: eisen mb. . we need to act now. elife :e . doi: https://doi.org/ . /elife. , pmid: emma w. . terminology: it’s not black and white. national cyber security center. https://www.ncsc.gov. uk/blog-post/terminology-its-not-black-and-white [accessed january , ]. ferguson c, araújo d, faulk l, gou y, hamelers a, huang z, ide-smith m, levchenko m, marinos n, nambiar r, nassar m, parkin m, pi x, rahman f, rogers f, roochun y, saha s, selim m, shafique z, sharma s, et al. . europe pmc in . nucleic acids research :d –d . doi: https://doi. org/ . /nar/gkaa , pmid: github. . renaming the default branch from master. github. e. https://github.com/github/ renaming google. . writing inclusive documentation. google. https://developers.google.com/style/ inclusive-documentation [accessed january , ]. herbers jm. . watch your language! racially loaded metaphors in scientific research. bioscience : – . doi: https://doi.org/ . /b herbers jm. . racist words in science. bioscience : . doi: https://doi.org/ . /biosci/biaa houghton f, houghton s. . 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https://doi.org/ . /elife. wimberley ce, heber s. . peakpass: automating chip-seq blacklist creation. journal of computational biology : a journal of computational molecular cell biology. doi: https://doi.org/ . /cmb. . , pmid: khan. elife ; :e . doi: https://doi.org/ . /elife. of feature article equity, diversity and inclusion a call to eradicate non-inclusive terms from the life sciences https://doi.org/ . /cmb. . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ https://doi.org/ . /elife. veterinary record - wiley online library 	skip to main content working off-campus? learn about our remote access options carnegie mellon university carnegie mellon university search withinthis journal all bva journals wiley online library 	search term advanced search citation search 	search term advanced search citation search 	search term advanced search citation search login / register 	journals 	veterinary record 	in practice 	veterinary record case reports 	veterinary record open 	visit bva journal list menu 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below and we will send you your username email or customer id close if the address matches an existing account you will receive an email with instructions to retrieve your username hospital staff take the knee in boston the big picture hospital staff take the knee in boston tom moberly the bmj [image: david l ryan/boston globe/getty images] members of staff kneel during a vigil on the lawn of brigham and women’s hospital in boston, massachusetts, on june as part of global black lives matter protests against racial injustice and in memory of george floyd, killed by the police in minneapolis on may. protests also took part in the uk, and a protester outside downing street demanded effective protection against covid- and highlighted the disproportionately higher mortality rate from the virus among ethnic minority groups. in a statement issued in response to the black lives matter protests, the bma said, “we stand in solidarity.” “black lives should matter to every individual and every medical professional,” the association added. “racism breeds health inequalities impacting on our patients, it adversely affects our colleagues, and at its worst it kills, with black women five times more likely to die during childbirth than white women in the uk. “these health inequalities are all too visible in the toll covid- is having on black, asian and minority ethnic communities in the uk. more than % of doctors who have died from the virus to date are from a bame background. unless the government engages in actions, not just words, the covid- pandemic will continue to disproportionately impact on bame healthcare workers and the communities they serve.” for personal use only: see rights and reprints http://www.bmj.com/permissions subscribe: http://www.bmj.com/subscribe bmj ; :m doi: . /bmj.m (published june ) page of news news o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b m j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j.m o n ju n e . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.bmj.com/permissions http://www.bmj.com/subscribe http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /bmj.m &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://www.bmj.com/ s .. the new (ab)normal in american politics michael bernhard and daniel i. o’neill american politics unbound a large part of this issue is devoted to a special section entitled “the new (ab)normal in ameri- can politics.” politics in the united states was long seen by many as highly institutionalized and stable. and the field of american politics developed a series of influential theories and an elaborate battery of methods to study that normalcy. from this perspective, american politics was not unlike that of many other advanced industrial countries in the immediate postwar period. the period from approximately to , dubbed les trente glorieuses (the glorious thirty) by the french economist jean fourastié, was one of unprecedented growth and increasing political inclusion in the west. the prosperity of these years was in no small measure due to the willingness of the united states to establish and support a global liberal order, something it had failed to do in the interwar period. both thomas piketty and barry eichengreen have argued that this thirty year period was quite exceptional in terms of economic performance. after the severe contraction and slow recovery associated with the great depression, and the devastation caused by the second world war, recovery was followed by a period of robust growth where sustained per capita growth rates of four percent per year were not unusual. as we know from the experience of the developing world, periods of expansive economic growth provide new opportunities to incorpo- rate previously excluded socio-economic groups, or as the school of rational distributionists has put it: democracy becomes more likely as the bargaining space between actors with conflicting interests narrows due to increased wealth. sheri berman has argued that the unprecedented prosperity of this period was the thing that allowed democracy to firmly establish itself in continental europe by enabling the building of more expansive welfare states and finally overcoming deeply antagonistic class divisions. during the same period, the united states also benefitted from expansive growth, a more generous welfare state, and an ideological consensus among elites where it was relatively easy to accommodate the conflict- ing goals of established contending interests. such an establishment consensus initially led some observers to declare the “end of ideology” in america. the critics, however, were quick to point out that the american system certainly privileged the organized over individuals, and favored big business in ways that allowed it to circumvent polyarchic controls in defense of their inter- ests. moreover, and even despite the bias towards the wealthy and against african americans, other ethnic outsiders, lgbtq citizens, and women, late in this period of prosperity new social movements representing formerly excluded groups emerged and fought for their place at the table as free and equal citizens. the struggles in the s over civil rights, women’s rights, and in opposition to the war in vietnam challenged the status quo. they also revealed the extent to which “ascriptive americanism” based on race, gender, and ethnic hierarchies has been a defining feature of the country since its inception. from this standpoint, “liberal democracy” in america looked far less like the historical inevitability depicted by louis hartz, and far more like an uncertain and incomplete project born of battles between multiple competing traditions in american political thought. ultimately, these struggles transformed but did not overturn the system. against this backdrop, sustained expansion came abruptly to a halt in the s, precipitated by oil shocks triggered by another arab-israeli war ( ) and the iranian revolution ( ). while there is debate over the extent to which the slowdown was caused by petroleum prices, it was at least exacerbated by the disruption in energy supplies. western prosperity and its associated politics were in part predicated on a plentiful and cheap supply of raw materials including petroleum, and the global increase in commodity prices that followed required extensive adaptation to a new reality in which cost push inflation diminished effective demand, and coincided with stagnation in productivity. since the s, western economic growth has reverted to the slower pace expected in developed economies, to around one to two percent a year. with slow growth, distributional politics in america has become a zero-sum game, and our ability to compromise has been curtailed by the ideological re- alignment of our party system following the consolidation doi: . /s © american political science association june | vol. /no. from the editors https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s &domain=pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core of electoral hegemony in the south by the republicans since . while the tools and methods developed by americanists to analyze our politics have proved robust, the theoretical assumptions that underlie our understanding of american politics have changed. if we ever could, we can certainly no longer assume compromise, expansive eco- nomic growth, centripetal competition and its moderating effects, the desire for greater political inclusion, and strongly institutionalized norms and practices. instead, american politics has grown more contentious, its rhetoric more confrontational, and american society more compartmen- talized and polarized. the notion that america is the leading democracy either in a global politics sense, as outlined in david lake’s presidential address this year, or in terms of its domestic democratic performance, are far from evident at this point. and this all seems to be accelerating since the onset of the great recession of . we raise these developments, not because as a compar- ativist and a theorist, we want to chastise our americanist colleagues, but instead to celebrate how the field has responded to these challenges. the field of american politics has become all the more exciting because a changing landscape unveils new problems, new research questions, and innovative theory and methods to cope with that changed environment. in reading a large number of submissions in american politics, it strikes us that the subfield is in a highly innovative phase. it also seems quite open to influence from other subfields which have confronted domestic political environments of this sort, particularly comparative politics. the articles that constitute “the new (ab)normal in american politics” are illustrative of the flourishing of the subfield of american politics in the face of our new political reality. the first two articles explore these themes through the prism of the controversies surrounding the affordable care act (aca), the signature achievement of the obama presidency, now under attack by the unified executive and legislative power of the republicans. jan leighley and jennifer oser assess the relative effects of popular mobilization and unequal material resources on political outcomes. the takeaway of “representation in an era of political and economic inequality: how and when citizen engagement matters” is that citizens with fewer resources can still effectively influence their representatives through political engagement outside the electoral arena. lawrence jacobs and suzanne mettler investigate the degree to which schattschneider’s observation “that a new policy creates a new politics” holds today. using public opinion data on responses to aca, in “when and how new policy creates new politics: examining the feed- back effects of the affordable care act on public opinion,” they examine what explains the degree of political feedback generated by policy change, as well as the nature of that change. they highlight how a range of factors, including partisanship, trust, policy design, and new burdens, mediate and shape feedback effects. in the back half of the journal, scott greer also considers a number of issues surrounding the aca in his review essay of three recent books on the american healthcare system in “the politics of bad policy in the united states.” alexander hertel-fernandez also explores policy feed- back in “policy feedback as political weapon: conserva- tive advocacy and the demobilization of the public sector labor movement.” in his account new policies are designed not only to enhance the position of supporters, but to also deny resources and support to disarm one’s opponents. he explores this by looking at new state-level legislation on public service unions and shows that concerted action by conservative policy networks has diminished union revenue and membership. in this sense policy becomes more than an approach to solving prob- lems but also a means to solidify the hold on power of the policymakers. margaret weir and jessica schirmer explore the bi- furcation of the american welfare regime in “america’s two worlds of welfare: subnational institutions and social assistance in metropolitan america.” they show that the delegation of welfare functions by the federal government to the states has led to two different welfare state systems—a civic-public model which is more prom- inent in the cities of the northeast and the midwest and a religious-private model in the south and mountain west. given the shift of population to the latter two areas, the prospects for the poor in the contemporary era are not auspicious. in “black lives matter: evidence that police-caused deaths predict protest activity,” vanessa williamson, kris-stella trump, and katherine levine einstein return to the theme of the carceral state and its impact on contentious politics. they find that the activism of black lives matter is a product of local conditions, specifically that the protest movement emerged in – in areas where more african americans had been killed previously by the police. this shows that harsher forms of repression by the carceral state do not discourage civic participation, but in contrast, provoke intense defensive mobilization. black lives matter is also taken up in a review essay by derrick darby, “democracy born of struggle.” darby reviews christo- pher lebron’s new book on the movement, together with books by alex zamalin on african american political thought, and sharon stanley on racial integra- tion in the united states. finally, in a reflection on “racial identity and voting: conceptualizing white identity in spatial terms” nich- olas weller and jane june examine the role of race in voting choices using a rational choice framework. in conceiving of whiteness as a form of privilege that conveys a utility payoff in the preferences of some voters, they frame the choice to vote against their redistributive perspectives on politics from the editors | the new (ab)normal in american politics https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core interests in a two-good dimensional space. its novelty lies in not seeing racial voting as “irrational” or “deeply cultural” by taking seriously the assertion that whiteness is a real privilege in a society with a long history of racism. it holds out the prospect of explaining the paradox of why some voters choose to vote against their material interests under such circumstances. other content in this issue finally, nicolas jabko and adam sheingate add to the institutionalist literature by probing the ability of dys- functional institutions to persist in “practices of dynamic order.” aligning themselves with the neo-pragmatic school of institutionalists they focus on micro- adjustments to rules and procedures by actors in power in order to stabilize order in times of crisis. the logic of regenerating order is illustrated by a discussion of the eurozone crisis and the precariousness of state authority in the united states as reflected in the uprising in baltimore in april–may following the death of freddie grey. transparency perspectives was one of the major journals not to sign the journal editors’ transparency statement (jets). while the former editor and the board were highly supportive of research transparency and replicability, there was extensive concern over whether dart and jets had a one-size-fits- all notion of research and how to implement transparency. the present editorial staff shares these concerns, and is interested in promoting data transparency and the repli- cability of work where it is appropriate. to this end, the perspectives on politics dataverse came on line for the articles publish in issue ( ). the authors of quantitative work are now posting replication files there. with regards to qualitative work we are being more cautious in terms of implementing universal standards for data and inferential transparency. we are actively working with individual scholars to cultivate new ways of doing this, and are encouraging them to use online appendices, so as not to crowd out substantive content in the body of the journal itself. there are qualitative articles in the pipeline that will make use of the syracuse qualitative data repository and we are exploring possibilities regarding active citation. we are also in the process of studying the replication and transparency statements of other major journals so as to update the online “statement on scholarly recogni- tion” for perspectives. in coming issues we will also be publishing a series of reflections on transparency exploring the diverse perspectives raised in the qualitative trans- parency deliberations. final note perspectives activated publons last month. for those un- aware, it is an app embedded in editorial manager that allows our manuscript reviewers to take credit for their reports and keep an ongoing record of their service to the profession in this sphere. perspectives, as a general interest journal, relies heavily on the knowledge of its reviewers. we use a minimum of four readers on the first review. the quality of our readers’ reports are generally high, leading to improvements in the innovativeness and clarity of our articles. we realize that providing a public record of the service of reviewers is small compensation for the kind of work you do. we appreciate your centrality to the success of the journal. notes fourastié . tooze . piketty , ; eichengreen , – . o’donnell , . przeworski , . berman , – . lowi , – . bell . schattschneider , . lindblom , – . inglehardt , . smith . eichengreen , . barro , – . black and black , – . lake . azpuro and hall . curiously, the authors of this piece did not consult the democracy scores of the varieties of democracy project, which has consistently rated american democracy as far from exemplary. https://www.qualtd.net/#. https://publons.com/home/. references azpuro, dinorah and michael hall. . “yes, our ‘flawed’ democracy just got downgraded. here’s why.” washington post (february , ), accessed february , . https://www.washingtonpost.com/ news/monkey-cage/wp/ / / /yes-our-flawed- democracy-just-got-downgraded-heres-why/? utm_term .a d f d. bell, daniel. . the end of ideology: on the exhaustion of political ideas in the fifties. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. black, earl and merle black. . the rise of southern republicans. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. barro, robert j. . determinants of economic growth: a cross-country empirical study. cambridge, ma: mit press. berman, sheri. . “warnings from history.” journal of democracy ( ): – . eichengreen, barry. . the european economy since : coordinated capitalism and beyond. princeton, nj: princeton university press. june | vol. /no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.qualtd.net/# https://publons.com/home/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/ / / /yes-our-flawed-democracy-just-got-downgraded-heres-why/?utm_term=.a d f d https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/ / / /yes-our-flawed-democracy-just-got-downgraded-heres-why/?utm_term=.a d f d https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/ / / /yes-our-flawed-democracy-just-got-downgraded-heres-why/?utm_term=.a d f d https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/ / / /yes-our-flawed-democracy-just-got-downgraded-heres-why/?utm_term=.a d f d https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/ / / /yes-our-flawed-democracy-just-got-downgraded-heres-why/?utm_term=.a d f d https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core fourastié, jean. . les trente glorieuses ou la révolu- tion invisible de à . paris: fayard. inglehart, ronald. . the silent revolution. princeton, nj: princeton university press. lindblom, robert. . politics and markets. new york: basic books. lake, david a. . “international legitimacy lost? rule and resistance when america is first.” perspec- tives on politics ( ): – . lowi, theodore. . the end of liberalism: the second republic of the united states. nd ed. new york: norton. o’donnell, guillermo. . modernization and bureaucratic-authoritarianism: studies in south american politics. berkeley: institute of international studies, university of california. piketty, thomas. . capital in the twenty-first century. cambridge, ma: belknap press. przeworski, adam. . “democracy as an equilibrium.” public choice ( – ): – . schattschneider, elmer eric. . the semi-sovereign people: a realist’s view of democracy in america. new york: holt, reinhardt, and winston. smith, rogers m. . “beyond tocqueville, myrdal, and hartz: the multiple traditions in america.” american political science review ( ): – . tooze, adam. . the deluge: the great war, america and the remaking of the global order. new york: penguin. perspectives on politics from the editors | the new (ab)normal in american politics https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core statement of mission and procedures perspectives on politics seeks to provide a space for broad and synthetic discussion within the political science pro- fession and between the profession and the broader schol- arly and reading publics. such discussion necessarily draws on and contributes to the scholarship published in the more specialized journals that dominate our discipline. at the same time, perspectives seeks to promote a complemen- tary form of broad public discussion and synergistic under- standing within the profession that is essential to advancing scholarship and promoting academic community. perspectives seeks to nurture a political science public sphere, publicizing important scholarly topics, ideas, and innovations, linking scholarly authors and readers, and pro- moting broad refl exive discussion among political scien- tists about the work that we do and why this work matters. perspectives publishes work in a number of formats that mirror the ways that political scientists actually write: research articles: as a top-tier journal of political sci- ence, perspectives accepts scholarly research article sub- missions and publishes the very best submissions that make it through our double-blind system of peer review and revision. the only thing that differentiates perspectives research articles from other peer-reviewed articles at top journals is that we focus our attention only on work that in some way bridges subfi eld and methodological divides, and tries to address a broad readership of political scien- tists about matters of consequence. this typically means that the excellent articles we publish have been extensively revised in sustained dialogue with the editor—me—to address not simply questions of scholarship but questions of intellectual breadth and readability. “refl ections” are more refl exive, provocative, or pro- grammatic essays that address important political science questions in interesting ways but are not necessarily as systematic and focused as research articles. these essays often originate as research article submissions, though sometimes they derive from proposals developed in con- sultation with the editor in chief. unlike research articles, these essays are not evaluated according to a strict, double- blind peer review process. but they are typically vetted informally with editorial board members or other col- leagues, and they are always subjected to critical assess- ment and careful line-editing by the editor and editorial staff. scholarly symposia, critical book dialogues, book review essays, and conventional book reviews are developed and commissioned by the editor in chief, based on authorial queries and ideas, editorial board suggestions, and staff conversations. everything published in perspectives is carefully vetted and edited. given our distinctive mission, we work hard to use our range of formats to organize interesting conver- sations about important issues and events, and to call atten- tion to certain broad themes beyond our profession’s normal subfi eld categories. for further details on writing formats and submission guidelines, see our website at http://www.apsanet.org/ perspectives/ https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core ebola and covid- in sierra leone: comparative lessons of epidemics for society&dagger; articles ebola and covid- in sierra leone: comparative lessons of epidemics for society† paul richards njala university, pmb freetown, sierra leone corresponding author. e-mail: paul.richards@wur.nl (received july ; accepted july ) abstract this case study focuses on two epidemic diseases in sierra leone. ebola in – drew international response, but was contained within the upper west african region. covid- reached sierra leone in april as part of a global pandemic. local social knowledge has been an important factor in shaping responses to both diseases. in the case of ebola, infection was concentrated in families, and responders needed a good knowledge of family interactional dynamics. covid- is a more public disease. responders have to assess risk factors in workplaces, markets, and places of worship. comparing and con- trasting the two cases also draws attention to different aspects of the historical context. ebola response indexes sierra leone’s history as a humanitarian project associated with the abolition of the slave trade. the pandemic challenge of covid- draws attention to sierra leone’s nodal position within a global diaspora rooted in atlantic slavery and emancipation. responders are forced to consider the ways in which the two infections articulate different aspects of calls for global social justice. keywords: black lives matter; covid- ; ebola virus disease; sierra leone; slave trade introduction epidemics are group learning experiences. responding to infection risks requires societal action as well as specialist medical intervention. the process of social mobilization to address an epidemic reveals society to itself. what has to be done, and what cannot be done, in terms of human behav- iour and interaction, in order to end infection generates reflection on cultural and historical pro- cesses through which human social cohesion has been created and sustained. controlled comparison of epidemics can be an especially insightful exercise, by throwing a spotlight on what remains consistent about human cohesion from epidemic to epidemic, and on what changes, and has to change, in response to variations in the challenge of infection. here, an attempt is made to summarize some of the social lessons to be learned from experi- ence of two historically adjacent epidemics in a single west african country – sierra leone. the two disease events are the epidemic of ebola virus disease (evd) in – and the arrival in march of the novel respiratory disease (covid- ) caused by the sars-cov- virus. evd evoked a major international humanitarian response, resonant with the country’s origins as a product of british abolitionist agency. covid- , however, places the country in a different his- torical light, emphasizing the aspect of atlantic african diaspora connections. the article is organized as follows. a short introduction describes the country as a product of the emergence of the globalized economy based on the slave trade and its aftermath. the main †the author’s work on covid- in sierra leone is part of the pandemic preparedness project and is supported by wellcome trust collaborative award no. /z/ /z. © the author(s), . published by cambridge university press. journal of global history ( ), : , – doi: . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at mailto:paul.richards@wur.nl https://doi.org/ . /s https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog?doi= . /s &domain=pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core featuresofthetwodiseasesarethencomparedandcontrasted.itisarguedthatlocalsocialknowledge isakey(andoftenneglected)factorinresponsetoepidemicdisease.evdinsierraleonecontributed to the realization of calls for a culturally well-informed epidemiology. these calls seem to have been sidelined in the global response to covid- . the article briefly discusses some reasons for an apparent retreat from an approach that served to end evd. there follows a concluding discussion of ways in which covid- has linked itself to legacies of injustice and inequality associated with atlantic commerce. this refreshed historical awareness draws attention to unresolved tensions within sierra leonean society underpinning its conflicted pandemic responses. sierra leone: an atlantic humanitarian project sierra leone is a small country on the upper west african coast, located on the ecological transi- tion from tropical forest to savanna grassland. the large natural harbour formed by the estuary of the rokel river, backed by the mountains of the sierra leonean peninsula, was an early gathering ground for atlantic maritime trade. portuguese merchants began acquiring tropical produce and slaves on the coast of sierra leone in the late fifteenth century. they were then joined in the slave trade by the english. the privateer john hawkins first shipped slaves from sierra leone (gathered ‘partly by the sword and partly by other meanes’) to the caribbean in . in the second half of the seventeenth century, an english trading monopoly, the royal african company, headed by the future king james ii, became a dominant force in the atlantic slave trade from west africa. it had small trading forts at sierra leone in the s (at tasso and bunce islands in the sierra leone river, and at york, sherbro island), but subsequently shifted its focus towards the gold coast, leaving behind on the sierra leonean coast a number of freelance traders once associated with the company, intermarried with coastal ruling families. after a brief surge in the mid eighteenth century, the slave trade from sierra leone finally declined during the american revolutionary and napoleonic wars. this was a period in which british abolitionists focused on establishing a model colony for freed slaves on the northern slopes of the peninsula mountains. english slavers with knowledge of this region, such as john newton, provided some of the evidence from which the abolitionists built their case against the atlantic slave trade. sierra leone, as a political project, dates from , and was promoted by a london-based group of abolitionists led by granville sharp. their scheme was to resettle in africa a group of former slaves offered freedom under the british flag in the american revolution, but reduced to poverty in london through lack of action by the british government. sharp’s province of freedom, on the north shore of the sierra leone peninsula struggled for survival in the napoleonic wars, was then reformed as a commercially self-supporting trading company under the direction of various british abolitionist merchant directors, and eventually became a british crown colony in . from that date a royal navy anti-slavery squadron was based at freetown to enforce the parliamentary act ending british involvement in the atlantic slave trade. thereafter, the new colony grew rapidly, largely as a result of the arrival of many ‘recaptives’ – captive west the statement comes from richard hakluyt, a younger contemporary of hawkins, who documented the activities of the english oceanic voyagers in the tudor era. clements markham, hakluyt’s nineteenth-century editor, realizing the momentous significance of hawkins’ first voyage to sierra leone, added that ‘it is not, therefore, john hawkins alone who can justly be blamed for the slave trade, but the whole english people during years, who must all divide the blame with him.’ clements markham, ed., the hawkins’ voyages during the reigns of henry viii, queen elizabeth, and james i (london: for the hakluyt society, ), v and . john newton, ‘thoughts upon the african slave trade’, , available at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/ thoughts_upon_the_african_slave_trade. for an eyewitness report of the slave trade in the vicinity of sierra leone in the s, see john matthews, a voyage to the river sierra leone, on the coast of africa (london: b. white and sons, ). the origins of the settlement have accrued a number of myths, carefully dispelled in stephen j. braidwood, black poor and white philanthropists: london’s blacks and the foundation of the sierra leone settlement – (liverpool: liverpool university press, ). paul richards https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/thoughts_upon_the_african_slave_trade https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/thoughts_upon_the_african_slave_trade https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core africans released from slaving ships apprehended on the high seas and resettled in villages adjacent to freetown. as british naval power expanded through the nineteenth century, driven both by atlantic trade and by competition for african territory, the strategic value of freetown’s vast natural harbour increased. fearing french colonial expansion, the british colony annexed adjacent interior regions in , ending local political and economic rivalries seen as a threat to supply lines to freetown after the closing of the last coastal slaving ports south of freetown in the s. from a -year perspective of british involvement, sierra leone can be seen as a long-term project to extend mercantilist trading preferences in west africa begun by the royal african company in the seventeenth century, and extensively remoulded by abolitionist concerns at the beginning of the nineteenth century. these at times uncomfortably intertwined mercantilist and humanitarian elements continued to shape the country through colonial occupation and into the post-colonial period. economic failure in independent sierra leone in the s led to a trou- blesome rebellion referencing some of the injustices associated with the era of the slave trade. a doctrine of armed humanitarian intervention espoused in britain by the blair government brought uk armed forces to sierra leone in to end the rebel war. in the subsequent uneasy peace, little was done to resolve underlying long-term social grievances. medical units of the british army were back in sierra leone in to help address a new international threat: an outbreak of deadly evd, surging out of control in guinea, liberia, and sierra leone. british-sponsored humanitarianism returned to the shores of the rokel in full force, notwithstanding widespread local scepticism about the real motivations for the interna- tional response, expressed via stories of body-snatchers and vampirism rooted in kidnapping, once a major means of acquiring slaves. from april the country became affected by the global pandemic of sars-cov- – a virus causing a life-threatening lung disease, covid- . the flood of international help seen with evd was not renewed. every country was busy tackling its own outbreak, and sierra leone ceased to be a focus of british humanitarianism. a case of police violence in the us against an african american at the height of a new pandemic coincided with a growing realization that covid- attacked ‘minority’ groups with more than average severity, and thus served to intensify inter- national concern about historical injustices associated with the atlantic slave trade. unresolved intercommunal concerns over local legacies of slavery and the slave trade have made an uncom- fortable reappearance in sierra leone, seemingly affecting the way that the pandemic is viewed locally. episodes of infectious disease articulate local and global histories in complex ways. epidemics and pandemics: how ebola and covid- compare how and why evd reached upper west africa in is still unclear. up until that point there had been about twenty outbreaks of the zaire species of the virus in central africa, mainly associ- ated with the congolian forests. ebola virus affects primates, but bats are frequently cited as the main vector. fruit bats carry the virus without ill-effect, and form networks along the forest mar- gins. the index case in south-eastern guinea in december was a toddler from meliandou, a village located close to the liberian and sierra leonean borders. it is claimed that the child played in or near a bat-infested tree. the story is disputed. up until the moment that the guinean john peterson, province of freedom: a history of sierra leone – (london: faber and faber, ). john d. hargreaves, prelude to the partition of west africa (london: macmillan, ). paul richards, fighting for the rain forest: war, you and resources in sierra leone (oxford: james currey, ); krijn peters, war and the crisis of youth in sierra leone (cambridge: cambridge university press, ). paul richards, ebola: how a people’s science helped end an epidemic (london: zed books, ), p. . b. s. hewlett and b. l. hewlett, ebola, culture, and politics: the anthropology of an emerging disease (belmont, ca: thomson wadsworth, ). james fairhead and dominique millimouno, ‘ebola in meliandou: tropes of “sustainability” at ground zero’, in the anthropology of sustainability, ed. marc brightman and jerome lewis (new york: palgrave macmillan, ), – . journal of global history https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core government reported ebola to the world health organization, in december , the presence of the virus in the forests of upper west africa had not been suspected. the outbreak quickly spread across international borders to both liberia and sierra leone. these borders divide kissi commu- nities, and there are many crossing points where interrelated people pass back and forth on a daily basis without control. the first cases of ebola in sierra leone were linked to the activities of a herbalist and a nurse treating patients from guinea. tracing cases as they spread through eastern and central sierra leone suggested that the disease moved along main road networks and branched off into the forested interior, not the other way round, implying that infection was human-to-human. molecular analysis of early cases in the country confirmed human transmis- sion as the main or sole factor in spread. bats and hunting were out of the picture, though it took international responders a long time to adjust their health messages. evd causes vomiting, diarrhoea, fever (sweating), and sometimes bleeding. infection is caused by contact with the body fluids of a sick person. nursing the patient and (in case of death) cleaning the corpse for burial are major sources of infection. international responders campaigned against home care and local burial practices, but failed to understand why family involvement in nursing and burial could not be so easily abandoned, despite the dangers. better understanding required detailed social and cultural knowledge, and it took international responders some time to acquire that knowledge. local knowledge was provided by local groups of volunteers, who orga- nized case finding, contact tracing, and quarantine as an extension of community civil defence obligations familiar from the civil war. this more secure knowledge of where the virus was to be found, plus the introduction of bio-secure case handling by international responders, then began to reduce the reproduction number for the disease (r) from an estimated . to below . , and the epidemic declined. community capacity for evd control remains relevant for handling the new threat of covid- , but the two diseases are different, and new knowledge of infection control needs to be acquired. covid- is a respiratory disease, with the virus concentrated in the upper respi- ratory tract where it is expelled by coughing, shouting, singing, or even heavy breathing. infection results from contacting the virus in the air or through touching contaminated surfaces. information that the disease was airborne and had deadly outcomes (often derived via tv news film of chaos and death in well-equipped hospitals in china, europe, and north america) brought about a rapid realization in sierra leone that more was needed than a re-run of ebola control. in two villages (one severely affected by evd and one where community civil defence had prevented infection), a game designed to assess how people rated the risks associated with evd and covid- produced the surprising finding that a majority in both communities rated covid- as the more threatening scenario. this was unexpected, since the death rate is about % for covid- but % for evd. the result is perhaps best explained by fear of the unknown. people had controlled evd by reducing contact with patients and minimizing burial risks. protection from an airborne disease seemed more difficult, since breathing is unavoidable. paul richards et al., ‘social pathways for ebola virus disease in rural sierra leone, and some implications for containment’, plos neglected tropical diseases , no. ( ) https://doi.org/ . /journal.pntd. . s. k. gire et al., ‘genomic surveillance elucidates ebola virus origin and transmission during the outbreak’, science , no. ( ): – ; t. stadler, d. kühnert, d. a. rasmussen, and l. du plessis, ‘insights into the early epidemic spread of ebola in sierra leone provided by viral sequence data’, plos currents outbreaks, october , https://doi.org/ . /currents.outbreaks. bc d ecee bbd ec ba a f. richards, ebola, esp. chap. . richards, ebola, esp. chap. . for an account of the origins of ‘hunter’ civil defence in the civil war in sierra leone, see patrick k. muana, ‘the kamajoi militia: civil war, internal displacement and the politics of counter-insurgency’, africa development , nos. – ( ): – . foday kamara, esther mokuwa, and paul richards, ‘how villagers in central sierra leone understand infection risks under threat of covid- ’, plos one , no. ( ), https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. . paul richards https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://doi.org/ . /journal.pntd. https://doi.org/ . /currents.outbreaks. bc d ecee bbd ec ba a f https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core there was also scepticism about the protective value of social distancing, given the crowded character of homes and public places in sierra leone. the first cases of covid- arrived from europe in late march , after which the country went into lockdown, closing its international borders, and greatly restricting movement between the fourteen districts into which it is divided. the restrictions on inter-district movement were more severe than those imposed during the evd crisis. once more, schools and country markets (though, oddly, not the more crowded and enclosed urban markets) were closed, and church and mosque services suspended. inter-district lockdown had severe immediate consequences (for example, in terms of rapidly deteriorating household food security) and was abandoned by the end of june . restrictions on schools and religious services have also now been eased. undoubtedly, early lockdown helped to slow the spread. some cases occurred in the capital, freetown, but the disease did not advanced through the rest of the country as fast as some antici- pated. covid- transmits more effectively indoors than in the open air, and the extent to which life in sierra leone is lived out of doors may have had an effect in reducing spread. the disease arrived in the hottest part of the dry season, when most people would in any case seek shady, breezy outdoor places as much as possible, whether for work or for leisure. recent evidence confirms that strong sunlight quickly kills the virus out of doors. factories and other enclosed working spaces with large numbers of crowded employees, and care homes for the elderly – major sources of infection in europe and north america – are uncommon. it remains to be seen how the epidemic will develop. reversing out of lockdown will not be easy. although the country has good experience of case finding, contact tracing, and quarantine from evd, it lacks the localized testing capacity to monitor and crack down on local outbreaks of covid- . covid- presents particular diagnostic challenges, since infection is spread by pre- symptomatic and asymptomatic cases. with evd, there was a three-day interval before a severely ill patient developed the highly infectious ‘wet’ symptoms. case numbers were never very high, though the prognosis for those unlucky enough to catch the disease was very poor. localization of initial case handling and better community liaison reduced reporting and test turnaround times. none of this applies to covid- . there may eventually be many more cases of covid- than there were of evd, and available test capacity may be swamped. covid- cases infect others before they know they are ill. the laboratory capacity for rapid turnaround of tests is not available. little was done by aid donors after the epidemic of evd to consolidate in-country laboratory testing capacities. equipment was sometimes supplied, but training and payment of technicians, especially in provincial locations, was apparently beyond the capacity of governments hovering on the brink of post-ebola bankruptcy to sustain. post-war and evd humanitarian supply lines are now greatly attenuated. in a pandemic, every country has the disease, and international help and mutuality are at a premium, as demonstrated by unseemly wrangling over shipments of scarce resources such as test reagents and supplies of personal protective equipment. african countries are now having to face up to the need to develop their own responses to the pandemic. some challenges are country- and location-specific, and international advice and equipment are not always relevant. local research and innovation are as important as imported solutions. for sierra leone, earlier lessons concerning social responses to evd provide a useful starting point, but these responses now need to be reworked to fit the challenge of covid- . m. schuit et al., ‘airborne sars-cov- is rapidly inactivated by simulated sunlight’, journal of infectious diseases , no. ( ): – , https://doi.org/ . /infdis/jiaa . the dutch government, for example, paid for a new laboratory with capacity to test for ebola at njala university, and supported the training of a group of technicians in ghana, to replace a pair of mobile evd laboratories introduced at the height of the epidemic. the njala one health laboratory still functions but has not so far been mobilized for covid- . journal of global history https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://doi.org/ . /infdis/jiaa https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core the role of local social knowledge in ebola and covid- control covid- is a new disease, and science is regarded worldwide as an important tool for coping with and adaptation to new diseases. african countries lag in science and technology-based health systems. as one of the world’s poorest countries, sierra leone is thought to be at a disadvantage in addressing epidemic diseases because the technical capacities of its health system are deemed to be exceptionally weak. but this assumption was challenged by the experience of evd, in which local social knowledge turned out to be as important as scientific and technological capacity. like covid- , evd was a new disease to sierra leone in , and one for which there were no effective treatments, but the weakness of local health systems was not the handicap at first supposed. with evd, everything had to be focused on preventing spread. the key to this was to develop an effective system for identifying and isolating cases, and tracing and quarantining contacts. this required human resources and social knowledge, a task to which sierra leoneans were well attuned. social knowledge can be defined as knowledge of the behavioural and organizational character- istics of the social group to which you belong. an example would be knowledge of how the mem- bers of a household are interrelated, and the kinds of obligations they owe to each other. in african households, this knowledge is often of considerable complexity. it requires, for example, detailed understanding of local systems of kinship categorization, such as the distinction between lineal and affinal relations, which of the people around you count as members of your family, and which are related by marriage. a further example is knowing the power structures of the community in which you reside, and which persons are entitled to exercise public authority, and whether this is a formal or informal power (for example, whether the person is a government-recognized chief or a highly respected traditional elder). much social knowledge is tacit; everybody knows it, so it is rarely openly explained. capacity to track and isolate evd cases based on local social knowledge in sierra leone can be contrasted with british experience of covid- . in the british case, reliance on human capacity was downgraded. the power of new technology was confidently announced as the inevitable solu- tion to the epidemic challenge. attempts to develop a ‘world-beating’ system of contact tracing for covid- centred on a smart phone application that would automatically record the close social contacts of persons reporting sick with the disease, so that these contacts could be advised to self- isolate. the system for smart phones to record potentially infectious contacts proved ineffective and was abandoned. security concerns could not be overcome. attention returned (far too late) to the starting point for evd in sierra leone: the mobilization of local public health teams equipped with the necessary social knowledge. one commentator summed up the british debacle in the following terms, ‘public health teams don’t need a superforecast or cutting-edge ai. they just need to know where people with infec- tions live and work and where they have been.’ from a perspective of what was learned about contact tracing for evd in sierra leone, even this statement, true though it is, needs to be taken further. contact tracers also need to know who they are dealing with in social terms, since that is highly relevant to the issue of who they are likely to interact with, and how frequently, and thus where they are likely to be found. being able to communicate in a relevant language is also of critical importance. it seems that contact tracers for covid- in the uk may not have had the relevant language skills to communicate with large numbers of older people in immigrant households. the larger lesson, then, is that the functionality of a contact tracing system depends not on whether it deploys ‘world-beating’ technology but on how capable it is at recognizing and responding to the realities of the complex social webs within which infected persons live. david mccoy, ‘countries from germany to vietnam got test and trace right, so why didn’t england?’, guardian, june , https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /jun/ /germany-vietnam-test-trace-england-coronavirus. richard vize, ‘government’s dithering risks unleashing a second covid- wave in england’, guardian, june , https://www.theguardian.com/society/ /jun/ /government-dithering-second-covid- -wave-england. paul richards https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /jun/ /germany-vietnam-test-trace-england-coronavirus https://www.theguardian.com/society/ /jun/ /government-dithering-second-covid- -wave-england https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core fitness for purpose was more readily achieved in ebola-affected sierra leone by hiring local people already equipped with relevant languages and social knowledge to do tracing on foot. some of the best results came from teams of village-based volunteers recruited by local chiefs. crucially, they knew every last corner of their area, how and where to find people according to the seasons and tasks they were likely to be engaged upon, and, most importantly, how to talk to them when found. added to that, the work was for these village volunteers more than a job. contact tracers cared about the results because they were engaged in a fight to protect their communities, lives, and livelihoods. our research team illustrated the importance of local knowledge through an accidental experi- ment. the team was carrying out a baseline household survey of a rural case-study community and wanted to collect information on the lineages from which the females in each household belonged. the information was of epidemiological significance, since at death a woman’s body belongs to her patrilineage and will be buried in her own village by her brothers and sisters and not in the village of her husband, unless a lifelong series of obligations by the husband’s family has been completed. burial was such an important factor in the spread of evd that we needed to estimate the likelihood of inter-village post-mortem body movements – something that would have been a disaster in epidemiological terms, since it would spread the disease between villages as well as between households. the field team comprised four experienced research assistants, two men and two women. as the survey forms came in, the likely accuracy of the information on family relationships was scru- tinized. all instances in which women had been assigned to their husband’s lineage were sent back for checking. local rules on incest make it impossible for a man to marry a woman from his own lineage, since she counts as his sister. mistakes (about % of the total set) had been made by only three of the four interviewers. all interviewers were well trained, but only one was a local resident. he had been a primary school teacher in the village for many years. when misreported family names were given, he had enough local social knowledge to query them on the spot. a key aspect of ebola response in sierra leone was that the family-clustered pattern of the disease first became apparent to local responders. international responders were focused on the need for large bio-secure isolation units for case handling. initially, there were no survivors, and the facilities were shunned by communities. local responders, on the other hand, recognized that evd was a family sickness, and used this awareness to argue for an enhanced role for family members. decentralized case handling was introduced and families with suspected cases approached these family-friendly localized case-handling centres more readily. testing and case-finding times fell. ‘safe burial’ (viewed initially as a scandalous dump-and-run exercise) was also rendered more acceptable through the introduction of socially distanced ritual elements in burial. together, these key changes provided a context within which the main epidemic risk factors were eventually controlled through behavioural modification. is there scope here to adapt these lessons to management of covid- ? evd and covid- transmit differently. home nursing and burials, although potential risk factors, are no longer the main activities requiring modification to increase biosafety. early in the pandemic it became apparent that covid- was a disease of congregations. the riskiest settings involved people gathered tightly packed indoors, with an abundance of loud talking or singing, and with poor ventilation. clubs, bars, choirs, sporting events, religious worship, offices, and factories all came under suspicion. the worst occasions in terms of infection risk were events that congregated large paul richards, esther mokuwa, pleun welmers, harro maat, and ulirike beisel, ‘trust, and distrust, of ebola treatment centers: a case-study from sierra leone’, plos one no. ( ), https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. . the name for ebola in mende, the main language of eastern and southern sierra leone is bonda wote (‘family turn back’). esther mokuwa and harro maat, ‘rural populations exposed to ebola virus disease respond positively to localised case handling: evidence from sierra leone’, plos neglected tropical diseases , no. ( ), https://doi.org/ . /journal. pntd. . journal of global history https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. https://doi.org/ . /journal.pntd. https://doi.org/ . /journal.pntd. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core numbers of people, allowing intense infection transmission, and then saw infected people disperse over large distances to travel home. new year festivities, winter après-ski gatherings, and carnival have all been implicated in the wide and rapid spread of covid- in china and europe in the period january–march . thus, infection risks are highly contextual: there are no après-ski parties or carnival street celebrations in sierra leone, but there are (for example) large work parties of rice planters, who will congregate closely in a small farm hut to shelter from rain or to share a midday meal. such events may be every bit as infectious as a german carnival street party. preventing them risks starvation, however. what, then, should the sierra leonean response to the new disease be? rapid lockdown of everything from international travel to education slowed initial spread but proved unsustainable. rural markets, essential to food security and supply of other everyday items, cannot be perma- nently closed, any more than school education can be halted indefinitely. more precision is there- fore required about which of a variety of typical local activities contribute to the infection rate for covid- . a key issue concerns how this information is to be gathered, and here we encounter a general problem with an evidence-based approach to epidemics. science is selectively weighted towards evidence of what is measurable, sometimes separated from consideration of what evi- dence is intrinsically important. not everything that matters can be precisely measured, however: measuring the crowding of rice planters while sharing their midday meal on a rainy day might serve as an example. for african countries like sierra leone to address a bias towards measure- ment over relevance, they will have to pay more attention to social observation and historical data, and to find ways to make the best possible inferences from ‘soft’ observations, especially in cases (such as face covering) where there is little realistic hope of more precise measurements becoming available. this is where the observational social sciences, familiar with the problem of making balanced judgements on the basis of less than ideal datasets, will have an important part to play. on the possibility of cultural epidemiology which activities should be examined and how? it is interesting, in this respect, to track an impor- tant shift towards closer observation as the evd epidemic in sierra leone unfolded. initially, a quantitative theory-driven perspective prevailed. there was much talk of getting the r number below . , and considerable debate about why this mattered. epidemic modelling was attempted, but then proved to be wildly off target because it failed to take full account of the family-based clustering involved in spread. quantitative discourse on epidemiology introduced by external responders was quickly superseded by a local discourse on the role of family factors in spreading the disease (as evidenced by the mende name for ebola – ‘family turn back’) from which social scientists, familiar with monitoring and interpreting such community debates, quickly learned. tracking the daily progress of the epidemic then became a national preoccupation. a simple dash- board provided by the national ebola response commission of daily cases by district was suffi- cient to make the situation clear to all. transmission began in the east of the country in may but ended in the first affected areas by november. this was termed ‘getting to zero’. localities that maintained themselves at zero were then designated ‘silent districts’. people strove to keep their districts or chiefdoms ‘silent’. hearts sank whenever a new case emerged after a period of silence. post-mortems were held to discover one german study shows infection risks from carnival street parties were higher than infection risks in the home. shared drinks may have been a factor. h. streeck et al., ‘infection fatality rate of sars-cov- infection in a german community with a super-spreading event’ (pre-print, ), https://doi.org/ . / . . . . models corrected for family clustering produced much better predictions: see s. scarpino et al., ‘epidemiological and viral genomic sequence analysis of the ebola outbreak reveals clustered transmission’, clinical infectious diseases , no. ( ): – . for evidence, see the exchanges archived at http://www.ebola-anthropology.net, the online discussion forum of the ebola response anthropology platform. paul richards https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://doi.org/ . / . . . http://www.ebola-anthropology.net https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core why this was the case, and passionate arguments broke out about whether cases imported from elsewhere should be counted against the local ‘clean sheet’. this meant that the population was engaged around issues conducive to ending the epidemic. but it was an engagement in which the r number and other epidemiological concepts (talk of ‘flattening curves’, for example) played little or no part. discussion of r almost ceased. instead, communities began to protect themselves by policing their neighbourhoods. locating hidden cases was the new driver of ebola response. chiefs were quite prepared to deny entry even to respected kinsfolk attempting to visit their home com- munities with the best of intentions: to check family welfare. persons of ‘unknown status’ simply spelt trouble. local voices also spoke out about the risks posed by large burials or attempted treat- ments by local herbalists, and what might be done to limit these risks. at this point, epidemiologists paused the mathematical modelling to take on board a new range of arcane ethnographic facts concerning such events as washing the corpse prior to burial. rituals of death came under intense examination. what infection risks did they convey, and did they vary from community to community? a new locally inflected explanatory paradigm for spread of evd modified international interventions accordingly. anthropologists wondered whether reports of the death of cultural epidemiology had been premature. scientific business-as-usual quickly returned in the immediate aftermath of the epidemic, as modellers scrambled to access medical records of the epidemic and apply standard numerical analytical techniques to sorting out causal patterns. scientific papers resulting from this activity report that little was achieved in explanatory terms beyond confirming that the evd epidemic was characterized by ‘heterogene- ities’ – a fine word, but not much of an explanation. to find out what lay behind these hetero- geneities a different approach was needed, giving due weight to ethnographic and historical methods. the lesson has not been entirely lost on covid- . response to the pandemic in germany, for example, has involved work by epidemiologists in reconstructing infection pathways at local level, combining testing with a range of social observational insights. german advisory panels on covid- are said to include philosophers, historians, and observational social scientists. in britain (increasingly an object lesson in how not to handle a pandemic) the pattern has been different. the government’s scientific advisory group on emergencies kept its membership secret, and when it was finally revealed it seemed that voices from the observational social sciences played a less decisive part than those from the behavioural sciences who deployed quasi-experimental methods of behaviour modification. of historians and philosophers there was no sight. the british approach implies that social pathways for infection are already well understood, and that that the main issue is to mitigate these behaviours. yet, manifestly, basic behavioural facts remain inadequately known. published case studies of (for example) the impact of religious worship or drinking in a crowded bar in spreading covid- remain few and far between. key assumptions – such as the need for social distancing at two metres – remain no more than informed guesses. policy-makers have then made key decisions on the basis of ‘unknown’ facts. stephen reicher, a psychologist with knowledge of research by anthropologists on proxemics – how people in different cultural settings typically arrange themselves relative to each other – has suggested that one metre is the normal distance at which the british arrange themselves in public for details, see richards, ebola, chaps. (‘washing the dead’) and (‘burial technique’). s. m. digiacomo, ‘can there be a “cultural epidemiology”?’, medical anthropology quarterly , no. ( ): – , https://doi.org/ . /maq. . . . . paul richards, gelejimah mokuwa, ahmed vandi, ebola gbalo research team, and susannah g. mayhew, ‘re-analysing ebola spread in sierra leone: the importance of local level social dynamics’, plos one (pre-print, ). ibid. streeck et al., ‘infection fatality rate of sars-cov- infection’. list of participants of the scientific advisory group on emergencies and related subgroups, may , https://www.gov. uk/government/publications/scientific-advisory-group-for-emergencies-sage-coronavirus-covid- -response-membership/ list-of-participants-of-sage-and-related-sub-groups. journal of global history https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://doi.org/ . /maq. . . . https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/scientific-advisory-group-for-emergencies-sage-coronavirus-covid- -response-membership/list-of-participants-of-sage-and-related-sub-groups https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/scientific-advisory-group-for-emergencies-sage-coronavirus-covid- -response-membership/list-of-participants-of-sage-and-related-sub-groups https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/scientific-advisory-group-for-emergencies-sage-coronavirus-covid- -response-membership/list-of-participants-of-sage-and-related-sub-groups https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core gatherings, so to take a decision to ease social distancing from two metres to one is no more than an invitation to forget about social distancing and revert to what is culturally normal. surely, the driver of this bias against observational knowledge is the notion that measured results count as evidence, but that inferences based on observed descriptions do not. this would explain why a cultural epidemiology of infection control has failed to flourish in a pandemic in which all the world leans on science, despite the evident utility of such an observational and descriptive approach in helping to transform the response to the – evd outbreak in west africa (overlap in personnel notwithstanding). african countries such as sierra leone should think hard about the need to counteract this bias. this is because observational inference made a crucial difference to changing understanding of ebola hazard among both responders and affected populations in – . it could yet make a crucial difference in adaptation to the hazards posed by covid- in africa. ngiyema (not its real name) was a sierra leonean village very badly affected in the first stages of the epidemic in may . the virus spread through the funeral of a highly respected local nurse who had attempted to treat patients with an unknown disease that turned out to be ebola. there were eighty-nine cases and sixty-nine deaths. but people became aware of a pattern in spread. it was observed that new cases occurred among people most closely involved in caring for the sick, thus providing convincing local proof that the disease was spread by touch. people then tried to protect themselves either by avoiding touching the sick, or by improvising personal protection using plastic bags and the like. further infection was then ended. in scientific terms, documenta- tion of this case is treated as no more than anecdotal evidence. this points to a bias in the way that science works. the bias, for covid- , shows up most strongly in the vexed matter of face covering. whether or not to wear a face covering has been debated since the onset of the pandemic, and at times advice changes daily, as much on political whim as on the basis of solid evidence. it appears to be the case that face covering plays little part in protecting uninfected persons but could be very effective in preventing people already shedding virus from passing on the infection. you wear a face covering not to protect yourself, but to protect others. it is hard, however, to imagine how this could be tested using the protocols of a double-blinded randomized field trial, the gold stan- dard of evidence for scientific publication. wearing a face covering is a highly visible act, so every- body knows who belongs to the treatment group. it is (or ought to be) impossible to get ethical approval for an experiment involving a control group exposed to the incessant coughing of car- riers of sars-cov- virus. yet wearing face coverings is something that african countries such as sierra leone might need to mandate. it may be the only option for contexts in which crowding is unavoidable, but where the activity is impossible to do without, such as market attendance or use of public transport. an excellent paper by greenhalgh reviews the circumstantial and natural experimental evi- dence that face coverings protect – including the case of a passenger who flew from china to canada wearing a face covering and tested positive for covid- the next day, but without infecting a single passenger or member of the crew. greenhalgh also addresses and refutes sev- eral of the hypothetical arguments that have been advanced to suggest why wearing face coverings might have negative consequences. she is explicit about why double-blind experimental evidence is not the sum total of scientific judgement. stephen reicher, ‘the way boris johnson has eased lockdown sends all the wrong messages’, guardian, june , https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /jun/ /boris-johnson-ease-lockdown-england. see, for example, christopher whitty, jeremy farrar, neil ferguson, w. john edmunds, peter piot, melissa leach, and sally davies, ‘infectious disease: tough choices to reduce ebola transmission’, nature , no. ( ): – . richards, ebola, p. . trisha greenhalgh, ‘face coverings for the public: laying straw men to rest’, journal of evaluation in clinical practice ( ), https://doi.org/ . /jep. . paul richards https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /jun/ /boris-johnson-ease-lockdown-england https://doi.org/ . /jep. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core the lesson of the ebola epidemic in sierra leone is that a culturally informed epidemiology based on observation of behaviour is a viable and necessary tool of epidemic response and can be undertaken without huge investment in scientific infrastructure. it should be retained and reap- plied to covid- . if high-quality work of this sort is rejected by the methodological gatekeep- ers of ‘standard’ science it may be necessary to ask whether such rejection is altogether rational. what social science contributes to management of epidemics the assumptions of a standard model of scientific best practice are strongly evident in the math- ematical modelling that plays such a prominent part in epidemiological analysis and is a major influence over policy. models are useful, and african countries will be wise to take note of, or commission, such analyses. but some scepticism is also in order. a model is only as good as its assumptions. as noted, initial model predictions of growth of evd cases in the west african epidemic were very wide of the mark because they failed to take proper note of the family clustering effects. some social scientists take this as a message to fine tune these models via better informed assumptions concerning human behaviour, and this is indeed highly desirable. but this underestimates the fuller potential of a social science approach. a feature of social science is that its knowledge-building activity is part of the social world it attempts to observe. the consequences of this reflexivity are sometimes treated as problematic, as if confounding or contaminating a desired objectivity. behavioural social sciences often prefer to take a ‘nudge’ perspective, seeking to influence behaviour without people becoming aware of the behavioural corrections they are making. the realist philosophy of social science offers a differ- ent prospect. analysis can help focus and mobilize social response through incorporating the affected populations as democratically enrolled agents of the social research process. this can be summed up in the phrase ‘know your epidemic’. better knowledge of how an infectious disease spreads then supports local commitments to protect community members. evidence from the evd epidemic in sierra leone in – suggests that typically it took communities only about six to eight weeks to figure out the nature of the infection challenges they faced, and to mobilize against them. of course, this mobilization will never be perfect. there are always free-riders and people who evade quarantine rules. nevertheless, the speed of local social learning surprised many external responders to the evd epidemic in sierra leone. the same surprise has been expressed in many countries affected by covid- . people understood more quickly than expected how the epi- demic threat was configured, and the need for measures such as social distancing. a great majority are then willing to take steps to protect themselves and their communities, and become under- standably angered by manifest breaches. social shaming serves to control free-riders. this is more than just a social response; it also depends on a degree of calculation of risk. the game comparing risks of infection and death from evd and covid- mentioned above was configured so that the combined risks were the same in both variants (high infection neil ferguson, ‘capturing human behaviour’, nature ( ): , https://doi.org/ . / a. see richards et al., ‘re-analysing ebola spread in sierra leone’. peter piot, co-discoverer of the ebola virus, expressed puzzlement that ‘it is not official policy [for covid- ] to have compulsory face masks not only on public transport but when you go into public [and] enclosed spaces’. sarah boseley, ‘make masks compulsory in public in uk, says virus expert’, guardian, june , https://www.theguardian.com/world/ / jun/ /make-masks-compulsory-in-public-says-virus-expert-peter-piot. scarpino et al., ‘epidemiological and viral genomic sequence analysis’. peter t. manicas, a realist philosophy of social science (cambridge: cambridge university press, ). richard thaler and cas sunstein, nudge: improving decisions about health, wealth and happiness (new haven: yale university press, ). manicas, realist philosophy. richards, ebola. journal of global history https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://doi.org/ . / a https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /jun/ /make-masks-compulsory-in-public-says-virus-expert-peter-piot https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /jun/ /make-masks-compulsory-in-public-says-virus-expert-peter-piot https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core risk × lower risk of death for the covid- proxy and low infection risk × high risk of death for the ebola proxy). one-fifth of all players spotted this and commented that there was no differ- ence in the overall level of hazard. this supports claims that humans are good intuitive proba- bilists. effective risk-assessment capacity among those lacking formal school education provides a basis for an effective people’s science of practical epidemiology. ebola taught that african policy- makers can rely on the good sense of the people. pandemic response can be based on a continued application of that understanding, supporting people to acquire the evidence they need and rely- ing upon them to make sensible decisions. with encouragement, african populations will learn their epidemic and adapt to its shifting challenges. this suggests that policy on covid- in africa can be usefully decentralized and opened to democratic decision-making. comparative questions raised about social justice in the atlantic world ebola was a singular disaster. the disease had never before been seen in west africa, and wreaked havoc in three neighbouring countries – guinea, liberia, and sierra leone. the urgency associated with such a terrifying disease rekindled memories of old humanitarian obligations. the aid min- istry of the british government and british charities focused their attention on sierra leone. the flow of aid funds and volunteer assistance was only fully achieved by the halfway point in the outbreak. before that point, sierra leoneans struggled with the disaster in large measure on their own resources and learned important lessons about how to cope with a new and deadly disease. an avalanche of international aid then threatened to engulf the country, and the problem became how to manage humanitarian largesse without trampling local capacity under foot. the pandemic of covid- has set different challenges. every country is dealing with the disease, and sierra leone is no longer in the humanitarian limelight. differences in standardized performance indicators, notably measures of ‘excess deaths’ (the numbers of deaths above the normal for that country and time of year), reveal variations in response. variation in impact by nation, class, and ethnic background demands attention. the country is forced to answer com- parative questions about who is doing well, and who is doing badly, and why. this places sierra leone back within a wider historical framework of atlantic connections, no longer the poster child for british humanitarianism. via diaspora links, there is awareness of the higher risks posed by covid- to persons of colour. many overseas-based members of sierra leonean families work in medical professions or in medical-related services (as hospital porters and cleaners, for example) in europe and north america, and have been badly impacted by the disease. this provokes questions about why death rates are so high among persons of african descent. in turn, racial bias in protection offered by host countries to workers of immigrant origins come under scrutiny. the killing by police of the african american george floyd in minneapolis occasioned mass demonstrations by supporters of the black lives matter movement across the world. these dem- onstrations have been undertaken in defiance of lockdown and create a counter-discourse to epidemic control. people have taken to the streets knowing the increased risks, on the basis that racist violence has pandemic features. they have felt impelled to make a stand, virus or no. moral outrage over covid- and racial injustice have become fused. the covid- pandemic cannot be thought of independently of larger and longer-term discourses concerning slavery and kamara et al., ‘how villagers in central sierra leone understand infection risks’. leda cosmides and john tooby, ‘are humans good intuitive statisticians after all? rethinking some conclusions from the literature on judgment under uncertainty’, cognition , no. ( ): – . for an insightful eyewitness account, see sinead walsh and oliver johnson, getting to zero: a doctor and a diplomat on the ebola frontline (london: zed books, ). see, for example, steven morris, ‘systemic racism among risk factors in covid- bame deaths in wales’, guardian, june , https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/ /jun/ /systemic-racism-among-risk-factors-in-covid- -bame- deaths-in-wales. paul richards https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/ /jun/ /systemic-racism-among-risk-factors-in-covid- -bame-deaths-in-wales https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/ /jun/ /systemic-racism-among-risk-factors-in-covid- -bame-deaths-in-wales https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core emancipation. these protests are closely monitored in sierra leone and have begun to impact on thinking about the epidemic. sierra leone’s nodal position in an atlantic world created by slavery and abolition is thereby brought back into focus. in one highly salient demonstration in the english city of bristol, protestors tipped the statue of the slave trader edward colston into the water of the docks where once his slave ships tied up from their voyages to the west african coast and the west indies. colston was chief executive of the royal african company in the s, during which time the company, a monopoly of the english royal family, was involved in shipping around , enslaved west africans to the caribbean, of whom an estimated , died during the atlantic voyage. the statue has long been a disputed artefact. it was erected in , at the height of british colonial expansion in west africa, in acknowledgement of colston’s charitable work, but made no mention of the source of his wealth. this was but a year before the british imposed colonial rule over the interior of sierra leone. it was the royal african company’s slave-trading activities under colston in the s that had first brought sierra leone firmly into the british sphere of atlantic commercial influence. sierra leone today thus stands at a point of intersection of two counterpointed global debates: how to control a worldwide nexus of pandemic infection and how to realize the human rights of a diaspora of persons of sub-saharan african descent who are living testimony to the consequences of global forced migration engineered over four centuries by agents such as colston. in sierra leone, the latter debate is by no means straightforward, since the country comprises the descend- ants of those who benefited from the slave trade as well as those descended from communities suffering its ravages. in terms of public culture, there is a silence of a long duration over the inter- nal legacy of the atlantic trade. in the place of public acknowledgement, however, there is subterranean debate, based on a long-term and largely murmured local critique of capitalism as a ‘vampire’ mode of wealth extrac- tion. this critique colours local understanding of infectious diseases. it envisages that the slave trade was replaced by an ever more rampant international system for extracting unearned wealth from the bodies of seized africans. international humanitarian agencies are in west africa not to help end epidemic disease but to lay the foundations of a wealth extraction system based on seiz- ing blood and human body parts for medical use in richer countries. ebola and covid- are contemporary tools for the renewal of a centuries-old extractive malpractice. the continued nag of this popular discourse in the shadows undermines confidence in epidemic response efforts and treatment. more generally, it nullifies the arguments of development agencies that enterprise is a means to bring about beneficial societal transformation. these fears, it is suggested, will not be assuaged until a darker secret connected to sierra leone’s colonial history is addressed. when britain declared a protectorate over provincial sierra leone in , a main purpose was to protect the hinterland of freetown from french colonial expansion. an uprising of interior chiefs against british rule in challenged the new british order. the chiefs were threatened with loss of sovereignty, an issue brought into focus for them by demands to pay new taxes. because rebellion threatened a key hub for both the british navy and merchant shipping in the atlantic at a time of major british colonial expansion in africa, the revolt was swiftly and ruthlessly put down. if the british had any ambition to end slavery in the interior, it was quietly dropped. a blind eye was turned in order to consolidate good relations with new chiefs appointed by the colonial government to take the place of the rebels executed for their part in the revolt. veronica gomez-temesio, ‘outliving death: ebola, zombies, and the politics of saving lives’, american anthropologist , no. ( ):, – . see richards et al., ‘re-analysing ebola spread in sierra leone’. david chalmers, report by her majesty’s commissioner and correspondence on the subject of the insurrection in the sierra leone protectorate . part : report and correspondence (london: hmso, ). journal of global history https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core the institution of slavery was tolerated because it was important to the food security of freetown. slave labour was deemed necessary for the back-breaking work of opening large areas of mangrove swamp for rice cultivation along the tidal zones of the rivers north of the port city. there were also significant areas of slave-based rice production further in the interior. it was in one of these, the mabole valley in bombaii district in northern sierra leone, that a slave revolt in finally brought evidence to the notice of the league of nations anti-slavery committee that slavery remained extant in a country founded as a home for freed slaves, despite three decades of colonial rule. this was a major scandal, and the colonial government in freetown was forced to act. a declaration of emancipation was hastily drafted, and slaves were finally freed on january , though not directly informed. at that point it was estimated that as many as one-quarter of all villagers in some parts of northern sierra leone had been living as slaves. many would remain trapped in subsequent poverty. compensation was offered not to the slaves but to the slave-owners. this compensation was controversial with the population of freetown, much of which shared ‘recaptive’ origins and had never been offered compensation for its ordeal. the sweetener to the slave-owners therefore came in the form of a major agricultural development initiative: a work-oxen ploughing scheme to com- pensate landlords for the loss of their slave labour force. the scheme was revived by the british overseas aid programme as recently as the s, presumably without recognition of its historical connotations. with perhaps a greater sense of local history than that possessed by british aid offi- cials, the cadres of the rebel revolutionary united front finished off the scheme, and roasted the animals, during the latter days of the civil war of the s. one of the movement’s war slogans was ‘no more master, no more slave’. emancipation in had been a sham. it is not even clear that the slaves were even informed officially of their change of legal status. like slaves of african descent across the atlantic basin, they continued to farm for their own subsistence on land they did not own. or they headed to the towns and the mining districts to join the ranks of the daily paid labouring classes. economic insecurity and a sense of lives being wasted for want of opportunity for improvement persisted into the decades of independence from britain in the second half of the twentieth century. and then something snapped. the civil war of the s can be seen as a major eruption of socioeco- nomic tensions in a society that up to that point had not fully resolved vexed issues separating those benefiting from atlantic slavery and those who bore the brunt of the social dislocation it caused. the conjunction of the covid- pandemic and activity by the black lives matter movement has resulted in re-energized debate on the complex legacies of atlantic slavery. it is genuinely alfred s. arkley, ‘slavery in sierra leone’ (ma thesis, columbia university, new york, ). the gap between the dec- laration of a british protectorate in interior sierra leone ( ) and the ending of slavery ( ) was longer even than that between the ending of the british atlantic slave trade ( ) and the general emancipation of slaves in the british colonies ( ). a slave uprising in jamaica in precipitated that larger emancipation. for discussion of agrarian tensions as factors in the civil war in sierra leone in the s, see peters, war and the crisis of youth in sierra leone, esp. chaps. and ; and paul richards, ‘to fight or to farm? agrarian dimensions of the mano river conflicts (liberia and sierra leone)’, african affairs , no. ( ): – . when slaves in the british caribbean were emancipated in , the british government raised a loan of £ million to pay compensation to the owners. the families of three subsequent british prime ministers (william ewart gladstone, anthony eden, and david cameron) were among the beneficiaries. information on compensation payments are to be found in the legacies of british slave-ownership database, https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/. on the organization of labour in the alluvial mining economy of sierra leone, see alfred babatunde zack-williams, tributors, supporters and merchant capital: mining and under-development in sierra leone (aldershot: avebury press, ). on the sierra leone civil war and tensions that fostered it, see richards, richards, fighting for the rain forest. for a compelling account of the psychological scars of slavery on rural communities in sierra leone, persisting to the present, see rosalind shaw, memories of the slave trade: ritual and the historical imagination in sierra leone (chicago: university of chicago press, ). paul richards https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/ https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core surprising to hear the number of voices of hope raised despite pandemic concerns. evidently, global social mutuality is being urgently rethought. some would argue, however, that sierra leone still needs to resolve internal tensions over its own legacy of collaboration with atlantic commerce in order to become more fully aligned with these larger demands for social reform. conclusion the comparative study of epidemics can reveal social and historical processes in a new light. ebola in – was mainly contained within three countries of the upper west african coast. the crisis called forth considerable amounts of international aid, but channelled mainly along colonial and cold war lines, with french, american, and british military missions playing a significant part in guinea, liberia, and sierra leone. russian assistance to guinea and chinese assistance to sierra leone recapitulated forgotten cold war alliances. sierra leone was once again a poster child for british humanitarianism, speaking to its abolitionist origins. the pandemic of covid- in sierra leone elicited no major boost in international aid but instead serves to throw into relief connections with atlantic forced migration. the global calls for inter-racial justice have no doubt been intensified by realization that covid- poses a higher risk to diasporic populations of african descent. in the event, sierra leone fights covid- with its own resources, drawing on lessons learned from evd, while at the same time being drawn into a wider re-examination of the legacies of atlantic slavery. its own deeply rooted history of social injustices, brutally exposed during the civil war of the s, surfaces once more. it is a feature of epidemics and pandemics that they have an apparent capacity to resurrect aspects of global history some might prefer to forget. paul richards is an anthropologist who has carried out fieldwork on food security, armed conflict, and epidemics in west africa (nigeria, sierra leone, and liberia) at various times since . he was professor of technology and agrarian development at wageningen university from to and is currently an honorary adjunct professor at njala university in sierra leone. his recent books include ebola: how a people’s science helped end an epidemic ( ) and (with perri ) mary douglas: understanding social thought and human conflict ( ). his current research concerns the collective dynamics of mental health. cite this article: richards p. . ebola and covid- in sierra leone: comparative lessons of epidemics for society. journal of global history : – , doi: . /s journal of global history https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core 	ebola and covid- in sierra leone: comparative lessons of epidemics for society&dagger; 	introduction 	sierra leone: an atlantic humanitarian project 	epidemics and pandemics: how ebola and covid- compare 	the role of local social knowledge in ebola and covid- control 	on the possibility of cultural epidemiology 	what social science contributes to management of epidemics 	comparative questions raised about social justice in the atlantic world 	conclusion fast violence, revolutionary violence: black lives matter and the pandemic symposium: covid- fast violence, revolutionary violence: black lives matter and the pandemic claire colebrook received: june /accepted: august # journal of bioethical inquiry pty ltd. abstract the pandemic cannot be divorced from the problem, pace, and spectacle of race, both because of the racial rhetoric regarding the origins of the virus and because of the subsequent racial injustice in the distri- bution of healthcare. this paper adds the concept of fast violence to rob nixon’s “slow violence” to look at the intersection between the climate of the planet and the climate of racial injustice. keywords pandemic . anthropocene . violence the anthropocene is an intensively temporal concept, not because it marks out a span of geological time (which would simply be extensive) but because it marks a time within human history and a certain discipline (geology) where one way of marking time (stratigraphy or the temporality drawn from the earth’s layers) intersects with a shift in the understanding of human time. at a certain point in geological history, a species can have geological impact, and at a certain point in human history, the earth’s geological time enters the political imaginary. the layers of the earth start to speak to how we might imagine our future; the contraction of our future speeds up. taking account of the once slow time of geology shows just how narrow our window is for any action that might save the world as we know it. what has brought to the fore is the extent to which the “anthropos” of the anthropocene and the “we” whose future is imperilled has always been racial (karera ). the speeds and intersections of human and geological time need to be rendered distinct by noting that the “we” of the anthropocene and the future that is both promised and threatened by humanism were made possible by a history of slavery, in which the private spaces and personal timelines of modern urban existence depended upon a massive interruption and de- struction of african time. as frank wilderson has ar- gued, so encompassing and universal is the trajectory of “the human,” so definitive was the social death demanded of slaves, that anti-blackness becomes definitive of a human time that knows no outside. in the united states especially, the state is premised upon anti-blackness: without the sexualized violence against and mass incarceration of hundreds of thousands of black captives, americans would not be able to elect a u.s. president. thomas jefferson would never have become president. in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries, … , [that’s less than a half million] . . . african slaves, bred like horses or sheep, became four-million enslaved african-americans . . . [t]he forced mating of slaves . . . gave slave states more voting power based on the number of slaves they held captive.virginia was the largest slave-breeding state. as a result, it gained twenty-five percent of the forty-six electoral college votes, more than enough to send jefferson to the white house (wilderson ). bioethical inquiry https://doi.org/ . /s - - - c. colebrook (*) pennsylvania state university, university park, penn state, state college, pa, usa e-mail: cmc @psu.edu http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf the “anthropos” of the anthropocene and the “we” of the future can appear as unified only by way of racialized time; “we” can declare ourselves to be partic- ipants in a single history and to be suffering from the same tragedy of the commons only after centuries of slavery and colonization. race appears to be erased in the figure of “the human,” even if the geopolitics that produces global interconnectedness relies heavily on outsourcing risk, toxicity, and exposure to those deemed to be less than human. the same racializing universality applies to the global tallies and graphs of the pandemic’s curves and statistics. the globalism that tracks, moni- tors, and distributes life—today as in —depicts humans as a species, but does so while erasing the violence that brought the very experience of “the hu- man” into being. in the united states, deaths were higher among ethnic minorities precisely because the entire economy was structured around distributing risk and vulnerability to those who were essential to an economy that would do very little to protect them. the pandemic, in this respect, made manifest and accelerat- ed the slow violence of the anthropocene. the intersec- tion of speeds that characterized the pandemic— where long-running inequalities resulted in surging death rates in certain parts of the united states— mirrors centuries of global violence where the steady growth of the world required the sudden destruction of so many worlds. the anthropocene as the intrusion of geological forces into the experience of being human was only possible because some humans—slaves—were regarded as energy to be extracted, torn from the ground of existence, and rendered into nothing more than matter for the sake of human progress. only with that sudden and disruptive violence was anthropos possible. it was in response to the anthropocene’s speeding up of geo- logical time and its impact on human existence that rob nixon formed one of the most fruitful concepts to emerge from the environmental humanities: slow vio- lence. for nixon this concept was tied to “the poor,” a concept that from the outset is tied yet once more to africa. nixon’s first example of slow violence is the transportation of toxic waste to africa. in this essay i want to think about slow violence in relation to fast violence. nixon ties slow violence to time, space, and visibility: by slow violence i mean a violence that occurs gradually and out of sight, a violence of delayed destruction that is dispersed across time and space, an attritional violence that is typically not viewed as violence at all. violence is customarily con- ceived as an event or action that is immediate in time, explosive and spectacular in space, and as erupting into instant sensational visibility. we need, i believe, to engage a different kind of violence, a violence that is neither spectacular nor instantaneous, but rather incremental and ac- cretive, its calamitous repercussions playing out across a range of temporal scales (nixon , ). the year brought to the fore the extent to which slow violence is intertwined with fast violence, the extent to which invisibility is tied to spectacle, and the extent to which outsourcing violence to reduce its visi- bility and the immediacy of impact could also generate sudden disruptions. to say that the pandemic coincided with the spectacle of racial violence is accurate only if one thinks about coincidence less as a chance event and more as the way in which the speeds of violence are always racial- ized and always fast and slow at the same time. the pandemic was sudden, experienced as a shock to the economy and daily rhythms; the entire purpose of lock- down was to slow down the rate of infection, with the graph of “flattening the curve” becoming a daily obses- sive checkpoint in the media. the disease was sudden, its onset sudden, and its spread sudden. more importantly—even though one of the common anti- lockdown reactions to the disease compared its mortal- ity rate to other accepted forms of mass death such as road vehicle accidents—what made covid- so alarming was the intolerable spectacle of its impact. it is here that nixon’s claims about slow violence allow us to think through the biopolitics of the pandemic, and its specific speed. there is some degree of truth to the claim that “we” accept all sorts of deaths without going into lockdown, but perhaps rather than this being a case for not acting it should prompt us to think about the toll of the everyday life that was ground to a halt. the slow violence of everyday hidden deaths (obesity, hyperten- sion, heart disease, diabetes—all tied to the hyper- consumption of the american way of life) intersected with the fast and intolerable violence of mounting covid- deaths, morgue trucks parked in manhat- tan’s park avenue, surging unemployment, plummeting stock market figures, and sudden ecological changes in urban centres (including the sudden visibility of dimin- ished pollution over densely populated cities and images bioethical inquiry of deserted streets in london and new york that echoed post-apocalyptic cinema). these speeds were made pos- sible by centuries of slow violence: like the pan- demic to which it is so often compared, the spread of covid- was highly racialized (mcdonald ). the death rates of non-white americans far exceeded those who had a long history of greater access to healthcare, insurance, decent working conditions, clean water, exercise, and healthy diets. with the president of the united states referring to the “china virus,” and “kung flu,” the virus’s origins were demonized, even if the global transmission of the virus was made possible by centuries of global trade and tourism that made the west both affluent and vulnerable. the fast racial vio- lence of the virus—its capacity to kill non-white amer- icans at a faster rate, while providing an opportunity for the united states to intensify racist immigration and border control policies—was preceded and enabled by centuries of slow violence. this slow violence would include the transformation of the earth as a living system but also the ongoing exclusion of poor and minority americans from healthcare, clean water, and decent living conditions. that slow violence, in turn, was the outcome of sudden and catastrophic events that destroyed worlds overnight, including the four hundred years of slavery that for each enslaved body was both a slow violence of an entire life of unfreedom, accompa- nied by visible, sudden, and singular events of violence. the pandemic in the united states cannot be uncoupled from the speed of violence that became vis- ible in the death of one man, george floyd, on may , . just as the flu formed the already racialized backdrop of the lynching of mary turner, so the pandemic brought to the fore the intense affective speeds of violence and vulnerability. as saidiya hartman noted with regard to the pandemic, “for every year between and , black folks in cities experienced a rate of death that equaled the white rate of death at the peak of the pandemic” (hartman ). hartman then notes, drawing on the work of du bois and walter white’s “the work of a mob” from , that the spectacle of lynching would be enough to gen- erate a form of pessimism in which only the end of the world might generate a space for hope. time is every- thing: the rate of black death had been at peak pandemic levels for years, prior to . the sudden and unbear- able violence of the death of mary turner was, hartman notes, “so revolting and the details so horrible that as editor du bois was reluctant to share them.” slavery had already been an intersection of slow and fast violence, the slow violence of four hundred years of building a racial empire, coupled with the sudden spectacle of lynching. by the time of the pandemic, those speeds intersected with uneven healthcare and substan- dard housing for african americans and then the holo- caust of lynchings of . violence, speed, and spectacle are always connected, with distance also playing its part. peter singer frequent- ly defends utilitarianism by way of an anecdote: you see a child drowning in an amount of water that poses no threat to you, but you will get your clothes muddy and be late for your next appointment. without question you would save the life of the child, regardless of your attachment to the shine of your prada loafers. singer then suggests that we use this anecdote to think about how little we would notice charitable actions that would save lives, but lives that are not—like the child in the anecdote—directly before us: once we are all clear about our obligations to rescue the drowning child in front of us, i ask: would it make any difference if the child were far away, in another country perhaps, but similarly in danger of death, and equally within your means to save, at no great cost—and absolutely no danger—to yourself? virtually all agree that dis- tance and nationality make no moral difference to the situation. i then point out that we are all in that situation of the person passing the shallow pond: we can all save lives of people, both children and adults, who would otherwise die, and we can do so at a very small cost to us: the cost of a new cd, a shirt or a night out at a restaurant or concert, can mean the difference between life and death to more than one person somewhere in the world—and overseas aid agencies like oxfam overcome the problem of acting at a distance (singer ). for singer the point of the exercise is utilitarian: at little cost to us we could do a great deal of good. but the thought experiment also says a great deal about imme- diacy and the imagination and how we accept at a daily level a very high global death toll for the sake of plea- sures and conveniences that, upon reflection, we might forgo. singer’s thought experiment is similar to nixon’s concept of slow violence in this one respect: both as- sume that re-narration and re-conceptualization would alter the attitudes and actions we adopt towards forms of bioethical inquiry violence that have been insufficiently visible. but per- haps what is at stake is something that exceeds narration and absent mindedness; perhaps the very temporality of “the human” is bound up with a metaphysical or libid- inal investment in certain forms of racist destruction? does the spectacle of morgue trucks in manhattan and the suddenly apparent inequity of healthcare resources draw attention to the ways in which non-white ameri- cans have borne the brunt of suffering for centuries? does that attention then lead to a change in action? the preliminary answer to this question has to be “no.” the pandemic did make the long slow systemic violence of racism more apparent, with public health officials ad- mitting that the comorbidities that placed individuals at higher risk were going to affect minorities and the poor. such resignations were background noise; the general focus was primarily on overall counts and trends. it required another spectacle and temporality to shift this acquiescence of violence in a different direction, and that was the visible and unbearably drawn-out eight- minute-and-forty-six-second murder of george floyd on may , . it was this event that took the slow violence of the pandemic—already an effect of climate change, global capitalism, empire, and inequity—and generated the fast revolutionary violence of the black lives matter protests. in his “critique of violence,” walter benjamin marked a critical distinction between violence that maintains the state (law-preserving) and the violence that founds the state (law-making); in both cases violence appears as a means to a seemingly “nat- ural” end (in the violence that founds the state) or as a means to an already-given end (in the legally sanctioned violence that preserves the state). where this seeming distinction and justification breaks down is in police violence, for it is here that what appears as simply preserving the law often appears as a violent production of legality without ground: therefore the police intervene “for security rea- sons” in countless cases where no clear legal situation exists, when they are not merely, without the slightest relation to legal ends, accompanying the citizen as a brutal encumbrance through a life regulated by ordinances, or simply supervising him. unlike law, which acknowledges in the “de- cision” determined by place and time a metaphys- ical category that gives it a claim to critical eval- uation, a consideration of the police institution encounters nothing essential at all. its power is formless, like its nowhere tangible, all-pervasive, ghostly presence in the life of civilized states (benjamin , ). it follows that opposition to police violence is oppo- sition to the very notion of violence as a means to a natural end. it is this oppositional violence that allowed the protests against police brutality to coincide with the ecological crisis of the pandemic. the death of george floyd gave immediate and spectacular visibility to the foundational violence that is bound up with global cap- italism, climate change, and the volatile conditions of zoonotic viruses (van dooren ). state-founding violence is at once, as benjamin has argued, mythically outside all narration and temporality—appearing as if by fate; but it is also, as anthropocene studies and black studies have made clear, discernible in all the monu- ments that mark moments of conquest. the revolution- ary violence that demanded the removal of confederate and settler statues was a violence directed against the colonization that destroyed black lives and the condi- tions for life in general. here i would add to the slow violence noted by nixon and the unbearably slow and therefore visible death of george floyd, an intensive violence that seeks to undo the world. at a quite prac- tical level it made sense for black lives matter pro- testers to gather in large protests, not simply in spite of the pandemic—although it could be argued that the risk of contracting covid- at a rally was lower for some non-white americans than being killed if you answered your own door with a steak knife (osaze osagie), or slept in your own bed (breanna taylor), or went for a neighbourhood jog (ahmaud arbery). because of the pandemic, because the world had been interrupted and was poised at a moment of high risk, might well be the time to engage in a form of civil disobedience that would challenge the structural state violence that coincided in the death of george floyd. floyd’s death cannot be explained without mak- ing some reference to the libidinal investment in the spectacle of black death. while the nine-minute video of his death was too brutal to watch for some, it provided the occasion for white supremacists to post staged videos of their knee on a friend’s neck (kesslen ). just as the visibility of lynching in reasserted the power of white “policing” amidst a pandemic that was already taking its toll on black lives, so the ’ ” video of floyd’s murder was yet one more occasion in which visible and arbitrary murder of black men maintained a bioethical inquiry police state (martinot and sexton ). the protests that responded to this murder retroactively brought at- tention to recent murders of other black men and wom- en, and in so doing drew upon the slowing down of time in a pandemic, the general sense of unrest and frustration of lockdown, and a loss of faith in the world. in my own quiet college town of state college, pennsylvania, large protests recalled the previous year’s killing of osaze osagie, who was shot by police after his father had called because he was concerned about his son’s mental health. in march of the memorial march for osagie’s death was postponed because of the pandemic. however, following the death of george floyd and national protests, state college took part in a series of significantly larger gatherings than it had seen or ex- pected prior to the global response to floyd’s murder. if the memorial in march was closed because of the pan- demic, by june the virus that seemed to threaten the world became the occasion to demand the end of the police state. this, i would argue, has been the overall effect of the trumpocene: there are events that trump the end of the world. in it might have seemed that the slow violence of climate change and ecological catas- trophe would be the global justice issues of our time. but that slow violence then led to a series of catastro- phes, including the spectacle of the pandemic, the racial injustice intensified by that pandemic, and then a sense that this unravelling world might be the occasion for a destruction of a system of policing inextricably intertwined with centuries of black death. the pandemic brought risk calculus to popular attention; debates whether saving lives from lockdown would cause greater harms from job loss and depression were accompanied by ghoulish claims that only the weak and elderly would be sacrificed. but these numerical risks and calculations, with their different speeds and distri- butions, were then overtaken by an event that questioned the very value of the world that lockdowns were seeking to save. from a global response of lock- downs and government rescue bills focused on the economy versus human life, a single visible event showed nine minutes to be a very long time and shifted the calculus of the multitude away from how much time in lockdown would be required to save the world to protests that sought to destroy the world for the sake of life. references benjamin, w. . critique of violence. in selected writings: volume , – , edited by m. bullock and m.w. jennings, – . cambridge: harvard university press. hartman, s. . the end of white supremacy, an american romance. bomb, june . https://bombmagazine. org/articles/the-end-of-white-supremacy-an-american- romance/. accessed august , . karera, a. . blackness and the pitfalls of anthropocene ethics. critical philosophy of race ( ): – . kesslen, b. . video shows white men in n.j. mocking george floyd’s death at protest. nbs news, june . https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/video-shows- white-men-n-j-mocking-george-floyd-s-n . . martinot, s., and j. sexton. . the avant-garde of white supremacy. social identities ( ): – . mcdonald, s. . in and , race colors america’s response to epidemics: a look at how jim crow affected the treatment of african americans fighting the spanish flu. the undefeated, april . https://theundefeated. com/features/in- -and- -race-colors-americas- response-to-epidemics/. accessed august , . nixon, r. . slow violence and the environmentalism of the poor. cambridge: harvard. singer, p. . the drowning child and the expanding circle. new internationalist, april . https://www.utilitarian. net/singer/by/ % d% d.htm. accessed august , . van dooren, t. . pangolins and pandemics: the real source of this crisis is human, not animal. new matilda, march . https://newmatilda.com/ / / /pangolins- and-pandemics-the-real-source-of-this-crisis-is-human-not- animal/. accessed august , . publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. bioethical inquiry https://bombmagazine.org/articles/the-end-of-white-supremacy-an-american-romance/ https://bombmagazine.org/articles/the-end-of-white-supremacy-an-american-romance/ https://bombmagazine.org/articles/the-end-of-white-supremacy-an-american-romance/ https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/video-shows-white-men-n-j-mocking-george-floyd-s-n https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/video-shows-white-men-n-j-mocking-george-floyd-s-n https://theundefeated.com/features/in- -and- -race-colors-americas-response-to-epidemics/ https://theundefeated.com/features/in- -and- -race-colors-americas-response-to-epidemics/ https://theundefeated.com/features/in- -and- -race-colors-americas-response-to-epidemics/ https://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/ % d% d.htm https://www.utilitarian.net/singer/by/ % d% d.htm https://newmatilda.com/ / / /pangolins-and-pandemics-the-real-source-of-this-crisis-is-human-not-animal/ https://newmatilda.com/ / / /pangolins-and-pandemics-the-real-source-of-this-crisis-is-human-not-animal/ https://newmatilda.com/ / / /pangolins-and-pandemics-the-real-source-of-this-crisis-is-human-not-animal/ 	fast violence, revolutionary violence: black lives matter and the pandemic 	abstract 	references bayesian estimate of federal agents’ use of zncl gas against black lives matter protesters juniper l. simonis lead scientist, dapper stats, portland or simonis@dapperstats.com abstract law enforcement’s use of chemical weapons is a threat to human and environmental health, exemplified during black lives matter (blm) protests in portland, or, where city, county, state, and federal agencies have deployed various chemicals for over days. in the second half of july, department of homeland security (dhs) agents used an exceptionally toxic and unknown weapon to quell free speech in support of black lives and against federal presence. with significant support from the community, i combined first-hand accounts, media reports, videos and photos of munitions, primary literature and analytical chemistry to identify the weapon as gaseous zinc chloride (zncl ) from so-called hexachloroethane (hc) “smoke” grenades. i then used hierarchical bayesian methods to estimate that dhs deployed ( - ) hc grenades in july. the gas released is so toxic that the grenades deployed produced enough zncl to kill the author (~ kg) ( - ) times over and its release has led to persistent major health issues in the exposed population. given prior case histories of zncl exposure and novel symptoms associated with hc grenade use by dhs, zncl is certainly the causal agent and has created an ongoing human and environmental health crisis extending well beyond the protests’ footprint. dhs’s wanton use of zncl against protesters will have lasting impacts for decades and was identified through a community of civilians standing up to say black lives matter. keywords black lives matter, chemical weapons, hexachloroethane, hierarchical bayes, metal fume fever, police brutality, zinc poisoning introduction “the use of poison in any manner, be it to poison wells, or food, or arms, is wholly excluded from modern warfare. he that uses it puts himself out of the pale of the law and usages of war.” - general orders no. , article , signed president abraham lincoln following the murder of george floyd in minneapolis minnesota on - - , black lives matter (blm) protesters took to the streets around the world to demand justice (morman et al ). in present-day portland oregon (on traditional land of chinook, clackamas, cowlitz, kalapuya, kathlamet, molalla, multnomah, tualatin, and wasco tribes), blm protests have continued for over a hundred days, only interrupted by hazardous wildfire smoke (appendix ). in response to gatherings, various law enforcement agencies have deployed chemical weapons, building upon a legacy of chemical weapons usage by portland police bureau (morman et al. mailto:simonis@dapperstats.com ). indeed, as of september th, portland currently has the most instances of police brutality among us cities (regardless of size) ( of the , ; new york city is the next highest with ) and a disproportionate rate of chemical attacks ( % vs % in all other cities combined) (appendix ). although they were outlawed for american wartime use by abraham lincoln via the lieber code in and internationally in the hague conventions of and as well as the geneva protocol of , chemical weapons have a long history of use by law enforcement against civilians to quell unrest (hu et al. ; appendix ). this occurs despite chemical weapons being fundamentally indiscriminate, often deployed against specifications, and lethal (hu et al. ). in the united states, the use of chemical weapons against protesters exacerbates systemic inequities and limits constitutionally protected expression of speech and assembly (morman et al. ). for example, in portland, law enforcement only deploys chemical weapons to prevent free speech in support of black lives; no such actions are taken against recognized white supremacist hate groups (morman et al. ). during the second half of july, as interest in portland’s blm protests was resurging and focused particularly on federal presence (fig. ), agents of the us department of homeland security’s (dhs) new protecting american cities task force (pactf) deployed deadly gaseous zinc chloride (zncl ) via hexachloroethane (hc) smoke grenades (fig. ). at the time, zncl was not a familiar chemical weapon nor were hc cans among any recovered munitions (appendix ). indeed, it took an incredible effort by frontline journalists, scientists, community leaders, legal observers, medics, and protesters to document the munitions so that hc use could be definitively identified, tied to dhs use, and connected to production by defense technology, a subsidiary of the safariland group (fig. , appendices and ). hexachloroethane is a munitions "smoke" developed in the early s by us army chemical warfare service that was understood by the mid- s to be a poisonous chemical agent (cullumbine , novak et al. , eaton et al. ), and which has since been replaced throughout the military (blaue and seidner ). hc itself is listed as hazardous by the international agency for research on cancer, environmental protection agency, department of transportation, occupational safety and health administration, american conference of governmental industrial hygienists, national institute for occupational safety and health, and national toxicology program (smith-simon et al. ) and has significant human and environmental health consequences. a more dire result of the use of hc grenades, however, is that they produce a highly lethal combination of gaseous products including the dominant (> %) constituent zncl , and additional noxious components such as carbon monoxide (co), phosgene (cocl ), hexachlorobenzene (c cl ), tetrachloroethene (c cl ), carbon tetrachloride (ccl ), hydrogen chloride (hcl) and chlorine (cl ) gasses based on temperature and humidity (dainton and ivin , archer , shaw et al. ). indeed, hundreds of cases of toxicity from hc smoke have been documented across the intervening decades, showing a range of significant symptoms including immediate dyspnoea, coughing, lacrimation, chest pain, vomiting, nausea, and mucosal irritation; delayed and prolonged inflammation of skin and internal organs as well as tachycardia; chronic genotoxicity of the bronchial epithelium; and an average fatality rate of . among case clusters (idrissi et al. ; appendix ). hc smoke has further significant effects on the environment, including defoliation and long-term reduction in tree growth (hartl et al. ) and stunted bone development and bioaccumulation in fish (davidson et al. , nichols et al. , salvaggio et al. ). given the lethality of its products, the wanton use of hc by dhs in portland is incredibly alarming and warrants significant further investigation. as a starting point, i derive here forensic-based bayesian estimates of hc use (appendix ). such an exercise would not be necessary if dhs were to release actual chemical weapons deployment data, but given the lack of transparency regarding chemical weapons use by all law enforcement agencies in portland, including retrieval of canisters to prevent identification (appendix ), an estimation of hc use is a critical starting point to understanding the scope and scale of its impacts. having collated a large dossier of photographs, videos, archived live streams, available twitter, print media, and news aggregators (appendices and ), i identified deployments of hc and recovery of munitions during july (appendix ). i also estimated the time federal agents were out of their buildings and crowd size for each day from this data set. i combined these data using hierarchical bayesian regression to estimate the number of cans of hexachloroethane deployed each day and over the course of the month (appendix ). i then translated this total number of canisters deployed to human fatality potential focusing on zncl (eaton et al. , blau and sneider , shaw et al. ; appendix ). over the course of july , dhs deployed an estimated ( - , % posterior interval) cans of hexachloroethane in the immediate vicinity of the wyatt federal building and the hatfield federal courthouse in downtown portland oregon. based on actual recoveries (fig. ), the definitive minimum number of cans is , six more canisters were observed being deployed by agents but were not recovered. translation of the estimated hc deployment to zncl gas shows that the number of fatalities that could have occurred was ( – , % posterior interval). although the canisters were deployed outside, which certainly prevented many deaths, diffusion was limited by crowds of thousands of people (fig. ), closed tree canopies, cars, and tents. indeed, the off-gassing zncl presented significant risks to individuals in the vicinity as evidenced by high levels of zinc in environmental samples, acute and chronic symptoms, and odors detectable miles away (appendix ). under ideal conditions (open field), the concentration of zncl produced by a typical hc grenade is high enough that an unmasked individual yards (three city blocks in portland) from detonation has a maximum of minutes of safety before acute symptoms appear and an individual , yards away has only . hours (cullumbine ). it is unclear how zncl dissipates through a densely-gassed, tree-lined urban landscape within a river valley like portland, but reported signs and symptoms indicate that it spread widely and cut through protective equipment (appendix ). given its bioaccumulation and the delayed severe inflammation response, zncl exposure is measured cumulatively over days (cullumbine ). as a highly mobile and poisonous gas, zncl poses a significant risk to humans as well as the environment. a community of protesters, activists, journalists, legal observers, and scientists standing up for black lives documented its use and are just beginning to understand its impacts on the residents and environment of portland. human health and environmental impact studies are urgently needed. all data, code, and supporting materials are included within the supporting information. acknowledgements this work would not have been necessary without law enforcement’s desire to poison a city to show how much they believe that black lives don’t matter, and would not have been possible without civilians standing up despite the wanton use of chemical weapons to say that black lives do matter. contributions to the dossier are acknowledged in appendices and . substantial thank yous to the don’t shoot portland team for documenting and organizing around use of chemical weapons in portland, sarah riddle for critical life-cycle documentation, the recompiler magazine for aggregation of protest news, and eric greatwood for particularly useful footage. black lives matter. land back. literature cited archer, w. l. . hexachloroethane. in m. grayson and c. eckroth, eds. kirk-othmer encyclopedia of chemical technology, rd ed., vol. . pp. - . john wiley & sons, new york, ny. blau, r. and n. seidner. . hexachloroethane obscurant replacement. atk propulsion systems. strategic environmental research and development program. report tr . cullumbine, h. . the toxicity of screening smokes. bmj military health : - . dainton, f. s. and k. j. ivin. . the pyrolysis of hexachloroethane. transactions of the faraday society : - . davidson, k. a., p. s. hovatter, and r. h. ross. . water quality criteria for hexachloroethane. oak ridge national laboratory. report ornl- . eaton, j. c., r. j. lopinto, and w. g. palmer. . health effects of hexachloroethane (hc) smoke. us army biomedical research and development laboratory. technical report . hartl, c., s. st. george, o. konter, l. harr, d. scholz, a. kirchhefer, and j. esper. . warfare dendrochronology: trees witness the deployment of the german battleship tirpitz in norway. anthropocene : . hu, h, j. fine, p. epstein, k. kelsey, p. reynolds, and b. walker. . tear gas - harassing agent or toxic chemical weapon? the journal of the american medical association : - . idrissi, a. e., l. van berkel, n. e. bonekamp, d. j. z. dalemans, and m. a. g. van der heyden. . the toxicology of zinc chloride smoke producing bombs and screens. clinical toxicology : - . morman, a., z. williams, d. smith., and a. c. randolph. . riot control agents: systemic reassessment of adverse effects on health, mental stability, and social inequities. don’t shoot pdx, portland, or. nichols, j. w., j. m. mckim, g. j. lien, a. d. hoffman, and s. l. bertelstein. . physiologically based toxicokinetic modeling of three waterborne chloroethanes in rainbow trout (oncorhynchus mykiss). toxicology and applied pharmacology : - . novak, e. w., l. g. lave, j. j. stukel, and s. miller. . a revised health risk assessment of the use of hexachloroethane smoke on an army training area. us army construction engineering research laboratory. technical report n- . salvaggio, a., f. marino, m. albano, b. m. lombardo, s. saccone, v. mazzei, and m. v. brundo. . toxic effects of zinc chloride on the bone development in danio rerio (hamilton, ). frontiers in physiology : . shaw, a. p., j. s. brusnahan, j. c. poret, and l. a. morris. . thermodynamic modeling of pyrotechnic smoke compositions. acs sustainable chemistry and engineering : − . smith-simon, c, j. m. donohue, and c. eisenmann. . toxicological profile for hexachloroethane. us department of health and human services, public health service, agency for toxic substances and disease registry. figure legends figure . time series of hexachloroethane use (left axis, boxes with vertical lines) compared to normalized (so maximum value is ) values of the amount of time federal agents were out of their buildings (orange circles and line); the estimated crowd size (salmon circles and line); and google search trends data for the portland metro area: “protests”, “black lives matter”, and “federal” (progressively darker purple circles and lines, respectively) in portland oregon during july . hexachloroethane use shows the minimum number known for each day at the box and the line indicates the range of possible values to the upper % credible interval. see appendix for full methods details. figure . hexachloroethane / zinc oxide canisters (top) and reactions (bottom). (a) unexploded ordnance clearly marked as “military style maximum smoke hc” from “defense technology. (b) hc ordnance off gassing zinc chloride mid deployment. (c) same canister from (b) after reaction stopped, showing charred remains of the label that matches the canister in (a). (d) three exploded hc canisters, including the one from (b) and (c) in the middle. photos (a) and (c) from the author, (b) and (d) from an anonymous collector and used with permission. reactions and products are taken from dainton and ivin ( ), archer ( ), eaton et al. ( ), and shaw et al. ( ). figures figure . figure . tf_template_word_windows_ emergent and divergent spaces in the  women’s march: the challenges of  intersectionality and inclusion  article  accepted version  moss, p. and maddrell, a. ( ) emergent and divergent  spaces in the women’s march: the challenges of  intersectionality and inclusion. gender, place and culture,    ( ). pp.  ­ . issn  ­  doi:  https://doi.org/ . / x. .  available at  http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/ /  it is advisable to refer to the publisher’s version if you intend to cite from the  work.  see guidance on citing  . to link to this article doi: http://dx.doi.org/ . / x. .   publisher: taylor & francis  all outputs in centaur are protected by intellectual property rights law,  including copyright law. copyright and ipr is retained by the creators or other  copyright holders. terms and conditions for use of this material are defined in  the end user agreement  .  www.reading.ac.uk/centaur    http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/ / /centaur% citing% guide.pdf http://www.reading.ac.uk/centaur http://centaur.reading.ac.uk/licence centaur  central archive at the university of reading  reading’s research outputs online [pre-proofs version] emergent and divergent spaces in the women’s march: the challenges of intersectionality and inclusion pamela moss* faculty of human and social development university of victoria victoria, canada pamelam@uvic.ca avril maddrell department of geography and environmental science university of reading reading, united kingdom avril.maddrell@reading.ac.uk pamela moss is professor in human and social development at the university of victoria. she is a feminist geographer teaching in the social justice studies program. her research interests include autobiography, women with chronic illness, soldiers with ptsd, contested illness, and disability. she is managing editor at gender, place and culture. avril maddrell is associate professor of human geography at the university of reading. she is a feminist social and cultural geographer interested in historical and contemporary issues. her research interests include emotional-affective geographies of deathscapes and sacred mobilities; place, landscape and heritage; historiography; charity shops as socio-cultural spaces. she is editor at gender, place and culture. emergent and divergent spaces in the women’s march: the challenges of intersectionality and inclusion this piece introduces the set of articles assembled from our call for rapid responses to the women’s march on washington circulated in february, . each addresses issues arising through collective expressions of protest. the women’s march on washington, organized on the twin principles of intersectionality and inclusion, acted as a flashpoint for the generation of emergent spaces to do politics differently. in the search for solidarity, tensions within groups and among individuals shaped the way in which resistance and protests were responded to and organized. the authors in this collection take up themes of intersectionality and inclusion/exclusion via politicizing the personal, contesting the state, and challenging simplistic notions of unity in solidarity. keywords: gender; intersectionality; relationality; resistance; social justice; feminist organizing; women’s march on washington the women’s march on washington the women’s march on washington january , was organized as a protest against the policies and personal conduct of the newly elected th president of the united states. it was estimated that over a million people filled the streets of washington -- two to three times as many marchers than the inauguration the day before (stein et al. ; wallace and parlapiano ). but the protest was not restricted to or contained within the us. it spilled over national boundaries and spread across the globe. estimates of the numbers of marchers worldwide ranged from between . and . million protesters (waddell ). if measured solely in numbers and international reach, there is no doubt of the success of the women’s march, as it has come to be called across activist groups. numbers however tell only part of the story. organizers of the women’s march sought to bring together diverse groups of people with a single focus. the twin principles of intersectionality and inclusion framed the approach. the organizers’ commitment to intesectionality was reflected in their reference to the triad of gender, race, and economic justice in their call to participation, inviting all women to join the march: “black women, indigenous women, poor women, immigrant women, disabled women, muslim women, lesbian, queer and trans women” (women’s march on washington ). invitations were issues to everyone, ‘regardless of gender or gender identity, who believes women’s rights are human rights’ women’s march on washington ). the organizers of the march, in refusing a singular identity of woman as well as who can supporters women’s rights, attempted to bring the reality of living in bodies marked by social difference into a common voice of dissent. for many, ‘pussy hats’ symbolised this alliance. lurid and gaudy, the pink knitted hats worn in washington and elsewhere signalled unity and acted as a rebuke to donald trump’s bragging about grabbing women by their pussies. for some, the women’s march was an epiphany, a political awakening, a wondrous expression of interwoven resistance and solidarity. yet in the days before and immediately after the march, criticism arising from feminist activists, bloggers, and scholars about the way in which intersectionality and inclusion were taken up by organizers, protesters and marchers eclipsed the glow of solidarity experienced by many participants. looking beyond the numbers, critics questioned the value of ‘comfort feminism’ called on to do the work of consoling in times of crisis that had driven people into the streets (silva, ) and raised a number of piercing questions and ongoing debate. has the women’s march been able to tap into a collectivity that could act as an umbrella group that would reinvigorate the drive toward rights and social justice for women? have feminists been able to surmount the divisive politics of difference and collaborate over the populist, globalized right? are protests and days of action effective in bringing about the change so desperately needed? furthermore, would the momentum be sustained? could the energy from the women’s march be harnessed to effect structural shifts in the economy, in the us and elsewhere? would existing tensions between activists’ experience and agenda be reproduced in these spaces? or would this new mobilisation of a gendered political statement transform into sustained activism and keep the women’s movement salient? in short, has the women’s march really spawned a new social movement? as editors of gender, place and culture we felt compelled to ask feminist geographers what they were doing, experiencing and thinking about intersectionality and inclusion in the context of the women’s march. the rich and varied responses can be found in the pages here and as a set of blog posts and responses on the journal’s website: genderplaceandculture.wordpress.com. the need for rapid responses rapid response is a new format for gender, place and culture. rapid responses in academic journals arose out of a need to engage quickly with published material, especially in the medical sciences (see bmj). these post-publication commentaries are meant to spur discussion and encourage debate, yet have a low participation rate making it difficult to sustain such interactivity (hames ). our choice of rapid response is not based on soliciting exchanges about that which is already in print; rather, our choice of rapid response is a call to action. what has the women’s march unleashed? what resistance is happening? what are the possibilities? we have received inquiries about these emergent spaces on campuses, in parks, on the streets, in classrooms, and as a globalizing phenomenon. we have also been part of email exchanges, skype calls, and meetings over coffee about how to support colleagues that are targeted in exclusionary state practices. discussions about the boston meeting at the aag [american association of geographers] have forced us to think about the politics of boycotts, what https://genderplaceandculture.wordpress.com/ supportive spaces mean, and what a feminist politics looks like. include a project in your course for students to write what they are going and how they are inspired. these spaces are where things are happening, and we invite you to write about them. (gpc editors ) as a call to action, the invitation to write and analyse what is going on right now, in the moment matters: the very act of writing then, conjuring/coming to ‘see’, what has yet to be recorded in history is to bring into consciousness what only the body knows to be true. the body – that site which houses the intuitive, the unspoken, the viscera of our being. – this is the revolutionary promise of ‘theory in the flesh;’ for it is both the expression of evolving political consciousness and the creator of consciousness, itself. seldom recorded and hardly honored, our theory incarnate provides the most reliable roadmap to liberation (moraga , xxiv) while quick responses may seem antithetical to much scholarly work, critical analytical skills, galvanized by the immediacy of the political environment, are necessary in times like these, when autocratic and right-wing movements are mobilising populist politics on an international scale and new expressions of populist resistance are emerging, but vulnerable to the dialectical tensions of varied and differing identity politics. as editors, we have sought to provide space to record some of these analyses of emergent spaces and practices of solidarity as well as to engage with the tensions arising within in-the-moment struggles around intersectionality and inclusion. rather than waiting for analyses of political spaces – like that of the women’s march – after years of research and long publication timelines, we see the need to offer a third space between social media posts and research papers for rigorous and timely analyses of current issues. in doing so, we want to bring the politics of the everyday and the immediate into the publishing agenda of gender, place and culture in ways that maintain analytical acumen and push the boundaries of feminist thinking and doing – but acknowledge that this process itself has its limitations, including those inherent to the short timeframe of curating such a rapid response as a collection of interventions compared to standard journal publication timelines. the contributors the contributions to this rapid response encompass a wide variety of feminist politics and experiences of protest. the contributors address sexism, racism, trans rights, and state policies as well as resistance, emotions, and solidarity. within these discussions, they lay out critiques of collective organizing, strategies of inclusions, and paths to transformation. most of the contributors relate experiences of the march and how those experiences moved them to act, ranging from being inspired by the verve of the pageantry and magnitude of the march to being conflicted by the purpose and politics of how and what was being protested. they politicize their experiences including those grounded in excitement, discomfort, or a blend of both. they also widen their analysis to include the broader context within which they strive to act relationally whether as individuals or a group (including as couples, families and interest groups). some of the contributors took the march and the associated actions as entry points into an intersectional analysis of what comprises unity and dissonance among women and feminists. they highlight how the practices of those marching, expressed through material and discursive icons and memes, support and contest the meaning of inclusion for solidarity. in politicizing the personal – in a long-standing feminist tradition – the contributors have been able to contextualize experience within a wider politics and ethics of political action. naomi adiv, in a creative non-fiction essay responding to trump’s personal behaviour, shows how sexism gets normalized in everyday practice. she recalls three instances of groping on three separate flights at three different times in her life. her reactions and that of others call into question fundamental issues of what counts as sexual assault – why is assumed consent commensurate with age, which body parts comprise sexual contact, and when does behaviour without contact constitute invasive and transgressive attentions? the normalization of systems of oppression in personal spaces support and reinforce systemic discrimination, marginalization, and violence. yet these processes are not smooth or unidirectional. banu gökariksel and sara smith complicate understandings of systems of oppression by focusing on embodied politics to show dissonance as resistance. in their intersectional analysis, they draw out discursive and material implications of pussy hats and american flag hijab, as both icons and headwear, to demonstrate how multiple differences disrupt certain white masculinities, especially that which is on display in the us white house. the resulting politics makes for unevenness both in the capacity to resist and among strategies for resistance. cindyann rose-redwood and reuben rose-redwood extend this particular point around whiteness in their piece on their experiences of the local women’s march in victoria, british columbia. they explore tensions among expressions of solidarity arising out of who attends which collective protests. they argue that even though including a wider range of issues around which to organize protest may attract more people, marginalization and erasure of women of colour is further reinforced. within these articles, points of contention within grassroots women’s organization get taken up by individuals and movements quite differently. in her essay, amanda hooykaas shows how the march acted as a catalyst not only for action but also for thinking about a wider politics. she was moved to be part of the women’s march in toronto, not because of her life-long commitment to a feminist politics as many were, but because of her need to claim feminism as a politics for resisting the autocratic governance shaping western democracies right now. she finds support through her everyday contact with women in her choir that continually challenges inequality across difference. in contrast, as part of the intense intimacy of experiencing a global phenomenon, shannon burke, alexandra carr, helena casson, kate coddington, rachel colls, alice jollans, sarah jordan, katie smith, natasha taylor and heather urquhart share their responses to the march. the authors are students and instructors of a geography course about intimacy in britain. in a series of vignettes, they bring together their analytical thinking about exclusion of particular bodies and voices, geopolitical strife around the globe, and uneven proximities of engaging in resistance. given that not all feminist politics are oriented along the same axes, identifying and mapping how varied movements can relate to and assist one another in achieving social and economic justice is one way that academic activists may be able make a contribution. in trying to connect the politics of the march with other social movements, garrett graddy-lovelace intertwines her experiences of the women’s march in washington with her political ecology work. she argues that feminism and the women’s movement could learn from the women-led agrarian transnational movement. groups like la via campesina have over years of experience of action while being informed by intersectional politics. having been borne out of a resistance to global neoliberalizing economies, la via campesina puts at the centre of the movement paid and unpaid work while seeking to bridge the divide between rural and urban women in light of food sovereignty. exploring a different entry point into resistance, shannon black looks to craft activism to address the widespread use of the pussy hat. she recounts a brief history of craft activism, or craftivism, within north america as a way to insert crafts back into the women’s movement. craftivism itself is often in conflict with politicized movements because crafts are not viewed or respected as political entities or those involved in crafts do not seem themselves as political. she inserts craftivism back into the agenda as a strategy for resistance in north america. tracing the effects of what happens in widely-based protests can show the potential fractious politics within a movement. sydney boothroyd, rachelle bowen, kenda chang- swanson, alicia lauren cattermole, hanna daltrop, sasha dwyer, anna gunn, brydon kramer, delaney m. mccartan, jasmine nagra, shereen samimi and qwisun yoon- potkins show how key pieces of the march came together to reproduce a hegemonic femininity, one (hopefully) not intended by the organizers of the women’s march on washington or any of the satellite marches. they argue that there is a politics of purity at play within the march that consistently, systematically, and systemically sets up white women with female genitalia who display appropriate emotions as the ideal. they support their argument by tracing the erasure of the black lives matter movement in vancouver, the implication of the pussyhat project for defining woman, and the effectiveness of anger as a political strategy. all these contributions disclose the personal nature of engagement with protest, whether it is about the experience of exclusion or the exaltation of claiming a political position. the building blocks to politicize the personal is a process and usually manifest in fits and starts over a long period of time. bisola falola and chelsi west ohueri trace this process in a creative non-fiction essay that highlights the complex terrain from where personal politics emerge. through talk-story they identify and then discuss the points of exclusion in the political strategies of inclusion, of black women’s experiences of gendered solidarity, and of complexity of one’s everyday lives. they organize their work around three types of responses -- resist, persist, desist -- as they manoeuvre through their daily life in order to make sense of the march. they argue that these encounters texture their political positioning as black women. this politicization of the personal can also come in a watershed moment. petra doan writes about her involvement in the state-wide lgbtq group in florida. she writes about how long it took her to be part of the lgbtq movement while she did the personal work around transitioning. but it was not until the fall of that she decided to engage fully with her own embodied politics. for the march, she gave a speech, one that brought together the politics resonating for her in this moment. in her essay, she describes the presence and connections of various diverse groups that marched in protest on a rainy day in tallahassee. the words in her speech bring the protest to life and show how a meshwork of resistance can indeed flourish. as a collection, these contributors show how the women’s march on washington was a catalyst for action that generated spaces for collective resistance against oppression and discrimination while at the same time revealed tensions among resisters that might prove to break apart solidarity ties. these everyday spaces – kitchens, living rooms, city streets, town halls, airplanes, buses, classrooms – tell a story of resistance and protest. as a collection, they tell inspirational tales of moving beyond one’s comfort zone into a space that can deal with collective discomfort around discrimination, marginalization, and violence. they also layer their accounts with their intimate and political responses to tensions that had led to aggressive acts of erasure. their collective work entreats feminists to go beyond personal levels of comfort and move into spaces full of trepidation so as not to let rallying cries eradicate difference and to listen to the silence that is protest. these contributions support the notion that there are ebbs and flows of convergence within resistance rather than a stable monolithic universalist approach to unite all women. without this movement toward uneasiness, toward awkwardness, toward discomfort, feminists may contribute to normalizing economic and social injustices as women across difference continue to be subjects and objects of systemic discrimination, economic exploitation, powerlessness, systematic marginalization, and state violence (after young, ). these pieces highlight the situating of political experience and agenda, as well as how this can be challenged, coloured and changed by the experience and insights of others. despite its critiques, we remain encouraged. underlying each of these contributions, even among those with the most pained and perilous analytical claims, there is some optimism. there is hope. there is hope in those taking to the streets in protest for the first time. there is hope in feminist solidarity across within and across all genders. there is hope that anger can be corralled and directed at the things that need to be changed, that diverse bodies can be included in ever-evolving resistance movements, and that precarious alliances and strategic networks can move forward together, strengthening one another. there is potential. there is potential in that feminists occupy these emergent spaces and keep them moving on and developing. there is potential in that grassroots groups acknowledging and apologizing for offences committed in rash and unthinking acts. there is potential in that individuals remain engaged and supportive instead of retreating into privilege and isolation, that groups have a will to forge dynamic collective inclusive strategies, and that both individuals and groups appreciate the relations and dialectical tensions that bind them together. and, we know that where there is hope and potential, there is always possibility. we see that this collection as a provocation to ongoing feminist activism, one grounded in the challenge to actively see, recognise, and respond to the needs and desires of diverse others, not least those whose experience differs from our own, and likewise to respect those who are changing. for some, possibility represents a call to a new form of political commitment and entwinement. for others, possibility depicts the long-time-in-coming vision of togetherness on a path worn through decades-long struggle, protest, and resistance. in the words of gloria anzaldúa ( , ) ‘we must align ourselves with and support those who challenge their own inherited or acquired privileges, examine their social positions, and take responsibility for their assumptions.’ in short, we must be open to possibility. acknowledgements we would like to acknowledge the support of katherine brickell and kanchana ruwanpura for the call. we thank all the authors for their steadfast politics of resistance and critiques of solidarity. references anzaldúa, gloria. . “foreword to the third edition.” in this bridge called my back: writings by radical women of colour, edited by cherríe moraga and gloria anzaldúa, – . albany: state university of new york press. gpc [gender, place and culture] editors. . “rapid response call: emergent spaces in the women’s march. intersectionality and inclusion.” february . retrieved may from: https://genderplaceandculture.wordpress.com/category/announcement/ hames, irene. . “peer-review in a rapidly evolving publishing landscape.” in academic and professional publishing, edited by robert campbell, ed pentz and ian borthwick, – . oxford: chandos publishing. moraga, cherríe, , “preface to the fourth edition: catching fire.” in this bridge called my back. writings by radical women of colour, th ed,, xv–xxv, edited by cherríe moraga and gloria anzaldúa. albany, state university of new york press. silva, kumarini. . “keynote panel.” comments presented at feminist geography conference: insides and outsides of feminism, chapel hill, north carolina, may – . stein, perry, steve hendrix and abigail hauslohner. . “women’s marches: more than a million protesters vow to resist president trump.” washington post, january . accessed may . https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/womens-march-on-washington-a-sea-of- https://genderplaceandculture.wordpress.com/category/announcement/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/womens-march-on-washington-a-sea-of-pink-hatted-protesters-vow-to-resist-donald-trump/ / / /ae def -dfdf- e -acdf- da ae _story.html?utm_term=. b faeb c pink-hatted-protesters-vow-to-resist-donald-trump/ / / /ae def -dfdf- e -acdf- da ae _story.html?utm_term=. b faeb c waddell, kaveh, . “the exhausting work of tallying american’s largest protest.” the atlantic, january . accessed may . https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/ / /womens-march- protest-count/ / wallace, tim and alicia parlaiano. . “crowd scientists say women’s march in washington had times as many people as trump’s inauguration.” new york times, january . accessed may . https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/ / / /us/politics/womens-march- trump-crowd-estimates.html?_r= women’s march on washington. . “guiding vision and definitions of principles.” [handout] accessed may . https://www.womensmarch.com/principles/ young, iris marion. . “five faces of oppression.” chap. in justice and the politics of difference, - . princeton, nj: princeton university press. https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/womens-march-on-washington-a-sea-of-pink-hatted-protesters-vow-to-resist-donald-trump/ / / /ae def -dfdf- e -acdf- da ae _story.html?utm_term=. b faeb c https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/womens-march-on-washington-a-sea-of-pink-hatted-protesters-vow-to-resist-donald-trump/ / / /ae def -dfdf- e -acdf- da ae _story.html?utm_term=. b faeb c https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/ / /womens-march-protest-count/ / https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/ / /womens-march-protest-count/ / https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/ / / /us/politics/womens-march-trump-crowd-estimates.html?_r= https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/ / / /us/politics/womens-march-trump-crowd-estimates.html?_r= https://www.womensmarch.com/principles/ s jra .. forum finding archaeological relevance during a pandemic and what comes after lynn h. gamble , cheryl claassen, jelmer w. eerkens, douglas j. kennett, patricia m. lambert, matthew j. liebmann, natasha lyons, barbara j. mills, christopher b. rodning, tsim d. schneider, stephen w. silliman, susan m. alt, douglas bamforth, kelley hays-gilpin, anna marie prentiss, and torben c. rick this article emerged as the human species collectively have been experiencing the worst global pandemic in a century. with a long view of the ecological, economic, social, and political factors that promote the emergence and spread of infectious dis- ease, archaeologists are well positioned to examine the antecedents of the present crisis. in this article, we bring together a variety of perspectives on the issues surrounding the emergence, spread, and effects of disease in both the americas and afro-eurasian contexts. recognizing that human populations most severely impacted by covid- are typically descendants of marginalized groups, we investigate pre- and postcontact disease vectors among indigenous and black communities in north america, outlining the systemic impacts of diseases and the conditions that exacerbate their spread. we look at how material culture both reflects and changes as a result of social transformations brought about by disease, the insights that paleopathology provides about the ancient human condition, and the impacts of ancient globalization on the spread of disease worldwide. by understanding the differential effects of past epidemics on diverse communities and contributing to more equit- able sociopolitical agendas, archaeology can play a key role in helping to pursue a more just future. keywords: infectious diseases, covid- , epidemics and pandemics, inequality, indigenous and black communities, paleo- pathology, climate change, marginalization, material culture, history of disease este articulo surgió a medidas que atravesamos la peor pandemia mundial de un siglo. con visión a largo plazo de factores ecológicos, económicos, sociales y políticos que promueven el aparecimiento y propagación de enfermedades infecciosas, los lynn h. gamble (gamble@anth.ucsb.edu, corresponding author) and douglas j. kennett ▪ department of anthropology, university of california, santa barbara, ca , usa cheryl claassen ▪ department of anthropology, appalachian state university, box , boone, nc , usa jelmer w. eerkens ▪ department of anthropology, one shields ave, university of california, davis, ca , usa patricia m. lambert ▪ department of sociology, social work, and anthropology, old main hill, utah state university, logan, ut - , usa matthew j. liebmann ▪ department of anthropology, harvard university, divinity avenue, cambridge, ma , usa natasha lyons ▪ ursus heritage consulting and department of archaeology, simon fraser university, coldstream creek road, coldstream, british columbia, v b e , canada barbara j. mills ▪ school of anthropology, po box , university of arizona, tucson, az - , usa christopher b. rodning ▪ department of anthropology, tulane university, dinwiddie hall, saint charles avenue, new orleans, la , usa tsim d. schneider ▪ department of anthropology, university of california, santa cruz, ca , usa stephen w. silliman ▪ department of anthropology, university of massachusetts, boston, morrissey boulevard, boston, ma - , usa susan m. alt ▪ department of anthropology, indiana university, bloomington, in , usa douglas bamforth ▪ department of anthropology, university of colorado, boulder, co - , usa kelley hays-gilpin ▪ department of anthropology, northern arizona university, flagstaff, az - , usa anna marie prentiss ▪ department of anthropology, university of montana, missoula, mt , usa torben c. rick ▪ department of anthropology, national museum of natural history, smithsonian institution, washington, dc - , usa american antiquity ( ), , pp. – copyright © the author(s), . published by cambridge university press on behalf of the society for american archaeology. this is an open access article, distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. doi: . /aaq. . https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:gamble@anth.ucsb.edu http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / arqueólogos están en buena posición para examinar los antecedentes de la crisis actual. en este artículo, presentamos una variedad de perspectivas sobre cuestiones de aparecimiento, propagación, y efectos de enfermedades en las américas y afro-eurasia. reconociendo que las poblaciones humanas más afectadas por covid- suelen ser compuestas de descen- dientes de grupos marginados, investigamos los vectores de enfermedades pre y post contacto entre las comunidades indígenas y negras en norteamérica, describiendo los impactos sistemáticos de las enfermedades y las condiciones que agravan su pro- pagación. examinamos como la cultura material refleja y cambia como resultado de las transformaciones sociales provocadas por la enfermedad, los conocimientos que provee la paleopatología sobre la antigua condición humana, y los impactos de la antigua globalización en la propagación de enfermedades en todo el mundo. al entender los efectos diferentes de epidemias pasadas en diversas comunidades y al contribuir a agendas sociopolíticas más equitativas, la arqueología puede tener un papel importante en formar un futuro más justo. palabras clave: enfermedades infecciosas, covid- , epidemias y pandemias, desigualdad, comunidades indígenas y negras, paleopatología, cambio climático, marginación, cultura material, historia de enfermedad i deas for this article emerged as we experience the worst global pandemic in a century. it has affected all aspects of life—political, religious, economic—and social structures have been chal- lenged at multiple levels. the primary goal of this article is to encourage scholars to consider the broader issues that the world confronts today and how we, as archaeologists, contribute to a greater understanding of similar issues that occurred in the past (trigger : – ). archaeologists are well positioned to examine the ecological, eco- nomic, social, and political factors that promote the emergenceandspreadofinfectiousdiseaseoverthe long term. we hope to encourage scholars to use archaeological knowledge byapplying it to broader topics of current significance in the world and to stimulate thinking on significant issues we face today—in this case, disease. the ongoing covid- global pandemic provides the most recent example of the eco- nomic devastation and human suffering caused by the rapid spread of infectious disease, expos- ing long-term weaknesses in infrastructure. irrational behaviors—such as berating construc- tion workers installing g networks because of the belief that they cause the virus, or suggestions by world leaders that the ingestion of bleach could be a cure for the disease—materialize as people cast blame, unable to believe or cope with scientific explanations. this pandemic illustrates how people do not always do the saf- est or most sensible things. instead, long-term societal fractures are exposed and amplified. events of the present provide an opportunity to tack backward and forward in time and use today’s lessons to humanize archaeological analysis and contextualize the factors that drive human actions. in this article, we begin with an examination of the historic period and the social issues sur- rounding the emergence, spread, and effects of disease. inequality is a central concern in these discussions. although inequalities are known to have developed within long-lived cultural tradi- tions (flannery and marcus ; kohler et al. ), they are most strongly associated with colonial situations. human populations most severely impacted by covid- are typically the descendants of those groups (dávalos et al. ). we address epidemic (outbreaks affecting communities or regions vs. pandemics that are international in scale) disease among indigenous groups in north america and mexico, outlining systemic impacts of diseases and the conditions that can exacerbate their spread. the importance of mobility as a disease vector and as a strategy of avoidance and even resilience is also investi- gated. we then examine impacts of disease on black communities as an effect of vulnerability and marginalization. in the second part of the article, we address the interplay of material culture, palaeopath- ology, and demography. we investigate how material culture both reflects and changes as a result of social transformations brought about by disease. in addition, we examine new insights that paleopathology provides about the ancient human condition via traditional, recent, and emerging analytical techniques, with examples of diseases from the americas both before and after european contact. the final section mirrors many of the issues in the covid- pandemic. gamble et al.] finding archaeological relevance during a pandemic and what comes after here, we consider how the spread of infectious disease was particularly rampant among ancient societies, and how this spread was exacerbated by climate-induced crop failures that made popu- lations more susceptible to disease. we conclude with thoughts about how the archaeological study of disasters, such as pandemics, can con- tribute to the growth of an archaeology that both furthers our understanding of the major challenges that humanity faces and supports the creation of equitable and scientifically supported agendas and solutions. this article was written by the members of the american antiquity editorial board during and in response to the covid- pandemic. through data, research, and analytical techniques, the texts that follow bring together different per- spectives on the current situation and the way these relate to human actions of the past. the arti- cle provides a multivocal commentary that has the goal of providing insights that are useful in new research on human-disease interactions. epidemic disease among indigenous peoples, black communities, and other underrepresented groups best-selling books such as jared diamond’s pu- litzer prize–winning guns, germs, and steel ( ) and charles mann’s ( ) draw attention to the devastation of indigenous com- munities due to epidemic diseases introduced through european colonialism. these works helped to popularize the notion that indigenous depopulation was a natural outcome, due to par- ticularities of geography and genes. although biology and geography may have laid the foun- dations for what followed, this naturalization separates the actions of people from the spread of disease, shifting blame from european settler onto microbes and genetics. sustained archaeological research from across north america over the past years demon- strates that the spread of epidemic diseases in the wake of european colonialism was complex (hull : – ). diseases did not spread independently from the actions of colonial agents, as hypothesized by a previous generation of scholars (e.g. dobyns ). advances in dat- ing and spatial analytics show that epidemic diseases lagged behind initial contacts in many areas, rather than advancing in a wave ahead of european traders, settlers, and missionaries in the sixteenth century. in the u.s. southwest, for example, the earliest evidence for postcontact pueblo depopulation occurs nearly a century after first encounters with europeans and afri- cans, and more than three decades after the estab- lishment of the first colonial settlements in the region (liebmann et al. ). similarly, disease appears to have followed on the heels of colonial incursions in the u.s. southeast, northeast, great lakes region, and far west, as well as on the canadian shield and the northwest coast (jones ). in other areas, there is strong archae- ological evidence of depopulation consistent with epidemic disease after initial contact but before sustained settlement (for example, progressive reduction in settlement and house sizes; collison ; kvamme and ahler ). the archaeology of colonial north america suggests that indigenous depopulation due to infectious disease is not a matter of simple expos- ure to new germs, as evidenced by the lag between first encounters and indigenous depopu- lation events. nor are infectious diseases autono- mous and wholly “natural” processes. instead, as dale hutchinson ( ) suggests, infectious dis- eases are also social processes, the consequences of which are directly affected by human deci- sions and dispositions. archaeology demon- strates that indigenous peoples died in vast numbers after not only because europeans introduced new diseases but because europeans introduced social structures that promoted new forms of poverty, famine, malnutrition, violence, and dislocation. these haunts of colonialism, termed “structural violence” by medical anthro- pologist paul farmer ( ), worked in concert with disease to render indigenous communities particularly vulnerable. instead of causing injury through direct physical actions, structural vio- lence refers to the economic, legal, political, and religious forces that place individuals and populations in harm’s way. historical narratives inform how we think about indigenous health and inequality today. the horrors of seventeenth-century “virgin soil” epidemics may appear to have been a unique occurrence—an accident of history (and [vol. , no. , american antiquity biology) that could never occur again. but this position ignores the fact that indigenous commu- nities have suffered disproportionately negative health outcomes for more than years. for indigenous peoples living under colonial regimes, health disparities are a persistent fact of life. whether we are talking about smallpox, measles, and typhus in the seventeenth and eigh- teenth centuries; tuberculosis in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries; or covid- in the twenty-first. today, indigenous communities suffer deaths due to diabetes at more than three times and cardiovascular disease at twice the rate of the rest of the nation, and infant mortality rates double that of the rest of the u.s. population (indian health service ). in the influ- enza pandemic, and again during the out- break of swine flu (also known as h n ), the death rate for indigenous groups that contracted these diseases was four times that of all other racial and ethnic groups combined (national library of medicine ). tragically and unsurprisingly, indigenous communities have been hit particularly hard by the novel coronavirus in . in new mexico, where native americans comprise % of the state’s population, indigenous persons accounted for % of the state’s , covid- cases as of may , (new mexico department of health ). the pueblos of zia and san felipe reported some of the highest community infec- tion rates in the country, at . % and . %, respectively. those rates exceeded that of new york city at the height of the spring pandemic (chavez ). once again, this is not a “natural” or inevitable situation. these sta- tistics should cause us to reflect on how indigen- ous peoples came to be more susceptible to covid- than settler colonial populations. the novel coronavirus pandemic of shines new light on a terrible truth: the horrors of seventeenth- to nineteenth-century epidemics among indigenous peoples were not a unique, one-time accident of history. it behooves us to think about how archaeologists can dismantle the enduring myths that continue to be used to rationalize health inequities in north america today as well as how we can contribute to pro- cesses, resources, and agendas that challenge this system. the way we think about the earliest days of european settlement in the americas structures the way we think about indigenous health disparities today. mobility when we consider the impact of epidemic dis- eases, we also need to contemplate mobility, or the lack of it. in the spring and summer of , local and national news focused on the growing malaise of citizens who were feeling not just increasingly frustrated about the uncer- tainty and tragedy of the covid- pandemic but also bottled up at home. with the spreading influence of armed protesters seeking to “liber- ate” their home states from what they interpreted to be oppressive restrictions on their mobility and ability to work during a global pandemic—along the way, grotesquely evoking the name and brav- ery of rosa parks to characterize their “plight” and resistance (scott )—some californians assembled for protests at the capitol in sacra- mento. others hit the beach. warm weather beckoned many outdoors in numbers, even if by doing so they not only defied the logic behind “flatten the curve,” “social distancing,” and “herd immunity,” but also outright ignored state restrictions against gathering in public spaces. according to one analysis of cell-phone data (aggregated from an average of million cell phones a day), differences emerged between those who dwell within densely populated metro- politan areas and “free-roaming” residents of many rural counties. a key social insight in this research is this: “state orders don’t necessarily dictate behavior” (schaul et al. ). mobility is at the core of human existence, and it is often infused with power and agency as seen in archaeological examples from colonial north america. beginning in the fifteenth cen- tury when european colonists first set foot on indigenous homelands, native peoples experi- enced spiritual and physical harm, theft of land, threats to their cultures and identities, and deeply wounding impacts to their lives and livelihoods from invasive plant taxa, grazing livestock, and the spread of introduced diseases. indigenous communities continue to negotiate the aftermath of these earlier phases of upheaval as well as the ongoing effects of sustained colonialism (light- foot and gonzalez ). in the face of the gamble et al.] finding archaeological relevance during a pandemic and what comes after severely reduced situations of indigenous com- munities, it is understandable why anthro- pologists working to “salvage” unadulterated cultural knowledge from “vanishing” tribes in the early s viewed missions and religious proselytizers as prime suspects in the story of loss visited far too often on native peoples of north america. the adobe, stone, and thatched walls of missions came to define sturdy physical and intellectual barriers between modernity and a space where prehistory ends. from mission “fortresses” described by borderland historian herbert bolton ( : ) to the prison-missions narrated in the present (madley ), popularized scholarly accounts of colonialism falsely depicted the immobility of indigenous peoples even when living indigen- ous peoples—and mounting archaeological evidence—suggest otherwise. crossing ancestral lands and waters, michelle lelièvre and maureen marshall ( ) note, the mobility of mi’kmaq people represented important political acts of sovereignty and emplacement that distressed catholic missionaries operating in nova scotia. mobilization to mesa-top refuges ensured access to spaces of protection and spiritual strength for indigenous peoples throughout the southwest following the pueblo revolt (e.g., aguilar and preucel ). not to be caught flat-footed, indigenous hunter-gather-fisher-managers of california frequently sequenced their visits to colonial missions—and their trips away from them—to coincide with seasonal harvests of food resources and to carry out mortuary rites, dances, and other social practices beyond the walls (schneider ). these and other examples from archaeology repeatedly show that mobility may be an act of agency in opposition to state control. although symbolic of the power of the state to control and confine, walls do not necessarily dictate behavior. stability of settlement in areas more remote from colonizing populations, particularly in the vast majority of the continent where no missions were ever established, underscores this. euro- american settlement came late to the heart of north america and, even faced with disease- driven depopulation, maize-farming communities on the great plains retained their traditional settlements, lifeways, and territories until late in the colonial era. these farmers built their own walls and resisted the changes around them from within (bamforth ). people’s use of mobility as a political state- ment today is controversial but also acknowledged for just that—a conscious and empowering action against perceived state control. when con- sidering archaeological examples of indigenous mobility, why are we so slow to apply a lens of power and autonomy? in these instances, sovereignty and agency were even more central and consequential, and yet tropes of indigenous loss and inaction endure. to be sure, these two contexts are different in their root causes and rea- sons for mobility. recent efforts at mobility in the face of state-dictated restrictions, however, draw heavily on ideas of liberty and freedom from state oppressors. this sits in stark contrast to the archaeological interpretations of indigen- ous mobility that largely downplay its signifi- cance, power dynamics, and sovereign political implications. examples from mexico we see many parallels among indigenous peo- ples of mexico, further demonstrating that dis- ease does not stop at international borders. it is especially instructive to look at the subtler rami- fications of the great death toll from numerous epidemics that hit central mexico in the sixteenth century after contact between men from europe with both women and men of mexico living in urban settings. the resulting massive death toll brought about significant changes and begs the question of how many other times in human history similar changes—in regional settlement patterns, rituals, foodways, age profiles, econom- ics, and political organization—have resulted from epidemics. no fewer than four diseases—smallpox, mea- sles, typhoid, and mumps—hit central mexico within a -year period, killing % of the popu- lation (prem ). the first epidemic occurred in the middle of the first entrada ( – ), and the second one a decade later. both epi- demics exacted their highest toll among young indigenous people. some spaniards died as well. this high death rate among indigenous peoples of new spain (central mexico in particular) and low death rate among spaniards [vol. , no. , american antiquity led to a number of assertions about the differ- ences between the native’s body and the span- iard’s body. why was the native body so fragile and the spaniard so hardy? the span- iards’ explanation was that the climate of central mexico and the caribbean (stars overhead, lati- tude, humidity) feminized a man, as did the diet of the indigenous peoples (root crops, insects, rodents, algae, and maize), which upset the humors. the european/christian/civilized foods of wheat, wine/spirits, and mammalian meat made the ideal (masculine) body. the absence of these in new spain eventually led to the rapid import of european foods, forever altering native foodways and causing environmental degradation from domesticated animals (earle ) and land grabs for acreage within only a few decades. like covid- , the epidemics of the six- teenth century affected and stressed one segment of the population much more than it did others: it was members of the working class and the native population who died in astounding numbers (earle ; prem ). these deaths impacted not only rituals through the loss of practitioners and their esoteric knowledge, but also crafts through the loss of skilled craftspeople. the high quantity of deaths— million to million in years in new spain—led to depopulation of native settlements and, consequently, the loss of elements of landscape and place that under- pinned ritual and identity. spaniards and the spanish language filled the vacant quarters. in some cases, the native populations that survived remained in these places and repurposed churches while developing new understandings of ruins and their place in the cosmos. mobility was not an option for catholic natives, given that they were forced to work on missions, for government officials, or for span- iards in mines and ranches; attend daily prayers and lessons; and report to their priest each week- end in larger towns. in writing about natives in jalisco, gerónimo de mendieta stated that “unlike other people in the world, they did not flee into the countryside when plague struck, instead staying together in their altepetl [towns] —only within the altepetl would they be assured a decent burial [catholic procedure] and not die like animals [pagan ancestors]” ( : ). hospitals had been built in nearly every doctrina town by the s, so for the later epidemics, these hospitals—as well as the desire for a proper burial and access to provisions—attracted rural dwellers to the doctrina and visita towns, increas- ing the density of population. eventually depopulation changed the ability of native peoples to pay tribute to their leaders, altering the quantities of goods, the variety of goods, and the geography and nodes of the trib- ute network. similar to our current situation, these economic losses worked their way up the social hierarchy. the lack of goods from their subjects meant that the native elite governors were unable to meet spanish tribute (goods and labor) demands, costing them their favored place in the spanish governmental hierarchy and the native peoples their self-governance. soon, the drastic decline in indigenous labor available to work on ranchos and mines led to the rapid importation of new laborers—africans, creating yet another culture contact situation. inequality, vulnerability, and effects of marginalization on african americans compared to the general u.s. population, the effects of covid- have been much greater not only among indigenous communities but also among black groups. there are many rea- sons why. historically and structurally, black communities in the united states have had com- paratively less access to health care, nutrition and fresh foods (given the “food deserts” in some urban areas), safe housing and neighborhoods that enable healthy lifestyles, and educational and employment opportunities that foster both flexibility and choice in career paths and living arrangements. these issues parallel those of indi- genous, latinx, and asian groups in the united states. the lives of people of color are more commonly affected by violent crime, aggressive and sometimes violent policing, and associated stresses and stressors. many black americans and members of other marginalized groups hold jobs that cannot be done from home and/or performed while consistently main- taining social distancing. many also have lost jobs because of the economic fallout of the co- ronavirus crisis, and—in part because of other factors noted here—they sometimes cannot find other jobs easily, thereby compounding other gamble et al.] finding archaeological relevance during a pandemic and what comes after sources of vulnerability and susceptibility to disease and poverty. this constellation of issues stems from the other multigenerational pandemic it represents: long-standing and virulent anti-black racism and the extensive systemic and practical effects of white privilege and supremacy. our duty as archaeologists is to make sure that those histories are not forgotten. they are precursors to the pres- ent, and these narratives and structural realities remind us that these conditions are not new nor are they “over.” they have been present since africans were first brought to the americas (see new york times ) enduring the horrors of the middle passage and perhaps never recov- ering entirely from the anguish and violence of those experiences. despite being far from any place familiar or friendly, enslaved african persons then carved out lives in new settings, maintaining some aspects of traditional african cultural practices while adapting to american environments and landscapes of colonialism and imperialism. archaeology sheds light on the resilience, resistance, strategy, and even opportunity pursued by african americans in the plantation landscapes of the american south, the chesapeake, and the caribbean (e.g., barnes and steen ; brown ; fer- guson ; mcdavid ; orser , ; samford ; singleton , , ); in urban and rural settings in the american north- east (e.g., delle ; matthews and mcgovern ); and at sites associated with the under- ground railroad in the united states (e.g., graff ; laroche ) and in latin america (balanzátegui ; costa ; weik ). not surprisingly, bioarchaeological studies of the health of both enslaved and eman- cipated africans and african americans show notable bodily stresses from inadequate nutrition, poor dental health, lifelong manual labor, and infection (e.g., blakey ; de la cova , ; lambert ; watkins ). emancipation of slaves in north america brought an end to the political imprimatur of enslavement and extraction of slave labor and lives, and archaeologists have been able to high- light the struggles and triumphs of black amer- icans in the periods that followed, from texas (franklin and lee , ; wilkie ) to massachusetts (battle-baptiste ; lee ; paynter and battle-baptiste ). however, violence and disenfranchisement of the rights of citizenship in the united states—and obsta- cles to african americans having access to “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness”—per- sisted throughout the late s and early s (barnes ; botwick ). in ways that res- onate with the current covid- context, these disparities can be tracked in the realms of health and healthcare for black populations and framed by gender and racial inequalities (e.g., dunna- vant ; franklin and wilson ). simi- larly, legacies of racism have contributed to structural violence and persistence of poverty and oppression of african americans in the united states since then (e.g., fracchia ; gray ). clear examples highlighted by archaeologists include the perpetual cycles of violence inflicted on black communities in the early twentieth century, such as the tulsa race massacre in oklahoma in (odewale and slocum ) and the rosewood massacre in florida in (gonzález-tennant ). archaeology can reveal diverse forms of oppression and marginalization in past societies as well as ideologies that have promoted the interests of some groups while extracting labor and resources (and sometimes lives) from others. the archaeology of enslavement reveals patterns of architecture and settlement layout that materi- alized and naturalized power relations, and that enforced systems of discipline and surveillance, alongside evidence of many forms of resilience and resistance. the archaeology of african american life during the past years illus- trates important patterns and processes that shape race relations in the united states currently and that contribute to the heightened vulnerabil- ity of black americans to the present pandemic. archaeology can amplify this knowledge by raising up the voices of black archaeologists and communities whose heritages are involved (e.g., epperson ; franklin ), following the #blacklivesmatter movement and its inter- sections with archaeology (see also rosenzweig ). a virtual panel on june , , “archaeology in the time of black lives mat- ter,” drove home this point with six panelists (justin dunnavant, ayana flewellen, maria [vol. , no. , american antiquity franklin, alexandra jones, alicia odewale, and tsonie wolde-michael) and more than , online attendees. the current convergence of the twin pandemics of racism and covid- demands that american archaeologists engage with this political moment. more than just researchers or even allies, archaeologists can serve as accomplices, shining light into the shad- ows previously cast by toppling monuments of colonizers and slavers. epidemics, pandemics, and material culture archaeologists are well positioned to assess changes in material culture following widespread disease. material culture figures prominently in present-day pandemic practices—such as the innovation and adoption of different mask styles, many of which are actively used to express mem- bership in different social groups and shared ideologies. perhaps even more than the hat styles in the classic article by martin wobst ( ), many masks convey emblematic styles (sensu wiessner ) that explicitly reference political and ideological membership in social move- ments and other groups—such as black lives matter (blm) or make america great again (maga)—as does even the choice of whether or not to wear a mask at all. the rapidity with which specific manufacturing technologies (folded, seamed, draped, or tubular), icons, and colors have been innovated and adopted in mask making and wearing provides an empirical record for looking at technological and semiotic networks. it also shows how style— both emblematic and assertive—goes beyond representation to how our interaction with these objects creates and maintains new relationships, including membership in new social movements. ethnohistorically documented epidemics and pandemics also provide contexts for understand- ing their effects on material culture, such as the transmission of knowledge about how to make specific kinds of items, along with their distribu- tion, uses, and consumption. diseases can di- rectly affect production by reducing the number of producers, creating population bottlenecks, and causing the loss of skilled knowledge bearers. for example, in , a smallpox epi- demic was introduced to zuni by mormon settlers of nearby savoia (ramah) that lasted until . one observer estimated about a % loss in zuni population (baxter ). in their analysis of three consecutive museum collections made at zuni by smithsonian institu- tion anthropologists from to the mid- s, margaret hardin and barbara mills ( ) noted a strong pattern of change in vessel size and sym- metry, with smaller bowls and more asymmet- rical patterns predominating in the last collecting expedition of – . they sug- gested that this was the result of the death of older, more skilled potters, who would have been the producers of larger vessels with more complex, symmetrical designs. similarly, sahn- ish (arikara) pottery production shifted after smallpox epidemics of the late s to a thicker, less carefully decorated pottery that is attributed to population loss, increasing warfare, and greater labor demands on women (krause and hollenback ). in another plains case, paw- nee potters stopped making cooking pots by the mid- s, at least in part because of eco- nomic decisions to put more labor in bison hide production (beck ). in all three of these examples, pottery production did not disappear. in fact, pots remained important objects that per- sisted—even in the face of massive euro- american incursions—and promoted identities of resilience in indigenous groups (see also hol- lenback ). potters had agency, and their decisions on what to make themselves and what to acquire by trade were a means of ensur- ing cultural persistence. epidemics and pandemics can inspire reli- gious innovations and changes in indigenous practices to control diseases. for example, new religious movements have arisen out of “crises responses” to european-introduced diseases, such as the chinigchinish religion in eighteenth- century california (preston : ). in another example, john creese ( ) cites the increased use of a particular style of effigy-smoking pipes by the wendat following epidemics of european diseases during the s and s. these objects were used in rituals of healing that involved smoking, an activity that by definition involves breath in all its layered meanings. changes in mortuary ritual have also been con- nected with seventeenth-century epidemics in gamble et al.] finding archaeological relevance during a pandemic and what comes after southern new england, where native americans buried their kin with european cloth to create a “protective” layer to the body (bragdon : ). such changes are not simply accul- turative acts. they are the selective use of new kinds of objects by indigenous groups because of those objects’ perceived abilities to affect what were dramatic transformations in their respective worlds. research worldwide demonstrates that mate- rial culture consumption may be used as an inde- pendent proxy for assessing the impact of pandemics on population loss, but with caveats. in eastern england, archaeological contexts dat- ing before and after the black death showed a % decrease in the amount of pottery deposited (lewis ). by contrast, lee mordechai and colleagues ( ) use material culture to argue against “maximalist” interpretations of mortality figures (cf. meier ) during the justinianic plague of ad – in the mediterranean region. drawing on multiple datasets, they showed that the expected drop in frequencies of coins, inscriptions, papyri, and other well-dated materials did not occur during or after the pandemic. their conclusions are supported by well-resolved palynological records showing no evidence for “rewilding,” or decreases in agricul- tural production, as they did following the black death. the use of multiple environmental and material culture datasets to challenge narratives of disease has also been employed in north america to demonstrate the resistance and resil- ience of indigenous populations rather than their disappearance (holland-lulewicz et al. ). paleopathology and insights into ancient human disease paleopathology can provide crucial insights into the history of human health and disease (buikstra ). much of this research has focused on chronic diseases such as degenerative joint dis- ease, malnutrition, and dental caries—conditions that leave macroscopic markers on bones and teeth. by comparison, development of knowl- edge about the history of most infectious diseases has been slower. historical texts, cases of pre- served pathological soft tissue (e.g., mummies), and macroscopic parasites recovered from archaeological context have provided some key insights (camacho and reinhard ; nerlich et al. ; reid et al. ), but unfortunately, such materials are rare, or they are not systemat- ically sought from the archaeological record. advances in biomolecular analytical tech- niques have opened new windows into the study of ancient disease, especially those of infectious origin (nerlich ). many of these techniques were developed within medical, forensic, and other stem sciences, but they require unique modifications when applied to ancient materials. together, they provide archaeology with new and independent datasets to test hypotheses about the long-term evolution of human disease and human–pathogen interactions. within this developing field, two main approaches are emerging. the first, and probably most direct, is the detection of pathogens them- selves, typically by way of the unique biomolecu- lar signatures they leave behind. paleogenomics, or the study of genetic material from ancient pathogens, has been the most fruitful of these approaches. ancient dna (adna) unique to pathogens associated with tuberculosis (mycobac- terium tuberculosis; salo et al. ), syphilis (treponema pallidum; schuenemann et al. ), chagas disease (trypanosoma cruzi; auf- derheide et al. ), and meningococcal disease (neisseria meningitidis; eerkens et al. ), among others, has been recovered from archaeo- logical human and animal remains in the americas. although bones and teeth are most commonly studied, the recent recognition that adna and other biomolecules are well-preserved in dental calculus has opened large areas of the world to this type of analysis (warinner, rodri- gues, et al. ). at the same time, there is still a sizable gap between the screening of archaeological materi- als for adna of pathogenic microbiota and the ultimate goal of making inferences about ancient epidemics and pandemics from such data. the fragile nature of the double-helix dna molecule makes recovery of adna challenging (pääbo et al. ; willerslev and cooper ), and ancient rna–based viruses even more so (smith and gilbert ). because adna fragments must be compared to reference databases— which, in most cases, only include known modern [vol. , no. , american antiquity pathogens—we are potentially overlooking a wide range of unknown and more ancient pathogens and diseases. that said, there are some recent successes, such as the extraction of ancient influenza from preserved human tissues dating to the early s (kobasa et al. ). beyond adna recovery, many microorganisms are opportunistic pathogens within the human body, causing no disease in the face of an active immune system but turning pathogenic in a wea- kened state (e.g., tubercular bacilli). as is evident in the case of covid- , humans can be asymp- tomatic carriers of a pathogen, so simply detect- ing the adna or rna of a pathogen does not indicate ancient disease, at least for the individ- ual from whom it was obtained. paleoproteomics is a second emerging biomo- lecular approach, although it is not as developed as paleogenomics. once again, dental calculus is proving to be a rich source for a wide range of ancient proteins (e.g., hendy et al. ; warin- ner, hendy, et al. ). proteins have several advantages relative to adna in paleopathology research. first, they are inherently more stable than dna—especially those that bind to mineral surfaces in bone, dental tissues, or calculus— which makes their preservation in ancient samples more likely. tammy buonasera and col- leagues ( ) recently showed that amelogenin protein signatures in human teeth show negli- gible degradation over a , -year window, whereas adna from the same set of individuals shows an order-of-magnitude decrease in signal. second, proteins are produced by both pathogen (antigen) and host (antibody), potentially provid- ing greater insight into the interaction between the two. for example, antigen proteins associated with sarcoma cancer have been identified in archaeological bone (bona et al. ), whereas jessica hendy and colleagues ( ) recovered a wide range of human antibody proteins from mummified lung tissue samples. although they can show an immune response to an infection, compared to dna, proteins are often less indica- tive of a particular disease. reconstructing ancient outbreaks and epi- demics from the archaeological record using paleogenomic and paleoproteomic approaches is still quite difficult, especially in the absence of written records. of course, there are a number of ethical and logistical issues to address with descendant communities prior to commencing such studies, particularly when analyses are par- tially destructive (bardill et al. ; fox ). these issues aside, methodologically, one of the major challenges is working with partial or incomplete data—not only in terms of biomo- lecular preservation and incomplete knowledge about possible diseases but also in terms of archaeological sampling. most paleopathology successes are at the scale of a single or small number of individuals, and they employ multi- pronged analytical strategies. using multiple sources of partial data, such as fragments of adna, degraded proteins, nonspecific lesions on bone, and skeletal elements that happen to survive, we are able to make strong cases for par- ticular diagnoses. by contrast, documenting ancient outbreaks and epidemics requires verifi- cation of synchronous infection across many individuals and/or sites. another key concern here is knowing the rate of false positives and false negatives, similar to the osteological paradox that challenges interpretations of osteo- logical data (wood et al. ). this is especially difficult, for example, when a diagnosis is based on osteological lesions in one skeleton, and adna in the dental calculus of another, whereas a third individual has neither osteological lesions nor calculus. without estimates for false positive —and especially for false negative—it is difficult to estimate the rate at which a disease affected members of a population. rather than attempting to mimic modern epi- demiology’s focus on tracking epidemics by learning a little bit (disease vs. no disease) about a lot of contemporaneous people, the real strength of our discipline lies in learning a lot about a select few individuals and then extending those results to the long timescales we are privy to. in this respect, documenting the origins of diseases as well as providing a rich social- material context for their subsequent develop- ment and geographic spread over centuries or millennia are areas where archaeology can make significant contributions, whereas estab- lishing morbidity rates within populations or r for ancient pathogens is not currently feasible. gamble et al.] finding archaeological relevance during a pandemic and what comes after infectious disease in the americas before and after european contact as bioarchaeologists have long noted, the amer- icas were not a disease-free environment before the arrival of europeans (larsen ; martin and goodman ; merbs ), and, as else- where in the world, infectious disease likely shaped the biocultural landscape of the americas in ways that have yet to be fully understood. from the beginning, ancient americans would have carried microorganisms such as h. pylori and other potentially pathogenic bacteria (e.g., streptococci and staphylococci) and fungi (e.g., candida albicans) with them across the bering land bridge or other routes of entry (araújo et al. ; darling and donoghue ; merbs ). microbes such as these are com- mon components of human microbiomes (e.g., oral, gut, skin), communities of microorganisms that play a crucial role in human health and dis- ease (lloyd-price et al. ). although we know strikingly little at present about the micro- biota of ancient americans, there is great poten- tial for their elucidation through the study of adna in human coprolites and tooth calculus (e.g.,warinner et al. ). host-specific para- sites such as hookworm, pinworm, and whip- worm would also have traveled with humans to the americas, although the timing of their arrival and routes of travel have yet to be clarified (araújo et al. ). early migrants may also have introduced anthrax to the americas, trans- porting the bacteria on animal hides as early as , bp and possibly contributing to pleisto- cene extinctions—although, again, more work is needed to evaluate prehistoric human impacts on pathogen–host ecology in north america (nickell and moran ). once in the americas, human populations would have been exposed to a range of new pathogens through their interactions with ameri- can flora and fauna (darling and donoghue ), including lyme disease (borrelia burg- dorferi; margos et al. ), carrion’s disease (bartonella bacilliformis; allison et al. ), salmonellosis (salmonella sp.; sawicki et al. ), and tularemia (francisella tularensis; farlow et al. ). protozoan diseases such as giardiasis (giardia sp.; nickell and moran ), leishmaniasis (leishmania sp.; costa et al. ), toxoplasmosis (toxoplasma gondii; lehmann et al. ), and chagas disease (tri- panosoma cruzi; aufderheide et al. ) were also present in some environments. other endemic pathogens, such as the spores of cocci- dioides immitis and blastomyces dermatitidis (merbs ; ortner and putschar ), may have lain dormant in the ground until people began to disturb contaminated soils with the tran- sition to agriculture. many of these diseases would have been localized to areas where patho- gens and insect vectors lived, although long- distance trade could have exposed traders from distant locales to “new” pathogens as they passed through affected areas (merbs ). it is likely that other pathogens, such as the widely distrib- uted hantaviruses, would have periodically affected individuals and households through infestations by reservoir species (rodents), as occurred in in the four corners region (jonsson et al. )—inexplicable events that could well have stimulated cultural responses such as the burning of affected houses and accusations of witchcraft. domestic animals, a common source of disease in afro-eurasian contexts (wolfe et al. ), were rare in the americas, and they do not appear to have served as major reservoirs for pathogens affecting humans there. that said, turkeys and macaws may have exposed peo- ple in the american southwest and mesoamerica to avian-borne diseases such as psittacosis (chla- mydia psittaci; e.g., dickx and vanrompay ), and their feces (cf. lipe et al. ) could have contaminated water or food supplies with pathogenic bacteria. human feces would also have created health risks (e.g., e. coli and salmonella infections) when people began to settle into permanent villages, leading to diar- rheal disease and possibly spreading other infec- tions as a result of poor sanitation (as still occurs in many world regions today). diseases transmitted directly or indirectly from human to human (e.g., hepatitis b, see roman et al. ; herpes simplex, see wertheim et al. ) were also present in pre- contact north american populations (merbs ; nickell and moran ), although their [vol. , no. , american antiquity presence has often been difficult to establish archaeologically because few affect the bones. treponematosis (treponema pallidum subsp.?) and tuberculosis (mycobacterium tuberculosis) are two infectious diseases that do have distinct osteological signatures and widespread distribu- tion, and both are well documented in the amer- icas before contact (baker et al. ; harper et al. ; powell and cook ; roberts and buikstra ). these are chronic bacterial infections that could be maintained in smaller populations through carriers and affected indi- viduals (ortner and putschar ; powell and cook ), emerging as major (or at least more visible) diseases when people began to set- tle into permanent villages with the transition to agriculture (larsen ; powell and cook ; roberts and buikstra ). treponemato- sis affected indigenous americans for thousands of years before european contact (baker et al. ; powell and cook ), whereas tubercu- losis may have been introduced only a couple of millennia before the arrival of europeans, per- haps through infected sea mammals hunted on the west coast of south america (bos et al. ). the study of these chronic infections has recently been energized by advances in adna research (e.g., bos et al. ; schuene- mann et al. ), and the potential for further elucidation of the origins and phylogenetic history of these and other infectious diseases through such studies is enormous—if researchers involved in the study of human skeletal remains collaborate with and seek permissions from de- scendant communities to obtain tissue samples from affected individuals. there is also much still to be learned about environmental influences on the skeletal manifestations of these chronic infections through careful analysis of lesion char- acteristics and distribution in the body (cf. baker et al. ; lambert ). with the arrival of europeans and enslaved africans came the collective afro-eurasian dis- ease load (e.g., chickenpox, cholera, diphtheria, influenza, malaria, measles, mumps, plague, smallpox, typhoid, and yellow fever; bryant et al. ; larsen ; wolfe et al. ), including diseases that had made the jump from domestic animals or wild nonhuman primates, as well as those with a long history of human- to-human transmission (wolfe et al. , ). new and more virulent strains of trepo- nemal disease (venereal syphilis; baker et al. ) and tuberculosis also appear to have arrived with europeans, the latter likely swamp- ing out ancient american strains of tuberculosis in a complex exchange of genetic material that is only beginning to be understood (bos et al. ; pepperell et al. ; see also kay et al. ). one often overlooked (but see merbs ) aspect of european contact that warrants further consideration is the arrival of norse explorers on the east coast of canada around ad , long before columbus. their settlement at l’anse aux meadows in newfoundland was populated by some – people (mostly male), and it served as a hub for coastal explor- ation and resource acquisition for the greenland colony for several years at least. according to icelandic sagas, summer and fall collecting of timber and grapes took place to the south, likely in new brunswick, where the norse foraged in the same coastal estuary as large groups of abori- ginal people (wallace ). it is not inconceiv- able that disease exchange occurred in contexts such as this that brought norse explorers into close contact with indigenous americans. con- sider, for example, emerging evidence that strains of smallpox were circulating widely in populations of northern europe during the viking age (mühlemann et al. ). ecology of infectious disease, agriculture, and demographic transitions major concerns exist today regarding the emer- gence and spread of infectious diseases asso- ciated with the expansion of global food production necessary to feed a projected bil- lion people by (rohr et al. ). the archaeology of complex systems provides a framework (sensu kohler ) for considering the causes and consequences of such interactive processes in the spread of infectious disease. the ongoing covid- pandemic demonstrates how the exogenous destabilizing effects of a rapidly spreading infectious disease can impact economic well-being, and it must be studied as interacting processes occurring on different spatiotemporal scales (ceddia et al. ). gamble et al.] finding archaeological relevance during a pandemic and what comes after plant and animal domestication during the last , years has been one of the most conse- quential cultural and environmental transitions in the history of our species (smith and zeder ), and it has fundamentally changed the eco- logical and population dynamics involved with the transmission and spread of infectious dis- eases. the spread of agricultural and pastoral societies throughout eurasia, africa, and the americas (e.g., bellwood ; bramanti et al. ; skoglund et al. ) put humans in closer contact with other animal species carrying a va- riety of zoonotic diseases—just as what occurred with bats in china, which are thought to be the primary source of covid- . pastoral popula- tions spreading through eurasia and africa were in close association with domesticated ani- mals that were the primary vectors for a range of diseases (e.g., measles from cattle, influenza from pigs and ducks [diamond ]). model- ing approaches have demonstrated that even small populations consistent with early farming communities were large enough to sustain the circulation of some viruses, such as brucella melitensis in goat populations in the near east (fournié et al. ). infectious diseases resulting from the transition to agriculture and pastoralism in eurasia ultimately devastated indigenous populations in the pacific islands, australia, and the americas as eurasian explorers and colonists came into contact with populations lacking immunity. high mortality rates in the americas caused by introduced diseases contributed to the loss of traditional knowledge and lifeways as europeans expanded across the continents. a major demographic shift accompanied the transition from foraging to farming that had sig- nificant implications for the spread of infectious diseases (bocquet-appel ). increases in population are thought to be related to decreases in mobility and reductions in birth interval. population aggregation and urbanization in the last , years has led to supply chain issues required to feed growing populations (zeder ) and resulted in the contamination of drink- ing water due to animal and human waste. larger populations are also required to sustain many infectious diseases (e.g., , people for measles [armelagos and harper ]), and long-distance trade and interaction would have served to disperse infectious diseases more broadly. wealth and health disparities also became much more visible in early urbanized societies. overall, the neolithic demographic transition was associated with increases in both morbidity and mortality. traditional bioarchaeo- logical indicators of disease fail to capture evi- dence for large-scale epidemics of acute infections because people either recovered with immunity or were killed quickly without osteo- logical evidence (ramenofsky ). as noted above, however, a variety of biomolecular approaches are now providing a new lens to examine infectious disease and revolutionize our ability to examine the dynamics of infectious disease in the past (e.g., mühlemann et al. ; schuenemann et al. ). the plague, or “black death,” touched upon earlier, provides one well-studied archaeological example of the ecological, economic, social, and political dynamics involved with the emergence and spread of a highly virulent infectious disease. the disease ravaged europe between approximately ad and , killing %– % of the population and devastating eco- nomic, social, and political systems (dewitte ). skeletal assemblages in mass burial grounds combined with historical accounts pro- vide a stark account of what unfolded as the dis- ease spread rapidly through the population. as would be expected, the disease killed people too quickly to leave osteological evidence, but ancient dna consistent with a virulent strain of bubonic plague bacterium (yersinia pestis) has been extracted from teeth in europe and asia (rasmussen et al. ). the age and sex com- position of these mass burial grounds has been studied in detail, and it demonstrates that the dis- ease selectively killed the elderly and individuals who had experienced physiological stress prior to the epidemic (dewitte and wood ). strontium and oxygen isotopic data from a mass burial in london demonstrated that roughly % of the burial population were immigrants from the countryside, suggesting that mobility contributed to the spread of the disease (kendall et al. ). the black death epidemic also occurred in the wake of a climate-driven famine throughout europe that reduced health and [vol. , no. , american antiquity increased frailty in the population, intensifying susceptibility to the disease (dewitte ). the transmission of infectious diseases is known to be exacerbated by climate change, and economic well-being is diminished by crop failures, making individuals more susceptible to negative health outcomes (patz et al. ). climate-driven famine and increasing human frailty just prior to the black death epidemic is consistent with this idea. there are other histor- ical instances where climate change, famine, and disease outbreaks also co-occur. archaeo- logical and historical data for epidemics in the ming and qing dynasties ( – ) indicate that epidemics flared up in the context of climate change that depressed economic well-being throughout china (speir et al. ). episodic drought in the maya lowlands has also been linked to crop failure and severe famine that resulted in disease outbreaks and increases in mortality and migration (hoggarth et al. ). consequently, the archaeological record provides long-term data- sets useful for assessing the dire nature of increas- ing health risks that could be associated with future climate predictions. conclusion felix riede ( ) emphasizes that by under- standing the impacts of catastrophes and disas- ters in the past, we can also focus on ideas about resilience within narratives of “past- forwarding” that make archaeology relevant to the present. although he was speaking largely of environmental catastrophes, the same goal underlies our project here. we might ask, “are disruptions from epidemics and pandemics dif- ferent from other disasters, especially natural dis- asters such as volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, or hurricanes?” pandemics are different from these environmental disasters in at least one major way: pandemics have a different temporality and geographic scale. as our contemporary situ- ation shows, contagious diseases have much longer periods in which they affect populations, and they may even come in waves that endure over months, if not years—although some disas- ters, such as volcanic eruptions, may be sporadic over long periods of time as well. there are, however, many commonalities—population loss and displacement, disruptions in production and supply chains, transformations in social net- works, institutional breakdowns, decreases in human and community security, and many other aspects of lived human experience that change in the wake of disasters (e.g., hegmon and peeples ). on a more aspirational note, michelle hegmon and matthew peeples ( ) observe that the negative impacts of social transformation are mitigated by a strong sense of community security, which should spur us as individuals and collectives to better create these moving forward. the exclusion of pandemics from much of the archaeological literature on dis- asters drives our comments here, and we hope that they contribute to our own resiliency. as archaeologists explore the relevance of the human past to understanding a variety of contem- porary societal issues—including climate change, the biodiversity crisis, and broader societal inequi- ties (kintigh et al. )—infectious disease, epi- demics, and pandemics are another important area of inquiry. the archaeological and historical records from the americas demonstrate the abun- dance of past epidemics—especially during the colonial era—and the often transformative societal inequities that emerged from these epidemics, as well as their effects on material cul- ture. these examples illustrate the interconnec- tions between the events of several centuries ago and the continued injustices of today, par- ticularly in indigenous communities, black com- munities, and other diverse communities. researchers are well equipped with tools and models to help understand past disease (e.g., adna, proteomics, complex systems modeling), but significant obstacles to determining if past disease resulted in epidemics or even pandemics remain. given the long history of epidemics and pandemics, the covid- pandemic will not be the last, which makes research on disease, dis- ease prevention, and societal responses to out- breaks a high priority. archaeology has a key role to play in the future study of disease, espe- cially by highlighting the differential effects of past epidemics on indigenous and other diverse communities as well as helping pursue a more equitable and just future. gamble et al.] finding archaeological relevance during a pandemic and what comes after acknowledgments. this truly was a collaborative effort, and every american antiquity board member made significant contributions. lynn gamble is listed first because she con- ceived of the idea for the article and contributed sections throughout, primarily to the introduction and conclusion, as well as transitions between sections. she also guided the authors through the entire process. authors with primary roles—those who contributed substantial sections—are next listed in alphabetical order. these are followed by those who wrote short sections or primarily provided editorial changes and comments. they are also listed in alphabetical order. jelmer eerkens wrote the introductory section on paleopathology and insights into ancient human disease. pat lambert contributed the section on infectious disease in the americas before and after european contact. this is followed by a section that doug kennett wrote on the ecology of infec- tious disease, agriculture, and demographic transitions. he also contributed to the introductory material, with some addi- tions by natasha lyons and torrey rick. torrey rick also helped edit the entire document and wrote the concluding paragraph. in addition to authoring the abstract and short sec- tions throughout, natasha lyons thoroughly edited and com- mented on the article, and she provided help with references and many other aspects. barbara mills wrote the section on epidemics, pandemics, and material culture, and she was key in supporting the original ideas of the article. matt lieb- mann authored the introductory material in the section on epi- demic disease among indigenous peoples, black americans, and other underrepresented groups. tsim schneider, who wrote the section on mobility, was also involved throughout the process. cheryl claassen provided the section on exam- ples from mexico. steve silliman and chris rodning wrote the section on inequality, vulnerability, and effects of margin- alization on black americans. doug bamforth wrote some brief sections throughout and contributed ideas, as did susan alt, kelley hays-gilpin, and anna prentiss. the par- ticipation of the entire board in this unusual collaboration contributed to the diverse perspectives and depth of knowl- edge. we also acknowledge tim kohler, who served as guest editor for the article and provided constructive com- ments, as well as two peer reviewers who helped improve it. in addition, glenn russell reviewed different iterations of the article, and alicia gorman oversaw the early editorial process. finally, we thank jessica morales, who translated the abstract into spanish. data availability statement. no primary data were used for this article. references cited aguilar, 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underrepresented groups 	mobility 	examples from mexico 	inequality, vulnerability, and effects of marginalization on african americans 	epidemics, pandemics, and material culture 	paleopathology and insights into ancient human disease 	infectious disease in the americas before and after european contact 	ecology of infectious disease, agriculture, and demographic transitions 	conclusion 	acknowledgments 	references cited book review: you’re more powerful than you think: a citizen’s guide to making change happen, by eric liu derek w. m. barker kettering foundation you’re more powerful than you think: a citizen’s guide to making change happen. by eric liu. new york: public affairs. . isbn: . pages. hardcover, $ . author note derek w. m. barker, kettering foundation. correspondence regarding this article should be addressed to derek w. m. barker, program officer, kettering foundation, commons road, dayton, oh . phone: ( ) - . e-mail: barker@kettering.org mailto:barker@kettering.org you’re more powerful than you think ejournal of public affairs ( ) through his writings, speeches, and civic entrepreneurship, perhaps no one has done more to inspire youth civic engagement than eric liu, ceo of citizen university. his new book, you’re more powerful than you think: a citizen’s guide to making change happen, takes on a timely and important topic—citizen power—and does not disappoint. liu’s central insight, which i find utterly compelling, is that citizens have power but must be taught to recognize and appreciate it. just as machiavelli sought to teach florentine royalty to play the game of politics, liu has written a handbook for citizen power in the st century. liu’s book comes at a time of widespread dissatisfaction with politics and public life. rejecting the idea of a common good, the nation’s founders designed an adversarial system in which factions could seek individually to gain power while the system as a whole prevented any single faction from dominating. though the system may at times have produced periods of healthy competition, politics now appears to be nothing more than a struggle for power, frustratingly incremental and amoral, if not downright dishonorable. liu takes on these negative connotations of politics in an effort to teach young people that power can be noble and glorious, if only they will have the courage to use it. liu offers numerous examples of citizen power accomplishing great deeds. his gifts as a writer are on display throughout the book, which he fills with stories of individual leader-activists and civic entrepreneurs, each representing lessons about power and social change. he tends to draw from local or single-issue campaigns—faith-based social justice activists in missouri, for instance, or minimum wage organizers in seattle—in which individuals and small groups have produced impressive concrete change. he compares these individuals to historical figures, from mao tse tung to nelson mandela, linking their local and individual stories to larger lessons about power and leadership. while the examples may seem small on their own, liu weaves them together effectively to show that inspired people working together can create change where none seemed possible—a phenomenon the political theorist hannah arendt described as the human capacity for “natality,” which she considered to be an essential component of democratic politics. liu’s insight is especially relevant to the field of civic engagement in higher education. historically, higher education has, for good reasons, eschewed certain forms of civic engagement that might be construed as overly or directly “political,” in large part because it seeks to separate knowledge from power. as a result, the you’re more powerful than you think ejournal of public affairs ( ) dominant forms of civic engagement generally favor individual volunteerism over collective action and shy away from controversial issues and larger policy or structural changes. while higher education claims to use civic engagement in the education of active citizens in democratic society, it too often neglects critical aspects of citizenship, perhaps even signaling to young people that civic engagement is an honorable and effective alternative to politics rather than a political activity in itself. higher education is still searching for a form of civic engagement that is at once neutral but also public and consequential. a genuinely civic conception of power would fill this important gap. unfortunately, liu’s book does not deliver fully on this task. while i was hoping for a new conception of civic power that might provide an alternative to adversarial democracy, liu’s view of power is relatively simple and familiar, as he admits. for liu, power is “the capacity to ensure that others would do as you would want them to do” (p. ). while this definition includes persuasive as well as coercive power, the apparent assumption is that the goal of politics is to promote one’s own point of view, rather than to see from common or conflicting perspectives. liu’s understanding of power thus fits into the dominant conception of politics as a struggle for power among adversarial factions. however, a genuinely civic conception of power would explain how i might have power along with someone who disagrees with me, even as neither of us gets what he or she wants. in liu’s examples, the activists primarily promote their own particular issues, mobilizing their supporters while perhaps hoping to convert or activate sympathetic audiences. notably lacking are examples of citizens engaged with others of fundamentally differing viewpoints. while liu maintains that civic power is “positive-sum,” this means only that it can be created where it does not seem to exist, not that it might be shared across differences. rather than complicate or transform adversarial power, liu’s tack is to embrace adversarial power and extend it to everyday citizens. for liu, power is a means, not an end in itself. as a means, liu’s concept of power is neutral, in that anyone can exercise it regardless of his or her partisan background. nevertheless, this implies that liu expects people to exert power in their own interests. thus, while power is neutral, it is not shared across differences. for example, just as he draws lessons from social justice organizers, liu cites the example of an activist who mobilizes millennials around libertarian issues, making clear that he admires his means while disagreeing with the goals (p. ). rather you’re more powerful than you think ejournal of public affairs ( ) than attempt to transform adversarial politics, liu seems content to encourage different groups to use power for their own objectives, even if the cumulative effect may be to cancel one another out, as one would predict in an adversarial system. perhaps more problematically, liu holds up several of the more divisive forces on the current political scene as positive examples of civic power. liu considers the tea party and the “trump train” alongside black lives matter and occupy wall street (p. ) as examples of a new age of citizen power—not because they accomplished anything together, but because each succeeded on its own terms in injecting fresh democratic energy into the system. liu is not wrong about the positive attributes of these movements. however, if this is an age of citizen power, it is also an age of divisiveness and polarization, and such movements have, with the best of intentions, reflected and contributed to these troubling dynamics. civic power, as i understand it, remains elusive. if liu’s conception of power fails to transform the collective understanding of politics, i fear that it will be less useful as a model for higher education civic engagement. if politics is understood as a competition among conflicting ideologies, higher education will rightly seek to steer clear of politics and continue to prioritize more benign forms of volunteerism and experiential learning. moreover, as students appear to be yearning for experiences that might represent a different kind of politics, it seems that liu’s conventional view of power represents something of a missed opportunity. i share liu’s aspiration for young people to find dignity and meaning in politics, and he is certainly correct that the negative connotations of power are significant deterrents to youth civic engagement. liu makes an important and convincing case for giving young people the skills they need to make a difference in public life beyond the individualistic and de-politicized conceptions of civic engagement. indeed, higher education has much to learn from you’re more powerful than you think. still, it seems to me that the negative connotations of power stem from an underlying conception of politics as adversarial, which liu never fully addresses. increasing levels of divisiveness increase the stakes of politics, while reinforcing the view of politics as a competitive game among groups lacking any common purpose. while we ought to be suspicious of efforts to return to a unitary democracy with complete agreement on the common good, at least some sense of commonality, despite our differences, might make power appear less you’re more powerful than you think ejournal of public affairs ( ) threatening. reducing the climate of divisiveness may be at least as important as overcoming the aversion to power. in fact, the two may go hand in hand. you’re more powerful than you think ejournal of public affairs ( ) author biography derek w. m. barker is a program officer at the kettering foundation. with a background in political theory, he works primarily on research concerning the democratic role of higher education institutions; philanthropy and nonprofit organizations; journalism; and the professions. derek is the co-editor (with alex lovit) of kettering’s higher education exchange, and also works closely with the foundation’s team of resident researchers. derek’s previous experience includes an appointment as visiting assistant professor of political studies at pitzer college, and he holds a ph.d. in political science from rutgers university. from frenemies to trusted partners: q&a the now widespread recognition of the benefits of open access (oa) to research and scholarship has brought the global system of scholarly publishing to a historic turning point, as well as an impasse as the key stakeholders differ on how best to achieve the goal of universal oa. the debate in scholarly communications since the announcement of plan s, oa , numerous negotiated “transformative agreements,” and the (rumored) forthcoming white house executive order has left both publishers and libraries scrambling to find sustainable and affordable paths forward. in these turbulent times, more than ever, libraries and publishers need to work together. and not just talk about working together. this was discussed during a liber online session, from frenemies to trusted partners . since it was not possible to answer all questions during the discussion which followed, two speakers kindly took the time to answer questions offline. their insights are presented in this document. questions answered by richard gallagher, president & editor-in- chief, annual reviews, and sara rouhi, director of strategic partnerships, plos in launching subscribe to open, being a collective action model, what have been the biggest challenges in the execution of the model? how have the libraries embraced this model? richard gallagher: as the success of subscribe to open (s o) depends on retaining subscribers, the biggest challenge is to engage every one of them. consortia managers were a great help in doing this. the librarians were prepared to engage and examine the proposal with an open mind. the outcome has been enthusiastic support and, although s o is still in the pilot phase, it feels like trusted partnerships have been established. in terms of transparency on transformation of hybrid journals/publishers, do you feel they are better than subscription models or not? sara rouhi: i think the challenges with hybrid journals/publishers re: transparency relate to the “black box” represented by subscription pricing. as subscription pricing is so often linked way back to print subscriptions (or other anachronous metrics), it’s hard to understand what those prices represent, what costs they cover, etc. when you add the hybrid/apc journals to that mix, the costs relating to those oa efforts get mixed/tangled https://youtu.be/ pmzvpvhvs https://youtu.be/ pmzvpvhvs with the subscription costs and it’s hard to untangle them. so by definition it’s harder to make them transparent. it’s telling, though, that many hybrid publishers can so deeply discount their apcs. it tells quite a bit about how much margin there is and the benefits of subscriptions in cushioning costs for oa publishing. richard gallagher: the level of transparency depends on the commitment/comfort level of the publisher to being open. it is a question of how you conduct business, rather than the publishing model you are pursuing, in my opinion. as sara notes, transparency is not necessarily straight-forward, there are many issues to untangle, but it is essential to a more equitable and cost-effective publishing ecosystem. what practical steps can be taken to avoid the large commercial publishers taking all the money in the system? sara rouhi: prioritizing partnerships with native-oa publishers, non-profits, and society publishers! it’s natural to want to cover the “big deals” first since they represent the majority of what libraries spend and what authors read/publish but that choice automatically leaves “crumbs” for everyone else. big kudos to libraries that are able to strategically prioritize smaller agreements with more “at risk” publishers. that’s the only way to ensure we maintain the diversity in the publishing ecosystem that libraries, researchers, and institutions value. richard gallagher: i agree with sara’s comments. supporting smaller, high quality, innovative publishers is vital to maintaining diversity in publishing, but support should be earned, not given. both for-profit or non-profit organizations are worthy of consideration, but there is always a possibility that outstanding for-profits will be bought by the commercial giants, contributing further to the oligopoly. what thoughts – specific thoughts – do any of you have for humanities scholars in the u.s., who typically are not recipients of government funding and who are by and large incapable of sustaining the apc model? this in a world where "annual review" is not a publisher but a place where publications are being tallied, thereby forcing scholars both to find the time and money to do research and then the money to "get it out there." sara rouhi: this really gets back to the question of new business models that do not rely on authors to manage the payment process and/or provide funds themselves. apcs are exclusionary - that’s a fact. social sciences and humanities are always going to be at a disadvantage in a publishing paradigm that asks authors to bear publishing costs. there are some fantastic, non-apc based models in the humanities - open library of the humanities (olh) comes to mind. again, libraries need to prioritize the business models and publishers they support to ensure that all their researchers are supported, not just those with access to large grants. richard gallagher: i agree, olh is a beacon. s o is also a good approach for humanities journals to convert to oa, assuming that publishers are surviving on existing revenues, and berghahn open anthro is pioneering this. is there anything wrong with being a commercial publisher? i guess the question is in their primary objectives or the way of conducting business, rather than being commercial or not. being commercial is not a fault i would assume. sara rouhi: there's no inherent problem with commercial publishers – it's more a question of what motivates business decisions. there are great for-profit solution providers in our space – digital science comes to mind – whose mission and efforts are very aligned with libraries and non-profits. that said, when shareholders or private equity are driving how revenue targets are set, priorities naturally shift. richard gallagher: nothing wrong with being a commercial publisher at all (i launched one at one point in my career and have worked for two big ones). to me, the problem is that a handful of big publishers control too large a fraction of the market (in fact, not all of these are commercial publishers). given their importance, these big companies have a profound impact on the system. much of their impact is positive; however, in my view, they now exert too much control, extract too much as profit, and fall well short in terms of transparency. and things are getting worse. when considering new models not based on apcs, how do publishers meet the plan s requirement on waivers for low-income economies? have you discussed that with coaliation s? sara rouhi: at plos, we have always had and will continue to have a robust set of waiver programs. the plos global participation initiative (gpi) provides fee assistance to authors whose research is funded primarily ( % or more of the work contained within the article) by an institution or organization from eligible low- and middle-income countries. the plos publication fee assistance (pfa) program is intended for authors unable to pay all or part of their publication fees – irrespective of their geographic location – and who can demonstrate financial need. for our collective action for plos medicine and plos biology, we will be making all research life countries automatic members to the collective without needing to pay a fee. with these three programs we are confident that we are meeting the needs of authors who cannot pay apcs but we need to do more. the fact is that requests for waivers only go up and we are not able to offer as much assistance as we’d like. richard gallagher: our model for oa, subscribe to open, depends on institutional librarians continuing to pay a subscription fee to provide access for their researchers, faculty and students. the published content is open to everyone, no author fee or end- user fee is levied, with the wealthy countries supporting access to the low-income countries. how about securing transparency not only of publishing costs but also on investments (e.g. towards fully reproducible papers)? sara rouhi: the nice thing about working at non-profit publisher is that our finances are publicly available. it would be really interesting to see rap/par and other transformative deals (or even renegotiations of subscription agreements) negotiating requirements for transparency in the agreements themselves. i’m sure this is being done and look forward to seeing more of it. the academy left the field to commercial publishers because of the increasing the cost of publishing and delivering. why don’t they return to the field again with oa publishing? like oxford, cambridge, harvard university, etc. is this a utopic idea? sara rouhi: this is a great point and why it’s really important for campuses to support their university presses. the recent comments by tony sanfilippo, director of the ohio state university press, re: the recent osu/t&f agreements were unfortunate to see. their clearly wasn’t alignment there and so the osu agreement seemed to advantage a commercial publisher over their in-house university press. ideally the library and consortia negotiating teams are fully engaged with their presses as they undertake these agreements. (see the liblicense thread titled “the ohio state university and taylor & francis announce a new read and publish agreement”) we are mainly talking oa journals for advanced scientists it seems: any developments towards early career researchers or oa student led journals? #curious. or developments towards smaller scientific communities? sara rouhi: there are a lot of efforts in this space. library publishing coalition, university presses, and outfits like olh are leading the charge in allowing for niche oa journals that are very targeted in terms of their communities – be they early career or smaller communities. there are legal concerns regarding the legal decision of adding the "publishing" component to the existing "reading (subscription)" component, some arguing that the publishing service shouldn't be considered an extension of "subscriptions" and leave behind the public procurement processes that could decide which publishing service is suiting better for the buying organization. thoughts? sara rouhi: while i understand the thinking here – and we saw an extensive discussion of this in the last six months with respect to agreements in europe – i think it’s very hard to make this case. publishing organizations are not interchangeable in the way a library platform or cris system is. publishers – particularly non-profit and society publishers – work for and with very specific communities, offer varying levels of service and support, and reach/target specific audiences. to reduce a publisher to a service for a price ignores those nuances and would generate a lot of pushback from specific research communities. unfortunately, another unintended consequence of pursuing a public procurement route is reduced diversity in the publishing ecosystem. non-profits and societies would likely be pushed out because they cannot offer the depth of discounts, services, and scale that larger commercial publishers can. aside from transformative agreements (aka new big deals), what sort of leverage do you see libraries being able to exert with our budgets. do you see library influence/leverage being different for read vs. publish libraries? sara rouhi: libraries have all the leverage! talk/walk with your dollars! cancel/renegotiate agreements that do not align with your expectation around transparency, open scholarship, inclusion and equity. we are in a unique moment where publishers are pressured to meet aggressive mandates from funders and all stakeholders in the scholarly community are crunched re: budgets. now is the time to aggressively negotiate for the norms/standards you expect as you have to be even more selective with your budget dollars. be brave! how do you see the relationship between oa and open infrastructure? how do we make sure that in five years, we are not locked into proprietary infrastructure the way we were locked into proprietary access for such a long time? sara rouhi: this is such an important question and one that will be driven by where libraries invest their limited dollars during this unique moment in scholarly publishing and in the world. covid, economic and social unrest, black lives matter -- all of these issues are asking individuals and organizations to think deeply about their priorities. is business as usual good enough anymore? is saving money for your individual institution in a big deal that further cements the commercial power of a small group worth the downstream consequences? these are tough questions. richard gallagher: good question. there is a clear need for open infrastructure. for a small publisher such as annual reviews, it needs to be a turnkey service at a competitive price, and i am not sure that has been achieved yet. this is one (of several) areas where the many small non-profit publishers could work together to create an effective and efficient service, but such collaborations have been slow to emerge. 	the now widespread recognition of the benefits of open access (oa) to research and scholarship has brought the global system of scholarly publishing to a historic turning point, as well as an impasse as the key stakeholders differ on how best to achie... 	in these turbulent times, more than ever, libraries and publishers need to work together. and not just talk about working together. this was discussed during a liber online session, from frenemies to trusted partners f . since it was not possible... 	questions answered by richard gallagher, president & editor-in-chief, annual reviews, and sara rouhi, director of strategic partnerships, plos s jra .. article resisting dispossession: performative spatial irruptions and the la poverty department kimberly chantal welch department of english, university of missouri, st. louis email: duke.kcw @gmail.com i was so unimpressed with the city council. … they had a line of homeless people who were allowed to vote because kevin [michael key] was running for councilman and everything. so, they wanted ids … [the person tabling] asked me, “well i need some id. do you have any id?” and the way he said it, he knew i wouldn’t have any id. it was like i wasn’t even there. i was invisible. he was just going through the motions of making the sound. but he didn’t know he was dealing with r-c-b. so when i dropped my passport, and i do mean dropped my passport on the table, that’s when i got respect. —rcb, los angeles poverty department (lapd) what does it mean to perform presence or selfhood? what conditions necessitate these performances? in the opening epigraph, rcb articulates an instance when transparency was mapped onto his body—a moment in which he was simultane- ously invisible as an individual and hypervisible as the projections of stereotypes surrounding homelessness and blackness collided on his body, rendering his his- tory, present, and future as instantly knowable. during the election cycles of , , and , kevinmichael key, a prominent, formerly homeless skid row activist, community organizer, and member of the los angeles poverty department (lapd), ran for a position on the downtown los angeles neighborhood council (dlanc). as part of his campaigns, key sought to help homeless residents of skid row exercise their right to vote. one instantiation of this objective involved tabling in the neighborhood. in a show of support, rcb lined up to vote and subsequently encountered the tabler. “and the way he said it, he knew i wouldn’t have any id. it was like i wasn’t even there. i was invisible.” as understood by rcb, the tabler did not expect homeless individuals to possess government-issued identification. instead of acknowledging rcb’s individuality and subjectivity, the tabler assumed that rcb’s status as homeless meant not hav- ing state id, an official marker of occupancy in a state-recognized residence. in this interaction, rcb’s political subjectivity was under erasure, invisible. for rcb, in this confrontation, homelessness marked him as a knowable (non)subject—a generic homeless man. i open with this excerpt from an interview i conducted with rcb because it highlights what i term performative spatial irruptions—one of the many ways © american society for theatre research theatre survey ( ), , – doi: . /s terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core mailto:duke.kcw @gmail.com https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core that people in precarious sites contest the homogenization (and/or erasure) of their subjectivities through everyday, spatial practice. my elaboration of this term draws on judith butler’s extension of j. l. austin’s concept of performatives as “speech acts,” or words that “do something.” in excitable speech: a politics of the performative, butler notes that austin identifies two forms of performative: perlocu- tionary, words that do not commit actions themselves but are instrumental; and illocutionary, words that act. here performative includes both perlocutionary and illocutionary speech acts as well as actions that “do more.” when rcb drops his passport, he not only literally releases an object from his hold, but also actualizes the action’s performative potential, rejecting the assumed transparency of his personhood. in doing so, rcb performs a performative spatial irruption that brings to the fore “subtle” violences often present in ostensibly mundane acts, like voting, which occur in and tangential to sites of spatial dispossession. unlike the term erupt, which connotes a breaking out from within a given (read dominant) structure, performative spatial irruptions are invasive. they attack head-on, interrogating hegemonic structures and making space for the visibility of what katherine mckittrick might term “black geographies.” in demonic grounds: black women and the cartographies of struggle, mckittrick argues that black geographies are “subaltern or alternative geographic patterns that work along- side and beyond traditional geographies and site a terrain of struggle.” black geog- raphies cite sites of contestation and disruption that occur in both the psychological and physical world, highlighting often untold stories of how black bodies have and continue to create, maneuver around, and take up space. as a performative spatial irruption, rcb’s gesture highlights a black geography occluded by the tabler’s behavior—an ideological and lived space where a black, male world traveler is also homeless. as an lapd actor, rcb’s use of performative gesture in his everyday life mirrors the types of performative citation that are central to the work of the los angeles poverty department. this article explores state of incarceration and chasing monsters from under the bed, the two lapd plays that speak most directly to per- formative spatial practices in the carceral state. i turn to chasing monsters and state of incarceration for three key reasons: . the plays represent iterations of everyday performative spatial irruptions per- formed by individuals and collectives. . they were written collaboratively between lapd founder john malpede and lapd artists and are based on members’ experiences in sites of spatial dispossession. . they interrogate psychological effects related to spatial dispossession and their multifaceted physical manifestations. navigating moments when the lapd cites performative spatial irruptions as well as times when they enact their own irruptions through performance, this article uses chasing monsters and state of incarceration to highlight the complex relationship between two seemingly disparate sites of spatial dispossession— homelessness and incarceration. theatre survey terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core my analysis is informed by ethnographic research, specifically a set of personal interviews and notes from observational fieldwork i conducted from october through april with homeless, formerly homeless, and formerly incarcerated individuals living in los angeles; most, but not all, of the people interviewed are current or former members of the los angeles poverty department (lapd), a the- atre company primarily comprising homeless and formerly homeless residents of downtown los angeles’s skid row. it is important to note that both the interviews and the lapd projects took place during barack obama’s presidency—an era that included health-care reform, but also the continued encroachment upon and over- haul of historically low-income communities, like skid row, by processes of gentri- fication. this period also saw the rise of the black lives matter movement, a response to continued state-sanctioned violences against black people. the lapd’s work responds to questions of access to health care and affordable housing as well as grassroots activism around respect for black life. all of the lapd mem- bers interviewed for this project performed in at least one production of state of incarceration or chasing monsters, and several cast members performed in both projects. when engaging with sites of spatial dispossession, one often encounters a plethora of stereotyped images and simplistic narratives that fail to account for the complexity of the lives of people occupying these sites. furthermore, these nar- ratives also fail to articulate the structures feeding (and keeping) black, brown, and poor bodies into spaces of dispossession. ethnography gave me a way to interrogate the relationship between theory and materiality by seriously engaging with the voices and experiences of (formerly) homeless and incarcerated people in scholar- ship around spatial dispossession. in addition, situating personal narratives along- side state and media narratives allows me to emphasize the tensions present among these archives. my use of ethnographic research aligns itself with work by scholars like forrest stuart who wrestle with the complexities of homelessness, particularly as it mani- fests in downtown los angeles’ skid row. in his ethnographic work, down, out, and under arrest, stuart interrogates the overpolicing and increasing criminaliza- tion of residents of skid row. weaving together personal interviews with skid row residents and police officers with field notes and historical research, stuart argues that “policing has become intimately woven into the social fabric of everyday life, restructuring how those relegated to the bottom of the social order come to under- stand their peers, their communities, and themselves.” while stuart’s sociological study strongly contributes to the growing scholarship on homelessness through its emphasis on ethnography and constructions of space, as well its attention to power structures, it focuses heavily on space and spatial practices related to the police but does not attend to gender. my project seeks to supplement this scholarship by using personal interviews to highlight the gendered performative spatial practices of skid row residents, and in doing so, to foreground citational practices and creative dis- sent responses that engender survival. like rcb’s performative gesture, scenes throughout the lapd’s chasing monsters and state of incarceration make visible the racializing assemblages prop- agating and sustaining the spatial dispossession of some bodies and not others. alexander g. weheliye draws on the work of deleuze and guattari to elaborate the term “racializing assemblage,” yet pushes on their assumptions about race. kimberly chantal welch terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core for weheliye, racialization is an articulated assemblage that deterritorializes some and territorializes others. expanding upon the scholarship of black feminists hortense spillers and sylvia wynter, weheliye investigates alterity to the present conflation of “man,” as white, heterosexual, property-owning subject, with “human” by pointing to the relationality of assemblages and the need to understand race as a sociopolitical entity that is made to appear natural versus race as biological or ideological. weheliye posits that racializing assemblages “materialize as sets of complex relations of articulations … structured in political, economic, social, racial, and heteropatriarchal dominance.” racializing assemblages help create and main- tain stereotyped images and related affective responses through continuous (re)cita- tion on multiple platforms (the media, institutionalized narratives of conquest, etc.) as well as through the creation of institutions and laws positing “the other” as less than human or abject. building on weheliye’s work, i argue that the collusion of racializing assem- blages supports capitalist logics, creating transparent space, which in turn hides the racializing assemblages that propagate spatial dispossession. dispossession names the polyvalent ways that nonnormative bodies, subjectivities, and forms of community are rendered unintelligible and the avenues by which their histories are erased from, fall out of, or never make it into, the archive. spatial dispossession then engages with the ways that multifaceted notions of space mediate and inform instances of dispossession. an analysis of chasing monsters and state of incarceration highlights how the overrepresentation and maintenance of black peo- ple in sites of spatial dispossession are tied to capitalist assemblages that articulate black people as naturally belonging in those spaces. additionally, understanding the forms of oppression indexed in the lapd’s work as part and parcel of said assem- blages illuminates how the plays themselves are performative spatial irruptions that confront transparent space and unburden the individual as the sole factor in dis- possession. the lapd’s work makes racializing assemblages visible and cites black geographies under erasure. the lapd and spatial irruptions the los angeles poverty department (lapd) was founded by john malpede in and, as noted, primarily comprises past and present residents of skid row. its repertoire includes devised work based on members’ experiences, verbatim scripts from court cases, and performance parades, to name just a few examples of the lapd’s diverse oeuvre. situated in skid row, an area of downtown los angeles that arguably hosts the largest concentration of homeless individuals in the united states, the lapd’s overtly political work addresses issues pertinent to its immediate community, such as gentrification, policing, and mental illness. drawing on performance methodologies including augusto boal’s theatre of the oppressed, malpede and associate director-producer henrïette brouwers utilize their training as performance artists to cocreate productions with their ever- changing cast. as a community-specific theatre company, the lapd differentiates itself from similar grassroots theatres. for example, cornerstone theater, a com- pany also based in los angeles that works with disenfranchised communities to create plays, has been around almost as long as the lapd. however, theatre survey terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core cornerstone often produces reconstructions of canonical plays, or of plays com- posed by a single playwright, that take the concerns of the current community of interest into account rather than creating new, dialogical pieces intricately shaped by members’ experiences. while other grassroots theatres function similarly to the lapd, to my knowledge there are no other theatres in the united states that have specifically focused on issues related to homelessness for a com- parable period of time. for the lapd, movement is an important aspect in the construction of a piece. when creating and rehearsing a new play, the cast do so on their feet. since all the theatre’s work is related to everyday concerns of people living in sites of spatial dispossession like skid row, the lapd relies on mem- bers’ own spatial practices and experiences to block the production, especially when the play makes use of personal narratives. lapd members come with a variety of performance experience: some having never acted in a stage production prior to their involvement with the company. in fact, the only requirement to be involved with the lapd is presence—you “just” need to show up. lapd’s approach to membership in combination with its repertoire distinguishes it from other grassroots theatres working with spatially dispossessed populations in the united states. the los angeles poverty department is well known in the realm of grassroots theatre and academia related to that field, but the body of scholarship around the lapd tends to focus on the structure of the organization and/or a specific pro- duction that exemplifies lapd’s success as a community-based theatre. for exam- ple, james mcenteer’s acting like it matters: john malpede and the los angeles poverty department, chronicles the origin and development of the lapd, providing an in-depth look at the events that led to malpede’s founding of the organization as well as a close reading of their internationally traveling piece, agents and assets. agents and assets is also the title and subject of the lapd’s own book. as a printed text, agents and assets situates the playtext (taken mostly verbatim from a court hearing about cia involvement with drug trafficking in los angeles) next to inter- views and transcriptions of the productions’ talkback sessions. my work builds on this scholarship by shifting the focus from the qualifications or exemplifications of the lapd as community theatre to explore instead specific instances in which the lapd’s work foregrounds spatial practice. if prior work on the lapd emphasizes successful performances of theatrical aptitude and audiences’ affective responses, my work attempts to flesh out the relationship between the spatial practices repre- sented onstage and historical and contemporary quotidian practices. rather than focus on the spectacular as the point of analysis, i use lapd’s theatrical represen- tations as an avenue to investigate everyday practices that black people in sites of spatial dispossession utilize in their navigation of precarious space. in this article the word “black” (with or without appended nouns, as in “black life”), unless oth- erwise indicated, is used broadly to refer to people’s lives, which have been histor- ically and systematically devalued in the united states. here, then, “black” refers to a set of experiences in racist, classist, heteronormative, patriarchal america that often, but not always, corresponds with phenotype. through an analysis of lapd’s work, i show how dissident spatial practices in sites of dispossession map a transnational and transhistorical cartography of struggle. while much of the lapd’s work connects seemingly disparate geographical locales, chasing kimberly chantal welch terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core monsters and state of incarceration depart from the company’s productions in that they forefront spatial practice as a tactic of survival, illustrating the lapd’s deep- ening investment in cataloging acts of dissent alongside their traditional emphasis on naming oppressive structures. in sites of spatial dispossession, such as solitary confinement or homelessness, individuals undergo absentification—they are rendered flesh. in her influential essay “mama’s baby, papa’s maybe,” spillers argues that the body holds subjectifi- cation, and when one is absented from a subject position through violence, the body becomes flesh. indexed earlier in rcb’s claim that he was “invisible,” this pro- cess produces “hieroglyphics of the flesh” that document racial–sexual domina- tion. throughout this article, i expand upon spillers’s theorization to explore the implications of reading differently gendered bodies as made flesh and putting gendered symbolic and material violences in conversation with one another. although spillers and weheliye specifically focus on blackness in their texts, i find their theorizations useful in my interrogation of homelessness and incarcera- tion because black people are grossly overrepresented in sites of spatial disposses- sion, and blackness is not only about phenotype—it is a subject positioning. i turn to performance, specifically work by the lapd and its racially diverse cast, because it is a space where this subject positioning, as well as the racializing assem- blages propagating said hierarchy, become visible through citation. an examination of the spatial irruptions cited and produced in chasing monsters from under the bed and state of incarceration show that incarceration and homelessness are so intertwined that one cannot thoroughly engage with one without addressing the other. chasing monsters from under the bed chasing monsters draws from the experiences of lapd members and chronicles the stories and experiences of people living with mental illness in skid row. serving as a spatial irruption, the piece showcases black life and black death as meeting points of commonsensical narratives, state-sanctioned violences, historic and present-day hegemonic structures, and spatial dispossession. throughout the piece, the lapd divulges members’ personal encounters with gendered spaces of precarity and black geographies, including homeless shelters, nontraditional com- munity formations, and hallucinations due or attributed to mental illness, to explore the meeting and collapse of psychological, affective, and physical space in sites of spatial dispossession. the opening scene portrays the shooting of africa, a homeless, middle-aged black man, and the subsequent crime scene. walter fears, playing africa, gets up from his seat in the audience and walks toward the center of the stage. as africa nears the center, he abruptly grabs first his right arm, then his stomach, then his chest signaling to the audience he has been shot. he collapses. two actors drape caution tape about the scene, further framing the stage. the narration begins. wearing graphic t-shirts proclaiming, “#can’t kill africa,” suzette shaw (a black woman) and henrïette brouwers (a white, immigrant woman) stand in front of the crime scene and narrate the story of a cameroonian man’s engagement with skid row. meanwhile, two other black theatre survey terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core actresses outline africa’s murdered body with tape. this outline refuses the erasure not only of africa, but also of histories of state-sanctioned, racialized violence; it catalogs the process of symbolic and physical dispossession: suzette: here i am, back in africa with my family. henrïette: on my own i was never able to raise enough money for the jour- ney back, but the people of skid row did—they (pause) brought me home. suzette: and my family, they grieved. they don’t understand who to believe— henrïette: the police say that i’m a thief. that they shot me because i had grabbed their gun. henrïette: they tell me to stay calm— (yelling and pointing) “calm down, sir!” suzette: they don’t sound so calm themselves. (places body in recognizable “hands up, don’t shoot” gesture) “come out and put your hands in the air, sir.” henrïette: (pointing) “we’ll have to come in if you don’t come out, sir.” suzette: i know they have guns. henrïette: man i freak out. i freeze, i hide, i curl up like a spider, make myself invisible. suzette: no way am i coming out of my tent. no way. henrïette: they tell me to break down my tent. they tell me that it’s illegal to have a tent up on the sidewalk before pm. four, five cops jump on me, they kick me in my face, in my gut, they throw me on the sidewalk. suzette: (vehemently) i fight for my life. i see the fear in the eyes of the rabbit. henrïette: (softly and fearfully) they are going to kill me. suzette and henrïette: (shouting) they do. this condensed excerpt dramatizes the killing of charly leundeu keunang, also known as “africa” in skid row, by the los angeles police department on march . according to the los angeles times, africa was shot six times. on march, hundreds of protestors marched from the los angeles police department’s downtown headquarters to skid row to protest the fatal shooting of africa, who was homeless, unarmed, and had a history of mental illness. while it is unclear from the documentation exactly when africa immigrated to the united states under a stolen french identity, it had been more than fifteen years earlier. in , africa was granted parole for a fourteen-year sentence for bank robbery. during his incarceration, he had been committed to the prison’s mental hospital. following his release, africa settled in downtown los angeles’s skid row. eight months after his death, the company publicly engaged with this controversial incident in chasing monsters from under the bed, performatively kimberly chantal welch terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core narrating the attempted dispossession of africa’s subjectivity through the system- atic rendering of his body as flesh. in their affirmation of subjectivity, the actresses map africa’s experience in a car- tography of struggle. made flesh through both the literal dispossession of life as well as the symbolic, through abjection from a subject position in official police narra- tives, africa’s body serves as a site where historic and present-day forms of spatial dispossession collide. lying prostrate in the center of the crime scene, his body reminds the audience of contemporary state-sanctioned violence against black peoples—the killing of tanisha anderson, michael brown, sandra bland, eric garner, janisha fonville, natasha mckenna, and trayvon martin. however, suzette and henrïette’s narration also simultaneously reminds the audience that africa is in fact from africa. calling forth images of recent african american and black death, centuries of black death associated with transatlantic slavery, as well as current dismal economic conditions in african countries related to histories of colonialization and theft that prompted africa’s immigration, the combination of africa’s still body and the actresses’ narration situates keunang’s death as related to histories of the violent devaluation of black life pre- and postemancipation across the atlantic, or what harvey young might term “phenomenal blackness.” although the legislation and discourse around black bodies and black life have evolved throughout the history of the postbellum united states, traces of the racist logics that undergirded the beginnings of capitalism remain integral to the present-day functioning of this system. as articulated by spillers, dominant symbolic activity, the ruling episteme that releases the dynamics of naming and valuation, remains grounded in the originating metaphors of captivity and muti- lation so that it is as if neither time nor history, nor historiography and its topics, show [s] movement, as the human subject is “murdered” over and over again by the passions of a bloodless and anonymous archaism, showing itself in endless disguise. for spillers, a change in rhetoric simply disguises the continued symbolic violence enacted upon black subjects; the emancipation of slaves did not alter the ruling episteme that classified blacks as less than human. located in a structure that also devalues black life, africa symbolically and physically undergoes absentification—he is made flesh. as a performative spatial irruption, chasing monsters’ opening scene begins to decode the hieroglyphics imprinted in africa’s flesh (including the carceral state’s infliction of physical and psychological violence) by questioning how the pervasive racializing assemblages that proffered blacks as property are tied to the contempo- rary capitalist system that mediated africa’s movements. what capitalist logics necessitated africa’s emigration from cameroon to the united states? what eco- nomic circumstances, upon his arrival to the united states, compelled him to rob a bank? what conditions led to africa’s movement to skid row and his sub- sequent death? arguably, africa emigrated from cameroon because, despite the country’s growing economy, per capita income has remained relatively unchanged for the past few decades due to socioeconomic conditions produced, in part, by histories of european colonization of africa; keunang came in search of economic opportunity. while it is unclear if africa developed his mental illness prior to theatre survey terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core arriving in the united states and/or before his incarceration, the lapd’s placement of africa’s story in conversation with the overrepresentation of blacks and people suffering from mental illness in skid row makes it clear that limited access to resources to deal with trauma—produced by living blackness in a racist, classist, hegemonic state—engenders involvement in coping mechanisms and survival economies, creating a cyclical structure that keeps black people in sites of spatial dispossession. what i’m trying to suggest is that the difficulty of surviving the everyday in a system that does not value black life, in addition to the myriad of obstacles to lawful economic advancement for black people, creates psychological trauma. i argue that through their attention to the processes by which the contem- porary racist, classist episteme renders africa’s body flesh, the lapd documents africa’s experience as predicated on the intertwining of transhistorical and transna- tional processes, and, in doing so, locates “the politics of daily life”—at least within the context of homelessness and, arguably, other sites of dispossession as well—“as inherently spatial,” that is, tied to pervasive symbolic and physical geographic structures. through its exploration of africa’s symbolic, material, and affective presence, chasing monsters marks sites of spatial dispossession as battlegrounds of flesh and subjectification. suzette and henrïette articulate the presence of multiple nar- ratives around africa’s murder: “and my family, they grieved. they don’t under- stand who to believe.” the official police narrative is that africa attempted to gain control of a police officer’s firearm and was consequently shot. however, an analysis of the cellphone video points to the narrative articulated in the lapd’s performance—that the police used unnecessary force and killed africa without provocation. in sites of spatial dispossession, there is often a disconnect between official, state disseminated narratives and the quotidian experiences of people living in those sites. suzette and henrïette foreground a narrative that contests the official one. if, as spillers posits, the body is the vessel that holds subjectification, then the two women embody the subject of their narration and in doing so, locate the articulation of presence—the charting of a black geography or positing of subjectivity—as a practice of contestation. by affirming africa’s subjectivity within a ruling episteme that recognizes africa only as flesh, suzette and henrïette perform a spatial irruption that challenges the racializing assemblages that deem africa less than human. invoking a larger narrative about spatial practices in skid row, the removal of africa’s body after his postmortem “chalking” questions the extent to which the traces left by individuals (or their bodies) document presence. the tape outline refuses the erasure of not only africa, but also histories of state-sanctioned, racial- ized violence. although walter (playing africa) leaves the playing space following the opening scene, the white tape outlining his body remains for the duration of the play—his presence ghosts the remainder of the production, and the outline becomes a place that can be filled by differently gendered bodies. ungendered and unraced, the outline opens up the space for transnational bodies, mapping the global effects of a capitalist system. simultaneous with its gesture to a larger scale, as past presence, the outline reminds its audience that africa was there—a black body inhabited that space. as a material manifestation of flesh, the outline catalogs the process of absentification—a process of enfleshment that includes the mapping of knowability or transparency onto the black body; it is a process kimberly chantal welch terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core that encapsulates both hypervisibility and invisibility. throughout the rest of the production, the ambiguity of the outline allows the lapd to engage with gendered narratives that depart from conditions specific to africa’s spatial dispossession. by placing the murder of a cameroonian immigrant by the los angeles police department in conversation with experiences of women (largely of color) living with mental illness in skid row, the company forefronts some of the ways that gen- der conditions spatial practice in sites of dispossession. in scenes focusing on the gendered experiences of dispossession, africa’s outline suggests the specific precar- ity of female bodies in skid row, particularly the experiences of women dealing with mental illness. the longest scene focusing on women managing mental illness occurs about midway through the production. in this scene, silvia portrays a woman dealing with mental illness that manifests as aggression expressed through heightened emotions, profanity, and body language. she cusses out both her date and the concession stand vendor at the movie theatre once she is informed that there are no more pretzels for purchase. in this depiction of mental illness, silvia appears to embody stereotypes associated with the wayward latina or the emascu- lating black woman. juxtaposing her aggression with the passivity of africa not only documents the different forms that mental illness can take, but also suggests that the categorization of different forms of mental illness are tied to gender differ- ence. although neither silvia nor any of the women from the opening scene in the production dies, the presence of the outline during their scenes implicitly speaks to the precarity of their gendered bodies. during our interview, silvia, a formerly homeless latina in her early s, explained a hyperawareness of her femaleness during her time living on the streets in skid row: i met a friend—a woman. she was a girl with some diagnosis, some mental diagnosis, and she helped me. at that point i was in a walker and i was taking a lot medicine, my back in a condition. so she was helping me to go places and (pause) protecting me when i was sleeping with her on the street. i was right there on broadway. we were there for about like a month or so. … you know, when you’re on the street, you don’t know what can happen. what i learned, there’s people, they are just looking for an opportunity to rob you if you have some valuable. or there’s people who have been molested, sexually molested. in my case, thank god, you know, i was never in that case. but because [of] her experience, and she’s been homeless for so long, she knew. for silvia, her friend’s extended time in skid row gave her specialized knowl- edge that conditioned both of their spatial practices; she learned that sites of spatial dispossession are gendered spaces. attempting to decrease the vulnerability of their bodies, silvia and her friend took turns sleeping and protecting one another; they created what stefano harney and fred moten and might term a community of indebtedness. in the undercommons: fugitive planning & black study, harney and moten explore what they call the undercommons, fugitive communities that function through a system of indebtedness. they argue that, unlike the violence of privatization enacted through the marriage of debt and credit, “debt” or indebt- edness is a proactive force embedded in fugitive places, marking the undercom- mons as a site of socialization and collectivity. aware that skid row is a theatre survey terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core gendered space that marks them as potential objects of (sexual) desire, silvia and her friend created a two-person undercommons to combat the further precaritiza- tion of their bodies. although the two of them formed a noninstitutional entity in response to spe- cific forms of racial–sexual domination present in sites of spatial dispossession, other women i interviewed turned to women-only shelters in search of a similar type of protection. as an explicitly gendered space, women-only shelters in skid row contend with gendered violence related to spatial dispossession and conse- quently become key points of intervention in racial–sexual domination. in our interview, stephanie, a formerly homeless, african american woman in her early fifties, articulated her experience of gendered violence and its influence on her movement to a shelter in skid row: i never lived downtown on skid row, but i have lived on skid row in the streets—period. it started when i was about, let’s see, how old was i, twenty—put it like this, i spent six- teen years in the streets and pregnant with my third child. i stayed at a place that was for battered and shelter women because at that time my ex had hit me with a metal pipe, so it had messed me up. it didn’t break no teeth, but my whole face was twisted like i had a stroke. for months and months i just had to suck out of a straw—horrible … the devil been trying to get me for a long time but he ain’t got nothing on me, can’t win. specifically designed to help women who are seeking safety from abusive rela- tionships, the shelter in which stephanie stayed pushes against the precaritization of women (mainly) from low-income urban communities in which domestic vio- lence is not a rare occurrence. understanding the demographics of low-income communities, their limited access to resources, and the ways that the collusion of racializing assemblages creates and sustains the precarity of black lives in these communities by providing obstacles to economic movement, the shelter serves as a black geography that attempts to counter some of the gendered effects of those assemblages, including access to physical safety. stephanie’s search for safety in a shelter for battered women resonates with silvia and her friend’s attempt to create a safe place for themselves in the streets. situated in a terrain where their gender marks them for specific violence stephanie, silvia, and silvia’s friend strategized their movements and adapted their spatial practices to protect themselves from sex- ual and other violence. taking into account the women’s elaboration of skid row as a gendered space posits another reading of suzette and henrïette’s embodiment of africa. in their interviews, silvia and stephanie map a cartography of struggle by exposing some of the ways racial–sexual domination affects geography and spatial practice. viewing the opening scene of chasing monsters with an awareness of gendered experiences in sites of spatial dispossession alter the reading of suzette and henrïette’s relationship to africa, suggesting backgrounded narratives. standing outside of the crime scene, the women not only usher forth africa’s subjectivity, but also foreground how gender mediates their movements in ways that do not nec- essarily resonate with africa’s story. while embodying africa, the women gesture to commonalities between his experience of spatial dispossession and their own. however, separated from him by caution tape, the women also mark their kimberly chantal welch terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core difference. in this scene, then, the caution tape performs in at least two distinct ways: ( ) as a border between the official police narrative that renders africa flesh and the company’s assertion of africa’s subjectivity, and ( ) as a border acknowledging the mediating role gender plays in sites of spatial dispossession. mckittrick argues that “[b]y defining and constructing the world they inhabit, black subjects challenge how we know and understand geography; by seriously addressing space and place in the everyday, through the site of memory and in the- ory and text, they also confront sociospatial objectification by offering a different sense of how geography is and might be lived.” by holding multiple subjectivi- ties—their own in addition to africa’s—suzette and henrïette carve out a geogra- phy that illuminates subjectivities and accounts for gendered experience in sites of spatial dispossession. it is in this space that silvia and stephanie’s narratives encounter africa’s; his “chalked” outline reveals the potential for differently gen- dered bodies to inhabit space that catalogs death. but more than this, the outline suggests that how one is rendered flesh is contingent upon constructions of gender. through its use of narration and costume in the africa scene, the lapd rewrites women into discourse surrounding homelessness and other sites of spatial dispos- session that rarely attends to gendered experiences, and in doing so, creates a per- formative spatial irruption. “come out and put your hands in the air, sir.” when suzette places her body in the recognizable “hands up, don’t shoot” gesture while delivering her line, she cites not only the prevalence of police brutality against people of color, but also the foregrounding of women of color in the black lives matter (blm) movement in contradistinction to other historical black liberation struggles. black lives matter began in after the acquittal of george zimmerman, the insurance-fraud investigator and neighborhood watch coordina- tor who shot and killed seventeen-year-old trayvon martin. since that murder, images of #blacklivesmatter continue to circulate as grassroots organizations and individuals protest the devaluation of black life. the organization’s emphasis on voices that have been historically marginalized in black liberation struggles sug- gests an attempt to excavate black geographies that are often under erasure in dom- inant discourse. as indexed in the blm mission as well as in a survey of scholarship around homelessness and incarceration, the gender-specific experiences of women in these sites have been (and continue to be) rendered as a backdrop. by locating africa in the blm, the lapd opens up space for a critique of a monocular view of homelessness as a male-specific space. the africa scene highlights histories of racialized violence and addresses the myriad ways gender matters in skid row. the lapd’s assertion of africa’s subjec- tivity can be viewed as a response to the attempted rendition of africa as flesh in the carceral state. in chasing monsters, it is primarily black women who articulate africa’s subjectivity: black actresses outline his body with tape, and suzette coem- bodies his subjectivity. in “interstices: a small drama of words,” spillers argues that, in the symbolic order, black american men and women paradoxically exist as nonbeings—their subjectivities are not acknowledged—and yet the empowered recognize their own beingness only by defining themselves against black americans. spillers writes: theatre survey terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core having encountered what they understand as chaos [the term spillers has just used to describe “the veritable nemesis of degree and difference” located in the black female], the empowered need not name further, since chaos is sufficient naming within itself. i am not addressing the black female in her historical apprenticeship as an inferior social subject, but, rather, the paradox of non-being. under the sign of this particular histor- ical order, black female and black male are absolutely equal. although in hegemonic systems both black men and women have been regulated to the status of nonhuman, in sites of spatial dispossession the avenues by which they are regulated differ. through suzette and henrïette’s shared embodiment of africa, the lapd catalogs these differences. it is only through collectivity, through their coembodiment, that henrïette and suzette can affirm africa’s subjectivity. if, as spillers posits, white femininity is defined by everything that the black woman is not, then it is africa’s maleness that allows henrïette to illuminate his subjectivity. however, the postulation of black subjectivity through a white (female) body can always only be partial. since in the dominant symbolic order whiteness equals human (although within the hierarchy, levels are mitigated by gender and class), on her own henrïette could never embody africa, who has been constructed as a nonbeing. in other words, as a subject recognized as such in the ruling episteme, henrïette cannot serve as a pathway for africa’s subjectification without substituting his body for her own, thereby repeating the process of absentification. suzette, however, who shares the symbolic space with africa, allows for the illumination of race- specific violence without the eradication of africa’s presence. instead, by serving as a vessel for her own subjectivity in addition to part of africa’s, suzette marks racialized gender violence. the embodiment of africa by each woman showcases the specific ways that, as a black male, africa becomes spatially dispossessed both figuratively and materially. in chasing monsters, the lapd interweaves its members’ lived experience with psychological imaginings, and in doing so, fore- grounds how, through spatial practice, both individual members and smaller collec- tivities within skid row posit their subjectivity and agency in sites that refuse to acknowledge their presence as individual, human subjects. the utilization of mul- tiple voices to verbalize africa’s story utters forth the collectivity often present in sites of spatial dispossession. serving as a black geography, chasing monsters from under the bed catalogs black performative spatial practices and highlights indi- vidual and communal acts of dissent. state of incarceration the lapd’s state of incarceration charts disparate communities in a shared cartog- raphy of struggle through its exploration of the (male) prison. the project began in , and in the play toured to the queens museum in new york. the project lives on through both youtube as well as intermittent museum installations, of which the most recent manifestation (at the time of this writing) was in april at the armory center for the arts in pasadena, california. at the armory, the installation included a projection of the filmed queens museum production. viewers could watch the production while seated on bunk beds in a small room that re-created the intimate set, a prison. all the actors perform male roles, kimberly chantal welch terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core consequently emphasizing the overrepresentation of black males in the us prison system. while this demographic focus potentially occludes the growing presence of women of color and other bodies in carceral spaces, a close reading of the per- formance suggests otherwise. in the scenes in which women appear in dialogue with one another, the women perform hypermasculinity, such as grabbing their crotch and using profane and erotic language. this and the fact that everyone in the play appears to perform “male blackness” highlight what is not present. in other words, the excessive reiteration of black masculinity through diction, vernac- ular language, and gesture pushes one to ask which bodies are not represented both onstage and in popular discourse. similar to the armory installation, the queen’s museum production is set in a prison. as described in the film, “[p]rison bunkbeds are crammed wall-to-wall into a gallery, and the audience sits amidst the performers, who interact or deliver monologues in the narrow aisles, sweep or scrub the bedframes, or sleep or ruminate on their backs, individually or as a chorus in choreographed sequences.” the placement of the audience “onstage” blurs the line between audience and spectator—a line that continues to disappear as lapd actors interact with the audi- ence, at one point aggressively relocating an audience member to a different bunk. the performance opens and closes with song. the somber music sung by the twelve-person cast at the beginning sets the tone for the dismal conditions empha- sized throughout the performance through guard–prisoner (physical and dialogi- cal) interactions and monologues. the upbeat closing number connotes a party atmosphere that celebrates community and collectivity as an avenue of resistance, and in doing so, gives physical form to the pedagogical work that went into the project. as with many of the los angeles poverty department’s devised pieces, the script for state of incarceration was produced from story circles, con- versations, and writing sessions conducted with lapd members. indeed, even the blocking pays tribute to members’ experiences, as the choreography developed out of corporeal exercises with the actors that spoke to their physical engagement with carceral space. in one of the most intimate scenes in the play, anthony taylor, a phenotypically asian, nonblack male, performs an internal dialogue about solitary confinement, aptly titled “in the hole,” which foregrounds spatial practice as a key tactic of resis- tance in sites of spatial dispossession. anthony’s monologue illustrates the paradox- ical relationship between stillness and movement in sites of spatial dispossession. the majority of the scene switches between medium and long shots through which the video-watching audience can see the majority of anthony’s body as well as the audience members sitting in the bunk beds to the lateral sides of anthony. behind anthony is a blank, gray, wall. he wears a white t-shirt, dark blue jeans, white socks, and a white beanie: thirty days in the hole, oh my god. what am i gon’ do? what would i do? (pause) four walls, one toilet, zero everything else. no tv, no books, nobody to talk to, no nothin’. just me. four walls, toilet, thirty days in the hole. (pause) i walk. i sit. i look. i think. i walk. i sit. i look. i think. (stops walking and crouches down) can’t nobody see me. (stands up, hands over face) why me? (pause) (begins walking) i walk. i sit. i look. i think. i count the holes in the wall. i count the rips in the mattress. i count the theatre survey terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core spots on the makeshift mirror. i count. i count. i count and i count. (looks up and out to the distance, pointing) hi mama. i’m doin’ alright pop. i’m doin’ good mama. i walk. i sit. i look. i think. i think. i think. i think. i think. i can walk through the wall, i think. i think i can walk through the wall, i can. i can. i can. i can. i can walk through the wall. i like walkin’ through the wall. it’s so nice to walk through the wall. (claps hands and starts singing and dancing) yeah, a party of the other side of the wall. whoop. whoop, whoop. (back to mellow) i like the other side of the wall. i’m so happy on the other side of the wall. i walk. i sit. i look. i think. i walk. i sit. i look. i think. i walk. i sit. i look. i think. fade to black. as a site of stillness, solitary confinement cells rarely have windows, and fre- quently prisoners do not have access to items, such as books, to help pass the time. time, in essence, stands still. to counteract this enforced stillness, anthony moves both physically and psychologically. “i walk. i sit. i look. i think.” with each movement, anthony moves time forward. interspersed with moments of counting, his daily cyclical movements denote the imperative to move in order to keep the envelopment of state-sanctioned precarity (produced in part through mental trauma) at bay. “i walk. i sit. i look. i think.” when anthony completes the cycle, he starts again. the repetition of anthony’s movements in itself articu- lates a type of stillness—a circular motion that ends where it begins and vice versa. that is, until the cycle breaks. “hi mama. i’m doing alright pop. i’m doing good mama.” in this sequence, anthony imagines his parents in the space (or at least within listening distance). he navigates the enforced absence of every- thing but self in solitary confinement both to invite people into the space and to break free from it: “i like walkin’ through the wall. it’s so nice to walk through the wall.” like suzette and henrïette’s imagined crossing of boundaries to protest state-sanctioned precaritization, anthony permeates his mandated enclosure. in both state of incarceration and chasing monsters freedom is imagined as accessible through movement. anthony’s psychological spatial move challenges a state-sanctioned attempt to precaritize his (black) life further. as mentioned earlier, the use of the term “black” throughout this article refers to a subject positioning that is not necessarily tied to phenotype. this formulation of black(ness) aligns with spillers’s and mckittrick’s theorizations, which mark race as produced rather than a preexisting ontological category. however, my analysis of anthony’s performance complicates the scholars’ arguments by foregrounding the role class plays in constructions of race. if we understand black geographies as sites that illuminate hieroglyphics of the flesh, then how might the rendering of anthony and his body as flesh, as non- being, complicate our understanding of not only the broader ruling episteme, but also everyday spatial practice? derived from anthony’s personal prolonged engage- ment with the carceral state as a filipino male, “in the hole” indexes a black per- formative spatial practice aimed at survival that is not predicated on a visually discernible black (female) body. by methodically walking while delivering his monologue, anthony illustrates how the physicality of his body catalogs histories of spatial dispossession as directly kimberly chantal welch terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core linked to socioeconomic status. earlier in the play, anthony articulates physical movement as a way to deal with incarceration. in this scene, he monologues about freedom while performing jumping jacks in solitary confinement. during our interview, anthony described the scene this way: my next piece, i don’t even think there’s a name for it, but it’s pretty dramatic because i do jumping jacks while i’m saying my monologue and that comes from being in the hole. when there’s nothing else to do, you exercise, and i made a monologue up and they [lapd members] knew i could do a lot of jumping jacks. matter of fact, i want to go for the world record. i think i can do it. anyway, i don’t know where that come from. if you see it, you ever see it, they got film on it, so i do jumping jacks continuously as i do the monologue, and it’s not really that easy. you know, for me it was at the time because i could just do thousands and thousands and thou- sands of jumping jacks. i learned how to do that being in the hole. but actually, let me say this part, because initially it was so painful to be in the hole with nothing to do on my mental psyche that i thought that if i do enough jumping jacks, maybe my heart would burst and they would take me to the hospital. that’s how my thinking got to be. i never took any medicine. i’m not on any now. i never been diagnosed with any mental illness, but it was that bad. it had got to the point to where it was so lonely and so hopeless that at least i did, i can keep it on me, i thought of doing enough jump- ing jacks where i would actually maybe even die. that’s how bad it got. in this excerpt, anthony exposes the disciplinary effects of solitary confinement. the space of solitary confinement conditions his body into a healthy, physical entity able to perform aerobic exercise, yet the confinement also simultaneously injures his mental faculties. through exercise, the carceral state molds anthony’s body, marking his flesh as a site of suffering. in her text, spillers argues that the distinction between body and flesh is as central as that between the captive and lib- erated subject position. she writes: “these undecipherable markings on the cap- tive body [from violence inflicted upon it] render a kind of hieroglyphics of the flesh whose severe disjunctures come to be hidden to the cultural seeing by skin color.” while here spillers specifically refers to the production of race in reference to the african diaspora, her claims about hieroglyphics of the flesh are relevant to anthony’s experience. although his conditioned body does not, at surface level, denote the violences enacted on his body, the lapd member’s performance, as well as his personal experience, demonstrate that spatial dispossession is not miti- gated only by race and gender; it is also about class. through his semiautobiographical monologues, anthony performs a spatial irruption that highlights the role class plays in the creation and maintenance of pre- carity. adopted as an infant, anthony taylor was raised by a japanese mother and an african american father in a predominantly low-income, black neighborhood in norfolk, virginia. anthony was twelve the first time he was arrested. at age fifteen, he was locked up in a youth detention center, and while there, anthony was held in solitary confinement, an × cell. throughout his adult life, anthony was in and out of spaces of incarceration until he became sober in the s. he drew inspi- ration from his experience “in the hole” to compose the monologue cited above. as articulated by anthony, “i wrote that monologue, and that’s the way i felt then [when i was fifteen] in solitary confinement … it was over a period of time but theatre survey terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core yes a lot of it came from then because it was devastating at first, more devastating because i wasn’t use to it. eventually i got used to it.” anthony was in and out of sites of incarceration mainly because his engagement with survival economies and self-medication, which are commonplace practices in low-income urban communi- ties. putting his personal history in conversation with the performance foregrounds the ties between socioeconomic status and the process of absentification in the car- ceral state. while the markings that illustrate him as a captive body, including men- tal trauma, are related to africa’s hieroglyphics, they differ in that some of anthony’s undecipherable markings are physically cataloged through his body. without context, anthony’s toned body does not suggest a history of violence inflicted by the carceral state. however, the stark juxtaposition of anthony’s conditioned body with his injured psyche in the monologues indexes the ways in which the racializing assemblages supporting prison systems disci- plined his body into flesh. in his illustration of the process, anthony points to a larger-scale oppressive regime that focuses on the policing of all bodies cat- egorized as less than human. anthony’s self-composed monologue articulates the precarity of marginalized bodies in general, not just phenotypically black ones. by vocalizing his trauma in a way that resonates with his subjective expe- rience in a hierarchal structure that posits his being as less than human, anthony articulates himself as part of a broader collectivity that utilizes spatial practice to break out of the spaces in which the dominant symbolic order has enclosed them. as indexed in state of incarceration, as well as chasing monsters and the lapd’s pedagogical practices, collectivities found in sites of spatial dispossession have the potential to become undercommons, spaces of dissident practice and community indebtedness. in his monologue, anthony’s recognition of freedom is dependent upon the presence of multiple bodies on the other side of the wall—a party. his envisioning of other bodies cites a legacy of community building as a tactic of sur- vival. anthony’s turn to creating community by bringing both his parents and the partygoers into the space of confinement serves as a spatial irruption that allows him to disrupt cyclical stillness and chart resistant black geographies through psy- chological movement. the juxtaposition with “in the hole” of a scene earlier in the videorecording highlights how transnational collectivities might manifest through shared engage- ment in sites of dispossession in the carceral state. as the film fades in from a black screen, viewers hear a conversation between a middle-aged black male, ricarllo porter (r), and an older white male, john malpede (j). the camera pans left to a close-up (head and shoulders) of j (left) and r (right). j and r stand face to face with about an inch between their noses; later their noses touch, even press together. the shot is angled in such a way that the audience sees j’s upper back and r’s upper chest. both are dressed in the standard white t-shirt and jeans worn by the cast, a costuming choice that cites at least two specific anteced- ents: prison uniforms as well as the association between criminality and the wearing of large t-shirts with jeans or shorts by brown and black people. kimberly chantal welch terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core black screen. r: (voice only) what’s up, bro? j: i’m doing good, man. r: you feeling real good? j: i’m doing real good. r: for real? shot fades in. pan to close-up of j and r, who stand practically nose to nose. j: for real. r: (yelling) for real? j: for real, for real. r: who made this? j: that shit got made on the stove, homes. r: technicolor didn’t make this shit. j: nah. r: take a deep breath. (pause) it’s that california cheese, everybody loves it! j: happy cows, man. happy cows. r: are you feeling indoors?—going up a lot of nostrils, up a lot of veins … j: they smell this shit they got it. their noses are now literally touching. r: are you feeling it, though? j: i’m feeling it. r: are you feeling the potency of it all? j: yeah, man— r: (crescendo) that shit is better than viagra! you know that? everybody’s getting hard off this shiiiit! j: they all over me, man. r: (loud) are you hard, homie? j: i’m hard, man. r: are you for real hard? (screeches) j: for real. r: (softly) are you ready to die hard, man? j: if that’s how it goes. r: it’s a live and die thang, you know that? j: yeah, man. r: you can’t take it back once you got that tattoo on your body. j: for life. r: for life. j: for life. as their dialogue slips in and out of public and private spaces, r and j speak, for the most part, in a black vernacular. the conversation begins in the public—salu- tations are exchanged—and then moves to food, which teeters on the boundary of public–private. “r: are you feeling indoors?—going up a lot of nostrils, up a lot of veins.… / j: they smell this shit they got it.” in this iteration, food is public in the theatre survey terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core sense that the two prisoners are conversing about the making of a spread—a com- munal act whose product will be shared with audience members during the show. but in the discussion of the communal/public presence of the food and its move- ment into bodies, slippage occurs where the diction employed mirrors language associated with the use of illegal drugs, namely cocaine and heroin, which, throughout the past century, had been tied to differently raced bodies. toward the end of the vietnam war, american veterans were dealing with not only post- traumatic stress, but also heroin addictions. according to connecticut congressman robert steele, in , approximately percent of us soldiers in vietnam were addicted to heroin. despite this history, since the s both the media and the united states government have articulated black and brown bodies as the main sources of criminality around the drug trade. by highlighting anthony’s experience with the carceral state, the lapd makes visible histories of us involvement with the drug trade. through state of incarceration and chasing monsters, the lapd connects us imperialism in asia and colonization in the americas, illustrating not only the per- vasiveness of hegemonic structures, but also that the shared experiences present in transnational sites of spatial dispossession map distant communities in a shared cartography of struggle. lapd’s repertoire thus points to hieroglyphics of the flesh that have yet to become intelligible as such. in order to grasp and convey the magnitude of the human hierarchal structure and spatial practices opposed to it, black geographies must be understood as created and inhabited by bodies that frequently not only do not read as black, but also undergo forms of violence that do not easily read as such—like anthony’s conditioned body. an understand- ing of blackness as a subject positioning rather than skin color opens up potenti- alities for the resistant community structures that refuse to coalesce around constructions produced and enforced by the carceral state. state of incarceration comes to a close with a scene that matches the lapd’s intentional cultivation of solidarity among marginalized groups in a racist, classist, heteropatriarchal society: the making and sharing of the spread discussed in r and j’s earlier dialogue. r narrates this scene, and throughout the narration the camera pans from r to the characters making the spread and zooms into a close-up of the process. “now that you’re clean, you get your ramen, you get your tomatoes, you get your onions, you get your garlic.” the camera zooms out to a medium, overhead shot, and the audience sees r with his arms almost fully extended in front of his body, parallel to the floor, reaching over the tarp laid out for the making of the spread. his hands are flapping, invoking popular images of primitivism (shaman or witch doctor, for example). during this pause in dialogue, the audience hears the shuffling of the actors and the items used to make the spread. r then picks up his narrative and begins to give orders pertaining to the garlic. “mince it down … it’s the music of the mincing.” upon this cue, the characters begin to make noises that evoke images of african tribal dances while pounding the garlic. they hold a clove of garlic in the palm of their left hand and slap down on it with their right. they walk around the space and continue this sequence until r yells, “stop!” like the repetition in anthony’s monologue, the repeated pounding highlights the continuous, cyclical nature of the prisoners’ precarity. the pounding also accentuates the labor involved in navigating sites of spatial kimberly chantal welch terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core dispossession. the making and dissemination of the spread is a communal (and classed) act. in a dominant symbolic system that renders blacks less than human and actively creates obstacles to the formation and maintenance of black community life, the articulation of (collective) presence is a labor-intensive act. the “spread scene,” like “in the hole,” illustrates some of the black geographies that manifest in response to the devaluation of black life and suggests the presence of under- commons in disparate sites of spatial dispossession. as an instantiation of collec- tivity, multiple people contribute to the preparation of the meal, and in the production the actors share the spread with the audience. while in that collective space gender matters—in the sense that it often mitigates and affects the types of violence enacted upon the body and, thus, the avenues by which one undergoes absentification—in that space of “nonbeing,” the body becomes, to a certain degree, ungendered and unraced (or, more accurately, raced as anything and everything but white). the opening up of the performance to audience members, who are seated in prison beds throughout the set, marks their bodies as part of the incarcerated community. echoing anthony’s psychological search for com- munity, the cast maps a cartography of struggle that implicates all bodies in the room. conclusion as indexed throughout the los angeles poverty department’s performance archive, spatial dispossession is a complex, violent process. in capitalist sites of spatial dis- possession, not only are black and brown bodies removed/re-placed, but also the capitalist logics that promote that dispossession naturalize the presence of black and brown bodies in spaces of homelessness and incarceration. both state of incarceration and chasing monsters from under the bed, derived from the experiences of members of the los angeles poverty department who have lived or are currently living in sites of spatial dispossession, are archived via filmic excerpts online. regarding these archives of spatial dispossession, it is important to address how technology variously mediates readings of the pieces. during the beginning of “in the hole,” the camera zooms in and out of close- ups of anthony’s face. the camera then pans to the audience, emphasizing their presence. for the remainder of the scene, the camera zooms in and out of long and medium shots of anthony. these shifts appear to attempt to align with anthony’s choreography: if he uses mostly his upper body to convey meaning, the camera zooms in; if he uses his lower body (while dancing, for example), the camera zooms out to capture his entire body. regardless of the range of the shot, throughout the majority of the scene the online audience can see audience members of the queens museum production. unlike state of incarceration, chasing monsters was filmed by an lapd mem- ber, and that is reflected in the archive. the africa scene begins as a medium shot of africa’s murder, the delineation of the crime scene with yellow caution tape, and the white taping around africa’s body. for the remainder of the scene, the camera zooms in and out of close-ups and medium shots of the actors in the piece. though theatre survey terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core the online viewer can see the audience in the medium shots, it is clear that they are not the focus of the lens; they exist as background text. in the juxtaposition of these two documented productions, the question becomes, “who is this for?” the cam- erawork of state of incarceration seems to suggest the production is for the audi- ence—the cameraperson attempts to capture audience engagement and, for a moment, moves completely away from the lapd actors to capture a broader range of audience members. however, the camerawork of chasing monsters is about and for lapd members and their communities. at no point in the filmed production does the camera focus on audience members. throughout the africa scene, the camera attempts to capture the corporeality of the actors embodying the text. it appears as if the cameraperson’s investment is in documenting the nar- ratives of the lapd performers and their attempt at making their experiences leg- ible through speech and embodied practice; the focus is on the visibility of a specific black geography: living with mental illness in skid row. consequently, the film’s aesthetic matches the play’s emphasis on making visible the complexities of living with mental illness in skid row. despite the disparity in filmic emphases, though, what if we view state of incarceration and chasing monsters from under the bed as examples of the articu- lation of presence, as spatial irruptions that foreground subjectivity? what if, through these devised pieces, the los angeles poverty department underscores not only the presence of obstacles facing communities of spatial dispossession, but also the presence of vibrant communities in these spaces that continue to flour- ish in opposition to the devaluation of their black lives? what future possibilities can be imagined? notes rcb, actor, los angeles poverty department, interview with the author, recorded as mp , los angeles, august . emphasis in the original. judith butler, excitable speech: a politics of the performative (new york: routledge, ), . katherine mckittrick, demonic grounds: black women and the cartographies of struggle (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, ), . my use of the term “carceral state” draws on dominique moran’s carceral geography: spaces and practices of incarceration (farnham, surrey, uk and burlington, vt: ashgate, ). in her work, moran posits that carceral spaces exist outside of prisons and highlights “the relationship between the car- ceral and an increasingly punitive state” ( ). forrest stuart, down, out, and under arrest: policing and everyday life in skid row (chicago: university of chicago press, ), . alexander g. weheliye, habeas viscus: racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and black feminist theories of the human (durham, nc: duke university press, ), – . ibid., . see mckittrick’s argument about the logic of transparent space in demonic grounds, – . drawing on the work of judith butler and athena athanasiou, dispossession “refers to processes and ideologies by which persons are disowned and abjected by normative and normalizing powers that define cultural intelligibility and that regulate the distribution of vulnerability.” judith butler and athena athanasiou, dispossession: the performative in the political (cambridge: polity press, ), . dain morain, “a walk along skid row in los angeles—block by bleak block,” calmatters, june , https://calmatters.org/articles/a-walk-along-skid-row-in-los-angeles-block-by-bleak-block/, accessed january . kimberly chantal welch terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://calmatters.org/articles/a-walk-along-skid-row-in-los-angeles-block-by-bleak-block/ https://calmatters.org/articles/a-walk-along-skid-row-in-los-angeles-block-by-bleak-block/ https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core robert h. leonard and ann kilkelly, performing communities: grassroots ensemble theaters deeply rooted in eight u.s. communities, ed. linda frye burnham (oakland, ca: new village press, ). for more on cornerstone, see sonja kuftinec’s staging america: cornerstone and community-based theater (carbondale: southern illinois university press, ). i place the term “just” in quotations to acknowledge the variety of factors that can hinder attendance to rehearsal, thinking specifically about transportation and time obstacles often present in sites of spatial dispossession. james mcenteer, acting like it matters: john malpede and the los angeles poverty department (north charleston, sc: streetwise press, ). other scholarship on the company includes jan cohen-cruz’s local acts: community-based performance in the united states (new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press, ), and leonard and kilkelly. in my project, i understand precarious bodies as those that lie outside of or on the borders of frame- works of intelligibility in dominant material, affective, and/or psychological landscapes. precarious space, then, is the site(s) in which the subjectivities of the spatially dispossessed are disavowed or under erasure. hortense j. spillers, “mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: an american grammar book,” in black, white, and in color: essays on american film and culture (chicago: university of chicago press, ), – , at . kara keeling, in the witch’s flight: the cinematic, the black femme, and the image of common sense (durham, nc: duke university press, ), – , argues that people share a set of collective memory-images that are called forth when one is presented with an image. the memory-images are often found in the form of clichés or stereotypes. los angeles poverty department, excerpt from chasing monsters from under the bed, directed by henriëtte brouwers and john malpede, www.lapovertydept.org/monsters/, accessed may . in the online video, only an edited version of this scene is available. rather than analyzing the full opening scene, my analysis focuses on the condensed version of the scene archived online. kate mather, “skid row shooting: autopsy shows man shot six times, had meth in system,” los angeles times, july , www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-skid-row-shooting-autopsy- - story.html, accessed april . kelly goff, “homeless man killed by lapd officers id’d,” march , www.nbclosangeles.com/news/ local/homeless-man-killed-by-lapd-officers-on-skid-row-idd- .html, accessed may . gale holland and richard winton, “lapd body camera video of skid row shooting raises questions on tactics and training,” los angeles times, september , www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me- body-cam-keunang- -story.html, accessed may . mather. harvey young, embodying black experience: stillness, critical memory, and the black body (ann arbor: university of michigan press, ), . in his elaboration of the black body, “an abstracted and imagined figure [that] shadows or doubles the real one” ( ), young argues that “[t]he phenomenon of the black body, or, for short, phenomenal blackness, invites a consideration of history, habit, memory, and the process of racial mythmaking” ( ). spillers, “mama’s baby, papa’s maybe,” . “the world factbook: cameroon,” central intelligence agency, www.cia.gov/library/publications/the- world-factbook/geos/cm.html, accessed september . neil smith, “contours of a spatialized politics: homeless vehicles and the production of geographical scale,” social text, no. ( ): – , at . silvia, skid row resident, interview with the author, recorded as mp , los angeles, july . stefano harney and fred moten, the undercommons: fugitive planning & black study (wivenhoe, ny: minor compositions, ), – , esp. – . stephanie, skid row resident, interview with the author, recorded as mp , los angeles, august . mckittrick, . “about the black lives matter network,” black lives matter, http://blacklivesmatter.com/about/, accessed april . hortense j. spillers, “interstices: a small drama of words,” in black, white, and in color, – , at . saidiya v. hartman, scenes of subjection: terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth-century america (oxford: oxford university press, ), – . “los angeles poverty department (lapd): state of incarceration,” queens museum, ny, february , video, www.youtube.com/watch?v=r cg flj yk, accessed may . theatre survey terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core http://www.lapovertydept.org/monsters/ http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-skid-row-shooting-autopsy- -story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/lanow/la-me-ln-skid-row-shooting-autopsy- -story.html http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/homeless-man-killed-by-lapd-officers-on-skid-row-idd- .html http://www.nbclosangeles.com/news/local/homeless-man-killed-by-lapd-officers-on-skid-row-idd- .html http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-body-cam-keunang- -story.html http://www.latimes.com/local/california/la-me-body-cam-keunang- -story.html http://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/cm.html http://www.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/cm.html http://blacklivesmatter.com/about/ http://blacklivesmatter.com/about/ http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r cg flj yk https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core “lapd: state of incarceration,” video, ca. : – : . anthony taylor, actor, los angeles poverty department, interview with the author, recorded as mp , los angeles, april . spillers, “mama’s baby, papa’s maybe,” . ibid., . anthony taylor, interview with the author, recorded as mp , april . although the hieroglyphics of africa’s flesh may have been cataloged in his physical body as well, it is outside the scope of this paper to make that argument, as the only engagement i have with africa is through the chasing the monsters production and media clips and news stories about his untimely death. “lapd: state of incarceration,” video, ca. : – : . for a more detailed delineation of discourse around drugs in the latter half of the twentieth century in the united states, see curtis marez, drug wars: the political economy of narcotics (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, ). liz ronk, “the war within: portraits of vietnam veterans fighting heroin addiction,” time, january , http://time.com/ /vietnam-veterans-heroin-addiction-treatment-photos/, accessed august . during the s, president nixon called for a “war on drugs.” continuing into the reagan admin- istration, state-sanctioned narratives demonized the usage of crack cocaine, linking the drug to black com- munities and criminality. “lapd: state of incarceration,” video, ca. : – : . in the united states, ramen noodles are often a staple in low-income as well as college-student communities; they are relatively inexpensive, versatile (thinking here about the spread), and require only hot water to cook. kimberly chantal welch is an assistant professor of english at the university of missouri – st. louis. she holds a ph.d. in theater and performance studies from the university of california, los angeles. with an emphasis on spatial practices, her research examines the intersections of performance, homelessness, and incarceration. welch has received support for her work from ucla’s institute of american cultures and its center for the study of women. in addition to her academic endeavors, welch has worked closely with activist-oriented organizations including the los angeles poverty department. cite this article: welch kc ( ). resisting dispossession: performative spatial irruptions and the la poverty department. theatre survey , – . https://doi.org/ . /s kimberly chantal welch terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core http://time.com/ /vietnam-veterans-heroin-addiction-treatment-photos/ http://time.com/ /vietnam-veterans-heroin-addiction-treatment-photos/ https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core 	resisting dispossession: performative spatial irruptions and the la poverty department 	the lapd and spatial irruptions 	chasing monsters from under the bed 	state of incarceration 	conclusion 	notes the dynamics of the demobilization of the protest campaign in assam tijen demirel-pegg indiana university-purdue university indianapolis abstract: this study highlights the role that critical events play in the demobilization of protest campaigns. social movement scholars suggest that protest campaigns demobilize as a consequence of polarization within the campaign or the cooptation of the campaign leaders. i offer critical events as an alternative causal mechanism and argue that protest campaigns in ethnically divided societies are particularly combustible as they have the potential to trigger unintended or unorchestrated communal violence. when such violence occurs, elite strategies change, mass support declines and the campaign demobilizes. an empirical investigation of the dynamics of the demobilization phase of the anti-foreigner protest campaign in assam, india between and confirms this argument. a single group analysis is conducted to compare the dynamics of the campaign before and after the communal violence by using time series event data collected from the indian express, a national newspaper. the study has wider implications for the literature on collective action as it illuminates the dynamic and complex nature of protest campaigns. international interactions this is the author's manuscript of the article to be published in final edited form at: demirel-pegg, tijen ( ), “the dynamics of the demobilization of the protest campaign in assam,” international interactions. http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/ . / . . introduction the year was marked by intense protests against the police after the killings of michael brown in ferguson and eric garner in new york and the subsequent failure to indict the police officers that killed them. while large scale protests were held across the united states, an unexpected event happened: two police officers were shot to death in new york on december , by a man who was allegedly outraged by the brown and garner cases. the momentum for the black lives matter movement in new york city was derailed as the police killings generated a backlash effect against demonstrators by critics and local leaders who maintained that it was not appropriate to keep protesting given the horrific nature of the police killings. meanwhile, the new york police blamed the protesters for those killings. these events show that in the midst of a mobilization process, protesters can withdraw from the streets when unexpected events occur, and external pressure encourages them to stop demonstrating. this study highlights the role that critical events play in the demobilization of protest campaigns. in the context of an ongoing protest campaign, critical events may alter protesters’ tactics and their willingness to continue demonstrating, leading to the demobilization of the campaign. typically, social movement scholars argue that protest campaigns demobilize as a consequence of a polarization between radical and moderate protesters or the cooptation of the campaign leaders. i offer critical events as an alternative causal mechanism and argue that protest campaigns in ethnically divided societies are particularly combustible as they have the potential to trigger unintended communal violence. when such violence occurs, elite strategies change, mass support declines and campaigns demobilize. the connection between critical events and the demobilization of a campaign has remained largely under-theorized mainly because scholars have typically associated critical events with increased protest activity (meyer and staggenborg , rasler ). for instance, rasler ( ) shows that the burning down of the abadan cinema resulting in deaths was one of the important critical events that escalated the protests during the iranian revolution. similarly, lohmann ( ) argues that president gorbachev’s visit to east germany in october where he publicly urged east german leaders to implement reforms was seen as a signal that the soviet military forces would not intervene if people started protesting. in both cases, critical events are seen as having an escalatory effect on mass protests against the regime. nonetheless, critical events can also have a de-escalatory effect. according to staggenborg ( : ), critical events are significant turning points that, whether intentional or not, alter expectations and perceptions of threats and opportunities, affecting the outcomes of protest campaigns. this definition allows for the possibility that critical events can lead to the demobilization of a protest campaign. for instance, the / gulf war was responsible for the demobilization of the first intifada protest campaign. until the gulf war, palestinian leaders communal violence refers to an intense, sudden, though not necessarily wholly unplanned, lethal attack by civilian members of one ethnic group on civilian members of another ethnic group, with the victims chosen because of their group membership (horowitz : ). the intention to kill and the civilian nature of the perpetrators and the victims are the defining characteristics of communal violence. used nonviolent tactics to convey their message to the international community, knowing that israel’s military response would evoke international criticism. the onset of the gulf war, however, shifted international attention away from the campaign, and created an opportunity for the israelis to clamp down on the palestinian activists by imposing a total curfew, limiting the intifada’s activities significantly (alimi : - ). to investigate how critical events can demobilize a protest campaign, i conduct a quantitative analysis of a single case study, the anti-foreigner protest campaign in the northeast indian state of assam between and . the critical event in the assam protest campaign proved to be the unexpected rise of communal violence in february . by using original and fine-grained data collected from the indian express, a daily newspaper, i demonstrate that the communal violence played a major role in the demobilization of the campaign in this ethnically divided state. though the communal violence was neither planned nor directed by the protesters, it had a significant impact on the campaign by compelling the campaign leaders to suspend protests temporarily, and leading to the withdrawal of one of the main ethnic groups that originally supported the campaign. consequently, protests declined dramatically, never reaching the levels they did during the first four years of the campaign. this study makes several important contributions to the theoretical literature. first, it examines the link between critical events and the demobilization process of a protest campaign. second, this research expands our understanding of how protest campaigns demobilize. so far, scholars have mostly identified the use of violence or the creation of formal organizations as the main determinants of demobilization (chenoweth and stephan , nepstad , piven and cloward , tarrow ). this study identifies communal violence in ethnically divided societies as another causal explanation. in societies where multiple ethnic groups compete for power, communal violence that occurs during a protest campaign, yet is not directed by the campaign leaders, is likely to lead to demobilization. communal violence pushes protest leaders to change strategies and results in the withdrawal of and rank and file support. third, this research brings a more nuanced understanding to the effects of violence on the demobilization of protest campaigns. traditional studies of nonviolent resistance campaigns assume that opposition groups choose to pursue nonviolent strategies and strictly adhere to such tactics even when faced with severe repression. if they fail to maintain nonviolent discipline, then the campaign is more likely to fail to achieve its political goal as protesters leave the streets in the face of violence. in short, the use of nonviolent tactics is an important factor that avoids the premature demobilization of the campaign before groups gain important concessions from the government (chenoweth and stephan , nepstad , schock , schock , sharp ). on the other hand, social movement scholars who have studied the dynamics of protest campaigns note that radical groups frequently use violence, and this development allows the state to distinguish the radicals from the moderates. by making concessions to the moderates, state leaders are able to demobilize the protest campaign by coopting the moderates while isolating the radicals (della porta and tarrow , tilly ). both of these strands of research assume that violence is a tactical choice designed to achieve political goals. yet, i argue that violence is not my understanding of protest campaign is similar to that of social movement scholars in that it involves both types of actions: nonviolent ones as well as low level forms of violence, short of organized military operations. while demonstrations, boycotts, or strikes are nonviolent tactics typically used during protest campaigns, the potential for a violent outbreak exists as people might throw stones, break windows, or set vehicles on fire. necessarily strategic, and when it is unorchestrated in the context of a protest campaign, it can produce a shock that may demobilize a protest campaign, as happened in assam. thus, the aim of this study is to examine protest campaigns and improve our understanding of their dynamics in terms of how and when the scale and scope of protest actions escalates or de-escalates. theoretical foundations: the demobilization of protest campaigns and critical events scholars who have studied protest campaigns frequently suffer from two limitations. first, scholars have mostly focused on the factors that predict success and have only included failed nonviolent campaigns as negative cases to identify the conditions for the achievement of the campaign’s stated goals (chenoweth and stephan , nepstad , schock ). this approach tends to overlook dynamics that are unique to unsuccessful outcomes. second, scholars of protest campaigns usually pay more attention to the origins and spread of mobilization rather than the demobilization process (koopmans , mcadam , tarrow , tilly ). although demobilization is a crucial process that occurs within the trajectory of protest campaigns, it has attracted surprisingly little theoretical attention. of the few scholars demobilization refers to the process by which protesting decreases in scale and scope and eventually ends (tilly and tarrow ). while demobilization typically evokes an unsuccessful outcome, these two concepts are distinct. although the demobilization of a nonviolent campaign often leads to its failure, demobilization might also precede a successful outcome. for example, the demobilization of the baltic and crimean tatar protests in and under coercive measures eventually led to a successful outcome as they triggered other protests, ending with the fall of the soviet union (beissinger ). that do study demobilization, the focus is on the cooptation or polarization processes. for instance, piven and cloward ( ) argue that the development of formally structured organizations greatly increases the prospects for elite influence and the cooptation of campaign leaders, thus, diminishing the campaign’s disruptive potential. others such as tarrow ( ) and della porta and tarrow ( ) maintain that demobilization is the inevitable outcome of the expansion of a protest campaign and is largely driven by the polarization between moderates and radicals. i advance a causal mechanism for demobilization that is different from either cooptation or polarization. i suggest that protest campaigns can demobilize because of critical events that constrain the leadership’s protest strategies. critical events are important turning points that affect public and elite attention to campaigns (staggenborg : ). scholars have examined critical events in different contexts in political science. for instance, several international relations scholars have studied the impact of critical events, or shocks in the de-escalation or termination of strategic rivalries (goertz and diehl , rasler,thompson and ganguly ). while critical events are not sufficient to terminate or de- escalate rivalries, they can contribute to a process of de-escalation of rivalries when political leaders take advantage of the uncertainty caused by the disruption of routine expectations (rasler, et al. : - ). scholars of historical institutionalism also have sought to understand institutional change via critical junctures (collier and collier , mahoney , polanyi ). critical junctures relax structural influences (economic, cultural, organizational, and ideological) on political action significantly for a short period of time, widening the options available to political actors. the consequences of powerful actors’ decisions during critical junctures typically have long term consequences (capoccia and kelemen ). both strands of research, however, mostly emphasize the relaxation of structural constraints and the widening of political options, rather than structural changes that narrow the options available to political actors. while studies of protest campaigns have examined the escalatory impact of critical events (rasler , shawki ), with the notable exception of staggenborg ( ), few scholars have provided theoretical guidelines as to how to identify critical events. staggenborg suggests six types of critical events based on the extent of control the actors exert: large-scale socioeconomic and political events, natural disasters and epidemics, accidents, critical encounters, strategic initiatives, and policy outcomes (staggenborg : ). large-scale socioeconomic and political events such as wars and depressions; natural disasters and epidemics; and industrial or nuclear accidents are critical events which neither campaign actors nor their opponents exert much control over. in contrast, strategic initiatives and policy outcomes are orchestrated by the campaign actors or their opponents. in strategic initiatives, campaign actors or the counter-campaign create events designed to mobilize support. policy outcomes are official state responses to mobilization. states might adopt favorable or unfavorable policies that affect levels of support for campaigns. critical encounters, which the communal violence in assam falls into, are events that involve face-to-face interactions or physical contact between authorities or other actors who are somewhat associated with the campaign. such events occur when other social actors attempt to assert control using methods ranging from ridicule to violence, causing a sudden change in the trajectory of the campaign (staggenborg : - ). staggenborg argues that the level of control in critical encounters ranges from full control by the state or campaign leaders to little or no control. thus, critical encounters might include events that occur during the campaign with the full knowledge and sanctioning of the elites or campaign leaders as well as events that are unauthorized or not approved by them. the shootings of the two police officers in new york during the black lives matter campaign in the united states, for instance, happened within the context of the campaign but were not sanctioned by the elites or the campaign leaders. similarly, in assam, the killings of the mostly muslim peasants by assamese villagers during the protest campaign were critical encounters that were beyond the campaign leadership’s control. while the campaign leaders had called for a boycott of the state assembly elections that increased violence associated with protests in major towns, the violent attacks in rural areas were not controlled by the leaders of the assam protest campaign (kimura : ). therefore, the communal violence in assam is distinct from the protest campaign in the sense that neither the protesters nor the campaign or the state leadership planned it. nonetheless, the communal violence occurred in rural areas when ethnic tension was significantly elevated in the region. the causal mechanism in societies where communal divisions are salient, opposition leaders broaden the base of resistance to include members of different ethnic groups. nonetheless, the inclusion of different ethnic groups makes the unity of the campaign precarious particularly if campaign activities highlight ethnic cleavages (horowitz , svensson and lindgren ). mass actions can exacerbate tensions by provoking fear or anger between different communal groups. when an ethnic group demonstrates strength by protesting in large numbers, others feel threatened especially if the protesters’ claims have ethnic overtones. in such instances, protest campaigns become highly combustible, increasing the chances of communal violence. for instance, uzbek demonstrations over ethnic claims to land and housing led to communal violence in kyrgyzstan in . similarly, the azeri protests against armenian demands for the unification of karabakh with armenia triggered communal violence, resulting in mass killings of armenians (horowitz , varshney ). although communal violence occurs outside the control of the protest leadership, it can dramatically affect the trajectory of the campaign. opposition elites face pressure to shut down the campaign to prevent more ethnic violence. moreover, protesters that are members of the ethnic groups targeted during the violence withdraw their support from the campaign as a result of the increased prominence of ethnic allegiances. the leaders also face the challenge of finding ways to reinvigorate enthusiasm and maintain solidarity particularly when political elites or the media call for a slowdown to give the communities time to heal. even if the campaign resumes, the loss of momentum leads to a decline in protest activity and lower levels of support. a striking example is the collapse of the civil disobedience campaign in india as a result of hindu- muslim violence in the early s. as the british were fighting against the ottoman sultan during world war i, the muslims in india turned against the british, providing gandhi the opportunity to unite hindus and muslims in a civil disobedience campaign for the freedom of india. even though muslim-hindu unity was created for some time, in mid- , muslim clerics in malabar in the state of kerala started to protest against the british treatment of the caliph in turkey. these protests first turned into a violent rebellion against the british, and then degenerated into hindu-muslim violence (varshney : ), creating a hindu-muslim divide within the indian national movement across the country. gandhi and the congress party were unable to maintain the campaign as communal divisions became too obvious. consequently, gandhi ended the campaign in and the congress party withdrew from mass mobilization until (varshney : - ). communal violence leading to the demobilization of a protest campaign differs from previously identified causal pathways in the literature. for piven and cloward ( ) and tarrow ( ), the broadening of the support base leaves campaigns vulnerable to internal divisions, resulting in a withdrawal of support, and finally, demobilization. however, the factors that trigger the withdrawal of public support are different. according to piven and cloward ( ), the expansion of the protest campaign prompts the government to coopt the opposition to channel their disruptive behavior into organized forms of contention. yet, campaign leaders usually overestimate their ability to keep the campaign strong and effective via organizations while simultaneously underestimating the amount of resources needed to maintain an organization. as leaders get isolated from the protesters, disruptive behavior declines, leaving the remaining agitated protesters discouraged and vulnerable to repression. alternatively, tarrow ( ) highlights the competitive dynamics among groups and its potential to lead to internal divisions before governments can coopt campaign leaders. when protest campaigns first emerge, disruptive protests diffuse to different locations and segments of the society. competition for mass support intensifies as both established groups, such as trade unions or political parties, and new groups join the campaign. nonetheless, the early enthusiasm for protesting wanes over time and the personal costs of participation wear people down. the decline in participation further encourages competition for mass support. while moderates lead the shift toward conventional forms of collective action such as strikes and demonstrations, smaller and newer groups turn radical as they employ violent tactics to distinguish themselves from the moderates. similar to piven and cloward’s ( ) cooptation model, the state represses the radicals selectively while accommodating the moderates, reinforcing the polarization between these groups. faced with repression, the radicals resort to more violent tactics, resulting in a further withdrawal of public support. the split between the moderates and the radicals eventually leads to the demise of the protest campaign (tarrow ). the causal mechanism i offer, however, allows for a disruption of the trajectory of protests by an unexpected and unorchestrated event. as figure illustrates, if a critical event such as communal violence occurs in an ethnically divided society, the campaign leadership refrains from employing strategies that might exacerbate ethnic tensions. governing elites usually assert their authority and criticize campaign leaders for mobilizing ethnic political demands and bringing ethnic issues to the forefront. in addition, political elites often pressure campaign leaders to suspend their activities in a highly tense ethnic and political environment to prevent the outbreak of more violence. as horowitz ( : ) suggests, ethnic groups can be provoked more easily to engage in large scale violence during mass demonstrations or processions, particularly if the core issues closely relate to ethnic demands. given the elevated tension as well as the political elite’s pressure in the aftermath of communal violence, campaign leaders will typically avoid organizing protests. furthermore, as communal violence highlights the divisions within the society, ethnic groups, particularly those that have been victimized by the violence, withdraw their support from the protest campaign as it becomes more difficult to act collectively across ethnic lines. when the protest campaign secures the support of different ethnic, religious, and/or socioeconomic groups, protest leaders face challenges in keeping these different groups together after a major shock like communal violence. if one of the groups included in this broad coalition has affiliations to the group that has been targeted, campaign solidarity declines. the group affiliated to the victims questions the purpose of the campaign and pressures the leaders to modify campaign policies that undermine the interests of the targeted groups. other groups also make demands to strengthen their profile, further undermining the campaign’s broad coalition. thus, the ability of the leaders to organize mass events decreases. furthermore, the leaders spend more time and energy into finding ways to re-energize the campaign and rebuild solidarity. figure causal pathway for the demobilization of a protest campaign assam and the anti-foreigner protest campaign, - assam is an ethnically heterogeneous society which has also witnessed large scale immigration from many parts of the subcontinent (particularly east bengal) over the last hundred years (baruah ). according to the census records (before the anti-foreigner protest campaign started in ) . % of the population in assam was hindu, . % was muslim, and . % was christian. the muslim population in assam includes ethnic assamese and demobilization protest campaign in ethnically divided societies critical event: communal violence changes in elite strategies withdrawal of mass support muslims of bengali descent while hindus also include ethnic assamese and hindu bengalis that immigrated to assam. people are divided along linguistic lines, which, simultaneously also stands for the division between “indigenous” and “immigrant” groups. as of , approximately % of the population in assam spoke languages or dialects that are considered to be of “indigenous” people while % of the population spoke “immigrant” languages or dialects (baruah : ). the protest campaign in assam emerged to drive out both hindu and muslim immigrants (kimura ). threatened by rapid population growth following a large influx of muslim immigrants from bangladesh and concerned by the growing political power of the middle-class mostly hindu bengali immigrants, ethnic assamese started a state-wide protest campaign in to pressure the indian government to identify illegal immigrants, delete their names from voting lists, and deport them to bangladesh. the campaign was led by the all assam students union (aasu) and the all assam gana sangram parishad (aagsp), an umbrella organization formed in to direct the protest activities against illegal immigrants (baruah ). while the campaign leaders demanded the deportation of all those who entered after , the indian state felt a humanitarian commitment toward the hindu refugees who crossed into india from east pakistan to escape the atrocities of the pakistani state before it became bangladesh in . therefore, the indian government insisted that should be the baseline year, allowing foreigners who entered before that year to stay (kimura ). the campaign gained mass support among ethnic assamese, including indigenous muslims who had settled in assam before colonization. the leaders of the campaign made a deliberate attempt to frame the immigration issue along secular lines by highlighting the illegality of it rather than identifying certain ethnic immigrants, especially the muslims, as the unwanted population (baruah , kimura ). thousands of students, government employees, peasants and workers participated in demonstrations, strikes, and sit-ins throughout the first four years. the government responded with a mix of repression and accommodation as it used force against the protesters at times while also periodically negotiating with the campaign leaders. in early , the campaign intensified in the wake of the state legislative assembly elections scheduled for february. the central government insisted on using the electoral rolls of without deleting the names of foreigners while the campaign leaders strongly opposed and called for an electoral boycott. both nonviolent and violent protests intensified before the elections as many assamese citizens supported the boycott. in addition to the strikes aimed at preventing election preparations and the filing of nominations, the aasu and the aagsp organized a general strike that was supported by state employees. as clashes between the police and the protesters increased, the assam government brought in additional police from other states. in the midst of this tense political environment, communal violence occurred when assamese and tiwa (an indigenous minority group) peasants in the rural areas attacked mostly muslims of bengali descent (kimura ). the first large-scale ethnic violence took place in the darrang district on the northern bank of the brahmaputra river on february . one week later, about , to , muslims of east bengali origin were killed in several villages around nellie in the nagaon district (kimura : ). according to kimura ( ), the nellie incident was one of the largest incidents of ethnic violence in india’s rural areas since india gained its independence in . after the communal violence, the aasu and aagsp suspended the campaign for a few months, resuming protest activities in august . yet, protest activity remained at dramatically lower levels after the ethnic violence of . as a result of extensive negotiations, the campaign leaders and the indian government signed the assam accord in august , both agreeing to disenfranchise all the foreigners that entered assam between and for ten years and deporting those that came after (baruah ). figure illustrates the trajectory of the protest campaign and the occurrence of communal violence in assam in . smaller scale communal violence in in assam is not considered as a critical event as it did not change the overall trajectory of the protest campaign. see capoccia and kelemen ( ) for a discussion of identification of critical events. this figure is generated by using the count of events. figure weekly protest activity before and after communal violence in assam assam as a “least likely” case assam is an ideal case to examine the effects of communal violence on a protest campaign because it is a “least likely” case, meaning that it is harder to prove the argument as opposed to a case that easily fits the argument (george and bennett ). first and foremost, communal violence took place in the spring of , but the campaign ended in august , more than two years later. in most other instances, communal violence ends protest campaigns rather abruptly, as in the case of the tamil protests against the declaration of sinhalese as the sole official language in sri lanka in (devotta ). in assam, though, protests actually resumed a few months after communal violence and continued intermittently for two more years. therefore, demonstrating the demobilizing effects of communal violence is more challenging in n u m b e r o f c o m m u m a l v io le n c e e v e n ts n u m b e r o f p ro te s t c a m p a ig n e v e n ts ja nu ar y ja nu ar y ja nu ar y ja nu ar y ja nu ar y ja nu ar y ja nu ar y week of event protest campaign communal violence the assam case. moreover, the campaign in assam was well-established since , long before the ethnic violence took place. protests were organized regularly and were usually well attended. a strong campaign like the one in assam should be less vulnerable to the negative effects of communal violence than other more ad hoc campaigns like the one in nigeria after the re- election of goodluck jonathan in . therefore, a demonstration of the decline in protest activity as a result of communal violence in assam should provide strong support for the demobilizing effect of ethnic violence in the context of ongoing protest campaigns. research design data the analysis is based on data collected from the indian express, a national daily newspaper, from january , to august , . the data set covers both nonviolent and violent forms of protest action such as demonstrations, strikes and clashes with the police, as well as incidents of communal violence. events were coded for the date, actor, location, target, number of participants, number of injured and number of deaths. the state’s repressive and accommodative actions were also coded for the same time period. events that lacked information on the exact date, actor, and type of action were omitted from the data set. in total, the codebook used for this data set is posted in the appendix. ethnic violence is distinguishable from protest violence as communal violence occurred in rural areas whereas protest activity typically took place in major cities. ambiguous cases were excluded. ambiguous events were excluded. , events were hand coded by the author based on a list of events compiled mostly from krain ( ) and moore and lindstrom’s ( ) violent international conflict data project (vicd) and weighted by a scale that is based on krain’s ( ) scale for opposition and state actions ranging from to . a detailed explanation of the weighting scheme and its modification of krain’s scale can be found in the appendix. the data were then aggregated in weekly intervals. the underrepresentation of the frequency of the actual events, the overreporting of violent events and the selective reporting of events are three obvious issues that could potentially challenge the validity of the data as a consequence of coding from a single newspaper. in terms of underrepresentation, the indian express had correspondents based in assam throughout the protest campaign directly reporting from the area and providing detailed information regarding a wide range of collective actions, thus reducing the chance of underrepresentation. moreover, the data illustrate similar trends to those found by scholars who have studied the anti-foreigner protest campaign and communal violence in assam (baruah , kimura ), somewhat minimizing concerns over validity. regarding the issue of overreporting violence and underreporting nonviolence (day,pinckney and chenoweth ), i used secondary sources every action of every actor was coded separately. for instance, if students shouted slogans and threw stones, two separate actions were coded. clashes are coded for both protesters and the police. since only one coder was involved, potential issues of inter-coder reliability do not arise. the correlation coefficients for all variables between the number of events and the weighted data range from . to . . (baruah , baruah , kimura ) to check the accuracy of the reporting whenever possible. nonetheless, given the media attention on assam and the protesters after the mass killings, underreporting of nonviolence seems unlikely. finally, selective reporting of events might introduce bias to the data because reporters do not (and cannot) report every single collective action that occurs in the public domain. therefore, they are left to make decisions regarding what to report and how much detail to present. the concern is that newspapers report events that are likely to attract more attention and underreport minor events, thus, disregarding the vast majority of contentious activity (mccarthy,mcphail and smith ). nonetheless, others have argued that selective reporting is an issue when and where protests occur frequently. in locations like assam in the late s, when protests were less frequent, they are more newsworthy and receive greater coverage (earl,martin,mccarthy and soule : ). moreover, the longitudinal design of the study reduces potential challenges to the internal validity of the analyses since selective reporting would be an issue both before and after the communal violence. model and estimation to understand the effect of communal violence on protest activity, i conduct a single group time series analysis that is commonly used in epidemiology, which compares a pre- intervention time series with a post-intervention time series (linden and adams ). accordingly, i model communal violence as an “intervention” on the protest activity series, the dependent variable, to examine two types of changes in protest activity: the immediate change in protest activity right after the first occurrences of communal violence and the long term change in the trajectory of protest activity until the end of the campaign. protest activity, the dependent variable, is the total weekly score of nonviolent and violent forms of collective action including demonstrations, strikes, boycotts, and arson. the minimum values of protest typically reflect the weeks when protesters use few nonviolent tactics; while the maximum values reflect the weeks when protesters resort to nonviolent tactics more frequently and/or resort to violent tactics such as clashing with the police. hence, the demobilization phase represents the period before the end of the campaign when the values of the dependent variable are declining, indicating that protesters used both nonviolent and violent forms of tactics less frequently. to assess the changes of the communal violence on protest activity, i construct a time variable denoting the number of weeks from the start of the campaign until its end. the coefficient of this variable represents the trajectory of protest activity until the communal violence begins. the intervention variable is a dummy variable coded for the weeks the communal violence are on (weeks to in ) and otherwise. the coefficient of intervention is the intercept at the time when communal violence occurs and indicates any immediate changes in protest activity right after the communal violence. finally, a post- intervention time variable is constructed to denote the number of weeks after the communal violence. the coefficient of this variable represents the change in the slope of protest activity. if the communal violence indeed has a demobilizing effect, then the coefficients of either intervention or post-intervention time, or both should be negative and have significant p values. a significant negative coefficient for intervention would signify a sudden drop in protest activity and a significant, negative slope after intervention would suggest a decay, which could be steep or gradual, depending on the slope. i also control for state actions as both repression and accommodation have the potential to affect protest activity. while several studies have shown that repression increases protest activity by creating a backfire effect (chenoweth and stephan , francisco , rasler ), others have found that carefully targeted and consistent repression is likely to demobilize protesters (beissinger , tarrow ). repression is the total weekly score of repressive actions carried out by the lower level authorities, typically the police, directly confronting the protesters, such as blocking the roads; as well as those sanctioned by higher level authorities including the imposition of curfews or restrictions on civil liberties. similarly, the state’s accommodative tactics can have a positive or negative effect on protests. accommodation can increase protest activity as it signals weakness (rasler ); or it can lead to a decline in protests as it creates splits between the moderates and the radicals (tarrow ) or coopts the protesters (piven and cloward ). accommodation is measured as the total weekly score of state concessions that include actions like negotiations, removing restrictive laws and regulations, or withdrawing the army from the region. i estimate both a zero-inflated negative binomial regression (zinb) and a poisson autoregressive (par) model of order (p) to examine the effects of communal violence on the protest campaign. both zinb and par are count models that are appropriate for the nature of the dependent variable in this analysis. a zinb analysis is appropriate for count models that are overdispersed and have a high number of zero observations of the dependent variable (long descriptive statistics for the variables can be found in the appendix. the variance of protest activity is greater than its mean, indicating overdispersion. ). the data are also ordered in time, meaning that past values influence future values. as brandt et al ( ) show, estimating event counts that are time dependent with a standard count model might lead to inefficient estimates. the systematic dynamics of the data have to be taken into account while working with time series event count data such as the series on the assam protest campaign, which a par analysis is able to do. the par model is suitable for cyclical and short-memoried processes that are mean reverting (brandt and williams ). as figure demonstrates, the protest activity series has a cyclical pattern as the peaks in the series are followed by declines. the plot for the autocorrelation function (acf) of the series (figure ) shows autocorrelation only in the first four lags indicating that the process has a short-term memory. therefore, i use the par model developed by brandt and williams ( ) to account for the time-series nature of the data and a zinb to deal with the high frequency of zero observations. vuong test statistics indicate that zinb is preferable to a regular negative binomial. a transfer function model assessing the impact of intervention on a time series is not suitable as the data are based on event counts (brandt and williams ). figure autocorrelation function plot for protest activity findings table shows the results of the zinb and par ( ) analyses for the protest activity in assam between january and august . the critical event model with the single the ar parameters in larger lags were insignificant. the same analyses were conducted on the unweighted data and the results are similar. also, the critical event model was run on nonviolent and violent protest activity separately. overall, the results still confirm the findings of the critical event model. the short-term positive impact of communal violence on violent protests can perhaps be explained due to the radicals’ initial - . . . . . a u to c o rr e la ti o n s o f p ro te s t a c ti v it y lag bartlett's formula for ma(q) % confidence bands group analysis controlling for repression and accommodation suggests that protest activity decreased significantly when communal violence began in the middle of february . both intervention and post intervention are statistically significant (p<. and p<. respectively) in the zinb analysis. the par results are also similar as both variables significantly decrease protest activity, indicating that protest activity declined immediately after communal violence began and continued to decline in its aftermath. table zinb and par estimates of protest activity in assam variable critical event model protest violence model pre-communal violence model post-communal violence model zinb par zinb par zinb par zinb par time . ( . ) . *** ( . ) - . ** ( . ) - . ( . ) - - - - intervention (communal violence) - . *** ( . ) - . *** ( . ) - . ** ( . ) - . † ( . ) - - - - post-intervention - . * ( . ) - . *** ( . ) . ( . ) - . ** ( . ) - - - - repression . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . *** ( . ) . ( . ) . *** ( . ) accommodation - . ( . ) - . *** ( . ) - . ( . ) - . ** ( . ) . ( . ) - . † ( . ) - . ( . ) - . ( . ) high violence - - . ** ( . ) . ( . ) - - - - constant . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) ar parameter (lag one) - . *** ( . ) - . *** ( . ) - . *** ( . ) - . ** ( . ) ar parameter (lag two) - - . ** ( . ) - - . † ( . ) - - . ( . ) - . ( . ) n probability>chi- square . - . - . - . - adjusted r - . - . - . - . † p<. , *p< . , **p<. , ***p<. ; all significant tests are two-tailed, standard errors in parentheses desire to show their continued determination to carry on. the results of robustness checks can be found in the appendix. these findings confirm that the communal violence led to a sudden drop in protest activity and continued to stifle the campaign until the assam accord was signed in august . table illustrates the factor changes in the rate of protest activity for a clear interpretation of the coefficients. accordingly, protest activity decreases by a factor of . after the communal violence begins, and continues to decline by a factor of . after the communal violence is over. table factor change in expected rate of protest activity critical event model protest violence model pre-communal violence model post-communal violence model time - - . intervention (communal violence) - . - . - - post-intervention - . - - - repression . . . - accommodation - - . - high violence - . the critical event model also shows that repression leads to an increase in protest activity in both the zinb and par analyses suggesting the existence of a backfire effect (chenoweth and stephan , francisco , rasler ). this effect is relatively strong, as repression increases protest activity by a factor of . , holding other variables constant (table ). this finding is particularly interesting because it suggests that the campaign continued to demobilize despite the backfire effect of repression. accommodation has a significant and only the expected rates of significant coefficients are listed negative effect only in the par analysis. the negative impact of accommodation indicates that, independent of communal violence, accommodative actions might have contributed to the demobilization of the protest campaign, confirming piven and cloward’s cooptation model or tarrow’s polarization model. to understand the effects of accommodation and repression more precisely, i examine the impact of these variables on protest activity during the pre- and post- intervention phases in models and respectively. in the protest violence model, i control for high levels of protest violence as previous studies have shown that heavy protest violence leads to the demobilization of a campaign as participation declines when violence erupts and polarization between the radicals and the moderates occurs (chenoweth and stephan , della porta and tarrow , tarrow ). for this model only, i construct a new dependent variable for protests that does not include heavy violence and create a new control variable, high violence representing acts such as abductions, armed attacks, and clashes with security forces that occur during the protest although studies have demonstrated that elections are associated with high levels of violence (dunning ), elections did not have a significant impact on protest activity. parliamentary elections in december and the state assembly elections in february were the only two elections held in assam during the time period under study. the parliamentary elections were postponed and held in december . a dummy variable coded for three months before and after each election was statistically insignificant in the zinb estimates of the critical event model. campaign. the results of the zinb and par analyses suggest that high violence is significant, but in the opposite direction. high violence does not seem to deter protests in assam, and instead, increases it by a factor of . (table ). thus, the protest violence model shows that high levels of violence during the elections was not the cause of the demobilization of the campaign. the heavy violence in assam was primarily associated with the protesters’ election boycott as anti-election groups, mostly ethnic assamese, tried to intimidate pro-election groups (mostly bengalis) from participating (baruah , kimura ). the pre- and post-communal violence models examine the effects of state actions before and after communal violence respectively to understand if state policies had differential effects across the two time periods. for instance, indian leaders could have been more inclined to make concessions to the protesters after ethnic violence began to alleviate the tension in the region. alternatively, the leaders might have resorted to more repressive measures in order to crush the protesters and bring order to assam. both zinb and par analyses show that repression has a positive and significant effect on protest activity during the pre- and post- communal violence periods, suggesting that the effect of repression remained relatively consistent across the protest campaign. accommodation has no significant effect in the pre and post-intervention period, indicating that the negotiations between the indian government and the campaign leaders, and the attempts to coopt the opposition did not demobilize the campaign. as figure also shows, protest activity had already declined dramatically when the parties agreed to participate in the last round of negotiations, which started in april , almost two years after the full range of events are listed under the high intensity collective action category in the codebook posted in the appendix. the ethnic killings took place. thus, neither model suggests that sate actions led to the decline in protest activity. predictive margins generated based on the zinb analysis of the critical event model provide a more nuanced understanding of the effect of the communal violence on protest activity (figure ). the predicted number of weekly protest events declines steadily over the course of time. as figure illustrates, the predicted number of protest events is immediately after the communal violence. about six months later, however, the number of protest events goes down to , and in about a year, the number is below , indicating a more than % decrease in protest activity. in approximately two years after the communal violence, the predicted number of protest events further declines to slightly above ten a week. when these numbers are put into context, the first year in particular seems quite significant. one year after the communal violence, none of the issues the protesters were campaigning on had been resolved and the leaders of the campaign were still trying to mobilize support. so, a more than % decline in the first year suggests that the communal violence had a significant effect on the demobilization of the campaign. figure predicted number of events after the communal violence to evaluate the predictive power of the critical event model, i generated out-of-sample forecasting, which is an ideal tool for cross-validation. the main idea is to compare the predicted values generated by the model to the observed values. moreover, these forecasts can be easily compared to those of other models. since polarization did not occur in the assam case, forecasts on a polarization model (tarrow ) cannot be tested. however, because the generating predicted values of observations that are not included in any of the analyses is another option for cross validation. the united liberation front of assam (ulfa), a separatist insurgent group, was established in but did not actively challenge the state until the late s. p re d ic te d n u m b e r o f e v e n ts number of weeks after communal violence % confidence interval band indian government used accommodative tactics to coopt the protesters, i am able to generate out- of-sample forecasts based on a cooptation model that has the accommodation variable only (piven and cloward ) and compare them to the out-of-sample forecasts of the critical event model. to obtain the out-of-sample forecasts, i first run zinb regressions to estimate the parameters for both models by holding back the weeks after the communal violence ends. based on these estimates, i then generate out-of-sample probabilities of protest activity for the period after the critical event and calculate theil’s u to evaluate the predictive power of each model. theil’s u is a ratio where the numerator is the sum of squared prediction errors and the denominator is the sum of squared prediction error from a naïve model, which expects no change from one observation to the other (farnum and stanton : ). values below one indicate a better performance of the statistical model compared to the naïve model. the plots in figure illustrate the number of observed protest events and the out-of- sample predictions based on the critical event and the cooptation models after the intervention. even though neither one of the models predict protest activity very accurately, the critical event model performs much better than the cooptation model. the theil’s u statistics for the critical event and the cooptation models are . and . respectively, indicating that although neither greatly outperforms the naïve model, the critical event model is still a better predictor of i hold back the weeks after june , approximately % of the observations, after the communal violence. these estimates can be found in the appendix. the aic scores for the critical event and cooptation models are . and . respectively. protest activity during the demobilization period. as figure shows, the cooptation model predicts higher values of protest activity while the critical event model predicts no activity during the demobilization period. figure out-of-sample forecasts for the critical event and cooptation models overall, the empirical analyses show that the communal violence in february led to the demobilization of the protest campaign. until the communal violence, the campaign was the critical event plot suggests that the variables present in the model are not sensitive enough to protest activity occurrence to be able to detect those spikes. this might be due to the inability of the model to account for the autoregressive component of the series. strong and had most of the characteristics identified by scholars of nonviolent resistance as likely to lead to a successful outcome. first, the campaign started off by employing nonviolent tactics and secured substantive mass support from ethnic assamese as well as from non-immigrant muslims, the most important factor for pressuring the government to change its unfavorable policies according to chenoweth and stephan ( ). the campaign leaders mobilized thousands of people, including students, teachers, peasants, state government officials and oil workers and brought them out into the streets. for instance, in november , nearly two million people assam participated in the civil disobedience campaign (baruah ). second, the high level of participation allowed for tactical innovation throughout the first four years, increasing the campaign’s resilience in the face of state repression (chenoweth and stephan , mcadam , schock ). for instance, in late december , shortly after launching a civil disobedience campaign, the protesters imposed an economic blockade, stopping the transportation of crude oil, plywood, and jute from assam to the rest of the country (indian express, december , ). moreover, many state police and government officials supported the campaign against illegal immigrants, dramatically reducing the level of repression used against the protesters (kimura ). according to nepstad ( ) and chenoweth and stephan ( ), such loyalty shifts are crucial for the success of a campaign. finally, potentially more radical supporters of the campaign did not have a violent insurgent group to turn to (chenoweth and stephan ), keeping the mass support for the campaign relatively intact. in short, the protest campaign in assam featured several mechanisms that should have enabled the leaders to continue to mobilize people and put pressure on the government before communal violence began. so, how exactly did the communal violence set the demobilization process of the campaign in motion? communal violence turned into a critical event that significantly limited the campaign leader’s available strategies. after the extent of the violence became known, members of the indian central government repeatedly called for peace and calm in the region (the indian express, february & march , ) while political actors and civil society groups offered competing explanations for the occurrence of such brutal violence. the campaign leaders blamed the indian government for imposing the elections without changing the electoral rolls (kimura ) whereas several members of the government accused the protesters of inciting violence in the region. for instance, right after the most publicized mass killings in nellie on february , prime minister indira gandhi publicly blamed the protest leaders for the violence in assam (the indian express, february , ). the campaign leadership was also criticized for their failure to condemn violence immediately after the communal violence started (gandhi ). when the temporary suspension of the campaign was finally announced in late march, the leaders emphasized the need to focus on relief, rehabilitation, and integration (the indian express, march , ). even though protests resumed in august , the intensity of the campaign decreased dramatically (figure ). the communal violence further entrenched ethnic divisions within the society alienating ethnic assamese and immigrant muslims (gupta ). the tension among these two groups had important consequences for the campaign. after the extensive killings of muslim peasants, many muslim protesters withdrew their support, including those who had settled before colonization and, hence, were seen as indigenous. for instance, one of the top muslim student leaders resigned from his position after the occurrence of communal violence (kimura ). consequently, the campaign leaders had to devote considerable time and resources into addressing internal divisions. several muslim members of the aasu issued an ultimatum to the aasu leadership demanding a correction in what they perceived as a pro-hindu communal tilt (baruah ). similarly, several other indigenous groups, such as the bodos, began to make demands that emphasized their distinctiveness from ethnic assamese. in january and december , the aasu organized two separate national conventions to address the rifts among such groups by emphasizing the urgent need to provide a unified political platform (baruah ). while the lack of primary sources makes it impossible to pinpoint which of these two causal mechanisms (the leaders backing off versus withdrawal of support) is more important, the secondary sources clearly demonstrate the role of communal violence in the demobilization process. two significant concessions by the central government in new delhi led to the end of the protest campaign. first, in , the election commission of india decided that the electoral rolls in assam were to be revised based on the electoral rolls, which meant that the immigrants who entered after would be disenfranchised (the indian express, july , ). the campaign leaders saw the election commission’s decision as a confidence building measure as many illegal immigrants who settled in assam after the creation of bangladesh in would be disenfranchised. second, the indian government left the state government out of the negotiations, recognizing the power of the campaign leaders, who insisted that the current government was not elected by the people of assam in as many ethnic assamese boycotted the elections (baruah ). therefore, they argued, the state government was illegitimate and should not participate in any discussions (narayan ). in early , the lack of enthusiasm for continued protests was already evident. many assamese defied the campaign leaders’ call to boycott the republic day celebrations in early by joining them in the main stadium in guwahati (the indian express, may , ). the final round of negotiations between the campaign leaders and the central government began in april , and the assam accord was eventually signed on august , . accordingly, all foreigners who had entered between and would be disenfranchised for ten years and those who had entered after would be deported. the current state government would be dissolved and new elections would be held in december based on the new electoral rolls (the indian express, august , ). conclusion this empirical analysis of the dynamics of the demobilization of the protest campaign in assam has several implications for the study of nonviolent campaigns. first, it offers an alternative causal mechanism for the demobilization of a protest campaign by demonstrating that critical events can trigger demobilization. communal violence in ethnically divided societies can curtail mass support for the protest campaign and force campaign leaders to suspend protest activities. while scholars have often highlighted the escalatory effects of critical events, this analysis shows that they can also be important turning points in the demobilization of a protest campaign. second, this study suggests that the participation of large numbers of people and the inclusion of various sectors and groups do not always set off mechanisms that lead to success. even if repression triggers a backfire effect and motivates larger number of people to participate, campaigns can still demobilize. indeed, similar to piven and cloward’s ( ) and tarrow’s ( ) models, the assam case shows that broadening the support base makes coalition maintenance challenging in ethnically divided societies. when communal violence against muslim immigrants occurred in assam, muslim protesters withdrew their support, forcing the campaign leadership temporarily to shift their strategy from confronting political authorities to trying to unify the different groups within the campaign. third, the assam case shows that violent protest activity does not necessarily undermine the strength of a protest campaign as scholars of nonviolent resistance maintain. although protesters resorted to violent tactics, mobilization levels remained high throughout the first four years of the campaign. instead, a critical event, communal violence, eventually led to the demobilization of the protest campaign. in line with davenport and moore’s ( ) call for better mapping and understanding of diverse forms of political conflict and violence, this study indicates that various types of violence can have differential effects on protest dynamics. from a policy standpoint, the implications of the assam campaign for states and activists are quite alarming. in ethnically divided societies, protests that highlight ethnic differences can have unintended violent consequences and lead to deeper societal cleavages in the long term. states should be aware of this potential and calculate the costs of repressing and fueling protests by taking into account the possibility of large-scale communal violence. likewise, protesters should develop strategies to prevent the escalation of ethnic tension as it can have detrimental effects on the campaign. at a more general level, the assam case illustrates the unpredictable nature of protest dynamics. scholars of political contention have long recognized the challenges associated with identifying causal pathways due to the unpredictability of contentious interactions between multiple actors. this study explains how an unpredictable event can demobilize a protest campaign. although this study has limitations in 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( ) ethnic conflict and civic life : hindus and muslims in india. new haven [conn.]: yale university press. appendix for the dynamics of the demobilization of the protest campaign in assam by tijen demirel-pegg this appendix includes the following sections: section a: explanation of the coding procedures and the codebook used in the data collection section b: descriptive statistics section c: robustness checks a. explanation of coding procedures and the codebook . coding procedures i followed multiple steps to construct the codebook and weight the data. first, i identified the four broad event categories that i needed data for: ) state accommodation; ) state repression; ) group collective action; and ) external support to the group. these categories were followed by the lists of actors involved in the assamese protest campaign. for state actions, i relied on a majority of krain’s ( ) list of repressive and accommodative events. krain includes a variety of repressive state actions, ranging from seizing assets to use of torture, as well as a comprehensive list of accommodative actions ranging from increasing security of target group to incorporation into government. even though these lists cover a wide range of events, i discovered some additional categories that were essential to my four cases throughout the coding process. therefore, i added violent arrests of opposition leaders; halt negotiations; curfews; declaration of president’s rule or governor’s rule; teargassing; violent disruption of group organization; beating up; clashes with group; damaging property; bombing; burning houses and bridges; and burning entire villages to the repressive events lists. these events came up with some frequency and provided detailed information about the exact form of events. i then labeled the repressive events based on their objectives and decision making agencies. preventive repression corresponds to repressive acts imposed by higher level authorities, such as the government or the judiciary, to demobilize the contenders and to prevent future acts of contention. the declaration of martial law, and the restriction of the right of assembly, for instance, fall into this category of repression. reactionary repression, on the other hand, stands for repressive acts of lower level agents, such as the police, applied during the course of a contentious episode in an attempt to respond to collective action and maintain or re- establish order. teargassing the protesters or damaging property are examples of reactionary repression. i consider arrests as a separate category because it is not always clear if arrests result from centralized policy directives, or if they are consequences of ad-hoc decisions made by the local police. finally, i grouped all repressive events under six broader categories: restrict; seize; warn; judicial actions; non-judicial actions; and use of force. regarding the state’s accommodative policies, i expanded krain’s list by adding organizing discussion meetings or committees, and withdrawal of army. the indian state used these two types of policies during the protest waves and insurgencies as a form of accommodation. again, i grouped similar types of events under broader categories: negotiations; judicial accommodation; non-judicial accommodation; and group recognition. for the purpose of systematic coding, i arbitrarily assigned the broad categories a -digit code and the specific event types a -digit code which started with the first two digits of the broader category. all repressive events that involve violence were assigned a at the very end (thus, violent actions are all -digit codes ending with ). all the codes for accommodative events start i did not include mass killings because some form of military armed attack, burning villages or bombing already covered this category. article of the constitution of india grants the president the right to dissolve or suspend a state legislature and place the state under direct federal rule if he is satisfied that there has been failure of the constitutional machinery in the state. with a and the repressive ones start with a . this code assignment was particularly helpful later throughout the data management process because it made it easier to identify similar types of events and their respective broader categories for aggregation purposes. it also helped me to detect miscoding, if any, more easily. the following are examples of categories of accommodation and repression with their respective codes. for group actions, i used a majority of the violent international conflict data project (vicdp) events list (moore and lindstrom ). the vicdp is a data project, which has generated conflict and cooperation data at the sub-national level. events from the integrated data for event analysis framework (idea) (bond,bond,oh,jenkins and taylor ) was also helpful in identifying specific events that were not included in the vicdp project, such as hijacking, and taking hostages. for the purpose of distinguishing between situations in which violence is or is not used, i added the “violent” versions of demonstrations, strikes and sit-ins to the list. i also created two separate categories for demonstrations based on size. demonstrations with less than participants are coded as small scale and the ones with more than are coded as large scale. even though the cut-off point of participants is arbitrary, there is a pragmatic reason behind it. the indian express usually reports massive demonstrations as featuring “hundreds” or “thousands” of demonstrators. i am conservatively interpreting “hundreds” as at least , and therefore, using it as my cut-off point. after completing the list for group actions, i grouped those under five broader categories: accommodative group actions; low intensity collective action; medium intensity collective action; and high intensity collective action. again, the broader category was assigned a - digit code and the specific events were assigned a -digit code. all the events that involved violence were assigned a at the end. all collective action events start with a . in addition to collective action i included a “splits” category for groups to code information about group cohesion. the list of events in this category does not reflect a wide range of group characteristics because the scope of the study is not on organizational aspects of the groups. instead, it includes the events that are the results of splits within a group. these specific events are disagreement between factions; forming an organization as a result of split; expelling members; armed attack against other factions; and militants surrendering. these events also have codes starting with a because they are related to groups. for the list of acts of external support to the group, i built on heraclides’ ( : - ) list of events which are specifically designed to fit cases with external involvement in secessionist conflicts. for example, some of the events in his list including providing access to communication, providing sanctuary and training, or giving direct military assistance such as armed intervention constituted the basis of the list for external support to the group. i also added firing across borders and granting asylum to leadership of group to the list to make it more comprehensive. all the events for external support to the group are arranged under two larger categories: material and diplomatic/political support. material support has three sub-categories based on the level of involvement: low, moderate and high. the digit codes for these main categories start with an and the specific events have digit codes, just like the rest of the codebook. while compiling the list of events for state, group, and external actor actions, i deliberately attempted to include similar policy options across the board. obviously, the same exact policy options that are available to the state are not available for the group and vice versa. however, if the state has the option of putting down a demonstration, then demonstration is included among the list of group actions; and so is allowing demonstrations in state’s own territory for external support actions. finally, for the list of actors and targets, i used the actor/target list in moore and lindstrom’s ( ) vicdp as a starting point for my initial deliberations on what kind of actors to include. the specific party names and factions, names of governors, chief ministers, names of religious or ethnic groups along with broader categories of students, peasants, workers, and businessmen, for instance, are listed in the codebook. these specific actors were organized based on types of actors and targets: state, social actors, political parties, religious groups / populations, insurgent groups, state enforcement, and external actors. all the broader categories have digit codes and the specific actors and targets have digit codes. if there is more detailed information available, then those more specific ones have digit codes. for example, in assam, the code for the state is , for the governor , and for governor shri t.s. misra, it is . once the entire list of events was compiled, i assigned scores to each event to reflect the intensity of these events more realistically. it would simply not be accurate to assume that the state’s restriction of assembly has the same impact as launching an armed attack. if both of these events would be assigned a score of (or simply counted by frequency), it might very well be possible that restriction of assembly ends up having more weight in the statistical analysis than launching armed attacks against the group if its frequency is higher. in order to make the analysis more accurate, the weights of those events needs to be taken into consideration. for assigning weights, my starting point was, once again, krain’s ( ) scale of repression and accommodation. krain’s scale is initially based on the rankings of experts in the field. the experts were asked to rank the repressive and accommodative events on a to scale. the average scores for each event were calculated and then rounded to the nearest whole number. to be able to make finer distinctions, krain took the square of the raw average score and assigned new scores to the events ranging from to (krain : - ). so, for example, while arresting opposition leader and armed attack received a score of by the expert rankings, krain scored them as and respectively. by expanding the range of the weights, krain gained enough flexibility to rank events which originally fell into the same score category. as a wider range of scores allows me to rank the events with more precision and thus to see the increases or decreases in the intensity of the actions, i decided to use a range between and as well. i first assigned similar scores to the repressive and accommodative events that krain had on his list. then i ranked the events which i had added in the previous step that were not in krain’s list. for example, while arresting opposition leaders is on krain’s original list, i included violent arrests of opposition leaders into my list of repressive events. these additions inevitably led to the modification of several scores. the addition of a violent event to the list meant that it had to have a score more than the non-violent version of it. so, the score was assigned based on other violent events with similar intensity. as a general principle, the violent events were assigned a point higher score than the non-violent versions. once this rule was established, similar events were modified based on the same principle. finally, i made some adjustments to the scale based on case-specific characteristics. throughout the data collection process, i read thousands of newspaper articles on the same subject, which gave me a good understanding of the actions of the state and the groups. i was, therefore, able to understand how the state used certain types of policies in what kind of context and used this insight to modify the this point difference is enough to account for the difference in intensity, yet does not place the violent and non- violent versions of the same event at the extreme ends of the scale. scale. for example, while declaration of martial law has a score of in krain’s scale, it is in my scale because the indian state declared martial law in situations where other repressive measures had already been taken and martial law was seen as the only option left to halt the further deterioration of law and order. therefore, declaration of martial law was assigned a dramatically higher score than violent or non-violent putdown of demonstrations. even with these various modifications, the correlation coefficient for accommodative and repressive events between the new scale and krain’s scale is relatively strong (. and . respectively). i then applied these similar guidelines to assign scores to group actions and external support events. the most severe forms of collective action and external support events were assigned scores closer to and the least severe were assigned scores closer to . actions included as options under both the state actions or group actions received similar scores. for example, armed attack receives a score of both in the list of state’s repressive actions and the group’s most threatening actions list. similarly, negotiating receives the same score of in both the state’s and group’s conciliatory actions lists. this systematic and consistent procedure of assigning weights was particularly important in ensuring some degree of balance and objectivity in this otherwise subjective process. subjectivity is a legitimate concern both with krain’s scale and also with my scale as, indeed, it is with any other weighting scheme. as there are no objective criteria used to rank such events, any ranking inevitably involves some kind of a judgment call on the researcher’s part. however, the application of the same principles across all types of actions will reduce the bias to a minimum and prevent it from affecting the analysis in a significant way. . codebook event list for accommodation main category specific category code adjusted weight (w) negotiations broad statement of guarantee of rights low-level concession compromise reached negotiations begun judicial accommodation reduction in fines, taxes, fees, punishment for compellance removing restrictive law/regulation allowing emigration allowing return from exile outlawing repressive apparatus institution, practice prosecution of enemies of target group stays of execution freeing prisoners general amnesty legalizing group membership non-judicial accommodation organizing discussion meetings, committees increasing access to information providing selective incentives giving positive publicity introducing enabling mechanisms/entitlement increasing opportunities for participation small-scale diversion of resources to group abandoning project hurtful to group increasing security of target group increasing access to markets large-scale redistribution of assets/resources direct aid (money, forces) to challenger withdrawal of army group recognition encouraging/allowing separatism incorporation into government other event list for repression main category specific category code adjusted weight (w) restrict preventive repression restricting access to resources, necessities, jobs restricting assembly restricting freedom of communication, speech and distribution of information restricting emigration, mobility prohibitive fines, taxes, fees, regulation seize preventive repression seizing assets arrest arrests/ detentions mass arrests (> ) non-violent arrest of opposition leaders violent arrest of opposition leaders warn preventive repression public threat of violence/punishment show of force exemplary punishment/deterrent show trials/political trials compellance: punishing non-performance expulsion/purge from party or ruling elite making groups more visible, easily spotted halt negotiations judicial actions preventive repression curfew martial law declared “special” extra-legal courts set-up suspension of parts of constitution or the regular workings of government / issuing ordinance outlawing organizations, groups, industries suspending or censoring news media/speech ousting groups from government exiles/expulsions trials in absentia forced conscription president's rule/governor's rule religious suppression/persecution non-judicial actions reactionary repression non-violent putdown of demonstration/strikes/hartals violent putdown of demonstration/strikes/hartals, lathi-charging and teargassing non-violent disruption of group organization violent disruption of group organization calling in additional police posts/ secret police/special forces use of force reactionary repression beating up clashes with group use of torture forced resettlement armed attack forced labor forced subjugation/integration of communities disappearance damaging property bombing burning houses, bridges, etc. burning entire villages manufactured famine or draught mass rape concentration camps other note: all actions that involve violence end with . event list for collective action main category specific category code weight (w) accommodative actions broad statement of guarantee of rights and security of government officials low-level concession compromise reached negotiations begun freeing hostages/prisoners abandoning plans/actions/strikes/boycotts / demonstrations etc. hurtful to state allowing government access to resources, mines, oil facilities, etc. renouncing secessionist goals acceptance of an agreement termination of separatist movement announcing ceasefire contentious actions low intensity collective action mild negative statements about federal government mild negative statements about local government strong negative statements about federal government strong negative statements about local government organizing meetings distributing information forming an organization medium intensity collective action non-violent strike (hartal) violent strike (hartal) non-violent bandh (general strike) violent bandh (general strike) non-violent small-scale demonstrations (less than participants) violent small-scale demonstrations (less than participants) non-violent large-scale demonstrations (more than participants) violent large-scale demonstrations (more than participants) non-violent sit-ins violent sit-ins commercial boycotts electoral boycotts halt negotiations forming a political wing / party running candidate in the election threat of violence/agitation violation of curfew, martial law, etc. high intensity collective action surveillance, links with spies, acquiring information through clandestine means assaults robbery/stealing-damaging property clashes direct confrontation with army or paramilitaries sabotage abduct tourists/journalists/citizens abduct and execute tourists/journalists/citizens abduct politicians abduct and execute politicians seizing buildings using training camps securing access to arms armed attack bombing riots burning houses, bridges, etc. burning entire villages other all actions that involve violence en with . splits main category specific category code weight (w) disagreements between factions forming an organization as a result of splits expelling members armed attack against other factions militants surrendering event list for external support to the state main category specific category code weight (w) material support low humanitarian aid medium providing financial assistance providing vital access to communication threatening to use force against group on state's behalf high non-injury destructive action against group providing arms providing military personnel border seal border skirmishes (support state) full scale military intervention support diplomatic / political support mild verbal statements strong verbal statements support in intergovernmental organizations campaigns in support of state banning groups to exist/function in the state's own territory / expulsion of group banning demonstrations/protests, etc. in the state's own territory detaining or arresting group members other event list for external support to the group main category specific category code weight (w) tangible support low humanitarian aid moderate providing sanctuary/training providing base of operation providing financial assistance providing vital access to communication threatening the state to intervene on group's behalf high - physical involvement non-injury destructive action against state providing arms providing military personnel under secessionist command border closures border skirmishes (support group) firing across borders full scale military intervention diplomatic / political support mild verbal statements strong verbal statements support in intergovernmental organizations campaigns in support of groups allowing groups to exist/function in the state's own territory allowing demonstrations/protests, etc. in the state's own territory freeing detained/arrested group members out of prison granting asylum to leadership of group other actors /targets for assam state federal government local government governor shri l.p. singh, ics shri p. mehrotra shri t.s. misra shri b. n. sing shri harideo joshi shri justice anisetti roghuvir, chief justice, assam shri d. d. thakur shri lok nath misra chief minister cm shri golap borbora cm shri jogenda nath hazarika cm shrimati anowara taimur cm shri kesab chandra gogoi cm shri hiteswar saikia cm shri prafulla kumar mahanta social actors media students workers peasants educators politicians political activists elites local tourists foreign tourists foreign journalists foreign politicians bengali nationals trying to immigrate civil servants nepali nationals trying to immigrate businessmen/traders foreign businessmen/traders other political parties congress party janata party bjp asom gana parishad (agp) asom gana parishad (splinter) united minorities front other religious groups muslims hindus sikhs buddhists christian other ethnic groups population assamese bangladeshi immigrants tribals nepalese bodos hindi-speaking people other agitating/insurgent groups united liberation front of assam all assamese student union (aasu) all assam gana sangram parishad (aagsp) asom sahitya sabha all assam minority students union (not insurgent) lok parishad assam jatiyatabadi yuva chhatra parishad (ajycp) - assam nationalistic youth and students forum) other state enforcement police paramilitary troops army border security force other external actors us united kingdom united nations regional organizations china bhutan bangladesh nepal burma (myanmar) pakistan other b. descriptive statistics table b- descriptive statistics for the main variables (weighted) variable observation mean standard deviation minimum maximum protest activity . . repression . . accommodation . . heavy violence . . c. robustness checks table c- zinb and par estimates for number of protest activity in assam (unweighted data) variable critical event model protest violence model pre-communal violence model post-communal violence model zinb par zinb par zinb par zinb par time - . ( . ) . * ( . ) - . ** ( . ) - . ( . ) - - - - intervention (riot) - . ** ( . ) - . * ( . ) - . * ( . ) - . ( . ) - - - - post-intervention - . ( . ) - . *** ( . ) . ( . ) - . * ( . ) - - - - repression . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) . † ( . ) . *** ( . ) accommodation - . ( . ) - . * ( . ) - . ( . ) - . * ( . ) - . ( . ) . * ( . ) - . ( . ) - . ( . ) high violence - - . * ( . ) . ( . ) - - - - constant . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) - . ( . ) ar parameter (lag one) - . *** ( . ) - . *** ( . ) - . *** ( . ) - . *** ( . ) ar parameter (lag two) - - . * ( . ) - - . ( . ) - - . * ( . ) - . ( . ) n probability>chi- square . - . - . - . - adjusted r - . - . - . - . † p<. , *p< . , **p<. , ***p<. ; all significant tests are two-tailed, standard errors in parentheses table c- zinb and par estimates for violent and nonviolent protest activity in assam variable nonviolent protest activity violent protest activity zinb par zinb par time - . *** ( . ) - . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) intervention (riot) - . * ( . ) - . * ( . ) . * ( . ) . *** ( . ) post-intervention - . ( . ) - . * ( . ) - . * ( . ) - . * ( . ) repression . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) . ** ( . ) - . ( . ) accommodation - . * ( . ) - . ** ( . ) - . ( . ) . * ( . ) constant . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) ar parameter (lag one) - . *** ( . ) - . † ( . ) ar parameter (lag two) - - . ( . ) - . 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( ). the next dada utopian visioning peace orchestra: constitutional theory and the aspirational. mcgill law journal / revue de droit de mcgill, ( ), – . https://doi.org/ . / ar https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/mlj/ https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar https://doi.org/ . / ar https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/mlj/ -v -n -mlj / https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/mlj/ mcgill law journal — revue de droit de mcgill the next dada utopian visioning peace orchestra: constitutional theory and the aspirational ————mcgill law journal annual lecture———— mari matsuda* i. i made an orchestra ii. there are two kinds of people a. the personal is the political b. the tool in your hand iii. art and constitutional theory: who is this constitution for? iv. the imperative of big change v. the utopian constitution vi. art as a right vii. problematizing art as a right viii. make your revolution with art in your hand ix. a constitution of aspiration appendix: manifesto of radical intersubjective collectivity and imagined possibility * professor of law, university of hawai‘i at mānoa, william s. richardson school of law. the author thanks roberta woods, elizabeth bowman, ciara kahahane, and kara teng for intrepid research assistance, and charles lawrence for critical reading. � mari matsuda citation: ( ) : mcgill lj — référence : ( ) : rd mcgill ( ) : mcgill law journal — revue de droit de mcgill ii. i made an orchestra someone is trying to make music somewhere, with a pair of wooden spoons on an oil drum. —elizabeth alexander but there are many other things that are still lying around the house, endeavoring to be developed historically. —ernst bloch i made an orchestra out of objects from the waste stream: household items relegated to the trash bin, pieces of buildings left in the junk yard, scraps of wood and metal, a broken guitar, a sewing machine, glass lamp shades, and a library card file drawer. the goal was to transform so-called post-consumer waste into instruments that could play bach. along the way i met people who were not afraid of odd, creative endeavors and i invited them to join the orchestra as musicians. i recruited professor charles lawrence, a critical race theorist, to conduct our public performance. a poet in the audience penned a poem about the experience, valorizing the struggling instruments that she said praise song for the day (saint paul, minn: graywolf press, ) (this line is from a po- em read at president barack obama’s first inauguration). the utopian function of art and literature: selected essays, translated by jack zipes & frank mecklenburg (cambridge, mass: mit press, ) at . bloch refers here to the relationship between the material world and the socially determined human prac- tice of making and knowing art. my primary attraction to this quotation is to the im- agery of things “lying around the house,” perhaps waiting to become art. the quote also acknowledges bloch’s theoretical reach for “the conscious and known activity within the not-yet-conscious, the utopian function” which he shares with the peace orchestra (ibid at ). specifically, johann sebastian bach, suite in g minor, bwv (fourth movement: sarabande). the scrapyard re-use hawai‘i yielded one orchestra member, who heard me tapping on glass and caught the reference to the experimental composer harry partch. my surprise that a reclamation wrangler was a student of musical composition gave way to deeper knowledge: any given stranger might actually be a dreamer-ally eager to join a utopian project. i took down his phone number, and he became the peace orchestra harpist. charles r lawrence iii is a professor of law at the william s richardson school of law, the university of hawai‘i, mānoa centennial professor and a lifelong musician who learned to sight-read music in church choirs; ba, haverford college, ; jd, yale law school, . for work relevant to the orchestra, see charles r lawrence iii, “the word and the river: pedagogy as scholarship as struggle” ( ) : s cal l rev at – (see part d, “the gift of the dream: embracing utopia”). constitutional theory and the aspirational “gave complaint.” “it is hard,” the instruments seemed to say, “but we will do it, we will transcend our declared status and send beauty into the world.” a young filmmaker volunteered to make a short video of the perfor- mance and the manifesto reading that went along with it. would you like to see it? this lecture includes the first showing of this video, the world premi- ere, right here at mcgill. the filmmaker, chris kahunahana, is an indig- enous hawaiian who is making his first feature film. mesdames et messieurs, may i present the next dada utopian vision- ing peace orchestra and manifesto of radical intersubjective collectivity and imagined possibility. [at this point, the lecture stopped for a video of the performance. the video is available online. ] iii. there are two kinds of people there are two kinds of people in the world when it comes to the next dada utopian visioning peace orchestra: . the ones who say “cool!”, and; . the ones who say “why?” actually, there is probably a third group of negative, doubting haters, but we will not address them in this lecture. i will use the rest of my time to the poem is titled “the library sounds” (reprinted with permission of author, j vera lee). it reads as follows: for mari all the sounds were strange and gave complaint to age and condition, even if they were not vain. they had cleaned themselves, just like animals, such as a lens would bring to life — if it were not buried. and still the sounds collected, a memory of water see mari j matsuda, manifesto of radical intersubjective collectivity and imagined possibility ( ) (reproduced in the appendix, below). see waikiki: the film, online: <www.waikikithemovie.com>. see mari matsuda, “next dada utopian visioning peace orchestra”, mari matsuda, online: <www.marimatsudapeaceorchestra.com>. ( ) : mcgill law journal — revue de droit de mcgill answer the “why” and to suggest that idiosyncratic utopian gestures are relevant to constitutional theory, law, and justice. aa. the personal is the political a basic tenet of feminism, “the personal is the political,” is the first part of the “why”. feminists start with the experience of women in order to ground theory in the lived reality of a group whose perspective and in- sight is cordoned off and called irrelevant by the gatekeepers of received wisdom. as a feminist, therefore, i do not discount my own experience. i am the daughter and granddaughter of makers. all my life, i have known people who use their hands, who use tools to grow food, to make, to fix, to transform discards into useful things. i heard laughing stories about the pages of the sears catalog used as toilet paper, and the fabric from old rice bags turned into underwear. my mother grew up on a sugar plantation where anything bought came at a high price from the company store, and therefore, almost nothing was bought. my father lost seven jobs for his politics during the mccarthy era, but we never went hungry because dad could fix things and people would pay for repairs. he had tool boxes, and voltmeters, and oscilloscopes. he taught me to respect tools, and to always, when taking something apart, have a container for the little pieces so i could find them when i needed to put the thing back together. the origin of the phrase “the personal is political” is sometimes traced to the title of a essay by carol hanisch: see carol hanisch, “the personal is political” in shula- mith firestone & anne koedt, eds, notes from the second year: women’s liberation, major writings of the radical feminists (new york: radical feminism, ) . see catharine a mackinnon, toward a feminist theory of the state (cambridge, mass: harvard university press, ) (describing consciousness raising as “the collective critical reconstitution of the meaning of women’s social experience, as women live through it” at ). mackinnon also provides an extensive discussion of consciousness raising as feminist method (see ibid at – ). see mari matsuda, “japanese american progressives: a case study in identity for- mation” in yasuko takezawa & gary y okihiro, eds, trans-pacific japanese american studies: conversations on race and racializations (honolulu: university of hawai‘i press, ) [matsuda, “japanese american progressives”] (discussing artistic pro- duction and left organizing in the lives and community of jinkichi and tsuyuko matsu- da at – ). see charles r lawrence iii & mari j matsuda, we won’t go back: making the case for affirmative action (boston: houghton mifflin, ) (“[t]he family survived on the mon- ey don earned doing small repair jobs. he was of the generation who knew how to fix things, back in the days when most things were made to fix rather than be thrown out” at xvii). constitutional theory and the aspirational my father’s mother was a working-class painter. for her, the only good thing about the world war ii internment of japanese-americans was that she had time to paint. she died before i was born, but i have al- ways had her paintings to tell me who she was: she loved the soft-edged landscapes of jean-françois millet, and the images of bodies bent in toil. she read karl marx. she valorized labour, and there are often figures at work in the paintings she left. when i was a law student, the building next to mine caught fire and i had to evacuate in a hurry. i grabbed my grandmother’s painting and ran, and in that instance i learned what object i would protect without think- ing. with this inheritance of art making in my family, i might have be- come an artist. in the first metal-working class i took in college, the de- partment chair said: “you have talent. have you considered changing your major?” instead, another inheritance called. my father and his parents were marxist internationalists. they believed in a specific ideology that envisioned a better world, and defined a good life as one spent working for that world. in my limited imagination as a temperamentally cautious, straight-a student in the seventies, my version of this vision was becoming a people’s lawyer, someone who could use the rules and rhetoric of the system to change it and fight it. art was the unserious, self- indulgent path; law the hard-edged tool to wield against empire. i walked away from art, and for forty years, carried regret. an art pro- fessor said i had talent, and i did nothing with it. this may happen to you: one day you might wake up and realize you are not going to live for- ever. the marriage i had made with the law—or more specifically to the see josephine fowler, japanese and chinese immigrant activists: organizing in amer- ican and international communist movements, – (new brunswick, nj: rut- gers university press, ) at , n (discussing the formation of the puroretaria geijutsu [proletariat arts], the journal of the proletarian arts society, in – by a group of artist-activists in los angeles that included the author’s paternal grandpar- ents, jinkichi and tsuyuko matsuda). the author’s grandmother’s painting, view from heart mountain internment center, wyoming was recently featured in an exhibition at the university of hawai‘i art department. see “mari matsuda”, ways of looking?, online: <waysoflookinguhm. wordpress.com/the-exhibit/mari-matsuda>. dave pimentel was an arizona state university art professor and metalsmith. see kathleen browne, “moving metal: an exhibition of contemporary metalsmiths” ( ) : metalsmith at . see fowler, supra note at , , n ; matsuda, “japanese american progres- sives”, supra note at – (discussing the matsuda family’s participation in the in- ternational labor defense). ( ) : mcgill law journal — revue de droit de mcgill intellectual work of deconstructing the subordinating, hegemonic func- tions of the law—suddenly felt unsatisfying. the small regret from closing a door on a promising romance with art grew to a heavy, saddening load. my possible talent lay in the graveyard of life’s unfulfilled intentions, waiting for my body to expire and join it. luckily, a sabbatical appeared, and i became a full-time b.f.a. stu- dent. a bit before this, i had stumbled upon a dada exhibition at the na- tional gallery. for the first time, reading the manifestos and back- ground notes, i realized that dada was not nihilism and absurdity—the vague legacy i had gleaned from urinals on gallery walls. dada was des- pair, it was a cri de cœur for a generation that had watched so many peers—fellow art students, classmates—march off to senseless slaughter in the first world war. the radical refusal to conform to anyone’s concep- tion of what art is was a part of a larger refusal, a rejection of the entire project of modernity and its lie of rationality. it was a refusal of bloated young bodies lying in blood, mud, and mustard gas. it was a refusal of an- yone’s paltry effort to explain why it all made sense. one of the classes i teach is peacemaking. when i ask students what world war i was about, they have a hard time explaining it. the reasons offered, by world leaders then and by historians after the fact are mud- dled, which is why you might be fruitlessly searching your well-educated brain right now to see what you have filed for “causes of world war i.” imagine living in that time, when an unexplainable war was killing so many of your friends. b.f.a. refers to a bachelor of fine arts, a degree typically requiring studio production and exhibition. for descriptions of dada exhibitions in the s, see e.g. anne umland, “dada in the collection: a permanent paradox” in anne umland & adrian sudhalter with scott gerson, eds, dada in the collection of the museum of modern art (new york: museum of modern art, ) at (describing the dada exhibition that premiered in the unit- ed states at the national gallery); us, national gallery of art, dada, online: national gallery of art <www.nga.gov/content/ngaweb/exhibitions/ /dada.html> (describing the dada exhibition); leah dickerman et al, dada: zurich, berlin, hannover, co- logne, new york, paris (washington, dc: national gallery of art, ) (a catalogue of the dada exhibitions). see generally margaret macmillan, the war that ended peace: how europe aban- doned peace for the first world war (london: profile books, ) at xxx–xxxi: the great war was nobody’s fault or everybody’s. ... the search will probably never end and i will myself argue that some powers and their leaders were more culpable than others. austria-hungary’s mad determination to destroy serbia in , germany’s decision to back it to the hilt, russia’s impatience to mobilise, these all seem to me to bear the greatest responsibility for the outbreak of the war. constitutional theory and the aspirational of course, i would be remiss if i did not acknowledge that unexplaina- ble war is, in fact, what life looks like to people in some regions of our world right now. they are holding broken bodies of loved ones killed in conflicts they did not create, and for which no one has offered a good case of necessity. the pain of loss cuts. the pain of loss unexplained is a second wound, and i proclaim here outrage that this is happening as i speak. this outrage was part of the artistic toolkit of the dada crew, and i came to see the original dadaists as among my many teachers. for any- one who thinks a peace orchestra is ridiculous, the retort was given in zurich, before i was born. my task was not to explain, but to refuse false explanation. bb. the tool in your hand a word about tools: making large-scale art requires space, equipment, and help. i had these thing because i was working in a university. i came to see how the university is a functioning model of a collective, communal space for mutual encouragement of art and knowledge. perhaps i already knew this, but i learned it in the body when i had to move something big- ger than myself and i could call out the studio door, and anyone in hear- ing distance would come to my aid because we were all artists, and artists help artists. i used mig welders, table saws, and hydraulic lifts that i could not afford to purchase and maintain on my own, deeply grateful for the investment my community had made in the art department. i amassed a precious collection of second-hand tools that gave me great joy just by sitting, well-honed, in a handmade tool holder, waiting for use. i learned, as the socialist artist william morris tried to tell us years ago, that holding the right tool in your hand to make a pleasing object will complete your soul and bring you back to the defining joy of human life on planet earth. we make things, we create beauty, we always have. tool swiss dada began at the cabaret voltaire in as an artistic anti-art, anti-war movement and literary phenomenon (see generally hans richter, dada: art and anti- art (london: thames and hudson, ) at – ). hans arp, an artist and member of the cabaret voltaire, described his experience as follows: revolted by the butchery of the world war, we in zurich devoted ourselves to the arts. while the guns rumbled in the distance, we sang, painted, made collages and wrote poems with all our might. we were seeking an art based on fundamentals, to cure the madness of the age, and a new or- der of things that would restore the balance between heaven and hell (ibid at ). see william morris, political writings of william morris, edited by al morton (london: lawrence and wishart, ) at – : ( ) : mcgill law journal — revue de droit de mcgill in hand, i was infinitely happy, making art, all day, every day, for the nine months of my sabbatical year. my fellow sculpture bfa students were all women—strong, optimistic women who were not afraid of fire or power tools. what does their choice of maker culture have to do with con- stitutional theory? iiii. art and constitutional theory: who is this constitution for? whoever does not hope for the unhoped-for will not find it. —ernst bloch some people think a constitution is a pact that allows us to live to- gether without killing one another. it keeps us at bay from one another, by creating a state apparatus to mediate our life together in a limited space with limited resources, and then, having created the state, it re- strains the state, keeping it at bay from us. in the logic of modern consti- tutions, we cannot trust each other so we create the state. we cannot trust the state either, so we restrain the state. it is as though we are na- tion of stingy, snarling dogs. thank goodness, we have a sturdy piece of paper keeping us all on a leash. the fiction is that any piece of paper could do that. this is the constitution of negative rights. it says who can do what, and what the state cannot do. it says nothing about what human beings need to flourish, nothing about joy or beauty, nothing about our obliga- tions to one another. it says nothing about our obligations to future gen- these arts, i have said, are part of a great system invented for the expression of a man’s delight in beauty: all peoples and times have used them; they have been the joy of free nations, and the solace of oppressed nations; religion has used and elevated them, has abused and degraded them; they are connected with all history, and are clear teachers of it; and, best of all, they are the sweeteners of human labour, both to the handicraftsman, whose life is spent in working in them, and to people in general who are influenced by the sight of them at every turn of the day’s work: they make our toil happy, our rest fruitful. morris also wrote that: “to give people pleasure in the things they must perforce use, that is one great office of decoration; to give people pleasure in the things they must perforce make, that is the other use of it” (ibid at [emphasis in original]). jack zipes, “introduction: toward a realization of anticipatory illumination” in bloch, supra note , xi at xxv (quoting ernst bloch from his november lecture titled “can hope be disappointed?”). see robin west, progressive constitutionalism: reconstructing the fourteenth amend- ment (durham, nc: duke university press, ). west rejects the negative rights lim- itation: the progressive interpretation rests on a very different moral vision. the ideal constitutional state envisioned by the fourteenth amendment un- constitutional theory and the aspirational erations, except in its beautiful, vague, and promising interstices. for ex- ample, in the united states constitution’s preamble, stating the intent to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. frederick douglass believed that the preamble was ground enough to demand the end of slavery, and i believe it is ground enough to say there is a right to art. to develop this thesis, i return to what, in the art de- partment, they call “process”. the giddy joy of a late night bronze pour with women buried under layers of protective gear, the whoops of delight when the moulds cracked open and a successful casting emerged, taught me something about what human beings need to flourish: shared endeavour, communal space, crea- tive process, and collective triumph. sweat and laughter, the cool night air, and relief after pulling off leather gear made for someone twice our size. bringing the object into the world, a world once without that object now changed by it, is nothing any of us would rather have been doing. anyone who could have that experience would choose it over ... well, you name your poison: consumption of inane popular culture; endless acquisition of high status schlock; exploitation of the labour of others; killing animals for fun; killing people for any reason. der a progressive interpretation also has three overriding characteristics: ( ) the state protects each citizen and all citizens equally against not only the criminality and brutality of each other but also the ravages and dangers of the natural world; ( ) individuals enjoy and states guarantee the “positive liberties” of civic participation, meaningful work, and unthreatened intimacy; and ( ) government quite generally—courts as well as legislatures—acts in concert to ensure to each citizen freedom from and protection against those natural, social, or private conditions that threaten to enslave her (ibid at – ). frederick douglass argued that the constitution, including the preamble and the bill of rights, contained a ringing indictment of slavery. in his speech at rochester, new york on july , titled “the meaning of july fourth for the negro”, douglass noted: “[t]he constitution is a glorious liberty document. read its preamble, consider its pur- poses. is slavery among them? is it at the gateway? or is it in the temple? it is neither” (frederick douglass, frederick douglass: selected speeches and writings, edited by philip s foner (chicago: lawrence hill books, ) at ). see also mari j matsuda, “looking to the bottom: critical legal studies and reparations” ( ) : harv cr- cll rev at [matsuda, “looking to the bottom”]; waldo e martin, jr, the mind of frederick douglass (chapel hill, nc: university of north carolina press, ) at . ( ) : mcgill law journal — revue de droit de mcgill the secret kernel of true joy that is known to makers in non- exploitive, communal settings is the world’s best-kept secret, and the elix- ir that could turn all of us into celebratory, productive pacifists. or so i posit, in my demand for a constitutional right to a creative commons. for those who need a semblance of a syllogism, it goes like this: . the constitution establishes a democracy intended to promote the well-being of all citizens through a form of government requiring the effective participation of all citizens. . citizen well-being and effective citizen participation requires max- imizing the talents and abilities of all citizen contributors. . the consumption and production of art are significant factors in citizen well-being and in developing the means of effective partici- pation in self-governance. . the constitution, therefore, requires art. in talking to students about a right to participate in artistic produc- tion, it is common that they confess to me that they actually have a signif- icant creative practice somewhere in their past. they quickly add, “but i’m not good.” a research assistant told me she had studied opera singing, “but i’m not good”, she replied. “who decides who is good?” i raged, “you can sing arias, you must sing better than i, does that mean i should stop singing?” some imposed, meri- tocratic ideal decrees that those who are “good” should sing, and the rest of us should pay to watch them, and go to law school. “but i am really not good.” why not have both, a system of recognition for the rare and stunning talent, and a way for the less-talented to participate also? why not a cen- tre for choral singing in every neighbourhood, with free lessons for those who want to improve? as my utopian exegesis grew more heated, another unsuspecting student stopped by the office. “liz,” i said, “didn’t you once tell me you play the piano?” my research assistant, her eyes growing bigger, tried to warn liz not to say what liz said next: “oh, i play, but i’m not good.” indeed, after delivering this address at mcgill university, many in the audience came up to reveal their own second life as an artist or musician. constitutional theory and the aspirational “not good,” i mock shouted, “who told you you’re not good? why is ‘good’ the criterion by which we decide whether you can share your talent with us?” by the time this conversation ended, i had convinced both law students that we should have a centre for performing and creative arts in every neighbourhood, with tools, supplies, teachers, and both amateur and expert performances and exhibitions. we brainstormed add-ons—a sewing room, a tool library, a system to drop off children or elders to do art with safe supervision, allowing caregivers a respite. theatrical pro- ductions, a costume shop. a concert series with picnic dinner provided for harried working families. this centre would improve mental health, community relations, public safety, educational attainment, and family well-being. it would cost, i pointed out—as students are always too quick to point out to me—“but look at what it would save,” they pushed back, if it really did reduce things like crime and domestic violence. this colloquy with students echoes years of classroom teaching in which i ask students to consider utopian possibilities, and they respond with small dreams and lots of reasons why the rest of the world will tell us we cannot have bigger dreams. with push and shove, i have watched dreams grow in dimension. the sweet and small dreams of my students stay with me over the years: “mandatory two-sided copying”; “giving teachers affordable housing in the neighborhoods where they teach”; “healing gardens next to public buildings”; “chicken tractors”; “a mental health centre at the law school”; and “more bike paths.” students, at least until recently, were much less likely to come up with sweeping utopian demands like “guaranteed minimum income”; “free, quality childcare on demand”; or “no prisons”. one legacy of the cold war and mccarthyism, at least in us universities, is that students are reluctant to make any demand that sounds like socialism. not so much for fear of political persecution, but for fear of intellectual derision. from the right will come scolding reminders of statism, gulags, moral hazard, and wasteful social programs; and from the denatured left, a sense that clear-eyed demands for redistribution lack nuance, complexity, and consideration of all the theoretical and empirical objections that stu- dents, of course, do not have at their disposal. the reason students do not have the intellectual tools at their disposal is that since the purge of the marxists from the academy, any discussion of alternative conceptions of property and work, and the challenges of the actual implementation of so- cialism, are not discussed. as a result, my students can recite all of the reasons why we should not forgive student loans, but have a hard time ar- ticulating a demand for free, quality education as a lifelong right. in teaching organizing for social change, i have found that most law students have a poorly developed utopian-visioning muscle. this class us- ( ) : mcgill law journal — revue de droit de mcgill es project-based learning to introduce the toolkit of social transformation. students take on an actual issue in their community, and organize others to join them. at every step in organizing, from choosing an issue to devel- oping a time-line and tactics, students are asked to consider the question of where, ultimately, they want us to go. i ask students to describe in specific terms the world they would like for themselves and future generations. i have found that my students, who can list easily and with conviction everything that they think is wrong and lacking in the world, hesitate when it comes to asking for con- crete change. they are particularly hesitant about change that will re- quire upending the apple cart called “the way things are,” an apple cart they have already told me is broken and decaying under the weight of rot- ting fruit. in class, we interrogate this hesitancy. why, if the problem is houselessness, don’t we build more housing and give people the social ser- vices they need to come in from the cold? and while we are at it, what would quality affordable housing look like? what amenities? what de- sign? with a little prodding, students realize that they know what kind of house they want to live in. the great marxist theorist, edward thompson, called this “the educa- tion of desire.” thompson rehabilitated the work of william morris, see- ing morris’s romantic vision as something more than sentimental victori- an dreaming. envisioning a world so much more humane and delightful than the one we currently inhabit is theory, is criticism, is politics. it is strategic. standard strategy-making requires a vision of where we want to go, in order to select interim goals. if students cannot articulate a vision, they have no means of evaluating whether their current strategy and tactics help them get there. a utopian end-goal is a pre-condition of strategic so- cial change formation. edward thompson, “romanticism, moralism and utopianism: the case of william morris” ( ) new left rev at [thompson, “utopianism & william morris”] [emphasis omitted]. see kim bobo, jackie kendall & steve max, organizing for social change: midwest academy manual for activists, th ed (santa ana, cal: forum press, ) at (on the consistency of values and vision: “the issues we choose to work on must reflect our val- ues and our vision. yes we do want money for more police, but is an endlessly increas- ing number of police and prisons the direction in which we want our society to go, or might education, housing and jobs be better investments?”). see also ibid at (on set- ting long-term goals: “it is important to set a goal that will get you to what you want to achieve, not set goals and strategies based on what you think can be accomplished ac- cording to insider assessments or conventional wisdom or past history. if you don’t know where you want to go, you will never get there”). constitutional theory and the aspirational my demand for utopian vision, however, is not just strategic, it is the historical imperative of this particular moment. iiv. the imperative of big change call it the elemental earth bursting the clasp of too-long winter. —pauli murray the ascendancy of ideologies of austerity, tax cuts for the rich, free markets, slashing social services, defunding public education, parsimoni- ous versions of liberalism, trickle-down economics, deregulation, union- busting, and mocking of the poor began the year i graduated from law school and ronald reagan was elected president of the united states. this radical experiment resulted in an extraordinary transfer of wealth to the rich, and a growing chasm between the very richest and the rest of us. it has completely captured our political system, such that money and politics are inseparable, and it has reduced public discourse to name- calling, gossip, and science denial. in the meantime, the scientists tell us, it is too late to stop devastating climate events and coming food scarcity. the best we can hope for now is to have some plan of amelioration in place. you may have noticed, there is no plan. “without name” in arna bontemps, ed, american negro poetry, revised ed (new york: hill & wang, ) at . see generally joseph e stiglitz, the price of inequality (new york: ww norton, ) (discussing the growth of the wealth gap). the leading source of statistical and scientific evidence of the effects of climate change was formerly the databases maintained by the government of the united states. since january , the sources have been removed and made unavailable to the public as part of the trump administration’s assault on science (see chris mooney & juliet eilperin, “epa website removes climate science site from public view after two decades”, the washington post ( april ), online: <www.washingtonpost.com>). the next two lines in this footnote are left intentionally blank by the author to repre- sent the scientific data that is no longer available to readers. see coral davenport, “with trump in charge, climate change references purged from website”, the new york times ( january ), online: <https:// www.nytimes.com> (“[w]ithin moments of the inauguration of president trump, the of- ficial white house website on friday deleted nearly all mentions of climate change”); us, national centers for environmental information, “global climate change indica- tors” ( april ), national oceanic and atmospheric administration, online: global climate change indicators <https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/monitoring-references/faq/ indicators.php> (analyzing data and statistics showing a “clear long-term global warm- ing trend”). see also naomi klein, this changes everything: capitalism vs. the cli- mate (new york: simon & schuster, ) at – (discussing climate change, re- ( ) : mcgill law journal — revue de droit de mcgill without radical, world-changing plans, you will wake up one day and turn the spigot in the bathroom sink. it will sputter and spurt, and then stop still. or you will go to the grocery store and find a long line outside, moving slowly, as people strip the shelves and pay—cash only—for the last available food in your city. i am not a writer of dystopian fiction, i am simply a world citizen hoping to survive in the coming season of scarcity and climate disruption. if enough of us keep talking about this emergen- cy, perhaps we will come to see how real it is, and do something about it. that required “something” is large and visionary. right now, there are big fights in my country about the regulation of coal, about whether to make coal less harmful. as many of you in canada know, we are well past the hour of regulating fossil fuels to make them less harmful. we have to leave them in the ground, or else we, in effect, offer our grandchil- dren’s bodies up as collateral against our continued extraction. sistance movements, and the barriers to taking on the climate crisis). naomi klein stresses that climate change is not a future problem: “and it’s too late to stop climate change from coming; it is already here, and increasingly brutal disasters are headed our way no matter what we do” (ibid at ). she suggests, however, that we can change the path we are on: put another way, only mass social movements can save us now. because we know where the current system, left unchecked, is headed. we also know, i would add, how that system will deal with the reality of serial climate- related disasters: with profiteering, and escalating barbarism to segregate the losers from the winners. to arrive at that dystopia, all we need to do is keep barreling down the road we are on. the only remaining variable is whether some countervailing power will emerge to block the road, and simul- taneously clear some alternate pathways to destinations that are safer. if that happens, well, it changes everything (ibid at ). klein sees the hesitance of politicians to challenge free-market orthodoxy as a concern: there is just enough time, and we are swamped with green tech and green plans. and yet … we are afraid—with good reason—that our political class is wholly incapable of seizing those tools and implementing those plans, since doing so involves unlearning the core tenets of the stifling free-market ideol- ogy that governed every stage of their rise to power (ibid at – ). see e.g. hiroko tabuchi, “republicans move to block rule on coal mining near streams”, the new york times ( february ), online: <www.nytimes.com> (dis- cussing the republican vote to repeal obama-era environmental regulations, including the stream protection rule, which sought to protect waterways from coal mining debris generated by surface mining); jeff turrentine, “coal is literally killing us”, onearth ( june ), online: <www.nrdc.org/onearth> (discussing the public health benefits of phasing out of coal-fired power plants and switching over to clean energy). see e.g. juliana v united states, elr (d or ), us dist lexis (ql) (d or) (a class action against the united states government for failure to protect future generations from the harm of global warming brought by a group of plaintiffs largely consisting of children). constitutional theory and the aspirational for the first time in my career as a law teacher, i feel not only the pedagogical need, but the moral imperative to push utopian visions, hard. the whole system of greed-driven decision-making passing as constitu- tional interpretation has to come down, now, or we will die. vv. the utopian constitution ... there are no magics or elves or timely godmothers to guide us. we are lost, must wizard a track through our own screaming weed. —gwendolyn brooks a constitution is something we do. a constitution can be seen as activity—as political struggle. —charles r lawrence iii utopian method, for purposes of constitutional theory, means that we reach for a better interpretation, describe it, and send it into the world to meet its fate in the democratic melee. the peace orchestra’s manifesto at- tempts to state a set of aspirations once thought beyond the reach of the law. what would a constitution that took human needs seriously look like? to begin it would retain the protection of the individual and constraint of state power necessary to keep the democratic conversation lively and literally alive. there is scarcely a nation on this planet without its version of mccarthyism. i preface this analysis of utopian visioning in constitutional theory with the premise that the basic norms of democracy and the rule of law are required scaffolding. they are needed no matter what social or politi- cal structures evolve around us. i see no justification, ever, for gulags. traditional interpretation of the united states constitution focuses on restraint of the state, seeing no need to journey forward to what robin west calls progressive constitutionalism, one charged with upholding and promoting citizen well-being. what people obviously need, is not obvious- selected poems (new york: harper & row, ) at . “promises to keep: we are the constitution’s framers” ( ) : how lj at [lawrence, “promises”]. see west, supra note at – . west notes that, [f]or some progressives, the meaning of the good and hence the content of the good life that should be the goal of state action should be understood by reference to a set of ideals that derive from the experiences and aspirations of the relatively disempowered. these progressives, whom i call idealistic pro- gressives, identify the content of their progressive politics—the meaning of ( ) : mcgill law journal — revue de droit de mcgill ly relevant to traditional constitutional interpretation. for classical marx- ist observers, this interpretation is obviously what capitalism generates, and utopian complaints are pointless. thus, while i begin by elevating rights that frederick engels saw as temporary expediencies of the transition out of feudalism, i do follow him beyond those rights. engels, in his deep dive into utopian thought, began with a different premise. for engels, the rule of law developed under cap- italism was superstructural. it was a predictable and hard-won progres- sion designed to bring order to the anarchy of unrestrained markets on the one hand, and unjustly entitled nobility on the other. the regime of law developed in one particular time might not work in another, he be- lieved, as history and all the ways in which humans organize themselves are a process, understood through scientific observation. perhaps i am a product of the twentieth century, well aware of my own country’s all-too-frequent departures from basic human rights—the palmer raids, cointelpro, guantánamo —and thus hyper- the “good life” that citizens must have the right to pursue and that the state has an obligation to encourage—by reference to a particular utopian vision of social life which is, in turn, grounded in those experiences: a world in which each individual enjoys some degree of meaningful individual autonomy, some degree of life-fulfilling rather than life-threatening connection to others and freedom from fear of oppression, want, violence, or subordination (ibid at [emphasis in original, footnote omitted]). see frederick engels, socialism: utopian and scientific, translated by edward aveling (new york: international publishers, ) at : we know today that this kingdom of reason was nothing more than the idealised kingdom of the bourgeoisie; that this eternal right found its realisa- tion in bourgeois justice; that this equality reduced itself to bourgeois equali- ty before the law; that bourgeois property was proclaimed as one of the es- sential rights of man; and that the government of reason, the contrat social of rousseau, came into being, and only could come into being, as a democratic bourgeois republic. the great thinkers of the eighteenth century could, no more than their predecessors, go beyond the limits imposed upon them by their epoch. see ibid at , where engels’s summary of law under the contradictions of rising capi- talism reads: “growing predominance and increasing effectiveness of the laws govern- ing the production of commodities. unbridled competition. contradiction between social- ized organisation in the individual factory and social anarchy in production as a whole” [emphasis in the original]. for a description of the scale and swiftness of the raids, see sonia kaross, “the palmer raids: the deportation mania begins” in bud schultz & ruth schultz, eds, it did happen here: recollections of political repression in america (berkeley: university of california press, ) (“[i]n an operation directed by hoover and palmer, upwards of ten thousand persons in thirty cities were seized—most without warrants—in one simultaneous action. citizens and aliens alike were caught in the massive roundup that hit meeting places, pool halls, bowling alleys, and cafés” at ). constitutional theory and the aspirational attached to the rule of law. read enough about the twentieth century, and feel the desperate absence of legality, fear the coming of bodysnatchers. watching a scene, in the film neruda, of union organizers herded into holding pens in the chilean desert, i know i never want to live in a land without habeas corpus. that, however, is the minimum. it is the platform from which we can ask questions about thriving, meaning, and the good. before reading what engels actually said about utopians, i assumed he was disdainful. dreamers, after all, are not scientists, and to marx for a description of the massive s fbi program, see david cole & james x demp- sey, terrorism and the constitution: sacrificing civil liberties in the name of national security, rd ed (new york: new press, ) at [footnotes omitted]: cointelpro, a set of secret investigations and disruptive actions against political activism across a wide ranges of issues. a special senate committee ... found that the fbi had conducted a wide-ranging campaign of monitoring and disrupting political groups that were not engaged in any illegal conduct. at the peak of its efforts, the fbi was investigating all major protest move- ments, from civil rights activists to vietnam war protesters to women’s liber- ation advocates. standard fbi methodology included bugging of homes and offices, wiretapping, break-ins, and informants. see also bud schultz & ruth schultz, “a final word” in schultz & schultz, supra note , at – . for a description of guantánamo as legal limbo, see cole & dempsey, supra note at – : for much of the world, guantánamo bay has become a symbol of the bush administration’s dismissive attitude toward the rule of law. the admin- istration chose to hold prisoners at guantánamo precisely to avoid the limits of law. the administration claimed that it could warehouse there any person it labeled an “enemy combatant,” or as president bush put it, “a bad guy.” it maintained that it could hold them until the war on terrorism ends. see also anthony d romero & dina temple-raston, in defense of our america: the fight for civil liberties in the age of terror (new york: william morrow, ) (“[h]oping to create a legal black hole where neither international law ... nor domestic law ... would apply, the american government picked guantánamo as the site of its prison camp for the ‘war on terror.’ ... the purpose was not to give terrorism suspects a fair trial, but rather to set up a process to convict them” at – ). see neruda, directed by pablo larraín ( ). marx and engels are associated with criticism of utopians in part because of the actual political choices on the table when they wrote, which included fomenting proletarian uprisings or withdrawing to bucolic communes. this may explain the somewhat overly- determined view of engels the anti-utopian. on the view of later marxists as anti- utopian, see barbara taylor, eve and the new jerusalem: socialism and feminism in the nineteenth century (cambridge, mass: harvard university press, ) at xvi, cit- ing thompson, “utopianism & william morris”, supra note at : the whole problem of the subordination of the imaginative utopian faculties within the later marxist tradition: its lack of a moral self-consciousness or even a vocabulary of desire, its inability to project any images of the future or ( ) : mcgill law journal — revue de droit de mcgill and engels, scientific analysis was all-critical. while engels does note the pre-scientific status of early socialist dreamers, he does not disparage them. he situates them in a history of displacement—first of peasants, then of workers—that generated moments of realization and coming to terms with human misery. a natural response to misery was the human capacity to imagine a way out: not yet scientific, not fully realizing the shape of the forces compelling concentration of wealth and throwing lives of ordinary folk into chaos, but suggesting the outlines of an alternative. from sir thomas more, to st. simon, to the owenites, to the com- munards, to the chartists, to the artist-dreamers like william morris, even its tendency to fall back in lieu of these upon the utilitarian’s earthly paradise—the maximization of economic growth. see engels, supra note at . engels, in fact, made fun of theorists who took the easy path of trashing utopians, stating that: we can leave it to the literary small fry to solemnly quibble over these phan- tasies, which today only make us smile, and to crow over the superiority of their own bald reasoning, as compared with such ‘insanity.’ for ourselves, we delight in the stupendously grand thoughts and germs of thought that eve- rywhere break out through their phantastic covering, and to which these philistines are blind (ibid). see ibid at – . discussing the human misery that accompanied the transition to wage labor and the utopians’ attempted response, engels states: the capitalistic mode of production ... is never able to get out of that “vi- cious circle,” which fourier had already discovered. what fourier could not, indeed, see in his time is: that this circle is gradually narrowing; that the movement becomes more and more a spiral, and must come to an end, like the movement of the planets, by collision with the centre (ibid at ). see ibid at : “the solution of the social problems, which as yet lay hidden in undevel- oped economic conditions, the utopians attempted to evolve out of the human brain. so- ciety presented nothing but wrongs; to remove these was the task of reason.” see vincent geoghegan, utopianism and marxism (london: methuen, ) at (“thomas more’s utopia ( ), with its pun ‘utopia’ (‘no-place’) ‘eutopia’ (‘good-place’), created the word for, and most celebrated example of, an alternative society”). see ibid at – (discussing henri saint-simon and his visions of an alternative society, noting that “saint-simon sensitively registered the social tendencies of his time; his work both harmonizes the interests of the proletariat and bourgeoisie and lays bare the tensions of early industrial capitalism” at – ). see ibid at – (discussing utopian socialist robert owen’s strategy of establishing alternative communities or “villages of co-operation” to “co-exist with older structures until the manifest advantages of the co-operative system caused the old to disappear naturally” at ). see also taylor, supra note at – (discussing women in owenite communities); robert owen, “manifesto, ” in timothy patrick mccarthy & john mcmillian, eds, the radical reader: a documentary history of the american radical tradition (new york: new press, ) . see kristin ross, communal luxury: the political imaginary of the paris commune (london: verso, ) at (describing generally the vision of the paris commune). constitutional theory and the aspirational those impatient with contemporary injustice dared to offer up specifics of what life could look like under different arrangements. while marx added a grand political economic analysis of alienation and surplus value, morris understood through his own hand what it felt like to produce and use the beautiful tray that held your home-baked daily bread. he wanted workers to grow their own food and own their own tools for dignified work, because he had watched too many hungry children going off to toil in sooty facto- ries. he was not a scientific marxist, but he was, in his way, a material- ist. his dreams came out of what he saw. engels does not disparage these thinkers, he simply adds what, in his view, they left out. he acknowledges them as forerunners of scientific so- for an appreciative historical explanation of the chartists, see generally stephen rob- erts, ed, the dignity of chartism: essays by dorothy thompson (london: verso, ); dorothy thompson, the chartists: popular politics in the industrial revolution, (new york: pantheon books, ). the definitive biography of morris as a utopian thinker is ep thompson, william mor- ris: romantic to revolutionary (london: lawrence & wishart, ). see also morris, supra note . morris envisioned a world without class division or private property, with work shared and ennobled, with art and nature celebrated at every turn, and no bad design. in morris’s vision: “wealth is what nature gives us and what a reasonable man can make out of the gifts of nature for his reasonable use. the sunlight, the fresh air, the unspoiled face of the earth, food, raiment and housing necessary and decent; the storing up of knowledge of all kinds, and the power of disseminating it” (ibid at ). morris described a system under which the unpleasant—say sewage maintenance— tasks were valorized, shared, and short. each abled person would contribute a share, proudly, and then go on to more pleasant endeavors. education, instead of “fitting peo- ple to take their places in the hierarchy of commerce” would help each person find work they were good at and enjoyed (ibid at ). morris also described a world liberated by art: then having leisure from all these things, amidst renewed simplicity of life we shall have leisure to think about our work, that faithful daily companion, which no man any longer will venture to call the curse of labour: for surely then we shall be happy in it, each in his place, no man grudging at another; no one bidden to be any man’s servant, every one scorning to be any man’s master: men will then assuredly be happy in their work, and that happiness will assuredly bring forth decorative, noble, popular art. that art will make our streets as beautiful as the woods, as elevating as the mountain-sides: it will be a pleasure and a rest, and not a weight upon the spirits to come from the open country into a town; every man’s house will be fair and decent, soothing to his mind and helpful to his work: all the works of man that we live amongst and handle will be in harmony with nature, will be reasonable and beautiful: yet all will be simple and inspiriting, not child- ish nor enervating; for as nothing of beauty and splendour that man’s mind and hand may compass shall be wanting from our public buildings, so in no private dwelling will there be any signs of waste, pomp or insolence, and eve- ry man will have his share of the best (ibid at – [emphasis in original]). see ibid at ff. ( ) : mcgill law journal — revue de droit de mcgill cialism. he cites them as examples of the immanent revolutionary poten- tial residing in our actual lived experience under the unstable and contra- dictory structures of inequality. similarly, the great organizer and marxist theorist mother bloor, from the united states, is commonly thought of as one who disparaged utopi- ans. her great break with eugene debs came from her belief that his at- tempt to fund and build actual utopian colonies was a waste of resources and a diversion from the task of organizing workers. in her autobiog- raphy, she speaks of debs with deep respect and affection, although she says of his colony plan: “i simply could not stay with anything so unscien- tific.” marx, engels, and mother bloor pushed science, which for them meant a scientific socialist knowledge of history, dialectical materialism, and the conditions necessary for progress. they railed against religion, idealist philosophers, and any theorizing that happened without empirical knowledge of history and political economy: how did we get here, what are the forces at play, where is the power, where is the contradiction? they never said “have no dreams.” this lecture suggests that utopian visions have value to constitutional interpretation. by deploying utopian visioning as both theoretical method and practice of politics, i draw on the long tradition engels cites, as well as engels himself, who dreamt of workers controlling the factories, with the transition to worker control being the first and last job of the state under socialism, before the sunset of the state. in lieu of defining the ul- timate “utopian vision”, this lecture suggests simply that we ought to begin a conversation about one, or many, such visions. we should dare to deploy what thompson called the “vocabulary of desire” to conceive of see engels, supra note at – . engels admired, for example, owen’s courage in risking “his whole social position” in challenging capitalism, noting that: “every social movement, every real advance in england on behalf of the workers links itself on to the name of robert owen.” yet, engels saw inevitable limitations to owen’s ideal—as op- posed to scientific—approach, which inevitably provided an “eclectic, average social- ism”. see ella reeve bloor, we are many (new york: international publishers, ) (“[f]rom the outset i told the members of my group that this [utopian] colonization scheme was unsound, not real socialism at all” at ). see ibid (“i felt it was unfair to collect money for something that did not yet exist. peo- ple were already selling out businesses to join the colony”). ibid at . bloor describes debs’ brilliance, militance, and magnetism in the following words: “he was sure and happy and full of life. debs had wonderful personal mag- netism. in speaking he used powerful similes and illustrations. he spoke like an evan- gelist, using his whole body to drive his points home, leaning far over the platform, and stretching out his long lean arm toward his audience” (ibid at ). constitutional theory and the aspirational something lovely that would make our lives better. we should send that conception out into the democratic conversation for responses of affinity and criticism. in making an orchestra, i attempted to create a little piece of the world i want to live in, in which people make art and music and performance together and share their aspirations. touch this instrument made out of discards. i believe it is worth giving life to, to make us rethink our relationship to the waste stream, and to one another. what do you be- lieve, when you touch it? does this sound ridiculous—either the music or the intended utopian claim? suggesting this conversation also points out its general absence from our usual political discourse. i made an orches- tra, and discovered it had an audience of many, ready to consider the uto- pian. without big ideas of what the world could look like—for example, if art were a right—we risk asking for too little. this is particularly true in times of retrenchment. when protestors are in the streets over muslim bans in my country, when children are growing up without homes, when rape culture means that no woman feels free to wander the streets and parks of her city at night enjoying the moonlight, we are living in a siege state. our first job, the one that had lawyers rushing to courtrooms on a saturday to file those habeas corpus petitions, is resisting immediate harm. when immigration and customs enforcement raids are rounding see thompson, “utopianism & william morris”, supra note at . in premiering the peace orchestra video at mcgill university, i was delighted to meet faculty and students, such as the women of colour collective of mcgill law, who wel- comed a non-traditional approach to jurisprudence: see e.g. aliah el-houni, “a state of the union: the l edition” ( october ), a legal education (blog), online: <www. alegaleducation.ca/a-state-of-the-union> (a student’s reaction to seeing the peace orchestra presented at mcgill university faculty of law). see also thy anne chu quang, “mari matsuda, in sharing her utopia” ( october ), online: instagram <https://www.instagram.com/p/bltivuya yp/?taken-by=ennayht>. see e.g. peter baker, “travelers stranded and protests swell over trump order”, the new york times ( january ), online: <www.nytimes.com> (“[i]n washington, protesters gathered by the thousands outside mr. trump’s front lawn to denounce his order and show solidarity with muslim americans. ‘shame,’ they chanted, hoisting homemade signs toward the executive mansion, where mr. trump was scheduled to host a private screening of the movie ‘finding dory’”). see charlie savage, “liberal lawyers plan wave of resistance to trump policies”, the new york times ( january ), online: <www.nytimes.com>. the author describes one response to president trump’s executive order issued on january : the effort was primarily drafted by lawyers at the [international refu- gee assistance project] and at the national immigration law center, and by law students at yale’s worker and immigrant rights advocacy clinic over- seen by profs. michael j. wishnie and muneer i. ahmad. then it was argued at an emergency hearing by an american civil liberties union lawyer. ( ) : mcgill law journal — revue de droit de mcgill up parents while their children stand by in terror, it hardly seems the time to suggest the right to music making. stop, take a breath, while i tell you it is perhaps exactly the time. while we do the exigent work, we should also do the other work, the visioning and the theorizing of alternatives. siege happens because change is possible. all over the world, “this can’t be happening” political events are the new normal. engels said to use science, know where you stand in history: [t]he final causes of all social changes ... are to be sought ... in the economics of each particular epoch. the growing perception that ex- isting social institutions are unreasonable and unjust, that reason has become unreason, and right wrong, is only proof that in the modes of production and exchange changes have silently taken place, with which the social order, adapted to earlier economic condi- tions, is no longer in keeping. the changes wrought by technology, globalization, and neoliberalism have rendered the current system unsustainable. we are fighting under emergency conditions because of this instability. this is precisely the moment when a grand vision offers exactly what we need. to ask for too little would lose the moment. first, think big lest you think too small at the historical crossroad. second, know that the utopian imaginary is an organizing tool. utopi- an thinkers have always attracted an audience because they fulfill a hu- man need. like religious prophets, they offer a salve—an opiate, if you will—for existing pain, but also something worth living for: the dream of a see also jonah engel bromwich, “lawyers mobilize at nation’s airports after trump’s order”, the new york times ( january ), online: <www.nytimes.com>. see e.g. matthew rozsa, “brain tumor patient removed from hospital, detained by immigration and customs enforcement”, salon ( february ), online: <www. salon.com>. sara, a salvadorean immigrant with a brain tumour, was taken from hos- pital to a detention centre. her situation is not extraordinary, however: sara’s experience is part of what’s being described as a growing climate of fear among many undocumented immigrants. undocumented agricultural workers in california have been keeping their children home from school, ac- cording to the new york times. ... this anxiety has been caused not only by president donald trump’s election in november, but by reports that the department of homeland se- curity is developing a mass deportation plan in the near future. engels, supra note at [emphasis in original]. constitutional theory and the aspirational better life. the best organizers i know understand that people need more than bread, they need roses too. they need dignity. the workers who were willing to die for a dream, from the paris commune to the hunger march protesters in detroit, were not risking their lives for a see e.g. ai-jen poo with ariane conrad, the age of dignity: preparing for the elder boom in a changing america (new york: new press, ) (writing on the movement to bring quality of life and dignity to the lives of both caregivers and those they care for). see ardis cameron, “bread and roses revisited: women’s culture and working-class activism in the lawrence strike of ” in ruth milkman, ed, women, work and pro- test: a century of us women’s labor history (boston: routledge & kegan paul, ) at : the strike of immigrant textile-workers in lawrence, massachu- setts, has generally been viewed by feminist labor historians as illustrative of the vast potential for female workers’ militancy ... the industrial workers of the world ... put forward demands which reached far beyond the narrow, economic orientation of the craft unions. it was a strike, as james oppen- heim’s famous song put it, for ‘bread and roses. see also ardis cameron, radicals of the worst sort: laboring women in lawrence, massachusetts, - (urbana: university of illinois press, ) (“[c]alling for a ‘fair days wages for a fair days work,’ female strikers also asserted their right to clean water, proper health care, decent housing, schools, even time ‘which belonged to us’” at ). my favorite film on the role of the quest for dignity in class struggle is salt of the earth, directed by herbert j biberman ( ). see ross, supra note (“[b]ecause the commune struck at the very heart of the state, social and economic system, the european middle class rallied against the insurrection in a movement resembling a religious ... massacre that occurred in the heart of ‘civi- lized’ europe: the mass shootings of tens of thousands of communards in may ” at ). william morris saw the legacy of the communards as a lasting vision of hope: see morris, supra note at : [w]e feel as though the paris workman had striven to being the day-dawn for us, and had lifted us the sun’s rim over the horizon, never to set in utter darkness again: of such attempts one must say, that though those who per- ished in them might have been put in a better place in the battle, yet after all brave men never die for nothing, when they die for principle. see fatimah hameed, “unemployed detroit auto workers conduct hunger march to protest ford motor company’s policies, united states, ”, global nonviolent action database ( march ), online: <nvdatabase.swarthmore.edu/>: after the stock market crash of , around percent of the industry was no longer producing and by large numbers of detroit’s citizens were dy- ing of starvation. the ford motor company, one of the richest employers, had laid off two-thirds of its employees. the unemployed councils, united auto workers, and communist union-organizing groups decided to organize a march against the ford motor company and its employment policies. ... ... the dearborn police launched tear gas against the marchers, some of whom began throwing stones and dirt clods at the police in response. ... the ( ) : mcgill law journal — revue de droit de mcgill simple pay raise, although they needed one. they were risking their lives for their human dignity and the love and community they found in their cause. bread was the spark, dreams were the fuel. an inspiring example of this comes from the new generation of social change makers, such as black lives matter, who have added self-care and mutual care to their practice. attention to mental and physical health, care in how we resolve conflicts within our movements, incorporation of art, healing, music, dancing, and joy in all we do, allows us to remain strong as we struggle. more importantly, it is the work of living the future we want as we make it, showing ourselves and everyone watching that we are making something worth fighting for. third, utopian long-term goals are strategic guides in developing short-term goals. determining what constitutional core we will bring, or what social norm we will inscribe, or how we will divide chores at the art commune, all happen best if immediate responses are tied to long-term goals, visions, and values. the shape of our first step on the path is de- termined by where the path is going. if we want a world without gulags, we might want to begin socializing ourselves for empathy, kindness, and non-violence now, as we do our organizing. finally, for lawyers, utopia is an interpretive tool. originalism aside, our task as constitutionalists is to see to it that our foundational, constitu- tive legal documents promote our collective well-being. if the rule of law, legalism, and rights are worth preserving, the question we have to an- swer, again and again in each era, is “why?” why preserve a polity and its rules? the answer comes from the quality of our lives, both present and future. the constitution lives on because it helps us to thrive together in peace. in the hardest times, as in the great depression, we expected the gov- ernment to ameliorate economic disruption and help people get what they needed to thrive. the populist artist norman rockwell captured this shared sense of need in his four freedoms series, which depicted ordi- nary americans enjoying their constitutional rights in tangibly familiar settings: the thanksgiving table, the town hall meeting. the four free- police and ford security began to shoot at the crowds of marchers, killing four marchers and injuring over sixty more. see stuart murray & james mccabe, norman rockwell’s four freedoms: images that inspire a nation (stockbridge, mass: berkshire house, ) at ix–x: as the second world war raged in , norman rockwell painted four im- ages that were to become enduring national symbols. his inspiration was president franklin delano roosevelt’s address to congress which set out the four fundamental freedoms enunciated by the allied powers on behalf constitutional theory and the aspirational doms made no distinction between substantive rights to food and proce- dural rights to political participation. rockwell understood that we are all interpreters of our constitution, and that in our lives and practices, we give life to notions like “free speech”. david cole has argued that citizen participation in constitution making is, essentially, the constitutional history in the united states. of people everywhere. eventually, in the minds of many, rockwell’s images became interchangeable with roosevelt’s concepts. ... ... the freedoms remain no less compelling or relevant today. ... ... both [president roosevelt and norman rockwell] rose above propaganda or appeals to a nationalism fueled by hatred and sought, instead, to define values which would unite citizens and could bind nations to each other. murray and mccabe provide samples of letters addressed to rockwell, pointing out that “americans might be vague on the politics of the war, but they clearly understood and appreciated rockwell’s four freedoms, and they wrote about it to him” (ibid at – ). one such letter reads: you paid much attention to detail in drawing that wrinkled gray jacket (in “speech”). being a new englander myself, i can appreciate that touch. it represents to me a part of america, as definite a part as the town meeting. nowhere is there a type of government as democratic as the town meeting, where all rules, laws and restrictions can be argued and thrashed out by those who will be immediately affected by them. i am indeed thankful that i am able to help defend that right. richard morrison u.s. army air corps maxwell field, alabama (ibid at ). see also katharine g young, “freedom, want, and economic and social rights: frame and law” ( ) : md j intl l at – (“[t]he interpretation of ‘freedom from want’ by popular artist norman rockwell provides a sense of completion to the aspira- tion that guides economic and social rights” at ). young discusses how “freedom from want,” a part of the “four freedoms” series, became a reflection of president roo- sevelt’s “central justification for his proposed ‘second bill of rights,’ which would recog- nize the right to a job, to trade, to a family home” (ibid at ). she also argues that norman rockwell’s depiction of “freedom from want” does not, in contemporary times, deliver “the inclusion that it promises. ... in celebrating the material comforts brought about by this freedom, it takes for granted a now caricatured celebration of patriarchy, consumerism, and cultural uniformity” (ibid at ). see david cole, engines of liberty: the power of citizen activists to make constitution- al law (new york: basic books, ) (“[t]he argument of this book is that civil society groups play an equally important part in shaping constitutional law. at their best, they are the catalysts of constitutional change—the engines of liberty” at ). more specifical- ly, cole argues: “lawyers, judges, and legal scholars often speak of the ‘living constitu- tion’ to underscore that constitutional law is not static, but a work in progress. but the constitution is ‘living’ in another sense, too. the constitution lives in each of us—and in the groups we create to safeguard and advance what we view as important constitu- tional values” (ibid at – ). ( ) : mcgill law journal — revue de droit de mcgill charles lawrence makes a similar argument in “promises to keep: we are the constitution’s framers.” the constitution of the united states was not originally written for all the people. built right into it are the contradictions of slavery and native displacement. the carnage of chattel slavery, ending in the carnage of the civil war, was the price paid for that contradiction. the amendments bringing equality to the constitution were the result. equality was fought for, in blood, and not just once, and it is not yet over. a fight continues to finally make explicit that equality really means equality, for everyone. in the united states, that is our particular challenge. the richest and most powerful nation to emerge from the twentieth century is the product of slavery and genocide, and efforts to inscribe equality without acknowl- edging this history have meant continued and deepening inequality. see lawrence, supra note (“[i]f the constitution has any unfulfilled promises they are those which we and others like us, who have gone before, have made to ourselves. it is we who must fight to give the due process and equal protection clauses a meaning that reflects our values” at ). see also charles r lawrence iii, “forbidden conversa- tions: on race, privacy, and community (a continuing conversation with john ely on racism and democracy)” ( ) : yale lj at – (arguing that citizens, not judges, are ultimately “the constitution’s framers”). see derrick bell, race, racism and american law, th ed (gaithersburg: aspen law & business, ) at (“[t]he recognition, maintenance, and protection of slavery were the essential quid pro quo for the establishment of the world’s first constitutional gov- ernment committed to the protection of basic rights of liberty. as historian david brion davis put it, ‘americans bought their independence with slave labor’”). see e.g. us const art i, § , cl (“representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons”); us const art i, § , cl (“to regulate com- merce with foreign nations, and among the several states, and with the indian tribes”). the commerce clause, in giving congress the power to negotiate with indian tribes, acknowledges the sovereignty and existence of the original inhabitants of the united states territory (see ibid). american expansionism has thus existed in uneasy tension with the acknowledgement of native sovereignty since the birth of the united states as a nation (see us const art i, § , cl : “the migration or importation of such persons as any of the states now existing shall think proper to admit, shall not be pro- hibited by the congress prior to the year one thousand eight hundred and eight, but a tax or duty may be imposed on such importation, not exceeding ten dollars for each person”). see also derrick bell, silent covenants: brown v. board of education and the unfulfilled hopes for racial reform (oxford: oxford university press, ) at (rec- ognizing that the delegates drafting the aforementioned articles of the constitution “hypocritically avoided the word ‘slaves,’ referring instead to ‘persons’ whom the states shall think it proper to import, or ‘persons’ bound to the service of labor”). see lawrence & matsuda, supra note at , where charles lawrence and i note that: [affirmative action] is not an idea cooked up in the abstract. it is an idea born of a struggle—the same struggle that made our parents radicals. but the af- constitutional theory and the aspirational from “forty acres and a mule” to black lives matter, from the iroquois confederation to standing rock, alternative visions of how we could live together in equal dignity in the united states have emanated from outside elite discourse in constitutional interpretation. at every step, out- sider constitutionalists have brought their claims, and exploited contra- dictions, to bring a brighter vision of mutual care to our interpretive work. this work, giving full meaning to equality, happens not just because we fight against our chains, but because we imagine the fullness of a life without chains. that is the utopian project. it is not a substitute for sci- ence, organizing, or law school. it is a practice of using what we know from our lives to bring richer versions of human possibility to the work of constitution-making. firmative action debate, as it is largely presented, focuses on abstract ideas outside of social context ... our work is about context and history and acknowledgement of culture. we are where we are, with the huge bloody problem delicately referred to as “race relations,” because of a history. in the history of the united states, “forty acres and a mule” is shorthand for what was promised and never delivered to the formerly enslaved after the civil war. on the role of black americans in keeping alive the dream of reconstruction, see eric foner, recon- struction: america’s unfinished revolution, - (new york: harper & row, ) at xxiv–xxv: rather than passive victims of the actions of others or simply a “problem” confronting white society, blacks were active agents in the making of recon- struction. during the civil war, their actions helped force the nation down the road to emancipation, and in the aftermath of that conflict, their quest for individual and community autonomy did much to establish reconstruction’s political and economic agenda. although thwarted in their bid for land, blacks seized the opportunity created by the end of slavery to establish as much independence as possible in their working lives, consolidate their fami- lies and communities, and stake a claim to equal citizenship. see black lives matter, online: <blacklivesmatter.com>. for an excellent account of the black lives matter movement in ferguson, missouri from the perspective of actual par- ticipants, see patrisse khan-cullors & asha bandele, when they call you a terrorist: a black lives matter memoir (new york: st. martin’s press, forthcoming in ); whose streets?, directed by sabaah folayan ( ). see donald s lutz, “the iroquois confederation constitution: an analysis” ( ) : publius (“[t]he iroquois confederation was based on an oral ‘text’ that was a true constitution in our meaning of the term today. as a result, the iroquois can lay claim to the first constitutional system in the geographical region that is now the united states of america” at [footnote omitted]). see sierra crane-murdoch, “standing rock: a new moment for native-american rights”, the new yorker ( october ), online: <www.newyorker.com> (describing the struggle to protect the water supply and stop the construction of the dakota access oil pipeline); saul elbein, “these are the defiant ‘water protectors’ of standing rock”, national geographic ( january ), online: <news.nationalgeographic.com>. ( ) : mcgill law journal — revue de droit de mcgill working among artists, i met many who know in their bones that cre- ative participation is essential to human well-being. the evidence of their lives could help us find our way to a right to art. vvi. art as a right what would a right to art look like? the reason i know it is not entire- ly crazy to envision a collective, constitutionally constituted decision to al- ter radically the terms of engagement between capital and art is that it happened, once. the reason i know it is not entirely crazy to envision the state funding neighbourhood art centres producing theatre, dance, fine arts, crafts, at the amateur and professional level, with paid staff, across the land, is that it happened, once. in the united states, it was called the new deal. it responded to the great depression, and it remade constitu- tional interpretation and citizens’ reasonable expectations of mutual aid. since so many of my students do not know the story of the works pro- gress administration (wpa), i will tell part of it here. once, in the unit- ed states, lying, cheating, and unregulated speculation in banking and fi- nance brought down the economy, throwing millions into poverty. in re- sponse, we created new rules regulating capitalists, and we gave workers new rights and economic protections—including social security, unem- ployment insurance, and the right to join a union. we created massive jobs programs to put people to work. in a stroke of genius, it was decided that the solution to unemployment was to give people jobs. the united states, like much of the world, faces a similar crisis today. unfortunately, the lie that direct government employment does not work sets aside a much-needed remedy, leaving us only wobbly solutions like reducing in- terest rates and cutting corporate taxes in the hopes that businesses will stop hoarding their cash and start hiring. see generally jeff hill, the wpa: putting america to work (detroit: omnigraphics, ) (providing an overview of the works progress administration (wpa), the center- piece of the new deal programs put in place by president franklin d roosevelt to com- bat the great depression). on the vast scale of the wpa, see greta berman, the lost years: mural painting in n.y. city under the wpa federal arts project, – (new york: garland publish- ing, ) at : the works progress administration was unprecedented in both size and range. according to notes from a conference on the arts programs of the wpa at the library of congress on october , , eight and one half mil- lion people had worked on the wpa since its inception in . approximate- ly one out of every five able bodied workers had worked on the wpa at some time. constitutional theory and the aspirational part of putting people back to work under the wpa was funding jobs for artists. overnight, artists, musicians, directors, writers, and photogra- phers suddenly had good jobs and a mandate to go out and make art and teach others. some of the best public art we have—including the famous mosaic subway designs in new york city, and beautiful murals and sculptures in schools and parks across the united states —are wpa leg- acies. congress fretted that the wpa was infiltrated by communists. in part, they were right, because most artists and creatives in that period were in some way sympathetic to the idea of socialism. there was no marxist orthodoxy, however, as artists are notoriously hard to corral. in harlem, a debate raged among marxist critics over whether “swing” was an authentic expression of the black experience, deserving promotion, or a commercialized vulgarization that demeaned the proletariat. swing see tess thackara, “what we can learn from the brief period when the government employed artists”, editorial, artsy ( february ), online: <www.artsy.net> (“[a]rtists were employed with specific goals in mind: to help the government communi- cate with the rest of the country, to inspire pride in a nation that had been brought to its heels, and to document the country’s recovery effort. in exchange, each artist re- ceived $ per week (approximately $ per week in today’s dollars)”). see berman, supra note at – (documenting , wpa murals produced be- tween and and , free standing and architectural sculptures); hill, su- pra note (“[a]pproximately , public murals were produced during the life of [the federal art project]” at ). see thackara, supra note : in the s as is the case today, partisan politics resulted in plenty of opposition to the federal art project from republican congressmen such as representative dewey short. short told congress that good art was the product of suffering artists while “subsidized art is no art at all,” as denoon notes in posters of the wpa. further fueling the fire, the leftist inclinations of this period, particularly among those engaged in the wpa and other alpha- bet agencies, led to a belief that the federal art project was a hotbed for communists. see mark naison, communists in harlem during the depression (urbana: university of illinois press, ) at – (“[u]nlike previous communist critics, who saw virtue primarily in protest songs or rural black music undiluted by ‘commercialism,’ these young turks displayed their greatest interest in black musical idioms which were com- mercially successful—swing and hot jazz” at ). naison further notes that: the harlem [communist party] founded an interracial “swing club,” and en- couraged “jitterbugging” at its social affairs (“she could dance like a dream, and she was a communist,” mike gold commented about a black social worker he met at a harlem benefit for the daily worker); the [young com- munist league] sponsored a “swing america” pageant at its conven- tion, and the daily worker began printing regular reviews of jazz albums that were remarkably free of didacticism and extraneous political commen- tary (ibid at ). ( ) : mcgill law journal — revue de droit de mcgill won—because, well, how could it not—and wpa-funded productions fea- tured packed shows of the swingingest rhythms. traditional marxist cultural critics preferred drama that valorized la- bour. one such play, orson welles’s the cradle will rock, was shut down by censors on opening night. the entire cast, crew, and audience marched down the street to an empty theatre, and performed from the seats, the stage being off limits because of union rules that required bond protection for actors before they took the stage. the stage manager called out cues, and actors rose in the audience to recite their lines. those pre- sent remember it as a great act of theatre civil disobedience that only added to the liberatory message of the script. not all of the wpa drama was in new york. in little towns all over the country, debates raged about whether nudes and social themes were appropriate, but everywhere the wpa set up shop, it was met with eager crowds of ordinary people who wanted to see and make art. four million visitors filed into art centres in north carolina. in the tiny town of helper, utah (population , ), the opening exhibition of the art center recorded an attendance of , in the first week, which meant that resi- dents came more than once or visitors rode in from beyond the town lim- its. in addition to art centres for instruction and exhibition, the wpa paid artists simply to make art. these grants led to interesting conflicts be- tween the artist’s lifestyle of inspired all-night studio sessions followed by periods of recovery. to make sure government funds were not “wasted”, artists were required to “check in” at an office every morning at nine, then see ibid at (describing works affiliated with the wpa negro theatre). see hill, supra note at (“[a]gency officials blamed budget cutbacks for the cancel- lation, but many observers believed that the cradle will rock was shut down because of its clear support for unions and its hostile characterization of american corpora- tions”). see hiram (chub) sherman, “the fina and lively arts” in studs terkel, hard times: an oral history of the great depression (new york: pantheon books, ) at – (hiram sherman recalling the staging of the cradle will rock). see ola maie foushee, “north carolina’s community arts centers” in john franklin white, ed, art in action: american art centers and the new deal (metuchen, nj: scare- crow press, ) at . see dan e burke, “the utah state art center”, in white, supra note , at (noting that citizens of price, a small town located near helper, were so impressed with helper’s commitment to the arts they invited the director of the helper art center to speak to their city commission about affordable ways to develop their own art centre). constitutional theory and the aspirational go off to make art, their whereabouts monitored by spot checks. despite the conflicts between bureaucracy and art, some of the most iconic art of this period, like the photographs of dorothea lange, were made on the federal payroll. as a baby boomer growing up in the world the new deal left us, i was offered art, dance, drama, and music instruction free of charge, in school and at neighbourhood recreation centres. i performed on stages that were literally built by workers employed by the wpa, creating a sense of enti- tlement: healthy communities provide access to the arts to all people, re- gardless of age, ability, or wealth. i played persephone before i ever un- derstood that she was part of a canon of the classics. i learned to plié be- fore i knew french was a language. i walked to ballet lessons at the rec- reation centre on queen anne place in los angeles, on my own second grade legs, and i signed up without any parent involved. the new deal made it normal to do this. reaganomics and neoliberalism replaced it with a new norm of slashing public services and moving to privatization. if my post-reagan children were to have dance, or music, or art in second grade, i had to find it, enroll them, pay, and chauffeur. when we moved to hawai‘i, one of my children went to a public school with an experimental curriculum that included art and music for every child, every day. how sad that the arts have gone from entitlement to experiment. sadder still, i report to you this experiment is a resounding success. the students at this school outperform their income-matched peers in schools with the traditional curriculum, in test scores, academic achievement, matriculation to college, and, not surprisingly, lifelong commitment to the arts. we have data that shows keeping art in chil- dren’s lives makes them less likely to make the dreaded bad choices, and see hill, supra note (“[i]n new york city, in the first years of the project, an artist was required to go from his home each day to a central location and sign in by a.m.” at ). see ibid at – (stating that another government agency known as the farm security administration hired photographers, including dorothea lange, to “record the lives of agricultural workers, including sharecroppers of the south and migrant families who had been uprooted from their ancestral homes by drought and economic hardship” at ); george p elliott, “on dorothea lange” in the museum of modern art, new york, dorothea lange (garden city, ny: double day, ) (noting that dorothea lange did her most iconic photography while working for the fsa at ). for a description of the academic program, see university laboratory school, “about uls”, online: <universitylaboratoryschool.org/about> (“[a]ll students enroll in a com- mon curriculum by grade-level cohort that includes daily instruction in english lan- guage and literature, history and social science, natural science, mathematics, visual arts and performing arts”). see ibid. see also “hawai‘i public school chart ”, honolulu magazine (april ), online: <www.honolulumagazine.com>. ( ) : mcgill law journal — revue de droit de mcgill increases neurons available for things like calculus and literature. but art is now in the private realm. you get it if you pay for it. an alternative vision has existed for as long as the fetish of the free market has existed: communal luxury. kristin ross’s book by that title discusses the ideology emanating from the lived experience of the paris commune. the artisan, the artist, and the farmer, in this view, are all entitled to do their work at the level of art, imbuing the hand’s labour with dignity. the work, collectively supported, and collectively consumed see generally katharine smithrim & rena upitis, “learning through the arts: les- sons of engagement” ( ) : - can j education at – (finding that stu- dents in a learning through the arts program had a positive effect on mathematics test achievements); jayne m standley, “a meta-analysis on the effects of music as re- inforcement for education/therapy objectives” ( ) : j research music education at (finding music as a highly effective motivator for increasing positive behav- iour and decreasing negative behaviours); swathi swaminathan & e glenn schellen- berg, “arts education, academic achievement and cognitive ability” in pablo pl tinio & jeffrey k smith, eds, the cambridge handbook of the psychology of aesthetics and the arts (cambridge: cambridge university press, ) (reviewing literature doc- umenting positive effects of arts training on academic achievement, general cognitive ability, language processing, and visuospatial skills and noting that positive effects are observed even when iq and socioeconomic status are controlled for). for literature sup- porting the connection between art education and improved performance in mathemat- ics, see generally richard allen baker, jr, the relationship between music and visual arts formal study and academic achievement on the eighth-grade louisiana educa- tional assessment program (leap) test (phd thesis, louisiana state university, ) [unpublished]; james s catterall, richard chapleau & john iwanaga, “involvement in the arts and human development: general involvement and intensive involvement in music and theatre arts” in edward b fiske, ed, champions of change: the impact of the arts on learning (washington dc: arts education partnership, ) ; barbara h helmrich, “window of opportunity? adolescence, music, and algebra” ( ) : j adolescent research . see ross, supra note at , – (“[a] lived experience of ‘equality in action,’ the commune was primarily a set of dismantling acts directed at the state bureaucracy and performed by ordinary men and women” at ). ross describes how the commune broke down social divides: more important than any laws the communards were able to enact was simply the way in which their daily workings inverted entrenched hierar- chies and divisions—first and foremost among these the division between manual and artistic or intellectual labor. the world is divided between those who can and those who cannot afford the luxury of playing with words or im- ages. when that division is overcome, as it was under the commune, or as it is conveyed in the phrase “communal luxury,” what matters ... are the capaci- ties set in motion (ibid at ). the commune also demonstrated a marked departure from the state’s influence over artistic expression: “the federation envisaged liberty for the arts as the autonomy of art and artists vis-à-vis state power: it instituted total freedom from state subsidy, which had been used throughout the second empire as a means of promoting a particu- lar artist or a particular theater over another” (ibid at ). constitutional theory and the aspirational was owned by no one and everyone at once. from this work, beauty would surround us in all things—beautiful tools, beautiful orchards, beautiful tables, beautiful chairs, beautiful knives, and beautiful forks. this idea— of beauty in the items ordinary people use in their lives, and elaborate art in the places where they gather, reflecting nature and honoring the hand—has pulled my eye all my life. it is the amazing tea rooms of mac- intosh, the curvaceous metal work of the glasgow girls, the handmade books of william morris, the swirls of the vienna secession. we are entitled to beautiful spaces, and no academy will dictate to us what art is. a teapot is art. a garden is art. an orchestra made from the waste stream is art. and what it is sing- ing to you, with its complaining voice, is a version of constitutionalism. the orchestra says yes to those portions of the liberal ideal that pro- tect individual expression and the dream of each person valued and shielded from the worst impulses of statism. long ago, i started my jour- ney as a theorist in the little corner known as the critique of the critique of rights. then, as now, the primary call of subordinated communities see perilla kinchin, taking tea with mackintosh: the story of miss cranston’s tea rooms (san francisco: pomegranate, ) at . kinchin describes the tea rooms: they became important meeting places, especially the smoking rooms where businessmen came for their morning coffee, a habit long believed to be crucial to wealth production in glasgow. every clerk had his favorite retreat where he could read the papers and play dominoes or billiards, all for the price of a twopenny coffee. the only danger was encountering his employer—for the tea rooms were in general remarkably democratic places (ibid). see e.g. jude burkhauser, “the glasgow style” in jude burkhauser, ed, “glasgow girls”: women in art and design, – (edinburgh: canongate, ) at , – (examining the influence of the conventionalized female form on the glasgow girls and the “geometric stylised flower form” that was incorporated into articles such as metalwork, at ). see e.g. morris, supra note . morris describes the “decorative arts” as: a very great industry indeed, comprising the crafts of house-building, painting, joinery and carpentry, smiths’ work, pottery and glass-making, weaving, and many others: a body of art most important to the public in gen- eral, but still more so to us handicraftsmen; since there is scarce anything that they use, and that we fashion, but it has always been thought to be unfin- ished till it has had some touch or other of decoration about it (ibid at – ). see e.g. victoria charles & klaus h carl, the viennese secession (new york: parkstone international, ) (discussing the shock gustav klimt’s “exotic ornamentation” gar- nered at the th exhibition of the secession in , at ). see matsuda, “looking to the bottom”, supra note . this volume of the harvard civil rights-civil liberties law review (volume , titled “minority critiques of the critical legal studies movement”) represents the origin of critical race theory, then located as an intervention into the deconstructionist left analysis presented by the critical legal ( ) : mcgill law journal — revue de droit de mcgill in my country was “stop killing us”, and it remains the ultimate negative right. i support the demand that the state may not take a life, and con- tinue to support basic rights claims that subordinated people, out of their experience, make. this support is not intended as a valorization of rights talk, but as a recognition that vulnerable humans need protection, and law is potentially constitutive of a culture of protection. i would also like to add a new footnote: the way to really make all citizens entitled right- holders, protected from the state, is to embed, through lived practice, as- pirational definitions of full citizenship into the constitution. the new deal practice of providing jobs and support for the arts, lifted some of the least advantaged citizens, allowing them to walk and live as rights- holders, and to self-present as creative, intelligent selves entitled to re- spect. elites have never worried about things like police killings because their elite status automatically warns state actors against overreaching. the aspirational goal of economic justice is linked to the goal of effective rights-claiming for all. studies movement. i would like to say here: both sides, critical legal studies and critical race theory, were right. it was a dialectical relationship. see laura hayes, “black lives matter leader recounts group’s beginnings”, furman news ( september ), online: <news.furman.edu> (“‘[p]eople were just fed up,’ [al- icia] garza said ‘and wanted to do something about it… [we came up with] an idea whose time had come with a basic demand, stop killing us’”). on the experience and approach of lawyers challenging the status quo of rights and power, see matsuda, “looking to the bottom”, supra note at [footnotes omitted]: non-white lawyers have passionately invoked legal doctrine, legal ide- als, and liberal theory in the struggle against racism. their success is at- tributable in part to the passionate response that conventional legalisms can at times elicit. these lawyers recited the bill of rights and demanded their participatory share of the american polity. at the same time, however, they maintained disrespect for claims of legality that accompanied oppressive acts. such lawyers needed no reminder that the constitution is merely a piece of paper in the face of the monopoly on violence and capital possessed by those who intend to keep things just the way they are. how could anyone believe both of the following statements? ) i have a right to participate equally in society with any other person. ) rights are whatever people in power say they are. one of the primary lessons cls can learn from the experience of the bottom is that one can believe in both of those statements simultaneously, and that it may well be necessary to do so. see frank i michelman, “the constitution, social rights, and liberal political justifi- cation” ( ) : intl j constitutional l at (“i suggest there exists at least one appealing argument to the conclusion that a constitution ought, as a moral matter, to affirm the claims of individuals to be assured of satisfaction of certain material needs, by the state if necessary, on reasonable conditions of effort and cooperation”). see also west, supra note . constitutional theory and the aspirational the peace orchestra, therefore, says no to an impoverished constitu- tion with no room for positive rights. effective participation in the liber- al ideal of self-governance requires literacy, internet access, and basic needs of survival met. it requires that citizens possess a sense of their self-worth, and the skills and habits of self-expression. the great artist ac- tivists in us history—paul robeson, nina simone, harry belafonte, ruby dee, ossie davids come to mind as examples—used their artistic training to help them stand on the stage of history as compelling advocates for freedom. i am inspired by their lives to adopt a new deal vision of liberty that includes the right to meaningful labour, a living wage, artistic partic- ipation, and lifelong learning. the ultimate process failure is that we all die. we stumble along for another decade or two with small, reformist goals in lieu of visionary, uto- pian ones, until we render this planet uninhabitable. the rights-based goals of liberalism—orderly state functioning, due process, rule of law— require drastic intervention to end wealth inequality and unrestrained markets, or we lose it all—the rights, the dreams, the courts, the habita- ble planet—in one fell swoop. enter, the visionaries. it is no accident that environmentalists have decided to start chaining themselves together to block the pipelines at the same time that black lives matters brothers and sisters are chaining themselves together to shut down freeways. it is no accident that the while typically understood as non-substantive, i believe an empirical understanding of what human beings as social animals require in order to exercise the full rights-holding personhood envisioned in the constitution points to a right to supported expression, in- cluding support for the exercise of artistic expression. for those who require specific doctrinal citation supporting a right to art in the us constitution, the most obvious is the first amendment right to expression, and the fourteenth amendment right to due process and equality (us const amends i, xiv). also relevant are the penumbra of rights to personhood and privacy found to reverberate throughout the bill of rights. see const amends i–x. see e.g. roe v wade, us at , s ct ( ): the constitution does not explicitly mention any right of privacy. in a line of decisions ... the court has recognized that a right of personal privacy, or a guarantee of certain areas or zones of privacy, does exist under the con- stitution. in varying contexts, the court or individual justices have, indeed, found at least the roots of that right in ... the penumbras of the bill of rights. see also griswold v connecticut, us at – , s ct ( ) (“the first amendment has a penumbra where privacy is protected from governmental intrusion. ... [s]pecific guarantees in the bill of rights have penumbras, formed by emanations from those guarantees that help give them life and substance”). see also samuel d warren & louis d brandeis, “right to privacy” ( ) : harv l rev at . see christopher brennan, “black lives matter protest shuts down bay bridge, leads to arrests”, [new york] daily news ( january ), online: <www.nydailynews. com>. ( ) : mcgill law journal — revue de droit de mcgill leap manifesto and the black lives matter platform came out in the same year, both providing radically reformulated visions of our relations to capital and to the state. the lunatics are the ones who think we can get by with small adjustments and paltry concessions to a worldwide demand for justice. the clear-headed ones are the visionaries with bold de- mands. they are doing this now, out of radically different experiences, be- cause global capital has globalized our pain. whether it is indigenous peoples fighting to protect sacred lands, migrants fighting for legal recog- nition, black citizens in the united states facing extra-judicial killings, or climate scientists panicking about polar ice melts, we all face the same corporate capture of our governments that has made state actors unre- sponsive to clear citizen demands. thus, our visions are converging. com- pare, for example, the leap manifesto and the black lives matter pro- posals: redistribute wealth through progressive taxation: black lives matter and leap manifesto. end capital punishment: black lives matter. % clean economy: leap manifesto. invest in community-based sustainable energy: black lives matter. universal basic income: black lives matter and leap manifesto. remove corporate money from politics: black lives matter and leap manifesto. bring back local agriculture: leap manifesto. full funding for lifelong learning: black lives matter. see “the leap manifesto: a call for a canada based on caring for the earth and one another” in naomi klein, no is not enough: resisting trump’s shock politics and winning the world we need (chicago, il: haymarket books, ) at – ; “the leap manifesto: a call for a canada based on caring for the earth and one another”, leap manifesto, online: <https://leapmanifesto.org/en/the-leap-manifesto>. see “platform”, the movement for black lives, online: <https://policy.m bl.org/ platform/>. indeed, the leap manifesto rejects characterization of its plan as utopian. see “fre- quently asked questions about the leap manifesto”, leap manifesto, online: <https://leapmanifesto.org/en/faq/> (“[a]re the policies advocated in the leap manifesto ‘utopian’? hardly. many of the policies—like a speedy transition to renewables, massive green job creation, and more democratic control over our energy—are already being im- plemented in other countries”). constitutional theory and the aspirational renegotiation of trade agreements to prioritize interests of workers and communities: black lives matter. end all trade deals that interfere with our attempts to rebuild local economies: leap manifesto. we could create jobs while we relearn how to feed ourselves locally and repair our broken planet. we could end the endless war and send new armies of teachers, doctors, engineers, and—yes—lawyers, out into the world to create places of solidarity instead of places of deepening rupture. a trillion dollars into the endless war on terror and we are less, not more, safe. there is another way. i found it easier to say this in an art performance than in a law review article. law is the profession of doubters who poke holes in rhetoric and point out gaps in evidence: “how do we know that after spending a trillion dollars on your arbitrary idea of a peace army, we would end up in a bet- ter place?” a critical move we learn in law school is to respond to a destabilizing question with a more incisive question. i do not have a formula to prove to you my idea is better, but i have a trillion dollars in sunk costs, a dis- graceful pile of bodies, and the daily news to prove that we are not safer under your plan. the certainty in the voices that took us to war barely covered the reality that there was no plan for success. you have no argu- ment that their way worked, are you suggesting we continue it? there is no requirement that we have a complete blueprint of what one hundred percent clean energy, or restorative justice, or aid before bombs, or neighborhood art centres for all, or any other utopian sugges- tion will look like. the defenders of the status quo have no alternative blueprint. it is enough that we start the hard work of the blueprint, look- ing at past models for ideas and self-criticism. vvii. problematizing art as a right a utopian project is an invitation to critique. imagining creative fu- tures invites risk-taking, best accompanied by tales of caution. rather than pretending one has all the answers, the better course is to admit that this is a collective journey, inviting challenge and self-criticism, so that we can dream smarter and implement dreams with appropriate hu- mility. let me close with a self-critique of the idea of art as a right. art as a right opens a slew of post-modern inquiries: what is art, who is an artist, who gets to decide? i start with the notion of respect for communities— communities of artists, communities of art learners, and art consumers. i trust artists to hold a generous view of “what is art,” and to work through ( ) : mcgill law journal — revue de droit de mcgill the bitter fights over legitimacy. i have met talented and passionate art- ists whose work almost never ends up in museums: those who carve duck decoys, those who paint hotrods, those who quilt by hand. all of these art practices have known champions and standards of excellence. i would in- clude all these practices, and say we are better off for it. the divide be- tween high and low might fade, or we might decide, collectively, that some art really belongs in the vaults that preserve them for the ages. we might include the lowrider in the treasures exalted for display, as the smithson- ian once did in an exhibit i will never forget. i trust viewers to know what they want, but i also know, historically, that people change their minds. early art education and exposure to mak- ing, viewing, criticizing, thinking critically, and situating historically might stave off the problem the wpa had with some rural communities flocking to “[p]aintings from new england,” and bitterly rejecting “mod- ern art.” another challenge is waste and quality control. handing out arts grants will mean that some artists will produce amazing work and others will not. for the most part, the history of art funding has shown signifi- cantly less waste than, say, military contracting. most artists report, see dave’s dream, washington dc, smithsonian collection ( . . ). see nicholas a calcagno & barbara k scott, “the federal gallery system in oklaho- ma: a successful experiment” in white, supra note , at – : extension galleries in the smaller communities presented an exaggerat- ed version of the educational problems of the larger galleries, particularly oklahoma city: taste was rather provincial and unsophisticated by the standards of the east coast and the public was unable to cope with the ‘mo- dernity’ of some of the circulating shows. ... ... one of the most popular shows in the wpa circuit was “paintings from new england” (wpa # ). see martha minow, “outsourcing power: how privatizing military efforts challenges accountability, professionalism, and democracy” ( ) : boston college l rev (observing that, and providing examples of how, the united states government’s recent practice of privatizing military functions without effective oversight not only leads to waste and corruption, but also compromises democratic norms, and providing specific examples of military waste scandals involving private contractors in the united states government’s response to the / terrorist attacks: e.g., “congressional and media sources charge the halliburton company ... with overcharging $ million worth of gas- oline and for charging $ million for meals not actually served as part of its $ bil- lion worth of contracts with the department of defense” at ). see also deborah d avant & renée de nevers, “military contractors & the american way of war” ( ) : daedalus (“[i]nadequate contract staffing and oversight have been important complaints in both iraq and afghanistan and have been tied to numerous problems— from poor performance to waste, fraud, and abuse” at ); juanita m rendon & rene g rendon, “procurement fraud in the us department of defense: implications for con- constitutional theory and the aspirational with a body of work to support it, a felt imperative to make art. they can- not stop. it is their breathing. the danger that we will pay them to hang out in bars is overstated. the possibility that we might not like what we pay for is real, and democratic systems for selection and oversight, with strong emphasis on artistic freedom, have worked through this issue in the programs of public funding that do exist. the big fights over unappre- ciated monoliths, like richard serra’s iron wall in the plaza, are part of our democratic work as artists and art-consuming citizens, to dive into pluralism and contested aesthetics. the fights themselves are valuable practice. universal art education will change how we wade into the roiling art waters. when workers are artists too, with experience with art exhibi- tions and art history, the battle over elite versus non-elite notions of artis- tic value will shift. the current art world affrays over appropriation and blackface, for example, reflect an investment-driven art market and his- toric structures of racial exclusion in the curatorial ranks more than they tracting processes and internal controls” ( ) : - managerial auditing j (“[t]he government accountability office (gao) has identified dod contract manage- ment as a high risk area ... due to its greater vulnerabilities to fraud, waste, abuse and mismanagement” at ); us, commission on wartime contracting in iraq and af- ghanistan, transforming wartime contracting: controlling costs, reducing risks: fi- nal report to congress (washington, dc: cwc, august ) (“[a]t least $ billion, and possibly as much as $ billion, has been lost to contract waste and fraud in america’s contingency operations in iraq and afghanistan” at ); us, government accountability office, contract management: dod vulnerabilities to contracting fraud, waste, and abuse (gao- - r) ( ) (“dod continues to face vulnerabilities to contracting fraud, waste, and abuse due to weaknesses in the areas of sustained sen- ior leadership, capable acquisition workforce, adequate pricing, appropriate contracting approaches and techniques, and sufficient contract surveillance” at ). see patty gerstenblith, art, cultural heritage, and the law: cases and materials, rd ed (durham, nc: carolina academic press, ) at – : in , the general services administration (gsa) commissioned the sculp- tor, richard serra, to create a sculpture for the federal plaza in lower man- hattan. ... serra’s sculpture consisted of an arc of steel feet long, twelve feet tall, and several inches thick that cut across the plaza concealing part of a decorative stone pavement and making passage among the federal build- ings difficult. the sculpture became a matter of considerable controversy both among the public and among those who worked in the buildings. the gsa decided to remove the sculpture barely four years after its installation. serra sued the government for violation of his first amendment right to free expression and his right to due process. for my response to some recent examples of contested aesthetics, see eunsong kim & gelare khoshgozaran, “mari matsuda: founding critical race theorist, activist and artist”, contemptorary ( april ), online: <contemptorary.org>. ( ) : mcgill law journal — revue de droit de mcgill reflect any competing concepts of artistic value. the more equality we bring to the arts, the more interesting and useful our aesthetic conflicts will become. fights over artistic value, once we overcome maldistribution of power, are enlightening fights. you will want to grab a front-row seat. next, there is the debate over what actual form these shared spaces of artistic production will take. autonomous, local, communal, and sponta- neous? funded, promoted, and regulated by some larger federation? na- tional? international? and what will become of the state? who, if anyone, will enforce safety and accessibility at the local art centre, and does it make sense to train a cadre of teachers and organizers in the specifics of maintaining safe workspaces and teaching to all levels of talent? will the local art centre become a precious and isolated harbor of escape, or will it have a connection to a broader struggle to remake the world into a beauti- ful and just place? and how will we do this if we spend all our time argu- ing about the chore chart in the shop? anyone who has worked with others to accomplish a major collective project knows that danger of sinking deep into the weeds of making it go. when i was twenty years old, my father fixed up a broken offset press and turned it over to young organizers who used it for pamphlets, newsletters, posters, and notices for everything from land struggles to ads for the local food co-op. i spent hours volunteering on the press, happy as the youngest one allowed to hang out with the doers and intellectuals the press attract- ed, but i watched the main printer become exhausted from the actual work of printing and negotiating task distribution. years later, i heard he had dropped out of movement work. perhaps doing everything collective- ly, by hand, with no revolution anywhere on the horizon, took the fight out of him. discernment between wheel-spinning and world-making is re- quired. see generally chin-tao wu, privatising culture: corporate art intervention since the s (london: verso, ) (discussing corporate entanglement and profiteering in the art world); doreen st félix, “the lenny interview: kimberly drew, aka @museummammy”, lenny ( november ), online: <www.lennyletter.com/culture/ interviews/a /meet-the-instagram-star-elevating-black-contemporary-art> (“[t]here’s all this art history that i missed, there’s all this art history that has been erased, there’s all this art history that has been inaccessible...”); witw staff, “kimberly drew’s cura- tion brings black artists to the forefront”, the new york times ( november ), online: <www.nytimes.com>; eunsong kim, “susan cahan’s mounting frustration: the art museum in the age of black power”, contemptorary ( june ), online: <con- temptorary.org>; claire voon, “dispute over asian american stereotypes gives way to dialogue at an art fair”, hyperallergic ( march ), online: <hyperallergic.com>; robin pogrebin, “it’s a diverse city, but most big museum boards are strikingly white”, the new york times ( august ), online: <www.nytimes.com>. constitutional theory and the aspirational whatever little oasis we create has to remain tied to the big vision, shared commitments, and openness to a wider world. i am a tentative federalist. i like local control, but also believe in the knowledge and prac- tical applications of scale and of standards. i have seen how in one’s com- fortable local shop, it is easy to go lax on safety rules, since it has been a long time since the last explosion. the traveling inspector who has seen multiple sites of carnage is much more attuned to the dangers and can remind us about spark suppression. there are thoughtful students of planning, design, and bureaucracy who have ideas about how to keep true to a wider vision, while still maintaining the discovery, love, and sponta- neity that arise at the local commune. there are many specificities of implementation we will confront as we ask how to teach and bring art to every corner, and as with any ambitious endeavour, we will work through the specific challenges, preferably with intelligence and generosity. as constitutional theorists our job is to point out complexities and suggest possible responses, weaving between identi- fication of the challenges and exaltation of the beautiful possibilities. and finally, one can ask why make an orchestra, when what we need is a revolution. why art, when rome is burning? i am reminded of grace lee boggs, student of c.l.r. james, and herself a classically trained phi- losopher, who could argue base and superstructure until she took you down. at the end of her life in her beloved detroit, she was immersed in bike co-ops and community gardens. a wicked theorist with a commit- ment to revolutionary class struggle was teaching children how to raise their own food. she was no advocate of self-help, charity, or one-step-at-a- time, but there she was handing out shovels. when the city is broken, and people are hungry, giving them the means to feed their neighbours and themselves, is the chance to live the imaginary. from the artists, and from grace, i learned this: see grace lee boggs, living for change: an autobiography (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, ), ch . for an example of the depth of boggs’s theoretical under- standing, consider this anecdote from her autobiography: i will never forget the day that raya came back from the library with the news that she had found a russian translation of the economic and philosophic manu- scripts written by marx in – when he was twenty-four years old. unknown in the united states at the time, these essays make it unmistakably clear that marx’s overriding concern was the human essence of the workers, not property re- lations. subsequently, i translated three of the essays from the original german into english, and in the johnson-forest tendency published the first english translation in the united states (ibid at – [footnote omitted]). see also american revolutionary: the evolution of grace lee boggs, directed by grace lee ( ) (a biographical film showing, inter alia, grace lee boggs’s participation in community gardening amidst the ruin of a post-industrial city). ( ) : mcgill law journal — revue de droit de mcgill if you make a revolution by tasting it, feeling it, loving it, you enter knowing what you are fighting for. you enter with love. vviii. make your revolution with art in your hand a pacifist once said: “if you make your revolution with a gun in your hand, you will have a gun in your hand after the revolution.” i am a constitutionalist because i want to make a revolution with law in my hand. i am an artist because i want to make a revolution with art in my hand. and after the revolution, i want both law and art in my hand. this is what i learned by spending nine months in the world of artists: they are natural-born revolutionaries. they have already chosen the call of something outside the market, or more typically, had that experience of having something outside the market choose them. i sat next to a young man and watched him start sketching in a note- book before class began. he sketched the desks, the people, anything he saw. “have you always done that?” i asked. “always,” he said, grinning. among the artists, i read aloud a dada manifesto of revolutionary tenor, and not one of them thought it was silly. “i sent it to my mother, and she loved it,” one told me. mom, and her artist child, are members of a growing tribe of the aspirationally willing. from the leap manifesto to black lives matter, to uprisings and wellsprings all over the planet, a new world emerges of those who say: “we choose love over war, sharing over greed, and making over taking.” whether in the community garden, the bike co-op, or the circle of art students gathered for critique, we have in this paltry world real experi- ences of a better one. my body learned the feeling of anxiously putting the product of one’s hand before others and seeing their amazed, expletive- tinged responses. “[expletive], mari, you made that?” it is a feeling better than anything, anything the market offers. i believe anyone who could feel it—that moment when something you made brings gasps of delighted amazement to someone who encounters it—would choose it over acquisi- tive hoarding, war, or hate. give them all the creative commons. a note from the author: after an exhaustive search, i could not find attribution for this statement found in my lecture notes for the class peacemaking for lawyers. i have come to the conclusion that i am the author. it is possible that i am mistaken, and that i am failing to attribute another speaker. if anyone does have a citation to offer, the edi- tors would love to hear from you. constitutional theory and the aspirational iix. a constitution of aspiration the documents—your country’s and mine’s—that form the rules of engagement for politics have a lot of work coming their way. my commit- ment to doing the work through the available documents does not reflect deluded acculturation to the superstructure of empire. the documents themselves contain the contradictions and exploitable fault lines of em- pire. i choose to mine those fault lines because i do not want my dream of art collectives to end with thousands of artists lined up against walls and shot by someone they considered a fellow citizen. in my hometown, the american civil liberties union (aclu) fought a battle to force the city to notify the unhoused before destroying their cardboard homes and worldly goods. every week, the city now announc- es, in writing, planned “sweeps” so people have notice before their tents and hovels are cleared. the aclu has not, thus far, been able to win a claim of the right to shelter. the absence of housing rights creates a see martin v honolulu (city and county of) ( september ), d hawaii : -cv- (class action complaint), online: aclu <https://acluhawaii.files.wordpress. com/ / /martinvcc_complaint.pdf>; martin v honolulu (city and county of) [settlement agreement], ( may ), d hawaii, : -cv- -hg-ksg, online: aclu <https://acluhawaii.files.wordpress.com/ / /final-martin-settlement-english- with-signatures.pdf>. the settlement arose from a class action lawsuit brought by homeless individuals against the city and county of honolulu. the class action al- leged that the city disposed of property belonging to unhoused citizens during en- forcement of “sidewalk nuisance ordinances” or “sweeps”. plaintiffs alleged such sweeps violated their fourth amendment rights against unreasonable seizures of property and fourteenth amendment rights against deprivation of property with- out due process of the law. on the prospects of a right to housing, see eric s tars & déodonné p bhattarai, “open- ing the door to the human right to housing: the universal periodic review and stra- tegic federal advocacy for a rights-based approach to housing” ( ) : clearing- house rev j poverty l & society at [footnote omitted]: while the reality for the millions of americans facing foreclosure, evic- tion, or homelessness remains grim, these policy statements are more than rhetorical changes. they reflect a recognition that the right to housing, based on the universal declaration of human rights … is relevant to domestic is- sues ranging from our response to the foreclosure crisis to the criminalization of homelessness. a growing movement for the human right to housing made up of lawyers and grassroots advocates worked for this recognition as the groundwork for a new kind of housing policy, one based on our obligations to realize housing as a fundamental right. see also michelman, supra note at : there is something about the particular moral point or purpose of constitu- tions, from which it follows that a constitution, in particular, is morally defec- tive—it fails of its moral purpose—by reason of its lack of social-rights guar- antees; and that this is so regardless of what any of us individually, outside ( ) : mcgill law journal — revue de droit de mcgill contradiction so wide that we can write a positive rights constitution com- fortably within it. if you aren’t learning to do that as a lawyer, you are not ready for the revolution that is coming, with or without you. we, the people, created these governments, as the constitution of the united states says, to secure the blessings of liberty for ourselves and our posterity. liberty was the goal, and liberty has to mean more than the right to receive written notice before the only place you have to sleep is cleared from the sidewalk. there is a bounding majority of us ready to ask for more: for the liber- ty to thrive and flourish in a community of mutual care and creative pro- duction. i made an orchestra so outside of what is normally presented on this stage at the venerable mcgill university, that i was worried i could not bring it to you. this is the season, however, of rewriting the possible. we did come, the instruments and i, to ask you to consider great, balletic leaps of constitutional interpretation, that will stop human extinction by inscribing, in our foundational texts, our capacity for love. the context of politically governed society, may or may not owe morally to others in the way of aid or support. constitutional theory and the aspirational aappendix: mari matsuda, manifesto of radical intersubjective collectivity and imagined possibility ( ). an intimate dialog between race and gender at women’s suffrage centennial article an intimate dialog between race and gender at women’s suffrage centennial mimi yang ✉ women’s suffrage centennial has arrived in a culturally divisive time in the united states as well as in a high-stakes presidential election year. all this is accompanied with the emergence of black lives matter movement on a global-scale in the wake of the african american man george floyd’s death under the knees of white police officers. in an “i cannot breathe” america at a new cultural awakening moment, is the centennial a divider or unifier for american women in ? this article aims to answer the question by revisiting the th and th amendments to the constitution and iconic figures like elizabeth cady stanton, susan b. anthony, frederick douglass, w.e.b. dubois, and mary church terrell. in an interdisciplinary approach anchored in both historical and cultural studies, the article scrutinizes the split between the two visceral elements pertinent to cultural identity—gender and race—in women’s suffrage movement, draws a pattern of their intersection, and maps out a “double consciousness” (to borrow w.e.b. dubois’ term). the article argues that the women’s suf- frage movement was indeed a gigantic step towards the american ideal of gender equality but it fell short of racial equality. there is a mixed legacy to embrace and to reevaluate at the same time. therefore, women’s suffrage centennial should not and cannot be a single-issue gender celebration, nor a one-size-fits-all symphony, but a landmark occasion for an intimate and nuanced dialog between gender and race. the article suggests that the centennial should not only celebrate white american suffragists, but should be an opportunity to make a historic step to cross the color line that has cutoff african american women, as well as women of color from other races, ethnicities, and heritages from the power center. https://doi.org/ . /s - - - open carthage college, kenosha, wi, usa. ✉email: myang@carthage.edu humanities and social sciences communications | ( ) : | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - () :,; http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf mailto:myang@carthage.edu introduction t he right to vote defines constitutional citizenship. a cen- tury ago, the long-and-hard-fought victory of women’s right to vote culminated with the passage of the th amendment to the u.s. constitution on august , , thus completing a full circle of citizenship for woman. she could now vote like her (white) male counterparts as an equal and full citizen. on the surface, this is an indisputable narrative, and in fact, has found its way into textbooks and seeped through the nation’s imagination for a century. however, if the constitutional right to vote is a basic definition of a citizen, women of color were still not able to exercise their full citizenship in but until years later in the era of the civil rights movement, with the voting rights act of signed into law by president lyndon johnson. as one of the most far-reaching pieces of civil right legislation, the voting rights act of addressed manmade obstacles that had prevented african americans and women of color in general from participating in nation’s political life. the act eventually removed literacy tests, poll taxes, and requirement of property ownership among other “tactically” designed obstacles at state level, which had effectively stripped away african americans and other minority individuals’ rightful right to vote. granted in the th amendment in , voting rights of a citizen of color had not got exercised until . history seems to have given birth to two americas—the white one at the center, entitled of a “standard” narrative; the non-white one at the periphery, “unfit” to be counted on equal terms. then, whose centennial of the women’s suffrage movement is this in ? which america is relevant to the landmark event? elizabeth j. clapp summarizes the characteristics of anniver- saries of the women’ suffrage movement: traditionally, historians viewed the suffrage struggle as part of the history of democracy in the united states, an effort to widen the franchise to all americans. they wrote organizational histories of the women’s rights movement, centering on the campaign for the vote, and biographers included suffragists among their projects. these pioneering histories paid attention to exceptional women who operated in the male world. they characterized them as white, middle class, and mostly living on the east coast, which… reflected little of the diversity and regional variation… ( , p. ). it has indeed been a long-standing tradition and a well- accepted standard to celebrate women’s suffrage based on a single-issue of gender, with a group of iconic suffragists—white, middle class, and from the east coast. the tradition has insti- tutionalized a widespread cultural perception that the women’s suffrage movement is white or wasp (white-anglo-saxon- protestant); a “standard” celebration as such has “reflected little the diversity and regional variation”. so observed clapp more than a decade ago. in , however, a one-size-fits-all “white” celebration proves to be evidently inadequate, given the twenty- first century demographics, distinctively transformed as opposed to the one a century ago. the centennial of women’s suffrage movement presents a much needed platform to examine these transformations and their impact on the way in which we frame and celebrate each anniversary and now the centennial. in reviewing ellen carol dubois’ book suffrage: women’s long battle for the vote, donna seaman states, “the story of suffrage in the united states is dramatic, infuriating, paradoxical, and saturated with sexism and racism” (seaman, , p. ). it is not a black or white story but a gray one in different shades at different times. dubois’ book explores in depth the links of the woman suffrage movement to the abolition of slavery and the complex make-up of “foremothers” of the suffrage movement lucretia mott, elizabeth cady stanton, susan b. anthony and sojourner truth. dubois points out, “the women suffrage movement had incredible range. it was sustained and trans- formed through massive political, social and economic changes in american life and carried forward at least by three generations of american women” (dubois, , p. ). the meaning of the suffrage for american women has thus never been set in stone; it morphs and alters as “hopes and fears for american democracy rise and fall” (p. ). from the mid-nineteenth century to the civil war, the reconstruction, the progressive era, the civil rights movement, the threshold of the global age, the post-colonial/ post-industrial time, and the digital/informational universe, what means to be an american woman changes, evolves, and trans- forms. the word “woman” no longer signifies a white archetypal female who represents all female individuals. because of demo- graphic changes, sociopolitical transformations, and economic reconfigurations, women’s suffrage victory has never unfolded as a straightforward line, but we are taught to grasp it as a single- issue binary of women-defeating-men or feminism-defeating- sexism. far from being “neat” and “fit” with our mental frames, women suffrage was a victory of feminism tainted by racism, of a gender-equality accomplishment that rejected racial equality. presently, we live in a racially susceptible, culturally divisive, and politically contentious time. not only marks women’s suffrage centennial but also the year of a high-stakes presidential election, in the thick of an unprecedented black-lives-matter movement. gender and race are lined up to configure the current sociopolitical landscape; competing voices collide in hatred, bigotry and at times, in violence. then the question is, are we equipped and ready for a race/gender dialog in the face of dis- connect, distrust, and diatribe in ? the answer is, not quite and not yet. this article digs into historic and cultural depth for a root- cause examination of “why not yet” in . as an inter- disciplinary article, its narratives, analysis, arguments, and con- clusions in the following sections are anchored in historical studies but for cultural studies engagement and outcome. his- toricity, with facts and evidences, lays a tangible foundation for the weaving of cultural narratives and the extrapolating of cul- tural patterns. an intimate dialog between gender and race occurs when we recognize familiar fear and bigotry from the past, and trace out similar divisive patterns in the current historical moment and the present sociopolitical landscape. thus, as methodology, the article engages in research-based interpreta- tions and analysis of context and text. historicity delineates his- torical and sociopolitical contexts that have produced iconic figures, landmark events, and influential writings/texts. con- versely, documentations and written works left behind by those who made history provide textual evidence of the contexts that they lived, created, and shaped. in a symbiotic interplay, contexts and texts mirror one another to configure a cultural history that speaks to us today. at the conjuncture of history and culture and society, an intimate dialog between gender and race celebrates the centennial of women’s suffrage and dissects the racial injustice of the present day, as evidenced by george floyd’s tragic death in may . these events shape and configure american culture for the years to come. part —the missing link between gender and race in : the binary and the color line in the present time of political divisiveness and racial injustice, the link between gender and race is missing, let alone the dialog. in fact, it was severed a century ago by the collision between the power center and its periphery, the standard and the diverse, in article humanities and social sciences communications | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - humanities and social sciences communications | ( ) : | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - american culture. both sides were tripped over the impassable and perennial “color line”, to use w.e.b. dubois’ term, which divides the nation in two since its inception. as a building block of american culture, the women’s suffrage movement was a gigantic sociopolitical and cultural step for women moving from the gender periphery to the patriarchal power center. however, this gigantic step is ironically not immune to forming an inter- sectional center/periphery binary within the women’s suffrage movement, with white women at the power center and african- american, as well as all other women of color at the periphery. in , elizabeth cady stanton and lucretia mott organized the seneca falls convention to launch the movement for women’s rights in the united states. subsequently, women around the country protested, picketed, and were imprisoned to secure their constitutional right to vote. that was a historic moment when women took on a patriarchal power structure that had been in place against them in the united states. while all men are born equal in this great country, american women of all races have had to fight for the right to vote in order to be a full citizen and an equal human being. the patriarchal oppression takes countless forms across cultures and for millennia along human history. the basic and universal form is however the binary and gender hierarchy of male/female. it takes courage and ingenuity to write history with a female hand. american women did precisely that in and set the nation on the path to gender equality. after years, on june , , the th amendment to the constitution was passed by the congress and granted women the right to vote for the first time in the u.s. history. many trailblazers of the movement did not live to see the landmark fruit of their enduring struggle and prolonged fight. “only two women who participated in the seneca falls convention were still alive when the nineteenth amendment went into effect” (mintz, , p. ). at the centennial, nationwide, museums, libraries, schools, and institutions celebrate the passing of the th amendment with forums, exhibitions, seminars, lectures, and parties. needless to say, this is the occasion of national gender celebration that moves american women in unison to honor the suffragists’ legacy. everyone is expected to remember or learn what textbook teaches. there is a “standard” and “centralized” version of what happened a century ago and who were the protagonists. indivi- duals across political spectrums, genders, races, and age groups are brought together to admire the courageous, visionary, and resilient suffragists. the occasion is largely treated as a single- issue victory of gender equality and as a binary engagement of how feminism defeated sexism. the long-held “mainstream” and “standard” celebration implies a one-size-fits-all assumption. wasp women are assumed to represent all women across races and heritages, embody the gender of the american female, and speak for all women in one voice of gender equality. the wasp uniformity and universality has been established by dismissing diversity and racial inequality within the realm of gender. not all women were created equal in the u.s. history; the struggle for racial equality is encapsulated and often eclipsed in the struggle of gender equality. keeping women of color in the periphery, in a support role or in irrelevance to white women’s suffrage, or simply dis- carding their existence are some of the mechanisms of the racial divide. it is not surprising that there is a canon that regards the wasp women as unquestionably perfect and flawless heroes, leaders, and saviors for all american women. this is the standard narrative rarely questioned and reevaluated in the suffrage his- tory. however, after a century’s immigration and demographic shifting, in , the terms “women” or “american women” expand to previously uncharted territories, while revolving around two reminiscent forces at play to define these terms: the one at the center that universalizes the terms in a vertical direction, and the one at the periphery that diversifies the term in a horizontal direction. first, let us focus on the universalizing and vertical force. upon the suffrage centennial, the term “american women” is still lar- gely used in reference to the wasp women as in history. we have rarely pondered its cultural underpinnings. it is a widely accepted or acquiesced in cultural imagination that wasp women are the face and voice of all american women across races and heritages, of the women’s suffrage movement and of the centennial. statues and monuments of susan b. anthony, elizabeth cady stanton, lucretia mott, amelia mott and lucy stone grace national parks, cities and historical sites, institutionalizing the narrative that the women suffrage is “white”. sojourner truth was later included in one of the representations as a response to the criticism of exclusion of black suffragists. the universalizing force has much to do with the cultural “blueprint” that the wasps set up at the birth of our nation. the “blueprint” has never been altered, in spite of the challenges of new cultural dna pooled from the civil war and the civil rights movement in particular. the men and women, programed in the initial wasp cultural design, inherit these cultural genes from generation to generation: the central elements of that culture [american] can be defined in a variety of ways but include the christian religion, protestant values and moralism, a work ethic, the english language, british traditions of law, justice, and the limits of government power, and a legacy of european art, literature, philosophy and music (huntington, , p. ). from a long anglo-saxon dominated culture and tradition in the united states, these element have been held as essential and fundamental; they are the “american creed”. wasp women had been victimized by wasp men for centuries; wasp women stood up in the women’s suffrage movement and became a bea- con for all oppressed women around the world to look up to. nonetheless, to what extent do the wasp women share or reject huntington’s monocutluralist view? not clear. what is clear is that huntington’s view has the wasps’ cultural dna as the standard, the norm, and the authority to shape and define american culture. in a paradoxical way, the wasp culture dna left its undeletable print, through the suffragists themselves, in the women’s suffrage movement. quite a few suffragist leaders themselves were abolitionist but turned to be racially vitriolic in fighting for (white) women’s rights. this paradox has helped with the wasp exclusive ownership of women’s suffrage history, as well as women’s fight for gender equality in general. the sense of exclusivity rejects groups of non-wasp heritages and divides citizens/women into the mainstream and the marginalized. thus, pivoted on the wasp blueprint, within women rights movement, a culture wall is erected by the wasp elites for exclusion and a power binary of the center/the periphery—wasp women/afri- can american women—is created. second, let us shift our focus to the diversifying and horizontal force. after a century of continuous, massive, and non-anglo/ nordic immigration, which unavoidably sparked social and cul- ture transformations, the year witnesses a “browner” and “flatter” america. as of the present day, there has been a sig- nificant increase of women of color; they now represent roughly % of u.s. women. when american women come together on the occasion of the suffrage centennial, the togetherness is far from being the sameness, despite shared interest for gender equality. throughout suffrage history, women of color were never much of a presence at best and they were discriminated and prevented from exercising their voting rights at worst. then, what is women’s suffrage centennial to a woman of color? in the “browner” and “flatter” america of the present day, not only do white women continue their fight for gender equality in their humanities and social sciences communications | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - article humanities and social sciences communications | ( ) : | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - professional and personal lives, but also a much broadened range of marginalized entities, defined by gender, as well as race, find themselves in day-to-day struggle for inclusion, equality, citi- zenship, and humanity. these include women and men of color, immigrants, lgbtq citizens, individuals from a non-christian faith, and members of special needs. an unprecedentedly diverse and all-encompassing population, just like white women a cen- tury ago, is fighting to cross the power binary of the center/the periphery separated by the color line. however, their binary is different from the one that their wasp sisters faced; it is a double binary with a double center and a double periphery—racial and gender. a double divide prevents women of color from being a full citizen, as well as a full woman as their rights are alienable on both fronts. if the celebration of the centennial highlights white women’s leadership, contribution and achievements in universal terms, defined by vertical wasp values, then, many con- temporary american women of color would certainly find themselves as “unfit” with the narrative of women suffrage; they would remain left out the nation’s history. the confrontation of the universalizing force from the center and the diversifying force from the periphery not only drives the women suffrage centennial to the crossroads of gender and race, but also reveals a deeper split between the two in our present social milieu. a woman of color in is no longer in the image of a freedom-deprived slave working in a cotton field in the antebellum south. she can well be a highly-educated individual, a lawyer, an executive, an artist, or a medical doctor. by the con- stitution, as white women, a woman of color has equal and “unalienable rights” of education, citizenship, and the pursuit of happiness. she may be from a long line of ancestors who wit- nessed the inception of this nation or may be a first or second generation immigrant. either falls into at least one of these categories: native-african-asian-hispanic-muslim-lgbtq americans. these “non-white” and non-wasp identities, after years of the struggle for gender equality, nonetheless, still have not yet crossed “the color line” to be accepted as inherently american. when an african-american woman speaks up, she would invite the perception of “an angry woman”. when a hispanic-american woman is in charge, how “american” she is to deserve that position would be an unuttered question. when an asian-american woman acts with self-confidence, she would be labeled as a “banana”—yellow outside and white inside. the notion that being a white is american or more american than a person of color is still prevalent. racism and color line in are not as raw and crude as the ones that characterized the society a century ago. they are well absorbed into institutional systems and continue to dehumanize people of color in the name of law, conventions, patriotism, and american values. deep in the fabric of the society and in the core of the culture, the center continues to exercise its dominance; the wounds of the periphery reopen and continue to bleed, internally or externally, in the presence of an external trigger. as the latest in a long line of black victims of systemic racism, george floyd’s death has sparked racial hemorrhage not only in the us but globally. in a more subtle and covert fashion, the institutional racism has left its undeletable stain not only on women’s suffrage movement but on its anniversary celebrations. “standard” women’s suffrage anniversaries have always been the celebration of iconic figures like stanton, mott, anthony, and stone, among others. indeed, the vision, leadership, spirit, and accomplishment of these remarkable wasp women have transformed our society and reshaped american culture. in many significant ways in the struggle for gender equality, american women across races, eth- nicities, religions and heritages are indebted to the history that the wasp women have made. nonetheless, all this glory does not alter a racialized past and does not heal the internal wounds sustained over a century. the togetherness of american women no longer means gender homogeneity but gender diversity. that not all women are created equal still remains a reality in . not only the nation but also american feminism is still divided by the color line. the question “what is women’s suffrage centennial to a ‘browner’ and ‘flatter’ america” confronts the “center” and the “standard”, reevaluates the “periphery” and the diverse, and redefines the term of “american women”. a his- torical examination how racial equality interacts with gender equality becomes indispensable in recasting the centennial celebrations. part —a blocked dialog between gender and race in history a dialog takes at least two parties to exchange information and ideas, debate differences or teach/learn from one another in an interactive and generative back-and-forth process. in women’s suffrage, gender and race intersected as the two dialogic parties; instead of moving forward, they blocked each other, thus unset- tling the dialogic binary that impacted cultural configuration. over a century since women’s suffrage, various ideologies on race and gender have been dislodged. in a multicultural and multi- racial society, the alignment or the derailment of an ideology never follows a straight line but winding and intertwining. there are always minefields and contingent contexts to be considered and cautioned, so much so that we often have to perform a still- walk, fossilized by fear, distrust, bigotry, and sometimes hate and violence. intriguingly, as the two building blocks of american culture, gender and race reject or recognize one another other as two competitors in given political circumstances. often, they are the elephant in the room, never in a comfortable position to acknowledge and articulate each other’s nature, significance, and above all, potential connections between them. they would rather avoid issues and themes associated with the other. not unlike rivalry twins, race and gender, from the same parentage, compete for social attention, cultural representation, and legal voices at any given moment. while a landmark stride has been made towards equality and social justice, the women’s suffrage movement and the civil rights movement have never been culturally congruent and ideologically harmonious. as much as the ideological tracks associated with gender and race intend or are orchestrated to steer clear from one another, their trajectories in pursuing social justice become paralleled in the same direction sometimes and intersected in collision other times. then, what exactly has severed the link between gender and race and blocked the dialog? the question puts us in a soul-search process with historical reflections and self-examination. to search for the root cause, let us be galvanized by the ratifications of th and the th amendments to the constitution that paralleled the trajectory of the women’s suffrage movement. the twists and turns of the movement split, as well as tangled gender and race. let the long overdue dialog start from where the split occurred. the civil war ( – ) brought two economic systems—the agrarian/plantation in the south and the industrial/urbanization in the north—into a life-and-death confrontation. slavery insti- tutions were not only the foundation of the southern economy but also a visible-to-the-naked-eye divide of two conflictive mindsets: freedom/equality to all human beings vs. freedom/ equality to certain groups. whether in the north or in the south, the two mindsets waged a cultural war because of the civil war. the north won the war in the battlefield but left historic wounds unhealed, continuing to bleed for a long time after the war. the reconstruction era ( – ), to the best definition of the word “reconstruction”, saw unprecedented efforts to heal racial wounds inflicted upon african american citizens and bridge cultural gaps created by economic disparity and social inequality. article humanities and social sciences communications | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - humanities and social sciences communications | ( ) : | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - a number of racially egalitarian policies and laws put in place. the th and the th amendments stood out as they tackle the issues central to reconstruction head-on: restoring slaves’ fun- damental human dignity, protecting their citizens’ rights, advancing racial equality, and pursuing economic justice in a bitterly heterogeneous society. these are monumental constitu- tional transformations, designed to evoke and embody the american ideal of freedom and equality. however, as constitu- tional laws, understandably, these governing documents did not sink into cultural and psychological depth as to provide an effective platform for a national dialog between gender and race. unfortunately, the link between the two major building blocks of american culture is thus missed. let us examine the split between race and gender in the th amendment. it states in section : all persons born or naturalized in the united states, and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the united states and of the state wherein they reside. no state shall make or enforce any law which shall abridge the privileges or immunities of citizens of the united states; nor shall any state deprive any person of life, liberty, or property, without due process of law; nor deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws. the th amendment was ratified in the immediate aftermath of the civil war on july , ; it was a direct echo of the gunfire in the battlefield for the emancipation of slavery in this land. after almost a century, the language of “all persons” resonates unmistakably with “all men are created equal” in the declaration of independence, signed in at pennsylvania state house. the th amendment granted citizenship to “all persons born or naturalized in the united states and subject to the jurisdiction thereof, are citizens of the united states and of the state wherein they reside”. recently freed former slaves were the main inten- ded audience and included in “all persons”. in addition, the amendment oversees and forbids states from denying any per- son’s “life, liberty or property, without due process of law” or to “deny to any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws”. once again, “life and liberty” coincides with “the unalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness” in the declaration of independence. laudably, the amendment granted the civil rights to african americans and recognized them as equal citizens in the constitution. in spite of the local states’ political maneuvering to defer african americans’ con- stitutional rights, the th amendment stands as the legal har- binger that foreshadowed the civil rights movement a century later. according to legal experts, the amendment is “the most commonly used—and frequently litigated—phrase in the amendment is ‘equal protection of the law’, which figures pro- minently in a wide variety of landmark cases”. this is one of the most cited amendment to enforce civil rights associated with race, gender, reproductive rights, affirmative actions. not only african-americans but all marginalized and dehumanized indi- viduals have a chance to defend themselves thanks to the law of equal protection in the th amendment. it sends a clear and loud message of racial equality. while section in the th amendment advocates and experiments interracial democracy by acknowledging african american rights with the clause “all persons born or naturalized in the united states”, it does not mention gender inclusion and equality. are women not part of “all persons?” section of the amendment, by particularly securing the male political repre- sentation and male citizens’ voting right, explicitly excludes women: representatives shall be apportioned among the several states according to their respective numbers, […] but when the right to vote at any election […] is denied to any of the male inhabitants of such state, being twenty-one years of age, and citizens of the united states, […] the basis of representation therein shall be reduced in the proportion which the number of such male citizens shall bear to the whole number of male citizens twenty-one years of age in such state. it limits the right to vote to “the male inhabitants of such state, being years of age, and citizens of the united states”. “male inhabitants” implies the inclusion of african-american males during the period of national healing. semantically, the document places african american men above (white) women in the suf- frage movement. if black men are above black women, it would probably be just “fine” and “logic”. now they are perceived above white women; white women were the universal representation of the gender at that time. section and section in the th amendment together set the stage where the racial equality col- lides with gender equality. as a result, women suffrage becomes contentious between race and gender. garth pauley quoted the argument of the stanton-anthony wing in the suffrage movement: …the cause of human freedom would be set back by an amendment that made it easier for the black man to vote while, by inserting the word male in the constitution for the first time, it made it harder than before for women to get the ballot (cited in pauley, , p. ). “the th amendment strained the relationship between white women and blacks” (pauley, , p. ). the male-vs.- female gender binary finds itself intersected with the racial binary of black-vs.-white. when african-american women stood in total absence, there was not such a gender equation as white women vs. black women, but a “chiasm” of white women vs. black men, in which two binaries on two different tracks crisscrossed: the gender and the race. this requires a gender/race joint approach to understanding both white female suffragists as well as black male suffragists, as they are situated in a chiasm crossing two different categories. it is worth noting the invisibility of african-american women during the second half of the nineteenth century. their absence was largely due to the double hurdle—gender and race—that they always had to encounter in order to enter into an equation and be counted in. they cross both gender and race categories, but neither gender nor race alone can represent a full identity of african-american women or any women of color for that matter. only when gender and race are in dialog and intersect, can they be defined as a full citizen and a full woman. a simple one-on- one binary in gender or in race reduces their representational complexity and subjugates them to either sexism or racism. therefore, they were/are the most vulnerable group in identity dismissal, when the dialog between gender and race is blocked. at the intersection of race and gender, the th amendment, in pursuit of racial equality, split race from gender and missed the link between the two. the split between gender and race become more evident when the th amendment was ratified on february , . marks its th anniversary, coinciding with women’s suffrage centennial. the text of the th amendment reads: section . the right of citizens of the united states to vote shall not be denied or abridged by the united states or by any state on account of race, color, or previous condition of servitude. humanities and social sciences communications | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - article humanities and social sciences communications | ( ) : | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - section . the congress shall have power to enforce this article by appropriate legislation. more explicit than ever, the amendment stresses an inclusive voting right that includes african-americans, as well as all citi- zens of color in broad stroke. however, like the th, the th amendment has no mention and no acknowledgement of women, which was perceived by the suffragists as dismissive and discriminatory. subsequently, the th amendment created a rock-paper-scissors situation that compelled suffragists to choose a position between gender or race, so that they could work towards their political conviction and personal priority, as fit and feasible. this sowed the seeds for the division of the women’s suffrage movement and of the polarization between gender and race in american culture. some white citizens and politicians who made peace with their conscience and supported black suffrage. “this is the negro’s hour” was a rallying cry of the period and “became the universal response to the women’s appeal”. anthony and stanton were deeply embittered by the “negro’s hour”; as they strongly believed that a white educated woman was superior, far more qualified to vote than an african american man. as staunch fighters for women’s rights, they refused to support the amendment and founded the national woman suffrage association (nwsa). on the other hand, lucy stone and henry blackwell, who were more inclined to universal suf- frage, supported the amendment and founded the american woman suffrage association (awsa). the emergence of the two suffrage organizations symbolically and ideologically dichot- omized race and gender. the split between the nwsa and the awsa brought to light the underlying divide—the color line—in the nation’s psyche: (white) women’s suffrage vs. black (men’s) suffrage. which one is the priority of emancipation, gender or race? the omission of gender in the th amendment helped already widespread sex- ism; this outraged white female suffragist leaders. to fight back sexism, “instead of arguing for suffrage in terms of equal rights” (mintz, , p. ), the representatives of the nwsa, and, later, of the national american women suffrage association, resorted to the ugly racism and xenophobia. by giving vote to (white) women, the leaders of these associations argued that “white, native born voters would” be guaranteed and “outnumbered immigrant and non-white voters” (mintz, , p. ). on a chiasm that crosses gender and race, neither sexism nor racism/ xenophobia can carry out any dialog but harbor bigotry and mutual exclusion, thus blocking the dialog between gender and race. the notion that the th amendment was regarded to put african americans’ voting rights before women’s indicated nineteenth-century men’s, black or white, representational power. white men represented all white individuals; in the same way, black men represented the entire black community. conversely, white women were omitted as non-entities in the same way that black women were erased. these were shared sexist “syndromes” across black and white races. prior to the th and the th amendments, in spite of deeply rooted sexism and racism, black men and white women had made some strategic alliance to win the vote. garth pauley made a point of an unprincipled but convenient relation between white female suffragists and black men with a quote from black feminist bell hooks: prior to white male support of suffrage for black men, white women activists had believed it would further their cause o ally themselves with black political activists, but when it seemed that black men might get the vote while they remained disfranchised, political solidarity with black people was forgotten and they urged white men to allow racial solidarity to overshadow their plans to support black male suffrage. (hooks, , p. , cited in pauley, , p. ) the th and th amendments made it “clear that the franchise would be granted only to african american men, many white suffragists spoke out against the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments” (pauley, , p. ). at this intersection, a one- to-one binary, whether white-vs.-black or men-vs.-women, does not hold; it blurs racial divide and deconstructs gender “logic”. if a white female suffragist holds onto racial solidarity, how would she combat her marginalized position by white males who had been the authority, the norm, and the standard to dehumanize her? if she embraces gender solidarity, how would she accept a black woman as her equal? should she side with white men or black women to win her fight for the vote? the one-to-one binary becomes destabilized and fluid in the intersection; it is no longer one-to-one but one-to-multiple or multiple-to-one or multiple-to-multiple. the fluidity of the multiplicity could have opened a purposeful dialog, but it did not happen. prioritizing race over gender by the two amendments fragments the coalition between white women and black men. anthony and stanton took a stand. in , they met with members of american equal rights association (aera), including the first mayor of boston wendell philips. when philips expressed his support for black suffrage and explained why he believed the two amendments offered what could prove to be the only chance for african-americans, “anthony objected vehemently” (pauley, , p. ). she raised up her right arm and proclaimed: “look at this, all of you. and hear me swear that i will cutoff this right arm of mine before i will ever work for or demand the ballot for the negro and not the woman”. clearly, in anthony’s vocabulary, “women” means white women only, and “the negro” signifies black men only. thus, her way of splitting gender and race straightforwardly hierarchizes gender above the race. anthony’s statement at the aera conven- tion vividly reflects the racism of her time, to which she was certainly not immune: the old anti-slavery school say women must stand back and wait until the negroes shall be recognized. but we say, if you will not give the whole loaf of suffrage to the entire people give it to the most intelligent first. if intelligence, justice, and morality are to have precedence in the government, let the question of woman be brought up first and that of the negro last. evidently, the universal noun “women” is reduced only to mean white women in anthony and her contemporaries, who were more intelligent, judicious and moral than “negroes”. in the late nineteenth century u.s., white race was widely considered superior to any other races, and therefore, (white) “women” are naturally superior to the “negroes”. the fight for the voting right turned out to be a competition between gender and race. the nwsa not only turned away from black suffrage, but also regarded african-americans taking away the chance for white women to win their vote. although many believed that both women suffrage and black suffrage were just and necessary, the constitution would only allow one social transformation at a time. groups that fall into both race and gender categories had no amendments nor social frames to define them and protect their rights. women of color who cross gender and race boundaries would struggle to figure out if they should fight for women’s voting rights or racial equality? african-american women and women of color in general have been historically boxed into race or gender, but never both. the simple binary boxing mirrors the sociological, cultural, and political “split” of gender and race, institutionalized by the th and the th amendments. at the article humanities and social sciences communications | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - humanities and social sciences communications | ( ) : | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - end of the reconstruction era, the rise of the ku klux klan and the reversal wave of interracial democracy wiped out the already faintly visible trace of african american women and women of color altogether from history. in the meantime, the (white) women’s suffrage movement was getting up steam and earning support nationwide. the th amendment, ratified on august , , finally granted american women the right to vote, ending almost a century of protest since ’s seneca falls convention. the th amendment, effective immediately in the same year as its ratification, is a landmark of the historic victory for (white) women. it defeated voting sexism and shook the u.s. culture at its core, but the core was not shaken hard enough to erase the color line and but continued to keep it intact. the th and th amendments heralded interracial democ- racy, granted citizens of color the defining and all-important right to vote, and assured them the constitutional protection. as much as the two documents intended to build racial equality, their scope and depth were severely limited as they were not designed to address the visceral color divide in the nation’s psyche. they left room for a retroactive surge of white supremacy in the late nineteenth century to undo the progressive ideal to heal and integrate the nation in the aftermath of the civil war. ironically, what blocked the dialog between gender and race is the very effort by the two amendments to cross the color line, but the effort was limited to a simple racial binary, dismissing a pluralistic chiasm across both race and gender. further, the cultural meaning of women or gender in the nineteenth century was white-centric. women of color found themselves in a no-man’s land, regarded as irrelevant to the landmark social transformation, whereas they should have been the catalyst of the dialog between gender and race. part —at the intersection: frederick douglass’ dialog between gender and race after having identified what blocked the dialog between gender and race, then, how should one engage in the dialog? four million slaves were freed with the union victory in the civil war in . despite the emancipation proclamation, the social and legal status of slaves stayed unchanged in day-to-day life and the slavery institution remained in full operation. integrating former slaves into the nation’s political and cultural life and bringing the former rebel southern states back with the union sparked the need for an urgent sociopolitical and cultural dialog, at a national level, with former slaves, as well as with former slave owners. as indicated previously, the reconstruction era ( – ) generated a set of new laws and policies towards national healing and interracial equality. the th and the th amendments paved the way for former slaves to participate in southern poli- tical life, as legal and equal citizens. for the first time the nation experimented an effort at federal level to attain a “black-and- white” interracial democracy. in that particular historic moment, the color line was eclipsed by the desire to reconstruct and reunify; the white world intersected with the black one, not as master-slave but as constitutional equals. however, the intersec- tion was highly unstable and fragile to be pushed around when the kkk and the force of white supremacy reversed the course that the th and th amendments were headed to. in less than a decade since the passage of the th amendment, the color line violently cut back to dichotomize the white and the black. racism continued to take root in both south and north. neither the civil war nor the reconstruction was able to stitch the wound that the color line had cut. under these complex and fluid circumstances, it was not surprising that stanton and anthony responded to the implied sexism in the th amendment with racist outrage. their prioritizing white women over black men in women’s suffrage movement not only alienated african americans but also reflected the volatile race relations in the post-civil war era. in the midst of the racism vented by the white suffragists that he admired, frederick douglass ( – ) took a different posi- tion; in doing so, he personified a dialog rather a diatribe at the intersection between race and gender. from a mixed racial heritage, frederick douglass was an intercultural insider—a staunch supporter for women’s suffrage, as well as for black suffrage. as a former slave, an abolitionist, and editor of the rochester north star, he was one of the few men present, together with elizabeth cady stanton and lucretia mott, at the seneca falls convention in july . it was a convention to champion women’s rights; the women present saw it as a public declaration to fight for women’s constitutional right to vote as full u.s. citizens. stanton drafted and presented “declaration of sentiments”, modeled on the declaration of independence; it described women’s grievances and demands. to parallel the struggles of the founding fathers, the “declaration of sentiments” summarized resolutions on women’s rights, including women’s suffrage. all were resolved but women’s suf- frage. in a patriarchal society like the nineteenth century u.s., a woman could not own property or make financial and repro- ductive decisions for themselves, and had no equal divorce, education and employment opportunities. the idea for them to vote was met with ridicule and hostility. it sounded abnormal and heretic, hardly appealing to the predominantly quake audience whose male attendees were dismissive of such an “unreasonable” demand. however, the african-american man, douglass, was standing by stanton’s side and defended women’s intellect, skills, and abilities to speak for herself and to stand up for herself. he described stanton’s document as “the grand movement for attaining the civil, social, political, and religious rights of women”. stanton declares women’s rights by asserting gender equality: we hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men and women are created equal; that they are endowed by their creator with certain inalienable rights; that among these are life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness; that to secure these rights governments are instituted, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed. women were part of a patriarchal society, oppressed and suppressed; they were stripped of gender-equal rights and therefore they were never full citizens in a democracy. this was a problem and a bitter irony of democracy. the declaration for- cefully argues that women be respected by the constitution as full citizens of the united states and be granted the same rights and privileges granted to her male fellow citizens. stanton’s declara- tion marked the beginning of the women’s rights movement in the country, laid groundwork for the suffrage movement, and galvanized american culture on an untrodden path to the passage of the th amendment. although douglass did not live to see the th amendment in place, he deeply understood the magnitude and the impact of the women’s suffrage movement, perhaps more than any man in his time. at the seneca falls convention, when the resolution of women’s suffrage was just about to be defeated, douglass asked for the floor and delivered a passionate and eloquent plea on behalf of women’s right to the elective franchise (foner, , p. ). his compelling words and persuasive power swayed the body into agreeing and adopting the resolution by a small margin. stanton found an unexpected supporter in a black man. to come to grips with douglass’ intersection of race and gender, let’s hear his own voice in the speech “the women’s suffrage movement”. given in april before the international council of women, in washington d.c. in that speech, after humanities and social sciences communications | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - article humanities and social sciences communications | ( ) : | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - years of the seneca falls convention, he reflected upon his role in women’s suffrage movement, “i come to this platform with unusual diffidence”. what is this “unusual” about? what enabled him to position women as men’s equals was not his “superior” male gender but his “inferior” african-american race. a mixed blood, an escaped slave, and a self-taught cultural thinker and writer, douglass has firsthand experience of humi- liation and dehumanization, and understands the existential need to be accepted and acknowledged as a dignified human being. he finds himself inside the mindsets of both the black and the white, the male and the female. uniquely capable of relating african- american’s marginalization to the gender marginalization of white woman, he sees clearly that along the course of the suffrage movement, race and gender, two seemingly separate identifiers, have to march on paralleled tracks, together. in between the entwined steps, there has to be a shared dialog on inclusion, equality, citizenship, and humanity. from his black’s vintage point, a mutually recognizable and relatable position is possible. in other words, he identifies his racial struggle with white women’s gender struggle, both equally deprived of the right to be a full citizen and a full human being. crossing a double boundary of race and gender, he stood up and defended white women in the same way in which he would defend himself and african- american citizens. “i say of her, as i say of the colored people, give her fair play, and hands off’” (douglass, ; foner (ed) , p. ), as such he carried on the fight on both racial and gender fronts. douglass’ position exemplifies an intersected dialog between gender and race. fully aware that he belongs to a different gender and a different race, from a doubled otherness, he becomes “a women’s rights man”, to be precise, a white women’s rights man. he declares in the same speech in , “this is an international council, not of men, but of women, and woman should have all the say in it. this is her day in court” (foner (ed) , p. ). douglass dismantles the gender binary of men vs. women and sided himself with women. at the same time, he also correlates the oppressed black race with the oppressed gender of the white race, thus demolishing the black-and-white racial binary. he sees a shared humanity undefinable by neither gender nor race, as it transcends beyond both. he asks men (white men) to relate to women by being quiet and listening to their voices as equals, i believe no man, however gifted with thought and speech, can voice the wrongs and present the demands of women with the skill and effect, with the power and authority of woman herself. … woman knows and feels her wrongs as man cannot know and feel them, and she also knows as well as he can know, what measures are needed to redress them. i grant all the claims at this point. she is her own best representative (douglass, ; foner (ed) , p. ). when douglass claims “her right to be and to do is as full, complete and perfect as the right of any man on earth” (douglass, ; foner, , p. ), he touches the quintessential amer- ican ideal of true equality. to him, women’s suffrage is not about a women vs. men but a gender-equality vs. gender-inequality movement; black suffrage is not about black vs. white, but a racial equality vs. racial inequality struggle. douglass has distilled these intersected paradigms from his own african-american and mixed racial combined experience, which had exposed him to many aspects of racial and social injustice as well as to the pos- sibility to live in between the black and the white without having to be boxed in. his paradigm suggests mobility and fluidity, and explains his “unusual” position of race-gender crossover to sup- port white women’s suffrage. in douglass’ world, gender and race are not mutually exclusive but organically related. he correlates gender and race: …it was a great thing for humane people to organize in opposition to slavery; but it was a much greater thing, in view of all the circumstances, for woman to organize herself in opposition to her exclusion from participation in government (douglass, ; foner (ed) , p. ) in contrast with stanton and anthony’s vitriolic racist rhetoric for the fear that black men would take away white women’s voting right, douglass presents a relational posture and a visionary engagement. the simple binary deepens the split between gender and race and blocks the dialog; the crossover “chiasm” connects gender and race and opens the dialog. dou- glass is gifted with a keen awareness of a shared framework by sexism and racism. he understands that the framework only allows the eye see the tangible and graspable reality in broad strokes and on the surface, not the intangible and nuanced inner world. the mental construct that perpetuates racism pivots on the skin color, not so much “the content of character” (in martin luther king’s term); the mental construct of sexism operates with a similar surface perception—the physical appearance and the biological make-up, devoid of intangible qualities. douglass’ ability to link race and gender comes from an insider’s view of an “inferior” racial, as well as a “superior” gender background. he cautions men the difference between open evils and hidden miseries of women’s oppression: the reason is obvious. war, intemperance and slavery are open, undisguised, palpable evils. the best feelings of human nature revolt at them. we could easily make men see the misery, the debasement, the terrible suffering caused by intemperance; we could easily make men see the desolation wrought by war and the hell-black horrors of chattel slavery; but the case was different in the movement for woman suffrage (douglass, ; foner (ed) , p. ) women’s rights movement in the united states did not start like a napoleonic war nor from a satanic event. on the contrary, it emerged from domestic “loveliness” and peacefulness (foner (ed) , p. ), where …everything in her condition was supposed to be lovely, just as it should be. she has no rights denied, no wrongs to redress. she herself along on the tide of life as her mother and grandmother had done before her (p. ) because of veiled evil and disguised dehumanization, women’s suffering became silent, virtuous, and ideal. many men in dou- glass’ time failed to recognize the why of women’s suffrage movement. by pointing out the different nature of evil and misery, douglass intends to create an “intersected” awareness of the intimacy between gender and race. he openly expressed his admiration for stanton: “mrs. stanton, with an earnestness that i shall never forget, unfolded her view on this woman question precisely as she had in this council” (foner (ed) , p. ). from a male and african-american perspective, douglass’ inti- mate understanding of stanton’s cause and mind defies any simple binary that dichotomizes: she [stanton] knew the ridicule, the rivalry, the criticism and the bitter aspersions which she and her co-laborers would have to meet and to endure. but she saw more clearly than most of us that the vital point to be made prominent, and the one that included all others, was the ballot, and she bravely said the word. it was not only necessary to break the silence of woman and make her voice heard, but she must have a clear, palpable and comprehensive measure set before her, one worthy of her highest ambition and her best article humanities and social sciences communications | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - humanities and social sciences communications | ( ) : | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - exertions, and hence the ballot was brought to the front (p. ). stanton’s suffering, humiliation, rivalry and criticism are relatable to what douglass has experienced in his fight for racial equality; her focus and courage echoes his; her ambition to transform culture mirrors his own. instead of being defined by gender or race, douglass chooses something bigger than these identifiers: when i ran away form slavery, it was for myself; when i advocated emancipation, it was for my people; but when i stood up for the rights of woman, self was out of the question, and i found a little nobility in the act (p. ). what he stands for is a pure human and humanistic spirit devoid of colors and shapes, outside the bounds of gender and race. with a clear consciousness that he represents something much larger that his own life, douglass is convinced that the cause that stanton and anthony fight for is also much larger than any individual’s life and more enduring than the historic moment. galvanized by spirituality, douglass’ dialog between gender and race takes place. however, the dialog is blocked again due to race tensions. there is a bitter color line between douglass and stanton. stanton prioritizes (white) women’s “wealth, education, and refinement”, and ridicules black and immigrants’ “pauperism, ignorance, and degradation” (griffith, , p. ), they are “’sambo’ walk[ing] into the kingdom” of the right to vote (kern, , p. ). she suggests that non-wasp voters would negatively affect the political system and erode american values (griffith, , p. ). therefore, she calls for “an educated suffrage” (baker, , pp. ), which helps justify literacy test in later years to exclude african american voters. stanton’s racism is clearly intended to cut a bleeding wound between race and gender, so that gender (white women) can be placed over race (black men). douglass publicly disagreed with stanton and anthony’s priority of “whiteness” in the name of gender equality. this leads critics to depict doulgass as an african-american man who “naturally” weighs race over gender, thus the exact opposite of stanton and anthony. such an approach to douglass may be “neat” and “fit” in a racial dichotomy, but falls out what douglass represents—a human spirit, not meant to be defined by black or white, gender or race. he is in dialog with both: …[women] is the victim of abuse, to be sure, but it cannot be pretended i think that her cause is as urgent as ours (black suffrage). …the principal is: that no negro shall be enfranchised while woman is not. now in considering that white men have been enfranchised always, and colored men not, the conduct of these white women, whose husbands, fathers, and brothers are voters, does not seem generous (douglass, foner (ed) , pp. – ) what differentiates douglass from stanton and anthony is the ability to go beyond a simple binary and engage crossover chiasms. at various intersections, douglass integrates black and white, gender and race; trapped by a single one-to-one binary, stanton and anthony wage anti-sexist campaign with racist rhetoric. while all three shared the same cause to attain the american ideal of freedom and equality, they are separated by the color line. one side of the line is stuck with the surface differences between race and gender and regards them as mutually exclusive. the other side discerns the underlying similarities and con- sistencies between race and gender, and connects and intersects them organically. stanton and anthony’s vitriolic intolerance towards black suffrage contrasts with douglass’ unwavering support for women’s rights and suffrage. fast forwarding to the suffrage centennial, no one wants to “tarnish” iconic figures like stanton and anthony. however, what makes them great is not their perfection but their humanity. when they broke with their abolitionist backgrounds after the civil war to oppose the th and th amendments, they showed fear, anger, territorial nature, prejudice, a shifting sense of white superiority, and vulnerability. they pioneered abolition movement but blocked the dialog between gender and race that douglass intended. they were full of self-contra- dictions, humanly and understandably. by acknowledging stan- ton and anthony’s extraordinariness while allowing them to be human with flaws and self-contradictions, many individuals across genders and races can have a human face to relate to. by celebrating an african american man, douglass, at the cen- tennial, we open a new modality of race as part of gender cele- bration. this dialog between gender and race needs to take place in . part —the legacy of the gender/race dialog: the double consciousness women’s suffrage centennial is an occasion to examine how douglass’ intersected dialog between race and gender has evolved to become cultural consciousness. it also presents a historic moment for an in-depth look at how the double consciousness has sustained women and men of color in their survival and coexistence in a multicultural and multiracial society during and beyond the suffrage movement. when gender diversity merges with racial diversity, an individual of color finds oneself in a landscape made for a pluralistic identity and “camouflage” skills. s/he is prone to develop a set of instinctive skills to “camouflage” for self-preservation and self-protection in a terrain where his/her skin color stands out, exposed to danger. “camouflaging” blends one in the background and is capable of multiplicity and simul- taneity. equipped with the ability to “camouflage” culturally, douglass, while crossing his race and gender, blended himself with white female suffragists, empathized with women’s suffrage and defended it as his own cause. at the dawn of the twentieth century, the cultural camoufla- ging was theorized with the publication of the souls of the black folk in by w.e.b. dubois ( – ). like douglass, dubois is also from mixed blood and heritages, leading a per- sonal, intellectual, and cultural life in between different worlds. throughout the book, the term “double consciousness” is recurrently coined to describe the existential nature and culture of african americans. to be fit and accepted in the white society, they must develop two mindsets, two fields of vision, two lan- guages, two perceptive modes, and two ways of living, that is, self-knowledge and the knowledge of being perceived. dubois uses the metaphor of a transparent veil that allows a double perception from both sides so the viewer is viewed at the same time: after the egyptians and indian, the greek and roman, the teuton and mongolian, the negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this american world,—a world with yields him no true self- consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other world. it is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of the others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a world that looks on in amused contempt and pity. one ever feels his twoness,—an american, a negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn sunder (dubois, [ ] , pp. – ). humanities and social sciences communications | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - article humanities and social sciences communications | ( ) : | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - douglass’ intersected dialog of race and gender would have not been possible without dubois’ “doubleness”. a black and a white at once, a feminist and an antiracist at once, he dreamed an american dream of a just and democratic society for women and black folks. douglass had already exemplified the double con- sciousness half a century ago before the term was coined by dubois. unlike a fixed and centralized cultural position held by racism or sexism, individuals like douglass and dubois leap back and forth in multiple spaces of race and gender, with mobility and malleability enabled by the double consciousness. their cultural indeterminacy sets them on constant move and constant search for a home in the american narrative. neither douglass nor dubois represents or falls into one single definition; they are self- willed and self-invented, caught between being and becoming. when it comes to male support for women’s suffrage move- ment, valethia watkins accurately points out: douglass “was arguably the highest profile man of any race consistently involved in the suffrage movement, and he was unwavering in his advocacy of voting rights for women from the inception of the organized movement in the united states in until his death in (watkins, , p. ) dubois was also “a woman’s rights man” in the tradition of frederick douglass“ (watkins, , p. ). almost a mirror image of douglass, dubois continues the intersected dialog between race and gender with the same cultural agility and the same spirit that set him free from the “curse” of “the color line”, another term repeatedly used in his the souls of the blake folk. he assimilates invisibility and vulnerability in both black people and white women and declares in douglassian manner: i am resolved to be ready at all times and in all places to bear witness with pen, voice, money and deed against… the wrong disenfranchisement for race or sex… (wilson, , pp. – , cited in watkins, , p. ) the dialog between gender and race embodies the double consciousness and crosses the color line “through the revelation of the other world” (dubois, , p. ). it is not defined by our biological make-up but our mental horizon. in the dialog, the observer is observed in action. the douglass/dubois double consciousness sinks into not only the souls of the black folk but all citizens, men and women, of color. sigma delta theta—the only organization that black women took part in—carried the dialog of gender and race in women’s suffrage movement on a national stage in ’s women’s suf- frage parade. suffrage (white) leader alice paul organized women marching along the pennsylvania avenue in washington d.c. on monday, march , , one day before the th pre- sident woodrow wilson’s inauguration. at the heart of the u.s. government, the women were campaigning for the th amendment guaranteeing women the right to vote (ratified in ). the brave women did it in the face of police’s brutality; many of them were insulted, spat upon and physically injured. what made the event extraordinary was not only white women’s courage and bravery, but also black women’s participation toge- ther with their white sisters. nonetheless, the white-and-black togetherness a la douglass in no way was a natural come-together but a hard-fought one. in her washington post article “despite the tremendous risk, african american women marched for suffrage, too”, michelle bernard ( ) detailed the participation of delta sigma theta sorority: marching against the status quo was not easy for white women, but it was even more difficult for african american women because of the racist sentiment of the day, as well as white suffragists who did not favor suffrage for black women. with a double consciousness, the african-american women had to fight for racial equality before gender equality in order to be part of the procession. the racist backlash as a reaction towards the th amendment lingered on in the women suffrage parade. alice paul did not like a mixed black-and-white women parade; she preferred an only white parade. she confided her fears to a sympathetic editor: “as far as i can see, we must have a white procession, or a negro procession, or no procession at all”. other white suffragists could not either accept black women, side by side, as equals in their fight for women’s rights. the white suffragists’ feminism was vitiated by racism in a reversed double consciousness. black women’s right to vote was not considered on an equal footing with white women’s; black women did not belong to the cause of justice championed by white women, who would not comprise their racial superiority for gender equality. paul’s “negro-exclusion” deepened the split between race and gender. she insisted “that the disenfranchisement of black woman was a race, not sex, matter” (dubois, , p. ), and was “uninterested in a racially inclusive women’s enfranchisement” (p. ). the women’s suffrage movement thus drew again the color line: white vs. black. with white women as gender and black women as race, the dialog between the two was again stagnated. white sisters’ racism proved without failing that not all women were born equal in the early twentieth century america. none- theless, black suffragists marched on for both gender and racial equality. bernard goes on to describe: so, despite the fact that the right to vote was no less important to black women than it was to black men and white women, african american women were told to march at the back of the parade with a black procession. despite all of this, the founders of delta sigma theta sorority marched. it was the only african american women’s organization to participate. from the back of the parade—a visual testament to racism, black suffragists led by mary church terrell marched on and sent a message of racial equality to the front, in the same struggle for gender equality. delta sigma theta’s presence showed, although in a compromised way, gender unity could overweigh racism and defeat sexism, not otherwise as preferred by some of their white sisters. in spite of all, women, black and white, although sepa- rately, traveled across the country anyway to make their voices heard and showed what is to be an american woman to win gender equality. in action, the dialog between gender and race was carried out by delta sigma theta sorority. it heightened the awareness that they were “the only group in this country that has two such huge obstacles to surmount… sex and race”, because of the color of their skin. a race-gender double consciousness in the line of douglass and dubois thus lived on. in black women’s suffrage, mary church terrell ( – ) emerged as a pivotal dialog participant on gender and race. like douglass and dubois, terrell is from a mixed ancestry. a daughter of former slaves, then becoming a well-to-do family, she has financial means, coupled with a well-educated background. in the suffragist circles of the national american woman suffrage association (nawsa)—the integration of nwsa and awsa, terrell’s path crosses with susan b. anthony’s. they developed a “delightful, helpful friendship” (adams and keene, , p. ), which lasted until anthony’s death in . as discussed in part , early suffragists had hoped to link gender equality and racial justice because of the abolitionist background of leaders like article humanities and social sciences communications | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - humanities and social sciences communications | ( ) : | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - stanton and anthony. however, the th and the th amend- ments created a split between race and gender, and forced a rift/ competition between women’s rights and blacks’ rights. towards the later years of anthony’s life, her goal of women’s suffrage “was eclipsed by a near-universal racism in the united states” (wheeler, , p. ). the racism within the nawsa did not allow black women to create their own chapter with the organi- zation. this propelled terrell to found an independent organi- zation in for black women to fight for both gender and race —the national association of colored women. for the first time in history, african-american women found an institutional space for their voice and fight. terrell served as its first national pre- sident. african-american women’s disenfranchisement was a main issue for the association to tackle. as one of the few women of color in the (white) women’s suffrage circle, terrell acted as de facto african-american women’s representative and an outside trailblazer in the white world. well versed and trained, terrell, like douglass and dubois, gave numerous speeches and did numerous writings. among them, “the progress of colored women”, “what it means to be colored in the capital of the u.s.”, “in union there is strength”, and “a colored woman in a white world” caught public attention and got her invited back to the anwsa. thus, she set a renewed stage for a continued dialog between gender and race. in this dialog, she confessed her racial and cultural ambiguity, personal struggles as an african- american woman, and her way to link both worlds by using her white-passing “camouflaging” skills. in activism and writing, terrell is a female version of douglass’ intersection and dubois’ double consciousness in gender and race. conclusion the th and th amendments granted african american men the right to vote but not women, and unwittingly created tension between gender and race. the th amendment granted women’s voting right but with long deferred implementation for women of color. these landmark constitutional measures have indeed reshuffled the deck but have never erased the visceral and indestructible color line in our culture. the civil war, recon- struction, the large-scale capitalism and the unstoppable indus- trialism haven shaken our universe and shattered the ground of sexism and racism. in the present global age and during this particular moment of the trump era and the black lives matter movement, the color line finds an internalized and systemic space, and perpetuates the division from within and opens the wounds wrapped with the “make america great again” banner. in a “browner” and “flatter” america in , a compartmenta- lized view on the suffrage centennial and a one-sided approach to its iconic heroes and protagonists further dislink gender and race. as of now, the celebration of the centennial of women’s suffrage bears relevance still largely to a specific group—the wasp and proud women. then, should women of color, men of color, and all historically underrepresented groups be celebrating the cen- tennial with the same pride and the same sense of achievement? the split between gender and race remains an open-ended topic for dialog if promises to be a more integrated society and a more inclusive culture. pivoting on the double consciousness, frederick douglass, w. e.b. dubois, mary church terrell have construed and sustained an intersected dialog between race and gender. if there is a contemporary carrier of the double consciousness, simon gikandi directs our attention to president barack obama. “in this regard, obama is probably the quintessential subject of what w.e. b. du bois famously described as ‘double consciousness’” (gikandi, , p. ). president obama, our nation’s first african-american commander in chief also comes from a mixed racial background and multicultural upbringing. unlike any other white president, he had to endure cultural distrust and racial humiliation targeted by the “birthers”, because he is on the other side of the color line and thus his citizenship was questioned. “it is ironic that in an age that celebrates cosmopolitanism and rootlessness, obama is vulnerable simply because he can claim to belong to different worlds, cultures, and traditions” (gikandi, , p. ). between the highest office in the land and his historically discriminated race, obama has to rely on the double consciousness to negotiate his location and dispel his dislocation in the american narrative. like douglass, dubois, and terrell, obama is an insider of both black and white culture circles and operates with a double mindset. then, the first african american first lady michelle obama faces a similar double consciousness in her dialog of gender and race to deal with vitriolic racism towards her persona and sexism towards her professional identity. in our postmodern era, the double consciousness does not only pertain to politicians and presidents, but it also has been making inroads to the still-defining field of cultural studies. kimberlé crenshaw is one of the earliest theoreticians on race/gender intersectionality. she questioned the convenient binaries of black/ white, male/female, and theorized the “multidimensionality of black women’s experience” (crenshaw, p. ) in her paper, written for the university of chicago legal forum, “demargi- nalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics”. her entire scholarship consistently argues about a modern-day double consciousness—that the experience of being a black woman cannot be understood in terms of being black and of being a woman considered independently, but must include the interactions between the two, as they “diverge from the standard” and “present some sort of hybrid claim” (p. ). lawmakers are not quite equipped with such cultural sophisti- cation and nuances yet, in crenshaw’s view. back to the “browner” and “flatter” america in , the position of african american women opens a broader question: does women’s suffrage centennial belong to women of color in other racial groups? is it another reminder of the double oppression of sexism and racism? chinese-american women had never been considered citizens on equal terms with white women either; they just started their fight for racial justice with the repeal of the chinese exclusion act in , when they were allowed to become citizens to enjoy the voting right. women’s suffrage had been one of the remotest topics for their citizenship and con- stitutional rights. the chinese exclusion act, implemented in , spurred later the passage of the immigration act of to effectively ban all immigrants from asia. japanese, hindu and east indians, middle easterners were deemed to be exotic and unfit groups for a wasp dominated nation and heresies for american culture. today, do asian-american women own women suffrage centennial? do they have a comparable victory to celebrate like wasp women? then, native american women are another group of ambiguity. the th amendment, passed in , granted all u.s. citizens the right to vote regardless of race, but native americans were prevented from participating in elections because the constitution left it up to the states to decide who has the right to vote. native american men and women had endured brutality, segregation, and discrimination not unlike african-americans. after the passage of the indian citi- zenship act, it would still take over years for all states to allow native americans to vote. native american women had long been denied citizenship prior to when white women became equal citizens like their male counterparts. women from these racial groups had been systematically denied the citizenship that grants the right to vote; they had to fight against racism first humanities and social sciences communications | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - article humanities and social sciences communications | ( ) : | https://doi.org/ . /s - - - before they could fight against sexism. mexican/hispanic- american women had to go through a triple struggle in order to be franchised—racial, gender, and linguistic barriers. the lin- guistic barrier for hispanic voters did resonate with the literacy test that african americans and underprivileged white citizens had had to take in order to be eligible to vote. for women of color, being franchised was more than a basic civil right; it meant an acknowledgement of her gender and race as a full human being. the african-american men and women’s fight culminated in the civil rights movement of the s and s, which led to landmark legislation that transformed american voting rights. together with african-americans, other groups and individuals of color gradually gained their full citizenship by participating in elections. in the long journey of women’s suffrage, while working in tandem, african americans set up a cultural model for other minority groups, men and women of color, to emulate in their struggles for racial and gender equality. in a “browner” and “flatter” america in , when racial and gender diversity collides with sexist and racist establishments, the “whiter” and “vertical” america still reckons with perpetual division and exclusion, so much so that white nationalism, nati- vism, and right-wing populism have reemerged in an attempt to pull the country back to the antebellum era, so that they can “make america great again”. it has become increasingly difficult to ignore the attempt to restore a wasp centered america, to “purify” american values, and to guard racial homogeneity. the attempt stokes fear, widens division, and fuels hatred and intol- erance. george floyd’s death is the latest of a long line of racial injustice. during women’s suffrage centennial, a cultural war has ensued while a new awakening to the american ideal of equality is on the horizon. in a context like this, singing a cen- tennial celebratory symphony highlights the heroic and extra- ordinary side of the story and makes it “standardized” and “perfect”. this approach runs the risk of creating a female version of anglo-centrism and wasp-centrism within twenty-first cen- tury feminism. a one-sided celebration also reduces suffragists’ humanity to a single-dimensional abstraction and denies their flesh-and-blood complexities. at the intersection of gender and race, the double consciousness however gives fluid and relatable meanings to the words “women” and “american women”, and resonates with women across races and cultures. nowadays in the nation’s political life, female mayors, cabinet secretaries, mem- bers of congress and governors—black, white, latina, asian, american indian, and of all religions—are a fact of life. all of the changes and transformation occurred because of the brave women, black, brown and white, who have fought for their constitutional citizenship before and after the passage of the th amendment. let them be at the centennial table for a dialog. received: december ; accepted: july ; notes while writing this article, katy morris, research coordinator at the massachusetts historical society (mhs) invited me to visit the exhibition “can she do it”- massachusetts debates a woman’s right to vote at the mhs (april –sept , ). i also had conversations with dr. kanisorn wongsrichanalai, director of research at the mhs on the subject. these firsthand exposures had validating effect on the article’s approaches and arguments. catalyst, quick take: women of color in the united states (november , ). as of november , catalyst, quick take indicates that white women is . %, african- american . %, asian-american . % and hispanic women . %. https://www. catalyst.org/research/women-of-color-in-the-united-states/. accessed on of october, . this question reminds one of frederick douglass’ speech “what to the slave is the fourth of july” given in . lgbtq is a postmodern term and an acronym for lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer or questioning. the term carries a message of inclusion and equity. from legal information institute, cornell law school. amendment xiv, section https://www.law.cornell.edu/constitution/amendmentxiv. ibid. ibid. ibid. fourteenth amendment, u.s constitution. https://constitution.findlaw.com/ amendment .html. this is a quote from garth pauley, “w.e.b. du bois on woman suffrage”, p. . the primary source 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dialog between gender and race 	part —the legacy of the gender/race dialog: the double consciousness 	conclusion 	references 	references 	competing interests 	additional information commentary volume (special issue) https://doi.org/ . /sajs. / july #blacklivesmatter, even in research: a call to researchers to take a knee south africa, the united states, and the world are facing a new revolution, one that seeks to bring to the fore the plight of african people who have endured years of racism, slavery and unfair discrimination. in the united states, the #blacklivesmatter movement has been at the forefront of voices that have raised concerns about the killing of african americans in what is perceived as racially motivated killings. recently, a wave of anti-racism protests spread around the world following the death of george floyd. ‘taking a knee’ has subsequently become a global symbolic gesture against racism. this gesture is associated with martin luther king jr, who 'took the knee' to pray with anti-racism protesters in selma, alabama, in , . in , south african students across the nation participated in #rhodesmustfall and #feesmustfall protests , . in these protests, students demanded, among other things, the removal of cecil rhodes’ statue from a university campus and the africanization of the curriculum. hlophe (p ) argues that the #rhodesmustfall and #feesmustfall protests were actually about a need to ‘close the gap between post-apartheid south africa's principles and its reality.’ as a consequence of these protests, interest in studies exploring strategies for decolonizing the curriculum has grown rapidly. in fact, ‘it is not uncommon to hear speakers refer, almost casually, to the need to 'decolonize our schools,' or use 'decolonizing methods,' or 'decolonize student thinking.' (p ). however, missing in these discourses is the need to decolonize research. it would appear as though #blacklivesmatter is only reserved for socio-political spaces. this apparent disconnection of science from socio-political issues is well captured by hodson (p ) who posits that ‘regrettably, science is often portrayed as the de- personalized and disinterested pursuit of objective truth, independent of the society in which it is practiced and untouched by ordinary human emotions, values, and conventions.’ however, garcía and sharif warn that racism may manifest through institutional policies and societal norms, and calls for research that is based on principles of social justice. racial undertones in research in the south african context, racism and decolonization are emotive subjects given the colonial and apartheid history of the country. nevertheless, despite this, recent research publications have raised concerns in the media regarding the extent to which researchers are sensitive to issues of racism. for example, nattrass (p ) published a commentary that sought to provide an insight into ‘why do conservation biology, zoology, and the other biological sciences subjects struggle to attract black south african author: lindelani mnguni affiliation: department of science and technology education, university of south africa, pretoria, south africa correspondence to: lindelani mnguni email: mngunle@unisa.ac.za how to cite: mnguni l. #blacklivesmatter, even in research: a call to researchers to take a knee. s afr j sci. ; (special issue), art. # , pages. https://doi.org/ . / sajs. / article includes: ☐ peer review ☐ supplementary material keywords: decolonization, curriculum, research published: july © . the author(s). published under a creative commons attribution licence. https://doi.org/ . /sajs. / https://doi.org/ . /sajs. / www.sajs.co.za https://www.sajs.co.za/associationsmemberships https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /sajs. / &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - https://orcid.org/ - - - page of commentary volume (special issue) https://doi.org/ . /sajs. / july students?’ in this controversial paper, from which her institution, distanced itself , nattrass (p ) suggests that ‘materialist values and aspirations (pertaining to occupation and income) as well as experience with pets and attitudes towards wildlife’ may be the reason why black students are less likely to consider studying biological sciences. referring to the #rhodesmustfall and #feesmustfall protests as the ‘‘fallists' protests’, she argues that ‘given the ‘fallist’ protests of / , another possibility is that wildlife conservation itself might be regarded as colonial, and students might perceive a trade- off between social justice and conservation’ (p ). de villiers (p ) reports that nattrass’ institution has since launched an investigation into ‘methodological and conceptual flaws’ in nattrass’ publication, which apparently is ‘constructed on unexamined assumptions about what black people think, feel, aspire to, and are capable of’. a similarly controversial paper was published in , where nieuwoudt et al. sought to assess ‘the cognitive function and its association with age and education in a sample of young and middle-aged colored south african women’ . these scholars made the following claims: • ‘the colored community is, in terms of social class, considered the most homogenous group in south africa and are generally described as a poor, lower working-class community’.(p ) • cognitive performance is impacted by several factors, including… sex, educational attainment, and ethnicity’(p ). • previous research has ‘revealed lower cognitive function scores, particularly in black african and colored participants’(p ) • previous research has shown that ‘colored and black african older adults achieved worse cognitive scores than white and indian/asian older adults’(p ). • ‘having higher education, being white or indian/asian, increased wealth, being married and in good health was associated with improved cognitive functioning’(p ). the researchers (p ) state that ‘all participants were informed of the purpose and procedures of the study and gave written consent to participate.’ however, this is the same argument that is often submitted by the beneficiaries of colonial settlers, who argue, to this day, that colonisation was constitutional and legal, and therefore colonial settler beneficiaries should not return the land to the indigenous people . following a global outcry about its underlying racial undertone, nieuwoudt et al.’s paper was retracted by the journal editors. it is noteworthy that even dr. james d. watson, who is heralded as a pioneer in modern genetics for his work on dna, was called to order following his ‘unsubstantiated and reckless personal opinions’ (p ), which suggested that blacks were intellectually inferior to whites . watson, who later apologized, had stated that he was ‘inherently gloomy about the prospect of africa’ because ‘all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours, whereas all the testing says, not really’ (p ). responding to these comments, the cold spring harbor laboratory stated that ‘dr. watson’s statements are reprehensible, unsupported by science, and in no way represent the views of cshl, its trustees, faculty, staff, or students. the laboratory condemns the misuse of science to justify prejudice’ (p ). asongu and kodila-tedika also published a controversial paper, in which they ‘postulate and justify a hypothesis that countries which are endowed with higher cognitive ability are more likely to experience lower levels of slave exports probably due to relatively better abilities to organize, corporate, oversee and confront slave vendors’ (p ). these researchers further state that their ‘study has assumed that most types of intelligences are captured by the iq. hence, the reasoning- orientation and ‘problem-solving’ inclination underlying the iq can be leveraged to avoid capture during slave trade’ (p ). page of commentary volume (special issue) https://doi.org/ . /sajs. / july sugar-coating decolonization in light of the examples above, i argue that while the interest in #blacklivesmatter, #rhodesmustfall, #feesmustfall, and decolonization of the curriculum is welcomed, researchers should not ignore the complexity of racism and the concept of decolonization. as such, scholars need not be naïve to the sugar-coated narrative given to the concept of decolonization. tuck and yang (p ) caution against ‘the ease with which the language of decolonization has been superficially adopted into education and other social sciences, supplanting prior ways of talking about social justice, critical methodologies, or approaches which decenter settler perspectives.’ tuck and yang (p ) further argue that ‘settler scholars swap out prior civil and human rights-based terms, seemingly to signal both an awareness of the significance of indigenous and decolonizing theorizations of schooling and educational research, and to include indigenous peoples on the list of considerations - as an additional special (ethnic) group or class.’ winberg and winberg (p ) suggest that ‘the process of decolonization does not reject established fundamental knowledge as the perversions of euro-centric thought but rather looks at the nature of the curriculum and critically engages in establishing potentially different approaches to the way this knowledge is produced or applied, looking at the process of learning as a whole.’ this view goes against tuck, and yang (p ) who state that ‘decolonize (a verb) and decolonization (a noun) cannot easily be grafted onto pre-existing discourses/ frameworks, even if they are critical, even if they are anti-racist, even if they are justice frameworks. the easy absorption, adoption, and transposing of decolonization is yet another form of settler appropriation’. this settler appropriation is evident in that some scholars suggest that ‘educators involved in the decolonization of a curriculum should thus be mindful of implementing changes that would lead to improvement, not to degrading, the resultant curriculum’ (p ). in line with tuck and yang's views, i argue that decolonization cannot and should not be domesticated as an ‘improvement’ of a colonized curriculum, including colonized institutions of higher learning. instead, it should be about deconstructing the colonized curriculum and reconstructing a new decolonized curriculum, one informed by research that is based on social justice principles. in , nelson mandela, a south african liberation hero, argued that ‘education is the most powerful weapon you can use to change the world’ . in line with this, the south african education system has already undergone various curriculum reforms , . underlying these reforms has been the need to introduce a decolonized curriculum that fosters citizenship. citizenship education suggests that education should aim to educate children, from early childhood, to become clear-thinking and enlightened citizens who participate in the reconstruction and empowerment of the society . if citizenship education is to be realized, research and curriculum designers should acknowledge and eliminate pseudo-science, which is perpetuating the narration that one race is superior to another. according to tuck and gaztambide- fernández , settler colonialism as a process rather than an event refers to the formation of colonies where the colonizer makes himself the arbiter of citizenship, civility, and knowing. this means decolonization of the curriculum and research would require the restoration of citizenship, civility, and knowledge back to the indigenous people. this is because colonization partly sought to ‘invent man’ through pseudo-science that justified the destruction of indigenous life and knowledge systems. this was done partly through a curriculum that adopted ‘fort pedagogy’ which is characterized by ‘an insistence that everyone must be brought inside and become like the insiders, or they will be eliminated. the fort teaches us that outsiders must be either incorporated or excluded, in order for development to occur in the desired page of commentary volume (special issue) https://doi.org/ . /sajs. / july ways’ (p ). the #blacklivesmatter, #rhodesmustfall, and #feesmustfall activists are partly fighting against this ‘fort pedagogy’ in which african people are treated differently to others. sadly, some research seems to promote this ‘fort pedagogy’ by implying that black people are not equal to others. conclusion in light of the recent anti-racism developments, therefore, i believe that institutions of higher education, including researchers, should ‘take a knee’ and reflect on their perceptions of racism and social justice. researchers, including editors and reviewers, must ask themselves: • to what extent do their research embrace social justice? • to what extent are institutions of research using fort pedagogy, which systematically promotes the exclusion of others? in responding to these questions, researchers cannot afford to sugar-coat the concept of decolonization, by continuing to produce research that is seen to imply that one race is better than another. it is time for researchers to take a knee, because black lives matter, even in research. references . abedi m. martin luther king jr. took a knee in . here’s a history of the powerful pose. the global news. . 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- -z https://doi.org/ . /s % - - -z http://journal.jctonline.org/index.php/jct/article/view/ http://journal.jctonline.org/index.php/jct/article/view/ becoming political: spinoza’s vital republicanism and the democratic power of judgement review becoming political: spinoza’s vital republicanism and the democratic power of judgement christopher skeaff university of chicago press, chicago and london, , xii+ pp., isbn: - - - - contemporary political theory ( ) , s –s . https://doi.org/ . /s - - -z; published online january christopher skeaff’s becoming political aspires simultaneously to offer a new interpretation of spinoza’s political philosophy, and to engage with contemporary political theory. substantively, the book articulates and defends an ideal of democratic politics whereby the state is open to its own reconstitution and internal transformation. such an ideal stands opposed to the tendency in democratic theory and practice to try to fix the bounds of democracy: whether through a sovereigntist view of politics (whereby democracy just means implementing the sovereign decision of the democratic assembly) or a moral view of politics (whereby philosophers attempt to define and codify in advance the norms of appropriate democratic decision- making). on my reading, skeaff envisions a sovereign state making laws, but he proposes that the sovereign’s rule must exist in an agonistic relation with citizens debating, contesting, reformulating, and resisting those same laws. citizen judgment challenges both specific laws, but also and more importantly it challenges meta-level considerations about what counts as fair game for political debate and who belongs in the political community. in other words, citizen judgment dynamically regulates the very boundaries of politics: hence, the book’s title becoming political. this vision is ‘agonistic’ both insofar as it refuses to lay down any definitive principles or norms of political life, and also insofar as it refuses to resolve the ongoing contestation between the state and the populace in favour of one side or the other. it may be possible to some degree for a sovereign state to shut down such citizen judgment, but it is normatively undesirable for it to do so. skeaff’s agonistic vision becomes clear incrementally across the book’s five chapters. successive chapters draw out this same agonistic structure within different contexts of spinoza’s political corpus. for instance, chapter interprets � springer nature limited. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s www.palgrave.com/journals spinoza’s famous advocacy of a right to philosophise in terms of the interaction between the sovereign’s ‘jurisdiction’ (its right to proclaim laws) and citizens’ ‘jurisprudence’ (their popular contestation of laws). chapter interprets spinoza’s analysis of the dynamics of human affect in terms of the interplay between our mimetic desire for sameness (and the hope for harmony that it expresses) and the more ethical and rational desire for alliance across difference (even as it brings with it ineradicable conflict). a similar structure is at play in chapter ’s contrast between rule by law and rule of law, chapter ’s contrast between theology supporting sovereignty and theology transforming sovereignty, and chapter ’s contrast between democracy as popular rule versus democracy as equal empow- erment expressed through dissent to rule. in putting forward such an ideal of politics, skeaff builds on several diverse existing traditions of politics focused on non-domination: the italian biopolitical tradition (negri), the analytic republican tradition (pettit), and the tradition taking judgment as politics’ most distinctive term (arendt). i take it that the book’s primary contribution for contemporary political theory is a positive effort to synthesise and enrich the ideas of these other thinkers that skeaff finds appealing. but what is the deficiency to be addressed? what precisely does spinoza offer to this already dense theoretical landscape? in skeaff’s hands, spinoza’s two key conceptual contributions are ‘vital republicanism’ and ‘democratic judgment’. neither of these are terms explicitly used by spinoza. rather, they are skeaff’s original efforts to organise and systematise the structure of spinoza’s political thought. the first, ‘vital republi- canism’, points towards a conception of political life as having its own immanent norms; the second, ‘democratic judgment’, specifies the conditions under which those immanent norms find their fullest expression. let me venture to make explicit how these two concepts might address deficiencies in the traditions of non-domination mentioned above. one issue for an agonistic conception of politics is to explain why the openness of a state to contestation is necessarily good. what guarantee is there that the contestation is not a mere conflict of brute power, against which it would be better to put in place protections and limitations? why is political ‘agonism’ desirable and not something that we should seek to overcome? or in more cognitive terms, why should ‘judgment’ be prioritised over determinate norms; how does the appeal to judgment avoid being subjective or arbitrary? it is against such fundamental skepticism that skeaff’s deployment of spinoza’s political philosophy is fruitful. skeaff appeals to spinoza’s idea of immanent normativity, whereby political life has a non-arbitrary normative grain, which nonetheless cannot be subsumed under a universal or fixed rule. specifically, each human being has their own individual ingenium or complexion (the characteristic motions of their concrete embodied existence), for which certain things are useful (utile) and others thwarting. for spinoza, virtue is nothing other than expressing and developing this individual nature, as we all strive review � springer nature limited. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s s to do to the best of our ability, and do better in proportion as we improve our reason. but spinozist reason is not monolithic: the diversity of ingenia means that there is no single dictate of reason given for everyone and for all time: in skeaff’s terms, each must exercise their own judgment. when the state does not seek to suppress this diversity, then it maximises its subjects’ flourishing and in turn maximises its own flourishing. democratic state sovereignty stands as necessary but insufficient to this maximisation. the state must establish laws to regulate interactions amongst diverse citizens. but at the same time, due to the very same embodied diversity, any such laws (or indeed any meta-rules for democratic politics) are only provisional. thus we have ‘vital republicanism’: a political order governed by laws, but those laws themselves continually regenerated and reformulated by the immanent normativity of the political entity, articulated through the ‘democratic judgment’ of its citizens. becoming political thus makes welcome contributions to both spinoza studies and to contemporary political theory. my key reservation is that the book needs to do more to unpack the link between judgment and democracy. first, granting (for the sake of argument) that the immanent normativity of a political order has a democratic structure, i was left unclear what accounts for skeaff’s confidence that this immanent normativity will tend to be expressed. skeaff appears to take the view that appropriately egalitarian popular contestation to sovereignty will just emerge: formal democratic institutions and rights of free speech make the people individually sui juris, in control of their own right and able to exercise democratic judgment (for instance, see his discussion of the black lives matter movement). textually, this confidence relies heavily on the theological- political treatise’s famous characterisation of democracy as a regime in which formal political equality allows everyone to take part in making the laws and thereby maintain their freedom (spinoza, a, . ). but even though the passage is famous, i think it is theoretically simplistic, and at odds with other elements of spinoza’s philosophy. skeaff’s own chapter grants that collective passional dynamics can go wrong. he also grants that the english revolution in spinoza’s own time failed to advance democracy. but in his discussion of contemporary democracy, he presumes that popular pressure will go right. such a presumption seems to me to be contrary to spinoza’s own injunction to consider human behaviour ‘like a thunderstorm’ (spinoza, b, . ): one needs to focus on its bad and troublesome aspects, with a view to understanding their determinate causes. specifically, what about when citizens fail to be exemplary citizens, and are animated by exclusionary rather than egalitarian passions? what about the fact that formally equal citizens are often not substantively sui juris, because they find themselves in relations of dependency (whether economic, occupational, informa- tional, or something else) (spinoza, b, . - ). in these cases, popular judgment may have no particular connection to democratic and egalitarian review s � springer nature limited. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s outcomes. skeaff’s book could usefully be complemented by a more critical theory of popular judgment and its conditions of democratic success. second, and perhaps more troubling, i was left unconvinced that spinoza’s own understanding of political immanent normativity is so clearly democratic as skeaff makes out. for skeaff, the link between judgment and democracy seems to be grounded in the presumption that judgment is a unified whole: in particular, skeaff does not seriously countenance the possibility of the philosophical or religious exercise of judgment and expression of ingenium being separated from the political exercise of judgment and equal political participation. but this is exactly the separation that spinoza sanctions for commoners in an aristocracy. on the one hand, commoners should be allowed to pursue their own ends under fair terms, unmolested, and with religious and philosophical freedom. but on the other hand, they must be vigorously and systematically prevented from exerting political pressure on the patrician rulers (spinoza, b, . - ). if this is done, aristocracy is presented as a regime which can be highly virtuous and sui juris, more so than many actually existing democracies. to be sure, good politics requires taking into account many and diverse points of judgment, but this can be ensured by maintaining a large and active decision-making council drawn from a wide patrician class. to be sure, the point of politics is not to transform humans into beasts or automata, but this is hardly the status of the commoners: they may be as philosophically and ethically developed as they like, they simply cannot participate in political decisions. to be sure, humans strive for what is useful to them and their community, but in the history of political thought the common good has often been conceived in an inegalitarian way, and it is not clear to me that spinoza is so unequivocally modern as skeaff presumes. in sum, i do wonder whether skeaff presents an excessively generous image of spinoza as a theorist of democracy. but this does not count strongly against the book: after all, such an image is pervasive in contemporary spinoza studies. skeaff’s achievement is to make the case for connecting spinoza’s politics with contemporary theorists of agonism and non-domination, and indeed to use spinoza to bolster those theoretical tendencies. references spinoza, b. ( a). the theological-political treatise. in the collected works of spinoza, trans. edwin curley. vol . princeton: princeton university press, pp. – . review � springer nature limited. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s s spinoza, b. ( b). the political treatise. in the collected works of spinoza, trans. edwin curley. vol . princeton: princeton university press, pp. – . publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. sandra field yale-nus college, singapore , singapore sandra.field@yale-nus.edu.sg review s � springer nature limited. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s 	becoming political: spinoza’s vital republicanism and the democratic power of judgement 	christopher skeaff university of chicago press, chicago and london, , xii+ pp., isbn: - - - - 	references du bois review, : ( ) – . © hutchins center for african and african american research - x/ $ . doi: . /s x x state of the art race, justice, policing, and the american presidential election kevin drakulich school of criminology and criminal justice, northeastern university john hagan department of sociology, northwestern university and american bar foundation devon johnson department of criminology, law and society, george mason university kevin h. wozniak sociology department, university of massachusetts boston abstract scholars have long been interested in the intersection of race, crime, justice, and presidential politics, focusing particularly on the “southern strategy” and the “war on crime.” a recent string of highly-publicized citizen deaths at the hands of police and the emergence of the black lives matter movement have brought renewed visibility to this racially-driven intersection, and in particular to issues involving contact with and attitudes toward the police. using data from the pilot study of the american national election studies, this study explores how contact with the criminal justice system and perceptions of police injustice shape political behavior in the modern era, with a specific emphasis on prospective participation and candidate choice in the presidential election. the results indicate that being stopped by the police—an experience that can feel invasive and unjust—may motivate political participation, while spending time in jail or prison—an experience associated with a marginalization from mainstream civic life—appears to discourage political participation. perceiving the police as discriminatory also seems to motivate political engagement and participation, though in opposite directions for conservative versus liberal voters. in addition, perceptions of police injustice were related to candidate choice, driving voters away from donald trump. affective feelings about the police were not associated with candidate choice. perceptions of the police appear to act in part as a proxy for racial resentments, at least among potential voters in the republican primary. in sum, the intersection of race, justice, and policing remains highly relevant in u.s. politics. keywords: political participation, vote choice, criminal justice contact, perceived police injustice, policing, racial attitudes, black lives matter at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s x x&domain=pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core kevin drakulich et al. du bois review: social science research on race : , introduction for decades, american scholars have studied the intersection of race, crime, justice, and presidential politics, focusing particularly on the goldwater, nixon, and reagan eras, which were characterized by the emergence and success of the republican “south- ern strategy” and broader themes of “law and order” and “war on crime.” recently, a series of highly-publicized deaths of african american citizens during encounters with police—and the black lives matter movement that has emerged in their wake— have increased the visibility of this racially-driven intersection, drawing political atten- tion to issues involving contact with and attitudes toward the police. the present study explores the impact of these events on the shape and directions of national political behavior in the contemporary era. we posit that citizen contact with the criminal justice system and perceptions of the police, in conjunction with racial feelings and resentments, are likely to be highly influential in predicting candi- date selection and the likelihood of citizen participation in the presidential elec- tion. we test this perspective using data from the pilot study of the american national election studies, a representative survey of voting-age citizens in the united states. in new and revealing ways, the results suggest that political behavior in the presidential election will be influenced by citizens’ experiences with and attitudes about race, justice, and policing, adding a new chapter to the long american history of race, crime, and presidential politics. contemporary political behavior in u.s. racial historical context to understand the current political climate surrounding race, crime, and the presidential election, it is helpful to consider how these issues became intertwined in the midst of the civil rights era. in and , as organizations began to regis- ter black voters across southern states where post-reconstruction policies had disen- franchised them (mcadam ), southern politicians who were threatened by the massive change that would accompany an enfranchised african american electorate began redefining political action in support of these policies as disorderly and unlaw- ful (beckett ; beckett and sasson, ; tonry ; wacquant ; weaver ). efforts to register voters or otherwise advocate for political civil rights were also met with violent repression, often organized by the state through the mobilization of the police (branch ; hampton and fayer, ). in the summer of , mass racial protests and violence erupted in rochester, harlem, and philadelphia. similar protests and violence occurred during the watts rebellion in los angeles in the summer of , and in detroit, newark and other cities across the country throughout the summer of . each of these uprisings was sparked by a specific incident of perceived police mistreatment of black citizens, although in each case tensions were already high between the police and the black community. as a result of these political and social actions, segregation, black disenfranchisement, urban unrest, and law and order were major themes in several presidential elections, beginning with the transformative and consequential election. from the end of reconstruction—when white southerners, including many former confederate sol- diers and politicians, re-established social and political dominance over blacks in their states—until , voters in “deep south” states had reliably voted against republican presidential candidates. the presidential election brought a reversal of this trend; for the first time, deep south states voted for the republican candidate, barry goldwater, at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core race, justice, policing, and the election du bois review: social science research on race : , while the majority of the country voted for democrat lyndon b. johnson. this pattern has persisted over time, with the deep south consistently voting against the democratic presidential candidate ever since. the election was consequential for a variety of reasons. it was the first stage of the “southern strategy,” where republicans attempted to peel large numbers of southern white voters away from the democratic party by appealing to their discomfort with the racial changes posed by the civil rights movement (carmines and stimson, ; edsall and edsall, ; tonry ; wacquant ). the election also saw the emergence of a racially-coded “tough on crime” rhetoric that initially sought to criminalize those involved in political protest, and which later evolved into support for “wars” on crime and drugs in the s and s (beckett ; weaver ). the policies and practices of these “wars” ultimately resulted in a significant uptick in aggressive policing tactics and massive increases in state and federal incarceration, all of which disproportionately affected black communities (alexander ; beckett and sasson, ; national research council ; tonry ). in addition, the presidential contest, and the election of lyndon johnson, also marked a major moment for the civil rights movement. lyndon johnson was able to mobilize congres- sional support and passage of the civil rights act of , the voting rights act of , and eventually the civil rights act of . lessons from this era suggest a basic model for understanding the role of race, crime, and the police in politics: issues of crime and policing are invoked not only as part of strategies to maintain status-quo racial group positions in the face of perceived threats, but also in efforts to challenge this status quo (beckett and sasson, ; blumer ; feagin ; tonry ). when protestors in the s sought to draw attention to the mistreatment of black citizens by the police as well as other issues of racial equality, some political actors responded by reframing these protests as promoting lawlessness and disorder and by otherwise highlighting images of black crime to delegitimize the protesters’ grievances and call to action (beckett ; beckett and sasson, ; tonry ; wacquant ; weaver ). this “law and order” and “tough on crime” rhetoric served as a racial “dog whistle” (lópez ), rallying support from those opposed to the expansion of african americans’ civil rights, a usage that continues in subsequent elections, especially during the “wars” on crime and drugs (beckett ; beckett and sasson, ; edsall and edsall, ; tonry ). in addition, the criminal justice system was used as part of the effort to reclaim white dominance in the political sphere through the criminalization of political protest and voter registration efforts, intimidation of prospective voters, and eventual state-level revocations of voting rights through felon disenfranchisement laws (beckett and sasson, ; behrens et al., ; manza and uggen, : tonry ; uggen and manza, ). on the other hand, widespread perceptions of injustice—rooted in real bias and mistreatment on the part of the criminal justice system, and in particular the police—served as a flashpoint to motivate and rally support for civil rights efforts (branch ). the presidential election the politics of race, crime, and criminal justice that emerged in the s left an indelible mark on the american electorate. despite progress over the last sixty years, race has retained critical importance in american politics, and issues involving crime and the police remain highly racialized. in a striking parallel to the events of the early s, public and political attention to the relationship between the police and the black community increased significantly at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core kevin drakulich et al. du bois review: social science research on race : , following the deaths of many black citizens during encounters with police in the years preceding the election. attention to police treatment of african american sus- pects began with the deaths of eric garner in new york city and michael brown in ferguson, missouri, and continued through the deaths of tamir rice, freddie gray, laquan mcdonald, alton sterling, philandro castile, and terence crutcher, among others. these events have inspired mass public protests in cities such as ferguson, st. louis, new york, baltimore, cleveland, baton rouge, and st. paul. in an echo of the past, some politicians have framed the protests as disorderly, violent, and unlawful, while expressing strong support for the police (campbell ; diamond ; stranahan ). these events have intensified the social and political action of the black lives matter movement, and have revived a national dialogue about police biases and bru- tality against african american citizens and discriminatory criminal justice practices more generally. this is all occurring at the same time that a bipartisan coalition of politicians is pushing for criminal justice reform (grawert ; whack ). black lives matter activists have protested at campaign events of both democratic and republican presidential candidates as political rhetoric about race, crime, and criminal justice in u.s. presidential politics has been re-energized. the result is a revival of framing and counterframing efforts utilizing the symbolic value of these issues to address questions about the relative status of racial groups in the united states. the major party presidential candidates have distinct positions on crime and policing issues. republican candidate donald trump has explicitly identified him- self as pro-police and pro–“law and order” (alcindor ); he has made claims about “inner-city crime” reaching record levels (fields ), and infamously tweeted false and misleading statistics about african americans and violent crime (greenberg ). trump has resisted holding police accountable for unprovoked violence against citizens (greenberg ) and has openly criticized the black lives matter move- ment, saying in september of that “i think they’re trouble. i think they’re looking for trouble” (campbell ). in november , he commented on an incident where a black lives matter demonstrator had allegedly been assaulted by trump supporters, noting that “maybe he should have been roughed up” (johnson and jordan, ). although trump is not alone in his views, his rhetoric is widely seen as inflammatory. his responses may yield support from white voters who feel they have lost status relative to minorities, and—at the extreme—from white nation- alists (berger ; confessore ; klinker ). in short, then, it appears that crime and justice rhetoric is once again being used to signal to those concerned about threats to the status quo racial hierarchy. democratic candidate hillary clinton has been criticized for her association with the clinton crime bill and mass incarceration, and for her use of racially-coded language when referring to juvenile offenders as “superpredators” during the s (capehart ). clinton has since repudiated a “tough on crime” policy approach (beinart ), openly called for reform in the aftermath of the baltimore pro- tests following the death of freddie gray while in police custody (bouie ; grawert ). her positions on criminal justice reform set her apart from democratic candi- dates in previous elections. her reform efforts align with some of the concerns raised by the black lives matter movement, and she has used injustice frames to rally sup- port among those concerned about the differential treatment of black citizens by the police and the relative status of black citizens more generally. in sum, the anecdotal evidence suggests that issues of crime, justice, and policing are highly salient—and fiercely contested—in the presidential election. at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core race, justice, policing, and the election du bois review: social science research on race : , our goal is to assess the general impact of these recent developments on the presidential election. specifically, we are interested in the influence of two distinct fac- tors on prospective political participation and candidate choice in the election: ) contemporary citizen contact with the criminal justice system; and ) perceptions of police injustice. in the following section, we review research and further develop a theoretical model for this purpose. research and theory about justice system contact, perceptions of police injustice, and political behavior criminal justice contact police stops and questioning have increased in recent decades and are often justified by police authorities as aggressive or zero-tolerance strategies for misdemeanor, morality, and “broken window” law enforcement. these police actions are often referred to as “terry stops,” in reference to terry v. ohio u.s. ( ), which effectively low- ered the evidentiary requirement from “probable cause” to “reasonable suspicion” of an infraction. such stops rarely result in arrests or convictions and disproportionately target economically disadvantaged, minority citizens. at the height of this policy in new york city in , for instance, , stops were made, with no charges or arrests in % of the cases. more than half of the citizens stopped were black ( %), with latinos making up more than half of the remaining stops ( %). given the number and the racial and ethnic disproportionality of the stops, it is unsurprising that many perceive them to be unjust (fagan and davies, ; gau and brunson, ; silverman and della-giustina, ; tyler and waslak, ; weitzer and tuch, a, b). among those who feel a stop was unwarranted and/or the prod- uct of police bias, the experience can be humiliating and infuriating. for many, police stops may be their primary point of contact with the criminal justice system and their main point of contact with the government. work on procedural justice suggests that when the police are perceived to be disrespectful or biased, compliance and cooperation with law enforcement suffers (brunson and weitzer, ; tyler and waslak, ; weitzer and tuch, ). one consequence of this is a sense of legal cynicism—a cultural frame in which the police are seen not only seen as unjust and therefore illegitimate, but also as failing at crime prevention, protection, and in providing public safety (anderson ; carr et al., ; hagan et al., ; kirk and papachristos, ; kirk and matsuda, ; sampson and bartusch, ). in addition to aggressive police stops, incarceration has increased dramatically since the s, and has disproportionately affected minority citizens (rosich ; western ). recent research documents the devastating personal, familial, social, and economic consequences of incarceration (clear ; clear and frost, ; mauer and chesney-lind, ; western ), resulting in long term exclusion from mainstream civic and public life (lerman and weaver, ; levy-pounds ; pettit ; pettit and western, ; travis ). crucially in terms of political enfranchisement, many currently or formerly incarcerated persons are legally prohib- ited from voting (manza and uggen, ). perceptions of police injustice one consequence of negative encounters with the police is perceived police injus- tice (see gau and brunson, ; hagan and albonetti, ; hagan et al. ; at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core kevin drakulich et al. du bois review: social science research on race : , wortley et al., ). these perceptions can proliferate as a result of both direct and indirect experience. thus exposure to news coverage of police abuses provokes more critical views of the police, even among whites who generally have more positive baseline views of the police (weitzer and tuch, a, b). in contrast, racial animus toward blacks can diminish perceptions of racial injustice by the police and the justice system more broadly (drakulich a, b; matsueda and drakulich, ). police practices and (mis)behavior vary both across the race of individuals who encounter the police (e.g., fryer ) and the racial composition of neighborhoods (brunson and weitzer, ; fagan and davies, ; hagan and albonetti, ; kane ; mastrofski et al., ; smith ; terrill and reisig, ; waddington and braddock, ; weitzer and tuch, , ), with interracial differences in perceptions of the police explained largely by differential experiences with the police (brunson and weitzer, ; hagan et al., ; hurst et al., ; skogan ; weitzer and tuch, b). one consequence is a “crisis of legitimacy,” in which per- ceptions of police bias influence citizen views of police responsiveness as well as their likely behavior serving on juries in cases where the police may have acted in biased ways (bobo and thompson, , p. ). high-profile incidents of police misconduct even appear to suppress the public’s willingness to call (desmond et al., ). perceptions of police actions are distinguishable from general affective evalua- tions of the police. in the recent context of the black lives matter movement and pro- posed police reform, some politicians and voters have been accused of being motivated by a dislike or hatred of the police (greer ), while other have expressed strong affective endorsements of the police (nuzzi ). one interpretation is that such views represent an expressive concern: that “hating” the police, or, alternatively, “loving” the police, and, indeed, voting on the basis of it, is an expression of one’s identity (brennan and hamlin, ). political behavior our collective responses to rule violations are fundamental to the operation of society, and our justice system represents one of the largest and most impactful public institu- tions. thus, there are good reasons to suspect that contact with the criminal justice system as well as broader beliefs about the fairness of the system are likely to impact political engagement, participation, and candidate choice. there are several key mechanisms by which criminal justice contact and percep- tions of police injustice may be related to political behavior. a line of political thought with a long history suggests that government institutions matter to the development of its citizens’ political behavior. alexis de tocqueville ( [ ]), for example, wrote of the importance of jury service in educating citizens about the purposes of the justice system. more recent work similarly suggests that people’s interactions with government representatives and institutions are important mechanisms by which citi- zens learn about the political process and civic matters more broadly (landy ; lipsky ; soss ). scholars like joe soss ( ) have found that direct contact with government agents plays a particularly important role in shaping how poorer and more marginalized people perceive government, writ large. more recently, amy lerman and vesla weaver ( ) tested the relationship between justice system contact and political behavior using the national longitudinal study of adolescent health and the fragile families and child wellbeing study. lerman and weaver argue that contact with agents of law enforcement is unlike contact with other government bureaucracies and suggest that this contact can have profound effects on views of the government, the civic body, and the place of the citizen within it. at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core race, justice, policing, and the election du bois review: social science research on race : , in fact, they found that citizens often form their opinions about the entire govern- ment based almost exclusively upon their personal experience with the criminal justice system. as a result, these citizens often see the focus of government to be the exercise of control, not the provision of services or the protection of citizens. this can result in the kind of legal cynicism noted above (see especially kirk and papachristos, ; hagan et al., ). lerman and weaver’s research uncovered weak, negative relationships between arrest, conviction, imprisonment, and “low-impact” political activities like contacting a representative; but the negative effects were much stronger on the likelihood of registering to vote or voting in the previous presidential election. the magnitude of the effect on political behavior increased with the punitiveness of the justice system encounter, and was robust to controls for differences in socioeconomic status, demo- graphic factors, and even respondent drug use. these results suggest that the expe- rience of being arrested and/or punished by the justice system may lead citizens to believe that they are part of a stigmatized class that has been symbolically severed from the polity. the implication is that such contact is marginalizing and exclusionary, driv- ing citizens away from political engagement and participation. however, lerman and weaver ( ) also discovered an unexpected (but small in magnitude) positive relationship between simply being questioned by police and polit- ical activities like engagement in civic organizations or contacting a representative. consistent with this “unexpected” finding, victor rios ( ) finds that disadvantaged youth who have experienced police harassment become more politically engaged in order to protest perceived injustice. in sum, it appears that very punitive encounters with the criminal justice system such as incarceration may drive individuals away from political participation, while less impactful actions such as police stops may actually increase engagement and participation. perceptions of police injustice may be relevant to political behavior for at least two reasons. the first draws on an idea from the collective action framing perspec- tive, which describes how actors seek to frame social problems for political purposes (benford and snow, ; gitlin ; goffman ). the goals of such framing efforts are to build consensus around the causes of and solutions to a problem, but also to motivate action around an issue. to spur such action, frames will emphasize the severity and urgency of the negative consequences of the issue, but they may also emphasize a moral imperative—the propriety or rightness of action (benford ). as such, viewing a problem as an injustice rather than a misfortune can be a power- ful motivating frame for an issue (snow and benford, ; turner ). thus, perceptions of police behavior not just as unfortunate but as unjust may motivate both political participation and support for political candidates whose statements conform to such a justice frame. in line with this perspective, anecdotal evidence suggests that the death of michael brown, viewed by many as the result of an unjust police action, prompted increased turnout for local elections in ferguson, missouri (eligon ). in addition, research shows that perceptions of police injustice may be related to candidate choice. using a political survey, ross matsueda and colleagues ( ) found that perceptions of police injustice were associated with a reduced likelihood of the respondent reporting that they would vote for george w. bush over bill clinton in a hypothetical election, even after controlling for political party and ideological identification. another possibility deserves further consideration: that pro-police rhetoric or perceptions of the police as fair may also motivate political participation and increase support for candidates espousing similar rhetorical and perceptual frames. as noted above, some politicians have used references to crime to signal and attract voters who at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core kevin drakulich et al. du bois review: social science research on race : , are uncomfortable with perceived changes in the relative standing of racial groups (beckett and sasson, ; edsall and edsall, ; hagan ; mendelberg ; tonry ). recent work suggests this connection between racialized feelings and perceptions of crime and (in)justice persists (drakulich a, b) and polarizes voters into two camps: those who perceive the police to be fair, impartial protectors of law- abiding citizens; and those who perceive the police (and the broader justice system) to be prejudicially biased and punitively discriminatory against minority citizens (peffley and hurwitz, ). this raises a final important consideration. if crime and justice rhetoric is fre- quently employed as a signal to voters concerned about threats to the existing racial order, this suggests that these views may act, in part, as a proxy for racial feelings and attitudes. indeed, abundant evidence demonstrates a connection between racial feel- ings, attitudes, and perceptions of crime and justice, including perceptions of crime as a problem, explanations for racial disparities in contact with the criminal justice system, and support for punitive responses to crime (bobo and johnson, ; drakulich a, b; johnson , , ; matsueda and drakulich, ; soss et al., ; unnever and cullen, , ; wozniak ). in addition, prior work has also identified a direct role for racial feelings and attitudes in voter choice (mcelwee and mcdaniel, ). key to this discussion is an understanding of the often hidden or implicit role of racial anxieties and racism in contemporary politics. beginning in the civil rights era, open expressions of racial antipathy towards blacks declined and were replaced by a norm of equality (mendelberg ). contemporaneously, new racial logic emerged that deemphasized racial group distinctions in favor of individualism, while ignoring that not all individuals have the same opportunities given historical group disparities (feagin ; jackman and muha, ; schuman et al., ). scholars have described this new racial logic—which serves to maintain inequalities by reject- ing group demands—as symbolic, laissez-faire, or colorblind racism (bobo ; bobo and kluegel, ; bobo and smith, ; bobo et al., ; bonilla-silva ; kinder ; kinder and sears, ; sears ). as a result, politicians have relied on implicit racial messaging and racial code words (such as “law and order”) to appeal to white voters concerned about relative racial group positions without overtly referencing race (lópez ; mendelberg ). thus, it is possible that views of the police serve as proxies for racial feelings and attitudes. ross matsueda and kevin drakulich ( ), for example, find that perceptions of police injustice are associated with a variety of political policy positions through an association with racial resentment. this measure represents one attempt to capture this new racial logic (henry and sears, ). research questions in light of the theory and research evidence reviewed above, we explore several key questions about the role of criminal justice contact and perceptions of police injustice in the u. s. presidential election. the first question involves the impact of criminal justice contact on political par- ticipation. negative police contact, especially if it is perceived to be unjust, may moti- vate political participation with the goal of changing the system. however, criminal justice contact that results in stigmatic marginalization or exclusion may deter individ- uals from participating. our hypothesis is therefore that police stops motivate political action, while incarceration decreases political participation. a second related question focuses on the impact of police contact on candidate choice. our hypothesis is that at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core race, justice, policing, and the election du bois review: social science research on race : , experience with police stops motivates support for democratic presidential nominee hillary clinton. in this election, there were clear distinctions between the criminal jus- tice policy positions of the major party candidates. both major democratic candidates (hillary clinton and bernie sanders) advocated for criminal justice and police reform. the major republican candidates generally, and the eventual nominee donald trump in particular, tended to express support for the police rather than propose police reform. the third and fourth questions involve the impact of perceived police injustice on political participation and candidate choice. once again, several hypotheses present themselves. perceptions of injustice may act as a powerful motivational frame inspir- ing political participation and support for candidates who promote justice-relevant reforms. however, views of the police as fundamentally fair may serve as a rallying cry for those on the other side of the political spectrum, especially in an election year in which the police are perceived to be unfairly criticized. in other words, strong views either way may drive both groups to the voting booth, but to vote for different candi- dates. this suggests a potentially strong effect on candidate choice, but also the pos- sibility of a confounding effect on participation. a fifth question asks whether the role of perceived police injustice can be distin- guished from a more general affective evaluation of the police, or in simplistic terms: “hatred of the police.” given our theoretical perspective on why perceptions of injus- tice matter, we expect the role of perceived injustice to be both independent of, and more important than, affective evaluations of the police. a final question, based on the long history of law and order rhetoric being used as a racial code word or dog whistle, asks whether the effect of these feelings about attitudes or the police are independent of measures of feelings and attitudes about race. methodology data to test the impact of recent experiences with and attitudes toward police and the crimi- nal justice system, the american national election studies agreed to include questions about criminal justice contact and perceptions in their pilot survey (anes ). the anes collected surveys from respondents and included weights designed to make the sample representative of the larger population of u.s. citizens age eighteen or older on the basis of age, gender, race-ethnicity, education, region, and party iden- tification. the survey was conducted over the internet drawing on respondents from an existing panel. the survey was conducted in late january , just before primary voting began in early february. measures political behavior the analysis seeks to explain two forms of political behavior: participation and choice. participation is captured by two indicators. the first is a measure of engagement, ask- ing respondents to rate themselves on a scale reflecting how frequently they “follow what’s going on in government and public affairs” (ranging from “hardly at all” to “most of the time”). the second measure captures intended behavior, the self-assessed percent chance, on a scale from zero to that the respondent will vote in . table describes the sample on key variables. the majority of respondents— %— reported that they followed politics some or all of the time, and respondents on average at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core kevin drakulich et al. du bois review: social science research on race : , table . descriptive information for the sample on key measures full sample whites blacks clinton trump political engagement, participation, and choice: % follow politics some or most of the time . . . . . percent chance of voting in presidential election . . . . . prefer donald trump among republican candidates . . . *** prefer donald trump in general election versus hillary clinton . . . *** criminal justice contact: ever stopped by the police . . . . . stopped by the police in the last months . . . ** . . ever spent a night in jail or prison . . . . . spent a night in jail or prison in last months . . . . . perceptions of and feelings toward police: feel warmly toward police on -point scale . . . *** . . *** percent believing whites are treated better than blacks by the police . . . *** . . *** percent believing white people are stopped by the police without a good reason somewhat or very often . . . . . percent believing black people are stopped by the police without a good reason somewhat or very often . . . *** . . *** percent believing the police use unnecessary force against whites somewhat or very often . . . . . percent believing the police use unnecessary force against blacks somewhat or very often . . . *** . . *** racial attitudes and feelings: feel warmly toward whites on -point scale . . . *** . . feel warmly toward blacks on -point scale . . . *** . . *** agree that blacks should overcome prejudice and work their way up without special favors as other groups have . . . *** . . *** disagree that slavery and discrimination have created conditions that make it difficult for blacks to work their way out of the lower class . . . *** . . *** disagree that blacks have gotten less than they deserve . . . *** . . *** agree that if blacks would try harder they could be as well-off as whites . . . *** . . *** *** p<. , **p<. , *p<. . reported a % chance that they would vote in the presidential election. table also presents descriptive means and significance tests for two different sub-group comparisons: black versus white respondents, and trump versus clinton supporters. at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core race, justice, policing, and the election du bois review: social science research on race : , there were no racial differences in political engagement or participation, nor were there any differences between trump and clinton supporters in these measures. political choice is also captured with two different questions. the first taps a pref- erence for the republican nominee, donald trump. respondents were asked “regard- less of whether you will vote in the republican primary this year, which republican candidate do you prefer?” respondents were provided a list of the top nine candidates at that point plus the options “another republican candidate” or “none” (about % chose this option). the resulting variable is coded as for those who indicated a pref- erence for trump and for those who indicated a preference for a different republi- can nominee. of those who expressed support for some republican candidate, about a third chose trump, though this was a significantly more popular choice among white versus black respondents. the second question moves to the general election. respondents were asked “if the presidential election were between hillary clinton for the democrats and donald trump for the republicans, would you vote for hillary clinton, donald trump, someone else, or probably not vote?” the resulting variable was coded for those indicating they would vote for trump in this case, and zero if they planned to vote for clinton, someone else, or not vote. the results suggest polling was close at this point in time (january ): around % expressed support for clinton versus % for trump, with % voting for a third party candidate, and % not voting. trump was again more popular among white relative to black respondents. because of the large number of potential general election matchups at this point in the primary season, respondents were randomly selected to answer only two. as a result, about % of the sample ( respondents) were asked this question. with the exception of those who were randomly chosen not to answer the question about a trump-clinton matchup, there is no missing data for any of these questions. criminal justice contact the survey included questions about a variety of different kinds of contact with the criminal justice system. many, such as whether the respondent had been arrested for, charged with, or convicted of a crime were highly interrelated. we focus on two dif- ferent points of contact. the first measure asked respondents whether they have been stopped and questioned by a police officer. the second asked if the respondent had spent one or more nights in jail or prison. respondents were randomly selected to be asked these questions either in reference to the last twelve months or ever. for each model and outcome, exploratory interactions were added between a dummy variable identifying those respondents who were asked about contact in the last twelve months versus ever and each of the two measures of contact. in no case was the interaction sta- tistically significant, suggesting that despite the different time periods, criminal justice contact was related to the outcomes in similar ways. missing data was rare for these questions: one respondent skipped the question about police stops and two skipped the question about time in jail or prison. black respondents were more than twice as likely to report being stopped and questioned by the police in the last year. perceptions of the police two measures were included to reflect respondent perceptions of the police. we dis- tinguish a basic perception of police fairness from an affective evaluation of the police, which we developed from the literature on perceived injustice and legal cynicism. the affective measure employs a “thermometer scale” question, a format common at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core kevin drakulich et al. du bois review: social science research on race : , in anes and other political surveys. respondents were asked to rate their feelings toward a list of individual persons and groups on a scale ranging from to , with representing very cold and unfavorable feelings and representing very warm or favorable feelings. respondents were asked specifically how warmly or coldly they felt toward “the police.” on average, respondents reported feeling modestly warm toward the police— on the -point scale. white respondents and trump supporters reported feeling significantly more warmly toward the police than black respondents and clinton supporters. the second measure taps into a very different evaluation of the police, one focused specifically on whether the police act in discriminatory ways. specifically, the variable is captured as factor scores from a confirmatory factor analysis with three indicators. the first indicator is a question asking respondent, on a seven-item scale, whether they believe that “in general, the police treat whites better than blacks, treat blacks better than whites, or treat them both the same.” just over % of respondents reported believing that whites were treated better than blacks by the police. clinton support- ers and black respondents were significantly more likely than trump supporters and white respondents to report this—nearly % of clinton supporters compared to less than % of trump supporters indicated that whites were treated better than blacks by the police. the second and third indicators are based on a series of questions about specific police behavior. respondents were asked (on five-item scales) how often they think police officers stop people on the street without good reasons and how often they use more force than is necessary. they were asked each of these questions twice: once con- cerning how the police act when dealing with white people, and once concerning how the police act towards black people. about half the sample, respectively, felt that black people were stopped by the police and subject to unnecessary police force, compared to less than % of the sample reporting the same for the treatment of white people. interestingly, there was widespread agreement that whites are not often stopped without reason or subjected to unnecessary force, but clinton supporters and black respondents were significantly more likely to feel that blacks experienced these kinds of police mistreatment. two simple measures were created—one for unnecessary stops and one for unnecessary force—as the difference between perceptions of police behavior towards blacks and whites, with positive values representing those respon- dents who believed whites were treated better and negative values reflecting those who perceived blacks as treated better than whites. missing data were again rare: respondent did not answer the questions about unjustified police stops, skipped the general question about police discrimination, and none skipped the question about police force. racial attitudes two measures were added to capture racial attitudes and feelings. the first is a simple measure of racial animus against blacks relative to whites based on the same affec- tive thermometer scale used to capture feelings toward the police. the measure is the difference between how coldly the respondent feels toward blacks versus whites, with higher values indicating respondents who felt more coldly towards blacks than whites. the average respondent reported feeling about degrees more warmly toward whites than they did toward blacks, with both racial groups showing in-group preferences. clinton and trump supporters did not differ in their feelings toward whites, but trump supporters felt significantly more coldly toward blacks than did clinton supporters. at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core race, justice, policing, and the election du bois review: social science research on race : , the second measure captures racial resentment, a dimension of “symbolic racism” widely used in prior work (henry and sears, ; kinder ; kinder and sears, ; sears ). the perspective suggests that because whites view african americans as inferior on key “protestant ethic” dimensions like being hard-working, they resent perceived harms resulting from these deficiencies, including african americans getting “unfair” special access to jobs or educational opportunities. the measure is captured as factor scores from a confirmatory factor model with four indicators. a majority of the sample, nearly two-thirds, believed that blacks should overcome prejudice and work their way up without “special favors.” around half the sample disagreed that slavery and discrimination created conditions that remained significant barriers for lower- class blacks, disagreed that blacks had gotten less than they deserved, and agreed that inequalities would be solved if blacks tried harder. however, white respondents were more likely to agree with these statements than were black respondents, and trump supporters were especially likely to agree with each of the racial resentment state- ments. missing data were again rare: respondents total skipped any of the racial resentment questions, and skipped the thermometer scales against either blacks or whites. political identity and beliefs we control for three measures of political sentiment when examining candidate choice: identification as conservative, identification as republican, and belief in a limited gov- ernment. one case is missing for republican party identification as are five for con- servative ideology. regarding preference for a limited government, respondents chose the option “i haven’t thought much about this.” to avoid reducing the n, these cases were recoded into the middle-category—those who did not strongly agree with either statement. however, models were also run dropping these cases and did not differ substantively from the reported models. demographic and biographical controls we control for a variety of standard demographic and biographical characteristics: gender, age, marital status, education, income, employment status, and race-ethnicity. there were no missing data for any of these questions other than income, for which respondents chose not to answer. in the interest of not dropping cases, all of the missing cases were mean-replaced. however, models were also run dropping these cases and did not differ substantively from the reported models. table presents basic descriptive information on the sample for all of these control variables. methods reported effects are estimated with survey-weighted generalized linear models run using the “survey” package in r (lumley ; r core team ). the four category measure indicating political engagement is treated as ordinal and mod- eled using an ordinal logit. the percent likelihood of voting in is treated as continuous. the measures of vote choice are dichotomous and are fit with a quasibinomial family logit link. cases missing data on any of the outcomes or key sub- stantive variables (contact, police, and racism) were dropped (as discussed above, missing data on these variables were infrequent), as were those for control variables with small numbers of cases missing. in total, only fourteen of the cases were dropped before the analyses. at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core kevin drakulich et al. du bois review: social science research on race : , the survey captures political preferences and inclinations from a point in time prior to the presidential election itself, and as with all voting polls the respondent preferences may change and they may act differently on november . the survey was conducted between january and , , prior to the major political parties’ nomination of candidates. according to the poll aggregation website realclearpolitics. com, on the first day of the survey donald trump led the republican field with about % of voters expressing a preference for him, versus about % for ted cruz, and % for marco rubio, the second and third most popular candidates at that time (real clear politics ). among democrats, % supported hillary clinton while % favored bernie sanders (real clear politics ). although asked in a slightly different fashion, the question about candidate preference from the anes survey reflects this same pattern. among those who indicated a preference for one of the republican can- didates, the top choice with % of support was donald trump followed by ted cruz at %, and then marco rubio at %. among those who expressed a preference for democratic candidates, % favored clinton versus % for sanders. in other words, although the survey occurred early in the election process, the survey data appear rep- resentative of voting preferences at that point in time. the data are cross-sectional, and as such we cannot definitively determine the causal direction of reported relationships. it is certainly possible, for instance, that feelings of coldness toward the police or perceptions of police injustice are formed as a consequence of following political reporting or by adopting the positions of a candidate chosen for other reasons (although, in fact, we explore the possibility that racial animus rather than perceptions of the police are a motivating factor). however, given our theoretical rea- sons for expecting an effect on political outcomes and given the dearth of direct research on these questions, we feel there is substantial value in examining the results. results the results are presented first for models predicting political engagement and partici- pation, and then for candidate choice. table . descriptive information for the sample on control measures political ideology and identification: conservative . republican . prefer limited government . demographic and biographical characteristics: female . age . married/partner . separated/divorced/widowed . at least some college . family income above $ k . unemployed . black . hispanic . other race/eth. . ***p<. , **p<. , *p<. . at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core race, justice, policing, and the election du bois review: social science research on race : , political engagement and participation table presents two models predicting political participation and engagement. the first three columns present coefficients, standard errors, and odds ratios for an ordered logit model predicting the measure of political engagement—how closely the respon- dent follows politics. among the control variables, men, older persons, single persons, and those who are employed, earn more, and have more years of education are all more likely to report that they follow politics most of the time. race and ethnicity are not associated with the likelihood of following politics. both criminal justice contact and perceptions of the police are relevant to political engagement, although the results suggest very different substantive reasons for each of the effects. first, those who reported having been stopped by the police were sub- stantially more likely to report that they follow politics most of the time—the odds of following politics closely are . times higher for those who have been stopped. on the other hand, those who have spent a night in jail or prison were substantially less likely to report following politics most of the time. perceptions of and affective feelings toward the police also had divergent effects on the likelihood of following politics. those who felt more coldly toward the police were less likely to report following politics most of the time, while those who per- ceived the police as biased towards blacks relative to whites were more likely to report table . coefficients from models predicting political engagement and likelihood of voting in follow politics likely to vote β s.e. odds β s.e. intercept . ** . female -. *** . . - . . age . *** . . . *** . married/partner -. *** . . - . . separated/divorced/widowed -. ** . . - . . education . *** . . . *** . family income . *** . . . ** . unemployed -. ** . . - . ** . black -. . . . . hispanic . . . - . * . other race/eth. . . . - . . stopped by police . *** . . . ** . jailed -. ** . . - . ** . cold toward police -. * . . -. . perceived police injustice . * . . . . thresholds: | . . | . . | . . * p<. , **p<. , ***p<. ( -tailed). n= . follow politics employs survey-weighted ordinal logit, likely to vote uses survey-weighted generalized linear model. at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core kevin drakulich et al. du bois review: social science research on race : , following politics most of the time. thus in general, a simple affective dislike of the police seems to drive people away from politics, while a perception of the police as act- ing in unjust ways drives greater interest. notably, both of these effects are relatively modest. however, as we suggested in the discussion of research questions, it is likely that people with different political orientations will be differentially motivated by these perceptions. those who perceive the police as treating blacks and whites the same, or even those who believe—in the spirit of the view that anti-white bias is now more prevalent than anti-black bias (norton and sommers, )—that the police treat whites worse than blacks, may also be motivated to be more politically engaged. in this way, the same sense of injustice driving political engagement and participation may occur at both ends of the scale but for different groups. conservative respondents may be more likely to be driven by a feeling that the police are biased against whites while liberal respondents may be more motivated by a sense that the police are biased against blacks. similarly, while conservative groups have accused liberals of being motivated by anti-police feelings, pro-police messages have been common at trump speeches and rallies (alcindor ). in fact, both measures of perceptions of the police have significant interactions with conservative identification. the top two panels of figure presents predicted values from this interaction. the top panel suggests that feeling more warmly toward the police is associated with an increased attention to politics, but only among those who identify as more conservative. feeling warmly (or, conversely, coldly) toward the police does not seem to be associated with following politics among those who identify as more liberal. the middle panel suggest the opposite pattern for perceptions of police injustice. for those who identify as more conservative, perceptions of the police as unjust toward whites versus blacks do not appear to be associated with following politics. for those who identify as more liberal, however, bigger perceptions of police bias against blacks are associated with a larger likeli- hood of following politics closely. the final two columns in table present coefficients and standard errors from a weighted generalized linear model predicting the self-assessed percent likelihood that the respondent will vote in the election. older persons, the employed, and those with more years of education and higher family income all reported a greater likeli- hood that they would vote in the election. hispanic respondents tended to report a lower likelihood of voting. both forms of criminal justice contact appear important to the likelihood of vot- ing, again in opposite directions. just as being stopped by the police is associated with more political engagement, it is also associated with a higher estimated likelihood of voting—those who experienced police contact were % more likely to vote. the experience of having spent at least a night in jail or prison, on the other hand, appears to be more marginalizing or exclusionary, and is associated with about a % lower chance of voting. feeling coldly toward the police or perceiving the police to be racially biased, on the other, hand, are not directly significantly related to the likelihood of voting. as with political engagement, however, it may be that the effect depends on ideological iden- tification. interactions suggest that the feeling coldly toward the police is not strongly associated with the likelihood of voting for conservatives or liberals. however, per- ceptions of police bias are associated with both, and in opposite directions (b = - . , p<. ). as the bottom panel of figure illustrates, for liberals, those who believe the police act in biased ways toward blacks were more likely to say they would vote in . for conservatives, it was those who believed that the police were more biased at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core race, justice, policing, and the election du bois review: social science research on race : , against whites who reported a higher likelihood of voting. thus, perceptions of police injustice do appear related to people’s political participation, but the direction of the effect depends on one’s political ideological identification. candidate choice table presents two models of candidate choice: the choice of trump among the republican candidates in the primary, and the choice of trump relative to clinton in the general election. the first three columns present coefficients, standard errors, and odds ratios from a model of a preference for donald trump among the republican presidential candidates. education is among the strongest predictors of support for trump, as those with fewer years of education were substantially more likely to express support for trump among the republican candidates. relatedly, those who are unem- ployed were more likely to support trump. in terms of race, black and hispanic vot- ers were less likely than white voters to support trump. all of this is consistent with the general narrative that trump is pulling substantial support from whites who have less education and experience greater unemployment (thompson ). however, even after accounting for these associations, those who perceive greater bias against blacks were much less likely to state support for trump in the primary—conversely, of course, fig. . predicted levels of political engagement and participation from interaction of percep- tions of police and political ideology. at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core k e vin d ra ku lich e t a l. d u b o is r e v ie w : s o c ia l s c ie n c e r e s e a r c h o n r a c e : , table . coefficients from models predicting candidate preference (survey-weighted, quasibinomial-family logit-link) trump/ republicans trump/ clinton β s.e. exp β s.e. exp β s.e. exp β s.e. exp intercept . . -. . - . ** . - . *** . . female . . . . . . -. . . -. . . age . . . . . . . * . . . * . . married/partner . . . . . . . . . . . . separated/divorced/widowed . . . . . . . . . . . . education -. *** . . -. ** . . -. . . -. . . family income -. . . -. . . -. . . -. . . unemployed . * . . . * . . -. . . -. . . black - . * . . -. . . -. . . . . . hispanic - . * . . -. * . . -. . . -. . . other race/eth. -. . . -. . . . . . . . . conservative . . . -. . . . . . . . . republican . . . . . . . *** . . . *** . . prefer limited government . . . -. . . . * . . . . . racial resentment . *** . . . *** . . feel cold toward blacks/whites . *** . . . . . stopped by police -. . . -. . . -. . . -. . . jailed . . . . . . . . . . . . cold toward police . . . . . . . . . . . . perceived police injustice -. ** . . -. . . -. *** . . -. ** . . n *** p<. , **p<. , *p<. at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s. h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s x x d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re. c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity, o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core race, justice, policing, and the election du bois review: social science research on race : , this means those who believe the police may be biased against whites were more likely to support trump. notably, neither contact with the criminal justice system nor more affective negative feelings toward the police appear to be relevant to support for trump. the next three columns in table present a second model for trump support in the primary, this time adding two measures of racial attitudes and feelings toward blacks. explicit animus toward blacks—those who openly admit to feeling more warmly toward whites than blacks—is strongly and positively associated with support for trump. sim- ilarly, racial resentment of blacks is also strongly and positively related to a preference for trump. interestingly, including these measures of racial attitudes have two impor- tant impacts on other estimates in the model. first, the size of the estimate for the differ- ence between black and white respondents is cut in half and drops below conventional significance. in other words, racial animus and racial resentment appear important to explaining the different preferences among white and black voters in the republican primary. second, the estimate for the effect of perceived police injustice is also cut nearly in half and drops below conventional significance. in other words, if racial attitudes were ignored, it would appear that people’s perceptions of police injustice was important in distinguishing trump supporters from those who support other candidates. however, the full results suggest such perceptions may be acting as a proxy for racial attitudes among these voters. in other words, when choosing among the republican candidates, perceptions of the police were less important than attitudes toward blacks. the third set of columns switches the focus to the general election, contrasting those who indicate they would likely vote for donald trump in a general election against hillary clinton versus those who would vote for clinton, a third-party can- didate, or no one. not surprisingly, partisanship is an important factor in the general election, with those who identify most with the republican party expressing the stron- gest support for donald trump in a match-up with hillary clinton. relatedly, “small government” advocates are more likely to support donald trump—an interesting finding given that donald trump, in contrast to previous republican candidates, has not made “small government” a campaign issue and has in fact proposed significant government expansions (appelbaum ; french ). however, even after politi- cal party identification is controlled for, perceptions of the police as biased against blacks is strongly and negatively associated with opposition to donald trump. once again, neither contact with the criminal justice system nor more affective negative feelings toward the police appear to be relevant to support for trump. the final set of models adds the two measures of racial attitudes. although explicit animus is not significantly associated with candidate choice in the general election, those respondents who scored high on the racial resentment measure were substantially more likely to express support for donald trump. including this measure results in a substantial drop in the direct effect of a preference for limited government, comple- menting prior work suggesting that individualistic or anti-big government ideological positions often serve as a mask for racial resentments (bobo et al., ; bonilla-silva ; kinder and sears, ; jackman and muha, ). there is also a modest decrease in the direct effect of perceptions of police injustice, though, unlike the primary model, perceptions of police injustice remain an important predictor of opposition to donald trump in the general election. discussion and conclusion during the civil rights era, which was a particularly turbulent moment in american political history, intersecting issues of race, crime, policing, and justice had great salience at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core kevin drakulich et al. du bois review: social science research on race : , for political behavior. specifically, issues of crime, justice, and the police became important sites for conflict about the relative status of racial groups. outrage over the unfair treatment of black citizens by the police set off massive protests across the country, ultimately contributing to the passage of several landmark pieces of civil rights legislation. at the same time, white politicians reframed these protests as crimi- nal to delegitimize them, used law and order rhetoric as a signal to rally white voters uncomfortable with the changes posed by the civil rights movement, and simultane- ously used law enforcement officers to try to suppress political activity by civil rights protestors. thus, claims of unjust treatment at the hands of the police were used to motivate action to attempt to address problems of racial inequality. on the other side, “law and order” rhetoric as well as the actual institutions of the criminal justice system served as tools in efforts to maintain white superiority. these tools play a critical role in the new racial logic justifying white privilege, one that de-emphasizes group distinc- tions and instead favors individualistic explanations for inequalities (bobo et al., ; bonilla-silva ; jackman and muha, ). in this model, the “law and order” rhetoric serves as an implicit racially-coded appeal to rally those concerned about chal- lenges to the racial order without mentioning race or legitimizing the importance of the racial structure (lópez ; mendelberg ). contemporary criminal justice institutions also serve an important role, mirroring some of the functions of older sys- tems of racial confinement and subjugation like slavery and the jim crow system, but without the overtly-stated racial motivations and goals of those institutions (alexander ; wacquant ). the findings presented in this paper reveal the continued relevance of the intersection of race, crime, justice, and policing to american political behavior. just as in that earlier era, though, the relevance is far from simple or one-dimensional. the results suggest, for instance, that the impact of contact with the criminal jus- tice system depends on the form and punitiveness of contact. while incarceration is a severe, marginalizing, and exclusionary form of contact that tends to drive citizens away from political engagement and participation, the experience of police stops and questioning appears to do the opposite, by motivating citizens to become politically engaged and to vote. we further find perceptions of police injustice to be an important factor both in political participation and candidate choice. the impact of these perceptions, however, differs along lines of political ideology. we find that perceptions of police injustice against blacks motivate liberals to vote, and to vote for the democratic presidential candidate, hillary clinton. perceptions of the police as fair or even biased against whites, on the other hand, motivates turnout among conservatives and greater sup- port for the republican candidate, donald trump. notably, we find that perceptions of the police are not simply expressions of affec- tive evaluations of the police. moreover, we find that affect is not significantly associated with candidate choice, or, for the most part, with turnout. for example, feeling warmly toward the police only motivated political engagement among conservatives. alterna- tively, we found no effect of feeling warmly or coldly toward the police among liberals. the simplest and most general conclusion from our analysis is that both criminal justice contact and perceptions of police injustice matter for political behavior in . this indicates that researchers in political science, political sociology, and political criminology should take these race, crime, justice, and policing issues seriously when trying to understand contemporary political behavior. one finding is particularly troubling. consistent with lerman and weaver ( ), we find that certain forms of contact with the criminal justice system marginalize and at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core race, justice, policing, and the election du bois review: social science research on race : , exclude citizens from political engagement. those who had spent a night in jail or prison were much less likely to report following politics and rated their likelihood of voting in as much lower. this complements and extends work on the most direct effect of incarceration—felon disenfranchisement—in its critique of the corrosively antidemocratic impact of the carceral state (manza and uggen, ; weaver and lerman, ). finally, the influence of perceptions of police injustice has both encouraging and worrisome implications. on the one hand, consistent with the broader narrative from the civil rights era, perceptions of the police as disproportionately mistreating black citizens motivates political engagement, participation, and support for the presidential candidate explicitly proposing police reforms. on the other hand, perceptions of the police as unbiased or as biased against whites motivates engagement, participation and support for the candidate who has been unconditionally supportive of police and antagonistic towards the accountability concerns of the black lives matter movement. we have found evidence that perceptions of police injustice in the latter group may be a proxy for anti-black sentiment. for fifty years, politicians have used racialized allusions to crime and disorder in order to prey on voters’ fears, secure electoral gains, and enact punitive criminal justice policies. the same types of conflicts between police and communities of color that sparked the most controversial and polarizing events during the civil rights movement are occurring once again across the country. despite recent progress toward bipartisan criminal justice reform in congress and numerous state legislatures, this study provides further evidence that the same racialized tensions that polarized the electorate in the s are still shaping national politics today. corresponding author: kevin m. drakulich, school of criminology and criminal justice, northeastern university, boston, ma, . e-mail: k.drakulich@northeastern.edu notes . the only exception was louisiana in . . the one major exception is , which saw the election of the of the first president from a deep south state since the civil war. louisiana and georgia also voted for the next southern-born president in and louisiana did again in . . notably, these numbers come from the nypd and likely undercount police stops, as officers may be less likely to make a record of a stop that did not produce anything to justify an arrest. source: new york civil liberties union, http://www.nyclu.org/content/stop-and-frisk-data. . before weighting the data, the average respondent was forty-eight years old, and the sample was roughly % black, % hispanic, and % female. . the sample was selected from the yougov panel by sample matching, using prior estimates of the u.s. population along the lines of gender, age, race, education, voter registration and turnout status, as well as politics and party identification. the survey was conducted in eng- lish. additional information about the study can be found at http://www.electionstudies.org/ studypages/anes_pilot_ /anes_pilot_ .htm . for ease of interpretation, ordinal variables are summarized as dichotomous—specifically the percent that fall on either side of key thresholds—in tables and but left as ordinal in the full regressions. . exploratory analyses suggested that criminal justice contact and perceptions of the police were less relevant to preferences for clinton versus sanders as the democratic nominee. . latent factor scores were derived from a confirmatory factor model which treats each item as ordinal and used a weighted least squares estimator. the model created factor scores both for perceptions of police injustice and for the racial resentment scale discussed below. the model fit reasonably well (rmsea: ; χ = . ; df = ; p = . ). a simple index at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available mailto:k.drakulich@northeastern.edu http://www.nyclu.org/content/stop-and-frisk-data http://www.electionstudies.org/studypages/anes_pilot_ /anes_pilot_ .htm http://www.electionstudies.org/studypages/anes_pilot_ /anes_pilot_ .htm https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core kevin drakulich et al. du bois review: social science research on race : , (alpha reliability of . ) was also considered, and showed substantively similar results to those reported here. . while political choice is expected to be a product of political identification and racial prejudice, political participation was not expected to be associated with these outcomes and indeed, the exploratory models suggested no direct effects of politics or prejudice on either outcome (although, as noted below, conditional effects do exist). . a note on interpretation: an ordered logit model assumes that regression coefficients remain the same as one moves to different levels in the response, so the odds ratio represents the odds of being in any higher level of concern or worry versus the lower levels (thus it simul- taneously represents, for instance, the difference between the most politically-engaged category and all three lower answers but also the difference between the top three most engaged answers and the least engaged answer). diagnostics revealed no evidence that the proportional odds assumption was violated. . for ease of interpretation, we present results from a model which treats political engagement as linear, although the interaction terms were also significant in the ordered logit models (b = -. , p<. for feeling cold toward police and b = -. , p<. for perceptions of police injustice). we also reverse the direction of affect toward the police to ease interpretation. . the political ideology scale ranges from extremely liberal ( ) to extremely conservative ( ). the predicted results shown are for those identifying as “somewhat” liberal ( ) versus “somewhat” conservative ( ). . those who preferred none of the republican candidates are omitted from this analysis to emphasize the choice among republican candidates. . operationalizing this variable as hillary clinton versus trump, third-party-candidate, and non-voters, or as trump versus clinton with third-party and non-voters dropped produces substantively similar results. references alcindor, yamiche ( ). trump, rallying white crowd for police, accuses democrats of exploiting blacks. the new york times, august . <http://www.nytimes.com/ / / / us/politics/donald-trump-rally-is-called-chance-to-show-support-for-police.html?_r= > (accessed october , 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( ). perceptions of prison and punitive attitudes: a test of the penal escalation hypothesis. criminal justice review, ( ): – . at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available http://bigstory.ap.org/article/ b f dfa a ba /groups-affiliated-black-lives-matter-release-agenda http://bigstory.ap.org/article/ b f dfa a ba /groups-affiliated-black-lives-matter-release-agenda https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x x https://www.cambridge.org/core neuropsychological consequences of covid- full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=pnrh neuropsychological rehabilitation an international journal issn: (print) (online) journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/pnrh neuropsychological consequences of covid- barbara a. wilson , shai betteridge & jessica fish to cite this article: barbara a. wilson , shai betteridge & jessica fish ( ) neuropsychological consequences of covid- , neuropsychological rehabilitation, : , - , doi: . / . . to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / . . published online: sep . submit your article to this journal article views: view related articles view crossmark data citing articles: view citing articles https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=pnrh https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/pnrh https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showcitformats?doi= . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=pnrh &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=pnrh &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/ . / . . #tabmodule https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/ . / . . #tabmodule editorial neuropsychological consequences of covid- there are seven coronaviruses of which four are relatively mild. the three acute ones are: sars (severe acute respiratory syndrome); mers (middle east respiratory syndrome; and the one causing the current pandemic, sars-covid- , which is the technical name for the new virus. the illness caused by sars-covid- is covid- . many covid- survivors who have been seriously ill are likely to need ongoing help. we know that several body systems can be affected by covid- , including the respirat- ory, circulatory, and digestive systems. central nervous system involvement has also been documented. in some cases the virus can directly affect the brain, with both infec- tion and inflammation-based mechanisms possible, and a range of secondary neurologi- cal effects as part of broader systemic illness has also been reported. as a result, alongside well-acknowledged difficulties with fatigue and deconditioning, people reco- vering from covid- may have cognitive, emotional and behavioural problems that require a referral to neuropsychology and/or neuropsychiatry services. we do not yet know how many people are affected nor how long their problems will last, but a number of reviews based on the early studies of people with covid- , as well as related conditions, have provided some initial pointers. within the uk, cases of those with covid- admitted to hospital and presenting with neurological and neuropsychiatric features have been carefully profiled as part of the coronerve national registry study. varatharaj et al. ( ) reported that of cases sub- mitted to the coronerve registry, had complete data. of these , they identified that % had suffered a cerebrovascular event and of these, % were ischaemic, % haemorrhagic, % had vasculitis and the remainder other cerebrovascular events. of the , % presented with altered mental status, and of this subgroup, encephalitis was identified in %, unspecified encephalopathy in % and neuropsychiatric disorder in %. of the cases classified as neuropsychiatric, % were described as having psy- chosis, % neurocognitive disorder, and % other psychiatric disorders. finally, % of the total were classified as having a peripheral disorder and % other neurological disorder. considering the international as well as uk data, ellul et al. ( a) examined case reports and series totalling patients with neurological manifestations of covid- up to may , they report that cerebrovascular events have been unexpectedly common, being reported in patients. they also highlighted that encephalopathy is relatively common, being reported for patients in total. this figure includes ( . %) of hospitalised covid- patients in wuhan, china, and ( %) of in intensive care with covid- in france. encephalitis has been documented in eight patients, and guillain-barré syndrome in patients. it is important to note that there is some doubt regarding whether or not covid- was a causal factor in all of these cases and some case reports have provided insufficient detail to establish causality (see ellul et al., b for guidance). nonetheless, it is clear that ‘neuro-covid’ cases exist and appropriate care and rehabilitation pathways are needed for these patients. a recent review by ritchie et al. ( ) is informative in considering the broader neu- ropsychological aspects of covid- . they cite a preliminary study documenting that © informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group neuropsychological rehabilitation , vol. , no. , – https://doi.org/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://www.tandfonline.com % of people with covid- admitted to intensive treatment units required mechanical ventilation, and link this to the literature on cognition in acute respiratory distress syn- drome (ards). they summarise that up to % of people with ards had cognitive pro- blems a year post-discharge and approximately % at two years. self-reported everyday memory failures, such as forgetting medication and appointments, have been found to persist in patients five years post-discharge. furthermore, a proportion of those who have spent time in intensive care (a population that overlaps with ards) are known to experi- ence lasting cognitive impairment. for example, wolters et al. ( ) found in a systema- tic review of the literature that, although estimated prevalence of cognitive impairment varied between – % in patients followed up at between – months, the majority of studies have identified that critical illness and associated treatment is linked with lasting cognitive deficits. together, these findings suggest that enduring cognitive deficits are likely to be common in people who have had severe forms of covid- even without an obvious neurological presentation in the acute stages. it is also the case that some people with pre-existing neurological conditions have become unwell with covid- , and there are indications that comorbidities may lead to more severe forms of the illness (e.g. louapre et al., , found this pattern in people with multiple sclerosis). though cognitive outcomes in such groups have not, to our knowledge, been studied our clinical impression is that cognition has been vulner- able to accelerated decline in such cases at least in the early stages of recovery. we do not yet have a good understanding of the profile of cognitive deficits resulting from covid- . the studies previously cited suggest problems with memory, attention and information processing, and executive function, are likely to be particularly prevalent (e.g. based on the hypothesised sensitivity of the hippocampus to the virus, and the ards and critical illness literature). however, it follows from the wide variety of neuro- logical and neuropsychiatric presentations reported that the cognitive profiles are also likely to be diverse and as neuropsychologists we must be alert to the possibility that rare and/or difficult to identify syndromes may result. an indian colleague, jwala naraya- nan, has reported a -year-old patient who developed covid- , then had a stroke and was left with balint’s syndrome (narayanan et al., in press). as far as we are aware, this is the first case of this rare syndrome to be reported in a patient diagnosed with covid- . the mental health impacts of covid- can also be estimated to be high, based on knowledge accrued from the earlier pandemics, and the literature on recovering from critical illness. ritchie et al. ( ) cite research on psychological distress in mers and sars, identifying that up to % of people with confirmed mers showed psychiatric symptoms including psychosis and hallucinations during their admission, and that in a study of people with sars, % were diagnosed with a psychiatric disorder, which persisted in a third of cases – years after the illness. a report by the british psychologi- cal society (bps) has also emphasised the potential for ongoing difficulties with mood, anxiety, and fatigue likely to be experienced be people recovering from less severe cases of covid- , for example those hospitalised but not in intensive care (bps, ), and by extension these may be experienced at a lower rate but by a higher number of people who were unwell but were not hospitalized. family members and carers may also experience anxiety, stress, and problems with mood and sleep, and these could well be exacerbated by restrictions on visiting family members in hospital. strokes are not uncommon (goldberg ). indeed, covid- may even present as stroke as reported in four patients in the usa (avula et al., in press). the varatharaj et al. paper referred to above found that cerebrovascular events predominated in patients over years of age. altered mental status, despite being present in all ages editorial and most frequently reported in those in their s, had a disproportionate representation relative to cerebrovascular events in the young. all of the above reports and observations suggest that many survivors of covid- are likely to require neuropsychological assessment and rehabilitation. at present, rehabilita- tion is severely underfunded. a paper from the british society of rehabilitation medicine (bsrm: phillips et al., ) stresses that rehabilitation is critical but we should expect pro- blems when trying to offer this rehabilitation, as covid- patients will provide a great challenge to the existing structures of rehabilitation. for example, many covid- patients will need local, community-based rehabilitation services which are weak and often transient. if any funding is available for rehabilitation it is likely to go to those cri- tically ill probably representing only a small minority of all patients needing rehabilitation. the bsrm report touches on clinical psychology/neuropsychology when discussing the importance of multidisciplinary teams but it does not recognise the importance of neuropsychiatry and clinical psychology in relation to the management of the mental health needs of these patients or stress the importance of clinical neuropsychology when dealing with the cognitive issues, which is our main area of expertise. in particular, the organisation of services around diagnoses has resulted in some covid- patients who exhibit cognitive deficits being unfairly restricted from accessing community neu- rorehabilitation services because they do not have a formal neurological diagnosis. fur- thermore, the physical rehabilitation teams, which covid- patients are referred to, are typically unskilled in the management of cognitive deficits. covid- has challenged all health care providers, including rehabilitation, and will continue to do so for at least the next few years. it has precipitated rapid change and adaptation to different circum- stances. we might, in the long term develop a much needed change in the attention paid to rehabilitation, leading to a better organisation and system of funding to allow for more efficient and effective use of resources around need rather than diagnosis. such a change will benefit all patients and all parts of healthcare. in the interim many patients are likely to require rehabilitation and there needs to be recognition by health care providers that covid- patients need to be allowed to access services based on clinical need rather than diagnosis, as the long-term sequelae of the condition are still unknown. we need to provide long-term follow up with regard to neu- ropsychology, as we do not know how long the cognitive, behavioural and emotional problems will last. in june, a report from public health england identified that people from black asian and minority ethnic backgrounds are up to twice as likely to die from covid- as people from white british background (public health england, ), a pattern that had been increasingly apparent in news reports on those affected. though the reasons behind this devastating health inequality are complex and remain under investigation, it is notable that the literature on neuropsychological aspects of covid- has yet to address this issue, and it will be important to ensure neuropsychological procedures and services are culturally-informed and that their equity is monitored. this is particularly pressing given the contemporaneous increase in awareness of the shameful extent to which racism continues to exist and operate from individual through to societal levels worldwide, highlighted by the black lives matter movement in response to the murder of george floyd. at st. george’s hospital in london, we are carrying out cognitive and psychological screening assessments on all post-covid- patients referred to the clinical neuropsy- chology and clinical health psychology department. we are conducting this audit in an attempt to characterise the neuropsychological needs of the people with covid- neuropsychological rehabilitation seen within our department. we want to know the reasons they are referred, what type of cognitive, emotional and behavioural difficulties they face and what are the functional consequences of these problems. we also wish to discover if these difficulties persist or resolve over time. through this audit we hope to be able to better understand the needs of this patient group, to inform the service we provide for them, and to share this knowledge with colleagues and commissioners. references avula, a., nalleballe, k., narula, n., sapozhnikov, s., dandu, v., toom, s., glaser, a., & elsayegh, d. (in press). covid- presenting as stroke. brain, behaviour and immunity. ellul, m., benjamin, l., singh, b., lant, s., michael, b. d., easton, a., kneen, r., defres, s., sejvar, j., & solomon, t. (in press). neurological associations of covid- . the lancet neurology. goldberg, e. (webinar entitled covid- and the brain) may organised by the luria neuroscience institute, new york. louapre, c., collongues, n., stankoff, b., giannesini, c., papeix, c., bensa, c., deschamps, r., créange, a., wahab, a., pelletier, j., & heinzlef, o. ( ). clinical characteristics and outcomes in patients with cor- onavirus disease and multiple sclerosis. jama neurology. murphy, d., wade, d., bunnage, m., doyle, a.-m., dupont, s., fish, j., firschman, p., frizelle, d., morrison, v., moss-morris, r., murray, h., & twose, p. ( ). meeting the psychological needs of people recovering from severe coronavirus. british psychological society. narayanan, j., wilson, b. a., & evans, j. j. (in press). a case of balint’s syndrome after covid- (to appear in the newsletter of the international neuropsychological society ). phillips, m., turner-stokes, l., wade, d., & walton, k. ( ). rehabilitation in the wake of covid- - a phoenix from the ashes. working document for the british society of rehabilitation medicine. public health england. ( ). disparities in the risk and outcomes of covid- . ritchie, k., chan, d., & watermeyer, t. ( ). the cognitive consequences of the covid- epidemic: collateral damage? brain communications. barbara a. wilson department of clinical neuropsychology & clinical health psychology, st george’s university hospitals nhs foundation trust, london, uk the oliver zangwill centre for neuropsychological rehabilitation, cambridgeshire community services nhs trust, ely, uk barbara.wilson @gmail.com shai betteridge department of clinical neuropsychology & clinical health psychology, st george’s university hospitals nhs foundation trust, london, uk jessica fish department of clinical neuropsychology & clinical health psychology, st george’s university hospitals nhs foundation trust, london, uk mental health & wellbeing research group, institute of health and wellbeing, university of glasgow, glasgow, uk editorial mailto:barbara.wilson @gmail.com 	references << /ascii encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles false /autorotatepages /pagebypage /binding /left 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/pdfxtrapped /false /description << /enu () >> >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [ ] /pagesize [ . . ] >> setpagedevice psr_ .. american political science review ( ) , , – doi: . /s © the author(s), . published by cambridge university press on behalf of the american political science association bridges between wedges and frames: outreach and compromise in american political discourse andrew stark university of toronto wedges and frames, two much-studied strategies of american political combat, are generallythought to be partisan weapons, meant to manipulate voters into making trade-offs that favor thepolitical actor wielding them. my inquiry here explores whether there exists anything compar- ably schematic to wedges and frames at work in attempts by american politicians not to polarize but to find consensus, not to cater to extremes but moderate them. despite the seeming paucity of such efforts in american public discourse, there is one such common and as-yet untheorized scheme, which uses the two issue positions involved in wedges to overcome the ill effects of reframing and the two value dimensions involved in reframing to overcome the ill effects of wedges. i elaborate this discursive structure by examining its presence in a number of american political debates, showing how it differs from other contemporary normative-theoretic frameworks for understanding compromise in american politics. wedges and frames, two much-studied strat-egies of american political combat, are gen-erally thought to be partisan weapons, meant to manipulate voters into making trade-offs that favor the political actor wielding them. in wedge politics, one side in a political conflict presents the electorate with a more attractive trade- off between two issue positions than the other side is offering (hillygus and shields , ). consider, for example, a republican candidate who favors conceal- and-carry and opposes raising the minimum wage. using guns as a wedge, she will try to win over those (working-class) voters who prefer to sacrifice their preference for the democratic position on raising the minimum wage in exchange for her position on loos- ening gun regulation. those faced with a wedge, then, are asked to make a “trade-off” (hillygus and shields , ; trubowitz , ). with framing, one side in a political conflict shows how its position on a particular issue, which seems unattractive based on one value dimension, becomes attractive based on a second (chong and druckman ). consider, for example, a republican politician opposed to the estate tax. if he frames that opposition as promoting the value of helping the wealthy, it is of course unattractive to voters who might—if it were framed as a way of promoting the value of interge- nerational bonds between family members—approve of it (meagher ). such reframing, too, is a “trade- off” (lahav and courtemanche , ; sniderman and theriault , ) between value dimensions, not—as with wedges—between issue positions. in opposing estate taxes, the voter sacrifices his equality values in order to satisfy his values in the domain of the family. wedge and frames thus display symmetry. wedges pose trade-offs between issue positions, whether within or across value dimensions. frames, conversely, pose trade-offs between value dimensions, whether within or across issue positions. even if not the topic of joint analysis, wedges and frames appear together in many studies that examine issue positions in tandem with value dimensions in american politics (see, e.g., shafer and claggett, ). my inquiry here, though, explores whether there exists anything comparably schematic to wedges and frames at work in attempts by american politicians not to score a victory at the expense of the other but create win-win resolutions of policy disputes, not to polarize but to find consensus, not to cater to the extremes of their own parties but moderate them. despite the andrew stark , professor of strategic management and political science, university of toronto, stark@rotman.utoronto.ca. i am grateful to simone chambers, don herzog, melissa wil- liams, and the apsr editor and reviewers for their helpful comments on earlier versions of this paper. received: june , ; revised: april , ; accepted: april , . framing lends itself to a number of different definitions; for the particular understanding used here, which equates frames with value dimensions, see brewer and gross ( ); chong and druckman ( ); smith ( , ), and sniderman and theriault ( , ). although, as chong ( , ) says, an “issue can be interpreted using any number of frames of reference or dimensions,” a “common frame of reference is a particular interpretation of an issue that has been popularized through political discussion” (see also gabrielson ). accordingly, the frames or value dimensions referred to in what follows are those that, if not explicitly stated as such by the political actors wielding them, can be “constructed” or “elaborated” from their discourse (gamson , – ). for example, in supporting abortion rights but opposing much social assistance for single mothers, former massachusetts governor william weld posed a wedge, for liberal democrats, between those two issue positions within the single value dimension “women’s rights.” in proposing to construct a parkway in washington in , transportation secretary john volpe posed a conflict between two frames within that single issue position, suggesting it be evaluated on an anti-traffic-congestion value dimension while opponents framed it on an environmental value dimension. and in opposing stem cell research while supporting the partial privatization of social security, president george w. bush posed a trade-off to traditionalist working-class voters across issue positions and value dimensions alike, as those voters opposed stem cell research on a cultural-values dimension but supported a robust public social-security system on an economic value dimension (see, relatedly, woodly , – ). d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://doi.org/ . /s https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:stark@rotman.utoronto.ca https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s seeming paucity of such efforts in contemporary us politics, there is at least one such scheme and it is to be found across a range of policy domains. if we were to give it a name analogous to a wedge or a frame, we might call it a “bridge.” it involves using a new value dimension to create a bridge between two issue posi- tions that might otherwise pose a trade-off on an initial value dimension and a new issue position to create a bridge between two value dimensions that might other- wise pose a trade-off on an initial issue position. bridges, wedges, and frames: an illustration consider an example. in , paul bridges, the republican mayor of uvalda, georgia, adopted two issue positions—rigorous and committed policing of domestic and drug-related violence and restrained and compassionate policing of illegal immigration— that, for his conservative base, posed a trade-off on the value dimension “law and order” (shoichet ). voters who cared about law and order were being asked to forego a certain amount of that value via his immigration issue position in return for bridges’s delivering a certain amount of that same value via his domestic/drug-crime-policing position (bridges a, a). bridges confronted them with a trade-off; it was, in effect, a wedge—except a wedge directed by a moderate at the more entrenched members of his own side instead of by a staunch partisan at wavering voters on the other. however, bridges advanced a second value dimen- sion, call it “protecting families,” on which his two issue positions did not pose a trade-off but instead cohered (bridges b, b). his issue position of rigorous domestic/drug-crime-policing, bridges argued, would protect families from household and neighborhood violence (bridges c, d; kennedy ). his issue position of restrained immigration policing, meanwhile, would contribute to the preservation of immigrant families, shielding them from being split up through deportation. “the republican party i joined years ago stood for protection of the family” bridges said; that’s why he had always adopted the issue pos- ition of rigorously supporting the police “on their mission to protect” and “enforce the peace” (political transcript wire ). but at the same time, he main- tained, that same value dimension of protecting the family would be promoted by his other issue position of restrained immigration policing, since rigorous immigration enforcement would actually “put [those] values under attack” by “break[ing] up … families” (bridges a, a). with bridges’s approach, his two issue positions, which pose a trade-off—a wedge— on one of the two value dimensions, law and order, cohere on a second—family protection—jointly con- tributing to it. bridges, however, offered a trade-off-effacing innov- ation not just in the domain of wedges, but in the arena of framing as well. he didn’t, as a traditional reframe would do, simply suggest that his voters change their view of his restrained immigration-policing issue pos- ition in and of itself, by framing it in the value dimen- sion of family protection, where it would be evaluated positively, instead of in the value dimension of law and order, where it would be evaluated negatively. bridges also used his rigorous domestic/drug-violence-policing issue position to cast the entire relationship between the two value dimensions, “law and order” and “pro- tecting families,” not simply as a trade-off—as they seem to be on his immigration-policing issue position— but as cohering in a means–ends relationship, the law- and-order value dimension being subordinate to the family-preservation value dimension. after all, when it came to his issue position of rigorous domestic/drug-crime policing—where the two value dimensions both offered positive frames— voters could readily see how the point of the value dimension of law and order is to “serve,” as bridges put it, the value dimension of family protection (shoichet ). family protection, he stressed, is the “mission” of law enforcement. we don’t protect families in order to preserve law and order; we pursue the value of law and order to serve the value of family protection. if, as it does on bridges’s issue position of policing domestic/drug crimes, an aggressive stance on the means value dimension of law and order promotes the end value dimension of family protection, then where a restrained approach to law and order promotes family protection—as it does with bridges’s issue pos- ition of compassionate immigration policing—that’s what should be indicated. it makes no sense, bridges said, to be a law-and-order zealot when it comes to immigration policing, turning “honest georgia citi- zens” who hire or marry undocumented immigrants “into lawbreakers,” if doing so will only “risk [family] separation” (bridges a, a), as if the value of family protection were subordinate to the value of law and order instead of the other way round. had bridges simply reframed his less-accepted immigration-policing issue position alone, as with trad- itional reframing, he would have been relying on his voters’ believing that the value lost on the “law and order” dimension is dominated by the value gained on the “family protection” dimension: a trade-off between two value dimensions in which the first value would be sacrificed for the second. but by reframing his more- accepted domestic-crime-policing issue position too, he argued that the entire value dimension of law and order is ultimately dominated by—is meant to serve, as a means to an end—the value dimension of family pro- tection, not the other way around. while in a traditional reframe, the two value dimensions pose a trade-off on the single issue position being offered, with bridges’s approach, the two value dimensions are shown, on the second issue position being offered, to cohere more fundamentally as means and ends, not just conflict as in a simple reframe. schematically, figure explicates what bridges did, both with wedges and with frames. this hybrid of wedges and reframes—in which two issue positions (as with wedge politics) get placed simultaneously on two value dimensions (as happens bridges between wedges and frames d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s with reframing)—is, i will argue, an as-yet untheorized rhetorical form of political outreach, or consensus- building, in american politics: one that is used across policy domains. when political actors, whether politi- cians or advocates, try to show how the same two issue positions occupy the same two value dimensions, they are usually reaching out noncombatively, whether to more extreme members of their own party, as did bridges, or to moderate supporters of the other party. in effect, they are superseding, mitigating, or eradicat- ing the polarizing aspects of wedges and reframing. in what follows, i first distinguish this bridging dis- cursive structure from some major contemporary normative-theoretic frameworks for understanding compromise in american politics. i then set out the article’s methodology. the following section examines the structure’s presence across a number of american political debates, developing a broad typology of some of its different manifestations. a final part concludes. wedges, frames, and democratic compromise a good deal of recent political theory focuses on the meaning and legitimacy of compromise in democratic politics. in this section, i situate the discursive structure of bridging within its major strands. some theorists, to begin with, equate a legitimate compromise simply with one in which each side gets more than it gives up, a variant of logrolling. but if that were all there was to it, then whenever the issue pos- ition each side receives is more valuable to it than the issue position it cedes, there would be never be any felt need for a second value dimension, one that dissolves the trade-off between the two issue positions altogether, aligning them in jointly promoting that value. instead, only one value dimension would ever be necessary to gain agreement on the two different issue positions. had he been governed by a logrolling approach, for example, bridges would have rested content with having merely offered a wedge, a trade- off, as long as the value in terms of law and order that his voters were gaining, via his rigorous domestic/drug- policing issue position, was worth the value they were giving up via his restrained immigration-policing issue position. in making outreach, however, bridges went beyond this to advance a second value dimension, family protection, on which the two issue positions cohered. figure depicts this form of logrolling com- promise: other theorists analyze democratic compromise as a form of “overlapping consensus.” here, two different sides harbor two very different value dimensions which, however, agree in supporting the same issue position. think of liberals who value free speech (but not polit- ical incorrectness), and conservatives who value polit- ical incorrectness (but not licentious speech), who both figure . bridges’s outreach to less moderate republicans trade-off trade-off for a normatively sophisticated discussion, see gutmann and thompson ( ). dryzek and list ( , ) show how an individual’s issue positions, which might not be single-peaked on one value dimension, never- theless can be single-peaked on a second: a different point than the one i am making here, on which issue positions that conflict for an individual on one value dimension can cohere on a second. andrew stark d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s take the position that there should be no curbs on campus expression. in effect, such an overlapping consensus constitutes a kind of reframing. each side evaluates the issue position based on how it promotes the value dimension—the frame—it prefers as distinct from the one it doesn’t. there is agreement on an issue position, but the value dimensions remain unreconciled—in conflict. in bridges’s case, he would have been happy simply if his voters had accepted his issue position of restrained immigration policing based on its serving the family-protection value dimension they harbored, without trying to reconcile them to its sim- ultaneously serving a frame—less-than-rigorous law enforcement—that they didn’t value. the bridging structure that i will examine, by contrast, involves those making outreach going further and showing, by reference to a second issue position, how the two otherwise conflicting value dimensions cohere in a means–ends relationship (see related discussion in goodin , ). figure illustrates the “overlap- ping consensus” compromise. still other theorists analyze a legitimate compromise as whatever results as long as each side advances its issue position based on values that the other can agree to, even if each ultimately prefers its own issue position (see the critical discussion in richardson and bohman ). pro-choice advocates, for example, would advance their position based on the value of personal autonomy—a value that pro-life advocates accept— rather than on any value that denies that the fetus is a human being. pro-life advocates, for their part, would advance their position based on the value of human life, a value that pro-choice advocates accept, rather than on any value that involves divine command. in such cases, value dimensions are jointly shared across sides even if their issue positions remain in conflict (see figure ). but in the case of the bridging outreach strategy i will be examining here, the point, as it was for bridges, is to find a shared value dimension that dissolves the conflict between the issue positions. finally, other theorists, in analyzing a legitimate compromise, make use of the idea of an “integrative” agreement as discussed in the negotiation literature. if a cake must be divided, a solution is integrative—“no party loses”—if one side wants only the spongy part and the other only the icing (warren and mansbridge , ). in such integrative agreements, the issue positions do not conflict—both are fully realizable together—even if the value dimensions underlying them are not shared across sides (one side values sweetness but not sponginess, the other sponginess but not sweet- ness). each side can agree to the other getting what it wants, even though—or precisely because—their underlying values differ. but again, in the bridging outreach strategy i am examining here, the point, as it was for bridges, is to find a shared issue position that dissolves the conflict between value dimensions (see, relatedly, white and ypi , ). figure depicts an integrative agreement. as the preceding discussion suggests, there is sym- metry within some major normative-theoretic approa- ches to democratic compromise, which, taken together, imply a missing synthesis. with logrolling, agreement is reached between the sides over two issue positions, even though those issue positions remain in conflict on the single value dimension on which they’re con- sidered. with overlapping consensus, agreement is reached over the single issue position being considered, despite the conflict between the two value dimensions each side brings to it. with “values the other can agree to,” agreement is reached on the two value dimensions being advanced while conflict remains between the two issue positions. and with “integrative agreement,” agreement is reached on the two issue positions being advanced even though the two value dimensions remain in conflict. all have their roles, but they cumulatively suggest the possibility of something overarching, something absent in the literature but present, i argue, in ameri- can political discourse. it is a mode of outreach—a structural effort to forge compromise—in which the issue positions that conflict on one value dimension are rendered coherent on a second and, equally, the figure . logrolling compromise figure . overlapping consensus bridges between wedges and frames d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s value dimensions that conflict on one issue position are rendered coherent on a second. methodology “rhetoric represents the currency of politics, in that everything important passes through it,” mark smith ( , , ) says, and “parsimony in studying rhetoric [can] lead to new insights into politics.” the analysis of rhetoric, or discourse, embraces a diversity of methodological approaches that unfold along at least two basic spectrums. some analyses incorporate a critical approach (dryzek and niemeyer , ), while others remain closer to thick description (botting and houser ). some focus on “text as text” (hawkesworth ) while others treat text as data (parthasarathy, rao, and palaniswamy ). to situate the task in which i am engaged, methodo- logically, within these spectrums, i rely on an observa- tion made by rogers smith ( , , , – ): “if one is attempting an interpretive narrative that shows [certain] structures of thought and argument to be visible in [the] text” of political discourse, one does so by focusing “on a few major cases that seem represen- tative instead of documenting how those structures are visible in all or most of the relevant cases” (see also dixit and londregan , ). for the purposes smith sets out—namely, to make a certain argumentative structure visible in the text of discourse in order to “build up a comprehensive por- trait of political life”—using a text-as-text and thick, descriptive approach is, smith ( , , ) says, appropriate (see also, e.g., fischer and gottweis ). the same applies for the broader purposes of converting that structure into independent or depe- ndent variables amenable to the analysis of its persua- sive effect or the circumstances in which it is most likely to emerge. as king, keohane, and verba ( , ) note, “it is hard to develop [causal] explanations before we know something about the world and what needs to be explained on the basis of what character- istic.” and if the characteristic in question is a certain structure in the world of public discourse, then a “text- as-text” and a “thick, descriptive” approach (maynard and mildenberger , ) is appropriate for identifying it. riker’s study of the heresthetical structure he identi- fied in american political discourse exemplifies this methodology. as riker ( , ) said, his goal was to “provide an open-ended set of categories for events that have not heretofore been systematically characterized.” and to capture that structure, he adopted a text-as-text and thick, descriptive approach to a series of cases. my inquiry here is whether there exists a structure compar- ably schematic to heresthetics at work when american political actors seek to discursively forge consensus, not polarization, and i do so by using the same text-as-text and thick, descriptive methodology. my examination takes the form of a “rational recon- struction” of discourse, which—while referring to the actual rhetoric of participants—explicitly brings out a formal structure it displays, in this case a certain mode of outreach, which for those participants might remain unrecognized as such (habermas , ). such rational reconstruction “helps agents recognize their own practices in a more articulate way [and its] norma- tive force … is due, in part, to the fact that practitioners already, at least implicitly, accept them” (kelly , ). because the arguments being analyzed here are polit- ically contentious, they will provoke differing views as to their normative and empirical validity (they are also conveyed at varying levels of policy specificity). but as smith ( , ) emphasizes, the project of analyzing and identifying argumentative structures is an inquiry separate and apart—necessary and precedent to —“the work of empirical political scientists and nor- mative theorists,” whose agenda involves providing a figure . values the other can accept figure . integrative agreement andrew stark d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s normative critique of those structures or an empirical analysis of argumentative soundness in given cases. variations on the theme carbon tax and deregulation in , representative bob inglis, a republican, adopted two issue positions—(i) broad opposition to business regulation and (ii) support for a carbon tax— that, to his base, posed a trade-off, a wedge, on what might be called the value dimension of “relieving burdens on businesses.” in voting for him, they had to accept some burden by way of the tax in order to relieve some burden by way of deregulation, and many weren’t happy (rosen ). but inglis also advanced another value dimension, call it “spurring economic growth,” on which he spent much time showing that both deregulation and a carbon tax would jointly cohere in advancing: deregulation by enabling businesses to channel new revenue to investment and a carbon tax by compelling businesses to innovate. on this value dimension, far from the two issue positions posing a wedge, they cohere: “[r]egulatory … reforms [will] make the united states economy more competitive, innovative and robust,” inglis said (becker ), while a “[c]arbon tax” would likewise “deliver innovation” and “grow the economy” (inglis ; targeted news service ). also, inglis emphasized that the value dimension of “relieving burdens on businesses” and the value dimen- sion of “spurring growth” are not simply two different frames for analyzing issue positions. instead, they cohere as means to an end: relieving burdens on business is a tool for spurring growth; spurring growth is not a tool for relieving burdens on businesses. on one of inglis’s two issue positions—his deregulatory position—this is evident. it’s obvious that the value dimension of “relieving burdens on business” is meant to advance the value dimension of “spurring growth.” “[g]overnment shrinking [and abolishing] regulations that are cumbersome,” he said, “get[s] innovation hap- pening” (emmett and kennedy ; randazzo ). and so when it comes to inglis’s issue position of a carbon tax, where a sacrifice of value on the “relieving- burdens-on-business” dimension yields value on the “spurring-growth” dimension, that is what should hap- pen, since—as his issue position of deregulation shows—the two values relate as means to an end. “we need to impose a tax on … carbon dioxide” to get “the things we want more of, income and jobs” (inglis and laffer ). unfortunately though, inglis noted, “in the political world we have sort of fallen in love with the concept of the girl rather than the girl,” by which he inelegantly meant that the value of removing government burdens on business has taken supremacy over the value of spurring growth, when it should be the other way round (political transcript wire ). inglis’s deregulatory issue position helped him convert the two frames, the “disburdening-business” value dimension and the “spurring-growth” value dimension, from a mere trade-off into a proper means–ends, sub- ordinate–superior relationship, and that is how they should be seen on his carbon-tax issue position as well. inglis’s outreach thus involved his using a second value dimension (spurring growth) to make coherent two issue positions that posed a wedge on a first (not burdening business), and it involved using a second issue position (cutting regulation) to convert into a coherent means–ends relationship two value dimen- sions that posed a mere reframe on a first (imposing a carbon tax). abortion rights and social assistance turn now from moderate conservatives like bridges and inglis, trying to win over more traditional conser- vatives to the case of a moderate liberal trying to win over progressives. in the s, pennsylvania’s demo- cratic governor robert casey confronted his liberal supporters with what, on the value dimension of “women’s rights,” was a trade-off: accept his issue position of placing hedges on abortion—a -hour delay and mandatory counseling on adoption—in exchange for his deeply progressive positions on other issues that promoted women’s rights, for example, expanding social programs in the form of medicaid, nutrition support, and child care. instead, though, of simply relying on the “wedge” idea that on the “women’s-rights” value dimension his supporters would think the trade-off between his two issue positions was worth it, casey advanced another value dimension on which those two issue positions posed no trade-off but instead fell into alignment. calling it the democratic party’s traditional focus on “protecting the most vulnerable,” casey argued that his anti-abortion issue position would promote that value; after all, casey asked, what’s more vulnerable than the fetus? meanwhile, his issue position of expanding social programs would also have advanced that same value by aiding vulnerable families. “no nation,” casey ( ) declared, “can truly progress by leaving behind its most vulnerable members,” and so we must “offer … women meaningful alternatives to abortion and children and families the help they need to have a real chance to live decent, healthy and happy lives.” the “protecting-the- vulnerable” value dimension was meant to ease the sense of trade-off, of wedge, between casey’s two issue positions, opposition to abortion and aid to children and families, which existed on the “women’s-rights” value dimension. instead, on the “protecting-the-vul- nerable” value dimension, his two issue positions jointly cohered. but there was more. for when it came to his issue position on circumscribing abortion, casey wasn’t sim- ply relying on the “reframing” idea that the value gained on the dimension of “protecting vulnerable” fetuses is worth the trade-off—the value sacrificed— on the dimension of “women’s rights.” he was using his other issue position, namely his support for a variety of social programs, to argue that the entire value dimen- sion of “women’s rights” is, itself, to be measured by how it generates value on the dimension of “protecting bridges between wedges and frames d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s the vulnerable.” the value dimension of “women’s rights” and the value dimension of “protecting the vulnerable” relate as means to ends, not simply as two coequal different frames. we give people rights to protect them when they’re vulnerable; we don’t protect them when they’re vulnerable in order to give them rights. as a democrats for life spokesperson described casey’s position, “democratic causes [such as] women’s rights” are meant to “express concern for those who are most vulnerable.” that subordinate– superior relationship is evident in issue positions that correct for “the harsh consequences of our economic system,” such as progressive medicaid, nutrition sup- port, and childcare policies. and it should apply as well, democrats for life argued, for those issue positions that show “respect for life” such as “pro-life laws” (mackura-tromski ). black lives matter and gun rights consider a second case of moderate democrats reach- ing out to more liberal ones. it involves “liberals for guns” (lfg), a group of otherwise liberal democrats who hold conservative views on the second amend- ment akin to the national rifle association. liberals for guns members—and members of like-minded groups, such as the liberal gun club—take (among others) the following two issue positions: while sup- porting (i) minimal gun regulation, they also advocate for (ii) black lives matter. in its outreach to more progressive liberals, whom they know support (ii) black lives matter but oppose (i) minimal gun regulation, lfg must deal with the reality that those two issue positions assume the relationship of a trade-off on an important value dimension: call it “preventing innocent deaths.” issue position (ii), supporting black lives matter, reaps value on that dimension by encouraging police offi- cers to observe proper restraint in dealing with young black men, thus reducing gun violence. but for progressive liberals, issue position (i), minimizing gun regulation, represents a sacrifice of value on that dimension—preventing innocent deaths—by making it easier for people to commit gun violence. there- fore, progressive liberals, in being asked to join in the work of lfg, conceive of (i) and (ii) as a wedge on the value dimension of “preventing innocent deaths.” in response, lfg advances a second value dimen- sion. call it “addressing root causes of violence.” on this value dimension, lfg argues, its two issue posi- tions, (i) minimizing gun regulation and (ii) supporting black lives matter, do not form a trade-off but rather cohere. issue position (ii), supporting black lives mat- ter, advances the value dimension of “addressing root causes of violence” by encouraging governments to grapple with urban crime not through rigid law enforce- ment but by marshaling education, counseling, work opportunities, and other programs targeted more dir- ectly at the social and economic roots of law-breaking. as a liberal gun club officer says in support of black lives matter, “[w]e should be looking at … systemic poverty and racism … .” (holloway ). as with issue position (ii), supporting black lives matter, so with issue position (i), minimizing gun regu- lation. it too, lfg argues, advances the “addressing root causes” value dimension (badger ), by redir- ecting our attention to the underlying sources of gun violence. minimizing gun regulation encourages gov- ernments to address the misuse of guns not through the rote enforcement of regulation but through social work, counseling, therapy, and other programs designed to deal with the mental conditions—the root causes—that make the private possession of guns dangerous. as a statement by the liberal gun club puts it, “we favor root-cause mitigation for violence prevention [such as] stronger mental health care … rather than focusing on prohibiting or restricting [guns]. we believe that add- itional regulation is too often political window dressing and does not serve to resolve the ills for which it is claimed as a cure” (liberal gun club n.d.a). on this value dimension, then—that is, “addressing root causes of violence”—the issue position that lib- erals traditionally support—namely (ii) black lives matter—and the one they traditionally oppose but that lfg supports—(i) minimizing gun regulation—are said to come together. the trade-off, the wedge between the two issue positions that progressive lib- erals see on the “preventing-innocent-deaths” value dimension, disappears. “we spend billions every year to ramp up enforcement [and] crack down on poor neighborhoods (largely comprised of people of color),” the liberal gun club (n.d.b.) says; likewise “we have strong gun laws in la, chicago, new york, and other major cities … . what haven’t we done? invested in these areas and given them a hand up … .” the lfg’s outreach approach also converts the relationship between those two value dimensions, “addressing root causes” and “preventing innocent deaths,” into a means–ends connection. importantly, though, it’s the value dimension that reconciles the two issue positions, “addressing root causes,” that is the means, and the value dimension on which progressive liberals see a wedge between them, “preventing inno- cent deaths,” that is the end. nevertheless, the outreach has the same ultimate effect. to those liberals whom lfg are trying to win over, it’s clear that on issue position (ii)—supporting black lives matter—the value dimension “addressing root causes” relates to the value dimension “preventing innocent deaths” not just as one frame to another but as subordinate value to superior value—as a means to an end. the reason that we should address the root causes that place young black men at risk of committing crime, as black lives matter recommends, is precisely so that we can prevent innocent deaths at the hands of police gun violence. we should “look at ideas like community-based policing [and] fair housing policies,” the liberal gun club (n.d.b.) says, in order to minimize the “risk that conflictual encounters will erupt in violence.” and so, lfg argues, the same means–ends relation- ship between the two value dimensions, “addressing root andrew stark d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s causes” and “preventing innocent deaths,” should apply with its other issue position, (i) minimizing gun regula- tion. rigorous regulatory enforcement is no more effect- ive in dealing with gun violence than rigorous law enforcement is with violence involving young black men. “blanket bans” on guns, the liberal gun club says, are merely like “popping painkillers”; they address only the “symptoms of violence.” “addressing root causes and combating stigma,” by contrast, is like “sur- gery” to deal with “chronic knee pain”; it will most effectively prevent innocent deaths (liberal gun club n.d.b). as noted, lfg’s outreach argument, in one key way, varies the structure that the bridges, inglis, and casey cases exhibit. with lfg, it’s the subordinate value dimension—the “means” value dimension of “address- ing root causes”—that reconciles the two issue positions, (i) minimizing gun regulation and (ii) black lives mat- ter, not the end value dimension of “preventing innocent deaths,” where they pose an a priori a wedge for pro- gressive liberals. after all, even if addressing the root causes that lead young black men or gun owners alike to commit crime is more effective than law or regulatory enforcement in preventing innocent deaths, it’s never- theless the case that law enforcement causes innocent deaths in the case of young black men while regulatory enforcement prevents it in the case of gun violence. even so, the lfg argument possesses a compensat- ing strength. consider the bridges case. when it comes to bridges’s issue position of rigorous domestic/drug policing, it is by promoting the means value dimension of law enforcement that we advance the end value dimension of family protection. but when it comes to his issue position of restrained immigration policing, it is by sacrificing on that means value dimension that we promote the end value dimension. in the lfg case, by contrast, it is by promoting the means value dimension, addressing root causes, that we advance the end value dimension, preventing innocent deaths, for both issue positions, black lives matter and minimizing gun regulation, equally. in which case, lfg contends, the two issue positions do attain reconciliation—they form much less of a wedge than progressive liberals think— on that end value dimension as well. mandates for health care, subsidies for health care the discourse i have examined thus far involves mod- erates in one party or the other reaching out to less moderate co-partisans. i now elaborate its structure by turning to a joint endeavor by moderates in both parties to reach out to their less moderate co-partisans, but in an effort to forge a bipartisan agreement between them. in the problem solvers, a bipartisan group of forty members of congress, announced a “comprom- ise” proposal on health care: one that its chief architects described as a difficult one, but a tribute to what legislators on both sides could achieve in a collabora- tive spirit. republican problem solvers, on the one side, gained democratic problem solvers’ agreement to raise the threshold of the mandate requiring employers to cover employees’ health care. instead of requiring all businesses with more than fifty employees to provide coverage, the compromise would have man- dated only those businesses with more than employ- ees to do so, thus removing an unspecified number of americans from work-based insurance coverage and necessitating that they seek it on the new government- created individual exchanges or else go without. call this issue position (i): raising the mandate threshold for business coverage of employees. democratic problem solvers, meanwhile, won assent from republican problem solvers to, among other things, guaranteed assistance for poorer households to pay deductible and co-pay expenses (cost-sharing reduction or “csr” funding). call this issue position (ii), ensuring government support for the financially needy to get health coverage (jones , ). in reaching out to their caucus and base, democratic problem solvers knew that their more liberal colleagues would view the two issue positions—(i) raising the mandate threshold for business coverage and (ii) ensuring government support for the needy to get coverage—as posing a wedge, a trade-off, on a value dimension of crucial importance to them, “maximizing coverage” (wikler ). some americans could lose coverage through issue position (i), the relaxed employer mandate, while others would gain coverage through issue position (ii), ensuring government support for those less well-off to purchase insurance. how then did democratic problem solvers try to win their party’s assent? rhetorically, it was by pointing out how these two issue positions, which form a trade-off on the value dimension “maximizing coverage,” work together to create value on a second value dimension that democrats harbor; call it “creating a universal, public health-insurance system.” a mckinsey report, cited by democratic problem solvers, explicitly argued that the two issue positions, raising the business mandate threshold and guaranteeing subsidies for needy ameri- cans, far from posing a wedge, in fact work together to encourage people to seek coverage through government- run exchanges. those exchanges, in turn, advance the value of universal public health insurance: the “univer- sal” part, since exchanges are available to individuals regardless of their work circumstances, and the “public” part, since they are government-run. as the report said, subsidies [for] the lowest-income workers [and] reduc[ing] the social-equity advantage of employer-sponsored insur- ance [encourages] workers to obtain coverage … on today’s individual market … because of the subsidies, many low-income employees will be able to obtain better health coverage, for less out of pocket, on an exchange than from their employer (kadner ; singhal, stue- land, and ungerman ). as democratic problem solver representative jim himes elaborated, to promote the government-run indi- vidual insurance market in this way—via the twin issue positions of raising the business mandate threshold and ensuring support for the needy—is to directly advance the value of universal public health insurance. “for bridges between wedges and frames d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s starters,” himes said to his fellow democrats, we must “stabilize individual insurance markets … [f]rom there, we should [proceed to] universal coverage … .” (himes ; sadin ). the joint issue positions of raising the employer mandate and ensuring support for the financially needy—though they form a wedge on the value-dimension of “maximizing coverage”—cohere in advancing, via the strengthening of government-run open-to-all exchanges, the value dimension of “creating a universal, public health care system.” as for those two value dimensions of “maximizing coverage” and “creating a universal, public, health-care system,” they are shown, on issue position (ii), ensuring support for the financially needy, to relate as means to ends. “universal care, that is our goal,” representative nancy pelosi said; “we think the affordable care act,” which brought coverage to millions of ameri- cans, “is a path to that … and that’s why we want the cost-sharing reduction payments to be made perman- ent” (pelosi ). however, if the value dimension of creating a universal public health-insurance system is the end goal and the value dimension of coverage maximization a means to that end, then—where neces- sary—it is reasonable to modulate the value of maxi- mizing coverage when doing so would advance the value of moving toward a universal, public system. and that is precisely what the problem solvers com- promise would do, democratic problem solvers argued to their more liberal colleagues, via its other issue position of raising the mandate threshold on business coverage. true, some might lose coverage as a result of the raised mandate threshold since (among other things) buying insurance on the individual “exchanges could … lead to higher transaction fees,” as a booz and company report quoted by democratic problem solvers conceded. but what ultimately matters is that “[h]ealth insurance in the united states is at the cusp of a major transition from an employer-driven payor model to a model directly involving many more employees and consumers [via] health insurance exchanges” (kapur et al. ). by placing the two issue positions on the value dimension not only of maximizing coverage but of creating a universal public system, democratic prob- lem solvers endeavored to reach out to fellow, more progressive democrats, converting would otherwise be a wedge between issue positions into a joint enterprise and a mere reframe between value dimensions into a means–ends relationship (see figure ). but what about the reverse? how did republican problem solvers reach out to more conservative republicans? after all, for conservative republicans issue position (i), “ensuring government support for the financially needy,” and issue position (ii), “raising the mandate threshold for business coverage,” formed a wedge—a trade-off—on their preferred value dimension of “minimizing government involvement in health insurance.” republicans would be giving up some of that “minimizing government involvement” value via issue position (i), ensuring governmental support for the needy, in order to gain some of that value via issue position (ii), raising the mandate threshold on business coverage (rodriguez ; olsen ). on a second value dimension harbored by repub- licans, though, these two issue positions did not pose a trade-off but instead cohered. call it the value dimen- sion of “expanding the use of market incentives.” the issue position republicans favor, “raising the mandate threshold for businesses,” certainly promotes that value. it removes the command-and-control require- ment that businesses with fewer than five hundred employees provide insurance, freeing them to do so, as republican problem solvers noted, only if market incentives—that is, the need to attract qualified employees—require them to (finkle ). yet the issue position conservative republicans were hesitant about—“ensuring governmental support for the financially needy”—also, republican problem solvers pointed out, would advance this same value dimension of “expanding the use of market incentives.” instead of mandating individuals to buy health insurance through command and control, as obama- care had, providing government support for the needy through guaranteed csr funding gives them market- style incentives to purchase insurance. republican problem solver representative bill johnson’s website stated that his goal was to “make coverage more access- ible and lower costs”—to use “incentives to individuals to purchase health insurance coverage”—“rather than having it mandated by washington” (king ) “alternatives to the individual mandate,” the problem solvers caucus declared, center around “incentives to purchase health insurance” (findlay ). so the two issue positions, “raising the mandate threshold for busi- ness” and “ensuring governmental support for the financially needy”—the one by diminishing the busi- ness mandate, the other by substituting for the individ- ual mandate—both, in their anti-mandate character, cohere in promoting the value of “expanding the use of market incentives” to induce the purchase of health insurance. or so republican problem solvers argued to their more conservative colleagues. what’s more, the two value dimensions, “minimizing government involvement” and “expanding the use of market incentives,” relate as means to an end: subor- dinate to superior. the point of minimizing government involvement in any area of the economy is to allow space for market incentives to do their work, and should be assessed by how it contributes as a means toward that end. certainly, when it comes to its issue position of raising the business mandate threshold, problem solvers’ argumentation illustrated that “expanding market incentives,” not “minimizing gov- ernment involvement,” is the end value dimension. “without the employer mandate in place,” even the liberal urban institute acknowledged, market “incen- tives” will induce businesses to “tailor benefits to their workers’ preferences in order to attract the best work- ers” (holahan and blumberg ). likewise, the ultimate value dimension for assessing the issue pos- ition of “guaranteeing government support to the financially needy” should be whether it expands mar- ket incentives, not whether it minimizes government andrew stark d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s involvement. as republican problem solver repre- sentative leonard lance put it to his colleagues, the “cost-sharing reduction … program implements free- market policies” because it furnishes incentives for low- income americans to purchase insurance (associated press ; olson ). republican problem solvers, then, placed the two issue positions on two value dimensions in order to appeal to conservative republicans (see figure ). in each of the bridges, inglis, casey, and lfg cases, where the outreach involves centrist partisans on one side or the other reaching out to their more orthodox co-partisans, a pair of issue positions is simultaneously placed on a pair of value dimensions. the problem solvers case varies that theme. here, where the goal is for partisans on both sides to create a bipartisan compromise over a pair of issue positions, those issue positions are simultaneously placed on two very differ- ent pairs of value dimensions, one pair being of pertin- ence to democrats and the other to republicans. precisely because of their different partisan orienta- tions, different pairs of value dimensions were opera- tive for the two sides. i will now explore a case with a reverse dynamic: where politicians in each party reach out not to less moderate politicians on their own side but to traditional voters on the other side—and not in an effort to forge a bipartisan compromise but to make their own party a bigger tent. redistributive outreach, regressive outreach in this section, i examine how liberal political actors reach out to upper-income americans in trying to persuade them of the virtues of redistribution: the twin issue positions of (i) raising taxes on those upper- income americans themselves while (ii) increasing government expenditures for those less well-off. and i will draw some parallels with the opposite kind of outreach: when conservative political actors try to per- suade low-income americans of the merits of regres- sivity—that is, the twin issue positions of (i) cutting taxes on the wealthy while (ii) cutting program spend- ing for those low-income americans themselves. there is a sense in which the two redistributive issue positions, (i) raising taxes on the well-off in order to (ii) increase expenditures for those less well-off, form at best a wedge—a quid pro quo—for the well-off. the well-off are making a payment, a quid, via issue position (i), and potentially benefitting, getting a quo, via issue position (ii), should they themselves ever become less well-off and require medicaid, housing assistance, and the like. or, in the case of social security, medicare, or public education, the well-off are paying a comparatively greater quid than those less well-off for the same quo, while benefitting from it comparatively less since they have access to private options. on what might be called the “social assistance” value dimension, issue positions (i) and (ii) pose at best a wedge, a trade-off, for those well-off in their roles as possible program beneficiaries (medicaid, housing assistance) and income earners (social security, medicare). it’s a quid of increased taxes for a potential or partial quo, which is why, historically, the “social assistance” outreach argument for redistri- bution has been an uneasy one (skocpol ). but on another value dimension, issue positions (i) and (ii) do not form a quid pro quo for the well-off in which they forgo some value and get even less in return. instead, issue positions (i) and (ii) cohere in returning all the value the well-off forgo and then even figure . problem solvers’ outreach to less moderate democrats to forge a deal with more moderate republicans trade-off trade-off bridges between wedges and frames d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s more on top. this is one way of interpreting the “social investment” strand of rhetorical outreach liberals have increasingly been making to upper-income americans in arguing for redistribution (see, e.g., morel, palier, and palme ). on this “social investment” value dimension, (i) increased taxes for the well-off and (ii) increased expenditures for those less well-off cohere in yielding those well-off a sizeable return in the form of a productive workforce that will generate new added value for the well-off in their roles as wealth holders or employers. “every employer knows [that] equipping people with employability and skills through education is the foundation to stimulating the economy,” west virginia democrat paula swearengin ( ) declares in arguing for boosting public-school funding in less well-off neighborhoods, “[i]t is an invest- ment that employers can earn back with profit, … paying dividends in the long run.” “kristi supports medicaid expansion to keep more kansans healthy,” says kansas democratic legislative candidate kristi kirk’s website. “healthy people are productive. pro- ductive people contribute to our economy. healthy people = healthy economy” (kirk n.d.). there is another sense in which issue position (i), increased taxes for the well-off, and issue position (ii), increased expenditures for those less well-off, cohere in generating new value as a social investment for the well-off. together, the two redistributive issue posi- tions will yield the well-off a return by saving them, in their roles as taxpayers, from having to pay an even greater amount in the long run. “[f]unding [for] early childhood education has been proven,” kansas demo- cratic gubernatorial candidate arden andersen ( ) declares, “to be an effective means to combat … dependency on government programs later in life.” “in west virginia, we have thousands of people in recovery from addiction,” democratic state senator william ihlenfeld ( ) notes, “[t]he fight to stay sober is incredibly difficult and those who are in the fight need resources to support their long-term recov- ery. [otherwise] the likelihood of them reoffending and returning to prison is much greater, thus costing tax- payers even more to pay for incarceration.” so, on one hand, the two redistributive issue posi- tions, (i) increased taxes for the well-off and (ii) increased expenditures for those less well-off, pose a quid for (at best) a partial or potential quo on the social-assistance value dimension for the well-off in their roles as income earners and program recipients. but, on the other hand, the two issue positions work together in yielding the well-off new value on the social- investment value dimension in their roles as wealth holders and taxpayers. nor, crucially, are those two value dimensions, “social assistance” and “social investment,” simply conflicting frames—the first offering a net negative quid pro quo and the second a net positive investment and return— for upper-income americans to use in evaluating the twin redistributive issue positions. on the contrary, the two value dimensions cohere as subordinate means (social assistance) to a superior end (social investment). this would be comparatively evident to well-off voters when it comes to one of the two redistributive issue positions, (ii) increased program expenditures for the less well-off. even the well-off themselves do derive some value from such expenditures on the value dimension of social assistance in their roles as income earners looking forward to social security or as potential program recipi- ents should their circumstances change. any value they derive from those expenditures on the social-assistance figure . problem solvers’ outreach to less moderate republicans to forge a deal with more moderate democrats trade-off trade-off andrew stark d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s dimension is, however, but a means to aid them—a backstop—as they pursue the end goal of becoming entrepreneurs and investors (i.e., wealth holders) and hence benefitting from those increased program expend- itures on the value dimension of social investment: programs like social security and medicare, as president obama has argued, actually enable people to reach higher. ‘they free us to take the risks that make this country great.’ [they] encourage more risk taking, entrepreneur- ship, and job creation … the safety net … backs up people who start businesses (callahan ; see also hacker ; smith ). so yes, the redistributive issue position of (ii) increased expenditures for the less well-off brings some value, on the dimension of social assistance, to the well-off in their capacities as income earners and potential pro- gram recipients. but that value is a subordinate one. it’s a stepping stone that enables the well-off to earn far greater returns from those expenditures, as wealth holders and employers, on the superior social- investment value dimension. and so the well-off should view the other redistribu- tive issue position, (i) increased taxes on the well-off themselves, in the same light. consider michael bloom- berg’sargument:“noonelikestheimpositionoftaxes… but devastating the very services that make this the world’s second home is far worse … if you think taxes aretoohigh,iwouldargueyou’reprobablyalittlebitout of step with businesses that are coming here, businesses that are expanding here.” bloomberg ( ) argues that if the well-off attempt to preserve value for themselves on the dimension of social assistance by opposing tax increases that involve transfers from them to those less well-off, their doing so would be “far worse,” for them, than their gaining value on the dimension of social investment by allowing those increases. it would be to get things backwards. when it comes to the issue position of tax increases on the well- off, the value dimensions of social assistance and social investment do not conflict as a mere trade-off. instead they cohere, for the well-off themselves as subordinate means to a superior end. or consider an argument advanced by jim barnett, a liberal republican gubernatorial candidate in kansas. “the number one thing,” barnett said, is “not taxes, which is what [conservative kansas republicans] are talking about; the number one thing is the workforce … . what businesses need is a workforce [via] education [and] health care” (brooks ; see also arizona chamber foundation ). yes, increased taxes rep- resent a loss of value, for the well-off, on the social- assistance value dimension, as they derive only partial or potential value from those increases in their roles as income earners or program recipients. but on the value dimension of social investment, those taxes, in going to health and education services for the less well-off, will generate new value for the well-off in their roles as taxpayers. and that’s not just a compet- ing frame. it’s “the number one thing.” figure schematizes redistributive outreach to the well-off. now consider regressivist outreach to the less well- off on behalf of the twin issue positions of (i) cuts in program expenditures for the less well-off and (ii) cuts in taxes for the well-off. the two form a quid pro quo for the less well-off, a trade-off, on what might be called the value dimension of “basic economic well-being.” those less well-off are asked to give up some value in terms of basic economic well-being via issue position (i), cuts in expenditures for themselves, in return for gaining some via issue position (ii), cuts in taxes for the well-off. after all, those tax cuts will trickle down to them, in their roles as income earners, via the good jobs the well-off will create. in making such an argument, regressivists explicitly cast their appeal to those less well-off as a trade-off on the basic economic-well-being value dimension. as one conservative writer (conard , ) puts it, he is asking the less well-off to “forgo … redistributed income” via (ii) expenditure cuts for themselves in order to gain “value from … investment” in job cre- ation via (i) tax cuts for the well-off. cuts to social programs are “painful,” senator jim demint ( ) conceded, but worth it for those less well-off because cutting “taxes on high earners” will result in “wealth generation” that will benefit low-income earners. a variant, the laffer curve argument, claims that the two regressivist issue positions represent a quid pro quo not because of the jobs those tax cuts will create but because of the new tax revenues a growing economy will generate even at lower tax rates. those less well-off might be giving up some basic economic well-being through expenditure cuts now, but they will get at least some of that value back—in their role as program recipients—in the form of greater government expend- itures over time (smith , ). in effect, the two regressivist issue positions, (i) expenditure cuts for the less well-off and (ii) tax cuts for the well-off, form a wedge for those less well-off on the “basic-economic-well-being” value dimension. while the less well-off are said to gain some basic economic well-being from (ii) the tax cuts, both as income earners (trickle down) and as program recipi- ents (laffer curve), they are asked to pay for it by relinquishing some basic economic well-being via (i) the expenditure cuts. on a second value dimension, though—call it the “upward-economic-mobility” value dimension—both issue positions, tax cuts for the well- off and expenditure cuts for the less well-off, are said to jointly generate value for those less well-off. writing about the republican tax bill, which would have cut taxes for well-off americans while imposing spending cuts on those less well-off, a detroit news columnist argued that “low-income americans will benefit … because many low-income americans will become higher-income americans” (mckenzie ; see also the discussion in martin , , ; scheve and stasavage , ; schuck , ; sowell ). to the extent that the less well-off harbor for themselves the value-dimension of upward bridges between wedges and frames d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s economic mobility—to the extent that they identify as future or even current members of the well-off—then tax cuts for the well-off and expenditure cuts for the lesswell-off alike cohere in generating value for them. “[w]orking-class voters support tax cuts for the rich and benefit cuts for everyone else,” as joan c. williams ( ) writes, “[b]ecause the white working class resents programs for the poor, [and] to the extent that benefit cuts target the poor, that’s attractive” (see also hochschild , ). the twin regressivist issue posi- tions of expenditure cuts for the less well-off and tax cuts for the well-off, which form at best a trade-off for the less well-off on the value dimension of their basic economic well-being, cohere in generating value for them on another value dimension they harbor: their upward economic mobility. so regressivists argue. nor, crucially, are those two value dimensions, their basic economic well-being and their upward economic mobility, simple reframes—one a negative frame, the other a positive frame—for the less well- off to use in evaluating the twin regressivist issue positions. the two value dimensions do not pose a trade-off but rather cohere, their basic economic well-being ultimately but a means to their upward economic mobility. this means–ends relationship is made particularly clear on one of the two regressivist issue positions, tax cuts for the well-off, where the two value dimensions are both positive frames for the less well-off. those tax cuts promote the value of basic economic well-being for the less well-off, as income earners, via the jobs they create. but that is just a stepping stone, a means, toward the end value of the less well-off then benefiting from those tax cuts as taxpayers themselves due to the ensuing upward economic mobility they will enjoy. as marco rubio ( ) says, tax cuts not only “create new middle class jobs,” they “create new taxpayers” who will then reap value from those lower rates as wealthier taxpayers. the niskanen center’s samuel hammond ( ) makes this point explicit in his pitch, directed at lower-income americans, for tax cuts for the wealthy. what matters about the “tax cuts and jobs act” is not so much the jobs the well-off would create for those less well-off but the fact that “people move in and out of top income percentiles all the time.” yes, the less well-off will benefit, in an indirect, trickle-down way, from tax cuts for the well-off in their roles as income earners on the value dimension of basic economic well-being. but they do so to the end of their ultimately directly bene- fiting from those tax cuts for the well-off, as taxpayers themselves, on the value dimension of upward eco- nomic mobility. the issue position of tax cuts for the well-off, then, allows regressivists to argue that the subordin- ate or means value dimension for the less well-off is their basic economic well-being, while the superior or end value dimension is the upward economic mobility to which that basic economic well-being is a stepping stone. therefore, where a sacrifice on the subordinate value dimension of basic economic well- being is necessary to make an advance on the super- ior value dimension of upward economic mobility— as with the regressivist issue position of expenditure cuts for the less well-off—that’s what should be indicated. cutting “government programs that drive the debt,” paul ryan ( ) says, “is a means to a greater end: a prosperous, growing economy … defined by upward mobility.” or as ted cruz ( ) puts it, figure . redistributive outreach to the well-off trade-off trade-off andrew stark d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s republicans should conceptualize and articulate every domestic policy with a single-minded focus on easing ascent up the economic ladder. we should assess policy with a rawlsian lens, asking how it affects those least well- off among us. [and on this score] widespread economic redistribution … rarely helps the recipients of government largess. free-market policies expand opportunity … espe- cially for those working to climb the economic ladder. when it comes to expenditure cuts for the less well-off, the value they sacrifice on the basic-economic-well- being dimension in their roles as program recipients and the value they reap on the upward-economic- mobility dimension as future wealth holders do not relate as an unfortunate trade-off. rather, they cohere as means to ends. figure displays the structure of regressivist outreach to the less well-off. when redistributive outreach to the well-off is con- sidered together with regressivist outreach to the less well-off, the discursive structure of bridging emerges in a further variant. unlike the health-care case, which involves two sides trying to reach bipartisan consensus on one pair of issue positions, the redistributive/regres- sivist case features two sides each trying to reach out to supporters of the other, offering two competing pairs of issue positions in doing so. but the redistributivist/regressivist case departs from the health-care case in yet another way. the health- care case involves two very divergent pairs of value dimensions, one for democrats and the other for republicans. democratic problem solvers appealed to their co-partisans by subordinating the means dimension of maximizing coverage to the end dimen- sion of creating a universal public system. republican problem solvers did so by subordinating the means dimension of minimizing government involvement to the end dimension of expanding market incentives. the redistributive/regressivist case, by contrast, involves each side reaching across to supporters of the other. and, accordingly, it displays two convergent pairs of value dimensions. consider redistributive outreach to the well-off. here, on the means value dimension—the value dimension of social assistance—the well-off are appealed to in their roles as income earners (social security) and potential program recipients (medicaid). when, however, it comes to the end value dimension, the value dimension of social investment, they are appealed to instead in their roles as wealth holders and taxpayers. likewise with regressivist outreach to the less well-off. it is on the means value dimension, the value dimension of their basic economic well-being, that the less well-off are appealed to in their roles as income earners (trickle down) and program recipients (laffer curve). and it is on the end value dimension, the value dimension of their upward eco- nomic mobility, that they are then appealed to in their roles as taxpayers and future wealth holders. there exists a convergence between the redistribu- tionist and regressivist value dimensions. and this makes sense. while health-care outreach was directed toward divergent partisans who see the country’s pre- sent and its future very differently, regressivist and redistributivist outreach are directed to the less well- off and the well-off precisely insofar as they see them- selves on the same present-to-future timeline. the value that comes from being an income-earner or a program recipient, for the well-off as for the less well- off, is but a subordinate means to the superior end of enjoying value as a wealth holder or a taxpayer: accord- ing to redistributivist and regressivist outreach alike. figure . regressivist outreach to the less well-off trade-off trade-off bridges between wedges and frames d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s conclusion the debates i have examined involve partisans on one side of the spectrum reaching out to those who are less moderate on their own side, or partisans doing so jointly with partisans on the other side in order to form a bipartisan consensus, or partisans reaching out to trad- itional supporters on the other side in order to expand their tent. the bridging discursive pattern they together reveal suggests itself as a phenomenon analogous to wedges and frames. indeed, it is structured so as to overcome them and hence is a fitting major variable for future empirical analysis, whether to test its effect- iveness with target audiences or the circumstances under which it is used, just as wedges and frames have been. measuring the persuasiveness of political rhetoric is a much-discussed topic, with a variety of approaches having been suggested (for a good overview see mutz, sniderman, and brody, ), all of which lend them- selves to the bridging discursive structure i have exam- ined. certainly, persuasive success comes in many forms other than winning elections or votes; it comes as well with the broader and less explicit shifts in opinion that experimental and survey research are able to measure (see, e.g., steiner , ). future research might also consider, given the typology i have developed here—one pair of issue positions and one pair of value dimensions, one pair of issue positions and two pairs of divergent value dimensions, two pairs of issue positions and two pairs of convergent value dimensions—whether other variations on the theme exist, either as hybrids or beyond these possibilities, and how persuasively successful each might be and under what circumstances. here, i have undertaken the kind of study rogers smith ( , ) describes when he speaks of the need for “qualitative studies of the patterns of reasoning characteristic of various strains of … discourse.” such studies, smith says, constitute independent “investiga- tions into one dimension of political conduct—a dimen- sion that needs to be assessed like any other if we are to build up a comprehensive empirical portrait of political life.” the attempt to take two issue positions that conflict on one value dimension and create a bridge between them by placing them on a second value dimension where they cohere in a joint venture—and, simultaneously, to take two value dimensions that con- flict on one issue position and create a bridge between them by showing how they cohere as means and ends for a second issue position—suggests itself as a discern- ible form of american political outreach. it is a way of overcoming the trade-offs involved in wedges and reframing. if not yet a norm, it is an ideal to which many political actors seem to commonly aspire in an otherwise polarizing era, and a guide for those who seek to build bridges in a highly partisan age. references andersen, arden. . issues. retrieved november , . http:// andersen .com/issues/. arizona chamber foundation. . the business case for ahcccs expansion. arizona 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/immigration.georgia.mayor/index.html https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare-systems-and-services/our-insights/how-us-health-care-reform-will-affect-employee-benefits https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare-systems-and-services/our-insights/how-us-health-care-reform-will-affect-employee-benefits https://www.mckinsey.com/industries/healthcare-systems-and-services/our-insights/how-us-health-care-reform-will-affect-employee-benefits https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/soaking-the-rich-it-could-backfire-for-progressives- . https://www.bnnbloomberg.ca/soaking-the-rich-it-could-backfire-for-progressives- . https://ballotpedia.org/paula_jean_swearengin https://ballotpedia.org/paula_jean_swearengin https://twitter.com/benwikler/status/ https://twitter.com/benwikler/status/ https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s 	bridges between wedges and frames: outreach and compromise in american political discourse 	bridges, wedges, and frames: an illustration 	wedges, frames, and democratic compromise 	methodology 	variations on the theme 	carbon tax and deregulation 	abortion rights and social assistance 	black lives matter and gun rights 	mandates for health care, subsidies for health care 	redistributive outreach, regressive outreach 	conclusion s jxx .. forum: discovering the environment the fallout from residential segregation jennifer thomson in , residents of flint, michigan, a majority black city, discovered that their water supply had been contaminated with high levels of lead resulting from the undemocratically appointed mayor’s decision to switch the city’s water supply from the detroit water and sewerage department to the heavily polluted flint river. after nearly a full year of prevarication and finger-pointing among involved officials, michigan governor rick snyder and president barack obama declared states of emergency. emergency managers darnell earley and gerald ambrose now face felony charges, and the state of michigan will spend eighty-seven million dollars to replace lead pipes in the city. despite this resolution, many flint residents still lack access to safe tap water, the city has threatened to foreclose on residents with outstanding bills for contaminated water and sewage service, and nearly three thousand cities in the united states suffer from levels of lead contamination higher than those discovered in flint. the black lives matter national network (blm) identified state violence as the root of the crisis. connecting flint residents’ lack of clean drinking water with other forms of racialized violence, including police brutality and residential discrimination, blm framed the crisis in terms of human rights: “the right to clean drinking water is a matter of health and dignity, and for many black residents in flint, it is also a matter of life and death.” on a national policy-making level, however, little has been done to remediate the structural causes of the flint water crisis or the widespread lead contamination of drinking water supplies around the country. a narrow legalistic solution, focused on the egregious actions of flint’s emergency managers, has so far triumphed over another that understood environmental problems as one facet of broader, racialized, structural violence in the united states. just as environmental protection has never meant a unified set of objectives, so too americans have never responded to environmental challenges as a single polity. as the limited resolution of flint’s water crisis suggests, there has been a strong correlation between practices of environmental protection and social citizenship in the modern united states, and neither has been equally distributed. the intertwined histories of slavery, settler colonialism, and restrictive immigration policies bluntly demonstrate that american-ness has always been exclu- sionary and impermanent—in reality a multiplicity of precarious citizenships sustained by a carefully policed potential for inclusion. while many individuals and communities in the © the author(s) . published by cambridge university press jacey fortin, “in flint, overdue bills for unsafe water could lead to foreclosures,” new york times, may , , https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/flint-water-home-foreclosure.html (accessed jul. , ); m. b. pell and joshua schneyer, “off the charts: the thousands of u.s. locales where lead poisoning is worse than in flint,” reuters, dec. , , http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-lead-testing/ (accessed jul. , ). black lives matter, “solidarity statement with flint, michigan,” https://www.workers.org/ / / /black- lives-matter-extends-solidarity-to-people-of-flint-mich/ (accessed feb. , ). m. b. pell and joshua schneyer, “thousands of u.s. areas afflicted with lead poisoning beyond flint’s,” scientific american, https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thousands-of-u-s-areas-afflicted-with-lead-poisoning-beyond- flints/# (accessed feb. , ). modern american history ( ), , – doi: . /mah. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/flint-water-home-foreclosure.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/flint-water-home-foreclosure.html http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-lead-testing/ http://www.reuters.com/investigates/special-report/usa-lead-testing/ https://www.workers.org/ / / /black-lives-matter-extends-solidarity-to-people-of-flint-mich/ https://www.workers.org/ / / /black-lives-matter-extends-solidarity-to-people-of-flint-mich/ https://www.workers.org/ / / /black-lives-matter-extends-solidarity-to-people-of-flint-mich/ https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thousands-of-u-s-areas-afflicted-with-lead-poisoning-beyond-flints/# https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thousands-of-u-s-areas-afflicted-with-lead-poisoning-beyond-flints/# https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/thousands-of-u-s-areas-afflicted-with-lead-poisoning-beyond-flints/# https://www.cambridge.org/core united states have aspired to and eventually have been granted membership within the polity, others have been repeatedly excluded and reminded of their unworthiness. the enduring legacy of oppression on the distribution of power in the united states means that only certain americans can realistically expect their demands on policy makers to be heard and answered. moreover, residential segregation and the dependence of most public services and infrastructure on local property taxes means that communities are incentivized to protect those environments which they identify as their own, and are differentially equipped to do so. how have millions become secure in their citizenship and embraced certain forms of envi- ronmental protection while turning a deaf ear to the environmental needs and demands of oth- ers? any analysis of the success or failure of environmental protection in the united states must begin by acknowledging that racial residential segregation is the experiential, ideological, and economic backbone of worsening environmental inequality—a sustained system of injustice that has limited americans’ imaginative response to environmental crises. the servicemen’s readjustment act of , best known as the g.i. bill, offers a clear way to think through the interwoven environmental enfranchisement of white americans and disen- franchisement of poor and minority communities. the g.i. bill provided grants for school and college tuition, low-interest mortgages, small business loans, job training, unemployment insur- ance, and hiring privileges to returning world war ii veterans. although written without ref- erence to race, the bill’s benefits were disbursed through local agencies often in a racially discriminatory manner with the result of facilitating social mobility for white veterans while blocking it for many african americans, and in such a way as to obscure the structural reason for their exclusion. elevating home ownership to a perceived birthright of millions of white americans, the g.i. bill also exacerbated residential segregation. the federal housing administration’s mortgage policies, which included assessments based on racially discrimina- tory redlining and privileging new suburban housing, often marked by racial covenants, over urban renewal projects, combined with the unequal distribution of other g.i. bill benefits, cre- ated acres and acres of racially exclusive suburbs. this association of race, place, and belonging continued a longer tradition in the united states of defining desirable environments as those free from certain groups and free for a circumscribed elite. it is difficult to identify a single sphere of life not impacted by residential segregation. educational opportunities; access to amenities such as after-school programs, parks, and open space; and the functioning of public services like sanitation and garbage collection are so closely tied to local property taxes as to make their presence, absence, and quality a direct reflection of the racial and economic makeup of a neighborhood. decades of disinvestment (or lack of investment) in black communities by banks and industry has drastically eroded the value of properties in black neighborhoods. and segregation shows few signs of lessening. khalil gibran muhammad, the condemnation of blackness: race, crime, and the making of modern urban america (cambridge, ma, ); mae m. ngai, impossible subjects: illegal aliens and the making of modern america (princeton, nj, ); zaragosa vargas, labor rights are civil rights: mexican american workers in twentieth-century america (princeton, nj, ). ira katznelson, when affirmative action was white: an untold history of racial inequality in twentieth-century america (new york, ). dorceta e. taylor, the rise of the american conservation movement: power, privilege, and environmental protection (durham, nc, ). although metropolitan residential segregation has declined slowly since the s, suburban segregation has increased, as whites move into exurbs at increasing removes from cities. daniel t. lichter, domenico parisi, and michael c. taquino, “toward a new macro-segregation? decomposing segregation within and between metropolitan cities and suburbs,” american sociological review , no. ( ): – ; john r. logan, “the persistence of segregation in the metropolis,” city & community , no. (jun. ): – ; alana semuels, “white flight never ended,” atlantic, jul. , , https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/ / / white-flight-alive-and-well/ / (accessed jul. , ). jennifer thomson downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/ / /white-flight-alive-and-well/ / https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/ / /white-flight-alive-and-well/ / https://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/ / /white-flight-alive-and-well/ / https://www.cambridge.org/core for many white americans, residential segregation is either invisible or justified by a mer- itocratic mythology that portrays those who have achieved the “american dream” of home- ownership in a prosperous neighborhood as successful through their own individual hard work, and those who have not as personally at fault. this assumption occludes the radical dependency of most white americans’ standard of living on government assistance, tax policies, and social welfare programs such as the g.i. bill. meritocratic myths and the structural inequal- ity they obscure have profound environmental consequences, such as determining the distribu- tion of environmental burdens and which communities historically have been able to protect their residential environments. residential segregation produces stark environmental inequalities. minorities are exposed to higher levels of nitrogen dioxide, a pollutant linked to higher risks of asthma and heart attack that is emitted by cars, construction equipment, and industrial facilities. hazardous waste facilities, industrial operations, and local undesirable land use areas are disproportionately located in poor and nonwhite communities, as are noise pollution and mosquito infestations. environmental burdens are not distributed equally, nor is the cost of their remediation shared. arguments about environmental quality, public health, and the threats posed by hazardous waste meanwhile have provided the means for some white communities to resist residential integration. as lily geismer demonstrates in her analysis of postwar liberalism in the boston suburbs, affluent white communities used arguments for the protection of open space to restrict neighborhood integration. case studies of gary, indiana; oakland, california; detroit, michigan; and love canal, new york reveal similarly racist practices embedded in local environmental protection efforts. because political power is so unevenly distributed, because economic enfranchisement remains so tenuous, and because affective connections are so often dependent on place and race, the possibility for forging a national, much less global, understanding of environmental threats, their causes, and collective solutions, remains elusive. indeed, these impediments cut straight to the heart of why a majority of americans are now firmly in favor of maintaining existing national environmental protections, but comparatively indifferent to the need to enforce these policies equally in all communities and often openly hostile to paying increased taxes to remediate environmental problems in communities other than their own. thus, despite the best efforts of activists, environmental hazards continue to be unequally distributed, minority communities continue to experience deteriorating public health conditions, the “the house we live in,” race—the power of an illusion, season , episode , dir. christine herbes-sommers (california newsreel, ); naa oyo a. kwate and ilan h. meyer, “the myth of meritocracy and african american health,” american journal of public health , no. (oct. ): – . lara p. clark, dylan b. millet, and julian d. marshall, “national patterns in environmental injustice and inequality: outdoor no₂ air pollution in the united states,” plos one , no. (apr. ): e . diana budds, “urban poverty has a sound—and it’s loud,” co.design, mar. , , https://www.fastcodesign. com/ /urban-poverty-has-a-sound-and-its-loud (accessed jul. , ); christopher ingraham, “the hidden inequality of mosquito bites,” washington post, jul. , , https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/ wonk/wp/ / / /the-hidden-inequality-of-mosquito-bites/?utm_term=. c e ba (accessed jul. , ); paul mohai and robin saha, “which came first, people or pollution? a review of theory and evidence from longitudinal environmental justice studies,” environmental research letters , no. (dec. ), http://iopscience. iop.org/article/ . / - / / / . elizabeth d. blum, love canal revisited: race, class, and gender in environmental activism (lawrence, ks, ); lily geismer, don’t blame us: suburban liberals and the transformation of the democratic party (princeton, nj, ); andrew hurley, environmental inequalities: class, race and industrial pollution in gary, indiana, – (chapel hill, nc, ); robert o. self, american babylon: race and the struggle for postwar oakland (princeton, nj, ); thomas j. sugrue, the origins of the urban crisis: race and inequality in postwar detroit (princeton, nj, ); jennifer thomson, “toxic residents: health and citizenship at love canal,” journal of social history , no. (fall ): – . “environment,” gallup news, http://www.gallup.com/poll/ /environment.aspx (accessed jul. , ). modern american history downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.fastcodesign.com/ /urban-poverty-has-a-sound-and-its-loud https://www.fastcodesign.com/ /urban-poverty-has-a-sound-and-its-loud https://www.fastcodesign.com/ /urban-poverty-has-a-sound-and-its-loud https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/ / / /the-hidden-inequality-of-mosquito-bites/?utm_term=. c e ba https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/ / / /the-hidden-inequality-of-mosquito-bites/?utm_term=. c e ba https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/ / / /the-hidden-inequality-of-mosquito-bites/?utm_term=. c e ba http://iopscience.iop.org/article/ . / - / / / http://iopscience.iop.org/article/ . / - / / / http://iopscience.iop.org/article/ . / - / / / http://www.gallup.com/poll/ /environment.aspx http://www.gallup.com/poll/ /environment.aspx https://www.cambridge.org/core environmental protections that exist are unequally enforced, and calls for the equitable distri- bution of environmental and social resources continue to go unanswered. historically, countless communities, organizations, and individuals in the united states have imagined their environment, assessed threats to it, and engaged in environmental protection work. but one of the most insidious consequences of structural environmental inequality is that notions of environmental protection by marginalized groups, in particular those which make sharp class or racial critiques, are seldom heard or taken seriously by policy makers or leading environmentalists. bioregional ecological restoration, the direct action practiced by earth first! and #nodapl water protectors, the environmental health work of african american women, and animal liberation activism offer but a few strong examples of practices that have been stigmatized as fringe, terroristic, or, perhaps worst of all, not even recognized as practices of environmental protection at all. the stigmatization of alternate environmentalisms stems from the degree to which residen- tial segregation has stunted americans’ political imagination when it comes to envisioning pos- sibilities for environmental protection in the united states. until enfranchised communities directly acknowledge and work to remediate the structural historical inequalities that have allowed them to engage in particular forms of self-interested environmental protection, the nation as a whole has no chance of constructing, much less adhering to, a coherent national environmental agenda that protects all environments and all residents. absent such a reckon- ing, we are likely to enter a state of eco-apartheid radically worse than the one in which we currently live. jennifer thomson is an assistant professor of history at bucknell university. she studies how environmental activ- ists in the late twentieth century united states used concepts of health to advance their politics. her manuscript, the wild and the toxic: health and environmental politics in the united states, is under contract with university of north carolina press. daniel aldana cohen, “new york mag’s climate disaster porn gets it painfully wrong,” jacobin, jul. , , http://jacobinmag.com/ / /climate-change-new-york-magazine-response (accessed jul. , ). jennifer thomson downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. http://jacobinmag.com/ / /climate-change-new-york-magazine-response http://jacobinmag.com/ / /climate-change-new-york-magazine-response https://www.cambridge.org/core 	the fallout from residential segregation microsoft word - _smc.docx atol: art therapy online, ( ) creativity as a lifeline: connection through witnessing serena martinez-coleman, jen mank, and toni morley issn: - date of publication: march citation: martinez-coleman, s., mank, j. & morley, t. ( ) creativity as a lifeline: connection through witnessing. atol: art therapy online ( ). available at: doi . /gold.atol.v i . this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial . international license http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / atol: art therapy online atol: art therapy online, ( ) the weekly accountability art project was the product of a chance meeting at an art exhibit to honor doris arrington, the founder of the art therapy department at notre dame de namur university. the conversation revealed a common theme that each of us were noticing – a lack of personal art making. the project began as accountability art: a pledge, between three art therapists, to complete one piece of art per week. we decided to hold one another accountable with weekly check-ins through mobile texts and emails. the accountability art project began prior to the covid- pandemic. in the united states, we also experienced distress related to extreme exposure to systemic racism and a divisive political election at the same time of the pandemic. the act of art making integrated inquiry and discovery. it allowed for reciprocal acts of witnessing life and loss that we were all facing, throughout a troubled and turbulent time in our nation and the world. the field of art therapy continues to grow and so does the challenge between creativity and practice in what it means to be an art therapist (junge, ). the current pandemic forces additional areas to consider, including emotional and physical well being. art therapists are equipped to adapt and assist during pandemics using creativity (potash, kalmanowitz, fung, anand, & miller, ). engaging in the art making process can provide further development for the art therapist to recognize personal biases, themes of social injustice, or current personal issues (braus & morton, ; hinz, ; moon, , ; potash, ). our accountability group is composed of three women ranging in ages from their thirties to their eighties. our different life stages bring unique challenges, opportunities, and perspectives. although we share differences, including our cultural backgrounds, we find commonality in our views towards social justice, creativity, and community. according to phillips ( ), the continual conversation in the field of art therapy has been understanding the identity of the art therapist and one’s relationship to one’s own artist self. the accountability art project created a space for connection and reflection in a time of isolation during the covid- pandemic and uncertain times. the realization of the neglect of art making within our own lives became the catalyst to connect to each other. art making provides a means to utilize the mystery within ourselves to engage upon a sacred journey of expressions of self and ultimately soul (moon, ). atol: art therapy online, ( ) art making is a mechanism to identify, contain and reconcile emotional content from daily life (fish, ). the resolution to create art on a weekly basis offered an opportunity to enhance self-understanding, promoting new and greater awareness of an ever changing identity of self through creativity (beaumont, ; fish, ). as we were sheltering in place, we experienced overwhelming emotions from the deaths caused by covid- and the racial injustice perpetrated against innocent black men and women in the united states. each of us had our own personal responses. art making provided a way to respond authentically to what was being experienced (potash, ). “images are not always beautiful; often they are raw and mysterious. they are not always comforting but can be exhilarating, challenging, provocative, even frightening at times” (allen, , p. x). art making furnishes a platform for creativity to make the implicit visible allowing for connection and healing (braus & morton, ; burt, ; metzl & morrell, ; moon, ). figure . on edge by: toni morley atol: art therapy online, ( ) on the th of march last year, one art therapist was exposed to the virus at work and the office was shutdown as californians went into lockdown. this piece was done as a reflection of the fear and unease she was feeling (figure ). figure . my jesus with dreads would wear a mask to save lives by: serena martinez-coleman the second image (figure ) was reconstructed from an original piece created during the black lives matter movement in . jesus, a religious figure known for love and justice, was used as a reminder of wwjd (what would jesus do) during the pandemic – wear a mask to show you care. atol: art therapy online, ( ) figure . dead fish and dreams by: jen mank the final image was created as a response to the behavior on display during the first presidential debate in (figure ). emotions flowed outward onto the image and coalesced into an internalized sense of lightness of being and transcendence. so often we are witnesses of the art made by our clients and there is little witnessing of our own journey. witnessing one another’s art was a way to be seen and experienced in an authentic manner that led to a sense of greater connection to self and one another (burt, ). similar to allen’s ( ) open studio method, our goal was not to have a therapeutic relationship, but instead a community to promote the artist within and the opportunity to self-express the soul. in the process of witnessing, we became aware of the variety of art materials used. we were inspired to expand our repertoire of art media resulting in new forms of creativity. the creative product is the vehicle for creative inspiration in others thereby becoming a legacy of creativity for the greater community (chiu & kwan, ; leddy, ; okada & ishibashi, ; plancke, ). atol: art therapy online, ( ) as art therapists, we recognize the importance of providing a gentle, safe holding space for our emotions to take artistic form. during a time when it seemed our nation was collapsing, we chose creativity to be a lifeline for connection. a world of creativity, expression of emotions, and a greater sense of connection during times of isolation awaited our engagement through art making (braus & morton, ). we continue to feel supported by the art and the empathy of our fellow art therapists by which creativity, through the process of art making, is our shared language. about the authors serena martinez-coleman m.a., lmft, atr-bc, phd candidate serena is a parent, student, therapist, activist, and artist. she considers herself a life learner and aspires to live each day like it is a gift. jen mank ph.d., lmft, atr-bc jen is a drummer, drum circle facilitator, art therapist, artist, author, and compassionate advocate. toni morley m.a., lmft, atr-bc toni is a printmaker and art therapist who is currently working with chronic pain patients. references allen, p. b. ( ). art is a way of knowing. boston; [new york]: shambhala; distributed in the u.s. by random house. allen, p.b. ( ). commentary on community-based art studios: underlying principles, art therapy, ( ), - . beaumont, s. l. ( ). from liminality to transformation: creating an art therapist identity through myths, metaphors, and self-portraits (de la liminalité à la atol: art therapy online, ( ) transformation: création de l’identité de l’art-thérapeute à travers mythes, métaphores et autoportraits). canadian art therapy association journal, ( ), – . braus, m., & morton, b. ( ). art therapy in the time of covid- . psychological trauma : theory, research, practice and policy, (s ), s –s . burt, h. ( ). witnessing, visibility, and the experience of self utilizing art therapy in recovery from childhood sexual abuse. canadian art therapy association journal, ( ), – . chiu, c-y., & kwan, l. y-y, . culture and creativity: a process model. management and organization review, ( ), pp. – . fish, b. j. ( ). response art: the art of the art therapist. art therapy: journal of the american art therapy association, ( ), – . hinz, l. d. ( ). the ethics of art therapy: promoting creativity as a force for positive change. art therapy, ( ), – . junge, m.b. ( ). history of art therapy. in d.e. gussak & m.l. rosal (eds.) wiley handbook of art therapy. (pp. - ). john wiley & sons. leddy, t. ( ). creative interpretation of literary texts. in m. krausz, d. dutton, & k. bardsley (eds.), the idea of creativity (pp. - ). leiden; brill. metzl, e., & morrell, m. ( ). the role of creativity in models of resilience: theoretical exploration and practical applications. journal of creativity in mental health, ( ), – . moon, b. l. ( ). introduction to art therapy : faith in the product. springfield, ill.: charles c. thomas. moon, b. l. ( ). ethical issues in art therapy. springfield, illinois se: charles c. thomas, publisher, ltd. atol: art therapy online, ( ) okada, t., & ishibashi, k. ( ). imitation, inspiration, and creation: cognitive process of creative drawing by copying others’ artworks. cognitive science, ( ), – . phillips, j. ( ). identity of the art therapist. in d.e. gussak & m.l. rosal (eds.) wiley handbook of art therapy. (pp. - ). john wiley & sons. plancke, c. ( ). affect, creativity, and community-making in a congolese song- dance performance: or how to follow the movement of the social. the journal of the royal anthropological institute, ( ), – . potash, j.s., kalmanowitz, d., fung, i., anand, s.a., & miller, g.m. ( ). art therapy in pandemics: lessons for covid- , art therapy, ( ), - . potash, j.s. ( ). relational social justice ethics for art therapists, art therapy, ( ), - . recreating wakanda by promoting black excellence in ecology and evolution comment recreating wakanda by promoting black excellence in ecology and evolution our non-black colleagues must fight anti-black racism and white supremacy within the academy to authentically promote black excellence. amplifying black excellence in ecology and evolution is the antidote for white supremacy in the academy. christopher j. schell, cylita guy, delia s. shelton, shane c. campbell-staton, briana a. sealey, danielle n. lee and nyeema c. harris growing protests to decry police brutality and anti-black racism have demanded sustained efforts for justice in the wake of the murders of rayshard brooks, george floyd, ahmaud arbery and breonna taylor. such injustices come at an especially challenging time in which black communities are disproportionately being ravaged by the global covid- pandemic , . these compounding issues have culminated in a watershed moment, in which non-black colleagues, some for the first time, are beginning to legitimately grapple with the pervasive and pernicious nature of anti-black racism embedded in our institutions and professions. many scientific institutions, professional societies and individuals have swiftly and emphatically denounced anti-black racism, pledging black lives matter and acknowledging their support in deconstructing racial oppression and white supremacy in the academy. this support has largely come in the form of public statements and editorials that elevate black voices, most notably from prestigious scientific outlets like nature , and science – . a recent editorial in nature ecology & evolution pledges to dismantle anti-black racism in the annals of life sciences, which is a necessary step. but let us be clear: this is not enough and not even the minimum , . the road to anti-racism in academia is a long, arduous, uphill climb that will require institutional and personal reconciliation, resolve, discomfort and humility . it is both necessary and urgent to promote inclusive excellence and transformative scholarship. black scholars in the life sciences are grieving, traumatized, exhausted, infuriated, frustrated and experiencing many other disparaging emotions , . as we attempt to operate in a system that presents extraordinary barriers to our success, we also watch our white counterparts thrive in a system equipped with the resources made for them . yet despite the paucity of black scholars in ecology and evolution – , repeated evidence emphasizes that scholars from underrepresented groups improve research innovation . the concept of ecosystem integrity emphasizes that species diversity is necessary for ecosystem function, in which rare and keystone species play a disproportionate role in maintaining ecosystem equilibrium . as such, black scholars are keystone scientists: we play a disproportionate role in advancing diversity and inclusion , while maintaining excellence in teaching and research, despite racial oppression within and outside our academic institutions . in the marvel comic series black panther, a universe is imagined in which the intellectual, cultural, social and scientific contributions of black scholars are celebrated. in this fictional nation of wakanda, the contributions of black scholars are elevated, emphasizing that global scientific and technological advancements are realized in a world welcoming of black excellence . to fully realize the beauty and power of wakanda in our own universe, we must employ anti-racist policies and actions (fig. ). root mentorship, training and research in anti-racism mentorship, training and research in ecology and evolution must be grounded in institutionalized and formalized anti-racist policies. this means being vulnerable and acknowledging your shortcomings in conversations about racial justice. white supremacy has purposefully suppressed historical narratives of black contributions to ecology and evolution . this necessarily means that scientists raised in western society are poorly educated about systemic racial oppression and history by design . mentors and principal investigators need to be aware of this reality, and must talk to their labs, collaborators and research groups about confronting and dismantling structural racism, especially senior white male colleagues . importantly, this work extends beyond the white heteronormative male majority, including white women and other minority groups in science. be humble enough to relinquish your power and privilege to elevate black scientists’ voices (fig. ). learn to identify microaggressions, guard against them in yourselves, and remain vigilant about eradicating them in your lab group and institutions. persistence will be required, understanding that fatigue and discomfort will happen. dig deep. decolonize and broaden evaluation metrics the guidelines for tenure, promotion and hiring are all heavily steeped in white supremacy and racial oppression that prohibits the full participation and excellence of black scientists . tenure, promotion and hiring guidelines customarily devalue community engagement and initiatives directed at promoting diversity, equity, inclusion and justice. this also includes internal and external funding initiatives, as black life scientists are customarily not funded for large grants . the invisible labour of black scientists often goes unnoticed or disregarded but is substantial to the excellence of the department and institution . radical revisions to evaluation metrics also need to hold non-black colleagues accountable for anti-racist work. integration of outreach and engagement efforts should be tantamount to publication record on a cv. too many non-black scholars have ascended the academic ladder without substantive contributions to diversifying life sciences and societal justice, and this is unacceptable. black scientists (students and faculty included) should serve on tenure and nature ecology & evolution | vol | october | – | www.nature.com/natecolevol http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://www.nature.com/natecolevol comment promotion committees, as well as hiring committees . the voices and opinions of those black scholars should seriously be taken into consideration when making all hiring or promotion decisions. not taking these immediate actions will inevitably jeopardize our ability to create a welcoming environment that broadens participation in our disciplines. recognize black excellence in all its forms to authentically be a welcoming space for black scholars, we need to accept the full expression of black excellence in all its forms. concurrently, that means interrogating how societal norms and stereotypes coerce black scientists to conform or assimilate to a strict definition of professionalism . we do not accept species uniformity in promoting healthy ecosystems, so why would we expect assimilation of personalities, values and cultures? recent social media movements, including but not limited to #blackbirdersweek, #blackintheivory and #blackinnature, illustrate the myriad forms of black scholarship, education and outreach . undervaluing these stories, narratives and identities negates the positive contributions our non-black colleagues make in fighting structural racism. support and fight alongside your black colleagues against racial oppression, especially when it is inconvenient and outside our academic walls. this is especially pertinent for field biologists, as our right to belong in nature without fear of persecution or violence is under constant threat , . the compounding and pervasive impacts of environmental racism in conservation and environmental movements all contribute to marginalizing black scholars’ contributions to field ecology and biology , , . authentically recognizing black excellence will likely mean confronting authority figures (that is, police, deans, chancellors, society presidents, department chairs and so on) and using your privilege to protect the rights of your colleagues. sustained work is required the best antidote for white supremacy is black excellence . as james baldwin famously wrote: “the future of the negro in this country… is precisely as bright or dark as the future of the country”. simply put: our collective success in ecology and evolution rests with our willingness to combat anti-black racism and white supremacy. our success is also predicated on our ability abolish anti-black racism in ecology and evolution amplify black excellence in ecology and evolution leave white fragility at the door, and be comfortable with being uncomfortable make justice, equity, diversity and inclusion (jedi) sessions main events deconstruct the evaluation process and guidelines for tenure and promotion interrogate your own racial biases and privileges cite black authors, and compensate them equitably fund black-led grants with strong community engagement celebrate public engagement by black scholars elevate black scholars as institutional and societal leaders invite black scholars as editors and reviewers in prestigious journals position black scholars as keynote speakers, panelists and symposia organizers hire multiple black faculty through cluster hiring do outreach at majority black and brown k- schools require black history courses and teach research through a justice lens practice anti-racist strategies everywhere; do not cherry pick fig. | recommendations for authentically amplifying black scholars while abolishing white supremacy in ecology and evolution. anti-racist practice and action means creating comprehensive policies that specifically target injustices and inequality at every level of an institution (for example, in lab settings, graduate cohorts, classrooms, conference venues and departmental meetings). creating sustained change and progress in fighting racial oppression in ecology and evolution requires a multi-tiered approach that incorporates aspects of education, support and personal and professional growth. most importantly, institutional policies must be married with individual interrogation of biases and privileges, placing accountability at the core of authentically practicing anti-racism pedagogy and doctrine. nature ecology & evolution | vol | october | – | www.nature.com/natecolevol http://www.nature.com/natecolevol comment to acknowledge and learn from the historical contributions of acclaimed black scholars before us. extensive and untold legacies and narratives of black scholars in ecology and evolution must be heard , . we demand long-term solutions that disrupt white supremacy in all areas of ecology and evolution, while simultaneously elevating black scholars (fig. ). our current declaration builds on an already exhaustive list of scholarly work addressing anti-racist strategies . may our call to action serve as a preface to lifelong engagement with eradicating systemic racism in our institutions. ❐ christopher j. schell     ✉, cylita guy    , delia s. shelton    , shane c. campbell-staton    , , briana a. sealey    , danielle n. lee and nyeema c. harris    school of interdisciplinary arts and sciences, university of washington tacoma, tacoma, wa, usa. department of ecology and evolutionary biology, university of toronto, toronto, ontario, canada. environmental and molecular toxicology, oregon state university, corvallis, or, usa. department of ecology and evolutionary biology, university of california, los angeles, ca, usa. institute for society and genetics, university of california, los angeles, ca, usa. department of integrative biology, university of texas at austin, austin, tx, usa. department of biological sciences, southern illinois university edwardsville, edwardsville, il, usa. applied wildlife ecology lab, ecology and evolutionary biology, university of michigan, ann arbor, mi, usa. ✉e-mail: cjschell@uw.edu published online: july https://doi.org/ . /s - - - references . van dorn, a., cooney, r. e. & sabin, m. l. lancet , – ( ). . yancy, c. w. j. am. med. assoc. , – ( ). . nature , ( ). . subbaraman, n. nature , – ( ). . langin, k. ‘i can’t even enjoy this.’ #blackbirdersweek organizer shares her struggles as a black scientist. science ( june ). . spikes, m. science , ( ). . lewis jr, n. a. what i’ve learned about being a black scientist. science ( june ); https://doi.org/ . /science.caredit. abd . nat. ecol. evol. , – ( ). . roberts, j. white academia: do better. medium ( june ); https://go.nature.com/ fkqpnh . gewin, v. nature , – ( ). . kendi, i. x. how to be an antiracist (one world, ). . dzirasa, k. cell https://doi.org/ . /j.cell. . . ( ). . tabuchi, h. & schlossberg, t. as scientists, we have yet to close the racial disparities. the new york times ( june ); https://go.nature.com/ dddtei . leslie, s. j., cimpian, a., meyer, m. & freeland, e. science , – ( ). . harris, a. the disciplines where no black people earn phds. the atlantic ( april ); https://go.nature.com/ jtid . abrahams, r. s. the brief history of african americans in evolutionary biology, and why that is the case. the molecular ecologist ( february ); https://go.nature.com/ eql he . hofstra, b. et al. proc. natl acad. sci. usa , – ( ). . garibaldi, a. & turner, n. ecol. soc. , ( ). . jimenez, m. f. et al. nat. ecol. evol. , – ( ). . johnson, c. ‘black panther’ and its science role models inspire more than just movie awards. the conversation ( february ); https://go.nature.com/ okaaer . lee, d. n. anim. behav. , – ( ). . mehta, d. nature , ( ). . hoppe, t. a. et al. sci. adv. , eaaw ( ). . matthew, p. a. what is faculty diversity worth to a university? the atlantic ( november ); https://go.nature.com/ by pr . gatheru, w. it’s time for environmental studies to own up to erasing black people. vice news ( june ); https://go.nature. com/ oxmmed . finney, c. black faces, white spaces: reimagining the relationship of african americans to the great outdoors (univ. north carolina press, ). competing interests the authors declare no competing interests. nature ecology & evolution | vol | october | – | www.nature.com/natecolevol http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:cjschell@uw.edu https://doi.org/ . /s - - - https://doi.org/ . /science.caredit.abd https://doi.org/ . /science.caredit.abd https://go.nature.com/ fkqpnh https://doi.org/ . /j.cell. . . https://go.nature.com/ dddtei https://go.nature.com/ jtid https://go.nature.com/ eql he https://go.nature.com/ okaaer https://go.nature.com/ by pr https://go.nature.com/ oxmmed https://go.nature.com/ oxmmed http://www.nature.com/natecolevol 	recreating wakanda by promoting black excellence in ecology and evolution
 	root mentorship, training and research in anti-racism
 	decolonize and broaden evaluation metrics
 	recognize black excellence in all its forms
 	sustained work is required
 	fig. recommendations for authentically amplifying black scholars while abolishing white supremacy in ecology and evolution. re-imagineering the common in precarious times full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=cjis journal of intercultural studies issn: - (print) - (online) journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjis re-imagineering the common in precarious times carl-ulrik schierup & aleksandra Ålund to cite this article: carl-ulrik schierup & aleksandra Ålund ( ) re-imagineering the common in precarious times, journal of intercultural studies, : , - , doi: . / . . to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / . . © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group published online: apr . submit your article to this journal view related articles view crossmark data http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=cjis http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/cjis http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showcitformats?doi= . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=cjis &show=instructions http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=cjis &show=instructions http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - re-imagineering the common in precarious times carl-ulrik schierup and aleksandra Ålund remeso, linköping university, norrköping, sweden abstract the paper explores movements for social transformation in precarious times of austerity, dispossessed commons and narrow nationalism; movements counterpoised to an exhausted neoliberalism on the one hand, and a neoconservative xenophobic populism on the other. applying ‘rainbow coalition’ as generic concept it points at contours of a globally extended countermovement for social transformation, traversing ‘race’, class and gender, driven by reimaginings of the commons and indicating how they could be repossessed and democratically ruled; that is ‘reimagineered’). a multisited enquiry explores how actors express their claims as activist citizens under varying conditions and constellations, and if/how discourses and practices from different locations and at different scales inform each other. it interrogates whether there may be an actual equivalence of outlook, objective and strategy of ostensibly homologous contending movements which develop under varying local, national and regional circumstances in contemporary communities riveted by schisms of class, ‘race’/ ethnicity and gender, occupied by the ‘migration’ issue and challenged by popular demands for social sustainability. the paper contributes to social theory by linking questions posed by critics of ‘post-politics’ concerning contingences of pluralist democracy and revitalised politics of civil society, to precarity studies focused on globalisation and the changing conditions of citizenship, labour and livelihoods. keywords multiculturalism; precarity/ precariat; diversity; race; class; globalisation; neoliberalism; social movements; social transformations ‘rainbow coalition’: a politics of possibility in the year mass movements seconded by the mobilising power of social media erupted in both the global south and north. they resounded across countries and more than cities, with the ‘arab spring’ and ‘occupy wall street’ as the most illustrious instances ( roos and oikonomakis ). for some, this global upheaval appeared to harbinger the coming of a deepened democracy and a brighter post-neoliberal future as presaged by the world social forum; for others, ‘seeds of dystopia’ jeopardising ‘the social contracts between states and citizens’, as read by a report from the world econ- omic forum ( ). still, will hardly be inscribed into the annals of social revolutions as a , or , but rather, as a ; a ‘people’s springtime’ followed by a © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . /), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. contact carl-ulrik schierup carl-ulrik.schierup@liu.se journal of intercultural studies, vol. , no. , – https://doi.org/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / mailto:carl-ulrik.schierup@liu.se http://www.tandfonline.com conservative reaction (e.g. sperber ). anew, a hopeful democratic spring has meta- morphosed into a necropolitical winter, driven by neo-conservatism and a surge of right-wing xenophobic populism, and with hopes and struggles of a nascent movement for deepened democracy and retrieval of the commons under siege. ‘what’s next?’ what’s after ‘the end of history’, at a historical junction where ‘the neoliberal market vision of the human future can no longer be positioned as an utopia, and in fact may now be widely recognized as profoundly dystopian’ (hosseini et al. : )? this is a question that resounds with alarm in society as well as academia. the ‘end of history’ alludes to the title of fukuyama’s ( ) illustrious study celebrat- ing the end of the cold war. it represents a globalised liberal democracy and the free market as the apex of evolution. revisiting it reminds us that in the beginning of the s neoliberal globalisation could still be envisaged as a fortunate final stage of history. yet, it came with the cost of a commodification of the commons, targeting all com- munal or common under the authority of states or civic communities, or as bourdieu ( a: ) contends: ‘an immense political operation … aimed at creating the conditions for realizing and operating … a programme of methodical destruction of collectives’. under the banner of ‘flexibility’ politics of precarity (schierup and jørgensen ) has posited contingent employment and fragmented livelihood – without, security, protection and predictability – as a new global norm. a multifarious, allegedly ‘dangerous’, precariat in search of political identity has entered world history, seen to harbinger a potential populist ‘inferno’ (standing ). on the background of scenarios of a present, of environmental disasters, social polar- isation, retrograde democracy, radical nationalism and antagonistic struggles, karl pola- nyi’s ( [ ]) work the great transformation has gained contemporary relevance in social science. also in our current transformation, we can discern the contours of a global countermovement querying excessive commodification. contestants appeal to a multi-ethnic precariat from divergent political positions and perspectives. a reregulation of the world economy is propagated among its original architects, chief beneficiaries and custodians, contending that neoliberalism may be ‘oversold’ (ostry et al. ), or warning that a globalised financial capital poses a ‘capitalist threat’ to ‘open democratic societies’ and to the sustainability of capitalism itself (soros ; sachs ). it promises redemption through a ‘transformation of our world’ (united nations ) in a dawning ‘age of sustainable development’(sachs ). in the meantime, the politics of austerity has provoked the surge of a second perspective. it is embedded in an exclusionary neo-nation- alist movement and regime changer, with self-understanding as challenging globalisation by a politics of fenced borders. a third perspective, however, promises deepened demo- cratic possibilities, social protection and emancipation from discriminatory domination embodied in contending movements of contemporary civil society: vistas of a ‘realizable utopia, a sense of commitment to enduring social and human values, which drives human agency giving rise to social movements’ (lambert : ). an interrogation of this third perspective is in focus of this paper. we pursue it by positing ‘rainbow coalition’ (‘rc’) as a critical generic concept; for instance, a concept con- structed for extracting exemplary dimensions of a historical ideopolitical configuration (santoro ) with the purpose of producing ‘cumulative knowledge’ (wiseman ) on globally dispersed configurations of the present that exhibit an apparent resemblance. at its core is a transversally mediated synthesis of regard for particular identities and c.-u. schierup and a. Ålund universalising claims for social justice, traversing race, class and gender, which distin- guished the original intersectional so-called ‘rc’. initiated shortly after the murder of martin luther king in , it opened for a moment, with chicago as its democratic lab- oratory, a visionary window of possibility for king’s last dream of extending the civil rights movement to a wider social dimension, realised through building inclusive commons from the ground up (williams ). transposed into a generic concept ‘rc’ embodies trans- formative movements of civil society for democracy, equity and emancipation of a compo- site twenty-first century precariat, rallying constituencies from across ethno-racially divided communities, focusing on ‘commoning’ and transcending ideologically forged gulfs between ‘natives’ and ‘aliens’: a ‘rainbow that is also a bridge’ (ezln ). rc is, thus, constructed as an imagination for social transformation, antithetic to the ideology and politics of the extreme right, which has succeeded in mainstreaming a divisive racism into a ‘pathological normalcy’ (mudde ) of the present. it is counterpoised, as well, to a reformed neoli- beralism’s mirage of sustainable development, eschewing deep-seated structural contra- dictions in our present transformation. in our critical endeavour we feel deeply indebted to our dear colleague and friend, stephen castles whose work and perspective on multicultural citizenship (castles , ; castles et al. ) was always a source of inspiration for our own enquiry into the potentials and paradoxes of multicultural politics and policies (Ålund and schierup ; schierup and Ålund b). this pertains to stephen’s distinctive perspective, urging for a synthetic intersection of universalism and particularism, equity and democ- racy, identity and agency, nation and community, race and class (castles , ). ste- phen’s pioneering studies on class, race and migrant labour (castles and kosack ) impacted on our own early writings on migration, ethnicity-race and migrant labour in scandinavia. in the s our work have followed a common track with a critical bite con- cerning contingencies of an actually existing multiculturalism’s immersion into unequal and racialized states of society, in australia, sweden, europe and globally (castles ; schierup et al. # ; castles and schierup ; schierup and castles ; schierup and Ålund a; Ålund et al. ). a common source of inspiration in our studies on global migration, the precarisation of labour and citizenship and on discourses on human rights is karl polanyi’s ( [ ]) work on the great transformation (castles ; schierup et al. ). this is also from where we set off in the following. we attempt to ‘upscale’ (munck ) polanyi’s perspective in terms of a globally extended politics of precarity (schierup and jørgensen ). in this endeavour we endorse waite’s ( ) theorisation of ‘precar- ity’ as a dual signifier of ‘social condition’ and as a ‘rallying point for resistance’. a ‘weight of the world’, embodying a multidimensional ‘social suffering’ (bourdieu b), pro- duced by a ‘neoliberal utopia’s’ gamble on the free market (beck : ) has, in turn, become baseline for a ‘populist interpellation’ (seymour ), generating ‘countermove- ments’ in terms of discourses, strategies and practices for democracy, social justice and reclaiming the commons. we scrutinise dilemmas of civil society in an age of the precariat and posit the notion of uncivil society as a potential driver of counterhegemonic struggles. however, rather than claiming that instances of rcs constitute an already-existent coun- termovement, we need to engage with its activism as a politics of possibility. thereby, we inscribe our approach into the methodological outlook of the ‘sociology of emergence’ articulated by de sousa santos ( ). we also endorse in our approach coleman and journal of intercultural studies collins’ ( ) argument that the field of study should be seen and explored as constantly in a process of ‘becoming’. this resonates with our understanding of commons as an ima- ginary coming into being; that is, reimagineered in terms of a social practice of common- ing. these processes may take different forms, modalities and dynamics, as well as vary in degrees of intensity and occur on different scales. conditions and contingencies of precarity tsianos ( : ), for one, has analysed precarity as a condition of life and work encom- passing imperatives of ‘flexibility’, ‘availability’, ‘multilocality’ and compressed ‘mobility’ across time and space. goldring and landholt ( ) designate unpredictability of dispos- sessed livelihoods in the nexus of precarious work and exclusionary citizenship, with ‘the migrant’ as quintessential incarnation. in reality, casas-cortes contends ( ) a con- dition of precarity extends through a wide cross-class and trans-cultural array of popu- lation groups, thus signifying a generalised, ‘becoming migrant of labour’. in his book, the precariat standing ( ) understands precarity as novel state of society, connected with neoliberal globalisation, austerity policy and the financialisation of the economy, retreating welfare and service delivery systems, and a deficient system of education. yet, sceptics argue that security of labour, livelihoods and citizenship are parentheses in the history of capitalism, distinctive for mid-twentieth century welfare states of the north, and that life and work in the south was always precarious (munck ; scully ). the state of the south (itself shaped by the domination of the north), is now seen to tell the north its fortune; or, as phrased by beck ( ), harbingering a ‘brasilianization of the west’. yet, contemporary studies also show that conditions of precarity in the global south, as well as their driving political forces, are shifting in character, compared to pre- carious conditions of the past; thus positing demands for ‘flexibility’ in terms of diminish- ing labour and social rights, excessive informalisation, contingent employment and de-unionisation (schierup ). studies of neoliberal transition in the former ‘second world’ appear to confirm the emergence of comparable conditions of precarity (bobkov et al. ; round and kuznetsova ). thus, precarity comes in a range of shades and shapes, depending on globally differentiated ‘varieties of capitalism’ (hall and soskice ) and diverging regimes of citizenship (schierup et al. ). essentially, the meaning precarity as a social condition conveys in a range of contem- porary critical studies is not ‘social exclusion’ due to curable systemic malfunctions, but: a ‘constitutive element of the new global disorder, to which it is very functional’ (ricceri : ). it has been interrogated as embodied in a globally-mobile reserve army of labour forged by austerity programmes which, from the end of the s, have rolled back the social compacts of welfare and developmental states, and grown on the ruins of actually existing socialism. poverty, insecurity and unpredictability is, consequently, moved beyond the integrationist durkheimian concern with ‘social cohesion’ in prevalent discourses on ‘social exclusion-inclusion’ (levitas ) and into a marxian influenced terrain of ‘flexploitation’ (bourdieu a: ), with the surplus population and the indus- trial reserve army seen as disciplinary vehicles for regulation and the instigation of mor- ality (harvey ). in this perspective, the functionality of precarity has been analysed in terms of keeping a cheap, multiplex and flexible ‘reserve army of labour in labour’ (moase ). c.-u. schierup and a. Ålund the driving forces are succinctly encapsulated in harvey’s ( ) notion of ‘accumu- lation by dispossession’. it implicates a dismantling of the commons at a planetary scale, involving the commodification of welfare services and livelihoods, together with the refraction of social and labour rights, instrumentalised through intersecting processes of financialisation, sub-contracting, outsourcing, informalisation and privatisation, gentri- fication and ‘land-grabbing’. the contingent production of precarious conditions of work and citizenship arrives in tandem with a transformation of a ‘redistributive state’ into a neoliberal ‘regulatory state’ (majone ). it is a state commanding the so-called detailed ‘negative’ regulatory capacities targeted at eliminating all institutional and social obstacles to the commodification of the human lifeworld. in this context of deep state transform- ation, a neoliberal ‘governmentality’ has undermined, argues brown ( : ), ‘the rela- tive autonomy of institutions from one another and from the market – law, elections, the police, the public sphere’. it relates to ‘an independence that formerly sustained an interval and a tension between a capitalist political economy and a liberal democratic political system’; or the very tension between market and state that lies at the heart of most readings of the polanyi problem and the dynamics of the ‘double movement’ in the great trans- formation (gt). seen from this perspective, the state is ‘not anymore … the mediator or “the shield” protecting society from the tensions between capital and labour – through … redistribu- tive policies’ (sommer-houdeville : ). it is a transformation of the state that undermines citizenship, the capacity to mobilise collective resistance and to form political constituencies (sassen ). it holds implications for the role of civil society. in the global north as well as the south, renegotiated social contracts, signified by state marketisation and the expansion of ‘participatory governance’, are matched by growing prominence of a reconfigured, professionalised and ngoised civil society, with a preeminent role as service providers rather than as a mobilising force in politics (wikström and lundström ; neocosmos ). wider implications of this is that ‘even in the presence of countermove- ments, neoliberalism mediates a divergence of state and civil society relationships creating uncertain futures for democratic possibilities’ (walton and udayagiri : ). thus, today’s theories and practices of commodification can be conceived as more far-reaching in consequence than those that guided globalisation in polanyi’s time. it has been depicted in terms of a ‘stealth revolution’ (brown ) which spells the end of liberal democracy by casting its very moral reason and institutional foundations in the moulds of an uncompro- mising market rationality; an ‘undoing the demos’ (op.cit.) engulfing also liberal democ- racy’s imagined life-nerve: ‘civil society’ (burawoy ). an Époque of contestation this scenario of a flagging democracy indicates the need to raise questions pointing beyond two still influential positions on civil society. on the one hand, the tocquevillian view of civil society as an area of liberty and organisational culture for building democracy, seen as a counterweight to and separated from state and market forces (tocqueville [ ]). on the other hand, the gramscian perspective stressing the fluidity of relations between civil society and the state, with civil society interpenetrating state insti- tutions and enmeshed in struggles for hegemony (gramsci ). with today’s civil society turning, tendentially, into sub-contracted and ngoised professional service journal of intercultural studies providers, it may lose critical clout, seen from both tocquevillian and gramscian perspec- tives. in this hiatus it is essential to link questions posed by critics of ‘post-politics’, con- cerning contingences for a pluralist democracy and politics of civil society, to those of precarity studies, focused on the conditions of globalisation in terms of changing con- ditions of labour and citizenship, and embodied in the precariat, signifying a potentially game-changing political actor for the twenty-first century. the neologism of ‘the precariat’ was coined at the turn of the millennium as idiom for self-identification by the alter-globalisation movement in europe and has since diffused into politics and social science worldwide. in recent critical studies ‘precarity’ has been conceptualised as a ‘toolbox’ (casas-cortés ) of contestative movements for coping with insecurity and flux, and the idiom of ‘the precariat’ as harbingering a ‘populist inter- pellation’ (seymour ) under the meme that ‘another world is possible’. it is an encom- passing perspective, relating to different social status groups across substantial arrays of the class structure, diverging from standing’s ( ) understanding of ‘the precariat’ as a potentially ‘dangerous’ new and separate ‘social class’ (bak jørgensen ). while we do share standing’s view of the precariat as representing a ‘danger’, we posit the issue topsy-turvy. socially insecure and identity-seeking precarious segments of today’s populations are – truthfully – being mobilised by the extreme right, neo-conserva- tive or neo-fascist gestations of a contemporary countermovement, ostensibly confronting neoliberal globalisation. it is, according to our reading of standing, a ‘danger’ seen to call for enlightened paternalistic social policies by the same state and corporations whose poli- tics of austerity produced the precariat in the first place. we focus, however, on and inter- rogate the contingencies of an alternative precariat movement which represents a conceivably more ‘dangerous’ prospect seen from the perspective of sustaining the present dominant hegemonies, in both the north and south, potentially uplifting radical alternatives from the margin to the centre. it concerns a multifarious activism of contestative movements with ‘radical imaginaries’ of a deepened non-racial democracy and harbouring transformative vistas of a ‘welt der commons’ (helfrich and bollier ). it has been been distinguished as a ‘social practice of commoning’ (harvey : ); ‘an unstable and malleable social relation between a particular self-defined social group and those aspects of its actually existing or yet-to-be created social and/or physical environment deemed crucial to its life and livelihood’ (ibid.). at the dawn of the new millennium it has come in many varieties and at varying scales – the neighbourhood, the city, the ‘nation’, the region and the globe (schierup et al. ; schierup and jørgensen ). contrary to being conceived as footloose and without sense of history and identity, the imaginaries of today’s contentious movements have been depicted as, beyond nostalgia, drawing intellectual energy from past movements for democracy, recognition and the common good. milkman ( ), for one, concludes that post- movements in the united states – contesting a racialised and gendered pre- carity of work, livelihoods and citizenship – are fusing an intellectual heritage of the working class movements of the s, centred on labour and class politics, with that of the ‘new social movements’ of the s and s focused on emancipation through the recognition of identity (cf. fraser ). thus, represented in terms of history-cognisant and intellectually-rooted insurgent movements, the ‘danger’ inherent in multifarious movements of a global precariat stands forth as contours of a contempor- ary ‘epoch of contention’ (funke ) with potentially system-transformative dynamics. c.-u. schierup and a. Ålund though drawing on the heritage of past movements, these ‘new-new’ movements (feixa et al. ) do not attempt to replicate the past. the challenge of understanding their particular ‘newness’ has spawned a proliferating academic debate. we find funke’s ( ) inclusive theorising of social movements fruitful. he designates a spectrum of movements, initiated by the zapatist surge in the s and, including the movements of the s, constituting a ‘distinct and integrated arch of mobilisations’; a historically particular ‘epoch of contention’ (funke : ). although movements are diverse – and can be understood as distinct ‘cycles of protest’, their commonality rests, in keeping with this perspective, in the shared ‘rhizomatic’ meta-logic of their movement politics (funke : ; cf. deleuze and guattari ), and their claims for fuller forms of democratic participation. this is a logic that enables multi-connectivity and het- erogeneity of protest and mobilisation, which can accommodate diversity and a ‘multi- plicity of struggles and possible futures [of] loosely linked organizations, groups and movements’ (funke : ). while diverging from both the ‘old’ class-centred labour movement and parties, as well as the ‘new’ movements of the s, the dominant rhizo- matic logic of the current epoch of contention has been to amalgamate core characteristics of both (funke : ; funke and wolfson : ff). it is a theoretical baseline, from which the emergence and development of a multitude of diverse movements and networks can be studied from a perspective that emphasises linkages, cooperation and coalition dynamics. through the implementation of ‘movement relays’ as a conceptual umbrella, ‘movement-to-movement transmissions’ can be captured in ways that avoid privileging structure over process and single movements over broader cycles of contention (op.cit). a pivotal issue around which transmission and coalition-making evolve is that of ‘com- moning as a transformative social paradigm’ (bollier : ); practices of ‘mutual support, conflict, negotiation, communication and experimentation that are needed to create systems to manage shared resources’. it is through a critical investigation of these processes that we retrieve the formation and impact of ‘rcs’ in the third great transformation. commoning – beyond civil society as we know it although the terms of engagement vary, countless activist communities around the world are playing out a drama of resistance to the neoliberal economy and the creation of commons-based alternatives. the essential similarity between resistance and commoning are not always apparent because the conflicts occur at many levels (for instance, local, region, national, and transnational); in diverse resource-domains; and with self-descrip- tions that may or may not use the commons language. yet, there is a shared dissent from the grand narrative of free-market ideology and its near-theological belief in ‘self- made’ individualism, expansive private property rights, constant economic growth, gov- ernment deregulation, capital-driven tech. in exploring the commons, through the critical theory of ‘populist reason’ (laclau ) is essential, in conjunction with theories on the formation and dilemmas of multi- plex contemporary contestative movements (Ålund and schierup ). what ‘the common’ stands for and what it could possibly be has been theorised by numerous studies in the s and s. fraser ( ), for one, posits in her reception of gt a dis- tinction between an ‘oppressive protection’, seen as embodied in étatist social policies journal of intercultural studies following the depression of the s, and an ‘emancipatory’ social transformation poten- tially driven by a multiplex civil society today. we relate the concept of commons as located within a civil society. the concept of commons is, as bollier ( : ) writes, ‘less a noun than a verb because it is primarily about the social practices of commoning’. thus ‘commoning’ is defined as ‘acts of mutual support, conflict, negotiation, communication and experimentation that are needed to create systems to manage shared resources’ (bollier : ), and condition social and environmental sustainability (relating to land, water, air, transport, public places, ideas, science, radio waves, housing, education, labour regulation, health, culture, etc.). at the heart of the practice of commoning rests the principle that the relation between social groups and social and physical aspects of the environment envisioned as a common ‘shall be both collective and non-commodified – off-limits to the logic of market exchange and market valuations’ (harvey : ). what ‘the commons’ and ‘commoning’ as social practice stand for, and what they could possibly be, has been theorised in numerous studies during the s and s, contend- ing that ‘state’ and ‘market’ are not the only governance systems possible. fraser ( ), for one, posits in her reception of the great transformation, a distinction between an often ‘oppressive protection’ embodied in étatist social policies and ‘emancipation from domination’ through movements of civil society; a ‘triple movement’ in an ambivalent relation to both corporate business and state. with a critical reception of this proposition, we posit the importance of transversal dialogue and coalition-building between a civil society, ever so often embedded as service providers in neoliberal governance (wikström and lundström ; kaldor ; veltmeyer ), and movements of a stigmatised, so- called uncivil society, emerging from the world’s poor racialised ‘favelas’, ‘townships’, ‘ban- lieus’ and urban ‘ghettoes’ that lodge a growing proportion of migrants and their offspring. in scholarship on ‘civil society’, ‘uncivil society’ figures typically as an antonym with pejorative undertones such as ‘uncivilised’, usually associated with intolerance, violence, political extremism, undemocratic values and anti-modernism. it figures as an ‘evil twin’ of a ‘civil society’ imbued with democratic and liberal values, celebrated by a trajec- tory of mainstream scholarship from tocqueville to putnam (glasius ). in contrast, an alternative postcolonial scholarship defines ‘uncivil society’ in terms of an indispensa- ble ‘weapon of the weak’ (paraphrasing scott ); a ‘politics of informal people’ for sur- vival. in effect, the poor may initiate ‘molecular changes’ (bayat : ) by the inventive creation of informal commons, corporeal as well as digital (chatterjee ; trimikliniotis et al. ). yet, our use of the concept transcends a perspective that defines ‘resistance’ as ‘defiance’ (hallward ), positing a rebellious ‘insurgent citizenship’ (holston ) of ‘accidental citizens’ (nyers ) with visions of a better future assembled under the aegis of, e.g. ‘we are the poors’ (desai ). we pick up, operate and extend the notion of ‘uncivil society’, from where it has been developed by neocosmos ( ) in his analysis of civil society, vio- lence and xenophobia in south africa. we suggest to probe its explanatory power in other sites and social situations across societies and communities bearing the brunt of precarisa- tion. if the mode of rule in uncivil society is such, argues neocosmos, that it enables the distortion or extinguishing of the very meaning of citizenship, it implicates that people in this domain are denied automatic access to ‘the right to have rights’ (cf. arendt ). with their primary relation to the state situated in precarious spaces of ‘uncivil society’ c.-u. schierup and a. Ålund they ‘face extraordinary obstacles when they wish to assert their rights directly as citizens and attempt a movement beyond their political place, for their political existence is outside the domain of rights’ (neocosmos : ): this outsider position results in the voices of the ‘plebs’ of our time being heard only as ‘noise’ (dikeç ; building on rancière ). if they shall be heard as citizens, beyond circumspect spheres of informal common- ing, they may be forced to seek ‘the mediation of trustees’ – usually in the form of estab- lished ngos speaking for them in state authorised spaces of civil society, involved in participatory governance – ‘for it is only there that the rule of law operates reasonably con- sistently’ (neocosmos : ). this argument demands integrating the idea of uncivil society into a wider theory of social movements and civil society in contemporary governance. this involves the critical scrutiny of the challenges and opportunities of alliance-building, and the dealings of ‘movement relays’ potentially bridging the uncivil-civil divide. it raises the issue of ‘trans- versal politics’ (yuval-davis ) – originally developed in feminist theory to encompass difference with equality and dialogue on equitable terms, transversing class, gender, ‘race’ and organisational positionalities – as the precondition for bringing about a deepened par- ticipatory and ‘pluralist democracy’ (mouffe ); linking identity to social divisions and agency to political economy (purcell ). we see an obvious necessity for an empiri- cally-illuminated theorisation of a multifarious ‘world encompassing many worlds’ (delgado wise and olivares ), in opposition to different versions of a new allegedly non-western-centric ‘cosmopolitanism’ (e.g. hosseini et al. ), as conception of the political contingent on ‘ideas for a new world economy’ (bello ). blasting open the continuum of history we see moments of crisis – that is moments of rupture in temporal continuity of hegemo- nic narratives and institutional practices – as social situations from where exemplary cases of contestative rainbow commoning can be distilled. we see them as situations of possi- bility in which radical imaginaries of social movements may represent ‘dynamite’ for ‘blasting open the continuum of history’ (brown : ); for producing their own tem- porality, transforming the flow of events and the reproduction of society through interven- tions in time and space (haiven and khasnabish : – ). here, bakhtin’s ( ) concept of chronotope appears heuristically valuable, in the sense of indicating a point of intense time–space connection; a shared imagination of the time flow, localised in a specific social space. or, as haiven and khasnabish put it: ‘how individuals and groups develop and change, how the past informs the present and shapes the future, and what might ultimately be possible’ (ibid.). let us illustrate the argument by relating in some detail to a social situation, the time and space ramifications of which we have been following in our current research (schierup et al. ). it is embodied in riots, provoked by repellent police violence that raged across stockholm’s poor, disadvantaged multiethnic districts in may . their extended and vehement character, matched historically only by clashes of rioters and police in the nine- teenth century (berglund ), struck the swedish political establishment with awe and took the international community with ‘blazing surprise’ (editorial ). however, only three years later, in the spring of , we found ourselves participating (as observers) at an event in the very same local stockholm community of husby, where the riots journal of intercultural studies started: the opening of a local ‘house of the people’ (named husby of the people). ‘house of the people’ (folkets hus) alludes parabolically to past politics of commoning, embedded historically in sweden’s legendary labour movement. yet, flying a logo (see figure ) recalling the zapatist imagination of a ‘rainbow that is also a bridge’ (ezln ) brands it as the child of a locally-grounded coalition spearheaded by sweden’s multitude of young, racialised, post-migrant subalterns – the megaphone – emerging invigorated out of the time-hole blasted by the stockholm rebellion (léon-rosales and Ålund ). in , it was still treated in mainstream media as an ephemeral exponent of an untrustworthy ‘uncivil society’s’ insurgent commoning practices (e.g. direct action against gentrification and the sham renovations of public housing), and vilified for its efforts to publicly explain the wider structural-institutional causes and predicament of the riots. in , the organisation had metamorphosed into a wider rhizomising network of transversal alliances for ‘social justice’ spearheaded by young post-migrant ‘organic intellectuals’ with their backgrounds mainly in the middle east and africa (léon-rosales and Ålund ; schierup et al. ). it includes increasingly consolidated alliances with, and activists’ representation within, national mainstream organisations of civil society with roots in the old labour and international humanitarian movements (e.g. the red cross and save the children), critical thinktanks, as well as incipient alliances with ‘justice movements’ of the precariat in other parts of europe, the united states, latin america and africa. in this context, we understand ‘the house of the people’ as sig- nifying what miraftab ( ) calls an ‘invented space’, contraposed to subordinated ‘par- ticipation’ in so-called ‘invited spaces’ of neoliberal governance; in sweden, as elsewhere, often reproducing rather than challenging conditions of precarity. it can be seen as the local hub for a multiplicity of innovative and self-governing commoning institutions. yet, it all takes place under conditions of precarity. this relates to reliance on increasingly insecure public financing for non-commercial ‘adult education’ driven by voluntary associations, as well as demands for demonstrating ‘entrepreneurship’ on the part of any civil society organisation, dependence on commercially-run ‘public’ housing compa- nies and, conceivably, demands not to venture beyond what is acceptable to allies among mainstream civil society organisations. this is all set in the contingency of a wider social context shaped by politics of sustained austerity which is increasingly paired with a surging narrowly nationalist and racializing politics, in line with a general european and global drift. comparable instances are the rise of black lives matter, following the riots in ferguson, missouri, , provoked by police figure . municipal housing project in rainbow colours. logo of the house of the people founded in by a local civil society coalition in husby - a poor multiethnic neighbourhood in metropolitan stockholm. c.-u. schierup and a. Ålund violence, political negligence and racialised precarisation; the ascent of podemos after the police clamp downs on the m in spain in ; the nascence of a fragile new generation of movements in russia after bolontaya; a recent turn of zapatismo from a localised insur- gency to a challenger in national power games, provoked by a new crisis of rupture and opportunity related to an increasingly hostile norte. they are a few examples among numerous situations of crisis and reimagineering. they emerge as ‘new sites and scales of struggle’ (isin and nielsen ) in contentious situations of crisis; ‘activist citizens’ articulating their claims under varying conditions and in differential constellations, in a process were discourses and practices from different locations and at different scales inform each other through transversal dialogue and practices. uncivil society: moving forward asking questions unlike the revolutionary movements of modernity, today’s movements are seen as less teleological in terms of goal setting. this is expressed in the formula of the zapatistas, ‘preguntando caminamos’ (holloway ); i.e. moving forward through questions rather than answers (simon ). given this, the criteria for the success and failure of social movements must be substantially revised (further in haiven and khasnabish : – ). a political movement’s coming to power (entering the formal party-pol- itical system) does not necessarily mean its success. the process and the emancipatory practice can be more important than immediate political implications. the strength of the forms of action developed is that they can be suspended and then renewed at any sub- sequent moment (groys ). we are, as seen in this perspective, dealing with the for- mation of a new societal culture, rather than with consistent political tactics; a ‘not yet’ (the future) that has ‘meaning (as possibility), but no predetermined direction, for it can end either in hope or disaster’ (de sousa santos : ). indeed consecutive precariat mobilisations for democracy and the commons can be read as ending in ‘disaster’ (e.g. occupy, the arab spring, the democratic mobilisations in turkey sparked in gezi park, syriza’s left populist challenge to ‘the troika’); tempor- arily ‘defeated by ideological and media forces, by the police, and by the ruling institutions’ (hardt : ). in effect, the public stigmatisation and institutional (often violent) repression from which these and other post- insurgent movements have repeatedly suffered in the north as well as the south, suggests the value of the notion of ‘uncivil society’, into the theoretical and analytical framework of social movement studies. such a move allows for a critical contextualisation and interrogation of the icon of ‘civil society’ as an ideological tenet and vehicle for market-driven governance in deeply unequal, segregated and racialised societies. its relevance may appear obvious relating to ‘townships’, ‘favelas’ or ‘shanty towns’ of the south and the racialised urban ‘ghettoes’, ‘banlieus’ or ‘förorter’ of the north with numerous migrants and post-migrant generations among its most dispossessed, who inhabit culturally stigmatised, and economically and politically marginalised spaces. here, the ‘state of exception’ – theorised by agamben ( ) as an immanent condition of contemporary societies through which civil, political and social rights pertaining to citizenship can be arbitrarily truncated by governments – can be observed to rule in the most ‘naked’ forms. states of exception constitute a rule under which new activist political subjectivities and movements are shaped among the most disadvantaged. however, while the contingent irregularisation of citizenship journal of intercultural studies implicated by states of exception may earlier have been characteristic of exceptional poli- tics in moments and spaces of acute crisis, it can now be observed to be part and parcel of the ‘normal’ working of most states. on this background, we posit a more general value of ‘uncivil society’ as a discursive and political predicament; a state of estrangement con- ditioning the agency of precariat movements in general, and contestative rcs in particu- lar, in a world where civil rights (of expression, assemblage, protest rallies, etc.) are becoming increasingly policed and institutionally truncated by executive instrumentalisa- tion of governance. disclosure statement no potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. funding this work was supported by forte [ – ] and svenska forskningsrådet formas [ – – ]. notes on contributors carl-ulrik schierup is a professor at the institute for research on migration, ethnicity and society (remeso), linköping university. he has a disciplinary background in social anthropology and sociology. he has published on issues of international migration and ethnic relations, globalisation, nationalism, multiculturalism, citizenship, working-life and labour relations. he co-authored the book migration, citizenship and the european welfare state (oxford university press, ) together with stephen castles and peo hansen. among his recent works is the coedited (with martin bak jørgensn) volume politics of precarity: migrant conditions, struggles and experiences (brill ). aleksandra Ålund is a professor at remeso, the institute for research on migration, ethnicity and society at linköping university. she has published widely on in swedish, english and other languages on international migration and ethnicity, identity, culture, gender, youth and social movements. her latest publications address issues of democracy and urban justice movements and include reimaginieering the nation, essays on teenty-first- century sweden. (co-edited with carl-ulrik schierup and anders neergaard). (peter lang, ). references agamben, g., . state of exception. chicago, il: the university of chicago press. Ålund, a. and schierup, c., . paradoxes of multiculturalism. essays on swedish society. aldershot: avebury. republished as e-book on the remeso home-page, linköpings university as: http://liu.diva-portal.org/smash/record.jsf?pid=diva : Ålund, a., and schierup, c. . making or unmaking a movement? challenges for civil society in the global governance of migration? globalizations, ( ). https://doi.org/ . / . . Ålund, a., schierup, c., and neergaard, a., eds., . reimagineering the nation. essays on twenty first century sweden. frankfurt am main: peter lang. arendt, h., . the origins of totalitarianism. second enlarged edition. cleveland: meridian books. bakhtin, m., . the dialogic imagination: four essays. austin, tx: university of texas press. c.-u. schierup and a. 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	commoning – beyond civil society as we know it 	blasting open the continuum of history 	uncivil society: moving forward asking questions 	disclosure statement 	notes on contributors 	references s jra .. what kind of movement is black lives matter? the view from twitter alvin b. tillery jr. northwestern university abstract: this paper examines the ways that social movement organizations affili- ated with the black lives matter (blm) movement use twitter through three content analysis studies. the main finding presented in the paper is that the modal tweet generated between december , and october , was an emotional response—an expression of sadness, outrage, or despair—to police brutality and the killings of african americans. the second key finding is that blm organizations generated more tweets that framed the movement as a struggle for individual rights than ones that utilized frames about gender, racial, and lgbtq identities. finally, the paper shows that blm activists urge their followers to pursue disruptive repertoires of contention less frequently than they encourage other political behaviors. these findings suggest that the blm movement is intelligible through both the resource mobilization and new social movement paradigms within social movement studies. keywords: blacklivesmatter, black lives matter movement, black twitter, social movements. introduction on july , , patrisse cullors, alicia garza, and opal tometi posted #blacklivesmatter on the micro-blogging site twitter. cullors, garza, and tometi created the hashtag to protest the acquittal of george zimmerman in the shooting death of trayvon martin, an unarmed african american teenager. the hashtag gained traction on the internet throughout the remainder of , as advocates for police reform utilized it to express their complex emotions in response to several high-profile cases where address correspondence and reprint requests to: alvin b. tillery, jr., northwestern university, evanston, il. e-mail: alvin.tillery@northwestern.edu the journal of race, ethnicity, and politics, ( ), – . © the race, ethnicity, and politics section of the american political science association doi: . /rep. . - / terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core mailto:alvin.tillery@northwestern.edu https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core unarmed african american men and women died at the hands of police officers (freelon, mcilwain, and clark ; garza ; hockin and brunson ). the phrase black lives matter (blm) gained even greater currency in our society when it became the organizing principle and mantra of the protests that swept through the nation in the wake of the shooting death of michael brown, an unarmed african american teenager, by a white police officer in ferguson, mo (bonilla and rosa ; jackson and welles ; taylor , – ). since the summer of , the blm movement has grown into a network of grassroots organizations rep- resenting more than american cities and four countries outside of the united states (ransby ; rickford ). moreover, the visibility of large blm protests in new york city; oakland, ca; and chicago, il between and garnered considerable attention from the u.s. media and registered in the national consciousness on public opinion surveys (horowitz and livingston ; neal ). as is often the case when new movements capture our attention, the blm movement is now a hot topic of debate in both the public sphere and academia. the debate in both quarters is focused on the tactics and organizational structures that blm activists employ to promote social change. some critics of the movement have argued that its focus on disruptive protest tactics, decentralized organizational structures, and unwillingness to negotiate with political elites in the gradualist realm of public policy formation will ultimately limit the success of the movement. on august , , for example, barbara reynolds, who described herself as a “septuagenarian grandmother” and “activist in the civil rights movement of the s,” penned a powerful opinion editorial in the washington post that urged blm activists to embrace the “proven methods” of the civil rights movement of the s. “the loving, non- violent approach is what wins allies and mollifies enemies,” reynolds argued in her piece, “[but] what we have seen come out of black lives matter is rage and anger—justifiable emotions, but questionable strategy” (reynolds ). president barack obama, who got his start in politics as a community organizer in chicago, il, made a similar critique of the movement on a trip to england in . while speaking at a town hall event in london on april , , president obama summed up the blm move- ment as follows: tillery terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core [the black lives matter movement is] really effective in bringing attention to problems. . .once you’ve highlighted an issue and brought it to people’s attention and shined a spotlight, and elected officials or people who are in a position to start bringing about change are ready to sit down with you, then you can’t just keep on yelling at them. and you can’t refuse to meet because that might compromise the purity of your position. the value of social movements and activism is to get you at the table, get you in the room, and then to start trying to figure out how is this problem going to be solved (shear and stack ). in short, these critiques suggest that the blm movement would be more successful if it emulated african american movements that ushered in what the sociologist john skrentny ( ) calls the “minority-rights revo- lution” of the s. ms. reynolds’s and president obama’s skepticism about the blm movement’s tactics and impact are not widely shared in the african american community. on the contrary, the movement receives very posi- tive appraisals from african americans on public opinion surveys. a national probability survey conducted by pew research in found that % of african americans express support for the movement (horowitz and livingston ). similarly, a nationally representative internet survey conducted by the center for the study of diversity and democracy at northwestern university found that % of african americans believe that the blm movement is at least moderately effective at achieving its stated goals (tillery ). at the same time, there is evi- dence in these surveys that african americans do share some of the con- cerns about organizational structure that the critics of the movement have raised. indeed, % of the respondents to the northwestern university survey stated that they believed that the blm movement would be more effective if it had a more centralized leadership structure (tillery ). the organizational and tactical differences between the civil rights movement of the s and the blm movement are also at the center of the burgeoning scholarly literature on the subject. however, academic researchers have largely set aside the question of the movement’s long-term impact on policy—what both ms. reynolds and president obama describe as “winning”—to focus on building knowledge about its internal dynamics and representations in the public sphere through detailed case studies and narrative accounts (harris ; lindsey ; rickford ; taylor ). thus far, three points of consensus have emerged within this nascent scholarly literature on the blm movement. the first what kind of movement is black lives matter? terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core point is that blm activists are intentionally rejecting the “respectability politics” model that animated the african american civil rights move- ment of the s and s (harris , – ; rickford , – ; taylor , – ). second, blm activists tend to utilize frames based on gender, lgbtq, and racial identities to describe both the prob- lems they are combatting and the solutions that they are proposing through contentious politics (harris , – ; lindsey ; rickford , – ). finally, there is consensus within the literature that the blm acti- vists do not define their aims in terms of linear policy objectives and that they see intrinsic value in the disruptive repertoires of contention that they utilize to draw attention to their causes (rickford , ; taylor ). the portrait of the blm movement that emerges from the scholarly lit- erature resembles more closely the “new social movements” that have emerged in europe and the united states since the s than the civil rights movement of the s. indeed, several studies of the blm movement make this point. harris ( ), for example, has argued that “the spontaneity and the intensity of the black lives matter movement is more akin to other recent movements—occupy wall street and the explosive protests in egypt and brazil—than s [african american] activism” ( ). rickford ( ) even goes as far as to say that the occupy wall street protests were a “precursor” to the blm movement. in short, the scholarly literature on the blm movement makes the case that critics of the movement should not expect it to look and feel like montgomery, selma, and the other iconic campaigns of the s movement—with their focus on respectability, rationally pur- posive action, and negotiation with political elites (mcadam ; morris ; ). this paper seeks to contribute to the scholarly conversation about the blm movement by analyzing how six social movement organizations (smos) affiliated with the movement use twitter. the aim is to deter- mine if systematic content analyses of the ways that these smos use the micro-blogging site support the interpretations developed through the extraordinarily high-quality case studies referenced above. in other words, does examining the tweets of smos affiliated with the blm move- ment as discrete speech acts in the african american counterpublic sphere lead us to the conclusion that the movement is more like occupy wall street and other new social movements than the civil rights movement of the s? this is not the first study of how blm activists use social media. on the contrary, there is a growing literature on this question within the fields of tillery terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core communications, african american studies, and social movement studies. these studies have almost exclusively focused on the hashtags that drive conversations between blm activists and their supporters and opponents on twitter and facebook. we have learned through these ana- lyses that hashtags raise the profile of the blm movement and spur action within the african american community (cox ; freelon, mcilwain, and clark ; ince, rojas, and davis ). these studies have also demonstrated that usage of hashtags gains the attention of political elites and sometimes encourages them to take positions in support of the move- ment (freelon, mcilwain, and clark ). what has been missing in this literature on social media usage is an account of the reasons that blm activists use twitter—to mobilize resources, communicate with pol- itical elites, or simply to convey their emotional states—and the types of frames that they construct and deploy within their tweets. the core argu- ment made in this paper is that understanding these two dynamics will give us a greater sense of how blm activists see their movement and facili- tate our ability to make fine-grained classifications of the movement based on the rubrics provided by social movement theory. the paper examines , tweets produced by six smos affiliated with the blm movement—black lives matter (@blklivesmatter); black lives matter new york city (@blmnyc), black lives matter los angeles (@blmla), black lives matter chicago (@blmchi), black lives matter washington, dc (@dmvblacklives), and ferguson action (@fergusonaction). these accounts were selected for three reasons. the first reason is their reach. when counted together, these six organiza- tions have more than , followers on twitter. second, the smos that manage these accounts are responsible for some of the most visible protests associated with the blm movement between and (taylor ). finally, the six accounts provide considerable regional vari- ation. moreover, the @blklivesmatter account represents the blm global network and not a geographically-defined chapter. analyzing content from this account will allow us to determine if there are distinctions to be made between the behavior of the umbrella network and the place- based organizations. the main research questions explored in this paper are: how do blm organizations communicate on twitter? do they use twitter primarily to mobilize resources in order to build the capacity of their smos? do they tweet about specific policy goals? do the six smos in this study use twitter to communicate frames that place gender, lgbtq, and racial identities at the center of their activism? finally, do the blm groups what kind of movement is black lives matter? terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core mailto:@blklivesmatter mailto:@blmnyc mailto:@blmla mailto:@blmchi mailto:@dmvblacklives mailto:@fergusonaction https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core examined in this study encourage their supporters to pursue disruptive rep- ertoires of contention over more conventional forms of political behavior? the analyses presented below confirm the view that the blm movement is best understood as a new social movement. indeed, less than one-third of the tweets examined in this study were aimed at mobil- izing resources or signaling political elites. moreover, only about one-third of the tweets generated by the smos communicated meanings through frames about gender, lgbtq, and racial identities. while the new social movement paradigm is the best theoretical lens for understanding how blm organizations communicate on twitter, the analyses presented below show that it is not the only window onto the on-line activism of these groups. this is so because all six of the organizations examined in this study tweeted more to urge their adherents to participate in the polit- ical system than they did to urge the pursuit of disruptive protest activities. the remainder of the paper proceeds as follows. the next section presents a discussion on the theoretical context for the study. it describes both the development of the new social movement paradigm within the literature on social movements and the core concepts that animate it as a research program. this section also presents three hypotheses derived from the new social movement theory about of the types of communication that we should expect to see in the twitter feeds of the six smos examined in the content analysis studies. section “method, data, and study designs” describes the data and methods utilized to conduct the three content ana- lysis studies that provide the empirical evidence presented in the paper. section “findings” presents the main findings from the content analysis studies. it will show that, with some caveats, the findings of the three studies support the view that the blm movement is best understood as a new social movement. the “conclusions” section describes the broader significance of the findings for our larger understanding of the blm movement and the literature on social movements. theoretical context and hypotheses as we have seen, several recent studies of the blm movement have asserted that it has more in common with occupy wall street than the civil rights movement of the s in terms of its organizational struc- ture, tactics, and representations in the public sphere (harris ; rickford ; taylor ). from the standpoint of classifying the blm movement using extant theories of social movements, this argument tillery terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core suggests that the movement is more intelligible through the lens of the new social movement paradigm than the dominant resource mobilization and political process theories. this is a very novel argument for the simple fact that social movement scholars have “mainly applied the theories [asso- ciated with the new social movement paradigm] to white, middle-class, progressive causes that cut across political and cultural spheres at the expense of paying attention to struggles that pertain to economic and racial issues” (carty , ). thus, the rise of the blm movement has precipitated the need to test the core assumptions of both paradigms against the behavior of the current generation of african american activists. the dividing line between the new social movement perspective and the resource mobilization and political process theories is the main assumption that they make about the motivations of activists. both resource mobilization and political process theories interpret the motiva- tions of protestors through the three axioms of what karl dieter opp ( ) calls “the most general vision of rational choice theory” ( ). the first axiom is that both the leaders of social movements and individual participants are rational, purposive actors (oberschall ; opp ; ; schwartz ). second, those who participate in social movements engage in cost-benefit analyses before they undertake an action (klandermans ; ; muller and opp ; oberschall ; ; opp ). finally, the rational choice perspective holds that move- ment participants are utility-maximizers who will “do what is best for them” (opp , ). building on this rationalist perspective, resource mobilization theorists developed a model of social movements that elevated the ability of purpos- ive activists to mobilize resources—e.g., labor, money, communication networks, facilities—in support of target goals to the main metric that dif- ferentiated successful movements from unsuccessful ones (mcadam ; mccarthy and zald ; morris ; ; tilly ; zald ). the proponents of resource mobilization theory also stress how important it is for the leaders of smos to remain attentive to environmen- tal factors and shifts in the political opportunity structure (freeman ; jenkins and perrow ; mcadam ; mccarthy and zald , – ; morris ; tarrow ). the political process theory of social movements grew out of this focus on political opportunity struc- tures. beginning in the s, several scholars began to argue—based largely on analyses of the civil rights movement—that sending the right signals to governing elites has the potential to shift political what kind of movement is black lives matter? terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core opportunity structures. under this view, movements that successfully signal and negotiate with governing elites are more likely to attain their strategic goals than ones that fail at these tasks (mcadam ; mcadam et al. ; tilly, tilly, and tilly ). despite the hegemony of resource mobilization and political process theories in social movement studies, even the leading practitioners of these approaches acknowledge that they do not explain every kind of movement. zald ( ), one of the principal progenitors of resource mobilization theory, for example, has written that the paradigm “does not begin to have all of the answers or pose all the important problems” that scholars must address about social movements ( ). zald’s insightful comments about the limitations of the resource mobil- ization and political process models were undoubtedly informed by the rise of the new left movements in europe in the middle of the s. the emergence of these movements “stimulated,” in the words of johnston et al. ( ), “a provocative and innovative reconceptualization of the meaning of social movements” ( ). this was so because the activists that populated these movements repeatedly demonstrated that they were less concerned with mobilizing resources to affect public policy debates or shift the trajectory of political institutions than with performing and rep- resenting their distinctive identities within post-industrial cultures (boggs ; johnston et al. ; melucci ; ; offe ). indeed, these movements tend to place messages about these identities at the center of the collective action frames that they proliferate in the public sphere (benford and snow ; snow and benford ; ; snow et al. ). moreover, the new social movements have demonstrated that for some activists signifying about these identities in the public sphere is an end unto itself (dalton ; johnston et al. ; offe ; pichardo ; touraine ). in other words, sometimes the messages that acti- vists associated with new social movements generate are what economists and social movement scholars call “expressive behavior” (chong ; downs ; hamlin and jennings ; hillman ; turner ). hillman ( ) has defined expressive behavior as “the self-interested quest for utility through acts and declarations that confirm a person’s iden- tity” ( ). turner ( ) has argued that “expressive behavior” is often undertaken by an activist in order to “express support for the cause [of the movement] regardless of whether it produces direct and visible conse- quences” ( ). finally, many scholars have noted that expressive behavior is often emotionally charged and or undertaken to provoke an emotional tillery terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core response from fellow adherents or opponents of social movements (clarke ; chong , – ; goodwin et al. , – ). the focus on signification within the new social movements does not mean that they ignore the importance of protests. on the contrary, a char- acteristic feature of these movements is that they encourage their adherents to pursue disruptive repertoires of contention through both mass mobili- zations and individual actions (johnston et al. ; klandermans and tarrow ). moreover, the horizontal organizational structure of these movements makes it possible for activists to pursue multiple repertoires of contention within the same protest (melucci ). in other words, because they are leaderless movements, there is no enforcement of tactical or messaging discipline on activists. it is also important to note that the new social movements are fueled by part-time activists who do not neces- sarily draw distinctions between participating in disruptive protests, pursu- ing individual acts of resistance, and even engaging in internet activism or “hacktivism” (carty ; jordan ). why analyze the twitter usage of blm-affiliated groups to ascertain the dynamics of the movement? there are multiple reasons that studying tweets provides an important window onto the movement. first, the blm movement was born on twitter and the micro-blogging site remains the primary tool that activists use to make representations about the movement in the public sphere (cox ; freelon, mcilwain, and clark ; ; ince, rojas, and davis ). second, twitter has been widely adopted in the african american community. indeed, while african americans are only . % of the u.s. population, they con- stitute % of the american twittersphere (brock ). third, studies have shown that twitter is a space where african americans are deeply engaged in a national conversation about race relations (carney ; nakamura ). the extant studies of the role that twitter plays in the blm movement have focused on tracking the rise and impact of the distinctive hashtags that activists generate to mark their tweets. while this approach has yielded the great insights that the tweets blm activists generate resonate with and spur their followers to protest and engage in hacktivism (freelon, mcilwain, and clark ; ince, rojas, and davis ), there is still a lot that we do not know about the overall landscape of the blm twittersphere. for example, we do not know if blm activists spend most of their time on twitter trying to mobilize resources and com- municate with governing elites as the resource mobilization and political what kind of movement is black lives matter? terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core process theories suggest they should or generating expressive tweets aimed at making representations about gender, racial, and lgbtq identities. this paper seeks to gain some clarity on these dynamics by asking the following questions: do blm activists use twitter primarily to mobilize resources or to communicate through frames that promote expressive utility about their identities? do blm activists use twitter to urge their adherents to pursue certain repertoires of contention over others? these questions will be pursued through content analyses of the public twitter feeds of six smos affiliated with the blm movement. the follow- ing three hypotheses were designed to produce strong tests of the new social movement paradigm and resource mobilization and political process theories: h : the twitter feeds of the six blm organizations will contain fewer tweets aimed at mobilizing resources than tweets generated to achieve other communicative goals. h : the twitter feeds of the six blm organizations will contain more social movement frames that call attention to issues related to gender, racial, and lgbtq identities than universalist frames related to socio- economic status or individual rights. h : the twitter feeds of the six blm organizations will contain more tweets that urge their followers to pursue disruptive repertoires of contention over other forms of protest or political action. the following section describes the data and explicates the design of the three content analysis studies developed to test these hypotheses. method, data, and study designs social scientists have used content analysis to understand political and cul- tural trends since the middle of the twentieth century (franzosi ; holsti ; krippendorff ; lasswell ; neuendorf ; weber ). over the past three decades, the method has become an analytic mainstay among scholars of racial and ethnic politics (e.g., caliendo and mcilwain ; entman ; lee ; mendelberg ; reeves ; tillery ). three content analysis studies designed to test the hypotheses described in the previous section provide the empir- ical foundation for this paper. the data were extracted from the public tillery terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core twitter feeds of six smos—@blklivesmatter; @blmchi (chicago, il); @blmnyc (new york, ny); @dmvblacklives (washington, dc); @fergusonaction (ferguson, mo)—affiliated with the blm movement. the @blklivesmatter feed is the account maintained by the national blm organization established by patrice cullors, alicia garza, and opal tometti, who created #blacklivesmatter in . the other five accounts are regional chapters of the same organization. the python program was used to scrape the feeds of these twitter accounts between december , and october , . this time period was selected for two reasons. first, it coincides with the peak of the national elections in the united states. the resource mobilization and political process theories suggest that blm-affiliated organizations should have strong incentives to mobilize their adherents to engage with the political system in such periods. second, the first high- profile studies confirming that african americans were disproportionately the victims of police killings were released by academics, media outlets, and grassroots organizations (like the blm affiliate mapping police violence) in (makarechi ). regardless of the theoretical lens that one uses to interpret the blm movement, it should follow that the release of these data into the public sphere would create what the social movement scholar james jasper ( ) calls a “moral shock” that would be likely to spur both recruitment and activism in the blm movement. the three content analysis studies utilized a two-coder system. both coders read the entire universe of , tweets that appeared on the public feeds of the six blm-affiliated accounts within the selected date range. the average intercoder reliability for the three content analysis studies is %. in the % of cases where there were disagreements between the first two coders, a third coder was utilized to break these ties. further details about the goals and design features of each of the three content analysis studies are presented below. the task at the center of study is coding the tweets and sorting them into three categories based on their apparent communicative function— resource mobilization, informational, and expressive. study was designed to provide an empirical test of hypothesis , which holds that the twitter feeds of the six blm organizations will contain fewer tweets aimed at mobilizing resources than tweets generated to achieve other communica- tive functions. tweets sorted into the resource mobilization category provide information about the smos’ activities and/or encourage adher- ents to provide support to the smo or broader blm movement through financial contributions, non-monetary donations, protest what kind of movement is black lives matter? terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core mailto:smos&mdash;@blklivesmatter https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core actions, or political activity aimed at supporting the movement. tweets coded as informational share news about events and incidents that are hap- pening in the blm movement, the external political environment, and current events. finally, tweets that are coded as expressive transmit emo- tional responses—e.g., anger, sadness, joy—to developments in the move- ment and external events. a finding that the six twitter feeds contain fewer tweets aimed at resource mobilization than tweets in the other two categories will provide confirmation of hypothesis . study examines the content of the social movement frames that appear in the twitter feeds of the six blm organizations. the goal of the study is to test hypothesis , which holds that the twitter feeds of the six blm organizations will contain more social movement frames that call attention to gender, racial, and lgbtq identities than universal- ist frames related to socioeconomic status or individual rights. benford and snow ( ) define social movement frames as “interpretive schemata” that activists deploy to simplify the world “by selectively punctuating and encoding objects, situations, events, experiences, and sequences of actions within one’s present or past environment” ( ). collective action frames make both diagnostic and prognostic attributions (benford and snow ; snow and benford , ; snow and machalek ; snow et al. ). finally, social movement theorists argue that col- lective action frames “enable activists to articulate and align a vast array of events and experiences so that they hang together in a relatively unified and meaningful fashion” (snow and benford , ). the coding scheme for this study will sort tweets that contain movement frames about african american identity into the category racial identity. tweets that contain frames about gender and or the intersectional status of african american women will be coded as gender identity. similarly, tweets that frame the blm movement as concerned with lgbtq issues will be coded as lgbtq identity. tweets that contain more univer- sal frames—about the economy or individual rights—will be sorted into their own categories. a finding that the majority of tweets examined in study deploy gender, racial, and lgbtq frames will confirm hypothesis . study examines all the tweets in the sample that urge the organiza- tions’ followers to take immediate action. the goal of this study is to test hypothesis : the twitter feeds of the six blm organizations will contain more tweets that urge their followers to pursue disruptive reper- toires of contention over conventional forms of political behavior. the coding scheme for study sorts the subset of tweets urging action in tillery terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core the public sphere into three categories based on the repertoires of conten- tion that the smos are encouraging their followers to pursue. tweets that urge disruptive protest actions will be sorted into the category labeled “dis- ruptive protests.” tweets that urge the adherents of the blm movement to pursue action through the political system—e.g., registering to vote, voting, contacting government officials, etc.—will be coded as conventional actions. finally, study will examine the validity of claims that the blm movement incites violence against police officers made by some law enforcement officials and right-wing pundits (bedard ; russell ). study will code all tweets that attempt to incite or urge violence into the “violent actions” category. this study will confirm hypothesis if the majority of tweets generated by the six blm accounts urge disruptive protests or violent actions over conventional forms of participation. findings the three content analysis studies yielded some very interesting results. the findings of study , which examined the types of communication —resource mobilizing, informational, and expressive—that the six blm organizations generated most frequently on their twitter feeds, were con- sistent with confirmation of hypothesis . again, hypothesis holds that the blm organizations will generate fewer tweets aimed at mobilizing resources than pursuing other communicative goals. the coders success- fully sorted all of the tweets in the sample into one of three categories. moreover, the results of a one-way analysis of variance (anova), f ( , ) = . , p = . , confirm that there are statistically significant dif- ferences between the means of the three categories. as table illustrates, all six of the twitter feeds of the blm groups con- tained fewer tweets in the resource mobilization category than in the infor- mational and expressive communication categories. overall, only , tweets, a figure that constitutes % of the sample, contained content aimed at mobilizing resources to strengthen the advocacy work of the six smos examined in this paper. the blm chapter in los angeles, ca (@blmla) generated a quintessential example of tweets in this category on july , , when they requested adherents to drop off supplies to support their #decolonizelacityhall protest. the text of the tweet reads: “#decolonizelacityhall nds [needs]: tylenol, paper plates, foam board, coffee, deodorant, juice boxes, chairs, fruit. drop off at n. main street.” another example comes from a tweet generated by the what kind of movement is black lives matter? terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core mailto:@blmla https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core group ferguson action (@fergusonaction) on april , to ask their followers to register to participate in a national call for the #justice gynnya campaign and add their names to a national database maintained by the movement for black lives group. the tweet reads: “@mvmt bl: / pm we demand justice! register here for the call. #justiceforgynnya.” the largest category of tweets in the sample are expressive communica- tions that demonstrate sadness or outrage with police shootings and other hardships faced by african americans in the united states. as table shows, the coders assigned , tweets, a figure that represented % of the overall sample, to the expressive category. on march , , black lives matter new york (@blmnyc) generated a tweet expressing outrage about prosecutors in new york city deciding to not pursue charges against a police officer for shooting an african american man. the tweet, which reads “what a sham & a shame to not even bring a grand jury together to bring nypd officer haste to trial for murdering #ramarleygraham,” is perfectly representative of tweets sorted into the expressive category. another excellent example from this category is when black lives matter chicago (@blmchi) tweeted “@blmyouth: we are justified in our pain” on september , . informational tweets, generated to share stories and information about the movement and local and national news items, were the second largest category of tweets. as table illustrates, there were , informa- tional tweets, a figure that comprises % of the overall sample, generated by the smos between december and october . most of the table . tweets by communicative goal twitter accounts expressive tweets informational tweets resource mobilization tweets row totals @black lives matter , , @blm_chicago , , @dmv_blm , , @blm_los angeles , , , @blm_nyc , , , @ferguson action , , number of tweets , , , , % of sample source: twitter (december , to october , ). tillery terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core mailto:@fergusonaction mailto:@mvmt bl mailto:@blmnyc mailto:@blmchi mailto:@blmyouth https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core tweets in the informational category resemble the following tweet gener- ated by the washington, dc metro area black lives matter chapter (@dmvblacklives) on march , . the tweet, which reads “@naacp_odu: roanoke, va county police department responds to naacp’s concerns over officer-involved shooting now. #kionte spencer,” circulated a news report about an officer-involved shooting in a neighboring jurisdiction. another example comes from the black lives matter chapter in boston (@blm_boston). on december , , the account generated a tweet that shared a news story about the case of tamir rice, a -year-old boy who was shot by police in while playing with a toy gun in his neighborhood park in cleveland, oh. the text of the tweet reads: “rt @blm_ : the grand jury will announce no indictment of the officers who shot tamir rice at : pm eastern time.” the fact that blm groups generate a vast number of tweets simply to convey news reports is consistent with recent studies that have found that twitter has become an important source of news for african americans about the blm movement and other issues (cox ; freelon, mcilwain, and clark ; jackson and welles ; rickford ). the fact that the six smos affiliated with the blm movement gener- ated more than twice as many expressive tweets as ones aimed at resource mobilization confirms hypothesis and strengthens the argument that the blm movement more closely resembles a new social movement than the social movements that emerged in the united states in the s. study examined the social movement frames that appeared in the public twitter feeds of the six blm organizations. the aim of study is to provide a test of hypothesis : the twitter feeds of the six blm organ- izations will contain more social movement frames that call attention to gender, lgbtq, and racial identities than universalist frames related to socioeconomic status or individual rights. the coding scheme required two independent coders to read the entire universe of , tweets to determine which ones relayed distinct social movement frames. the first noteworthy finding to come out of this study is that most of the tweets in the sample did not contain social movement frames. indeed, only , of the tweets, a number that constitutes % of the overall sample, contain frames. within this subset of the sample, the coders were able to identify five distinct categories of tweets. moreover, the inde- pendence of these categories within the sample was confirmed by a one-way anova: f( , ) = . , p = . . as figure shows, % of the tweets in this segment of the sample—a total of , tweets— what kind of movement is black lives matter? terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core mailto:@dmvblacklives mailto:&ldquo;@naacp_odu mailto:@blm_boston https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core contain a frame that highlights violations to the individual rights of african americans and makes demands based on the individual rights enshrined in the united states constitution and guaranteed by state and local laws. the black lives matter new york city (@blmnyc) provided dozens of examples of this individual rights frame at the height of the #swipeitforward campaign in july and august . the goal of the campaign was to increase the presence of african american activists at major project and cultural events throughout the city by sharing funds on single use metro cards. on august , , for example, @blmnyc tweeted: “#swipeitforward facts—its illegal for someone to ask to be swiped into the train. but you can legally always offer to swipe them in.” the blm groups also frequently quoted historical examples to convey frames about individual rights. on may , , the black lives matter chicago chapter (@blmchi) generated a tweet repre- sentative of this kind: “@blackrt @docmellymel: #pantherstaughtme in organizing: “no rights without duties. no duties without rights. @lacanetwork @blmla @blklivesmatter.” the second largest category of social movement frames in the sample— % of all tweets containing frames—are ones that focus on african american cultural expression. in the tweets that the coders sorted into this category, the six blm organizations commented on the distinct- ive contributions made by african americans to popular culture in the united states through music, sports, and the visual arts. the black lives matter chapter in new york city (@blmnyc) provided excellent figure . social movement frames by category. tillery terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core mailto:@blmnyc mailto:@blmchi mailto:&ldquo;@blackrt mailto:@blmnyc https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core examples of the tweets deploying cultural frames of the movement. on september , , @blmnyc generated a tweet urging their adher- ents to support a gathering of artists that supported the movement. the tweet reads: “@occupytheory: sat. sept. . pm—art action assembly in manhattan. #decolonizethisplace.” the group also celebrated the importance of african american cultural production to the blm move- ment. on august , , for example, they tweeted “visit us on activism row @ #afropunk today! come trade books written by black women. #blerd” to announce that they were turning their booth at new york’s afropunk festival into a book swap to circulate the work of african american women. the coders identified tweets that contained frames about gender identity. this figure constitutes % of all frames present in the sample. we know that blm organizations put a lot of focus on amplifying the names of african american women who were victims of police brutality through the use of #sayhername (lindsey ). the six smos exam- ined in this study often framed the overall movement as a project to elevate african american women and girls. the chicago chapter of blm (@blmchi) produced several excellent examples of this kind of tweet. on april , , @blmchi called on their followers to join a protest action to support women separated from their families due to incarceration in the cook county prison. the tweet reads: “join @momsunitedchicago @supporthosechi & us for a vigil outside ccjail on / #forgottenmoms.” on may , , @blmchicago urged their adherents to “support #blackgirlmagic in chicago and donate to @assatadaughters! the[y’]re doing unique and critical work.” there were tweets in the sample that contained frames centering lgbtq identities. this number, which is % of all tweets with frames, is lower than expected in light of the focus that some leading blm activists have placed on amplifying the experiences of lgbtq african americans as victims of the “hetero-patriarchal” culture that is dominant in the united states of america (rickford , ). another unexpected finding is that % of the tweets utilizing frames about lgbtq identities come from the @blklivesmatter twitter feed maintained by the national blm campaign. in short, the five smos with geographic boundaries almost never framed the movement using lgbtq identities during the period under study. on june , , @blklivesmatter generated an excellent example of the tweets sorted into this category to describe their #policeoutofpride protest actions designed to highlight what they argued is the dangerous over-policing of pride parades across the what kind of movement is black lives matter? terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core mailto:@occupytheory mailto:@blmchi https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core country. “as we work to protect ourselves from homophobic violence,” @blklivesmatter tweeted, “it is important to remember we can’t police away hate. #policeoutofpride.” on the day after the action, the group tweeted: “pride was a riot. of queerness. of trans dignity. of gender non-conformity. led by folks of color. against the police. #policeoutofpride.” the coders identified tweets in the sample that framed blm as a universal movement for economic equality. the tweets in this category, which constitute % of all tweets with frames, describe the blm move- ment as fundamentally concerned with expanding the rights of workers and addressing inequalities rooted in socioeconomic status. the ferguson action (@fergusonaction) group generated several tweets in this category as they publicized their work through the #reclaimmlk campaign in january . on january , , for example, @fergusonaction tweeted: “@byp_ : we’re talking #buildblackfutures on mlk weekend because dr. king was assassinated working to win black economic justice #reclaimmlk.” similarly, on january , , @fergusonaction tweeted “@baysolidarity: invest in workers-divest from police! #underpaidoverpoliced # hours #reclaimmlk.” there were, as figure illustrates, just tweets— % of all the tweets with frames—that contained frames of the blm movement predicated on ideologies that stress african american group consciousness (e.g., black nationalism, afro-pessimism, etc.). the los angeles chapter of black lives matter (@blmla) produced several tweets that stressed african american solidarity to challenge najee ali, an advisor to mayor eric garcetti and a frequent critic of the blm movement in the los angeles media. on july , , @blmla tweeted: “@leonardfiles najee ali is a modern-day benedict arnold to the blm and entire black movement for police accountability.” black self-love is also a consist- ent theme within this subset of tweets. on august , , for example, ferguson acton (@fergusonaction) tweeted: “@ edjustice: a the #vision blacklives is a love note to our mov’t. we center the wholeness of black people. we see us. we got us.” while the dearth of movement frames referring to african american identity within the text of tweets is interesting, we should not read too much into this finding. this is so because it is likely that the frequency with which blm activists mark their tweets with #blacklivesmatter obviates the need to generate add- itional frames based on racial identity within the texts of their tweets. tillery terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core mailto:@fergusonaction mailto:@byp_ mailto:@baysolidarity mailto:@blmla mailto:@blmla mailto:@leonardfiles mailto:@fergusonaction mailto:@ edjustice https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core the relatively low number of frames within the tweets about gender and lgbtq identities is somewhat surprising. after all, some of the most visible blm activists in the u.s. media have frequently articulated that one of the movement’s major goals is to “center” the lives and contribu- tions of “black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, black-undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all black lives along the gender spec- trum” (garza ). an important caveat to this finding is that the data are drawn from only one year in the -year life span of the blm move- ment. as a result of this fact, it is plausible that gender and lgbtq frames are more prevalent when we observe the longer arc of the move- ment. subsequent studies should explore this issue to get a firmer sense of how much smos affiliated with the blm movement actually work to frame the movement in terms of these identities. for now, it is sufficient to say that, while less than the predicted value, it is not trivial that % of the tweets generated by these organizations deployed one of these identity frames. study examined the % of the tweets in the overall sample that con- tained specific calls to action. in other words, it focused on the , tweets where the six smos urged their adherents to immediately take an action. the primary goal of the study was to discern whether blm acti- vists more frequently urged their followers to pursue disruptive repertoires of contention—e.g., traffic blockades, the interruption of public meetings, occupation of businesses, etc.—or actions that fall within the conventional bounds of the political system. a secondary goal was to determine if blm activists encouraged their adherents to engage in violence. as figure illustrates, the coders did not find one tweet in the entire dataset of , that urged the use of violence as a tactic. the coders were able to identify tweets that urged the pursuit of disruptive repertoires of conten- tion and a second category that encouraged conventional forms of polit- ical behavior. moreover, the results of a student’s t-test, t( ) = . , p = . , demonstrate that the means of these two categories are distinct. during the height of the national blm action to protest the killing of philando castile by police in minneapolis, mn, new york city’s black lives matter chapter (@blmnyc) generated several tweets that demonstrate the ways that these smos struck a balanced their calls for the use of disruptive tactics with calls for maintaining peaceful interactions with the police. on july , , as news that a spontaneous protest was forming to block an interstate highway in atlanta, @blmnyc tweeted: “atlantawe see you. shut that shit down. no business as usual.” two minutes later, @blmnyc urged what kind of movement is black lives matter? terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core mailto:@blmnyc https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core caution by tweeting “#blacklivesmatter! keep it peaceful but stand your ground atlanta! we will not be stopped.” the findings that blm activists never incited violence and were more likely to urge their followers to pursue conventional forms of political behavior than disruptive protests during the period between december , , and october , pro- vides evidence that indicates we should reject hypothesis . further analyses of the tweets that the blm organizations generated to spur participation in the political system only strengthen the case for reject- ing hypothesis . the majority of the tweets containing a call to action urged adherents to engage with the political system by signing petitions to governmental officials ( tweets), contacting government officials ( tweets), and voting ( ). together these tweets urging participation in the political system constituted % of all calls to action issued by the six smos. the washington, dc area black lives matter chapter (@dmvblacklivesmatter) composed some excellent examples of these types of calls to action. on march , , @dmvblacklivesmatter retweeted a national petition calling for the firing of a chicago police officer, dante servin, who was charged with manslaughter in the case of -year-old rekia boyd. in the wake of terrence sterling’s death at the hands of dc police, @dmvblacklivesmatter tweeted “keep calling @mayorbowser at ( )- - about #terrencesterling tell her to release names of the officers and arrest them today.” twenty-three percent of the calls to action in the sample ( tweets) urged people to engage in individual acts of resistance—such as building figure . calls to action issued by blm activists on twitter. tillery terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core mailto:@dmvblacklivesmatter mailto:@dmvblacklivesmatter https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core memorials and signs, taking pledges to support the principles of the blm movement, praying, etc. on july , , the black lives matter organ- ization (@blklivesmatter) tweeted to urge their followers to pledge solidary with the movement by taking the “movement for black lives pledge.” the tweet reads: “every generation is called to define itself. take the pledge for peace and justice. #m blpledge.” on august , , the los angeles chapter of blm (@blm_la) generated a tweet inviting people to join a “morning prayer circle at #decolonizelacityhall.” finally, there were tweets— % of the tweets containing a call to action—that urged on-line activism or hacktivism. on may , , for example, the los angeles chapter of black lives matter (@blm_la) tweeted: “rt @blacklife : please read, react and retweet. @shaunking @dmvblacklives @blmchi @blmla @blmnyc #sayhername #justiceforindia #roc https. . .” similarly, on august , , the ferguson action group (@fergusonaction) tweeted: “over k ppl have endorsed #vision blacklives today. join us at pm est tmrw for a twitter townhall to talk about it.” the rejection of hypothesis does not necessarily mean that the new social movement perspective does not hold validity for understanding the blm movement. again, the very fact that there are so few tweets in the sample that urge action is in some ways a characteristic of a new social movement. moreover, it is plausible that this result is a function of the fact that the data were collected from the six smos during the pri- maries and general election cycles. as the blm movement continues to build up its public profile on twitter, we will be able to glean a more definitive answer to this question through comparative analyses of tweets over multiple election years. these caveats notwithstanding, the finding that blm groups are more likely to urge their followers to pursue systemic actions over disruptive repertoires of contention suggests that the activists who are crafting the messages and frames that drive the blm movement have not completely given up on the u.s. political system. conclusions the blm movement was born on twitter when patrice cullors, alicia garza, and opal tometi created #blacklivesmatter to express their grief and outrage over george zimmerman’s acquittal in the shooting death of trayvon martin. over the past years, the movement has morphed into a vital, multi-issue social movement in african american what kind of movement is black lives matter? terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core mailto:@blklivesmatter mailto:@blm_la mailto:@blm_la mailto:@blacklife mailto:@shaunking mailto:@dmvblacklives mailto:@blmchi mailto:@blmla mailto:@blmnyc mailto:@fergusonaction https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core communities across the united states (harris ; rickford ; taylor ). as previous researchers have demonstrated (cox ; freelon, mcilwain, and clark ; ince, rojas, and davis ), twitter has been an indispensable tool for blm activists as they work to build their movement. most extant studies have highlighted the role that hashtags play in forming dialogs between core blm activists and their adherents. these studies have led to considerable gains in our knowledge by demon- strating how these dialogs have boosted the movement’s ability to dissem- inate information and mobilize supporters for protest actions (cox ; freelon, mcilwain, and clark ; ince, rojas, and davis ). despite their profound contributions to theory building, the hashtag studies do not allow us to make distinctions between the communications originating from the blm movement’s core activists, who ostensibly have control over the movement’s strategy and messaging, and rank-and-file pro- testors and bystanders. this means that it is impossible to analyze the behaviors of the core activists as they attempt to build the movement. this situation, in turn, leaves us in the position of being unable to make firm judgments about the dynamics of the blm movement. this paper has advanced the position that focusing exclusively on the tweets generated by the smos helps to resolve these dilemmas. the results of the three content analysis studies presented in this paper leave us in a stronger position to understand the blm movement. the findings from study that the vast majority of tweets generated by the six smos examined in this study are expressive in nature certainly lends credibility to the conventional wisdom that blm is best understood as a new social movement. the results of study , which examined the frames deployed by the smos, were not as definitive. while % of the frames used to talk about the movement made a reference to gender, lgbtq, racial identities, or cultural issues, most tweets in the sample used a liberal frame focused on individual rights. this finding does not necessarily cut against the interpretation of blm as a new social movement, but it does illustrate that the movement’s core activists take a broader approach to talking about their movement than just “centering” the identities of the most marginal segments of the african american community. the results of study present the strongest challenge to the classifica- tion of blm as a new social movement. again, this study found that only % of the smos’ tweets issued a call for immediate action that urged fol- lowers to engage in disruptive protest activities. moreover, the vast majority of tweets in this subset of the sample ( %) urged the pursuit of actions tillery terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core through the existing political system. together these findings present a very different narrative of the blm movement than what is portrayed in aca- demic writings, media accounts, and by the core activists themselves. indeed, the results of this study suggest that blm groups do value the pol- itical process and are willing to mobilize their followers to pursue out- comes within it. moreover, the fact that there was not one tweet among the , examined advocated violence provides a significant challenge to the argument that the movement incites attacks upon law enforcement officers. while, at first glance, these findings suggest that blm is something of a hybrid movement that sometimes resembles a new social movement and sometimes engages in traditional resource mobilization, we must be cau- tious not to overstate the meaning of these findings for two reasons. first, as we have seen, the number of tweets produced by the smos that exhort their followers to action is an incredibly small subset of the overall sample. second, the fact that data for this study were collected at the height of the primary and general elections in the united states may have encour- aged the blm groups to generate more tweets about mainstream politics than they would do in a non-election year. subsequent studies will be required to truly get a handle on this issue. for now, it is sufficient to say that, by judging all of this evidence in context, the smos examined in this study are building a movement that is focused much more on expressive communication than strategic communication aimed at mobil- izing resources and negotiating directly with the elites who control the levers of power that are making african americans vulnerable to police brutality and other forms of predation. contrary to the viewpoints expressed by the movement’s critics, the fact that the blm movement pursues expressive communication more often than strategic communication does not limit its potential to have a long- term impact on african american communities and american politics. as we have seen, even without issuing explicit calls to action, blm organ- izations have been able to foment large and enduring protests in dozens of american cities since . these protests are clearly a response to the expressive and informational content that blm activists deliver to their followers. this reality provides further evidence in support of social movement scholars who have argued over the past two decades that emo- tional appeals hold great potential to generate protest activities and, as a result of this reality, we should dispense with the artificial distinction between expressive and strategic behavior (jasper ; polletta and amenta ). what kind of movement is black lives matter? terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. 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subject to the cambridge core http://thefederalist.com/ / / /black-lives-matters-violence-undermines-its-credibility/ http://thefederalist.com/ / / /black-lives-matters-violence-undermines-its-credibility/ http://thefederalist.com/ / / /black-lives-matters-violence-undermines-its-credibility/ http://thefederalist.com/ / / /black-lives-matters-violence-undermines-its-credibility/ http://thefederalist.com/ / / /black-lives-matters-violence-undermines-its-credibility/ https://www.csdd.northwestern.edu/research/ https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm 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neonatology today�www.neonatologytoday.net�august jenné johns, mph in this months’ health equity column, i welcome the readers of neonatol- ogy today to journey with me, as we take a deeper look into health and ra- cial equity issues plaguing our society and impacting black nicu and pree- mie families. in recognition of nicu awareness month (a time designated to honor families experiencing a stay in the neonatal intensive care unit and the health professionals that care for them), i’ve interviewed deb discenza, co-founder of the alliance for black nicu families for an inside look at the power of standing in solidarity and leading solutions that address health and racial equity in the nicu and beyond. q: what is the alliance for black nicu families? a: these are like-minded organizations that have come together along with partner organizations, to create long-needed change in the african american community of nicu families. too long we have seen systemic racism play its part in healthcare and the ,& �lv�qr�glႇhuhqw���$q\�surihvvlrqdo�wkdw�vd\v�wkdw�wkhlu� ,& �lv� not prone to systemic racism doesn’t realize what implicit bias is and that it can feed into narratives behind curtains, behind closed doors. it can be as simple as not providing a family resources that would be given to anyone else in the same situation. we have to do better. we must do better. q: who are the members of this newly formed alliance? a: we have members that span the african american leadership of nicu and preemie support groups nationwide as well as orga- nizations that see the importance of being a part of our movement. we have also had industry representation. we are also proud to kdyh�rxu�¿uvw� lqwhuqdwlrqdo�phpehu�� � dflvp�grhv�qrw�nqrz�d� state boundary, it does not know a country boundary either. our members are as follows: x� glo preemies: https://www.glopreemies.com x� connect to nicu: http://connect nicu.com x� eli collins foundation for premature babies: http://www.el- ibabies.org x� families blossoming: https://familiesblossoming.com x� once upon a preemie: www.onceuponapreemie.com x� pebbles of hope: http://www.pebblesofhope.org x� saul’s light: https://www.saulslight.org x� mended little hearts: https://mendedhearts.org x� preemieworld: https://preemieworld.com x� prolacta bioscience: https://www.prolacta.com x� sage therapeutics: https://www.sagerx.com/ x� sobi therapeutics: https://www.sobi.com/en q: what does the formation of this alliance mean to the neo- natal community at this time? a: this alliance came about because i saw what was happening with the black lives matter movement and reached out to many of the people you see listed as members that are african american. i simply sent them messages of love and support during this tur- bulent time. but you, know what? that seemed hollow compared to the people risking their lives protesting in the streets around the world. i felt that as someone that is immunocompromised with an immunocompromised child (who was formerly premature), i was not helping anyone by going out and risking my health and that of my daughter. so, i thought long and hard about what i could do. and then it dawned on me that i already had a plat- form and that our community struggles massively under racial and health equity. upon learning about the once upon a preemie academy, my brain started to go on overdrive. we needed to lift up the implicit bias training imperative to get things moving and to make infrastructure changes. the only way to do that is through reaching into the states’ requirements for licensure. by pulling together survey data, by having partners on our partnership letter, along with our founding members, and by having petition signers included, we may see change in states. ashley randolph, co- “i’ve interviewed deb discenza, co-founder of the alliance for black nicu families for an inside look at the power of standing in solidarity and leading solutions that address health and racial equity in the nicu and beyond. " health equity column: more than a moment: the alliance for black nicu families neonatology today�www.neonatologytoday.net�august founder of the alliance for black nicu families and president of glo preemies stood in complete alignment and agreement with the importance of charge of this alliance. as an african ameri- can led nicu support organization, ashley knew instantly that this alliance would move our country beyond a moment to support black nicu lives to a movement. through our early outreach and dzduhqhvv�udlvlqj�hႇruwv��hyhu\rqh�zdv�olwhudoo\�rqerdug�zlwkrxw� much convincing. they understood the goals immediately. same with the industry folks. they were really excited and wanted to help. and so here we are. q: what personal and professional experiences led you and the co-founder to co-create the alliance? $��$v�iru�ph��,�dp�qrw�$iulfdq�$phulfdq���,�dp�frplqj�iurp�d�glႇhu- ent background as a jewish woman that grew up with extremely dark olive-toned skin. i was picked on, i was bullied and i was treated as if i were not human. after the elections when the white supremacy movement appeared to see its moment in wkh�vxq��,�kdg�p\�¿uvw�rႈfldo�kdwh�fulph�rffxu�dv�dq�dgxow���:kloh� my skin tone has lightened a lot as an adult, i still look ethnic. if that is what happened to me in a single instance, i fear for the african american community that is just trying to go about their lives like every other human being on earth. the black lives mat- ters movement is about police brutality but it shines a light on so many other inequities. hearing ashley and others members of the alliance talk about this is so enlightening. too many times and in too many ways, our country has let down the african american community and that has to stop. ashley randolph and i, formed this alliance to focus on the tiniest of community members and their families- the nicu community (one in which we both experi- enced). we hope to plant seeds of education and advocacy and vxssruw�lq�d�yhu\�srzhuixo�zd\��� xu�¿uvw�hႇruw�lv�khdowk�dqg�udfldo� equity education for the neonatal professional sector. q: what does the alliance want to accomplish and what is the call to action? a: we are hoping to garner an annual mandate for continuing education on racial and health equity for gaining and maintaining licensing for nicu and pediatric professionals. our current goal is to get that change instituted in at least states that have a vljql¿fdqw�$iulfdq�$phulfdq�srsxodwlrqv�dqg�vljql¿fdqw�udfldo�dqg� ethnic disparities. we will uplift our founding member, the once upon a preemie academy as the gold standard for this continuing education. in addition, we are asking the community at large to share this ra- cial and health equity survey with black families that have been or are currently in the neonatal intensive care unit (nicu): https:// preemie.us/blacknicufamilies . for organizations interested in partnering with us we ask ) to include their organization’s name as a partner on our letterhead going out to state licensing boards and ) encourage black nicu families to complete the above sur- vey. ��:khuh�fdq�zh�¿qg�pruh�lqirupdwlrq�derxw�wkh�$ooldqfh" a: we have a website at https://blacknicufamilies.org. for addi- tional information on partnering with the alliance please contact me directly at: deb discenza at connect@preemieworld.com disclosure: the author has no disclosures. nt corresponding author -hqqp�-rkqv�� +� rwkhu�ri�d�plfursuhhplh��dxwkru��vshdnhu��dgyrfdwh��dqg� national senior health equity leader email hi@onceuponapreemie.com ,qwhuylhzhh deb discenza )rxqghu�dqg�&klhi�([hfxwlyh� ௻fhu uhhplh:ruog zzz� uhhplh:ruog�frp email: connect@preemieworld.com . psychosocial aspects of covid- pandemic review article how to cite: kartikey, d., kumar, s., mishra, a.k., & mishra, m. ( ). psychosocial aspects of covid- pandemic: a brief overview. journal of psychosocial wellbeing, ( ), - . quick response code this is an open access journal, and articles are distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non commercial-share alike . license, which allows others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms. website : www.jpsw.co.in access this article online doi: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. psychosocial aspects of covid- pandemic: a brief overview introduction a n a i r b o r n e i n f e c t i o u s respiratory disease (covid- ) has been spreading worldwide since december . from being just a small virus, a non- living entity, it has now become a full blown pandemic by using the human biological system to spread worldwide and disrupt every sphere of our life, be it health, financial, psychological or social. the losses borne out of this pandemic are immense. over a million people have died and around million infected. all the major economies have either shrunk or have entered into recession. the lockdown i m p o s e d w o r l d w i d e h a s resulted in job loss and financial insecurity. according to the imf (international monetary fund), the pandemic will result in loss of jobs and loss of trillion dollars worldwide. at this time, nature also seems to be very wild and chaotic, natural disasters like forest fires of amazon and california and water calamities in india, china and bangladesh. m o n e t a r y l o s s e s c a n b e calculated and compensated in due time but what about u n a c c o u n t e d l o s s e s l i k e psychological. the cost of all this are psychological shocks, to journal of psychosocial wellbeing, ( ), correspondence address: subodh kumar, research scholar, department of psychology, banaras hindu university, varanasi, up, india. email: bhu.subodh@gmail.com divye kartikey, subodh kumar alok kumar mishra, meena mishra intern, brain behaviour research foundation of india (bbrfi), new delhi, india research scholar, department of psychology, banaras hindu university, varanasi, up, india. joint secretary, association of indian universities chairperson, brain behaviour research foundation of india (bbrfi), new delhi, india abstract since the start of the covid- pandemic everything has changed, from our daily routine activities to how we think and plan for the future. as we progress into the later stages of the pandemic, both our thinking and society will change and it is in this backdrop, taking a psychosocial perspective is important in understanding the psychological effect of covid- pandemic on society. psychological impacts due to such catastrophic events are largely subtle and hidden in nature due to stigma related to mental health issues. this review paper aims to uncover and demystify the extent to which societies were affected psychologically, and how it has impacted the course of the pandemic. a comprehensive analysis is presented on mental health problems in patients infected from covid- , frontline health workers, old age people and women, also of the people who are facing problems due to unemployment and loneliness. the social behaviors like anti-lockdown protests, anti-racial discrimination protests, anti-vaccine protests and panic buying are also discussed. finally, some solutions are suggested as learning that we can take from this pandemic so that our society is better prepared psychologically for any future pandemic. covid- , pandemic, quarantine, mental health, lockdownkeywords: submitted: . . revised: accepted: . . published: . . . . which everyone is subjected to at a personal level. these psychological shocks are in the form of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and inability to cope with grief and loss. these psychological effects led people to irrational social behaviors like panic buying, stockpiling, defying quarantine rules, not wearing masks, attending parties or large gatherings and most recently into anti-lock down protests and anti-vaccine protests. in this article we are focusing on the psychosocial perspective of covid- pandemic. psychosocial perspective means studying the problems from the view of psychological impacts on society. this is important because we have seen it for the first time in the history of humanity when every human is subjected to the same problem at the same time irrespective of caste, religion, color, creed, ethnicity and country. it is important to answer a few i m p o r t a n t q u e s t i o n s l i k e , ' h o w m u c h psychologically we were prepared for a crisis like this?', 'how we adapted or mal-adapted to this crisis?', 'how will we cope with loss and grief?', 'what is the psychological cost of such a crisis?', 'what type of irrationality were we subjected to?' and last but not the least 'what psychological pitfalls led to social unrest and worsened the pandemic?'. we have to answer all these questions if we want to have any learning to safeguard humanity from future pandemics. we will first look into broad psychosocial impacts of covid- like, mental health problems in patients infected from covid- , mental health of frontline workers in essential services, mental health of vulnerable sections of society i.e. old age people, women, youth and adolescent, and workers in informal sector. then we will make an attempt to inquire about the general attitude of masses during pandemic like, street protests, believing in conspiracy theories and not following the guidelines and the necessary health practices of wearing masks and practicing physical distancing. the role of cognitive biases will be taken into account and how it has led many people to make wrong decisions during pandemic, and how it has shaped the outcomes of the pandemic. at the end, some recommendations and important lessons will be given which we need to learn, so that our society is better prepared psychologically to handle such kind of future pandemics. psychosocial impacts of covid- : mental health problems in patients infected from covid- researchers are now concluding that the effect of this virus is beyond the normal physical symptoms. virus can now cross the blood- brain barrier to influence the brain and mind. the first evidence of this was the common covid- symptom of loss of smell and taste. there is evidence where patients after being discharged from successful treatment of covid- , suffered from depression, anxiety and post- traumatic stress. a study conducted among patients infected from covid- in san raffaele hospital, italy, found that more than half recovered patients suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, insomnia, anxiety and depression. out of the patients studied, % suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, % in depression, insomnia in %, anxiety in % and obsessive compulsions in % of the patients. the severity of these psychological problems was in proportion with the severity of covid- infection (parodi, ). an online study conducted in spain among people, who had mild covid- and were not hospitalized, found that . % were in depression, . % in anxiety and . % showed symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder (gonzalez & austin, ). mental health problems in frontline health workers mental health problems among frontline health workers have been serious. inadequate personal journal of psychosocial wellbeing, ( ), kartikey et al: psychosocial aspects of covid- pandemic protective equipment, underpayment after long hours of duty and lack of psychological support is causing mental health problems like depression and anxiety. recently, health workers in italy and america even committed suicide due to fear that they might have infected other patients with covid- (rahman, & plummer, ). study on romanian medical residents found a high prevalence of burnout syndrome (dimitriu, et al., ). similarly, a study found burnout symptoms among singapore health professionals (tan, et al., ). health anxiety in public health anxiety is the anxiousness that a person feels when bodily symptoms are misinterpreted or misjudged in an exaggerated form, based on limited knowledge. the anxiety resulting from this fixes the belief in a person's mind that they are suffering from a disease, which in reality may not be the case. this is fear-based self-diagnosis, which is reinforced every time whenever those bodily symptoms are present. the failure to take the objective view on this leads to more fixation of the belief and more impairment in the functioning of daily life (tyrer, ). the most common symptom for covid- was shortness of breath and it was a common site in society that normal body symptom of shortness of breathe due to daily activities was usually feared with contracting covid- (kartikey, ). health anxiety was also present with people, who were already suffering from physical illness/es such as blood pressure, diabetes, heart ailments and cancer, and also those who were already suffering from mental illness like depression and anxiety before pandemic started. fear of loneliness social distancing and quarantine were one of the first measures by every country to stop the spread of sars-cov- virus. nationwide lockdowns were imposed and everyone was forced to live in the confinements of their house. in countries like india, nationwide lockdowns were imposed with strict curfews to make sure that there are no large public gatherings. as the rate of infection reduced in countries, lockdowns were lifted, however, these continued in the form of localized lockdowns or area specific lockdowns. it is during these times that people suffering from mental illness like depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder etc. lost their social support from friends, relatives and neighbors. this either aggravated their symptoms of pre- existing mental illness or triggered relapse into previous cured mental illness (chaurasiya & chaurasiya, ). financial insecurity and unemployment mental health is closely linked to financial insecurity and unemployment. covid- , from being a health crisis it has turned into an economic crisis and now transformed into a mental health crisis. various surveys have shown that public mental health has worsened due to stated reasons. people working in sectors, which are heavily affected due to covid- pandemic like hospitality industry, tourism industry, sports industry and above all those who are working in the informal sector, faced a significant amount of distress due to loss of livelihood and financial security. those working in jobs are now in fear of losing their job or if they have lost their job then the big challenge in front of them is to re-skill them or update them to be market ready for any future employment. in a cross sectional study conducted in lebanon, a developing country, among participants, all were over years, it was found that there was a direct link between poor mental health and a crashing economy. lebanon has been under economic crisis for a long time due to civil war and political turmoil, but due to covid- pandemic it never recovered, thereby resulting in job loss and the closing of many businesses. significant stress and anxiety also was noted in people who were getting reduced salary as a result of pandemic (salameh, et al., ). food insecurity and mental health food insecurity during covid- pandemic took place in two ways. first, the inability to buy food for kartikey et al: psychosocial aspects of covid- pandemic journal of psychosocial wellbeing, ( ), the family due to loss of job or daily wages and second, from the shortage of food supplies to cities. in a survey conducted in vermont city, united states of america, among people, an increase in food insecurity was found. people who had lost their job faced obstacles in finding access to food and were eating less. this not only made them vulnerable to malnutrition but also to stress and anxiety (niles, et al., ). in many african countries, iran, pakistan and india, locusts, a crop devouring insects, threatened the food security by attacking several agricultural fields and damaging tonnes of crops. one of the main reasons was failure to check the population of locusts due to pandemic and lockdowns. (koshy, ). women mental health during covid- pandemic, women became more vulnerable to mental health issues because they play multiple roles in the family like being a homemaker and earning income for the family. whether a woman is working or nonworking, lockdowns affect the lives of women like never before. women now had to bear the burden of devoting extra time in the care of their families, in addition to their work from home. women working in the informal sector lost their financial freedom due to loss of jobs. pregnant women suffered from anxiety as they were subjected to not only the emotional and mood swings due to pregnancy but also from fear of going for delivery to hospitals which had themselves turned into covid- centers. social distancing and restricted movement made them even more emotionally vulnerable which affected pregnancy. domestic violence increased as women now had no choice but to spend more time with their abusive partners with whom they have turbulent relationships. they become silent sufferers of their own home environment (matiti, et al., ). youth and adolescent mental health the age of adolescence and youth is always considered vulnerable for mental health. it is known for depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress. in a study of the psychological condition of participants in china, of age group to , through online questionnaires it was found that most of the participants suffered from depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress. as social contacts got shrunk due to lockdowns, most of the youth and adolescents adopted many mal-adaptive, coping strategies like, tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, psychedelics and spending too much time surfing videos on the internet and social media. such mal-adaptive coping techniques only perpetuate psychological distress in the long term (liang, et al., ). geriatric mental health mental health of older people has worsened during covid- pandemic due to social restrictions. their inability to use technology to connect with others has shrunk their social support. if at all, they connect with others through technology, the element of realistic care and love was not there. in addition, mental health problems aggravated when older people were left without any social support and were not able to access health services, banking services, transport services and inability to get groceries. study conducted on geriatric mental health during covid- pandemic in the arab countries of the middle east and north africa region, which included countries like, lebanon, kingdom of saudi arabia, egypt and united arab emirates, found depression to be highly prevalent among old aged people. elderlies with dementia and parkinson's disease also had depressive symptoms (hayek, et al., ). panic buying, 'black lives matter', anti-lockdown protests and anti-vaccine movement panic buying or stockpiling is an irrational phenomenon wherein people buy more than usual in order to save their family from unforeseen adversities. the reason people reacted to the pandemic with panic buying was because of misinformation and fake news that items in shops will run out. to generate a sense of control over the kartikey et al: psychosocial aspects of covid- pandemic journal of psychosocial wellbeing, ( ), situation, panic stricken people hoarded food items. the fall out of such incidences was that lower income people were not able to afford food items due to rise in price. had there was no panic buying then it could have benefited everyone(arafat, et al., ). all over the world, protests are also happening against the racial injustices and corrupt governance. but why during and pandemic? the possible explanation behind these is, as lockdowns and social distancing put people out of their daily busy routine, and with continuous active use of social media, they become more sensitive to old social and economic problems. the psychological impact of pandemic made individuals lose their personal life meanings only to move towards larger social meaning. people associated their personal identity with a larger social identity of people suffering racial discrimination. the element of enlarged social identity created a sense of common fate and shared interests among people, which when reached a tipping point resulted in black lives matter protests. (duncan, ) a study conducted in eight cities in the united states of america, where protests took place due to the george floyd incident. in all the cities there was an abnormal increase in covid- infection. in six of the eight cities, the increase was significant. this was because the guidelines for social distancing given by the centre for disease control were not followed (valentine, et al., ). there were many anti lockdown protests in many parts of the world. protests due to financial insecurity are understandable. but what explains anti- lockdown protests happening out of complete denial of covid- pandemic? in the atmosphere of fear and uncertainty fake news and conspiracy theories are easily spread through social media platforms to misinform the general public. through the media, fake information was spread to downplay the seriousness of the pandemic and false hopes were given that lockdowns will be lifted soon.two cognitive biases, motivation perception and confirmation bias played crucial roles in this scenario. people formed false and unscientific beliefs related to pandemic and became motivated to see lockdown lifted, these beliefs were confirmed every time they spent some time on social media platforms (bartholomew, ). similarly in the anti-vaccine movement, fake information and conspiracy theories like vaccines can cause measles and autism, were spread through social media (pierre, ). there has been a considerable psychological cost of covid- pandemic. to deliver mental health services, online platforms were used everywhere. however, these were not able to reach people who are either not comfortable with technology or are unable to use technological devices. poor people are also not able to access such services due to financial hardships. although tele- mental health services are no match to face-to-face services, there is still a need to make them more user friendly, cost effective and easily accessible (moreno, ). study on romanian medical residents has shown that many methods can be used to reduce mental health issues, like- encouraging residents to keep a balance between work and home, and sharing problems with colleagues (dimitriu, et al., ). similarly, study on burnout among singapore healthcare workers has shown that avoiding prolonged shifts of more than hours helped in reducing burnout and other mental health issues (tan, et al., ). for vulnerable sections of the society like women, it is important to promote community based organization in delivering mental health services and to make strict laws against domestic violence (matiti, et al., ). for youth and adolescents, it is important to engage them in healthy ways of coping with their mental health (liang, et al., ). for old age people, there is a need of geriatric mental health specialists which can provide services as per their age (hayek, et al., ). study from lebanon among people who are facing financial insecurity and unemployment, shows that there should be screening of mental health among discussion kartikey et al: psychosocial aspects of covid- pandemic journal of psychosocial wellbeing, ( ), people who are poor and financially insecure. their poverty should not become a barrier to avail any mental health services, because recovery from psychological problems can help them to overcome financial challenges (salameh, et al., ). study on panic buying has shown that to avoid such happenings there should be strict regulation of essential commodities and tough laws against black marketing and hoarding. for food insecurity related mental health issues, policies should be made to encourage food assistance programme and home delivery businesses (arafat, et al., ). those people for whom lockdowns and quarantine were the time to re-skill and learn something new had positive outlook towards pandemic and were optimistic about their career and financial security in near future.it is important to have a mindset where people have internal locus of control, which means that situation can improve if right actions are executed. this is better than having a mindset which is based on external locus of control, in which the belief is that nothing can be done as outside events are more powerful in deciding the outcome. this pandemic is witnessing many social movements but also irrational social behaviors. it is because people are using a more top-down approach to pandemic than bottom-up approach. in top-down approach the perception of reality is blurred by pre- existing distorted ideas and opinions, thereby inhibiting the capability to see the real problem in a novel way. in the absence of any prior belief system in mind of the general public, people fell in the trap of their own cognitive biases and accepted distorted perception floating on social media and in the community. for example, people still have this belief system that wearing a mask is not effective against covid- , despite the availability of all the scientific evidence that masks are very effective in curbing the spread of infection. in bottom-up approach, the belief is formed but is not corrupted by pre-existing distorted beliefs and ideas. those people who did not have any prior ideas and beliefs, as to how to act in such turbulent time, practiced mindfulness to come to the right conclusion by believing in science and hence acted much better in protecting themselves and others from getting infected. it is important for science to spread its clear message before misinformation and fake news reach the public through social media, and identify all the possible cognitive traps that people can fall into, so that scientific messages can be modified into people friendly language. responsible journalism is the need of the hour to safeguard public rationale. to counter rumors more emphasis has to be on framing of messages for the target audience so that there is always clarity among people regarding what the stand of science is (pierre, ). covid- pandemic is impacting our lives like never before and it is still unclear how long it will be like this. psychosocial impacts of covid- are so diverse that this article alone cannot cover everything under the sun. however, papers we reviewed for our topic have successfully given us information on the extent to which societies are psychologically affected and also solutions that can be implemented. we now know that people from all age groups are getting affected psychologically. people who were infected from covid- were also psychologically affected, but the role of sars-cov- virus in creating psychological problems needs more investigation. deteriorating mental health among general public and social unrest shows us that to achieve real psycho-social well-being we not only have to stop covid- from spreading but also work collectively on many socio-economic issues. affordable and easily accessible mental health services, and right socio-economic government policies is the way forward. the papers we reviewed also throw light on how we should adapt to new challenges posted by new threats like pandemics. on one side it shows the bright side of the human capability to be adaptive and resilient but on other side it exposes our psychological vulnerabilities. these useful learning will help us to prepare for any future pandemic and make us proactive in our collective responses to ensure psycho-social well-being. conclusion kartikey et al: psychosocial aspects of covid- pandemic journal of psychosocial wellbeing, ( ), references arafat, s. y., kar, s. k., menon, v., kaliamoorthy, c., mukherjee, s., &mohamed, a. a.et al. ( ).panic buying: an insight from the content analysis of media reports during covid- pandemic. neurology, psychiatry and brain research. , - . doi: https://doi.org/ . /j.npbr. . . bartholomew, r. ( ). what's driving the lockdown protests over covid- . psychology today. accessed on . . from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/its- c a t c h i n g / / w h a t - s - d r i v i n g - t h e - l o c k d o w n - protests-over-covid- chaurasiya, a.&chaurasia, n. ( ). covid- : psychological impact of a pandemic disease. research report - university of sydney. doi: . /rr. . duncan, l. ( ). speaking of psychology: the psychology of protests and activism. retrieved from https://www.apa.org/ research/action/speaking-of-psychology/protest- activism gonzalez, c., & austin, b., Ángel, m., castellanos, saiz, j., lópez- gómez, a., ugidos, c., muñoz, m. ( ). mental health consequences in the initial stage of the coronavirus pandemic (covid- ) in spain. journal of brian, b e h a v i o r a n d i m m u n i t y, , - . d o i : https://doi.org/ . /j.bbi. . . hayek, s. e., cheaito, m. a., nofal, m., abdelrahman, d., adra, a.,shamli, sa., &alharthi, m., et al. ( ).geriatric mental health and covid- : an eye-opener to the situation of the arab countries in the middle east and north africa region,the american journal of geriatric p s y c h i a t r y , ( ) , - . d o i : https://doi.org/ . /j.jagp. . . kartikey, d. ( ). anxiety amid pandemic. brain and behavior research foundation of india. accessed on . . from http://bbrfi.blogspot.com/ / /anxiety-amid- pandemic.html koshy, j. ( ). the hindu explains | why is the locust surge posing a threat to agriculture in india?. the hindu. accessed on . . from https://www.thehindu.com/sci- tech/agriculture/the-hindu-explains-why-is-the- l o c u s t - s u r g e - p o s i n g - a - t h r e a t - t o - a g r i c u l t u r e - i n - india/article .ece liang, l., ren, h., cao, r., hu, y., qin, z., li, c., & mei, s. ( ). the effect of covid- on youth mental health. the psychiatric quarterly. ( ), – . matiti, t., rai, b., biswas, t. ( ). women mental health during covid- and lock down: a brief narrative and introspection. clinical psychiatry. ( : ). mihai c.t. dimitriu, anca pantea-stoian, alexandru c. smaranda, anca a. nica, alexandru c. carap, &vlad d. constantin, et al. ( ). burnout syndrome in romanian medical residents in time of the covid- p a n d e m i c . m e d i c a l h y p o t h e s e s . , . d o i : https://doi.org/ . /j.mehy. . moreno, c., wykes, t., galderisi, s., nordentoft, m., crossley, n., & jones, n. et al. ( ). how mental health care should change as a consequence of the covid- pandemic. the lancet. psychiatry. ( ), – . doi: https:// doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - niles, m. t., bertmann, f., belarmino, e. h., wentworth, t., biehl, e., & neff, r. ( ). the early food insecurity impacts o f c o v i d - . n u t r i e n t s . ( ) , , d o i : https://doi.org/ . /nu padoli, e. ( ). some covid- survivors suffer psychiatric disorders, italian study says. reuters. accessed on . . from https://uk.reuters.com/article/us- h e a l t h - c o r o n a v i r u s - d i s o r d e r s / s o m e - c o v i d - - survivors-suffer-psychiatric-disorders-italian-study- says-idukkcn z o pierre, j. ( ). anti-vaccine and covid- conspiracy theories: a perfect storm, psychology today. accessed on . . from https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/ psych-unseen/ /anti-vaccine-and-covid- - conspiracy-theories-perfect-storm rahman, a., & plummer, v. ( ). covid- related suicide among hospital nurses; case study evidence from worldwide media reports. psychiatry research. , . doi: https://doi.org/ . /j.psychres. . salameh, p., hajj, a., badro, da., selwan, ca., aoun, r., sacre, h. ( ). mental health outcomes of the covid- pandemic and a collapsing economy: perspectives from a developing country. psychiatry research. , . tan, b.y., abhiram, k., lim, l.j., tan, m., chua, y.x., & tan, l., et. al. ( ). burnout and associated factors amongst healthcare workers in singapore during the covid- pandemic. journal of the american medical directors association. tyrer, p. ( ).covid- health anxiety. world psychiatry. : - . doi: https://doi .org/ . /wps. valentine, r., valentine, d., & valentine, j. ( ). relationship of george floyd protests to increases in covid- cases using event study methodology. journal of public health. , - .doi: https://doi.org/ . /pubmed/ fdaa . kartikey et al: psychosocial aspects of covid- pandemic journal of psychosocial wellbeing, ( ), this is a pre-print of an article published in contemporary political theory. the final authenticated version is available online at: https://doi.org/ . /s - - -z becoming political: spinoza's vital republicanism and the democratic power of judgement christopher skeaff university of chicago press, chicago and london, , xii+ pp., isbn: - - - - christopher skeaff's becoming political aspires simultaneously to offer a new interpretation of spinoza's political philosophy, and also to engage with contemporary political theory. substantively, the book articulates and defends an ideal of democratic politics whereby the state is open to its own reconstitution and internal transformation. such an ideal stands opposed to the tendency in democratic theory and practice to try to fix the bounds of democracy: whether through a sovereigntist view of politics (whereby democracy just means implementing the sovereign decision of the democratic assembly); but equally through a moral view of politics (whereby philosophers attempt to define and codify in advance the norms of appropriate democratic decisionmaking). on my reading, skeaff envisions a sovereign state making laws, but he proposes that the sovereign's rule must exist in agonistic relation with citizens debating, contesting, reformulating, and resisting those same laws. citizen judgment challenges both specific laws, but also and more importantly it challenges meta-level considerations of what counts as fair game for political debate and of who belongs in the political community. in other words, citizen judgment dynamically regulates the very boundaries of politics: hence the book's title becoming political. this vision is 'agonistic' both insofar as it refuses to lay down any definitive principles or norms of political life, and also insofar as it refuses to resolve the ongoing contestation between the state and the populace in favour of one side or the other. it may be possible to some degree for a sovereign state to shut down such citizen judgment, but it is normatively undesirable for it to do so. skeaff's agonistic vision becomes clear incrementally across the book's five chapters. successive chapters draw out this same agonistic structure within different contexts of spinoza's political corpus. for instance, chapter interprets spinoza's famous advocacy of a right to philosophise in terms of the interaction between the sovereign's 'jurisdiction' (its right to proclaim laws) and citizens' 'jurisprudence' (their popular contestation of laws). for another instance, chapter interprets spinoza's analysis of the dynamics of human affect in terms of the interplay between our mimetic desire for sameness (and the hope for harmony that it expresses) and the more ethical and rational desire for alliance across difference (even as it brings with it ineradicable conflict). a similar structure is at play in chapter 's contrast between rule by law and rule of law; chapter 's contrast between theology supporting sovereignty and theology transforming sovereignty; and chapter 's contrast between democracy as popular rule versus democracy as equal empowerment expressed through dissent to rule. in putting forward such an ideal of politics, skeaff builds on several diverse existing traditions of politics focussed on non-domination: the italian biopolitical tradition (negri); the analytic republican tradition (pettit); and the tradition taking judgment as politics' most distinctive term (arendt). i take it that the book's primary contribution for contemporary political theory is a positive effort to synthesise and enrich the ideas of these other thinkers that skeaff finds appealing. but what is the deficiency to be addressed? what precisely does spinoza offer to this already dense theoretical landscape? in skeaff's hands, spinoza's two key conceptual contributions are 'vital republicanism' and 'democratic judgment'. neither of these are terms explicitly used by spinoza; rather they are skeaff's original efforts to organise and systematise the structure of spinoza's political thought. the first, 'vital republicanism', points towards a conception of political life as having its own immanent norms; the second, 'democratic judgment', specifies the conditions under which those immanent norms find their fullest expression. let me venture to make explicit how these two concepts might address deficiencies in the traditions of non-domination mentioned above. one issue for an agonistic conception of politics is to explain why the openness of a state to contestation is necessarily good. what guarantee is there that the contestation is not a mere conflict of brute power, against which it would be better to put in place protections and limitations? why is political 'agonism' desirable and not something that we should seek to overcome? or in more cognitive terms, why should 'judgment' be prioritised over determinate norms; how does this avoid being subjective or arbitrary? it is against such fundamental skepticism that skeaff's deployment of spinoza's political philosophy is fruitful. skeaff appeals to spinoza's idea of immanent normativity, whereby political life has a non-arbitrary normative grain which nonetheless cannot be subsumed under a universal or fixed rule. specifically, each human being has their own individual ingenium or complexion (the characteristic motions of their concrete embodied existence), for which certain things are useful utile and others thwarting. for spinoza, virtue is nothing other than expressing and developing this individual nature, as we all strive to do to the best of our ability, and do better in proportion as we improve our reason. but spinozist reason is not monolithic: the diversity of ingenia means that there is no single dictate of reason given for everyone and for all time; in skeaff's terms, each must exercise their own judgment. when the state does not seek to suppress this diversity, then it maximises its subjects' flourishing and in turn maximises its own flourishing. democratic state sovereignty stands as necessary but insufficient to this maximisation. the state must establish laws to resulate interactions amongst diverse citizens. but at the same time, due to the very same embodied diversity, any such laws (or indeed any meta-rules for democratic politics) are only provisional. thus we have 'vital republicanism': a political order governed by laws, but those laws themselves continually regenerated and reformulated by the immanent normativity of the political entity, articulated through the 'democratic judgment' of its citizens. becoming political thus makes welcome contributions to both spinoza studies and to contemporary political theory. my key reservation is that the book needs to do more to unpack the link between judgment and democracy. first, granting (for the sake of argument) that the immanent normativity of a political order has a democratic structure, i was left unclear what accounts for skeaff's confidence that this immanent normativity will tend to be expressed. skeaff appears to take the view that appropriately egalitarian popular contestation to sovereignty will just emerge: formal democratic institutions and rights of free speech make the people individually sui juris, in control of their own right and able to exercise democratic judgment (for instance, see his discussion of the black lives matter movement). textually, this confidence relies heavily on the theological-political treatise's famous characterisation of democracy as a regime in which formal political equality allows everyone to take part in making the laws and thereby maintain their freedom (spinoza a: . ). but even though the passage is famous, i think it is theoretically simplistic, and at odds with other elements of spinoza's philosophy. skeaff's own chapter grants that collective passional dynamics can go wrong; he also grants that the english revolution in spinoza's own time failed to advance democracy. but in his discussion of contemporary democracy, he presumes that popular pressure will go right. such a presumption seems to me to be contrary to spinoza's own injunction to consider human behaviour 'like a thunderstorm' (spinoza b: . ): one needs to focus on its bad and troublesome aspects, with view to understanding their determinate causes. specifically, what about when citizens fail to be exemplary citizens, and are animated by exclusionary rather than egalitarian passions? what about the fact that formally equal citizens are often not substantively sui juris, because they find themselves in relations of dependency (whether economic, occupational, informational, or something else) (spinoza b: . - ) in these cases, popular judgment may have no particular connection to democratic and egalitarian outcomes. skeaff's book could usefully be complemented by a more critical theory of popular judgment and its conditions of democratic success. second, and perhaps more troubling, i was left unconvinced that spinoza's own understanding of political immanent normativity is so clearly democratic as skeaff makes out. for skeaff, the link between judgment and democracy seems to be grounded in the presumption that judgment is a unified whole: in particular, skeaff doesn't seriously countenance the possibility of the philosophical or religious exercise of judgment and expression of ingenium being separated from the political exercise of judgment and equal political participation. but this is exactly the separation that spinoza sanctions for commoners in an aristocracy. on the one hand, commoners should be allowed to pursue their own ends under fair terms, unmolested, and with religious and philosophical freedom. but on the other hand, they must be vigorously and systematically prevented from exerting political pressure on the patrician rulers (spinoza b: . - ). if this is done, aristocracy is presented as a regime which can be highly virtuous and sui juris, more so than many actually existing democracies. to be sure, good politics requires taking into account many and diverse points of judgment, but this can be ensured by maintaining a large and active decisionmaking council drawn from a wide patrician class. to be sure, the point of politics is not to transform humans into beasts or automata, but this is hardly the status of the commoners: they may be as philosophically and ethically developed as they like, they simply cannot participate in political decisions. to be sure, humans strive for what is useful to them and their community, but in the history of political thought the common good has often been conceived in an inegalitarian way, and it is not clear to me that spinoza is so unequivocally modern as skeaff presumes. in sum, i do wonder whether skeaff presents an excessively generous image of spinoza as a theorist of democracy. but this does not count strongly against the book: after all, such an image is pervasive in contemporary spinoza studies. skeaff's achievement is to make the case for connecting spinoza's politics with contemporary theorists of agonism and non-domination; and indeed to use spinoza to bolster those theoretical tendencies. references spinoza, b. a. 'the theological-political treatise'. in the collected works of spinoza, trans. edwin curley. volume ; princeton: princeton university press, pp. - . spinoza, b. b. 'the political treatise'. in the collected works of spinoza, trans. edwin curley. volume ; princeton: princeton university press, pp. - . sandra field yale-nus college, singapore sandra.field@yale-nus.edu.sg a virus as an icon: the pandemic in images vol.:( ) american journal of cultural sociology ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - - o r i g i n a l a r t i c l e a virus as an icon: the  pandemic in images julia sonnevend published online: october © springer nature limited abstract the coronavirus pandemic is puzzling from a visual point of view. there are millions of photographs published about the crisis every day, yet we can see the key actor, the virus, only in artistic representations. most of us also have very restricted access to central sites of the crisis, as intensive care units, nursing homes, meat packing plants and prisons are often not available for photographic representa- tion. at the same time, we are oversupplied by other images that try to capture the “essence” of the moment. this article analyzes three prevalent visual genres in con- nection with the ongoing pandemic: abstract representations of the virus and public responses to it, images of heroes and sinners, and photographs of the “stage”: the iconic spaces including empty public buildings and busy domestic spaces. all these iconic representations try to grasp the “deep meaning” of the crisis through a par- ticular scene or moment. their expressive surfaces have become our key sources to imagine the coronavirus crisis, and to socially connect in a time of painful and pro- longed physical distance. keywords icon · image · representation · visual · pandemic · coronavirus the coronavirus crisis presents some unique visual challenges. there are mil- lions of photographs published about this event every day, yet we cannot see the key actor: the virus. most of us do not have access to the central sites of the crisis either. intensive care units, nursing homes, meat packing plants and prisons are key locations of the crisis, often far away from cameras. public health experts argue that if only we saw how the novel virus wrecked bodies, we would behave differently. thus, there seems to be a fundamental problem with our not seeing what is happen- ing in, and even around us. the frustration of public health experts with people’s lack of compliance also makes it clear that having powerful and expressive representations is not about the * julia sonnevend jsonnevend@newschool.edu department of sociology, the new school, east th st., th ave th floor, new york, ny  , usa http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf j. sonnevend need for “spectacle” or “voyeurism”. without the ability to see and relate to this cri- sis, people will be unlikely to follow strict guidelines that interfere with their usual daily lives. communicating and representing the crisis is thus not only about “talk”, but also about “walk”. as sociologist jeffrey c. alexander once put it, “icons root generic, social meaning in a specific and ‘material’ form” ( , p. ). instead of being mere illustrations, they are entry points for public discussion and social con- testation. only through powerful communicative tools can those not in the medical profession comprehend a public health crisis, and ultimately act upon it. strangely, in the case of the pandemic while we are deprived of key visual experiences in relation to the coronavirus, we are also oversupplied by other images that try to capture the “essence” of the moment. on the new york times website, there is a section that displays a permanent loop of “everyday” coronavirus-related photographs from nepal to hong kong to the united states. and photographs pop up every second from a myriad of other sources internationally. the invisibility of the main actor has led to a flood of “indirect images” that struggle to stand for the event. in this strange visual ecosystem, what do these indirect or side photographs communicate to us? what are the stories, narratives and imaginaries they project and symbolically condense? the visual supply is seemingly endless, but there are still a few key visual genres, a set of identifiable iconic repertoires. first, the artistic representation of the lead actor (the virus) and the abstract, and often confusing charts of our actions and their outcomes, for instance the “flattening curve.” then the images of the heroes (the essential workers, the efficient politicians, the successful scientists), and the sinners (whom you call a “covidiot” depends on your ideologies, but they can range from incompetent politicians to partyers in packed pools, to vigilantes, “libtards”, the gates foundation, and so on). finally, the “stage” of the crisis: the changing world around us, the empty airports and iconic buildings, people in masks in grocery stores, students taking exams at carefully placed tables, images of protests against stay-at-home-orders and systemic racism. the “stage” also includes the domestic spaces where we spend most of our time, the disorganized or over-organized apart- ments, the homes for heroic struggles with homeschooling and make-shift office work. the virus is a unique performer. invisible to the regular eye, yet widely repre- sented in spectacular visuals. perhaps the most well-known rendering of the virus came from the us-based centers for disease control (cdc) (fig.  ). on january , , a day after the c.d.c. decided to activate its emergency operations center as a response to the developing coronavirus, two medical illustrators were tasked with the impossible: creating an “identity” for the virus that would “grab the public’s attention” (giaimo ). this was not the first time, alissa eckert and dan higgins had to draw something that was invisible to the human eye. eckert, for instance, was particularly proud of her rendering of the bacteria that cause gonorrhea. but in this case, they aimed to produce something that they call a “beauty shot”, “a detailed, solo close-up” that would be memorable and would inspire viewers to take the situ- ation seriously. even so, the illustrators did not expect the representation to reach a very wide audience and were genuinely surprised when the image suddenly spread around the world, like the virus it aimed to depict. a virus as an icon: the  pandemic in images while this most often reproduced image of the coronavirus is increasingly famil- iar to many, most viewers do not actually know what they are seeing. what do the red, the yellow and the gray parts signify? what do other viruses look like? are these the virus’s “real” colors, or simply illustrative ones? a recent article called the famous cdc coronavirus representation a “ d rendering of a spiky fuzzball” and then attempted to interpret the distinct parts: the gray surface is a “spherical envelope that surrounds the nucleus of the virus”, and it contains genetic material, the orange bits are “membrane proteins” which help us identify the virus and dis- tinguish it from others, the yellow bits stand for “envelope proteins” which regulate virus replication and finally the red spikes are the virus’ tools to attach to cells (britt ). in addition to these relatively objective markers, there were also elements of the representation that required decisions from the illustrators. for instance, they chose a “stony texture”, so that it seems like “you could actually touch” the virus, they also added details “to help display the gravity of the situation and to draw atten- tion” (giaimo ). no representation, not even this relatively expressive one can translate the novel coronavirus to us. the virus’s visual characteristics will mostly remain incompre- hensible to the lay eye, regardless of how well the illustrators captured its details. but the representation’s elusiveness has a key advantage: it makes the image easy to use in a wide variety of contexts. since the image does not communicate much, it can relatively easily be added to a wide variety of texts. you will see the “spiky fuzzball” next to an article about whether or not to reopen colleges in the fall, arti- cles on the mental health consequences of a pandemic, or a political op-ed criticiz- ing the president’s failing response to the crisis. ultimately, the image of the coro- navirus is highly versatile, because to non-experts it has very little meaning to offer. the desire to present a representation that invites touch is particularly puzzling. instead of scaring the viewer away, instead of the virus becoming a much-feared fig. this illustration, cre- ated at the centers for disease control, reveals ultrastructural morphology exhibited by coronaviruses. (alissa eckert, msmi, dan higgins, mams, ) [cdc photograph in the public domain] j. sonnevend “beast,” the coronavirus representation triggers admiration. like a beautifully arranged flower bouquet, made from red roses, it is aesthetically pleasing. its varied surfaces trigger the desire to approach, to explore, to find a connection, and ulti- mately: to touch. of course, almost any representation of an unimaginable object is destined to attract attention and trigger exploration. still, there is nothing in this coronavirus image that would make the viewer even a little bit fearful or cautious. in its aim to represent, the image manages to build a real connection between the viewer and the represented. it has become a representation of something the lay eye cannot see. but it does not symbolically condense the complex feelings and prac- tices associated with the virus. it certainly does not trigger “social distancing”; its viewer rather craves proximity than distance. if a representation of a virus was an unlikely candidate for iconicity, an abstract graph had even less “objective” chances. most graphs are neither visually spectacu- lar, nor easy to decipher. but abstract graphs have still played a central role in the representation of the pandemic crisis and became exceedingly popular with journalists. the most frequently reproduced graph shows the “flattening curve” which highlights that with social distancing measures the curve of the infection and hospitalization rates can be extended to a longer period of time, which in turn can help hospitals with the supply of hospital beds and critical equipment, for instance, ventilators for patients and protective gear for health care workers (fig.  ). as one article in the new york times put it, “the longer it takes for the coronavirus to spread to the population, the more time hospitals have to prepare” (roberts ). the most likely origin of the chart was a cdc document from , entitled “goals of community mitigation”, that recommended a series of mitigation practices in the event of a pandemic, including “social distancing”, closing schools and limiting public gatherings. the colors have changed over time and a public health professor added a line representing “health care capacity” during the pandemic, but the core idea has remained the same (weinberg ). many pointed out that the key feature of the “flattening the curve” graph is that it does not include numbers on the axes. most of the time, not even the axes are defined. while meant to be a simplified representation, this graph is in fact highly abstract. “the flattening curve” graph provides the viewer with the illusion of being an insider of science who truly understands complex medical processes, but the graph is in fact every data scientist’s nightmare. as one commentator put it, the flat- tening curve graph “was a work of the imagination, too artless to be art but lacking the hard empiricism we expect of science” (weinberg ). still, somehow both the iconic representation and the related slogan (“flatten the curve”) have become fig. “flattening the curve.” adapted from the cdc by the economist. infographic created by drew harris, dpm, mph a virus as an icon: the  pandemic in images central features of the coronavirus discourse, perhaps because they provided people with agency and some control, and a set of clearly defined rules to follow. likely due to the limited iconic power of the lead actor, the virus, the roles of the “hero” and the “villain” are assigned to other performers. from early on in the crisis, healthcare workers and grocery store workers were framed as “essential work- ers”, often described as “heroes”. cities all around the world have adopted rituals to clap and cheer for these workers every evening, creating a distinct celebratory music for those risking their lives. homemade signs also popped up in front of grocery stores and hospitals, communicating simple and powerful messages such as “heroes work here” (fig.  ). many also aimed to give actual “faces” to the generic category of “heroes.” frus- trated by the non-distinctiveness of the category, essential workers took to social media to share images showing their distinct everyday experiences. a powerful example is the “covid nurses” [recently renamed as “frontline health heroes”] instagram account, which described itself as “diaries from the field” and “nurses fighting on the frontlines & sharing their stories. it’s not over till it’s over.” nurses aimed to show their real faces on instagram: exhausted, bruised from n- masks, annoyed by those who are not following public health guidelines. as black lives matter protests also started to unfold during the pandemic, nurses began to post photographs where they were holding up signs connecting the pandemic to racial justice issues: “i save lives regardless of race, you take lives because of it”, “white supremacy is deadlier than covid”, and “imagine if nurses ignored ‘i can’t fig. “heroes work here” sign in front of a grocery store in hillsdale, new york (julia sonnevend, june , ) j. sonnevend breathe’—black lives matter”. one powerful photograph showed a white nurse with a sign “nurses for black lives” next to an african-american nurse whose sign stated “keep that same energy when you can’t breathe! a black rn” (fig.  ). in this case the visual power of “covid nurses” that was developed during the early months of the pandemic provided the platform for expressive messages against racial inequality. while the pandemic’s heroes have been mostly “faceless” and nameless, cov- ered by facemasks, standing for a broad and often abstract category, some particu- lar iconic figures did emerge. perhaps the most obvious icon is dr. li wenliang, a -year-old ophthalmologist at wuhan central hospital in china, who was an early whistleblower in the crisis and subsequently died from the novel coronavirus he was warning the world about (yu ). dr. wenliang, a young, healthy, and successful doctor, stood out as a hero who took political, professional and health risks to avert the pandemic. li was the father of a young boy and his wife was pregnant with their second child when he died, which made the tragedy even more relatable worldwide. his early-in-the crisis hospital photo where he was wearing a surgical mask, and his final photograph that he took while wearing an oxygen mask in a hospital bed have become the iconic representations of the early crisis (fig.  ). the outrage over li’s death was—so far—the only time when the chinese political leadership faced mas- sive domestic backlash during the coronavirus crisis. his death became a top trend- ing topic on chinese social media, garnering more than one billion views (bbc ). tens of millions chinese social media users posted tributes to li, and many fig. nurses holding up signs at a black lives matter protest, posted on the “covid nurses” instagram site (courtesy of christel-ann augustin, june , ) a virus as an icon: the  pandemic in images demanded systemic change and transparency in the country’s pandemic response (feng ). it is unlikely people would have felt a similar connection to him with- out his relatable photographs—showing again the power of images in representing social meanings. the popular framing of “heroes” has received ample criticism on social media, as many have argued that adequate pay and proper protective gear would be the real rewards for essential workers, while the language of heroism remains cheap. “hero” is too broad a term that is easily applicable to everyone, without highlighting vast differences in who are “doomed” to be heroes in this case and who are more likely to escape to their second homes. some analysts have also emphasized that while health care workers may have considered heroism as part of their job descriptions, this is hardly the case with grocery store, meat plant workers or teachers, who pic- tured a much less risky future for themselves. keeping a focus on heroes seemed almost too safe a bet for cultural institutions as well, as this framing was less likely to trigger controversy. for instance, a recent project entitled “hold still”, organized by the national portrait gallery in london and spearheaded by the duchess of cambridge, asked people to submit their por- traits in relation to three categories: “helpers and heroes”, “your new normal”, and “acts of kindness”. these categories already limit the viewer to a relatively posi- tive take on the events, only the “your new normal” category has allowed for some interpretational flexibility. the description of the project also included its ultimate interpretation: “hold still will capture a snapshot of the people of the uk at this fig. one of the last photo- graphs posted by dr. li wen- liang on weibo on february , (reuters/gan en fund/ li wenliang) j. sonnevend time, creating a collective portrait of our nation which will reflect resilience and bravery, humor and sadness, creativity and kindness, human tragedy and hope as we hold still for the good of others, and celebrate those who have continued so we can stay safe” (national portrait gallery ). villains, disrupters and contrarians were absent in this description. but villains seem to be the most exciting actors in the coronavirus drama, perhaps unsurprisingly. identifying and shaming coronavirus villains is an international pas- time on social media, and their prevalence even warranted a new term: “covidiot.” according to urban dictionary: a covidiot is “someone who ignores the warnings regarding  public health or safety” or “a person who hoards goods, denying them from their neighbors”. the related examples are: “that covidiot is hugging every- one she sees.” “did you see that  covidiot with rolls of toilet paper in his  bas- ket?” since there are so many unknowns about the virus, many take solace in the few knowns, for instance in the increasing evidence that face masks help in the pre- vention of asymptomatic spread (prathner et  al. ). this desire for control and community has also led to a wide-spread habit of vigilantism and public shaming. an early example was the attention over-crowded florida beaches had received on social media. another example was a packed pool-party at the lake of the ozarks in missouri on memorial day weekend in that attracted extensive condemna- tion on social media. images of partyers, standing in close proximity to each other without wearing masks, went viral on twitter. only one confirmed coronavirus case has emerged from this event; the excessive party has most likely not become a super-spreader event, but it has clearly become one of the iconic sites of “covidiot” shaming. early evidence increasingly shows the lower prevalence of transmission in out- door settings, but packed outdoor events still tend to attract the public’s visual imagination, perhaps due to their powerful representational qualities. office meet- ings, elevator or subway rides seem to be significantly riskier from a public health perspective, but they also have far less iconic potential. these activities in poorly lit indoor settings are much harder to capture by camera, and it is even more challeng- ing to effectively communicate them to broad audiences. thus, visually spectacular sites, ideally combined with the image of a partying or otherwise irresponsible “cov- idiot”, provide powerful visuals to capture attention without necessarily representing the core components of the crisis. when our imagination moves away from the categories of “hero” and “villain”, we are often picturing the “stage”: the iconic spaces that show the signs of radical change in pandemic times (fig.  ). images of the eerily empty times square, eiffel tower and taj mahal remind viewers of how understandings of a “rapid globali- zation” have changed from one day to the next. sites that are usually packed with tourists are now left to locals and to some animals that have started to reclaim them. everyday sites from airports to museums to concert halls are also lacking the buzz they were used to. non-iconic sites of everyday life, like subways and buses, have lost most of their regular appeal, suggesting a potential shift in how we are going to conduct our future, whether in “post-pandemic” or “living with a pandemic” times. there are also new sites that are excessively photographed. make-shift hospitals, for instance in iconic central park, serve as key examples. these hospitals, which a virus as an icon: the  pandemic in images can be white tents, stadiums, dorms and military ships tend to echo the memories of the superdome that has become one of the infamous iconic sites of the kat- rina disaster in the united states (eyerman ). in particularly hard-hit areas of the world, hospital corridors, exam rooms and other make-shift spaces have also become key sites of the crisis. but medical privacy concerns do not permit adequate access for photographers to human suffering in these spaces, rendering the make- shift hospital photographs, with a few notable exceptions, mostly empty and similar to spectacular architectural images. since what we can photograph outside is limited, our visual attention often turns to our domestic sites instead: the only space to which we still have unlimited access. a powerful example is a very popular international facebook group, “the view from my window” that asks people to post pictures of their apartment views, and accompany these photographs with short narratives. facebook users in their com- ments celebrate the views and also add where they are posting their notes of admira- tion from, presenting themselves as part of a caring and beautiful “global village”. but most posted photographs seem too perfect to be true, suggesting that even in this case social media tempt people to show a better-than-real-life version of themselves, or the site evoked responses mostly from that minority of people who have really great apartment views. some also pushed back against this “perfect” view of the world, writing about various hardships people face during the pandemic (fig.  ). leading photographers from tehran to shanghai to florence have also contrib- uted to this movement on instagram and other platforms, posting images of their homes and everyday neighborhood walks (libbey and farago ). perhaps the most ambitious photographic project so far was the new york times’ “the great empty”. more than thirty photographers took to the streets all around the world to capture the world as it was changing in front of their eyes. their images showed empty london during rush hour, a subway without commuters in munich, boats without passengers in srinagar, a deserted airport in tokyo, and an empty hot dog stand in seattle, among others. the new york times published a selection of the photographs, introduced by an essay from architecture critic michael kimmelman. kimmelman argued that “[t]hese images are haunted and haunting, like stills from movies about plagues and the apocalypse, but in some ways they are hopeful. they also remind us that beauty requires human interaction” (the new york times ). fig. “an aerial view shows the deserted place de l’etoile and the arc de triomphe in paris, during a lockdown imposed to slow the spread of the coronavirus disease (covid- ) in france, april , . picture taken with a drone april , ”, pascal rossignol, reuters j. sonnevend as streets and offices emptied out, our work lives suddenly moved to our domestic spaces, at least this was the experience for many professionals who had the privilege to stay at home. zoom and other video conferencing software served as connections to the outside world. but they also invited outsiders to our homes. pets, kids and other family members routinely jumped into the carefully arranged “home offices”, making our domestic spaces and lives more visible to outsiders. the famous bbc interview scene, when the interviewed professor’s kids unexpectedly entered his office as he was live on television, has become a regular experience for many workers and their colleagues. the changing practices of work were much eas- ier to capture and publish than the horrors of the disease and became a very popular genre in mass media. finally, some images of spaces also attempted to grasp the tragedy of the pandemic. they showed mass graves from brazil to iran to the united states. fami- lies on zoom as they tried to say goodbye to loved ones who were spending their last days alone in hospitals. refrigerator trucks in front of overflowing hospitals. packed hospital rooms in northern italy. online mourning and funerals. some photographs also showed the economic toll the pandemic took on people, for instance, a fre- quently used genre of photographs displayed people in lines in front of food banks. all these images of the coronavirus tried to grasp the “essence”, the “deep meaning” of the crisis through a particular scene or moment. they were all attempts to touch the general through the particular. representations of the virus, our actions, heroes, villains and spaces offered the illusion that we see the crisis, even when the key performer, the virus, has remained invisible. iconic representations as symbolic condensations also fig. photo posted in the “view from my window” facebook group. “this is the view from our kitchen window in chattarpur, new delhi. we are lucky to live in an apartment with a fridge. the workers next door are also in lockdown but have few savings, no income, no fridge, and no social distance.” (courtesy of graham r. hulse, april , ) a virus as an icon: the  pandemic in images summarize more than they actually depict (sonnevend , ). they resemble some aspects of the crisis, but they come to represent something much broader and larger in social life. their powerful, expressive surfaces become reference points that trigger passionate debates, but sometimes also provide solace. in the case of the pandemic, images have become our key sources for imagining the crisis. they also offered ways to socially connect in a time of painful and prolonged physical distance. acknowledgements i would like to thank the editors and peer-reviewers of ajcs for their very thoughtful and constructive comments, agnes szanyi for her invaluable work as my research assistant, and christel-ann augustin, graham r. hulse and drew harris for generously agreeing to the publication of their photographs and infographics. references alexander, j.c. . iconic consciousness: the material feeling of meaning. environment and planning d: society and space ( ): – . https ://doi.org/ . /d . bbc. . li wenliang: coronavirus death of wuhan doctor sparks anger. february. https ://www.bbc. com/news/world -asia-china - . accessed aug . britt, r.r. . what the coronavirus image you’ve seen a million times really shows. elemental, march. https ://bit.ly/ nudu e. accessed june . eyerman, r. . is this america?: katrina as cultural trauma. austin: university of texas press. feng, e. . millions demand answers in china after doctor’s death from coronavirus. nrp, february. https ://www.npr.org/ / / / /milli ons-deman d-answe rs-in-china -after -docto rs-death -from-coron aviru s. accessed aug . giaimo, c. . the spiky blob seen around the world: how c.d.c. medical illustrators created the corona- virus pandemic’s most iconic image. the new york times, april. https ://nyti.ms/ frlb h. accessed june . libbey, p., and j. farago. . the world’s great photographers, many stuck inside, have snapped. the new york times, april. https ://nyti.ms/ dzcq dt. accessed june . national portrait gallery. . hold still: a portrait of our nation in . https ://www.npg.org.uk/hold-still /. accessed june . prathner, k.a., c.c. wang, and r.t. schooley. . reducing transmission of sars-cov- . science, advance online publication may. https ://doi.org/ . /scien ce.abc . roberts, s. . flattening the coronavirus curve. the new york times, march. https ://www.nytim es.com/artic le/flatt en-curve -coron aviru s.html. accessed june . sonnevend, j. . iconic rituals: towards a social theory of encountering images. in iconic power: materi- ality and meaning in social life, ed. j.c. alexander, d. bartmanski, and b. giesen. new york: palgrave macmillan. sonnevend, j. . stories without borders: the berlin wall and the making of a global iconic event. oxford: oxford university press. the new york times. . the great empty photographs by the new york times. (introduction by michael kimmelman). march. https ://nyti.ms/ eywh o . accessed june . weinberg, a. . the “flatten the curve” chart was ugly and not scientifically rigorous. why did it work so well? mother jones, july/august. https ://bit.ly/ mag jv. accessed aug . yu, v. . ‘hero who told the truth’: chinese rage over coronavirus death of whistleblower doctor. the guardian, february. https ://bit.ly/ cvqq gi. accessed june . publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. julia sonnevend is associate professor of sociology and communication at the new school for social research in new york. she is the author of stories without borders: the berlin wall and the making of a global iconic event (oxford university press: ). https://doi.org/ . /d https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china- https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china- https://bit.ly/ nudu e https://www.npr.org/ / / / /millions-demand-answers-in-china-after-doctors-death-from-coronavirus https://www.npr.org/ / / / /millions-demand-answers-in-china-after-doctors-death-from-coronavirus https://nyti.ms/ frlb h https://nyti.ms/ dzcqdt https://www.npg.org.uk/hold-still/ https://www.npg.org.uk/hold-still/ https://doi.org/ . /science.abc https://www.nytimes.com/article/flatten-curve-coronavirus.html https://www.nytimes.com/article/flatten-curve-coronavirus.html https://nyti.ms/ eywho https://bit.ly/ magjv https://bit.ly/ cvqqgi 	a virus as an icon: the  pandemic in images 	abstract 	acknowledgements 	references [pdf] meaner on mobile: incivility and impoliteness in communicating contentious politics on sociotechnical networks | semantic scholar skip to search formskip to main content> semantic scholar's logo search sign increate free account you are currently offline. some features of the site may not work correctly. 	doi: . / corpus id: meaner on mobile: incivility and impoliteness in communicating contentious politics on sociotechnical networks @article{groshek meanerom, title={meaner on mobile: incivility and impoliteness in communicating contentious politics on sociotechnical networks}, author={jacob groshek and chelsea cutino}, journal={social media + society}, year={ }, volume={ } } 	jacob groshek, chelsea cutino 	published 	sociology 	social media + society this study explores the nature of how mobile social media may potentially be sharpening the tenor of communicating online. specifically, randomized representative twitter data were collected for several controversial issues, and then examined to determine the extent to which mobile or web-based content tends more toward greater incivility and impoliteness. additional analyses further model how certain dialogic features, such as explicitly mentioning other users and retweeting others’ posts… expand view on sage journals.sagepub.com save to library create alert cite launch research feed share this paper citationsbackground citations view all tables from this paper 	 table 	 table citations citation type citation type 	all types 	cites results 	cites methods 	cites background has pdf publication type author more filters more filters filters sort by relevance sort by most influenced papers sort by citation count sort by recency the digital architectures of social media: comparing political campaigning on facebook, twitter, instagram, and snapchat in the u.s. election 	michael bossetta 	sociology, computer science 	arxiv 	 	 	pdf 	view excerpt, cites background save alert research feed bigger than sports: identity politics, colin kaepernick, and concession making in #boycottnike 	rob eschmann, jacob groshek, senhao li, noor toraif, julian g. thompson 	computer science, sociology 	comput. hum. behav. 	 	 save alert research feed re/constructing politics through social & online media discourses, ideologies, and mediated political practices 	michał krzyżanowski, joshua a. tucker 	sociology 	 	 	pdf save alert research feed brevity is the soul of twitter: the constraint affordance and political discussion 	kokil jaidka, alvin zhou, yphtach lelkes 	sociology 	 	 save alert research feed racist call-outs and cancel culture on twitter: the limitations of the platform’s ability to define issues of social justice 	g. bouvier 	sociology 	 save alert research feed exploring the metadiscursive realisation of incivility in tv news discourse 	jamie mckeown, h. ladegaard 	sociology 	 	 save alert research feed the uncensored masses: turkish coup attempt in facebook video posts 	oylun apak 	political science, computer science 	smsociety 	 save alert research feed mobilizing users: does exposure to misinformation and its correction affect users’ responses to a health misinformation post? 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( ). occupying the intersection: rupaul’s celebration of meritocracy. critical studies in television, ( ), - . https://doi.org/ . / general rights it is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like creative commons). disclaimer/complaints regulations if you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the library know, stating your reasons. in case of a legitimate complaint, the library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. please ask the library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: library of the university of amsterdam, secretariat, singel , wp amsterdam, the netherlands. you will be contacted as soon as possible. download date: apr https://doi.org/ . / https://dare.uva.nl/personal/pure/en/publications/occupying-the-intersection-rupauls-celebration-of-meritocracy( -aecd- d - - dcb a a e ).html https://doi.org/ . / interventions occupying the intersection: rupaul’s celebration of meritocracy joke hermes university of amsterdam, the netherlands michael kardolus university of amsterdam, the netherlands rupaul’s drag race ( – ) started its run on the gay-friendly ‘logo tv’ in , and made its way to the reality television-focused vh network (also part of viacom) in , where it was a great success with mainstream viewers. drag race spoofs project runway ( –) and america’s next top model ( –) by pitching – professional drag queens against each other to become america’s next drag superstar (collins, ). rupaul herself is a drag queen, a gay man and a television host, excelling in all three like no other. we are using ‘herself’ rather than ‘himself’, as one of the authors feels more comfortable calling ru a ‘she’. rupaul does not care about pronouns: ‘you can call me he. you can call me she. you can call me regis & cathy lee; i don’t care! just as long as you call me’ (as declared on the official rupaul’s drag race twitter account, @rupaul #ruference, : am— september ). at the point of writing this intervention, we have had seasons of rupaul’s drag race, seasons of rupaul’s drag race: all stars ( –present) and international drag race versions (either announced or in production). as drag race moved to vh ru won three emmys for best host of a reality competition programme in , and . meanwhile netflix, where rupaul’s drag race is now available in the nether- lands, became the premier on-demand television portal and helped break the stronghold of broadcast television (lotz, ). drag race, it appears, is an intersectional show on multiple levels: it broaches new forms of representation as well as new televisual culture. to us, the international mainstream success of the programme is a celebration of diversity and a clarion call for a new world that is not predominantly white or corresponding author: joke hermes, inholland university and university of amsterdam, wx amsterdam, the netherlands. email: joke.hermes@inholland.nl critical studies in television: the international journal of television studies , vol. ( ) – ª the author(s) article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions doi: . / journals.sagepub.com/home/cst mailto:joke.hermes@inholland.nl https://sagepub.com/journals-permissions https://doi.org/ . / http://journals.sagepub.com/home/cst http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . % f &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - heteronormative. drag race makes you dream of a different kind of television landscape that seems to be on the verge of becoming a reality. in this intervention we want to expand on that: how is this show—a monument to trans and queer representation— twined with how television is changing? and seemingly in contrast to this: might its new-found mainstream success also obscure how its politics of representation can be problematic? this intervention comes in two parts. the first part uses drag race to identify how television has changed not just technologically as a platform and in its business models, but also ideologically. the second part tackles the problematic parts of rupaul, rupaul’s drag race and drag. drag does not make everybody happy, nor are ru’s strong neo- liberal views about making your way and owning your future entirely comfortable. a third issue is how rupaul and the show handle diversity and altercations that involve body politics (strings and bui, ). while a social activist in her own way (raymond, ), ru has taken a long time to speak out on behalf of trans people and when she finally did, it was not what people had expected her to say. the trans moment of television the art of drag satirises gender; rupaul’s drag race does television viewers the camp service of satirising television as a medium. for one thing, the show disproves of lingering connotations of television as a medium that makes viewers passive. the sheer volume of viewers, contestants and additional television content made by its host, illustrates how television has become a cross-media mode of storytelling where professionals and tele- vision lovers challenge one another in a process that takes place across different screens and platforms. this helps television transition away from its former ‘feminine’ inscription as passive (see newman and levine, : ). it is no longer a medium ruled by paternalist public service broadcasters nor can it be identified with the non-offensive content of commercial stations seeking to maximise audience figures or by its key women-addressed genre of the soap opera (see modleski, ; newcomb, ). drag race occupies different ‘spaces’ as annette hill ( ) puts it, one of which is a real-life political space. the election of donald trump has spurred rupaul to give interviews to news media and speak at gay pride rallies on lgbtqiþ representation and rights in current day america. contestants are social activists too: bob the drag queen is a black lives matter advocate, carmen carrera and gia gunn are trans activists and nina west is a lgbtqiþ-youth charity founder. occasionally, discussion of politics enters the television programme both in serious forms, for example in the discussion of the nightclub shooting in orlando in in the third episode of season , and in comedic forms, as in ‘trump the rusical’, which was the main challenge in the fourth episode of season . televisual space is drag race’s most prominent and complex space: this is real-life entertainment cast and produced for television, which spoofs but also is reality televi- sion. it is a televisual space that ru makes good use of as a celebrity. as misha kavka argues when writing about industry convergence shows, this is television crossed with consumer and leisure industries (here drag as performance art) (kavka, : ). it is hermes and kardolus ‘celevision’, the multiplication of screens allowing television a multi- and cross-media presence, linked by the figure of the celebrity and providing individuals with seemingly effortless social mobility and for us, the viewers, forms of deep affective intimacy (kavka, : ). no wonder that for ru to be a television celebrity success, she needs to spark controversy and be both lovable and hateable. this is exactly where television is able to produce economic value (kavka, : ) and where incidentally one’s heart may be broken by one’s hero/heroine. drag race shows how television has become ‘post-television’: it has moved towards a more personal experience across platforms and can no longer be identified as foremost a family medium. it no longer needs to practice suffocating heteronormativity. it encourages active viewerdom of many different guises and offers layered and wide- ranging affective links between media and ideology. drag and gender, race and reality tv: occupying the intersection as much as we love drag culture and commercial television, both have their dark sides. the art of drag has long been criticised from a feminist perspective as a sexist repre- sentation of traditional femininity by men with masculine privilege (taylor and rupp, : ). according to rusty barrett, ‘feminist scholars have traditionally argued that drag is inherently a misogynistic act, primarily because it represents a mockery of women or, at the very least, a highly stereotyped image of femininity and womanhood’ ( : ). while neither of us agrees with this reading of drag culture—we both see drag as a challenge to hegemonic gender ideals—it has to be said that definitions of femininity in rupaul’s drag race are surprisingly rigid. drag comes in many guises. common distinctions are between high and low camp, between camp and fish queens. high camp is pure imitation while low camp allows performers their own style and creativity. ru is a low-camp queen of the glamour camp kind (zervignon, ). the provokingly controversial term ‘fish’ is part of a slightly different distinction where fish denotes real-life likeness (for the queen to represent a convincing woman), and camp the artier and politically provoking forms of drag, in which queens forgo the perfect female illusion in order to fit their act. drag race has historically not encouraged camp drag. competing queens who do not follow the hegemonic ‘fish’ ideal of drag have been admonished since the start of the show by ru and the judges: this is not the kind of femininity we are looking for in drag race. cisgender ‘correct’ representations of femininity are also ‘a thing’ in the work- room and ‘untucked’ discussions among candidates. fights between ‘fish’ and ‘camp’ queens have been a staple of high drama in the show since it started. similarly, highly problematic policing of the female body is also part and parcel of how transgender candidates in rupaul’s drag race have been treated over the years. ru has likened transgender drag queens to athletes who use doping during sports events. allowing them to compete would ‘[change] the concept of what [drag race] is doing’ (aitkenhead, ), implying that trans contestants would have an unfair advantage. until recently, candidates were not allowed to be in transition. this meant candidates had critical studies in television: the international journal of television studies ( ) to stop their transitioning to be able to compete, which, of course, did allow for their emotional coming out as trans women on the show. while this was amazing reality television, it was also painful disciplining of bodies and gender expression of trans can- didates. drag is meant to produce strong gender identities as performance, no matter what body is underneath the outfit. recent seasons have had competitors who identify as trans women, such as peppermint and gia gunn, as ru seems to have altered the rules after the backlash of her controversial statements. what exactly the rules are now, we could not say. it is interesting that ru argued that trans women competing would be making use of an unfair advantage. throughout her career rupaul has preached meritocratic ideals and making good use of your assets (charles, ). ru does not believe in complaining about one’s position or lack of means, nor has she ever believed that intersectional identities speak of oppression and structural inequality. if ru was able to overcome issues of race and sexuality and find ways to satisfy mainstream audiences (read: white straight), everybody else can too. when chi chi devayne in season eight dared com- plain that her lack of resources excluded her from buying the expensive designer gowns she felt were expected by the judges, she was told that she simply needed ‘to make it work’. ru’s denial of structural inequality and meritocratic convictions prohibit her from thinking like the intersectional hero she is for us. (indeed, research into meritocratic convictions illustrates that those who hold these simply have no truck with intersectional understanding, see cech and blair-loy, ; crenshaw, ; littler, ). while drag race is the ultimate case for ‘post-television’ as a hopeful and exciting multiple transition, it is at the same time limited by the ambitions that created it. discussing early seasons of drag race, sabrina strings and long t bui ( ) point out that lighter- skinned queens were far more likely to win. in addition, drag race has encouraged queens to play on racial stereotypes, following the adage that this makes for strong (reality) television. what skeggs and helen wood ( : ) have called the peda- gogical invitation of reality television (of which they are critical for its disciplining of lower-class culture) extends in an unfortunate camp reversal to what is ultimately racist stereotyping. likewise, in the early seasons ru’s allegiance to commercial television was a great joke. drag race looked like a parody of capitalist entertainment. a small group of sponsors would mostly make products available: vodka, make-up, a vacation. prizes you could not be sure anyone would really want to win. the camp tone and feel of the show allowed the prizes and commercials for the sponsors to be hilariously funny in their own right. the more successful the show has become, the less easy it is to read this as parody, which, in a sense, compromises how we watch it: the show has become what it promised to satirise for so long. conclusion ultimately our issue with rupaul and rupaul’s drag race is that we have decided to champion someone who polices femininity, condoned forms of racist logic and said that she does not believe in structural inequality. while for us rupaul and rupaul’s drag hermes and kardolus race are intersectional politics come alive, we may be engaging in a form of self- congratulatory leftist politics that tries to appropriate minority culture. even worse, we might be seen as denying the show and its creators their definitions of themselves in a flagrantly patronising neocolonialist move. while we might want to see ru and the show in intersectional terms, we acknowledge that the purpose of the show is not intersectional at all: it is commercial television and it celebrates neo-liberal meritocratic ideology. so there we are: we enjoy the media products created by the rupaul conglomerate in a most unironic manner and are critical of rupaul’s drag race and our own viewer motives and judgements. it helps somewhat to recognise that even progressive media texts have their problematic aspects. it is a bit like jade’s tucking failure in season one: ‘interesting to see such a beautiful woman with such a big dick’ (edgar, : ). when we venture out of our self-congratulatory bubble (look at us being ‘woke’ viewers), we can see both beauty and awkwardness in the drag that commercial tele- vision likes. the rupaul we know will not care either way: as long as our watching is paying her bills, she ain’t paying these bitches no mind. authors’ note joke hermes is also affiliated with inholland university, netherlands. declaration of conflicting interests the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publica- tion of this article. references aitkenhead d ( ) rupaul: drag is a big f-you to male-dominated culture. the guardian, march, . available at: https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/ /mar/ /rupaul-drag-race-big- f-you-to-male-dominated-culture (accessed august ). america’s next top model ( –) united paramount network (upn)/the cw network (the cw). by entertainment/anisa productions/pottle productions/ty ty baby productions. barrett r ( ) from drag queens to leathermen: language, gender and gay male subcul- tures. oxford: oxford university press. cech e and blair-loy m ( ) perceiving glass ceilings? meritocratic versus structural explana- tions of gender inequality among women in science and technology. social problems ( ): – . charles rp ( ) lettin’ it all hang out: an autobiography. new york: hyperion. collins cg ( ) drag race to the bottom? updated notes on the aesthetic and political economy of rupaul’s drag race. transgender studies quarterly ( ): – . crenshaw k ( ) mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics and violence against women of color. stanford law review ( ): – . edgar ea ( ) ‘xtravaganza!’: drag representation and articulation in rupaul’s drag race. studies in popular culture ( ): – . critical studies in television: the international journal of television studies ( ) https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/ /mar/ /rupaul-drag-race-big-f-you-to-male-dominated-culture https://www.theguardian.com/tv-and-radio/ /mar/ /rupaul-drag-race-big-f-you-to-male-dominated-culture hill a ( ) reality tv crime programs. in: rafter n and brown m (eds) oxford research ency- clopedia of crime, media and popular culture. oxford: oxford university press, pp. – . kavka m ( ) industry convergence shows and the leisure franchise. in: kackman m, binfield m, payne mt, perlman a and sebok b (eds) flow tv: television in the age of media conver- gence. london: routledge, pp. – . kavka m ( ) celevisions: mobilizations of the television screen. in: marshall pd and red- mond s (eds) a companion to celebrity. london: wiley, pp. – . littler j ( ) against meritocracy. london: routledge. lotz a ( ) portals: a treatise on internet-distributed television. ann arbor: maize books. modleski t ( ) loving with a vengeance. london: methuen. newcomb h ( ) tv: the most popular art. garden city: anchor/doubleday. newman mz and levine e ( ) legitimating television. london: routledge. project runway ( –) bravo cable. lifetime television/bunim-murray productions (bmp)/ full picture/magical elves productions/miramax: the weinstein company. raymond j ( ) the politics of transgender. feminism & psychology ( ): – . rupaul’s drag race ( – ) logo/vh television. amazon studios/world of wonder productions. skeggs b and wood h ( ) reacting to reality television: performance, audience and value. london: routledge. strings s and bui lt ( ) she is not acting, she is: the conflict between gender and racial realness on rupaul’s drag race. feminist media studies ( ): – . taylor v and rupp lj ( ) chicks with dicks, men in dresses: what it means to be a drag queen. journal of homosexuality ( – ): – . zervignon a ( ) drag shows: drag queens and female impersonators. glbtq encyclopedia. available at: http://www.glbtq.com (accessed august ). author biographies joke hermes is a professor of media, culture and citizenship at inholland university of applied sciences and teaches television studies at the university of amsterdam. she is founding co-editor of the european journal of cultural studies. michael kardolus has a ba in media studies and is completing his research master’s degree in television and cross media culture studies at the university of amsterdam. hermes and kardolus http://www.glbtq.com << /ascii encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles true /autorotatepages /none /binding /left /calgrayprofile (gray gamma . ) /calrgbprofile (srgb iec - . ) /calcmykprofile (u.s. web coated \ swop\ v ) /srgbprofile (srgb iec - . ) /cannotembedfontpolicy /warning /compatibilitylevel . /compressobjects /off /compresspages true /convertimagestoindexed true /passthroughjpegimages false /createjobticket false /defaultrenderingintent /default /detectblends true /detectcurves . /colorconversionstrategy /leavecolorunchanged /dothumbnails false /embedallfonts true /embedopentype false /parseiccprofilesincomments true /embedjoboptions true /dscreportinglevel /emitdscwarnings false /endpage - /imagememory /lockdistillerparams true /maxsubsetpct /optimize true /opm /parsedsccomments true 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/includebookmarks false /includehyperlinks false /includeinteractive false /includelayers false /includeprofiles true /marksoffset /marksweight . /multimediahandling /useobjectsettings /namespace [ (adobe) (creativesuite) ( . ) ] /pdfxoutputintentprofileselector /documentcmyk /pagemarksfile /romandefault /preserveediting true /untaggedcmykhandling /usedocumentprofile /untaggedrgbhandling /usedocumentprofile /usedocumentbleed false >> ] /syntheticboldness . >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [ ] /pagesize [ . . ] >> setpagedevice international journal of environmental research and public health article building a narrative of equity: weaving indigenous approaches into community-engaged research lisa j. hardy , ,*, kevin shaw , amy hughes , elizabeth hulen , priscilla r. sanderson , candi corrales , travis pinn , jamie esplain and r. cruz begay department of anthropology, northern arizona university, flagstaff, az , usa; travis.pinn@nau.edu social science community engagement lab, northern arizona university, flagstaff, az , usa center for research and evaluation on education and human services, montclair state university, montclair, nj , usa; shawk@montclair.edu cline library, northern arizona university, flagstaff, az , usa; amy.hughes@nau.edu department of sociology, portland state university, portland, or , usa; ehulen@pdx.edu health sciences, northern arizona university, flagstaff, az , usa; priscilla.sanderson@nau.edu (p.r.s.); cruz.begay@gmail.com (r.c.b.) department of politics and international affairs, northern arizona university, flagstaff, az , usa; candi.corrales@nau.edu coconino county, flagstaff, az , usa; jayesplain@gmail.com * correspondence: lisa.hardy@nau.edu received: april ; accepted: july ; published: july ���������� ������� abstract: in , global injustice has taken center stage during the uprising of the black lives matter movement and other social movements. activists are calling attention to longstanding disparities in health outcomes and an urgent need for justice. given the global socio-political moment, how can health researchers draw on current critical theory and social movements to create structures for equitable outcomes in health research and practice? here, we demonstrate principles for effective health research and social justice work that builds on community-engaged approaches by weaving critical indigenous approaches into structural project designs. our project, “health resilience among american indians in arizona”, brought new and seasoned researchers together to collect and analyze data on the knowledge of healthcare providers concerning american indian health and well-being. four years after the conclusion of the project, the team developed and created a post-project self-assessment to investigate lasting impacts of project participation. in this communication, we discuss the principles of defining and measuring the capacity to build together. this work responds to the call from indigenous scholars and community leaders to build an internal narrative of change. while we will not present the full instrument, we will discuss building a strong foundation using the principles of engagement for planning and implementing justice and change. keywords: community engagement; evaluation; capacity building; resilience; campus community partnerships . introduction the complexity of global and local crises is immense. there is not a single solution that can solve urgent, health-related problems. the uprising of social movements like black lives matter, which began after minneapolis police officer derek chauvin murdered george floyd, brings to light many years of longstanding inequalities in life and health. indigenous peoples have also faced health disparities and threats to their well-being and life at higher rates than their nonindigenous counterparts. the relationships between social justice and health are not new for people who live with these threats, nor are relationships that have been unexplored by social scientists and public health researchers. int. j. environ. res. public health , , ; doi: . /ijerph www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /ijerph http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph https://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= int. j. environ. res. public health , , of public health researchers and social scientists have turned to community-engaged approaches to address unequal health outcomes. these approaches provide well documented success in advancing health through multiple forms of knowledge [ , ]. engaged approaches are strongest when they incorporate methods for collapsing divides between communities and institutions, specifically when including people who have more or less economic and political power. indigenous leaders suggest a need for research designs that are developed “with” instead of “on” people in ways that provide opportunities for “counter-storytelling” [ ]. it is in this confluence of approaches that new narratives of impact emerge. this communication presents the principles behind the development of an internal measure of capacity building to discuss a foundation for justice in engaged research that can contribute to narratives of change. . . community-engaged and indigenous approaches community-based participatory research (cbpr) and other engaged approaches share goals of collapsing divides between researchers and the researched by equally incorporating different skills and forms of knowledge. these approaches differ from those that exclusively center professional research skills [ – ]. however, underlying principles of engagement, do not always result in equitable outcomes of project research and practice. even when working toward justice, benefits of health-focused projects are sometimes unequally weighted. for example, people who already have leadership positions in hospitals, health clinics, schools, and academic researchers, may obtain more measurable benefits from grant-funded projects than community researchers who bring valuable insider knowledge and skills [ , ]. for instance, the evaluation of a project may only measure the impact on people who are considered to be “beneficiaries” instead of collaborators. a more inclusive look at capacity might reveal that tenure-track university researchers have gained additional grant experience, which is advanced in scholarships, promotions, publications, and other benefits. the short-sightedness of measuring only one type of capacity building leaves equity in benefits from funding unexplored. developing a more inclusive narrative of how all partners benefit from the project allows groups to understand if benefits are equally weighted [ ]. one way of capturing a more inclusive look at how multiple communities benefit from engagement is to involve all project partners in the evaluative process that incorporates multiple perspectives and reflects on the long-term impact that aligns with and draws on indigenous approaches to research [ , ]. this shift also places trust in the building and the skill development at the center of project goals rather than considering them to be a side effect of partnership projects. our goal in developing a collaborative process for capacity building was in part to create and understand more fully what capacity building looked like for all members of the team instead of focusing only on members of a “community” outside of leadership. we defined the layered definition of capacity building that our group developed together in the results section. the authors of this article include members of original research and post-project evaluation teams. here, we share principles and strategies to continue the conversation of how to measure and interpret capacity building through a process of narrative creation and expand our discussion of the principles used to create a process fully engaged with a research team and community-based and indigenous theories of change. . . context the parent project for the development of the evaluation was called “health resilience among american indians in arizona”, (hereafter “health resilience”), which is funded by the national institutes of health (nih) and national institute on minority health and health disparities (nimhd), under the center for american indian resilience (cair). “health resilience” built on prior engaged studies to investigate health and patient–provider perceptions. project leads (a health scholar and medical anthropologist) developed a strategy to identify and hire community members to join the team as researchers. past employment and degree status were not considered in the hiring process intentionally to reflect a community-engaged strategy [ ]. community researchers became paid employees beginning with a multiday intensive training session and continuing into data int. j. environ. res. public health , , of collection, analysis, implementation, and dissemination. the “health resilience” project team included community and academic researchers of different tribal affiliations, ages, genders, and life experiences. data collection included semi-structured interviews, focus groups, and wellness mapping activities [ ]. researchers obtained permissions through the american indian led local organizations and a university institutional review board (irb). the team gained permission from the navajo nation human research and review board, hopi tribe, and indian health service. once the multiyear project concluded, the team analyzed data and wrote about, presented, and continued “health resilience” in different ways. . . building a new instrument together researchers built capacity by creating their own instrument based on experiences with the project and questions they had about lasting change after the conclusion of “health resilience”. this emergent model reflected a process similar to “counter storytelling” [ ] as an epistemological approach to building knowledge. indigenous researchers have discussed how to make research and evaluation “culturally responsive”, being called culturally responsive indigenous evaluation (crie) [ ]. this varies from a research strategy that uses a vetted evaluation instrument in a local site. in the case of “health resilience”, we specifically created the process to define and understand capacity and relationship building while developing an internal narrative. we did not use a crie-specific research design, though we did develop our instrument through a similarly emergent process that focused on capacity and relationship building, which is in line with indigenous approaches to research. understanding why the group chose to develop a narrative requires replacing a traditional research focus with one that is steeped in community engagement and the values of indigenous focused research. findings from a recent systematic review found that cbpr projects in indigenous contexts yielded improved research and capacity and, at the same time, there was a need for projects that improved rigor by defining research questions in partnership [ ]. over half of the projects reviewed relied exclusively on researcher-defined questions that had not been developed with community member involvement. research with indigenous peoples has been identified as an area where existing evaluation tools are lacking, and where there are opportunities for using principles of engagement to create a new narrative rather than relying on an existing one [ ]. community-, culture-, and language-focused programs tend to show improvements in health, relationship building, and sustainability of change [ ]. in one example, a community-engaged approach was used to develop a “healing model of care” for indigenous people by building crucial partnerships [ ]. these partnerships led to the development of dynamic partnerships that contributed methodologically and in practice to evidence-based models of care. in another example, a research partnership with a native american community developed procedures for measuring cbpr, which included a focus on measuring “level of participant involvement” and “community voice” to be used in the measure trust and “trustworthiness” of an engaged and participatory project [ ]. indigenous researchers highlight the importance of building a narrative for evaluation together [ ]. the development of the assessment allowed for an organic structure of openness to emergent narratives of change [ , ]. the team positioned “community” as a series of overlapping groups including academic researchers and highlighted the need to “integrate knowledge and action for all partners”, as suggested for use of community engagement in tribal contexts [ ]. in our team, there was no definitive line between community and academic partners in that some community members had or have since obtained positions affiliated with the only university in the region, while others had full time appointments there. over half of the researchers were indigenous or american indian with different tribal affiliations. this framework of a broad understanding of community beyond academia and non-academia allowed team members to re-think how people work together to challenge and shift power structures in campus–community partnerships. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . . defining “communities” in engaged research a collaboration that crosses institutional, tribal, social, and other boundaries relies on trust, transparency, and tangible reciprocity to function well. achieving these principles requires project designs and measures that include different communities as both targets of health programming and recipients of the benefits of community-engaged work [ , ]. community-engaged and indigenous-focused approaches to research attempt to decolonize research and methods by reducing the traditional categories of researchers and the researched and positioning people who may not have academic degrees as “cultural experts” over their neighborhoods and social spaces [ – ]. these approaches recognize the benefits of including people from outside institutional settings. for instance, noninstitutional team members learn new skills like team-building and institutional team members learn how to collaborate and learn from the people in the communities of study. in limiting a definition of “community” to people outside of academia and clinical settings, researchers can fail to incorporate a full understanding of how researchers themselves constitute a community, or series of overlapping communities. project leadership at health clinics, hospitals, universities, or other entities constitute a set of communities in the same way that neighborhoods encompass a set of overlapping communities. community-engaged research offers an opportunity to examine benefits and capacity changes over time in multiple communities, including those who already occupy positions of power. ongoing collaborative evaluation helps to ensure that outcomes are reaching through barriers to support equity where it is needed most. the development of evaluation in this setting rests on current challenges to empirical models of data collection and analysis discussed by indigenous researchers and by drawing on foundations that shift the researcher–researched roles to develop new narratives [ , ]. decolonizing implicit bias of power in definitions of “community” in research is necessary for the health and justice of those communities involved in research activities [ ]. . . project assessment in relation to parent project methods for the parent project were designed collaboratively with a group of researchers. the parent project grew out of a series of community-engaged projects. those prior projects resulted in questions about patient–provider communication and american indian resilience. upon funding, project leads developed a hiring strategy to recruit and select researchers from communities of study who were skilled at listening and critical thinking regardless of education or work experience. once the team came together, there was intensive multiday, collaborative training. intensive research for the parent project lasted – weeks, with additional weeks for transcriptions and ongoing analysis. this post-project activity happened long after the conclusion of the parent project. at the conclusion of the project, members of the team continued to stay in contact and work with one another in different capacities. we were curious about how the project impacted all of us, and wanted to ask ourselves and each other about impacts that stayed with us. evaluation models that exist help groups to explore and understand community coalition functioning and capacity building [ , ]. in addition, the creation of the process presented an opportunity for group members to continue their work together in the development of an instrument and the dissemination of results. engaged project approaches and designs include ongoing, iterative evaluation embedded within processes of research and implementation [ ]. development of evaluation was part of the primary collaborative training that the team led and participated in together. leadership was provided by one of the project principal investigators (pis). this pi is not an american indian person, although the other two pis are. she designed and developed the project based on learnings from indigenous scholars and practitioners, and on experience from developing best practices for community engagement with partners outside of academia. this detailed description of the process of development and evaluation occurred on the foundation of a project structure in a communicative environment. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . during research and analysis, team members discussed doing a post-project evaluation together. no one person prioritized this process. instead, it was part of the ongoing discussions during analysis meetings. . after the project ended, several members of the group stayed in touch through professional and friendship connections. one project lead and the person who had served as a research specialist discussed checking in with the group to determine the remaining interest in evaluating the long-term impacts of the project. . a project lead had sent an inquiry via email to the team. all but one team member responded that they would be interested in participating. the team was unable to locate the remaining member of the team. everyone was invited to participate in the discussion, which was possible because of trust established during the parent project. . the group circulated an inquiry asking people to create questions they would like to have answered about lasting impacts of the project and post-project reflections. all team members responded to the email with ideas. . an outside researcher organized the questions into an online survey and analyzed results. this decision was intentional so that the organization of the questions would occur by someone who was not involved in the original project, and therefore did not have a heavy investment in project outcomes. only the outside researcher had access to the raw data to analyze results and to share the results with team members. . all members of the team with the exclusion of two people, who were not available, participated in the development and writing of the manuscript. . materials and methods methods specific to the assessment include project partners reconnecting to create an evaluation instrument to assess capacity at an individual level and to evaluate lasting impacts. the project fostered ongoing engagement and capacity building for team members outside of and within university settings. these relationships provide opportunities for employment, raises or promotion, entrance into graduate programs, new partnerships, new funding proposals, and other tangible opportunities. working together on equal ground to develop the evaluation instrument demonstrated our ability to work together professionally in the years after the completion of the research. final questions and answers reflected our ability to quickly pick up where we left off at the end of the project, and reflected use of our relationships and skills to complete the evaluation. this process was evaluative in practice and in outcomes. . results the most salient outcome of this process was the development of our own way of thinking through and defining lasting capacity building. capacity building has been defined elsewhere as community-level outcomes resulting from leveraging a community’s individual and organizational resources toward addressing collective problems and resources, relationships, and leadership [ ]. approaches to community engagement can add skills, knowledge, experiences, new partnerships, and a breadth of experience to deepen individual and community level knowledge and experience. once a community builds on existing skills to increase capacity, there can be many outcomes that go beyond a project and transform into new partnerships, projects, grants, relationships, and wellness [ ]. we drew on these definitions to develop an operationalized concept of capacity building that reflects increases in skills, knowledge, and ability to design and perform related projects; new and/or improved skills that lead to different employment and educational opportunities; new generative relationships of trust; and new knowledge that leads to other outcomes beyond the stated project goals. capacity building includes human relations skills within a collaborative working team, recognition of project timeline and priorities, and a respectful communication style. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of our view of capacity building began with the understanding that it can impact people on an individual level (e.g., a person obtaining a higher paying job) as well as on a community level (a community leveraging partnerships to bring resources to a neighborhood), and even a larger, policy level (new partnerships that lead to local, state, and federal policy change). capacity building through engagement can add to a skill set and opportunity landscape for community members who may not hold positions of power or have degrees, as well as people who already hold leadership and research positions, by providing a learning experience that leads to better and more holistic relationships between individuals and organizations as the trust and experience grows. our perspective on capacity building reaches beyond the idea that capacity is owned, and distributed by people in positions of power. certainly, people in positions of power can provide training opportunities and access to resources; however, equally important is the ability for project leads and researchers to learn how to engage with communities outside of these entities to challenge inequality. in light of the focus on power and position in engaged work, scholars and partners critique the public health programming that begins with an assumption that researchers hold knowledge and community partners can (and should) learn from them [ , ]. a layered read of capacity building assumes differently positioned groups can learn from one another for a common goal. researchers and healthcare providers can learn from communities, just as community groups may learn from investigators [ ]. . discussion in the burgeoning area of community-engaged work, project teams develop plans based on collaborations between researchers and the researched; however, the relationships between researchers and community partners are not always central to the functioning of these projects. there are numerous reasons for the breakdown of equitable and productive relationships between individuals who already have access to resources before a project begins, including policies that result in unequal pay, structures that only involve community members as recruiters, and other system level issues. indeed, in our own work, we have witnessed projects where inequality between researchers is borne out through unequal employment advancement, lack of transparency in authorship roles in publications, and the weight of ongoing project success falling on people who are already in positions of power. partnerships and relationships between people working together in a community-engaged project are central to the ability of projects to positively impact health and well-being [ , ]. scholars and researchers who work in health knowledge and implementation must consider how engaged practice impacts project team members and communities in multiple ways, and how benefits of research and practice are distributed. highlighting capacity building as a focus of research and practice is one way to measure and understand what works, and to identify possible improvements [ ]. this is a multifaceted alternative to more popular approaches that assess programs, typically dealing with a hierarchical set of dichotomies such as patient/provider or client/provider, and cogently answers many critical concerns coming from indigenous researchers [ , , ]. in our engaged assessment, we implemented a communal-reflective contingent of community building [ ]. the inclusion of multiple team members demystified the barriers usually constructed between academic cultures, students, and community members and opened a space for exploring intersectionality and challenges assumed boundaries of power. this established a balance between flexibility and commitment through collaboration efforts bridging professional and social gaps among different community spheres of influence, which brought about a sense of equitable distribution of knowledge and power. team members developed relationships that continue on through collaborative work. these relationships reflect a greater ability to engage in ongoing work based on the relational aspects of the research, which are the qualities that indigenous researchers define as key principles in understanding and conducting research [ , ]. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . conclusions we recommend that projects with the goal of engaging multiple communities reducing unexplored boundaries of power create a group process of instrument development and analysis. this activity could be implemented annually for multiyear projects and again after the conclusion of the project to explore and measure who benefits from research. it would enable groups to adjust structures to meet the needs of different and overlapping communities participating in research and practice and help to integrate a framework into practice to erode an assumed barrier between a community of need and others. this would be a summative process that could cause community engagement practices to become more deeply woven into present and future project benefits and keep partnerships accountable for areas where benefits could be equitably distributed. author contributions: conceptualization, all authors; methodology, all authors; software, k.s.; formal analysis, k.s.; investigation, l.j.h., k.s., a.h., e.h., p.r.s., c.c., t.p., j.e., r.c.b.; writing—original draft preparation, l.j.h., k.s., e.h., a.h., writing—review and editing, l.j.h., k.s., e.h., a.h. and all authors; project administration, l.j.h., r.c.b.; funding acquisition, p.r.s., l.j.h., r.c.b. all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. funding: this work was supported by the center for american indian resilience (p md ) and the national institutes of health’s national institute on minority health and health disparities. the content is solely the responsibility of the authors and does not necessarily represent the official views of the national institutes of health. acknowledgments: the authors acknowledge all of the time and care that participants provided to 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[pubmed] http://dx.doi.org/ . /fpubh. . http://dx.doi.org/ . /ev. http://dx.doi.org/ . /cdn/nzz http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - -z http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . / - / / http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /ajcp. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /annurev.publhealth. . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.evalprogplan. . . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . million, d. intense dreaming: theories, narratives, and our search for home. am. indian q. , , – . [crossref] . womack, c.s. theorizing american indian experience. in reasoning together: the native critics collective; womack, c.s., justice, d.h., teuton, c.b., eds.; university of oklahoma press: norman, ok, usa, ; p. . © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . /amerindiquar. . . http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	community-engaged and indigenous approaches 	context 	building a new instrument together 	defining “communities” in engaged research 	project assessment in relation to parent project 	materials and methods 	results 	discussion 	conclusions 	references review: workers on arrival: black labor and the making of america, by joe william trotter, jr. | pacific historical review | university of california press skip to main content close 	ucpress 	about us 	blog 	support us 	contact us search search input search input auto suggest search filter all content pacific historical review search user tools register carnegie mellon university carnegie mellon university sign in toggle menumenu 	 content 	 recent content 	 browse issues 	 all content 	 purchase 	 alerts 	 submit 	 info for 	 authors 	 librarians 	 info for advertisers 	 reprints & permissions 	 about 	 journal 	 editorial team 	 contact us skip nav destination article navigation close mobile search navigation article navigation volume , issue winter 	 previous article 	 next article article navigation book review| february review: workers on arrival: black labor and the making of america, by joe william trotter, jr. workers on arrival: black labor and the making of america . by joe william trotter, jr. 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	print issn - 	copyright © stay informed sign up for enews 	twitter 	facebook 	instagram 	youtube 	linkedin visit the uc press blog disciplines 	ancient world 	anthropology 	art 	communication 	criminology & criminal justice 	film & media studies 	food & wine 	history 	music 	psychology 	religion 	sociology 	browse all disciplines courses 	browse all courses products 	books 	journals resources 	book authors 	booksellers 	instructions 	journal authors 	journal editors 	librarians 	media & journalists support us 	endowments 	membership 	planned giving 	supporters about uc press 	careers 	location 	press releases 	seasonal catalog contact us 	acquisitions editors 	customer service 	exam/desk requests 	media inquiries 	print-disability 	rights & permissions 	royalties 	uc press foundation 	© copyright by the regents of the university of california. all rights reserved. privacy policy   accessibility close modal close modal this feature is available to subscribers only sign in or create an account close modal close modal this site uses cookies. by continuing to use our website, you are agreeing to our privacy policy. accept a mathematical approach to study and forecast racial groups interactions: deterministic modeling and scenario method a mathematical approach to study and forecast racial groups interactions: deterministic modeling and scenario method goran dominioni • addolorata marasco • alessandro romano , published online: october � the author(s) . this article is an open access publication abstract globalization and migratory fluxes are increasing the ethnic and racial diversity within many countries. therefore, describing social dynamics requires models that are apt to capture multi-groups interactions. building on the assumption of a relationship between multi-racial dynamics and socioeconomic status (ses), we introduce an aggregate, con- textual, and continuous index of ses accounting for measures of income, employment, expected life, and group numerosity. after, taking into account that groups’ ses assumes the form of a logit model, we propose a lotka–volterra system to study and forecast the interaction among racial groups. last, we apply our methodology to describe the racial dynamics in the us society. in particular, we study the kind and the intensity of asians– blacks–natives–whites interactions in the us between and . moreover, we forecast the evolution of groups’ ses and how interracial relations will unfold between and and in three alternative stylized scenarios. electronic supplementary material the online version of this article (doi: . /s - - - ) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users. & goran dominioni dominioni@law.eur.nl addolorata marasco marasco@unina.it alessandro romano sandro.romano.na@gmail.com rotterdam institute of law and economics, erasmus university rotterdam, burgemeester oudlaan , dr rotterdam, the netherlands department of mathematics and applications, university of naples federico ii, via cintia, naples, italy china university of political science and law, xitucheng road , haidian district, beijing, china yale law school, wall st., new haven, ct , usa qual quant ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &amp;domain=pdf http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &amp;domain=pdf https://doi.org/ . /s - - - keywords racial interactions � deterministic modeling � scenario method � logit model � lotka–volterra systems introduction ethnic and racial diversity is rapidly increasing within many countries. the transformation of united states into a prismatic society constitutes a paradigmatic example of this phe- nomenon. and indeed, according to census bureau projections by non-hispanics whites will amount for less than % of the population (u.s. census bureau ). prismatic societies pose a great challenge for social scientists, as inter-groups studies have often built on the two groups paradigm (abascal ). yet, the methodologies used to analyze the two-party case are not suited for triads (or multi-groups cases), as the latter ‘‘entails a transformation, not simply an extension, of the two-party case’’ (abascal ). for this reason, developing quantitative models to understand, predict and control multi- groups interracial dynamics is a compelling priority. to take on this challenge, we propose a mathematical approach based on a deterministic model of the lotka–volterra (lv) type to study multi-group interactions from a dynamic perspective. this mathematical model, previously introduced in marasco et al. ( a, b), provides a methodology to study the kind (e.g. mutualism, competition, etc.) and the intensity of the interactions among groups and to forecast future dynamics in a scenario framework. we argue that the joint use of the proposed lv model and the scenario methodology offers a key to understand, interpret, and predict multi-groups dynamics. in particular, we study the dynamical interactions among asians, blacks, natives and whites within the united states. the analysis is structured as follows. we start by proposing an aggregate index of socioeconomic status (ses) comprising measures of income, employment, expected life, and numerosity of each group for the period – . then, we show that these ses indices can assume the form of a logit model, and that therefore the corresponding ses functions can be linked to the competitive roles in the lv dynamic framework as shown in marasco et al. ( a). indeed, in our approach the ses functions allow us to highlight and quantitatively measure the interactions among racial groups. therefore, using the proposed model to study the dynamics of the ses indices allows us determine the kind and the intensity of the interactions (in terms of changes in the respective ses) among asians, blacks, natives and whites during the time interval considered. last, we forecast the evolution of groups’ ses and how interracial relations will unfold in three stylized scenarios. in the first scenario we study what is the magnitude of the policies that would be necessary to prevent whites from losing ses shares. in the second scenario we perform a similar analysis, but the goal is to ensure that blacks’ ses shares become at least equal to that of asians. in the third scenario we simulate a period of economic expansion. we disregard the normative appeal of each scenario, as our intention is merely to offer a quantitative measure of the changes required to achieve a given goal or to investigate the impact on ses’ dynamics of a change in some components of the ses. the proposed model is general and applies for any number of racial groups and for any continuous measure of ses. therefore, while in this article we focus on asians, blacks, natives and whites for reasons of data comparability (e.g. the classification of latinos changes across data sources), the analysis can be replicated including other racial/ethnic groups. similarly, it is possible to adopt a different index for groups’ ses. g. dominioni et al. we remark that, although formally the ses functions play the role of the utility functions in a logit model, our methodology in no way implies that the individuals belonging to a racial group consciously organize to maximize the utility of the group to which they belong. instead, the analysis only requires three milder conditions to hold. first, despite being indistinguishable from an anthropological point of view (aaa ), racial groups must be a meaningful unit of analysis from a sociological perspective and in the public policy debate. this is confirmed by the countless domains that are relevant to define the ses of an individual in which there are persistent and significant differences among races (waters and eschbach ; smedley and smedley ) [e.g. life expectancy (day ) and unemployment (u.s. bureau of labor statistics )]. second, given that ses is inherently a relative concept (i.e. the ses of an individual can only be interpreted with respect to the ses of the other individuals) (brown ), we claim that variations in the ses of one group have an influence on the ses of other groups. for instance, an individual with a given level of income can be considered upper-class in contexts in which the average income is significantly lower, whereas the same level of income could qualify her as low-class in contexts in which the average income is higher. therefore, if the income of all racial groups but one significantly increases over time, the socioeconomic status of the group that is left behind will worsen even though its income has not decreased (e.g. average prices will be higher). similarly, despite the fact that the life expectancy of blacks in united states has increased over the last decades, the literature considers that blacks suffer from poor health conditions because they live less (and in worse health conditions) than asians (hayward and heron ). the fact that blacks have a lower life expectancy than other groups sharing the same environment is an indicator that their socioeconomic status is relatively lower in this dimension. the same logic applies to group size. the political influence of a racial group is affected by its relative numerosity, if anything due to the share of votes that it can cast at the elections. for instance, in a country with a small population a racial group composed by a few thousands of individuals might have a relevant voice. the same group would have a negligible influence in a country with a large population. in this vein, if the size of one group increases it worsens the relative position of the other groups. third, we argue that the socioeconomic status is a determinant of the kind of interaction among groups. this is corroborated by research showing that racial attitudes shape (huffman and cohen ) and are shaped (taylor and reyes ) by the ses of the racial groups. in other words, we build on the assumption that there is a relationship between multi-racial dynamics and socioeconomic status. the main findings of the paper are the following. first, we find that the lv model introduced in marasco et al. ( a) can accurately describe and forecast groups inter- actions provided that the ses index for each group are rewritten as a logit model. indeed the measures of error considered indicate that the model is ‘‘highly accurate’’. second, the kind of interaction among the racial groups changes over time, indicating that studies that do not use panel data can only take snapshots of reality. third, our approach confirms that the interactions among racial groups are influenced by macroeconomic factors. in partic- ular, we find that during the financial crisis all racial groups engage in rivalrous interactions and that the intensity of competition is modulated by the severity of the crisis. fourth, we find that only very drastic interventions can prevent the ses share of whites from declining or allow blacks to enjoy the same ses share of asians. last, an economic boom only marginally affects ses shares, while increasing the level of mutualism within the society. the structure of the paper is the following: sect. covers some preliminary methodological issue and the background literature. section illustrates the data and the a mathematical approach to study... method. the results are presented in sect. . section concludes and discusses potential extensions of this research. preliminary methodological considerations and background literature . background literature at a general level, this work relates to the literature that analyzes racial groups ses dynamics. in an influential article hirschman studies the evolution of the ses of asians, blacks, hispanics and white men in the united states between and (hirschman and wong ). his main finding is that the socioeconomic status of high ses minorities tends to converge, or even surpass, that of the whites, whereas disadvantaged minorities (e.g. black) constantly lag behind. although many decades have passed, we find that very similar dynamics still characterize american society. other studies concentrate on the evolution of one of the dimensions of ses over time (generally wages) finding that differences across racial lines tend to be stable over time [see leicht ( ) and references therein]. we contribute to this literature by studying from a dynamic perspective the interactions among the ses of the various groups. two other strands of literature that are relevant to our analysis are studies investigating (i) how the ses of one group influences the attitude of out-group members toward that group and (ii) how the attitudes of the out-group members toward a group influence the ses of that group. taken together, (i) and (ii) show that the interactions among groups are influenced by their respective ses via attitudes. however, while there is a general con- sensus in the literature that racial group ses affects racial interactions (branton and jones ; taylor and reyes ), scholars disagree on the direction of this effect. on the one hand, literature on racial group competition and threat argues that minorities with high ses foster negative attitudes in the dominant white group (blumer ; blalock ). this occurs because as minorities improve their social standing in society whites perceive that they are encroaching their privileged position. conversely, the group contact hypothesis predicts that higher ses levels of racial minorities can trigger positive attitudes in the majority group (allport ). in this view, an equal social standing facilitates positive inter-group contacts. looking at the ses-attitudes relationship from the opposite per- spective, various strands of research investigate impact of attitudes on the allocation of resources among racial groups (pager and karafin ; desante ). this literature shows that racial attitudes create differences in key determinants of ses across racial groups [e.g. job positions (pager and karafin ), wages (holzer and ihlanfeldt ; huffman and cohen ), and government assistance (desante )]. to summarize, variations in the ses of a racial group can affect the distribution of resources across racial groups. this, in turn, can trigger shifts in ses measures of the various groups within a society. another related strand of literature investigates directly how variations in one com- ponent of the ses of a group affects the ses of other groups (cohen ). in this regard, it is important to distinguish two ways in which these effects can take place. on the one hand, changes in the socioeconomic standing of a group always have an effect on the ses of the other groups because ses is an inherently relative concept (brown ). if one group improves its condition while the other remains stable, the position of the latter becomes relatively worse. on the other hand, research on the interactions between racial g. dominioni et al. groups’ ses highlights that variations in ses measures of a racial group can trigger variations in ses measures of other racial groups in absolute terms. for instance, varia- tions in the size of minority populations may lead to reductions/increases in the economic well-being of different racial groups (tigges and tootle ; cohen ; albrecht et al. ). in this regard, cohen ( ) finds a negative relation between concentrations of blacks and their earnings. moreover, he finds a positive relation between the number of blacks and the earnings of whites. therefore, there is a relationship between groups’ ses that goes beyond the mere shift in the relative position of the groups. on this background, the emergence of a prismatic society complicates the analysis, because a multi-racial society is a fertile environment for the emergence of nuanced relationships among racial groups. and indeed, a growing body of literature is investi- gating social patterns in a multi-groups framework (wilkinson ). the present work contributes to this literature by offering a rigorous mathematical approach to test in a quantitative and replicable way how n racial groups interact and influence each other ses. . conceptual framework of the analysis an important methodological premise to this study is defining in a clear and detailed way the ses measure, because ses is a multidimensional and contextual concept that can be measured using many different indicators (braveman ; berkowitz ; berzofsky et al. ). in particular, traditional measures of ses include education, income, employment—sometimes called the ‘‘big three’’—but also wealth, household tenure, parental education, and so on. ses-related measures are sometimes used as single items or suitably combined (branton and jones ; braveman ; berkowitz ; berzofsky et al. ), and are often operationalized as a single ordinal categorical variable (e.g., poor/nonpoor, less than high school/high school/more than highschool, or low/middle/ upper wealth). moreover, measures of ses can have a different scope and range from a neighborhood (identified via zip codes, census tracts, and census blocks) to areas as large as states and regions. as both single and composite measures of ses have some disad- vantages, it is widely understood that there cannot be one universally accepted indicator, and the debate is still open on which are the most reliable (alsabbagh ). it was noted that (i) the indicators should carry as much relevant information as possible, (ii) the indicators used should be clearly spelled out, including their limitations, (iii) and the impact of non accounted factors should be explicitly stated (braveman ). we try to follow these guidelines to build our measure of ses. in detail, we adopt a multi-dimen- sions approach that accounts for measures of income, employment, group numerosity, and life expectancy. we focus on income and employment because they constitute natural dimensions to study interracial dynamics and the reciprocal impact of the various groups on their respective ses. moreover, recent studies show that measures of income, even considered alone, have a high predictive power on relevant outcome variables (alsabbagh ). in addition, to develop a more comprehensive indicator of ses, we aggregate also information relative to groups’ political power and health status. we account for the former by considering group numerosity, because size can positively influence the political strength of a group in a democratic society. this is even more so in societies, such as the american one, in which minorities’ political turnout is positively correlated with increases in their relative group size (fraga ). we account for the latter by including information on life expectancy, which is widely recognized as an indicator of various dimensions of ses [e.g. exposure to pollutants, eating habits, access to health services, exposure to a mathematical approach to study... violent crimes, etc. (harper ; lynch and kaplan )]. admittedly, our indicator overlooks some important component of ses, like education and wealth. we do not include these factors due to data availability and because they cannot be aggregated in a straightforward way with the other measures of ses considered. for example, unlike the variables that we consider, education is not a continuous variable. and indeed, the ‘‘amount’’ of education is traditionally expressed using categories (e.g. high school, bachelor, master etc.). then, in order to include a measure of education in the proposed ses index it would be necessary to build an ad hoc continuous version of the ‘‘amount’’ of education (e.g. as a weight varying in the interval [ , ]). however, we remark that in principle our approach is well suited also when accounting for measures of wealth and education. similarly, provided that the relevant data is available, the analysis can be replicated at a state level or even at a county level. while the indicators chosen are far from foreign to the literature, we adopt a different strategy to aggregate them. instead of obtaining the composite ses measure as a weighted average of their single indicators (sackett ; higdem ), we opt for a multiplicative form. this choice allows us to approximate the behavior of american courts in tort cases when calculating damages awards. as noted by avraham and yur- acko, race-based tables of wage and life expectancy are commonly used to define the compensation owed to a victim of a tort (avraham and yuracko ). assume that in a car accident a white and a black child of the same age die. simplifying to the extreme, if these tables are used a court will determine compensation multiplying the predicted wage of each child for his expected work-life (adjusted according to the specific cir- cumstances of the case). because whites generally live longer and have higher wages, the parents of the white child will be awarded higher damages. this approach has a relevant practical impact on how resources are allocated within the society. for instance, ceteris paribus for a firm it is cheaper to pollute in a ‘‘black neighborhood’’ than in a ‘‘white neighborhood’’ because the expected liability is lower (avraham and yuracko ). in turn, the choice of the firm to locate in a black neighborhood further reduces the ses of the blacks, as an increased pollution is likely to decrease life expectancy. due to the practical relevance of these considerations, we build our ses indicator following the same logic and multiply income, expected life and employment rate. last, we correct the result of this product for the size of the group. as standard manipulations allow us to write each ses index as a logit model, we perform the quantitative analysis using the class of lv models introduced in marasco et al. ( a). these models are a powerful tool to study and forecast the interaction among different entities in a given environment. at a general level, lv models have the advantage of being able to capture every possible kind of interaction (i.e. mutualism, predator-prey, commensalism, competition, amensalism, and neutralism). for this reason, they are widely used in natural sciences, and are becoming more and more widespread in a variety of domains in social sciences [see modis ( ), romano ( ), marasco et al. ( a) and references therein]. there are two main factors that explain why traditionally lv models have been used more frequently in natural sciences. first, the most used lv models are autonomous, i.e., the model equations contain only constant coefficients as in tsai and li ( ), chiang ( ), lin ( ), lakka ( ), duan et al. ( ), cerqueti et al. ( ), thus, the kind and the intensity of the interaction is assumed to be constant over time. intuitively, this is a greater limitation for studies in social sciences than for some studies in natural sciences. for example, it is very unlikely that sheeps and wolves change the way in which they interact, and therefore modeling them respectively as preys and predators for the whole time horizon is a perfectly reasonable choice. on the contrary, g. dominioni et al. phenomena in social sciences are usually characterized by a high variability of competitive roles. for instance, an appropriate marketing campaign can turn a firm that used to be a prey of another into a predator. similarly, we expect that ethnic groups do not have a constant pattern of interaction (brandt et al. ), thus autonomous lv systems are generally not an appropriate choice to model this social dynamics. second, in most cases the analytical solutions of lv models—especially in the nonautonomous case—are not known in a closed form. therefore, the parameters of the model have to be estimated using expensive numerical fitting procedures. this is not always possible in many domains of social sciences that are plagued by data scarcity. the lv model presented in marasco et al. ( a), romano ( ) overcomes both problems. on the one hand, it is a nonau- tonomous model and therefore the competing entities are allowed to change their com- petitive roles over time. on the other hand, the analytic solutions are known and therefore the quantitative analysis is significantly easier and requires less data. importantly, the analytical solutions of this class of lv models are in the form of a logit model introduced by mcfadden ( ), extensively used in every area of social sciences, and also in studies analysing socioeconomic status and race (bayer and mcmillan ). therefore, besides its properties, this model has the additional advantage of being coherent with the main- stream approach to the quantitative study of many social phenomena. differently from marasco et al. ( a), in this paper we can easily design the scenarios since the ses functions are linked in a known way to the components of groups’ ses (i.e., income, employment, group numerosity, and life expectancy). . scenario method in public policy the scenario method consists in developing ‘‘a set of hypothetical events set in the future constructed to clarify a possible chain of causal events as well as their decision points’’ (kahn and wiener ). in particular, scenario planning allows to forecast future dynamics by presenting the crucial elements of a given problem in a systematic and coherent way (burt and heijden ; amer et al. ). if appropriately applied, it is a powerful tool to approach complex problems characterized by a high degree of uncer- tainty in a more rational and effective way (kahn ). moreover, in settings domi- nated by uncertainty, scenarios are useful for ‘‘highlighting implications of possible future system discontinuities, identifying nature and timing of these implications, and projecting consequences of a particular choice or policy decision’’ (amer et al. ). not surprisingly, the literature identifies a correlation between the degree of uncertainty characterizing a given domain and the use of the scenario method (malaska ). as in many policy domains the debate is dominated by the concept of uncertainty (e.g. environmental law (sachs ), health law (sadeleer ), financial law (pacces and romano )), scenario planning can be a useful tool also for policy makers. we contribute to the scenario literature in two ways. first, many of the scenario applications in the public policy area often remain at a qualitative level. we complement this lit- erature by proposing a deterministic modeling approach that translates into deterministic predictions the set of possible narratives. second, we apply the scenario methodology to a domain that is extremely appropriate for scenario analysis due to its complexity and uncertainty, yet in which scenarios—to the best of our knowledge—have not been applied before. a mathematical approach to study... materials and methods . data we collect data on life expectancy, average income, employment rate, and total number of residents for four racial groups (ri; i ¼ ; :::; ): natives (i ¼ ), asians (i ¼ ), blacks (i ¼ ) and whites (i ¼ ). in this data set, the racial group of asian refer both to asian and pacific islanders, natives include american indians, eskimo and aleut, and all racial groups refer both to hispanics and non-hispanics. in particular, we obtain data on life expectancy and numerosity from the u.s. bureau of the census (day ). the life expectancy liðtÞ for the i�th racial group ri, at time t, is obtained as follows liðtÞ ¼ n f i ðtÞ l f i ðtÞ þ nmi ðtÞ lmi ðtÞ n f i ðtÞ þ nmi ðtÞ ; ð Þ where n f i ðtÞ; nmi ðtÞ represent the total number of female and male resident, respectively; whereas l f i ðtÞ; lmi ðtÞ are the corresponding mean life expectancies. we denote by niðtÞ the total number of residents of the i�th racial group ri, whereas nðtÞ ¼ x i¼ niðtÞ is the total number of residents. to fill gaps in the dataset containing the annual values of n f i ðtÞ; l f i ðtÞ; nmi ðtÞ, and lmi ðtÞ, we construct an approximate function that interpolates the available data for each variable in eq. ( ) (years – , , ), then we use this function to find the missing values (years – , – ). in particular, the fitting procedures are performed by using the following fourier series of order n a þ xn r¼ ar cos rpt s þ br sin rpt s � � ð Þ where s ¼ ð � Þ þ , and n ¼ . the data on average income ii per racial group for asians, blacks and whites is taken from the website of the u.s. census bureau, https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/ data/historical/people/. in particular, we take the asians alone, blacks alone and whites alone data at current dollar value. last, the data on employment ei per racial group for asians, blacks and whites is obtained from a report of the u.s. bureau of labor statistics ( ). all the collected data are reported in fig. . . ses index, and logit model supposing that the ses index siðtÞ, at any time t, for each groups is a function of the variables liðtÞ; eiðtÞ; iiðtÞ; niðtÞ, we propose the following analytical form siðtÞ ¼ liðtÞ � eiðtÞ � iiðtÞ � ln þ niðtÞ=nðtÞð Þ mðtÞ ; i ¼ ; . . .; ð Þ where the census does not include the data relative to the income of native americans in the same table. therefore, we derived it from the data on factfinder of the census bureau, https://factfinder.census.gov/ faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml. g. dominioni et al. https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/people/ https://www.census.gov/hhes/www/income/data/historical/people/ https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml https://factfinder.census.gov/faces/nav/jsf/pages/index.xhtml mðtÞ ¼ x i¼ liðtÞ � eiðtÞ � iiðtÞ � ln þ niðtÞ=nðtÞð Þ½ �: we note that the function ln þ niðtÞ=nðtÞð Þ is a weight function to account for the relative size of i�th racial group (see fig. in the ‘‘appendix’’). to highlight the role of each variable in the aggregate indices siðtÞ, we summarize in table all data for the four racial groups in . the ses indices over the period – are reported in fig. (see also table in the ‘‘appendix’’). in order to apply the lv model proposed in marasco et al. ( a) to the study of racial groups interactions, we need to write each ses index in the form of a logit model. as we see in fig. , the role of the ‘‘outside good’’ is played by the racial group of ‘‘natives’’ (i ¼ ), because of their very low ses share. then, introducing the positive functions aiðtÞ ¼ liðtÞ � eiðtÞ � iiðtÞ � ln þ niðtÞ=nðtÞð Þ½ �; i ¼ ; . . .; ð Þ standard manipulations allow to write eq. ( ) in the following form life expectacy population employment income asians blacks natives whites fig. life expectancy (age), total number of residents (millions), employment rate (%), and average income ($) for each racial group over the period – table driving data and the ses index for each racial group in racial group life expectacy (age) population (millions) employment (%) income ($) ses (%) asians . . . , . blacks . . . , . natives . . . , . whites . . . , . a mathematical approach to study... s ðtÞ ¼ þ x j¼ expðfjðtÞÞ ; siðtÞ ¼ expðfiðtÞÞ þ x j¼ expðfjðtÞÞ ; i ¼ ; ; ; ð Þ where the ses functions fi write fiðtÞ ¼ ln aiðtÞ a ðtÞ ; i ¼ ; :::; : ð Þ we remark that, as in the logit models, the ses of the i�th racial group increases when its ses function fiðtÞ increases and decreases when the ses function fjðtÞ of any other group increases. the first relation captures the fact that the ses of a group is positively influenced by increases in the resources (e.g. health, jobs, income) available to the members of the group. the second relation derives from the inherently relative nature of ses. since the status of one group can be determined only in relation to the one of the other groups, positive variations in the ses of one group necessarily negatively affect the ses of the other groups and vice-versa. moreover, due to eqs. ( )–( ), each ses function fiðtÞ increases when one or more functions liðtÞ; eiðtÞ; iiðtÞ; niðtÞ increase and decreases when one or more functions ljðtÞ; ejðtÞ; ijðtÞ; njðtÞ of any other group increase (j ¼ i). how ses shares vary in response to variations of one or more ses functions can only be evaluated by numerical simulations (see sect. . ). . the lotka–volterra model in the following we describe in detail the proposed lv model in which the native play the role of the ‘‘outside good’’ (see fig. ). by assigning the natives the role of the outside good we implicitly assume that their strength is too limited to significantly alter social dynamics at a macro-level. . . . . . ses shares asians blacks natives whites fig. ses indices for each racial group over the period – g. dominioni et al. if we assume that all the ses functions fiðtÞ; i ¼ ; :::; ; are of class c t ; þ ½ Þð Þ it is easy to demonstrate that eq. ( ) are the unique (global) solution of the following cauchy problem _siðtÞ ¼ giðtÞsiðtÞ � siðtÞ½ � � p j¼ ;j ¼i gjðtÞsjðtÞsiðtÞ; i ¼ ; . . .; ; siðt Þ ¼ expðfi t ð ÞÞ þ p j¼ expðfj t ð ÞÞ >>>>>>< >>>>>>: t t ; þ ½ Þ ð Þ where the dot denotes the derivative respect to time, siðtÞ � represents the ses share of the i�th racial group at time t, giðtÞ ¼ _f iðtÞ, and s ðtÞ ¼ � p i¼ siðtÞ. eq. ( ) describes the interaction between the i�th and j�th racial groups by means of their ses indices in a framework of competitive roles varying over time. the evolution of the ses share siðtÞ of the i�th racial group is mathematically determined by two factors: the logistic growth rate function giðtÞ and the competition functions gjðtÞ between the i�th and j�th racial groups. last, according to eq. ( ), the maximum capacity related to the saturation value of each siðtÞ is . we remark that, at any time, the competitive roles are determined by the signs of the functions giðtÞ. hence, according to table the lv model ( ) is able to capture all the possible kinds of competitive interactions. then, owing to eq. ( ), the competitive roles between the i�th and j�th racial groups are determined by the signs of the functions giðtÞ ¼ _f iðtÞ ¼ d dt ln aiðtÞ a ðtÞ � � ¼ _aiðtÞ aiðtÞ � _a ðtÞ a ðtÞ ; i ¼ ; ; ; ð Þ where the functions aiðtÞ are defined in eq. ( ). to clarify the meaning of the possible forms of interactions, let us focus on the two minorities considered: asians and blacks. if these groups stand in a relationship of mutualism an increase in the ses (share) of one group favors the growth of the other group ses (share). importantly, even in presence of mutualism there is no guarantee that when asians gain more ses shares also the ses share of the blacks grows, as the beneficial effect of the growth of asians’ ses on blacks’ ses must be balanced with other factors. an example of mutualism emerging among minorities is the following case. there is table the competitive roles between any pair of competitors siðtÞ and sjðtÞ gi gj type of interation explanation þ þ pure competition the competitors suffer from each other’s existence - þ predator-prey predator benefits from preys, whereas preys suffer from predators - - mutualism symbiosis or a win–win situation - commensalism one benefits from the existence of the other, while the other remains unaffected þ amensalism one suffers from the existence of the other, which is impervious to what is happening neutralism no interaction a mathematical approach to study... empirical evidence that some asian minorities are discriminated on the work place and that this discrimination also negatively affects their health (castro et al. ). similar findings have been reported for blacks (krieger and sidney ). in our framework these forms of discrimination are bound to affect the ses of both groups, because measures related to employment and to health are considered in our ses indicator. let us assume that one group becomes more influential in the political arena (for example due to an increased number of in-group members) and some of its representatives persuade the government to pass more effective anti-discrimination rules. in this case, also the other group will benefit and hence mutualism between the groups could exist. competition is the other side of the coin: when one group gains the other loses. for instance, the access to health services in united states is a scarce resource and is largely tied to the economic status. if asians improve their economic status they will be able to purchase better insurances and ‘‘con- sume’’ a larger share of the pie destined to health care services. this could negatively affect the blacks that might experience a further decrease in the share of health care expenditures allocated to them. there is amensalism between asians and blacks if an increase in the ses of the asians (resp. blacks) negatively affect the ses of the blacks (resp. asians), whereas the ses of the asians (resp. blacks) is unaffected by variations in the ses of the blacks (resp. asians). instead, there is commensalism between asians and blacks if an increase in the ses of the asians (resp. blacks) positively affect the ses of the blacks (resp. asians), whereas the ses of the asians (resp. blacks) is unaffected by variations in the ses of the blacks (resp. asians). it seems reasonable to assume that these interactions emerge when one of the two groups is extremely small, and hence it only has a negligible influence on the other. as the number of asians, blacks and whites is signif- icant, we do not expect to observe these forms of interactions. predator-prey is a more nuanced interaction. in particular, it presupposes that an increase in the ses of the predator harms the prey, whereas an increase in the ses of the prey benefits the predator. last, neutralism simply means that the ses of the two groups are completely independent. equation ( ) allows us to determine a discrete set of values for each ses function starting from historical data on ses shares (see fig. ). therefore, the indirect determi- nation of the analytical form of these functions is obtained by a fitting procedure using the fourier series of order n ¼ with s ¼ ð � Þ þ [see eq. ( ) and fig. ]. . . performance of the lv model on the historical data to evaluate the fitting and forecasting performance of the proposed model, we use the mean square error (mse), and the mean absolute percentage error (mape) fig. ses functions over the period – g. dominioni et al. mse ¼ n xn i¼ hi � pið Þ ; mape ¼ n xn i¼ hi � pi hi ���� ���� %; where hi and pi are the historical and predicted values, respectively (fig. ). the values of the mse and the mape confirm that the model is ‘‘highly accurate’’ in describing interracial dynamics (table ). we recall that the forecasting accuracy by mean of mape can be classified into four levels: \ % (highly accurate), � % (good), � % (reasonable), and [ % (inaccurate) (lewis ; makridakis et al. , ). we note that lv models (autonomous and nonautonomous) have gained in popularity in time-series forecasting due to their simplicity and ability to characterize a real system by using few data points (e.g. chiang ; lin ). nevertheless, we examine some standard forecasting methods, such as those belonging to arima, garch, and sarima families, and compare them with our lv model to highlight the forecasting performances under the constraint of few data (not shown). indeed, due to the paucity of data, we focus on arima models for the dynamics of asians and blacks and compare them with lv models using the mann–whitney tests at significance level of . . according to akaike (aic), bayesian (bic), and schwartz–bayes (sbc) information criteria, the ses shares of asians are well described by an arima process of parameters p ¼ ; d ¼ ; q ¼ (aic value ¼ � : ; bic value ¼ � : ; sbc value ¼ � : ). the forecasted data obtained from lv and arima models are statistically indistinguishable (p value of the mann–whitney test is . ). as we see in fig. (left panel), both models are consistent with the observed ses shares of asians in the years and . similarly, choosing for the ses shares of blacks the arima( , , ) process (aic value ¼ � : bic value ¼ � : ; sbc value ¼ � : ) we obtain the behavior in fig. (right panel). although the ses shares of blacks obtained by lv model belong to the upper prediction band, also in this case the forecasted data obtained from lv and arima models are statistically indistinguishable (p value of the mann–whitney test is . ). we remark that differently from forecasting statistical processes, the proposed lv methodology provides information about competitive roles (i.e. it highlights the kind and intensity of the interactions among populations) both in the past and in the future. moreover, the procedures required in a statistical approach to design future scenarios (see sects. . , . , . , . ) would be extremely complex. this is especially true with regards the data on and was not available at the time in which the article was written. we included this data at a later stage to compare the predictions of our model with the observed dynamics. fig. estimated and observed ses shares over the period – a mathematical approach to study... to the possibility of controlling the considered phenomenon (see scenarios sw and sb ) and evaluating the effect of any (quantitative) variation in one or more of the elements composing the ses (see sect. . ). . scenario methodology and development although there are different approaches, it is frequent to divide the scenario analysis into five main steps (foster ; dong et al. ). following this structure, we begin our analysis by identifying the major driving forces and the key variables that are likely to influence how groups interact and their ses (see table ). we note that the most part of these variables depend on each other. each of these driving forces deserves special attention to understand how inter-groups dynamics will unfold. for instance, affirmative action policies have been shown to effectively benefit minorities by fostering their employment (miller and segal ). in addition, affirmative action increases diversity in the workplace (kalev et al. ), thus facilitating interracial contact, which is an important determinant of interracial attitudes. similarly, media play a key role in shaping racial attitudes and stereotypes (weisbuch et al. ). however, for reasons of tractability and data availability we limit our focus to four of these variables. in particular, we concentrate on measures of income, employment rate, life expectancy and group numerosity. the second step of the scenario analysis consists in developing the scenario logic and the respective story lines. during the first two steps the analysis is prevalently qualitative and it is generally conducted via interviews, surveys and workshops. the third step consists in quantifying the future developments of the main driving forces and the corresponding variables. for instance, a ‘‘low numerosity’’ among whites could be quantified in whites representing only % of the population in the near future. alternatively, it can be studied a ‘‘high numerosity’’ scenario in which the share of the whites is above current levels. these measures are then used in the fourth step to table mse, and mape for our model over the period – racial group asians blacks natives whites mse : � � : � � : � � : � � mape . . . . fig. ses shares of asians (left panel) and blacks (right panel). continuous and dashed lines refer to lv and arima models, respectively. star symbols represent the observed ses shares in the years and . blue and red regions represent % prediction bands. (color figure online) g. dominioni et al. perform a quantitative analysis of the main variables of interest. last, in the fifth step the scenarios are updated and refined on the basis of the availability of new data or knowledge. the lv model presented in this work and introduced in marasco et al. ( a) is suited to perform the last three steps of the scenario analysis, and especially the fourth one. in fact, during the fourth phase quantitative methods have a comparative advantage over qualitative ones in providing accurate forecasts. moreover, we improve on marasco et al. ( a) because we identify the ses functions and hence scenario simulations can be directly linked to changes in the components of ses. using the proposed lv model, we analyze the following scenarios. – business-as-usual (bau) current trends (in terms of population, economy, political/ legislative and culture) are expected to continue. – non-declining whites scenario (sw ) instead of declining, the ses shares of whites in the forecasted period are stabilized around the value of the last historical observation. we calculate the increase in the ses function of whites needed to ensure that their ses shares does not decline and we find that : ðt � t Þ, where t represents the year , provides this result. in other words, as it will be discussed in sect. . , the function : ðt � t Þ allows to derive a measure of the magnitude of the changes that are necessary to achieve a given result (in this case stabilizing the ses share of whites at the value prevailing in ). we therefore modify the ses function of the whites as follows f sw ðtÞ ¼ f ðtÞ þ : t � t ð Þ; t t ; t½ � ð Þ where t and t represent the years and , respectively. – improving blacks’ ses scenario (sb ) the ses shares of blacks in the forecasted period increase at a faster rate than in the bau, and becomes higher than that of asians after the year . we calculate by how much the ses function of the blacks should be increased to obtain this result. we find that the function : t � t ð Þ ensures that the ses share of the blacks becomes higher than that of the asians after the year . given this result, we modify the ses function of blacks as follows f sb ðtÞ ¼ f ðtÞ þ : t � t ð Þ; t t ; t½ �: ð Þ – economic boom scenario (seb) in the forecasted period, the income and the employment rate of all the groups improve. in particular, we assume that the changes table main driving forces and variables to study racial groups interactions main driving forces variables demography life expectancy, numerosity, immigration, age, distribution on the territory,... economy relative and absolute wealth, income, employment rate, international context, knowledge based economy,... political/ legislative affirmative action policies, education policies, housing policies, health reforms, fiscal policies, criminal system reform,... culture education, media, schools programs, political discourse,... environmental climate change, pollution levels,... as for non-declining whites scenario, sect. . further elaborates on this point. a mathematical approach to study... mirror the losses produced by the economic crisis. for instance, blacks during the - economic crisis lost : % of their income, hence we simulate that during the forecasted period the income of the blacks grows at most by : % more than in the bau (by ). then, we consider the following ses function f seb ðtÞ ¼f ðtÞ þ � t � t t � t � � ; f seb ðtÞ ¼f ðtÞ þ � t � t t � t � � ; t t ; t½ �; f seb ðtÞ ¼f ðtÞ þ � t � t t � t � � ; ð Þ where � ¼ � : ; � ¼ � : ; � ¼ � : . to highlight how to modify the main variables to obtain the ses functions in eqs. ( ) and ( ), we proceed as follows. limiting our attention to eq. ( ), we assume that the changes in the ses function f are due to the average income i (or employment rates) only. this is because, in normal circumstances, life expectancy and group size are relatively inelastic in the short term. from eqs. ( ) and ( ) we determine f sw ðtÞ ¼ f ðtÞ þ ln isw ðtÞ i ðtÞ ; t t ; t½ �: ð Þ then, by comparing eqs. ( ) and ( ), we obtain isw ðtÞ ¼ i ðtÞ exp : ðt � t Þð Þ; t t ; t½ �: ð Þ analogously, if we assume that the change in the ses function f is due to both the average income i and employment e , instead of eq. ( ) we obtain aðtÞbðtÞ ¼ exp : ðt � t Þð Þ; t t ; t½ � ð Þ where aðtÞ ¼ esw ðtÞ=e ðtÞ; bðtÞ ¼ isw ðtÞ=i ðtÞ. alternatively, owing to eq. ( ), it is possible to study how future dynamics change on varying the driving variables li; ei; ii; ni (i ¼ ; :::; ). and indeed, any change in these variables result in a modification of the ses functions and of the competitive roles as shown in eqs. ( ) and ( ), respectively. in particular, we show how to modify the income and the employment rate of the four racial groups to obtain the ses functions in eq. ( ). from eqs. ( ) to ( ), if we assume that the change in the ses functions is only due to the functions ei and ii, for i ¼ ; ; , we can write f sebi ðtÞ � fiðtÞ ¼ ln esebi ðtÞ eiðtÞ � isebi ðtÞ iiðtÞ � e ðtÞ eseb ðtÞ � i ðtÞ iseb ðtÞ � � ; t t ; t½ � ð Þ where eiðtÞ and iiðtÞ refer to the bau scenario. setting esebi ðtÞ eiðtÞ ¼ aeiðtÞ; isebi ðtÞ iiðtÞ ¼ aiiðtÞ; i ¼ ; :::; equation ( ) becomes f sebi ðtÞ ¼ fiðtÞ þ ln aeiðtÞ � aiiðtÞ ae ðtÞ � ai ðtÞ � � ; t t ; t½ �: ð Þ g. dominioni et al. to determine the analytical form of the functions aeiðtÞ � aiiðtÞ ae ðtÞ � ai ðtÞ ; i ¼ ; ; ð Þ we proceed as follows. it is assumed a period of economic growth characterized by a ‘‘specular trend’’ of the economic crisis of the years – . then, owing to the historical data of the income and the employment rate of the four groups, we have ae tð Þ ¼ : ; ai tð Þ ¼ : ; ae tð Þ ¼ : ; ai tð Þ ¼ : ; ae tð Þ ¼ : ; ai tð Þ ¼ : ; ae tð Þ ¼ : ; ai tð Þ ¼ : : ð Þ in addition, if the effect of economic growth is supposed to result in a gradual change in ses functions, we can model these functions by second-order polynomials. then, since aei t ð Þ ¼ aii t ð Þ ¼ ; i ¼ ; :::; , we obtain ln aeiðtÞ � aiiðtÞ ae ðtÞ � ai ðtÞ � � ¼ aei tð Þ � aii tð Þ ae tð Þ � ai tð Þ t � t t � t � � ; t t ; t½ �: ð Þ hence, eq. ( ) becomes f sebi ðtÞ ¼ fiðtÞ þ �i t � t t � t � � ; t t ; t½ � where �i ¼ aei tð Þ � aii tð Þ ae tð Þ � ai tð Þ ; i ¼ ; ; : finally, from eq. ( ) we have � ¼ � : ; � ¼ � : ; � ¼ � : : the scenarios that we analyze are reported in table . results and discussion in this section, we present and discuss the historical data and the results of the quantitative analysis performed by means of the proposed lv model. all the forecasting in the scenario analysis extends to the year (see table ). as a preliminary remark, we note that the interactions most frequently observed are mutualism and competition. the former implies that an increment in the ses of one group has a positive effect on the ses of the other group, whereas the latter means that an increment in the ses of one group has a negative effect on the ses of the other. a more detailed description of the competitive roles can be found in the sect. material and methods. a mathematical approach to study... . historical data, and bau scenario before describing the results, we can make some preliminary remarks. first, the ses of whites is substantially higher than the ses of the other racial groups, indicating that they stand in a position of relative dominance. yet, their dominance is closely related to their numerosity, because asians have higher values than whites in all the other indicators (see fig. ). because the relative number of whites is expected to decline, their relative dominance is likely to weaken. moreover, asians are eroding ses shares from all the other groups. this result is mainly driven by their larger relative improvements in terms of income and employment rates. on the contrary, blacks have the lowest growth rate in terms of income, while their employment level is lower in than in . the bad performances of blacks in these dimensions are only partially compensated by their improvements in expected life. as a result, between and the gap between asians and blacks increased. interestingly, in the forecasted future these patterns are expected to partially change (fig. ). an interesting explanation is that blacks—being the weakest group – thrive when there is mutualism in the society, whereas they suffer when society is characterized by rivalrous interactions (see fig. ). and indeed, before the crisis the rate of growth of the ses share of the black population had a positive sign only between and . incidentally, these years are preceded by mutualism between whites and blacks (see fig. ). as the model forecasts that groups proceed in mutualism between and , this might explain why blacks perform well in the forecasted period. let us now turn to analyzing the kind and the intensity of the interactions among asians, blacks and whites by studying the behavior of the interaction coefficients (see fig. ). notably, the model captures the simultaneous interaction of all the groups, which is an important advantage of lotka–volterra models. the most relevant finding is that the groups enter into pure competition roughly at the beginning of the crisis, and the interaction coefficients of all the three groups reach their maximum in , during the spannung of the crisis. at that moment, the groups invert the tendency of the previous years (i.e. the derivatives of the interaction coefficient become negative) and steadily decrease the intensity of the competition to reach mutualism in . a possible explanation is that negative economic conditions induce groups to compete to appropriate the scarce resources available. yet, when the intensity of the crisis reaches a certain threshold the fear of potential losses induces the groups to slowly abandon competitive behaviors in favor of more mutualistic interactions. we remark that in the gdp of the united states decreased by . %, whereas in it only table different scenarios captured by suitable ses functions in the period – scenarios ses functions asians blacks whites bau f ðtÞ f ðtÞ f ðtÞ sw f ðtÞ f ðtÞ f ðtÞ þ : ðt � t Þ sb f ðtÞ f ðtÞ þ : ðt � t Þ f ðtÞ seb f ðtÞ � : t � t t � t � � f ðtÞ � : t � t t � t � � f ðtÞ � : t � t t � t � � g. dominioni et al. decreased by . %. therefore, the losses to be allocated among the groups in were significantly larger than in the preceding years. this behavior during severe crisis is in line with the well established concept of loss aversion. that is, individuals fear losses more than they value gains (tversky and kahneman ), and hence during severe crisis the groups might avoid win-lose interactions for fear of being on the losing side. let us now move to analyze the single dyads of interaction. during the period – asians and blacks always engage in rivalrous interactions (prey-predator between and , and pure competition between and ), thus disproving the idea that minorities cooperate, wittingly or unwittingly, to erode the privileges of the dominant majority. a possible explanation is that the two groups present drastically different traits, as asians are only rarely unemployed, have significantly higher incomes and have a higher life expec- tancy than blacks. therefore, it is very likely that in the political arena the two groups take diametrically opposite positions on many divisive issues. two additional points should be made. a similar pattern is observed also between asians and whites, as the groups always engage in rivalrous interactions during the period – . this finding is in line with the well known group position theory, which predicts that the dominant group reacts in an aggressive manner when exposed to the growing power of a minority that threatens the prevailing hierarchical structure of the society (blumer ). last, we turn to blacks/ whites interaction. here, we observe the only instance of mutualism in the years preceding the crisis. this mutualistic relationship could be interpreted as an attempt to cooperate to prevent asians from eroding other groups ses shares. this attempt abruptly ended when the resources available became scarcer during the crisis. fig. ses shares of asians, blacks, natives and whites over the period – . star symbols represent the observed ses shares in the years and fig. interaction coefficients of asians, blacks and whites – a mathematical approach to study... . non-declining whites scenario (sw ) in the bau, the behavior of ses shares reveals that the dominant position of whites is being eroded by other ethnic groups, and especially by asians. the only factor that keeps whites’ ses above that of asians is the relative numerosity of the two groups. as united states is rapidly turning into a majority–minority society, the relative size of the white population vis-à-vis the other groups is going to shrink thus accelerating the decline of their ses. history teaches that when the dominant group feels threatened it can adopt defensive behaviors and/or support nationalistic parties (e.g. the austrian presidential elec- tions). according to many, the united states are already experiencing a white backlash (‘‘whitelash’’) and the election of president donald trump would be a proof of this (gusterson ). the practical relevance of the whitelash is testified by the fact that it is discussed in scientific articles [e.g. (gusterson )], in popular media (ryan ) and in university courses (e. g. ‘‘white backlash in a dramatically changing landscape’’ (prof. roithmayr), yale law school). also the tax-cut recently proposed by president donald trump can be seen as a signal that the us might be moving in this direction. and indeed, according to some the proposed tax-cut provides relatively small benefits to the middle class, while rewarding more the richest (nitti ). although at the moment of writing any comment on the possible tax reform amounts only to speculation, a tax reform that benefits the wealthiest would indirectly harm the weaker racial groups, and therefore it would contribute to protect the status relatively wealthier groups. for this reason, in this scenario we study what kind of policies are sufficient to keep whites’ ses constant in the forecasted period – . in particular, as life expectancy and group size are inelastic in the short term, we study what changes in employment rates and income level are necessary to prevent whites from losing ses shares in the forecasted future (see fig. ). we find that to prevent whites’ ses from declining their income or occupational level must be increased to reach a ? % with respect to the bau in [see eq. ( )]. acting on employment alone is not a viable strategy, because—for obvious reasons—it cannot be increased by ? % (see fig. ). therefore, the only two available options are to increase income alone or to simultaneously act on employment and income according to eq. ( ). in any case, even when acting simultaneously on both variables the required changes remain very large (still above the ? . % threshold in ). net of any ethical consideration on the desirability of this goal, the analysis reveals that it is almost impossible to prevent whites from losing ses shares by implementing policies that act on income and employment rate in the short-medium term. if a political party decides to embark on a crusade to preserve the dominant position of whites, it must be willing to either work on long-term policies or to take rather extreme measures. inter- estingly, we find that in this scenario whites reduce their level of mutualism toward the other groups and by they engage in rivalrous interactions with both asians and blacks (see fig. ). this result is probably dictated by the new-found strength of whites that no longer feel the need of cooperating with other ethnic groups. . improving the ses of blacks (sb ) blacks are the weakest group of the three considered. this finding is particularly striking if we consider that their number is significantly higher than that of asians. therefore, it is possible that in the near future there will be (more) political pressure toward an increased description of the course available at: http://courses.law.yale.edu/courses/term/ . g. dominioni et al. http://courses.law.yale.edu/courses/term/ equality among racial groups. the surge of the ‘‘black lives matters’’ movement origi- nated in ferguson, mo after a police officer killed michael brown is a clear symptom of this pressure. the fact that president barack obama set up a dedicated task force testifies that the voice of the ‘‘black lives matters’’ movement has been heard at the highest political level and might affect future policies (shannon ). moreover, the recent increase in congress representatives of colour may ease the implementation of pro-equality policies (manning ). in this vein, in this scenario we test by how much the income and/or the employment rate of the black population should be improved to ensure that their ses reaches that of the asians (see fig. ). we remark that blacks are . times more numerous than asians and therefore an equal ses implies that asians still perform better on the job market and in terms of life expectancy. ensuring that the ses of blacks is equal to that of asians requires increasing their income to reach a ? % with respect to the bau. as above, a possible alternative is to simulta- neously act on income and employment according to eq. ( ) (about ? % in ). the required changes remain implausible (see fig. ). there are a number of ways to improve employment rate or the average income of blacks. among them, the most notable are enhancing affirmative action policies, targeting discriminatory practices, increasing tax rates for high income groups while decreasing tax rates for low income groups, etc. however, these policies generally produce effects that are significantly smaller than theone required to ensure that blacks and asians have the same ses. for example, there is an extensive literature trying to identify which share of the wage gap between blacks and whites can be explained by racial discrimination (fryer et al. ). the findings of this strand of literature are conflicting as some authors argue that wage differential is mainly driven by a gap in skills between blacks and whites (neal and johnson ), whereas others find that racial discrimination explains % of the wage differential (reimers ). a recent article locates in between these fig. scenario sw . ses shares of asians, blacks, natives, and whites. continuous and dashed lines refer to bau and sw scenarios, respectively fig. scenario sw . competitive roles of asians, blacks and whites. continuous and dashed black lines refer to bau and sw scenarios, respectively a mathematical approach to study... extremes and finds that racial discrimination accounts for about % of the wage gap (fryer et al. ). assuming that % is a reasonable estimate, even eliminating all racial dis- crimination in wage determination would not suffice to allow blacks to enjoy the same ses as asians. and indeed, thedifference between the income ofblacks and that of whites in is equal to . $. therefore, eliminating the part of the gap that is due to discrimination can only increase the income of blacks at best by around % (or . $). it is unlikely that reducing the gap between the income of blacks and that of whites can be achieved by simply increasing the income of the former. even though it is not necessarily a zero-sum-game, it is reasonable to assume that thevalues wouldconverge, withwhites averageincome decreasing and black average income increasing. similarly, affirmative action policies have been shown to be effective in improving minorities conditions (miller and segal ), yet the size of the effect that they generate is significantly smaller than what is required by this scenario. these findings suggest that to promote equality among racial groups it is mandatory to act on long term variables like education. last, in this scenario blacks abandon any mutualism in favor of rivalrous interaction with both asians and whites (see fig. ). it seems that when the gap between the disadvantaged and the stronger groups decreases below a given threshold the former engages in rivalrous interaction to further improve its condition in society and reach the status of other groups. a corollary of this hypothesis would be that to reduce differences among racial groups it is necessary go through periods of social frictions. . economic boom (seb) last, we study how a period of economic growth affects the interaction among racial groups and the dynamics of their ses shares. differently from the first two scenarios we do not set a target (i.e. keeping the ses share of the whites constant or increasing the ses share of the blacks to the level of that of asians). instead, we study the impact of a change in two ses variables on ses dynamics. therefore, from a mathematical perspective this scenario is the other side of the coin of the first two. as we intend to portray a period of economic expansion, we act on the income and the employement rate of the four groups. the reason is twofold. on the one hand, these components of the ses are conceptually more immediately related to changes in macroeconomic trends. on the other hand, life expectancy and group size are less elastic in the short term. clearly, we have no way to predict the magnitude of an economic boom or how the benefits would be allocated between racial groups with precision. for this reason, we simulate a scenario in which ses dynamics mirror those of the economic crisis. for instance, asians during the – economic crisis lost : % of their income, hence we simulate that during the forecasted period the income of the asians grows at most by fig. scenario sb . ses shares of asians, blacks, natives, and whites. continuous and dashed lines refer to bau and sb scenarios, respectively g. dominioni et al. : % more than in the bau (by ). besides offering a slightly less arbitrary anchor, this choice has an interesting property. as blacks and natives are the groups the suffered more the crisis, in the simulation performed these two groups enjoy larger additional gains from the economic expansions. in principle, in absolute terms the natives and the blacks might still grow less than asians and whites, because we add these value on the base trends predicted by the bau. in other words, if the base growth of whites’ income is significantly higher than that of blacks, the overall increase in income of the whites might still be larger than that of the blacks. thus, we do not postulate that during an economic boom the blacks and the natives will necessarily perform better than the asians and the whites. instead, in line with the economic literature, we claim that an economic expansion can contribute to lessening the racial gap and benefit weaker groups (compared to the performance of each group in bau), both in terms of unemployment rate (couch and fairlie ) and in terms of income (freeman and rodgers ; wilson and rodgers ). at a general level, we note that the simulated economic expansion has a negligible impact on ses shares (see fig. ), whereas it alters the interaction coefficients in a noticeable way (see fig. ). this finding is consistent with the first two scenario simu- lations. it confirms that altering ses dynamics in the short-medium term is extremely hard, whereas the kind of inter-group interaction is more malleable. more in detail, we notice that during the simulated economic boom the ses shares of all the groups remain almost identical. the minimal changes observed point to a very small convergence of the ses shares, given that blacks and natives perform marginally better than in the bau, while the whites perform marginally worse. the finding that—albeit only marginally—an economic expansion can lead to lessening the gap between the strongest and the weakest groups is consistent with the results obtained by the economic literature (wilson and rodgers ). at the same time, we observe that the interaction coefficients of the groups significantly change in the simulated scenario. the mutualism among racial groups becomes much stronger than in the bau and the rivalrous interactions disappear completely. in other words, as the size of the pie increases the groups shift to more symbiotic relationships. this seems to be in line with the observation that during the economic crisis all the groups engaged in fierce competition. conclusion and research perspectives racial groups interactions are an important component of the dynamics underlying the functioning of many modern societies. yet, the growing racial diversity within many countries is making their study—especially from a quantitative perspective—increasingly fig. scenario sb . competitive roles of asians, blacks, and whites. continuous and dashed red lines refer to bau and sb scenarios, respectively a mathematical approach to study... complex. for example, dyadic studies analyzing blacks/whites relations are not apt to capture the dynamics characterizing the modern american society. in this work, after defining a ses index for each racial group and rewriting each of them as a logit model, we employ an integrable nonautonomous lv model to analyze quantitatively and from a dynamic perspective the kind and the intensity of the interaction among these groups. this approach has a number of advantages. first, it can capture nuanced forms of interaction like mutualism and commensalism. second, as the interaction coefficients are explicitly dependent on time, it allows to study how the interaction evolves over time. third, because the solutions of the lv systems are known, the analysis is not data demanding and the interaction coefficients of the model do not have to be estimated via expensive numerical methods. last, when combined with the scenario method, this model helps to understand and shape the evolution of social dynamics. we apply the model to the study of the interactions in terms of ses among asians, blacks, native americans and whites in the united states. however, we remark that our model is general and therefore it is possible to include more groups (e.g. hispanics) or to focus on different continuous measures of ses. in particular, we build an index of ses to study how racial group interactions evolve over time. to build this index we aggregate data on life expectancy, average income, employment rate and group numerosity for each group during the period – . our analysis highlights that racial interactions are inherently dynamic and influenced by macroeconomic factors. moreover, in a scenario framework we study how the ses of the groups should be altered to achieve the following goals: (i) preventing the ses share of whites from declining and (ii) ensuring that the ses share of blacks reaches that of asians. the main finding is that these goals require changes in groups’ ses that are hard to achieve via short-term policies. last (iii), we investigate the impact of an economic boom on interracial dynamics. we find that the ses shares are hardly affected by an economic fig. scenario seb. ses shares of asians, blacks, natives, and whites. continuous and dashed lines refer to bau and seb scenarios, respectively fig. scenario seb. competitive roles of asians, blacks, and whites. continuous and dashed red lines refer to bau and seb scenarios, respectively g. dominioni et al. expansions, and that mutualistic inter-group interactions prevail over rivalrous interactions when the state of the economy is improving. acknowledgements the authors would like to thank dr. enrica pirozzi and the anonymous reviewers for their valuable comments and suggestions, which helped to improve the manuscript. open access this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . inter- national license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons license, and indicate if changes were made. appendix see table and fig. . table ses shares over the period – time ses index asians blacks natives whites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . 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we call it the configuration space. this idea is pervasive in many federico ardila-mantilla is a professor of mathematics at san francisco state university, and profesor adjunto at universidad de los andes. his email ad- dress is federico@sfsu.edu. this work was supported by nsf career grant dms- , grants dms- , dms- , dms- , simons fellowship , and nih grant ul gm - awarded to sf build. for permission to reprint this article, please contact: reprint-permission@ams.org. doi: https://doi.org/ . /noti fields of mathematics, which call such maps moduli spaces, parameter spaces, or state complexes. this article seeks to explain that, for many objects that move discretely, the resulting “map of possibilities” is a cat( ) cubical complex: a space of nonpositive curvature made of unit cubes. when this is the case, we can use ideas from geometric group theory and combinatorics to solve problem . this approach is applicable to many different settings, but to keep the discussion concrete, we focus on the follow- ing specific example. for precise statements, see section and theorems and . figure . a pinned down robotic arm of length in a tunnel of height . the figure above shows its configuration space. theorem ([ ], [ ]). the configuration space of a -d pinned down robotic arm in a rectangular tunnel is a cat( ) cubical complex. therefore there is an explicit algorithm to move this robotic arm optimally from one given position to another. august notices of the american mathematical society . black lives matter on july , , we finished the implementation of our algorithm to move a discrete robotic arm. three days later, seemingly for the first time in history, us police used a robot to kill an american citizen. now, whenever i present this research, i also discuss this action. the day started with several peaceful black lives matter protests across the us, condemning the violence dispro- portionately inflicted on black communities by the amer- ican state. these particular protests were prompted by the shootings of alton sterling and philando castile by police officers in minnesota and louisiana. in dallas, tx, as the protest was coming to an end, a sniper opened fire on the crowd, killing five police offi- cers. dallas police initially misidentified a black man— the brother of one of the protest organizers—as a suspect. they posted a photo of him on the internet and asked for help finding him. fearing for his life, he turned himself in, and was quickly found innocent. a few hours later, police identified us army veteran micah johnson as the main suspect. after a chase, a stand- off, and failed negotiations, they used a robot to kill him, without due process of law. the organizers of the protest condemned the sniper’s actions, and police officials believe he acted alone. the ro- bot that killed johnson cost about $ , ; police said that the arm of the robot was damaged, but still functional after the blast [ ]. the innocent man who was misiden- tified by the police continued to receive death threats for months afterwards. different people will have different opinions about the actions of the dallas police in this tragic event. what is certainly unhealthy is that the large majority of people i have spoken to have never heard of this incident. our mathematical model of a robotic arm is very simpli- fied, and probably far from having direct applications, but the techniques developed here have the potential to make robotic operations cheaper and more efficient. we tell our- selves that mathematics and robotics are neutral tools, but our research is not independent from how it is applied. we arrive at mathematics and science searching for beauty, un- derstanding, or applicability. when we discover the power that they carry, how do we proceed? axiom ([ ]). mathematics is a powerful, malleable tool that can be shaped and used differently by various communities to serve their needs. who currently holds that power? how do we use it? who funds it and for what ends? with whom do we share that power? which communities benefit from it? which are disproportionately harmed by it? for me these are the hardest questions about this work, and the most important. the second goal in writing this article—a central one for me—is to invite myself, and its readers, to continue to look for answers that make sense to us. . moving robots we consider a discrete -d robotic arm 𝑅𝑚,𝑛 of length 𝑛 moving in a rectangular tunnel of height 𝑚. the robot con- sists of 𝑛 links of unit length, attached sequentially, facing up, down, or right. its base is affixed to the lower left cor- ner of the tunnel, as shown in figure for 𝑅 , . the robotic arm may move freely, as long as it doesn’t collide with itself, using two kinds of local moves: • flipping a corner: two consecutive links facing different directions interchange directions. • rotating the end: the last link of the robot rotates ∘ without intersecting itself. this is an example of a metamorphic robot [ ]. figure . the local moves of the robotic arm. how can we get the robot to navigate this tunnel effi- ciently? figure shows two positions of the robot; suppose we want to move it from one position to the other. by trial and error, one will not have too much difficulty in doing it. it is not at all clear, however, how one might do this in the most efficient way possible. figure . two positions of the robot 𝑅 , . . maps to answer this question, let us build the “map of possi- bilities” of the robot. we begin with a configuration graph, which has a node for each position of the arm, and an edge for each local move between two positions. a small piece of this graph is shown in figure . as we see in figure , the resulting graph looks a bit like the map of downtown san francisco or bogotá, with many square blocks lined up neatly. such a cycle of length arises whenever the robot is in a given position, and there are two moves a and b that do not interfere with each other: if we perform move a and then move b, the result is the same as if we perform move b and then move a; see for example the -cycle of figure . more generally, if the notices of the american mathematical society volume , number figure . a part of the graph of possibilities of 𝑅 , . robot has 𝑘 moves that can be performed independently of each other, these moves result in (the skeleton of) a 𝑘- dimensional cube in the graph. this brings up an important point: if we wish to move the robot efficiently, we should let it perform various moves simultaneously. in the map, this corresponds to walking across the diagonal of the corresponding cube. thus we construct the configuration space of the robot, by filling in the 𝑘-cube corresponding to any 𝑘 moves that can be performed simultaneously, as illustrated in figure ; compare with figure . the result is a cubical complex, a space made of cubes that are glued face-to-face. figure . a part of the configuration space of 𝑅 , . definition . the configuration space 𝒞(𝑅) of the robotic arm 𝑅 is the cubical complex with: • a vertex for each position of the robot, • an edge for each local move between two positions, • a 𝑘-dimensional cube for each 𝑘-tuple of local moves that may be performed simultaneously. figure . the configuration space of the robotic arm 𝑅 , . this definition applies much more generally to discrete situations that change according to local moves; see sec- tion and [ ], [ ]. in our specific example, figure shows the configura- tion space of the robot 𝑅 , of length in a tunnel of height . it is now clear how to move between two positions effi- ciently: follow the shortest path between them in the map! . what are we optimizing? is it so clear, just looking at a map, what the optimal path will be? it depends on what we are trying to optimize. in san francisco, with its beautifully steep hills, the best route between two points can be very different depending on whether one is driving, biking, walking, or taking public transportation. the same is true for the motion of a robot. for the configuration spaces we are studying, there are at least three reasonable metrics: ℓ ,ℓ , and ℓ∞. in these metrics, the distance between points 𝑥 and 𝑦 in the same 𝑑-cube, say [ , ]𝑑, is √ ∑ ≤𝑖≤𝑑 (𝑥𝑖 − 𝑦𝑖) , ∑ ≤𝑖≤𝑑 |𝑥𝑖 − 𝑦𝑖|, max ≤𝑖≤𝑑 |𝑥𝑖 − 𝑦𝑖|, respectively. figure shows the two positions of the robot of figure in the configuration space, and shortest paths or geodesics between them according to these metrics. figure . some paths between two points in the configuration space 𝒞(𝑅 , ). the black path is geodesic in the ℓ metric, the magenta path is geodesic in ℓ and ℓ∞, and the cyan path is geodesic in ℓ ,ℓ , and ℓ∞. if each individual move has a “cost” of , then perform- ing 𝑑 simultaneous moves—which corresponds to cross- ing a 𝑑-cube—costs √𝑑, 𝑑, and in the metrics ℓ , ℓ , and ℓ∞. although the euclidean metric is the most familiar, it seems unrealistic in this application; why should two si- multaneous moves cost √ ? for the applications we have in mind, the ℓ and ℓ∞ metrics are reasonable models for the cost and the time of motion: cost (ℓ ): we perform one move at a time; there is no cost benefit to making moves simultaneously. time (ℓ∞): we may perform several moves at a time, caus- ing no extra delay. these two metrics, studied in [ ], [ ], will be the ones that concern us in this paper. the euclidean metric, which is useful in other contexts and significantly harder to ana- lyze, is studied in [ ], [ ]. august notices of the american mathematical society . morning routine i write this while on sabbatical in a foreign city. being the coffee enthusiast that i am, i carefully study a map several mornings in a row, struggling to find the best cafe on my way from home to my office. one morning, amused, my partner may-li stops me on the way out: “fede, you know you don’t always have to take a geodesic, right?” perhaps, instead of the most efficient paths, we should be looking for the most pleasant, or the greenest, or the most surprising, or the most beautiful. . cat( ) cubical complexes our two most relevant algorithmic results are the explicit construction of cheapest (ℓ ) and fastest (ℓ∞) paths in the configuration space of the robot arm 𝑅𝑚,𝑛. still, the eu- clidean metric (ℓ ) turns out to play a very important role as well. most configuration spaces that interest us exhibit nonpositive curvature with respect to the euclidean metric, and this fact is central in our construction of shortest paths in the cost and time metrics. let us consider a geodesic metric space (𝑋,𝑑), where any two points 𝑥 and 𝑦 can be joined by a unique shortest path of length 𝑑(𝑥,𝑦); such a path is known as a geodesic. let 𝑇 be a triangle in 𝑋 whose sides are geodesics of lengths 𝑎,𝑏,𝑐, and let 𝑇′ be the triangle with the same side lengths in the plane. for any geodesic chord of length 𝑑 connect- ing two points on the boundary of 𝑇, there is a compari- son chord between the corresponding two points on the boundary of 𝑇′, say of length 𝑑′. if 𝑑 ≤ 𝑑′ for any such chord in 𝑇, we say that triangle 𝑇 is at least as thin as a euclidean triangle. a b c d a b c d x r figure . a chord in a triangle in 𝑋, and the corresponding chord in the comparison triangle in ℝ . the triangle in 𝑋 is at least as thin as a euclidean triangle if 𝑑 ≤ 𝑑′ for all such chords. definition . a metric space 𝑋 is cat( ) if: • between any two points there is a unique geodesic, and • every triangle is at least as thin as a euclidean triangle. a (finite) cubical complex is a connected space obtained by gluing finitely many cubes of various dimensions along their faces. we regard it as a metric space with the eu- clidean metric on each cube; all cubes necessarily have the same side length. cubical complexes are flat inside each cube, but they can have curvature where cubes are glued together, for example, by attaching three or five squares around a common vertex (obtaining positive and negative curvature, respectively), as shown in figure . we invite the reader to check that the triangles in the left and right panels of figure are thinner and not thinner than a eu- clidean triangle, respectively. figure . a cat( ) and a non-cat( ) cubical complex. we have the following general theorem. theorem ([ ], [ ], [ ], [ ], [ ]). given two points 𝑥 and 𝑦 in a cat( ) cubical complex, there are algorithms to find a geodesic from 𝑥 to 𝑦 in the euclidean (ℓ ), cost (ℓ ), and time (ℓ∞) metrics. thus a robot with a cat( ) configuration space is easier to control: we have a procedure that automatically moves it optimally. we will see that this is the case for the robotic arm 𝑅𝑚,𝑛. . how do we proceed? once i began to feel that this work, which started out in “pure” mathematics, could actually have real-life applica- tions, i started getting anxious and selective about who i discussed it with. it is a strange feeling, to discover some- thing you really like, and yet to hope that not too many people find out about it. when i was invited to write this article, i felt conflicted. i knew i did not want to only dis- cuss the mathematics, but i am much less comfortable writ- ing outside of the shared imaginary world of mathemati- cians, where we believe we know right from wrong. still, i know it is important to listen, learn, discuss, and even write from this place of discomfort. how should i tell this story? should i do it at all? i have turned to many friends, colleagues, and students for their wisdom and advice. mario sanchez, who thinks deeply and critically about the culture of mathematics and philosophy in our soci- ety, is wary of mathematical fashions: what if it becomes trendy for mathematicians to start working on optimizing robots, but not to think about what is being optimized, or whom that optimization benefits? he tells me, with his quiet intensity: “if you’re worried that your paper might have this effect, you should probably emphasize the hu- man question pretty strongly.” laura escobar just returned from a yoga retreat in champaign-urbana where a scholar of indian literature notices of the american mathematical society volume , number taught them the story of arjuna, a young warrior about to enter a rightful battle against members of his own fam- ily. deeply conflicted about the great violence that will ensue, he turns to krishna for advice. oversimplifying his reply, krishna says: “one should not abandon duties born of one’s nature, even if one sees defects in them. it is your duty as a warrior to uphold the dharma, take ac- tion, and fight.” with her usual thoughtful laugh, laura tells me about the distressed reactions of her peace-loving yoga classmates. laura and i grew up in the middle of colombia’s sixty-year-old civil war, which has killed more than , civilians and , combatants and has dis- placed more than % of the country’s population [ ], [ ]; it is hard for us to understand krishna’s advice as well. so we go to the bookstore and buy matching copies of the bhagavad gita. many of my friends who do not work in science are sur- prised by the lack of structural and institutional resources. they ask me: if a mathematician or a scientist is trying to understand or have some control over the societal im- pact of their knowledge and their expertise, what organi- zations can they turn to for support? i have been pos- ing this question to many people. i have not found such an organization, but i am collecting resources. interdis- ciplinary organizations such as the union of concerned scientists, science for the people, data for black lives, and sections of the american association for the advancement of science seek to use science to improve people’s lives and advance social justice. our colleagues in departments of science, technology, and society, public policy, history, philosophy, and ethnic studies have been studying these issues for decades, even centuries. this has often taken place too far from science departments, and it must be said that my generation of scientists largely looked down on these disciplines as unrigorous, uninteresting, or unimpor- tant. governments, companies, and professional organi- zations assemble ethics committees, usually separate from their main operations, and give them little to no decision- making power. how do we make these considerations an integral part of the practice and application of science? i am encour- aged to see that the new generation of scientists under- stands their urgent role in society much more clearly than we do. may-li khoe, whom i can always trust to be wise and direct, asks me: “if you tell me that this model of mapping possibilities could be applicable in many areas, and you don’t trust the organizations that build the most powerful robots, why don’t you find other applications?” she’s right. i’m looking. we later learn that robert oppenheimer quoted krishna when he and his team detonated the first nuclear bomb. . examples just like any other cultural practice, mathematics respects none of the artificial boundaries that we sometimes draw, in an attempt to understand it and control it. this is ev- ident for cat( ) cubical complexes, a family of objects which appears in many seemingly disparate parts of (math- ematical) nature. let us discuss three sources of examples; each one raises different kinds of questions and offers valu- able tools that have directly shaped this investigation. geometric group theory. this project was born in geo- metric group theory, which studies groups by analyzing how they act on geometric spaces. gromov’s pioneering work in this field [ ] led to the systematic study of cat( ) cubical complexes. a concrete source of examples is due to davis [ ]. a right-angled coxeter group 𝑋(𝐺) is given by generators of order and some commuting relations between them; we encode the generators and commuting pairs in a graph 𝐺. for example, the graph of figure (a) encodes the group generated by 𝑎,𝑏,𝑐,𝑑 with relations 𝑎 = 𝑏 = 𝑐 = 𝑑 = , 𝑎𝑏 = 𝑏𝑎,𝑎𝑐 = 𝑐𝑎,𝑏𝑐 = 𝑐𝑏,𝑐𝑑 = 𝑑𝑐. the cayley graph has a vertex for each element of 𝑋(𝐺) and an edge between 𝑔 and 𝑔𝑠 for each group element 𝑔 and generator 𝑠. this graph is the skeleton of a cat( ) cube complex that 𝐺 acts on, called the davis complex 𝒮(𝐺). it is illustrated in figure (b). one can then use the geometry of 𝒮(𝐺) to derive algebraic properties of 𝑋(𝐺). for example, one can easily solve the word problem for this group: given a word in the generators, determine whether it equals the identity. this problem is undecidable for general groups. b d bc c cd abc ac ab a ad dadda cda b dc a figure . (a) a graph 𝐺 determining a right-angled coxeter group 𝑋(𝐺), and (b) part of its davis complex 𝒮(𝐺). phylogenetic trees. a central problem in phylogenetics is the following: given 𝑛 species, determine the most likely evolutionary tree that led to them. there are many ways of measuring how different two species are, but if we are given the (𝑛 ) pairwise distances between the species, how do we construct the tree that most closely fits that data? billera, holmes, and vogtmann [ ] approached this problem by constructing the space of all possibilities: the space of trees 𝒯𝑛. remarkably, they proved that the space of trees 𝒯𝑛 is a cat( ) cube complex. in particular, since it has unique geodesics, we can measure the distance we should approach them thoughtfully and critically; see section . august notices of the american mathematical society figure . ernst haeckel’s tree of life ( ). between two trees, or find the average tree between them. this can be very helpful in applications: if ten different al- gorithms propose ten different phylogenetic trees, we can detect which proposed trees are close to each other, detect outlier proposals that seem unlikely, or find the average between different proposals. owen and provan showed how to do this in polynomial time [ ]. a b c d a b c d a b c d a b c da b c d figure . five of the fifteen squares in the space of trees 𝒯 . these results made us wonder whether one can simi- larly construct ℓ -optimal paths in any cat( ) cube com- plex. new complications arise, but it is possible [ ], [ ]. discrete systems: reconfiguration. abrams, ghrist, and peterson introduced reconfigurable systems in [ ], [ ]. this very general framework models discrete objects that change according to local moves, keeping track of which pairs of moves can be carried out simultaneously. exam- ples include discrete metamorphic robots moving around a space, particles moving around a graph without collid- ing, domino tilings of a region changing by flips , and reduced words in the symmetric group changing by commutation moves 𝑠𝑖𝑠𝑗 ↔ 𝑠𝑗𝑠𝑖 for |𝑖 − 𝑗| ≥ and braid moves 𝑠𝑖𝑠𝑖+ 𝑠𝑖 ↔ 𝑠𝑖+ 𝑠𝑖𝑠𝑖+ . definition associates a configuration space to any re- configurable system. such a configuration space is always locally cat( ). it is often globally cat( ), and when that happens theorem applies, allowing us to move our ob- jects optimally. . why do we map? math historian michael barany points out to me that, struck by the aesthetic beauty of the tree of life shown in figure , i failed to notice another map that haeckel drew: a hierarchical tree of nine human groups—which he regarded as different species—showing their supposed evolutionary distance from the ape-man. modern biology shows this has no scientific validity, and furthermore, that there is no genetic basis for the concept of race. haeckel’s work is just one sample of the deep historical ties between phylogenetics and scientific racism, and between mapmak- ing and domination. if we map from a different—an other—point of view [...] then mapping becomes a process of get- ting to know, connect, bring closer together in re- lation, remember, and interpret. —sandra alvarez [ ] . characterizations how does one determine whether a given space is cat( )? we surely do not want to follow definition and check whether every triangle is at least as thin as a euclidean tri- angle; this is not easy to do, even for an example as small as figure . fortunately, this becomes much easier when the space in question is a cubical complex. in this case, gromov showed that the cat( ) property—a subtle met- ric condition—can be rephrased entirely in terms of topol- ogy and combinatorics; no measuring is necessary! to state this, we recall two definitions. a space 𝑋 is sim- ply connected if there is a path between any two points, and every loop can be contracted to a point. if 𝑣 is a vertex of a cubical complex 𝑋, then the link of 𝑣 in 𝑋 is the simpli- cial complex one obtains by intersecting 𝑋 with a small notices of the american mathematical society volume , number sphere centered at 𝑣. a simplicial complex Δ is flag if it has no empty simplices: if 𝐴 is a set of vertices and every pair of vertices in 𝐴 is connected by an edge in Δ, then 𝐴 is a simplex in Δ. theorem ([ ]). a cubical complex 𝑋 is cat( ) if and only if: • 𝑋 is simply connected, and • the link of every vertex in 𝑋 is flag. in fact, one can also do without the topology: there is an entirely combinatorial characterization of cat( ) cubical complexes. this is originally due to sageev and roller, and we rediscovered it in [ ] in a different formulation that is more convenient for our purposes. let a pointed cubical complex be a cubical complex with a distinguished vertex. definition ([ ], [ ]). a poset with inconsistent pairs (pip) (𝑃,≤,↮) is a poset (𝑃,≤) together with a collection of inconsistent pairs, denoted 𝑝 ↮ 𝑞 for 𝑝 ≠ 𝑞 ∈ 𝑃, that is closed under ≤; that is, if 𝑝 ↮ 𝑞 and 𝑝 ≤ 𝑝′, 𝑞 ≤ 𝑞′, then 𝑝′ ↮ 𝑞′. pips are also known as prime event structures in the com- puter science literature [ ]. the hasse diagram of a pip (𝑃,≤,↮) shows graphically the minimal relations that de- fine it. it has a dot for each element of 𝑃, a solid line from 𝑝 upward to 𝑞 whenever 𝑝 < 𝑞 and there is no 𝑟 with 𝑝 < 𝑞 < 𝑟, and a dotted line between 𝑝 and 𝑞 whenever 𝑝 ↮ 𝑞 and there are no 𝑟 ≤ 𝑝 and 𝑠 ≤ 𝑞 such that 𝑟 ↮ 𝑠. a b d fe c figure . the hasse diagram of a pip: solid lines represent the poset, and dotted lines represent the (minimal) inconsistent pairs. notice that 𝐶 ↮ 𝐹 implies 𝐸 ↮ 𝐹. theorem ([ ],[ ], [ ]). pointed cat( ) cube complexes are in bijection with posets with inconsistent pairs (pips). this rediscovery was motivated by the observation that cat( ) cubical complexes look very much like distribu- tive lattices. in fact, theorem is an analog of birkhoff’s representation theorem, which gives a bijection between distributive lattices and posets. the proof is subtle and re- lies heavily on sageev’s work [ ], but the bijection is easy and useful to describe. pointed cat( ) cubical complex ↦ pip. let (𝑋,𝑣) be a cat( ) cubical complex 𝑋 rooted at vertex 𝑣. every 𝑑-cube in 𝑋 has 𝑑 hyperplanes that bisect its edges. whenever two cubes share an edge, let us glue the two hyperplanes bisect- ing it. the result is a system of hyperplanes associated to 𝑋 [ ]. figure shows an example. the pip corresponding to (𝑋,𝑣) keeps track of how one can navigate 𝑋 starting from 𝑣. the elements of the cor- responding pip are the hyperplanes. we declare 𝐻 < 𝐼 if, starting from 𝑣, one must cross 𝐻 before crossing 𝐼. we declare 𝐻 ↮ 𝐼 if, starting from 𝑣, one cannot cross both 𝐻 and 𝐼 without backtracking. remarkably, the simple com- binatorial information stored in this pip is enough to re- cover the pointed space (𝑋,𝑣). a b d f e c v figure . a rooted cat( ) cubical complex with six hyperplanes. its pip is shown in figure . pip ⟼ rooted cat( ) cubical complex. let 𝑃 be a pip. an order ideal of 𝑃 is a subset 𝐼 closed under <; that is, if 𝑥 < 𝑦 and 𝑦 ∈ 𝐼, then 𝑥 ∈ 𝐼. we say that 𝐼 is consistent if it contains no inconsistent pair. the vertices of the corresponding cat( ) cubical com- plex 𝑋(𝑃) correspond to the consistent order ideals of 𝑃. two vertices are connected if their ideals differ by a single element. then we fill in all cubes whose edges are in this graph. the root is the vertex corresponding to the empty order ideal. we invite the reader to verify that the pip of figure corresponds to the rooted complex of figure . theorem provides a completely combinatorial way of proving that a cubical complex is cat( ): one simply needs to identify the corresponding pip! august notices of the american mathematical society . remote controls and geodesics intuitively, we think of the pip 𝑃 as a “remote control” to help an imaginary particle navigate the corresponding cat( ) cubical complex 𝑋. if the particle is at a vertex of 𝑋, there is a corresponding consistent order ideal 𝐼 of 𝑃. the hyperplanes that the particle can cross are the maximal el- ements of 𝐼 and the minimal elements of 𝑃 − 𝐼 consistent with 𝐼. we can then press the 𝑖th “button” of 𝑃 if we want the point to cross hyperplane 𝑖. this point of view is powerful because in practical applications, the configuration space 𝑋 is usually very large, high dimensional, and combinatorially compli- cated, whereas the remote control 𝑃 is much smaller and can be constructed in some cases of interest. theorem provides algorithms to move optimally be- tween any two points in a cat( ) cubical complex in the ℓ ,ℓ , and ℓ∞ metrics. we sketch the proof in the cases that are relevant here: in the ℓ and ℓ∞ metrics, where the two points 𝑣 and 𝑤 are vertices. sketch of proof of theorem . to move from 𝑣 to 𝑤, let us root the cube complex 𝑋 at 𝑣, and let 𝑃 be the correspond- ing pip. then 𝑤 corresponds to an order ideal 𝐼 of 𝑃; these are the hyperplanes we need to cross. cost (ℓ ) metric: we simply cross the hyperplanes from 𝑣 to 𝑤 in nondecreasing order, with respect to the poset 𝐼 ⊆ 𝑃: we first cross a minimal element 𝑚 ∈ 𝐼, then a minimal element 𝑚 ∈ 𝐼 − 𝑚 , and so on. time (ℓ∞) metric: we first cross all minimal hyperplanes 𝑀 in 𝐼 simultaneously, then we cross all the minimal hy- perplanes 𝑀 in 𝐼 − 𝑀 simultaneously, and so on. this corresponds to niblo and reeves’s normal cube path [ ], where we cross the best available cube at each stage. □ these algorithms show how to move a cat( ) robot optimally and automatically. . automation driving in san francisco, i get stuck behind a terrible driver. they are going extremely slowly, hesitating at every corner, stalling at every speed bump. when i finally lose patience and decide to pass them, they swerve wildly towards me; i react quickly to avoid being hit. i turn to give the driver a nasty look, but i find there isn’t one. what happens if you are injured by an automated, self- driving vehicle or robot designed by well-meaning scien- tists and technologists? when you live this close to silicon valley, the question is not just philosophical. . prototype: a robotic arm in a tunnel if we wish to apply theorem to move an object optimally, our first hope is that the corresponding map of possibili- ties is a cat( ) cubical complex. if this is true, we can prove it by choosing a convenient root and identifying the corresponding pip. tia baker and rika yatchak pioneered this approach in their master’s theses [ ]. for concreteness, let us consider our robotic arm of length 𝑛 in a rectangular tunnel of height . baker and yatchak found that the number of states of the configura- tion space is the term 𝐹𝑛+ of the fibonacci sequence. this seemed like good news, until we realized that these num- bers grow exponentially! the dimension of the map is 𝑛/ , and its combinatorial structure is enormous and intricate. we cannot navigate this map by brute force. fortunately, by running the bijection of theorem on enough examples, baker and yatchak discovered that this robot has a very nice pip: a triangular wedge 𝑇𝑛 of a square grid with no inconsistent pairs, as shown in figure . it is much simpler than the configuration space and only has about 𝑛 / vertices. indeed they proved that the map of possibilities of the robot 𝑅 ,𝑛 is isomorphic to the cubical complex 𝑋(𝑇𝑛) corresponding to 𝑇𝑛. this implies that the map is cat( ), and it allows us to use 𝑇𝑛 as a remote con- trol to move the robot optimally. figure . the map of the robot 𝑅 , and its remote control, the pip 𝑇 . more generally, we have the following. theorem ([ ], [ ]). the configuration space of the robotic arm 𝑅𝑚,𝑛 of length 𝑛 in a tunnel of height 𝑚 is a cat( ) cubical complex. therefore, we have an algorithm to move the arm optimally from any position to any other. naturally, as the height grows, the map becomes in- creasingly complex. after staring at many examples, get- ting stuck, and finally receiving a conclusive hint from the pacific ocean—a piece of coral with a fractal-like structure—we were able to describe the pip of the robot 𝑅𝑚,𝑛 for any 𝑚 and 𝑛. it is made of triangular flaps like the one in figure recursively branching out in numerous directions. this coral pip serves as a witness that the map of possibil- ities of the robotic arm 𝑅𝑚,𝑛 is a cat( ) cubical complex. it can also be programmed to serve as a remote control, to help the arm explore the tunnel. notices of the american mathematical society volume , number figure . the coral pips of the robot 𝑅 , , which contains the pips of 𝑅 , ,…,𝑅 , , shown in different colors. . implementation the algorithms to navigate a cat( ) space optimally, and hence move a cat( ) robot, are described in [ ]. we have implemented them in python for the robotic arm in a tunnel [ ]. given two states, the program outputs the distance between the two states in terms of cost (ℓ ) and time (ℓ∞), and an animation moving the robot opti- mally between the two states. the downloadable code, in- structions, and a sample animation are at math.sfsu.edu /federico/robots.html. with the goal to broaden access to these tools, i joined my collaborator césar ceballos, who led a week-long workshop for young robotics enthusiasts as part of the clubes de ciencia de colombia. this program invites colombian researchers to design scientific activities for groups of students from public high schools and univer- sities across the country. we proposed some discrete models of robotic arms, and our students successfully built their maps of possibilities. extremely politely, they also pointed out that césar and i really didn’t know much about the mechanics of robots, and cleverly proposed several possible mechanisms. after the workshop, arlys asprilla implemented the design on cad and built an initial prototype. . escuela de robótica del chocó arlys, his classmate wolsey rubio (on the right in figure (a), my partner may-li khoe, our friend akil king, and i designed a similar workshop in arlys and wolsey’s na- tive chocó. this region of the colombian pacific coast figure . (a) césar ceballos and students discuss configuration spaces during the clubes de ciencia de colombia. (b) arlys asprilla and one of his robotic arms. is one of the most biodiverse in the world, and also one of the most neglected historically by our government. we partnered with the escuela de robótica del chocó, led by jimmy garcı́a, which seeks to empower local youth to de- velop their scientific and technological skills in order to address the problems faced by their communities. at the end of the workshop, we asked the students: what robot do you really want to design? deison rivas wants to build a firefighter robot; it will quickly and safely go in and out of houses—traditionally made of wood— and put out the fires that have razed entire city blocks in quibdó in the past. juan david cuenta wants to design an agile rescue robot; it will help people stuck under the fre- quent landslides caused by illegal mining operations and by heavy rainfalls on the roads. this theoretical exercise in robotic optimization imme- diately took on new meaning, thanks to the wisdom of these young people. august notices of the american mathematical society http://math.sfsu.edu/federico/robots.html http://math.sfsu.edu/federico/robots.html figure . (a) at the escuela de robótica del chocó. (b) deison rivas and juan david cuenta. . what does it mean to do math ethically? six years ago, my student brian cruz asked me whether mathematicians have an ethical code, similar to the hippo- cratic oath adopted by physicians. more than two decades into my mathematical career, i had never thought or heard of this specific suggestion. thanks to brian, i did some research, gathered some resources with the help of my students, and i now de- vote one day of each semester to discuss this question with them. posing the question to them is surely more impor- tant than proposing an answer: writing assignment. what does “doing mathematics ethically” mean to you? this question is an invitation to recognize the power you carry as a mathematician, and the privilege and re- sponsibility that comes with it. when you enter a scientific ca- reer, you do not leave yourself at the door. you can choose how to use that power. my hope is that you will always continue to think about this in your work. these resources are available at math.sfsu.edu/federico /ethicsinmath.html. arlys asprilla césar ceballos hanner bastidas john guo matthew bland maxime pouokam megan owen rika yatchak seth sullivant tia baker acknowledgments. i would like to extend my sin- cere gratitude to the students and colleagues who have collaborated with me on this research: arlys asprilla, césar ceballos, hanner bastidas, john guo, matthew bland, maxime pouokam, megan owen, rika yatchak, seth sullivant, and tia baker. i am also very grateful to the many people who en- couraged me and helped me figure out how to tell this story. references [ ] aaron abrams and robert ghrist, state complexes for meta- morphic robots, the international journal of robotics re- search ( ), no. - , – . [ ] sandra c. alvarez, tracing a cartography of struggle: reflec- tions on twenty years of transnational solidarity with the u’wa people of colombia, international feminist journal of poli- tics ( ), no. , – . notices of the american mathematical society volume , number http://math.sfsu.edu/federico/ethicsinmath.html http://math.sfsu.edu/federico/ethicsinmath.html [ ] federico ardila, tia baker, and rika yatchak, moving robots efficiently using the combinatorics of cat( ) cubical complexes, siam j. discrete math. ( ), no. , – , doi . / . mr [ ] federico ardila, hanner bastidas, cesar ceballos, and john guo, the configuration space of a robotic arm in a tunnel, siam j. discrete math. ( ), no. , – , doi . / m . mr [ ] federico ardila, megan owen, and seth sulli- vant, geodesics in cat( ) cubical complexes, adv. in appl. math. ( ), no. , – , doi . /j.aam. . . . mr [ ] federico ardila-mantilla, todos cuentan: cultivating diver- sity in combinatorics, notices amer. math. soc. 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( ), no. , – , doi . /j.aam. . . . mr [ ] m. gromov, hyperbolic groups, essays in group theory, math. sci. res. inst. publ., vol. , springer, new york, , pp. – , doi . / - - - - _ . mr [ ] koyo hayashi, a polynomial time algorithm to com- pute geodesics in cat( ) cubical complexes, th interna- tional colloquium on automata, languages, and program- ming, lipics. leibniz int. proc. inform., vol. , schloss dagstuhl. leibniz-zent. inform., wadern, , art. no. , pp. mr [ ] g. a. niblo and l. d. reeves, the geometry of cube complexes and the complexity of their fundamental groups, topology ( ), no. , – , doi . /s - ( ) - . mr [ ] megan owen and j. scott provan, a fast algorithm for computing geodesic distances in tree space, ieee/acm trans- actions on computational biology and bioinformatics (tcbb) ( ), no. , – . [ ] martin roller, poc sets, median algebras and group actions, habilitationschrift, regensberg; available at arxiv: . ( ). [ ] michah sageev, ends of group pairs and non-positively curved cube complexes, proc. london math. soc. ( ) ( ), no. , – , doi . /plms/s - . . . mr [ ] sara sidner and mallory simon, how robot, explo- sives took out dallas sniper in unprecedented way, cnn news, https://edition.cnn.com/ / / /us /dallas-police-robot-c -explosives/index .html (july ). [ ] glynn winskel, an introduction to event structures, lin- ear time, branching time and partial order in logics and models for concurrency (noordwijkerhout, ), lecture notes in comput. sci., vol. , springer, berlin, , pp. – , doi . /bfb . mr federico ardila-mantilla credits opening graphic and figures – (a) are courtesy of federico ardila-mantilla. figure (b) is courtesy of arlys asprilla. figure is courtesy of may-li khoe. photo of arlys asprilla is courtesy of arlys asprilla. photo of césar ceballos is courtesy of césar ceballos. photo of hanner bastidas is courtesy of hanner bastidas. photo of john guo is courtesy of john guo. photo of matthew bland is courtesy of matthew bland. photo of maxime pouokam is courtesy of maxime pouokam. photo of megan owen is courtesy of megan owen. photo of rika yatchak is courtesy of rika yatchak. photo of seth sullivant is courtesy of seth sullivant. photo of tia baker is courtesy of tia baker. photo of federico ardila-mantilla is courtesy of may-li khoe. august notices of the american mathematical society http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / m http://dx.doi.org/ . /aama. . http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.aam. . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / - - - - _ http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - http://dx.doi.org/ . /plms/s - . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /bfb http://dx.doi.org/ . / m https://edition.cnn.com/ / / /us/dallas-police-robot-c -explosives/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/ / / /us/dallas-police-robot-c -explosives/index.html https://edition.cnn.com/ / / /us/dallas-police-robot-c -explosives/index.html http://centrodememoriahistorica.gov.co/observatorio http://centrodememoriahistorica.gov.co/observatorio https://www.unhcr.org/ d d ee .pdf https://www.unhcr.org/ d d ee .pdf http://www.arxiv.org/abs/ . http://www.ams.org/mathscinet-getitem?mr= http://www.ams.org/mathscinet-getitem?mr= http://www.ams.org/mathscinet-getitem?mr= http://www.ams.org/mathscinet-getitem?mr= http://www.ams.org/mathscinet-getitem?mr= http://www.ams.org/mathscinet-getitem?mr= http://www.ams.org/mathscinet-getitem?mr= http://www.ams.org/mathscinet-getitem?mr= http://www.ams.org/mathscinet-getitem?mr= http://www.ams.org/mathscinet-getitem?mr= http://www.ams.org/mathscinet-getitem?mr= racism here, racism there, racism everywhere: the racial realities of minoritized peer socialization agents at a historically white institution racism here, racism there, racism everywhere: the racial realities of minoritized peer socialization agents at a historically white institution jodi l. linley journal of college student development, volume , number , january-february , pp. - (article) published by johns hopkins university press doi: for additional information about this article [ access provided at apr : gmt from carnegie mellon university ] https://doi.org/ . /csd. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ https://doi.org/ . /csd. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ january–february ◆ vol / no racism here, racism there, racism everywhere: the racial realities of minoritized peer socialization agents at a historically white institution jodi l. linley i critically examined the ways racially minoritized college students who served as peer socialization agents (i.e., orientation leaders, tour guides) experienced their campus climate in relation to their racial identities and student ambassador positions. framed by critical race theory, the counternarratives of racially minoritized peer socialization agents at a historically white institution illuminated the ways racially minoritized student leaders experienced pervasive racism despite their prestigious status at the institution. the results of this study suggest implications for practice and future research. many racially minoritized students serve as collegiate peer socialization agents (psas), such as campus tour guides and orientation leaders, at historically white institutions (hwis). as ambassadors of the institution, psas educate prospective and new students about the institution’s “academic life, culture, traditions, history, people” (mack, , p.  ). the influence of peers has long been established in college impact research (astin, ; pascarella & terenzini, ); in fact, chickering ( ) stated, “a student’s most important teacher is another student” (p. ). knowing the pro­ found influence of peers, it makes sense that student affairs professionals use undergraduates as facilitators of socialization initiatives. no doubt, socialization coordinators seek to hire student staff who represent the diversity of their student body (mullendore & banahan, ; pretty, ). seeing diversity among a socialization program’s student staff allows prospective and new students to see themselves as belonging at the institution. given the influence of sense of belonging on enrollment, persistence, and student success (capps & miller, ; hausmann, schofield, & woods, ; mullendore & banahan, ; rode, ; strayhorn, ), hiring a diverse student staff is a sensible strategy toward increasing prospective and new students’ sense of belonging. at the same time, experiences of margi­ nalization for students of color at hwis are well documented in the higher education literature (see harper, ; harper & hurtado, ; smith, hung, & franklin, ). research about the experiences of student leaders of color has further illuminated marginalizing experiences (see arminio et al., ; harper, ; harper et al., ). this literature suggests that racially minoritized psas likely experience incongruities between the dominant institutional narrative about diversity they are trained to promote and their own lived experiences on campus as people of color. psas are often touted as the most presti­ gious and integrated student leaders on campus (abraham, nesbit, & ward­roof, ; mullendore & banahan, ; pretty, ). psas carry a considerable responsibility for socializing prospective and new students. as institutions look to psas to educate prospective and new students, it would benefit higher education leaders to understand the ways racially minoritized psas experience jodi linley is assistant professor of educational policy and leadership studies at the university of iowa. journal of college student development linley the campus themselves. thus, the research question i sought to answer was: how do racially minoritized psas experience their campus climate in relation to their racial identities and socialization agent positions? context harper et  al. ( ) conducted focus groups with black men who served as resident assistants (ras) at hwis. ras facilitate formal socialization (weidman, ), an impor tant part of a student’s process in matriculating to a higher education institution. participants in that study described racial microaggressions, presumptive and negative stereotyping, under­ representation, tokenization, and scrutiny. what about the racially minoritized psas who facilitate anticipatory socialization (weidman, ), giving prospective and admitted students a glimpse into the realities of campus life as students consider enrolling at the institution? to my knowledge, only one study has specifically examined anticipatory socialization and the role of racially minoritized psas, albeit indirectly. in harper’s ( ) study of collegiate racial socialization, male black students who participated in a college bridge program for students of color described their psas—all current black undergraduates—as educating them about the racial climate at the institution. according to these participants, their black psas: advised program participants on how best to respond to racial issues that would inevitably emerge; shared lists of faculty and staff advocates they should seek out when confronted with racism; insisted that these incoming students use resources in campus counseling centers, as well as in black/multicultural centers; touted the benefits of membership in ethnic student organizations; explained the necessity of solidarity among minoritized students; and volunteered to engage in longer­ term success partnerships with program participants. (p. ) these upper­level undergraduates commu­ nicated to new black students the racial realities of campus, including racism, counterspaces, and sources of support. with limited literature about racially minoritized psas, i sought to expand on the important research discussed here. this study is contextualized within literature about campus racial climate and the impact of climate on students’ well­being. woven together, these bodies of literature make a clarion call for this study, in which i sought to understand the ways racially minoritized psas experience campus climate. campus climate i anticipate that racially minoritized psas experience discrepancies and tensions between their institution’s dominant narrative about diversity and students’ own lived experiences. i have formed this assumption based on nearly three decades of campus climate literature and research about racially minoritized students’ experiences of marginalization. hurtado, milem, clayton­pedersen, and allen ( ) conducted a meta­analysis of research on “the sources and outcomes of campus racial climate” (p. ) and constructed a framework for under standing campus climate that deline­ ated external and internal forces. the resulting report, “enacting diverse learning environ­ ments: improving the climate for racial­ethnic diversity in higher education” (hurtado et al., ), remains a widely accepted framework for understanding campus climate (e.g., harper & hurtado, ; yosso & lopez, ). external forces fall into two domains: government initiatives (e.g., financial aid, state affirmative action policy) and sociohistorical forces (e.g., supreme court decision in fisher v. university of texas, black lives matter january–february ◆ vol / no minoritized psa racial realities movement; hurtado et  al., ). internal, or institutional, forces are organized into four interrelated but distinct dimensions of campus climate: (a)  historical legacy of exclusion or inclusion, (b) structural diversity, (c) psychological dimension, and (d) behavioral dimension (hurtado et al., ). in this section, i use the internal forces of the framework for understanding campus climate to organize and discuss literature about campus climate and racially minoritized student leaders. institutional legacy. for the first years of us higher education, the only people involved in teaching or attending college were white men (geiger, ; thelin, ). most hwis have a history of exclusion (thelin, ), and that legacy influences “the prevailing climate” and practices at any given hwi (hurtado et  al., , p. ). according to hurtado et  al. ( ), campus desegregation plans are a defining factor of campus racial climates at hwis. some leaders of postsecondary institutions, aware of the legacy of racial discrimination in higher education, advance espoused values of diversity in an effort to change the landscape from exclusion to inclusion. for example, in a content analysis of viewbooks from us ­year institutions, hartley and morphew ( ) found “the prevailing message . . . was simply that students of all races, creeds and incomes are welcome. diversity is frequently ‘celebrated,’ but ill defined” (p. ). yosso and lopez ( ) noted, “certainly recruitment brochures would not advertise the fact that many universities foster a campus climate wherein whites enjoy a sense of entitlement while racial minorities face charges that they are unqualified” (p. ). adopting a new paradigm can be more challenging in practice than it is in theory, especially when an institution’s espoused theory does not align with its theory­in­use (argyris & schon, ). structural diversity. structural diversity, the second dimension of campus climate, refers to the demographics of student enrollment. many higher education leaders have put considerable effort in this domain as it relates to racial demographics, especially given research that has documented cognitive, psychosocial, and interpersonal benefits of a racially diverse campus (e.g., bowman, ; chang, denson, saenz, & misa, ; gurin, dey, hurtado, & gurin, ; pike & kuh, ). yet, institutions that pay attention to only this dimension of campus climate are participating in what critical race theorist derrick bell ( ) coined interest-convergence. increasing racial diversity in enrollment serves the interests of people of color by increasing access to higher education in response to historical exclusion, while racially diverse enrollments serve the interests of white people by preparing white students for citizenship in a multicultural society. pursuing interest convergence goals without considering all of the dimensions of campus climate results in problems for racially minoritized students, such as tokenism (bell, ; hurtado et al., ). potential negative consequences of focusing only on structural diversity lead to the next dimension of campus climate, the psychological dimension. psychological dimension. the third dimen­ sion of campus climate, the psychological dimension, has been well documented in research about experiences of marginalization and identity­related stress. for example, research has shown that students of color experience isolation, discrimination, and an unwelcoming environment at hwis (allen, ; bennett & okinaka, ; castellanos & jones, ; feagin, vera, & imani, ; harper, ; ortiz, ; smedley, myers, & harrell, ; solórzano, ceja, & yosso, ; turner, ; yosso & lopez, ; yosso, smith, ceja, & solórzano, ). african american students at an hwi in one study “felt personally diminished by nonverbal journal of college student development linley microaggressions perpetrated by their white counterparts” (solórzano et al., , p. ). in a recent critical quantitative study of the impact of positive and negative interactions with diverse peers on students’ psychological well­being, kilgo, linley, and bennett ( ) found that positive diversity interactions benefitted only white students’ psychological well­being. further, these authors found that negative diversity interactions contributed to the accrued stress students of color face in higher education. literature about the impact of marginali­ zation on minoritized students’ psychological well­being often refers to meyer’s ( ) minority stress theory, advanced “to distinguish the excess stress to which individuals from stigmatized social categories are exposed as a result of their social, often a minority, position” (p. ). minority stress theory connects individuals’ minoritized identities to their health. several studies have explored identity­related stress for students of color (see saldaña, ; smedley et  al., ; smith et al., ; wei et al., ). for individuals with racially minoritized identities, minority stress might include intergroup relations (e.g., difficulties with peers from whom one is different), intragroup conflict (e.g., feeling rejected among same or similar­identity peers), achievement stress (e.g., feeling less capable than others), and explicit experiences of discrimination (e.g., racism; meyer, ; smedley et  al., ; wei et al., ). smith et al. ( ) extended this concept to what they coined racial battle fatigue for racially minoritized individuals in predominantly white environments “replete with gendered racism, blocked opportunities, and mundane, extreme, environmental stress” (p. ). “fatigue” references the additional energy required to cope with racism, energy that one must redirect “from more positive life fulfilling desires” (p. ). no doubt, racially minoritized collegians experience the fatigue of minority stress as described in this section. while student leadership engagement may generally contribute to students’ persistence and success in college (astin, ; tinto, ), leadership does not mitigate racially minoritized student leaders’ experiences of racism. predating harper and colleagues’ research discussed earlier, a qualitative study of student leaders of color by arminio et  al. ( ) shed important light on the racialized experiences students of color serving in leadership roles faced. arminio and colleagues interviewed students of color in various leadership positions at two institutions. students in that study rejected the label of “leader” because it often indicated to their same­race peers that they were “selling out” to the system that oppressed them. students discussed loss of relationships as one of several collateral damages to serving as a leader; students also described losing privacy, feeling as though their every move was watched and noted by the institution. by and large, students with racially minoritized identities experience racism on hwi campuses, and it negatively impacts their psychological well­being. behavioral dimension. the fourth dimen­ sion of campus climate, the behavioral dimen­ sion, is about the ways students interact with each other. the overwhelming and enduring view of intergroup relations on hwi campuses is one of racial and ethnic clustering (altbach & lomotey, ; villalpando, ). research about racial clustering at hwis has established that for students of color, clustering is a form of cultural support within a larger environment that is perceived as unsupportive (loo & rolison, ; solórzano et al., ; yosso & lopez, ). for racially minoritized students, racial clustering may provide reprieve and empowerment with peers who understand the fatigue of persistent racism. “counter­spaces january–february ◆ vol / no minoritized psa racial realities serve as sites where deficit notions of people of color can be challenged and where a positive collegiate racial climate can be established and maintained” (solórzano et  al., , p. ). loo and rolison ( ) emphasized that students of color can feel a sense of belonging among their racial or ethnic subculture while simultaneously feeling alienated from the larger institutional environment. in addition to the literature about racial clustering and counter­spaces, literature about racial microaggressions illustrates the ways students interact with each other across racial differences. social psychologists have documented the ways racism has evolved in recent decades, from public, conscious displays of overt racial bigotry to subtle, covert forms that are more difficult to identify as racism (see dovidio, gaertner, kawakami, & hodson, ). aversive racism manifests as racial microaggressions, which are “brief and commonplace daily verbal, behavioral, and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial slights and insults to the target person or group” (sue et al., , p. ). sue and colleagues (sue, ; sue et  al., ) delineated three distinct forms of racial microaggressions: microinvalidations, microinsults, and microassaults. microinvalidations “exclude, negate, or nullify the psychological thoughts, feel­ ings, or experiential reality of a person of color” (sue et  al., , p. ). on hwi campuses, microinvalidations would include a white student telling a student of color that the student of color is overly sensitive when the student of color describes a racist experience; and a white student telling a peer of color that the white student does not “see” race. microinsults “convey rudeness and insensitivity and demean a person’s racial heritage or identity” (sue et al., , p. ). examples of microinsults at hwis include a white student asking a student of color if he or she was admitted to the college on a diversity scholarship; and a white campus administrator leading a search process and saying the most qualified person should be hired, regardless of race. microassaults are more explicit than the other two forms, communicating a “verbal or nonverbal attack meant to hurt the intended victim through name­calling, avoidant behavior, or purposeful discriminatory actions” (sue et  al., , p. ). at an hwi, examples of microassaults would include a white student writing a racial epithet on the residence hall door of a student of color; and a server at the campus café serving a white student before a student of color. together, these bodies of literature led me to believe that racially minoritized psas likely experience discrepancies between their institution’s dominant narrative about diversity and inclusion they are trained to promote and students’ own lived experiences on campus. theoretical framework critical race theory (crt) provides the framework for this study. legal scholars developed crt in the s, and it has since evolved as a theoretical framework for social science research. drawing from interdisciplinary perspectives across history, women’s studies, ethnic studies, sociology, education, and law, crt advances a set of defining tenets that illuminate systemic racial inequities in the united states (bell, ; delgado & stefancic, ). three tenets of crt framed this study. first, crt scholars acknowledge racism is a form of power (solórzano et al., ) so engrained in us society that it is ordinary and permanent (bell, ; delgado & stefancic, ). assumptions of white supremacy are so common that they are difficult for whites journal of college student development linley to recognize (delgado & stefancic, ; taylor, ). in this study, acknowledging the pervasiveness of racism informed the analysis of the data. rather than asking, “do racially minoritized psas experience racism on campus?” i approached the data asking, “in what ways do racially minoritized psas experience racism on campus?” second, crt unveils dominant ideology (bell, ; yosso et  al., ) by exposing interest convergence, bell’s ( ) theory that articulates that progress toward racial equity happens only when the interests of people of color converge with the interests of whites. for example, many higher education leaders who support affirmative action policies, which benefit people of color, simultaneously argue the benefits of a racially diverse student body for white college students (gurin et  al., ). this tenet informed the larger study from which the data were originally collected. specifically, this tenet facilitated the illumination of the perspectiveless dominant narrative promoted by socialization programs at the study site. this tenet further informed the practical implications of the study. third, crt values racially minoritized individuals’ narratives as legitimate and authoritative knowledge (bell, ; solórzano & yosso, ) that can “redirect the dominant gaze, to make it see from a new point of view what has been there all along” (taylor, , p.  ). counter to the dominant narrative, counternarratives problematize supposed race neutrality (solórzano, ), notions of merit (taylor, ), and racial preconceptions and myths (delgado & stefancic, ). this tenet guided data collection for my study (narrative inquiry) and the write­up of the findings, amplifying students’ voices to illustrate their racial realities. the dominant narrative about psas is that they are some of the most integrated student leaders on any campus. this tenet of crt problematized that narrative by guiding me to centralize the campus experiences of racially minoritized psas in their own voices. crt can help higher education practi­ tioners and scholars “recognize patterns, practices, and policies of racial inequality” such that they can be dismantled (villalpando, , p. ). in a different article about the minoritized psas in this study, i described the dominant institutional narrative psas were expected to promote as one of racial unity (linley, ). recognizing the dominant narrative as perpetuating white supremacy (bell, ; solórzano, ; yosso et  al., ), i sought to give voice to the ways racially minoritized psas experience their campus climate in relation to their racial identities and socialization agent positions. counternarratives of racially minoritized psas convey the racial realities of campus in the voices of those marginalized on campus (delgado & stefancic, ; solórzano & yosso, ), thus challenging the narra tive of racial unity while providing first­hand knowledge of racial discrimination faced by racially minoritized psas whose counternarratives also serve to end the silence and onlyness faced by racially minoritized collegiate leaders at hwis by naming their racialized experiences while revealing that other racially minoritized student leaders have similar experiences. method the data for this analysis are from a broader study of the ways minoritized psas (students of color, lgbq students, trans* students, students with disabilities, students from low­ income backgrounds, and first­generation college students) make meaning of their collegiate contexts. i used a critical constructivist methodology, that is, a qualitative process that centers interpretation and joint construction of knowledge while critiquing and challenging january–february ◆ vol / no minoritized psa racial realities power structures (kincheloe, ; merriam, ). grounded by crt, i used narrative inquiry methods to invite minoritized psas to share their counternarratives about their collegiate experiences and their psa positions (delgado & stefancic, ). site selection: midwest university the study site is a large, predominantly and historically white, midwestern, research university. i refer to the institution as midwest university (mu) and the mascot as the bulldogs. mu’s enrollment was more than , students, with approximately , undergraduates. people of color composed % of the student body. participants the study sample was recruited from minori­ tized psas who facilitate anticipatory sociali­ zation initiatives, including recruitment, summer orientation, welcome week, and a ­day institute for entering students of color and first­generation students. i conducted criterion (lecompte & preissle, ) and snowball (merriam, ; rossman & rallis, ) sampling in search of rich, thick descriptions of counternarratives from minori tized psas. all student affairs professionals who coordinate socialization initiatives at mu forwarded an invitation to participate in the study to their respective socialization teams. initially, psas expressed interest to participate within the first week of advertising the study, and the remaining participants resulted from snowball sampling. ultimately, psas expressed interest and psas met the selection criteria. this article details the narratives of the participants who identify as people of color. the racially minoritized psas who partici­ pated in this study (see table  ) selected pseudonyms and gave informed consent. as a strategy to maintain students’ confidentiality, i refrain from reporting the socialization table . racially minoritized peer socialization agents pseudonym status at mu gender minoritized identity(ies) danielle third year woman african american emma third year woman biracial (mexican and japanese) jennifer third year woman multiracial (white and filipino) kelly third year woman african american, first-generation student logan fourth year genderqueer latinx, gay, genderqueer, student with a disability maria third year woman latinx, low-income background, first-generation student miss green fourth year woman black mitochondria third year woman black sharon graduate woman african american, first-generation student, low-income background zac fifth year man latinx, gay, low-income background, first-generation student zora third year woman african american journal of college student development linley initiatives that individual students served. together, racially minoritized psas in this study represented psa positions for recruitment (tour guides), summer orientation, welcome week, and a ­day institute for entering students of color and first­generation students. data collection and analysis each participant completed two semi­struc­ tured interviews (glesne, ), and each interview lasted approximately minutes. after the second interview, i sent each parti­ cipant a $ gift card. all participants agreed to be audio recorded. after verbatim transcription, i uploaded transcripts to a qualitative research application and used the constant comparative method of data analysis (corbin & strauss, ; glaser & strauss, ). trustworthiness i established trustworthiness by engaging participants in member­checking and engaging peers in debriefing (creswell & miller, ). i invited participants to give feedback on their initial interview transcripts and in response to my initial write­up of the findings. two peers who direct anticipatory socialization programs at different midwestern hwis read and provided written and verbal feedback on the findings and implications of the study. limitations foremost, my positionality was a potential barrier in the study. for racially minoritized psas who experience discrepancies between their institutional culture and lived experiences, my privileged white identity may have represented the structures that oppress them, creating an obstacle to participate or to be fully open with me about their experiences. some of my roles represent differences in power and also could be barriers. for example, as a faculty member, i have power over undergraduate students and psas may perceive that power as negating their agency to participate or be critical. throughout this study, i reflected on my privileged identities continuously and worked to minimize their effects on the study and on the participants. in practice, this included conducting interviews in spaces selected by participants instead of my office, spending time before and after each interview developing rapport, and communicating my own critique of the institution’s dominant narrative of supposed inclusion. further, as i journaled after each interview, i challenged myself to be aware of my whiteness and how it influenced my perspectives and interpretations of the interviews. as i analyzed data, i centered participants’ narratives as true and authoritative by using participants’ words and quotes to identify themes to describe the ways racially minoritized psas experience their campus climate in relation to their racial identities and socialization agent positions. discussion i never knew what people expected me to say when parents of color would come up to me and ask me, “what’s it like being a young, black female on campus? do you feel safe? do you feel supported?” it was really important for me to be honest with people, because i don’t want to say one thing, and then they come here and they’re students, and that’s obviously not the reality. i would try to be as honest as possible, but also knowing i have to paint the university in a good light. (danielle, third­year african american woman) danielle’s quote illustrates the complex tension between “being honest” and “painting the university in a good light.” most racially minoritized psas similarly identified incon­ gruence between the institutional dominant narrative about diversity and their own lived experiences on campus as people of color. january–february ◆ vol / no minoritized psa racial realities the dominant narrative mu wanted psas to promote was one of inclusion and unity, ignoring the institution’s historical legacy of exclusion. as miss green recalled from her psa training, her supervisors drilled into the psa staff that, “no matter where you’re from or what race you are, you’re a [bulldog] when you get here.” this supposedly neutral narrative, while well­intentioned to promote an inclusive environment, perpetuates the experiences of white students as the standard college experience (yosso & lopez, ) and disregards that students of color are minoritized by that narrative. the research question i sought to answer was: how do racially minoritized psas experience their campus climate in relation to their racial identities and socialization agent positions? three themes from the counternarratives of racially minoritized psas emerged about the behavioral dimension of campus climate and the effects of those experiences on the psychological dimension. their stories illustrate their everyday experi­ ences with microassaults, microinsults, and microinvalidations, contrary to the “we are all bulldogs” dominant narrative. “other people didn’t see me”—racial realities when the psa polo is off for many racially minoritized psas, micro­ aggressions were a regular part of their lives when they were not engaged in their psa work, especially in students’ primary academic spaces: classrooms. several african american psas described a common experience of white students avoiding them in the classroom. as kelly said: “if i’m sitting here, and there’s two seats in between, then there’s a white student sitting there, a student will always sit next to the white student. every single time.” similarly, zora described: “you walk into a [class]room and, i don’t know, i could just be reading too much into it, but just nonverbals from people. they don’t want, really, anything to do with you. like, ‘who are you?’” sharon described white students talking around her in class, as though she did not exist: “in a sense, i wasn’t even there, so those moments where i felt like i—i don’t know, like other people didn’t see me.” these examples of racism could be felt by racially minoritized psas as microassaults in which white students avoided interracial interactions or as microinvalidations in which white students aversively communicated to racially minoritized psas that they should not be in their classes or at the university. racially minoritized psas also experienced microinsults in their classrooms. danielle recalled when first starting classes on campus: “people were like, ‘you’re the first black person i’ve ever talked to in real life.’” sharon described being tokenized by instructors and classmates: from “oh, how do you all get your hair to go like this?” or things about the civil rights movement or just anything where it was a minority, i was the spokesperson. everyone in class looked to me to answer the questions, so it came to a point where i felt like i was no longer educating people, but that i was—it felt like i was doing the work for them. similarly, emma said about her classroom experiences: “when we would talk about culture, i felt like i had to be the spokeswoman, because i have the most—i’m most familiar with it.” these racial snubs may have been unknown to the perpetrators but communicated an insulting message to the racially minoritized psas (sue et  al., ). these classroom microaggressions, which are elements of the behavioral component of campus climate, communicated an unwelcoming climate to racially minoritized psas. these experiences also influenced partici­ pants’ psychological dimension of campus clim­ ate. regularly experiencing micro aggressions in the classroom created an unwanted burden for journal of college student development linley racially minoritized psas. danielle described: it was the burden of—which i guess is, now that i think about it, it’s weird— being my best self so that black people as a whole could be thought of well, i guess. knowing that other people—whether you wanted to or not—other people did see you as representative of all black people. racist classroom experiences placed an un­ wanted burden on racially minoritized psas to unfairly represent their race and contributed to participants’ identity­related stress (saldaña, ; smedley et al., ; wei et al., ). whether slighted by white peers overlooking them or by instructors tokenizing them, racially minoritized psas described microaggressions as a regular classroom experience. this theme of racist classroom experiences is consistent with the findings of solórzano et al. ( ) in their study of microaggressions and campus racial climate for african ameri­ can students. much like the racially minori­ tized psas in my study, african american students in the study by solórzano et  al. described classroom verbal and nonverbal microaggressions from white peers and instructors as influencing students’ perceptions of campus climate; participants in both studies described racist classroom experiences as contributing to their understanding of campus climate as racially splintered. “don’t try to fool these students”— racist psa experiences racial microaggressions also pervaded the student leadership positions with socialization programs held by racially minoritized psas. for example, sharon reflected: one time i was not on a panel. three of my peers, they were all white—two males, one female. a parent asked a question about the cultural centers. none of them on the panel knew about the cultural centers besides the fact that there were four, and they were on the [campus region]. they didn’t really know different activities that went on inside the cultural centers. after the panel was over, one of the guys, who is really a close friend of mine, he came up to me, he said, “[sharon], you should have been on that panel to answer that question.” he didn’t know that that was offensive to me. in that microinsult, sharon’s white, male psa coworker communicated to sharon that it was her responsibility, not his, to answer questions about the cultural centers. kelly had a similar experience, though in her situation, her psa coworker brought a black student to kelly to talk about the african american cultural center on campus. in sharing this story with me, kelly said: “apparently it’s irrelevant to you unless it happens to you. it was kinda like, ‘i don’t know what to do, let me find someone who can relate.’” the space where racially minoritized psas engaged in important socialization work on behalf of their university was riddled with microaggressions, further demonstrating the depth of a racist campus climate at the institution. microaggressions led some racially minori­ tized psas to question their value on their socialization teams. for example, sharon reflected on feeling “used” by her supervisors: many times we received e­mails asking if we were free for “special visits,” which means a certain culture who would be coming to campus and we would be the ones on the panel or leading them around campus or having lunch with them. i remember vividly all of us, we received an e­mail about . . . some high school coming. while we wanted to be there for those students, at the same time we wanted to teach the admission staff a lesson of why—don’t try to fool these students—why do we have to be the ones to lead the group or have lunch with them or sit on a panel? it was eight or nine of us january–february ◆ vol / no minoritized psa racial realities in the e­mail. none of us responded. we know that in a sense we’re being used—it’s come to a point where you reach enough of your identity being used to make the university seem so diverse. sharon felt slighted by the admissions office’s request. this is an example of a micro­ invalidation; sharon felt like a second­class citizen whose value was only to recruit other people of color. despite her negative e x p e r i e n c e s i n t h e p s y c h o l o g i c a l a n d behavioral dimensions of campus climate, mu expected her to help improve the institution’s structural diversity. further, sharon’s example illuminates interest convergence. to benefit whites, higher education leaders desire racially diverse campuses and pressure admissions staff to recruit students of color. at mu, recruiting students of color often means recruiting out­of­state students who pay a higher price tag for tuition, thus benefitting the institution financially as well as socially. as a strategy to foster prospective students of color seeing themselves at the institution, socialization program coordinators hire racially diverse psa staff. this benefits the racially minoritized students in psa roles, creating a pathway for students to gain social and cultural capital by earning money for on­campus work while also gaining positional legitimacy and access to an institutional network of leaders. racially minoritized psas are aware their identities are valued as contributing to the diversity of a psa team as visual demonstration of the university’s racial composition, but in the situation described by sharon, she and her racially minoritized psa coworkers believed the university was exploiting them in an effort to recruit prospective students of color. although the admissions request did not explicitly ask sharon and her peers to falsely represent the university, the discrepancies between the dominant narrative and students’ lived experiences led sharon and her peers to assume they were being asked to lie about mu. the result for sharon was tension between feeling valued and feeling used. racially minoritized psas experienced regular microaggressions across campus, including their classrooms and their socialization initiatives. moreover, participants experienced racism in the sur­ rounding off­campus community. “they’re ignoring your humanity”— explicit, deliberate racial attacks racism was a regular part of racially minoritized psas’ daily lives on campus, and participants did not find reprieve in the local off­campus community. when racially minoritized psas left campus to engage in their local community, they faced a variety of microaggressions. for example, early in her first semester, miss green was with a small group of african american women waiting for the city bus when a white man drove by and yelled “niggers” at them: “he didn’t know who we were, we didn’t know who he was. it was just, that experience was—‘how could you be so offensive? we’re just a bunch of ­year­olds coming back from wal­mart.’” this was an explicit, deliberate racist attack. what makes it a microassault is that the perpetrator retained anonymity in the individual­level attack, meaning he felt safe to demonstrate his belief of racial inferiority by shouting the racial slur as he drove off without consequence (sue et al., ). this example illustrates how frightening the behavioral climate can be for racially minoritized psas in the local community. other racially minoritized psas also felt unsafe, like danielle: there are few things more scary for an african american woman than being around or near a group of straight white males who have been drinking. because things get said or are done. people feel like they can touch you. people feel like journal of college student development linley they can—i don’t know. it’s almost like they’re ignoring your humanity, that you’re a person. kelly has had similar experiences: i was out and i was at the bars just walking around. there’s a lot of white men. when they’re intoxicated, they just say a lot of racist or sexual slang that is not appropriate. that just makes you feel really uncomfortable with who you are because it’s like, “you would not—i’m like any other woman—you would not treat other women like this, so you shouldn’t be saying it to me.” these examples demonstrate that racially minoritized psas, specifically black women, faced macro­level environmental micro­ aggressions, in addition to the micro­level racism described. danielle’s and kelly’s descriptions of being hypersexualized by white men were simultaneously invalidating, insulting, and assaulting. the off­campus racist experiences of racially minoritized psas also point to the importance of the exter nal influences on campus climate. racism is a persistent ailment in us society and the cities where hwis are situated are certainly not immune. despite being prestigious student leaders who are highly engaged and successful, racially minoritized psas experienced the campus climate as incongruent with the diversity narrative mu tried to promote through its socialization initiatives. consistent with other study results (saldaña, ; smedley et  al., ; smith et  al., ; wei et  al., ), racially minoritized psas in this study reported their existence at mu came at a psychological price. implications these counternarratives of racially minoritized psas illustrate that even collegiate ambassadors experience a racist campus climate. they further illustrate that the university’s dominant narrative about diversity and inclusion did not represent students’ lived experiences on campus as people of color. implications for practice these narratives of racially minoritized psas about racism in classrooms suggest an opportunity for instructor development. academic instructors, including faculty, adjunct and contingent instructors, and teaching assistants, have and should wield the power to shape their classroom environments. instructors should raise their awareness about racism in the classroom and take steps to eradicate it. one step instructors can take is to participate in formal learning opportunities, including those offered by their campus faculty development or teaching and learning staff and those offered by national networks, such as the national center for faculty development and diversity. while instructors often attend conferences within their academic disciplines, instructors may also benefit from attending the national conference on race and ethnicity, an interdisciplinary meeting focused on institutional change for improved campus racial climates. instructors can also take steps on their own to increase their awareness and consider their role in creating antiracist classroom environments. in a recent publication for the academy, harper and davis ( ) recommended eight steps instructors can take, from remediating their racial illiteracy to integrating diverse people and perspectives into the curriculum. instructors hold significant power to influence campus climate and move their institution toward their espoused values of diversity and inclusion. racism permeated the campus sites where racially minoritized psas championed their institutions and the socialization initi­ atives themselves. student affairs educators january–february ◆ vol / no minoritized psa racial realities who coordinate socialization initiatives must acknowledge that the narrative of unity and inclusion they promote for their campus is not always consistent with racially minoritized students’ lived experiences; indeed, the dominant narrative further minoritizes students of color by centering whiteness and ignoring the institution’s historical legacy of exclusion. socialization coordinators have the potential to improve the campus racial climate through anticipatory socialization. rather than promoting a narrative that only advances the institution’s espoused values, socialization programs can educate prospective and new students about the actual campus climate. as critical scholars contend, perspectiveless programs that adopt supposed neutrality actually perpetuate power, privilege, and oppression (crenshaw, ). rather than perpetuating perspectivelessness with a “we are all bulldogs” narrative, sociali­ za tion coordinators should reimagine anti­ ci patory socialization using the framework for campus climate from hurtado et  al. ( ). socialization coordinators should educate themselves and their psa staff about the institution’s legacy of exclusion and inclusion, the institution’s structural diversity, the psychological dimension of campus climate, and the behavioral dimension of campus climate (hurtado et  al., ). while a perspectiveless campus tour protocol might include stops at the student union, a science building, the campus library, and the recreation center, a campus tour protocol designed to decenter whiteness might include stops at the institution’s cultural centers and the multicultural affairs office. socialization coordinators should further raise among themselves and their psa staff the awareness of external dimensions of campus climate, such as the black lives matter movement. by educating themselves, and subsequently prospective and new students, about all dimensions of campus climate, anticipatory socialization program leaders may foster a campus environment that promotes open dialogue and awareness about racism. further, recruiting (and supporting and retaining) students of color is a central task of working toward a positive racial climate (hurtado et al., ; solórzano et al., ). the counternarratives of racially minoritized psas in this study demonstrate the ways participants felt tokenized by socialization program coordinators. it is essential that program coordinators understand their racially minoritized psas want to feel valued, not used. racially minoritized psas serve in psa positions because they feel connected to their institution and want to help prospective and new students of color succeed at the institution (linley, ). racially minoritized psas are already managing conflicting notions of diversity on campus and it behooves socialization coordinators to invite, hear, and value the honest counternarratives of their racially minoritized psas who are complex meaning­makers (linley, ) and deserve the trust of their supervisors to present counternarratives to prospective and new students that simultaneously express their sense of belonging and racial realities on campus. implications for research further research is necessary to better under­ stand the collegiate experiences of racially minoritized psas. psa hiring and training should be further explored to better under­ stand the strategies socialization coordinators use to prepare psas to foster prospective and new students’ sense of belonging. another line of inquiry is to explore the “peer pedagogies” of racially minoritized psas (harper, ). how and what do racially minoritized psas communicate to prospective and new students of color and their families? how did danielle answer the common question she received journal of college student development linley from black parents? i am further interested in the conceptions racially minoritized psas have of the psa role. do racially minori­ tized psas view themselves as shapers of campus climate? do they feel personally responsible for prospective and new students of color? these additional studies can build on existing research to explore the potential for anticipatory socialization practices to shift campus climate by centering the voices of the racially minoritized students doing this important work on behalf of the institution. conclusion as institutions of higher education strive to enact espoused values of diversity and inclusion, higher education leaders must first understand the racial realities of racially minoritized students in the broader context of collegiate climates. given the ways psas are touted as prestigious institutional ambassadors, i sought to give voice to the racial realities of the minoritized peer socialization agents charged with socializing prospective and newly admitted students at a historically white university. through this study, the counternarratives of racially minoritized psas illustrate the pervasiveness of racism across campus spaces, including classroom and socialization sites, and off­campus spaces. racially minoritized psas named the ways their racial realities stood in stark contrast to the “we are all bulldogs” narrative psas were trained to promote. armed with this awareness, higher education leaders can begin to dismantle the dominant narrative so the campus climate can be changed. correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to jodi linley, educational policy and leadership studies, university of iowa, n lindquist center, iowa city, ia, ; jodi-linley@uiowa.edu january–february ◆ vol / no minoritized psa racial realities references abraham, j. w., nesbit, b. g., & ward­roof, j. a. 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( ). critical race theory, racial microaggressions, and campus racial climate for latina/o undergraduates. harvard educational review, , ­ . the asm journals committee values the contributions of black microbiologists patrick d. schloss,a chair, asm journals committee, melissa junior,b director, asm journals, rebecca alvania,b assistant director, asm journals, cesar a. arias,c,d editor in chief, antimicrobial agents and chemotherapy, andreas baumler,e editor in chief, infection and immunity, arturo casadevall,f editor in chief, mbio, corrella detweiler,g editor in chief, microbiology and molecular biology reviews, harold drake,h editor in chief, applied and environmental microbiology, jack gilbert,i editor in chief, msystems, michael j. imperiale,a editor in chief, msphere, susan lovett,j editor in chief, ecosal plus, stanley maloy,k editor in chief, journal of microbiology and biology education (jmbe), alexander j. mcadam,l,m editor in chief, journal of clinical microbiology, irene l. g. newton,n editor in chief, microbiology resource announcements, michael j. sadowsky,o editor in chief, microbiology spectrum, rozanne m. sandri-goldin,p editor in chief, journal of virology, thomas j. silhavy,q editor in chief, journal of bacteriology, peter tontonoz,r editor in chief, molecular and cellular biology, jo-anne h. young,s editor in chief, clinical microbiology reviews, craig e. cameron,t isaac cann,u a. oveta fuller,a ariangela j. kozikv adepartment of microbiology and immunology, university of michigan, ann arbor, michigan, usa bamerican society for microbiology, washington, dc, usa ccenter for antimicrobial resistance and microbial genomics and division of infectious diseases, university of texas health science center, mcgovern medical school, houston, texas, usa ddepartment of microbiology and molecular genetics, university of texas health science center, mcgovern medical school, houston, texas, usa edepartment of medical microbiology and immunology, university of california, davis, california, usa fdepartment of molecular microbiology and immunology, johns hopkins bloomberg school of public health, baltimore, maryland, usa gdepartment of molecular, cellular & developmental biology, university of colorado, boulder, colorado, usa hdepartment of ecological microbiology, university of bayreuth, bayreuth, germany idepartment of pediatrics, university of california, san diego, california, usa jdepartment of biology, brandeis university, waltham, massachusetts, usa kdepartment of biology, san diego state university, san diego, california, usa lboston children’s hospital, boston, massachusetts, usa mharvard medical school, boston, massachusetts, usa ndepartment of biology, indiana university, bloomington, indiana, usa obiotechnology institute, university of minnesota, st. paul, minnesota, usa pdepartment of microbiology and molecular genetics, university of california, irvine, california, usa qdepartment of molecular biology, princeton university, princeton, new jersey, usa rdepartment of pathology and laboratory medicine, david geffen school of medicine, university of california, los angeles, california, usa sdepartment of medicine, university of minnesota, minneapolis, minnesota, usa tdepartment of microbiology & immunology, university of north carolina, chapel hill, north carolina, usa ucarl r. woese institute for genomic biology, university of illinois, urbana, illinois, usa vdepartment of internal medicine, university of michigan, ann arbor, michigan, usa black lives matter. the ongoing problem of police brutality and the resulting deathsof george floyd ( ), breonna taylor ( ), and many other black people in the united states ( ) has rightly shaken the country. acts of racism should cause us to question the level to which we have personally participated in the systems of racial inequity that facilitate such acts. we all have an obligation to identify the ways that systemic racism functions in our society and in science. as scientists, we prefer to believe that we are driven by data and are immune to such detrimental behaviors. yet, if we are honest, we know that this is not always true. citation schloss pd, junior m, alvania r, arias ca, baumler a, casadevall a, detweiler c, drake h, gilbert j, imperiale mj, lovett s, maloy s, mcadam aj, newton ilg, sadowsky mj, sandri- goldin rm, silhavy tj, tontonoz p, young j-ah, cameron ce, cann i, fuller ao, kozik aj. . the asm journals committee values the contributions of black microbiologists. mol cell biol :e - . https://doi.org/ . /mcb . - . copyright © american society for microbiology. all rights reserved. ed. note: this editorial is being published by the following asm journals: antimicrobial agents and chemotherapy, applied and environmental microbiology, clinical microbiology reviews, ecosal plus, infection and immunity, journal of bacteriology, journal of clinical microbiology, journal of microbiology and biology education, journal of virology, microbiology and molecular biology reviews, microbiology resource announcements, microbiology spectrum, molecular and cellular biology, mbio, msphere, and msystems. address correspondence to patrick d. schloss, pschloss@umich.edu. accepted manuscript posted online july published editorial crossm october volume issue e - mcb.asm.org molecular and cellular biology o n a p ril , a t c a r n e g ie m e l l o n u n iv l ib r h ttp ://m cb .a sm .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - x https://doi.org/ . /mcb. - https://doi.org/ . /mcb. - https://doi.org/ . /asmcopyrightv mailto:pschloss@umich.edu https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /mcb. - &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - https://mcb.asm.org http://mcb.asm.org/ between and , the horrific tuskegee syphilis study was performed to observe the natural history of latent syphilis infection in black men ( ). the premise of the study was driven by the racist pseudoscience of social darwinism. the study directors hypothesized that black men were inferior to white men. the study directors lied to the men about their condition, leading the men to infect their partners and children. furthermore, when penicillin was shown in to treat syphilis, the doctors hid the treatment and refused to treat the men. leading peer-reviewed journals of the time published results from the study. this textbook example of racism in microbiology underscores the historic role of scientific publishers in disseminating racist ideologies and points to the potential for scientific publishers to prevent the spread of racism. as the journals committee of the american society for microbiology, we are committed to promoting the work of black microbiologists and the issues that impact the black community. to do this, we must improve the representation of black microbiologists across the peer review process, recruit black authors to publish their research in asm’s journals, and identify aspects of peer review where there is oppor- tunity for bias to affect our decisions to publish their research, something that we wish to avoid. we must also reassess the scopes of our journals to ensure that the micro- biological problems that are important to the black community are published within the journals of this society. issues that affect the black community matter. black people in the united states in are, and historically have been, disproportionately and negatively impacted by infectious diseases ( ). the flint, mi, water crisis brought significant suffering to the primarily black community, including outbreaks of legionnaires’ disease ( ). black women are more likely to have a preterm birth, of which half are associated with a microbial etiology ( ). black children are more likely to have asthma, a disease which is associated with increased bacterial burden in the lungs ( ). black people are more likely to have a severe case of and die from coronavirus disease (covid- ) ( ). in new york city and elsewhere, the death rate due to covid- for black people is twice that for white people ( ). black people are also far more likely to be affected by sexually transmitted infections, including hiv, and evidence suggests a role for underlying structural inequities, such as mass incarceration and unequal treatment when seeking medical care ( , ). these disparities in health are an outcome of differences in socio-economic factors and the corresponding disenfranchisement. these include less access to health care, food deserts where nutritious and affordable food is not available, and poorly funded public health infrastructure. a person’s race provides no biological basis for the observed health disparities, and to assert otherwise will slow the identi- fication of solutions to these disparities. unfortunately, research related to solving such problems is often discounted. a recent analysis of research project (r ) proposals reviewed by the national institutes of health found that the community- and population-level research topics of interest to black scientists placed them at a disad- vantage for a fundable outcome and accounts for much of the reduced success rate of black scientists ( ). as an academic publisher, we have a responsibility to help to promote the importance and legitimacy of work that is important to the black com- munity. black scientists have made significant contributions in spite of the systemic racism that they have faced throughout their lives. these scientists should be able to put their energy into their science rather than into overcoming the bias and prejudice that deters their efforts and devalues their humanity. as an example, george washington carver was born into slavery yet went on to become a preeminent plant biologist, chemist, and microbiologist despite many barriers to safely obtaining an education (https:// www.tuskegee.edu/support-tu/george-washington-carver). he improved the lives of farmers by developing alternative crops to cotton, harnessing the power of rhizobia to help improve soil health, and fighting fungal plant pathogens. he impacted the lives of many black and non-black people. numerous black microbiologists have had significant impacts on topics that are particularly relevant to black communities and beyond, including drs. william hinton, ruth moore, jane hinton, and many others. in an editorial molecular and cellular biology october volume issue e - mcb.asm.org o n a p ril , a t c a r n e g ie m e l l o n u n iv l ib r h ttp ://m cb .a sm .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://www.tuskegee.edu/support-tu/george-washington-carver https://www.tuskegee.edu/support-tu/george-washington-carver https://mcb.asm.org http://mcb.asm.org/ interview at the microbe meeting in new orleans, la, dr. marian johnson- thompson (university of the district of columbia) recounted the lives of many of these and other black microbiologists ( ). she told the story of dr. moore, a professor at howard university who attended a general meeting of the asm. because of segrega- tion, she was not able to stay at hotels within the city or eat at any of its restaurants. although we want to believe that such systemic racism no longer exists within our discipline, we must constantly question that assumption. the stories of these microbi- ologists emphasize that representation matters. they underscore the fact that unless the perspective and challenges of black communities are represented, then they will not be addressed. in a recent msphere of influence article, dr. michael johnson recounted his shock that although there was a % increase in the number of biomedical ph.d.’s awarded to black people and those from other underrepresented groups (urgs) between and , there has not been a meaningful change in the number of assistant professors from urgs over that time ( ). in his article, he asks how he wound up at a research-intensive university as a black professor. he asks two questions of himself: “by what miracle did i beat the odds to get here?” and “what can i do to get other urms [underrepresented minorities] in a similar position as myself?” yet, it is not dr. johnson’s responsibility alone to remove these barriers. as a publisher of microbiology research, we acknowledge the important role that we have in the career development of junior scientists and the role that we have in giving legitimacy to scientific questions. for too long, we have not promoted the work of junior black and other scientists from urgs as much as we could have. we have been too passive in recruiting these scientists to publish in our journals. scientists like dr. johnson should not think that their success is a “miracle.” we also must ask ourselves what we can do to get more scientists from urgs into faculty and leadership positions. although we should always strive to recruit more people from urgs into science, the data that he reports indicate that the problem also lies with retention of this talent. as leaders of the asm journals program, we need to take a greater role in mentorship. we can recruit more junior scientists from urgs to be peer reviewers, put them in leadership positions, and publicly recognize them. as the journals committee, we seek to improve the representation of black micro- biologists and therefore take on the responsibility to do the following. ● learn from the stories of black microbiologists, past and present. we will listen. black microbiologists should not have to shoulder the burden of dismantling systems of inequality on their own. ● ensure that diverse voices and viewpoints are represented among the editors in chief. we will conduct open searches that actively recruit black scientists and scientists from urgs. we will not constrain the candidate pool to current or past editors and editorial board members, which have traditionally been the source of candidates. ● appoint editors in chief who understand that the impact of their journal is dependent on the diversity of their authors, reviewers, and editors. we will ask candidates to state their experience fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion in their application. ● improve the representation of black scientists and those from other urgs across the peer review system. each journal will develop a plan that will be regularly evaluated and used as a criterion to determine whether an editor in chief should be reappointed. ● be alert to implicit and overt bias when handling manuscripts from black and other scientists from urgs. we will work with our editors and others to under- stand bias and study where it can manifest itself in peer review. ● more fully represent the scope of how microbiology impacts the black commu- nity. we will solicit input from black microbiologists for topics that are not being editorial molecular and cellular biology october volume issue e - mcb.asm.org o n a p ril , a t c a r n e g ie m e l l o n u n iv l ib r h ttp ://m cb .a sm .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://mcb.asm.org http://mcb.asm.org/ addressed adequately within asm’s journals and revise the scopes of the journals accordingly. ● promote black microbiologists. we will ensure that their representation is equi- table when selecting papers for editor spotlights, authors for commentaries, and subjects for biographical reports. ● help develop the next generation of microbiologists and more actively listen. we will participate in opportunities to serve and mentor black scientists and those from other urgs through the annual biomedical research conference for minor- ity students (abrcms) and the annual conference for the society for advance- ment of chicanos/hispanics & native americans in science (sacnas). ● identify appropriate methods for identifying and quantifying representation of black microbiologists. we will collaborate closely with the asm taskforce on diversity, equity, and inclusion. there is no place for anti-black or for any form of racism within microbiology. to solve the most important microbiological problems of today and prepare for those of the future, we must leverage the experiences, perspectives, and expertise of everyone. references . boone a. june . one week that shook the world: george floyd’s death ignited protests far beyond minneapolis. star tribune, minneap- olis, mn. https://www.startribune.com/george-floyd-death-ignited -protests-far-beyond-minneapolis-police-minnesota/ /. . gardner h. june . ‘this is for you, baby’: days of protests are about more than breonna taylor. courier-journal, louisville, ky. h t t p s : / / w w w . c o u r i e r - j o u r n a l . c o m / s t o r y / n e w s / l o c a l / / / / l o u i s v i l l e - p r o t e s t s - m o r e - t h a n - b r e o n n a - t a y l o r - l m p d - s h o o t i n g / /. . peeples l. . what the data say about police brutality and racial bias—and 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october volume issue e - mcb.asm.org o n a p ril , a t c a r n e g ie m e l l o n u n iv l ib r h ttp ://m cb .a sm .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://www.startribune.com/george-floyd-death-ignited-protests-far-beyond-minneapolis-police-minnesota/ / https://www.startribune.com/george-floyd-death-ignited-protests-far-beyond-minneapolis-police-minnesota/ / https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/local/ / / /louisville-protests-more-than-breonna-taylor-lmpd-shooting/ / https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/local/ / / /louisville-protests-more-than-breonna-taylor-lmpd-shooting/ / https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/local/ / / /louisville-protests-more-than-breonna-taylor-lmpd-shooting/ / https://doi.org/ . /d - - -z https://doi.org/ . /d - - -z https://doi.org/ . / https://www.medrxiv.org/content/ . / . . . v https://www.medrxiv.org/content/ . / . . . v https://doi.org/ . /mbio. - https://doi.org/ . /s - - - https://doi.org/ . /s - - - https://doi.org/ . /peds. - c 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issue through its disparate and adverse health impact on those targeted by this practice, as well as members of their communities. we discuss six ways police profiling and racial discrimination adversely impact black american health. we identify four direct and two indirect ways. four direct ways are ( ) violent confrontation with police that causes injury or death; ( ) police language that escalates a confrontation through micro-aggressions or macro-aggressions; ( ) sub-lethal confrontations with police; ( ) adverse health consequences of perceived or vicarious threat, i.e., the mere belief in potential harm by police injures health. there are two indirect ways: ( ) through knowledge of or personal relationship with someone who directly experienced racial profiling; ( ) through public events without a personal knowledge of the unarmed person threatened or killed by police as a result of racial profiling, but where such events cause both individuals and the community at large to perceive a threat. we support recognition of racial profiling as a public health and health disparities issue. we recommend support for community programs that address the clinical health effects of racial profiling. we also recommend widespread engagement of trauma-informed policing (tip) that acknowledges the clinical effects of racial profiling. this is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution. access options buy single article instant access to the full article pdf. us$ . tax calculation will be finalised during checkout. subscribe to journal immediate online access to all issues from . subscription will auto renew annually. us$ tax calculation will be finalised during checkout. rent this article via deepdyve. learn more about institutional subscriptions references 	 .warren py, farrell a. the environmental context of racial profiling. annals am acad pol soc sci. ; : – . article  google scholar  	 .bor j, venkataramani as, williams dr, tsai ac. police killings 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(n.d.). retrieved february , , from https://www.integration.samhsa.gov/clinical-practice/trauma-informed download references funding the authors would like to acknowledge support from the national institutes of health (nih): nih build (rl gm ) and nih pioneer (dp ar ) for funding this work (c.t.l.). author information affiliations 	connecticut convergence institute for translation in regenerative engineering, university of connecticut health center, farmington avenue l , farmington, ct, , usa cato t. laurencin & joanne m. walker 	raymond and beverly sackler center for biomedical, biological, physical and engineering sciences, farmington, ct, usa cato t. laurencin 	department of orthopaedic surgery, university of connecticut health center, farmington, ct, usa cato t. laurencin 	department of materials science & engineering, university of connecticut, storrs, ct, usa cato t. laurencin 	department of biomedical engineering, university of connecticut, storrs, ct, usa cato t. laurencin 	department of chemical & biomolecular engineering, university of connecticut, storrs, ct, usa cato t. laurencin authors	cato t. laurencinview author publications you can also search for this author in pubmed google scholar 	joanne m. walkerview author publications you can also search for this author in pubmed google scholar corresponding author correspondence to cato t. laurencin. ethics declarations conflict of interest the authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. ethical approval this article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals performed by any of the authors. informed consent not applicable. additional information publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. rights and permissions reprints and permissions about this article cite this article laurencin, c.t., walker, j.m. racial profiling is a public health and health disparities issue. j. racial and ethnic health disparities , – ( ). https://doi.org/ . /s - - - download citation 	received: january 	revised: february 	accepted: february 	published: april 	issue date: june 	doi: https://doi.org/ . /s - - - keywords 	racial profiling 	health disparities 	public health 	police 	structural racism 	mental health access options buy single article instant access to the full article pdf. us$ . tax calculation will be finalised during checkout. subscribe to journal immediate online access to all issues from . subscription will auto renew annually. us$ tax calculation will be finalised during checkout. rent this article via deepdyve. learn more about institutional subscriptions advertisement over million scientific documents at your fingertips switch edition 	 academic edition 	 corporate edition 	home 	impressum 	legal information 	privacy statement 	california privacy statement 	how we use cookies 	manage cookies/do not sell my data 	accessibility 	contact us not logged in - . . . north east research libraries ( ) - lyrasis ( ) - carnegie mellon university ( ) - carnegie mellon university hunt library ( ) springer nature © springer nature switzerland ag. part of springer nature. \ performances, acknowledgments, and dinner: closing of the th anniversary celebration performances, acknowledgments, and dinner: closing of the th anniversary celebration dagmawi woubshet, charles henry rowell, rizvana bradley, nathaniel mackey, joshua bennett, howard dodson, ben okri callaloo, volume , number , winter , pp. - (article) published by johns hopkins university press doi: for additional information about this article [ access provided at apr : gmt from carnegie mellon university ] https://doi.org/ . /cal. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ https://doi.org/ . /cal. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ callaloo . ( ) – performances, acknowledgments, and dinner closing of the th anniversary celebration by dagmawi woubshet, charles henry rowell, rizvana bradley, nathaniel mackey, joshua bennett, howard dodson, and ben okri the closing of the th anniversary celebration included the presentation of the lifetime achieve- ment awards, closing remarks by howard dodson and ben okri, and musical performances by carole strong thompson, robert reid, hermine pinson, and harris simon. woubshet: i conducted an interview with dr. rowell at the goethe-institut in addis abba back in , a year before the callaloo conference in addis in . i asked him, foolishly, “dr. rowell, how do you keep up with the literary trends of the day so that the journal keeps current?” without skipping a beat, he replied, “we don’t have to keep up since we set the trend.” [laughter] foolish question, wise answer. callaloo has been setting the standard for the past forty years, and in the process has forever changed the american and english literary canon. it has done so by prizing rigor, experimentation, what greg pardlo calls “radical individuality,” and also our collective ideals of justice, of freedom, and of beauty. dr. rowell, we treasure you, we love you, and we thank you for being our standard-bearer. please, i was going to say “raise your glass” but raise your hand to charles rowell. i’d like to invite to the podium the editor of callaloo, dr. charles henry rowell. [applause] rowell: we also honor the people who have been setting trends in various forms of art in literature, in literary criticism, in fiction writing, and in visual art. that’s what we’re going to do tonight. first, we will honor frank bowling for his lifetime achievement in visual art. rizvana will not only speak about him, but she will accept his award. he is not able to be with us this evening. bradley: thank you so much, dr. rowell. it is a great honor to speak about frank bowling’s work, as i’ve also had the honor of teaching his work in many of my courses in art history and visual studies. frank bowling’s paintings have been exhibited widely and internationally. his selected solo shows have included the whitney museum of american art in new york, the serpentine gallery in london, and a touring retrospective in the royal academy of arts in london. it’s worth noting as well that in the haus der kunst in munich will present frank bowling: mappa mundi, a comprehensive survey of large-scale paintings. frank bowling, order of the british empire, was born in in guiana and moved to london in , where his artistic career began shortly after his arrival at the royal college of art. he started his career as a figurative painter and then moved to abstraction and became involved in the british pop movement in the s and c a l l a l o o s. his first solo exhibition, image in revolt, was hosted the year bowling graduated at the grabowski gallery in london, and he decided to move to new york in , as stuart hall noted in a very well-known essay about black british artists published in the s. he was also awarded a guggenheim fellowship in . bowling’s paintings began to turn to abstraction, the field in which his contributions were to be most significant, and he was frequently visited by the art critic, clement greenberg. his series of quasi-abstract color fields, overlaid with stenciled images of maps of australia, south america, and af- rica, are his best known works, in which he experimented with the possibilities of paint. it has been noted that bowling’s legacy concerns his innovations with new process within his paintings. it should also be noted that he developed a special mechanical apparatus, which tilted the canvas so he could pour paint on it, and that allowed him to create what we now know as his famous and iconic poured paintings. i’m very happy today to be able to speak about his work very briefly and his contribution to contemporary art, and i’m honored to accept this award on his behalf. rowell: the award reads: “the callaloo lifetime achievement award to richard sheridan franklin bowling for your sterling contributions to visual art and visual culture.” bradley: thank you so much. [applause] rowell: we will also honor wilson harris. he is not able to come tonight, but nathaniel mackey will introduce him and receive the award. mackey: it is a great honor and privilege and pleasure to receive this award for wilson harris, a writer whose work is, i think, one of the most senior bodies of work extant. i came upon it in the s and began with a reading of palace of the peacock, his first novel, published in . i had never read anything like it. i proceeded to read everything of his that i could find. it had that impact on me. let me read you a paragraph from the intro- duction that i wrote for the callaloo special issue on harris: “in while working on an essay on wilson harris’s ninth novel, ascent to omai, i inquired in the course of a letter to harris concerning the significance of the cards upon which the judge in the novel draws and writes. harris replied, ‘the cards imply that as they fall, no hand is absolute, each hand writes and is written by another.’ the cards change by hands and changing hands further figure the quote ‘self-revolving parts in endless dialogue’ of which we read in harris’s sixth novel, the eye of the scarecrow. such intimations of ensemblist authorship abound in his work, attesting to the aleative, accretional conception, animating one of the most strikingly original bodies of writing to have emerged in the twentieth century.” mr. har- ris—or, i should say, sir harris, for he was knighted a few years ago—was born in british guiana in , and he’s been a resident of england since . he has published more than twenty books of fiction, one book of poetry, and three books of criticism between the years and . the great c. l. r. james was one of the first to note his genius, and he’s gotten plenty of accolades since then. many of us believe that he should have won a nobel prize for literature by now, but unfortunately, he doesn’t play guitar. [laughter] there have been many attempts to categorize his writing. surrealism, marvelous realism, c a l l a l o o and other terms have been floated out there. he, in an interview, referred to his writing as “quantum fiction” and he went on to say, “my writing is quantum writing. do you know the quantum bullet? the quantum bullet, when it’s fired, leaves not one hole but two.” great pleasure to receive this award. rowell: this is an extraordinary award. it is a poem that nathaniel mackey wrote when we told him that we were going to honor wilson harris. for the extraordinary achieve- ment of wilson harris, we honor him with this poem.* we will put the awards out on the table, so at the end of the dinner if you want to come look at them and inspect them you are welcome. now we come to two people who are a part of the callaloo conference group. first we want to honor hortense spillers. introducing hortense spillers is joshua bennett. bennett: i first encountered dr. hortense spillers’s work during my freshman year at the university of pennsylvania. i had just been admitted to mellon mays, the undergraduate fellowship there, and our graduate fellow that year, brandon, had assigned an article by spillers to my entire cohort. i had never encountered anything quite like “mama’s baby, papa’s maybe: an american grammar book.” on first and second read, i found it both impenetrable and incomparably energizing. it was almost as if i was relearning how to read, how to write, and not only that, but understanding for the first time what a certain kind of reading and writing practice could produce in its most rigorous and unflinching form, both a mode and a mood, a style that reflected countless hours of formal studies and remained committed to expressing both the unthinkable terror and unfettered beauty of black social life. spillers wrote of the flesh over and against the body, blackness as “ves- tibular to culture.” it was this image of the vestibule that i was unable to shake for the next eleven years or so, reminiscent as it was of my time in messiah baptist church as a boy, huddled with all the other latecomers, any number of whom were still recovering from saturday night’s revelry. and even though what most would call the main event took place in the sanctuary, there was life in the vestibule, a gathering space for those who moved with their own sense of tempo and propriety, those barred, if we think of the vestibule in a wider and metaphorical sense from the protections and protocols of western man. and this is what dr. hortense spillers’s work makes available to us: a critical vocabulary for our full, fleshy lives, an entire corpus that dares to assert that black cultural production across genre merits attention and diligent study. indeed, that rigor can be our dream. it should come as no surprise, perhaps, that dr. spillers was a radio dj during her tenure as an undergraduate at the university of memphis or that she wrote a doctoral dissertation that held the rhetoric of black preachers at central concern. all her work bears the trace of such deep, fugitive music of commitment to the black quotidian and ear-tuned to the everyday lives of everyday people across the african diaspora. time and time again, spill- ers invites us to look where we have been taught to look away in either disgust or awe. to train our gaze on the unimaginable that we may do just that, might craft incredibly divergent ways of organizing human and non-human life alike, that we might find if not joy, then certainly wonder in this blackness, this beauty that the world calls “nothingness.” over and against such relentless reading, spillers offers us plentitude and abundant life. * see “angel at the gate” by nathaniel mackey pg. – in this issue. c a l l a l o o in the name of those forced to live at the underside of modernity, she asserts that our people deserve complexity. indeed, if she were not here, we would be left to dream of her invention. any such dream, of course, would fall short of the genuine article. for though she is part of a longstanding tradition, her life’s work represents something of a cosmic event in the field of black studies, a breaking into the world of a new way. in no uncertain terms, she helped make my work as well as that of so many of my friends, mentors, and the greatest teachers, possible. from her abiding love of this craft, this field, this way of moving through the world, and making something more livable and beautiful of it. we’re trained, hundreds of us, ready to be in battle, ready to claim the insurgent ground she mapped out for us so many years ago. [applause] rowell: the inscription for this award is: “the callaloo lifetime achievement award to hortense spillers for your provocative and invaluable contributions to literary and cultural studies.” [applause] spillers: thank you. i think i’m supposed to say something, but i don’t really want to say very much. i’m really grateful for this. this is the first award of its kind that i’ve ever received in my life. and i’m profoundly grateful. [applause] rowell: receiving the other award for this evening, joan anim-addo, creative writer, literary and cultural critic. she will be introduced also by joshua. [applause] bennett: i was not aware that i was going to be introducing joan, and i feel that that’s actually all the more potent because when i was sitting up here, she came up to me with her camera phone out and she said, “i’m going to take a picture of you because you look like you belong here, like you’ve always belonged here.” i’ll never forget about two years ago when we met at the callaloo conference at emory. i remember sitting in the audi- ence hearing joan speak at length with power, clarity, and conviction about being a black academic here in the uk. i remember her generosity when we spoke after her talk, how clear and powerful and convicting it was. and i remember feeling that a strong bridge had been built, not just between us but between my conception of what it meant to be black, to be a thinker, and to be committed to this work in a global sense. i think in her litera- ture, in her poetry, her scholarship, joan is always inviting us into that much wider, more capacious conception. so for that, and also for the generosity she shows in her everyday life, i’m intensely thankful. i want to thank her for the work she does, for the work she is in the world, the work she enfleshes and embodies. [applause] rowell: the callaloo lifetime achievement goes to joan anim-addo for your individual contributions to literature and to literary and cultural criticism. anim-addo: thank you. thank you. i’ll just say that when i had an email inviting me to dinner and there was a list of people being honored this evening, i glanced at the list, and i saw my name and i thought, “oh, dear. how embarrassing. they’ve made a mistake.” [laughter] so i didn’t say anything. i just waited for someone to say, “we’re terribly sorry. c a l l a l o o we’ve made a mistake.” [laughter] but when i spoke to the callaloo office, apparently it wasn’t a mistake, so what can i say, we’re not used to being invited to the table here in the uk. so i really feel very humbled and very honored to be given this award this evening. thank you very much. [applause] woubshet: we’re going to have two closing remarks by two extraordinary individu- als. first is howard dodson, director emeritus, schomburg center for research in black culture, new york public library, followed by ben okri, novelist. dodson: four distinguished individuals—joan anim-addo, frank bowling, wilson harris and hortense spillers—have been recognized and honored tonight for their ex- traordinary achievements and contributions to the academy, to their respective disciplines, to humankind, and especially to people of african descent. i’m talking about individuals whose work has fostered knowledge and appreciation of the black experience. i’m talking about people who have helped affirm the dignity and self-worth of african-descended people and demonstrated the standards of excellence and creativity that make people around the world honor and respect black folk and the black experience. these callaloo lifetime achievement award winners are certainly worthy of the honors that have been bestowed upon them, and i for one want to add my congratulations to them. i personally feel honored to be in their presence and to share this moment with each of them—and you. my task this evening is to acknowledge and celebrate a person who is equally worthy of receiving the callaloo lifetime achievement award. this is especially true given the fact that we are celebrating the th anniversary of callaloo. i refer to none other than dr. charles henry rowell, founder and editor of callaloo throughout its forty years of exis- tence. as most of you likely know, tonight’s program of recognition, like most of what happens through and with callaloo, is dr. rowell’s brainchild. callaloo has recognized other lifetime achievement awardees and like tonight’s they, too, have been his designees. in his typically humble and self- deprecating way, he likely never thought of making himself an honoree. that would, for charles, be too self-serving. what i have chosen to do is take that decision out of his hands and put it in yours. so, i’m going to make a case for why it’s time for him to receive this award. my hope is that the evidence will be so persuasive that you will endorse my recommendation and that he will grant us permission to make him an awardee next year so we can start the fifth decade of his and callaloo’s life together in full recognition of the pivotal role he has played in the making of callaloo. in the time that i have, i will only be able to mention a few of the prize-worthy facts about charles’s contributions to callaloo, the academy, literature and the arts, and african diasporic people. as i stated earlier, charles is the founder of callaloo, “a journal of necessity,” and has served as its editor continuously for forty years. but charles is more, much more than just an editor. at callaloo, he is the producer, curator, writer, mobilizer, and marketer as well as its editor. that’s because callaloo is more than a journal of literature and art. it is, as charles reminds us, a literary and art center as well as a journal. and charles is its impresario as well as its editor. over the last forty years, he and callaloo have led a transformation in african american and african diaspora literature and art, presenting through the pages of callaloo thousands of writers and artists from the african diaspora who might not have found a publication vehicle for their creative talents. c a l l a l o o for purposes of comparison, i went back and checked the tenure of the editors of other major african american and african diaspora journals. what i found is that only one edi- tor of a journal of any kind by and about people of african descent has served as editor for forty years. and that person is dr. charles henry rowell. carter g. woodson edited the journal of negro history for thirty-five years. charles thompson edited the journal of negro education for some thirty-five years. and alioune diop, editor of presence africaine, a paris-based journal on africa and its diaspora, only lasted for thirty-three years. dr. rowell has forty continuous years of editing callaloo and he is still at it! over the course of his tenure as editor, dr. rowell has published the work of an esti- mated , - , writers in over issues comprising more than , pages of text and images. the quality of the writing, art, and aesthetics of callaloo has earned for it a place of distinction in the field. it is widely recognized as “the premier journal of literature, art, and culture of the african diaspora,” and was recently ranked th among the top fifty literary magazines worldwide by every writers resource. these are just a few of the reasons why i believe charles rowell has more than earned a callaloo lifetime achieve- ment award. but they are more than enough, in my mind, to put him at the top of next year’s list of callaloo lifetime achievement awardees. and if you agree, i’d ask that you stand and give him a standing ovation and vote of affirmation. [applause and cheering]. okri: good evening, everybody. thank you for your extraordinary compression of forty years of thought into five minutes of celebration. to those of us who have experi- enced the annual international callaloo conference, it is always a unique and special experience. we are aware that callaloo represents the best in our transcultural dialogue, bringing together the highest thoughts and critical practices and literary political activ- ism, as well as intellectual meditation from all across the diaspora. it is to my mind the most important vehicle for circulating the perception of our culture, our history, and our civilization and suggesting the possibility of our unity. this unity has been a vexed issue these last forty years. there’s much to celebrate, but there are also the feelings of this time that what has been done to us historically may have done irreparable damage to this great family, whose roots go back more than a million years to the denizens of olduvai gorge in east africa. the history of our genius and our genes goes back longer than the history of our cultures and of our other identities. what unites us is older than what divides us. it seems to me that sometimes we focus more on what has been done to us than what we are and our spiritual and cultural heritage transcends the centuries. maybe we need a new perspective, guided by more open time to reexamine the ways in which our past can inform and transform our futures. this is why callaloo is so important and why dr. charles rowell is a visionary. it is a vision that constantly redefines who we are towards a constantly greater perspective. with the clouds gathering above trans-atlantic skies, with new shifts in the political atmosphere, i feel we’re living in vaguely dangerous times, and more dangerous than anything we’ve ever known for a generation, and for that reason, we need callaloo’s vision now more than ever. i feel we need now to find a new fire as a people to torch our way through the possible dark times that are coming. it’s not just that black lives matter. black thought matters, and it ought to be and it will be the defining force of our times, and it depends on all of us here under the guidance of charles. thank you all very much. [applause] howard dodson’s final remarks at the callaloo conference in oxford. ph ot og ra ph c ou rt es y of je rr io d a va nt article doi: . /djph. . . , copyright (c) delaware academy of medicine / delaware public health association advancing racial equity: leading, learning and unlearning tia taylor williams, m.p.h., c.n.s. director, center for public health policy, center for school, health and education, american public health association it feels odd to write this in the middle of a pandemic, but now is an exciting time to be both an employee and member of the american public health association (apha). i am in a moment where the back- and heart-breaking work of all of those who came before me is finally getting the attention, recognition and action it merits. in my first few years on staff at apha, we, like many others, danced around addressing racism as a core part of our work, despite its seemingly obvious connections to our mission and values. apha's mission is to improve the health of the nation and achieve equity in health status. health equity is a guiding principle and core value of the association. our engagement in explicit advocacy for racial equity dates back to with the passage of a resolution, the health of minorities and the relationship of discrimination thereto. over the past years apha’s work has broadened from reducing disparities, with the launch of a national campaign in with the u.s. department of health and human services to eliminate racial and ethnic health disparities, to adopting “creating health equity" as a strategic priority in . still, like many others we were reluctant to take consistent and meaningful actions in naming and addressing racism and the role it plays in the inequities and disparities in health and life outcomes. today, thanks to a core group of dedicated and passionate staff, our staunch members and affiliates, the national discourse on racism fueled by the inequities in the covid- pandemic and the uprising over police violence, we have been afforded another opportunity to act on our values. we are leading while learning (and unlearning) as we work to dismantle racism to achieve our vision of creating the healthiest nation. where are we leading? naming and addressing racism as a driving force of health inequities apha was among the first national public health organizations to be explicit about naming racism as a driving force for social determinants of health. our efforts on racism began to increase in momentum about five years ago. in the summer of , prompted by a mass shooting in charleston, sc, the black lives matter movement rising out of ferguson, mo, and other racism-fueled violent attacks, apha launched a four-part webinar series, entitled, the impact of racism on the health and well-being of the nation. the series highlighted the intersection between racism and various social determinants, including violence, health care and education. at the time, it was apha’s most successful series, attracting over , live participants with over , replays to date. in addition, the apha president, dr. camara jones, made a national campaign against racism the focus of her presidency and galvanized apha members, affiliates and partners to article doi: . /djph. . . , copyright (c) delaware academy of medicine / delaware public health association name and address racism as a driving force of the social determinants of health. while these efforts lacked the financial or resource support required for broad scale impact and reach, they made an indelible impression on the association staff, members, affiliates and partners. in a survey, % of apha leaders and % of general members who responded ranked addressing racism as very important for a member of apha. an average of % of survey respondents also reported being involved in racial equity efforts outside of apha. over the past four years, we’ve seen an uptick in programming from our member components and affiliates on the topic of racism and racial equity. this includes scientific sessions and other activities at our annual meeting, national public health week activities, research projects, advocacy activities and book publishing. meanwhile, staff have continued to strengthen capacity to apply a racial equity lens through training, grant proposals, and member and affiliate engagement. given the popularity of the series, we knew we wanted to launch another webinar series that would focus more explicitly on advancing racial equity and elevating strategies. developing tools and resources to galvanize action producing the advancing racial equity webinar series our advancing racial equity webinar series had been in the works for some time. however, in an odd case of déjà vu, the launch of the webinar series was aptly timed with the summer uprising and the black lives matter movement. once again, the timing is ripe for open, honest and uncomfortable conversations about the insidious ways in which racism operates within all aspects of our society. apha is pleased to provide a platform for frank discussions that lift up the voices and experiences of people of color. the intention with the series is to explore historical policies and practices and their present- day impact and implications. the planning committee felt it imperative that participants have a sense that current inequities are not happenstance, or the result of bad luck, or worse, bad “choices” among communities of color. we deemed it essential that the webinars explore how the belief in white superiority and black inferiority guided the founding of the united states and permeate all of its institutions, policies, norms and values. these webinars allow us to both serve our members and broader audiences who are especially hungry for solutions right now. in addition to the webinars, we developed discussion guides to help walk viewers through prompts and activities to deepen their thinking on the various subjects. tracking racism declarations across the country. as governors, county and city officials declared racism a public health crisis, we realized it would be important to track and monitor these declarations, and provide this as a resource to our members and the greater public health community. while some may view these declarations as purely symbolic, there is significance in naming racism. for far too long the u.s. has denied and avoided talking about racism and the belief in racial hierarchy as the key drivers of inequities. explicitly naming racism as the root cause for the inequities in opportunities, access, and outcomes is an important step towards creating systems of accountability and taking meaningful action towards change. article doi: . /djph. . . , copyright (c) delaware academy of medicine / delaware public health association apha will also be monitoring what actions state and local leaders are taking in alignment with these declarations. we will work with our members, affiliates and partners to help hold leaders accountable for meaningful policy and practice changes to dismantle structural racism and create new systems, polices, practices and norms. over the next year, we will be hosting mini-webinars to walk participants through various tools and processes that they can use to deepen their understanding of structural racism, and for practical application of a racial equity lens to policies and programs. what are we learning (while unlearning)? we approach this work with intention and an understanding that, as professionals educated by and indoctrinated in systems built on the belief in racial hierarchy, white supremacy culture influences how we approach and execute our work. as a result, we are simultaneously learning and unlearning as we work to dismantle racism and advance racial equity. when to lead and when to follow. as a national organization representing nearly , individual, organizational and affiliate members, we know that we have an incredible reach, responsibility, and influence. there are many cases in which we are not the leaders or experts, and our role is to amplify voices that are often silenced or unheard. walking the talk is required. to serve our members and the greater public health community with integrity, we have to do the work internally. we are taking steps to create an organizational culture of race equity among apha staff and members. organizationally, apha has worked to build awareness and capacity of staff, leadership and affiliates through mandatory trainings on equity, diversity and inclusion; brown bag presentations; and film screenings and discussion. we are in the process of exploring how we can apply what we’re learning about racial equity across all aspects of the organization including procurement, hiring and recruitment, professional development, and membership. we have to be explicit about centering voices of color. we are becoming more comfortable and confident in acknowledging that there are some conversations for which people who are white should be listeners. we are also becoming more direct in asserting that certain topics and discussions should center black voices given the strong anti-black sentiment that undergirds racism and discrimination across systems, cultures and communities. this is a divergence from an (unspoken) norm to not alienate our white staff, members and partners. lived experience is as important as work experience. when considering who to invite to speak or present on a topic, there are often intense debates about what voices and perspectives to include: the researcher or clinician with name recognition and accolades; or the community organizer or member of an impacted community? all perspectives are necessary and we are more intentional about ensuring that the community voice is highly valued and sought out. silence equals complicity. there is no longer room for neutrality on this topic. we are either actively anti-racist or complicit with maintaining and perpetuating racism and a belief in racial hierarchy. this work is not easy to do. as a black woman who is helping to lead these efforts, it can be downright exhausting. as an organization, we don’t always get it right and will likely continue to make flubs along the way. we also operate from a place of humility and curiosity with a firm commitment to doing better and deepening our practice of anti-racism. article doi: . /djph. . . , copyright (c) delaware academy of medicine / delaware public health association it also must be acknowledged that, quite frankly, not everyone in the association is on board or has bought into anti-racism and racial equity as priorities. we continue to encounter active resistance internally and externally from those who fail to see (or choose to ignore) the connections between racism and discriminations and the outcomes they wish to achieve. but for those of us who live and breathe this work, we are forging ahead so that those coming behind us will have a less steep hill to climb. references . american public health association. (n.d.). racism and health. retrieved from: https://www.apha.org/topics-and-issues/health-equity/racism-and-health . ford, c. l., griffth, d. m., bruce, m. a., & gilbert, k. l. (eds.). ( ). racism: science and tools for the public health professional. washington, dc: apha press . american public health association. (n.d.). advancing racial equity webinar series. retrieved from: https://apha.org/events-and-meetings/webinars/racial-equity . american public health association. (n.d.). declarations of racism as a public health issue. retrieved from: https://apha.org/topics-and-issues/health-equity/racism-and- health/racism-declarations . okun, t. (n.d.). white supremacy culture. dismantling racism works. retrieved from: https://www.dismantlingracism.org/uploads/ / / / / /okun_- _white_sup_culture.pdf 	advancing racial equity: 	leading, learning and unlearning 	where are we leading? 	naming and addressing racism as a driving force of health inequities 	developing tools and resources to galvanize action 	producing the advancing racial equity webinar series 	tracking racism declarations across the country. 	what are we learning (while unlearning)? 	references a new decade for social changes www.techniumscience.com issn - vol. , the modern online democracy: an evaluation of social media’s ability to facilitate political discourse hojun (tom) choi chadwick international hchoi @chadwickschool.org abstract. in an ideal democracy, the opinions of individuals form the basis of societal decision- making as they exercise critical thinking and take part in political discourse to form opinions they take to the voting booths. this formation of opinions, however, is increasingly being affected by social media platforms that provide features that affect with who and in what way people interact with each other. this study will evaluate these effects that social media can have on the formation of political opinions by examining the two representative platforms facebook and twitter. these platforms will be evaluated for their abilities to allow freedom of expression, expose users to diverse opinions, and promote user engagement in civil political discussion. overall, the effects are mixed due to a number of factors, and taking these conclusions into account the study also provides policy suggestions for humanity’s future intertwined with social media. keywords. social media, echo-chamber, political discourse, civil discussion, homophily, opinion formation, facebook, twitter . introduction social media in the st century have quickly become the de facto platform for people to interact. these online platforms such as facebook, twitter, instagram, or reddit now offer unprecedented connectivity for people across the world, enabling a person to find and forge new connections with someone else regardless of distance, nationality, and soon even income level as technology becomes increasingly affordable. along with this meteoric rise in social media connectivity in the past decade has come an increase in its usage for sharing opinions and spreading influence. this has been facilitated by the release of more features that have been refined overtime to allow people to find communities, amplify their voice, and respond to others. although each social networking service (sns) platform does have its own unique set of rules and properties that alter the way discussions are conducted on them, one commonality between every platform is that the new landscape of the internet has significantly changed political discourse. the matter has also become increasingly relevant as more social movements, presidential campaigns, and political discussions in general are based in and fomented by social media. the rise in digital fluency and the internet access are sure to make this impact greater over time. as a result, an evaluation of social media’s effect on political discourse is necessary. technium social sciences journal vol. , - , october issn: - www.techniumscience.com this evaluation will focus on the two primary platforms of facebook and twitter for reasons which will be outlined in the following section, and try to answer the question “to what extent do social media facilitate political discourse?” the platforms will be evaluated for their ability to facilitate “productive” political discourse. of course, what constitutes productive discourse varies from person to person; people pursue politics for different ends, meaning their concepts of what makes something productive will be different. however, i have identified three common factors past studies have used to operationalize the facilitation of political discourse on social media. referring to this existing literature, i define productive political discourse as having the following qualities. first, it allows for free expression of one’s opinions (kushin ), in that individuals do not feel coercion of any kind that dissuades them from voicing their political beliefs. these coercions may be systematic, but they can also be socio psychological. second, it involves individuals being exposed to a variety of opinions (wojcieszak, magdalena, and mutz ) by interacting with a wide range of people and hearing their political opinions. third, individuals can actively and civilly engage in political topics, meaning users criticize ideologies rather than individuals. this can also contribute to allowing for greater freedom of expression (kushin ). once these representative platforms have been evaluated for their creation of freedom, exposure, and civil discussion, the implications of these qualities will be discussed for politics in the future. . the advent of new media traditional media before the rise of sns primarily consisted of print newspapers and magazines, television, and radio. however as of , up to % of the world’s entire population has internet access, and facebook alone had over billion users in (clement a). this rapid increase can also be seen figure depicting the number of people using social media platforms from to (ortiz-ospina ). the sheer accessibility and global reach of the internet has by extension boosted the prominence of social media as a substitute for these older mediums. figure : number of people using social media platforms but other than accessibility and reach, what other traits of social media can account for this rise? first, social media allow for more targeted sharing of information. nobody needs to tune technium social sciences journal vol. , - , october issn: - www.techniumscience.com into a specific channel at a specific time or subscribe to a newspaper for just the sunday comics. instead, people can now subscribe to youtube channels, join facebook groups, follow twitter accounts, and join sub-communities on reddit all at the press of a button (or click of a mouse). corporations can also target certain demographic groups and regions with their advertising, and digital algorithms are helping to provide each user with tailor-made social media feeds without television or radio-based needs like flipping through channels or memorizing channel numbers (lawlor ). social media are also much more immediate. someone who just experienced a funny moment at work or caught their friend doing something funny on video can immediately upload it to social media for everyone to see, with very few steps in between. there are no tv crews, editors, or distributors who add their own framing to the piece, since all of the distribution of information happens automatically. social media pieces are also more dynamic. television and print media have a degree of finality to them, in that audiences have limited options to provide input or give their reactions. most feedback comes from ratings and sales, in which audience opinions are reduced to mere statistics. most social media platforms, on the other hand, give anyone the ability to comment on posts, videos, and articles in a way that makes for more dynamic interactions. people can express themselves however they want and to whoever they want, a degree of freedom that caters well to the basic human tendency for social interaction. in short, social media are more direct, expedient, dynamic, and open than traditional media forms. under the criteria set above of freedom, exposure and engagement, it appears that these new platforms may facilitate productive political discourse. however, there is still a number of additional factors that may alter the extent to which this is true. . the attributes of representative platforms because not all platforms are used equally for political discourse, i chose to look at two representative platforms, facebook and twitter. both are some of the most popular social media platforms in the us, facebook boasting around million monthly mobile users and twitter around million users as of september (clement b). although there are other platforms like instagram that are also just as popular, i chose facebook and twitter for the features that make them particularly appealing to those looking for a platform to discuss politics. these qualities are the prominence of bipartisan politics, features that foster community, and the ability to not only create but also react to content. . . . bipartisan political prominence. facebook and twitter are popular platforms amongst politicians who use them to engage in political discussions. this was made evident by their consistent mention in a large number of existing literature analyzing the relationship between social media and politics, the primary reason being their popularity and reach in western democracies like the us, the netherlands, and norway. this extensive reach brings with it a reported popularity among politicians for either advertising their campaigns or holding ongoing conversations with the public (bode ; effing, hillegersberg, and huibers ; trottier and fuchs ; reuter and szakonyi ; enli and skogerbø ). . . community features. people can follow certain people or join groups of interest with like-minded users. on facebook, users can send friend requests to others, accept and decline offers, and unfriend existing connections. facebook groups can be created by individual users, on which members can post links, media, questions, events, documents, and comments. public groups can be viewed by anyone, but non-members cannot interact with members unless they join. the content produced in closed groups cannot be viewed by the public unless a member specifically invites another user to join (nations ). twitter users can follow other people or unfollow them, as well as block or mute certain accounts they want to avoid. a user can also technium social sciences journal vol. , - , october issn: - www.techniumscience.com submit their account for verification to enable a blue checkmark badge to pop up next to their name, which confirms the authenticity of the account (twitter help center ). . . creation of and reaction to content. sns allow people to upload text-based posts with the primary purpose of making a statement or some sort of personal update. on facebook, people can make status updates and text/image/video posts. this content is exposed to other users via a news feed through which these other users are exposed to status changes, posts, and other notices like events and birthdays (nations ). twitter allows users to “tweet” their opinions in -character statements that can include photos, a gif, or a video. multiple tweets can be strung together into threads that allow users to express themselves with more words. a user can also add a hashtag to their post, which is a keyword that allows the user to group that tweet under a certain topic. those who search for that topic will then be able to view that tweet in the search results (twitter help center ). people can also comment on and react to these posts. more specifically, if a facebook user likes a status update, comment, or photo shared by a friend, that content will appear in the feeds of that user’s friends. in addition to the like button are five other reactions that can be chosen, including “love,” “haha,” “wow,” “sad, “or “angry” (nations ). twitter users can like or comment on a tweet, or retweet it to re-share it publicly with their followers to pass along news or opinions (twitter help center ). . freedom of expression along with the emergence of social media has come a massive influx of information and opinions, some of which are more innocuous than others. social media companies are experiencing increasing pressure to moderate the content on their platforms. these pressures include pressure from advertisers, and ideological reasons. these pressures have recently manifested in the form of trump’s critical social media posts regarding the black lives matter movement. these included tweeting videos of black-on-white violence without context, tweeting doctored videos, citing fringe blm groups and their inciting remarks, and criticizing the painting of a giant “black lives matter” mural on fifth avenue (liptak and holmes ). in another controversial message he posted on multiple platforms, the president called the protesters “thugs” and warned, “when the looting starts, the shooting starts,” referring to those exploiting the chaotic environment to steal from local businesses (hern ). furthermore, his support base has also been criticized by the media for being racist and violent. this contentious political climate has elicited different responses from both twitter and facebook. twitter responded to the president’s actions by actively undermining his claims. it placed warning labels and fact-checks on multiple tweets for providing misleading information, manipulating video, and inciting violence against an identifiable group. this included the tweet in which trump referred to the protesters as “thugs,” which was described as “glorifying violence.” twitter justified its actions in a public interest exception introduced in june , in response to criticism it received for failing to properly enforce its rules on public figures like the president. to this end, twitter also stated that its approach of hiding the president’s tweets behind warnings and reducing their reach via the algorithm struck a balance between “enabling free expression, fostering accountability, and reducing the potential harm caused”(hern ). limiting and undermining the president’s rhetoric on its platform has caused twitter to go under fire from the white house for being biased and manipulating the flow of information (lerman ). facebook has stood out amongst other companies for coming under the most criticism from advertisers and the media for deciding not to moderate its own platform. trump had posted his looting-shooting message on facebook as well, but instead of undermining the president’s technium social sciences journal vol. , - , october issn: - www.techniumscience.com message like twitter mark zuckerberg decided not to enforce any censoring action. zuckerberg received criticism even from his own staffers, who stated they were “disappointed” and “gravely concerned” that facebook was taking a neutral position on an issue they believed shouldn’t be treated indifferently. zuckerberg spoke out about his personal reaction to the post, describing how he had a “visceral negative reaction to this kind of divisive and inflammatory rhetoric,” but appeared to place his own values second to what he believed was more important for the platform (shead ). the platform’s adherence to neutrality regarding the president has caused major backlash from advertisers. a boycott was started, called stop hate for profit, which over major brands participated in. brands like coca-cola, starbucks, ben & jerry’s, denny’s, and many others have agreed to pull their advertising off of facebook, cutting off one of its revenue streams (sonnemaker and naftulin ). zuckerberg, however, remained unperturbed, stating he was not going to change the platform’s policies “because of a threat to a small percent of [the platform’s] revenue” (clayton ). the current picture painted by the above description, combined with the criteria set above, appear to paint facebook as a staunch proponent of free speech and public discourse, in that it strives to be a platform that does not restrict political content at all, being a place for anyone and everyone to speak their minds. this may be helpful in other areas, but in politics this sheer freedom can also backfire, detracting from meaningful political discussion rather than facilitating it. by allowing complete freedom of spreading information including dangerous fake news, facebook may be doing more harm than good in its refusal to moderate its content more. furthermore, facebook groups have gained infamy for being networks spreading misinformation and conspiracy theories about the blm movement, with conversation topics including the killing of black men and women (seitz ). it is necessary, however, to remember that benevolent content moderation can become a slippery slope into abuse of power. civil libertarians have criticized platforms like twitter for setting precedents for more malicious content moderation in the future, in which the perception of the “public interest” from these third parties could provide risks for american democracy (bowles ). social media sites today have a huge responsibility of influencing the opinions of the general public, and these platforms must find the right balance between responsible moderation and freedom of speech in order to properly facilitate political discourse. yet there is also a different facet to the freedom of expression, not necessarily affected by the moderation of the platforms on which political discourse is held, rather by the effects of inner psychological factors that make up humans as social beings. one such factor is of a phenomenon called the spiral of silence, which theorizes that people’s willingness to speak out on controversial topics is unconsciously affected by social desirability (petersen ). in other words, people are less willing to speak their opinion if they believe this opinion will negatively affect their public image. this effect has been seen to manifest on facebook, on which individuals avoid expressing opinions that their friends might disapprove of. a survey of facebook users confirmed its presence, in which users reported their willingness to engage online was affected by self-presentational concern as well as their equation of social approval with self-worth (liu, rui, and cui ). these limiting factors on free speech on sns platforms can give rise to an issue that will be discussed in the next section; namely, how people may cope with these obstacles using features on social media. . exposure to diverse opinions do social media provide exposure and equality of opinions? i investigate the extent to which people’s influence varies due to various factors. in this case, “influence” will be described as technium social sciences journal vol. , - , october issn: - www.techniumscience.com the user’s ability to spread his/her ideas to others and receiving some sort of affirmative or confrontational reaction. when it comes to the topic of social media and exposure of opinions, a word that commonly surfaces is that of the “echo-chamber.” an echo-chamber is an environment or social group in which opinions are homogenized, meaning users inside will all share similar opinions, creating biased sharing and discussion of information. sns platforms have been criticized for creating such spaces within the features they offer. to put this idea to the test, a study in studied echo-chambers on facebook and twitter. more specifically, it characterized echo-chambers as places with homophily, the preference to interact with like-minded peers. as these like-minded individuals interact with one another, the polarization of views between echo-chambers was also described in this characterization. the influence of each individual was analyzed using social network analysis, which mapped the flow of information between users (cinelli, et al ). upon plotting the leanings of individuals and those of their associated networks the study was able to compare these individual leanings with those of their “neighborhoods.” for facebook and twitter, the study saw a clear positive correlation that showed high densities of users on either side of their respective controversies. a further analysis of people’s circles of influence showed that users on facebook and twitter were more likely to interact with other users with similar leanings due to the way the platforms spread information. this means that the structures of social media platforms limited the extent to which users could be exposed to others’ opinions (cinelli, et al ). this view is also supported by a study of twitter in , in which researchers used data from a large network of politically active twitter users and analyzed their opinions and networks based around the us presidential election. by analyzing these individuals and their networks, the study found that voters on twitter were disproportionately likely to see like-minded information in their feeds. furthermore, this information also was seen to reach these users faster than different viewpoints (halberstam and knight ). others don’t believe the echo-chamber effect is as strong as people make it out to be. according to a national survey of adult internet users in the uk, those who professed an interest in politics tended to avoid echo chambers and consumed diverse media sets. the study critiqued existing notions of echo-chambers for being restricted to single media platforms without taking into account the real-life multiple media environment in which users aren’t restricted to only social media. in a regression analysis, the study concluded that a greater interest in politics reduced the likelihood of being caught in an echo chamber (dubois and blank ). however, this conclusion does not necessarily generalize as well, for a couple of reasons. first, professed political interest is relative, and even those who claim to be uninterested would still have access to the same kind of rhetoric and information spread by social media. second, just because there are many choices does not mean individuals will necessarily utilize them. as seen above, homophily can be a factor that causes people to seek out the comfort of agreement and commonality, whether consciously or not. a real-life case of these echo-chambers is facebook groups. under the recent quarantine and mask-wearing measures enacted to quell the spread of covid- , a network of facebook groups began to protest these orders. these groups have become places of misinformation and conspiracy theories, consisting of an audience of over million members. the commonality within these groups has also generalized to the political opinions of these people, shifting their focus to mocking the blm movement and promoting conspiracy theories about the protests (seitz ). by providing means for such users to avoid media that conflict with their own technium social sciences journal vol. , - , october issn: - www.techniumscience.com opinions, facebook is compromising these users’ ability to share their ideas and have their ideas challenged by others. on the other hand, does exposure to other opinions necessarily allow users to be influenced by these opinions? not necessarily. in a study of democrats and republicans on social media, participants were asked to fill out a survey about their political views before and after consuming media from the opposing party. according to the results, viewing the other party’s views actually increased the polarization of opinions: democrats leaned further left, and republicans leaned further right (bail et al. ). in other words, exposing people to conflicting political viewpoints may perpetuate a key trait of echo-chambers, polarization of viewpoints. this means that humans also have innate propensities to retreat deeper into their existing ideologies, choosing to clutch their existing beliefs tighter rather than entertaining opposing views. this conclusion supports what was theorized above, that social media facilitate homophily within echo-chambers by exacerbating tribal mentalities while accentuating differences between opposing groups. in conclusion, in a political landscape laden with controversy and polarized viewpoints fueled by emotion, social media have the ability to perpetuate these polarizations. facebook and twitter mainly spread information via feeds that are influenced by the media consumption of friends. this means that the algorithms governing these sites are prone to creating echo chambers in which one’s feed is filled with opinions and viewpoints of people that they agree with. in addition, facebook groups create communities that keep to themselves in terms of media consumption, perpetuating misinformation and giving users a way to satisfy their need for political confirmation, when political discussion thrives on the civil discussion of such ideas. some research does show that exposure to other views can further polarize one’s opinion, but the mere act of hearing other opinions and reaching conclusions about them is better than remaining stagnant in an echo-chamber. . engagement in civil discussion although social media can perpetuate these echo-chambers, they have also become platforms for users to engage in discussions. for productive political discussion, civility also plays a part in allowing everyone involved to feel open to having their ideas challenged. on this front, however, the situation is slightly more mixed. social media have become popular channels for politicians during election campaigns, enabling them to directly reach out to the general public (stier ). a survey of users on facebook and twitter showed that facebook was mostly used by the general public to engage with politicians, and twitter was mostly used by a smaller fraction of the population for politics. the more engaged with political discussions people were, the more they utilized the features the platforms provided like commenting and sharing to interact with politicians (kalsnes, larsson, and enli ). this shows that the features offered by social media are desirable by politicians and the politically interested to interact via comments and sharing. the nature of discussions on social media, however, is more ambivalent. critics of social media-based politics blame sns platforms for creating media consumption practices that are detrimental to proper political discussion. because social media creates a constant flow of information, it can put users in a literal state of flow, defined as a state in which people remain in a comfort zone of constant passive consumption. this means that the deliberate and mentally intensive nature of political discussion is drowned out in the sea of other attention-seeking things. this rapid and mindless consumption is facilitated by word limits like on tweets, which prevent politicians from making consistent coherent narratives for people to follow, instead offering instantly gratifying, digestible emotional bites (bolter ). technium social sciences journal vol. , - , october issn: - www.techniumscience.com in addition to these built-in limits to engagement, social media are criticized for facilitating incivility. according to some, their mere presence on twitter compels them to start fights and seek arguments with other strangers online. some users lament how members of both the right and left used to be able to sit around the same dinner table for a respectful discussion, but with the advent of social media discussions have become more hostile (garsd ). word limits on tweets appear to have contributed to this incivility. a study headed by professor yphtach lelkes at the university of pennsylvania found that civility of conversations on twitter directly correlated with the word count limit on tweets (jaidka, zhou, and lelkes ). perhaps the need to condense one’s speech into a limited space prompts people to use more emphatic language and informal slang to get their message across. a study on facebook, however, shows a different reality (which may speak to differences between the way both platforms function). it analyzed the content of discussions on politically sensitive topics on two different platforms; first was the washington post facebook page, on which users would be identifiable and accountable for what content they produce. second was the washington post website, where users have a higher level of anonymity. results showed that political discussion on the website was far more likely to be uncivil, with derogatory comments made toward other participants in the discussion. the facebook page, on the other hand, suffered less from this issue. it seems that, although both facebook and twitter provide the tools necessary for meaningful discussion, these tools may or may not be used for civil discussion. along with issues with engagement in an age where information is more passively consumed, the topic of civility on social media is also being debated. in general, it seems that accountability can play a part in facilitating civil discussion, something that can be addressed. what cannot be addressed, however, is the issue of engagement, which is further exacerbated by the echo- chamber effects described in the previous section. . implications for the future . . freedom of expression basic human socio psychological compulsion means the spiral of silence will likely continue to dissuade some individuals from voicing their truthful opinions online. on the other hand, anonymous accounts that do not contain any of the user’s personal information will remain unfettered. as technological capabilities in video/photo manipulation and general internet trolling culture evolve, social media will likely suffer more from individuals finding enjoyment in spreading misinformation and discord. as seen by the actions taken by twitter against trump’s misinformation, this will likely prompt more intervention from both social media companies themselves and government regulatory bodies to moderate their content. it is noteworthy that in august, , a us congressional committee called in four ceos of top technology companies to testify before them. amongst the many issues that were covered in that congressional meeting, the regulation of misinformation and fake news on their platforms took center stage (euronews ). although the elimination of misinformation promotes political discourse by creating a better-informed public, it must be remembered that such moderation is a slippery slope. some freedoms do need to be curtailed, like the freedoms of those who actively seek to undermine political processes through their actions. however, this well-intentioned moderation can just as easily devolve into content moderation for selfish political or ideological ends. the phrase “general public interest” that has been used to justify this moderation is vague, reflecting the weaknesses of paternalistic leadership; social media companies’ views of public interest are fallible and subjective. moderation policies by these social media companies must remain under technium social sciences journal vol. , - , october issn: - www.techniumscience.com careful scrutiny going forward. although the need to cut out fake news appears to be universal, the public must keep an eye out for potential abuses of power on the platforms they use in the foreseeable future. . exposure to diverse opinions homophily is unfortunately an integral part of human socialization, a propensity deeply embedded in our psyche. social media add fuel to this compulsion by providing spaces for like- minded communities and letting users block others they do not want to hear from. yet the problem will not be solved simply by removing these features. no matter what social media platforms do, people will probably find other ways to gravitate towards like-minded individuals regardless. in addition, forcefully trying to expose people to opposing ideologies may lead to further polarization, as seen in bail et al.’s twitter study. no matter what social media companies try to do, people will naturally relapse into tribal mentalities and create widening rifts between ingroups and outgroups. worse, trying to force exposure could further accelerate political polarization. the newsfeed method of consuming information from friends and followers will also create what is called a news-finds-me method of consumption. here, individuals consume what is known as “ambient news,” ubiquitous news that reaches individuals via social networks and word-of-mouth rather than official news outlets (gil de zúñiga, weeks, and ardèvol-abreu ). this increase in passive media consumption without the drive to dive deeper into usually nuanced political issues means users are at risk of being even more limited in their political knowledge. rather than trying to dissuade people from following their natural desires, governments and social media companies must take an active role in raising awareness about such psychological phenomena. knowing about the existence of echo-chambers and the deleterious effects of passive media consumption can better motivate individuals to broaden their media diets and better self-diagnose the echo-chambers they may be in. . engagement in civil discussion the limited word count on social media and the need for conciseness in spreading one’s message will likely continue to compromise civility online. worse, as seen in the npr piece on incivility online, it doesn’t appear to matter whether an account is anonymous or not. individuals online find themselves acting uncharacteristically uncivil anyway (garsd ). anonymity would probably worsen this phenomenon. when the problem with polarization between echo-chambers is already pressing, such incivility between both sides can turn things even worse as it furthers stereotypes and taints perceptions of opposing parties. bipartisan politics will only work if both sides can learn to put aside their differences, and a rise in incivility will continue to preclude such action if not remedied. similar to the challenges of exposing users to diverse opinions, attempts to force engagement in civil political discussion online will probably end up being counterproductive and overly restrictive. completely eliminating anonymity on the internet would not only be extremely difficult, but would also eliminate some of the freedom associated with this anonymity. if everyone is required to reflect their real-world selves in all of their online interactions, it will only raise psychological barriers to free expression. in an age where people are going online at younger and younger ages, it is important to make sure people are instead properly educated about the importance of civility in all aspects of life (not just sns) and about the effects social media have on the way they absorb information (carufel ). technium social sciences journal vol. , - , october issn: - www.techniumscience.com . conclusion this investigation reviewed literature evaluating the two primary social media platforms facebook and twitter in relation to their ability to create productive political discourse on their platforms. both platforms were evaluated based on three criteria: freedom of expressing opinions, exposure to other opinions, and the level of engagement in civil discussion on politically sensitive issues. on the freedom of expressing opinions, social media theoretically offer no barriers to entry for users and allow anyone anywhere to voice their opinion. however, the implementation of this trait in real life shows that this is not exactly the case. social media companies are facing increasing pressure to moderate content on their websites, causing some to undermine views of certain groups and interfere in the spread of their opinions. this comes with risks, but it is also important to note that complete unfettered sharing of opinions on social media may not be beneficial to politics either, and a balancing act between moderation and freedom appears to be necessary. there are also psychological factors like the spiral of silence theory, which may psychologically hinder users from expressing their opinions. on the exposure to other opinions, i examined and confirmed the prominence of echo- chambers, which are facilitated by the way sns platforms spread information and the features they provide. the ability of facebook and twitter to perpetuate homophily through their algorithms can create situations where users consume content they already agree with. facebook groups also contribute to this effect by giving users the ability to satisfy their homophily, restricting themselves to a comfortable echo-chamber in which their views are no longer challenged. social media appear to lack the most in this area, as the features and functionalities that enable such a phenomenon are a fundamental part of how they work. on the level of engagement in civil discussion, although social media are becoming a place for politicians to easily engage with the public, the passive consumption of media is also encouraged by social media. this passive consumption is antithetical to meaningful political discussion, and additional restrictions like word limits on tweets can further restrict users’ ability to properly communicate their thoughts. civility is also an issue that can hinder meaningful political discussion, but it appears to be remedied by improving the accountability of users. the spiral of silence theory may also apply here, in which social desirability restricts the free sharing of opinions but also may discourage incivility. in response to these limitations of social media and their implications for political discourse, i provided two main solutions for the future: extensive education of the public on the effects of social media on political discourse and civility, and continued scrutiny of social media companies and their content moderation practices. without context, these recommendations may seem insufficient and impotent. furthermore, social media provide a more comfortable alternative for users, reducing incentives to change the patterns of media content they consume; they allow users to easily find others who agree with them, block those whose opinions they don’t want to hear, or hide behind anonymity to personally attack people they do not like. yet the effects of social media are tangled and nebulous, and encouraging social media companies to wield the power they have over many millions of user interactions will more likely than not make the situation worse. the recommendations i conclude with instead place trust in the public that awareness of social media’s limitations will lead to bottom-up changes as more people take on the responsibility they must shoulder as political beings. with sufficient educational measures and the resulting shift in attitudes to politics online, i believe we will be able to see a slow but steady improvement in the status quo. technium social sciences journal vol. , - 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( ). “the role of social media in international relations vol: ıssue: pp: - keywords: social media, international relations, changes, development . article type review article the role of social media in international relations arrived date . . accepted date . . published date . . Şeyma nur bÖyÜkbaŞ* abstract being a social entity; starts to be raised by parents who are be able to socialize, survive, communicate and interact with his environment since birth. thus, the society, which comes together from people who socialize by communicating, has a unique set of values called “culture” that affect the behavior and beliefs of people. in the st century digital life; with the global use of internet technology as a means of communication, the digital culture defined as a whole of material values that individuals maintain in their databases and online accounts has begun to affect people's lives and beliefs. in this context. social media has a big impact in the st century and in this article we will discuss and make ourselves an opinion how it impacts with international relations and how it would be able to make changes throughout the world view and politics. meanwhile everybody is getting to become a social influencer it got much easier to speak about the own opinion and reach out for a wider public. introduction since technology developed in the past few years mostly everybody got a smartphone in which they have a social media account. social media refers to websites and applications that are designed to allow people to share their content quickly, efficiently and in real-time. it allows people to broadly share content and engage with other people. social media has a very big impact on everyone’s life it changed the routine of most peoples days and therefor that started new careers.through social media everything got much easier; for example : „to advertise something, to get in contact with somebody even if that person is on the other site of the world, or it got much easier to get famous throughout the internet and gain more people interested in you.“like or title said “the role of social media in international relations“, but what exactly is international relations ? international relations is the way in which two or more nations interact with and regard each other, especially in the context of political, economic, or cultural relationships.it is an academic discipline that focuses on the study of the interaction of the actors in international politics, including state and non-state actors.now that we know what our keywords mean, what kind of impact do they actually have with each other ? what is actually the role of social media for ir ?, does it help in any way? main body according to ir theorist and author, david bollier “the internet and other information technologies are no longer a peripheral force in the conduct of world affairs but a powerful engine for change.”the way information is disseminated to the public has changed with social media and the internet. in the old times, information was accessible only through state institutions, and tightly controlled information flowing between governments and citizens. through the internet we see this paradigm turned entirely on its head as the costs of capturing and sharing information fell drastically and the * seeyma.nur. @gmail.com, yıldırım beyazıt university, international reliations student, ankara/turkey https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - volume: , issue: , july issjournal.com rapid growth of citizen journalists, blogs and online activists began.since the increasing usage of digital technologies and social media channels expand from the private sector to the public sector, the use of social media to help policymakers accomplish their strategic objectives at home as well as internationally has become a commonly embraced tactic. we've seen social media help create radical change over the past decade and shift countries towards equality and democracy. experts often praise social media to bring other issues to the mainstream audience's attention. of starters, syria's refugee crisis, the ice bucket challenge of motor neuron disorder (also known as lou gehrig's disease) even these days people are protesting for the black lives matter movement also known as „blm“, are all examples of problems that benefitted from the power of social media to disseminate photos and information to the public rapidly.also these days were we live in a pandemic, social media helps us to entertain ourselves and teach us what to do because even doctors are broadcasting or making videos and through social media shopping for food and clothing got much easier. since technology developed in the past few years mostly everybody got a smartphone in which they have a social media account. social media refers to websites and applications that are designed to allow people to share their content quickly, efficiently and in real-time. it allows people to broadly share content and engage with other people. social media has a very big impact on everyone’s life it changed the routine of most peoples days and therefor that started new careers. through social media everything got much easier; for example : „to advertise something, to get in contact with somebody even if that person is on the other site of the world, or it got much easier to get famous throughout the internet and gain more people interested in you.“ like or title said “the role of social media in international relations“, but what exactly is international relations ? international relations is the way in which two or more nations interact with and regard each other, especially in the context of political, economic, or cultural relationships.it is an academic discipline that focuses on the study of the interaction of the actors in international politics, including state and non-state actors. now that we know what our keywords mean, what kind of impact do they actually have with each other ? what is actually the role of social media for ir ?, does it help in any way? according to ir theorist and author, david bollier “the internet and other information technologies are no longer a peripheral force in the conduct of world affairs but a powerful engine for change.” the way information is disseminated to the public has changed with social media and the internet. in the old times, information was accessible only through state institutions, and tightly controlled information flowing between governments and citizens. through the internet we see this paradigm turned entirely on its head as the costs of capturing and sharing information fell drastically and the rapid growth of citizen journalists, blogs and online activists began.since the increasing usage of digital technologies and social media channels expand from the private sector to the public sector, the use of social media to help policymakers accomplish their strategic objectives at home as well as internationally has become a commonly embraced tactic. we've seen social media help create radical change over the past decade and shift countries towards equality and democracy. experts often praise social media to bring other issues to the mainstream audience's attention. of starters, syria's refugee crisis, the ice bucket challenge of motor neuron disorder (also known as lou gehrig's disease) even these days people are protesting for the black lives matter movement also known as „blm“, are all examples of problems that benefitted from the power of social media to disseminate photos and information to the public rapidly.also these days were we live in a pandemic, social media helps us to entertain ourselves and teach us what to do because even doctors are broadcasting or making videos and through social media shopping for food and clothing got much easier. the notion of e-diplomacy as a force for social good, or digital diplomacy, was a topic often debated by scholars, civil servants and academics. in digital life, people use digital media to communicate and live their individual existence in these environments according to the values brought by digital culture. social media is the general name given to digital media that people use today to communicate. according to the internet and social media usage statistics published in ; active social media users as % of the world population volume: , issue: , july issjournal.com hours minutes per day, % of turkey's population uses social media daily average of hours minutes (hootsuite and wearesocial, ). communication has never been this easy before social media. the ease of communication and access to people has changed our values positively or negatively. we now have a new human typology. people who used to show their existence by speaking, producing in the society; he is now trying to show his presence on social media by sharing messages, status and pictures. it is a fact that social media has many positive and negative effects on individuals' beliefs, attitudes and behaviors. the positive effects of social media on individuals; it is due to the wealth of possibilities of accessing and disseminating information, and its ability to be used as a means of communication and information. in social media, individuals can acquire and spread information very quickly with their friends. in this way, individuals were able to become famous, watched and appreciated by everyone through social media. another positive effect of social media on individuals' attitudes and behaviors; if there is a pressure that exceeds, it can be used as a communication tool by exceeding the limits and distances against bullies. the convenience of social media on access to and dissemination of information has positive effects on individuals' attitudes and behaviors; as individuals can exhibit narcissistic, sadistic, interests and attitudes that prioritize interests, they can also cause negative self and moral development in individuals' attitudes and behaviors. with the social media culture, special moments and private lives that were previously confidential, forbidden to share and forbidden are opened to the opinions and views of others. children can share their most special moments for the sake of appreciation. unfortunately, most of the children have the perception that “i will share my special memories, the more i will be open to appreciation”. let's try to explain the corruption of social media in the moral values of the human with the example of artificial intelligence boat named “tay”. artificial intelligence bot named "tay", developed by microsoft company in and working on twitter, programmed to learn and interact with people; it starts correspondence with a very calm and classical style. however, thai; as soon as hours, the character that produces sexual, racist and swear words is closed by microsoft. developed as a result of intense and misuse of social media by children; as a result of the technology addiction and cyberbullying behaviors that negatively affect children's attitudes and behaviors, moral values and beliefs, children can turn into individuals who do not come into society, who are introverted, cannot express their thoughts, and whose imagination is weak, depressed and prone to suicide. the negative effects of social media on the moral values of our children, social media; this is due to the fact that it can be used as a means of emotional exhibitionism for the sake of personal appreciation and appreciation, and that it can be used as a means of sedition by serving false and fake news as if they were real. through emotional exhibitionism that negatively affects our children's moral values, children can open everything private and private to everyone. our children like being visible on social media. children can share their feelings, thoughts, joys, sorrows and special moments with people they do not know. if we leave the body aside in terms of sexuality, we expose our naked souls on social media to people we do not know. from this perspective, we all become actors of a spiritual pornography. to put it more clearly; today's man simply says, "look at me, watch me and watch me." with our social media posts, we turn ourselves into photos and messages. we try to satisfy our desires to be appreciated and appreciated by using social media as a mirror of images, by showing us as if we are not who we are, with gilded and non-our messages, photos corrected with photo editor programs. we take selfies, we share our image to others on social media. nowadays, our children are looking for the image they share their own value and they want to be liked by these images. the notion of e- diplomacy as a force for social good, or digital diplomacy, was a topic often debated by scholars, civil servants and academics. on the first table we are able to see in percentage how often and how many people are using which social media platform to get their daily news informations. volume: , issue: , july issjournal.com table . % of each social networking sites‘ users who get news on the site source: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/social_media_use_in_politics we just discussed about the benefits of social media influencing international relations but what about the negative aspects of it ? there are many people on those sites who are actual frauds and are just trying to get attention while disrespecting other people or destroying their life or work. unfortunately those people are just trying to force their own way by not thinking about other people and being selfish; for example: „racism“. they are also wrong role models and therefor a bad influence for children, who will be our next generation ,which we should not teach wrong. that makes us think about wether or not social media is a good influence on international relations but to put it into a pot and label it as bad we should actually do more research and make our own opinion about everything. it is not a bad way to influence something but like in everything world topic related we have to be careful and we should not jump into any conclusions. on the second table we are able to see reasons in percentage to not use social media platforms. table reasons for not using social media source: https://adriandayton.com/ / /what-if-your-clients-dont-use-twitter-facebook-or- linkedin/resizedimage -reasons-for-not-using-social-media/ debates on media and public relations the influence of the media is increasing day by day and it is seen that it is accepted that it works as a fourth force, which acts as an effective, controlling function and directs the society, especially in political societies where political powers exist. media has a formative and transformative effect on society. those who have held power / power since the time the media appeared, wanted to take these tools under their control and control. the media, which is very effective in terms of the formation of the public and the seizure of social consciousness, draws attention as a tool that those who have https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/social_media_use_in_politics https://adriandayton.com/ / /what-if-your-clients-dont-use-twitter-facebook-or-linkedin/resizedimage -reasons-for-not-using-social-media/ https://adriandayton.com/ / /what-if-your-clients-dont-use-twitter-facebook-or-linkedin/resizedimage -reasons-for-not-using-social-media/ volume: , issue: , july issjournal.com political power want to control. in this part of the study, the relationship between public opinion, public opinion creation, media and media and public opinion is examined. media concept although it is used quite intensely today, the limits and scope of the concept of media are not clear. for example, it is called “television media”, besides; the term “media” is used to mean all of them, especially print media, radio and television (even the internet) (kocadaş, ). when it comes to the media, it is understood in a society that all communication systems that provide the opportunity to carry out the three main functions for storing messages and information, transmitting them remotely and updating cultural and political practices in whole or in part (mora, ). since mass media are formed within the economic, political and cultural structure of the society in which they are a social institution, the dominant forces of the time, the struggles of power and the mode of production have a direct effect on the form and content of mass media (dağtaş, ). the concept of public opinion the concept of public opinion; it is possible to express it as “common attitudes of those who belong to the same social groups towards a certain event”. harwood childs defines the public as “the sum of opinions” and emphasizes that the interaction and communication within the group and among the groups must be taken into consideration. it is also known as “the thoughts of the people that are mostly united in any subject”. the expressed public opinion is the sum of the ideas and concepts that reflect the common judgment of the society (childs, ). kejanlıoğlu ( ) states that the public will be defined as "the total opinion of the public on issues that concern everyone or the views and attitudes supported by a large part of the public.kapani ( ), on the other hand, defines the public opinion as “an opinion that dominates the group or groups of people dealing with a particular controversial problem at a certain time”. moressi ( ), on the other hand, can be attributed to the situation that the citizens expressed in a generalized and verifiable majority in a generalized and verifiable manner, individually or collectively. media and public relations the primary task of the media should be to inform. mass media are indisputable means to spread information as a value. (charon, ). information can be provided by preserving the content of the news and making the news transfer accurate and impartial. the transferred news-information pair directly affects the public. information also includes educating the public and contributes to the education of the individual over a lifetime by creating an invisible education system or in other words, it should undertake this task. personal attitudes, environmental factors, ideologies, population, culture, political institutions and mass media are the main elements of public opinion. the first stage in the formation of public opinion; it is the period of "mass behavior". opinions occur within primary groups during this period. the second stage is the period of "public debates and contradictions". the opinions formed in this period are transferred to the secondary groups. the last stage is the “institutionalized decision making” stage. as a result of this stage, a positive or negative action is put forward. (bektaş, ). the media should never say that they are the only truth when creating public opinion and giving specific messages, and the messages they give should be informative, positive and constructive (bittner, ). when the right message is given targeting the right masses, it can be mentioned that there is a real communication mutually. masses can gain spirit and vitality with messages. this creates the mobility of societies in spirit and vitality. the media must be the pioneer of the mobility and productiveness of the society and form the public opinion from this perspective. mass media have the opportunity to address large masses of people. for this reason, press organs, radios, televisions, social media environments are expanding the area of the masses that are called and at the same time they become very effective in forming and organizing public opinions. these effective features of the media are used in forming or reforming public opinion. as the media directs the public, from time to time, the public can direct the media. the public participating in programs aimed at informing the public by telephone ensures that the topics of many programs remain on the agenda for a long time. the media should always embrace some democratic concepts and views that need to be protected. the volume: , issue: , july issjournal.com future of a society depends on a bright and clear perspective, its studies in science and culture, education, a media that is aware of its responsibilities, a modern and productive public created under healthy conditions. conclusion and discussion citizens are no longer just contact users, they still create their own media reporting thanks to the internet and create new forms of political participation and leadership through the use of social media sites. it can be argued that one of the main ways where the influence of the internet has been felt is that modern forms of social and political action can be made possible. the internet is changing governance in the st century, while transnational connectivity is being opened up to many millions of online societies. in fact, national security is evolving, governments are facing an increasing number of challenges and perpetrators may be entities, organizations, persons or other combinations. some states are weaker inside than their private forces. in a transnational struggle over the agenda of world politics, private organizations, ngos, industry and unions can compete for media attention from major countries. so we can tell that international relations as a profession has only lately begun to deal with social media proliferation and the consequences for global diplomacy. yet if the new climate is anything to go by, then social media is well on the way to undermining conventional political networks and processes. all in all we could say that this is only the beginning of development in international relations through social media, which will cause many changes and will be able to make the citizens will come true through their teamwork on the internet. many many people are working for a better world but also some of them are trying to make it worse and through social media everybody is able to see it, thats why it will help on the one hand international relations to know what the people want and what they want to change but on the other hand, it would also be a bad influence thats why everybody has to be careful about their posts and should make their own research. therefor we can be excited to see those big changes and always be open to help our community for growth between those nations. references bektaş, a. ( ). public opinion, communication and democracy. istanbul: context publications. bittner j.r. ( ). mass communication: an introduction, new jersey: prentice-hall, s. . charon j.m.( ). media world, istanbul: communication publications, p. . childs h. ( ). an introduction to public opinion, new york: wiley and sons, s. dağtaş e. ( ). tabloid newspaper in turkey, ankara: utopia press, p. . hootsuite ve wearesocial ( ). global digital report in . https://wearesocial.com/global- digital-report- ( . . ). kapani m.( ). introduction to political science, ankara: bilgi publishing house, p. . kejanlıoğlu b.( ), “public sphere”, concept dictionary - discourse and truth, (ed.) fikret baskaya, ankara: free university library, p. . kocadaş b.( ). culture ve media, bilig ,pp. , - , (online). http://www.yesevi.edu.tr/bilig/biligtur/pdf/ / - .pdf , ( . . ). mora n.( ).“symbolic elite as media, society and news source“, international journal of human sciences, c.v, p. , p. . moressi e. ( ). news ethics. establishment and criticism of moral journalism, (trans.) fırat genç, ankara: dost bookstore publishing, , p. . http://jirfp.com/journals/jirfp/vol_ _no_ _december_ / .pdf ( . . ). https://blogs.unsw.edu.au/thedigitalage/blog/ / /the-role-of-social-media-in-international- relations/( . . ). https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/social-media ( . . ). https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/social_media_use_in_politics ( . . ). https://adriandayton.com/ / /what-if-your-clients-dont-use-twitter-facebook-or- linkedin/resizedimage -reasons-for-not-using-social-media/ ( . . ). http://jirfp.com/journals/jirfp/vol_ _no_ _december_ / .pdf https://blogs.unsw.edu.au/thedigitalage/blog/ / /the-role-of-social-media-in-international-relations/ https://blogs.unsw.edu.au/thedigitalage/blog/ / /the-role-of-social-media-in-international-relations/ https://dictionary.cambridge.org/dictionary/english/social-media https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/social_media_use_in_politics https://adriandayton.com/ / /what-if-your-clients-dont-use-twitter-facebook-or-linkedin/resizedimage -reasons-for-not-using-social-media/ https://adriandayton.com/ / /what-if-your-clients-dont-use-twitter-facebook-or-linkedin/resizedimage -reasons-for-not-using-social-media/ the hegemony of the white gaze in america and black resistance as counter-hegemony by james junior phiri a thesis submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of master of arts in the faculty of graduate and postdoctoral studies (political science) the university of british colombia (vancouver) august © james junior phiri, ii the following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the faculty of graduate and postdoctoral studies for acceptance, the thesis entitled: the hegemony of the white gaze in america and black resistance as counter-hegemony submitted by james junior phiri in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of master of arts in political science examining committee: bruce baum, associate professor, political science, ubc supervisor handel kashope wright, professor, educational studies, ubc supervisory committee member iii abstract my primary aim in this thesis is to analyse and identify points of black resistance within the ‘white gaze’. seeking to maintain specificity, i will use historical and anecdotal evidence that examines the experience of black bodies in the united states. i begin by arguing that the black lived experience has been under the microscopic focus of the dominant white gaze which is undergirded by white supremacy and the domination of the black body. the second part of the essay will be centered towards ironing out ways or methods in which black resistance has been found and needs to be explored further, not only in order just to bring more understanding but ultimately to advance equality within the united states. most notably, i explore this topic by amalgamating the phenomenological study of black lives in the united states and literature developed by critical racial theorists. iv lay summary in light of the global outcry for justice which led to massive protests concerning anti- black racism particularly in the united states, i wanted to highlight how systematic racism has affected and continues to affect black people in a negative way. moreover, marks six hundred and one years since the first “black” africans were brought to the colony of virginia as an enslaved people. one important ongoing, though shifting feature of this racial domination has been the white gaze. the white gaze can be understood as a particularly negative or disparaging way that white people have looked at and thought of the non-white body under the eyes of white supremacy. lastly, i wanted to explore some ways that black people can and do resist white domination. v preface this dissertation is original, unpublished, independent work by the author, j. phiri. vi table of contents abstract .......................................................................................................................................... iii lay summary ................................................................................................................................. iv preface ............................................................................................................................................. v table of contents ........................................................................................................................... vi acknowledgements ....................................................................................................................... vii introduction ..................................................................................................................................... i. understanding the white gaze ................................................................................................ ii. space and the white gaze ....................................................................................................... iii. the white gaze and the marketing of blackness as evil ................................................... iv. white gaze: influence on sexuality and gender ............................................................... v. white gaze and black status ................................................................................................. vi. violence and the culture of surveillance under the white gaze ....................................... vii. examples of black resistance against the white gaze ...................................................... viii. conclusion ......................................................................................................................... bibliography ................................................................................................................................. vii acknowledgements i would like to thank bruce baum and handel kashope wright for their support and dedication to this paper. i am also grateful to my family and friends for all their encouragement and support throughout this journey. lastly, i give praise and honour to my god the lord jesus christ who gave me strength to overcome. introduction recent protests in the united states concerning anti-black racism, including police violence, have highlighted once again the continuing role of white racism against black americans in that country. in fact, marks six hundred and one years since the first “black” africans were brought to the colony of virginia as slaves. one important ongoing, though shifting feature of this racial domination has been the white gaze. this notion refers to how white racial domination and black subordination have been crystallized in how those people who have called themselves “white” people have regarded, treated, and looked upon black people throughout the modern era. in this thesis, focusing on the effects of the white gaze in the united states, i aim to demonstrate how the white gaze can be understood as a particularly negative or disparaging way that white people have looked at and thought of the non-white body by the white world of modern times – say, since the importation of the first enslaved africans into the virginia colony in . moreover, within the context of western white supremacist structures, the white gaze is an important site of white racial power that is predicated on a white epistemic order that seeks to dominate and subordinate black lives (yancy, , ). according to the philosopher george yancy, the white gaze is a hegemonic tool and by-product of the white supremacist structures and ideas that are historically grounded in material relations of white power (yancy, , xxxvi). it has been a gaze that conveyed that black lives do not matter as anything other than a the rise of european colonialism and the african slave trade, initiated by portugal around , led europeans increasingly to categorize and regard the diverse peoples of sub-saharan africa as “negroes” or “blacks,” and sometimes worse designations. in the united states during the late s, black activists rejected the designation of “negroes” and reclaimed the term “black.” see cedric j. robinson, black marxism: the making of the black radical tradition, foreword by robin d. g. kelley (chapel hill: university of north carolina press, [ ] ), p. ; kwame anthony appiah, in my father’s house: africa and the philosophy of culture (new york: oxford university press, ), pp. - , . means, as enslaved and subordinated laborers, for the benefit of white people. this kind of white looking at black people, as i explain later, is exemplified in a passage of frantz fanon’s book black skin, white masks, where he discusses a white boy fearfully looking at him and declaring to his mother, “look, a negro,” seeing fanon as strange, threatening, and less than fully human (fanon, , - ). in short, i will show that the white gaze is a manifestation of white racial power and domination that, as the passage from fanon indicates, dehumanizes and marginalizes black people. in so doing, the white gaze has been a significant part of a white supremacist racial order that has worked to limit the freedom, dignity, security, and well-being of black people while enhancing the freedom and status of white people, even as it has not benefitted all white people equally. at the same time, while the white gaze has limited the freedom of black people, it has not completely destroyed their agency. in fact, many black people have always resisted the white gaze in various ways, with various degrees of success . the black lives matter movement in the us is thus only the latest embodiment of black resistance. this activism, i argue, has lessened the power of the white gaze but has not yet eradicated it. in what follows, i develop this argument in seven parts and a conclusion. in the first section, i explain the basic idea of the white gaze. in section two, i examine how the white gaze racializes space, defining white spaces in which only whites are fully welcome and non-whites are not. section three explores how the white gaze is materialized through popular culture, black resistance in the us can be traced back to the beginning of their enslavement, through the abolitionist movements and the subsequent emergence of black intellectuals such as debois in the wake of the reconstruction period. moreover, there was continued resistance from black americans who were coming back from the world wars, through the civil rights and black power movement. see henry louis, jr, did african-american slave rebel? (the african americans: many rivers to cross ( pbs, / / ) https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans- many-rivers-to-cross/history/did-african-american-slaves-rebel/ https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/did-african-american-slaves-rebel/ https://www.pbs.org/wnet/african-americans-many-rivers-to-cross/history/did-african-american-slaves-rebel/ especially in its negative depictions of blackness. in section four, i analyze the white gaze's influence on racialization of gender and sexuality. in section five i examine how the white gaze undermines black status. section six considers violence and the culture of surveillance within the white gaze. these considerations raise the question of the possibilities for black resistance to the white gaze. therefore, in section seven i explore some of the ways that black people have resisted this oppressive white gaze. in the concluding section, i summarize my argument and its implications. i. understanding the white gaze it is now widely understood among critical race theorists that the current capitalist world order is fundamentally anti-black. it largely conforms to what charles mills ( ) describes as the “racial contract” through which white people have organized societies for their own benefit at the expense of non-white peoples. mills argues that “white supremacy is the unnamed political system that has made the modern world what it is today” ( , ). whiteness, he says, “is not really a color at all, but a set of power relations” operating within the fabric of historically constructed social identities (mills, , ). thus, one could argue that the white gaze has always existed as a major tool of white supremacy. fanon does a masterful job of situating the black experience within the white gaze by demonstrating that the black body lives under a ‘crushing object-hood’ (fanon, , ). this analysis of the objectification of black bodies exposes some of the disastrous effects of the white gaze that are by-products of white supremacy. thereby, the white gaze manifests itself in both figurative and phenomenological understandings – that is, through symbolic and embodied aspects. nevertheless, some might ask, does the white gaze exist or is it just an inaccurate idea? the concept of the ‘white gaze’ denotes a kind of spotlight and a derisive looking at or a looking through the black body. fanon provides a vivid picture by recounting a time when he heard the words, ‘look, a negro’ ( , ). he, like most blacks who are confronted with this objectifying gaze of the white world, was subjected to demeaning scrutiny and othering. moreover, at certain historical moments, the intensity of the white gaze has had a dual effect on the black body: on the one hand, rendering the black body invisible, while, on the other hand, black bodies are highly visible to the watching gaze. this dual function of the white gaze means that there is the negation of the black bodies and the subsequent rendering of invisibility to the white world. as a matter of fact, the term ‘black’ was formulated within the interstices of the colonial categorization people of african origin. in other words, all people of sub-saharan african origins, despite diverse ethnic affiliations and language groups, were lamped into a single “racial” group of ‘black.’ thereby, the white gaze often manifests itself with a critical and controlling gaze over the black body. the power of this duality is such that black lived experience is often dependent on being able to survive and thrive under the oppressive white gaze. as frederick douglass observed, “trained from the cradle up, to think and feel that their masters are superior, and invested with a sort of sacredness, there are few [enslaved blacks] who can outgrow or rise above the control which that sentiment exercises” (douglass, quoted in yancy, , ). from this observation, we can clearly see that there is an all-encompassing scrutiny of the white oppressive view upon the black body. likewise, frantz fanon talks about meeting the white man’s eyes and feeling overwhelmed by stating the following in black skin white masks: “and then the occasion arose when i had to meet the white man’s eyes. an unfamiliar weight burdened me. the real world challenged my claims. in the white world the man of color encounters difficulties in the development of his bodily schema” (fanon, , ) . that is, the white man’s eyes represent a dual experience of power and privilege: on the one hand, the white man exhibits some genuine curiosity of the unknown black man (or “savage”); at the same time, the white man’s gaze has the power to render judgement by accepting or denying the black body’s access into the canon of humanity. moreover, the white gaze is an evitable formulation that appears within the context of the larger process of white racial domination spearheaded by white supremacists. thereby, whiteness becomes something this was fanon’s colonial assertion of the almost impossible task of asserting black humanity in colonial times. the postcolonial assertion of the humanity of the person of colour (admittedly not black) is captured in the title of sherene razack’s ( ) book, looking white people in the eye. thanks to professor handel wright for pointing this out. that the black body must constantly seek to obtain in order to be accepted into ‘civilized’ society. fanon states that the black man is required to be black only in relation to the white man ( , ). the problem, however, is that although whiteness is often presented as an attainable goal that non-whites should pursue, it nonetheless remains an ever-elusive objective, especially for blacks. for instance, we can see that in the united states there were numerous occasions of white flight in many cities, especially when the number of blacks moving from the south to the north increased substantially in the “great migration” that extended from roughly - . therefore, it was the racist edifice of white supremacy that made many african americans believe the lie that moving neighborhoods or regions would get them accepted into white middle class in society . furthermore, the mark of blackness in america is that blacks are often viewed with suspicion and excluded from many economic opportunities. the white gaze is so prevalent that it not only oppresses poor blacks but also successful blacks. the rap artist j. cole describes this very phenomenon (after his studio was illegally raided because his white neighbors had called the police) in the song neighbors in the following manner: “i can't sleep cause i'm paranoid, black in a white man territory” (cole, ). another similar example is when, in , the harvard professor henry louis gates, jr, was arrested by the police while trying to enter his own house because his neighbor had called . these examples, exemplify how blacks are always cognizant and reminded of their blackness whenever they enter white spaces regardless of their class status (yancy, , xxxiii). note that, “race” or racialized identity does include status dimensions so that even poor white historically have had a privileged social status, and even blacks who are economically successful in class terms (middle class, professional, capitalists, wealthy entertainers, etc.) are seen as socially and economically out of place. that is, they have a lesser and more vulnerable or marginalized social status (fredrickson, ). thereby, the white gaze is an inevitable derivative of the white supremacist racial categorization and exclusionary oppression of the black bodies. george yancy describes this phenomenon in the following manner: the history of the black body in north america is fundamentally linked to the history of whiteness, primarily as whiteness is expressed in the form of fear, sadism, hatred, brutality, terror, avoidance, desire, denial, solipsism, madness, policing, politics, and the production and projection of white fantasies (yancy, , xvi). yancy’s point is that the white gaze has acted as a universalizing agent of the white imaginary that was forged through a colonial and racist history of white dominance. moreover, the white gaze is at times almost inescapable in racist societies as it cuts across social and economic class and gender structures as exemplified in the aforementioned examples. thus, the white gaze acts as an effective gatekeeper for whiteness and white privilege. in the process of unpacking the white gaze, it is important to be attentive to its enduring but shifting character. it has changed significantly from jim crow/ colonial era of fanon to the current post-colonial/ post-civil rights movement era in which black activists have achieved partial gains in overcoming stark racial domination of the jim crow period; but as i will explain, its power has not been completely overturned. the differences from the previous era of blatant white supremacism have been evident in achievements of black americans during the us civil rights movement to gain greater equality and dignity and to redefine their identities. one notable aspect of this process was the way black activists rejected the designation “negro” and asserted a black identity, as represented in james brown’s song “say it loud, i’m black and i’m proud” in . ii. space and the white gaze upon studying racialized societies, it is clearly evident that space plays a major role in both the establishment and the entrenchment of white supremacy that views the world through the lens of the white gaze. mills describes this action as the ‘racing of space’, in that there is a clear desire to separate people based on the color of their skin (mills, , ). thereby, we have to understand that the demarcation of physical space played a fundamental role in the shaping of racialized societies such as the united states, thereby perpetuating global white supremacy. one can see this through the historical ‘white flight’ from american urban neighborhoods and the subsequent creation of ghettos. this process, i believe, begins with the white gaze, as blacks and other brown bodies are identified as being different and therefore required to live in designated racialized spaces. mills writes, “you are what you are in part because you originate from certain kind of space, and that space has those properties in part because it is inhabited by creatures like yourself” (mills, , ). this racing of space became a way of controlling people’s movement and ultimately their very existence through the white gaze and other tools of white supremacy. we are all creatures of our environment and the fact that most blacks are born in these disadvantaged places of being, means that they are trapped into a vicious cycle of inferiority, violence and poverty. hence mills states that “space must be normed and raced at the macro level (entire countries and continents), the local level (city neighborhoods)” (mills, , ). thereby, one may deduce that the white gaze plays a major role in the racialization of different spaces by acting as one of the main tools of white supremacy in identifying and determining categories of belonging into a particular space within a racist polity (yancy, , xxxiii). for instance, in the united states the landmark case plessy vs. ferguson ( ) assisted to legitimize and cement the prevailing idea of ‘separate but equal’ – that is, the belief that segregated social spaces, schools, and public accommodations could be considered “equal” as long as some such spaces and services were provided for both white and black americans – into the white imaginary. moreover, this supreme court case helped to entrench the so-called jim crow laws that justified segregation among different racial groups and created more barriers to equality for black people. the conscious or unconscious participation in the shaping of a segregated society based on race, meant that a lot of white americans were active agents in the preservation of white supremacist attitudes and institution. therefore, the white racialized imaginary, which is largely derived from the white gaze, is significant, in that it forms opinions, attitudes, myths and actions of the entire society. in contemporary times the white gaze has often through white neighborhood watch groups or through individuals, controlled standards for entry into white space, in the aim of maintaining racialized spaces that were conceived historically through a racist architecture. this has recently been exemplified by the myriad of cases of white people calling the police when the black bodies are just trying to exist in these white spaces. one such prominent example is when a white manager of a starbucks called the police on two black men who had just come there for a meeting (dias, eligon, and oppel, jr., ). the troubling thought is that there are numerous other cases just like this one that do not make the national news. the racialization of space in relation to the ‘white gaze’ becomes clearer when analysed through the daily individual interactions or encounters of black and white bodies. george yancy speaks of the black body being metaphorically ‘confiscated’ in his description of an encounter with a white woman on an elevator by observing; it is a peculiar experience to have one’s body confiscated without physically being placed in chains. well-dressed, i enter an elevator where a white woman waits to reach her floor. she “sees” my black body, though not the same one i have seen reflected back to me from the mirror on any number of occasions… she sees a black male body “supersaturated with meaning, as they [black bodies] have been relentlessly subjected to [negative] characterization by newspapers, newscasters, popular film, television programming, public officials, policy pundits and other agents of representation.” her body language signifies, “look, the black!” on this score, though short of a performative locution, her body language functions as an insult (yancy, , ). here yancy paints a vivid picture of this common encounter. one implication is that there is a divide as a result of the racial baggage that society has placed on both individuals. i would also maintain that gender plays a significant role in this interaction. this as we will see is mainly because the african american male, has often been disproportionally criminalized and rendered a danger to society. bell hooks, in her book we are cool: black males and masculinity ( ), further elaborates this problem. she says, “black males in the culture of imperialist white-supremacist capitalist patriarchy are feared but they are not loved” (hooks, , ix). thus, the white woman is a product of a racialized society that has normalized this racist caricature of the black male body as being threatening. is her reaction a conscious or unconscious one? i would argue that the majority of times it is an unconscious reaction. in other words, the woman’s feelings of fear do not necessary stem from explicit racist motivations, but rather a mind that has been conditioned from birth to equate black with violence and danger. in agreement with this ideation, fanon opines, “hate is not inborn; it has to be constantly cultivated, to be brought into being, in conflict with more or less recognized guilt complexes” (fanon, , ). thereby, one can imagine the woman from a young age being taught through various explicit and implicit means that she should be afraid of black men. the fact that the elevator is a small space immediately puts the woman in a fight or flight psychological response. yancy ( ) also demonstrates that this particular situation is also very uncomfortable for the black man. does her reaction reinforce his sense of inferiority? i would argue that he faces a stark choice on how to respond to her uneasiness. on the one hand, the black man could get angry and say something such as ‘i am not going to do anything to you’ as a form of protest against her irrational fear. but, he fears that, he will reinforce the notion of the angry black man syndrome, which is often championed by white supremacists whenever they are trying to justify violent repression of the black body. on the other hand, he could decide to make no sudden movements and take a nonthreatening body posture in order to reassure her that he means no harm. nonetheless, in doing this, he may in turn be reinforcing white supremacists’ view that states that he ought to know his place! i believe that he is trapped in an almost inescapable white gaze no matter what he decides to do. hooks eloquently describes this phenomenon. she states, whether in an actual prison or not, practically every black male in the united states has been forced at some point in his life to hold back the self he wants to express, to repress and contain for fear of being attacked, slaughtered, destroyed. black males often exist in a prison of the mind unable to find their way out (hooks, x). in sum, one can rightly deduce that the white gaze helps the white supremacist structures occupy space and has the initial categorizing power in determining who has the right to occupy that space or who does not. space, here, as the social geographer edward soja explains, encompasses at least two dimensions – both the more concrete or material social spaces that we inhabit (what soja calls “firstspace”) and imagined, representational spaces (what soja calls “secondspace”) (soja, ). iii. the white gaze and the marketing of blackness as evil in this section of the essay, i am going to explore how the white gaze is materialized through popular culture that is initiated and normalized by white supremacy. this white racialized imaginary is significant, in that it forms opinions, attitudes, myths and actions of the entire society. furthermore, racist ideas conveyed by popular culture through the lens of the white gaze, have a unique power to influence the unconscious mind and thereby form the underpinning of the dominant culture that is often anti-black. for instance, i believe that the white gaze has made it possible for hollywood to place african americans in stereotypical roles. the white gaze in this instance comes from the captains of industry and the majority white audience. thus, a producer in film might characterize a black actor as a drug dealer and the audience will see this as normal. it is through the eye of the white gaze that mythical stories and fantasies were popularized, by a white supremacist culture that wanted justification for its negation of the black bodies. moreover, the white gaze creates and celebrates type of actual and mental games that seek to pacify the guilty conscious of the white world. the white gaze does this by making it easier for racists’ structures to identify token blacks that represent the illusion of a post racial world. thus, many white americas thought that electing first black president was evidence that the racial tensions and white racism in the united states had been solved by this particular singular event. the delusionary tales that have been created to convince the american ‘negro’ that he ought to count himself lucky to have been allowed to participate in the great american experiment occurs under the watching white gaze. the white gaze is so powerful that the average african american always feels judged by the wider society that has been conditioned by these misleading and destructive tales. hooks puts it in the following words: black males “are victimized by stereotypes that were first articulated in the nineteenth century but hold sway over the minds and imaginations of citizens of this nation in the present day” (hooks, , x). upon looking at the divergent depiction of black and white bodies in popular culture, one can see how the normalization of the white gaze could be imbedded within the fabric of a society. baldwin, describing the depictions of whites as heroes in film, opines: “i suspect that all these stories are designed to reassure us that no crime was committed, have made a legend out of a massacre” (baldwin, , ). therefore, it should come as no surprise that the average american, no matter what race or creed, during their formative years are most likely taught to celebrate the white cowboy story of fighting against ‘savages’ in the name of protecting his/her own. thus, it is clearly evident that the racist structures of white supremacy in popular culture in the united states, normalizes the white gaze. moreover, the white man was and is seen to be morally courageous in movies or novels whenever violence is employed as a means to an end. after all, who is going to protect and preserve the virtue of the white woman? thus, the white gaze is so pervasive that it uses popular culture as means of establishing dominant ideas and images of good and evil. additionally, the black man’s life in most movies is often ‘nasty, brutish and short’ mirroring the real experience for most blacks in american society. for instance, the criminalization of the black man on the big screen reinforces stereotypes and legitimizes mass incarceration of brown and black bodies (davis, , ). in this way, as it is embedded in popular american culture the white gaze contributes to the maintenance of a racist society. moreover, the white gaze with its underlying racist messages helps establish mores and norms which are then internalized by ordinary americans. the white gaze creates a culture that imitates life by placing a negative spotlight on black characters in stories. these mythical illogical portrayals of blacks as evil are always racialized and often also gendered. the white gaze begins with the looking and the subsequent othering of non-whites in contrast to normalized whiteness. for example, the white woman as opposed to her black counterpart is portrayed as the ultimate image of virtue and chastity. w. e. b. du bois once wrote the following words, “colored folk, like all folk, love to see themselves in pictures; but they are afraid to see the types which the white world has caricatured” (du bois, , ). from these words, one can see that the mockingly distorted depictions of blacks as lazy, stupid or violent, have over time produced a sense of shame and chronic anxiety of what the white world thinks of them (blacks). thus, we see that the white gaze is so powerful in that it affects blacks in a negative manner by dominating their self-image. imagine having daily experiences where the narrative and image of who you are, is constantly manipulated by a culture of white supremacy that does not value your humanity, one such example is the use of blackface in minstrels. the fact that blackface is still enacted by white students on college campuses throughout the us demonstrates that many have not understood the painful history that these types of impersonations represent. for instance, megan kelly, a prominent white television personality, recently asked, “what is racist?” in reference to the phenomenon of some white americans dressing up in blackface as part of their halloween costume (poniewozik, ). she, like many americans who are lost in white privilege and supported by the power of the white gaze, imagines a colorblind world where blacks are expected to get over their pain. thereby, in this narrative, blacks are expected to suffer in silence and act as if they have not gone through trauma as a people. moreover, according to smithsonian national museum of african american history and culture, “by distorting the features and culture of african americans including their looks, language, dance, deportment, and character—white americans were able to codify whiteness across class and geopolitical lines as its antithesis” (smithsonian national museum, n.d.). thereby, we can observe that the white gaze is at its most influentially active when it permeates into society’s consciousness and thoughts through the back door of the imagination and the unconscious mind. one can deduce that it is these racialized images that normalize and entrench the white gaze. moreover, these racist images are produced within the full view of the white gaze. ultimately, the white gaze is so pervasive that is it exists in the dual functionality of cause and effect. iv. white gaze: influence on sexuality and gender the white gaze is a tool of a racialized society that does not just seek to keep an eye on black bodies in the public but also seeks to monitor how black people conduct themselves in the private sphere. one can see that sex has often been a tool of many different states for control and domination. thereby, it is inevitable that racialized societies such as the united states would seek to monitor and or control black sexuality (hooks, , ). in regards to this point, elizabeth abel asks, “what threat to white nationhood was posed by interracial eating?” (abel, , ). she then opines that the fear of eating together stems from intermingling and the ultimate threat that potential interracial dating (and eventually interracial sex and marriages) posed to white american society. the white gaze equips the government to act as big brother in the orwellian nineteen eighty-four tradition to regulate interracial sex, especially before when under the miscegenation laws interracial marriages were prohibited in many states. furthermore, according to white supremacists, interracial sex was and is the biggest threat to a homogeneous white america that is not to be under any circumstance be contaminated by black blood. through the period of reconstruction and jim crow era, these miscegenation laws kept different races apart in the pursuit of maintaining racial purity. it was only after the landmark case loving vs virginia that these miscegenation laws were revoked in virginia and other states. thereby, loving vs virginia is major part of the anti-miscegenation law struggles that have resulted in a lot more acceptance of interracial marriages and subsequent increase in interracial marriages . nevertheless, it vital to note that the white gaze plays a fundamental role currently, one in six newlyweds in the united states has a spouse of a different race or ethnicity, according to a recent analysis of census data by the pew research center. that is a fivefold increase from , when just percent of marriages crossed ethnic and racial lines. see sheryl gay stolberg, years after loving v. virginia (the new york times, / / ), https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/ -years-after-loving-v-virginia.html. https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/ -years-after-loving-v-virginia.html in monitoring this separation (yancy, , ). moreover, the white gaze cannot stand the idea of mixed marriages and thereby pre-empts any interracial fraternizing and ensuring that it is deemed illegal or morally irreprehensible. thereby, the white gaze can be seen as the eyes that promote overt ideas of racism in order to influence culture and subjugate black and brown bodies. yancy articulates this move as quintessential to the colonial gaze that always posits an ‘definitional power’ ( , ) as i have already noted, the white gaze is gendered as well as racialized. the role of the white gaze goes beyond the usual societal roles that males or females occupy in the home, which can apply universally to all races (yancy, , ). however, the white gaze uniquely tries to control and monitor the body of the black female. hence, the very idea of beauty is often viewed from the lens of the white gaze (hooks, , ). on the one hand, the black woman is seen as being promiscuous, as her alleged promiscuity is seen as leading her to tempt the white man into the horrors of the private life which is interracial sex. on the other hand, there also has been widespread fetishizing of the non-white bodies by the white gaze. hooks explains, “often black female models appear in portraits that make them look less like humans and more like mannequins or robots” (hooks, , ). this carries with it an idealized symbol of beauty that is acceptable within the white gaze. the white gaze in the us, then, involves a contradictory view of the black woman. despite overt and covert cultural messaging telling her that she is not beautiful, she remains the object of desire for many white men. hooks describes this in the following manner, “if black women were raped in slavery it was because they were licentious and seductive, or so white men told themselves” (hooks, , ). despite, the white gaze controlling nature, there is the struggle for agency within this white gaze. hooks puts it in the following way: this is certainly the challenge facing black women, who must confront the old painful representations of our sexuality as a burden we must suffer, representations still haunting the present. we must make the oppositional space where our sexuality can be named and represented, where we are sexual subjects-no longer bound and trapped ( , ). thereby, agency begins when black females name and deconstruct the way the white imaginary portrays them. we have seen this in black female activists such as angela davis who rose up to challenge and protest the way the black females were portrayed. hooks states that the domineering white gaze can have the unintended effect of awakening black agency. for example, hooks says “all attempts to repress our/black peoples' right to gaze had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze” (hooks, , ). moreover, the black male is not exempt from the entrapping gendered and racialized look of the white gaze upon his body, especially stemming from his interactions with white females. moreover, the racialist edifice mediated by the white gaze historically has ensured and continues to ensure that the black male body has been eroticised and fetishized (hooks, , ). hooks argues that “the history of the black male body begins in the united states with projections, with the imposition onto that body of white racist sexist pornographic sexual fantasies” ( , ). more specifically there is the belief that black males have supernatural or animal like abilities during sexual intercourse (hooks, , ). furthermore, hooks argues that enslaved male blacks were not initially obsessed with the idea of sexuality but rather were more concerned with survival. hooks goes on to say that the fact that western sexuality was predicated on domination, confused the newly arrived slaves in the americas ( , ). as it is with the experience of black women, there is a contradictory duality in the white view of the black man. on the one hand, there is this erotization of the black male body; on the other hand, according to the white gaze, the sexual appetites of the black man are to be feared because they stem from an impulsive and beastly nature. hooks describes this in the following way: “psychohistories of white racism have always called attention to the tension between the construction of the black male body as danger and the underlying eroticization that always then imagines that body as a location for transgressive pleasure” ( , ). moreover, the image often depicted is one that suggests the powerful idea that, the black man’s sexual drive should be kept in check, otherwise he might be let loose and end up raping a white woman (hooks, , ). evidence of this can be found in the following words by chelsea hale and meghan matt: “the most common reason for lynching was the perception that white women needed to be protected from african american rapists and attempted rapists. black men were painted as sexually deviant monsters” (hale and matt, ). as a vivid historical claim, we can look at the emmett till case. it is clear that once young emmett was confronted by the glaring eyes of the white gaze, it was inevitable that this incident would lead to his subsequent lynching (yancy, , ). the white gaze, especially at that particular time in history, could not be bothered that he was just a boy who was depicted as the raging savage negro to which fanon alludes. i would argue against claims by some commentators that we now live in a so-called post racial or colorblind society in the united states. there is considerable evidence that suggests that if a white woman accuses a black man of any sexual misconduct, the justice system will likely consider the black man guilty until proven innocent. for instance, data from the national registry of exonerations that shows “that black defendants convicted of raping white women are about eight times more likely to be innocent than white men convicted of raping women of their own race” (gross, possley, and stephens, , ). it is clear that the white gaze is prevalent in the most intimate of human interactions and seeks to regulate sex between racial groups. moreover, the white gaze is a major part of controlling reproduction in the aim of keeping white genetic purity and blacks subjugated. nevertheless, hooks argues that there is room for the black males to find agency against the pornographic white gaze. she argues that there needs to be spaces were black males can find sexual healing and reclaim their “healthy erotic agency” ( , ). additionally, awareness that black male sexuality was also forged within the context of the white pornographic gaze is the beginning of a necessary consciousness that leads to resistance. v. white gaze and black status the white gaze affects black status in society by seeking to define black reality. furthermore, it serves to regulate and police who is accepted into various places or positions in society, clearly exemplified by the struggles that barack obama experienced as the first black president of the united states from - (yancy, , xvvii). despite the country’s chequered and horrific past in regard to its treatment of blacks, many commentators proclaimed that the united states had become a post-racial society soon after obama’s election (joseph, ). it would soon become clear to the objective observer of american society, however, that this school of thought was naïve and ahistorical at best. the history of racial division could not simply be erased in one single election, just as the passing of the th and th amendments to the us constitution after the civil war did not automatically give black people full equality under the law. furthermore, the white gaze on obama was extremely intense and at times very crushing to the hopes of racial equality. peniel joseph states that “almost, immediately, the obama presidency unleashed racial furies” that got worse of over time (joseph, ). thereby, president obama could not just embrace his blackness without offending many white people. in particular, obama had to tread lightly in his first term when it came to issues of racial justice (ibid.). one important example was when obama stated that trayvon martin could have easily been him or his son, if he had had a son. in short, the white gaze manifested itself in the heightened scrutiny of obama among many white americans. in particular with respect to any actions that appeared to in anyway unduly favor black americans, most white racists actively worked to ensure that he did not step out of place or he would face the consequence of being a one term president. the white gaze often makes black americans and non-black allies afraid to stand up for black justice at the risk of facing evitable white backlash (yancy, , xvii). the history of lynching in the us bears this out, as du bois addresses in the souls of black folk (see ch. , “of the coming of john”). yet, such threats have not completely stopped black resistance, as represented most visibly in recent years by black lives matter movement. therefore, under the white gaze even the so-called token blacks must act white, or within the limits of what whites find acceptable, in order to maintain their positions of power and privilege. the white gaze in this case acts as a way of looking at the world that is based on an irrational reality. furthermore, the white gaze does this by being ever present in the white world’s justification and normalization of an extremely unequal societal structure. fanon summed it up well when he states in black skin white mask, “historically, inferiority has been felt economically” by blacks (fanon, , ). the white gaze also has a way of making blacks feel inferior specifically by the looking at or looking through the black body. for instance when fanon in black skin white masks, speaks about blacks experiencing traumatic psychological tension as a result of being watched or judged at some time in their lives, which in turn puts them in a constant state of alertness or fear. fanon’s claim resonates with my own experiences. as a direct result of this tension, black people start believing the images that the white world has portrayed about them due to the overarching influence of the white gaze ( , ). however, it is when black people seek to matter that they find the necessary courage to resist the white gaze. fanon puts it in the following words: “disalienation will come into being [for blacks] through their refusal to accept the present as definitive” (fanon, quoted in yancy, , ). one can then surmise that the white gaze seeks to keep a watchful eye on black mobility and often has an adverse reaction to black success. despite this being the case, it is when blacks begin to resist the notion that their success must be defined by the white gaze were self-definition and freedom occur. vi. violence and the culture of surveillance under the white gaze as i previously stated, violence is a logical result of the white gaze, mainly because the gaze is fueled by racist stereotypes of the black body (fanon, , ). in a society controlled by the white gaze, the black body suffers dehumanizing and horrifying violence often in silence. the slave plantation remains one of the most powerful images of violence inflected on blacks under the domineering eyes of the white gaze. moreover, violence was one of the major methods of control and subjugation on the plantation. for example, if an enslaved person escaped, he/she would be severely flogged and/or have a limb cut off or in some cases face a ghastly death such as lynching (hooks, , ). there was always the white eye of control on the enslaved, embodied by the overseer who held a burdensome and ultimately physiologically dehumanizing gaze. nonetheless, a sceptic might ask, “is there a direct link between the white gaze and violence?” in order to discover if there is a connection, we must not merely imagine violence as physical; we must also consider psychological, emotional, spiritual, and intellectual violence. bob marley described the anguish of the black folk in the following poetic verse, “how long shall they kill our prophets, while we stand around and look?” (marley, ). thus, violence within the white gaze is tied to the language of looking and negative depiction of the black body that has been incorporated into the general societal discourse. consider, for instance, how the word ‘thug’ has often been synonymous with the word ‘nigger’. smiley and fakunle ( ) problematize the idea of “thug” in their attempt to understand the demonization and criminalization of unarmed black male victims in america. they state, this term (thug) has become the platform to dismiss black life as less valuable and perpetuates a negative and criminal connotation in forms of micro-insults and micro- invalidations. moreover, the recent killings of unarmed black men have sparked discussion and discourse surrounding the term “thug” and how it is used in the context of reshaping perceptions of black life broadly and black males specifically (smiley and fakunle, ). that is, this negative language is normalized and spotlighted by a prevailing white gaze. let us once again go back to fanon to get a clear understanding of this phenomenon. in white skins black masks, fanon begins his chapter “the fact of blackness” by highlighting this type of language, “‘dirty nigger!’ or simply, ‘look, a negro!’” ( , ). the white gaze looks upon and creates an identity that attributes these words upon the black body which is ultimately dehumanizing towards black people. fanon’s juxtaposition is so powerful because it speaks to a different historical racist era, but one that has similar undertones to other forms of white supremacy. there was a point in time when one could openly use the word “dirty nigger” and this was acceptable under the white gaze. in contemporary united states this phrase would be frowned upon. nevertheless, fanon shows us that “look a negro” has been just as dehumanizing; it has just been a more disguised racism. moreover, even the very term ‘negro’ is rarely used in the us after changes in language and black self-ascription. there is therefore no doubt that the white gaze uses psychological violence to maintain influence and control. furthermore, the white gaze will always subsequently end up subjecting the black body to the numerous categorical expressions of violence mentioned above because at its core it is steeped in the canopy of white supremacy. moreover, the white gaze’s surveillance is what enables violence on the black body to occur. more specifically, slave branding was the chief corner stone laid in the historical foundation of surveillance on black bodies (browne, , ). by branding their black slaves, the racist white slave owners made sure that they kept track of their property and maintain their control over their slaves. as the slave trader theodore canot wrote, two days before embarkation, the head of every male and female is neatly shaved; and if the cargo belongs to several owners, each man’s brand is impressed on the body of his respective negro. this operation is performed with pieces of silver wire, or small irons fashioned into the merchant’s initials (theodore canot, memoirs of a slave trader, , quoted in browne, , ). the fact that the enslaved blacks were branded like cattle demonstrates the corrosive paranoia that the slave masters must have possessed. they were well aware that slavery would always be resisted by the subjugated peoples because it was inherently inhumane. additionally, branding is also about rendering human beings into animals and property. it is about ownership, marking one’s possession as belonging to one. furthermore, it was a system of keeping biometric records of the human subjects to facilitate future surveillance and control. as browne explains, this branding of black slaves foreshadowed ongoing dehumanizing surveillance of black americans under the white gaze throughout us history: “the tracking of blackness as property informs the contemporary surveillance of the racial body by now questioning how the intimate relation between branding and the black body our biometric past can allow us to think critically about our biometric present” (browne, , ). in contemporary times, such surveillance has been evident in police tactics and actions in non-white communities. for instance, in new york city the policy of stop and frisk which disproportionately targeted minorities and colored communities can be traced back to the lantern laws of march , which were designed to prohibit non-white people from traveling without an form of lighting, this was ensure that they could be visible and monitored at all times “lantern laws,” which were ordinances “for regulating negroes and slaves in the night time” in new york city that compelled black, mixed- race, and indigenous slaves to carry small lamps, if in the streets after dark and unescorted by a white person. with this citywide mandate, “no negro, mulatto or indian slave could” be in the streets unaccompanied “an hour after sunset” without “a lanthorn and lighted candle in it, so as the light thereof may be plainly seen” without penalty. see browne, simone. . dark matters: on the surveillance of blackness. duke university press.p.g . (browne, , ). such racial profiling of black americans persists due to the entrenched culture of surveillance of the black body, informed by stereotypes of blacks as criminals, that is manifest in the white gaze. additionally, i would like to briefly explore the power of surveillance and space that also has racialized historic roots. the modern-day documents of travel or identification such as state ids stems from the need for the white gaze to monitor black people. browne states the following, “the book of negroes, i argue, is the first government issued document for state regulated migration between the united states and canada that explicitly linked corporeal markers to the right to travel” (browne, , ). we see that in order for blacks to be kept in their subordinate place there was the need to find ways of keeping track of their movement. furthermore, this was done in the segregated south of the united states as was also practised in apartheid regime in south africa (passbooks). more specifically, black women who worked as domestic workers were used as a test case for this type of surveillance (browne, , ). the white gaze is critical in that white supremacy created spaces that the number of blacks in white areas had to be limited and documented at all times. the book of negroes became the first public state record of presence black people in north america (browne, , ). thus, the modern- day passport system has its roots in the tracking of black people and influences modern day immigration control. evidence of this can be found in the following words: my argument here is that the body made legible with the modern passport system has a history in the technologies of tracking blackness. my discussion on the making of the book of negroes offers a historicizing of the ways in which the tracking, accounting, and identification of the racial body, and in particular the black body and black social life, form an important, but often absented, part of the genealogy of the passport (browne, , ). in short, the white gaze not only inflicts physical violence, but violently affects the black man’s entire being and endures in the current culture of surveillance on the black body. vii. examples of black resistance against the white gaze after painting such a dire picture of the prevailing white gaze, one might wonder if there is any hope of escaping it. in other words, to what extent is there a point of resistance or is there any agency in the black oppositional gaze? the oppositional ‘gaze’ can be seen as a political looking back against racist power relations, a daring to look back at the world through the eyes of the subjugated, which in itself is a revolutionary act. hooks, in her book black looks, explains that “the ‘gaze’ has always been political in my life” and that “the gaze has been and is a site of resistance for colonized black people” (hooks, , - ). before we get to the idea of the oppositional black gaze, which i believe has to play a major part in black liberation movements and will help achieve full freedom, and equality, let us consider some of the thoughts expressed by fanon. in the last two chapters of black skin white masks and his chapter on violence in the wretched of the earth. fanon, while discussing the concept of recognition, stated that “the former slave wants to make himself recognized” (fanon, [ ], ). this need for recognition is the starting point of resistance against the white gaze since the white gaze exemplifies the denial of mutual recognition of black people by white people. fanon stated that at the basic level the black man wants to be recognized by the white world and he believed that the black man just wants to be accepted into the realm of being, that is to be recognised as fully human with unquestioned human dignity ( , ). this “dignity of the spirit” arises as soon as the black man seeks to become more than he is in his current condition ( , ). crucially, fanon elaborated in the penultimate chapter in black skin, white masks that the white gaze can only be resisted if black people are made aware of their own agency and, ultimately, only if and when they realize and assert their full humanity (as many have done in the past and still are doing through resistance). this is the catalyst for struggle and the fuel that is needed to resist any form of oppression. in the face of oppression, fanon stated, “but man is also no. no to scorn of man. no to degradation of man. no to exploitation of man. no to the butchery of what is most human in man: freedom” (fanon, , ). thereby, the existence of agency among black people demonstrates that it is possible for the white gaze to be resisted. in the chapter the negro and recognition, fanon touches on the importance of education in bringing awareness within the black community. he believed that an educated man “prepares to act” against his oppressors and that black people will not remain passive when confronted with the everyday realities of the white gaze (fanon, , ). nevertheless, fanon would agree that black people would have to be given a decolonised education in order for the education or consciousness to give them a sense of agency within the white gaze. such an education would counter the colonial racial devaluation of black lives and black agency. he stated that “to educate a man is to be actional, preserving in all his relations his respect for the basic values that constitute a human world, is the prime task of him who, having taken thought, prepares to act” ( , ). thus, a decolonised mind or thoughts will always lead to actions that seek to restore full equality and justice in these racialized settler colonial societies. fanon would later translate this approach to liberating collective action in the wretched of the earth into a call for armed resistance against oppressors as a means to decolonisation of the minds of the colonized and concrete decolonization. ngugi wa thiong’ in his book decolonizing the mind offers a detailed account of what this type of decolonization would entail by stating: the classes fighting against imperialism even in its neo-colonial stage and form, have to confront this threat with the higher and more creative culture of resolute struggle. these classes have to wield even more firmly the weapons of the struggle contained in their cultures. they have to speak the united language of struggle contained in each of their languages. they must discover their various tongues to sing the song: `a people united can never be defeated' (ngugi, ) one can see that there is a need for a global intellectual and cultural decolonization and assertion of the humanity and creativity of the colonized. this decolonization affects africans and all peoples of african descent who are living in the diaspora. thereby, consciousness is an ongoing struggle to reclaim their historical narrative and creativity. thus, fanon did not naively believe that “appeals to reason or respect for human dignity can alter reality”; instead, he realized that “consciousness is only the beginning but there is a required second step of contending against oppressive forces” ( , ). fanon took a defiant stance against the humanity of black people being defined (or denied) by whiteness. he stated, “i am not the slave of the slavery that dehumanised my ancestors” ( , ). that is, he insisted that black people are not captive to, or strictly determined or limited by, the history that has been written from the viewpoint of the white gaze. moreover, fanon argues that it is in actively resisting the racist historical baggage conducted under the white gaze, when the black man or woman can truly begin to be free. he goes on to add that “in the world through which i travel, i am endlessly creating myself” ( , ). thereby, one can rightly deduce in the quest for freedom that black people are on a journey of self-discovery that is not tied to the reality that the white gaze has created. fanon’s aim, in short, is to cut the historical umbilical cord of the past dehumanizing relationship between black and white people while discovering black agency. fanon summarizes these thoughts in the following way: “if the question of practical solidarity with a given past ever arose for me, it did so only to the extent to which i was committed to myself and to my neighbor to fight for all my life and all my strength so that never again would a people on earth be subjugated” (fanon, , ). fanon, then, maintained that the past is only valuable insofar as it leads to decolonization and the full recognition of the humanity and dignity of black people. yet, in the wretched of the earth, he clearly articulated that “decolonization is always a violent event” (fanon, , ). he also argued that the colonized would only fully realize their humanity through the radical process of decolonization. decolonization would mean total change of the colonial infrastructure of domination. therefore, fanon’s view immediately raises the question of how it is relevant today, in different ‘post-colonial’ circumstances. we have to begin by recognising that fanon was writing in a colonial/ anti-colonial struggle moment in the s and early s. yet, in contemporary times we live in a (formally) post-colonial period – one that arguably has substantially changed since the colonial era but still carries the horrific legacy of anti-black colonial racism. here bell hooks’s understanding of the black oppositional gaze offers a way to carry forward fanon’s insights into the contemporarily times. as aforementioned, there has, of course, always been some black resistance whenever black people have been subjugated. thereby, hooks, following in the footsteps of fanon, seeks to describe how black critical thinkers have taken it upon themselves to think of ways that the “colonized gaze” can be resisted and ultimately uprooted ( , ). she recognises that there is a difficulty in sustaining this resistance but states, “it is only as we collectively change the way we look at ourselves and the world that we can change how we are seen. in this process, we seek to create a world where everyone can look at blackness, and black people, with new eyes” ( , ). in short, it remains vitally important for the black people to take a critical stance on evaluating the white gaze when it comes to the appropriation of black images. in particular, it is essential that black people take an active role in evaluating how the white world portrays them if they are to eventually escape the subordinating white gaze (hooks, , ). for instance, in response to recent protests against anti-black racism and police violence in the us and globally, the quaker oats company in the us (which is owned by pepsico), the owner of the -year-old brand of the racist caricature named aunt jemima, announced that it would change the product name in an effort “to make progress toward racial equality” (hsu, ). moreover, there has been a reawakening of societal consciousness spearheaded by black activism forcing corporate america to acknowledge black lives and issues. that is why an “increasing number of companies, including vox media, twitter and square, will now observe june as a permanent company holiday,” called juneteenth, also known as freedom day, with the aim of honoring black celebration of their actual emancipation (holt, ). these seem to me clear examples of how black activism is shifting the white gaze, and calling black and white people to think about blackness and black lives differently. moreover, hooks argues that black critical thinkers should adopt a revolutionary stance when it comes to the struggle against the white gaze. we need to dismantle the white racist structures that seek to subjugate black bodies. nevertheless, for this resistance against white gaze to be sustainable, it is also imperative that the old racist views are replaced with new ways of looking at the black bodies ( , ). hooks argues that the need for black people to love their blackness is fundamental and it is the logical conclusion once black people have become self- aware. she argues that the loving of blackness in a white supremacist culture carries with it the threat of death. nonetheless, hooks observes, “the oppositional black culture that emerged in the context of apartheid and segregation has been one of the few locations that has provided a space for the kind of decolonization that makes loving blackness possible” ( , ). thereby, these first juneteenth celebrations equivalent to colonel thomas wentworth higginson’s report of the ceremonies for the emancipation proclamation as it was read aloud on port royal island, south carolina, on new year’s day, . black troops, white commanders, white clergymen, white women schoolteachers, black women schoolteachers, and the formerly enslaved turned resisters gathered at the sober campground to ratify in their hearts the next covenant of the republic. see darryl pinckney. ‘we must act out our freedom’. (the new york review of books, / ) https://www.nybooks.com/contributors/darryl-pinckney/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/ / / /we-must-act-out-our-freedom/ https://www.nybooks.com/contributors/darryl-pinckney/ moments in black historical resistance against the white gaze are important because of the emergence of the political formulation of loving of blackness. thus, it is in this organization oppositional black culture and movements often where black people feel safe and free. this idea of loving of blackness demonstrates that for society to fully affirm the dignity of black people there needs to be a decolonising of both the white and black mind. jean-paul sartre makes this very point clear in his “preface” to wretched of the earth. he declares to his fellow white europeans, “we too, people of europe, we are being decolonized” (sartre, in fanon, [ ], ivii). furthermore, we see that for blacks to struggle against the white gaze and to achieve freedom and equality, they must cultivate a culture that values blackness. one example of this can be seen in the black lives matter movement, which emphasises this very point. black lives matter exemplifies how the affirmation of self-worth has gone hand-in-hand with active resistance to oppression and marginalization. moreover, this follows the example of the civil rights, black power, and black arts movements that were part of the black freedom struggles of the s- s in the us, and these were matched by the black consciousness movement in south african, led by steven biko and others. hooks speaks directly to such movements as follows: collectively, black people and our allies in struggle are empowered when we practice self-love as a revolutionary intervention that undermines practices of domination. loving blackness as, political; resistance, transforms our ways of looking and being, and thus creates the conditions necessary for us to move against the forces of domination and death and reclaim black life ( , ). that is, one of the negative effects of the white gaze is that it makes black people feel inferior and unwelcome whenever they enter a white space. thus, it is vital that blacks begin to self-love as a fundamental way of escaping the imperial gaze that seeks to define them. ultimately, the crucial point of resistance of the white gaze is the oppositional gaze of resistance from the black people. this is the fundamental space or position of agency that the black people have always possessed. hooks argues that this look is powerful in that it can act as a way of documenting oppression. thus, it has too often been images of black men and women being killed by the police that have been a powerful catalyst for resistance against oppression. a very recent example is that it was only when george floyd was killed right in front of our eyes, with this killing captured on a cell phone by an observer. this event led many black people and their allies to say enough is enough. in a manner similar to fanon, hook says that in the process of resisting the white gaze, the oppositional eye learns to look in a particular way in order to ultimately resist ( , ). this critical look manifests itself in the world of cinema as black people begin to have a critical eye towards the way they are portrayed on scene. we see in movies like spike lee’s film “do the right thing” ( ) – an example of black people writing their own narratives on the big screen as a way of combating the racist images and engage the negation of black representation (hooks, , ). in such radically conscious black cinema, black narratives and images are no longer under the white gaze. thus, every spectator has agency to either accept or resist the images in film or television. one other powerful tool of activism emerged on a comedic live stage, where black comedians such as richard pryor or chris rock, were able to tell the black story in a unique way that often exposed the white gaze in entertainment and in society while exhibiting black agency. furthermore, living in a predominately racist white world, the black consciousness movement will need solid allies. allies are needed in the deconstruction of the white gaze in order to create a new way of living in the world. hooks observes, “luckily, there are individual non-black people who have divested of their racism in ways that enable them to establish bonds of intimacy based on their ability to love blackness without assuming the role of ‘cultural tourists’” ( , ). it is vital that allies begin to love black lives not just as part of a political agenda or slogan but as a fundamental way of combating the white gaze holistically. it is so easy for white people to consider themselves allies while still holding on to stereotypes about black people and not seek to actively dismantle white supremacist structures. thus, i believe the first step is for white allies to recognize their white privilege and the existence of the white gaze. for far too long, there has been silence from moderate and liberal whites in america. martin luther king, jr. observed that the white moderates were more “devoted to order than justice” (king, ). moreover, in light of the protests that have emerged from the george floyd’s death at the hands of police, charles blow, writing in the new york times, warns us that this “freedom summer” should not be “another moment when allies fail” (blow, ). in short, for structural racism to be given a fatal blow will require sustained efforts and true commitment from black americans and their allies. thus, i believe that without recognising the existence of the racial contract and acknowledging how one may have intentionally or unintentionally benefited from the anti-black world, one cannot be considered an ally (blow, ). black activism has a rich history of inspirational figures taking a stand against the white gaze because they were prepared to pay the cost in the march towards freedom. one such a figure is muhammad ali, who once courageously stated, “i know where i’m going and i know the truth, and i don’t have to be what you want me to be, i’m free to be who i want” (lipsyte, , ). these words echoed his desire to escape the white gaze and to be totally emancipated. moreover, ali’s opposition to limitations imposed on him through the white gaze can be clearly seen when he refused to go fight in america’s war in vietnam. he said, ‘i ain’t got nothing against no vietcong.” this stance ultimately cost him his livelihood and put him at odds with the us government which temporally took away his freedom (lipsyte, , ). ali’s influence looms large on black athletes taking a stand against racism and he stands as a giant that influenced a generation of black activists (lipsyte, , ). black people must dare to look back critically at the white gaze and move to decolonize racists systems and minds. racism must be combated wherever it raises its ugly head. this anti-black system of oppression was carefully, intentionally, and violently preserved over centuries and it requires similar effort and commitment to dismantle it at its roots (blow, ). viii. conclusion in summary, one would have to recognise what has been demonstrated in this thesis, that the white gaze carries power that was established by historical racist structures that have continued to dehumanize and marginalize black lives. this historical baggage, which endures in the white gaze, entails continuing tension for the black body. moreover, the white gaze acts as a universalizing agent of the white imaginary that was forged through a colonial and racist history of white dominance. thus, whenever black men and women enter the white world, they immediately encounter these power dynamics, to which they must respond by either flight or fight. the white world is, as fanon outlines, considered by many the “real world.” thus, black people always have to perform under the white gaze and seek acceptance into this so-called “real world.” ultimately, the white gaze also has the power of negation by the messaging that black life doesn’t matter. this is done whenever black stories of pain are dismissed as reverse racism. yancy states, “historically, “the imago of the [black] in the european mind” has involved a process of discursive and material violence” (yancy, , ). thus it is important to always be aware that the white gaze is an important site of white racial power that is predicated on a white epistemic order that seeks to dominant and subordinate black lives. on the other hand, while the white gaze has limited the freedom and dignity of black people, it has not completely destroyed their agency. in fact, many black people have always resisted the white gaze in various ways, with varying degrees of success. the black lives matter movement in the us is thus only the latest embodiment of black resistance. hooks states that the domineering white gaze can have the untended effect of reawakening black agency. for example, she says that “all attempts to repress our/black peoples' right to gaze had produced in us an overwhelming longing to look, a rebellious desire, an oppositional gaze” (hooks, , ). the crucial point of resistance to the white gaze is the oppositional gaze of resistance from the black people and the consciousness of starting to love blackness. loving blackness requires the decolonization of the mind of both black people and their allies – including both white allies and other people of color. but more importantly, after coming to this awareness, decolonised minds must take action to dismantle the effects of the white gaze, which include the white supremacist structures and enduring inequalities that it supports. for future research, we need to gain a deeper understanding of how the white gaze has changed significantly from the jim crow/ colonial era of fanon to the current post-colonial/ post-civil rights movement era, in which black activists have achieved partial gains in overcoming stark 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(eds.), geographies of schooling, knowledge and space , https://doi.org/ . / - - - - _ chapter geopolitical framings of subalterity in education: compounding a neoliberalized welfare state ranu basu state-funded public education—long valued as a critical tool for reducing inequality, promoting economic mobility, and advocating for social justice—can have an ongo- ing transformative effect on the evolution of the public realm. the ideologies, poli- cies, and practices of state-funded education distinctly shape various aspects of social justice, including the way urban spaces are produced and contested by those most vulnerable. however, researchers and the broader public are increasingly acknowl- edging the inability of publicly funded education systems to sufficiently address the needs of poor and marginalized groups. within the context of this systemic short- coming, displaced migrants—whose relegation to the subaltern already disconnects them politically, socially, and geographically from power—face conditions of extreme precarity. this chapter is drawn from a broader project exploring the chal- lenge of displacement and spaces of refuge in the three disparate cities of toronto, havana, and kolkata, where displacement is experienced in different forms. its core argument highlights the dire consequences of forced mobility and immobility, a result of imperialist wars, geopolitics, hegemonic relations between nation states, and the historical legacies of colonialism; these must be given serious consideration should the field of geographies of education remain politically relevant. given the context of pressing challenges confronting global societies, this chapter presents pre- liminary theoretical deliberations incorporating these themes, highlighting the geo- political framings of subalterity in education and its contradictory relation with the the findings in kolkata are not discussed in this chapter. “as a group experiencing subordination, subalterity is understood as the process of this subjectiv- ity, conditioning the ways of being a subaltern that is constantly in an unsettled relation with the state” (basu, a, p.  ; italics in original). r. basu (*) faculty of liberal arts & professional studies, department of geography, york university, toronto, on, canada e-mail: ranubasu@yorku.ca http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / - - - - _ &domain=pdf https://doi.org/ . / - - - - _ mailto:ranubasu@yorku.ca neoliberalized welfare state. such framings are useful if we are to seriously envision the geographies of nonviolence and peace within the spheres of education. the first section of the chapter presents five propositions or imperatives, framing the geopolitics of subalterity in education to explore the tensions and contradictions between, on the one hand, the ideal notion of state governance and the public good and, on the other, the realities of marketized hegemony and its close connection to the violent geographies of war and displacement. the framing incorporates a spirit of praxis towards a theory for social change within the realm of schooling and education as spaces of transformation and intervention. the second section presents two very different empirical cases related to the spatial politics of displacement. in “displacement i—subalterity through exile,” i explore the spaces of displacement and refuge in toronto, canada, and the political discourses that preceded them. in “displacement ii—subalterity through blockade,” i address the context of the economic blockade imposed on cuba and utilize a case study to examine the effects schools have as revolutionary frontiers in guantánamo. both case studies allow us to reflect on the structural significance of engaging with the geopolitics of subalterity in education as a praxis-oriented theory for social change. the geopolitics of subalterity in education the encyclopedia entry on the “geographies of education” reviews the complex inter- actions between education, space, and civil society (basu, ). the geographies of education reflect the various sites and scales of opportunities available for investigating an array of diverse concerns. educational spaces, the entry’s author argues, are imbued with multiple purposes and meanings where the ideologies of the state and its corre- sponding discursive and material realities become discernible. this is a crucial point i will return to later on in the chapter. critical studies within this broader realm are con- cerned primarily with social justice, power relations, and structural inequities relating to or emanating from the educational system. manzer ( ) defines schools as human communities, public instruments, and political symbols, as well as the means by which people in a political democracy collectively strive for civic virtue, economic wealth, and cultural survival. apart from its educational mandate, schools are places where neighborhood integration, social capital formation, and the fostering of civil society are ideally endorsed and contested (basu, ). the city-school relationship is also intrinsically linked to the planning and sustainability of urban regions through the qual- ity and vibrancy of its educational institutions; with the increasing rationalization of the neoliberalization of education, however, the public realm is often compromised. subalterity of education: five imperatives a few years ago in a paper published in the canadian geographer (basu, a), i argued that to research the spatialities of subalterity in education was to grapple with a differential and complicated terrain. the “political and theoretical importance r. basu of this conceptual framing,” i argued, suggested that its “form, function, and structural significance posed a number of new challenges for those investigating social justice and rights in education” (p.  ). in a time of “global economic crisis, cultural divides, and social and political uncertainties,” it was crucial to understand how subalterity was further accentuated through the impacts of neoliberalized education. in this paper, i explored how the “terrain of subalterity in education had multiplied in heterogeneous ways accentuated through the project of neoliberalism” (p.  ). i argued that unpacking these “socially, politically, or ideologically— through three contradictory imperatives—revealed intersecting spaces of marginality, hegemonic discourses, and complicated outcomes related to the governmentality of educational rights” (p.  ). the three contradictory imperatives discussed in this article included: (i) the premise of a state-funded educational system for a broader public, a universal good that would (ii) maintain equality and equity through proper policy driven redistribution and recognition approaches but in which such mandates would be governed through (iii) the logic of the market in a postcolonial settler/multicultural state. i argued that the act of silencing or subordinating different social groups was embedded within institutional practices and structures of power. this was the realm of subalterity reproduced through spaces of alienation and fragmentation and further legitimized and institutionalized through the rational discourses of neoliberalism. through different case examples of subalterity and activism, i reviewed the spatialities of contestation. one aspect that became increasingly evident in subsequent work but that has not been sufficiently theoretically addressed in the literature on the critical geographies of education is the importance of geopolitics in the subalterity of education alongside the radical question of spatial praxis for broader structural change. in this chapter, i thus extend the underlying spatial framing to include a possible fourth and fifth imperative, which allows me to take into account these political conditionings: (iv) geopolitics in the subalterity of education is a driving force of displacement further complicated by the rationalization of neoliberalism. (v) this in turn leads to serious theoretical and political reconsiderations if we are to indeed engage in any kind of spatial praxis and solidarity for social justice and change. the conceptual framing below (fig.  . ) highlights the intersections and contradictions between the governance of territorialities on different scales, the hegemonic influences of neoliberalism and geopolitical regimes, and the tensions between ideal notions of the welfare state and the actual implementations through the microgeographies of school spaces. these are evident in the case studies presented below. in the instance of canada, international geopolitical strategies and policies designed at the federal level are in contradiction with the legacy of neoliberal policies instituted by the state at the local level. in the case of cuba, the economic ramifications of over five decades of a financial blockade by the us have constrained and severely limited the flow of resources; at the same time, the presence of the guantánamo naval base and detention camp against the will of the cuban people undermines its sovereignty. i then offer politics through theory and praxis of subalterity in education as a radical alternative. geopolitical framings of subalterity in education: compounding a neoliberalized… geopolitics and neoliberalism discussions on the linkages between geopolitics and neoliberalism are not new. in their paper “neoliberal geopolitics,” roberts, secor, and sparke ( ) connect the “geopolitical world vision” to the “neoliberal idealism of free markets, openness, and global economic integration” (p.  ). they warn against the totalizing economic narratives of neoliberalism and recommend paying attention to its “interarticulation with dangerous supplements,” including the violence of american military force, alongside the presumptuous myth of the “prosperity and peace building capacity brought about by free market reforms” (p.  ). they articulate a particular kind of neoliberal geopolitics, observing that “[t]he economic axioms of structural adjustment, fiscal austerity, and free trade have now, it seems, been augmented by the direct use of military force” (p.  ) through the logics of state- managed liberalization. historically acknowledging that most imperial wars have been fought over economic concerns, they note that current interventions are carried out with a “much more open, systematic, globally ambitious, and quasi corporate economic style” (p.  ). as such, the geographies of such militarization and secu- ritization are closely linked to investment capitalism and developmentalism, closely controlled by an elite minority; the market-state-civil society relations remain ambiguous. they then make the important case that neoliberal practices on a global scale have come to depend on violent interventions (p.  ) that are not solely fig. . five imperatives on the subalterity of education. source: design by author r. basu restricted to war zones but are part of the workings of state institutions themselves. in fact, disposable and readily available subjects are not accidentally produced but can be traced to a chain of institutional linkages for the profit of the neoliberal state. roberts, secor, and sparke note how neoliberal sites of such violence and aggres- sion range from “maximum-security prisons [and] aggressively policed inner cities [to] workfare administration offices” (p.  ), and they note “perhaps the most exemplary site of antiliberal authoritarianism of all—guantanamo bay” (p.  )—a site i will return to later on in this chapter. such sites, they argue, “should be seen, not as exceptions to neoliberalism, but rather as neoliberalism’s necessary spaces of exemption” (p.  ). child detention centers and spaces of education for youth are not exempt from these geopolitical-neoliberal dynamics and are often used as sites of control and resistance. feminist and critical geopolitics aside from the logic of the market discussed above, it is important to note the strate- gies and techniques of governance that bind these two realms further. the neoliberal governance of such sites is aided by the biopolitical instruments and tools central to geopolitics. hyndman highlights the feminist insights that link geopolitics closely to biopolitics. she notes that “the biometric management of outsiders with its assemblage of new laws, policies and border practices render geopolitics and bio- politics inseparable” (hyndman, , p.  ). hyndman argues that the state’s role in managing and containing migrants through the process of securitization is a “defining feature of the current state of geopolitics” (p.  ). through a feminist geopolitical lens, she disrupts dominant thinking in the field by bringing attention to the migrants themselves rather than to the political and abstract constructs of borders that minimize, she argues, the experience of “border crossers.” within the realm of critical geopolitics, dalby ( ) cautions that a number of elements must be carefully interrogated when exploring imperial interventions that might be considered “more hegemonic rather than dominance” (p.  ). drawing on joxe, dalby ( , from joxe, ) suggests that the “mode of imperial rule defines the terms and conditions of trade and disciplines local regimes that do not follow policies broadly congruent with american financial and security interests” (p.  ). this is most explicitly evident in the case of cuba, where the economic, commercial, and financial blockade imposed on its people by the united states continues to exist after five decades, despite being rejected times by the un general assembly. further, the territory illegally occupied by the us naval base in guantánamo continues to challenge its sovereignty. in this case, the displacement through economic sanctions and regulations that have isolated this caribbean island for over five decades are implemented through exclusionary policies. according to shaw ( ), such “permanent wars” are spatial strategies used by “predatory empires.” geopolitical framings of subalterity in education: compounding a neoliberalized… geopolitics and displacement geopolitical processes are most explicitly evident in the mass displacement of migrants across the globe. according to the most recent data from the unhcr ( a), the world is currently witnessing the highest levels of displacement on record: nearly , people are forcibly displaced every day as a result of conflict or persecution. as of june  , the unhcr reports that “an unprecedented . million people around the world have been forced from home. among them are nearly . million refugees, over half of whom are under the age of . there are also ten million stateless people who have been denied a nationality and access to basic rights such as education, healthcare, employment and freedom of movement” ( a). hyndman ( ) has argued that migration has long served as a “barometer of geopolitics, from human displacement generated by war to containment practices in particular territories or camps” (p.  ). the consequences of subalterity through geopolitical displacement—whether through forced migration, exile, internal displacement, or the blockades and sanc- tions imposed by wars and conflict—become evident in the struggles and resistance of everyday life. the realms of education, particularly schools, often become the spaces where such daily negotiations take place. for displaced migrants, for instance, schools are frequently the first sites of the settlement experience and the collective community-building opportunity within this realm can either be inclusionary or exclusionary. school spaces are also ideological terrains where structural condition- ings can be decolonized from previous histories of colonialism (battiste, ). in the following section, i turn to two very different cases related to the geopoli- tics of subalterity in education through the cases of exile and blockade. these cases provide an opportunity to empirically explore the framings presented in this section. case studies displacement i: subalterity through exile: neoliberal contradictions and the geopolitics of displacement: redefining educational spaces of refuge in toronto, canada in , canada accepted , migrants; of these, , ( . %) were refu- gees (government of canada, ). a large proportion settles in the major urban centers of the country, making multiculturalism a largely urban phenomenon. based on the national household survey, one third of the immigrants in toronto have arrived in canada during the past  years. toronto prides itself on its identity as a “city of diversity;” the city’s residents have over different ethnic origins, and over half of them were born outside of canada. the refugees arriving in canada during the past  years have come from many different parts of the world, most recently from syria, iraq, sri lanka, and columbia. after the world war ii, the r. basu largest single-source countries included hungary, with an estimated , hungarians arriving in and , and vietnam, cambodia, and laos, with approximately , “boat people” arriving between and (el-assal, ). canada admits five categories of refugees, their admittance based either on resettled categories from overseas or on successful refugee claims made in canada. these refugees include government-sponsored refugees (gar), privately spon- sored refugees (psr), blended visa office-referred refugees (bvors), refugees landed in canada (rlcs), and refugee dependents. the predominance of privately sponsored refugees has been critiqued to being limited to families and excluding single men, who are often perceived as security threats. the current canadian context has made international headlines and been influ- enced by geopolitical intentions and civil society interventions. when the liberal party under justin trudeau won a majority government in the october elec- tions, he soon after announced the federal government plans to resettle , syrian refugees by december and , by december . this effort to endorse canada’s image as a peace-building nation, especially after a decade of conservative rule, was promoted as a radical initiative. the announcement came at a time when most other countries were grappling with draconian measures such as closing borders, building fences, and confiscating assets. furthermore, the reported death of -year-old ayan kurdi (in september ), who drowned while crossing from turkey to greece and had been denied resettlement to canada, caused a public outcry. communities across the country rallied for more compassionate grounds for refugee admissions. the official web site of the liberal party notes: canadians have been deeply moved by the suffering of refugees in syria and the surround- ing region. canada has a strong history of helping those in need, from hungarian refugees in the s to ismaili muslim refugees in the s to those fleeing south east asia by boat in the s and s. [w]e will expand canada’s intake of refugees from syria by , through immediate government sponsorship. we will also work with private sponsors to accept even more. to do this, we will invest $ million, including $ million this fiscal year, to increase refugee processing, as well as sponsorship and settlement services capacity in canada. (liberal, n.d.) the admission of privately sponsored refugees, a policy unique to canada, sparked numerous collaborative efforts among different community groups, religious and nonprofit institutions, public schools and universities, and other actors. the government anticipated that by the end of , the resettlement effort could prove to be canada’s second largest from a single-source country since world war ii. yet the importance of civil society in altering the geopolitical strategies of neo- liberalism provides a framework for subaltern praxis and change. for example, in its recently published report “global strategy beyond detention” ( b), the unhcr reports a % decrease in the total number of children detained across coun- tries—from ,  in to ,  in . the report notes that as a result of the efforts of civil society, the two countries that were taken to court have now stopped detention. the work of the “sanctuary cities” movement in us and canada geopolitical framings of subalterity in education: compounding a neoliberalized… has provided protection to nonstatus migrants against prosecution related to immi- gration law. although successful movements like the toronto district school board’s “don’t ask don’t tell” approach have allowed for nonstatus migrant chil- dren to attend school without fear of deportation, this is not a given in the canadian context. contradictions emerge when ideal meets reality on the ground and the poli- tics of redistribution and recognition are brought into question. as recently as september , “education without borders” activists noted that as many as sev- eral thousand undocumented migrants were not eligible to attend free public school in quebec. the legislature continues to debate this issue (news montreal, ). discrepancies between grand federal geopolitical visions meeting the local reali- ties of the neoliberal welfare state on the ground rattle the terms of engagement. years of neoliberal regimes and the retrenchment of the welfare state have left most canadian urban centers with inadequate physical and social infrastructure, in areas including affordable housing, health care, employment options, education, transit access and equity, and community centers. the large and rapid influx of refugees has thus strained settlement services in all sectors, which lack sufficient resources to adequately cope with the needs of refugees. this is particularly evident in the smaller towns across canada where many refugees have been directed. aside from access to settlement services, the geopolitical impacts of war and terror have had serious impacts on the health and mental well-being of students suffering from trauma and grief, including posttraumatic stress disorder (ptsd). yet defenders of the right- wing populist explanations that currently prevail often blame the inadequacies of the state structures on the refugees themselves. this convenient shifting of blame diverts attention from the marketization of the neoliberal state or the imperialist wars that created the conditions of displacement in the first place. decades of neoliberaliza- tion of education in ontario, for instance, have resulted in school closures, crowded classrooms, and insufficient resources, as well as reduced funding for esl and special education programs, settlement workers, and psychiatrists, among other changes. many schools are crumbling and in disrepair, which has produced particu- larly difficult learning environments those in working class and migrant neighbor- hoods. according to a recent report released by the ontario government and published by the toronto star, there is a $ . million backlog in nearly of ontario schools. for , the report lists schools— % of all toronto district school board (tdsb) schools—as being in “critical” condition (sachgau, ). in these circumstances, it is difficult for a school to function as a “community hub.” how, then, do you create a sanctuary city school system within the broader con- text of urban neoliberalism? how do you raise awareness that the larger geopolitical regimes of displacement compounded with the retrenchment of the neoliberal state lead to cities with structural impediments and continual exclusion? where can the right to the city be recognized as a radical reconditioning of social and political policy? countering dominant narratives of insecurity, criminality, and victimhood, refugee communities themselves have over the years also responded by creating creative hubs as spaces of refuge through various grass-root initiatives. these hubs often function within the public school setting. for example, the case of multilin- gualism in toronto schools has redefined meanings of “multifarious integration” r. basu and created cities of nimmathi or peace (see basu, , b). using the exam- ple of heritage languages, this study’s author demonstrated how diverse migrant students, due to the close proximity of living and studying in similar neighborhood schools, have had the opportunity to become multilingual and learn international languages with their classmates. aside from learning an official language (english or french, a process defined as “unidirectional integration”), or language of ances- tral heritage (italian or tamil, “mutual integration”), students were keen to learn new languages (mandarin or spanish, “multifarious integration”). from unidirec- tional to mutual to multifarious integration, the schools provided unique opportuni- ties for the settlement process to work in ways that made migrants feel at most ease. the schools provided unique multifarious spaces where integration processes worked in informal and heterogeneous ways as a way of countering destabilizing experiences. the school in these examples often provides local institutional spaces where such power dynamics are creatively explored and become materially evident. the interactions then spilled into the public realm of the city, where common chal- lenges of the settlement experience led to alternative social and political networks. other subaltern resistances in toronto that have redefined the imagination of the city have included the “black lives matter” movement and indigenous responses to the “truth and reconciliation report” ( ). the spatial discrepancies between different levels of governance as indicated in the current context of the migrant crisis often bring into question the fickleness of geopolitical strategies with the more long-term effects of neoliberal governance. at the time, observers speculated that the radical response to the syrian migrant crisis would allow canada to play a leading role on the global stage and thereby secure a seat on the un security council. the speculations were correct. in march , at the un headquarters in new york, trudeau announced canada’s plan to seek the un security council seat with a “mandate to focus on tackling climate change, helping syrian refugees and promoting gender equality” (harris & kent, ). trudeau noted that his government was “determined to ‘revitalize’ canada’s peacekeeping efforts, support civilian institutions that prevent conflict and promote international peace and security,” arguing: “this is the canada of today, this is how we will build the world of tomorrow” (news montreal, ). on august , , the liberals announced their commitment to provide up to troops and $ million to un peacekeeping missions. as political observers noted, canada was seeking to be recognized as a “middle” rather than a “super” power in the new geopolitical order. agnew’s ( ) emphasis on the distinction between “formal and practical geo- politics” (p.  ) is relevant here. this distinction becomes evident at the scalar level. on one hand, the linkage between geopolitical strategies, global displacement as a result of war and violence, and international discourses of the canadian state (for- mal geopolitics) work alongside the neoliberalized retrenchment of the welfare state (practical geopolitics). the site of education is a local example of resettlement ten- sions and of contradictions arising and playing out in different ways (practical level). http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-peacekeeping-announcement- . . geopolitical framings of subalterity in education: compounding a neoliberalized… http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-peacekeeping-announcement- . displacement ii: subalterity through blockades: resisting sanctions, blockades, and the military base: schools as revolutionary frontiers in guantánamo, cuba since the cuban revolution of , the economic, commercial, and financial blockade imposed on the people of cuba by the united states has had serious detrimental effects. despite being rejected by the un general assembly times, the blockade continues to exist. in his state of the union speech of january , , president obama spoke of beginning to set an end to the embargo, followed by a much publicized visit to the island. regardless of this initiative and of the resumption of flights and discussions of trade and exchange, the embargo policy continues to remain intact. a june report to the un by the government of cuba describes in detail the outdated nature of the policy. based on ten blockade laws, the report outlines the serious repercussions on the cuban economy and consequential effects of any right to development for the cuban people—including health, education, agriculture, infrastructure, and other sectors of the economy. the report’s authors estimate the cumulative damage to amount to over . billion dollars and note the unjust nature of the policy and the deep extent of international control. the text clarifies the workings of the blockade as “not merely a bilateral issue;” its “extraterritorial nature” is further evident by “sanctions applied to third parties.” the report states that announcements of december , , act as a “violation of international law,” in particular as it relates to the “the principle of sovereign equality of states established in the charter of united nations” (cuba, report to un, , p.  ). examples include the imposition of million dollar fines on banks and financial institutions as a result of transactions with the nation. penalties include prohibitions on the import and export of products and services from the us, or holding accounts in any us currency at an international financial institution, including the world bank, the imf, and the idb (p.  ). the laws and regulations supporting this policy, the report notes, are applied most “rigorously by us government agencies, especially by the departments of the treasury and commerce and the office of foreign assets control (ofac)” (p.  ). the report’s authors regard the policy as “absurd, illegal, and morally unsustainable” and judge that “the effects of the blockade restrict cuba’s economic possibilities and harm its right to raise the living standards of its people” (p.  ). in his work on new imperialism, harvey ( ) called the blockade imposed on cuba a form of violence. another serious point of geopolitical contention has been the demand for the return of the territory illegally occupied by the us naval base in guantánamo. this base holds the infamous guantánamo prison, which since has held prisoners from the “war on terrorism.” the base’s closure is a condition for the full normalization of relations. for over five decades, the cuban government has refused to cash $ annual rent checks for the military base, as a stance of sovereignty. in november , i participated in the fourth international seminar on peace and for the elimination of foreign military bases held in guantánamo, city. the r. basu conference was organized by the world peace council, the cuban movement for peace and the sovereignty of the peoples (movpaz), and the cuban institute of friendship with the peoples (icap), and was attended by a large international delegation. approximately military bases exist worldwide today, and the international delegates gathered to discuss the implications of military bases, war, and securitization for their local communities. as part of the conference, cultural events were held in guantánamo city with a special trip to caimanera, the town closest to the military base. caimanera has been a neighbor to the -square-mile us naval base since , and the purpose of the trip was to hear first-hand from local residents their experiences of living in such close proximity. on the way we were greeted by rows and rows of children in school uniforms and women and men in neatly attired work clothes, many holding banners, demanding the closure of the military base from their home town, and waving flags, delighted to welcome visitors. the mayor of caimanera along with the governor of the province of guantánamo presented to us an historical overview of the city, including its imperial past and role in the revolution. they proudly showcased an overview of state-funded planning and infrastructure investments, health and educa- tion initiatives, and cultural programs particularly focused on youth. we were then escorted on a tour to observe the base, followed by a community town square meet- ing and proclamation of the international peace resolution. despite living in the metaphorical backyard of one of the world’s most notorious prisons, efforts concen- trated on cultivating a sense of stability among local communities and minimizing the impending fears. the us naval base’s illegal occupation violated the territorial sovereignty of cuba and was a constant reminder of impeding danger and violence. further, its strategic location on a critical part of the bay hampered possibilities for any trade in the region. the looming danger of living in the shadow of imperialism is noted by castro in his address to the congress in education in : ... problems of a nation  miles from the united states threatened by planes, by warships, by the millions of imperialist soldiers and their chemical, bacteriological, conventional, and all other kinds of weapons; they are not the problems of a nation waging an epic battle against that empire that wants to sink us and blockade us on every side. no, they are not the problems that we face as an underdeveloped nation having to sustain itself under difficult conditions. they are not the problems of more than two million children and youth or of students whom we must care for, supply with textbooks, materials, pencils, clothing, shoes, furniture, desks, blackboards, audio-visual means, chalk, and quite often food—since we have nearly half a million who eat in school—and also provide with classrooms, school buildings, clothing, and shoes. no! for such men living in such an unreal world, these are not problems. they do not exist. ( ). during our visits to both caimanera and guantánamo city, we conference partici- pants positively noted the strong efforts to maintain peace and harmony within the schools and local community spaces through the engagement with culture, music, dance, and solidarity. we attended many shows that included school children sing- ing, dancing, and reciting revolutionary poetry. the messages were often ones of peace, the singers redefining their own subjectivities through joyful practices. songs http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/castro/db/ / .html. geopolitical framings of subalterity in education: compounding a neoliberalized… http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/castro/db/ / .html of peace, poetry, cuban dance celebrating their rich culture, and orchestras in the public square all contributed to the discussions about peace and solidarity. as lefebvre reminds us ( ), space is political and ideological. in cuban cities, ide- ological space is embedded in the landscape and further evident in the public spaces and monuments dedicated to revolutionary heroes, as constant reminders of their years of success despite the struggles. marxist societies such as cuba, after all, consider ideas weapons in the class struggle, stress the function of education in particular in facilitating political indoctrination of the population, and value universal education as a way to bring about social equality. (aguirre & vichot, , p.  ) schools have countered the tense spatial relations resulting from the close proximity to the guantánamo prison and the area’s troubled history acting as crucial institutions to maintain stability and security. spatio-historical relations are simultaneously social, geopolitical, and neoliberal. schools were crucial to building a culture of peace and resilience. conclusion in this article, i have addressed fundamental theoretical questions in the field of geographies of education by drawing on broader theoretical concepts of subalterity, geopolitics, and neoliberalization. i have previously argued that in a time of global economic crisis, cultural divides, and social and political uncertainties, an expanded notion of subalterity is crucial to understanding the underlying embedded and stra- tegic workings of neoliberalized education (basu, a). i have used this chapter to argue that the spatialities of subalterity in education must also contend with a geopolitical framing if the question of displacement is to be addressed structurally and systematically. whether displacement occurs through exile or blockades, it is fundamentally an act of violence that leads to dispossession and loss. schools often form the spatial frontiers of such resistance in which the impacts of displacement are most visibly evident and in which critical consciousness can be raised for eman- cipatory change. in toronto and other cities undergoing a large influx of forced migrants, the settlement experience is one of inclusion or exclusion. schools are critical local institutions in cities of diversity and in constant flux. in guantánamo or other cities where imperial military bases are a cause of discomfort and anxiety among local communities, or where the effects of the blockade have left local insti- tutions in dire circumstances, the creative interventions within schools allow for consciousness building and spaces of resilience. in cuba, schools have always been central to the project of the revolution. geopolitical framings on subalterity in edu- cation provide one possible direction for intervention that is both intellectually chal- lenging and practice-oriented towards a theory of social change. as scholars in the field of geographies of education are closely investigating the realm of power and knowledge, the question of radical spatial praxis then reflects initiatives that build on protecting human rights, social justice, and peaceful societies. r. basu references agnew, j.  a. 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(n.d.). syrian refugees. retrieved from https://www.liberal.ca/realchange/syrian-refugees/ geopolitical framings of subalterity in education: compounding a neoliberalized… https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . /c r https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . /cag. https://search.proquest.com/docview/ ?accountid= https://search.proquest.com/docview/ ?accountid= http://lanic.utexas.edu/project/castro/db/ / .html http://www.cubavsbloqueo.cu/sites/default/files/informe bloqueo - en.pdf http://www.cubavsbloqueo.cu/sites/default/files/informe bloqueo - en.pdf https://doi.org/ . / http://www.conferenceboard.ca/commentaries/immigration/default/ - - / _a_record-setting_year_for_refugee_resettlement_in_canada.aspx http://www.conferenceboard.ca/commentaries/immigration/default/ - - / _a_record-setting_year_for_refugee_resettlement_in_canada.aspx http://www.conferenceboard.ca/commentaries/immigration/default/ - - / _a_record-setting_year_for_refugee_resettlement_in_canada.aspx http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/refugees/ http://www.cic.gc.ca/english/refugees/ http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-united-nations-security-council- . http://www.cbc.ca/news/politics/canada-united-nations-security-council- . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://www.liberal.ca/realchange/syrian-refugees/ manzer, r. a. ( ). public schools and political ideas: canadian educational policy in histori- cal perspective. toronto, canada: university of toronto press. news montreal. ( , august ). activists say up to several thousand immigrant children not eligible for quebec public schools. retrieved from http://montreal.ctvnews.ca/activists-say- up-to-several-thousand-immigrant-children-not-eligible-for-quebec-public-schools- . roberts, s., secor, a., & sparke, m. ( ). neoliberal geopolitics. antipode, , – . https:// doi.org/ . /j. - . . .x sachgau, o. ( , august ). toronto schools face $ . billion repair backlog: tdsb first board in province to release detailed information on conditions of its schools. the star. retrieved from https://www.thestar.com/yourtoronto/education/ / / /toronto-schools- faces- -billion-repair-backlog.html shaw, i.  g. r. ( ). predator empire: the geopolitics of us drone warfare. geopolitics, , – . https://doi.org/ . / . . unhcr (the un refugee agency). ( a). figures at a glance. in about us (section ). retrieved from http://www.unhcr.org/figures-at-a-glance.html unhcr (the un refugee agency). ( b). beyond detention: a global strategy to support governments to end the detention of asylum-seekers and refugees. geneva, switzerland: united nations high commissioner for refugees. open access this chapter is licensed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons license and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this chapter are included in the chapter’s creative commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the chapter’s creative commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. r. basu http://montreal.ctvnews.ca/activists-say-up-to-several-thousand-immigrant-children-not-eligible-for-quebec-public-schools- . http://montreal.ctvnews.ca/activists-say-up-to-several-thousand-immigrant-children-not-eligible-for-quebec-public-schools- . https://doi.org/ . /j. - . . .x https://doi.org/ . /j. - . . .x https://www.thestar.com/yourtoronto/education/ / / /toronto-schools-faces- -billion-repair-backlog.html https://www.thestar.com/yourtoronto/education/ / / /toronto-schools-faces- -billion-repair-backlog.html https://doi.org/ . / . . http://www.unhcr.org/figures-at-a-glance.html http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / 	chapter : geopolitical framings of subalterity in education: compounding a neoliberalized welfare state 	the geopolitics of subalterity in education 	subalterity of education: five imperatives 	geopolitics and neoliberalism 	feminist and critical geopolitics 	geopolitics and displacement 	case studies 	displacement i: subalterity through exile: neoliberal contradictions and the geopolitics of displacement: redefining educational spaces of refuge in toronto, canada 	displacement ii: subalterity through blockades: resisting sanctions, blockades, and the military base: schools as revolutionary frontiers in guantánamo, cuba 	conclusion 	references equity for women and underrepresented minorities in stem: graduate experiences and career plans in chemistry equity for women and underrepresented minorities in stem: graduate experiences and career plans in chemistry jean stockarda, celeste m. rohlfingb, and geraldine l. richmondc,  adepartment of planning, public policy and management, university of oregon, eugene, or ; bcommittee on the advancement of women chemists (coach), university of oregon, eugene, or ; and cdepartment of chemistry, university of oregon, eugene, or contributed by geraldine l. richmond, november , (sent for review october , ; reviewed by arthur bienenstock and victor mccrary, jr.) recent events prompted scientists in the united states and throughout the world to consider how systematic racism affects the scientific enterprise. this paper provides evidence of inequities related to race–ethnicity and gender in graduate school experi- ences and career plans of phd students in the top ranked de- partments in one science, technology, engineering, and math (stem) discipline, chemistry. mixed-model regression analyses were used to examine factors that might moderate these differ- ences. the results show that graduate students who identified as a member of a racial/ethnic group traditionally underrepresented in chemistry (underrepresented minorities, urm) were significantly less likely than other students to report that their financial support was sufficient to meet their needs. they were also less likely to report having supportive relationships with peers and postdocs. women, and especially urm women, were significantly less likely to report supportive relationships with advisors. despite their more negative experiences in graduate school, students who iden- tified as urm expressed greater commitment to finishing their degree and staying in the field. when there was at least one fac- ulty member within their departments who also identified as urm they were also more likely than other students to aspire to a uni- versity professorship with an emphasis on research. men were significantly more likely than women to express strong commit- ment to finishing the phd and remaining in chemistry, but this difference was stronger in top-ranked departments. men were also more likely than women to aspire to a professorship with an emphasis on research, and this difference remained when indi- vidual and departmental-level variables were controlled. graduate student experience | underrepresented minorities | urm | women fifty years ago, the field of chemistry was overwhelminglypopulated by white men, but, in recent decades, has become more diverse. since , women have received about half of the bachelor’s degrees and over a third of the phds. the representation of those who identify as underrepresented minorities (urm), in- cluding african americans, latinx, and native americans, has also increased, reaching % of bachelor’s and % of phd degrees awarded in ( ). these percentages, however, are far less than their representation within the us population (∼ %). moreover, representation in faculties at research-intensive colleges and uni- versities has remained lower than would be expected given the number of phd recipients. by , only a little more than one- fourth of tenure-track professors at the assistant and associate ranks in top-ranked departments were women. substantially fewer ( %) identified as urm ( – ). research has highlighted the importance of the educational process in increasing the representation of women and urm in science, technology, engineering, and math (stem) ( , ), but less research has focused on the nature of graduate school ex- periences and their relationship to career plans within a specific stem discipline ( ). in this paper, we begin to fill this gap by looking at the extent to which graduate school experiences and career plans of chemistry graduate students differ by gender or identification as urm, and factors that might moderate, or help explain, these differences. data came from a survey of chemistry graduate students sponsored by the american chem- ical society (acs) ( ) and publicly available data on chemistry departments. the sample was restricted to doctoral students enrolled in the departments in the united states that receive the largest share of research funding and who had been enrolled in their departments from to y. it included , graduate students, with an average of . students in each department (range – ). we found disturbing patterns of inequitable graduate experi- ences and career plans. on average, women, and especially those who identified as urm, reported significantly fewer positive interactions with their advisors than other students. urm stu- dents were less likely to report that financial support for their graduate studies was adequate to meet their needs. this differ- ence in financial support was slightly smaller, but remained, in even the most prestigious and resource-rich departments. urm students, and especially men, were significantly less likely to re- port receiving interpersonal support that they desired. women were significantly less likely than men to be committed to fin- ishing their phd and staying in chemistry, but this pattern was strongest among students in larger or more prestigious depart- ments. women were also significantly less likely to aspire to professorships with an emphasis on research, rather than significance on june , , as part of the black lives matter movement, scientists in the united states and throughout the world paused to consider how systematic racism affects the scientific enterprise. as a result, many academic departments are now assessing policies and practices that may contribute to this situation. this paper provides evidence of the nature of ineq- uities related to race–ethnicity and gender in graduate school experiences and career plans of phd students in one science, technology, engineering, and math (stem) discipline, chemis- try. the results can help promote understanding of the prob- lems and guide efforts toward equity within stem and, potentially, other academic areas. in turn, these changes can strengthen the scientific enterprise and the well-being of society. author contributions: j.s. designed and conducted the analysis; and j.s., c.m.r., and g.l.r. wrote the paper. reviewers: a.b., stanford university; and v.m., university of the district of columbia. the authors declare no competing interest. this open access article is distributed under creative commons attribution license . (cc by). to whom correspondence may be addressed. email: richmond@uoregon.edu. this article contains supporting information online at https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/ doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental. published january , . pnas vol. no. e https://doi.org/ . /pnas. | of so c ia l sc ie n c es c h em is tr y d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /pnas. &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / mailto:richmond@uoregon.edu https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://doi.org/ . /pnas. https://doi.org/ . /pnas. teaching, and this association was not moderated by any of the control variables we introduced. although the results are con- cerning to us chemistry departments, the findings have relevance to graduate student equity issues across the stem disciplines and other areas of academe. background a relatively large literature has examined variables associated with students’ persistence in stem degree programs. factors often cited as important include strong relationships with an ac- ademic advisor or mentor ( , ), support from peers and co- workers, and a “sense of belonging” or “community” ( , – ). researchers have documented the way in which subtle negative interactions, incivilities, or “microaggressions” can negatively im- pact student experiences and plans ( – ), and have stressed the importance of promoting true inclusion rather than simple nu- merical diversity ( ). based on this literature, we examined stu- dents’ perceptions of their relationships with advisors and peers. there are also documented differences in student experiences and outcomes between departments and universities with varying levels of prestige and different faculty composition. both women and students identifying as urm appear less likely to finish stem degrees in more prestigious schools ( , , ). for stu- dents who identify as urm, the presence of faculty who also have this identification appears important. a study of chemistry doctoral programs found that departments with more faculty members identified as urm had a greater increase over time in the percentage of urm students receiving phds. however, this study also found a slight negative association between the rep- resentation of women faculty and phds awarded to women ( ). previous studies have also reported lower levels of financial sup- port for urm students ( , ). based on this literature, we ex- amined variations in students’ experiences across departments with different characteristics as well as differences in financial support related to gender or identification as urm. note that these studies, as well as our own, underrepresent phd programs in historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) as most fall outside of the top institutions as ranked by research funding. individual characteristics other than gender and identification as urm can, of course, influence graduate experiences and ca- reer plans. researchers have noted the way in which retention in graduate programs is enhanced by support from significant others, especially family members ( ), and higher socioeco- nomic status ( , ). in addition, individual values and preferences have been found to influence aspirations ( ). it is possible that women chemists have more often opted for non- academic careers because they prefer work environments that allow greater freedom to pursue family and other personal in- terests. thus, we included measures of these variables in our analysis to see if any differences related to gender or identifi- cation as urm might be moderated, or lessened, when these variables were considered. materials and methods the study of the acs data was reviewed and deemed exempt by the university of oregon human subjects office. the acs summary of the sur- vey responses ( ) noted significant bivariate results related to gender and identification as urm but did not attempt to examine why differences appeared or test hypotheses regarding the association of graduate experi- ences with factors related to the students and their departments. our work was designed to fill this gap and was based on the assumption that effective actions to address inequities require understanding the underlying dynamics. our analysis of the data obtained from the acs focused on three measures of the graduate school experience: quality of relationship with the advisor, support received from other graduate students and postdocs, and perceived adequacy of financial support; and two measures of career-related plans: commitment to finishing the phd degree and staying in chemistry, and in- tent to pursue a career as a professor in a research-oriented university. to test for moderating effects, we examined the impact of six individual-level variables (years in the program, parental education, marital/partnered sta- tus, having dependents, value attached to having a well-paid and secure career, and value attached to having a job with flexibility for family and personal interests) and four department-level variables (a composite mea- sure of the size and prestige of the department, diversity of the university, proportion of women on the faculty, and any department faculty who identified as urm). we used mixed-model regression analyses, a powerful statistical method for examining associations among variables measured on two levels of analysis (individual students and their departments). we examined a series of increasingly more complex models, looking at ) the extent to which experiences and plans differed by gender and identification as urm, and ) if these differences were moderated by the individual and department-level control variables. the analysis included tests of interaction effects, or the ways in which the “intersection” ( ) of gender and urm might result in different experiences. the final, best-fitting models were determined through standard model fit procedures. (si appendix gives details on the underlying theoretical model, methodology, and results.) results slightly more than half ( %) of the graduate students who responded to the acs survey were men. nine percent identified fig. . average standardized (z) scores, measures of graduate experiences by gender and identification as urm. note: the sample included women identified as urm, men identified as urm, women not identified as urm, and men not identified as urm. of | pnas stockard et al. https://doi.org/ . /pnas. equity for women and underrepresented minorities in stem: graduate experiences and career plans in chemistry d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://doi.org/ . /pnas. as urm, and this percentage was similar for men and women. on average, students had been in their programs for about two and a half years. slightly more than one-fourth were first- generation college students, but this percentage was significantly higher for students who identified as urm. about two-fifths were married or partnered but less than one-tenth indicated that they had dependents. on average, students indicated that obtaining a secure and well-paid job was relatively important ( . on the -point scale), and students who identified as urm were signifi- cantly more likely to express this view. students were slightly less likely to attach value to family-related and other personal aspects of their future jobs ( . on the -point scale). women and those who identified as urm were more likely to attach greater value to these elements. there were no gender differences in the contex- tual measures. that is, women and men were, on average, in schools of similar rank, similar levels of diversity, and with similar proportions of women and urm faculty. students who did or did not identify as urm were in schools with similar levels of campus and faculty diversity. but, those who identified as urm were significantly less likely to be in larger and more prestigious de- partments. in total, % of the students were in schools within the top quartile of our measure of departmental size and prestige compared to % in departments in the bottom half of this measure. (details in si appendix, table s .) graduate school experiences. fig. shows average values on the measures of graduate school experiences for men and women who did or did not identify as urm. because the measures had slightly different scales, we transformed the values to standard- ized (z) scores. by definition, standardized scores have a mean of zero and an sd of , and thus the values for each variable are comparable. the horizontal line in the graph represents the overall average (zero) for the total group. when a bar associated with a group falls below that line it indicates experiences that were less favorable than the overall average. the average values for each group can also be compared, yielding the difference, in sd units, between average scores for students in two groups. (details in si appendix, table s .) advisor–student relationships. the survey asked an extensive series of questions about students’ experiences with their advisors in areas such as involvement in research, availability, encourage- ment, and fair treatment. because responses to these measures were highly correlated, we combined them into an additive scale (cronbach’s alpha = . ). some students ( % of the total) reported that they had two advisors and the scale score for these students was the average of the ratings given to the two advisors. generally, students reported that their advisors were slightly supportive (an average of . on the -point scale). however, men were more likely than women to say that their advisors were supportive, and this gender difference was greater among those identifying as urm (a significant interaction effect). women identifying as urm reported the most negative experiences (an average z score in fig. of − . ), while men identifying as urm reported, on average, the most positive (an average z score in fig. of + . ). we found similar differences in each of the individual items in the scale. women identifying as urm were least likely to report that their advisors encouraged them to take challenges or pursue their goals, advocated for them, gave credit for their contributions, created a “fair environment,” gave regular feedback, engaged them in writing proposals and giving presentations, helped develop professional relationships, or in- dicated that they were satisfied with the student’s work. our multivariate statistical analyses indicated that the more negative experiences of urm women could not be explained by the other variables we examined. in other words, no matter what year the students were in their graduate program, the ed- ucational level of their parents, their marital status, the value attached to different aspects of their careers, the size and prestige of their department, the diversity of their university, or the composition of their faculty, the urm women were signifi- cantly more likely than other students to report negative expe- riences with their advisors. women who did not identify as urm had the next most negative experiences (details in si appendix, tables s –s ). support from peers and postdocs. a series of survey questions asked the students about the extent to which they desired and received “support and advice” regarding their “professional development and career” from others. we focused on support from other graduate students and postdocs, the two groups with which they would be most likely to interact on a day-to-day basis, and combined these indicators into a -point scale with the highest value indicating that students received as much support as they wanted from both sources and the lowest indicating that they did not receive this level of support from either source. on average, non-urm men were most likely to report that they received the support they desired, followed by non-urm women. students who identified as urm, and especially urm men, were less likely to report receiving such support. (the in- teraction effect was statistically significant.) almost a quarter of urm men ( %), compared to % of the urm women and – % of the non-urm students, reported that they did not receive desired support from either fellow graduate students or postdocs. less than half of the urm men, but almost two-thirds of the non-urm men, reported that they received the support they wanted from both sources. our multivariate analyses indi- cated that this pattern was not moderated by any of the indi- vidual or department-level factors. (details in si appendix, tables s –s .) financial support. in addition to questions regarding advisor rela- tions and support from others, students were asked to indicate the extent to which they agreed or disagreed with the following statement: “the funding for my graduate studies is adequate to meet the cost of living where i live.” responses could range on a -point scale from strongly disagree to strongly agree. on aver- age, there were no differences between men and women in an- swers to this query. however, there were significant differences between students who identified as urm and those who did not. students who identified as urm were more than twice as likely as other students to indicate that their financial support was not adequate ( % versus % responding disagree or strongly disagree). the z score associated with urm men was especially low: − . or greater than one-half of an sd below the overall mean. the students were also asked to report what percentage of their support came from sources such as teaching assistantships (ta), research assistantships (ra), fellowships, and personal resources including other employment, support from family members, and loans. reflecting the inadequacy of formal grad- uate stipends, the percentage of support from personal resources was over twice as large for urm students as for other students ( . % versus . %, t = . , p < . ). the results of our multivariate analyses indicated that the difference between urm and other students in perceived ade- quacy of support was not moderated by students’ individual characteristics, such as marital status or having dependents; the extent to which they received support from tas, ras or fel- lowships; nor by the composition of departmental faculty or di- versity of their universities. it was, however, moderated by departmental prestige and size. the gap in reported adequacy of funding between urm and other students was less in depart- ments that were larger and had more research funding, but did not disappear. fig. illustrates these results by displaying the average value on this measure, predicted by our best-fitting statistical model, for urm and non-urm students in schools at various levels of size and prestige. the values in the figure show the average for each group that would be predicted if they were equivalent on each of the variables included in the analysis, stockard et al. pnas | of equity for women and underrepresented minorities in stem: graduate experiences and career plans in chemistry https://doi.org/ . /pnas. so c ia l sc ie n c es c h em is tr y d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://doi.org/ . /pnas. including both individual and departmental characteristics. (details in si appendix, tables s , s , and s –s .) taken together, our findings regarding graduate school ex- periences support earlier research and theoretical understand- ings. women’s less satisfactory relationships with advisors could be due to gender-biased assumptions regarding women’s roles in stem. the inequities encountered by urms could be due to institutional racism. the lack of personal support from peers illustrates the ways in which implicit biases and a lack of true inclusion can permeate social interactions in daily life ( – ). the greater difficulties with funding can be linked to an almost -fold difference in net worth between non-hispanic whites and minority groups that are underrepresented within stem (si appendix, table s ). even though departments and funding agencies generally have well-established and seemingly univer- salistic student funding policies, urm students could be far less likely to have back-up financial resources and be more likely to face expectations from others, such as family members, for fi- nancial assistance. while our analysis controlled for family background and having dependents, it is unlikely that these control variables were adequate to fully capture the true scope of financial disparities. at present, graduate students are paid at levels far less than they might earn outside academe and the impact of this low level of funding appears to be far greater for urm students than for others. career plans. in the second part of our analysis we examined students’ career-related plans and the extent to which any dif- ferences related to gender and identification as urm were moderated by characteristics of the students, their departments, and their graduate experiences. we first looked at students’ commitment to finishing the phd and remaining within the chemical sciences. men were significantly more likely than women to express high commitment; within each gender group, those who identified as urm were more likely to do so. (the standard scores, or z scores, associated with this measure were . for urm men, . for non-urm men, . for urm women, and − . for non-urm women.) our multivariate analyses indicated that gender differences, but not those related to urm status, were moderated by other variables, specifically the size and prestige of the department and the quality of the relationship that students had with their advisors. students who had more supportive advisors expressed significantly greater commitment to the field and their degree, and this association was similar for men and women. in contrast, the association between the prestige of the department and commitment varied for men and women, as illustrated in fig. . there was no gender difference in commitment in the less prestigious and smaller departments, but striking differences in the more prestigious schools, where women were significantly less likely to be com- mitted to completing the phd and remaining in chemistry. (again, the values depicted in fig. control for, or equalize, other variables related to commitment. additional details in si appendix, tables s –s .) the second measure of career plans involved students’ career aspirations, focusing on the area in which women have been most underrepresented––tenure-track professorships at research uni- versities. the highest value of this measure indicated students were very interested in completing a postdoc and becoming a professor with an emphasis on research, and the lowest value indicated no plans for either pursuit. [the phrasing of the question differentiated “professor (emphasis on research)” from “professor (emphasis on teaching)” as well as “researcher (not professor) in college/university.”] the pattern of differences by gender and identification as urm paralleled those with the measure of commitment. men were significantly more likely than women to aspire to a postdoc and professorship; and, within each gender group, those who identified as urm were more likely than other students to express these aspirations. (the standard scores, or z scores, associated with this measure were . for urm men, . for non-urm men, − . for urm women, and − . for non-urm women.) multivariate analyses indicated that students were significantly more likely to aspire to a professorship emphasizing research when they were first-generation college students, attached less importance to a job that allowed time for family and other in- terests, had a more supportive advisor, and expressed greater commitment to finishing their degree and staying in chemistry. fig. . estimated average values, perceived adequacy of financial support by prestige/size of department and identification as urm, controlling for other individual and departmental variables. note: perceived adequacy of support measured on a -point scale with indicating strongly agree. mean values estimated from the best-fitting mixed-model regression and included controls for gender, marital status, dependents, value attached to a high paying job, diversity of university, and presence of urm faculty in the department. estimated means for the measure of departmental prestige and size calculated at the midpoint of each range shown. horizontal line indicates the average value for all students. thirty percent of the students ( non-urm and urm) were in the departments in the bottom half of the prestige/size distribution of departments; % ( non-urm and urm) in the departments in the second quartile; and % ( non-urm and urm) in the departments in the highest quartile. additional details in si appendix. of | pnas stockard et al. https://doi.org/ . /pnas. equity for women and underrepresented minorities in stem: graduate experiences and career plans in chemistry d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://doi.org/ . /pnas. yet, even when all of these variables were equalized, women were less likely than men to express this aspiration. at the same time, however, the multivariate results revealed that the ten- dency for students who identified as urm to more often plan to become a professor at a research-oriented university was highly dependent on the composition of their departmental faculty. as illustrated in fig. , in departments with at least one faculty member identified as urm, the urm students were more likely than others to express strong aspirations to a postdoc and professorship in a research-oriented department. in contrast, urm students in departments without any professors identified as urm were slightly less likely than other students to express these aspirations. the difference between non-urm students in the two types of departments was much smaller. (details in si appendix, tables s –s .) (as noted above, our study of the acs survey data underrepresents phd chemistry programs in hbcus as most fall outside of the top institutions as ranked by research funding.) fig. . estimated average values, commitment to finishing degree and staying in chemistry by prestige/size of department and gender, controlling for other individual and departmental variables. note: commitment was measured on a -point scale, with indicating strongest commitment. mean values estimated from results of the best-fitting mixed-model regression and included controls for identification as urm, years in the graduate program, marital status, value attached to a high-paying job, value attached to a job allowing time for family and other interests, quality of advisor, and presence of urm faculty in the department. within all departments both men and women students reported greater commitment when they also reported more supportive advisors. horizontal line is the average scale score for all students. thirty percent of the students ( women and men) were in the departments in the bottom half of the prestige/size distribution of departments; % ( women and men) in the departments in the second quartile; and % ( women and men) in the departments in the highest quartile. additional details in si appendix. fig. . estimated average values, career aspirations by identification as urm and presence of urm on faculty, controlling for other individual and de- partmental variables. note: aspirations for a faculty position at a research-oriented institution measured on a -point scale with the highest value indicating greatest commitment. estimates derived from results of mixed model regression that included controls for gender, parental education, value placed on a job allowing time for personal interests and family, supportive relations with advisor, support from peers and postdocs, and commitment to finishing degree and staying in the chemical sciences. the horizontal line is the average for the total group. among the urm students, % were in departments with at least one urm faculty. among the non-urm students, % were in such departments. seventy of the departments had at least one urm faculty member. ad- ditional details in si appendix. stockard et al. pnas | of equity for women and underrepresented minorities in stem: graduate experiences and career plans in chemistry https://doi.org/ . /pnas. so c ia l sc ie n c es c h em is tr y d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://doi.org/ . /pnas. our analysis of students’ career plans illustrates the important role of both a supportive advisor and departmental-related var- iables in students’ career plans, supporting previous literature reviewed above. net of other variables, students who had more supportive advisors were more likely to plan to finish their de- gree, stay in chemistry, and aspire to a postdoctoral position and an academic career at a research-oriented university. yet the positive effect of an advisor on women’s commitment was muted in larger and more prestigious departments, where the gender gap in commitment was significantly stronger. the racial/ethnic composition of departments’ faculties was especially important in explaining the aspirations of urm students, paralleling earlier research on chemistry departments ( ). we suggest that these results highlight the ways in which those concerned with graduate students’ career plans need to address both the actions of indi- vidual faculty as well as the nature of departmental culture and composition. conclusion for many years, members of the scientific community have stressed the importance of diversity and inclusion within the scientific enterprise by finding and building on scientific interests and talents from all segments of the population ( , , ). graduate schools are the major path to producing a diverse and inclusive scientific workforce. yet, as illustrated in this paper, graduate school experiences can mirror inequities in other areas of the society and potentially work against achieving this goal. the academic world projects an aura of universality, meritoc- racy, and respect for all, regardless of their individual charac- teristics. however, the results of this analysis suggest that the reality for those who are traditionally underrepresented appears to be quite different. in their academic departments and labo- ratories, these underrepresented students may encounter subtle, insidious, and continual social and psychological hostilities and devaluation. amazingly, despite this situation, students who identify as urm are more likely to plan to persist in their degree programs and the discipline, and to aspire to careers as professors who emphasize research as well as teaching. this commitment suggests extraordinary individual courage and devotion to their science. the acs is commended for commissioning the data-gathering effort that led to this paper. it could be tempting for some to dismiss the findings described above as unique to one discipline, or to stem but not to other areas. given the deep roots of sys- tematic racism and sexism within our society, it would seem un- likely that the results reported here are so limited. at the very least, this is an empirical question and one that requires concerted attention throughout the scientific and academic world. thus, we hope that researchers replicate this work in a wider range of in- stitutions, including hbcus and those with less research funding, in other stem fields, and in other academic disciplines. si ap- pendix includes an extended discussion of possible future research as well as the implications of our findings for changing policies and practices. however, it is important to note that ample resources are available to assist chemistry departments and faculty who wish to address these findings, including minority technical organiza- tions such as the national organization for the professional ad- vancement of black chemists and chemical engineers ( ) and the society for advancement of chicanos/hispanics and native americans in science ( ). in june , many scientists in the united states and throughout the world expressed their commitment to uncovering and addressing inequities within their disciplines and to demonstrating that black and brown lives matter within laboratories, hallways, faculty offices, and the everyday life of academe and the larger scientific enterprise ( ). we hope that the findings summarized in this paper can help guide corrective actions, not just within chemistry, but throughout academia. data availability. data is available at https://coach.uoregon.edu/ coach-research-publications-and-articles. acknowledgments. this material is based upon work supported by the us department of energy, office of science, office of basic energy under award de-fg - er . we greatly appreciate and thank the acs for administering the survey and sharing the data with us. . calculated from data in national science foundation, integrated postsecondary ed- ucation data system. 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econ. educ. rev. , – ( ). . m. estrada et al., improving underrepresented minority student persistence in stem. cbe life sci. educ. , es ( ). . a. o. haller, a. portes, status attainment processes. sociol. educ. , – ( ). . a. m. santiago, m. k. einarson, background characteristics as predictors of academic self-confidence and academic self-efficacy among graduate science and engineering students. res. high. educ. , – ( ). . s. beyer, why are women underrepresented in computer science? gender differences in stereotypes, self-efficacy, values, and interests and predictors of future cs course- taking and grades. comput. sci. educ. , – ( ). . p. h. collins, intersectionality as critical social theory (duke university press, durham, nc, ). . r. j. burke, m. c. mattis, eds., women and minorities in science, technology, engi- neering, and mathematics: upping the numbers (edward elgar publishing limited, cheltenham, uk, ). . k. w. phillips et al., how diversity makes us smarter. sci. am. , – ( ). . national organization for the professional advancement of black chemists and chemical engineers ( ). https://www.nobcche.org/. accessed november . . society for advancement of chicanos/hispanics and native americans in science ( ). https://www.sacnas.org/. accessed november . . n. subbaraman, thousands of scientists worldwide to go on strike for black lives. nature, new ( ). https://idp.nature.com/authorize?response_type=cookie&client_ id=grover&redirect_uri=https% a% f% fwww.nature.com% farticles% fd - - -x. accessed june . stockard et al. pnas | of equity for women and underrepresented minorities in stem: graduate experiences and career plans in chemistry https://doi.org/ . /pnas. so c ia l sc ie n c es c h em is tr y d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , https://www.nobcche.org/ https://www.sacnas.org/ https://idp.nature.com/authorize?response_type=cookie&client_id=grover&redirect_uri=https% a% f% fwww.nature.com% farticles% fd - - -x https://idp.nature.com/authorize?response_type=cookie&client_id=grover&redirect_uri=https% a% f% fwww.nature.com% farticles% fd - - -x https://idp.nature.com/authorize?response_type=cookie&client_id=grover&redirect_uri=https% a% f% fwww.nature.com% farticles% fd - - -x https://doi.org/ . /pnas. a needed balance editorial a needed balance governments need to act now to halt rising inequalities or they will fail to deliver on the promise of a better future for all. the enduring impacts of the covid- pandemic and the more recent black lives matter protests have been shaking societies across the world. what is at the heart of so much social disorder? it’s inequality, many argue. we agree. no matter in which country one lives, the threats, the challenges, the missed opportunities, the impacts of policies are different depending on which social group one belongs to. is it the high- or low-income group? is it the dominant or the minority ethnic group? the list goes on. within-country inequality has been growing high on the agenda of development scholars and experts among others for quite some time now, not so much of politicians. not until now at least. at the onset of the financial crisis, countries like the united states, united kingdom, germany and others saw the governments bailing out banks while the economies were slowing down. the resulting increase in government deficits led to austerity policies aimed at reducing such deficits mostly through spending cuts. did such policies affect everyone equally? most certainly not. in , a report from the secretariat of the united nations conference on trade and development titled beyond austerity: towards a global new deal, argues how the world economy remains unbalanced, despite the agenda ambitions as reflected in sdg ‘reduce inequalities within and among countries’. deep inequalities — able to destabilize the political, social and environmental health of the planet — pre-existed austerity measures and got worse because of such measures. poorer communities were hit the hardest leading to even more polarization while the most vulnerable experienced increasing anxiety about the future. now the covid- pandemic has heightened the situation with poorer, most vulnerable and minority groups suffering much greater health and socio-economic impacts than the rest of the population. as highlighted by lise kingo, the ceo and executive director of the united nations global compact initiative, the pandemic has simply revealed the fragilities of our global system. in her view, business leaders should become social activists and understand social inequality because it is the right thing to do and because it creates stability across the world. she is not alone in seeing a connection among the impacts of the covid- and climate change crises, and more recently the black lives matter movement. sustainable development hinges on a more equal and a fairer world. we cannot tackle climate change, biodiversity loss and environmental degradation if we ignore social inequalities. likewise, we cannot succeed at eliminating social inequalities if we neglect environmental damage. how can inequality be eradicated? the first step is to admit, rather than closing an eye on, that inequalities are all around us and are too large to be justified on grounds of different abilities and aspirations among individuals. when they are so large, they harm society and the natural world. scholars and practitioners from various disciplines sent the alarm long ago. there are many accounts in the scholarly domain of the extent to which societies characterized by uneven income distribution score poorly in terms of social order — poor health and low life expectancy, high levels of crime, poor school educational attainment, low social mobility, low social capital, high expressions of racism, substantial gender gaps and so on. besides, uneven power structures aggravate social dysfunction through various channels. for example, in , boyce discussed evidence that when those who stand to gain from environmentally damaging activities have more power than those who stand to lose the most from such activities, the result is more iniquities in terms of class, race, ethnicity, gender and age. this is in addition to the fact that social inequalities have direct impact on environmental quality. more recently, a review of published work by hamann and colleagues draws on diverse disciplines to provide a systemic understanding of the connections between inequality and the biosphere and highlights the complex nature of inequality. though more interdisciplinary work to shed light on such a conundrum is welcome, including in nature sustainability, it’s time to focus on finding effective solutions. so we urge decision makers — and in particular politicians — to take stock of available evidence, and admit that the issue is real, it is worsening and it is dangerous. then, action should come. do we need new policy tools? we don’t think so. we need willingness to embrace the complexity of human–nature interfaces like the social inequality–biosphere health one, at all levels of governance and policy. we need stronger and competent political intervention to stop practices fuelling inequalities such as environmentally damaging activities, and to enable change in institutional and cultural settings now favouring racism, imbalance of power structures, gender and minority group gaps, among other issues. it’s time for politicians to prioritize above all the well-being of all citizens by providing fair access to basic services, equal wealth and by eradicating inequality of opportunities, the worst dimension of inequality according to stiglitz (the great divide, ). halting the inequality spiral with decisive political action will make societies and economies stronger and more sustainable over the long term. there is need of business courage to change the profit baseline and respond to societal calls for a more equitable and environmentally sustainable economy. citizens have a duty to hold those in power accountable for their actions. and those in power have to listen to citizens around the world as they won’t tolerate neglect, injustice and unfairness any longer. a fairer future can be achieved but it requires willingness to change the status quo, accepting some costs and eliminating unfair privilege. it’s a balancing act across thriving socio-economic opportunities for all, access to healthcare and other basic services for all and environmental sustainability globally. we know such balance can be achieved: we have made the system we live in; therefore, we can change it. and we want to get that done soon. for this we need decision makers to stop promising and start acting today. ❐ published online: july https://doi.org/ . /s - - - nature sustainability | vol | july | | www.nature.com/natsustain http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf https://unctad.org/en/publicationslibrary/tdr _en.pdf https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ /jun/ /covid- -pandemic-is-fire-drill-for-effects-of-climate-crisis-says-un-official https://scholarworks.umass.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article= &context=peri_workingpapers https://www.annualreviews.org/doi/abs/ . /annurev-environ- - https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/ / /the-great-divide/ .html https://doi.org/ . /s - - - http://www.nature.com/natsustain 	a needed balance
 michigan journal of community service learning spring , pp. – can intergroup dialogue combined with slce answer today’s call to action? khuram hussain and jeremy wattles hobart and william smith college dozens of bodies lay stiff and still. arms and legs overlay one another. black, brown, and white undergraduate bodies clogged the arteries of the student center at hobart and william smith (hws) colleges in geneva, new york. flanking them were faculty and staff, standing in solidarity, hold- ing block letter signs reading: “black lives matter,” “hands up don’t shoot,” and “i can’t breathe.” it was the end of the fall semester, and black lives matter protests pervad- ed cities and campuses nationwide. this was not the first time our city had witnessed mass protest against police violence. following the police shooting death of unarmed black resident cory jackson, geneva’s hispanic and black community and white allies rose up in protest to demand ac- countability by, and greater inclusion in, city gov- ernment. such campus and community protests have guid- ed us to reimagine service- learning as cooperative, rights- based, and dialogue- driven. at the center of our vision for the future of the service- learning and community engagement (slce) movement is an inextricable link between dialogue and collabo- rative action. in our campus- community initiative tools for social change, we use intergroup dia- logue (igd) to help students, faculty, staff, and city residents co- create knowledge and expand their civ- ic capacity. beyond the particularities of our work, we see a universal role for dialogue in building trust and understanding between stakeholders so they can more effectively serve their communities. in his framing piece for the slce future directions project, zlotkowski calls for “enhanced social efficacy” through stakeholder inclusive- ness and demonstrable community impact. this thought piece dreams out loud, with zlotkowski and others’ bold calls to develop slce programs for collaborative learning and social change. for us, collaborative learning requires creating con- ditions for stakeholders to engage in active, often difficult, conversations about identity, power, and oppression. it is not until we have named our per- sonal experience with (or complicity in) broad and deep forces of inequality that we can begin to create community anew. what follows is an overview of our call for linking dialogue- to- action in slce. throughout the piece we reference our initiative, tools for so- cial change, not as a program description but as a love story about enactments of justice and hu- man agency that moved us to share our vision for democratic, transformative slce. we offer noth- ing prescriptive, but instead send a dispatch from the place where memory and imagination meet. yet this is not a passive call. any ethical pedagogy must attend to the historical moment it occupies. slce practitioners and scholars cannot turn away from the fierce urgency of the call to empower our communities. in their thought piece, whitney and col- leagues call for designing asset- based, collabora- tive programs that engage with the contexts of local places and national realities. looking at today’s na- tional realities we see a rising tide of youth move- ments for racial and economic justice. our campus mirrors national activism. as we write this piece, students are rallying to establish hws colleges as a sanctuary campus, participating in the interna- tional women’s day strike, marching against the muslim ban, and participating in national marches. our students are calling us to the realities of the world. in today’s climate of social activism, we be- lieve slce, combined with igd, is uniquely situ- ated to address these realities.    we both affirm our students’ street- level activ- ism and assert that slce educators have a special role to play in supporting democratic urges. stu- dent activism often engages in discrete acts of vir- tue signaling (e.g., a single rally or vigil), rather than building, power at a grassroots level to achieve systemic change. this is where igd holds a ca- pacity for generating student and community civic collaborations: by supporting collaborative learn- ing. within the context of democratically designed slce this can evolve into collective action. hussain and wattles lessons from our slce model: tools for social change we witness firsthand the unique role igd can play in slce through tools for social change. we structure this approach to slce as a scaffolded process in which students, faculty, staff, and com- munity partners engage in critical dialogues about social class- and race- based inequality and ulti- mately develop and execute projects co- designed, sustainable, and focused on local issues. tools ex- plicitly shares the view that slce should enhance stakeholder inclusiveness and demonstrate commu- nity impact. the curriculum has four phases: . participants form group relationships by sharing their experience with identity, differ- ence, and community. . participants explore the lived realities of white privilege and racist oppression through structured activities and dialogue. . participants identify dimensions of exclusion and division within our community (e.g., areas of disinvestment or pollution, employ- ment, and housing discrimination) and the ways in which some participants are com- plicit beneficiaries while others are subordi- nated by these divisions. . lastly, participants identify ideas for com- munity solutions, including alliance building and advocacy work. tools is now going into its third year and has been reshaped by every incoming cohort of students and community members.  beyond the programmatic particularities of tools, the approach has three underlying principles relevant to the slce movement at large. first, dia- logue is essential to building interpersonal trust and understanding. second, well- organized dialogue can move participants into well- designed civic ac- tions that speak to the living realities of a commu- nity. finally, both dialogue and civic action must be present. the absence of one undermines the other. sustaining both empowers both. dialogue has a powerful capacity to promote in- terpersonal connection and understanding between people from different backgrounds. in our work, we employ an igd model developed at the university of michigan in the s by educators focused on intergroup race dialogues (zúñiga, nagda, chesler, & cytron- walker ). we are interested in igd’s ability to create a supportive space for participants to share their experiences with identity, difference, and community. and we want participants to ex- plore their lived realities of privilege and oppression in ways that are rooted in their lived experiences and relevant to local realities. igd offers an espe- cially important method of grounding our shared understanding of inequality within our community and within ourselves. in our previous experiences leading slce projects, we witnessed that illusory notion that students often have of inequality “out there,” which they are supposed to “help” with. by focusing on the full range of participants’ perspec- tives and lived realities with inequality through the igd process, we are all positioned to look inward at our own status within an unequal community. this kind of dialogue creates space for partici- pants to eventually speak openly about their experi- ences with racism and the campus community’s un- checked entitlements within the city. for instance, during one dialogue- session, a community member expressed frustration with how faculty were given preferential treatment by city government officials as well as local media outlets. in his words, “you at hobart and william smith have all the power in this town.” igd provided language to interrogate some of the faculty and staff’s social entitlements. ulti- mately, igd is about collective interrogation of in- equality. by using a process that allows for shared meaning making and that acknowledges the ways privilege limits opportunities for equal exchange, we aspire to lay the groundwork for more equitable collaboration. furthermore, we assert that igd is uniquely valuable in the context of slce. on- campus igd experiences do not effectively lend themselves to collective action (see, for example, yu & taylor, ). igd is usually designed for classroom use and abstracts inequality beyond the classroom. by contrast, linking igd with slce offers a clearer path toward social change, since slce calls for experiential learning outside of the classroom, and, at its best, demands engagement that produces pos- itive community outcomes. for instance, hartman ( ) calls for slce that is “community- driven” and “explicitly advances the goals of economic eq- uity, equal partnership, mutual learning, coopera- tive and positive social change . . . .” (p. ). partic- ipating in this kind of slce requires that we orient our curricular aims to directly impact issues of eq- uity and justice in our communities. in this context igd lends itself to shared community work to ad- dress the very issues that required igd in the first place! in our case, for example, we dialogue about the mounting distress in our community over the dispossession of people of color in geneva, new york, on and off campus, and then develop and im- plement initiatives to address it. ultimately, situating our dialogues within a place- based slce program allows us to intervene can intergroup dialogue combined with slce answer today’s call to action? into a set of issues that are not typically addressed in on- campus intergroup race dialogue. specifical- ly, we introduce questions related to the rights of all genevans to participate in the city’s public spaces. we explore privilege and oppression as it relates to how geneva is occupied and who is ‘occupied’ upon. through storytelling and dialogue, partici- pants share their experiences with institutional rac- ism as it is lived in the city, including on campus. in turn, our vision of justice becomes rooted in the living city and our sense of service rooted in the lives of people we encounter. when we begin from community knowledge of local issues, then our community solutions can emerge organically. emergent community solutions: an example the following illustration of one of our civic initiatives provides a sample trajectory for moving from deep dialogue on to deep civic work. while the anecdote is specific to a moment in tools, its aim here is to provide a glimpse into our wider as- piration for an approach to slce that emerges out of authentic, collaborative encounters and speaks truth to power. early in , concerned members of a local vol- unteer committee were commissioned to develop a comprehensive plan for the city’s land use policies. the plan would advise city government on how to develop public spaces and set funding priorities for the next years. the comprehensive plan volun- teers collaborated with tools because of our work to promote inclusive processes in the city. we held a series of dialogues about the comprehensive plan and asked our participants to share their thoughts and feelings about it. we concluded that the plan overrepresented the views of upper- middle class residents because it relied heavily upon data from an online survey to which few working class, non- white residents replied. tools addressed concerns regarding the data collection process by presenting to the city a vision for a “big talk.” we proposed using tools’ capability for facilitating dialogue for gatherings in spaces occupied by residents whom the online survey failed to engage: black and his- panic churches, barbershops, housing projects, free lunch program sites, the salvation army, and senior housing. we mobilized locally trained facilitators, includ- ing our students, who engaged in community di- alogues in different locations, recording a com- bined total of over hours of dialogue throughout the city. more than half of the participants were hispanic or black, and most were women. three of the dialogues engaged geneva’s spanish- speaking residents, with one conducted entirely in spanish and others conducted bilingually with the help of translators. we wanted to understand what public spaces empower residents and what public spaces marginalize them. a faculty colleague analyzed the transcribed interviews and presented a summary document to the public. the aim of the big talk was to produce this document and better inform the write- up of the comprehensive plan. however, it retains an addi- tional and equally valuable purpose: it represents the production of knowledge at the grassroots through collaborative processes. genevans told their own stories, through themselves and to them- selves, and echoed them back to those in power. it was a moment of dreaming out loud about what democratic urban development can be. these narratives, which are now public record (cityofgenevany.com), brought to the surface sto- ries of systematic racism, job and housing discrim- ination, and racial isolation. further, participants provided a critical reading of the city’s develop- ment policies as essentially a process of disposses- sion masked by a selectively representative image of an idyllic lakeside town. in plainspoken ways, interviewees also provided creative ideas for sup- porting economic empowerment by licensing food trucks, expanding public library programming, and redesigning public transportation to improve food access. here is why the big talk – serving here as an example of igd – matters beyond our little city. first, the dialogical process that created the initia- tive was symbolically and literally embodied in the process. in other words, by beginning with collabo- rative dialogue, we provided space for participants to become accustomed to collaboratively develop- ing processes to address particular instances of in- equity and exclusion. in turn, those processes were collectively executed through community- directed initiatives like the big talk; while the report was part of the city government’s comprehensive plan, and had logistical support from city staff, tools vol- unteers facilitated the conversation spaces and thus the knowledge creation which the document rep- resents. second, this process of engaging members of the community within a diverse subset of a city was one of approaching social problems as funda- mentally about building community. for instance, instead of police accountability being seen as an abstract issue of “social justice,” it could be un- derstood as a matter of access to comparable pub- lic services for all members of a community. fair housing could be seen as part of what is required of neighbors in a community. in other words, jus- tice becomes a community- building project – or as cornel west told an audience of genevans in hussain and wattles – “justice is what love looks like in public.” last- ly, we believe slce must retain (from start to fin- ish) a persistent commitment to deep interpersonal understanding between stakeholders. nothing else we do matters if that principle is ignored. how can we truly participate in the lives of others without acknowledging their lives and having our lives ac- knowledged too? hope in collaborative process we aspire for practices in slce wherein the journey is as empowering as the destination. for us, that requires a focus on dialogues that priori- tize democratic co- production of knowledge at the grassroots level. while not all practitioners will uti- lize igd (or any formal dialogue) in their slce activities, we call upon democratic- minded educa- tors to consider the ways in which we literally and symbolically dialogue within our communities. for instance, how do our off- campus partnership sites disrupt or reinforce the power dynamics of the cam- pus “bubble” that students often experience? tools’ weekly dialogues are situated in the city’s oldest black church, within the city’s lead- poisoned th ward. historically it is a location our students have engaged with as a charity site, where food is donat- ed or fresh paint is provided. we located tools here as a quiet reclamation of where important cultural and political work is recognizably done in the city. ultimately, this dialogue- driven approach was our way to address broader considerations related to developing justice- minded, collaborative slce projects: how are marginalized members of the community accessing slce spaces with author- ity and autonomy? are there literal or figurative “circles” where students and community members collaborate? is leadership easily distinguished or is it diffuse and situation specific? is democratic decision- making in place? lastly, have we designed and promoted specific incentives or opportunities to recruit, include, and empower historically silenced participants? in the current political moment, with the ad- vance of new waves of campus protests, we remain hopeful about the future of dialogically- driven, community- directed, democratic slce. ursula k. le guin ( ) reminds us that “you cannot buy the revolution. you cannot make the revolution. you can only be the revolution. it is in your spirit, or it is nowhere” (p. - ). in that spirit, we do not present our work as fixed or proprietary but as, it- self, part of a dialogue about how we might dream differently about the future of slce. we maintain that slce is uniquely situated to reimagine how institutions of higher education choose to occupy spaces and (potentially) confront structural in- equality. our hope here is to enter into conversation with other justice- minded educators who see the transformational possibilities of community- driven slce. at our best, we can collectively be part of a wider movement to push the edges of our standard practices and advance the rights and dignity of all people in all of our communities. references hartman, e. ( ). a strategy for community- driven service- learning and community engagement: fair trade learning. michigan journal of community service learning, ( ), - . le guin, ursula k. ( ). the dispossessed: an ambig- uous utopia. new york: harper and row. tools for social change. ( ). “big talk in the little city” (unpublished documents), retrieved from http:// cityofgenevany.com/wp- content/uploads/ / / part- - final.pdf whitney, b., muse, s., harrison, b., edwards, k., & clayton, p. h. ( ). learning from and with com- munity organizations to navigate the tensions of dem- ocratic engagement. michigan journal of community service learning, ( ), - . yu, c. m., taylor, w. l. (eds.). ( ). the test of our progress: the clinton record on civil rights. new york: citizens’ commission on civil rights. zlotkowski, e. ( ). twenty years and counting: a framing essay. michigan journal of community ser- vice learning, ( ), - . zúñiga, x. nagda, b. a., chesler, m., & cytron- walker, a. ( ). intergroup dialogues in higher education: meaningful learning about social justice. ashe high- er education report series, ( ). san francisco: jossey- bass. can intergroup dialogue combined with slce answer today’s call to action? authors khuram hussain (hussain@hws.edu) is an associate professor of education at hobart and wil- liam smith colleges and is a co- founder of tools for social change in geneva, ny. khuram com- pleted his ph.d. in the cultural foundations of ed- ucation at syracuse university. his current schol- arship and teaching explore grassroots anti- racist education and the possibilities of democratic learn- ing. his book, weapons for minds: visual thought in muhammad speaks is under contract with johns hopkins university press. jeremy wattles (wattles@hws.edu) gradu- ated from the university of edinburgh in with an msc in english literature. in he returned to upstate new york, where he grew up, and spent two years in national service as an americorps vista worker, organizing volunteer programs and nonprofit internships for students. currently, he works at hobart and william smith colleges as the associate director of the center for community engagement and service learning, where he is re- sponsible for several tutoring programs, volunteer projects, and social justice initiatives. he is a co- founder of tools for social change in geneva, ny. copas—current objectives of postgraduate american studies . ( ) luke cage as postpost- / tv: spatial negotiations of race in contemporary u.s. television lea espinoza garrido abstract: reading luke cage as a ‘postpost- / ’ text with a focus on the body of the bulletproof black male superhero, luke, as well as the show’s setting, this paper examines the serial’s potential to negotiate social and cultural implications of american politics in response to the attacks on september , , particularly with regard to the war on terror’s embeddedness in long-standing histories of racism. keywords: war on terror; luke cage; space; / ; racial profiling; postpost- / ; superhero look, dog, a hero never had one. already took malcolm and martin, this is the last one. now we got a hero for hire and he a black one. method man, “bulletproof love” introduction as one of the most influential social and political phenomena in the new millennium, / has sparked a plethora of interdisciplinary studies in various fields in the past years, ranging from studies of the event’s representations in various media and its political and psychological consequences to how it has been portrayed in literature and art. the iconic fall of the twin towers, its psychological, arguably traumatic, impact as well as its fictional (re-)imaginations have frequently occupied the center stage of many of these engagements with the event. in the comic book world, early responses to the september , attacks included images of shocked and sometimes even physically wounded superheroes staring at the debris of the fallen towers, oftentimes helping those identified as the “true heroes,” the new york city fire department (fdny) firefighters (quesada et al., “stand”). these comic book representations of / oscillate between two dominant narratives: on the one hand, they foreground a collective and national trauma that is inscribed on the white male bodies of prototypical american superheroes such as captain america, spiderman, and superman. prominent examples include the amazing spiderman vol. , no. ( ) as well as captain america vol. , no. ( ). copas—current objectives of postgraduate american studies . ( ) on the other hand, a narrative of national strength and male heroism in response to this national trauma becomes visible, stressing the alleged necessity to abandon any thoughts of surrender and instead fight the ostensibly malicious ‘other’ deemed responsible for the attacks. patriotism and nationalism are at the core of these narratives, and have converged in response to the attacks to foster racist and xenophobic tendencies, vizualized particularly by the extensive use of patriotic imagery, such as the showcasing of the american flag. this opportunistic logic, so evidently reflected in the legislation passed in the united states shortly after the attacks — the usa patriot act ( ) or the homeland act ( ) —, is perhaps most pointedly summarized by captain america in an inner monologue in the first edition of his comics published after the / attacks: we’ve got to be stronger than we’ve ever been — as a people. as a nation. we have to be america. or they’ve won. we’re going to make it through this — we, the people. united by a power that no enemy of freedom could begin to understand. we share — we are — the american dream. (quesada et al., “enemy”) moreover, many of the comics explicitly link the two dominant narratives of national victimhood and of national strength to both the city space of new york and the body of the white, male, able-bodied superhero. stylized as a site of the war on terror, it is not only new york’s cityscape, but also the superhero’s body, that becomes a space of negotiation for these two narratives. in line with the two narratives that dominated post- / comic books, the predominantly white bush administration attempted to justify islamophobic practices after the events in . in contrast, the netflix series luke cage highlights that these events have merely provided the occasion to legitimize racialized state violence, which is, in fact, yet another manifestation of institutional and structural racism that existed in the united states long before the alleged watershed moment / . luke cage portrays a version of new york city after september , in which the history of (national) victimhood runs deeper the further we stray from lower manhattan. here, questions of race and empowerment are refracted and re-articulated in the aftermath of the attacks, and america’s ideological responses to / are re-contextualized through the perspective of a black male superhero. luke cage, this article argues, addresses the legacy of / through the historicity of its harlem setting and through the bulletproof black body of the serial’s eponymous protagonist. as a result of experiments conducted on him while he was falsely imprisoned, luke’s bulletproof body constitutes a symbolic space in which the perpetuation copas—current objectives of postgraduate american studies . ( ) of state violence against racialized bodies in the united states is negotiated. unlike the legions of marvel’s white cinematic superheroes, in its mode of challenging foundational assumptions of the political war on terror discourse, luke cage can be understood as an example of what i shall call ‘postpost- / television.’ the distinction between post- / and postpost- / modes is central to my understanding of luke cage as diverging from the responses to / in the aforementioned comic book editions as well as in other literary and cinematic texts. post- / vs. postpost- / modes many of the early responses to september , can be described as attempts to come to terms with the event itself, suggesting that the attacks caused a (collective) trauma whose meaning and impact cannot be easily processed. as a consequence, post- / literature can broadly be categorized as literature that attempts to grasp the event itself and its aftermath, to understand the meaning of the attack and its traumatic implications. these texts, however, are increasingly subjected to criticism. according to richard gray, in an attempt to comprehend / , they often “simply assimilate the unfamiliar into familiar structures” ( ), for example by domesticating the crisis in novels such as claire messud’s the emperor’s children ( ), or don delillo’s falling man ( ). while approaching the psychological and semiotic implications of / is significant and necessary, gray convincingly argues that many texts “[betray] a response to crisis that is eerily analogous to the reaction of many politicians and the mainstream american media after / : a desperate retreat into the old sureties” ( ), such as propagation of american exceptionalism or traditional gender roles. paul petrovic rightly criticizes that these texts “overly fetishized national victimhood” (x), and, i would add, the patriotic white male heroism that is depicted in many comic books of the post- / era. tv series such as ( - ), the csi franchise, and movies like the thriller-drama united ( ) are commercially successful and award-winning examples of how these tendencies translated directly into audiovisual texts. overall, these early responses are inclined to promote rather clear-cut manichean binaries that have frequently informed the hegemonic war on terror discourse and its justifications. they tend to operate with categories such as ‘evil terrorist’ and ‘good war hero/freedom fighter,’ which are treated as presumably stable entities, and which can be located at the copas—current objectives of postgraduate american studies . ( ) core of purposive legitimation strategies after september , . this certainly does not mean that texts that have criticized u.s. actions in the war on terror are entirely absent. however, in their critique, authors of post- / texts indiscriminately rely on the same categories as texts that are affirmative of these actions. hence, even critical texts tend to work within the same discursive framework. a typical example for this mode of engaging with september , and its aftermath are texts that criticize the treatment of ‘terrorist suspects,’ for instance their torture in abu ghraib or guantanamo bay. while critical of the practices, these texts hardly ever call into question the concept of ‘terrorism’ and its epistemic construction: who is seen as a terrorist? who decides why a person is categorized as a terrorist, and on which basis? nor are they attuned to the inherent racialization of the war on terror discourse: why is the concept of the lone sociopath so often invoked in news outlets when a white person is the perpretrator in what would otherwise certainly be labeled a terrorist attack? although the criticism of the action itself — here the torture of terrorist suspects — is undoubtedly necessary, these post- / texts neglect to criticize the underlying empistemic categories and their appendant racializations that form the basis for such gruesome actions in the first place. post- / texts fail to do so and thus become, i would argue, part of this discourse themselves — despite the fact that some of them forcefully oppose the practices of the war on terror. this article focusses on a different, a postpost- / , mode of engagement that can also be found in audiovisual and written texts published after the / attacks. the strategies used in these texts offer more nuanced interrogations not only of the attacks themselves but also of their sociopolitical aftermath. operating in a highly self-reflexive manner, such texts challenge and subvert their own reliability by pointing towards internal constraints and contradictions as well as towards their own complicity in post- / discourses. rather than merely scrutinizing political and legal decisions made during the war on terror, postpost- / texts impeach the simple, affective dichotomies that have provided the discursive basis for these decisions. such postpost- / texts are thus keenly aware of the constructedness of categories such as ‘terrorist’ that are at the core of the dominant political discourses of the post- / era. george w. bush’s statement “you are either with us, or with the terrorists” used in his address to a joint session of congress and the nation on september , perhaps most adequately captures the binary thinking that dominated the post- / political discourse. copas—current objectives of postgraduate american studies . ( ) it is relevant to note that the division between these two different strands is not primarily temporal. i do not understand texts that exhibit a postpost- / mode as a later form of post- / texts whose origin can be traced to a specific turning point in the post- / era, as there is no such watershed moment. the distinction between the two is to a greater degree based on their strategies of engaging with / and its aftermath rather than grounded in their production time. borrowing from stuart hall’s deliberations on the meaning of ‘post’ in ‘postcolonialism,’ i argue that the shift between post- / texts and postpost- / texts does not constitute a mere periodical break, or ‘after’ in a structuralist sense, but, rather, presents a “going beyond” (hall ) other forms of engaging with these events. consequently, there are strong overlaps and certain continuities between the two modes of engagement that can often be found in one and the same text. given the narratological complexity needed to negotiate these nuances of the war on terror discourse, all of the texts that i categorize as postpost- / television could certainly also be subsumed under jason mittell’s highly influential concept of ‘complex tv.’ complex tv, according to mittell, describes “a changing landscape of american television, where complex and innovative storytelling can succeed creatively and economically” ( ). all series i categorize as postpost- / certainly employ many, if not most, narrative strategies identified by mittell, yet narrative complexity does not by itself guarantee a deconstructive self-reflexivity with regard to / and the war on terror. in fact, only a very small portion of complex tv shows exhibits postpost- / features, and series such as alias, , or homeland’s later seasons that qualify as complex tv are firmly rooted in a simple post- / framework. moreover, while mittell acknowledges the influence of the emerging war on terror on developments in the television industry after , he explicitly refrains from focussing on “analyzing meanings as conveyed by television narratives” ( ). in contrast, my analysis of postpost- / tv explicitly centers on the meaning of such complex television the first season of showtime’s homeland, for instance, exemplifies how the plot of a tv serial can subscribe to the dominant discourse, promoting islamophobia and racist stereotypes, while the show’s cinematography, particularly the non-linear unreliable narration, challenges the narrative’s overall reliability as well as the end-justifies-the-means mentality that the serial seems to endorse. although the serial ultimately confirms that the male protagonist, nicholas brody, is a so-called ‘terrorist,’ throughout the first season, homeland also negotiates the constructedness of this label and exposes the ways in which this construction is tied to social and political power struggles. thereby, the serial deconstructs those simplistic binary categories it seemingly reproduces, and thus exhibits a powerful postpost- / subtext. copas—current objectives of postgraduate american studies . ( ) series in relation to a post- / discourse in a wider sense. in order to understand the ways in which they challenge foundational assumptions of the post- / era, it is essential to not only take into account the doubtlessly complex narrative strategies these texts employ but — perhaps primarily — to examine the ways in which these techniques are used to dismantle meaning-making processes in the war on terror. within the transmedia behemoth known as the marvel cinematic universe (mcu), its more nuanced netflix offshoots like luke cage signal a departure from ‘traditional’ post- / feature films and embrace, as i argue, a postpost- / sentiment. (post)post- / marvel marvel’s blockbuster movie the avengers concluded the first phase of its transmedial world-building and features the so-called ‘battle of new york’ as its final showdown: a confrontation between the chitauri, an army of alien warriors, and marvel’s eponymous superhero team. through its spatial practices, the film visually spells out its parallels to the attacks on september , as skyscrapers and considerable parts of manhattan are destroyed. while the movie points to internal conflicts among some of the superheroes preceeding the battle, they stand united once the city is under attack. the physical monstrosity of the literally alien invaders empasizes their ‘otherness,’ thus clearly upholding the dichotomy between the ‘good (western) self’ and the ‘evil (terrorist) other’ that has predominated post- / politics in both the ‘real’ world and in the aforementioned (comic) books. marvel’s netflix series luke cage, jessica jones, and daredevil are all set after the battle of new york. i argue that it is precisely this catastrophic incident in the shared marvel universe which provokes renegotiations of space and identity through various lenses such as race (luke cage), (dis)ability (daredevil), and gender (jessica jones) as depicted in marvel’s individual television series. deviating from the norm of the white, male, able-bodied superhero, their social positionalities determine the ways in which the protagonists move within the city space of new york. in contrast to the mcu’s macrocosm, i.e. the cinematic depiction of the storyworld in the movies, marvel’s latest tv serials are interrelated in the aforementioned spiderman comic, even the villains are presented with tears in their eyes, shocked by the scope of the destruction of / , which has not only contributed to the humanization of these characters but, primarily, to the dehumanization of the ultimate ‘evil terrorist other.’ copas—current objectives of postgraduate american studies . ( ) microcosms within the same universe which make visible those spaces that have been only indirectly affected by the attack and which remain unseen in the movies. they thereby counter the limited visual representation of post- / new york, which is characterized almost exclusively by images of what suheir hammad calls “new york south of canal street.” on the other hand, the now-visible spaces in the shows also provide different analytical angles on the transformed ‘post-incident’ american society and the issues with which it struggles. luke cage as postpost- / television in luke cage, its harlem setting creates a literal space in which black cultural heritage can not only be located but in which it can also be revisited in order to negotiate challenges the united states have faced since / . foremost among these challenges, as i have indicated earlier, is the racialization that has become a core tenet of the post- / era, manifest in the question of racial profiling in the show. in the mcu, luke cage is a black superhero with impenetrable skin and superhuman strength who first appeared in the first season of jessica jones. after being wrongfully convicted of murder under his original name carl lucas, he escaped from prison, changed his name into luke cage, and now uses his powers to fight crime in harlem, personified in the first season by cornell “cottonmouth” stokes, his cousin mariah, and luke’s half-brother, “diamondback.” as the franchise’s first black superhero protagonist on screen long before the release of the highly acclaimed black panther movie, luke is a forerunner as a hero who “fights to preserve black culture,” as samantha blackmon convincingly argues ( ). this is particularly relevant against the backdrop of the “whiteness of a united states hegemonic frame” (frankenberg ) that is ever-present in the aforementioned comic books and the early movies in the mcu. in this context, ruth frankenberg’s claim that “whiteness is inherently connected, in its own view, with narratives of innocence, goodness, godliness and strength” ( ) is reflected in the trope of the white, male superhero that has come to save the traumatized american nation after / — a notion that luke clearly subverts. luke cage is the first black superhero protagonist in the marvel movies. however, in mainstream u.s. comics, the black panther t’challa appeared before any other superhero of african or african american descent in , i.e. six years prior to the first appearance of luke cage in the comics in . copas—current objectives of postgraduate american studies . ( ) one of the ways in which this nation-as-victim narrative has been repeatedly employed is to justify increased surveillance of people fitting an allegedly stereotypical arab and/or muslim american outward appearence after september , . enhanced surveillance and racial profiling was constructed as a mere response to the attacks: the dominant narrative of the bush administration and many u.s. media outlets contended that the united states had been attacked by people whom they vaguely identified as ‘muslim arabs,’ and they thus deemed it necessary to increasingly monitor people who allegedly fit this category in order to prevent another such an attack from happening. the inductive causality that is seemingly established here between the events in and the reaction to them — a specific form of racial, and racist, profiling — conveniently corresponds with white supremacist notions of racial hierarchization. this form of justification, which presents itself as a rational response, in fact, promotes general suspicion geared towards people who were not in any way involved in the attacks, and uses the occasion to legitimize racist tendencies, which have arguably been constitutive of american society for centuries. as evelyn alsultany convincingly argues, “the logic that / is an exceptional moment of crisis — and therefore demands exceptional measures — becomes crucial in producing a new kind of racism, one that purports to be antiracist while perpetrating and justifying racism” ( ). what is “new” the term ‘arab and muslim americans’ is not as much an ontological categorization but an attempt to counter the conflation of arab, muslim, and various, predominately southwest asian and north african (swana), identities as ‘muslim arabs’ in dominant u.s. political and media discourses (naber - ; alsultany - ). at least since the iran hostage crisis, the constructed group has been subjected to widespread surveillance, racial profiling, and persecution, which further intensified in the wake of september , despite the linguistic, religious, and ethnic heterogeneity of the affected communities. it is worth citing alsultany at length on the consequences of grouping together diverse communities under the moniker of ‘muslim arabs’: this conflation enables a particular racial othering that would not operate in the same way through another conflation, such as, for example, arab/christian, arab/jew, or indonesian/muslim. the result is particularly damaging, since it reduces the inherent – and enormous – variety of the world’s muslim population, projecting all muslims as one very particular type: fanatical, misogynistic, anti-american. this recurring conflation, advanced by u.s. government and media discourses at this historical juncture, serves a larger narrative about an evil other that can be powerfully and easily mobilized during times of war. ( ) the differentiation employed in this article between arab and muslim americans thus serves to counter the stereotypical homogenization so often found in contemporary public debate. at the same time the term addresses – without claiming to resolve – the complexities that result from a wide range of overlapping identities and self-identifications as arab, as muslim, both, or, in the case of non-muslim, non-arab minorities in or from north africa and southwest asia, as neither (even though the latter are problematically often grouped among the former). in using the term, or various derivations, i have attempted to be, as alsultany advises ( ), specific whenever possible, and to point out unwarranted, at times racist, generalizations that are the result of the dominant, white, hegemonic discourse. copas—current objectives of postgraduate american studies . ( ) here, are the discursive strategies used to legitimize pre-existing perpetual racism, thereby stylizing september , as a watershed moment in u.s. history. as a consequence of this ‘logic’ of / exceptionalism, the precarious position muslims and arab americans found themselves relegated to “firmly brands [them] as the racial, religious, political, and national other of a hegemonic us national identity” (fadda-conrey ). of course, the legitimacy of racial profiling of arab and muslim americans has been rightly questioned in many post- / texts. on ethical and moral grounds, these texts have criticized enhanced surveillance of this group based on fear of another attack. however, post- / texts have only ever examined whether this form of profiling is an adequate response to the attacks, but not whether it is a response in the first place. in other words, they have still operated within the same discursive framework, never evaluating racial profiling as a practice deeply engrained in the workings and traditions of the american security apparatus that, over the course of the past four centuries, has drawn upon many similar legitimizing strategies. as such, authors of these texts have unwittingly left room for other racist endeavors to use the same discursive strategy — identifying a threat to the nation’s security and authorizing (racist) practices as a response to stem the problem — with u.s. president donald trump introducing a so-called muslim ban under the same pretenses as merely the latest example. in contrast to this, i argue that luke cage uses its spatial practices to stress that racial profiling is, in fact, embedded in longstanding histories of racism in the united states. the series thus highlights continuities that the political post- / discourse is keen to suppress. while it is not my intention to diminish or equate specific experiences of different racialized communities, i nevertheless think that an analysis of luke cage’s spatial practices can help dismantle the illusion of racial profiling as a mere response to the events of . in twinning the collective, historical experiences of black america with the particular mode of post- / profiling of arab and (non-black) muslim americans, the show challenges one of the foundational assumptions of the war on terror discourse: the notion of / as an “exceptional moment of crisis” (alsultany ), as a watershed moment that necessitates unprecedented racial profiling as its equally exceptional response. copas—current objectives of postgraduate american studies . ( ) in its introductory credits, luke cage establishes an explicit connection between luke’s racialized body as a space of negotiation and the material city space of harlem, ny, which is projected onto his skin in the form of harlem landmarks and street signs. street names such as the “malcolm x boulevard,” projected onto luke’s clenched fist in the intro, emphasize how the show actively positions itself in narratives of black emancipation and civil rights struggles – and how luke’s physical strength is symbolically infused with the power of his ideological forbearers. the show also exhibits various intertextual references to the harlem renaissance, to ralph ellison’s invisible man, to the civil rights movement, and to slavery, as well as to black music cultures. a variety of rap, hip-hop, and soul artists perform on the show, particularly on the stage of a successful night club named ‘harlem’s paradise.’ although sometimes only briefly alluded to, this variety of cultural and textual references nevertheless underlines the historically rooted diversity of contemporary black culture. harlem is depicted in the show as a space in which black culture exists in different facets and in interaction with its residents. this diversity is also emphasized by the show’s multiple black focalizers and their entirely different agendas and social backgrounds. rather than perpetuating the notion of a homogenous black community, the series points to tensions within this perceived community and gives voice to individual experiences inside this racialized group. as a result of this focus on complex representation, some of the characters on the show are black villains — characters still conspicuously absent in most comic books. mariah, a black female politician, is one such character. she is given an extensive back story dating to her childhood in harlem, filled with traumatizing experiences that shed light on her development as a complex and strong female character without redeeming her criminal actions. by depicting a diverse range of black characters, the show demonstrates how systemic racism affects the lives of black people regardless of their social positionality. the serial references interrelated issues such as black mass incarceration, the legacy of slavery, police brutality, gentrification, human rights struggles, and, of course, racial profiling in the united states — and it does so through the way it deals with space, as the show’s settings continuously spark conversations about these issues. as part of her political campaign, mariah calls for a “new harlem renaissance,” using the space of harlem and references to copas—current objectives of postgraduate american studies . ( ) its architecture and history to address the necessity of preserving black culture. mariah certainly performs her harlem identity to forward her political career and purposefully stages most of her interviews in front of harlem’s brownstone buildings and parks. the multiple long shots that are used in these scenes foreground the beauty of harlem, but the scenes also bring to mind that mariah’s call to preserve harlem as a space is inextricably linked to preserving black lives as well. “for black lives to matter, black history and black ownership must also matter” (“moment” : - : ), she argues, playfully substantiating some of the explicit demands of the black lives matter movement. mariah foregrounds that the movement not only demands protection for black bodies, but that the discrimination that african americans face reaches far beyond this imminent threat to their lives. she thereby points to the movement’s quest for recognition of humanity in its most profound sense, and identifies a variety of levels on which institutionalized racism occurs and on which it consequently needs to be tackled: social, financial, historical, and cultural, to name but a few. it is striking that harlem’s urban space serves as the starting point for a discussion about racism in the united states that exceeds the discussion in dominant u.s. media outlets today. particularly mariah’s demand that black history must be recognized points to the ongoing erasure of both a history of slavery and perpetual racism as well as a history of black struggles against these injustices. the doubtlessly specific and singular experience of black americans in the united states, however, also points to a larger tradition of western historiography that continuously peripheralizes and erases experiences of those who are marginalized — and, given police brutality and vigilantism, are often literally erased — in society as well. as nadine naber has convincingly argued in the introduction to the seminal edited collection race and arab americans before and after / : from invisible citizens to visible subjects, this tendency also applies to arabs and arab americans as they are often perceived as a “people without history” ( ). with reference to the city space of harlem, luke cage thus illuminates processes of marginalization in the united states that transcend racial boundaries. in countering this historical erasure, the show puts emphasis on the achievements of black americans in their fight for civil rights, social equality, and cultural recognition. standing in copas—current objectives of postgraduate american studies . ( ) front of the crispus attucks building, luke enters a conversation with one of cornell’s gang members about the use of the n-word in the black community. the scene opens with a low- angle shot circling luke, who is currently reconnoitering the building in which cornell’s money is presumably hidden. yet, due to the external ocularization and focalization, the object of luke’s observation is not revealed at first. the camera only switches to an over- the-shoulder shot when one of the gang members threatens luke with a gun to his head. this initial lack of vision and knowledge on the part of the viewer allows the show to draw attention to the space itself, whose connection to struggles of liberation is made explicit in the conversation. the dialogue between luke and cornell’s employee is sparked only because the characters are located in this specific, historically-charged space in harlem when the young african american man uses the n-word to address luke. criticizing the fact that cornell’s employee uses the n-word “across the street from a building named after one of our greatest heroes” (“code” : - : ), luke highlights the fact that attucks, who was the first person killed in the boston massacre of , played an important part in america’s struggle against british domination. however, in many representations of the event from this period, “the complete absence of the black patriot crispus attucks” is conspicuous, and can be seen as “an evident example of excluding the african american participation in an important historical event from the american national and cultural memory” (fitz ). on the one hand, luke cage thus, once again, addresses the marginalization of black americans in western historiography. on the other hand, the show simultaneously points to the connection between this erasure and the history of black enslavement, which cannot be separated from any present-day discussion regarding the n-word. the scene presents harlem as both a space of black empowerment and a space for political disagreement and diversification among the black community. as jacquelyn rahman points out, “roots of present-day uses of the term in the african american community lie in the counterlanguage, where the term served as a symbol representing the most salient aspect of slaves’ identity” ( ). in the black community today, the n-word is thus frequently used as a form of re-appropriation that furthers black self-emancipation. however, according to rahman, african americans who reject the use of the n-word within their own community are “concerned that its use is symptomatic of an internalization of white racism, […] as contributing to the construction of an identity founded on self-hate” ( ). copas—current objectives of postgraduate american studies . ( ) i argue that it is primarily the show’s setting that renders the interconnectedness of historical and contemporary struggles for equality and recognition visible. in contrast to the use of new york spaces in the aforementioned post- / comic books, in luke cage, the urban space of new york is employed to counter the whitewashing of superhero representations following september , . the urban space of harlem in the show functions as a reminder that propagating the image of nationalism (and heroism) as white is an exclusionary, racist, discursive strategy. rather implicitly here, the show thus engages with its post- / subtext, which is less related to the event itself, but rather to the narratives and representational strategies that have since become inextricably linked to the space of new york. luke’s black male body as a postpost- / space apart from the show’s setting, luke cage also uses the body of his eponymous superhero as a space in which these discourses can be negotiated. luke is bulletproof due to forced experiments conducted on him while he was falsely imprisoned for a murder he did not commit. this storyline is, of course, a reference to state violence afflicted on and the mass incarceration of young black men in the united states. although luke was a policeman himself before his wrongful conviction, his case demonstrates the ways in which state violence and incarceration can initiate a social downward spiral. in luke’s case, prison guards forced luke to agree to experiments conducted on his body by threatening to hurt one of his friends. luke is, thus, subjected to state violence that transforms his skin into a shield protecting his racialized body against the very same forces that created it in the first place. posing the question whether bulletproof skin would be the only conceivable shield against fatal police shootings of african american men in the united states today, luke’s body serves as a battleground for a variety of discourses related to the black lives matter movement and racial profiling. moreover, as nathan irvin huggins convincingly criticizes, the marginalization of racialized experiences in the creation of a national history “teleologically bound” to the idea of progress, democracy, and exceptionalism creates the impression that “american history – its institutions, its values, its people – was one thing and racial slavery and oppression were a different story” (xii). with unequal sentencing for similar charges and imprisonment rates of african americans five times as high as those of white people (naacp), disenfranchisement through mass incarceration has long since become a pressing racial and social issue in the united states. copas—current objectives of postgraduate american studies . ( ) the show deviates from luke’s costumes in the comic books and, instead, chooses to dress him in a black hoodie — a significant and politically motivated decision, as i will demonstrate. being frequently shot at by both the police as well as a number of criminals, luke is forced to replace his clothes frequently. in episode of season , luke receives one of these hoodies from wu tang clan mc clifford smith, better known as method man, after saving him from a robbery in a small harlem corner store. as luke and method man recognize each other, luke mentions that “‘p.l.o. style’ was my joint back in the day” (“soliloquy” : - : ). two particulars stand out here. where one of the robbers vaguely associates method man with his arguably more famous group (“i grew up on that wu-tang shit” ( : - : )), luke’s comment is revealing as it points to another meaningful intertext of the tv serial. “p.l.o. style” first appeared on method man’s solo debut, tical ( ), so he foregrounds his — and the show’s — intimate knowledge of black east-coast, and specifically new york-based, rap and hip-hip culture. as with its other nods to harlem’s history, luke cage points to the historical complexities and idiosyncrasies of black american culture. by including this song, the show addresses the potential of hip hop music as a medium to express social concerns. “p.l.o. style,” however, is not just any song in method man’s vast back catalogue, but, rather, his most obvious link between the political struggles of african americans and arabs, here the palestinian liberation organization (p.l.o.). when asked in an interview in about his motivation for writing this song, method man replied that he perceived the p.l.o. as “freedom fighters” who he could identify with because “we felt like we was fighting for our freedom every day, too, and we live that” (“method man” : - : ). while the two struggles for freedom described here can certainly not be equated due to the cultural, political, and historical specificities of their respective contexts, this intertextual reference nevertheless creates an explicit link between black american and arab experiences of marginalization and the struggles to overcome them. following the encounter between luke and method man, in an attempt to help luke, the corner store owner distributes perforated black hoodies to the people of harlem to deflect the police officers looking for luke, who is falsely accused of murder again. the scene is cinematically interesting due to the cross-cutting between the people moving around the neighborhood of harlem being mistaken for luke by the police, and a scene in a radio studio in which method man raps about the importance of having a black hero for harlem. in the copas—current objectives of postgraduate american studies . ( ) song, entitled “bulletproof love,” method man explicitly criticizes the fact that a white male superhero like iron man will not “come and save us all” (“soliloquy” : - : ) — and thus implicitly criticizes the lack of superheroes in the mcu that do not fit this discriminatory norm. he also places the character of luke in a lineage of eminent symbolic figures in black emancipatory movements such as the black power movement and the black lives matter movement by singing that they — an unnamed entity most likely denoting representatives of america’s white supremacist system — already took malcolm and martin, this is the last one. i beg your pardon, somebody pulling a fast one. now we got a hero for hire and he a black one. and bullet-hole hoodies is the fashion. we in harlem’s paradise, tell the captain that i’m about to trade the mic for a magnum give up my life for trayvon to have one. (“soliloquy” : - : ) the black hoodie has become one of the symbols of the black lives matter movement after -year-old trayvon martin was shot by george zimmerman, a white man, in while walking back to his stepmother’s house in a primarily white neighborhood. zimmerman was a member of the ‘neighborhood watch’ who called after spotting the young man and ignored the dispatcher’s advice not to pursue martin. zimmerman was later acquitted in court after justifying his act by arguing that he had felt threatened by the hoodie on a black man (trayvon), whom he had allegedly thought to be either intoxicated or a criminal. the virtual legitimation of this notion through the jury’s verdict semiotically codes the black hoodie as ‘criminal’ when associated with a black male body. as mimi thi nguyen argues, “the figuration of the hoodie as an animate thing demonstrates some of the operations of power that deem some bodies criminally other — because they are black, and therefore threatening — and available to state violence” ( ). these lethal and fictional associations of hoodies worn by people read as black with criminality are, of course, the result of the centuries-old conflation of blackness and criminality in the united states, which is intimately ‘heroes for hire’ is of course also a reference of comic book fan method man to the eponymous marvel superhero team that first appeared in power man and the iron fist vol. ( ), and that later received its own eponymous comic book in . luke cage (a.k.a. power man) was a founding member of this team. the issue of zimmerman’s perceived racialized identity is complex and ambiguous. while he self- identifies as hispanic, the television news network cnn referred to him as “white hispanic” (planas), and his alleged (afro-)peruvian and german american descent further complicate the debate. for further reference, see hing, francescani, or planas. copas—current objectives of postgraduate american studies . ( ) tied to the history of slavery and jim crow and which has been used to legitimize racialized (state) violence. by using the hoodie as a protection against such racially motivated violence, luke cage reverses the dynamics related to this specific piece of clothing as a symbolic act of protest not only against the murder of trayvon martin and the acquittal of the murder charges but also as an act of resistance against all forms of racially motivated violence and discrimination. the hoodie is transformed from a sign of alleged criminality into a symbol of black empowerment that is used subversively by black subjects in the city space of harlem. positioning itself against profiling that is based on essentialist assumptions about race as well as clothing, the show also points to the perils of internalized racism and respectability politics. luke cage beats the oppressive system at its own game by using two essentialist characteristics that render him a “visible subject” (naber ) — his blackness and the hoodie — to make him invisible for the police. it is also noteworthy that it is only possible for diamondback to frame luke in the first place due to the police’s apparent inability to distinguish between different black men wearing a black hoodie, as diamondback dresses up in luke’s preferred outfit when beating a police officer and shouting “i’m luke cage” (“take” : - : ). the villain seems to be well aware of this dynamic and uses it to his own advantage — much like the people of harlem use the hoodie for luke’s protection later. by playing with the contrast between the presumed epitome of luke’s identity — the simplified idea that he is allegedly nothing but a black man in a hoodie — and the actual luke — a complex and individual character — the show points to the fact that the social construction of race, and profiling based on this construction, always operate on the grounds of racial stereotyping. it is striking that, because the simplified image of luke is so hypervisible to the police in the public sphere due to the performance of the people of harlem, the actual character luke is able to hide and remain invisible. hence, luke cage oscillates between invisibility and hypervisibility of racialized bodies in the eyes of state power, paralleling and simultaneously subverting the development that arab and muslim americans have faced since / , as outlined by naber and the other contributors in amaney a. jamal and naber’s edited collection. while the show, on the level of content, addresses the problem of racism luke’s strategic invisibility bears resemblance to the unnamed narrator’s disguises towards the end of ellison’s invisible man, at the very least because both negotiate the epistemology of race in relation to public spaces and institutionalized racism. copas—current objectives of postgraduate american studies . ( ) primarily against the black community, i would argue that the black body of its protagonist also serves as a space to highlight other processes of marginalization that would otherwise have remained unseen. conclusion situated in the mcu, luke cage cannot be separated from the transmedial universe’s fictionalized version of / , the ‘battle of new york.’ by linking the social justice issues addressed in the series explicitly to the city space of new york, and thus also to september and the war on terror, the show simultaneously creates an explicit link between the longstanding histories of racism in the united states and the allegedly singular event of september , . it draws attention to the fact that these issues are also part of post- / new york although they are mostly excluded from post- / media representations — and from many post- / tv series — which focus almost exclusively on the political dimension of the war on terror and the seemingly imminent threat of terrorism. hence, beyond luke cage’s function as a powerful critique of the racist practices that african americans still face in the united states today, in its postpost- / mode, the show also has the potential to expose structures of racism whose impact on racialized bodies far exceeds the limits of the black community. while it is not my intention to diminish the specificity of individual racialized experiences or to equate black american and arab and muslim american experiences, i have nevertheless argued that, through its spatial practices, luke cage dismantles the illusion of racial profiling as a mere response to september , and, thereby, challenges one of the foundational assumptions of the war on terror discourse. as such, analyzing the show through the lens of postpost- / television provides a productive additional perspective on both the show itself as well as on current pressing issues in the united states and beyond. with a view to the nation’s racialized history, luke cage does its utmost to question the singularity of political and cultural responses to september , . it reveals that these responses are a manifestation of institutional and structural racism that existed in the united states for centuries and, therefore, also moves away from the notion of the event as a watershed moment in u.s. history. all in all, it goes beyond questioning the moral legitimacy of racial profiling targeting arabs and muslim americans and, unlike even the most critical post- / texts, avoids reproducing the copas—current objectives of postgraduate american studies . ( ) foundational assumptions of the discourse it criticizes. in contrast, the show has the potential to shed light on the discursive strategies used by white supremacists and self- proclaimed patriots to justify perpetual racism under the guise of protecting the nation. instead of weighing security against liberty, or reasoning against the effectiveness of harassing people based on their outward appearance and religious beliefs, luke cage takes a different route. the show argues that september , merely provided the occasion, or legitimation, for the continuation of deeply flawed police practices that are rooted in a deeper institutional and structural racism than dominant post- / narratives allege. works cited alsultany, evelyn. arabs and muslims in the media: race and representation after / . new york up, . amaney a. jamal and nadine naber, editors. race and arab americans before and after / : from invisible citizens to visible subjects, syracuse up, . blackmon, samantha. “‘be real black for me’: lincoln clay and luke cage as the heroes we need.” cea critic, vol. , no. , , pp. - . black panther. directed by ryan coogler. marvel studios and walt disney studios motion pictures, . bush, george w. “president bush addresses the nation,” sep. . washington post. www.washingtonpost.com/wpsrv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/bushaddress _ .html. “code of the streets.” luke cage, created by cheo hodari coker, season , episode , netflix, . coker, cheo hodari, creator. luke cage. netflix, -present. delillo, don. falling man. scribner, . ellison, ralph. invisible man. random house, . fadda-conrey, carol. contemporary arab-american literature: transnational reconfigurations of citizenship and belonging. new york up, . fitz, karsten. “commemorating crispus attucks: visual memory and the representations of the boston massacre, - .” amerikastudien/american studies, vol. , no. , , pp. - . francescani, chris. “george zimmerman: prelude to a shooting”. reuters, apr. , www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-florida-shooting-zimmerman/george-zimmerman- prelude-to-a-shooting-idusbre o h . http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpsrv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/bushaddress_ .html http://www.washingtonpost.com/wpsrv/nation/specials/attacked/transcripts/bushaddress_ .html http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-florida-shooting-zimmerman/george-zimmerman-prelude-to-a-shooting-idusbre o h http://www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-florida-shooting-zimmerman/george-zimmerman-prelude-to-a-shooting-idusbre o h copas—current objectives of postgraduate american studies . ( ) frankenberg, ruth. “cracks in the façade: whiteness and the construction of / .” social identities, vol. , no. , , pp. - . goddard, drew, creator. daredevil. netflix, -present. gordon, howard, and alex gansa, creators. homeland. th television and showtime, - present. gray, richard. after the fall: american literature since / . wiley-blackwell, . hammad, suheir. “first writing since (poem on crisis and terror).” in motion magazine, nov. , www.inmotionmagazine.com/ac/shammad.html. hall, stuart. “when was ‘the postcolonial’? thinking at the limit.” the post-colonial question: common skies, divided horizons, edited by iain chambers and lidia curti, routledge, pp. - . hing, juliane. “the curious case of george zimmermann’s race.” colorlines, july , www.colorlines.com/articles/curious-case-george-zimmermans-race. huggins, nathan irvin. black odyssey: the african-american ordeal in slavery, vintage, . messud, claire. the emperor’s children. knopf, . method man. “p.l.o. style.” tical, def jam recordings and polygram records, . “method man talks ‘p.l.o. style’.” youtube, uploaded by sama’an ashrawi, feb. , www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhoq iqxea. mittell, jason. complex tv: the poetics of contemporary television storytelling. new york up, . “moment of truth.” luke cage, created by cheo hodari coker, season , episode , netflix, . naacp. “criminal justice fact sheet.” naacp, www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/. naber, nadine. “arab americans and u.s. racial formations.” introduction. race and arab americans before and after / : from invisible citizens to visible subjects, edited by amaney a. jamal and nadine naber, syracuse up, , pp. - . nguyen, mimi thi. “the hoodie as sign, screen, expectation, and force.” signs, vol. , no. , , pp. - . petrovic, paul. “emergent trends in post- / literature and criticism.” introduction. representing / : trauma, ideology, and nationalism in literature, film, and television, edited by paul petrovic, rowman littlefield, , pp. ix-xvii. planas, roque. “cnn’s ‘white hispanic’ label for george zimmerman draws fire.” huffingtonpost, july , www.huffingtonpost.com/ / / /cnn-white- hispanic_n_ .html. http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/ac/shammad.html http://www.colorlines.com/articles/curious-case-george-zimmermans-race http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=nhoq iqxea http://www.naacp.org/criminal-justice-fact-sheet/ http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ / / /cnn-white-hispanic_n_ .html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ / / /cnn-white-hispanic_n_ .html copas—current objectives of postgraduate american studies . ( ) quesada, joe, et al. enemy, part one: dust. captain america, vol. , no. , marvel comics, . ---. stand tall: the amazing spiderman, vol. , no. , marvel comics, . rahman, jacquelyn. “the n word: its history and use in the african american community.” journal of english linguistics, vol. , no. , , pp. - . rosenberg, melissa, creator. jessica jones. netflix, -present. shooter, jim, et al. heroes for hire! power man and iron fist, vol. , no. , marvel comics, . “soliloquy of chaos.” luke cage, created by cheo hodari coker, season , episode , netflix, . surnow, joel and robert cochran, creators. . imagine television and th century fox television, . “take it personal.” luke cage, created by cheo hodari coker, season , episode , netflix, . the avengers. directed by joss whedon. marvel studios and walt disney studios motion pictures, . united . directed by paul greengrass, universal pictures, . wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ microsoft word - . dawson_introduction.docx introduction ashley dawson the graduate center, city university of new york hen donald trump unveiled his america first energy plan while on the campaign trail back in , he summoned coal miners to stand at his side. flanked by these brawny emissaries from a bygone age of american industrial might, trump announced his plan to “end the war on coal” and promised to use the resulting revenues to rebuild the nation's roads, schools, bridges and public infrastructure (lakely ). the miners may have helped legitimate trump's rollback of obama-era efforts to fight climate change, but they functioned above all as symbols of an american working class betrayed and abandoned during more than four decades of bipartisan support for neoliberal globalization (davenport and rubin ). when trump stood surrounded by these men and proclaimed that “we will unleash the full power of american energy, ending the job killing restrictions on shale, oil, natural gas and clean, beautiful coal,” he seemed to promise to elevate not simply coal country but all of the country’s willfully forgotten workers. but trump’s promises to the failing coal industry have proven to be hollow. opening federal lands to coal mining has not brought jobs back to economically depressed communities in coal country, where mechanization of the industry began to destroy jobs as long ago as the s (climate nexus ). the real reason for the coal industry’s decline, however, is that power plants have been abandoning coal for natural gas as the price of gas has plummeted following the fracking revolution, a bonanza that began under the obama administration (fears ). over the last seven years, over half of the coal-fired power plants in the us have either shut down or announced plans to retire, and natural gas is now the biggest source of the nation’s electricity. it should be no surprise that trump’s promises to revive coal have failed, since they are incoherent: his american first energy w | introduction jam it! no. may | nationalism: hyper and post plan promises support for natural gas as well as coal, despite the fact that the former is the main reason for the death of the latter. trump's unbridled support for fossil fuels has, however, helped the us achieve and indeed surpass the goal of “energy independence” that presidents since richard nixon have promised but failed to achieve. the explosive expansion of fossil fuel production under trump has turned the us into “saudi america,” generating what trump and energy- industry minions in his administration celebrate as “energy dominance.” trump has successfully fomented a new oil bloc – consisting of the us, russia and saudi arabia – which has effectively replaced opec as the dominant global energy superpower. notwithstanding his populist rhetoric about saving the american working class, trump's hyper-nationalism actually serves the interests of a corrupt ruling oligarchy. as is the case in the other countries with which the us now finds itself in a baleful triumvirate, trump's hyper-nationalism is a very thin fig-leaf covering the monstrous appetites of a self- interested, globe-trotting elite. hyper-nationalism might thus be said to be the current mode of post-nationalism; the former should be seen not so much as an antithesis of the latter as the means of securing hegemony for a parasitic elite under contemporary conditions of crisis-ridden capitalism. that is, if trump – and counterparts of his in nations such as hungary, the philippines, and brazil – have come to power by sensing and articulating popular rage at the manifest failures of a neoliberal capitalist order that has been globally hegemonic for nearly three decades, they do not offer any significant solutions to the resulting crisis but rather seek to exploit it for their own narrow interests. in the process, they pile up the contradictions of the system ever higher. we have been here before. at the outset of the current era of conservative counterrevolution in the late s, stuart hall and his colleagues at the centre for contemporary cultural studies in britain analyzed the onset of what they called popular authoritarianism in response to the crisis of the postwar keynesian capitalist order (hall et al. ). on the eve of margaret thatcher's electoral victory, hall and his colleagues anatomized the rise of what they termed a “moral panic” over mugging in britain. according to the police, the courts, and the media, the culprits for this crime wave were ashley dawson | britain's black and asian british population, who at the time constituted less than percent of the national population. hall and his comrades showed that the mugging scare was in fact generated not so much by a real rise in crime but rather, by growing anxiety about eroding social consensus as the postwar keynesian economic order frayed. the crisis of this model of accumulation and the social quietus it helped secure manifested itself most clearly, hall and his colleagues argued, in fears among the british police and judiciary about the transatlantic spread of “american mugging” and other social crises such as unrest in urban ghettos, which in turn led to targeting of black and asian communities by these organs of state power, which then led to heightened statistics about crime, in a ramifying feedback loop. media coverage of the purported “crime wave” of the era helped generate a sense of an implied dominant, consensual, and homogenous national body under threat, one said to be characterized above all by respect for law and order. the result was the consolidation of an authoritarian popular consensus in which the majority of the british public consented to the erosion of their collective rights in the name of cracking down on social scapegoats – the country's racialized populations – who were blamed for the economic downturn and social disorganization that generated public anxiety in the first place (hall et al. , ). this racist moral panic culminated in the thatcher regime's nationality act, which intended to terminate the rights of subjects born in the british colonies to citizenship. donald trump's public persona was crafted during this era of capitalist crisis, racist moral panic, and conservative counterrevolution. his public pronouncements continue to reflect this genealogy of racist authoritarian populism. indeed, his campaign for president was characterized by a paroxysm of authoritarian populist rhetoric that sought to suture the sort of scapegoating tactics that hall anatomized so effectively to mendacious promises to make the white working-class whole. as was true of thatcherism, trump's policies have only inflamed the gaping social wounds that they promised to heal. although it should be noted that many trump voters were actually quite well-heeled, and it is therefore a fallacy for a more extended discussion of how this politics of racial scapegoating played out in britain, see my book mongrel nation ( ). | introduction jam it! no. may | nationalism: hyper and post to blame the working class for his victory, trump's rhetoric nonetheless resonated with significant numbers of people in the us precisely because the material conditions of the working and middle classes have deteriorated significantly since the crisis of the s. since then, elites have overseen the creation of a new international division of labor that has shipped much – if not all – industrial production abroad. in the us, a bipartisan consensus among the established political parties in favor of “globalization” has meant little opposition to these trends, no matter who is in office. in tandem, as economists such as thomas piketty have documented, economic and social inequality have ballooned grotesquely ( ). elites have dealt with the gargantuan fortunes they have accumulated thanks to this counterrevolution by investing in the stock market and in real estate, leading to forms of financialization and galloping gentrification that have added to the deterioration of the life conditions of the majority. elites have dealt particularly harshly with traditionally excluded portions of the american population through the establishment of carceral gulags and militarized policing. the primary salve to this parlous situation has not been any creative new economic and ideological dispensation, but rather fresh rounds of authoritarian populism yoked to the inclusion of ever-greater segments of the american population in credit-fueled asset bubbles. the extension of housing mortgages to african americans, who had previously been denied access to this – the most significant form of government subvention to the us middle class – is the most telling example. but in this creditocracy came crashing down (ross ). we have lived since then in a state of perpetual unacknowledged crisis, one of secular economic stagnation and the increasingly patent ideological bankruptcy of neoliberalism. hyper-nationalism is the result of these worsening contradictions: liberal elites who have embraced neoliberal governance that benefits the % are everywhere being displaced by a strident authoritarian populism, whether in the form of the election of donald trump, the brexit vote in the uk, or in the slide towards explicit fascism evident in the rise of figures like jair bolsonaro in brazil and matteo salvini in italy, and parties like the front nationale in france and alternativ für deutschland in germany. ashley dawson | given the bankruptcy of most “mainstream” thinking about this crisis, it is not clear what the exit from the present cul-de-sac will be, but there is one overarching factor that suggests that another round of savage dispossession will not solve the increasingly intractable contradictions of the global capitalist system: the climate emergency. the ultimate bankruptcy of an economic system predicated on ceaseless expansion on a finite planetary natural resource base is becoming increasingly clear to masses of people, not least because the climate emergency is generating “natural” disasters and slow-onset tragedies that affect increasing numbers of people, including those in the wealthy nations. in this regard, the destructive impact of trumpian oligarchy is epic. under trump regulatory agencies charged with protecting the environment and public health have been turned into subsidiaries of big oil, the epa has dismantled the obama clean power plan and eliminated rules regulating methane emissions and coal ash waste, congress has opened up drilling in the arctic national wildlife preserve, and the interior department has rescinded rules designed to make offshore drilling safer after the deepwater horizon tragedy – to name but a few of the elements of the trump administration's full-throttle attack on the environment. in the process, the trump regime has overseen a significant expansion of carbon emissions, thereby helping to condemn the planet to catastrophic climate change (juhasz ). we are confronted with nothing short of planetary ecocide, although, as the movement of climate justice constantly reminds us, the impact of the climate emergency will be borne first and foremost by the people of the global south and by dispossessed peoples in the wealthy nations. in other words, those who are least responsible for carbon emissions will bear the heaviest brunt of the climate emergency. fortunately, there are countervailing tendencies, heroic activists and movements around the world who are fighting against the right-wing surge and planetary ecocide. while it might be easy to conclude that the upsurge of hope that accompanied the arab spring, the occupy movement, and the rise of radical parties like syriza in greece after was misplaced given the rise of the far right, progressive struggles against the contradictions of the neoliberal order have in fact intensified over the last decade. movements in the us such as black lives matter, the struggle of the standing rock sioux | introduction jam it! no. may | nationalism: hyper and post and their allies against the dakota access pipeline, the women's march and #metoo movement, and movements against islamophobia and for immigrant rights have proliferated despite the heavy repression meted out to them under both the obama and trump administrations. although there have been tensions within and between these movements, they are nonetheless striking for their solidarity. indeed, it is in these movements that truly radical forms of transnational affiliation are gestating. the rise of global indigenous solidarity that was evident in the mobilization at standing rock is an obvious example. another clear example of this transnational ethic is the enduring solidarity between black lives matter activists and palestinians. these movements are definitively not post-national, at least not in the sense of the term that enjoyed prominence in discussions of globalization in the s and early s – including among radicals such as antonio negri and michael hardt in empire ( ). in the case of indigenous peoples, the insistence on national sovereignty in the face of settler colonialism and the repeated abrogation of treaties by countries like the us and canada is a constant. but the determination to engage with and remake existing structures of national governance is equally clear among other contemporary radical movements. take the movement for a green new deal. this notion has been in circulation in the us and europe at least since the onset of the great recession in , but it has recently reignited as a result of the efforts of newly elected us congressperson alexandria ocasio-cortez. working with the sunrise movement, ocasio-cortez has insisted that the democratic leadership in the house of representatives constitute a committee to develop a plan for rapid and sweeping climate action. as its name suggests, this plan would entail a massive program of investments in clean energy jobs and infrastructure that would transform not just the energy sector but the entire us economy, making it far more egalitarian and just. the proposal for a green new deal has caught fire in the us because of its sweeping ambitions to remake a country whose people have been devastated by decades of neoliberal austerity, who are angry with the political status quo, and who are hungry for climate action plans that constitute genuine responses to the unfolding climate emergency. this desire for transformation is, in other words, the same one that donald trump tapped, although it ashley dawson | is of course intent on countering the odious bigotry embedded in trump's “make america great again” rhetoric. like the depression-era programs for which it is named, the green new deal would remake the american economy, but would also allow the us to export cutting edge renewable energy technologies in order to ensure a global just transition. the green new deal, in other words, aims to be a genuine program of national uplift that would also be part of a progressive internationalism aimed at averting planetary ecocide. jam it! debuts and must inevitably be shaped by this context of political extremes and radical movements of various stripes in the us and in italy and other european nations. while american studies in italy has, according to a commentator such as maurizio vaudagna, largely retreated behind the walls of the academy, this is decisively not the case across the atlantic (vaudagna , ). the last decade or so in the us has seen not just the politically inspired transnational turn in american studies but also the public support of the american studies association for the boycott, divest, and sanctions movement. the asa's courageous public stance in a country where public statements challenging israel's policies towards palestinians have long been anathema is mirrored and augmented by recent scholarly work in american studies scholarship on settler colonialism, decolonization, critical prison studies, queer studies, and similar topics. these trends have only intensified during the trump years. the politicization of american studies in the us has also been propelled by the job market, which, as in italy, is terrible. in the us, it is clear that the lack of openings for younger scholars is in significant part a result of political decisions: on the part of state legislatures to cut back support for public education, and on the part of university presidents to hire cadres of handsomely paid administrators and ill- paid adjuncts rather than tenure-track professors. such transformations of the american university are animated by decades of right-wing attacks on “identity politics” and the interdisciplinary programs (american studies, women's studies, ethnic studies) that recent issues of american quarterly offer ample testimony to the radical bent of contemporary american studies in the us. | introduction jam it! no. may | nationalism: hyper and post social movements have managed to establish within the us academy. critical university studies has therefore also become an important branch of us studies. jam it! will no doubt bring a lively awareness of this terrain of struggle to american studies in italy. it promises to offer younger italian scholars of american studies an important venue for publication and intervention, a key intervention given the relative sclerosis of the field that the dismal job market in italy has precipitated. it is not too much to hope that the journal will also play a role in catalyzing and solidifying new circuits of progressive transnational solidarity, both within academia and in broader public life. after all, we know that despite their bellicose nationalist rhetoric, leaders of the extreme right like steve bannon are organizing transnationally. the malignant presence of fascist organs like breitbart in the us and multiple european countries demonstrates this clearly. the task of all those opposed to the fascist creep must be to develop new stories of radical political and social possibility, and to learn from and support one another through new bonds of solidarity. i very much hope that jam it! will play an important role in this great struggle against the contemporary onslaught of barbarism. bibliography climate nexus. . “what’s driving the decline of coal in the united states.” https://climatenexus.org/climate-issues/energy/whats-driving-the-decline-of-coal-in-the- united-states/ davenport, coral and alissa j. rubin. . “trump signs executive order unwinding obama climate policies” in new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /climate/trump-executive-order-climate- change.html dawson, ashley. . mongrel nation: diasporic culture and the making of postcolonial britain. ann arbor: university of michigan press. on the history of these attacks, see lisa duggan, the twilight of equality? neoliberalism,cultural politics, and the attack on democracy (beacon press, ). see, for example, roderick a. ferguson's the reorder of things: the university and its pedagogies of minority difference (university of minnesota press, ). ashley dawson | duggan, lisa. . the twilight of equality? neoliberalism, cultural politics, and the attack on democracy. boston: beacon press. fears, darryl. . “trump promised to bring back coal jobs. that promise ‘will not be kept,’ experts say” in the washington post. ferguson, roderick a. . the reorder of things: the university and its pedagogies of minority difference. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. hall, stuart et al. . policing the crisis: mugging, the state, and law and order. london: macmillan. juhasz, antonia. . “trump's pursuit of “american energy dominance” threatens the entire planet” in washington post. lakely, jim. . “an america first energy plan” in the heartland institute. https://www.heartland.org/publications-resources/publications/an-america-first-energy- plan negri, antonio and michael hardt. . empire. cambridge: harvard university press. piketty, thomas. . capital in the twenty-first century. cambridge: belknap press. ross, andrew. . creditocracy, and the case for debt refusal. new york: o/r press. vaudagna, maurizio. . “american studies in italy: historic legacies, public contexts, and scholarly trends”. storia della storiografia : - . ashley dawson is professor of english at the graduate center/cuny and the college of staten island. he is the author of two recent books on topics relating to the environmental humanities, extreme cities: the peril and promise of urban life in the age of climate change (verso, ), and extinction: a radical history (o/r, ), as well as six previous books and essay collections on topics related to anti-racism, global social justice, and anti- imperialism. he is a long-time member of the social text collective and the founder of the cuny climate action lab. science magazine april • vol issue sciencemag.org s c i e n c e il l u s t r a t io n : r o b e r t n e u b e c k e r editor’s note in her working life piece “instagram won’t solve inequality” ( march, p. ), meghan wright examined why she feels conflicted reading #scicomm instagram posts by fellow women scientists. she explained that she recognizes the good they can do, yet it seems unfair that such scientists must devote time to social media outreach to combat systemic inequities. so, she has decided that she prefers to separate her social media use from her scientific activities. wright named a social media role model at her university—the science sam instagram account run by samantha yammine—before detailing why she did not want to participate in this kind of outreach. although she intended to use science sam as an example of social media success, wright’s critical comments about such outreach were interpreted by some as a sexist and mean-spirited personal attack on samantha yammine in particular and women science communicators in general. in this section, samantha yammine and colleagues describe the power of social media, the women scientists organization responds to the working life article, and two scientists recognized by aaas (the publisher of science) for public engagement discuss how outreach and institutional reform can go hand in hand. in the online buzz box, we provide several excerpts from the online eletters we received. jeremy berg editor-in-chief . /science. aat other marginalized scientists must overcome as minorities in science, tech- nology, engineering, and mathematics (stem) ( ), they should not be expected to bear the full responsibility for out- reach—nor should they be penalized for choosing to do this work. diversity among communicators should be encouraged because multiple styles and approaches of science communication can make science more accessible and relatable to more people, including those who may not otherwise seek stem edu- cation. selfies on instagram are optional, but they receive % more engagement than pictures without a face ( ), enabling open dialogue with broad audiences in an effectively personal manner. further research can determine whether shar- ing selfies from a research setting helps confer more trust without sacrificing credibility, and these data will inform strategies for improving the public’s lack of trust in scientists ( , ). social media serve an important role in the movement toward increased equity, diversity, and inclusion within stem because it provides a widely available, readily accessible platform for many to use easily. social media allow high- throughput networking and exploration of careers, which benefits trainees who may otherwise lack access to professional development ( ). although not free from the bias and prejudice inherent in society, social media can connect diverse groups, enable rapid information exchange, and mobilize like-minded communities. this connectivity can allow those same groups to challenge tradi- tional structures, identify and call out systemic barriers, and question hierarchies of power. instagram, for example, allows for visible represen- tation of individuals who are often unseen, and can amplify voices that may go unheard in traditional settings. furthermore, increased representa- tion of those who break stereotypes and are underrepresented creates a more inviting percep- tion of stem careers, and these efforts can improve diversity and inclusion in academia ( – ). for a diverse academic com- munity to thrive, inclusion and acceptance of every scientist, regardless of edited by jennifer sills component of publicly funded research grants, and public engagement activities should have weight in merit, tenure, and promotion assessments. whether scien- tists do outreach themselves or work with communication and media experts, public engagement with science is a responsibil- ity requiring important skills that should be valued accordingly. given the other barriers women and letters insights social media for social change in science although we agree with m. wright (“insta- gram won’t solve inequality,” working life, march, p. ) that there are many systemic structures perpetuating the marginalization of women in science, we view social media as a powerful tool in a larger strategy to dismantle such structures. in addition, scientists have been using social media productively to address several other concerns in aca- demia, including engaging with the public about science, increasing science literacy, promoting trust, exploring career options, networking internationally, and influenc- ing policy. strong public trust in science con- tributes to a democratic, civil society. scientists have a responsibility to engage effectively with society, especially when trust is lacking ( , ) and scientific knowledge is not equitably accessible ( ). within academic science, much of this outreach is done by women ( ) and underrepresented groups ( ). thus, not surprisingly, outreach has been grossly undervalued and sometimes demeaned. instead of urging academia to stop celebrating this essential service, we should ensure sufficient compensation and recognition for public engagement. evidence of outreach is increasingly a da_ letters.indd / / : am published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ april • vol issue s c i e n c e sciencemag.org online buzz scicomm speaks the working life “instagram won’t solve inequality” (m. wright, march, p. ) sparked a wide-ranging discus- sion about the value and purpose of social media in science. excerpts from readers’ reactions to the article are below. read the full eletters and add your own at http://science.sciencemag. org/content/ / / / tab-e-letters. a selection of your thoughts: not every tweet, post, or youtube video that happens to feature a woman sci- ence communicator is uploaded with the express intent of challenging the status quo or systemic and institutionalized bias…. to assume this…fails to under- stand the many reasons why women choose to communicate science to the public. there are indeed activists who constantly challenge the institutional- ized bias favoring men, people who sporadically participate in collective events such as women in science day, and also science communicators who just hap- pen to be women. we should applaud all of their efforts…. victoria j. forster …like the author, i strongly believe that women and other underrepresented minori- ties in science should feel no obligation to take on additional emotional labor for the sake of educating others. i also agree that systemic issues of inequality will likely require systemic solutions to enact lasting change.… it is evident that the author views #scicomm on instagram as a chore, but for some of us it is a labor of love. if build- ing model satellites out of cake…or posing my dog in front of apollo moon trees… weren’t incredibly fun, i wouldn’t be doing it.… instagram has significant and largely untapped potential as a vehicle for science communication. the visual nature of the platform, in conjunction with the large and diverse userbase,…provides tremendous opportunity to reach nontraditional audi- ences. i agree with the author that science communication must be performed in a manner authentic to each individual, but my hope is that we can continue to encour- age each other to promote science in a variety of ways. right now, we need #scicomm more than ever. beth r. gordon …as an early-career researcher, the first in my family to go to university, social media has provided me with both community and opportunities that would have been unimaginable without it. having a window into the lives other academics and scientists from a range of backgrounds has helped me feel i belong and reassured me that there is a place in the academy for people like me…. at the same time, i was recently invited to publish a comment piece… after an editor noticed my tweets. i have also found coauthors on twitter and used it to keep up with recent publica- tions and research…. i have nonetheless begun to limit time spent on social media, realizing that it…distracts me from important work. but the benefits far outweigh the limitations…. glen wright . /science.aat indianapolis, in , usa. louisiana state university, college of science, baton rouge, la , usa. department of chemistry and biology, ryerson university, toronto, on m b k , canada. *corresponding author. email: samantha.yammine@mail.utoronto.ca r e f e r e n c e s . m, “state of science index global report” ( ); https://multimedia. m.com/mws/media/ o/ presentation- m-state-of-science-index- -global- report-pdf.pdf. . s. t. fiske, c. dupree, proc. natl. acad. sci. , ( ). . m. anderson, “the race gap in science knowl- edge,” pew research centre ( ); www. pewresearch.org/fact-tank/ / / / the-race-gap-in-science-knowledge/. . e. h. ecklund, s. a. james, a. e. lincoln, plos one , e ( ). . m. ong, “the mini-symposium on women of color in sci- ence, technology, engineering, and mathematics (stem): a summary of events, findings, and suggestions” (terc, cambridge, ma, ). . n. gupta, c. kemelgor, s. fuchs, h. etzkowitz, curr. sci. , ( ). . s. bakhshi, d. shamma, e. gilbert, “proceedings of the nd annual acm conference on human factors in computing systems” ( ), pp. – ; http://comp. social.gatech.edu/papers/chi .faces.bakhshi.pdf. . a. l. gonzales, commun. res. , ( ). . b. j. drury, j. o. siy, s. cheryan, psychol. inquiry , ( ). . s. d. hermann et al., basic appl. soc. psychol. , ( ). . s. cheryan, j. o. siy, m. vichayapai, b. j. drury, s. kim, soc. psychol. person. sci. , ( ). . /science.aat appearance (whether conventional or not) is necessary. no single post or person on social media should be expected to change the world, but social media have been instrumental in mobilizing grassroots political move- ments, including those related to safety in education, research, and equity, such as the march for our lives, the march for science, black lives matter, #metoo, and the women’s march. thus, we challenge the false dichotomy that use of social media for public engagement with science and working to change policy and remove systemic barriers to inclusion are mutu- ally exclusive. rather, they are intrinsically linked, and we need to harness the poten- tial power of social media to create social change. as scientists, we must look to data and evidence to inform our understanding of the benefits and pitfalls of the use of social media for public outreach and policy change, and uphold the same rigor and analysis in determining what has value and what should be celebrated. samantha z. yammine, * christine liu, paige b. jarreau, , imogen r. coe department of molecular genetics, university of toronto, toronto, on m s e , canada. helen wills neuroscience institute, university of california, berkeley, berkeley, ca , usa. lifeomic, journal editors should not divide scientists we’re writing to express our disappoint- ment at the poor judgment that led to the publication of “instagram won’t solve inequality” (m. wright, working life, march, p. ), which singled out and criticized a successful woman science communicator for her instagram presence promoting and celebrating science. the editor of this piece should have ensured that the message focused on the issues: women and underrepresented minorities take on a great deal of science com- munication, mentorship, and outreach work without recognition or professional reward from their institutions. despite increasing institutional pressure to com- municate about science — whether to increase a university’s public profile or meet the national science foundation’s broader impact requirements — many institutions expect the work to be done on personal time without compensation or additional resources. although the piece hinted at these systemic issues, those arguments were undermined when the editors allowed the author to criticize the work of another woman with an da_ letters.indd / / : am published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ unabashed tone of condescension and did not give the target of the comments an opportunity to respond. rather than address the roadblocks facing women and underrepresented groups in science, technology, engi- neering, and mathematics (stem) or grapple with the author’s personal misgivings around science communica- tion, the piece was framed as an attack. the tone implied that anything beyond basic research is a frivolous waste of time, belittling meaningful approaches to science communication and public engagement. it offered a false choice between an authentic and relatable social media presence and effective advocacy for institutional change. the choice to run this inflammatory article demonstrates a lack of thoughtfulness on the editors’ part. pitting one woman scientist against another is destructive and irresponsible, and it perpetuates unreasonable standards for women and underrepresented groups in stem. it is antithetical to the open, accessible, and inclusive future that we at women scientists envision for science. maryam zaringhalam,* rukmani vijayaraghavan, juniper simonis, kelly ramirez, and jane zelikova, on behalf of women scientists women scientists, boulder, co , usa. *corresponding author. email: info@ womenscientists.org . /science.aat efforts large and small speed science reform the working life article “instagram won’t solve inequality” (m. wright, march, p. ) asserts that science outreach efforts by individual women cannot counteract struc- tural inequities and that women are doing outreach at a cost to their own careers. we concur that collective action and structural change are needed to diversify science and improve meaningful science engagement with the public. however, when such reform is absent or too slow, individual efforts fill the vacuum and should not be condemned. along with hundreds of other scientists, we devote time and energy to individual public engagement initiatives, while pushing for institutional reforms to support more scientists who wish to engage effectively. these reforms would provide support and incentives through professional recognition, financial and logistical resources, networks of support, and an inclusive culture and capac- ity for public engagement. with support, more scientists could develop collabora- tive and innovative engagement practices to broaden participation in science. while changing the culture of public engagement, we must similarly push to dismantle other structural barriers to women and minorities in the sciences. to accelerate these changes, data collection and learning networks would enable us to improve the effectiveness of our efforts to create a diverse workforce and tackle science-societal challenges. individual action versus structural change is not an “either/or” question; it is a “yes, and.” anne j. jefferson * and melissa a. kenney department of geology, kent state university, kent, oh , usa. cmns-earth system science interdisciplinary center, university of maryland, college park, md , usa. *corresponding author. email: ajeffer @kent.edu . /science.aat “...when [structural change] is absent or too slow, individual efforts fill the vacuum...” insights | l e t t e r s da_ letters.indd / / : am published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ social media for social change in science samantha z. yammine, christine liu, paige b. jarreau and imogen r. coe doi: . /science.aat ( ), - . science article tools http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / . content related http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full references http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / . #bibl this article cites articles, of which you can access for free permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions terms of serviceuse of this article is subject to the is a registered trademark of aaas.sciencescience, new york avenue nw, washington, dc . the title (print issn - ; online issn - ) is published by the american association for the advancement ofscience science. no claim to original u.s. government works copyright © the authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee american association for the advancement of o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / . http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . 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please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ race, crime, and emotions creative commons cc by: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /) which permits any use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the sage and open access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). https://doi.org/ . / research and politics july-september : – © the author(s) doi: . / journals.sagepub.com/home/rap introduction upon returning from a trip to the store on february , , a -year-old black male named trayvon martin was shot and killed by george zimmerman, a resident of sanford, florida who was participating in a neighborhood watch program. in the black community, the murder of trayvon martin produced widespread anger and discus- sions of changes to “stand your ground” legislation (alvarez, ). shortly after george zimmerman was found not guilty, former president barack obama stated (coates, ), i think it's important to recognize that the african-american community is looking at this issue through a set of experiences and a history that doesn't go away…the african-american community is also knowledgeable that there is a history of racial disparities in the application of our criminal laws— everything from the death penalty to enforcement of our drug laws. and that ends up having an impact in terms of how people interpret the case. many black americans believed that racial bias played a role in zimmerman’s shooting of martin, and that zimmerman would have been arrested immediately had he shot a white teenager (newport, ). the rage sparked by this particular murder also led to a common retort among white, and some black, conservatives, “where is the out- rage in the black community for black-on-black” vio- lence?” (coates, ; harriot, ). this real world scenario begs the following questions: how do black americans respond to intra- and intergroup violent crime? are attitudes about punitiveness dependent upon the race of the victim and perpetrator? moreover, to what extent do black americans’ emotional reactions to intra-and-inter- group violence vary? extant literature on racial attitudes, crime, and emotions provide incomplete answers to these questions. scholars examining attitudes about crime often focus on how white americans’ racial stereotypes of black americans influ- ence their attitudes about violent crime and the death pen- alty (gilliam and iyengar, ; hurwitz and peffley, ). research on emotions often focuses on the experi- ences of white americans, with very few examining the implications of blacks’ emotional experiences (harris- perry, ; simien, ; white et al., ). to our race, crime, and emotions camille d. burge and gbemende johnson abstract experimental research on racial attitudes examines how whites’ stereotypes of black americans shape their attitudes about the death penalty, violent crime, and other punitive measures. marginally discussed in the race-to-crime literature are blacks’ perceptions of retribution and justice. we fill this void by using an original survey experiment of black americans to examine how exposure to intra- and- intergroup violent crime shapes their policy attitudes and emotional reactions to crime. we find that black americans are more likely to support increased prison sentences for violent crimes when the perpetrator is white and the victim is black, and reduced sentences for “black-on-black” crime. our analyses further reveal that black people express higher levels of anger when the victim is black and the perpetrator is white; levels of shame and anger also increase in instances of black-on-black crime. given current race relations in the united states, we conclude by speculating about how these emotional reactions might shape one’s willingness to participate in the political arena. keywords african-american politics, crime, intergroup conflict, emotions, shame, anger villanova university, usa hamilton college, usa corresponding author: camille d. burge, department of political science, villanova university, e lancaster avenue, villanova, pa , usa. email: camille.burge@villanova.edu rap . / research & politicsburge and johnson research-article research article http://journals.sagepub.com/home/rap mailto:camille.burge@villanova.edu http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . % f &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - research and politics knowledge, none have quantitatively explored the causal roles of race, emotions, and attitudes about retribution and justice. we contend that blacks’ emotional reactions to violent crime along with their attitudes about punishment are contingent upon the race of the perpetrator and victim. understanding blacks’ emotional reactions to violent crime writers, activists, and abolitionists such as frederick douglas, ida b. wells, fannie lou hamer, lorraine hansberry, shaun king, the founders of the black lives matter movement, the family members of those victimized, and countless others, have spoken of the ways in which racialized violence works to terrorize, marginalize, and oppress black americans. the fear and pain of such vio- lence is often accompanied by anger (baldwin, ; coates, ; du bois, , ; francis, ; turner, ). we do not envision our work as starting this conver- sation. rather, we view our work as joining a long and ongoing conversation that includes a number of vocal par- ticipants. our study attempts to provide quantitative causal evidence to understand the lived emotional experiences and policy implications in the aftermath of such events. in a paper titled, “the color of memory,” booth ( ) explains, “color causes the injustice of slavery and discrim- ination and the myriad of social relations associated with them to remain an enduring presence and wound, threaten- ing to make the past and its injustices visible” ( ). arguably, the interplay of history, race, and violence con- tinue to affect the way in which black americans perceive and process certain phenomena. during the jim crow era, race and racial differences were salient through the use of “separate but equal” laws, societal norms, and acts of race- based violence. separate but equal policies are now of course unconstitutional; however, blacks may consider current instances of white-on-black violence to be a con- tinuation or legacy of historical race-based violence, thus, making race salient once again (equal justice initiative, ; francis, ; nobles, ; peffley and hurwitz, ; russell-brown, ). psychology research surrounding the concept of inter- group threat can help us make sense of how black people might react to violent crime committed by members of a racial out-group. riek et al. ( ) define an intergroup threat as one that “occurs when one group’s actions, beliefs, or characteristics challenge the goal attainment or well-being of another group” ( ). existing political science literature focuses on two types of intergroup threats: realistic and symbolic. realistic threats include threats to physical well-being, and political and economic power (hutchings et al., ), whereas symbolic threats are threats to the in-group’s value system, belief system, or worldview (kinder and sears, ). events such as lynchings, the murder of emmett till in (latson, ), or the bombing of th street baptist church in , which killed four black girls, are concrete exam- ples of realistic intergroup threats (civil rights digital library, ). stephan and mealy ( ) state that the appraisal of threat can evoke strong negative emotions, including fear, rage, anger, hatred, resentment, frustra- tion, contempt, and insecurity; threats to the group as a whole are more likely to evoke anger (cottrell and neuberg, ; stephan et al. ; stephan and mealy, ). anger is defined as “a belief that we, or our friends, have been unfairly slighted, which causes in us both painful feelings and a desire or impulse for revenge” (lazarus, ). anger is a negative emotion wherein blame for undesirable behavior and resulting undesirable events is directed at another person or group. therefore, we hypothesize the following. when black americans are exposed to an intergroup threat, in the form of violent crime, from a member of a racial out-group, blacks’ feelings of anger should increase (hypothesis ). although far less is written and known about blacks’ emotional reactions to intragroup violence, we suspect that shame might be the natural response. shame is defined as “an all-consuming experience of the self as fundamentally flawed or defective” (ferguson et al., , ). research pertaining to social identity theory finds that “individuals gain a sense of identity from their membership in groups” (tajfel, ; tajfel and turner, ). lickel et al. ( ) find that members of stigmatized racial groups experience higher levels of shame when members of their racial in- group engage in behaviors that confirm negative stereo- types of the group. research demonstrates that crime has been cognitively linked to black americans in the minds of white americans (gilliam and iyengar, ; hurwitz and peffley, ). exposure to instances of intragroup vio- lence (“black-on-black” crime) could potentially induce feelings of group shame and embarrassment in response to socially undesirable behavior that seems to confirm pre- vailing negative stereotypes. as such, we expect the following. when black americans are exposed to an intragroup threat, in the form of violent crime, from a member of their own racial group, blacks’ feelings of shame should increase (hypothesis ). scholars have examined the complexity of blacks’ atti- tudes toward issues of crime and punishment. given that blacks are more likely to live in neighborhoods with higher crime rates, and more likely to report being the victim of crime (ramirez, ), one might expect black people to express greater support for harsher punishments (manda- tory sentences, death penalty, etc.) for those convicted of crimes (bobo and johnson, ). however, black americans are arrested at disproportionate rates (bobo and burge and johnson thompson, ; buckler et al., ) and view the crimi- nal justice system as discriminatory, unfair, and biased towards black people (bobo and thompson, ; peffley and hurwitz, ; ramirez, ). this can create wari- ness toward the ability of the criminal justice system to treat black americans, particularly those accused of com- mitting a crime, fairly. in general, research shows that blacks are less supportive of harsher sentencing policies (bobo and thompson, ), but these preferences are potentially malleable when race is made salient (bobo and johnson, ). as such, we hypothesize the following. when blacks are exposed to an intragroup threat, in the form of violent crime with a black perpetrator, regardless of the race of the victim, blacks will become less punitive (hypothesis a). however, blacks’ support of punitive measures might be attenuated by the race of the perpetrator and victim. qualitative writings of black sociopolitical thought leaders suggest that anger is a natural response of black people to instances of white-on-black violence (du bois, ; turner, ). anger produces a desire to regain control, remove the obstruction, and if necessary, attack the source of injury (cottam et al., , ). in an effort to regain control and remove the obstruction, we might expect the following. when blacks are exposed to an intergroup threat, in the form of violent crime with a white perpetrator and a black victim, blacks will become more punitive (hypothesis b). method we obtained a sample of approximately self-identified black respondents from survey sampling international in march of to participate in our online survey experi- ment. to observe how black americans respond to intra- and intergroup threat, respondents were randomly assigned to one of five vignettes that varied the race of the victim and perpetrator in a fictitious article about a murder and subse- quent arrest. one group served as the control, receiving a crime bulletin about a murder and arrest without any men- tion of the race of the perpetrator and victim. the remaining four groups received the same crime bulletin as those in the control, but the crime bulletin in the treatment conditions specified the race of the perpetrator and victim, thus yield- ing the following conditions: “white-on-black” crime, “black-on-black” crime, “white-on-white” crime, and “black-on-white” crime. after reading the crime bulletins, respondents com- pleted a questionnaire that gauged emotions and opinions on crime. we adapted our emotions measures from the short-form of the positive and negative affect schedule (watson et al., ) to reflect experiencing emotions as a member of a group. specifically, we ask respondents to what extent the news article made them feel angry or ashamed as a member of their racial group. we add a racial group cue to our emotions questions to shift and or specify the lens through which the threat is evaluated. psychology research on emotions suggests, “social categorization into a group changes emotional experience” (mackie and smith, ). indeed, ray et al. ( ) found that when a group of students was categorized as americans, respondents viewed muslims as threatening and had negative emotions toward them. however, when the perceivers were categorized as students, they had more positive emotions towards muslims. since we know that groups matter in the political arena, whether racial, religious, partisan, or sexual orienta- tion, the racial group cue should provide us with a more nuanced understanding of the implications of emotional experiences in the political arena (burge ). to gauge attitudes about punishment for violent crimes, we use a dependent variable measure from peffley and hurwitz ( ) that asks respondents to rate the extent to which they strongly agree or disagree on a -point likert scale with the following statement: “the best way to deal with violent crimes is to dramatically increase prison terms for people who commit violent crimes.” all of our depend- ent variables (i.e., the punitiveness measure and our emotions measures) are rescaled from to for comparability. our sample of approximately black americans is evenly balanced between men and women. our average respondent has some college education but no degree. the average level of household income ranges from us$ , to us$ , . respondents range in age from to but the average age of respondents is . we checked for balance in the experimental conditions by examining age, education, income, gender, region, ideology, and partisanship. results the results for hypothesis appear in table and figure . we hypothesized that respondents would increase in anger when exposed to a white-on-black crime incident and we find moderate support for this hypothesis. table , model (a - b) demonstrates that when compared to the control, those in the white-on-black condition increase in anger (p < . ). figure also depicts these findings. although the comparison between respondents in the control group and those in the white-on-black crime condition shows that the respondents increase in anger, an important question is to what degree does the race of the perpetrator, as compared to the race of the victim, produce the observed increase in anger? in table , the white-on-black/black-on-black dif- ference of means comparison in model (b–e) allows us to isolate the effect of the race of the perpetrator. the white- on-black/white-on-white comparison in model (b - c) allows us to isolate the effect of the race of victim on anger. research and politics however, the results from these analyses to do not reach the traditionally accepted levels of statistical significance. an additional finding deserving of further scrutiny is that the level of anger is the highest in the black-on-black condition. why might black people feel the angriest in the black-on-black crime condition? statistically, members of an in-group are more likely to be victimized by other mem- bers of their in-group across racial and ethnic groups, so as some note, black-on-black crime is not a “thing” (harriot, ). indeed, some argue that the frame of black-on- black crime is used to either suggest group-wide noncon- formity with legal and societal norms, and to derail in-depth discussion of the occurrence and inadequate prosecution of white-on-black violence (bouie, ; coates, ). black americans could potentially increase in anger if in- group violence is thought to contribute to and reinforce this black-on-black crime narrative, while simultaneously cre- ating barriers to adequately redress of interracial violence concerns (white-on-black crime in particular). we cannot necessarily confirm that these factors are driving the anger response we see in figure ; additional empirical analysis is needed to add nuance and depth to our current knowledge of blacks’ emotional reactions to crime. another plausible alternative is directly related to the action tendencies of anger. lazarus ( ) and banks ( ) argue that the experience of anger involves knowing whom to blame for the offense and believing the person offending could have taken an alternative course of action. one might argue that when black people witness the mur- der of other blacks it makes them angry because members of their racial group are facing a realistic threat and believe that violence could have been avoided. anecdotally, we know that many individuals in black communities are out- raged over these instances of what many believe are sense- less acts of violence and this outrage has led to community protests in cities like new york, chicago, pittsburgh and many others (bouie, ; coates, ). table and figure include our findings for hypothesis . we stated that feelings of shame would increase when black respondents are exposed to crime incidents with table . differences of means in anger across experimental conditions. control white-on- black white-on- white black-on- white black-on- black differences across experimental conditions (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (a - b, model ) (b–e, model ) (b - c, model ) anger ( – ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) – . * – . . n *p < . . figure . average levels of anger by treatment condition. wob: white on black; wow: white on white; bow: black on white; bob: black on black. burge and johnson black perpetrators. table and figure contain average levels of shame across each treatment group. as hypothe- sized, reported feelings of shame are highest in the black perpetrator categories. in the “differences across experimental conditions” portion of table , the findings in model (b–e), which compares respondents in the white-on-black and black-on-black conditions, indicate that respondents in the black-on-black condition experi- ence substantially higher levels of shame than those in the white-on-black condition (p < . ). when a member of the in-group behaves in a way that fails to conform to expectations of desired social behavior, a shame response could emerge across a variety of contexts. however, for black americans, feelings of shame are potentially exacer- bated given blacks’ historically stigmatized status (cohen, ; du bois, ; kennedy, ) and as noted earlier, the stereotypical linkage between black people and crimi- nal behavior. we had somewhat divergent hypotheses for attitudes about punitiveness: if the perpetrator is black, respondents would express a decreased desire for punishment (h a); if the victim of a violent crime is black, and the perpetrator is white, blacks should express an increased desire for punishment (h b). our findings in table and figure provide mixed support for these hypotheses. in table , we attempt to isolate the effect of the race of the perpetrator on the respondents’ punishment preferences by comparing the opinions of respondents in the “white-on-black” condition to those in the “black-on-black” crime condition (b–e). the results suggest that respondents are less punitive when exposed to the “black-on-black” crime treatment as com- pared to those exposed to the “white-on-black” treatment. however, the difference is not statistically significant. we see a similar result when we examine the effect of the race of the perpetrator when the victim is white in model (c - d). blacks appear less punitive when perpetrator is black and the victim is white; however, the difference also lacks statistical significance. but, perhaps it is the race of the victim that matters most. our findings in table , model (b - c) show that respondents in the “white-on-black” crime condition are more punitive than those in the “white-on-white” crime treatment (p < . ). that is, as hypothesized, respond- ents become more punitive when a black victim is mur- dered at the hands of a white perpetrator and less punitive when a white victim is murdered at the hands of a white perpetrator. figure shows that black respondents are most punitive when the perpetrator in the crime vignette table . differences of means in shame across experimental conditions. control white -on-black white -on-white black -on-white black -on-black differences across experimental conditions (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (a - b, model ) (b–e, model ) (b - c, model ) shame ( – ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) – . ** – . ** – . ** n **p < . . figure . average levels of shame by treatment condition. wob: white on black; wow: white on white; bow: black on white; bob: black on black. research and politics is white and the victim is black. we believe this finding has important implications for research in sociology sur- rounding punitiveness. scholars suggest that in certain instances blacks are less punitive than whites (bobo and johnson, ; buckler et al., ), and our results also illustrate that their willingness to punish depends on the context. in table and figure , we saw an increase in anger among those in the white-on-black crime condition and an even greater spike in anger amongst those in the black-on- black crime condition. these findings demonstrate that when blacks are portrayed as the victim, their anger increases. however, we saw somewhat different responses in the context of punitiveness. even though blacks are extremely angry in the black-on-black treatment, table and figure suggest a decreased desire to punish black perpetrators. in figure , we explore the relationship among race, anger, and punishment in greater detail. figure dem- onstrates that as one’s anger increases, respondents in the white-on-black condition increase their willingness to support increased prison sentences for those accused of violent crime. however, this is not the case for those in the black-on-black condition, as increases in anger are associ- ated with a decrease in punitiveness. potential explanations are understandably complex and multi-faceted. as noted previously, the decreased desire to punish could reflect suspicion of the criminal justice sys- tem toward accused blacks, suspicion that was noted by w.e.b. du bois over a century ago. in addition, the decreased willingness to punish, despite increased anger, could reflect an underlying sentiment that intragroup vio- lence, particularly in the context of black americans, emerges as a symptom of broader racial oppression and injustice and its effects (poverty, joblessness, inadequate education access). intragroup violence among oppressed groups, thus, is an indictment of the broader institutional and political system and the optimal response is not neces- sarily punishment of individual perpetrators but rather restorative justice for the marginalized group and a removal of discriminatory policies and values. table . differences of means in punitiveness across experimental conditions. control white -on-black white -on-white black -on-white black -on-black differences across experimental conditions (a) (b) (c) (d) (e) (a - b, model ) (b–e, model ) (c - d, model ) (b - c, model ) increase prison sentence ( – ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) – . . . . * n *p < . . figure . average of punitiveness by treatment condition. wob: white on black; wow: white on white; bow: black on white; bob: black on black. burge and johnson conclusion our goal in this paper is to examine how exposure to crime affects emotions and public opinion among black americans. the findings from our survey experiment suggest that feel- ings of anger and shame feature prominently in blacks’ emo- tional reactions to instances of intra- and- intergroup crime, and further, that reactions to crime and subsequent retribu- tion are contingent upon the race of the victim and perpetra- tor. as hypothesized, respondents in our experiment report higher feelings of anger after exposure to a news story regarding intergroup violence. our findings also indicate that respondents are most willing to support harsher punishment for violent crimes when the perpetrator is white. the interplay of emotions and public opinion potentially has important implications regarding how those exposed to crime (particularly a crime involving a member of one’s racial/ethnic group) interact and mobilize within the politi- cal sphere. anger in politics can play a vital role, motivat- ing some people to participate in ways they might ordinarily not (valentino et al., ). in addition to expressions of anger and frustration, there have been numerous recent examples of mobilization among black americans in the aftermath of intergroup crime involving civilian and non- civilian perpetrators (cbs news, ). specifically, in the aftermath of highly publicized intergroup crime, such as the trayvon martin murder, a key component of the protest and group mobilization is not only a call for widespread reform of the criminal justice system, but also a call for adequate punishment of the specific perpetrator (luscombe and siddique, ). the responses to black-on-black crime are more var- ied. the finding of increased feelings of shame seems to reflect negative group feelings toward undesirable behav- ior from in-group members. interestingly, exposure to black-on-black crime is met with very high levels of anger from black americans (respondents actually exhibit the highest levels of anger in this treatment condition). however, this anger is also accompanied by a decreased preference for punitive sentences. this decrease in sup- port for harsher punishments for black perpetrators, even when the victim is black, potentially reflects concerns over systematic biases in the american criminal justice system that disproportionally affect blacks, particularly in regard to sentencing (buckler et al., , ramirez, ). the way in which the juxtaposition of increased anger and decreased desire for punishment potentially affects engagement with the public sphere is less clear. in con- trast to an increased desire for longer criminal sentences in the aftermath of intergroup crime, one could envision greater calls from in-group members for solutions such as antipoverty programs or greater educational opportunities aimed at reducing the occurrence of intragroup crime (ramirez, ). unfortunately, in today’s society, the occurrence of crime and violence are common. when these instances involve intergroup conflict, such as in the trayvon martin example, responses from certain racial in-group members seem particularly acute and vocalized. our study attempts to provide quantitative causal evidence to understand the lived emotional experiences and policy implications in the aftermath of such events. understanding the factors involved with intra- and- intergroup conflict can poten- tially help facilitate societal dialogue beyond the halls of academia after the occurrence of these types of conflicts. figure . the effects of anger on punitiveness by treatment condition. wob: white on black; wow: white on white; bow: black on white; bob: black on black. research and politics declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. supplemental materials the supplemental files are available at http://journals.sagepub. com/doi/suppl/ . / the replication files are available at https://doi.org/ . /dvn/ v lmz notes . national surveys find that black americans are more likely to worry about being attacked, more worried about being murdered, and more worried about crime (bouie, ). . in addition to anger, some scholars note that a secondary appraisal of threat is anxiety (smith and ellsworth, ; smith and kirby, ). although we do not test for anxi- ety in this paper, we look forward to doing so in the near future. . see the online appendix for discussion of the survey sampling international recruitment process. . see the online appendix for full treatments, questionnaire, and hotelling t test statistics for balance in covariates. . see the online appendix for a detailed discussion of this measure and how it is distinct from questions that gauge racial identification. . see the online appendix for test statistics. carnegie corporation of new york grant this publication was made possible (in part) by a grant from the carnegie corporation of new york. the statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author. references alvarez l ( ) florida sit-in against ‘stand your ground’. august . the new york times. http://www.nytimes. com/ / / /us/dream-defenders-arent-walking-out-on- their-florida-protest.html. last accessed january . baldwin j ( ) the negro in american culture. cross current ( ): – . banks a ( ) anger and racial politics: the emotional foundation of racial attitudes in america. new york: cambridge university press. bobo ld and johnson d ( ) a taste for punishment: black and white americans’ views on the death penalty and the war on drugs. du bois review ( ): – . bobo ld and thompson v ( ) racialized mass incarcera- tion: poverty, prejudice, and punishment. in: markus hr and moya pml (eds) doing race: essays for the st century. new york: norton, pp. – . booth j ( ) the color of memory: reading race with ralph ellison. political theory ( ): – . bouie j ( ) “actually, blacks do care about black crime.” december . slate.com. http://www.slate.com/articles/ news_and_politics/politics/ / /black_community_is_ concerned_with_black_on_black_crime_suggesting_other- wise.html. last accessed april . buckler k, wilson s and ross salinas p ( ) public support for punishment and progressive justice policy preferences: the role of symbolic racism and negative racial stereotype. american journal of criminal justice : – . burge c ( ) fired up, ready to go: the effects of group- based and intergroup emotions in politics. nashville: vanderbilt university. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/ .pdf. cbs news ( ) “‘enough is enough’: tens of thousands march to protest police violence.” cbsnews.com, december . http://www.cbsnews.com/news/eric-garner-ferguson- missouri-protesters-converge-on-washington/. last accessed december . civil rights digital library ( ) “birmingham bombing (sixteenth street baptist church).” crdl, http://crdl.usg. edu/events/birmingham_bombing/?welcome. last accessed july . coates t-n ( ) why don’t black people protest ‘black-on- black violence’? april . the atlantic. https://www. theatlantic.com/national/archive/ / /why-dont-black- people-protest-black-on-black-violence/ /. last accessed april . coates t-n ( ) “considering the president’s comments on racial profiling.” the atlantic. july . https://www. theatlantic.com/politics/archive/ / /considering-the- presidents-comments-on-racial-profiling/ /. last accessed march . coates t-n ( ) “black people are not ignoring ‘black on black’ crime.” the atlantic. august . https://www. theatlantic.com/national/archive/ / /black-people-are- not- ignoring-black-on-black-crime/ /. last accessed march . cohen cj ( ) the boundaries of blackness: aids and the breakdown of black politics. chicago: university of chicago press. cottam m, dietz-uhler b, mastors em, et al. 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lized state violence towards a gender-inclusive analysis of racialized state violence towards a gender-inclusive analysis of racialized state violence towards a gender-inclusive analysis of racialized state violence resisting police brutality against black women say her name july update african american policy forum www.aapf.org // info@aapf.org center for intersectionality and social policy studies www.intersectionality-center.org // intersectionality@columbia.law.edu west th st. - box e new york, ny by kimberlé williams crenshaw and andrea j. ritchie with rachel anspach, rachel gilmer and luke harris acknowledgments we would like to thank the following individuals and organizations for their contributions: graphic design tony carranza photo credit mia fermindoza photos on pages , , , , , , , , and taken at the say her name vigil, hosted by the african american policy forum on may , . this document is dedicated to black women who have lost their lives to police violence, and to their families who must go on without them. we are greatly indebted to the family members who have bravely spoken out to shed light on their loved ones’ stories. we would like to thank each and every family member we spoke to, along with all family members who have lost loved ones to police violence. we acknowledge the generous support of novo foundation, the open society foundation, and the new york women’s foundation for continuing to make this important work possible. for additional copies, please contact: info@aapf.org © african american policy forum • center for intersectionality and social policy studies the opinions and conclusions expressed herein do not necessarily represent the views of the funders. kieran alessi valarie carey center for constitutional rights frances garrett sara gedeon michael gnat janine jackson cassandra johnson julia sharpe levine george lipsitz david malik maria moore new york civil liberties union eric sanders martinez sutton sharon wilkinson resisting police brutality against black women the august th police killing of -year-old michael brown sparked a smoldering nationwide movement against police violence and, more broadly, against anti-black racism. as mike brown, eric garner, and tamir rice have become household names and faces, their stories have become an impe- tus for public policy debates on the future of policing in america. however, also marked the unjust police killings of a number of black women, including gabri- ella nevarez, aura rosser, michelle cusseaux, and tanisha anderson. the body count of black women killed by the police continued to rise in with the killings of alexia christian, meagan hockaday, mya hall, janisha fonville, and natasha mckenna. the lack of meaningful accountability for the deaths of unarmed black men also extended to deaths of unarmed black women and girls in . just as the officers who killed mike brown and eric garner escaped punishment for these homicides, officers who killed black women and girls were not held accountable for their actions. joseph weekley, who killed a sleeping, seven-year-old aiyana stanley- jones, escaped prosecution after a jury failed to convict him in his second trial. dante servin, an off- duty officer who shot rekia boyd in the back of the head, was cleared by a judge of all charges. other officers faced no charges whatsoever, such as those who killed mya hall, a black transgender woman. none of these killings of black women, nor the lack of accountability for them, have been wide- ly elevated as exemplars of the systemic police brutality that is currently the focal point of mass protest and policy reform efforts. the fail- ure to highlight and demand accountability for the countless black women killed by police over the past two decades, including eleanor bumpurs, tyisha miller, latanya haggerty, margaret mitchell, kayla moore, and tarika wilson, to name just a few among scores, leaves black women unnamed and thus underprotected in the face of their continued vulnerability to racialized police violence. the resurgent racial justice movement in the united states has developed a clear frame to under- stand the police killings of black men and boys, theorizing the ways in which they are systematically criminalized and feared across disparate class backgrounds and irrespective of circumstance. yet black women who are profiled, beaten, sexually assaulted, and killed by law enforcement officials are conspicuously absent from this frame even when their experiences are identical. when their experi- ences with police violence are distinct—uniquely informed by race, gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation—black women remain invisible. resisting police brutality against black women s a y h e r n a m e s h e d s l i g h t o n b l a c k w o m e n ’ s e x p e r i e n c e s o f p o l i c e v i o l e n c e i n a n e f f o r t t o s u p p o r t a g e n d e r - i n c l u s i v e a p p r o a c h t o r a c i a l j u s t i c e t h a t c e n t e r s a l l b l a c k l i v e s e q u a l l y . despite their marginalization in contemporary efforts to challenge anti-black racism and police bru- tality, black women and girls continue to lose their lives to racially motivated violence. the nation has been left reeling in the wake of the june th shooting in which a white gunman murdered nine black parishioners at a historically black church in charleston in an explicit act of racial terror. six of the nine people killed were women—the oldest, susie jackson, was an -year-old grandmother—demonstrat- ing clearly that black women also face the lethal risk of white supremacist violence. black women and girls’ vulnerability to state violence has likewise been exposed in shocking footage that has surfaced in recent months. viewers were stunned to see marlene pinnock pummeled in the face by a california highway patrol officer and keyarika diggles beaten in a texas police precinct. and on june , , as this report was being updated for printing, a video emerged showing a police of- ficer in mckinney, texas pulling out his gun, pinning down dejerria becton, an unarmed black teenage girl at a pool party, as she sobbed and asked for her mother. in the context of the constantly evolving conversation around anti-black police violence unfolding in this country, these images of police abuse demonstrate concretely that black women and girls are, like black men and boys, subject to police abuse that runs the gamut from profiling to excessive force to murder. say her name sheds light on black women’s experiences of police violence in an effort to support a gender-inclusive approach to racial justice that centers all black lives equally. it is our hope that this document will serve as a tool for the resurgent racial justice movement to mobilize around the stories of black women who have lost their lives to police violence. our goal is not to offer a comprehensive catalog of police violence against black women— indeed, it would be impossible to do so as there is currently no accurate data collection on police killings na- tionwide, no readily available database compiling a complete list of black women’s lives lost at the hands of police, and no data collection on sexual or other forms of gender- and sexuality- based po- lice violence. moreover, the media’s exclusive focus on police violence against black men makes find- ing information about black women of all gender identities and sexualities much more difficult. given these limitations, our goal is simply to illustrate the reality that black women are killed and violated by police with alarming regularity. equally important, our hope is to call attention to the ways in which this reality is erased from our demonstrations, our discourse, and our demands to broaden our vision of social justice. as a result of the paucity of data, the stories of police violence included in this document are essen- tially either gathered through online research or cases that have come to the attention of the report’s authors. many cases have never seen the light of day, and even those that have surfaced momentarily have received little sustained national or local attention. significantly more women who have been killed by the police are missing from these pages, but their lives are certainly no less valuable. the erasure of black women is not purely a matter of missing facts. even where women and girls are present in the data, narratives framing police profiling and lethal force as exclusively male experiences lead researchers, the media, and advocates to exclude them. for example, although racial profiling data are rarely, if ever, disaggregated by gender and race, when race and gender are considered to- gether, researchers find that “for both men and women there is an identical pattern of stops by race/ ethnicity.” in new york city—one of the jurisdictions with the most extensive data collection on police stops—the rates of racial disparities in stops, frisks, and arrests are identical for black men and black women. however, the media, researchers, and advocates tend to focus only on how profiling impacts black men. background and purpose building on the work of scholars and activists who have, over the past two decades, called for increased attention to black women’s experiences of policing, say her name offers a number of stories that reveal the ways gender, race, and sexuality can operate to- gether to inform police abuse of black women. similarly, a malcolm x grassroots movement (mxgm) report, operation ghetto storm, revealed that police, security guards, and vigilantes killed black people that year, which represents a black person being killed every hours. the cases cited in operation ghetto storm explicitly include black people of all genders, but the report is often cited to support the premise that a black man is killed every hours, thereby erasing the killings of black women. our hope is that this document will honor the intention of the #blacklivesmatter movement to lift up the intrinsic value of all black lives by serving as a resource to answer the increasingly persistent call for attention to black women killed by police. this document offers preliminary information about police killings of black women that have not galvanized national attention or driven our discourse. the information presented here is organized around two themes. first, we seek to highlight the fact that many killings of black women could be understood within the existing frames surrounding racial profiling and the use of lethal force. the solution to their absence is not complex; black women can be lifted up across the movement through a collective commitment to recognize what is right in front of us. second, we present cases that highlight the forms of police violence against black women that are invisible within the current focus on police killings and excessive force. the challenge here is to ex- pand the existing frames so that this violence too is legible to activists, policy makers and the media. addressing black women’s experiences of police violence requires a broadening of the public conversa- tion, informed by robust research, analysis, and advocacy. toward this end, we will offer a more detailed analysis of black women’s experiences of policing in a forthcoming research report. in the meantime, we hope that this document will be used by the media and policymakers, advocates and organizers, to begin to break the silence around black women’s experiences of police violence. but the first step in breaking this silence is within reach now. we need only answer the simple call to #sayhername. first, including black women and girls in the narrative broadens the scope of the debate, enhanc- ing our overall understanding of the structural relationship between black communities and law en- forcement agencies. in order to comprehend the root causes and full scope of state violence against black communities, we must consider and illuminate all the ways in which black people in the us are routinely targeted for state violence. acknowledging and analyzing the connections between anti- black violence against black men, women, transgender, and gender-nonconforming people reveals systemic realities that go unnoticed when the focus is limited exclusively to cases involving black non-transgender men. second, both the incidence and consequences of state violence against black women are often in- formed by their roles as primary caretakers of people of all ages in their communities. as a result, violence against them has ripple effects throughout families and neighborhoods. black women are positioned at the center of the domestic sphere and of community life. yet their marginal position with respect to economic and social power relations creates the isolating and vulnerable context in which their struggle against police violence, mass incarceration, and economic marginalization oc- curs. in order to ensure safe and healthy black communities, we must address police violence against black women with equal outrage and commitment. third, centering the lives of all segments of our communities will permit us to step away from the idea that to address police violence we must “fix” individual black men and bad police officers. moving be- yond these narrow concepts is critical if we are to embrace a framework that focuses on the complex structural dimensions that are actually at play. through inclusion it becomes clear that the problem is not a matter of whether a young man’s hands were held up over his head, whether he had a mentor, or whether the police officers in question were wearing cameras or had been exposed to implicit bias trainings. a comprehensive approach reveals that the epidemic of police violence across the country is about how police relations reinforce the structural marginality of all members of black communities in myriad ways. fourth, including black women and girls in this discourse sends the powerful message that, indeed, all black lives do matter. if our collective outrage is meant to warn the state that its agents cannot kill black men and boys with impunity, then our silence around the killing of black women and girls sends the message that their deaths are acceptable and do not merit repercussions. why we must say her name: the urgent need for a gender- inclusive movement to end state violence there are several reasons why the resurgent racial justice move- ment must prioritize the development of a gender inclusive lens. our failure to rally around black women’s stories represents a broader failure to demand accountabil- ity for all black lives targeted by the state. families who lose black women to police violence are not regularly invited to speak at rallies and do not receive the same level of community support or media and political attention as families who lose black men. this leaves the families of black women killed by the police not only to suffer the loss of their loved ones but also to confront the fact that no one seems to care. yet the killings of black women and girls are no less troubling than the killings of their male counterparts. their families mourn no less for their lost loved ones, and they should not be left to suffer in solitude and silence. black women have consistently played a leadership role in struggles against state violence—from the underground railroad to the anti-lynching movement to the civil rights and black power movements to the current black lives matter movement—yet the forms of victimization they face at the hands of police are consistently left out of social movement demands. black women leaders are often asked to speak only about their fears of losing their sons, brothers, partners, and comrades. yet as the trag- edies that have befallen many black women who have died at the hands of the police reveal, black women and girls also face real risks of lethal police violence, which must be contested along with those facing black men and boys. what follows are several brief frames that highlight black women’s experiences within commonly un- derstood narratives of racial profiling and police violence, and illuminate black women’s unique expe- riences of police violence in gender- and sexuality-specific contexts and forms. each is illustrated by several cases intended to demonstrate how race, gender, gender identity, sexual orientation, and class can work in conjunction with racial stereotypes to inform violent responses to black women from law enforcement officials. while in many cases black women killed by police were alleged to be armed or dangerous, witness accounts often dispute officers’ versions of the facts, and suggest that less lethal force could have been employed—particularly in cases where black women were experiencing mental health crises, or in the context of responses to domestic disputes. yet perceptions of black women as menacing and their bodies as “superhuman”—and, therefore, not susceptible to pain or shame—inform police interactions with them in much the same way as they do those with black men. these fears are often perceived to be reasonable no matter how vulnerable or in need of assistance these women might be. that so many of these cases have been justified by official government representatives reflects unique forms of discrimination faced by women who are black. all too often problematic per- ceptions are further amplified and reinforced when the black woman in question is poor, transgender, gender-nonconforming, or alleged to be engaged in criminalized activity. re-framing state violence: patterns of police killings against black women all black people experience racial profiling while driving. black women as well as men are commonly stopped as minor traffic violations serve as a pretext for criminal investigations. in the worst-case scenarios, the perception or reality of more serious traffic violations—speeding, failing to pull over, or driving a stolen car—can turn deadly when race-based perceptions of black drivers as inherently dangerous lead the police to use unwarranted lethal force. victims of such deadly encounters are typically imagined to be men, but black women also pay the ultimate penalty for driving offenses committed while black. driving while black alexia christian april , / atlanta, georgia the details of this case are still emerging. how- ever, what is known is that police officers in at- lanta were investigating a stolen vehicle call and found -year-old alexia christian inside the ve- hicle. the officers arrested christian and placed her in the back seat of their patrol car. at some point they fatally shot her in the car. they claim that she escaped from her handcuffs and shot at the officers with a stolen gun. the officers report that they failed to fully search her while putting her in the car. mya hall march , / baltimore, maryland mya hall was a black transgender woman killed by national security agency (nsa) police just weeks before freddie gray’s case garnered national head- lines. alleged to be driving a stolen car, she took a wrong turn onto nsa property and was shot to death by officers after the car crashed into the secu- rity gate and a police cruiser. no effort to use non- lethal force was made even though there was no threat to the facility, and no one in the vehicle was armed. friends remembered hall as a kind and car- ing woman struggling to make ends meet in the face of entrenched structural discrimination against black transgender women. was in the car with her. carey’s lawyer claims that the narrative presented by the police is false, and that the media’s failure to interrogate official ac- counts of the incident helped to justify her sense- less killing. no charges have been filed against the officers. shantel davis june , / brooklyn, new york phillip atkins, a plainclothes detective, fatally shot shantel davis, an unarmed -year-old woman, in east flatbush, brooklyn. police say they noticed her driving erratically and followed her. the car chase came to a halt when she collided with a minivan. at- kins then fatally shot davis in the chest. atkins later claimed that he had accidentally fired his gun as he struggled with her to shift the car into “park.” wit- nesses contradicted his statements. davis was pro- nounced dead at the hospital following the incident. malissa williams november , / cleveland, ohio -year-old malissa williams was a passenger in the front seat of timothy russell’s car when he refused to pull over for police after russell’s car backfired and the officers mistook the sound for a gunshot. the police followed russell’s car in a high-speed chase across cleveland, which ended with police opening fire on the car. williams and russell were killed when officer michael brelo climbed up onto the hood of the car and fired sev- eral rounds at them. neither russell nor williams were armed. brelo’s use of deadly force has been gabriella nevarez march , / sacramento, california police killed -year-old gabriella nevarez after her grandmother called the police because neva- rez had taken her car after an argument. officers at the scene claimed that after they tried to appre- hend her, she led them on a high-speed chase and attempted to ram her car into their vehicle. the officers claimed they opened fire in self-defense, but passengers reported that nevarez lost control of the car and crashed after she was shot. since her death, many have questioned why the police failed to use nonlethal force to subdue her. miriam carey october , / washington d.c. federal agents killed miriam carey, a -year-old dental hygienist and suburban mother, after she allegedly sped away from a white house check- point. secret service officers claimed that they approached her and told her to stop at the check- point site and that she refused to do so. valarie carey, miriam’s sister, and her attorney, eric sand- ers, claim that the official report of the incident shows that the altercation actually started when an undercover agent moved a large object into carey’s path, and she swerved to avoid him, hit- ting a barricade instead. they say that carey likely tried to drive off from the scene out of fear, and became increasingly frantic as officers chased and shot at her from behind. officers fired sev- eral shots as they pursued her, and they continued to fire even after her car had stopped. she was hit in the back of her head, three times in the back, and once on her left arm. her one-year-old baby widely criticized by civil rights groups. brelo was charged with manslaughter but was acquit- ted on may , when the judge ruled that he “acted reasonably” in climbing onto the hood of the car because it was “brelo’s perception of a threat that matters.” sharmel edwards april , / las vegas, nevada police followed sharmel edwards on the suspicion that she was driving a stolen car. they claimed that when she finally stopped driving and exited the car, she pointed a gun at them, and they opened fire in self-defense. at least three witnesses dis- puted the account that she pointed a gun at the officers, and two claimed that edwards had no weapon. the clark county district attorney’s office disregarded this eyewitness testimony and ruled that the officers who had killed edwards had acted reasonably and lawfully. kendra james may , / portland, oregon three police officers stopped the car kendra james was riding in and removed the driver after they found he had an outstanding warrant. after her friend was arrested, james moved up to the driver’s seat. although james was not under arrest herself, officer scott mccollister began struggling with james to remove her from the vehicle. he lat- er claimed that he tried to use nonlethal methods to subdue james, including pepper spray, but that these methods had failed to work. at some point mccollister held a gun to james’ head and fired a single, fatal shot. subsequently, he claimed he shot james in self-defense because the vehicle was moving while his body was partially inside the car. he was cleared of all charges related to her death by a federal grand jury but found liable in the civil case james’ family filed against him. latanya haggerty june , / chicago, illinois latanya haggerty was shot by chicago police officer serena daniels after the car in which she was a pas- senger failed to stop when police asked the driver to pull over. the officer claimed she thought haggerty pulled a gun, but no weapon was found at the scene. the young computer analyst was speaking on her cell phone at the time she was gunned down. three of the officers were fired, one was suspended, and the family was awarded $ million in a settlement by the city of chicago. sandra bland july , / waller county, texas on july , -year-old sandra bland was pulled over for failing to signal a lane change, and, as a video of her arrest shows, was pinned to the ground and sur- rounded by police officers. bland was heard ques- tioning the officers about why they had slammed her head to the ground, and complaining that she could not hear. officers charged her with assault and held her in the waller county jail. bland was found dead in her cell three days later. bland had recently driven from suburban chicago to texas to begin a new job at her alma mater, texas prairie view a & m. officials maintain that her death was a suicide, but bland’s friends and family members adamantly reject this ex- planation and suspect foul play. black women’s encounters with police often take place against a backdrop of disproportionate poverty. overall, black women are poorer than black men and white women, and many confront desperate condi- tions while attempting to keep themselves and their families afloat. black women continue to face grave socioeconomic disparities even in the face of the economic recovery that others in america have enjoyed. they are the only group whose unemployment rate failed to decrease in . many black women who are abused and killed by police are among the low-income and homeless people increasingly targeted by the policing of poverty and “broken windows” policing practices. the criminalization of poor people, when coupled with negative stereotypes about black women, may result not only in police harassment but also in police killings. policing poverty: police brutality at the intersections of gender, race and class shelly frey december , / houston, texas louis campbell, an off-duty sheriff and hous- ton area minister, shot and killed shelly frey in an attempt to apprehend her friend whom he suspected to be shoplifting from a walmart store. after campbell failed to stop the group from leaving the store, frey and her friend got into a car and attempted to drive away. camp- bell fired shots into the car, hitting frey twice in the neck. he later claimed that he fired shots in self-defense because the driver had attempted to run him over. sharon wilkerson, frey’s mother, explained that after her daugh- ter was shot, neither the driver nor the police sought medical attention for frey. her body was left in the car for eight hours. margaret laverne mitchell may , / los angeles, california described by amnesty international as “a frail, mentally ill, homeless african american woman in her s,” margaret laverne mitchell was shot dead by an lapd police officer on the streets where she lived. mitchell was well known in the area, and local residents, who affection- ately called her “mom,” described her as sweet and harmless. based on eyewitness accounts, officers stopped mitchell as she was pushing a shopping cart down the street. when an eye- witness sought to intervene to protect her from police harassment, mitchell walked away from the officers, who then shot her in the back. the officers later claimed that mitchell—who was years old, weighed pounds, and was a diminutive five foot one—lunged at them with a screwdriver, causing them to fear for their lives. the shooting was found to have violated lapd rules, but the officer who shot mitchell was acquitted of all criminal charges. eleanor bumpurs october , / bronx, new york police arrived at the bronx home of eleanor bumpurs, a -year-old grandmother, in re- sponse to a city-ordered eviction notice. she was four months behind on her monthly rent of $ . . when she refused to open the door for the police, the officers broke into her apart- ment. in the struggle to subdue her, an officer fatally shot bumpurs twice with a -gauge shotgun. in march , the city of new york, as part of a settlement agreement, agreed to pay $ , to bumpurs’ estate. bumpurs was one of the first black women whose deaths prompted protests, but her case never served to drive our collective analysis of the causes and contexts of police violence. some are familiar with the impact of the war on drugs on black women through stories such as those of kemba smith and dorothy gaines—women who were given long prison sentences under manda- tory minimum guidelines despite their peripheral involvement in the drug trade. yet there has been relatively little attention to the law enforcement interactions that drive these phenomena—interactions informed by perceptions of black women’s bodies as vessels for drugs ingested, swallowed, or con- cealed—or of their homes as drug factories or dens of danger and violence. these perceptions have fueled interactions that have taken the lives of black girls as young as and black women as old as . casualties of the war on drugs: black women as drug “mules” kathryn johnston november , / atlanta, georgia undercover police shot and killed -year-old kathryn johnston in her home during a botched drug raid. when officers arrived unannounced at her home and attempted to enter, johnston fired a shot in self-defense. it went through the screen door but it hit no one. in response, the police opened fire and released bullets, several of which hit johnston. afterward, the three atlanta police officers tried to cover up the fact that the incident was based on an in- accurate report of drug activity in johnston’s home. one officer planted marijuana in john- ston’s house and cocaine in the evidence file. all three officers were sentenced to prison terms ranging from to years for conspiracy to vi- olate civil rights resulting in death. two of the officers were further charged with voluntary manslaughter and making false statements. the city of atlanta paid a $ . million settlement to johnston’s family. alberta spruill may , / harlem, new york fifty-seven-year-old alberta spruill, described by her niece cynthia howell as a devout, long- time city worker, died of a heart attack after the police broke down her door and threw a concussion grenade into her apartment. the police were acting on misinformation about drugs and guns inside her apartment. spruill’s family filed a wrongful death lawsuit, which the city ultimately settled for $ . million. danette daniels june , / newark, new jersey danette daniels, a pregnant black woman, was arrested for dealing drugs by new jersey po- lice officers. daniels was then fatally shot in the neck by a police officer as she sat in the police squad car after an alleged “scuffle.” witness- es deny that daniels was involved in any drug transaction at the time of her death. frankie ann perkins march , / chicago, illinois frankie ann perkins, the mother of three daughters, aged , , and , was walking home one evening when the police stopped her. they claimed they observed her swallowing drugs and tried to get her to spit the drugs out. wit- nesses state that the officers strangled her to death, a claim consistent with the medical ex- aminer’s findings and autopsy photos that showed bruises on her face and rib cage, and eyes that were swollen shut. no drugs were ever found. perkins’ mother reported that po- lice subsequently harassed young men in the neighborhood to prevent them from speaking out about her case. the police office of profes- sional standards found “no criminal wrongdo- ing” by the officers. the city of chicago settled a lawsuit with the family for $ , . in the absence of adequate mental health resources for the vast majority of black communities, law enforcement officers often serve as the first and only responders to mental health crises experienced by black women. police officers, however, are not mental health professionals, and often lack the skills and training necessary to handle these situations. this lack of training, compounded with a take- charge-at-all-costs attitude on the part of some officers, has led to the loss of life of those whom the police were called to serve. in several tragic instances, police officers have perceived black women who are experiencing mental health crises as dangerous or as individuals who possess “superhuman” strength no matter how vulnerable, fragile, or in distress they might be. instead of offering the com- passionate support these women needed, police criminalized them and responded with deadly force. violence instead of treatment: police killings of black women in mental health crises tanisha anderson november , / cleveland, ohio the family of -year-old tanisha anderson reached out for assistance to calm their daugh- ter during a mental health crisis. anderson grew increasingly agitated when the police separated her from her family and attempted to place her in the confined space of the police vehicle. dur- ing the struggle, a police officer performed a “takedown” move on her, slamming her against the concrete sidewalk. he placed his knee on her back and handcuffed her as she lay face-down on the pavement. the officers refused to allow anderson’s family to comfort her as she lay dy- ing and exposed on the snow-covered street. she was pronounced dead upon arrival at the hospital. the cuyahoga county medical exam- iner ruled her death a homicide. anderson’s family has filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city of cleveland and two of its police of- ficers. anderson suffered from bipolar disorder, but her mother, cassandra johnson, explained that as long as she was on her medication, “you wouldn’t know anything was wrong with her.” johnson indicated that despite media narra- tives, anderson was not violent, and that it was the behavior of the police in isolating her from her family that made her panic. michelle cusseaux august , / phoenix, arizona police shot michelle cusseaux to death in her home while they were attempting to take her to a mental health facility. cusseaux refused to let the police in her home, prompting officer percy dupra to break through the screen door to gain entry. dupra en- countered cusseaux holding a hammer and shot her in the heart. dupra claimed that although cus- seaux said nothing to threaten him, “she had that anger in her face like she was going to hit some- one with that hammer.” cusseaux’s mother, frances garrett wondered, “what did the police officer see when he pried open the door? a black woman? a lesbian?” cusseaux’s mother further explained that cusseaux was changing the lock on the door when the police arrived, and that was why she had tools out. moreover, the police knew when they arrived at her home that cusseaux suffered from mental illness, but they were ill-prepared to manage the situation and ended her life instead of protect- ing it. in february , cusseaux’s mother filed a lawsuit against the city of phoenix, arguing that the police sergeant either ignored michelle’s condition, or was inadequately trained to respond to it. pearlie golden may , / hearne, texas police officer stephen stem fatally shot pearlie golden, a -year-old woman, after her nephew called to report that she was waving a gun. her nephew said that golden was upset because he had taken her car keys after she failed a driving test. when stem saw the elderly woman wav- ing the gun around, he fired - rounds at her, hitting her at least twice. four days later he was fired from the police department. a grand jury failed to indict him for golden’s killing. kayla moore february , / berkeley, california kayla moore, a black transgender woman, was killed by berkeley police who came to her home in response to a call for help from her roommate because moore was experiencing a mental health crisis. instead of escorting moore to a medical facility as requested, the officers attempted to arrest her on a warrant for a man years her senior, who had the same name moore was given at birth. several officers over- powered moore in her own bedroom, suffo- cating her to death in the process. afterward, officers delayed monitoring her vital signs, referred to her using transgender slurs, and failed to administer adequate life-saving treat- ment. moore’s body was also exposed during and after the police assault. activists in berke- ley have organized to publicize her case, and her family has filed a lawsuit against the berke- ley police officers responsible for her death. shereese francis march , / queens, new york shereese francis’ family called for an ambu- lance after she became emotionally distraught following an argument with her mother. francis was schizophrenic and at the time was not tak- ing her medication. four police officers arrived at their home in queens and tried to convince francis to go to the hospital, but she refused. the officers reported that she was uncoopera- tive and that she lunged at them. in response, all four officers pinned her down and attempt- ed to handcuff her. francis stopped breathing during this altercation, and the hospital pro- nounced her dead shortly afterward. the coro- ner’s report concluded francis had died due to the “compression of [her] trunk during agitated violent behavior.” her family has filed a wrong- ful death lawsuit, and the police department has yet to release its records in response to a freedom of information act request. tyisha miller december , / riverside, california three days after christmas, police officers fa- tally shot -year-old tyisha miller after find- ing her unconscious in a car that had broken down. a gun rested on tyisha’s lap as she lay unconscious. friends said the gun was likely displayed for protection because a man had been harassing her when they left to get help. police arrived and broke a side window of the car, rousing miller. as she regained conscious- ness, officers fired shots at her, striking her with bullets. following the shooting the of- ficers were placed on administrative leave, but no one was charged with the shooting. natasha mckenna february , / fairfax county, virginia -year-old natasha mckenna died in the hos- pital several days after she was tased by offi- cers in the fairfax county jail. mckenna, who weighed pounds, was already restrained with handcuffs behind her back, leg shackles, and a hood when a sheriff’s deputy shocked her four times. she suffered from mental illness and officers used a taser on her even though its use is not recommended on people in men- tal health crisis. officers claimed she was being uncooperative, which led them to restrain and then tase her. within minutes of being tased mckenna stopped breathing. when her mother visited her in the hospital her body was covered in bruises, both of her eyes were blackened, and one of her fingers was missing. she died a few days later. kyam livingston july , / brooklyn, new york nypd officers left kyam livingston in a hold- ing cell after they arrested her for fighting with her grandmother. while in custody, livingston complained of cramps and diarrhea, but officers ignored her pleas for help, and those of people held in the cell with her, for hours. after liv- ingston spent hours in the cell, police finally called for medical assistance when they claimed to notice that she was suffering from “apparent seizures.” she was pronounced dead upon ar- rival at the hospital. a medical examiner found that the cause of death was an alcohol-induced seizure. she was -years-old and a mother of two. in , livingston’s family filed a wrong- ful death lawsuit in brooklyn federal court. sheneque proctor november , / bessemer, alabama eighteen-year-old sheneque proctor was ar- rested for disorderly conduct, and was taken to the bessemer city jail. when proctor—who suf- fered from asthma—called her mother from the jail she indicated that the police had treated her roughly. she had informed the police that she was ill, but they had ignored her requests for medical attention. she was found dead in her cell the next morning. her cell was videotaped during this entire period, but the police depart- ment has refused to release the footage to her family. the family’s lawyer, hank sherrod, told the guardian that “this young woman was de- nied medical treatment while being recorded on videotape right before police eyes. the fact that they won’t hand the film over makes us won- der what they have to hide.” proctor was the mother of an infant boy. a study in social psychological and personality science found that white people were more likely to “implicitly and explicitly superhumanize” black people. in the context of law enforcement interactions, this “superhuman” trope can lead black women to be treated punitively, denied help, and left to suffer in unbearable circumstances while in police custody. this cruelty that would be difficult to imagine were a middle-class white woman involved is no doubt informed by narratives that frame black women as some- how “superhuman” and, therefore, incapable of feeling pain in the same ways as their white counterparts. death in custody: black women as “superhuman” and incapable of feeling pain in the age of mass incarceration and the “war on drugs,” black women are often killed even when they are not the main targets of police action. the notion of “collateral damage,” which frames virtually all police violence against black women as the product of simply being next to the “real target”—black men—is by no means the only or even primary way in which black women experience state-sanctioned violence. nevertheless, the vulnerability of black women and girls to being killed alongside black men no matter what they were doing at the time is a damning indicator of the impacts of the distribution of deadly police force in black communities. guilt by association: black women as “collateral damage” rekia boyd march , / chicago, illinois off-duty chicago police detective dante servin fatally shot -year-old rekia boyd as she was standing in an alley with friends. when servin told them to quiet own, words were exchanged with one of boyd’s friends. servin, seated in his car, then fired five rounds from his gun into the group, whose backs were turned to him at the time, hitting boyd in the back of the head. a friend who rushed to hold and comfort the bleeding young woman was threatened with arrest and forced to step away from the mor- tally wounded boyd as she lay in the street. boyd was removed from life support two days later. servin continued to work for the chica- go police department until he was officially charged with involuntary manslaughter and the reckless discharge of a firearm. his trial was held in april , and the judge issued a directed verdict effectively clearing servin of all charges. the legal reasoning for the judge’s decision – that servin’s actions were intention- al rather than reckless, and, therefore, he could not be convicted of involuntary manslaughter – has been critiqued by legal scholars on all sides of the bar. in , the city of chicago awarded boyd’s family a $ . million wrongful death settlement. aiyana stanley-jones may , / detroit, michigan detroit police officer joseph weekley shot and killed seven-year-old aiyana stanley-jones in her sleep during a raid on her grandmother’s home. weekly claimed that he pulled the trig- ger accidentally during a struggle with the girl’s grandmother, mertilla jones. jones re- ported that she was reaching out to protect her granddaughter and another officer testi- fied that there was no struggle over the weap- on. weekley was tried twice and cleared of all charges, most recently in january . he returned to work in april . tarika wilson january , / lima, ohio police conducted a swat team raid of -year- old tarika wilson’s home in search of wilson’s boyfriend—a suspected drug dealer. moments after entering her home, a police officer opened fire on wilson and her -month-old son, kill- ing her and wounding her baby. wilson was not involved in the illicit drug trade. sergeant joe chavalia, who killed wilson, was acquitted of two misdemeanors: negligent homicide and negligent assault. wilson’s family received a $ . million wrongful death settlement. as the frames and cases described above demonstrate, black women are killed by police in ways and situations that are very similar to those in which black men are killed. yet black women are also killed in gender-specific contexts—such as responses to domestic disturbances. moreover, black women are less likely to be protected by police when they are being murdered, beaten, and/or abused by their partners and community members. a fuller exploration of the nonresponse to violence against black women is be- yond the scope of this report, but it is clear that police involvement in the death of black women involves not only action but also inaction. expanding the analysis of police violence beyond lethal and excessive force to include sexual harassment and assault, policing of gender and sexuality, and profiling and targeted enforcement in the context of prostitution-related offenses brings the breadth of black women’s interactions with law enforcement into sharper focus. in order to conceptualize and act on black women’s experiences of policing and achieve accountability for all forms of state violence, our attention must turn to police violence that takes gender- specific forms or occurs in gender-specific contexts. expanding the frame: gender specific forms and contexts of police violence black women are disproportionately at risk for domestic violence, sexual abuse, and death at the hands of family members, partners, and people they know. a time magazine article revealed that they are almost three times more likely to experience death as a result of domestic violence than are white women. while they comprise only percent of the population, black women make up percent of domestic violence homicides. in fact, a leading cause of death of african american women ages - is homicide at the hands of a current or former intimate partner. even when black women do turn to the police for support, they often fail to secure safety from their abusive part- ners. more disturbingly, an alarming number of police killings of black women take place in the context of police responses to domestic violence situations. similarly, black women’s experiences of sexual or homophobic and transphobic violence—leading to the deaths of at least transgender women nationally in the first few months of alone and a total of at least deaths in – have failed to result in protection or prevention. the reflexive criminalization of black women seems at times to heighten the perception that they are threatening, foreclosing the possibility in police officers’ minds that they are simply survivors of violence. black women survi- vors of violence—and particularly poor, lesbian, gender-nonconforming, and transgender black women—find that police responses to violence all too often result in further, and sometimes deadly, violence against them. police killings in the context of responses to violence meagan hockaday march , / oxnard, california a police officer fatally shot -year-old mother meagan hockaday when responding to a do- mestic dispute. within seconds of entering her home, the officer fatally shot hockaday, who he claimed was advancing toward him with a knife drawn. hockaday had three young children who were all in the house when the in- cident occurred. the official investigation into this case is ongoing. janisha fonville february , / charlotte, north carolina janisha fonville was shot to death by a char- lotte police officer who was responding to a domestic violence complaint involving fonville and her girlfriend. the officer, who had pre- viously been involved in questionable shoot- ings, claimed that fonville lunged at him with a knife. her girlfriend, the only other person on the scene, maintains that fonville was over six feet away from officers, and stood a mere five feet tall, posing no direct threat to the officer who shot her. neighbors questioned why officers could not have used nonlethal force to subdue her. aura rosser november , / ann arbor, michigan when aura rosser’s boyfriend called the po- lice to his apartment over a domestic dispute, rosser was fatally shot upon their arrival. po- lice later claimed she had attacked them with a knife, compelling them to use deadly force. her boyfriend contradicted them, telling report- ers, “it doesn’t make any sense … me and her, we had an argument. glass was being broke, so i called the police to escort her out … the police said ‘police,’ so i stopped. she walked towards them. they said ‘freeze’ and the next thing i know i heard [gunshots].” one officer shot rosser while the other attempted to use a taser to subdue her. rosser suffered from ad- diction and mental health issues, but her sister disputes that she was a threat to the police. “she would have fainted at the sight of the gun being drawn on her. she would have been ex- tremely docile, no aggression whatsoever to- wards police.” the officer who shot rosser was not charged with her death, but her family is moving forward with a civil suit. yvette smith february , / bastrop county, texas police officers arrived at -year-old yvette smith’s home in response to a domestic dis- turbance complaint between two men in the household. smith, a single mother of two, opened the door for the officers and was shot almost immediately in the head and the stom- ach. the officers first alleged that smith had a gun, but that claim was retracted the next day. deputy daniel willis, who fatally shot smith, has been indicted for murder. along with cisgender and heterosexual black women, lesbian, bisexual, transgender, and gender-nonconforming black women have been largely absent from the discourse around racist state violence. the overlap of sexism, rac- ism, homophobia, and transphobia place black lgbtq and gender-nonconforming people in a precarious position at the intersection of constructs around gender, race, and sexuality, fueling police violence against them. for instance, police often punish actual or perceived sexual or gender nonconformity with physical and sexual violence. these acts are sometimes accompanied by homophobic, transphobic, and/or misogynist slurs like “dyke ass bitch,” or assertions that if they want to “act like a man” they will be “treated like a man,” or threats to “rape them straight.” in one particularly egregious case, a black lesbian in atlanta reported being raped by a police of- ficer who told her that the world needed “one less dyke.” profiling of black transgender women, along with black non-transgender women for prostitution-related offenses is rampant, sometimes based on the mere presence or possession of a condom. black transgender women and gender-nonconforming women are also routinely sub- jected to transphobic verbal harassment and abuse, unlawful and degrading searches to assign gender based on anatomical features, and dangerous placement in police custody. according to the national transgender discrimi- nation survey, percent of black transgender people who had interactions with police reported harassment, percent reported physical assault, and percent reported sexual assault. gender and sexuality policing duanna johnson february , / memphis, tennessee duanna johnson was a black woman living in memphis who had been turned away from jobs, drug treatment, and every shelter in the city because she was transgen- der. johnson was profiled and arrested for prostitution as she walked down the street one night, even though there was no alleged client and no documented exchange of money for sex. booking officer bridges mcrae called her “faggot” and “he-she”. when she refused to answer to the slurs, mcrae put on gloves, wrapped a pair of hand- cuffs around his knuckles and savagely beat her about the face and head while officer james swain held her down. mcrae then pepper-sprayed her, pushed her to the floor and handcuffed her. security video captured the entire incident. mccrae was federally prosecuted, pled to a single count of violating johnson’s civil rights after a mis- trial, and sentenced to two years in prison for both john- son’s beating and tax evasion. johnson was later found dead, shot execution style, the third black transgender woman to be killed in memphis in two years. her killing remains unsolved. nizah morris december , / philadelphia, pennsylvania nizah morris, a black transgender woman, was found in- jured and unconscious a few minutes after three phila- delphia police officers gave her a ride home. one of the officers, thomas berry, returned to the scene where she was reported to be bleeding and unconscious. instead of helping her or reporting that a crime had taken place, he covered “her face while she was still alive.” she was left at the scene of the crime for minutes before finally being taken to a hospital where she died two days later of a severe head injury. the police claimed they had no idea what happened. their disclaimer remains highly suspect given that morris had been beaten with the butt of a gun, and the officers were the last ones to see her prior to the incident. her death remains unsolved. new jersey august , / new york, new york the new jersey are a group of black lesbian and gen- der-nonconforming women who were physically assault- ed and threatened with rape by a man because they were lesbians, only to be arrested and charged by responding police officers with “gang assault” when they defended themselves—an outcome which would be unimagina- ble were they a group of straight, gender-conforming, wealthy white women. four of the women went to trial in the midst of a media circus characterizing them as a “seething sapphic septet” and “lesbian wolfpack.” the man who had ripped a handful of dreadlocks out of one woman’s head, burned another with a cigarette, and choked a third claimed to be a victim of a “heterosexual hate crime.” they were found guilty and sentenced to up to years in prison until a campaign for justice won an acquittal, new trials, and shorter sentences. an entirely hidden dimension of police violence against black women is reflected in victim reports of sexual abuse perpetrated by officers. the cato institute’s annual report on police misconduct found that: “sexual mis- conduct was the second most common form of misconduct reported throughout [after excessive force] with officers involved in sexual misconduct complaints during that period, of which were involved in complaints that involved forcible non-consensual sexual activity such as sexual assault or sexual battery.” when the existing— though limited—data on police sexual assault are compared to fbi crime statistics, the results indicate that “sexual assault rates are significantly higher for police when compared to the general population.” the uneven power dynamic between an officer and his victim, combined with the officer’s possible belief that since he is the law, he is above the law, have been hypothesized as root causes of this type of police abuse. black women are particularly vulnerable to sexual assault by police due to historically entrenched presumptions of promiscuity and sexual availability. historically, the american legal system has not protected black women from sexual assault, thereby creating opportunities for law enforcement officials to sexually abuse them with the knowledge that they are unlikely to suffer any penalties for their actions. unfortunately, there is no official data on how often police officers commit these crimes. existing studies are largely based on media coverage, criminal convictions, and civil cases. the lack of data collection by police departments and civilian oversight bodies is compounded by the underreporting of sexual assaults in general. victims are even less likely to report the crime if the assailant is a police officer. “the women are terrified,” says penny harrington, the former police chief of portland, oregon. “who are they going to call? it’s the police who are abusing them.” sexual harassment and assault have been reported to be particularly pervasive during traffic stops and interactions with minors. it is also reported to take place with alarming frequency in the context of responses to requests for assistance or investigation of domestic violence or sexual assault. unseen and unsupported: black women as targets of sexual assault daniel holtzclaw perpetrator in oklahoma, officer daniel holtzclaw stopped a -year-old grandmother on her way home from a game of dominoes with friends. he pub- licly strip-searched her, ostensibly looking for drugs, and then forced her to perform oral sex, prompting her to file a complaint. further in- vestigation uncovered allegations that he had raped and/or sexually assaulted at least oth- er black women over a period of several years, often in the context of traffic stops. holtzclaw generally preyed on women with criminal re- cords or those who were caught with drug par- aphernalia, which inhibited them from coming forward. a facebook group in his defense has garnered hundreds of “likes,” revealing how the widespread defense of abusive police officers has converged with skepticism toward rape victims to generate sympathy for holtzclaw in- stead of his many victims. his trial is set for october . ernest marsalis perpetrator ernest marsalis’ abhorrent record of abusing women while serving as a chicago police officer was known before he was accused of kidnap- ping and raping a -year-old african american woman during an arrest. marsalis had previously been accused of violent or threatening behav- ior in more than cases. most of the charges were lodged by women, and two involved rape. despite these multiple complaints, marsalis was never prosecuted. he resigned after months on the force. denise stewart august , / brooklyn, new york denise stewart, a -year-old grandmother, answered when the police knocked on the door of the wrong apart- ment in response to an allegation that a child was be- ing harmed. she informed them that they had the wrong apartment and that she had just come out of the shower. nonetheless, new york city police officers dragged her half naked, out of her towel and into a hallway, as she begged for her inhaler and later collapsed. her neighbors protested and videotaped the behavior of the officers, to no avail. police dragged stewart’s four children out into the hall and handcuffed them as well. minutes passed as an officer held her naked in the hallway of her apartment building in utter disregard for her rights and dignity. of- ficers ultimately proceeded to the correct apartment and threw a towel over her. rosann miller july , / brooklyn, new york just weeks after nypd officers choked eric garner to death on camera, rosann miller, a black woman who was seven months pregnant, was placed in a chokehold by officers who initially approached her to tell her she could not barbeque in front of her house. community activists and politicians expressed outrage at the use of a pro- hibited chokehold on a visibly pregnant black woman. although the case received some attention, the officers involved have not been charged. alesia thomas july , / los angeles, california mother of two alesia thomas dropped off her children— ages and —at a los angeles police station because she felt she was unable to care for them. in response, lapd officers came to thomas’ apartment to arrest her for child abandonment. officer mary o’callaghan was caught on tape repeatedly kicking thomas as she attempted to arrest her and move her into the police vehicle. thomas lost consciousness in the back of the police vehicle, went into cardiac arrest, and was pro- nounced dead at the hospital shortly afterward. officer o’callaghan was charged with assault under color of au- thority and was convicted on june , . sonji taylor december , / los angeles, california police officers shot -year old sonji taylor in a roof- top parking lot where she had parked her car. taylor was a college graduate and church choir member. she was returning from christmas shopping with her three-year-old son. the officers claimed that she was holding her son hostage with a kitchen knife while repeating the words “the blood of je- sus.” the officers charged taylor, shooting her with pepper spray, and tearing her son away from her. they reported that they shot taylor in self-defense after she “lunged” at them. according to her family, the officers surrounded taylor for half an hour be- fore she was killed. her family stated that the knife was a christmas present, her son was never harmed, and “the blood of jesus” was a phrase taylor had learned from her pentecostal upbringing to repeat when in danger. the autopsy revealed that she was shot twice in the chest and several times in the back while lying face-down on the ground. no officers were prosecuted for the shooting. in , the city agreed to a $ . million settlement. the presence of children does not necessarily prompt the police to proceed with caution where pregnant and mothering black women are involved—even those holding their babies. this lack of concern is con- sistent with a longstanding historic pattern of devaluing black motherhood and the loving bonds that tie mothers and children together. damaging stereotypes that cast black women as criminal and unfit moth- ers share a common genealogy with practices that deprive black women of protections typically associ- ated with motherhood during police encounters, sometimes leading to the use of lethal force. the use of excessive force against black mothers and their children patricia hartley and constance malcolm february , / bronx, new york shortly after her unarmed grandson, ramarley gra- ham, was shot to death by police in front of her, an officer threatened to shoot patricia hartley, when she asked why the officer had killed graham. she was then taken to the police precinct and interrogated without an attorney for hours. constance malcolm—graham’s mother and hartley’s daughter—went to the precinct to find hartley. as she tried to ensure that hartley was not questioned without counsel present, constance malcolm was violently pushed to the ground by police officers and insensitively informed of her son’s death. in , the family received a $ . million settlement. two grand juries failed to indict the officers respon- sible and the family is calling for an investigation by the department of justice. tajai rice, sister of tamir rice november , / cleveland, ohio in january , cleveland officials released extend- ed video footage of the fatal shooting of -year-old tamir rice. the police killed him as he played with a toy gun in the park. this case has understandably caused a national outcry. less well known is the fact that rice’s -year-old sister also endured a violent confrontation with the officers who killed her brother. as she ran toward his side after he was shot, the po- lice tackled the distraught girl, handcuffed her and forced her into the back seat of the police car. the officers’ neglect of the dying child and their refusal to heed the cries of his sister reflect a profound de- valuing of black life and of the loving bonds that exist between black people. tasha thomas, girlfriend of john crawford iii august , / beavercreek, ohio the police harshly interrogated tasha thomas on the same day they fatally shot and killed her boyfriend, john crawford iii, in an ohio walmart. crawford was talking to thomas on the phone as police shot him while he held one of the store’s bb guns. thomas was then taken into custody for questioning. the video of the interrogation shows that the officers first ac- cused her of being under the influence of drugs and threatened her. not until the “interview” had gone on for minutes did the police inform thomas that her boyfriend was dead. at that point, one of the officers curtly remarked that, “as a result of his actions, he is gone.” thomas will never see justice for the emo- tional injuries senselessly inflicted on her that day. she was killed in a car accident on new year’s day, . when black women advocate for black family members targeted by police, the police sometimes treat them inhumanely. these women, who may be victims of violence themselves, are sometimes subjected to brutal interrogations. the police have treated grieving women with little empathy and have offered no services to support them in the traumatic aftermath of the loss of a loved one. no sympathy: police terrorize black women who demand justice for family members our efforts to combat police violence must expand to address the experiences of all black people. an intersectional, black feminist perspective—one that recognizes that categories such as race, gender, gen- der identity, and sexual orientation are not mutually exclusive—demands the inclusion of black women and girls, transgender and not transgender, lesbian, bisexual, and heterosexual in the dominant discourse around police violence. when the lives of marginalized black women are centered, a clearer picture of structural oppressions emerges. no analysis of state violence against black bodies can be complete with- out including all black bodies within its frame. until we say the names and tell the stories of the entire black community, we cannot truly claim to fight for all black lives. recommendations: building a gender-inclusive agenda for addressing anti-black state violence the frameworks and stories presented in say her name point to specific actions community organizers, policy makers, researchers, and the media can take to build a comprehensive approach to fighting state- sanctioned violence—one that is inclusive of non-transgender, transgender, and gender-nonconforming black women. what follows are some initial recommendations for those involved in various aspects of the work to make all black lives matter. recommendations: • at protests, demonstrations, and other actions calling attention to state violence, include the faces, names, and stories of black women alongside those of black men. • local and national organizations and social movements must find ways to support all families who have lost a loved one to police violence and all surviving victims of state violence. • policy platforms should be developed using an intersectional gender and racial lens to ensure that comprehensive solutions to state violence are being built and that the myriad ways in which it impacts the lives of all black people are addressed. • spaces must be created to discuss the ways in which patriarchy, homophobia, and transphobia impact black communities as a whole, and to hold individuals and organizations accountable for addressing how our communities sometimes recreate systems of oppression. • skills to talk about the multiplicity of ways in which state violence affects all black women and girls should be continuously developed. in so doing, stakeholders can move beyond a frame that highlights only killing. all black women—transgender, non-transgender, and gender-nonconforming—must be included in this reconceptualization. • as domestic violence is a leading cause of death for black women aged - , there is a need to acknowledge that both public and private forms of violence are devastating the lives of black women and girls. conclusion some examples of gender-specific and inclusive policy demands to address black women’s experiences of policing: . calling for passage of the end racial profiling act of , which for the first time includes a ban on racial profiling based on gender, gender identity, and sexual orientation, and urging local police departments to adopt and enforce gender and sexuality-inclusive racial profiling bans; . calling for enactment and enforcement of “zero-tolerance” policies toward sexual harassment and assault of members of the public by police officers; . calling for a comprehensive ban on confiscation, use, or mere possession or presence of condoms as evidence of any prostitution-related offense; . calling for adoption and enforcement of police department policies explicitly banning officers from searching people to assign gender based on anatomical features, and requiring officers to respect gender identity and expression in all police interactions, searches, and placements in police custody; . calling for use-of-force policies to prohibit the use of tasers or excessive force on pregnant women or children. resources: say her name: sample questions for a community conversation building a gender-inclusive frame for addressing state-sanctioned violence requires that communities come together with the purpose of focusing on this issue. the following questions can serve as a starting place for communities interested in taking action. . say her name articulated several frames to expand our analysis of state violence to include black women and gender-nonconforming black people. what frames and/or individual stories from say her name stood out most to you and why? what forms of state violence against women do we see playing out in our own community? . what forms of private violence do we see playing out in our community? what can we do to draw attention and concern to the state and private violence black women face? how do we see a patriarchal mentality play out in our community organizing and within the media? what impact would expanding our frame of state violence to include women and gender- nonconforming people have locally and nationally? . as we go about our daily work and conversations, what can each of us do to expand the frame on state violence to include black women and girls? . does anyone here want to share an experience they have had with police violence personally or through a loved one? why is sharing these stories so important? * how can we come together to support the families and surviving victims of state violence of all genders? what steps can we take to pressure local law enforcement officials to collect data on police violence that are gender- and race-specific? and what about data on sexual assault and rape by law enforcement officials? what concrete actions can we take to increase awareness around the issues raised in this discussion? who is willing to commit to specific actions to further the concerns we raised? and, for those willing to make such a commitment, what will those actions be? ____________________________________________________________________________________________ * once this door is opened, those holding the conversation need to be prepared for what comes up, which is often deep trauma, including sexual violence. if this question is to be included in the dialogue, a trained professional should be on hand and prepared to offer survivors emotional supports and referrals to trauma care. resources: say her name: a webinar on black women and police violence. by the african american policy forum. . (available at: http://www.aapf.org/sayhername) invisible betrayal: police violence and the rapes of black women in the united states. by black women’s blueprint. . (available at: http://www.ushrnetwork.org/sites/ushrnetwork.org/files/ -police-wapb.pdf) arrested justice: black women, violence, and america’s prison nation. by beth richie. new york: new york university press. . law enforcement violence against women of color & trans people of color. an organizer’s resource & tool kit. by incite! women of color against violence (available at: http://www.incite-national.org/sites/ default/files/incite_files/resource_docs/ _toolkit-final.pdf) queer (in)justice: the criminalization of lgbt people in the united states. by joey l. mogul, andrea j. ritchie, and kay whitlock. boston: beacon press. . “law enforcement violence against women of color.” by andrea j. ritchie. in color of violence: the incite! anthology. cambridge, ma: south end press. . “from private violence to mass incarceration: thinking intersectionally about women, race, and social control,” by kimberlé williams crenshaw, in overpoliced and underprotected: women, race, and criminalization, ucla l. rev. . . (available at: http://www.uclalawreview.org/from-private- violence-to-mass-incarceration-thinking-intersectionally-about-women-race-and-social-control/)) caught in the net: the impact of drug policies on women and families. by american civil liberties union, break the chains, and brennan center for justice at nyu. . (available at https://www.aclu.org/files/ images/asset_upload_file _ .pdf) whose safety? women of color and the violence of law enforcement. by anannya bhattacharjee. philadelphia: american friends service committee. . (available at: http://www.afsc.org/document/whose-safety) ____________________________________________________________________________________________ our reference to black women throughout this document includes cisgender, transgender and gender- nonconforming, lesbian, bisexual and queer women as well as women with disabilities. david lohr, “charleston church shooting victims identified,” huffington post, june , , available at http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ / / /charleston-church-shooting-victims-identified_n_ . html. scott neuman, “video shows texas police officer pulling gun on teens at pool party,” npr, june , , available at http://www.npr.org/sections/thetwo-way/ / / / /video-shows-texas- police-officer-pulling-gun-on-teens-at-pool-party; brittney cooper, “america’s war on black girls: why mckinney police violence isn’t about ‘one bad apple’,” salon, june , , available at http://www. salon.com/ / / /americas_war_on_black_girls_why_mckinney_police_violence_isnt_about_one_ bad_apple/. the video reveals multiple levels of aggression. in addition to shoving becton’s face into the ground and pushing his knee into her back, the officer sits on her buttocks, straddling her small body as she weeps. when two black teenage boys attempt to defend her, the officer pulls out his gun and aims it at them, forcing them to literally run for their lives. see, e.g., incite!, law enforcement violence against women of color and transgender people of color: a critical intersection of gender and state violence - an organizer’s toolkit (burbank, ca: incite!, ), available at: http://www.incite-national.org/sites/default/files/incite_files/resource_docs/ _toolkit- final.pdf; andrea j. ritchie, “law enforcement violence against women of color,” in color of violence: the incite! anthology, ed. incite! women of color against violence (boston, ma: south end press, ); kimberlé williams crenshaw, “demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black femi- nist critique of antidiscrimination doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics.” u. chi. legal f. , ( ); kimberlé williams crenshaw, “from private violence to mass incarceration: thinking intersec- tionally about women, race, and social control,” in overpoliced and underprotected: women, race, and criminalization, by kimberle williams crenshaw, in overpoliced and underprotected: women, race, and criminalization, ucla l. rev. , ( ), available at http://www.uclalawreview.org/from-private- violence-to-mass-incarceration-thinking-intersectionally-about-women-race-and-social-control/; lenora lapidus, namita luthra, anjuli verma, deborah small, patricia allard, and kirsten levingston / american civil liberties union, break the chains, brennan center for justice at nyu, caught in the net: the impact of drug policies on women and families (new york: american civil liberties union, break the chains: communities of color and the war on drugs, brennan center for justice at new york university, ), available at https://www.aclu.org/files/images/asset_upload_file _ .pdf; anannya bhattacharjee, whose safety? women of color and the violence of law enforcement (philadelphia: , american friends service committee, ( ), available at: http://www.afsc.org/document/whose-safety; dayo f. gore, damayo,, tamara jones & joo-hyun kang, “organizing at the intersections: a roundtable discussion of police brutality through the lens of race, class, and sexual identities,” in zero tolerance: quality of life and the new police brutality in new york city, ed. andrea mcardle and tanya erzen (new york: nyu press, ), organizing at the intersections, zero tolerance: quality of life and the new police brutality in new york city, mccardle and erzen, eds. (nyu press ); angela davis, violence against women and the ongoing challenge to racism (latham: kitchen table press, ); angela davis, the angela y. davis reader, ed. , joy james, ed. (malden, ma: blackwell, ), ; joy james, resisting state violence: radicalism, gender, and race in u.s. culture (minneapolis: university of minnesota, ). a concept that many use to understand and explain the complex experiences of black girls and women as they encounter state violence is “intersectionality,” which addresses the dynamic relationship among race, gender, class, sexuality, age, nationality, ability and other social variables. see kimberlé williams crenshaw, “demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex: a black feminist critique of antidiscrimina- tion doctrine, feminist theory and antiracist politics.” u. chi. legal f. , ( ). r. lundman and r. kaufman, “driving while black: effects of race, ethnicity and gender on citizen reports of traffic stops and police action,” criminology ( ): . new york civil liberties union, “women demand end to discriminatory nypd stop-and-frisk” new york civil liberties union, press release, april , ); women of color policy network, “women of color: two-thirds of all women in new york city still invisible in policy - the nd annual report on the status of women of color in nyc,” (new york: women of color policy network at nyu wagner & the roundtable of institutions of people of color, wagner institute for public policy at new york university, ). arlene eisen, operation ghetto storm: annual report on the extrajudicial killing of black people by police, security guards, and vigilantes (new york: malcolm x grassroots movement, april ): , avail- able at http://www.operationghettostorm.org/uploads/ / / / / /operation_ghetto_storm.pdf. for instance, in , alternet published an article titled, “ black man is killed every hours by police” based on this study. adam hudson, “ black man is killed every hours by police or vigilantes: america is perpetually at war with its own people,” alternet, may , . alicia garza, “a herstory of the #blacklivesmatter movement,” black lives matter, december , available at http://blacklivesmatter.com/a-herstory-of-the-blacklivesmatter-movement/. alicia garza, pa- trisse cullers and opal tometi, who self-identify as black queer women, created #blacklivesmatter and spearhead the multimedia grassroots movement. in her analysis, garza challenges the way women of color, particularly lgbtq women of color, have been erased both from the history of the movement and from the national discourse about state violence. the word trans or transgender refers to people whose gender identity and/or gender expression are different from the sex assigned to them at birth. the word cis or cisgender is used to refer to people whose gender identity and expression matches the gender they were assigned at birth. in other words, transgender is a term used to describe people whose way of understanding their own gender, or whose way of expressing their gender (clothing, hairstyle, etc.), is different from what society expects based on the gender they were assigned when they were born. this term includes a wide range of people with dif- ferent experiences — those who change from one gender to another as well as those who sometimes ex- press different gender characteristics or whose gender expression is not clearly definable as masculine or feminine. when speaking about transgender people, always refer to their current gender as they describe it — which may include not identifying with any gender. when using the term “black men” in this document, we are referring to non-transgender black men. we recognize that black transgender men are often targeted in ways that are both similar to non-transgender black men and unique to their transgender experience, and address these experiences when referring to those of black transgender people. aaron gould sheinin, “family of woman killed after firing at apd questions procedures,” atlanta journal-constitution, may , . peter hermann, “baltimore’s transgender community mourns one of their own, slain by police,” washington post, april , ; justin moyer, “nsa attacker identified as transgender homeless sex worker,” washington post, april , ; peter hermann, sari horwitz, and ellen nakashima, “a fatal wrong turn suspected at nsa,” washington post, march , . carlos saucedo, “high-speed chase ends with officers killing woman,” abc news , march , . valarie carey (sister of miriam carey) and eric sanders (family attorney of miriam carey), interview by rachel gilmer and rachel anspach, may , . steve almasy, “woman killed during d.c. chase was shot five times from behind, autopsy shows,” cnn, april , . “shantel davis, unarmed alleged car thief, shot and killed by nypd cop in brooklyn,” huffington post, june , . thomas sheeran, “timothy russell, malissa williams shooting: cleveland community wonders why rounds fired,” associated press, december , . mitch smith and ashley southall, “cleveland police officer acquitted of manslaughter in deaths,” new york times, may , ; kimbriell kelly and wesley lowery, “cleveland officer acquitted in killing of unarmed pair amid barrage of gunfire,” washington post, may , . matt guillermo, “vegas woman shot by police identified,” fox , april , . mike blasky, “friends: woman killed by police was nonviolent,” las vegas review-journal, april , . nicole lucht, “da releases review of april police shooting,” news now las vegas, november , . portland copwatch, “police shooting of young women draws intense community criticism: the death of kendra james, , prompts new calls for accountability,” the people’s police report , august, . todd lighty and gary washburn, “city to pay haggertys $ million: deal makes daley meet with fam- ily,” chicago tribune, may , . chuck goudie, christine tressel, ross weidner, barb markoff and ann pistone, “road trip for suburban woman ends in jailhouse death,” abc chicago, july , . laura bassett, “black women are the only demographic not gaining jobs,” huffington post, septem- ber , . james q. wilson and george l. kelling, broken windows: the police and neighborhood safety, atlan- tic monthly, march , ; bernard e. harcourt illusion of order: the false promise of broken windows policing. (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, ); zero tolerance: quality of life and the new police brutality in new york city, andrea mccardle and tanya erzen, eds. (nyu press ). laura beck, “woman shot dead by walmart security guard on suspicion of shoplifting,” jezebel, december , ; “family: mother suspected of shoplifting at walmart didn’t deserve to die,” khou, december , . sharon wilkerson, interview by authors, may , . amnesty international, usa: race, rights, and police brutality, amr / / (washington, dc: amnesty international, ), . the stolen lives project, stolen lives: killed by law enforcement, nd ed. (new york: the stolen lives project, october nd coalition, anthony baez foundation, national lawyers guild, ), ; earl ofari hutchinson, “new menace to society? police shootings of black women are the deadly conse- quence of stereotypes,” christian science monitor, june , , available at http://www.csmonitor. com/ / /p s .html. a motorist who witnessed the police encounter with ms. mitchell said that when police stopped and harassed ms. mitchell, she was doing nothing more than pushing her cart down the street. hutchinson, “new menace to society? police shootings of black women are the deadly consequence of stereotypes,” . ibid. ibid. selwyn raab, “state judge dismisses indictment of officer in the bumpurs killing,” new york times, april , . lenora lapidus, namita luthra, anjuli verma, deborah small, patricia allard, and kirsten levingston, caught in the net: the impact of drug policies on women and families (new york: american civil liberties union, break the chains: communities of color and the war on drugs, brennan center for justice at new york university, ), available at https://www.aclu.org/files/images/asset_upload_file _ .pdf. “ex-atlanta officers get prison time for cover-up in deadly raid,” cnn, february , . william k. rashbaum, “woman dies after police mistakenly raid her apartment,” new york times, may , . ronald smothers, “newark officer is cleared in shooting during arrest,” new york times, september , . gary washburn, “city settles police brutality suit: $ , to be paid in west side death,” chicago tribune, july , . brandon blackwell, “daughter of mentally ill cleveland woman who died in custody hopes for change,” cleveland plain dealer, november , . cassandra johnson and sarah gideon, “interview on tanisha anderson,” interview by authors, may , . frances garrett, “interview on michelle cusseaux,” interview by authors, may , . ibid. editorial board, “did michelle cusseaux have to die?” the arizona republic, august , . associated press, “elderly woman shot by police: pearlie golden, , killed after allegedly brandishing a gun,” huffington post, may , . kimberly veklerov, “leaked documents shed new light on kayla moore’s in-custody death,” daily californian, may , ; toshio meronek, “how did kayla moore die,” east bay express, march , . nick pinto, “family sues to learn why shereese francis was suffocated in her home by police,” village voice, june , . david rosenzweig, “no charges in killing of tyisha miller,” los angeles times, december , . jesse singal, “white people think black people are magical,” new york magazine, november , ; adam waytz, kelly marie hoffman, and sophie trawalter, “a superhumanization bias in whites’ percep- tions of blacks.” social psychological and personality science ( ), doi . / . julie k. brown and mary ellen klas, “inmate reports threats by guard, turns up dead,” miami herald, october , . state violence in prisons fall outside the scope of this brief, but latandra ellington’s case represents a critical example of deadly state violence against incarcerated black women. in september , latandra ellington was just seven months away from getting out of the lowell correctional institu- tion in florida when she wrote a letter to her aunt saying she feared for her life because a corrections officer had threatened to beat her to death. ten days later she was found dead. she was -years-old, the mother of four children. no concrete evidence exists to determine who killed her, but her autopsy revealed that she suffered blunt force trauma to her abdomen consistent with a beating. the family has hired a lawyer and the case is ongoing. in the meantime, the florida department of corrections has refused to release information about whether or not the sergeant suspected of killing ellington has been disciplined in any way. tom jackman and justin jouvenal, “fairfax jail inmate in taser death was shackled,” washington post, april , . jane janekzco, “kyam livingston’s family sues nypd after death in holding cell,” huffington post, october , . ed pilkington, “family of black alabama teenager who died in police cell still waiting for answers,” the guardian, january , . martinez sutton, “interview on rekia boyd,” interview by rachel anspach and rachel gilmer, february , . editorial board, “rekia’s shooting was ‘beyond reckless’ so cop got a pass,” chicago tribune, april , ; steve schmadeke, “after acquittal, prosecutors defend decisions in fatal police shooting,” chicago tribune, april , . charlie leduff, “what killed aiyana stanley-jones?,” mother jones, november/december . associated press, “final charge dropped against detroit cop in fatal raid,” new york times, january , ; george hunter, “cop in aiyana stanley-jones shooting back on job,” the detroit news, april , . christopher maag, “police shooting of mother and infant exposes a city’s racial tension,” new york times, january , . institute on domestic violence in the african american community, “fact sheet: intimate partner vio- lence (ipv) in the african american community” (st. paul, mn: institute on domestic violence in the af- rican american community at university of minnesota, ), available at http://www.idvaac.org/media/ publications/factsheet.idvaac_aapcfv-community insights.pdf. feminista jones, “why black women struggle more with domestic violence,” time, september ; selwyn crawford, “black women at greater risk of becoming victims of homicidal domestic violence,” the dallas morning news, september , . andrea j. ritchie, “law enforcement violence against women of color,” in color of violence: the incite! anthology, ed. incite! women of color against violence (boston, ma: south end press ). national lgbtq task force, stop trans murders (new york: national lgbtq task force, june ), available at http://www.thetaskforce.org/stop-trans-murders/. wendy leung, “oxnard woman killed by police after domestic dispute call,” ventura county star, march , . wbtv web staff, “woman shot, killed by charlotte officer, no charges expected,” wbtv, february , . fred clasen-kelly, “witness: officer didn’t have to shoot,” charlotte observer, february , ; mark becker, “girlfriend of victim in deadly police shooting speaks out,” wsoctv, february , . kate abbey-lambertz, “no charges for officer who killed mentally ill woman who ‘confronted’ police with a knife,” huffington post, february , . calily bien, “family of woman shot, killed by bastrop county sheriff’s deputy seeks damages,” kxan, august , . joey l. mogul, andrea j. ritchie, and kay whitlock, queer (in)justice: the criminalization of lgbt people in the united states (boston, ma: beacon press ). ibid. amnesty international, stonewalled: police abuse and misconduct against lgbt people in the united states (washington, dc: amnesty international, ) , available at http://www.amnesty.org/en/library/ asset/amr / / /en/ d-d bd- dd- a -d a c d /amr en.pdf. see, e.g., florrie burke, forced into prostitution and denied a lifeline, huffington post, may , , available at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/florrie-burke/forced-into-prostitution-_b_ .html; hu- man rights watch, sex workers at risk: condoms as evidence of prostitution in four u.s. cities, ( ) available at http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/us forupload_ .pdf; acacia shields, crimi- nalizing condoms: how policing practices put sex workers at iv services at risk in kenya, namibia, russia, south africa, the united states, and zimbabwe (new york: open society foundations, ), available at http://www.opensocietyfoundations.org/reports/criminalizing-condoms; pros network and leigh tomppert, public health crisis: the impact of using condoms as evidence of prostitution in new york city, (new york: pros network and sex workers project, ), available at http://sexworkersproject. org/downloads/ / -public-health-crisis.pdf. national black justice coalition, injustice at every turn: a look at black respondents to the transgen- der discrimination survey (washington, dc: national black justice coalition, national center for trans- gender equality, national gay and lesbian task force, ) available at: http://endtransdiscrimination. org/pdfs/blacktransfactsheetfinal_ .pdf. andrea ritchie, “standing with duanna johnson against police brutality,” left turn, issue # , may ; “video shows beating at poplar,” action news , wmc-tv, june , , available at: http:// www.wmctv.com/global/story.asp?s= . wendi c. thomas, “rights groups mum on beating,” memphis commercial appeal, june , . rev. dwight montgomery, president of the southern christian leadership conference (sclc), later made a statement that the sclc was “appalled ... duanna as an individual, as a human being, has our support.” but, he added, “i certainly don’t condone transgender or homosexuality.” mogul, ritchie, and whitlock. japhy grant, “duanna johnson murdered ‘execution-style’ in memphis,” queerty, november , . princess harmony rodriguez, “whose lives matter?: trans women of color and police violence,” black girl dangerous, december , . see, e.g., beth e. richie, arrested justice: black women, violence, and america’s prison nation (new york: nyu press ); joey l. mogul, andrea j. ritchie, and kay whitlock, queer (in)justice: the crimi- nalization of lgbt people in the united states (boston: beacon press, ); incite!, law enforcement violence against women of color and transgender people of color: a critical intersection of gender and state violence - an organizer’s toolkit (burbank, ca: incite!, ), available at: http://www.incite- national.org/sites/default/files/incite_files/resource_docs/ _toolkit-final.pdf. the cato institute’s national police misconduct reporting project, annual report, (washington, dc: cato institute, ), available at http://www.policemisconduct.net/statistics/ -annual-report/. ibid. a study from bowling green state university found that in known cases, . percent of law en- forcement officers who commit sexual assault are men, and . percent of victims are women. for more information, see: philip matthew stinson, john liederbach, steven l. brewer, and brooke e. mathna, “po- lice sexual misconduct a national scale study of arrested officers.” criminal justice policy review ( ), doi . nancy phillips and craig r. mccoy, “extorting sex with a badge,” philadelphia inquirer, august , . samuel walker and dawn irlbeck, police sexual abuse of teenage girls: a update on “driving while female” university of nebraska at omaha, department of criminal justice, police professional- ism initiative (omaha, ne: police professionalism initiative, university of nebraska at omaha, depart- ment of criminal justice, june ), available at: http://samuelwalker.net/wp-content/uploads/ / / dwf .pdf; samuel walker and dawn irlbeck, , “driving while female”: a national problem in police misconduct” (omaha, ne: police professionalism initiative, university of nebraska at omaha, department of criminal justice, march ), available at: http://samuelwalker.net/wp-content/uploads/ / / dwf .pdf. nancy phillips and craig r. mccoy, “‘police turned predators’ series” philadelphia inquirer, august , available at http://www.philly.com/philly/news/special_packages/inquirer/police_turned_preda- tors.html. jessica testa, “how police caught the cop who allegedly sexually abused black women,” buzzfeed news, september , . while outside the scope of this brief, dorothea reynolds’ case is also illustrative of the sexual assault black women face at the hands of the state. dorothea reynolds was sent to the ohio reformatory for women for arson. in prison a white guard began making sexual advances toward her. reynolds reported that the officer forced her to perform oral sex on him. the prison authorities gave her various lie-detector tests -- all of which she passed. but, rather than acting in the interest of her safety, prison officials sent reynolds back to her cell and told her to come back if she gathered more evidence. the guard was moved to another prison but not prosecuted. as of now, the da’s office has refused to litigate reynolds’ case even though she was assaulted three times. see reynolds v. smith et al, no. : cv - document (s.d. ohio ). john marzulli, laura dimon, and ginger adams otis, “naked brooklyn woman dragged from apart- ment, left topless in hallway for minutes by nypd officers who say she beat -year old daughter,” new york daily news, august , , available at: http://www.nydailynews.com/new-york/brooklyn/ nypd-officers-drag-naked-brooklyn-woman-apartment-video-article- . emily thomas, “pregnant woman allegedly put in chokehold by nypd officer,” huffington post, july , . tami abdollah, “lapd officer mary o’callaghan charged in arrest that turned fatal,” huffington post, october , . marisa gerber and brittny mejia, “jury convicts lapd officer for kicking woman in groin,” los angeles times, june , . andrea j. ritchie, “law enforcement violence against women of color”; dianne klein and jim newton, “lapd shooting leaves anguish and questions,” los angeles times, february , . matt lait, “council oks settlements in police suits,” los angeles times, july , . personal communication with constance graham, mother of ramarley graham, september . lauren gambino, “tamir rice shooting: cleveland police handcuffed sister as -year-old lay dying,” the guardian, january , . tom mckay, “watch cops viciously interrogate a woman after shooting her boyfriend dead,” newsmic, december , , available at http://mic.com/articles/ /watch-police-viciously-interro- gate-girlfriend-of-an-unarmed-black-man-police-shot-dead. ibid. for more information on these and other policy recommendations to address women’s experiences of policing, see the president’s task force on st century policing. final report of the president’s task force on st century policing (washington, dc: office of community oriented policing services, ), available at http://www.cops.usdoj.gov/pdf/taskforce/taskforce_finalreport.pdf, adopting several key recommendations that over individuals, women’s, racial justice, and lgbt organizations offered in policy and oversight: women of color’s experience of policing (january ) available at http:// changethenypd.org/sites/default/files/docs/women% s% sign% letter% on% to% presiden- tial% task% force% -% policy% and% oversight% -% final.pdf. millions march, december , . www.aapf.org justice as friendship: a theory of law review review the future of whiteness linda martín alcoff polity press, cambridge, uk and malden, ma, , viii+ pp., isbn- : - (paper); isbn- : - (hardbound) within the next few decades white people will lose their majority status in the united states and perhaps also in parts of europe. this is the context in which linda martín alcoff sets out to ask whether there could be ‘a place in the rainbow’ for whites: could whites become just an ‘ordinary’ group among others in the rainbow, or is whiteness – as critical race theorists and whiteness studies scholars most often argue – so intrinsically tied to racism and white supremacy as to make this impossible? alcoff is well aware of the racist baggage, the supremacist claims and privileges that continue to accompany whiteness. even so, she argues that a place for whites qua white in the rainbow is possible and desirable. the intended audience for this book is mainly antiracist progressives, among whom alcoff has long established her own credentials as an activist and critical thinker. she insists that it is now imperative for them to consider how whiteness could become lived or ‘inhabited’ as a positive identity that is delinked from racism. the history of whiteness, as alcoff nicely exemplifies, is complex and far from homogenous, and its future meanings, too, are in principle multiple and open. accordingly, she argues ‘against the idea that white identity cannot adapt in positive ways to a loss of centrality [for] it is not at all clear that, without white supremacy, there can be no whiteness’ (p. ). to the contrary, she insists, the ‘essentializing of whiteness as necessarily, fundamentally and centrally about white supremacy is simply ahistorical, and based in a wrong understanding of how meanings operate as well as of how social identities are formed’ (pp. – ). essentializing whiteness is not only conceptually misguided, it is also politically counterproductive. what she calls ‘antiracist white exceptionalism’, wherein whiteness is conceived as nothing but a project of race supremacy, has serious costs for progressive politics. for exceptionalism not only expunges numerous instances of transracial collective action from the historical record but also obscures potential sites for such action today. in addition to rejecting essentialist conceptions of race, alcoff also criticizes those alternative views she calls ‘eliminativism’. by eliminativism she refers to left-wing contemporary political theory ( ) , e –e . doi: . /cpt. . ; advance online publication march © macmillan publishers ltd. - contemporary political theory vol. , , e –e www.palgrave.com/journals © macmillan publishers ltd. - contemporary political theory vol. , , e –e e review versions of ‘post-racialism’ that seek to deny the ‘reality’ of race, that view naming race as itself contributing to racism, or that claim racial categories are now becoming irrelevant (p. ). for social identities, including but not limited to race, carry ‘ontological weight’. even though they are more fluid than essentialists grant, they remain ‘real’. ‘a realist view’, she argues, ‘understands identities to be significant aspects of the social world and of our lived sense of who we are and how we are positioned in the immediate social environs in which we live and work’ (p. ). thus, they make sense of the world for us, and they involve material, embodied and visible practices. they are imbued with systems of collective meaning, and they locate us within shifting historical and hermeneutic horizons. alcoff painstakingly, and in my view persuasively, carves out a conceptual middle ground where social identities in general and race identities in particular are neither essentialized nor erased. in what ways, then, is whiteness ‘real’? although race is not a viable biological category it remains real as a ‘social kind’, she argues. its objective economic and other empirical effects can be measured, its dominant collective cultural imaginary persists, and its role in ‘the constitution of individual subjects with particular ways of experiencing and perceiving as well as interacting with the social and natural environment’ (p. ) cannot be ignored. thus, she criticizes recent neo-marxist work, such as that of piketty, for ignoring the ways in which race is integral to the history of capitalism (p. ). she also argues against claims that the category of whiteness has no real content because there are only multiple ethnic identities into which it dissolves. it is true that jews, italians or irish were once excluded from being ‘white’ but are now included, that other groups are now ambiguously located on its margins, and that ‘mixed’ identities are becoming increasingly common. indeed, alcoff’s characterization of her own identity as being ‘on the margins’ of whiteness – she is, she recounts, the light-skinned child of a panamanian father and a southern, poor white mother of irish origin (pp. – ) – itself epitomizes the complexities of whiteness. yet, for all its internal differentiations whiteness remains – and will remain for the foreseeable future – a powerful, reality-shaping social phenomenon. the question, then, to which alcoff turns in the later sections of the book is how whiteness may productively be lived in ways that are not intrinsically tied to racism. ‘what would it mean for whites to become more positively embodied as white within a multipolar social landscape?’ she asks (p. ). the later sections the book that address this question are less finely argued than the critiques of essentialism and eliminativism, and they tend to skim, sometimes rather uncritically, across diverse social science materials. however, alcoff also draws insightfully on examples from film and autobiography as resources. white guilt, compassion or moral outrage are most often presumed to supply the main motives for why some whites become ‘allies’ in antiracist struggles. moving beyond (while not discounting) such assumptions, alcoff makes the important argument that white interests now are key to white transformation. although challenges to white supremacy can incite reactionary responses such as the tea party, she argues there © macmillan publishers ltd. - contemporary political theory vol. , , e –e e review are also increasing ‘positive’ motivations for whites – on their own behalf – ‘to reassess the meaning of whiteness’ (p. ). these include their inability to make sense of their present economic and cultural predicaments without grasping the historical effects of racism, the impossibility of virtually any effective labor or political action except in cross-racial coalitions, and the discomfort that many whites experience in a world where, in a kind of ‘double consciousness’, they are increasingly obliged to see themselves through the eyes of their nonwhite neighbors. i suspect alcoff may underestimate the degree to which a great many whites, even poor ones, still live in worlds insulated from contact with nonwhites and enjoy the benefits of racially segmented labor markets and white cultural preeminence. however, within a longer-term perspective her insistence that we focus on why a white minority may be motivated to ‘inhabit’ their whiteness positively is of the upmost importance. alcoff concludes her book by telling the stories of two white men whose interests lead them – in strikingly divergent ways – to combat white supremacy while also positively inhabiting their whiteness. bob zellner was a white field coordinator for the student nonviolent coordinating committee during the civil rights struggle. what interests alcoff about him is not only his outstanding dedication to the cause of black rights but his insistence that the southern racist order was also a violation of white rights, a regime of terror against whites such as himself. she cites zellner: he was not, he said, acting ‘on a missionary impulse’, but rather ‘joining the movement to establish my own right to fight for what i believed in’ (p. ). very different is the final story alcoff relates in the book. this concerns c.p. ellis, a leading member of the ku klux klan (kkk) in north carolina, who later left the klan and became a supporter of school integration. ellis was a dirt-poor southern white for whom kkk membership initially appeared to offer recognition and social status. however, snubbed by wealthier members of the klan, and realizing that they had the financial resources to remove their children from the public schools after integration, whereas he would not, he left the kkk. putting himself at risk of attack from his erstwhile kkk colleagues, he instead began actively to cooperate with civil rights activists. over time he developed affective relations with some of them, and he learned how the realities of poor black lives shared some affinities with his own. he struggled to ensure that harmonious school integration took place, not only to the benefit of poor white children such as his own but also out of a deep concern for black children. in concluding the book alcoff admits to a certain sympathy for ellis. he was himself a victim of deeply oppressive circumstances, and he found a way to resist them by acting at once on behalf of others as well as himself within a multiracial community of activists. whites who contest white supremacy are not ‘allies’ but rather ‘activists in their own right’, she insists (p. ). this is a courageous book to have written. for, given the climate of race politics in the era of ‘black lives matter’, alcoff’s project is likely to prove contentious. it may make many antiracists, be they ‘white exceptionalists’ or ‘race eliminativists’, © macmillan publishers ltd. - contemporary political theory vol. , , e –e e review white or nonwhite, uncomfortable or even angry. some may object that her very focus on the question of how whiteness could come to be lived more positively is posed from the site of her own (albeit marginal) white privilege; or that pursuing her question is merely a distraction from the main project, which still should be to combat white racism and to empower nonwhites. alcoff certainly does not deny that combatting racism and empowering nonwhites remain vital struggles. however, if race identities are unlikely to disappear in the foreseeable future then she is surely correct that it matters not only to whites but also to nonwhites – and to the struggle itself against racism – that we consider what whiteness could become other than an assertion of white supremacy. alcoff’s book thus initiates an important conversation. it opens up new avenues in critical race and whiteness studies that deserve to be pursued further. sonia kruks oberlin college, oberlin, oh , usa sonia.kruks@oberlin.edu 	the future of whiteness s x .indd du bois review, : ( ) – . © hutchins center for african and african american research - x/ $ . doi: . /s x state of the discourse black agency and the ongoing struggle for black educational opportunity carla o’connor school of education , university of michigan carla shedd , unequal city: race, schools, and perceptions of injustice , new york : russell sage foundation , , pages, isbn - - - - . $ . paper. amanda e. lewis and john b. diamond , despite the best intentions: how racial inequality thrives in good schools , new york : oxford university press , , pages, isbn - - - - . $ . hardcover. …theoretically, the negro needs neither segregated schools nor mixed schools. what he needs is education. —w. e. b. du bois, “does the negro need separate schools?” journal of negro education ( , p. ) …the real evil of pre- brown public schools [is] the state-supported subordination of blacks in every aspect of the educational process. racial separation is only the most obvious mani- festation of this subordination. providing unequal and inadequate school resources and excluding black parents from meaningful participation in school policymaking are at least as damaging to black children as enforced separation… whether based on racial balance precedents or compensatory education theories, remedies that fail to attack all policies of racial subordination almost guarantee that the basic evil of segregated schools will survive and flourish, even in those systems where racially balanced schools can be achieved. low academic performance and large numbers of disciplinary and expulsion cases are only two of the predictable outcomes in integrated schools where the racial subordination of blacks is reasserted in, if anything, a more damaging form . —derrick bell, “serving two masters: integration ideals and client interests in school desegregation litigation,” the yale law journal ( , pp. – ) at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core carla o’connor du bois review: social science research on race : , forty-one years separated w. e. b. du bois’s and derrick bell’s shared recognition that school desegregation would not resolve the struggle for black educational opportunity. du bois pronounced, “…i am no fool…i know that race prejudice in the united states today is such that most negroes cannot receive proper education in white institutions” ( , pp. - ). writing nearly twenty years before the brown v. board of education decision, du bois’s ( ) concern with “race prejudice” was focused on its more vulgar expression as demonstrated by white “animosity” (p. ). he explained that blacks may have been “admitted and tolerated” in white (northern) schools but “not educated” nor “welcomed” (p. ). there they received neither “decent” nor “sympathetic” education and found themselves “despised,” “resented,” “neglected and bullied” (du bois , pp. - ). du bois indicated that the harm to black children was not limited to what they learned or failed to learn academically but what they came to understand about themselves, their positioning, their history, and their agency as black subjects. approximately twenty years after the brown decision, derrick bell ( ), empha- sized that the durability and insidiousness of race prejudice is most powerfully articu- lated via state-supported black subordination. rather than highlight the abject neglect and palatable disdain black children experienced in their encounters with white children, parents, and teachers in desegregated schools, he drew our attention to race prejudice (or more precisely racism) that is evidenced via institutionalized policies and systematic practices that are more nuanced and less perceptible (or obvious) but are no less profound and debilitating than state sanctioned school segregation. although bell did not explicitly indicate, as du bois had, that the impact on black children extended beyond readily measured educational outcomes (as per his reference to academic performance and disciplinary and expulsion rates), he did indicate that institutionalized racial subordination reasserts itself in new forms that produce a range of predictable and, by implication, less predictable outcomes. having published their books in , carla shedd, author of unequal city: race, schools, and perceptions of injustice , and amanda e. lewis and john b. diamond, authors of despite the best intentions: how racial inequality thrives in good schools differen- tially take up, refine, expand upon, and resituate the concerns raised by du bois and bell. both books, using chicago as the field setting, are concerned with the ongoing struggle for black educational opportunity; how that struggle seems to be indetermin- ably tied to the racial demographics of schools, and how in the pursuit of educational opportunity blacks must still cross the racial (and by implication class and resource) boundaries that distinguish schools. in the process they confront new forms of institu- tionalized racial subordination. in unpacking these new forms of racial subordination, shedd and lewis and dia- mond make evident the paradoxes that emerge when, in this contemporary era, many black students and their families still find themselves “choosing” between segregated and desegregated schools rather than choosing an education that guarantees their abil- ity to thrive academically, psychologically, and socio-culturally. below i elaborate a bit more on this choice context as evidenced by these texts and then discuss in detail the findings and contributions of each book as well as a key lingering question for both texts: where is the promise for black collective and political agency in the ongoing struggle for black educational opportunity? the “choice” context(s) although the majority of black and brown children in chicago (and in other urban centers) remain sequestered in racially segregated and underresourced schools, some at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core losing sight of black agency du bois review: social science research on race : , black and brown children do have the “choice” to attend more resourced and racially integrated schools. the gains of the civil rights movement have enabled some blacks (particularly the middle class) to activate school choice by moving into neighborhoods featuring these presumably “good” schools; and the proliferation of charter schools and the expansion of open enrollment policies in chicago and elsewhere have oth- erwise enabled black children and their families to choose these “good” schools over their neighborhood schools. lewis and diamond illuminate the first choice context by documenting how black children experience riverview high school, their racially integrated and well- resourced neighborhood high school, located on the north side of chicago. shedd contends with the second choice context and documents the experiences of black children who leave their south side neighborhoods each day to attend either lincoln park high school or walter payton preparatory high school, two selective, racially diverse, and highly resourced schools. both schools, like riverview, are located on the north side of chicago. shedd compares how the experiences of lincoln park and payton students compare with those of children who also reside on chicago’s south side, but attend either harper high school or tilden career community academy high school, two racially segregated and underresourced high schools within a short distance from their homes. while lewis and diamond are singularly and substan- tively focused on how institutionalized black subordination is articulated every day through the micro-interactions and micro-political processes that animate, and are animated by, school policies and practices, shedd emphasizes how black (and brown) subordination is experienced in the journey between home and school and is especially influenced by the penal character of both urban streets and urban schools. lewis and diamond explore the relationship between their documentation of “everyday” black subordination and black achievement. shedd, advancing what she refers to as a “place- sensitive” sociology, primarily concerns herself with how the journey between home and school, and the subordinating experiences embedded therein, “expand” (or not) youths’ contexts for making sense of injustice. journeying to opportunity or the construction and reinforcement of injustice? according to shedd, a “place-sensitive” sociology appreciates place “not just as a backdrop to our social lives but also as an agentic player in our lives with measure- able and independent effects” (p. ). inspired by literature on neighborhood effects, shedd demonstrates this sensitivity by establishing chicago as an “unequal city” that is ripe for exploring “how race and place shape youth perceptions of social and criminal injustice” (p. ). she begins by documenting how racial and socio-economic segrega- tion in chicago—itself a product of histories of racism and structured inequality— intersect with housing and especially school reform policies to produce “a racially ordered ‘geography of opportunity’ wherein the resources for improving school and life chances are meted out by race, class, and zip code” (p. ). more specifically, shedd orients the reader to how the illinois charter school law of (which autho- rized charter schools) and the renaissance plan of (which was designed to replace underperforming neighborhood schools with instructionally innovative schools) extended the promise of greater educational opportunity for those willing to transgress local school attendance boundaries. shedd indicates that this reconfiguration of educational opportunity coincided with the razing of chicago’s largest public housing projects and the relocation of at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core carla o’connor du bois review: social science research on race : , their residents. by implication, the black youths among them were displaced not only from their “residential” but their “educational” communities. taken together, these housing and school reform policies meant that many chicago adolescents were now traveling longer distances—geographically, psychologically, and symbolically—to attend schools that promised them greater educational and social opportunity. signifi- cantly, their passages were not safe because these policies emerged against an upsurge in chicago violent crime which was met with increased policing that eventually seeped into school policies and practices. shedd notes, “…police officers and other mechanisms of social control have become a central feature of urban schools since the early s, in tandem with the peak in violent crime in large urban cities in the nation” (p. ). shedd is ultimately concerned with how youths’, but especially how black youths’, “perceptions of themselves and the larger social world are shaped by their daily interac- tions with others” in their journey back and forth from home to school—particularly if that journey carries them into whiter and wealthier neighborhoods and, by impli- cation, into more racially diverse and highly resourced schools (p. ). of particular concern are the “symbolic and actual dangers” youths must make sense of and navi- gate (e.g., differential surveillance and monitoring in school and public settings; con- tact with police in and out of school; transgression of gang boundaries). according to shedd, such sense-making and navigation teaches youths important lessons about the “boundaries of race, place, class and more and how to achieve safe passage within and across these boundaries” (p. ). in order to capture these lessons, shedd relies on both survey and interview data. the survey data, collected by the chicago consortium on school research (ccsr), captures, among other things, how some , ninth- and tenth-grade students enrolled in chicago public schools, perceive of social injustice (i.e., “whether racial discrimination makes it difficult for members of his or her race to “find a job” and “find a place to live’”) as well as criminal injustice (i.e., assessments of “various forms of discrimination and measures…of whether or not police engage in racial, gender, age, and class discrimination”) (shedd , p. ). these survey data were supplemented by initial (and when feasible, five-year follow up) open-ended interviews with forty teenagers, who also completed a replication of the ccsr survey. these students were equally distributed across the four aforementioned schools that differed on the basis of racial composition, selective enrollment, and their surrounding neighborhoods; and the ten students from each school were selected with the goal of maximizing “the variation of respondents by racial composition, perceptions of social and criminal jus- tice, and police contact” (p. ). in interviewing them, shedd sought to make sense of “everything from how they traveled to school to which class they enjoyed best, how much their parents supervised their free time, and even their ideas about the rules and laws they had to follow inside and outside the schoolhouse doors” (p. ). the intent of shedd’s study is novel and compelling and the design is both prom- ising and intriguing with regards to considering the school journeys of adolescents attending schools that differ in terms of demographics and opportunity. shedd con- vincingly argues that if we want to understand how youths make sense of social and criminal injustice it is not enough to examine their interactions with courts, jails, and the criminal justice system; we must examine far more mundane enterprises including their travel back and forth to school and the interactions that are embedded therein— including their interactions with same and different race peers and adults, and their interactions with the police and their concomitant sense of safety. she notes that we must also examine their experiences in school with particular attention to how they make sense of the shadow carceral system that has become a common feature of urban schools. shedd shows that this system is more physically salient in under-resourced at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core losing sight of black agency du bois review: social science research on race : , and racially isolated schools (via the presence of metal detectors and police in and around school campuses) and more symbolically salient in highly resourced and racially diverse schools (via the heightened surveillance and disproportionate punishment of black and brown youths compared to white youths). shedd also captures the imagi- nation and investment of the reader when she notes that her work will complicate cur- rent discourse regarding neighborhood effects which has inadvertently marginalized how (traveling to) schools effect students’ experiences and perceptions. unfortunately, shedd’s findings, interpretation, and articulation of the study’s implications are less compelling than they might have been given the intrigue raised by the objectives and design of her study. shedd’s survey and interview data show that african americans and hispanics “who travel farther along the racial-spatial divide’’ to “attend more racially integrated (and better resourced) schools,” have “‘expanded contexts’ or wider frames of com- parison, than their peers who travel shorter distances” and attend majority black or hispanic schools (p. ). these long distance travelers are much more sensitized to injustice, particularly if their school neighborhood contexts are “dissimilar on several measures of significance—racial composition, quality of resources, policing tactics, and so on” (p. ). shedd elaborates that the isolation of students attending south side schools not only sequesters them “from job opportunities and housing choices, to name a few” but from “unequivocal evidence that they are likely to receive inferior treatment because of their race” (p. ). shedd explains that although young people “are likely to recognize [old-fashioned discrimination and prejudice] even when they live in and attend school in racially homogenous socially isolated neighborhood [like those on the south side of chicago], their perception of structural discrimination is more uneven” (p. ). it is uneven because, absent an expanded or comparative frame, they are limited in their ability to robustly and profoundly assess their group’s relative disadvantage . thus while race still predicted perceptions of social and criminal injus- tice with black and hispanic students perceiving greater injustice than asian or white students, the within group variation with which black and hispanic students made sense of injustice was a function of whether they attended segregated, resource poor versus racially diverse, resource rich schools. nowhere was the effect of schools more salient than in explaining how students made sense of criminal injustice. this was especially the case for those black and brown students who attended school on the north side and had a high perception of crimi- nal injustice despite having had no personal contact with the police. how did these students “come to believe that members of their race are more likely to be ‘treated worse’ and ‘stopped and/or searched by the police’” (p. ) when they, compared to many of their peers attending south side schools, did not report having been stopped, searched, or told to move on by police? after all, shedd collected her data prior to the dawning of the black lives matter movement and the relentless public discussions about the susceptibility of black people to criminal injustice. shedd explains that it was the carceral apparatus in schools (even if more subtly articulated in north side schools) that helps to explain this quandary. she notes that in the absence of police contact outside of schools, her participants’ “perceptions of injustice have been shaped by their experiences, both personal and vicarious, with police and security guards in their school environments” (p. , author’s emphasis) which included being subject to differential enforcement of school rules and codes of conduct on the part of these and other schools officials (e.g., teachers) or witnessing such differential treatment along racial lines. early on in her book shedd asks, “what exactly are our young people learning in school—not just about math and science but also about their own importance and at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core carla o’connor du bois review: social science research on race : , the relative worth of their peers?” (p. )—a question anticipated by du bois. in her book she makes evident that if they are black and brown and they leave their black and brown neighborhoods to pursue educational opportunity a great distance from their homes, their journey to and experience in these whiter and wealthier schools confirms their group’s structured disadvantage and their vulnerability to the criminal gaze. shedd offers important and robust claims and establishes a significant empirical case regarding the unanticipated consequences of journeying to opportunity and experiencing subordination along the journey and upon arrival at the destination. however, her presentation and interpretation of the qualitative data (meant to ani- mate and elaborate upon the quantitative data) is less cogent than it might have been. given the small number of student participants who varied in terms of race, ethnic- ity, and socio-economic status and stretched across four school contexts, shedd often struggled in her effort to report on the broad territory of experience and perspectives that coincided with this variation and then stitch these varied experiences and perspec- tives together in a manner that convincingly accounted for prominent themes and claims. as such, the prospective promise and power of shedd’s qualitative data and the extent to which they added texture to the quantitative findings is not fully realized. this is not the case for despite the best intentions which compellingly integrates quanti- tative and qualitative data to evidence and theorize how the evil of black subordination is reasserted in new forms in racially diverse schools. the everyday instantiation of institutionalized racism and white supremacy in school routines in their book, lewis and diamond examine the ostensibly race-neutral policies and practices that are inevitably animated by race-central micro-interactions and micro- political processes to produce, sustain and justify racial gaps in educational outcomes. their book project builds upon growing interest in better understanding how school- based processes contribute to achievement gaps, especially in light of continued evidence that socioeconomic background and family resources, while very influential, do not explain these gaps in full. lewis and diamond also deliberately and effectively tangle with the most prominent explanation for the black-white gap in particular: the oppositional culture argument or the notion that black students expend limited effort in school because of the negative influences of a black peer culture that defines school- ing as a white domain and as an enterprise that fails to yield comparable rewards for blacks and whites. like shedd, lewis and diamond rely on both quantitative and qualitative data. they similarly had the opportunity to take advantage of a secondary data set—in their case, the assessment of secondary school student culture that was administered at riverview and fourteen similar districts and captured the perspectives and experiences of , seventh- to eleventh-grade students with regards to the following: academic achievement, academic behaviors, experience with negative peer pressure, affect toward school, academic aspirations, and friend group racial composition. lewis and diamond also rely on interviews with a racially and ethnically diverse group of par- ticipants; but in addition to interviewing black, white, and latino students (eighty- three in total), they had the benefit of interviewing many of these students’ parents and also teachers and staff across various departments and units at riverview. students were asked to discuss their school experience, educational aspirations and expecta- tions, perceptions of race and opportunity, and beliefs about the relationship between peer dynamics and school achievement. among other things, the adults were asked to at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core losing sight of black agency du bois review: social science research on race : , discuss how they experienced riverview (including its policies and practices), how they made sense of racial achievement gaps, and how their children (in the case of parents) and students of different racial groups experienced riverview. before getting to the heart of their findings and the substance of their theorization, lewis and diamond deliberately work to debunk the oppositional culture argument. towards this end, in chapter two they recount current evidence (both survey research and ethnographic) that indicates that key assumptions of the argument are broadly unsubstantiated for black youths and their families. they, however, acknowledge that there is, nevertheless, some evidence that oppositional culture may have traction in racially integrated schools, like riverview. for this reason, they empirically explored “whether there is a culture of opposition among black students at riverview” and found “that there is virtually no support for the oppositional culture argument in [their] data” (pp. , ). more specifically, in conflict with the logic and suppositions of the oppositional culture argument, their data indicate (among other findings) that: ( ) despite being sensitized to racial discrimination and an inequitable opportunity structure (often via familial influences and their own experiences in school), black stu- dents demonstrated more pro-school attitudes than their white peers and remained committed to the notion that education paid off and could be a resource in combatting the racism they anticipated; ( ) black students were no more likely than white stu- dents to experience negative peer pressure for achievement and, like white students, those who reported experiencing teasing for high achievement were a minority ( % or less); and ( ) black students reported receiving more academic support and encour- agement from their friends than was the case for white students. a couple of conundrums were, however, raised by their quantitative data analy- sis, including the finding that, compared to their white counterparts, black students reported being less happy at school. lewis and diamond indicate that “given that black students don’t report negative feelings about specific school activities, it is very likely that black students’ lower levels of reported happiness at their schools is likely dissatisfaction with the education institutions themselves rather than opposition to the actual educative process” (p. ). this speculation establishes an important prelude to their subsequent reporting of how black (versus white) students and their families experience riverview’s disciplinary and tracking routines—and why a focus on these and other schooling processes provide a more profitable starting point for understand- ing racial patterns in educational outcomes compared to our previous focus on the culture (and by implication pathology) of black folks. using organizational theory, racialization theory, and theories of capital and repro- duction as key interpretative frames, lewis and diamond document how riverview’s disciplinary and track placement routines function as everyday institutionalized racism. they explain that the school’s rules and placement procedures appear rational in and of themselves and equally applicable to all students (what lewis and diamond categorize as the ostensive aspect of routines ). however, these routines are enacted in ways (i.e., the performative aspect of routines ) that systematically disenfranchise black and brown students and privilege white students. according to lewis and diamond, such inequity emerges because the school officials enacting the routines are not only susceptible to implicit biases and unconscious racism but are deferential to the power and status of white families. these orientations on the part of school officials, and the subsequent impact on how routines are performed, make evident how “race works structurally (affecting who has access to certain kinds of resources)” as well as “symbolically (affecting how we understand who is around us)” (p. ). lewis and diamond show that as per the symbolic operation of race in riverview, black students are more apt to be selected for punishment because of pervasive racial at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core carla o’connor du bois review: social science research on race : , stereotypes about the criminality of black people (and also the hypersexuality of black girls). they are also less likely to be enrolled in more selective courses (i.e., honors and advancement placement courses) because of stereotypes that mark them as less academically competent or inclined and the subsequent extension of lower perfor- mance expectations. in contrast, pervasive assumptions about the innocence of whites (including the perceived sexual innocence of white girls) allow them to elude scrutiny and surveillance and to decrease, in turn, the likelihood that they will be observed or interpreted as having transgressed school rules, dress codes, or codes of conduct— thereby diminishing their chances of being selected for punishment. with regards to track placement, pervasive positive assumptions regarding whites’ academic ability and inclination, unreflexively orient school officials to high performance expectations and to recommend or facilitate, in turn, white students’ enrollment in more rigorous courses. at the structural level, racism, as it has been articulated across time, has led to the confounding of race and class such that, on average, whites evidence more elite eco- nomic and educational statuses and more dominant cultural know-how than blacks. they then leverage these statuses and know-how to manipulate school routines to the advantage of their children. this common place navigation and negotiation of routines on the part of many socio-economically advantaged white parents not only results in their own children receiving favorable processing in both the disciplinary and track- ing systems, but accords advantage to white children as a whole. more specifically, lewis and diamond elucidate how the anticipation that white parents with power will resist both negative disciplinary decisions and lower track placement, inclines school officials to unreflexively process almost any white student more favorably in the disciplinary and tracking systems. this anticipatory response thereby converts the economic and cultural capital of some whites into symbolic capital for all whites. that is, being white comes to symbolize statuses and orientations that trigger and institutionalize white preferential treatment in the enactment of school routines. what is especially compelling about lewis’ and diamond’s analysis is their ability to show that the power and durability of these raced micro-assessments, -actions, and -interactions are a function of their subtlety. these micro-processes, which constitute “everyday racism,” in no way approach the kind of vitriolic or intentional racism to which du bois alluded. rather, to quote beverly tatum ( ), this articulation of racism operates like “smog in the air” (p. ). the smog constitutes “the images and messages that affirm the assumed superiority of whites and the assumed inferiority of people of color” (tatum , p. ). tatum notes that, like smog, these images and messages are sometimes thick enough to be visible but are often imperceptible; and that, regardless of their perceptibility, we breathe in and are influenced by these images and messages each day. as per lewis’ and diamond’s analysis, then, we should not be concerned with whether individual school officials or parents are racist but how this smog unreflexively informs the meaning-making of even well intended practitio- ners and parents to affect how their response to and take up of school practices and policies produces racial patterns in educational outcomes. lewis and diamond subsequently theorize how these raced and stereotype laden policies and practices are then institutionally reinforced and legitimized via the opportu- nity hoarding of whites. they make clear that the white families at riverview “are not focused on directly blocking racial minorities as they are focused on securing advantage for their own” (p. ), and in the process of securing this advantage they “advocate… for the maintenance of the structures of inequality that facilitate their advantage” (p. ). as such, lewis and diamond document the pressure school personnel “felt from middle-class white parents not to change anything about the tracking system or any of the related practices that currently created and/or reinforced white students’ at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core losing sight of black agency du bois review: social science research on race : , advantages” (p. ). “believing that there were not enough resources to do every- thing well, these parents…[sought] to ensure that their children continue[d] to get the best of what riverview ha[d] to offer” (p. ). even in instances where white par- ents were willing to support supplementary programs aimed at closing racial achieve- ment gaps (rather than overhaul the system to facilitate racial equity), school officials reported that these programs “eventually became populated by white students” if they were shown to produce “positive results” (p. ). having actively facilitated and reinforced their children’s advantaged status in the academic hierarchy, lewis and diamond show how white parents subsequently ratio- nalized the racial stratification of this hierarchy via the invocation of racial stereotypes and status beliefs. that is, breathing in the smog yet again, white parents were shown to attribute blacks’ disadvantaged status in the academic hierarchy to cultural devi- ance and deficiencies on the part of black children and black families. by implication they distinguished themselves and other white families as normative and as culturally superior. according to lewis and diamond: how do members of the white middle and upper class rationalize their positions in status hierarchies? they engage in ideological work, including the marking of symbolic boundaries between deserving and undeserving social actors, or people “above” and “below” others. a key mechanism is the creation of symbolic bound- aries using ideas drawn from a larger social milieu. (p. ) other scholars have previously documented the extent to which black and brown students are susceptible to the criminal gaze and pejorative assumptions regarding their sexual, academic, and cultural inclinations. lewis and diamond, however, accomplish two significant analytical feats having also documented the same. their analysis makes evident how such meaning-making, “despite the best intentions,” gets instantiated in the micro-level enactments of educational policy and practice to produce and ratio- nalize racial hierarchies in schools. additionally, their analysis is not limited to the ways black students and their parents experience this subordination, but how white supremacy gets institutionalized and rationalized as per “the key role white actors play and have always played in reproducing their own racial advantage” (p. ). they thus make empirically and theoretically transparent how black subordination and white supremacy are inextricably yoked. unresolved dilemmas in the pursuit of educational opportunity both unequal city and despite the best intentions reveal what carla shedd coins as the “paradoxes of progress.” in a city where there is a clear “geography of opportunity” some black students and their families have traversed this geography to find them- selves in “good” schools. these better resourced (and therefore whiter and wealthier) schools evidence better facilities, more experienced teachers, and more rigorous cur- riculum and instruction. the problem is that we are now more than sixty years past the brown v. board of education decision—what was then imagined as a decisive blow against black educational subordination—and, paradoxically, it is still the case that these presumably good schools are not yet good for black and brown children. for some (like the black and brown students in shedd’s study) the goodness is compromised by the inherent indignity of having to rise early and travel far outside of your neighborhood to have access to the quality educational resources that most white, at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core carla o’connor du bois review: social science research on race : , middle class children experience within a short distance of their homes. but once inside these schools (whether as function of an arduous journey or because youths are among a black minority that resides in communities that feature such schools), black students find that these schools are culturally, socially, and institutionally organized in ways that amplify and reify their subordination. these new forms of subordination evidence greater subtlety and have often escaped sufficient public scrutiny because they are instantiated in routine schooling practices that are either: ( ) represented as equi- table and racially neutral (as demonstrated by lewis and diamond); or ( ) advanced in the interest of some greater good like school or public safety (as demonstrated by shedd). their everydayness, subtlety, and nods to equity and safety make them that much more intractable because it is less than clear how to galvanize robust opposition to them as was the case when blacks collectively resisted more obvious forms of black subordination (e.g., de jure school segregation). as such, the following is the unspoken dilemma in each text: what is the prospect for black human and political agency in the contemporary battle for black educational opportunity (and ideally liberation)? in the case of unequal city that which might plant the seeds for such agency is positioned as a liability. shedd indicates, “the fact that increased school diversity may lead to higher perceptions of injustice among african american and hispanic youth speaks to the ‘protective’ properties of segregation and social isolation, which can prevent youth from confirming their individual- and group- level disadvantage” (p. ). when we place this assessment within the context of shedd having previously noted that “perceptions of social injustice are positively related to crime and delinquency” (p. ) it is clear that shedd struggles to conceive of how the recognition of injustice can function as a political resource. shedd does signal that it can function as a psycho- logical resource when she notes how this recognition can protect black and brown people from self-blame. namely, she indicates: when youth whose lives are governed by unjust institutions fail to perceive injustice, but also fail to succeed, they understand their failure to be personal instead of perceiving race, class, or other social factors as key contributors to social inequality (p. ). however, she inadvertently converts the recognition of injustice into a substantive impairment in encounters with the state. she notes: individuals who perceive low levels of injustice may believe that members of their group are treated as fairly as other groups, or even better because they truly are (the case with the white and asian american or filipino students in the sample), or because they have a “restricted comparative frame” or reduced expectations (the experience of youth who live and learn in the same neighborhood in a low-resource environment). the ninth-grader attending harper who has been searched but not arrested multiple times in one year may simply assume that this happens to everyone (p. ). shedd then asks: “what will happen to him when he realizes that this is not in fact the case?” (p. ). her answer (absent additional elaboration): “the consequences of this dawning realization must be addressed, especially since police contacts are the most direct link between law enforcement and the public” (p. ). this answer, however imprecise, suggests only negative consequences and portends dangerous out- comes as per the state apparatus that is of central interest in this book (i.e., the police and criminal justice system). at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core losing sight of black agency du bois review: social science research on race : , what is lost from consideration is how such dawnings might also facilitate and embolden social movements or protest activity. the black lives matter movement is one contemporary manifestation of being “woke” in this way. but there is also his- torical evidence that under the right resource, political, strategic, and organizational conditions the anger and moral outrage spawned by the recognition of injustice can be converted into protest movements and rebellious activity that facilitate or are oriented towards social change (brush ; giugni ; tyler and smith, ). driven sometimes and in part by a sense of relative deprivation (a concept that is central to shedd’s analysis and undergirds her considerations regarding perceptions of injustice), it is often the more advantaged members of disadvantaged groups who have been shown to engage in collective action because they are well positioned to draw upon the very comparative frames to which shedd wants the reader to attend (caplan and paige, ; gurin and epps, ; tyler and smith, ). as such, the south side students who are attending payton and lincoln park, and who have a heightened recognition of injustice as per their more privileged educational access, may actually be well poised to inspire and engage in collective action aimed at combatting black subordination. and even the prospective conflict with police to which shedd insinuates as per these dawnings may do other than compromise and endanger black bodies. as evidenced by the black lives matter movement, these conflicts might spawn more coordinated collective work aimed at facilitating social change and black (educational) liberation. in the case of lewis and diamond, that which is especially powerful about their work (i.e., the documentation and theorization of how white agency operates nimbly and powerfully to sustain racial hierarchies via its structural and symbolic animation of school routines), inadvertently diminishes the prospects that blacks might effectively tangle with white agents who are always and already more materially and symbolically powerful than black and brown agents and can thus puppeteer and perpetuate raced educational inequities to their advantage. in despite the best intentions the seeming lim- its of black agency are also evidenced by the fact that the black parents, and especially the black school officials, who report on and often express frustration with the racially unjust routines, are positioned as a poor match for the socio-economically privileged whites who want to sustain the systems “as is.” it is not that lewis and diamond fail to recognize the importance of cultivating and enacting black agency. in fact, citing welner and burris ( ), they note: …[t]hose who have been on the losing end of tracking may not be as politically powerful as other constituencies, but their voices still need to be heard. “when parents of low-track students are politically invisible, they are too easily ignored” (lewis and diamond, , p. ). and as per lewis’s and diamond’s findings, the same might be said for those who have been on the losing end of disciplinary systems. lewis and diamond take their recognition of the power of political agency one step further when they note that they “agree with bonilla-silva ( ) that what is needed to address the core [findings of their text] is a new ‘civil rights movements demanding equality of results’” (p. ). this call for a new movement is consistent with their policy recommendation that what is warranted as per their findings is a “focus on disparate impacts rather than intentional discrimination” which requires institutions to not only collect disaggre- gated racial data but, moreover, conduct forensics on routines (or to use their words, unpack them “piece by piece”) to determine “the actual sources of the discrepancies” and to then “modify the routine[s] accordingly” (p. ). but their compelling articu- lation of the complex and slippery ways in which “structural inequalities, institutional at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core carla o’connor du bois review: social science research on race : , practices, and racial ideologies mutually reinforce each other and collectively generate different educational trajectories” (p. ) over and against the insights, frustration, and desire of black folks makes it difficult to imagine how and from where black insur- gency might arise to support such a movement. as per du bois, what blacks still need is an education. they do not need segregated nor integrated schools, but schools that ensure their ability to thrive academically, psychologically, and socio-culturally. the black civil rights movement of the s and s, however, emphasized school desegregation over a fundamental attack on “ all [educational] policies of racial subordination” (bell , p. ). the basic evil of segregated schools has thus survived and flourished and, as is demonstrated by shedd and lewis and diamond, has been reasserted in new and damaging forms in racially integrated schools (bell ). at the same time, most black children today attend majority minority schools where they are systematically denied high quality educa- tional resources. the issue which arises is from where will the u.s. public generate the will and commitment to move decisively against both these reassertions and the enduring expression of separate and unequal educational systems. and what role will black folks play in inciting this will and commitment? the work of shedd and lewis and diamond inadvertently raise this question. in response, researchers need to docu- ment and analyze the power and agency that exists among black folk and the prospect of them spawning in this contemporary era a new civil rights movement that attacks all policies of racial subordination. the concomitant challenge is for researchers to explore whether and how schools might be a resource in, rather than an impediment to, the cultivation or articulation of not only black (and brown) agency but the agency of other racial subjects who will function as allies towards this end. corresponding author : carla o’connor, university of michigan, school of education, e. university avenue, seb, ann arbor, mi - . e-mail: coconnor@umich.edu . references bell , derrick a. , jr . ( ). serving two masters: integration ideals and client interests in school desegregation litigation . the yale law journal , ( ): – . bonilla-silva , eduardo ( ). racism without racists: color-blind racism in the post-civil rights era . boulder, co : lynne riener . brush , stephen g . ( ). dynamics of theory change in the social sciences: relative depri- vation and collective violence . journal of conflict resolution , ( ): – . caplan , nathan s. , and jeffery m. paige ( ). a study of ghetto rioters . scientific american , : – . du bois , w. e. b . ( ). does the negro need separate schools? journal of negro education , ( ): – . giugni , marco g . ( ). was it worth the effort?: the outcomes and consequences of social movements . annual review of sociology , : – . gurin , patricia , and edgar epps ( ). black consciousness, identity, and achievement: a study of students in historically black colleges . new york : wiley . tatum , beverley d . ( ). defining racism: “can we talk?” in paula s. rothenberg (ed.), race, class, and gender in the united states: an integrated study , pp. – . new york : worth publishers . tyler , tom r . ( ). social justice . in rupert brown and sam gaertner (eds.) handbook of social psychology: intergroup processes , pp. – . malden, ma : blackwell publishers, ltd . tyler , tom r. , and heather j. smith ( ). social justice and social movements. irle working paper no. – . < http://irle.berkeley.edu/workingpapers/ - .pdf > (accessed october , ). wellner , kevin , and carol corbett burris ( ). alternative approaches to the politics of detracking . theory into practice , ( ): – . at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core s jra .. constrained bodies: dance, social justice, and choreographic agency stacey prickett i n over three decades of research, randy martin has critiqued failures of capitalism and the left’s inability to correct social injustices, interrogating relationships between artistic and cultural expressions and the way they are situated within economic and political contexts. martin’s theories offer tools for analyzing the choreographic agency in works inspired by distinct sociopolitical conditions and unequal relations of power in society. key concepts are applied below to innovative artistic responses to mass incarceration and the conditions that led to the black lives matter protest movement that began in to raise awareness of police shoot- ings of unarmed men of color, prompted by the death of michael brown in ferguson, missouri. the first two case studies below apply martin’s work to projects emerging from participatory cre- ative processes and have outreach imperatives, thus expanding the theoretical scope beyond its ini- tial articulation. the concept of mobilization is interrogated in zaccho dance theatre’s dying while black and brown ( ), which explores attempts to create a sense of home while incarcerated on death row. a social kinesthetic is identified in an analysis of a screendance by amie dowling and austin forbord, whose film well contested sites ( ) responds to issues of mass incarceration that cross racial boundaries. choreographic power arises in part from a decentered social kinesthetic that is counterhegemonic in the way it transforms pedestrian movement. the third case study draws on martin’s concept of overreading developed in his analysis of bill t. jones’s productions that connect narrative and abstract components of his choreography to external realities. overreading is utilized in my analysis of kyle abraham’s dance theatre production of pavement ( ), which reflects on the complexity of social relations in an inner-city neighborhood. inspired by his own experiences as an african american man and john singleton’s film boyz in the hood, abraham layers abstract dance phrases with stark motifs that evoke the veil of suspicion often faced by people of color. conceptualization of a black habitus offers another ana- lytical strategy, one that is juxtaposed to movement drawn from technical vocabularies ranging from hip-hop to ballet and contemporary dance. the productions analyzed here are celebrated for their agency, as art, and as contributions to wider discourses around race, the criminal justice stacey prickett (s.prickett@roehampton.ac.uk) is a principal lecturer in dance at the university of roehampton in london. her monograph embodied politics: dance, protest and identities (dance books, ) draws together case studies about dance and identity politics in the u.s. and the united kingdom. she has contributed chapters to dance and politics ( ), dance in the city ( ), ‘of, by and for the people: dancing on the left in the s, studies in dance history ( ), and entries to the routledge encyclopedia of modernism ( ) and fifty contemporary choreographers ( and ). her articles have been published in south asia research, dance research, dance chronicle, and pulse. a british academy/leverhulme small research grant award is supporting new research into dance during the cold war. drj / • december copyright © congress on research in dance doi: . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at mailto:s.prickett@roehampton.ac.uk https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core system, and equality. bodily constraint, control over life, and concepts of freedom that impact upon racial and economic politics in the u.s. are introduced to help situate the dance analyses. biopolitics, necropolitics, and neoliberalism the shaping of race relations in general and mass incarceration in particular, as articulated below, links to concepts of necropolitics, biopower, and neoliberalism that emerge through interrogation of various “wars” and armed conflicts, which manifest social control in different ways. for exam- ple, the legislation that set out to alter the socioeconomic imbalances faced by america’s poor— known unofficially as a war on poverty—under president lyndon johnson in evolved into later “wars” declared by successive governments with wide-ranging negative legacies. as martin ( ) analyzes, war as a concept has expanded beyond the conventions of an armed battle, such as the war on drugs, which officially commenced in , and the war on terror, which came into effect in the aftermath of the / terrorist attacks. these wars established the legislative and economic framework for the growth of the criminal justice system, with the allocation of fund- ing toward militaristic aims and away from state welfare and education systems (alexander ). conditions of biopower were articulated by michel foucault ( ) as conditions under which political control is asserted over life by the state and institutions, such as clinics, prisons, education, and the military. achille mbembé ( ) expands on foucauldian concepts to interrogate cases of sovereign power over the body implemented by modern states in the concept of necropolitics or control over death. taken to the extreme, necropolitics asserts control over life and death of indi- viduals through processes of racialization and a racism that, as mbembé argues, is prominent in the “calculus of biopower” ( , ). rooted in the legacy of slavery, the current criminal justice sys- tem reinforces the ties between biopower and racialization, which mbembé categorizes as a “state of exception” resulting in a “‘triple loss’ for those enslaved: loss of a ‘home,’ loss of rights over his or her body, and loss of political status” ( , ). although the emancipation proclamation of set slaves free, their liberty was partial. legal codes were rewritten to fulfill the economic and labor needs of farmers in the american south. conditions of neoslavery, it is argued, underpin contem- porary conditions of racism and discrimination perpetuated by neoliberal ideologies (see alexander ; bush ; haney-lopez ). michelle alexander ( ) details the legislative history from onward that arose from political campaigns that perpetuated racist ideologies and resulted in “new jim crow” structures. myths about welfare cheats and crime, circulated by politicians, planted seeds of fear that increased a sense of victimization, particularly among poor whites in southern states. economic globalization and the transition from a manufacturing to a technologically based economy also contributed to the rise of an underclass marginalized from the benefits of wealth and social mobility afforded to many. racial inequities are deep-rooted—in , percent of those incarcerated were people of color or ethnic minorities. such disparities sit in tension with milestones achieved in the battle for equality, heralded by the election of barack obama as president from to . significantly, however, martin and others have challenged initial claims of postracial gains. martin advocated moving beyond essentialist notions of identity even though he situated the construction of race as central to national identity in the u.s. ( , ). in his analysis of hip-hop dance and rap music videos, martin’s critique of nationalism and multiculturalism describes a composite body ( , ), one that encompasses diverse ideological stances and cultural practices that cross racial categories although he acknowledges instances of appropriation and commodification of subcultural forms. dances inspired by themes of social (in)justice evoke institutional issues alongside the personal, juxtaposing constraint of the body and spirit with expressions of hope and resistance. martin ( , , for example) explored how diverse types of dance productions are more than a mere representation in how they are linked to external society, extending beyond a mirrorlike drj / • december https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core relationship to reveal structures of power and the impact of sociopolitical circumstances and inspi- rations. defining dance as politicized culture, martin ( , – ) establishes an interdependence between artistic practice and the notion of mobilization that brings specific contexts to awareness. while dance does not have the capacity to affect social change in and of itself, it can offer something unique through the activities of performance and viewing that are “the means through which mobi- lization is accomplished” ( , ). dance is placed “in the service of politics,” and its nonnarrative elements, are “precisely what may be difficult to see in the social context, namely the horizon of possibility for politics” (martin , ). the possibilities of mobilization and the concept of a social kinesthetic are explored below in relation to two dances that arose from specific social justice imperatives. discipline, the death penalty, and mobilization dance is celebrated for transforming the lives of people who are incarcerated by linking concepts of foucauldian discipline, biopower, and control to expressivity. zaccho dance theatre offers a mul- tilayered vision of foucauldian theory in practice, drawing from individuals’ stories of their expe- riences while on death row—stories that challenge the viewer to think about the underlying social structures of the prison industry. starting in , artistic director joanna haigood began to research the impact of the death penalty, and began working with jazz composer marcus shelby on a production commissioned by the equal justice society (ejs), a criminal justice advocacy group. based in oakland, california, the organization champions the application of the fourteenth amendment of , which enshrined in the constitution the rights of former slaves to be citizens. zaccho’s dying while black and brown ( ), as commissioned by ejs, explores the disproportionate number of african americans and men of color on death row, an implemen- tation of necropolitical power through the ultimate control over life of the incarcerated individual held by the state. martin ( ) locates a power within dance and what it can achieve and defines it in relation to theories of social mobilization. zaccho’s production offers an example of how documentary input has been creatively shaped to reveal a political mobilization within the dance, and from there the possibilities for social mobilization to occur beyond the stage. haigood and shelby researched the impact of isolation on those incarcerated on death row. the four performers have individual characters—one is fictionalized, the others are drawn from real people’s lives—including wrongly imprisoned anthony graves who spent eighteen years in prison, sixteen of these years on death row in texas. after being exonerated in , graves talked extensively to haigood and shelby who also investigated the execution procedures, studying official manuals that set out the highly detailed and regimented steps required to put someone to death. another source was jeanne woodford, a cofounder of death penalty focus and the former warden of san quentin pri- son, who became committed to abolishing the death penalty. as haigood ( ) explained, the choreography set out to convey a “picture that resonated with humanity” by exploring how people hold ideas of home, and deal with the sense of “being caged” when safety and survival are important. the shell of a small house becomes a climbing frame that the men move around and through, exploring its boundaries and stability during moments where it is tilted to rest on a single corner. the ‘house’ functions as a cell, a space for exploring the adjustments required to create a sense of home. the dance opens with four men in baggy top and trouser orange uniforms crouched atop the frame. they drop down into the space, clamber back up onto the roof, at ease on the climbing frame as they adopt watchful posi- tions, eyeing each other and gazing out into the distance. they emulate the all-seeing sense of the panopticon design of prison buildings. in a postperformance discussion session, dancer travis rowland said they were like gargoyles. moments of stillness are broken by swinging overhand from one pole to the other, then moving into and out of the space of the house/cell. haigood compared drj / • december https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core the circular flow of the four men to the neverending path into the prison and jail that black men expe- rience—guilty and innocent—after release due to the high rate of recidivism. at one point, as the men join arms, their precarious counterbalance atop the frame becomes increasingly unstable as they shake each other and the set. in another section, the performers enter and shadowbox, escape into a series of calisthenics—push-ups, jumping jacks—striving to keep fit in the limited conditions. their energy shifts between antagonizing each other back to a calmer coexistence, revealing different hierarchies that change between equal, dominant, and dominated relationships as they move around, lift, or bounce off one another. those imprisoned also become the watchers momentarily, enforcing the constraints over the others who are incarcerated. rather than a straightforward narrative, a com- plex web of representation conveys processes of survival. the second section starts with the men removing the orange uniforms of california jails, replacing them with the prison uniform of light blue top and blue jeans symbolic of moving further into the criminal justice system. lining up in a row in the middle of the “house,” the performers step for- ward to call out their identities: “anthony graves, floor b, .” layers of symbolism are also intensified by the audio score. “inmates talk a lot about noise, it is very loud in prison on death row. . . . they have to dig through a cloud of noise to reach someone they want to have a conver- sation with.” an inability to hear is manifest in the battle between speech and the haunting jazz score with percussion, flute, saxophone, and piano competing for our attention. haigood explained that the inability to distinguish clearly what the men were saying was intentional, a metaphor for the voiceless state of the incarcerated. a central moment occurs when one performer is pulled down from the roof beam, carried forward downstage, his arms crossed in front of his body. standing still, his limbs are manipulated by two others who systematically mime strapping him down. fear and trepidation spreads from the physical to the audible, the words he speaks are mainly unintelligible, although a plea of innocence cuts through the music. a portrayal of death emerges as constrained convulsions overtake his body still held down to the invisible deathbed, transforming spectators into witnesses of execution. the dance functions on multiple levels through humanizing the men and engaging the viewer to think about how the men interact with each other and with their constraining space. an “incarcer- ated” man reaches his arms out at shoulder level, spanning the six-by-nine foot spatial dimensions of an actual cell, reinforcing the boundaries those on death row endure twenty-three hours a day. different relations emerge—from the processes of execution to the sense of time passing and to the knowledge of impending death—that evoke the institutional systems in place. martin explains: photo . matthew wickett (foreground), rashad pridgen, travis santell rowland, and antoine hunter in joanna haigood and zaccho dance theatre’s dying while black and brown. photo courtesy of kegan marling. drj / • december https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core for dance to move the political beyond arrested development, its knowledge of how bodies are assembled, of how space and time are configured, of how interconnec- tions are valued must be made legible beyond the ends of choreographic endeavor. foregrounding the analytics of movement so redolent in dance can make for a richer evaluation of what is generated through political mobilization. ( , ) in dying while black and brown, zaccho moves beyond the narratives of those incarcerated. two of the men manipulate the frame with the third dancer positioned on the poles—the “house” is set down to offer the viewer a window to look through as a tremor starts in the soloist’s hands and travels through his body. shelby’s jazz score is replaced by sam cooke’s bluesy lyrics in “a change is gonna come,” the song anthony graves sang to himself to ease his anxieties while on death row. hope exists, despite the looming threat of execution. awareness of botched executions and wrongful convictions has helped pressure states such as illinois and pennsylvania to cease carrying out death sentences. even though changing public per- ceptions around necropolitical power cannot be causally traced back to the dance, the internal mobilization of the dance manifests in the potential for external action. zaccho’s audiences can engage in the discourses around the death penalty as the dance enacts a humanizing process that critiques capital punishment. social kinesthetics in corporeal resistance and restraint martin analyzed dance’s power as the social kinesthetic or “the capacity to move an idea in a par- ticular direction through the acquired prowess of bodies in action” ( , ), which is illustrated by the second case study. a screendance production also explores the corporeal constraints of pri- sons countered by poetic metaphors in well contested sites (dowling and forbord ). choreographer amie dowling and filmmaker austin forbord use the notion of the incarcerated individual’s body as a contested site, where “its presence or absence, its power and its vulnerability are all intensely realized in jails and prisons—institutions that emphasize control, segregation, sol- itude and containment” (amrhein, dowling, and schultz , ). the project was filmed on alcatraz island, a site that has a long history as a place of imprisonment, ranging from a civil war jail to a place where hopi indians were held in for refusing to “americanize” their chil- dren. alcatraz, known as the rock, also housed the notorious federal penitentiary from to and was occupied by native american activists from to (anonymous, n.d.). it is a deceptively short distance across the bay from crowds of tourists and the marina populated by sea lions to the island. in visiting the national park, strong winds heighten a sense of isolation that is light years away from the crowds, shops, and sounds of san francisco’s pier . stepping from the boat onto the walkway covering barren rocks, sightseers are taken inside the prison to walk along chilly corridors, invited to peer into cells with doors gaping open. the solitary confine- ment rows offer a brief taste of the extreme sensory deprivation of the punishment, devoid of light, comforts, and human contact. the historical power of the site remains, long after the cells have been emptied. in the short film, dowling and forbord collaborate with men who were previously incarcerated, drawing on their memories to explore physical and social spaces in prisons and relationships within them. a group of men set out their personal possessions on the ground—keys, wallets, photos, and phones. in doing so, they abandon levels of freedom, and their individuality is stripped away. the men lie face down on the rough concrete, lined up head to toe as the camera enters the building moving past the human pathway. in long sections, the camera pans across danced phrases in rows of abandoned run-down cells and central spaces of the building. motifs generated in one body rip- ple down the cells to another man despite the isolation from each other. faces are initially unseen with the performers facing the back, the floor, or looking up to the ceiling although momentary drj / • december https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core glimpses of a profile appear. the decayed concrete and rusted metal contrasts with the expanse of water and the golden hills in the background. initially anonymous performers move through space, at times in formation, and gradually become individualized as identity markers emerge and stand out amidst the uniformity of clothing. tattoos, physical build, and skin and hair color set some apart from the others. as dowling explained, “the blurring of the faces, the lack of a single figure up until the end, was an effort to keep the audience away from focusing on one man. in story-based work audiences can over-identify with individuals and their stories, making mass incarceration about personal failures and bad choices, instead of systemic issues—racism, poverty, etc.” the bleakness is oppressive, counteracted by images of lifting each other up, bouncing off the walls of the narrow cells. an emotional distance in the interactions allows relationships to be read in mul- tiple ways as the action alternates from the disciplined formations of a group to the sole or double occupancy of a cell. the façade of machismo cracks, with vulnerability exuding through tough exteriors. music contributes another layer of symbolism as the film ends to the accompaniment of philadelphia dj king britt sampling the distinctive voice of gospel singer sister gertrude morgan in “new world in my view.” dowling describes it as a “mix of old and new sound, the religious, redemptive words and the hope the piece spoke about.” hope is portrayed in the dreams of one of the previously incarcerated men who is joined in the film by his young son, as the view broadens to take in the iconic california landscape. created by performers with diverse levels of dance experience, a “decentered social kinesthetic” (martin , ) emerges that martin describes as a transforma- tion of the relationship between move- ment and culture. he explains how a social kinesthetic was challenged by ordinary gestural actions and nontheater spaces of postmodern dance of the s and the physicality in hip-hop and board culture (skateboarding, for exam- ple) that moves off the vertical axis (martin , ). resistive potential emerges, in part through how the move- ments oppose hegemonic ideologies manifest in dominant dance styles (clas- sical ballet and the canonic modern dance of martha graham, for example; martin , ). although martin articulates the concept in relation to decolonized bodies and the financial sys- tem of derivatives, the status of those incarcerated and impacted by the crimi- nal justice system is parallel to that of the disempowered other. the film facilitates exploration of the prison problem in community and edu- cational situations to “connect audiences to both the performers and the impacts of incarceration.” outreach activities extend outside the local neighborhoods devastated by the effects of mass incar- ceration to open up a dialogue about photo . erik camberos and matthew keuter in well contested sites, choreography by amie dowling. photo courtesy of amie dowling. drj / • december https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core discrimination and disenfranchisement that often continues upon release and raises awareness of the social structures that underpin an expanding criminal justice system that disproportionately impacts african americans and latinos. a well contested sites facilitation guide (amrhein, dowling, and schultz ) created by a group of “artists, scholars, formerly incarcerated men and their families, and community activists” offers workshops that invite reflection on the issues in both intellectual and corporeal ways. theories of justice and processes of taking responsibility for criminal actions are articulated while discussion—at times with performers and community activ- ists—helps enhance awareness of underlying issues. simple movements are explored around words such as “confinement,” for example, moving beyond verbal communication while considering the use of metaphors in the film. material from participatory prison projects is included in the film and build on collaborative cre- ative processes. dowling distinguishes her work from therapeutic sessions by describing how the focus is on the participants’ opportunity to create “while inside,” offering “creative spaces within which individuals can engage with, and develop their artistic practices—be it movement, acting, spoken word, music or writing.” for example, reggie daniels, who ends the film dreaming of his son and freedom, collaborated with dowling on another project sponsored by the san francisco county sheriff’s department and the university of san francisco’s department of performing arts and social justice. daniels’ experiences of oppression and incarceration inform an artistic practice that has helped in his journey to become a community advocate, supporting those directly impacted by the criminal justice system while educating others. stereotypes are challenged by film and the outreach activities that function as a powerful indictment of mass incarceration and, like zaccho’s production, as acts of political mobilization. the expres- sions of resistance performed in the remains of alcatraz mediate against the constraints and isola- tion of incarceration in moving through emotional states, revealing hope and the potential for breaking cycles of recidivism and disenfranchisement. overreading and black habitus in the urban u.s. the final case study turns to pavement, an hour-long piece of dance theater by abraham.in.motion, supplementing martin’s concept of overreading with analysis of a black habitus. w. e. b. dubois’s novel the souls of black folk ( ) provided part of the inspiration for kyle abraham’s choreography, who also drew from past experiences of being a person of suspicion. with the approach of the twentieth anniversary of boyz in the hood, abraham set out to question how much has changed since the film was released in . narrative impulses are accompanied in the dance by movement with a rich musicality and stylistic versatility, created collaboratively with the dancers. the interweaving of past and present and issues of race and representation in pavement have structural resonances with the type of production martin analyzed in formulating the relationship between a production and the social context that inspired it. martin elucidates the concept of overreading through an analysis of bill t. jones’ work last supper at uncle tom’s cabin/the promised land from (martin , ). overreading aspires to establish connections between a dance’s “interiority and exteriority . . . to mobilize the text in the service of context” ( , ). jones’s piece, which interweaves the history of slavery with con- temporary questions of subjectivity set out in multiple narratives, manipulates a temporal trajectory that challenges viewers’ perceptions. time is disrupted by jones through the use of repetition, with the dance moving between stories, text, and subjectivities. stories are juxtaposed with abstract sec- tions, enabling viewers to be drawn to what attracts them, and ultimately expanding the interpretive possibilities ( , – ). setting out the dance’s narrative is central to overreading, but this inter- pretive practice also requires articulation of the abstract movement: “the internal movement of dance narrative, what moves the plot, so to speak, rests on the mobilization of what is nonnarrative drj / • december https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core in dance” ( , ). it is in working through the power of the dancing bodies that the possibility of making connections to the world outside occurs, when the analysis can “read through and past the dance to the point where it meets its own exterior” ( , ). following from martin, the analysis of pavement strives to delve past overt representational strategies and their political imperatives. abraham plays on some dominant stereotypes in pavement, which opens with two male friends who stop to greet each other in passing. initially hesitant, undulations and twitches travel through their bodies and out their limbs. with a flash of recognition they relax—a potential standoff is over. their pedestrian swagger, coded handshakes and backslaps situate them within an inner-city landscape, moving from hip-hop moments into a duet of indulgent movement that mutates into oppression as one dancer is forced down on the ground, arms pinned behind his back as if hand- cuffed. he doesn’t resist, and after a moment, stands up to rejoin the action. the phrase is repeated by the seven men and one woman to the point where the dancers adopt the position of their own volition. after numerous repeats of the handcuffed position, its final manifestation is intensified. abraham lies face down onstage, arms placed behind his back as if handcuffed, while a flurry of activity moves around him. a highly technical unison duet explores the rhythmic intricacy of the score; moments of friendly camaraderie and an intimate gesture of support are overlaid on top of virtuosic steps. all the other dancers reappear to jog in formation around the space, their action weighted down as if controlled by others. although lying still, the rise and fall of abraham’s back provides proof of life, as the action continues around him for another ten minutes or so. one by one, three other dancers lie down top of abraham, their breathing settling into a communal rhythm of inhalation and exhalation. a lengthy wait increases the tension as we ponder the physical weight born by the man on the bottom. eventually dancers extricate themselves, some- times from the middle of the pile. they emerge from the physical but not the metaphorical shadow of prejudice evoked by the simple yet profound imagery. prime material for foucauldian analysis unfolds throughout the dance, revealing patterns of self- surveillance and normalization of constraint. deborah jowitt’s evocative review focuses on the qual- ity of the walk, ranging from self-assured to fearful: pavement has no single narrative; its atmosphere is that of a dream in which images form, dissolve, overlap, and recur. a dream in which the fallen rise and walk and, at a later time, fall again. a dream in which a casual gesture can ignite violence between two people, yet end in an embrace, with no transitions between states. (jowitt ) photo . jeremy “jae” neal, maleek washington, and the company of abraham.in.motion in pavement. choreography by kyle abraham. photo courtesy of carrie schneider. drj / • december https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core brief vignettes reveal rich characterizations. fleeting connections between the cast rise in emotional tension and then suddenly revert to lyrical calm. unisonphrasesconsumespace,lowleapsglideintoa multiple pirouette in back attitude; intricate arm popping movements travel across the body from one side to the other. the one white dancer takes the authoritarian role at times, moving abraham or anotherblackdancertoadoptthe“arrested”position.theboundariesofraceareconstructedthenrup- tured in the dance, as the sole white male moves between the position of authority to join in the group dance phrases and the ending pile of bodies that concludes the dance as described above. the sole woman moves between roles of sister, lover, mother, and friend to the men, her athleticism matching theirs. the dancers exhibit a confident technical proficiency in flow, strength, and stamina that binds together virtuosic dance vocabularies with more pedestrian gestures, presenting a composite body that encompasses a range of ideologies. filmed improvisation sessions helped set the movement while the material was generated in workshops with dramaturg charlotte braithwaite. cultural historian and african-american scholar harvey young ( ) articulates how black embodied experiences point to the role of critical memory and the notion of the black body as dis- cursive wherein related histories provide an experiential overlap to how blacks are perceived and treated. acknowledging “differently complexioned and gendered bodies” (young , ) and vast diversity within the experience of race and its impact, young argues that similar experiences of objectification, prejudice, and unequal treatment place race as a dominant identity marker. the critical memory of past practices shapes contemporary experiences. a black habitus emerges, the movement patterns of life as a person of color in the u.s. today are often met with suspicion, evidenced by the unequal treatment of blacks by police in comparison to white people. this habitus is evident in pavement, particularly in the ending. moments of stillness are abrupt reminders of incarceration, injury, death, and as young analyzes, as protest. young ( ) describes breaks in action that disrupt an objectifying gaze or function as resistance, exemplified by muhammed ali’s civil disobedience and resultant incarceration in refusing to step forward for the draft in . in contrast, photographs of african americans from the early twentieth century exude con- fidence and power in the positions they held (young ). in an interview, abraham spoke of how the political resonance of his works can be liberating as well as inhibiting (cash ). starting work on pavement in , early showings coincided with the shooting of unarmed black high school student trayvon martin in florida and with other vio- lent deaths. martin’s killer was absolved of responsibility based on the “stand your ground” law, appearing to offer legal justification for the use of firearms to deadly effect. international condem- nation brought racial injustices to the forefront of media attention, and pavement was often linked the tragic deaths. the impetus arose out of abraham’s experiences, however, and the reflections on the essence of s gang violence resonate with today’s viewers and dancers, with the perform- ers drawing on their individual reflections in the creative processes (abraham ). music enhances the emotional experiences with pavement’s eclectic playlist offering a shifting aural landscape that moves from the blues to bach and vivaldi’s lyrical strings. operatic arias also con- trast with the sounds of sirens, gunshots, women screaming, and banter between the dancers. the sopranist countertenor phillipe jaroussky intones “we’ve come to take you home” from the finale of benjamin britten’s opera, peter grimes. abraham’s prone body almost becomes part of the landscape, he has been still so long. a dancer sits next to him, eating a bag of potato chips, high- lighting a quotidian reality that contrasts with britten’s words. pavement’s musical journey contin- ues with sam cooke’s “so lonely tonight” ( ) and ends with donny hathaway’s “someday we’ll all be free” ( ), which is faded out mid-song. songs associated with the civil rights movement call for pride, self-respect, and freedom, but are heard as a fragment, leaving the viewer to fill in the gaps—or not. lyrics can offer up multiple meanings in the passion they convey. abraham describes how “even in the most up-beat song, you could still hear the pain in someone’s voice.” through overreading processes, the complexities of class and the generational and racial associations of the diverse songs can be located. drj / • december https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core aspects of black experience also emerge in the text, adding specificity to the bodily action. at one point abraham pleads with others to help him: “i thought you were my brother, we’re family”—but is met with an indifference that he finds dangerous within local communities. “i look at black on black crime, use of the ‘n’ word in urban communities, a word that is so rooted in hatred and when we’re using it in these films, and we’re talking about killing each other, . . . [and] using things rooted in hatred to then reflect on why we’re killing someone that looks just like us.” the destruction of community cohesion in neighborhoods devastated by the impact of mass incarceration, the threat of arrest or interrogation that haunts people of color—these stand in contrast to police treatment of whites in similar circumstances. dan scully’s lighting and set design establish a functional as well as specific space as the basketball backboard becomes a screen for projected images of exploding buildings. the drama of the streets evokes filmic narratives for viewers distanced from affected neighborhoods, while for others it touches on a daily reality. conclusion within wider society, the veneer of postracial politics in the u.s. has been shattered, as police bru- tality continues to generate protests and militarized police responses. celebrations in of the fiftieth anniversary of the passage of civil rights act were tempered by the implementation of new voting laws perceived as intimidating marginalized underclasses and ethnicities. federal courts of appeal have overturned some of the voting restrictions, deeming them to be racist and directly targeting minorities. underlying ideological divisions contributed to a particularly contentious presidential campaign, with the republican candidate’s political rhetoric exposing deep seeded racism, homophobia, and xenophobia which did not dissipate in the weeks after voting day. the shock election of donald trump to the office of president threatens decades of progress in civil rights, environmental protection, international relations, and social justice—issues that have long inspired activist dancers. as artists respond to the long-standing conditions that have led to con- temporary discourses around social injustice, randy martin’s interrogations of the relationships between dance and politics offer analytical paradigms for revealing the political resonances of a pro- duction. concepts such as mobilization and the social kinesthetic help refine discussion of choreo- graphic agency while the overreading process reveals complexities of how the internal reality of the work is linked to its external reality without being reduced to a representative relationship. joanna haigood, amie dowling and austin forbord, and kyle abraham offer corporeal confron- tations, reaching out to raise awareness of structural imbalances in society through diverse creative processes. whether working with documentary or participatory input or moving from historical accounts to engage with contemporary experiences, their dances are unsettling as well as hopeful. issues of social inequality are confronted in direct terms, engaging with injustice through narrative and abstract constructs. body practices push beyond established technical vocabularies and repre- sentational strategies, highlighting risk and diverse physical challenges. zaccho constructs distinct characters through a series of vignettes while dowling and forbord move away from individual sto- ries to humanize the lives of those caught up in the criminal justice system. zaccho manipulates a set to emulate the corporeal constraints and emotional repercussions of the threat of death by the state. dowling’s partnering work moves across the cells of alcatraz where men are lifted up to walk around the walls and ceilings. in abraham’s choreography, floor work and virtuosic technical vocabularies are juxtaposed by the lengthy stillness of a prone body. although they cannot effect change directly, the dances illuminate different ways of thinking about mass incarceration, the death penalty, and race relations. martin’s work helps reveal how political mobilization can inspire social mobilization to occur beyond the artistic practice. drj / • december https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core notes . this article began as a presentation at the international federation of theatre research at the university of warwick in and i am grateful for discussion generated in the session. comments from mark franko and anonymous readers for drj have also been invaluable. thanks go to debbie williams for suggesting i look at amie dowling’s work while rachel straus introduced me to kyle abraham’s choreography. . elizabeth hinton ( ) has traced how legislative changes and responses to the civil rights movement resulted in the modification of the war on poverty into an unofficial “war on drugs,” which started earlier than the official declaration of the war on drugs in . harper’s magazine reporter dan baum ( ) reinforced the racial biases during president richard nixon’s adminis- tration, citing john erlichman’s admissions that antidrug policies were designed to undermine advances from civil rights legislation. . duringthereconstructionperiodafterthecivilwar,segregationandeconomicdiscrimination laws were named after a minstrel characterization of african americans, jim crow. see alexander ( ) for a comprehensive analysis of the “new jim crow” social structures and their impact. . a breakdown of arrest statistics can be found at the website of the sentencing project: research and advocacy for reform, https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/ / crime-in-the-u.s.- /tables/ tabledatadecoverviewpdf, accessed march , . . for further reading on race and politics in relation to president obama, see michael eric dyson ( ). . thomas defrantz ( ) defines a composite body in the repertory of the alvin ailey american dance theatre while halifu osumare ( ) draws on martin’s concept in her investi- gation into global hip-hop dance and identity politics. . a number of scholars integrate martin’s concepts. for instance, susan leigh foster exam- ines social kinesthesia in choreographing empathy ( ); danielle goldman ( , – ) draws on martin’s analysis of the multiplicity of techniques embodied in a dancer, who may not be aware of how to move outside his or her training which influences his or her improvisation and can con- strain a sense of freedom; and aiofe mcgrath ( , – ) investigates political mobilization in dance theater in ireland. . for example, the cebu penitentiary in the philippines uses dance as a disciplinary tool and has been analyzed for how the process shapes a docile body. see discussion of the performances of michael jackson’s thriller by fleur cathreal williams ( ). . the analysis is taken from a recording of a performance at the charles houston center, harvard school of law, followed by a discussion session with the cast (matthew wickett, rashad pridgen, travis santell rowland, and antoine hunter) and joanna haigood ( ); https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_q xgfre . . see michel foucault’s discipline and punish ( ) for analysis of the panopticon and architecture of prisons. . joanna haigood, interview with the author, january , . . ibid. . ibid. . joanna haigood, email to the author, july , . . reports of action against the death penalty can be found on the death penalty focus web site, https://death.rdsecure.org/index.php. . the cast is comprised of eric camberos, reggie daniels, travis rowland, john carnahan, eric garcia, zachary johnson, justin perkins, gabe stuckey, jordan daniels, and freddie gutierrez. . amie s. dowling, email to the author, january , . . ibid. . ibid. . amie s. dowling, email to the author, august , . drj / • december https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/ /crime-in-the-u.s.- /tables/ tabledatadecoverviewpdf https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/ /crime-in-the-u.s.- /tables/ tabledatadecoverviewpdf https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/ /crime-in-the-u.s.- /tables/ tabledatadecoverviewpdf https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/ /crime-in-the-u.s.- /tables/ tabledatadecoverviewpdf https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/ /crime-in-the-u.s.- /tables/ tabledatadecoverviewpdf https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/ /crime-in-the-u.s.- /tables/ tabledatadecoverviewpdf https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/ /crime-in-the-u.s.- /tables/ tabledatadecoverviewpdf https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/ /crime-in-the-u.s.- /tables/ tabledatadecoverviewpdf https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/ /crime-in-the-u.s.- /tables/ tabledatadecoverviewpdf https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/ /crime-in-the-u.s.- /tables/ tabledatadecoverviewpdf https://www.fbi.gov/about-us/cjis/ucr/crime-in-the-u.s/ /crime-in-the-u.s.- /tables/ tabledatadecoverviewpdf https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_q xgfre https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_q xgfre https://death.rdsecure.org/index.php https://death.rdsecure.org/index.php https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core . ibid. for further reading on therapeutic dance projects in prisons see sara houston ( ), who analyzes contact improvisation sessions in a british prison, and janice ross ( ), who dis- cusses issues of vulnerability and transformation. . reggie daniels worked with dowling on man.alive, supported by community works west. daniels began studying for his phd in education at the university of san francisco, drawing on his experiences of violence, substance abuse, involvement in the criminal justice system in pro- jects that integrate creative approaches to transformation and recovery (see http://danceexchange. org/summer-institute- -faculty/). . du bois’s work underpins numerous black studies theoretical perspectives, ranging from paul gilroy’s notion of a black atlantic ( ) to thomas defrantz’s exploration of double con- sciousness ( ). . this analysis of pavement derives from viewing a live performance in leicester, united kingdom, on may , performed by kyle abraham, matthew baker, william briscoe, vinson fraley, tamisha guy, jeremy “jae” neal, and eric williams. . kyle abraham, interview with the author, january , . . andrew boynton ( ) analyzes the gender associations in pavement’s music. . abraham, interview with the author, january , . . ibid. . changes in state voting rights laws are being challenged with federal courts overturning new legislation in texas and north carolina, for example (see hasen ). works cited abraham, kyle. . “kyle abraham in discussion with matthew baker.” november . accessed march , . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btgc jcjhio. alexander, michelle. . the new jim crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. new york: the new press. anonymous., n.d. “alcatraz island history and culture.” alcatraz island national park service web site. accessed january , . http://www.nps.gov/alca/learn/historyculture/index.htm. amrhein, marielle, amie dowling, and rebecca schultz. . well contested sites facilitation guide. community works west. accessed january , . http://communityworkswest.org/ exhibits-publications/well-contested-sites/. baum, dan. . “legalize it all: how to win the war on drugs.” harpers, accessed august , . http://harpers.org/archive/ / /legalize-it-all/. boynton, andrew. . “’boyz n the hood’ reimagined as dance.” the new yorker, november . accessed january , . http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/ boyz-n-the-hood-reimagined-as-dance. bush, melanie. . everyday forms of whiteness: understanding race in a ‘post-racial’ world. d ed. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. cash, debra. . “abraham in motion at the ica.” the arts fuse, october . accessed january , . http://artsfuse.org/ /fuse-dance-review-howling-wolf-abraham-in-motion-at-the- ica/. defrantz, thomas. . “composite bodies and dance: the repertory of alvin ailey american dance theater.” theatre research ( ): – . defrantz, thomas f. . “the black beat made visible: hip hop dance and body power.” in of the presence of body: essays on dance & performance theory, edited by andré lepecki, – . middletown, ct: wesleyan university press. dowling, amie s., and austin forbord. . well contested sites. rapt productions, http://vimeo. com/ . dubois, w. e. b. [ ] . the soul of black folk. mineola, ny: dover publications. dyson, michael eric. . the black presidency: barack obama and the politics of race in america. new york: houghton mifflin. drj / • december https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at http://danceexchange.org/summer-institute- -faculty/ http://danceexchange.org/summer-institute- -faculty/ http://danceexchange.org/summer-institute- -faculty/ http://danceexchange.org/summer-institute- -faculty/ http://danceexchange.org/summer-institute- -faculty/ http://danceexchange.org/summer-institute- -faculty/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btgc jcjhio https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=btgc jcjhio http://www.nps.gov/alca/learn/historyculture/index.htm http://www.nps.gov/alca/learn/historyculture/index.htm 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http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/boyz-n-the-hood-reimagined-as-dance http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/boyz-n-the-hood-reimagined-as-dance http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/boyz-n-the-hood-reimagined-as-dance http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/boyz-n-the-hood-reimagined-as-dance http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/boyz-n-the-hood-reimagined-as-dance http://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/boyz-n-the-hood-reimagined-as-dance http://artsfuse.org/ /fuse-dance-review-howling-wolf-abraham-in-motion-at-the-ica/ http://artsfuse.org/ /fuse-dance-review-howling-wolf-abraham-in-motion-at-the-ica/ http://artsfuse.org/ /fuse-dance-review-howling-wolf-abraham-in-motion-at-the-ica/ http://artsfuse.org/ /fuse-dance-review-howling-wolf-abraham-in-motion-at-the-ica/ http://artsfuse.org/ /fuse-dance-review-howling-wolf-abraham-in-motion-at-the-ica/ http://artsfuse.org/ /fuse-dance-review-howling-wolf-abraham-in-motion-at-the-ica/ http://artsfuse.org/ /fuse-dance-review-howling-wolf-abraham-in-motion-at-the-ica/ http://artsfuse.org/ /fuse-dance-review-howling-wolf-abraham-in-motion-at-the-ica/ http://artsfuse.org/ /fuse-dance-review-howling-wolf-abraham-in-motion-at-the-ica/ http://artsfuse.org/ /fuse-dance-review-howling-wolf-abraham-in-motion-at-the-ica/ http://vimeo.com/ http://vimeo.com/ http://vimeo.com/ https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core foster, susan leigh. . choreographing empathy: kinesthesia in performance. london: routledge. foucault, michel. . discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. translated by alan sheridan. new york: vintage books. gilroy, paul. . the black atlantic: modernity and double consciousness. london: verso. goldman, danielle. . i want to be ready: improvised dance and the practice of freedom. ann arbor, mi: university of michigan press. haigood, joanna. . culture wire. san francisco government television production. accessed february , . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbu-dn vau. ———. . dying while black and brown: dance & discussion, march , harvard law school. accessed february , . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_q xgfre . haney-lópez, ian f. . “post-racial racism: racial stratification and mass incarceration in the age of obama.” california law review ( ): – . hasen, richard l. .”turning the tide on voting rights.” the new york times, august . accessed august , . http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/campaign-stops/ turning-the-tide-on-voting-rights.html?_r= . hinton, elizabeth. . from the war on poverty to the war on crime: the making of mass incarceration in america. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. houston, sara. . “the touch “taboo” and the art of contact: an exploration of contact improvisation for prisoners.” research in dance education ( ): – . jowitt, deborah. . “getting down with ailey.” dance beat blog, december . accessed december , . http://www.artsjournal.com/dancebeat/ / /getting-down-with-ailey/. martin, randy. . “over-reading the promised land: towards a narrative of context in dance.” in corporealities: dancing knowledge, culture and power, edited by susan leigh foster, – . london & new york: routledge. ———. . critical moves: dance studies in theory and politics. durham, nc: duke university press. ———. . “dance and its others: theory, state, nation, and socialism.” in of the presence of the body: essays on dance and performance theory, edited by andré lepecki, – . middletown, ct: wesleyan university press. ———. . “toward a kinesthetics of protest.” social identities ( ): – . ———. . “allegories of passing in bill t. jones.” dance research journal ( ): – . ———. . “a precarious dance, a derivative sociality.” tdr ( ) (t ): – . mbembé, achille. . “necropolitics.” translated by libby meintjes. public culture ( ): – . mcgrath, aiofe. . dance theatre in ireland: revolutionary moves. london: palgrave. osumare, halifu. . “global breakdancing and the intercultural body.” dance research journal ( ): – . ross, janice. . “doing time: dance in prison. in dance, human rights and social justice: dignity in motion, edited by naomi jackson and toni shapiro-phim, – . lanham, md: scarecrow press. young, harvey. . embodying black experience: stillness, critical memory, and the black body. ann arbor, mi: university of michigan press. williams, fleur cathreal. . “the embodiment of social dynamics: a phenomenon of western pop dance within a filipino prison.” research in dance education ( ): – . drj / • december https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbu-dn vau https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbu-dn vau https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bbu-dn vau https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_q xgfre https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z_q xgfre http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/campaign-stops/turning-the-tide-on-voting-rights.html?_r= http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/campaign-stops/turning-the-tide-on-voting-rights.html?_r= http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/campaign-stops/turning-the-tide-on-voting-rights.html?_r= http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/campaign-stops/turning-the-tide-on-voting-rights.html?_r= http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/campaign-stops/turning-the-tide-on-voting-rights.html?_r= http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/campaign-stops/turning-the-tide-on-voting-rights.html?_r= http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/campaign-stops/turning-the-tide-on-voting-rights.html?_r= http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/campaign-stops/turning-the-tide-on-voting-rights.html?_r= http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/campaign-stops/turning-the-tide-on-voting-rights.html?_r= http://www.artsjournal.com/dancebeat/ / /getting-down-with-ailey/ http://www.artsjournal.com/dancebeat/ / /getting-down-with-ailey/ http://www.artsjournal.com/dancebeat/ / /getting-down-with-ailey/ http://www.artsjournal.com/dancebeat/ / /getting-down-with-ailey/ http://www.artsjournal.com/dancebeat/ / /getting-down-with-ailey/ https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core 	constrained bodies: dance, social justice, and choreographic agency 	biopolitics, necropolitics, and neoliberalism 	discipline, the death penalty, and mobilization 	social kinesthetics in corporeal resistance and restraint 	overreading and black habitus in the urban u.s. 	conclusion 	notes 	works cited vol. ( ) the beacon: eng journal for studying ideologies and mental dimensions _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ – do we need a great reset? covid- , black revolution, inequality and common good vladimir m. moskovkin vladimir m. moskovkin, phd, dr habil (geography), professor, belgorod state university, world economy department, director, centre for development of publication activity, russia article no / Номеръ статьи: for citation (chicago style) / Для цитированія (стиль «Чикаго»): moskovkin, vladimir m. . “do we need a great reset? covid- , black revolution, inequality and common good.” the beacon: journal for studying ideologies and mental dimensions , . versions in different languages available online: russian only. permanent url links to the article: handle: . . /thebeacon. . http://thebeacon.ru/pdf/vol.% .% issue% .% % rus.pdf please send the correspondence to e-mail: moskovkin@bsu.edu.ru. vol. ( ) the beacon: eng journal for studying ideologies and mental dimensions _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ www.thebeacon.ru – __________________________________ received in the original form: june review cycles: st review cycle ready: june review outcome: of positive decision: to publish with minor revisions nd review cycle ready: july accepted: june published online: july __________________________________ aabbssttrraacctt vladimir m. moskovkin. do we need a great reset? covid- , black revolu- tion, inequality and common good. the current coronavirus crisis is inextricably linked to “black lives matter” protests in usa and beyond. both social processes are results of many-year social and economic inequality. corona crisis gave an acceleration to the process of becoming the societies “left.” we suggest that the great reset, i.e. post-covid- innovative development of societies should be based on economy for the common good principles outlined by christian felber in . the great reset concept is closely connected with the world economic forum initiative of june . it opens prospects for truly sustainable develop- ment of all future societies. kkeeyy wwoorrddss:: corona crisis, covid- , economy for common good, ecological sustainability, great reset, black protests, black lives matter ВВВВЕЕДДЕЕННiiЕЕ ССТТААТТЬЬЯЯ ННААППИИССААННАА ППОО ГГООРРЯЯЧЧИИММЪЪ ИИ ААККТТУУААЛЛЬЬННЫЫММЪЪ ССООББЫЫТТІІЯЯММЪЪ и проблемамъ сегодняшняго времени, и состоитъ изъ трехь основныхъ главъ. Первая глава посвящена коронавирусу и протестамъ черныхъ, которые обнажили про- блему неравенства до самой крайней точки, вторая связана съ коронавирусными играми и фейками, которые сильно подогрѣваютъ протестныя движенія по всему міру, въ третьей анализируются движенія economy for the common good и the great reset, которые даютъ шансъ пріобрѣсти нашъ міръ вновь. vol. ( ) the beacon: eng journal for studying ideologies and mental dimensions _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ www.thebeacon.ru – ККООРРООННААВВИИРРУУССЪЪ,, ППРРООТТЕЕССТТЫЫ ЧЧЕЕРРННЫЫХХЪЪ ИИ ННЕЕРРААВВЕЕННССТТВВОО ЧЧИИТТААЯЯ ННООВВООССТТИИ ВВЕЕДДУУЩЩИИХХЪЪ ЗЗААППААДДННЫЫХХЪЪ ААГГЕЕННТТССТТВВЪЪ,, мы наблюдаемъ, что распространеніе коронавируса актуализировало возвратъ къ соціалистическимъ цѣнно- стямъ – справедливости, солидарности, равенству и благополучію для всѣхъ. Серія репор- тажей агентства cnn отъ апрѣля г. изъ Франціи подъ общимъ заголовкомъ «virus exposed years of inequality» («Вирусъ обнажилъ годы неравенства») была предварена такой преамбулой: Пока милліардеры изолировали себя въ роскошныхъ укрытіяхъ Средиземноморья, во время эпидеміи коронавируса, жители депрессивныхъ и перенаселенныхъ районовъ Франціи столкнулись сейчасъ съ волной смертей и уличными безпорядками (benjamin berteau et al. ). Извѣстный французскій соціальный активистъ Абделаали эль Бадауи (abdelaali el badaoui) заявилъ журналисту агентства cnn: Коронавирусъ не создаетъ соціальный кризисъ, а просто показываетъ уровень сло- жившейся нищеты и страданій, съ которыми сталкивается множество людей. Коронавирусъ долженъ дать намъ возможность измѣнить тотъ путь, на который мы об- рекли людей, сталкивающихся съ неравенствомъ каждый день. Любопытно, когда я заглянулъ въ концѣ іюня г. на эту серію репортажей, то они уже шли подъ другимъ заголовкомъ «from private testing for the rich to unrest in banlieues, coronavirus is highlighting france’s stark divide», но это сути не мѣняетъ. Конечно, большая ошибка Евросоюза состояла въ томъ, что онъ позволилъ наводнить Европу огромнымъ количествомъ азіатскихъ и африканскихъ мигрантовъ, которымъ чужда европейская культура и которые усугубили во много разъ то неравенство, о которомъ го- воритъ Бадауи. Эти мигранты изъ бѣдныхъ кварталовъ больше всего и страдаютъ отъ эпидеміи, также какъ негры и латиносы въ США. Тѣмъ не менѣе, у насъ такихъ репортажей отъ центральныхъ новостныхъ агентствъ вы не встрѣтите, хотя люди гдѣ-нибудь въ глубинкѣ также страдаютъ отъ нищеты и того же нера- венства и безъ коронавируса. Почти вѣсь міръ сейчасъ только и можетъ, что слезно просить деньги у своихъ олигар- ховъ и международныхъ финансовыхъ агентствъ. У правительствъ денегъ не хватаетъ, льви- ная ихъ доля – у владѣльцевъ транснаціональнаго капитала, а имъ на все наплевать, имъ чѣмъ всѣмъ хуже, тѣмъ имъ лучше. Они только и рады ходу коронавирусныхъ событій, а возможно и управляютъ ими. Наступаютъ опасныя времена. Вирусъ наноситъ двойной ударъ, унося сотни тысячъ жиз- ней и принося экономическій крахъ. Ненависть и протесты противъ сильныхъ міра сего можетъ быть поддержана многими людьми. Это вся лѣвая Америка, особенно, молодежь, которая безъ ума отъ «Капитала» Маркса. Европа уже давно лѣвая. А коронавирусъ только vol. ( ) the beacon: eng journal for studying ideologies and mental dimensions _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ www.thebeacon.ru – задалъ ускореніе лѣвому повороту. Если даже, въ лучшемъ для васъ случаѣ, когда % богатствъ принадлежитъ % насе- ленія, то есть вамъ, какъ гласитъ принципъ Парето, то такой раскладъ, въ условіяхъ экспо- ненціальнаго числа потерпѣвшихъ и когда число умершихъ достигнетъ нѣсколько мил- ліоновъ, какъ при испанкѣ, приведетъ къ глобальной катастрофѣ, въ томъ числѣ и для васъ. Поэтому основнымъ владѣльцамъ мірового капитала необходимо тщательно подумать, не подѣлиться ли своими богатствами пораньше. Въ авторитарныхъ странахъ это сдѣлали очень быстро. Китайскіе коммунисты добро- вольно собрали милліардъ долларовъ на борьбу съ коронавирусомъ, да еще приказали своимъ олигархамъ положить въ учрежденный ими фондъ нѣсколько болѣе внушительную сумму. Иранцы также безъ всякаго разговора выдѣлили млрд евро на борьбу съ коронавирусомъ. Въ другихъ, болѣе бѣдныхъ странахъ, благодаря строжайшей дисциплинѣ и безпрекословному подчиненію властямъ, и безъ денегъ добились успѣха. Во Вьетнамѣ вообще умершихъ нѣтъ, а въ Сѣверной Кореѣ нѣтъ даже и заболѣвшихъ, какъ утверждаютъ ихъ власти. Любопытно, какъ Востокъ и Западъ въ миніатюрѣ соперничаютъ въ Кореѣ, хотя, что ре- ально происходитъ на сѣверѣ этого полуострова, намъ достаточно сложно представить. Тѣмъ не менѣе, въ началѣ февраля этого года въ СМИ прошло сообщеніе, что сѣвероко- рейскаго чиновника, пріѣхавшаго изъ Китая и нарушавшаго карантинъ походомъ въ обще- ственную баню, разстрѣляли, чтобы не разносилъ заразу. Радикальный методъ борьбы съ коронавирусомъ, но исключительно дикій для xxi вѣка. Кимъ Ченъ Ынъ въ себѣ и своей странѣ увѣренъ на все сто процентовъ, наблюдая изъ блиндажа за военными ученіями въ разгаръ эпидеміи. Онъ сидитъ, улыбаясь безъ маски, а по обѣ стороны отъ него, его гене- ралы въ черныхъ маскахъ – все это представляетъ собой впечатляющее зрѣлище. Сѣверокорейская пропаганда твердитъ, что въ странѣ вообще нѣтъ заболѣвшихъ коронавирусомъ. Сѣвероамериканскіе СМИ, конечно, это опровергаютъ. Но никто толкомъ ничего не знаетъ, даже западная развѣдка, коль на covid- -картѣ Сѣверной Кореи нѣтъ. Феномены обѣихъ Корей въ остановкѣ новаго коронавируса будутъ еще долго поражать міръ. Южная Корея добилась успѣха, используя новѣйшія технологіи, а Сѣверная Корея – очень допотопными и жесткими, вплоть до разстрѣла, методами. Іранъ – еще одинъ изгой мірового сообщества по опредѣленію всезнающаго Запада. Въ этой странѣ вирусъ также вызываетъ зараженія, но не такъ быстро, какъ въ нѣкоторыхъ странахъ Запада, напримѣръ, Италіи или Испаніи. Первоначальная вспышка эпидеміи была связана съ очень активными внѣшнеэкономическимъ и гуманитарными ирано-китайскимъ связями. Но, похоже, иранскимъ властямъ удалось достаточно быстро справиться съ ситу- аціей. А тутъ какъ назло для сильныхъ міра сего грянула «Черная революція» подъ лѣвыми ло- зунгами, вовлекшая въ свою орбиту также азіатскія и латиноамериканскія общины США. Мы уже видимъ, какъ она распространяется по всему западному міру. Протесты черныхъ и пандемія остро поставили вопросъ неравенства и справедливаго распредѣленія благъ. Но этотъ вопросъ никто рѣшать не хочетъ, а онъ рѣшается элемен- тарнымъ введеніемъ налога на сверхдоходы, такого налога, который ляжетъ непосильнымъ vol. ( ) the beacon: eng journal for studying ideologies and mental dimensions _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ www.thebeacon.ru – бременемъ на ихъ обладателей. Такое уже было одинъ разъ въ американской исторіи. Од- нако люди, отъ которыхъ зависитъ принятіе такихъ налоговыхъ законовъ, входятъ въ число сверхбогатыхъ людей, и поэтому они не хотятъ разставаться со своими сверхдоходами, тѣмъ самымъ создавая протестную и даже революціонную ситуацію. Ихъ логику трудно понять нормальному человѣку. Если у тебя есть шикарный особнякъ, яхта, вертолетъ, тогда зачѣмъ тебѣ еще по нѣскольку экземпляровъ этихъ благъ? Къ сожалѣнію, капиталъ ненасытенъ и амораленъ по своей сути, таковъ законъ развитія капиталистическаго общества. Объ этомъ писалъ еще Марксъ. Въ то же время нельзя всѣхъ сверхбогатыхъ людей приравнивать другъ ко другу. Профилактикой протестныхъ и революціонныхъ ситуацій нужно было заниматься рань- ше, въ спокойное время, а сейчасъ Америка доведена до крайней черты. Злорадствовать Россіи, да и кому бы то ни было еще, по этому поводу крайне глупо: если она пойдетъ на дно, то это повлечетъ соціально-экономическіе кризисы во многихъ странахъ. Сегодняшніе революціонные протесты не имѣютъ созидательнаго начала, они подняли со дна всю чернь, независимо отъ цвѣта кожи. Поражаютъ масштабы антикультурной революціи, борьбы съ міровымъ культурнымъ наслѣдіемъ въ видѣ сноса памятниковъ великимъ людямъ. Во что превращенъ Сиэтлъ, лучшій городъ США, гдѣ люди всегда жили очень разумно, также какъ и въ сосѣднемъ канадскомъ Ванкуверѣ? Этотъ городъ – оплотъ демократовъ. Благодаря мѣстнымъ властямъ въ немъ была нала- жена образцовая жизнь. Но что дѣлаютъ мѣстные демократы сейчасъ? Они спонсируютъ разруху, лишь бы любой цѣной убрать Трампа, совѣтуя ему сидѣть въ бункерѣ и помалки- вать. Анархисты и лѣвые радикалы всѣхъ мастей создали свою народную республику, вско- пали стадіоны подъ огороды. Такъ какъ въ этомъ комфортномъ для проживанія городѣ много нашихъ соотечественниковъ, то отъ нихъ мы и узнаемъ о томъ, что творится въ немъ и вообще въ штатѣ Вашингтонъ, вѣдь даже Трампъ ругалъ массъ-медіа, что онѣ замалчива- ютъ ситуацію въ этомъ регіонѣ. Маленькій эпизодъ изъ потока частныхъ сообщеній оттуда. Любимая внучка назвала свою бабушку расистской за то, что она немного пожурила улич- ныхъ безобразниковъ. Среди протестующихъ нѣтъ интеллектуаловъ, которые бы выдвинули разумныя требо- ванія къ властямъ, а не твердили бы только одну и ту же фразу, что «black lives matter». Нельзя все время сидѣть на пособіяхъ и подачкахъ, нужно требовать отъ властей созданія условій, чтобы американскія меньшинства могли сами зарабатывать себѣ на хлѣбъ. По крайней мѣрѣ, добиваться если не созданія новыхъ рабочихъ мѣстъ, то условій для самозанятости. Для этого нужны безплатные обучающіе курсы, напримѣръ, компьютерные курсы съ обученіемъ тому, какъ зарабатывать деньги черезъ сѣть Интернетъ. Необходимо обезпечить каждую бѣдную семью компьютерами съ выходомъ въ эту сѣть. Если ужъ расовые предразсудки въ странѣ непреодолимы, то необходимо идти по пути разумной и взаимопріемлемой сегрегаціи, создавая автономныя, но качествення системы образованія, здравоохраненія, соціальной защиты и безопасности для національныхъ меньшинствъ. Средства на все это, какъ я уже отмѣчалъ, можно брать за счетъ налога на сверхбогатыхъ. vol. ( ) the beacon: eng journal for studying ideologies and mental dimensions _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ www.thebeacon.ru – ККООРРООННААВВИИРРУУССННЫЫЕЕ ИИННФФООРРММААЦЦІІООННННЫЫЕЕ ВВББРРООССЫЫ,, ИИГГРРЫЫ ИИ ППРРОО-- ТТЕЕССТТЫЫ ППРРООТТЕЕССТТННААЯЯ ССИИТТУУААЦЦІІЯЯ ННАА ВВООЛЛННѢѢ ККООРРООННААВВИИРРУУССАА во многомъ подогрѣвается информаціонными вбросами со стороны властей, чиновниковъ отъ здравоохраненія и журналистовъ. Приведу два примѣра. іюня г. американскій кабельный и спутниковый телеканалъ новостей бизнеса cnbc на своемъ сайтѣ опубликовалъ репортажъ Уильяма Фойера (william feuer) и Ноа Хиггинса- Данна (noah higgins-dunn) «asymptomatic spread of coronavirus is "very rare", who says». Это было интервью съ главой подраздѣленія ВОЗ по новымъ возникающимъ болѣзнямъ и зоонозамъ Маріей Ванъ Керкхове – въ оригинальномъ текстѣ «head of the who’s emerging diseases and zoonosis unit mariya van kerkhove» (feuer and higgins-dunn ). Зоонозами называютъ инфекціонные заболѣванія, въ основномъ, людей, передающіеся имъ отъ жи- вотныхъ. Изъ одного только названія репортажа слѣдуетъ, что вся дѣятельность властей по подго- товкѣ къ будущей вакцинаціи, требованій по соціальному дистанцированію, самоизоляціи, ношенію масокъ и отслѣживанію контактовъ смысла не имѣетъ, такъ какъ случаи переноса заболѣванія людей отъ безсимптоматичныхъ больныхъ очень рѣдки. Но это противорѣчитъ всемъ медицинскимъ изслѣдованіямъ. Для подтвержденія своихъ словъ о томъ, что без- симптоматичное распространеніе коронавируса встрѣчается очень рѣдко, Марія Ванъ Керкхове привела ссылки на нѣкіе малоизвѣстныя изслѣдованія съ небольшими выборками: «i was referring to a small subset of studies». Такъ какъ сразу же послѣ этого интервью въ мірѣ поднялась волна негодованій, то ВОЗ на слѣдующій день, въ лицѣ той же Маріи Ванъ Керкхове, пришлось взять свои слова об- ратно. Она пыталась оправдываться, говорить, что это вопросъ очень сложный, что многое неизвѣстно и у насъ еще мало изслѣдованій. Якобы она такъ подумала, ознакомившись съ небольшимъ числомъ изслѣдованій. Но для чиновника такого ранга это дѣлать непозволи- тельно! Возникаетъ вопросъ, развѣ чиновники ВОЗ не знали, какую реакцію вызоветъ этотъ репортажъ? Конечно, знали и понимали, что на слѣдующій день придется давать опровер- женіе. Но главное было сдѣлано, новость была запущена и сама по себѣ начала будоражить вѣсь міръ. Не думаю, что самъ ВОЗ затѣялъ эту игру. Бизнесу надо зарабатывать деньги, а его хозяевамъ здоровье людей малоинтересно. Тутъ и нужно искать причину этого инфор- маціоннаго взброса. Приведу еще одинъ показательный случай. Это хорошій примѣръ дезинформаціи, когда главный распространитель англоязычной новости изъ Германіи умышленно или не умыш- ленно не захотѣлъ добраться до сути дѣла. Ну, а о нашихъ новостныхъ трансляторахъ и го- ворить не приходится. Все нижеизложенное будетъ продѣлано въ духѣ дотошнаго эксперт- наго разслѣдованія. Детальный анализъ въ сѣти интернетъ показалъ, что первоначальная новость была опубликована на сайтѣ Фонда стратегической культуры (strategic culture foundation) жур- налистомъ Даніэле Поцатти (daniele pozatti ) мая г. подъ заголовкомъ «german official leaks report denouncing corona as "a global false alarm"». Судя по сайту этого фонда, vol. ( ) the beacon: eng journal for studying ideologies and mental dimensions _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ www.thebeacon.ru – онъ анонимный и занимается распространеніемъ эксклюзивной аналитики и политическихъ комментаріевъ по евразійскимъ и глобальнымъ дѣламъ, начиная съ года. Самъ авторъ репортажа является извѣстнымъ итальянскимъ журналистомъ и политическимъ коммента- торомъ, проживающемъ въ Мюнхенѣ. google даетъ около сотни ссылокъ на его матеріалы въ различныхъ массъ-медіа и въ соціальныхъ сѣтяхъ. Все сайты, опубликовавшіе въ первой половинѣ іюня репортажъ подъ вышеуказаннымъ названіемъ, даютъ ссылку на оригиналь- ный текстъ, размѣщенный на сайтѣ Фонда стратегической культуры. Частичный переводъ этого довольно обширнаго текста на русскій языкъ впервые появился іюня на сайтѣ « Яндексъ Дзенъ» подъ авторствомъ «Пенсіонеръ безъ Пенсіи». Авторъ пишетъ, что онъ не профессіональный переводчикъ и перевелъ матеріалы изъ разныхъ источниковъ, но мы видимъ, что это все взято изъ указаннаго матеріала, такъ какъ другихъ оригинальныхъ тек- стовъ не было. Россійскіе профессіональные журналисты на слитый въ сѣть Интернетъ сек- ретный нѣмецкій докладъ не отреагировали. Заголовокъ репортажа Поцатти на сайтѣ фонда написанъ на фонѣ летящаго чер- но-бѣло-краснаго дрона и фасада одной изъ берлинскихъ университетскихъ клиникъ charite. Ниже идетъ заставка ютобовского слайдъ-шоу подъ заголовкомъ «Немецкіе слитые въ сѣть документы и коронавирусъ», а ниже большими буквами – «въ нихъ также было написано, что вирусъ является менѣе смертельно опаснымъ, чѣмъ гриппъ во время волны / гг.» Слайдъ-шоу, созданное Фондомъ стратегической культуры, красочно вбиваетъ въ голову читателямъ основныя мысли скандальнаго доклада. Пройдемся теперь по тексту репортажа. Въ началѣ сказано, что федеральныя власти Германіи и ведущія СМИ занялись изслѣдованіемъ ущерба, нанесеннаго докладомъ, который былъ слитъ изъ Мини- стерства внутреннихъ дѣлъ (МВД) Германіи и бросившаго вызовъ устоявшимся положеніямъ о коронавирусе. Здѣсь дается гиперссылка на этотъ докладъ, идущій подъ шифромъ km - / # . Ниже дадимъ наши комментаріи отъ поверхностнаго просмотра доклада. Въ началѣ идетъ страницъ преамбулы (расширенное резюме) къ докладу, нумерованныхъ отъ до . Мы видимъ, что докладъ подготовленъ подраздѣленіемъ km по анализу кризиснаго ме- неджмента. Это подраздѣленіе въ МВД Германіи отвѣтственно за защиту критической ин- фраструктуры. На титулѣ -х страничнаго доклада мы видимъ, что это его проектъ подъ версіей . . съ датами . april / . mai . Подъ этими свѣдѣніями идетъ текстъ auswertungsbericht des referats km (bmi), переводъ котораго ставитъ насъ въ затруд- неніе, такъ какъ слово referat имѣетъ два разныхъ значенія перевода на русскій языкъ – до- кладъ (рефератъ) и отдѣлъ (подраздѣленіе). Тогда могутъ быть два перевода выше указаннаго текста «Отчетъ по оцѣнкѣ докладовъ km (bmi)» или «Отчетъ по оцѣнкѣ подраздѣленій km (bmi)». Во второмъ случаѣ подра- зумѣвается оцѣнка дѣятельности подраздѣленія km , но оно и само является небольшимъ подраздѣленіемъ, такъ что мы склоняемся къ первому варіанту перевода. Тогда получается, что мы имѣемъ дѣло съ отчетомъ матеріаловъ km . Здѣсь bmi это немецкоязычная аб- бревіатура министерства внутреннихъ дѣлъ. Ниже написано и перечеркнуто краснымъ цвѣтомъ: «-erstellt von ?????????????-», то есть сказано, что «создано съ -ю вопросительными знаками». Видимо, хотѣли написать авто- vol. ( ) the beacon: eng journal for studying ideologies and mental dimensions _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ www.thebeacon.ru – ровъ этого отчета, но потомъ передумали. Потомъ, наконецъ-то, идетъ само названіе до- клада или отчета, которое легко переводится какъ «Коронавирусный кризисъ съ точки зрѣнія защиты критически важной инфраструктуры», и еще ниже написано «Оцѣнка предыдущей стратегіи управленія и рекомендаціи къ дѣйствію». Теперь вернемся къ статьѣ Поцатти, въ то мѣсто, гдѣ онъ перечисляетъ ключевыя поло- женія доклада, написанныя въ его восьмистраничной преамбулѣ: . Опасность covid- была переоцѣнена: вѣроятно, ни при какихъ условіяхъ, опасность, создаваемая новымъ вирусомъ, не выходила за рамки нормальнаго уровня. . Люди, которые умирали отъ коронавируса, по сути, являлись тѣми, которые ста- тистически и такъ бы умерли въ этомъ году, потому что они достигли конца своей жизни, и ихъ ослабленныя тѣла не могутъ справляться съ любымъ случайнымъ повседневнымъ стрессомъ (включая видовъ вирусовъ, циркулирующихъ въ природѣ). . Во всемъ мірѣ, въ теченіе четверти года, было зарегистрировано болѣе смертей отъ covid- , по сравненію съ . милліоновъ смертей ( въ Гер- маніи) во время гриппа - гг. (данныя по Германіи Поцатти добавилъ отъ себя, сославшись на изслѣдованія Института Роберта Коха). . Опасность, очевидно, не больше, чѣмъ отъ многихъ другихъ вирусовъ. Нѣтъ ни- какихъ доказательствъ того, что это была болѣе чѣмъ ложная тревога. . Упрекъ можетъ состоять въ слѣдующемъ: Во время коронавирусного кризиса государство зарекомендовало себя какъ одинъ изъ крупнѣйшихъ производителей фейковыхъ новостей. Вѣроятно, основныя положенія доклада были спеціально подобраны итальянскимъ жур- налистомъ, чтобы усыпить бдительность нѣмцевъ и пожелать имъ вѣсь тотъ ужасъ, который пережила Италія. Въ преамбулѣ къ докладу мы видимъ восемь, а не пять тезисовъ, но мы въ этомъ разбираться не будемъ, такъ какъ это никакъ не повліяетъ на дальнѣйшіе выводы. Далѣе авторъ репортажа не безъ юмора отмѣчаетъ, что докладъ фокусируется на «раз- нообразныхъ и тяжелыхъ послѣдствіяхъ коронавирусныхъ мѣръ», которыя ведутъ людей прямо въ «могилу». Или болѣе простымъ его же языкомъ: «Больше людей умираетъ изъ-за введенія государствомъ коронавирусныхъ мѣръ, чѣмъ отъ вируса». Мысль эффектная, но ее практически не возможно подкрѣпить фактическими данными. Скандальная ситуація въ Германіи сложилась изъ-за того, какъ пишетъ Поцатти, что система здравоохраненія сфоку- сировавшись на спасеніи коронавирусныхъ больныхъ и забыла объ остальныхъ. Дѣйстви- тельно, на случай такихъ непредвидѣнныхъ ситуацій и особенно на случай войны государ- ства должны резервировать дополнительныя медицинскія мощности. Напримѣръ, въ прак- тикѣ совѣтскаго здравоохраненія это было предусмотрѣно. Теперь начинается самое интересное. Авторъ даетъ подзаголовокъ «Берлинъ отказыва- ется. Ученые даютъ отпоръ», то есть власти даютъ понять, что они никакого отношенія къ слитому въ сѣть Интернетъ докладу не имѣютъ. Все нижеслѣдующее – это примѣръ того, какъ солидный журналистъ, не докопавшись до сути, самъ оказался производителемъ фейковой новости, соглашаясь съ однимъ изъ тези- vol. ( ) the beacon: eng journal for studying ideologies and mental dimensions _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ www.thebeacon.ru – совъ доклада, что государство тоже можетъ быть производителемъ такихъ новостей. Онъ пишетъ, что первоначально власти хотѣли повѣсить этотъ докладъ на одного со- трудника МВД, объявивъ, что это его собственное мнѣніе, но журналисты и слышать объ этомъ не хотѣли. Далѣе идетъ слѣдующее утвержденіе автора репортажа о томъ, что « -х страничный докладъ по названіемъ “Анализъ кризиснаго менеджмента”, подготовленъ па- нелью ученыхъ уполномоченныхъ МВД Германіи, состоящихъ изъ внѣшнихъ медицинскихъ экспертовъ нѣсколькихъ университетовъ Германіи». Здѣсь и по мелочамъ, и по сути ни од- ного вѣрнаго слова. Какъ мы увидѣли своими глазами докладъ написанъ на -х страницахъ, а не на -х, названіе его совершенно другое, мы выше его перевели на русскій языкъ, а что это были за ученые и какое они имѣли отношеніе къ докладу – мы увидимъ изъ дальнѣй- шаго анализа. Далѣе, авторъ статьи утверждаетъ, что написаніе доклада было иниціативой подраз- дѣленія km МВД Германіи, отвѣтственнаго за защиту критической инфраструктуры, въ ко- торомъ работалъ Штефенъ Конъ (stephen kohn), слившій его массъ-медіа. Онъ также заяв- ляетъ, «что авторы доклада выпустили совмѣстный прессъ-релизъ еще мая, отчитывая правительство за игнорированіе совѣта эксперта, и требуя, чтобы МВД Германіи оф- фиціально комментировало ихъ совмѣстное экспертное заявленіе». Однако, авторы доклада могли отчитывать власти за игнорированіе ихъ доклада, а не за совѣтъ какого-то эксперта. Словосочетаніе «expert advise» будетъ очень важнымъ моментомъ въ дальнѣйшемъ нашемъ разслѣдованіи. Поцатти свелъ довольно обширное заявленіе авторовъ пресс-релиза къ тремъ тезисамъ: . Терапевтическія и профилактическія мѣры никогда не должны приносить больше вре- да, чѣмъ сама болѣзнь. Ихъ цѣль состоитъ въ защитѣ группъ риска, безъ нанесенія ущерба всей системѣ здравоохраненія и населенію въ цѣломъ, что, къ сожалѣнію, происходитъ. . Мы – ученые и медицинскіе практики – сталкиваемся со вторичнымъ ущербомъ, при- чиняемыхъ нашимъ паціентамъ коронавирусными мѣрами, на ежедневной основѣ. . Мы поэтому просимъ МВД Германіи прокомментировать нашъ прессъ-релизъ и надѣемся на умѣстную дискуссію, касающихся мѣръ, которыя приведутъ къ возможно луч- шему рѣшенію для всего населенія. Авторъ статьи даетъ ссылку на прессъ-релизъ опубликованный на сайтѣ rt deutsch мая г. Журналистская преамбула къ нему дана подъ заголовкомъ «Не игнорируйте экспертизу: Ученые критикуютъ bmi за борьбу съ коронавируснымъ документомъ». Здѣсь подъ документомъ понимается докладъ, слитый въ сѣть Интернетъ изъ подраздѣленія km МВД Германіи. На нѣмецкомъ языкѣ онъ названъ, какъ corona-papier. Какъ отмѣчаетъ Поцатти, съ момента опубликованія прессъ-релиза до момента выхода его репортажа, а это около дней, реакціи отъ властей на прессъ-релизъ не послѣдовало. Заявленіе въ этомъ прессъ-релизе подписали десять профессоровъ-медиковъ изъ университетовъ Гейдельбер- га, Бремена, Майнца, Вѣны, Витгенъ-Гердеке, Эппендорфа и Шлезвигъ-Гольштейна. Въ поддержку уже сказаннаго въ докладѣ и прессъ-релизе Поцатти приводитъ ссылку на краткую информацію, опубликованную мая г. въ газетѣ das bild, подъ заголовкомъ « Драматическія послѣдствія коронавирусныхъ меръ: тысячи операцій на ракъ отложены», въ которой отмѣчается, что еще въ теченіе многихъ лѣтъ будутъ чувствоваться побочные vol. ( ) the beacon: eng journal for studying ideologies and mental dimensions _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ www.thebeacon.ru – эффекты коронавирусного кризиса. Слѣдуетъ поблагодарить автора этой статьи, что онъ вездѣ даетъ ссылки на поднятые имъ изъ сѣти Интернетъ информаціонные и аналитическіе матеріалы. Поэтому мы легко перевели остальной небольшой кусокъ информаціи изъ этой газеты: «Въ глобальномъ опросѣ изслѣдователи уже опросили хирурговъ изъ клиникъ на предметъ того, сколько хирургическихъ операцій потерпѣло неудачу во время пика пандеміи». Очень интересно дождаться публикаціи результатовъ этого опроса. И вотъ мы подходимъ къ финишу, читая послѣдній фрагментъ статьи Поцатти подъ заго- ловкомъ «Охота на освѣдомителя. Игнорированіе доклада». Здѣсь онъ ссылается но но- востную ленту газеты der spiegel изъ раздѣла “international” отъ мая г. (felix bohr et al. ). Причемъ изъ двухъ новостныхъ репортажей «a global false alarm» и «a difficult situation» онъ выхватываетъ случайные куски, поддерживая старую свою версію. Если бы онъ внимательно изучилъ оба матеріала, ему бы пришлось переписывать всю статью. А можетъ, все это онъ читалъ и прекрасно понималъ? Онъ пишетъ, ссылаясь на матеріалъ изъ der spiegel, что Штефенъ Конъ былъ уволенъ, его лэптопъ конфискованъ, а ему самому предложено нанять адвоката. Далѣе, Штефенъ Конъ мая передалъ докладъ либерально-консервативному журналу tichys einblick, одному изъ крупнѣйшихъ и самыхъ популярныхъ альтернативныхъ изданій Гер- маніи. Новости по докладу вошли въ нѣмецкій мейнстримъ со второй недѣли мая, но уже на третьей недѣлѣ журналисты и политики прекратили дискуссіи по этому докладу. Символиченъ, какъ отмѣчаетъ Поцатти, былъ подходъ босса освѣдомителя. Когда его спросили, относится ли онъ серьезно къ слитому въ сѣть документу, онъ отвѣтилъ: «Если вы начинаете анализировать доклады, подобные этому, тогда довольно скоро вы будете при- глашать парней въ шапочкахъ изъ фольги на парламентскія слушанія». Какъ мы понимаемъ, здѣсь рѣчь идетъ о сторонникахъ конспирологическихъ теорій. Въ этой связи Поцатти пи- шетъ, что въ разсматриваемыхъ репортажахъ въ der spiegel отъ мая г. онъ насчи- талъ не менѣе -ти упоминаній слова «conspiracy». Онъ сѣтуетъ на то, что дискуссіи по до- кладу прекратились, и что эта новость за предѣлами Германіи практически не распростра- нялась. Заканчиваетъ свою статью авторъ небольшимъ фрагментомъ подъ заголовкомъ «the protest movement or corona-rebellen». Учитывая нѣмецкое слово rebellen, мы понимаемъ, что рѣчь пойдетъ о мятежникахъ или повстанцахъ противъ коронавирусныхъ мѣръ. От- мѣчается, что нѣмцы начали выступать противъ этихъ мѣръ еще въ раннемъ апрѣлѣ, и ты- сячи гражданъ продолжаютъ появляться на демонстраціяхъ каждый уикъ-эндъ, даже не- смотря на то, что правительство ослабляетъ ограниченія. Очень любопытно, что авторъ статьи протестующихъ называетъ не людьми (people), а демосомъ (demos). Далѣе, я просто переведу концовку статьи Поцатти: Народъ не просто противъ ограниченій, которыя были сравнительно мягкими по сравненію со многими другими западными странами. Народъ подвергаетъ сомнѣнію разсказъ о коронавирусе, и даже больше – о роли его акторовъ (принципаловъ), осо- бенно, о роли Билла Гейтса въ качествѣ втораго по величинѣ финансоваго спонсора vol. ( ) the beacon: eng journal for studying ideologies and mental dimensions _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ www.thebeacon.ru – ВОЗЪ (а теперь уже и перваго послѣ отказа Трампа финансировать эту организацію). Самыя крупныя демонстраціи состоялись въ Штутгартѣ мая, десятки тысячъ людей со- брались сказать нѣтъ новому міровому порядку (nwo). Нѣмцы говорятъ нѣтъ любому оруэлловскому рѣшенію, которое правительство можетъ однажды навязать въ рамкахъ чрезвычайнаго положенія, отъ web-приложеній для слѣжки за людьми до обязательной вакцинаціи. Утечка доклада доказала, что ихъ страхи были обоснованы. Насколько мы понимаемъ, это касается фальшивой природы коронавирусной пандеміи. Остальное мо- жетъ вскорѣ послѣдовать. Что онъ понимаетъ подъ остальнымъ – малопонятно. Теперь мы попытаемся понять, что же это за секретный докладъ. Отмѣтимъ вначалѣ, что серія репортажей отъ мая г. въ газетѣ der spiegel написана семнадцатью журналистами подъ общимъ заголовкомъ «Бер- линъ опасается, что популисты воспользуются протестнымъ движеніемъ» (felix bohr et al. ). Въ новостномъ репортажѣ «a global false alarm» подчеркнуто, что въ электронномъ письмѣ, которое сотрудникъ МВД Германіи Штефенъ Конъ направилъ въ свое министерство, имъ было написано: «вѣроятно, ни при какихъ условіяхъ опасность, создаваемая новымъ вирусомъ, не выходила за рамки нормальнаго уровня». Это голословное утвержденіе мы уже видѣли въ основныхъ тезисахъ доклада, которые продублировалъ Поцатти въ своей статьѣ. Штефенъ Конъ также подготовилъ рекомендаціи, въ которыхъ правительственныя мѣры назвалъ слишкомъ жесткими. Далѣе, идетъ ключевая фраза, изъ которой мы узнаемъ, что все предложенія Кона были изложены въ статьѣ объемомъ въ страницъ съ прило- женіями. Какъ отмѣчено авторомъ репортажа, въ статьѣ Кона было много заслуживающаго вниманія: отложенныя операціи и отложенныя посѣщенія врачей, которыя чреваты преж- девременными смертями, ментальное здоровье людей и др. Но, въ цѣломъ, авторъ статьи слишкомъ многое преувеличиваетъ, въ ней пандемія названа глобальной фальшивой тре- вогой, используются данныя изъ сомнительныхъ блоговъ, что является несерьезнымъ для сотрудника министерства, какъ отмѣчаетъ авторъ репортажа. И далѣе: Конъ въ теченіе нѣсколькихъ недѣль выражалъ свои опасенія въ министерствѣ и даже разослалъ тезисы своей статьи, хотя написанные въ болѣе сдержанномъ тонѣ. Люди со- общали ему, что нѣкоторыя его идеи были интересными, но въ другихъ отношеніяхъ онъ либо ошибается, либо опирается на устарѣвшія данныя. Его начальство сигнализировало ему, чтобы онъ остановился, и что онъ даже не отвѣтствененъ за этѣ проблемы. И теперь самое важное, о чемъ сообщилъ намъ корреспондентъ der spiegel: "kohn не прислушался къ предупрежденію своего начальства, и когда его прямого начальника не было на мѣстѣ, онъ отослалъ свою статью въ урѣзанномъ видѣ подъ шапкой своего мини- стерскаго департамента какъ expert advice, приписавъ въ ней, что государство можетъ, въ конечномъ итогѣ, стать самымъ крупнымъ производителемъ фальшивыхъ новостей. Напи- сано неудачно "sent out", а куда выслалъ – непонятно, но подразумѣвается, что онъ просто слилъ въ сѣть Интернетъ, какъ оно и есть на самомъ дѣлѣ. А получилось наоборотъ, итальянскій журналистъ изъ этой исторіи состряпалъ фейкъ. vol. ( ) the beacon: eng journal for studying ideologies and mental dimensions _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ www.thebeacon.ru – Оказывается не было никакого заказного доклада со стороны МВД Германіи, его не писали ведущіе профессора-медики изъ нѣмецкихъ университетовъ, а была частная иниціатива одного сотрудника министерства, который свою статью выдалъ за экспертное заключеніе отъ лица своего министерскаго подраздѣленія. Это, конечно, недопустимо, и онъ понесъ за это наказаніе, возможно, чрезмѣрное. Но, съ другой стороны, такъ какъ онъ настаивалъ публично на своихъ выводахъ, то министерство могло бы организовать у себя широкіе де- баты по этому вопросу съ приглашеніемъ внѣшнихъ экспертовъ, прежде чѣмъ уволить сво- его сотрудника. Самъ министръ Хорстъ Зеехоферъ говорилъ журналистамъ, что онъ всегда поддержи- валъ высокую степень либерализма въ Министерствѣ внутреннихъ дѣлъ, но это было уже вопіющимъ случаемъ, когда его сотрудникъ подъ эгидой министерства обнародовалъ свое личное мнѣніе. Однако огласка была слишкомъ большой, министра МВД Германіи вызвали на дистанціонную встрѣчу парламентской группы. Онъ послалъ на нее вмѣсто себя своего представителя Гюнтера Крингса, и тотъ сказалъ то, о чемъ мы писали со словъ Поцатти, то есть о любителяхъ конспирологическихъ теорій. При этомъ итальянскій журналистъ умол- чалъ, что это было парламентское обсужденіе документа Штефена Кона. Въ отвѣтъ Вероника Бельманъ, членъ парламента отъ восточной земли Саксонія (членъ ХДС), обвинила министра МВД Германіи въ преждевременномъ отказѣ отъ разсмотрѣнія статьи. Она сказала, что «раздѣляетъ тезисъ статьи о преувеличенной угрозѣ коронавирусной инфекціи», добавивъ, что «государственный служащій просто дѣлалъ свою работу, а то, что онъ сейчасъ изображенъ чокнутымъ, меня безпокоитъ», и продолжила: «Дѣлая такъ, мы подливаемъ масло въ огонь конспирологической теоріи. Я ожидаю, что мы должны серьезно обсудить его идеи». Помимо фейковаго характера статьи Поцатти, который выдалъ частную рукопись за ми- нистерское экспертное мнѣніе, мы видимъ, какого накала достигла борьба между прави- тельствомъ и парламентаріями. МВД Германіи, придерживаясь рекомендацій медиковъ, ужесточаетъ мѣры по борьбѣ съ коронавирусной инфекціей, а парламентаріи, выбранные народомъ, стараются ему угодить. А благодаря этимъ жесткимъ мѣрамъ, Германія вполнѣ прилично выглядитъ въ коронавирусной гонкѣ, опускаясь все ниже и ниже въ коронавирусномъ рейтингѣ, занимая на начало іюля г. четырнадцатое мѣсто въ мірѣ по числу инфицированныхъ. ЭЭККООННООММИИККАА ДДЛЛЯЯ ООББЩЩААГГОО ББЛЛААГГАА ИИ ««ББООЛЛЬЬШШААЯЯ ППЕЕРРЕЕЗЗААГГРРУУЗЗККАА»» ППРРООШШЛЛОО УУЖЖЕЕ ДДЕЕССЯЯТТЬЬ ЛЛѢѢТТЪЪ,, а мы мало знаемъ о томъ, что въ Европѣ въ г. было запущено движеніе подъ названіемъ economy for the common good (ecg). Оно было основано въ Австріи и толчокъ ему дала книга change everything: creating an economy for the common good австрійскаго автора Христиана Фелбера (felber ), чье первое из- даніе было опубликовано въ томъ же году на нѣмецкомъ языкѣ. Отмѣтимъ, что на англійскомъ языкѣ эта книга вышла въ свѣтъ въ г. Объ авторѣ и его книгахъ можно почитать на сайтѣ www.changeeverything.info. Въ предложенной въ этой книгѣ экономиче- vol. ( ) the beacon: eng journal for studying ideologies and mental dimensions _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ www.thebeacon.ru – ской модели пріоритетомъ является достойная жизнь для всѣхъ, гармонія и благополучіе всей планеты. Очевидно, что данная книга была откликомъ на глобальный экономическій кризисъ г. Описываемая въ ней модель включаетъ въ себя четыре вида этическихъ цѣнностей: че- ловѣческое достоинство, солидарность и соціальная справедливость, самоподдерживающаяся окружающая среда (environmental sustainability, авторы модели отошли здѣсь отъ не вполнѣ концептуализированного понятія «устойчивое развитіе»), про- зрачность и совмѣстное опредѣленіе политики. Это движеніе включаетъ сейчасъ въ себя сторонниковъ, активныхъ членовъ, ассоціацію ecg, мѣстныхъ главъ, го- родовъ, компаній и университетовъ міра. Сформированы хабы консультантовъ, коммуникаторовъ, аудиторовъ и спикеровъ. Всѣ организаціи имѣютъ возможность создавать балансовые листы или отчеты (common good balance sheets) на основѣ common good matrix, которая описываетъ темъ. Каждая тема на стартѣ получаетъ балловъ. Этѣ темы и показываютъ вкладъ компаній въ общее благо. Матрица имѣетъ размѣрность x , пять видовъ вкладчиковъ и четыре этическія цѣн- ности. Каждая компанія можетъ достичь максимума балловъ. Какъ видимъ, здѣсь за- пущена математическая процедура экспертныхъ оцѣнокъ и состязательный процессъ. Сравненія производятся по секторамъ, типамъ юридическихъ фирмъ и ихъ размѣрамъ. Очень интересно почитать профили компаній, посмотрѣть, чѣмъ онѣ занимаются на благо мѣстныхъ сообществъ. Любопытно, что университеты дѣлаютъ вкладъ въ common good, напримѣръ, своими учебными пособіями и лекціями. То есть читаются, не какъ у насъ, примитивный западный экономиксъ и даже не стандартный неолиберальный курсъ по эко- номикѣ благосостоянія, а курсы по common good. Отмѣтимъ, что либеральная доктрина уже давно подмѣнила понятіе общаго блага на понятіе общественнаго блага, гдѣ человѣку позволено дѣлать все, что ему заблагоразсудится. Однимъ изъ первыхъ среди университе- товъ опубликовала свой балансовый отчетъ business school lausanne (Швейцарія). Разсматриваемая экономическая модель была запущена первоначально въ нѣмецко- и франкоязычныхъ странахъ Европы, а также въ Скандинавіи, гдѣ вездѣ сильны соціалъ- демократическія традиціи и цѣнности, а въ послѣднее время къ этому движенію присоеди- нились компаніи и организаціи Южной Америки, въ которой этѣ традиціи и цѣнности имѣютъ уже революціонный характеръ. Очень важно, что эта модель развивается снизу, на добровольной основѣ, ей чужды мо- дели полюсовъ роста и блоковаго противостоянія, гдѣ одни стараются подавить другихъ въ конкурентной борьбѣ. Сейчасъ какъ никогда нужны коопераціонныя, а не конкурентныя стратегіи развитія, иначе планету ждетъ быстрый коллапсъ. Модель экономики для общаго блага – реальная альтернатива глобализаціи по американскому сценарію и засилью неоли- беральной доктрины. Кризисъ г. привелъ также къ созданію Комиссіи по измѣренію эффективности эко- номической дѣятельности и соціальнаго прогресса, дѣятельность которой вылилась въ пуб- ликацію уникальнаго доклада. Одинъ изъ авторовъ этого доклада, выдающійся французскій экономистъ Жанъ-Поль Фитусси, размѣстилъ въ январѣ г. -страничный докладъ на платформѣ researchgate, такимъ образомъ онъ находится въ открытомъ доступѣ (stiglitz et vol. ( ) the beacon: eng journal for studying ideologies and mental dimensions _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ www.thebeacon.ru – al. ). Докладъ въ году переведенъ на русскій языкъ и изданъ Институтомъ Гайдара въ видѣ книги «Невѣрно оцѣнивая нашу жизнь: почему ВВП не имѣютъ смысла». Книга продается въ сѣти Интернетъ, но нѣкоторые сайты позволяютъ скачивать его безплатно. Авторы доклада считаютъ, что онъ долженъ быть въ общественномъ достояніи, размѣщая его въ публичномъ доменѣ сѣти Интернетъ. Наши же либералы, переведя черезъ семь лѣтъ этотъ докладъ, очевидно, за грантовыя деньги, отдали его на продажу различнымъ интер- нетъ-торговцамъ. Хорошо, что находятся люди, выкупающіе его у этихъ торговцевъ и выкладывающіе свободно въ сѣть. Даже федеральный образовательный порталъ позволя- етъ скачивать его безплатно на своемъ сайтѣ www.institutiones.com (stiglitz et al. ). Прошло уже около лѣтъ, какъ выдающейся экономистъ современности Семенъ Куз- нецъ разработалъ методологію расчета національнаго дохода и національныхъ счетовъ, и до сихъ поръ ничего лучшаго не было предложено. ВВП можетъ расти и приводить къ большему неравенству, такъ какъ доходы богатыхъ людей могутъ расти непропорціонально быстро. Загрязненіе окружающей среды растетъ, а это сказывается на ростѣ ВВП, что гово- ритъ о двусмысленности самаго понятія ВВП. Данные примѣры показываютъ, что ВВП не учитываетъ экономическаго неравенства и послѣдствій экономическихъ воздѣйствій на окружающую среду. Въ докладѣ подчеркнуто: «То, что мы измѣряемъ, вліяетъ на то, что мы дѣлаемъ, а если наши измѣренія не вѣрны, то и наши рѣшенія будутъ разрушительными». Здѣсь правильнѣе было бы написать: «что и какъ мы измѣряемъ». Вмѣсто ВВП въ этомъ докладѣ предлагается цѣлый спектръ индикаторовъ – отъ устойчи- выхъ показателей экономическаго благосостоянія до измѣренія сбереженій и богатства, а также «зеленыхъ» счетовъ. Въ докладѣ сдѣланъ акцентъ на смѣщеніе отъ измѣренія произ- водства къ измѣренію человѣческаго благосостоянія, которое является многомѣрной ха- рактеристикой и включаетъ въ себя параметры дохода, образованія, здоровья, соціальныхъ связей, окружающей среды, безопасности и др. Подготовка этого доклада была иниціативой Николя Саркози, который обратился къ Но- белевскимъ лауреатомъ по экономикѣ Джозефу Стиглицу и Амартіи Сѣну, а также къ вы- дающемуся французскому экономисту Жану-Полю Фитусси, котораго мы упоминали ранѣе, создать Комиссію для изученія вопроса о томъ, является ли ВВП надежнымъ индикаторомъ экономической дѣятельности и соціальнаго прогресса. Самъ Николя Саркози для этого до- клада написалъ прекрасное вступительное слово. Пока я писалъ это статью, произошло нѣчто непредвидѣнное. Либеральные экспер- ты-экономисты Всемірнаго экономическаго форума, наконецъ-то, дошли до пониманія того, что такъ жить какъ раньше уже нельзя, и что коронавирусный кризисъ открываетъ новые измѣренія и подходы къ выживанію человѣчества. Информація объ этомъ была опублико- вана на сайтѣ ВЭФ іюня г. Новую концепцію «Большой Перезагрузки» (the great reset) представили принцъ Уэльскій Чарльзъ, исполнительный предсѣдатель и основатель ВЭФ Клаусъ Швабъ, генеральный секретарь ООН Антоніу Гутерришъ и исполнительный ди- ректоръ Всемірнаго банка Кристина Георгіева. «Если есть одинъ важный урокъ, который можно извлечь изъ этого кризиса, – это то, что мы должны поставить природу въ центръ всей дѣятельности. У насъ просто нѣтъ времени на разговоры», объяснилъ необходимость запуска новой иниціативы принцъ Чарльзъ. vol. ( ) the beacon: eng journal for studying ideologies and mental dimensions _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ www.thebeacon.ru – Въ противоположность изжившей себя системы, разработчики новой концепціи пред- ложили: . Справедливое регулированіе для поддержки экономики и урегулированіе интересовъ множества сторонъ. . Пакеты экономическаго стимулированія, оріентированные на экологическіе, соціальные и управленческіе показатели. . Использованіе инновацій четвертой промышленной революціи для поддержки об- щаго блага. Для простого человѣка это мало о чемъ говоритъ, но было принято рѣшеніе, что -ая встрѣча ВЭФ въ Давосе, которая состоится въ октябрѣ г., будетъ посвящена именно проблемѣ полной перезагрузки, и, что эта встрѣча откроетъ впервые двери для всѣхъ соціальныхъ и экологическихъ активистовъ. Это, на нашъ взглядъ, даетъ шансъ россійскому и всему постсовѣтскому зеленому движенію, которое сейчасъ возрождается подъ эгидой Международнаго Соціально-Экологическаго Союза Святослава Забелина, быть услышан- нымъ на самомъ высокомъ глобальномъ уровнѣ, какъ разъ въ томъ періодъ, когда природа на всемъ постсовѣтскомъ пространствѣ безжалостно уничтожается. Разсматривая сегодняшніе климатическіе дебаты, какъ борьбу двухъ корпоративныхъ точекъ зрѣнія – одни хотятъ продолжать жечь ископаемое топливо и дѣлать на этомъ свой привычный бизнесъ, другіе хотятъ зарабатывать на использованіи альтернативныхъ источ- никовъ энергіи, то можно сказать, что вторая точка зрѣнія взяла, наконецъ-то, вверхъ. И въ этомъ слѣдуетъ благодарить covid- . Встанетъ серьезная проблема, какъ помочь развивающимся странамъ Азіи, Африки и Латинской Америки въ переходѣ на альтернативные источники энергіи. Для этого необхо- димо будетъ передавать имъ технологіи и ноу-хау, но онѣ въ большинствѣ своемъ у транс- національныхъ корпорацій. Какъ побудить ихъ къ этой передачѣ, это большой вопросъ. Нѣкоторые, навѣрно, знаютъ, какъ этотъ вопросъ рѣшалъ Альбертъ Горъ въ отношеніи Индіи, а два его фильма о глобальномъ потеплѣніи an inconvenient truth ( ) и an inconvenient sequel: truth to power ( ) даютъ нѣкоторые рекомендаціи. Похоже, что всѣ мы въ ближайшее время будемъ свидѣтелями ожесточенной борьбы американскихъ кон- серваторовъ вмѣстѣ съ ихъ президентомъ съ новой концепціей «Большой Перезагрузки». Къ сожалѣнію, при запускѣ этой иниціативы, ея разработчики и лидеры забыли отдать дань Ричарду Флоридѣ за его книгу «Большая Перезагрузка. Какъ кризисъ измѣнитъ нашъ образъ жизни и рынокъ труда», въ которой онъ по горячимъ слѣдамъ кризиса г. пи- салъ: «Экономическій кризисъ, съ которымъ сталкивается человѣчество, можетъ стать зарей новой эпохи изобрѣтательства и предпріимчивости». Его книга съ тѣмъ же названіемъ но- вой иниціативы the great reset вышла въ г. (florida ) и была переведена на русскій языкъ въ г. Любопытно, что въ томъ же г. вышла книга Христіана Фелбера «Измѣнить все. Со- зданіе экономики для общаго блага», о которой рѣчь шла выше, а только что, въ канунъ коронавирусного кризиса, вышло второе англоязычное изданіе этой книги (felber ). Хочется вѣрить, что благодаря этимъ источникамъ, включая докладъ, написанный подъ ру- ководствомъ Джозефа Стиглица, фильмамъ Альберта Гора, Гретѣ Тунбергъ и, конечно, vol. ( ) the beacon: eng journal for studying ideologies and mental dimensions _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ www.thebeacon.ru – covid- , жизнь на планетѣ Земля станетъ лучше. conflicts of interest: none declared. rreeffeerreenncceess berteau, benjamin, reynolds, emma, and barbara wojazer. . “from private testing for the rich to unrest in banlieues, coronavirus is highlighting france’s stark divide.” cnn. april . https://edition.cnn.com/ / / /europe/coronavirus-france-inequality-intl/index. html bohr, felix et al. . “berlin fears populists will exploit protests movement.” may . in der spiegel. https://www.spiegel.de/international/germany/berlin-fears-populists-will-exploit-protest -movement-a- a b - - d-b - d e a “expertise nicht ignorieren": wissenschaftler kritiseren bmi für umgang mit corona-papier”. rt deutsch. may . https://deutsch.rt.com/inland/ -umstrittene-bmi-analyse-wissenschaftler-kritisier en felber, christian. . change everything. creating an economy for the common good. london: zed books. http://www.changeeverything.info feuer, william, and noah higgins-dunn. . “asymptomatic spread of coronavirus is ‘very rare’, who says.” in cnbc. june . https://www.cnbc.com/ / / /asymptomatic-coronavirus-patients-arent-spreadi ng-new-infections-who-says.html florida, richard. . the great reset: how new ways of living and working drive post-crash prosperity. new york. harper collins publishers. http://www.creativeclass.com/richard_florida/books/the_great_reset “now is the time for a ‘’great reset’”. in wef agenda. june . https://www.weforum.org/agenda/ / /now-is-the-time-for-a-great-reset pozatti, daniele. . “german official leaks report denouncing corona as ‘a global false alarm’”. may . strategic culture foundation. https://www.strategic-culture.org/news/ / / /german-official-leaks-report-deno uncing-corona-as-global-false-alarm stiglitz, joseph e., sen, amartya, and jean-paul fitoussi. . “report by the commission on the measurement of economic performance and social progress.” in researchgate. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/ _report_of_the_commission_on_t he_measurement_of_economic_performance_and_social_progress_cmepsp stiglitz, joseph e., sen, amartya, and jean-paul fitoussi. . neverno ocenivaya nashu zhizn': pochemu vvp ne imeet smysla?. moscow: izdatel'stvo instituta gajdara. . in vol. ( ) the beacon: eng journal for studying ideologies and mental dimensions _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ www.thebeacon.ru – russian. https://institutiones.com/download/books/ -neverno-ocenivaya-nashu-zhizn-poch emu-vvp-ne-imeet-smysla.html “ krebs – ops in deutschland verschoben.” in das bild. may . https://www.bild.de/bild-plus/politik/inland/politik-inland/folgen-der-corona-massnah men- - -krebs-ops-verschoben- ,view=conversiontologin.bild.html eexxtteennddeedd ssuummmmaarryy mmoosskkoovvkkiinn,, vvllaaddiimmiirr mm.. ddoo wwee nneeeedd aa ggrreeaatt rreesseett?? ccoovviidd-- ,, bbllaacckk rreevvoolluuttiioonn,, iinneeqquuaalliittyy aanndd ccoommmmoonn ggoooodd.. ccoorroonnaa ccrriissiiss iiss iinnsseeppaarraabbllyy rreellaatteedd ttoo ““bbllaacckk lliivveess mmaatttteerr”” pprrootteessttss in usa and beyond, as both social issues reveal the problem of social and economic inequal- ity severely exacerbated by the end of the second decade of the twenty-first cen- tury. the spread of coronavirus has actualised a return to socialist values, justice, solidarity, equality and prosperity for all instead of prosperity of a small number of people that hold the major financial capital in the world. therefore, corona cri- sis and black protests may be dealt with using innovative economic approaches introduced in the concept of economy for the common good (ecg) initially ad- vanced by christian felber in . epidemiological aspect of sars-cov- virus spread did not create new social crises, it rather revealed and made evident that in the global world the level of poverty and privation is enormous. containing the novel coronavirus is impossible without effective containing and prevention of social issues caused by it. dealing with impoverishment of the main part of humanity can be regarded as one of the most important tasks in the nearest time perspective. introducing new taxes im- posed upon the richest representatives of human population worldwide may cov- er budget expenses of all countries that suffered most of covid- pandemic. the model of ecg includes four types of new ethical values that should define the development of humanity in the years to come: ) human dignity; ) solidarity and social justice; ) environmental sustainability; and ) transparency and com- mon defining the policies. currently ecg movement already includes supporters, active members, ecg associations, local authorities, cities, companies and world-level universities. hubs of consultants, communicators, auditors and speakers have been formed as well. within ecg, all organisations have an ability to create “common good balance sheets” based on “common good matrix,” which describes twenty topics. each topic at the start gets fifty points. each company can reach a maximum of points. as one can see, the mathematical procedure of expert evaluations and the competition pro- cess are fundamentals in ecg ranking. the ecg economic model was initially probed in the german and french-speaking countries of europe, as well as in scandinavia, where social vol. ( ) the beacon: eng journal for studying ideologies and mental dimensions _____________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ www.thebeacon.ru – democratic traditions and values are strong. recently several latin american companies and organisations have joined the movement, where these traditions and values have already transformed to revolutionary narratives. ecg cooperation may become a foundation for the great reset in the post-corona era. though the same name was given to a post-crisis situation by richard florida in , this time we may deem the “reset,” i.e. switch to a new way of social development, truly “great,” because it aims at changing all major constituents of functioning the societies. we analyse how the new great reset paradigm was outlined in the world economy forum initiative of june . its major principles are as follows: ) fair regulation to support the economy and the interests of sundry parties; ) packages of economic incentives focussed on envi- ronmental, social and managerial indicators; ) using the innovations of the fourth industrial revolution to support the common good. there will be a serious task of helping developing countries in asia, africa and latin america in the transition to alternative energy sources. it will be necessary to transfer high technologies and know-hows to them. however, this will probably face an opposition of transnational corporations that own most of technological achievements in the modern world and obviously do not demonstrate any wish to share them with those who are in need. the only possibility of the state structures to guide and control the successful development of societies in the post-covid time, is to implement left and socialist principles. otherwise, new revolts and so- cial mischief may break out around the world, independently of skin colour, reli- gious beliefs and ethnic/racial/national identification. author / Авторъ vladimir m. moskovkin, world economy department, belgorod state national research university, pobedy st, belgorod, russia © vladimir m. moskovkin licensee the beacon: journal for studying ideologies and mental dimensions licensing the materials published is made according to creative commons attribution . international (cc by . ) licence listening in a time of pandemic: new mediations and intimacies between solitude and solidarity special feature “listening in a time of pandemic” https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / sociologica. v. n. ( ) issn - listening in a time of pandemic: new mediations and intimacies between solitude and solidarity jessica feldman* naomi waltham-smith† submitted: september , – accepted: september , – published: september , abstract during the pandemic, listening habits around the world have been undergoing significant transformationinresponsetovariouspublichealthmeasuresimposingphysicaldistancing and stay-at-home-isolation. this situation has prompted new experiments with digital mediations, transformationsinmodalitiesofprotestandautonomy, andimpulsestowards anecdotal accounts in a bid to share experiences of isolation. the essays in this special featurerangeacrossavarietyofsocio-politicalanddisciplinaryconcernsandpointtowards a crucial issue facing societies today: how to design new forms and practices of listening to foster the forms of sociality and collectivity urgently needed in a changed world. keywords: listening; protest; sociality; digital mediation; solitude. with the introduction of various public health measures imposing physical distancing and stay-at-home-isolation, listening habits around the world have been undergoing significant transformation. from changing patterns in the consumption of music, radio, and podcasts through the relocation of deliberative democracy onto digital platforms to the reattunement to quieter public spaces and soundscapes of revived biodiversity, listening practices have been undergoing change no less significant than and deeply entangled with the broader social and economic impacts of the pandemic. one striking effect of the pandemic has been a translation of listening’s affective dimensions into new spheres of mediation. as the experience of being * department of global communications, the american university of paris (france);  https://orcid.org/ - - - † centre for interdisciplinary methodologies, university of warwick (united kingdom);  naomi.waltham- smith@warwick.ac.uk;https://orcid.org/ - - - copyright © jessica feldman, naomi waltham-smith the text in this work is licensed under the creative commons by license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / art. # p. https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / listening in a time of pandemic sociologica. v. n. ( ) together “face-to-face” has been significantly disrupted and displaced, the ears have come to take on new and adaptive possibilities and affordances. new forms and practices of listening, now more intensely mediated by technological prostheses and digital platforms, are caught up in the production of new modalities of collective care and social intimacies. the challenges and possibilities for listening are being felt across multiple sectors: politics, civil society, education, cultural production, psychoanalysis, urban design, ecology, and so forth. this special feature gathers together a series of short essays and meditations from scholars, all of whom also have a creative sound or writing practice. the pieces assess and critically reflect on the ways in which listening is adapting to and evolving in light of the unprecedented condi- tions imposed in response to covid- . these contributions highlight a wide range of issues acrossaspectrumfromaesthetictosocio-politicalconcerns,embracingdiversedisciplinarycon- cerns from psychoanalysis to critical pedagogy, but a series of recurring motifs and common themes emerge notwithstanding the variety of issues and disciplines represented. each of the essays in some way foregrounds the possibility of protest, noisy or silent, or of otherwise mark- ing some degree of resistance or autonomy from prevailing modes of governance. listening, far from being a panacea, is revealed to be pharmacological — poison and cure. it provides the ba- sis for uncontrolled forms of sociality, undictated conversations, unregulated intimacies, and unscripted solidarities, but it can also tune out and conspire with existing regimes of exclusion and marginalization, silencing the voices of black, brown, and indigenous peoples or any voice not deemed to have been sufficiently disciplined by reason. echoes of the black lives matter protests in the us and france that ruptured the sudden vacation of politics from the streets are never far out of earshot. educational institutions also form important sites for the politics of listening as they are radically transformed through an abrupt evacuation to virtual spaces. one thing that is striking is how anecdotal the contributions are, often straddling the boundaries between realism, autobiography, and autofiction, even though this was never an express intention when the idea for the special feature was conceived. as such, these are invitations to listen, for the anecdote has a confessional quality, as if announcing a secret in plain sight (etymologically, the anecdote is something unedited so both as yet unpublished and also the surplus of what might have been left unsaid). the anecdotal quality that comes to the surface in these essays, as in other writing prompted by the isolation and solitude of the pandemic, attests to a need to be heard that has come to be perhaps more acutely experienced in these times. it moreover points to the aporetic impossibility of sharing isolation which is broken the moment that the experience is made public. from their different perspectives, each of these essays highlights that the social is inextri- cable from the question of power, and that our practices and tools of listening are contested terrains on which social forces form and congeal. while a piece on the topic of “listening in a time of pandemic” could just as well invite a focus on non-human sounds or digital tools alone, all these contributors write urgently about political, interpersonal, and communal struggles brought up by the quarantine and pandemic, and how they are articulated through listening and its challenges. it is noisy protest in the streets rather than quiet quarantine that frames this special issue, opening with jessica feldman’s narrative of a collective silence in the presence of the police and closing with julie beth napolin’s moving account of a public speech at a black lives matter rally, calling to collectivize our breath and life forces. feldman moves from the street to the digital network, pointing out the ways in which the isolation of confinement has been politically dangerous and that online listening tools must be redesigned to accommodate a form of politics that prioritizes the communal rather than the atomized neoliberal subject for which corporate tools are imagined. https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / listening in a time of pandemic sociologica. v. n. ( ) that the pandemic became an occasion to intensify the already existing forms of exclusion remains an acute theme under examination. erin soros brings this problem painfully close to the heart in her autobiographical essay, laying bare the absence of empathetic understanding in the academy, exacerbated by the reduction of spaces of communication to “zoom rooms.” for soros, the confinement meant a turn to an experience of solitude “which can never be shared,” by definition, much as one cannot be accompanied on the journey into psychosis and must therefore invent one’s own witness. the move to the zoom-room triggered the ensuing failure or perhaps refusal of her community to understand and honour intentions and communica- tions from a voice which represented madness, a logic outside of academic puzzles, the exterior to a rationality upon which knowledge reifies itself. naomi waltham-smith echoes these con- cerns about “zoom atomization” and exhaustion but argues that listening is always already mediated and therefore spaced out. following derrida’s reflections on a line from celan — “the world is gone, i must carry you” — she argues that a politically powerful “listening alone together” requires a “militant carrying of the other by ear.” this kind of militant listening entails holding the other in our and their solitude, shared and disjoined, in order to cultivate and radicalize practices of mutual aid — an exhausting task when the tools are against us, but absolutely politically necessary. like soros, emile bojensen takes up the question of the university as a space for listening, reversing the indictment of students’ listening capacity to remind us that some of the most important listening occurs between students, often informally in the cracks of the institution andoutsideoftheclassroomandotherformalizedspaces. bojensenasksifandhowthesespaces could be allowed to emerge in an online environment where unplanned conversation and semi- anonymity is lost to priorities of efficiency and tracking. this finds its echo in napolin’s ques- tion: “how can we record what we cannot fully register?” the question points to the nec- essarily partial and unequal nature of digital capture by surveillance technologies, such as the new york city street microphones which registered only the absence of public noise during the quarantine, as well as police body cams which serve less to reveal nuanced truths than to support dominant ruling-class narratives. the absence of human listening with and to others means an absence of witnessing death and struggle, both individually and as collective politics. napolin ties together pandemic and the protest at a physiological level, connecting the human breath as a source and index of life to the act of sounding together in protests and the speak- ing of the names of those killed by the police. to fully register this history requires a kind of listening and witnessing that is only achievable through collective action. we are, though, only beginning to reckon with the necessity of this demand in the throes of ahealthandeconomiccrisis inwhichlisteninghasbeenaffected. inmultifariousways, listening — its practices, mediations, and capacities — will continue to be affected in a world where such uncertainty remains about the forms that sociality and social relations will take as economic aftershock ripples across the global south as well as the global north. this collection of essays points to questions that remain to be addressed when it comes to assessing the impact of the pandemic on the conditions, practices, techniques, and mediations of listening in social and political environments. what does it mean in this climate to listen well and in what new ways will misunderstanding arise, on the one hand, and empathy be nurtured, on the other? are there tools, tactics, and technologies that can be designed to promote more effective, more attuned, more compassionate listening on digital platforms and to what extent are these bound up with broader struggles against an intensified turn towards state monopoly capitalism that puts increasing power in the hands of big tech? how can new forms and practices of listening be designed to foster the forms of sociality and collectivity urgently needed in a changed world? https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / listening in a time of pandemic sociologica. v. n. ( ) jessica feldman: department of globalcommunications, the americanuniversityof paris(france) https://orcid.org/ - - -  https://www.aup.edu/profile/jfeldman jessica feldman is an assistant professor/enseignante-chercheuse in the department of global com- munications at the american university of paris, where she directs the civic media lab. she is also an affiliated researcher in the digital civil society lab at stanford university, and a practicing artist. her research is concerned with the relationship between listening, emerging digital design, social justice, and self-governance. naomi waltham-smith:centreforinterdisciplinarymethodologies,universityofwarwick(united kingdom) https://orcid.org/ - - -  naomi.waltham-smith@warwick.ac.uk;  https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/cim/people/naomi- waltham-smith/ naomi waltham-smith is associate professor in the centre for interdisciplinary methodologies at the university of warwick. at the intersection of music, sound studies, and recent european philosophy, her work appears in journals including boundary , the cambridge journal of postcolonial literary inquiry, cr: the new centennial review, diacritics, music theory spectrum, parallax, parrhesia,and sound studies. she is the author of music and belonging between revolution and restoration (oxford university press, ) and shattering biopolitics: militant listening and the sound of life (fordham university press, ). in – , she is a fellow at akademie schloss solitude. https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://orcid.org/ - - - https://www.aup.edu/profile/jfeldman https://orcid.org/ - - - https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/cim/people/naomi-waltham-smith/ https://warwick.ac.uk/fac/cross_fac/cim/people/naomi-waltham-smith/ https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / ps • april n e w s ©american political science association, the apsa minority fellows program (mfp), established in , is a longstanding fellowship compe- tition to diversify the profession by providing support to students from under- represented backgrounds applying to, or in the early stages of, a phd program in politi- cal science. the goal of the program is to increase the number of minority scholars in the discipline, in particular political science phd programs, and ultimately the profes- soriate. apsa has once again awarded a new cycle to provide support for fi rst- and second-year political science phd students from underrepresented backgrounds. please join us in congratulating the – class of fellows. claudia alegre claudia alegre is a senior double major- ing in political science and sociology at uc santa barbara. she is a mcnair scholar and has had the opportunity to present her research at her i n s t i t u t i o n a s well as a national conference. her current research interests focus on race and ethnic politics, specifi- c a l l y l a t i n o politics. in addi- tion, claudia is interested in investigating undocumented latino political engagement and the impacts of mass illegality on the political socialization of latinos. she hopes to enroll in a phd program in political science to become a professor and continue her work on race and ethnic politics. gregory amusu gregory amusu graduated from carleton college with a major in political science/ i n t e r n a t i o n a l relations and a minor in political economy. he has held positions as a research assistant in the department of political science a t m i c h i g a n state university, as a participant in the hoover institution summer policy boot camp at stanford, and as an intern in the ida development finance office at the world bank. his research interests include comparative and international political economy, with a focus on the political economy of devel- opment. having conducted fi eldwork in hanoi, vietnam on female migratory labor and the political economy of the vietnam- ese craft industry, gregory has a strong regional interest in mainland southeast asia. he has also conducted research on ethnic partitioning throughout the afri- can continent. gregory has presented his research at carleton college, michigan state university, and the university of chicago. austin barraza austin barraza is a second-year master’s student in political science at california state university, fullerton (csuf), where he studies educa- t i o n p o l i t i c s . austin focuses o n h o w s t a te legislatures use funding to incen- tivize commu- nity colleges to m e e t s t u d e n t success metrics. h e w i l l b e presenting his research at the west- ern political science association’s annual meeting and hopes to carry this research into his doctoral program. as a graduate equity fellow at csuf and a fi rst-gener- ation college student, austin hopes to become a professor and to mentor students who are the fi rst in their families to attend college. in , he completed a certifi - cate in teaching and learning at csuf and a faculty internship at fullerton college. prior to attending csuf, austin earned his ba in political science with honors from ucla and his aa in american studies with distinction from riverside city college and norco college. juan campos juan campos is an ma candidate in politi- cal science at california state university, long beach (csulb). while studying at csulb, juan became a csu sally casanova pre-doctoral scholar and earned the most prestigious graduate award on campus—the csulb gradu- a t e r e s e a r c h fellowship. in , he received his ba in govern- ment and inter- national politics f r o m g e o r g e mason univer- s i t y . j u a n ’ s research inter- ests include political violence, democrati- zation, and state-cartel peace settlements in latin america. in a paper published on justice in mexico’s website, he empir- ically assesses the causes and conse- quences of mayoral assassinations. drawing on a novel dataset of mexican states between and , this work shows that competition among different political parties across multiple levels of government (federal and state) makes it difficult for security institutions to protect mayors from being assassinated by drug trafficking organizations. at the doctoral level, juan plans on specializing in comparative politics and international relations. michael herndon michael herndon (rbsi ) is a senior at the university of nebraska at omaha where he is pursuing a dual degree in political science a n d i n t e r n a - t i o n al s t u d i e s w i t h a m i n o r in chicano(a)/ latino(a) stud- i e s . m i c h a e l c o m p l e t e d a n i n d e p e n d e n t research project through the ralph bunche summer institute (rbsi) in and has presented his work at the politics of race, immigration, and ethnicity consor- tium (priec) in houston. his research interests include identity, latinx politi- cal behavior, and representation in legis- lative bodies. michael aims to pursue a career in academia where he can continue to conduct research and mentor future change-makers. meet the – apsa minority fellows ps • april n e w s ©american political science association, leann mclaren leann mclaren (rbsi ) is a politi- cal science and history double major at the university of connecticut, in the honors program. she currently serves on the college of liberal arts and sciences lead- ership board and has served as the vice president of the univer- sity of connecti- cut’s chapter of the naacp. her research inter- ests center on american public opinion, voting behavior, race and ethnicity, and immigra- tion politics. specifi cally, leann is interested in black immigrant voting behavior and political incorporation. over the course of her undergraduate career, leann has assisted on several projects facilitated by university faculty, including research on homicide and sex traffi cking of women of color, gender bias in congressional hearings, and archival research on caribbean immigration. leann is a ralph bunche summer insti- tute (rbsi) scholar and has presented her research at the apsa annual meeting and the emerging scholars conference at the university of michigan. srilekha murthy srilekha murthy is a senior at mount holy- oke college, pursuing a major in politics, along with minors in french and develop- ment studies. her current research project examines the successes of indigenous move- ments aligned with the catho- lic church in the andean region of latin amer- ica. this project has informed her broader interest in the political participation of racial and ethnic minorities. she aims to pursue a doctoral degree in political science where she plans to study questions of race, ethnicity, and political participation in latin america and the caribbean. ultimately, srilekha aims to be a professor and to work to increase repre- sentation of racial and gender minorities in academia. monique newton monique newton (rbsi ) is a recent graduate of oberlin college where she double majored in politics and law & society and minored in afri- cana studies. her research inter- ests lie within the subfields of race and ethnic- ity politics, urban politics, politi- cal psychology, and political behavior. in graduate school, she intends to explore african american political participation in urban settings. monique has presented her research at various conferences includ- ing the apsa annual meeting. as an alumna of the ralph bunche summer institute (rbsi), mellon mays undergrad- uate fellowship, and the institute for the recruitment of teachers summer work- shop, monique is excited by the opportu- nity to mentor fi rst-generation students of color as a political science faculty member upon completion of graduate school. crystal robertson crystal robertson (rbsi ) is currently a senior in the honors program at the univer- sity of michigan, where she is majoring in political science. h e r r e s e a r c h interests include american poli- t i c s , ra c e a n d ethnicity poli- tics, and public opinion. specif- i c al l y, c r y s t al is interested in racially-focused social movements and how public percep- tions of the movement shift across diff erent racial groups. crystal is a apsa ralph bunche summer institute (rbsi) scholar. she has presented her research at confer- ences such as the apsa annual meet- ing, where she presented her work on black lives matter and racial attitudes. she is currently completing an honor's thesis under the advisement of dr. vincent hutchings. precious cheray robinson precious cheray robinson is a senior at bryn mawr college, where she is majoring i n p o l i t i c a l science with a c o n c e n t r a t i o n in gender and sexuality stud- ies. as a mellon m a y s u n d e r- graduate fellow, she was involved in the univer- sity of chicago's summer research training program where she began her current project. precious’ research focuses on black femi- nist literature, which she maintains, is a topic that has been largely overlooked by the field of political theory. through engaging black feminists, she explores how black political thought can be enriched by acknowledging and overcom- ing its patriarchal biases. she presented her work at the association for polit- ical theory (apt) conference as well as the chicago research symposium. precious is currently the head of the bryn mawr student curriculum committee and aspires to become a professor once she finishes her phd. michael strawbridge michael strawbridge (rbsi ) is a senior at beloit college double majoring in politi- cal science and media studies. as a mcnair scholar, he researched the progress made i n fe r g u s o n , mo since , a s s e s s i n g t h e city’s progress and challenges i n e n a c t i n g reforms. at the ralph bunche summer institute (rbsi), he completed a project examining the effects of print, television, and internet news on opinions regard- ing the importance of gun control. he presented his research at the apsa annual meeting. michael’s research interests include american politics, political communication, public opin- ion, and media and politics. as a phd student, michael intends to explore the role media plays in diminishing the voices of those less privileged while prioritizing the issues facing those already in a posi- tion of power. ps • april n e w s ©american political science association, catalina udani catalina udani (rbsi ) is an honors senior at the university of central florida studying human communication, intelligence and national secu- rity, and terror- ism studies. she conducted inde- pendent research at the ralph bunche summer institute (rbsi) on terrorism and human trafficking and looks forward to her first publications, a coauthored book on terrorist propaganda and a book chapter analyzing terrorist rhetoric, both of which are in progress. her undergraduate thesis was a longitudinal thematic analysis of isis digital media, comparing rhetorical trends with the group's real-world operations. a teaching assistant for the burnett honors college, catalina's research interests include inter- national peace and conflict, terrorism, cbrn weapons, and human rights abuses. she developed these research interests as a lawrence j. chastang global fellow and an india research fellow for the global perspectives office. upon graduation, she plans to use her research interests to pursue an academic career through a phd in politi- cal science with an international relations focus. zoe walker zoe walker (rbsi ) is a senior at the university of notre dame studying polit- ical science and english. at notre dame, she was named a franklyn doan scholar for her outstanding research skills. she has also conducted research for the american bar foundation (montgomery summer research fellowship) and was a participant in the ralph bunche summer institute (rbsi). zoe is interested in studying the effects of partisan polarization on the political partici- pation of minor- it y groups as well as the role of media in shaping political behav- ior and attitudes, changes in amer- ican public opin- ion, and identity g r o u p - b a s e d political conflict. she has presented her research at notre dame's undergradu- ate scholars conference, the apsa annual meeting, and the emerging scholars conference at the university of michigan. zoe plans to earn a phd and she looks forward to producing scholarship in political science with an eye towards the role that identity plays in political decision making. ■ _ _ _article .. journal of urban health: bulletin of the new york academy of medicine, vol. , suppl doi: . /s - - - * the new york academy of medicine editorial: excessive police violence as a public health issue this special issue of the journal of urban health was organized in response to a series of widely reported deaths and sexual assaults of black children and adults by the police in the usa. this particular series began with the deaths of michael brown in ferguson mo, eric garner in new york city ny, -year-old tamir rice in cleveland oh, sandra bland in waller county, tx, and freddy gray in baltimore md, and the sexual assault of jannie ligons and other girls and women in oklahoma city ok. with rare exception, police officer after police officer has been absolved of wrong-doing. meanwhile, cities have paid millions of dollars to settle civil claims, thus acknowledging the profound harms that have been done. in response to these events, a massive protest movement has arisen under the umbrella of bblack lives matter.^ the rallies and marches have forced the issue of unjustified police violence to the fore and consistently kept it in the public eye. at the same time, the growing availability of video cameras and the rapid dissemination of videos online have brought the last moments of these lives and the testimonies of assaulted women into the homes of the nation. it is hard to watch the police gun down an unarmed person without crying out against unfairness. while police cars are labeled with slogans such as bto serve and protect,^ this racially biased epidemic of violence has raised the question, bhow can we stop this?^ that question calls us to study the epidemic, bringing all the weight of public health science to bear on untangling this phenomenon. in truth, however, public health has historically remained largely silent about the consequences of excessive police violence for health and health equity. this silence is striking for many reasons. violence itself has long been framed as a public health issue, and achieving health equity has been central to public health’s mission for decades. additionally, public health’s increasing recognition that social policies shape patterns of health and disease , has created opportunities to engage with law enforcement policies and practices as social determinants of health. with the exception of research and interventions with active drug users and sex workers, e.g., – however, public health has rarely studied or intervened in excessive police violence as a social determinant of health. in this issue of the journal, a group of researchers has stepped forward to begin to sketch the health consequences of excessive police violence and to explore possible solutions. they point out that we face a problem that is rooted in the use of violence to enforce centuries of oppression against black adults and children in the usa. at the present time, this violence is an obvious and hurtful part of daily life in poor cooper is with the rollins school of public health at emory university, atlanta, ga , usa; fullilove is with the columbia university mailman school of public health, new york, ny , usa. correspondence: hannah l. cooper, rollins school of public health at emory university, atlanta, ga , usa. (e-mail: hcoope @emory.edu) s hannah l. f. cooper and mindy fullilove http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf ghettoes. finally, we learn that efforts to change these patterns have been fiercely resisted and quickly undone. excessive police violence undermines health several papers reviewed for this special issue examine the health effects of excessive police-related violence using multiple measures of police violence, outcomes, and methods with different populations living in different settings. all converge on the conclusion that living in conditions of excessive police violence adversely affects health. by analyzing data from the new york police department (nypd), sewell and jefferson create several measures of stop and frisk (e.g., number of stop and frisks per residents; proportion of stops involving frisking; ethnoracial disparities in stop rates) within new york city (nyc) neighborhoods. they then use multilevel methods to analyze whether and how these neighborhood-level measures are associated with several health outcomes (e.g., high blood pressure, diabetes, self-rated health, recent asthma occurrence), measured at the level of individuals. in % of associations analyzed, they find that residents of neighborhoods with higher rates of stop and frisk were more likely to be in poor health. gomez employed qualitative methods to explore perceptions of policing, social cohesion, and stress among black residents of baltimore neighborhoods with high arrest rates. she finds that participants reported that police were present not to protect residents of predominately black neighborhoods but to surveil and intimate them, and that the war on drugs was in truth a war on black people. police actions routinely undermined local social cohesion and led to considerable stress. markwick and colleagues expand the traditional definition of policing to include private security forces, a vital expansion given increases in the number of security guards and in the size of the terrain they patrol. in a sample of people who use drugs in vancouver canada and who reported a recent encounter with security guards, this qualitative study found that participants experienced pervasive, discriminatory profiling, surveillance, and excessive physical and psychological violence, particularly participants of aboriginal descent, and that this profiling, surveillance, and violence restricted participants’ access to public and private spaces, including pharmacies and hospitals where they received vital health services. it is a relatively intractable problem several papers in the issue describe efforts to rein in police violence. mcgregor uses mixed methods to document the history of efforts to establish a civilian review board in newark, nj. public awareness of excess police force extends back centuries, but became a central issue in , when the beating of the cab driver john smith triggered the newark uprising. though decades of advocacy had failed to create a civilian police review board, a confluence of factors—federal oversight, the black lives matter movement, and the election of ras baraka as mayor—created a turning point. mcgregor’s study ends with that advance so its efficacy is not examined. green and hutto sr. investigate community efforts to stop police homicides in prince george’s county, md, a county that went from majority white to majority black in the last years. their historical review, which utilizes a bclassic marxist^ perspective that racist police violence helps the bourgeoisie maintain their hegemony, finds that egregious police practices were tamed by cooper and fulliloves federal intervention, but appear to be in resurgence now that that oversight has ended. concern that good interventions do not last is echoed in evans and saligari’s paper, which described efforts to stop police homicides of people with mental illness. an intervention had the desired effect, but, evans and saligari found, the effect waned after the intervention ended. it grows from and contributes to irrational narratives about danger gabler and wright explore how communal narratives of police brutality perpetuate racialization and future brutality. analyzing darren wilson’s testimony about his killing of michael brown, gabler and wright find that wilson portrays brown as a demonically aggressive, nonhuman monster, a perspective echoed by mainstream media, which characterized brown as a bthug^ and a bgangster.^ characterizations of black men as monstrously aggressive and inhuman resonate historically, and support future state violence against this group. better theories and data can help richardson, st. vil and cooper open their paper by quoting trauma surgeon dr. roy smith, who said, bi’ve never had someone say they were shot by the police who wasn’t and i’ve been doing this for years.^ they examine the imprecision of data about police shootings, and note that we know almost nothing about non-fatal shootings. they observe that injury prevention programs based in hospitals have the capacity to improve data quality on non-fatal shootings by the police. they interviewed doctors, nurses, and others to find out if this idea might have salience. on balance, they find that this would be feasible as a method for collecting these missing data. like sewell and jefferson, rengifo and fowler posit that police stops may be highly varied, and that different types of stops may have different consequences. using nypd stop and frisk data, they characterize stops in terms of rationale (vague vs specific), setting (e.g., public housing complex, transit system) and intrusiveness, and aggregate data to nyc’s police precincts. their longitudinal ecologic analysis suggests that precincts with higher rates of stops formally attributed to a vague rationale (e.g., for a suspicious bulge), of intrusive stops, and of stops in the transit system had higher rates of complaints filed with the nyc civilian complaint review board; notably, rates of stops by uniformed officers were inversely associated with complaint rates. combined with sewell and jefferson’s work, these findings testify to the importance of moving beyond measures that simply capture the total number (or rate) of stops to create measures that seek to quantify specific characteristics of stops, and explore the distinct ramifications of these characteristics for the public’s health. gilbert and ray’s theoretical paper uses bpublic health critical race theory^ to examine existing data about the process and outcomes of police brutality. they note, bwe aimed to integrate all principles that span each of [several] focal areas: (a) race consciousness, (b) the primacy of racialization, (c) race as a social construct, (d) gender as a social construct (author’s addition to the original model), (e) ordinariness of racism, (f) structural determinism, (g) social construction of knowledge, (h) critical approaches, (i) intersectionality, (j) inter-disciplinary editorial: excessive police violence as a public health issue s selfcritique, and (k) voice.^ the authors use this analysis to arrive at a set of recommendations for a multi-level intervention into the problem. future directions for research these papers, by tackling an array of domains, suggest the problem we face is both tenacious and multi-faceted. it is typically impossible to solve such problems without a socio-ecological framework and coordinated action. police culture, police unions, violence as a tool of social stratification, poverty, perceived rates of crime, policies of mass incarceration, and absence of police oversight—to name some of the factors—operate together to create the current levels of excessive police violence. interventions that target only one or few of these aspects of the situation will fall short. a useful example is found in the control of schistosomiasis, a parasitic infection that is second to malaria in its health consequences. the parasite has a complex life cycle, which includes snails, fresh water, and humans, at a minimum. while drugs have great utility, experience has shown that a combination of killing snails, protecting the fresh water supply and using medication is essential for sound control of this terrible infection. a similarly complex understanding of the life cycle of police violence will be of great utility as we move forward. some specific areas of research will help to build this comprehensive conceptual model: i. conceptualization: we can mine past public health work on violence to help refine our understanding of excessive police violence. to date, public discourse has focused overwhelmingly on extreme physical violence (i.e., death), but the world health organization (who) identifies four types of violence: psychological violence, physical violence, sexual violence, and neglectful violence. these categories can be mapped onto excessive police violence. a key next step for research is to systematically determine whether the prevalence and health consequences of each type varies across subpop- ulations. who defines collective violence as b…the instrumental use of violence by people who identify themselves as members of a group…against another group or set of individuals, in order to achieve political, economic or social objectives.^ ( , page ) this construct and related literature could support analyses of the health and health equity impacts of excessive police violence, conceptualized as a potent tool for maintaining white supremacy and other forms of oppression. ii. measurement: it is difficult to quantify the public health consequences of excessive police violence if we cannot measure it. several papers in this special issue grapple with this topic, as have krieger and colleagues. there are no valid surveillance data on fatal or non-fatal injuries at the hands of the police in the usa. the release of bstop and frisk^ data in several jurisdictions has been a boon to research on excessive police violence and its health consequences, though recent evidence suggests that officers are now submitting incomplete data to obscure key dimensions of these stops. creating a federal monitoring system of fatal and non-fatal injuries by police is a vital first step in assessing the prevalence and health impacts of excessive police violence; reporting must be mandatory for all jurisdictions and include information on the victim’s social position. we note, however, that this system would be limited. it would not capture neglectful violence, and would cooper and fulliloves likely dramatically undercount instances of psychological and sexual violence. moreover, it would likely not be a source of data on excessive police violence. police officers are empowered to use force, provided that they use the minimal amount needed to bcontrol an incident, effect an arrest, or protect themselves or others from harm or death.^ the line between necessary and excessive force is hotly contested, and has historically been decided overwhelmingly in favor of officers. to complement surveillance data, we must develop and validate survey-based measures of self-reported exposure to excessive police violence. measures should, at a minimum, recognize that this violence can be physical, sexual, psychological, and neglectful, and can be directly experienced or witnessed (i.e., community violence). iii. analyses: policing is inherently spatial, and law enforcement strategies associated with excessive police violence are more likely to be deployed in predominately impoverished black and latino neighborhoods than else- where; within (and outside of) these neighborhoods, there is considerable variation in direct experiences of excessive police violence by gender, social class, perceived or actual criminal involvement, and other characteristics. – studies seeking to quantify the public health effects of excessive police violence must recognize the resulting differential prevalence of exposure across racial/ethnic groups and other subpopulations. odds ratios and other kinds of effect estimates merely quantify the extent to which the outcome varies as the exposure varies; they fail to incorporate differential exposure across subpopulations. , population attributable risk percents, however, incorporate both the prevalence of the exposure and the effect estimate, and can thus be a powerful tool for quantifying the true public health effects of excessive police violence, particularly when calculated for specific racial/ ethnic groups and for subsets within those groups defined by gender, social class, perceived or actual criminal involvement, sexual orientation, and other dimensions of social position. population attributable risk percents have assumptions which this line of inquiry may not yet meet, including assuming that a causal relationship exists between the exposure and the outcome. the extent to which these assumptions are met can be thoughtfully discussed and should not preclude efforts to calculate population attributable risk percents. iv. interventions: several municipal governments and police departments have created initiatives to reduce excessive police violence and its adverse effects (e.g., , ). health impact assessments should compare and contrast the effects of different initiatives on health, with particular attention to decays over time in improvements and to differential effects across subpopulations. v. public health leadership: excessive police violence is centuries old—it predates the creation of the usa , —and yet there was virtually no research on its public health impacts until recently. one primary reason for this, we propose, is that leaders within the field of public health have been predominately non-hispanic white, and thus did not live in communities that were targeted by excessive police violence, and benefited, whether willingly or not, from the system of white supremacy that excessive police violence supports. ensuring that the sociodemographic compositions of public health professionals at all ranks reflect those of the populations served is vital if we are to engage with the full range of determinants of population health and disease. editorial: excessive police violence as a public health issue s conclusion this special issue of the journal of urban health creates a vital foundation for answers to the question, bhow can we stop this racially biased epidemic of excessive police violence?^ the papers provide insights into ways to constructively engage public health theories, methods, and interventions to study this epidemic. but the work presented here leaves more questions than it answers. a concerted public health push to eliminate excessive police violence is badly needed. this is not only a question of excess mortality but also a question of taking a stand for a law-abiding democracy in which all can prosper. we can point to all too many epidemics bredlined^ because they baffected^ people of color, ignoring the deeper truth of the interrelated web of existence. let us move forward, charting a public health that really fights for the health of the whole public. acknowledgments we want to thank the authors who contributed to this special issue for their excellent and thought-provoking work, and the reviewers for their insightful comments about the manuscripts. this work was supported by bplace character- istics & disparities in hiv in idus: a multilevel analysis of nhbs^ (da ; cooper, pi) and the emory center for aids research (p ai ; curran, pi). references . dahlberg l, mercy j. history of violence as a public health issue. ama j ethics. ; ( ): – . . centers for disease control and prevention. health objectives for the nation. mmwr. ; ( ): – . . berkman lf, kawachi i. social epidemiology. new york, ny: oxford university press; . . kawachi i, berkman l. neighborhoods and health. new york, ny: oxford university press; . . maher l, dixon d. policing and public health: law enforcement and harm reduction in a street-level drug market. br j criminol. ; ( ): – . . rhodes t, wagner kd, strathdee sa, shannon k, davidson p, bourgois p. structural violence and structural vulnerability within the risk environment: theoretical and methodological perspectives for a social epidemiology of hiv risk among injection drug users and sex workers. in: o’campo p, dunn jr, eds. rethinking social epidemiology: toward a science of change. new york, ny: springer; : – . . cooper h, moore l, gruskin s, krieger n. characterizing perceived police violence: implications for public health. am j public health. ; ( ): – . . cooper h, moore l, gruskin s, krieger n. the impact of a police drug crackdown on drug injectors’ ability to practice harm reduction: a qualitative study. soc sci med. ; ( ): – . . markwick n, mcneil r, small w, kerr t. exploring the public health impacts of private security guards on people who use drugs: a qualitative study. j urban health. ; ( ): – . . utzinger j, n’goran e, caffrey c, keiser j. from innovation to application: social- ecological context, diagnostics, drugs and integrated control of schistosomiasis. acta trop. ; : s –s . . krug e, dahlberg l, mercy j, zwi a, lozano r. world report on violence and health. geneva, switzerland: who; . cooper and fulliloves . krieger n, chen j, waterman p, kiang m, feldman j. police killings and police deaths are public health data and can be counted. plos med. ; ( ): e . . baker a. new york police still struggle to follow street-stop rules, report finds. new york times. . http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /nyregion/new-york-police-struggle-to- follow-new-street-stop-policy-report-finds.html?_r= . accessed mar . . the national institute of justice. police use of force. . retrieved january from http://www.nij.gov/topics/law-enforcement/officer-safety/use-of-force/pages/ welcome.aspx. . hennekens ch, buring je. epidemiology in medicine. boston, ma: little, brown and company; . . northridge me. annotation: public health methods-attributable risk as a link between causality and public health action. am j public health. ; ( ): – . . broadwater l, puente m. baltimore officials offer plan to curb police brutality. the baltimore sun. . retrieved march from http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/ maryland/sun-investigates/bs-md-police-report- -story.html. . bass s. policing space, policing race: social control imperatives and police discretionary decisions. soc justice. ; ( ): – . . cooper hl. war on drugs policing and police brutality. subst use misuse. ; ( – ): – . editorial: excessive police violence as a public health issue s http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /nyregion/new-york-police-struggle-to-follow-new-street-stop-policy-report-finds.html?_r= http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /nyregion/new-york-police-struggle-to-follow-new-street-stop-policy-report-finds.html?_r= http://www.nij.gov/topics/law-enforcement/officer-safety/use-of-force/pages/welcome.aspx http://www.nij.gov/topics/law-enforcement/officer-safety/use-of-force/pages/welcome.aspx http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/sun-investigates/bs-md-police-report- -story.html http://www.baltimoresun.com/news/maryland/sun-investigates/bs-md-police-report- -story.html 	editorial: excessive police violence as a public health issue 	excessive police violence undermines health 	it is a relatively intractable problem 	it grows from and contributes to irrational narratives about danger 	better theories and data can help 	future directions for research 	conclusion 	acknowledgments 	references looking to decolonize your public library? address aporophobia first john pateman and margaret demillo abstract this article will examine some of the deeper conversations that need to happen before a public library can fully institute a decolonization and reconciliation plan. using mass observation as evidence, the authors argue that acts of discrimination are often mistaken as racism, when in many cases the ‘us versus them’ mentality is rooted in a perverse and often unconscious fear of poverty and of the poor. a decolonization plan cannot be fully implemented until aporophobia and to a greater extent, the confines of capitalistic society are fully understood by library staff. introduction under the leadership of john pateman the thunder bay public library (tbpl) is addressing the issues of racism, decolonization and reconciliation head on. as these uncomfortable discussions unfold, some emerging themes have emerged. there is no doubt that racism exists in thunder bay, ontario and that tbpl is one of many eurocentric public organizations that exudes institutional racism. but current discussions, both direct and indirect are highlighting an undercurrent to the perceived racism issue - economics. in fact, it is the fear of poverty and of the poor (‘aporophobia’ to be precise) that is at the root of many decolonization and race relation discussions. thunder bay, ontario is a city with a population of slightly over , people. the city sits near the head of lake superior and is often referred to as the ‘lakehead’. the city is revered for its geographical beauty, slate blue skies are reflected in the largest of the great lakes. a large formation of mesas (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/mesa) on the sibley peninsula (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/sibley_peninsula) in lake superior information for social change issn - x, ( ) winter / (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/lake_superior) resembling a reclining giant has become a symbol of the city that both indigenous and non-indigenous communities recognize as ‘nanabijou’ or the ‘sleeping giant’. the natural beauty of the area is haunted by the community’s reputation as the ‘murder capital of canada’, a city with its racism headlining in national newspapers and the focus of tanya talaga’s book seven fallen feathers that captured the tragedy of indigenous youth within the city. pateman has started very serious and awkward discussions within the library and the larger community, stating: “thunder bay public library recognizes, accepts and acknowledges that racism exists in thunder bay and at tbpl. racism is the problem and only a strong anti-racism response is the answer.” (press release, thunder bay public library, ). the tbpl board approved an action plan to support the advancement of initiatives in decolonization, anti-racism, reconciliation and relationship building with indigenous peoples - in direct response to the findings from the truth and reconciliation commission's call to action. the library is the only public institution in the city that has actually taken such proactive steps to enact change. thunder bay public library in , tbpl held a number of community conversations (focus groups of - people) to inform the development of its strategic plan for – . every sector and demographic were engaged in this process, including arts / heritage, business, criminal justice, community, faith, indigenous, health / well being, seniors, women and youth. the aim of these conversations was to identify community aspirations and concerns so that tbpl can become both community- led and needs based. community intelligence was also gathered via an online community survey. tbpl’s community consultation groups – the community action panel, youth advisory council, indigenous advisory council – as well as tbpl board members and staff, were used to validate and prioritize the primary themes which emerged from the community conversations and survey. these themes formed the basis of the following strategic objectives:  foster a safe, clean and healthy community  challenge institutional and systemic racism  cultivate diversity and inclusion  mitigate the impact of homelessness and poverty  encourage and support youth these strategic objectives are aspirational for any organization. however, some people have suggested they are beyond a public library’s ‘raison d’etre’. can a public library be a catalyst for change? the library is “a very seditious organization because we can engineer social change in a very quiet way” - quoted from pateman in the globe and mail (galloway, ). interestingly, the thunder bay police have aligned their strategic directions with tbpl. in the same article, police chief sylvie hauth stated the police are “…with them (tbpl)” when it comes to trying to change things in the city. responding to reports that thunder bay had the most homicides per capita of all municipalities in canada in , chief hauth followed, “it’s no surprise…. we do have very high socio-economic issues in our community.” (turner, ) these socio-economic issues are often the topics of hushed whispers about ‘those people’. like many public libraries, tbpl is a sanctuary for the homeless, the new immigrant, those economically disadvantaged, those with mental illness and others disenfranchised by society. often the perception of sanctuary is matched by library staff’s perception of an unsafe work environment. for a marginalized patron, the library is warm, dry and quiet compared to the streets. library staff members, however, see the library as smelly, messy and full of loud people who are not necessarily borrowing books. the ‘us versus them’ mindset festers in this maligned psychological space. the antipathy towards this patron is based on fear, real or perceived, not because of physical violence but a fear of the patron’s poverty status. aporophobia ‘spain's prestigious language foundation fundéu bbva has chosen ‘aporofobia’ (aporophobia) as its word of the year for ’ (dunham, ). aporophobia can be roughly translated into english as a fear of poverty and poor people. fundéu bbva credits spanish philosopher adela cortina with coining and circulating ‘aporofobia’ in the press to bring attention to the fact that xenophobia and racism are often used to explain the disdain shown towards migrants and refugees when that aversion is often caused by their poverty status rather than for being foreign. thunder bay has a long history of a working class, union-strong society with a relatively leftist leaning political tendency. regardless of these roots, the community was never able to fully realize its ideological potential as a socialist state and became entrenched in capitalistic thinking. with this thinking came the inevitable losers of capitalism - the poor. poverty implies scarcity, discrimination, isolation, crime, ill health, homelessness, antisocial behaviour, and powerlessness. the notion of ‘winners’ and ‘losers’ creates ‘us’ and ‘them’. for the purposes of this article, ‘us’ can be described as a front-line library worker, likely female between the ages of - with at least a high school education and a median salary of $ , cdn. ‘they’ are more difficult to define, firstly because the library does not collect data on patrons regarding socioeconomic status. ‘they’ are perceived and classified as ‘the other’ arbitrarily and unequally by staff; that is, not all staff will consider the same patron as ‘the other’. there are times when one staff member's ‘them’ is another’s ‘us.’ it can be asserted, however, that ‘those’ patrons are from a considerably lower income level, likely on some form of government assistance and are regulars at the soup kitchen and shelters near the various library branches. a definite gender bias is evident with an eighty/twenty split as male/female, with both genders represented between the ages of - . in her article ‘please admit you don’t like poor people so we can move on’, ( ) hannah brooks olsen captures how witnessing poverty and perceiving scarcity creates biases in people who are not poor. perceptions of poverty have substantial impacts on the way people collectively think and act. imagine a community meeting about a proposed homeless shelter, wherein self-proclaimed ‘concerned’ neighbours begin every testimony with something along the lines of ‘i care about the homeless! i really do! but…’ and then follow their opener with something that expresses an unfounded bias about people living in poverty - ‘…i’m worried about increases in crime.’ ‘…why do we have to pay for their housing?’ ‘…they’ll just trash it!’ ‘…how will i explain them to my children?’ these sentiments — which assume that homeless individuals are criminals, that they’re freeloaders, that their very existence is somehow damaging to children — are not based in research, nor do they account for the complexity of socioeconomic status. they are, instead, based on a reaction to poverty and scarcity that is intimately linked to our own survival mechanisms. tbpl is not exempt from such sentiments. this exact same conversation happened recently when an attempt was made to establish a transitional housing facility for indigenous youth in thunder bay. fear of ‘the other’ – expressed as fear of crime, violence, drug dealing, gangs and guns – dominated the discourse, and drowned out the very real needs of young indigenous people who are literally dying on the streets because their basic needs, including food and shelter, are not being met. the perceived crimes of drugs and guns are prioritized over the real crimes of hunger and homelessness. in , tbpl solidified its partnership with anishinabek employment and training services (aets). aets is an incorporated, not-for-profit organization, with over years as part of a national network delivering an indigenous skills and employment training program. the objective of the national program and each of the regional agreement holders is to increase the participation of indigenous citizens in the canadian labour market. this partnership enables aets to accommodate its continued growth to empower the anishinabek and support the tbpl’s strategic plan in community hub development, decolonization, relationship building and facilities renewal at two library sites. library staff members were not happy at this development. some staff members were candid with their opinions and shared them respectfully with management. some of these opinions had rationale - the library was losing space for the collection (aets was taking over almost an entire floor at two library locations) or concerns over shared resources in tbpl’s unionized environment. some staff worried that the library would lose its status as an institute of society and simply become a landlord. these legitimate (and more importantly, legitimately posed questions) were few and far between, and were answered in an open forum via tbpl’s weekly staff newsletter. most staff, however, chose to voice their concerns to patrons, politicians and the public and then engage in acts of micro- aggressions. a tbpl board member, already influenced by some of these staff, asked at the desk, ‘how are you going to keep the smokers away from the front door once those people move in?’ when asked to clarify, the board member explained that once aets moved into the library, there would be increased traffic by indigenous people, and ‘they’ smoked without heeding the signs to stay clear of the entrance. rumours in the coffee room included the suggestion that tbpl entered into the partnership because ‘only indigenous organizations are given money. this is pateman’s way to get government funding.’ tbpl staff expressed resentment when hot breakfasts were delivered to aets early morning meetings: ‘my tax money is paying for that bacon’. the biases identified by olsen emerged. when tbpl management addressed the murmurs and micro aggression, the tone of the murmurs became one of raised eyebrows and suggestions that free speech was under attack. instead of ‘my tax money is paying for that bacon’, comments like ‘i’m not going to say anything but it sure must be nice to be paid to eat’ were observed. tbpl staff resisted realizing the partnership potential with aets; they knew where aets was located and that they did some sort of training and that their clientele was indigenous, but the resistors insisted they didn’t know why aets was in their library. meet and greet events were organized so the two groups could learn about the other. tbpl staff questioned the expense of the catered events; some staff refused to attend. six months after sharing a physical desk with aets, many tbpl staff still stated that they didn't understand the partnership; the ‘us’ and ‘them’ dynamic permeated tbpl’s already fragile organizational culture. around the same time, patron-banning and incident reports were on the rise across the library system. tbpl staff complete incident reports when the behaviour policy is breached. the behaviour policy has a number of considerations ranging from unattended bags to weapons in the library. patrons can be suspended temporarily for being among other things noisy or intoxicated, threatening staff or for acts of physical violence. most incidents do not result in suspensions and even less result in banning letters. staff members are encouraged to capture all incidents, minor and serious in an incident report so risk assessments can be better addressed. at about the same time as aets was settling onsite at one library, incident reports at another branch spiked. the increase in reports wasn’t necessarily alarming, as cyclical spikes are common (cold weather, government pay days, full moon). what was alarming was an increased notation of race in the reports such as ‘aboriginal patron’, ‘indigenous man’, ‘first nations woman’. racism racism has long been an issue in the broader thunder bay community but had always been simmering on the back burner at tbpl. management insisted it was time to address it head on. part of that process included mandatory intercultural competency training. external consultants were brought in to facilitate joint training sessions with aets and tbpl staff. the groups worked together during the day on self assessments and development activities. it was a long day in a conference room. the topics were deep and at times conversations were difficult. many people did not want to be there; some even stated so to the facilitators. about three quarters of the way through the first day, a profound conversation occurred between tbpl and aets staff at one of the tables. it went something like this: aets staff: ‘we’ve never had to deal with issues like we are dealing with now. we never had problems before we moved into the library.’ tbpl staff: ‘what issues do you mean?’ aets: ‘those people. we’ve never encountered smelly people, sleeping people, violent people, people with mental health issues, people who just hang out all day. we’ve only ever had to deal with our clientele - people who want to work. tbpl staff to tbpl staff: they get us!’ this revelation revealed the larger truth. the discord was not necessarily about race. the aets staff who spoke of ‘them’ was indigenous. the tbpl staff was white. the two bonded over their fear of the poor patron, and more importantly, their own fears of scarcity and they became ‘us’. ‘them’ was the mentally ill, smelly, ragged, poor patron. and then something similar happened. the facilitators told a story that happened on the day they arrived in thunder bay. they had never visited the community before but were familiar with race relations as reported in national newspapers. the story goes that after an almost hour wait for a taxi at the airport, they got into the cab and started a conversation with the driver. facilitator: ‘why is there such a long wait for a cab at such a small airport in thunder bay?’ taxi driver: ‘nobody wants to drive a cab up here. our company has nineteen cabs, but we only have two drivers. all these people come to the city from up north. they don’t want to work. no one wants to work. in the old days everyone worked at the mill but now none of these people want to work. i’m polish, my family is polish. we work hard. but these people nowadays they just sit around.’ the facilitator listened intently to what was said. he took careful note of what was unsaid or implied. in his first encounter in thunder bay on his way to deliver intercultural competency training, the facilitator witnessed racial bias in the first hour of his arrival. this bias was presented as somehow predicated on an economic value system: ‘all these people come to the city from up north. they don’t want to work’. the perception that ‘people nowadays they just sit around’ manifests in the driver’s fear of his own potential scarcity. poverty, the perception of poverty and ultimately the fear of poverty instilled in those who are not poor is often at the root of race relations. colonization colonization flourished throughout the world as a means of gaining access to land and labour resources. it was an outcome of imperialism motivated by economic greed. the act of decolonization scares some people. decolonization implies the current economic imbalance between indigenous and non-indigenous people - in favour of the non-indigenous person - could in fact shift in favour of indigenous people. in a decolonized canada, even the most remote indigenous communities might enjoy the same standard of living as their non-indigenous neighbours, with access to clean water, healthy food and equitable education. it is even possible that the economic divide lessens to the point there is no winner or loser, no ‘us’ and ‘them’. for some people, especially those used to a racial divide, the closing of the economic gap and possibility of parity is as disturbing as the concepts of poverty and scarcity. colonization in canada, like slavery in america, needed an intellectual and moral justification to hide its real motivation, which was purely economic – to extract the human value of black slaves in america and appropriate the property value of indigenous land in canada. the pseudo-scientific justification for these economic activities was eugenics – the belief that the human population can be divided into separate races with distinctive characteristics, including intellectual ability. the black slaves in america and indigenous peoples in canada were re- invented as inherently inferior to the white man who was inherently superior. this ideological and cultural mind set continued long after the end of slavery and the colonization process, although these also continued in more nuanced and sophisticated forms. when slavery and colonization ended this was presented as a moment of conscious enlightenment when the white man realised that what he was doing to black and indigenous peoples was morally and ethically wrong. in fact, there was no such ‘light bulb moment’ because the real reason why slavery and colonization ‘ended’ was pure economics and nothing to do with morality or ethics. when slavery and colonization were no longer profitable to the white man, he used the profits he had extracted from these processes to invest in an even more lucrative project called capitalism. and as is often the way with the white man, he was able to have his cake and eat it. he was able to distance himself from slavery and colonization while at the same time benefitting from the continuation of its ideological base which was embedded in people’s minds, i.e. white people were superior to black and indigenous peoples. he could then use this ideology to divide and rule and entrench his power and wealth under capitalism. he used capitalism to continue enslaving and colonizing the minds of the people he continued to oppress and they became agents of their own oppression. capitalism to challenge capitalism is a huge step to take because it requires that we completely turn a long accepted and entrenched world view on its head. we are required to not only stand in someone else’s shoes and view the world through someone else’s eyes, but also to reprogram our brains so that we can see their world through our own eyes. it is possible, but by no means easy, to intellectually imagine how this might happen. the barrier to creating a new world view is not our intellect but our emotions, because one of our most powerful emotions – fear – is at play here. fear is used by capitalism as a deliberate tactic to ensure that we always look downwards upon those below us - for answers to our questions and sources of our frustrations and challenges – rather than upwards at the real, and common, source of our problems. the middle class look down on the working class, and the working class look down on the underclass. meanwhile, the ruling class looks down on all of us. imagine if this sequence was reversed. imagine if the underclass looked up to the working class to help them climb up the social and economic ladder; imagine if the working class looked up to the middle class to use their resources and connections to break through glass ceilings. and imagine if the underclass, working class and middle class all looked up at the ruling class and realised that this tiny one per cent elite was their common enemy. then some real change might be possible. but in the real world the ruling class in america, britain and canada can convince the middle class that their enemy is the working class and that the greatest threat to the working class comes from the underclass. when trump says ‘make america great again’ this assumes that america was great at some time in its past and that someone is responsible for bringing it down from greatness. but instead of pointing to the real culprits – corporate america – he singles out the undocumented migrant worker trying to cross the rio grande. the same argument was deployed during the brexit campaign in britain and the recent federal elections in canada. the enemy was not the rich and powerful (who we should revere) but the poor and dispossessed (who we should fear). this classic divide and rule tactic is used by the ruling class to entrench their wealth and power. middle class library workers are fearful of working-class library patrons. working class library workers are fearful of underclass library patrons. white library workers are fearful of indigenous library patrons. this fear has several elements: fear of the other, fear of poverty, and fear of revenge. fear that ‘the other’ might take what we have from us; fear that we may then become ‘the other’; and fear that ‘the other’ may exact revenge on us for what we have done to them. this fear has been used to justify the oppression of colonized, enslaved and working-class people. the ‘logic’ behind this argument is that the ruling class (with the support of the middle and working classes) have to use increasingly cruel and vindictive methods to hold down ‘the other’ or they will rise up and inflict a terrible vengeance on us for all the injustices we have done to them. there is an inherent recognition within this argument that wealth and power imbalances have negative consequences but, instead of using this recognition to correct these imbalances, we project our fear of revenge on to those we oppress. this makes us all complicit and compromised by the capitalist revenge system. vengeance, vindictiveness and revenge are used to maintain the status quo. these mechanisms justify the oppressive actions of the ruling class, they compromise and make complicit the middle and working classes, and they constrain the capacity of the oppressed to resist and fight back. black people in america have a long and proud history of resistance from slave revolts to ‘race riots’ in chicago and other major cities. one of the primal fears underpinning trump’s america is that the white man will become a minority within ‘his own country’ and that ‘the other’ will overwhelm him and take his wealth and power. the response to this perceived threat is to use all the forces at the white man’s disposal – most notably the militarised police state – to suppress and subdue ‘the other’ and act as a constant reminder of who is in charge. this weaponised response is played out every time a white police officer pulls over a black driver in america. the interaction that follows is overlaid by the whole racial history of america, from slavery right up to the present day. the black driver is quite rightly fearful of the weaponised white cop. but the gun wielding white cop is just as fearful, and maybe more so, of the black driver. this fear is driven in part by his knowledge of all the injustices that white people (including the white cop) have wreaked upon black people and also by the white cop’s perceived fear that the black driver he has pulled over might take the opportunity to wreak his personal revenge. the same dynamics come into operation when a white police officer interacts with an indigenous person in thunder bay. the white cop is playing his historical role as the agent of white oppression that is enshrined in law by the indian act; at the same time, he knows at some psychological level that this oppression is not justified, and he fears that the indigenous person may want to take revenge. this raises the stakes on both sides of the encounter – real fear combined with perceived fear – with often tragic consequences. perceived ‘acts of revenge’ not only manifest through mass actions such as ‘race riots’ in america or ‘stand offs’ between indigenous people and white police in canada, but also in everyday one to one interpersonal interaction between white people and ‘the other’. these interactions happen on a daily basis at thunder bay public library, but few would locate them within the context of fear, vindictiveness, vengeance and revenge that we are suggesting in this article. social class if library workers can recognize their settler colonial world view, understand what makes them view welfare mothers and homeless people for example, unfavourably, and recognize that poverty - not poor people - is the problem, that poverty can be reduced if not ended, and that the most vulnerable and dispossessed among us are citizens and neighbours who deserve compassion, support, and respect - then there’s a real chance to change their heads and hearts. but first they must be able to frame their understanding in terms of class rather than race. talking about class is as difficult as talking about race, even though class is a real economic construct whereas race is a perceived social construct. people feel very uncomfortable talking about class because it forces them to recognize that class exists, also it reminds them of where they are in the class pecking order. for those in the working class this can trigger feelings of resentment but, as previously mentioned, these feelings are often misdirected downwards towards the underclass, rather than upwards at the real class enemy. this powerful resentment among the working class is particularly evident among those who have made it out of the underclass. instead of lowering a ladder down to their former brothers and sisters who remain in the underclass, they pull up this ladder, distance themselves from the underclass, and enjoy the benefits of their new class status. there are many immigrants who, after establishing themselves in their new home country, argue vociferously against more immigrants being let into the country. this is because they fear the economic competition that continued immigration may bring and the related fear that this competition may push them back down into the underclass. the same dynamics exists between the working and middle classes. working class people who make it into the middle class (if such transitions are truly possible) often start to despise the very class they have escaped from. they argue ‘if i made it so can you, and if you don’t it’s because you are stupid or lazy.’ they fail to recognize that they were only able to ‘escape’ from the working class because it serves capitalisms interest to let them do so. the middle class works hard for the ruling class and are its eager agents, even though there is very little possibility that many people from the middle class will make it into the top one per cent. what keeps the middle class working hard for capitalism is not their hope that they will make it into the ruling class but their fear that they will fall back into the working class. discussions about class are often hijacked or diverted by two dominant narratives that are used by the ruling class to maintain their hegemony. one of these narratives is that class no longer exists or is no longer relevant. if the ruling class can get people to buy into this narrative then they can make the class question disappear altogether, along with all the inequities that go with it. if this narrative does not work, they fall back on a second, even more beguiling argument: ‘we are all middle class now’. not only does this obscure the true nature of the class system but it motivates people to buy into that system by suggesting that it can be a tool which can be used to get on in life. during the recent federal election in canada there were many references to the ‘middle class’ but very few mentions of the working and ruling classes. the campaign narrative was dominated by ‘the middle class and those who are working hard to join it’, the implication being that if you do not succeed in life that is because you are not working hard enough. any discussion about race – no matter how difficult that may be – has to start with a discussion about class. and any discussion about class has to be grounded in capitalism, economics and poverty. racism is a product of capitalism. capitalism is the cause, racism is the effect and class is the solution. this analysis has been distorted by proponents of intersectionality who argue that identities such as race and gender are of equal or greater significant than class. while intersectionality and identity politics are important because they motivate people into taking political action, they can also become a distraction from the real struggle, which is the class struggle. intersectionality and identity politics tend to divide rather than unite. ‘black lives matter’ alienates some white people. transgender alienates some feminists. these are important causes and should be fought for and defended but they play into the capitalist game of divide and rule. we only have to see how corporate america has bought into intersectionality and identity politics to understand that it is being used as a tool against the very people it pretends to support. intersectionality and identity politics focus on differences rather than commonalities, and some of these differences are not real, they are social constructs. race is a classic social construct; biologically all of the people on this planet are one race. our dna is identical. we may look different on the outside but in many ways, we are exactly the same. slavery and colonialism were the great engines of capitalism and, although some of the superstructure of these systems has gone, the ideology that created and perpetuated them remains firmly in place. black people are not being taken from africa and enslaved today but the ideology that made this possible – that black people are inferior and white people are superior – lives on in modern day america. indeed, it can be argued that this divide and rule between black and white people is what enables the ruling class to stay in control, such is the power of racism in america. in canada, the power of the ruling class is entrenched by the deep divide between indigenous and non-indigenous peoples; this divide is embedded within the legal superstructure via the indian act which created and perpetuates an apartheid system in canada. this racist superstructure shapes and determines the ideological base in canada and enables white people and immigrants to look down upon indigenous peoples, who are viewed and treated as an underclass by white settlers and new arrivals. decolonization in order to start challenging these false feelings of superiority and inferiority and these socially constructed ‘racial differences’ between white and indigenous peoples, we have to shift the discussion from an ideological and cultural argument to an analysis of the underlying economic system. for example, ‘truth and reconciliation in canada’ (truth and reconciliation commission/ trc) requires us to admit the harsh and unpalatable truth that the white man stole the land from the indigenous peoples, and that reconciliation is only possible between two equal parties who have equal wealth and power. this means either giving the land back to indigenous peoples or, better still, finding a way to share the land with them for mutual benefit. this is what many indigenous peoples thought they were committing to when they signed the treaties. instead, the land was stolen from them and they were forced onto reserves. the white man saw the treaties as contractual land deals and paid some token economic compensation in return for what became very valuable real estate. this very act of compensation created deliberate divisions and resentments between indigenous and white canadians that are still evident today; for example, this resentment is apparent every time a status card (which in itself is a powerful symbol of the apartheid state) is presented at a store check out. these perceived unfair economic transactions trigger ideological and cultural resentments such as ‘why do those people pay less than me.’ this economic resentment is in the mind of every white staff member – either consciously or unconsciously – each time they interact with an indigenous person in the library. another thought that is at the back or front of the minds of library workers is that the library they work in was built on land that was stolen from the indigenous people; with this thought comes an attendant fear of revenge if the land was somehow taken back. this fear is managed by ‘land acknowledgement statements’ which acknowledge that something happened in the past but do not admit that this was an injustice or commit to doing anything about it. these acknowledgements are carefully crafted legal statements that merely recognize a historical fact rather than admit culpability, e.g.: “we acknowledge that the city of thunder bay has been built on the traditional territory of fort william first nation, signatory to the robinson superior treaty of . we also recognize the contributions made to our community by the métis people.” (thunder bay land acknowledgement statement). some indigenous people feel that land acknowledgements are a step in the right direction because they at least recognize that something happened in the past. but recognition requires no action, which makes the white man feel very comfortable, because he doesn’t have to do anything to right a historical wrong. the white man can salve his conscience by admitting a historical act, while at the same time distancing himself from it (‘that was in the past and had nothing to do with me’) and admitting no liability. he can continue to enjoy the benefits, economic and otherwise, of this historical injustice. decolonization of public libraries will only become meaningful when the stolen land that they were built on is given back to indigenous peoples. in order for the public library to commit to decolonization of the institution, the organization and its staff must understand and accept they are in fact parties to the treaties. this requires the authentic admission that we all have rights and obligations with respect to treaties and that we also share the negative impact that colonialism continues to have on us. in order to do this, it is necessary to examine the social and economic constructs that frame and drive colonialism. if aporophobia is one of these constructs the library must start an uncomfortable conversation with its staff and patrons about capitalism, poverty, class and race. this conversation must take place before truth, reconciliation and decolonization of the public library can move forward. john pateman, thunder bay public library (jpateman@tbpl.ca) margaret demillo, thunder bay public library (mdemillo@tbpl.ca) references allemang, j. ( , may ) the classless society? only in canada, eh? pity. retrieved december , , available at: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/news/world/the-classless-society-only-in- canada-eh-pity/article / andrew-gee, e. ( , august ) hot-dog harmony: how a thunder bay diner and its coney sauce comfort a divided city, available at: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-hot-dog-harmony-how-a- thunder-bay-diner-and-its-coney-sauce-comfort-a/ beaulieu, m. s. ( ) essays in northwestern ontario working class history: thunder bay and its environs. thunder bay: lakehead university. beaulieu, m. s. ( ) labour at the lakehead: ethnicity, socialism and politics. kelowna: ubc. dunham, a. ( , december ) the local, available at: http://www.thelocal.es/ /spanish-word-of-the-year-highlights-hatred- of-poor-people-aporofobia dunk, t. w. ( ) it’s a working man’s town: male working-class culture. montreal: mcgill-queen’s university press. galloway, g. ( , june ) turning the page: thunder bay’s library a leader among civic bodies in healing a racial divide, available at: http://www.theglobeandmail.com/canada/article-turning-the-page-thunder- bays-library-a-leader-among-civic-bodies-in/ lspc, t. b. ( ) lakehead social planning council, available at: http://www.lspc.ca/wp-content/uploads/ -poverty-reduction-strategy.pdf menzies, c. r. ( ) indigenous nations and marxism: notes on an ambivalent relationship. new proposals: journal of marxism and interdisciplinary inquiry, ( ), – . morrison, j. ( ) labour pains thunder bay’s working class in canada’s wheat boom era (first edition). thunder bay: thunder bay historical museum society. olsen, h. b. ( , july ) please admit you don’t like poor people so we can move on, available at: medium.com/@mshannabrooks/please-admit-you-dont- like-poor-people-so-we-can-move-on-f e b proudfoot, s. ( , july ) macleans.ca, available at: https://www.macleans.ca/society/what-does-it-mean-to-be-working-class-in- canada raquel, j. ( ). progressive toolkit: a guide to winning arguments for transformative change, available at: http://classonline.org.uk/pubs/item/ robinson, o. ( , september ) decolonizing the public library, available at: https://rabble.ca/news/ / /decolonizing-public-library trifonas, p. p. ( ) pedagogies of difference: rethinking education for social change. ( st ed.). abingdon: routledge. tuck, e., & yang, k. w. ( ) decolonization is not a metaphor. decolonization: indigeneity, education & society, ( ). turner, l. ( , july ) “no surprise” thunder bay, ont. has most homicides per capita in canada: says police chief, available at: https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/thunder-bay/tbay-police-chief-responds-to- -crime-stats- . wong, d. ( ) moving in the circle: indigenous solidarity for canadian libraries. partnership: the canadian journal of library and information practice and research, ( ). https://doi.org/ . /partnership.v i . deception: types, principles, and tactics volume , editorial perspective cite as: cohen, e. ( ). deception: types, principles, and tactics. informing science: the international journal of an emerging transdiscipline, , - . https://doi.org/ . / (cc by-nc . ) this article is licensed to you under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial . international license. when you copy and redistribute this paper in full or in part, you need to provide proper attribution to it to ensure that others can later locate this work (and to ensure that others do not accuse you of plagiarism). you may (and we encour- age you to) adapt, remix, transform, and build upon the material for any non-commercial purposes. this license does not permit you to use this material for commercial purposes. deception: types, principles, and tactics eli cohen informing science institute, santa rosa, ca, usa elicohen@informingscience.org abstract aim/purpose the paper provides general background on the who, what, when, and why of de- ception. methodology it uses a naturalistic observational methodology. whenever possible, the paper provides examples. contribution the research cited in this paper comes from a large variety of disparate fields of study. as such, it is one of the few multidisciplinary attempts to understand de- ception. findings the research uncovered general principles for conducting deception and tactics that support these principles. impact on society the authors hope that this paper’s finding will shed light on the topic of fake news as well as misinformation and disinformation, particularly in politics. keywords deception, principles, tactics, fake news introduction in contrast to an earlier paper in this series that laid the groundwork for examining fake news from a high level, a conceptual overview focusing on informing science literature (e. cohen, ), this pa- per has no such lofty philosophical aspiration. instead, it attempts to explore more fully the princi- ples and tactics of deceiving, particularly how false and misleading information is delivered, as shown in figure . that is, this paper explores the tactics and principles commonly used to deceive. https://doi.org/ . / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / mailto:elicohen@informingscience.org deception: types, principles, and tactics figure . this paper focuses on the principles and tactics used to disinform, with emphasis on the areas outlined in red. (adapted from cohen, ) how we deceive: types of deception on the least granular level, there are three types of deception: stating untruths, concealing the truth, and paltering, a cross between the two. the paper turns its attention to each in turn. statin g un truth s lying refers to knowingly stating untruths with the intent to deceive. it involves two elements ) providing false information (an act of commission) in conjunction with the ) intention to mislead. this paper acknowledges that there is no universally accepted definition of lying acceptable to all phi- losophers (mahon, ). nevertheless, the notion of lying, while nuanced, is well understood by most. con cealin g th e truth another type of deception is an act of omission, choosing not to voice the truth by concealing at least some relevant facts. purposefully concealing (hiding, obscuring, masking) of the truth is another form of deception. an example of that seen in deceiving the government taxation office by failing to report all sources of one’s income. palterin g the third type of deception falls in the middle, between deceiving by an act of commission and de- ceiving by omission. it is known as paltering. vocabulary.com defines paltering as voicing “deliberately ambiguous or unclear [statements] in order to mislead or withhold information” (“palter,” n.d.) o’sullivan ( ) reports, “agents of disinformation today mix factual and false information, making it more difficult for audiences to determine what is real and what is fake.” gerdeman ( ) defines it slightly differently as “active use of cohen truthful statements to influence a target’s beliefs by giving a false or distorted impression.” figure shows paltering in a venn diagram as the intersection of lying and concealing since it contains elements of both. figure : three broad ways to deceive: by commission, omission, and paltering. components of paltering can include equivocations, exaggerations, minimalization, and spin. we now examine these terms in turn: equivocations equivocation means making vague or ambiguous statements to conceal the truth or avoid commit- ting oneself. for example, when the mayor of chicago was about to make the unpopular decision to close schools, he phrased it as in positive-sounding terms that concealed the details of his decision, namely “optimizing school resource utilization.” also, see chang ( ). exaggeration exaggerations (auxesis) refer to overstating or stretching the truth. in some cases, exaggerations do not endeavor to hide the truth, as in, for example, “his brain is the size of a pea.” other times, they defy facts, as when a politician said an event had “the largest audience ever to witness an inaugura- tion, period, both in-person and around the globe.” minimization minimizations (meiosis) denote the opposite of exaggerations, understatements, and downplaying of facts. they include belittling statements made by a politician, such as “how can a dummy dope like harry hurt, who wrote a failed book about me but doesn’t know me or anything about me, be on tv discussing trump?” spin spin in the context of deception can be understood as paltering squared. it involves both the minimi- zation of inconvenient facts and the exaggerating of helpful facts to make vague statements. the pol- itician whose parent died on the gallows may attempt to cleanse his family history in the eyes of his audience by spinning that “while attending a large public event, my father died when the platform he was standing upon suddenly collapsed.” many disciplines study spin. gerdeman ( ) provides examples of the use of paltering in politics as “attempts to distort the story to influence voters.” rogers, zeckhauser, gino, norton, and schweit- zer ( ) experimentally examine paltering in everyday human behavior, particularly negotiations from a psychology viewpoint. deception: types, principles, and tactics creatin g a perspective on deception two different research efforts, each using two-dimensional charts, endeavored to relate the impact of deception and to differentiate the types of deception. both looked at lies and concealment, although neither explicitly looked at paltering. rowe and rothstein ( ) examined types of deception using the dimensions of the duration of the effect’s impact (long-term/short-term) and the degree the type is active or passive and offer the fol- lowing chart (figure ). figure . types of deception source: adapted from rowe and rothstein ( ) image retrieved from wikipedia https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/file:spectrum_of_deception_types.gif druckman and bjork ( ), reviewing the psychological literature, took a more expansive view of deception and offer a different two-dimensional mapping of terms, in this case, based on the dimen- sions of the degree of covertness and degree of harmfulness, as shown in figure . figure . deception by harmfulness and covertness. (adapted from druckman & bjork, , p. .) https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/file:spectrum_of_deception_types.gif cohen the figures were adapted to omit many additional terms that are irrelevant to this paper for reasons of clarity. from these two analyses, we discern lying categorized as having the attributes of being overt, harmful, and short term while concealment as covert with long term effects. we can speculate that palter- ing would follow in the middle. figure shows a box around several terms that may be related to dis- information. in other words, while lying harms, the damage from paltering and by concealment are more durable and insidious. wh y people deceive all forms of deception (lying, paltering, and concealment) have their potential downside when the truth is later revealed. so why deceive. table suggests that people practice deception to gain esteem or an advantage and to avoid punishment or embarrassment. much of the deception described below is for political gain. people also deploy deception for per- sonal financial gain. for example, clickbait “news” sites on the web show misleading headlines de- signed to entice visitors to click a link and thereby to increase the website’s advertising revenue (holi- day, ). for example, the headline might read, “you will never guess what he just said.” some deceive to garner sympathy and to gain fame. deb and healy ( ) write that actor jussie smollet reportedly orchestrated a fake attack to advance his cause (and thus his net worth). some spread false information without intending to deceive when a misunderstanding leads to the dissemination of misinformation. for example, jenny mccarthy advocates against vaccinating chil- dren against diseases, believing that the vaccination caused her son’s autism. table . why people practice deception. (source: “why we lie,” n.d.) wh o en deavors to deceive? sun tzu wrote in the art of war some years ago that deception is the basis of all warfare. how- ever, deception use certainly is not limited to warfare. politics, business, literature, cinema, and magic tricks all make use of deception. nonetheless, many of the tactics of deceptions span usage across fields. only a fine line separates deception from persuasion (see, for example, schudson, ). consumer products use marketing techniques to lead people to want to purchase their wares. likewise, people utilize public relations firms to help market themselves and their reputations. when people’s deeds have severely damaged their reputations, some turn to reputation management firms. one tactic is to replace the current top of page listing of real news reports about the person’s indiscretions with fa- vorable stories by using fake news outlets to eclipse the accurate adverse news reports (levy, ). principles and tactics of deception the following is exploratory research on the principles and tactics used to deceive. the following list evolved from reviewing the relevant literature but mostly first from observation and then a search for supporting literature. for this reason, this list is a work-in-progress. readers who object to deception: types, principles, and tactics knowledge obtained through observing occurrences in real-life settings need to recall the break- throughs in developmental psychology provided by jean piaget and his disciples. the principles observed by the author include the following. prin ciple: distort th e t ruth - lie the foundation of deception is the lie, expressing an untruth. gilbert experimentally showed that ex- posing people to false information, even when they know it to be false, leads them to believe it (gilbert, krull, & malone, ; gilbert, tafarodi, & malone, ). one cannot un-ring a bell. prin ciple: lie big the “big lie” (große lüge) is a lie so big that it defies logical thinking. hitler coined the term big lie in mein kampf (“his combat”) to express using a lie so “colossal” that no one would believe that some- one “could have the impudence to distort the truth so infamously.” prin ciple: r epeat th e lie (fireh ose of falseh ood) repeat a lie repeated often enough, and some will believe it. lenin may have said, “a lie told often enough becomes the truth.” commentator stephen colbert calls this effect “truthiness,” a sense that a be- lief is true without checking the facts (“truthiness,” n.d.). ira hyman ( ) refers to this by the more academic-sounding term “illusory truth effect.” this phenomenon, the “illusory truth effect,” has been well-studies and replicated (de keersmaecker et al., ). former kgb chairman yuri andropov said, “we have only to keep repeating our themes that the united states and israel are fascists, imperial-zionist countries bankrolled by rich jews” (shaw, ). paul and matthews ( ) refer to this as the russian “firehose of falsehood” propaganda model. corollary: keep repeating a big lie joseph goebbels is given attribution for the quote, “if you tell a lie big enough and keep repeating it, people will eventually come to believe it” (cited in mccarthy & walsh, ). prin ciple: wh en caugh t in a lie, den y as pointed out by vox (“ . deny everything,” ), a successful playbook when accused of sexual misconduct is to deny, deny, deny. repeated accusations of sexual misconduct plagued several pow- erful us politicians in recent years, including brett kavanaugh, donald trump, roy moore, bill clin- ton, and clarence thomas. they all ( ) denied the allegations of sexual impropriety, ( ) found others to provide them with favorable testimonials, ( ) questioned the accusers’ judgment and motivation, ( ) diverted the discussion, and then ( ) moved on. this five-step playbook for denial has proven successful for these politicians, all of whom have weathered their many accusations of sexual miscon- duct. tactic: doubling down the tactic of doubling down refers to repeating a denial when questioned on its veracity and be- coming even more resolute, zealous, and tenacious. madhani ( ) and sherman ( ) provide ex- amples of doubling down. tactic: blame others for one’s failures scapegoating of others is typically found in narcissists. vesil vex (n.d.) writes, “a person who constantly blames others for their own actions thinks of themselves as perfect, probably because of some abuse or trauma they’ve suffered early in life. having parents that were abusive, punishing you for your mistakes would naturally cause you to adopt a kind of perfectionist approach to life.” cohen alternatively, it may be related to the fundamental attribution error. sullum ( ) provides an exam- ple of this trait in a leader. tactic: instead of accepting failure, distract the press by changing the topic (perhaps by creating a crisis) zeke miller ( ) notes a tactic at least one leader uses when confronted with a problem: turning attention away from the failure or falsehood by creating a crisis from which one later retreats until attention has moved away from the original failure. tactic: mirror the accusation to create the illusion of equivalence the mirroring tactic is found on the playground of schools and of politics. children mirror insults with, “that’s what you are, but what am i?”. some politicians behave similarly. when accused of wrongdoing, they claim the accuser of the same wrongdoing. perhaps doing so provides a fictitious shield of moral equivalence. for example, when the speaker of the us house of representatives charged the president for contravening the constitution, he accused her of violating the constitution. this tactic requires no factual basis. (see also the related discussion under the principle: distract, deflect, divert attention.) prin ciple. attack – preven t free sh arin g of ideas by oth ers another principle is to attack one’s opponent to prevent their thoughts from being heard. college campuses and, to a lesser extent, other public assemblies provide the stage for such tactics to oppose free speech. tactic. censor speech by occupying the limited seating a tactic found on college campuses under the guise of free speech is to thwart free speech by organ- izing large numbers of agitators, sometimes including nonstudents, to arrive early to a public talk that they want to shut down. these early arrivals occupy the seating, which often is limited and, by doing so, prevent others from hearing the talk. tactic. censor speech by heckling the speaker a tactic to thwart free speech by those with opposing views employs heckling the speaker and by this disruption and noise, prevent the audience from hearing the speaker. a variation of this tactic is for hecklers to wait until the speaker begins the talk and then disrupt the talk, in turn, shouting, often that the speaker is a liar. once police escort out the first hooligan, the next one begins this obstruction anew. the article “ times campus speakers were shouted down by leftist protesters this school year” ( ) outlines these tactics in action. tactic. censor speech by threatening to riot or pressuring to disinvite another tactic to disrupt academic freedom relates to requiring the organization that invited the speaker and not the university to pay for police protection. doing so assures that inviting organiza- tions will need to deplete their limited budget to have their voices heard. similarly, if the university is to be held responsible for riots threatened by the insurgents, the admin- istration may choose to disinvite the speaker. a similar tactic to prevent free speech is to demand the university to disinvite the speaker for even the flimsiest of reasons. nelson and greenberg ( ) note, “at brown university in march, the transgender activist janet mock canceled a speech after anti-israel students objected because the campus hillel chapter [a student organization] was among the sponsors.” deception: types, principles, and tactics prin ciple: wh en offen se is exposed, r everse victim and offen der blaming the victim of one’s aggression is a potent principle for deception. after russian invaded ukraine, it claimed victimhood when ukrainian civilians attempted to navigate ukrainian waters (moore, ). a recent example of perpetrators claiming victimhood is discussed by tawil ( ), who describes that when terrorists fire rockets across the border at israeli civilians from civilian locations (home, school, mosque), the culprits criticized israel for protecting its civil- ians. the tactic below is a variation: attacking the whistleblower. tactic. attack the one who discloses wrongdoing or the process once malfeasance is revealed, one tactic is to retaliate against the person or attack the process that divulged the wrongdoing. when the malfeasance occurs in a workplace setting, often the one who reports violations of laws or regulations may elect to do so anonymously as a whistleblower. many organizations, including the us department of labor, protect whistleblowers by guaranteeing ano- nymity and freedom from retaliation. defaming the messenger can be an ad hominem abusive (that is, personal) attack. labossiere ( , p ) describes such actions as substituting “abusive remarks for evidence when attacking another person’s claim or claims.” another definition is “a fallacious argumentative strategy whereby genuine discussion of the topic at hand is avoided by instead attacking the character, motive, or other attribute of the person making the argument, or persons associated with the argument, rather than attacking the substance of the argument itself” (“ad hominem,” n.d.). the darvo combo - deny, attack, reverse victim and offender the term darvo expresses the combination of the above three tactics: deny, attack, claim victim- hood. rapists use darvo to attack their victims in public. politicians also employ the darvo combination of tactics. see “ deny everything” ( ). the principle is that when one’s attack on a victim comes to light, the perpetrator does two things: denies it and attacks the victim (for example, by bullying, threats, terror), thus attempting to shift blame to the victim. prin ciple: dem on ization of th e oppon en t in some cases, the defaming of the messenger becomes truly ugly, containing demonization. getting the public to demonize one’s opponent prevents rational thinking, notes the united states holocaust memorial museum (n.d.) video “the path to nazi genocide.” demonization portrays those who are different or even have a different viewpoint as evil. philip cole explores the phenomenon in his book “the myth of evil” ( ). the united states holocaust memorial museum. (n.d.) explores it in “chapter : from citizens to outcasts, – ” of its film “the path to nazi genocide.” more recently, the united states president donald trump declared in a speech that his deceased op- ponent was in hell (“president trump implies…,” ). in other cases, trump has used this tactic to demonize those reporting his actions (freedman, ), opponents of his building a border wall (bonn, ), and those who disagree with his energy policy (schroeder, ). peter wehner ( ) notes that supporters of trump are increasingly portraying their critics as demons. at present, as has happened in the past, this same demonization has been used against the jewish people and is seen in the russian language and arab press as well as on us campuses (see figure ). such demonization occurs even now on us college campuses (see sharf, ). this author observes cohen that nations, such as the us, are now witnessing a replacement of rational discussion with others holding alternative beliefs with discourses of demonization. slogans are overtaking truth. figure . antisemitic memes in nazi, soviet, and arab media plus a poster distributed at duke university found on may , . note that they all use similar imagery of jews. (source: amcha initiative antisemitism tracker, ) prin ciple: divide an d con quer – create ch aos the tactic of divide and conquer (or divide and rule) may have originated in the kingdom of mace- don over , years ago. the idea that is it easier to overcome an opponent by splitting it into parts, or factional groups. when two millennia ago, rome conquered israel, it split the nation into five ad- ministrative districts. in modern times, russian agents use social media to generate factionalism in other countries by creating tribalism, that is, what freud called the narcissism of small differences (“narcissism of small differences,” n.d.). as used here, narcissism is not of oneself, but one’s faction. tactic: employ tribalism to create dissension tribalism, in its political context, refers to peoples’ loyalty to their social group over society as a whole. we encounter tribalism in everyday life. for some, active support of one’s preferred sports team may include rioting against and pummeling supporters of other teams. the differences between sports teams are small, often limited to the location of their home stadium, hence the narcissism of small differences in the political arena, haddad ( ) writes that tribalism helps explain the many conflicts in the middle east. tactic: infiltrate tribes to inject one’s message tribalism can be artificially stoked. the kremlin, for example, uses tribalism tactics to trick people of goodwill into doing their ill bidding. over years ago, the kgb created “peace” movements in the west, such as the world peace council, to weaken democracies and dampen protests against soviet aggression. as stated above, historical research shows that the kgb organized and infiltrated “peace” movements in the west to weaken democracies. the essence of this approach is to inject an- other’s partisan message into a tribe. deception: types, principles, and tactics consider the biological process by which a virus invades a body. larson ( ) writes that misinfor- mation is like a virus. the virus has a message (its rna instructions) to infiltrate and grow in the host. to overcome the body’s defenses, it may appear to the body to be one of the body’s own com- ponents, and so bypass the host body’s defenses against intruders. similarly, those with messages they wish to cultivate will infiltrate existing host organizations to gain control over the host and have it do its bidding. reciprocation. robert cialdini ( ) notes that an effective way to influence and persuade people is by reciprocation (i will march in your parade if you march in mine). we seek out informational sources from like-minded people. to sway us elections, the russians set up or joined social media groups on various topics, including black lives, religion, even animal lovers, and used the trust given by those who subscribed to these social media groups to sway opinions toward their preferred presi- dential candidate. similarly, antisemites joined special interest groups in the us, even ones with contrary viewpoints, to sway those groups to endorse antisemitism (engel, ). the women’s march, an organization to advance women’s aspirations, was infiltrated by at least three antisemites whose goal was to advance antisemitism. only after the light of day revealed their bigotry, and other membership declined, did these infiltrators lose their leadership positions. however, by this time, its cancer had already metas- tasized, and “the israel-haters have colonized the women’s march, and they’re not letting go.” (“the women’s march still has an anti-semitism problem,” ). the truth was not a cure for this deception. singer ( ) and o’sullivan ( ) point out the infil- tration of the women’s march and the black lives matter movement by antisemites, even though, unlike many islamic countries, in israel men and women are treated equally in society and under the law. followers of louis farrakhan, a self-proclaimed racist and antisemite, infiltrated both groups. farrakhan, the head of the nation of islam, calls for separation by races, promotes antisemitism, op- poses lgbtq rights, and is against treating men and women equally. the united kingdom has for years prohibited farrakhan from visiting or even giving a videotaped or live stream message to a uk audience. according to queen’s counsel nicholas blake, farrakhan has not only targeted jews in his speeches but also “said unkind things about whites, catholics and gays” (“farrakhan banned from britain,” ; muhammad, ). lipstadt ( , p. ) writes, “using a language of shared op- pression, progressive groups have made israel part of the matrix of their concerns.” tribalism works because people tend to believe people they perceive as being like them, with whom they are homophilous. homophilous channels and the spiral of silence. homophily can best be understood as “birds of a feather flock together.” the purpose of infiltrating homophilous groups is to lever the trust that the group engenders to advance one’s cause. we tend to believe and repeat what we hear from friends, and people we think are similar to us, that is our communities, yet “[c]ommunities can have an insidious effect on what people believe and consequently on their decisions and actions” (sloman & fernbach, , p. ). a result can be trusting untrustworthy narratives. while there is little cost to accepting the false narrative offered by the infiltrator, gill points out that “communicating outright rejection of a fake news story could potentially result in exclusion (e.g., we might be ‘un- friended’ on facebook) from a homophilous group that is otherwise unanimous in its acceptance” (gill, ). this exclusion-attempt happened to us commentator bill maher, who noted that tlaib refused to visit her grandmother living in ramallah when she could not use the opportunity to promote a boycott of israel: rep. rashida tlaib, d-mich., advocated a boycott against hbo host bill maher after he de- nounced the international movement to boycott israel as a “bullshit purity test by people who want to appear woke but actually slept through history class.” tlaib responded in a tweet, “maybe folks should boycott his show” (rozsa, ). cohen tlaib’s blatant misrepresentation of her motives will be ignored by those who feel an allegiance to her in what might be called the emperor’s new clothes effect. gill ( ) notes, “in environments of high extrinsic complexity, the importance of truth in a news story will often be secondary to the motivational and emotional benefits that accrue from reinforcing group membership and coher- ence…believing [disinformation] or pretending to believe it (and acting accordingly) would both serve the purpose of reinforcing membership within the group of self-similar individuals who believe (or actively pre-tend to believe) the same.” noelle-neumann ( ) calls this phenomenon the spiral of silence, the fear that voicing an idea contrary to the one dominant in the group will isolate the individual. to stay in the good graces of fellow members of the women’s march, one had to voice or at least accept its antisemitic message. infiltrate allies. the issue of “i will march in your parade if you march in mine” was noted above by sharf ( ) as a method for demonizing jews. russian operatives used it in a broader way to sow discord in the us election, as noted in the report of the select committee on intelligence on russian active measures campaigns and interference in the u.s. elections, volume ( ). one method mentioned in this paper and explored more fully elsewhere was to create fake accounts and even fake websites to garner trust by homophilous groups to manipulate real people and events to exploit existing fissures and create new ones. the report found that russian election interference was not limited to us elections. several other elections, including in europe, were mentioned. prin ciple: distract, deflect, divert atten tion according to magicians penn and teller, a fundamental principle of magic is driving attention and focus away from what the magician wants hidden (“penn and teller principles of magic,” ). r. hyman ( ) and macknik et al. ( ) provide fuller descriptions of the psychology of magic. see “colour changing card trick” ( ) for a highly recommended video that demonstrates the impact of changing one’s focus. misdirection (distracting and diverting attention) works because humans have limited attention ca- pacity, a topic this author wrote about almost a half-century ago (shiffrin, craig, & cohen, ). magicians use attractive assistants to distract the audience. politicians will dodge the question, and typically the audience (or interviewers) follow the new “shiny object” the politician offers as the dis- traction. tactic: evasion – dodge, stall, deflect evasion is the term used in ethics to deceive by paltering. peter bull in his book “the microanalysis of political communication: claptrap and ambiguity,” ( , as cited in “evasion (ethics),” n.d.) points out six techniques to evade answering a political question. they include ignoring the question “what you are asking is not important,” acknowledging the question without answering it, attacking the question, and attacking the questioner “what are you talking about?” and “don’t you have some- thing better to do?” tactic: deflect attention by changing the topic this author learned in graduate school another tactic to handle the situation when he did not have the answer, deflection. a deflection might take the form of “what you need to know is …” and then provide the information that the individual wants to give. politicians favor this technique, according to abdullah ( ). deception: types, principles, and tactics tactic: distract by exaggerating minor details an example best explains the tactic of distracting by exaggerating minor details. if a politician cannot attack the substance of a report condemning her, she asks who selected the hideous color of its cover and asks to open an investigation in the color choice. prin ciple: deflect atten tion people have a limit to their capacity to pay attention. we can be distracted by tangling a “shiny” ob- ject in front of us (or in the case of the stage magician, a quick movement of the hand.) understand- ing this, when confronted with an undesirable topic, politicians know how to misdirect the public’s attention with a verbal “shiny object” of their choosing. tactic: misdirect, confuse, move on to understand the tactic of “misdirect, confuse, and then move on,” consider an example. when trump appointee for us attorney general jeff sessions lying to congress about his contacts with russians came to light, president trump used this tactic to misdirect the media’s attention away from the scandal. trump dangled before the media a twitter “shiny” object declaring, “how low has president obama gone to tapp (sic) my phones during the very sacred election processi” in doing so, trump successfully deflected media attention away for the topic of russian interference in the us election (robenault, ). prin ciple: h ijacked em otion s overtake r eason the effect of using emotions when lying is even more effective (brady, wills, jost, tucker, & van bavel, ). most people wish to comfort those who are crying. crying indicates distress and mobi- lizes emotional support from others. marshall mcluhan ( ) titled the first chapter of his book understanding media as “the medium is the message,” pointing out the medium used to convey a message impacts (biases) the receiver. for example, images of a crying or dead child convey a more significant impact on the receiver than providing statistics about children’s health. images evoke emotions that can bypass the ration parts of the brain and so are ripe for agitprop, a term coined by stalin for a type of propaganda that mixes fiction with facts to create false information; the term also includes organized guerilla armies as mos- cow has done in spain, ukraine, and israel. agitprop focuses on the emotional, non-rational parts of the brain “to arouse [the] audience to indignation or action” (“agitprop,” n.d.) david konn and pok fu lam ( ) write in the south china morning post, “pictures of children killed or injured make great ‘copy’ and fulfil the narrative of israel as an ‘oppressor state.’” (the photo they referred to was fake.) truth cannot compete with a fake photo of a crying child. prin ciple: em ploy a fake n arrative prin ciple the great enemy of the truth is very often not the lie – deliberate, contrived and dishonest – but the myth – persistent, persuasive, and unrealistic. john f. kennedy ( ) a narrative is a story that people tell themselves and others about themselves. it is common for peo- ple to teach their children a sanitized version of their history, one that omits any dispiriting historical details. a fake narrative is fashioned in large part from fiction. it is a myth on a mission. de baets ( ) is of the view that lying about history is a crime. it is no exaggeration to say that the cumulative effects of fake news – especially if it takes the form of defamation, privacy invasion, war propaganda and hate speech – can seriously undermine democratic societies. as such, it is a real danger (de baets, ). cohen fake narrative and magic. parts of a fake historical narrative may be based on actual history and other parts on hiding elements of the past, misdirection, and simulation, that is, given the impres- sion that something happened that did not. these constructions are elements of penn & teller, the basic principles of magic ( ): . palm: to hold an object in an apparently empty hand. (hide) . ditch: to secretly dispose of an unneeded object. (change topic) . steal: to secretly obtain a needed object. . load: to secretly move a needed object to where it is hidden. . simulation: to give the impression that something that has not happened, has. (assert as true without factual basis) . misdirection: to lead attention away from a secret move. . switch: to secretly exchange one object for another. the fake narrative is deceptive because it relies not on actual history and its artifacts but on fictitious constructions and omission of relevant historical facts. see, for example, plosker ( ). prin ciple: work in secret (covert) publicity is justly commended as a remedy for social and industrial diseases. sunlight is said to be the best of disinfectants; electric light the most efficient policeman. louis brandeis, , p. deception works best when it is accomplished covertly (mayer, ). as noted above, the soviet (now the russian) state early on engaged in disrupting democracies by covertly creating discord among factions. much of the success of the russian disinformation has been due to its ability to keep these “active measures” concealed from scrutiny. prin ciple: em ploy m essage m agn ifiers deception is most effective when concealed. when infiltrating a group to inject a message, endeavor to hide your intent from the host lest it employ antibodies to protect itself. it helps to find a suscepti- ble and trusting host, a useful idiot, or an unwitting agent. useful idiots. a related technique is employing useful idiots. the term “useful idiots,” attributed to vladimir lenin, refers to recruiting a useful pawn, one who shares your goals to disseminate your message. cybenko, giani, and thompson ( ) delve into these and other elements of cognitive hacking (ways to manipulate perception). according to b. cohen ( ), carlos enrique bayo pub- lished in the left-wing catalan newspaper público the iranian authored hoax that “spanish security ser- vices, eager to overrule their catalan subordinates, colluded with the islamist terrorist cell that planned the attacks, and that the mossad, israel’s intelligence service, executed the attack on the rambla by remotely controlling the truck from an operational base thousands of miles away in richmond, va.”. unwitting agents are ordinary people who unwittingly repeat misinformation (starbird, ). re- peated exposure to misinformation can create a false memory (loftus, ). gieryn ( , pp. , ) talks about the “gentleman witness” who is willing to testify to something that never happened. reporters, planting stories, and controlling the vocabulary. a report issued by the research in- stitute data and society (donovan & friedberg, ) identifies the tools and tactics used to employ well-meaning journalists and others to disseminate propaganda, that is, misleading and outright false information. reporters as useful idiots and as unwitting agents at times repeat and even amplify planted stories. planting stories. one technique to influence reporters involves planting in some friendly outlet (such as rt or aljazeera) a fake story that resembles legitimate news. “then they (the russians) use fake accounts to amplify the story — repeatedly tweeting it, making it appear like it is being shared by real people, making deception: types, principles, and tactics it ‘trend’ — until someone like a journalist, or maybe a politician, shares it and it goes into the mainstream” writes david halevy, a jerusalem-based correspondent for time magazine (as cited in o’sullivan, ). a specialist on disinformation and the media at the alliance for securing democracy, bret schafer ( ) tracks russia’s digital deception. he writes of the technique of planting anti-western worldview stories in russian media sources. this disinformation is then picked up and repeated by more mainstream reporters (mayer, ; zappone, ). note that the message is spread from one (or more) less reputable news sources to ones with greater trustworthiness, thereby gaining a glimmer of respectability and believability. so far, the paper has brought to the fore principles and tactics for deception. the paper concludes by pointing out when deception is entertaining and when it is dangerous. wh en deception is en tertain in g: m agic, cin em a, literature not all deception is undesirable. in addition to white lies, there are times and places where deception is highly desirable, such as in magic shows, the theatre and cinema, and literature. magic. as mentioned above, principles of magic illusion involve the psychology of deception, partic- ularly concealment, distraction, and misdirection. r. hyman ( ) and chapters and on decep- tion in the druckman and bjork book ( ) describes these. readers will find the short video “col- our changing card trick” ( ) interesting, entertaining, and relevant. it demonstrates the principles used in magic (and politics) to drive and redirect attention and focus. arts. deceiving the audience/reader adds interest to the story of literature, theater, and cinema. one example is the popular thriller film, “the sixth sense,” which hides an essential plot feature until the end. murder mysteries by agatha christie likewise tell the story by leaving out essential features until they resolve at the end. robert fulford ( ) writes, “deception is perfectly at home in the movies.” wh en deception is n ot fun: journ alism, politics, war in most fields, deception is ethically dishonest. faking results in a scientific paper can not only waste the time of other researchers but in medical research even lead to deaths. similarly, it is not fun when used by the military against another nation in war or even in impacting their elections. journalism. the problems occur when journalists and others justify their lying as a means for ex- pressing a greater truth. see, for example, lee ( ). it might seem evident that journalists should acknowledge in their writing the bias of the people they interview and explore and own up to their own biases. those trained in old-school journalism expect journalists do a thorough job of searching for the truth (dean, n.d.). however, some journalists share the view of doyle ( ), that reporters should be advocates, picking and choosing what facts to ig- nore and when to embellish the truth. for example, neil kressel ( ) studied press coverage of the arab-israel conflict and found disturbing evidence of media bias through the publication of untruths, double standards, slants, and failure to follow journalist norms. an in-depth quantitative study by the committee for accuracy in middle east reporting ( ) replicated this finding, as did kalb and saivetz ( ). weimann ( ) shows how this and other abuses of modern media create “fake real- ities,” perhaps a precursor to the term “fake news.” a corollary danger of deception in journalism is that other important issues receive reduced attention or even go unreported. politics as seen from the examples offered above for paltering, elected officials prefer to palter rather than to make statements that some of their constituents might oppose. nevertheless, deception is also part of countries’ diplomacy when diplomats meet with other diplomats, and as part of public diplomacy in which broadcasts, narrowcast, and printed works are offered to citizens to gain their support, for cohen example, by the voice of america radio broadcasts of the usa, china’s news magazine china today and, in the ussr, the national newspapers pravda and izvestia. media and cyber. in the past, the most pressing security concern of nations has been physical or cyber-attacks from other nations (clarke & knake, ). today countries are aware of another dan- ger, the use of media and psychologic warfare to spread misinformation and propaganda. peter pom- erantsev ( ) writes, “war used to be about capturing territory and planting flags,” but now the war is about propaganda, perhaps even more than using armies to inflict harm on adversaries. he writes that propaganda, with its lies and half-truths, threatens democracy. in his paper published in foreign policy, pomerantsev writes of russian efforts against ukraine as if that campaign was some- thing new. however, cohen and boyd ( ) demonstrate that the playbook is an old one. many have explored in great depth the role of the soviets in influencing elections, e.g., mueller’s ( ) report on russian interference in the us election. time magazine reported on recent russia’s social media attacks on american democracy (calabresi, ) and the new republic re- ported on russian disinformation attacks on ukraine (cain, ). these and other campaigns by russians have been exposed elsewhere (engel, ). conclusion this paper documents some essential issues regarding deception, such as the who, when, why, and how. however, for the most part, the descriptions have been generalities. what is missing is a spe- cific example of using deception to create a false narrative. with this, the paper serves as an introduction to operation sig, a specific example of a government disinformation campaign that, years after its inception, is highly successful in sowing discontent and division. operation sig is the focus in the paper by 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( , august ). palestinians: why allow facts to get in the way? gatestone institute international policy council. retrieved from https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/ /palestinians-facts-terrorism truthiness. (n.d.). in wikipedia. retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/truthiness united states holocaust memorial museum. (n.d.). the path to nazi genocide. [video file]. retrieved from https://www.ushmm.org/learn/holocaust/path-to-nazi-genocide/the-path-to-nazi-genocide/full-film vex, v. (n.d.) what do you call someone who blames others for their own actions? quora. retrieved from https://www.quora.com/what-do-you-call-someone-who-blames-others-for-their-own-actions wehner, p. ( , november ). are trump’s critics demonically possessed? the atlantic. retrieved from https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/ / /to-trumps-evangelicals-everyone-else-is-a-sin- ner/ / weimann, g. ( ). communicating unreality: modern media and the reconstruction of reality. sage publications. the women’s march still has an anti-semitism problem. ( , september ). new york times. accessed at https://nypost.com/ / / /the-womens-march-still-has-an-anti-semitism-problem/ why we lie. (n.d.) changing minds. retrieved from http://changingminds.org/explanations/behaviors/ly- ing/why_lie.htm zappone, c. ( , september ). russian propaganda stoking g health fears in australia. the sydney morning herald. https://www.smh.com.au/world/oceania/russian-propaganda-stoking- g-health-fears- in-australia- -p rmc.html biography eli cohen serves as a governor and executive director of the informing science institute. he focuses his current research on bias, misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda. https://www.gatestoneinstitute.org/ /palestinians-facts-terrorism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/truthiness https://www.ushmm.org/learn/holocaust/path-to-nazi-genocide/the-path-to-nazi-genocide/full-film https://www.quora.com/what-do-you-call-someone-who-blames-others-for-their-own-actions https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/ / /to-trumps-evangelicals-everyone-else-is-a-sinner/ / https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/ / /to-trumps-evangelicals-everyone-else-is-a-sinner/ / https://nypost.com/ / / /the-womens-march-still-has-an-anti-semitism-problem/ http://changingminds.org/explanations/behaviors/lying/why_lie.htm http://changingminds.org/explanations/behaviors/lying/why_lie.htm https://www.smh.com.au/world/oceania/russian-propaganda-stoking- g-health-fears-in-australia- -p rmc.html https://www.smh.com.au/world/oceania/russian-propaganda-stoking- g-health-fears-in-australia- -p rmc.html 	deception: types, principles, and tactics 	abstract 	introduction 	how we deceive: types of deception 	stating untruths 	concealing the truth 	paltering 	equivocations 	exaggeration 	minimization 	spin 	creating a perspective on deception 	why people deceive 	who endeavors to deceive? 	principles and tactics of deception 	principle: distort the truth - lie 	principle: lie big 	principle: repeat the lie (firehose of falsehood) 	corollary: keep repeating a big lie 	principle: when caught in a lie, deny 	tactic: doubling down 	tactic: blame others for one’s failures 	tactic: instead of accepting failure, distract the press by changing the topic (perhaps by creating a crisis) 	tactic: mirror the accusation to create the illusion of equivalence 	principle. attack – prevent free sharing of ideas by others 	tactic. censor speech by occupying the limited seating 	tactic. censor speech by heckling the speaker 	tactic. censor speech by threatening to riot or pressuring to disinvite 	principle: when offense is exposed, reverse victim and offender 	tactic. attack the one who discloses wrongdoing or the process 	the darvo combo - deny, attack, reverse victim and offender 	principle: demonization of the opponent 	principle: divide and conquer – create chaos 	tactic: employ tribalism to create dissension 	tactic: infiltrate tribes to inject one’s message 	principle: distract, deflect, divert attention 	tactic: evasion – dodge, stall, deflect 	tactic: deflect attention by changing the topic 	tactic: distract by exaggerating minor details 	principle: deflect attention 	tactic: misdirect, confuse, move on 	principle: hijacked emotions overtake reason 	principle: employ a fake narrative principle 	principle: work in secret (covert) 	principle: employ message magnifiers 	when deception is entertaining: magic, cinema, literature 	when deception is not fun: journalism, politics, war 	politics 	conclusion 	references 	biography reframing marriage equality as death equality reframing marriage equality as death equality quarterlyhorse.org/fall /martin-baron michelle martin-baron (hobart and william smith colleges) a provocation: what would it mean to reframe the marriage movement as a crusade for death rights and death equality? even though weddings are the performative centerpiece of the activism that successfully challenged the defense of marriage act (doma), the ground-breaking case of windsor vs. the united states ( ) is one about death rights. when edie windsor's partner of over forty years, thea spyer, passed away, windsor found herself in a precarious position; spyer had left windsor her estate, but was not considered to be a "surviving spouse," the term spouse referring "only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife" under doma.[ ] these legal restrictions famously cost windsor $ , more in inheritance taxes than she would have been charged if she and spyer had been in a heterosexual marriage. in other words, the "price" of being lgbt in the united states had a concrete figure, which spyer's attorneys used to make their case.[ ] ogerbefell vs hodges ( ), which effectively made gay marriage legal across all fifty states, centered around questions of death as well. james ogerbefell was denied the right to be listed as partner john arthur's surviving spouse upon arthur's death. this denial not only renders the two "strangers even in death," but also makes it impossible for ogerbefell to receive survivors’ benefits as heterosexual widowers or widows would.[ ] additional plaintiffs in the case joined in order to protect their families in the event of unforeseen death or injury. without legalized same-sex marriage, both partners could not be equally considered parents to their adopted children, leaving the family unit vulnerable. similar situations are brought by plaintiffs in the twenty-seven other cases brought before the courts regarding same-sex marriage.[ ] viewing windsor v. the united states through the lens of death exposes marriage equality as about determining legal kinship for purposes of inheritance. in this light, the conservativism of marriage is revealed, as the passing down of property and wealth is revealed to be at the heart of the institution. ogerbefell v. hodges adds the dimension of protection in life, and the concerns regarding death or injury that acutely effect the living, particularly minor children. when we remove the performative apparatus of the wedding, we are left with raw kinship ties. although the wedding is designed to make these ties public, durable, and communal, these ties become exposed in the face of loss, when we strip them down to questions of bodies and access. the recognition of kinship relations is a legal process in the united states. legalized kinship matters when it dictates who has access to the physical body of another person, whether that body is living, injured, or dead; romantic partner, blood relation, or dependent child. despite / http://www.quarterlyhorse.org/fall /martin-baron the legalization of marriage in individual states, same-sex couples must have a durable power of attorney in addition to multiple (and costly) other documents enabling each other access to not only each other’s finances but also to their bodies in the case of injury or death.[ ] because, according to u.s. supreme court case de sylva v. ballentine ( ), "there is no federal law of domestic relations," the jurisdiction of many of these types of (non-tax related) claims belongs to the individual state (and thus the slow state-by-state legalization popping up across the country).[ ] marriage equality has not completely solved questions of equity for all forms of coupled kinship in the united states. coupled kinship is by no means the only kind of kinship. kinship emerges when adults come together to care for loved ones, themselves and others, both adults and minors, which may or may not involve cohabitation, monogamy, biological offspring, sexual intimacy, etc. marriage precludes many of these kin relations that become important when we think of end-of-life concerns. who has the right to access the deceased and determine burial and memorial practice? the ability to call a group of people a family and have them treated that way legally (not just taxation, but also mobility and travel, health benefits, etc.) is at stake – the definition of family and how it relates to wealth, capital, and access to resources. during the aids crisis, bodies and their vulnerability to state neglect were at the heart of queer activism. bodies and their vulnerability to state violence/genocide are at the root of the contemporary black lives matter movement. when viewed through the lens of death rights, gay marriage has the potential to put bodies and kinship ties back at the center of politics. this is where queer politics have the potential to be truly revolutionary and to work in concert with human inequality as a whole. after the massacre at the pulse nightclub in orlando, where forty-nine men and women were killed, primarily lgbtq+ people of color, intersectional questions of death rights are tantamount. when queer folks utilize stage names, drag personas, and other non-legalized forms of identification, including but not limited to gender identity, the precarity of legal frameworks to dictate not only access to bodies but also information, demonstrates that lgbtq+ people continue to live their authentic lives somewhere outside of legal limits. when homophobia and racism cut short the lives of lgbtq+ people, these folks have generally not made the extra legal preparations to ensure that their chosen families and extra-legal kinship networks can carry out their last wishes. tackling the questions of equitable kinship and death rights widens the umbrella of marriage politics. a focus on death rights and equality places gun control, poverty and discrimination, and criminal justice at the center of lgbtq+ civil rights. our activism must continue to include, but also be fought beyond, the courthouse and the ballot box. if there's anything that over a decade of research into queer funerary ritual and mourning has taught me, it's that queer folks are especially adept at transforming grief and rage into creative and often efficacious activism and social justice work.[ ] strategies like the die-in, for instance, have been utilized in various forms by a host of other social justice movements. this, coupled with reports of generosity surrounding funeral and memorial efforts for the victims of the pulse orlando massacre, leads me to believe that lgbtq+ politics will not be guided by the wedding, but by the funeral. / notes . windsor v. the united states, u.s. ( ). . of course, this figure does not even begin to address the psychological price of fulfilling the role of abject within a normative society, a price which is realized differently due to a host of other intersecting identities, and which would be impossible to calculate in financial terms. . ogerbefell v. hodges u.s. ( ) . many thanks to my colleague katherine mason for extended discussion of this matter. for more on the protection of children vis-a-vis same-sex marriage see katherine mason, "reproductive futurism and same-sex marriage" ( , unpublished at this time) . the high price-point of legal services renders some same-sex unions more protected than others, exposing poverty as an essential barrier to lgbtq+ equality. . de sylva v. ballentine, u. s. ( ). . this is a well-documented phenomenon, particularly in scholarship around aids activism. see douglas crimp, melancholia and moralism ( ), deborah gould, moving politics: emotion and act up’s fight against aids ( ), benjamin shepard, queer political performance and protest ( ). works cited crimp, douglas. melancholia and moralism: essays on aids and queer politics. cambridge and london: mit up, . de sylva v. ballentine. u. s. ( ). gould, deborah. moving politics: emotion and act up’s fight against aids. chicago: u of chicago p, . mason, katherine. "reproductive futurism and same-sex marriage," unpublished, . ogerbefell v. hodges. u.s. ( ). shepard, benjamin. queer political performance and protest. new york: routledge, . windsor v. the united states. us ( ). quarterly horse . (nov. ), http://www.quarterlyhorse.org/fall /martin-baron. / 	reframing marriage equality as death equality s .indd re- viewing studies on africa, #black lives matter, and envisioning the future of african studies akosua adomako ampofo editors’ note: an earlier version of this article was presented as the asr distinguished lecture at the th annual meeting of the african studies association, november , san diego, california. abstract: this article considers what african studies needs to look like in order for it to retain its disciplinary relevance for the next generation and in the larger context of the black lives movement globally. it asks questions about where we have come from in terms of race consciousness in our discipline and why this issue matters today. it begins by tracing the development of african studies’ epistemic journey, and follows this with an examination of the recent black student move- ments in south africa and the u.s. it concludes by suggesting where we should be going. résumé: cet article traite ce que les études africaines doit ressembler afin de con- server sa pertinence disciplinaire pour la prochaine génération et dans le cadre plus large du mouvement “black lives matter” au niveau mondial. il pose des ques- tions sur où l’on vient en termes de conscience de la race dans notre discipline et pourquoi ce sujet est important encore aujourd’hui. il commence en retraçant le african studies review , volume , number (september ), pp. – akosua adomako ampofo is a professor of african and gender studies at the university of ghana, where she was the founding director of the centre for gender studies and advocacy. in – she was a fulbright scholar-in-residence at concordia university, irvine, california. adomako ampofo’s work addresses african knowledge systems, higher education, identity politics, gender-based violence, women’s work, masculinities, and gender representations in popular culture. she is founding vice-president of the african studies association of africa (asaa), co-editor of the “critical investigations into humanitarianism in africa” blog, a fellow of the ghana academy of arts and sciences, and an honorary member of the human sciences research council of south africa. e-mail: aadomako@ug.edu.gh © african studies association, doi: . /asr. . african studies review développement du voyage épistémique des Études africaines et suit cela avec une analyse des mouvements récents des étudiants noirs en l’afrique du sud et les États-unis. il conclut en suggérant où nous devrions aller. keywords: african-centered knowledge ; african studies ; afrofutures ; black lives matter ; rhodes must fall ; decolonization ; higher education ; student movements ; social media ; african diaspora critical reflection, therefore, involves not only rethinking the prospects of pan-african unity under conditions of global coloniality, but also under- standing the constitution of the present, taking stock of the sacrifices made by africans in their struggle to defeat global imperial designs as well as understanding the invisible and visible colonial matrices of power that continue to reproduce a particular form of african subjectivity that is characterized by “deficits” and “lacks.” —sabelo ndlovu-gatsheni ( ) re- viewing studies on africa and envisioning our future about a year ago, when i was invited to present the asr distinguished lecture at the annual meeting of the african studies association, all i was certain of was that i wanted to be able to make some hopeful utterances for our tomorrows. so i reflected on the journey we africanists have traveled and pondered my expectations for the future of my profession; in other words, i did some stocktaking. many important reviews on african studies as a discipline and of programs have been presented, including by asa mem- bers such as jane guyer ( ) and paul zeleza ( ), and more recently toyin falola and christian jennings ( ). as early as melville herskovits assessed the development of “africanist” studies in europe and america; tejumola olaniyan and james sweet ( ) reviewed the african diaspora and the disciplines; and as recently as james gordon and emmanuel acheampong provided a very useful overview of the history and development of african studies around the world. a particular benefit of gordon and acheampong’s work is that it documents which institutions are doing what, including offering a list of centers and institutes around the world. my intention is to re- view, to take another look, at what african studies might mean today. what does it mean for the survival of our dna, as africanists, especially among millennials, and at a time of afro-revivalism as well as a heightened onslaught on black bodies globally. i am particu- larly interested in links between resistance and enabling discourses on the continent and the diaspora and what this promises for african studies. essentially, i seek to bring into one conversation the following: ( ) a nar- rative of “where we have come from”; ( ) a brief account of attacks on black lives and thought and the responses to these, particularly the recent the future of african studies “black lives matter” (blm) and “rhodes must fall” (rmf) movements on u.s. and south african university campuses, respectively; and ( ) what, in my view, this should signify for african studies (i.e., a suggestion of “where we should be going”). the africanist: the survival of our dna scholars inside and outside the academy may not have the power and influ- ence of nelson (madiba) mandela or beyoncé knowles. unless we are active bloggers or have some other high-hit social media presence, our work, even of the best known among us, may reach a few thousand readers. with multi- ple new editions of our most popular books, the most prolific among us may reach an audience of a few thousand. many of us won’t come close. according to google scholar, the version of the book molecular cloning by sambrook et al., one of its most cited works, had been referred to , times as of april , up by citations since i first checked in late . according to the journal nature , which has explored “the most cited research of all time,” it takes a “staggering , citations to rank in the top one hundred and many of the world’s most famous papers do not make the cut” (van noorden, maher, & nuzzo ). (i will address the politics of pub- lishing and knowledge gatekeeping soon, so please bear with me). according to nature , the most cited article is a paper by lowry et al. in the journal of biological chemistry titled “protein measurement with the folin phenol reagent.” even in that more popular domain of scholarly output, documen- tary films, the most viewed, according to one website, is food inc , a film that examines food and eating cultures and the agriculture and food industry as a whole. it has had a little over six hundred thousand views. in contrast, consider the views that the following music videos have received on youtube as of april . “gangham style,” first uploaded to the internet in july , had received . billion views. even beyoncé knowles doesn’t come close; her most-watched youtube video, “young forever/halo,” first posted in september , had just under . million hits. u-media films’ azonto , one of ghana’s most popular dance videos, first offered on youtube in october , had received . million hits, and the extremely popular video “oliver twist” of the top nigerian musician d’banj, first posted on youtube in march , had received . million hits. the most popular videos of anne kansiime, a ugandan comedian, receive around a half million viewings. we can of course argue that the south and southeast asian market gives “gangham style” an unfair advantage, but my point, simply, is that popular culture icons would seem to have a much longer reach than we do. i say popular culture icons “would seem” to have a longer reach, because those of us in the academy do have wide-reaching epistemic power. professors are the experts; we determine what should be known, and how that knowledge should be collected and articulated. we define constructs and deconstruct others. our reach extends into the corridors of political african studies review spaces, and we influence policy, or at least political thinking and rhetoric. year after year young people enter our classrooms; they hear us, under- stand us, believe and trust us. our students take our work and spice up their virtual spaces with our wisdom. they go into the field, at home or abroad, and they borrow our lenses as they view and share their views on society. many from the global north join the study-abroad train or humanitarianism business, where they either perpetuate or destabilize stereotypes. they too become experts. some of us are ourselves public intellectuals, constantly invited to speak in churches and mosques, high schools and professional gatherings, on radio and television, or we muse on our blogs and other social media sites. our explanations of the material world and its problems, and how these should be understood (or not), and fixed, affect people’s everyday lives in far-reaching ways that cannot be measured. we may even reach several million who have never read a book or entered a classroom. a particularly potent example is beyoncé knowles’s sampling of the nigerian writer chimamanda adichie’s work in her song “flawless.” “flawless” consists of two parts—“bow down” and “flawless,” divided by a speech titled “we should all be feminists” delivered by adichie at a tedx euston conference. upon its release, “flawless” was received positively by music critics who were particularly impressed with knowles’s use of adichie’s sample and who widely discussed and acclaimed its lyrics. adichie herself has noted, “i’m happy that my thirteen-year-old niece calls herself a feminist— not because i made the speech, but because of beyoncé. having attained the status of ‘cool’ to my niece is wonderful.” foucault is perhaps more responsible than most scholars for popular- izing the notion of epistemic power. i believe that even the pessimists and realists among us would agree that we have epistemic power. so if we agree that this is true, then what are our (moral) obligations to ensure the survival of the african-centered knowledge production and dissemination project—to one another in the fraternity, to our social and cultural commu- nities, and especially to the next generation who will ensure the survival of our profession, and to those who may seem removed from our daily realities? crain soudien, in the foreword to a collection of papers in a volume on africa-centered knowledge (cooper & morrell ), asserts that we have two obligations: ( ) to ensure the democratization of knowledge, and ( ) to constantly nurture a self-awareness of the impact of our work beyond our social, religious, ethnic, national, and cultural contexts. the obligation here, he argues, is to explain ourselves to one another, and provide what he terms “civilizational procedures for how to deal with ourselves in each other’s presence” ( :xv). in the next section i provide a very brief narrative of the epistemic jour- ney of african studies, including the content covered in our association’s journal, the african studies review . i then go on to situate what i refer to as “the onslaught on black and brown bodies and thought,” and youth responses to this. i conclude with some comments on what these youth perspectives portend for “afrofutures.” the future of african studies our epistemic journey the development of african studies on the continent, and black studies in the diaspora, was concerned with refuting notions of black subjectivity, that lacking “other,” that constituted euro-american constructions. the leaders of liberation, independence, and civil rights movements recognized that the modern university was a european construct: hence the importance of an african-centered approach to knowledge production to advance pan- africanism and decolonization. kwame nkrumah’s charge to the fellows of the institute of african studies, established in at the university of ghana, is instructive. at the formal opening in nkrumah exhorted, one essential function of this institute must surely be to study the history, culture and institutions, languages and arts of ghana and of africa in new african-centred ways—in entire freedom from the propositions and pre- suppositions of the colonial epoch, and from the distortions of those professors and lecturers who continue to make european studies of africa the basis of this new assessment. by the work of this institute, we must re-assess and assert the glories and achievements of our african past and inspire our generation, and succeeding generations, with a vision of a better future. nkrumah went on to exhort the fellows of the institute to extend their focus beyond the continent and to include the study of the african diaspora in their work. but you should not stop here. your work must also include a study of the origins and culture of peoples of african descent in the americas and the caribbean, and you should seek to maintain close relations with their scholars so that there may be cross fertilisation between africa and those who have their roots in the african past. and when ghana gained her independence in , at a time when black people in the americas were in the throes of the civil rights movement, he, and other leaders on the continent, insisted that ghana’s independence was meaningless without freedoms for africans in the diaspora. similar institutes with a pan-african and decolonial agenda were established at the universities of ibadan and nigeria in and , respectively, and addis ababa university in ethiopia in . the centre for african studies at the university of cape town, the oldest on the continent, was, however, set up with a colonial agenda to grapple with the “native question” so as to colo- nize successfully. w.e.b. du bois died, aged , on august , , in accra, ghana, a day before the august , , march on washington at which martin luther king gave his “i have a dream” speech. not long before, having been given ghanaian citizenship, du bois declared, “i have returned so that my remains may mingle with the dust of the forefathers.” he continued, african studies review “now my life will flow on in the vigorous young stream of ghanaian life which lifts the african personality to its proper place among men. and i shall not have lived and worked in vain” (quoted in alexander : ). du bois’s efforts to establish the field of black studies was recorded as early as when he spoke at the annual conference of presidents of negro land grant colleges (warrant ). he was viewed by many african intellectuals as the father of modern pan-africanism, and his role in establishing the pan- african congresses, and his campaigns to end colonialism, made him an inspiration to many african leaders (alexander ; see also new african magazine ). though du bois’s life in ghana was short, barely two years, it was very productive. he worked with nkrumah on the encyclopedia africana , and this and other work drew radical african american intellectuals and artists to ghana and other parts of africa. they included julian mayfield, an activist and writer who became a speechwriter and aide to president nkrumah; the writer maya angelou, who taught at the university of ghana; and bill sutherland, who married the famous ghanaian playwright and artist afua sutherland. and of course, du bois’s second wife, shirley graham du bois, accompanied him to ghana and was instrumental in the establishment of the ghana broadcasting corporation. this brief narrative allows us to recognize the important role played by blacks in the u.s. in the development of critical african (black) studies. in his presidential address at the asa meetings in indianapolis, james pritchett reminded us that long before the establishment of formal programs in african studies at universities and colleges, indeed by the end of the civil war, the negro upliftment projects had a pan-african agenda deeply embedded in them. when du bois asked, in the souls of black folk ( ), what it felt like for a black person to be a “problem,” he was articulating the potent need to forge a meaningful identity at a time when blacks in the u.s. had become the “negro problem.” the racial uplift project was the response of educated, middle-class black leaders, who felt they had a major responsibility to “lift up” blacks in the face of the on-going jim crow onslaught on their lives, identities, and personhood. their efforts to provide education that would inspire and “lift up” led them to pursue studies of the history and culture of the african continent. academics such as du bois, as well as clergy and community leaders, paid attention to issues that con- cerned the continent and linked the ways in which, in today’s parlance, “black lives mattered” across space. by a “black lives” approach i simply mean one that specifically addresses issues of race and oppression—what sabelo ndlovu-gatsheni ( ) refers to as “complex colonial matrices of power” ( : )—and specifically links the experiences of people of african descent globally. this attention to linking the experiences of continental africans and blacks in the u.s. was at least partly responsible for kwame nkrumah’s studying at lincoln university, a historically black university. subsequently african studies programs at the research universities— as they have come to be named—such as boston, indiana, northwestern, the future of african studies and the university of florida were a product of the cold war and the par- ticular agenda at the time, namely, securing u.s. interests on the continent. this should be viewed within the wider context of area studies in the u.s., which had its roots in national security interests. after world war ii—which by the way, wasn’t the war of most of the world—both so-called liberals and conservatives in the u.s. were concerned about the ability of the u.s. to respond effectively to perceived threats from the soviet union and china, as well as a potential domino effect of liberation movements on the african continent. the national defense education act of spurred the teaching of less commonly taught languages, and the department of education’s title vi framework referenced maintaining the “security, stability and eco- nomic vitality of the united states” as the central motivation for supporting area studies. the guiding principle behind these programs was that area studies would yield practical knowledge that could be used to make better policy. the ford foundation, the rockefeller foundation, and the carnegie corporation of new york came to an agreement to address this knowledge deficit and invest in international studies, including african studies (gordon & acheampong ; pritchett ). in the intervening years all three have funded many programs that support african studies in the u.s. and higher education more broadly on the continent—most recently, for example, carnegie’s next generation program. in the s both the carnegie corporation and the rockefeller foundation gave modest grants ($ , over five years) to the association for the study of negro life and history, whose work included the study of africans on the continent (chellenor ). from the s, historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) promoted african studies; howard, atlanta, and fisk, for example, offered courses on “negro history” that included african history. in howard, following the awarding of a ford foundation grant, was the first hbcu to establish a formal african studies program (challenor ). indeed, howard remains one of the few univer- sities with a fully-fledged department, and as far as i am aware, it was also the first university to offer a ph.d. in african studies. today there are more than fifteen ph.d.-degree-granting institutions in the field of black studies and several more in the field of african studies in the u.s. according to the institute of education statistics, african studies is “a program that focuses on the history, society, politics, culture, and eco- nomics of one or more of the peoples of the african continent, usually with an emphasis on africa south of the sahara, and including the african dias- poras overseas.” initially african and black studies were not bifurcated at hbcus the way they are today, although the former focused on the conti- nental experience with an “upliftment” agenda for blacks in the u.s. and the latter focused on challenging racism in the u.s. in their report on a survey of black studies, abdul alkalimat and his colleagues at the university of illinois noted that the academic specialty was established as “a direct confrontation with the institutionalized white racism that con- trolled higher education.” according to the report, of the total number african studies review of institutions surveyed ( , ), percent have some form of black studies, percent with formal units and percent without units but with a course or courses. public colleges and universities are more likely to have black studies: percent, as opposed to percent of private institutions. the report recommends a number of priorities for african american studies at the graduate level, including “global connections and diaspora dialogues.” however, neither african nor african american nor black studies make it onto the list of the top two hundred masters or doctoral degrees in the u.s., according to the myplan.com website, which helps students and professionals in career planning. further, the early concrete connections between the lives of africans on the continent and in the u.s. in the study of the black experience have all but disappeared—students either focus on one or the other. this is true of african studies on the con- tinent as well, where a focus on the diaspora experience is limited. gordon and acheampong ( ) list twenty centers and institutes in africa that provide training in african studies, including three offering a b.a. degree. most of the newer ones focus on the political and economic development of africa, a.k.a “contemporary problems.” as i see it, a major challenge to retaining an anticolonial agenda (or building one in the case of postindependence institutes and centers) is the notion held by many administrators and faculty that everyone in an african university does african studies. at the institute of african studies at the university of ghana this assumption has been the focus of an ever-recurring discussion requiring a justification of the discipline. while african students who attended colonial schools in africa learned more about european “empires” than about africa, african studies institu- tions that were established in europe firmly followed the colonial agenda— to know and conquer africa, as evidenced by their content and the research questions they asked. african knowers and philosophers were generally not included in the sources or as teachers, for they were the subject, the “other.” this is what nkrumah referred to in his speech as “european studies of africa.” the school of african and oriental studies (soas) at the university of london is perhaps the most well known. it was established in , after the so-called oriental schools had already been established in berlin, paris, and petrograd. later, in the s and s, more institutes were set up in the former soviet union to counterbalance western europe’s dominance in the field: the department of african studies at saint petersburg university ( ), the institute of asian and african studies at the lomonosov moscow state university ( ), and the institute of african studies at the russian academy of sciences ( ). the centre d’etudes africaines at the université montesquieu in bordeaux was established in (gordon & acheampong ). gordon and acheampong ( ) list twenty-eight centers, departments, or institutes in europe. the terrain is very mixed, of course, but today african studies in europe, as in the u.s. and africa, very much pays attention to contemporary issues. although created in very different geopolitical moments, the u.s. african studies the future of african studies association (asa) and the africa-europe group for interdisciplinary studies (aegis), established in and , respectively, both seek to “understand” africa. no specific mention of african-centered knowledge or links to the diaspora are mentioned in their mission statements. however, the african studies association of africa (asaa), established in , does state clearly that its mission is “to promote africa’s own specific contributions to the advancement of knowledge about the peoples and cultures of africa and the diaspora.” space will not permit me to pay attention to african studies in asia and the middle east; however, suffice it to say that with the possible exception of india, most centers and institutes were established after the cold war and have a very policy-focused orientation. a late entrant to the modern cultural export game, china, has “gifted” confucius centers and institutes to universities across africa, including the university of ghana, my home. and our universities have accepted these uncritically, with no discussion of new forms of cultural dominance. at the same time, political correctness has not attained the status of self-censoring guard in china that it has in the global north, and explicitly racist representations find comfortable homes. i would like to conclude this section by focusing on the output of this journal, the african studies review . the mission of asr , the asa’s principal scholarly journal, is to “publish the highest quality articles . . . of interest to the interdisciplinary audience of asa members.” obviously many impor- tant papers are presented at the asa annual meetings that never end up in asr , and the articles are not all produced by asa members; however, they provide some indication of what our interests are. my former teaching assistant and a ph.d. student at ias created a database of all asr articles between and september (see appendix). i analyzed a total of , articles by the sex of the author(s), country of institutional location, institution, and subject. i sought to glean how many articles directly addressed issues pertinent to the broader question of what we might call black lives, the african diaspora, or pan-africanism. it is important to explain that this database should be considered as suggestive rather than as an “objective” collection, bearing in mind the following limitation: i relied principally on titles and key words to assign articles to subject categories. obviously there will be much that i missed from this limited approach; for example, an article on structural adjustment might pay attention to the ways in which the bretton woods institutions delegitimize african knowledge even though valorization of african knowledge systems is not its main focus. by way of background demographic information: female authorship increased from . percent in the s to . percent in the period – . while authorship by african-based scholars has sea-sawed ( . % in the s, % in the s, down to % in the s, and . % in the period – ), authorship by scholars based in europe has increased steadily (from % in the s, to % in the s, . % in the s, and % in the recent decade). the proportion of authors based in the u.s. and african studies review canada has declined from percent in the s to just under percent. this is probably a function of the increasing membership of scholars from the continent. there was one author based in the caribbean. in terms of content, over the period, . percent of articles directly addressed what i would consider the topics of black lives, the african dias- pora, or pan-africanism. these articles either discuss the black experience outside of and across the continent, or they provide discussions of the links between the black experience across geopolitical spaces, including what we might refer to as “upliftment” activism. given the relatively small percentage of articles focused on the diaspora overall, i would conclude that the interest of members of the asa and asr authors remains focused on issues pertinent to the experiences of africans on the continent. indeed, this was the reason that i myself joined the asa in . however, i believe the times we live in call for us to consider paying more attention to the politics of blackness and the connected experiences of people on the continent and in the diaspora. black bodies, the “rhodes must fall” and “black lives matter” movements, and african studies during the first half of i was at a conference at a university in the u.s. on the first day the dean of the division hosting the conference welcomed, among others, participants from the “u.k., canada, india, and africa.” there were two of us “from africa,” both from ghana. i am sure anyone from the continent has many stories of similar experiences. the “africa-is- a-country” view of the continent persists even among academics. while in the u.s. as a fulbright scholar this year i taught a class titled “culture and self” that included a viewing of the movie skin ( ), about a young girl, sandra, who would have been considered “coloured” by the phenotypical race standards of south africa at the time. sandra was born to white par- ents. in their reflection responses to the film several students in my class referred to sandra as the “african american” girl. race matters, and the black experience, albeit context specific, contains sufficient similarities to retain salience. this is true whether one is dealing with questions of migra- tion, employment, police attitudes, or knowledge production, all sites of the “othering” of black bodies. the academy, for one, both on the continent and in the diaspora, priv- ileges euro-centered knowledge and methods, and the privileging of non-african voices persists. in his essay collection titled you’re not a country, africa ( ) pius adesanmi, a nigerian scholar of literature and french, presents an interesting piece titled “sarah baartman, invisible!”, a fictitious letter written by sarah baartman to sandra gilbert and susan gubar, the editors of the norton anthology of literature by women ( ). adesanmi (via baartman) laments the “excision of african theories and theorists” ( : ) from this , -page, two-volume collection. another example of such exclusion is the oxford handbook of modern african history , the future of african studies which does not have a single african author among the twenty-six authors. it is difficult to believe that the editors, john parker and richard reid, could not find any african historians competent to write on their continent. a final example should suffice. the women, gender, and sexuality studies’ – speaker series at yale university titled “gender and political economy in africa” included four speakers, three of whom were white women from the u.s., while the fourth was a non-black south african. i am not suggesting that only africans and their descendants should embody knowledge on africa. but that a series on africa could not find at least half of the speakers from africa i find unacceptable, especially given that there are so many africans in the american academy and also that yale university has the resources to fly in a speaker from anywhere on the globe. the # wherearetheafricans twitter feed emerged to reflect this “excision” (adesanmi ). as we know all too well, not all voices have the same power—where we speak, and the authority of our voices don’t have equal reach, and hence impact our lives differentially. some voices are marginalized by the way the academy is structured in different places around the globe, exemplified most sharply perhaps by the so-called impact factor syndrome. since american and european journals are prized, african scholars both on the continent and in the diaspora seek to publish in these “high impact” jour- nals to gain tenure, and they have to legitimize their own knowledge by referencing european and american authors. and as african and other black scholars chase these journals, the continental and other purportedly less prestigious black ones don’t receive the submissions that will promote them; scholars on the continent are deprived of the research, the journals stagnate, african experiences and perspectives are deprioritized, and the cycle continues. the same can be said of other aspects of the scholarly project—research priorities and projects, grant sources, professional associ- ations, teaching methodologies, faculty hiring and promotions. interestingly, the university of ghana recently announced that it would establish a divi- sion of european studies within the centre for social policy studies, “to broaden the frontiers of research and learning.” vice-chancellor ernest aryeetey is reported to have noted that “the centre would provide avenues to study european politics, law, history . . . [and advise] government about its impact on the economy for possible solutions.” one hopes that this is our initiative and that it will be european studies that helps us under- stand the “other” with a view to dismantling, not merely responding to, euroecentric geopolitics. enter the “rhodes must fall” (rmf) and “black lives matter” protests that spread across university campuses in south africa and the u.s. in . while these are very specific contexts, and some may argue that their expe- riences are not translatable into majority african nations, i would disagree. a majority african population does not imply a decolonized education, and many africans have merely submitted themselves quietly to conditions of subordination, even as they are opposed to them (see ndlovu-gatsheni ). both movements illustrate the extent to which today’s black (and african studies review some white) students expect the university to become a decolonized space, and what they are willing to do to see this happen. the cyber world is replete with accounts of both movements, and both have been criticized by some as being the mere tantrums of privileged middle-class black youth. my own limited experience with some students at the universities of cape town in south africa and yale university in the u.s. suggests that although there were elements of this, as with all move- ments, the call for “transformation” was genuine and broad-based. from august to september i was a mellon fellow at the centre for african studies at the university of cape town (uct) and witnessed the beginnings of the fusing of anger and frustration into action. in diverse student meet- ings i attended as well as informal gatherings black students expressed frustration with the content of their education, from texts to methodol- ogies. one student complained that what he learned in class from his eco- nomics lecturer was far removed from his own reality and that he could teach his lecturer a thing or two about economic survival in poor black com- munities. another, a graduate student, narrated his struggle to get his lec- turer to agree to his writing his honors thesis on an african playwright rather than on one of the europeans offered for consideration; his lecturer’s initial response was that no literature existed on that african playwright. others voiced anger at the structure of the university system that was not designed, they felt, to take account of the cultural diversity of students, specifi- cally the experiences of black students. and many expressed frustration, pain, and anger that the statue of cecil rhodes still greeted them at the pin- nacle of the university despite multiple requests since for its removal. cecil john rhodes was a british businessman, mining magnate, and south african politician who served as prime minister of the cape colony from to . born in england on july , , he moved to south africa when he was only seventeen. he was a committed british imperialist, and his views on race have led contemporary critics to label him as an “architect of apartheid” (rothberg ) and a white supremacist (see also magubane , attiah ). at the time of my visit there was a sign beneath the statue acknowl- edging the requests for its removal but noting that the university felt it was a historical feature that needed to be retained. however, on april , , fol- lowing a uct council vote the previous night, the statue was removed. the campaign to remove it also led to the wider rmf movement to decolonize and transform education across south africa by hiring more african faculty, africanizing the curriculum, and increasing access for african students. campaigns and protests followed at north-west, witwatersrand, stellenbosch, and rhodes universities, and the universities of the free state and pretoria. during my fellowship at uct in i workshopped a university-wide introductory course on african studies taught at the university of ghana. in response to the protests, in april uct announced that it would be introducing black studies as part of its transformation project. the “#blm” twitter feed created in by three black women— alicia garza, patrisse cullors, and opal tometi—provided the genesis for the future of african studies “black lives matter” protests on u.s. campuses. the campaign was initiated after george zimmerman (a white man) was acquitted for the shooting that resulted in the death of a teenager, trayvon martin, an african american teenager. blm became nationally recognized for its street demonstrations following the deaths of several other african americans, including the police shooting of michael brown in ferguson, missouri, the police choking of eric garner in new york city, and the death of sandra bland in police custody in texas. the blm website ( http://blacklivesmatter.com ) declares that “blm is a chapter-based national organization working for the validity of black life. we are working to (re)build the black liberation movement.” the movement has gained global prominence with major protests in berlin, london, and paris in against police brutality. in student protests also rocked more than one hundred u.s. university campuses. the issues ranged from demands that hostile envi- ronments and racist treatment of black and other students of color be addressed, to calls that curriculums be decolonized and that links to slavery be acknowledged and corrected. for example, the black justice league at princeton was particularly vocal in its demand for the removal of woodrow wilson’s name from its school of public and international affairs. wilson, a one-time president of princeton and later of the u.s., is known to have opposed admitting black students to the university in , and was sympathetic or even had links to the ku klux klan. the ten-member special committee set up to consider the demand voted to retain wilson’s name. however, students at georgetown university suc- ceeded in their campaign to change the names of two buildings named after university presidents who sold jesuit-owned slaves to save the uni- versity from bankruptcy. for now, they are to be renamed freedom hall and remembrance hall. the most prominent protests were those that took place at the university of missouri (mizzou) and at yale. at mizzou jonathan butler, a veteran of the ferguson protests, went on a hunger strike to protest a series of racist incidents, including reports that feces were smeared in the form of a swastika in a dorm restroom. students had long been unhappy about the administration’s failure to respond to their concerns. a demonstration and a faculty walkout followed, and there were demands for the resignation of the mizzou president, tim wolfe. when the largely african american football team boycotted games, a protest that would have cost the university millions of dollars if it had continued, it seemed the die was cast and and president wolfe resigned. a series of new initia- tives to address racial tensions on campus were instituted, including the hiring of a diversity, inclusion, and equity officer for the entire university of missouri system. there were also student protests at ivy league schools such as harvard, dartmouth, brown, and yale, with the latter garnering the most attention. a series of events in late came to a head just before thanksgiving. first some women students alleged that they were barred from attending african studies review a fraternity party which was admitting “white girls only.” then swastikas were drawn across campus. finally, an e-mail message from one admin- istrator urging students to be “thoughtful” on halloween and avoid insensitive costumes, including those that feature blackface, turbans, and mock native american headdresses, was met with a response from another administrator suggesting that the e-mail exhorting students to be sensitive pandered to the culture of “coddling” young people and curtailed free speech. “is there no room anymore for a child or young person to be a little bit obnoxious[,] . . . a little bit inappropriate or provocative or, yes, offensive?”, erika christakis, the second administrator, responded in her own message. students held a “march of resilience” that garnered more than a thousand supporters and sent a detailed list of requests to president peter salovey, who acknowledged in a closed- door meeting that the university had “failed” its minority students and that the students had made very mature and practical suggestions for the way forward. among other things students requested that yale actively seek to increase the numbers of black faculty, address its historical ties to slavery, ensure that the campus is a safe space for minority students, and enrich its curriculum offerings by making them more diverse. a few weeks later yale’s president delivered on his promise to provide a concrete action plan that included a “strengthening of the academic enterprise” via a greater focus on “particularly intense study of race, ethnicity, and other aspects of social identity.” yale also created new faculty positions and launched a five-year series of conferences on issues of race, gender, inequality, and inclusion. foretelling our futures this generation of young people and young scholars—including the descendants of those carried forcibly to north america, europe and the caribbean on boats, and the children of first- and second-generation immigrant parents—do not necessarily draw clear lines between the african experience on the continent and in the diaspora. they recognize that race- based police brutality knows no national origin. in we celebrated black history month at the institute of african studies, university of ghana, in collaboration with the africa world documentary film festival spon- sored by the university of missouri, st. louis. one of the films we showed was in his own home , a documentary about kofi adu brempong, a ghanaian ph.d. student with mental health issues at the university of florida who was shot several times in the head in his own home by police following a call from a neighbor who heard him shouting. the predominantly ghanaian audience “got it” quite clearly—that the police don’t discriminate between presumed “good” and “bad” blacks. in a particularly eloquent speech given by the writer adowa badoe in at the university of ghana, badoe asks about the futures we will create from our stories. the future of african studies the real drive forward into the future is the story that is heard, known, held, and believed corporately. . . . it begins with vision and hope. . . . we need to understand the timelines of our being, seek the root and stem of our aspirations for our elders and children, the girls, the boys, the women, the men, and society at large. we need to talk about our attitudes, relation- ships, traditional cultures and also popular culture. we need to think of ourselves within our cultures and also against other cultures. we need to recreate the past, such that we can collectively experience it, while we discuss the present as observers and investigators of society. we must journey through history and what is currently news, and by our explora- tions, create futures as we see arise from the story. then we must send the story into the future as a prophecy by the development of identifiable characters and the unmasking of our hopes. which hopes will we unmask, she asks? what stories will we tell? the stu- dent movements show us clearly the historical ties to slavery, colonialism, and racism that exist in the everyday lives of black people, and in the cultures of the academy and knowledge production. the current flows of migration from north and west africa are deeply tied to the erasure of black lives. what is also clear, according to a briefing paper from the u.k. race and europe network (clark ), is that racist stereotypes about skin color are prevalent in europe, and “anecdotal and country-specific evi- dence shows that people of african descent are consistently and dispropor- tionately discriminated against” in everything from housing to employment. that includes policing: blacks are six times more likely than whites to be stopped by paris police, for example, and in a survey, sub-saharan africans in spain were by far the most likely group to report having had police check their ids in the street. if we are to sustain our dna as scholars of african studies in the next generation we need to blur the lines between the experiences of people of africa around the world and the attendant academic studies. we must not, as badoe also exhorted, continue to “embalm” the story, thereby nostalgically turning art into craft, “preservations of themes and enact- ments, connected by familiarity to a simplified history and function.” she reminds us that early storytellers responded dynamically to the needs of their communities, to create a vision along with the processes needed to grow sustainable societies. within the asa our future should see a con- scious reaching out to scholars in traditional “black studies” and african american studies programs. for this to happen the asa must intention- ally sponsor papers and panels that respond to their interests and needs, professionally, socially, and politically. the new asa “one-gets-one” (membership, with rewards) and emerging scholars initiatives are excel- lent opportunities for this. another way to do this would be to engage very intentionally with the student movements discussed above, and others as they emerge, possibly beginning with solidarity statements sent out to show that we are not only interested in the lives of africans in africa, but also the lives of african-descent people around the world. african studies review the asa has already reached out to the asaa about presenting a panel at the asa meetings via teleconferencing. could we—asa, centers, and institutes—consider extending this to black associations in europe and the caribbean, maybe through some joint panels? similarly, the asr could invite faculty and students of black studies and african american studies programs to submit manuscripts. i would like to suggest here that the jour- nal organize a special issue on the diverse black lives movements. what would an african-centered approach to african studies look like and what would it foretell? it would recognize the diverse experiences of african people while also recognizing our shared geopolitical history and contemporary realities. it would also emphasize the relationships among our realties—so that the “othering” of dominican immigrants in the u.s., for example, would be read as related to the global discourse on immigra- tion, the continuing conflation of who black and african people are and the problems we purportedly create. within the academy on the continent, especially, we must actively seek to unsettle hegemonies—the silences, appropriations, and misrepresenta- tions, especially between what many have referred to as the “metropole” and the “periphery.” as brenda cooper and robert morrell ( ) and others have noted, the influence of certain knowers purports to benefit everyone, when in fact there is an inherent privileging. an african-centered knowledge agenda will develop tools and methodologies that are relevant to our context and enable “truer” pictures of our reality. without neces- sarily discarding well-tested disciplinary and methodological canons, we must be fully aware that there is merit to the maxim, “african solutions for african problems.” the days of blindly (or greedily) absorbing every new theory “manufactured in western laboratories [that] do not account for the complexities of african communities” (kemedijo ) are over. how will we reassess which sources are legitimate? whose authority and in what form? one of the projects we initiated at the ug institute of african studies, under the then occupant of the kwame nkrumah chair, jacob gordon, was the building of a lab for oral histories within our archives. the shona respond to the greeting “how are you?” with the answer “i am well if you are well.” may it be so for african and african diaspora studies as we share in our black experience. acknowledgments i would like to express my deepest appreciation to the editorial board of the african studies review and the asa board of directors for selecting me as the asr distinguished lecturer. the women’s caucus and the ghana studies association have been my homes within the asa since i became a member in , and i acknowledge their contributions to my critical appreciation of african studies within area studies. i am grateful for the comments and questions i received after my talk, which i hope have improved this article. finally, i acknowledge with gratitude the assistance the future of african studies of edwin adjei, currently a ph.d. student at the institute of african studies, university of ghana, for creating the database of all asr issues from to that i refer to in this paper. references adesanmi , pius . . you’re not a country, africa: a personal history of the african present . new york : penguin . alexander , shawn leigh . . w.e.b. du bois: an american intellectual and activist . london : rowman and littlefield . alkilimat , abdul , et al. . african american studies : a nation web-based survey . university of illinois at urbana champaign department of african american studies. http://afro.illinois.edu . attiah , karen . . “woodrow wilson must fall.” the washington post , november . www.washingtonpost.com . badoe , adwoa . . “unleashing the story.” legon international scholar series (liss) speaker, november , institute of african studies, university of ghana. challenor , herschelle . . “african studies at historically black colleges and universities.” african issues ( ): – . citi . fm . . “university of ghana to establish centre for european studies.” may . http://citifmonline.com . clark , amy . . “people of african descent in europe.” a ukren briefing paper. uk race and europe network, june. http://www.ukren.org . cooper , brenda , and robert morell , eds. . africa-centred knowledges: crossing fields and worlds . oxford : james currey . daily mail . . “race row over chinese detergent advert showing a woman shoving a black suitor into a washing machine and then smiling in delight as he emerges as an asian man.” may . http//www.dailymail.co.uk . dery , mark . . “black to the future: interviews with samuel r. delany, greg tate, and tricia rose.” in flame wars: the discourse of cyberculture , edited by mark dery , – . durham, n.c. : duke university press . du bois , w.e.b . . souls of black folk . chicago : a.c. mcclurg . falola , toyin , and christian jennings . . africanizing knowledge: african studies across the disciplines . new brunswick, n.j. : transaction publishers . gilbert , sandra , and susan gubar . . norton anthology of literature by women . new york : w.w. norton and company . gordon , jacob , and emmanuel acheampong . . trends in african studies . new york : nova science publishers . guyer , jane . . african studies in the united studies: a perspective . new brunswick, n.j. : african studies association . herskovits , melville . . “the development of africanist studies in europe and america,” in proceedings of the first international congress of africanists , edited by lalage bown and michael crowder , – . evanston, ill .: northwestern university press . in his own home . . directed by malini johar schueller. indiepix films. www. indipixfilms.com . kemedijo , cilas . . “the virgin fallacy: from the famine cotton board to the millennium village project.” www.cihablog.com . african studies review lukianoff , greg , and jonathan haidt . . “the coddling of the american mind.” the atlantic , september. http://www.theatlantic.com . magubane , bernard m . . the making of a racist state: british imperialism and the union of south africa, – . trenton, n.j. : africa world press . mbembe , achille . . “african modes of self-writing.” public culture ( ): – . ndlovu-gatsheni , sabelo . . “what is beyond discourses of alterity? reflections on the constitution of the present and the construction of african subjectivity.” in the social contract in africa , edited by sanya osha , – . bramfontein : the africa institute of south africa . nelson , alondra , ed. . afrofuturism: a special issue of social text . durham, n.c. : duke university press . new african magazine . . “w.e.b. dubois: the father of modern pan-africanism?” december . http://newafricanmagazine.com . nkrumah , kwame . . the african genius . speech delivered at the formal opening of the institute of african studies, university of ghana. accra : afram publications . nyamnjoh , francis b . . #rhodesmustfall: nibbling at resilient colonialism in south africa . mankon, cameroon : langa research and publishing . olaniyan , tejumola , and james h. sweet . . the african diaspora and the disciplines . bloomington : indiana university press . parker , john , and richard reid , eds. . the oxford handbook of modern african history . oxford : oxford university press . rotberg , robert i . . the founder: cecil rhodes and the pursuit of power . oxford : oxford university press . ruge , t. m. s . . “your white savior complex is detrimental to my development.” march . http://tmsruge.com . shujaa , mwalimu , and kenya j. shujaa , eds. . the sage encyclopedia of african cultural heritage in north america . thousand oaks, calif. : sage publications . soudien , crain . . “foreword: the power of knowing.” in africa-centred knowledges: crossing fields and worlds , edited by brenda cooper and robert morell , xv–xvi. oxford : james currey . university world news . . “africa: carnegie grant for next generation academics.” december . http://www.universityworldnews.com . van noorden , richard , brenda maher , and regina nuzzo . . “the top papers.” nature ( ). http://www.nature.com . wong , alia , and adrienne green . . “campus politics: a cheat sheet.” the atlantic , april . http://www.theatlantic.com . worland , justin . . “why a free speech fight is causing protests at yale.” time , november . http://time.com . zeleza , paul. t . . manufacturing african studies and crises . dakar : codesria book series . notes . i am fully aware that race is merely a social construct and i use the term “black,” with the capital letter, deliberately to signify shared belongingness in terms of culture, history, and identity. in their report on a survey of black studies, abdul alkalimat et al. pointed out that “black was capitalized as it was the the future of african studies assumed name of a nationality,” and added that “this practice continues to make sense given the reality of racism in the usa.” . https://scholar.google.com/scholar?oi=bibs&hl=en&q=molecular+cloning . . the article, which describes an assay that determines the amount of protein found in a solution, had garnered more than , citations as of october . . http://documentaryaddict.com/films/best . . www.youtube.com/watch?v= bzkp q f . . www.youtube.com/watch?v=rmfmdkolzvi . . www.youtube.com/watch?v=gtuiloudlhi . . www.youtube.com/watch?v=cqp-etyu ps . . some critics, like manisha desai, have referred to study abroad programs as an “industry” (panel, “global learning: who gets to define it?”, winter meet- ings of sociologists for women and society, memphis, february ). and indeed, if one considers the secondary commerce generated through travel, hotels, immunization, orientation consultants, and the like, this term is apt. many critiques of the humanitarianism industry address issues of the spectacu- larization of poverty, the western voyeuristic gaze, cultural arrogance, and the so-called white savior complex that offers feel-good vibes but doesn’t tackle the inequalities generated in the global north. see, for example, the illuminating blog posting of t. m. s. ruge ( ) called “your white savior complex is detrimental to my development” and the “critical investigations into human- itarianism” blog ( www.cihablog.com ). . www.vogue.com/ /chimamanda-ngozi-adicihie-feminism-beyonce- book/ . . space limitations prevent a full discussion on “afrofutures.” suffice it to say that the term, first coined by mark dery ( ), envisions black futures particu- larly within a literary and cultural aesthetic. the concept has seen a resurgence in recent applications. i first encountered its current usage at a conference i attended in bayreuth in , attended by several literary, performance, and media scholars, including alondra nelson, who attended the same conference and has popularized its more recent use (see, e.g., nelson ). the term “afrofuturism,” as used today, refers not only to notions of the cultural aesthetic, especially as experienced and expressed in the diaspora, but also to the conti- nent, and the lived realities of black bodies. imagining futures by making asso- ciations with the past makes science fiction, for example, a popular medium for the expression of afrofutures. . i have heard both lungislie ntsebeza, the current a. c. jordan chair at the centre, and mahmood mamdani, the first occupant of the chair, criticize the colonial study of the “other” at uct in various forums, including at codesria meetings. . view the full lecture at www.youtube.com/watch?v=hdmxdyzpz g . . there is an impressive list of black intellectuals who have paid attention to this subject of upliftment or advancement, including anna julia cooper, booker t. washington (although he was du bois’s intellectual rival), fanny jackson coppin, hugh browne, rose butler brown, zora neale hurston, and pauli murray (whom i only recently learned about because a building at yale university has been named after her in response to student demands for more recognition of the contributions of people of color). . see www .ed.gov/about/offices/list/ope/iegps/title-six.html . african studies review . see university world news ( ). . see the sage encyclopedia of african cultural heritage in north america (shujaa & shujaa ). . their survey also captured other names that reflect the national and/or a diasporic reality—african american, afro-american, africana, pan-african, and others. the survey covered , u.s. colleges and universities that award bachelors, masters, and/or doctoral degrees, as identified by the carnegie foundation, and excluded programs that focus exclusively on africa. . see www.africanstudies.org/images/pp- .pdf (asa) and http://www.aegis- eu.org/why-aegis (aegis). . www.as-aa.org/index.php/about-asaa . . see, e.g., the daily mail ( ) article about a racist chinese laundry detergent. . i hope someone will carry out the much more elaborate process of producing a similar database of all papers presented at asa meetings. . asr did produce an issue in (vol. [ ]) titled “the last decade: a con- tent analysis of the african studies review .” . this effort is a first step, and further work will include an institutional analysis; for example, i am interested in looking at work that comes specifically out of hbcus. . sarah baartman was the most famous of at least two khoikhoi women who were exhibited as curiosities in nineteenth-century europe under the now discredited name “hottentot venus.” african feminists have used her story to draw atten- tion to the double burdens of sexism and racism endured by black women. . i would like to thank gretchen bauer for bringing the twitter exchange to my attention. . see citi . fm ( ). . the university of witwatersrand doctoral work of leigh-ann naidoo, a leader of the “rhodes must fall” campaign, focuses on the rmf movement, which she calls the “emergence of a new black intellectual life” in south africa. see http://mg.co.za/multimedia/ - - -decolonising-institutions-leigh-ann- naidoo . see also francis nyamnjoh’s recent text “#rhodesmustfall: nibbling at resilient colonialism in south africa” ( ), which provides an important chronology and analysis of the complexities of the south african movement. . see the atlantic magazine’s “cheat sheet” of some of the major campus protests (wong & green ). . woodrow wilson’s links to the klan have recently received new attention as the extremely racist film, birth of a nation (originally called the clansmen ), by d. w. griffith, which he hailed, has also received renewed attention following the release of a film by the same name by nate parker. parker’s film reclaims the title and is about a slave who becomes a leader. . regina titi ofei, georgetown university student (personal communication, april ). . see worland ( ). the fraternity, sigma alpha epsilon, had been banned from activities on campus and the party was held off campus. it had come under pressure in recent times at the university of alabama for their chant, “you can hang from a tree, but will never sign with me, there will never be a nigger at sae.” . erika christakis was a deputy master of a residential college at yale, and wife of nicholas christakis, the college’s “master” (resident faculty member). the timing of her message was curious, given that it was made the week before greg lukianoff—co-author of an atlantic magazine article titled “the coddling of the future of african studies the american mind” that received a great deal of attention—was due to speak at yale. see lukianoff and haidt ( ). in yale agreed to drop the title “master” following similar moves at princeton and harvard. the university did not, however, agree to change the name of calhoun college, named after john c. calhoun, an graduate of yale college and an “intellectual fore- father of the confederacy who famously defended slavery as a ‘positive good.’” see http://news.yale.edu/ / / /yale-retains-calhoun-college-s-name- selects-names-two-new-residential-colleges-and-change . . in the lecture from which this article is derived i proposed a merging of black studies and african studies programs. this was foolhardy of me, and i want to thank sandra barnes for politely pointing this out after my talk. beyond the practical politics that would make a merger unlikely, such a move would also not necessarily be helpful for learning purposes. what we need is for these programs to come out of their silos and talk to each other. . i would reject claims of “afro-radicalism” or “nativism,” as mbembe ( ) does, in such endeavors. . the phrase (asap for short) has been used by the african union to mean that africa as a continent must endeavor to be full partners in addressing african problems. it has, however, been discredited by others as having no practical value, leading rather to the ignoring of the african situation by the interna- tional community and allowing bad leaders to use it as an excuse to continue to abuse their citizens. african studies review appendix asr articles ( – ) on pan-africanism and the diaspora “africa’s diaspora: a special issue,” asr ( ), judith byfield (dartmouth college). “introduction: rethinking the african diaspora.” tiffany ruby patterson (binghamton university) and robin d. g. kelley (new york university). “unfinished migrations: reflections on the african diaspora and the making of the modern world.” brent hayes edwards (rutgers university), cheryl johnson-odim (columbia college), agustin lao-montes (university of massachusetts), michael o. west (university of north carolina), tiffany ruby patterson (binghamton university), and robin d. g. kelley (new york university). “unfinished migrations”: commentary and response.” hakim adi (middlesex university). “pan-africanism and west africa nationals in britain.” jacob u. gordon (university of kansas). “teaching the african experience: a pan-african approach.” asr ( ). l. adele jinadu (university of lagos). “some african theorists of culture and modernization: fanon, cabral and some others.” asr ( ). kenneth hall (suny oswego) and byron blake (caricom secretariat, guyana, barbados, jamaica). “emergence of the african-caribbean-pacifi c group of states: an aspect of african and caribbean international cooperation.” asr ( ). carlton e. wilson (north carolina central university). “racism and private assistance: the support of west indian and african missions in liverpool, england, during, the interwar years.” asr ( ). neil j. savishinsky (new york university). “rastafari in the promised land: the spread of a jamaican socioreligious movement among the youth of west africa.” asr ( ). edward o. erhagbe (university of benin). “african-americans and the defense of african states against european imperial conquest: booker t. washington’s diplomatic efforts to guarantee liberia’s independence – .” asr ( ). cortney jung (yale university). “race matters.” asr ( ). jacques depelchin (ota benga alliance for peace, healing, and dignity). “cuba and the recentering of african history.” asr ( ). rhoda e. howard-hassmann (wilfrid laurier university) and anthony p. lombardo (university of toronto). “framing reparation claims: differences between african and jewish social movements for reparations.” asr ( ). michelle c. johnson (bucknell university). “death and the left hand: islam, gender, and ‘proper’ mandinga funerary customs in guinea-bissau and portugal.” asr ( ). paul tiyambe zeleza (loyola marymount university). “african diasporas: toward a global history.” asr ( ). the future of african studies edward a. alpers (university of california, los angeles). “recollecting africa: diasporic memory in the indian ocean world.” herman l. bennett (rutgers university). “the subject in the plot: national boundaries and the ‘history’ of the black atlantic.” kim d. butler (rutgers university). “from black history to diasporan history: brazilian abolition in afro-atlantic context.” amanda d. kemp (dickinson college) and robert trent (howard university). “poking holes in the sky”: professor james thaele, american negroes, and modernity in s segregationist south africa.” ivor miller (schomburg center for research in black culture). “a secret society goes public: the relationship between abakua and cuban popular culture.” vijay prashad (trinity college). “afro-dalits of the earth, unite!” south african representations of “america” full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rsaf safundi the journal of south african and american studies issn: - (print) - (online) journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsaf south african representations of “america” ronit frenkel & andrea spain to cite this article: ronit frenkel & andrea spain ( ) south african representations of “america”, safundi, : , - , doi: . / . . to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / . . published online: jun . submit your article to this journal article views: view related articles view crossmark data citing articles: view citing articles https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rsaf https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rsaf https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showcitformats?doi= . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rsaf &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rsaf &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/ . / . . #tabmodule https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/ . / . . #tabmodule safundi: the journal of south african and american studies, vol. , no. , – https://doi.org/ . / . . introduction south african representations of “america” ronit frenkela and andrea spainb ajohannesburg institute for advanced study, university of johannesburg, johannesburg, south africa; bdepartment of english, mississippi state university, starkville, ms, usa abstract this special issue considers literature that has recourse to the ambivalent agency of a “national” condition outside of its place of production. in particular, it explores american-themed south african literature, with a particular focus on changing cultural patterns within a context of transnational flows. this special issue highlights conduits between south africa and the united states that circulate cultural and political influence across and through places, forms, categorizations, and texts. each article examines how literature can open circuits between affective alignments, histories, infrastructures, economies and importantly, political imaginaries of lived spaces in different time periods. this issue does not argue for a theory of replication between south africa and america but rather works to develop analytical tools to highlight the transnational connections that create layers of resonant meaning while at the same time circulating “untranslatable” sense between south africa and the united states. each of the texts under discussion in this issue offers a rich meditation on transnational histories of raciology, global popular cultural flows, the destabilization of the specificities of place, and the resonant aspirations of the ordinary. the writers under discussion include richard rive, langston hughes, maurice evans, ca davids, patrick flanery, zakes mda, jaco van schalkwyk, and lauren beukes. each inhabits a global space where local history and cosmopolitan configurations combine seamlessly at times, while at other moments, reveal the paradoxes of what might be called global capital’s “parochialism of the authentic” as defined through official discourses of national or even cosmopolitan belonging. the geo-political order is changing. old inequalities persist and new varieties of unfreedom emerge. the racialised structuring of our world which was established during the nineteenth century is evolving too. the north atlantic no longer lies at the center. the situation requires new analytical tools and conceptual adjustments. the scale on which analysis operated previously has to be altered in order to take emergent patterns into account. the teleological sequence that made the overdeveloped countries into the future and their formerly colonized territories into the past is being left behind. gilroy, darker than blue, . keywords south african literature; world literature; postcolonial modernity; cosmopolitanism; transnational circuits; post- liberation consciousness; richard rive; ca davids; patrick flanery; lauren beukes; jaco van schalkwyk; zakes mda © informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group contact ronit frenkel ronitf@uj.ac.za mailto: ronitf@uj.ac.za http://www.tandfonline.com http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf r. frenkel and a. spain several recent works of south african fiction have engaged in one way or another with the united states. while this phenomenon might be read as a marker of the condition of the global anglophone text in an age of american cultural hegemony, or perhaps herald a cosmopolitan outlook, it also raises the question of what makes a text south african or “american,” blurring the lines between postcolonial modernities and those of the global north. what new analytical tools might we develop to take into account emergent patterns gestured toward in the words of paul gilroy quoted above? the category description “world literature” has problematized national categories, suggesting itself as a cosmopolitan alter- native to national (or even continental) categories for understanding literary and cultural production, be they “american” or “african.” and yet many now consider the term to be too politically troubling to be useful. for example, scholars like emily apter have foregrounded how issues of untranslatability and transmission are constitutive of conceptual categories of “world literature” (hereafter without quotations), while others, like pheng cheah, have argued that the reputed transformative agency of cosmopolitanism that world literature cen- tralizes always presumes “a recourse to the ambivalent agency of the post-colonial nation- state, and therefore to nationalism and national culture” per se. this special issue considers literature that has recourse to the ambivalent agency of a “national” condition outside of its place of production. in particular, it explores american-themed south african literature, with a particular focus on changing cultural patterns within a context of transnational flows. a number of studies that have charted changing literary representations in the usa post- / , from ghost stories to dystopian post-apocalyptic fictional worlds, the occurrence of dominant hyper-masculine heroes, and depictions of violence as “justified,” preemptive, or retaliatory. yet, as catherine morley has argued, much post / writing is also “steeped in the domestic, [and involves] inward-looking dramas.” recent south african literature has been termed post-transitional insofar as the strictures of the apartheid past have given way to a cultural landscape that is both parochial and cosmopolitan, often outward looking while still retaining its locality, in which past, present, and future form a helix of intertwined temporalities and stylistic conventions. writers discussed in this special edition – including richard rive, ca davids, patrick flanery, lauren beukes, jaco van schalkwyk, and zakes mda – have published novels that reveal strong connections between south african and american literary traditions or patterns as they augment or replace south african settings (conversations and tropes) with ones that bear the mark of the united states in ways that put both locations into conversation in new ways. connections between place, space, and cul- tural formations are inscribed with and draw attention to the connections between oppres- sions that cut across nations and continents to reveal the connections between global issues. this issue of safundi asks: what are south african writers doing in their representations of “america”? how do these texts problematize our conceptual systems of understanding in their challenging of boundaries? a significant trend in current literary studies is one in which the limitations posed by ideas of discrete national canons are contested by scholars around the globe, who often propose replacing them with constellations of texts bound together instead by ideas of see apter, against world literature, particularly chapter , “the untranslatables: a world-system” and chapter , “keywords : monde”. cheah, inhuman conditions, . morley, “end of innocence,” . safundi: the journal of south african and american studies cosmopolitanism and transnationalism. the notion of a field of world literature, however, in its most dominant formulations – by, inter alia, franco moretti, pascale casanova, and david damrosch – are open to accusations that they replicate the eurocentric bias that gave rise to much area studies scholarship with its reliance on world-systems theory and the privileging of euro-american forms to which others should aspire. in her excellent critique of literary systems of categorization like world literature and their impact on african liter- atures, sara marzagora reminds us of the historical context of african studies-based schol- arship: “in the case of africa, these assimilationist practices, based on allegedly universal theories, uncannily resonate with imperialist narratives,” which, she argues, are “narratives against which african thinkers persistently fought from the early colonial period to the present day.” the rise of discussions of world literature has arguably not effected sufficient epistemological shifts in global terms, but has certainly opened the space for challenging questions to be asked about the ways in which globalization has entered the classroom. earlier postcolonial-studies center-periphery models have also often obscured as much as they have revealed enduring epistemological shifts. damrosch’s reformulation of world literature as all literary works that circulate beyond their culture of origin is arguably more nuanced, but it also relegates much indigenous-language literatures outside of notions of the global. this has implications for african studies, for instance, with its political imperative to make visible on its own terms that which has been marginalized, while still interacting with global networks and embracing new scholarly practices and insights. there is a relationship here between the political imperative of much african studies scholarship and emily apter’s notion of the problematic of untranslatability in world lit- eratures. apter argues that world literature (as discipline) assumes language as effable or translatable despite obvious instances of incommensurabilty among languages, written forms, or cultural and historical contexts. apter argues that world literature paradigms trace how literatures travel without examining that which remains obscured through trans- lation (whether linguistic or cultural), leading to a flattening. she argues instead for nuanced readings of “untranslatables” within transmission – “sex,” “gender,” “peace,” “monde” – as marks of dissemination and disclosure in transnational literary studies. apter’s position resonates with many african studies critiques of western scholarship that fail to understand the context of african formations, languages, and histories. theories of cosmopolitanism, following martha nussbaum, similarly imagine a sort of morality where humanism is more pertinent than nationalism, but these remain reliant on categories of national literature and culture within ideas of the global and transversal. while kantian-inspired cosmopolitanism aspires to a sociability precipitated by the humanities’ ability to “cultivate our mental powers by instilling in us ‘the universal feeling of sympathy, and the ability to engage universally in very intimate communication,’” it becomes, as habermas suggests (albeit in a very different context), a “normative philosophy for carry- ing the universalistic norms of discourse ethics beyond the confines of the nation state.” the postcolonial cosmopolitanism of thinkers like james clifford and homi k. bhabha, by contrast, grew out of the critique of universal morality that “disproved kant’s benign marzagora, “african-language literatures and the ‘transnational turn’,” . see apter, against world literature. ibid., . cheah, inhuman conditions, . see benhabib, another cosmopolitanism, . r. frenkel and a. spain view of the unifying power of international commerce and discredited the moral-civilizing claims of cosmopolitan culture.” at the same time, however, the postcolonial recasting of cosmopolitanism focusing on hybridity, fluidity, and the dissolution of national culture signals aspirations to be unbound by the nation or other presumably unified imagined communities. theorists like bhabha and clifford might be understood, on the one hand, as trying to develop “a critical or emancipatory project” of cosmopolitan agency (either through the positing of the hybrid subject, or the dissolution of national cultures). on the other hand, however, in both critical trends and creative work, the anxieties and ambiv- alence that are understood to accompany the “splitting” of the presumed unified subject (and/or the dissolution of cultural imaginaries) are, more often than not, presented as symptoms of “the nervous conditions” of the colonized, cast as “mimic men” or those otherwise understood as on the margins of anglo-european subjectivity. whether evoking universal moralism (such as kant, nussbaum, or habermas) or the ontological “universal contingency” of subject and/or cultural formation (such as clifford or bhabha), each of these forms of cosmopolitanism ironically takes the nation, postcolonial or otherwise, as its ground for departure. in contrast to universal concepts of the cosmopolitical, whether a universal humanism or a universal ontology of the hybrid or split subject, neil lazarus looks at cosmopolitanism as something that is constructed, something we are not born into but rather make, where all versions of cosmopolitanism are local cosmopolitanisms. this is due to the unfolding of “a particular way of registering selfhood in a particular time and place.” as a construct, this form of cosmopolitanism can reconcile contradictions among ideas of the universal, local, or national, when we are at home in the world. lazarus writes: “cosmopolitanism describes ideals for communities in which outward orientation among citizens is emphasized, and where strangers and cultural differences are accommodated by the group.” in similar vein, stephanie newell reminds us that, [a] s arif dirlik suggests, “the local” will always be “very contemporary… serv[ing] as a site for the working out of the most fundamental contradictions of the age.” such present-ness makes “local cosmopolitanism” a useful historical concept, giving us an entry point to categories, ideas, styles, recreations and reactions from periods and locales that have informed, but are no longer necessarily relevant to, contemporary theories of cosmopolitanism. local cosmopolitanism is a useful concept for reading south african representations of the united states. the relationship between cosmopolitanism, locality, and its impact on literary studies, is nicely framed by pier paolo frassinelli, ronit frenkel, and david watson as follows: cheah, inhuman conditions, . ibid., . we are thinking here of tsitsi dangarembga’s postcolonial title (nervous conditions ) more than fanon’s original phrase in the wretched of the earth ( ). for a contemporary counterpoint to these types of archetypal characterizations, see jacob dlamini’s native nostalgia (jacana media, ). for psychoanalytic understanding of “universal contingency” of subject formation, see also rose’s seminal, “on the ‘universality’ of madness”. lazarus, “cosmopolitanism and the specificity of the local,” . ibid., . ibid., . to see an earlier consideration of this discussion, see frenkel, “chinua achebe’s the education of a british- protected child,” – . newell, “local cosmopolitans in colonial west africa,” . safundi: the journal of south african and american studies cosmopolitan perspectives have restructured the field of literary studies, transforming the way scholars imagine their object and method of study, and have brought to the fore such (renewed) frameworks for literary studies as world literatures, or the transnational, the global, and the planetary. yet competing notions of cosmopolitanism, coupled with changes in the political economy of the globe and increasing “global securitocracy,” have given the nation renewed promi- nence too. scholarship that is cosmopolitan in orientation is often precariously placed in this context. frassinelli and watson call this a cosmopolitanism in crisis, or a precarious mode of cosmopolitanism, which entails “a dual task: to […] narrate an ongoing fidelity to the possibilities enabled by certain modes of cosmopolitanism and [to] think through the precarity of these potentialities.” this is not to say that other imaginaries, where people do not participate in cosmopolitan flows for different reasons, are not also circulating simultaneously. south african representations of the us can then be seen as being both transnational and cosmopolitan, while reinventing ideas of place within a frame of global cultural flows, transnational histories, and local cosmopolitan configurations. frassinelli, frenkel, and watson define transnationalism as being suggestive of the cos- mopolitan movements and cultural circulations that flow across the globe in this way. its “focus on circulations and crossings among different spaces” on “different scales – subna- tional, national, outernational, and global” as well as “different temporalities,” they argue, “does not occur for its own sake, but enables the critical interrogation of these spatio-tem- poral coordinates, for which the transnational serves as a substitute.” the “coordinates” that we focus on in this special edition are located in a circuit between south africa and the us, revealing how the history of one relates to the cultural geography of the other within an entangled helix that moves us beyond monadic constructions of the global, toward oth- ers that are rather of a helix, of cultural circuitry. conceptual entanglements do not make distinctions irrelevant, but rather graft one layer of meaning on top of another that is better able to speak to the overlays of the present. our world is indeed changing. global political turbulence seems everywhere embodied in the rise of authoritarian politicians channeling waves of populism that challenge under- standings of left and right that have been more or less stable for the last century: witness leaders like the philippines’ duterte, turkey’s erdogan, or indeed the us’s donald trump and south africa’s jacob zuma, with their divisive populist discourse and polarizing policies. fanaticism and intolerance wear the guise of religiosity or the state in many parts of the world, while ethnic nationalisms have resurfaced within a transnational age of tightened border controls and “freer” trade. although the political contexts that made area studies a necessity have changed, the need to examine the scholarship that emerges across established disciplinary boundaries has become even more important for an understanding of the present, where transnationalism and cosmopolitanism are ascendant even as increasingly narrow ideas of authenticity and belonging emerge globally. these contradictory imaginaries share a global stage with local particularities. it is at this juncture that many south african representations of the us become crucial signifiers of changing patterns within transnational global flows of culture, both in terms of the content and in the global influence of this work. frassinelli and watson, “precarious cosmopolitanism,” . gilroy, darker than blue, . frassinelli and watson “precarious cosmopolitanism,” . frassinelli, frenkel, and watson, traversing transnationalism, . r. frenkel and a. spain the writers under discussion in this special issue inhabit a global space where local history and cosmopolitan configurations combine, at times seamlessly, at other moments revealing the paradoxes of what might be called global capital’s “parochialism of the authen- tic” as defined through official discourses of national or even cosmopolitan belonging. even as each text points to paradoxes of power and the exclusionary tendencies of orchestrated desire and aspirations, this literature also points to moments where – to quote kwame anthony appiah describing his father – one can exist “between being part of the place you were and a part of a broader human community.” the special issue begins with south africa and the united states’ “long conversation about race” in which writers adjudicate just such questions of authenticity, belonging, or unbelonging in complexly varied experi- ences of rigid racial categories. shane graham’s essay traces langston hughes’s influence on richard rive, highlighting how hughes’s desire to write the experience of the “ordinary negro” working in and strug- gling against jim crow racism inspired rive’s provisional “claims to a unifying blackness.” graham deftly thinks through the sometimes complementary but often competing terms of blackness in rive’s work, demonstrating the shifting ground of his attempt to draw on a valorized conception of blackness even as he remained committed to non-racialism work- ing to discredit apartheid discourses of race in south africa. this dialogue demonstrates how transnational exchange also works to forge for rive what it meant to write a national literature. graham writes: the valorization of blackness and of african cultures and traditions, which was the driving force behind langston hughes’s entire corpus of writing, continued to appeal to rive and have value for him as a countermeasure to the dehumanizing racial ideologies and policies of apartheid. at the same time, rive ultimately insisted that the goal of writing as a coloured south african was to create a national literature divorced from “ethnic labels, when the only criteria will be writing well and writing south african.” drawing on rive’s short story “middle passage” and its radio adaptation, make like slaves, graham demonstrates that rive deploys a kind of strategic essentialism to “writ[e] well and writ[e] south african” by “embracing blackness as a pragmatic political necessity to forge unity among the oppressed, while still insistently conveying the unique, creolized culture of the cape colored population.” graham argues that through their exchange, personal resonances and disagreements hughes and rive demonstrate the uneasy cultural production of heterogeneous identities, whether “black transnationalism” or local, national ones. at the same time, graham argues that rive resisted easy analogies between the us and south africa and dramatizes how reification of racial categories “all too easily devolves into the commodification of ethnicity, and the reduction of both african and american cultural artifacts to flattened stereotypes and stock images.” kirk b. sides similarly takes up transatlantic dialogues on race but focuses on the technol- ogies of segregation and apartheid, the specificity of racial governance and the boundaries of national belonging. arguing against the “aura of exceptionalism” of either racial gov- ernance or its supposed overcoming, sides provides an historicized understanding of how appiah, cosmopolitanism, xviii. sides, “precedence and warning,” this volume, . graham, “this curious thing,” this volume, . ibid., . ibid., – . ibid., . sides, “precedence and warning,” this volume, . safundi: the journal of south african and american studies “apartheid and segregation have become world organizing systems, their logics extended to the planet through economies of outsourcing and offshoring, and within ideologies of privatization and neoliberalism.” charting early twentieth-century conversations between white supremacists in south africa and the us, sides demonstrates how us attitudes and designs for racial segregation couched as liberal sociological commentary became tem- plates for what would become apartheid. drawing on maurice evans’s black and white in the southern states and writing by howard j. pim, j.e. holloway, hendrik verwoerd, and other prominent south african architects of apartheid, sides demonstrates how south african segregationists pointed to us history as model – unfortunately admiring american indian reservations and “tribal policy” – and underscored the “horrors” of reconstruction and processes of “negro assimilation,” thinking they should serve as cautionary tales. sides argues that these racial ideologies, policies and implementation of segregation precipitated a crisis of racism on global, rather than (only) specifically national, scale. he argues that this continues to haunt each country in the present as new political movements in both locales such as the black lives matter and rhodes and fees must fall campaigns continue to battle the coloniality undergirding contemporary institutional racisms. both graham and sides make arguments that underscore ursula heise’s claim that one of the most conspicuous events in american studies over the last fifteen years is the trans- national turn that has marked scholarship – the increasing interest in approaching the study of american culture from within a transnational framework rather than a national one. this is a shift where localisms are centered within a transnational paradigm and are held together by a shift in the conceptualization of the cultural subject: while some scholars aim to reconceptualize american studies hemispherically by linking explorations of anglo-american and latin-american literatures and cultures, others focus on transpacific connections around the “pacific rim,” both orientations following a combined geographical and cultural logic. other theorists…focus on diasporic communities – such as the african or jewish diaspora – for whom the us is one among several, often geographically remote, anchoring points. finally, approaches that seek to internationalize american studies through greater attention to the work of americanists from outside the us ultimately aim not so much to reconfigure the object of study itself as to bring a different range of institutional, disciplinary, and cultural perspectives to bear on it. the remaining three articles in this special issue take up writers that might be thought of as reconfiguring “america” just as heise suggests. each of these articles analyzes how literary texts by ca davids, zakes mda, jaco van schalkwyk, and lauren beukes, open up and index circuits of racialized histories, crimes committed, constructed landscapes, and individual and national betrayals. yet they also circulate, as ronit frenkel argues, an “afterlife of liberatory affect in south african modernities that reveals new spaces and forms of political articulation that bring a post-liberation consciousness to global circuits that resonate with similar inequalities.” in other words, these writers’ recent works open a circuit of ideas and imaginaries generative of local cosmopolitanisms, with their ghostliness and their potentiality, in what frenkel calls their “restlessness.” as she argues, these texts …ask important questions around trauma and examine how crimes committed in one place haunt others across distant locales, leading to deeply local and historically specific versions of ibid., . heise, “ecocriticism and the transnational turn,” . ibid., – . frenkel, “the afterlives of a successful revolution,” this volume, . r. frenkel and a. spain globalized difference and sameness, thereby recalibrating the relationship between culture as restless circulation and representation as a restless position of enunciation. simon van schalkwyk’s “heterotopia and heterotopology in ca davids’ the blacks of cape town,” for example, takes up lived experiences of the palimpsests of temporal, textual, and spatial simultaneity of “the near and far … the dispersed” of global racialized moderni- ties and their attendant “ghostly cosmopolitanism.” focusing on heterotopological sites of prisons, gardens, libraries, and graveyards, van schalkwyk reads davids’ protagonist, zara, as an “unsettled cosmopolitan subject,” a transplant to the garden state of new jersey, living a kind of fugitive life “from her own existence” as she meditates on questions of exile. the twined imagery of garden and grave are set in relief to those of the carceral and the library in van schalkwyk’s nuanced close readings that suggest that these local spaces – even when imbibed with inhospitable pasts – might still enable a cultivation of global imaginaries of places. according to van schalkwyk, the disciplinary surveillance of post- / new jersey stages “a distinctively carceral geopolitical imaginary.” these mechanisms of surveillance become “intimately connected to the insistent demands attending zara’s commitments to an agonizingly clandestine and potentially shameful south african past, [and] her current life as transient in the ‘foreign place’ of new jersey” is coupled with “a future overshadowed by the prospects of her father’s betrayals.” spaces such as the garden-as-library “signal the curious promise…that there may be spatial and temporal sites that stand apart from” personal, political, national and increasingly global “ambiguities of skin and betrayal.” as van schalkwyk shows, these ghostly cosmopolitanisms highlight both “transnational and trans-historical suffering, […] that tests the limits of cosmopolitan idealism.” similarly, but in a much different vein, andrea spain argues that lauren beukes’ recent novels set in the us index the reemergence of a harrowing cultural-global unconscious: that of white male resentment, of the ostensibly “forgotten men” who face a perceived threat to their masculine and racial power, which they entirely take for granted in a com- plex representation of white male privilege. reading beukes’ works as reconstructing “the urban materiality of precarious lives,” spain adds to existing scholarship by arguing that beukes’ characters “emerge as … infrastructure of the city in abdoumaliq simone’s sense and as critique of social oppression in both south africa and more globally.” herein lies the global appeal of beukes’ texts: that is, her ability to allegorize the present as the return of the repressed – the past – or, in achille mbembe’s terms, “a manifestation of traumatic amnesia, and in some cases, nostalgia or even mourning,” even as they assemble emergent forms of bodily, technological, “animaled,” gender-queer and female protagonists. spain sustains her argument through an analysis of two characters, clayton broom in broken monsters and harper in the shining girls, and reads the historically specific chronotopes ibid., . foucault, “spaces” quoted in van schalkwyk, “heterotopia and heterotopology”, this volume, . van schalkwyk, “heterotopia and heterotopology,” this volume, . ibid., . ibid. ibid. ibid. jones qtd. in van schalkwyk, “heterotopia and heterotopology”, this volume, . van schalkwyk, “heterotopia and heterotopology”, this volume, . spain, “shining girls and forgotten men”, this volume, . mbembe, qtd. in spain, “shining girls and forgotten men,” this volume, . safundi: the journal of south african and american studies of the urban centers through which they are constituted. spain argues that as new claims to urban space – by women of color, working-class white women, and immigrant men and women – begin to assert themselves more firmly, so, too, the old certainties of masculinity and race assert themselves to counter a perceived “invasion and contamination.” for example, spain argues that beukes’ setting of s chicago and the detroit of the early s each illustrates that the us urban “promise of working-class reproductive futurity ends with a series of crashes, creating an unresolved subjective experience of an intolerable reality within global capital,” prompting “the brutal violence [that is always] the enacting of a certain symbolic deadlock.” at its most provocative moment, the article concludes that the novels might, on the one hand, be an literary enactment of a new form of collective ritual of symbolic violence, challenging us audiences and readers to think about their desires to witness and consume narratives of misogynistic and racialized fantasies of violence. on the other hand, spain argues that beukes’ novels might work to both reimagine the global histories of us cities, while also serving as a cautionary tale that points to the re-emergence of contagious, restless, paranoid fantasies of the racist and the misogynist populism so familiar to s south africa. ronit frenkel’s contribution also highlights how literature can open circuits between affective alignments, histories, infrastructures, and importantly, political imaginaries of lived spaces. frenkel’s reading of zake’s mda’s rachel’s blue and jaco van schalkwyk’s the alibi club illustrates how south african writers can alter analytical frameworks and under- stand us locales as equally informed and haunted by others across the globe. through her close readings, frenkel illustrates that as much as the transnational flows and global circuits can open conduits to racialized discourses and practices circumscribing agency, the restlessness of cultural representations can also sustain “the afterlives of a post-liberation consciousness” that is “bound to the idea that things can be fought over and changed.” this means that contemporary african literature is capable of altering analytical frame- works through which we can not only come to understand american modernity but can rigorously analyze “debates on human rights as they relate to the poor and disenfranchised,” depicting us localities as forms of “globalized difference that is familiar” across national borders. reading the enunciative positions of mda and van schalkwyk as “emerging from a successful revolution that ended white minority rule in south africa,” frenkel argues that each writer’s understanding of american modernity – whether its urban configurations of belonging and alienation or rural poverty and gendered violence – is understood not only from a south african perspective, but from a perspective that understands american places of suffering and despair as sites of contested political terrain. frenkel’s readings disclose us modernity as containing global commonplaces in which extreme disparities of wealth, mobility and gendered rights structure social life. from mda’s text depicting the effects of capitalist modernities through the decimation of local industries such as coal mining, “leaving behind isolated pockets of people overrun by drugs, fundamentalism and a new version of predatory capitalism in the form of fracking,” to van schalkwyk’s depictions of graham, qtd. in spain, “shining girls and forgotten men”, this volume, . spain, “shining girls and forgotten men”, this volume, . Žižek qtd. in spain, “shining girls and forgotten men,” this volume, . frenkel, “the afterlives of a successful revolution,” this volume, . ibid., . ibid., . r. frenkel and a. spain american customs and homeland security procedures that alienate immigrants, to scenes in both books underscoring how “[p] overty stretches on either side, as far as the eye can see.” these south african novels demonstrate how each locality is engendered by the global. drawing on stephen greenblatt’s cultural modernity: a manifesto, frenkel writes that both novels dramatize the “‘sensation of rootedness’ through which people experience their cultural and social lives that very much depends on the ‘powers of a culture … to hide the mobility that is its enabling condition.’” the issue concludes with a conversation between the writers carol-ann davids and patrick flanery, entitled “reflection, understanding, and empathy.” in this timely exchange, davids and flanery reflect on these conditions of mobility and the “untranslatability” of linguistic, cultural, and historical locales that inflects and engenders their own creative processes. in the exchange, davids and flanery discuss, as flanery puts it, “the trace of sen- sibility” that the “ghosts of location” – that is to say, their own location as writers, whether as a south african writing “america” or china, or as an american writing south africa. focusing on the ways in which language, tone, cultural codes, and “the tensions that exist between … moment and epochs” affect their own creative work, davids and flanery high- light how “migration and transplantation” demands empathy as well as a process of under- standing that involves the “layering of historical perspectives, sifting between truth and truthiness, and a fair deal of reading between lines.” the interview considers how language, codes of decorum, institutional bureaucracy, racial dynamics, and “divi[sions] along racial and economic lines (and their intersection)” redefine and impinge on writers’ language, actions, and affinities, and by extension, on those of their characters. importantly for our time, the conversation enters into current debates about cultural appropriation and mis- representation, while thinking through questions of both caution and risk while writing the other. when considering the violence of representation that might be done by people writing about precarious lives from positions of privilege, davids writes unapologetically: “i would say that caution is not only necessary but perhaps a fundamental act of empathy.” caution, then, rather than a call for censorship, becomes a charge for “reflection, under- standing, [and] even research,” for both the novelist and critic. for the purposes of this special issue, we seek to highlight global cultural flows that circulate across and through places, forms, categorizations, and texts. we are not arguing for a theory of replications between south africa and america but are rather trying to highlight the transnational connections that create another layer of cultural meaning that reveals a sort of ephemeral archive, to borrow ann cvetkovich’s term, undergirded by the idea that “america” is still visibly marked by the after effects of slavery and south africa is still visibly marked by the after effects of apartheid. this is illustrated by achille mbembe’s observation that apartheid is inscribed onto the south african “social, economic and mental landscape” despite the change that has taken place since . similarly, imraan coovadia recently said van schalkwyk, the alibi club, qtd. in frenkel, “the afterlives of a successful revolution,” this volume, . qtd. in frenkel, “the afterlives of a successful revolution,” this volume, . davids and flanery, “reflection,” this volume, . ibid., . ibid. ibid. ibid. cvetkovich, an archive of feeling. mbembe, “rule of property versus rule of the poor,” . safundi: the journal of south african and american studies [i] f you think about the usa, it’s like  years since slavery was abolished and it’s still one of the major structuring features of what they talk about, how they think about race. it is hard to imagine us getting rid of it any sooner. patrick gaspard, the outgoing american ambassador to south africa, has often empha- sized a reciprocal relationship between south africa and the us, saying that the two coun- tries are still dealing with the lingering social trauma of slavery and apartheid. in a recent interview with rebecca davis, gaspard positioned racial discourse in both locales as follows: “in south africa, y’all don’t have gentle and polite conversations about the tensions that exist between the races,” he says. “in the united states, we come up with lots of different kinds of euphemisms for these things, and sometimes it’s really hard to solve problems when you’re using euphemisms. here it is direct and blunt and there’s nothing opaque about it, and i appreciate that – particularly as someone who came up from the rights movement in the us and always felt like we were talking past one another. here, it’s hard to talk past one another.” gaspard thumps his fist into his palm. “you talk right into one another.” our interest here does not lie in theorizing comparative replications or one-to-one analogies between south africa and the united states, but rather lies in how the texts under discus- sion in this collection offer a rich mediation on global popular cultural flows, transnational histories of raciology, the destabilization of the specificities of place, and how resonant aspirations of the ordinary might talk “right into one another.” disclosure statement no potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors. notes on contributors ronit frenkel holds ba honours and master’s degree in african literature from the university of witwatersrand, and a phd in comparative cultural and literary studies from the university of arizona. she works at the intersection of cultural studies, african literature, and critical theory. she is the author of reconsiderations: south african indian fiction and the making of race in postcolonial culture (unisa ) and co-editor of traversing transnationalism: the horizons of cultural and literary studies (rodopi ). andrea spain received her phd in the department of comparative literature at the university at buffalo and is an associate professor of english at mississippi state university, where she teaches courses on postcolonial and world literatures, gender studies, film, and critical theory. she has published on bhanu kapil, zoë wicomb, sello duiker, nadine gordimer, and south africa’s truth commission. her essays can be found in modern fiction studies, safundi, trickhouse, bombay gin, and the edited collection, gender, ghosts, history. she is currently finishing her book manuscript postcoloniality and event that explores the role of time, memory, and perception in the postcolonial present. bibliography appiah, kwame anthony. cosmopolitanism. ethics in a world of strangers. new york: w.w. norton & company, . apter, emily. against world literature: on the politics of untranslatability. new york: verso, . frenkel, “imraan coovadia in conversation,” . davis, “politics of performance”. r. frenkel and a. spain benhabib, seyla. another cosmopolitanism with jeremy waldron, bonnie honig and will kymlicka. oxford: oxford university press, . cheah, pheng. inhuman conditions: on cosmopolitanism and human rights. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, . cvetkovich, ann. an archive of feeling: trauma, sexuality and lesbian public cultures. durham, nc: duke university press, . davis, rebecca. “u.s. embassador on the politics of performance and theatre.” mail and guardian, june , . http://mg.co.za/article/ - - -us-ambassador-on-the-politics-of-performance- and-theatre. davids, carol-ann and patrick flanery. “reflection, understanding, and empathy: a conversation between carol-ann davids and patrick flanery.” safundi , no. ( ): – . frassinelli, pier, ronit frenkel, and david watson. traversing transnationalism: the horizons of cultural and literary studies. new york: rodopi, . frassinelli, pier and david watson. “precarious cosmopolitanism in o’neil’s netherland and mpe’s welcome to our hillbrow.” comparative literature and culture , no. ( ): – . frenkel, ronit. “the afterlives of a successful revolution: zakes mda’s rachel’s blue and jaco van schalkwyk’s the alibi club outside of the global novel.” safundi , no. ( ): – . frenkel, ronit. “chinua achebe’s the education of a british-protected child and african cosmopolitanisms.” in chinua achebe’s legacy: illuminations from africa, ed. james ogude, – . pretoria: african institute of south africa, . frenkel, ronit. “imraan coovadia in conversation with ronit frenkel.” current writing: text and reception in southern africa , no. ( ): – . gilroy, paul. darker than blue. on the moral economies of black atlantic culture. cambridge, ma: the belknap press of harvard university, . graham, shane. “‘this curious thing’: richard rive, the harlem renaissance, and the commodification of the black atlantic.” safundi , no. ( ): – . heise, ursula. “ecocriticism and the transnational turn in american studies.” american literary history , nos. – ( ): – . lazarus, neil. “cosmopolitanism and the specificity of the local in world literature.” the journal of commonwealth literature , no. ( ): – . marzagora, sara. “african-language literatures and the ‘transnational turn’ in euro-american humanities.” journal of african cultural studies , no. ( ): – . mbembe, achille. “rule of property versus rule of the poor.” wits leader ( ): . morley, catherine. “the end of innocence: tales of terror after / .” review of international american studies special issue on terror and security . – . ( / ): – . newell, stephanie. “local cosmopolitans in colonial west africa.” the journal of commonwealth literature , no. ( ): – . rose, jacqueline. “on the ‘universality’ of madness: bessie head’s a question of power.” critical inquiry ( ): – . sides, kirk b. “precedence and warning: global apartheid and south africa’s long conversation on race with the united states.” safundi , no. ( ): – . spain, andrea. “shining girls and forgotten men in lauren beukes’ urban ‘america’.” safundi , no. ( ): – . van schalkwyk, simon. “heterotopia and heterotopology in ca davids’ the blacks of cape town ( ).“ safundi , no. ( ): – . http://mg.co.za/article/ - - -us-ambassador-on-the-politics-of-performance-and-theatre http://mg.co.za/article/ - - -us-ambassador-on-the-politics-of-performance-and-theatre 	abstract 	disclosure statement 	notes on contributors 	bibliography #black lives matter editorial #black lives matter communications biology is committed to improving diversity in our pages, our reviewer pool, and our editorial board. we recognize both the overt and unconscious racism in the sciences and have tasked ourselves with using our platform to amplify black voices and the voices of all biologists of color. w e, the editors of com- munications biology, are deeply saddened by the recent events in the u.s.: the killings of george floyd, an unarmed black man; breonna taylor, a black woman who was asleep in her own home; and countless others, by police officers. these events are of course only the tip of the iceberg and have sparked mass protests nationwide in demand of social reform and justice. the systemic and deeply rooted racism reflec- ted in this and too many other similar events is not confined to any border or culture or field. change is not easy and doesn’t happen overnight; however, it feels that in the last few years, the political environment in many countries has moved every inch of forward change yards backwards, and amplified the problems that had previously sim- mered just below the surface. so how can we as a society—and as scientists— affect positive change? it all starts with us. before pointing fingers at others, we must self-reflect. as scientists, we know intellectually that racism makes no sense. all humans share nearly identical dna, and we know that most genetic variation is found within populations rather than between them . therefore, it follows that science should be accessible to all people, regardless of group identification. unfortunately, the reality is that we still suffer from wide racial disparities in stem. just look around any academic department or research lab; how many black scientists do you find? despite some progress in the last years, in black americans still accounted for only . % of the work force in science and engi- neering, while representing . % of the population in the u.s . our journal offices are based in big cities like new york city and london— cities that are often referred to as ‘melting pots’—where you would expect to have the highest levels of diversity. still, even research institutes in these cities suffer from a dramatic under-representation of black professionals in the sciences and in science publishing. this disparity doesn’t start at the professional level. it is shaped by inequities throughout life in terms of access to good schools and colleges, mentorship opportunities and support infrastructure. an example of this can be found in the uk, where institutional racism against black students and employees on campuses is not seriously recognized or addressed, which pushes many of the 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without making a conscious effort to improve diversity. so what can we do? at communications biology, we will seize on this opportunity to educate ourselves, prioritize efforts to reach black scientists at all stages of their careers, and ensure that such efforts are part of a long- term continuous plan rather than a one- time reaction to a specific incident or to show that we are checking a box. instead, we pledge to speak out against racism and reflect on actionable steps for a positive change in the life sciences. after careful thought, we share our commitments: ● we will work to recruit black scientists to our editorial board. ● we will start a series to discuss the journey in science for black researchers at any point in their career. this will be in the form of a q&a series that sheds light on the scientific journey of black and other minority researchers. ● we will aim for each of our in-house editors to visit at least one historically black college or university, or other 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black editors to our in-house team and the teams of our sister journals. please don’t hesitate to con- tact us about opportunities at nature research if this is something you may be interested in. racism is not a political issue, but rather a human rights issue. science and human rights go hand-in-hand. with this in mind, we at communications biology stand in solidarity with the black community and with our fellow activists in the black lives matter move- ment to not only denounce racism, but to actively commit to ensuring equal opportunity and achieving antiracism. as a single journal, we cannot solve the inequities caused by hundreds of years of systemic racism. but by working together, an all-inclusive future becomes possible. references . witherspoon, d. j. et al. genetic similarities within and between human populations. genetics , – ( ). . burke, a. demographic trends of the s&e workforce. national science foundation https:// ncses.nsf.gov/pubs/nsb /demographic- trends-of-the-s-e-workforce ( ). . weale, s. uk universities condemned for failure to tackle racism. the guardian https://www. theguardian.com/education/ /jul/ /uk- universities-condemned-for-failure-to-tackle- racism ( ). open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons license, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s creative commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article’s creative commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a 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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / www.nature.com/commsbio 	#black lives matter 	references not neutral: reimagining antiracism as a professional competence all editorial matter in cmaj represents the opinions of the authors and not necessarily those of the can adian medical association or its subsidiaries. © joule inc. or its licensors cmaj | january , | volume | issue e r acial justice was a dominant theme of . the medical community has grappled with a long history of racial injustice, and it was heartening to see medical institu- tions acknowledge their obligations to antiracism in reaction to high-profile events. although some physicians joined black lives matter protests or became engaged in antiracist movements, others may have hesitated, concerned that their hospitals and universities would view such activism as unprofessional behav- iour. such conflicts expose a tension in the canmeds framework. according to the framework, physicians, as professionals, must “reflect contemporary society’s expectations ... which include … promotion of the public good … and values such as … humility, respect for diversity. in their role as health advocates, they are called to promote the health of the communities they serve.” if advocating for racial justice is in line with our professional val- ues, how can there be any hesitation in doing so? yet, in practice, the role of professional can undermine that of advocate for phys- icians because our current understanding of professionalism is not race neutral. in this article, we discuss the ways that race fac- tors into interprofessional interactions and inpatient care, and argue that a change to our current understanding of profession- alism is critical to operationalizing the recent commitments of hospitals and universities to antiracist work. a white, cisgender, apolitical, heteronormative man not liv- ing with a disability has long been upheld as the model “profes- sional,” in line with a system that centres on “a series of charac- teristics that institutionalize whiteness and westernness as both normal and superior to other ethnic, racial and regional identi- ties and customs.” however, this is not in line with the profes- sion’s stated values. professionalism is how physicians hold themselves accountable to patients and society. as such, it is imperative that physicians engage with larger conversations challenging what constitutes professional behaviour. in fact, we argue that our professional accountability to society demands our commitment to a more just, and thereby more healthy, society. in a recent debate article, boroumand and colleagues described uptake of the advocate role in medical education as “underwhelming,” suggesting that at least part of the reason for its relatively weak application in medical education is a lack of “role modelling”; that is, trainees do not see the health advocate role embodied by their teachers. in contrast, the role of physician as “professional” remains a constant pillar of medical education. socialization theory posits that occupational training includes not only knowledge acquisition but also identity formation and, for medical learners, this has included messaging related to becoming a “neutral physician,” where learners’ social identities are suborned in pursuit of becom- ing an “impartial knower.” although this concept of professional- ism does respect diversity, it is not designed to encourage advo- cacy in progressive movements, and particularly not the critical interrogation of racism within the medical profession itself. canadian medical education has relied heavily on lectures in the preclinical years and the apprenticeship model during clin ical training, which, for trainees, means that the culture of what is considered professional in medicine is strongly influenced by the behaviour of their staff and seniors. modelled behaviour forms an important part of the hidden curriculum. learners’ experi- ence of professionalism in training programs is not race neutral, however. racialized residents in canadian surgical programs have reported that their competence was questioned more often than that of their gender-matched peers, and they felt less confi- dent that their reports of discrimination (often itself considered to be an unprofessional act) would lead to appropriate action being taken. indeed, the findings of a recent qualitative study of commentary not neutral: reimagining antiracism as a professional competence saroo sharda mbchb mmed, aruna dhara md mph, fahad alam md mhsc n cite as: cmaj january ; :e - . doi: . /cmaj. key points • the canmeds roles of professional and health advocate as defined seem to be at odds. • medicine’s current concept of professionalism is not designed to encourage advocacy in progressive movements or the critical interrogation of racism within the medical profession itself. • it is time to challenge traditional concepts of what constitutes professional behaviour in medicine so that physicians can be equipped to advocate for a society that supports health for all. • although tools for embedding antiracism training into medical programs exist, much work remains for canadian institutions to firmly embed antiracism into medical education. c o m m en ta r y e cmaj | january , | volume | issue us physician-trainees considered underrepresented in medicine suggest that racialized students must actively work to dismantle harmful stereotypes to be able to align their professional (phys- ician) and racial identities. although medical training curricula certainly include race and racism as determinants of health, whether they adequately pre- pare trainees to act in solidarity with and to actively advocate for structural improvements for affected communities is less clear. institutions have been offered an opportunity to reflect on their complicity in unjust structures through the recently released recorded comments made by health care professionals to joyce echaquan, an indigenous woman who died in a quebec hospital, as well as emerging evidence of the complex and disproportion- ate effects of the coronavirus disease pandemic on the lives of racialized people. many institutions have offered statements condemning racism in medicine. yet such institutions, if they are concerned with the public good, must also be willing to sup- port physicians who are politically engaged to further antiracism as medical professionals. advocacy activities — including pub- licly protesting, grassroots organizing and engaging in academic discourse — are all valid parts of physician identities. one barrier to broadening the concept of medical profession- alism may be the profession’s timidity in tackling racism within its ranks. rather than acknowledge the difficult issue of racism, institutions talk instead about increasing diversity. , the canad ian federation of medical students’ broad definition of diversity — encompassing “diversity in culture, ethnicity, gender, sexuality, physical ability, geography, religion and socioeconomic status” — gives insight into how specifically naming and addressing racial inequity within the profession can become diffi- cult. by focusing broadly on improving diversity, an institution can claim to have addressed the problem without even tackling racism, which may actually compound racial oppression. antiracism training in canadian medical education is not well established, but there are many institutions that are actively engaged with this work. for example, the university of manitoba rady faculty of health sciences has an indigenous health cur- riculum that includes antiracism content, and the temerty fac- ulty of medicine at the university of toronto recently stated plans to “expand antiracist education in our learning, research and clinical spaces and focus on cultural safety for black and indigenous learners across our institutions.” such initiatives sup- port the idea that antiracism is an important part of medical edu- cation. expanding service-learning programs to explicitly include social justice advocacy may serve to normalize this work as part of medical professional practice for nonracialized and racialized physicians alike. universalizing and normalizing a racial-justice approach to health care will foster better patient care. professionalism itself must include advocacy. although medical professionals may not agree with each other or their institutions, we are united in our obligations to the public good. as such, physicians must be sup- ported in breaking free from narrow notions of professional behaviour to engage with the work of racial justice. we cannot be neutral when the stakes are as high as the health and well-being of our patients. references . frank jr, snell l, sherbino j, editors. canmeds physician competency framework. ottawa: royal college of physicians and surgeons of canada; (accessed july ). . gray a. the bias of “professionalism” standards. palo alto (ca): stanford social innovation review; . available: https://ssir.org/articles/entry/the_bias_of_ professionalism_standards (accessed july ). . boroumand s, stein mj, jay m, et al. addressing the health advocate role in medical education. bmc med educ ; : . . hafferty fw. professionalism and the socialization of medical students. in: cruess rl, cruess sr, steinert y, editors. teaching medical professionalism. cambridge (uk): cambridge university press; : - . . beagan bl. neutralizing differences: producing neutral doctors for (almost) neutral patients. soc sci med ; : - . . byszewski a, gill js, lochnan h. socialization to professionalism in medical schools: a canadian experience. bmc med educ ; : . . lehmann ls, sulmasy ls, desai s, et al.; professionalism and human rights committee. hidden curricula, ethics, and professionalism: optimizing clinical learning environments in becoming and being a physician: a position paper of the american college of physicians. ann intern med ; : - . . mocanu v, kuper tm, marini w, et al. intersectionality of gender and visible minority status among general surgery residents in canada. jama surg ; :e . . wyatt tr, rockich-winston n, taylor tr, et al. what does context have to do with anything? a study of professional identity formation in physician-trainees considered underrepresented in medicine. acad med ; : - . . webb hooper m, nápoles am, pérez-stable ej. covid- and racial/ethnic dis- parities. jama ; : - . . canadian federation of medical students statement in response to the death of joyce echaquan [news release]. ottawa: canadian federation of medical students; oct. . available: www.cfms.org/news/ / / /canadian -federation-of-medical-students-statement-in-response-to-the-death-of-joyce -echaquan (accessed nov. ). . ahmad nj, shi m. the need for anti-racism training in medical school curricula. acad med ; : . . funnell s, kitty d, schipper s. moving toward anti-racism. can fam physician ; : . . tahsn statement on anti-racism [news release]. toronto: temerty school of medicine, university of toronto; oct. . available: https://medicine.utoronto .ca/news/tahsn-statement-anti-racism (accessed nov. ). competing interests: none declared. this article has been peer reviewed. affiliations: department of anesthesia (sharda), halton healthcare — oakville trafalgar memorial hospital, oakville, ont.; department of anesthesia (sharda), mcmaster university, hamilton ont.; depart- ment of family medicine (dhara), dalhousie university, halifax, ns; department of anesthesia (alam), sunnybrook health sciences cen- tre; department of anesthesiology and pain medicine (alam), and the wilson centre for research in medical education (alam), faculty of medicine, university of toronto, toronto, ont. contributors: all of the authors contributed to the conception and design of the work, drafted the manuscript, revised it crit- ically for important intellectual content, gave final approval of the version to be published and agreed to be accountable for all aspects of the work. content licence: this is an open access article distributed in accor- dance with the terms of the creative commons attribution (cc by-nc- nd . ) licence, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided that the original publication is properly cited, the use is noncommercial (i.e., research or educational use), and no modifications or adaptations are made. see: https://creativecommons .org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / correspondence to: saroo sharda, ssharda@haltonhealthcare.com wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top 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keywords: festival, festival review i grew up in san luis obispo, a small town on the central coast of california, nestled equidistant between san francisco and los angeles. now a seasoned traveler and brooklyn-based filmmaker, i look at san luis obispo as the small town that could not contain my curiosity and was not prepared to show me the breadth of the world’s virtues, especially as a black youth in the pre- dominantly white city. still, i love to return to the community and share my global perspective, and san luis obispo international film festival (sloff) is a place where that perspective is welcomed in the spirit of independent filmmaking. my long-standing personal connection to this very special geo- graphic region, as well as my direct experience with the cultural nuances that are embedded in the fabric of the san luis obispo community, give me a unique perspective to reviewing the festival. the year was also the first time that one of my films had been accepted into the festival. my short doc- umentary, kut to be the best: the last black barbershop in san luis obispo fea- tures the story of a black business owner faced with the closure of his barber- shop, and the impact that closure had upon the black community in san luis obispo. san luis obispo county, the epicenter of the central coast of california, is dotted with world renown wineries to the northeast and epic stretches of pacific coastline to the southwest. the sloff website refers to the city as ‘quaint and sophisticated’[ ] – the perfect destination for wealthy filmmakers and los angelenos. what better way than a prime california coastal experi- ence to attract hollywood players to a small community film festival on a late https://necsus-ejms.org/san-luis-obispo-international-film-festival-the-social-responsibility-of-redesigning-an-american-film-festival/ https://necsus-ejms.org/san-luis-obispo-international-film-festival-the-social-responsibility-of-redesigning-an-american-film-festival/ https://necsus-ejms.org/san-luis-obispo-international-film-festival-the-social-responsibility-of-redesigning-an-american-film-festival/ https://necsus-ejms.org/tag/festival/ https://necsus-ejms.org/tag/festival-review/ necsus – european journal of media studies vol ( ), march weekend? san luis obispo international film festival, which sur- passed the quarter century mark with this year’s festival, has grown from a small-town festival to now include attendees and entries from around the world. with humble beginnings in the early s the event has always been connected to the history of american cinema. william randolph hearst’s ‘castle’ is only a short drive from the city of san luis obispo, and in the festival made history by screening orson welles’ classic citizen kane at the hearst castle, bringing this historical marker in cinema history to the site of its original inspiration. the festival’s top award, the king vidor award, is also rooted in the cinematic history of san luis obispo county. the award’s namesake, vidor, once lived in nearby paso robles. known now for its dis- tinct contributions to the california wine market, it is also where king vidor spent his final days. like almost every festival in the world, the history of the festival was again marked by change and evolution in . scheduled for the week of march, the festival was interrupted by the abrupt paradigm shift amidst the pandemic, as were each of our daily lives, as we all adjusted to the global health crisis. the structure of viewing films has not been immune to the pain- ful stripping away of the extraneous. the theater industry has been badly damaged, adding salt to a long slow wound being imparted by the dominance of streaming services like netflix and its competitors. the ides of march will always be remembered through a haze. but some, including festival or- ganiser skye mclennan, were forced to look into the future with a clairvoy- ant focus. i spoke with skye this summer, once we all had some hindsight on this momentous spring. skye detailed her experience being at the helm of the festival during the day-to-day readjustments as the nation plunged into the unknown depths of the pandemic and ensuing public lockdowns.[ ] the primary stakeholders involved in the festival sat on the edge of their seats awaiting the decisions that would be made by skye and her team as they en- tered the final week of planning for the opening events. while the county of san luis obispo was one of the last places in califor- nia to show signs of the viral outbreak, festival organisers like skye were forced to assess the feasibility of their event amidst a lack of information and growing public anxiety.[ ] this reassessment was focused on whether or not the festival could be held at all. it also drove skye to examine their purpose, their impact, and their connection to the primary stakeholders, some who have valued the festival for decades. ‘every part of the industry has been a part of the conversation’, says skye, as she explained the process of sharing san luis obispo international film festival whitaker her learned experiences with other festival organisers. ‘the experience of a festival is much more than showing a film.’ [ ] how that experience is recre- ated for audiences is one of the most pressing questions facing organisers of festivals worldwide today. days before the event skye stayed fixed to the minute-by-minute updates being given by the center for disease control on large group gatherings, while the audiences and regular supporters of the festival turned their eyes to national and global news coverage, trying to understand the risk of the impending viral outbreak. we all struggled to gain perspective on the degree of the crisis. as a director of a film that was slated to screen as an official selection of the festival, i also had to weigh my options. i struggled with whether or not to fly to attend the red carpet events for filmmakers and the first screening of my work in my hometown festival. skye knew that like my- self, many filmmakers were slated to travel from outside the area – some outside the country. furthermore, she knew filmmakers were most eager for information and details, but she also had to prioritise communication with festival pass holders who are major financial contributors to the festival. skye was emailing filmmakers daily with updates, and ultimately three days be- fore the opening of the festival she and her team made the decision to go virtual. skye labored tirelessly for days to upgrade her tech knowledge and find the right full-service company to make sure the pass holders of the festival still got what they expected. she single-handedly built a new wordpress site to use as a platform for the online festival. she was also tasked with compar- ing file server systems such as dcp traffic and cinesend – companies that themselves were bracing for the increase in workload as they moved from a small presence providing a resource for the online festival community to a necessary commodity for every festival in the world. according to skye the ‘film festival culture was against digital’, and now that culture was shifting, as many festivals looked for ways to pivot under new social guidelines. in just under a week skye and her colleagues were able to offer a virtual screening of almost every title originally slated for the festival, my film included. it would be hard to argue that the festival organisers in san luis obispo did not successfully set the precedent for the industry’s commitment to a vir- tual presence amidst the pandemic. skye points out that ‘social responsibility’ was her motivation for pushing the festival forward in such a short time. she sees her first responsibility to her community, to the audiences and pass holders that have grown to expect a curated experience from the festival; but necsus – european journal of media studies vol ( ), she also notes her obligation to the filmmakers, and to the larger community of festival organisers. still, questions remain. how long will this unprece- dented need for innovation last? will the film festival ever regain its physical strength? for filmmakers like myself and david osit (mayor, ) the virtual screenings do not quite feel the same. osit, who expected to show his film at south by southwest in , reminisced on the experience of screening to a live audience, after having varied experiences with virtual festivals.[ ] the purpose of the film festival, for filmmakers, is different than for the audience. many of the physical benefits of flying across the country for a small festival outside of los angeles just do not translate to virtual coffee sessions, meetups, pitch-a-thons, or any other digital substitute for the excitement of a post-screening talkback or the opportunity to sell an idea to a team of pro- ducers. before a festival can completely redesign its screening structure, it has to determine its purpose. like all things in , even film festivals must become much more self-aware. for skye and the san luis obispo festival organisers, this process of self-assessment has gone through many stages. now, particularly in america, film festivals are being forced to reassess their purpose and impact within another context in addition to the ongoing pan- demic. the video of the murder of george floyd can shake any viewer to the core, also reminding us that documentary images have the potential for a larger social impact. in that moment, the contribution of the visual image as a motivation for shifting the festival paradigm and purpose was removed from the hands of filmmakers and festival planners and placed into the raised fists of the people. the ensuing global uprisings became a different call to action. around the united states of america, and soon around the globe, acts of solidarity for the struggle of black americans became widespread and grabbed the focus of the entire world. seemingly overnight, the already trending catch phrases ‘diversity and inclusion’ became required mentions for every organisation email list in the nation, whether independent or cor- porate. when asked about the impact the uprisings had on the festival, skye emphasised her festival was ‘not doing enough’, as leadership was ‘discussing with board members and other organisations, how they could increase ca- pacity for diversity’ in future years.[ ] the increased scrutiny into the prac- tices of all organisations has illuminated hollywood’s already poor track rec- ord of equal representation in guilds and other institutions. i am hoping that the increase in dialogue and awareness of the black american experience will san luis obispo international film festival whitaker trickle down to smaller festivals throughout the country in communities like san luis obispo. the independent filmmakers project (ifp) hosted a virtual panel, ‘the future of festivals: creating community connection & curation online’ in july , as the protests quieted to a dull drone and the world reeled from the whirlwind of the last four months. hosted by jessie fairbanks of doc- nyc, tribeca, and mountainfilm festivals, the panel members, each repre- senting a small festival, included nehad khader of blackstar film festival and zandashé brown, filmmaker and programming manager for the new orleans film society. considering the recent political events, i was specifi- cally interested in what these two women of colour would have to say about the future of film festivals, as the title of the presentation promised. the filmmakers discussed how their organisations could better serve the stake- holders, including both audiences and filmmakers, as the need for online programming continues. while the framework presented by host jessie fair- banks focused on online curation as a response to the pandemic restrictions, the panelists quickly shifted the dialogue toward the ideas of inclusion and diversity, indicating the rapid proliferation of these ideas in the festival com- munity.[ ] zandashé brown highlighted that her organisation was actively ‘interrogating how we engage with filmmakers’ and focusing the conversa- tion on ‘decentering whiteness’. these discussions are critical to the forward movement and growth of united states festival culture in . however, they seem to be absent from the dialogue in the san luis obispo film com- munity. these collisions of race, global health, police brutality, and the viral out- break are polarising moments that catalyse global unity while edifying our institutions, our creators, and ourselves. while san luis obispo film festival was initially forced to innovate under the state guidelines necessary to reduce the deadly impact of the pandemic, skye and the entire festival community are now being forced to examine themselves wholly in light of the global questions of race and equality in america – and they are not alone. each small niche festival must now explore how their unique community relates to a nationwide conversation about diversity and inclusion that is hinged upon the back of social media call-out culture. nobody can stay hidden. the predominantly white population of san luis obispo has been liberated by centering its whiteness for decades. the film festival has consistently played to that audience, even rejecting some of my more radical films before ac- cepting my work this year. so when i was approached to schedule a screening necsus – european journal of media studies vol ( ), of my film as continued programming after the uprisings i could not help but wonder if that was because i was one of the only representations of racial diversity in their festival lineup. san luis obispo made national headlines in august when activist tianna arata was arrested and charged with a series of misdemeanor charges that could result in an extended detainment for the twenty-year-old activ- ist.[ ] tianna is a hero, a powerful youth voice who has been critical to or- ganising peaceful rallies in the city of san luis obispo since shortly after floyd’s public murder. yet arata is another victim in a series of injustices targeting black lives matter activists with overblown charges in the wake of the george floyd protests and efforts to defund police departments nation- wide. the relationship between the san luis obispo film festival and tianna’s case is not self-evident. rather, tianna arata reflects a growing need for programming in small communities that supports the voice of black and brown people throughout the country. tianna’s voice, and the opinions, ideas, and voices of those like her, have been silenced in small communities like san luis obispo for generations. the quaint city, once deemed ‘the hap- piest place in america’,[ ] is being challenged during this year of great clarity. the response from the festival has been small, with a few emails that track with skye’s expressed goal of ‘doing more for diversity’. this also reflects her admission that ‘they aren’t doing enough’. we never scheduled another screening or any programming around the content of my film, and i am not convinced that the impact of the black lives matter movement in san luis obispo and arata’s experience have resonated with the organisers of the fes- tival in the same way i had hoped. while film festivals throughout the country may turn to the san luis obispo international film festival and the recently learned wisdom of festi- val director skye mclennan for their programming concerns, there is a deeper lesson to be learned from the sleepy coastal town. we are on the prec- ipice of great global change as filmmakers, audiences, and agents of the insti- tutions that uphold this industry. while the city of san luis obispo struggles to liberate their imprisoned hero in tianna arata, the wider filmmaking community must fight for a culture of festival programming that aptly re- flects the changes in our shifting world. that may be as concrete as a hybrid festival with both virtual and in-person events, as san luis obispo interna- tional film festival has scheduled for march ; or it may be something reflected more abstractly, and as the result of thorough in-depth self-analysis in the wake of such events as the death of george floyd or the arrest of san luis obispo international film festival whitaker tianna arata. either way the social responsibility does not only lie with skye and other festival programmers. the social impact begins with us, the crea- tors, the filmmakers, and the audiences – to tell stories, to listen to black and brown voices, to come together collectively in the face of global crises, and to emerge from with more clarity about our shared futures. justice a. whitaker (filmmaker) notes [ ] www.slofilmfest.org/about (accessed on october ). [ ] skye mclennan, personal interview, may . [ ] @slopublichealth twitter account, august . [ ] skye mclennan, personal interview, may . [ ] https://www.documentary.org/feature/virtual-festival-circuit-filmmakers-reflect-covid-months (accessed on october ). see also in this dossier limov and hobbins-white’s contribution on sxsw. [ ] skye mclennan, personal interview, may . [ ] ‘the future of festivals: creating community connection & curation online’, july : www.ifp.org. [ ] https://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/a /how-to-help-tianna-arata-black-lives-mat- ter-petitions-donate/ (accessed on october ). [ ] www.bluezones.com/ / /happiest-cities-america/ (accessed on october ). http://www.slofilmfest.org/about https://www.documentary.org/feature/virtual-festival-circuit-filmmakers-reflect-covid-months http://www.ifp.org/ https://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/a /how-to-help-tianna-arata-black-lives-matter-petitions-donate/ https://www.cosmopolitan.com/politics/a /how-to-help-tianna-arata-black-lives-matter-petitions-donate/ https://www.bluezones.com/ / /happiest-cities-america/ 	justice a. whitaker: san luis obispo international film festival: the social responsibility of redesigning an american film festival 	notes exploring the anthropology of energy: ethnography, energy and ethics jessica smith, colorado school of mines mette high, university of st. andrews the remarkable growth in global energy consumption has been accompanied by increasingly urgent questions about which energy sources ought to fuel the spiraling demand. witness the recent controversy surrounding the north dakota access pipeline, for example, in which activists joined forces with native american groups in an attempt to halt the final phase of construction. news of the protests reached around the world, raising concern not just about native american sovereignty and potential water and ground pollution of the transported oil, but also about the pipeline’s facilitation of our more general continued reliance on fossil fuels that hasten climate change. supporters of the pipeline pointed out that pipelines are safer than railroads for transporting the oil on which the us currently depends, and argued that the pipeline would bring economic benefits in the form of jobs and increased energy availability. the pipeline project thus became a flashpoint for much larger debates about the kinds of energy futures that people desire and how these impact the everyday lives of people along the paths of production, distribution, consumption, and waste. figure : rally against the dakota access pipeline in st. paul, minnesota. licensed under a creative commons attribution license. original source: fibonacci blue. figure : pro dakota access pipeline demonstrators in north dakota. photo credit dena takruri @dena. this special issue shows that debates about energy raise fundamental ethical questions that involve judgments about the kinds of lives we desire for ourselves and our others: what is the place of energy in human life? how do we make sense of the ways in which we produce, distribute, use and dispose of it? and how do such actions relate to what we consider to be right or good? the articles highlight the unique contributions an ethnographic perspective offers to understanding how people themselves encounter energy and judge its place in their lives. towards this end, we propose the term energy ethics to capture the ways in which people understand and ethically evaluate energy: how do people judge the ways in which energy can contribute to or imperil the kinds of lives, societies, and futures that they deem to be good or valuable? we emphasize that our approach takes seriously people’s own ethical sensibilities in relation to energy, working from the ground up, rather than analyzing social life through pre- defined notions of ethics. energy ethics illuminates the multiple and varied ways that people experience, conceptualize, and evaluate matters of energy in their lives. our approach to energy ethics is distinct but complementary to the growing literature on energy justice. scholars working in this area define energy justice as a “global energy system that fairly disseminates both the benefits and costs of energy services, and one that has representative and impartial energy decision-making” (sovacool et al. : ; see also sovacool and dworkin, ; sovacool ). the field is guided by ten principles: availability, affordability, due process, transparency and accountability, sustainability, intergenerational equity, intragenerational equity, responsibility, resistance and intersectionality (sovacool et al. ). while these principles have been generative for inspiring research, policymaking and practice that seeks to make energy systems fairer in terms of these particular principles, they too are social constructions that emerge from particular historical and cultural contexts (heffron and mccauley ). the field is building on this insight, as evidenced by the call to include more non-western justice theorists (sovacool et al. ) and research that identifies how actors themselves frame energy justice in their own activities (fuller and mccauley ). it is an “evaluative and normative” approach in which “energy justice researchers both assess injustices and make recommendations on how they should be approached” (jenkins et al. : ). in this special issue our focus on energy ethics takes a different approach. rather than applying a preexisting framework to evaluate a particular context, we identify how people themselves judge the rightness and wrongness of energy. starting from the ground up opens up analytic space to consider ethical sensibilities that inform how people understand and judge energy systems, but are not necessarily captured in the ten principles forming the basis of the energy justice literature. shedding light on the multiple energy ethics that emerge in culturally distinct places requires exploring how people understand energy. this task may initially seem straightforward, especially if “energy” is considered in abstract terms to be the fundamental ability to do work. commonsense might even suggest that ‘energy’ accomplishes similar things for a variety of people irrespectively of their particular sociocultural, geographic or economic location; according to this logic, energy improves lives by allowing people transportation and mobility and opportunities to light homes, schools and businesses. providing people access to these ‘basic’ or ‘universal’ energy needs animates many energy justice activities and global corporate advertisement campaigns. however, as this special issue demonstrates, once we begin to look more closely and consider the multiple and varied ways in which individual people encounter energy—and desire to encounter energy—the question of how they understand what energy actually is transforms into an invitation for transdisciplinary ethnographic scholarship. it becomes an opportunity to consider empirically how people live with energy and how energy may or may not contribute to their definition of a good life. admittedly ambitious in its scope, this special issue cuts across conventional analytical divisions that separate production, distribution, consumption and waste into distinct fields of inquiry. it also extends across wide-ranging geographical regions and, not least, it challenges scales that seek to isolate global concerns from local realities. our authors come from a variety of disciplines, including american studies, sociocultural anthropology, forestry and environmental science, literature, philosophy, and science and technology studies. this diversity reflects how ethnographic approaches to research have travelled across disciplines. throughout, these diverse scholars show what qualitative methods, especially an ethnographic gaze, can bring to our understanding of energy expectations and practices. out of the diversity of fieldsites, research methods, and conceptual frameworks, three clear themes emerge. the first is that multiple, conflicting understandings of energy animate how people engage it in their everyday lives and work. the second is that great diversity exists in how people make ethical judgments about the role of energy in the types of “good lives” and “good societies” they imagine for themselves. each of the papers troubles a normative ethical framework of fairness, showing that there is no singular set of values that are shared equally at all times by all actors. finally, the papers underscore the significance of government interests and public policy for shaping people’s experiences of and ethical judgments about energy. these perspectives reveal the value of research that is attuned to the ways in which people view the world and the place of energy in it, opening up space to identify and reflect on our taken-for- granted assumptions. why ethnography? the term ethnography has come to be equated very broadly with qualitative research projects that seek to provide a detailed, in-depth description of everyday life. this broad conceptualization is captured in the term’s greek etymology of έθνος ethnos ‘folk, people,’ and γράφω grapho ‘i write’. the authoritative collection by taylor ( ) exemplifies the enormous variety in ethnographic research, demonstrating various approaches to data gathering, data processing and project design. however, amidst the variety, some shared characteristics do appear. whether it is a tightly scheduled research team or a single researcher engrossed in long- term data gathering, whether researchers draw on mostly discrete methods of formal data collection or open-ended informal interactions, ethnographic research, for taylor, is characterized by its empirical approach. through especially first-hand observation, ethnographers set out to study people and, what taylor calls, their “social worlds” ( : ) . based on their observation, they produce texts that aim to be “full, nuanced and non-reductive” (ibid.: ). alongside such observation, hammersley and atkinson ( ) also emphasize the importance of first-hand participation. as they note: ethnography usually involves the researcher participating, overtly or covertly, in people’s daily lives for an extended period of time, watching what happens, listening to what is said, and/or asking questions through informal and formal interviews, collecting documents and artefacts – in fact, gathering whatever data are available to throw light on the issues that are the emerging focus of inquiry (hammersley and atkinson : ). given ethnographers’ broad range of data gathering activities, o’reilly poignantly remarks how ethnography is not so much a method of data collection as it is “an approach to research” ( : ). this approach is fluid and flexible, constantly adjusting to and reflecting on the data being gathered. instead of starting with set hypotheses to test, ethnographic research often lays out a theoretical problem or question that guides the evolving design and process of the research. with no clear demarcations between data gathering and data processing, the research for an interesting debate in relation to climate ethics and the (im)possibility of a universal notion of ‘justice’, see gardiner and weisbach ( ). ethnographic scholars refer to this also as “the human condition” (bernard : ), “ways of life” (denzin :xi), “human experience” (willis and trondman : ). it is a commonplace view of ethnographic research that it is devoid of hypotheses and its aim is merely to understand and describe phenomena (agar : ). however, as gobo ( ) reminds us, hypotheses are central to our everyday practices of reasoning and are routinely used thus proceeds in “a manner which is informed but open to surprises” (ibid.: ). as such, the researcher engages in a continuing process of both induction and deduction, of theory building and theory testing (bernard , ezzy : ). perhaps it is this open-ended approach to research that allows ethnographic research to be complemented so successfully with a whole suite of methods. some of these may be participant observation and semi-structured interviews, biographies and life histories. others may be more formal methods such as questionnaires and surveys, focus groups and experiments. depending on the specific discipline within which we work, the questions we ask about the human condition may differ quite substantially. in terms of energy research specifically, there is a crucial difference between those of us for whom “the first principle of inquiry is that reality is constructed uniquely by each person (the constructivist view) and those of us who start from the principle that external reality awaits our discovery through a series of increasingly good approximations to the truth (the positivist view)” (bernard : ). recognizing our epistemological differences, however, the actual methods we apply for data gathering belong to all of us (bernard ). taking this point seriously, this special issue seeks to showcase the broad range of insights and applications of ethnography in energy studies. the contributors come from sociocultural anthropology and beyond. in the articles, we ask very different questions and draw on very different methods. yet we all share the same fundamental approach to research, which o’reilly above defines as ‘ethnographic’. rather than limiting ethnography as suitable for only certain disciplines, thereby reproducing disciplinary silos of knowledge production, we demonstrate that ethnography can in general deepen our understanding of energy expectations and practices. indeed, we contend that this would also be the case for research that is more quantitative. there is no inherent or necessary bifurcation between qualitative and quantitative approaches to research. as bernard warns us, “never use the distinction between quantitative and qualitative as cover for talking about the difference between science and humanism. lots of scientists do their work without numbers, and many scientists whose work is highly quantitative consider themselves humanists” ( : ). in our view, ethnography has precisely the potential to facilitate dialogue among researchers of various disciplines, offering an approach that not only travels easily across academic divides but also brings into sharp focus the individual people and their practices that we seek to better understand. when we apply an ethnographic gaze, social life emerges with all its implicit and explicit relations, untold rules of thumb and self-aware sensitivities, underlying assumptions and clear intuitions, shared world views and conflicts of interest. a plethora of habits, rules, norms and constraints appear. seeking to understand this ethnographically involves an “important bridge between macro and micro perspectives” (o’reilly : , see also geertz ). rather than constituting distinct scales where we can choose which one to examine, the macro and micro are “confounded in one another” (comaroff and comaroff : ). the local and the global, here and elsewhere, now and then, the concrete and the virtual are inseparable. importantly, this inseparability is not merely theoretical, conceptual or abstract but rather “an empirical conjuncture” that forms the reality we seek to understand (ibid.: ). an ethnographic interest in, say, a family’s smart meter operations requires attention to the material and moral conditions that animate their usage, as well as the social and political environment that they both consciously and unconsciously to make sense of the world around us. this means that whilst fixed or rigid hypotheses to apply, test, and adopt or discard are generally avoided in ethnographic research, “working hypotheses” and “guiding hypotheses” ( : ) that remain flexible and explorative do not conflict with this research aim. spawn. looking ethnographically at how people understand energy thus entails scholarly attention to these awkward scales that simultaneously escape, embrace, consume and construct the local. ethnography thus challenges our preconceived ideas and offers to take us on a journey that might be full of surprises. how have anthropologists studied energy? anthropologists have long studied energy, but only recently began to organize their work along these lines. indeed, anthropologists have used studies of particular energy sources—ranging from coal and oil to nuclear and renewables—to contribute to wider disciplinary debates. for example, a substantial anthropological literature on oil plays a key role in critiquing the pervasive resource curse literature (apter ; behrends et al., ; weszkalnys ) and in advancing scholarship on the interrelationships of states, corporations and the communities closest to production sites (e.g. appel ; coronil ; rogers ; sawyer ). anthropological research on oil has also made crucial interventions into theories of resources and resource materialities (richardson and weszkalnys ), highlighting the distributed networks of material technologies and infrastructures and regimes of expertise and representation that emerge along the points of extraction, production, marketing and consumption (appel et al. ). considering other energy sources, anthropologists examine the labor and environmental politics of coal mining (mcneil ; rolston , ) and offer a critical lens on renewable energy (acheson and acheson ; campbell et al. ; cross ; gunel ; howe and boyer ; howe , ; lord ; love and garwood ; morris ). anthropologists also point to the mutual imbrication of nuclear energy with the nuclear weapons complex (brooks ; gusterson ; maasco ; nader ). anthropological scholarship on energy more generally, rather than particular energy sources, historically appears in conjunction with heightened public and policy concern during energy crises and perceived energy transitions, including our current predicament. these stretch back to leslie white’s ( , ) early evolutionary theory linking the “cultural development” of societies to their energy production, which was framed by his concerns about the implications of dwindling reserves of coal and oil and increasing world demand for energy. in the wake of the s energy crisis, laura nader ( , ) used her observations of nuclear scientists to call for more divergent thinking about the taken-for-granted values that inform scientific and policy debates about energy futures, spurring increased anthropological attention to experts and expertise. other anthropologists documented troubling sociocultural and environmental impacts of energy development, especially for vulnerable communities and indigenous peoples (e.g. jorgensen et al. ; kruse et al. ). after almost two decades of scarce anthropological research on energy, a revitalization of the field occurred in the early s, sparked by multiple sources: renewed concerns about geopolitical uncertainty wrought by the iraq war, the us onshore oil and gas production boom spurred by the twinned technologies of horizontal drilling and hydraulic fracturing, as well as climate change initiatives. the edited book cultures of energy: power, practices, technologies (strauss et al., ) stands out as the first collection of anthropological studies of energy that together assert that “human use of energy is understood and experienced through cultural frameworks” (ibid.: ). following this publication, special issues of anthropological journals have explored energy and see boyer ( ), mitcham and rolston ( ), strauss et al. ( ) for more detailed critiques of white’s legacy for the anthropology of energy as well as the historical patterns in anthropological research on energy. political power (boyer ), electricity’s influence on anthropological theory and the human sciences (boyer ), and energy and economy (love and isenhour ). anthropologists also play a key role in the emerging field of the energy humanities (e.g. szeman and boyer ). this current generation of energy studies continues in the earlier vein by exploring how energy production and use unevenly distribute other forms of social, political and economic power. these studies stand out from previous approaches for their attention to patterns of consumption as well as production, and to renewable as well as fossil resources. for example, cymene howe and dominic boyer illustrate how the (now stalled) development of a massive wind park in oaxaca, mexico, inspired local resistance from nearby indigenous communities and fishers concerned about local environmental damage as well as disrespect of communal property regimes (howe ) and how national electricity grids encourage demand and create subjects of the state (boyer ). this special issue’s focus on ethnography, energy and ethics builds on and complements two key conceptual frameworks developed by anthropologists to study energy: energyscape and energopower. the authors of the cultures of energy volume propose the term energyscape, drawing on the anthropologist arjun appadurai’s ( ) influential theoretical framework that draws attention to dynamic flows across boundaries of global economies, cultures and politics. analyzing an energyscape allows the authors to shift across local, national, and transnational scales in order to “consider the problem of energy in motion across social and physical spaces, shifting its cultural, social, economic, and technological values as it flows from one domain to the next” (strauss et al. : ). they offer a series of energy-inspired metaphors to conceptually link the chapters. currents and flows, for example, are advanced to shed light on the “parallel between physical flows of energy and the circulation of social, economic, and political relationships that emerge in the context of energy systems” (ibid.: ), while transformation draws attention to social change and transitions ( ). in a special issue of anthropological quarterly, dominic boyer offers the analytic frame of energopower to focus scholarly attention to the interrelations of energy and political power identified by many anthropologists, including those in the cultures of energy volume. as a “genealogy of modern power that rethinks political power through the twin analytics of electricity and fuel” ( : ), energopower has the potential to draw together otherwise disparate research into a shared scholarly discussion. the authors of this special issue engage both approaches to studying energy. as a whole, our collection illustrates how energy and energy infrastructure take on different values in different locations. disagreement about energy production from coal seam gas development threatens a community in australia (grubert and skinner), whereas a new mexican town negotiates becoming the only nuclear waste storage facility in the us (richter). residents of two zambian copper mining towns desire more access to the electricity that flows to the mines (kesselring), whereas transmission lines in the us can be viewed as an unwelcome visual blight (wuebben). the study of ‘energy biographies’ even shows how energy consumption can take on different valences for the same person (groves). the articles also draw on the notion of energopower to show how political power is exercised through energy infrastructure, from the labs of synthetic biologists (mcleod) to off-grid energy consumers (forde). the contribution of this collection is its explicit engagement with the multiple and sometimes conflicting ethical frameworks that animate these varied encounters with energy. the term complements the philosopher michel foucault’s ( ) influential theorization of biopower, as a technique of power in which nation states regulate their subjects and control populations through managing bodies and life. what kind of ethics? as noted by nader, “experts often claim that energy solutions are purely technological” ( : ). while this may indicate a commitment to late modernity and its “almost unchallenged priority of scientific progress and technological innovation” (barbour et al. : , see also szeman and boyer : ), energy is never just technological in any strict or narrow sense of the word. as goodman ( ) put forward in his provocation: “whether or not it draws on new scientific research, technology is a branch of moral philosophy, not of science”. this is because there is no neutral moral ground from which technology can be understood, implemented or pulled back. any action is underpinned by the centrality of ethical practice and judgement, experience and reasoning, cultivation and questioning. with reference to energy research specifically, sovacool thus observes that “it is a mistake to talk about building infrastructure, improving energy security, developing energy resources, forecasting future energy demands, or conducting research on new technologies without first asking what this energy is for, what values and moral frameworks ought to guide us, and who benefits” (sovacool : ). in this special issue we want to take this further by recognizing how ethical considerations – “recognition of persons, attributions of agency and responsibility, evaluations of states of affairs” (laidlaw : ) are not limited to researchers and other experts. we take seriously how ethical considerations are pervasive in human life among all actors. some of these actors work in research laboratories to develop new biofuels (mcleod), while others draw on kinship values to determine how they will engage in off-grid household energy exchanges (singh et al.). again others engage in activism for more democratic forms of energy (lennon), while still others visit a park that turns high-voltage transmission lines into potential aesthetic features of the landscape (wuebben). ethical considerations are ubiquitous and central to how humans act and interact (high , lambek ). this ethical constitution of human social life should be recognized in our energy research, as to do otherwise would be to ignore how people in their everyday lives make sense of and engage with energy. in anthropology, a growing strand of scholarship has turned to ancient greek and roman ethics for conceptual inspiration. these ancient scholars offer a picture of morality closely bound up with everyday practices of self-cultivation, the perfection of specific technologies of moral development and an emphasis on developing a virtuous character as the basis for moral action in everyday political and social life. one of the attractions of the virtue ethics of classical antiquity has been its possibility for engaging in an often critical dialogue with kantian and utilitarian moral positions. but this attraction to moral philosophy is not without its reservations. indeed, as discussed in the edited collection by howell ( ), although this classical strand of philosophy has a long intellectual tradition, it is not concerned with “locating the moral subject within social and cultural worlds” (ibid.: ). given anthropology’s ethnographic approach, moral projects are necessarily part of a wider historical, political, and socio-economic dynamic. to achieve a reinterpretation of virtue ethics that is sensitive to social life as lived, many anthropologists have turned for inspiration to foucault’s writings on moral subjectivation (e.g. faubion , laidlaw , mahmood ). applying an ethnographic gaze on ethics, anthropology thus examines “the human predicament of trying to live a life that one is somehow responsible for but is in many respects out of one’s control” (mattingly : ). that is, an recognizing that this is a provocation that emerged in the late s in the us, where fundamental shake-ups were vocalized, such statements can be seen as important precursors to later discussions, for example, by bernard ( ) on the relationship between science and humanities. approach that is attentive to processes of ethical judgment grounded in both singular events and larger structures. given this conceptual orientation of anthropology, our calling for attention to energy ethics does not involve the scholar making a priori assumptions about what constitutes a good life, a good community, a moral person and the like. this is not an exercise in which scholars impose their own moral views on to those we study. rather, it is call for us to be cognizant of the moral aspects of social life as it pertains to matters of energy. this means that this special issue is not advocating certain energy resources, energy practices, or energy politics above others. as laidlaw remarks: it is important not to confuse the claim that the ethical dimension is pervasive in human life with the quite different question of how often people meet or disappoint their own or anyone else’s expectations or hopes. the claim on which the anthropology of ethics rests is not an evaluative claim that people are good: it is a descriptive claim that they are evaluative ( : ). whilst recognizing the urgent politics surrounding energy, our mission is thus one of neither critique nor advocacy of the ethical positions taken by the people we study. this approach requires scholars to be self-reflexive about their own political commitments, to recognize when and how these influence our interpretation of ethnographic evidence, and to open up intellectual space for our interlocutors to enact and express commitments that differ from our own. this approach distinguishes our collection from much anthropological scholarship on energy, since energy is a subject matter that so often gets caught in scholars’ implicit or explicit value judgements. although only few scholars engage theoretically and empirically with questions of ethics, their publications are often informed by strong ethical persuasions. the focus on an impending energy transition in the context of climate change, for example, often asserts an ethical stance about particular energy futures that are deemed good or right. for example, the editors of the special issue on “energy and economy” of the journal economic anthropology argue that because “the postcarbon transition… is now inevitable”, anthropologists must encourage people to “make room for the development of plausible postcarbon narratives” (love and isenhour : ). likewise, the editors of cultures of energy see anthropology’s contribution to energy studies in terms of its help with “reducing global dependence on fossil fuels” in order to support more “sensible and sustainable” energy futures ( : ). by casting particular sorts of energy sources and energy futures as good or desirable, little room is left for understanding how the people we study make sense of the world. we must be self-reflexive as we ask: whose voices are being heard? what does an analytical framework allow us to see? and what does it hide? embracing the ethnographic gaze with its many surprises and awkward scales, energy ethics is a term that itself entails an ethical project, valuing the intricacies of our imbrication with energy. what do these articles contribute to social science research on energy? the authors in this special collection all share an ethnographic approach to understanding energy. from blackouts in a zambian copper mining town to the ideals of responsible research innovation that guide the work of british scientists producing biofuels, the articles illustrate the complex and contradictory ways in which people live with—and without—energy. the research spans multiple scales, from the off-grid “prosumers” in wales who generate their own electricity (ford), to people who live in the midst of vast energy infrastructures that concentrate the dilemmas of production, distribution, consumption, and waste in particular places, such as the australian town contemplating a future with coal seam gas development (grubert and skinner), the nebraskan park that domesticates the “wire evil” of high voltage transmission lines (wuebben), and the new mexican community that negotiates a nuclear waste site (richter). the collection as a whole underscores the multiple and conflicting understandings of energy that animate how people encounter energy in their everyday lives. frigo provides a discussion of the multifaceted history of ideas that has contributed to the emergence of, what he calls, our “traditional energy paradigm”. this paradigm influences our conceptualizations of energy, making us notice only certain measurable, quantifiable, and mechanistic properties of energy at the expense of many other diverse sets of properties. as such, frigo shows how our paradigmatic conceptualization of energy is a particular cultural construct that is grounded in and shaped by centuries of increasingly homogenizing and colonizing discourses. yet, for frigo, alternative paradigms are possible and he invites us to think creatively about how we can better attend analytically to these. lennon traces how distinctions in what energy is—including between the “big e” and “little e” conceptions of fossil fuel industrial capitalism and decentralized, locally produced energies—come to matter in the intersection between the black lives matter and energy justice movements in new york city. he provides a framework for not just democratizing, but decolonizing energy, disentangling energy systems from those that cause certain lives not to matter. the collection also shows how people make ethical judgments about the role of energy in the societies which they imagine as ‘good’ or ‘desirable’. based on a qualitative methodology they call ‘energy biographies’, groves et al. explore how members of different communities in wales and london reflect on the role of energy use in creating lives which they themselves imagine to be ‘good’. as the authors show, embodiment, attachment and life narratives affect implicitly and explicitly the ways in which people use and make sense of energy in their everyday lives. the result is a complex everyday energy ethics. rather than being consistent about which energy practices contribute to good lives, the article shows how individuals can hold multiple and sometimes conflicting views simultaneously. grubert and skinner show that multiple and conflicting views of energy’s contribution to ‘the good’ also animate community-level politics in their exploration of perceptions of proposed coal gas seam development in a town in new south wales, australia. residents hold strong positions that coal seam gas would either endanger or facilitate a desirable future and quality of life. they trace this polarization to a long period of uncertainty about whether the development would go forward and a feeling among locals that they were not empowered to participate in those decisions. wuebben’s study of utility-owned arboretum in nebraska invites us to consider how energy infrastructures can take on varying moral saliences, showing how high voltage transmission lines are sites of tension between landscape aesthetics and environmental ethics. whereas transmission lines have historically been considered a blight or “wire evil,” the arboretum is frequented by visitors who view it as a beautiful place, pointing to the possibility of a “power line poetics” that balances the aesthetics of electric infrastructures and the ethics of renewable energy development. singh et al. critique dominant social science studies of the increasingly prevalent practice of energy trading, in which householders exchange locally provisioned (and usually renewable) energy with others. whereas the existing literature assumes that people are motivated by “rational economic choices,” their ethnographic intervention study in a rural village in india shows such market exchanges do not exhaust the spectrum of actual practices: people also engage in energy exchanges informed by the ideals of mutuality and obligation encompassed in kinship systems. the article by chatti et al. also describes how energy practices, as well as academic and popular paradigms, are informed by multiple, and indeed conflicting, ethical judgments. drawing on multidisciplinary debates surrounding bioenergy, discourse analysis and ethnographic research in the indian himalayas, the authors call for attention to so-called ‘mundane bioenergy’: the wood, dung, and crop residue that is used in cooking stoves across the world for people’s subsistence needs. although such bioenergy is often presented as an attractive ‘green alternative’, the authors argue that it often entails significant emissions affecting people’s health and the climate, large-scale deforestation and other forms of environmental degradation. they thus encourage us to reflect on renewables as not necessarily a moral good for those who rely on them and the earth at large. the articles also highlight the significance of government interests and public policy for shaping people’s experiences of and ethical judgments about energy. seeking to understand how residents of carlsbad, new mexico, came to accept nuclear waste, richter examines the complex interplay of sociotechnical expertise, trust in governance, and visions of a desirable future present in their negotiations with the federal government. she brings together the analytical frames of energopower and technopolitics to show how the risks from radioactive waste were made understandable and manageable. kesselring’s examination of blackouts in new zambian mining towns shows how electrical infrastructure is inherently political, structuring new social classes. the mines consume more than half the available electricity and maintain their supply even during shortfalls, despite the fact that there are daily blackouts and only one-fifth of households across zambia are even connected to the national grid. in forde’s article, ethnographic research on off-grid ecovillages in wales shows how villagers have to adapt their energy usage to temporal and seasonal energy fluctuations. this is partly due to the problem of how to store electricity, and partly due to the specific sociotechnical regimes implemented in each household. forde argues that these encounters with energy give rise to a particular off-grid energy subjectivity. while the villagers see off-grid life as a moral reconfiguration of industrialized societies’ relationship with energy, ford shows how their energy subjectivity actually captures many of the elements of self-governance that is being promoted by the uk government. mccleod further shows the intersections between british government discourses and local energy practices in the context of a synthetic biology research laboratory that seeks to develop new sources of fuel from bacteria. while the government heralds the discoveries for their exciting promise, the scientists themselves feel less certain about the ethical projects entailed in their experiments. some scientists voice their empathy for the anthropomorphized bacteria while others join in the triumphalist potentially new biological industrial revolution. together, the articles in this special issue ethnographically explore people’s everyday engagements with energy, illuminating the multiple, varied and sometimes contradictory ethical stances that emerge as people live with and think about energy. collectively they urge us to rethink the normative ethical frameworks that animate much academic scholarship and public debates about energy. energy ethics invites us to become more self-reflexive about the assumptions and commitments driving our scholarship and to take the ethical 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( ) * anne zimmerman, jd, ms candidate columbia university © anne zimmerman. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license, which permits unrestricted use, distributio n, and reproduction, provided the original author and source are credited. federal troops in the portland, oregon protests: race, authoritarianism, and a posse comitatus act violation anne zimmerman* abstract the use of federal troops in the portland oregon protests has a racial element. the motive to disperse the protests could be the disempowerment of those protesting racial injustice cloaked in an innocuous motive like assisting local police in ensuring the safety of civilians and protecting property. the implications for equality, respect, and justice in the us are dire: if federal troops can suppress racial protests in moments of nonviolent protesting, the racist undertones normalize the disparity in other areas like healthcare and access to education and high paying jobs where black people do not experience a level playing field. keywords: justice, racial justice, posse comitatus, insurrection act, free speech, military ethics introduction in portland, oregon, federal troops detained protesters placing several into unmarked cars. the authority to use federal trained military, in this case homeland security agents, to enforce laws against citizens likely violates the posse comitatus act meant to prevent the use of the military in law enforcement. under the insurrection act, the federal authority to use the military is extended in certain cases but none applies unequivocally to the oregon fact pattern. the oregon protests are racial protests. protesters want change that embodies the black lives matter movement, equality, and justice. police brutality was the impetus for the protests in the wake of the death of george floyd. the presence of both the police and federal troops escalates the need to protest by those who feel law enforcement is the agitator creating a circular continuous pattern of protest. the use of federal troops in this case has a racial element. the motive to disperse the protests could be the disempowerment of those zimmerman, federal troops in the portland, oregon protests, voices in bioethics, vol. ( ) protesting racial injustice cloaked in an innocuous motive like assisting local police in ensuring the safety of civilians and protecting property. the implications for equality, respect, and justice in the us are dire: if federal troops can suppress racial protests in moments of nonviolent protesting, the racist undertones normalize the disparity in other areas like healthcare and access to education and high paying jobs where black people do not experience a level playing field. in covid- , the president requested that the states skip the cdc and report their data directly to hhs; the epa is compromising air standards during a pandemic that affects lung capacity; the budget cuts at the noaa limit the ability to research climate change. the seemingly evenhanded actions have racially disparate affects—hhs will release the data as it sees fit, not according to cdc guidelines; air quality affects those in poorer neighborhoods; climate change and adverse weather events hurt those who are more vulnerable, live in lower quality dwellings, are less insured, or are homeless. in portland, the use of the military is part of the pattern. the pattern affects the disenfranchised. even if the actions on their face are neutral, their impact on race can be unconstitutional. analysis i. application of the posse comitatus act and the insurrection act the posse comitatus act prevents the military from using its force in executing domestic laws. in oregon, the federal “help” is anti-constitutional: the purpose of the use of military is to disband legal protests, something the state and city do not want to use federal troops to achieve. the federal forces suppress people from exercising their rights to assembly and free speech. the mayor of portland and the governor of oregon explicitly stated that they do not want the federal troops present. federal military stepping in to perform local police responsibilities against the will of the mayor is feeding racial tensions. the principals behind the posse comitatus act are both anti-militarism and the prevention of abuse of power. the military is not an instrument of civilian law enforcement because there is a moral foundation met by ensuring personal freedom and state autonomy. the act is a moral check on presidential use of the powerful military. the insurrection act provides exceptions to be used in dire circumstances: when states or localities request help (for example, in riots in la after police brutality against rodney king); absent a request, the case of “necessity” due to an “unlawful” assemblage or rebellion, or when the actions interfere with federal or state law and the government has issued a proclamation to disperse which has been ignored. past examples include civil rights era uses to enforce desegregation that was ordered by federal courts: eisenhower in little rock, arkansas ; and kennedy in mississippi in . in the case of desegregation, the insurrection act was invoked because those exercising legal rights were met with people unlawfully standing in the way. the act allowed those presidents to protect the marginalized. the role of the military under the insurrection act is to support local law enforcement – the federal government should not direct the actions. in oregon, the protesters who have been arrested were exercising protected first amendment rights. the use of the insurrection act, while arguably to promote public safety and the protection of federal property, could have the effect of quieting protesters based on their message rather than behavior. the los angeles riots in included numerous deaths, the burning down of buildings, and significant violence. the danger was clear and the destruction was significant. the relationship between people and police has changed. some argue to allow federal troops to intervene would interfere with the relationship between the community and the police, using a heavy hand of government to quiet the marginalized. while cities in the us have experienced looting, whether “looting justifies[y] shooting” is settled law. federal troops must obey “standing rules for the use of zimmerman, federal troops in the portland, oregon protests, voices in bioethics, vol. ( ) force.” had police followed appropriate local use of force guidelines, the very thing being protested would not have occurred. nonetheless, the argument that troops can help, especially when cloaked as law and order style assistance considering looting in some cities, parallels the norms of many who value law and order. those envisioning fairness as a system of punishment for crime rather than fairness as a level playing field for all may support the president’s decision to invoke the insurrection act. while it is a stretch to apply the act to the oregon fact pattern because the help was not requested by the state, the ethics behind the decision reflect public safety despite indifference toward quieting the peaceful demonstrations. the police force in portland is not necessarily against the federal presence and appears to be joining forces with them in some circumstances. the federal government argues that the troops are there to diffuse the situation. weeks ago, the local police used tear gas, stun grenades, and acoustic weapons. now, federal troops use similar instruments. the mayor and the citizen organization that oversees the portland police moved to control police behavior and to ban tear gas. the bigger issue is the racism, not the protests. the federal government insists they are there to protect portland from “violent anarchists.” the government asserts that rather than peaceful protesters, they are detaining those who target federal buildings. the portrayal of protesters as anarchists is unsettling – it could lead people to believe those wanting justice and equality are anti-american when really the values they are protecting by protesting are long held core american principles. wyden and merkley, the two oregon senators, introduced an amendment to the national defense authorization act called the preventing authoritarian policing tactics on america’s streets act. the bill would require visible identification on federal troops, disclosure of how many troops would be sent and why, and would limit their authority to participate in crowd control not requested by the state or locality but would still allow the federal government to protect federal property. the amendment addresses prevention of authoritarian tactics and ensures people’s constitutional rights are not violated by federal orders. ii. relationship to racism a racial motive to invoke the insurrection act and use it against protesters is a flagrant abuse of power. using military force in this manner furthers racial tension—why these protests? why now? since , racial protests over the new york city death of eric garner, the ferguson, missouri death of michael brown, the baltimore, maryland death of freddy gray, and the minnesota deaths of philando castile and george floyd all took place in the city of the police brutality as well as in other cities around the country. the protests following the killing of george floyd by a police officer represent a steady progression of increasing awareness of police brutality against black people. if the federal government steps in now to quash the voice of the people, it would cement a federal government relationship pitted against those fighting for racial justice. with all actions, there is an opportunity cost—a different action was foregone to allow the funding for the action taken. in covid- , black americans die at a disproportionate rate. to help states manage covid- , the federal government could use its power to manufacture ppe, develop a vaccine or better treatments, and support states’ efforts to supply the best care to the most people. tax revenue is being diverted to suppress people’s rights with a backdrop of racial unrest. when viewed in the context of federal government power, of deaths of black people from covid- , and from a historical perspective of ascriptive americanism, a theory that the liberal calculus that fed american development and moral backdrop operated alongside racist policies, the use of federal troops is a continuation of racist traditions. the thing in need of repair is the relationship between black americans and zimmerman, federal troops in the portland, oregon protests, voices in bioethics, vol. ( ) the police. the federal government should be taking stronger action against police brutality rather than stepping in where local leaders sense federal troops escalate the tension. the small issue of potential looting should not cloud the large issue of racism. conclusion legal means to prevent the abuse of power should complement ethical concerns driving how the us addresses racism. if a posse comitatus act exception is made when the state does not want federal help, the protests fall within first amendment rights rather than unlawful rebellions or assemblages, and there is not an urgent or immediate danger accompanied by notice and a proclamation to disperse, racism begins to emerge as not only a result of but as a precursor to the federal deployment. in a country with ethics and laws that require equality and justice, the federal action underpins more than a military overreach. like federal decisions in healthcare, mass incarceration, public education, and the environment, placing federal troops in portland is a continuation of seemingly neutral decisions that disproportionately affect people based on their race. npr, all things considered, july , . https://www.npr.org/ / / / /federal-officers-use-unmarked- vehicles-to-grab-protesters-in-portland they are customs and border patrol agents and us marshals special operations group. posse comitatus act, u.s.c. section , in . u.s.c. §§ – ; prior to , u.s.c. §§ – ; amended , . yick wo v. hopkins, u.s. ( ) congressional research service, “the posse comitatus act and related matters: the use of the military to execute civilian law,” updated november , . https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/r .pdf interview of gov. kate brown https://www.koin.com/news/oregon/gov-kate-brown-on-covid-potential-rollbacks-protesters- -on- - /; associated press, “mayor of portland to trump: get your troops out of the city,” july , . https://www.tampabay.com/news/nation-world/ / / /oregon-officials-decry-portland-arrests-by-federal-agents- dressed-in-camouflage/ congressional research service, “defense primer: legal authorities for the use of military forces,” updated january , . https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/if .pdf congressional research service, “the posse comitatus act and related matters: the use of the military to execute civilian law,” updated november , . https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/r .pdf the national guard is a state-run successor to the militia and is usually used first in help with natural disasters or to assist police in managing protests and keeping civilians safe. the national guard is not subject to posse comitatus – it is permitted to help with civilian law enforcement. national guard is commonly used in riots although the federal military has been called in when the riots are outside the scope of the national guard’s training or effectiveness. mark f. cancian, senior adviser, international security program, center for strategic and international studies, “use of military forces in the covid- emergency,” march , . https://www.csis.org/analysis/use-military-forces-covid- -emergency alicia victoria lozano, “the insurrection act was last used in the los angeles riots. invoking it again could undo years of police reform, some warn.” nbc news, june , . https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/insurrection-act-was-last-used- -los-angeles-riots-invoking-n mark nevitt, “the president and the domestic deployment of the military: answers to five key questions,” just security, june , . https://www.justsecurity.org/ /the-president-the-military-and-minneapolis-what-you-need-to-know/ nevitt. https://www.oregonlive.com/news/ / /evidence-shows-portland-police-working-with-federal-officers-at-protests- contradicting-city-officials.html https://www.npr.org/ / / / /federal-officers-use-unmarked-vehicles-to-grab-protesters-in-portland https://www.npr.org/ / / / /federal-officers-use-unmarked-vehicles-to-grab-protesters-in-portland https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/title_ _of_the_united_states_code https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/ / https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/ / https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/r .pdf https://www.koin.com/news/oregon/gov-kate-brown-on-covid-potential-rollbacks-protesters- -on- - / https://www.koin.com/news/oregon/gov-kate-brown-on-covid-potential-rollbacks-protesters- -on- - / https://www.tampabay.com/news/nation-world/ / / /oregon-officials-decry-portland-arrests-by-federal-agents-dressed-in-camouflage/ https://www.tampabay.com/news/nation-world/ / / /oregon-officials-decry-portland-arrests-by-federal-agents-dressed-in-camouflage/ https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/if .pdf https://fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/r .pdf https://www.csis.org/people/mark-f-cancian https://www.csis.org/analysis/use-military-forces-covid- -emergency https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/insurrection-act-was-last-used- -los-angeles-riots-invoking-n https://www.justsecurity.org/ /the-president-the-military-and-minneapolis-what-you-need-to-know/ https://www.oregonlive.com/news/ / /evidence-shows-portland-police-working-with-federal-officers-at-protests-contradicting-city-officials.html https://www.oregonlive.com/news/ / /evidence-shows-portland-police-working-with-federal-officers-at-protests-contradicting-city-officials.html zimmerman, federal troops in the portland, oregon protests, voices in bioethics, vol. ( ) oregon governor kate brown banned tear gas unless there is a declared riot and the use of teargas is announced first. police did not respect the ban. https://www.wweek.com/news/ / / /hours-after-gov-kate-brown-signs-tear-gas-ban-into-law- portland-police-deploy-more-gas-onto- protesters/#:~:text=on% june% % c% oregon% gov,is% imminent% before% deploying% it. morgan phillips, “dhs pushes back against claim federal agents detaining portland protesters aren't identifying themselves,” fox news, july , . https://www.foxnews.com/politics/dhs-pushes-back-against-claim-federal-agents-detaining-portland- protesters-arent-identifying-themselves quoting chad wolf, acting secretary, department of homeland security. https://www.merkley.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/ndaa% crowd% control% . . .pdf linda poon and marie patino, “citylab university: a timeline of u.s. police protests,” bloomberg news, bloomberg citylab, june , . https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ - - /a-history-of-protests-against-police-brutality rogers m. smith, “beyond tocqueville, myrdal, and hartz: the multiple traditions in america,” the american political science review, vol. , no. (sep., ), pp. - https://www.wweek.com/news/ / / /hours-after-gov-kate-brown-signs-tear-gas-ban-into-law-portland-police-deploy-more-gas-onto-protesters/#:~:text=on% june% % c% oregon% gov,is% imminent% before% deploying% it. https://www.wweek.com/news/ / / /hours-after-gov-kate-brown-signs-tear-gas-ban-into-law-portland-police-deploy-more-gas-onto-protesters/#:~:text=on% june% % c% oregon% gov,is% imminent% before% deploying% it. https://www.wweek.com/news/ / / /hours-after-gov-kate-brown-signs-tear-gas-ban-into-law-portland-police-deploy-more-gas-onto-protesters/#:~:text=on% june% % c% oregon% gov,is% imminent% before% deploying% it. https://www.foxnews.com/politics/dhs-pushes-back-against-claim-federal-agents-detaining-portland-protesters-arent-identifying-themselves https://www.foxnews.com/politics/dhs-pushes-back-against-claim-federal-agents-detaining-portland-protesters-arent-identifying-themselves https://www.merkley.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/ndaa% crowd% control% . . .pdf https://www.bloomberg.com/authors/auc draqlce/linda-poon https://www.bloomberg.com/authors/at ydozwhfs/marie-patino https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/ - - /a-history-of-protests-against-police-brutality d e b a t e keywords resistance monuments history protests debate should monuments resist? the social outbreak of october defined a new role for monuments in chile. during the demonstrations, not only the statues that paid tribute to spanish conquistadors – namely, those who built a country to the detriment of the native peoples – were torn down, but the historical (therefore constructed) backing of certain buildings’ patrimonial status was also questioned. even the baquedano monument, located in the middle of a roundabout of the same name, at the focal center of the demonstrations in santiago, was completely covered with new meanings during the protests. a r q — s a n t ia g o , c h il e in late may , the death of african american citizen george floyd – at the hands of the minneapolis police, in the u s – reactivated the black lives matter movement, which resists and opposes racism against african american people. in the context of this movement, a series of statues that paid tribute to slave-traders and owners were attacked, generating a surprising parallel (just months away), between what happened in chile and in other parts of the world. considering both events, in the debate on this issue of a r q we asked: should monuments resist in place? or is it preferable to protect them by removing them from the public space? what happens if their meaning changes? are they still considered monuments? what is it that resists in them? after all, if monuments materialize the intersection between history, architecture, and the city, what can resist the most, their meaning or their material? fig. la estatua de edward colston cae en bristol, inglaterra, el de junio de . edward colston statue falls in bristol, england, on june , . © ben birchall, pa wire/ pa image fig. estatua del general baquedano después de las protestas del estallido social iniciadas el de octubre de , santiago de chile. the general baquedano statue after the protests of the social outbreak, which started on october , , santiago, chile. © francisco díaz, de febrero de / february , a r q — s a n t ia g o , c h il e continúa en / continues in: p. u ntil october , , public monuments were the least known national monument category, from those established by law , . from the technical secretariat of the council of national monuments, we had already noticed the low visibility of these works and we had started an initiative to enhance their value towards the community. we wanted to highlight – as they deserve – the works of distinguished artists such as virginio arias, rebeca matte, blanca merino, or gustavo garcía del postigo, through heritage circuits and seminars. we had designed a whole program. however, since that friday, public monuments received the most evident manifestation of the social outbreak’s emerging emotions. the geo-referenced registry of damages and alterations to the cultural heritage protected by law that we carried out from the ministry of cultures, arts and heritage, yielded , affected patrimonial assets throughout the country. of these, correspond to public monuments, the majority with minor damage such as scratches with spray and/ or enamel and adhered elements, and with greater damage, such as deformation, loss of parts, cracks, fissures, collapse, removal, replacement or fire damage. most of those which suffered the greatest damage represent military or police characters or events from the independence, conquest, and colony periods. in short, figures installed in the public space that are not perceived by some groups as binding or worthy of pride, but as symbols of a history that in many cases they do not even recognize as their own. thus, a misunderstanding of meanings was generated through heritage. through public monuments, the state was challenged by a society that manifested itself. questions that were unheard or hadn’t been formulated strongly enough arose now energetically from citizens. what heritage reflects today’s society? what really represents us? could the same sculpture be uncomfortable for some and heroic for others? and, above all, do they enable us to project the society we want to build? yes, we were shaken. these questions show that heritage is a dynamic phenomenon. identity and culture are in constant change and transformation. change that in recent decades has been even more accelerated, given the communications’ globalization. it is not possible to conceive heritage, therefore, as a closed list, only under the prism of past civilizations. heritage is built from the values of present societies. furthermore, public monuments, understood as elements bearing meanings, are installed in the most public monuments: protagonists of a possible future e r w i n b r e v i s v e r g a r a secretario técnico del consejo de monumentos nacionales, ministerio de las culturas, las artes y el patrimonio, chile a r q — s a n t ia g o , c h il e erwin brevis vergara <ebrevis@monumentos.gob.cl> democratic place within the urban context: public space. it is there where we all have free access, where diversity manifests itself, therefore, the elements that construct this space must express democracy, since it belongs to all of us. then, what do we do with those public monuments that represent oppression and harm for some groups and generate such a resistance that reaches violence? it is a broad question. in the technical secretariat of the c m n, we initiated a process of reflection, considering the experience, the international context, and our local reality. there can be various solutions: installing another monument that serves as a counterpoint in front of an ‘uncomfortable’ one; incorporating the superposition of an artistic action on a monument that generates dissent; removing and relocating a statue where it can be understood within context (in a museum, for example). whatever the new symbolic resignification, the most important thing will be the process to reach it. we will need a broad, participatory, consultative and inclusive dialogue that encompasses different visions and where, ultimately, society as a whole, builds and drives its own process. and for this, decentralization is essential, so that decisions are made at the local level, proximate and belonging to the territory, in a transparent, open and democratic manner. however, heritage management today does not have all the tools to address this issue. this is why a change in legislation is so urgent. the current law hardly considers public monuments as “statues, columns, fountains, pyramids, plates, crowns, inscriptions”! without context, without interpretations. clearly, a legislation that is about to turn a hundred years old does not give enough answers to today’s questions. as long as we have an anachronistic law, where all decisions continue to be made in the capital, by expert technicians, we will not have the ability to make local communities take the lead in decisions about their own heritage. heritage is the encounter and social cohesion in common elements. heritage allows us to learn from the past to build a better future. that is our great challenge. arq architect, universidad de concepción. co-founder of the heritage unit of the municipality of chillán (u pa ), an entity that was distinguished in with the conservation of national monuments award. distinguished as one of the young leaders of by sábado magazine of el mercurio, also recognized in by the d o co m o m o international foundation. in he took over as technical secretary of the council of national monuments. psc_ .. reimagine our politics courses in ways that not only engage and excite graduate students but also recognize them as fellow scholars with unique experiences—both privileges and discriminations— and thus often unique needs. doing so will have benefits that far outlast the rapid and improvised shift to online learning. acknowledgments for insightful feedback, i thank this spotlight’s guest editors michael m. murphy and eric d. loepp. i also thank roland bleiker and anonymous reviewers at ps: political science & politics.▪ references casey, nicolas. . “college made them feel equal. the virus exposed how unequal their lives are.” new york times, march . hooks, bell. . teaching to transgress: education as the practice of freedom. new york: routledge. smith, heather ann, and david hornsby. . “towards a pandemic pedagogy: power and politics in learning and teaching.” unpublished manuscript, may . doi: . /rg. . . . . when good enough is good enough: department chairing during covid- brent j. steele, university of utah doi: . /s emergencies are unexpected and dangerous, and they require quick action. they also are, admittedly, opportunities for “securi- tization” (murphy ) and fraught with additional difficulties. when i took over as chair of my department in , i had no idea we would be experiencing a pandemic in . my philosophy as a department chair during this pandemic then and even now (because the united states as a national community has utterly failed to confront the pandemic effectively and safely) is to simply get by and do a good-enough job. it is the same philosophy of the ncaa basketball tournament: survive and advance. we hear the phrase that “perfect is the enemy of the good,” but i would amend that by saying the “good is (also) the enemy of good enough.” i ground my understanding of “good enough” by following schick’s ( , ) gillian rose–inspired book. schick’s approach is “agonistic,” one that “does not assume that we can take linear steps towards a better future, but it does not retreat from action… knowing that any such action will need to be revisited and revised in the light of its inevitable unintended consequences.” the tem- poral horizon for this approach is clear, not a long-term resolution but rather a “good enough” one “in the here and now” (schick , ). in this article, i share both what this good-enough approach looked like in my own emergency experience and takeaways for those in leadership positions regarding the benefits and drawbacks going forward. in early march , with the increased pace of universities worldwide shifting to online, my advisory team and i began planning for the possibility—and then the likelihood—of doing the same for our department, courses, and students. when the university announced that we were transitioning to online, i sent an email to our department to provide all of the information i had at that time. i emphasized from the beginning that their priorities should be centered around their own health and the health of their family. if they got sick or they had family members to tend to, we reassured our colleagues that we could assist them in covering their classes. i was reminded of my own vulnerability to the virus one week into the online switch when i filled out a “succession” form to name who would assume chair duties if i became incap- acitated by or died of covid- . after we transitioned, i sent a weekly department email throughout the spring to summarize the highlights from the wave of emails we received from various offices and leaders at the university of utah, as well as “leaders luncheon” “town hall” meetings for chairs with central administration. our department handled the transition effectively. leading up to the pandemic, i had worked with our graduate director and graduate adviser to hire our technology-proficient graduate stu- dents to assist instructors, including seth wright and zach stickney as “tech tas,” in the transition. our fairly collegial unit also includes instructors who are adept at online teaching. in addition to the two tech tas we provided, our tech-savvy colleagues including david carter and marjorie castle proved to be great resources for the department whenever an instructor with a recently “flipped” course had a question. still, some colleagues had questions about the broader impact of the pandemic; others had administrative questions regarding classes. i took most of these one-on-one conversations on the phone (to alleviate zoom fatigue) usually when i was walking my dog in the afternoon. considering the financial impact of the pandemic on state revenues, colleagues were anxious about their job security; others were concerned about tenure clocks. to handle the former, i tried to relay information from central administra- tion as clearly as possible in the phone conversations without promising with certainty what the road ahead might entail. the latter concern was addressed by central administration in a helpful decision to extend junior faculty clocks by a year—on request, no questions asked. the challenges of the spring semester were daunting but proved to be manageable. students responded favorably to instructors—our course evaluations were the best on record. by early may, faculty, students, and administrators were turning their attention to the fall semester and to the question of whether a return to campus would happen. such uncertainty consumed the summer of . the univer- sity has increasingly expanded the criteria for instructors who want to teach remotely while also being attentive to the import- ance of student preferences for in-person teaching. the latter shapes enrollments, important for the financial health of the university. all of this has only led to further uncertainty. i was reminded of my own vulnerability to the virus one week into the online switch when i filled out a “succession” form to name who would assume chair duties if i became incapacitated by or died of covid- . ps • january ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. https://doi.org/ . /rg. . . . our fiscal numbers in the state are not catastrophic; neither are they great. our cases of covid- are spiking in utah—a state that previously effectively handled the pandemic. yet, with a us presidential election and the necessarily charged atmosphere resulting from the black lives matter protests, political science enrollments have already set a record for the fall. political science is not an industry, it is a vocation. we must find ways to help these students navigate the political world that has proven to be far more important in shaping the response to this pandemic than anything else. for department chairs who are handling this emergency situ- ation going forward, i suggest the following six “good-enough” practices: • people care most about their jobs, their health, and their families. prioritize these when relaying the prospects for cuts or furloughs and for the provisions made by a university or your department in protecting the health (mental, emotional, and physical) and safety of instructors, graduate assistants, and staff. in turn, communicate that any obstacles regarding colleagues’ pay, job security, and health will be attended to immediately. • consider regular but not too frequent communications to all department instructors, teaching assistants, and staff. resist the urge to appear “on top” of the situation with constant communication. less frequent but detailed updates stream- line and summarize the deluge of emails from central admin- istration and also highlight other information that has been shared in town hall meetings between chairs and higher administration. • avoid the temptation to overdo contingency planning. there will be long-term drawbacks to the good-enough approach; that is, strategic plans will need to be postponed to a more certain time. however, our energy is being sapped daily and relentlessly by this dynamic situation. even planning for “scenarios” in this fluid time is difficult and borderline quixotic. furthermore, communicate this reality to higher- ups in your university administrative structure who other- wise consistently use strategic planning. • teaching evaluations will be haphazard. flexible instructors likely will be rewarded for their understanding and empath- etic approach to their students and classes. however, stu- dents who feel they are being “shorted” tuition value by the adjusted formats of online teaching during the pandemic may take it out on the instructors in their evaluations. recognizing that your faculty members also are under pres- sure in various life roles (e.g., instructor, scholar, and parent), advocate for those who are using the good-enough approach in their teaching. address how course evaluations should be used (or not) in their own assessments and reviews. • if you are at a research institution (as i am), recognize that there is a bifurcation in research productivity happening throughout the academic world. some scholars are not pro- ducing any research. i am a parent first, a department chair second, and a research scholar third. i am not getting any research done—at all. yet, other faculty are using this new format as a quasi-sabbatical and accomplishing a lot. some of this breaks down along gender lines (weigand et al. ). be sensitive to this and advocate for maximum flexibility for your research faculty regarding timelines for tenure and promotional reviews in the coming years. • although many colleagues appreciate the flexibility of the good-enough approach, others are perfectionists or prefer a more controlling, confident, and certain approach. i have witnessed this in some of my colleagues. they will be frustrated with this type of leadership, as some are with me. so be it. doing good enough inevitably entails dealing with the disappointment and disapproval of colleagues. some of us, however, do not need to be a perfect department chair. we just need to get by. we remain in an emergency situation. the actor with agency, the one securitizing the entire situation, however, remains the virus. until covid- is resolved or defeated, i am not going to be perfect. i am going to be just good enough.▪ references murphy, michael p. a. . “covid- and emergency e-learning: consequences of the securitization of higher education for post-pandemic pedagogy.” contemporary security policy ( ): – . schick, kate. . gillian rose: a good enough justice. edinburgh, scotland: edinburgh university press. wiegand, krista, debbie lisle, amanda murdie, and james scott. . “journal submissions in a time of covid- : is there a gender gap?” duck of minerva. available at https://duckofminerva.com/ / /journal-submissions-in-times- of-covid- -is-there-a-gender-gap.html. concluding thoughts: what can(’t) we research about emergency e-learning? michael p. a. murphy, university of ottawa doi: . /s the interventions in this spotlight draw attention to various ways that political science and international relations experi- enced the emergency e-learning transition in response to the covid- pandemic. by way of conclusion, i turn to the ques- tions still to be asked about pandemic pedagogy and what lessons it might hold for teaching and learning. although the university has increasingly expanded the criteria for instructors who want to teach remotely while also being attentive to the importance of student preferences for in-person teaching. the latter shapes enrollments, important for the financial health of the university. all of this has only led to further uncertainty. ps • january teac her s potlight: covid - and emer g enc y e-lear ni ng in political s cience a nd ir ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. https://duckofminerva.com/ / /journal-submissions-in-times-of-covid- -is-there-a-gender-gap.html. https://duckofminerva.com/ / /journal-submissions-in-times-of-covid- -is-there-a-gender-gap.html. s jed .. from the editor i am sitting at my desk and attempting to write in the immediate after- math of the vile and murderous spectacle that was the white nationalist march in charlottesville, virginia, on august , . it is difficult to find words adequate to the many forms of solidarity we must engage and the many forms of repentance many of us must own. as an american, as a catholic, and as the descendant of four italian immigrant grandparents who experienced discrimination, oppression, and exclusion for being both italian and catholic, i reject the xenophobia, the racism, and the antisemitism of the various groups purporting to “unite the right.” on their side, they have no right. as a second-generation italian american, though, i am no longer consid- ered someone of swarthy, olive-hued skin. i am now “white” and must own the consequences of that privilege and accept responsibility for my complicity in structural racism. my professional work, meanwhile, focuses on jewish- christian relations; and the sight of angry hordes with tiki torches chanting, “jews will not replace us” and “blood and soil,” renders me near-speechless as i contemplate the many times i have stood on the ground of auschwitz- birkenau with my students trying to honor the lives of those murdered there. never again?! the nazi pure-blood obsession echoes loudly in the other chants used that day by those who think there are only a few “pure” people who are truly human: “white lives matter,” “you will not replace us,” and “whose streets? our streets.” the lynching tree remains the deep wound in our american body politic. our work as theologians compels us to bring our faith to bear on the oppressions that prevent us from approaching the gospel’s eschatological vision of peace and justice. james cone puts the challenge to us explicitly and vividly: “until we can see the cross and the lynching tree together, until we can identify christ with a ‘recrucified’ black body hanging from a lynching tree, there can be no genuine understanding of christian identity in america, and no deliverance from the brutal legacy of slavery and white supremacy.” from the perspective of a different project, cornel west argues that “the very structure of modern discourse at its inception produced  james cone, the cross and the lynching tree (maryknoll, ny: orbis books, ), xv. horizons, , pp. v–ix. © college theology society,  doi: . /hor. . v terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /hor. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /hor. . &domain=pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /hor. . https://www.cambridge.org/core forms of rationality, scientificity, and objectivity as well as aesthetic and cul- tural ideals which require the constitution of white supremacy.” historian david nirenberg suggests another fault line in western thought: “anti-judaism should not be understood as some archaic or irratio- nal closet in the vast edifices of western thought. it was rather one of the basic tools with which that edifice was constructed.” sexism is surely to be added to these structural deformations of western thought. it is merely a truism to say that the hate violently erupting from these and other “isms” that make our neighbor “other” must be confronted. but it must be said. far better minds than mine have confronted these problems and provide us with warn- ings and analyses. i offer three perspectives, all of which shine light on the problems exposed by racist, neo-nazi, white supremacist marches. rabbi abraham joshua heschel taught: it is such a situation that we face today when the survival of mankind, including its sacred legacy, is in balance. one wave of hatred, prejudice, or contempt may begin in its wake the destruction of all mankind. it is therefore of extreme importance that the sinfulness of thoughts of suspi- cion and hatred and particularly the sinfulness of any contemptuous utter- ance, however flippantly it is meant, be made clear to all mankind. this applies in particular to such thoughts and utterances about individuals or groups of other religions, races, and nations. speech has power and few men realize that words do not fade. what starts out as a sound ends in a deed. martin luther king jr. continues to hold us accountable and inspire us to courageous acts of solidarity; these famous words cannot be quoted too often: i am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. i cannot sit idly by in atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in birmingham. injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. we are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agi- tator” idea. anyone who lives inside the united states can never be consid- ered an outsider anywhere within its bounds.  cornel west, prophesy deliverance! an afro-american revolutionary christianity (louisville, ky: westminster john knox press, ),  (emphasis in the original).  david nirenberg, anti-judaism: the western tradition (new york: w. w. norton, ), .  abraham joshua heschel, “on improving catholic-jewish relations: a memorandum to his eminence agostino cardinal bea, president, the secretariat for christian unity,” may , , http://ajcarchives.org/ajcarchive/ digitalarchive.aspx,  (my emphasis).  martin luther king jr., “letter from birmingham jail,” in from christ to the world: introductory readings in christian ethics, ed. wayne g. boulton, thomas d. kennedy, and allen verhey (grand rapids, mi: william b. eerdmans, ), . vi f r o m t h e e d i t o r terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /hor. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core http://ajcarchives.org/ajcarchive/digitalarchive.aspx http://ajcarchives.org/ajcarchive/digitalarchive.aspx http://ajcarchives.org/ajcarchive/digitalarchive.aspx https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /hor. . https://www.cambridge.org/core oscar romero joined king in the ranks of those martyred for justice: a civilization of love that does not demand justice of people would not be a true civilization nor would it designate the true relationships between people. . . . true love begins by demanding what is just in the relations of those who love. but it is not enough to demand justice, for the civiliza- tion of love also demands truth. truth, illuminated by faith, is the perennial source of discernment for our ethical conduct. if there is no truth in love, then we have hypocrisy. . . . a civilization where trust of one another is lost, where there is so much lying and no truth, has no foundation of love. love cannot exist where there is falsehood. our environment lacks truth. and when the truth is spoken, it gives offense, and the voices that speak the truth are silenced. heschel, king, and romero call us to reform, renewal, and repentance— certainly not easy tasks in the face of the deep deformations of western thought. this year, horizons has joined other journals and groups in com- memorating the five-hundredth anniversary of the reformation. reverend elizabeth eaton, presiding bishop of the evangelical lutheran church in america, reminds us that “commemoration” not “celebration” was the word chosen to describe the october , , prayer service in lund, sweden, that marked the beginning of a year of reflecting on the reformation. at an event explicitly hosted by both the lutheran world federation and pope francis, she remarked that the choice of words was “not only to honor catholic sensibilities in avoiding a celebration of separa- tion, but also an act of making room for repentance on all sides.” the five authors of our theological roundtable, “luther’s ninety-five theses: ecumenical prospects on its quincentennial,” demonstrate the life-giving transformations that the difficult and painstaking work of honest reform, renewal, and repentance can produce. though only fifty-plus not five hundred years in the making, the remark- able renewal of jewish-catholic relations since nostra aetate provides yet another example of reform, renewal, and repentance that offers hope that structural injustice in thought and actions can be effectively confronted. philip cunningham’s “emerging principles of a theology of shalom” focuses on how building a recognition of interrelationship between commu- nities while fully respecting another’s self-understanding can yield relation- ships of mutuality. of course, repentance with regard to all forms of racism, antisemitism, sexism, and other forms of structural injustice cannot be rushed, or renewal and reform will not be authentic. the analyses of  oscar romero, “love, law of the new covenant,” april , , http://www.romerotrust.org.uk/homilies//_pdf. pdf.  see horizons: journal of the college theology society , no.  (): v–x, –. from the editor vii terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /hor. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core http://www.romerotrust.org.uk/homilies/ / _pdf.pdf http://www.romerotrust.org.uk/homilies/ / _pdf.pdf http://www.romerotrust.org.uk/homilies/ / _pdf.pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /hor. . https://www.cambridge.org/core cornel west, david nirenberg, and others lay bare the profound depths of injustice. reform, renewal, and repentance are not easy or quick tasks. yet, they are the currency of people of many faiths and all people of courage who care about what it means to be human and what a world of justice might look like in the twenty-first century. cunningham suggests that pro- gress in jewish-catholic relations may be a model for other difficult relationships. michael jaycox’s interrogation of catholic ethics in terms of the black lives matter movement and james sabak’s analysis of the difference between public candlelight vigils in the wake of violent attacks and the easter vigil are eerily timely this week after the charlottesville demonstrations and the terrorist attacks in spain. jaycox contends that “the major moral cri- tique of the black lives matter movement [is that] a nation professing adher- ence to cultural values such as freedom, justice, and equality before the law is in fact complicit in an extensive and complex system of white dominance that devalues black life as an object of particular scorn and disregard.” consider for a moment what this analysis of the black lives matter movement means when we reflect on the fact that a statue of robert e. lee was central to the charlottesville melee. cone sheds further light on the contro- versy: “although white southerners lost the civil war, they did not lose the cultural war—the struggle to define america as a white nation and blacks as a subordinate race unfit for governing and therefore incapable of political or social equality.” in response to the violence, the statue of chief justice roger taney, a catholic and author of the dred scott decision, was removed, after a vote by the state house trust board, from the grounds of the maryland state house. even if some acknowledge this act by the state of maryland’s government as a very small first step in a process of repentance, since a system of white supremacy is written into the very structure of western thought, our reform, renewal, and repentance will take a very long time indeed. sabak suggests that the efforts of “the public, civic vigil” to respond to the violence that erupts in societies (from entrenched systems of oppression, from acts of terror) can “obviate tendencies toward any type of determinism” and be more effective if understood in terms of its origin in the practice of christian liturgical vigil. though jaycox cautions us that a renewed practice of the catholic sacraments may not be enough for catholics to “‘unperform’ their whiteness,” sabak reminds us that christian vigils are grounded in “a firm trust in the power of god to redeem and transform humanity.” though we fail constantly (simul justus et peccator, to give luther his due  cone, the cross and the lynching tree, . viii f r o m t h e e d i t o r terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /hor. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /hor. . https://www.cambridge.org/core in this issue), the christian faith tradition provides us with the hope that we can reform, renew, and repent. jaycox and sabak offer ways to begin that process. the notion of the importance of memorialization is addressed in yet a very different context by maureen walsh as she explores how a growing set of practices surrounding pregnancy loss is being experienced in terms of the “broader ritual tradition of the church.” she asserts that “bringing hidden pregnancy losses to light, and drawing on the church’s long-standing sacramental imagination,” can provide significant experiences of reform and renewal. reform, renewal, and repentance can be dismissed as pious words easily tamed. they can also be embraced as the radical practices of christianity that they are from the tradition of the biblical prophets and jesus to martin luther, the radical reformers, and the catholic reformers to pope john xxiii and pope francis. the commemoration of the reformation has given us an opportunity to consider more deeply the ongoing meaning of constant renewal. the struc- tural sins of racism, antisemitism, sexism, and other assaults on the dignity of human persons challenge us to accelerate our repentance and reform. as pope francis said in lund, sweden, “we christians will be credible witnesses of mercy to the extent that forgiveness, renewal, and reconciliation are daily experienced in our midst. together we can proclaim and manifest god’s mercy, concretely and joyfully, by upholding and promoting the dignity of every person. without this service to the world and in the world, christian faith is incomplete.” * * * as always, i thank our authors for sharing their scholarship with our readers, and i thank all of the members of the horizons editorial team for their inspir- ing creativity, diligent work, and unwavering commitment to excellent schol- arship. in particular, i offer a special expression of gratitude to colleen carpenter, st. catherine university, as her excellent service as book review editor concludes with this issue.  pope francis, “common ecumenical prayer at the lutheran cathedral of lund, homily of his holiness pope francis,” october , , https://w.vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies//documents/papa-francesco__o- melia-svezia-lund.html. from the editor ix terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /hor. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://w .vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies/ /documents/papa-francesco_ _omelia-svezia-lund.html https://w .vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies/ /documents/papa-francesco_ _omelia-svezia-lund.html https://w .vatican.va/content/francesco/en/homilies/ /documents/papa-francesco_ _omelia-svezia-lund.html https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /hor. . https://www.cambridge.org/core cl noble_proofed ll 	 cultural logic: marxist theory & practice - (whole number ), pp. - i am not that corpse: a working praxis for black lives matter demetrius noble i am not michael brown i wasn’t shot down and left in the street like trash police aren’t stomping over my dried blood while bombing my hood with teargas my momma’s face ain’t drowning in putrid tears and thick globs of snot my daddy’s soul ain’t on fire crying why his baby boy shot my niggas ain’t weeping as they reminisce on laughs we shared last weekend my black flesh aint pieced by white cop bullet my blood ain’t leaking i ain’t eric garner i ain’t got cops on my neck just squeezing and squeezing and squeezing and squeezing till they choke me lifeless and my black ass stop breathing i ain’t john crawford police didn’t murdered me in walmart for holding a toy weapon on sale in the toy section my baby mom ain’t have to hear the police chief say the cops made the right decision while she tries to explain why i’m never coming home to our small children i’m not tamir rice trigger happy cops didn’t snatch my innocent -year old life in a park in broad daylight i’m not akai gurley i wasn’t gunned down in a housing project stairwell crawling with armed cops trained to believe that’s where criminals dwell dispatched on vertical patrols like rabid rats that harass and troll those dark denizens forced to inhabit capital’s hellholes 	 noble	 	 i’m not johnathan ferrell not ezell ford i’m not shereese francis not rekia boyd i’m not renisha mcbride my nigga i’m still alive so the question remains how can i not ride??? there are no excuses but the truth is we’d rather be dead that’s why we march holding signs of “i am trayvon” above our heads that’s the wishful thinking of the already defeated an empty slogan for those who have already conceded that this world can’t be radically changed thus there’s no incentive to organize and strategize to redirect our lives towards revolution we’d rather be walking bullseyes wondering if we’re next when they’re shooting we scream we bout that life but our lack of action says we bout that slow death we bout heavy sobs in between stolen breaths we bout pictures on t-shirts, candlelight vigils, funerals, hashtag memorials our lives are rushed dress rehearsals for death long prayers with jesus help us feel alive when we just lambs for the slaughter sitting ducks waiting to be plucked out of broke levee’s water and while we play possum they get mo’ ruthless notice the pigs’ pistols have replaced the klan’s nooses they institutionalized the terror and we pay taxes to the institutions we lay prostrate for the state hold silent vigils at the courthouse gates instead of dragging out the cops, jurors and judges with their heads on stakes 	 	cultural	logic	 we place foolish faith in their district attorneys meanwhile they place our kids on gurneys we chant no justice no peace but suffer injustice in peace we scared to scream fuck the police let alone buck at the beast we think we big meech but they running the streets armed to the teeth with a license to kill and all the black bodies they leave behind are proof that they will they yell “don’t move!” then shoot when we still but i aint shot yet i am not oscar grant i am not aiyana jones: a year old girl shot by the police while sleep in her own home i am alive which means there is no excuse to not struggle for revolution study for revolution organize for revolution i am alive i must revolt we must win 	 	 noble	 	 a martyr without a cause or much ado about trayvon demetrius noble another young black body becomes a stage upon which corporate media manufactures outrage front page headlines highlight passive gatherings in streets where multitudes perform resistance with candied sweets we tweet our disbelief pray that jesus eases the martin family’s grief and while police restock with more pepper spray and more heat we like photos of hooded politicians and the miami heat we demand the conviction of a pig-influenced zimmerman but feign ignorance to the fact that % of the world lives on less than $ a day they can’t afford the stamp much less the skittles you plan to mail away to the sanford police while you play like you nwa besides isn’t there a better way to say fuck the . other than eat my candy and taste the rainbow maybe we’ll never know cuz we spend too much energy reimagining travyon as emmett till and painting zimmerman as the kkk without questioning if anti-black racism still functions that way ain’t it ironic how the commodified iconography of yesterday can sabotage our ability to properly theorize today dominant discourses distorting viable voices from the left until reactionary rhetoric wrapped in respectability politics is all that’s left this vicious class system remains unaddressed while sanctioned conversations converge on rachel jeantel’s diction and trayvon’s dress what is/who is trayvon within the global cartography of black death? is he nigga memorialized by hoodies and candy or the contradictions of capital come home? if barack had a son would he look like trayvon or one of the thousands of africans that he bombed? 	 	cultural	logic	 why do we/ how should we mourn him? should not the dead bury their dead while the living endeavor for their freedom instead? somewhere in between his murder and the performed purchase of arizona tea arizona is still being terrorized by tea party decrees you might not see the link but allow me to bring it home in each scenario white tyranny polices where colored bodies can roam when in rome, many do as the romans they eat skittles, drink tea, wear hoodies, go voting they celebrate four more years and applaud a murderous commander in chief who smiles under drones with black blood dripping from his pearly white teeth while he belches and speaks of which foreign conquest is next on his list to eat no doubt we hear a wolf but pretend he’s a sheep and the silence of the lambs ensures the flock stays sleep and while they snooze and watch the news for the next cues on when and how to act trayvon increasingly fades to black a vanishing memory like kathryn johnston in fact now what you talking about poet, who in the hell is that? 	 noble	 	 homecoming demetrius noble homecoming a paradoxical idea for those clothed in despair dodging obstacles of fear with blank eyes they stare at strangers in mirror whose cares have been cannibalized by their very own tears cells to one tier souls damned here minds lost hearts cut off as their bodies pay rising costs on principles/ principals untouched interest never accrues thus we remain out of touch homecoming a nightmarish idea when world out there resembles hell in here from the minotaur’s labyrinth to the dragon’s layer got furloughed on parole and released from warden to mayor from cold cot to hot street from c.o.’s block to cop’s beat from crips and bloods dripping blood to bloods and crips unloading clips i slipped and fell into bottomless pit and landed where i never left inhaled putrid breath repulsed by the smell of my own death but my nostrils failed to flinch as they are familiar with the stench homecoming what a laughable idea to prey swallowed whole wading through state’s diarrhea home is a fiction a violent contradiction for those forced to bear the afflictions of such horrific conditions 	 	cultural	logic	 home is a deadly ideology mystifying symbol of oppressive philosophies satanic curse cloaked in sentimental appeal haunted house of horrors where proletariats are killed homecoming is the inevitable act for the revolutionary armed with gas and lit match 	 since issn - http://clogic.eserver.org/ editors rich gibson san diego state university martha gimenez university of colorado (retired) gregory meyerson north carolina a & t university james neilson north carolina a & t university joseph g. ramsey university of massachusetts - boston e. wayne ross university of british columbia david siar winston-salem state university advisory group robert albritton, york university, canada theodore w. allen, brooklyn public library ( - ) crystal bartolovich, syracuse university rosalyn baxandall, state university of new york, old westbury vladimir bilenkin, north carolina state university jamie owen daniel, director of organizing and development, upi local , ift/aft/afl-cio anthony dawahare, california state university, northridge greg dawes, north carolina state university teresa l. ebert, state university of new york, albany barbara foley, rutgers university marcial gonzález, university of california, berkeley rosemary hennessy, state university of new york, albany mike hill, state university of new york, albany peter hitchcock, graduate center-city university of new york amitava kumar, vassar college neil larsen, university of california, davis john mcclendon, michigan state university sophia a. mcclennen, pennsylvania state university andrew milner, monash university, melbourne warren montag, occidental college bill v. mullen, university of texas, san antonio richard ohmann, wesleyan university bertell ollman, new york university vijay prashad, trinity college russell reissing, university of toledo modhumita roy, tufts university e. san juan, jr., philippines cultural study center sean sayers, university of kent helena sheehan, dublin city university david slavin, westfield state college and emory university paul smith, george mason university alan spector, purdue university calumet michael sprinker, state university of new york, stony brook ( - ) carol a. stabile, university of wisconsin-milwaukee richard stahler-sholk, eastern michigan university kenneth surin, duke university jeffrey williams, carnegie mellon university richard wolff, university of massachusetts, amherst michael yates, university of pittsburgh, johnstown (retired) wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ parsing the gulf between africans and african americans $ € £ ¥ social sciences article parsing the gulf between africans and african americans ashly nsangou and lauren dundes * sociology department, mcdaniel college, westminster, md , usa; aan @mcdaniel.edu * correspondence: ldundes@mcdaniel.edu; tel.: + - - - received: december ; accepted: february ; published: february abstract: the rise in african immigrants to the us provides an opportunity to assess relations between africans and african americans in college. an online survey of current and recently-graduated college students (including africans, african americans, and whites) assessed respondents’ experiences of racism in us high schools and colleges. semi-structured interviews of students ( african, african american and white students) supplemented these data. even within a sociopolitical context of more visible racial intolerance, black intra-racial cohesion was absent. although more first- and second-generation africans ( %) felt that they had been judged while living in the us compared to african americans ( %) or whites ( %), for – % of respondents, this had occurred only in high school. despite experiencing these judgments, africans’ identity related more to their focus on education than their race, reflected in a higher proportion who felt intense family pressure to attend college ( %) compared to african americans ( %) and whites ( %). interview data confirmed previous reports in the literature that african americans lack a sense of connection to africans, attributed to africans’ purported sense of superiority and disregard for african americans’ ongoing struggle to end oppression. these mixed-methods data suggest that intermingling in the college environment has not resulted in first- and second-generation africans and african americans sharing a common in-group, race-based identity. we discuss the implications of overlooking ethnic distinctions due to presumptions of racial homogeneity that deprive black individuals of their uniqueness. keywords: africans; african americans; black; ethnicity; race; racism; stereotypes; acculturation; immigrants; identity; college student; slur; african booty scratcher; akata; assimilation; bullying . introduction the number of african immigrants to the us has roughly doubled each decade since (oliphant ), piquing interest in their acculturation to the us. this steady increase raises the question of the extent to which the . million african immigrants currently in the us identify with african americans (oliphant ). the rise in the number of african immigrants provides an opportunity to complement the literature that explores african americans’ connection to their african heritage. the “elusiveness of tangible african ties”, however, may be less of a concern among african americans than promoting race-based group loyalty to demarcate “differences from and grievances toward outsiders” who are not black (martin , pp. – ). advantages of black inter-ethnic unity are underscored by the salience of black-white divisions in the us: “[w]hile blacks may make intra-racial distinctions based on ancestry or skin tone, the power of race as a socially defining status in u.s. society makes these internal differences rather unimportant in interracial settings in comparison to the fundamental black/white color boundary” (nagel , p. ). prior explorations of black racial and ethnic identity that are relevant to african-african american relations (e.g., vickerman , ; zhou ) predate significant changes in the us political soc. sci. , , ; doi: . /socsci www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci http://www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci http://www.mdpi.com http://dx.doi.org/ . /socsci http://www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci soc. sci. , , of landscape that occurred when donald trump was elected president (in ). trump followed barack obama, the first black us president, possibly reflecting “whitelash” (kellner ). white people seemed to become more comfortable expressing attitudes critical of people of color after the election of trump; due to trump-era “invocations of racial conflict and even explicit derogation of african americans . . . [m]any whites now view themselves as an embattled and even disadvantaged group, and this has led to both strong ingroup identity and a greater tolerance for expressions of hostility toward outgroups” (valentino et al. , p. ). despite reports of the rarity of coalitions between black immigrants and african americans (greer ; imoagene ; jackson ; kasinitz ; martin ; mthethwa-sommers and harushimana ; rogers ; waters ), very little of this literature examines africans who have immigrated to the us (versus black immigrants from other areas such as the caribbean) (thornton et al. ), partly due to the recency of african immigrants establishing a significant presence in the us. this research examines the relationship between two ethnic groups, african americans and first- and second-generation africans, to explore the relative roles of culture and ethnicity versus race in the probability of a common in-group identity in a college environment. within a social context of a rising number of african immigrants and more open disparagement of nonwhite outgroups, we present data from first- and second-generation africans and african americans that relate their experiences and perspectives to the tension between intra-racial solidarity and inter-ethnic distinctions that are critical to understanding racial dynamics in the us. . . african immigrants and international students in us colleges and universities in , there were . million african immigrants in the us, accounting for % of us immigrants. this number reflects a significant increase compared to (when there were , african immigrants) and major growth since (at which time there were only , african immigrants who comprised . % of the immigrant population) (anderson ). given the influx of african immigrants mostly after , they are fewer in number but have an average educational level that is higher than other foreign-born black immigrant groups in the us (such as those from the caribbean) (corra and borch ). more black immigrants from africa age and older have earned a college degree ( %) than the overall us population ( %) or us-born blacks ( %) (anderson ). furthermore, black immigrants as a whole excel: they are % of all black undergraduates, but comprise % of black undergraduates at selective colleges and % of black undergraduates at ivy league schools (george mwangi and fries-britt ). although first- and second-generation african immigrants are the focus of this study, the number of international students from sub-saharan africa as of , about , , was equal to % of the approximately , international students in the us, a reflection of africans’ growing importance to the fabric of us culture. nigeria, kenya, ghana, south africa, and cameroon comprised the top sub-saharan african countries of origin of these international students (iie ; ruiz and radford ). studies of african international students have relevance to first-and second-generation african students and help complement the scant literature about the experiences of africans in college. . . black immigrant and african american student relations while black immigrant college students have unique concerns in adjusting to college life (summarized by (boafo-arthur )), their relationship with african american students has received limited attention (george mwangi et al. ; george mwangi and english ; thornton et al. ). in a qualitative study of african american and black immigrant students, both groups of students experienced marginalization on campus. first-generation immigrants, however, reported fewer incidents of racial discrimination (griffin et al. ), despite that at the college level, african students face discrimination not only due to their race, but also their accents and negative assumptions and stereotypes about their countries of origin (lee and opio ). in addition, bullying associated with soc. sci. , , of these differences is pronounced in high schools, including those that are majority african american (traoré ). george mwangi ( ) found that most of her sample of ten black international students at historically black colleges and universities (hbcu), including some from african countries (nigeria, kenya, senegal, ghana and eritrea), lacked close relationships with african american college students, and felt more comfortable spending time with foreign-born peers instead. these students stated that they did not feel as if they were a part of the african american community and as a result, felt like outsiders on the hbcu campus. only one student in this study (who was haitian, rather than african) expressed solidarity with african americans regarding issues of concern such as police brutality, racially disparate incarceration rates and workplace discrimination; the others felt a lack of personal connection to these problems. instead, africans’ identity was more based on their country of origin, consistent with previous research documenting that black immigrants distance themselves from african americans (see jackson ; rong and brown ), a phenomenon especially notable among immigrants who have been in the us a relatively short period of time (i.e., first- and second-generation immigrants) (benson ). george mwangi ( ) sample of international students, “expressed confusion or dissonance regarding the dominance of race in us society”, a perspective based on their view that african americans “talk about race constantly” (p. ). george mwangi’s respondents also indicated that they were loath to raise any questions about assumptions underlying claims of systemic oppression to avoid offending african americans. similarly, in other research that examined the views of a diverse sample of international students, “many participants were surprised to witness the extent to which race and racism are emphasized” in the us (mitchell et al. , p. ). fries-britt et al. ( ) quote a nigerian student’s perspective on african americans’ reaction to racism: “[a]s much as that is part of their history, i believe that we should be able to move past that” (p. ). such differences in perspective about racism could help explain reports of poor communication between africans and african americans that were negative according to % of black respondents who comprised a convenience sample of members of the diaspora from african countries, the caribbean, as well as from the us who were attending a conference or were from four urban universities (jackson and cothran ). the authors recommend rapprochement and unity between africans and african americans: africans should accept “common ancestry without putting others down by accentuating feelings of superiority. african descendants of slaves must get rid of emotional and mental baggage” (jackson and cothran , p. ). consistent with these findings, a minority of african americans ( %) reported feeling very close to black people living in africa (thornton et al. ). . . in-group racial identity: commonality as a disadvantaged racial minority understanding the lack of cohesiveness between first- and second-generation africans and african americans warrants examination of concepts underlying racial identity. according to the social identity threat model, threats (including racism) that are perceived as directed at an individual’s group, result in disparaging assorted outgroups (such as other racial minorities) to elevate the positivity of an individual’s own group (branscombe et al. ; hornsey ). this derogation of other groups, however, does not occur in cases of a feeling of common identity with another group, as when members of another group are seen as sharing a similar status as a “disadvantaged racial minority” (gurin et al. ). in other words, conspicuous discrimination against one’s own racial group can lead to a sense of bonding with others who are also seen as a “disadvantaged racial minority”. this bonding can promote an in-group identity that prompts positive views and cohesiveness (craig and richeson , p. ). this common identity appertains when two groups are viewed as having similar ideas, feelings, and interests as well as comparatively lower advantage relative to high status white males, especially when a group is reminded of past victimization (galanis and jones ). africans and african americans, however, have a wide disparity in social and cultural contexts in which opportunity soc. sci. , , of and progress are viewed and have been experienced. because the notion of “disadvantaged” is culturally relative, some immigrants from african countries may have a perspective that is compared to opportunities and conditions in an immigrant’s country of origin, which could make them less sensitive to racially-based affronts. in addition, there may be a social class differential given the resources of many africans with the means to immigrate, especially in cases of “extreme immigrant selectivity”, relevant, for example, to some nigerian first-generation immigrants (imoagene , p. ). in these cases, advantages and social capital of previous generations (called “cultural embedding”) help second-generation immigrants, in a departure from assumptions underlying segmented assimilation in which ethnicity signals subordination (imoagene , p. ). dominguez et al. ( ) attribute different perceptions of racism in the us to african americans’ sensitizing their children to white racism (racism that is aptly articulated by coates ( ) and prager ( ) in terms of the justice of reparations for african americans). this “primary lens” (dominguez et al. , p. ) in which race and racism are central appears to be less salient among black immigrants; fewer of them are socialized to be wary of an oppressive ruling class of a different race, and they often arrive in the us with greater capital to concentrate on upward mobility, contributing to their reputation as a ‘model minority.’ africans’ status as a “model minority” bestows on them an elevated minority status that diverges from contrasting views of african americans such as those based on unflattering stereotypes about inferior academic prowess and motivation (adjepong ; greer ; mthethwa-sommers and harushimana ; ogbu ; waters ). as voluntary immigrants who specifically come to the us to take advantage of opportunities that are less available in their home countries, they cannot always relate to african americans, who were largely involuntary immigrants that endured the indignities of slavery, followed by countless and continuing struggles that play a major role in their identity, reinforced by institutional and personal racism. the multitude of ways in which african americans have been disadvantaged are outside the scope of this paper, but beyond the legacy of slavery, conditions that necessitated the civil rights movement persist (alexander ; bonilla-silva ). for example, despite reversing legalized racism inherent in redlining and neighborhood covenants that barred the sale of homes to black people in certain areas (pietila ), the racial gap in wealth persists, rooted in historical disadvantage (lipsitz ; seah et al. ). furthermore, growing up in a society where the indignities of the infamous -year tuskegee study went unchallenged (until ), and with significant white apathy regarding the black lives matter movement (carney ; robertson and dundes ), african americans tend to be in touch with how historical oppression informs past and continued disadvantage, e.g., the typical black household has just % of the wealth of the average white household (shin ). the potential impact of racism, however, is difficult to measure. in a study comparing us born black and foreign-born black participants in the united for health study, a smaller proportion of african americans ( %) reported no experiences of racism compared to a higher percent of foreign-born black participants ( %) (krieger et al. ). these findings relate to speculation about how differences in africans’ and african americans’ experiences of racism could be reflected in health outcomes. there is growing interest in whether biological sequelae, such as an elevated cortisol level, could result from the chronic stress of racism called “allostatic load” (nuru-jeter et al. ; geronimus et al. ) that could in turn drive african american women’s higher rates of preterm delivery, low birth weight, and infant mortality relative to other racial and ethnic groups in the us, including foreign-born africans living in the us (dominguez et al. ). this area of research has the potential to elucidate the interaction between culture and health that illustrates the crucial role of identity in individuals’ well-being. . . black race as overly monolithic there is a lack of recognition, particularly among white people, about differences between africans and african americans, for whom the category of “black” disguises cultural differences soc. sci. , , of (which is also the case for afrolatinos mistaken for african american (louis et al. )). with the emphasis on race in the us (nagel ), within-race ethnic differences are difficult for white people to discern which helps account for their assumptions of “pan-black” solidarity. furthermore, it is unclear whether white americans understand that race is not the master status of many recent immigrants. in addition to persistent white colorblindness (mueller ), including ignorance about country and ethnic distinctions critical to black identity, there are also manifold within-group differences among african americans that are commonly overlooked. regardless of their black phenotype and their own racial self-identification, african americans may be deemed “white” by both their peers and white people due to their educational and career accomplishments, dialect, financial status, neighborhood, etc., demonstrating the variety of factors relevant to racial identity (carbado and gulati ; thelamour and johnson ). similarly, common social interests (such as sports or greek fraternity participation) appear to be more salient than race in the case of predicting collegiate african american male solidarity (harper and nichols ). . . africans identify as studious and see african americans as too focused on race according to george mwangi and fries-britt ( ), african students believe african americans are “too quick to assume that negative incidents occurring on campus . . . were based on race or racism” (george mwangi and fries-britt , p. ), that is, too apt to impose a racial lens. african americans thought their african peers lacked the experience in the us to accurately perceive racism. africans in george mwangi and fries-britt’s study concentrated on staying on track in their studies, a strategy that involved trying to distance themselves from issues of race and racism. yet as george mwangi and fries-britt ( ) indicate, a student who “sought to exclude his black racial identity from his campus experience . . . was at the same time adjusting to [a] new racial minority status in the united states and being consistently confronted with it” (p. ). nevertheless, black immigrant students did not “naturally develop relationships around a shared black experience” (p. ). one respondent stated, “i try to relate to everyone, to be a global student” (p. ), an attempt to minimize the role of race in acculturation. this phenomenon extends beyond the college setting. on the npr program tell me more ( ), african american host michel martin said: “a lot of african americans feel that the first-generation africans look down on them.” african short story writer tope folarin, a guest on martin’s show, retorted that africans believe that african americans view africa as “backward”. folarin added that africans see african americans as “squandering their opportunity” to succeed. another guest, arsalan iftikhar (of the islamic monthly), opined that most white people see africans and african americans “through the same prism” because according to american identity politics, they cannot see past white and black and ignore a person’s country of origin (martin ). in the same vein, the academic literature that examines issues surrounding black students is predominately about african americans; there are more of them than africans in us colleges and universities and their struggles relate to the black-white divide rooted in slavery (nagel ; vickerman ). nevertheless, calls for diversity in which black students are recruited by colleges generally ignore the heterogeneity of the black population, a problem that contributes to african students’ invisibility (george mwangi ). issues surrounding the diversity of the us black population is also a topic of concern for the u.s. census bureau as it grapples with the complexity of racial identity in preparation for the census “to provide accurate and relevant data about our changing and diversifying nation” (compton et al. , p. ). this study provides data about the context for african/african-american relations among college students in order to inform individuals concerned with diversity who are unfamiliar with ethnic differences between the two groups. there is limited research documenting issues surrounding assumptions about african/african american solidarity among college students; for example, pairing an african and an african american as roommates with the expectation that two black students will find common ground more easily than if either of them were assigned instead to a non-black roommate soc. sci. , , of gives primacy to race over a surfeit of other factors that determine compatibility. increasing awareness of the heterogeneity of individuals categorized as black is key to dispelling stereotypes of black people that are both inaccurate and ignore individuality. rogers ( ) and george mwangi and english ( ) who decry the dearth of information about non-native or foreign-born black students’ college experiences, recommend mixed methods. in accordance with these recommendations for this type of methodology, we include both qualtrics survey data and interview data in our efforts to parse ethnic distinctions among black individuals in the us. the purpose of our analysis is to illustrate why an individual’s ethnicity should not be subsumed by a broad racial category that obscures substantial within-race cultural differences associated with the complexities of ingroup and outgroup forces. . methods this study employed mixed methods that allowed the authors to first probe descriptive statistics from quantitative survey data and then compare these findings to qualitative interview data. this process of extracting key findings from both types of data led to a number of salient themes that are then examined in the results and discussion sections of the paper. . . qualtrics survey we first launched an online, irb-approved qualtrics survey that was available through a link that the first author distributed via email to her high school and college friends. the first author, who immigrated to the mid-atlantic region of the us from cameroon at age seven, encouraged these initial contacts in her social circle to forward the link to their friends and acquaintances who were attending or who had attended college in the us. the survey was accessible for a six-month period, from march – september to recruit students both at the end of the spring semester, and at the beginning of the fall semester, . while african and african american participants were the focus of the study, the authors also solicited white respondents as a means of determining whether the two groups of black students were closer in their responses to whites than to the other group of black respondents. the qualtrics instrument began with a brief introduction indicating that the short, anonymous survey was designed to assess how culture might relate to school satisfaction in the us and also alerted respondents that questions included the topic of whether they had ever been judged because of their race or culture. examples of the qualtrics survey questions include the following: ( ) when you were in school, were you ever judged—made to feel like an outsider, or made fun of—because of your race or country of origin? (answered as yes or no). if yes, did you feel judged in: high school only; college only; both high school and college. ( ) have people in college ever made you feel uncomfortable or offended due to both subtle and/or more obvious reactions to (a) your hair; (b) your skin color; (c) how you dress; (d) how you pronounce words (with the following response categories: often, sometimes, rarely or never). can college students whose race is different from yours relate to your ups and downs? (with the following response categories: all or most of the time; occasionally; rarely or never). (see table ). the survey had an optional question that asked respondents to share any specific incident in which they had been judged: “if you ever felt judged due to your race or country of origin when you were at school, please describe a specific example that stands out to you.” in order to increase the probability that respondents would be willing to take the time to narrate their answer to this open-ended question (that lacked set response options), we added, “this is the only survey question that asks you to describe a situation.” the quantitative survey data were analyzed using qualtrics software (provo, ut, usa). the comparison of survey data from african, african american and white respondents was conducted using chi-square analysis and a difference of proportions test where appropriate. a p value . was considered to be statistically significant. qualitative responses to the one open-ended qualtrics question were examined by the authors to identify major topics and key concepts that were organized by theme in table form (see appendix a). soc. sci. , , of table . qualtrics survey data. african n = african american n = white n = % % % ever judged/made to feel like an outsider due to race or country of origin χ = . ; p < . where race/nativity-related judgments occurred: high school only ns high school and college ns college only ns high school: sometimes or often uncomfortable or offended due to subtle or more obvious reactions to: hair χ = . ; p = . skin color χ = . ; p < . how you dress ns how you pronounce words χ = . ; p < . college: sometimes or often uncomfortable or offended due to subtle or more obvious reactions to: hair χ = . ; p = . skin color χ = . ; p < . how you dress ns how you pronounce words ns as a teenager, could tell nearly all/all to: mother ns father χ = . ; p = . closest sibling χ = . ; p < . closest friend ns college students of a different race can relate to your ups and downs most of the time χ = . ; p < . never considered transferring ns considered transferring ns did transfer χ = . ; p < . if considered or did transfer, race was definitely not a factor χ = . ; p < . whites in majority in college χ = . ; p < . “very happy” with college social life ns “very happy” with college academics ns very high family pressure to attend college difference of proportions p = . (difference between africans and the other two groups combined) not at all homesick at college ns . . interview methods following the collection of qualtrics survey data, the authors conducted the second part of the study that involved obtaining three sets of ten interviews (n = ) in october and november . after obtaining informed consent for the interviews, the authors and an undergraduate white female student volunteer each conducted interviews of a convenience sample of ten persons, all of whom were soc. sci. , , of assigned pseudonyms. all interviewees were queried in person, individually, in a private on-campus setting and informed that their confidential responses would be helpful in a student-faculty project designed to explore racial identity and the relationship between africans and african americans. interviewees’ responses were recorded with hand-written notes that were later transcribed for analysis. for the interviews of african students, the first author approached a convenience sample of six first-generation african college females and four first-generation african college males in her social circle (see table for their country of origin, major and year in college). in particular, this way of recruiting africans minimized discomfort that can occur when an interviewer ’s background is distinct from that of an interviewee, reportedly an issue of concern among african interviewees in particular (adida et al. ). with the help of an african american male college student volunteer at her institution, the second author recruited a convenience sample of six african american females and four african american males (from a variety of majors, as delineated in table ). the white sample was recruited by an undergraduate white female student volunteer who obtained and interviewed a convenience sample of six white females and four white males in her social circle (see table ). table . major, year in college and country of birth (n = ). major year country of birth arabic: st year: cameroon: biology: sophomore: ethiopia: business: junior: gambia: psychology: senior: ghana: kinesiology: nigeria: social work: togo: sociology: undecided: table . african american interviewees (all born in us) (n = ). major year biology: st year: communication: sophomore: psychology: junior: religious studies: senior: social work: sociology: undecided: table . white interviewees (all american, born in us) (n = ). major: year: business: st year: communication: sophomore: environmental studies: junior: history: senior: political science: sociology: undecided: africans were interviewed most extensively, with responses to the following interview questions: . what can you tell me about your decision to attend college? . what is the nature of any racism you experienced in high school? did any of these experiences also occur in the college setting? . describe whether you have close friends of another race and indicate if there are any factors that could help soc. sci. , , of us understand the reason for your answer to this question. . how would you characterize the relationship between africans and african americans in general? . aside from where you were born, what makes you identify as african? african american and white students were asked only a single question: how would you characterize the relationship between africans and african americans in general? the interview questions for africans were more expansive because as first-generation immigrants, these individuals had issues of acculturation that distinguished them from the other interviewees. these qualitative data helped the authors tease out sensitive and nuanced information, especially about the extent of race-based solidarity versus ethnically-based identity among black students as well as whites’ awareness of this phenomenon. none of the research participants received any incentive to participate and all students approached agreed to be interviewed. interview data were read thoroughly in order to extract and report salient themes and place them within the context of existing literature. using this mixed-methods approach allowed us to compare trends found to be statistically significant in quantitative survey data to more nuanced interview data. . results . . demographic data of the total respondents, there were african respondents, % of whom were first-generation and % of whom were second-generation immigrants. in addition, african americans and white students ages – also completed the survey. most ( %) of those who started the survey completed it. the sample of was predominately female ( %), a larger disparity than nationally, but also reflective of a general gender gap in response rate and recruitment gender bias in which the disparity between black female and black male enrollment was larger than all other racial/ethnic groups in , when females constituted % of total black undergraduate enrollment while white female enrollment was steady at about % during this time period (national center for education statistics ). the age distribution was as follows: age ( %); age ( %); age ( %); age ( %); age ( %); ages – ( %) (see table ). respondents were from colleges in ten different states in the eastern half of the us, with the majority ( %) attending or who had attended college in maryland. eighty-four percent ( %) of africans had their immediate family living in the us. about one fifth ( %, n = ) of those who identified as african were born in the us and were second generation as they had a parent or parents from one of the following african countries: botswana ( ), gambia ( ), ghana ( ), nigeria ( ), senegal ( ), sierra leone ( ), and togo ( ) (see table ). the remaining / africans were first-generation africans, born in the following countries: cameroon ( ); ethiopia ( ); nigeria ( ); ghana ( ); togo ( ); belgium ( ); côte d’ivoire ( ); italy ( ); liberia ( ); mauritania ( ); senegal ( ); sierra leone ( ); uganda ( ); uk ( ) (see table ). about a third ( %) of the first-generation africans were age or younger when they immigrated; % were aged – , and % were age or older when they moved to the us (see table ). a fifth ( %) of africans spoke only one language fluently compared to % of african americans and % of whites. africans were more likely to speak two languages fluently ( %) than african americans ( . %) or whites ( %) and far more likely to speak three or more languages fluently ( %) compared to african americans (less than %) or whites ( %) (see table ). nine percent ( %) of those identifying as african americans (n = ) were born outside of the us. there was one african american born in each of the following countries: benin, cameroon, canada, democratic republic of the congo, ghana, guyana, haiti, liberia, sierra leone (totaling respondents) (see table ) with born in jamaica (i.e., / [ %] of those who self-identified as african american were born in african countries). all but one of the fourteen african americans who were born outside of the us moved to the us by age (and % had moved by age ). thus, although some respondents born outside of the us still considered themselves african american, the place of birth and age at which they moved to the us were largely predictive of how most africans and african americans soc. sci. , , of self-identified. the category “other” was excluded from our analysis but included one respondent born in each of the following countries: bahamas, grenada, guyana, togo; were from haiti and were from jamaica. table . characteristics of total sample (n = ). demographic survey data sex male % female % number of african respondents n = first-generation african % second-generation african % racial/ethnic distribution african n = african american n = white n = age distribution % % % % % – % percent of africans with immediate family living in the us % age of first-generation africans when immigrated to the us age or younger % aged – % aged + % number of languages (including english) spoken fluently african (first and second generation) one language (english only) % two languages % three or more languages % african american one language (english only) % two languages . % three or more languages . % white one language (english only) % two languages % three or more languages % table . second-generation african respondents (n = ). number of respondents with parents from named country botswana gambia ghana nigeria senegal sierra leone togo soc. sci. , , of table . first-generation african respondents (n = ). number of respondents from named country of origin cameroon ethiopia nigeria ghana togo belgium côte d’ivoire italy liberia mauritania senegal sierra leone uganda uk table . african americans, born outside of us (n = ). country of birth benin, cameroon, canada, democratic republic of the congo, ghana, guyana, haiti, liberia, sierra leone . . judgments experienced africans were more than twice as likely as african americans to report ever having been judged or made to feel like an outsider in the us due to either their race or country of origin ( % versus %), with both groups more apt to report feeling judged than white respondents ( %). for all demographic groups, at least two thirds of the judgments occurred only in high school, with almost no respondents reporting that the judgments occurred only in college but not in high school (see table ). the data reveal that in high school, where the majority of judgments occur, africans endure comments significantly more often than their african american counterparts in regard to their skin color ( % versus %, p = . ) and especially how they pronounce words ( % versus %, p = . ). they were about equally likely to hear comments about their hair or how they dressed ( – % for both). we do not have data on the race of the persons who made the judgments, but our interview data and the literature suggest that african americans in large part comprise individuals making these comments or who otherwise convey sentiments critical of africans (imoagene ; lee and opio ; traoré ). in college, there was only a slight drop in the proportion of both groups that was subject to judgments about their skin color compared to high school ( % to % for africans and % to % for african americans in high school compared to college, a non-significant difference between the two ethnic groups—i.e., % of africans versus % of african americans). there was, however, a statistically significant drop from high school to college in the proportion of africans who experienced judgments about how they pronounced words (from % to % for africans [p = . ]) but the decline for african americans was not statistically significant ( % to %); there was no statistically significant difference between the two ethnic groups in judgments in college on how they pronounced words ( % of africans versus % of african americans) (see table ). . . the nature of relationships with family and friends although few africans ( %) and african americans ( %) reported that college students of a different race can relate to their ups and downs most of the time, the situation may be worse for africans because there are fewer of them than african americans and african students are generally soc. sci. , , of closer to other african students than african americans, despite their racial commonality (pruitt ; trice ). this suggests that in the absence of finding comfort in relating to those of a different race, africans could have fewer individuals to whom they can turn for camaraderie. this could be exacerbated by the greater ability of african americans compared to africans to confide all or nearly all to their fathers ( % versus %, p = . ), and their siblings ( % versus %, p = . ). while african americans were also more likely to confide all or nearly all to their mothers ( % to %) and to their closest friend ( % to %), these differences were not statistically significant (see table ). these results could be related to family pressure to gain advanced degrees: more africans ( %) felt intense pressure to attend college than african americans ( %) or whites ( %) (p = . ), a phenomenon previously noted (ogbu and simons ; knight et al. ). in terms of african/african american relationships, we note the relative paucity of africans ( %) that have at least one close friend who is african american, a proportion is markedly lower than the proportion of white people ( %) who report having a close friend who is african american (see table ). in other words, beyond well-known black-white tensions, we documented friction between africans and african americans that manifests in the likelihood of friendships between the two ethnic groups. . . interview data from africans the interview data from africans, all of whom were first generation (and are identified by pseudonyms), illustrate how the intersection of race and ethnicity are compounded to make africans feel disconnected from african americans, especially regarding the unambiguous expectation for them to attend college (see section . above for the questions): imani commented that it is difficult for non-africans to understand “what it means to be an african girl”. she further explained: “the food i eat, the clothes i wear, and the way i speak all add to my identity as an african. i don’t consider myself african american because we don’t think the same way and we don’t have the same values. for example, i said earlier i had no option but to attend college but some of my black friends in high school had parents that gave them the option of either attending college or doing something else that made them happy.” other african interviewees shared this view of the preeminence of a college education that was also revealed in our qualtrics survey data: “my parents said college or i was on my own.” —leeda “i brought it up to my dad once that i did not want to attend college after high school and he almost had a heart attack. whether to go to college has never been an option in my household.” —aisha “being raised in an african household, i knew i had to go to college in order to be somebody in life. so, i only gave myself one option after graduating high school which was to go to a four-year college.” —subira another theme that emerged in our interview data was the bullying of africans by african americans (mostly prior to college since % took place only in high school, according to our qualtrics data). the use of the slur, african booty scratcher, an insult commonly used to disparage africans and sometimes african americans (see imoagene ), was reported by / , or % of africans who completed our qualtrics survey. our qualtrics data also documented that a similar proportion of africans and african americans were made to feel uncomfortable about their hair and clothes, while africans were more likely to have been subjected to comments regarding their skin color and pronunciation of words. soc. sci. , , of binta said: “the students in my high school made fun of me for having short hair and an accent, so i went home and told my mother and she gave me one of her wigs to wear. they laughed at me even more. this made my self-esteem very low. at one point, i felt worthless. i have not had any of these experiences in college.” . . tensions between africans and african americans african interviewees generally expressed a lack of connection with african americans: “i was raised in togo and i live my life based on my culture and principles as an african woman from the motherland. i love to show off my culture—whether it’s dressing, dancing, or advocating for african countries. i am not african because i was born in africa, but because africa was born in me. it would be impossible for me to identify as african american because we have nothing in common apart from our skin color.” —binta similar sentiments were expressed by leeda: “the way i was brought up by my parents and the values and culture they instilled in me makes me completely different from an african american. my language and ethnic group gives me my identity and not my skin color. the only thing we have in common with african americans is our skin color.” harif shares the view that africans maintain their distinctiveness from african americans: i just know in my heart i am african and not african american. there’s no way for me to prove it. i lived in africa and at home, i was raised like an african, not an african american. it is a shame for an african to act as an african american. for example, talking back to my parents or even sitting down and watching the same television show as them is considered being disrespectful and unheard of, but african americans don’t really see a problem with that. another respondent was also specific about the nature of values that differed from those associated with african americans: “my mindset is different from african americans. we see things differently. an african woman, for example, dates for marriage while an african american dates for fun (though not every african american woman).” —aisha this perceived difference in marriage and dating was also broached by ashley akunna, millennial creator and host of grapevine, an online show consisting of discussion panels of black millennials (okwuosa ). grapevine aims to use panel discussions to air concerns relevant to people of color in the us, including those needed to address “real and perceived tensions that characterize relationships between immigrants and african americans” (stuesse et al. , p. ). akunna pointed to her identity as a first-generation nigerian (specifically igbo), when she shared with viewers that as a child, adults told her to be wary of african american men who could “ruin” her life. akunna was told, “don’t date african american men; they’ll get you pregnant and leave you.” her friends also were warned about african american men: “stay away from them. don’t be friends with them. they’re no good for you” (grapevine a, : – : ). akunna told her panelists and audience, “as i get older, i do see a cultural difference: with marriage, with the importance of culture, the importance of learning certain things, education” (grapevine a, : – : ). the marriage disparity is supported by national data: almost half ( %) of black immigrants aged and older are married versus % of us-born blacks, a factor that could be related to higher household incomes of foreign-born blacks than us-born blacks (anderson ). soc. sci. , , of . . tensions between africans and whites interviewees also indicated a lack of connection to white peers. harif questioned the motives of white people in his social circle: “i do not really consider the white people i hang around close friends, but they are cool people to hang around with. it’s so hard to be close with someone who will never understand your struggle. in a way, i feel the white friends i have are my friend to be able to say “i am not racist” because i have a black friend, but that’s a different story.” binta corroborates the sense of alienation from white people: “white people always feel they are better than everyone else. i would say hi but as far as a friendship goes, ummm . . . no. i feel we are so different and we just don’t click.” . . appreciation of advantages of living in the us african female interviewees ada and subira felt that african americans failed to appreciate the opportunity to attend school through th grade for free, a feeling of gratitude that they feel distinguishes them from african americans. subira: “what makes me african is the four different languages i speak and the way i dress. the struggles i’ve been through back in africa, including paying for school, even elementary school, separate me from african americans. this is why i value education the way i do and i believe this is why african americans don’t value education as much.” ada spoke of education as inherently valuable as well as key to pleasing immigrant parents who considered education the sine qua non of success. in fact, college was considered the bare minimum, with graduate education strongly preferred, if not expected, to attain success. she saw african americans as both bogged down in the legacy of slavery, and unable to understand africans’ struggles: who they are, where they come from. she believed they tended to be uninformed about the lives of africans (living in african countries) including how africans commonly lack “social safety nets like food stamps or section housing”, and are subject to the whim of “corrupt leaders ruling for as long as three decades” without governmental checks and balances on their power. . . expressions of the divide millennial nigerian grapevine host ashley akunna expressed pessimism about the ability for africans and african americans to connect as an in-group: “the cultures are so different now . . . i think people can be respected—respect each other—but i don’t think the gap can be bridged” (grapevine a, : – : ). furthermore, although akunna mentions the importance of mutual respect, when she references her own background, not only as nigerian, but as igbo, she tacitly reminds african americans that they are cut off from their ancestry due to slavery, an additional factor underlying the persistent cultural divide, and a sensitive topic for african americans. references to different values of african americans were likely related to the stereotype of them as akata, a term nigerians use to signify individuals who are “wild, rude, impetuous, aggressive and uncultured” (imoagene , p. ), referred to obliquely by chaga (an african male): “the food i eat and the mindset i have makes me african and not african american. i also lived in africa, so i was raised with values and expectations that a normal african american does not and might never have.” a nigerian-american panelist on grapevine shared that her aunts scolded her as an “akata” when she was being “too american”, while noting that this term is too derogatory and divisive to use herself (grapevine a, : ). there are other media reports of african immigrants warned by parents to distinguish themselves from african americans. author nana ekua brew-hammond, a u.s.-born child of ghanaian parents, grew up hearing insults directed at african children (including african booty soc. sci. , , of scratcher) and gained an early awareness of the tensions between africans and african americans, perpetuated by stereotypes of african americans as poorly educated and violent. her parents warned her against emulating black americans, in order to receive better treatment from white americans (npr ). these strained relations parallel not only our interview data, but also our finding that % of africans have a close friend who is african american while % have a close friend who is white. in contrast only % of african americans and % of white students said they had a close friend who is african. in other words, despite sharing the same race as africans, african americans are not more likely than white students to have an african friend, while whites are more likely to have a close friend who is african american ( %) than are africans ( %). this finding, however, also could reflect the variation in what constitutes a “close friend”. alternatively, it could relate to the social desirability of having a close friend of another race as a badge of open-mindedness that can ostensibly negate future accusations of racism, akin to the “some of my best friends are black” phenomenon (jackman and crane ). . . bullying bullying was also raised as an issue that affected africans’ adjustment to the us: according to leeda, “when i was in the th grade people, made fun of me because of my accent and they called me african booty scratcher.” similarly, a male nigerian living in the us who was a panelist on grapevine alluded to the long-term effect of bullying: “i’m supposed to like you after your teasing me [growing up]?” (grapevine a, : – : ). african booty scratcher emerged as one of the most common insults, reported by eight qualtrics respondents, consistent with the common use of the insult to disparage peers with very recent ties to africa, reported by respondents in a sample of second-generation nigerian students, all of whom reported discrimination by african americans (imoagene ). this slur was the planned name for the nollywood sitcom, renamed african time ( ), about a nigerian immigrant family’s adjustment to life in the us and balancing the desire to acculturate while retaining cultural heritage. the initial title, “african booty scratcher”, was deemed “too provocative”, according to the series’ creator and writer damilare sonoiki (egbedi , para. ). the trailer for the series depicts the son’s struggles with his african name that his peers at school cannot pronounce—and his father’s rebukes when he raises the possibility of using a western name instead to curb teasing, a plot that likely resonates with many african immigrants. subira echoes these themes in her comments about the nature of the bullying: “most african americans made fun of my accent and called me names. they went so far as to ask me if i lived in trees or wore clothes in africa.” an african male, eche, shared similar ridicule of africans: “during high school, people used to ask me if we have shoes and clothes in africa. in addition, they used to call some africans in my school names like kunta kinte [a character from alex haley’s novel, roots].” bullying data from qualtrics survey (optional comments) qualtrics comments by africans paralleled our interview data, including allusions to bullying related to dark skin, african features, associations of africans with the jungle, primitive conditions as well as taunts about ebola (see appendix a). using ebola to disparage africans (monteiro and ford ), while not as well known as “african booty scratcher”, is part of the repertoire of insults against africans. in the hollywood movie meet the blacks ( ) starring mike epps, an african and an african american trade abusive remarks in one scene that includes a reference to the african’s “ebola finger”. three qualtrics comments referenced an odor associated with africans. this type of comment has been previously reported by africans taunted with insults that they come from uncivilized soc. sci. , , of jungles and smell (even though they also are characterized as intelligent, consistent with the model minority stereotype) (imoagene ; mthethwa-sommers and harushimana ). in a study of the relationship between africans and african americans at a philadelphia high school, a student described her treatment by some of her african american peers: “they say negative things. yeah, like if we walk into a certain room . . . the first thing a student would say is, ‘them africans, they stink!’” (traoré , p. ); such comments about “africans having a bad odor [were] heard over and over again” (traoré , p. ). so long as bullying remains prominent, hopes for building a coalition based on shared experience of africans and african americans (see lindsay ) must be tempered. . . qualtrics comments by african americans while assumptions are commonly made about africans and their lifestyle (e.g., living in huts, near the jungle), african americans who completed the qualtrics survey reported racism most commonly in the form of comments about their hair or skin color or intimations that they could not be properly categorized because of an uncertain identity, e.g., not being “black enough”, being called an “oreo”, or assumed to celebrate kwanzaa (see appendix a). these insults had more to do with the relationship between african americans and white individuals (rather than africans). . . interviews of african american students african american students were asked to describe their perceptions of and relationships with african students. all ten of the african american student interviewees believed that africans consider themselves to be superior to african americans (or “hold themselves in very high regard” in the words of marcus [african american]). grapevine host ashley akunna corroborated this sentiment when describing fellow nigerians as “pompous”. she then added, “i think that africans in general think that they’re better than everybody else” (grapevine b, : – : ). tony (african american) expressed frustration that african americans had suffered under slavery, and then worked tirelessly for greater equality only to have newly-arrived africans taking all of african americans’ gains for granted, while holding african americans in contempt. he said: “they don’t understand what we’ve been through and how this struggle is part of our daily lives. but they want to take advantage of what we’ve accomplished—and then say they’re better than us.” two african american female students mentioned frustration that attempts to connect with african roots by adopting african clothing, accessories or hair styles could be labeled cultural appropriation. angela (african american) commented: “damned if you do, damned if you don’t.” rhonda was offended that africans seemed to fear african americans who wore african clothes would be mistaken for africans, which would somehow taint their image as africans. this notion that africans base their superiority on their connection to their known ethnic roots was upsetting to toya (african american): “africans don’t think about what it was like for us to be cut off from our roots, and that for some of us, it was because their ancestors sold our ancestors into slavery.” jaylyn (african american) spoke about her frustration with the lack of acceptance of african americans: “we can’t try to get in touch with our own [african-rooted] culture because we’re told it’s just a fad. we can’t be ‘just american’ because white people don’t accept us, and we can’t ‘be african’ because we’re not african enough. it’s a no-win for us.” al (african american) talked about the rampant bullying of africans (something that several other interviewees described as commonplace at their schools). when trying to explain its prevalence, he suggested that “black self-hate” could be operative in that black people are socialized to have low self-esteem and that it could be functional for them to displace those feelings onto another black group. he added, “when we do that [bully others], then we’re not the lowest ones anymore,” a comment that coincides with research on negative associations with the label black (hall et al. ). kimberly (african american) discussed how africans cannot understand the wounds of slavery. she applauded oprah winfrey’s dramatic series greenleaf for featuring a super-rich black family, soc. sci. , , of while still reminding viewers of slavery, despite its irrelevance to the plot. during the opening credits of each episode, viewers briefly see enslaved africans wearing yokes around their necks, with their hands tied behind their backs, linked together with chains—a scene followed by a picture of a slave ship with the caption “plan of lower deck with the stowage of slaves” (greenleaf – ). cynthia, similar to most of the african american interviewees, remarked that she “loved talking about race” and never gets tired of it because it is so central to her identity. she commented on how her perception of differences in social class explains why she felt a disconnect with the african students: “some of the africans here grew up with servants. one student is supposedly a princess. they just can’t relate to the struggles of african americans. i don’t even understand why they would want come here if that’s how they lived at home.” james, an african american male, recognized the rift between the two groups, specifically how each group sees itself relative to the other: “sometimes both sides can look down on each other creating a larger separation. for example, africans may say they are pure because they come from the original homeland, yet african americans may say they are superior because of how much more advanced america is than africa.” . . interviews with white students most of the white respondents who were asked about their view of relationships between africans and african americans thought that among people who are black, the racial similarity forged a “strong bond;” most did not perceive any significant differences between african americans and africans. one female said, “with them both being black, they know the feeling of discrimination and can relate on levels of people treating them different because they are black.” only one of the six white women believed that there were cultural differences that could be difficult to surmount, but she did not know what differences there were. three of the four white males thought that africans might take offense if african americans did not understand their culture or they might feel superior about being a “full-fledged” african, as one male expressed. this type of response reflected the belief among some of the white respondents that african americans were connected to their african roots. as one female respondent opined: “they both cherish their heritage and find it easier to spend time together, discuss their background and understand each other on a level compared to people without african background.” another female respondent stated: “they will have a strong bond because the african american is still half african so their friend being a full african can make the relationship more interesting because they can learn about their culture.” this comment suggests confusion about what the label african american denotes. the gist of the comments by white interviewees as a whole is the belief that race has a stronger influence than ethnicity for black people. . discussion although both africans and african americans are racially black, the identity of many africans is rooted in ethnically distinct food, language, customs, family dynamics, dress, etc. in fact, to demarcate themselves, they may subconsciously use their accents, dress and other customs to reduce the probability that they are seen as native-born black people who are stigmatized and have limited social mobility (benson ; kasinitz ; waters ). based on national telephone survey data from african americans, latinos and asians, craig and richeson ( ) predicted that perceived discrimination would result in the incorporation of an in-group comprised of similarly stigmatized minority group members who have the potential to be allies in fighting for racial equality. citing black americans and the lgbtqia community, however, they note that individuals that are not categorized collectively might instead engage in outgroup derogation, as occurred in another study in which white college women reminded of sexism responded with more, not less, bias against racial minorities (craig et al. ). as a result, expanding an in-group seems to require commonality that is apparent or promoted (galanis and jones ) lest group discrimination trigger an identity threat that results in outgroup derogation (branscombe and soc. sci. , , of wann ; cadinu and reggiori ; branscombe et al. ). our research indicates that neither africans nor african americans see the two populations as having the commonality of being similarly disadvantaged outgroups. in fact, differences between the two groups are manifested in how many schools have separate organizations for african students (greer ) (e.g., with names such as africa’s legacy, africa united, african students association/organization/union), all groups that are distinct from black student union clubs that tend to focus on african american interests. this rift is perpetuated by white preferences for africans as voluntary immigrants in pursuit of the american dream versus african americans who are more apt to fight white hegemony (jackson ). furthermore, white interests in perpetuating a hierarchy of black people living in the us could contribute to african immigrants’ identity as african more than as black, rather than feeling solidarity with african americans (johnson ). . . prospects for an african-african american rapprochement . . . going beyond the single narrative africans’ reactions to negative stereotypes about african americans must be considered in conjunction with inadequate us school curricular coverage of african countries (jackson and cothran ). as a result of the informational lacuna, distrust is mutual, with african americans also sometimes distancing themselves from negative stereotypes of africans (watson and knight-manuel ). our survey respondent comments included negative stereotypes heard in us schools (see appendix a), insults that reflected very limited knowledge about african countries and contributed to a “single narrative” that nigerian novelist chimamanda adichie decries (tedglobal ). these views of africans make them feel unwelcome, like interlopers. in a case study of a kenyan studying at a us college, the interviewee said that skin color was the only common ground between himself and african americans. in particular, he believed african americans perceive africans as “coming to take away what belongs to us”, as if africans’ employment results in a zero-sum game relative to african americans, perceptions that should be dispelled (george mwangi ; nichols , p. ). . . . the relative positioning of groups judgments are not the result of animosity towards an individual but rather stem from how groups see their position relative to each other in a way that a group seeks superiority over “subordinates” (jackman and crane , p. ), a phenomenon notable in dominican identity relative to haitians (lamb and dundes ). our data reveal that both africans and african americans view each other in terms of relative social positioning; africans see themselves as more diligent in their studies and as possessing greater career ambitions while african americans see africans as willfully blind and unduly complacent about racism in a single-minded, unapologetic attempt to climb the social ladder. white individuals contribute to this divide by advantaging africans due to their discomfort with not only negative stereotypes about african americans, but also the legacy of slavery and the persistence of social structural inequality that is kept in the public eye with such social movements as black lives matter. white people’s comfort with select voluntary immigrants who are less likely to confront them with their present and past racism also perpetuates divisions among black individuals in the us, as black immigrants may be favored over african americans (coates ; jackson ) including in college admissions (mccleary-gaddy and miller ). racial hierarchies allow white people to apply racial labels to nonwhite groups to facilitate their exploitation while promoting the value of whiteness (lipsitz ). negative stereotypes of both africans and african americans are divisive in a way that deflects attention from white hegemony. applying jackman and crane’s ( ) analysis of black-white relations to the current research, it seems that the uneasiness between africans and african americans will not abate so long as both groups see an advantage in subordinating the other group within the context of white dominance. soc. sci. , , of . . limitations the qualtrics sample has limited external validity as it was drawn from the first author’s social circle (from high school and college) which resulted in an overrepresentation of females and respondents from cameroon ( % of african respondents), distinct from the greater proportion of african immigrants to the us from such countries as nigeria, kenya and ghana (anderson ). in addition, out of necessity, in one of our survey items, we employed the term “african,” even though such an overarching label ignores country-specific heterogeneity. however, we partially addressed this labeling flaw with survey items that added specificity to the category “african” such as the respondents’ country of birth, and the age at which they moved to the us. another limitation is reflected in the four percent ( %) of african americans born in africa, showing the potentially blurred lines between african and african american that is a more fluid concept than what was conveyed in this paper. in the future, results should be examined according to whether respondents are first versus second generation, a variable that warrants further study although there is reason to believe that both first- and second-generation immigrants often consider themselves african (ogbu and simons ). the probability that second-generation africans in the us become “just black”, however, may depend on the resources that their families bring with them, given how social class and chances for mobility relate to identity (imoagene ). these complexities as well as the possibility for multiple, intersectional identities require further exploration (capers and smith ), and serve as additional justification for promoting education about the different perspectives of african students that would be helpful for faculty, staff, and students who interact with them (fries-britt et al. ). . conclusions group identity is strengthened by insiders that seek commonalities to differentiate themselves from others. in an atmosphere in which highly racialized and explicitly hostile political rhetoric is less stigmatized, black people living in the us may be presumed to be a group united by their common race and oppression. yet this assumption unnecessarily presumes that race is the master status of black people of various ethnicities. africans’ and african americans’ beliefs and actions must be recognized as driven by their own specific experiences and perspectives relative to their ethnicity, not only their race. the expectation that individuals should connect to a single, cohesive macro racial category independent of ethnicity, however, perpetuates blindness to cultural distinctiveness and pride associated with ethnic uniqueness. among individuals with a similar commitment to and experience in higher education, we might expect more common ground, shared experiences, and the ability to overlook differences, especially in the post-obama political climate. yet unease is not mitigated in the college environment—even in a milieu in which students normally feel a bond, or a sense of group identity (that alumni associations often promote). our data reveal that intermingling in a college setting does not appear to narrow the divide between africans and african americans, which is seemingly a result of the strong pull of in-group identity in which both groups favorably view themselves, often at the expense of the other group. while it is arguably politically advantageous to unite on the basis of skin color, doing so also ignores group differences critical to in-group identity. it is offensive to any group to be subsumed by another. it is especially frustrating for africans because not only are they distinct from african americans, reflecting the intersectionality of race and immigrant identity, but they are also very different from each other: that is, individuals from cameroon are distinct from those from ethiopia, etc. (reflecting a serious flaw in the use of the label “african”). in an attempt to assert their individual identity and perhaps to compensate for the feeling of being a cultural outsider in the us, africans may sometimes project superiority. this may be a phenomenon that is more common among first- and second-generation college students (who comprised the african students studied in this research). soc. sci. , , of future research on evolving collective identities is needed to help predict at what point african identity might merge with or morph into an american or african american identity. we should be aware that the common demographic identifier of african american/black can be construed as insensitive if this nomenclature implies that the two terms are interchangeable, overlooking the importance of ethnic identity. it is imperative to encourage dialogue about similarities and differences that can inculcate mutual understanding and respect among those broadly categorized as racially black but with important ethnic differences that should not be ignored. immigrants who hail from over different countries in the african continent are already considered as a monolithic group to a certain extent. similar to needed updates in census racial classifications, college admission forms could revise the way in which they collect data on race. although the desire for cross-institutional comparison data may warrant colleges maintaining current racial categories, there is no reason for colleges not to add additional items to reflect greater awareness of differences (not unlike the – academic year changes in the common application for college admission that allow more options for non-binary gender identity). by using the united nations’ five-category classification of african sub-regions (northern, western, central, eastern africa and southern africa), colleges could demonstrate some degree of recognition of and appreciation for ethnic differences that are completely absent in the generic black/african american category. this initial step could provide an underpinning for efforts to promote understanding of within-race diversity among faculty, staff and students in colleges and universities. furthermore, an overly broad racial classification also minimizes the history of african americans, their triumphs over oppression and their strides for racial equality for people of color. similarly, african american culture, emulated across the globe, also merits recognition as distinctive. overlooking ethnic distinctions due to presumptions of racial homogeneity deprives black individuals of their uniqueness, a key asset in fighting overly simplified categorization of a heterogeneous racial group. author contributions: both authors developed and designed the survey, interviewed respondents and conducted the data analysis. ashly nsangou solicited respondents for the qualtrics survey and lauren dundes wrote the initial draft of the manuscript. both authors participated in manuscript revisions. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. appendix table a . written comments from qualtrics survey. african called african booty scratcher (reported by respondents) skin and appearance my skin color and how dark it was compared to them. i was made fun of for my dark skin. everyone called me ugly cause i was african. i’ve been told that i’d be prettier if i was lighter skinned and didn’t have a wide, african nose. these comments have been by blacks, africans, and whites alike on separate occasions. kids wouldn’t let me play tag because they didn’t want my skin touching them. miscellaneous these girls told me i should go back to where i came from because i didn’t belong here. people always saying that africans think they are better than everyone and getting dirty looks when i speak about my culture in class. talking about my name. soc. sci. , , of table a . cont. african stereotypes people made animal sounds whenever i walked by because i am african and they equated africa with the jungle. i was asked so many times if i lived in a forest or ran with lions. i was teased about how africans look like animals and are not educated in any way. ebola came out and students were telling basically everyone that’s from africa and go back to your country even though we came here before ebola even started. people will say things like: do you have schools? do you sleep in trees? do you live with animals? you stink. they say all africans smell. people made fun of the way i spoke and said that i stink and live in trees in africa. my freshman year of high school my teacher asked me in front of the class if she was right about knowing that all africans who live in africa have a strong body odor and live in huts. called: smelling african. african american when i was bullied because of my skin color, it made me feel insecure about myself for years afterwards. people not wanting to be around me because of my color. this is a high school example: in my dance company, they would call me “the shadow” because i was the only black person on the team. my sociology professor did an experiment in class that made me feel judged because she expected that because i am a black female, i would sit with the black females when i actually did the opposite. i don’t understand why she was so shocked. my hair. made fun of me because of my hair. people made fun of my natural hair when i was in nd grade. that insecurity carried on until this year when i came to college and i saw a lot of other people with big poofy natural hair. it made me confident enough to wear my hair out, too. i am half black and half white 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[crossref] © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . /csd. . http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/ . / http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/pdfplus/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / x http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	african immigrants and international students in us colleges and universities 	black immigrant and african american student relations 	in-group racial identity: commonality as a disadvantaged racial minority 	black race as overly monolithic 	africans identify as studious and see african americans as too focused on race 	methods 	qualtrics survey 	interview methods 	results 	demographic data 	judgments experienced 	the nature of relationships with family and friends 	interview data from africans 	tensions between africans and african americans 	tensions between africans and whites 	appreciation of advantages of living in the us 	expressions of the divide 	bullying 	qualtrics comments by african americans 	interviews of african american students 	interviews with white students 	discussion 	prospects for an african-african american rapprochement 	going beyond the single narrative 	the relative positioning of groups 	limitations 	conclusions 	 	references ayeh, bioethical silence & black lives, voices in bioethics, vol. ( - ) © derek ayeh. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction, provided the original author and source are credited. bioethical silence & black lives derek ayeh keywords: genetic modification, human enhancement introduction when confirmation was released that researchers from china had genetically modified human embryos for the first time ever, there was a sudden explosion of activity on the web from the bioethics community. physicians, academics, and anyone else who could claim some affiliation to the field wrote articles for magazines discussing the ethical dimensions of the issue. after all, human enhancement and genetic modification are staples of bioethical discourse. who wouldn’t want to add their two cents and take part in such an important discussion? analysis conversely, when the news of freddie gray’s death became public, i was greeted by a surprising but familiar bioethical silence. surprising because i thought that the relationship between freddie gray’s death and bioethics was rather obvious: here was a man who requested healthcare numerous times but was refused it— the justification being that he was a criminal and either faking his pain or self-inflicting it. while there are likely numerous reasons why freddie gray died, do bystanders have moral responsibilities when they witness an injured person? there’s often debate about whether a bystander has a moral responsibility to intervene. however, as public servants, police officers surely have some ethical responsibility to ensure that even criminals receive medical treatment when badly injured. it is ethically troubling that individuals charged with protecting the public ignored a man who was begging for and needed immediate medical treatment. the dimensions of the situation also intrigued me: even incarcerated individuals are entitled to receive “adequate” healthcare, so on what moral grounds does a police officer stand when he/she ignores the cries for treatment of someone who has been seriously injured? while other aspects of the case concern me, these were questions i was able to ask purely as a student of bioethics— questions i thought bioethicists should have opinions about and be interested in discussing. yet, while bioethicists have had no issue condemning genetic experimentation they seem to sew their mouths shut on the matter of black lives. the lack of any analysis or statement from bioethicists on freddie gray’s case is familiar. just last year, i was greeted by a similar silence from my field in response to eric garner. it is even easier to claim his case is within the realms of bioethical inquiry—those squeamish about discussing race could ask: why was garner refused cpr, the standard of care? while some claimed that garner was still breathing (despite his now famous ayeh, bioethical silence & black lives, voices in bioethics, vol. ( - ) last words, “i can’t breathe”), the union president for emts and paramedics, israel miranda, was quoted widely as saying that the emergency medical team that arrived at the scene ignored the state protocol of supplying oxygen to an individual having difficulty breathing. the ethics of the case are fairly easy— the standard of care exists for a reason, and the refusal to uphold it should have been condemned. even the recent death of sandra bland overlaps with bioethical inquiry. though there is currently dispute over whether her death was a suicide, let’s assume that everything that waller county jail has told the public is true. her intake forms indicate that she attempted suicide in the previous year. there is a standard of medical care for inmates who may be actively suicidal or have exhibited past suicidal behavior. waller county jail failed to remove the plastic bag from her cell as a potential tool of self-harm and did not keep her under close surveillance. if it was truly a suicide, sandra bland’s death was the result of the jail withholding the standard of care. as bioethicists we know that disregarding the principle of justice is akin to asking for a healthcare scandal. we learn about the tuskegee syphilis study so we can recognize how racism, inequality, and poverty can affect what type of healthcare an individual receives. denouncing medical injustice doesn’t end because the victim isn’t a patient and the crime scene isn’t a hospital. why hasn’t bioethics spoken up about the “black lives matter” movement, especially when the health profession at large has contributed widely to the discussion? medical students have hosted “white coat die- ins” to show that they stand in solidarity with the protesters in ferguson and baltimore. public health officials like dr. mary bassett, new york city’s health commissioner, have taken this opportunity to try and educate the public about the connections between health and racism. the health professions have been entrenched in our nation’s conversation over the value of black lives and the problems that persons of color face when they come into contact with the criminal justice system. these professionals didn’t wait for an invitation to speak their minds on these issues, as there was never any question that the health professions belong in this conversation. still, bioethics shies away. leigh turner, associate professor for the center for bioethics at the university of minnesota, has criticized bioethics for exactly this tendency. he believes that the field is obsessed with the “cutting-edge.” anytime a new technology or innovation that impacts human health springs up, so do the bioethicists. we are even drawn to ethical issues that are still decades away, while questions of race or inequality fall just outside of our purview. with just a quick search hundreds of papers come up covering human enhancement and cloning. however, bioethics often overlooks poverty, unemployment, and gun violence, leaving them for other healthcare professionals. the academics in our field are fixated on high technology and, as turner points out, it paints a picture of bioethical inquiry as only being useful for addressing the concerns of the upper and middle classes. he likely sees us as the epitome of elitist scholars commenting on the world from our ivory tower. however, i see our field’s silence as a problem for a very different reason than turner’s. the late adrienne asch once wrote “bioethics is at its best when people don’t merely ask each other what their views are, but really take the time to find out what is behind those views.” she believed that bioethical inquiry was a profound tool that could transcend the drudgery of political polarization and get at the foundations of why people believe what they believe. the ideal bioethicist not only articulates his or her own views but also understands what perceptions and life experiences shape those views and can see what values lie behind the views of others. to asch, bioethicists are capable of thinking far beyond simply identifying with the political “left” or “right,” probing further to find out why people think differently in order to stimulate reasonable discourse. i want to believe that adrienne asch is right and that i study bioethics because of its potential to find resolutions through reasonable discourse. her vision of bioethics is truly striking and certainly not what the field always is, but what it should constantly aspire to be. most importantly, it is asch’s bioethics that would be truly useful in our country’s current debate over racism and black lives. it’s hard to even call it a debate— we constantly spend our time talking over one another and raising our voices louder in hopes that someone will hear our views. our country is completely divided on this issue. where some see criminals and rioters ayeh, bioethical silence & black lives, voices in bioethics, vol. ( - ) others see disenfranchised individuals and suffering communities. conclusion i am not saying that a handful of bioethicists writing about these issues will correct the gap between our perceptions, nor do i think that the field should stop talking about technological advancements. nevertheless, i do believe that we have a place in this important conversation and hope that those in the field with far more experience than i will seize the opportunity to make bioethics more than it is today. payne, ed. “we failed to get freddie gray timely medical care after arrest,” cnn, april th, . http://www.cnn.com/ / / /us/baltimore-freddie-gray-death/. mueller, benjamin. “medical workers face scrutiny after man’s death in police custody,” the new york times, july , . http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /nyregion/medical-workers-face-scrutiny-after-mans-death-in-police- custody.html?_r= . mathis-lilley, ben. “sandra bland reportedly told jail staff she’d previously attempted suicide,” slate, july , . http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/ / / /sandra_bland_previous_suicide_attempt_jail_intake_form_disclosed _attempt.html. liebelson, dana. “a texas jail failed sandra bland, even if it’s telling the truth about her death,” huffington post, july , . http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sandra-bland-jail-death_ ae f e b af d . turner, leigh. “bioethics, social class, and the sociological imagination.” cambridge quarterly of healthcare ethics, ( ): pgs. - . asch, a. “big tent bioethics: toward an inclusive and reasonable bioethics.” hastings center report, ( ): pgs. - . http://www.cnn.com/ / / /us/baltimore-freddie-gray-death/ http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /nyregion/medical-workers-face-scrutiny-after-mans-death-in-police-custody.html?_r= http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /nyregion/medical-workers-face-scrutiny-after-mans-death-in-police-custody.html?_r= http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/ / / /sandra_bland_previous_suicide_attempt_jail_intake_form_disclosed_attempt.html http://www.slate.com/blogs/the_slatest/ / / /sandra_bland_previous_suicide_attempt_jail_intake_form_disclosed_attempt.html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/entry/sandra-bland-jail-death_ ae f e b af d bda the british dental association (bda) has set out its commitment to tackle racism and discrimination at all levels in dentistry, following international outcry initiated by the death of george floyd in may. in response the association has set out a major programme of work. it will engage with black, asian and minority ethnic (bame) dentists, as part of a research project to establish the views of those involved both in its ranks and the wider profession, to identify clearly those areas where racial disparities and racism exist within dentistry and on the basis of this develop an evidence-based action plan to address them. despite the demographic changes in the make-up of the dental profession, black people are still significantly underrepresented, accounting for only % of the general dental council (gdc) register. while other bame groups are steadily increasing in number, all remain underrepresented at all levels within the profession’s leadership. the bda is currently undertaking a comprehensive review of its governance structures, with an emphasis on diversity and ensuring that it represents the profession fully at its heart. lack of of the general dental profession, however more needs to be done. it wants to be proactive in addressing these issues in its organisation and in the profession. the faculty is committed to addressing the impact of discrimination and said that it will be taking the following actions immediately: . ‘we will educate ourselves about the issues that affect the various groups within the bame community, and ensure our organisation actively promotes inclusion at every level. as part of this, we will review our ongoing equality and diversity training for fgdp(uk) board members and educational programme leads to ensure that it is fit for purpose, and can implement positive and lasting change . we will invite dental healthcare representatives from black, asian, chinese and other minority groups to join a task force, to be chaired by fgdp(uk) vice dean onkar dhanoya, to identify the areas in dentistry which directly or indirectly disadvantage these groups . we will collaborate with organisations and individuals across the profession to actively promote equality, diversity and inclusivity in general dental practice.’ bda and fgdp(uk) commit to tackling racism and discrimination diversity in leadership is an issue across healthcare, with research describing ‘the snowy white peaks’ at the top of the nhs. there is also evidence to suggest that bame patients are less likely to attend the dentist. the bda has said the reasons for this need to be clearly understood, so that all communities can have access to dental services on an equal footing. public health england analysis of the disparities in covid- outcomes related to ethnicity and other factors have drawn renewed attention to health inequalities and dentist leaders have said these inequalities must be addressed in oral health as well. bda chair mick armstrong said: ‘the dental profession is guided by the principle of acting in the best interests of patients, regardless of their background. yet it is clear, as recent events have highlighted, that we still have a long way to go before everyone in our society is treated equally, and with dignity and respect’. fgdp(uk) the fgdp(uk) is proud of its long standing commitment to promoting equality and inclusion and says that it stands in solidarity with the black lives matter movement and is an anti-racist organisation. the faculty said that the diversity of its board is central to its effective representation the faculty of dental surgery (fds) at the royal college of surgeons of england has welcomed the government’s commitment to include oral health education in its reforms to the early years foundation stage (eyfs) statutory framework. the fds submitted evidence to the department for education earlier this year, calling for a requirement on promoting good oral health to be included as part of its safeguarding and welfare reforms. child tooth decay represents a major public health issue, with one in five children in england experiencing tooth decay at the age of five. this has a significant impact on young children’s overall health and wellbeing due to increased difficulties eating and sleeping because of oral pain and discomfort. this in turn leads to difficulty in concentrating and so affects their education. they can experience bullying as a result of the appearance of their teeth, as well as being at an increased risk of disease in their adult teeth. tooth decay is also the leading cause of hospital admissions amongst five- to nine-year-olds by some distance – there were , such admissions in – . in its evidence, the fds also repeated its calls for supervised tooth brushing in schools as there is significant evidence, notably from scotland and wales, that such initiatives are effective in improving children’s oral health. however, the government state that individual settings and schools will be able to determine how the requirement to promote good oral health is met. last year’s prevention green paper announced that the government will consult on extending the provision of supervised tooth brushing programmes in england. mr matthew garrett, dean of the fds said: ‘while we would have liked to see supervised tooth brushing schemes mandated, this is a good first step in improving children’s oral health. during the pandemic, dental services have rightly functioned differently. this has meant that routine check-ups – where dental problems are often first spotted – have been paused, making this commitment to oral health in education settings more important than ever.’ fds welcomes inclusion of oral health in early years curriculum british dental journal | volume no. | july upfront © british dental association. all rights reserved. the top of bravery by jeremy v. morris (review) the top of bravery by jeremy v. morris (review) jordana cox theatre journal, volume , number , march , pp. - (review) published by johns hopkins university press doi: for additional information about this article [ access provided at apr : gmt from carnegie mellon university ] https://doi.org/ . /tj. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ https://doi.org/ . /tj. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ performance reviews / lies as dysfunctional. while the black family, black parenthood in particular, remains under constant critique, morisseau refused to respond to the criti- cism by creating a morally upstanding and intact family. instead, pipeline asked its viewers whether a black boy can succeed in america with his soul unscathed? the production presented a divorced mother and father struggling to assist their son as he attempts to navigate a hostile world that they themselves can barely manage, despite their middle- class trappings. pittman performed nya as a loving and devoted, yet flawed mother who pursues every avenue to help her son succeed. substance abuse, infidelity, and foul language all appear in the play as coping mechanisms that she adopts as a way to manage not only the stresses of single parenting, but also of teaching at an under-resourced school. through the character, morisseau destabilizes what black feminist scholar michele wallace once called the myth of the superwoman, rejecting the notion that survival requires perfection from black mothers. morisseau’s weaving of canonical literature by richard wright and gwendolyn brooks throughout the play allowed the production to talk back to the us educational system, while also demonstrating the power of black literature to craft tender, yet brutal depictions of black boyhood in the country. her dizzying reimagining of brooks’s poem “we real cool” haunted the production. nya’s expli- cation of the four verses for her students revealed how evocative the poem’s depiction of young black boys in remains. this scene also demonstrated the power of black literature to capture the fates of those too often relegated to the pipeline that leads them nowhere and the ability of art and education to confirm that black lives matter. notably, it was a question posed by omari’s teacher about wright’s classic novel native son that served as the lightening rod that threatened his fu- ture. in this moment omari worried about being perceived as a “monster” like the boys in the pool hall in brooks’s poem or like wright’s protagonist bigger thomas. the threat of the black boy as mon- ster appeared repeatedly in pipeline. the vibrant film projections by hannah wasileski presented during scene transitions provided glimpses of young black students at an urban public school. it was difficult to discern whether the students in the footage were simply being teenagers or if they were on the verge of being dangerously out of control. the projections served to remind audiences of how often fear of black male violence emerges in the american imagi- nation, even in the minds of black boys themselves. powerfully, pipeline invited audiences to ques- tion assumptions about what constitutes a “good school” and the idea of school choice, especially if both elite and low-performing schools fail their black students both culturally and pedagogically. new york, with its labyrinth of highly segregated schools, ranging from elusive private academies to under-resourced public schools, provided the ideal setting for the world premiere of the play. over- shadowing the show was the specter of the even- tual prize of acceptance to a prestigious college or university; it loomed large in the background of the story, as does its alleged guarantee for a successful adulthood. pipeline not only encouraged its audi- ences to consider the cost of educational achieve- ment to the souls of many, but also to interrogate what constitutes a successful society. lisa b. thompson university of texas at austin the top of bravery. by jeremy v. morris. directed by tawnya pettiford-wates. quill theatre, richmond triangle players, rich- mond, virginia. february , . blackface minstrelsy haunts american vernacu- lar performance, from children’s cartoons to soror- ity selfies, but in the top of bravery it took center stage. running for three weeks at the richmond triangle players, jeremy v. morris’s new play was a collaboration between quill theatre and the af- rican american theatre of virginia, with support from the conciliation project. even if it had not debuted in the former confederate capital and less than a month after trump’s inauguration embold- ened racism across the country, morris’s choice to perform a blackface repertoire would have been provocative. but the top of bravery was, like the figure that inspired it, brave and virtuosic. the play heather velazquez (jasmine) and namir smallwood (omari) in pipeline. (photo: jeremy daniel.) / theatre journal grappled with the life and legacy of bert williams, best known as one half of the black vaudeville duo, williams and walker. blending documentary traces of williams’s ca- reer with imagined scenes from his life, the top of bravery explored the ways in which williams fought for racial justice even, perhaps especially, within the devastating limits of blackface minstrel- sy. morris set the play in richmond in at the now-defunct academy theatre. as the lights rose, williams, played by morris, was preparing for a performance; the stage was strewn with costume pieces and furniture; williams had not yet applied the burnt cork that became his public face. estab- lishing a convention of direct address, williams greeted his audience; we must, he acknowledged, be confused to see him without makeup. in these first few moments it was clear that the top of brav- ery’s spectators had an uncomfortable part to play: we were cast as williams’s audience, ardent consumers of blackface. frustrating the presumed desires of his jim crow audience, williams did not apply makeup until the play’s final scenes. instead, preparing for his official performance, he grappled with the path that led him to a richmond stage. notably, he did not work alone—three spirits haunted the academy theatre. they whirled onstage and off to play a range of on- lookers, disparagers, and confidants: most notably, williams’s wife lottie, his partner george walker, and collaborator aida overton walker. the range and energy of these actors (katrinah carol lewis, keydron dunn, and jasmine eileen coles) were formidable. their visible transitions from ghosts to a wide array of characters reformulated a cen- tral question: what makes people recognizable to others, especially when systematic racism renders them invisible? williams and his ghosts told the story of his career, centering the possibilities of comedy. as a schoolboy in florida he had clowned for classmates. comedy, he discovered, allowed him to act up without getting into trouble. but as williams grew up, his comedic jeremy v. morris (bert williams), katrinah carol lewis (lottie williams), keydron dunn (george walker), and jasmine eileen coles (aida overton walker) in the top of bravery. (photo: aaron sutten of sutten photo.) performance reviews / gifts were curtailed by the expectations of white au- diences. criticizing the indignities of blackface, his collaborator, walker, and lottie both urged him to perform without makeup; yet, williams maintained that it was only by blacking up that he could pres- ent otherwise provocative material. and indeed, by animating williams’s repertoire in a narrative about his life onstage and off, the top of bravery proposed that many of his numbers were more transgres- sive than they might appear in the archive. his performance of “evah dahkey is a king,” adapted from cook and dunbar’s libretto to ’jes lak white fo’ks ( ), was fraught with racist conventions: a blackface dialect; a proud zip coon; an imagined repatriation to africa. yet, the top of bravery invited spectators to look against the grain. in an imagined conversation that introduced the number, williams and walker envisioned africa as a site of liberation and alternative to racist america. director tawnya pettiford-wates orchestrated scenographic contra- dictions to echo dramatic ones; for example, when williams and walker returned to the united states from a triumphant tour in britain, it was a tattered american flag, projected behind them, that wel- comed them home. by the play’s final scenes, when williams’s life story had finally arrived in the present moment, the laughs were few and far between. his collabo- rators had died; the ghosts of lottie and walker had angrily left him alone to apply his humiliating “mask.” williams would say little about his train ride to richmond, but in a photo projected behind him the body of a black man hung from a tree. the contradictions that threaded his performance culminated in the announcement that williams’s richmond show would be cancelled because he was barred from performing in the same theatre as white actors. in true vaudeville style, music played through- out the top of bravery, most memorably in a short refrain. the company repeatedly belted two words: “that’s america.” the refrain rose in a harmoni- ous crescendo, at first evoking triumphant pride; it resolved, however, in a dissonant coda, punctu- ated by a musical question mark. are we stuck, the company challenged us, with this america? is another america possible? the top of bravery ended ostensibly in , but it reached into the present. its white spectators were complicit in the repertoire it performed, its spectators of color still navigating its legacies. throughout the performance the audi- ence had been entangled in the predicaments of spectatorship. who could laugh and when? was applause appropriate after a minstrel performance? were spectators applauding a character, or an actor playing a character, or the human being who chose to act? in which performance exactly were we com- plicit? in staging these questions, often more explicit in scholarly writing than in performance, the top of bravery cast a spotlight on both theatre history and contemporary spectatorship. jordana cox university of waterloo wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ activist localities in the queer south activist localities in the queer south helis sikk* : * e-mail: helissikk@depauw.edu abstract: cultural anthropologist arjun appadurai’s theories about place link together various surrounding contexts: technology, media, economics, and ideology. he sees locality as a “complex phenomenological quality” ( , p. ) that we should not look at as context, but instead focus on how contexts define the boundaries of localities. appadurai’s theories help to link global and local by taking into account the various surrounding contexts: technology, media, economics, and ideology. this paper uses appadurai’s theory as a basis to explore how localities emerge in grassroots queer activist practices that combine offline and online tactics in their organizing. i use participant observation, in-depth interviews, and content analysis to gain an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of networked locality created by lgbtq activists physically located in southern united states. keywords: activism, lgbtq, the south, online communication. “i view locality as primarily relational and contextual rather than scalar or spatial. i see it as a complex phenomenological quality, constituted by a series of links between the sense of social immediacy, the technologies of interactivity, and the relativity of contexts.” — arjun appadurai ( , p. ). cultural anthropologist arjun appadurai’s theories about place link together various surrounding contexts: technology, media, economics, and ideology. he sees locality as a “complex phenomenological quality” ( , p. ) that we should not look at as context, but instead focus on how contexts define the boundaries of localities. appadurai’s theories help to link global and local by taking into account the various surrounding contexts: technology, media, economics, and ideology. this paper uses appadurai’s theory as a basis to explore how localities emerge in grassroots queer activist practices that combine offline and online tactics in their organizing. i use participant observation, in-depth interviews, and content analysis to gain an understanding of the strengths and weaknesses of networked locality created by lgbtq activists physically located in southern united states. the primary data included here is based on the interviews i conducted in with activists who were part of southerners on new ground (song) —a southern multi-issue advocacy organization that connects queer liberation with racial and economic justice, and immigration reform. headquartered in atlanta, ga, song was founded in by three black and three white lesbians (southerners on new ground). the organization currently covers four southern states in addition to georgia: virginia, north carolina, south carolina, and most recently alabama. song follows the southern tradition of (re)building relationships and lives against the odds of often hostile cultural climate and geographical challenges (burton, ; drews & law, ; gregory, ). their mission statement reads as follows: southerners on new ground (song) is a regional queer liberation organization made up of people of color, immigrants, undocumented people, people with disabilities, working class and rural and small town, lgbtq people in the south (southerners on new ground). song recognizes that queer issues cannot be limited to sexuality alone. unlike single-issue mainstream lgbtq organizations such as the human rights campaign, song relies on intersectionality as one of its main strengths and consciously works to bring together queer folks across the south from socioeconomically and geographically diverse backgrounds. stss vol / issue studies of transition states and societies mailto:helissikk% depauw.edu?subject= helis sikk contradictory conditions of southern activism queer activist networks in the south are the fruit of the peculiar conditions of the region, which is a place of many contradictions. as an imagined space, most people know exactly where the south is. yet once you start to demarcate its exact boundaries, the conversation gets messy. if we think of the south as it is imagined in mainstream popular culture: a place of poverty and bigotry, we can point out cultural ‘souths’ all across the united states and the world. since “region is a fluid geographical concept in the american context” (gregory, , p. ), there has been considerable debate where exactly the south as myth and physical landscape coalesce. as flyover country, the south gets imagined in our current popular media landscape as “mythically rural, white, poorly educated and thickly accented region that has yet to join the st century” (cox, ). reality television brings us honey boo boo in georgia and ‘swamp people’ in louisiana, which rely on the image of a southerner as ‘white trash’ that never seems to cease to be a source of comedy. this humorous image of the white southern working class is equally hospitable and violent, as the old saying goes, “southerners are friendly until they are mad enough to kill you.” in rednecks, queers, and country music, nadine hubbs ( ) argues, there is a “moral suspicion” attached to “the white working class as (purported) ground zero for america’s most virulent social ills: racism, sexism, and homophobia” (p. ). hubbs traces how country music helped to establish white liberal bias against white non-urban working class that became especially prominent in the s with the ‘gay liberation’ movement. although initially radical, the ‘gay liberation’ movement of the late s driven by the politics of respectability, started to distinguish themselves as middle class and moved away from working class values. this according to hubbs resulted in: shifting of ideological poles in the realm of sexuality and class. homosexual acceptance has gone from being working class and bad to the middle class and good, while homosexual aversion—what we now call homophobia—has gone from being middle class and good to working class and bad ( , p. ). yet even shows as blatantly exploitive and stereotyping as the previously mentioned here comes honey boo boo remind us that queer people exist among the rural working class. sadly, however, rural queers such as honey boo boo’s uncle poodle get judged against established mainstream lgbtq aesthetics and remain culturally significant only as the stereotypical humorous trope. not just in popular culture, the south as the regional ‘other’ has been also frequently equated with the ‘rural’ in bicoastally biased queer theory and writing. the majority of scholarship done on lgbtq issues locates the heart of queer culture in the city (shilts, ; d’emilio, ; chauncey, ; kaiser, ; warner, ; somerville, ; valentine, ; canady, ; hanhardt, ). among others, john d’emilio ( ) has pointed out that queer identities emerged together with the historical development of urban capitalism, and rural to urban migration, which ultimately altered (heterosexual) family relations (p. ). not only has the development of queer identity paralleled processes of urbanization but, as jack halberstam ( ) points out, the metronormativity of queer subjectivity is embedded within a narrative of rural to urban migration that maps the psychological journey of ‘coming out’ onto a physical journey to the city (pp. - ). within this urban (mostly new york city) queer writing tradition, the ‘rural’ south has been infused with tales of isolation, prejudice, and physical violence characterizing the experiences of the queers who live there. against popular belief, the southern united states is home to more queer people than any other region in the country: nearly one-third of all estimated million ‘out’ lgbtq adults live in the southern states (kan, ). at the same time, those . million lgbtq identifying people do not benefit from the recent policy gains occurring in the rest of the country. since only - % of domestic lgbt funding goes to the south, queer activists have been forced to be creative and develop innovative organizational strategies that rely on strong intersectional relationships (kan, ). this means not necessarily focusing on marriage equality, but looking at where social, cultural, physical, and mythical landscape converge to perpetuate deep-rooted structural violence. activist localities in the queer south today’s south is also one of the most racially and ethnically diverse regions within the united states. in , % of black americans lived in the south, which is the highest percentage since the s (copeland, ). the top states with the largest black alone-or-in-combination populations in were new york ( . million), florida ( . million), texas ( . million), and georgia ( . million). between and , the black alone-or-in-combination population grew most in florida ( %), georgia ( %), texas ( %), and north carolina ( %) (rastogi et al., ). at the same time, washington, d.c., formerly known as the ‘chocolate city’ saw a . % decrease in the black alone-or-in-combination population (rastogi et al., ). as a result of new reverse migration in , % of the black alone-or-in-combination population lived in the former confederate states (burton, , p. ). the south also has the fastest-growing latino population in the nation. between - , the region saw a % growth in its latino population, which was four times the growth of the total population in the region ( %) (burton, , p. ). new arrivals are people escaping poverty in mexico, guatemala, and honduras. in the last couple of decades, a number of queer studies scholars have been catching up with the realities of rural lgbtq life and contributed to research that seeks to counterbalance the urban bicoastal bias within sexuality studies (howard, ; ; drews & law, ; johnson, ; gray, ; griffin, ). those studies that commonly could be referred to as queer anti-urban writings are diverse in terms of methodology, the time periods, and the regions they cover. queer anti- urbanism is a concept developed by scott herring ( ) in another country: queer anti-urbanism to refer to “a means to critically negotiate the relentless urbanisms that often characterize any united states based ‘gay imaginary’” (p. ). herring focuses on rural queer aesthetics in the midwest and in the deep south to challenge the dominant middle-class urban aesthetics. queer anti-urban writing has reshaped our notions about queer lives, aesthetics, and culture and shown that what we imagine as ‘rural’ cannot be pinned down to a specific region. rural queers can be found in iowa farming community, north-western lumber camps, in frontier-era idaho, mid-century mississippi, and present day alabama. although a number of community studies have shown the uniqueness of each locality, even the academic subculture of queer anti-urbanism cannot escape certain biases: the focus in these areas has nonetheless been overwhelmingly on white gay men. often unknowingly, this bias coaxes readers into generalizations that eliminate the more dynamic intersectional histories of non-binary folks, women, and people of color who live in the flyover country between the west coast and the east coast. this essay attempts to challenge this one-dimensional representation of ‘rural’ queer life by exploring the networked locality of a multiracial southern activist community. i will use appadurai’s idea of locality to interrogate the boundaries between ‘rural’ and ‘urban’ and gain an understanding of how song functions as an activist network. relativity of contexts when i started my research, i was very much invested in the ‘rural’ aspect of activism in the south only to discover that most of the people i interviewed if not living in the city were at least very much connected to the metropolitan areas close to them. the activists i interviewed all made a connection between ‘home’ and the ‘south’ and ‘land’ even when raised in what is traditionally considered the north in the context of the united states. appadurai ( ) explains that, “contexts are produced in the complex imbrication of discursive and non-discursive practices” (p. ). the ‘south’ as a locality is a combination of spatial, temporal, and psychological contexts and always already relative. the difference between a ‘rural’ or an ‘urban’ queer is therefore rather ambiguous; it comes down to how the person identifies and carries themselves at particular time and in a specific spatial environment. mary hooks was of the people who inhabited this complex activist locality that is not tied to a particular place, but rather defined by multiple contexts. mary is an african american lesbian who raises a -year-old daughter with her partner in atlanta, ga. i interviewed mary hooks before a snapco (solutions not punishment coalition) meeting in atlanta in september . formed in february , snapco brings together dozens of social justice organizations in atlanta (thompson ). in september , snapco came together to oppose the banishment ordinance helis sikk and support pre-booking diversion for low-level sex and drug offences. mary has lived in multiple locations in the united states. she grew up in racine, wisconsin and graduated from carthage college in spite of her religious aunt trying to get her expelled because of her “lesbianism” (hooks, personal communication, september , ). moving to the suburbs of atlanta and coming “back” to south meant coming back “to the land in a lot of ways:” “i identify as a southerner. my grandparents are from mississippi, tuskegee alabama. i identify with the culture. i’ve lived in different places and so it has influenced how i express myself. but in terms of what south means to black folks, i certainly identify as a southerner. going back south is as close as you can get for black folks in terms of going back to africa. i mean to the land in a lot of ways. the south is where black people identify as a home-base even if you were raised in the north” (hooks, personal communication, september , ). mary’s locality is defined by how she sees herself in connection to geography, region, and land, which changes as she moves physically through space in an attempt to create a stronger southern social justice network. for her, working for song was a calling connected to a sense of belonging to the south and going to what she saw as her “home-base.” at the time of our interview, mary was a field organizer in atlanta, ga, but she initially started organizing part-time for song in summer in alabama. although she only had four contacts to start with, she got in her car and drove around alabama looking for “gay people” (hooks, personal communication, september , ). in her own words: “i hopped in my car and tried all sort of ways. went to the artsy parts of town and would smoke and people who walked pass offer light. i would go to straight places where i knew that there would be gay people there. i would out myself. i went to an open mic and said that i was a lesbian woman who was part of this organization” (hooks, personal communication, september , ). mary’s work as a filed organizer in alabama is extreme in the sense that she had to build community from scratch, but it also highlights how song operates on the most grassroots level. she struggled to build an activist locality in a region where there was no prior familiar infrastructure in place. the main goal of mary’s travel was to collect contacts, create networks and bring people together for social gatherings. when she found enough people across the state, song organized get- togethers and movie screenings. alabama is to date the most recent addition to song; other states especially georgia, north carolina, and virginia have more established networks. mary’s locality is tied to her ability to read the physical, social, and cultural landscapes of alabama. like most people i interviewed, she did not and currently does not live in areas that are ‘rural’ by definition. according to the census bureau, urban areas (uas) have the population of , or more and ‘rural’ encompasses “population, housing, and territory not included within an urban area” (the us census bureau ). yet mary has been fostering communication and connections between folks who live all over the south in more traditionally ‘rural’ areas. mary’s locality was defined by a multitude of geographical and cultural contexts that challenge the definitions of ‘rural’ vs. ‘urban’ and ‘queer’ vs. ‘straight’ places. as a field organizer, mary moved in “straight places” and created opportunities for queer networks by outing herself because she “knew that there would be gay people there” (hooks, personal communication, september , ). at times she had young african american lesbians approach her and be astonished that she was a ‘lesbian.’ mary’s work is remarkable as she would push the boundaries of the queer activist networks in the south by putting her body in unfamiliar places; standing in the streets and smoking, optimistic for queer locality to emerge by the light of a cigarette. after a year and a half of part-time organizing, mary left her human resources job and joined song as a full-time field organizer in february . she said she felt a calling (hooks, personal communication, september , ). as of october , mary is one of the two co-directors of song. activist localities in the queer south technologies of interactivity moments of activism are contingent on spatial and temporal contexts—the subjects’ particular somatic conditions and geographical location. however, appadurai’s idea of locality is by no means bound by what we traditionally consider physical or material ( , p. ). today queer activism is immensely shaped by the relationships between what i referred to in the beginning of this essay as technologies of interactivity (appadurai , p. ). technologies of interactivity include all media that is utilized in the “electronic mediation of community” (appadurai , p. ). the ambiguous yet urgent points of entry to mainstream online discourse demanded by queer subjectivities highlight the complexity of relationships between the technologies of interactivity and spatial contexts in facilitating a locality. similarly, to second-generation of internet scholars such as maria bakardjieva ( ), i am interested in the online experience of everyday life. i am aware of the theoretical conclusions made by first generation of internet scholars that later research has challenged (castells, ; dutton, ; webster, ). studies by second-generation internet scholars have shown that online interaction is by no means free of the biases and social inequalities that are present in the offline world (chen & wellman, ; hargittai & hinnant, ). i am not naively optimistic in my exploration of online activist communities and communication, but i do find it important to trace the differences in activist practices that have the potential for creating a positive change toward queer liberation. i argue that activist network publics in the south use technologies of interactivity in ways that is determined by their marginalized geographical location and which can only result in a more dynamic locality when informed by the strong presence of offline context. the need for ‘safe spaces’ has conditioned queer subjectivities to cultivate a unique relationship with the online world. over the years, queer subculture has developed its own set of online communities, differing aesthetics and vernaculars. internet scholars had already documented in the s how queer folks were quickly seizing on the opportunity to come out online, express themselves more freely and form communities. nina wakeford ( ) in her landmark essay “cyberqueer” states that the lgbtq community was amongst the earliest to embrace the opportunities and activist potential of cyberspace: “cyberqueer spaces are constantly reconstituted as points of resistance against the dominant assumption of the normality of heterosexuality in ways which are familiar to activists engaged in other struggles against heterosexism” (p. ). although message boards and sites such as datalounge and autostraddle or dating applications such as grindr uniquely target gays and lesbians, queer activist locality as a non-normative alternative does not only exist in such mainstream lgbtq identified sites. in her work on networked publics, internet scholar, danah boyd ( ) sees online communities as “simultaneously the space constructed through networked technologies and the imagined collective that emerges as a result of the intersection of people, technology, and practice” (p. ). as she explains, “i contend that networked publics are publics that are restructured by networked technologies; they are simultaneously a space and a collection of people” (p. ). boyd recognizes two major theoretical approaches to publics: the hambermasian idea of a public space that is accessible and denotes the shared values of a large group of people and the cultural studies approach that focuses on the sameness of media around which diverse groups of people gather to form publics. boyd sees networked media technologies as something that “extend and complicate publics in all of their forms” (p. ) and combine these two understandings of publics. this means that publics are both virtual technological environments and imagined collectives. boyd also discusses how the properties of different network media transform the publics: “architecture shapes and is shaped by practice in mediated environments just as in physical spaces” (p. ). admittedly, online communities make a significant difference for queers in the south where there are less queer friendly establishments. song activists consistently shifted their technologies of interactivity in an attempt to connect the several most pressing social justice issues prevalent in their locality. they utilized architecturally diverse sets of online platforms to take the action out of online platforms such as facebook and onto a particular geographical location. song activists’ online presence includes posts—sharing events, selfies, live videos, and personal accounts of events—on facebook, instagram or twitter. these posts are tied to a particular location on the map helis sikk but ultimately add to the activist locality that is not bound by the geographical. while living in virginia, i was contacted by song members via a private facebook message to volunteer, received official emails regarding the more general organizational developments, and was invited in person to public events or protests. queer activists use these different online platforms and face-to-face interaction to reach as many different populations as possible. the use of online platforms varies across age, race, class, and immigration status (yates, kirby & lockley, ; smith & anderson, ). limiting outreach to one platform and not extending beyond online communication would result in a much more homogenous activist network. song aims to include a diverse set of people who feel accountable towards the organization and its goals. in more rural areas, the locality that is (in)formed by the conditions created by specific technological environments and imagined collectives, can be rather weak and strained unless there is a strong offline presence. besides talking to people face-to-face, mary hooks also used social networking sites to reach out to people via lgbtq affiliated groups in the area. for instance, she ‘cold call’ posted on the facebook page of alabama all american goddess and asked for people to contact her if they were interested in community building. in a world of hashtag activism and twitter diplomacy, we cannot underestimate the degree to which the internet transforms contemporary society and power relations, as we know them. yet in song’s early stages of building networks, queer activist locality could only appear when online networked publics were connected to at least the potential of offline interaction. in other words, it appears that in the case of song, technologies of interactivity only contribute to an activist locality in meaningful ways if offline networks have been established in person first, especially in locations that are at the cultural and geographical margins of queer life. hermelinda cortés’s experience speaks directly to the limits of technologies of interactivity in more remote areas. hermelinda cortés, a xicana queer feminist, is the rural and communications organizer for song in harrisonburg, va. i interviewed hermelinda in washington, d.c while she was on her way to new york city to visit friends. she described the limitations of queer activist locality during our interview in april : “the sheer isolation that people are dealing with is an incredible form of violence that i think is probably one of the most overwhelming things to combat that people are dealing with. even our folks on staff who are very well connected to each other and networks, but we all still get isolated as queer folks of color who are mostly working class and low income. it’s you know… if nothing else gets you then isolation will. so i think that is what so much of our work is around trying to break that isolation because we see it as such a huge form of violence” (cortés, personal communication, april , ). being “very well connected” in more isolated areas such as harrisonburg, va mostly refers to online communication and organizing done by activists dispersed across the south (cortés, personal communication, april , ). yet, even for someone who is “very well connected” through various technologies of interactivity, hermelinda did not feel connected within her geographical location, until she spatially redefined her locality: she left the more isolated rural community for a trip to see her friends and fellow activists in new york city. hermelinda embraced the relativity of geographical contexts that inform her identity as an activist and queer woman of color. hermelinda’s story shows how song activists negotiate the complex realities of identifying with their rural communities and land, taking pride in it, but recognizing that the lack of resources and infrastructure make it necessary to make trips to the ‘city’—new york city or washington, d.c. hermelinda’s experience challenges the anti-urban queer writing that sometimes tends to romanticize queer life in the country in its attempt to counterbalance the urban bias in lgbtq scholarship. the combination of two theoretical frameworks for understanding online networked publics discussed by boyd—the hambermasian idea of a public and the cultural studies approach— speak to the ways in which online communication can provide support for activists in their work and on a personal level while at the same time highlight the shortcomings of virtual technological environments and online imagined collectives in more remote areas. activist localities in the queer south a perfect locality: social immediacy, technologies of interactivity, and relativity of contexts as my discussion so far shows, due to the unique socio-political and geographical conditions in the south, the queer activist locality facilitated by song cannot rely solely on a specific geographical context or on online technologies of interactivity to foster a reliable and functional network. in the case of song, queer activist locality emerges at its strongest when relativity of contexts and technologies of interactivity are combined with a heightened sense of social immediacy. social immediacy involves the gathering of the activist community in a physical space, a movement that is usually motivated by a specific political urgency. appadurai ( ) notes, “locality is an inherently fragile social achievement” that “must be maintained carefully against various kinds of odds” (p. ). paradoxically, song’s activist locality arises most unambiguously when the activists—during moments of political urgency—work to overcome the “various kinds of odds” created by the oppressive policies of the nation state. the specific conditions of song’s activist locality were highlighted during an informal fundraiser in the fall of . i had been participating in southern queer activist networks since i moved to virginia in , but it was not until after , after the formation of the black lives matter movement, that the uniquely networked qualities of this activist locality became apparent. the fundraiser took place at salem acuña’s house in richmond, virginia in november of . this was at the height of the ferguson protest that erupted after police officer darren wilson shot michael brown (hare, ). as a result, a lot of the queer activist family was on the move that fall; travelling to protests across the south to provide support. i was invited to the gathering by salem, a field organizer for song at the time, whom i had interviewed earlier in the year. salem, originally from santiago, chile, is a queer latinx immigrant in his mid-twenties who has been organizing around social justice in the south and d.c. area since he was a teenager (acuña, personal communication, march, , ). the facebook page for the event read (wooden keel, ): lovely song members, supporters, lovers and friends, join the entire song board and staff, along with local members, for an evening of queer liberation rva style! as a political home, song has always been about investing in building long-lasting connection and kinship among lgbtq folks in the south. we would like to invite you to come out and learn more about song's work across the region, mingle with song leadership and experience some fierce spoken word from our local song members. and as always--come looking fabulous! (we will provide heavy hors d’ouerves, wine, and beer) we will be taking donations at the door on a sliding scale: $ entry $ -$ entry + raffle ticket for song swag bag $ entry + raffle for dinner for at local lgbtq-owned restaurant l'opposum (alcohol not included) this was an event with a total of invitees. on the facebook event page people responded “going,” said “maybe,” and were marked as “can’t go.” i counted approximately people at the actual event. the people present included several song staff members, but also supporters from all over the south. to protect the privacy of the participants i cannot mention all of their names. i only include here names of people who signed the consent form. mary hooks stopped by on her way to protests in baltimore. suzanne pharr, a white lesbian elder in her mid-seventies and one of the founders of helis sikk song travelled from tennessee. present were also the director of virginia anti-violence project, the director of lgbtq campus life at the university of richmond and several volunteer facilitators for side-by-side, an organization for lgbtq youth with several locations in virginia. the diversity of people present at the event speaks to the dynamic locality of song activism that is defined by multitude of geographical, cultural, and professional contexts. besides some of the core staff, there were a number of people who were not directly involved with song, but part of the activist networks in the south, mostly from virginia, north carolina, and georgia. hieu tran was one of these people, whom i met at salem’s house that same night. hieu’s connection to song demonstrates the multi-issue platform of the organization that informs its complicated locality. hieu is an hiv-positive vietnamese american gay man. at the time, hieu worked as a farmer for lynchburg grows in lynchburg, va (personal communication, november , ). founded in , lynchburg grows is an urban farm that focuses on promoting “sustainable food production” in the community (lynchburg grows, ). food justice activism is crucial to improving livability in the south. lynchburg grows aims to restructure neighbourhoods to avoid and eliminate food deserts by teaching people how to grow their own food. although lynchburg grows consists of predominately white heterosexual staff members, environmental sustainability and ableism are key queer issues that demand coalition with queer people of color like hieu. hieu’s presence at the event and involvement with song shows how the organization’s locality gets even more multi-layered during times of political urgency, which in this case was brought about by police violence against people of color. the potluck-style gathering culminated with recap of recent activities and multi-racial bilingual slam poetry (in spanish and in english). the performance ended with mary hooks, who is a member of a queer choir in atlanta, chanting words of empowerment while language justice activist, roberto tijerina translated each line into spanish (personal communication, november , ): in this moment, en este momento, we are the movement. somos el movimiento. let’s move while we can still do it. ahora vamos a movernos mientras que todavía it’s not about fighting for rights, podemos. it’s about continuing the fight for our lives. no se trata de luchar por nuestros derechos. we are the civil rights movement. se trata de continuar la lucha para nuestras the feeling of community and solidarity in the room after this communal chant could not be unfelt or forgotten. a diverse group of about people present at the time were all connected by what mary hooks, during my interview with her a few months earlier, had called, “fire in the belly”: a strong will to imagine and work toward a more just south (personal communication, september , ). the people at salem’s house differed not just in terms of race, ethnicity, immigration status, age, gender or sexuality, but also in terms of their work and where they lived in the south. as noted earlier, there were people in leadership positions and committed members who would regularly attend protests and events, but also folks who feel connected by simply living across the southern united states. those loosely affiliated people included college professors, farmers, lawyers, high school teachers, and people working for various social justice non-profits across the region. such diversity speaks to the unique dynamics of the particular activist locality that song fosters. this locality is not only created via organizational membership, or during a protest or meeting, but by affiliated supporters who work in education or at a non-profit around intersecting themes of concern. ultimately, song activists form an online/offline social justice locality that is at times formed around a particular media platform but cannot fully function without being spatially grounded. as much as scholars have argued for the positive potential of virtual networked publics, song as a grassroots activist network creates change by very much relying on offline moments of interaction, such as the fundraiser in salem’s house. online environments are safe(er), but face-to- face interaction has proven to be more effective for song on a long-term basis. activist localities in the queer south conclusion the activist practices of song further destabilize appadurai’s already fluid notion of locality. song’s activist locality is less of a dimension of a community or value, and more of an experience that cannot be temporally or spatially pinned down. song serves as an example of a queer social justice activist locality that is in movement in more than one sense of the term. movement, not only in terms of psychological change or state of mind, but also through physical space has been one of the most prominent themes in queer writing. the psychological, professional, and physical movement of song activists does not match the ‘progressive’ homo–and metronormative narratives that dominate mainstream queer writing, scholarship, and media. these normative narratives follow a trajectory from ‘rural’ to ‘urban’ that is attached to individual ‘coming out’ process. song’s online networks and strong offline presence create an alternative subcultural space across the south that challenges the boundaries between ‘rural-urban’, and the idea of the south as an enclosed, static place. the people i interviewed moved between the official and unofficial definitions of the south. the activists understand the south, as defined by the united states census bureau, as a rural queer cultural imaginary, and are cognizant where the two overlap or collide. by defying normative narratives of queerness and traditional definitions of the south, song activists form an experiential locality that is porous and informed by the relativity of contexts, technologies of interactivity, but perhaps above all, by the changing sense of social immediacy around a specific social justice issue. 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(november , ). personal facebook event page. helis sikk is a postdoctoral fellow in women’s, gender & sexuality studies at depauw university. her research takes a feral multidisciplinary approach in exploring the relationships between queerness, affect, the built environment, communities, media, and visual culture. she is currently working on her monograph, mainstreaming violence: affect, activism, and queer politics of place. wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ www.ssoar.info how right-wing alternative news sites in the u.s. depict antifa knüpfer, curd erstveröffentlichung / primary publication arbeitspapier / working paper empfohlene zitierung / suggested citation: knüpfer, c. ( ). how right-wing alternative news sites in the u.s. depict antifa. (weizenbaum series, ). berlin: weizenbaum institute for the networked society - the german internet institute. https://doi.org/ . /wi.ws/ nutzungsbedingungen: dieser text wird unter einer cc by lizenz (namensnennung) zur verfügung gestellt. nähere auskünfte zu den cc-lizenzen finden sie hier: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /deed.de terms of use: this document is made available under a cc by licence (attribution). for more information see: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . http://www.ssoar.info https://doi.org/ . /wi.ws/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /deed.de https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . how right-wing alternative news sites in the u.s. depict antifa curd knüpfer june weizenbaum series # working paper weizenbaum series editors: the executive board of the “weizenbaum institute for the networked society – the german internet institute“ prof. dr. christoph neuberger prof. dr. herbert zech prof. dr. sascha friesike project coordination: wissenschaftszentrum berlin für sozialforschung reichpietschufer berlin visiting address: hardenbergstraße berlin email: info@weizenbaum-institut.de web: www.weizenbaum-institut.de editorial assistant: roland toth, m.a. this work has been funded by the federal ministry of education and research of germany (bmbf) under grant no. dii („deutsches internet-institut“). persistent long-term archiving of this series is ensured by the social science open access repository and the doi registration service in germany for social science and economic data da|ra. doi . /wi.ws/ this series is available open access and is licensed under creative commons attribution . (cc-by . ): http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://doi.org/ . /wi.ws/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / how right-wing alternative news sites in the u.s. depict antifa curd knüpfer june acknowledgement this study was aided by feedback and assistance from robert entman and maria mildner. the most important story about antifa is not who they actually are, but how trump and the right-wing media define the term. weizenbaum series # working paper antifa (short for “antifascist” or an abbreviated form of the german term “antifaschis- tische aktion”) does not consist of any specific set of actors, institutions or organiza- tional structures. in lieu of formalized membership, it can be seen as a loose movement of individuals and organizations practicing forms of activism aimed at counter-acting far-right mobilization. this designation presents a “floating signifier” of sorts and can be easily used to associate, antagonize or even prosecute individuals who are only connected through their respective opposition towards perceived forms or threats of fascist activities. case in point: u.s. president donald trump recently tweeted out his intention to de- clare “antifa as a terrorist organization,” while his attorney general william barr blamed antifa for “inciting violence and sowing discord,” without providing any sub- stantial evidence for these claims. in fact, no further evidence was presented by the trump administration that there exists such an “organization.” further complicating this matter are reports of “false flag” operations and coordinated online efforts by right-wing activists, seeking to vilify political activism on the left. in the days leading up to the recent pronouncements by trump and barr, right-wing media in particular exhibited spikes in referring to “antifa,” particularly in their co- verage of the nationwide protests against police brutality. on may and , over percent of all stories featured on such websites mentioned the term. this prompts the question: who or what are these articles talking about? figure . media cloud stories for the collection “rnis us” and fox news. https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/ https://abcnews.go.com/politics/ag-barr-evidence-antifa-foreign-actors-involved-sowing/story?id= https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-protests-facebook/facebook-takes-down-white-nationalist-and-fake-antifa-accounts-iduskbn a j https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/security/twitter-takes-down-washington-protest-disinformation-bot-behavior-n https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/ / / / /antifa-portland-andy-ngo-proud-boys how right-wing alternative news sites in the u.s. depict antifa table . sampled websites and article counts. website / medium n website / medium n fox news conservativedailynews.com breitbart chicksonright.com gatewaypundit americanmilitarynews.com pjmedia americanthinker.com daily caller libertynation.com newsmax thenewamerican.com thepoliticalinsider.com lifezette.com wnd westernjournal.com libertyunyielding.com patriotpost.us hot air daily signal bigleaguepolitics.com daily wire the blaze free beacon townhall.com politichicks.com ijr conservativebase.com Σ = in the wake of trump’s tweets, many articles on mainstream and legacy media have attempted to address this question and have offered explanatory pieces that describe the term and its history, often pointing to trump’s misleading and flawed definition. but such fact-checking efforts might be missing the mark. trump does not seem to be pursuing a good-faith line of argumentation. and it should be noted that a review of the actual charges brought against demonstrators active during the analyzed week failed to reveal any “effort by antifa to perpetrate a coordinated campaign of violence.” instead, recent fundraising and pr campaigns coming out of the white house have in- dicated that the term is being used somewhat strategically to ramp up support for hard- line policies. as vox’s zack beauchamp aptly explained: “’antifa’ as trump imagines it only exists in the conservative mind — but could end up serving as justification for much more significant state violence down the line.” to address the question of what this image “in the conservative mind” might look like, i collected material from a total of right-wing or far-right websites which typically present themselves as alternative news providers. these were queried via media cloud and the collection “rnis-us,” which includes a variety of right-wing alternative news https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /jun/ /what-is-antifa-trump-terrorist-designation https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/trump-is-spreading-a-dangerous-conspiracy-theory-about-antifa/ / / / f fa -ab - ea- d -d bc b bf _story.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/antifa-protests-george-floyd.html https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/ / / / /antifa-anti-fascist-explained https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/ . /poi . sites, along with the website for fox news. using the python package newspaper k, a total of articles could be scraped. these were posted between may and june and featured the term “antifa.” aided by quantitative text analysis software, i then ap- plied a simple coding scheme to text passages that had been marked as containing the term, in order to find out more about who and what the subjects, locations, and actions associated with the term were. in order to gain insights about how right-wing media portray antifa, i wanted to know: ) “who or what is antifa?” ) “what does antifa do?” ) “who or what is associated with or compared to antifa?” ) “where has antifa been active?” the underlying question in coding these passages was always: what information and impression would a regular reader obtain, in order to get an impression of who and what antifa are and do. this means that quotes and citations were taken into account, even if they referred to outside sources that the text themselves might disagree with, as these would still provide information on a probable definition of the term. i excluded direct quotes referring to a tweet by donald trump, in which he designates antifa a terrorist organization, as this was prominently featured during the analyzed timeframe and would have skewed the results. i did include remarks that explicitly agreed with this categorization or directly endorsed it. who or what is antifa? the first and most obvious result of my analysis was the striking degree of heterogeneity in how the term was defined. the tables below present the results aggregated into various larger categories. while this might mask the full range of variation, the tables nonethe- less show how many different and sometimes contradictory terms were used. does this confusion simply stem from the heterogeneity of my sample? it stands to reason that the various websites i included might simply report from different angles and perspectives. but although one might expect terms like “group,” “organization,” or “movement” to be somewhat mutually exclusive, deeper analysis revealed that these were used across articles stemming from the same websites. furthermore, there was no full list of sources included in this collection: https://sources.mediacloud.org/#/collec- tions/ . for a detailed explanation of source selection, see heft et al . ou-yang, lucas ( ): https://github.com/codelucas/newspaper.git. source data and full coding results will be made available via email request to curd.knuepfer@ fu-berlin.de https://github.com/codelucas/newspaper.git mailto:curd.knuepfer% fu-berlin.de?subject= mailto:curd.knuepfer% fu-berlin.de?subject= how right-wing alternative news sites in the u.s. depict antifa statistically significant association between classification as one of these actor types and particular outlets, meaning that they were used interchangeably across the entire sample. table . actor types and attributes used to describe antifa. who or what is antifa? (n = ) count % group % far left; left-wing % terrorist % radical; extremist % rioters; hooligans; thugs; criminals % violent; militant % anarchist % movement % organization % leaderless, diffused, loose, etc. % specific name of individuals or institution % anti-fascist % outside, paid, professional % communist; fascist % children; kids % masked % the classification of “group” is by far the most frequently used. at the same time, this may well be the vaguest term in the list of actor types. in contrast, the sample contained only instances in which the name of an actual person or institution was given. these ranged from an activist in hamburg, germany, a social media account, to willem van spronsen and included the names of specific local entities like the port- land-based “rose city antifa.” the categories listed in table include types of actors as well as specific attributes. some of these would be terms that pop up in conjunction with actor types and are not mutually ex- clusive (e.g. far-left, militant organization), which is why the percentages surpass . the most common attribute was that of “far-left or “left wing.” there were some descriptions of the antifa as being “leaderless” and diffused as well as references to “anti-fascist” along with the explanations for what the term actually stands for – but each of these arguably quite important attributes only comprised % of the coded passages. the designation of “terrorist” – the second most frequently found, at % – arguably rests on the strongest underlying claim and is therefore one that deserves closer scru- tiny. in order to find out which websites applied the term in order to define antifa and what the impact of trump’s classification may have been, i divided the dataset into articles published before (n = ) and after (n = ) trump tweeted about designa- ting antifa a terrorist organization. the results show that some of the most prolific of the sampled websites, like breitbart and gatewaypundit, employed the term before trump’s tweet. it stands to reason that this might be part of the media discourse that may have also led trump to adopt the topic. the results also show the immediate effect this classification had: after trump’s tweet, all sites in the sample affirmed the de- signation of “terrorist” at least once (again: this excluded direct quotes from trump). figure . websites‘ use of „terrorist“ label before and after trump‘s tweet. how right-wing alternative news sites in the u.s. depict antifa throughout the articles, there was a noticeable absence of further features that identify a group or individual actors as antifa. there are practically no mentions or descripti- ons of specific insignia like logos, flags or pins that could lead to the conclusion that these individuals would self-identify or be designated as antifa. occasional references are made to black bloc clothing and “flags,” but apart from this, any potential readers would be ill-equipped to recognize or identify antifa members in a real-world situa- tion. perhaps more importantly, no direct quotes by individuals or groups identifying themselves as antifa are offered. what does antifa do? the most prominently featured term indicting actions by antifa is the word “violence.” as becomes clear in the terms that follow, this is often associated with the destruction of property, rioting or looting. in many instances, however, these “acts of violence” were not defined further. when it came to actual acts of violence or assault aimed at persons, the only groups that were singled out where “police” and “journalists” – whe- re it should be noted that most of these accounts regarding journalists referred specifi- cally to one particular incident and individual (andy ngô). thus, these websites were engaging frequently in fallacious generalization from a single incident. another important theme was the idea of “hijacking” or exploiting the protests sur- rounding the murder of george floyd by instigating protests and sowing discord wit- hin african american communities. such claims were significantly correlated with charges of travelling across state lines, specifically for these purposes. table . activities associated with the term antifa. what does antifa do? (n = ) count % acts of violence % destroy; havoc % burn; arson % instigate; incite; sow discord; exploit; use % loot; steal % travel; cross state lines % terror % attack % target police % figure . word cloud based on frequency of terms or phrases coded as segments that mention antifa activities. looking at this word cloud helps clarify key attributes of antifa in the discourse. since there are so few actual individual or specific institutions associated with the term, it would appear that antifa is mostly defined through their actions. arguably, many of the classifications listed above, already contain descriptive elements alluding to their actions (e.g. rioters, criminals, terrorists). this creates some redundancies, if not tauto- logies in the texts, whereby actions define the individual. these, in turn, are associated with the larger moniker of “antifa,” not by external features but by the very acts they are purportedly committing. by this logic, if antifa are rioters, then acts of rioting might also make you antifa. in order to learn more about how the classification as a particular actor type is associated with which types of action, i looked at correlation patterns between them. unsurprising- ly, the most prominent type of action, “acts of violence,” is also the one most closely associated with a variety of different actor types and attributes. yet these results can also serve to show us the importance of classification, even if there are no concrete actions by actor types mentioned. for example, it seems that while the classification as a “group” or “organization” is closely associated with violence and destruction, the classification how right-wing alternative news sites in the u.s. depict antifa of “movement” has no significant association with these types of acts. conversely, the terms “group” and “organization”, which might be seen to imply more active efforts of coordination, are more closely associated with instigating or perpetrating violence. furthermore, we can gain more insights into “who” is purportedly committing acts of terror: there is an association to specific names or institutions, but mostly the asso- ciation goes hand in hand with attributes like “militant,” “radical,” “extremist,” (and, of course, “terrorist”). these attributes also go hand in hand with “acts of violence,” “burning” and “arson.” when antifa is said to be instigating, inciting or exploiting, which implies a degree of strategic or tactical maneuvering, it is usually connected to organizational structures, as well as ideologically extreme positions. table . association between actor types and activities based on pearson’s r correla- tion (p-value: -tailed). actor types & attributes / activites travel; cross state lines instigate; incite; sow discord; exploit target police terror acts of violence destroy; havoc burn; arson loot; steal attack movement , (p= , ) , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) , (p= , ) organization , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) , (p= , ) group , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) leaderless, diffused, loose, etc. , (p= , ) , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) , (p= , ) rioters; hoo- ligans; thugs; criminals , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) children; kids - , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) specific name of individuals or institution , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) , (p= , ) far left; left wing , (p= , ) , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) communist; fascist , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) , (p= , ) anarchist - , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) , (p= , ) anti-fascist , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) radical; extremist , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) violent; militant , (p= , ) , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) terrorist - , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) outside, paid, professional - , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) masked , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) - , (p= , ) , (p= , ) who or what is associated with or compared to antifa? table . actors, groups and organisations associated with antifa by right-wing websites. who is antifa associated with / compared to? count (n = ) % black lives matter % leftists; far-left groups % anarchists; extremists; criminals; rioters % specific institutions % specific individuals; george soros ( ) % jeremiah and/or keith ellison % right-wing, far-right, racist groups % democrats % media; journalists % in cases in which antifa was mentioned, the term was associated with other groups or individuals. this code was applied to names or terms that were likened to or listed in conjunction with antifa, as well as to names of individuals or institutions who were described as supporting them. the most prominent of these was the black lives matter movement ( %), which often appeared in direct conjunction with the term antifa and was presented as taking part in the same activities described above. other far-left groups, as well as terms for criminal activities made up the next two most prominent categories. instances make mention of other specific groups or institutions, including occupy wallstreet, the animal liberation front, the minnesota freedom fund, moveon.org, but also isis, the weatherman, or the pkk. similarly, % refer to far-right extremist and explicitly racist groups like “brown shirts,” the kkk and “white supremacists.” in these examples, as well as in references to notorious terror groups, the association seems more akin with a classification of antifa, in that it establishes that these are equivalent to the extremist ideologues they purport to oppose. % of the recorded instances made mention of specific individuals, including politi- cians like bernie sanders, alexandria ocasio-cortez, or ilhan omar, but also media personalities like don lemon, actor patton oswald and twitter ceo jack dorsey. ar- guably, this number goes up to %, if it were to include keith ellison, the attorney general of minnesota, and/or his son jeremiah ellison. but this is probably an artifact how right-wing alternative news sites in the u.s. depict antifa of the sample’s timeframe and specific media agenda for that week. nonetheless, the focus on specific individuals shows the power of associating a term like antifa with all its negative connotations, to specific individuals who are prominently featured within a given news cycle. overall, it seems noteworthy that these associations with specific names of individuals or organizations were much more common than actually stating who antifa is. this is perhaps not surprising since antifa is such a loose and vague collection of individuals and positions: there is no identifiable collective “who,” except perhaps in the fevered imagination of the far-right. where has antifa been active? figure . reports of antifa activity in right-wing website articles. while only articles ( %, across websites) named specific locations in setting the scene for antifa activities, articles ( %, across websites) employed the rather imprecise phrase “our cities.” this correlated significantly with the activities of “travel; cross state borders” and “instigating.” the combination might suggest that antifa activists are regarded as somewhat of a foreign entity and thus can be “othered” as not being part of the communities in which they cause conflict. another recurrent theme in many of the stories is that antifa seems to be particularly active in cities and states governed by democrats. the most frequently named location being portland, oregon, while minneapolis, new york, seattle and various locations in california are also prominently featured. additionally, some articles made mention of antifa activities in other countries such as germany ( ), the uk ( ), and france ( ). canada ( ) and athens, greece ( ) also received mentions. assuming that these are not places where the majority of these websites’ audiences are located, this ultimately creates the impression of a somewhat external scene for these conflicts. it also makes it less likely that readers are going to have first-hand experience with the types of protest that are being depicted. as political communication scholarship on news coverage of foreign events has pointed out, spatial distance between audiences and events may lead to “information asymmetries that disadvantage average citizens” and provide media and political elites with a considerable amount of leeway in framing and interpreting events. this latter aspect is especially relevant in light of the fact that percent of all sampled articles on antifa also make explicit mention of trump, and almost a third ( %) refer to attorney general barr. furthermore, most of the articles are sourced solely by either referring to social media posts of prominent politicians or via links to and interpretation of viral videos that pur- port to show events at protests. the third main genre of articles are essentially opinion or think pieces that editorialize against antifa sympathizers or for the designation of “domestic terrorism.” meanwhile, there is a noticeable absence of on-the-ground reporting or even commen- tary of such pieces by other media organizations. in fact, much of the on-the-scene reports appears to stem from a single source, andy ngô, a right-wing provocateur and “media personality,” often portrayed as a journalist. ngô has purportedly been attacked and antagonized by antifa supporters in the past, as these articles also often note, which make him part of the very story he is being cited on. across the sample of articles, his twitter handle is the second most frequently cited (n = ), after @real- donaldtrump ( ), across articles by different websites. conclusion the main takeaway from the analysis of these articles has been how diffuse and confu- sing the answer to my initial question has become: who or what is antifa and what do they do? bearing in mind that my sample was drawn from a very limited timeframe, focused on much the same overall agenda, it seems stunning how many different and often contradictory answers the analyzed articles provided. apart from the quantifica- tion of different definitions, activities, associates, or locales, the general sense that per- vades is that there exists a rather loose and broadly dispersed group of far-left militant radicals, who routinely cross state borders in order to strategically cause damage and destruction in the name of a dangerous ideological cause. https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mbaum/files/baum_potter_jop_preprint.pdf https://scholar.harvard.edu/files/mbaum/files/baum_potter_jop_preprint.pdf https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/andy_ngo how right-wing alternative news sites in the u.s. depict antifa arguably, antifa and its history is a complex issue that not many americans are likely to be familiar with. if they should rely primarily on news sites such as the ones analy- zed here, this paves the way for more confusion and obfuscation and enables political elites to use the term in any sense pertaining to its many connotations. indeed, it seems that for donald trump and his administration, antifa might indeed serve as a welcome foil with which to associate political or ideological opponents on the left. the findings presented here stemmed from a wide spectrum of right-wing websites, ranging from prolific ones like fox news or breitbart, to more niche outfits like patri- otpost or politichicks. the similarities that emerge across this spectrum call to mind classifications of a “right-wing echo chamber” and forms of networked propaganda, in which right-wing media have shown to be tightly interconnected in sharing content and agendas. the sheer scope of misleading information circulating here may also be seen as presenting a problem to social media platforms and their content moderation practices, which tend to classify sites like breitbart or fox news as legitimate journa- listic outfits and often serve as entry points into this news environment. meanwhile, on the ground level of right-wing and far-right activism, the threat of anti- fa may indeed be seen as a more legitimate concern. an integral part of the actual anti- fa agenda is “to attach professional and social costs to membership in white suprema- cist, neo-nazi and similar organizations,” as joshua holland has pointed out. holland suggests that contrary to the diffused and unspecific image of a far-left “bogeyman” conjured by right-wing media, many antifa activities have revolved around the direct involvement of a specific individual or organization with far-right extremism and whi- te supremacist ideology. such acts of exposing coordinated activities by specific in- dividuals create transparency and accountability within spaces of public deliberation. the same could not be said for right-wing media coverage of antifa, which is rife with generalizations, obfuscation and unsubstantiated claims. most importantly, however, it fails to be specific in defining who its subjects actually are. in the hands of authori- tarian governments, such “floating signifiers” can serve as convenient catch-all scape- goats and might ultimately serve as useful tools in criminalizing dissent. https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /nyregion/who-is-martin-gugino-buffalo-police.html https://books.google.de/books?id= oa mosagc&printsec=frontcover https://www.oxfordscholarship.com/view/ . /oso/ . . /oso- https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgeqe /how-breitbart-is-crushing-mainstream-media-on-facebook https://www.alternet.org/ / /antifa-are-a-ridiculous-right-wing-bogeyman-but-theres-more-to-the-story/ linked sources andy ngo. ( , june .). in wikipedia. https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?tit- le=andy_ngo&oldid= baum, m. a. & potter, p. b. k. ( ). media, public opinion, and foreign policy in the age of trump. journal of politics, ( ), - . beauchamp, z. ( , june ). antifa, explained. vox. https://www.vox.com/poli- cy-and-politics/ / / / /antifa-anti-fascist-explained beauchamp, z. ( , july ). the assault on conservative journalist andy ngo, explained. vox. https://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/ / / / / antifa-portland-andy-ngo-proud-boys benkler, y., faris, r., & roberts, h. ( ). network propaganda: manipulation, disinformation, and radicalization in american politics. oxford university press. doi: . /oso/ . . collins, b., zadrozny, b. & saliba, e. ( , june ). white nationalist group posing as antifa called for violence on twitter. nbc news. https://www.nbcnews.com/tech/se- curity/twitter-takes-down-washington-protest-disinformation-bot-behavior-n editorial board. ( , june ). trump is spreading a dangerous conspira- cy theory about antifa. the washington post. https://www.washingtonpost. com/opinions/trump-is-spreading-a-dangerous-conspiracy-theory-about-anti- fa/ / / / f fa -ab - ea- d -d bc b bf _story.html feuer, a. ( , june ). trump falsely targets buffalo protester, , as ‘antifa pro- vocateur’. the new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /nyregion/ who-is-martin-gugino-buffalo-police.html heft, a., mayerhöffer, e., reinhardt, s., & knüpfer, c. ( ). beyond breitbart: comparing right-wing digital news infrastructures in six western democracies. policy & internet, , - . https://doi.org/ . /poi . holland, j. ( , june ). here’s the real reason so many on the right are terrified of antifa. alternet. https://www.alternet.org/ / /antifa-are-a-ridiculous-right- wing-bogeyman-but-theres-more-to-the-story/ jamieson, k. h., & cappella, j. n. ( ). echo chamber: rush limbaugh and the conservative media establishment. oxford university press. macfarquhar, n., feuer, a. & goldman, a. ( , june ). federal arrests show no sign that antifa plotted protests. the new york times. https://www.nytimes. com/ / / /us/antifa-protests-george-floyd.html how right-wing alternative news sites in the u.s. depict antifa mallin, a. ( , june ). evidence that antifa, ‘foreign actors’ involved in sowing unrest and violence: ag barr. abc news. https://abcnews.go.com/politics/ ag-barr-evidence-antifa-foreign-actors-involved-sowing/story?id= menn, j. ( , june ). facebook takes down white nationalist and fake antifa accounts. reuters. https://www.reuters.com/article/us-minneapolis-police-pro- tests-facebook/facebook-takes-down-white-nationalist-and-fake-antifa-ac- counts-iduskbn a j trump, d. [realdonaldtrump]. ( , may ). the united states of america will be designating antifa as a terrorist organization. [tweet]. retrieved from https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/ uberti, d. ( , december ). how breitbart is crushing mainstream media on facebook. vice. https://www.vice.com/en_us/article/jgeqe /how-breitbart-is-crus- hing-mainstream-media-on-facebook wilson, j. ( , june ). what is antifa and why is donald trump targeting it? the guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /jun/ /what-is-anti- fa-trump-terrorist-designation the challenge of jewish difference in québec the challenge of jewish difference in québec stephanie tara schwartz journal of jewish identities, volume , number , january , pp. - (article) published by johns hopkins university press doi: for additional information about this article [ access provided at apr : gmt from carnegie mellon university ] https://doi.org/ . /jji. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ https://doi.org/ . /jji. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ january , ( ) the challenge of jewish difference in québec stephanie tara schwartz, independent scholar in may , a group of gender studies and jewish studies scholars were invited to milwaukee to participate in a conference called “grammars of co- herence and difference: jewish studies through the lens of gender studies.” the goal of the conference was to explore whether gender studies methodol- ogies might be useful for theorizing jewishness. the conference organizers proposed the term “jewish difference” to refer to the relationship between the constructed poles of jew/non-jew, in the way that “gender difference” ex- plores the relationship between the presumed categories of “man” and “wom- an.” jewish difference and gender difference in these cases are predicated on the relationship between terms set as binaries, based on the philosophical principle of defining a concept as a thing with a coherent identity in relation to that which it opposes. in thinking about the complexity of jewishness in the context of the ongoing exploration of what it means to be québécois, i wish to propose an alternative entry point for exploring “jewish difference.” gilles deleuze’s philosophy of difference inverts the hierarchical prioritiza- tion of identity over difference, urging us to see difference—a philosophical concept—as defined in-itself rather than “conceived of as an empirical rela- tionship between two terms which each has a prior identity of its own.” fol- lowing this philosophy, i use the term “jewish difference” as a concept that insists upon its own internal complexities and variability, taking into account intra-jewish differences that are simultaneously being negotiated with defini- tions of what is or is not jewish. a discussion of three media events in québec will help illustrate the use- fulness for theorizing jewish difference in this way. the first is an interview in the film ans après ( years later), in which the moroccan jewish filmmaker jacques bensimon talks to the director of the allied jewish com- munity services of montréal about the francophone sephardic community’s desire to have a separate community center. the second is the interactive documentary toi, moi et la charte (you, me and the charter), that invites users to explore competing opinions on québec’s charter of values, including one francophone jewish woman’s support for the controversial proposed bill. the third is life outside of blackness, a feature on three generations of ethio- pian jewish women in montréal, that was produced as part of the canadian broadcasting company’s (cbc) montréal journalism series called “real talk journal of jewish identities ( ), ( ) the challenge of jewish difference in québec journal of jewish identities on race.” an analysis of these media events points to the challenges of lan- guage, race, ethnicity, religion, and gender in defining jewishness in québec and the need to understand jewishness as a theoretically open concept, fol- lowing deleuze’s philosophy of difference. jewish difference in québec before the s: jews as “honourary protes- tants” jewish difference conceived as an inherently complex and variable concept is most appropriate for understanding the struggles that québec jews have faced in their efforts to define themselves on an individual and a commu- nal level in this canadian province. québec distinguishes itself from other provinces in canada because it continues to fight for recognition as a distinct society with a french-speaking majority and a unique culture and civil law tradition. in this context, montréal jews have historically been conceived as a “third solitude,” an institutionally complete community with a unique culture heavily influenced by the mass migration of yiddish-speaking east- ern european jews between the s and s, and “wedged between the economically dominant english-protestant minority and the disenfranchised french-canadian majority” of the city. jews had not been permitted to settle in france’s catholic colony of new france, but after the british conquest of new france in , a handful of jew- ish merchants who worked as purveyors to the british army settled in the british-controlled province of québec. in , jewish settlers (most of whom were of ashkenazi background) established shearith israel (the spanish and portuguese congregation), conforming to the sephardic style of prayer prom- inent in the american jewish culture they had participated in before mov- ing to québec. by a breakaway english, german, and polish congrega- tion (shaar hashomayim) was created that followed ashkenazi rather than sephardic rites, spurred by the growing migration of jews from central and eastern europe. temple emanu-el, montréal’s first reform temple, was estab- lished in after controversy surrounding the unorthodox leanings of shaar hashomayim’s newly hired american rabbi samuel marks led some mem- bers to form a new congregation. the population of early jewish settlers was small, and they tended to achieve some level of socioeconomic stability and integration into montréal’s anglophone protestant elite. however, the arrival of larger numbers of poorer, yiddish-speaking jews from the former russian empire created conflicts between the “downtowner” jewish immigrant pop- ulation and the “uptowner” jews who lived in the wealthier parts of the city. these tensions lasted for decades. questions of jewish difference have been raised anew with each subse- quent wave of jewish migration. the long-lasting debate over jewish school- ing in québec exemplifies the ways in which jews have struggled to negoti- ate intra-jewish difference in response to externally imposed definitions of “jew,” and the ensuing social, legal, and political consequences. section of stephanie tara schwartz january , ( ) the constitution act of designated education as the responsibility of the individual provinces that were created under the umbrella of the new cana- dian federation. it guaranteed the rights of the protestant minority in catho- lic-majority québec and those of the catholic minority in protestant-majority ontario, allowing each of the minorities to establish separate institutions of re- ligious education. as a result, québec developed a confessional school system, in which public education was divided into roman catholic and english-prot- estant school boards until it was replaced by a linguistically divided system in . in the s and s, members of shaar hashomayim who oversaw the baron de hirsch institute (a philanthropic organization created to assist newly arrived eastern european immigrants) challenged a deal that the spanish and portuguese congregation made with the catholic school board. in the agree- ment, the board would return percent of the property taxes that jews had paid to the congregation in order to operate its jewish confessional school. the baron de hirsch executives argued that their newly created school— which was located in an immigrant neighborhood, served a larger population, and prepared students to attend english-language schools—should receive part of the funds raised by school taxes paid by jewish property owners. for their part, as a minority in québec, anglophone protestants would benefit from increased revenue to serve jewish students through their system (though they were unwilling to give up any of their exclusive rights over religious ed- ucation). after a period of controversy and negotiation, the spanish and por- tuguese congregation ended its arrangement with the catholic school board in , and jewish school taxes would instead be exclusively administered through the protestant school board. the confessional school system in québec forced jews from different socio- economic backgrounds and countries of origin to unite in order to advocate for their community, but the different groups of jews were never able to entirely resolve their conflicts about issues of both internally and externally negotiat- ed jewish difference. following a court case between the jewish community and the protestant school board, the québec legislature passed an act in that made jews into “honourary protestants” for the purposes of schooling. jewish school taxes were allocated to the protestant school board and jewish students could attend protestant schools, but jews were not allowed to sit on school boards in the montréal region (where most of them lived), few jewish teachers were employed, jews were not exempt from protestant religious in- struction, and they did not receive accommodation for jewish holidays. by the early s, the proportion of jews in the montréal protestant school board had risen to more than percent of total enrollment, but their lack of rights within the system had not changed. yiddish had become the third most spo- ken language in québec after french and english. some schools such as baron byng high school in the dense jewish neighborhood now called the plateau were percent jewish, and yet the students were still receiving a protestant education. in the early s, the protestant school board felt financially pressed by the large jewish student population (who, they felt, were not paying their equal the challenge of jewish difference in québec journal of jewish identities share), and sought to repeal the act that permitted jews to attend prot- estant schools. consequently, the debate over jewish schooling in québec’s confessional school system raged again both within the jewish community and between jews, the protestant school board, the government of québec, and the roman catholic school board. this time many uptowner jews—in- dividuals affiliated with the spanish and portuguese congregation or shaar hashomayim—advocated for full integration into the protestant system while downtowners—yiddishists, labour zionists, and working-class jews—want- ed instead to establish a separate jewish school system. ultimately jewish leaders reached an agreement with the protestant school board. the act was maintained and québec’s jewish students could continue to attend prot- estant public schools or private jewish schools. this jewish schooling issue in québec, used as an example here, is significant for two reasons: first, it helps explain why multilingual jews became predominantly anglophone in the francophone majority province of québec. second, it illustrates the extent to which questions of jewish difference—internally complicated by divisions of class, language, and ethnicity among jews, and externally challenged by gov- ernment systems designed to serve anglophone protestants and francophone catholics—have existed since the earliest jewish settlement in present-day québec. tensions between jewish uptowners and downtowners eased over the years as eastern european immigrants integrated linguistically and econom- ically into anglophone québec. dramatic upheavals in the s and s, however, provoked a new set of challenges for québec’s jews. the election of jean lesage’s liberal government triggered a social and cultural trans- formation known as the quiet revolution, a period of rapid modernization, secularization, and nationalization of the québec state, which until then had been dominated by the roman catholic church and anglophone protestant capital. the organized jewish community, which was built to serve jews in québec’s religiously and linguistically divided system, now had to grapple with the state’s push to nationalize and francize social services. with the ho- locaust vivid in recent memory, jews feared québec’s rising nationalism, and events such as the october crisis created much anxiety. tensions cul- minated in the election of réné lévesque’s parti québécois (pq) in . the parti québécois enacted bill , the charter of the french language, that established french as québec’s only official language in , and it held qué- bec’s first sovereignty referendum in . thus while the government pur- sued a quest to define and preserve a québécois national identity, based on the assumption of a shared french linguistic and ethnic origin, the situation in québec was complicated by a growing number of racially, ethnically, reli- giously, and linguistically diverse immigrants who benefitted from the termi- nation of canada’s racist immigration regulations in the s. the immi- gration of a significant population of francophone north african jews during this tense period of language politics prompted both french quebecers and anglophone jews to rethink the presumed coherence of their collective and individual identities. with this background, we can examine our first media stephanie tara schwartz january , ( ) event during the s, in which a moroccan jewish filmmaker broached the issue of an independent sephardic community center with a leader of the an- glophone, ashkenazi community. media event one: ans après jacques bensimon’s film ans après documents the struggle of moroccan jews to settle in montréal and find their place between the en- glish-speaking ashkenazi jewish community and the majority francophone catholic culture. two questions haunt the film: first, can moroccan jews be- come québécois and be accepted as equals by the majority culture? second, can moroccan jews preserve their unique cultural identity and independence without total absorption into the organized anglophone ashkenazi jewish community? through individual and group interviews, voice-overs and ar- chival footage, bensimon depicted the experiences of new north african jew- ish immigrants regarding their immigration, schooling, work, religion, sex- uality, relationships, and community. it was the first and only film to tackle the conflict between francophone sephardic and anglophone ashkenazi jews and is thus a crucial and rare primary source for understanding this issue in its historical setting. ans après follows the national film board of canada’s (nfb) tradition of activist documentaries by which film was used a tool for social change. bensimon followed this tradition by giving ample space for discussion and debate in the film, featuring scenes in which sephardic jews challenged ash- kenazi jews, french (non-jewish) quebecers, and fellow sephardic jews, on a variety of social, political, and religious issues, and in the film’s dialogues, interlocutors worked toward resolutions of these conflicts. it is one such scene that can help theorize the contours of jewish difference in québec of the s. bensimon featured a crosscutting of talking head interviews with manny bat- shaw, director of allied jewish community services (ajcs), the centralized philanthropic and social service organization for montréal’s jewish commu- nity, and jean-claude lasry, president of the association sépharade franco- phone (asf), the organization formed to advocate for the unique needs of francophone sephardic jews. batshaw began by stating that it had become necessary for the jewish community, as for canada as a whole, to increase its population through immigration because the birth rate was so low that communities did not reproduce themselves. in fact, due to the introduction of the birth control pill in and the rapid secularization of québec society, québec’s birth rate had dropped from one of the highest in the western world to one of the lowest by the s. opening his interview in this way, batshaw set the tone for highlighting the ajcs’s concern for jewish cohesion and com- munity preservation in the city that was, at the time, home to canada’s largest jewish population. while the migration of north africans increased the total population of montréal jews, it also created a fissure within the community due to qué- the challenge of jewish difference in québec journal of jewish identities bec’s tense language politics. in the film, batshaw continued: “we now have a confrontation in regard to one aspect of service. many of the sephardim rep- resented by an elite leadership propose that there should be a separate com- munity center for sephardi youth and adults. we have to ask: is this in the best interest of both the sephardim and the general jewish community?” to this, the filmmaker responded in english from off-camera: “but the sephardim told you that it is in their best interest.” batshaw replied: “yes, a leadership group has informed us. but to what extent is that leadership representative of all the sephardim?” this statement is ironic, as batshaw himself spoke on behalf of a leadership group that was evidently not representative of all montréal jews. in any case, batshaw went on to explain: and this is the crux of the problem. are we talking about a total jewish com- munity, which is the concern of ajcs or are we talking about a sub-communi- ty that wants to be almost independent with only a tangential relationship to the jewish community as a whole? our insistence is that we cannot see a sep- arate group without some connection, because we have a responsibility to our contributors . . . .we need the strength of all of our jews, and as a people we have a sense of unity, and we have to find a way of maintaining that unity. bensimon prompted: “otherwise the risk is what?” batshaw replied: “los- ing any one jew from the general jewish community is from my point of a view a tragedy. if we were to lose a large segment of that community it would be, as far as we’re concerned a holocaust.” batshaw’s likening the desire of moroccan jews to have independent institutions to the systematic destruction of european jews during the holocaust reveals something of the panic experienced by the ajcs in montréal in the s. but it also shows the extent to which jewish federations in canada continued to face challenges in trying to do what they had done since their inception, when they had attempt- ed to bring together uptowner and downtowner jews. organized community leadership still struggled to forge (or impose) jewish unity from the commu- nity’s inherent diversity. indeed, the attempts of the organized jewish community in canada to im- pose jewish unity ran counter to the fact that the boundaries of “jewish” have never been fixed by a single authority or tradition. taking this into consider- ation, i suggest conceptualizing “jewish” as operating like a rhizome rather than a tree, in the way in which deleuze and félix guattari have distinguished between multivalent “rhizome” thinking and binary “tree” thinking. deleuze and guattari have named several qualities that characterize a rhizome. first and second are connection and heterogeneity: any point of a rhizome can be connected to another and must be. a rhizome ceaselessly establishes connec- tions and should never be considered a closed system. third is multiplicity: everything is internally differentiated and changes when the rhizome extends its connections; no point is ever to be considered a unity or pivot point. the unity of a rhizome is an amalgam of buzzing frequencies, a coherence of heterogeneous and moving components; it is only the appearance of unity. fourth is a signifying rupture: the process of territorialization–deterritorializa- stephanie tara schwartz january , ( ) tion–reterritoralization is the rhizome’s way of resisting signification, resisting being pinned down to a single authentic meaning. this is also how a rhizome proliferates. fifth and sixth are cartography and decalcomania: the construction of new connections and multiple entryways is stressed, rather than the tracing or exact replication of an original. a tree has multiple branches that all die if severed from the root while a rhizome is like ginger, a more integrated or- ganism that continues to grow even if one section is severed. it is much more difficult to uproot. applying this theory to our example, batshaw worried that a separate sephardic jewish community center might “lack a connection” to ajcs. this presumed that ajcs was already representative of the entire jewish commu- nity, and that the allocation of funding to support sephardim to preserve their unique cultural identity without the overhead supervision of the ajcs was a threat to jewish cohesion. in a tree-like model of conceiving jewishness, the severing of a branch (sephardic independence) from its presumed single trunk (ajcs) potentially damages the entire tree. moreover, the communities represented by the organizations ajcs and asf were themselves internally diverse, representing a variety of jewish voices. (at the same time, the orga- nizations were not representative of many other jews in montréal, such as the progressive jewish left or hassidic jews.) a rhizome model of conceiving jewishness acknowledges that it is impossible to include all jews definitive- ly and completely within one single centralized organization because jewish individuals have an ongoing and dynamic relationship with their identity as jews, and judaism is a lived religion that “comes into being in an ongoing, dynamic relationship with the realities of everyday life.” rather than there being a binary jewish/non-jewish mode, jewish is actually difference in its core, constantly changing, shaping, and revising its boundaries. conceptualiz- ing jewishness through this metaphor helps explain why “the jewish people” or “the people of israel” have endured for so many centuries despite countless attempts to uproot them. along the same lines, the scholars daniel boyarin and jonathan boyarin argue for a diaspora model of jewish identity, based in rabbinic judaism, rather than a conception of jewish identity in which a cen- tral state plays a defining role. to further explore the implications of conceiving jewishness as a rhizome, i turn to insights from gender and sexuality studies. in her article “queering the center by centering the queer: reflections on transsexuals and secular jews,” naomi scheman juxtaposes the subject positions of secular jews and transsexuals to bring the “apparatuses” into view that render these positions “normatively incoherent,” i.e., marginal to the centers of heteronormativity and christian normativity. scheman’s goal is twofold. she not only seeks to support individuals at the margins, who experience oppression, but she also aims at disrupting the systems that create privilege and oppression in the first place. scheman’s work was inspired by her attempts to work through her own privilege as a female-born feminist and her puzzlement about “the claim of (most) male-to-female (mtf) transsexuals to be women.” the effort to define the authentic boundaries of the term “woman” (as a means of pro- the challenge of jewish difference in québec journal of jewish identities tecting people under that category from oppression) created political antag- onism between, as one example, some transsexual women and men on one side and some feminists on the other. the conflict centered particularly on how “women-only” spaces should be defined and who should have access to them. in response to these controversies, scheman advocated the disrup- tion of the center, the supposed coherence of the definition of “woman.” she suggested the term perinatally pinked to designate the condition of an individ- ual who was labelled female around the time of birth. in contrast to the term “woman,” perinatally pinked is not a noun with an apparently self-evident epistemological status, but the term describes a process in which outsiders fix a gender to a person around the time of birth. exposing the apparatus behind the construction of the alleged coherence of the concept “woman” becomes a tool for better understanding the multiple ways in which individuals experi- ence oppression (whether or not they are made intelligible) in relation to this presumably fixed category. scheman argues that: . . . there is a striking similarity between the heteronormative representation of the homosexual and the representation of the jew in what i called “chris- tianormative” discourse. analogously to the androcentrism of heteronorma- tive gender, christianormativity purports to divide the world into religions (all presumed to be like christianity except for being mistaken) while really only have two categories: christian and not (yet) christian. thus, according to scheman, the category of jew is not defined in-itself, that is, accounting for the complexity of difference that challenges its coherent identity as a concept, but it is defined in relation to a christian definition of re- ligion that sees the jew as choosing not to accept the divinity of jesus. further- more, scheman used her own relationship to jewishness—natally ascribed but not religiously observant—to complicate the definition of jew under “chris- tianormative” terms, in scheman’s rendering. like in the rhizome theory of jewish difference, scheman prefers a conceptual openness—allowing for mul- tiple meanings that define a category from within, in relation to what it is constructed against. in a follow-up article, she wrote: . . . rather than trans women’s arguing that there is some core meaning of woman that as a matter of fact includes them, or definitely claiming the right to self-identify as women freed from any shared social understanding of what that means, there is more political hope in arguing against the currently nor- mative understandings of gender (understandings that—of course for differ- ent reasons—cis-female feminists deplore) and struggling to find plural but interrelated coalitional understandings that do justice to the wide range of gender’s discontent. to understand jewish difference in contemporary québec, we must look to competing definitions of jewish as a “religion” and as something intelligible based on the changing definition of religion and its supposed opposite: “secu- stephanie tara schwartz january , ( ) larism.” our second example explores this further in considering the québec charter of values debate of – . media event two: toi, moi et la charte the nexus of race, religion, gender, and nation in québec was on full dis- play during the charter of values debate in the years and . following le printemps érable (maple spring), a series of protests against post-secondary tuition hikes and austerity measures imposed by québec’s liberal govern- ment, pauline marois led the parti québécois to victory in september , becoming québec’s first female premier. a year later, the pq proposed bill , the “charter affirming the values of state secularism and religious neutrality and of equality between women and men, and providing a framework for accommodation requests” to the québec national assembly on november , . the charter of values sought to affirm “the values of state secularism and religious neutrality and of equality between women and men” and to provide a framework for responding to requests for religious accommoda- tion. to this end, the charter recommended that “[i]n the exercise of their function, personnel members of public bodies must not wear objects such as headgear, clothing, jewelry or other adornments which, by their conspicuous nature, overtly indicate a religious affiliation.” in addition, public employ- ees providing services, and individuals receiving public services, must have their faces uncovered. bill was eventually defeated and in april , the pq lost the election to the liberals. however, the debate about the charter of values fueled social division and led to increased acts of violence against religious minorities. the charter of values followed on the heels of the “reasonable accommo- dations” debate, that had raised similar questions about which practices, be- liefs, and people were included within the normative definition of “québé- cois.” in , the bouchard-taylor commission was formed by the québec government to investigate a series of complaints about requests for accom- modation by religious minorities in québec. scholars such as darryl leroux, gada mahrouse, and sirma bilge have argued that the debates over cultural or religious difference in québec hid a deeper anxiety about racialized differ- ence. bilge argued that the reasonable accommodations debate was based in an ideology that saw religious communities (muslims in particular) as a threat to québécois (civilized, western) “core values” of gender equality and sexual freedom. in mapping how this ideology came to coalesce, she discussed how fears of the muslim other (especially post - ) in the present were linked to a historical narrative that saw catholicism as responsible for québec’s “back- wardness” before the quiet revolution and women as religion’s primary victims. fears of racialized, religious others, diluting a presumed coherent québécois identity (distinct from a canadian identity), were intricately tied to québec’s sovereignty aspirations. the challenge of jewish difference in québec journal of jewish identities jews fell outside the definition of québécois in these debates, as they had in previous manifestations of québec nationalism. the leaders of the orga- nized jewish community thus took a strong public stand against the charter of values. ever anxious about the position of jews in québec, they rejected the pq’s sovereigntist politics and the racist implications of the charter. many jews feared its impact on jewish life in montréal. on november , the jewish general hospital (jgh) released a statement opposing bill as: . . . discriminatory and deeply insulting to public-sector workers . . . . for near- ly years, the jgh had prided itself on the fact that its staff—representing a wide diversity of faiths, with many employees wearing conspicuous items of clothing with religious symbols—had provided care of superior quality to quebecers [sic] of all backgrounds. the jgh rejected the idea that wearing a kippah, hijab, or turban interfered with the ability of its employees to fulfill their public duties as health care professionals. the fact that the jgh was built in response to discrimination against jews in québec’s confessional health care system in the s and served primarily the residents of côte-des-neiges, “one of the most ethnical- ly, racially, culturally, linguistically and religiously diverse neighborhoods in canada” provides context for the strong jewish opposition to the bill. these concerns were heightened because the jewish leadership feared that this discriminatory legislation would affect the willingness of jews to remain in québec. this was voiced explicitly in the brief that federation cja and its advocacy wing, the centre for israel and jewish affairs, submitted to a parlia- mentary hearing on december , . in it they wrote: the impact of bill on our community would be devastating. the social climate that had prevailed since the beginning of this societal debate has the potential to damage the continuity of the jewish community. already weak- ened by the exodus of the ’s, our aging community devotes all its energy towards programs to keep our youth in québec, and to attract others, notably from france. now, the debate on the “charter of québec values” has discour- aged our young people, who are starting to question their futures in québec. meanwhile numerous french jewish families tell us that they are considering immigrating to other regions of north america instead. . . . now, the “québec charter of values” threatens to disrupt this precious balance achieved by the quiet revolution by imposing an artificially homoge- nous framework on québec national identity to the detriment of the dynamic character of québec society. we deplore that the spirit of this bill results from a will to reassert a notion of québec identity based exclusively on ethno-cul- tural characteristics of the majority. the brief referred explicitly to the turmoil of the s that was captured so dramatically in ans après and the established québec anglophone ashke- nazi jewish community’s anxiety that still resonates today. it also mentioned stephanie tara schwartz january , ( ) the community’s active recruitment of jewish immigrants from france to sus- tain québec’s jewish population. this echoed the fears expressed by bat- shaw as a reason why it was so important to keep north african jewish im- migrants within the fold of a coherent jewish community in the s (before the exodus of a significant population of québec’s young anglophone jews around the sovereignty referendums of and ). the assumption of jewish unity would again be challenged, however, this time by different val- ues held by jewish migrants from france in relation to the charter of values. the nfb again offers a unique media event with which to consider how defining “jew” intersects with the attempt to define “québécois.” nfb direc- tors vali fugulin and jérémie battaglia partnered with the blog urbania, and the digital design studio dpt., to create the interactive web documentary toi, moi et la charte (you, me and the charter). on the site’s homepage, users are greeted with three floating bubbles, entitled “me,” “my values,” and “my discomforts,” and are invited to populate each of these bubbles with terms from a list supplied adjacent to the bubbles. i dragged the words “montréal,” “woman,” and “feminist” into the “me” bubble; “freedom of religion,” “re- spect,” and “immigrant,” into the “values” bubble; and “crucifix,” “racism,” and “fundamentalism,” into the “discomfort” bubble. after completing this step, the three bubbles merge into one, then split off into a new bubble dis- playing a “thumb-up” character and a second bubble with a “thumb-down” character. above the choices, a title reads: “es-tu plutôt pour ou contre le pro- jet de charte des valeurs québécoises? (are you for or against the charter of quebec values?) i selected thumb-down. the bubbles merge again and then split off into two new bubbles, with silhouettes of face profiled in them. the title above prompts: “une des ces personnes est ton opposée: decouvre laquelle” (one of these people is your opposite: discover which). i selected the profile of a woman. the silhouette morphed into a series of real faces and settled on a close-up of sonia sarah lipsyc, a sociologist, play- wright, and founding director of aleph, the centre for contemporary jewish studies of the communauté sépharade unifée de québec (csuq) (sephardic community of québec), established in . she was born in morocco and raised in france. in the interactive documentary, she reads a text message from a phone. in heavy québécois slang and using expletives, the text com- plains that “we” must “pay their kosher tax de merde with our money . . . there is no means of boycotting les osties, they have % of our grocery products.” lipsyc laughs this off, explaining that the text writer’s presumed “kosher tax” is a myth. thereafter, a sequence of cuts follows lipsyc as she walks through a park and speaks to the camera. she explains that, as a sociologist, she is fas- cinated by the issues surrounding the charter of values rather than offended by them. thus, lipsyc’s reaction to the debates about the charter differs from the statements by the organized jewish community, for whom she worked and whose headquarters in montréal appear on the screen in next scene of the interactive documentary. over a background image of the federation cja building with an israeli flag waving in front of it, the user is presented with two questions that can be the challenge of jewish difference in québec journal of jewish identities clicked to proceed through the documentary. i selected: “can one be a femi- nist within the framework of religion?” images of lipsyc cut between a talking head interview and shots of her perusing the stacks at the jewish public li- brary. she responds to the question: me, i’m a jewish woman! and i won’t let anyone dictate my place as a jew . . . no rabbi, no notable, no institution! i think that the inequalities in the jewish tradition can change . . . one example, it wasn’t possible for women to study the talmud . . . . and for years, it’s been done! why? because female and male feminists, including rabbis . . . considered it unjust that women did not have access to the talmudic text like men . . . so, in the face of this i can say “yes, i’m a jewish woman, there are things that don’t please me, i can arrange things in my hidden corner [or i can work on it publicly] . . . my tradition, i love it! it’s my community, i love it! it has problems, i do too . . . we can try to improve all this.” her statements regarding the freedom of feminist interpretations within judaism did not, however, apply to religious freedom vis-à-vis the state: i am for the charter because i think that . . . the ostentatious, visible signs of one or another can be put aside by people exercising their functions as au- thorities. that being said, do we consider on the same point a sikh who is a magistrate and a sikh who is a police officer? i believe that these are the ques- tions we must debate. i think that seeing a sikh in a police turban, this can help in certain circumstances whereas a sikh judge with his turban . . . could interfere. these are the questions posed . . . . lipsyc is a french citizen and a sociologist who immigrated to canada as an adult, and her approach to the relationship between church and state were likely shaped by the concept of laïcité, which is deeply rooted in france’s re- publican culture. laïcité is a model of political secularism whose definition of religion is based on catholicism. it imposes this definition and its “chris- tianormative” framework on non-christian others, interpreting all religious practices (including judaism) through a christian-centric and catholic-centric lens. as wendy brown argued in her reading together of jewish difference and sexual difference: . . . [b]oth jews and women, formally emancipated in nineteenth-and twen- tieth century europe, gained political equality without fully shedding the stigma of their difference. but for jews, emancipation is accompanied by the governmentality of tolerance because once the legal strictures are removed, the discursive construction of the jewish difference ceases to be systematically subordinating as a state or economic operation—and this very loss constitutes a threat to a crucial euro-atlantic nation-state norm. the presumption that one can simply conform to a cluster of privileged char- acteristics that make up european modernity by choosing to remove a hijab, kippah, turban, or kirpan, ignores the entangled relationship between reli- stephanie tara schwartz january , ( ) gion, gender, and racialized difference, and the “christianormative” frame- work that shaped québec’s debates on laïcité. many political scientists, anthropologists, and scholars of religion have raised this concern and critiqued western liberal, state-mandated versions of secularism along these lines. it is worth taking this critique seriously and reflecting on how islam became a target during québec’s charter of values debate, and what that meant for the understanding of judaism as another non-christian religion. bilge drew on joan w. scott’s concept of “sexularism” to critique québec’s version of laïcité and gender equality, vaunted during the reasonable accommodation debates. she wrote: sexularism can be defined as a contemporary discourse offering a teleological narrative of the secularisation process, believed to lead inevitably to gender and sexual equality. from the sexularist stand, religion is deemed unam- biguously oppressive to women and non-heteronormative sexualities—an assumption that heavily relies on hierarchical binaries (modern/traditional; secular/religious; sexually liberated/sexually oppressed; gender-equal/patri- archal; west/east) and produces the west as the site of gender equality and sexual emancipation thanks to secularism. at the core of this issue, she argues, is the neoliberal privatization of differ- ence that positions equal rights for individuals and fails to recognize the mul- tiple structures of oppression that render certain individuals outside the civi- lized nation. bilge understands this as a sort of reverse orientalism, that sees the east as sexually repressed and threatening rather than something exotic to be conquered. a look at secular judaism, as scheman takes it in her work, reveals the problems with the sexularist discourse. secular is not the binary opposite of “religious.” indeed, many secular jews struggle with their jewish identities, constructed through complex compounds of practices, belonging, belief, and genealogy. moreover, the debates around the charter of values also raised questions about how québécois political discourses constructed “jewish” in relation to muslim “others.” increasingly, in recent years hasidic jews have come to represent a threat to québécois laïcité and to presumed gender equality. one of the initial disputes that inspired the bouchard-tay- lor commission in concerned a request for accommodation by a hasidic yeshiva in the montréal neighborhood of outremont. they asked a ymca to cover the glass of their windows so that the yeshiva’s male students would not be exposed to the sight of women working out in the adjacent building. the charter of values was predicated upon western “christianorma- tive”-cum-secularist ideas of religion as uncivilized, homogenous, anachro- nistic, and misogynistic. its proponents declined to see islam, judaism, and sikhism as vibrant, diverse, living religions practiced by their adherents in multiple ways. yet, lipsyc demonstrated in toi, moi et la charte that many jew- ish individuals creatively engage with feminist critiques of religion, and in dialogue with these critiques, offer their own, often diverging, interpretations of religious laws and practices. in this way, lipsyc provides counter evidence for the secularist assumption that religion always oppresses women. her posi- the challenge of jewish difference in québec journal of jewish identities tion as a francophone jewish woman in favor of the québec charter of values, in contrast to the majority anglophone montréal jewish leadership, suggests that it is useful to understand jewishness in québec as a rhizome. it is better for leadership organizations or individuals concerned with jewish unity in the face of a political threat, such as the charter of values, to engage with jewish difference rather than to cut ties with individuals or groups who do not fit the norm. an examination of a third media event, the cbc montréal piece “‘life outside of blackness’: montréal family reflects on race, identity,” explores how race intersects religion and gender in defining both jewish and québé- cois. media event three: life outside of blackness the charter of values debate gives us insight into the ways in which race, in addition to religion and gender, threatened to place some individuals out- side the body of citizenry in québec. while we possess a robust literature on jews and race in the united states, neither jewish studies nor canadian studies scholars have paid much attention to the study of jews and race in canada. thus, in a recent article, michele byers and i called for a sustained exploration of jews and whiteness and for an examination of how racializa- tion has affected groups such as sephardic, mizrahi, and arab jews. jacques bensimon’s ans après helped expose the marginalization of north african jews by ashkenazi jews in canada and israel and by francophone catholics in the s. the migration of ethiopian jews to israel and canada in the s and s created a different layer of jewish “blackness.” while the experi- ences of both north african and ethiopian jews complicate presumptions of jewish whiteness, a further examination of their relationship with blackness challenges the binary division of sephardic and ashkenazi jewish categories that have become dominant norms for conceiving jewish unity in montréal. in , kimberlé williams crenshaw coined the term “intersectionality,” to explain how race and gender interrelate in the context of violence against women of color in the united states. i suggest that this concept is also useful for thinking through, in a theoretically informed way, how the complexity of jews and whiteness operates and what its consequences might be for black jewish women. according to crenshaw, intersectionality is: . . . a lens through which you can see where power comes and collides, where it interlocks and intersects. it’s not simply that there’s a race problem here, a gender problem here, and a class or lbgtq problem there. many times that framework erases what happens to people who are subject to all of these things. while intersectionality is sometimes used as a blanket term for acknowl- edging multiple layers of oppression experienced by an individual, its specific intervention around the marginalization of black women by both white wom- stephanie tara schwartz january , ( ) en and black men, and within violent apparatuses of the state, remains crucial. krenshaw argued that: . . . political strategies that challenge only certain subordinating practices while maintaining existing hierarchies not only marginalize those who are subject to multiple systems of subordination but also often result in oppo- sitionalizing race and gender discourses. an intersectional critique is thus important in uncovering the ways in which the reformist politics of one dis- course enforce subordinating aspects of another. in the same vein as scheman’s view, crenshaw’s feminist critique in this quote challenges a (white, heterosexual) normative center and exposes the core difference within the definition of “woman.” like the term “jewish,” “woman” is not a closed category, but rather defined (and redefined) through the diverse experiences of individuals who define themselves (or are defined by others) in relation to this category. drawing from crenshaw’s important analysis, an intersectional approach could help develop better tools for tack- ling the complexity of jewish difference in québec and fighting the oppression of racialized jewish individuals (women, men, non-binary people) by both jews and non-jews. in – , women in canada and in the united states initiated two ma- jor activist movements that spread on social media and gained much visibility in the canadian public sphere. idle no more, “one of the largest indigenous mass movements in canadian history,” began as a series of teach-ins in sas- katchewan protesting parliamentary bills that threatened to erode indige- nous sovereignty. it was catalyzed by attawapiskat chief teresa spence’s hunger strike in december that called attention to the canadian federal government’s long neglect of indigenous peoples. along with the truth and reconciliation committee, set up to investigate canada’s destructive residen- tial school system, and growing support for an inquiry into murdered and missing indigenous women and girls, idle no more helped bring indigenous resistance into mainstream media. an american movement that shared in idle no more’s transnational resistance to colonialism, oppression, and white supremacy, black lives matter was created in july following the acquittal of george zimmerman in the shooting death of trayvon martin, an african american teenager. according to its website, the black lives matter initiative aimed at “broadening the conversation around state violence to include all of the ways in which black people are intentionally left powerless at the hand of the state. we are talking about the ways in which black lives are deprived of our basic human rights and dignity.” while black lives matter began as an american movement, it inspired anti-racist activists in canada as well. discussions about race in québec are particularly complex and fraught, and they are exacerbated by language divides that separate anglophones from francophones and make solidarity between the speakers of different languages more difficult. for example, there is an ongoing debate in québec about the use of blackface and whether or not it should be considered racist like its american counterpart. a significant intervention in these debates was the challenge of jewish difference in québec journal of jewish identities cbc montréal’s “real talk on race,” a two-week long series produced by nantali indogo and launched on march , . an article about the series on march , stated: “islamophobia, black lives matter, missing and mur- dered indigenous women (mmiw), the val-d’or police allegations, blackface in québec—like everyone else around the world, montrealers are affected by issues of race.” in this series, canada’s national english-language broadcast- er considered multiple layers of discrimination, but its focus on race diverged from the more common emphasis on religion, as in the debates around the québec charter of values. one feature in the series dealt explicitly with jewish difference and high- lighted the importance of crenshaw’s intersectional critique. in her piece “‘life outside of blackness’: montréal family reflects on race, identity,” ainslie maclellan interviewed three generations of women in the eyob family, who were ethiopian jews and had settled in montréal in the s. the video clip opened with the eyob family lighting shabbat candles and reciting the bless- ing. malefiya zeleke, who was born in ethiopia and immigrated to montréal in , tells us: “when i used to live in ethiopia we always hiding. we don’t want to talk too much about the jewish religion. most of the time they don’t understand about us and they give a bad name. jewish [is] my religion, and ethiopian jewish it’s my identity.” her daughter hirut was born in ethiopia but arrived as a child in montréal. she says: more and more my identity is very much that as an ethiopian jew, there are just very few of us . . . maybe a total of . . . my default of community that i go to is the black community, but that hasn’t always been the case. there was always that question. you’re black, how could you be jewish? so over and over it’s like, well how can you be jewish and having to explain myself—well that’s who i am. her sister recalls the difficulty of being the only black person in an all- white jewish school. despite being prominent and well-liked by her friends she says: “but. you know what with all being famous and being popular, when prom came, no boy would ask me to prom. and they would never date me. ‘cause i was black.” hirut added: . . . the idea of blackness, i learned that from coming to canada at the age of . i didn’t understand what they are talking about, they’re like where are you from because i looked exactly like my friend who was from sri lanka. and it’s over time that i learn blackness is a political identity. it’s a survival identity. it’s not necessarily how i might identify but also how i’m perceived. here she makes the explicit the role of the other in shaping the coherence of one’s identity. blackness was something imposed from the outside, that she later began to claim as a political identity. it intersected with her jewishness, complicated it, but did not cover over it. stephanie tara schwartz january , ( ) for hirut’s daughter méshama, who in attended a french-language public school in québec as a jew, the influence of outsider definitions of one’s identity were even more evident. méshama told the interviewer: i consider myself what i call “ethio-jamaican-canadian.” i was all about ethi- opia. i listened to ethiopian music, i spoke amharic and then i went to french school so i was like, i think i’m québécoise. my first encounter with racism was either grade one or two and there was this girl, she was white, she was always telling me i looked like poo. i went to french school and she was like “tu ressembles caca.” that’s when i knew, i am different from everyone here. and people are going point it out to me. i used to have dreads . . . no one looks like me in my environment, no one understands my hair, so like maybe i’m not even meant to have this hair. i just started cutting them, slowly. my parents would find dreads around the house. i would try to like, hide them away so that they wouldn’t see them. but eventually they started noticing. méshama, is that your dread on the balcony? is that your dread on the floor? we need to talk . . . my mom had told me that she had an opportunity before coming to canada to experience life outside of blackness . . . . the first time she told me that i was offended. i was like, what’s wrong with being black? she was just like, there’s nothing wrong with it . . . it’s just that i live and breathe blackness . . . going to the mall for me is all about blackness. i can’t walk around the mall with- out someone always following me around the store, i can’t look at the police without feeling something inside of me. i cannot just like, be in a public area without just like having . . . oh yea i’m black. people are definitely not black and they’re looking at me for it. méshama highlights the complexity of being black, jewish, and bilingual in contemporary québec and the consequences of being racialized in her ev- eryday life. mekefiya, hirut, and méshama reveal in this article the extent to which their racial, gender, and religious identities were inherently connected, coming to the forefront when reminded of their difference from white québé- cois individuals and white jews. to understand the jewishness of these women by only looking at the sup- posed cohesion of montréal’s jewish community, or even at the ashkenazi– sephardic binary would be impossible. the intervention of taking into ac- count the experiences of the eyob family calls into question the cohesion of the jewish community, in relation to both internal and external definitions of jews as white. as hirut says, the identification with blackness provided her with a sense of belonging that she could not find in the predominately white jewish community. thus, the intersection of language, religion, gender, and race in contemporary québec affects how jewishness is defined both from within and outside the jewish community. the examples discussed in this essay make ev- ident that the definition of “jewish” is never static. for this reason, the concept of the rhizome helps to capture jewishness in its moving multiplicity. the challenge of jewish difference in québec journal of jewish identities the analysis of ans après, toi, moi et la charte, and “life outside of black- ness” demonstrates that intra-jewish difference and jewish/non-jewish dif- ference are constantly and simultaneously being challenged and negotiated. in montréal, where the definition of québécois is also constantly being chal- lenged and negotiated at the intersection of gender, race, language, and reli- gion, jewishness is constituted within a unique nexus of difference. under- standing jewishness as difference-in-itself, rather than a necessarily coherent concept is most useful for considering the many different people gathered within this category, who experience jewishness in a large variety of ways. the gender studies scholars scheman and crenshaw have created theoretical frameworks that allow feminist activists to take account of and respect people who experience the category of “woman”—and the consequences of wom- en’s oppression—differently. i have tried to show in this essay that applying theories from gender, sexuality, and critical race studies to the examination of jewish difference helps interrogate the concept of “jew” (as it does the con- cept of “woman”). i hope that my insights help to expand the conversation on jewish difference. notes daniel smith, “gilles deleuze,” stanford encyclopedia of philosophy, may , ; revised sep- tember , , accessed january , , https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/deleuze/#dif; gilles deleuze, difference and repetition, trans. paul patton (new york: columbia university press, ). sephardic is the identity that moroccan jews in montréal chose to organize around, despite the reality that many moroccan jews had roots in morocco before the migration of jews from spain and portugal. while the term mizrahi is more commonly used today in israel to refer to jews who immigrated from arab and muslim countries, it is less often used in montréal. when i refer to “sephardic” in this paper, it should be understood that this is its own con- structed and problematic category. brian o’neal, “distinct society: origins, interpretations, implications,” canada: library of parliament, , accessed january , , https://bdp.parl.ca/content/lop/researchpublica- tions/bp -e.htm; jocelyne richer, “quebec plans to reopen constitutional debate, launch coast-to-coast discussion,” globe and mail, may , , accessed january , https:// www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/quebec-plans-to-reopen-constitutional-debate- launch-coast-to-coast-discussion/article /. rebecca margolis, “sholem shtern: bridging the gaps,” in new readings of yiddish montréal, ed. pierre anctil, norman ravvin, sherry simon (ottawa: university of ottawa press, ), . see also gerald tulchinsky, “the third solitude: a.m klein’s jewish montréal, – ,” journal of canadian studies . ( ): – , and michael brown, jew or juif: jews, french-canadians and anglo-canadians, – (philadelphia: jewish publication society, ). gerald tulchinsky, taking root: the origins of the canadian jewish community (toronto: lester publishing ltd., ), . john kalbfleish, “from the archives: synagogue rose from push toward reform judaism,” montréal gazette, august , , accessed january , , http://montrealgazette.com/ sponsored/mtl- th/from-the-archives-synagogue-rose-from-push-toward-reform-juda- ism. this example is from tulchinsky, taking root, – . roderick macleod and mary anne poutanen, a meeting of the people: school boards and prot- estant communities in quebec, – (montréal: mcgill-queen’s university press, ), stephanie tara schwartz january , ( ) – . david fraser, “honorary protestants”: the jewish school question in montréal, – (toronto: university of toronto press, ). this discussion of the jewish school question in the s is derived from gerald tulchin- sky, branching out: the transformations of the canadian jewish community (toronto: stoddart, ), – . while the s is often referred to as the beginning of the quiet revolution, michael gavreau argues that it began earlier, stemming from changes within catholic culture rather than constituting a series of political breaks with catholic institutions. michael gauvreau, the catholic origins of quebec’s quiet revolution, – (montréal: mcgill-queen’s uni- versity press, ). the front liberation de québec (flq) kidnapped the british trade commissioner james cross and murdered québec’s minister of labour and vice-premier pierre laporte on oc- tober , . canada’s prime minister pierre elliot trudeau enacted the war measures act and indiscriminately started rounding up anyone suspected of links to the terrorist group. sean mills, the empire within: postcolonial thought and political activism in sixties montréal (montréal: mcgill-queen’s press, ), – . canada omitted overt racial discrimination from its immigration policies in . the devel- opment of the “points system” made skill, rather than race or national origin, the primary basis of determining acceptance into canada. see lindsay van dyk, “canadian immigration acts and legislation,” canadian museum of immigration at pier , accessed january , , http://www.pier .ca/research/immigration-history/canadian-immigration-acts-and-legis- lation. for more on the construction of québec’s ethno-cultural identity see darryl leroux, “the many paradoxes of race in québec: civilization, laïcité and gender (in)equality,” in critical inquiries: a reader in studies of canada, ed. lynn caldwell, darryl leroux, and carrianne leung (black point, ns: fernwood, ), – . on the migration of black an- glophone west indians to quebec, see david austen, fear of a black nation: race, sex, and security in sixties montréal (toronto: between the lines, ), and on francophone haitians, see sean mills, a place in the sun: haiti, haitians, and the remaking of quebec (montréal: mc- gill-queen’s university press, ). like jewish communities across north america, montréal developed a federation system to coordinate communal fundraising and allocations to various social agencies. at the time of bensimon’s film this central organization was called allied jewish community services (ajcs). today it is called federation cja (combined jewish appeal). when bensimon was first hired at the national film board, he worked on films such as occupation ( ), produced under the nfb’s challenge for change program that saw film production as a tool for enacting social change. i argue in another article that ans après is inspired by this activist tradition. stephanie tara schwartz, “occupation and ans après: representing jewish activism in montréal, – ,” canadian jewish studies ( ): – . on the challenge for change program see thomas waugh, michael brendan baker, and ezra winton, eds., challenge for change: activist documentary at the national film board of canada (montréal: mcgill-queen’s university press, ). an après, directed by jacques bensimon, canada: national film board, . these or- ganization are today respectively federation cja and communauté sépharade unifée de québec. ans après, : – : . john a. dickinson and brian young, a short history of quebec (montréal: mcgill-queen’s press, ), . while most of ans après was filmed in french, batshaw’s interview was conducted in en- glish with french subtitles. ans après, : – : . ans après, : capitalized words are emphasized in the french subtitles of the film. ans après, : – : . see jack lipinsky, imposing their will: an organizational history of jewish toronto, – (montréal: mcgill-queen’s university press, ). thank you to antoine burgard for this reminder. gilles deleuze and félix guattari, a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia, trans. brian massumi (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, ), . the challenge of jewish difference in québec journal of jewish identities ibid., . ibid. robert orsi, “everyday miracles: the study of lived religion,” in ed. david d. hall, lived religion in america: toward a history of practice (princeton: princeton university press, ), . daniel boyarin and jonathan boyarin, “diaspora: generation and the ground of jewish diaspora” in theorizing diaspora, ed. jana evans braziel and anita mannur (malden, ma: blackwell publishing ltd., ), – . naomi scheman, “queering the center by centering the queer: reflections on transsexuals and secular jews,” in feminists rethink the self, ed. diana tietjens meyers (boulder, co: westview, ), – ; reprinted in naomi scheman. shifting ground: knowledge and reali- ty, transgression and trustworthiness (new york: oxford university press, ), . ibid., . ibid., . ibid., . naomi scheman, “looking back on “queering the centre,” tsq: transgender studies quar- terly . – ( ): – . “charte affirmant les valeurs de laïcité et de neutralité religiuse de l’État ainsi que d’egal- ité entre les femmes et les hommes et encadrant les demandes d’accommodement,” in its french original. full text available here: “read: full text of bill —quebec’s charter of values,” global news, november , , accessed january , , http://globalnews.ca/ news/ /read-full-text-of-bill- -quebecs-charter-of-values/. ibid. ibid., chapter ii, division ii, . ibid., chapter iii, . “violence against muslim women on the rise, group says,” cbc news, october , , ac- cessed january , , http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/violence-against-mus- lim-women-on-the-rise-group-says- . . darryl leroux, “québec nationalism and the production of difference: the bouchard-tay- lor commission, québec identity act, and québec’s immigrant integration policy,” que- bec studies ( ): – ; gada mahrouse, “‘reasonable accommodation’ debates in quebec: the limits of participation and dialogue,” race and class . ( ): – ; sirma bilge, “mapping québécois sexual nationalism in times of ‘crisis of reasonable accommo- dations,’ journal of intercultural studies . ( ): . bilge, “mapping québécois sexual nationalism,” . ibid., . ibid., . pq leader jacques parizeau famously blamed “money and the ethnic vote” for the loss of the québec sovereignty referendum in .this wording was widely understood as referring to jews and immigrants. “jewish general hospital opposes bill as patently discriminatory,” jgh.ca., october , , accessed january , , http://jgh.ca/en/news?id= &year= . ibid. federation cja and the centre for israel and jewish affairs, general consultation and pub- lic hearings on bill (montréal: federation cja, ), , accessed january , , http:// www.federationcja.org/media/mediacontent/englishbrief.pdf. jean-françois venne, “the québec government recruits students from france to attend uni- versity in québec in the hope that the mostly young people will subsequently choose to set- tle in the province,” university affairs, june , , accessed december , , http://www. universityaffairs.ca/news/news-article/quebec-government-attempts-woo-international-stu- dents/. many french jewish immigrants interviewed by robert aaron kenedy cited fears of antise- mitic attacks by “arabs” as a reason for their emigration. robert aaron kenedy, “the new antisemitism and diasporic liminality: jewish identity from france to montréal,” canadian jewish studies ( ): – . vali fugulin and jérémie battaglia, toi, moi et la charte, national film board, , accessed january , , http://charte.onf.ca/ .“toi, moi et la charte: c’est parti!” urbania.ca, novem- ber , , accessed january , , http://urbania.ca/ /toi-moi-et-la-charte-cest-parti/. stephanie tara schwartz january , ( ) for more information about dpt, see their website, accessed december , , http://dpt. co/en/about/. in the original: moi, mes valeurs et mes malaises. “portrait sonia sarah,” toi, moi et la charte, january , , http://charte.onf.ca/#/portrait/so- nia; aleph “archives de l’auteur : dr sonia sarah lipsyc,” accessed january. , , http:// alephetudesjuives.ca/author/sonia/. all french to english translations of toi, moi et la charte are mine, with the help of antoine burgard. “dire qu’on paye leur taxte kosher de merde avec notre cash . . . on a même pas moyen de les boycotter les osties, ils ont plus de % de nos produits d’épicerie!” the “kosher tax conspiracy” appeared regularly in the news during the charter of values debates, es- poused as it was by pq candidate and philosophy professor louise mailloux. bernie m. far- ber, “parti québécois candidate revives an anti-semitic lie,” toronto star, march , , accessed december , , https://www.thestar.com/opinion/commentary/ / / / parti_qubcois_candidate_revives_an_antisemitic_lie.html. “les osties” (the hosts) is a par- ticular brand of curse word used in quebec related to the rejection of catholicism. graeme hamilton, “can quebec’s church-based curse words survive in a secular age?” national post, september , , accessed january , , http://nationalpost.com/news/canada/ can-quebecs-church-based-curse-words-survive-in-a-secular-age. my translation from the french. laïcité is france’s model of secularism that aims to protect the population from religion by main- taining a neutral state. secularism in anglophone north american is based on religious free- dom as a political value, to protect religion from the state. brent bambury, jackson doughart, and frédéric bastien, day with brent bambury, “secularism vs. laïcité: the quebec char- ter of values,” cbc, september , , december , , http://www.cbc.ca/radio/day / episode- -quebec-s-model-for-secularism-errol-morris-on-donald-rumsfeld-is-war-in- nate-and-more- . /secularism-vs-la%c %afcit%c %a -the-quebec-charter-of-val- ues- . . wendy brown, regulating aversion: tolerance in the age of identity and empire (princeton: princeton university press, ), . see for instance, talad asad, formation of the secular: christianity, islam, modernity (stanford: stanford university press, ); wendy brown, “civilizational delusions: secularism, tol- erance, equality,” theory and event . ( ), accessed january , , https://muse.jhu. edu/article/ ; saba mahmood, religious difference in a secular age: a minority report (princeton: princeton university press, ). joan w. scott, “sexularism,” robert schuman centre for advanced studies distinguished lectures, ursuala hirschmann annul lecture on gender and europe, florence italy, april , , accessed january , , http://cadmus.eui.eu/bitstream/handle/ / / rscas_dl_ _ .pdf?sequence= . bilge, “mapping québécois sexual nationalism,” . the ymca initially installed frosted glass in the four windows in question, but later replaced these with regular glass and blinds in reaction to outrage by their members and surrounding community, reflecting a broader tensions between the hassidic jews of outremont and their (mostly) québécois secular neighbors. ingrid peritz, “ymca to replace frosted windows,” globe and mail, march , , accessed january , , https://www.theglobeandmail. com/news/national/ymca-to-replace-frosted-windows/article /. michele byers and stephanie tara schwartz, “theorizing multicultural jewish identity in canada,” in critical inquiries: a reader in the study of canada, lynn caldwell, darryl leroux and carrianne leung, eds. (black point, ns: fernwood, ), – . some exceptions in- clude kelly amada train’s work on sephardic and indian jews in toronto and treyf pod- cast. byers and schwartz, “theorizing multicultural jewish identity.” the trope of blackness was often applied to arab jews. the jewishness of mizrahi jews was never questioned whereas ethiopian jews faced questions about their authenticity. in israel today, ethiopian jews (and non-jewish african labor migrants) face issues similar to those faced by black people in the united states and canada: economic and social marginalization, racism, and higher rates of policing and incarceration. kimberle crenshaw, “mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color,” stanford law review ( ): . gabriella djerrahian, black the challenge of jewish difference in québec journal of jewish identities matters: young ethiopian jews and race in israel (phd diss., mcgill university, ), accessed january , , http://digitool.library.mcgill.ca/webclient/streamgate?folder_id= &d- vs= ~ ; “israel’s ethiopian jews clash with police at race rally,” al jazeera, may , , accessed january , , http://www.aljazeera.com/news/ / /israel-ethi- opian-jews-rally-police-brutality- .html. “kimberlé crenshaw on intersectionality, more than two decades later,” columbia law school news, june , , accessed january , , http://www.law.columbia.edu/ news/ / /kimberle-crenshaw-intersectionality. kimberle williams crenshaw, “racism and misogyny: black feminism and live crew,” in feminist social thought: a reader, ed. diana tietjens meyeres (new york: routledge, ), . “the story,” idle no more, accessed december , , http://www.idlenomore.ca/story. stephanie maclellan, “idle no more, one year later,” toronto star, december , , https://www.thestar.com/news/canada/ / / /idle_no_more_one_year_later.html. for an analysis of the response by canadian jews, see david s. koffman, “suffering and sover- eignty: recent canadian interest in indigenous peoples and issues,” canadian jewish studies ( ): – . “about the black lives matter network,” black lives matter, accessed december , , http://blacklivesmatter.com/about/. for example see robyn maynard’s “#blacklivesmtlsyllabus,” for a reading list on mon- tréal’s history of anti-black racism organizing, accessed december , , http://robyn- maynard.com/blacklivesmtlsyllabus/. michelle lalonde, “do black lives matter in montréal?” montréal gazette, february , , accessed december , , http://montrealgazette.com/news/local-news/in-an-era-of- black-lives-matter-montreal-has-been-curiously-quiet-where-are-the-young-black-activists. rachel décoste, délice mugabo, karine-myrgianie jean-françois, and nydia dauphin, “réponse à louis morissette sur le blackface,”l’encre noir, january , , accessed january , , http://lencrenoir.com/reponse-a-louis-morissette-sur-le-blackface/com- ment-page- /; dan delman, “blackface controversy highlights quebec’s media diversity problem,” montréal gazette, february , , accessed january , , http://montrealga- zette.com/opinion/columnists/dan-delmar-blackface-controversy-highlights-quebecs-me- dia-diversity-problem. “what’s behind cbc montréal’s series,” cbc news, march, , , accessed december , , http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/montreal/real-talk-on-race-q-and-a- . . ainslie maclellan, “‘life outside of blackness’: montréal family reflects on race, identity,” cbc news, montréal, march , , accessed december , , http://www.cbc.ca/news/ canada/montreal/real-talk-on-race-montreal-jewish-ethiopian- . . wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top 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m. edwards id department of religion, baylor university, waco, tx , usa; elise_edwards@baylor.edu received: august ; accepted: november ; published: november abstract: the black lives matter movement has become one of the most visible, controversial, and impactful campaigns to address racialized violence and discrimination in the st century. activists within the movement join traditional forms of social protest and policy development with rituals and spiritual practices, drawing upon spiritual resources as a source of transformation and empowerment. the transformative aims of black lives matter and other contemporary african american justice movements address critical areas for reform, like criminal justice, education, and public health, but their vision for reform is broad and extensive, envisioning the creation of a more just world. as such, the physical context for african american life—the buildings and public spaces known as the built environment—is a crucial aspect of social transformation. this essay examines the spirituality of black lives matter and other contemporary african american justice movements and considers how it inspires the ongoing transformation of buildings and public spaces. by analyzing the spiritual practices and themes in the black lives matter movement as described by its founders, this paper identifies three principles and relates them to similar concepts in african american religious thought, womanist ethics, and ecowomanism. applying these three spiritual principles—liberation, inspiration, and healing—to the design of architecture and public spaces can enrich and affirm african american life. appealing to the smithsonian’s national museum of african american history and culture as an example, this paper articulates the possibilities of architectural projects to symbolically and practically support liberative goals in african american religious systems and political movements. keywords: african american religion; african american spirituality; black lives matter; architecture; built environment; womanist ethics; ecowomanism; liberation theology; social justice; national museum of african american history and culture . introduction the black lives matter movement has become one of the most visible, controversial, and impactful campaigns to address racialized violence and discrimination in the st century, emerging after the killing of trayvon martin. the movement began as a social media intervention using the hashtag #blacklivesmatter created by alicia garza, patrisse cullors, and opal tometi, but subsequently grew beyond its online presence. black lives matter is now a network of chapters around the united states. the organization has partnered with others in the movement for black lives to develop a policy agenda that addresses political, economic, and educational issues that degrade black lives. their agenda is holistic, and the movement embraces spiritual practices. these spiritual practices are a vital expression of the movement’s work for social transformation and can have a wider effect than what we typically credit to spirituality and religion. spirituality cultivates an inner life that, as it grows, inspires visions of religions , , ; doi: . /rel www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /rel http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions religions , , of a better world and empower individuals to bring these visions into being. the spiritual principles and aims of black lives matter and other african-american justice movements have real-world implications beyond the obvious areas for reform, such as criminal justice, education, and public health. these are critical areas that merit immediate attention, but if a movement is about imagining a different kind of world to live in, it should also consider the physical landscape of that world. the complex of constructed spaces that humanity inhabits, comprised of architecture, landscape design, and infrastructure is known as the built environment. ordinary buildings and eminent works of architecture alike are the products of design intent and construction, and therefore reveal something about how designers envision the world they seek to create. at a house dedication in , paul tillich, a christian theologian, spoke about the ways space and time relate to dwelling. the word dwelling designates both a residence and a mode of living, a way of making a particular place in the world familiar. tillich argues that “it makes sense” to reflect on our dwellings when “a community of people has transformed [them] into the space of its communal life” (tillich [ ] , p. ). this essay takes up that reflective task by seeking design inspiration from african american social justice movements and considers how architecture and the built environment relate to the pursuit of justice in african american communal life. specifically, this paper examines spiritual principles in contemporary african american social justice movements and considers the implications for those principles in creating spaces that promote the flourishing of black lives. those who want to live in a world oriented to justice must participate in constructing it and interpreting it. how might african american spirituality guide us to create a built environment that affirms black life? theologians philip sheldrake, t. j. gorringe, eric jacobsen, john de gruchy, and others have explored the spiritual, ethical dimensions of built environments and urban spaces. the spiritual city, sheldrake’s (sheldrake ) book, presents a moral and spiritual vision of cities that addresses contemporary social problems. he uses a historical and theological lens to describe how christian thought can promote reconciliation and social cohesion in urban life, despite the christian tradition’s anti-urban bias. gorringe’s the common good and the global emergency: god and the built environment ( ) focuses on how christians might address the built environment based on their commitments to the common good. this work extends his previous scholarship that proposes a trinitarian theology of the built environment. his more recent book is a response to a global emergency predicated by increasing world population, climate change, and resource depletion. gorringe addresses architecture and urban planning and relates these disciplines’ insights to ethical issues regarding place, transportation, agriculture, and food production (gorringe ). jacobsen’s most recent book (jacobsen ) continues the christian reflection on the built environment that began in his book sidewalks in the kingdom: new urbanism and the christian faith (jacobsen and peterson ). like the earlier work, the space between offers a theologically-informed conceptual framework for questioning the experience of community in the places we live and the qualities of those places. the book presents a compelling analysis of christianity’s relation to urbanism. de gruchy’s contribution to this discourse is his discussion of art and architecture as they relate to social justice (de gruchy ). he articulates the redemptive power of beauty and sacred images in both the life of the church and in the public square. as the title of his book suggests, christianity, art, and transformation: theological aesthetics in the struggle for justice provides a compelling vision of theological aesthetics that serves an ethical purpose. writing from a south african context, de gruchy addresses the historical struggles for equality and empowerment among racial groups in his country and uses theological reflection to explicate a role for the arts in societal transformation. as other scholars build from these theologians’ work, we have the opportunity to apply their insights to other cultural histories and community contexts. these scholars understand the crises present within our historical moment. they seek to create a vision informed by christian thought and concern for the common good that might guide the religions , , of formation and re-formation of our built environments to be just and inclusive. however, the growing body of theological scholarship about the built environment is male-dominated and it has not yet substantially addressed the social justice concerns of black america, specifically the concerns of the black lives matter (blm) movement, “an ideological and political intervention in a world where black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise” (garza n.d.). this paper addresses that gap by centering liberative religious scholarship and political, ideological movements initiated by and for black people as its source for guiding principles to reconceive built environments. african american justice movements like black lives matter call our attention to the ways black lives have participated in cultivating land and building public spaces of various forms, but have been denied equal benefit from them and are monitored and policed within them in detrimental ways. the black land and liberation initiative (blli) articulates a mission developed by black activists, organizers, healers, farmers, educators, and others that integrates the pursuit of black spaces and land into a platform for justice. their manifesto states, “we call for a return of accumulated wealth to black people in the us and black people across the diaspora. we call for a release of stolen land. we vow to work with integrity and build partnership with those whose lands were stolen and with the land itself. we vow to continue the struggle, to build liberated black spaces, institutions, and power until we are returned what is rightfully ours” (tutashinda ). reclaiming black space and building places that serve the well-being of african american communities is a critical issue for our time. spaces that support black life do exist, but religious theory and practices attending to them and their significance within the overall framework of well-being for african american communities could be developed further. as such, this paper centers african american spirituality in this area of emerging discourse. the academic and political movements examined within this paper also center women’s voices to construct a more fully inclusive and informed vision of justice. what might their spirituality contribute to a vision for architecture focused on the design and construction of places in which african americans live and move and have our being? the answer to this question is developed in three sections. the first section below describes the interrelated nature of social, spiritual, and material transformation within african american justice movements. if we do not understand their interconnection, we may overlook the relevance of physical spaces for justice work. the next section explains why enhancing the built environment is consistent with the goals of the black lives matter movement and suggests expanding its agenda to more explicitly include the built environment. the next section addresses the heart of the matter by describing the spiritual principles in this social justice movement and their relevance to the built environment. through analysis of the spiritual practices and themes in the black lives matter movement as described by its founders, this paper identifies three principles and relates them to similar concepts in african american religious thought, womanist ethics, and ecowomanism. ongoing research about the spirituality of the black lives matter movement is merited. the aim of this paper is to connect this emerging form of spirituality to the built environment, so analysis of these principles is discussed in religious and architectural terms. these three spiritual principles—liberation, inspiration, and healing—suggest approaches to and characteristics of public spaces and buildings that would enrich and affirm african american life. appealing to the smithsonian’s national museum of african american history and culture as an example, this paper articulates the possibilities of architecture to contribute to shared liberative goals in the black lives matter movement and african american religion. the museum demonstrates that the spirituality-architecture connection is not merely theoretical or limited to religious buildings. the articulation of these spiritual principles and their architectural implications along with the descriptions of the national museum of african american history and culture not only these thinkers are not trying to impose a christian theocratic vision on urban life and built environments. in different ways, these theologians develop frameworks informed by christian doctrines and virtues that include robust conceptions of the common good or cosmopolitan life that embrace the autonomy and wellbeing of non-christians. religions , , of indicate what is already possible with our built environment but also help us to imagine a different way of approaching design in the future. sensitive to the ways racism and heteropatriarchy marginalize the work of queer black women, even when people use the hashtag #blacklivesmatter and appeal to its agenda, the analysis of each of the three principles in contemporary african american spirituality begins with descriptions from interviews with two of its founders, patrisse cullors and alicia garza. because academic scholarship about the spirituality within the black lives matter movement is limited, the analysis of its spiritual practices and applications to the built environment in this paper is supplemented with scholarship from allied movements that also seek social transformation for african american life. black liberation theology and ethics have always been concerned with the real-world, practical implications of religious doctrines and cosmologies. in academic settings and the worlds outside them, liberative theology and ethics have confronted issues about african americans’ opportunities and quality of life. they have sought the transformation of lived realities and religious systems. the transformative goals of womanist ethics and ecowomanism, especially, align with the goals of the black lives matter movement, hence my inclusion of them here. . spiritual transformation and the material world the black lives matter movement has clear guiding principles about the transformative work it is doing. the movement is “unapologetically black” in affirming the value of black lives, while its activists also remain committed to diversity and globalism within their movement. black lives matter is a queer-affirming organization “guided by the fact all black lives [matter], regardless of actual or perceived sexual identity, gender identity, gender expression, economic status, ability, disability, religious beliefs or disbeliefs, immigration status or location” (black lives matter n.d.). their guiding principles include empathy, loving engagement, intergenerational participation, and support for black families and black “villages” of collective care. black lives matter is committed to affirming and making visible the efforts of transgender persons and black women so that they may participate in and lead the movement freely, without harassment or harm. they are committed to the principles of restorative justice, which means they seek to renew their communities through invigorating approaches (black lives matter n.d.). to this end, participants in the movement incorporate spiritual practices into traditional forms of protest and civic engagement. black lives matter activists have been known to burn sage at sites of conflict, which is a ritualized cleansing practice that invites balance, love, and light (farrag ). they have also constructed altars to honor the dead at protest sites and activists read the names of the dead as a sacred act of remembrance (tippett et al. ). in addition to these practices, organizations within the movement for black lives host events focused on emotional health and spiritual well-being (farrag ). participants engaged in these spiritual practices know that social transformation involves politics and policy, but they believe that transformative work is ultimately a spiritual effort that requires a shift in consciousness. although black lives matter is predominantly a political and ideological movement, its co-founder patrisse cullors explains that political engagement alone will not accomplish the transformative work that needs to occur. cullors insists: “i believe that this work of black lives matter is actually healing work. it’s not just about policy. it’s why, i think, some people get so confused by us. they’re like, where’s the policy? i’m like, you can’t policy your racism away. we no longer have jim crow laws, but we still have jim crow hate” (tippett et al. ). human transformation is dependent on inner change, the type of reorientation that religionists call conversion. although spiritual transformation does not necessarily require the aid of formalized religious communities, african american communities have consistently drawn on black religion to propel and sustain transformative justice movements and cultivate resistance to racism and other death-dealing forces. rev. traci blackmon, an ordained minister in the african methodist episcopal (ame) church and united church of christ (ucc), has been a visible spiritual leader in black lives matter since the killing of michael brown in ferguson, missouri. she serves as the acting executive religions , , of of ucc justice and witness ministries, representing an institutional christian church that welcomes those outside its denominational bounds into its community work. justice work in black communities was often grounded in christian churches but has also notably occurred in other religious communities such as the nation of islam and those rooted in other african and caribbean religious traditions like rastafarianism. cullors, herself, is inspired by indigenous spiritualities and ifà (farrag ). she explains that the spirituality of many black lives matter activists is not based in traditional or formalized religious communities. many of the activists felt rejected or even “pushed out” of churches because of their queer identities or challenges to patriarchy. nevertheless, they continue to practice their spirituality through “healing justice work,” working to exorcise their communities of racism, sexism, and homophobia (tippett et al. ). the activists’ healing practice confronts the emotional, intellectual, and spiritual wounds that they and their opponents carry. yet, there is a physical component to their work, too. western religious and philosophical traditions sometimes lead us to believe that spiritual work is transcendent or immaterial. however, african-american spirituality has been profoundly engaged with the material world, whether found in th century enslaved communities, the black church, liberation theology, womanist ethics, or black lives matter activism. these contexts resist dualisms that uplift only body or spirit. the spiritual is exercised in everyday lived experience; this african american form of spirituality addresses the practical aspects of what it takes to stay alive and flourish. this, of course, is explicit in the assertion that black lives do matter. the spiritual work of healing is a practice of promoting the wellbeing of black bodies and furthering justice for black people as we move inside constrained economic systems, criminal justice systems, educational systems, and neighborhoods. cullors asserts that the spiritual work of black lives matter is integral to reimagining humanity; we have to use our collective imagination to center on black life, not black death. “let’s imagine something different,” she says. why not image a physical environment that promotes black life? after all, communities are not mere social networks. womanist ethicist emilie townes writes, “in black theology, community is an exploration of a ‘we’ relationship through seeking to understand the dynamics of belonging, group identification, and social solidarity” (townes , p. ). communities have a material presence; they are the places where people meet, the physical spaces they share in common life together, and the territory they recognize as their own. what type of environment—what type of built environment—would promote a healthy, communal existence? in light of systemic failures to remediate toxic environments like flint, michigan, envisioning a physical environment where african americans will be nourished and restored to health and wholeness is an urgent need. this work is already taking place, but can be enhanced by spiritual resources. spiritual power helps people claim more than a minimal existence, it orients them to a life of fulfillment. an architecture influenced by the spirituality of african-american communities is not about trying to give buildings “a soul” it is about stirring the soul in its people, building their own power, and cultivating “the audacity to imagine something different for [themselves]” (tippett et al. ). . an architectural agenda: black lives in the built environment black lives matter began in , so critical scholarship about the movement is still emerging. however, its goals are widely disseminated. given the movement’s origins online, it is unsurprising that its guiding principles and agenda are communicated through the websites blacklivesmatter.com and m bl.org, which is the official site for the movement for black lives (the movement for black lives n.d.). black lives matter activism is breaking new ground with its savvy use of media and technology. its message is shared through multiple social media platforms aided by the ubiquitous hashtag #blacklivesmatter. additionally, articles and interviews with leaders in the movement have not only stated their aims for political and economic life, but also described the spirituality within the movement. as the movement for black lives emerges and expands, the timing is right for supporters to assess its agenda and offer issues for consideration that may not already be included. the arts, broadly speaking, are vital to the movement. however, its consideration of the arts does not include a religions , , of comprehensive analysis of architecture and its significant role in shaping communities. this movement is hardly the first to overlook the built environment as its own area of concern. but because the agenda does include concerns about community control, housing, environmental health, and the vitality of black neighborhoods, it could also explicitly address architecture and urban planning, recognizing that buildings are literal building blocks that form the material conditions in which humanity lives. architecture has both practical and symbolic implications for how communities dwell within the spaces they occupy. methodologically, this essay interweaves architectural criticism with varied strands in theological-ethical discourse: the spirituality of black lives matter, black theology, womanist and ecowomanist ethics. the synthesis is intentional. a connective thread between these contemporary movements is their hope and effort for making our world more just, humane, and livable. creating this new world requires forming the real places african americans inhabit into places that promote survival and actively challenge a death-dealing racialized hierarchy. the black community is not monolithic; african americans live and work and occupy varied spaces and have diverse experiences within them. consequently, there can be no singular expression of african american space. a vision for the built environment must include multiple types of spaces. predominantly black neighborhoods can be poor or affluent, african american homes meager or lavish, and black places of business can be delipidated or well-maintained. but because of pervasive characterizations of african american people as criminal threats or dangers to others, even when african americans dwell in “safe,” economically sound neighborhoods, their spaces might not be secure. after all, it was in sanford, florida that trayvon martin was killed as he walked home from a convenience store. trayvon martin rightfully belonged on those streets, but his killer had a dangerously racialized perception of the neighborhood as the teenager walked through it. the killer’s insidious conception of blackness (particularly youthful, male, blackness) was applied to the built environment in such a way that threatened the young man’s very existence. the physical space of the built environment was overlaid with immaterial conceptions of who and what belonged there. this kind of spatial mapping and interpretation likely occurs in every built environment, and it suggests that concerns about justice should address the physical settings in which justice is subverted. obviously, it is highly unlikely that good architecture would have prevented trayvon martin’s murder. but architecture, like other art forms, can be utilized to communicate positive messages about blackness that contradict the insidious stereotypes that link blackness and danger. designers can create just, inclusive architecture that incorporates and celebrates a blackness that is too often demonized. the smithsonian institution’s national museum of african american history and culture (nmaahc) in washington, dc is one example of a notable architectural work that accomplishes this. it demonstrates the potential of architecture to express life-affirming principles. the section below will explore the ways architecture can be employed in the work of social transformation. . spiritual principles and their implications for the built environment the remainder of this essay will identify and discuss three spiritual principles for an architecture that affirms black life: liberation, inspiration, and healing. the principles are grounded in the spirituality of the black lives matter movement, but they are also present in other forms of black liberation movements, like womanist ethics and ecowomanism. while ideas that inspire architectural design can be found anywhere, these three principles offer a vision grounded in something profound and more life-affirming than political consciousness, racial struggle, or aesthetic preferences could provide alone. they emerge from a black spirituality that ties everyday living to the spirit of a people and seeks to infuse a sacred dimension into the most common, ordinary of things: our buildings. the expression of these principles can be found in architecture that already exists, like the nmaahc, but these principles also provide guidance about what to consider for buildings that have not yet been envisioned and built. liberation, the first principle, aims to promote freedom from oppression and death. applied to the built environment, liberation promotes claiming or reclaiming spaces for african americans to flourish. religions , , of it centers their needs in design processes like creative placemaking and aims to create architecture for the people—buildings that meet the needs of african americans. the second principle, inspiration, is a reliance on spirit to inform and invigorate the process of social transformation. for architecture informed by african american spirituality, inspiration means basing design decisions on what will uplift the full humanity of the who dwell in the community. spirit, in african american religion, is an active force that guides people to truth, beauty, and justice. responding to spirit as inspiration means incorporating beauty and cultural referents into architecture. the final principle, healing, is central to the black lives matter movement and also ecowomanism. in these movements, contemporary social justice advocates see their work as having not only political or educational aims but also emotional and spiritual intentions. social transformation requires healing what is broken. applied to architecture, healing becomes about repairing and rebuilding the physical structures of a community to restore them to wholeness. the three principles identified here are not the only ones that can be drawn from contemporary justice movements and applied to architecture. however, these three principles offer a compelling vision of a different way to shape community life. they are also, to a large degree, interconnected and inseparable. inspiration promotes acts of liberation and liberative thinking, which aim to heal the effects of racial hierarchies. . . liberation: reclaiming black space the theological principle of liberation is a fitting start. alicia garza declares that black lives matter “centers those that have been marginalized within black liberation movements. it is a tactic to (re)build the black liberation movement” (garza n.d.). garza asserts that liberation efforts need to be rebuilt because they are too often exclusive; this subverts the principle of liberation itself. the movement is unapologetically focused on black lives in all their diversity but stands in solidarity with others who seek liberation. as one of the co-founders of black lives matter, garza is committed to preserving its central tenet. she defends the unapologetic focus on black life by citing numerous ways in which black people’s dignity and rights are subverted by violence, often at the hands of the state. she continues: #blacklivesmatter doesn’t mean your [non-black] life isn’t important–it means that black lives, which are seen as without value within white supremacy, are important to your liberation. given the disproportionate impact state violence has on black lives, we understand that when black people in this country get free, the benefits will be wide-reaching and transformative for society as a whole. when we are able to end hyper-criminalization and sexualization of black people and end the poverty, control, and surveillance of black people, every single person in this world has a better shot at getting and staying free. when black people get free, everybody gets free. this is why we call on black people and our allies to take up the call that black lives matter. we’re not saying black lives are more important than other lives, or that other lives are not criminalized and oppressed in various ways. we remain in active solidarity with all oppressed people who are fighting for their liberation and we know that our destinies are intertwined. (garza n.d.) garza’s expression of liberation is centered on black life, but it is not exclusive. the movement’s centering on black life, however, is the specified route to inclusive liberation. liberation, in a religious context, is the freedom that god wants for the world, a freedom that its most marginalized people seek. emilie townes explains, “the aim of liberation is to restore a sense of self as a free person and as a spiritual being” (townes , p. ). it seeks the freedom to live abundantly, to escape from oppressive structures and institutions, and to triumph over death-dealing religions , , of powers. liberation theologians and ethicists focus on the practical considerations of living. their argument is that god is concerned with humanity’s well-being, and does not divide us into discrete parts: spirit, soul, body, mind. god’s concern is for our whole selves, and therefore what constrains and denigrates any part of human being is subject to theological consideration and challenge by liberationists. liberation theologians argue that there are patterns to marginalization and exclusion; that status and access to opportunity are often demarcated along lines that preference or disadvantage people according to their race, gender, class, physical condition, and sexual orientation or identity. there are often intersecting systems of oppression that work together and reinforce each other. if a force or system is oppressive, then according to christian liberation theologies, it is sinful, subverting god’s purposes or design. this is why christian liberation theologies invert traditional hierarchies, advocating for god’s preferential option for the poor. in the kingdom of god, the first shall be last and the last shall be first. god suffers with the oppressed, and works for their salvation. to be marginalized, oppressed, poor, or in some other way on the underside is to have an epistemological privilege that enables one to more clearly know the things of god. whereas dominant systems have said to be in a same-sex relationship is sinful, liberationists argue that oppressing or excluding someone on the basis of sexual orientation is sinful. where theologians like thomas aquinas have infamously stated that a woman is a misbegotten male (quoting aristotle) and not fit for clerical leadership (aquinas , . . ), feminists have used the principle of liberation to declare the full humanity of women. as rosemary radford reuther writes in a clear demonstration of the liberation principle, “theologically speaking, whatever diminishes or denies the full humanity of women must be presumed not to reflect the divine or an authentic relation to the divine, or to reflect the authentic nature of things, or to be the message or work of an authentic redeemer or a community of redemption” (ruether , pp. – ). garza does not rely on a christian theological framework to support her view of liberation. as cullors has explained in her description of healing justice work, many activists in the movement were rejected in christian churches. black lives matter is queer-affirming in its participation and leadership, and although there are queer liberation christian theologies, the dominant christian tradition has supported heterosexual, male leadership. even civil rights movements committed to liberation have marginalized some of the people they purport to fight for. for this reason, black lives matter is committed to fostering a more inclusive vision of liberation. “it goes beyond the narrow nationalism that can be prevalent within some black communities, which merely call on black people to love black, live black and buy black, keeping straight cis black men in the front of the movement while our sisters, queer and trans and disabled folk take up roles in the background or not at all,” garza explains (garza n.d.). any religious system that knowingly perpetuates systems of exclusion as it works toward liberation is incompatible with the principles undergirding black lives matter. the principle of liberation advances a social, political, and economic agenda of inclusive equality. ethicist peter paris describes the “structure of inclusive equality” as one “wherein the well-being of all the community’s members is assured” (paris , p. ). this fight for inclusive equality is the goal of justice movements in african american communities. when activists say “black lives matter” or shout “say her name,” they assert the radical equality of all black people to miguel de la torre writes about the distinction between liberationist and liberative ethics: “while liberationist ethics is a type of liberative ethics, liberative ethics is not necessarily liberationist. liberation ethics is based on liberation theology (usually rooted in s latin america), which is characteristically christian. liberative ethics, like liberation theology, still emphasizes the preferential option for the oppressed, but in doing so, might—but not necessarily—center its reasoning on christian concepts. the focus of liberative ethics moves away from orthodoxy, correct doctrine, towards orthopraxis, the correct actions required to bring about liberation. so while liberationism is christian, liberative ethics can be muslim, hindu, humanist, or buddhist” (de la torre , p. ). that distinction is helpful. in this section, the term liberationist is used to convey an association with christian theological systems. liberative will be used to refer to the broader, non-christian context of ethical thought. in the remainder of the essay, i simply use liberation ethics or liberation as descriptors that include both approaches. equality does not (necessarily) mean integration or equal distribution of wealth; the ideal social organization varies in different liberation theologies. the principle of full inclusion in societal systems and structures and equal valuing and equal opportunity is consistent, though, and certainly evident in the spirituality of black lives matter activism. religions , , of their white counterparts and underscore the right to black life. these justice movements work to disrupt a racialized hierarchy of white supremacy that allows blackness to be devalued by asserting the inferiority and danger that black bodies possess (vesely-flad ). one implication of this hierarchy is that black spaces—neighborhoods, homes, parks, vehicles, and bodies—are allowed to neglected, monitored, invaded, and usurped for the benefit of other races. we see these patterns in deteriorating and neglected infrastructure, surveillance, racially disproportionate policing, and gentrification. the challenge that black communities can consciously practice in response to the racist construction and redefinition of boundaries is preserving and reclaiming their space. preserving and reclaiming black space as a liberation practice can be approached in two different ways: creative placemaking and designing architecture for the people. placemaking is an approach to urban planning and design that focuses on public spaces for the community. it “capitalizes on a local community’s assets, inspiration, and potential, and it results in the creation of quality public spaces that contribute to people’s health, happiness, and well being” (project for public spaces ). creative placemaking highlights the role of local arts and culture to activate the social dimension of space. the process and concept of creative placemaking are very close to practices of community-based design, although community-based design may be practiced in various types of architectural or urban planning projects and not just those related to placemaking. community-based design is an approach to decision-making that empowers the local community, including its members who do not have expertise in architecture, urban planning, or community development. community-based design recognizes that despite an individual’s lack of specialized education or training, that person can and should have a legitimate say in the conditions in which they live. it recognizes that people in a local community know things about the community—good and bad—that outsiders (even professionals) do not. the inversion of authority and the inclusive vision of creative placemaking and community-based design are consistent with the principle of liberation. architecture for the people is an approach through which notable works of architecture are commissioned for poor or marginalized communities. in typical design processes, the most specialized buildings and the most prestigious architecture of a region are commissioned for those who can pay for them. great works of architecture are most often placed in desirable neighborhoods because signature buildings designate areas of importance. architecture for the people inverts this principle to help the marginalized. commissioning significant works of architecture for marginalized people and/or placing them in areas that are considered unremarkable or undesirable elevates their image in practical and symbolic ways. it is entirely possible for creative placemaking and architecture for the underserved to be done without appealing to religious or spiritual frameworks. however, applying the spiritual principle of liberation to guide the work enables us to see these activities’ meaning and significance in terms of the sacred, divine, and life-affirming energy of the universe. it allows us to connect these activities to the deepest motivations a community holds. . . . creative placemaking creative placemaking is a collaborative process “public, private, non-profit, and community sectors strategically shape the physical and social character of a neighborhood, town, city, or region around arts and cultural activities . . . [it] rejuvenates structures and streetscapes, improves local business viability and public safety, and brings diverse people together to celebrate, inspire, and be inspired” (markusen and gadwa , p. ). when we speak about creative placemaking, even from a religious perspective, we are discussing the possibilities for public spaces, not just religious buildings. at first, that may seem confusing, or even presumptuous: what could religion possibly have to say about public spaces and why should it say anything? however, we might concede (without much controversy) that throughout history, a sense of religious mission has inspired significant works of architecture in the form of churches, monasteries, places of worship, monuments, and hospitals. is it such a stretch, then, to agree that a contemporary form of religious belief might inspire other types of religions , , of buildings that contribute to a community’s well-being? good design can support a religious mission not only when it is used for worship, but also when it is used for service to the community. serving one’s sisters and brothers is at the heart of the black lives matter agenda and it is also what the black church and religious communities have been doing with their buildings. churches are not used for worship alone. ecclesial buildings often house community meals, food pantries, clothes closets, homeless shelters, emergency shelters, immigrant sanctuaries, community meetings, addiction recovery groups, scouting troops, polling places, and numerous other occasions for civic engagement and community gathering (hopkins , pp. – ). churches provide a type of semi-public space that differs from the semi-public space of shopping malls named “town centers” whose primary aim is commercial. commercial spaces do often host community celebrations, but they are constructed specifically for drive consumer activity, whereas ecclesial spaces are built to promote activity that serves god and others; even when financial transactions occur in ecclesial spaces (e.g., tithes and offerings, fundraisers, bazaars), their primary aim is service oriented. although church buildings and even the buildings of para-church ministries provide so much, they are not sufficient to meet the needs of an entire community. also, they may not be hospitable to people outside their religious group. therefore, a commitment to the principle of liberation requires expanding our scope beyond churches to examine public architecture. public architecture includes government buildings, libraries, schools, community centers, and park structures. they are buildings for the public good, in which the community is shaped and formed. examining how these buildings might be designed and constructed to further the aims of justice enables us to confront the religious-ethical questions of how what we believe about the divine influences how we should live outside of houses of worship. this is a similar assertion to that of countless ecowomanists, ecofeminists, and environmental ethicists who argue that caring for our communities must address unhealthy environments we live in, both for our own sakes and out of obligation to the interrelated living world we occupy. ecowomanist analysis is particularly applicable to this essay, because its approach to environmental justice incorporates race, gender, and class analysis, “but also helps to show how religious moral codes and values support an ethic that honors the earth and honors voices from communities of color and women as they speak up for the earth” (harris , p. ). ecowomanism is an emphasis within womanist discourse that centers black women’s spirituality and connections to the earth. its contribution to the discourse of environmental justice is that it addresses intersecting oppressions of racism, sexism, classism and environmental injustice that can become separated in other movements (harris , p. ). not only does ecowomanist analysis confront issues like water, air, and land toxicity, it highlights the effects of toxins on already marginalized communities who may not have adequate access to health care and enforcement of environmental regulations. by broadening environmental justice sensibilities to include the built environment, we address spaces that we construct from the earth’s raw materials and work to make our environs livable and enjoyable. as we construct environments that nurture african american life for the present, considering its environmental impact on future generations is important. this means selecting materials with low energy footprints and levels of toxins, seeking building technologies (like heating and cooling systems) that use passive or renewable forms of energy and implementing construction procedures that minimize disruption of local ecosystems and reduce waste. in this essay, hopkins lists dozens of ways that the black church “has functioned as the practical organizing center” of community life. this, of course, is not to say that environmental concerns do not significantly overlap with concerns about the built environment. we make a mistake when we assume a sharp separation between nature and human culture. we are animals, natural beings, and are dependent on nature and culture. emilie townes writes, “black womanist thought must work to broaden the black community’s understanding of what is at stake in the atmosphere we breathe, beyond the pristine and irrelevant images of sierra club calendars that rarely, if ever, put people in nature” (townes , p. ). religions , , of creative placemaking allows a community to identify the values that are important to them and incorporate them into design through imaginative approaches. sustainability, the principle of creating buildings that use resources wisely out of concern for our environment, is one value that we have seen emerge in the public sphere over the past few decades. yet there are others that may be incorporated into placemaking and design. recognizing a place’s specific cultural history is a tenet of placemaking (fleming ). in african-american communities, it may be crucial to use buildings to engage in constructive memory. christian theologian m. shawn copeland articulates the importance of reviving the stories of the oppressed in her account of anamnesis, which she defines as “the intentional remembering of the dead, exploited, despised victims of history” (copeland , p. ). in copeland’s work, anamnesis is crucial to the praxis of solidarity, the sharing of sufferings that forges connections among people and also between humanity and the crucified jesus. solidarity affirms the interconnectedness of humanity across identity groups and time periods. intentionally invoking the memory of the past sufferings is more than remembrance, it is an act that obliges those who inherit the stories to do what they can to end oppression in the present (copeland , pp. – ). anamnesis can be incorporated in architecture through naming and signage, textual tools that explicitly tell the stories of those who have been oppressed and forgotten. creative placemaking offers other ways for these stories to be incorporated as well. the arts can be used as a civic engagement toolkit that can be promoted through architecture. murals and public art can be visual representations of cultural memory. too often, these are only added to projects after they are built. advocating for their inclusion at the early stages of design enables the space and viewing angles to be incorporated into the building’s plan. the visual arts do not have to do the work of storytelling alone. performing arts are vital to african-american communities, who have a long tradition of innovation in music, dance, and acting. creating facilities for the safe creation, rehearsal, and performance of these arts should be part of the justice agenda, too. creative placemaking is about cultivating an authentic feel to a built environment, one that resonates with the community’s sense of itself and its aspirations. it is a process of laying out intentions for the present and future. ronald fleming describes the potential of creative placemaking to bring together political figures, artists, and community members to clarify the meaning of a particular place: “interpretation of place can now become an interactive process, inviting the community to evaluate future civic planning and design options. strengthened by new technologies and the experience of confronting controversy, both interpreters and artists are initiating dialogues with the public and occasionally collaborating” (fleming , p. ). when informed by spiritual principles, the quest for a true “spirit of place” is not just about the realities that exist in plain sight. a religious or spiritual outlook seeks to infuse the ordinary with the sacred, and the imminent with the transcendent. this means that ultimately, we are looking to create a built environment that nurtures the soul as it meets the bodily need for shelter. it means we look beyond a building’s function and its aesthetic properties to assess its potential for forming (or deforming) the souls of african american communities. the topic of spirit will be addressed more thoroughly later in this essay. for now, it will suffice to affirm its role in creative placemaking. it enables deep examination of what is being built and the motivations behind it. when spiritually grounded, creative placemaking is a process of discernment. . . . architecture for the people reclaiming black space can also be accomplished by designing and constructing buildings that are intended for black communities. this does not mean enforcing racial segregation, as in facilities with “blacks only” signs to exclude occupants from other races, and does not mean excluding others from participating in design processes. the national museum of african american history and culture illustrates that creating spaces for or about specific communities (in this case, african american communities), is about centering the experience of the intended groups, not regulating others’ participation. this is consistent with the liberation aims and methodologies of the movement for black religions , , of lives, black theology, womanism, and ecowomanism, which center on the lives and experiences of african american groups. the vision for the built environment inspired by the principle of liberation proposed here is an intentional investment in facilities that meet the needs of underserved and marginalized populations. this strategy is about devoting resources to building architecture and infrastructure in black communities to provide what they need and restore them to health. the black land and liberation initiative (blli) is promoting juneteenth (june ) as an annual day for black people to reclaim their space and land. this observance and other blli activity center on reclaiming land and repairing relations. they describe their work as such: “we are taking back land that should be used for the good of the people; land that has historically been denied access to black people. through these actions we will confront the institutions that have been built off the extracted wealth of black bodies and black land and the individuals who have profited from them” (tutashinda ). their call for reparations is a call for those who continue to benefit from the harm to accept their moral responsibility, which cannot be discharged by apologies alone. patrisse cullors, too, is an advocate for reparations, especially for communities like flint, michigan, where, for years, residents ingested water that contained unacceptable levels of lead (tippett et al. ). reparations could remediate infrastructure needs in flint, as well as provide for health care and compensate for other damages. an alternative approach to resource allocation might make sense in another context. as indicated previously, there is no uniformity in the kinds of spaces that african americans inhabit. therefore, the strategies implemented to reclaim and preserve their spaces will vary. in an area facing gentrification and racialized displacement, architecture for african americans may focus on providing housing or places for local business to thrive. in an affluent area that does not need investment in housing or infrastructure, the agenda for the built environment might be cultural, as in the creation of community centers or places of worship that serves constituencies that do not have places to gather. these kinds of needs can be uncovered during a creative placemaking process. the national museum of african american history and culture (nmaahc) is an example of architecture for the people focused on african americans. it is a public building that is part of a network of cultural institutions sited on “america’s front lawn,” the national mall in washington, dc. government buildings, like the united states capitol, sit adjacent to the national mall with museums, monuments, and memorials that chronicle american history and culture. as of , the nmaahc is the most recent addition to the mall’s landscape. the building’s design was selected through a competition, which is common for high-profile museums. the winning entry was submitted by a team led by david adjaye, a london-based, ghanaian-british architect; phillip freelon, head of the largest minority-owned architecture firm in the united states, and j. max bond jr., known as the “dean of african american architects” (rybczynski , p. ). designs submitted to the competition were expected to express the building’s cultural aims. the description in the request for qualifications (rfq) for the competition included this requirement for design teams: ”detail in writing how you will infuse your participation and vision for this project with an appreciation of african american history and culture” (rybczynski , p. ). adjaye, the lead designer, envisioned a bronze-paneled building that draws on the shape of a yoruban caryatid, which is a traditional column topped by a corona (kimmelman ). yet adjaye was clear that the building needed to express an african american, not just african form. he explains: i wanted to see if we could make the silhouette of the building the beginning of the narrative . . . . i was completely moved by the corona motif. it seemed like a way to start to tell a story that moves from one continent, where people were taken, along with their cultures, and used as labor, then contributed towards making another country and new cultures. that history then continues in the decorative patterning of those [bronzed, exterior] panels . . . people keep thinking that the slave trade was about cotton picking. it was also about bridge building, canals, house making. labor in all its forms. so, i suddenly went, ‘oh my god, well, let’s really talk about architecture and african-american history, let’s go back and look at georgia and charleston, you know, religions , , of all these places, through a different lens. there, the history is right in front of you—this incredible tradition of metalsmithing by freed slaves. (kimmelman ) it is more than the exterior part of the building’s form (shown in figures and ) that expresses the history and culture of african american people. the experience of moving through the museum, a visitor ’s educational journey, is a progression through three parts of the museum. historical galleries are underground, in a crypt-like space. the second part of the museum represents a migration. visitors move closer to the light above ground as they view exhibits addressing black migration from the south and the emergence of a visible black professional class (kimmelman ). while the lower levels focus on history, the highest levels of the museum are about community, arts, and culture. the third section on the building’s two highest floors is a celebration of what african americans have and continue to offer to the development of the world’s culture. exhibits address visual and performing arts, but also television, politics, sports, and religion. whereas the lower levels are self-contained in dark rooms, the lobby level and upper floors provide views to the surrounding buildings, allowing visitors to perceive history as it continues (kimmelman ). adjaye intended for the experience of the museum to differ from other smithsonian buildings, in which the exhibit spaces are typically are closed off to the outside world. he explains that the other museums “function a bit like cinema: you go into a different world and then you come back out. i didn’t want that. the experience of being black is not a fiction. there’s something important about always coming back to the light of day” (kimmelman ). the nmaahc’s architecture expresses a message about african american experience in the present, not only the past. religions , , of buildings, allowing visitors to perceive history as it continues (kimmelman ). adjaye intended for the experience of the museum to differ from other smithsonian buildings, in which the exhibit spaces are typically are closed off to the outside world. he explains that the other museums “function a bit like cinema: you go into a different world and then you come back out. i didn’t want that. the experience of being black is not a fiction. there’s something important about always coming back to the light of day” (kimmelman ). the nmaahc’s architecture expresses a message about african american experience in the present, not only the past. figure . an exterior view of the national museum of african american history and culture with the washington monument in the background, june . figure . an interior view of the exterior panels at the national museum of african american history and culture, june . figure . an exterior view of the national museum of african american history and culture with the washington monument in the background, june . religions , , of buildings, allowing visitors to perceive history as it continues (kimmelman ). adjaye intended for the experience of the museum to differ from other smithsonian buildings, in which the exhibit spaces are typically are closed off to the outside world. he explains that the other museums “function a bit like cinema: you go into a different world and then you come back out. i didn’t want that. the experience of being black is not a fiction. there’s something important about always coming back to the light of day” (kimmelman ). the nmaahc’s architecture expresses a message about african american experience in the present, not only the past. figure . an exterior view of the national museum of african american history and culture with the washington monument in the background, june . figure . an interior view of the exterior panels at the national museum of african american history and culture, june . figure . an interior view of the exterior panels at the national museum of african american history and culture, june . religions , , of . . inspiration: responding to spirit architecture is a physical object, but it is never just that. it is material, but it always points to another dimension, the world of ideas and abstractions, where design originates. architecture begins as an idea or intent developed by a person or group, and this is especially true of public architecture. paul tillich writes, “if a strong architectonic will has created these spaces, has formed them throughout on the basis of an idea, in great and in small, that will deserves to be grasped in thought and placed into overarching contexts” (tillich [ ] , p. ). people unfamiliar with architectural theory or criticism may not consciously be aware that architecture expresses a range of ideas and values, but they are likely familiar with this assertion in the way it is expressed in ordinary situations. when we complain that a house does not feel like a home or when we celebrate the destruction of public housing that confines people like laboratory rats, we appeal to aesthetic, function-based, or moral ideals and sensibilities. we want to dwell in buildings that have a certain look. we expect certain buildings to meet particular needs. and when it comes to public architecture that serves a representative function, we want it to look good, function well, and say something about what we value. following the spirit, the second spiritual principle extracted from spirituality in the black lives matter movement, equips african american communities to have courage, clarity, and truth to ask questions about the meaning and function of architecture and answer them. in religious and mystical traditions, spirit is the power that guides us to truth and action. the spirituality of african american social justice movements has appealed to an active force of spirit, evident throughout history spanning from the abolitionist movement, to the us civil rights movement, to contemporary black lives matter and ecowomanist activism. for patrisse cullors, spirit has a role in moving humanity to its fullness. she explains, “i come at all my work from a deep philosophical place that [asks], what does it take for humans to live in our full humanity and allow for others to live in their full dignity? . . . i don’t believe spirit is this thing that lives outside of us dictating our lives, but rather our ability to be deeply connected to something that is bigger than us. i think that is what makes our work powerful” (farrag ). the principle of inspiration is that relying on spirit to guide actions and movements will lead justice seekers to pursue our full humanity. howard thurman, a contemplative christian minister who was influential during the civil rights movement, asked people engaged in the struggles for justice of his time to become aware of their inner authority, who decides what is placed on the altar of their “inward sea.” this altar and what we place on it are connected to the divine (thurman ). our inner authority has the power of consent over our innermost being; it is what determines what we are for and what we seek. accordingly, thurman advocates taking an inventory of the fundamental purpose of our lives. self-examination, guided by spirit, will help us understand what our lives are truly set upon. the question “what is my life set upon?” has the power to provoke african americans to dig through falsehoods and internalized oppressions to find a source, an altar in the inward sea, that will provide a truth that sustains them. this mystical dimension of african american spirituality is crucial for locating and maintaining what is good, true, beautiful, and worthy of pursuit in a culture that denigrates blackness. we must be willing to ask what a building is about, what it is generating for our community, and whether it is intended for the community’s benefit or harm. the architectural implication of inspiration inspiration, in the context of this paper, refers to a practice of following one’s spirit. it may be conceived as a deity (see note below) or not, depending on one’s religious or spiritual orientation. inspiration is an active experience of seeking out guidance from what is sacred, divine, holy, good, true, or beautiful. within african american writings, the capitalization is of spirit is inconsistent. i have chosen not to capitalize it, following the style of articles that quote patrisse cullors. capitalizing spirit as a proper noun signifies both its personal and deified character. in the christian tradition, the holy spirit is one person of the trinity, and even when referring to the spirit’s indwelling presence in a human person, it is capitalized as the title god would be. womanist layli maparyan (maparyan ) capitalizes luminosity, the principle that “all living things are filled with light and spirit,” but does not capitalize spirit itself. in christian usage, it is common to refer to the spirit. i have excluded the definite article to be consistent with cullors’ usage. religions , , of this: the buildings we inhabit and the processes of creating them should affirm the full humanity of african american communities. being guided by spirit means refusing to let market forces alone dictate design. instead, we should respond to what fulfills a fuller conception of humanity. african american spirituality informs us that what people need and desire in our built environment cannot be determined at the material or economic levels alone. people need buildings that nourish our souls. they need environments that remind them what is good and sacred within themselves, especially in the cultural context of perception that blackness is a lack or something or deformation of something. turning to the right sources for inspiration sustains movements. spirit has the power to revive people who have faced oppression and those who work for justice. cullors explains: “when you are working with people who have been directly impacted by state violence and heavy policing in our communities, it is really important that there is a connection to the spirit world . . . for me, seeking spirituality had a lot to do with trying to seek understanding about my conditions—how these conditions shape me in my everyday life and how do i understand them as part of a larger fight, a fight for my life. people’s resilience, i think, is tied to their will to live, our will to survive, which is deeply spiritual” (farrag ). inspiration does not always need to be thought to be derived from a deity for it to be spiritually renewing. for african americans, a renewing spirit can be found in community life, black history, and cultural pride. promoting and sustaining these can inspire a renewed vigor to work for justice. the nmaahc celebrates african american history and engenders cultural pride, but also highlights the importance of beauty and rest for a healthy spirit. the building is beautiful and manages to express its beauty through its simple, yet expressive, modernist form. the museum’s director, lonnie bunch, was pleased that the competition’s jurors selected a building that was able to convey “spirituality and uplift” (rybczynski , p. ). consistent with adjaye’s design aesthetic, a modernist aesthetic that avoids figural ornamentation, the building’s exterior derives its beauty from its materiality. the bronze-colored skin of the building gleams in the sunlight. this skin stands out; it is distinctive on the national mall even though the buildings of the smithsonian are by no means monolithic. the east wing of the national gallery of art designed by i.m. pei and the hirshhorn museum designed by gordon bunshaft are geometric in form, like the nmaahc. the museum of the american indian, designed by douglas cardinal, has a curvy form meant to express the spirit of the land’s indigenous peoples and the “spirit of the great plains” (rybczynski , p. ). most of the other buildings on the national mall, though, have classical greco-roman forms. but with notable exceptions (like the smithsonian castle), the buildings are typically white, pale gray, or a light sand color. the overall impression of the complex of buildings is one of whiteness. so the very color of the nmaahc’s building is distinctive and part of its appeal. symbolically, the building’s shimmering brownness and its intentional use of bronze-clad aluminum for visual effect (shown in figure ) cannot be overstated. the building’s skin appears to be different shades as the sun and clouds shift during the day, recalling the shades of african american skin, a primary identifying mark of blackness. in the nmaahc’s exterior, brown skin/blackness is displayed as beautiful. it is notable that when we take the museum’s design as a whole, blackness is neither reduced to an experience of oppression nor resistance. the design conveys joy and delight, as well. one remaining element of the nmaahc that expresses spirit is its contemplative court. museum guides recommend visiting the contemplative space to “renew your spirit” after touring the lower galleries of the museum that has exhibits about slavery, jim crow, and the legacy of white supremacy. while the exhibits do speak to the resilience and innovation of african americans, the tragedies in american history are not glossed over. they are made present so that we can remember them. this anamnesis is crucial, but it can be emotionally draining. the contemplation court, then, provides a transition point between the lower galleries and the upper galleries for visitors to reflect and re-center themselves. in the building, it is placed on a level between the lower history galleries and the upper culture and community galleries. the large room is situated below street level, but skylights to the religions , , of plaza above bring in daylight. as shown in figure , visitors to the contemplation garden sit together on benches or stand side by side around the perimeter of the room, which features dramatic waterfalls and inspirational quotes. the renewal of the spirit that takes place in this area is a communal one. religions , , of dramatic waterfalls and inspirational quotes. the renewal of the spirit that takes place in this area is a communal one. figure . the bronze colored exterior panels appear to change color as the sunlight changes, june . figure . the interior contemplative court of the national museum of african american history and culture, june . barbara holmes, who has examined contemplative practices of the black church, notes that for african and african american people, contemplation can take individual or communal forms. communal practices of contemplation, she explains, are about orienting the gathered community and unifying them with a shared vision of the work of the divine. she writes, “contemplation in africana contexts is an act of communal reflection and reflexive engagement with both knowable and unknowable occurrences. in communal settings, it is the confluence of atomistic experiences and reflection grounded in a shared interpretive process” (holmes , p. ). this element of spirit in contemplation and in the nmaahc contemplation court’s design is ultimately oriented to the figure . the bronze colored exterior panels appear to change color as the sunlight changes, june . religions , , of dramatic waterfalls and inspirational quotes. the renewal of the spirit that takes place in this area is a communal one. figure . the bronze colored exterior panels appear to change color as the sunlight changes, june . figure . the interior contemplative court of the national museum of african american history and culture, june . barbara holmes, who has examined contemplative practices of the black church, notes that for african and african american people, contemplation can take individual or communal forms. communal practices of contemplation, she explains, are about orienting the gathered community and unifying them with a shared vision of the work of the divine. she writes, “contemplation in africana contexts is an act of communal reflection and reflexive engagement with both knowable and unknowable occurrences. in communal settings, it is the confluence of atomistic experiences and reflection grounded in a shared interpretive process” (holmes , p. ). this element of spirit in contemplation and in the nmaahc contemplation court’s design is ultimately oriented to the figure . the interior contemplative court of the national museum of african american history and culture, june . barbara holmes, who has examined contemplative practices of the black church, notes that for african and african american people, contemplation can take individual or communal forms. communal practices of contemplation, she explains, are about orienting the gathered community and unifying them with a shared vision of the work of the divine. she writes, “contemplation in africana contexts is an act of communal reflection and reflexive engagement with both knowable and unknowable occurrences. in communal settings, it is the confluence of atomistic experiences and reflection grounded in a shared interpretive process” (holmes , p. ). this element of spirit in contemplation and in the nmaahc contemplation court’s design is ultimately oriented to the shared religions , , of work of interpreting their realities. the communal spirit is a key element of the third principle, healing, to be discussed below. . . healing: facilitating well-being for self and others healing is a predominant theme that emerges repeatedly in black lives matter activists’ description of their spiritual practice. hebah farrag, the assistant director of research at the usc center for religion and civic culture, writes about the role that spirit and healing play in black lives matter activism, “black lives matter chapters and affiliated groups are expressing a type of spiritual practice that makes use of the language of health and wellness to impart meaning, heal grief and trauma, combat burn-out and encourage organizational efficiency” (farrag ). initiatives for self-care and recovery are part of today’s social justice movements and their spiritual practices. cullors explains that these are the next steps to the civil rights work of years ago: i think when there are laws on the books that are so hateful, of course our first instinct is to get rid of those laws, transform those laws, reform those laws. but there’s something much deeper inside of us that causes our behavior to be biased or discriminatory. and to me, racism is a sickness. if we’re approaching racism and sexism and homophobia as sicknesses, you’re not just gonna think, “well, if someone writes standards over and over again, i will no longer be racist, i will no longer be racist,” that it’s going to change them. no, it takes something else. it takes a sort of exorcism. i deeply believe that. and you see it in people’s transformation in this work. in the last year and a half, from the black community in and of itself, as we say “black lives matter,” you see the light that comes inside of people to other communities that are like, i’m going to stand on the side of black lives. you see people literally transforming. and that’s a different type of work. and for me, that is a spiritual work. it’s a healing work and we don’t have it codified. there’s no science to it. really, it’s—we are social creatures. human to human, if you take a moment to be with somebody, to understand the pains they’re going through, you get to transform yourself. (tippett et al. ) empathy, one of the guiding principles of black lives matter, feeds the spiritual process of healing. the sicknesses that lead to social stratification require intentional processes that build connections across social divides. but overcoming racism, sexism, and homophobia’s divides between people is not the only healing task to be accomplished. internal divides within the self can cause harm, too. contemporary african american justice movements seek to affirm a holistic conception of black life, which for many, means they address and heal the negative impacts of mind/body dualisms. black lives matter activists are committed to challenging negative perceptions of black bodies. kelly brown douglas’ stand your ground: black bodies and the justice of god (douglas ) deftly traces a history of the america’s socio-cultural narratives and the religious canopies that legitimate a culture that has allowed and promoted racialized violence. she examines the cultural associations that have been implemented to designate black bodies with associations of chattel, guilt, hypersexuality, danger, and criminality. trying to heal the psychic and spiritual harm that bearing these labels produces might lead some african americans to dissociate their bodies from themselves—referring to an inward sense of self as the true self. at times, religion has been complicit in this disassociation, lifting up the ways of the “spirit” over the “flesh”. but rejecting the negative perceptions of the body and not the body itself is a healthier strategy. cullors recognizes the value in affirming the body’s ability to sustain life and its centrality to the movement: “my being alive is actually a part of the work . . . even rudimentary things like eating healthy and exercising “are essentially taken from us, black folks in particular. to reclaim our bodies and our health is a form of resistance, a form of resilience” (farrag ). overcoming human/nature dualisms can promote healing. the separation of the human self from nature or “the environment” is a common criticism of western theology and cosmology emerging from religions , , of ecowomanist and ecofeminist. in one sense, the human/nature divide is an epistemological separation that needs to be healed; it is based on faulty knowledge. we have come to believe that as humans, we are separate from other forms of nature, distinctive by our reason for existing. in some christian cosmologies, this is taught through the belief that humans are to rule, subject, or dominate nature. in a second sense, humanity is literally separated from nature. a large number of westernized people spend most of their days in buildings and automobiles. for many urban dwellers, spending time in natural surroundings requires intentional acts of visiting a park or cultivating a garden. even cities that have tree-lined streets and sidewalks often do not provide enough expansive vegetation for meaningful interaction, much less immersion. how does this distort our perceptions of the self in relation to nature? black feminist cultural critic bell hooks posits that the great migration of black people from the agricultural south to the industrial north altered communal practices and black people’s relation to their bodies (hooks , p. ). she argues that recovering a connection to nature is integral to african americans’ healing: “estrangement from nature and engagement in mind/body splits made it all the more possible for black people to internalize white-supremacist assumptions about black identity . . . . if we think of urban life as a location where black folks learned to accept a mind/body split that made it possible to abuse the body, we can better understand the growth of nihilism and despair in the black psyche. and we can know that when we talk about healing that psyche we must also speak about restoring our connection to the natural world” (hooks , pp. – ). ecowomanist melanie harris uses this quote to describe the ecowomanist perspective that promotes relationality between the earth, human and non-human communities, and the human self. she notes that healing the connections between self, community, and nature is important because of their interrelated nature. as we experience climate change and environmental degradation, marginalized black and brown communities will likely face the most disastrous results (harris , pp. – ). building community gardens and public green spaces like the grounds surrounding the nmaahc is one strategy to dissipate both mind/body and human/nature dualisms. considering the immense scope of environmental problems like climate change, gardening to promote healing may seem like a trivial intervention in the built environment, but its impact should not be easily dismissed. community gardens address one’s spiritual and physical health. they provide healthy food that is especially important in food deserts and also provide productive work for those who cultivate them. gardens and other community green spaces provide a place for members of the community to gather and interact. figures and show the groups of people gathered in the landscaped park areas around the nmaahc. this is space to share experiences with one another. ecowomanists have noted that in literature and in actual communities, gardens provide space for reflection and expression of self in relation to others (morrison ). these gardens have the additional benefit of providing the gardeners the agency to work with their physical surroundings to transform them, instead of merely receiving what someone else has provided. any green space that is tended by the community has this potential. lastly, community gardens and public green spaces add vitality to built environments. when they are sited on previously unused plots of land, green spaces insert living elements in neglected space, and, in urban environments, break up the harshness of concrete, brick, and stone surfaces. healing, like the other principles in the context of african american spirituality, is applicable to both the individual and the community. caring for others in the community is an expression of the virtue of beneficence. peter paris identities this virtue as the most highly praised moral virtue among africans and african americans (paris , p. ). the beneficent person respects all members of the community (paris , p. ). this virtue is closely connected with liberation, discussed earlier. healing and liberation together are about improving the conditions in which a community lives. applied to the built environment, these principles would be manifested by maintaining, rebuilding, and rehabilitation what already exists. where buildings have been neglected and allowed to deteriorate, healing a built environment entails finding the means to fix them for the common good. healing also includes creating new structures when previous elements are so damaged that they cannot be repaired. religions , , of healing, in the context of architecture, is ultimately a practice of creating spaces that improve the wellbeing of individuals and communities. public architecture and design projects that meet the needs of particular black communities express the core commitment of black lives matter—they affirm the value of black lives and promote their flourishing. . concluding reflections: anamnesis and present crises for communities that care about justice—african american religious communities are among these—architecture and the built environment needs be on the agenda for society’s transformation. we need built environments that support liberation, spirit-filled living, and healing, especially in this historical moment. although buildings like the nmhaac and numerous others demonstrate that life-affirming principles can successfully be built into architectural forms, contemporary scholarship lacks sustained religious reflection about justice that includes the built environment and recognizes its importance for the well-being of african american communities. this essay begins this work, pointing us toward a new approach to african american religious thought. there is more that can be researched, described, and examined concerning spirituality in the black lives matter movement, and womanist ethics seems a particularly fitting methodological lens for this work. one of the significant methodological contributions that womanist ethics has made to the broader fields of religion and christian ethics, is its use of narratives, both historical and contemporaneous, as a source for ethical reflection (floyd-thomas ). this essay has foregrounded the accounts of women in the black lives matter movement to define the principles of their spirituality and then apply them to the built environment. alicia garza and patrisse cullors are but two activists who are invigorating their political work with a sense of spirit. as scholarship in this area expands, we will likely unearth the narratives of others who enable us to reconceive the work of justice. to conclude this essay, i will share the experiences of people i know and love. as i write this essay in august , justice-seeking communities around the united states are horrified about events that have unfolded in charlottesville, virginia. white nationalists, nazis, and other white supremacists held a rally there to protest the removal of confederate memorials. the rally degenerated from angry protest to violent attacks throughout the city. one white supremacist drove his car into a crowd of people who were protesting the rally, killing one woman and injuring others. while tragedy does not require an explanation for us to perceive its harm, explaining the latent forces at work in violent, racist acts can help us confront them. we know these rallies and protests are about white supremacy and a rage against socially transformative movements that seek to make our society more inclusive and just. but also, at the heart of the issues concerning these protests and counter-protests is a debate about anamnesis and privilege of claiming space. who has the right to move safely through public space and who determines the meaning we attribute to those spaces? the opposing groups have competing visions of what should be commemorated in public space, who belongs there, and what they both signify about their national or regional identity. in , the massacre in charleston at emanuel african methodist episcopal church renewed debates about the display of the confederate battle flag at statehouses and other public grounds and turned attention to confederate monuments and memorials, too. some localities, like new orleans, louisiana decided to remove these monuments from public places. most confederate monuments placed around the south are emblems of the lost cause, a movement after the confederacy’s defeat that sought to narrate confederate secession, not as treason and their loss not as a defeat, but as heroic attempts to preserve the truest ideals of the nation. christian ministers promoted and provided theological rationalizations i am indebted to church historian bill j. leonard at wake forest university school of divinity for our conversations about lost cause narratives and american exceptionalism following his lecture titled “redeemer nation or lost cause religion?: making america great again (for the first time)” at baylor university on march . religions , , of of the lost cause memorials and rituals (wilson ). they were hoping to use the memory of their fallen soldiers to propel them into a new world in which their values would be celebrated. their aims are not very different from my own, and those of black lives matter activists. the crucial difference, though, is that those of us who reject public memorials that commemorate our nation’s slaveocracy and the continuing effects are staking our claim for a diverse, inclusive community. we want to, as cullors would say, imagine something different. the deadly car attack in charlottesville took place on a downtown street that is home to several shops and offices. even in the wake of this attack, one of my college friends, an african american architect, must travel there to go to her workplace. she does not want to be there and the reason is obvious. i wonder if there exists any space in this moment that is both literally and symbolically safe for her. this event and the historical precedents for it confirms, for me, two central claims of this essay: ( ) for the liberation and healing of their communities to occur, african americans need to be able to claim space for themselves. ( ) spirituality, religious systems, and ritual practices will either promote or hinder these efforts to make places for african americans to thrive. the spirit in african american social justice movements needs to be utilized as a voice of discernment that challenges all other narratives that seek to (re)build places of exclusion based on race, gender expression, class, or sexuality. the practice of african american religion, in all its diverse manifestations, continues to be relevant as long as it helps promote survival and flourishing for african american communities. the moral significance of built environments is that they give physical form to our deepest commitments about how we wish to live. the religious dimension of these commitments should not be underestimated. the spirituality evoked through black lives matter activism shares specific moral orientations with other forms of african american spirituality and religion. in black theology, womanist ethics, and ecowomanism, we find similar themes: liberation, participation, inspiration, and healing. we may call liberation emancipation. we may identify participation as mobilization. inspiration may be living in the spirit, and healing may be recovery. despite what we call these impulses, they move us toward justice and wholeness, and as such, are critical to securing the fullness of black life. incorporating these into an agenda for the built environment with further the aims of justice. acknowledgments: i thank the college of arts & sciences and the department of religion at baylor university for their support in publishing this essay. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. references aquinas, thomas. . summa theologica. edited by fathers of the english dominican province. london: burns, oates, and washborne, ltd. black lives matter. n.d. guiding principles—black lives matter. black lives matter. available online: http: //blacklivesmatter.com/guiding-principles/ (accessed on august ). copeland, m. shawn. . enfleshing freedom: body, race, and being. edited by anthony b. pinn and katie g. cannon. innovations: african american religious thought; minneapolis: fortress press. de gruchy, john w. . christianity, art and transformation: theological aesthetics in the struggle for justice. cambridge: cambridge university press. miguel a. de la torre, ed. . ethics: a liberative approach. minneapolis: fortress press. douglas, kelly brown. . stand your ground: black bodies and the justice of god. maryknoll: orbis. farrag, hebah h. . the role of spirit in the #blacklivesmatter movement: a conversation with activist and artist patrisse cullors. religion dispatches. available online: http://religiondispatches.org/the-role-of-spirit- in-the-blacklivesmatter-movement-a-conversation-with-activist-and-artist-patrisse-cullors/ (accessed on june ). fleming, ronald lee. . the art of placemaking: interpreting community through public art and urban design. london: merrell. floyd-thomas, stacey m. . mining the motherlode: methods in womanist ethics. cleveland: the pilgrim press. http://blacklivesmatter.com/guiding-principles/ http://blacklivesmatter.com/guiding-principles/ http://religiondispatches.org/the-role-of-spirit-in-the-blacklivesmatter-movement-a-conversation-with-activist-and-artist-patrisse-cullors/ http://religiondispatches.org/the-role-of-spirit-in-the-blacklivesmatter-movement-a-conversation-with-activist-and-artist-patrisse-cullors/ religions , , of garza, alicia. n.d. herstory—black lives matter. black lives matter. available online: http://blacklivesmatter. com/herstory (accessed on august ). gorringe, timothy j. . the common good and the global emergency: god and the built environment. cambridge: cambridge university press. harris, melanie l. . ecowomanism: black women, religion, and the environment. the black scholar : – . [crossref] holmes, barbara ann. . joy unspeakable: contemplative practices of the black church. minneapolis: fortress press. hooks, bell. . sisters of the yam: black women and self-recovery, rd ed. new york: routledge. hopkins, dwight n. . introduction. in black faith and public talk: critical essays on james h. cone’s black theology & black power. edited by dwight n. hopkins. maryknoll: orbis, pp. – . jacobsen, eric o. . the space between: a christian engagement with the built environment. edited by william a dyrness and robert k. johnston. cultural exegesis; grand rapids: baker academic. jacobsen, eric o., and eugene h. peterson. . sidewalks in the kingdom: new urbanism and the christian faith. the christian practice of everyday life; grand rapids: brazos press. kimmelman, michael. . amid white marble, a bold statement: david adjaye on designing a museum that speaks a different language. the new york times, september . maparyan, layli. . seeds of light, flowers of power, fruits of change: ecowomanism as spiritualized ecological praxis. worldviews: environment, culture, religion : – . [crossref] markusen, ann, and anne gadwa. . creative placemaking. washington: national endowment for the arts. morrison, debbie-ann. . ecowomanist gardens in the new world. caribbean writer : – . paris, peter j. . virtues and values: the african and african american experience. minneapolis: fortress press. project for public spaces. . creative communities and arts-based placemaking. project for public spaces. available online: https://www.pps.org/reference/creative-communities-and-arts-based-placemaking/ (accessed on august ). ruether, rosemary radford. . sexism and god-talk: toward a feminist theology, with a new introduction ed. boston: beacon press. rybczynski, witold. . how architecture works: a humanist’s toolkit. new york: farrar, strauss and giroux. sheldrake, philip. . the spiritual city: theology, spirituality, and the urban. malden: wiley blackwell. the movement for black lives. n.d. about us—the movement for black lives. the movement for black lives. available online: https://policy.m bl.org/about/ (accessed on august ). thurman, howard. . the living wisdom of howard thurman: a visionary for our time. boulder: sounds true audio. tillich, paul. . dwelling, space, and time. in on art and architecture. edited by john dillenberger and jane dillenberger. new york: crossroad, pp. – , first published . tippett, krista, patrisse cullors, and robert k. ross. . the resilient world we’re building now. in on being. edited by krista tippett. minneapolis: krista tippett public productions, available online: https:// onbeing.org/programs/patrisse-cullors-robert-ross-the-resilient-world-were-building-now/ (accessed on november ). townes, emilie m. . searching for paradise in a world of theme parks. in black faith and public talk: critical essays on james h. cone’s black theology & black power. edited by dwight n. hopkins. maryknoll: orbis, pp. – . townes, emilie m. . ethics as an art of doing the work our souls must have. in womanist theological ethics: a reader. edited by katie g. cannon, emilie m. townes and angela d. sims. louisville: westminster john knox, pp. – . tutashinda, chinyere. . reparations for black land and liberation manifesto. black land and liberation initiative. may . available online: http://blacklandandliberation.org/uncategorized/manifesto/ (accessed on november ). vesely-flad, rima. . racial purity and dangerous bodies: moral pollution, black lives, and the struggle for justice. minneapolis: fortress press. wilson, charles reagan. . baptized in blood: the religion of the lost cause, – . athens: university of georgia press. http://blacklivesmatter.com/herstory http://blacklivesmatter.com/herstory http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / - https://www.pps.org/reference/creative-communities-and-arts-based-placemaking/ https://policy.m bl.org/about/ https://onbeing.org/programs/patrisse-cullors-robert-ross-the-resilient-world-were-building-now/ https://onbeing.org/programs/patrisse-cullors-robert-ross-the-resilient-world-were-building-now/ http://blacklandandliberation.org/uncategorized/manifesto/ religions , , of © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	spiritual transformation and the material world 	an architectural agenda: black lives in the built environment 	spiritual principles and their implications for the built environment 	liberation: reclaiming black space 	creative placemaking 	architecture for the people 	inspiration: responding to spirit 	healing: facilitating well-being for self and others 	concluding reflections: anamnesis and present crises wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty 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about time: a view of crowdsourced data before and during the pandemic it’s about time: a view of crowdsourced data before and during the pandemic evgenia christoforou research centre on interactive media, smart systems and emerging technologies nicosia, cyprus e.christoforou@rise.org.cy pınar barlas research centre on interactive media, smart systems and emerging technologies nicosia, cyprus p.barlas@rise.org.cy jahna otterbacher open university of cyprus & research centre on interactive media, smart systems and emerging technologies nicosia, cyprus jahna.otterbacher@ouc.ac.cy abstract data attained through crowdsourcing have an essential role in the development of computer vision algorithms. crowdsourced data might include reporting biases, since crowdworkers usually describe what is “worth saying" in addition to images’ content. we explore how the unprecedented events of , including the unrest surrounding racial discrimination, and the covid- pandemic, might be reflected in responses to an open-ended annotation task on people images, originally executed in and replicated in . analyzing themes of identity and health conveyed in workers’ tags, we find evidence that supports the potential for temporal sensitivity in crowdsourced data. the data exhibit more race-marking of images depicting non-whites, as well as an increase in tags describing weight. we relate our findings to the emerging research on crowdworkers’ moods. furthermore, we discuss the implications of (and suggestions for) designing tasks on proprietary platforms, having demonstrated the possibility for additional, unexpected variation in crowdsourced data due to significant events. ccs concepts • information systems → computing platforms; • human- centered computing → empirical studies in hci; • computing methodologies → artificial intelligence. keywords crowdsourcing, data reproducibility, image annotation, reporting bias, temporal sensitivity acm reference format: evgenia christoforou, pınar barlas, and jahna otterbacher. . it’s about time: a view of crowdsourced data before and during the pandemic. in chi conference on human factors in computing systems (chi ’ ), may – , , yokohama, japan. acm, new york, ny, usa, pages. https: //doi.org/ . / . permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. copyrights for components of this work owned by others than the author(s) must be honored. abstracting with credit is permitted. to copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. request permissions from permissions@acm.org. chi ’ , may – , , yokohama, japan © copyright held by the owner/author(s). publication rights licensed to acm. acm isbn - - - - / / .. .$ . https://doi.org/ . / . introduction paid micro-task crowdsourcing is an essential tool in the creation of datasets for training and evaluating computer vision algorithms. in particular, datasets designed for object and scene recognition typically require descriptive labeling at some stage in the pipeline. for example, the imagenet project [ ] is reported to be the largest academic user of amazon’s mechanical turk, employing between - k workers per year to label and/or verify semantic image la- bels. similarly, microsoft coco is another widely-used dataset, which relies on mturkers for labeling and instance detection (i.e., detecting objects and scenes) [ ], as well as for providing descrip- tive captions for images [ ]. while the availability of such large, human-enriched datasets has been a boon to computer vision research, there is increasing awareness of the human biases that are reflected in crowdsourced data. dumitrache rejected the notion that there can be a single ground truth in any semantic annotation task, arguing instead for a “disagreement-aware" approach to crowdsourcing [ ]. in a similar vein, chung and colleagues [ ] noted the diverse answers often provided by workers, and advocated for reporting statistical distri- butions of responses, to preserve this diversity. in explaining the variation in responses to open-ended image annotation tasks, berg and colleagues [ ] described crowdsourced annotations as being fundamentally “human-centric"; when we ask workers to describe images, they provide us with a wealth of social information beyond that for which there is direct visual evidence. misra and colleagues [ ] further developed this view, emphasizing that workers’ anno- tations on images should be not considered as a faithful description of content, but rather, constitute a report of what is “worth saying" about the target image. a concrete example of the human biases found in image annota- tions is that of gender and racial stereotypes. in his analysis of the flickr k dataset, van miltenburg [ ] found that workers make inferences on images of people, which do not logically follow from the image content. in particular, he noted cases of gender, racial and ethnic stereotypes, and other “unwanted inferences" (e.g., eth- nicity marking, suggesting that images of white people are the default). zhao and colleagues noted rampant gender biases in the ms coco dataset [ ], as a result of the types of images included in the dataset, but also the annotations accompanying them, leading https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /science/for-web-images-creating-new- technology-to-seek-and-find.html https://doi.org/ . / . https://doi.org/ . / . https://doi.org/ . / . https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /science/for-web-images-creating-new-technology-to-seek-and-find.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /science/for-web-images-creating-new-technology-to-seek-and-find.html chi ’ , may – , , yokohama, japan christoforou, et al. to bias amplification in the trained computer vision models. hen- dricks and colleagues reported similar findings in the ms coco data for an image captioning task [ ]. finally, gender stereotyping has also been documented in data arising through a gamified image labeling task, the esp game [ ], in which players were more likely to describe physical traits for images of women (as compared to men), and the inferred professional roles for images of men (as compared to women). in summary, it is evident that crowdsourcing, and in particular image annotation tasks, are key elements of the process by which society’s biases are amplified and perpetuated in computer vision algorithms. while the above constitute examples of datasets built and used mainly by experts, it is becoming increasingly easy and econom- ical for non-experts to create datasets for computer vision and other machine learning tasks, that better serve their needs. the recent industry trend of “democratizating artificial intelligence," together with the rise in “no-code tools" and “cognitive services" are empowering non-expert business users. data harvesting plat- forms – powered by crowdwork – have also followed suit. while mturk has always provided easy-to-use templates for a range of human intelligence tasks (hits), crowdsourcing platforms such as appen and clickworker took an additional step by offering a full range of data collection and “crowd management" services. notably, computer-vision start-up clarifai now offers integrated end-to- end services, from dataset creation and labelling to training and evaluating models. despite the convenience of such services and their potential to aid innovation, there is awareness that they may be a “double-edged sword," given the prevalence of biases which may go unrecognized by non-experts. given the above concerns, it is becoming increasingly important to better understand the nature of human biases that can manifest in data crowdsourced from popular platforms and services, and the extent to which particular characteristics of the platform and/or task may exacerbate them. as will be explained, in the current work, we study the temporal effects that significant global and local events might have had on an open-ended task involving the description of people-related images. motivation to examine temporal effects, we replicate an open-ended image annotation task, which was originally designed and carried out two years prior, comparing the data received in versus that collected in . next, we will motivate the choice of our crowd- sourcing task. following that, we explain why we expect to observe temporal sensitivity, as a result of the influence of ’s significant events on crowdworkers’ responses. as previously discussed, human-labeled training datasets for computer vision algorithms often suffer from social bias, which is most evident in the annotations on people-related images. this bias is, of course, carried down the development pipeline and is https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesfinancecouncil/ / / /a-no-code- environment-brings-ai-to-the-business-user/ https://appen.com/ https://www.clickworker.com/ https://www.clarifai.com/ https://www.strategy-business.com/article/democratizing-artificial-intelligence-is- a-double-edged-sword?gko=ffdcd typically reflected in the final output of the algorithms trained on the data. there is a growing body of research documenting the consequences of this in the social world (e.g., the algorithmic misgendering of images of women and people of color [ ] and of non-binary people [ ]). thus, bias in computer vision training datasets can have great implications. while others have noted the issue of imbalanced representation in training data (e.g., [ , ]), we focus on the manner in which images in training data are annotated by crowdworkers. in particular, from the works discussed in the introduction, it appears that popular, open-ended crowdsourcing task designs give a higher degree of freedom to the annotators to express what they find "worth saying" in a image and thus, potentially introduce their own biases into the dataset. this may be especially true when the requester of the task is a non-expert, and simply uses a platform’s template uncritically. thus, an open-ended image annotation task is a good candidate for our study on temporal sensitivity, as it leaves room for workers’ interpretations on the image. at the same time, it represents a common task in building high-impact computer vision datasets. having motivated our crowdsourcing task, we now discuss the importance of studying temporal sensitivity, in light of the cur- rent world climate. the unprecedented events of have created a temporary social imbalance that has influenced people around the globe. thus, we take advantage of this “organic” and universal change in the crowdworkers’ environment and study the temporal variation manifested in the collected data. we hypothesize that among other factors, the difficulties experienced worldwide, given the covid- pandemic, coupled with the continuing social unrest surrounding racial discrimination in the u.s., have influenced the datasets generated through crowdsourcing. in particular, given the significant impact of these events and their extensive media cover- age, we expect that concepts central to these events (i.e., issues of health and identity) are “at the forefront of thought" [ ]. this hy- pothesis is in parallel to findings from cognitive psychology, which demonstrated that the public’s perceptions of airplanes changed after the september th terrorist attacks. while a causal effect could not be definitively claimed based on the experimental results reported by novick [ ], she postulated that the change in peo- ple’s perceptions of airplanes – as being more “typical" examples of the semantic category “vehicle" after / as compared to before – was likely due to the frequent exposure to media coverage of the attacks. similarly, the current work studies how time influences crowdsourced data, by showing a connection between the present events and the data collected from a crowdsourcing task in , as compared to the data collected from the same task in . public health researchers have described how these unprece- dented experiences have affected our well-being. individuals may be suffering from confusion, isolation, and feelings of insecurity, while communities are facing secondary crises brought about by the lack of resources for medical response, schooling and child- care, among other challenges. [ ]. large-scale problems are being reported, such as alcohol and drug abuse [ ] as well as increased levels of anxiety and sleep disturbances in the general population [ ], together with some early signs of eating disorders [ ] and the danger of weight gains over short periods of time [ ]. for some individuals with existing eating disorders, the pandemic has been https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesfinancecouncil/ / / /a-no-code-environment-brings-ai-to-the-business-user/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesfinancecouncil/ / / /a-no-code-environment-brings-ai-to-the-business-user/ https://appen.com/ https://www.clickworker.com/ https://www.clarifai.com/ https://www.strategy-business.com/article/democratizing-artificial-intelligence-is-a-double-edged-sword?gko=ffdcd https://www.strategy-business.com/article/democratizing-artificial-intelligence-is-a-double-edged-sword?gko=ffdcd it’s about time: a view of crowdsourced data before and during the pandemic chi ’ , may – , , yokohama, japan a trigger for increased anxiety and worsening symptoms [ ]. in the midst of all this, the “stay at home” movement and/or enforced lockdowns, in combination with the economic crisis, have created a fruitful environment for crowdwork supply to bloom and demand to increase, with on-premise laboratory studies being suspended in many areas [ ]. a plethora of new datasets produced through crowdsourcing are being created, but can crowdwork during a pan- demic yield reliable data? thus, we seize the opportunity to observe crowdworkers dur- ing what clearly cannot be considered “normal times,” providing evidence that societal events can introduce temporal variations in resulting data. we leverage an existing image annotation dataset [ ], created in december through a generic task presenting work- ers with standardized, passport-style images of people from the chicago face database [ ]. we replicate the image annotation task as described in [ ] using the same platform. as will be detailed, we find that themes of identity (words relating to race and nationality) as well as health (e.g., body weight) are used significantly more frequently by workers to describe images in , as compared to the data, supporting our hypothesis that the events of may have contributed to the variations in the resulting data. we dis- cuss the challenges of crowdsourcing during a time of heightened stress, as well as the need to cope with temporal effects. finally, we provide a set of guidelines for accomplishing this. background and related work in this section, we take a closer look at the value of the information to be gained by replicating an open-ended image annotation task. in addition, we ground the approach used in analyzing the workers’ descriptions of the images. . stress, mood and (crowd)work although it is clear that the present circumstances have brought about significant stress and uncertainty to much of the population, we are only beginning to understand how this has affected work, both in terms of process and outcomes. early studies have consid- ered the particular stresses of healthcare workers [ ] or of parents returning to work with schools closed [ ]. likewise, researchers are considering the complex interactions between the black lives matter protests, their psychological impact on racial minorities [ ] as well as public efforts to enforce social distancing to combat the spread of covid- [ ]. park and colleagues [ ] surveyed mturkers to understand their stress during this time period, as well as their coping mechanisms. however, we are unaware of pub- lished studies that have considered how the current situation has impacted the process and outcomes of crowdwork in particular. as noted by zhuang and gadiraju [ ], while there is a substan- tial body of literature that links workers’ moods to processes and outcomes in the physical workplace, little is known about mood and crowdwork. therefore, they considered the relationship between crowdworkers’ moods and their perception of work as well as their performance on task, conducting a two-phase study. first, a survey suggested that workers’ moods correlated to their perceptions of https://cedefop.europa.eu/en/news-and-press/news/has-coronavirus-crisis-made-us- all-crowdworkers their level of engagement with a task; however, a follow-up ex- periment involving an information-finding hit demonstrated no significant correlation between performance (outcome) and self- reported moods. in contrast, other researchers have attempted to harness moods to enhance crowdwork. for instance, morris and colleagues [ ] found that inducing a happy mood through playing music, helped workers perform better on creative tasks. finally, shen et al. [ ] suggested an “affective crowdsourcing" approach, which attempted to account for workers’ moods when scheduling tasks, in order to maximize their collective efficiency. these findings, along with reports of generalized feelings of stress and anxiety during the events of – and even boredom and frustration during lockdown [ ] when the population of crowd- workers likely increased [ ] – suggest that we may find differences in the data produced in , as compared to that collected during a less stressful time period. although the literature to date does not evidence a direct link between workers’ stress or mood during the pandemic, to the quality of their work, it is logical to anticipate an observable, temporal sensitivity, based on the unique characteristics and significance of this period of time. . image annotation as communication: analyzing textual responses the micro-task we conducted asks workers to “translate" the rich visual, but implicit, information contained in an image, by pro- viding an explicit encoding of that information (i.e., word tags). thus, the task is fundamentally a communication process; this ex- plains why social information is conveyed in workers’ responses, as demonstrated in previous research [ , ]. in particular, the way we express ourselves in writing reveals a great deal of (often unin- tended) information, such as our emotional state, our membership within social group(s) as well as our relationships to others [ ]. for instance, stylistic changes in writing can often be observed after the experience of emotional trauma; thus, textual analysis has been used to explore collective and individual traumatic experiences. cohn and colleagues [ ] conducted a large-scale analysis of u.s. users of an online diary service, comparing their writing before and after the events of september th. they noted changes in the emotions expressed in text, as well as changes in the use of stylistic markers, such as pronouns. in particular, after the terrorist attacks, writers were more often socially distanced, which decreased over time (as indicated by increasing use of first-person pronouns over time, which show personal engagement). similar trends were noted in a spanish study of online expressive writing after the march th terrorist attacks [ ]. while the above findings pertain to expressive writing, social psychologists have also considered the characteristics of the lan- guage used for a specific purpose – describing other people. first, it is clear that people do not only describe how they literally see another person; they also make inferences about others’ abstract characteristics and traits. even without contact (e.g., when shown a photo), this happens automatically and almost immediately [ ]. fiske and cox compared the concepts used to describe a friend versus a stranger, finding that strangers were more often described with physical attributes, while familiar persons were more likely described in an interpretive manner [ ]. semin and colleagues https://www.cedefop.europa.eu/en/news-and-press/news/has-coronavirus-crisis-made-us-all-crowdworkers https://www.cedefop.europa.eu/en/news-and-press/news/has-coronavirus-crisis-made-us-all-crowdworkers chi ’ , may – , , yokohama, japan christoforou, et al. detailed a distinction between the use of abstract/inferential versus concrete language [ ]. while the former is not based on visual evidence, the latter follows logically and directly from visual ev- idence. furthermore, abstract language (e.g., describing someone as “intelligent" or “kind") implies stability over time and generaliz- ability across situations, whereas concrete descriptions (e.g., noting the clothing worn or the facial expression) report an observation “here and now.” psychologists have noted a strong tendency for us to describe more expected or stereotype-congruent people more abstractly, as compared to less familiar / unexpected people. this tendency is known as linguistic bias and is believed to play a role in the creation and perpetuation of social stereotypes [ ]. . research questions inspired by the above findings, we analyze crowdworkers’ descrip- tions of the people images, considering the use of two themes in their chosen word tags: concepts related to health and racial or national identity. given the tendency for traumatic events as well as social relations to influence the use of language, we expect to observe differences in the use of these themes across time. finally, we also consider the use of inferential (abstract) versus concrete tags to describe people, given their correlation to the social rela- tionship between the perceiver (i.e., worker) and the person being described, in light of the ongoing racial tensions. in particular, we answer the following research questions: rq . do workers in refer to the identity and health of the depicted persons, more so than in ? rq . do workers use abstract/inferential versus concrete tags with similar frequencies over time? method . data collection and pre-processing we replicated an image annotation task, originally executed by barlas et al. [ ] on the appen platform. their task was designed to emulate the common open-ended image tagging templates at platforms such as mturk and appen. the researchers used a highly standardized set of people images, the chicago face database (cfd) [ ] featuring individuals from four racial groups, which were self- reported. as shown in figure , the individuals depicted wear the same grey t-shirt, have a neutral facial expression, and directly face the camera. the cfd is composed of images in total: depict asian, depict black, depict latino/a and depict white persons, balanced by gender within each group. contrary to [ ], which targeted india and u.s.-based workers in separate runs, we are only interested in participants based in the u.s. thus, we ran an identical task with the same images, restricted to crowdworkers registered in the u.s., similarly asking for three unique judgements per image. crowdworkers were presented with an image, and asked simply to describe its “content" through tags (consisting of one to two words) of their choice. workers were permitted to describe up to images. they were compensated . usd per image, with the mean time on task being seconds. we adopted all the same quality control measures described in [ ]. in , our study was https://appen.com/ - the study used the figureeight platform, later acquired by appen. active from may to june, while the study presented in [ ] was active during december (i.e., months apart). for the purpose of comparing the data produced in the two studies, we used a portion of the dataset [ ] which is freely accessible. in both the and datasets, there are a small number of responses in spanish. contrary to the study, we translated the spanish-language tags – both those found in the dataset as well as those collected in our study – into english. we used the same spell-check process as described in the study (on both the tags collected in , and all the newly-translated spanish-language tags) in order to fully replicate the process. . thematic tag clusters in the study, all processed tags were grouped into clusters fol- lowing a specific typology (see [ ], table ). however, for the needs of this work, we isolated the tags describing a person’s health and identity appearing in the tags from both years (see table for exam- ples), creating new clusters for our analysis. as detailed in figure , we consider tags that describe aspects of a person’s health and identity, as expressed by the crowdworkers, which make up the two themes of our current typology of tags. within the theme related to a person’s health, we find two respective clusters {health, weight}. since weight may be an indicator of health, we include these tags under the health-related theme . the symptoms sub-cluster con- tains all the tags that could be used to describe a physical feature that may indicate a health condition, while the overall health sub- cluster contains all the tags that describe whether a person is gener- ally healthy or not. tags referring to a physiological characteristic of a person that might be otherwise related to a health condition (e.g., “albino”, “broken-nosed”) were not included. furthermore, tags referring to the color of a specific body part (i.e., “pale_face”) were also excluded for being too ambiguous. the weight cluster consists of three sub-clusters: {overweight, underweight, normal weight}. tags describing the person’s body structure (e.g., “heavy_build”) were excluded. similarly, the identity theme includes tags used by the crowd- workers to specify a characteristic of a person’s physical appearance that could potentially be used to identify a person as belonging to a certain nationality, ethnicity or race. the identity theme contains three clusters: {external features, nationality, race}. the external features cluster contains the sub-clusters describing a person’s skin tone (see figure ) and physical features that are described with inferences to the person’s ethnicity, race, or nationality (e.g., “chinese_eyes,” “latin_skin”). the nationality cluster consists of sub-clusters of the nationalities most often reported along with the other sub-cluster, which refers to nationalities appearing only a few times (e.g., “peruvian” or “korean”). finally, the race cluster includes four races common in the u.s. (which are analogous to the race categories used in the cfd) as well as the sub-cluster multi- race, consisting of tags such as “half_black” and “asian_black.” note that in figure , the sub-clusters have been coded as to whether they represent inferential or concrete characterizations of the target person. for example, tags referring to the overall health https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataset.xhtml?persistentid=doi: . /dvn/apzkss we recognize that weight is a ubiquitous topic. we only place weight relevant tags in the health category with the intention of placing these tags into context with identity relevant tags. https://appen.com/ it’s about time: a view of crowdsourced data before and during the pandemic chi ’ , may – , , yokohama, japan figure : four images from the chicago face database (cfd) (left to right: am- , bf- , lm- , wf- ). c on cr et e in fe re nt ia l h ea lth -r el at ed health symptoms overall health weight underweightnormal weightoverweight id en tit y external features inferential features dark skin black skin brown skin medium skin white skin pale/light skin nationality america/usa chinese native other race african/black asian latin multi-race caucasian/white figure : event-driven themes: health-related and identity, and their respective sub-clusters.color-coding indicates whether a cluster is inferential or concrete. the sub-clusters, symptoms, overweight, normal weight and underweight and the sub- clusters describing a persons skin belong to the concrete characterization; the rest of the sub-clusters belong to the inferential characterization. clusters are mutually exclusive. of a person (“healthy," “fit") are considered abstract/inferential, as they cannot be ascertained directly based on visual evidence alone. in contrast, the sub-cluster overweight, consisting of tags such as “heavy" or “plump," is concrete, as its tags are based on visual evidence. data analysis our analysis focuses on the workers’ use of tags that refer to the topics of health and identity. therefore, tags analyzed will either belong exclusively to one of the (sub-)clusters under health or identity, or will be from the set of “other remaining tags" that are not processed in this work (see section . ). each of the images received three judgments, each producing tags. however, as part of the pre-processing, tags that were considered low-quality as described in [ ], were excluded. thus, in our analysis, we consider a total sample size of , tags in and , tags in . breaking this down by the race of the depicted person, images with a white subject received in total , tags in , and , tags in ; black subject images received , tags in and , in ; asian subjects a total of , tags in and , tags in , and latino/a subjects a total of , tags in and , tags in . for each tag belonging to either dataset (i.e., v. ), we computed the number of unique occurrences. by the term unique occurrences we mean that in the event a worker provided the same tags for the same image more than once, we count it as a single occurrence. of course, if the same tag appeared in two different judgments, it is counted twice. thus, the number of unique occur- rences in our analysis will inform us of how many tags we have for a particular (sub-)cluster, counting only the repetitions of a tag that do not belong to the same worker, for the same judgement. from this point onward, we refer to the number of unique occurrences simply as occurrences of a tag or # occurrences. in section . , we present a thematic perspective on the use of tags, comparing the we were granted access, by the authors of [ ], to the raw data of the u.s. workers in order to count the number of unique occurrences in the study. chi ’ , may – , , yokohama, japan christoforou, et al. table : example of tags belonging to the health-related and identity themes, and their respective sub-clusters. (sub-)cluster example tags sub-cluster example tags health symptoms pain, dehydrated, sweaty overall health healthy, cadaverous, fit weight overweight overweight, fat, obese normal weight normal_weight, average_weight underweight thin, skinny, skeletal external features inferential features chinese_eyes, asian_look medium skin medium_skin_color, olive_skin dark skin dark_skin, dark_complexion white skin white_skin, face_white black skin black_features, black_skin pale/light skin fair_complexion, light_skin brown skin brownish_skin, face_brown nationality american/usa american, usa, afro-american native native_woman, native_american chinese china, chinese_man other mexican, vietnam, non_american race african/black black_guy, afro-descendant, african multi-race half_black, multi_race asian asian, asia, asiatic caucasian/white white_girl, caucasian, white_person latin latino, hispanic, latin_girl use of health-related tags across the people images, across time. moreover, we consider the use of identity-related tags at both points of time, as well as by the race group of the persons depicted in the target images. following that, in section . , we present the stylistic perspective on the workers’ use of tags, considering where they use more abstract or concrete tags to describe the depicted individuals, and if these stylistic tendencies have changed over time. . thematic perspective: health and identity we begin with a high-level look at the use of tags belonging to the topics of health and identity, applying a chi-squared test to examine whether the number of occurrences of the types of tags workers provided (i.e., health, identity, or other remaining tags) are independent of the year these tags were collected, which is our null hypothesis. as expected, the observed distributions of tags by topic differ between and (𝑋 ( , 𝑁 = ) = . , 𝑝 < . ). in order to provide answers to our research questions, we take a closer look at the extent to which workers describe the health and identity of the depicted persons, analyzing separately the two topics. . . health-related tags. we now focus on the use of the health- related tags. as shown in figure , we observe an increase in in the use of tags belonging to the overweight, underweight and symptoms sub-clusters. we apply a two proportion z-test to see whether the proportion of tags used that are health-related (i.e., # occurrences of health-related tags over the total sample size of the tags, as presented above) is the same across the two years. since we are examining four hypothesis at the same time (one for each of the health-related sub-clusters) we apply a bonferroni correction, adapting our significance level to . / = . . for the overweight sub-cluster, the observed difference between and is significant (𝑧 = − . , 𝑝 = . ). on the other hand, for the underweight sub-cluster, the results are not significant (𝑧 = − . , 𝑝 = . ). notice that we consider a strict significance level in our analysis; thus, results for the underweight sub-cluster could be considered significant under different conditions. from this point forward we will report only the exact values for 𝑝 < . together with the bonferroni correction we apply in each case, clearly mentioning the significance level we consider. in figure , we omitted the graphical representation of the nor- mal weight sub-cluster, since we observed only four unique tag occurrences from that sub-cluster in and none in the study. a total of images were described in both and with a tag belonging to the overweight sub-cluster. in terms of images tagged at only one point in time, there were distinct images receiving a tag belonging to the overweight sub-cluster in , as compared to only in . finally, our analysis indi- cates that workers provided a similar number of tags describing the symptoms (𝑧 = − . , 𝑝 > . ) and overall health (𝑧 = . , 𝑝 > . ) of the depicted person in both years. the above observations address rq , as far as health-related tags are concerned, with a positive answer. it is somewhat surpris- ing to see that tags belonging to the overall health and symptoms sub-clusters were not more frequently used in , given the events of the pandemic. again, parallel to [ ], our initial assumption was that with the pandemic and issues of personal and public health being discussed extensively in the media, health-related tags would be used more frequently. interestingly enough though, crowdwork- ers in the study did not increase their use of overall health and symptoms tags but instead, used significantly more tags belonging to the weight cluster, in comparison to . by posing rq , we anticipated, up to a certain degree, that workers’ descriptions would also reflect their concerns and stresses related to the pandemic. our results indicate that weight-related issues are on their minds. ac- cording to google trends, during april-may , there was a spike in search terms such as “recipes” and “quarantine workout,” reinforcing the idea that such topics were on people’s minds. in other words, workers may be most likely to notice and mention – when describing an image – what is directly affecting them at the present moment, e.g., weight-related concerns resulting from the circumstances of the pandemic. of course, the use of more weight trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=us&q=quarantine% workout,home% recipes https://trends.google.com/trends/explore?geo=us&q=quarantine% workout,home% recipes it’s about time: a view of crowdsourced data before and during the pandemic chi ’ , may – , , yokohama, japan figure : number of tag occurrences over time, for sub-clusters under health and weight clusters. for each sub-cluster, left bar represents the year and the right bar the year . related tags in might also be correlated with other factors affecting the crowdworkers and their perception of the subjects, of which we are unaware. . . identity-related tags. next, we explore the workers’ use of tags related to the depicted person’s identity, in addressing rq . figure shows the observed tag occurrences of the three clusters of identity-related tags {external features, race, nationality} and their respective sub-clusters. over all images, workers are approximately three times more likely to mention the person’s external features and race than to infer the person’s nationality. considering the external features cluster, a two proportion z- test reveals that the proportion of tags used (i.e., the number of occurrences over the total sample size) for the two years we consider is similar (𝑧 = . , 𝑝 > . ), thus providing a partially negative answer to the identity-related aspect of rq . furthermore, we notice that for all races of the persons depicted in the images, the number of tag occurrences in versus are similar. in other words, there are no statistically significant differences across time, in the use of these types of tags when referring to a white subject (𝑧 = . , 𝑝 > . ), when describing a black subject (𝑧 = . , 𝑝 > . ), for tags referring to asian subjects (𝑧 = . , 𝑝 > . ) or when describing latino/a subjects (𝑧 = − . , 𝑝 > . ). notice that the sample sizes when considering the different proportions are different based on the year and the race of the depicted subject in the image as described in the introduction of this section. looking at the different sub-clusters of the external features tags, it is interesting to notice that in , there is a strong prefer- ence from workers in tagging people as pale/light colored, while in , there is a shift towards tagging them as having white skin/features. in fact, considering a two-proportion z-test for the white sub-cluster tags, we observe a significant difference in oc- currence between the two years (𝑧 = − . , 𝑝 < . ). a similar trend is noticeable for describing people of color. while in , significantly more tags in the dark skin sub-cluster were observed (𝑧 = . , 𝑝 < . ), in , we have significantly more tags refer- ring to black skin (𝑧 = − . , 𝑝 < . ) or brown skin (𝑧 = − . , 𝑝 = . ). in other words, more specific tags are observed in to describe a person’s color. notice that we compared together the four hypotheses relevant to the external features sub-cluster tags, presented above; thus, our threshold for significance is 𝑝 < . , according to the bonferroni correction. it appears that tags used by the workers describing external fea- tures referring to the colors white and black/brown are trending in the dataset, while in , the sub-clusters pale/light and dark were more frequently used. among the most popular dictionary words used to write about the black lives matter (blm) movement are the words “white” and “black,” thus serving as evidence that workers might be subject to attentional bias. of course, it must be noted that this is one among many factors that could affect such behavior. looking at the cluster of race-related tags, we notice no statis- tically significant increase in the total number of tag occurrences between the two years (𝑧 = − . , 𝑝 > . ); thus again, a par- tially negative answer is given regarding the identity-related part of rq . however, we observe a significantly larger number of race-related tag occurrences in describing images depicting black subjects (𝑧 = − . , 𝑝 < . ). moreover, we observe the opposite behavior regarding latino/as (𝑧 = . , 𝑝 = . ) and https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/blog/ -words-black-lives-matter-how-are- british-children-responding-to-the-emerging-themes-and-issues-in-their-writing/ https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/blog/ -words-black-lives-matter-how-are-british-children-responding-to-the-emerging-themes-and-issues-in-their-writing/ https://home.oxfordowl.co.uk/blog/ -words-black-lives-matter-how-are-british-children-responding-to-the-emerging-themes-and-issues-in-their-writing/ chi ’ , may – , , yokohama, japan christoforou, et al. figure : the number of occurrences of tags for the clusters external features, race, and nationality, in (left/top bar) v. (right/bottom bar), broken out by the race of the person depicted (left col.) and the specific tag sub-clusters (right col.). it’s about time: a view of crowdsourced data before and during the pandemic chi ’ , may – , , yokohama, japan white subjects (𝑧 = . , 𝑝 < . ), with significantly more race- related tag occurrences in as compared to . notice that the proportion of tags for images depicting asian subjects are similar among the two years (𝑧 = − . , 𝑝 > . ). considering the we are comparing four different hypotheses above, we set the threshold for significance to 𝑝 < . , following the bonferroni correction. the above observations relevant to the race of the depicted subject are in line with the observations on the sub-clusters on the race-related tags. for instance, in , we find workers using a significantly larger number of tags belonging to the african/black sub-cluster with (𝑧 = − . , 𝑝 < . ), while the tags from the caucasian/white sub-cluster are significantly more frequent in with (𝑧 = . , 𝑝 < . ). previous research on crowdwork and image labeling [ , ] reported race-marking (i.e., greater tendency to use race-related words when describing non-white individuals). those observations are partly in line with the above results. the asian images in the cfd included individuals with south asian heritage (i.e., who didn’t “look east asian/chinese"), hence this could be one factor contributing to our not finding anti- chinese sentiments in the workers’ responses, despite the global increase in anti-asian racism due to the covid- pandemic [ ]. notice also that the images depicting black individuals received the least amount of race-related tags, as compared to other races, in . given the difference in race-marking in our data, we could say that some workers might suffer from a form of implicit racism in the study. we have analyzed the number of inflammatory tags referring to people of color, and noticed a decrease in in comparison with the data of . however, race-marking has clearly increased in . this could be an indication that workers are thinking about what is “politically correct” when describing people, but involuntarily, they are still showing markedly different behavior towards people of color. another factor that can be im- pacting our observed results, is that the race labels on each subject in an image is self-reported by the subject [ ]. finally, considering the nationality tags, we observe a statisti- cally significant increase in , as compared to (𝑧 = − . , 𝑝 < . ). this observation provides us with a partially positive answer this time regarding the identity aspect of rq . examining each group of images (by racial group), we observe more tags de- scribing nationality in , as compared to . however, the differences are not statistically significant, in particular, for the images depicting black subjects (𝑧 = − . , 𝑝 > . ). considering the sub-clusters of tags in the nationality cluster, we noticed an increase in the number of occurrences in all of them. noticeably, tags describing the depicted person as “american" or as a “usa citizen" show a statistically significant increase in use in (𝑧 = − . , 𝑝 = . ). factors that could have affected these results include the black lives matter movement, the upcoming u.s. presidential elections, or the aforementioned anti-chinese xeno- phobic sentiments due to the covid- pandemic, all of which may be influencing the workers’ “state of mind.” www.hrw.org/news/ / / /covid- -fueling-anti-asian-racism-and- xenophobia-worldwide . stylistic perspective: inferential and concrete language the analysis presented above took a thematic perspective when considering the use of the health and identity-related tags. next, we provide a stylistic perspective on the workers’ descriptions of the depicted person, at the same time differentiating between the health and identity themes. before moving on to look at the stylistic differences by theme, we examine whether the number of occurrences of the tags workers provided (i.e., inferential, concrete, or other remaining tags) are independent of the year these tags were collected, which is our null hypothesis. we observe that the distributions of the tags by stylistic perspective differ between and (𝑋 ( , 𝑁 = ) = . , 𝑝 = . ). as we can see in figure , workers provided significantly more inferential tags for the identity theme in overall, as compared to (𝑧 = − . , 𝑝 = . ). however, considering the images by racial group of the depicted persons, we find that workers became more inferential in only when describing the images of black (𝑧 = − . , 𝑝 < . ) and asian (𝑧 = − . , 𝑝 = . ) subjects. instead, it appears that the proportions of the inferential tag oc- currences between the two years are similar for images of white (𝑧 = . , 𝑝 = . ) and latino/a (𝑧 = . , 𝑝 > . ) subjects consid- ering a significance level of 𝑝 < . . we consider the significance level for the four hypothesis above to be 𝑝 < . according to the bonferroni correction.this is particularly interesting given the racial climate in the u.s. during the time frame that the data were collected, and seems to suggest a sensitivity towards the issue of identity and racial minorities. frequency of use for the concrete tags is stable between and , in the identity theme. considering now the heath-related theme, we can see an oppo- site trend. overall, the concrete tags belonging to this theme are significantly more frequent in compared to (𝑧 = − . , 𝑝 < . ), while inferential tags are overall stable across the two years. an interesting remark is that images of black subjects are the only group receiving significantly more concrete health-related tags in as compared to (𝑧 = − . , 𝑝 < . ). in answering rq , we can say that it appears that workers’ use of identity-related tags exhibited a notable change from to . overall, workers used more abstract tags in , in particular, when describing images depicting asian and black individuals. in other words, workers made more inferences and assumptions about the depicted individual, instead of simply describing their physical appearance. this may imply that in , workers had a heightened awareness of, or sensitivity towards, the issue of race. notice that this is only one factor that can have impacted our results. as we discuss in section . , since we do not have control over the set of workers recruited in , it is possible that we ended up with a large concentration of workers that are sensitive towards the issue of race, because of the particular time we have initiated the crowdsourcing task. in other words, there is no way for us to gauge if we have received an over-representation of responses from people in a particular region of the u.s. where racial tensions had intensified during this time. given the large available pool of workers in the appen platform, this a more unlikely factor, but might still have some effect on the observed results. https://www.hrw.org/news/ / / /covid- -fueling-anti-asian-racism-and-xenophobia-worldwide https://www.hrw.org/news/ / / /covid- -fueling-anti-asian-racism-and-xenophobia-worldwide chi ’ , may – , , yokohama, japan christoforou, et al. figure : stylistic analysis (inferential (left bar) v. concrete (right bar)) on identity and health tags, used across time, by racial group of depicted person. discussion data collection through crowdsourcing, and in particular, for cap- turing the implicit, visual information contained in images, can be challenging, especially in the hands of non-experts, who may be unfamiliar with issues of data bias. computer vision experts deal with the issue by mitigating bias in image datasets, during the process of algorithm development (e.g., [ , ]). bias mitigation during the collection or processing of the crowdsourcing results, is a field that is currently being explored (e.g., [ , ]). recently, due to the covid- pandemic, crowdsourcing platforms are becoming busier, both in terms of supply (i.e., available workforce) as well as demand (e.g., with physical laboratories moving online). moving on-premises laboratory studies to crowdsourcing platforms is not trivial, and thus, has been researched in the past [ ] in terms of quality and reproducibility of the resulting data. what is presently unaccounted for is the potential influence that major local or global events can have on the collected data through crowdsourcing, and how this might affect the human bias introduced in datasets built over a large time frame (e.g., imagenet). our findings support the existence of a parameter conforming with societal events, which alongside other factors, can influence and create variation in the data harvested through crowdsourcing. thus, given a particular crowdsourcing task, it is essential that additional steps are taken, to identify whether the collected data it’s about time: a view of crowdsourced data before and during the pandemic chi ’ , may – , , yokohama, japan can be influenced by variations associated with societal events, and if so, whether measures need to be taken to restrain or promote said effects. in this work, we looked at the consequential example of an open-ended annotation task on people-related images. to observe in a quantitative manner the impact of a temporal variation, we considered the number of unique occurrences as an indication of the popularity of a given tag of interest, among the workers. it is an indication of how frequently we will encounter a certain word in a similar image tagging setting. in the example of an automated process receiving the crowdsourced data for training a computer vision algorithm, it is more likely that the most popular tags (in our scenario, the tags with the highest number of occurrences) will be the ones to be incorporated and used. applications trained on our versus datasets might be positively or negatively impacted, depending on the application’s particular context. for instance, an image tagging algorithm trained on the data, might end up using more weight-related tags to describe input images of people, which could be seen as a risk when deployed in user-facing apps or platforms. descriptive image annotation is one type of task that can be im- pacted by temporal variations. another example is image content moderation. in such a setting, data collected through crowdsourc- ing can assess the content of an image in an open-ended way (as we explored in this study), or in a closed form way, by providing a list of possible answers or a scale to measure, for instance, the degree of violence in the image. in this example, an image that in the past was considered inappropriate by the majority of crowdworkers, might not be in the present, and vice versa. hence, the requester of such a dataset must be aware of this fact. it must be noted that image annotation is merely one class of crowdsourced micro-tasks that can have serious ramifications as a result of temporal variations. future work can explore the types of temporal variations that may manifest in other common micro-tasks such as descriptive annota- tion on other media (e.g., audio or video), image categorization, or sentiment analysis. . coping with temporal variations this work has demonstrated that temporal variations can appear in the crowdsourced data and has discussed how these variations can generate, or even reduce, pre-existing social bias in a dataset. given the crowdsourcing task we considered in this study, we noticed that the data collected in and had tags that varied in the number of occurrences on the topic of a person’s identity and body weight. as we mention in section , the major events of the pandemic and the blm movement, are significant social factors that, among others, bring about this observed variation in the data. below, we discuss the implications of our work, providing a set of instructions, using as a running example the crowdsourced datasets generated in this work. these instructions can be used as guidelines for managing the possible temporal variations that manifest when requesters use crowdsourcing for the purpose of collecting and/or annotating image datasets, regardless of whether the variations are considered desirable or not. . . awareness. as a first step, the requester of a crowdsourcing task must first identify the “nature” of the crowdsourcing task to- wards the generation of the dataset. a crowdsourcing task may involve generating the dataset (from the point of image collection) and/or enriching it. in this study, our task focused on enriching an existing dataset, by providing descriptive tags for the provided im- ages. it is important for a requester to identify the nature of the task since generating an entirely new dataset implies that a complete record of the major global or local events taking place at the par- ticular time and space, where the crowdworkers are “positioned," must be recorded. recording this type of contextual information must be an essential part of the dataset, which will permit the re- quester or anyone else that will use the dataset, to be mindful of the reporting bias that it might potentially carry, or at a later stage when more data will be generated. on the other hand, when the crowdsourcing task focuses on enriching a pre-existing dataset, the requester must be aware of any bias pre-existing in the dataset, and take it into consideration when looking into temporal variations. in our case, the “ground truth" race label on each image was provided by the depicted people, who self-reported their race [ ]. thus, any conclusion we make regarding the observed temporal variation must take this fact into account, as was discussed in the analysis. besides identifying the nature of the crowdsourcing task, and being aware of the possible implications that this might have for the data’s susceptibility to temporal variations, there is more that can be done to raise awareness. in the present study of an open-ended, annotation task on people images, we observed evidence that stress- ful social circumstances are reflected in the data collected. thus, we would recommend requesters acquiring additional information from workers, such as: ( ) the worker’s familiarity with the content of the image, ( ) whether the content of the image produces stress in any way to the worker, ( ) whether the content of the image produces a positive or a negative feeling to the worker. additionally, given the correlation we observed among the societal events and the reported dataset, the worker might be asked to identify the degree and intensity of information they receive on major societal events happening around the globe and in their present location. the above questions regarding the worker’s possible "connection" to the image can be a valuable tool for the requester for identifying whether the collected data can be affected by temporal variations. moreover, depending on the order in which these questions will be posed to the worker, they can also act as a tool for managing temporal variations (see section . . ). . . recognition. a second step that the requester must take is to acknowledge whether similar datasets have been created in the past, or whether there is an intention of creating similar datasets in the future. recognizing this fact is essential since temporal variations will obviously have a greater impact on reproduced or enhanced datasets. at this step, the requester of the crowdsourcing task must be able to identify whether the information collected in the "aware- ness" step indicates that collecting new crowdsourced data will reduce or augment the potential bias introduced in the datasets due to major events, and how this aligns with the use of the collected data. for example, if the data presented in this study were to be used to predict the body weight of a person, the data might prove to be more valuable, as compared to the dataset. thus, the requester of the data must be able to recognize whether the note that this is simply an example, the data collected in this study were not collected with the goal of being used in weight prediction algorithms, and we would advise chi ’ , may – , , yokohama, japan christoforou, et al. collected data will produce a desirable or undesirable temporal variation according to their usage. this step is essential for under- standing how to manage temporal variation, in particular if it is undesirable. . . management. once the requester is aware that the data col- lected through crowdsourcing might be subject to undesirable tem- poral variations, a few steps can be taken to reduce said effects. a preventive step can be taken by posing the questions discussed in section . . before introducing the main crowdsourcing task. this action can raise the awareness of the crowdworkers towards the task; essentially, the workers are being pre-disposed towards the task [ ]. we believe that this step may have a positive effect towards reducing temporal variations. an additional or alternative step, would be to prime workers by informing them of the goal of the task and the known inherent biases in the presented images. on the other hand, if the requester has identified that the potential temporal variation introduced during the crowdsourcing process is desirable, it is best to ask the questions introduced in the awareness step after the completion of the main task. each application will use the crowdsourced data according to its specific goal(s). it is possible that temporal variations affecting the collected data do not align with the goals of the application. for example, an algorithmic application predicting the most dis- tinguishable features of a person, with the purpose of facilitating “search and find," must include universally accepted labels. hence, our dataset – in which issues of identity and health are salient – must be used with additional caution in such an application. miti- gating bias in the collected data, once those data are collected, is an action strictly linked to the goal of the application. it appears that if data are to be used by a different application, it is a essential that the raw crowdsourced data are released, if possible. as part of the documentation, a section describing the specific time/main events during which the data were created, will help facilitate the re-use of the data. documenting the procedures and the time-frame during which the data were created will help the user of these data to apply a similar logic to the “recognition” step and aid in coping with temporal variations. . limitations and future work due to the online nature of the study, and the manner in which crowdworkers are recruited, it was not possible for us to perform a controlled experiment; inviting the same workers to participate was naturally impossible. thus, no claims can be made towards a strict causal relationship between the situation/time and the changes in workers’ annotations. additionally, our study included a single task. nonetheless, it is logical that other types of open-ended tasks, and particularly those requiring workers to provide natural language answers, will be impacted in a similar matter. we plan to identify other open-ended crowdsourcing tasks that have been performed in the recent past and replicate them. in this study, we isolated the tags relevant to a person’s physical appearance on the themes of health and identity. thus, we have not yet examined many tags that can potentially allow us to observe against it. this study advocates that crowdsourced data must be used almost exclusively for the purpose they were created for. further the influence of the present social events on the data. in par- ticular, mapping the workers’ emotional state through the reported tags is of interest. thus, future work can consider the valance of emotions expressed (if at all) when describing the cfd images. additionally, given our current understanding of the influence of social events on crowdsourced data, we plan to repeat the image an- notation task, including a questionnaire like the one discussed above in section , and measure the extent to which the self-reported ques- tions can capture, or help explain, the temporal variations. finally, temporal effects are only one factor affecting a worker’s mood or attention, another can be deliberately pre-disposing a worker with a qualification test or audio-visual stimulus [ ], or a questionnaire as discussed above. in the future, we also plan to further explore this direction. conclusions our work contributes by pointing out another limitation in the use of crowdsourced data. the empirical evidence of our study emphasizes the influence that significant events – in this case, in the sphere of public health and racial discrimination – can have on crowdsourced data, among other factors, in an image annotation task. we linked our work to the yet largely unexplored area of crowdworkers’ mood and variations in the collected data, by ex- ploring the thematic and stylistic changes in workers’ reports over time. furthermore, our work extends the discussion concerning the repeatability of a crowdsourcing task and the replication of data. although a task executed in the same platform can weakly conform to the repeatability condition, as pointed out in [ ], we observe that replication of the results might not be feasible over periods of time marked by significant, large-scale events and/or experiences. we provide some interesting observations regarding the human crowdworkers’ behavior that can be linked to attentional bias and race-marking, which is worth exploring further. the computer vi- sion community, which relies extensively on human-labelled image datasets, now has to face a new crowdsourcing challenge especially during this sensitive period of time. to this respect, we provide a set of guidelines for recognizing and coping with temporal effects when requesting or using crowdsourced image datasets. acknowledgments this project is partially funded by the cyprus research and innova- tion foundation under grant excellence/ / (descant) and by the european union’s horizon research and innova- tion programme under agreements no. 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(crowd)work 	 . image annotation as communication: analyzing textual responses 	 . research questions 	 method 	 . data collection and pre-processing 	 . thematic tag clusters 	 data analysis 	 . thematic perspective: health and identity 	 . stylistic perspective: inferential and concrete language 	 discussion 	 . coping with temporal variations 	 . limitations and future work 	 conclusions 	acknowledgments 	references <i>history of education in the news</i> the legacy of slavery, racism, and contemporary black activism on campus history of education in the news the legacy of slavery, racism, and contemporary black activism on campus james d. anderson and christopher m. span members of concerned student protesting for racial equality at the uni- versity of missouri in november (ap photo/jeff roberson photographer). the history of education quarterly editorial team is planning to integrate a new feature, “history of education in the news,” into periodic issues of the journal. our idea is to highlight relevant historical scholarship on a topic that has contemporary public resonance. our first piece in this new vein engages the current uptick of interest in the links between slavery and higher education. recent scholarship and popular press accounts have documented how many eastern colleges and universities benefited from enslaved african- american labor. we asked professors james d. anderson and christopher m. span of the university of illinois at urbana-champaign to take up this issue and reflect on how a deep knowledge of history informs recent activism on college and university campuses, particularly activism focused on forcing institutions to reckon with their histories and become antiracist spaces. james d. anderson is head and gutgsell professor of education policy, organization and leadership at the college of education, university of illinois at urbana-champaign. christopher m. span is associate dean for academic programs at education adminis- tration, university of illinois at urbana-champaign. history of education quarterly vol. no. november copyright c© history of education society h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /h o eq . d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /hoeq. https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms the legacy of slavery, racism, and contemporary black activism as the late maya angelou stated so profoundly, “history, despite its wrenching pain, cannot be unlived, and if faced with courage, need not be lived again.” put another way by the late historian eugene genovese, it is never certain which lessons can be drawn from the past to inform the future, “except perhaps one: until a people can and will face its own past, it has no future.” this essay explores the historical persistence of attitudes toward the sanctity of black life and its resulting impact on contemporary activism as expressed in social movements such as black lives matter. while many americans look for present-day arguments for or against black lives matter, answers to understanding the origins of the primary motives for this movement are rooted in the past. we illustrate how the demands of contemporary student activists force their campuses to face their pasts, acknowledge the role of slavery and racism in their creation and success, and rectify their wrongs. in short, these activists aspire to have their universities become the first of many communities to unconditionally value everyone equally and make clear that white lives do not matter more than any other. americans have always had great difficulty facing their past squarely, especially around issues of genocide, slavery, and racism. it is common to view slavery as the distant past with no relevance to the present, while at the same time viewing other events that developed within the context of slavery (i.e., the declaration of independence, the war for independence, the formation of the united states, and the ratification of the constitution) as extremely relevant to the present and the future. the perpetual ritual of sanitizing the “wrenching pain” from our history renders us incapable of comprehending and under- standing the political and cultural legacy of american slavery or the social movements that aim to overcome its continuing effects. in an ar- ticle on the political legacy of american slavery, authors avidit acharya, matthew blackwell, and maya sen show that contemporary differences in political attitudes in the american south, in part, trace their origins to slavery’s presence more than years ago. “drawing on a sample of more than , southern whites and historical census records,” acharya, blackwell, and sen demonstrate “that whites who currently live in counties that had high concentrations of slaves in are to- day, on average, more conservative and express colder feelings toward african americans than whites who live elsewhere in the south.” these maya angelou, presidential inaugural poem, january , , http://poetry. eserver.org/angelou.html. eugene d. genovese, “the nat turner case,” new york review of books , no. (september , ): . avidit acharya, matthew blackwell, and maya sen, “the political legacy of american slavery,” journal of politics , no. (july ), . h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /h o eq . d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /hoeq. https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms history of education quarterly authors make the simple, yet profound, point that racist norms and in- stitutional arrangements to subordinate and control african americans have been passed down locally across generations. their research and findings illustrate a willingness to squarely face a past that most amer- icans prefer to disremember. nowhere is this historical amnesia more evident than in the con- temporary reaction to black activism that is commonly known as the black lives matter movement. a common response to black lives matter is to assert that “all lives matter,” and thus the focus on black lives, as some would have it, is inherently racist. this position assumes that historically black lives have mattered in the same manner as all other lives, including the lives of white americans. in view of years of slavery followed by years of jim crow in southern states and patterns of pervasive racism in northern states, it would indeed be a remarkable result if slavery and racism failed to have a profound impact on the sanctity of black life. to the contrary, the historical record is replete with evidence of how black lives have not mattered. black life ceased to matter with the onset of the north atlantic slave trade. this was poignantly portrayed in a minutes episode entitled “the slave ship,” a story about the quest for the remains of a shipwreck (the são josé paquete d’africa) that sank off the coast of cape town, south africa, in . it is the first time that the wreckage of a slaving ship that went down with slaves aboard has been recovered, along with a document detailing the rescue of the crew and half of the enslaved africans. the document, which is in portuguese and paraphrases the inquest testimony of the ship’s captain, manuel joão, reminds us of the way in which regard for black lives had been reduced to livestock being transported as cargo. captain joão reported that he was able to save the men (meaning white men) but could save only half of the cargo (meaning black people). the distinction between people and cargo underscores the point that black lives did not matter except as valuable cargo to be sold. this attitude toward black bodies developed within a slave trade that lasted nearly years and that made it virtually impossible to trade and sell people while maintaining a sense of dignity toward the sanctity of their lives. the devaluation of black lives continued with each passing year of slavery, and, following the end of slavery in america, the disregard for black lives was passed on from one generation to the next. this fact is replete in every aspect of american life and culture and has been in plain sight even as we turned a blind eye to its significance. for generations, americans read the adventures of huckleberry finn while minutes, “the slave ship,” november , , http://www.cbsnews.com/ news/the-slave-ship- -minutes. h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /h o eq . d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /hoeq. https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms the legacy of slavery, racism, and contemporary black activism ignoring mark twain’s illustrations of how black lives didn’t matter. when huck, pretending to be tom, tries to explain why he had been delayed, he explains that the steamboat engine was damaged when a cylinder head blew up. huck says to aunt sally: huck: it warn’t the grounding—that didn’t keep us back but a little. we blowed out a cylinder-head. aunt sally: good gracious! anybody hurt? huck: no’m. killed a nigger. aunt sally: well, it’s lucky; because sometimes people do get hurt. clearly, the fact that a black man was killed did not factor into aunt sally’s conception of “people.” in , mark twain used the fictional aunt sally, and the society in which she lived, to underscore the reality that the death of a black man was widely regarded among whites as unimportant. indeed, aunt sally captures the attitude that black lives matter seeks to change: the deep-seated habit of regarding the sanctity of black lives differently than that of white lives. both the disregard for the sanctity of black lives as well as the struggle to make black lives matter are products of slavery’s past and have a detectable effect on present-day black activism. hence, the an- swer to the question as to where we should begin in accounting for the rise of the black lives matter movement lies in our past. it does not begin with the tragic deaths of trayvon martin, michael brown, tamir rice, or sandra bland, even as their deaths are part and parcel of the long-standing disregard for the sanctity of black lives. we must begin the accounting for the black lives matter movement at the onset of the massive north atlantic slave trade that made it impossible to treat black lives as people when their primary value to the new world was as cargo to be captured, bought, and sold like livestock. we should not be surprised at the emergence of a joseph generation that knows not pharaoh’s generation and does not share historically conditioned sensibilities regarding the sanctity of black lives. what they feel and believe has been in the making for centuries and they will not stand for its continuance. the recent black protest movements and activism, particularly on college campuses, illustrate this growing discontent. within the past two years, black students at over eighty colleges and universities, from harvard, yale, duke, and occidental, to the university of michigan and the university of missouri, have submitted formal demands that their universities acknowledge their histories and change their practices, poli- cies, and treatment of all people from underrepresented backgrounds, mark twain, the adventures of huckleberry finn (new york: harper and brothers, ), – . h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /h o eq . d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /hoeq. https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms history of education quarterly but particularly african-american students. the persistent overt acts of racism on their campuses, and the silence, resistance, and failure of university administrators, faculty, students, and alums to acknowledge and address these harms, reinforce the refrain that black lives are not valued as much as white lives. the devaluing, disregard, indifference, and mistreatment of black lives compared to white lives, and the lack of any meaningful response to remedy these problems, is what theologian and scholar eddie s. glaude jr. has come to define as the “value gap.” “no matter our stated principles or how much progress we think we’ve made,” glaude states, “white people are valued more than others in this country, and that fact continues to shape the life chances of millions of americans.” he concludes, “the value gap is in our national dna.” it continues to justify slavery, segregation, racism, and discrimination. it affords and denies opportunities. it determines who is protected and harmed. it determines who receives the benefit of the doubt or the “deficit of the doubt.” it defines who is qualified, worthy, and deserv- ing. the only way the value gap can be closed and dismantled is when whites show and express an appreciation and value for the lives of others as much as they do their own. it is arguably the last lingering vestige of slavery’s past—a vestige that continues to haunt us to the present day. two of the more recent and notable black lives matter protests to challenge this value gap occurred at yale and at the university of missouri at columbia. the administrative responses to this activism are telling and mirror the title of the charles dickens classic a tale of two cities. the timeline for black activism at the university of mis- souri tentatively began in november after the nonindictment of a ferguson, missouri, police officer who shot and killed unarmed black teenager michael brown three months earlier. it took center stage at the start of the fall semester when the student government pres- ident, payton head, posted on facebook “his frustration with bigotry, anti-homosexual and anti-transgender attitudes at the school after peo- ple riding in the back of a pickup truck screamed racial slurs at him.” missouri chancellor r. bowen loftin investigated the incident and immediately issued a statement deploring any act of discrimination, but student protesters felt the university’s response was halfhearted and for the listing of universities and student demands, see http://www.thedemands. org. eddie s. glaude jr., democracy in black: how race still enslaves the american soul (new york: crown publishers, ), . jeff cook, “why i am a racist,” huffington post, july , , http://www. huffingtonpost.com/entry/why-im-a-racist_us_ b ee b e c . michael pearson, “a timeline of the university of missouri protests,” cnn, november , , http://www.cnn.com/ / / /us/missouri-protest-timeline/. h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /h o eq . d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /hoeq. https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms the legacy of slavery, racism, and contemporary black activism more was needed to ensure the well-being and safety of everyone on campus. then, in early october, “a drunken white student disrupts an african american student group preparing for homecoming activi- ties and uses a racial slur when asked to leave.” the next day, chancellor loftin issued another statement, again denounced the in- cident, and said “racism is clearly alive at mizzou” and that “every member of our community must help us change our culture.” he in- stituted a policy—to begin at the start of the next academic year—that required all students and faculty to complete diversity and inclusion training. two days later, black student protesters blocked the univer- sity president’s car at the homecoming parade to voice their concerns. in an effort to get around the protesters, the car “taps a protester,” further inflaming the situation. ten days later, on october , “the student group concerned student —named for the year african americans were first admitted to the university—issue[d] a list of de- mands.” the administration did not respond immediately. four days later, someone on campus used “feces to draw a swastika on the wall of a residence hall. a similar incident occurred in april, but with ashes.” two days later, after a private meeting with concerned student , president tim wolfe refused to agree to all of their demands, one of which asked him and the chancellor to resign. in early november, one black student protester launched a hunger strike until all demands were met. a week later, more than sixty black football players “announce they won’t practice or play until wolfe is removed.” the athletics depart- ment, head football coach, and many white teammates announced their support of the players who stood in protest. one day later, november , approximately one year after the nonindictment of the ferguson po- lice officer, the university of missouri system’s administration said that president wolfe and chancellor loftin had “undeniably failed us,” and both immediately resigned thereafter. four days after the university of missouri president was forced to resign, protest arose at yale. empowered by the mobilization, activism, and success at missouri, protesters submitted a list of demands to yale president peter salovey. the demands read: next yale, an alliance of yale students of color and our allies, have come together to demand that peter salovey and the yale administration implement immediate and lasting policies that will reduce the intolerable ibid. ibid. ibid. ibid. ibid. h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /h o eq . d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /hoeq. https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms history of education quarterly racism that students of color experience on campus every day . . . because the administration has been unwilling to promptly address institutional and interpersonal racism at yale, next yale has spent hours organizing, at great expense to our health and grades, to fight for a university at which we feel safe—a university that we would feel happy sending our younger siblings and eventual children to attend . . . in the spirit of the nationwide student mobi- lization demanding racial equality on campus—particularly at university of missouri, virginia commonwealth university, and ithaca college—next yale intends to hold yale accountable to its students of color in the public eye. the response to the activism at yale differed significantly from missouri. university president salovey immediately responded to their concerns, announcing that over the next five years yale would invest more than $ million in initiatives to promote cultural awareness and inclusion, increase faculty diversity, and construct an academic center to “build a more inclusive yale” and “reaffirm and reinforce [their] commitment to a campus where hatred and discrimination have no place.” amid this activism for access, inclusion, recognition, and equal consideration, one thing was certain: lessons from the past were being drawn upon to question the current and future considerations of these institutions of higher learning. on both sides of the discord, history mattered. black student activists drew upon the past to explain their current conditions and demands, and administrators were forced to confront institutional and societal wrongs that many hoped would be disremembered, ignored, or simply forgiven. sharp images stood out during these exchanges. at missouri, black activists named their student group after the year the university admitted nine black students and be- came fully integrated. they wore t-shirts that read “ was built on my b(l)ack,” in reference to the role free and unfree blacks played in the construction and daily maintenance of the university since its found- ing in . yale activists insisted campus officials change the name of calhoun college—a residential hall named in honor of alumnus and unapologetic defender of slavery john c. calhoun. this was not a new demand. for decades, residents of the college and protesters demanded the building be renamed and that the stained glass windowpanes and iconography depicting the life of calhoun as a prominent slaveholder “next yale demands for administration,” november , , https://www. thefire.org/next-yale-demands-for-the-administration/. isaac stanley-becker, “yale’s president responds to protesters’ demands, announces new initiatives to ease racial tension,” washington post, november , , https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/grade-point/wp/ / / /yales-president- responds-to-protesters-demands-announces-new-initiatives-to-ease-racial-tension. h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /h o eq . d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /hoeq. https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms the legacy of slavery, racism, and contemporary black activism and enslaved blacks as cotton pickers be removed or replaced. ac- tivists at missouri and yale illuminated the troubled history of slavery and racism at their universities, and the disremembering and unre- sponsiveness of generations of university leaders, faculty, students, and alum who dismissed or disregarded the intergenerational concerns of the black men and women who enhanced the profile and experiences of these campuses. the timing of historian craig steven wilder’s account of the central role slavery and racism played in the building and shaping of america’s first colleges and universities coincided with the protests roiling college campuses. as wilder records in ebony and ivy, “human slavery was the precondition for the rise of higher education in the americas.” virtually every institution of higher education founded prior to the abolition of slavery was built and maintained, in some form, by the labor of free and enslaved blacks. blacks were on col- lege campuses, not as students, but as cheap sources of labor that both directly and vicariously taught whites enrolled and working in these spaces that blacks were inferior and subordinate and they were superior and leaders. wilder demonstrates that for nearly two centuries univer- sities valued black lives only to the extent that they could benefit from their presence. he details how curricula was developed and taught that “scientifically” race was immutable and biologically determined, that whites were superior, and that the expansion of western civilization to every corner of the world was necessary, just, and beneficial. with each passing generation, graduates from these institutions of higher learning became the next assembly of elected officials, judiciaries, pro- fessors, theologians, educators, and businessmen to nurture morals and practices and to sanction ideologies, policies, laws, and institutions that justified slavery and racism, and exacerbated the human value gap be- tween blacks and whites. wilder was not alone, however. the new york times reported that “since , when ruth simmons, then the president of brown university, announced a headline-grabbing initiative to investigate that university’s ties to slavery, scholars at william and mary, harvard, emory, the university of maryland, the university of north carolina at chapel hill and elsewhere have completed their own studies.” these ed stannard, “renaming calhoun college still possible as yale forms committee after outcry,” new haven register, august , , http://www.nhregister.com/general- news/ /renaming-calhoun-college-still-possible-as-yale-forms-committee- after-outcry. craig steven wilder, ebony and ivy: race, slavery, and the troubled history of america’s universities (new york: bloomsbury press, ), . jennifer schuessler, “dirty antebellum secrets in ivory towers: ‘ebony and ivy,’ about how slavery helped universities grow,” new york times, october , h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /h o eq . d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /hoeq. https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms history of education quarterly investigations substantiate the centrality slavery and racism had in the development and growth of their universities. the recent discovery that georgetown university sold enslaved blacks in to keep the institution afloat raises an important question as to whether these institutions of higher learning have any obligation and accountability to the descendants of those who were held in bondage or sold away from their families to save or advance the mission of universities that blacks, in mass, could not attend until well into the twentieth century. in the wake of these findings, georgetown took the initiative to begin the healing process. it established a working group to identify ways the university could acknowledge and make amends for this trou- bled history. genealogists were hired to work alongside georgetown alums, faculty, and students to trace and find the descendants of the enslaved blacks sold to keep the university solvent. it is “weigh- ing whether the university should apologize for profiting from slave labor, create a memorial to those enslaved and provide scholarships for their descendants.” as adam rothman, a historian at georgetown and member of this working group, correctly states, “it’s hard to know what could possibly reconcile a history like this . . . the university itself owes its existence to this history.” important questions need answers in light of these explorations and findings. what can be done to make amends? what must society, communities, institutions, and individuals do to move beyond this troubled past to ensure it does not continue to fester and fracture into a troubled future? to come to the point, where do we go from here? the collective knowledge and histories produced and recorded on the impact slavery and racism have had, not merely on the rise of american colleges and universities, but on the dehumanization of blacks for the benefit of whites, is essential to understanding and addressing the value gap that still plagues our society. these histories expand our understanding of how ingrained the impacts of slavery and race are. as historian eric foner reasons, “it is hardly a secret that slavery is deeply embedded in our nation’s history. but many americans still see it as essentially a footnote, an exception to the dominant narrative of the expansion of liberty on this continent.” in order for our nation to , http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /books/ebony-and-ivy-about-how-slavery- helped-universities-grow.html. rachel l. swarns, “ slaves were sold to save georgetown. what does it owe their descendants?” new york times, april , , http://www.nytimes. com/ / / /us/georgetown-university-search-for-slave-descendants.html. ibid. eric foner, “a brutal process: ‘the half has never been told,’ by edward e. baptist,” new york times, october , , http://www.nytimes.com/ / / / books/review/the-half-has-never-been-told-by-edward-e-baptist.html. h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /h o eq . d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /hoeq. https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms the legacy of slavery, racism, and contemporary black activism truly begin the healing process, we must reflect upon and acknowledge our past and better understand the society we have inherited. then, and only then, will we be able to take the necessary steps to make amends and hopefully get to a point of meaningful and momentous reconciliation. that is what this current generation of activists demands, and they seem prepared to accept nothing less. black activists protesting across america’s colleges and universities have relied on these recently un- covered histories and this process of self-reflection to further articulate their concerns and demands. they connect these histories to their own experiences in an effort to impact meaningful change for themselves and future students on their campuses. they demand their campuses proactively speak out against racism and discrimination, adapt their cul- ture and practices to challenge these vices, and implement plans and policies to protect, include, develop, and value them. their activism underscores a collective and long-standing demand made by every gen- eration of blacks before them who sought to be recognized as persons of equal value and consideration, and to be regarded as something more than a commodity for another person’s profit, consumption, ben- efit, fear, or imagination. “these activists force us, whether we agree with them or not,” as glaude thoughtfully penned, “to think about how we currently live our lives. in short, they shed light on our racial habits and create the conditions, however fleeting, for us to change them.” these contemporary activists call us to action; they ask us to strive alongside them in the hopes of upending the enduring ill effects of slavery and racism and to help them establish a social order where black lives not only matter, but are unequivocally valued. on our campuses, they expect us to develop guidelines and action plans that define and confront racial harassment and protect them from its harms. truth be told, we should have already laid this foundation; they should never have had to ask. fundamentally, they expect us to live up to the aspiration we’ve championed for generations (and they have come of age believing as truth) that america, in general, and our universities, more specifically, are one of the few places in the world where everyone is valued and given equal consideration. their lived experiences conflict in important ways with this aspiration and encapsulate the growing frustrations and angst these activists feel. just as universities expect students to learn, succeed, develop, and become excellent ambassadors of their institutions and creed, students protesting for change expect their campuses to close the gap between their professed values and the ones they live. they want their campuses to acknowledge and face their past with courage, even glaude, democracy in black, . h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /h o eq . d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /hoeq. https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms history of education quarterly if it is a wrenching pain, as maya angelou expressed, so that it need not be lived again. we cannot undo our past, but we can learn from it; examples abound prove this truth. history provides a lens and medium for us to revisit who we were, what we did, and how our thoughts and actions make us who we are today. history affords opportunities to address fail- ings and start anew. if the ideals of society and our profession impress upon us to teach the general public to appreciate diversity and inclusion, to be self-reflective and mindful of others, and to enhance our strengths and remedy our limitations, then it is imperative we have the moral com- pass and courage to learn from our pasts, amend their shortcomings, and develop and implement the practices, policies, and innovations nec- essary to produce the outcomes, opportunities, and reconciliation that this current generation and future generations of americans rightfully deserve. h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /h o eq . d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /hoeq. https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms << /ascii encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles false /autorotatepages /none /binding /left /calgrayprofile (gray gamma . ) /calrgbprofile (srgb 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davis previously published works title diversity and inclusion by design: a challenge for us all permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ d c v journal landscape journal, ( ) issn - authors rios, m napawan, nc publication date doi . /lj. . . peer reviewed escholarship.org powered by the california digital library university of california https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ d c v https://escholarship.org http://www.cdlib.org/ la nd sc ap e jo ur na l  :   is sn - © b y th e bo ar d of r eg en ts o f t he u ni ve rs ity o f w is co ns in s ys te m diversity and inclusion by design: a challenge for us all “engaged scholarship: bringing together research, teaching, and service” is the theme of the coun- cil of educators in landscape architecture (cela) conference. the aim is to start a dialogue about the ways in which our community of practice focuses on issues of public concern and is useful to, and devel- oped in concert with, diverse audiences beyond the academy. while public engagement is not new to our field, there is increasing attention to the ways in which engaged forms of scholarship advance diversity and inclusion in higher education. diversity and inclusion effects are mainstream and are now an integral part of many universities and colleges. based on our review of websites, almost all u.s. institutions with an accredited landscape architecture program have offices dedicated to promoting the value of a diverse academic commu- nity while ensuring representation of underrepresented individuals on campus. supplementing these efforts are a growing number of training courses, workshops, and other mechanisms that value diversity, while also increasing awareness and understanding of the effects of implicit/hidden bias, macro and microaggressions, and other forms of discrimination. whether individual faculty welcome these changes or not, attention to diversity issues and inclusion are not going away as our students are beginning to mirror the changing demographic landscape outside of the ivory tower, and as more women, international, and people of color enter the field. for example, landscape architectural accreditation board data indicate that more than % of all students (graduate and undergraduate) were women, and that individuals from underrepresented racial and ethnic groups grew from % to % of the total student body between and . in , only % of graduating land- scape architecture students were non-whites (asla, a). embracing these trends, prominent landscape architecture organizations, including cela, signed a commitment to “achieve a professional profile that correlates with the population-share estimates, while working toward the longer-term goal of parity with projections for the nation as a whole” by (asla, b, p.  ). diversifying academia will likely have a direct impact on efforts to diversify the profession. the american society of landscape architecture’s (asla) inaugural diversity summit in revealed the lack of mentors, “and specifically mentors that looked like them,” as the greatest hurdle for recruiting underrep- resented students interested in the profession. in their most recent diversity summit ( ), the asla estab- lished a five-year prioritized action list to meet diver- sity goals, including diversifying imagery and resources integrated across their website, and increasing acces- sibility of these resources to underrepresented minori- ties. in response, as landscape architecture academics, we must ask: what is being done to diversify the faculty ranks and the organizations that we lead? how is diversity and inclusion reflected when it comes to faculty recruitment and advancement, and selection of department/program chairs, as well as the composition of organizational and journal editorial boards and of- fices? more importantly, what additional actions need to be taken to achieve a diverse and inclusive academy? there is evidence to suggest that institutional pol- icy change and other top-down approaches will have minimal impact on faculty diversity. a recent study by bradley et al. ( ) found no “significant statistical evidence that preexisting growth in diversity for under- represented racial/ethnic minority groups is affected by the hiring of an executive level diversity officer for new tenure and non-tenure track hires, faculty hired with diversity and inclusion by design: a challenge for us all diversity and inclusion by design: a challenge for us all michael rios and n. claire napawan university of california, davis landscape journal : tenure, or for university administrator hires” (p.  ). this is not to suggest a causal linkage exists between hiring a diversity officer and the lack of progress being made. other factors need to be considered such as the provision and effective use of resources and the par- ticular institutional culture in which diversity is being advanced. regardless, it becomes important to reflect on how and in what ways do our collective and indi- vidual behaviors either contribute to, or ameliorate, existing representation gaps. it is one thing to believe in and support diversity. it is far more difficult to break down barriers of exclusion and practice inclusion in our everyday lives. silence is complicity when it comes to individual and collective actions that reinforce power imbalances—in the studio, classroom, faculty meetings, and other professional settings. to believe any of us are immune to such discriminatory slippages is simply false, regardless of how one identifies by race, ethnicity, gender, class, or other means. as educators, researchers, and scholars, we often pride ourselves in the insights, discoveries, and new knowledge that shape the profession and larger society. just as the “declaration of concern” (miller et al., ) placed landscape architecture at the forefront of the sustainable environmental design and planning movement, this current moment provides an opportunity to establish the profession as a leader in addressing persistent social and racial inequities. in order to do so, we must seriously note the changes that are taking place outside our privileged locations and rethink our societal relationships. or, to take the example of the “declaration of concern,” consider gina marie ford’s (fasla) critical response at the landscape architecture foundation’s retrospec- tive: “fifty years ago, the voice of our profession was eerily prescient, undeniably smart, and powerfully inspired. it was also, let’s admit it, almost entirely white and male” ( , p.  ). events within the past decade such as the occupy movement, the ferguson protests and black lives matter, the fight for lgbtq rights and, more recently, the #metoo movement, can no longer be ignored as was the case with the civil rights movement a generation earlier. it is clear we have not done enough yet to change our institutional environments and personal behaviors towards a more equitable and engaged culture. we must continue to diversify our faculty ranks and student body, as well as program and organizational leadership. in order to achieve this obvious opportunity, it will require us to move beyond an examination of numbers alone. instead, it is crucial to work towards creating an inclusive culture in our scholarly and creative practice. if the value of diver- sity in academia includes the mentorship of minority students, innovative/creative research methodologies, and the ability to address the needs of underserved communities—these contributions must be recognized as such by academia and move beyond the unseen labor in which they currently operate. an inclusive culture of scholarly and creative practice can take many forms and includes collaborative relationships with local communities as well as providing access to univer- sity resources, to intellectual pursuits and organized research that inform and shape public policies and debates, to scientific and technological innovations that improve people’s lives and the environments in which they inhabit. collectively, these activities have impact at different geographic scales, across sectors, and be- tween disciplines that aim to improve the wellbeing of individuals, communities, and the planet. yet, despite their potential for transformative societal change, some higher learning institutions insist on ignoring the labor-intensive nature of this work or devalue their scholarly contributions. these types of activities can be described as the “scholarship of engagement,” borrowing a term from ernest boyer ( ), who challenged institutions of higher education to go beyond traditional definitions of research, teaching, and service toward articulating the scholarly contributions in each of these catego- ries. today, this reflects a shift away from using the terms “service” or “outreach” and instead an embrace of “engagement” to describe reciprocal and mutually beneficial relationships between faculty, students, and non-university groups. equally important is a con- ception of knowledge that has relevance beyond the academy, and is often produced with, not for, non-uni- versity groups, towards actionable outcomes. these scholarly practices are familiar to our field given the focus on the “design, planning, and manage- ment of the land.” scholarly practice examples include evaluative studies that assess built works from a user perspective, inquiry that tests resilient responses to cli- mate change, or ecologically-based research to improve urban habitat, among others. each example speaks to the important role that landscape architects can play diversity and inclusion by design: a challenge for us all as the leaders, choreographers, and communicators for addressing the most complex socio-ecological problems of our era and which require transformative learning and adaptive governance models. the truth is, addressing the majority of the pressing contempo- rary environmental concerns requires recognition of societal conditions that exacerbate their impacts. in addition, a substantial amount of professional train- ing focuses on project-based and experiential learning that addresses societal concern issues. many curricula facilitate interaction between students and non-univer- sity groups through studio projects, practicum courses, education abroad, and internships, among other forms of learning. often landscape architecture programs organize these activities through the many community engaged centers and non-profit organizations. these centers are part of a larger ecosystem of publicly-facing and multi-disciplinary design organizations that, since , have nearly tripled in north america from under to over (acsa, ). despite the positive impact that these activities have had for non-university groups and shaping the professional trajectory of many students, little progress has been made in defining how engaged scholarship intersects with diversity and inclusion more explicitly, and how this is valued and assessed when it comes to faculty recognition and the supportive infrastructure necessary to incentivize fac- ulty participation. or, to refer again to ford’s decla- ration retrospective: “we will need to wholeheartedly embrace the rich diversity of who we are and strive more ambitiously to understand and meet the needs of the people we serve” ( , p.  ). these concerns are not unique to the land- scape architecture field. recent interviews with over  uc davis faculty from the university’s ten colleges and schools identified significant barriers to practicing engaged scholarship. community engaged research requires an enormous amount of work due to the relationships and interactions with non-university groups, and is essentially invisible institutional labor. this research approach often necessitates a substan- tial amount of time, coordination, and non-university resources that other forms of research do not require. related, many colleagues do not value the placement of public scholarship outputs unless they are published in traditional journals and fora. an examination of merit and promotion criteria of thirty-three institutions designated as carnegie community-engaged campuses, revealed that the majority still placed engaged schol- arship within the realm of service and required ad- ditional forms of scholarship to support merit and promotion (saltmarsh et al., ). this leaves faculty few options other than to do this type of work on their own time because they feel it is important, not because they believe they will be rewarded. compounding these challenges is the difficulty in devoting the time to develop collaborations with non-university groups out- side existing commitments. the decentralized nature of many campuses has produced enclaves that exist within the confines of colleges and schools, which does little to promote the value of engaged scholarship or sustain collaborations or communications across disci- plines and academic units. university-wide support for scholarship that involves partnerships with non-corpo- rate/non-industry partners, community stakeholders, and other public entities is also lacking as compared to other sponsored research that involves industry or generates significant revenue. fortunately, many landscape architecture pro- grams already support engaged scholarship, especially given a general orientation toward applied research as well as professionally credentialed curricula. however, we must do a better job in communicating and ampli- fying the importance of this work in serving the public good, measuring its impact outside of the academy, and elevating excellence in research and teaching. the inter- viewed uc davis faculty echoed these sentiments and also shared the main motivations and benefits for why engaged scholarship is essential to their work. some of the reasons include deepening research and learning, serving the underserved, and relevant to this discussion, as a means of practicing more effective diversity and inclusion at higher education institutions. for example, many are personally motivated by a sense of obligation given their position of privilege and/or seeing an im- perative to support those that do not have the privilege. as evidenced by these personal experiences, engaged scholarship allows for a more democratic and inclusive scholarly practice than traditional avenues of research and teaching. however, there is much to be done to create an institutional culture that values, recognizes, and rewards public scholarship as essential to the civic mission of higher education institutions, especially public universities that espouse serving the public good. so what can be done to move closer to these ideals in supporting diversity and inclusion? landscape journal : valuing and supporting publicly engaged research and teaching requires that we respond to the changing demographic landscape in urban, suburban, and rural communities (rios & vazquez, ) and improve experiential learning opportunities in ways that con- nect with a diverse student body. creating an inclusive community of faculty from different backgrounds is one place to start. with the increased diversity among recent graduates, it is no longer excusable to suggest that diversity is lacking among the qualified pool of individuals seeking to enter into the academy as faculty. while it is unreasonable to expect transform- ing the face of the academy necessarily transforms its values, we need to make explicit the types of research and teaching our programs support. for example, a recent study by uc berkeley indicates that faculty job descriptions that included a subject area with public or engaged scholarship saw higher proportions of women and underrepresented minority (urm) applicants as compared with searches that did not use this approach (stacy et al., ). moving beyond recruitment, there is also a need to create spaces where individuals feel welcomed, respected, and can express divergent viewpoints. recent studies indicate implicit bias still impacts retention of urm faculty in landscape ar- chitecture and other disciplines (laden & hagedorn, ; smith & calasanti, ; whittaker et al., ; zambrana et al., ). whittaker et al. ( ) write: [t]he persistent “calls to action” designed to catalyze diversification of the professoriate have resulted in incremental changes at best. as such, successes of a few urm individuals appear to have led to a sense of complacency along with generalized notions that urms no longer face discrimination. the successes of a few can lead to many institutions contracting recruitment and retention efforts. the few (or single) individuals that have been recruited are then left as potential “token” representatives with high service demands, which are not among rewarded performance criteria and/or of limited impact. while discrimination or imposed isolation may not always be blatantly overt, a critical factor and consideration in addressing this issue revolves around environmental and inherent unconscious biases directed towards urms in the academic workplace. institutions should recognize this as a sense of urgency and commit to the transformational and sustained work required to mitigate the problem, which will require long- term, strategic initiatives and commitment of resources (p.  ). in an academic setting, particular norms—not only determined by gender, race, ethnicity, and other attri- butes, but also by disciplinary culture, methods and approaches to research and teaching, and professorial rank—are reinforced through practices and behaviors carried out by individuals, colleagues, peer mentors, and departments that police the boundaries of what constitutes time well spent. moreover, the use of head- counts alone to support faculty diversity exemplifies how affirmative action and other metric-based means of recruitment can hinder retention and advancement. it is not uncommon for a female faculty and/or faculty of color to feel disempowered or have their scholarly and creative work devalued under the assumption that their recruitment was based on their gender and/or ethnicity, and not by the merits of their scholarship/ capabilities (turner et al., ). additional examples of hurdles to retention and advancement of underrep- resented faculty include evidence that student teaching evaluations are often skewed to the disadvantage of women and/or minority faculty (lilienfeld, ), re- search that suggests female faculty carry greater service commitments than their male counterparts (guarino & borden, ), and a study exploring gendered racism perpetrated by white male students towards female faculty of color (pittman, ). online train- ing, retreats and other supports to create and sustain a thriving program culture address these issues head on and ensure underrepresented faculty will want to re- main. services that address implicit bias and cross-cul- tural understanding, among others, are now available at many universities and colleges. beyond creating a culture of inclusion, we must also take a hard look at merit and promotion to ensure success, especially among faculty whose work center on some form of public or community engagement. as patricia matthew, author of written/unwritten: diversity and the hidden truths of tenure, notes: “chances are a faculty member of color is not going to get a sabbatical or a grant from her institution because she contributes to the diversity mission her university diversity and inclusion by design: a challenge for us all probably has posted somewhere on its website. she certainly isn’t going to get tenure for it” ( , p.  ). instead, this effort begins with correlating diversity missions with explicit statements about what a pro- gram/campus values and how these values translate into specific criteria. when revising the appointment, merit, and promotion evaluation criteria in our land- scape architecture + environmental design program at uc davis, this included referencing the campus mission statement, university standards for research and creative excellence, and comparison to commensu- rate institutions and programs. the uc davis mission statement is as follows: . . . generation, advancement, dissemination and application of knowledge. . . . teaching students as a partnership between faculty mentors and young scholars; advancing knowledge and pioneering studies through creative research and scholarship; and applying that knowledge to address the needs of the region, state, nation and globe . . . committed to the land grant tradition on which it was founded, which holds that the broad purpose of a university is service to people and society” (uc davis apm, , section – ). interestingly, this statement reflects many goals of an engaged model of scholarship and supports the cri- teria identified for evaluating such a scholarly pur- suit. in addition, the document required defining the unique scholarly practices of landscape architecture academics: landscape architecture and related placemaking professions are broad and inclusive disciplines in which faculty members pursue different career paths as they become successful and productive scholars and teachers in the academic community. the faculty recognizes that the strength of the program depends on an intellectually engaged faculty who successfully pursue diverse career paths and academic and professional activities (matthew, , p.  ). thus, our appointment, merit, and promotion doc- ument identifies the value of diversity and the role engaged scholarship might play in supporting that effort without resorting to specific metrics or overt statements about race, ethnicity, gender, or other legally protected characteristics of an existing or pro- spective faculty member. these efforts are more than symbolic gestures, but serve as the basis for writing candidate statements, evaluating dossiers, and writing merit and promo- tion review letters. purposeful criteria help to ensure success at the department or program level, but more often, when faculty dossiers are reviewed by college and university committees unfamiliar with engaged scholarship. for example, explicit criteria were a deciding factor for a faculty member in our program who received a split vote by a university-wide review committee that was successfully overturned. in the deciding letter, departmental criteria for promotion were explicitly referenced and included diverse schol- arly outputs as well as a focus on “publicly engaged research or creative work” and “publications more broadly presented than is customary.” however, not all institutions have checks and balances to ensure an ad- equate review of engaged scholarship and its scholarly value. in response, some institutions such as the uni- versity of minnesota are taking it a step further and are launching a university-wide committee that reviews promotion portfolios of publicly engaged scholars, and provides supplemental review letters that assess the quality of promotion candidates’ engaged scholarship. this is in addition to a number of other supports such as departmental grants to “plan, establish, implement, and evaluate strategic initiatives that advance the integration of public engagement into the departments’ research and teaching activities” (university of minne- sota, ). as educators we also must do our part to ensure that educational environments are inclusive spaces for student success. implicit bias, microaggressions and other hurdles to a diverse faculty are also challenges to a diverse student body—an obvious necessity if we are going to see greater diversity in the profession and the academy. again, workshops that address these challenges are increasingly available to instructors as a means of identifying implicit bias and other impedi- ments to an inclusive learning environment. in , a mandatory microaggression training was provided for all faculty at suffolk university in response to a blog post that went viral written by a latina student who was wrongly accused of plagiarism for using the word “hence” in a literature review. her written response landscape journal : articulated what many underrepresented individuals feel within the academy: my last name and appearance immediately instill a set of biases before i have the chance to open my mouth. these stereotypes and generalizations forced on marginalized communities are at times debilitating and painful. as a minority in my classrooms, i continuously hear my peers and professors use language that both covertly and overtly oppresses the communities i belong to (martinez, ). unfortunately, these kinds of biases can feel routine in academia to minority students; moreover, these trans- gressions often occur without full awareness by those who might have committed the offense. just as more diverse metrics of academic success need to be considered to achieve a more diverse faculty, instructors need to embrace broader conceptualiza- tions of what constitutes an ideal student. oftentimes, extroverted characteristics (active verbal participation, for example) are rewarded in scholastic settings, and the students that make themselves more “visible” in a classroom or those with charisma are awarded more accolades. this can be particularly true in design stu- dio instruction, where oral presentations can serve as a major means of evaluating student work. valuing such characteristics, however, reflects a particular cultural bias that student knowledge is reflected only through verbal articulation. equally problematic is an over-reli- ance on individual student assessments. different types of feedback instruments are needed, including ones that also instigate reflective learning for both individu- als and groups. recently within our own program, our faculty recognized the important need to reassess our metrics for student success following an evaluation of our olmsted scholar nominees over the past years— this very process led us to the conclusion that we had been utilizing culturally based definitions of academic strength (such as active class participation and lead- ership roles in group projects) and brought about new perspectives in recognizing student achievements. in- terestingly, laf criteria for olmsted scholars include “leadership” and “communication skills” (landscape architecture foundation, ). finally, there are substantial data supporting that zero-tolerance policies disproportionately impact students of color (hines-datiri & andrews, ). de- spite this, educational institutions often employ such a policy to address academic or social misconduct in the classroom. uc davis, for example, allows an instructor to fail a student if proven to have committed academic misconduct such as cheating or plagiarism (uc davis, ). adopting new strategies such as restorative justice provide greater opportunities to address mis- conduct in a culturally inclusive manner. restorative justice is “. . . a process where all stakeholders affected by an injustice have an opportunity to discuss how they have been affected by the injustice and to decide what should be done to repair the harm” (braithwaite, , p.  ), and evidence suggests that such an approach leads to less recidivism, greater offender accountability, and higher rates of victim satisfaction in the resolution (sherman & strang, ). whether in our student body, faculty, adminis- tration, editorial boards, or institutional committees, it is clear that a more inclusive culture is needed to address current diversity concerns in the landscape architecture academy. by extension, greater inclusivity is needed in our definitions of scholarship. there is a growing body of research that speaks to the value of engaged scholarship and the intersections with diver- sity and inclusion. much of this evidence can be found in a number of academic journals including gate- ways: international journal of community research and engagement, international journal of research on service-learning and community engagement, journal of community engagement and higher education, journal of public scholarship in higher education, journal of community engagement and scholarship, and public: a journal of imagining america, among others. there are also resources pro- vided through national organizations, institutes, and centers. imagining america, for example, is a national organization that promotes publicly engaged scholar- ship in the arts, humanities, and design. it has been a leader in advancing a national dialogue about engaged scholarship in merit and promotion as well as its intersection with diversity and inclusion. for example, sturm et al. ( ) provides a framework to integrate equity, diversity, and inclusion with community, pub- lic, and civic engagement. this document informed much of the criteria for evaluating an engaged scholar- ship model for the uc davis landscape architecture program. diversity and inclusion by design: a challenge for us all if you are interested in these issues, we encour- age you to join us and other engaged scholars at the upcoming cela conference hosted by uc davis in sacramento. the conference’s theme on “engaged scholarship” provides an opportunity to participate in conversations throughout the conference to ad- dress many of these questions and topics. timothy k. eatman, a nationally-recognized educator and past co-director of imagining america, will in his keynote address challenge all of us to reflect on the ethical and practical dimensions of knowledge production and the role that design can play in democratizing our diverse communities of place, identity, and practice. other sessions will focus on inclusion and equity in design decision-making such as a panel discussion on the use of social media and other technologies to make visible, the often hidden, inequities across the land- scape. participative and other techniques for collective creativity will be employed throughout the cela con- ference to elevate engagement toward more democratic and inclusive outcomes in landscape architecture. let us begin. endnote . currently, asla surveys do not provide an option for non-binary gender. references american society of landscape architecture (asla). 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( ). restorative justice: the evidence. philadelphia, pa: university of pennsylvania press. smith, j. w., & calasanti, t. ( ). the influences of gender, race and ethnicity on workplace experiences of institutional and social isolation: an exploratory study of university faculty. sociology spectrum, ( ), – . doi: . / sturm, s., eatman, t., saltmarsh, j., & bush, a. ( ). full participation: building the architecture for diversity and community engagement in higher education. retrieved from https://surface.syr.edu/ia/ stacy, a., goulden, m., frasch, k., & broughton, j. ( ). searching for a diverse faculty: data-driven recommendations. berkeley, ca: university of california. turner, c. s. v., gonzález, j. c., & wood, j. l. ( ). faculty of color in academe: what  years of literature tells us. journal of diversity in higher education, ( ), – . doi: . /a university of california davis. ( ). academic personnel manual (apm). instructions to review committees which advise on actions concerning appointees in the professor and corresponding series, section - . retrieved from http://academicaffairs.ucdavis.edu/apm/apm-toc.htm university of california davis. ( ). academic senate regulation . academic misconduct. retrieved from https://academicsenate.ucdavis.edu/bylaws_and_ regulations/regulations.cfm university of minnesota ( ). engaged department grant program. office for public engagement. retrieved from https://engagement.umn.edu/our-impact/engaged- department-grant-program whittaker, j. a., montgomery, b. l., & martinez acosta, v. g. ( ). retention of underrepresented minority faculty: strategic initiatives for institutional value proposition based on perspectives from a range of academic institutions. journal of undergraduate neuroscience education, ( ), a –a . zambrana, r. e., ray, r., espino, m. m., castro, c., cohen, b. d., & eliason, j. ( ). don’t leave us behind: the importance of mentoring for underrepresented minority faculty. american educational research journal, , – . doi: . / https://surface.syr.edu/ia/ doi: . /a http://academicaffairs.ucdavis.edu/apm/apm-toc.htm https://academicsenate.ucdavis.edu/bylaws_and_regulations/regulations.cfm https://academicsenate.ucdavis.edu/bylaws_and_regulations/regulations.cfm https://engagement.umn.edu/our-impact/engaged amp -amp .. represented by the aaas membership, as well as explorations of other emerging technologies, such as artificial intelligence and machine learning. as these and other technologies become increasingly widespread, great attention must also be paid to ensuring that they are applied in an ethical manner—an obligation that is all the more pressing when the applications involve the types of vulnerable populations that are often associated with human rights investigations. aaas is dedicated to ensuring that this obligation does not go unheeded, through activities dedicated to exploring the impacts, both positive and negative, that may be associated with these powerful new tools, in order to better fulfill the mandate of our organization’s motto: “advancing science, serving society.” new technologies in international criminal investigations doi: . /amp. . by rebecca j. hamilton* my current research looks at ways in which people and institutions are using technology to build the evidentiary record in international criminal litigation. in particular, i focus on the collection of, and reliance on, what i call user-generated evidence. this is footage that an ordinary citizen—the user—records on their smartphone, in an effort to achieve legal accountability. the collection of user-generated evidence is a phenomenon that the american public has become increasingly familiar with through the black lives matter movement, thanks to user recordings of police brutality. yet the phenomenon is a global one; with smartphones in the hands of an estimated . billion users, user-generated evidence is being captured worldwide. the united nations is working to secure evidence captured by local actors, even in the absence of courts with jurisdiction over the crimes in question. and organizations like the international bar association and the long-time video advocacy group, witness, have now developed user- generated evidence applications (“apps”) to enable users to record footage with sufficient metadata to satisfy evidentiary standards for authentication. the question of authentication is obviously a key challenge for digital evidence in an era when deepfake technology enables even those with minimal technical skills to create forgeries that are undetectable to the lay eye. but the authentication of evidence is hardly a new challenge; * american university washington college of law. see rebecca j. hamilton, user-generated evidence, colum. j. transnat’l l. (forthcoming, ). i consciously refer to the ordinary citizen who records this footage as a (smartphone) “user” rather than as a “citizen” in order to not exclude users who are stateless or do not have citizenship in the locations where they are filming. number of smartphone users worldwide from to (in billions), statista, at https://www.statista.com/ statistics/ /number-of-smartphone-users-worldwide. the international, impartial and independent mechanism (iiiim), established by the un general assembly in relation to the conflict in syria, is collating user-generated evidence for use in future prosecutions. see int’l bar ass’n, eyewitness v english subbed, vimeo (june , ), at https://vimeo.com/ (“as an initiative of the international bar association, we know the legal requirements for photos and videos to be admitted as evi- dence in court. recognizing the immense risks eyewitnesses take we believe these efforts should never be in vain and poten- tial evidence should always be admissible in a court of law.”); harlo holmes, making cameras count, youtube (oct. , ), at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzjoadhakwu (describing encryption and metadata features of the camerav app that enable authentication). see robert chesney & danielle citron, deep fakes: a looming crisis for national security, democracy and privacy?, lawfare (feb. , ), at https://lawfareblog.com/deep-fakes-looming-crisis-national-security-democracy-and-privacy (describing deepfakes as the “digital manipulation of sound, images, or video to impersonate someone or make it appear new technologies https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /amp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.statista.com/statistics/ /number-of-smartphone-users-worldwide https://www.statista.com/statistics/ /number-of-smartphone-users-worldwide https://www.statista.com/statistics/ /number-of-smartphone-users-worldwide https://vimeo.com/ https://vimeo.com/ https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzjoadhakwu https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lzjoadhakwu https://lawfareblog.com/deep-fakes-looming-crisis-national-security-democracy-and-privacy https://lawfareblog.com/deep-fakes-looming-crisis-national-security-democracy-and-privacy https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /amp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core moreover, it is one that those supporting the production of user-generated evidence are attuned to. the implications that flow from the widespread production of user-generated evidence, however, extend far beyond the obvious. like all technology, there is the potential for both a positive and negative narrative to unfold as individuals and organizations experiment with user-generated evidence. the positive narrative begins with a baseline that recognizes that international criminal investigations are in trouble on at least two counts. first, there are a number of crime scenes that international investigators simply cannot access. nearly a decade after the international criminal court (icc) issued an arrest war- rant for the sudanese president based on crimes in sudan’s western region of darfur, the court’s investigators still have not set foot in the area. and even when international investigators do get access to sites of atrocity, security challenges abound. the net result has been a weakened eviden- tiary record that has helped derail some important trials at the icc. against this troubling back- drop, user-generated evidence provides a potential solution: the access problem disappears if the local population, already present at the scene of the crime, is collecting evidence. second, international criminal investigations are facing a legitimacy problem, with an african union-led critique of their imperialistic features. detractors argue that international criminal investigations are an “extractive industry,” with hague-based investigators flying into african countries to take evidence from the local population and then flying out again with little in-country follow-up. here, user-generated evidence offers the possibility of democratizing international criminal investigations by transforming them into a bottom-up process. however, the attractive story of user-generated evidence as a tool that empowers local commu- nities to hold perpetrators accountable in scenarios where access issues might otherwise make international justice unavailable, is far from inevitable. a negative narrative could unfold, if the risks that come with the collection of user-generated evidence by individuals—and the reliance on it by courts—are not properly accounted for. in a forthcoming article, i synthesize the three main areas of risk that those who are seeking to rely on user-generated evidence need to address as a matter of urgency. user-security evidence collection is a risky business; perpetrators would rather not have witnesses document their crimes. user-generated evidence enables international lawyers to obtain hard-to-access that a person did something—and to do so in a manner that is increasingly realistic, to the point that the unaided observer cannot detect the fake”). see generally evgeny morozov, to save everything click here: the folly of technological solutionism ( ). see, e.g., prosecutor v. lubanga dyilo, icc- / - / -rule deposition-red -eng, deposition of witness - (nov. , ), available at http://www.icc-cpi.int/iccdocs/doc/doc .pdf. see int’l criminal court, kenyatta case, at https://www.icc-cpi.int/kenya/kenyatta (“charges withdrawn due to insuf- ficient evidence.”); int’l criminal court, ruto and sang case, at https://www.icc-cpi.int/kenya/rutosang. see rebecca hamilton, the icc, the african union, and the un security council narratives and counter-narratives, in the elgar companion to the international criminal court (margaret deguzman & valerie oosterveld eds., forthcoming ). of course, this critique was simply the latest iteration of a long-standing critique of international law’s imperialist tendencies. see, e.g., u.o. umozurike, international law and colonialism in africa, cited in james t. gathii, africa and the history of international law, in oxford handbook of the history of international law (bardo fassbender & anne peters eds., ). dustin n. sharp, human rights fact-finding and the reproduction of hierarchies, in the transformation of human rights fact-finding , (philip alston & sarah knuckey eds., ) (explaining how the term “extractive industry” is used by some critics of human rights fact-finding missions led by ingos from the global north). see supra note . asil proceedings, https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /amp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at http://www.icc-cpi.int/iccdocs/doc/doc .pdf http://www.icc-cpi.int/iccdocs/doc/doc .pdf https://www.icc-cpi.int/kenya/kenyatta https://www.icc-cpi.int/kenya/kenyatta https://www.icc-cpi.int/kenya/rutosang https://www.icc-cpi.int/kenya/rutosang https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /amp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core evidence at no risk to themselves. but what if the risk associated with evidence collection does not disappear, so much as get transferred—from professionals backed by an international court to indi- vidual users with no such institutional safety net? as has so often been the case with new technol- ogy, user-generated evidence may serve to merely replicate, rather than transform, existing power hierarchies. bias bias is a problem for user-generated evidence in two distinct respects. first, smartphones are unevenly distributed between and within conflicts. as a result, user-generated evidence is neces- sarily unrepresentative of the existing pool of evidence regarding atrocity crimes. trained inves- tigators can mitigate this problem by seeking out other forms of evidence, but they first must be aware that the problem exists. second, notwithstanding the common perception that “seeing is believing,” cognitive science has established a well-documented set of visual biases that pervade our processing of visual material. lawyers and judges need to be aware of common cognitive errors as they work with a body of evidence that is increasingly visual in form. inequality of arms the emergence of user-generated evidence apps arose against a backdrop of high-profile pros- ecution failures at the icc. while the developers of these apps believe that their software would be as useful to the defense as the prosecution, there are more users interested in holding perpetrators to account than there are users concerned with the fair trial rights of defendants. as a result, the emer- gence of user-generated evidence risks exacerbating already significant problems regarding equal- ity of arms between prosecution and defense in international criminal trials. overall, the first movers in this space are all working hard to be thoughtful about how they are utilizing this technology. but while they are the first, they will not be the last—and there are limits to what self-regulation and trust in the good faith of private actors can deliver. user-generated evidence is changing the landscape of international criminal investigations and opening it up to new actors in ways that may ultimately be beneficial, but nonetheless involve a significant degree of risk. the question for those relying on this evidence is what policies and procedures they should put in place, not only to mitigate against these risks, but also to ensure there is an entity responsible if—and likely, when—problems arise. see, e.g., g. daniel lassiter, illusory causation in the courtroom, current directions psychol. sci. , ( ) (citing to research done by koffka in , k. koffka, principles of gestalt psychology ( ), establishing the phenomenon of “illusory causation,” which leads us to attribute an unwarranted degree of causal influence to the object or person we happen to be looking at.); see also dan m. kahan, david a. hoffman & donald braman, whose eyes are you going to believe? scott v. harris and the perils of cognitive illiberalism, harv. l. rev. ( ). see, e.g., charles jalloh & amy dibella, equality of arms in international criminal law: continuing challenges, in the ashgate research companion to international criminal law-critical perspectives , – (william schabas, yvonne mcdermott & niamh hayes eds. ). see, e.g., todd shields, steven t. dennis & sarah frier, senators tell facebook ceo the days of self-regulation may end, bloomberg (apr. , ). new technologies https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /amp. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /amp. . https://www.cambridge.org/core 	new technologies in international criminal investigations 	user-security 	bias 	inequality of arms wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") 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t io n : r o b e r t n e u b e c k e r editor’s note in her working life piece “instagram won’t solve inequality” ( march, p. ), meghan wright examined why she feels conflicted reading #scicomm instagram posts by fellow women scientists. she explained that she recognizes the good they can do, yet it seems unfair that such scientists must devote time to social media outreach to combat systemic inequities. so, she has decided that she prefers to separate her social media use from her scientific activities. wright named a social media role model at her university—the science sam instagram account run by samantha yammine—before detailing why she did not want to participate in this kind of outreach. although she intended to use science sam as an example of social media success, wright’s critical comments about such outreach were interpreted by some as a sexist and mean-spirited personal attack on samantha yammine in particular and women science communicators in general. in this section, samantha yammine and colleagues describe the power of social media, the women scientists organization responds to the working life article, and two scientists recognized by aaas (the publisher of science) for public engagement discuss how outreach and institutional reform can go hand in hand. in the online buzz box, we provide several excerpts from the online eletters we received. jeremy berg editor-in-chief . /science. aat other marginalized scientists must overcome as minorities in science, tech- nology, engineering, and mathematics (stem) ( ), they should not be expected to bear the full responsibility for out- reach—nor should they be penalized for choosing to do this work. diversity among communicators should be encouraged because multiple styles and approaches of science communication can make science more accessible and relatable to more people, including those who may not otherwise seek stem edu- cation. selfies on instagram are optional, but they receive % more engagement than pictures without a face ( ), enabling open dialogue with broad audiences in an effectively personal manner. further research can determine whether shar- ing selfies from a research setting helps confer more trust without sacrificing credibility, and these data will inform strategies for improving the public’s lack of trust in scientists ( , ). social media serve an important role in the movement toward increased equity, diversity, and inclusion within stem because it provides a widely available, readily accessible platform for many to use easily. social media allow high- throughput networking and exploration of careers, which benefits trainees who may otherwise lack access to professional development ( ). although not free from the bias and prejudice inherent in society, social media can connect diverse groups, enable rapid information exchange, and mobilize like-minded communities. this connectivity can allow those same groups to challenge tradi- tional structures, identify and call out systemic barriers, and question hierarchies of power. instagram, for example, allows for visible represen- tation of individuals who are often unseen, and can amplify voices that may go unheard in traditional settings. furthermore, increased representa- tion of those who break stereotypes and are underrepresented creates a more inviting percep- tion of stem careers, and these efforts can improve diversity and inclusion in academia ( – ). for a diverse academic com- munity to thrive, inclusion and acceptance of every scientist, regardless of edited by jennifer sills component of publicly funded research grants, and public engagement activities should have weight in merit, tenure, and promotion assessments. whether scien- tists do outreach themselves or work with communication and media experts, public engagement with science is a responsibil- ity requiring important skills that should be valued accordingly. given the other barriers women and letters insights social media for social change in science although we agree with m. wright (“insta- gram won’t solve inequality,” working life, march, p. ) that there are many systemic structures perpetuating the marginalization of women in science, we view social media as a powerful tool in a larger strategy to dismantle such structures. in addition, scientists have been using social media productively to address several other concerns in aca- demia, including engaging with the public about science, increasing science literacy, promoting trust, exploring career options, networking internationally, and influenc- ing policy. strong public trust in science con- tributes to a democratic, civil society. scientists have a responsibility to engage effectively with society, especially when trust is lacking ( , ) and scientific knowledge is not equitably accessible ( ). within academic science, much of this outreach is done by women ( ) and underrepresented groups ( ). thus, not surprisingly, outreach has been grossly undervalued and sometimes demeaned. instead of urging academia to stop celebrating this essential service, we should ensure sufficient compensation and recognition for public engagement. evidence of outreach is increasingly a da_ letters.indd / / : am published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ april • vol issue s c i e n c e sciencemag.org online buzz scicomm speaks the working life “instagram won’t solve inequality” (m. wright, march, p. ) sparked a wide-ranging discus- sion about the value and purpose of social media in science. excerpts from readers’ reactions to the article are below. read the full eletters and add your own at http://science.sciencemag. org/content/ / / / tab-e-letters. a selection of your thoughts: not every tweet, post, or youtube video that happens to feature a woman sci- ence communicator is uploaded with the express intent of challenging the status quo or systemic and institutionalized bias…. to assume this…fails to under- stand the many reasons why women choose to communicate science to the public. there are indeed activists who constantly challenge the institutional- ized bias favoring men, people who sporadically participate in collective events such as women in science day, and also science communicators who just hap- pen to be women. we should applaud all of their efforts…. victoria j. forster …like the author, i strongly believe that women and other underrepresented minori- ties in science should feel no obligation to take on additional emotional labor for the sake of educating others. i also agree that systemic issues of inequality will likely require systemic solutions to enact lasting change.… it is evident that the author views #scicomm on instagram as a chore, but for some of us it is a labor of love. if build- ing model satellites out of cake…or posing my dog in front of apollo moon trees… weren’t incredibly fun, i wouldn’t be doing it.… instagram has significant and largely untapped potential as a vehicle for science communication. the visual nature of the platform, in conjunction with the large and diverse userbase,…provides tremendous opportunity to reach nontraditional audi- ences. i agree with the author that science communication must be performed in a manner authentic to each individual, but my hope is that we can continue to encour- age each other to promote science in a variety of ways. right now, we need #scicomm more than ever. beth r. gordon …as an early-career researcher, the first in my family to go to university, social media has provided me with both community and opportunities that would have been unimaginable without it. having a window into the lives other academics and scientists from a range of backgrounds has helped me feel i belong and reassured me that there is a place in the academy for people like me…. at the same time, i was recently invited to publish a comment piece… after an editor noticed my tweets. i have also found coauthors on twitter and used it to keep up with recent publica- tions and research…. i have nonetheless begun to limit time spent on social media, realizing that it…distracts me from important work. but the benefits far outweigh the limitations…. glen wright . /science.aat indianapolis, in , usa. louisiana state university, college of science, baton rouge, la , usa. department of chemistry and biology, ryerson university, toronto, on m b k , canada. *corresponding author. email: samantha.yammine@mail.utoronto.ca r e f e r e n c e s . m, “state of science index global report” ( ); https://multimedia. m.com/mws/media/ o/ presentation- m-state-of-science-index- -global- report-pdf.pdf. . s. t. fiske, c. dupree, proc. natl. acad. sci. , ( ). . m. anderson, “the race gap in science knowl- edge,” pew research centre ( ); www. pewresearch.org/fact-tank/ / / / the-race-gap-in-science-knowledge/. . e. h. ecklund, s. a. james, a. e. lincoln, plos one , e ( ). . m. ong, “the mini-symposium on women of color in sci- ence, technology, engineering, and mathematics (stem): a summary of events, findings, and suggestions” (terc, cambridge, ma, ). . n. gupta, c. kemelgor, s. fuchs, h. etzkowitz, curr. sci. , ( ). . s. bakhshi, d. shamma, e. gilbert, “proceedings of the nd annual acm conference on human factors in computing systems” ( ), pp. – ; http://comp. social.gatech.edu/papers/chi .faces.bakhshi.pdf. . a. l. gonzales, commun. res. , ( ). . b. j. drury, j. o. siy, s. cheryan, psychol. inquiry , ( ). . s. d. hermann et al., basic appl. soc. psychol. , ( ). . s. cheryan, j. o. siy, m. vichayapai, b. j. drury, s. kim, soc. psychol. person. sci. , ( ). . /science.aat appearance (whether conventional or not) is necessary. no single post or person on social media should be expected to change the world, but social media have been instrumental in mobilizing grassroots political move- ments, including those related to safety in education, research, and equity, such as the march for our lives, the march for science, black lives matter, #metoo, and the women’s march. thus, we challenge the false dichotomy that use of social media for public engagement with science and working to change policy and remove systemic barriers to inclusion are mutu- ally exclusive. rather, they are intrinsically linked, and we need to harness the poten- tial power of social media to create social change. as scientists, we must look to data and evidence to inform our understanding of the benefits and pitfalls of the use of social media for public outreach and policy change, and uphold the same rigor and analysis in determining what has value and what should be celebrated. samantha z. yammine, * christine liu, paige b. jarreau, , imogen r. coe department of molecular genetics, university of toronto, toronto, on m s e , canada. helen wills neuroscience institute, university of california, berkeley, berkeley, ca , usa. lifeomic, journal editors should not divide scientists we’re writing to express our disappoint- ment at the poor judgment that led to the publication of “instagram won’t solve inequality” (m. wright, working life, march, p. ), which singled out and criticized a successful woman science communicator for her instagram presence promoting and celebrating science. the editor of this piece should have ensured that the message focused on the issues: women and underrepresented minorities take on a great deal of science com- munication, mentorship, and outreach work without recognition or professional reward from their institutions. despite increasing institutional pressure to com- municate about science — whether to increase a university’s public profile or meet the national science foundation’s broader impact requirements — many institutions expect the work to be done on personal time without compensation or additional resources. although the piece hinted at these systemic issues, those arguments were undermined when the editors allowed the author to criticize the work of another woman with an da_ letters.indd / / : am published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ unabashed tone of condescension and did not give the target of the comments an opportunity to respond. rather than address the roadblocks facing women and underrepresented groups in science, technology, engi- neering, and mathematics (stem) or grapple with the author’s personal misgivings around science communica- tion, the piece was framed as an attack. the tone implied that anything beyond basic research is a frivolous waste of time, belittling meaningful approaches to science communication and public engagement. it offered a false choice between an authentic and relatable social media presence and effective advocacy for institutional change. the choice to run this inflammatory article demonstrates a lack of thoughtfulness on the editors’ part. pitting one woman scientist against another is destructive and irresponsible, and it perpetuates unreasonable standards for women and underrepresented groups in stem. it is antithetical to the open, accessible, and inclusive future that we at women scientists envision for science. maryam zaringhalam,* rukmani vijayaraghavan, juniper simonis, kelly ramirez, and jane zelikova, on behalf of women scientists women scientists, boulder, co , usa. *corresponding author. email: info@ womenscientists.org . /science.aat efforts large and small speed science reform the working life article “instagram won’t solve inequality” (m. wright, march, p. ) asserts that science outreach efforts by individual women cannot counteract struc- tural inequities and that women are doing outreach at a cost to their own careers. we concur that collective action and structural change are needed to diversify science and improve meaningful science engagement with the public. however, when such reform is absent or too slow, individual efforts fill the vacuum and should not be condemned. along with hundreds of other scientists, we devote time and energy to individual public engagement initiatives, while pushing for institutional reforms to support more scientists who wish to engage effectively. these reforms would provide support and incentives through professional recognition, financial and logistical resources, networks of support, and an inclusive culture and capac- ity for public engagement. with support, more scientists could develop collabora- tive and innovative engagement practices to broaden participation in science. while changing the culture of public engagement, we must similarly push to dismantle other structural barriers to women and minorities in the sciences. to accelerate these changes, data collection and learning networks would enable us to improve the effectiveness of our efforts to create a diverse workforce and tackle science-societal challenges. individual action versus structural change is not an “either/or” question; it is a “yes, and.” anne j. jefferson * and melissa a. kenney department of geology, kent state university, kent, oh , usa. cmns-earth system science interdisciplinary center, university of maryland, college park, md , usa. *corresponding author. email: ajeffer @kent.edu . /science.aat “...when [structural change] is absent or too slow, individual efforts fill the vacuum...” insights | l e t t e r s da_ letters.indd / / : am published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ journal editors should not divide scientists scientists maryam zaringhalam, rukmani vijayaraghavan, juniper simonis, kelly ramirez, jane zelikova and on behalf of women doi: . /science.aat ( ), - . science article tools http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / . content related http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions terms of serviceuse of this article is subject to the is a registered trademark of aaas.sciencescience, new york avenue nw, washington, dc . the title (print issn - ; online issn - ) is published by the american association for the advancement ofscience science. no claim to original u.s. government works copyright © the authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee american association for the advancement of o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / . http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/about/terms-service http://science.sciencemag.org/ microsoft word - green letters review sultzbach.docx ecocriticism in the modernist imagination: forster, woolf, and auden, by kelly elizabeth sultzbach, cambridge, cambridge university press, , viii + pp., £ . (hardcover), isbn - - - - modernism, wrote malcolm bradbury, is ‘an art of cities’. the collocations and lineaments characteristic of the urban environment give to the modernist geographic imaginary its angularity, its intensity and torsion. the cosmopolitan energies of vienna, prague, and berlin; london, new york, and chicago; paris, moscow, and st petersburg embody and generate modernism’s characteristic tensions and complexities. studies like hugh kenner’s the mechanic muse ( ) have heightened our awareness of the animating rhythms of the inanimate—the paradoxical energy of the motor car, the light bulb and the linotype—to the point where our consciousness of modernity’s polyphonic richness is subtended by an inescapable technological pulse. kelly sultzbach’s ecocriticism in the modernist imagination offers an enriching alternative view of modernism’s nascent environmental consciousness, discerned in the works—some canonical, others less well-known—of three key writers: e. m. forster, virginia woolf, and w. h. auden. it participates in what sultzbach calls the ‘turn toward rural perception’ ( ), of which alexandra harris’s romantic moderns: english writers, artists and the imagination from virginia woolf to john piper ( ) is a noteworthy earlier example. the focus on green modernism complements recent studies by bonnie kime scott (in the hollow of the wave: virginia woolf and the modernist uses of nature, ) and carrie rohman (stalking the subject: modernism and the animal, ), and fits within a developing body of ecocritical work on renaissance, romantic, and victorian literature by scholars such as ken hiltner, robert watson, jonathan bate, john parham, and allen macduff. theorists of the pastoral figure large (terry gifford and raymond williams in particular), but sultzbach’s volume manages to draw into its ambit a variety of focalising perspectives. the author’s commitment to an intellectual expansiveness in evident in her view of material ecocriticism, ecophenomenology and embodiment theory, queer ecocriticism, and animal studies as elements in a larger critical ecology. sultzbach’s central preoccupation is with the unspoken—that which can’t be said. she relates this to a specifically modernist animality located, from conrad on, in the notorious discontinuities and irrationalities of modernist writing. her formulation revises and widens the arnoldian fascination with the buried life into an ecocritical vision of rural landscapes alive with subsumed signification. in place of the light and heat of the modern metropolis, sultzbach seeks out the densely layered silences of rural landscapes, and calls our attention to the ‘innate, unspoken presences’ of the non human ( ). the book positions modernist writers’ deep probing of the frontiers of language, and their interrogation of human interiority and intersubjectivity in relation to their responsiveness to the ‘metalinguistic potential’ of the environment ( ). this is not, strictly, a study of non human voice, although the phonic presence of trees, caves, rain, cows, cats, and even snails are all given careful and sympathetic attention. rather, sultzbach’s concern is with the environmental dimensions of human identity engaged in ‘reflexive exchange’ with the natural world ( ). although at times the prose struggles to free itself from the constraints of its idiom, the study is an astute exploration of the ways in which modernism’s formal innovations acknowledge and enter into the fluctuations between human and non human, arguing that modernist troubling of formal boundaries can lead to a heightened responsiveness to ‘the animate complexity of non- human agency’ ( ). the volume is divided into three chapters, ‘passage from pastoral: e. m. forster’, ‘the phenomenological whole: virginia woolf’, and ‘brute being and animal language: w. h. auden’. in each of these sultzbach measures the work of her chosen writer against a series of representational responses to the natural world, ranging from an over-reverent feigning of environmental consciousness and fetishisation of the non human “other”, to a reified sense of one’s own porosity and trans-corporeality in relation to the material world. chapter describes the ‘plastic art’ ( ) of forster’s progressive shift from pastoral to anti-pastoral and post-pastoral modes. this is discerned in the movement from the idealised and permissive environments of short stories like “the story of a panic” and “the other kingdom”, through the (anti-pastoral) failed sexual and economic promise of rural retreat evident in texts like howards end and maurice, to the post-pastoral intrusion of the non-compliant environment in a passage to india. the chapter makes a persuasive case for the centrality of pastoral tropes in ‘registering forster’s growing opposition to social prejudice and colonial politics’ ( ). chapter characterises woolf as a modernist exemplar of cohesion, drawing on the ecological dimensions of maurice merleau-ponty’s phenomenology and the material ecocriticism of serenella iovino and serpil oppermann. this chapter positions the embodied experiences of woolf’s human characters within a network of relations between the animate but inarticulate (animals as agents of social critique), the material inanimate (chairs, steps, street, lighthouse), and immaterial presences drawn from the responsiveness of memory to place (merleau-ponty’s ‘secret blackness’ whose dense void generates presence, like the ghost of mrs ramsay’s reminiscences ( )). this reticulate complexity, sultzbach argues, allows for the generation of ‘more-than-human’ meaning ( ). chapter reads auden’s later poetry as making ‘gestures of empathy’ toward the non human ( ), revelling in the kinship between animal and human. with the movement from prose to poetry, the analysis ventures more assuredly into investigating linguistic and poetic strategies for testing the barriers between human and non human communication (something that could have featured more heavily in the earlier chapters). the close readings of ‘natural linguistics” and “first things first” are highlights, and the book is at its most enlivening when discussing the auden’s embodied relationship with the clouded brightness and limestone undertow of his northern childhood in the pennines. one gets the sense that this is where sultzbach’s primary passion lies. the volume also contains much valuable information on the environmentally-inflected interactions between authors. their revealing invocation of the botanical, the animal, and the geometrical in their assessments of one another’s work is a rich sub-strata of the volume’s field of inquiry. thankfully, sultzbach does not shy away from modernism’s darker thickets, noting evidence of woolf’s racism, and forster’s occasional, reactionary desire for escapism. she is particularly alive to the constraining effects of pastoral narratives on non-white characters, whose fates often reflect the violent damage wrought by empires. in considering ‘problems of agency and representation’ ( ) as they might be reimagined in a more carefully responsive form of environmental perception, sultzbach reads modernist representations of non human agency as a powerful means of literary reckoning with the corrosive power dynamics of race, empire, and gender. sultzbach is righty chary of attributing too immediate a saving role to the burgeoning awareness and responsiveness of the literature she is concerned with, noting that while literary imagination can play a part in altering and expanding cultural perceptions, ‘the role of literature is slow-moving’ ( ), and invoking auden’s quietly desolate observation that poetry survives as ‘a way of happening, a mouth’. but the study acknowledges that its vision of green modernist investment in the shared community that constitutes ‘the flesh of the earth’ has political ramifications for the present. without making grand claims for empathy’s coalescing power, sultzbach is able deftly to demonstrate how the experimental quest to give ‘new voices’ to ‘imagined subjectivities … pries open further productive crevices where wild things grow’ ( ). such concerted attention to the latent and the unspoken has the potential to make visible the ‘attritional lethality’ of environmental degradation (sultzbach quotes the phrase from rob nixon’s work on ‘slow violence’): ‘these are the ethical recognitions that literary art, particularly green modernism, provides, and academic work can forefront.’ ( ) the volume’s epilogue contains a thoughtful and personal meditation setting clarissa dalloway’s oceanic, interconnected consciousness in poignant metaphorical relation with “black lives matter”, and with the desperate ‘ebb and flow’ of human migration in quest of survival. such scholarly willingness to breach period boundaries is a timely reminder of the renewed importance of forster’s injunction to ‘…only connect’. sarah kennedy downing college, cambridge sarah.kennedy@dow.cam.ac.uk © , sarah kennedy black lives do matter commentary black lives do matter bradley a. boucher, pharmd,a marie chisholm-burns, pharmd, mph, mbaa,b a university of tennessee health science center (uthsc) college of pharmacy, memphis, tennessee b university of tennessee health science center college of medicine, memphis, tennessee submitted july , ; accepted september , ; published november . recent black deaths at the hands of law enforcement officers has heightened awareness of racism within the united states. the consequences of this racism are not only differential policing practices toward black people, but also inequities related to numerous other sectors, including housing, educa- tion, economics, and overt health care disparities between white and non-white americans. health care practitioners, including pharmacists, are extremely well positioned to be leaders in addressing long-standing inequities, thereby saving lives and improving access to and quality of care. the views of two senior faculty administrators are outlined: one, a white faculty member of privilege, the other, a black ceo dean. despite having very different life experiences, they partner to foster unity and an antiracist culture within their institution and among their many stakeholders, with the ultimate goal of creating a culture of equity regardless of skin color. keywords: black lives matter, racism, antiracism the black lives matter movement originated with a facebook post by alicia garza following the death of trayvon martin and the subsequent acquittal of his killer, george zimmerman. the words “black lives matter,” which have permeated our lives in recent months, are not merely a slogan, but a declaration and affirmation that black lives do matter. at a time when racial polarity is gripping our nation after the deaths of ahmaud arbury, breonna taylor, george floyd, rayshard brooks, daniel prude, and countless other unnamed black americans, it is important for each of us to think about our personal perspective on racism in the united states. only then can we begin to achieve the ideals of a nation for all citizens, not merely those of privilege. this commentary offers two unique perspectives on racism by senior administra- tors at the university of tennessee health science center (uthsc) college of pharmacy. one is offered by a white, male, clinical pharmacist and educator whose career spans over years. the other is rendered by a black, female, seasoned faculty member, former depart- ment head, researcher, executive director, and ceo (chief executive officer) dean with more than years of academic experience. the goal of sharing these per- spectives is to provide context for their partnership and efforts to achieve racial awareness, literacy, unity, and eventually equity at their academic institution. if indi- viduals can identify to some degree with the views of either one of these two professionals whose social expe- riences represent opposite ends of the spectrum, an en- vironment of inclusivity, equity, and diversity may be achieved among us all. perspective of bradley a. boucher, pharmd i grew up in a predominantly white, blue-collar community on the northside of minneapolis, where i attended public schools. during these years ( s- s), it was evident to me that minneapolis did indeed have segregation. the inner-city neighborhoods to the north and south of downtown minneapolis clearly had a higher degree of poverty than the neighborhood i resided in, as well as a very different demographic make-up, ie, one of predominantly black residents. what i did not know until recently, however, was that racial residential covenants existed in many communities within minne- apolis and its adjacent suburbs throughout much of the th century. these covenants de facto created racial boundaries, and this segregation, supported by the courts until the s, continues to have a ripple effect even today. the overall intended effect was to enrich white homeowners while impoverishing black communities. this, in turn, undoubtedly has affected the quality of ed- ucation and health care available to the citizens living in these communities. nevertheless, i gave little thought to how advantaged i was by being able to attend the pre- dominantly white schools in my neighborhood vs the corresponding author: marie chisholm-burns, university of tennessee health science center, madison ave., ste. , memphis, tn . tel: - - . email: mchisho @uthsc.edu american journal of pharmaceutical education ; ( ) article . b y gu es t on a pr il , . © a m er ic an a ss oc ia ti on o f c ol le ge s of p ha rm ac y ht tp :/ /w w w .a jp e. or g d ow nl oa de d fr om mailto:mchisho @uthsc.edu http://www.ajpe.org inner-city minneapolis schools that the majority of black students attended. i do not recall thinking about the privileges afforded by my “whiteness” (also known as white privilege, which is defined as “the unearned, mostly unacknowledged social advantage white people have over other racial groups simply because they are white”). in contrast, i believed strongly in the myth of american meritocracy for all at that time, firmly believing it was only one’s work ethic and discipline that stood in the way of future success. eventually my efforts facilitated com- pletion of my professional pharmacy training at the university of minnesota college of pharmacy. thereaf- ter, i began my academic career at the uthsc college of pharmacy in , and moved to memphis, a city with a majority black population. while memphis demograph- ics were very different than those of my home city of minneapolis, the ability of privileged white citizens to orchestrate neighborhood segregation was virtually in- distinguishable. as in minneapolis, the segregation of black citizens into neighborhoods with subquality hous- ing had spawned poverty and diminished their access to quality health care and education. this tactic was and continues to be the norm across the united states. on an individual level, the question i now ask myself as a relatively successful senior faculty member is: did i achieve this success as a result of good fortune, hard work, the color of my skin, or a combination of these and other factors? in other words, would i have had the same suc- cess if i had been a black man and not enjoyed a life of privilege? i certainly had more advantages because of my skin color. furthermore, my three sons who are all health care professionals have also enjoyed white privilege. while i have never thought of myself as a “racist,” neither have i consciously acted to reverse the system of advan- tage based on race that exists in our society, past and present. therefore, depending on one’s definition, i may have to accept the “racist” label along with all other white americans who actively or passively enjoy lives of privilege. while i have no guilt or shame regarding the privi- lege being white has provided me and my offspring, i have committed myself to becoming immersed into a heighted awareness of racism in the united states. the sentinel events leading to this commitment are the two black deaths in or near my hometown of minneapolis, a city i love. the first was the shooting of philando castile during a routine traffic stop in . the other was the killing of george floyd at the hands of a white police officer in may . how could either of these deaths occur in the city that i grew up in? the answer is that structuralracism continuesto thrivethereand in citieslike it across america. these tragedies, and many others, are at the forefront of the black lives matter movement. furthermore, countless black americans lose their lives because of health care disparities tied to racism. because these black lives do matter, it is time that we as phar- macists serve as advocates and agents of change to eliminate health disparities and health care disparities and promotea culture ofequityfor black americans and other persons of color. perspective of marie chisholm-burns, pharmd, mph, mba i grew up in a city in new york where the high school graduation rate was less than %, my parents never earned more than $ , a year, and neither graduated from high school. my parents worked hard but also en- dured unimaginable prejudice in their efforts to make a better life for themselves and me. i vividly remember being with my father on repeated occasions when his gas station was set on fire and vandalized, with racial slurs scrawled on the walls. my parents instilled in me the will to focus on the business of survival and staying clear of any signs of trouble, including “good trouble” (which refers to acting as an agent for social change and justice, even if it causes disruption or defies authority). although my parents were the best parents anyone could ask for, their moralcharacter wasunimpeachable,and my focused approach to better my circumstances was immensely valuable and life changing, over the years i have learned that i must address inequities (defined simply as injustice or unfairness ), which may challenge boundaries. with the disturbing events of this year, whenever i hear stories of racism, oppression, and brutality, i am haunted by a gas station on fire and the story of devastation and loss written on my father’s face. so today, as my dear colleague, dr. boucher, reflects on his life journey, i must in order to survive and move forward, reflect on the sunrise. the morning after congressman john lewis and reverend c.t. vivian died, i watched the newscast reflecting on their lives, tears streaming down my face as i realized two icons had left us. however, their legacy of “keeping your eye on the prize” will continue, just as the sunrise continues. this year served as a watershed mo- ment in which the eyes of the public have been opened, not only to the existence of racial inequities, but also to the pervasiveness and depth of racism in the united states. the country is struggling with crises on multiple fronts: the covid- pandemic and the strain and pain it has caused our health systems and personal lives; health disparities, particularly among black and hispanic americans, tragically exposed by the onslaught of the pandemic; and underrecognized, uncorrected, and un- treated racial traumas experienced by black americans. american journal of pharmaceutical education ; ( ) article . b y gu es t on a pr il , . © a m er ic an a ss oc ia ti on o f c ol le ge s of p ha rm ac y ht tp :/ /w w w .a jp e. or g d ow nl oa de d fr om http://www.ajpe.org these racial traumas have existed since the birth of this country, accumulated over the decades, and include (but are not limited to): slavery, jim crow laws, the practice of “redlining,” mass incarceration, police bru- tality, food apartheid, educational disparities, economic gaps, microaggression, and additional traumas extending beyond the scope of this commentary, but experienced in mine and other african americans’ daily reality. - racism exists in many forms, and includes biologi- cal racism (the belief the races are biologically different and that white people are superior), ethnic racism (the belief that the origins of various ethnic groups are dif- ferent from one another and that one group has greater ability than other groups because of their ethnic origin), bodily racism (the belief that black people are more physically dominant, violent, and threatening), and cul- tural racism (the belief that the black culture is inferior to other cultures). furthermore, the term structural racism is commonly used today, breeding the formation of ill-formed stereotypes and racist behaviors toward an individual ascribed to a certain group as a whole and, in reciprocal, the group or the “system” is responsible for the behavior of the individual. structural racism perpetu- ates discrimination with little energy from individuals as it is inherently built into daily operations across govern- ment agencies, institutions, health systems, educational systems, and other myriad structures, and driven by cul- ture, environment, practice, and policies of the system, organization, and/or program. additionally, i also believe that structural racism or institutional racism masks the core of the problem and reduces racists’ ownership of creating, implementing, facilitating, and capitalizing on racist practices. it exonerates the individual of responsi- bility to change, preserves power, and even perpetuates further racist behaviors. moreover, it relieves all indi- viduals, including racists, of the responsibility for cor- recting the inequity. no doubt structural racism exists and should be eradicated. as ibram x. kendi declares and as dr. boucher appreciates, if you are not practicing anti- racism (defined as the belief that all people are equal and fighting to deconstruct racism), you are racist. martin luther king, jr., suggested decades ago that the greateststumblingblock toward liberation ismoderates who prefer a negative peace that is free of any tension, including uncomfortable conversations, and absent of real actions leading to racial equity. just as dr. boucher re- flectson hisinternal dilemma ofwhiteprivilege, i toohave reflected on my own “dueling consciousness” in order to both embrace my heritage and conform to the society that i want to be accepted in, and wonder if i could do more to fight inequities. as founder and director of the medication access program, i help to increase medication access among those who have limited access to needed medica- tions, and the majority of my patients are persons of color. is there more i can and should do in this area? although i have some degree of privilege as a ceo dean, my skin color continues to be one of the first things people notice about me, before they ever think about checking my cre- dentials (if they check my credentials at all). even as a well-educated black woman, aggressions occur, not as open attacks like my father’s burning gas station, but as the more common microaggressions often experienced by black americans today. i often wonder what i would have been if i had all the privileges of a white male. however, wasting energy on wondering “what if” is not a fruitful exercise.instead,ichoose tomove forwardusing whatever privilege i have in my circle of influence including my institution, uthsc college of pharmacy. our minority student population has certainly grown during my tenure and is now greater than %. dr. boucher and i are clearly different, but for almost a decade we have worked together at uthsc, along with many others, to help forge a path for our college to uphold a culture of diversity, and now we must commit to do more to resolve inequities. recently, i published a commentary in the american journal of health-system pharmacy where i framed racism as a disease not dissimilar to covid- . to effectively treat a disease in a patient, the first step is to diagnose orrecognizethe problem.likewise, thefirst step to changing the culture within a society regarding racism is to acknowledge the problem, regardless of one’s life journey and where one falls presently on the continuum from racist to antiracist. thereafter, one needs to be in- tentional and committed to attitudinal change on an in- dividual level. this is based on the assumption that one can grow toward development of antiracist behaviors, which in turn can lead to institutional initiatives focused on promoting inclusiveness, diversity, and equity. what treatment (medicine, if you will) can we start working on today to treat racism? a few proposed strat- egies include: identify the problem and call it out. what symptoms are being displayed? what behaviors are adversa- rial? what behaviors are producing the inequities and promoting racism? have the uncomfortable conversations that lead to reflection and a treatment plan. we must approach treatment from multiple perspectives or symptoms, including treatment plans to eliminate micro- aggressions and disparities/inequities concerning health care, education, socioeconomic, employ- ment, law enforcement, and housing, to name a few. get to know people who are not like you. push yourself out of your comfort zone. american journal of pharmaceutical education ; ( ) article . b y gu es t on a pr il , . © a m er ic an a ss oc ia ti on o f c ol le ge s of p ha rm ac y ht tp :/ /w w w .a jp e. or g d ow nl oa de d fr om http://www.ajpe.org extend radical empathy, defined as “actively striving to better understand and share the feelings of others. to fundamentally change our perspectives from judgmental to accepting, in an attempt to more au- thentically connect with ourselves and others.” learn as much as possible about racial inequities and how to be an antiracist. in particular, white and non- white americans must be intentional about being allies and advocates related to achieving equity and justice within communities across the united states. also, we must never take for granted the importance of leadership because leadership does matter. treat people as you want to be treated, and once learning more about the individual, treat them as they want to be treated (which may be different than how you want to be treated). strive toward reducing disparities within your spheres of influence, including calling attention to policies, practices, and systems facilitating inequities. promote resilience as we strive toward equity. this is a marathon, and engagement is long-term. one major initiative at our college has been the recent creation of the equity, inclusivity, and diversity advisory board (comprised of faculty, staff, and student pharmacists) to swiftly identify goals and action items to promote an em- pathetic, attentive, and healing environment. some early successes are several curricular changes related to health care disparities, diversity, and inclusion; virtual social gathering and “listening sessions” with approximately and college participants in the first two offerings, respectively; and requiring all faculty and staff members to complete for- mal diversity training programs. while the majority of the action items of the board are inwardly focused on the envi- ronment at the uthsc college of pharmacy and our many stakeholders, such as our student pharmacists, faculty, staff, and alumni, the overarching goal is to affect the patients we serve and society as a whole. in doing so, we support that “black lives do matter” in addition to upholding the well- beingofallpersonslessprivileged.thesunhasrisen,anditis a new day with a better tomorrow ahead. acknowledgments theauthorswouldliketothankdrs.christinaspiveyand jenny johnson for their assistance in manuscript preparation. marie chisholm-burns serves on the board of direc- tors for the accreditation council of pharmacy education (acpe); however, this manuscript does not represent acpe or the boards’ opinions or views. references . 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disease of racism. am j health syst pharm. ; ( ): - . doi: . /ajhp/zxaa . . schott j. what is radical empathy? camp stomping ground blog. https://campstompingground.org/blog/ / / /what-is- radical-empathy. published february , . accessed november , . american journal of pharmaceutical education ; ( ) article . b y gu es t on a pr il , . © a m er ic an a ss oc ia ti on o f c ol le ge s of p ha rm ac y ht tp :/ /w w w .a jp e. or g d ow nl oa de d fr om https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwqfdbbqv e https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xwqfdbbqv e https://www.dictionary.com/e/pop-culture/white-privilege/ https://www.dictionary.com/e/pop-culture/white-privilege/ https://placesjournal.org/article/memphis-burning/ https://placesjournal.org/article/memphis-burning/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/ / / /five-things-john-lewis-taught-us-about-getting-in-good-trouble/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/ / / /five-things-john-lewis-taught-us-about-getting-in-good-trouble/ https://www.brookings.edu/blog/how-we-rise/ / / /five-things-john-lewis-taught-us-about-getting-in-good-trouble/ https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/inequity https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/inequity https://twitter.com/repjohnlewis/status/ https://twitter.com/repjohnlewis/status/ https://www.theguardian.com/society/ /may/ /food-apartheid-food-deserts-racism-inequality-america-karen-washington-interview https://www.theguardian.com/society/ /may/ /food-apartheid-food-deserts-racism-inequality-america-karen-washington-interview https://www.theguardian.com/society/ /may/ /food-apartheid-food-deserts-racism-inequality-america-karen-washington-interview https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/microaggressions-in-everyday-life/ /racial-microaggressions-in-everyday-life https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/microaggressions-in-everyday-life/ /racial-microaggressions-in-everyday-life https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/microaggressions-in-everyday-life/ /racial-microaggressions-in-everyday-life https://campstompingground.org/blog/ / / /what-is-radical-empathy https://campstompingground.org/blog/ / / /what-is-radical-empathy http://www.ajpe.org edinburgh research explorer towards a radical digital citizenship in digital education citation for published version: emejulu, a & mcgregor, c , 'towards a radical digital citizenship in digital education', critical studies in education, vol. , no. , pp. - . https://doi.org/ . / . . digital object identifier (doi): . / . . link: link to publication record in edinburgh research explorer document version: peer reviewed version published in: critical studies in education publisher rights statement: this is an accepted manuscript of an article published by taylor & francis in critical studies in education on / / , available online: http://wwww.tandfonline.com/doi/full/ . / . . . general rights copyright for the publications made accessible via the edinburgh research explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. take down policy the university of edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that edinburgh research explorer content complies with uk legislation. if you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please contact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. download date: . apr. https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/towards-a-radical-digital-citizenship-in-digital-education( ef d - ab - e-a - f abbb e ).html towards a radical digital citizenship in digital education akwugo emejulu, university of edinburgh callum mcgregor, university of edinburgh abstract in this article we attempt to define and explore a concept of ‘radical digital citizenship’ and its implications for digital education. we argue that the ‘digital’ and its attendant technologies are constituted by on-going materialist struggles for equality and justice in the global south and north which are erased in the dominant literature and debates in digital education. we assert the need for politically informed understandings of the digital, technology and citizenship and for a ‘radical digital citizenship’ in which critical social relations with technology are made visible and emancipatory technological practices for social justice are developed. key words: digital activism; digital capitalism; digital citizenship; digital education; digital labour; digital literacy; digital materialism; social justice; social movements; black lives matter introduction the reason the digital debate feels so empty and toothless is simple: [it is] framed as a debate over “the digital” rather than “the political” and “the economic”. (morozov, ) in this article we attempt to define and explore a concept of radical digital citizenship and its implications for both digital education and digital citizenship. by ‘digital education’ we mean the processes of teaching and learning about digital technology and the use of digital technology in educational spaces (bayne and ross, ; goodfellow, ; selwyn, ). in particular, we seek to examine how hegemonic constructions of digital citizenship within the field of digital education do little to critically understand citizens’ social relations with technology and the ‘digital’ and, in fact, obscure and silence the particular politics embedded within digital citizenship. in order to counter problematic constructions of digital citizenship, we argue there is need for a radical digital citizenship. by radical digital citizenship we mean praxis through which individuals and groups: ( ) critically analyse the social, political, economic and environmental consequences of technologies in everyday life; ( ) collectively deliberate and take action to build alternative and emancipatory technologies and technological practices. our interpretation of radical digital citizenship seeks to displace instrumental conceptions of digital literacy, which reduce digital citizenship to mere skills acquisition for navigating a digital world. although there are good examples of critical scholarship engaging with this issue (e.g. collin and apple, ; goodlaw and lea, ; knox and bayne, ), a developed sense of the political—and how it shapes social and cultural relations—remains largely absent in the field of digital education. we argue that radical digital citizenship should problematise dominant ideas about technologies and rethink citizens’ relations with technology to advance the common good. radical digital citizenship should also debunk magical thinking whereby the ‘digital’ is invoked as a fetish, operating to obscure the material inequalities and socially exploitative relations upon which the proliferation of digital technology is premised. these (political and educational) tasks of ‘seeing the world relationally’ and ‘repositioning’ ourselves accordingly, are fundamental to understanding the connections between global crises, education and social justice (apple, , p. ). moreover, they require a more critical and capacious understanding of digital literacy than mainstream definitions allow (collin and apple, ). by ‘critical’ we mean recognition of the ways in which the dominant discursive and material practices of digital literacy are entangled in a wider web of exploitation. by ‘capacious’ we mean understanding the agential capacity of students, educators and activists who ‘appropriate the tools of high-tech global capitalism for use in the construction of more just orders’ (collin and apple, , p. ). we begin this article with a discussion of the obscured politics of digital citizenship in the field of digital education. we then move on to explore the materiality of the digital and the consequences this has for the politics of digital citizenship. this leads us to a discussion of how the politics of recognition and redistribution are interwoven with processes of digital subjectification. we conclude with an examination of how a radical digital citizenship might support the development of a radical digital education. the depoliticisation of digital citizenship and technology in both formal and informal educational contexts, digital citizenship is primarily framed as the ability to effectively make sense of, navigate and exist in the digital world (hargittai, ; ; seale and dutton, ). from learning how to access and use digital technologies, to developing ‘netiquette’ in online interactions, to understanding the ramifications of one’s digital footprint, privacy and rights, digital citizenship appears to be synonymous with digital literacy (knox and bayne, ). by digital literacy we mean ‘the capabilities which fit someone for living, learning and working in a digital society’ (jisc / / ). digital citizenship is also increasingly articulated through rights-based discourses, focusing on debates around access to relevant digital technologies and resilience in the face of a rapidly changing world whereby education, work and leisure are ‘disrupted’ by new technologies (potter, ; jounell, ; barber, donnelly and rizvi, ; oyedemi, ). furthermore, in much of the digital education literature, technology—digital or otherwise—is assumed to possess neutral properties that can simply be harnessed to achieve educators’ aims. consequently, digital technology is excepted from debates about inequality and injustice and not implicated in their reproductions (for example see: boody, ; gane, ; notable exceptions to this are selwyn, ; knox and bayne, ; sheail, ; the special issue of learning, media and technology ( ), focused on critical approaches to open digital education). in this context, digital citizenship functions as a reaction to technologies operating as disciplining devices compelling individuals and groups to adopt particular skills and ways of being in order to successfully exist in this newly and constantly disrupted world of work and leisure. to be sure, constructing digital citizenship as a lived practice and a social learning process, rather than a conferred status, is important (lister, ; isin and neilsen, ). however, thinking about digital citizenship only in the context of technological change renders digital citizenship as an unproblematic and instrumental process of becoming an ‘effective’ citizen able to cope in a fast changing and disrupted new world of work and leisure. constructing technology as innocent or neutral misunderstands the social relations of technology and its very real material consequences in our social world. what is interesting in these dominant conceptions of digital citizenship is that they seem to have been constructed in isolation from collective struggles for social, political, economic and civil rights and their corresponding notions of citizenship (marshall, ; berlin, ; young ; lister ; yuval-davis, ). thus, fetishised notions of digital citizenship have been stripped of their politics and political implications. by focusing on ‘what’s new’, oftentimes the field of digital education has failed to ask ‘who has power’. this is fundamentally problematic because, as neil selwyn ( , p. ) argues, ‘many of the issues that surround education and technology are fundamentally political questions that are always asked of education and society – i.e. questions of what education is, and questions of what education should be.’ in arguing for a radical digital citizenship, we seek to explicitly inject politics into constructions of citizenship and technology in digital education. we seek to frame digital citizenship in wider discursive and material struggles for equality and social justice. in so doing, we wish to make the ‘digital’ a key site for articulating, organising and mobilising citizens for rights. we do not conceive of digital citizenship as separate from marshallian, feminist and intersectional notions of citizenship but instead see it as a new context in which perennial debates about the redistribution of income and wealth, the recognition of difference and the representation and participation of different kinds of citizens are played out in the public sphere (marshall, ; young, ; lister, ; fraser, ; yuval-davis, ). in this way, digital citizenship becomes another front in citizens’ struggles for justice. we will now turn to discuss the materialities, and hence, the politics, of the digital by exploring how ‘new’ technologies reproduce familiar struggles for justice. we will also explore the new opportunities this site of struggle offer citizens and the implications this has for our conceptions of radical digital citizenship and its technologies. what’s old and what’s new in the materialities of digital citizenship? in attempting to subvert the fetishisation of the ‘new’ in digital citizenship, we must first explore the ‘old’ materiality of the digital—the natural resources that make the digital possible, their relationship to global social relations of production and the political and environmental consequences of these relations. to paraphrase paulo freire ( ), this ‘reading of the world’, in the context of digital technology, should be a key component of a radical digital citizenship. as parikka ( ) has demonstrated in his recent work, a geology of media, the digital ‘demands its ecology.’ we argue that making this ecology clear, in turn clarifies the ideological function of tropes such as the ‘information age’, ‘network society’, ‘immaterial labour’ and the ‘participatory web . ’ that are often used legitimise the supposed emancipatory potential of digital technologies (ampuja & koivisto, ; fuchs, ). we will now turn to examine the ‘old’ oppressive relations that make ‘new’ digital technologies possible—the exploitation of natural resources and labour in the global south. digital technology’s everyday violence of resource extraction and labour exploitation columbo-tantalite, or coltan, is a ‘black metallic grit’ that is obtained by ‘panning’ from alluvial or riverine deposits typically in the democratic republic of congo (drc) (whitman, ). from this exported grit, the element tantalum is extracted by companies in various countries. tantalum is used in digital communication devices – such as laptops, tablets and particularly g and g phones – because its robustness across a range of temperatures and ability to store and release electric charge are properties that are required for the production of capacitors in the microchips of such devices (whitman, ; nest, ). currently, there is no like-for-like industrial substitute for it, which is why it has euphemistically been called a ‘strategic mineral’ by the us department of defence. the less exotic, but equally necessary, element of tin is essential in the production of these same devices. it is not only used for casing but makes up a large proportion of the solder that holds together resistors, transistors and circuit boards. nearly half of all mined tin is used for such purposes and indonesia is currently the world’s biggest exporter of tin (friends of the earth, ). the scramble to control and exploit these natural resources to manufacture digital technologies constitutes a very old and familiar materialist struggle played out for the benefit of supposedly new digital citizens. control over the lucrative coltan is a prime objective of armed groups in the drc, who are estimated to earn $ million per year from its trade (whitman , p. ). increases in consumer demand for this resource, associated with the release of various consumer products such as laptops and games consoles, has therefore been indirectly linked to civil war, mass atrocities and associated sexual violence in the eastern region of the drc (maciver, ; whitman, ). due to the complexity of supply chains, whitman ( ) suggests that by the time coltan reaches refining companies in europe and asia, it is virtually impossible to distinguish ‘clean’ from ‘dirty’ tantalum. despite these atrocities, its trade continues unabated due to growth markets in china, india and russia, and ‘because of the direction in which manufactured goods tend to flow, much of this coltan is likely still finding its way into goods destined for consumers in the global north’ (maciver, , p. ). thus rather than something new, digital citizenship is constituted (although this is obscured in the hegemonic discourses about digital citizenship) by the familiar practices of environmental despoliation, civil war, slave labour and sexual violence for resource extraction and exploitation. the labour relations of both resource extraction and product assembly further reveal the materiality of the digital. indonesian tin mostly comes from bangka island. its mining is an essential source of income for local people and a miner can make almost three times an agricultural day labourer’s rate at the equivalent of £ per day (friends of the earth, , p. ). despite this, working conditions are documented as being extremely treacherous with injuries and fatal accidents common. moreover, pollution of drinking water, loss of soil fertility, decreasing fish stocks and loss of - % of local coral from tin dredging are consequences of mining practices (ibid., p. ). supply chain research conducted by friends of the earth (ibid.) has revealed that samsung and foxconn (the company that assembles apple products) rely on tin from bangka. a radical digital citizenship, we argue, must reckon with these brutal material struggles that form the foundation of supposedly ‘new’ digital relations. radical digital citizens seeking to challenge inequality must act to make these seemingly invisible racist, patriarchal, enslaving and capitalist power relations visible. from raw materials, we turn to their transformation into consumer products and technologies through the assembly process. we focus on foxconn (or hon hai precision) – apple’s contract manufacturers in china. the labour power required to produce apple products is secured through a chinese economic policy which: ( ) has attracted capital through tax exemptions, with the effect of underfunding public services such as social welfare, healthcare and education ( ) has stagnated wages for agricultural workers in order to ensure an almost limitless supply of urban labour for high-tech industry (sandoval, ). significantly, robotic assembly technologies are under-utilised in comparison to european and north american high-tech industries because chinese wage labour is so cheap (sandoval , p. ). the new chinese urban workers—rural migrants, oftentimes young women—are routinely denied education, health and employment rights due to a legal framework that denies them urban citizenship status (nakamura, ; sandoval, ). in this context, gender, ethnic and class relations in digital labour have very real impacts on citizenship status and rights. thus, through the lived but obscured experiences of rural and urban workers in the global south we can see the material relations of production upon which the digital is premised. and yet, although marginal, there are instances of activist- academic alliances practicing forms of radical digital citizenship that re-define digital citizenship as a relational, politically engaged and oppositional process. following multiple suicides by foxconn employees in , a group of students and scholars organised with labour activists, media campaigners, ngos, current and ex-foxconn employees to undertake a participatory action research project and to provide support and advice for factory workers (qui, gregg and crawford, ). consequently, ex-foxconn employees, students and academics have been involved in collectively producing educational resources and materials shared online, such as the documentary ‘deconstructing foxconn’ in order to raise consciousness and mobilise around these issues (ibid, p. ). moreover, foxconn employees, through their labour organising, are increasingly using their mobile phones in acts of citizen journalism, to document the poor conditions and the industrial relations of their workplaces (chan and pun, ; qui et al. ). thus we see the potential for radical, creative and oppositional mobilisations which support the political agency of exploited workers and force us to consider more critical and capacious ideas of both digital education and digital citizenship. exploitative relations are not confined to the global south, however. we will now turn to examine digital technology’s material consequences in the global north. digital technology’s logic of displacement and dislocation in the global north and in the united state in particular, we also see the materialities of the digital at work. emblematic of this process is the systematic displacement of long established middle and working class african american and latinx communities from their neighbourhoods in the bay area in california and in brooklyn in new york city, two hubs of technocapitalism. the billions of dollars made by tech entrepreneurs and venture capitalists have profound localised consequences that are disproportionately borne by racialised groups in these two areas. for instance, the rise in the median rental price in oakland has seen a % drop in the black population since (cagle, ). google, facebook and apple, which are engaged in widespread tax avoidance, use publically funded roads, bus stops and bus lanes to operate a private fleet of buses, so-called ‘google buses’, for their employees who commute between their homes in oakland and san francisco and their corporate offices in silicon valley (rodriguez, / / ). with skyrocketing costs of living combined with the privatisation of key public services and a lack of rent controls, tech-based gentrification is rapidly transforming the race and class of once affordable and liveable inner-city neighbourhoods (judd and douglas, ). we recognize that the politics of gentrification is a complex phenomenon not solely attributable to the digital technology industry. however, the municipal government in the bay area has leveraged the digital technology boom to attract the industry and its employees to oakland and san francisco, which, we argue, is a de facto gentrification policy for poor and working class neighbourhoods. indeed, san francisco’s municipal transportation agency (mta) board of directors has normalized and sought to regulate the use of so-called ‘google buses’ making them a permanent feature of the city’s transport system—with mta only charging $ . for each ‘shuttle stop event’ from the participating billon dollar tech companies (rodriguez / / ). this purposeful undercharging of these corporations appears to us to be a tax subsidy that supports the displacement of poor and working class black and latinx residents. furthermore, whittle et al ( , p. ) demonstrate how tech-based gentrification exacerbates existing public health problems such as food insecurity and chronic illness by inflating housing costs which forces chronically ill individuals to choose between food and rent. the researchers argue that increasing housing insecurity can only be understood in the context of the ‘structural violence’ of neoliberal urban policy that has created the conditions for the influx of high-tech capital, whilst failing to put in place rent control policies to stabilise neighbourhoods and secure the tenancies of long established working class black and latinx communities. neither can the energy requirements and environmental implications of techno- capitalism in the global north be disentangled from the structural violence of neoliberal urban development. for example, the reality behind the benign language of ‘cloud computing’ comprises ‘massive structures housing thousands of servers for storing data, advanced mechanical cooling and ventilation equipment’, which in some cases require more power than medium-sized towns (mahmoudi and levenda, , p. ). significantly, the resource intense (water, bricks and mortar, fossil fuels, telecommunication infrastructure etc.) materiality of such data centres has driven extensive corporate-state collusion in the form of firms successfully lobbying for corporate tax exemptions so that they can afford to do business at the expense of the most marginalised. this is why we argue that a radical digital citizenship must be predicated on relational understandings of materialities: understandings which work relentlessly to expose the raced, gendered and classed bodies masked by the digital fetish. given these ‘old’ materialist politics of expropriation and exploitation embedded in the digital in both the global south and north, what is, in fact, ‘new’ in terms of digital citizenship and technology? we will now turn to explore new ways of organising in social movements that digital technology affords. new opportunities for social protest? certainly, what is new is that these materially mediated digital technologies offer a different way to communicate across time and space that circumvent mass media outlets. for our purposes here, we are particularly interested in the significance of this for citizenship practices. social movement theorist manuel castells ( ) claims that we have witnessed a global epochal shift to a ‘network society’, implying that hegemonic power lies with those who control, program and connect dominant networks. for him, it follows that citizen counter-power is contingent on the ability of social movements to ‘reprogram’ networks around alternative interests and values and build connections between ‘pro-democracy networks and economic justice networks, women’s rights networks, environmental conservation networks, peace networks, freedom networks and so on’ (castells, , p. ). furthermore, castells argues that a feature of the ‘new’ is contemporary social movements’ existence in hybrid space-times between the urban ‘space of place’ (occupations, encampments, street protests and other forms of direct action) and the digital ‘space of flows’. this allows discrete citizen mobilisations to network and learn from one another at a heretofore unachievable rate. collin and apple ( , p. ) make a similar case that: the wiring together of the world and the spread of digital literacies means that increasing numbers of workers and activists are able to communicate rapidly and at little cost both within and across groups. thus, feminists struggling against healthcare policies that exploit women’s unpaid labour may work online to alert and enlist the help of environmentalists committed to creating healthier living conditions for all families. on the face if it, this analysis seems to hold across a range of contemporary social movements, from occupy to the arab spring to black lives matter. let us take black lives matter as an example. black lives matter is the movement against the extra-judicial killings of black people in america and has grown to have a note that activists make a distinction between #blacklivesmatter, the twitter hashtag, black lives matter, the national activist network set up by garza, tometi and cullors and the movement for black lives, the broader social movement struggling for justice and equality for black people. for our purposes here, we are discussing all three manifestations of this movement. much wider focus on the equality and social justice for black people. the twitter hashtag #blacklivesmatter was established in by three black queer women—alicia garza, opal tometi and patrisse cullors—to give space to the collective anger at the acquittal of george zimmerman for the murder of trayvon martin (garza ; ruffin ). social media was used for storytelling, mobilization and citizen journalism and the movement grew significantly in following the organization of a ‘freedom ride’ to ferguson, missouri to build solidarity with black activists protesting the fatal shooting of michael brown by darren wilson. as deray mckesson (kang / / ), a prominent protestor in the movement for black lives and a prolific #blacklivesmatter twitter user argues: social media was our weapon against erasure. it is how many of us first became aware of the protests and how we learned where to go, or what to do when teargassed, or who to trust…many of us became friends digitally, first. and then we, the protestors, met in person. social media allowed us to become our own storytellers. with it, we seized the power of our truth. however, whilst the scale and complexity of the movement’s social relations (and thus learning capacity) would clearly not be possible without these new digital technologies, we should perhaps resist castells’ ( ) romanticized idea of a leaderless movement through which participants relate on equal footing in frictionless, horizontal spaces. indeed, as alicia garza ( ) argues in her herstory of the movement, black lives matter was developed in response to the systematic exclusions of different kinds of black people in ostensibly emancipatory black liberation spaces: ‘black lives matter affirms the lives of black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, black undocumented folks, folks with records, women and all black lives along the gender spectrum. it centers those that have been marginalized within black liberation movements’. thus the ‘old’ power relations within the supposedly ‘new’ terrain of digital activism help to shape articulations and actions that challenge romanticized ideals of open, democratic and non-hierarchical relations within a ‘network society’. note, we are not claiming that the ‘newness’ of digital citizenship is actually ‘old’ in the sense that it is the same ‘kind of thing’ as longstanding activist practices, merely amplified by technology. nor would we deny that digital technologies have unintended and emergent effects on social action. instead, through a consideration of the extent to which the ‘old’ materiality of the digital has been obfuscated, we argue that a radical digital citizenship should partly be about the capacity to deconstruct seductive grand narratives that erase or deprioritise the situated and complex politics of redistribution and recognition in particular struggles. we must pay close attention to the relationship between misrecognition and material inequality when we speak of the ‘new’ affordances of digital technologies in citizenship practices. in short, radical digital citizenship must address the material and discursive aspects of digital subjectification. it is to such matters we now turn. digital subjectification given the obfuscation of the materialities of the digital, we are interested in the consequences of digital education’s hegemonic constructions of digital citizenship and technology. digital education oftentimes reproduces neoliberal citizen subjectivities that are functionally aligned with the requirements of digital capitalism. there is a sense in which the ‘cyber culture’ ideal of the digital citizen epitomises what boltanksi and chiapello ( ) identify as the ‘new spirit of capitalism.’ du gay and morgan ( , p. ) explain further: this ‘ideal typical’ figure is a nomadic ‘network-extender’, mobile, tolerant of difference and ambivalence, realistic about people’s desires (and weaknesses), informal and friendly, with a less rigid relationship to property. those lacking the requisite flexibility, who cannot become the nodal point of various networks, thus generating the necessary activity, or otherwise engage, communicate, market, innovate, add value, and so on and so forth, have little hope of success. in other words, digital citizens exist outside of time and place. this extreme cosmopolitanism requires no anchoring and loyalty to a particular job, neighbourhood or even nation state. those who must be tied to a time and place, because of poverty or caring responsibilities, will be left behind in this brave new world. however, the infinite flexibility of the nomadic digital citizen comes at a very high price. the nomadic digital citizen is also a precarious one with few expectations of job security or state-based social welfare (standing ). this freedom through precarity presents both affective and cognitive challenges. cockayne (forthcoming , p. ), who explores the affective dimensions of creative digital labour, argues that techno-utopian narratives of ‘horizontality, empowerment and democratisation’ are coupled to ‘the forms of work they valorise, which necessarily include normative entrepreneurial and affective attachments to precarious working conditions.’ moreover, digital education has tended to advance an exclusionary ideal of digital citizenship. turner ( ), in his historical account of the rise of ‘digital utopianism’, shows how the protagonists at the convergence of counter culture and tech entrepreneurship in silicon valley universalised their own standpoints to construct an ideal type of the new digital citizen: a white, educated, middle class man living in the global north. this nomadic digital citizen, as we argued above, has the ability to be infinitely flexible and untied to a particular time and place is a privileged position dependent on one’s race, class, gender and legal status. importantly, these digital citizens practice a kind of utopian politics that seeks to accelerate the gains of digital technology beyond the ‘value system, governance structures and mass pathologies’ of ‘late capitalism’ in a process of globalisation ‘from below’ (williams and srnicek, , no pagination). by attempting to ‘democratise knowledge’ about coding, financial algorithms and big data for the benefit of those groups who are failing to be flexible in a disrupted world, these nomadic digital citizens seek to intervene and repurpose technocapitalism for progressive ends. we can see examples of these practices in the myriad of projects that seek to include ‘under-represented’ groups in techocapitalism through training and development programmes (for example see: hack the hood http://www.hackthehood.org, women who code https://www.womenwhocode.com and we code america http://www.wecodeamerica.com). http://www.hackthehood.org/ https://www.womenwhocode.com/ http://www.wecodeamerica.com/ whilst these kinds of ‘civic tech’ initiatives are important in the democratisation of digital technology knowledge, they seek to include the so-called ‘digital have nots’ in the prevailing logic of exclusion and capitalist consumption. the human geography of silicon valley itself reflects this. for example, davidson’s ( , p. - ) ethnographic study of the ‘spatialised politics’ of aspiration in two different high schools in silicon valley (one predominantly white and one predominantly latinx) found that: despite the efforts of many well-meaning educators and workers in silicon valley working within programmes…designed to ‘bridge the digital divide’, gendered, hetero-patriarchal, and racialized school space, urban space, and (anti-immigrant) national space worked to promote the social exclusion of latina students by constructing them as not academically inclined, too interested in boys and sex, likely to get pregnant (hyper-reproductive), and unemployable as a highly-skilled worker. democratising digital technology knowledge is crucial but the bases on which different social groups are included in this digital utopia are elided. too often utopian practices ‘[intensify] a largely online and networked politics’ that relies heavily on individualised notions of self-improvement, self-organisation and advancement—through the acquisition of digital knowledge, skills and capabilities—which ‘pretends not only that there are no gendered, class or raced hierarchies between the actors, but also suggests a subject capable of organising’ (hoofd, , p. ). under technocapitalism, nomadic digital citizens are compelled ‘to situate themselves [in the social world] by pretending everyone is on the same level of privilege’ and that there are no institutionalised inequalities that might undermine the agency of citizens (ibid., p. ). given the limitations of these prevailing constructions of digital citizenship in digital education, we will now turn to examine what an alternative model to dominant approaches to digital citizenship might look like. we seek to define radical digital citizenship and attempt to discuss in greater detail the constitutive elements of this form of citizenship and the implications this has for technology and radical citizenship practices. towards a radical digital citizenship we define ‘radical digital citizenship’ as a process by which individuals and groups committed to social justice critically analyse the social, political and economic consequences of digital technologies in everyday life and collectively deliberate and take action to build alternative and emancipatory technologies and technological practices. unlike hegemonic models of digital citizenship in digital education, radical digital citizenship is not concerned with the instrumental process of acquiring digital literacy and capabilities in order to effectively function in an apparently ‘disrupted’ world. instead, the cornerstone of a radical digital citizenship is the insistence that citizenship is a process of becoming—that it is an active and reflective state for individual and collective thinking and practice for collective action for the common good (hooks, ; lister, ; yuval-davis, ). radical digital citizenship is a fundamentally political practice of understanding the implications of the development and application of technology in our lives. we believe that scholars, activists, practitioners and artists can and should adopt the practices of radical digital citizenship. we will now turn to discuss what we see as the two constitutive elements of a radical digital citizenship: ) critically analysing technology and ) collective action for developing emancipatory technologies. to make meaningful the idea of a radical digital citizenship means citizens must attempt to understand the social construction of technology and evaluate the political features of technology (heidegger, ; mumford, ; winner, ; pinch and bijker, ; klein and kleinman, ; chun and coleman ; noble ; noble and tynes forthcoming ; nakamura ). in so doing, citizens will be able to trace the particular political, economic and social arrangements that give rise to certain kinds of technology and examine the influence of technology on social relations. for example, winner ( ) persuasively demonstrates how robert moses, the powerful urban planner in new york city during the s and s, turned the city’s infrastructure into a technology designed to frustrate desegregation efforts and undermine the social citizenship claims of african americans and latinxs. in particular, winner ( , pp. - ) shows how moses constructed freeways and bridges in such a way as to block public transport from reaching all-white suburbs. since minority groups at the time were most likely to use public transport for work and leisure, moses effectively prevented these groups from settling in white neighbourhoods by privileging the car as the only means of transport from the city to the suburbs. by refusing to define technology as a neutral concept, we can see how it—in this case, the transportation infrastructure in new york city and its suburbs—can embody particular ideologies to undermine the citizenship claims of marginalised groups. in groundbreaking work, safiya umoja noble ( ; forthcoming ) demonstrates how racism and sexism are encoded in the seemingly apolitical space of google’s algorithm. noble argues that women of colour experience a loss of agency through the racist and sexist misrecognitions and misrepresentations that are generated through various search engines. the dominance of white male engineers at google who are not attuned to these politics in the coding process and the naturalisation of racism and sexism in our culture combine to re-enforce racist and sexist oppression on the web. politicising technology makes it easier to understand how: there is no such thing as a pure and politically innocent “basic” science that can be transformed into technological applications to be “applied” in “good” or “bad” ways at a comfortable distance from the “clean” hands of the researcher engaged in the former. (asberg and lykke, , p. ) to practice a radical digital citizenship is to resist the idea that a neutral technology exists. technology always reflects the interests of scientists, engineers and capitalists (and in silicon valley, as elsewhere, there is little difference between engineers and capitalists) thus ‘the practices and social relations of technoscience go hand in hand with global and local capitalism’ (asberg and lykke, , p. ). by critically analysing the social construction of technology, we can map the effects of particular kinds of technology beyond its ‘intended’ applications. returning to the example of oakland, by politicizing digital technology, we are able to understand that the displacement of african american and latinx residents from their neighbourhoods through rapid gentrification is not an ‘unintentional’, ‘unforeseen’ and ultimately ‘unfortunate’ byproduct of the tech boom in nearby silicon valley. rather, to understand the digital technologies designed and engineered (but not manufactured) in silicon valley necessitates that we understand their local and global effects. just as robert moses used urban transport infrastructure to further his racist politics, so the tech entrepreneurs and companies are using digital technologies to transform oakland in their own image. this city is being reconstructed to better facilitate capitalist reproduction and better service (at the direct expense of working class minority residents) the rich, white and mostly male nomadic digital citizens untied and disloyal to a particular time and place. thus, to understand what digital technology is, we must understand what it does, materially and asymmetrically, to different social groups. politicising technology is directly linked to what we identify as the second constitutive element of a radical digital citizenship and that is collective action for emancipatory technology and technological practice. by ‘collective action for emancipatory technology and technological practice’ we mean the process by which individuals and groups work together to build and maintain alternative communication infrastructure to enable marginalised groups to ‘convey their own messages, bypassing the filters of commercial and state gatekeepers’ (milan , p. ). a tentative example of this kind of work might be observed in the femtech network (http://femtechnet.org). if we recognise that dominant digital http://femtechnet.org/ and communication technologies embody and practice an exclusionary capitalist ethos, then it is important to develop independent information platforms, alternative presses, grassroots internet service providers (isps), and open source software that support dialogue, organisation and mobilisation outside the confines of corporate media infrastructure (earl and kimport, ). however, it is important to resist techno-utopian thinking about emancipatory technology and technological spaces. whilst important examples of emancipatory technology include linux and ubuntu, the free open source software and operating systems, open source movements are themselves oftentimes exclusionary spaces in which radical activists—in the name of liberation— reproduce racism, sexism and homophobia (nakamura, kolko and rodman, ; tanczer, ). thus, emancipatory technological practices must look beyond simplistic analyses of class and capitalism and take seriously intersections of race, class, gender, sexuality and disability (juhasz and balasmo, ; cooper and rhee, ). an important example of creating alternative technological spaces for emancipatory learning and practice is the women’s freedom conference, a digital conference organised by women of colour to ‘center and amplify the unique voices and experiences of underrepresented women who have been disenfranchised beyond gender alone’ (http://womensfreedomconference.com/live/). a collective leadership of black women, including feminista jones, sarah huny young and melanie dione, coded and built their site, organised and hosted the live-stream of speakers and http://womensfreedomconference.com/live/ coordinated participant debate across a range of social media platforms in order to include the largest possible number of women of colour across the globe. however, we also identify emancipatory technological practices using corporate digital social media platforms. returning to our earlier example of black lives matter, activists have been able to transform aspects of twitter into emancipatory learning and protest spaces. the act of using a hashtag to denote the murder of a black person by the police has become a routinised political and pedagogical practice in which a hashtag becomes a space for citizen journalists to share information about the incident, and to organize and mobilise in both digital and neighbourhood spaces for justice. indeed the hashtag has become a key site for political education for black lives matter activists that has sparked a number of other related campaigns such as #sayhername, which seeks to counter the prevailing notion that black death at the hands of the police is solely a problem for black men and highlight state sanctioned brutalisations and deaths of black women and black trans women. again, what is important to emphasise is that twitter does not determine activism—but, it is not neutral either, it supports new forms of learning about injustices which in turn enhance grassroots organising efforts by activists for social justice. if politics is about struggles for power, then part of the struggle is to name digital technologies as a power relation and create alternative technology and practices to create new spaces for citizens to encounter each other to struggle for equality and justice. this, of course, does not mean that emancipatory uses of technology are free from the materialist inequalities and injustices we outlined earlier in this article. what is missing in the radical digital citizenship examples of we cite is an explicit acknowledgement of and activism against technology’s exploitative production and critical reflections on the implications the production of technology has on how activists construct their emancipatory praxes. so, what does radical digital citizenship mean for digital education? for us, digital education must move away from its apolitical and/or politically naïve posture. if the field of digital education wants to be more than just a convenient tool for the neoliberal reshaping of education and citizenship, it must take seriously the radical potential of education in digital spaces and digital technologies. what that means is that digital education, as an academic field of practice, is not just about investigating the educational experiences of being online. understanding this new space for human activity and education is important but it is also important to identify the ways in which it has been created and shaped for particular purposes. to pretend that those purposes do not matter—or worse, pretend that those purposes are part of a different conversation that is outside the purview of digital education is a mistake. the critical heavy lifting about digital technologies should not be left to cultural theory and science and technology studies scholars and digital privacy and rights activists. we think the apolitical stance of digital education amounts to an abdication of responsibility about what education in digital spaces might mean and what education in these spaces might be. as lyn tett ( ) argues, education is at least partly about desire fulfillment. taking part in education is an opportunity to consider the world as it is and how it could be. education can ‘open up a way to aspiration, to desire better, to desire more and to above all to desire in a different way’ (thompson , quoted in tett, , p. ). digital education can play an important role in helping individuals and groups desire more for themselves than being a commodity and performing a digital self online. we think digital education can help us to desire more from the internet than just the commodification of digital spaces. we also think that digital education can help us understand systemic social, economic and environmental inequalities in a new and different way. however, to make this leap to help us desire better requires the development of a radical digital citizenship. conclusions in this article we attempted to examine how certain facets of digital education, as a scholarly field, construct digital citizenship in ways that obscure the politics of the digital and reproduce exclusionary and capitalist forms of citizenship. we argued that digital citizenship is depoliticised through a hegemonic assumption that the digital is fundamentally new and immaterial. we went on to demonstrate how, in fact, the digital and digital technologies are constituted by on-going materialist struggles for equality and justice. as a way to re-politicise digital citizenship, we argued for an alternative radical digital citizenship in which critical social relations with technology are made visible and that emancipatory technological practices for social justice are developed. we are sceptical about the possibilities of developing a radical digital citizenship in digital education. the key priorities in digital education at present such as developing online undergraduate, postgraduate programmes and massive online open courses (moocs), learning analytics and analysing digital identities in online spaces, constrain critical questions about the politics of digital education. this is especially case in relation to the very real material struggles—between faculty, students, universities and private sector organisations—over the shape, delivery, cost and accessibility of higher education. the above academic questions about digital education are important but they must always and relentlessly be put in a wider context of the struggles of power as embodied in digital 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( ). the politics of belonging: intersectional contestations. london: sage. http://criticallegalthinking.com/ / / /accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/ http://criticallegalthinking.com/ / / /accelerate-manifesto-for-an-accelerationist-politics/ the asm journals committee values the contributions of black microbiologists the asm journals committee values the contributions of black microbiologists patrick d. schloss,a chair, asm journals committee, melissa junior,b director, asm journals, rebecca alvania,b assistant director, asm journals, cesar a. arias,c,d editor in chief, antimicrobial agents and chemotherapy, andreas baumler,e editor in chief, infection and immunity, arturo casadevall,f editor in chief, mbio, corrella detweiler,g editor in chief, microbiology and molecular biology reviews, harold drake,h editor in chief, applied and environmental microbiology, jack gilbert,i editor in chief, msystems, michael j. imperiale,a editor in chief, msphere, susan lovett,j editor in chief, ecosal plus, stanley maloy,k editor in chief, journal of microbiology and biology education (jmbe), alexander j. mcadam,l,m editor in chief, journal of clinical microbiology, irene l. g. newton,n editor in chief, microbiology resource announcements, michael j. sadowsky,o editor in chief, microbiology spectrum, rozanne m. sandri-goldin,p editor in chief, journal of virology, thomas j. silhavy,q editor in chief, journal of bacteriology, peter tontonoz,r editor in chief, molecular and cellular biology, jo-anne h. young,s editor in chief, clinical microbiology reviews, craig e. cameron,t isaac cann,u a. oveta fuller,a ariangela j. kozikv adepartment of microbiology and immunology, university of michigan, ann arbor, michigan, usa bamerican society for microbiology, washington, dc, usa ccenter for antimicrobial resistance and microbial genomics and division of infectious diseases, university of texas health science center, mcgovern medical school, houston, texas, usa ddepartment of microbiology and molecular genetics, university of texas health science center, mcgovern medical school, houston, texas, usa edepartment of medical microbiology and immunology, university of california, davis, california, usa fdepartment of molecular microbiology and immunology, johns hopkins bloomberg school of public health, baltimore, maryland, usa gdepartment of molecular, cellular & developmental biology, university of colorado, boulder, colorado, usa hdepartment of ecological microbiology, university of bayreuth, bayreuth, germany idepartment of pediatrics, university of california, san diego, california, usa jdepartment of biology, brandeis university, waltham, massachusetts, usa kdepartment of biology, san diego state university, san diego, california, usa lboston children’s hospital, boston, massachusetts, usa mharvard medical school, boston, massachusetts, usa ndepartment of biology, indiana university, bloomington, indiana, usa obiotechnology institute, university of minnesota, st. paul, minnesota, usa pdepartment of microbiology and molecular genetics, university of california, irvine, california, usa qdepartment of molecular biology, princeton university, princeton, new jersey, usa rdepartment of pathology and laboratory medicine, david geffen school of medicine, university of california, los angeles, california, usa sdepartment of medicine, university of minnesota, minneapolis, minnesota, usa tdepartment of microbiology & immunology, university of north carolina, chapel hill, north carolina, usa ucarl r. woese institute for genomic biology, university of illinois, urbana, illinois, usa vdepartment of internal medicine, university of michigan, ann arbor, michigan, usa black lives matter. the ongoing problem of police brutality and the resulting deathsof george floyd ( ), breonna taylor ( ), and many other black people in the united states ( ) has rightly shaken the country. acts of racism should cause us to question the level to which we have personally participated in the systems of racial inequity that facilitate such acts. we all have an obligation to identify the ways that systemic racism functions in our society and in science. as scientists, we prefer to believe that we are driven by data and are immune to such detrimental behaviors. yet, if we are honest, we know that this is not always true. citation schloss pd, junior m, alvania r, arias ca, baumler a, casadevall a, detweiler c, drake h, gilbert j, imperiale mj, lovett s, maloy s, mcadam aj, newton ilg, sadowsky mj, sandri- goldin rm, silhavy tj, tontonoz p, young j-ah, cameron ce, cann i, fuller ao, kozik aj. . the asm journals committee values the contributions of black microbiologists. infect immun :e - . https://doi.org/ . / iai. - . copyright © american society for microbiology. all rights reserved. ed. note: this editorial is being published by the following asm journals: antimicrobial agents and chemotherapy, applied and environmental microbiology, clinical microbiology reviews, ecosal plus, infection and immunity, journal of bacteriology, journal of clinical microbiology, journal of microbiology and biology education, journal of virology, microbiology and molecular biology reviews, microbiology resource announcements, microbiology spectrum, molecular and cellular biology, mbio, msphere, and msystems. address correspondence to patrick d. schloss, pschloss@umich.edu. accepted manuscript posted online july published editorial crossm october volume issue e - iai.asm.org infection and immunity september o n a p ril , a t c a r n e g ie m e l l o n u n iv l ib r h ttp ://ia i.a sm .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - x https://doi.org/ . /iai. - https://doi.org/ . /iai. - https://doi.org/ . /asmcopyrightv mailto:pschloss@umich.edu https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /iai. - &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - https://iai.asm.org http://iai.asm.org/ between and , the horrific tuskegee syphilis study was performed to observe the natural history of latent syphilis infection in black men ( ). the premise of the study was driven by the racist pseudoscience of social darwinism. the study directors hypothesized that black men were inferior to white men. the study directors lied to the men about their condition, leading the men to infect their partners and children. furthermore, when penicillin was shown in to treat syphilis, the doctors hid the treatment and refused to treat the men. leading peer-reviewed journals of the time published results from the study. this textbook example of racism in microbiology underscores the historic role of scientific publishers in disseminating racist ideologies and points to the potential for scientific publishers to prevent the spread of racism. as the journals committee of the american society for microbiology, we are committed to promoting the work of black microbiologists and the issues that impact the black community. to do this, we must improve the representation of black microbiologists across the peer review process, recruit black authors to publish their research in asm’s journals, and identify aspects of peer review where there is oppor- tunity for bias to affect our decisions to publish their research, something that we wish to avoid. we must also reassess the scopes of our journals to ensure that the micro- biological problems that are important to the black community are published within the journals of this society. issues that affect the black community matter. black people in the united states in are, and historically have been, disproportionately and negatively impacted by infectious diseases ( ). the flint, mi, water crisis brought significant suffering to the primarily black community, including outbreaks of legionnaires’ disease ( ). black women are more likely to have a preterm birth, of which half are associated with a microbial etiology ( ). black children are more likely to have asthma, a disease which is associated with increased bacterial burden in the lungs ( ). black people are more likely to have a severe case of and die from coronavirus disease (covid- ) ( ). in new york city and elsewhere, the death rate due to covid- for black people is twice that for white people ( ). black people are also far more likely to be affected by sexually transmitted infections, including hiv, and evidence suggests a role for underlying structural inequities, such as mass incarceration and unequal treatment when seeking medical care ( , ). these disparities in health are an outcome of differences in socio-economic factors and the corresponding disenfranchisement. these include less access to health care, food deserts where nutritious and affordable food is not available, and poorly funded public health infrastructure. a person’s race provides no biological basis for the observed health disparities, and to assert otherwise will slow the identi- fication of solutions to these disparities. unfortunately, research related to solving such problems is often discounted. a recent analysis of research project (r ) proposals reviewed by the national institutes of health found that the community- and population-level research topics of interest to black scientists placed them at a disad- vantage for a fundable outcome and accounts for much of the reduced success rate of black scientists ( ). as an academic publisher, we have a responsibility to help to promote the importance and legitimacy of work that is important to the black com- munity. black scientists have made significant contributions in spite of the systemic racism that they have faced throughout their lives. these scientists should be able to put their energy into their science rather than into overcoming the bias and prejudice that deters their efforts and devalues their humanity. as an example, george washington carver was born into slavery yet went on to become a preeminent plant biologist, chemist, and microbiologist despite many barriers to safely obtaining an education (https:// www.tuskegee.edu/support-tu/george-washington-carver). he improved the lives of farmers by developing alternative crops to cotton, harnessing the power of rhizobia to help improve soil health, and fighting fungal plant pathogens. he impacted the lives of many black and non-black people. numerous black microbiologists have had significant impacts on topics that are particularly relevant to black communities and beyond, including drs. william hinton, ruth moore, jane hinton, and many others. in an editorial infection and immunity october volume issue e - iai.asm.org o n a p ril , a t c a r n e g ie m e l l o n u n iv l ib r h ttp ://ia i.a sm .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://www.tuskegee.edu/support-tu/george-washington-carver https://www.tuskegee.edu/support-tu/george-washington-carver https://iai.asm.org http://iai.asm.org/ interview at the microbe meeting in new orleans, la, dr. marian johnson- thompson (university of the district of columbia) recounted the lives of many of these and other black microbiologists ( ). she told the story of dr. moore, a professor at howard university who attended a general meeting of the asm. because of segrega- tion, she was not able to stay at hotels within the city or eat at any of its restaurants. although we want to believe that such systemic racism no longer exists within our discipline, we must constantly question that assumption. the stories of these microbi- ologists emphasize that representation matters. they underscore the fact that unless the perspective and challenges of black communities are represented, then they will not be addressed. in a recent msphere of influence article, dr. michael johnson recounted his shock that although there was a % increase in the number of biomedical ph.d.’s awarded to black people and those from other underrepresented groups (urgs) between and , there has not been a meaningful change in the number of assistant professors from urgs over that time ( ). in his article, he asks how he wound up at a research-intensive university as a black professor. he asks two questions of himself: “by what miracle did i beat the odds to get here?” and “what can i do to get other urms [underrepresented minorities] in a similar position as myself?” yet, it is not dr. johnson’s responsibility alone to remove these barriers. as a publisher of microbiology research, we acknowledge the important role that we have in the career development of junior scientists and the role that we have in giving legitimacy to scientific questions. for too long, we have not promoted the work of junior black and other scientists from urgs as much as we could have. we have been too passive in recruiting these scientists to publish in our journals. scientists like dr. johnson should not think that their success is a “miracle.” we also must ask ourselves what we can do to get more scientists from urgs into faculty and leadership positions. although we should always strive to recruit more people from urgs into science, the data that he reports indicate that the problem also lies with retention of this talent. as leaders of the asm journals program, we need to take a greater role in mentorship. we can recruit more junior scientists from urgs to be peer reviewers, put them in leadership positions, and publicly recognize them. as the journals committee, we seek to improve the representation of black micro- biologists and therefore take on the responsibility to do the following. ● learn from the stories of black microbiologists, past and present. we will listen. black microbiologists should not have to shoulder the burden of dismantling systems of inequality on their own. ● ensure that diverse voices and viewpoints are represented among the editors in chief. we will conduct open searches that actively recruit black scientists and scientists from urgs. we will not constrain the candidate pool to current or past editors and editorial board members, which have traditionally been the source of candidates. ● appoint editors in chief who understand that the impact of their journal is dependent on the diversity of their authors, reviewers, and editors. we will ask candidates to state their experience fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion in their application. ● improve the representation of black scientists and those from other urgs across the peer review system. each journal will develop a plan that will be regularly evaluated and used as a criterion to determine whether an editor in chief should be reappointed. ● be alert to implicit and overt bias when handling manuscripts from black and other scientists from urgs. we will work with our editors and others to under- stand bias and study where it can manifest itself in peer review. ● more fully represent the scope of how microbiology impacts the black commu- nity. we will solicit input from black microbiologists for topics that are not being editorial infection and immunity october volume issue e - iai.asm.org o n a p ril , a t c a r n e g ie m e l l o n u n iv l ib r h ttp ://ia i.a sm .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://iai.asm.org http://iai.asm.org/ addressed adequately within asm’s journals and revise the scopes of the journals accordingly. ● promote black microbiologists. we will ensure that their representation is equi- table when selecting papers for editor spotlights, authors for commentaries, and subjects for biographical reports. ● help develop the next generation of microbiologists and more actively listen. we will participate in opportunities to serve and mentor black scientists and those from other urgs through the annual biomedical research conference for minor- ity students (abrcms) and the annual conference for the society for advance- ment of chicanos/hispanics & native americans in science (sacnas). ● identify appropriate methods for identifying and quantifying representation of black microbiologists. we will collaborate closely with the asm taskforce on diversity, equity, and inclusion. there is no place for anti-black or for any form of racism within microbiology. to solve the most important microbiological problems of today and prepare for those of the future, we must leverage the experiences, perspectives, and expertise of everyone. references . boone a. june . one week that shook the world: george floyd’s death ignited protests far beyond minneapolis. star tribune, minneap- olis, mn. https://www.startribune.com/george-floyd-death-ignited -protests-far-beyond-minneapolis-police-minnesota/ /. . gardner h. june . ‘this is for you, baby’: days of protests are about more than breonna taylor. courier-journal, louisville, ky. h t t p s : / / w w w . c o u r i e r - j o u r n a l . c o m / s t o r y / n e w s / l o c a l / / / / l o u i s v i l l e - p r o t e s t s - m o r e - t h a n - b r e o n n a - t a y l o r - l m p d - s h o o t i n g / /. . peeples l. . what the data say about police brutality and racial bias—and which reforms might work. nature : – . https://doi.org/ . /d - - -z. . brandt am. . racism and research: the case of the tuskegee syphilis study. hastings cent rep : – . https://doi.org/ . / . . cyrus e, clarke r, hadley d, bursac z, trepka mj, devieux jg, bagci u, furr-holden d, coudray ms, mariano y, kiplagat s, noel i, ravelo g, paley m, wagner ef. may . the impact of covid- on african amer- ican communities in the united states. medrxiv https://www.medrxiv .org/content/ . / . . . v . . byrne bg, mccolm s, mcelmurry sp, kilgore pe, sobeck j, sadler r, love ng, swanson ms. . prevalence of infection-competent serogroup legionella pneumophila within premise plumbing in southeast michigan. mbio :e - . https://doi.org/ . /mbio. - . . fettweis jm, serrano mg, brooks jp, edwards dj, girerd ph, parikh hi, huang b, arodz tj, edupuganti l, glascock al, xu j, jimenez nr, vivadelli sc, fong ss, sheth nu, jean s, lee v, bokhari ya, lara am, mistry sd, duckworth ra, iii, bradley sp, koparde vn, orenda xv, milton sh, rozycki sk, matveyev av, wright ml, huzurbazar sv, jackson em, smirnova e, korlach j, tsai yc, dickinson mr, brooks jl, drake ji, chaffin do, sexton al, gravett mg, rubens ce, wijesooriya nr, hendricks- muñoz kd, jefferson kk, strauss jf, iii, buck ga. . the vaginal microbiome and preterm birth. nat med : – . https://doi.org/ . /s - - - . . akinbami lj, moorman je, garbe pl, sondik ej. . status of childhood asthma in the united states, – . pediatrics :s –s . https://doi.org/ . /peds. - c. . tai dbg, shah a, doubeni ca, sia ig, wieland ml. june . the disproportionate impact of covid- on racial and ethnic minorities in the united states. clin infect dis https://doi.org/ . /cid/ciaa . . yancy cw. april . covid- and african americans. jama : . https://doi.org/ . /jama. . . . hallfors dd, iritani bj, miller wc, bauer dj. . sexual and drug behavior patterns and hiv and std racial disparities: the need for new directions. am j public health : – . https://doi.org/ . /ajph . . . . institute of medicine committee on understanding and eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in health care. . unequal treatment: confronting racial and ethnic disparities in health care. the national academies press, washington, dc. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/ nbk /. . hoppe ta, litovitz a, willis ka, meseroll ra, perkins mj, hutchins bi, davis af, lauer ms, valantine ha, anderson jm, santangelo gm. . topic choice contributes to the lower rate of nih awards to african- american/black scientists. sci adv :eaaw . https://doi.org/ . / sciadv.aaw . . asm microbe. june . early african american microbiologists: making contributions/overcoming barriers. youtube video posted by asm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v�yqaozdcl gm. . johnson m. . msphere of influence: hiring of underrepresented minority assistant professors in medical school basic science depart- ments has a long way to go. msphere :e - . https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - . editorial infection and immunity october volume issue e - iai.asm.org o n a p ril , a t c a r n e g ie m e l l o n u n iv l ib r h ttp ://ia i.a sm .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://www.startribune.com/george-floyd-death-ignited-protests-far-beyond-minneapolis-police-minnesota/ / https://www.startribune.com/george-floyd-death-ignited-protests-far-beyond-minneapolis-police-minnesota/ / https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/local/ / / /louisville-protests-more-than-breonna-taylor-lmpd-shooting/ / https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/local/ / / /louisville-protests-more-than-breonna-taylor-lmpd-shooting/ / https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/local/ / / /louisville-protests-more-than-breonna-taylor-lmpd-shooting/ / https://doi.org/ . /d - - -z https://doi.org/ . /d - - -z https://doi.org/ . / https://www.medrxiv.org/content/ . / . . . v https://www.medrxiv.org/content/ . / . . . v https://doi.org/ . /mbio. - https://doi.org/ . /s - - - https://doi.org/ . /s - - - https://doi.org/ . /peds. - c https://doi.org/ . /cid/ciaa https://doi.org/ . /jama. . https://doi.org/ . /ajph. . https://doi.org/ . /ajph. . https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/nbk / https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/nbk / https://doi.org/ . /sciadv.aaw https://doi.org/ . /sciadv.aaw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqaozdcl gm https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - https://iai.asm.org http://iai.asm.org/ 	references l’antiracisme comme compétence professionnelle: quand la neutralité ne suffit plus tout le contenu éditorial du jamc représente les opinions des auteurs de ce contenu, et ces opinions ne sont pas nécessairement celles de l’association médicale canadienne et de ses filiales. e jamc | mars, | volume | numÉro © joule inc. ou ses concédants l ’enjeu de la justice raciale a occupé une place prépon­dérante en . des événements fortement médiatisés ont poussé les établissements de santé à reconnaître leurs obligations en matière d’antiracisme, un développement encou­ rageant étant donné la longue histoire d’injustice raciale asso­ ciée au domaine médical. certains médecins ont manifesté avec black lives matter ou ont pris part à des mouvements antira­ cistes, mais d’autres ont peut­être hésité, inquiets à l’idée que leur hôpital ou leur université considère cet activisme comme un manque de professionnalisme. voilà qui met au jour une contra­ diction dans le référentiel canmeds : selon ce cadre, un médecin joue un rôle de professionnel qui «  reflète les attentes de la société […] y compris […] la promotion de l’intérêt public […] et des valeurs telles […] l’humilité, le respect de la diversité […]  ». en tant que promoteurs de la santé, les médecins sont en outre appelés à améliorer la santé des collectivités qu’ils servent . si la défense des droits des minorités racisées concorde avec nos valeurs professionnelles, pourquoi hésiter à se mobiliser? c’est qu’en pratique, le rôle de professionnel fait parfois ombrage à celui de promoteur de la santé, car notre vision actuelle du pro­ fessionnalisme n’est pas neutre sur le plan racial. dans le présent article, nous analysons la manière dont ces enjeux influencent les échanges interprofessionnels et les soins aux patients hospi­ talisés, et faisons valoir qu’une transformation de notre vision actuelle du professionnalisme s’impose si nous voulons concré­ tiser les récents engagements des hôpitaux et des universités en matière d’antiracisme. depuis longtemps, le modèle du «  professionnel  » est celui d’un homme blanc cisgenre apolitique, hétéronormé et sans handicap, conformément au système centré sur «  une série de caractéristiques qui établissent tout ce qui est blanc et occiden­ tal comme normal et supérieur aux autres identités et coutumes ethniques, raciales et régionales   ». pourtant, cet état de fait ne cadre pas avec les valeurs établies de la profession médicale . c’est par leur professionnalisme que les médecins assument leur responsabilité à l’égard des patients et de la société. il est donc impératif que ces représentants du corps médical prennent part à des conversations à grande échelle sur ce qui constitue un comportement professionnel . nous avançons en fait que la responsabilisation professionnelle devant la société demande des médecins une volonté affirmée de bâtir une société plus juste, et conséquemment plus en santé. dans un récent article de débat, suzanne boroumand et ses collaborateurs qualifiaient de «  modeste   » le niveau d’adhésion des étudiants de médecine au rôle de promoteurs de la santé, situation qu’ils attribuaient à un manque de «  modèles à émuler  »; autrement dit, les étudiants ne voient pas leurs profes­ seurs incarner leur rôle de promoteurs de la santé. en revanche, le rôle de «  professionnel  » est une constante inébranlable des études de médecine. selon la théorie de la socialisation, la formation professionnelle ne sert pas qu’à l’acquisition de connaissances, elle joue aussi un rôle dans la for­ mation de l’identité ; les étudiants en médecine ont ainsi inter­ nalisé l’importance de devenir des médecins «  neutres  » qui occulteraient leur propre identité dans l’espoir d’atteindre le statut d’«  initié impartial   ». bien que ce concept de profession­ nalisme respecte la diversité, il n’encourage pas, tel qu’il est commentaire l’antiracisme comme compétence professionnelle : quand la neutralité ne suffit plus saroo sharda mbchb mmed, aruna dhara md msp, fahad alam md mscs n citation : cmaj january ; :e ­ . doi : . /cmaj. ­f voir la version anglaise de l’article ici : www.cmaj.ca/lookup/doi/ . /cmaj. points clÉs • les rôles de professionnel et de promoteur de la santé, tels qu’ils sont définis dans le référentiel canmeds, semblent incompatibles. • la vision actuelle du professionnalisme en médecine n’encourage pas la participation à des mouvements progressistes ni l’essentielle remise en question du racisme au sein même de la profession. • l’heure est venue de remettre en question la vision traditionnelle du professionnalisme en médecine afin que les médecins soient outillés pour militer en faveur d’une société où la santé de tous est importante. • bien qu’il existe des outils pour l’intégration de l’antiracisme aux programmes de médecine, il reste beaucoup de travail à faire dans les établissements d’enseignement canadiens pour que ce concept fasse partie intégrante des études de médecine. c o m m en ta ir e jamc | mars, | volume | numÉro e conçu, la participation à des mouvements progressistes, et encore moins la remise en question critique du racisme au sein même de la profession médicale. au canada, les études de médecine sont essentiellement constituées de cours magistraux durant les années précliniques, puis de stages de formation clinique. pour les étudiants, la cul­ ture du «  professionnalisme  » en médecine est donc fortement influencée par les comportements du personnel et des supé­ rieurs . les comportements appris par imitation forment une part non négligeable du programme occulte . le profession­ nalisme dont les apprenants font l’expérience dans les pro­ grammes de formation n’est cependant pas neutre sur plan de la race. au canada, les médecins résidents racisés des pro­ grammes de chirurgie indiquent que leurs compétences sont remises en question plus souvent que celles de leurs pairs de même genre, et ils ont moins confiance de voir appliquer des mesures adéquates s’ils signalent de la discrimination (ce qui, en soi, est souvent considéré comme un geste non profession­ nel) . les conclusions d’une récente étude qualitative menée auprès d’étudiants américains appartenant à des groupes sous­ représentés dans la profession médicale montrent également que les étudiants racisés doivent travailler activement à déman­ teler les stéréotypes nuisibles pour réussir à faire correspondre leurs identités professionnelle (comme médecin) et raciale . il ne fait aucun doute que les programmes d’études de médecine placent la race et le racisme parmi les déterminants de la santé, mais rien n’indique clairement qu’ils préparent adéquatement les étudiants à être solidaires des groupes tou­ chés par ces enjeux ni à promouvoir des améliorations struc­ turelles dans l’intérêt de ces groupes. de récents événements ont donné à nos établissements des raisons de s’interroger sur leur complicité dans les systèmes d’injustice  : pensons à la dif­ fusion des commentaires de professionnels de la santé à l’égard de joyce echaquan, une femme autochtone décédée dans un hôpital du québec, ou encore aux nouvelles données qui montrent la complexité et la disproportion des effets de la pandémie de maladie à coronavirus  sur la vie des per­ sonnes racisées . beaucoup d’établissements ont publié des déclarations condamnant le racisme en médecine , mais s’ils ont à cœur l’intérêt public, ces établissements doivent égale­ ment être prêts à soutenir les médecins qui s’engagent poli­ tiquement dans la promotion de l’antiracisme en tant que professionnels. manifestations publiques, organisation commu­ nautaire, prise de parole dans les milieux intellectuels  : toutes ces formes de militantisme ont leur place dans l’identité d’un médecin. l’une des difficultés, lorsqu’on tente d’élargir le concept du professionnalisme en médecine, c’est peut­être que la profes­ sion hésite à s’attaquer au racisme qui sévit dans ses rangs. au lieu de reconnaître qu’il s’agit d’un problème de taille, les établissements parlent de favoriser la diversité , . la fédéra­ tion des étudiants et des étudiantes en médecine du canada a d’ailleurs une définition très large de cette notion — «  diversité de culture, d’origine ethnique, de genre, d’orientation sexuelle, de capacité physique, de lieu géographique, de religion et de statut socioéconomique  » —, preuve s’il en est de la difficulté à nommer et à combattre spécifiquement l’injustice raciale dans la profession. en se contentant d’améliorer la diversité en général, un établissement peut prétendre, sans même s’être attaqué au racisme, avoir résolu le problème, ce qui risque d’exacerber l’oppression raciale. l’éducation antiraciste n’est pas encore ancrée dans les études de médecine au canada, mais beaucoup d’établis­ sements ont commencé à travailler activement en ce sens. par exemple, la faculté des sciences de la santé rady de l’université du manitoba offre un programme en santé autochtone qui parle entre autres d’antiracisme, et la faculté de médecine temerty de l’université de toronto a récemment annoncé son plan d’«  étendre l’éducation antiraciste dans ses espaces d’appren­ tissage, de recherche et de soins cliniques et de miser sur la sécurité culturelle pour les étudiants noirs et autochtones de tout l’établissement  ». les initiatives de ce genre viennent ren­ forcer l’idée selon laquelle l’antiracisme doit faire partie inté­ grante des études de médecine. il serait notamment possible d’élargir les programmes d’apprentissage communautaire pour y inclure explicitement la justice sociale, et ce, afin de nor­ maliser la défense de ces enjeux dans la pratique de tous les médecins, racisés ou non. l’universalisation et la normalisation d’une approche de jus­ tice raciale en santé produiront des soins de plus grande qualité pour les patients. le rôle du professionnel doit englober celui de promoteur de la santé. bien que les professionnels du milieu soient parfois en désaccord avec leurs collègues ou leurs établis­ sements, ils sont unis dans leurs obligations de défense de l’intérêt public. il est donc impératif d’encourager les médecins à se défaire de leur vision étroite du professionnalisme pour mieux se consacrer à la promotion de la justice raciale. nous ne pou­ vons pas rester neutres devant des enjeux aussi considérables que la santé et le bien­être de nos patients. références . frank jr, snell l, sherbino j, editors. canmeds physician competency framework. ottawa: royal college of physicians and surgeons of canada; (consulté le juill. ). . gray a. the bias of “professionalism” standards. palo alto (ca): stanford social innovation review; . accessible ici : ssir.org/articles/entry/the_bias_of_ professionalism_standards (consulté le juill. ). . boroumand s, stein mj, jay m, et al. addressing the health advocate role in medical education. bmc med educ ; : . . hafferty fw. professionalism and the socialization of medical students. in: cruess rl, cruess sr, steinert y, editors. teaching medical professionalism. cambridge (uk): cambridge university press; : ­ . . beagan bl. neutralizing differences: producing neutral doctors for (almost) neutral patients. soc sci med ; : ­ . . byszewski a, gill js, lochnan h. socialization to professionalism in medical schools: a canadian experience. bmc med educ ; : . . lehmann ls, sulmasy ls, desai s, et al.; professionalism and human rights committee. hidden curricula, ethics, and professionalism: optimizing clinical learning environments in becoming and being a physician: a position paper of the american college of physicians. ann intern med ; : ­ . . mocanu v, kuper tm, marini w, et al. intersectionality of gender and visible minority status among general surgery residents in canada. jama surg ; : e . . wyatt tr, rockich­winston n, taylor tr, et al. what does context have to do with anything? a study of professional identity formation in physician­trainees considered underrepresented in medicine. acad med ; : ­ . c o m m en ta ir e e jamc | mars, | volume | numÉro . webb hooper m, nápoles am, pérez­stable ej. covid­ and racial/ethnic disparities. jama ; : ­ . . canadian federation of medical students statement in response to the death of joyce echaquan [communiqué de presse]. ottawa: canadian federation of medical students; oct. . accessible ici : www.cfms.org/news/ / / / canadian ­federation­of­medical­students­statement­in­response­to­the­death ­of­joyce ­echaquan (consulté le nov. ). . ahmad nj, shi m. the need for anti­racism training in medical school curricula. acad med ; : . . funnell s, kitty d, schipper s. moving toward anti­racism. can fam physician ; : . . tahsn statement on anti­racism [communiqué de presse]. toronto: temerty school of medicine, university of toronto; oct. . accessible ici : medicine. utoronto .ca/news/tahsn­statement­anti­racism (consulté le nov. ). intérêts concurrents : aucun déclaré. cet article a été révisé par des pairs. affiliations  : service d’anesthésie (sharda) de halton healthcare – hôpital trafalgar memorial d’oakville, ont.; département d’anesthésie (sharda) de l’université mcmaster, à hamilton, ont.; département de médecine familiale (dhara) de l’université dalhousie, à halifax, n.­É.; service d’anesthésie (alam) du centre des sciences de la santé sunnybrook; département d’anesthésiologie et de médecine de la douleur (alam); et centre wilson de recherche en édu­ cation (alam) de la faculté de médecine de l’université de toronto, ont. collaborateurs  : tous les auteurs ont con­ tribué à l’élaboration et à la conception de l’étude, ont rédigé le manuscrit et en ont révisé de façon critique le contenu intellec­ tuel important; ils ont donné leur approba­ tion finale pour la version destinée à être publiée et assument l’entière responsabi­ lité de tous les aspects du travail. propriété intellectuelle du contenu  : il s’agit d’un article en libre accès distribué conformément aux modalités de la licence creative commons attribution (cc by­nc­nd . ), qui permet l’utilisation, la diffusion et la reproduction dans tout médium à la condition que la publication originale soit adéquatement citée, que l’utilisation se fasse à des fins non commerciales (c.­à­d., recherche ou éducation) et qu’aucune modification ni adaptation n’y soit apportée. voir : https://creativecommons. org/licenses/by­nc­nd/ . /deed.fr. correspondance : saroo sharda, ssharda@haltonhealthcare.com digitized collections of india’s memory institutions: a socio-historical perspective digitized collections of india’s memory institutions: a socio-historical perspective bidyarthi dutta vidyasagar university, west bengal, india anup kumar das jawaharlal nehru university, new delhi, india w: www.anupkumardas.blogspot.com sasnet online conference: rethinking the politics of memory in south asia december - , introduction • a memory institution is an organization maintaining a repository of public knowledge, and enables transition of knowledge and memory to the respective communities, such as libraries, archives, heritage sites like memorials and monuments, aquaria and arboreta, zoological and botanical gardens et al • memory institutions serve the purpose of documentation, preserving and indexing elements of human culture and collective memory. • archive is to society, what memory is to human beings • these institutions allow and enable society to better understand themselves, their past, and how the past impacts their future. • the repositories are ultimately preservers of communities, languages, cultures, customs, tribes, and individuality. these institutions eventually remain some form of collective memory. research questions • what is the role of some stipulated digitized collections to portray the rich cultural heritage of india? • how the social impact of digital collection of india’s memory institutions can be ascertained? • how and to what extent the said collection of the memory institutions maintained pace in learning and research process, particularly in the context of covid pandemic situation? objectives • to enumerate the list of digitized collections of selective memory institutions of india • to investigate the role of said digitized collections as the national heritage and to highlight respective salient features • to investigate the socio-historical perspective of said digitized collections abhilekh patal of national archives of india (nai) www.abhilekh-patal.in online records of national archives of india (nai) • national archives of india (nai) was established on march as the imperial record department, in calcutta, india. • in nai was transferred to the new capital, new delhi, and in nai was shifted into its new building. • online records of national archives of india: • abhilekh patal (abhilekh-patal.in) • netaji subhas chandra bose papers (netajipapers.gov.in) • a searchable web portal of the nai, “abhilekh patal” was launched on march on the occasion of th foundation day celebration. • this searchable portal was launched with the intention of making the rich archival treasure accessible to scholars and users. • approximately . million records of reference media have already been uploaded. • collection size: , digitized documents on abhilekh patal netaji subhas chandra bose papers (netajipapers.gov.in) • digital copies of first files relating to netaji were released on rd january by the prime minister of india. • collection size: presently digitized documents available on netajipapers.gov.in • holding departments: • prime minister’s office • ministry of external affairs • ministry of home affairs digitized collections >> curated collections, to bring you the best of our digitized records offerings http://www.netajipapers.gov.in • https://www.indianmemoryproject.com • initiated in february , by smt. anusha yadav in mumbai, india • the archive reveals valuable information about the subcontinent’s people, visitors, families & ancestors, cultures, lifestyles, traditions, choices, circumstances and thereby consequences. • www.indianmemoryproject.com/archivedirectory/ • includes digital archives (india + worldwide) • about indian archives • exemplary ones: o people’s archive of rural india o national archives of india o partition archive o tamil nadu archives o tata central archives o aditya arya archive o godrej archives o manipur state archives o national film archive of india o archive of indian music o khuda baksh oriental public library http://www.indianmemoryproject.com/archivedirectory/ • https://ruralindiaonline.org • initiated in december , by countermedia trust in mumbai, india • people's archive of rural india (pari) showcases the occupational, linguistic and cultural diversity of india and covers a countryside that the dominant media usually ignore. • provides oral histories and narratives on india’s vast rural society. https://ruralindiaonline.org/ • https://indianlabourarchives.org • initiated in july , jointly the v.v. giri national labour institute (vvgnli), noida, india and the association of indian labour historians (ailh) • "archives is to society what memory is to human beings." archives of indian labour (indianlabourarchives.org) • archives of indian labour preserves any kind of resources on issues related to labour, including: • personal correspondence and biographical material of labour leaders • documents of trade unions • journals and newspapers addressing the labouring poor • pamphlets, leaflets and posters issued by trade unions • relevant papers of employees organisations • relevant documents of business corporations • oral testimonies, personal narratives of participants in labour struggles • photographs, video tapes and films on labour • work songs and other similar material of workers' culture • trial proceedings in courts of law • records of individual and collective labour disputes • papers on international working class bodies • records of the ministry of labour, national commissions on labour and other government agencies. https://in. partitiona rchive.org https://in. partitionarchive.org • over , interviews have been collected from more than cities and villages in countries including india, pakistan, bangladesh • searchable by city: migrated from, migrated to, current city • portal launched in . directorate of state archive: govt. of west bengal digital library of the west bengal secretariat website: http://wbsl.gov.in the west bengal secretariat library, previously known as "bengal secretariat library", was established in . wbsl at writers' building, kolkata, is one of the oldest and largest library under government of west bengal. it has a traditional and historical significance. the library has a rich collection of books dating back from the british era till date. some of them are very rare. search by title: ‘madras’ retrieved records centre for studies in social sciences, kolkata, india hiteshranjan sanyal memorial collection (https://www.cssscal.org/archive.php) other distinguished collections more collections… jadunath bhawan museum and resource centre- a unit of csss (https://jbmrc.cssscal.org/) • sir jadunath sarkar ( december – may ) • the renowned indian historian • the csss, calcutta was initially established in his house, which was donated to the state government by sarkar's wife. • csss houses the jadunath bhavan museum and resource centre, a museum- cum-archive of primary sources. jadunath bhawan museum: collections conclusion • need to improve indexing and visibility of our national-level, state-level and community-driven digital archives on wikipedia, and other international directories, search engines, and metadata harvesting services. • our research scholars should undertake a comparative analysis of the lesser-known archives, and publicize their digitized collections through scholarly forums. • their metadata and navigational features should be well-documented and presented in journal articles, conference papers, theses, and dissertations. • there is a need to integrate available digital archives from india in a single platform to help the researchers and historians in finding out digital artefacts and reuse them in their scholarship. • interoperable digital collections with open licenses should be encouraged to develop. references • bhattacharya, s. ( ). archiving the british raj: history of the archival policy of the government of india, with selected documents, - . new delhi, oxford university press. • dasgupta, k. ( ). where knowledge is free:the journey of a librarian. kolkata: allcap communications. • das, a. k. ( ). digitization of documentary heritage collections in indic language: comparative study of five major digital library initiatives in india. international conference on the memory of the world in the digital age: digitization and preservation. september , vancouver, canada. • mahesh, g., & mittal, r. ( ). digital libraries in india: a review. libri, ( ), - . • mittal, r., & mahesh, g. ( ). digital libraries and repositories in india: an evaluative study. program. • das, a. k. ( ). open access to knowledge and information: scholarly literature and digital library initiatives: the south asian scenario. new delhi: unesco house. • ghosh, s. b., & kumar das, a. ( ). open access and institutional repositories—a developing country perspective: a case study of india. ifla journal, ( ), - . • das, a. k., dutta, c., & sen, b. k. ( ). information retrieval features in indian digital libraries: a critical appraisal. oclc systems & services: international digital library perspectives. • jain, p. k., & babbar, p. ( ). digital libraries initiatives in india. the international information & library review, ( ), - . • das, a. k., sen, b. k., & dutta, c. ( ). collection development in digital information repositories in india. vishwabharat@tdil, ( ), - . 🙏🙏thank you for your kind attention 🙏🙏 e: bidyarthi.bhaswati@gmail.com e: anup_csp@jnu.ac.in w: www.anupkumardas.blogspot.com sasnet conference : rethinking the politics of memory in south asia // panel sasnet – swedish south asian studies network lund university box lund, sweden visiting address: norlindska huset, biskopsgatan e-mail: sasnet@sasnet.lu.se phone: + sasnet conference : rethinking the politics of memory in south asia content introduction .................................................................................................................................................... schedule .......................................................................................................................................................... panel : cultural production and heritage politics ................................................................................. shabana ali ...................................................................................................................................................................... praggnaparamita biswas ............................................................................................................................................. moumita sen ................................................................................................................................................................. anna stirr ........................................................................................................................................................................ panel : heritage and the construction and contestation of national memory .............................. shahul ameen kt ......................................................................................................................................................... debadrita chakraborty .............................................................................................................................................. bidyarthi dutta & anup kumar das ....................................................................................................................... hamari jamatia ............................................................................................................................................................. mirza zulfiqur rahman & edward boyle .............................................................................................................. panel : violence, collective memory and trauma ................................................................................ runa chakraborty paunksins ................................................................................................................................... sujeet karn ..................................................................................................................................................................... greeshma mohan ........................................................................................................................................................ sumit saurabh srivastava ......................................................................................................................................... marvi slathia .................................................................................................................................................................. panel : navigating sites of memory in urban spaces .......................................................................... pamela das ..................................................................................................................................................................... moulshri joshi ............................................................................................................................................................... zehra kazmi ................................................................................................................................................................... sarunas paunksnis ....................................................................................................................................................... ved prakash .................................................................................................................................................................... panel : remembering displacement ...................................................................................................... priyanka bhattacharyya ............................................................................................................................................. trina bose & punyashree panda ............................................................................................................................. mohini mehta ................................................................................................................................................................ priscilla n. rozario ........................................................................................................................................................ sreya sen ......................................................................................................................................................................... panel : history writing and the politics of memory in south asia .................................................... anisa bhutia ................................................................................................................................................................... silje lyngar einarsen ................................................................................................................................................... manoj parameswaran & aiswarya sanath ........................................................................................................... deepa pawar .................................................................................................................................................................. mohammad waqas sajjad ........................................................................................................................................ hp highlight sasnet conference : rethinking the politics of memory in south asia introduction the current debates around the politics of memory and memorialization reinforce that the act of remembrance and forgetting in the present does not exist in isolation from the past that informs them. this mnemohistorical continuity becomes even more apparent in the current context of the covid- pandemic which has highlighted, like never before, the structural and systemic nature of privilege and inequality. the groups and categories of people who have been most adversely affected by the pandemic are also those who have been at the receiving end of historical injustice and oppression and in turn also the most likely to fall through the cracks of the meta-narratives of history and collective memory. further, what makes the on-going discourse on memory politics immensely relevant is its universality in that it resonates with and speaks to experiences and histories of marginalization, exploitation and exclusion across national borders and cultures. for example, in the us the murder of george floyd and the world-wide protests in solidarity with the black lives matter movement that it sparked, has brought questions of race, historical injustice, the institutionalised remembrance of difficult pasts, construction of ‘national memories’, their silences and how they are contested into sharp focus. it is not as if these are novel concerns that have suddenly erupted as a response to the current tragedy. how and what we choose to remember and forget as collectives and individuals has always been a politically fraught issue as it is intricately connected to notions of power, belonging and exclusion. ironically, in india and south asia in general, the global blm protests received considerable traction, especially across the various social media with numerous posts expressing solidarity with it, including those from prominent public personalities, celebrities and film stars. and yet, the globally significant discussion on race and prejudice assumes myriad hues and dimensions in the south asian context and needs to be acknowledged as such. this is so on account of a socio-political fabric deeply enmeshed in and shaped by religion, region, caste and class and their intersectionalities. how, and to what extent, do these play into and inform the processes of crafting and curating national histories and memories in south asia? what are the silences that exist within it and how are they contested? what are the alternative modes of remembering, marking and accounting for ‘difficult pasts’ beyond the confines of state regulated memorial projects? also, what events constitute dominant and rightful entry points into the field of memory studies and what are ignored? these are some of the questions that constitute the focus of this conference that calls for a rethinking of memory studies in south asia beyond the analytical lens of the partition that has tended to (and deservedly so) occupy centre stage in scholarship on the politics of memory in the region. conference conveners isha dubey (post-doctoral fellow, sasnet) andreas johansson (director, sasnet) contact info hanna geschewski: hanna.geschewski@sasnet.lu.se isha dubey: isha.dubey@sasnet.lu.se sasnet conference : rethinking the politics of memory in south asia schedule day – wednesday, december : – : cet opening remarks (dr. isha dubey & dr. andreas johansson) : - : cet panel – cultural production and heritage politics . shabana ali evoking public memory and re-writing histories: memorials within the anti-caste struggles . praggnaparamita biswas politicization of memory: transforming the personal recollections into the national history in maati . moumita sen the ‘demon’ of vanquished histories: memory and myth in the mahishasur movement . anna stirr the politics of remembering nepal’s cultural martyrs: the anekot commemorative gathering as political critique : - : cet panel – heritage and the construction and contestation of national memory . shahul ameen kt the making of a heritage city: conservation as development and social exclusion in ahmedabad . debadrita chakraborty biopolitics, necropolitics and nostalgia in the making of the nation: race, citizenship and gender politics in india in times of covid- (working title) . bidyarthi dutta & anup kumar das digitized collections of india’s memory institutions: a socio-historical perspective . hamari jamatia north-east india and the imaginations of sacred space . mirza zulfiqur rahman & edward boyle borders of memory at india’s northeastern edge : - : cet panel – violence, collective memory and trauma . runa chakraborty paunksins reclaiming identity: memory as mechanism of protest in the blood island and shikor chhera jibon . sujeet karn “grief arising out of violent death is like swallowing a hot chilli” a nepali case . greeshma mohan remembering and responsibility: a study of dalit life narratives . sumit saurabh srivastava remembering collective violence: interplay between caste and gender in a north-indian rural hinterland . marvi slathia collective violence, state machinery and communities: a study of hindu and muslim survivors of jammu and kashmir : - : cet lunch break / zoom lounge room for speakers hp highlight psc_ .. be devoted to lectures but rather to discussion and student engagement through collaborative work. despite the challenges of working remotely, i also maintained group projects and ensured that students would complete them and present their findings to the class. although the syllabus content and reading materials remained unchanged, the class discussions tied our current collective pre- dicament to ir theories and concepts. the final exam, which— under normal conditions—would have consisted of a set of short answers and multiple-choice questions, was changed to a long essay. the exam asked, “what ir theories and concepts can help us make sense of the global spread of the covid- pandemic and its implications on world politics (broadly defined)?” students’ responses to this question demonstrated a range of serious and personal engagement with ir theories and the pan- demic, as well as the ways in which it disproportionally affected racial and ethnic minorities, low-income families, and otherwise vulnerable populations in the united states. drawing from marx- ist and postcolonial theories and a critique of capitalism, many students argued that covid- was one of numerous other medical and social “pandemics” that can be traced to the legacies of unequal distribution of power and opportunities in the united states and around the world. a pandemic pedagogy of care therefore opens up the possibility of “doing ir as if people mattered.” in this instance, for a student population of young black men in america, the covid- pan- demic along with the police and state violence and black lives matter movement that flared up this summer are all central to how we make sense of and relate to the world of (international) politics. ultimately, if we accept inayatullah’s ( , ) polemic that “teaching is impossible. learning is unlikely… [w]e enter the classroom to encounter others. with them, we can meditate on the possibility of our own learning,” perhaps then a pandemic peda- gogy of care is simply that: encountering our students so we may all meditate on our collective predicament.▪ notes . united negro college fund, “hbcus make america strong: the positive impact of historically black colleges and universities.” available at https://cdn.uncf.org/ wp-content/uploads/hbcu_consumer_brochure_final_approved.pdf?_ ga= . . . - . . . morehouse college’s mission, available at www.morehouse.edu/about/mission. html. . see morehouse college’s campaign to raise funds to support students experien- cing hardship. available at https://ignite.morehouse.edu/project/ . . i am grateful to jonneke koomen, from whom i first heard this expression. references inayatullah, naeem. . “teaching is impossible: a polemic.” in pedagogical journeys through world politics, ed. jamie frueh, – . london: palgrave macmillan. price, gregory n. . “ in hbcus were financially fragile before covid- endangered all colleges and universities.” the conversation, june . available at https://theconversation.com/ -in- -hbcus-were-financially-fragile-before- covid- -endangered-all-colleges-and-universities- . smith, heather ann, and david hornsby. . “towards a pandemic pedagogy: power and politics in learning and teaching.” available at doi: . / rg. . . . . teaching in times of crisis: covid- and classroom pedagogy ayesha ray, king’s college doi: . /s covid- brought unexpected challenges to institutions of higher learning. like most academics, as a full-time faculty member teaching political science at a liberal arts college, i also experienced the dramatic changes that came with the transition to distance delivery and remote instruction. my institution shifted to online instruction in mid-march. although there are major barriers to online teaching (keengwe and kidd ), this article outlines positive lessons i drew from the transition: what worked and what did not. the methods i used applied to all of my courses for spring . i teach relatively small classes between and students. this allows for better engagement and made online teaching via zoom simpler. i found the use of zoom and panopto especially helpful in adapting students to a smoother online delivery (mohanty and yaqub ). both zoom and panopto allowed me to combine elements of both synchronous and asynchronous teaching. first, i held my classes during regularly scheduled times to mimic the in-class experience. the delivery was mostly a mix of slides and discussions, sometimes using the chat feature and breakout rooms. synchronous lectures were recorded on panopto and uploaded to moodle for students who were unable to attend live meetings. this helped many students who suggested in their end-of-course assessment that recorded lectures kept them informed about the course material when they were unable to attend the synchronous classes. students who were working, had difficult home environments, or were experiencing personal hard- ships and could not regularly attend the live lectures benefited most from the recorded lectures. second, given the difficult circumstances in which students found themselves, i relaxed my attendance rules for spring . it was not mandatory for them to be present during synchronous sessions, especially for those who had additional jobs or who could not attend due to time constraints and other reasons. third, a significant component of my online pedagogy was the use of a discussion forum. based on each week’s course readings, i posted one focused question and students were given a two-to- three-day window to submit their responses. the same questions, including student responses, were revisited during synchronous lectures. maintaining an overarching theme/question enabled students to address the learning outcomes for the course. this this calls for a pedagogy of care, not because our students are incapable of facing and surmounting challenges but rather because they are already in a disadvantaged position, which compounds the effects of the pandemic. ps • january teac her s potlight: covid - and emer g enc y e-lear ni ng in political s cience a nd ir ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. https://cdn.uncf.org/wp-content/uploads/hbcu_consumer_brochure_final_approved.pdf?_ga= . . . - . https://cdn.uncf.org/wp-content/uploads/hbcu_consumer_brochure_final_approved.pdf?_ga= . . . - . https://cdn.uncf.org/wp-content/uploads/hbcu_consumer_brochure_final_approved.pdf?_ga= . . . - . https://cdn.uncf.org/wp-content/uploads/hbcu_consumer_brochure_final_approved.pdf?_ga= . . . - . http://www.morehouse.edu/about/mission.html http://www.morehouse.edu/about/mission.html https://ignite.morehouse.edu/project/ https://theconversation.com/ -in- -hbcus-were-financially-fragile-before-covid- -endangered-all-colleges-and-universities- https://theconversation.com/ -in- -hbcus-were-financially-fragile-before-covid- -endangered-all-colleges-and-universities- https://doi.org/ . /rg. . . . https://doi.org/ . /rg. . . . method also was used to replace in-class discussions by giving students the opportunity to participate virtually. the discussion forum comprised % of their overall grade. i maintained a tally of weekly points for students who used the forum. the results were somewhat mixed. most students who had been fairly engaged continued to post to the forum; others apparently ignored it. as online delivery continues into the fall, use of the discussion forum will be tweaked to make it mandatory for all students to submit at least one response every week—even if that response is a brief reflection or comment (christopher, thomas, and tallent- runnels ). fourth, i gave students the option to upload their papers through turnitin or email. i preferred receiving papers as word documents via email so i could use the “track changes” function to edit and grade. this was an easier option because i find some turnitin editing and commenting features to be unwieldy. the final exam—a combination of three- to five-sentence conceptual definitions and five -word short essay questions—was altered to a take-home–exam format. students were provided a template with the final-exam questions two weeks in advance. papers were to be returned on an assigned due date during the scheduled final- exam period. most students were diligent and found it quite easy to follow these instructions. although i returned student papers within a week, grading online was significantly labor intensive (lao and gonzales ; sellani and harrington ). at the end of the course, i used a feedback tool on moodle to compile my own evaluations that asked students basic questions on course content in addition to the main tools they preferred in remote learning. most students were pleased to have the option of both synchronous meetings and recorded lectures. many reported that they were satisfied with my communication and that i had maintained the same momentum as an in-person class by keeping the content, structure, and objectives the same. although i man- aged to use online tools in the spring and will continue using them in the fall, teaching daily classes on zoom can be exhausting— especially with a higher teaching load. there is something deeply limiting about not having the physical and mental space to move around in the classroom. interpersonal interactions also are more difficult, making student participation challenging. mutual respect and setting ground rules are important principles for me, especially as a female instructor. student privacy is an important concern; however, if synchronous lectures become the norm in the fall, then—in this spirit of mutual respect—i will expect my students to be present at all online meetings for my courses. key to managing online instruction without too many obstacles—at least in my case—were flexibility and communication (jones, kolloff, and kolloff ). i cannot emphasize this enough. given the unnatural circumstances in which both faculty and students find themselves, being flexible and clearly communicat- ing ideas are crucial. this means relaxing unreasonable expect- ations of students. successful online instruction depends on delivering course content as simply as possible without compli- cating or adding to/revising the curriculum.▪ references christopher, mary m., julie a. thomas, and mary k. tallent-runnels. . “raising the bar: encouraging high-level thinking in online discussion forums.” roper review ( ): – . jones, paula, mary a. kolloff, and fred kolloff. . “students’ perspectives on humanizing and establishing teacher presence in an online course.” society for information technology and teacher education international conference, las vegas, nv, march – . keengwe, jared, and terry t. kidd. . “towards best practices in online learning and teaching in higher education.” merlot journal of online learning and teaching ( ): – . lao, teresa, and carmen gonzales. . “understanding online learning through a qualitative description of professors and students’ experiences.” journal of technology and teacher education ( ): – . mohanty, manoranjan, and waheeb yaqub. . “towards seamless authentication for zoom-based online teaching and meeting.” available at arxiv.org/abs/ . . sellani, robert j., and william harrington. . “addressing administrator/faculty conflict in an academic online environment.” the internet and higher education ( ): – . simulating “normalcy” in a global pandemic: synchronous e-learning and the ethics of care in teaching stéphanie martel, queen’s university serena rourke, queen’s university sydney wade, queen’s university munro watters, queen’s university doi: . /s the benefits of using simulations as an active-learning activity in the political science classroom are well documented (asal and blake , – ; newmann and twigg , – ). insights from the pedagogy literature in the discipline already address a variety of formats, including simulations developed for in-person learning in or outside of the classroom or entirely online (taylor , – ). yet the covid- pandemic presents new oppor- tunities and challenges. instructors may need to consider whether and how an in-person simulation can be conducted while main- taining physical distancing, determine if and how it can be con- ducted remotely, and reassess the balance between synchronous and asynchronous learning. this article builds on our experience, as instructor and students, in remotely conducting an in-class simulation in the context of emergency e-learning as part of a fourth-year under- graduate seminar in international relations at a canadian univer- sity. we offer practical advice on how to move simulations online as well as broader insight into the value of a hybrid approach to remote learning that combines asynchronous and synchronous components and how this can be grounded in a pedagogy of care (smith and hornsby ). the voices of student coauthors, identified by their first name, are woven in throughout the follow- ing discussion. our hope is that this contribution will inform how students, educators, and administrators approach the so-called new normal in postsecondary education. in this particular course, the transition to emergency e-learning entailed adapting an in-class, two-week simulation of a diplomatic negotiation between parties to the south china sea disputes for remote instruction in less than a week. this decision was made amid emerging discussions about synchronous versus asynchron- ous learning in an emergency context (barrett-fox ; flaherty ). most of the structure of the simulation, which involved both synchronous and asynchronous components, was preserved, and the structure and timeline were adjusted so that the assign- ment could be conducted via zoom. the simulation also became optional: students could choose an alternative (i.e., fully asyn- chronous) assignment. ps • january ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. health implications of black lives matter among black adults | springerlink advertisement search 	 log in search springerlink search 	published: april health implications of black lives matter among black adults 	eleanor k. seaton  orcid: orcid.org/ - - - , 	aggie j. yellow horse , 	hyung chol yoo & 	edward vargas   journal of racial and ethnic health disparities volume  , pages – ( )cite this article 	 accesses 	 citations 	 altmetric 	 metrics details a correction to this article was published on may this article has been updated abstract objective the current study examined whether knowledge, understanding and support of the black lives matter movement were positively linked to self-reported physical health among a representative sample of black american adults. methods the collaborative multiracial post-election survey (cmps) examined attitudes about the us election, immigration, policing, racial equality, and racial discrimination among asian american, black american, latinx, and white adults. the current study used the black american sample, which included individuals ( % female) older than  years of age. we used a set of logistic regression models to assess the associations of knowledge, support, and understanding of black lives matter with overall physical health. results although knowledge of black lives matter was not a significant predictor for physical health, understanding and supporting black lives matter significantly predicted positive physical health among black american adults. conclusions black american adults who understand and support black lives matter reported more positive overall physical health. this is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution. access options buy single article instant access to the full article pdf. us$ . tax calculation will be finalised during checkout. subscribe to journal immediate online access to all issues from . subscription will auto renew annually. us$ tax calculation will be finalised during checkout. rent this article via deepdyve. learn more about institutional subscriptions change history 	 may the names of two coauthors of this article were updated following the article’s original publication. references 	 .garza a, tometi o, cullors p. a herstory of the# blacklivesmatter movement. are all the women still white. : – . 	 .khan-cullors p. when they call you a terrorist: a black lives matter memoir: canongate books; . 	 .movement for black lives. . https://policy.m bl.org/about/. 	 .dixson ad. “what’s going on?”: a critical race theory perspective on black lives matter and activism in education. urban educ. ; ( ): – . article  google scholar  	 .hargons c, mosley d, falconer j, faloughi r, singh a, stevens-watkins d, et al. black lives matter: a call to action for counseling psychology leaders. couns psychol. ; ( ): – . article  google scholar  	 .royal c, hill ml. fight the power: making# blacklivesmatter in urban education: introduction to the special issue. urban educ. ; ( ): – . article  google scholar  	 .garcía jj-l, sharif mz. black lives matter: a commentary on racism and public health. am j public health. ; ( ):e – . article  google scholar  	 .bassett mt. # blacklivesmatter—a challenge to the medical and public health communities. n engl j med. ; ( ): – . cas  article  google scholar  	 .edwards f, esposito mh, lee h. risk of police-involved death by race/ethnicity and place, united states, – . am j public health. ; ( ): – . article  google scholar  	 .mapping police violence. police violence 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black/african american women using civic engagement: a pilot study. bmc public health. ; ( ): . article  google scholar  	 .barreto m, frasure-yokley l, vargas ed, wong j. the collaborative multiracial post-election survey (cmps), . los angeles; . 	 .barreto ma, frasure-yokley l, vargas ed, wong j. best practices in collecting online data with asian, black, latino, and white respondents: evidence from the collaborative multiracial post-election survey. politics, groups, and identities. ; ( ): – . article  google scholar  	 .barreto m, segura g. latino america: how america’s most dynamic population is poised to transform the politics of the nation: public affairs; . 	 .cadenas ga, bernstein bl, tracey tj. critical consciousness and intent to persist through college in daca and us citizen students: the role of immigration status, race, and ethnicity. cult divers ethn minor psychol. ; ( ): – . article  google scholar  	 .rapa lj, diemer ma, bañales j. critical action as a pathway to social mobility among marginalized youth. dev psychol. ; ( ): – . article  google scholar  	 .freire p. pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: continuum ; . google scholar  	 .united states census. place of birth for the foreign-born population in the united states. washington, dc: united states census bureau; . google scholar  	 .mapping police violence. national trends . google scholar  download references author information affiliations 	t. denny sanford school of social and family dynamics, arizona state university, tempe, az, usa eleanor k. seaton 	school of social transformation, arizona state university, tempe, az, usa aggie j. yellow horse, hyung chol yoo & edward vargas authors	eleanor k. seatonview author publications you can also search for this author in pubmed google scholar 	aggie j. yellow horseview author publications you can also search for this author in pubmed google scholar 	hyung chol yooview author publications you can also search for this author in pubmed google scholar 	edward vargasview author publications you can also search for this author in pubmed google scholar corresponding author correspondence to eleanor k. seaton. ethics declarations conflict of interest the authors declare that they have no conflict of interest. additional information publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. the original version of this article was revised: the names of two coauthors of this article were updated following the article’s original publication: the names “aggie noah” and “brandon yoo” are now given in the article’s author line as “aggie j. yellow horse” and “hyung chol yoo”, respectively. rights and permissions reprints and permissions about this article cite this article seaton, e.k., yellow horse, a.j., yoo, h.c. et al. health implications of black lives matter among black adults. j. racial and ethnic health disparities , – ( ). https://doi.org/ . /s - - -z download citation 	received: january 	revised: march 	accepted: march 	published: april 	issue date: december 	doi: https://doi.org/ . /s - - -z keywords 	black lives matter 	black american 	adults 	physical health indicator access options buy single article instant access to the full article pdf. us$ . tax calculation will be finalised during checkout. subscribe to journal immediate online access to all issues from . subscription will auto renew annually. us$ tax calculation will be finalised during checkout. rent this article via deepdyve. learn more about institutional subscriptions advertisement over million scientific documents at your fingertips switch edition 	 academic edition 	 corporate edition 	home 	impressum 	legal information 	privacy statement 	california privacy statement 	how we use cookies 	manage cookies/do not sell my data 	accessibility 	contact us not logged in - . . . north east research libraries ( ) - lyrasis ( ) - carnegie mellon university ( ) - carnegie mellon university hunt library ( ) springer nature © springer nature switzerland ag. part of springer nature. \ . /primer. . development of a health policy elective for medical students during the covid- pandemic: a pilot study rebecca walton, bs | alexandra greenberg, ms, msph | daniel ehlke, phd | orlando solá, md, mph primer. ; : . published: / / | doi: . /primer. . abstract introduction: in central brooklyn, downstate health sciences university (dhsu) serves a diverse population that has experienced worsening rates of chronic disease and elevated rates of morbidity and mortality related to the covid- pandemic. the medical community has shown an interest in addressing clinical and nonclinical disparities impacting patients’ health and safety. as such, health policy knowledge is of special importance during a time of social and political unrest. health policy and advocacy are listed in medical education guidelines, but there is a lack of standardized guidelines for implementation of a robust health policy curriculum within the rigors of clinical education. methods: faculty from the department of family medicine and the department of health policy and administration devised a health policy curriculum to be delivered virtually in the wake of covid- - related quarantine. to assess the effectiveness of the curriculum, we administered pre- and postsurveys composed of learning objectives placed on a -point likert scale, at each learning session. results: the results of these surveys showed an increase in con`dence in the learning objectives of each educational session. conclusion: this pilot study warrants further research to fully assess the effect of a health policy curriculum on students’ con`dence in health policy knowledge and skills. “education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.” —nelson mandela introduction downstate health sciences university (dhsu) serves a diverse ethnic and economically disadvantaged community in central brooklyn, new york, with higher rates of economic adversity compared to national . /primer. . of averages. consequently, patients in this community suffer from unique health disparities in rates of maternal-fetal mortality, metabolic disease, and effects from the covid- pandemic. health policy and advocacy referenced in medical educational guidelines encourage physicians to reach beyond the conventional clinical format to address the myriad social determinants that affect patient health. these skills are especially important as our communities are shaken by ongoing political, social, and economic unrest. we believe that integrating health policy into medical education will empower future health care leaders to navigate institutional, local, and national obstacles to providing high-quality patient care. although several medical schools have developed policy curricula, few take a comprehensive approach, and no validated guidelines exist for implementing such a course. while % of medical schools offer some form of policy education, the amount and extent of coursework varies, with an average of hours over years. in a survey conducted by malik et al, % of medical students sampled reported no current or previous activity in health policy, with % willing to undertake a future role. common barriers to student involvement included lack of knowledge and time and an unawareness of available opportunities. in response to these de`ciencies, faculty from the department of family medicine and the department of health policy and administration developed a course to augment existing policy training opportunities. the covid- pandemic highlighted the importance of health policy knowledge and created a need for remote learning that met existing educational standards. the development and implementation of this course was therefore expedited in order to meet these needs. methods a -week course was offered to rising fourth-year medical students as a remote course during the pandemic. as the school transitioned to virtual learning, a list of available remote courses was sent to the students, that included the health policy elective. ultimately, the course was held over the span of months with students enrolled per month. the curriculum outline details the sessions. asynchronous sessions are prerecorded lectures focusing on creating a health policy fund of knowledge. the synchronous sessions allow learners to regect on the recorded content and develop speci`c competencies meant for use in pursuing their policy agenda. open- discussion sessions focusing on current topics create an informal venue for learners to share in free- ranging discussion. a writing workshop allows learners to practice health policy writing with one-on-one mentoring, with completed articles submitted to a peer-reviewed institutional policy newsletter. during the resolution writing workshop, learners are guided through cognitive models that assist in the development of policy proposals, followed by a review of parliamentary processes and the production of a policy resolution with associated implementation strategy. to assess the impact of this -week elective, we provided pre- and postlecture surveys using a -point likert scale, with questions derived from each session’s learning objectives. surveys were anonymous and voluntary, and provided via qualtrics. we performed a paired-sample wilcoxon signed-rank test to determine whether there was a signi`cant difference in likert scores reported by participants before vs after educational sessions. surveys were voluntary, thus the number of students who had attended the session and completed both the pre- and postsurvey varied. we also collected and analyzed advocacy content created by learners, including articles and resolutions, for professionalism and content. our institutional review board (irb) reviewed this study and determined it to be exempt. , - , . /primer. . of     results we found that - participants (number varied by session) completed both pre- and postsurveys: health policy basics, health `nancing, american health policy, lgbtq+ health policy, resolution writing, and the writing workshop. we chose these sessions for analysis because of the availability of matched pre- and postsurvey results collected for six or more students, as well as the desire to evaluate both lecture and workshop sessions. we measured a signi`cant increase (p<. ) for all likert-scale questions before and after these lectures (table ). the improvement in median pre- vs postsession scores ranged from . to . this signi`cant increase in score indicates students on average reported an increase in con`dence in their knowledge and skills relating to important health policy topics, as de`ned by session learning objectives. conclusions the survey responses show an increase in con`dence in health policy comprehension and skills. however, this pilot study has notable limitations. internal validity was affected by the small sample size and our dependence on participants’ self-assessment, and selective bias may have affected the pool of learners who elected to take the health policy course in lieu of alternative remote learning opportunities. another limitation stems from this course not being required for all medical students, but rather offered as a voluntary elective. therefore, our sample is self-selected, as the participants may have a preexisting interest in the content. finally, our outcomes were based on self-reported feedback, making this a kirkpatrick level assessment. this low level of assessment is another limitation. moving forward, we will expand this curriculum to a larger audience in dhsu, including students and residents. once allowed, synchronous sessions will transition to in-person, where programs such as visits to local elected oncials can resume. data gathered from implementation of the full curriculum will provide guidelines for the integration of similar content in general medical and postgraduate education. there is a persistent need for health policy reform, and covid- and the black lives matter movement have highlighted the need for political advocacy from the medical community. nevertheless, there is lack of standardized guidelines for implementing health policy curriculum that combines the competencies necessary for effective advocacy. the `ndings from this pilot study warrant further investigation into the necessity and utility of health policy education for medical students. tables and figures . /primer. . of . /primer. . of corresponding author orlando solá, md, mph author ahliations rebecca walton, bs - suny downstate health sciences university, brooklyn, ny alexandra greenberg, ms, msph - suny downstate health sciences university, brooklyn, ny daniel ehlke, phd - suny downstate health sciences university, brooklyn, ny orlando solá, md, mph - suny downstate medical center, brooklyn, ny references . united states census bureau. king’s county (brooklyn borough), new york. https://www.census.gov /quickfacts/kingscountybrooklynboroughnewyork. accessed june , . . united states census bureau. united states. https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table /us/pst . accessed june , . . webb hooper m, nápoles am, pérez-stable ej. covid- and racial/ethnic disparities. jama. ; ( ): - . doi: . /jama. . . national academies of sciences. the state of health disparities in the united states. in: weinstein jn, geller a, negussie y, baciu a, eds. communities in action: pathways to health equity. . /primer. . of washington, dc: the national academies press; : . . centers for diesase control and prevention. racial and ethnic disparities continue in pregnancy- related deaths. https://www.cdc.gov/media/releases/ /p -racial-ethnic-disparities- pregnancy-deaths.html. published . accessed june , . . accreditation council for graduate medical education. common program requirements. acgme. https://www.acgme.org/what-we-do/accreditation/common-program-requirements. accessed may , . . liaison committee on medical education. standards, publications, and noti`cation forms. lcme. https://lcme.org/publications/. accessed may , . . mou d, sarma a, sethi r, merryman r. the state of health policy education in u.s. medical schools. n engl j med. ; ( ):e . doi: . /nejmp . malik b, ojha u, khan h, begum f, khan h, malik q. medical student involvement in health policy roles. adv med educ pract. ; : - . doi: . /amep.s . walton r, greenberg a, ehlke d, sola o. health policy curriculum outline. stfm resource library. https://resourcelibrary.stfm.org/viewdocument/health-policy-curriculum- outline?communitykey= b d- f- e - de- faced a a. published . accessed october , . . walton r, greenberg a, ehlke d, sola o. survey template. stfm resource library. https://resourcelibrary.stfm.org/viewdocument/survey-template?communitykey= b d- f- e - de- faced a a. published . accessed october , . copyright © by the society of teachers of family medicine . /primer. . of inclusive teaching in isolating situations: impact of covid- on efforts toward increasing diversity in bme teaching tips - special issue (covid) inclusive teaching in isolating situations: impact of covid- on efforts toward increasing diversity in bme memoria e. matters , andrew o. brightman, patrice m. buzzanell , and carla b. zoltowski school of engineering education, purdue university, west lafayette, in , usa; weldon school of biomedical engineering, purdue university, west lafayette, in , usa; department of communication, university of south florida, tampa, fl , usa; and schools of electrical and computer engineering and (by courtesy) engineering education, purdue university, west lafayette, in , usa (received june ; accepted july ; published online august ) as part of national science foundation (nsf) sponsored research in the formation of engineers (rfe), we have been focusing on inclusive teaching strategies for engineering professors. now, in the presence of a pandemic and protests for racial justice in america, underrepresented students are facing unprecedented challenges as they navigate new situa- tions of remote learning. what does inclusive teaching look like in this new context, and what does this mean for teaching in the future? background our research group was formed to investigate the intersection of three goals in engineering education: professional formation of students, diversity and inclusion, and a sociotechnical perception of engi- neering. we approached these goals with design thinking in collaboration with faculty, staff, and stu- dents in a comparative study of two engineering departments—electrical and computer engineering (ece) and biomedical engineering (bme)—at a large, research-intensive university. in our recent work, we have highlighted the importance of faculty support for engineering students, especially those in underrepre- sented groups. through interviews, we found that bme undergraduate students felt they were ‘‘on their own’’ to navigate the system of getting their degree and finding jobs. they felt it was up to them to learn effective study habits, find a practical specialization, and seek out professional development opportunities. however, all of those skills are heavily influenced by students’ previous knowledge and experience, or cul- tural and social capital, within the world of engineer- ing. if it is left up to students to navigate the complexities of a career in bme, then underrepre- sented and underprivileged students, who are less likely to have the types of cultural and social capital typically expected for that career, are at a distinct disadvantage for success. therefore, if professors become more en- gaged with their students both inside and outside of the classroom, it can help level the playing field among a diverse student body. a call for stronger relationships between engineer- ing professors and students has a strong precedent in the literature. to aid the persistence of underrepre- sented stem students, it is important that professors foster their interest, capacity, and belongingness in their field. stronger faculty-student relationships are associated with higher performance and confidence in students, while student-perceived distance from fac- ulty may actually harm self-efficacy and confi- dence. the evidence implies that to teach inclusively means to actively form relationships with students, work to understand them individually as people, and engage in ‘‘informal mentoring’’ in everyday classes and office hours. this means that inclusive teaching takes work. to professors already juggling a multitude of responsibilities, personally investing in students can become an emotional, professional, and even financial burden. we observed this conflict in our interviews with ece professors, who perceived a lack of resources and support to take action for diversity and inclusion. as one resulting intervention, we developed inclusive teaching ‘‘tip sheets’’ targeted at both the ece and bme departments that lists simple inclusive practices address correspondence to memoria e. matters, school of engineering education, purdue university, west lafayette, in , usa. electronic mail: matters@purdue.edu biomedical engineering education, vol. , no. , january (� ) pp. – https://doi.org/ . /s - - - biomedical engineering society - / / - / � biomedical engineering society http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &amp;domain=pdf intended to take little extra time or resources for pro- fessors to implement. examples include showcasing in class a wide variety of career paths related to the course material, addressing students by name, and deliberately inviting students to office hours. all of these tips, of course, assumed an in-person learning environment which suddenly evaporated when cam- puses across the country shut down and/or moved to remote learning in the wake of the coronavirus pan- demic. challenge: diversity and isolation campus shutdowns and self-isolation suddenly dis- rupted every aspect of university operation and the lives of students, faculty, and staff. professors are scrambling to redesign courses for remote learning amid the wider community’s uncertainty about finan- cial stability, social isolation, and the virus itself. in a time of heightened stress and physical separation for both instructors and students, the idea of faculty-stu- dent connection has become obscure. if bme students felt they were ‘‘on their own’’ before the coronavirus, now they are more on their own than ever. what does this situation mean for underrepresented and under- privileged students? some students in bme have noted recently that their family and living situations make it difficult to complete school assignments on time and communi- cate with their classmates for team assignments. these are just some ways that the switch to online learning has affected students in unanticipated ways. without the ‘‘equalizing’’ environment of the classroom and campus, students’ differences in economic as well as cultural and social capital are exacerbated. many stu- dents do not have access to a quiet place at home to do their schoolwork, or reliable access to a computer with internet. many low-income students relied heavily on university resources for food, housing, and healthcare. when those resources were suddenly shut down, some students who were told to leave campus had nowhere else to go. underprivileged students have had to navigate online learning while also dealing with unex- pected expenses, loss of jobs and housing, and worry about the health and safety of themselves and their families. to complicate matters, the recent national attention on racism in america and the resurgence of the black lives matter movement after the death of george floyd have disrupted black students’ lives further by bringing their trauma to the surface. many black stu- dents have been forced to become activists for their own survival, while recognizing that the universities they attend are in many ways complicit in institutional racism. these students are attempting to continue their coursework while the country publicly debates their right to live. in all the above ways, diversity and inclusion in higher education are more relevant than ever, espe- cially at the critical nexus of professional formation and sociotechnical integration, and yet because of re- mote learning and other isolating situations appears harder to support. novel initiative: inclusive remote teaching how can the bme educational community bring much needed support to underrepresented students during isolation? what is inclusive teaching in the context of remote instruction? although remote learning has changed the mechanics of how instructors are able to interact with students, the spirit of our inclusive teaching tip sheet remains. it is a set of strategies grounded in compassion and support, and made to foster interest, capacity, and belongingness in underrepresented students. in this section, we reimag- ine each of our tips in the current context of isolating situations. where possible, we point to examples of some specific virtual tools that instructors can use in their remote learning courses. interest students need to feel that course material is important and relevant to the world and their own futures. amid the current uncertainty, students may be struggling more than usual to stay engaged in course topics and see the true impact of what they are learn- ing. our tips for fostering interest in remote learning courses are: � incorporate active learning to keep students en- gaged: although active learning in a remote class may sound daunting, there are many tools avail- able to create engaging activities virtually. if teaching through zoom or webex, you can carry out pair-and-share activities and other discussions using breakout rooms. zoom is also capable of hosting a live collaborative whiteboard where students can share ideas. you can also create live quiz games and other activities with kahoot!. biomedical engineering society matters et al. � connect course material to the real world and people: just as in in-person courses, continue to spend time in remote lectures explaining the real- world applications and impacts of what you teach. including discussions of recent biomedical engi- neering research and responses to covid- , both from your own campus as well as globally, is a prime example. � showcase career paths which use your course mate- rial: invite guest speakers working in the area of your course to your remote lectures to talk about their work and take questions. also, provide students with links to videos about the wide variety of careers in bme (the nsf and the american institute for medical and biomedical engineering (aimbe) websites are just two sources) and follow-up with online discussions related to student submitted questions. � embed research experiences into courses: integrat- ing research into courses is vital to fostering interest, but it is made difficult by the lack of access to laboratories during social distancing. to continue emphasizing the connection between course material and research, you can create class activities or assignments where students design an experiment and get feedback. you can also have students find examples of bme research online to post in discussion boards. capacity students’ capacity in engineering includes both their ability and perceived ability, or self-efficacy. in other words, students need to feel capable of succeeding in the field. the extra challenges of remote learning, in which students have less access to academic support from instructors, staff, and peers, can be damaging to students’ confidence. fostering students’ capacity involves using a growth mindset, or the belief that ability is not fixed but can change, in order to encourage students to keep trying. our tips for fos- tering capacity through remote learning are: � understand and accommodate differences in re- sources: as discussed above, not all students have access to ideal remote learning conditions. be aware of assumptions you could be making about students’ resources (technology, time, living condi- tions, etc.) and have a plan to accommodate students’ unique situations when necessary. � provide consistent feedback so students can recog- nize their progress: just as in in-person courses, return graded exams and assignments as soon as possible so students can correct course early. the remote learning context also provides opportuni- ties to leverage auto-grading capabilities of learn- ing management systems and other digital technologies (e.g. gradescope, crowdmark, etc.). � provide opportunities for students to build confi- dence: when creating assignments, break up longer problems and projects into distinct steps so they are less overwhelming. also, an important way that students can build confidence is through group work (as long as their contributions are valued); however, group assignments can be tricky to implement remotely. to help alleviate communi- cation issues between group members, you can create defined roles for group members and help groups establish a communication plan before starting the project. � destigmatize students needing help: some students may be nervous about attending office hours, and the unfamiliar format of virtual office hours may make them even less likely to attend. hold virtual office hours and make it clear to students that they are welcome and that you want to help them. additionally, provide an asynchronous way for students to ask questions—even anony- mously—through a discussion board like piazza. � embrace questions in class: praise students asking questions during remote lectures by saying ‘‘thanks for asking,’’ or ‘‘good question,’’ to encourage more questions. you can also use the zoom or webex chat feature or hotseat to make it easier for students to ask questions. belongingness students need to feel that people like them belong in the field. since belongingness is influenced by visible role models and strong relationships at school, this is one of the most difficult factors to work toward in a remote setting. however, given the particular struggles of underrepresented students during this time, it is also one of the most important. our tips for belongingness adapted to remote learning are: � model authenticity and vulnerability: acknowledg- ing your own challenges and life situation in the pandemic as well as your struggles with online technology and virtual teaching can provide a biomedical engineering society inclusive teaching in isolating situations connection point for students. asking for student suggestions on how to make the virtual classroom feel more connected can also encourage a sense of belonging in the class, even if means potential for introducing some changes to the routine. � include diverse students in class participation: when taking questions during remote lectures, ask to hear from students who haven’t spoken yet so that a diverse set of voices is heard. providing short interactive activities for peers to get to know each other in virtual breakout rooms can also enhance belonging in the virtual classroom. � use diverse engineers as examples: just as in in- person courses, showcase the accomplishments of diverse engineers when discussing real-world exam- ples and represent diversity in any imaginary characters you create for practice problems. the virtual classroom allows opportunities for guest appearances from diverse academic and industry colleagues who might otherwise not be able to attend in-person due to distance and time commit- ments. � show interest in individual students: during remote learning, students may feel especially disconnected from instructors. to let students know you care, you can learn students’ names and address them by name, even in remote lectures. at the beginning of the term, create an introduction activity (during lecture or via student-made videos) to get to know your students. if possible, schedule one-on-one meetings with students to check how they are doing in the course and in life. these extra interactions can make a big difference to students’ sense of belonging. � promote diversity in student leadership roles: rec- ognizing that student activities and employment have been limited by restrictions of the coron- avirus, it is still important to consider representing diversity when you do have opportunities to offer students (such as undergraduate research positions or assistantships). these are just a few examples among many and varied options of inclusive teaching practices that can be adapted for remote learning. we encourage instructors to consider how other inclusive strategies from their own experiences and from colleagues can be incorporated into remote instruction. the work for increasing diversity and inclusion in bme is inher- ently difficult—it requires introspection and a will- ingness to make mistakes —and the current circumstances might make it seem even more daunt- ing. however, those circumstances’ effects on under- represented students is precisely why this work is so important now. therefore, despite the general uncer- tainty and chaos during this time, it is especially vital that instructors remember to consider inclusion in their course designs. reflection: what’s next? in our current study, we are conducting interviews with faculty members of the ece and bme depart- ments to determine the effects of the inclusive teaching tip sheets and their own experiences on their intention to use inclusive teaching strategies in their classrooms. thus, this exploratory study is focused on the extent of usage of inclusive strategies by engineering faculty. with this data, we will be able to identify school policies and intervention strategies that encourage inclusive teaching among engineering professors. in the wake of current events, the interviews also inves- tigate how remote teaching has affected the partici- pants’ ideas of inclusivity in teaching. as diversity and inclusion have recently been brought to the forefront of world dialogues, perhaps these experiences can help refocus the bme community on inclusion beyond the current crises. the coronavirus pandemic combined with the cur- rent political crisis in america will certainly have lasting effects on many aspects of life, including higher education. as members of academia during this time, we are helping to decide what those effects will be. we are at a critical moment where we are all reminded of our humanity: our differences, our emotions, and our mortality. what if we use this experience to regroup around compassion? what if we let the current crises lead us to more human-centered teaching in the future? author contributions the first draft of the manuscript was written by mem and all authors commented on previous versions of the manuscript. all authors read and approved the final manuscript. funding this work was made possible by a grant from the national science foundation (eec- ). any opinions, findings, and conclusions or recommenda- tions expressed in this material are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect the views of the national science foundation. conflict of interest the authors report grants from the national sci- ence foundation during the conduct of the study. biomedical engineering society matters et al. consent to participate for the interviews used to inform these teaching tips, informed consent was obtained from all individ- ual participants. ethical approval approval for the engineering education research was obtained from the institutional review board of purdue university. the procedures used in this study adhere to the tenets of the declaration of helsinki. references corple d, zoltowski cb, eddington s, brightman ao, buzzanell pm. what you need to succeed: examining culture and capital in biomedical engineering undergraduate edu- cation. presented at asee, tampa, fl, . https://peer.a see.org/ . packard bwl. successful stem mentoring initiatives for underrepresented students: a research-based guide for fac- ulty and administrators. sterling: stylus; . micari m, pazos p. connecting to the professor: impact of the student-faculty relationship in a highly challenging course. coll teach. ; ( ): – . https://doi.org/ . / . . . vogt cm. faculty as a critical juncture in student retention and performance in engineering programs. j eng educ. ; ( ): – . https://doi.org/ . /j. - . . tb .x. schwartz j. faculty as undergraduate research mentors for students of color: taking into account the costs. sci educ. ; ( ): – . https://doi.org/ . /sce. . matters me, zoltowski cb, brightman ao, buzzanell pm. an engineering faculty and an intention to make change in diversity and inclusion: creating sustainable change efforts. presented at conecd, crystal city, va, . forth- coming. weissman s. the underrepresented, underprivileged hit hard by coronavirus-related campus closures. diverse issues in higher education. . https://diverseeducation.com/a rticle/ /. chiles m. student voice: ‘college students like me were stopped in their car by police and subsequently tased and beaten for trying to get home.’ the hechinger report. . https://hechingerreport.org/student-voice-the-current- generations-civil-rights-movemement/. chesler nc. a how-to guide for promoting diversity and inclusion in biomedical engineering. ann biomed eng. ; ( ): – . https://doi.org/ . /s - - - . publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with re- gard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu- tional affiliations. biomedical engineering society inclusive teaching in isolating situations https://peer.asee.org/ https://peer.asee.org/ https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . /j. - . .tb .x https://doi.org/ . /j. - . .tb .x https://doi.org/ . /sce. https://diverseeducation.com/article/ / https://diverseeducation.com/article/ / https://hechingerreport.org/student-voice-the-current-generations-civil-rights-movemement/ https://hechingerreport.org/student-voice-the-current-generations-civil-rights-movemement/ https://doi.org/ . /s - - - https://doi.org/ . /s - - - 	inclusive teaching in isolating situations: impact of covid- on efforts toward increasing diversity in bme 	background 	challenge: diversity and isolation 	novel initiative: inclusive remote teaching 	interest 	capacity 	belongingness 	reflection: what’s next? 	acknowledgements 	acknowledgements 	references catalyzing a reproductive health and social justice movement catalyzing a reproductive health and social justice movement the harvard community has made this article openly available. please share how this access benefits you. your story matters citation verbiest, sarah, christina kiko malin, mario drummonds, and milton kotelchuck. . “catalyzing a reproductive health and social justice movement.” maternal and child health journal ( ): - . doi: . /s - - - . http://dx.doi.org/ . / s - - - . published version doi: . /s - - - citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn- :hul.instrepos: terms of use this article was downloaded from harvard university’s dash repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to other posted material, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn- :hul.instrepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#laa http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/dash/open-access-feedback?handle=&title=catalyzing% a% reproductive% health% and% social% justice% movement&community= / &collection= / &owningcollection / &harvardauthors= c fd c a dd e a a e &department http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn- :hul.instrepos: http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn- :hul.instrepos:dash.current.terms-of-use#laa http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn- :hul.instrepos:dash.current.terms-of-use#laa http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn- :hul.instrepos:dash.current.terms-of-use#laa c o m m e n t a r y catalyzing a reproductive health and social justice movement sarah verbiest , • christina kiko malin , • mario drummonds , • milton kotelchuck , published online: january � the author(s) . this article is published with open access at springerlink.com abstract objectives the maternal and child health (mch) community, partnering with women and their families, has the potential to play a critical role in advancing a new multi-sector social movement focused on creating a women’s reproductive and economic justice agenda. since the turn of the twenty-first century, the mch field has been planting seeds for change. the time has come for this work to bear fruit as many states are facing stagnant or slow progress in reducing infant mortality, increasing maternal death rates, and growing health inequities. methods this paper synthesizes three current, interrelated approaches to addressing mch challenges— life course theory, preconception health, and social justice/ reproductive equity. conclusion based on these core con- structs, the authors offer four directions for advancing efforts to improve mch outcomes. the first is to ensure access to quality health care for all. the second is to facilitate change through critical conversations about challenging issues such as poverty, racism, sexism, and immigration; the relevance of evidence-based practice in disenfranchised communities; and how we might be per- petuating inequities in our institutions. the third is to develop collaborative spaces in which leaders across diverse sectors can see their roles in creating equitable neighborhood conditions that ensure optimal reproductive choices and outcomes for women and their families. last, the authors suggest that leaders engage the mch workforce and its consumers in dialogue and action about local and national policies that address the social determinants of health and how these policies influence reproductive and early childhood outcomes. keywords preconception � life course � reproductive equity � mch leadership � health equity � infant mortality � social determinants of health significance this article synthesizes core constructs, historical chal- lenges, and current opportunities for maternal and child health leaders in addressing the complex and tenacious challenge of maternal and infant mortality and morbidity. the paper offers four strategic directions that have the potential to foster innovation and change, and serve as a roadmap to leaders within and beyond mch. the authors call for a new social movement to create an agenda for women’s reproductive health and economic justice that will usher in a new period of health, social, and financial development for women, girls, and their family members. mario drummonds was former ceo of northern manhattan perinatal partnership, inc. & sarah verbiest sarah_verbiest@med.unc.edu school of social work and the center for maternal and infant health, university of north carolina at chapel hill, campus box , room old clinic building, chapel hill, nc - , usa national preconception health and health care initiative, chapel hill, nc, usa alameda county public health department, broadway, suite , oakland, ca , usa northern manhattan perinatal partnership, inc., west th street, rd floor, new york, ny , usa division of general academic pediatrics, maternal and child health mgh, center for child & adolescent health research and policy, mass general hospital for children, pediatrics harvard medical school, boston, ma, usa matern child health j ( ) : – doi . /s - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &amp;domain=pdf http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &amp;domain=pdf introduction since the turn of the twenty-first century, the field of maternal and child health (mch) has been planting seeds for significant change. these efforts have been guided by a new paradigm offered by the life course theory, which has widened our lens to look more broadly at infant and maternal mortality and morbidity as a social barometer with an intergenerational impact. this approach requires moving beyond a singular focus on clinical interventions to addressing issues that affect the health and well-being of young women and men, including poverty, racism, edu- cation, violence, and reproductive justice. preconception health has been synchronized with this approach since the release of national recommendations and goals in , which identified the importance of reproductive awareness, life planning, and comprehensive services for young women and men [ ]. because the united states is facing stagnant or slow progress in reducing infant mortality, increasing maternal death rates, and growing health dis- parities, we offer directions for our mch colleagues to consider as we work collectively and creatively to improve the health and wellness of our nation’s mothers, fathers, and families. this paper aims to spark innovation and new connections within and outside of the mch field and to engage critical partners in this endeavor across public health, social work, social justice, reproductive justice, business, and community development. core constructs for change work by lu and halfon [ ] built on the biopsychosocial framework and applied the expanded framework across a life course model [ ]. this work opened up new ways of not only linking health and wellness across the life span, but also tracking the relentless impact of social inequity as it layers on itself over time to create shorter life expectancies and limited life opportunities for dispropor- tionately affected populations. the growing body of research in epigenetics demonstrates that a person’s life trajectory begins with the health of his or her parents and their social conditions. further, the life course model opens discussion for creating services and programs that not only serve young children but also serve families raising young children. moreover, this model creates connections to fields such as chronic disease by providing a framework to explain the link between high-risk pregnancies, poor birth outcomes, and less-than optimal health later in life. as the mch field continues to struggle with . fold racial dis- parities in birth outcomes, the life course model elucidates how the social determinants of health, described as protective and risk factors, led to these inequities. lu et al.’s [ ] work on the point plan for closing the black white gap in birth outcomes offers a roadmap for action in the domains of improving health care, strengthening families and communities, and addressing social and eco- nomic inequities. although evidence of the impact of a woman’s health prior to pregnancy on birth outcomes has been available for decades, the promotion of preconception health only began gaining momentum in the mch field since . this momentum was prompted by the release of recommenda- tions to improve preconception health and health care in the united states by the centers for disease control and prevention/atsdr work group and the select panel on preconception health. narrowly defined, preconception care is a set of interventions that endeavor to identify and modify biomedical, behavioral, and social risks to a woman’s health or pregnancy outcome through prevention and management. however, the national movement has consistently broadened this definition to encompass reproductive life planning, access to comprehensive and quality health care, high reproductive awareness for both women and men, and the elimination of disparities in health outcomes [ ]. a greater understanding of the importance of women’s wellness and reproductive health in reducing infant mortality has pushed the mch field to expand its focus beyond immediate pregnancy and early childhood interventions to new areas that include women’s and men’s preventive health services, reproductive life planning, and maternal care for up to years postpartum. the hrsa maternal and child health bureau has begun to align major programs such as healthy start and title v to address this larger framework. likewise, the office of population affairs partnered with the centers for disease control and prevention (cdc) to introduce providing quality family planning services for the title x program and public and private providers of comprehensive primary care, guidelines that include preconception health services for women and men [ ]. such efforts have been informed by a growing urgency to address both the conditions in which people live—and children are raised—and differential access to quality health care, education, and career opportunities, especially for people of color. health equity is achieved when all people have the opportunity to attain their full health potential regardless of their race/ethnicity, income, edu- cation, or other social circumstances [ ]. work by hogan et al. [ ] issued a call to action for public health to spotlight health equity. the authors challenged leaders to do more than simply learn about the life course model and catalogue disparities, but to act to change internal policies and strategies that will shift the ways in which services are delivered so that young women and men of color are less matern child health j ( ) : – likely to encounter barriers to the services they need to be well and determine their life plans. notably, the authors emphasized that decades of institutionalized racism require intentional efforts not only to eliminate barriers but also to augment services to close gaps in health and life expec- tancy [ ]. combined, these seeds of change require public health leaders to take a holistic view of women’s wellness and reproductive health that recognizes the role social, eco- nomic, and political factors play in influencing the condi- tions and environments in which women and men make decisions about their reproductive health and futures. optimal conditions for making these decisions should be experienced equally by all women and men in our country. preconception health does not imply that we must provide a narrowly defined, isolationist set of services to women based on the assumption that they will have children someday; rather, this perspective urges that special con- sideration should be given to the importance of the pre- conception period because this life stage can have a profound impact on the health of women, men, and any children they choose to have. challenges to this work moving these frameworks and constructs into action is not a small task. the mch field has developed expertise, programs, and funding streams built around prenatal care and core mch services and their related performance metrics. although the mch field recognizes the impor- tance of connecting with colleagues in other disciplines, including chronic disease, family planning, health equity, infectious disease, housing, transportation, economic development, and environmental health, these connections are developing slowly, largely because these groups also function within specific funding streams and areas of expertise. moreover, even though these fields serve the same populations and have similar goals as mch, few models exist of fully integrative practices with resource sharing across these partners. preconception health has offered an opportunity to broaden the mch perspective, emphasizing that the field needs a generation of healthy young adults to have sig- nificant improvements in birth outcomes and children’s health and well-being. historically, there has been power in leveraging the role of maternal health in moving policy forward for women’s wellness. however, the belief that preconception health is focused only on a woman’s reproductive function (maternalism) is narrow and incor- rect [ ]. at its core, preconception health supports family planning, thereby assuring that women and men can become parents if and when they want to, and that they have the opportunity to be as healthy as possible before having a child. ongoing national and state political debates and actions that question funding for the full suite of family planning options (e.g., long-acting reversible contracep- tives, emergency contraception, and abortion) create a challenging backdrop against which public health leaders, clinicians, and women must function. further, preconception health must include men. men’s health and their role in supporting the health and well- being of their children and partners are important. engag- ing men in preconception health requires new ways of thinking about how we conduct intakes, provide services, and manage complex issues around relationships. giving more attention to thinking about men’s sexual health and reproductive planning might move some people beyond their comfort zone, but this wider view is essential to achieving reproductive justice. opportunities historical cycles have shown a convergence of key factors make conditions ripe for social change. we believe the current period of us social history is in such a cycle, with key factors in play that create fertile ground for a new movement for reproductive health and social justice. first, the affordable care act has brought significant disruption to the health care system. as access to care has increased, the health care industry has experienced increasing pres- sure to provide cost-efficient, equitable population-based care to newly insured populations and to address health disparities. with this shift, hospitals and clinics are being held accountable for health outcomes influenced by fac- tors outside their doors, requiring that these medical centers build partnerships and conduct community out- reach in new ways. further, health care reform has introduced a business rationale for prevention because steps toward universal coverage create higher stakes for payers in ensuring the health of populations, particularly young men and women. efforts have been underway since to enroll people in health insurance, to collect stories from the newly insured and people who have been denied services, and to push states to expand coverage for all residents. health care reform is reshaping the identity of public health and its role in ensuring the health of com- munities. policy makers and health care leaders are increasingly aware of the impact of social determinants on health and life opportunities, which in turn offers public health the chance to leverage its influence to elevate innovative strategies for change. activists are engaged on many issues. movements such as black lives matter provide an opening for discussion on complex issues and create an important opportunity for matern child health j ( ) : – mch professionals to help frame and shape these con- versations. vocal calls for a living wage for all workers and equal pay for equal work have also seen resurgence. sig- nificant strides are being made in advancing the civil rights of the lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and questioning (lgbtq) community, particularly in regard to marriage equality. moreover, america’s ongoing inability to address racism, power, and privilege have been front and center on newspaper pages, particularly regarding the over-policing of young men of color, incarceration, and violence directed at places of worship. now is an opportune time to turn up the volume on the dialogue about the impact of economics, environment, and opportunity on the health and stability of communities by specifically considering how these factors affect the well-being of women, children, fathers, and families. the way forward given these constructs, challenges, and opportunities, what is the role of mch professionals in making sure all people have the social, political, and economic power necessary to make decisions about their health, reproduction, and future? the mch community, partnering with women and their families, has the potential to play a critical role in advancing a new multi-sector social movement focused on creating a women’s and men’s reproductive and economic justice agenda. given that the majority of people in the communities served by public health and social justice entities have children, will have children, have had chil- dren, support or live with children, or are children (in- cluding adolescents and youth), extensive opportunities exist to infuse an mch perspective into the work done by non-mch partners. a key goal of preconception health and the life course approach is to build agency for all women and men to make decisions that will ensure good repro- ductive health. this goal can best be accomplished by creating neighborhood conditions that support good reproductive decisions, resulting in healthy children who will become healthy adults and populate healthy commu- nities. to begin this work, we offer four strategic directions for consideration and conversation. strategic direction : stay the course for access to quality health care for all young women and men cannot achieve their optimal health without access to coordinated, comprehensive care, including preventive screenings, health education, medical services, contraceptives, behavioral health care services, and dental care. the capacity to afford these services through universal health insurance is a big step, but one that many states have not yet made. as seen in the national women’s health report [ ], wide variations exist across states in health coverage for women, women’s access to health care, and women’s health outcomes. universal access to health care is imperative. young adults also need care that facilitates access (e.g., evening and weekend services) and services provided in a culturally-competent manner. further, all people, regard- less of their language, race, ethnicity, or geography, should receive evidence-based care and have the information needed to be full partners in their health care. for example, a recent study by the center for reproductive rights [ ] and sistersong (a women of color reproductive justice collaborative) suggested that african american women living in georgia and mississippi—two states with among the highest maternal death rates in the country—experience key inequities, including poor quality sexual and repro- ductive health information and services, lack of access to needed reproductive care, and discrimination throughout the health care system. mch professionals can continue to support health care reform through multiple avenues, such as building inno- vative partnerships; implementing outreach efforts to enroll all eligible persons in insurance plans; supporting the provision of evidence-based, quality preventive services; and encouraging health care systems to understand and lean into their role in reducing health inequities. moreover, mch professionals have the opportunity to bolster the health care system with wrap-around community services, to encourage providers to ask their patients and clients about reproductive intentions, and to provide trauma-in- formed care paired with access to comprehensive behav- ioral health services as needed. such opportunity also entails a unique responsibility for critical developmental periods outlined by the life course approach, including late adolescence as teens enter legal adulthood, new mothers in their postpartum year, and young adults who might not think they need preventive health services. strategic direction : facilitate change through crucial conversations and listening sessions although meetings will not change the world, intentional dialogue that allows for listening and sharing can change hearts, minds, and perspectives. few opportunities exist for diverse groups of colleagues or partners to deeply and honestly discuss critical and challenging issues such as racism, power structures, privilege, sexism, immigration, and reproductive equity. such dialogue is crucial and deserves time and attention. the queries suggested by hogan et al. [ ] including ‘‘what is the public health community doing to actively disassemble processes that feed inequity in our own institutions?’’ (p. ) are a good matern child health j ( ) : – place to begin. supporting quality conversations requires leaders who are aware of their own perspectives and biases and are well-versed in facilitating courageous conversa- tions. encouraging such dialogue also requires a broad agency commitment to responding to recommendations that emerge from these conversations and calls for changes in practice and internal systems. as we engage in courageous conversations, all voices should be heard—not just the voices of formal leaders, but also the voices of front-line workers, young professionals, and consumers whose perspectives are essential to pro- viding authentic, effective, and innovative services. mch professionals need to take lead roles in engaging people outside public health in the dialogue to ensure diverse perspectives are included from social workers, community developers, health care administrators, women’s studies leaders, business leaders, social entrepreneurs, reproduc- tive justice leaders, and faith leaders. when done well, dialogues across differences (including political or reli- gious lines) can be powerful and can lead to new program and policy directions. as mch leaders, we understand that specific protocols exist to establish ‘‘evidence’’ and then share evidence in public health and other fields. this approach is largely a construct that continues to support an academic/clinical professional power structure made up of individuals con- ducting biomedical research and publishing results in journals that most communities cannot readily access. we cannot ignore one of the most obvious and effective ways to make change: asking women and their communities what they need and how they want to engage with mch professionals to knock down barriers and create programs with an increased chance of sustainability. we have to rely on women and men to tell us their stories, needs, hopes, and ideas for program and policy changes in order to transform the reproductive and women’s health landscape in america. the mch community has the skills needed to facilitate this conversation—via social media, qualitative research, well-constructed staff and consumer satisfaction surveys, and taking the time to talk with women waiting for ser- vices. listening and agenda-building sessions should take place in every city and state; the policy recommendations and action-oriented tasks that arise should be documented, prioritized, assigned, advocated for, and included in bud- gets. conversations among women’s groups that represent diverse backgrounds should be supported to generate common ground on a few issues and then use that con- sensus to better mobilize women as a critical voting block on key issues. this strategy can create political will and innovative solutions. these conversations are necessary if we are to spark change, build community, and approach our work in ways that are more efficient and effective. strategic direction : develop collaborative, comprehensive programs within and beyond public health that support preconception health, reproductive equity, and life planning set within a life course context, preconception health and reproductive life planning not only recognize the impor- tance of healthy infants, but also acknowledge the equitable physical, social, educational, and economic development of the woman, her partner, and her larger family. the mch footprint transcends traditional silos. therefore, our charge is to create a sense of shared value in and commitment to the belief that, at its most basic level, reproductive health equity is the foundation of a healthy community. numerous programs and initiatives are underway across the country that support reproductive health equity by addressing the social determinants of health. these pro- grams have great potential. for example, the promise zones program designates high-poverty urban, rural, and tribal communities as promise zones where the federal government will partner with and invest in communities to create jobs, leverage private investments, increase eco- nomic activity, expand educational opportunities, and improve public safety [ ]. the best babies zone (bbz), funded by the w.k. kellogg foundation, is a place-based approach to reducing infant mortality. bbz uses the con- cept of small neighborhood zones to engage residents and local community organizations in identifying opportunities for collaborative action that will improve neighborhood conditions so everyone can thrive. the bbz serves as a catalyst and convener to bring together resources with community vision to create neighborhood-led initiatives that link health services, early care and education, eco- nomic development, and community systems [ ]. the bbz model does not focus on doing work to a community but rather on working in partnership with the community on projects that are resident-designed and led. the robert wood johnson foundation’s focus on building a culture of health [ ] also embraces a multifaceted ‘‘whole com- munity’’ approach to health. a collective impact effort to improve reproductive health could be achieved by marshalling the expertise, resources, and networks of other public health sectors, including chronic disease, infectious diseases, tobacco prevention and control, community clinics, health equity policy, planning, environmental health, violence preven- tion, and early childhood education. ‘‘it is imperative to combine and deploy the scientific, social, and program- matic development resources of the public health com- munity to lead the charge in creating a reproductive health equity roadmap for all stakeholders’’ [ , p. ]. life course theory creates a space for public health leaders to matern child health j ( ) : – work across sectors to better engage diverse partners in this effort, while maintaining a sharp focus on the importance of preconception health and reproductive planning as a shared endeavor. intermediate steps can be taken to expand the mch imperative into the purview of these sectors, beginning with cross-informing and strategically using existing resources to model incremental, multi-sector pro- grammatic change. strategic direction : educate and engage the mch workforce and its consumers on local and national issues that address the social determinants of health: demonstrate the impact of these policies on improved reproductive health and birth/early childhood outcomes key social determinants of health positively affect the life course of women, men, and young families, and include factors such as equitable pay, living wages, workplace policies, access to affordable health insurance, access to affordable, safe housing, local food movements, educa- tional pipelines of young children (birth through age years), college affordability and completion, civic engagement, just policing, and access to affordable quality childcare. an opportunity for new leadership has come forth from the emergence of social media and its power and the convergence of the positive disruption brought by health care reform, street protests, and growing voices calling for greater attention on social determinants of health and equity. as petersen [ ] commented. leadership is about creating and communicating a shared vision for a changing future and while one of the bulwark features of mch is its endurance… it is the vision that endures while the means and the methods of achieving that vision evolve over time, populations and circumstances (p. ). significant movements focused on social determinants of health would benefit from engaging with mch pro- fessionals and consumers. the mch field can engage in this important work by describing the clear connections these efforts have with preconception health, life course, and reproductive health equity. to make a meaningful contribution, the mch workforce must commit to learn- ing about these issues, especially in terms of state and local efforts and policy. in addition, mch professionals would benefit from training in adaptive leadership, which mobilizes people to tackle difficult root causes of a problem. challenging and innovative work is required if we are to capitalize on our current moment in time. to achieve this goal, it will be critically important that graduate students and professionals across the career continuum receive training in communication, creative conflict, social entrepreneurship, and how to construct ‘‘unusual’’ partnerships. for example, we can begin immediately by focusing on protecting the political voting power of women, students, and people of color. as part of our mch work, we must ensure, in a nonpartisan manner, that all of our clients are registered to vote and are encouraged to exercise that right in local, state, and national elections. clients should be reminded that every vote counts and that they should engage with and vote for candidates who represent their political, economic, and social interests. our responsibility is to help clients understand that civic engagement is one way they can improve health, gain economic power, and achieve reproductive justice in america. we can find ways to promote voter registration and share nonpartisan infor- mation about the issues. we can ask candidates to share their opinions on key reproductive health and mch issues during bipartisan debates and discussion forums. what else can we do? we can foster community dia- logue by screening thought-provoking documentaries such as the raising of america (www.raisingofamerica.org) or unnatural causes (www.unnaturalcauses.org). mch pro- fessionals can document the effects of lack of access to health care, lack of affordable childcare, and lack of sick leave on health outcomes. we can identify topics receiving attention in our community based on current events and policy challenges, and make a commitment to developing a depth of knowledge about at least one new topic area. in our personal time, we can engage other sectors in our lives (e.g., faith communities, clubs, sororities, leagues) in dis- cussions on these issues. using our skills in building partnerships, we can align with the efforts of other groups such as moms rising (www.momsrising.org) that are already working to bring awareness of these issues to women in all communities. such joint efforts might include creating learning communities at work that meet over lunch to share information and perspectives on various issues. further, as mch professionals build new partnerships, we will collectively increase our leverage locally, statewide, and nationally to win transformational policy, program, and system changes. although it remains imperative that public health pro- fessionals respect the boundaries of their employers regarding speaking out at work, we might be restraining our voices more than necessary. without crossing these boundaries, we can still raise topics in meetings; educate public officials about our issues; and demonstrate to county commissioners the positive or negative impact of local business practices, zoning laws, and public budgets on the health of women and children. we can use the health in all policies approach that forces leaders to evaluate if new policies and program initiatives move toward health equity or sustain inequality, whether inadvertently or intentionally matern child health j ( ) : – http://www.raisingofamerica.org http://www.unnaturalcauses.org http://www.momsrising.org [ ]. we can support our clients and community members in building their capacity to contribute to critical conver- sations at city hall, health department board meetings, state legislatures, and beyond. in the same way that we hope other agencies and sectors will ally with us in supporting preconception health, reproductive life planning, and maternal and infant health, mch professionals as a group must be willing to expand our own boundaries and knowledge to learn about economic and political issues that affect the daily lives and well-being of the people we care about. conclusion maternal and child health is built upon the work of a group of women who applied their passion, skills, and evidence to create a national focus on children and families [ ]. the time has come for a revival in our field. we believe that the mch workforce should form alliances with other profes- sionals in community development, social work, social justice, the faith community, and other arenas to create a new movement for our time: a movement that recognizes the impact of policy and privilege on the health of gener- ations and engages a broad array of thought leaders and community advocates in creating change; an effort that can help actualize the vision of the national preconception health and health care initiative that all women and men of reproductive age will achieve optimal health and well- ness, fostering a healthy life course for them and any children they may have. we challenge our colleagues and professionals in other fields to advocate relentlessly for high quality, compre- hensive, culturally-appropriate health care for everyone. we believe a foundational aspect of public health advocacy is to train for and orchestrate conversations among col- leagues and with communities about the core issues of our day, including racism, structures of power, gender dis- crimination, and privilege. collaboration is not optional, nor is moving beyond our comfort zone and traditional organizations. initiating a new social movement will require unconventional alliances and the capacity to engage more broadly to enhance the conditions where people eat, live, work, play, pray, and create families. as a profession, we have much to learn, and we hope that colleagues will take advantage of existing training opportunities and create new training opportunities where gaps exist. further, we must fulfill our critical public health function of demon- strating the impact (via data and surveillance) of social changes on health trajectories. given that the vast majority of people in this nation have children, have had children, support or care for children, or are children, conversations about creating the conditions for healthy reproduction have implications for the majority of the population and future generations. these conversa- tions widen the lens through which we view our work, creating space for a collective approach and a new lan- guage that unites the mch field and moves us towards our vision for healthy women, men, children, families, and communities. the time is ripe for the next social movement to focus on creating a reproductive health and economic justice agenda that will usher in a new period of health, social, and financial development for women, families, and communities across america. open access this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (http://crea tivecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons license, and indicate if changes were made. references . alliance for a just society. ( ). the promise of quality, affordable health care for women: are states delivering? retrieved from http://allianceforajustsociety.org/wp-content/ uploads/ / / . _womens.health_national.pdf. . bylander, j. ( ). the best chance at life. health affairs (millwood), , – . doi: . /hlthaff. . . . centers for disease control and prevention. ( ). social determinants of health. retrieved from http://www.cdc.gov/ socialdeterminants/. . center for reproductive rights. ( ). reproductive injustice: racial and gender discrimination in u.s. health care. retrieved from http://www.reproductiverights.org/sites/crr.civicactions.net/ files/documents/cerd_shadow_us.pdf. . gavin, l., moskosky, s., carter, l., curtis, k., glass, e., god- frey, e., et al. ( ). providing quality family planning services: recommendations of cdc and the u.s. office of population affairs. morbidity and mortality weekly report, (rr ), – . . hogan, v. k., rowley, d., bennett, t., & taylor, k. d. ( ). life course, social determinants, and health inequities: toward a national plan for achieving health equity for african american infants—a concept paper. maternal and child health journal, , – . doi: . /s - - - . . johnson, k., posner, s. f., biermann, j., cordero, j., atrash, h. k., parker, c. s., et al. ( ). recommendations to improve preconception health and health care—united states. a report of the cdc/atsdr preconception care workgroup and the select panel on preconception care. mmwr recommendations and reports, (rr- ), – . . lu, m. c., & halfon, n. ( ). racial and ethnic disparities in birth outcomes: a life course perspective. maternal and child health journal, , – . doi: . /a: . . lu, m. c., kotelchuck, m., hogan, v., jones, l., wright, k., & halfon, n. ( ). closing the black–white gap in birth out- comes: a life-course approach. ethnicity and disease, (suppl ), s - –s - . . petersen, d. j. ( ). leading maternal and child health (mch): past, present and future. maternal and child health journal, , – . doi: . /s - - - . matern child health j ( ) : – http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://allianceforajustsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/ / / . _womens.health_national.pdf http://allianceforajustsociety.org/wp-content/uploads/ / / . _womens.health_national.pdf http://dx.doi.org/ . /hlthaff. . http://www.cdc.gov/socialdeterminants/ http://www.cdc.gov/socialdeterminants/ http://www.reproductiverights.org/sites/crr.civicactions.net/files/documents/cerd_shadow_us.pdf http://www.reproductiverights.org/sites/crr.civicactions.net/files/documents/cerd_shadow_us.pdf http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /a: http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - - . lavizzo-mourey, r. ( ). building a culture of health: president’s message to the robert wood johnson foundation. retrieved from http://www.rwjf.org/content/dam/files/rwjf-web- files/annual_message/ _rwjf_annualmessage_final.pdf. . rudolph, l., caplan, j., ben-moshe, k., & dillon, l. ( ). health in all policies: a guide for state and local governments. washington, dc: american public health association and public health institute. . the white house. ( ). fact sheet: president obama’s pro- mise zones initiative (press release). retrieved from https://www. whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/ / / /fact-sheet-president- obama-s-promise-zones-initiative. . waggoner, m. r. ( ). motherhood preconceived: the emer- gence of the preconception health and health care initiative. journal of health politics, policy and law, , – . doi: . / - . matern child health j ( ) : – http://www.rwjf.org/content/dam/files/rwjf-web-files/annual_message/ _rwjf_annualmessage_final.pdf http://www.rwjf.org/content/dam/files/rwjf-web-files/annual_message/ _rwjf_annualmessage_final.pdf https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/ / / /fact-sheet-president-obama-s-promise-zones-initiative https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/ / / /fact-sheet-president-obama-s-promise-zones-initiative https://www.whitehouse.gov/the-press-office/ / / /fact-sheet-president-obama-s-promise-zones-initiative http://dx.doi.org/ . / - http://dx.doi.org/ . / - 	catalyzing a reproductive health and social justice movement 	abstract 	significance 	introduction 	core constructs for change 	challenges to this work 	opportunities 	the way forward 	strategic direction : stay the course for access to quality health care for all 	strategic direction : facilitate change through crucial conversations and listening sessions 	strategic direction : develop collaborative, comprehensive programs within and beyond public health that support preconception health, reproductive equity, and life planning 	strategic direction : educate and engage the mch workforce and its consumers on local and national issues that address the social determinants of health: demonstrate the impact of these policies on improved reproductive health and birth/early childhood outcomes 	conclusion 	open access 	references the video way of thinking full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rthj download by: [computing & library services, university of huddersfield] date: january , at: : south african theatre journal issn: - (print) - (online) journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rthj the video way of thinking ben spatz to cite this article: ben spatz ( ): the video way of thinking, south african theatre journal, doi: . / . . to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / . . © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group published online: jan . submit your article to this journal article views: view related articles view crossmark data http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rthj http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rthj http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showcitformats?doi= . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rthj &show=instructions http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rthj &show=instructions http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - the video way of thinking ben spatz * department of music and drama, university of huddersfield, huddersfield, uk this article rethinks the concepts of zoê and bios proposed by giorgio agamben in relation to the history of technology. it argues that the relationship between embodiment and the audiovisual is only beginning to be understood alongside the recent and increasing omnipresence of digital audiovisual recording technologies in everyday life. just as writing completely changed human society’s understanding of speech, the development of audiovisual media over the past century has profoundly affected and perhaps even founded our contemporary understanding of embodiment and embodied knowledge. questions of performance documentation that have circulated in performance studies barely scratch the surface of what amounts to a new way of understanding life, embodiment, and knowledge, which i here begin to call the ‘video way of thinking’. keywords: video; audiovisual; embodiment; agamben; epistemology . when philosopher giorgio agamben writes that ‘language presupposes the nonlin- guistic’ and that ‘law presupposes the nonjuridical’ ( , p. ), he begins from the conceptual premise that language and law are the first phenomena to be explained while that which exceeds them comes later. this is what i have called the ‘trope of excess’ (spatz ): a habit of thought in which affordances that ought to be con- sidered primary are rendered secondary to those which in fact ought to be decentered. in this essay i attempt to rethink agamben’s well-known categories of zoê and bios from the standpoint of a third mode of life: technos. what we find in video – by which i mean the audiovisual – is that certain aspects of embodiment (understood as first affordance, cf. spatz ) become newly available for inscription into a transmissible and relatively stable technological archive. if we did not have hundreds of years of writing and print culture with which to compare the emergence of video, we might be tempted to suspect that the audiovisual now deli- vers to us the main truth of embodiment itself, even if we still acknowledged seconda- rily that there are some modes of bodily ‘excess’ (notably touch and smell) that remain untraceable by the new medium. however, in the context of the history of technology it is evident that neither writing nor the audiovisual delivers embodiment, in the sense of first affordance, to the archive. rather, each is able to trace and document particular © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, pro- vided the original work is properly cited. *email: b.spatz@hud.ac.uk south african theatre journal, https://doi.org/ . / . . d ow nl oa de d by [ c om pu ti ng & l ib ra ry s er vi ce s, u ni ve rs it y of h ud de rs fi el d] a t : j an ua ry http://orcid.org/ - - - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / mailto:b.spatz@hud.ac.uk http://www.tandfonline.com http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf dimensions of living first affordance. what interests me here is the way in which the new possibilities of audiovisual inscription interact with writing, thought, and action. it is not that writing, or indeed video, is barred completely from particular zones of embodied life. writing can and does inscribe taste and smell into the archive through language. but it has been discovered (notably this discovery coincides with the rise of the audiovisual) that writing has two aspects, which are sometimes called the signifier and the signified, or the semiotic and the semantic (cf. agamben , p. ). writing first of all inscribes verbal technique, the technique of speech. only because it does so with great clarity is it then able to access, by way of reference to speech, other areas of life. the word ‘lavender’, for example, refers first of all to the embodied technique of verbal production by which that word is spoken and heard. it then also refers, via that technique, to a particular plant or color which may be matched to that spoken word. from the perspective of the audiovisual it becomes possible to recognize that there is such a thing as a writing way of thinking. indeed, much of what we call philosophy is not more than the development of a particular way of working with the technology of writing. how often do we refer to the ‘thought’ of a particular philosopher when what we mean is precisely their writing? the writing way of thinking has become so domi- nant that today we often simply call it ‘thinking’, but to be more specific we might use the term logos. with the rise of the audiovisual we are beginning to experience a new kind of thinking, which i will call the video way of thinking. i think we begin to see the emergence of a video way of thinking in disciplines like performance studies, which despite its rich engagement with the audiovisual has mostly elected to remain bounded within the older medium of writing as far as its pro- ducts and publications are concerned. the more recent emergence of artistic research and ‘practice (as) research’, with their endless debates over performance documen- tation, are still-early inquiries that push the matter of the audiovisual further into the territory of knowledge production and towards the institutional heart of the uni- versity: its engagement with the archive. i even suspect that the spread of embodiment as a key concept across the humanities and social sciences over the past several decades is closely related to the rise of the audiovisual and its new ways of thinking. yet for all this i do not think that the video way of thinking, whatever it might be, has fully arrived. cinema is its prehistory, but aesthetically and epistemologically limited by the economic constraints of that technology. just as writing could not give us the modern university when it was bound to the economic and political elite but only as it became more widely available after the advent of printing, the era of the audiovisual does not properly begin until video meets the internet. . now let us think through these developments in terms of what agamben calls zoê and bios. please note that i am not attempting to reduce agamben’s theory of the political to the history of technology. rather i think that a glance now at the history of technology can help us imagine the future of politics. just as i intend ‘language’ to refer not merely to the technology of writing but more importantly to the way of thinking afforded by that technology, i ask you here to understand by the audiovisual not specific new digital video technologies but the domains of life which these new technologies allow for the first time to be inscribed in an archive and – perhaps even more importantly – the ways of thinking and doing to which that new possibility of inscription points. b. spatz d ow nl oa de d by [ c om pu ti ng & l ib ra ry s er vi ce s, u ni ve rs it y of h ud de rs fi el d] a t : j an ua ry agamben traces to the ancient greeks – one of the origin points of europe’s writing way of thinking – a division of life between zoê and bios. i want to rethink these categories in a way that does not begin from writing and the law and work back- wards towards embodiment (understood through the trope of excess as ‘the nonlin- guistic’ and ‘the nonjuridical’) but which rather begins from embodiment and asks about the relationship between writing/law and the audiovisual. recall that embodiment here means no more or less than first affordance: ‘the first site at which the dialogue between agency and materiality takes place’ and thus ‘the first site of that negotiation which makes possible all other negotiations and affor- dances’ (spatz ). embodiment in this sense is a teeming, lively thing, both with and without organs (deleuze and guattari ), more than the body but less than a full ecology. aristotle’s city or polis, which is the etymological and philosophical root of politics, emerges from the development of a new technology – writing – which captures in a relatively stable and hence transmissible form a certain aspect of embodiment, namely the technique of speech, and allows it to appear as a stable system of what then becomes law or nomos. in this moment, the ‘word’ as such comes into existence as that which can be written. logos then refers not to the word as spoken utterance but to the written word and to the cut by which writing separates word from sound, cry, and song. in the city, the full life of bios becomes distinguishable from the much older mere or bare life of zoê, which humans share with other animals. agamben tells us that the culmination of this division, two millennia later, occurs at the site of the fascist death camp, wherein zoê is radically severed from bios in the absolute debasement of human beings. we are thus shown an opposition between zoê and bios in which the former is a horrifying reduction. but what if the apparent binary opposition of zoê and bios is an artefact of the writing way of thinking? if bios is the written life, then, from the perspective of writing, zoê (unwritten life) is merely an excess or remain- der. i would instead refigure zoê – as alexander weheliye ( ) begins to suggest – as the full body, as embodiment in the sense of first affordance, which precedes writing and the writing way of thinking (and living) by hundreds, thousands, or millions of years. the death camp is then not so much the site of zoê as the site of zoê’s most extreme abuse at the hands of logos (writing) and bios (written life). in the sites of embodied activation studied by anthropology and performance studies, where writing is either not historically dominant or intentionally postponed, could we hope to find something like a relatively free manifestation of zoê? or at least zoê in a state of equilibrium with bios rather than zoê as produced by the violent subtraction of bios. but it is not enough to look for places in which zoê appears on its own terms rather than as the remainder or excess of a violently metas- tasized bios. what we need to ask is why zoê seems to be appearing for us now in a new way, that is, why other aspects of life are newly entering into philosophical and politi- cal and scientific discourse at this time. to answer this question, we may need to expand our ancient greekist ontology with a further entity, which i will call technos. . in the idealized polis or city – which here stands for all kinds of institutionality, includ- ing the national and the international, that are made possible by inscription and its archives – zoê is not meant to be opposed to bios. rather the city should allow for south african theatre journal d ow nl oa de d by [ c om pu ti ng & l ib ra ry s er vi ce s, u ni ve rs it y of h ud de rs fi el d] a t : j an ua ry bios as a harmonic relation of zoê and logos, of life and writing, in which pre-writing ways of thinking and doing are structured and supported by writing ways of thinking and doing. in this imagined polis, writing and bios both constrain and enable zoê, to be sure ranking different forms of life (citizen, woman, slave, animal) but not in order to destroy or annihilate any of them. in the death camp, on the other hand, this nominally harmonious relationship between bios and zoê is overturned as the former seeks to exterminate the latter. in the camp, bios and zoê are radically split, as prisoners are debased to a state of pure zoê and guards are required to act as pure disciplinary incar- nations of bios. (this is not to say that the split is ever completely achieved. even in the most horrific situations, victims and prisoners find moments of dignified thought and action. the concentration camp is merely the most extreme example of the poten- tial to divide life in a violent hierarchy of law and body.) we now have zoê and bios, united in the polis and torn asunder in the anti-polis space of the camp. what then if another form of inscription, a wholly different way of incorporating zoê into polis, appears? what should we call the audiovisual in this sense, understood not as a specific set of technologies (photograph, phono- graph, cinema, video, hologram) but as a distinct mode of contact between zoê and polis? it is telling that we do not have a word that specifically incorporates the auditory and the visual aspects of embodiment in their moving conjunction. the linking of recorded sound with motion pictures in the twentieth century produced a new kind of inscription that unites what were previously understood as two different senses or zones of embodiment: audio + visual. there is no compound word that names both the sonic and visual aspects of embodiment as practiced, that is, those aspects of embodiment which are traced by audiovisual technologies. we may call this domain the audiovisuality of the body, audiovisual embodiment, or most con- cisely the audiovisual body. this embodied audiovisuality is neither zoê, in the sense of first affordance, nor that bios which is produced through writing and textual- ity. it is rather a distinct territory of inscription, which i will argue is part of the larger domain of technos. how appropriate is technos as a term for the audiovisual and its associated ways of thinking and doing? scholars of ancient greece may correct me, but is not techne just exactly that kind of knowledge which is deemed ‘practical’ because it is not easily inscribed in writing? is not episteme, in contrast, knowledge that can be written, knowledge articulated through the embodied technique of the verbal, which itself is retroactively defined by its availability for inscription by writing? remember, this does not mean that episteme knowledge is actually written down but only that it can be expressed verbally, that is, within the writing way of thinking. and is not alethia, truth, that kind of knowledge which cannot be inscribed by any means, which precedes all writing and which for us would be linked to zoê? then is not techne, which we more recently refer to as the ‘how’ of knowing (‘know-how’), a kind of knowledge that appears between or alongside episteme and alethia and is not synonymous with either of those? the ancient greeks did not have advanced audiovisual technology of the kind i mentioned above. how then could they have encountered this category of knowledge as distinct from both episteme and alethia? but is not techne precisely the kind of knowledge that can be shown in drawings, that is, with the help of analogues of life (such as maps and charts), and the techniques of interpretation they require, rather than through a symbolic alphabetics? and is not drawing the ancient precursor of b. spatz d ow nl oa de d by [ c om pu ti ng & l ib ra ry s er vi ce s, u ni ve rs it y of h ud de rs fi el d] a t : j an ua ry the audiovisual? if so, then perhaps techne really is the right word for the kind of knowledge that is made by possible analogue (analogous) inscription and the mode of thinking and doing that is afforded by this knowledge can with some accuracy be called technos. this technos would then refer to ways of thinking and doing that arise in relation to all manner of analogue inscriptions, from ancient drawing to con- temporary digital video. we then have alethia, knowledge that is present without inscription, and the mode of life (zoê) afforded by that knowledge; techne, knowledge arising from analogous inscription – the audiovisual in a broad sense – and the ways of thinking and doing, the mode of life (technos), made possible by that knowledge; and episteme, knowledge arising from symbolic inscription (writing or logos) and its associated ways of thinking and doing, its mode of life (bios). at long last the ancient hierarchy is reversed and logos-bios-episteme is no longer our starting point. beginning instead from a triangu- lation of zoê, bios, and technos, we can now perhaps begin to grasp the enormous sig- nificance of a video epistemology or video way of thinking. . if technos begins with drawing, which predates writing; is surpassed by writing at the founding of the ancient greek and jewish traditions; is further rendered secondary fol- lowing the advent of print technology; and then begins a new ascendency with the photograph and phonograph, which culminates in their synthesis in digital video – then what is its future? does the new era of the audiovisual bring us closer to zoê, to life itself as primary affordance and origin of all inscriptions and archives? or does technos merely supplant bios as a new system of domination, exploitation, and abuse, a new technological mode through which to control zoê? it is not at all clear that the death camp, the site of total abjection and annihilation of zoê, was dominated more by bios than by technos. the nazi system was surely a culmination of some kind of horrible power found in the logos, which from hitler’s book mein kampf to the printed schedules of the death trains allowed for the coordi- nation of genocide on an unprecedented scale. and surely the racialized logic by which the victims of the holocaust were ejected from the polis, violently deprived of bios, and reduced to bare life (zoê) followed mechanisms of racialization that were developed by european colonialism via the ascent of logos during the renaissance and enlightment periods. but nazi propaganda, as in the films of leni riefenstahl, was powerfully audiovisual. the nazis themselves documented their own camps with audiovisual recordings. we should therefore in no way carry an expectation that technos will depart from the violent history of logos unless the specifics of emergent history guide it to do so. it is not difficult to imagine a tyranny of the audiovisual that would rival or surpass that of the logos, from colonial genocides to the holocaust. it is not difficult to see how zoê might be absolutely objectified before a new law or nomos that consists not in written rules, orders and policies, but in a set of absolutely charismatic audiovisual commands and exemplars. contemporary forms of biopolitical violence such as mass shootings and terrorism in general, including the terrorism of the state, seem to speak clearly of this potential horror. the question is whether we can imagine a different future in which technos is enlisted to right past wrongs: a technos in service of zoê rather than the reverse. south african theatre journal d ow nl oa de d by [ c om pu ti ng & l ib ra ry s er vi ce s, u ni ve rs it y of h ud de rs fi el d] a t : j an ua ry perhaps there can be a new polis, necessarily planetary, based on a triangulated practice of care in which the gifts of logos are combined with those of technos not in order to further discipline and control zoê but in order to support and sustain it. if globalization was made possible by the unrestrained zeal and zealotry of the logos, could the rise of technos become linked, historically, not with an increase and expansion of global exploitation but with the development of a planetary democratic or socialist politics? in short, will the opening of the audiovisual domain help us move further away from life and earth, as some proponents of virtual reality seem to desire, in a final nihilistic spree before the crash? – or could it instead bring us back to earth and to life? this is much less a question of the inherent politics of technos or bios, as in some kind of technological determinism, than of how politics is unfolding today in the still new domains of the audiovisual. we have already begun to see the public audiovisual documentation and dissemi- nation of governmental and international debates. with facebook ‘live’, political events of all kinds may be streamed directly to mass audiences who comment indivi- dually upon them in the old medium of writing. this is already a shift in the operation of the polis, but certainly not yet the full arrival of technos to work alongside logos in the custodianship of zoê. what will happen to the role of the politician as the audio- visual continues to ascend? how will the very concept of law or nomos be transformed when it becomes possible to write and sign legal documents in audiovisual form? it is easy enough to track the rise of celebrity culture and its horrors, from reagan to trump, but also necessary to link the growth of alternative and radical movements and lifeworlds, such as the world social forum and black lives matter, to the audiovisual. can we dare to hope, with anarchists and other ambassadors of embodiment, that instead of a shared sovereignty between logos and technos, to the further detriment and imprisonment of zoê, the rise of the audiovisual may yet create a crucial opening through which a social and political movement might appear that would displace the primacy of inscription and initiate a return to the sovereignty of zoê, with logos and technos in merely supporting roles? would this be desirable? what, after technos, is the zoê? . the exploration, intensification, and expansion of the audiovisual seems to be unstop- pable and needs no supporting argument. barring a level of global catastrophe that destroys the internet, the audiovisual domain will continue to grow. let me then offer a reminder of what else there is. as scholars of performance and embodiment have been saying for more than two decades, the audiovisual is not life itself; technos does not deliver zoê to the archive. the video way of thinking and the writing way of thinking coexist alongside older, pre-writing modes of life (zoê). whenever we see the latter figured as an excess of the former, we should remind ourselves of the order of things, not only as a chrono- logical history of technology and mythopoetic origin story but perhaps more impor- tantly as a set of ethical commitments that must be renewed in every moment: embodiment, not writing or the audiovisual, is first affordance. when we refer to writing or video as thought, we are taking on board the entire history of inscriptive technologies. perhaps, in the present era, it would be wiser to continue to distinguish b. spatz d ow nl oa de d by [ c om pu ti ng & l ib ra ry s er vi ce s, u ni ve rs it y of h ud de rs fi el d] a t : j an ua ry between thought proper, which is a function exactly of zoê and not available to inscrip- tion, and those powerful modes of inscription (bios and technos) that allow thought to cross vast geographical and historical distances in the form of archival traces. the pre-writing way of thinking undoubtedly persists as embodied technique and through the embodied transmission of knowledge. activities organized by memorized repetition, including the repetition of memorized words in poems and songs, continue to structure performing and other embodied arts. writing has been ascendant for so long that we now often think of words as if they derive their meaning from their inscription. theatre then becomes a sanctuary for the pre-writing way of thinking in which words are memorized and not merely inscribed. as the audiovisual continues to rise, we will more often think of our own movements, gestures, and sounds (includ- ing spoken words) in terms of their inscription and recording in technos rather than as written words (bios) or as structures of repetition. yet the relationship of the audiovi- sual to embodiment is not the same as that between bios and zoê. whereas bios is based on a symbolic logic, technos is analogical (even or especially when it is digital). while i would not ascribe to this difference any kind of deterministic political valence, it must be reckoned with. the analogical mode of inscription that defines technos could be seen as risking a dangerous substitution in which the video way of thinking is under- stood to replace living thought. on the other hand, the same analogical power might be figured as a powerful sensory return to life itself after a millennium of logocentrism. in fact, these are not two different possibilities but the same one: it is precisely the unique power of technos to trace embodiment analogically that makes it both so tempting and so risky. among our priorities during this period of increasing audiovisuality should be the defense of the logos – as found, for example, in the institution of the university. if we consider the current neoliberal attack on universities as an attack of technos upon bios, we can immediately see that the destruction of books and laws and their general repla- cement by images and sounds is not a path we should risk treading. if the video way of thinking is to develop in a historical arc towards sustainability and justice for zoê (and there is no reason to limit zoê here to human life only), it will do so in dialogue with the logos rather than by replacing it. we must not, in a heady march into the audiovisual, abandon the writing way of thinking. rather, writing and the audiovisual must be counterbalanced in service to life. this is what i have attempted to propose in the form of ‘illuminated video’, in which uncut audiovisual documentation of experimen- tal practice is overlayed by textual annotations and citations. in these videos, which reverse the relationship between techne and logos that was found in medieval illumi- nated manuscripts, we not only approach zoê from the standpoint of the audiovisual but also attempt to find a proper place for logos within and alongside technos. the jux- taposition of audiovisual and textual inscription makes clear in a new way that what we are witnessing is not merely video documentation of practice but an entirely new domain of inscription in which other aspects of embodiment can circulate: the video way of thinking. in this article i have attempted to articulate the meaning of the audiovisual through writing. in some emerging documents of artistic research, writing finds a new home inside the audiovisual (or more broadly, the analogue) way of thinking: technos. i do not think it is a coincidence that the invention of illuminated video as a medium of thought appeared within the context of a project aimed to investigate judaism through the embodied technique of song (figure ). judaism is the other mythic origin point, south african theatre journal d ow nl oa de d by [ c om pu ti ng & l ib ra ry s er vi ce s, u ni ve rs it y of h ud de rs fi el d] a t : j an ua ry along withthe ancient greeks, of the european logos. aswe have seen here, logos is not the spoken or sung or danced word but the written word, the inscribed or inscribable word. there could not be any clearer statements of the ascendancy of the logos over technos during the past two millennia than the commandment against graven images (drawings) and idols (sculptures) and the appellation ‘people of the book’. my attempt to rework the relation between zoê and bios through university-based research led to my stumbling upon a third term in this equation: the mode of technos, which between (let’s say) and was merelyan addendum towriting but which has nowentered into a new period of ascen- dency. there is no returning to a time before the logos, but there may be some hope for a time after it: an epoch in which technos points back to zoê, an era that honors not the medium of video but the video way of thinking. notes . gold open access to this chapter is made possible by the university of huddersfield and the arts and humanities research council (ahrc) leadership fellow project ‘judaica: an embodied laboratory for song-action’ ( – ) [grant reference ah/n / ]. the insights shared here arose following a series of embodied laboratory work sessions with nazlıhan eda erçin, agnieszka mendel, and caroline gatt, which took place under the rubric of that project. i am extremely grateful for their co-authorship of those sessions. . this article is an extended speculative meditation on the concepts of zoê and bios as devel- oped in agamben’s best known work, homo sacer ( ). it intersects agamben’s work transversally and does not attempt to treat his larger oeuvre. significantly, my use of technos to refer to modes of analogue audiovisual inscription – as distinct from the textual inscriptions i associate with bios – relies upon my own theorization of technique (spatz ) rather than the work of heidegger, agamben, or others who have worked with cognate terms such as campbell ( ). i am grateful to an anonymous reviewer for inviting this clarification. figure . ben spatz (practitioner) and nazlıhan eda erçin (videographer) in a laboratory session of the project ‘judaica: an embodied laboratory for songwork’. photo by agnieszka mendel. b. spatz d ow nl oa de d by [ c om pu ti ng & l ib ra ry s er vi ce s, u ni ve rs it y of h ud de rs fi el d] a t : j an ua ry . what i am saying here applies to alphabetic writing and print. to what extent it applies also to other technologies is a matter for further consideration. . certainly, the turn ‘towards’ materialism and the fight that speculative realism picks with kantian correlationism would not be thinkable without the original turn ‘away’ from matter that is grounded in the writing of the word. . i do not engage here the question of whether other species also share partially in bios or in what i will call technos. it is not at all necessarily to my argument to set the human species absolutely apart from others. on the contrary, i think that a better understanding of tech- nique and technology in the human may be part of the turn to a richer species and ecological perspective. . the fact that the isolation of zoê does not imply its debasement is evident in the superficial similarity between the prison cell and the monastic cell. both attempt a return or reduction to bare life, but only one of them is an act of violence. . for examples of illuminated video, please visit www.urbanresearchtheater.com. orcid ben spatz http://orcid.org/ - - - references agamben, g., . homo sacer: sovereign power and bare life. (trans. d. heller-roazen) stanford, ca: stanford university press. campbell, t.c., improper life: technology and biopolitics from heidegger to agamben. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. deleuze, g. and guattari, f., . a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. (trans. b. massumi) minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press. spatz, ben ( ) what a body can do: technique as knowledge, practice as research. new york and london: routledge. spatz, ben ( ) ‘embodiment as first affordance: tinkering, tuning, tracking’. performance philosophy . : – . weheliye, a., . habeas viscus: racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and black feminist the- ories of the human. durham, nc: duke university press. south african theatre journal d ow nl oa de d by [ c om pu ti ng & l ib ra ry s er vi ce s, u ni ve rs it y of h ud de rs fi el d] a t : j an ua ry www.urbanresearchtheater.com http://orcid.org/ - - - 	abstract 	 . 	 . 	 . 	 . 	 . 	notes 	orcid 	references wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ prioritizing black self-determination: the last strident voice of twentieth-century black nationalism genealogy article prioritizing black self-determination: the last strident voice of twentieth-century black nationalism bayyinah s. jeffries department of african american studies, ohio university, athens, oh , usa; jeffrieb@ohio.edu received: august ; accepted: november ; published: november ���������� ������� abstract: black self-determination, like the movement for civil rights, has long been a struggle on both the national and international stage. from the black consciousness campaign of south africa to the black power crusades of the united states and caribbean, and the recent global affirmations of black lives matter, black nationalist ideology and desires for equity and independence seem ever more significant. while marginal characteristics of black nationalism clearly persist in the calls for justice and equality, only one voice of twentieth-century black nationalism remains committed to the full dimensions of the black nationalist agenda. this essay documents the one leader and movement that has remained committed to a black nationalist platform as a response to persistent white supremacy. the author reflects on the valuable contributions of twentieth-century black nationalism and what form, if any, black nationalism will take when this last black nationalist movement leader is gone. keywords: black nationalism; black self-determination; black muslims; nation of islam; reconstituted nation of islam; louis farrakhan . twentieth-century expressions of black nationalism in may , one of the most powerful social media platforms, facebook, banned minister louis farrakhan. twitter briefly suspended his account but reinstated it the same day. while farrakhan and the noi have been labeled anti-semitic, they maintain a great deal of support from many in the black community. the nation of islam continues to carry the banner of a doctrine that centers black people, and encourages the work and perspective of black self-determination, the centerpiece of black nationalism. self-determination is about self-definition. it also encourages the construction and control of black institutions, prioritizes black people, creates and legitimizes knowledge, and sets an agenda by and for black people. in , malcolm x defined black nationalism as a moral, political and economic viewpoint. more importantly, he described it as a philosophy of self-determination, where black people controlled every aspect of their own community, institutions and political economy. historian william l. van deburg in his important work on modern black nationalism outlines several nationalist perspectives including cultural, religious, political, revolutionary, educational and economic. in the case of black nationalism, he described it as an ideology desirous of maintaining black “sociocultural” and economic autonomy. deburg’s explanation of nationalism has been the most common approach. for the purpose of this work, black nationalism is defined in order to capture the various dimensions expressed in the most popular groups of the time. thank you to michigan state university archives, one of only a few libraries to own most copies of the final call newspaper (malcolm , pp. – ; van deburg ). genealogy , , ; doi: . /genealogy www.mdpi.com/journal/genealogy http://www.mdpi.com/journal/genealogy http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /genealogy http://www.mdpi.com/journal/genealogy genealogy , , of twentieth-century black nationalism served as a movement, perspective, philosophy and work, which promoted black consciousness, self-definition, black success, beauty, business, health, religiosity, political agency, and overall black self-determination and independence. black nationalists set their own criteria for liberation, free from whites who sought to control them. today, groups such as the people’s new black panther party, the huey p. newton gun club, the black riders liberation party, washita nation, the new black liberation militia, and parties associated with black lives matter, tap into the audacity and rhetoric of twentieth-century black nationalism that made black men such as muhammad ali, malcolm x, and others so popular. the efforts and ideology of these contemporary groups and individuals, like the few mentioned above, demonstrate the influence of past black nationalists who sought to address the “unresolved backlog of race-based social problems” in the united states in the most frank and unapologetic way. still, these groups, and those who espouse black nationalist sentiments today, have yet to match the efforts or garner the impact of twentieth-century black nationalists, particularly those at their apex prior to . unquestionably, twentieth-century black nationalists articulated valuable ideas, and organized programs based on a foundation that recognized the importance of black humanity, self-determination, self-defense, and intra-racial solidarity. diverse in their approaches, focus and application in terms of belief systems, institutions, cultural expression, psychological reclamation, social programs, economic reform, and even curricular development, all black nationalists to some degree remained committed to the liberation of black people. while black nationalist efforts have historically remained mostly positive, responses to this mode of black self-determination from the u.s. media, government, law enforcement, black accommodationists, and the wider public, then and now, have generally stayed negative. media outlets and other institutions have labeled those associated with black nationalism as domestic terrorists and hate mongers. even with their diversity in terms of goals and strategies, those connected with black nationalist thought or views continued to be seen uniformly as irrational radical extremists and temporary irritants who refuse to bend to existing mechanisms of white social control and black accommodationism. since at least , this country has witnessed the rise and fall of twentieth-century black nationalist leaders, programs, organizations, institutions, and movements. still, one of the most consistent and strident voices of twentieth-century black nationalism persist today, the black muslims in the nation of islam and their leader minister louis farrakhan. this essay argues that farrakhan and the reconstituted nation of islam or noi has not only stayed on message by continuing to prioritize black self-determination but they have also attempted to simultaneously provide the most important dimensions of black nationalism since the late s. consequently, the noi, particularly farrakhan, stands as the last influential voice of twentieth-century black nationalism. farrakhan’s eventual departure, and the subsequent decline of the noi, will likely leave a substantial vacuum in the black nationalist tradition for the first time in over one hundred years. (sullivan ; johnson , issue , pp. – ; van deburg , p. ). (trodd , p. ; van deburg , p. ). see southern poverty law center hate group listings, marshall project “black identity extremists,” and a number of articles and social media sites that call black lives matter advocates terrorists (beydoun and hansford ; deese ). see (glaude ; joseph ; levy ; moses ; ogbar ; robinson ; taylor ; van deburg ). i use reconstituted to differentiate between the noi from to and then to present for historical clarity when necessary. genealogy , , of twentieth-century black nationalism can be traced back to marcus garvey’s universal negro improvement association (unia). garvey, and his wives amy ashwood, and later amy jacques, were responsible for the second wave or renaissance of black nationalism in the united states in the early s. garvey took the lead to remove the manacles of racial oppression by prioritizing economic and social black self-determination. the universal negro improvement association’s leadership worked hard to create institutions that sought to raise the consciousness and socioeconomic station of black people. garvey also aspired to break the physical (through emigration) and psychological (miseducation) ties that bonded african peoples to their former slave masters and colonizers. though the movement was thwart with problems, garvey and his unia followers had a great deal of success. with powerful rhetoric and strategies to acquire economic independence such as the establishment of the black star line, the negro world newspaper, and other black business ventures, garvey raised the hopes and aspirations of working-class black people. within just ten years after coming to the united states, garvey found himself under government surveillance, the target of the black elite, surveilled, arrested, then imprisoned, and eventually deported. as a result, the garvey movement in the u.s. became irreparably fractured. moreover, on account of saboteurs within his organization, and his poor management skills, and status as a so-called outsider, the garvey movement in the united states was short lived, leaving very little behind outside of a few followers, and his philosophy and lessons written and later published by his wife amy jacques garvey. consequently, garvey’s exile, in addition to other challenges mentioned, resulted in the deterioration of unia businesses, and the like; and, a movement that was once popular, strong and vibrant, became nearly extinct in the united states. despite these failures, garvey laid an important foundation on which to build subsequent movements. according to william l. van deburg, james l. taylor, peniel joseph, jeffrey ogbar, eddie glaude, and other scholars, several individuals and groups revived the philosophy and aspirations of black nationalism after the decline of the garvey movement in the united states. for example, the african blood brotherhood (abb) recaptured the attention of those with black nationalist leanings. cyril briggs, founder and leader of the group, established what van deburg called a “secret order” in “which possessed both fraternal and paramilitary characteristics.” comparable to other black nationalist organizations, the abb attempted to address some of the wider black community’s most pressing issues, as they saw it, including colorism, economic dependency and instability, black self-esteem, and the need for religious and historical reclamation. the abb eventually became absorbed by the communist party of the united states of america (cpusa); and briggs became its national secretary. by the late s, the abb had waned, and no institution remnants of the organization remained that would continue their specific black nationalist goals and mission. like the garvey movement and abb, most of the twentieth-century campaigns and organizations that appeared between the s and s had at least three components—economic, cultural, and educational uplift. in terms of economic development, a few emphasized self-help initiatives such as black entrepreneurship such as opening up restaurants, department stores, newspapers, bakeries, and other businesses. other proponents centered their efforts on black consumerism. for example, the buy black campaigns encouraged black consumers to purchase products that would help advance black commerce and build wealth within the community. these tactics were two pronged, in that they not only sought to increase support for black businesses but to also undo the psychological effects of white hegemony that led some black people to believe that anything sold or created by black people was inherently inferior. moreover, this strategy intended to undercut european american businesses in black neighborhoods that mistreated, cheated and took advantage of black consumers. in , “carlos cooks organized the african nationalist pioneer movement.” cooks economic scheme focused on the buy black campaign, which he argued would place black people in a position to “control the businesses in black neighborhoods” and ensure financial survival through “economic cooperation.” (van deburg , pp. – ). genealogy , , of cooks advice to buy black for the most part fell on deaf ears and the movement for stable, lucrative, and permanent black businesses in black communities ultimately failed, particularly outside of the south. yet, calls to build and support businesses by and for people of african descent remained a central facet of black nationalism throughout the twentieth century. from the s to the late s, other groups that focused on efforts by and for black people were mostly local. however, much larger groups with more national appeal included the original nation of islam, the us organization, and the black panther party for self defense, as the more popular. the us organization, founded by maulana karenga in , possessed some black nationalist aspects but prioritized cultural reclamation. karenga’s group centered african culture and prescribed cultural unity as a strategy to combat white supremacy. in october , huey p. newton and bobby seal founded the black panther party (bpp). while seal was named chairman, newton became the minister of defense. their decision to form the bpp not only came out of their respect for the conscious-raising work of malcolm x, and by extension the nation of islam, but also the desire to bring an end to the oppression of black people in general and the public execution of black men in particular at the hands of police. the black panther party, though not black nationalist per se, pulled from black nationalist rhetoric, and promoted nationalist programs and ideas. for instance, their desire for community policing to end police brutality against oppressed peoples helped align them with many black nationalist viewpoints. in addition, their call for political activism and education that centered on the black experience, breakfast programs, health clinics, the black panther newspaper, and calls for self-defense exemplified some of the most important qualities of twentieth-century black nationalism. moreover, while they did not support racial separation, they did encourage certain aspects of it such as black people controlling their own schools and communities, such as the bpp oakland community school established in . twentieth-century advocates of black nationalism, even if they only embraced certain aspects, helped to frame, legitimize and advance a new black identity that was self-determining, community centered, and strongly situated in black consciousness. black men, particularly those associated with the bpp, such as stokley carmichael, rap brown, and huey p. newton, became some of the most important black nationalist icons of the twentieth century. while socioeconomic class was central to the bpp’s mission and understanding of the racial problem in america, and culture was central to the us organization, both realized the importance of racial solidarity, identity, and unity among black people. akin to so many black nationalist campaigns and organizations, the black panther party was momentary because of internal strife; government infiltration; the assassination, exile and incarceration of leaders; and complex gender politics. like the garvey movement, the bpp found itself in sharp decline and nearly eradicated within ten years after its founding. the organizations briefly outlined here, from the unia to the bpp, projected some of the most important twentieth-century black nationalist ambitions. other groups, mostly small, or former advocates of integration, such as the student non-violent coordinating committee (sncc), and congress of racial equality (core), moved toward a black nationalist platform by the end of the s to some extent in practice but mostly in terms of rhetoric. groups that embraced some aspect of black nationalism were relatively small, irrelevant, disbanded, or ineffectual by the late s. the only groups to broaden its appeal and continue well into the late twentieth and twenty-first centuries were the programs and ideas of the original nation of islam, although not without significant change. (neilly , p. ; van deburg , p. ). (newton , pp. – ). the nation of islam remains the longest existing black nationalist organization of the twentieth century. genealogy , , of . the last voice of twentieth-century black nationalism july marked the th anniversary of the nation of islam. the original nation of islam, under the leadership of clara and elijah muhammad, represented one of few black nationalist groups that established a national and later international enterprise, such as their private schools, h&g whiting imports, and muhammad speaks newspaper. established in in detroit, mi, the noi operated department stores, clothing factories, a printing press, restaurants, bakeries, a bank, grocery stores, farms and other endeavors, similar to the garvey movement but more robust. elijah muhammad’s program, philosophy, and leadership, though often overlooked by scholars for his tremendous contributions, were some of the most important and successful articulations of twentieth-century black nationalism. muhammad’s strategy of racial upliftment helped turn former convicts, drug users, and black people who lacked meaningful purpose into upstanding members of black communities and the wider society. for the first time, those cast aside as unimportant, unintelligent and criminal became morally upright, family-centered homeowners, and entrepreneurs. men and women associated with the nation of islam attempted to implement the most potent elements of black nationalism—economic advancement, re-education, conscious raising and spiritual recovery. lastly, the nation of islam produced some of the most powerful leaders and spokesmen for black self-determination in the twentieth century, one of whom was minister louis farrakhan. louis farrakhan joined the nation of islam in . by , farrakhan became the lead minister of boston temple no. ; and, by , elijah muhammad appointed farrakhan to malcolm x’s previous position, national spokesperson for the noi. from to , farrakhan held both the role of national spokesperson and the minister of new york temple no. . farrakhan oversaw the rebuilding of mosque no. after the bombing, which was said to be in retaliation for the assassination of malcolm x in february . although he had a difficult time winning over what some have referred to as malcolm’s harlem, farrakhan eventually succeeded in building a strong base. under his leadership, the new york noi no longer rented the restored temple but owned the building. the new structure housed a school, restaurant, bookstore, health food store, and bakery in addition to the temple. as minister and spokesperson for the noi, farrakhan’s popularity and power expanded in the late s and early s, represented by his appearance on shows such as soul! television on wnet in new york, and the success of the annual black family celebration. because of his oratory skills, and ability to rebuild the reputation of the harlem temple, other black leaders, organizations, and students from all over the country invited him to speak at various venues. for instance, “farrakhan often spoke on the same platform with other notable black leaders . . . including being one of the first speakers who addressed the first national black political convention, held in gary indiana . . . [in ].” by , farrakhan easily attracted large audiences with “more than , [attending] his black family memorial day lecture in new york.” though things seemed to be going well for farrakhan in his capacity as noi national spokesman and minister of the new york temple, in , after the death of elijah muhammad, w.d. mohammed, as the new leader of the nation of islam, made significant changes to the organizational structure including moving farrakhan from new york to chicago, and eliminating his post as national spokesperson. a few years later, farrakhan split with the original noi, renamed the world community of islam (wcoi) and later american muslim mission (amm), to “lift the name, defend the honor, spread the message, and rebuild the work of the honorable elijah muhammad.” with the departure of farrakhan, the original noi now split into two major groups, the wcoi/amm, and the reconstituted nation of islam (rnoi), both of which rightly claim the historical legacy of the original nation of islam. although there were a few other offshoots, none flourished compared to farrakhan’s group. though the wcoi/amm and the rnoi share an important past, they pursued different aims from onward. under the leadership of w.d. mohammed, the wcoi/amm struggled to juggle warring ideologies—the desire to (marshall , p. ; walker , p. ). genealogy , , of be more aligned with traditional islam, the need to embrace american patriotism and, to a certain degree, to remain allied with the black struggle for freedom, justice and equality. by the late s, the wcoi/amm’s historic legacy and commitment to black nationalism, as well as weighing in on american racial politics, mostly faded, and conventional islamic and american cultural acceptance and assimilation became prioritized. farrakhan, among one of the first to see and contest the move toward a divestment in an unapologetic agenda for black self-determination, left the group with the desire to reclaim the legitimate spirit of the nation of islam, i.e., reestablishing the community as a self-determining, authentic, economic, unified, and informed voice for black people in the late s. like w.d. mohammed, farrakhan also sought to do a balancing act. he too would seek to align the rnoi with so-called orthodox islam, to a degree; but unlike the wcoi/amm, his group would prioritize the black struggle for freedom, justice and equality over adherence to a more conventional islam, and reject the movement toward uncritical american patriotism and assimilation, similar to elijah muhammad. with his previous experience as minister, and national spokesman for the nation, farrakhan successfully raised additional money and “reestablished the noi, expanded his following, reinstituted the annual saviour’s day celebration, rebuilt the international empire, and [quickly resumed his position] as one of the most powerful and popular black leaders in the u.s. and abroad, particularly among young black people.” from the s to late s, farrakhan worked hard to restore the presence of the noi in nearly every city in the u.s., and outside the country including bermuda, where the original noi had existed, and as a result, his popularity soared both nationally and internationally, especially after the million man march. however, in a post-civil rights-black power landscape, farrakhan faced a great deal of criticism, media misinformation, and controversy. still, he accomplished tremendous feats as the leader of the reconstituted noi by forging partnerships with other black organizations, such as forward-thinking black church leaders like jeremiah wright and spreading the noi message of racial uplift. wherever he went, farrakhan packed “every auditorium he visited with people across the wide socioeconomic and religious spectrum of the black community.” according to marshall, more than “ people, representing different organizations from various cities and states” attended farrakhan’s first noi saviour’s day held in february , and in august, as an invited speaker, farrakhan addressed the significant gathering for the twentieth anniversary of the march on washington. in december of , he traveled with jesse jackson to syria, and he helped secure “the release of navy pilot lt. robert o. goodman jr.” as an example of black solidarity, farrakhan registered to vote for the first time in order to back jesse jackson’s run for the u.s. presidency in and encouraged his followers to do the same. marshall argues that because of farrakhan’s political gesture, one hundred and sixty-seven muslims registered that day. farrakhan’s willingness to openly support jackson inspired other muslims and “a large sector of the militant black nationalist movement which had previously opposed electoral participation” to get involved. many detractors and critics of black nationalists, farrakhan, and by extension the nation of islam, align their programs and philosophy with black supremacy or black capitalism. some find their goals unattainable and outdated, while others accuse black nationalists such as farrakhan of anti-semitism, toxic masculinity, racial bigotry and homophobia. but, despite these beliefs and accusations, farrakhan, like malcolm x, and muhammad ali before him, became a sought-after voice at universities and colleges across the country in the s and s. though some attempted to undercut his freedom of speech, challenged students’ rights to invite him to campuses, and whites and their black allies attempted to discredit farrakhan and his nation of islam, his following and support grew stronger. (marshall , p. ). (marshall , pp. , ). (marshall , pp. , , – ). genealogy , , of given the tremendous controversy, student demonstrations, and efforts to intimidate black student organizations such as the black student union, who invited him, farrakhan’s visits to campuses such as michigan state and northern illinois university in the s resulted in a ban for nearly a decade from many colleges and universities across the country. amid this backlash against black nationalist aspirations and voices, particularly at colleges and universities, farrakhan continued to work on reestablishing clara and elijah muhammad’s efforts, and to propagate their islamic ideologies grounded in black nationalism. the spiritual component of his noi programs, though at times steeped a bit in aspects of old-world superstitions, helped reposition islam as a healthy, pro-black, and life-changing alternative for black people. the educational component, also revitalized, promoted self-education, self-help, and a positive black identity from childhood to adulthood, all of which farrakhan saw, like his predecessors, as integral to the survival and advancement of black people. more specifically, farrakhan reinitiated other original noi programs that sought to undo and eventually eradicate the damaging legacy of white supremacy including severe black unemployment, substance abuse, destruction and separation of the black family, and community violence (securing the internal safety of the black community). as such, the reconstituted nation of islam continued work in the area of drug use recovery by instituting a drug program that successfully helped reduce drug use among black people. they also maintained their community protection efforts. in attempts to quell black animosity and violence in areas such as chicago, new york and washington dc, the nation of islam dispatched security details made up of the fruit of islam (foi), the paramilitary arm of the group, which several politicians and leaders acknowledged. in , “d.c. council member, h.r. crawford . . . supported the muslims,” and as recent as , “mayor emanuel of chicago enthusiastically welcomed the noi, even while under attack from those of the jewish community” who saw farrakhan as anti-semitic. former mayor daley of chicago also embraced the work of the reconstituted noi in chicago as he had done with the original noi in the s, as they helped to bring peace between rival gangs, implemented a clinic for drug abuse, and developed an adopt-a-prisoner program to help decrease recidivism. the nation of islam attempted to create alliances between african americans, native americans, and latino and chicano americans to work toward reducing drug addiction and crime and improve the conditions of socioeconomic suffering in those communities. community control of black spaces, and building alliances with other oppressed groups, helped to bolster the noi’s platform and popularity. for example, in , farrakhan met with navajo leaders such as president joe shirley in an effort to improve relations between black and indigenous peoples. he also tried and succeeded in increasing the noi’s latino membership, particularly in the la area. . economic articulations of self-determination farrakhan and the nation of islam continued commitment to twentieth-century black nationalist ideas, actions, philosophies and perspectives is most evident in their economic goals, conscious-raising efforts and critique of european-american imperialism and white supremacy. though most of the noi’s attempts to restore muhammad’s economic programs met with failure, farrakhan believed that the unique economic problems of black people remained critical and required several approaches to succeed. first, he insisted black people must address “their own unemployment concerns.” next, there was a need to revitalize efforts that focused on black business by reinitiating a buy black campaign, similar to the earlier black nationalist initiatives. additionally, the need for black manufacturing required some attention. in , farrakhan revived elijah muhammad’s three-year economic savings program. this community savings program sought to combat persistent poverty in the black community. he later collaborated with al wellington, founder of the wellington group, to (marshall , p. ; walker , pp. – ). (newsmakers , p. ). genealogy , , of implement “people organized and working for economic rebirth” or p.o.w.e.r. as a way to help build economic independence for black people. as a means to elicit unity, foster community allegiance, and establish an economic base, farrakhan suggested to “secure yourself and your family by establishing a business providing a service or product that fulfills a community need.” he went on, “if you can provide food, clothing and/or shelter—if you can enhance the mind and spirit you are well on your way to making a measurable contribution toward the independence of your community.” with forces meant to disrupt black communities such as gentrification, urban renewal, massive displacement of entire areas, and environmental factors such as contaminated water, the stability and socioeconomic advancement of black communities stand as important staples of any black nationalist agenda. farrakhan argues, “living in close proximity to each other increases political and economic power as well as the quality of life.” the p.o.w.e.r. program encouraged black people to manufacture basic daily items “like soap, deodorant, toothpaste, lotion . . . as well as other household items.” at the core of these efforts remain initiatives by and for the advancement of black people. before widespread popularity of the farm-to-table movement, farrakhan worked to revive the original nation’s farming system in order to produce “foods that [were] uninfected with pesticides and other chemicals that facilitate poor health” and to make them widely available in black communities. by , farrakhan purchased elijah muhammad’s former home for $ , , and again successfully operated several “security firms that . . . won government contracts to patrol crime-ridden black neighborhoods.” the noi also purchased some land in the midwest and opened salaam restaurant & bakery in chicago. in , the nation held an agriculture seminar at muhammad’s farm in buffalo, michigan, saying “farming is the engine of our national life.” nation one communications, “a long-distance service and telecommunications company”, was also founded by the noi. in the los angeles area, the muslims established a food co-op to develop a “partnership with black farmers throughout california to produce crops for the cooperative.” few of these ventures were stable, widely supported, or long term, although some remain in operation. the final call newspaper represents one of the few economic ventures that the reconstituted noi pursued that appears to be the most successful. although it is uncertain just how profitable the paper has been, it is disseminated in every major city in the united states, online, and worldwide. the final call picked up where muhammad speaks, the original noi mouthpiece by and for black people, left off. it remains one of the few international, independent, outspoken, and unbought black nationalist newspapers founded in the twentieth century. the paper covers issues sometimes ignored by the mainstream media, and even some black media outlets, and helps to highlight not only the problems that plague black people but also other racially marginalized groups, their contributions, and accomplishments. it is a paper that includes the experiences and challenges of all people who remain racially ostracized. the final call unapologetically covers the abuse of power by the u.s. government and military on less powerful countries such as iraq, iran, afghanistan, libya, and syria. the noi has been particularly critical of the illegal and savage murders of iraq and libya leaders, which left these countries severely unstable. lastly, the final call maintains a close eye on american dealings with iran and provides a needed account of israel and its dealing with palestinians. the newspaper continues to shine a light on the duplicitous nature of american foreign affairs in latin america, and has maintained an important record of domestic hate crimes, “police terrorism,” and other domestic terror attacks against people of african descent not only in the u.s. but also throughout the world since the s. the noi paper chronicles the black and brown struggle and the fight against injustices generally overlooked by other media outlets such as the ice round up of undocumented workers, civil suit against denny’s in east st. louis in which a black family won $ , for racial discrimination; a black mother’s fight (felicia wilson) to see justice against a now closed bowling brook preparatory (marshall , pp. – , ; van deburg , p. ). (marshall , pp. , ; muhammad ; walker , p. ). genealogy , , of school responsible for the death of felicia wilson’s son; and, fair housing violations in places such as milwaukee, wi. farrakhan, and the nation of islam, have stayed committed to their economic blueprint for self-determination, a core component of twentieth-century black nationalism, through their newspaper, farms, restaurants, schools, and other business ventures. although the economic platform remains significant, the noi continues to recognize the need to eradicate black self-hate as well. nearly all groups—the universal negro improvement association, the african blood brotherhood, the african nationalist pioneer movement, the black panther party, the us organization, the shrine of the black madonna, the original nation of islam, and other groups—tried to address black internalized hatred, even if marginally. generally, three major approaches to the issue of self-hate persisted in the twentieth century—building brick and mortar institutions to help shift the tide of educational indoctrination and miseducation; the outright challenge to white supremacists’ normative ideas of beauty and intelligence in writings, speeches, music, and art; and redefining black religiosity and the conceptions of g-d. all of these methods proved essential to helping to upend internalized racism and allowed black people to see themselves through a new and more positive perspective. . educational articulations of self-determination the schooling of black children is central to cultural awareness and upliftment. black nationalists recognized the tremendous need for both schools and educational programs by and for people of african descent to undo the psychological damage of historical white supremacy. black muslims addressed this concern by removing their children from public schools. when nation members decided to educate black children in the s, their makeshift schools eventually became the first k- private muslim school system in the united states. the black panther members founded weekend schools. their education program intended to challenge the misrepresentation and miseducation found in traditional public schools. the bpp schools also helped to raise the political consciousness of young black people. the us organization sought to re-educate through cultural initiatives such as the implementation of kwanzaa, a cultural holiday and other programs. other groups also offered some kind of educational initiative, with saturday and after school programs becoming the most popular. a few independent black schools were also founded such as lotus academy in philadelphia, pa, nation house watoto shule in washington, dc, and omowale ujamaa school in pasadena, ca. recently, though not independent several charter schools have also attempted to do some of this work, although with great limitations. these liberation schools educated black children about their history, self-defense, and the evils of capitalism and white supremacy. the original nation of islam created a (baylor , p. ; damu , p. ). i reviewed the final call paper since . the black muslim paper covers a broad range of topics domestically and internationally. for instance, domestic issues include racial injustice and terrorism, housing foreclosures in black communities, housing and employment discrimination, unemployment, police brutality, health disparities, government corruption, and international issues such as the iraq war and issues in africa, latin america and caribbean. sample articles include “ december movement leads ‘a day of outrage’ against nypd terrorism,” october , p. ; “u.s. tries to blunt cuba, venezuelan health initiatives in latin america,” october , p. ; “the war economy and the costs of war, part ii,” october ; “a message of atonement comes to the incarcerated,” october , p. ; “millions unemployed: what does major rise in joblessness mean for black america’s future?” november , p. ; “police brutality on the upswing, advocates warn,” november , p. ; “cigarette smoking and lung cancer: a deadly mix, especially for black males”, november , p. ; “corruption: the american way of life,” december , p. ; “mass murder in gaza strip: israeli attacks on palestinians condemned worldwide, but u.s. stands with aggressor nation”, january , p. ; “the exploitation of africa’s land and people”, february , p. ; “stringent anti-immigration law has activist wondering: how far will it go?” may , p. ; “katrina: five years of pain,” september ; “muslims establish organic farm in georgia,” october , p. ; “killing gadhafi,” november ; “who defines black women?” january , p. ; “taking away your rights: national defense authorization act lays foundation for targeting political dissenters, activism,” january , p. ; “carving out a united caribbean,” april ; “investing in black america’s future,” october ; “farrakhan, iran & election ,” march ; “black mother fights for justice,” “another denny’s pays the price,” “fair housing council wins’ discrimination case,” final call, october , p. . genealogy , , of k- national and later international independent school system. as of , many of those schools, many in operation for more than fifty years, have closed. louis farrakhan’s nation of islam was never able to reach the success of the original noi in terms of educational institutions. although there are some noi (reconstituted) schools, few have achieved the reputation of the former muhammad universities, renamed the sister clara muhammad schools in the late s. the noi’s chicago school is likely the most successful. it stands next to the noi headquarters, mosque maryam. the muhammad school, like earlier islamic universities, offers not only typical subjects such as math, reading and science but also arabic, islamic studies and physical training (self-defense). farrakhan sees the inability to maintain these kinds of autonomous black institutions, as well as a failure to support black schools in general, as the miscarriage of the black elite who he argues dismiss black nationalist efforts and self-determination, and do not see the benefits of this particular aspect of black nationalism. in july , farrakhan penned a letter to black leaders. in the letter, he highlighted the inability of the black elite to effect positive change amid the masses of black people. he said “no matter how rich and powerful some of us have become we have never been shown how to network with the wealthy and the learned of our people, pooling our resources, that we may produce for our people that which would grow us from a begging position as little children to become masters of our own destiny.” essentially, given the conditions of public schools and the overall miseducation of black youth, farrakhan envisions that wealthy african americans are positioned to do more in terms of establishing their own schools in the united states, and at minimum in the communities from which they came to assist in the intellectual upliftment of black people. historically, the nation of islam underscored the unfortunate realities faced by black children in american schools; the rnoi continues to do so today. most majority-black schools still lack appropriate resources, black teachers, and black history. instead, what young people see and learn in most schools continues to undermine self-determination and promote the belief of white superiority and black inferiority. just a little more than sixty years ago, the brown v. board decision gave hope to some black people who believed that the supreme court’s ruling would lead to better conditions and outcomes for black children. yet, more than sixty-five years later, black students continue to endure inequities in their schooling. according to the urban leagues’ report on the state of black america, “white students are three times more likely than black students to be at or above proficient in reading and . times more likely to be at or above proficient in math.” moreover, “while the high school graduation rate for americans is improving the achievement gap between racial groups persist. black students have the lowest rate of high school graduation among all racial groups.” the report states that students unable to secure “a high school diploma . . . will have fewer opportunities, much lower wages,” and likely experience higher incidence of health problems. consequently, quality education by and for black youth remains fundamental to any black nationalist agenda and remains especially encouraged by the noi. in a interview with professor henry louis gates, farrakhan said “i think the worst enemy of this country and all the countries of this earth is neither white nor black nor jew nor gentile but ignorance. the hallmark of a true democracy is the enlightenment of the people. in addition, where ignorance prevails democracy cannot be. we have to [seriously] look at the purposeful destruction of the american educational system.” some people, who bend toward black nationalist ideas, have attempted to address the persistence of educational inequality by establishing charter schools; but, these efforts lack the real autonomy and self-determination indicative of twentieth-century black nationalist initiatives. “black mother fights for justice,” p. ; dr. maulana karenga was not a black nationalist and therefore is not suggested as one of the last voices of twentieth-century black nationalism. he is included given the period and his important contributions during the period as it concerns aspects of black nationalism but more specifically cultural nationalism. (farrakhan ). (state of black america , p. ; farrakhan and gates ). genealogy , , of farrakhan and the reconstituted nation of islam’s message of education is not solely for those in the k- system. his nation of islam is a staunch supporter of historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) and views the education of young black people in those institutions closely linked to the economic success, survival, advancement, and self-sufficiency of the wider black community. in , there was renewed interests in the noi’s message. that year, louis farrakhan received a number of invitations to visit hbcus by various student groups. the popularity and number of requests turned this into farrakhan’s black college tour. like his early university tours in the s, s and s, farrakhan’s visits were not without significant controversy. in typical fashion, white detractors of farrakhan tried to put considerable pressure on the administrators and students at various universities to prevent his trip though to no avail. advocates of freedom of speech do not extend such courtesies to groups that relay a challenge to the rhetoric of the status quo and white supremacy. in april of , farrakhan visited with students at alabama a&m university, tennessee state university, lemoyne owens college and the university of arkansas at pine bluff. in march , farrakhan traveled to tuskegee university. in november , morgan state university student government association invited louis farrakhan as their keynote speaker for the nd annual black united summit international. while there, farrakhan spoke about the importance of hbcus and the need to support them not only materially but also by encouraging more black students to opt for enrollment at hbcus in place of predominantly white institutions. he argued that the move toward dismantling hbcus was a direct assault and halt to the fight for black liberation, and he highlighted the fact that some of the black communities best and most vibrant leadership in the s came from the ranks of hbcus. he went on to say that everything must be done to maintain these institutions. farrakhan urged students to major in disciplines that would not simply equip them to get a job but to create jobs. in this area, farrakhan, like his original noi predecessors, encouraged black students to seek degrees important to nation building such as agriculture, mathematics, medicine, engineering and the like. he said, “you have new buildings (at the university) but you’re not producing new minds. you’re not being taught the disciplines that will make you a nation builder, you’re being taught that which will cause you to come out of here looking for a job—and the jobs don’t exist anymore.” he goes on, “get a degree in something that will allow you to build a future for yourself and your people.” his most recurring message was economic and educational development, the very tenets of twentieth-century black nationalism. like the original noi, farrakhan continues to carry the banner of racial uplift and community responsibility, and encourages black college students, and soon to be graduates, to invest in institutions that will help them to be productive citizens for their family, community, society, and the world. farrakhan’s other college visits included the march u.c. berkley’s afrikan black coalition conference which brought together student from all over california, and more recently winston salem university in may among others. it is clear that like other twentieth-century black nationalists, farrakhan continues to capture the attention and respect of black people as evident in his college invitations to morgan state university, tuskegee, prairie view, and other colleges and universities across the country between and . . one nation: international dimensions of black self determination “just four months after the million man march in october , farrakhan took his message abroad in his world friendship tour. visiting ‘ nations in days’.” farrakhan visited places such as sudan, libya, nigeria, and iraq. as a result of his growing international status, and association with so-called enemies of the u.s., farrakhan was accused by u.s. state officials as “cavorting with terrorists”. while some denounced his travels abroad especially to places considered adversaries to american democracy, others celebrated his message of black (and to a lesser degree muslim) unity (farrakhan , ). genealogy , , of and atonement. in a november, article in the new amsterdam newspaper, during his caribbean tour from jamaica to cuba, farrakhan remarked about the need for a caribbean coalition, similar to past calls for a united africa. during his visit to libya, the late muammar qaddafi “pledged $ billion to louis farrakhan to help uplift the black race in america.” lastly, farrakhan collaborated with national and international leaders to create an international economic fund, though unsuccessful. when qaddafi visited the u.s. in , farrakhan and the nation of islam, a long time and strong supporter of the then libyan ruler, said of qaddafi that “he was on the frontline of many [black] liberation struggles including ones focused on freeing mandela, the anti-apartheid movement in south africa, and the continued palestinian struggle.” twentieth-century black nationalists, such as farrakhan and the nation of islam, have always had a complex but important relationship with not only other colonized and oppressed peoples throughout the world but also those who oppose western judeo-christian imperialism. black self-determination remains an important foundation to build black [and muslim] diaspora support. since at least the mid- s, louis farrakhan has enjoyed global celebrity. like his predecessor, elijah muhammad, farrakhan’s message possesses international allure and application not only in its unique brand of islamic religiosity but also in its ability to remain anchored in the most important aspects of black self-determination, black unity, black spirituality, self-help, educational uplift, and economic development. like some earlier twentieth-century black nationalists, such as garvey, the nation of islam continues to call for an african diaspora coalition. the noi is the last strident voice against american imperialism and global white supremacy. in june , farrakhan criticized president barak obama for his “decision to commit u.s. military forces to strategic airstrikes in libya.” in the final call, farrakhan provided a compelling critique of the american government in terms of their complacency regarding domestic terrorism as it concerns black people within u.s. borders, and their violence and duplicity against the international community, particularly muslims. in a speech, titled “under one god,” farrakhan said regarding the bush administration, “they got us in a war that destroyed the economy. all of them are liars. all of them are murderers.” while so-called black leaders in general, and black people in particular, stay silent on the issues related to an ethnocentric american foreign policy, farrakhan and the noi attempt to keep the masses of black people informed, and provide an alternative lens and critical analysis of the american government’s international dealings. in terms of the israeli and palestinian conflict, the noi also remains very outspoken, drawing parallels between the illegal war in iraq, the war on palestinians and islam, and the one being waged against african americans in the united states. farrakhan described rockets launched by israel’s against palestinians as “a continuation of the history and bloody policy of the zionist state and its unapologetic effort to virtually exterminate civilians and wipe palestine off the map.” he has often spoke of / as a justification to invade iraq, and to later assassinate saddam hussein. moreover, according to farrakhan, the u.s. did not go into libya to help the people but to strengthen the opposition against muammar qaddafi and hopes of removing him from power and installing someone more friendly to u.s. capitalists’ interests. he said, “listen to the hypocrisy [of the] american people . . . is it that american government is so concerned over the blood that is being shed in libya, but you looked the other way when the israeli defense force was bombing the innocent people of gaza, unnamed men, women and children? where were you in rwanda? where are you in the congo?” the noi remains critical of the growing anti-muslim rhetoric of u.s. government officials since / . farrakhan claims that african americans must remain vigilant concerning western imperialism and should place so-called terrorism in a historical context. he averred, “terrorism is a response to oppression. we should be asking ourselves what have europeans and americans done to drive people to such great (marshall , pp. , , ; jones ; arinde , p. ). ebony, june , p. . ebony.com; (farrakhan ). genealogy , , of lengths?” he goes on “we must recognize the common issues we face as non-white people of the world and turn to each other and repair our relationships.” historically, one of the nation’s and other black nationalists’ most important and most celebrated characteristics was their ability to shine a light on racially and economically motivated offenses by western powers who continue to criminalize and terrorize non-white peoples with impunity through military action and economic sanctions. farrakhan and the nation of islam’s continued significance, prioritization of black self-determination, and by extension the importance of twentieth-century black nationalist sentiments lie in the ability to disrupt mainstream narratives of misinformation, and the powerful and persistent messages of western white supremacy. . the black nationalist tradition the nation of islam prioritizes black self-determination. the do for self, love thyself, and know thyself principles of the group remain a central theme of their rhetoric and their works. the noi reestablished educational institutions and businesses in the u.s. and abroad, particularly in bermuda and london, though not to the degree of the original nation. they continue to link the twenty-first-century black american struggle for human rights with the broader muslim struggles of palestinians, syrians, afghans, iraqis, and the like, fighting against western judeo-christian imperialism, and european-american capitalist interests. american black nationalism, particularly the noi agenda, continues to be linked to the african diaspora struggle against colonial white supremacists’ socioeconomic control and encroachment. louis farrakhan successfully attracted nation of islam supporters all over the world in europe, africa and the caribbean. he met with various heads of state from africa and the middle east including robert g. mugabe, saddam hussein, and muammar qaddafi. he effectively secured monetary support from libya in order to help build up his enterprise in the s. farrakhan has been only one of a few nationally and internationally recognized black leaders to call for the u.s. government to either “try or release” the guantanamo bay detainees. in , he also called for “a multi-faith [and race] delegation of americans to go to guantanamo” to investigate the reports of abuse and the “desecrations of the qur’an at guantanamo bay” the noi newspaper has continued to cover the iraq and afghanistan conflicts, and critique the united states for what they see as “its real” intentions of capitalistic imperialism, and war crimes that continue unabated. for more than sixty years, farrakhan has provided an important voice and assessment of the persistent and purposeful socioeconomic poverty and racial violence directed toward black people. the noi remains one of the most consistent and important organizations that came out of the twentieth-century spirit of black nationalism. though the noi’s major focus continues to be on unemployment, education, global affairs, and health-related issues, it also continues to address black love and family. in the case of the black family, the noi remains a strong advocate of marriage and monogamy. future scholars may want to examine the marriage and divorce rates of this community compared to other groups given the attention, encouragement, and support provided to build and maintain healthy black families. the nation of islam continues to encourage black solidarity, institution building, self-pride, and economic self-sufficiency. even in the twenty-first century, the noi believes that these tenants are essential to increasing the life chances and opportunities for people of african descent. in , black people continue to deal with many of the same obstacles and limitations to their psychological and socioeconomic well-being that the nation seeks to address—a bankrupt “obama, farrakhan, and the muslim dilemma,” ebony magazine, , p. . ebony.com. (walker , pp. , ). (walker , pp. – ). genealogy , , of educational system; family disruptions and separations; toxic, dilapidated and unstable housing; high unemployment; self-hate; and health disparities that continue to expand, particularly with the onslaught of covid- deaths and black infant mortality. as such, i think the spirit and philosophy of twentieth-century black nationalist remains necessary. there is no other formal articulation or platform of twentieth-century black nationalism today, outside of the noi. louis farrakhan and the noi continue to lay bare long-held notions that maintain and advance the narrative of white superiority and black inferiority most evident in the american media and educational institutions. accordingly, farrakhan and the noi are the last strident voice of twentieth-century black nationalism. although the number of members in the nation of islam are unknown, his following and supporters clearly go beyond formal membership given the millions who show up to his annual events and other affairs. farrakhan is one of very few who can convene black leaders from across the spectrum, from congressman danny k. davis, dr. cornell west, father michael pfleger of saint sabina church in chicago, il russell simmons, reverends al sharpton and jeremiah wright, to the late dorothy height, and others as he did with the millions more movement in washington d.c. when the last voice of twentieth-century black nationalism is silenced, what national and international voices will continue to articulate the possibilities for the masses of black people to re-inspire, restore, and renew black communities? what twentieth-century black nationalist tools may still be useful for a new generation of black activists? or, does black nationalism no longer hold importance for the liberation of black people? how will twenty-first-century black nationalist proponents address the persistent issues of racial strife and inequality; and what new paths may they forge in the protracted struggle for human rights? finally, what might be learned from the nation of islam and farrakhan’s leadership, both successes and challenges, that may pave new ways and envision new strategies in the battle for black self-determination and liberation? funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. references arinde, nayaba. . libya’s qadhafi and farrakhan in nyc next week. the new amsterdam news, september – . baylor, leroy. . farrakhan uses saviour’s day to address the believers and has a message for president obama. the new york amsterdam news, march – . beydoun, khaled, and justin hansford. . the fbi’s dangerous crackdown on ‘black identity extremists.’. new york times online. november . available online: https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/black- identity-extremism-fbi-trump.html (accessed on november ). damu, jean. . rounding up undocumented workers: reflection on the ice raids. final call, october . deese, kaelan. . giuliani says black lives matter is a ‘domestic terrorist’ group. the hill. august . available online: https://thehill.com/homenews/media/ -giuliani-says-black-lives-matter-is-domestic-terrorist- group (accessed on november ). farrakhan, louis. . minister louis farrakhan calls for unity during ‘one nation under god’ speech on saviour’s day. ebony magazine, march . farrakhan, louis, and henry louis gates jr. . farrakhan speaks. transition : – . 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rights-black power era. new york: routledge. levy, peter b. . the civil rights movement in america: from black nationalism to the women’s political council. westport: greenwood. malcolm, x. . the ballot or the bullet. in civil rights since : a reader on the black struggle. edited by jonathan birnbaum and clarence taylor. new york: new york university press. marshall, a. . louis farrakhan: made in america. johnsonville: bsb publishing. moses, william jeremiah, ed. . classical black nationalism: from the american revolution to marcus garvey. new york: new york university press. muhammad, starla. . nation of islam michigan farm host agriculture seminar. final call, july . neilly, herbert l. . black pride: the philosophy and opinions of black nationalism. indiana: authorhouse. newsmakers. . farrakhan visits navajo nation. jet magazine, july . newton, huey p. . revolutionary suicide. new york: penguin books. ogbar, jeffrey o. . black power, radical politics and african american identity. baltimore: the johns hopkins university press. robinson, dean e. . black nationalism in american politics and thought. new york: cambridge university press. state of black america. . urban league report. available online: http://soba.iamempowered.com/soba-boo (accessed on august ). sullivan, kevin. . the rise of black nationalist groups that captivated killers in dallas, baton rouge. washington post. july . available online: https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/inside-the-black- nationalist-groups-that-captivated-killers-in-dallas-baton-rouge/ / / /e aef - f - e -a - ab ed e a_story.html?utm_term=. e badfe (accessed on august ). taylor, james l. . black nationalism in the united states: from malcolm x to barack obama. boulder: lynne rienner publishers. trodd, zoe. . black nationalism. in the civil rights movement in america: from black nationalism to the women’s political council. edited by peter b. levy. santa barbara: greenwood press. modern black nationalism: from marcus garvey to louis farrakhan. . van deburg, william l., ed. new york: new york university press, pp. – . walker, dennis. . islam and the search for african american nationhood: elijah muhammad, louis farrakhan and the nation of islam. georgia: clarity press. publisher’s note: mdpi stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/minister_louis_farrakhan_ /article_ .shtml http://www.finalcall.com/artman/publish/minister_louis_farrakhan_ /article_ .shtml http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /nyregion/farrakhan-defends-his-world-tour-before-a-receptive-crowd-in-brooklyn.html http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /nyregion/farrakhan-defends-his-world-tour-before-a-receptive-crowd-in-brooklyn.html http://soba.iamempowered.com/soba-boo https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/inside-the-black-nationalist-groups-that-captivated-killers-in-dallas-baton-rouge/ / / /e aef - f - e -a - ab ed e a_story.html?utm_term=. e badfe https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/inside-the-black-nationalist-groups-that-captivated-killers-in-dallas-baton-rouge/ / / /e aef - f - e -a - ab ed e a_story.html?utm_term=. e badfe https://www.washingtonpost.com/national/inside-the-black-nationalist-groups-that-captivated-killers-in-dallas-baton-rouge/ / / /e aef - f - e -a - ab ed e a_story.html?utm_term=. e badfe http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	twentieth-century expressions of black nationalism 	the last voice of twentieth-century black nationalism 	economic articulations of self-determination 	educational articulations of self-determination 	one nation: international dimensions of black self determination 	the black nationalist tradition 	references current musicology (spring ] © black. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons-attribution- noncommercial-noderivatives license (cc by-nc-nd). the queer of color sound economy in electronic dance music blair black within electronic dance music cultures (edmcs), musicality and experi- mentation have been indebted to black and latinx djs of color since its inception in the s. even today, queer djs of color continue to push the envelope of experimental edm by showcasing dance music from the “global south,” centering remix styles that border between hip hop and edm, and sampling cultural references popular in queer communities of color. this article explores music’s complex entanglements with identity and community for queer people of color in underground electronic dance music scenes. to be specific, the individuals within these communities self-identify as racial/ethnic minorities on the genderqueer spectrum of non-normative gender and sexual identities (gay/lesbian, trans, non- binary, etc.). moreover, i argue that these socio-economic positions act as an impetus of a sound economy – the shared system of socio-cultural aesthetics – for queer communities of color in edm. the first section dis- cusses the identity politics that underlie this sound economy by tracing how intertextuality allows djs to display these minoritarian perspectives. i then highlight why (re)centering racialized queer identities is radical by tracing edm’s political shifts. specifically, i highlight how narratives sur- rounding edm changed due to the demographic turn in europe during the s. the last section explores the re-emergence of pivotal queer djs of color and the scenes they founded in los angeles, chicago, and new york by focusing on the flows of culture and people between cities to point to a more extensive global network of racialized queer communities in constant musical and political dialogue. this section also examines how the intercity networks of social media, identity-based collectives, inde- pendent records labels, and social activist organizations coalesced into an “underground” music culture and industry that focuses on the care and the pursuit of equity for queer people of color. lastly, i argue that this industry disrupts the cultural and musical hegemony of unmarked whiteness in the power structures that gatekeeping in mainstream edm. queer of color sound economy the sampling of music genres and the use of edit styles employed by queer current musicology communities of color is a generative space to examine how minoritarians articulate the intersections of music, identity, and community. further, sampling, as a practice where producers take segments of “fixed musi- cal text” to create newly articulated compositions, is deeply rooted in afrodiasporic musicianship. consequently, the music heard within these scenes include, but is not limited to, angolan kuduro, brazilian funk ca- rioca, american r&b, hindi pop, and dominican dembow. what is most interesting is the editing styles used by djs to remix the genres, as men- tioned above. techniques, such as ballroom, baltimore club, ghettotech, and house music, allow djs to recontextualize meanings of the source material. additionally, sampling as artistic expression reflects a sense of style and cultural knowledge wherein semiotic indices are essential in the genre’s music making. for example, “ha crash,” a cymbal crash on the fourth beat that informs dancers to “dip,” is a staple in ballroom music. the “ha crash,” which first appears in masters at work’s “the ha dance” ( ), is sampled from a scene where eddie murphy and dan ackroyd are disguised as racist caricatures in the movie trading places ( ). as such, remixing serves as a disidentificatory process that allows djs to create new meanings to suit their needs. the concept of musical intertextuality high- lights how djs construct new “relationships, implicit and explicit, between different “texts,” including music, visual art, theatre, body movement, et cetera, in the process of creating, interpreting, performing and listening to music.” consequently, it is common to hear reality tv star tiffany pollard screaming “i don’t give a fuck” over a ghettotech track and congress- woman maxine waters’s “reclaiming my time” over a vogue music beat placed next to each other in an hour-long dj set. on the other hand, the practice of blurring lines between music and sound allows artists and djs to (re)center the politics that affect them. for example, deconstructed club innovator, dj total freedom, once sampled an audio clip of charges being laid against the officers involved in the extrajudicial killing of freddie gray. indeed, this practice of centering politics, whether overtly or implicitly, is a common aesthetic practice. this disruption of linear time is indicative of kara keeling’s conception of black polytemporality that seeks to use the past in service of present interest and desires. moreover, this play with time affirms the futurity often denied for minoritarian subjects. this is especially the case, given specters of various structural violence, such as police brutality, racialized homophobia, and transphobia. this sentiment is also shared by artist mister wallace whose cool mom persona is an “otherworldly being from roughly three thousand human years into the future who is ‘sent back here to right the wrongs of this time.’” therefore, music in this sound economy and club culture blair black functions as an intervention and reminder for those living on the margins of society to celebrate their survival communally. in the example of the freddie gray sample, dj total freedom critiques the social condition of black life, while simultaneously imagining a future outside of oppressive structures. furthermore, djs and artists tap into an (afro)futuristic prac- tice of using the past to reclaim narrative control of their communities and experiences. as such, remixing and re-editing points to how perception was influ- enced by personal history. that is, people’s background ultimately affects how source material will refract and give new meaning to the source ma- terial. for example, singer-songwriter kelela explains that any one song “could have three completely different lives for the same vocal and that’s what we do. that’s our culture. in the club you’re gonna hear a halftime version, then you’re gonna hear one with no drums, then you’re gonna hear one that’s bpm.” within this aesthetic practice, djs that music is in a constant state of refraction because sound occupies “multiple systems and plays several roles.” this refraction is possible because artists’ and djs’ dispositions affect how they reinterpret and create music. as such, this sound economy is socially mediated and dialogic. in the same interview, kelela expounds on the role of collaboration: “there’s a way that we empower each other through that conversation. not only is the song better for it, but when your ideas are constantly be- ing challenged and constantly questioned, there’s a way that you move through the world considering a lot of things. you can’t navigate the way that a man would navigate studio sessions or even dictate the drums on a track. it was really important to me through this project that everyone was going to have to go through us. not on some reverse-machismo shit, but really on a more profound level. there’s insight and intuition and consideration.” indeed, collaboration as a practice forefronts the importance of diversity in musicianship, positionalities, and politics. in highlighting these differ- ences, this sound economy and more extensive dance music community work to prevent centralizing power and authority within the scene. in doing so, this scene philosophically vanguards an incommiserate com- munism as expressed by queer theorist jose esteban muñoz where “living-in-difference” is more representative of the messy negotiations of race, class, gender, and sexuality in diverse communities. this is especially important given how corporate structures have coalesced to flatten any representations of racial, sexual, and other socio-economic differences by universalizing edm’s function and meaning. current musicology shifting demographics, shifting priorities three historical events in the s would ultimately change the poli- tics and overall perception of edm’s function in mainstream audiences. starting in the mid to late s, the acid house movement – created by the chicago-based african american group phuture – made its way into europe and influenced new generations of british, dutch, german, and belgian djs who subsequently created new edm genres. these djs were affected by the african american djs playing techno in detroit and the dub and soundsystem cultures of british jamaicans. consequently, trance, house music, and techno became fixtures within largely white het- erosexual club scenes and the music subsequently departed from its queer and african american sensibilities. moreover, the discursive shifts in european dance music scenes muted the liberatory politics central to the black queer underground scenes in the us. this was especially the case in the dutch house music scene where they envisioned dance music scenes as escapist youth culture that “has no messages and gives no comfort.” ethnomusicologists and dance music enthusiast hildegonda rietveld speculates that because the dutch were not economically and socially disenfranchised, like the racialized queer communities, they did not view edm as a refuge. upon seeing its popularity in europe, record executives repackaged the various dance musics created by european djs under the umbrella genre, “rave music.” they then resold it to the unknowledgeable american youths. therefore it becomes clear that edm’s apolitical nar- rative is vital to consider given the prevalence of dutch edm from the s well into the s. additionally, the proliferation of british music magazines, such as i-d, the face, and mixmag on both sides of the pond further disseminated this perception of edm. lastly, the aids epidemic effectively diminished edm’s founding generations of queer djs of color whose presence could have pushed against edm’s lack of politics. those who were lucky enough to survive either joined the straight and whiter scenes of edm or joined pop-fueled circuit parties that notoriously cen- ter white gay “masc” (gender conforming) men. as a result, the more radical countercultural principles were decentralized in edm. communities marginalized by edm’s overrepresentation of white cis- gendered men, (e.g. women, people of color, and sexual minorities) began critiquing the status quo. in the last five years, journalists outside of edm industries report the “canyons” between male and female djs, racist door policies, and institutions distancing themselves from sexual minorities to avoid “confusing edm event goers.” these incidents are symptomatic of the overwhelmingly straight and white men in executive positions of music institutions, such as club management, record labels, journals, and festival blair black committees. in turn, straight, cis-gendered white djs are disproportionally hired and praised compared to their queer and non-white counterparts. even critiques of the representational politics within edm triggers “mu- sic purists” to react negatively. for example, dj mag posted a video of racially diverse demonstrators dancing to house music in solidarity with the nationwide black lives matter protests against the extrajudicial kill- ing of george floyd by minneapolis police. however, some fans focused their anger towards a sign that read “house music is black music.” in the comments, people expressed that “music doesn’t have a race” and called for the dj mag page to stop “political sh****t.” despite others stepping in to explain how the sign serves as a reminder of house music’s history, those who were angered defaulted to the universalist rhetoric to justify their re- sponses. in doing so, they perpetuated the narrative that edm is a largely apolitical party music. “it’s where you come to dance out your politics”: (re)centering community and politics in queer of color edm scenes “underground” industries represent a functional necessity for queer djs of color while simultaneously serving as one of the last bastions of politically ascribed countercultures in edm. indeed, this underground consisting of dj collectives, parties, independent record labels, promoters, clubs, and social activist groups all formed within underground dance music scenes with similar calls to re-center alternative sexualities and ethnic minorities in edm cultures. as a result, many of these scenes tend to collaborate by co-hosting events, sharing talent, and even operating as tour legs within an underground concert world. this section introduces some of the players that reignited underground queer and queer of color edm scenes in los angeles, chicago, and new york starting in . these collectives, djs, and creatives have influenced models of current nightlife spaces and have also changed the trajectories of music-making in edm and popular music. los angeles though los angeles is no stranger to queer nightlife or edm, there was (and still is) a shortage of club spaces that cater to queer people of color. even with a healthy number of gay-friendly clubs in west hollywood, many establishments have a documented history of discriminatory door policies that deny entry to black, latinx, and gender non-conforming communities. the situation was made worse by the influx of apartment developments and rising rent prices that resulted in the closing queer of color edm institutions, such as arena and circus disco. moreover, after current musicology the fatal overdose on ecstasy by -year-old sasha rodriguez at electric daisy carnival (edc) in , the local government placed a moratorium on publicly held raves. the ensuing moral panic stirred by the death of rodriguez resulted in mainstream clubs, such as the exchange, avalon, and vanguard, dominating the edm scene (rodriguez ). on the other hand, illegal raves still operated, but due to safety reasons many women and queer people of color were wary of attending. however, a group of djs and creatives would emerge to diversify los angeles’s dance music scene. club nights, such as a club called rhonda, established in by gregory alexander and loren granic, harkens back to disco, house music, and techno’s golden eras when racial and sexual diversity was celebrated. indeed, the duo views nightlife as a cultural in- stitution born from the politics of gay communities of color. around the same time in downtown los angeles, josh peace and ignacio “nacho” nava started their party of queer of color misfits. hailed as “la’s only straight-friendly queer dance party.” mustache monday was a menag- erie of performance artists, drag queens, club kids, musicians and fashion designers that filled the void left by “great punk and art institutions” that disappeared in the s. from this group of creatives, ashland mines, dj total freedom, emerged to give mustache monday their distinctive sound that would first entrench la’s underground scene and mainstream edm. in addition, mines and collaborators wu tsang and nguzunguzu had their party, wildness, at the silver platter, a trans-inclusive bar for latinx immigrants in koreatown. the collaboration between wildness and mustache mondays led to the formation of the fade to mind label by the then new york city-based rapper-cum-dj, kingdom. this label is cur- rently home to a roster of queer, queer of color, and women of color artists who would eventually influence the eerily dissonant electronic club music that made its way into mainstream music. for example, former label dar- ling kelela’s popularity illustrates the queer of color sound translatability for pop music. as a result of fade to mind’s success in promoting the ethnically di- verse sounds from queer dance music scenes, a new vanguard of queer activists, promoters, collectives, and djs are emerging throughout the city. ravers-cum-activist groups, such as rave reparations, seek to build relationships between local black queer-identifying djs and edm promot- ers. additionally, they partner with underground edm scenes to subsidize ticket costs for marginalized bodies. moreover, collectives such as negress mag, you, and bodywork center queer femmes in black, afro-latinx, and latinx communities. negress mag and bodywork regularly feature international talent from cities such as toronto, montreal, and london. as blair black a result, these creative communities often pool resources for community members in need while sharing radical ideas that ultimately foster radi- cally experimental spaces. chicago known as the birthplace of house music, chicago is hailed for its diverse selection of edm clubs. smart bar, an institution considered to be the longest-running edm club, still regularly hosts dance music heavyweights as well as local talent. smart bar is located chicago’s boystown, thus il- lustrating the entangled histories between dance music and queerness. however, boystown and other well-known edm clubs located in the de facto racially segregated northside. consequently, boystown, as an af- fluent and predominately white neighborhood, is guilty of discriminating against lesbian, gender non-conforming, and their racialized peers. the neighborhood bars require multiple forms of id from black and brown pa- trons and even blamed violent crimes on queer youths of color. however, south and west side nightlife spaces – such as jeffrey’s pub and club escape – have remained institutions for queer people of color. thus, a new generation of queer of color collectives continue to make space for their peers in chicago’s south and west sides. due to the racial covenants starting as early as , african american, and then mexican, and mexican americans in the s, were redlined into west and south chicago neighborhoods while simultaneously restricting their access to neighborhoods of the north side. trqpiteca, led by djs la spacer and cqqchifruit, is a performance and production collective-cum-com- pany that centers queer women of color in techno and house. moreover, this company regularly hosts events in the historically mexican american neighborhoods of little village and pilsen in hopes of making edm clubs more accessible to the communities that inform their afrolatinx infused dance music. in the duo hosted their first music and visual arts symposium, icuqts, to highlight work by queer, trans, gender non- conforming, people of color, femme, and non-binary artists internationally and around the country. another southside based collective, party noire, hosts dance events that are intentional spaces for black femmes to enjoy themselves and reaffirm all parts of their personhood in the black and middle-class hyde park neighborhood. this collective regularly hires black femmes from other cities – such as nyc’s tygapaw, and toronto’s dance music vanguard, bambii. taylor and alder have expanded their reach by establishing the femme noir grant, which is awarded to black femmes working in the creative industry. lastly, the record label futurehood, owned by “cool mom” mister wallace, represents the queer men of color current musicology from chicago’s southside. he explains that the mission of his record label is to create revolution music that liberates young black men who feel over- determined by society’s perception of their gendered identities. new york city ghe g th k is a well-known underground club event and subsequent scene created by native manhattanite, jazmin soto (dj venus x). as a bud- ding dj and goth enthusiast, venus x wanted to push against the top bottle service club model that was endemic to new york’s club scene. the deconstructed club music that became iconic to the party and the larger underground scene sought to destabilize the eurocentric conceptions of goth people of color by centering “darker” forms of popular afrodiasporic music: “‘me and my friends were listening to a lot of juke music, three mafia and memphis rap, which is a very dark subgenre of hip-hop. i was like, ‘this is so goth!’ or, at least, i thought it was just as goth as the type of music being played at the parties i was religiously going to, which only played joy division, the cure and alien sex fiend – bands that are con- sidered to be pioneers of what we’ve come to know as gothic music. i also went to a lot of raves, but they really lacked diversity. we definitely wanted to fuck up the assumption of what goth was but also keep it pretty dark.’” consequently, the party developed notoriety for its clashing genres and subcultures that catered to queer audiences of color . moreover, venus x’s penchant for crossing music cultures led to a lasting collaborative relation- ship with la’s underground scene. indeed, throughout the decade, talent from ghe g th k, mustache mondays, and fade to mind would often circulate talent and music edits among each other. adapting to a similar model in , papi juice sought to diversify the manhattan circuit party scene severely lacking people of color, gender non-conforming commu- nities, and gay men of color. interestingly, the party’s rise in popularity coincided with discwoman, a collective and booking agency for women and femmes along the sexual and gender spectrum. throughout the years, discwoman has worked to combat the rampant sexism within the edm industry by throwing events with all-female lineups. as a result of their shared interest in creating femme and queer-centric nightlife spaces for people of color, the two parties would often share talent. throughout the s, the queer of color edm underground estab- lished itself as a contending cultural force both inside and outside its com- munity. indeed, papi juice and discwoman regularly fundraise for local blair black community organizations, such as the brooklyn community fund, and international non-profit organizations, such as the samidoun palestinian prisoner solidarity network. moreover, venus x’s ghe g th k is considered important to the development of new york city’s diy club scene, while simultaneously influencing underground edm communi- ties in berlin, mexico and stockholm. inspired by the success of queer of color parties in new york’s edm underground, newer iterations of parties arose to address the material realities of queer people of color. for example, for the gworls, a collective created by asanni armon, hosts a monthly party that fundraises for housing, gender-affirming surgeries, and general medical expenses for the black transgender community. similarily, discakes, the diy rave collective created by dj pauli cakes, established a common code of conduct for diy and corporate venues and most recently pivoted their efforts to raising money for immigrant families “as well as queer, trans, and nonbinary undocumented immigrants” dealing with the economic fallout from the covid- pandemic. concluding thoughts this article has attempted to explore the ways queer people of color build communities in underground edm scenes. relatedly, this article also serves as an introduction to the intricate webs of meaning created by di- verse queer communities. i have argued how these marginalized commu- nities’ liberatory politics render them largely illegible through mainstream edm networks that center cis-gender white men. i also argued that their experiences as minoritarians influence their music-making. i also argued that their experience as racialized sexual minorities influences their music- making and presented how the music from these highly specified networks has appeal outside their community. however, there are still more questions about the relationship between these queer of color undergrounds and the white heteronormative mainstream. in his dissertation about disco’s queer politics, brock webb ( ) argues that the emphasis on underground/ mainstream binaries obscures the more meaningful relationships and embodied experiences felt by those within the scene. indeed, the terms “underground” and “mainstream” are loaded because of the overlap be- tween the two scenes, whether philosophical or in practice. however, there is significant evidence to suggest that the liberatory identity politics and aesthetics centered in these networks philosophically work in opposition to white capitalist patriarchy that structures the music industry. as such, further research is required to present the means by which and the extent to which queer people of color act as a creative resource that moves the culture and musical innovation for the mainstream dance music industry. current musicology this is especially important given the well-documented history of the ex- ploitative relationships endemic to the music industry. consequently, it is vital to analyze if these queer of color networks are blueprints for creating a more symbiotic music industry. notes . “subjects who do not conform to the phantasm of normative citizenship,” jose esteban muñoz, disidentification (university of minnesota press, ) . . kai fikentscher, “the disc jockey as composer, or how i became a composing dj.” cur- rent musicology / (october ). . dick hebdige, cut’ n’ mix: culture, identity and caribbean music (new york and lon- don: routledge. ); donna hope, inna di dancehall: popular culture and the politics of identity in jamaica (university of west indies press, ); sandra d’angelo, “sampling the sense of place in baile funk music”. relocating popular music (palgrave macmillan, ), - ; jorge de la barre, “sampling lisbon: kuduro and the lusophone imagination.” jour- nal of popular music studies : (march ). . tara rodgers, “on the process and aesthetics of sampling in electronic music produc- tion.” organised sound . (april ), - ; kai fikentscher, “you better work!”: underground dance music in new york (wesleyan university press, ). . thomas turino, “signs of imagination, identity, and experience: a peircian semiotic theory for music.” ethnomusicology . (april ). . göran folkestad, “intertextuality and creative music making.” intersection and interplay ( ). . tygapaw. “cringe mix # – tygapaw” (soundcloud, ). https://soundcloud. com/clubcringe/cringe . retrieved june , . . mikeq. “commentator buddah - reclaiming my time (prod by. mikeq).” (soundcloud, ) retrieved june , , from https://soundcloud.com/qweenbeat/commentator- buddah-reclaming-my-time-prod-by-mikeq. . eugene carolus, “how total freedom’s devastating dj sets changed club music” (dazed, ) january, retrieved june , , from https://www.dazeddigital.com/ music/article/ / /total-freedom-influence-interview. . tavia nyong’ o. afro-fabulations: the queer drama of black life. (nyu press, ). . later, m. “mister wallace & futurehood are liberating chicago’s music scene”. (out, ) december, retrieved june , , from https://www.out.com/out-ex- clusives/ / / /mister-wallace-futurehood-are-liberating-chicagos-music-scene. . kwodo eshun, “further considerations of afrofuturism.” cr: the new centennial review . (summer ), . khalila douze, “kelela and asma maroof on reimagining club music.” (dazed, ). october, retrieved june , , from https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/arti- cle/ / /kelela-asma-maroof-take-me-apart-remixes-interview. . rick altman, film sound: all of it. ( ). . khalila douze, “kelela and asma maroof on reimagining club music.” (dazed, ) october, retrieved june , , from https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/arti- cle/ / /kelela-asma-maroof-take-me-apart-remixes-interview. blair black . jose esteban muñoz, “race, sex, and the incommensurate: gary fisher with eve kosof- sky sedgwick” queer futures: reconsidering ethics, activism, and the political (ashgate, ). . “a sphere of relation structured less by the flat social fictions of possession equality, and equivalence, than by a mode of sharing out, just redistribution and being together in racial and sexual particularity,” joshua chambers-letson, after the party (nyu press, ). . simon jones, “rocking the house: sound system cultures and the politics of space.” journal of popular music studies : (july ). . hildegonda rietveld, this is our house: house music, cultural spaces and technolo- gies. (routledge, ). . ibid, . . ibid, . . ibid, . . commercial parties that often cener white masculine gay men. . a term used to describe gender-conforming gay men. . shawn reynaldo, “reclaiming the queer dance floor.” (npr, ) april, retrieved june , , from https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/ / / / /re- claiming-the-queer-dance-floor . lyndsey havens, “edm is a big, lucrative world, but not for women djs.” (chicago tribune, ) jul, retrieved june , from http://www.chicagotribune.com/enter- tainment/music/ct-edm-women-lollapalooza-ent- - -story.html. . aimee cliff, “house legend felix da housecat got refused to berghain, was very unhappy about it.” (the fader, ) february, retrieved june , , http://www. thefader.com/ / / /felix-da-housecat-vs-berghain. . doug brown, “‘a kick in the gut’: popular queer events booted from euphoria nightclub (updated).” (portland mercury, ) jul, retrieved june , , https:// www.portlandmercury.com/blogtown/ / / / /a-kick-in-the-gut-popular- queer-events-booted-from-euphoria-nightclub. . @itsfauzia, “i said i’d do this a while ago, but now seems like the best time…” (twitter, ) june, retrieved june , , https://twitter.com/itsfauzia/sta- tus/ . . dj mag, “scenes from atlanta’s peaceful black lives matter protests” (face- book, ). june , retrieved june , , https://www.facebook.com/djmagazine/ posts/ . . alessandro negrete, “where are los angeles clubs for queer, transgender people of color?” (q voice, ) february, retrieved june , , from https://qvoicenews. com/ / / /where-are-los-angeles-gay-clubs-for-queer-transgender-people-of-col- or/; zonkel, phillip, “circus disco gene la pietra owner - who tore down club for a luxury condo development - to receive community hero award.” (q voices, ) october, retrieved june , , from https://qvoicenews.com/ / / /circus-disco- owner-gene-la-pietra-who-tore-down-club-for-a-luxury-condo-development-to-get-com- munity-hero-award/ . billboard staff, “la officials question raves after electric daisy carnival death, in- juries.” (billboard, ) january, retrieved june , , from https://www.billboard. com/articles/news/ /la-officials-question-raves-after-electric-daisy-carnival-death- current musicology injuries . katie bain, “can la nightlife institution a club called rhonda become an interna- tional brand?” (la weekly, ) december, retrieved june , , from https:// www.laweekly.com/can-l-a-nightlife-institution-a-club-called-rhonda-become-an-inter- national-brand/; ariana marsh, ‘“a club called rhonda’ is a pansexual dance party and everyone’s invited.” (i-d, ) july, retrieved june , , from https://i-d.vice.com/ en_us/article/a qgvk/a-club-called-rhonda-is-a-pansexual-dance-party-and-everyones- invited. . la cita bar, “mustache mondays – la’s only straight-friendly bar” (facebook, ), retrieved june , , from https://www.facebook.com/events/la-cita-bar/mus- tache-mondays-las-only-straight-friendly-queer-dance-party/ /. . gustavo arellano, “ignacio ‘nacho’ nava jr., l.a. lgbtq nightlife icon, dies at (los angeles times, ) feb, retrieved from https://search.proquest.com/docview/ ?accountid= ; marke b., “celebrating ten years of mustache mondays, la’s iconoclastic party.” (red bull music academy, ) october, retrieved june , , from https://daily.redbullmusicacademy.com/ / /mustache-mondays. . christina von messling, “wildness: between reality, the stage and life” (la re- cord, ) july, retrieved june , , from https://larecord.com/uncatego- rized/ / / /wildness-between-reality-the-stage-and-life. . ibid . august brown, “la record label fade to mind looks to expand its cultural reach.” (la times, ) april, retrieved june , , from https://www.latimes.com/entertain- ment/music/la-et-ms-fade-to-mind-record-label-la-music-underground- -story. html. . ibid . andré wheeler, “‘make techno black again’: a social experiment subverts white- washing in clubs.” (the guardian, ) march, retrieved june , , from https:// www.theguardian.com/us-news/ /mar/ /african-americans-techno-music-los-ange- les-clubs-whitewashing. . a floating signifier used to describe feminine identified and/or presenting individuals. see (levitt, gerrish and hiestand ) for more an overview of its modern conception. . julie tolentino, vivian a. crockett, tara hart, amira khusro, leeroy ky kang, dragon mansion, “the sum of all questions: returning to the clit club.” glq: a journal of les- bian and gay studies / (october ), . arnold hirsch, making the second ghetto: race and housing in chicago - . (university of chicago press, ); zach stafford “privilege, policing and living while black in chicago’s white north side.” (the guardian, ) september, retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ /sep/ /privilege-policing-black-chicago- white-north-side. . anthony taylor, “southside trash & proud: the vixen says there’s no place for preju- dice in pride” (pride ) june, retrieved june , , from https://www.pride.com/ thevixen/ / / /southside-trash-proud-vixen-says-theres-no-place-prejudice-pride. . steven jackson and jason, “making chicago’s boystown.” (wnez . chicago, ) retrieved june , , from https://interactive.wbez.org/curiouscity/makingboystown/. . pronounced “i see you cuties.” international chicago underground queer transcen- blair black dence symposium. . ashley ray-harris, “there’s an uplifting party scene just for black womyn in chicago” (red bull, ) april, retrieved june , , from https://www.redbull.com/us-en/ theredbulletin/party-noire-club-night-founders-interview. . matthew later, “mister wallace & futurehood are liberating chicago’s music scene.” (out, ) november, retrieved june , , from https://www.out.com/out-exclu- sives/ / / /mister-wallace-futurehood-are-liberating-chicagos-music-scene. . nico amarca, “ghe g th k: courting catharsis through choas.” (highsnobiety, ). may, retrieved june , from https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/ghe g th k- nyc/. . ibid . antwaun sargent, “meet papi juice, the collective behind brooklyn’s best qtpoc party” (the fader, ) june, retrieved june , , from https://www.thefader. com/ / / /papi-juice-the-collective-brooklyn-qtpoc-party. . andra nikolayi, “the radical dissonance of deconstructed, or ‘post-club,’ music” (bandcamp daily, ) july, retrieved july , , from https://daily.bandcamp.com/ lists/deconstructed-music-post-club-list. . marissa matozzo, “this rave collective is helping nyc immigrants affected by co- vid- ” (paper magazine, ) may, retrieved july , from https://www.paper- mag.com/discakes-fundraiser- .html?rebelltitem= #rebelltitem . . brock webb, this side of midnight: recovering a queer politics of disco club culture doctoral dissertation (bowling green state university, ). . ibid, references altman, rick. . film sound: all of it. amarca, nico. . “ghe g th k: courting catharsis through choas.” highsnobiety. may, retrieved june , . https://www.highsnobiety.com/p/ghe g th k-nyc/. arellano, gustavo. . “ignacio ‘nacho’ nava jr., l.a. lgbtq nightlife icon, dies at .” los angeles times. feb. https://search.proquest.com/docview/ ?accoun tid= . b., marke . “celebrating ten years of mustache mondays, la’s iconoclastic party.” red bull music academy . october, retrieved june , . https://daily. redbullmusicacademy.com/ / /mustache-mondays. bain, katie. . “can l.a. nightlife institution a club called rhonda become an international brand?” la weekly. december, retrieved june , . https:// www.laweekly.com/can-l-a-nightlife-institution-a-club-called-rhonda-become-an- international-brand/. bar, la cita. . “mustache mondays – la’s only straight-friendly bar” facebook. retrieved june , . https://www.facebook.com/events/la-cita-bar/mustache- mondays-las-only-straight-friendly-queer-dance-party/ /. brown, august. . “l.a. record label fade to mind looks to expand its cultural reach.” l.a. times. april, retrieved june , . https://www.latimes.com/ entertainment/music/la-et-ms-fade-to-mind-record-label-la-music-underground- -story.html. brown, doug. . “‘a kick in the gut’: popular queer events booted from euphoria current musicology nightclub (updated).” portland mercury. jul, retrieved june , . https://www. portlandmercury.com/blogtown/ / / / /a-kick-in-the-gut-popular- queer-events-booted-from-euphoria-nightclub. carolus, eugene. . “how total freedom’s devastating dj sets changed club music.” dazed. january, retrieved jun , . https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/ article/ / /total-freedom-influence-interview. chambers-letson, joshua. . after the party: a manifesto for queer of color life (nyu press). cliff, aimee. . “house legend felix da housecat got refused to berghain, was very unhappy about it.” the fader. february. http://www.thefader.com/ / / / felix-da-housecat-vs-berghain. d’angelo, sandra. . “sampling the sense of place in baile funk music”. relocating popular music. palgrave macmillan. - de la barre, jorge. . “sampling lisbon: kuduro and the lusophone imagination.” journal of popular music studies ( ): , - . douze, khalila. . “kelela and asma maroof on reimagining club music.” dazed. october. retrieved june , . https://www.dazeddigital.com/music/ article/ / /kelela-asma-maroof-take-me-apart-remixes-interview eshun, kwodo. . “further considerations of afrofuturism.” cr: the new centennial review . (summer), - . fikentscher, kai. ( ) “the disc jockey as composer, or how i became a composing dj.” current musicology / , - . ____________. “you better work!”: underground dance music in new york. wesleyan university press. folkestad, göran. . “intertextuality and creative music making.” intersection and interplay. . haven, lyndsey. . “edm is a big, lucrative world, but not for women djs.” chicago tribune. jul. retrieved june , . http://www.chicagotribune.com/ entertainment/music/ct-edm-women-lollapalooza-ent- - -story.html. hebdige, dick. . cut ‘n’ mix: culture, identity and caribbean music. new york and london: routledge hirsch, arnold. . making the second ghetto: race and housing in chicago - . university of chicago press . hope, donna. inna di dancehall: popular culture and the politics of identity in jamaica. university of west indies press. later, matthew. . “mister wallace & futurehood are liberating chicago’s music scene”. out. december. retrieved june , . https://www.out.com/out- exclusives/ / / /mister-wallace-futurehood-are-liberating-chicagos-music- scene. levitt, heidi, elisabeth gerrish, and katherine hiestand. . “the misunderstood gender: a model of modern femme identity.” sex roles : - , - . jackson, steven and jason nargis. . “making chicago’s boystown.” wnez . chicago. retrieved june , , from https://interactive.wbez.org/curiouscity/ makingboystown/. jones, simon. . “rocking the house: sound system cultures and the politics of space.” journal of popular music studies : , - . mag, dj. . “scenes from atlanta’s peaceful black lives matter protests” facebook. retrieved june , . https://www.facebook.com/djmagazine/ posts/ . marsh, ariana. “‘a club called rhonda’ is a pansexual dance party and everyone’s blair black invited.” i-d. july, retrieved june , . https://i-d.vice.com/en_us/article/ a qgvk/a-club-called-rhonda-is-a-pansexual-dance-party-and-everyones-invited. matozzo, marissa. “this rave collective is helping nyc immigrants affected by covid- .” paper magazine. may, retrieved july , . https://www.papermag. com/discakes-fundraiser- .html?rebelltitem= #rebelltitem . mikeq. . “commentator buddah - reclaiming my time (prod by. mikeq).” soundcloud. retrieved june , . https://soundcloud.com/qweenbeat/ commentator-buddah-reclaming-my-time-prod-by-mikeq. muñoz, jose esteban. disidentifications: queers of color and the performance of politics (vol. ). university of minnesota press. _________________. . “race, sex, and the incommensurate: gary fisher with eve kosofsky sedgwick” queer futures: reconsidering ethics, activism, and the political. ashgate, - . negrete, alessandro. . “where are los angeles clubs for queer, transgender people of color?” q voice. february, retrieved june , . https://qvoicenews. com/ / / /where-are-los-angeles-gay-clubs-for-queer-transgender-people-of- color/. nikolayi, andra. . “the radical dissonance of deconstructed, or ‘post-club,’ music” bandcamp daily. july, retrieved july , . https://daily.bandcamp.com/lists/ deconstructed-music-post-club-list. nyong’o, tavia. . afro-fabulations: the queer drama of black life. nyu press. ray-harris, ashley. . “there’s an uplifting party scene just for black womyn in chicago” red bull. april, retrieved june , . https://www.redbull.com/us-en/ theredbulletin/party-noire-club-night-founders-interview. reynaldo, shawn. . “reclaiming the queer dance floor.” npr. april. retrieved june , . https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/ / / / / reclaiming-the-queer-dance-floor. rietveld, hildegonda. . this is our house: house music, cultural spaces and technologies. routledge. rodgers, tara. . “on the process and aesthetics of sampling in electronic music production.” organised sound . (april), - . sargent, antwaun. . “meet papi juice, the collective behind brooklyn’s best qtpoc party.” the fader. june. retrieved june , . https://www.thefader. com/ / / /papi-juice-the-collective-brooklyn-qtpoc-party. staff, billboard. . “l.a. officials question raves after electric daisy carnival death, injuries.” billboard. january. retrieved june , . https://www.billboard.com/ articles/news/ /la-officials-question-raves-after-electric-daisy-carnival-death- injuries. stafford, zach. . “privilege, policing and living while black in chicago’s white north side.” the guardian. september, retrieved from https://www.theguardian.com/us- news/ /sep/ /privilege-policing-black-chicago-white-north-side. taylor, anthony. ( ) “southside trash & proud: the vixen says there’s no place for prejudice in pride” pride. june, retrieved june , , from https://www. pride.com/thevixen/ / / /southside-trash-proud-vixen-says-theres-no-place- prejudice-pride tolentino, julie, vivian a. crockett, tara hart, amira khusro, leeroy ky kang, dragon mansion. . “the sum of all questions: returning to the clit club.” glq: a journal of lesbian and gay studies / (october), - . turino, thomas. . “signs of imagination, identity, and experience: a peircian semiotic theory for music.” ethnomusicology . (april), - . current musicology tygapaw. . “cringe mix # – tygapaw” .soundcloud. retrieved june , from https://soundcloud.com/clubcringe/cringe . retrieved june , . von messling, christina. . “wildness: between reality, the stage and life” l.a. record. july, retrieved june , . https://larecord.com/ uncategorized/ / / /wildness-between-reality-the-stage-and-life. webb, brock. . this side of midnight: recovering a queer politics of disco club culture doctoral dissertation. bowling green state university. wheeler, andré. . “‘make techno black again’: a social experiment subverts whitewashing in clubs.” the guardian. march. retrieved june , , from https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ /mar/ /african-americans-techno- music-los-angeles-clubs-whitewashing. zonkel, phillip. . “circus disco gene la pietra owner - who tore down club for a luxury condo development - to receive community hero award.” q voices. october. retrieved june , . https://qvoicenews.com/ / / /circus-disco- owner-gene-la-pietra-who-tore-down-club-for-a-luxury-condo-development-to-get- community-hero-award/. @itsfauzia. . “i said i’d do this a while ago, but now seems like the best time…” twitter. june, retrieved jun , . https://twitter.com/itsfauzia/ status/ . michigan journal of community service learning fall , pp. – responses to the call for a national strategic plan lori e. kniffin jeffrey howard university of north carolina at greensboro depaul university the service- learning and community engage- ment future directions project (slce- fdp) was launched in . since then approximately in- dividuals from a wide range of perspectives have come together as contributors of thought pieces that issue bold calls to guide the future of slce. in an essay accompanying the ten thought pieces in fall , howard and stanlick ( ) called for the “development and implementation of a u.s. national slce strategic plan” (p. ). their essay provides one answer to the question of how all of the ideas about the future of slce being assem- bled by the slce- fdp – and also being articulated in other publications over the last few years – can become more than individual thoughts, questions, and actions. in this essay we review the highlights of the call for a national plan and then share some of the responses to it as a basis for ongoing engage- ment with the proposal. howard and stanlick ( ) have in mind “an intentional organizing effort broadly developed by multiple stakeholders . . . [to] move us beyond the current prevalence of independent, individuals ef- forts . . . to a more coherent nationwide collective endeavor” (p. ). although the slce movement has made strides in the last twenty years, it has pri- marily occurred at the individual level: individual students, individual faculty and staff, individual courses, individual programs and centers, individ- ual institutions, individual community organiza- tions, individual disciplinary associations, individ- ual regional and national organizations. howard and stanlick wonder “what collaborations might evolve if there were a platform to which many slce stakeholders and entities could contribute their voices,” and they offer the metaphor of a com- pass that “not only guides individuals . . . but also synergizes across all levels of organizations . . . and all stakeholders . . . for more lasting civic engage- ment that has greater impact on social justice” (p. ). their rationale for a national plan for slce includes the sheer growth of the movement with- in higher education, the recent calls among many thought leaders for new ways to think about and implement slce, the innovation and synergy that a national conversation can engender, and the value of greater clarity regarding our ultimate purposes as a movement and how best to advance them. their sense is that a national planning process is need- ed to leverage the bold calls for enhancing slce being gathered by the slce- fdp, providing “the impetus, the structure, and the focus to bring each of them into conversation with other visions and strategies within and beyond this project” (p. ). their essay acknowledges several challenges: that the “very idea of a national strategic plan is likely to be contested,” that inevitably some voices will not be at the table, and that reaching consensus on either general directions of or specific elements in a national plan will be difficult (p. ). it asks: “what is the critical mass needed to move forward collectively and how do we best maintain open- ended dialogue around contested ideas?” (p. ). and it proposes as a first step the identification or creation of a coordinating entity: could the plan- ning process be driven by a national organizational leader or by a group of representatives from several national organizations and a variety of other stake- holders? however it is coordinated, the authors note, there will need to be a way to engage stake- holders, identify funding, facilitate conversations, and develop and disseminate a product. howard and stanlick summarize their call as fol- lows: intended to support the flourishing of the work and its purposes across a wide range of con- texts, such a large- scale strategic plan would, of necessity, be grounded in a sense of our ultimate vision(s), emerge from a set of broad goals, be accompanied by illustrative strate- gies, and point to indicators of positive change – all dynamic and co- created by the slce community as a whole .  .  .  . we envision a multitude of opportunities for co- creation and collaboration – from conversations to white pa- pers to a finalized strategic planning process. we urge you to become involved and join us. (pp. – ) building on the invitation to share ideas regard- ing a potential national plan issued in howard and kniffin and howard stanlick’s essay, the slce- fdp has worked over the last year in a variety of venues to solicit respons- es to and invite ongoing thinking about the call for such a plan. to investigate interest and investment in the idea of a national plan and to begin gather- ing suggestions for how a planning process might proceed and what a plan might include, we have hosted in- person conversations, assembled recom- mendations and concerns from hundreds of individ- uals at conferences, and solicited the perspectives of national slce organizations. in the remainder of this essay, we summarize what we have heard to date; a third essay on the topic of a national plan for slce, forthcoming in the spring special section of mjcsl dedicated to the slce- fdp, will provide analysis of the conversation to that point and offer substantive recommendations for subse- quent action. perspectives from national slce organizations we invited leaders of national slce organiza- tions to read howard and stanlick’s ( ) essay (as well as the introduction and framing essay for the slce- fdp, also published in the michigan journal of community service learning, fall ) and to respond on behalf of their organizations to a set of questions we sent them. our questions ad- dressed six issues: (a) their overall reactions to the howard and stanlick essay; (b) their suggestion(s) regarding the content to be included in a national plan for slce; (c) their suggestion(s) regarding the process of developing a national plan for slce; (d) their organization’s potential involvement in developing a national plan for slce; (e) their reactions to the proposed coordinating entity for the development of a national plan for slce and their organization’s potential role with such an entity; and (f) their view of the goals for the slce move- ment in the next two decades. five organizations participated: community- campus partnerships for health (ccph), campus compact, imagining america, the international association for research on service- learning and community engagement (iarslce), and the international partnership for service- learning (ipsl). while they are by no means a comprehen- sive set of national organizations, their responses offer some key thought leader perspectives regard- ing the idea of a national plan to guide the future of slce. these responses are summarized below by question, not linked specifically to the respondent organization and in no particular order within each question. overall reactions to the essay none of the five organizations objected to the idea of a national plan for slce, although they did raise some questions and cautions regarding the timing and the process through which it might move forward. they also wanted to ensure that such a plan would honor the autonomy of each organization to pursue its respective mission. one organization, in the midst of its own planning pro- cess, suggested that we should “get everything that can be got out of the current effort before focus- ing on something else.” another expressed support for “the spirit of creating a national strategic plan for slce and much of what it advocates” but was “skeptical about the specific approach suggested”; that organization proposed instead that “we could begin a process to first create a statement of stra- tegic intent, or to craft a shared agenda” as a step toward “achieving a living, generative framework from which to articulate a general direction to pur- sue and a few basic principles for how to get there.” one response emphasized the importance of iden- tifying the best community engagement work and cultivating it through an organizing model. one in- dicated that developing such a plan “offers opportu- nity for important self- scrutiny.” another organiza- tion’s leadership fully supported examining current practices and gathering “stakeholders and thought leaders around the table to discuss our collective future” and also asked “how does one gather the (many) disparate voices that now operate largely in silos?”  content ideas for a national plan the leaders of all five organizations offered sug- gestions for topics to be addressed in a national plan for slce. one proposed that the plan focus on the faculty reward system, explain social justice and how to measure movement toward it, and address “ways of enhancing the permeability of academic- community borders at multiple levels” (e.g., “entry points for community members to study, teach, en- gage in collaborative research”). another similarly shared multiple suggestions: intertwining slce with diversity, inclusion, and equity; developing scholars’ “epistemic orientation around communi- ty engagement”; and focusing on trans- disciplinary and asset- based approaches to slce. one response indicated that a “comprehensive vision for engage- responses to the call for a national strategic plan ment” includes approaching engagement “in an integrated way across teaching, research, and func- tional areas of the institution such as purchasing, real estate, development, human resources, financial aid, and admissions” and “integrating institutions into community ecosystems in ways that promote a more just, equitable, and sustainable democra- cy.” another cautioned against creating a percep- tion that the content of any national plan developed has been predetermined, suggested returning to the work begun by zlotkowski’s focus on slce in the disciplines, and called for new research on how two trends in higher education – the rise of adjunct fac- ulty and neoliberalism – may affect slce’s future. one organization wanted to ensure that any nation- al plan developed would emphasize the ethical un- derpinnings of slce; its response also questioned whether the academy should be the “de facto de- livery model for ethical service- learning practices.” process ideas for a national plan the leaders of all five organizations offered sug- gestions for how the process of developing a nation- al plan for slce might best proceed. one response indicated that any process would need to “support existing organizations pursuing complementary objectives.” two organizations did not explicitly answer this question, but process suggestions were embedded in their responses to other questions. one of them suggested producing “a roadmap and suggested milestones for the journey  .  .  . in order to ensure accountability, mark progress, and make appropriate adjustments along the course”; artic- ulating a “problem statement”; and developing a “conceptual framework for what such a plan might address, as well as a vision for how that plan might be articulated, disseminated, implemented and ul- timately evaluated.” the other noted the difficulty and importance of “identifying the many actors in service- learning and in inviting them to participate in a way that serves not only the field, but the com- munities we purport to serve” and emphasized the importance of “open dialogue.” one organization suggested that a national planning process be con- sidered as “a collective, movement- building activi- ty, not only a strategic plan but a ‘theory of change’ – this could focus attention on the long- term out- comes and how to achieve those outcomes.” an- other response supported the idea of a coordinating entity but not the notion that it be composed of and led by representatives of existing slce organiza- tions, proposing instead locating leadership of the planning effort in a cross- cutting body (specifically, the academy of engaged scholars (aces) serving as a convener and secretariat). potential organization involvement in developing a national plan responses from four of the five organizations indicated readiness to be involved in developing a national plan for slce; the fifth indicated not knowing what their role might be until after their organization’s planning process is completed. one organization expressed the desire to be represented on a coordinating entity and indicated that it could “help conceptualize and guide the steps needed to develop and advance the plan.” one indicated want- ing to “remain in dialogue with the process as it unfolds.” another proposed being a “core associ- ation involved in this endeavor.” another indicated willingness to “commit resources to an open dia- logue” around content areas that fit their mission (e.g., ethical underpinnings of slce). reactions to a coordinating entity and organizational role therein the responses to the idea of a coordinating en- tity to guide the development of a national plan varied from suggestions for specific organizations to take on the role to important considerations for the formation of such group, including who should be involved. one, as mentioned above, proposed a crosscutting body such as aces to serve in a coordinating role.  one organization leader noted that any new structure would require resources that “existing organizations have no surplus of.” another indicated that a coordinating entity “as a coordinating group is required” because “this is too large a task for one organization and there is tremendous value in getting broad buy in through contributing to plan development and feeling own- ership  .  .  . result[ing] in a stronger plan  .  .  . more likely to be used as a guide to change.” another suggested strongly that community members must be involved with a coordinating entity to avoid the process of developing a national plan being an “‘about them, without them’ exercise.” one pointed to campus compact’s th anniversary gathering as an example of providing space for many organiza- tions to showcase their work – noted as an essen- tial step in movement building – and wanted to see more opportunities to work across organizations to build a movement. goals for the slce movement the set of responses about goals for the next two decades of the slce movement is multi faceted. one organization noted that its answers to the pre- ceding questions reflected the goals of slce (e.g., kniffin and howard equitable resource distribution, social justice). one response indicated: “we need higher education col- lectively to reclaim its public purposes by organiz- ing all of its activities in ways that maximize public goods.” another suggested the purpose is social jus- tice and specified that “the goals must include state- ments related to reducing/eliminating racism and discrimination, building community capacity for ad- vancing community- defined social justice goals, and redistribution of power to promote equity.” another organization saw slce as “representing more of a struggle for the soul of higher education, its potential for racial and social justice, its promise of address- ing social and economic inequality, and the explicit recognition that this is a political struggle – for the distribution of resources, for power and authority, for institutional policies and structures”; it proposed “an alliance between diversity, inclusion, and equity, and student success, and community engagement” and highlighted as a goal “the emergence of community engagement as an explicit and critical alternative to neoliberal logic – and an alternative future for higher education that emphasizes its public and democratic aspirations and purpose.” another organization was reluctant to specify goals, given concerns about tradi- tional strategic planning processes, but noted “we are very concerned about the growing schism between (a) neoliberal values that have infiltrated the slce move- ment and (b) the democratic values that encourage education for education sake as a means to promote critical- thinking, justice- minded, responsible citizens who are engaged with their communities.” perspectives from individuals and other organizations in addition to gathering responses from national organizations about the idea of a national strategic plan to guide the future of slce, the slce- fdp also collected ideas from other organizations and individuals throughout the past year, primarily (al- though not exclusively) at conferences. in these sessions, we asked for feedback from potential stakeholders on both the process of creating a na- tional plan and the content of such a plan. these discussions proved to be fruitful, with contributors candidly sharing opportunities, concerns, and criti- cal feedback on the prospect of creating such a plan. here we share a few preliminary themes emerging in each of these three areas, some of which overlap with the responses from the national slce organi- zation leaders. overall, the feedback from individuals and or- ganizations supported the development of a shared plan. comments noted that this kind of plan is “timely and urgently needed” and that “it is clear that acting in unison on this topic would be of great benefit to the slce movement as it would be for any national movement.” there was a broad base of interest to participate in the process, provide feed- back, and in some cases take on an organizing role. those who did not express full support of a shared plan mostly cautioned regarding timing and poten- tial duplication of work (e.g., with campus com- pact’s campus action plans). when asked to provide thoughts on a process for a national plan, the majority of the respondents provided feedback on the coordinating entity and method of a plan and the stakeholders/participants to be included. the following ideas about the coor- dination of a planning process were suggested: grassroots organizing methods neutral convener/facilitator slce organizations, consortiums, or regional partnerships slce- fdp independently third-party organization not tied to slce communities of practice around content areas echoing the emphasis on including a diverse range of stakeholders from the national organization leaders, specific ideas regarding who should be in- volved in the development of a national plan con- verged around the following: government (local to national) slce community partners and other practi- tioners of slce in communities (e.g., non- profit agencies, non- government organiza- tions, faith- based organizations) all types of educational institutions ( - year in- stitutions, community colleges, k- ) students, administrators (including chancellors and presidents), faculty, staff people from underrepresented cultures and back- grounds diversity of disciplines feedback cautioned against assuming that a sin- gle individual can speak for an entire stakehold- er group and also urged the use of technology to include those who cannot travel to conferences or other convenings. a wide range of topics were proposed as po- tential content for a national slce plan. specific suggestions for what such a plan should speak to included, for example: faculty salaries and com- pensation for community partners, the ethics of responsible engagement, relationships between slce and other fields or movements (e.g., civic education in k- , black lives matter), decon- responses to the call for a national strategic plan structing academic- community borders and power structures, assessment, intercultural understanding, and working both within and across disciplines. broader ideas for how to determine the content of a national plan included, for example: dream big but be realistic, provide examples and case studies, name the role of neoliberalism in higher education, push for better practice, incorporate contested ideas and values, list overarching goals for the move- ment, use language that works for all stakeholders, focus on social justice, and speak to the full range of where campuses and communities are in their journeys with slce. two opportunities for thinking about the possi- bility of a national plan for slce were somewhat in- depth and, in addition to highlighting some of the same issues noted above, generated questions and tension points for further consideration, a few of which follow. there was general agreement that the slce movement should better articulate shared ends or purposes that transcend individuals, pro- grams, organizations, institutions, and national as- sociations; but there was less consensus on whether those ends are already established (e.g., social jus- tice as the ultimate goal of slce) or should emerge organically through ongoing conversation about what we do and do not share in terms of our sense of purpose. several participants in these discus- sions noted that how we think about a national plan and whether and how we proceed to develop one depends on whether slce is a “field,” a “move- ment,” both, or something else entirely. relatedly, the question arose of whether we ought to be envi- sioning the future of slce (whether as a field or a movement) or of the world more generally. echoing some of the thinking of the national organization leaders, one issue identified by several participants concerned the danger of losing slce’s radical na- ture; one example was the question of how, assum- ing a plan will likely speak to civic skills, that be done through a broad- based national conversation in ways that maintain a critical edge? some point- ed to the range of barriers to having a voice in a planning process as a significant challenge to the development of a vision and strategies that are tru- ly shared; the slce- fdp itself was discussed in these terms, with some individuals suggesting it is too academic to be truly inclusive. use of the term “strategic plan” was also questioned as the most ap- propriate representation of what it might mean to generate and document a strong sense of direction for slce and guidance on how we might move forward together. and the distinction between de- veloping a plan that is “strategic” and one that is “tactical” in orientation arose – the suggestion be- ing to try to achieve shared understanding, purpose, principles, and goals but not to try to reach consen- sus on specific methods. as with the national organization leaders’ re- sponses to our questions, we recognize these ideas from individuals and other organizations about a potential national slce plan are not comprehen- sive. although hundreds of people have provided process and content suggestions, they are by and large faculty and staff who participated in the con- ference sessions we facilitated this past year. many more perspectives, especially from community members and students, are needed, as are more opportunities for in- depth discussion. the input we have gathered to date does, however, begin to suggest the variety of visions our slce colleagues across the u.s. hold for a national planning process and document. at the very least, we are beginning to build out a set of issues that will require careful consideration as this conversation proceeds. now what? we take this full set of input – preliminary as it is – as support from the slce community to con- tinue the conversation about and move forward on a national plan for slce. certainly this past year’s conversations have helped bring into focus some of the central challenges associated with conceptual- izing, developing, and using such a plan. questions remain about process, including timeline, coordina- tion, and participants. yet it seems to us that begin- ning to move forward in accordance with a few of the process suggestions we have received may be in order. specific ideas around distributed leadership for the next phase of this process have emerged, for example in the form of organizations that have expressed interest in convening slce colleagues around particular aspects of the plan. even though it is unclear where the funding – that clearly will be needed to facilitate a broad- based and in- depth series of discussions – will come from, we are hopeful that the past year has nurtured a sense of commitment to and investment in the idea sufficient to bring forward the needed resources. the slce- fdp leadership team makes four commitments at this time: (a) to following up with several individual and organizational participants in the conversation to date in the hope of formaliz- ing their roles as supporters of an ongoing process; (b) to facilitating several additional conversations in the coming months that will be designed to yield substantive and diverse input regarding the future of slce and how we might best move forward to- gether to advance a shared vision and strategies; (c) to collaborating with new and continuing contribu- tors to publish more thought pieces that call atten- kniffin and howard tion to particularly important future directions for slce; and (d) to produce an analysis of the ideas gathered by the slce- fdp as of , two years after our launch, as a basis for determining the fu- ture of the project overall and of the proposal it has generated for a national plan. equally if not more important, however, is the question of what thought piece contributors, read- ers, and other slce colleagues on campuses and in communities will commit to regarding the de- velopment of a movement- wide vision for slce. to that end, we ask you as a member of the slce movement to consider the following questions and how you might engage with the project in order to envision that future together. will you be part of building on past work that has brought us to this place of readiness and need for a collective focus on our future? if so, how? will you comment on this essay on the slce- fdp website? will you participate in virtual gatherings to con- tinue the conversation about the process and content of a national plan? will you be part of analyzing the first rounds of thought pieces and thereby helping ensure the ideas developed there will be brought forward and built on at the movement- level? will you offer to convene in- person gatherings to advance work on a plan? to fund them? to fund the slce- fdp more generally so that it can continue to hold open what seems to be a useful space for national and international idea sharing? will you bring the slce- fdp to your campus, community organization, or association and thereby make explicit to your colleagues the invitation to contribute their questions, ideas, and concerns to the conversation about the future of our work generally and a potential guiding plan in particular? will you develop your own thought piece or blog post for the slce- fdp website in response to the call for a national plan and the conversa- tion around it to date? this is an open call to anyone and everyone in- volved in slce to (paraphrasing alice walker) create in the present the future we wish to see. what are your thoughts on a national plan? this process needs your input. in the spirit of the origi- nal proposal for a national strategic plan, we must think beyond our own individual and organizational contexts and reach out through dialogue and action across the slce community to continue to advance our movement with enhanced intentionality, integ- rity, and impact. please join the conversation on www.slce-fdp.org or email us at slce.fdp@gmail. com. note two other national organizations were invited to par- ticipate but declined. references howard, j., & stanlick, s. ( ). a call for a national strategic plan. michigan journal of community ser- vice learning, ( ), – . authors lori e. kniffin (lekniffi@uncg.edu) is a doc- toral student in cultural foundations of education and a graduate assistant at the institute for com- munity and economic engagement at the universi- ty of north carolina at greensboro. her scholarly interests include food justice, community dialogue, and democratic classrooms. she is the – slce future directions project fellow and the chair of the international association for research on service- learning and community engagement (iarslce) graduate student network. jeffrey howard (jhowar @depaul.edu) is director of faculty development at depaul’s steans center for community- based service learning where he conducts faculty workshops and consults on service- learning courses and getting community- engaged scholarship published. he is the founder and editor of the michigan journal of community service learning. http://www.slce-fdp.org mailto:slce.fdp@gmail.com mailto:slce.fdp@gmail.com mailto:lekniffi@uncg.edu mailto:jhowar @depaul.edu s .. illiberalism unbound: america’s progressive legacy desmond king the new freedom and the radicals: woodrow wilson, progressive views of radicalism, and the origins of repressive violence. by jacob kramer. philadelphia, pa: temple university press. . p. $ . . illiberal reformers: race, eugenics & american economics in the progressive era. by thomas c. leonard. princeton, nj: princeton university press. . p. $ . . i s there any meaningful way in which leaders of the progressive era can be labelled ‘progressive’? their racism and illiberalism are overpowering, and for scholars of this period, reek like chloroform. the notionally radical economist john commons dismissed african americans as “indolent and fickle.” the august american economics association published and promoted john hoffman’s vile diatribe entitled race traits of the american negro adum- brating on african americans’ “utter worthlessness.” the leading eugenicists such as charles davenport and madison grant advocated the energetic exercise of illiberal state coercion to cleanse america by ruthlessly sterilizing, segre- gating, deporting, and preventing marriage amongst the unfit and inferior, while irving fisher’s tract national vitality demanded curbing the reckless humanitarianism which misguidedly permitted the “survival of the unfit and their perpetuation in the next generation.” and it goes on, with crude dismissals of fin de siècle immigrants—a familiar trope in the progressive gallery of the undesirable and inferior. eugenicists drove exclusionary immigration reform and the surge in americanization of those who made it into the country past the restrictions (king ). these alleged progressive heroes of factory laws, non- partisan ballots, and state intervention hated all those unlike themselves—dodgy immigrants, african ameri- cans, asians, mexicans, and anyone else they bothered to think about who offended the ascriptive hierarchies and codes, as rogers smith ( ) calls them, by which they lived. undesirables were deemed incurable. progressives seized on eugenic solutions to rid america of these undesirables. theodore roosevelt sent fisher’s book to congress, enthusiastic about (and intoxicated by) its “fundamental importance.” the leading intellectual figures in progressivism had a profound ambiguity about enfranchising women voters, worrying that the emanci- pated “better stock” would be diverted from child bearing, while the inferior, licentious female voters would harm democracy. however formulated, illiberal invective mar- inated progressivism. this poisonous legacy clouds the contemporary scene. it is aired in the increasing recognition of woodrow wilson’s overweening nastiness, and in the persistent burden confronting activists trying to explain why a racist inheritance is not instantly dismissible in an america tarnished by enduring inequalities (kristoff , coates , page , king and smith ). electorally, the mobilization against immigrants as undesirables reeks through the presidential campaign, quite explicitly in several candidates’ cases. and yet, americans don’t just have donald trump’s jingoism. as in the progressive era, the modern debate has competing forces. voters have a sanders version of socialism promising inclusion and laws working for the non-one per cent households: socialism was a key radical doctrine influencing progressives’ ideas and observable in some of the era’s policies. but the language used by sanders and to some extent trump, is the stranger because it has become remote in american politics in two ways. first, radicalism in the us since the late s has been the purview of the political right (and trump’s populism extends that influence). reaganism transformed the land- scape, pressing the nominally democratic progressive bill clinton to enact a viciously punitive welfare reform, and to initiate a crushing imprisonment regime. in his health care and regulatory measures, only president obama has made some inroads into the steady march of america’s right. desmond king (desmond.king@nuffield.ox.ac.uk) is the andrew w. mellon professor of american politics at nuffield college, university of oxford. perspectives on politics doi: . /s © american political science association review essay http://dx.doi.org/ . /s downloaded from http:/www.cambridge.org/core. princeton univ, on sep at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at http:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. http://dx.doi.org/ . /s http:/www.cambridge.org/core http:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms tleonard text box second, as the books by thomas leonard and jacob kramer rehearse, a century ago the political landscape was steeped in a variety of radical ideologies and policy options from anarchism, syndicalism, and feminism to industrialism and socialism. radical ideas from the left and right have crowded into the content and rhetoric of the presidential election, compelling the more traditional candidates to take account of proposals for the break-up of big wall street banks, to expand the federal minimum wage, to challenge the beneficence of free trade agreements, and to reconsider natural gas fracking. “too big to fail” banking institutions—a core concern of progressive analyses of trusts (lemann )—is back in the political mill, catapulted by the ravages of the great recession and its aftermath (clinton , warren ). the scale of income inequality—resonating with the gilded age and progressive era—has smashed its way into the presidential debate (jacobs and king , scheiber and cohen ). absent from the presidential debate is attention to civil rights and the challenges posed by the black lives matter movement. certainly there is no space for these issues in the trump or cruz version of the republican party. voters who ask off-script questions are unceremoniously manhandled out of trump’s vast rallies. but the demo- crats aren’t much interested either—bernie sanders pusil- lanimously dismissed a question about reparations (coates ), and hillary clinton’s “natural” connection to african american voters often appears strained. this neglect of racial inequality not only rehearses a bi-partisan silence ingrained into party polarization (tesler ), but also echoes the insouciance of progressives confronted with racial inequality. progressivism defined it is a good indicator of the scale and elasticity of the era of progressivism that these two books, both centered on progressivism and progressive thinkers, evince remarkably little overlap. the economic theories of progressive economists and eugenic obsessions of progressives imbibe leonard’s meticulous and scholarly study but make no appearance at all in kramer’s useful volume. leonard offers up the view that progressivism was “less a coherent agenda of substantive goals than it was a technocratic theory and practice of how to obtain them in the age of industrial capitalism” (p. ). for kramer, progressivism was “an effort to expand the capacities of the state to address the problems of class conflict, poverty, corruption, and immorality that accompanied the rise of big business” (p. ). both authors accord a key place to the administrative state, as a necessary condition for pro- gressive policies and as a legacy. the illiberal inheritance one commonality is the oppressive presence of woodrow wilson. wilson stands over much of the progressive era and its legacies. his stern, icy eyes and exaggerated pince nez stare out unappealingly at the reader from the cover of the new freedom and the radicals. how much damage could such a grim looking figure inflict on those fellow citizens whom he judged unfit to be equal members of his country? the answer is plenty, especially if you were african american. as leonard observes in his study, wilson used progressive arguments to justify his suppres- sion of african americans. thomas leonard has crafted an elegant, original, and cleverly argued account of core progressive ideas. illiberal reformers is deeply researched, and far ranging in the deployment of primary sources. leonard has not just recycled material from the voluminous secondary liter- atures on eugenics, economics, immigration, race ‘theory,’ labor studies, and darwinism. instead he has invariably read key thinkers’ publications and quotes from these primary documents, often to devastating effect. the book is a major achievement. leonard’s intellectual interest is primarily with eco- nomic ideas and the economists such as richard t. ely, john commons, and irving fisher who paraded them. for him, these thinkers are the core of the progressive movement, their arguments extending across the spectrum from labour market efficiency and work place conditions, to hereditary exclusion of the unfit either through immi- gration or sterilization or both. their aversion to the crass individualism, inefficiencies, and monopolistic tendencies of modern industrial capitalism informed the economic arguments developed for state intervention, and a commit- ment to the establishment of an administrative state capable, under the guidance of experts like themselves, of rational planning and ameliorative policy. they held, according to leonard, “an extravagant faith in adminis- tration” (p. ). the federal reserve, set up in , epitomized this style of governance (jacobs and king ), constituting for leonard a “watershed in the formation of the american administrative state”(p. ), but many progressive schemes rested on fundamentally illiberal arrangements (king ). as leonard writes, an administrative state, to be effective, should legitimately and “regularly override individuals’ rights” (p. ). this assumption marks out the fundamental break with and fault-line between classical liberalism and progressivist thought. across the ideological spectrum of progressive economists from right to left wing, leonard discovers through detailed research a striking shared willingness to “subordinate individual rights to their reading of the common good” with impunity (p. ). leonard strives to eschew retrospective judgments, but his aim to be even-handed and historically sensitive becomes overwhelmed by the sheer ghastliness of these early twentieth century thinkers. their internal contra- dictions and mental contortions can only defeat the modern observer: commons’ promotion of labourers’ september | vol. /no. http://dx.doi.org/ . /s downloaded from http:/www.cambridge.org/core. princeton univ, on sep at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at http:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. http://dx.doi.org/ . /s http:/www.cambridge.org/core http:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms rights at work sits with his odious eugenics of the immigrant. one can only hope that he and his elk would have resisted annihilating the dismissed masses of whom they disapproved. regrettably, on leonard’s telling, these progressives would have competed to pull the lever, and then enjoyed a reviving cup of herbal tea, pleased to have dispatched the drunken worthless dregs of humanity. socialism in america? eugenics does not warrant an index entry in jacob kramer’s highly competent the new freedom and the radicals (though the book’s production by temple up is marred by rather too many proofing errors). despite writing about nominally the same political movement as leonard—progressivism in american politics—kramer’s focus on this movement’s relationship to radicalism un- expectedly leads him away from the eugenic and racial hierarchical context into the world of four radicalisms: anarchism, syndicalism (represented by the iww), social- ism (debs), and revolution overseas (from mexico to russia to post-ww europe). kramer homes in on how wilsonian progressives responded to these four tendencies from the late s to the mid- s. the narrative moves in and out of how key figures—such as florence kelley, helen keller, jane addams, louis brandeis, george creel, w e b du bois, herbert croly, and walter lippmann—responded to and interpreted the intense demands of radicals. kramer’s thesis is that the way in which progressivism related to these four radical strands of political organiza- tions and ideas was a crucial determinant of the evolving concept of progressivism. although his interest is with individuals and their choices, this relationship was medi- ated by context: scale of industrial strife, wartime, socialist pressures, and fluctuating attitudes toward militants, especially militant immigrants. he traces a path toward ‘repressive tolerance’—a contradictory term, which he takes to mean what level of repression was tolerable to progressives in electoral office. kramer is impressive in laying out the four strands of radicalism and documenting their development chrono- logically. the book retains the feel of its origins in a doctoral thesis, with careful organization, cautious argument, and an overly formal effort to judge its findings against a schematic literature review in the closing chapter. kramer’s explanation for the shifting relationship between progressivism and radicalism is ultimately a listless one: “progressivism and radicalism were not always fundamentally similar, but the place of radicalism within progressive thought followed an identifi- able pattern depending on the circumstances” (p. ). those varying circumstances consist in the presence or absence of economic crisis, war, presence or absence and level of intensity of internal political violence, the level of power held by progressives, and the potential importation from overseas of revolutionary threats and ideologies. as a chronology, these conditions turn largely on pre ww , wartime, and then the post—war red scare era of the palmer raids. kramer documents many of the most brutal industrial disputes vividly conveying the scale and ferocity of strikes, the role of the iww and debs’ organization, and the alacrity with which ‘broad minded’ progressives embraced illiberal repressive measures of internal security to match their illiberal social principles. kramer has used some archival sources, but when using the language of his key thinkers and activists he relies extensively on quotations from other scholars’ books. the book therefore lacks the flavour of novel research or original documentation usually associated with first monographs by historians. the book’s quality and importance must rely on the interpretative claim. here kramer does a commendable job of assembling and organizing the material for his argument. he demonstrates sophistication in presenting and assessing competing sources of ideas among leading progressive thinkers and contributes to our understanding of the coagulating forces in this era and their dynamics. the wilsonian problem however, because of the way he defines and sets up radicalism, historian jacob kramer underestimates the significance of woodrow wilson’s white house incum- bency as a destructive force on the contemporaneous status, and then the ensuing prospects, of african amer- icans. and this persists despite centering much of his analysis on the wilsonian era. in one passage he dismisses wilson’s enforcement of segregation in the federal gov- ernment as “de facto” rather than official policy and, therefore, somehow as less consequential. admittedly kramer is drawing on secondary sources about this fundamental restructuring in the relationship between african americans and the federal government. such documents would have informed him of the explicit wilson policy to segregate by race within the federal government and the deliberate demotion or redundancy of many black civil servants (king ), which wrecked hardship on their household incomes and those of their children and grandchildren. kramer buys the canard that wilson kept his segregationist policy at arms-length and could therefore claim not to be personally responsible or aware, a position which was contradicted by wilson’s avid racism and shouting exchange with monroe trotter and other civil rights activists who dared to challenge his injection of segregated race relations into the federal government. it was wilson’s treasury secretary and assistant secretary of the treasury who reported their outrage to the president that white and black women worked in close proximity to one another in the bureau of engraving and printing. the president ended such, to him, unforgivable arrangements. his actions ensured the perspectives on politics review essay | illiberalism unbound http://dx.doi.org/ . /s downloaded from http:/www.cambridge.org/core. princeton univ, on sep at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at http:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. http://dx.doi.org/ . /s http:/www.cambridge.org/core http:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms administrative state was a segregated state (king , rung ). the legacy of wilson’s restructuring endures (rung ). the economic carnage has been described by descendants of several victims of the wilson era discrim- inatory segregation (davis ). such belittling of these racial processes make the historical analysis offered in the new freedom and the radicals close to complicit in americans’ historical forgetfulness about this era. this central episode in wilsonianism is little more than a footnote in kramer’s study, yet its illustration of the vapidness and racialized core of much of his ‘radicalism’ ideologies is unmistakeable. kramer is tone deaf about the perverse beliefs underlying these ideologies and how those beliefs survived the destruction of ideological options. it is curious of kramer to place w.e.b. du bois amongst his group of progressives and not to discuss how mistreated he was by the dominant white progressives including wilson, who consistently dismissed as fruitless the prospects of equal citizenship for african americans. du bois’s great study of philadelphia was ignored by white progressives, who considered black voting rights prepos- terous. ignorant of african americans’ role in the union army, economist john commons was apoplectic that “this race, after many thousand years of savagery, was suddenly let loose into the liberty of citizenship, and the electoral suffrage” (quoted in leonard p. ). for commons, addressing the unequal status of african americans would only subvert american democracy not achieve it. du bois paid a bitter price for allying to the american cause after the united states entered ww . the programmatic challenge: too big to work? both authors recognize the development of the admin- istrative state as pivotal to progressive aims and reforms. this institution got decisive expansionary jolts during the war and relatedly as workplace reforms were enacted. leonard’s analysis underlines how much progressive economists were motivated by the inadequacy of the market—“american markets no longer served the public good” (p. )—and saw themselves as disinterested experts better able to manage the economy. this disinterestedness and expertise easily slide into a broader illiberal “intelligent social engineering” project. the elements of engineering stretched from the benign (regulation of work conditions and helping pensioners) to the intrusive and illiberal (immigration restrictions and a program of involuntary sterilization, upheld in the supreme court). for american political development, a singular achievement and legacy of the progressive era was the administrative state, a bureaucracy prompted by the combination of woodrow wilson’s presidency and u.s. mobilization for ww . but this american administrative state was distinct comparatively, assuming a much greater national regulatory rather than policy delivery character, a distinctness of continuing significance (fioretos, falletti and sheingate , valelly, mettler and lieberman ). fewer direct powers of planning were achieved by the national state than progressives had anticipated and lobbied for. wartime also made income tax a reliable revenue sources for the modern state, something expanded greatly by franklin d. roosevelt (sparrow, ), and heralded the arrival of economists as experts in such government agencies as the us war industries board. institutionally a springboard for the new deal, wwii mobilization and the great society resulted. planning and agency expansion during the first world war offered a pathway for new deal programmes. the death knell of new deal style liberal activism has been announced on numerous occasions, especially by critics of bernie sanders in the campaign. such proclamations are premature. the affordable health care act shows that there is no inherent limit to the passage and enactment of comprehensive public policy measures, though the design and implementation of this health care program fits with the american state’s in- stitutional distinctness. where the progressive tradition of planning and administrative capacity lacks reach is on the persisting material racial inequalities bequeathed to the u.s. polit- ical system from the progressive era, in terms of crude racial hierarchies, and the new deal era, in terms of racialized policies with entrenched institutional effects (gerstle , katznelson ). since the s, the dominant thrust of political debate has been to emphasise individualism (privatising as much as possible, stigmatiz- ing and punishing welfare recipients) and to legitimate it by reference to a vacuous color-blind ideology (king and smith ). this is the legacy of the reagan initiated era dismantling of the administrative state, expressed most recently in the paul ryan review of the war on poverty. but in fact small government has not precluded comprehensive state intervention as demonstrated in the political econ- omy of mass incarceration (gottschalk , lerman and weaver ). nor have its advocates been able to explain how the deep problems of material racial inequalities will get addressed in the absence of comprehensive, universal, and enforced federal government action. in his response to bernie sanders, the public intellectual ta-nehisi coates ( ) rehearses the “facts” that cannot be “evaded:” “from until at least the late s, american institutions, businesses, associations, and governments— federal, state and local—repeatedly plundered black communities. their methods included everything from land-theft, to red-lining, to dis-enfranchisement, to con- vict-lease labor, to lynching, to enslavement, to the vending of children.” he adds: “so large was the plunder that america, as we know it today, is simply unimaginable without it. its great unviersities were founded on it. its september | vol. /no. http://dx.doi.org/ . /s downloaded from http:/www.cambridge.org/core. princeton univ, on sep at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at http:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. http://dx.doi.org/ . /s http:/www.cambridge.org/core http:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms early economy was built by it. its suburbs were financed by it. its deadliest war was the result of it” ( ). the lachrymose agenda of enduring inequality remains weary- ingly familiar and urgent. references clinton, hillary. . “how i’d rein in wall street.” new york times december . coates, ta-nehisi. . “the case for reparations.” atlantic monthly. june. . . “why precisely is bernie sanders against reparations?” atlantic monthly january . davis, gordon j. . “what woodrow wilson cost my grandfather.” new york times. november . fioretos, orfeo, tulia g. falleti, and adam sheingate eds. . the oxford handbook of historical institutionalism. oxford: oxford university press. gerstle, gary . liberty and coercion. princeton: princeton university press. gottschalk, marie. . caught. princeton: princeton university press. jacobs, lawrence r. and desmond king. . fed power: how finance wins. new york: oxford university press. katznelson, ira. . fear itself. new york: norton. king, desmond. . in the name of liberalism. oxford: oxford university press. . . making americans: immigration, race and the origins of the diverse democracy. cambridge ma: harvard university press. . . separate and unequal: african americans and the us federal government. new york: oxford university press. king, desmond and rogers m smith. . still a house divided: race and politics in obama’s america. princeton: princeton university press. . . without regard to race: critical ideational development in modern american politics.” journal of politics. : – . kristoff, nicholas. . “when whites just don’t get it, part .” new york times. april . lemann, nicholas. . “notorious big.” the new yorker, march . lerman, amy and vesla weaver. . arresting citi- zenship. chicago: university of chicago press. page, jennifer. . reparations and state accountability. doctoral thesis, department of government, harvard university. rung, margaret c. . “the color of money: race and fair employment in the bureau of engraving and printing, – .” journal of policy history. : – . scheiber, noam and patricia cohen. . “for the wealthiest, a private tax system that saves them billions.” new york times december . smith, rogers m. . civic ideals, new haven: yale university press. sparrow, james. . warfare state. new york: oxford university press. tesler, michael. . most racial, post racial. chicago: university of chicago press. valelly, richard, suzanne mettler, and robert lieberman. eds. . the oxford handbook of american political development. oxford: oxford university press. warren, elizabeth. . “the banking industry’s transparent attempt to weaken the cfpb.” huffington post. october . perspectives on politics review essay | illiberalism unbound http://dx.doi.org/ . /s downloaded from http:/www.cambridge.org/core. princeton univ, on sep at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at http:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms. http://dx.doi.org/ . /s http:/www.cambridge.org/core http:/www.cambridge.org/core/terms jm-jabf .. commentary systemic racism and health disparities: a statement from editors of family medicine journals sumi m. sexton, md, caroline r. richardson, md, sarina b. schrager, md, ms, marjorie a. bowman, md, mpa, john hickner, md, msc, christopher p. morley, phd, ma, timothy f. mott, md, nicholas pimlott, md, phd, john w. saultz, md, and barry d. weiss, md ( j am board fam med ; : – .) the year has been marked by historic protests across the united states and the globe sparked by the deaths of george floyd, ahmaud arbery, breonna taylor, and so many other black people. the protests heightened awareness of racism as a public health crisis and triggered an antiracism movement. racism is a pervasive and systemic issue that has profound adverse effects on health. , racism is associated with poorer mental and physical health outcomes and negative patient experiences in the health care system. , as evi- denced by the current coronavirus pandemic, race is a sociopolitical construct that continues to disad- vantage black, latinx, indigenous, and other people of color. – the association between racism and adverse health outcomes has been discussed for deca- des in the medical literature, including the family medicine literature. today there is a renewed call to action for family medicine, a specialty that emerged as a counterculture to reform mainstream medicine, to both confront systemic racism and eliminate health disparities. this effort will require collaboration, com- mitment, education, and transformative conversations around racism, health inequity, and advocacy so that we can better serve our patients and our communities. the editors of several north american family medicine publications have come together to address this call to action and share resources on racism across our readerships. we acknowledge those members of the family medicine scholar community who have been fighting for equity consistent with the black lives matter movement by writing about racism, health inequities, and personal experiences of practic- ing as black family physicians. while we recognize that much more work is needed, we want to amplify these voices. we have compiled a bibliography of scholarship generated by the family medicine commu- nity on the topic of racism in medicine. the collection can be accessed here: https://www.annfammed.org/ content/sharedbibliographysystemic-racism-and- health-disparities. while this list is likely not complete, it does include over published manuscripts and dem- onstrates expertise as well as a commitment to addressing these complex issues. for example, in , dr. j. nwando olayiwola, chair of the department of family medicine at ohio state university, wrote an essay on her experiences tak- ing care of patients as a black family physician. in january of , family medicine published an entire issue devoted to racism in education and training. dr. eduardo medina, a family physi- cian and public health scholar, coauthored a call to action in for health professionals to dismantle structural racism and support black lives to achieve health equity. his recent article builds on that theme and describes the disproportionate deaths of black people due to racial injustice and the covid- pandemic as converging public health emergencies. , in the wake of these em- ergencies a fundamental transformation is war- ranted, and family physicians can play a key role. from the american family physician (sms); annals of family medicine (crr); fpm (sbs); journal of the american board of family medicine (mab); journal of family practice (jh); primer (cpm); fpin/evidence- based practice (tfm); canadian family physician (np); family medicine (jws); fp essentials (dbw). funding: none. conflict of interest: none. corresponding author: marjorie a. bowman, md, mpa, wright state university, dayton, oh (e-mail: marjorie.bowman@wright.edu). jabfm january–february vol. no. http://www.jabfm.org o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .ja b fm .o rg / j a m b o a rd f a m m e d : first p u b lish e d a s . /ja b fm . . . o n ja n u a ry . d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://www.annfammed.org/content/sharedbibliographysystemic-racism-and-health-disparities https://www.annfammed.org/content/sharedbibliographysystemic-racism-and-health-disparities https://www.annfammed.org/content/sharedbibliographysystemic-racism-and-health-disparities mailto:marjorie.bowman@wright.edu http://www.jabfm.org/ we, the editors of family medicine journals, com- mit to actively examine the effects of racism on soci- ety and health and to take action to eliminate structural racism in our editorial processes. as an in- tellectual home for our profession, we have a unique responsibility and opportunity to educate and con- tinue the conversation about institutional racism, health inequities, and antiracism in medicine. we will take immediate steps to enact tangible advances on these fronts. we will encourage and mentor authors from groups underrepresented in medicine. we will ensure that content includes an emphasis on cultural humility, diversity and inclusion, implicit bias, and the impact of racism on medicine and health. we will recruit editors and editorial board members from groups underrepresented in medicine. we will en- courage collaboration and accountability within our specialty to confront systemic racism through content and processes in all our individual publications. we recognize that these are small steps in an ongoing process of active antiracism, but we believe these steps are crucial. as editors in family medicine, we are com- mitted to progress toward equity and justice. simultaneously published in american family physician, annals of family medicine, canadian family physician, family medicine, fp essentials, fpin/evidence based practice, fpm, journal of the american board of family medicine, journal of family practice, and primer. the authors thank renee crichlow, md; byron jasper, md, mph; and victoria murrain, do; for their insightful comments on this editorial. to see this article online, please go to: http://jabfm.org/content/ / / .full. references . institute of medicine (us). committee on under- standing and eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in health care. smedley bd, stith ay, nelson ar, eds. unequal treatment: confronting racial and ethnic disparities in health care. washington, dc: national academies press; . . bailey zd, krieger n, agénor m, graves j, linos n, bassett mt. structural racism and health inequities in the usa: evidence and interventions. lancet ; : – . . ben j, cormack d, harris r, paradies y. racism and health service utilisation: a systematic review and meta-analysis. plos one ; : e . . paradies y, ben j, denson n, et al. racism as a de- terminant of health: a systematic review and meta- analysis. plos one ; :e . . american academy of family physicians. insti- tutional racism in the health care system. . available from: https://www.aafp.org/about/policies/ all/institutional-racism.html. accessed sept. , . . yaya s, yeboah h, charles ch, otu a, labonte r. ethnic and racial disparities in covid- -related deaths: counting the trees, hiding the forest. bmj glob health ; :e . . egede le, walker rj. structural racism, social risk factors, and covid- —a dangerous conver- gence for black americans n engl j med ; :e . . centers for disease control and prevention. health equity considerations and racial and ethnic minority groups. updated july , . available from: https:// www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/ -ncov/community/ health-equity/race-ethnicity.html. accessed sept. , . . stephens gg. family medicine as counterculture. fam med ; : – . . olayiwola jn. racism in medicine: shifting the power. ann fam med ; : – . . saultz j. racism. fam med ; : – . . hardeman rr, medina em, kozhimannil kb. structural racism and supporting black lives—the role of health professionals. n engl j med ; : – . . hardeman rr, medina em, boyd rw. stolen breaths. n engl j med ; : – . . / nejmp . medline. doi: . /jabfm. . . commentary o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .ja b fm .o rg / j a m b o a rd f a m m e d : first p u b lish e d a s . /ja b fm . . . o n ja n u a ry . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://jabfm.org/content/ / / .full http://jabfm.org/content/ / / .full https://www.aafp.org/about/policies/all/institutional-racism.html https://www.aafp.org/about/policies/all/institutional-racism.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/ -ncov/community/health-equity/race-ethnicity.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/ -ncov/community/health-equity/race-ethnicity.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/ -ncov/community/health-equity/race-ethnicity.html http://www.jabfm.org/ ‘there’s a wall there—and that wall is higher from our side’: drawing on qualitative interviews to improve indigenous australians’ experiences of dental health services international journal of environmental research and public health article ‘there’s a wall there—and that wall is higher from our side’: drawing on qualitative interviews to improve indigenous australians’ experiences of dental health services skye krichauff, joanne hedges and lisa jamieson * dental school, university of adelaide, adelaide , australia; skye.krichauff@adelaide.edu.au (s.k.); joanne.hedges@adelaide.edu.au (j.h.) * correspondence: lisa.jamieson@adelaide.edu.au received: august ; accepted: september ; published: september ���������� ������� abstract: indigenous australians experience high levels of untreated dental disease compared to non-indigenous australians. we sought to gain insight into barriers that prevent indigenous australians from seeking timely and preventive dental care. a qualitative study design was implemented, using face-to-face interviews conducted december to february . participants were indigenous australians ( women and men) representing six south australian indigenous groups; ngarrindjeri, narungga, kaurna, ngadjuri, wiramu, and adnyamathanha. age range was middle-aged to elderly. the setting was participants’ homes or workplaces. the main outcome measures were barriers and enablers to accessing timely and appropriate dental care. the findings were broadly grouped into eight domains: ( ) fear of dentists; ( ) confusion regarding availability of dental services; ( ) difficulties making dental appointments; ( ) waiting times; ( ) attitudes and empathy of dental health service staff; ( ) cultural friendliness of dental health service space; ( ) availability of public transport and parking costs; and ( ) ease of access to dental clinic. the findings indicate that many of the barriers to indigenous people accessing timely and appropriate dental care may be easily remedied. cultural competency training enables barriers to timely access and provision of dental care to indigenous australians to be addressed. the findings provide important context to better enable health providers and policy makers to put in place appropriate measures to improve indigenous people’s oral health, and the indigenous oral health workforce in australia. keywords: indigenous australian; qualitative interviews; dental service provision; barriers; enablers . introduction poor oral health has considerable impact on quality of life and general well-being. indigenous australians suffer disproportionately poor oral health relative to non-indigenous australians. they have higher levels of untreated dental caries (tooth decay) and periodontal (gum) disease, and are less likely to have received preventive dental care [ ]. they tend towards unfavorable dental visiting patterns, broadly associated with accessibility, cost, and a lack of cultural awareness by some service providers [ , ]. in , the australian government recognized that aboriginal and/or torres strait islander peoples (respectfully referred to as indigenous australians from hereon) are about per cent less likely to visit a dentist than non-indigenous australians and that ‘poor oral health can affect educational and employment outcomes, and can exacerbate other chronic diseases’ [ ]. in the – national survey of adult oral health, higher proportions of indigenous australians (compared with non-indigenous australians) delayed dental care due to cost, avoided eating certain foods because of dental problems, int. j. environ. res. public health , , ; doi: . /ijerph www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph http://www.mdpi.com http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /ijerph http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph int. j. environ. res. public health , , of had experienced toothache in the last months, felt uncomfortable about their dental appearance and perceived a need for dental care [ ]. in july , australian health organizations—including the australian dental council and the dental board of australia—signed the national registration and accreditation scheme statement of intent, committing them to achieve equity in health outcomes between aboriginal and torres strait islander people and other australians by [ ]. nonetheless, the compilers of the closing the gap report clearly state that the national target ‘to close the life expectancy gap by is not on track’ and that social determinants such as education, employment status, housing and income are responsible for at least per cent of the health gap between indigenous and non-indigenous australians [ ]. the literature shows that barriers to health care access and lack of cultural inappropriateness prevent positive outcomes for indigenous health [ ]. to date there have been few examples of evidence exploring the social determinants, providing solutions to barriers or enabling a space for the voices of indigenous people [ ]. this is especially true in the oral health context. one effective method through which to identify entrenched social barriers is through qualitative research [ ]. the aim of this study was to thus obtain a greater understanding of people’s perceptions, experiences of oral health, and the barriers and enablers that prevent indigenous australians from seeking timely and preventive dental care, using qualitative methodology. . methodology this qualitative project is a nested sub-study of a larger study examining oral human papilloma virus (hpv) infection among indigenous south australians [ ]. ethical approval for the nested qualitative sub-study was provided by the university of adelaide’s human research ethics committee (hrec- - ) and aboriginal health research ethics committee (ahrec - - ). all participants provided signed informed consent. the interviewer was a historian with specialized knowledge of south australian indigenous people’s colonial and twentieth century history, was sensitive to the intergenerational transmission of trauma and had extensive experience working with indigenous people of diverse backgrounds and ages. the interviewer spent a lot of time developing a rapport with each interviewee prior to commencing interviews, providing information about the project and answering questions. this was over the course of several days prior to the formal interview and occurred either over the telephone or at an aboriginal community controlled health organisation. interviews were semi-structured, based on a life history approach and drawing from settler colonial theory [ ]. the interview questions were developed by the research team in collaboration with the broader study’s senior indigenous research officer, indigenous reference group, and aboriginal health research ethics committee. the aim of the interview guide was to generate questions that would capture, compare and evaluate indigenous people’s perceptions of their oral health, general health and experiences with the health system across the life course. at some point, all participants were asked about their: ( ) earliest memories of caring for their teeth; ( ) first visits to the dentist; ( ) the health of their teeth throughout their childhood and adulthood; ( ) the health of their parents’, grandparents’, children’s, and grandchildren’s teeth; ( ) their own and the indigenous community’s positive and negative experiences with dentists and the health care system; and ( ) visions for how indigenous participants would like to see future oral health and oral health care for their own mob. at all times the study’s indigenous reference group was available to both the interviewer and study participants, as was the parent study’s senior indigenous research officer (jh). . . setting of the completed interviews, six took place in participants’ work places and the remainder in participants’ homes. eighteen participants resided in metropolitan adelaide, with two in or near victor harbour (an hour and a half south of adelaide). int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . . sampling strategy inclusion criteria included identifying as having an aboriginal and/or torres strait islander background, being aged + years, residing in south australia and feeling comfortable conducting an interview in english. exclusion criteria included not identifying as aboriginal and/or torres strait islander, being aged less than years, not residing in south australia or not able to conduct the interview in english. contact details of participants in the parent study who had expressed an interest in being interviewed were provided to the researchers. recruitment snowballed from initial contacts. on completing their own interview, several participants contacted relatives and friends and provided the oral historian with contact details of others interested in being interviewed. . . data collection techniques interviews were recorded, with participant consent, on a digital audio recorder and professionally transcribed. interview length ranged from min to h min; the average length was min. the gender balance was equal: ten women and ten men. six different south australian indigenous groups were represented (ngarrindjeri, narungga, kaurna, ngadjuri, wiramu, adnyamathanha), as well as central arrente and torres strait islander peoples. backgrounds were diverse: seven participants spent some of their childhood on missions/reserves (four at raukkan, two at point pearce, one at ernabella) and participants grew up in or spent substantial portions of their childhood in adelaide (including two at colebrook home, an institution for australian indigenous children run by the united aborigines mission that was sited at eden hills (just outside adelaide) from to ). with the exception of one interviewee who was fostered at six months and adopted into a white family, all came from large extended families and, implicitly or explicitly, expressed the significance of their family to their sense of identity and well-being. occupations included health educators, cultural educators, youth workers and careers in indigenous affairs and advocacy. . . analysis data saturation was reached after interviews. a two-stage approach to coding was used in the thematic analysis of transcripts from the interviews. a primary analytical framework (the first stage) was structured using the interview guide to create a coding scheme [ , ]. grouping of responses occurred according to themes of what was similar and what was different, and was categorized according to questions asked from the interview script. developing thematic codes was the nd step, which occurred in the next stage of analysis. the a priori conceptual frame upon which analyses were conducted was based on settler colonial theory [ ]. this phase of analysis sought to more deeply reveal the assumptions, perceptions and conceptual constructs that undergirded participants’ perceptions of their own oral health, general health, and experiences with the health system across the life course. names used within the paper are aliases. each participant was provided with a transcript of their interview to ensure what had been recorded was a true and accurate record of what the participant felt had been discussed. the objective was to demonstrate the sustained and entrenched impacts of settler colonialism on indigenous perceptions of their health and wellbeing through an oral health lens. for teeth, and the health of teeth, provide a unique insight into the structural and historical factors that contribute to the health gap between indigenous and non-indigenous australians. this is because oral health provides a contemporary and simultaneous reflection of social determinants (dental diseases are socially patterned) [ ] and inequities in access to dental services (restored teeth versus teeth with untreated decay) across the life span. all three of the authors were involved in the analysis, with the study’s senior indigenous research officer providing insights in the interpretation of the findings based on her first-hand cultural knowledge and lived experience. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . . nature of the engagement, involvement and leadership by indigenous people participants in this project were part of the broader study examining oral hpv infection among indigenous south australians. this broader study is governed by an indigenous reference group (irg), comprising indigenous community members, councilors, and health workers, and is chaired by an indigenous health manager. the irg provides oversight and cultural guidance on all aspects of the study, including recruitment strategies and data collection. the study team is led by a senior indigenous research officer (jh), who has published more specific details of the indigenous engagement processes implemented in the study [ ]. . . whose priorities are being addressed by the study priorities of the participants are being addressed by the study, with the idea for the work arising from much anecdotal feedback provided by other indigenous community members during past and present research interactions. because most policy will not be informed without ‘evidence’, it was the decision of the indigenous reference group (who were involved in both the study’s conception and design) and study authors to empirically investigate the research question and to publish the findings. . results age, gender, place of birth, places of residence, family history, childhood, adolescent and adult experiences, education level, and occupation were all constructs which influenced the emerging themes. the findings emphasized here focus primarily on the barriers and enablers participants referred to with respect to access timely dental care. . . childhood experiences approximately % of participants did not recall seeing a dentist when they were young. about % did not think they used a toothbrush or toothpaste throughout their childhoods. several explicitly stated that the health of their teeth was not a priority. cheryl, a year old, grew up on the west coast of south australia. cheryl said that when she moved to adelaide in her early twenties, ‘i didn’t know, didn’t know much about teeth’. when she was young, teeth weren’t an issue, ‘it was like, making sure you got something to eat’. ned, also , grew up in a shack on the coorong (stretch of coast south of adelaide). he ‘never saw a toothbrush’ and was sure his brothers ‘would never have picked up a toothbrush ever.’ ned doesn’t remember going to the dentist as a kid as ‘it just wasn’t a priority’—‘all we thought about was having a good feed’. anthony, a year-old, works as an indigenous outreach worker helping indigenous peoples manage their own health; ‘we go and talk [to people] . . . who’s your gp, (pause) when was the last care plan done . . . we even talk dental, you know, when’s the last time you seen the dentist, when’s the last time you had your eyes tested’. anthony said most of his clients do not visit dentists and he provided several reasons why. high on his list was ‘fear of the going to the dentist’. his observation tallied with comments made by virtually all participants. when asked about their first dental visit, participants remembered being afraid and the pain of being injected with ‘big needles’ and when having teeth pulled. in ned’s words, ‘the one thing that scares people is the needle . . . that’s why they avoid the place, they know they’re going to get drilled, they know—that’s why they’d rather let the teeth rot (pause) and then get it pulled out’. early memories of fear and pain remain vivid throughout participants’ lifetimes despite more positive recent experiences. participants stated or implied they only go to the dentist if there is a problem. thirteen participants had dentures or plates and so did not see the need to visit a dentist—two people had not been back to a dentist since receiving dentures over thirty years ago. in the words of year-old participant alex, ‘they’ll only come in if they’ve got a toothache or something’. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . . communication barrier challenges surrounding communication/language were noted as a substantial barrier to making and attending appointments. this was demonstrated by anthony, who said a key reason why his clients didn’t visit dentists was ‘a communication barrier’ and referred to ‘ringing, making that appointment’. a critical part of anthony’s job is to ‘make the phone call for them’. sometimes anthony has been put on hold for min when making an appointment. long waiting times on the telephone are frustrating and, when using a pre-paid mobile phone, expensive. they also use up battery charge. as -year-old yvonne pointed out, ‘even when they [indigenous people] ring up to make an appointment, if they don’t answer that phone, they’re not going to bother ringing back no more . . . i find with our people they don’t have sort of time for it—people don’t answer their phones they’re not going to ring back, even with doctors or whatever’. the same applies to follow-up appointments. alex recalled that the dentist at an aboriginal community controlled health organisation in adelaide said he’d make another appointment for alex, but ‘he never rang back’. alex said ‘i’m not worrying about him if he’s not going to worry about me. when he says something, you’re gonna do something and (pause) cause i’m thinking . . . that’s probably how he treats other black fellas, he knows they’re not gonna come back—“if i don’t ring them, they won’t come”’. stephanie, aged , bluntly, although not unsympathetically, described her people’s reluctance to make appointments; ‘you know you get some dumb-bells that don’t, oh—they’ve got an excuse, so what they do is they get back further and further with the appointments . . . and then, they’re idiots then they realise “oh well, i should’ve rang up”. i say “well they should’ve”’. the desire for clinic staff to be proactive was reiterated by roy, a year old torres strait islander, who said ‘if someone rings up [for an appointment], ring them back’, otherwise ‘months go past and you kind of like, “oh, well it’s not hurting so, just move on”, but i think, yeah, ring people back’. anthony felt that short waiting times on the phone would make making that appointment much easier. yvonne referred to the frustration of long waiting times once the appointment was made, noting it ‘can take – months to see someone’. roy said that health care workers shouldn’t ‘make people feel guilty for missed appointments’. . . atmosphere of clinic a critical element of anthony’s role is to accompany people to their health related appointments. he and his co-workers have found ‘there’s a lot of gp’s that are out there and some surgeries which aren’t really culturally appropriate . . . and don’t have that respect’. in clarifying what he meant by ‘culturally appropriate’, anthony referred to ‘both the physical space and the attitude of staff ’. . . physical environment anthony gave a new teaching dental clinic as an example saying ‘it’s not really an indigenous friendly place’. anthony suggested the space could have indigenous artwork, or an acknowledgement on the wall, the sorry speech or the aboriginal flag as they ‘help put aboriginal people at ease’. phyllis, years, thought having indigenous people on posters providing information was ‘really good’ and makes ‘a h*** of a difference’. . . perception of empathy the empathy of dental staff is crucial to indigenous people’s experience in health care settings and strongly influences whether indigenous peoples will return to a clinic. nora didn’t like an orthodontist her son was seeing because she sensed ‘it was all about the money, he was just a number, so [we] didn’t go back’. according to anthony, lots of indigenous people don’t like the way dentists talk to them. cheryl said she saw a ‘lady dentist [at another aboriginal community controlled health organistion] and it’s like, they don’t treat you like you’re human. they talk down to you’. earlier experiences caused cheryl to deduce that people who ‘are working for low-income earners and aboriginal organisations (pause), they’re not there with passion, or heart’. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of several participants made it clear that a good dentist will clearly explain everything they have to do and not just tell their patient what they’re doing, but why. where possible, they will involve the patient in the decision-making process. referring to her relatives elsewhere in south australia, cheryl said patients need to be shown how to clean teeth and have it clearly explained to them why it is important to clean. (recently, when cheryl went to the new university of adelaide dental hospital, a female dentist explained—verbally and through illustrations—everything clearly. cheryl was surprised, she told the dentist ‘you’re the first dentist that—oh no, sorry, the second dentist, that i’ve ever been to in my life that’s actually treated me as a human being’). . . expense and confusion over available services for participants who were not on a pension or centrelink, the cost of seeing a dentist is prohibitive. anthony said it is ‘just money’ that stops him going. nora said ‘you’re stuck between a rock and hard place if you’re not on centrelink’ and ‘it’s the cost of things that is prohibitive’. nora thought it would be good if dental care could be a free service or like medicare. significant confusion was evident among participants regarding the australian government’s closing the gap initiative and services available through the scheme. worryingly, some participants had never heard of closing the gap. others thought it was no longer funded, others thought dental care was not included. expressing his frustration with closing the gap providers, ned said ‘the left hand doesn’t know what the right hand’s doing, you need to get that part in order, because nothing worse than mucking a person around, you know because they’ve got to make other arrangements’. . . transport/access to building when speaking about the new dental hospital, yvonne said that many of her people can’t afford the parking, and that access to the building is difficult for those using public transport due to the steep decline from the bus stop to the entrance, which is ‘tricky if you have a walker’. anthony similarly commented that the new dental hospital is ‘pretty challenging to get to’. for alex, who lives in one of adelaide’s outer suburbs, ‘it’s a long way to go into adelaide to see a dentist.’ fred has been battling cancer and has had to attend many appointments but ‘how the h*** do i arrange transport?’ . discussion our findings illustrate the challenges that indigenous australians face in accessing culturally safe, appropriate and timely dental care. many of the barriers identified can be readily ameliorated. these include improving the cultural friendliness in dental health provider spaces, making cultural competency training a regular requirement of all dental health personnel (from receptionists to dental providers to transport officers), and improving childhood experiences of dental care that in turn reduce dental fear in older age [ ]. for example, evidence suggests that addressing any fear children may have in the dental setting markedly improves attitudes and attendance for dental care later in the life course [ ]. simple steps can be taken to make indigenous people feel welcomed. these include: ( ) clearly displaying signs (posters, flags, acknowledgment of country) which positively recognize indigenous people; ( ) demonstrating an awareness and sensitivity towards indigenous people’s connection to country and the injustice of the colonial past; ( ) educating all health workers (including receptionists, dentists, nurses etc.) of the importance of empathy; ( ) explaining procedures thoroughly and, where possible, using visual aids; and ( ) including patients in the decision-making process to nurture a sense of autonomy over dental care-related proceedings [ ]. other improvements require greater resources/organizational change. for example, having the funds to answer the phone without putting people on hold for long periods and returning phone calls; persisting with making and chasing up follow-up appointments; not penalizing people who can’t make or forget appointments (instead, it’s important to understand the reasons why and be empathetic); checking people are able to get to appointments and if difficult, jointly problem-solving to come up with solutions. the quote around “he never rang back” goes beyond communication barriers, int. j. environ. res. public health , , of however, and into the importance of trust/integrity and delivering on a commitment. the literature provides evidence of how following up on due diligence regarding indigenous patient appointments does increase utilization of health services [ ]. it is also crucial to have more indigenous dental staff, with none of the participants mentioning indigenous staff members in the dental clinics they had attended. part of the recommendations in a report from the australian medical association was to dramatically increase the proportion of oral health personnel who identify as indigenous [ ]. fear was described by numerous participants as a critical reason for dental non-attendance. this is consistent with literature from other vulnerable populations [ ] and the general public [ ]. using minimally invasive dental care practices among children has been shown to mitigate the impacts of dental fear in this age group [ ], but there is little evidence of what might be effective among adults. certainly, our recommendations to take the time to explain procedures properly and to ensure understanding of why regular check-ups are important would go some way to alleviating dental fear among all who are dentally anxious. the institutional racism contributing to much of the participants’ reluctance to attend for dental care requires a whole of society shift [ ]. certainly, the recent black lives matter movement has raised awareness of this, as has the increased profile of many prominent indigenous australian leaders. the role of racism in oral health inequalities has been documented at a global level [ ]. although there is limited evidence of successful initiatives to address this, there are some encouraging results from the general health arena in this space [ ]. many participants demonstrated both considerable empathy for, and deep understanding of, the experiences across the lifecourse that impact on indigenous health and wellbeing. there was universal condemnation of racism in all its forms; overt and covert, personal and institutional. racism, culture and difference was described by almost all participants. this demonstrates the crucial gap between the critical and conscious requirement of dental health service staff (and policy makers responsible for funding dental health care) to understand how past settler colonial structures of decision making and power have led to their now privileged positions in broader australian society, and the study participants’ understanding of these issues. in the context of our study, most participants were unable to fully appreciate just how manifestly unjust the power differential is in australia, with just one outcome of this being the inequitable and unfair models of dental service provision for indigenous australians. this poor indictment of both policy makers and health providers means that the need for more content relating to indigenous health in the training courses of all dental programs in australia will likely not be acted upon, which has downstream consequences for ongoing racism/non-indigenous australian dominance in future provision of dental services. limitations of the study include: ( ) a non-indigenous person conducting the interviews; ( ) participants from only south australia involved, whose views might differ in meaningful ways to indigenous persons in other parts of australia; and ( ) participants were generally in the mainstream; not, for example, in prisons, residential care facilities or homeless shelters. this means the views of these more vulnerable groups were not collected. . conclusions in conclusion, barriers preventing timely access to dental services for indigenous australians include ( ) fear of dentists; ( ) confusion regarding availability of dental services; ( ) difficulties making dental appointments; ( ) waiting times; ( ) attitudes and empathy of dental health service staff; ( ) cultural friendliness of dental health service space; ( ) availability of public transport and parking costs; and ( ) ease of access to dental clinic. many of the barriers to indigenous people accessing timely and appropriate dental care may be easily remedied. the findings provide important context to better enable health providers and policy makers to put in place appropriate measures to improve indigenous people’s oral health. indigenous peoples have been substantially impacted by racism and settler colonialism [ , ], meaning it is crucial that learning spaces are created in dental and other int. j. environ. res. public health , , of health programs throughout australia to enable dialogue so that these insights can be expanded upon and addressed. author contributions: conceptualization, all authors; methodology, s.k., l.j.; software, s.k.; validation, all authors; formal analysis, s.k.; investigation, s.k.; resources, l.j.; data curation, s.k.; writing—original draft preparation, s.k.; writing—review and editing, j.h. and l.j.; visualization, j.h. and l.j.; supervision, l.j.; project administration, l.j.; funding acquisition, l.j. all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. funding: national health and medical research council: app . conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. references . australian health ministers advisory council. aboriginal and torres strait islander health performance framework report; ahmac: canberra, australia, . . council of australian governments health council. healthy mouths, healthy lives: australia’s national oral health plan – ; south australian dental service: adelaide, australia, . . national advisory council on dental health. report of the national advisory council on dent. health ; department of health and ageing: canberra, australia, . . australian government, department of social services. available online: https://www.dss.gov.au/about-the- department/publications-articles/corporate-publications/budget-and-additional-estimates-statements/ closing-the-gap-indigenous-dental-services-in-rural-and-regional-areas (accessed on june ). . australian research centre for population oral health. australia’s oral health: national study of adult oral health – ; 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[crossref] [pubmed] © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . /cdoe. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /j. - . . .x http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /adj. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /journal.pone. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	methodology 	setting 	sampling strategy 	data collection techniques 	analysis 	nature of the engagement, involvement and leadership by indigenous people 	whose priorities are being addressed by the study 	results 	childhood experiences 	communication barrier 	atmosphere of clinic 	physical environment 	perception of empathy 	expense and confusion over available services 	transport/access to building 	discussion 	conclusions 	references westminsterresearch http://www.westminster.ac.uk/westminsterresearch anonymity and democracy: absence as presence in the public sphere asenbaum, h. this journal article has been accepted for publication and will appear in a revised form, subsequent to peer review and/or editorial input by cambridge university press in the american political science review. © cambridge university press, the final definitive version in the online edition of the journal article at cambridge journals online will be available at: https://doi.org/ . /s the westminsterresearch online digital archive at the university of westminster aims to make the research output of the university available to a wider audience. copyright and moral rights remain with the authors and/or copyright owners. whilst further distribution of specific materials from within this archive is forbidden, you may freely distribute the url of westminsterresearch: ((http://westminsterresearch.wmin.ac.uk/). in case of abuse or copyright appearing without permission e-mail repository@westminster.ac.uk https://doi.org/ . /s http://westminsterresearch.wmin.ac.uk/ repository@westminster.ac.uk anonymity and democracy: absence as presence in the public sphere i need to become anonymous. in order to be present. the more i am anonymous, the more i am present. tiqqun, introduction anonymity is an essential feature of liberal democracies around the world. the secret ballot constitutes the central legitimation mechanism. anonymity is also crucial in a wide array of modes of political participation ranging from campaign funding to textual political debates in newspapers, manifestos, pamphlets, and graffiti. additionally, the importance of anonymity in political participation increases as the mask becomes a focal point for social movements like anonymous, the black bloc, the zapatistas, and the pussy riot movement. this trend is amplified in the digital era, where anonymous expression in online newspaper forums and in activism via social media becomes an everyday practice (asenbaum ). given the crucial role of anonymity in the practices of democracy, its lack of conceptual grounding in democratic theory is surprising (cf. gardner , ). in contrast to the absence of anonymity in democratic theory (with moore being a recent exception), there is a plethora of diverse, empirically driven literature discussing anonymity in various forms of political participation. this literature, however, suffers from a lack of theoretical attention to its main subject of research. eric barendt’s book anonymous speech ( ), for example, discusses anonymity in various forms of political participation but fails to provide a definition of anonymity. the meager traces of definitions that are found in the literature on anonymity in political participation suffer first from a lack of acknowledgment of the complexity of the phenomenon. many scholars treat anonymity as a simple and self- explanatory concept. for example, jonker and pieters ( ) state: “intuitively, anonymity means that it is impossible to determine who sent which message to whom” ( ). secondly, and more importantly, anonymity is often equated with privacy. akdeniz’ ( ) only definition of anonymity, for example, consists of the sentence: “as a concept anonymity is closely related to free speech and privacy” ( ). these two interrelated shortcomings—the oversimplified definition of anonymity as privacy—result in a lack of theoretical attention to the complexity of anonymity in democracy. this essay will develop a deeper understanding and a clear definition of anonymity rooted in democratic theory. i contend that the problem with the common notion of anonymity consists in its sole focus on identity negation. this perspective results in an understanding of anonymity as privacy and thus as absence. it implicitly conceptualizes anonymity as negative freedom: the freedom from detection and interference by malevolent actors in society. anonymity, however, consist as much of identity creation as it consists of identity negation. it entails both negative and positive freedoms. it facilitates expression and thus presence in the public sphere. therefore, i define anonymity as follows: anonymity is a context-dependent identity performance expressing private sentiments in the public sphere by negating some aspects of the legally identified and/or physically embodied persona. both negating and creating identity has inherently liberating effects. identity negation indeed affords negative freedoms, protecting the democratic subject from interference of powerful actors and peer pressure. anonymity shares this feature with privacy. the combination of identity negation with identity creation, however, bestows the democratic subject with an array of positive freedoms to act (berlin [ ]; cf. fromm ). these freedoms are not always democratic. berlin ( [ ]) explained in his elaboration on positive and negative freedoms: “[t]he liberty of some must depend on the restraint of others” ( ). and the brazilian philosopher paulo freire ( [ ]) described the fear of elites in societies marked by class, race, and gender inequality as the fear “of losing the ‘freedom’ to oppress” ( ). thus, the subjective freedoms of some can result in oppression of others. while on one hand anonymity contributes to a sphere of equals sincerely expressing their diverse ideas, on the other it allows for discrimination, hate speech, and lying. the contradictory character of the core elements of anonymity— identity negation and creation—results in three sets of contradictory freedoms, with each set consisting of one element conducive to and the other undermining democracy: (a) inclusion and exclusion, (b) subversion and submission, and (c) honesty and deception. to develop this concept of anonymity and its affordances, i pursue two strategies. first, i review etymologies and conceptualizations of anonymity and their relation to privacy in various academic disciplines outside political science. both their advancements and shortcomings provide inspiration for the definition of anonymity rooted in democratic theory developed here. second, the article turns to anonymity in political participation. it briefly describes four different forms of anonymous participation: voting, campaign funding, textual political discussions, and masked collective action. it then identifies anonymity’s three sets of contradictory freedoms, offering illustrations from the empirical literature on political participation. building on these insights, i finally elaborate the theoretical conceptualization of anonymity in contrast to privacy and the workings of the three sets of contradictory freedoms in more depth, introducing three contextual axes affecting anonymity: ( ) the materiality of the communicative infrastructure, ( ) the positionality of the communicative subject within established power structures, and ( ) the configuration of identity knowledge. what is anonymity? the etymological development of the term “anonymity” is characterized by a continuous expansion of meaning. to trace this development, i bring together three sets of literature, moving from literature studies to computer science— which each describe anonymity in a specific context—and finally to more general elaborations of anonymity in communication studies, sociology, and philosophy. the same expansionary development of meaning can be observed for the term privacy. the expansions of both “anonymity” and “privacy,” coalesce with the development of new communication technologies, resulting in their overlapping and partial convergence. the task undertaken here of developing a definition of anonymity rooted in democratic theory consists of disentangling anonymity and privacy. the term “anonymous” entered the english language in the late th century, and referred to publications whose authors remained unknown. while the meaning of the greek original translating to “nameless” is already quite confined, its meaning in english was even more narrow: “anonymity [was] defined broadly as the absence of reference to the legal name of the writer on the title page” (griffin , ; also cf. kopley , ). “anonymity” thus did not refer to any kind of unidentified communication, but solely to nameless textual publications (ferry ). the practice of anonymous publishing was common even before this time. it was only then, however, that the blank spaces on pamphlets, poems, and books were replaced by the word “anonymous”. the question arises as to why the blank space was not simply left blank but filled with the name-like “anonymous”. this move appears to be a collective effort to draw attention to the author and his or her conscious decision to remain unidentified. in the linguistic establishment of “anonymity” we thus find the first traces of identity creation rather than solely identity negation, which, as i will argue later, is the core element of anonymity. current conceptualizations of anonymity in computer science and technology studies illustrate the significant qualitative shift the term has undergone through the emergence of digital communication. the nameless author now becomes the unidentified communicator. the recipient of a message perceives “all subjects in the anonymity set as equally probable of being the originator of a message” (díaz et al. , ). this literature acknowledges the complexities of anonymity as part of a communicative process exceeding textual publication. moreover, it insists on the scalability of anonymity. anonymity is not a state that is present or not, but a matter of degree to be measured on a scale between two opposing poles: anonymity and identity. to acknowledge the different degrees of anonymity, this literature introduces not only quantitative measures, but different types of anonymity, specifically insisting on its demarcation from “pseudonymity”: the use of pseudonyms in contrast with communication without any identifier (pfitzmann and hansen ). this qualitative shift of anonymity’s meaning expressed in quite technical terms in computer science and technology studies is also recognized in communications studies, sociology, and philosophy. exceeding definitions of anonymity in literary publications and online communication, authors such as helen nissenbaum and craig scott generate more complex understandings of anonymity as a social phenomenon both online and offline. scott ( ) defines anonymity as “the degree to which a communicator perceives the message source is unknown and unspecified,” ( ) thus drawing attention to subjectivity: anonymity is not an objective state but defined by the perception of communicators. marx ( ), wallace ( ), and nissenbaum ( ) all draw attention to the plethora of identity markers that define a person. while for anonymous textual publishing, the name was the sole identifier, in today’s information age and for an increasingly complex understanding of anonymity factors such as location (address), social security numbers, looks, social categories (race, class, gender), profession, family members, etc. are a set of highly diverse identifiers that constitute a person. accordingly, anonymity is defined as the non-identifiability of one or several of these traits (marx ) or, as wallace ( ) describes it, “the noncoordinability of traits” ( ). nissenbaum ( ), finally, explains anonymity as unreachability: “deepening our understanding of the issue of anonymity in an information age… requires an appreciation of what it takes to be ‘unreachable’ or ‘out of grasp’ in a world where technologies of knowledge and information are increasingly efficacious at reaching, grasping, and identifying” ( ). but if anonymity means unreachability, how, then, is it different from privacy, which can be broadly understood as an individually defined personal sphere protected from alien intrusion? in the information age, the meanings of anonymity as one’s personal identity being undetectable in a communicative network and privacy as personal information being undetectable in a communicative network become virtually undistinguishable. the term “privacy” has undergone an expansion similar to that of anonymity (cf. westin ). its original meaning in the work of ancient philosophers such as aristotle and plato referred to private property as personal control over objects (papacharissi , ). in its modern sense, the term privacy was first used by warren and brandeis in as “the right to be let alone.” when newspapers—at the time of the spread of the printing press in europe and the us—started publishing details about the lives of public persons, this was perceived as an intrusion into their personal affairs. this notion of privacy thus constitutes a sphere that is shielded from external intervention. privacy in this version has not lost its original meaning of ownership, as the private sphere is characterized by its control by the individual subject (reiman ). it relies on a physical demarcation of space, distinguishing private locations (home) and public locations (cafés, squares). it is this demarcation of private and public space in the context of patriarchal modes of domination that has been aptly criticized by feminist scholars (cohen ; wagner ). this physical geography is upset by new forms of communication. zizi papacharissi ( ) goes so far as to describe the public/private dichotomy as collapsing as new online spaces are both “privately public and publicly private” ( ). public digital communication relies on private websites, with participants located in private homes being “alone, but not lonely” ( ). to grasp this new hybridity, nissenbaum ( ; ) develops the concept of “privacy in public.” the individual’s control over who has access to personal information is compromised by government surveillance and commercial data mining. this new understanding of privacy still contains original elements of personal control and the demarcation of a sphere to be left alone. it is uprooted, however, by the physical dislocation of this sphere. privacy becomes mobile. this brief review explains why and how the terms anonymity and privacy overlap. their parallel expansion in meaning has peaked following their digitization, resulting in overlapping and blurring understandings. looking at the conceptualizations of anonymity above, a new understanding of anonymity must not only overcome this amalgamation, it has several other challenges to face. current discussions successfully deepen the understanding of anonymity by explaining it as subjective, a matter of degree, depending on various identifiers, and resulting in several types of anonymity. however, these definitions suffer first from heir conceptualization of anonymity as mere identity negation, neglecting the possibilities of identity creation. this is observable in relation to terms such as unidentifiability, unknowability, undetectability, unreachability, and noncoordinability. these terms explain anonymity as the impossibility of the identification of communicators by the audience, rather than as action by communicators themselves. the sole focus on identity negation is also evident when anonymity is defined as the opposite of identity. second, this is also another reason why anonymity and privacy appear so closely related. when anonymity is conceptualized as concealing identity and privacy as restricting access to personal information, they are hardly distinguishable. third, the terms employed to describe anonymity do not coincidently share the suffix -ity, which indicates that they are conceptualized as state rather than as process. and fourth, the differentiation of types of anonymity is helpful to a certain extent. but terms like pseudonymity, physical anonymity, discursive anonymity, offline anonymity, online anonymity, self-anonymity, other- anonymity (scott ), agent anonymity, recipient anonymity, and process anonymity (wallace ) can lead to confusion and over-complexity. a new definition of anonymity must provide clarity and, at the same time, encompass these various subtypes of anonymity. i generate this new definition of anonymity by drawing on two concepts rooted in democratic theory: the public sphere and positive liberties. first, current understandings of anonymity as closely related to privacy emerge from the position of concern over the infringement of civil rights. the alignment with privacy results in defensiveness. in contrast, i suggest drawing on democratic theory’s rich accounts of the public sphere (fraser , habermas [ ]). anonymity is inherently communicative. it is not primarily a matter of hiding, but of showing, exchanging opinions, and creating identities. second, the inherently liberating effects of anonymity as unidentifiability have been conceptualized as negative freedoms, freedoms to be protected from external intrusion. again, the overlap with privacy becomes apparent. however, i suggest that we also need to take positive freedoms, as freedoms to act, into account. thus, while privacy is closely related to negative freedoms protecting from intrusion, anonymity relates to positive freedoms of expression and identity creation. since the original conceptualization of negative and positive freedoms by erich fromm ( ) and later isaiah berlin ( [ ]), critics have contended that the two cannot be easily demarcated, since every freedom contains both positive and negative aspects (blau ; maccallum ). i agree with and build on this critique by drawing attention to the positive freedoms of anonymity that add to its negative freedoms of concealment and protection. thus, while anonymity in current debates is conceptualized as the impossibility of interlocutors to identify the subject, i define anonymity as the self-expression of the democratic subject. anonymity is not the opposite of identity, it is a pre-condition for creating identity drawing on both positive and negative freedoms. i therefore define anonymity as follows: anonymity is a context-dependent identity performance expressing private sentiments in the public sphere by negating some aspects of the legally identified and/or physically embodied persona. in contrast with previous definitions, it gives priority to the creative and constructive aspects of anonymity, while not neglecting its concealing and negating aspects. moreover, it defines it as a public, communicative process, rather than a private state, stressing its discursive and agentic nature. and finally, it is broad enough to encompass various subtypes, both providing unity and allowing for differentiations. the following sections will investigate the workings of anonymity in various forms of political participation and illustrate how its positive freedoms facilitate both democratic and anti- democratic action. anonymity in different modes of political participation anonymity plays a key role in different modes of political participation. in what follows, i briefly outline anonymous (a) voting, (b) campaign funding, (c) textual political discussions, and (d) masked collective action. voting as the central mode of political participation in representative democracies is in its current practice strongly linked to the notion of anonymity. however, the correlation of anonymity and voting is relatively recent. open voting either by voice, raising of hands or on a visually identifiable ballot provided by different parties in different colors was the common practice in the us for more than years from its founding in . under these circumstances, political parties heavily influenced citizens’ voting behavior either by threat or patronage. this was the reasoning behind introducing the secret ballot in the us and uk in the late th century (barendt , ff; gardner , ; hunter ). the opposite legal trend to voting procedures, from anonymity to public identification, took place in the case of private campaign contributions. in the late th century, the mandatory disclosure of financial contributions exceeding a certain amount to candidates and political parties was introduced in the us (gardner , ). nevertheless, anonymity is still in place in most countries for donations below a certain amount. anonymity in textual political discussions has been addressed empirically in at least three forms: the publication of political texts, graffiti, and online communication. first, smith ekstrand and imfeld jeyaram ( ) extensively elaborate on the role of anonymity in the political controversy between federalists and anti-federalists in the debate of the us constitution in . the use of pseudonyms was essential in this debate and built on a long european tradition of anonymous publication. second, anonymity is a core feature of graffiti in public bathrooms as examined at one us and one australian university campus (butler ; rodriguez and clair ). far from just scribbling slogans or jokes, graffiti appear as extensive dialogues between students who negotiate their gender, sexuality, race, and political views. third, the medium of bathroom walls is surprisingly comparable to online forums. participants post messages and check back some time later to see if someone responded. with the advent of the internet, textual anonymous discussions have become more prevalent, with increasing publication speed and reach and reduced costs (akdeniz ; gardner , ; leitner ; woo ). while asynchronous posts in online forums are reminiscent of anonymous political writings from the th century and bathroom wall graffiti, real-time chats make political writing more akin to live discussions. another strand of literature investigates masked collective action used by both pro- and anti-democratic social movements and civil society organizations. pro-democratic movements use masking to turn demonstrations into street parties with clownesque performances, street theatre, and carnivalesque tactics of disguise (bruner ; morris ; ruiz ; spiegel ). an example of such a carnivalesque guerilla performance can be found in the russian feminist collective pussy riot who performed their “punk prayer” at moscow’s cathedral of christ the savior in . three of the five women masked by colorful balaclavas were arrested and jailed. a global movement in solidarity with pussy riot re-enacted the mockery of authority with the colorful balaclavas as their symbol. this form of political participation builds on carnival traditions dating back to ancient rome. medieval carnival was more political than its commercialized rendition today. the tradition of people taking to the streets in disguise was used to challenge authorities through mockery and enact a reversal of social hierarchies (bruner ). similar practices of masking are used in online protest by hacktivist groups like anonymous. it uses anonymous online communication to attack scientology, global corporations, and national governments around the world and promotes freedom of speech and social justice (asenbaum ; coleman ). the black lives matter movement uses the guise of hoods to enact solidarity with victims of hate crimes and police brutality who are criminalized because of wearing hoodies. the “million hoodie march” can be read as a proud reclaiming of a marginalized race/class identity (kinney ; nguyen ). on the other hand, the ku klux klan, as an example of an anti-democratic movement, uses anonymity to enact white racial homogeneity through uniform white hoods and racist acts of intimidation and murder. emerging in in the us south, it fast became the largest and most influential white supremacist movement (blee and mcdowell ). this example also illustrates that anonymous hate crimes predate the internet. the connectivity and reach of the kkk is, however, amplified today by the use of online communication (schmitz ). while anonymous voting, campaign funding, textual political discussions, and masked collective action appear as quite distinct forms of political participation, the discussion of the freedoms afforded by anonymity in the following section reveals surprising similarities. anonymity’s contradictory freedoms the starting point for developing a more complex understanding of anonymity beyond a mere equation with privacy, is the observation that anonymity does not only facilitate identity negation but also affords identity creation. sociologists like erving goffman ( ) pointed out decades ago that new identities are constructed on the foundation of the hidden identity. the mask— be it physical or virtual—serves both identity negation and creation. in the literature on anonymous political participation, identity negation is framed in terms of freedom of speech. concealing identity appears necessary in the face of various repressive forces in society. anonymity appears as negative freedom—as a means of becoming invisible and avoiding detection. regarding online communication, akdeniz ( ) argues: “apart from facilitating freedom of expression, anonymity enables users to prevent surveillance and monitoring of their activities on the internet from commercial companies and from the government” ( ). identity negation does, however, not only protect from interference of state and economic actors but also from peer pressure by family, friends, and colleagues. according to barendt, the secret ballot was introduced in the late th century in the us and uk not only to protect workers from their employers; the voting booth also proved especially important to women gaining suffrage in the early- and mid- th century as it shielded from the influence of husbands and fathers (barendt , ff). identity negation, be it through voting booths, computer screens, or masks, results in the emergence of new imaginaries and alternative personae. ruiz ( ) claims: “[t]he mask does not negate identity; instead it signifies the possibility of a multiplicity of identities… it suggests a way of thinking about blankness as a means not only of erasing difference but also as a means of articulating difference” ( ). employing anonymity bestows democratic subjects with the ability to reinvent their appearance and thus influence their perception by others, be it through wearing a mask, designing an avatar, or creating a pseudonym. the literature on masked collective action interprets playful experimentation with a diversity of identities as having liberating effects. the democratic subject is temporarily relieved from the constraints of the one and only identity in the public sphere, which is subject to governance surveillance and commercial targeting. mikhail bakhtin ( [ ]), a prominent scholar on the carnivalesque, wrote: “the mask is connected with the joy of change and reincarnation, with gay relativity and merry negation of uniformity and similarity; it rejects conformity to oneself” ( , emphasis added). based on this core contradiction of identity negation and creation as anonymity’s founding elements, three sets of contradictory freedoms emerge, each consisting of one democratic and one anti-democratic element. anonymity in democracy serves (a) inclusion and exclusion, (b) subversion and submission, and (c) honesty and deception. inclusion and exclusion nowhere does the contradictory character of anonymity become so apparent as in the discussion of inclusion and exclusion. on the one hand, anonymity appears to level the playing field by stripping away hierarchizing identity markers, generating a more inclusive participatory space. on the other hand, anonymity’s disinhibition effect (suler ) contributes to attacks on marginalized social groups in an attempt to exclude those deemed inferior. inclusion. the common argument for the equalizing effect of anonymity claims that social hierarchies are suspended—or at least their effects are mitigated— by concealing visible markers of gender, race, socio-economic status, age, and so on, thus contributing to inclusion. in the words of leitner ( ), for example: “[c]yberspace represents a sphere of existence free from (or at least freer from) socio-economic inequalities and social constraints. without the ex- ante requirement of self-identification, individuals can equally share in the personal freedom to choose how to express themselves, including whether and how to self-identify” ( ). while unequal power relations are not simply suspended on the internet, anonymity appears at times to contribute to more equal relations. similarly, among participants of bathroom graffiti, anonymity structurally impedes discrimination along visual identity markers. while identity clues might persist in writing, physically embodied signifiers of social status are suspended: “[g]raffiti level the playing field by getting past all of the factors—such as social status, hierarchical position, education, access, familiarity with rules, expertise, communication competence—that advantageously privilege and benefit certain members against others” (rodriguez and clair , ). the same argument is made by activists in the pussy riot movement. after their arrests the media revealed personal details about band members and stylized them as celebrities. in contrast, anonymous pussy riot members claim: “we are anonymous because we act against any personality cult, against hierarchies implied by appearance, age and other visible social attributes. we cover our heads because we oppose the very idea of using female faces as trademark for promoting any sort of goods or services” (cited in groeneveld , ). these equalizing effects of anonymity result in meritocracy. while in non- anonymous settings identity markers indicating the status of the speaker influence the perception of what is said, anonymous communication can only be judged by the value of its content. a participant of bathroom graffiti explains: “i like toilet walls because there’s no identity. because if you knew who wrote it, you could think ‘oh, i don’t like that person, i’m not going to respond well to what they said’, but if you don’t know who wrote it, you’re going to respond with whatever you think is the best response” (cited in butler , ). this argument is curiously echoed in the us constitutional debate: melancton smith, writing under the pseudonym plebeian, claimed that arguments should be judged “on their own merits. if it be good, it stands not in need of great men’s names to support it. if it be bad, their names ought not to sanction it” (cited in smith ekstrand and imfeld jeyaram , ). the principle of meritocracy is also at the center of both the ideology and practices of anonymous. the hacktivist collective originated on the image board chan and its sub-board /b/, where mostly young north americans share and discuss digital images with complete anonymity. “with no method of individual identity verification, /b/ becomes a community made up of non- persistent individual identities. when you post on /b/, nobody can prejudge you based on your looks, age, wealth, status, or style. they only have your words” (wesch et al. , f). the ephemerality of the site, with every post expiring as new posts appear, can be interpreted in terms of a critique of digital archiving and monitoring. mcdonald ( , ) sees chan and anonymous as antitheses to the facebook culture of naming, liking, and tagging, which connects value to the persona and not the content, and creates an archive easily abused for surveillance (cf. cambre , ). this leads halpin ( ) to interpret anonymous as an anti-capitalist project: “anonymous […] is an ontological shift on the terrain of identity at the very moment that identity has become the highest form of selection and exploitation in cognitive capitalism, the first glimpse of life without identity on the internet” ( ). the notion of anonymity as destabilizing capitalist hierarchies by countering personality cult also resonates in the literature on masked protest (morris , ; ruiz , ). social movements are framed in opposition to capitalist inequality as a place of horizontality, reciprocity, and solidarity. the movement itself appears as democratic utopia. this inclusive agenda is expressed in frames like the slogans of the occupy movement “we are the %”, anonymous “we are anonymous we are legion”, the mexican zapatistas “we are you”, the pussy riot movement “we are all pussy riot”, and the black lives matter movement “we are all trayvon martin”. all these slogans start with self-definitions rather than political claims. the identification “we are” is then followed by a broad, inclusive term. the “we” is constructed as inclusive space for (almost) everyone. thus, not only the negation of hierarchizing identity markers but also the creation of new collective identities can lead to inclusion. ruiz ( ) elaborates: “[t]he mask creates a space that can be occupied by those who perceive themselves to be excluded and that explicitly refuses to shape or filter that which could be heard” ( ). exclusion. the freedom to oppress and exclude is facilitated by anonymity when identity negation is used to avoid accountability and discriminate against those whose positions are marginalized within society. these acts aim to keep members of marginalized groups out of social and political spaces, especially those with decision making capacities. the ku klux klan represents a telling example of the exclusive potential of anonymity. here, anonymity is used in an attempt to cast out members of certain social groups in order to form a homogenous cultural and racial unity. the most appalling use of anonymity can be observed in racist hate crimes and the murder of african americans in the s (blee and mcdowell ). in these cases, masking was used in public lynchings to avoid detection. while today the kkk does not engage in public executions, their ideology of white supremacy that is disseminated via social media shows how the klan upholds its original ideas of racial purity (schmitz ). the goal of such actions is to expel particular ethnic groups that are perceived as a threat to their own culturally cognate community. the example of the kkk illustrates how not only identity negation, but also identity creation, can be used for exclusion. while members of the first kkk in the second half of the th century wore various eclectic self-made robes, masks, and hoods, the second kkk founded in —heavily inspired by the movie birth of a nation—adopted the uniform white robes with conical hats still worn by its third generation today. these ghost-like figures are meant to intimidate their victims. moreover, schmitz’ study of the kkk’s ideology, as expressed on its various webpages, shows that racism toward non-members is not the only line of discrimination. rather, websites also contain misogynist and heteronormative content. most pages exclusively display klansmen, often in military attire and combat, while women are underrepresented and depicted as housewives (schmitz , ff). the anonymity of the hood eradicating gender differences in a universalizing move enacts kkk members as default men, which deters women from participating in the klan. anonymity’s affordance of exclusion does not always take the form of blatant discrimination. it can take more subtle forms, when social and economic elites use their financial power to gain exclusive access to decision-making spaces. when economic actors influence the legislative process directly through lobbying and corruption and indirectly through campaign and party funding, they effectively buy access to an exclusive space. the doors to the public are shut. where there are no transparency laws in place requiring the identification of donors, anonymous financial contributions establish secret connections between the donor and the candidate or party. the donor is known to the beneficiary; however, he or she is unknown to the public. while in clear cases of corruption the donation is tied to explicit political demands, in less explicit cases the beneficiary might act in the interest of the donor in expectation of future advantages. such concerns were raised in when the british labor government proposed to exempt motor racing from a ban on tobacco advertising shortly after the labor party received a £ million donation from business magnate and formula one chief executive, bernie ecclestone (barendt , ff). thus, anonymous party financing can distort legislative processes, which translates economic inequality into political exclusion. another example of more subtle forms of exclusion afforded by anonymity can be found in the practice of voice vote in the us congress. while the roll call voting record, which identifies the voting behavior of each congress member individually, has established itself as the dominant practice in modern congressional procedures, the default version still practiced today is the voice vote. here yeas and nays are each expressed verbally and collectively so that the individual vote of the respective congress member remains unknown to the public. the chair then gauges the majority and decides the vote. this procedure, which is the original practice of the us congress, undermines transparency and parliamentary accountability. obscuring voting behavior effectively shuts the public out and metaphorically speaking closes the doors of parliament to public scrutiny. lynch and madonna ( ) find that elections incentivize congress members to request a recorded roll call vote. thus, while the competition for seats enhances transparency, voice voting is still a common practice when members of congress want to conceal their voting behavior on controversial issues. subversion and submission by allowing dissidents and marginalized groups to avoid detection (identity negation) and to form new collective identities (identity creation), anonymity facilitates the contestation of hegemonic power structures. simultaneously, however, anonymity can be used to submit subversive subjects and those at the bottom of power structures when it is used to discipline and maintain established inequalities. anonymity thus facilitates both subversion and submission. subversion. some of the most influential texts contesting political power relations that are today clearly attributed to certain authors were originally published anonymously, such as thomas paine’s common sense attacking the english government published in by “an englishman.” the communist manifesto by karl marx and friedrich engels calling for a proletarian revolution was published anonymously in and only attributed to its authors in . the importance of anonymity for subversion has not decreased since. morris ( ) argues that neoliberal developments of commodification and surveillance create a political context in which anonymity becomes an empowering tool: “anonymity is not only a politically-motivated response to the encroachments of data-gathering devices and the bioinformatics that underwrite the impersonal efficiency of contemporary biopolitical control societies. it is also an aesthetic revolt against the era of navel-gazing narcissism that has hypnotized the subject of these regimes… a form of resistance to the state, then, is to eliminate its access to its economic subjects by scrambling the informatics networks it uses to delineate, organize and manage them, effectively de-activating oneself as a political subject” ( ). whistleblowing, for example, is a subversive practices, where individuals “leak” information on illegal or immoral actions from an insider perspective (barendt , ). this contests capitalist logics of privatization and commodification of knowledge. wikileaks—as prominent example— provides a website for the anonymous publication of information on us governmental wrongdoings. in , bradley/chelsea manning, a soldier in gender transition, leaked the greatest amount of classified military and diplomatic documents to the public in us history via wikileaks and other channels exposing human rights violations like the purposeful killing of civilians by the us-military in iraq and afghanistan. the story of wikileaks appears at the center of a global cultural rupture of identity reconfigurations. the anonymity of its whistleblowing practices contrasts dramatically with the celebrity status of julian assange, its public face overshadowing the drama of manning, a young person searching for a new identity between army barracks and prison walls. wikileaks is part of a broader “freedom of information movement” (beyer ; mccarthy ), evolving from the hacker counter culture that upholds the principle of free speech and open source. political groups like the pirate party derive their name from the notion of online piracy, consisting of stealing and publically sharing digital private property. anonymous is another actor in the freedom of information movement that engages in the practices of hacking and leaking. it is most notoriously known for its distributed denial of service attacks (ddos), making their opponents’ websites inaccessible. this tactic is often equated with analogous forms of civil disobedience like sit-ins or occupations. anonymous illustrates how employing anonymity enables some “computer nerds” to inflict serious harm on powerful institutions like the church of scientology, visa and mastercard, and governments around the world (asenbaum ). the mask becomes a common focal point of diverse movements contesting practices of identification and surveillance. what the guy fawkes mask is for anonymous, the colorful balaclava is for the pussy riot movement. in contrast to the white faced, bearded man who is associated with the digital culture of disembodiment and western reason, the hand-knit balaclavas in different colors enact physical embodiment, femininity, cultural diversity, and passion. this contrast between pussy riot and anonymous shows how pussy riot’s performative interventions are deeply rooted in a feminist contestation of patriarchy. pussy riot’s “punk prayer” directly attacked vladimir putin’s government and the russian orthodox church, the two centers of patriarchal rule in russia. the global movement in support of pussy riot reinterprets these objectives from a western perspective as protest against state surveillance and police brutality. interpreting an image of a policeman pulling the balaclava off a female protester’s face at a us solidarity demonstration with pussy riot, bruce ( ) states: “in this image the balaclava circulates as vehicle for drawing parallels between us and russian state repression” ( ). not coincidentally did pussy riot stage their “punk prayer” protest in february—the carnival season. medieval carnival provided a temporal chance to enact the inversion of social hierarchies as “the lower classes had an opportunity to dress up as the ruling classes and mock their power” (spiegel , ). political dissidents and disenfranchised groups “used carnival festivities to critique government officials and state institutions and demand significant political reform” (bruner , ). bruner reports one such example: in romans-sur-isére, a small town in france, the gap between the rich and the poor widened as the ruling elite exempted themselves from paying taxes. in response, the carnival festivities organized by the common people ran under the theme “eat the rich”. the crowd in disguise held mock armed military parades, marched with rakes and brooms to sweep away the rich, and enacted selling the meat of the rich at a market. this fictive performance had real consequences as the mock rebel leaders were prosecuted, tortured, and hanged (bruner , ). the parallels to pussy riot’s “punk prayer” are apparent: “medieval carnival is known to have included mockery of church authorities, even swearing and indecent behavior from pulpits and altars” (steinholt , ). while both pussy riot and medieval carnival encompass elements of humor, they combine these with serious threat. the threat “eat the rich” is echoed by the chorus of the punk prayer “virgin mary, chase putin away.” the punk prayer consists of aggressive rock music and swear words. the balaclava itself, however colorful, contains aspects of threat: “[t]he circulatory power of the balaclava means that such endless reproduction can become monstrous and terrifying” (bruce , ). this can also be observed in the techniques of the black bloc in anti-capitalist demonstrations. hiding their faces behind black balaclavas, scarves, and hoods, the creation of a menacing persona is not an unintentional side effect as an anti-globalization protester explains: “part of the effectiveness of our mass mobilizations rest on this threat of implied violence” (cited in ruiz , ). hiding faces in hoods is also an essential practice in the black lives matter movement. the hood affords a performance of defiance through its association with youth riots, gang wars, and anti-capitalist insurgency. in the “million hoodie march” hundreds took to the streets of new york city in hoods to protest the killing of trayvon martin, a -year-old african american, whose killer, white neighborhood watchman george zimmerman, went free. as the anonymity of martin’s hood was blamed for creating a threat which justified zimmerman’s actions, black lives matter activists wear hoodies to perform solidarity with the victim and claim their race/class identity (kinney ; nguyen ). kinney ( ) elaborates: “but even when, and sometimes because, authorities brand the hood as criminal or illegitimate, people keep wearing their hoods for resistance, revolution, and transformation. for self- expression, defiance, and play” ( ). submission. while anonymity promotes subversive tendencies in society when it is used by subaltern subjects, it can have the reverse effect when it is employed by those in positions of power. anonymity can unfurl disciplinary power and work to maintain established hierarchies. in contrast with the freedom to exclude, rather than expelling the subaltern, the freedom to submit disciplines the subject to alter its behavior and restrict it to its subjugate position while keeping it within the community. in many countries, riot police concerned with maintaining public order at demonstrations and protests increasingly appear masked. while these black masks (either in the form of balaclavas or gas masks) serve physical protection, they also fulfill the double function of anonymity: negating and creating identity. first, by concealing identity, police evade personal identification and escape public scrutiny. this goes along with trends of police refusing to wear their badge numbers and restricting civilians from filming their actions, which is most frequently observed in the context of police brutality against ethnic minorities (spiegel , f). second, anonymity also allows police to construct menacing personae. riot police uniforms are more akin to soldiers’ military gear evoking an image of an army at war. while the camouflage of military uniforms is meant to let soldiers disappear, black uniforms signal presence, threat, and unity. thus, anonymity is employed to enhance police’s ability to remain order and discipline subversive subjects. the power imbalance between anonymous police and demonstrators is amplified by bans on mask wearing in public gatherings. the canadian federal ban on masks implemented in , for example, punishes mask wearing with up to years of imprisonment. this inverts the logic of liberal democracies making state actors identifiable to be held accountable by the public and simultaneously upholding citizens’ right to privacy. according to spiegel ( ), these tendencies need to be interpreted in a wider context: “in the united states, cases of individuals arrested and charged for filming police officers multiply, while high-profile cases such as those of chelsea manning and edward snowden, both charged with breaching national security for exposing to the american people state documents concerning american government activity, further anchor the asymmetrical logic of coding and surveilling individuals while obscuring the actions of public forces that, in principle, serve and answer to these same individuals” ( f). these tendencies cannot only be observed in physical gatherings but also in online communication. the internet amplifies possibilities of surveillance: “[u]sers’ identities have become increasingly exposed, while the subject of surveillance and their activities have become less identifiable. therefore, the major impetus for the power imbalance between the subject and the object of surveillance in the network is their differences in identifiability” (woo , ). the disciplinary function of anonymity is not only used against protestors and insurgent minorities, but against marginalized groups more generally as privileged groups assert their dominance. this is the central observation in rodriguez and clair’s ( ) analysis of bathroom graffiti. while they acknowledge graffiti as important outlet for suppressed anger, they also observe that it is used by those on the top of hierarchies to affirm their position: “[d]ominant groups—especially white heterosexual men—use the open nature of graffiti to intimidate and ‘discipline’ minority groups… graffiti allow for open discourse (sexist, racist, and homophobic speech) that organizations cannot sanction, but which may also act to establish or reinforce the privileging aspects of patriarchal practice, thus, supporting the hegemonic order” ( ). while anonymity’s freedom to exclude is used in the politics of extreme right-wing groups to keep those perceived as inferior out of communal space, submission, to the contrary, keeps them in place—in their subjugate position. thus, women are excluded from decision-making spaces as in the example of the kkk cited above, but submitted in social spaces like a university campus through sexist discourses in bathroom graffiti. a last example illustrates that submission through anonymity is not only at work in unequal power struggles but can also affect struggles between peers. the phenomenon of hate speech and “flaming”, which is discussed today mostly in the context of online anonymity, is expressed not only in graffiti but also was well known to participants in the us constitutional debate. addressing insults to each other’s pseudonyms federalists and anti-federalists used terms like “ignorant loggerhead” and “ungrateful monster” to submit their respective opponent (smith ekstrand and imfeld jeyaram ). “an onslaught of sparring and often libellous remarks appeared in newspapers and pamphlets… the absence of an author’s true identity, however, did not spare anonymous authors from attack and may have indeed made such attacks easier” (ibid. , ). honesty and deception lastly, accounts of anonymity in political participation describe how anonymous participants are more willing to reveal their true beliefs. identity negation avoids peer pressure which in turn leads to more sincerity in public discourse. others, however, point to anonymity’s affordance of lying as it allows for the construction of fake identities and encourages deceit through a lack of accountability. anonymity thus appears to contribute to both more honesty and more deception in democracy. honesty. oscar wilde famously wrote: “man is least himself when he talks in his own person. give him a mask and he will tell you the truth” (wilde [ ]). these words were based on th century practices of masked balls and anonymously published novels that often contained strong political undertones (barendt , ). the same can be observed today in all modes of anonymous political participation discussed here: escaping domination through anonymity—be it from state institutions, private actors, or peers— contributes to a diversity of opinions in the public sphere: “there are certain unpopular positions which some people might want to explore, but not if they know they will be exposed to ridicule and perhaps even physical harm if they are tied to such views in public. to completely forbid anonymity would therefore result in no unorthodox views ever reaching the public sphere of debate” (hunter ). in elections, voters can uninhibitedly express their interests anonymously. similarly, anonymity is used in polling to detect the electorate’s true preferences on various political issues (kuran , f). anonymity’s freedom to speak the truth also plays into the freedom to subvert as anonymous movements challenge authority. dissidents like pussy riot and anonymous reveal their true beliefs when shielded by anonymity. anonymous media are established as truth-promoting institutions such as wikileaks’ whistleblowing website or anonymous’ independent media channel anonews.co that challenges the mainstream media narratives of current events (cf. mcdonald ). however, honesty does not only contribute to subversion but also to exclusion and submission. aggressive and derogatory speech directed at marginalized groups is an expression of true sentiment. thus, gardner’s two sides of anonymity might actually be seen as one and the same phenomenon: “[a]nonymity has been both praised for freeing citizens to vote and speak their true beliefs, and condemned for providing convenient cover to harmful or democratically undesirable behavior” (gardner , ). both butler ( ) and rodriguez and clair ( ) report in their respective accounts on bathroom graffiti on university campuses how these anonymous dialogues between students are used to verbalize political opinions that are deemed inappropriate in classrooms and student newspapers. thus, the more formally regulated public sphere has exclusive effects: “graffiti allow the key benefit of anonymity, that is, protection against any form of retribution. all can say whatever, however, and whenever, to whomever” (rodriguez and clair , ). rodriguez and clair claim that the bathroom stall functions as a kind of confession booth where both social identities and political views are expressed and negotiated. one might add the comparison to a voting booth, also serving the expression of true beliefs. the study of bathroom graffiti at a us university with predominantly african american students in the late s shows how under conditions of anonymity taboo topics like homosexuality could be addressed. as the following dialogue shows, both sides of the argument—those defending and those opposing homosexuality—expressed their opinions in a candid and unrestricted manner: “(d) i really don’t understand how a woman could be attracted to another woman and i agree with the sister girl to the left of me. homosexuality is very unnatural and since god says its wrong in the bible i don’t [think] he would create a human being that way. it’s a learned behavior. (e) you have to learn to interpret the bible. king james was a racist woman hater. reading is fundamental. you also think god is a he. question everything that contradicts your freedom and liberty. (a) african american women. look! don’t judge people. you don’t understand homosexuality at all! if it was a choice i wouldn’t choose it because of all the abuse. why can’t i just be myself in this world?” (cited in rodriguez and clair , ff) this dialogue is indicative for a few reasons. not only can the construction of sexual identity be observed, but we can also witness a genuine dialogue that most likely never would have taken place without an anonymous medium. the question (a) poses at the end is especially telling: “why can’t i just be myself in this world?” implies that she can express her real self publicly only under conditions of anonymity. both freedoms of subversion of hegemonic identity constructions and submission within a peer group resulting from frankly speaking one’s mind can be observed in the dialogue. the case of bathroom graffiti illustrates that anonymity is especially important to marginalized social groups to publicly express their identities. the internet provides another outlet to articulate queer identities. leitner elaborates the situation of lgbtiqs in south korea who often face stigmatism and social ostracism: “[m]any persons identifying with a homosexual (or other non- heterosexual) identity find an anonymous internet to be the only recourse for open expression… a lack of expressive opportunity deprives homosexual persons of reasonable opportunities to develop their identities” (leitner , ). in countries with more accepting cultures toward queer sexualities, anonymity nevertheless plays an important role. annual gay pride parades are characterized by masquerade and carnivalesque identity performances enacting gender changes and fusions (baxter ). deception. paradoxically, while enabling a more honest discourse by concealing identity is an undisputed feature of anonymity, facilitating deceit appears just as plausible. in his notebooks from the late th and early th century, leonardo da vinci wrote: “fire is to represent truth because it destroys all sophistry and lies; and the mask is for lying and falsehood which conceal truth” (da vinci , ). while today hiding one’s identity when casting the ballot in elections is perceived as a core political right, the role of the secret ballot was far more contested in th century britain: “[s]ecret voting was contrary to the english cultural traditions of honesty and openness; it would lead to habits of falsehood and deception” (barendt , ). while one was supposed to vote in accordance with the common good, the secret ballot gave the opportunity for selfish voting, either concealing or even lying about one’s decision. voting based on the common good was particularly important in the face of exclusion of certain social groups—most prominently women—from the suffrage. thus, john stuart mill argued men had to reveal their voting behavior not only to a wider public, but specifically to their wives and daughters whose interests they were supposed to include (ibid.). in contrast to single voting acts, the internet provides multiple and continuous opportunities for deception. the case of a gay girl in damascus is a telling example. in the wake of the uprisings in arab countries in , the blog a gay girl in damascus told the personal story of the syrian lgbtiq activist amina, resisting the ultra-conservative syrian regime from within. amina’s blog posts were promoted by lez get real, an us-based lgbtiq news website run by paula brooks. after the blog rapidly rose in popularity in just a few months, news spread that amina was abducted, causing her loyal community to spring into action under the hashtag #freeamina. soon it turned out amina was really tom macmaster, a forty-year old, white, heterosexual american man. paula brooks, who had promoted amina’s blog through lez get real and engaged in private and allegedly romantic contact with amina, later turned out to be bill graber, a fifty-seven-year-old, heterosexual american. both men claimed to have invented fictive personae to more credibly rally for a social group they were not part of. cardell and maguire’s ( ) pointed analysis uncovers the relevance of the power structures the case is contextualized within: “the hoax is dangerous because it cloaks the dominant narrative under the disguise of a subversive narrator who corroborates rather than disrupts the dominant narrative…it places a us readership in the privileged position of cardcarrying listener to the voice of a subordinate object whose ‘true’ story confirms the rightness of western democracy and orientalist discourses about middle eastern otherness, evident, for example, in the cultural stereotype of the arab woman as being in need of rescuing” ( f). conscious deceit is also used to troll or infiltrate political opponents and to spread fake news. anonymous, for example, employed deception facilitated by anonymity to attack the white supremacist hal turner. turner propagated racist views via his radio show and web site. anonymous activists flooded the radio show with anonymous prank phone calls and the website with prank comments (coleman , f). this incidence is not an isolated case. groups like expose attempt to document illegal content of extreme right groups online and report it to the police. while this is not the official policy of the group, some members create fake accounts on social media—so-called “sock puppets”—to post racist comments, add right-wing individuals as friends, and like right-wing groups to gain the trust of the online community. when they are ultimately invited to secret chat rooms where strategy and future actions are planned, they gain access to valuable information (bartlett , ff). more sophisticated forms of deception are employed when anonymous programmers design social bots to present themselves as people on social media. on twitter, bots simulating political supporters or activist groups tweet and retweet political content, heavily influencing which political messages are read online and potentially swaying election and referendum results. both the campaigns of donald trump for us president in and for brexit in the uk referendum in the same year were heavily supported by artificial agents whose puppeteers remained in the dark (bastos and mercea ; bessi and ferrara ). absence as presence in the public sphere when considering the antithetical character of anonymity as identity negation and creation and the resulting three sets of contradictory freedoms, the stark contrast between privacy and anonymity becomes evident: neither inclusion, exclusion, subversion, submission, honesty, nor deception have much, if anything, in common with privacy. this is because they all relate to a crucial aspect of anonymity besides concealment. they all hint at the inherently discursive character of anonymity. this is also illustrated by the four modes of anonymous political participation discussed above: voting, campaign funding, political writing, and masked collective action are all modes of communication in the public sphere. thus, anonymity does not entail being let alone. on the contrary, anonymity only exists within a public discursive arena. the public sphere—the opposite of privacy—is the precondition for anonymity (cf. barendt , ). this does not mean, however, that privacy and anonymity do not share any common features. they clearly overlap in their functions of shielding the democratic subject from interference by others, be they state actors, economic actors, or peers. however, while privacy withdraws both identity and content from public scrutiny, anonymity only shields identity while communicating content in the public sphere. anonymity thus conveys one crucial feature of privacy, the concealment of identity, into the public sphere. it erodes the boundaries between the opposing binary of private versus public and facilitates a private form of engagement in the public discursive arena. by negating some aspects of the legally identified and physically embodied persona, anonymity transcends publicity and privacy, transforming private sentiments into political claims and transmitting them into the public sphere thus facilitating absence as presence. the three sets of contradictory freedoms afforded by anonymity can be a useful tool for future research; one should keep in mind, however, that reality is not necessarily as simple as heuristics. one form of anonymous political participation does not simply result in one of these freedoms but rather entails a combination or even all of these tendencies to a certain degree. anonymity’s effects are always both positive and negative and remain contradictory. to further develop these categories, i suggest viewing them not as mutually exclusive, forming two poles on a continuum. rather, their relations are to be understood as dialectical. inclusion is defined by exclusion and vice versa. in other words, inclusion always rests on the exclusion of others, even if it is the exclusion of the one percent. subversion by some aims at obtaining the submission of others. and what is an act of self-revelation by some is perceived as deception by others. to illustrate this dialectic dynamic, i introduce a last example. in her book, veil, rafia zakaria ( ) contends that in the context of the enforcement of burka bans and islamophobic media discourses, the practice of publicly wearing the veil becomes an act of political participation. while the gendered practice of veiling women does fulfill the function of submission in a social context dominated by patriarchal norms, the veil becomes a tool for subversion confronting islamophobia and claiming diversity in the public sphere. “veils thus are a form of resistance and rebellion, an extension of the private space of the harem where [the women] are protected, into the public realm” ( f). thus, in a dialectical move, patriarchal practices of submission are transformed into acts of subversion to counter state forces of submission. this dialectical move can also be investigated along the binary of honesty and deception. the german democratic theorist hubertus buchstein ( ) argues in his essay on online deliberation: “[t]he network presents an unreal world which allows all of us to create one or even more virtual identities… in most cases people pretend to have those positive characteristics they feel they lack. ‘virtual identities’ overall tend to be somehow ‘better’ than the real ones” ( f, emphasis added). the literature on masked collective action offers a different explanation. it interprets identity creation as revealing aspects of the multifaceted self: “the mask is related to transition, metamorphoses, the violation of natural boundaries, to mockery and familiar nicknames. it contains the playful element of life” (bakhtin [ ], ). while this essay compared cases of deception with cases of honesty, in practice all cases contain both aspects as the boundaries between reality and fiction blur. referring to the guy fawkes mask (v-mask) employed by anonymous, cambre ( ) states: “the generative trait of the v-mask, as deleuzian multiplicity, like the quality of undecideability, ensures resistance to representation because it provides a riddle rather than a clear relationship, it is a non-identity acting as-if an identity, but instead of choosing one or the other it oscillates between them. it rejects dominant ‘either/or’ alternatives” ( ). the dialectic of anonymity’s contradictory freedoms is further complicated by a normative dimension. while the division in dichotomies of freedoms conducive and harmful to democracy might be a helpful heuristic, it is also necessary to think about positive and negative effects within each freedom. suzanne dovi ( ), for example, convincingly argues that exclusion is a necessary mode in democracy, as the access of privileged groups needs to be restricted in public decision-making bodies. submission to commonly established rules and deception as expression of the multifaceted democratic subject are all positive aspects that contribute to a healthy democratic community, while inclusion can further privilege the more powerful, subversion can compromise security, and honesty might lead to hurt. lastly, future empirical research will need to take the particular contexts in which these three sets of contradictory freedoms occur into account. identity performances afforded by anonymity are highly context-dependent, as they rely on three contextual axes: ( ) the materiality of the communicative infrastructure, ( ) the positionality of the communicative subject within established power structures, and ( ) the configuration of identity knowledge. first, anonymous political participation depends on the materiality of the communicative infrastructure as it employs physical objects such as pens and paper, felt pens and bathroom walls, keyboards and computer screens, typewriters, masks, and digital objects such as avatars, emoticons, and pseudonyms. these objects play an essential role in anonymous identity performances. the perceived reality of the identity, for example, differs depending on whether physical masks or digital pseudonyms are used. the socio-cultural identity of the speaker is constructed differently if a political message is written on a bathroom wall or in a newspaper as a letter to the editor. the crucial role of communicative infrastructures becomes even more evident in the information age. the comparison of bathroom graffiti with posting in online forums illustrates this qualitative shift, which does not only affect the in/visibility of physically embodied identity but the dimensions of time and space. the increasing mediation of everyday communication establishes aspects of identity negation and creation as the norm. anonymity becomes an integral part of our lives. second, the freedoms afforded by anonymity are affected by the positionality of the anonymous communicator within pre-existing social hierarchies. the social location affords different power resources to protestors and riot police, affluent and poor party funders, and heterosexual and homosexual graffiti scribblers. linda alcoff ( ) claims that the social position of the speaker alters the uttered content. perceptions vary in accordance with the speaker’s social status. these pre-established hierarchies along the lines of identity categories like race, class, and gender, can be disrupted or amplified by anonymity. alison kinney ( ) elaborates how the material object of the hood reverses its meaning when it is employed by activists to protest racism in comparison to its use in executions. while the anonymity afforded by the hood enhances the position of protestors, it dehumanizes and degrades the condemned criminal. similarly, the veil can amplify patriarchal structures submitting its wearer, while also empowering its wearer to confront state repression (zakaria ). third, configuration of identity knowledge form another crucial contextual condition of anonymous political participation. first, it matters which identity knowledge is conveyed by the identifiers used (pseudonyms, social security numbers, initials etc.) and which identity markers (gender, age, ethnicity etc.) of the legally identified and physically embodied persona are revealed. second, it matters who is anonymous within a communicative space and who is not. the struggle of masked riot police and masked protestors exemplifies this on an apparent level. a more subtle level can be illustrated by the question of whether online user identities are known to operators of websites and accessible to hackers and government agents. third, it matters whether anonymous participants have previous knowledge of each other and have pre- established social relations or not. in workplace participation via anonymous online feedback tools, for example, participants might be formally unidentified but as the anonymity set is small, their identities might be easily deduced via social cues such as recognizable wording or content. in summary, the workings of anonymity’s contradictory freedoms are affected by who knows what about whom within a communicative setting. this article presents the first undertaking to root anonymity in democratic theory. it contributes to future research on anonymity in political participation by generating three sets of contradictory freedoms (a) inclusion and exclusion, (b) subversion and submission, and (c) honesty and deception. these freedoms are to be analyzed in the context of ( ) the materiality of communicative infrastructure, ( ) the social positionality of communicative subjects, and ( ) the configuration of identity knowledge. future research on anonymity will need to investigate the value and validity of these concepts in the pressing challenge of explaining the ambiguous workings of anonymity in political participation. these challenges appear ever more important as anonymity becomes a central feature of the 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digital humanities at the small scale roopika	risam	 rrisam@salemstate.edu	 salem	state	university,	united	states	of	america	 	 susan	edwards	 sedwards@salemstate.edu	 salem	state	university,	united	states	of	america	 digital	humanities	practices	are	often	understood	 in	terms	of	significant	scale:	big	data,	large	data	sets,	 digital	 humanities	 centers	 (terras	 et	 al.	 ;	 kow- alczyk	 et	 al.	 ;	 borgman	 ;	 kretzschmar	 ).	 this	 emphasis	 leads	 to	 the	 perception	 that	 projects	 cannot	 be	 completed	 without	 substantial	 access	 to	 financial	 resources,	data,	 and	 labor	 (pres- cott	 ;	hockey	 ;	evans	and	rees	 ).	while	 this	 can	 be	 the	 case,	 such	 presumptions	 serve	 as	 a	 deterrent	 to	 the	development	of	an	 inclusive	digital	 humanities	 community	 with	 representation	 across	 academic	 hierarchies	 (student,	 librarian,	 faculty),	 types	 of	 institutions	 (public,	 private,	 regional),	 and	 geographies	 (global	 north,	 global	 south).	 in	 re- sponse,	how	can	digital	humanities	scholars	find	val- ue	in	work	undertaken	at	a	small	scale?	this	question	 is	at	the	heart	of	this	paper	theorizing	the	practices	of	 micro	digital	humanities	by	reporting	on	initiatives	at	 salem	 state	 university.	 these	 practices	 include	 the	 embrace	of	minimal	computing,	small	data	sets,	local	 archives,	 and	 freely	 available	 platforms	 for	 creating	 small-scale	digital	humanities	projects	while	working	 with	undergraduate	students.		 	 the	 work	 of	 the	 minimal	 computing	 working	 group	has	articulated	a	vision	 for	minimal	 forms	of	 digital	humanities	praxis	(minimal	computing	work- ing	group	 ).	jentery	sayers	( )	has	identified	 key	 components	 of	 minimal	 computing,	 including	 minimal	design,	maximum	justice,	and	minimal	tech- nical	language.	these	principles	privilege	access	and	 openness	for	stakeholders	across	economic	and	tech- nical	 barriers.	 more	 importantly,	 they	 are	 precepts	 that	envision	how	digital	humanities	practices	might	 be	 available	 to	 those	 who	 work	 outside	 of	 macro	 structures	 that	 have	 historically	 shaped	 digital	 hu- manities.	this	has	been	 important	at	salem	state,	a	 regional,	 public	 university	 undergoing	 an	 unprece- dented	 budget	 crisis	 due	 to	 funding	 cuts	 from	 the	 state	legislature.	however,	we	have	faculty	and	librar- ians	who	are	committed	to	using	digital	humanities	to	 cultivate	digital	and	 st	century	literacies	in	our	stu- dents.	 as	 a	 result,	 we	 have	 conceptualized	 a	 micro	 digital	 humanities	 approach	 inspired	 by	 minimal	 computing.	micro	dh	validates	scholarly	output	that	 does	not	require	digital	humanities	centers,	big	data,	 large	data	sets,	and	access	to	high-performance	com- puting.	as	an	intervention	in	local	digital	humanities,	 it	 places	 high	 value	 on	 working	 with	 available	 re- sources,	however	small.		 at	 salem	 state,	 we	 have	 embraced	 micro	 digital	 humanities	 through	 our	 work	 with	 undergraduates.	 this	talk	explores	these	practices	in	depth,	as	a	model	 for	claiming	the	 legitimacy	of	small-scale	digital	hu- manities.	it	considers	how	we	have	drawn	on	minimal	 university	resources	and	existing	institutional	struc- tures	to	build	a	digital	humanities	community.		 first,	the	focus	of	our	work	is	our	university’s	ar- chives	and	special	collections,	a	diverse	and	free	but	 untapped	source	of	material.	this	choice	emphasizes	 the	primacy	of	local	resources	in	micro	digital	human- ities.	although	salem	is	known	for	 its	history	of	the	 salem	witch	trials	and	literature	of	nathaniel	haw- thorne,	our	archives	 focus	on	 the	common	person’s	 experience	 in	 salem	 from	 the	 mid- th	 century	 to	 present.	this	 includes	a	rich	history	of	 immigration	 and	activism.	it	exemplifies	the	power	of	micro	digital	 humanities	 for	 the	diversifying	 the	historical	 record	 by	giving	voice	to	the	ordinary	and	everyday.	through	 our	work,	we	shed	light	on	the	hidden	histories	that	 shape	salem	today.		 we	undertake	this	work	in	service	of	our	under- graduate	students.	micro	digital	humanities	is	an	ap- proach	that	cuts	across	hierarchies	in	academic	labor,	 bringing	faculty,	 librarians,	and	students	together	to	 create	small	projects.	salem	state	is	the	most	diverse	 state	 university	 in	 massachusetts	 ( %	 students	 of	 color,	 %	 first-generation	 college	 students)	 and	 draws	 a	 primarily	 regional,	 working-class	 student	 population.	both	the	students	and	the	university	have	 few	resources,	but	we	work	with	what	we	have.	to	 serve	this	population,	we	developed	the	digital	schol- ars	program,	piloted	through	a	small	grant	from	the	 university.	 we	 designed	 the	 program	 to	 answer	 the	 call	of	the	university’s	strategic	plan	to	foster	student	 success	through	research	opportunities.	students	ap- ply	 to	 become	 digital	 scholars,	 and	 those	 who	 are	 selected	are	mentored	through	the	process	of	creating	 a	 small-scale	 digital	 humanities	 project	 over	 the	 course	of	a	semester.		 because	 they	 receive	 course	 credit	 rather	 than	 payment,	we	do	not	believe	that	we	can,	ethically,	ask	 students	to	work	on	projects	for	us.	instead,	the	pro- gram	is	student-centered	and	student-led	 through	a	 scaled	 down	 approach	 emphasizing	 the	 creation	 of	 micro	projects.	we	select	collections	for	the	students	 to	explore	related	to	the	history	of	salem	state	then	 lead	them	through	the	experience	of	creating	a	digital	 humanities	project	from	start	to	stopping	point.	the	 process	 includes	making	discoveries	 in	the	archives,	 identifying	 research	 questions	 that	 suit	 their	 inter- ests,	 curating	 materials,	 envisioning	 project	 design,	 selecting	platforms,	and	creating	a	final	product	-	and	 all	the	iterative	dimensions	this	process	entails.	stu- dents	 also	 have	 access	 to	 professional	 development	 workshops	 and	 opportunities	 to	 engage	 with	 guest	 speakers	who	are	themselves	digital	humanities	prac- titioners.	projects	our	students	have	undertaken	 in- clude	recovering	the	history	of	lgbtq	activism	at	the	 university,	revealing	the	colonialist	gaze	of	salem	res- idents	 who	 traveled	 to	 india	 in	 the	 s,	 creating	 historical	 models	 of	 the	 university’s	 oldest	 campus	 building,	and	connecting	contemporary	student	activ- ism	around	black	lives	matter	to	the	history	of	anti- racist	activism	at	the	university	 in	the	 s.	these	 projects	 have	 helped	 students	 engage	 in	 a	 range	 of	 practices:	digitizing	texts,	tei,	omeka,	 d	modeling,	 quantitative	 textual	 analysis,	 data	 visualization,	 and	 oral	history.	in	the	spirit	of	micro	digital	humanities,	 we	only	use	freely	available	resources	or	open	source	 software	we	can	host	ourselves.	this	is	a	response	to	 our	lack	of	financial	resources	but	is	also	a	result	of	 our	focus	on	students;	we	do	not	want	to	force	them	 to	use	proprietary	technologies	they	may	not	be	able	 to	afford	to	access	outside	of	a	university	or	on	their	 own.	 	 we	situate	this	work	as	a	practice	of	micro	digital	 humanities,	 cutting	 across	 hierarchies	 to	 shift	 stu- dents	from	the	position	of	consumer	of	digital	media	 and	 technologies	 to	 the	 role	 of	 producer.	 this	 re- quires	setting	aside	our	preferences	for	what	projects	 based	on	the	collections	should	look	like	and	recog- nizing	that	students	will	be	working	at	a	small	scale.	 however,	we	view	these	small	projects	as	pieces	of	a	 bigger	puzzle	that	illuminates	life	in	salem.	to	bring	 these	 projects	 together,	 we	 developed	 an	 umbrella	 digital	humanities	project	called	digital	salem,	a	por- tal	that	aggregates	student	projects	by	collection.	us- ers	visiting	digital	salem	are	offered	multiple	ports	of	 entry	into	the	history,	culture,	and	literature	of	salem.	 there,	the	small	student	projects	add	up	as	they	con- tribute	to	a	rich,	varied	resource	on	salem.	this	expe- rience	has	suggested	how	a	micro	digital	humanities	 can	be	designed	with	emphasis	connecting	small	pro- jects	as	modular	pieces	that	work	together	to	form	a	 bigger	picture.		 these	 micro	 digital	 humanities	 practices	 have	 been	 the	 foundation	 of	 the	 digital	 humanities	 com- munity	at	the	university.	they	have	brought	together	 faculty,	 librarians,	 and	 students	 to	 facilitate	 student	 research	 at	 a	 teaching-intensive	 university.	 further,	 they	offer	a	model	for	developing	digital	humanities	 at	 scales	 appropriate	 to	 institutional	 contexts	 and	 strategic	 planning.	 perhaps	 more	 importantly,	 they	 offer	 a	 vision	 of	 digital	 humanities	 with	 learning	 curves	and	barriers	to	entry	that	do	not	require	affili- ation	with	centers,	access	to	expensive	technologies,	 or	substantial	resources.	this,	we	argue,	 is	essential	 to	the	development	of	an	inclusive	digital	humanities	 community.		 bibliography 	 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( ).	enabling	complex	analysis	of	large- scale	 digital	 collections:	 humanities	 research,	 high	 performance	 computing,	 and	 transforming	 access	 to	 british	library	digital	collections.	in	digital	humanities	 :	 conference	 abstracts	 (pp.	 - ).	 jagiellonian	 university	&	pedagogical	university,	kraków.	 	 	 	salem state university 	from the selectedworks of roopika risam 	august , 	micro dh: digital humanities at the small scale 	microsoft word - . risam-microdh- .docx wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ listening to black lives matter: racial capitalism and the critique of neoliberalism | springerlink advertisement search 	 log in search springerlink search 	article 	published: april listening to black lives matter: racial capitalism and the critique of neoliberalism 	siddhant issar   contemporary political theory volume  , pages – ( )cite this article 	 k accesses 	 citations 	 altmetric 	 metrics details abstract this article explores left critiques of neoliberalism in light of the black lives matter movement’s (blm) recourse to the notion of ‘racial capitalism’ in their analyses of anti-black oppression. taking a cue from blm, i argue for a critical theory of racial capitalism that historicizes neoliberalism within a longue durée framework, surfacing racialized continuities in capitalism’s violence. i begin by revealing how neo-marxist and neo-foucaultian approaches to neoliberalism, particularly that of david harvey and wendy brown, respectively, partition race from the workings of contemporary capitalism. such analyses obscure neoliberalism’s differential impact on non-white racialized populations, while simultaneously casting anti-racist struggles as divisive. in contrast, i then trace how the movement for black lives policy platform invokes cedric robinson’s work on racial capitalism, investigating the utility of this framework for the movement’s demands. building on blm’s turn to the concept of racial capitalism, i finally offer an outline of a critical theory of racial capitalism to better theorize neoliberalism. by historicizing neoliberalism within racial capitalism’s historical arc, such a theory unravels the qualitatively different mechanisms through which racialized populations are pressed into circuits of capital accumulation. it also paves the way to move past the entrenched class-versus-identity debate on the american left. this is a preview of subscription content, access via your institution. access options buy single article instant access to the full article pdf. us$ . tax calculation will be finalised during checkout. subscribe to journal immediate online access to all issues from . subscription will auto renew annually. us$ tax calculation will be finalised during checkout. rent this article via deepdyve. learn more about institutional subscriptions references 	alvarez, s., dagnino, e., & escobar, a. 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( ) the origin of capitalism ( st edition). monthly review press. download references acknowledgements i am thankful to lisa disch and the two anonymous reviewers for their constructive suggestions. i am also grateful to participants at the abolition collective’s inaugural convergence in , the western political science association meeting, and the university of chicago’s race and capitalism graduate conference in , and to nick xenos, yasmeen daifallah, sonia alvarez, adam dahl, john mcmahon, rachel brown, basil zeno, sean gordon, james padilioni, rob echeverria, and lars cornelissen for their feedback. author information affiliations 	university of massachusetts-amherst, amherst, ma, , usa siddhant issar authors	siddhant issarview author publications you can also search for this author in pubmed google scholar corresponding author correspondence to siddhant issar. additional information publisher's note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. rights and permissions reprints and permissions about this article cite this article issar, s. listening to black lives matter: racial capitalism and the critique of neoliberalism. contemp polit theory , – ( ). https://doi.org/ . /s - - - download citation 	published: april 	issue date: march 	doi: https://doi.org/ . /s - - - keywords 	black lives matter 	racial capitalism 	neoliberalism 	race 	left politics access options buy single article instant access to the full article pdf. us$ . tax calculation will be finalised during checkout. subscribe to journal immediate online access to all issues from . subscription will auto renew annually. us$ tax calculation will be finalised during checkout. rent this article via deepdyve. learn more about institutional subscriptions advertisement over million scientific documents at your fingertips switch edition 	 academic edition 	 corporate edition 	home 	impressum 	legal information 	privacy statement 	california privacy statement 	how we use cookies 	manage cookies/do not sell my data 	accessibility 	contact us not logged in - . . . north east research libraries ( ) - lyrasis ( ) - carnegie mellon university ( ) - carnegie mellon university hunt library ( ) springer nature © springer nature switzerland ag. part of springer nature. \ the asm journals committee values the contributions of black microbiologists the asm journals committee values the contributions of black microbiologists patrick d. schloss,a chair, asm journals committee, melissa junior,b director, asm journals, rebecca alvania,b assistant director, asm journals, cesar a. arias,c,d editor in chief, antimicrobial agents and chemotherapy, andreas baumler,e editor in chief, infection and immunity, arturo casadevall,f editor in chief, mbio, corrella detweiler,g editor in chief, microbiology and molecular biology reviews, harold drake,h editor in chief, applied and environmental microbiology, jack gilbert,i editor in chief, msystems, michael j. imperiale,a editor in chief, msphere, susan lovett,j editor in chief, ecosal plus, stanley maloy,k editor in chief, journal of microbiology and biology education (jmbe), alexander j. mcadam,l,m editor in chief, journal of clinical microbiology, irene l. g. newton,n editor in chief, microbiology resource announcements, michael j. sadowsky,o editor in chief, microbiology spectrum, rozanne m. sandri-goldin,p editor in chief, journal of virology, thomas j. silhavy,q editor in chief, journal of bacteriology, peter tontonoz,r editor in chief, molecular and cellular biology, jo-anne h. young,s editor in chief, clinical microbiology reviews, craig e. cameron,t isaac cann,u a. oveta fuller,a ariangela j. kozikv adepartment of microbiology and immunology, university of michigan, ann arbor, michigan, usa bamerican society for microbiology, washington, dc, usa ccenter for antimicrobial resistance and microbial genomics and division of infectious diseases, university of texas health science center, mcgovern medical school, houston, texas, usa ddepartment of microbiology and molecular genetics, university of texas health science center, mcgovern medical school, houston, texas, usa edepartment of medical microbiology and immunology, university of california, davis, california, usa fdepartment of molecular microbiology and immunology, johns hopkins bloomberg school of public health, baltimore, maryland, usa gdepartment of molecular, cellular & developmental biology, university of colorado, boulder, colorado, usa hdepartment of ecological microbiology, university of bayreuth, bayreuth, germany idepartment of pediatrics, university of california, san diego, california, usa jdepartment of biology, brandeis university, waltham, massachusetts, usa kdepartment of biology, san diego state university, san diego, california, usa lboston children’s hospital, boston, massachusetts, usa mharvard medical school, boston, massachusetts, usa ndepartment of biology, indiana university, bloomington, indiana, usa obiotechnology institute, university of minnesota, st. paul, minnesota, usa pdepartment of microbiology and molecular genetics, university of california, irvine, california, usa qdepartment of molecular biology, princeton university, princeton, new jersey, usa rdepartment of pathology and laboratory medicine, david geffen school of medicine, university of california, los angeles, california, usa sdepartment of medicine, university of minnesota, minneapolis, minnesota, usa tdepartment of microbiology & immunology, university of north carolina, chapel hill, north carolina, usa ucarl r. woese institute for genomic biology, university of illinois, urbana, illinois, usa vdepartment of internal medicine, university of michigan, ann arbor, michigan, usa black lives matter. the ongoing problem of police brutality and the resulting deathsof george floyd ( ), breonna taylor ( ), and many other black people in the united states ( ) has rightly shaken the country. acts of racism should cause us to question the level to which we have personally participated in the systems of racial inequity that facilitate such acts. we all have an obligation to identify the ways that systemic racism functions in our society and in science. as scientists, we prefer to believe that we are driven by data and are immune to such detrimental behaviors. yet, if we are honest, we know that this is not always true. citation schloss pd, junior m, alvania r, arias ca, baumler a, casadevall a, detweiler c, drake h, gilbert j, imperiale mj, lovett s, maloy s, mcadam aj, newton ilg, sadowsky mj, sandri- goldin rm, silhavy tj, tontonoz p, young j-ah, cameron ce, cann i, fuller ao, kozik aj. . the asm journals committee values the contributions of black microbiologists. j bacteriol :e - . https://doi.org/ . /jb. - . copyright © american society for microbiology. all rights reserved. ed. note: this editorial is being published by the following asm journals: antimicrobial agents and chemotherapy, applied and environmental microbiology, clinical microbiology reviews, ecosal plus, infection and immunity, journal of bacteriology, journal of clinical microbiology, journal of microbiology and biology education, journal of virology, microbiology and molecular biology reviews, microbiology resource announcements, microbiology spectrum, molecular and cellular biology, mbio, msphere, and msystems. address correspondence to patrick d. schloss, pschloss@umich.edu. accepted manuscript posted online july published editorial crossm october volume issue e - jb.asm.org journal of bacteriology september o n a p ril , a t c a r n e g ie m e l l o n u n iv l ib r h ttp ://jb .a sm .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - x https://doi.org/ . /jb. - https://doi.org/ . /jb. - https://doi.org/ . /asmcopyrightv mailto:pschloss@umich.edu https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /jb. - &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - https://jb.asm.org http://jb.asm.org/ between and , the horrific tuskegee syphilis study was performed to observe the natural history of latent syphilis infection in black men ( ). the premise of the study was driven by the racist pseudoscience of social darwinism. the study directors hypothesized that black men were inferior to white men. the study directors lied to the men about their condition, leading the men to infect their partners and children. furthermore, when penicillin was shown in to treat syphilis, the doctors hid the treatment and refused to treat the men. leading peer-reviewed journals of the time published results from the study. this textbook example of racism in microbiology underscores the historic role of scientific publishers in disseminating racist ideologies and points to the potential for scientific publishers to prevent the spread of racism. as the journals committee of the american society for microbiology, we are committed to promoting the work of black microbiologists and the issues that impact the black community. to do this, we must improve the representation of black microbiologists across the peer review process, recruit black authors to publish their research in asm’s journals, and identify aspects of peer review where there is oppor- tunity for bias to affect our decisions to publish their research, something that we wish to avoid. we must also reassess the scopes of our journals to ensure that the micro- biological problems that are important to the black community are published within the journals of this society. issues that affect the black community matter. black people in the united states in are, and historically have been, disproportionately and negatively impacted by infectious diseases ( ). the flint, mi, water crisis brought significant suffering to the primarily black community, including outbreaks of legionnaires’ disease ( ). black women are more likely to have a preterm birth, of which half are associated with a microbial etiology ( ). black children are more likely to have asthma, a disease which is associated with increased bacterial burden in the lungs ( ). black people are more likely to have a severe case of and die from coronavirus disease (covid- ) ( ). in new york city and elsewhere, the death rate due to covid- for black people is twice that for white people ( ). black people are also far more likely to be affected by sexually transmitted infections, including hiv, and evidence suggests a role for underlying structural inequities, such as mass incarceration and unequal treatment when seeking medical care ( , ). these disparities in health are an outcome of differences in socio-economic factors and the corresponding disenfranchisement. these include less access to health care, food deserts where nutritious and affordable food is not available, and poorly funded public health infrastructure. a person’s race provides no biological basis for the observed health disparities, and to assert otherwise will slow the identi- fication of solutions to these disparities. unfortunately, research related to solving such problems is often discounted. a recent analysis of research project (r ) proposals reviewed by the national institutes of health found that the community- and population-level research topics of interest to black scientists placed them at a disad- vantage for a fundable outcome and accounts for much of the reduced success rate of black scientists ( ). as an academic publisher, we have a responsibility to help to promote the importance and legitimacy of work that is important to the black com- munity. black scientists have made significant contributions in spite of the systemic racism that they have faced throughout their lives. these scientists should be able to put their energy into their science rather than into overcoming the bias and prejudice that deters their efforts and devalues their humanity. as an example, george washington carver was born into slavery yet went on to become a preeminent plant biologist, chemist, and microbiologist despite many barriers to safely obtaining an education (https:// www.tuskegee.edu/support-tu/george-washington-carver). he improved the lives of farmers by developing alternative crops to cotton, harnessing the power of rhizobia to help improve soil health, and fighting fungal plant pathogens. he impacted the lives of many black and non-black people. numerous black microbiologists have had significant impacts on topics that are particularly relevant to black communities and beyond, including drs. william hinton, ruth moore, jane hinton, and many others. in an editorial journal of bacteriology october volume issue e - jb.asm.org o n a p ril , a t c a r n e g ie m e l l o n u n iv l ib r h ttp ://jb .a sm .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://www.tuskegee.edu/support-tu/george-washington-carver https://www.tuskegee.edu/support-tu/george-washington-carver https://jb.asm.org http://jb.asm.org/ interview at the microbe meeting in new orleans, la, dr. marian johnson- thompson (university of the district of columbia) recounted the lives of many of these and other black microbiologists ( ). she told the story of dr. moore, a professor at howard university who attended a general meeting of the asm. because of segrega- tion, she was not able to stay at hotels within the city or eat at any of its restaurants. although we want to believe that such systemic racism no longer exists within our discipline, we must constantly question that assumption. the stories of these microbi- ologists emphasize that representation matters. they underscore the fact that unless the perspective and challenges of black communities are represented, then they will not be addressed. in a recent msphere of influence article, dr. michael johnson recounted his shock that although there was a % increase in the number of biomedical ph.d.’s awarded to black people and those from other underrepresented groups (urgs) between and , there has not been a meaningful change in the number of assistant professors from urgs over that time ( ). in his article, he asks how he wound up at a research-intensive university as a black professor. he asks two questions of himself: “by what miracle did i beat the odds to get here?” and “what can i do to get other urms [underrepresented minorities] in a similar position as myself?” yet, it is not dr. johnson’s responsibility alone to remove these barriers. as a publisher of microbiology research, we acknowledge the important role that we have in the career development of junior scientists and the role that we have in giving legitimacy to scientific questions. for too long, we have not promoted the work of junior black and other scientists from urgs as much as we could have. we have been too passive in recruiting these scientists to publish in our journals. scientists like dr. johnson should not think that their success is a “miracle.” we also must ask ourselves what we can do to get more scientists from urgs into faculty and leadership positions. although we should always strive to recruit more people from urgs into science, the data that he reports indicate that the problem also lies with retention of this talent. as leaders of the asm journals program, we need to take a greater role in mentorship. we can recruit more junior scientists from urgs to be peer reviewers, put them in leadership positions, and publicly recognize them. as the journals committee, we seek to improve the representation of black micro- biologists and therefore take on the responsibility to do the following. ● learn from the stories of black microbiologists, past and present. we will listen. black microbiologists should not have to shoulder the burden of dismantling systems of inequality on their own. ● ensure that diverse voices and viewpoints are represented among the editors in chief. we will conduct open searches that actively recruit black scientists and scientists from urgs. we will not constrain the candidate pool to current or past editors and editorial board members, which have traditionally been the source of candidates. ● appoint editors in chief who understand that the impact of their journal is dependent on the diversity of their authors, reviewers, and editors. we will ask candidates to state their experience fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion in their application. ● improve the representation of black scientists and those from other urgs across the peer review system. each journal will develop a plan that will be regularly evaluated and used as a criterion to determine whether an editor in chief should be reappointed. ● be alert to implicit and overt bias when handling manuscripts from black and other scientists from urgs. we will work with our editors and others to under- stand bias and study where it can manifest itself in peer review. ● more fully represent the scope of how microbiology impacts the black commu- nity. we will solicit input from black microbiologists for topics that are not being editorial journal of bacteriology october volume issue e - jb.asm.org o n a p ril , a t c a r n e g ie m e l l o n u n iv l ib r h ttp ://jb .a sm .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://jb.asm.org http://jb.asm.org/ addressed adequately within asm’s journals and revise the scopes of the journals accordingly. ● promote black microbiologists. we will ensure that their representation is equi- table when selecting papers for editor spotlights, authors for commentaries, and subjects for biographical reports. ● help develop the next generation of microbiologists and more actively listen. we will participate in opportunities to serve and mentor black scientists and those from other urgs through the annual biomedical research conference for minor- ity students (abrcms) and the annual conference for the society for advance- ment of chicanos/hispanics & native americans in science (sacnas). ● identify appropriate methods for identifying and quantifying representation of black microbiologists. we will collaborate closely with the asm taskforce on diversity, equity, and inclusion. there is no place for anti-black or for any form of racism within microbiology. to solve the most important microbiological problems of today and prepare for those of the future, we must leverage the experiences, perspectives, and expertise of everyone. references . boone a. june . one week that shook the world: george floyd’s death ignited protests far beyond minneapolis. star tribune, minneap- olis, mn. https://www.startribune.com/george-floyd-death-ignited -protests-far-beyond-minneapolis-police-minnesota/ /. . gardner h. june . ‘this is for you, baby’: days of protests are about more than breonna taylor. courier-journal, louisville, ky. h t t p s : / / w w w . c o u r i e r - j o u r n a l . c o m / s t o r y / n e w s / l o c a l / / / / l o u i s v i l l e - p r o t e s t s - m o r e - t h a n - b r e o n n a - t a y l o r - l m p d - s h o o t i n g / /. . peeples l. . what the data say about police brutality and racial bias—and which reforms might work. nature : – . https://doi.org/ . /d - - -z. . brandt am. . racism and research: the case of the tuskegee syphilis study. hastings cent rep : – . https://doi.org/ . / . . cyrus e, clarke r, hadley d, bursac z, trepka mj, devieux jg, bagci u, furr-holden d, coudray ms, mariano y, kiplagat s, noel i, ravelo g, paley m, wagner ef. may . the impact of covid- on african amer- ican communities in the united states. medrxiv https://www.medrxiv .org/content/ . / . . . v . . byrne bg, mccolm s, mcelmurry sp, kilgore pe, sobeck j, sadler r, love ng, swanson ms. . prevalence of infection-competent serogroup legionella pneumophila within premise plumbing in southeast michigan. mbio :e - . https://doi.org/ . /mbio. - . . fettweis jm, serrano mg, brooks jp, edwards dj, girerd ph, parikh hi, huang b, arodz tj, edupuganti l, glascock al, xu j, jimenez nr, vivadelli sc, fong ss, sheth nu, jean s, lee v, bokhari ya, lara am, mistry sd, duckworth ra, iii, bradley sp, koparde vn, orenda xv, milton sh, rozycki sk, matveyev av, wright ml, huzurbazar sv, jackson em, smirnova e, korlach j, tsai yc, dickinson mr, brooks jl, drake ji, chaffin do, sexton al, gravett mg, rubens ce, wijesooriya nr, hendricks- muñoz kd, jefferson kk, strauss jf, iii, buck ga. . the vaginal microbiome and preterm birth. nat med : – . https://doi.org/ . /s - - - . . akinbami lj, moorman je, garbe pl, sondik ej. . status of childhood asthma in the united states, – . pediatrics :s –s . https://doi.org/ . /peds. - c. . tai dbg, shah a, doubeni ca, sia ig, wieland ml. june . the disproportionate impact of covid- on racial and ethnic minorities in the united states. clin infect dis https://doi.org/ . /cid/ciaa . . yancy cw. april . covid- and african americans. jama : . https://doi.org/ . /jama. . . . hallfors dd, iritani bj, miller wc, bauer dj. . sexual and drug behavior patterns and hiv and std racial disparities: the need for new directions. am j public health : – . https://doi.org/ . /ajph . . . . institute of medicine committee on understanding and eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in health care. . unequal treatment: confronting racial and ethnic disparities in health care. the national academies press, washington, dc. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/ nbk /. . hoppe ta, litovitz a, willis ka, meseroll ra, perkins mj, hutchins bi, davis af, lauer ms, valantine ha, anderson jm, santangelo gm. . topic choice contributes to the lower rate of nih awards to african- american/black scientists. sci adv :eaaw . https://doi.org/ . / sciadv.aaw . . asm microbe. june . early african american microbiologists: making contributions/overcoming barriers. youtube video posted by asm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v�yqaozdcl gm. . johnson m. . msphere of influence: hiring of underrepresented minority assistant professors in medical school basic science depart- ments has a long way to go. msphere :e - . https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - . editorial journal of bacteriology october volume issue e - jb.asm.org o n a p ril , a t c a r n e g ie m e l l o n u n iv l ib r h ttp ://jb .a sm .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://www.startribune.com/george-floyd-death-ignited-protests-far-beyond-minneapolis-police-minnesota/ / https://www.startribune.com/george-floyd-death-ignited-protests-far-beyond-minneapolis-police-minnesota/ / https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/local/ / / /louisville-protests-more-than-breonna-taylor-lmpd-shooting/ / https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/local/ / / /louisville-protests-more-than-breonna-taylor-lmpd-shooting/ / https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/local/ / / /louisville-protests-more-than-breonna-taylor-lmpd-shooting/ / https://doi.org/ . /d - - -z https://doi.org/ . /d - - -z https://doi.org/ . / https://www.medrxiv.org/content/ . / . . . v https://www.medrxiv.org/content/ . / . . . v https://doi.org/ . /mbio. - https://doi.org/ . /s - - - https://doi.org/ . /s - - - https://doi.org/ . /peds. - c https://doi.org/ . /cid/ciaa https://doi.org/ . /jama. . https://doi.org/ . /ajph. . https://doi.org/ . /ajph. . https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/nbk / https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/nbk / https://doi.org/ . /sciadv.aaw https://doi.org/ . /sciadv.aaw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqaozdcl gm https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - https://jb.asm.org http://jb.asm.org/ 	references european journal of media studies www.necsus-ejms.org film festivals and the first wave of covid- : challenges, opportunities, and reflections on festivals’ relations to crises marijke de valck & antoine damiens necsus ( ), autumn : – url: https://necsus-ejms.org/film-festivals-and-the-first-wave-of- covid- -challenges-opportunities-and-reflections-on-festivals-rela- tions-to-crises/ keywords: film festival, covid- as the year is slowly coming to an end, we are confronting an unprec- edented crisis and witnessing what will likely be a major moment in the his- tory of film festivals. the novel coronavirus covid- provoked a pandemic of soaring proportions and the restrictive measures taken to contain the virus are heavily impacting the global festival world. this particular climate is de- fined by uncertainty: as such, it seems that the festival circuit is in a constant state of suspension. we do not know how long the disruption will last, to what extent we will be able to ‘go back to normal’, nor how deeply the festival world will be impacted. for those working in and for the film festival indus- try, the current crisis poses immediate challenges and severe risks. for those with scholarly engagement to film festivals and the industries and cinemas supported by them, the crisis offers challenges as well as opportunities to re- flect on our ways of thinking about the festival ecosystem. the festival reviews section in necsus was conceived eight years ago as a space for critical reflection and shared thinking. since then, it has cherished its profile as ‘a platform for writing that falls between the fast and prolific genre of individual festival reports and the slow and rigorous labor of film festival research’.[ ] in mid-march , when the first film festivals were moved online, postponed, and cancelled, it was apparent the festival review section should offer its dedicated space to report on the various ways in which film festivals worldwide are responding to the covid- crisis. the festival reviews section has always aimed to animate collaborative discussions https://necsus-ejms.org/film-festivals-and-the-first-wave-of-covid- -challenges-opportunities-and-reflections-on-festivals-relations-to-crises/ https://necsus-ejms.org/film-festivals-and-the-first-wave-of-covid- -challenges-opportunities-and-reflections-on-festivals-relations-to-crises/ https://necsus-ejms.org/film-festivals-and-the-first-wave-of-covid- -challenges-opportunities-and-reflections-on-festivals-relations-to-crises/ https://necsus-ejms.org/tag/film-festival/ https://necsus-ejms.org/tag/covid- / necsus – european journal of media studies vol ( ), on the ramifications of festival cultures. it thus seemed particularly appro- priate to use the format of academic festival reviews to document and think through this ongoing crisis as it unfolds. this special dossier will be the section’s first installment of reflective re- ports on the current crisis in the film festival world. the featured reviews were solicited from the responses to a call we sent out in april and therefore offer snapshots of early responses to the crisis, zooming in on spe- cific cases in canada, spain, sweden, turkey, the united kingdom, and the united states. our goal here is to think seriously about the ways in which these festivals handled the first wave of covid- . to that end, the festival reviews section hopes to not only chronicle festivals’ practices but also to en- courage an open debate on the future of festivals. by bringing an analytical attitude to these examples, we acknowledge practitioners’ efforts, document endeavours, and stimulate open debate and reflection. this special dossier echoes the inaugural statement of necsus on crisis as a productive centre. ‘now is the time of/for crisis.’[ ] with this sentence the first issue of necsus was launched in june . the choice to focus on the theme of crisis for the inaugural issue of a media studies journal was de- liberate. the relations between crises and media are inextricable and funda- mental, the editors argued; crises are communicated by media that in turn feed on the news logic of crisis events. moreover, a specific temporality – anchored in a concentrated and compressed presence – is shared by crises and media. media scholars dedicate themselves to objects of study that are in continuous processes of transition and are always already challenged to find ways of dealing with this immediacy. in documenting the impact of covid- on various international festi- vals, the review section aims to highlight the concrete mechanisms through which practitioners ‘manage’ this ongoing crisis. in other words, our goal is not to make a grand argument about the lasting impact of covid- on fes- tival cultures, but rather to attend to and to historicise the specific forms taken by the pandemic in various geographic contexts; as such, the crisis does not necessarily impact every festival at the same time or on the same level. these contributions thus testify to the resourcefulness, adaptability, and cre- ativity of festival organisers who had to, very quickly, find local solutions to a global calamity. more importantly, this special dossier makes clear that covid- cannot be understood apart from other crises. our contributors pay particular atten- tion to the ways in which the current pandemic precipitates, accentuates, film festivals and the first wave of covid- de valck & damiens and/or transforms other (social, economic, and political) crises. asli ozgen- tuncer resituates the solutions chosen by the international labour film fes- tival within growing concerns over censorship and political freedom in tur- key. similarly, montserrat jurado martin & francisco-julian martinez- canore frame covid- as just one of a series of economic and political cri- ses faced by the elche international independent film festival (valencia, spain), including the downfall of the organisation funding the festival. justice whitaker discusses the san louis obispo international film festival in cali- fornia as it intersects with the black lives matter movement and the fight against police violence, anti-blackness, and white supremacy. taken to- gether, these reviews make clear that we cannot theorise the impact of covid- on festival cultures without paying attention to how this crisis re- fracts and amplifies other political and cultural issues. festivals matter – and scholars should not refrain from engaging with ongoing social movements. while covid- plunged many of us into a state of disarray, marked by isolation and uncertainty, our contributors note that the current crisis may also bring forth new opportunities for festivals, filmmakers, and cinephiles. without being too celebratory or pessimistic, their nuanced analyses high- light how online screenings may lead to new forms of engagement with cin- ema. brad limov & philippe hobbins-white build on interviews with filmmakers and digital ethnography to discuss the opportunities and draw- backs of the partnership between sxsw and amazon prime. dagmar brunow looks at two virtual film clubs that capitalised on communal digital screenings to create new communities in covid times and to theorise a cu- ratorial ethics based on shared experiences of vulnerabilities. sheila petty analyses how the move toward online festivals has enabled her to watch af- rican films with friends from all over canada. however, despite this broader access, she discusses how it potentially prevents those outside the country from accessing films they would have seen prior to travel restrictions. taken together, these reviews analyse early examples of festivals re- sponding to the pandemic. we hope that these snapshots will serve as both documents highlighting some of the first debates around the role and place of festivals in the pandemic, archiving scholars’ and practitioners’ hopes and fears, and as pioneering theoretical endeavours that aim to energise festival research. necsus – european journal of media studies vol ( ), references ‘editorial necsus, # , spring, “crisis”’, necsus, june : https://necsus-ejms.ord/editorial-necsus- -spring- -crisis/ (accessed on october ). ‘review submissions’, necsus: https://necsus-ejms.org/review-submissions/ (accessed on october ). notes [ ] necsus ‘review submissions’. [ ] editorial necsus . https://necsus-ejms.ord/editorial-necsus- -spring- -crisis/ https://necsus-ejms.ord/editorial-necsus- -spring- -crisis/ https://necsus-ejms.org/review-submissions/ 	marijke de valck & antoine damiens: film festivals and the first wave of covid- : challenges, opportunities, and reflections on festivals’ relations to crises 	references 	notes s jed .. legacies and gifts: an editorial farewell nancy beadie, joy williamson-lott, isaac gottesman, and kathryn nicholas the history of history of education quarterly is rich with both intellec- tual and personal gifts from many scholars. as editors of heq for the last five years, we have been continually grateful for the long tradition of probing historical scholarship that the journal builds upon as well as the current and ongoing investment of time and intellectual resources that many individuals make in the everyday work of cultivating new scholarship in the field. we’d like to take some space at the start of this—the last issue of volume , heq’s sixtieth anniversary year, and the last of our editorship—to appreciate that tradition and acknowledge those contributions. to honor an intellectual tradition is to make it new again. in our time with the journal, we sought to recognize and foster new perspec- tives, directions, and potential in the field in the form of special forums, features, and issues. one of the ways we are most challenged to make history new again is in our teaching. thus the first of our special forums focused on the history of education as pedagogy. nine inno- vative scholar-teachers reflected on their use of historical cases in the joy williamson-lott and nancy beadie, “forum on teaching: constructing historical cases,” history of education quarterly , no. (feb. ), – . forum contributions appearing in that issue included jack dougherty, “defining purpose and process in teaching history with case studies,” – ; ansley t. erickson, “case study as common text: collaborating in and broadening the reach of history of education,” – ; heather lewis, “future teachers and historical habits of mind: a pedagogical case study,” – ; laura k. muñoz, “civil rights, educational inequality, and transnational takes on the u.s. history survey,” – ; karen leroux, “using case studies in the history of education to teach u.s. women’s and gender history,” – ; valinda w. littlefield, “using the educational histories of individuals to complicate standard historical narratives about expanding citizenship rights and opportunity,” – ; jon n. hale, “reconstructing the southern landscape: the history of education and the struggle for civil rights in charleston, south carolina,” – ; and isaac gottsman and michael bowman, “the significance of geographic and programmatic context in developing historical case studies in social foundations in teacher education,” – . history of education quarterly vol. no. november copyright © history of education society doi: . /heq. . h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /h eq . . d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /heq. . https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms history of education to achieve a variety of pedagogical aims in a range of courses and settings. these included survey courses in american history that use educational biographies to help students recognize their own places in history and seminars that engage students in col- lective historical research as well as courses in gender and women’s studies aiming to illuminate how gender is learned and changes over time and foundation courses in undergraduate and graduate teacher education that challenge students to think about issues of context in their own teaching. a second way to renew the field is to bring historical perspective to current issues. in two policy forums, we invited groups of scholars to share their perspectives on enduring issues of education equity through historical assessments of two major policies and policy studies: the elementary and secondary education act (esea) and the coleman report. later, in response to increased challenges to aca- demic freedom here and around the world, we invited ten scholars from seven different countries to reflect on current issues of academic freedom from the perspective of their own historical research on the topic. the policy forum on the esea appeared in history of education quarterly , no. (may ). forum contributions appearing in that issue included adam r. nelson, “the elementary and secondary act at fifty: a changing federal role in american education,” – ; crystal r. sanders, “‘money talks’: the elementary and secondary education act of and the african-american freedom struggle in mississippi,” – ; douglas s. reed, “esea at fifty: education as state- building,” – ; and susan l. moffitt, “the state of educational improvement: the legacy of esea title i,” – . the policy on the coleman report appeared in history of education quarterly , no. (nov. ). forum contributions appearing in that issue included harvey kantor and robert lowe, “introduction: what difference did the coleman report make?,” – ; zoë burkholder, “the perils of integration: conflicting northern black responses to the coleman report in the black power era, – ,” – ; victoria cain, “from sesame street to prime time school television: educational media in the wake of the coleman report,” – ; leah n. gordon, “if opportunity is not enough: coleman and his critics in the era of equality of results,” – ; and ethan l. hutt, “‘seeing like a state’ in the postwar era: the coleman report, longitudinal datasets, and the measurement of human capital,” – . the forum on academic freedom appeared in history of education quarterly , no. (aug. ). forum contributions appearing in that issue included joy ann williamson-lott, “protecting academic freedom: using the past to chart a path toward the future,” – ; marjorie heins, “‘a pall of orthodoxy over the classroom’: lessons from the great keyishian case,” – ; timothy reese cain, “‘friendly public sentiment’ and the threats to academic freedom,” – ; vania markarian, “authoritarian legacies and higher education in uruguay,” – ; hans-joerg tiede, “the front rank: on tenure and the role of the faculty in the defense of academic freedom,” – ; qiang zha and wenqin shen, “the paradox of academic freedom in the chinese context,” – ; history of education quarterly h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /h eq . . d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /heq. . https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms similarly, in a feature in november we called “history of education in the news,” scholars brought historical insight and com- mentary to current events. in response to the black lives matter movement and recent scholarship on the history of slavery in higher education, for that issue we solicited and published an essay by james d. anderson and christopher m. span, “the legacy of slavery, racism, and contemporary black activism on campus.” more recently, in response to the covid- pandemic, we published “higher education institutions respond to epidemics,” an essay by james w. thomas and holly ann foster that surveys prior institu- tional responses to epidemics of cholera in the nineteenth century and the influenza epidemic of . another approach to renewal is to solicit scholarship that actively seeks to uncover new historical knowledge, mobilize untapped analyt- ical potential, or synthesize underappreciated perspectives in the field. from the start of our editorship, the first in the journal’s history to view the field and its work from the pacific rim, we had an interest in high- lighting how a history of education that more richly encompassed the distinctive peoples, issues, and dynamics of the north american west could transform our understanding. in two special issues, we chal- lenged the field to reimagine the history of education from that per- spective, both by soliciting new work and by synthesizing existing scholarship around that focus in two historiographical essays called “gateways to the west,” parts i and ii. we are pleased that since then we have continued to receive and publish new manuscripts with a western focus. finally, as we looked forward to the future of heq beyond our editorship and backward over its history for this sixtieth anniversary volume, we commissioned three special forums and one special issue that intentionally draw upon seminal articles heq previously karen graves, “a matter of public concern: the first amendment and equal employment for lgbt educators,” – ; beth le roux, “repressive tolerance in a political context: academic freedom in apartheid south africa,” – ; and anne corbett and claire gordon, “academic freedom in europe: the central european university affair and the wider lessons,” – . james d. anderson and christopher m. span, “the legacy of slavery, racism, and contemporary black activism on campus,” history of education quarterly , no. (nov. ), – . james w. thomas and holly ann foster, “higher education institutions respond to epidemics,” history of education quarterly , no. (may ), – . nancy beadie et al., “gateways to the west, part i: education in the shaping of the west,” history of education quarterly , no. (aug. ), – ; and nancy beadie et al., “gateways to the west, part ii: education and the making of race, place, and culture in the west,” history of education quarterly , no. (feb. ), – . legacies and gifts h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /h eq . . d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /heq. . https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms published as springboards for considering new ideas and directions in the field. thus, carl kaestle’s classic piece, “standards of evidence in historical research: how do we know when we know?” spawned a set of new essays by david g. garcia and tara j. yosso, kabria baumgartner, and ansley t. erickson that address issues of silence and the limits of generalization in research in the field. next, taking up classic essays on “politics of knowledge” by ellen condliffe lagemann, james d. anderson, and mary ann dzuback (all originating as history of education society (hes) presidential or american educational research association vice presidential addresses), four scholars—jessica blatt, christopher p. loss, linda m. perkins, and nidia bañuelos–outline needs and opportunities for scholarship, bringing new angles to the topic. continuing this idea of critically renewing the field, kate rousmaniere and jason ellis penned a provocative essay they called “professor bailyn, meet professor baynton” to introduce a special issue they edited on “the new disability history.” now, for this last issue of the sixtieth anni- versary volume, we build on seminal heq essays by victoria-maría mcdonald, eileen h. tamura, and k. tsianina lomawaima to publish five “reflections on education, ethnicity, and race” by rosina lozano, stephanie hinnershitz, derek taira, liping bu, and kim cary warren, all of whom explore new directions and conceptualiza- tions in the field. “how do we know when we know?: reflections on method,” history of education quarterly , no. (feb. ), . forum contributions appearing in the issue included david g. garcia and tara j. yosso, “recovering our past: a methodological reflection,” – ; kabria baumgartner, “searching for sarah: black girlhood, education, and the archive,” – ; and ansley t. erickson, “how/should we generalize?” – . “not simply academic: perspectives on the politics of knowledge,” history of education quarterly , no. (may ), . forum contributions appearing in the issue included jessica blatt, “institutional logics and the limits of social science knowledge,” – ; christopher p. loss, “‘no operation in an academic ivory tower’: world war ii and the politics of social knowledge,” – ; linda m. perkins, “race, gender, philanthropy and the politics of knowledge,” – ; and nidia bañuelos, “why we need more histories of low-status institutions,” – . jason ellis and kate rousmaniere, “professor bailyn, meet professor baynton: the ‘new disability history’ of education,” history of education quarterly , no. (aug. ), – . “extending the conversation: education, ethnicity, and race,” history of education quarterly , no. (nov. ), . forum contributions appearing in the issue included: rosina lozano, “new directions in latino/a/x histories of education: comparative studies in race, language, law, and higher education,” – ; stephanie hinnershitz, “across the divides: beyond school, nation, and history of education quarterly h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /h eq . . d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /heq. . https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms the work of these authors and the authors of the many other arti- cles published over the twenty issues heq published under our edi- torship is a great gift. every work of genuine and serious scholarship is an act of faith, love, and life that we appreciate all the more in these challenging times. this human generosity, and our appreciation of it, is even greater when the work is largely hidden from view. taking the research and ideas of others seriously enough to provide one’s considered and well-informed review and assessment of it— almost always anonymously—is genuine giving. we are deeply grate- ful for the many scholars— of them to be exact—who over five years have given that gift (many multiple times!) and in the process made our work as editors possible and, we believe, more constructive. in our role we have tried to honor and acknowledge that work by keep- ing reviewers informed about editorial decisions and helping authors to appreciate the generosity, value, and importance of the feedback they receive. a sense of the formidable effort of joint munificence this repre- sented is suggested by the numbers. over our term as editors, we have handled unique manuscripts. this total does not reflect the number of times we saw a manuscript through multiple rounds. in addition, we published reviews of books. those books come from fifty-seven different publishers, and the reviewers represent different colleges and universities. truly this work by authors; reviewers; our formidable book review editor, isaac gottesman; and his former assistants, jennifer gallagher and amber graeber, is to be celebrated. lastly, we want to thank all the members of the heq editorial board, the hes board—who are all acknowledged in the front matter of every heq issue—and the society itself, who have supported the journal over the years. as we all know, appreciation and generosity are necessarily mutual. your moral support kept us going, and we trust it will extend long into the future. our appreciation further extends to the colleagueship of compatriots in the work, including the graduate students at the university of washington who collabo- rated with us, especially in the first years as we brainstormed and developed possibilities for our editorship. the most dedicated, best the immigration act in the history of asian american education,” – ; derek taira, “‘we are our history’: reviewing the history of education in hawai‘i and oceania,” – ; liping bu, “confronting race and ethnicity: education and cultural identity for immigrants and students from asia,” – ; and kim cary warren, “rethinking racial, ethnoracial, and imperial categories: key concepts in comparative race studies in the history of education,” – . legacies and gifts h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /h eq . . d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /heq. . https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms organized, and most forgiving of these eventually became our inimi- table managing editor, kathy nicholas. that league of editorial compatriots began for us with the editors at the university of illinois from whom we took over work on the journal over five years ago and it continues with the editors at the university of massachusetts at lowell, who now take over the work from us. at the university of illinois, yoon pak, chris span, and jim anderson put key systems in place that served the journal well, even as we refined and modified them, as will our successors, editors a. j. angulo, jack schneider, and chris carlsmith, along with managing editor kim tolley and book review editors ethan hutt and sonya ramsey. we welcome you and wish you well as you shepherd this formidable intellectual tradition and these many legacies and gifts. history of education quarterly h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /h eq . . d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /heq. . https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms 	legacies and gifts: an editorial farewell s jra .. research article “glass half full: cautious optimism and the future of black women political elites in america” nadia e. brown * and sarah allen gershon political science, purdue university, brng , west lafayette, in, usa and georgia state university, atlanta, georgia, usa *corresponding author. e-mail: brown @purdue.edu (received august ; revised september ; accepted september ) abstract in this essay, we place black women’s electoral challenges and opportunities in context. we situate this year of “black women candidates” as an anomaly, but one that has been a long in the making. we also point to the appeal of black women lawmakers among voters to mirror alberder gillespie’s claims in this epigraph. we note that black women have long been the backbone of the democratic party and are willing to use their clout for their own political means. furthermore, given the unique ways that black women represent their constituents, an influx of black women into governing bodies may have a substantial, lasting impact on policy-making. we conclude with insights from our own research and that of other scholars on black women to demonstrate future avenues of scholarly research. keywords: black women; candidates; elected officials; election we bring a different perspective to politics as black women. we have the ability and the tendency to look out for everyone. we are connected with people who are clos- est to the pain in ways that other politicians probably are not—alberder gillespie. senator kamala harris (d-ca) has made history by being on the democratic presidential ticket. harris, a multi-ethnic black woman and the daughter of jamaican and indian immigrants, is a descriptive representative of many historically marginalized communities that called on the government to be more inclusive. the first black woman to be nominated as the vice-presidential candidate by a major political party, kamala harris is charting new ground. yet, she is not alone. harris is running in an election cycle where she joins other black women who are seeking office at an unprecedented rate. in fact, this is the year of the black woman candidate. the center for american women and politics reports that at least black women © the author(s), . published by cambridge university press on behalf of the race, ethnicity, and politics section of the american political science association the journal of race, ethnicity, and politics ( ), , – doi: . /rep. . terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:brown @purdue.edu https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core are running for congress in compared to black women who ran in and the who ran in (cawp, ). this number includes the universe of black women who filed as candidates but do not include the non-voting offices in the u.s. house (cawp, ). black women are running as both democrats and republicans, although democrats vastly outnumber their gop sisters. black women candidates are running at unprecedented levels. indeed, this is the largest number of black women candidates in the nation’s history. to be clear, there have been several notable black women politicians in the past and a good number of whom could have held presti- gious office if they were not stymied by structural and institutional racism and sexism. this new level of engagement with politics along with harris’ increased visibility as she moves from senator to vice presidential nominee, requires us to think about the motivations and challenges faced by black women seeking political office. studies of women candidates have debated ambition (lawless and fox, ), structural con- straints (brown and dowe, ), as well as the effect of sexism on their prospects for electoral success (frasure-yokley, ; cassese and holman, ; filindra et al., ). studies on black candidates, including obama, have discussed how the race of the candidate influences their electoral chances (siegelman et al., ), but also their typification as liberal and focused on race may have electoral implications as well (karl and ryan, ). furthermore, studies have examined how women of color candidates’ messaging and strategies can influence their ability to establish win- ning coalitions within the electorate (barreto, ). others have also shown the effects of “racial gerrymandering” (canon, ) and the difficulties associated with running outside of majority-minority districts (lublin et al., ). however, black women inhabit an intersectional space: their access to nominations, their can- didacies, their ability to raise money, and their chances with the electorate are influ- enced not only by their race but also their gender (dowe, ). in that sense, black women are often seen as doubly marginalized in society as well as in politics (king, ; beal, ). this study highlights these unique challenges and identifies avenues for future research in this domain. we situate this year of “black women candidates” has been long in the making. indeed, is the culmination of black women’s historic contributions across elec- tions. yet, many more black women are running in because of the unique threat that trump is posing to minority communities. black women have long been the back- bone of the democratic party and are now willing to use their clout for their own polit- ical ends (brown and dowe, ). however, it is likely that this pattern of political engagement may generate a positive feedback effect, motivating more black and other minority women to run in future elections. furthermore, as alberder gillespie suggests in the epigraph, given the unique ways that black women represent their con- stituents, an influx of black women into governing bodies may have substantial, lasting impact on policy-making (brown, ; brown and gershon, ). in spite of the barriers that black women face to securing electoral victories there are good reasons to believe that they are the future of politics. however, our optimism is tempered by ongoing political, economic, and social inequities that marginalize black women both as citizens and political elites. we foreground two points of anal- ysis in this essay: what we know about black women by presenting both the good and bad news; and what scholars have yet to examine but should as we deepen our nadia e. brown and sarah allen gershon terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core understanding of black women political elites. we conclude with insights from our own research and that of other scholars on black women to demonstrate future ave- nues of scholarly research. . black women campaigning for office . the bad news the choice to run for office is complex for women. women––often breadwinners and the primary caregivers of loved ones—face unique challenges in seeking higher office. they are also less likely to be recruited to run for office and face significant challenges when fundraising (crowder-meyer, ; shames et al., ). as a result of these and other challenges, some women may decline to run (shames, ). scholars have also found that the decision to run for office among women of color and black women, in particular, may be distinct from white women (e.g. holman and schneider, ; silva and skulley, ). for example, women of color face greater challenges in fundraising, compared with white women (see sanbonmatsu, ). additionally, women of color are successful when they run but are often absent from races in majority white districts (shah et al., ). black women candidates routinely document their dissatisfaction with the political process. they are less likely to be recruited by their political parties and are discour- aged from running for office (brown and dowe, ). when black women decide to run, they face an uphill battle, compared with white women and men, in securing funds and are thus viewed as less electable than their male and white counterparts (sanbonmatsu, ). black women interested in running for office perceive that political parties are perceived as a hindrance rather than a help (sanbonmatsu, ; brown and dowe, ; dowe, ). black women candidates often consider the democratic party, in particular, as fostering the persistent marginalization of their candidacies (brown and lemi, forthcoming). black women feel neglected and ignored within transactional party politics that values black women’s votes but not their leadership (gillespie and brown, ). furthermore, black women candidates consistently state that they face distinctly racialized and gendered challenges while on the campaign trail. they are often told to straighten their hair, tone down racial identifiers or to wear more feminine attire to appeal to more voters (brown, ; brown and lemi, forthcoming). additionally, racial and gender phenotypes of black women candidates are assessed in some voters’ evaluations of this group in ways that disadvantage darker skin and women without straight hair (lemi and brown, ). in sum, black women do not lack political ambition. structural barriers, instead, are the cause of their undersized role in some electoral districts. . the good news in spite of the challenges mentioned above, black women have exceeded black male elected officials and are the fastest growing demographic among women political elites (hardy-fanta et al., ). this may be due in large part to black women’s political ambition. dowe ( ) finds that this group is more ambitious than white the journal of race, ethnicity, and politics terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core women likely because of black women’s political socialization, networks, and their raced-gendered identity. this high level of ambition may have prompted black women to seek elected office outside of majority-minority districts (perry, ), whereas a vast majority of black elected officials represent districts with large black populations (scola, ; troustine and valdini, ). as candidates, black women engage in distinct messaging which may resonate with voters in and beyond, particularly voters who share one or more of their identities. for decades, scholars have identified substantive differences in the campaign-style and experiences of women and minorities running for office, com- pared with their white male peers. with notable exceptions, women have been found to engage in more frequent gendered discussion as well as mentions of partic- ular issue areas often associated with women (e.g., thomas, ; dodson et al., ; kahn, ; swers, ; carroll, ; thomas and welch, ; dolan and kropf, ; fridkin and woodall, ). furthermore, scholars often note that racial and ethnic minorities are more likely to emphasize particular identities, issues, and expe- riences when running for and holding elective office. we and other scholars have often found that minorities emphasize their racial and ethnic identities and issues associated with race and ethnicity (mcilwain and caliendo, ; gulati, ; gershon, ; brown and gershon, ). given that many minority candidates run in minority-majority districts, the choice to play up particular identities and mes- saging is likely also a signal to potential voters about shared experiences and ability to represent constituents’ interests (gershon, ; brown and gershon, ). although there is less literature in political science on the experiences of women of color and black women specifically (relative to the attention paid to gender gener- ally––often focusing on white women), scholars have found distinct ways that these women campaign for office. the study of gender and politics has largely been that of white women (junn, ) which has unfortunately left the political experiences and behavior of black women undertheorized. for example, in our pre- vious work (e.g., brown and gershon, , ), we have found women of color highlight their multiple identities, as well as that of their descriptive constituencies in their campaign messaging more frequently than their peers. there is a great diver- sity among black women in the ways they bring their identity to bear in this type of campaign messaging. in our research on the midterm election (brown and gershon, ), we found that many black women express how their multiple identities inform their policy positions, experiences and plans in unique ways. for example, congresswoman alma adams (d-nc) website biography opened with a descriptor of how her identity informs her politics. she expressed “education and women’s rights aren’t political issues, they are personal issues that have shaped how she is today and how she represents the people she serves.” the succeeding paragraph in congresswoman adams’ biography noted that she grew up in a single- parent household where she witnessed her mother’s sacrifices that ultimately instilled in her a strong work ethic and love for education. the theme of family and identity was also found in congresswoman karen bass’s (d-ca) biography webpage, in which she stated that “[she] became interested in community activism as a child watching the civil rights movement with her father. it was at this time that she made a lifetime commitment to effecting social change in her community …” one nadia e. brown and sarah allen gershon terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core of the few black republican women running for congress in , aja smith proudly presented her family’s military service as being the foundation for her belief system. on her biography webpage, she shared “both of aja’s grandparents served in the u.s. military. her grandfather was a veteran of wwii, korea, and vietnam. her great uncle was a tuskegee airman pilot.” demonstrating her connections to black service- men and women signals to two sets of potential voters. first, as a republican, aja smith is conveying to black communities that through her military lineage, she is part of the glorified history of blacks in this country. likewise, as a retired member of the armed forces, aja smith also demonstrated that not only has her family’s mil- itary values influenced her career choices but it has also impacted her political orien- tation. this is a signal to republican voters in her would-be ca district that being black does not automatically link her to liberal or democratic policy positions. these identity-centered examples demonstrate that black women candidates are thinking broadly about the role of identity in their political lives and in some cases connecting them to specific political issues, preferences and plans. in addition to our expectations about candidate messaging and strategy in , we anticipate that the year of the black women candidates may shape voter behav- ior––particularly among black voters. research has found that shared identity often shapes voter attitudes among racial and ethnic minorities, including black vot- ers (see goodyear-grant and tolley, for a discussion of this literature). philpot and walton ( ) demonstrate that black women are often the strongest supporters of black women candidates. indeed, this support is partisan as the majority of blacks are democratic voters (white and laird, ) and there is strong democratic sup- port among black women voters (gillespie and brown, ). black voters’ political engagement in the election may also be impacted. for exam- ple, scholars have often found increased engagement in politics among women and minority voters when a candidate sharing one or more of their identities is running for office (bobo and gilliam, ; burns et al., ). thus, we anticipate that the presence of black women on the ballot––particularly with the announcement of harris’s candidacy––will increase political engagement among black voters. new research suggests that voters display a positive orientation towards intersectional in-group candidates (gershon et al., ; bejarano et al., ). coupled with the increased attention that black women political elites pay to the specific issues that impact marginalized communities, these warm feelings toward black women candi- dates may increase support for this popular within these communities. . implications of for black women candidates gubernatorial candidate stacey abrams’ race in ga provides a recent example of the power of black women candidates to mobilize black voters (frey, ; scott et al., ). yet, we must also temper our expectations in this regard somewhat, given the attempts at voter suppression that abrams and others have cited, as well as the impact the covid- pandemic may have on turnout in (wines, ). we also expect that the year of the black woman candidate may shape candidate emer- gence, in the long run, encouraging more black women to run for office and shaping the party’s recruitment strategies. the journal of race, ethnicity, and politics terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core . the year of the black woman elected official? implications for representation as we noted, we are not certain that this historic campaign season will result in a “year of the black woman elected official.” however, if sees a sizable growth in black women in office, implications for policymaking may be significant. yet, as in our discussion above, there is also “the bad news” regarding the systemic challenges black women face in representing their constituents while in office. below, we detail the research regarding black women’s impact in policy-making as well as the barriers they face. . the good news scholars have found black women represent their constituents in distinct and mean- ingful ways. for example, black women’s symbolic representation through communi- cation on their websites and floor debates often includes a greater discussion of the needs of marginalized communities, including, but not limited to those sharing one or more of their identities (brown and gershon, , ). our own intersec- tional research (brown and gershon, ) on the floor debate over the reau- thorization of violence against women act (vawa) demonstrates that black congresswomen provided a dynamic analysis of the implications of the bill. indeed, maxine waters (d-ca) framed expansions to vawa as necessary to ensure that vulnerable groups who had been inadequately protected in the previous version of the bills would see their needs reflected in the reauthorization. waters’ advo- cated for increased protections for lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender victims of domestic violence who are often turned away from traditional shelters. she also asked her colleagues to include provisions for native american women who are dispropor- tionally on the receiving end of intimate partner violence. native women experience domestic violence at rates nearly three and half times that of the national average. and lastly, representative waters called on her colleagues to limit barriers that immi- grant victims face when trying to report crimes out of fear that they will be denied citizenship. she argued to maintain confidential protections and access to u-visas for immigrant survivors of domestic violence. while maxine waters did not explicitly speak about protecting black women from domestic violence, she was one of the few members of congress who made explicit connections to how policies should take into account the specific needs of marginalized groups. the other members of congress to take this same approach were democratic congresswomen of color such as representative nydia velasquez (d-ny) and lucille roybal-allard (d-ca). this stood in stark contrast to republican (primarily white) congresswomen who sought to paint women as a monolith and favored a universal approach to anti-violence protections. this scholarship mirrors earlier work that demonstrates how black women state legislators approach policy creation with an identity-based lens. for instance, brown ( ) finds that black women lawmakers were the only group that challenged minority business enterprise (mbe) legislation for being exclusive and having the unintended consequence of placing minority women contractors at a disadvantage. nadia e. brown and sarah allen gershon terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core minority women business owners were forced to choose between applying for state contracts to do business as either a woman or a minority. furthermore, these quotes for state contracts were often opaque and minority women business owners had little understanding if the numbers were in their favor to apply as a woman or minority. as a result, they were often left out of state contracts and unable to do business through the minority business enterprise program. it was black woman state legislators who raised this issue with their colleagues and pointed out the shortsightedness of white women and ethno-racial minority male legislators who established this program. without the voices of black women legislators, it is doubtful that maryland’s mbe would have addressed this oversight. a more recent example of the work that black women lawmakers are championing is the right to wear one’s natural textured hair in culturally appropriate ways. the crown act is a law that prohibits race-based hair discrimination. create a respectful and open world for natural hair seeks to protect employment and edu- cational opportunities for wearers of protective styles such as braids, locs, twists and those with afro-textured hair. in a forthcoming book project, brown and lemi estab- lish that black women lawmakers are at the forefront of pushing this legislation and that hair discrimination is of particular concern to black women and girls. indeed, ca state senator holly j mitchell introduced the crown act. black women state legislators in ny and nj quickly followed mitchell’s lead and introduced the legisla- tion in their respective states. first signed into law in ca, the crown act is now law in seven states and a handful of local municipalities. two black men senator cory booker (d-nj) and cedric robinson (d-la) introduced the crown act to congress in with the overwhelming support of black women state and local law- makers as well as citizens. our individual and collective research––like that of other scholars cited here––dem- onstrates that black women bring a distinct voice to the legislative process. they have a unique policy perspective that is needed to represent groups that had been previously ignored. electing black women, therefore, has policy consequences for the representa- tion of groups and issues that have been largely overlooked by legislators of other iden- tity groups. the responses to these uncrystallized issues illustrate the importance of having diverse bodies in legislative settings (mansbridge, ). to be clear, it is not simply having black women elected to office to bring about these policy shifts, but rather it is having a number of black women with varying experiences in the policy- making process who are recommending political solutions to a set of problems that had previously been made without them in mind (brown, ). thus, the policy implications of the election may be significant for the representation of black women as well as many other historically marginalized groups in america. . the bad news we hesitate in our optimism, given the systemic obstacles black women face while governing. this is truly a historic election year. yet even if all of the black women running in are elected to office, they may be unable to see their legislative agenda come to fruition. legislative bodies are institutions that structure racial and gender hierarchies that persistently silence, exclude and challenges the authority of the journal of race, ethnicity, and politics terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core women of color (hawkesworth, ). political institutions remain overwhelming populated and controlled by individuals from dominate groups (rosenthal, ) which means that racism and gender biases are incorporated into the structure of the legislature because of the social practices of the legislators themselves (johnson, ). as such, black women elected officials may not realize the impact they are capable of making in institutions designed to exclude and marginalize them. even when black women legislators obtain powerful positions and seniority within the institution, there are reports feeling that they are not equal members of the governing body (smooth, ). without structural changes in our governing bodies, black women and legislators from other historically marginalized backgrounds may be unable to advance the policy interests of the groups that they represent. while is the year of the black woman candidate, the outcome of electoral vic- tories in november may be stymied by discriminatory practices within legislatures (hedge et al., ), institutional unresponsiveness (hall, ), and biases of their colleagues (githens and prestage, ). the year of the black women candidate will not only be shaped by the extraordinary accomplishments of this group, but also by the structure of the institutions and that they will enter in january and the actions of their colleagues. . where do we go from here? expanding research on black women in the future black women are quintessential to american democracy. as political elites and voters, black women push america to live up to democratic principles. yet black women repeatedly note that they are undervalued and unappreciated in the political process (gillespie and brown, ; brown and dowe, ). they are also undertheorized subjects in political science research (alexander-floyd, ). thus, we advocate for black women in politics on two fronts: within academia and in electoral politics. we contend that both scholars and the american political structure should pay more attention to black women. the discipline of political science should diversity our studies of political elites and voters in order to speak to the contemporary political environment. we echo the commendation made by the american political science association’s presidential task force “political science in the st century report” that is nearly a decade old. the pinderhughes administration ( – ) recommended that political science research take gender and ethno-racial diversity seriously. the authors of the report urged political scientists to recognize the diversifying demographics of our country and to produce scholarship that reflects the rapidly changing national and global con- texts in which we write. political science has been slow to heed this advice (sinclair-chapman, ). as such, the discipline and the larger american political class was unprepared to assess president trump’s victory in . many scholars were surprised to learn that a majority of white women supported trump and that ethno- race is the driving factor in the gender gap (junn, ; frasure-yokley, ). however, intersectional scholars have long implored the discipline to be more fully attuned to intra-group diversity (simien, ; frasure and williams, ; greer, ; brown, ). we anticipate that this election cycle and those in the immediate nadia e. brown and sarah allen gershon terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core future will be marked by increased attention to the intra-group diversity among ethno-racial minority groups and women. as scholars who study women and politics, we urge our field to consider how our scholarship (and as a byproduct, our assumptions about the role of gender identity in politics) has historically centered on the experiences of some (primarily white) women over others. this oversight has limited our collective knowledge and our abil- ity to speak to the trends we see unfolding in politics this year. there is an increased need for intersectional approaches and to expand our focus on the specific and unique experiences of differently situated women. for instance, how are black queer urban women fairing in today’s political climate? in what ways are their polit- ical experiences different or similar to that immigrant or multi-ethnic black women? do they have divergent policy preferences or is their race/gender an outsized predic- tor of their political behavior? future scholarship should take a deeper dive into intra- group differences and similarities to learn more about what politically animates undertheorized groups’ engagement in american politics. further, scholarship focus- ing on black women without comparison to whites, black men or other women must also expand. comparisons of black americans to other groups often ignore or con- flate the socio-historical contexts that gave rise to unique group formation (carter, ). as masuoka and junn ( ) forcefully argue, we must ban the dummy var- iable. it is imperative that group development and maintenance is addressed in work that seeks to assess or compare historically marginalized groups (see hardy-fanta et al., as an excellent example of how to do this kind of research). in a similar fashion, biden’s declaration that he would name a woman as a run- ning mate drew considerable discussion in the media, among citizens, and scholars about the continued salience of descriptive representation (kalid, ). the subse- quent successful lobby by black women activists and political elites that she should be a black woman revealed that an intersectional approach is necessary for understand- ing the political needs of the american electorate (king, ). indeed, harris’ selec- tion was the byproduct of a decades long black women’s advocacy, struggle with the democrat party, and progressive activism. black women are a political force, an enthusiastic and consistent voting bloc for democratic ideals (gillespie and brown, ). black women political operatives successfully championed several potential black women candidates for biden’s pick of vice president and rallied to support kamala harris (burdryk, ). the political climate is ripe for black women candi- dates. however, black women have always been ready for high profile political posi- tions. shirley chisholm (d-ny), barbara jordan (d-tx) or patricia harris would have made remarkable candidates for vice president; however, the country was unwilling and unready to see a black woman in this position prior to . even with the progress of naming a black woman to the ticket, there remain ves- tiges of the country’s uneasiness with black women political elites. kamala harris has been subject to racist and sexist attacks. misogynoir, hatred of black women and girls (bailey and trudy, ), is evident in this election cycle. indeed, president donald trump has used racist and sexist attacks against harris, he questioned whether she was eligible to serve as vice president given her parent’s immigrant background (keith, ) as well as calling her “nasty” and “horrible,” (solendar, ) words that he often uses to criticize women opponents (rogers, ). likewise, the journal of race, ethnicity, and politics terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core republican mayor barry presgraves of luray, va, called kamala harris “aunt jemima” in august , showcasing that stereotypic epithets against black women are still common place. and another virginian, strasburg council member john massoud posted a meme on social media that referred to harris as a hoe (vargas, ). these types of insults further reify blacks women’s social and political subju- gation as bodies out place in american politics. this historic election which may put the first multi-racial black woman in the white house demonstrates that we need to become broader and more wide-ranging in our research in the fields of racial and ethnic politics as well as gender and politics in the american context. while kamala harris’ selection as the democratic nominee would not have been possible without the countless other black women who pushed for the democratic party to be more inclusive, this moment would be remiss if the scholarship of black women’s political participation and candidacies were not cou- pled with this historic moment. indeed, this moment is not only for harris but for black women’s future in american politics, whose political labor is often invisible both inside and outside of the academy (jordan-zachery, ). we close as we begin. the words by alberder gillespie are a powerful reminder of why the work of black women political elites is so important. it is imperative that scholars and practitioners alike recognize the value that black women bring to delib- erative democracy, particularly in today’s political climate—one marked by covid- , black lives matter activism, and a global economic slowdown. black women charac- terize themselves as running to represent the interests of those that are often in the most pain, those that they have a deep connection to, and communities that are ignored. black women candidates are running at outsized rates at time that highlighted their political activism, showcased persistent racial and gender disparities and the inat- tention of some political elites to their issues. as such, black women have taken it upon themselves in to run for elected office. their time is now, they are the future. notes all website biographies cited were downloaded from the candidates’ campaign websites and archived in november . please contact the authors for more information about the data collection. https://www.thecrownact.com/about. references alexander-floyd ng ( ) why political scientists don’t study black women, but historians and sociol- ogists do. in jordan-zachery j and alexander-floyd ng (eds), black women in politics: 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https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core 	&ldquo;glass half full: cautious optimism and the future of black women political elites in america&rdquo; 	black women campaigning for office 	the bad news 	the good news 	implications of for black women candidates 	the year of the black woman elected official? implications for representation 	the good news 	the bad news 	where do we go from here? expanding research on black women in the future 	notes 	references dissocial personality traits and past experiences matter in how people perceive the police dissocial personality traits and past experiences matter in how people perceive the police charles tochukwu orjiakor & moses onyemaechi ede & chigozirim m. emebo # society for police and criminal psychology abstract the study investigated the contributions of dissocial traits and experience with the police to police perception. participants ( : males = , females = , mean age = . ) completed psychometric measures deviant personality traits, police per- ception, and experience with the police. regression analysis was used to examine relationship patterns. results indicated that people detested the police as they got older (β = − . , t = − . , p = . ). also, having an encounter was associated with more negative perception of the (β = − . , t = − . , p = . ). among the dark triad traits, only narcissism predicted police perception such that higher narcissism traits was associated with higher negative perception of the police (β = − . , t = − . , p = . ). findings seem to suggest that the police, especially in nigeria, needs to do more to improve their connections with citizens; albeit, individual personality disposition matters, and should be a potential issue to consider when the police deals with citizens. keywords dissocial traits . experience . police . police perception introduction police organizations work to ensure law and order in society, but in addition, strive to ensure that the public that they serve, trust them and at least perceive them to be effective (cheng ). however, the police, especially in developing coun- tries such as nigeria, have a poor reputation and are consid- ered one of the weakest institutions (chatham house ). abuse, torture, extortion, violence, elite defense, bribery, and corruption are often reported by local and international ob- servers (andvig and fjeldstad ; amnesty international ; chatham house ; human rights watch , ; obe and odesola ). little wonder, nigeria ranked worst in a global ranking of policing that considered among other measures, the public view of the police (international police science association [ipsa] ). though it may seem obvious that the notorious abusive style and practices associated with the nigerian police could be the reason as to why they are poorly perceived, an empirical research into factors that contribute to perception of the police is needed. however, studies regarding what fuels this poor reputation are scarce. in the current study, we aim to examine factors that contribute to the poor perception of the police in nigeria. abusive/negative attitudes and actions meted from the police toward citizens will certainly earn the police negative percep- tions from citizens. even relatively minor wrongdoings by the police have been found to impact attitude toward the police (smith and hawkins ). people who are dissatisfied with the police are less likely to contact them or provide officers with information about criminal activity (decker ). thus, nega- tive perceptions of the police contribute to a cycle of reduced police effectiveness, increased crime, and further distrust of the police. conversely, having positive/favorable contacts with the police improves perceptions of the police (dean ; thomas and hyman ; smith ; worrall ). citizens’ percep- tion of the police have been reported to vary such that people who initiated contact with the police had more favorable percep- tion compared to people whose contact was initiated by the police (cheurprakobkit ). however, cheurprakobkit ( ) also found that as contact with the police increased, peo- ple became less satisfied with police performance. in this study, we contend that in nigeria, the experience one had while in contact with the police contributes to how favorable perceptions of the police would be. * moses onyemaechi ede moses.ede@unn.edu.ng department of psychology, faculty of the social sciences, university of nigeria, nsukka, nigeria department of educational foundations (guidance and counselling unit), faculty of education, university of nigeria, nsukka, nigeria journal of police and criminal psychology https://doi.org/ . /s - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:moses.ede@unn.edu.ng the perception of the police is however not limited to po- lice (mis)doings. attitude toward, and perceptions about the police are also influenced by demographic characteristics as well as individual psychological dispositions (lee and gibbs ; macdonald et al. ; zhao et al. ).though the contributions of personality to police perception has been scarcely explored, johnson et al. ( ) found that personality dispositions influenced attitudes toward authority figures such as parents, the police, and government. also dissocial person- ality traits such as psychopathy have been found to affect general lifestyles (eze et al. ), as well as the perception of procedural justice (augustyn and ray ). the dark triad (of psychopathy, narcissism, and machiavellianism) is a more robust, widely researched constellation of dissocial personal- ity traits, that is yet to be explored in relation to the perception of the police. narcissism is characterized by grandiosity, pride, egotism, and a lack of empathy (konut ). machiavellianism is characterized by manipulation and exploitation of others, a cynical disregard for morality, and a focus on self-interest and deception (jacobwitz and egan ). psychopathy is characterized by enduring antisocial behavior, impulsivity, selfishness, callousness, and remorselessness (skeem et al. ). the dark triad has been recently found to influence specific antisocial behaviours such as problem gambling (onyedire et al. ), as well as generic ideological attitudes and social worldviews (zeigler-hill et al. ). we contend that these traits could also contribute to how the police is perceived. global challenges in have provoked more discussions about police organisations and their approaches in discharging their duties. video images showing events leading to the death of george floyd in the united states of america sparked mas- sive outrage and calls for institutional reformations. there was a knock-on effect on other police instituions in europe and beyound triggering the black lives matter march globally. ironically, the police is still expected to effectively manage the negative fallouts arising from such protests, such as de- structions and looting of property. in nigeria and indeed many african countries, there are several accounts of police brutality as the police tries to enforce lockdown measures arising from the corona virus pandemic (british broadcasting cooperation ; egwu ). understanding factors that influence how people perceieve the police will help inform police organisa- tions on the necessary changes they have to make in building confidence and elicitng coorporation with the public so as to effectively deliver their critically needed services. johnson and olukayode ( ) reported that public support and coopera- tion will significantly enhance police performance in crime management in the nigerian society. in the current study, we specifically explore the contributions of dissocial personality traits and past experiences with the police to the perception of the police in nigeria. we hypothesize that ) dissocial triats will not significantly predict the way the nigerian police is perceived; ) that experience with the police will not predict how people perceive the police. method ethical approval the researchers obtained written approval letter from the ethics committee of their institution. the researchers adhered to ethical standard of american psychological association when conducting study with human participants (american psychological association, ). participants three hundred participants were recruited for the study; how- ever, only (females = . %) participants validly complet- ed the questionnaires. university students made up . % (n = ) of the sample and were accidentally sampled across the faculties in the university of nigeria. also, em- ployees of different public and private organizations were conveniently recruited to participate in the study. participants were aged between and years (mean age = . , sd = . ) and have completed at least, secondary level education. instruments in addition to the demographic section, statements investigat- ing exposure to crime ( -items), sample items include “i have witnessed or been a victim of a crime in the past years”, “a member of my household has been a victim of crime in the past years”, “how often do you use the media to get news on crimes” etc., age, gender, religion, denomination, marital sta- tus, highest qualification, locality, occupation, and substances used. the second part contained the measure of the variables of dissocial traits, experience, and perception. short dark triad the dark triad scale was developed by jones and paulhus ( ). it is a -item scale which covers aspects such as psychopathy ( -items), narcissism ( -items), and machiavellianism ( -items). responses are made on a point response format ranging from (strongly disagree) to (strong- ly agree). some of the items are reverse scored. a sample item includes “it’s not wise to tell your secrets”, while an example of the item with reverse scoring is “i hate being the center of atten- tion”. cronbach alpha for the machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy scales were . , . , and respectively. factor analysis also showed alignment to the three dimensions identi- fied by jones and paulhus ( ). j police crim psych experience with the police items were drawn from the police survey for england and wales. the experience with the police (ewp) scale is a -itemed scale highlighting various encoun- ters with the police including being questioned, searched, arrested, or detained by the police. responses are given on a likert scale of never ( ), once ( ), twice ( ), and thrice or more ( ) with higher scores indicating more encounter with the police. it does not explicitly point to a positive or negative experience, rather higher scores indicate having more encoun- ter with the police. sample items include “have you had an encounter with the police” and “have you ever been questioned by the police”. item analysis on the scale yielded a cronbach’s alpha of . . factor analysis on the scale also confirmed a single factor structure. police perception scale as no specific comprehensive scale was found to assess police perception, approximate scales that utilized items close to the construct were pulled together to assess police perception. items were picked from the police legitimacy scale, a -item scale developed by ferdik ( ); the general attitude toward and specific trust in the police officers measure (gastp) lai and zhao ( ); the confi- dence in police index scale (cp), ren et al. ( ); the per- ception of police integrity measure (ppi) by wu ( ); and the attitudes toward police misconduct measure (atpmm) dowler and zawilski ( ). sample items include “how often do you believe police officers will bend the rules to get a confession from a person accused of crime” and “how often do you think police officers physically abuse those who are accused of a crime”. items were scored such that higher scores indicated better perception of the police. items were screened for repetition and ambiguousness. items were also screened for face validity by experts in psychometrics. twenty-eight items were selected in all based on corrected item total scores (> . ). cronbach’s alpha for the assembled scales was . . factor analysis on the scale supported a single factor solution. procedure the researchers administered the questionnaires to indi- viduals which included undergraduates from different facul- ties of the university of nigeria, nsukka and also to workers from different organizations within enugu. participants com- pleted consent forms. the researchers received the assistance of the departmental class representatives in distributing the questionnaires to their students within their lecture periods. the nature of the study was explained to the participants in written instructions, and they were sufficiently guided in com- pleting the instruments. the questionnaires were collected im- mediately after completion, and the participants were verbally appreciated for their participation. of the copies of the questionnaire that were distributed, were returned and were appropriately completed and used in data analysis. design/statistics the study employed a cross-sectional design. the statistics used to test the hypotheses was regression analysis. after con- sidering missing data, participants qualified for the regres- sion analysis. descriptive and zero order correlation of police perception, age, gender, experience with the police, machiavellianism, narcissism, and psychopathy is presented first. this is followed by the results of statistical analysis per- formed to test the hypotheses (see table ). the correlation table show that age (r = − . , p = . ), experience with the police (r = − . , p = . ), and narcis- sism (r = − . , p = . ) were negatively and significantly related to police perception. interestingly as scores on these variables increased, police approval ratings decreased as the intercorrelations among these variables were negative. other interesting significant correlating patterns were psychopathy scores were related to machiavellianism scores (r = . , p = . ) (see table ). result from the regression analysis showed that age nega- tively and significantly predicted experience with the police such that the older a person is, the more negatively the police is perceived (β = − . , t = − . , p = . ). also in the sec- ond model, having an encounter with the police negatively predicted police perception (β = − . , t = − . , p = . ). hence, the more encounter people had with the police the poorer their perception about the police. this suggets that many encounters with the police were negative. finally among the dark triad traits, only narcissism predicted police perception such that higher narcissism traits culminated in a more negative perception of the police (β = − . , t = − . , p = . ). discussion this study investigated the roles of dissocial personality traits and experience with the police on how people perceived the table descriptive and zero order correlation table among demographics and main study variables variables . police perception – . age − . * – . gender − . . ** – . exp with police − . * . ** . ** – . machiavellianism . − . * . * . – . narcissism − . * . . . . – . psychopathy . . . . . * . *p < . , **p < . j police crim psych police. the first hypothesis which stated that dissocial traits would not significantly predict police perception was not confirmed because at least one of the dissocial traits, narcissism, negatively and significantly predicted police perception. among the dark triad traits, only narcissism predicted police perception such that higher narcissism traits culminated in more negative perception of the police. this implies that individuals with higher narcissism traits were more likely to perceive the police in negative light. this result is in agreement with previous findings. for instance, campbell and foster ( ) found that narcissists tend to view the police in a less favorable way. persons with narcissistic traits demonstrate a lack of interest in warm and caring interpersonal relationships. they also find it difficult to get involved in relationships between two or more people because of they are full of egoism and pride. our finding further demonstrates that apart from the activities of the police, individual factors such as personality could influence how the police is seen. stretching the implication of this finding, persons who are likely to perceive the police in negative light, may also tend to comply less, or even act negatively towards them. rigby and rump ( ) had found that personality factors are linearly related to attitude towards authority. previous studies have not highlighted how persons with psychopathic traits typically percive the police. though psychopathic traits (and its related callous unemotional traits in youths) is widely recognised to be associated with disruptive behaviours such aggression (orjiakor et al. ) and serious criminal offending (dhingra and boduszek ; mccuish et al ), it was rather surprising to notice that it did not predict the perception of the police. this finding may however align with brankley and rule ( ), who found that psychopathy is associated with a bias to see others as unthreathening. brankley and rule equally found that machiavellianism was highly associated with psychopathy, and this may also explain why the former personality trait failed to predict police perception. the sec- ond hypothesis which stated that experience with the police would not significantly predict police perception was also not confirmed because experience with the police negative- ly and significantly predicted police perception. we found that participants' experience with the police negatively im- pacted how they saw the police. thus the more contacts they had with the police, the more they resent the police. this implies that contact with the police in nigeria leaves citi- zens with a bad taste. this is not surprising giving the high rates of reports on police brutality and police involvement in corruption in the country. previous nigerian studies on the police share the same findings (ajomo and okagbue ; alemika ; alemika and chukwuma ; ibidapo- obe ; nwokeoma et al. ; onyishi et al. ). nigeria is currently ranked as the worst country in the world internal security and police index (ipsa ). this is a strong message to the management of the nigerian police force, related organisations, as well as policy makers who influence policing policies in africa's most populous country. there is a strong need to constatntly examine and improve policing in the country. slightly similar findings have been found in literature. in canada, respondents were only marginally positive in their evaluations of the police (chow ); canadian adoles- cents who were older and those who held more positive school attitudes, experienced no police mistreatment or ha- rassment, reported no criminal victimization, and exhibited lower propensity to engage in unlawful activities were found to rate the overall police performance significantly more favorably (chow ). in india (singh ) and in easter europe (land ), low evaluations of the police, which were most likely due to respondents’ knowledge of, or experience with, corrupt or brutal officers have also been reported. brandt and markus ( ) indicated that adolescents who reported negative experiences with the po- lice had less favorable attitude toward the police. thus experience with the police is a key concern in how the police is perceived. police organisations should then do well to ensure that they invest in trainings/interventions that will improve their modus operandi as well as their professional- ism in order to positively engage with the public. participants were drawn from a state in nigeria, menaing that our findings may be taken with caution. we also deployed a cross-sectional design which mean that causal inferences may not be made. future studies can expand the sample size and accommodate, perhaps experimental designs. as with most self-report studies, participants may have presented themselves in a more favorable light, downplaying the pres- ence of dissocial traits and compromising the links between other dissocial traits and police perception. also, getting indi- viduals to provide sincere answers to survey questions is dif- ficult even though confidentiality is assured; as a result, some participants could have randomly rated themselves without reading the questions. table regression table predicting police perception from demographics and main study variables model variables r r Δ β t . age . . − . − . * gender . . . experience with police . . − . − . * . psychopathy . . . . narcissism − . − . * machiavellianism . . *p < . j police crim psych conclusions the study investigated the relationship between dissocial traits and experience with the police and police perception. dissocial traits particularly narcissism was negatively associ- ated with police perception. experience with the police was a negative predictor of police perception; this implies that the more encounter people had with the nigerian police, the poorer their perception about the police. police organizations, especially in nigeria should strive to improve in their relation to citizens as this will ensure better coorporation and effec- tiveness in delivering services. a qualitative assessment of experiences with the police and how it impacts relationship with the poilce is a worthy pursuit, especially in nigeria. identifying areas that police organizations can leverage to improve their connectedness to citizens have potentials to im- prove the perception of the police. compliance with ethical standards conflict of interest the authors declared that they have no conflict of interest. ethical approval the researchers obtained written approval letter from research and ethics committee, of the department of psychology, university of nigeria to conduct the study. informed consent participants completed consent forms. references ajomo ma, okagbue ie ( ) human rights and criminal justice ad- ministration in nigeria. nigerian institute of advanced legal studies, lagos, p alemika eeo ( ) policing and perceptions of police in nigeria. police studies : – alemika eeo, chukwuma ic ( ) police-community violence in nigeria. centre for law enforcement education (cleen), ikeja american 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( ). psychopathic personality: bridging the gap between scientific evi- dence and public psychological science in the public interest smith dj ( ) the origins of black hostility to the police. polic soc : – smith pe, hawkins ro ( ) victimization, types of citizen-police contacts and attitudes toward the police. law soc rev : – thomas cw, hyman jm ( ) perceptions of crime, fear of victimiza- tion, and public perceptions of police performance. j police sci adm : – worrall jl ( ) public perceptions of police efficacy and image: the ‘fuzziness’ of support for the police. am j crim justice : – wu y ( ) college students’ evaluation of police performance: a com- parison of chinese and americans. j crim justice ( ): – . https://doi.org/ . /j.jcrimjus. . . zeigler-hill v, martinez jl, vrabel jk, ezenwa mo, oraetue h, nweze t, andrews d, kenny b ( ) the darker angels of our nature: do social worldviews mediate the associations that dark personality features have with ideological attitudes?. pers individ differ : zhao js, tsai cf, ren l, lai yl ( ) public satisfaction with police control of disorder crime: does the public hold police accountable? justice q ( ): – publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdic- tional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. j police crim psych https://doi.org/ . /pijpsm- - - https://doi.org/ . /pijpsm- - - https://doi.org/ . /md. https://doi.org/ . /md. http://www.punchng.com/articl.aspx?theartic=rt http://www.punchng.com/articl.aspx?theartic=rt https://doi.org/ . /s - - https://doi.org/ . /j.jcrimjus. . . 	dissocial personality traits and past experiences matter in how people perceive the police 	abstract 	introduction 	method 	ethical approval 	participants 	instruments 	procedure 	design/statistics 	discussion 	conclusions 	references neonatologytoday_ _ _ _ white privilege & why nicus should care the national coalition for infant health advocates for: a collaborative of professional, clinical, community health, and family support organizations improving the lives of premature infants and their families through education and advocacy. www.infanthealth.org access to an exclusive human milk diet for premature infants increased emotional support resources for parents and caregivers suffering from ptsd/ppd access to rsv preventive treatment for all premature infants as indicated on the fda label clear, science-based nutrition guidelines for pregnant and breastfeeding mothers safe, accurate medical devices and products designed for the special needs of nicu patients the national coalition for infant health is a collaborative of more than professional, clinical, community health, and family support organizations focused on improving the lives of premature infants through age two and their families. ncfih’s mission is to promote lifelong clinical, health, education, and supportive services needed by premature infants and their fam- ilies. ncfih prioritizes safety of this vulnerable population and access to approved therapies. peer reviewed national coalition for infant health values (sane) safety. premature infants are born vulnerable. products, treat- ments and related public policies should prioritize these fragile infants’ safety. access. budget-driven health care policies should not pre- clude premature infants’ access to preventative or necessary therapies. nutrition. proper nutrition and full access to health care keep premature infants healthy after discharge from the nicu. equality. prematurity and related vulnerabilities disproportion- ately impact minority and economically disadvantaged families. restrictions on care and treatment should not worsen inherent disparities. “ in the year , where covid showed the realities of the disparities among african american families, the brutality of those disparities, and the racism on which they were created, the alliance for black nicu families was our part of making infrastructural change specifically in the nicu parent and professional communities ongoing.” “mayhem occurred at every entrance to the building resulting in “patriots” breaking through doors and windows and entering with every intent of “taking back the country.” like you, i watched how the capitol hill police were outnumbered and overwhelmed. ” neonatology todaytwww.neonatologytoday.nettjanuary deb discenza in late december, i received our new non-profit designation letter from the irs. the alliance for black nicu families (https://black- nicufamilies.org) was in place. my co-founder, ashley randolph, celebrated with me by phone. in the year , where covid showed the realities of the disparities among african american families, the brutality of those disparities, and the racism on which they were created, the alliance for black nicu families was our part of making infrastructural change specifically in the nicu par- ent and professional communities ongoing. it was beyond over- due and something i had spoken to during board and steering committee meetings regularly. i am not black myself, but i saw too much that had yet to be addressed in our community, so i stepped up to do what was needed. fast forward to wednesday, january , , our nation’s capital came under siege as the electoral votes were being certified for then president-elect joe biden. mayhem occurred at every entrance to the building resulting in “patriots” breaking through doors and windows and entering with every intent of “taking back the country.” like you, i watched how the capitol hill police were outnumbered and overwhelmed. i also watched as some of the of- ficers were high-fiving rioters and taking selfies, too. in the after- math, the capitol hill police chief resigned, feeling he had failed his officers. as it turns out, he had been requesting help for many days and weeks ahead of the certification. his pentagon bosses deemed it not necessary as one of them felt that the “optics looked bad.” seriously? well, the scene looked way worse, as it turned out. it was horrific and also the very definition of white privilege on full display. as the rioters looted and destroyed congressional offices as they beat officers with various weapons, others chose to “add to this learning that my fellow preemie moms that were black and the families they served never received any educational materials or given any sense of how to advocate for their child.” “white privilege is receiving care without security being called. it is also getting the resources and educational materials needed to make informed decisions and appropriate follow-ups as well. it is not having to look over your shoulder all of the time while caring for your baby in the nicu. ” neonatology todaytwww.neonatologytoday.nettjanuary cement the moment in other ways with pictures alongside statutes as they waved a trump flag or meandered down a hall with a large confederate flag. for days i shook with anger and was equally devastated. i attended the women’s march in as . million people of every type of background attended and marched peacefully throughout the city filled with military trucks, tanks, and police vehicles. and note that all of this, plus full riot gear, rubber bullets, and tear gas was in place for the black lives matter pro- tests. the contrasts are glaringly apparent to this month’s utter thuggery—shame on us. so what does this blatant white privilege have to do with neona- tology? a lot, as it turns out. studies are now showing that black newborn babies under the care of a white doctor are at a high risk of dying. % of the babies in the nicu are black. do the math. it is painful. add to this learning that my fellow preemie moms that were black and the families they served never received any educational ma- terials or given any sense of how to advocate for their child. know- ing that she was at high risk for preterm birth, my co-founder found out that the p shots were not going to be covered. she had to move states to get what she needed to help her baby have a safe start to life. i have one close friend whose son was supposed to be taken to the eye doctor for rop follow-up, but no one had told the family at discharge. today, he is blind, despite the family’s heroic efforts after the fact. and, another family had security called on the father in the operating room as his wife had an emergency c- section to save her life and that of the child just because he was asking questions. imagine weeks later when this same family got a call from the nicu the morning of the baby’s discharge date to tell them that their son died. all of these families were black. surreal. white privilege is receiving care without security being called. it is also getting the resources and educational materials needed to make informed decisions and appropriate follow-ups as well. it is not having to look over your shoulder all of the time while caring for your baby in the nicu. it is not having to endure mi- croaggressions and outright racist behavior from a nicu provider simply because you have a different skin color. add to this the white privileged moms who have enough means to buy their baby needed items and access to specialized healthcare outlets and equipment as well as time off from work and/or childcare for ap- pointments, etc. and do not even get me started on the lack of access to decent housing, food, and medications as well as jobs, benefits, and equal compensation. the stark difference is horrific and shameful. i was one of those privileged moms, and i had no idea that this was a problem years ago. white privilege is as- suming that everyone else is treated as well as you are. it is time for a change. we need to do better for these families. everyone entering the nicu deserves equal care, respect, equal access to help, and so much more. racism is insidious, and if i hear from one more pro- fessional on social media that “racism is not in our nicu,” i will scream. racism in the nicu happens quietly in rooms, behind doors with a word, a look, a feeling of unwelcome. it is not always the blatant encounters one sees in the movies. join us as we make real, positive change. change happens when good people join hands in partnership and work together. the al- liance for black nicu families welcomes organizational partners across the country to help us mandate annual implicit bias train- ing for nicu professionals state by state and endorses the once upon a preemie academy for its unique approach. we are also working to provide families and african american-led nicu/pree- mie organizations with grants to further their work. disclosures: deb is a co-founder of the alliance for black nicu families (https://blacknicufamilies.org), and the founder of pree- mieworld, llc (https://preemieworld.com) as well as crystal ball health, llc (https://crystalballhealth.com) nt corresponding author: deb discenza founder and chief executive officer preemieworld email: deb@preemieworld.com www.preemieworld.com science journals — aaas s c i e n c e a d v a n c e s | r e s e a r c h a r t i c l e so c i a l m ov em en t s department of sociology, university of maryland, parren mitchell art-sociology building, campus drive, college park, md , usa. *corresponding author. email: drfisher@umd.edu fisher, dow, ray, sci. adv. ; :eaao september copyright © the authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee american association for the advancement of science. no claim to original u.s. government works. distributed under a creative commons attribution noncommercial license . (cc by-nc). intersectionality takes it to the streets: mobilizing across diverse interests for the women’s march dana r. fisher,* dawn m. dow, rashawn ray can a diverse crowd of individuals whose interests focus on distinct issues related to racial identity, class, gender, and sexuality mobilize around a shared issue? if so, how does this process work in practice? to date, limited research has explored intersectionality as a mobilization tool for social movements. this paper unpacks how intersectionality influences the constituencies represented in one of the largest protests ever observed in the united states: the women’s march on washington in january . analyzing a data set collected from a random sample of parti- cipants, we explore how social identities influenced participation in the women’s march. our analysis demon- strates how individuals’ motivations to participate represented an intersectional set of issues and how coalitions of issues emerge. we conclude by discussing how these coalitions enable us to understand and predict the future of the anti-trump resistance. o n a p ril , h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m introduction following the presidential election of donald trump, which was won while the candidate explicitly insulted large swaths of the american public, there has been substantial and continuous protest against the direction that the new administration is taking the united states. one of the more visible responses to the new regime is the numerous street demonstrations that have been organized to express opposition to the administration and its policies. since president trump’s inaugura- tion, demonstrations have taken place to express concern about a range of progressive issues. the first and largest protest to date was the women’s march, a coordinated effort around the united states that mobilized more than million people on the day after the inaugu- ration. the biggest demonstration on this historic day of action took place in washington, dc. a key theme of the scholarship on contentious politics is understanding mobilization processes and how individuals become involved in various forms of collective action ( – ). a subset of this re- search has explored the strategies and mechanisms through which so- cial movements broaden their societal reach and mobilize more participants ( – ). large-scale street demonstrations and marches have been documented as a site where social movement expansion is partic- ularly visible to the general public ( , ). although social movement scholarship has examined movement-to-movement transmission, focusing on tactical overlap ( ), social movement spillover ( ), and the sequencing of social movements ( ), research has yet to explore how overlapping motivations influence participants who join a protest that is concentrated on one specific issue [but see the study of goss and heaney ( )]. in addition, few studies have examined how intersectionality contributes to social movements ( – ). scholars of intersectionality examine how intersections of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, le- gal status, and other categories of identity are linked to structures of in- equality and produce different life experiences and forms of oppression ( – ). some scholars suggest that these intersections divide people into silos with distinct and competing interests that deter the coalition building necessary for robust social movements ( , ). moreover, re- search has found that, when these interests are incorporated into move- ments, some interests become marginalized in favor of broader movement goals ( ). intersectionality has been criticized as producing “identity politics” that focuses on narrow group interests at the expense of broader political claims. more recently, however, a handful of studies of collective action have focused on how intersectional interests can be used to build coalitions within and across social movements, thereby increasing the number and diversity of activists ( – ). in her influential work, crenshaw ( ) suggests that intersectionality can promote coalitions instead of divisions. a small number of studies have specifically explored inter- sectional mobilization processes and how shared grievances play a role ( ). in her work that explores how organizations cross movement boundaries, van dyke ( ) comes to similar conclusions without ex- plicitly discussing intersectionality. to date, intersectionality has been understood as a theory ( , ), an analytical framework ( , , ), and/or a method ( ) that focuses on understanding how experiences of inequality are complicated by intersections of race, gender, social class, and other social categories. here, we extend the application of the notion of intersectionality to analyze how it influences the motiva- tions of individuals within social movements, thereby mobilizing them to engage in collective action in the form of a large-scale street demonstration. although there have been numerous claims that the election of donald trump will galvanize the progressive movement, this so-called merging of movements has yet to be documented. the women’s march provides an ideal opportunity to explore how intersectionality may be used as a mechanism to increase activism. although the women’s march was initiated by a white grandmother in hawaii who posted a call to action on facebook on the day after the election, it soon transitioned into a broader, intersectional coalition of seasoned activists. the four national co-chairs of the women’s march were a racially di- verse group of women who were already engaged in a range of political activism and social mobilization. together, these activists aimed to cre- ate an inclusive event that responded to donald trump’s rhetoric, which encouraged women’s marginalization and social inequality. by the day of the event, the women’s march’s website listed more than organizational partners, sending a clear signal that the women’s march intended to appeal to participants across social categories of race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and legal status. it is worth noting that the women’s march’s organizers made the decision to exclude anti- abortion groups from their list of partners. of http://advances.sciencemag.org/ s c i e n c e a d v a n c e s | r e s e a r c h a r t i c l e d o w n lo a d the day after average crowds came out for donald trump’s inau- guration, hundreds of thousands of people descended on washington, dc to participate in the women’s march. the women’s march in washington, dc was part of a broader day of action that took place in other cities across the united states and around the globe. indi- viduals with a range of demographic backgrounds turned out at these “sister marches.” as participants flooded the same streets that had hosted the inaugural parade only hours beforehand, chants op- posing the new administration reverberated through the air. the protesters themselves held signs and wore t-shirts that suggested intersectional issues as motivations for attending. much speculation has focused on who attended the women’s march and what issues motivated them to raise their voices in protest. moreover, although the progressive movement spans issues of race, class, gender, and sex- ual orientation, more research is needed to understand how indi- viduals motivated by certain issues come together to participate in intersectional forms of social protest. accordingly, this paper presents analysis of a unique data set collected from a random sam- ple of participants in the women’s march in washington, dc to examine the issues that motivated individuals to protest the new u.s. president and his policies. h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg e d fro m results table shows the distribution of issues that motivated participants to attend. not surprisingly, women’s rights ( %) was the top mo- tivating reason. four other issues—equality ( . %), reproductive rights ( . %), environment ( . %), and social welfare ( . %)— were reported by more than % of respondents. in addition, more than % of respondents reported that racial justice, lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (lgbtq) issues, politics/voting, and immigration were issues that motivated them to attend. although this march was called the “women’s march,” these findings demon- strate that participants were not just motivated by issues related to fisher, dow, ray, sci. adv. ; :eaao september o n a p ril , / women but were actually motivated by a diverse set of issues con- nected to intersectional concerns ( ). table shows a series of regression models for the association among various sociodemographic variables and the issues that moti- vated individuals to participate in the women’s march. women were significantly more likely to mention reproductive rights than others (b = . , p < . ). men were significantly more likely than women to mention trump as a motivation to participate. blacks were signifi- cantly more likely to mention racial justice than whites and all other racial groups (b = . , p < . ). hispanics were significantly more likely to mention immigration than whites and other racial groups (b = . , p < . ). these findings are consistent with the research that connects intersectionality and identity politics ( ). it also suggests that the women’s march’s unity principles and its organizational coalition were successful in mobilizing a crowd with diverse interests. in addition, nonorganization members were significantly less likely to mention politics as a motivating issue than organization members (b = − . , p < . ). in addition to these relationships among gender, race, ethnicity, and organizational affiliation and the stated motivations of the women’s march participants, other findings re- lated to age are noteworthy. age is significantly and negatively asso- ciated with women’s rights, reproductive rights, and racial justice. in other words, older protesters relative to younger protesters were less likely to mention these issues as their motivations for attending the women’s march. table shows a regression graph for the associations among the different issues that motivated participants to attend the women’s march. these models control for the number of protests attended in the past years, gender, race, age, and organizational membership. in addition, a cross-tabulation of percentages of overlapping motivations for attending the women’s march is included as table . through these models, we are able to examine the extent to which individuals reported intersectional motivations for participating in the women’s march. participants who mentioned women’s rights were signifi- cantly more likely to mention racial justice, immigration, and social welfare. however, they were significantly less likely to mention repro- ductive rights and equality. similarly, participants who mentioned reproductive rights were significantly more likely to mention immi- gration and social welfare. these participants were also significantly more likely to mention labor. in addition to the negative association with women’s rights, these reproductive rights respondents were significantly less likely to mention equality and trump. the negative association between women’s rights and reproduc- tive rights seems counterintuitive and deserves more attention. upon further examination, we found that % of the respondents who selected women’s rights as a motivation for attending also selected reproductive rights (see table ). in comparison, % of respondents who selected reproductive rights as a motivation for attending also selected women’s rights. demographically, respondents who selected either women’s rights or reproductive rights are similar. for exam- ple, although a higher percentage of women are represented among those who selected reproductive rights ( %) relative to women’s rights ( %), this difference is nonsignificant because men in this group were significantly less likely to mention reproductive rights. individuals who selected both women’s rights and reproductive rights were more likely to be a member of an organization, as either a passive or an active member. racial justice is the driver of the negative association between women’s rights and reproductive rights. nearly % of respondents table . reasons for attending the women’s march (respondents selected all that applied) (n = ). women’s rights . % equality . % reproductive rights . % environment . % social welfare . % racial justice . % lgbtq . % politics/voting . % immigration . % labor . % police brutality/black lives matter . % peace . % religion . % of http://advances.sciencemag.org/ s c i e n c e a d v a n c e s | r e s e a r c h a r t i c l e table . regression analysis of reasons for attending (n = ). z statistics are in parentheses except for racial justice and immigration, which includes t statistics in parentheses because those models are ordinary least squares regression rather than logistic regression. fish er, dow, ray, sci. adv. ; :eaao women’s rights september reproductive rights environment lgbtq racial justice immigration first ever protest − . − . − . − . − . − . (− . ) (− . ) (− . ) (− . ) (− . ) (− . ) first in years − . . − . − . . . (− . ) ( . ) (− . ) (− . ) ( . ) ( . ) women − . . ** . . − . . (− . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) (− . ) ( . ) black − . − . − . − . . ** − . (− . ) (− . ) (− . ) (− . ) ( . ) (− . ) hispanic . − . . . . . ** d o ( . ) (− . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) w n lo asian . − . − . . − . . a d e d ( . ) (− . ) (− . ) ( . ) (− . ) ( . ) fro m multiracial . − . − . − . − . − . h tt p ( . ) (− . ) (− . ) (− . ) (− . ) (− . ) ://a age − . ** − . ** . − . − . ** − . d v a n (− . ) (− . ) ( . ) (− . ) (− . ) (− . ) c e s. nonorganization member − . − . − . − . − . − . * s cie n (− . ) (− . ) (− . ) (− . ) (− . ) (− . ) c e m passive organization member − . . . . . . a g .o (− . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) r o g / constant . − . − . − . . . n a p ( . ) (− . ) (− . ) (− . ) ( . ) ( . ) ril , social welfare labor peace equality politics trump first ever protest − . . − . − . . . − . ) ( . ) (− . ) (− . ) ( . ) ( . ) first in years . . − . . . . * ( . ) ( . ) (− . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) women . . − . . − . * − . ** ( . ) ( . ) (− . ) ( . ) (− . ) (− . ) black − . − . − . − . . . (− . ) (− . ) (− . ) (− . ) ( . ) ( . ) hispanic − . . . − . . . (− . ) ( . ) ( . ) (− . ) ( . ) ( . ) asian − . . . . . − . (− . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) (− . ) continued on next page of http://advances.sciencemag.org/ s c i e n c e a d v a n c e s | r e s e a r c h a r t i c l e o n a p ril , h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m selected women’s rights and racial justice but did not mention repro- ductive rights, whereaslessthan % of respondents mentioned repro- ductive rights and racial justice but did not mention women’s rights. this difference is driving the negative association between women’s rights and reproductive rights. these findings suggest that identity is playing a complex role in these overlapping motivations. in contrast, participants who mentioned environment as a motiva- tion did not mention the identity-based themes that are associated with intersectionality. rather, they were significantly more likely to mention social welfare, peace, and equality. participants who mentioned lgbtq issues did not overlap at all with participants who were moti- vated by the environment. instead, they were significantly more likely to mention racial justice and immigration. fisher, dow, ray, sci. adv. ; :eaao september individuals who mentioned racial justice indicated the most num- berof additionalissuesasmotivating themto participateinthewomen’s march.specifically,theyweresignificantlymorelikelytomentionwomen’s rights, lgbtq issues, immigration, labor, peace, equality, politics, and trump. people who reported attending because of immigration issues were significantly more likely to mention peace, equality, and politics in addition to reproductive rights, lgbtq issues, and racial justice. although participants who mentioned trump were significantly less likely to mention women’s rights, reproductive rights, and equal- ity, they were significantly more likely to mention racial justice and peace. together, these findings strongly support the view that intersec- tionality can promote alliances across identity-based issues ( , , ). in contrast to the studies that focus on coalitions among organizations women’s rightssocial welfare reproductive rightslabor environmentpeace lgbtqequality racial justicepolitics immigrationtrump multiracial − . − . . − . . − . (− . ) (− . ) ( . ) (− . ) ( . ) (− . ) age . − . − . − . . . ( . ) (− . ) (− . ) (− . ) ( . ) ( . ) nonorganization member . − . − . . * − . *** − . ( . ) (− . ) (− . ) ( . ) (- . ) (− . ) passive organization member . − . . . * − . . ( . ) (− . ) ( . ) ( . ) (− . ) ( . ) constant − . − . − . − . . − . (− . ) (− . ) (− . ) (− . ) ( . ) (− . ) *p < . . **p < . . ***p < . . table . the women’s march survey regression models by motivation for attending (n = ). these models control for number of protests, gender, race, age, and organizational membership. +, significant and positive association (p < . ); −, significant and negative association (p < . ). dependent variables women’s rights reproductive rights environment lgbtq racial justice immigration social welfare labor peace equality politics trump independent variables women’s rights − + + − − reproductive rights − + + − − environment + + lgbtq issues + + racial justice + + + + + + + immigration + + + + + social welfare + + + + labor + + + + + peace + + + + + equality − − + + + + − − politics + + + trump − + − of http://advances.sciencemag.org/ s c i e n c e a d v a n c e s | r e s e a r c h a r t i c l e h ttp ://a d va n ce s.sci d o w n lo a d e d fro m ( , , ), this paper identifies coalitions among the motivations of individual participants, particularly those associated with identity- based issues. o n a p ril , e n ce m a g .o rg / discussion as one might expect and consistent with the intersectional character of the women’s march in washington, dc, individuals were more likely to be motivated by issues connected to the social identities that were most salient for them: black participants mobilized for racial jus- tice, hispanic participants mobilized for immigration, and women mo- bilized for reproductive rights. our analysis supports previous studies that find that individuals concerned with a range of social issues can establish and build coalitions informed by intersectional motivations [( , , ); see also the study of van dyke ( )]. although we find that individuals were often motivated by issues related to their own so- cial identities, we also find that individuals reported being motivated by reasons that extended beyond their social identities. our findings demonstrate that individuals can be mobilized to pro- test on the basis of issues that fall outside their narrow interests or spe- cific social identities. in contrast to the extant research that focuses on how smaller-scale movements use intersectionality to mobilize and ex- pand their constituencies ( , ), we find that members of these coali- tions participated together in one large-scale protest event while still coalescing around a suite of intersectional interests that sometimes overlapped. in many ways, we believe that the large turnout at the women’s march, which organizers and others see as an indicator of success, is the direct result of the effective mobilization of various indi- viduals and organizational constituencies that were motivated by in- tersectional issues. one has only to review the expansive list of the organizational partners for the women’s march to see how it aimed to mobilize people whose interests lie at the intersections of race, fisher, dow, ray, sci. adv. ; :eaao september class, gender, sexual orientation, legal status, and other categories of identity, along with less identity-based sympathizers. in contrast to social movement–oriented research that tends to take as a given that people who turn out for a particular march are explicitly motivated by that specific issue and focus their inquiry on movement- to-movement transmission [( , ); but see the study of goss et al. ( )], we find that there is much to learn from looking at the varied issues that motivated participants to join the women’s march. future research should examine the degree to which other marches and movements can also mobilize participants who are motivated by an in- tersectional set of issues. moreover, research should be devoted to understanding how and why people come to see their interests as linking to certain issues but not others. on a more practical level, the results from this research shed im- portant light on potential cleavages and enduring coalitions within the progressive movement. for example, although the environmental movement has worked for many years to break free from its reputa- tion as a predominantly white social movement ( , ), our findings from the women’s march on washington, dc show that people who are mobilizing around the environment continue to be less concerned about issues that mobilize people of color. in contrast, individuals who identify issues that more directly relate to people of color, such as racial justice or immigration, also tend to be more likely motivated by issues related to the lgbtq community and vice versa. this overlap suggests that, rather than existing as silos with distinct aims, these political con- stituencies have come to view their fates as connected to one another. in many ways, these findings are consistent with the work of ghaziani and baldassarri who have found that activists involved in lgbtq marches take advantage of what they call “cultural anchors” to address internal diversity while also responding to unfolding historical events ( , ). similarly, those motivated by peace were also motivated by most of the other dominant issues. this finding indicates that the table . the women’s march survey cross-tabulations of motivations for attending (n = ). women’s rights reproductive rights environment lgbtq racial justice immigration social welfare labor peace equality politics trump n = n = n = n = n = n = n = n = n = n = n = n = women’s rights . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % reproductive rights . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % environment . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % lgbtq issues . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % racial justice . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % immigration . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % social welfare . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % labor . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % peace . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % equality . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % politics . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % trump . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % of http://advances.sciencemag.org/ s c i e n c e a d v a n c e s | r e s e a r c h a r t i c l e threat of war and conflict is seen as a cross-cutting issue for many protest participants. there is much to be learned from the women’s march and its successful mobilization of hundreds of thousands of participants. in particular, our findings may be of use to organizations that are seeking to mobilize sympathizers who are motivated by an intersectional set of issues.forissueswhere overlapping interestsmay already exist,activists, organizers, and policymakers can apply our findings to develop more effective strategies for sustainable cross-movement coalitions. in cases where overlap does not exist, our findings help to explain the work that has yet to be carried out to broaden the base. o n a p ril , h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m materials and methods this research draws on unique survey data collected from a random sample of protest participants in the women’s march in washington, dc on january . participants were selected using a field ap- proximation of random selection throughout the women’s march. this methodology has been developed over a series of empirical investi- gationsofactivismandprotest in the unitedstatesandabroad( , – ). an eight-member research team spread out across the area designated for the staging of the women’s march: from rd street southwest to th street southwest on the national mall. pairs of researchers entered the crowd at the entrances designated by the organizers (on th street, th street, and th street). snaking through the crowd as people gathered, researchers “counted off” protesters, selecting every fifth person to participate. this method avoids the potential of selection bias by preventing researchers from selecting only “approachable peers” ( – ). the women’s march participants were sampled throughout the morning and early afternoon of the st as they listened to speeches and performances during the rally. the survey was designed to be short and noninvasive, so as to en- courage the highest level of participation possible and facilitate data col- lection in the field: it took less than min for participants to fill out the one-page, two-sided survey. data were collected in accordance with the university of maryland institutional review board protocol(umd irb # - ). on the basis of the requirements of this protocol, only in- dividuals over the age of were eligible to participate in the study. re- searchers completed surveys with participants. forty-three people refused to participate in the study, representing a refusal rate of . %. it is worth noting that our refusal rate is lower than other studies that have used this methodology ( ) and is substantially lower than those studies that rely on mailed-back questionnaires, which can suffer from delayed refusal bias ( , ). dependent variables to understand the potentially intersectional motivations of the protest participants, the survey instrument included an open-ended question that asked respondents: “what issues motivated you to participate today?” respondents could write in as many issues as they wanted. on average, respondents wrote in . issues. the responsesto this ques- tion were coded into categories including women’s rights, repro- ductive rights, environment, lgbtq issues, racial justice, police brutality, immigration, religion, social welfare, labor, peace, equality, politics, and trump. we reduced these categories to . first, using factor analysis, we consolidated racial justice and police brutality into “racial justice” (a = . ). althoughthe scale reliability coefficient is not as high as expected, we believe that these two categories are theoretically related and should be viewed as one larger motivating issue. second, we fisher, dow, ray, sci. adv. ; :eaao september created a variable that combines immigration and religion (a = . ), which we call, “immigration.” many respondents specifically mentioned the threat of a muslim ban, which combines immigration and religion. these motivating issues serve as the dependent variables for our analysis. although many respondents explicitly mentioned these issues, there were other terms that we interpreted as referring to these issues. any mention of “women” or references to specific women in people’s lives, such as a mother, sister, or partner, was coded as women’s rights. any mention of abortion or a woman’s right to choose was coded as repro- ductive rights. mentions of climate change or pollution were coded as environment. mentions of same-sex or gay marriage were coded as lgbtq issues. mentions of racism, police brutality, or black lives matter were coded as racial justice. mentions of the threat of a muslim ban or threats to religious freedom were coded as immigration. mentions of health care reform, the affordable care act, medicaid, medicare, education, or housing were coded as social welfare. mentions of equal pay were coded as labor. many respondents also mentioned equality in addition to peace. thus, equality received its own category. in these cases, equality was a broader category for respondents that spoke to their desire to have everyone treated the same without noting a specific gender, race, or sexual orientation. mentions of government, con- gress, or the potential russian hack were coded as politics. the newly inaugurated president trump received his own category as many re- spondents wrote specific and poignant comments about his election and their fears about his presidency. the women’s march participants were viewed as having intersectional motivations when they reported being motivated by multiple issues related to social identities tradi- tionally associated with intersectionality such as race, gender, class, and sexual orientation. independent variables table shows a series of sociodemographic variables that were used as controls. gender was an open-ended question. participants responded as woman ( . %), man ( . %), or transgender ( . %). in the regres- sion models, women are compared to the other two groups. race was coded as white/caucasian ( . %), hispanic/latino ( . %), black/af- rican american ( . %), asian ( . %), or multiracial ( . %). age was an open-ended variable. in contrast to claims by milkman ( ) that “mil- lennials comprise the bulk of those involved in the new movements that emerged on the left” since , the median age of the sample was . years old. we also collected data about participants’ connections to the -plus organizational partners of the women’s march. organization membership was coded into three categories: not a member ( . %); passive member, or what some scholars would call a “tertiary” or “mail-in member” ( . %) ( ); or active member ( . %). like recent studies of large-scale protest events ( ), we asked re- spondents about their protest experience. responses were coded into three categories: first protest attended ( . %), first protest in years ( . %), or more than one protest in the past years ( . %). this var- iable was created on the basis of the responses from two questions: one question that asks what was the first protest/demonstration ever attended and another question that asks how many protests the respondent had participated within the past years. the women’s march was identified as the first protest experience for respondents whether they listed it as their first protest or they checked the option that said, “this is the first protest that i have ever attended.” respondents were also asked who they attended with and could se- lect as many responses that applied. this variable was coded into four of http://advances.sciencemag.org/ s c i e n c e a d v a n c e s | r e s e a r c h a r t i c l e o n a p ril , h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m categories: attended alone ( %), attended with family ( . %), attended withfriends( . %), andattendedwithcolleagues ( . %).thispattern is consistent with the existing research that finds social networks to play an important role in mobilization ( , , ). respondents were also asked about their levels of educational attain- ment, place of employment, and political ideology. more than % of the sample reported having a bachelor’s degree. although it is not un- usual for protesters to represent an educated group, note that middle- class participants are overrepresented in our sample relative to the gen- eral population, and thus, our analysis of intersectionality speaks best to the motivations of that group. it is also worth noting that the racial distribution of our sample was relatively consistent with the national averages for college-educated americans. most of the sample report working in either the public or private sector (only % were students) and about % report being left-leaning politically. roughly % re- ported voting in the presidential election with % of all partici- pants reporting that they voted for hillary clinton. given the similarities of these variables across the sample, we do not control for these variables in the models. note that non-whites were no less likely to fall into these categories than their white counterparts. fisher, dow, ray, sci. adv. ; :eaao september statistical analysis this paper examines the issues that motivated protesters to participate in the women’smarchin washington, dc.accordingly, we performed two sets of analyses. first, using ordinary least squares and logistic re- gression analysis, we examined the association between sociodemo- graphic factors and the issues that respondents reported motivated their participation. second, we examined the relationship among each of the motivating issues to determine whether patterns emerge among individuals with certain motivations for participating. ordinary least squares regression analysis was used for racial justice and immigration as these two variables are transposed from a factor analysis that joins two existing issues, which we previously discussed. because of missing data on some of the sociodemographic variables (roughly % of the sample), our sample size decreased from to . there were no sys- tematic patterns to the missing data. references and notes . r. v. gould, multiple networks and mobilization in the 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oklahoma press, ). . j. verhulst, s. walgrave, the first time is the hardest? a cross-national and cross-issue comparison of first-time protest participants. polit. behav. , – ( ). acknowledgments: we would like to thank the three anonymous reviewers who provided comments on this paper, as well as b. powell and r. vanneman, and the workshop on cultural and political sociology at the university of north carolina for comments on previous versions of this paper. we also would like to thank the following students for their help with data collection: t. barnes, d. chen, a. dewey, s. genter, h.-y. ho, and d. koonce, as well as g. fuentes for her coding assistance. funding: this project received no financial support, grants, or funding. author contributions: d.r.f. directed the data collection. d.r.f. and d.m.d. collected the data.r.r. managed the data entry and cleaned and analyzed the data. all authors prepared the survey instrument and contributed to writing and revisions of the manuscript. competing interests: the authors declare that they have no competing interests. data and materials availability: all data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper and/or the supplementary materials. additionaldatarelated to thispapermaybe requested from the authors. data analyzed in thispaper, along with a codebook and the survey instrument, are available on the principal investigator’s website (www.drfisher.umd.edu/protest.html). submitted june accepted august published september . /sciadv.aao citation: d. r. fisher, d. m. dow, r. ray, intersectionality takes it to the streets: mobilizing across diverse interests for the women’s march. sci. adv. , eaao ( ). h ttp of o n a p ril , ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / http://www.drfisher.umd.edu/protest.html http://advances.sciencemag.org/ march intersectionality takes it to the streets: mobilizing across diverse interests for the women's dana r. fisher, dawn m. dow and rashawn ray doi: . 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permissions 	 comment invited commentary medical education august  , historically black universities and medical colleges—responding to the call for justice danielle laraque-arena, md , author affiliations article information 	 new york academy of medicine, new york 	 mailman school of public health, department of epidemiology, columbia university, new york, new york jama netw open. ; ( ):e . doi: . /jamanetworkopen. . visual abstract icon visual abstract editorial comment icon editorial comment related articles icon related articles author interview icon interviews multimedia icon multimedia 	 editorial call for papers on prevention and the effects of systemic racism in health frederick p. rivara, md, mph; stephan d. fihn, md, mph 	 original investigation projected estimates of african american graduates of closed historically black medical schools kendall m. campbell, md; irma corral, phd, mph; jhojana l. infante linares, ms; dmitry tumin, phd the article by campbell et al in this issue of jama network open examines the closure of historically black colleges and universities coincident with the flexner report of , assesses the consequences of this report for the number of african american medical school graduates, and uses steady expansion and rapid expansion models to estimate the progress that might have occurred in the diversity of the medical profession if those colleges and universities had remained open. based on their analyses, which are innovative and interesting, the authors suggest that an increase in african american graduates could be achieved today with the creation of more medical schools at historically black colleges and universities. the campbell et al article raises important questions regarding how to respond to the documented lack of progress in the medical profession toward achieving the widely stated value of a diverse and inclusive discipline and the proportionate representation of physicians in the diverse communities of the us. a review of the campbell et al article merits an analysis of the context that necessitated the opening of historically black colleges and universities and a comparison of the realities of that era with those of the st century, with a fundamental question in mind: are we in a postracial period in the history of the us? this question has changed the calculus on the need for historically black colleges and universities. what were the circumstances that brought about the formation of historically black colleges and universities that might inform our present strategies in higher education? historically black colleges and universities were explicitly created to educate black citizens after the cessation of slavery as an economic structure, which had curtailed nearly all educational opportunities, including higher education, for black americans. the history has been reviewed by many, and the development of historically black colleges and universities was initiated by the freedmen’s bureau of the federal government with the assistance of white citizens (abolitionist missionaries and northern philanthropists) and the african methodist episcopal church. historically black colleges and universities were, until the mid- s, the only option for higher education among most african americans because segregation existed in all sectors and aspects of the lives of americans until that time. it should be noted that while historically black colleges and universities supported the education of black physicians, the segregation of clinical care continued in hospitals, and medical organizations, such as the american medical association and honorific societies, remained closed to african americans. so, what is the current context for higher education, and what are the implications for historically black colleges and universities? although change has occurred from the jim crow period at the turn of the th century to the turn of the st century, structural inequities and systemic racism persist and sustain a medical profession and a health care system that is visibly segregated and noninclusive. the advent of the civil rights movement in the s brought about affirmative action policies in an effort to remedy the segregation in higher education and academia in general. however, documented legal actions, with claims of reverse discrimination, derailed many of these efforts. in , allan bakke challenged the affirmative action policy of the school of medicine at the university of california, davis. in the court’s ruling, the vague term of diversity was considered to be a “compelling state interest” and a key constitutional and social justification for the use of affirmative action policies in higher education; however, as some understood, this ruling also contained the “seeds of its own (affirmative action) destruction.” the next years would bear witness to debates and legal actions over race-conscious policies that addressed admission to nonhistorically black colleges and universities, slowing the progress of the medical professional workforce toward the achievement of true equitable representation, with its inherent benefits for underserved populations, the sciences, and society at large. a recent commentary in this journal, written in response to an article by lett et al, indicated that despite the standards on diversity accreditation guidelines of the liaison committee on medical education, little change has occurred in the landscape of medical education, with no substantive progress made in diversifying the physician workforce. the current low health status ranking of the us among countries in the organization for economic cooperation and development and the persistence of health disparities that mirror the current socioeconomic divide by race and ethnicity in the us is evident in the current coronavirus disease (covid- ) pandemic. adding to the tone of the country are multiple incidents of racial unrest associated with the killings of unarmed black men (most recently, george floyd) and women by police officers, the continued divestment in programs addressing poverty and educational attainment, and the responses of the black lives matter movement for human rights. a discussion of the current state of higher education for medical trainees requires a review of educational opportunities throughout the life course, beginning with opportunities for black children aged to years, access to universal preschool, equitable financing of kindergarten through grade , and universal access to free undergraduate education in preparation for entry into medical college without the burden of substantial debt, all within the context of an educational system that would value, respect, and welcome the individual and the individual’s culture. in the absence of a truly just society, historically black colleges and universities have served the role of educating traditionally underserved students in a more supportive environment despite the presence of many obstacles, a responsibility that was not borne equally by most nonhistorically black colleges and universities. the lack of cultural change in the implementation of policies and practices at every level of the academic infrastructure to address the underlying factors associated with the lack of equitable representation among medical trainees, faculty, and staff of all backgrounds is evident in the absence of bona fide partnerships with communities or transformative educational curricula that associate the teaching of science with measured improvements in the health status of all individuals. the persistence of practices such as legacy admissions policies signals an investment in those who need the least help and a divestment in the notion of diversity and inclusion. given the complex context of current medical education, would the creation of medical schools at additional historically black colleges and universities ameliorate and accelerate progress toward the achievement of health equity through the development of a more representative workforce? the answer is yes. campbell et al point to missed opportunities for the creation of intentional strategies to improve diversity, reporting that, to their knowledge, none of the nearly new medical schools that have opened since were located at historically black colleges and universities. the criteria set for the establishment of new medical schools (eg, financial resources and location) have not explicitly included the health care needs of communities or the lack of equal distribution of health services, although the rationale for the creation of new schools was that they were needed in response to a projected shortage of physicians in the st century. an impetus for the development of some new schools has been the economic benefits these schools could provide as major employers, but there was no explicit focus on health disparities. historically black colleges and universities have indicated the ability to provide training to black medical students at rates substantially higher than those of nonhistorically black colleges and universities, and these efforts are important to the improvement of the quality of care, the availability of physicians in medically underserved areas, the responsiveness of medical educators in the training of cultural humility, the breadth and depth of medical research, and the existence of bold leadership. the conclusions of campbell et al are compelling and suggest that historically black colleges and universities are an avenue, alongside a comprehensive national and systemwide approach, to address the weaknesses of higher education and the underlying factors of disadvantage that are associated with health. let us celebrate our diversity, eliminate the elitism and exclusivity of higher education, and envision and strive for excellence in medical education that is open to all. back to top article information published: august , . doi: . /jamanetworkopen. . open access: this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the cc-by license. © laraque-arena d. jama network open. corresponding author: danielle laraque-arena, md, new york academy of medicine, fifth avenue, new york, ny (dlaraque-arena@nyam.org). conflict of interest disclosures: none reported. references .campbell  km, corral  i, infante linares  jl, tumin  d.  projected estimates of african american medical graduates of closed historically black medical schools.   jama netw open. ; ( ):e . doi: . /jamanetworkopen. . google scholar .gasman  m. the changing face of historically black colleges and universities. center for minority serving institutions, university of pennsylvania; . accessed june , . https://www.gse.upenn.edu/pdf/cmsi/changing_face_hbcus.pdf .laraque-arena d. how long will we wait? a recap of our latest race & health series event. the new york academy of medicine center for history. august , . accessed june , . https://nyamcenterforhistory.org/ / / /how-long-will-we-wait-a-recap-of-our-latest-race-health-series-event/ .deville  k, kopelman  lm.  diversity, trust, and patient care: affirmative action in medical education years after bakke.   j med philos. ; ( ): - . doi: . /jmep. . . . pubmedgoogle scholarcrossref .lett  la, murdock  hm, orji  wu, aysola  j, sebro  r.  trends in racial/ethnic representation among us medical students.   jama netw open. ; ( ):e . doi: . /jamanetworkopen. . pubmedgoogle scholar .laraque-arena  d.  meeting the challenge of true representation in us medical colleges.   jama netw open. ; ( ):e . doi: . /jamanetworkopen. . pubmedgoogle scholar .abdul-jabbar  k. don’t understand the protests? what you’re seeing is people pushed to the edge. los angeles times. may , . accessed june , . https://www.latimes.com/opinion/story/ - - /dont-understand-the-protests-what-youre-seeing-is-people-pushed-to-the-edge .sullivan  lw, suez mittman  i.  the state of diversity in the health professions a century after flexner.   acad med. ; ( ): - . doi: . /acm. b e c pubmedgoogle scholarcrossref comment limit characters limit characters conflicts of interest disclosure identify all potential conflicts of interest that might be relevant to your comment. conflicts of interest comprise financial interests, activities, and relationships within the past years including but not limited to employment, affiliation, grants or funding, consultancies, honoraria or payment, speaker's bureaus, stock ownership or options, expert testimony, royalties, donation of medical equipment, or patents planned, pending, or issued. err on the side of full disclosure. if you have no conflicts of interest, check "no potential conflicts of interest" in the box below. the information will be posted with your response. not all submitted comments are published. please see our commenting policy for details. yes, i have potential conflicts of interest. no, i do not have potential conflicts of interest. limit characters limit 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for one year sign in to customize your interests 	 	 	 		sign in to your personal account 	 	 	 	 	 	 		 create a free personal account to download free article pdfs, sign up for alerts, customize your interests, and more 	 get free access to newly published articles create a personal account or sign in to: 	register for email alerts with links to free full-text articles 	access pdfs of free articles 	manage your interests 	save searches and receive search alerts privacy policy sign in to make a comment 	 	 	 		sign in to your personal account 	 	 	 	 	 	 		 create a free personal account to make a comment, download free article pdfs, sign up for alerts and more 	 get free access to newly published articles create a personal account or sign in to: 	register for email alerts with links to free full-text articles 	access pdfs of free articles 	manage your interests 	save searches and receive search alerts privacy policy chronic breathlessness: re-thinking the symptom carel, h., macnaughton, j., oxley, r., russell, a., rose, a., & dodd, j. ( ). chronic breathlessness: re-thinking the symptom. european respiratory journal, ( ), [ : ]. https://doi.org/ . / . - publisher's pdf, also known as version of record license (if available): cc by link to published version (if available): . / . - link to publication record in explore bristol research pdf-document this is the final published version of the article (version of record). it first appeared online via european respiratory society at http://erj.ersjournals.com/content/ / / . please refer to any applicable terms of use of the publisher. university of bristol - explore bristol research general rights this document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. please cite only the published version using the reference above. full terms of use are available: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/red/research-policy/pure/user-guides/ebr-terms/ https://doi.org/ . / . - https://doi.org/ . / . - https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/publications/fddd d a-cb - c - -f cf a c https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/publications/fddd d a-cb - c - -f cf a c chronic breathlessness: re-thinking the symptom to the editor: is chronic breathlessness a symptom or a syndrome? although hotly debated [ – ], we would like to suggest an alternative viewpoint. here, we speculate that the argument over chronic breathlessness being considered as either a symptom or syndrome both holds us within a reductionist framework, and somewhat misses the point. the approach of traditional medicine has been to identify and target the pathophysiology thought to underlie symptoms, and thus treat a disease. however, more modern neuroscientific approaches have taken a significant leap forward within our understanding of perceptual systems. first examined within the conventional, exteroceptive senses (vision, touch, etc.), the “bayesian brain hypothesis” outlines how perception occurs as a result of a delicate balance between incoming sensory information and the brain’s predictions about the world around us, based on learned experiences (priors) (figure ). this hypothesis has recently been applied with vigour toward a more abstract set of perceptions, which consider the monitoring of our internal sensations (termed interoception [ – ]), such as breathing [ , ]. thus, this framework emboldens us for a more comprehensive appreciation of the important point raised by calverley [ ]; namely, understanding what illness means to the patient and how it affects their lives. each individual brings their own set of prior expectations, interoceptive abilities and bodily awareness [ , ] and, thus, breathlessness will be both vastly quantitatively and qualitatively different between individuals. the breadth of these differences cannot hope to be enumerated into a narrow, homogenous set of symptoms that fall within a customary definition of a “syndrome”, but that does not need to be what johnson et al. [ ] were trying to achieve. the point, instead, is to view breathlessness as something that might not directly correspond to airway pathophysiology, and which may need to be treated both in parallel and independently of the lungs. furthermore, this theoretical view of breathlessness does not simply stop at lung disease. whilst descriptive differences are often apparent between individuals who experience breathlessness in health, lung disease and other breathlessness-associated diseases, there is unlikely to be a hard qualitative boundary that exists between these (sometimes transient) health statuses. the wealth of experiences and prior expectations brought to the table by even healthy individuals will evoke a spectrum of breathlessness perceptions, and may even alter an individual’s propensity towards symptom severity and debilitation, should they ever become associated with disease. therefore, attempts to quantify even the intensity of breathlessness as a more purely physiological perception determined by neural respiratory drive, whilst appealing within a traditional reductionist framework, appears to be a significant oversimplification that moves us further from understanding breathlessness within an individual. so where do we go from here? how do we tackle these seemingly infinite degrees of freedom and dimensions of breathlessness within an individual? whilst phrenology was popular within the victorian era, where different parts of the brain were assigned different functions, we must now update our methodology to equip us to test these current theories. modern neuroimaging techniques allow us to envision cortical activity that may flow from areas such as primary motor/sensory cortices and posterior insula, relevant for primary signal transduction of afferent inputs, but we must tread carefully in labelling this “conscious perception”. instead, perception (and indeed breathlessness) is likely to be an evolving @erspublications chronic breathlessness, symptom or syndrome: are we asking the right question? http://ow.ly/qjsx hrpfq cite this article as: faull ok, marlow l, finnegan sl, et al. chronic breathlessness: re-thinking the symptom. eur respir j ; : [https://doi.org/ . / . - ]. https://doi.org/ . / . - eur respir j ; : | agoracorrespondence http://ow.ly/qjsx hrpfq https://doi.org/ . / . - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . - &domain=pdf&date_stamp= function embedded within dynamic brain networks, where transduced sensory inputs are continuously compared to the brain’s model of the world. thus, linear increases in activity within one brain area is not likely to produce a corresponding linear change in breathlessness, and we need to equip ourselves with appropriate computational strategies [ , ] to tackle these more difficult, more multi-dimensional brain network models. therefore, the suggestion from campbell and howell [ ] that “a respiratory physiologist offering a unitary explanation for breathlessness should arouse the same suspicions as a tattooed archbishop offering a free ticket to heaven”, appears to have been a foreseen and apt word of caution to our modern neuroscientific selves. indeed, to understand breathlessness we need to delve into the brain more deeply, requiring an understanding of the networks that generate perception, and not just correlated activity in single brain areas. in turn, this may lead us to identify important treatable traits relating to breathlessness, complementing periphery-based therapies across a host of diseases and disorders, and hopefully better address the holistic effect of an illness on the life of an individual. olivia k. faull, lucy marlow, sarah l. finnegan and kyle t.s. pattinson breathe oxford research group, nuffield dept of clinical neurosciences, university of oxford, oxford, uk. correspondence: kyle t.s. pattinson, breathe oxford research group, nuffield dept of clinical neurosciences, university of oxford, john radcliffe hospital, oxford, ox du, uk. e-mail: kyle.pattinson@nda.ox.ac.uk received: oct | accepted: nov conflict of interest: disclosures can be found alongside this article at erj.ersjournals.com references johnson mj, yorke j, hansen-flaschen j, et al. towards an expert consensus to delineate a clinical syndrome of chronic breathlessness. eur respir j ; : . johnson mj, yorke j, hansen-flaschen j, et al. breathlessness despite optimal pathophysiological treatment: on the relevance of being chronic. eur respir j ; : . calverley pma. breathlessness despite optimal pathophysiological treatment: on the relevance of being chronic. eur respir j ; : . morélot-panzini c, adler d, aguilaniu b, et al. breathlessness despite optimal pathophysiological treatment: on the relevance of being chronic. eur respir j ; : . calverley pma. chronic breathlessness: symptom or syndrome? eur respir j ; : . seth ak. interoceptive inference, emotion, and the embodied self. trends cogn sci ; : – . stephan ke, manjaly zm, mathys cd, et al. allostatic self-efficacy: a metacognitive theory of dyshomeostasis-induced fatigue and depression. front hum neurosci ; : – . van den bergh o, witthöft m, petersen s, et al. symptoms and the body: taking the inferential leap. neurosci biobehav rev ; : – . herigstad m, faull ok, hayen a, et al. treating breathlessness via the brain: changes in brain activity over a course of pulmonary rehabilitation. eur respir j ; : . faull ok, hayen a, pattinson kts. breathlessness and the body: neuroimaging clues for the inferential leap. cortex ; : – . garfinkel sn, seth ak, barrett ab, et al. knowing your own heart: distinguishing interoceptive accuracy from interoceptive awareness. biol psychol ; : – . garfinkel sn, manassei mf, hamilton-fletcher g, et al. interoceptive dimensions across cardiac and respiratory axes. philos trans r soc lond b biol sci ; : . stephan ke, friston kj. analyzing effective connectivity with functional magnetic resonance imaging. wires cogn sci ; : – . perception sensory inputs prior figure schematic of the bayesian brain hypothesis. both prior expectations and incoming sensory information contribute to the resulting perception, where each is a distribution of possible values. thus, both the precision and position of priors and sensory inputs can influence perception. https://doi.org/ . / . - correspondence mailto:kyle.pattinson@nda.ox.ac.uk erj.ersjournals.com petzschner fh, weber lae, gard t, et al. computational psychosomatics and computational psychiatry: toward a joint framework for differential diagnosis. biol psychiatry : – . campbell ejm, howell jbl. the sensation of dyspnoea. br med j ; : . copyright ©ers from the authors: we agree with much presented in o.k. faull and colleagues’ response to our proposed chronic breathlessness syndrome and thank them for their views supporting chronic breathlessness as more than just a symptom [ ]. in particular, we agree that naming and defining chronic breathlessness as a syndrome does not aim, or need, to constrain a recognition or understanding of quantitative and qualitative between-individual differences. we agree that our intention is to ensure patients and their families living with the daily disability affecting all domains of life, irrespective of cause, may legitimately bring this experience to the attention of health and social professionals, receive a systematic assessment and subsequently benefit from individually tailored evidence-based management. there are two issues for comment. firstly, o.k. faull and colleagues appear to equate breathlessness with primarily a sensory, effective and cognitive perception. however, the foremost burden of chronic breathlessness is not sensory, but rather the functional confinement that breathlessness imposes on an individual. in chronic breathlessness, affective and cognitive perceptions relate more to loss of function, socialisation and fulfilment, and to fear of suffocation and death. chronic breathlessness syndrome highlights that the impact of this condition reaches well beyond the unpleasant perceptions of, and emotional response to, a symptom into the realm of functional impairment and disability. this concept is illustrated well in recently published practical clinical assessment and management approaches to chronic breathlessness, the breathing, thinking, functioning and breathing space models [ , ]. secondly, the use of the term reductionist is unhelpful as implied by o.k. faull and colleagues, that is, a syndrome attempts the impossible; a complex idea cannot be completely understood in terms of its components and an attempt to do so is foolish. however, reductionist may also be used in the sense of analysing “complex things into less complex constituents” [ ]. “breathlessness persists despite optimal treatment and causes disability” [ ] for many, yet remains almost totally invisible to most health and social care professionals. therefore chronic breathlessness needs an identifiable profile in order to bring patient experience into view, help them access evidence-based interventions and stimulate research into the complexity of breathlessness in order to identify future therapeutic targets. already, the work of o.k. faull and colleagues has increased our understanding that perception of chronic breathlessness (experienced by patients) compared with that in healthy volunteer models is different; but much more research is needed [ ]. if reducing the complex to recognisable components in clinical practice helps clinicians to routinely assess patients, helps patients have their concerns heard, helps carers to seek support and understanding, and helps services to develop and research to grow, then the reduction of chronic breathlessness to a syndrome will have made a major difference to the lives of many. miriam j. johnson , janelle yorke , john hansen-flaschen , robert lansing , magnus ekström and david c. currow , wolfson palliative care research centre, hull york medical school, university of hull, hull, uk. school of nursing, midwifery and social work, university of manchester, manchester, uk. perelman school of medicine, hospital of the university of pennsylvania, philadelphia, pa, usa. beth israel hospital harvard medical school, boston, ma, usa. dept of clinical sciences, division of respiratory medicine & allergology, lund university, lund, sweden. faculty of health, university of technology sydney, sydney, australia. correspondence: miriam j. johnson, allam medical building, hull york medical school, university of hull, hull, hu rx, uk. e-mail: miriam.johnson@hyms.ac.uk received: nov | accepted: nov conflict of interest: disclosures can be found alongside this article at erj.ersjournals.com @erspublications chronic breathlessness reaches beyond symptom perception into the realm of functional impairment and disability http://ow.ly/ibrd h wms cite this article as: johnson mj, yorke j, hansen-flaschen j, et al. chronic breathlessness: re-thinking the symptom. eur respir j ; : [https://doi.org/ . / . - ]. https://doi.org/ . / . - correspondence http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . - &domain=pdf&date_stamp= https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:miriam.johnson@hyms.ac.uk erj.ersjournals.com http://ow.ly/ibrd h wms http://ow.ly/ibrd h wms https://doi.org/ . / . - references johnson mj, yorke j, hansen-flaschen j, et al. towards an expert consensus to delineate a clinical syndrome of chronic breathlessness. eur respir j ; : . spathis a, booth s, moffat c, et al. the breathing, thinking, functioning clinical model: a proposal to facilitate evidence-based breathlessness management in chronic respiratory disease. npj prim care respir med ; : . hopkinson ns, baxter n. breathing space – a practical approach to the breathless patient. npj prim care respir med ; : . collins english dictionary – complete and unabridged digital edition. new york, harper collins, . herigstad m, hayen a, evans e, et al. dyspnea-related cues engage the prefrontal cortex: evidence from functional brain imaging in copd. chest ; : – . copyright ©ers to the editor: we wholly applaud the move by johnson et al. [ ] to improve awareness of breathlessness and to raise its profile as a subject for focussed clinical research. we consider their research and the ensuing proposal to recognise breathlessness via a new medical term, “chronic breathlessness syndrome”, as important and justified. we share their goal, which is to direct attention to this neglected, undertreated and under-researched symptom. there are two important caveats to be made in response to this article, however. first, there is a need to involve those who live with chronic breathlessness and are thus “experts by experience” in discussions about the framework proposed here, rather than bringing them into the conversation once consensus has been achieved. second, further medicalisation of breathlessness via the term “syndrome” may not be the best way forward. research into patients’ experience of breathlessness shows that the ways in which breathlessness is spoken about (medicalised and otherwise) not only reflect their experiences but also helps to shape how breathlessness is lived [ – ]. o.k. faull and colleagues, in their response to johnson et al. [ ], comment on the individuality of responses to breathlessness that rely on prior experiences and bodily awareness (interoception). context and culture play an important role in shaping the understanding and perception of breathlessness [ – , ]. for example, among african american communities across the usa, the last words of eric garner, “i can’t breathe”, as he suffocated in a tussle with police officers, have become a slogan for the black lives matter movement and a metaphor for the lives of those living under other kinds of oppression [ ]. baŞoĞlu [ ] suggests that asphyxiation is the most traumatic form of torture and that persistent breathlessness because of an underlying medical condition may be even worse due to the duration of the suffering involved. sufferers of respiratory illness vary in relation to the intensity, affect, ideation and meaning they attribute to their breathlessness [ – ]. it affects every aspect of the life of a breathless person in ways that description of it as a medical symptom cannot capture in full [ ]. there is a need to legitimise a range of attitudes towards breathlessness in order for them to inform the clinical encounter. collecting such experiences under the umbrella term “syndrome” may not be sufficient to enable full expression of the variability and multiple meanings of the experience of breathlessness, and may carry unexpected cognitive and affective “baggage” that detracts from its utility as a proxy for experience. in view of the highly contextualised experience of breathlessness, it is critical to think about whose views are part of the debate. discussions with experts by experience and first-person reports of experiences of breathlessness [ , ] have revealed how powerful language and context are in determining how people with breathlessness think about and experience their problem [ , ], and how this influences what they might do. words such as “pulmonary” and “rehabilitation”, for example, may negatively impact upon the uptake of one of the most effective interventions for breathlessness [ ]. @erspublications people with breathlessness should be involved in renaming their condition as their experience can be influenced by clinical language http://ow.ly/zknj hzuum cite this article as: macnaughton j, oxley r, rose a, et al. chronic breathlessness: re-thinking the symptom. eur respir j ; : [https://doi.org/ . / . - ]. https://doi.org/ . / . - correspondence http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . - &domain=pdf&date_stamp= http://ow.ly/zknj hzuum http://ow.ly/zknj hzuum https://doi.org/ . / . - there is a further stage necessary in the research process of johnson et al. [ ] in order to validate the claim made in the paper that “a recognised syndrome would […] give permission for patients to discuss their ongoing breathlessness with their clinicians”. as johnson et al. [ ] suggest, patients and their families need to be involved in the discussion, but they should be able to critique the framework suggested by the paper, rather than be presented with it as a fait accompli. otherwise there is a danger that the words “chronic” and “syndrome” will drive people with breathlessness further underground, in part because they have not been involved in the process of describing their own condition [ ]. we encourage johnson et al. [ ] to take this research on to its next logical stage, that of developing a truly consensual terminology that considers the critical role language, metaphor and meaning play in both living with and treating breathlessness. this could be done using the delphi technique within a more participatory paradigm [ ]. such an approach offers the chance of empowering patients and caregivers in ways that would result in real changes to both their experience and treatment. jane macnaughton , , , rebecca oxley , , , arthur rose , , , andrew russell , , james w. dodd , , and havi carel , centre for medical humanities, durham university, durham, uk. dept of anthropology, durham university, durham, uk. life of breath project, durham, uk. dept of english studies, durham university, durham, uk. dept of anthropology, durham university, durham, uk. academic respiratory unit, southmead hospital, bristol, uk. respiratory medicine, university of bristol, bristol, uk. life of breath project, bristol, uk. dept of philosophy, university of bristol, bristol, uk. correspondence: jane macnaughton, centre for medical humanities, durham university, caedmon hall, leazes road, durham, dh sz, uk. e-mail: jane.macnaughton@durham.ac.uk received: nov | accepted: nov conflict of interest: disclosures can be found alongside this article at erj.ersjournals.com references johnson mj, yorke j, hansen-flaschen j, et al. towards an expert consensus to delineate a clinical syndrome of chronic breathlessness. eur respir j ; : . rose a. tim winton’s pneumatic materialism. interventions ; in press. carel h. phenomenology of illness. oxford, oxford university press, . oxley r, macnaughton j. inspiring change: humanities and social science insights into the experience and management of breathlessness. curr opin support palliat care ; : – . carel h. illness: the cry of the flesh. nd edn. durham, acumen, . oxley r. lost in translation? exploring the language of breathlessness. life of breath blog. https://lifeofbreath. org/ / /lost-in-translation-exploring-the-language-of-breathlessness/ date last accessed: november , . date last updated: september , . başoğlu m. effective management of breathlessness: a review of potential human rights issues. eur respir j ; : . hayen a, herigstad m, pattinson kts. understanding dyspnea as a complex individual experience. maturitas ; : – . kidd ij, carel h. epistemic injustice and illness. j appl philos ; : – . kezar a, maxey d. the delphi technique: an untapped approach of participatory research. int j soc res methodol ; : – . copyright ©ers this article is open access and distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence . https://doi.org/ . / . - correspondence mailto:jane.macnaughton@durham.ac.uk erj.ersjournals.com https://lifeofbreath.org/ / /lost-in-translation-exploring-the-language-of-breathlessness/ https://lifeofbreath.org/ / /lost-in-translation-exploring-the-language-of-breathlessness/ https://lifeofbreath.org/ / /lost-in-translation-exploring-the-language-of-breathlessness/ https://lifeofbreath.org/ / /lost-in-translation-exploring-the-language-of-breathlessness/ https://lifeofbreath.org/ / /lost-in-translation-exploring-the-language-of-breathlessness/ https://lifeofbreath.org/ / /lost-in-translation-exploring-the-language-of-breathlessness/ https://lifeofbreath.org/ / /lost-in-translation-exploring-the-language-of-breathlessness/ https://lifeofbreath.org/ / /lost-in-translation-exploring-the-language-of-breathlessness/ https://lifeofbreath.org/ / /lost-in-translation-exploring-the-language-of-breathlessness/ https://lifeofbreath.org/ / /lost-in-translation-exploring-the-language-of-breathlessness/ 	chronic breathlessness: re-thinking the symptom 	references 	references 	references we are who we are: futuristic teen agers backstage / recensioni https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / zonemoda journal. vol. n. ( ) issn - we are who we are: futuristic teen agers ylenia caputo* pubblicato: dicembre “il personale è politico”. la seconda ondata femminista degli anni settanta ha fatto di tale enunciato il proprio slogan. oggi, a distanza di cinquant’anni, il valore di queste quattro parole sembra aver man- tenuto la stessa carica rivoluzionaria. ci ricorda che ciò che l’individuo è, è inscindibile da ciò che l’in- dividuo è nel mondo e come prodotto di questo mondo. È una missione volta a riportare il personale su un piano politico e rendere il politico uno strumento per cambiare il personale. pensiamo ai recen- ti movimenti quali il #metoo, black lives matter o, in generale, la rivoluzione queer: non sono forse l’espressione del personale, dell’esperienza “privata” che diviene pubblica, dunque politica? È in riferimento a queste tematiche che può essere analizzata la serie tv we are who we are ( ) diretta da luca guadagnino per hbo e sky atlantic. guadagnino, per la prima volta autore di un prodotto seriale, non è nuovo in un certo racconto di formazione che fa della sessualità, dell’amicizia e dell’amore gli strumenti per indagare l’identità di genere (si pensi a call me by your name, ). supportato dalla possibilità di una narrazione estesa offerta dal formato seriale, guadagnino rilancia ed esplora in profondità i temi trattati in precedenza. stavolta, dedica il suo racconto al legame tra fraser wilson (jack dylan grazer) e caitlin poythress (jordan kristine seamón), due adolescenti americani che vivono con le loro famiglie in una base militare americana a chioggia, in italia. la serie si inserisce in un recente contesto produttivo seriale italiano che vede la rinascita del teen drama. per citare un caso significativo di produzioni teen oriented, la serie skam italia ( – ) che, al pari di we are who we are, ha goduto di grande successo internazionale. pur diversi tra loro nelle modalità di rappresentazione dei personaggi e dell’universo narrativo, entrambi i prodotti seriali sono accomuna- ti dal racconto di una generazione, la generazione z, che nella fluidità di genere e nella valorizzazione della diversità trova suo fondamento; una generazione non politicizzata ma politica. per intenderci, pa- radossalmente nessuno degli adolescenti rappresentati è impegnato politicamente eppure il loro agire nel mondo è politico. cosa lo rende tale? in we are who we are ogni personaggio deve fare i conti con l’eterno dilemma dell’essere ciò che è o ciò che dovrebbe essere: la serie sembra ricordarci in continuazione che l’identità richiede un altro, un * università di bologna (italy);  ylenia.caputo @unibo.it . vanesa miseres, “the personal is political”, in teaching gender through latin american, latino, and iberian texts and cultures, eds. gómez l., horno-delgado a., long m.k., silleras-fernández n. (rotterdam: sense publishers, ), https://doi.org/ . / - - - - _ . copyright © ylenia caputo the text of this work is licensed under the creative commons by license. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / we are who we are: futuristic teen agers zmj. vol. n. ( ) pubblico, un interlocutore. i suoi protagonisti mostrano che esistiamo solo in relazione a qualcun altro. il modo in cui gli altri ci vedono non ci definisce (siamo ciò che siamo, dopotutto), eppure crea crepe nel modo in cui ci vediamo, costringendoci a cercare ancore che rendano la nostra identità leggibile agli altri così come lo è per noi. guadagnino mostra tale conflitto in tanti e differenti modi. in questa sede interessa, tuttavia, far emer- gere la stretta connessione tra rivoluzione identitaria e moda, dove la moda è intesa sia in senso lato — associabile al concetto di fashioning of the self — che come fashion in quanto tale. la moda assume ruolo fondamentale nel percorso di formazione di caitlin e fraser: è mezzo di ricerca identitaria per l’u- na e di espressione per l’altro. prendiamo caitlin, sospesa nella sua identità di genere, tra il suo apparire donna e il sentirsi uomo. l’espressione del suo conflitto interno si traduce nell’ alterazione del proprio viso, dai peli incollati sulle labbra a mò di baffi, fino al gesto — per lei estremo — di tagliare i lunghi e caratteristici capelli. il simbolico restyling, vagamente posticcio, le è funzionale per creare una versione di sé stessa più virile in modo che gli altri possano vederla come lei desidera essere vista. significativo il monito “gender fluid” di fraser: «davvero pensi che essere maschio significhi saper sparare, fare pipì in piedi e avere peli sul viso?». eppure, per caitlin, adeguarsi al pensiero binario è l’unico modo tangibile per esprimere la rivoluzione che c’è in lei: pur essendo ciò che è, ha bisogno che gli altri la vedano come lei vede sé stessa. ricorda il concetto di self-fashioning di stephen greensblat: il processo di costruzione della propria identità e personalità pubblica secondo una serie di standard socialmente accettabili e lo sforzo cosciente di imitare un modello socialmente condiviso. al polo opposto, fraser. come un moderno flâneur baudeleriano, il ragazzo dallo sbadiglio facile è l’es- senza di ciò che si dà nella transitorietà, nella fluidità: è solitario e malinconico, tuttavia ama perdersi nella folla; pur sentendosi forse diverso, un osservatore esterno, non può fare a meno di essa. nel non- luogo di divise militari e omologazione in cui vive, fraser è un outsider che sente su di sé tutta l’estraneità di un mondo alienante e brutale in cui non può in alcun modo riconoscersi. se il flâneur, così come in walter benjamin, critica la moderna società capitalistica e il turismo mordi e fuggi, così fraser si oppone alla caducità del fast fashion (e del fast feeling, diremmo). così provoca caitlin: « mi piace la poesia per- ché non è come i tuoi vestiti, moda usa e getta; compri una cosa che ti piace adesso e tra due mesi la butti. cerco qualcosa che abbia significato». È lì che fraser trova ed esprime il suo significato: nelle poesie che legge e in ciò che indossa; ammira demna gvasalia, direttore creativo di balenciaga e fondatore di ve- tements, che «porta il realismo sulla stoffa»; indossa felpe come quella, già iconica, del brand human made — rivolto a una nicchia di persone rivoluzionarie e controcorrente — il cui slogan è “gears for futuristic teen agers”. quanto visto finora conduce alla riflessione conclusiva: i corpi e gli abiti che li vestono sono strumenti per esplorare e affermare l’identità dei personaggi. in tal senso, con la gen z, lo slogan “il personale è politico” si riconfigura: la rivoluzione è dei corpi, narrati in poesia o costantemente mostrati nelle lo- ro trasformazioni, che siano completamente nudi o vestiti di significativi abiti. i corpi divengono corpi politici, strumenti per sfidare il razzismo, la repressione sessuale, l’imposizione di binarismi di genere interiorizzati. gli abiti indossati, così come la mera esposizione del corpo sanguinante di caitlin o l’in- timità senza filtri dei personaggi della serie — tra genitali esposti e rapporti sessuali promiscui — sono rivoluzionari simboli di resistenza, fonte di potere e di normalizzazione di quelli che vengono considera- ti tabù sociali (il ciclo sessuale, il desiderio sessuale, l’identità sessuale). al riguardo, il fatto che la storia sia collocata temporalmente nel , durante il periodo delle elezioni presidenziali e dell’inaspettata vittoria di trump, è piuttosto significativo. . stephen greensblat, reinsassance self-fashioning (chicago: the university press of chicago, ). https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / msphere highlights black in microbiology week msphere highlights black in microbiology week michael d. l. johnson,a,b,c editor, msphere adepartment of immunobiology, university of arizona, tucson, arizona, usa bbio institute, university of arizona, tucson, arizona, usa cvalley fever center for excellence, university of arizona, tucson, arizona, usa abstract the inaugural black in microbiology week (#blackinmicro) is septem- ber through october . its mission is to “showcase the presence and ac- complishments of black microbiologists from around the globe, connect black micro- biologists with one another and foster a sense of community among them, and provide a forum for the discussion of racial disparities in microbiology and its sub- fields.” participation in this event will happen primarily over twitter through the hashtag #blackinmicro and over zoom through registration on the website https:// blackinmicrobiology.org/. an additional mission of black in microbiology week is to amplify black scientists. today, msphere does this by presenting two msphere of influence commentaries from black in microbiology co-lead organizers ariangela j. kozik (“msphere of influence: frameshift—a vision for human microbiome research” [msphere :e - , , https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - ]) and kishana taylor (“msphere of influence: that’s racist—covid- , biological determinism, and the limits of hypotheses” [msphere :e - , , https://doi.org/ . /msphere . - ]). whether the idea is projected internally or externally, eliminating the perception ofa person being inferior based on race or gender is a difficult, uphill climb. lack of representation and visibility in a given area impede the ability to progress. while there have been many statements in solidarity with the black lives matter movement and against the plague of racism, unless action is taken based on the words of wisdom provided, the needle of change will stagnate. lip service is as the wasp that uses surface tension to drink water from the pond, delicately balancing on the tiny ripples caused by the wind, not causing new ones, and flying away when done, while action, and what is needed, is the stone that is skipped to spread the message through its ripples or that is dropped in to cause a big splash. dare to be the stone, the rock that can be relied on, not the wasp that will fly away only to return when it needs to feel nourished. while taking action might be an intimidating first step, we must be bold in taking it. there is no shortcut. for this reason, we as a journal and a scientific society not only support the black lives matter movement with our words but we also support it with our actions of amplification and allyship ( ). #blackinmicro week, which celebrates being black in microbiology, starts september and goes through october . while this week highlights representation, accomplishments, disparities, commu- nity, and stories of being black in microbiology, the expectation and hope is that the ripples continue long afterwards. we, as msphere, highlight the two co-lead organizers of black in microbiology, drs. ariangela j. kozik and kishana taylor, in giving them the opportunity to share what science has impacted their career by having them each write an msphere of influence commentary. dr. kozik in her article entitled “msphere of influence: frameshift—a vision for human microbiome research” discusses microbiome diversity and its rela- tionship to disease disparities ( ), and dr. taylor in her article entitled “that’s racist— citation johnson mdl. . msphere highlights black in microbiology week. msphere :e - . https://doi.org/ . / msphere. - . copyright © johnson. this is an open- access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license. address correspondence to mdljohnson@arizona.edu. for the articles discussed, see https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - and https://doi .org/ . /msphere. - . published editorial crossm september/october volume issue e - msphere.asm.org september o n a p ril , a t c a r n e g ie m e l l o n u n iv l ib r h ttp ://m sp h e re .a sm .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://orcid.org/ - - - https://blackinmicrobiology.org/ https://blackinmicrobiology.org/ https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / mailto:mdljohnson@arizona.edu https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /msphere. - &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - https://msphere.asm.org http://msphere.asm.org/ covid- , biological determinism, and the limits of hypotheses” rightfully attacks the bias behind many hypotheses of health disparities research ( ). additionally, the american society for microbiology is also committing financial sponsorship for both this week and for annual programming, professional development content, and their online platforms to promote black in microbiology week. while these commentaries and some of the issues discussed in #blackinmicro week (and beyond) might make you feel uncomfortable, your challenge will be to lean in, listen, learn, stand with this community, and dare to be the stone. references . schloss pd, junior m, alvania r, arias ca, baumler a, casadevall a, detweiler c, drake h, gilbert j, imperiale mj, lovett s, maloy s, mcadam aj, newton ilg, sadowsky mj, sandri-goldin rm, silhavy tj, tontonoz p, young jh, cameron ce, cann i, fuller ao, kozik aj. . the asm journals committee values the contributions of black microbiologists. msphere :e - . https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - . . kozik aj. . msphere of influence: frameshift—a vision for human microbiome research. msphere :e - . https://doi.org/ . / msphere. - . . taylor k. . msphere of influence: that’s racist—covid- , biological determinism, and the limits of hypotheses. msphere :e - . https:// doi.org/ . /msphere. - . editorial september/october volume issue e - msphere.asm.org o n a p ril , a t c a r n e g ie m e l l o n u n iv l ib r h ttp ://m sp h e re .a sm .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - https://msphere.asm.org http://msphere.asm.org/ 	references canadian perspectives on academic integrity ( ), vol , iss editorial https://doi.org/ . /cpai.v i . __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ editorial academic integrity in : editorial year in review sarah elaine eaton, university of calgary keywords: academic integrity, canada, covid- what a tumultuous year has been. as i reflect on this year and what it has meant for academic integrity in canada and beyond, there is no doubt that the world has changed in ways we cannot yet fully appreciate. for me, the year began with assuming the role of co-editor-in-chief for the international journal for educational integrity. i will return to this point later. icai conference i recall being at the annual conference of the international center for academic integrity (icai, a), held in portland, or, usa, from march to , . the conference provides an opportunity to connect with friends and colleagues from around the world. the canadian consortium day, offered as a day-long workshop to the main conference, has provided canadians with an opportunity to connect since its inception (mckenzie, ). i expect i am not alone when i say that it is the highlight of the conference for many canadians. we were delighted when jennie miron from humber college was named to the board of directors of icai, joining long-standing canadian board member, amanda mckenzie. the conference also included moments of sadness, such as when news of the passing of robert (bob) clarke was shared. clarke was known for his work with thomas lancaster, including coining the term contract cheating (clarke & lancaster, ). the two of them became a dynamic duo of research and presentations on the topic, impacting scholars, practitioners and policy makers around the world. for details on clarke’s passing, see reisz ( ). during this year’s conference, the state of california to the south, and the state of washington to the north, both declared states of emergency due to the sars-cov- (covid- ) coronavirus. i recall sitting in the portland airport after the conference awaiting the flight home to calgary when we learned that oregon’s governor, kate brown, had declared a state of emergency hours before (hyams et al., ). canadian perspectives on academic integrity ( ), vol , iss editorial https://doi.org/ . /cpai.v i . __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ initial impact of the covid- coronavirus pandemic none of us realized that the icai conference in portland would be our last opportunity to connect in person at an academic integrity event in . not long after returning home, we found ourselves going into lockdown as the federal, provincial, and municipal governments responded to the virus. subsequent conferences, as well as provincial meetings, were either cancelled or moved online. as i write this, academic integrity organizations and networks are already in the process of planning for virtual events for . none of us knows when we will be able to see one another in person again. the pivot to remote emergency teaching and learning across schools and post-secondary institutions began in march to ensure classes could continue and students could complete their academic year. that shift brought with it increased concerns about breaches of academic integrity across the country and across the world, resulting in more attention to academic integrity as well as increased workload for those with integrity in their professional portfolio. webinars rapidly emerged as a way to engage in professional development and provide support to colleagues. the icai responded quickly with a worldwide webinar (see bertram gallant et al., ). universities, colleges, and provincial academic integrity networks across canada also developed and delivered webinars that were widely attended. examples include webinars such as the one hosted by the manitoba academic integrity network (main), featuring speakers brenda m. stoesz, josh seeland, and lisa vogt ( ). another example is one offered by the taylor institute on teaching and learning at university of calgary (see eaton, a). these are just a couple of examples of the dozens of academic integrity webinars offered from march through the rest of the year. new online communities also emerged during this time. at the university of calgary, a small internal community of practice for academic integrity, founded by ellen perreault in , as a way for academic departments and other units across campus to share resources about academic integrity. perreault invited me to take on the stewardship of the group in and i carried on with our periodic meetings on campus until the pandemic. because it was not possible to meet in person after march , i re-jigged the community of practice and migrated it to an online space. i opened up the first meeting on march to colleagues at other institutions and integrity hour was born. this informal group has met regularly on monday mornings throughout the year. conversations are participant-driven and sharing of information, ideas, and resources happens at every meeting. we typically have between and participants from different institutions across a number of provinces, from british columbia to new brunswick, join in, creating an opportunity for academic integrity experts to connect and build their professional networks. colleagues were curious about how to implement something similar for their own professional canadian perspectives on academic integrity ( ), vol , iss editorial https://doi.org/ . /cpai.v i . __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ communities, so i wrote a how-to guide for facilitating an online community of practice for academic integrity (eaton, c). virtual events, such as integrity hour and the various webinars, have resulted in a breakthrough of sorts for the academic integrity community in canada. prior to the pandemic, colleagues in atlantic canada had yet to become active in the academic integrity community in a regular and sustained way (see mckenzie, ). connecting virtually meant developing connections with new colleagues, including some on the east coast. these relationships continued to flourish throughout the year thanks to technologies that allowed us to remain in touch. impact of black lives matter police killings of black people led to social and civil unrest, catalyzed by the killing of george floyd on may in minneapolis, mn (hill et al., ). the black lives matter movement had an impact across the world. protests were held in major cities, including in canada, with calls to defund the police. the movement sparked conversations among academic integrity experts about systemic racism in how violations are reported and addressed. i wrote a white paper calling for action to collect demographic data about students who are reported for academic misconduct to identify how systemic racism affects particular student populations and to address that racism in our institutions (eaton, b). the need for anti-discrimination advocacy became a focus of the alberta council on academic integrity (acai) during this period. it led to the council’s statement against racism in matters relating to academic integrity (acai, ), calling for more equitable approaches to how alleged or actual misconduct among particular student populations is addressed. in addition, some members of the steering committee collaborated to offer a professional development workshop at the alberta teachers of english as a second language (atesl) annual conference (boisvert et al., ). at a steering committee meeting held in the final quarter of the year, the acai steering committee unanimously agreed to establish a working group on equity, diversity, and inclusion. the working group will be led by nazanin teymouri and sheryl boisvert of norquest college, edmonton. wicked problems related to academic integrity heightened during the pandemic summer proved to be a busy time for those working in academic integrity. many of us did not take a vacation in a traditional sense and we remained busy (and often exhausted) without the typical summer lull in our professional work. instead, academic integrity professionals canadian perspectives on academic integrity ( ), vol , iss editorial https://doi.org/ . /cpai.v i . __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ everywhere spent their time preparing for september, as one by one, institutions announced that the fall semester would be fully or mostly online (or remote). staying connected virtually provided many of us with the energy to keep going, knowing we were not alone and that we could help one another whether it was to share ideas or resources, or to connect on a personal level for video and phone calls to catch up, and even commiserate. the pandemic meant that we worked harder to stay connected, but the energy we put into that deepened our relationships with one another in a way that had not happened before the pandemic. a number of wicked problems (see churchman ) related to academic integrity intensified during : unethical file-sharing, contract cheating, and remote invigilation (i.e., e-proctoring). prior to the pandemic, i’d never heard of e-proctoring or remote proctoring, as it is also called. i am sure i am not alone with that experience. however, e-proctoring became a major point of debate as many institutions quickly signed up for multi-year contracts with companies offering services that would lockdown students’ browsers and monitor via video during exams written at home. educators and students began to protest the use of surveillance technology in educational settings. students all over the world initiated online petitions against the technology, including in canada (e.g., the one initiated by students at concordia university (change.org, ). the topic received local, national, and international media attention (cbc news, ; krugel, ; sonnemaker, ; wong, ). academic integrity advocates became activists when one company sued ian linkletter, an employee at the university of british columbia in september for allegedly disseminating the company’s copyrighted, confidential, and proprietary information (alden & ha, ; sonnemaker, ). companies offering contract cheating and file-sharing services have flourished this year, including those offering “ / homework help” (isai, ). some companies offering promises of removing unauthorized material from their sites has resulted in extensive additional work for academic integrity professionals, as the requirements to have materials removed often involves following an exacting process that requires time and effort. the url blocking project undertaken by colleagues in manitoba garnered international attention when they wrote about their work on the icai blog (seeland et al., ). experts worked with members of their institutional administration and it departments to implement the blocking of nearly , contract cheating and file-sharing sites on campus networks. even though campuses were closed through much of the summer, they have not only set themselves up for success for when campuses re-open, but they have set a precedent for how collaborative action with people working together across multiple institutions can make a stronger impact. canadian perspectives on academic integrity ( ), vol , iss editorial https://doi.org/ . /cpai.v i . __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ passing of tracey bretag on october , , tracey bretag passed away after a valiant battle against cancer. as i reflect on and also on the influence that bretag had on so many of us, i recall when she came to the university of calgary in to give the keynote address for the canadian symposium on academic integrity. one morning before the conference activities for the day began, she met the editorial board members for canadian perspectives on academic integrity for breakfast to offer advice and wisdom on how to make the journal a success. she felt unwell during the symposium, but none of us, not even her, knew the seriousness of her illness when she visited us. it turned out that her visit to calgary was one of the last international trips she would take. by the end of , she knew she was terminally ill, though she kept the news private for some time. after her passing, tributes to bretag came in various forms, including the dedication of the international day of action against contract cheating on october to bretag, as contract cheating was a topic that she was passionate about. international day of action against contract cheating the international day of action against contract cheating was held on october this year. jennie miron chaired the organizing group (icai, b), leading a global planning team to conceptualize and implement “twenty live in -- global conversations about contract cheating schedule” (icai, d). the live event, offered entirely online through youtube and zoom, featured hours of programming, offered in -hour segments, with contributions from around the world. the canadian hour was titled, “unapologetically ethical: canada’s stance against contract cheating”. the panel, led by jennie miron, included susan bens (university of saskatchewan), sheryl boisvert (norquest college), tod denham (thompson rivers university), bob mann (dalhousie university), amanda mckenzie (waterloo university), paul sopcak, (macewan university), alycia stewart (macewan university), brenda m. stoesz (university of manitoba), martin weilemaker (university of new brunswick), and me. canadian perspectives on academic integrity ( ), vol , iss editorial https://doi.org/ . /cpai.v i . __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ figure . screenshot of tweet posted by the manitoba academic integrity network showing some of the panelists for “unapologetically ethical: canada’s stance against contract cheating.” a video created by students at ryerson university was especially memorable. the video, “imagine a world where grades are for sale” (ryerson university, ), featured students talking about the importance of doing one’s own work. the video had impact because it was created by students and hearing them talk about the importance of acting with integrity resonated with viewers. to further support students, the academic integrity council of ontario (aico) released a new resource for the day of action entitled “contract cheating student tip sheet” (miron & mckenzie, ). canadian perspectives on academic integrity ( ), vol , iss editorial https://doi.org/ . /cpai.v i . __________________________________________________________________________________________________________________________ concluding reflections as draws to a close, we are beginning to recognize the magnitude of the impact the covid- virus has had on education generally, as well as on academic integrity specifically, not to mention society at large. we are still living in the midst of the pandemic and i expect that the full impact of the pandemic will not be fully understood for some time. i mentioned in my introductory remarks, that in january , i accepted the role of co-editor- in-chief for the international journal for educational integrity (ijei), working alongside bretag, the co-founder of that journal. when she invited me to serve in the role, she disclosed her illness to me and made it clear that working alongside her as co-editor included a commitment to carry on as editor-in-chief of ijei after her passing. as i take on that responsibility, it necessitates stepping down from my role as co-editor-in-chief for canadian perspectives on academic integrity (cpai). although cpai is still in its first few years of development, it has a strong editorial board and brandy usick will continue to serve as its co-editor-in-chief. she will be joined by brenda m. stoesz, who has served as a member of the editorial board since its beginning, and is the incoming co-editor-in-chief, starting in january , for volume four. i look forward to continuing to support the journal as a member of the editorial board going forward. if has taught us anything, it is that integrity matters, whether it is in our classrooms (virtual or otherwise), in our interactions, and throughout society. although leaving the editorial role for cpai is bittersweet, i am excited to see where usick and stoesz take the journal into its next 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( , october ). post-secondary students call for changes to online exam rules as cheating concerns rise. cbc news. retrieved from https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/post-secondary-assessment-integrity-proctoring- . https://www.timeshighereducation.com/people/robert-clarke- - https://ryecast.ryerson.ca/ /watch/ .aspx https://www.academicintegrity.org/blog/research/shopping-interrupted-blocking-access-to-contract-cheating/ https://www.academicintegrity.org/blog/research/shopping-interrupted-blocking-access-to-contract-cheating/ https://www.businessinsider.com/proctorio-silencing-critics-fueling-student-protests-against-surveilalnce-edtech-schools- - https://www.businessinsider.com/proctorio-silencing-critics-fueling-student-protests-against-surveilalnce-edtech-schools- - https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/post-secondary-assessment-integrity-proctoring- . https://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/post-secondary-assessment-integrity-proctoring- . science magazine climate change resource managementartifcial intelligencesustainability international s&t innovationpublic engagement infectious diseasetechnology public healthdiversity ecology workforce developtment big data anthropogenic processes microbiome the aaas annual meeting will convene entirely online february - , with related pre-released materials available starting in late january. see inside for details: president’s address | registration | plenary lectures | topical lectures scientific sessions | career workshops product.indd / / : am o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ american association for the advancement of science | aaas.org/meetings it is di/cult to believe how much our world has changed since our aaas annual meeting in february. the theme of the annual meeting, understanding dynamic ecosystems, took on a new and unexpected meaning, especially in light of how vital advances in science and technology come together to meet and to overcome the challenges of today’s rapidly changing world. what has demonstrated is that coming together virtually to highlight and discuss advances and collaborations across the stem ecosystem is needed now more than ever— so much so that we are radically reducing the registration fee for our scientiic program, thanks in part to the generous support of our sponsors. we continue to ofer workshops, e-posters, and other complimentary programming. just as the rest of the world has adapted to a new normal, so too has your annual meeting team. our new virtual format has transformed many aspects of the meeting, and we extend our gratitude to our attendees, speakers, sponsors, and volunteers for their patience and fexibility. this february, we hope you will consider sharing your voice with our diverse community of scientists, educators, policymakers, journalists, and many others. sincerely, claire m. fraser, ph.d. president, aaas chair, annual meeting dean’s endowed professor and director, institute for genome sciences university of maryland school of medicine dear science enthusiast: product.indd / / : am o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ aaas annual meeting | virtual | february – , | #aaasmtg starting in late january, look out for the pre-release of meeting content: • hundreds of scientifc session videos, highlighting the work of individual panelists will be available to stream. • e-poster galleries will showcase research, including highlights from early career researchers. thanks to the generous support of our sponsors, access to the scientifc program for aaas members is available at a deeply discounted rate of $ . not a aaas member? now’s the time to join. the annual meeting is open exclusively to members, but we’ve made joining easier than ever with new membership options ranging from $ to $ .* simply choose the membership option for you and complete your meeting registration. live february – , • invited topical lecturers will be available for q&a. • scientifc sessions will convene to discuss how each presenter’s work interacts with others’ and for q&a. • public workshops will focus on: • advancing your career; • advocating and building alliances; • diversifying and enhancing equity in the scientiic enterprise. • and, of course, leading scientists will address attendees and the public during plenary lectures. *ofer valid from november , to february , , for new individual members only. there is a limit of one aaas “future of science”t-shirt per membership order. members with an international shipping address and student members who select a digital subscription are not eligible to receive the t-shirt. please allow up to ten weeks for delivery of the t-shirt. the aaas “future of science” t-shirt is provided as is, without any guarantees or warranty, and cannot be exchanged or returned. in association with the product, aaas makes no warranties of any kind, either express or implied, including but not limited to warranties of merchantability or itness for a particular purpose. aaas members are entitled to receive issues published only during their -month membership term. connect with us! #aaasmtg aaas.org/meetings @aaasmeetings /aaas.science product.indd / / : am o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ american association for the advancement of science | aaas.org/meetings plenary lectures ruha benjamin princeton university claire m. fraser president, aaas university of maryland school of medicine anthony s. fauci u.s. national institute of allergy and infectious diseases mary l. gray microsoft research sethuraman panchathan national science foundation presented by: product.indd / / : am o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ aaas annual meeting | virtual | february – , | #aaasmtg anne h. charity hudley university of california, santa barbara ayanna howard georgia institute of technology joseph m. desimone carbon, inc. and stanford university nalini m. nadkarni university of utah yalidy matos rutgers university topical lectures as of september , product.indd / / : am o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ american association for the advancement of science | aaas.org/meetings : a critical year to support climate and biodiversity organized byandrew allen, the royal society, london, united kingdom st century alchemy: turning waste into resources organized byboyoung choe, national research council of science and technology, sejong, korea, republic of (south) aerospace industry: opportunities for physical and functional expansion organized bylynnette d. madsen, national science foundation, alexandria, va amazon development pathways to foster conservation and socio- economic prosperity organized byjessica tome garcia and lauren barredo, sustainable development solutions network, new york, ny an epidemiological blueprint to understand the complex dynamics of a pandemic organized bymarianne lucien, eth zurich, zurich, switzerland appropriate scientific responses to crises organized byatsushi arakawa, japan science and technology agency, tokyo, japan artificial intelligence for physics: experimental and theoretical perspectives organized bysergei gleyzer, university of alabama, tuscaloosa, al; meenakshi narain, brown university, providence, ri astrobiology and origins of life: from chemical networks to living ecosystems organized by david baum, university of wisconsin-madison, madison, wi bacteria, key players in many diverse ecological networks organized byjohn beutler, national cancer institute, frederick, md biological invasions in mountain ecosystems: research and education organized byrobert pal and beverly karplus hartline, montana technological university, butte, mt biosphere responses 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( ), - . science article tools http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions terms of serviceuse of this article is subject to the is a registered trademark of aaas.sciencescience, new york avenue nw, washington, dc . the title (print issn - ; online issn - ) is published by the american association for the advancement ofscience copyright © , american association for the advancement of science o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/about/terms-service http://science.sciencemag.org/ black lives matter: differential mortality and the racial composition of the u.s. electorate, - lable at sciencedirect social science & medicine - ( ) e contents lists avai social science & medicine journal homepage: www.elsevier.com/locate/socscimed black lives matter: differential mortality and the racial composition of the u.s. electorate, e javier m. rodriguez a, b, arline t. geronimus c, b, d, *, john bound e, b, d, danny dorling f a mathematica policy research, usa b population studies center, institute for social research, university of michigan, usa c department of health behavior and health education, university of michigan, usa d center for advanced study in the behavioral sciences, stanford university, usa e george e. johnson collegiate professor, department of economics, university of michigan, usa f halford mackinder professor of geography, school of geography and the environment, oxford university centre for the environment, oxford university, uk a r t i c l e i n f o article history: available online april keywords: race health disparities premature mortality electorate political inequality voting health policy * corresponding author. casbs, alta road, stanf e-mail address: arline@umich.edu (a.t. geronimu http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.socscimed. . . - /© elsevier ltd. all rights reserved. a b s t r a c t excess mortality in marginalized populations could be both a cause and an effect of political processes. we estimate the impact of mortality differentials between blacks and whites from to on the racial composition of the electorate in the us general election of and in close statewide elections during the study period. we analyze million us deaths from the multiple cause of death files to calculate: ( ) total excess deaths among blacks between and , ( ) total hypothetical survivors to , ( ) the probability that survivors would have turned out to vote in , ( ) total black votes lost in , and ( ) total black votes lost by each presidential candidate. we estimate . million excess black deaths between and . of those, . million would have survived until , of which over . million would have been of voting-age. we estimate that million black votes were lost in ; of these, , votes were lost by the defeated democratic presidential nominee. we find that many close state-level elections over the study period would likely have had different outcomes if voting age blacks had the mortality profiles of whites. us black voting rights are also eroded through felony disenfranchisement laws and other measures that dampen the voice of the us black electorate. sys- tematic disenfranchisement by population group yields an electorate that is unrepresentative of the full interests of the citizenry and affects the chance that elected officials have mandates to eliminate health inequality. © elsevier ltd. all rights reserved. . introduction in the united states, after centuries of de jure and de facto disenfranchisement of black americans, the voting rights act of resulted in a mass enfranchisement of poor and black amer- icans. today, however, erosion of these rights is a great and growing concern. although the us government acknowledges political participation to be a universal human right, several governmental decisions and practices, often at the state level, appear to be selectively undermining the prohibition against voting rights discrimination on the basis of race, first set forth in the th amendment to the us constitution. felony disenfranchisement laws in many states have a significant discriminatory impact on ord, ca , usa. s). voting outcomes given race/ethnic variations in prosecution and sentencing of drug-related crimes (manza and uggen, ; uggen et al., ). partisan legislative redrawing of electoral boundaries that concentrate racial/ethnic groups into minority districts also has been shown to reduce their political influence (epstein and o'halloran, ; trebbi et al., ). the trend toward shortened poll hours and more stringent voter id policies in several states have had or are anticipated to have disproportionately negative effects on voting among the nonwhite and the poor (barreto et al., ). us racial inequalities in excess mortality are another possible threat to the relative voting power of blacks compared to whites, but how important are they? in this analysis we begin to answer that question by estimating the cumulative impact of mortality differentials between us blacks and whites from to on the racial composition of the electorate in the general election of and in close statewide elections during the study delta: _given name delta: _surname delta: _given name delta: _surname mailto:arline@umich.edu http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /j.socscimed. . . &domain=pdf www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/ http://www.elsevier.com/locate/socscimed http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.socscimed. . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.socscimed. . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.socscimed. . . fig. . age distributions of the deceased by race ( ). j.m. rodriguez et al. / social science & medicine - ( ) e period. while voting behavior is influenced by a range of forces, it is certainly true that the longer a person lives, the greater their op- portunity to vote over their lifetime. throughout the th century, the mortality rate of us blacks was, on average, about % greater than that of us whites (kaufman et al., ). although measure- able improvements in black excess mortality were seen mid- century, black-white mortality disparities have changed little over recent decades. for instance, the age-sex standardized mortality rate for blacks was . in and . in (satcher et al., ). these statistics suggest that significant black-white mor- tality differentials are important social forces shaping the compo- sition of the us electorate. beyond the compositional impact, a contraction in black voting- age adults might also affect partisan politics and policy, and thereby influence structural inequality. abundant evidence indicates that race and racial prejudice affect political attitudes (henry and reyna, ; sears and kinder, ), candidate preferences (bobo and dawson, ; valentino and sears, ), political behavior (enos, ; sidanius and pratto, ), political ideology (lane et al., ; pratto et al., ), public opinion (mendelberg, ; valentino et al., ), political inclusion (lavariega monforti and sanchez, ; massey and denton, ), and race-based policy preferences (rabinowitz et al., ; tesler and sears, ). other evidence ties these racialized political pro- cesses to broad social inequalities (bonilla-silva, ) including race-based geographic or residential segregation (dawson, ), incarceration rates (caplow and simon, ), and access to and the quality of structural resources such as medical care and welfare (gilens, ) e all factors connected to health outcomes. in the us, where populations with different voting preferences face system- atically unequal life chances, population health inequalities could affect not only the composition of the electorate, but election outcomes and subsequent policy, including policy that influences the health disparities that lead to excess mortality (blakely et al., ; laveist, ; purtle, ; rodriguez et al., ). differential mortality by social group has been found to be associated with the composition of the electorate in the united kingdom (dorling, , ; smith and dorling, ). for example, individuals living in working class areas in the uk live an average of one general election less than those living in middle or upper class areas (mccartney et al., ). many national uk gen- eral elections have been very closely fought battles and so this difference could have been influential on past electoral outcomes in the uk. however, the possible impact of black excess mortality relative to whites on us election outcomes has not been examined. in this analysis, we estimate the impact of excess deaths among blacks on the racial composition of the electorate in the us presi- dential election of . because felony disenfranchisement is widely considered significant enough to have changed electoral outcomes, especially in local elections (manza and uggen, ; uggen and manza, ), we also explore the impact of black excess mortality on close statewide elections during the study period. . theoretical framework the social, economic and geographical inequalities in mortality found in the us are remarkably large by international standards (marmot and bell, ) and disproportionately disadvantage blacks relative to whites. and much evidence suggests that us black-white health disparities are persistent at all levels of the so- cioeconomic spectrum (pearson ), and far higher than in other affluent countries with less of a history of racial discrimination. popularized images portray excess us black deaths as largely occurring to youth e the result of homicide, drug overdoses and other accidents; or reflecting a shorter life expectancy among black relative to white seniors. in fact, the predominant and persistent driving force behind us black/white mortality disparities is the unequal distribution of chronic morbidity among young through middle aged adults (geronimus et al., , , ). fig. shows the age distributions of all individuals who died in the us in by race. the area between the curves represents the mortality gap between non-hispanic blacks and whites. notably, the distributions do not intersect until approximately age , indicating that the mortality gap between blacks and whites per- sists throughout the average life expectancy of blacks. fig. also shows that the mortality gap between blacks and whites is greatest between the ages of about and e also an age range during which the probability of turning out to vote is the highest, as shown in fig. . simply put, this creates an especially high political participation disadvantage for the black population because blacks are dying off from the electorate at higher rates than whites during the ages of highest voter turnout. the causes of racial disparities in health are multiple and complex and include social policies and laws that are, at least theoretically, amenable to reinforcement or change depending on political mandates. among them, residential segregation, cumula- tive disinvestment, and austerity urbanism in predominantly black neighborhoods in the us have contributed significantly to health disparities (geronimus, ; geronimus et al., ; schulz et al., ). predominantly black neighborhoods are characterized by higher exposure to pollution, fewer recreational facilities, less pedestrian-friendly streets/sidewalks, higher costs for healthy food, and a higher marketing effort per capita by the tobacco and alcohol industries (diez roux and mair, ; diez roux et al., ; geronimus, ; schulz et al., ). in the us, large black- white disparities are also detected in access to and quality of health care resources, including health insurance coverage and health services for preventive screening, diagnostic, diagnosing and treatment, and rehabilitation (williams and mohammed, ). moreover, racialization and its subsequent environmental, ma- terial, and health care constraints shape exposure to everyday challenges and coping options. repeated and high-effort coping with social disadvantage and the contingencies of stereotyped fig. . age distribution of voting population ( ) (ages e years). j.m. rodriguez et al. / social science & medicine - ( ) e social identity are now thought to contribute to a cumulative physiological toll across the life-course, or weathering (geronimus, ; geronimus et al., ). weathering reflects stress-mediated physiological damage and dysregulation across body systems. these can result in a relatively steeper age-gradient increase in high allostatic load, adverse health outcomes including early onset of hypertension, diabetes, and disability, and excess death from young through middle adulthood, such as that observed in fig. (crimmins et al., ; geronimus et al., ; mcewen and seeman, ). to the extent that social stratification processes e which are affected by public policy and political power e sort americans into different socioeconomic strata and physical environments based on their race, a disproportionate number of blacks are non-randomly exposed to the challenges, physiological stressors, and risks of injury that emanate from social disadvantages, thus contributing to racial inequality in health. it is widely acknowledged that elimi- nating racial disparities in health will require addressing such fundamental social causes and more proximate social determinants of health (satcher, ). because the social determinants of health are influenced by political forces, the black vote may play a key role in determining both the mechanisms of social stratification and the ultimate exposure of blacks to the psychosocial and environmental threats and challenges that increase racial health inequality (rodriguez et al., , ). thus, large and persistent us black-white mortality disparities could be both a cause and an effect of political processes. social and health policies that have population health implications are shaped, in part, by those holding elective office. it is also possible that political mandates or political will in support of policy to diminish disparities in health, are linked to political participation (keiser et al., ; schneider and ingram, ; thompson, ). because political representation is a function of the share of the population eligible to vote and participation levels throughout adulthood, racial disparities in age-specific mortality rates may influence political outcomes. in particular, as excess mortality impacts black underrepresentation in the electoral process, it may limit blacks' influence on policy-making and po- litical decision-making processes including those that affect their health. . racial mortality gaps and electoral politics the effects of black-white differential mortality on electoral participation are dynamic and influence the demography of politics in at least three quantifiable ways. first, individuals who die before the age of never have the opportunity to vote. second, in- dividuals who die after the age of , but before the age of life expectancy of their cohort have a shorter “electoral life” than those who culminate their normal life span. and third, premature death prevents individuals from voting not only in the election immedi- ately following their death but in all subsequent elections for which they could have expected to have lived, making the effect cumu- lative. this cumulative effect most dilutes the electoral voice of blacks relative to whites. we aim to quantify this cumulative effect of excess mortality on nonparticipation. . research design we evaluate a counterfactual: what would have been the effect on the general election if blacks had survived at the same rates as whites between the years and ? considering that differential mortality effects are cumulative, the case study of the general election allows for the full electoral cumulative effects of excess mortality in the time range of the available data. because the mortality files we use are only available on the state level until , the general election represents the latest general elec- tion available for analysis. ideally we would trace cohort mortality back to birth, but for methodological and data availability reasons, we instead start the clock at rather than at the birth cohort of the oldest blacks alive in . although crude versions of the mortality data used in this analysis date back to , it is not until that the available data allow us to account for consistent state-level mortality sta- tistics in all states and years, and to validly identify the hispanic or non-hispanic origin of whites and blacks. in addition, in our statewide calculations we assume no net migration across states. this assumption would be implausible prior to . between and , . million blacks migrated from southern to northern states, million after during the great migration (lemann, ). after when the great migration ended and there were small cross-state net migration rates among blacks, our assumption is reasonable. using as the starting point, how- ever, implies that we will underestimate accumulated excess black deaths by given that all those succumbing to premature death before e who would have otherwise survived beyond e are excluded from the analysis. our calculations use data from four sources. deaths by state of residence, race, gender, and age were derived from the multiple cause of death files from to . population counts by state of residence, race, sex, and age were taken from population esti- mates from the us census bureau. data on the total number of votes by state were taken from the us elections project, while state data on the gender, race, and age distribution of voters were taken from the national election pool general election exit polls ( ). for more details, see the data appendix. all calculations are conducted using stratification by sex, non- hispanic race origin (i.e., non-hispanic black and non-hispanic white), age ( e years), state of residence ( states with signif- icant black populations and the district of columbia, see table ), and year ( e ). to exploit the fullness of the available data, we use similar analyses to examine both the presidential election of and close senate and gubernatorial elections during the study period. our calculations occur in stages. first, the total number of black excess deaths by sex, age, and state is calculated for each year table estimates of excess deceased blacks ( e ), hypothetical survivors and votes lost ( ). state total black excess deceased ( e ) hypothetical black survivors to voting-age hypothetical black survivors to voting-age hypothetical survivors as percent of black vap total black votes lost black votes lost for kerry votes lost for kerry as percent of total votes lost black votes lost for bush votes lost for bush as percent of total votes lost votes lost as percent of total black votes new york , , , . , , . , . . illinois , , , . , , . . . florida , , , . , , . . . california , , , . , , . , . . texas , , , . , , . . . georgia , , , . , , . . . north carolina , , , . , , . , . . pennsylvania , , , . , , . . . michigan , , , . , , . . . louisiana , , , . , , . . . virginia , , , . , , . . . new jersey , , , . , , . . . south carolina , , , . , , . . . ohio , , , . , , . . . maryland , , , . , , . . . alabama , , , . , , . . . tennessee , , , . , , . . . d.c. , , , . , , . . . mississippi , , , . , , . . . missouri , , , . , , . . . indiana , , , . , , . . . arkansas , , , . , . . . kentucky , , , . . . . connecticut , , , . . . . massachusetts , , , . . . . wisconsin , , , . . . . oklahoma , . . . . delaware , . . . . washington . . . . arizona . . . . colorado . . . . minnesota . . . . nevada . . . . total , , , , , , . , , , . , . . j.m. rodriguez et al. / social science & medicine - ( ) e between and . then, applying life tables for whites, we calculate the fraction of black excess deceased who would have survived to had they faced white mortality rates. finally, using the election data we then estimate the fraction of these hypothet- ical black survivors who ( ) would have voted; and ( ) would have voted for each party's nominee e john kerry (d) or george w. bush (r) e, assuming that the voting behavior of these hypothetical survivors would have resembled the voting behavior of the existing black population stratified by sex, age, and state of residence. to provide a context for the magnitude of our findings, we compare the number of voting-age hypothetical black survivors in to the total number of black disenfranchised felons and ex-felons in that year (for detailed descriptions of our estimation procedures, please see the methodological appendix.) in addition, we examine the possible partisan-electoral effect of black votes lost to excess mortality at the state level by identifying close senate and gubernatorial elections between and . in this calculation, we make the conservative assumption that the number of black hypothetical survivors in each year prior to would be no greater than the number in . given the stability of the black-white mortality gap, this assumption, while crude, should not bias our conclusions. in addition, as explained above, we un- derestimate the accumulated excess black deaths by excluding from analysis those excess deaths occurring before . we looked for senate and gubernatorial elections in which the margin of victory for the republican compared to the democratic candidate was % or less than the number of hypothetical black survivors in that state, positing that these races were sufficiently close that had blacks survived at white rates, it is reasonably likely that the election result would have been reversed. to place our findings in context, we then compared these results to the impli- cations for state elections of total felony disenfranchisement calculated by uggen and manza (manza and uggen, ; uggen and manza, ). . results as shown in table , implementing our methods, we calculate . million excess deaths among us blacks (ages e years) from to in the study states plus the district of columbia (for additional estimations see appendix table a ). considering that the total us black population was . million in and . million in , this number represents % of the total national black population growth in this period. the total number of black deaths would have been reduced from . million to . million if blacks faced the same mortality schedules as whites. thus, out of every black deaths occurring within this time period was an excess death. of the . million black excess deaths, we project a total of . million hypothetical survivors to , . million of voting age, about million of whom would have been voters (table ). this number represents . % of the national black vote in the election. because black americans vote overwhelmingly democratic, black excess mortality disproportionally diminishes the democratic party voting base. according to our calculations, democratic pres- idential candidate john kerry lost . % of the total number of all j.m. rodriguez et al. / social science & medicine - ( ) e black votes lost to black excess mortality e or about , votes e while republican candidate george w. bush lost about . %, or , , of these votes. however, despite the closeness of the election, the additional black votes from our estimates of hypo- thetical survivors alone would not have been sufficient to reverse bush's win. when we combined the effects on the black voting population in of both excess mortality and felony disenfranchisement, we found that in ( %) of all voting-age blacks did not have the opportunity to vote in that year for one of these two reasons (table a , appendix). in , a total of presidential electoral votes ( . % of the needed to elect a president) were disputed in states where at least % of voting-age blacks did not have the opportunity to vote either due to premature death or felony disenfranchisement. turning to state level results, we estimate that between and the outcomes of close senate elections, and of close gubernatorial elections would have been reversed from republican to democratic victors with the addition of black hypothetical sur- vivors alone (see tables and ). uggen and manza's estimations of the impact of total felony disenfranchisement on senate elections (manza and uggen, ) suggest it could have reversed senate races between and , of which overlap with the we have identified. in one additional election, the senate election in missouri, adding excess mortality and felony disenfranchisement effects together, we infer that the democrat would have won, even though neither effect alone would have been sufficient to change the election. . discussion in this study, we provide the first estimates of the impact of racial mortality differentials on political participation in the us. we find that premature deaths among blacks have had a significant impact on the racial composition of america's electorate and, dur- ing the study period, may have been a key influence on several state election outcomes. state level findings suggest that our estimated effects could have had political potency at the national level, as well, given that the predicted reversal of specific senate elections would have sustained democratic control of the senate from to (manza and uggen, ; purtle, ). in our calculations we were able to account for only years of mortality exposure rather than the ideal of years. thus, while somewhat crude, on balance, our results underestimate the effect that black excess mortality has on the size of the black population and electorate. even with our truncated years of data, we estimated . million total black voting-age hypothetical survivors in table crude test of hypothetical effect of mortality gaps on us senate elections. territory e year republican candidate votes (two-party vote share %) democratic can (two-party vot georgia e , , . . florida e , , , . . georgia e , , . . north carolina e , , . . texas e , , , . . virginia e , , . . nevada e , , . . (see table ). this number is close to the . million black voting- age disenfranchised felons and ex-felons in the year esti- mated by manza and uggen ( ). manza and uggen's estimated figure is widely considered significant enough to have changed electoral outcomes, especially in local elections (manza and uggen, ; uggen and manza, ). blacks having the same mortality schedules as whites during the study period could have yielded different results in other political arenas as well e state legislatures, cities, counties, and congres- sional districts, although data limitations precluded us from these calculations. if so, they also may have acted to reduce the gerrymandering and redistricting by the majority that dilutes the political power of racial minorities, potentially altering national congressional majorities. the impact of these hypothetical black survivors might have been felt in additional aspects of the demo- cratic process, such as democratic primaries, in which blacks manifest a high vote share in key southern states (some over %), or in the electoral college presidential vote, especially when a small number of swing states decide the election. the current study findings suggest that excess black mortality has contributed to imbalances in political power and representa- tion between blacks and whites. politics helps determine policy, which subsequently affects the distribution of public goods and services, including those that shape the social determinants of health, which influence disenfranchisement via excess mortality. in the united states, especially after the political realignment of the s, policy prescriptions emanating from government structures and representing ideologically divergent constituencies have influenced the social determinants of health, including those that affect racial disparities. and given the critical role of elected poli- ticians in the policy-making apparatus, the available voter pool is an essential mechanism for the distribution of interests that will ultimately be represented in the policies and programs that affect us all. thus, our examination suggests that large and persistent black- white mortality disparities have been both a cause and a conse- quence of partisan us politics over the past years. in our polarized electoral environment, partisan electoral implications can translate into important policy differences. on a speculative level, there are a huge number of ‘what might have been?’ hy- potheses. for example, our estimates suggest that some recent republican governors may have been defeated by their democratic opponent, if hypothetical survivors were included in the electorate. the state-by-state question of whether or not to incorporate the medicaid expansions provided by the affordable care act has proven to be a highly partisan issue, suggesting that different electoral outcomes in states with republican governors might have didate votes e share %) two-party vote difference (%) -year votingage hypothetical black survivors (% black vap) , , . . , , , . . , , . . , , . . , , , . . , . . . . table crude test of hypothetical effect of mortality gaps on us gubernatorial elections. state e year republican candidate votes (two-party vote share %) democratic candidate votes (two-party vote share %) two-party vote difference (%) -year voting-age hypothetical black survivors (% black vap) alabama e , , , . . . . new jersey e , , , , , , . . . . alabama e , , , , . . . . new jersey e , , , , , , . . . . mississippi e , , , , . . . . michigan e , , , , , , . . . . new jersey e , , , , , . . . . louisiana e , , , . . . . texas e , , , , , , . . . . ohio e , , , , , , . . . . south carolina e , , , , . . . . j.m. rodriguez et al. / social science & medicine - ( ) e affected the health insurance prospects of millions of poor resi- dents of those states. in general terms, what difference might it make for american democracy, if we were able to diminish or eliminate the several sources of disproportionate black disenfranchisement? would minority interests be better reflected in government and policy? suggestive evidence comes from a recent study where fowler ( ) investigated the implementation of compulsory voting in australia � a democracy with past turnout inequalities between different social groups similar to present-day inequalities in the us. the investigation was undertaken to respond to the question of what would happen to public policy and the partisan composition of government if the electorate were substantially expanded. findings from this research suggest that both policy and govern- ment became more representative of the aggregate interests of the citizenry, including the most disadvantaged who did not vote before the adoption of compulsory voting. our findings highlight that black excess deaths are a challenge to democracy. while we have presented the results of a statistical exercise, the meaning of lives lost too soon cannot be reduced to aggregate numbers. as with all human beings, it matters whether a black person is alive or dead. each of the hypothetical survivors represented in our results had a name, a personal history, a family, a community, human rights, and the potential to continue to contribute. they matter. after reconstruction, along with literacy tests and poll taxes, the lynch mob was used explicitly to rob blacks of their votes and to intimidate surviving blacks from fully exer- cising their rights, including to vote (markovitz, ). although less spectacular or overtly intentional than the noose, the culture of impunity that allows us to escape accountability for the structural violence that disproportionately cuts black lives short e whether through acute injury, a discriminatory and militarized criminal justice system, or the accumulated physiological insults inherent to everyday life at the margins of a race-conscious society e remains a moral failure and threatens democracy. funding this research was supported in part by the eunice kennedy shriver national institute of child health and human development (grant #t hd ) and by the center for advanced study in the behavioral sciences, stanford university. acknowledgments the authors would like to acknowledge helpful conversations with james denardo, teresa e. seeman, mark q. sawyer, david o. sears, and peter m. bentler, the support of libbie stephenson and jamie jamison at the ucla social science data archive, and the editorial assistance of n.e. barr. the findings and conclusions expressed are solely those of the authors and do not represent the views of mathematica policy research. appendix a. supplementary data supplementary data related to this article can be found at http:// dx.doi.org/ . /j.socscimed. . . . references barreto, m.a., nuno, s.a., sanchez, g.r., . the disproportionate impact of voter- id requirements on the electoratednew evidence from indiana. ps polit. sci. polit. , e . blakely, t.a., kennedy, b.p., kawachi, i., . socioeconomic inequality in voting participation and self-rated health. am. j. public health , . bobo, l.d., dawson, m.c., . a change has come. du bois rev. soc. sci. res. race , e . bonilla-silva, e., . racism without racists: color-blind racism and the persis- tence of racial inequality in america. rowman & littlefield publishers. caplow, t., simon, j., . understanding prison policy and population trends. crime justice e . crimmins, e.m., johnston, m., hayward, m., seeman, t., . age differences in allostatic load: an index of physiological dysregulation. exp. gerontol. , e . dawson, m.c., . behind the mule: race and class in african-american politics. princeton university press. diez roux, a., mair, c., . neighborhoods and health. ann. n. y. acad. sci. , e . diez roux, a., merkin, s.s., arnett, d., chambless, l., massing, m., nieto, f.j., et al., . neighborhood of residence and incidence of coronary heart disease. n. engl. j. med. , e . dorling, d., . whose voters suffer if inequalities in health remain? 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( ) - /sref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sref 	black lives matter: differential mortality and the racial composition of the u.s. electorate, – 	 . introduction 	 . theoretical framework 	 . racial mortality gaps and electoral politics 	 . research design 	 . results 	 . discussion 	funding 	acknowledgments 	appendix a. supplementary data 	references black citizenship, afropolitan critiques: vernacular heritage‐making and the negotiation of race in the netherlands uva-dare is a service provided by the library of the university of amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) uva-dare (digital academic repository) black citizenship, afropolitan critiques vernacular heritage-making and the negotiation of race in the netherlands de witte, m. doi . / - . publication date document version final published version published in social anthropology license cc by-nc-nd link to publication citation for published version (apa): de witte, m. ( ). black citizenship, afropolitan critiques: vernacular heritage-making and the negotiation of race in the netherlands. social anthropology, ( ), - . https://doi.org/ . / - . general rights it is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like creative commons). disclaimer/complaints regulations if you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the library know, stating your reasons. in case of a legitimate complaint, the library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. please ask the library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: library of the university of amsterdam, secretariat, singel , wp amsterdam, the netherlands. you will be contacted as soon as possible. download date: apr https://doi.org/ . / - . https://dare.uva.nl/personal/pure/en/publications/black-citizenship-afropolitan-critiques(ad e d - - bf- e -e e c e).html https://doi.org/ . / - . social anthropology/anthropologie sociale ( ) , – . © the authors. social anthropology published by john wiley & sons ltd on behalf of european association of social anthropologists doi: . / - . special section article m a r l e e n d e w i t t e black citizenship, afropolitan critiques: vernacular heritage‐making and the negotiation of race in the netherlands this paper offers a new perspective on the relationship between the contested terrain of race and the politics of heritage and belonging in postcolonial europe. presenting material from the netherlands, i argue that instead of reproducing the dyadic white‐majority–black‐minority framework, we must situate the negotiation of race in the triangular relationship between the persistent ‘whiteness’ of dutch nationhood, the country’s postcolonial afro‐caribbean population and its more recent african postmigrant population. discussing ‘african heritage’ projects by young dutch people of afro‐caribbean and ghanaian descent respectively, i discern two different critiques of the racialised exclusivity of dutchness. struggles for ‘black citizenship’ seek recognition of african heritage as part of dutch colonial history and seek to inscribe blackness into dutch nationhood; ‘afropolitan’ celebrations of ‘being african in the world’ not only question the primacy of dutch national belonging but also resist hegemonic formulations of blackness. in this ‘trialogue’, race gets done and undone in intersection with other axes of difference and inequality, including citizenship status, migration trajectory and african origin. the triadic framework the paper advances not only conveys the complexity of racial dynamics in heritage‐making, but also sensitises to alternative understandings of belonging and alternative sources of critique. key words  race, heritage-making, african diaspora, postcolonial europe, black citizenship i n t r o d u c t i o n in a critical response to a blog post titled ‘what is afro‐europe? who are the afro‐ europeans or black europeans?’, a commenter named ‘bazompora’ wrote: in the us, ‘black’ and ‘african’ might be synonymous; but that is not the general case in the old worlds, where the one‐drop rule wasn’t mandated. i don’t call myself black, and it is not because i want to distance myself from my ‘dark‐skinned black’ ancestors, but quite the opposite; it is because i, like many ‘afro‐europeans’, still have a living connection with africa and can appreciate the africans’ viewpoint just as much as that of the europeans: i’m ‘white’ to my burundian relatives, ‘brown’ to my ‘mul- tiracial’ belgian family and, only when i’m the darkest guy around, ‘black’ to unrelated white belgians. but let my kirundi username serve you as evidence that i am ‘proud’ about my ‘african’ heritage, as a legitimate full‐fledged muhanza (clan id) and muhutu (ethnicity) – both valid according to the patrilineal inheritance thereof, set up by my barundi ancestors and having nothing to do with eurocentric classifications. http://afroe urope.blogs pot.nl/ / /what-is-afroe urope-who-are.html, accessed april . this is an open access article under the terms of the creative commons attribution‐noncommercial‐noderivs license, which permits use and distribution in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, the use is non‐commercial and no modifications or adaptations are made. //afroeurope.blogspot.nl/ / /what-is-afroeurope-who-are.html://afroeurope.blogspot.nl/ / /what-is-afroeurope-who-are.html http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / m a r l e e n d e w i t t e © the authors. social anthropology published by john wiley & sons ltd on behalf of european association of social anthropologists bazompora’s identity statement immediately raises two issues an anthropology of race and ethnicity in europe is to engage with, especially if it wants to focus on the dynamics of race in practice. first, the complexity, variability and relationality of race and ethnic- ity, and the ways in which racial and ethnic formations tie in with notions of heritage, inheritance and belonging. second, the global circulation and relative standing of racial formations, in particular american ones, and how these relate to (that is: influence, differ from, interact with, seep into, etc.) african, european and afro‐european ones. the relationship between ‘black’ and ‘african’ is a central bone of contention in this. in this article, i turn to the netherlands to explore the relationship between race and the politics of heritage and belonging as it appears in ‘african heritage’ projects by young afro‐dutch people of caribbean and ghanaian descent. conceptualising race as a socially effective practice of categorising people into distinct groups based on selected bodily markers and the meanings and values ascribed to those, i am interested in what connections of natural–cultural belonging (wade ) these projects trace, and how the body appears in this tracing. the material on which i draw forms part of a larger ethnographic study of the social life and aesthetic design of the idea of ‘african heritage’ among young people of various african and black ancestries. over the past years, african identity has become a hot topic for debate, as well as a fashionable sty- listic trope mobilised in the arena of fashion, lifestyle and entertainment (de witte , ). from these debates and trends, ‘african identity’ emerges as a search – such as the one for authenticity, e.g., ‘discover who you really are’ – and a practice of self‐making. this process is deeply rooted in a social context in which race has a par- ticular ‘absent presence’ (wade ; cf. m’charek et al. a): a ‘colour‐blind’ society in which race is denied to exist as a relevant social category, but whose reality is felt on an everyday basis by people of colour (essed and hoving ; wekker ). while the search for identity, authenticity and selfhood may characterise young people in general, what makes it specifically urgent for young people of colour is their routine experience of having their being and belonging questioned, and of being defined by others, often in negative terms, on the basis of their racially phenotyped bodies and a presumed difference of ‘culture’ inferred from their appearance. in this context of racialised othering, identity becomes an explicit and often politicised quest for self‐ definition and self‐realisation, both on individual and collective levels. in this quest, ‘african roots’ and ‘african heritage’ appear as key terms. approaching heritage as ‘a mode of cultural production in the present that has recourse to the past’ (kirshenblatt‐gimblett : ), i see ‘african roots’ and ‘african heritage’ not as givens – as something that people simply have – but as projects: projects of self‐ making and of group‐making that mobilise genealogical ancestries and cultural pasts as part of individual or collective identities (cf. van stipriaan ). while research participants often took ‘african heritage’ as a given resource for identity, the question of who or what is african, and on what grounds, turned out to be far from self‐evident and instead much disputed. as pointed out by a recent volume on heritage‐making the hyphenated category of ‘afro‐dutch’ has recently grown in usage, especially among afro‐ surinamese dutch, as a unifying label for all african‐descended dutch people, but is also contested by some of them. there are many cross‐cutting terms of self‐identification in circulation, and the definition, scope and even relevance of each of them is debated. as all such terms are situational and relational, my own use of terms such as afro‐caribbean dutch, ghanaian dutch and moroccan dutch is decidedly not meant to denote neatly bounded and coherent ‘ethnic groups’, but, much like participants’ own use of ethnic labels, as short‐hands. b l a c k c i t i z e n s h i p, a f r o p o l i ta n c r i t i q u e s © the authors. social anthropology published by john wiley & sons ltd on behalf of european association of social anthropologists (meyer and van de port ), heritage is always a construction subject to dynamic processes of reinventing culture within particular social‐political formations. contrary to popular perceptions, meyer and van de port, and the volume’s contributors, thus highlight the actual making of heritage, involving both the selection and fashioning of particular items as heritage and its naturalisation as an essential ground to group identi- ties. this process includes politics of ownership and works to both include and exclude specific groups. as such, heritage is often subject to debate and contestation (de witte ; isnart and leblon ), especially in culturally plural societies. a growing body of work in critical heritage studies emphasises how these dynamics of inclusion and exclusion are often highly racialised. that is, the legacies of race ‘shape the way […] heritage has been produced and consumed and what and who gets to count as being part of it’ (littler : ). while these debates have mostly been focused on how national heritage forma- tions have been racially marked (see also hall ), this article takes the whiteness – or indeed the historical ‘whitening’ – of dutch cultural heritage (balkenhol ; wekker ) as a context to which subaltern dutch citizens are forced to relate and concen- trates ethnographic attention on their vernacular heritage projects and the alternative forms of dutchness they produce. the question i address is how race plays into grass- roots heritage‐making. more specifically, when and how is ‘african heritage’ as the mobilisation of cultural pasts made to intersect with africanness as read – and made readable – in specific physical traits, such as skin colour, hair texture or facial features? as i will point out, in afro‐dutch heritage‐making, race turns out to be a recurring but also a contested and a shifting object, sometimes expressed as ‘blackness’ and some- times as ‘africanness’, sometimes as a synonymisation of both, and sometimes as a contrast between them. whereas in the past many black surinamese and antillean dutch distanced themselves from their african peers (‘i am black but i am not african’), an afro‐caribbean dutch interest in and embrace of ‘african roots’ has been on the rise over the past decade. many, especially young, people now claim an african identity (‘i am black thus i am african’). concurringly, second‐generation ghanaian‐dutch increasingly embrace a ‘black’ racial identity (different from their parents), but, as we shall see, tend to be critical of subsuming their africanness to what they perceive as a dominant (transatlantic) framework of blackness. these shifting articulations between blackness and africanness among current generations of afro‐ dutch, who trace their roots to africa via different historical routes, call for an under- standing of race ‘as a phenomenon that emerges through global circulations, and that articulates in local settings’ (balkenhol and schramm, introduction to this issue; cf. clarke and thomas ). exploring the variability of afro‐dutch articulations of race in the local setting of amsterdam, i address broader questions about the production of heritage as a body politic of subaltern belonging in postcolonial and postmigrant europe. one crucial issue highlighted by the scholarly field of afro‐european or black european stud- ies (clark hine et al. ; espinoza garrido et al. ; lópez ) is the multi- plicity of europe’s african diasporas and the relationship between the ‘old diaspora’ of slavery, which in europe is mostly a ‘double diaspora’, and the ‘new diaspora’ of despite older projects of identifying as ‘african’, in particular in the context of surinamese nation- alism, ‘african’ had (and still has) a negative connotation that harks back to colonial hierarchies (mbembe ). m a r l e e n d e w i t t e © the authors. social anthropology published by john wiley & sons ltd on behalf of european association of social anthropologists africa–europe migration. several authors have noted the primacy of black atlantic formations in african diaspora studies at the expense of more recent, post‐cold war africa–europe migrations and their descendant communities (e.g. zeleza ). in cit- ies like london (codrington ) and amsterdam (de witte ), an earlier afro‐ caribbean dominance has given way to a strong african presence. the multiple and shifting nature of afro‐european populations problematises reductive analyses of race and identity within a dyadic framework of ‘white majority’ versus ‘black minority’ populations. to allow for the complexity of racial identity formations, i propose to situate the negotiation of race in the cross‐cutting relationships between the per- sistent ‘whiteness’ of dutch nationhood and the country’s variously positioned black and african citizenries. in what follows i explore the convergences and divergences between west african and afro‐caribbean dutch as they produce ‘african heritage’ as part of their identity projects. seeking to grasp the dynamics of race in practice, the question i address is how race is done and undone in these afro‐dutch negotia- tions around heritage, identity and belonging. what cultural and historical elements are mobilised as ‘african heritage’ and how do these come to be linked to particular bodies and people? approaching these questions in terms of self‐making and group‐ making, i show how racialised social and cultural identities emerge in young people’s heritage practice. my discussion is based on seven years of close observation of the field, includ- ing ethnographic fieldwork in amsterdam (participant observation of events and everyday contexts, in‐depth interviews with key actors and informal talks, conducted most intensively between and by myself and my research assistants gladys akom ankobrey and rita ouedraogo) as well as participant observation in online environments. as a background, i first sketch the contemporary dynamics of race, identity and politics of belonging in the netherlands and briefly describe the history and multiplicity of the dutch african diaspora. discussing a number of amsterdam‐ based african heritage projects, the following sections trace the multiple genealogies of ‘african heritage’ and components of race as they emerge and intersect in creative projects. all seeking to intervene in dominant frameworks of identity and belonging, the projects exemplify different interventions, which i analyse as a struggle for black citizenship and as afropolitan critique respectively. these critiques articulate race in different, cross‐cutting ways. comparing these ways brings out the various intersec- tions and relations within which race is produced and negotiated in practice and calls for an understanding of race as part of the production and circulation of categories of difference and belonging on multiple spatial levels. r a c e , i d e n t i t y a n d t h e p o l i t i c s o f b e l o n g i n g i n t h e n e t h e r l a n d s in the netherlands today, two major tendencies regarding race, identity and national belonging seem to hold each other in contradictory embrace, reflecting both the historical configurations of ‘racial europeanization’ (goldberg ) and an alter- native, racially inclusive ‘europeanization from below’ (el‐tayeb ). on one hand, anxieties run wild around ‘dutch identity’, perceived by many to be under threat by ethnic and religious diversity and the alleged ‘migration crisis’. since the proclaimed b l a c k c i t i z e n s h i p, a f r o p o l i ta n c r i t i q u e s © the authors. social anthropology published by john wiley & sons ltd on behalf of european association of social anthropologists death of multiculturalism, the current public and political climate witnesses a return to ethnocultural nationalism, combined with a stubborn clinging to the myth of a ‘colour‐ blind’ nation where race does not matter and all are equal. indeed, the paradox of race in the netherlands, gloria wekker argues in her book white innocence ( ), is that the persistence of a colonially formed structure of racialised othering goes together with a remarkably resilient postcolonial amnesia and an overwhelming denial of racial discrimination, in particular (but not only) on the part of the white majority. in prac- tice, dominant notions of dutch identity and (non)belonging are heavily racialised, inflected by a regime of visible difference directed at the ‘phenotypic other’ (m’charek et al. b) in everyday encounters, including the popular ascription of the label allochtoon to people who ‘look different’. in this context, black (and other ‘phenotyp- ically different’) dutch youth, born and raised in the netherlands, face ongoing ques- tioning of their dutchness, and of the legitimacy of their being in the country. against this persistent but unspeakable ‘whiteness’ of an imagined dutch nation- hood, the reality of another nationhood is increasingly coming into view and into voice: a dutch nationhood that is culturally and racially plural and hybrid. this nation has always been there, constituted as it is by the country’s long histories of empire and migration, but its reality has hardly become part of established notions about who or what is ‘really dutch’. with new generations of postcolonial and postmigrant dutch citizens growing in numbers and assertiveness, however, especially in the cities, new, alternative formulations of belonging are on the rise. as i discuss in detail below, they are carving out new spaces for hyphenated identities and redefining the idea of dutchness (e.g. landvreugd ). the recent emergence of the hyphenated category of ‘afro‐dutch’ as part of black dutch (especially afro‐surinamese) projects of self‐ identification and social‐cultural critique is one manifestation of this. so is the new wave of black emancipation and anti‐racism currently under way. more than ever before, this movement is driven by young people, embedded in european‐wide net- works and activism, and inspired by globalising social movements such as black lives matter. in this context, shared experiences of phenotypic othering ‘force [black youth] to recognize their commonality as “blacks” or “africans”’ (blakely : ) and urge them to proclaim that they too are dutch. their ‘commonality as “blacks”’ in the face of everyday racism (essed ), however, is cross‐cut by significant historical, cultural (including religious and linguistic), and socio‐economic distinctions between, as well as within, various african‐descended groups in the netherlands. these distinc- tions, i argue, complicate their ‘commonality as africans’ and disrupt taken‐for‐ granted notions of ‘afro‐dutch’ or ‘the dutch african diaspora’ as unifying categories. the oldest and largest african‐descended population in the netherlands results from the dutch participation in the transatlantic slave trade and dutch colonial rule in suriname, the dutch antilles and aruba. this is a very heterogeneous ‘double diaspora’ far from being a naturally occurring, monolithic entity, a ‘white majority’ is itself produced through racialised narratives about ‘ethnic minorities’ (jones ) and enacted through everyday interac- tions between those racialised as white and ‘ethnic others’. ‘i too am dutch’ is a social media campaign (ook ik ben nederlands) started in by ethnic minority youth to address their everyday experiences of exclusion from dutchness (http://ookik benne derla nds.tumblr.com/ accessed july ). http://ookikbennederlands.tumblr.com/ http://ookikbennederlands.tumblr.com/ m a r l e e n d e w i t t e © the authors. social anthropology published by john wiley & sons ltd on behalf of european association of social anthropologists constituted by forced migration out of (west) africa to the caribbean and later migra- tion to the dutch ‘motherland’ during colonial and postcolonial times. while their belonging to – and in most cases their citizenship of – the netherlands is thus rooted in centuries of colonial history, dutch postcolonial amnesia and phenotypic othering has made their blackness a marker of non‐belonging. substantial sub‐saharan african migration to the netherlands started in the s, when political and economic crises in several african countries forced many to seek greener and safer pastures abroad, and intensified after the end of the cold war. this has given rise to significant african dias- poric populations from countries not formerly colonised by the netherlands and with living connections to concrete places in africa. in amsterdam, ghanaians now form a major group. many of them have acquired dutch citizenship or official residence, while a large number are still ‘working on papers’ while making a living in ‘illegality’. a second generation born and/or raised in the netherlands is now coming of age, with many now in their twenties and entering public and professional life. particularly revealing of the negotiated boundaries of africanness and the complex ways in which race plays into heritage‐making is the variable inclusion and exclusion of people of north african descent in african heritage projects. the large population of moroccan‐dutch are not usually (self‐)identified as ‘african’, despite their roots on the african continent. this reveals a strong yet often taken‐for‐granted racialised conflation of ‘african’ with sub‐saharan african or black. as i discuss below, some african heritage projects explicitly include moroccan cultural heritage so as to prob- lematise the dominant racialisation of african as black, and some moroccan‐dutch, most of whom are of amazigh origin, are becoming interested in their ‘african roots’. this multiplicity of the dutch african diasporas raises questions about how dif- ferent, postcolonial and postmigrant groups are variously positioned with regard to questions of belonging, identity and citizenship in the netherlands. how do these differences play out? what new collective identifications do young, dutch‐born gen- erations form around notions of ‘blackness’, ‘africanness’ or ‘afro‐dutchness’? what various histories and heritages are mobilised as part of these formations? and what is race made to do in these? i now turn to these questions. p e r f o r m i n g a f r i c a n h e r i t a g e a s b l a c k h i s t o r y the first ‘african heritage’ project to be discussed is the annual black history festival in amsterdam southeast, which is home to the city’s largest black population (mainly of afro‐surinamese and ghanaian descent). a grassroots initiative by several afro‐ caribbean dutch community leaders, the festival was first organised in as part of the th anniversary of the abolition of slavery in the dutch kingdom. inspired by similar projects in the usa and the uk, it brings together a variety of locally based performing arts projects within a larger framework of youth empowerment, talent development and black consciousness. on june , i visited the black history festival, this year themed ‘empowerment’, in community centre no limit. as i arrived early in the evening, an african fashion and jewellery stand was being put up in the hallway. the pre‐programme ‘empowerment session’ was about to start and people were trickling in. the founder of an ethnic‐minority student organisation talked about how the legacy of race thinking and slavery still works in the present and what we can do to ‘empower the afro or black community’; a professional coach spoke about b l a c k c i t i z e n s h i p, a f r o p o l i ta n c r i t i q u e s © the authors. social anthropology published by john wiley & sons ltd on behalf of european association of social anthropologists staying loyal to who you are and ‘standing in your power’; and the founder of a black ‘natural hair’ beauty pageant asked why ‘we [black women] do all we can to look as little as africans as possible’ and stated that real beauty starts learning to love your real self and show it. in the main hall, half‐filled with a predominantly surinamese audience, the festival programme started with a video reportage made for the occasion by bijlmerenzo, a local youth media team, covering a discussion among themselves about whether they, as black persons, are african or not. they are shown not to agree and come up with different arguments. the video thus immediately introduced african identity as a topic for discussion and disagreement. the festival host, a cultural entrepreneur and black activist publicly known as kunta rincho, then took over to open the evening: ‘well, i think that there are a lot of africans in the house tonight. maybe not everyone agrees, but then at least people with african roots.’ a woman sitting next to me in the audience remarked, somewhat sceptically and audibly only to those around her, ‘life started in africa, everybody is from africa’. on stage, rincho – with well‐trimmed beard and long dreadlocks, dressed in red three‐quarter pants, light grey dress jacket, wooden necklace with africa‐shaped pendant, two africa‐shaped earrings and a black button – continued: welcome to the black history festival, the festival where we draw inspiration from african history and african culture. then why not african history festi- val? because a lot of people when they hear african history, they think it’s not about them. but most of them would not deny that they are black, or we need to start a whole discussion about i am not black, i’m brown, coloured, et cetera. it is a hot topic these days: who am i? am i african? am i black? am i afro‐dutch? am i the n‐word? during an intermezzo of audience interaction in between the performances, rincho indeed evoked this discussion by asking people in the audience ‘what are you?’ few were ready to identify themselves as african and disagreement arose. ‘surinamese’, the first interviewee said. ‘born in suriname?’ ‘no, in the netherlands.’ ‘then how?’ ‘well, my parents and my grandfather are from suriname.’ ‘i see,’ rincho said, ‘is there any- one who is born in suriname and says i am not surinamese?’ otmar watson, organiser of the festival, stood up and said: ‘i am born in suriname, but i am an african. it doesn’t matter where you are born, you are simply an african.’ a lady sitting close to him rose to object: ‘no, i am born in the netherlands and i am surinamese.’ ‘well,’ watson answered, ‘surinamese is a nationality, but ethnically, that is to say your anatomical features, you are javanese or african or …’ ‘but i am a mix of hindustani, creole, and chinese’, the lady said, resisting both a singular ethnic label and watson’s prioritising of ‘anatomical features’. watson then addressed the audience as a whole and explained that africans come in various skin tones, ranging from light to dark brown, and that while many surinamese mention the ethnic mix that they are, very few acknowledge the african in themselves. from this perspective, the festival was to promote african consciousness among a community with a highly complex history of ethnic mixing and categorisation and to put the often‐erased connection with africa – rooted in the colonial denigration of africanness – centre stage. the button commemorates the fact that after the formal abolition of slavery in the dutch colonies in , formerly enslaved persons were obliged to work on the plantations for ten more years. m a r l e e n d e w i t t e © the authors. social anthropology published by john wiley & sons ltd on behalf of european association of social anthropologists the line‐up, however, featured a variety of local youth performance groups, some distinctly african‐oriented and others hardly so. the opening act was untold empowerment, a dance and theatre group founded by watson and targeted at ‘engag- ing afro‐dutch youth in knowing and valuing their identity and culture’ so as to strengthen their self‐esteem (see de witte ). using a variety of west african and afro‐caribbean music and dance styles, but mainly ‘african traditional dance’, the group produces theatre and dance shows that tell ‘the untold story’ of ‘what is left in the netherlands of the tradition and culture of the african diaspora’. at the black history festival they gave an energetic show of ‘african traditional’ drumming and dance, the percussionists dressed in african wax print shirts and knee‐long jeans and the dancers in kente‐print outfits. after this, theatre group ethnical file performed a sketch about what was introduced as a ‘sensitive topic’ within the afro‐surinamese community: ‘superstition’ and ‘rituals’, in this case the use of blueing powder against ‘evil eyes’ and taboos around menstruation. the audience’s active engagement expressed a mixture of pleasurable recognition, humorous distancing and discomfort. after a hip hop dance performance that made no explicit reference to africa, africa was back on stage with the closing performance by black harmony, an afro‐surinamese male a‐capella sing- ing group, bringing, as rincho announced, ‘old african culture in a new coat; decolo- nizing this culture as much as possible’. black harmony makes songs in sranantongo inspired by the afro‐surinamese winti religion. lead singer orlando ceder told me that for him ‘winti is a religion and not a culture, because winti does not discriminate according to skin colour or ethnicity and is open to anyone’. still, the song they sang at the black history festival strongly appealed to feelings of nostalgia towards africa as the ancient motherland, the ties with whom were violently cut by the middle passage: ‘mama afrika’, a song they first released during the keti koti (‘broken chains’, slavery abolition) celebrations in when it moved many to tears. when i later spoke to watson, driving force behind both the black history festival and untold empowerment, he explicitly connected african cultural heritage to black dutch citizenship. explaining the social urgency of the projects, he said: as black citizens, we are part of the dutch nation and its colonial history. but this history, our history, and our cultural heritage, has been erased from the offi- cial canons, it is not common knowledge. this is why we are still seen as foreign- ers – ‘non‐western allochthones’ – and why a lot of our youth struggle with low self‐esteem. with his long‐term record as a youth worker in amsterdam southeast, watson has devel- oped a deep insight into the detrimental impact of racial discrimination on black youth and is driven to improve their self‐image and fuel their social progress and successful par- ticipation in dutch society. he is convinced that knowledge of the dutch history of slave trade and colonialism – ‘knowing where you are coming from’ – and of the ‘rich african culture from which you are descending’ is crucial to this end. as happened during the fes- tival, transmitting this knowledge often involves teaching, if not persuading, people that they have an ‘african background’ in the first place. on other occasions too, i observed how such persuasion often included references to a person’s skin colour, curly hair or body shape, but also resistance to such acts of reading africanness into bodily features. key to untold empowerment’s approach, then, is that next to african dance classes, theatre techniques and performance opportunities, it also offers workshops b l a c k c i t i z e n s h i p, a f r o p o l i ta n c r i t i q u e s © the authors. social anthropology published by john wiley & sons ltd on behalf of european association of social anthropologists about black history and social issues confronting black youth. african heritage thus comes to be directly associated with a historical and political understanding of black- ness grounded in the foundational moment of the middle passage. recuperating a pre‐ slavery african heritage as a source of empowerment and self‐realisation is a way of undoing the legacy of the colonial co‐production of ‘african’ and/as ‘black’ as inferior to ‘white’ (mbembe ). heritage as a metacultural framework of value serves here to mark ‘culture’, as linked to particular bodies, as valuable in a context in which the opposite often happens, or has been happening for a very long time. importantly also, presenting black history as dutch history, watson’s projects make african performing arts a medium of telling and embodying ‘the untold story’ of african‐descended people in the netherlands to redress hegemonic narratives of national belonging. as discussed above, dominant views – and recurrent treatment – of black people as a certain kind of foreigners who belong elsewhere, build on a long european history of racial othering. the opposition between black and white thus pro- duced became central to a european self‐image as essentially but unspeakably white. like the term afro‐dutch, projects such as those discussed here question that white- ness by performing african heritage as blackness and as part of dutch history. thus making functional and significant a distinction between black and white as relevant social categories, they express a struggle for ‘black citizenship’: for full and uncondi- tional recognition of national belonging in a context in which this is yet to be attained for persons of colour. ghanaian‐dutch youth, also a large community in amsterdam southeast, share this experience of racial othering and exclusion, but in general the black history festival and the untold performances have little of their interest. the ‘african heritage’ mobil- ised to link afro‐caribbean youth to africa seems to serve less easily to connect them with their ghanaian peers. i asked watson why so few youth of ghanaian descent, despite their rising interest in ‘african heritage’, participate in these projects. one of the reasons he gave was that in amsterdam southeast surinamese are dominant, especially in politics and activism, and ‘ghanaians don’t really participate in the black struggle.’ conversely, some ghanaian‐dutch i spoke to felt that surinamese strongly positioned themselves as dutch citizens, entitled to the country on historical, colonial grounds, and africans as (unwanted) immigrants, who essentially belong elsewhere (in africa). cross‐cutting the notion of (and struggle for) black citizenship, then, is a distinction made between (afro‐caribbean) postcolonial belonging and (african) postmigrant (non‐)belonging. this intersection complicates the primacy of the dominant‐whiteness versus subaltern‐blackness opposition and the singularity of notions like black citizen- ship and ‘the black struggle’. to flesh this out, i now turn to ghanaian practices of citi- zenship, blackness and african heritage‐making in the netherlands. u n i t i n g t h e g l o b a l ‘ c i t i z e n s o f a l k e b u l a n ’ in contrast to (post)colonial migrants, who travelled to the netherlands holding dutch passports, most ghanaian migrants have been more concerned with acquiring another reason is that many ghanaians are committed christians and are put off by untold’s inter- est in winti. this raises the question, to be addressed elsewhere, of how religion, including also islam, plays into the racial formations emerging here. m a r l e e n d e w i t t e © the authors. social anthropology published by john wiley & sons ltd on behalf of european association of social anthropologists citizenship than with social recognition of citizenship already obtained. a dutch pass- port makes life and work in the netherlands easier and more efficient and is thus an important tool for realising their goals. whether they have this passport or not, many first‐generation ghanaians perceive of themselves as ‘strangers in somebody’s land’ (ohohuo in twi), as travellers (okwantuni), a temporary experience often commented on in popular songs and radio discussions. being seen as strangers despite dutch citi- zenship is not the problem; they struggle with different issues, including the difficulty of obtaining papers or legalising diplomas, and the barrier the dutch language poses. formal citizenship, then, is not so much a social issue of national belonging, but more a practical one of access to the rights and benefits that come with being a member of the dutch nation. very important among these is access to unrestricted international travel, including the possibility to go ‘home’ and come back. dutch citizenship thus enables transnational living (cf. mazzucato ), and the latter is more important. although many ghanaians i have spoken to acknowledge that in europe they are categorised as ‘black’, many express reservations about this term and prefer to think of themselves as africans. in the dutch context, and particularly in amsterdam southeast, ‘black’ is a social category already occupied by dominant others (afro‐caribbeans). ‘to ghanaians,’ one ghanaian‐dutch young woman said referring to her parents’ gen- eration, ‘there is very little difference between white europeans and black europeans.’ a distinction between ‘european’ or ‘western’ (including ‘black’ and ‘white’) and ‘african’ can trump that between ‘white’ and ‘black’. a ghanaian mother in her fifties was quite explicit about the difference between ‘blacks’ and ‘africans’: blacks don’t know where they are coming from – it is sad – so they have all these identity issues. they don’t know who they are, where they belong. africans know where they are coming from, and then i am not talking about ‘i am from ghana’, ‘i am from nigeria’, no, and i am not even talking about which tribe, no. africans know their village, their hometown. if you don’t know your village, you are not an african. indeed, a ghanaian‐dutch student of mine recounted how, when she visited ghana and her accent gave her away as foreign‐born, the question ‘where are you from?’ (wofiri hen?) served as a litmus test for her true ghanaianness (easily generalised as africanness). her mentioning of her mother’s hometown proved both her culturally correct interpretation of the question (not place of birth or residence, but of ances- try), her connection to a concrete place in ghana and her knowledge of the asante principle of matrilineal descent. in contrast to watson’s reading of africanness from ‘anatomical features’, ghanaians (in ghana and abroad) locate being african in physi- cal appearance only if connected to cultural knowledge and a known genealogical link to a ‘hometown’. most ghanaian parents abroad try to raise their children with such knowledge and a strong awareness of being african. like in the opening vignette, this includes specific ethnic (e.g. asante, ewe) identifications and heritages. a ‘black con- sciousness’ is not necessarily part of it. this is changing with the second generation. just like their afro‐caribbean peers, ghanaian‐dutch youths live in a white‐dominated society in which racial discrimina- tion is a fact of life they have had to deal with since primary school. especially for those growing up in white environments, blackness is a reality as material as the inquisitive fingers of white school mates touching their hair and remarks about the colour of their b l a c k c i t i z e n s h i p, a f r o p o l i ta n c r i t i q u e s © the authors. social anthropology published by john wiley & sons ltd on behalf of european association of social anthropologists skin or the shape of their nose. as a result, many ghanaian‐dutch have inadvertently come to see themselves as black, and are increasingly coming to identify with black social struggles, both in the netherlands and elsewhere. the new wave of black eman- cipation and anti‐racism in the netherlands, including the movement against the racial caricature of black pete, stimulates an emerging black consciousness among them. and so do transnationally networked movements for racial justice, such as black lives matter. more than their parents, they are becoming black. when it comes to ‘african heritage’, however, many ghanaian‐dutch have reser- vations about the incorporation of africanness in a dominant, transatlantic narrative of blackness, which grounds african heritage in the history of slavery. even if they show increasing interest in this history, their own african heritage projects address different issues and invoke different, if connected histories. one example is the multimedia proj- ect citizens of alkebulan, initiated by two young ghanaian‐dutch women and dedi- cated to ‘changing the perception of africa and its citizens’. creating an international network of ‘african creatives’ in music, art, fashion and culture, the aim is to showcase ‘the beauty, diversity and riches of africa’s cultural heritage’. they do this through a series of cultural events, including an annual festival, a music album and a book series with personal stories, collected from within their own networks of family and friends, about ‘african cultures and creatives’. the project name is a direct resistance against being defined on european terms: alkebulan, according to founder rudy, is ‘the name of africa before it was called africa by the europeans’. as ‘one of the oldest names given by our ancestors for the continent that we now know as africa, the name alkebulan symbolizes going back to our roots’, to the era before the european trade. significantly, alkebulan explicitly includes north africa, and people of north african descent, in its project so as to disrupt the common, racialised distinction between ‘black africans’ and ‘north africans’. this, ‘alkebulians’ say, is a european invention based on a mistaken and misleading notion of race that disregards centuries of trans‐ saharan connection, exchange and mixture. among the team members are two moroccan‐dutch, a somali‐dutch and several other ghanaian‐dutch artists and cre- atives. united as citizens of alkebulan, they mobilise african cultural creativity to challenge common stereotypes about africa and africans – stereotypes that have a great impact on second‐generation african youth growing up in europe, like themselves. ‘we all have our stories of shame’, rudy said. these stories, recurrent also in our conversations with young africans who grew up in the netherlands, had much to do with the dominant image of africa in the mainstream media and the public imagina- tion. many told of their confusion, shame or anger at being associated, in interactions with non‐africans, with a continent reduced to poverty, hunger, war and disease, and with a people recurrently portrayed in the media as pitiful and in need of western saving (cf. weiner ). this trope has a long genealogy in the european ‘invention’ and ‘blackening’ of africa as europe’s quintessential other, of africans as essentially different from and ultimately inferior to europeans (mudimbe ; mbembe ). colonial portrayals of africa as a ‘dark continent’ and its inhabitants as savage, bar- baric, primitive or child‐like, resurface today in the media and popular culture, and in ignorant questions and ‘jokes’ from non‐african peers and schoolteachers. in alkebulan is supposedly an ‘indigenous’, arabic name meaning ‘land of the blacks’, but the origins of the toponym are highly disputed. m a r l e e n d e w i t t e © the authors. social anthropology published by john wiley & sons ltd on behalf of european association of social anthropologists addition, ghanaian kids growing up in amsterdam southeast encountered a specific form of everyday racism in the name that surinamese kids used to call them: bokoe, a surinamese slur for african. literally meaning stinking fish, it carries a complex of colonially rooted racist stereotypes of savagery and backwardness, and smelly, dirty and ugly bodies (de witte ). prevalent among ‘white’ and ‘black’ dutch alike, then, derogatory, stereotypical misrepresentations of africa and africans as europe’s fundamental opposite cross‐cut racial categories and deeply impact the lives of young people developing identities as european and african and black. born from such experiences, the alkebulan project aims, like the black history festival, at ‘empowerment’: to provide new generations of african youngsters in the netherlands with empowering, cool african role models. ‘we didn’t have enough examples’, rudy explained in an interview with my research assistant gladys. ‘there was nelson mandela of course, but he was old; talking about young examples, like fuse odg [a popular ghanaian‐british music star] and so on now, we didn’t have that, so who could you identify with?’ in addition, history books in school taught about africa only in the one chapter about slavery, leaving african pupils with little to be proud of. ‘there have been so many powerful, smart, creative people in africa before that time, and after, people doing great and cool stuff, but we never hear about them.’ calling up the talent for creativity as an african cultural heritage, alkebulan events (and other productions) bring together a wide variety of artists, writers, fashion designers, photographers and other creatives with roots in ghana, morocco, somalia, and many other african countries, as well as people of afro‐caribbean backgrounds. this pan‐african unity‐in‐diversity approach was unmistakable at the first alkebulan festival on july . featuring a range of music, dance and spoken‐word perfor- mances, panel debates, food, fashion and visual styling referencing places and peoples all over the continent, the festival was all geared towards ‘taking delight in a self‐confi- dent africa that will not settle for being just a charity case’. in its emphasis on cool creative production that speaks to a young generation, the alkebulan project is part of a broader, recently emerging movement of african self‐ identification and pride among young second‐generation african postmigrants that thrives on the global circulation and popularity of contemporary urban african pop culture (de witte ). although i have not heard alkebulians speak about this trans- national movement in terms of afropolitanism (a term they may well be critical of), their proclaimed aim of presenting a ‘voice for the modernized, wandering, global cit- izen who each conveys a mishmash of cultural inputs and influences from africa’ clearly resonates with the term ‘afropolitans’ as coined by ghanaian‐nigerian writer taiye selasi for the new generation of ‘young africans working and living in cities around the globe, belonging to no single geography, but feeling at home in many’ (tuakli‐wosornu ). citizens of the world, privileged with european or american passports, who are proudly african and have a living connection with a tangible place in africa, and refuse to be defined by the colour of their skin, or by the singularity of one particular nation. although afropolitanism has been criticised for its elitism, embrace of consumerism, and lack of political engagement and historical conscious- ness, its critical potential in contesting ascribed identities is worth stressing (see also eze ) and resonates in the alkebulan project. disrupting commonplace indeed, rudy objected to the afro‐prefix in ‘afro‐dutch’, because it usually means ‘black’ and excludes north africans. b l a c k c i t i z e n s h i p, a f r o p o l i ta n c r i t i q u e s © the authors. social anthropology published by john wiley & sons ltd on behalf of european association of social anthropologists essentialisms of race and territory, and the caging singularity of dominant identity cat- egories, afropolitan critiques posit cultural hybridity, and multiplicity of being and belonging. as rudy told gladys: what we really feel with alkebulan is that we create a world where it is okay to be both, because … when i go to ghana, people see me as western, but here they call me allochtoon. so where do i belong? alkebulan is that world where you can simply be yourself, be both, and also return to your roots. be a combination of both. of course i am also western, it’s a combination. that’s what alkebulan stands for, and all citizens have that in a way. alkebulan’s project of world‐making, then, is to carve out a space for this plurality of belonging that comes with the postmigrant reality of living multiple cultural affini- ties. such a fundamental openness to otherness, the ability to incorporate affiliations with people of diverse ethnic, cultural and racial backgrounds as part of selfhood, has a much longer history, both in caribbean societies (badiane ; landvreugd ) and in many african societies (mbembe ; nyamnjoh ). in a european society in which dominant identity models persistently – and ever more forcefully – produce being and belonging in singular, exclusionary or oppositional terms, however, it has a distinctly innovative character, challenging any rigid binary construction of the world and the people in it. c o n c l u s i o n : a f r o ‐ d u t c h d i a l o g u e s o n r a c e , i d e n t i t y a n d b e l o n g i n g in this article i have set out to explore the relationship between race, identity and belonging as it appears in projects of ‘african heritage’ by and for young dutch people of afro‐caribbean and african descent. the complexity of the politics of belonging, connection and heritage that we see transpiring from the examples i have presented escapes a dyadic analytical framework of ‘white majority’ versus ‘black minority’ pop- ulations. i have thus argued for opening up simplistic black‐and‐white schemes and sit- uated questions of race, identity and belonging in the netherlands in the relationships between the persistent ‘whiteness’ of dutch nationhood, the country’s postcolonial afro‐caribbean population and its more recent african (post)migrant population. the ‘african heritage’ projects i have discussed speak to experiences situated in personal biographies, families, neighbourhoods and schools. these experiences also emerge out of histories of slavery, imperialism, colonialism, postcolonialism and migra- tion – multiple histories that have tremendously complicated the meaning of being ‘african’ and being ‘black’ and the relationship between the two. each in their own way, our research participants addressed the contemporary repercussions of the histor- ical processes through which the categories of ‘black’ and ‘african’ were co‐produced through each other as a continent and its people were made black. this detrimental co‐ production has been internalised as well as resisted, disrupted as well as reproduced, on various sides of the black atlantic. what concerns us here are the traces it has left in the this tendency is visible not only in the ossification of oppositional ‘black’ and ‘white’ categories, but also in the recent, us‐inspired pitting of ‘non‐black people of colour’ against ‘black people’. m a r l e e n d e w i t t e © the authors. social anthropology published by john wiley & sons ltd on behalf of european association of social anthropologists netherlands today – in everyday racisms, in stereotypes about africa, in the reproduc- tion of white dutch normativity – and the ways in which the porous boundaries of and mutable relations between ‘africanness’, ‘blackness’ and ‘dutchness’ are re‐negotiated in the grassroots efforts of different subaltern communities. in these efforts we can discern at least two different critiques of the racialised exclusivity of dutchness. first, the black history festival and the untold empowerment project express struggles for ‘black citizenship’ that seek recognition of african heritage as part of dutch (colo- nial) history and, drawing on a global framework of blackness as a source of collective identification and empowerment, serve to inscribe blackness into dutch nationhood. second, alkebulan’s celebration of african cultural creativity contests the marginali- sation of africa and africans in dominant eurocentric narratives. its afropolitan cri- tique not only questions the primacy of dutch national belonging. by including north africans it also resists hegemonic formulations of africanness as black that tend to reproduce, if unintentionally, eurocentric classifications. amidst the multiplicity of cross‐cutting notions of difference and belonging enacted in these projects, race appears as a negotiated object that is fundamentally rela- tional, malleable and circulating. race is variably ascribed to bodily features, history, territory, cultural style and any particular combinations of these. the circulation of such different components of race, and the various ways in which they are assembled in different social locations, asks for ‘closer attention to what circulates, who consumes, how communities are affected, and how political solidarities are forged and broken’ (thomas : ). in short, the dynamics of race in the ethnography i have presented calls for an anthropology of race in europe that attends to the production and circula- tion of categories of difference and belonging on several spatial levels: ( ) the multiple global trajectories of ‘blackness’ and ‘africanness’ and the ways in which they intersect but also diverge; ( ) intensified racism and growing black emancipation on national and european levels; and ( ) shifting hierarchies of ethnicity on local, neighbourhood levels. particularly important in engaging with an emerging afro‐europe is to take into account the experiences of second‐generation african europeans and their navigat- ing the complex dynamics of partly overlapping, partly distinct afro‐caribbean and african diaspora. this will not only help avoid the problematic conflation of black and african in conceptualising the african diaspora. more importantly for our purpose here, it can sensitise to the ways in which racial hierarchies might intersect with other axes of difference and inequality, including citizenship status, (post)colonial belonging, migration trajectory and geographic origin. a c k n o w l e d g e m e n t s my research project ‘african by design: self‐styling among afro‐dutch youth’ has been generously funded by a veni grant (nr. ‐ ‐ ) from the netherlands organisation for scientific research (nwo) and also profited from a fellowship from the netherlands institute for advanced study in the humanities and social sciences (nias). special thanks to my research assistants gladys akom ankobrey and rita ouedraogo, who conducted some of the interviews on which i draw in this article. i am also grateful to markus balkenhol and katharina schramm and to three anony- mous reviewers for their detailed comments on earlier versions of this text. b l a c k c i t i z e n s h i p, a f r o p o l i ta n c r i t i q u e s © the authors. social anthropology published by john wiley & sons ltd on behalf of european association of social anthropologists marleen de witte department of anthropology university of amsterdam po box amsterdam the netherlands marleendewitte @gmail.com references badiane, m. . ‘négritude, antillanité et créolité ou de l’éclatement de l’identité fixe’, the french review : – . balkenhol, m. . iconic objects: making diasporic heritage, blackness and whiteness in the netherlands, in b. meyer and m. van de port (eds.), sense and essence: heritage and the cultural production of the real, – . new york: berghahn. blakely, a. . african diaspora in the netherlands, in m. ember, c. r. ember and i. skoggard (eds.), encyclopedia of diasporas: immigrant and refugee cultures around the world, – . new york: springer. clark hine, d., t. d. keaton and s. small (eds.) . black europe and the african diaspora. urbana: university of illinois press. clarke, k. m. and d. a. thomas (eds.) . globalization and race: transformations in the cultural production of blackness. 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race aux pays‐bas cet article offre une nouvelle perspective sur la relation entre le terrain contesté de la race et la politique du patrimoine ainsi que l’appartenance à l’europe postcoloniale. en présentant de la recherche dans les pays‐bas, je soutiens qu’au lieu de reproduire le cadre dyadique majorité blanche–minorité noire, nous devons situer la négociation de la race dans une relation triangu- laire entre la «blancheur» persistante de la nationalité néerlandaise, la population postcolonial afro‐caribéen du pays, et sa population plus récente de post‐migration africaine. en discutant des projets «d’héritage africain» créé par de jeunes néerlandais d’ascendance afro‐antillaise et ghanéenne, je discerne deux critiques différentes de l’exclusivité racialisée de l’identité néerlan- daise. les luttes pour la «citoyenneté noire» cherchent à faire reconnaître l’héritage africain en b l a c k c i t i z e n s h i p, a f r o p o l i ta n c r i t i q u e s © the authors. social anthropology published by john wiley & sons ltd on behalf of european association of social anthropologists tant que partie intégrante de l’histoire coloniale néerlandaise et cherchent à inscrire l’identité black dans la nationalité néerlandaise; les célébrations «afropolites» de «l’être africain dans le monde» remettent en question non seulement la primauté de l’appartenance nationale des pays‐ bas, mais également la résistance aux formulations hégémoniques de cette identité noire. dans ce «trilogue», la race se fait et se défait au croisement d’autres axes de différence et d’inégalité, notamment le statut de citoyenneté, la trajectoire de la migration et l’origine africaine. le cadre triadique que le document avance traduit non seulement la complexité de la dynamique raciale dans la constitution d’un patrimoine, mais sensibilise également à des conceptions alternatives de l’appartenance et à d’autres sources de critique. mots-clés race, fabrication d’héritage, diaspora africaine, europe postcoloniale, citoyenneté noire iconography for the age of social media humanities article iconography for the age of social media raymond drainville postgraduate arts and humanities centre, manchester metropolitan university, manchester m bg, uk; raymond.drainville@stu.mmu.ac.uk received: december ; accepted: january ; published: january abstract: an iconic photograph of ieshia evans’ arrest at a black lives matter protest went viral on twitter. twitter users’ textual and visual responses to it appear to show recurring patterns in the ways users interpret photographs. aby warburg recognized a similar process in the history of art, referring to the afterlife of images. evaluating these responses with an updated form of iconography sheds light upon this tangled afterlife across multiple media. users’ response patterns suggest new ways to develop iconological interpretations, offering clues to a systematic use of iconography as a methodology for social media research. keywords: black lives matter; confrontation; iconography; iconology; ieshia evans; interpretation; panofsky; photography; protest; social media; twitter; warburg . introduction during an arrest in the american city of baton rouge on july , a police officer shot and killed alton sterling after having rendered him immobile. philando castile was shot and killed during a routine traffic stop in saint paul, minnesota the following day. both men were african americans. video recordings of both deaths went viral on social media. both events were part of a long string of police killings of african americans during the past several years, and the tragedies were subsumed into the black lives matter (blm) protest movement (lebron ). ieshia evans, a nurse from pennsylvania, was so outraged by the deaths that she decided to attend a protest scheduled for july in baton rouge. jonathan bachman (reuters) and max becherer (ap) were among a number of photographers present to record the day’s events. evans and other blm protestors marched through the streets; on the pretext of public safety, police threatened to arrest individuals who refused to clear the road. both bachman and becherer photographed the impassive evans as she stood in the street while armored police bore down upon her, arrested her, and carted her away (figures and ). one of bachman’s pictures (figure ) rapidly went viral on twitter, and then spread to traditional broadcast media swiftly afterwards. regarding the photograph solely on its own merits, it is not difficult to see why it evoked such a strong response. in figure , the central figures are parallel to the picture plane: since none of the figures are blocked from view, the relationship between them appears clear. there is a strong contrast between the frenetic, awkward movement of the two armored police at the left as they advance upon the tranquil evans in a sundress: they appear to be at the point of touching her in order to arrest her. the background of the photograph serves to heighten the contrast between the two central forces: behind the arresting police is a phalanx of armored associates. behind the full series may be viewed online per bachman ( ). bachman was perpendicular to evans at the moment of arrest. becherer was positioned obliquely to evans and to the left of bachman, behind the pair of policemen. becherer’s photograph (figure ), taken at virtually the same instant, suggests instead that the police have not yet in fact laid hands upon evans, and that this touch is an illusion based upon bachman’s viewpoint. humanities , , ; doi: . /h www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities http://www.mdpi.com http://dx.doi.org/ . /h http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities humanities , , of evans, there is an expanse of grass and a tree, the branches of which seem to arch away from her. both the phalanx of police and the tree form lines locking the viewer’s eyes to the center of the picture. humanities , , x for peer review of armored associates. behind evans, there is an expanse of grass and a tree, the branches of which seem to arch away from her. both the phalanx of police and the tree form lines locking the viewer’s eyes to the center of the picture. figure . arrest of ieshia evans at a black lives matter rally in baton rouge, louisiana, on july . photograph by jonathan bachman (reuters). figure . arrest of ieshia evans at a black lives matter rally in baton rouge, louisiana, on july . photograph by max becherer (ap/rex/shutterstock). figure . arrest of ieshia evans at a black lives matter rally in baton rouge, louisiana, on july . photograph by jonathan bachman (reuters). humanities , , x for peer review of armored associates. behind evans, there is an expanse of grass and a tree, the branches of which seem to arch away from her. both the phalanx of police and the tree form lines locking the viewer’s eyes to the center of the picture. figure . arrest of ieshia evans at a black lives matter rally in baton rouge, louisiana, on july . photograph by jonathan bachman (reuters). figure . arrest of ieshia evans at a black lives matter rally in baton rouge, louisiana, on july . photograph by max becherer (ap/rex/shutterstock). figure . arrest of ieshia evans at a black lives matter rally in baton rouge, louisiana, on july . photograph by max becherer (ap/rex/shutterstock). humanities , , of the awkward stance of the police uncannily suggests not that they are rushing forward, but rather that they are jumping backwards, either from fear or by an unseen, even supernatural, force emanating from evans at the moment they appear to touch her. formal elements and the peculiarities of the frozen moment, then, allied with the contrast between action and passivity, aggression and preternatural calm, present a profoundly asymmetrical representation of power and action: one coercive and the other moral. the tension in the photograph is all the greater given that similar asymmetric confrontations have resulted in the deaths of many african americans by u.s. police. the presence of recording witnesses has not been a deterrent, as in the cases of eric garner, laquan donald, tamir rice, walter scott, alton sterling, and philando castile, to name but a few particularly egregious examples. this contrast between coercive and moral force, between armored male aggression and a woman whose sundress floats in the breeze, seems an example of punctum. in contrast to the studium, or our general interest in a photograph, the punctum is the element that causes an affective response that “pierces” the viewer (barthes [ ] , p. ). however, the notion of punctum does not do justice to the scale and variety of responses elicited by the photograph on twitter. twitter has become a locus of visibility for the blm movement, in part because of the greater visibility of african americans there—a phenomenon sometimes referred to as “black twitter” (ince et al. ; sharma ). however, the photograph was not merely forwarded and reproduced in isolation: twitter users paired many other pictures with it and supplied short, pithy observations with their posts. they also presented similar pictures, produced new pictures based upon the original photograph, and explained the characteristics that they saw in common among all of them. to an art historian, this will sound familiar: these users were effectively engaged in a contemporary iteration of iconographic practice. this paper looks at the textual and visual responses to bachman’s photograph of ieshia evans. it uses iconography as a method to map some patterns of interpretation and how they connect the photograph to the larger history of image making, focusing upon users’ characterization of the conflict. indeed, it appears that using iconography on images in social media provides significant advantages over its use when investigating works of fine art. . the status of photographs showing human conflict one of the most arresting photographic forms is that which records episodes of human conflict—whether the act itself or the aftermath. how do we read them? why do we seem to respond to some pictures, such as bachman’s—to the extent that we call them “secular icons” (sontag , p. )—in marked preference to others, such as becherer’s (figure )? is it even legitimate to view some photographs as “secular icons”? there is a strain within photography criticism that exhibits distrust over whether photojournalistic images can contain any meaning beyond its status as an instantaneous record. sontag claimed that photographs “give people an imaginary possession of a past that is unreal” and moreover that photography of conflict can amount to “war pornography” (sontag [ ] , pp. , ). barthes described the photograph as “somehow stupid and undialectical”, an “arrest of interpretation” that “teaches me nothing” (barthes [ ] , pp. , , ). it cannot provide context: “photographs do not explain the way the world works; they materials for this essay are drawn from twitter data collected by social media analytics company pulsar covering the period between and july . the criteria for collection were the use of the terms: “ieshia evans”, “ieshiaevans”, “leshia evans”, and “leshiaevans” (evans was misidentified by some users as leshia, so this erroneous name is necessary to cover the subject). this data amounted to tweets in total and shared pictures, the vast majority of which were bachman’s photograph (figure ). this essay focuses upon the text of the most shared tweets (containing pictures in total) and upon all the artistic response pictures that were based upon the arrest of evans ( pictures). the most-shared tweets were all positively disposed towards evans. negative interpretations exist via different search terms and in replies to individual tweets: but they, too, use different phrases other than the search terms above, and so were not captured in this dataset. a note on ethics: twitter users may broadcast their opinions in a public social media space, but this does not mean that they expect their opinions to be reproduced outside of that space. in order to protect users’ privacy, this essay will only summarize comments from private individuals; any comments from public individuals present in the dataset will be quoted in full. this includes artists who presented their own work; where possible, i have identified the image maker. humanities , , of do not offer reasons or cause; they do not tell us stories with a coherent, or even discernible, beginning, middle, and end. photographs cannot burrow within to reveal the inner dynamics of historic events” (linfield [ ] , p. ). in addition, these theoretical concerns bleed over into the professional world. zelizer ( , pp. – ) notes that journalists prize words over imagery, because the photograph is unable to convey the more complex issues at hand. there is truth to these statements. in addition, yet some photographs—dorothea lange’s migrant mother ( ), joe rosenthal’s raising the flag on mount suribachi ( ), and nick ut’s accidental napalm ( ), to name but a handful of undisputed classics—seem to possess an ontological status greater than that of being a mere record of a fraction of a second in a specific location. in short, they seem symbolic. such photographs produce a range of responses from audiences: sympathy, outrage, antagonism, and more. hariman and lucaites call such examples “iconic”. they define the iconic photograph as an aesthetically conventional image featuring recognisable subject matter, framed in such a way as to performatively, emotively emphasise conflicts within the society in which it was produced. simple in composition, the iconic photograph nevertheless provides fertile ground for multiple semiotic codings (hariman and lucaites , pp. – ). focusing upon notions of citizenship in the american polity, theirs is a civically oriented elaboration of barthes’ punctum. bachman’s photograph seems to fit their definition. whereas sontag saw photography as providing an untrue past, hariman and lucaites instead see the photograph as producing our collective memory of the past: that they are instances of making sense, or interpreting, important events. for them, iconic photographs form the starting-point of a dialogue with audiences and artists, who reproduce, re-use, and re-situate them in different contexts: they provide the “provision of figural resources for collective action” (hariman and lucaites , p. ) and are thus seen as providing a vocabulary of symbolic materials. however, this vocabulary does not arise ex nihilo. hariman and lucaites claim that iconic photographs follow recognizable conventions (hariman and lucaites , pp. – ), but in this assessment and in their subsequent volume—wherein they examine non-iconic photographs that make the viewer “take a second look” (hariman and lucaites , p. )—they make only brief nods towards any antecedents to their imagery in the photographs. this is odd, because photography is not isolated from the prior history of image making. indeed, they are rarely taken in any form of isolation at all, photographers often taking dozens or hundreds of pictures at a given event. in this pile of imagery, one or two are recognized as being superior to the others. bachman wrote, “when i came back to my car and i looked at that picture, i knew it would speak volumes about what was going on in that moment right there and over the past few days in baton rouge” (bachman ). the question, of course, is what is it about the photograph that suggests it speak volumes? in the long history of western image making, many have suggested that image-makers create, and audiences interpret, images along the lines of similar things they have seen before. broadened to photography, we might state that photographers and editors gravitate towards instances that look like things they have seen before. apollonius of tyana discussed the “imitative faculty”: we project comprehensible interpretations onto imagery, such as clouds, because we try to use familiar items to parse the unfamiliar (philostratus [c ] , pp. – ). edgar wind (wind [ ] , p. ) stated succinctly that “every act of seeing is conditioned by our circumstances”. those trained in the history of art are used to examining connections between images, taking it as axiomatic that pictures influence one another. tracking meaningful connections in the history of art—be they gestural or the titles to these photographs are not the original captions but are rather the titles subsequently given them as they have become cultural touchstones. notable exceptions include madonna and pietà-style imagery in lange’s migrant mother (hariman and lucaites , pp. – ) and the conventions of portrait photography inherent in a photograph of a bird suffocating in an oil slick (hariman and lucaites , p. ). humanities , , of thematic in nature—often falls under the rubric of iconography. in addition, while it is not a given that photographs echo past image-making patterns, or that viewers interpret photographs iconographically, the methodology provides a structure for investigating possible connections. . what is iconography? iconography is a method for examining, categorizing, and interpreting imagery. it has been most thoroughly employed in the investigation of works from both the italian and northern renaissance (warburg [ ] ; panofsky [ ] , panofsky [ ] ), but variations of it have been used in archaeological contexts (roller ) and, arguably, in hariman and lucaites’ aforementioned study of th-century iconic photography. the most well-known formulation of the method comes from the art historian erwin panofsky. he divided it into three parts: . pre-iconographic description. the most fundamental step, identifying the components in a picture. it is “the sphere of practical experience”, augmented by research when elements of the picture are unfamiliar (panofsky [ ] , p. ). . iconographical analysis. here, one uses the stuff of pre-iconographic description to identify symbolic elements such as personifications, allegories, symbols, attributes, and emblems inherent in the artifact. it is necessary to consult materials outside of the picture or sculpture (including books, myths, and standard representational practices for the subject) to make sense of these elements. . iconological interpretation. this is “iconology turned interpretative” (panofsky [ ] , p. ), wherein one synthesizes the materials collected from the iconographical analysis with knowledge of the period in which the picture was created. in order to check the sanity of one’s interpretation, panofsky enjoined the iconographer to hew to the “general and essential tendencies of the human mind” (panofsky [ ] , p. ). elements of iconography have been remarkably influential, for pre-iconographic description and iconographical analysis can help one follow the development and spread of imagery across space and time. its value continues today. for example, reflect upon any number of political cartoons that employ the statue of liberty or uncle sam. we identify these figures through their attributes, and understand their presence in the cartoon via their symbolic associations: each performs didactic roles, in effect telling the viewer that the figure is emblematic of the united states, and that therefore whatever happens to the symbol is happening to the country. acknowledging the limitations and addressing them the solidity of the methodology breaks down, however, when one comes to iconological interpretation, and many criticisms have been leveled at it. as formulated, it treats symbolic content as having clearly-defined meanings when this is often not the case. iconological interpretations evidently not content with his formulation of the methodology, panofsky pursued several iterations of it over the course of two decades. he first articulated his conception of it in german; this account was only translated into english eighty years later (panofsky [ ] ). he subsequently introduced the subject twice in english (panofsky [ ] ; panofsky [ ] ), refining his conception as he did so. the distinctions between these versions are beyond the remit of this paper; an exhaustive rendition of the differences, and the possible implications of those differences, may be found in (didi-huberman [ ] , pp. ff). moxey ( , p. ) highlighted the single (or terminal) authoritative voice in panofsky’s iconology. bann ( ) noted interpretative problems when different artists used the same imagery in entirely different contexts, resulting in a tangle of contradictory meanings and associations. arasse (arasse [ ] , p. ) and mitchell ( , pp. – ) both claimed that panofskian iconography flattens idiosyncrasies in individual examples by concentrating upon ostensibly similar treatments of subject matter. similarly, didi-huberman (didi-huberman [ ] , pp. – ) objected to the synthetic nature of panofsky’s iconological interpretation, and more broadly questioned the very possibility of reducing a work of art to discursive interpretation. see for example, taylor ( , pp. ff) on the dangers of iconographic interpretations of dutch flower paintings. because there is so much (often contradictory) symbolism attached to flowers, one can easily cobble together an elaborate iconographic program—with, however, little proof that anyone in the period would have “read” the painting in that way. humanities , , of have been pursued as secret codes that unlock some fixed, erudite meaning. and surviving contemporary accounts of pictorial content often concentrate upon affective responses instead to, e.g., the sweet and chaste appearance of the virgin mary in a painting, and not upon any didactic program (marrow ). there are direct parallels for the study of imagery on social media: affective responses are common, but references to iconographic resonances less so. this seems to provide support for constructing a new form of iconology, borrowing from aby warburg and jan białostocki. warburg placed emphasis upon the “charge” of affective gestural formulas (pathosformeln) and their impact upon artists and viewers. warburg saw these gestural types as periodically recurring in an “afterlife” or “survival”. compositions and gestures were reused in radically different contexts and meanings, e.g., a defensive gesture used in antique sculpture is retooled as a gesture of victory in the renaissance (warburg [ ] ). białostocki ( ) also proposed a looser iconographical categorization based upon “encompassing themes” such as the ruler, the sacrifice, motherhood, and the like, all of which were incorporated into gestures and poses. this modified approach recognizes the fact that gestures often cross into different iconographic subjects and contexts. it might be more useful to bifurcate panofsky’s iconological interpretation between an “iconographical interpretation” and an “iconological interpretation”. the former would be oriented around the artist’s intention (if discernible). the latter, in contrast, would ask cultural and historical questions, which are perhaps more the domain of the specialist: “why has a certain work of art arisen in a particular way? how can it be explained in the context of its cultural, social, and historical backgrounds; and how can the possible hidden meanings that were not explicitly intended by the artist be brought to light?” (van straten , p. ). a revised iconological interpretation thus provides an independent space both to examine the effect of gesture and recurrent themes, and address viewers’ interpretations of art as vital clues for the reconstruction of cultural resonance. nevertheless, problems remain. within the broader history of image making, we are still left with patchy evidence linking specific commentary to specific images. we are also hobbled in evaluating responses to images, given the lack of direct connections between text and picture. in addition, perhaps because of these breaks in the evidence, the iconographer’s approach privileges the iconographer’s conclusions: we rarely hear the voices of those who made pictures, commissioned them, or looked at them, because records of those voices have rarely survived. . pursuing iconography of social media this is where social media presents opportunities unavailable to art historians: images are frequently presented with interpretative commentary alongside them. on twitter for example, a user shares a picture; indeed, they frequently share a gallery of pictures, comparing and contrasting them. comments almost invariably accompany these pictures. individually, these comments may be inchoate, but in aggregate they can teach us a lot: the iconographer here follows a form of discourse analysis, of “talk and text in context” (van dijck , p. ). here, however, the discourse is between the author of the tweet, the event that motivated the tweet, and the picture appended to the tweet. by taking see (gombrich [ ] , pp. – ). there is often very little evidence linking source material to works of art, something gombrich observed to a student many years ago (marrow , pp. – ). worse, we have surviving accounts for pictures that do not survive, and vice versa. a number of exceptions of surviving pictures and commentary about them are available in vasari’s lives of the artists (vasari [ ] ): they are nevertheless rare. other examples include rogier van der weyden’s descent from the cross and hieronymus bosch’s garden of earthly delights (campbell and van der stock , pp. ff; ilsink et al. , pp. ff, – ). michaud (michaud [ ] , p. ) contrasted the panofskian approach as finding meaning in figures, whilst the warburgian approach finds meaning in the interrelationships of figures and how they are composed. didi-huberman (didi-huberman [ ] , pp. ff) emphasizes that warburg viewed the recurrence of pathosformel not as an identical return to the same meaning or forms, but rather as shifting over time. a classic example is the use of ecstatic maenads as models for the mourning mary magdalene at the foot of crucifixion scenes (wind ; didi-huberman [ ] ). humanities , , of comments seriously as part of a complex relationship with pictures, we make the first steps in taking greater advantage of the information afforded us by the collection of social media data. the rich potential of analyzing imagery, text, and data together is rarely explored in social media research. studies frequently focus upon the purely textual response to photographs to the detriment of the pictures they share, for example in the spontaneous formation of ad hoc publics that arise from their distribution online (mortensen and trenz ). an alternative, and equally rich, form of analysis is to focus upon the “visual rhetoric” employed in photographs and memes; however, these are conducted with little recourse to social media users’ responses, whether in terms of accompanying commentary or metrics that suggest the comparative resonance of some pictures over others (huntington ; milner ). a more integrated approach examining both text and image in a data context is only just emerging (bruns and hanusch ). an updated iconographic approach follows this, employing user responses and their clues to explore, as it were, the mechanics of resonance working through a loose chain of antecedent imagery. the intersection between initial photograph, comments about it, and response pictures all reveal patterns wherein people articulate their understanding of imagery. they echo warburg’s emphasis upon gesture and affect. they point to other visual examples, indicating the resonances they have felt from pictorial antecedents. their interpretations are polyvalent: different people shared bachman’s photograph, yet assigned different interpretations to it. the result is relevant to methodological questions relating to the study of imagery of social media, but also to the permutation of images over time, a classic iconographic question. . . practicalities social media texts—in this instance, -character-long tweets—may be individually brief, but collectively their volume may prove daunting. collecting and processing the data is a multi-step process involving a number of computer applications. the evans data was collected into a basic spreadsheet via pulsar platform, web-based commercial social analytics software that has the ability to collect keyword- and hashtag-based content across various social media platforms, blogs, forums, and news sources (benello a, b). individual tweet urls were extracted into a text-file and processed in a beta version of webometric analyst, specialized software that can download copies of the tweet and accompanying image files to a computer (thelwall , pp. ff). the original spreadsheet and downloaded data were then merged, and image files accompanying individual tweets were manually appended to it. image files were identified individually and the contents of tweets were parsed manually according to recurrent thematic patterns. . . . organizing pictures for analysis there then follows several stages of manual analysis. the first stage identifies the authors of different pictures, where necessary identifying the creators through a reverse image search on google images. pictures are then analyzed for their content, e.g., the number of appearances of the u.s. statue of liberty, or the tanks from tiananmen square. each tweet record also contains a textual description of the appended picture[s] in order to perform future searches of the spreadsheet. twitter users also often share multiple pictures in galleries of up to four pictures. the intentions of users when presenting galleries seem to vary. some present multiple renditions of the scene, for instance comparing bachman’s photographs with becherer’s. others presented multiple artistic interpretations of the event, seemingly pointing to a broader recognition of the photograph’s iconicity by image-makers. yet others paired bachman’s photograph with artistic variations, either to anchor the artistic interpretation to its source material or to show the original photograph and an interpretation with which they presumably agree. still others paired bachman’s photograph with other figure contains a list of all the various gallery permutations, organized by author (where attribution could be confirmed). humanities , , of photographs—be they iconic, such as an image of tank man in tiananmen square ( ) or historically resonant, such as dr. martin luther king being arrested in a civil rights demonstration—again seemingly to underscore the nature of the photograph’s iconicity, and the continuation of acts of civil disobedience. indeed, a number of users indicated their belief that the photograph will be one replicated in history books. however, people did not merely share original photographs: they also shared derivative imagery, i.e., response imagery based upon the original photograph. the spreadsheet outlined above is less useful for querying these: few artistic responses were shared sufficiently widely. for instance, for the top most widely shared posts of evans—which reaches down to the level of nine retweets—the vast majority of posts share bachman’s photographs (figure ), with only becherer’s variant coming a distant second. only four of the tweets contain artistic interpretations of evans. this power law distribution is a common feature of viral events: many people share and repost a few tweets—forming the bulk of the sharing—while there is a long tail of tweets that appear briefly and are barely reposted at all (nahon and hemsley ). this does not mean that these less widely shared pictures, situated far down in the list of posted tweets, are unworthy of interest: far from it. however, to study them, the researcher will have to pick through all the collected pictures to find them. in this dataset, there are over variations (see section . below). humanities , , x for peer review of iconicity by image-makers. yet others paired bachman’s photograph with artistic variations, either to anchor the artistic interpretation to its source material or to show the original photograph and an interpretation with which they presumably agree. still others paired bachman’s photograph with other photographs—be they iconic, such as an image of tank man in tiananmen square ( ) or historically resonant, such as dr. martin luther king being arrested in a civil rights demonstration— again seemingly to underscore the nature of the photograph’s iconicity, and the continuation of acts of civil disobedience. indeed, a number of users indicated their belief that the photograph will be one replicated in history books. however, people did not merely share original photographs: they also shared derivative imagery, i.e., response imagery based upon the original photograph. the spreadsheet outlined above is less useful for querying these: few artistic responses were shared sufficiently widely. for instance, for the top most widely shared posts of evans—which reaches down to the level of nine retweets—the vast majority of posts share bachman’s photographs (figure ), with only becherer’s variant coming a distant second. only four of the tweets contain artistic interpretations of evans. this power law distribution is a common feature of viral events: many people share and repost a few tweets—forming the bulk of the sharing—while there is a long tail of tweets that appear briefly and are barely reposted at all (nahon and hemsley ). this does not mean that these less widely shared pictures, situated far down in the list of posted tweets, are unworthy of interest: far from it. however, to study them, the researcher will have to pick through all the collected pictures to find them. in this dataset, there are over variations (see section . below). figure . sharing images of ieshia evans over the period – july , demonstrating the utter dominance of jonathan bachman’s photograph in the dataset. chart developed in tableau. . . . the importance of textual commentary because the vast majority of sharing focused upon bachman’s photograph, concentrating exclusively upon the small variety of pictures omits a lot of evidence: namely, the wide variety of comments people make about the pictures they share. this textual commentary is analyzed as further evidence of iconographic resonances. tweets are broken into separate themes and listed in the spreadsheet. for instance, any time an author refers to the police in the picture as “robocops”, “army”, or “armor”, that tweet is tagged as “armored police”. iterations of similar comments can be aggregated to achieve a better this approach is based very loosely upon framing and content analysis, except that the texts are divided into smaller, tag-like elements (gamson and modigliani ; entman ; krippendorff [ ] , pp. ff). figure . sharing images of ieshia evans over the period – july , demonstrating the utter dominance of jonathan bachman’s photograph in the dataset. chart developed in tableau. . . . the importance of textual commentary because the vast majority of sharing focused upon bachman’s photograph, concentrating exclusively upon the small variety of pictures omits a lot of evidence: namely, the wide variety of comments people make about the pictures they share. this textual commentary is analyzed as further evidence of iconographic resonances. tweets are broken into separate themes and listed in the spreadsheet. for instance, any time an author refers to the police in the picture as “robocops”, “army”, or “armor”, that tweet is tagged as “armored police”. iterations of similar comments can be aggregated to achieve a better understanding this approach is based very loosely upon framing and content analysis, except that the texts are divided into smaller, tag-like elements (gamson and modigliani ; entman ; krippendorff [ ] , pp. ff). humanities , , of for the similarities (and differences) of different users’ comments about a given picture, and to see what other terms they use in common. for instance, the most common theme accompanying bachman’s photograph emphasizes and individuates evans as a person and not a symbol. they introduced her with terms such as “her name is”, “say her name”, or “this is”; it is often coupled with the authors noting that evans is both a mother and a nurse, thus highlighting her roles of familial duty and professional care—i.e., an ordinary person doing something extraordinary in the face of armored police. on the face of it, these interpretations resist iconographic readings. however, evans’ role in bachman’s photograph was also described in symbolic terms: she is a positive symbol of black identity (“she represents what it means to be unapologetically black”), and the term is often accompanied by themes of defiance, strength, and connection to the civil rights struggles of the s and s. . iconographies of the arrest of ieshia evans iconographic readings of the evans photograph are therefore derived from pictures and text. it is necessary to familiarize ourselves with both. . . the textual evidence it should be emphasized again that much textual evidence does not allow for iconographic readings. by individuating evans as a mother and a nurse, they appear to echo sontag’s belief that the picture cannot be symbolic. that said, many users clearly drew comparisons to other imagery and saw symbolic elements in the photograph. the police are described as the aforementioned “robocops” or storm troopers (from the star wars films): images of faceless, oppressive armored forces, and tellingly, both from cinema. despite all their armor, the police “fear her strength”; facing them, evans wears only a sundress, but the author rhetorically asks, “tell me who looks stronger”. in contrast, evans is not only beautiful and defiant, she “is beauty” and “is defiance” (emphasis mine), i.e., she is the personification of those traits. she is the “living, breathing statue of liberty”, and is described as a “queen”, a “goddess”, a “superhero”, and “wonder woman”, as having a “strength that lives”. she “captures the spirit” of the blm movement. all these descriptions confer extraordinary powers upon her. . . pictorial evidence of the pictures in the full dataset, there are separate artistic interpretations of ieshia evans’ arrest. some of these mediations have been shared multiple times, but the majority were only shared once. all but two were-based upon bachman’s photograph. they can be separated into the following five forms: textual overlays: perhaps the simplest of mediations, the image-maker places text atop the photograph (figure ). there are four examples of this in the dataset. licensing rights to reproduce some pictures (mainly stills from movies) have proven impossible to obtain. in these circumstances, i have used the perma.cc service, which creates permanent links to resources on the internet. its purpose is to combat link rot, wherein links fail to resolve to the linked resource due either to its deletion or change of location. see (zittrain et al. ) for the issues surrounding link rot and the rationale for creating perma.cc. the makers of derivative response pictures have been identified where possible (see figures – ). their pictures are reproduced on a small scale with specific, permitted exceptions. humanities , , of humanities , , x for peer review of figure . textual overlays. source: twitter. pictorial comparisons: the image-maker has juxtaposed two or more picture files together for the sake of comparison (figure ). there are ten of these merges, the majority of which compare bachman’s photograph with other notable pictures. in effect, these pictorial merges duplicate the gallery presentations in twitter, the number of which dwarfs these. she is frequently compared with the “tank man” from tiananmen square. apart from comparing the pictures in figure , users compared evans’ nonviolent resistance to that of gloria richardson dandridge during the original civil rights struggle. users also connected evans to contemporary struggles against racism, notably to bree newsome, the woman who removed the confederate flag from charleston, south carolina, and tess asplund, who defied neo-nazi marchers in sweden (kisseloff ; contrera ; crouch ). figure . textual overlays. source: twitter. pictorial comparisons: the image-maker has juxtaposed two or more picture files together for the sake of comparison (figure ). there are ten of these merges, the majority of which compare bachman’s photograph with other notable pictures. in effect, these pictorial merges duplicate the gallery presentations in twitter, the number of which dwarfs these. she is frequently compared with the “tank man” from tiananmen square. apart from comparing the pictures in figure , users compared evans’ nonviolent resistance to that of gloria richardson dandridge during the original civil rights struggle. users also connected evans to contemporary struggles against racism, notably to bree newsome, the woman who removed the confederate flag from charleston, south carolina, and tess asplund, who defied neo-nazi marchers in sweden (kisseloff ; contrera ; crouch ). humanities , , of humanities , , x for peer review of figure . pictorial comparisons. source: twitter. filtered mediations: bachman’s picture of evans has been passed through one or more digital filters (figure ). these include filters such as those found in instagram that brighten, increase the contrast, or warm color tones. other users appear to use mobile applications such as snapchat to add elements such as peace symbols, or other applications such as prisma or visionn or create more figure . pictorial comparisons. source: twitter. filtered mediations: bachman’s picture of evans has been passed through one or more digital filters (figure ). these include filters such as those found in instagram that brighten, increase the contrast, humanities , , of or warm color tones. other users appear to use mobile applications such as snapchat to add elements such as peace symbols, or other applications such as prisma or visionn or create more ethereal versions. still others appear to use photoshop filters to manipulate the threshold or posterize the photograph for dramatic effect. there are eighteen filter-based variations in the dataset. humanities , , x for peer review of ethereal versions. still others appear to use photoshop filters to manipulate the threshold or posterize the photograph for dramatic effect. there are eighteen filter-based variations in the dataset. figure . filter-based mediations. source: twitter. artistic mediations: these fourteen examples required more significant reworking of the source material in order to create the final image (figure ). some are by professionals such as shepard fairey while others are by enthusiastic amateurs. in these, evans is converted into (and identified as) a goddess and as the statue of liberty; uncle sam kneels to her. she is pressed into service for other contemporary debates (keystone). veronica marche entirely reimagines the scene. blm comics uses the comic life application to contrast bachman’s photograph with one of organizer deray mckesson’s arrest at the same protest: the very format casts the protagonists as heroes. figure . filter-based mediations. source: twitter. artistic mediations: these fourteen examples required more significant reworking of the source material in order to create the final image (figure ). some are by professionals such as shepard fairey while others are by enthusiastic amateurs. in these, evans is converted into (and identified as) a goddess and as the statue of liberty; uncle sam kneels to her. she is pressed into service for other contemporary debates (keystone). veronica marche entirely reimagines the scene. blm comics uses the comic life application to contrast bachman’s photograph with one of organizer deray mckesson’s arrest at the same protest: the very format casts the protagonists as heroes. humanities , , of humanities , , x for peer review of figure . artistic mediations. source: twitter. photoshop-style manipulations: these mediations used adobe photoshop to alter bachman’s photograph significantly (figure ). the majority of these take heed of the odd stance of the police by ascribing supernatural power to evans. there are eleven manipulations in the dataset. figure . artistic mediations. source: twitter. photoshop-style manipulations: these mediations used adobe photoshop to alter bachman’s photograph significantly (figure ). the majority of these take heed of the odd stance of the police by ascribing supernatural power to evans. there are eleven manipulations in the dataset. humanities , , of humanities , , x for peer review of figure . photoshop-style manipulations. source: twitter. . . visual theme: extraordinary power most of the photoshop manipulations work upon the contrast between the peculiar posture of the police and evans’ calm, as if providing an underlying cause for these features. both zaidi ademeit and paul brymer gave evans wings—in effect, acknowledging the visual support provided by the figure . photoshop-style manipulations. source: twitter. . . visual theme: extraordinary power most of the photoshop manipulations work upon the contrast between the peculiar posture of the police and evans’ calm, as if providing an underlying cause for these features. both zaidi ademeit humanities , , of and paul brymer gave evans wings—in effect, acknowledging the visual support provided by the tree branch behind her in the original photograph even when the background has been removed. brymer makes his associations explicit with a text-box that states “america has a new superhero! ieshia evans!” (figure ). the comics code approval of authority stamp adds to the comic book look-and-feel, but it also adds a subtle moral element, as the introduction of that stamp was intimately connected to the teaching of public morality in the medium (hajdu [ ] ). humanities , , x for peer review of tree branch behind her in the original photograph even when the background has been removed. brymer makes his associations explicit with a text-box that states “america has a new superhero! ieshia evans!” (figure ). the comics code approval of authority stamp adds to the comic book look- and-feel, but it also adds a subtle moral element, as the introduction of that stamp was intimately connected to the teaching of public morality in the medium (hajdu [ ] ). figure . ieshia evans, superhero ( ). by paul brymer. picture courtesy of the artist. in addition, these artists place great emphasis on the moment that the police seemingly touch evans. ademeit places a lens flare between evans and the police to highlight the defining moment, while brymer adds sparkles that emanate from evans’ hand and cover the police, seeming to freeze them. nial smith (figure ) adds a tornado and lightning surrounding evans, the lightning striking and repulsing the police as they touch her: the very ground cracks between them, smith being the only one to highlight the role that the pavement’s cracks play in the creation of depth in an otherwise planar composition. zack sande places imagery of explosions in the background in order to explain the seeming repulsion (figure ). geek dad places a ghostly dr. martin luther king in the picture, his hand providing the supernatural power causing the repulsion. in addition, yvang creates a three- part narrative, whereby the touch causes the police to fly back and deflate (figure ). none of these interpretations are random. the image-makers acknowledge and highlight formal properties in the photograph. their usage of these properties, however, points back to other, older imagery and reinforces the textual comments made by twitter users. figure . ieshia evans, superhero ( ). by paul brymer. picture courtesy of the artist. in addition, these artists place great emphasis on the moment that the police seemingly touch evans. ademeit places a lens flare between evans and the police to highlight the defining moment, while brymer adds sparkles that emanate from evans’ hand and cover the police, seeming to freeze them. nial smith (figure ) adds a tornado and lightning surrounding evans, the lightning striking and repulsing the police as they touch her: the very ground cracks between them, smith being the only one to highlight the role that the pavement’s cracks play in the creation of depth in an otherwise planar composition. zack sande places imagery of explosions in the background in order to explain the seeming repulsion (figure ). geek dad places a ghostly dr. martin luther king in the picture, his hand providing the supernatural power causing the repulsion. in addition, yvang creates a three-part narrative, whereby the touch causes the police to fly back and deflate (figure ). none of these interpretations are random. the image-makers acknowledge and highlight formal properties in the photograph. their usage of these properties, however, points back to other, older imagery and reinforces the textual comments made by twitter users. humanities , , of humanities , , x for peer review of figure . ieshia evans, supernatural being ( ). by nial smith. picture courtesy of the artist. figure . the supernatural effect of touching evans ( ). by zack sande. picture courtesy of the artist. figure . ieshia evans, supernatural being ( ). by nial smith. picture courtesy of the artist. humanities , , x for peer review of figure . ieshia evans, supernatural being ( ). by nial smith. picture courtesy of the artist. figure . the supernatural effect of touching evans ( ). by zack sande. picture courtesy of the artist. figure . the supernatural effect of touching evans ( ). by zack sande. picture courtesy of the artist. humanities , , of humanities , , x for peer review of figure . the police repulsed and deflated ( ). by yvang. picture courtesy of the artist. figure . the police repulsed and deflated ( ). by yvang. picture courtesy of the artist. humanities , , of . . the chain of antecedents the purpose of iconological interpretation in examining both the photograph and the responses social users made to them is to see how a specific compositional formula accretes into a recurring encompassing theme to the point that the theme feels not only familiar, but natural. twitter users often likened evans and the police to superheroes and villains, often figures from films or comics; they concentrate upon the power relationship between the figures. the cinematic comparison is particularly telling. in a medium that frequently depicts depth recession, it is notable that conventions depicting confrontation between two characters employ a planar composition: the “two-shot” parallel to the screen, familiar to any movie-goer in which antagonists square off against one another, viewable in popular films such as avengers ( ), star wars ( ), and classic films such as yojimbo ( ) (bordwell and thompson [ ] , p. ; brown [ ] , p. ). this convention is enforced in other media besides, such as comic books, which by their nature are completely unconstrained by technical limitations of the camera angle, since they have none. these in turn have their own formal antecedents, however, and thematically they cleave more closely to the spirit of bachman’s photograph, i.e., to the confrontation of moral and coercive authority. the arrest of evans shares strong thematic and formal parallels with images of the arrest of christ. this event is commonly represented with jesus’ arrest at the hands of armed soldiers in the garden of gethsemane, frequently at the moment when judas betrays jesus with a kiss: giotto’s arrest of christ (figure ) and caravaggio’s betrayal of christ (figure ) are representative of this. this theme almost invariably portrays christ calmly standing in a shallow plane amid a roiling storm of armed adversaries. his hands are held out, already bound or waiting to be bound, suggesting passive acceptance of his fate. a rare variant, famously portrayed by the limbourg brothers (figure ) depicts the moment directly following, when christ identifies himself and the soldiers fall to the ground (john : ). uncannily, bachman’s photograph—highlighted by many of the photoshop-manipulated responses—evokes the liminal point between these two biblical scenes: the awkward stance of the police suggests their imminent collapse to the ground. each of these examples—the arrest of christ, two-shot scenes in cinema, and comic book covers—are links in a chain of antecedents. each link in the chain influences those near it. but of course, none of this is to claim that bachman consciously modeled his photograph after old representations of antagonistic encounter, nor is it to denigrate his skill as a photographer. it is certainly not to mitigate the extraordinary bravery of evans in the face of aggression, particularly when the police have used deadly force with impunity. finally, it is not to suggest that viewers had works of art in mind when they described what they saw in bachman’s photograph. it is rather to understand the mechanisms of resonance: to understand why users responded more to bachman’s photograph than to becherer’s, and indeed, why bachman himself knew it would “speak volumes”. https://perma.cc/q t- uxt (accessed august ). https://perma.cc/a yt-t l (accessed august ). https://perma.cc/ k -ph u (accessed august ). https://perma.cc/t - a k (accessed august ). it is useful to compare bachman’s photograph with arthur tsang hin wah’s tank man at tiananmen square ( ), one made by a number of twitter users. in contrast to bachman’s composition, which acts out parallel to the picture plane, wah’s subject recedes from the picture plane. twitter users comparing the two thus concentrate upon thematic rather than compositional similarities. this scene is alternately called the “betrayal of christ”, the “taking of christ”, or the “kiss of judas”, depending upon the precise moment being portrayed. for the source, see especially luke : – . https://perma.cc/q t- uxt https://perma.cc/a yt-t l https://perma.cc/ k -ph u https://perma.cc/t - a k humanities , , of humanities , , x for peer review of figure . arrest of christ (c. – ). by giotto. arena chapel, padua. photograph from wikimedia and flagged for noncommercial use. figure . betrayal of christ (c. ). by caravaggio. national gallery of art, dublin. photograph from wikimedia and flagged for noncommercial use. figure . arrest of christ (c. – ). by giotto. arena chapel, padua. photograph from wikimedia and flagged for noncommercial use. humanities , , x for peer review of figure . arrest of christ (c. – ). by giotto. arena chapel, padua. photograph from wikimedia and flagged for noncommercial use. figure . betrayal of christ (c. ). by caravaggio. national gallery of art, dublin. photograph from wikimedia and flagged for noncommercial use. figure . betrayal of christ (c. ). by caravaggio. national gallery of art, dublin. photograph from wikimedia and flagged for noncommercial use. humanities , , of humanities , , x for peer review of figure . arrest of christ, from the très riches heures de jean, duc de berri (before ). by the limbourg brothers. musée de chantilly ms , fol. v. photograph from wikimedia and flagged for noncommercial use. . looking forward, looking back there is no iconographic stopping point for iconic imagery: they inflect future examples by their existence. well after the end of data collection, the image of the arrest of evans has kept popping up. aby warburg wrote of the nachleben der antike, or the “survival” of imagery from the greco-roman figure . arrest of christ, from the très riches heures de jean, duc de berri (before ). by the limbourg brothers. musée de chantilly ms , fol. v. photograph from wikimedia and flagged for noncommercial use. humanities , , of . looking forward, looking back there is no iconographic stopping point for iconic imagery: they inflect future examples by their existence. well after the end of data collection, the image of the arrest of evans has kept popping up. aby warburg wrote of the nachleben der antike, or the “survival” of imagery from the greco-roman world. by this he meant the survival and reuse of emotive formulas, not their mere repetition. they can spring forth anew. similarly, as nahon and hemsley ( ) observed, viral events—and the sharing of bachman’s photograph certainly counts as a viral event—can be reactivated in the public’s consciousness when the context dovetails into the wider perception of that viral event. this constitutes no less than the afterlife not of images in general, but the afterlife of a particular photograph. in the middle of august, a french “naïf noir” artist working under the name mina mond previewed a piece inspired by bachman’s photograph. by the end of the month, mond had finished the triptych am i not a (wo)man?, placing the image of evans within the united states’ traumatic history of race relations, from slavery to the killings highlighted by the blm movement (figure ). mond has adopted a syncretic mixture of attributes and symbols gleaned from sources across various cultural traditions and belief systems: europe and the middle east (the sun and moon) and louisiana/haiti/sub-saharan west africa (the skeletal figures), to name but a few. mond has added her own symbolic elements to the mix: the tormentors of all the figures are now american eagles. in the center, they are symbolic referents to the police, and by their repetition in the other panels, to all the agents of the pernicious racism that has plagued the united states since before its independence. she described the work thus: the left panel recalls slavery. the white snake (found throughout the three panels) was a confederate symbol against the abolition of slavery. the skeletal figures with raised arms are inspired by african statuary honoring ancestors, and their placement in the work references the black lives matter movement. the central panel is a direct reference to ieshia evans, who became a symbol for both the struggle for civil rights against police violence in spite of herself. the right panel is an homage to trayvon martin, michael brown, and all those who have died for no good reason. the main figure wears a mask (derived from funerary masks) because he has no precise identity: a phantom, he symbolizes the spirit of those killed. i won’t explain everything, as i would prefer the viewer to weave it together. (mond ) evans had previously been linked to representations of confrontation that reaches back at least as far as the arrest of christ and through cinematic confrontations, and now, through mond, to the on-going struggle of people in their confrontation with a violent state apparatus. mond’s title evokes wedgwood’s anti-slavery slogan, updated to focus upon evans and her centrality of a woman in the photographed event. that inflection echoes sojourner truth’s “ain’t i a woman?” speech: truth emphasized the scantly-recognized strength of women in the struggle for racial equality. this was recognized immediately by a number of twitter commentators, who noted that african-american women were always in the front lines of the civil rights struggle. in mond’s triptych, we therefore see a motif migrating back, from painting to photograph to painting; from a religious subject of cosmic importance, to the recording of a fraction of a second containing deep resonance, and back to an image containing historical evocations. this is a true migration of images, which are “always reappropriated, and thus metamorphosed, in the constantly changing course of their survivals and their renaissances” (didi-huberman [ ] , p. ). humanities , , of humanities , , x for peer review of figure . am i not a (wo)man? ( ). by mina mond. picture courtesy of the artist. in a prominent example commemorating the dr. martin luther king holiday on january , photographer and graphic artist daniel rarela paired bachman’s photograph with a quotation from king about the importance of nonviolent protest. by framing his piece (figure ) in the visual language of barbara kruger’s work—stark black and white photograph, with bands of brilliant red crossing it, text set in the futura font—rarela inflected the image with the political, indeed revolutionary power of both king’s words and evans’ peaceful protest. having been evoked in the arrest of evans, the theme of nonviolent or passive confrontation undergoes another transformation, curling back to the civil rights struggle of the s and the graphically confrontational power of s art. the photograph will, in turn, impact future evocations of the theme. the migration of images does not follow a pre-ordained, unobstructed path: fundamentally rhizomatic, it is “always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo“ (deleuze and guattari [ ] , p. ). the instantiation of any particular theme inflects its usage and influences future instantiations. warburg recognized this process long ago. it continues on social media platforms, where we see a continuous dance of encounter, interpretation, and re-situation of imagery, coiled around each other and, though more distant, the broader history of image-making. through an examination of the data afforded to us by social media, we can glean new, more granular observations about the myriad ways resonance plays out in contemporary culture. figure . am i not a (wo)man? ( ). by mina mond. picture courtesy of the artist. in a prominent example commemorating the dr. martin luther king holiday on january , photographer and graphic artist daniel rarela paired bachman’s photograph with a quotation from king about the importance of nonviolent protest. by framing his piece (figure ) in the visual language of barbara kruger’s work—stark black and white photograph, with bands of brilliant red crossing it, text set in the futura font—rarela inflected the image with the political, indeed revolutionary power of both king’s words and evans’ peaceful protest. having been evoked in the arrest of evans, the theme of nonviolent or passive confrontation undergoes another transformation, curling back to the civil rights struggle of the s and the graphically confrontational power of s art. the photograph will, in turn, impact future evocations of the theme. the migration of images does not follow a pre-ordained, unobstructed path: fundamentally rhizomatic, it is “always in the middle, between things, interbeing, intermezzo“ (deleuze and guattari [ ] , p. ). the instantiation of any particular theme inflects its usage and influences future instantiations. warburg recognized this process long ago. it continues on social media platforms, where we see a continuous dance of encounter, interpretation, and re-situation of imagery, coiled around each other and, though more distant, the broader history of image-making. through an examination of the data afforded to us by social media, we can glean new, more granular observations about the myriad ways resonance plays out in contemporary culture. humanities , , of humanities , , x for peer review of figure . we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined… nonviolent pressure. by daniel rarela ( ). picture courtesy of the artist. acknowledgments: i would like to thank an xiao mina, with whom i penned a brief online article that inspired this analysis (mina and drainville ). i would also like to thank anne burns and jennifer saul for their many editorial and theoretical insights. finally, many thanks to pulsar platform, which kindly provided the funds to cover the collection of the dataset for this paper. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. the dataset sponsors had no role in the design of the study, in its analysis or interpretation; in the writing of the manuscript, or in any decision to publish the results. references (arasse [ ] ) arasse, daniel. . take a closer look. translated by alyson waters. princeton: princeton university press. first published . (bachman ) bachman, jonathan. . taking a stand in baton rouge. reuters. available online: https://widerimage.reuters.com/story/taking-a-stand-in-baton-rouge (accessed on january ). (bann ) bann, stephen. . meaning/interpretation. in the art of art history: a critical anthology. edited by david preziosi. oxford: oxford university press, pp. – . (barthes [ ] ) barthes, roland. . camera lucida: reflections on photography. translated by richard howard. london: vintage. first published . (benello a) benello, sophie. a. what data sources or channels are supported on pulsar? pulsar. available online: https://intercom.help/pulsar/pulsar-general-faqs/what-data-sources-or-channels-are- supported-on-pulsar (accessed on april ). figure . we have not made a single gain in civil rights without determined . . . nonviolent pressure. by daniel rarela ( ). picture courtesy of the artist. acknowledgments: i would like to thank an xiao mina, with whom i penned a brief online article that inspired this analysis (mina and drainville ). i would also like to thank anne burns and jennifer saul for their many editorial and theoretical insight, and to pulsar platform, which kindly provided the funds to cover the collection of the dataset for this paper. finally, many thanks to simon faulkner, farida vis, and jim aulich, who read an early draft of this essay. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. the dataset sponsors had no role in the design of the study, in its analysis or interpretation; in the writing of the manuscript, or in any decision to publish the results. references arasse, daniel. . take a closer look. translated by alyson waters. princeton: princeton university press. first published . bachman, jonathan. . taking a stand in baton rouge. reuters. available online: https://widerimage.reuters. com/story/taking-a-stand-in-baton-rouge (accessed on january ). bann, stephen. . meaning/interpretation. in the art of art history: a critical anthology. edited by david preziosi. oxford: oxford university press, pp. – . barthes, roland. . camera lucida: reflections on photography. translated by richard howard. london: vintage. first published . https://widerimage.reuters.com/story/taking-a-stand-in-baton-rouge https://widerimage.reuters.com/story/taking-a-stand-in-baton-rouge humanities , , of benello, sophie. a. what data sources or channels are supported on pulsar? pulsar. available online: https:// intercom.help/pulsar/pulsar-general-faqs/what-data-sources-or-channels-are-supported-on-pulsar (accessed on april ). benello, sophie. b. what is pulsar trac? pulsar. available online: https://intercom.help/pulsar/pulsar- trac/what-is-pulsar-trac (accessed on april ). białostocki, jan. . die ‘rahmenthemen’ und die archetypischen bilder. in stil und ikonographie: studien zur kunstwissenschaft. köln: dumont, pp. – . bordwell, david, and kristin thompson. . film art: an introduction. new york: mcgraw-hill. first published . brown, blain. . cinematography: theory and practice. imagemaking for cinematographers and directors. london: routledge. first published . bruns, axel, and folker hanusch. . conflict imagery in a connective environment: audiovisual content on twitter following the / terror attacks in paris and brussels. media, culture & society : – . 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[crossref] © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . /ssrn. http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	the status of photographs showing human conflict 	what is iconography? 	pursuing iconography of social media 	practicalities 	organizing pictures for analysis 	the importance of textual commentary 	iconographies of the arrest of ieshia evans 	the textual evidence 	pictorial evidence 	visual theme: extraordinary power 	the chain of antecedents 	looking forward, looking back 	references building an informing science model in light of fake news volume , editorial perspective. cite as: cohen, e. ( ). building an informing science model in light of fake news. informing science: the inter- national journal of an emerging transdiscipline, , - . https://doi.org/ . / (cc by-nc . ) this article is licensed to you under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial . international license. when you copy and redistribute this paper in full or in part, you need to provide proper attribution to it to ensure that others can later locate this work (and to ensure that others do not accuse you of plagiarism). you may (and we encour- age you to) adapt, remix, transform, and build upon the material for any non-commercial purposes. this license does not permit you to use this material for commercial purposes. building an informing science model in light of fake news eli cohen informing science institute santa rosa, ca, usa elicohen@informingscience.org many disciplines have addressed the issue of “fake news.” this topic is of central concern to the transdiscipline of informing science, which endeavors to understand all issues related to informing. this paper endeavors to build a model to address not only fake news but all informing and misin- forming. to do this, it explores how errors get into informing systems, the issue of bias, and the models previously created to explore the complexity of informing. that is, this paper examines mod- els and frameworks proposed to explore informing in the presence of bias, misinformation, disinfor- mation, and fake news from the perspective of informing science. it concludes by introducing a more nuanced model that considers some of the topics explored in the paper. setting the stage: defining bias, misinformation, disinformation, fake news, and propaganda this paper uses these working definitions of some of the keywords as they will be used in this paper, and by doing so, to present relevant research findings. ) informing occurs when, as the result of the informing process, the informed has a better and stronger understanding of reality. this paper does not concern itself with fideism or psy- chedelic revelation, for example. ) the science of misinforming crosses disciplinary boundaries. lazer et al.’s ( ) study of the science of fake news, published in science, explored fake news from the disciplinary perspectives of its authors, crossing the boundaries of network science, social science, government, law, political science, informatics and engineering, communications, govern- ment, psychology, and journalism. ) to err is human. errors in informing systems are inevitable due to constraints in psychol- ogy and technology. many occur unconsciously on the part of the informer (if there is one) or the informed. one type of these errors is due to bias. others involve other limitations in human and technological processing of information. cohen ( b) outlined four major types of such honest mistakes in informing systems, from transcription errors to solving the wrong problem. figure summarizes these errors. https://doi.org/ . / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / mailto:elicohen@informingscience.org building an informing science model in light of fake news figure . four types of errors that create misinforming systems (source: cohen, b) ) the term bias, as used in this paper, is an element of human frailty and imperfection. it is an artifact of how our brains process information; brains have limited bandwidth for percep- tion, attention, memory, and thinking. bias is pervasive and mostly unacknowledged in sci- ence. all academic authors are biased, at the minimum in the topics they choose to explore and which to ignore. philosophers cailin o’connor and james owen weatherall’s book the misinformation age ( ) describes the role of bias in the spread of false beliefs. even technology based on human bias demonstrates bias. even artificial intelligence built on neural expert systems (learning from human decisions) absorbs bias from humans. ai trained on adult white urban males to develop best practice recommendations regarding di- agnosing medical issues, for example, are biased and so of limited use for other populations, such as youth, non-white, rural residents, and women. marshall mcluhan ( ) titled chapter of his book understanding media as “the medium is the message,” pointing out the medium used to convey a message impacts (biases) the re- ceiver. for example, images of a crying child convey a more substantial impact on the re- ceiver than providing statistics about children’s health. one type of bias often mentioned in the news, confirmation bias, is the predisposition to fo- cus our attention on and remember information that confirms our existing prejudices. it can be characterized as “my mind is made up; don’t confuse me with facts.” however, it is hardly the only bias problem for informing. a compendium archived at “list of cognitive biases” (n.d.) lists and describes almost others, including cognitive biases, social biases, and memory biases and effects. figure illustrates of these. cohen figure . cognitive biases. (source: lebowitz & lee, ) building an informing science model in light of fake news ) “misinformation” is dictionary.com’s word of the year (funke, ). misinfor- mation refers to incorrect information in general. bias and the other errors mentioned above are inherent in informing and so can lead to misinforming. misinformation can result from these problems. (for this series, misinformation is incorrect information spread without any intention to mislead.) the problem with misinformation is even more profound. as pointed out in cohen ( a, b), the future will likely disprove much of that which is now dis- seminated as information, as has happened throughout history. all information has a half- life. for example, medical science has abandoned bloodletting and our best understandings in history, paleontology, and even programming techniques are refined or replaced through- out the ages. ) disinformation is misinformation disseminated with the intention to deceive. disinformation is a relatively new word, meaning “deliberately false or distorted information given out in order to mis- lead or deceive” (wilson, , p. ). misinformation, a much older word, means “inaccurate or erroneous information, usually provided without conscious effort at misleading, deceiving or persuading one way or another… the suppression of information can, of course, play a part in [both]” (wilson, ). when disinformation is used as a weapon, the term psyop, for psychological operations, is often employed. psyops are used to influence any element of society (individual, group, gov- ernment) to act in the desired way. the term black psyops is used when psyops are “laun- dered,” that is the source of the disinformation is disguised so as to make it seem credible. former fbi special agent asha rangappa ( ) gave an example of black psyops in a twit- ter feed about how the ussr placed an article in an indian newspaper that the usa created aids to kill blacks and gays. it then cited that article in a soviet run journal as proof coming from a democratic country. spin. spin can be seen in this example of one who strives to conceal the essential implica- tions about a public hanging using words like “while attending a large public event, the indi- vidual died when the platform on which she had been standing suddenly collapsed.” in this case, the spin, while wholly accurate, hides from the reader or viewer essential facts and con- text. lakoff ( ) developed a theory on the idea of “spin” in his conceptual metaphor the- ory. o’sullivan ( ) reports, “agents of disinformation today mix factual and false information, making it more difficult for audiences to determine what is real and what is fake.” spin and terminology. britannica defines spin in politics as “the attempt to control or influence communication in order to deliver one’s preferred message” (braun, n.d.). words possess both denota- tion (meanings) and connotation (feelings). they have both rational and emotional loading (condon, ). in this way, the choice of words and terminology can be used as a tool of spin. are you pro-life or pro-choice? are you for or against a “death tax” or taxing unearned inherited wealth? in other words, the terms one selects convey one’s bias. ) propaganda. lexico.com defines propaganda as “information, especially of a biased or misleading nature, used to promote a political cause or point of view” (“propaganda,” n.d.). propaganda draws upon the public relations techniques created by the american edward bernays for applying techniques of psychology to influence people’s thinking. bernays, the double nephew of sig- mund freud, is considered a father of public relations, modern advertising, and psychologi- cal warfare, and his books, including crystallizing public opinion ( ) and propaganda ( ), delve into his ideas. his “accomplishments” include convincing the public to use dis- posable paper dixie cups instead of glassware and making it socially acceptable and desirable for women to smoke cigarettes. propaganda works because, as reed anfinson ( ) points out, the truth cannot compete with it on social media. newman ( ) found that social media is preferred as the source for news, beating out television and printed news. fake news blossoms on social media since anyone can publish with fact-checking. cohen ) the term agitprop refers to political propaganda in popular media, particularly those com- ing out of the ussr, including films, plays, and literature as well as on social media and fake news. ) narratives and false narratives. narratives are stories about real or imagined events. these stories may find their basis in objective facts or, for false narratives, are based in full or in part on artificiality. narratives and the words used to express them deliver both objective (denotative) and emo- tive (connotative) content. they can be used to convey the truth (either objective truth or a more in-depth understanding about a significant issue), spin the truth, or, in the case of false narratives, convey falsehoods. garry and wade ( ) found that false narratives are potent ways to deceive. their study found that while fake photographs lead to false memories in their experimental study’s sub- jects, false narratives produce even stronger fake impressions. ) fake news is a type of disinformation circulated as truthful news. it was dictionary.com’s word of the year for (funke, ). often fake news is used to support a false narra- tive. it may be created and disseminated to disinform, for example, as propaganda, and for other reasons, such as using it as clickbait for gaining personal profit. we need to be wary when defining “fake” since simply being incorrect does not make infor- mation fake. for instance, it may be just stale information. information has a limited useful life, the period between when it is generated until it is corrected. for example, current devel- opments make obsolete the teachings of history, paleontology, and even programming tech- niques. second, honest mistakes are part of life. eyewitnesses get things wrong; memory is malleable and fallible (cohen, a, b; garry & wade, ; loftus, ). ) trust (and mistrust) of potential sources of information. a study conducted by new- man, fletcher, kalogeropoulos, and nielsen ( ) found that there is a decline in the trust given to news media worldwide. they write, “less than half ( %) agree that they trust the news me- dia they themselves use” (p. ). similarly, newman ( ) writes, “various forms of misinformation is helping to further undermine trust in media.” putting this together, alarmingly, we are seeing a spi- ral of fake news from social media that contradicts factual reporting of news by the media undermining trust in the fact-based news reports. ) framing, spin, and selection of terminology. the term framing has a variety of mean- ings and definitions. a simplified version of the term is seen on a website that calls itself “psychology students’ best friend” (“framing,” n.d.). it defines framing as selecting how to phrase a question to elicit the preferred response. similarly, myers ( ) defines it as determining which facts to include in an argument and which to exclude. likewise, linvill and warren ( ) write, “is- sues that have been central to important social movements like black lives matter and #metoo — they are framed to serve russia’s interests in undermining americans’ trust in our institutions.” these definitions use the term as a synonym for spin, the deliberate and intentional filtering in the conveying (telling) of an event. (another definition not used here is the one by psychologists and econ- omists who follow the technical definition provided by tversky and kahneman, . for them, framing refers to a type of cognitive bias that, when given two choices yielding identi- cal outcomes, lead people to avoid risk when the alternatives are wording in one way but seek risk when the same alternatives are worded differently.) the choice of which facts to present and particularly how they are processed, sequenced, and formatted has a significant effect on what impact they will have on the informed. fram- ing can be used as a mask to conceal intentions. those seeking to destroy can use framing to building an informing science model in light of fake news mask their message as one of peace. those seeking to divide can present messages that ap- pear to be of solidarity. figure graphically illustrates this idea. this definition of framing is similar to the one for political spin, which was defined in the encyclopedia britannica as “the attempt to control or influence communication in order to deliver one’s preferred message” (braun, n.d.). figure . spin and framing can mask the message. (source: ministry of strategic affairs and public diplomacy, ). ) information dominance creates illusory truth. the term information dominance refers to a source or view having a significant influence on the thoughts and opinions of the in- formed. the importance of this is that people tend to believe that which comes readily to mind. adolf hitler wrote in mein kampf that “slogans should be persistently repeated until the very last individual has come to grasp the idea.” hasher, goldstein, and toppino ( ) and fazio, brashier, payne & marsh ( ) empiri- cally verified hitler’s observation. they found in their study that subjects rated repeated statements as more probably true than new statements. repetition gives an illogical basis for truth, the illusion of truth. more recently, effron and raj ( ) found similar results, and de keersmaeacker et al. ( ) found that the results are valid across all types of cognition styles. likewise, people tend to look for information sources to confirm their existing bias. in the us, fox news is the dominant news source for people whose beliefs place them on one end of a political spectrum, while msnbc is the dominant source for those on the other end (grynbaum, ). in countries without access to a free press, information dominance is even more pronounced. information must be available to have an impact on beliefs. in short, several factors influence people’s beliefs, including the availability of information, repetition, framing, including the connotation of the verbiage used, and cognitive biases. this begs the ques- tions, does reality have anything to do with beliefs and, for that matter, what is truth? philosophical underpinning for truth bernstein ( ) examined knowledge from the viewpoints of various disciplines. an even more fun- damental assumption in the study of fake news and disinformation is that there is such a thing as truth and reality. if not, are not facts the same as opinions and opinions as facts? what do philosophers think about reality? this brief exploration leads us down a lewis carroll rabbit hole on a difficult journey full of problems. cohen the three main areas of philosophy are metaphysics, epistemology, and ethics. all three relate to an examination of informing, misinforming, disinforming, and promoting fake news. the paper now looks at each in turn. m etaph ysics the metaphysical field of ontology examines the nature of reality. to assert that this is true and that is false assumes a shared vision of reality. truth and falsity rely on sharing a mutual sense of reality. keep in mind that science, including the transdiscipline of informing science, assumes that a unique understanding of reality exists. this point is recognized by gackowski ( ), who relates metaphysics to the issue of informing. his paper shows how the thoughts of philosopher arthur schopenhauer relate to the issue of informing, particularly schopenhauer’s ideas on will, representation, and the interplay between them. gackowski writes that arthur schopenhauer’s concept “is a logical equivalent to a contemporary information model of deci- sion situations in which one takes inventory of what is already known by the decision-maker (data), what is not yet known and must be acquired (information), and the applicable rules of reasoning (knowledge)” (p. ). epistem ology the philosophical field of epistemology considers the nature of knowledge and so relates to distin- guishing justified belief from opinion. it examines the nature of truth, belief, and justification. modern science imposes its own rules for accepting something as real, based on observations and ex- perimentation. to be accepted as factual, phenomena need to be observable, replicable, and testable. these conditions are not required for what might be called religious truth, by which truth may be re- vealed in the writings of sacred texts. a related epistemological concept is skepticism, a questioning of the truth even of a commonly held, putative, belief. at a time that socrates argued with sophists that the goal of discourse should be the search for truth, he identified in his sophistical refutations (sophistici elenchi), thirteen fallacies used by sophists. the relevance for today’s topic is that these fallacies are used by today’s sophists to argue and spin the truth. this point is particularly relevant in that few models in the informing science per- spective deal adequately with deliberate disinforming. logic and semantics. logic is a tool of epistemology. semantics is the field of study in linguistics and philosophy that studies meaning in language and, more recently, in programming languages. the theory of semantic information applies formal logic to the study of communications. see, for exam- ple, floridi ( ). words can be viewed as symbols to represent information, but words have limitations: ( ) inexacti- tude (hence specialized vocabulary) not only in denotation, but also connotation (emotive elements); ( ) words contain non-verbal elements (context, tone and quality of voice used, and facially expres- sion in oral use and placement on page, email for written, or placement in a radio broadcast, for ex- ample). some positions attract attention while others dissuade attention. christopher john fox ( , p. ) took the following formal logic approach of applying logic to discerning information from disinformation and informing from misinforming.  x misinforms y that p if  x informs y that p, and  p is false building an informing science model in light of fake news eth ics the issue of ethics in the context of informing has been explored from the viewpoint of journalism (e.g., see borden & tew, ; for survey research conducted by the pew research center, see pew research center (n.d.) even ethical issues around the epidemiology of fake news has been examined (kucharski, ). from the perspective of informing science, wang and lu ( ) looked at the is- sue of the ethics of misinformation on online (cyber) dating sites. on a less perilous theme, grant and cohen ( ) delve into the ethics in holy scriptures when the divine dissembles. even museums, which, like libraries, are society’s bastion for knowledge collection and display of truth, are under fire for operating with policies that run counter to the changing ethical norms. prac- tices there were once viewed as ethical at times now raise ethical criticisms. for example, museums are now coming under fire for providing defective or politically incorrect interpretations of various subject matters, ranging from dinosaurs to the displaying of cultural artifacts. museums must now confront the question of whether relics of ancient civilizations should be retained for display to edu- cate their nation’s public or should they be returned to the lands from whence they were collected, notes rothstein ( ). in sum, philosophers and philosophies do not have a definitive answer to the question if truth exists. the paper now turns to the question of “is the truth required in order to inform?” does informing require truth? the above briefly points out major philosophical areas and highlights a question for informing sci- ence regarding truth. does informing require truth or even its existence? how have researchers in the informing science arena explored these issues? stahl ( ) examines how modern philosophies understand the nature of and necessity for truth. his paper examines the question from the perspectives of jürgen habermas and michel foucault and notes that these philosophers do not agree on the nature of truth. it further concludes that all re- search is biased based on the researcher’s biases and is influenced more by the researchers’ values than by truth. as shown in figure , gill posits that some things can be useful even if they are not true (gill, ). scarantino and piccinini ( ) and lundgren ( ) explore the topic of value in untruth from a metaphilosophical perspective. readers with a philosophical bent who are interested in the bar-hil- lel–carnap paradox and the scandal of deduction should read gorsky ( ). the crux of these pa- pers is that informing can occur in the absence of truth. figure . models, theories and conceptual schemes (source: gill, ). cohen in a related way, bednar and welch ( ), using a semiotic approach, derive a complementary con- clusion that even those endeavoring to provide the truth can misinform. their paper contrasts the logical empiricist school of thought with that of hermeneutic dialectics and concludes that philo- sophical underpinnings create what they term a tyranny of ‘truth.’ together, these two conclusions lead to the perplexing quandary that ( ) one can be informed in the absence of truth, and ( ) true statements can misinform. this difficulty may lead us to question the value of truth. does truth matter or are we now living in an age of post-truth? post-truth if truth and falsity grow from sharing a common sense of reality, what happens when a shared sense of reality is lacking? the term for this is post-truth. the oxford dictionary declared “post-truth” as its word of the year, defining it as “relating to or denoting circumstances in which objective facts are less in- fluential in shaping public opinion than appeals to emotion and personal belief” (“word of the year is …”, n.d.). (likewise, in the same year dictionary.com named it the word of the year [funke, ]). illing ( ) defines post-truth more succinctly as “the disappearance of shared objective standards for truth.” sacha baron cohen ( ) said in his acceptance speech upon receiving adl’s international leadership award, “the age of reason, the era of evidential argument, is ending … democracy, which depends on shared truths, is in retreat and autocracy which depends on shared lies is on the march.” martin shovel’s cartoon ( ), dis- played as figure , expresses this idea more playfully. figure . truth vs. post-truth (source: shovel, ) the quest then is to create a model or framework of informing considering alternative understand- ings of reality. for the most part, the models of informing and disinforming created so far require the assumption of a shared sense of reality; from many philosophical perspectives, this shared sense is a requirement for truth. however, as witnessed by the many religious wars throughout history, humans have argued over and gone to war over different sources for the truth. one group’s sense of divine revelation is for others but a myth. even today, members of the us congress wage war on eviden- tiary reality, some denying facts or offering opinions as facts (kroll, ). linvill, boatwright, grant, and warren ( ) and linvill and warren ( ) explore the importance of post-truth as a feature of fake news and propaganda, pointing out that adversaries create dissension via fake news to disrupt and divide us by manufacturing alternative narratives of reality. building an informing science model in light of fake news with this in mind, the paper now explores some of the many models or frameworks put forth for in- forming science to date. these models require and assume a single source for truth and reality. the paper then concludes with an initial framework that removes this “truth” assumption by dealing with alternative sources for the truth. the final model further adds the dimension of competition in the informing process. shannon-weaver basic model for communications and adaptations for misinformation and disinformation the most common frameworks for informing are elaborations of the shannon-weaver communica- tions model (shannon & weaver, , p. ), depicted as figure , to explain the magic that occurs to get information from a source to its destination. the shannon-weaver model notes that this magic includes a transmitter, signal, noise, and a receiver. figure . the shannon-weaver basic model for communications. the shannon-weaver basic model is often used to explore human communications, yet shannon and weaver never intended for the framework to be used outside of mathematical information theory. carnap and bar-hillel ( ) quote shannon as writing, “these semantic aspects of communication are ir- relevant to the engineering problem” and “it is important to emphasize, at the start, that we are not concerned with the meaning or the truth of messages; semantics lies outside the scope of mathematical information theory.” nonetheless, the model is useful for explaining the “magic” that must occur between the sender and the receiver for humans to be informed. the model spawned myriads of adaptations and refine- ments, some of which are shown below. for example, one team of researchers has, for over a decade, used the model to examine risk in the informing and misinforming processes. christozov, chuckova, and mateev ( ) adapted the shan- non-weaver model to account for both misinformation and interpretation and applied it to create a mathematical assessment of risk. figure displays their model. over the next decade, the researchers continued to develop the model’s underlying mathematics. cohen figure . a model to account for misinformation in the communications process. (source: christozov et al., ) cohen ( ) adapted the shannon-weaver model by collapsing the transmitter-signal-receiver com- ponents as “media magic” and instead focused on the people, the informer, and the client (informed) and did so from an informing science perspective, as seen in figure . that paper brought forth the environment (or context) of both – their needs, and their biases. figure . cognitive aspects of an informing system. (source: cohen, ) building an informing science model in light of fake news jamieson and hyland ( ) expanded the shannon-weaver model by adding details on the role of bias in an informing system, including information bias, cognitive bias, risk bias, and uncertainty bias, as seen in figure . figure . bias in an informing system (source: jamieson & hyland, ) building on jamieson and hyland, gill ( ) further explored the filters between the sender and the client, as shown in figure , in the client resonance model by explicitly including filters for the chan- nel, attention, risk, and more. figure . gill’s client resonance model (source: gill, ). cohen figure . single client resonance model mapped against the success framework. fake news often addresses these questions. (source: gill, ) in , gill added balloon explanations to combine the single client resonance model he created in with the success framework of heath and heath ( ). fake news purveyors often comply with the specifications of this model, he writes. see figure the above models are but a representative sampling of efforts to adapt the shannon-weaver model to the complexities of human communications. the paper now presents yet another attempt. this latest attempt adds the complexity derived from earlier in this paper, that there is no single source for truth and untruth and that there is a competition of informational sources. t h e competition fram ework the paper now provides creating a fuller model that deals with some of the elements addressed above. the models above rely on a single source for information and use a single sender. in life, there are multiple sources of messages (informers, misinformers, and disinformers), and there are multiple channels for obtaining information. the following adaptation recognizes multiple, alterna- tive information sources all in competition for attention. the fuller model recognizes the following: a) facts and artifacts. both objective truth and false narratives present artifacts that compete for attention, to inform or misinform. some messages use artifacts drawn from objective truth while others use artifacts drawn from false narratives building an informing science model in light of fake news b) objective truth is not necessarily reflective of reality. as philosopher vladimir mokiy (personal communication) points out, even objective observed truth does not always reflect reality. as shown in figure , objectively, the spoon in water appears to be bent, yet in real- ity, it is not. only an appropriately bent spoon will appear straight when placed in water. c) honest and dishonest reporters. some informers, even those who make an honest effort to convey objective truth, are influenced by numerous biases and agendas that filter and bias their endeavors. other informers strive to advance a false narrative through spin and disin- formation. d) trust affects information’s impact. trust in the source is important, but even friends and others who are trusted will, from time to time, convey messages (rumors, gossip, retweets of fake news, and such) that have no or limited objective basis. e) filtering occurs throughout the informing system. all informers and informees (the ones who receive the message) operate under the limitations of various filters. these filters include biases and agendas, the strength of the signal, and trust. figure . vladimir mokiy (personal communication) figure . a framework for informing (source: cohen, b). cohen while not explicitly stated in figure , the informer selects, processes, sequences, and formats the artifacts to best meet informee’s needs. that is, the word model of informing science shown in fig- ure remains useful. it suggests that to understand informing we need to analyze the selection of artifacts, the processing applied to the artifacts (in light of the various filters), how these artifacts are presented (their sequence and formatting), and the problems the clients (informee) face given their current knowledge and uncertainties and their biases and filters. filters and noise. the informer is biased, not the least of which as to which artifacts (such as news item) to notice (perceive) and attend. that is both a perceptual issue as well as an issue of attention (perception and memory), and so the research on these areas bears consideration. other filters are trust, context, aspirations, and personal history. similarly, the receiver (informed or informee) has its own set of filters. the channel itself imposes filters. also, the channels themselves impose their own filters. for ex- ample, in newspapers the selection of the news is made in light of the biases of the editor and the headline writer, the placement of the article in the newspaper, what other news is competing for this space, the amount of space given the article, and, if available space is limited, what to omit. advanta- geous placement, amount of space/time given, and repetition strengthen a message’s impact. these same types of filters exist in stocking groceries in stores, listing news on websites, and beyond. news programs on radio and tv are of fixed length, so their editors select which news items to include and exclude and how much length to provide to each. with this in mind, figure offers the following; an initial informing science framework that re- moves the assumption of the singularity of truth and reality and that provides a multi-source frame- work for understanding informing, misinforming, and disinforming. to save space, this rendering of the framework omits the lines connecting boxes to boxes from left to right. each box on the left connects to the box on its right. this figure shows only one set of boxes for the filtered informer, channel, and informee but understand that these boxes with a white background are replicated for each information source. for example, the new york times newspaper has its own filters, channel filter, and informee filter as does each news radio source and each email source. the models in this paper all reflect an idealized framework for understanding how information and disinformation sources influence people. researchers are now endeavoring to understand how disin- formation impacts people and their decision making. an upcoming paper by brashier and marsh ( ) affirms that people more readily accept information that fits their biases and to which they have ready access; repetition of lies makes them more believable. a recently published paper by cor- onel, poulsen, and sweitzer ( ) shows experimentally that people tend to believe as true infor- mation provided to them, but their biases affect what they remember. in the experiment, subjects told others what they had just learned. the study found that people can and do generate their own misinformation. people’s biases impact not only which messages hold their attention, but also how they remember those messages. people’s biases garble how people remember the message and also on how people tell the message to others. via this process, people self-generate misinformation. building an informing science model in light of fake news figure . multi-source competition framework for understanding informing, misinforming, and disinforming. an array of informing artifacts, only some drawn from objective truth, are available to the informer. the informer’s filters impact which artifacts receive attention when packaging a message and placing it into one or more informing channels. channels them- selves have filters often based on limited bandwidth (space) and channels compete for the attention of the informee. informees have their own filters for what messages they will re- ceive and which will impact their beliefs. conclusion the issue of informing and disinforming crosses many disciplinary perspectives. each discipline puts on blinders that limits what it can contribute to its understanding of research topics. it is like trying to study a forest by seeing only the trees and not the animals or the animals but not the trees. re- search perspectives that cross disciplinary boundaries are needed to more fully understand complex phenomena. this paper lays out some fundamental cross-disciplinary issues including how errors find their way into informing systems, the issue of bias, and the frameworks used to model this phenomenon. future developments. this paper is just a start. the elements of the competition model need to be fleshed out and then tested to determine their explanatory power. limitations: the concluding framework offers insights into understanding informing and disinform- ing. but this framework offers no insights into other forms of informing that are less well explored, such as song, dance, physical art, and architecture. likewise, this framework does nothing to help the understanding of informing via fideism or psychedelic revelation. cohen references anfinson, r. 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( ), the columbia guide to standard american english. retrieved from http://citese- erx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi= . . . . &rep=rep &type=pdf word of the year is … (n.d.). oxford dictionaries. retrieved from https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the- year/word-of-the-year- biography eli cohen serves as a governor and executive director of the informing science institute. he focuses his current research on bias, misinformation, disinformation, and propaganda. http://pages.ucsd.edu/% earonatas/project/academic/tversky% and% kahneman% framing.pdf http://pages.ucsd.edu/% earonatas/project/academic/tversky% and% kahneman% framing.pdf https://doi.org/ . /science. https://doi.org/ . / http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi= . . . . &rep=rep &type=pdf http://citeseerx.ist.psu.edu/viewdoc/download?doi= . . . . &rep=rep &type=pdf https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year- https://languages.oup.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year- 	building an informing science model in light of fake news 	setting the stage: defining bias, misinformation, disinformation, fake news, and propaganda 	philosophical underpinning for truth 	metaphysics 	epistemology 	ethics 	does informing require truth? 	post-truth 	shannon-weaver basic model for communications and adaptations for misinformation and disinformation 	the competition framework 	conclusion 	references 	biography lessons from medicine orthogonal rotation in consciousness lessons from medicine jon kabat-zinn # , © jon kabat-zinn just as there are few cures in medicine, in spite of all that is known about biology and disease, there are even fewer cures or quick fixes in the domain of the body politic. we work with the world as we find it and as we inhabit it, realizing that our understanding of events and our ability to shape outcomes are always limited, sometimes humblingly so. but, as we have discovered in medicine, that does not mean that profound healing cannot take place if the situation is met in ways that embrace the full spectrum of inner and outer resources for working even a bit more selflessly and orthogonally with what is, with things as they are, especially in the domain of the human mind and heart. the same is possible for the body politic. it too can be approached from a perspective of healing and transformation rather than merely fixing and curing, es- pecially when the fixes can be potentially damaging to the patient and to the very potential for healing. that is precisely what the movement of mindfulness in vari- ous parliaments around the world is trying to accomplish. obviously, it is what we might call, relatively speaking, a “top down approach.” at the same time, a certain mindful political organizing is going on more broadly in communities worldwide, in the united states through groups such as the me too move- ment, black lives matter, and many others. if we are all cells within the one body politic of a country or the larger body of the planet itself, then the health of every one of those cells needs to be optimized. everybody’s health and vital interests need to be met, recognized, and taken into account, while at the same time, we hold the larger interests of the well-being of the whole in mind as well, and protect them to whatever degree is consistent with the allegiance we pledge, as americans, to the notion of “liberty and justice for all.” just like the meditation practice itself, this is simple but far from easy. the limits of possible synergies and collaborations be- tween bottom up and top down movements are unknown, but the world is crying out for attempts to heal our society and world through such inclusive mindfulness-based ap- proaches. even a little mindfulness, because it is so potent and potentially transformative, can go a long way toward dis- solving or mitigating many of the barriers to effective resolu- tion of the enmities, disputes, and thorny issues that have dogged and plagued the human enterprise for millennia, in- cluding the endemic objectifying and mistreatment of women. such healing is virtually an imperative in a world that is now so interconnected, so densely populated, so resource- threatened and environmentally stressed, and bleeding so pro- fusely from endless wars and conflicts, terror, genocide, and the huge mass-migrations that have followed directly as a consequence that the very core of its well-being and health is threatened by these chronic diseases. in the past forty years, americans have learned to participate in appreciating, refin- ing, and sustaining their own health and well-being to a degree that was unthinkable just a generation ago, when you just accepted what the doctor said and never questioned his or her judgment (and there were very few hers in those days). it was unquestioningly assumed that the patient would be a passive recipient of care, and simply needed to follow “doc- tors’ orders.” it was not uncommon to conceal a cancer diag- nosis from a patient and only tell the family—the thought being that it would only make the person with the diagnosis feel bad unnecessarily. now we have a patient’s bill of rights to safeguard the dignity of the patient from condescension and worse, and to protect the sanctity and confidentiality of the doctor/patient relationship. not that dignity, sanctity, and con- fidentiality aren’t still compromised all too often, particularly in the incredibly time-pressured and litigious atmosphere in which medicine is now being practiced, and in how much excerpted from mindfulness for all: the wisdom to transform the world by jon kabat-zinn. copyright © jon kabat-zinn. published by hachette books. all rights reserved. * jon kabat-zinn mindfulness@umassmemorial.org center for mindfulness, university of massachusetts medical school, lake avenue north, worcester, ma , usa https://doi.org/ . /s - - - published online: april mindfulness ( ) : – http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf mailto:mindfulness@umassmemorial.org medicine is influenced by drug companies and other special interest groups. various “market pressures” have compelled doctors to see more and more patients in less and less time, leading to dissatisfaction and malaise all around, on the part of both the patients and the doctors. medicine itself is suffering and in need of radical healing. nevertheless, perhaps even unbeknownst to these larger forces but flowing within them all the same, a significant movement to shift the culture of medicine to a more patient- centered, relationship-centered, and participatory perspective has been taking place. mind/body medicine in general, and mindfulness-based strategies in particular, under the umbrella paradigm and practices of integrative medicine, have been in the vanguard of this cultural shift for over a decade now. ultimately though, all such qualifiers will need to be dropped. in the end, there is only good medicine. and that should be as good as it can be, for everybody. is this radical reorientation of medicine damaging the de- livery of high quality medical care? of course not, although in the old days of “the doctor knows best,” such a shift in orien- tation would have been seen as eroding the stature and author- ity of the physician, and bad for health care. but to the con- trary, this change in the culture of medicine and how it is practiced promises to significantly enhance the options and the quality of care for patients and families alike. it is also more satisfying for the doctors, since they now can be—in concert with the other skilled members of the health care team, such as nurses, social workers, physical therapists, psycholo- gists, occupational therapists, nutritionists—more often than not in partnership with their patients rather than in a predom- inantly authoritarian and therefore more isolating relationship. in fact, in spite of all the problems with medicine and health care nowadays, and those problems are legion, enormous strides have been made toward a more patient-centered and participatory medicine, in which the patient and the physician and the health care team all have their assignments and roles to play, and in which there is, ideally, an informed and honest give-and-take among the parties that changes creatively as things unfold over time. in this model, everyone, including the patient, especially the patient, is working to move the patient toward greater levels of health and well-being and comfort at every age and stage of life to whatever degree possible, right up to the very end of life. alternative views and approaches to treatment, backed increasingly by credible research, are now a more welcomed part of this process than ever before, and potential synergies between more traditional and more integrative treatment approaches are being recog- nized and optimized wherever possible, as an increasingly informed public turns to different, often orthogonal perspec- tives and approaches when faced with health crises that stan- dard medicine heretofore has only dealt with in limited and sometimes grossly unsatisfying ways. such approaches are now slowly making their way into the standard curriculum as well as into elective offerings in medical schools across the country as a result of the passion and interest of growing numbers of imaginative and caring clinical practitioners in medical centers everywhere. hospitals themselves are becom- ing more welcoming environments, more hospitable, we might say. if such profound transformative currents can change the face of medicine in less than one generation, even in a time of crisis in the health care system, driven as they have been to a large degree by “consumer demand,” they can also happen, to some degree at least, in politics, also driving by consumer demand, so to speak. politicians may be highly expert in particular areas, as are physicians and all other professionals, and they may be privy to information we have no access to. yet they are not omniscient. their judgment may not be any better or wiser than our own in certain matters. yet they are vested for a limited time with the authority and responsibility to participate in various ways in critical decision-making to preserve and further the well-being and security of the country and regulate and protect its various homeostatic processes, such as the economy; the rule of equal and impartial treatment under the law—and the need to look at who those laws may protect or favor, and who they don’t protect—the education, welfare, and safety of its citizens; diplomatic, trade, scientific, and cultural relationships with oth- er countries; and the natural resources of the environment. but by the very nature of their calling, politicians are perpetually at far higher risk than doctors of becoming caught up in conflict- ing interests, such as the desire to do good measured against the desire to get re-elected and keep their job and thereby extend the opportunity to serve the greater good; or the constraints of the age-old quid pro quo “deals” seemingly necessary to get anything accomplished at all. if we shift frames for a moment, it is plain to see that such conflicts of interest would severely jeopardize a physician’s capacity to make appropriate judgments in regard to their pa- tients. that is why there is a hippocratic oath that makes it explicit that the doctor is there to serve the patient’s needs above all other pulls and considerations and interests, espe- cially and explicitly personal ones. to embody and protect that selfless relationship with those who are suffering is the core and sacred responsibility of medicine, one that each young doctor vows to uphold. why should we accept anything less where the health of the body politic and, by extension, the health of the world are concerned? elected and appointed officials take an oath of office as well. perhaps it is time to pay renewed attention and reverence to those oaths, and perhaps even revise some of them in the light of the pervasive dis-ease that our society and the earth are experiencing, and in the light of what we are that is not to suggest that medicine itself cannot be deeply corrupted. just think of the travesties of nazi doctors in the concentration camps in world war ii. mindfulness ( ) : – coming to learn about dis-ease and disease, and about our own ability either to compound our problems or heal their intrinsic causes, to whatever degree that may be possible. maybe those revised oaths should start, as in medicine, with “primum non nocere . . .”: “first do no harm.” oaths, which are really great vows, if taken to heart as they need to be to be of any import whatsoever, accord us trust- worthy reminders and a glide path for staying in alignment and embodying what is most important to living a life of meaning and purpose, often in the face of great obstacles. they call us back to ourselves and remind us of what is, in the end as at the beginning, worthy of our embracing, of our love. no small thing. what would that be for you? just as medicine has learned that it has to focus on and understand health as well as disease to appropriately treat a person, so we, as the cells of the body politic, need to act from the side of the health of the society rather than solely reacting to flare-ups or to overt threats of disease. nor can we perpet- ually use the constant flare-ups as an excuse for not being able to attend to the true needs of the society and thereby divert our resources away from that attending. at the same time, just as we do in cultivating greater mindfulness in our own lives from moment to moment, in democratically participating in the body politic, it is equally important that we recognize the many energies in ourselves and in others which, out of greed, hatred, fear, or simply ignoring important dimensions of a situation that are therefore not taken into account, pose ongo- ing dangers to a healthy and harmonious society, whether we are speaking of a family, a community, a country, or the com- munity of all peoples and nations on the planet. in order not to be terminally tainted by these vectors of dis-ease, we need to keep grounding ourselves in ease, in all of the ways we are already healthy, all the while keeping the shadow side of things in both ourselves and others in full awareness. we could call that practicing preventive medicine in politics. but how do we do that, you might ask? how do we get there? simple. there is no “there” to get to. the ease is already here, underneath the dis-ease! the balance is already here, inside the imbalances! the light is already here, behind the shadow! we need to remember this, and realize it in the sense of making it real, through the ongoing cultivation of mindfulness, in other words, through practice, which is tantamount to keeping in mind what is most important. the dis-ease itself is only an appearance, albeit, recalling einstein’s phrase, a persistent one, with serious and very real consequences. we all feel it, in some moments and in some years more than we do in others. and some of course, feel its harmful side far more than others, usually as a function of poverty, race, and gender pure and simple. but even these very real elements are not the whole story. for we don’t need to find our goodness to restore balance, we only need to remember it— to reconnect with it, and embody it in our actions. simple? yes. easy? no. ultimately and profoundly, it is ease that is the substrate, the ground of our being, as individuals, as a culture, and as a world. we do not always know this, but we can recover it, dis- cover it, precisely because it is already here. it lies at the root of our nature, this dance between disease and ease, between illness and health, whether we are talking about our own body, the body of america, or the world as one body, one seamless whole, one organism really. and for us as a species, nothing is more urgent or more important than that we do dis-cover it. everything hangs in the balance. fortunately this ease, this wholeness of being, as we have also been seeing, is right under our noses. it always has been. if the basic fact is one of dis-ease masking innate ease of wellbeing, then we need to arrive at a consensus diagnosis of the ailment, however complex it may appear to be on the surface, and however many different opinions there are re- garding it, and then explore appropriate “treatments.” if we miss the diagnosis, all our efforts to address and alleviate the fundamental underlying dis-ease and the suffering that stems from it will be for naught. we will also be much more suscep- tible to demagoguery out of our fear and feelings of insecurity and dissatisfaction, stoked, funded, and exploited by groups and perspectives with primarily self-serving agendas and toxic ideologies, but also, if we are honest, evoking or exploiting very real grievances on the part of alienated individuals of all stripes who feel their well-being and their concerns and suf- fering are not being recognized or addressed, or perhaps are even being betrayed. it is not that a great deal of what is going on in the world wouldn’t benefit from reform, and in some cases radical re- form. the world has clearly benefited enormously over the centuries from the efforts of valiant reformers. it is just that we also require something bigger and more fundamental at this point, because a fixing orientation by itself ignores the rotation in consciousness that is necessary for healing the un- derlying disease and dis-ease. without it, we are likely to catapult ourselves reflexively into a rescuing, fixing mode, without looking deeply into and understanding more clearly the root causes of our problems, our suffering, our dukkha, and therefore overlooking the need to work with those causal factors up close and personal, in the landscape of our own minds and hearts. what is more, since what may appear broken to some may not be of any concern to others, the very mind set with which we see and know requires examination, cultivation, and, above all, ongoing conversation and genuine dialogue rather than the noise and haranguing that tend to dominate public discourse. mindful dialogue (see book , “dialogues and discussions”) invites true listening, and true listening expands our ways of knowing and understanding. ultimately, it ele- vates discourse, and makes it more likely that we will mindfulness ( ) : – gradually learn to listen to and grow from understanding one another’s perspectives rather than just fortifying our own po- sitions and attachments and stereotyping all those who dis- agree with us. as we grow into ourselves through paying closer attention to our own minds and the minds of others who see things differently, our sense of who we are as an individual expands, and what most needs attention and healing changes for us. we may feel less threatened personally as our view of who we are gets larger, and we see how deeply our interests and well-being are embedded within the interests and well-being of others, and of the whole. as we have seen (book ), when people are considering enrolling in the mbsr clinic, we often say something along the lines that, from our point of view, “as long as you are breathing there is more right with you than wrong with you, no matter what is ‘wrong’ with you.” we extend this message to people with long-standing chronic pain conditions, heart disease, cancers of all kinds, spinal cord injury and stroke, hiv/aids, and to many with less terrifying medical problems but, nevertheless, like these others, with rampant stress and distress in their lives. and we mean it. and, even though they don’t and can’t possibly know what they are getting into at first, no matter what we tell them, as they cultivate mindful- ness formally and informally, they discover that it is indeed the case. as long as they are breathing, there is more right with them than wrong with them, no matter what they are suffering from. as they recognize this, and commit to taking the pro- gram as a complement to whatever medical treatments they may be receiving, not as a substitute for medical treatment, a large majority grow and change and heal, often in ways they themselves would not have believed possible a short time earlier. the message itself becomes an invitation into the or- thogonal, into new ways of seeing and being with things as they are. and it is the practice that provides the vehicle and framework for the actual realization of what the invitation is merely pointing to. this growth and change and healing in people with chronic medical conditions has been described and confirmed over and over again in scientific studies over the past forty years. the same principle applies to the world. no matter what is wrong with it, as long as it is “breathing,” there is more right with it than wrong with it. there is a great deal right with it, and with the various “metabolic” functions and homeostatic processes that keep it healthy. some of this we certainly real- ize and even appreciate and celebrate from time to time. but much of the health of the world and its peoples is totally ignored, completely taken for granted, or discounted, even abused. but what does “breathing” correspond to in the body pol- itic? how will we know when the world is close to not breath- ing and therefore it is already past time to act? will it be when we can no longer go outside in our cities and breathe the air? or when our bodies and our children’s and our grandchildren’s bodies are all carrying an overwhelming bur- den of toxic chemicals courtesy of the air we breathe, the water we drink, and the food we eat, internal assaults against which the body has no defenses? or will it be when the global temperatures warm to the point of melting the ice caps and all the glaciers, and flooding our coastlines worldwide, a threat that was so much less apparent when this sentence was orig- inally written fifteen years ago than it is now, in ? or when the periodic genocides on the planet get even larger and more frequent and perhaps closer to home? or when in- fectious diseases spread around the world at greater than the speed of sars or aids or ebola and are no longer contain- able? or when terrorism is a regular occurrence in our coun- try? or will it only be when the things that happen in the movies, such as a nuclear attack on one of our cities, happen for real? or when ai eliminates millions of jobs? what will it take to wake us up, and for us to take a different, more imag- inative, and wiser path? to face the autoimmune disease we are suffering from as a species, and that we are equally the cause of, we will need, sooner or later, to realize the unique necessity for the cultiva- tion of mindful awareness, with its capacity for clarifying what is most important and most human about us, and for removing the thick veil of unawareness from our senses and our thought processes; its capacity for reestablishing balance to whatever degree might be possible—always unknown; and its capacity for healing, right within this very moment as well as over time. if we have to come to it sooner or later, why not sooner? why not right now? what is to prevent us from un- dergoing a planetary rotation in consciousness at this point in time, or at least taking the first steps available to us right now? we could start by paying attention to and honoring what is right with ourselves and the world and pour energy into that, and move on all levels and on all fronts, boldly, wisely, incre- mentally, toward creating the conditions whereby the com- plex, self-regulating capacities we have as a society and as a world can settle into a dynamic balance, a balance that our own minds have managed to disturb and disrupt and threaten through unawareness, through avoiding a deep inquiring into what is most important, and thus, ultimately through ignorance. even though as a nation and as a planet we are under a great deal of stress, and are suffering massively from dis-ease and diseases, at present these conditions can be worked with, man- aged, and ultimately will resolve, just as such conditions can resolve or be greatly improved in individuals suffering from chronic medical problems when they are seen and met over and over again with awareness. we might do well to put our energy into that seeing and that knowing, and learn how to inhabit and act out of our ease, to inhabit our true wholeness, which is the root meaning of the words “health,” “healing,” and “holy.” otherwise, we will not be attending wisely to the mindfulness ( ) : – dis-ease. if we are not careful, especially where the body pol- itic is concerned, we might wind up fueling its root causes, all the while fooling ourselves into thinking that we are eradicat- ing them. so clarity in diagnosing what is wrong and what is right with us based on the preponderance of the evidence, even in the face of some uncertainty, which is the case in medicine much of the time, is extremely important. and it is ultimately the responsibility of all of us to do that, not just a few experts. a mis-diagnosis is a mis-perception. and a mis-perception in this domain can have severe untoward, you might even say lethal, consequences. here is an instance in which, individually and collectively, we desperately need to perceive what is actually going on in its fullness and investigate where the roots of the pain and suffering actually lie. as in a medical diagnosis, many differ- ent approaches can be brought to bear on understanding the root nature and cause of the disease. then, as with medical treatments, different approaches can be employed as appropri- ate, on the basis of the diagnosis and the understanding of how that particular pathology unfolds. some treatment approaches can be deployed simultaneously, some delivered sequentially, in all cases monitored and modulated according to how the patient responds. in the case of the world, we will need to bring the full armamentarium of human wisdom and creativity to bear on making the correct diagnosis and then on an appropriate and flexible treatment plan to bring about the restoration of health and balance, rather than losing ourselves in desperate but mis- guided and superficial and mechanical attempts at fixing spe- cific aspects of the underlying disease when we don’t actually understand what it is or know its origins, and when we forget that healing is fundamentally different from curing and fixing, and often a more appropriate and a more attainable option. healing is not a mechanical process that can be mandated or forced. we drift way off course if we are only treating the symptoms of the dis-ease, and reacting to them out of fear rather than out of respect for the patient, the body of the world, the world seen and known as one body, which i suspect we are on the verge of realizing it is. and while individual bodies inevitably do die, life itself goes on. regarding the planet, it is life itself, both present and future generations, and the health of the natural resources, processes, and mechanisms that sus- tain it that we are concerned with here. there is much to be learned from the new medicine that is emerging in this era, a medicine that honors the patient as a whole person, much larger than any pathological process, whether an infection or a chronic disease, disorder, or illness not amenable to cure. it recognizes that each of us, no matter what our age, our story, and our starting point, has vast, un- charted, and untapped inner resources for learning, growing, healing, and indeed, for transformation across the life span; that is, if we are willing and able to do a certain kind of work on ourselves, an inner work, a work of profound seeing, a deep cultivation of intimacy with those subterranean resources we may not remember we have or may not have faith in. in the three earlier volumes in this series, we have seen how drinking deeply from this well can contribute profoundly toward the healing of one’s mind, body, heart, and sense of deep connect- edness with the world, and toward making a very real, perhaps even comfortable peace with those things in one’s life that are not amenable to fixing or curing. none of this means that mindfulness is some kind of mag- ical elixir or cure. nor does it mean that mindfulness is the answer to all life’s problems, medically or politically. but cultivating intimacy with how things actually are is the first step on the path of healing, whether we are talking about a person or a nation, or all nations and all beings. this kind of wise attention provides a practical, non-naïve way to reclaim our humanity, to be what we already are but have perhaps lost touch with, in a word, to be human, fully human. after all, we do go by the appellation human beings, not human doings. maybe that itself is trying to tell us something. maybe we need to inquire into what being actually entails. that inquiry might lead us to what being fully human might require of us and what it might offer to us that we have not yet tasted, touched, or developed. whether we adopt an autoimmune model, a cancer model, or an infectious model to describe the origin of our collective dis-ease and suffering—and in fact, these approaches are all interrelated, in that autoimmune diseases and their treatments can frequently make the body more susceptible to cancers and to opportunistic infections—it is clear that what seem at first, to the privileged at least, to be tolerable, if not minor and ignorable symptoms of societal disease and dis-ease, such as poverty, denigration, injustice, racism, tyranny, and funda- mentalism sooner or later can wind up in the heart of the organism if not attended to in appropriate ways, which in- cludes addressing the underlying dis-ease processes that give rise to and feed them rather than merely masking or temporar- ily assuaging the symptoms. of course, that would also in- clude keeping in mind that, as in medicine and health care, prevention is the best policy in governing and in diplomacy. mindfulness ( ) : – 	lessons from medicine s jra .. moral diversity and moral responsibility abstract: in large, impersonal moral orders many of us wish to maintain good will toward our fellow citizens only if we are reasonably sure they will maintain good will toward us. the mutual maintaining of good will, then, requires that we somehow communicate our intentions to one another. but how do we actually do this? the current paper argues that when we engage in moral responsibility practices—that is, when we express our reactive attitudes by blaming, praising, and resenting—we communicate a desire to maintain good will to those in the community we are imbedded in. participating in such practices alone will not get the job done, though, for expressions of our reactive attitudes are often what economists call cheap talk. but when we praise and blame in cases of moral diversity, expressions of our reactive attitudes act as costly signals capable of solving our social dilemma. keywords: moral responsibility, strawson, cheap talk, costly signal, moral disagreement introduction althea and bertha inhabit the same society. they are not particularly close—they are neither friends nor family nor are they lovers—but occupy the same community nonetheless. since both althea and bertha are beings with a sense of morality, they wish to maintain relations of good will toward one another. yet they are neither saints nor martyrs. as a result, they do not wish to display good will toward one another at all costs. more specifically, althea and bertha both wish to display good will toward one another conditionally—that is, althea wishes to display good will toward bertha only if she is reasonably sure that bertha will display good will toward her and vice versa. the worst-case scenario is to display good will toward one’s fellow citizens while one’s fellow citizens harbor ill will toward one. this makes one a sucker, and no one wants to be a sucker. althea and bertha thus find themselves being pulled in opposing directions. on the one hand, they both most desire to live in a community where all display good will toward all. this suggests that they should display good will, in hopes of achieving the best possible outcome. but on the other hand, both desire to avoid a society in which they display good will toward others, yet others display ill will toward them. this suggests that they should prudentially display ill will, so that they may avoid the worst possible outcome. how is this dilemma resolved? in order to secure the most desired outcome, althea and bertha need some way of journal of the american philosophical association () – © american philosophical association doi:./apa.. downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://doi.org/ . /apa. . https://www.cambridge.org/core communicating to one another that they both desire to maintain good will, thereby assuring one another. this is more difficult to do than one might initially think, however. a fundamental lesson of game theory is that (under certain kinds of incentive structures) when communication is not costly to engage in—that is, when talk is cheap—we cannot rationally infer facts about the intentions of others from their communicative acts. but on the flip side, when communication is costly —that is, when communication acts as a costly signal—we can rationally infer facts about the intentions of others from their communicative acts. this paper proposes a mechanism—but certainly by no means the only mechanism—by which althea and bertha can solve their dilemma by appealing to this notion of costly signaling. the basic idea is that when we disagree with others about important moral questions, we incur costs from such disagreement. the fact that we willingly incur such costs—that is, the fact that we willingly engage in moral disagreement when we could otherwise simply remain silent—allows others to infer rationally that we wish to maintain relations of good will with them. the same applies to our ability to infer rationally the intentions of others when they similarly engage in moral disagreement. hence, our central thesis: engaging in moral disagreement is sufficient but not necessary to maintain relations of good will within a community. the next section offers a more careful analysis of althea and bertha’s dilemma and sketches in the abstract what a solution might look like (section ). again, the general idea is that the two can assure one another of their desire mutually to maintain good will if they communicate their intentions to one another, which is possible so long as such communication is sufficiently costly. after this, we explore how althea and bertha might communicate their intentions to one another by turning to the moral responsibility tradition that follows the work of p. f. strawson (section ). in short, when we express our reactive attitudes and so blame and praise when such reactions are called for, we communicate our desire to maintain good will toward others. problematically, though, expressions of our reactive attitudes can be quite cheap. yet, expressions of our reactive attitudes are not cheap—that is, expressions of our reactive attitudes are costly—when we blame and praise in an environment of moral heterogeneity (section ). hence our central thesis: engaging in moral disagreement is sufficient to secure a community in which all display good will toward all. we end by further refining this thesis, highlighting conditions that must hold for the mechanism we identify to function successfully. not only must we have the right kind of moral diversity for this solution to work, but we must also have the right attitude toward moral diversity (section ). this latter point, we believe, fails to characterize much contemporary public discourse.  we thus join a growing body of literature in political philosophy that points out the positive benefits diversity and disagreement can bring about. as a few examples see gaus (), muldoon (), kogelmann (). that said, we do not wish to suggest that there is something problematic about homogenous societies. it may be that deeply homogenous societies do not face the same incentives that althea and bertha face and thus do not play assurance games with one another. or if they do, there might be some other mechanism that solves their dilemma besides the one we highlight in this paper. again, the claim is that moral disagreement is sufficient but not necessary to maintain mutual relations of good will.  b r i a n ko g e l m a n n a n d ro b e r t h. wa l l ac e downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core . the possibility and fragility of mutual good will let us make more precise the problem highlighted in the introduction. althea and bertha both wish to maintain good will toward one another but do not wish to do so at all costs. neither wants to display good will if the other harbors ill will. we can model this situation game theoretically, as shown in figure . here, althea and bertha both most prefer to maintain good will toward one another. althea’s second most preferred outcome is where she harbors ill will toward bertha but bertha maintains good will toward her—here, althea can gain advantages in her social interactions with bertha for bertha is being a sucker. the same applies for bertha’s second most preferred outcome. the third most preferred outcome for althea and bertha is where both harbor ill will toward one another. finally, the least preferred outcome for both parties is where that party maintains good will toward the other but the other harbors ill will—here the party harboring good will is a sucker. in figure  the desire to display good will toward others is conditional—the players wish to maintain good will toward others only if they are reasonably sure they will receive good will in return. compare john rawls’s definition of reasonable persons, defined such that they ‘are ready to propose principles and standards as fair terms of cooperation and to abide by them willingly, given the assurance that others will likewise do so’ (rawls [] : , emphasis ours). the technical term for the game illustrated in figure  is an assurance game. assurance games present an interesting problem. both the outcome (maintain good will, maintain good will) and the outcome (harbor ill will, harbor ill will) are pure nash equilibrium solutions. roughly, they are both outcomes to the game that we could expect rational parties to settle on. clearly, the mutual maintaining of good will is preferred to the mutual harboring of ill will by both parties. what, then, is the problem? why would althea and bertha not simply both harbor good will toward one another? even though the mutual harboring of good will is an equilibrium outcome in this game, and even though the mutual harboring of good will yields the pareto dominant equilibrium when compared to the risk-dominant equilibrium (where both parties harbor ill will), it is not obvious that rational players will actually achieve such an outcome. the slightest doubt that bertha will harbor good will can force althea to harbor ill will so as to avoid the sucker payoff, where she harbors good will and bertha harbors ill will figure . assurance game. m o r a l d i v e r s i t y a n d m o r a l r e s po n s i b i l i t y  downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core (aumann ). brian skyrms nicely summarizes the problem: ‘rational players are pulled in one direction by considerations of mutual benefit and in the other by considerations of personal risk’ (skyrms : ). so the dilemma highlighted in figure  presents a tricky social problem. but to what extent does this dilemma actually obtain? that is, when do persons actually face the incentives highlighted in figure ? we typically want to maintain good will toward our friends, family, and lovers unconditionally. even if our children harbor ill will toward us, we still want to harbor good will toward them—figure  is thus not applicable in such a case. but figure  plausibly models our interpersonal relationships with some. when it comes to strangers on the street, other drivers on the highway, and fellow imbibers at the bar, we want to maintain good will toward them only if we are reasonably sure they will maintain good will toward us. if others maintain ill will toward us it is foolish—and, in some cases, dangerous—to continue harboring good will toward them. indeed, figure  plausibly models the relations between those persons constituting what f. a. hayek called ‘the great society’: ‘a large-scale moral order in which we often confront others as strangers’. in such an environment we ‘know little about the other, except that she is a moral person’ (gaus : ). despite a lack of interpersonal closeness our relationships to strangers are still moral relations: we still wish to offer them some modicum of good will, even if this good will is conditional. (indeed, much work in evolutionary psychology and evolutionary accounts of moral norms suggest that we are such conditional cooperators; for instance, see bowles and gintis .) it is these kinds of impersonal relationships and the problems they raise that we shall be interested in for the remainder of the paper and not those deeply personal relationships that constitute close friendships, families, and small groups. to put it another way: we are interested in those relationships among persons who desire to maintain good will conditionally, and, we believe, such a set of persons is coextensive with those persons in large, impersonal orders. if one believes that persons in large, impersonal orders wish to maintain good will unconditionally (as we grant is likely the case among friends and family) then the forthcoming analysis will not be compelling. however, we believe this to be implausible. assuming figure  models a nontrivial subset of our interpersonal relationships, we thus face an assurance problem: how can we be sure that other persons in our community will maintain good will toward us, and how can they be sure that we will maintain good will toward them? one prima facie plausible solution is that assurance can be achieved through acts of communication. althea says: ‘i promise that i will maintain good will toward you if you promise to maintain good will toward me’. this seems as though it should assure bertha that althea is going to harbor good will rather than ill will. and if bertha says something similar then this should assure althea to display good will as well. as a result, both parties display good will and the most desirable equilibrium is attained. though intuitively plausible, this will not do. suppose althea, through an act of communication as suggested above, tries to signal to bertha that she will harbor good will in order to induce bertha to harbor good will as well. this is indeed bertha’s best response to althea’s harboring good will. but what should bertha infer from althea’s  b r i a n ko g e l m a n n a n d ro b e r t h. wa l l ac e downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core communicative act? given knowledge of althea’s preferences, bertha knows that it is in althea’s interest no matter what to induce bertha to harbor good will. returning to figure , if bertha harbors good will, the worst outcome althea can achieve is a payoff of —if althea harbors ill will and bertha harbors good will. if, on the other hand, bertha harbors ill will, the best outcome althea can achieve is a payoff of —if both players harbor ill will. given this, bertha cannot infer from althea’s communicative act that althea will actually harbor good will. whether or not althea actually plans to harbor good will, it is in althea’s interest for bertha to believe that althea will harbor good will (so bertha then harbors good will as well), and thus it is in althea’s interest to say that she will in fact harbor good will. the problem here is that althea’s communicative act is cheap talk. cheap talk is defined as communication that does not affect the payoffs of a game (crawford and sobel ). when althea tells bertha that she will harbor good will it does not cost her anything; likewise, when bertha tells althea that she will harbor good will as well. now suppose that while telling bertha that she will harbor good will, althea pulls out a knife and cuts her hand open. why? because cutting her hand open is not cheap (here we follow kogelmann and stich : –). althea is attempting to show bertha that she really is committed to harboring good will. bertha cannot infer a commitment on althea’s part from cheap talk. but why, if she plans to harbor ill will anyway, would althea cause herself pain? if she plans to harbor ill will, cutting her hand open would likely be irrational. she would be imposing a loss on herself with seemingly no compensating benefit. but if althea plans to harbor good will, then the behavior is rational. althea is willing to lower her utility to show bertha that she is committed to harboring good will. the pain from the knife wound is a loss, but a loss that althea believes will be more than compensated if both parties inhabit a society where mutual good will is maintained. in other words, bertha can infer that the knife cutting is an honest costly signal on the part of althea. to be clear, by ‘cost’ we follow the standard meaning in game and decision theory, where to impose a cost on some individual i is to reduce i’s utility, which just means that i’s preferences are not as well satisfied as they otherwise would be. there are thus no actions that are costly as such, as costs depend on preferences. when we thus make judgments in the forthcoming analysis about what kinds of actions are costly, we are implicitly making judgments about how preferences typically look. it is of course logically possible that there exist preferences such that the kinds of actions we say are costly are not costly given these preferences. we are not interested in logical possibility, but only in empirical likelihood. let us try to make this notion of costly signaling more precise. in the above figure  we used ordinal utilities—all we know is that higher numbers are more preferred to lower numbers. figure  now represents the same assurance game with cardinal utilities—now utilities represent intrapersonal intensity of preferences, such that the gap between the numbers now represents how much more preferred an outcome is. importantly, cardinal utilities typically do not contain information about interpersonal intensity of preferences (though they can be defined in a manner such that they do contain such information; for more on the distinction between ordinal and cardinal utilities see kogelmann and gaus ). m o r a l d i v e r s i t y a n d m o r a l r e s po n s i b i l i t y  downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core suppose cutting her hand open costs althea a utility of .. this behavior could be rational no matter how althea plans to act. if she plans to harbor good will and successfully convinces bertha to harbor good will, then she gains a utility of . compared to the outcome that otherwise would have obtained where she harbors good will, but bertha does not (because her payoff in this case is ). but if althea plans to harbor ill will and successfully convinces bertha to harbor good will, then she has gained . utility compared to the outcome that otherwise would have obtained where both althea and bertha harbor ill will (because her payoff in this case is ). no matter what, althea gains utility, and therefore sending such a signal could be rational regardless of her intentions. now suppose that cutting her hand open costs althea utility s, where  < s < . in this case, cutting her hand open is rational only if althea plans to harbor good will. for suppose althea plans to harbor ill will. then althea has caused herself more pain than she gains from bertha’s switch from harboring ill will to harboring good will. given that this would be irrational, bertha should conclude that althea’s cutting her hand open is a sincere signal when doing so costs althea utility s. it can easily be checked that any time althea and bertha play an assurance game with the ordinal structure of figure  or figure , then there will always be some costly signal althea can send that would only be rational to send so long as she plans on harboring good will. likewise for bertha. it is the mutual sending of such costly signals that can assure both parties to harbor good will rather than harbor ill will. this achieves the desired outcome and solves our dilemma. . communicating good will the preceding section presented a tricky social problem and sketched in broad, abstract terms what a potential solution might look like. when citizens engage one another in large, impersonal orders, they often face the incentives of an assurance game. because they are moral beings, they wish to maintain good will toward one another—this is the most desired outcome and an equilibrium solution to the game. since both want to avoid being suckers, they could quite easily end up in a situation where all harbor ill will toward all—this is the undesirable equilibrium at which they could very well settle. to make sure mutual good will is maintained, persons must assure one another. but how? one way is through communication but only if communication is sufficiently costly. figure . assurance game with cardinal utilities.  b r i a n ko g e l m a n n a n d ro b e r t h. wa l l ac e downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core this claim might sound false if taken too literally. we do not mean to say that persons are actively calculating when they pass each other on the street. instead, we offer a model detailing how a tricky social problem might be overcome that may explain features of our shared world even if it fails to be descriptive of individual cognitive processes. compare: teenagers who eat tide pods are probably not consciously rationally calculating the benefits of such behavior. they may even be aware of (the very good) reasons against such behavior. nevertheless, a costly signaling model may help explain why such an action might be individually rational for a teenager to perform. as a dangerous and risky action, it acts as a costly signal of one’s status and fitness (murphy ). back to the problem at hand: persons must assure one another of mutual good will. but signals of assurance (given the incentive structures we are interested in) only work if they are sufficiently costly. so how can we communicate our desire to maintain good will toward our fellow citizens? and when we do this, will such communication be costly enough? this section answers both questions in turn. in terms of our first question—how can we communicate our desire to maintain good will toward our fellow citizens? —there already exists an answer in the moral responsibility literature. moral responsibility takes as its subject those who are apt candidates for moral demands and thus those who are liable to be the target of moral sanctioning practices from the community they are embedded in. though an important question, we are not interested in what it means to be an apt candidate for moral demands—whether one must act freely and with sufficient knowledge or the like. rather, we are interested in the moral sanctioning practices themselves. that is, we are interested in how it is we hold persons morally accountable and what it is we are doing when we do hold persons morally accountable. given althea’s and bertha’s assurance problem, we assume that the moral standard to which we hold others accountable in large-scale impersonal orders is a standard of reasonable good will. failure to meet this standard makes blame fitting. typically, exceeding this standard makes praise fitting. for many in the moral responsibility literature, our moral sanctioning practices are fundamentally (or paradigmatically) public and communicative (e.g., watson [] : –; darwall : –; mckenna : –). strawson’s seminal ‘freedom and resentment’ () first articulated a theory of moral responsibility that highlights this feature of praise and blame. on this view, praise and blame are expressed reactive attitudes, emotions that are particularly reactive to the intentions of other persons. according to strawson’s view, for althea to blame bertha is for her to express to bertha that she believes bertha has acted with ill will (and so acted wrongly) by showing resentment to bertha. for althea to praise bertha is for her to express that she believes bertha has acted with good will by showing bertha gratitude. fundamental for our purposes, though, is the fact that the moral responsibility practices between althea and bertha are communicative—when the two hold one another responsible, they are communicating things to one another via their expressed reactive attitudes. the strawsonian model is a well-developed view of moral responsibility and is particularly useful for articulating a potential solution to althea and bertha’s problem. to make things more precise, we will say that when we blame someone, m o r a l d i v e r s i t y a n d m o r a l r e s po n s i b i l i t y  downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core we communicate to them through expressed reactive attitudes that we think they have done a wrong and so acted from ill will. likewise, when we praise, we commend an action as performed with good will. call instances of this kind of communication through expression of our reactive attitudes accountability signaling, for such acts of communication signal to others that we hold them accountable for their good or ill will. accountability signaling is primarily about communicating to other members of our community what we believe the quality of their will to be. it would be wrong to think, though, that when we engage in moral responsibility practices, we only signal to those we praise and blame. for when engaging in such practices, we also communicate something about ourselves. when we blame those who ought to be blamed, we communicate that we have good will to others who bear witness to the expression of our reactive attitudes; the same applies when we praise those who are deserving of such approval. as angela smith points out, blame has the important secondary function of asking for ‘moral recognition’ of the wrong done ‘by the wider moral community’ (smith : ). by responding to this call for recognition, we signal our own quality of will not only to the person wronged but also to the community at large. and if we fail to express indignation on some stranger’s behalf when that person is wronged, then we have indicated that we lack a reasonable degree of good will toward strangers generally. call this kind of communication—not done to the perpetrator of a wrong or right action alone but to the community we are imbedded in—quality signaling, for we are signaling the quality of our will, be it good or ill. there are thus two kinds of signaling and two different ways we communicate to others when we engage in moral responsibility practices. we signal to others that we believe they have acted with either good or ill will (this is accountability signaling), and in doing so we also signal to others around us the quality of our own will in the process (this is quality signaling). although we proceed with the strawsonian account of moral responsibility in mind, we note that the framework we develop extends to other accounts of our moral responsibility practices. often, even those who reject the strawsonian view take interest in the public and communicative aspects of moral responsibility, thus implying that our notions of accountability and quality signaling plausibly extend beyond the strawsonian view to other models of moral responsibility. t. m. scanlon, for instance, significantly modifies the basic ideas articulated above, arguing that blameworthy actions ‘show something about the agent’s attitudes towards others that impairs the relations that others can have with him or her’, including the basic moral relationship all persons have toward one another (scanlon : ). to express blame, then, precisely points out this fact—in other words, it communicates something to those one is blaming. others, like  more generally, quality signaling occurs whenever one acts intentionally and not only when one engages in moral responsibility practices. consider, for instance, recycling and polluting. the fact that one goes out of one’s way to recycle signals (not always honestly) that one cares about the environment and one’s fellow inhabitants of the world, thus implying that one has good will. and the fact that one throws one’s water bottle on the side of the road signals (again, not always honestly) that one lacks care and respect for the environment and one’s community, thus implying that one has ill will.  b r i a n ko g e l m a n n a n d ro b e r t h. wa l l ac e downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core pamela hieronymi (), matthew talbert (), and angela smith (), see blame as a form of moral protest. as before, such blaming communicates to other persons beliefs about their actions, attitudes, or character. shared among a diverse array of views about our moral responsibility practices is thus the idea that when we engage in the relevant practices, we also engage in a communicative enterprise. some philosophers have argued that blame can be private, in which case blame is not communicative (e.g., scanlon : –). but this is orthogonal to our project, which only focuses on blame as a communicative act. we remain agnostic on whether blame can indeed be private. thus, we have an answer to our first question: we can communicate our desire to maintain good will to our fellow citizens by participating in moral responsibility practices. following our analysis of strawsonian accounts of moral responsibility, we can say that expressions of our reactive attitudes communicate a desire to maintain good will toward others. when we are indignant at acts that display ill will, we signal that we have good will to others around us through acts of what we have called quality signaling. and when we praise acts that display good will, we again signal that we have good will toward those around us through acts of quality signaling. this quality signaling can assure others that we wish to maintain good will toward them. and if others quality signal through expression of their reactive attitudes, then they communicate to us that they wish to maintain good will toward us. but this solution works only if such instances of quality signaling are not cheap talk. this leads into our second guiding question for this section: will such instances of signaling be sufficiently costly? problematically, expressions of our reactive attitudes are often quite cheap. if althea says: ‘hey! what’s the matter with you?’ then plausibly such a display of indignation does not cost althea much in terms of making her preferences less well satisfied than they otherwise would be if she were not to express indignation. and if althea says, ‘well done!’ then such an act of praise does not cost her much either. but if these expressions of althea’s reactive attitudes cost her nothing, then others around althea cannot rationally infer that she wishes to maintain good will. the same applies to althea’s ability to infer that those around her wish to maintain good will. we have not solved our assurance dilemma quite yet. surely, it might be objected some expressions of our reactive attitudes are costly. indeed, think of how uncomfortable it can be to tell one’s friend or partner that he or she has screwed up—such discomfort is certainly a cost and makes the expression of resentment difficult. but recall the central target of our inquiry: we are focusing on those interpersonal relationships that arise in communities among relative strangers, for it is these sorts of relations that we believe give rise to the assurance problem we are concerned with. thus, though resentment among those we are close with might be quite costly, intuitively it seems that expressions of our reactive attitudes among persons we lack deep interpersonal relationships with will be cheap. this suggests that expressions of our reactive attitudes, such as praise and blame, are not performing the communicative function we wish for them to perform—such expressions are not allowing others to infer rationally the quality of our will when we engage in quality signaling. we thus still do not have m o r a l d i v e r s i t y a n d m o r a l r e s po n s i b i l i t y  downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core a way of assuring those who inhabit large-scale impersonal orders that we wish to maintain good will toward them. and they have no way of assuring us. . when blaming is costly the preceding section argued that (i) engaging in moral responsibility practices through expressions of our reactive attitudes communicates our desire to maintain good will toward others through acts of what we have called quality signaling, but (ii) many times expressions of our reactive attitudes are quite cheap. this implies that such instances of quality signaling cannot solve our assurance problem, for others cannot infer anything rationally about our intentions from such acts. but on the flip side, if expressions of our reactive attitudes were sufficiently costly, then we would have a plausible mechanism by which our assurance problem can be solved. in these sets of cases, persons can draw rational inferences about our intentions. to this end, the current section proposes a mechanism by which our quality signaling acts as a costly signal. to get a feel for the mechanism that induces costs on our quality signaling, consider a case. honor killing. dupree resides in a community where honor killings are performed against women who violate tradition sexual norms. cassidy, a young woman in the relevant community, engages in premarital sex. as a result, the community kills cassidy according to the relevant honor killing standards. in response, dupree is indignant at the members of his community: ‘what is wrong with you? are you all depraved? this is one of the most morally disgusting things i have ever witnessed!’ dupree says this despite not knowing cassidy personally. what is the likely effect of dupree’s expression of indignation? since the community, by and large, thinks that honor killings should be done, those in the community that are subject to dupree’s indignation will likely push back: they might judge dupree, shun dupree, or engage in some kind of formal or informal sanction against him. perhaps dupree is now no longer able to shop at their stores. as such, dupree’s expression of his reactive attitudes in this case is costly. it costs him something to engage in quality signaling. intuitively, it seems clear that dupree’s actions are costly. but what, exactly, induces the costs? the key here is that through quality signaling in cases of moral diversity, dupree opens himself up to sanction and criticism from the community at large. it is not easy to be told that one is a moral monster or even simply just misguided about some crucial moral issue; suffering backlash from those who  we by no means suggest this is the only mechanism. hence our thesis: that moral diversity is sufficient, but not necessary, to secure a community in which all display good will toward all. one mechanism that we do not explore is opportunity costs: that when one’s quality signaling is particularly extensive and requires great time and effort to carry out, one has incurred a cost to oneself. we believe that acts of ‘moral grandstanding’ as discussed by justin tosi and brandon warmke () are ways of inducing such costs, thereby serving a critical assurance function even if, as the authors argue, such acts are generally morally suspect.  b r i a n ko g e l m a n n a n d ro b e r t h. wa l l ac e downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core hold moral standards different from one’s own can be a difficult thing indeed. as such, the psychological costs of being criticized, reprimanded, and sanctioned are the relevant costs that one undergoes when one quality signals in cases of moral diversity, though there might be other possible costs as well: at the limit, bodily harm from those one has disagreed with. we are primarily interested in the relevant psychological costs. one may suffer backlash when one praises and blames in cases where others disagree that praise and blame are called for. this is the cost one incurs when one quality signals in environments of moral heterogeneity. because dupree’s quality signaling is costly in honor killing, though the members of the community might be upset with dupree for issuing judgments that call into question their moral norms, there is something they can be sure of: that dupree wishes to maintain good will toward them. for if dupree did not wish to do this, then imposing this cost on himself through quality signaling would likely be irrational. it is only because dupree wishes genuinely to maintain good will toward others that he is willing to engage in costly signaling. if he wished to maintain ill will toward the community, then the rational thing to do would be to stay silent. or perhaps he joins in with the community even though he disagrees, with the hope that doing so tricks others into thinking he wishes to maintain a good will. from there he may harbor ill will and achieve the payoff where he exploits and others are suckers. here, it might objected: why should those dupree blames and expresses indignation toward interpret him as harboring good will? for from their perspective, dupree has a flawed moral view, and if he had things his way, he would replace the current (correct) moral norms with incorrect ones. though it is true that those dupree blames disagree sharply with the norms dupree propagates, this does not mean that they will be able to infer rationally from this point of disagreement that dupree harbors ill will toward them. indeed, the fact that christians and muslims disagree over important moral questions does not allow all those in one group to infer rationally that all those in the other group harbor ill will. but even though this inference is not rational, some do in fact draw such an inference. we think drawing such inferences is indicative of a problematic attitude toward moral disagreement—more on this in section . below—such that when it obtains, the costly signaling mechanism we identify no longer functions successfully. instead of making this irrational inference, those persons dupree blames must ask themselves: given the costs dupree faces for his disagreement, what reason does dupree have, other than that he cares about what is right, for speaking up? if no alternative answer can be given here, those around dupree should interpret his costly signaling as evidence of him seeking to harbor good will because being motivated by the right kinds of reasons (even if one argues for the incorrect moral view) is indicative of having good will (arpaly : , –). now, it is possible to give other answers when we ask about people in circumstances like the one dupree finds himself in. for instance, a white man publicly complaining about the unfairness of affirmative action hiring practices will likely face backlash for his indignation. this is costly. does he express indignation because he genuinely cares about what is right (thus implying he has m o r a l d i v e r s i t y a n d m o r a l r e s po n s i b i l i t y  downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core good will)? perhaps. but he could also be doing so because a change in norms would benefit him. thus, in cases where self-interest aligns with the position one costly signals in favor of, drawing rational inferences about good will from costly signaling becomes difficult. caution in these cases is warranted. notice, though, that we have stipulated that dupree and cassidy do not have a close interpersonal relationship. thus, it is rational for members of dupree’s community to infer his concern for others generally from his costly disagreement. honor killing is an extreme case, but we believe the lesson of this case generalizesto all cases where there is significant moral diversity: cases where persons disagree about the relevant moral norms governing the circumstances in question. consider, for instance, students who shut down a debate at a liberal arts college because the speaker is controversial. a rogue student who signals her indignation at her fellow classmates typically does so in a costly way; there may be significant repercussions from those who disagree with her. as such, her quality signaling is costly. other examples abound: being indignant on twitter toward black lives matter protesters after they have destroyed property if one has many left-leaning twitter followers; displaying resentment toward privileged white people who voted for trump when one lives in a community full of trump supporters; and standing up and arguing that young girls ought to be given the same education as their male peers when one lives in pakistan. here, there is no doubt that malala yousafzai wishes to maintain good will and for good reason: malala’s quality signaling was costly indeed. importantly, we are not arguing that dupree and others in similar circumstances are morally required to express their reactive attitudes in cases of moral disagreement. we are merely highlighting the consequences of dupree doing this: when dupree decides to express indignation at those who radically disagree with him, such quality signaling acts as a costly signal capable of solving our assurance problem. of course, given the potential benefits of dupree’s actions, one could perhaps argue that dupree is indeed morally required to do so. we shy away from such arguments for space constraints, though we do note that such arguments might exist. we are merely highlighting what happens when dupree does engage in moral responsibility practices in an environment of moral heterogeneity. so here is where we stand: normal displays of quality signaling when engaging in moral responsibility practices likely cannot assure our fellow citizens that we wish to maintain good will toward them and vice versa. such quality signaling is often too cheap. as a result, we can end up in a situation where everyone displays ill will toward everyone else even though everyone wishes to maintain good will toward everyone else. there is, however, at least one way in which quality signaling can achieve its intended communicative function: when one quality signals in cases of moral diversity. for when one does quality signal in cases of moral diversity, one imposes costs on one’s self. this allows others to make rational inferences about one’s intentions. . refining the moral diversity solution the preceding section argued that in environments of moral heterogeneity expressions of our reactive attitudes can act as costly signals capable of solving the  b r i a n ko g e l m a n n a n d ro b e r t h. wa l l ac e downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core assurance problem characterizing large, impersonal orders. the final section of this paper refines this thesis. first, we note that only certain kinds of moral diversity will allow expressions of our reactive attitudes to act as effective costly signals. moreover, even when this right kind of diversity obtains, it is still not sufficient for expression of our reactive attitudes to be costly. we also must take seriously the possibility of genuine moral disagreement as well as take seriously the reprimand from those who disagree with the moral standards we propagate. in other words, we must foster the right kinds of attitudes toward moral diversity. . the right kind of moral diversity in cases of moral diversity instances of quality signaling act as costly signals assuring others that we wish to maintain good will toward them. disagreeing with others over deep moral questions is costly to the point that it often does not make sense to do so unless one wishes to achieve the (maintain good will, maintain good will) outcome from figure . from this it might be thought that a simple corollary follows: the more diversity, the better. for the more disagreement there is among the relevant community, the greater the likelihood that our quality signaling is costly. and when expressing our reactive attitudes is costly, we are capable of assuring our fellow citizens that we wish to maintain good will toward them. this inference is incorrect. to see why, consider a case. soles. esau and franklin live in the same community even though they have radically different backgrounds. esau is from an arab country, franklin from a western liberal democracy. a third party wrongs franklin in some way. esau, who sees this happen, takes off his shoe and points the sole toward the offender in an effort to signal his indignation at the perpetrator through an act of accountability signaling and also to signal the quality of his will toward franklin through an act of quality signaling. franklin is confused by esau’s actions, and therefore he does not interpret esau’s actions as esau wishing to maintain good will. what has gone wrong here? in many arab cultures displaying the soles of one’s shoes is a particular way of signaling indignation. when esau stands witness to franklin being harmed by some third party, esau tries to signal his indignation toward this third party. if all goes well, esau should successfully accountability signal to the perpetrator that he thinks the perpetrator has shown ill will, and he also should have successfully quality signaled to franklin the quality of his will. but he has at least failed to do the latter, for when franklin sees esau take his shoe off and point the sole toward the perpetrator, he is simply confused by esau’s behavior. here, diversity has caused problems rather than offered solutions. the diversity between esau and franklin seems too great in soles, causing a breakdown of communication. we are thus left with a somewhat pessimistic and trivial conclusion: diversity is sometimes capable of solving our assurance problem except when it cannot. m o r a l d i v e r s i t y a n d m o r a l r e s po n s i b i l i t y  downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core we now wish to make more nuanced our claim that moral diversity is capable of solving our assurance problem by inducing costs on our quality signaling. consider two ways in which diversity might manifest itself. token diversity. token diversity characterizes esau and franklin’s relationship if and only if they disagree about how it is they ought to engage in accountability and quality signaling. felicity diversity. felicity diversity characterizes esau and franklin’s relationship if and only if they disagree under what conditions they ought to engage in accountability and quality signaling. with this distinction in hand we now refine the central thesis of our paper: in order to solve the assurance problem, there needs to be significant felicity diversity but very little token diversity. in other words, when it comes to how it is we engage in accountability and quality signaling, we seek homogeneity; when it comes to under what conditions we should engage in accountability and quality signaling, we seek heterogeneity. why is this so? the problem with token diversity is that there may be confusion concerning when a signal is a signal. this seems to be what went wrong in soles. here, esau tried to signal his indignation toward the perpetrator and his quality of will toward franklin by displaying the sole of his shoe. but because esau and franklin disagree about how it is they ought to express their reactive attitudes— franklin thinks a simple ‘hey, buddy what’s the matter with you?’ is what’s called for—esau’s signal fails to achieve its intended outcome. franklin does not interpret it as a signal in the first place due to the pair’s token diversity. hence successful communication has broken down. note that many of the instances of successful costly signaling we have discussed thus far in the paper can fail as successful instances of communication when token diversity obtains. consider the first case we introduced in section  above: where althea and bertha must assure one another that they will mutually display good will. the example of costly signaling we used was althea cutting her hand open— something that most agree is costly. but now suppose althea and bertha are from radically different cultures: althea is from a wealthy western liberal democracy and bertha is from a pre-agricultural foraging society. to convince bertha that she really intends to maintain good will, althea burns a pile of money, which is the common example of costly signaling used in the technical game theory literature (indeed, the title of bernheim and redding’s  paper is ‘optimal money burning: theory and application to corporate dividend policy’). but in this case bertha does not know what money is. to her, althea sets aflame funny looking pieces of paper. as such, bertha cannot interpret althea’s costly signal as a genuine costly signal because token diversity obtains between the two. if there is token homogeneity, though, then these problems dissipate. but this same homogeneity cannot characterize the conditions under which we hold people responsible for the moral diversity solution to work. for as we have seen, it is precisely in cases of moral diversity—in terms of felicity conditions specifically—that  b r i a n ko g e l m a n n a n d ro b e r t h. wa l l ac e downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core expressions of our reactive attitudes can become costly, for we open ourselves up to sanction from those whose moral norms we criticize. it is this costliness that assures others that we wish to maintain good will toward them. hence, when it comes to moral diversity broadly construed, we face a double-edged sword: diversity in terms of how we express our attitudes can induce noise, but diversity in terms of the moral standards we hold each other accountable to is one mechanism that can help facilitate a community in which all maintain good will toward all. . taking disagreement seriously unfortunately, significant felicity diversity along with high levels of token homogeneity within a community are still not sufficient to ensure that costly signals are sent that are capable of solving our assurance problem. along with felicity diversity and token homogeneity, persons in a shared community must have the right kinds of attitudes toward the diversity they confront. there are two ways of responding to disagreement that, if they obtain, cause problems for our proposal. we now wish to highlight these problematic attitudes. to highlight the first problematic attitude, consider the following variation on honor killing. silent honor killing. dupree resides in a community where honor killings are performed against women who violate traditional sexual norms. cassidy, a young woman in the relevant community, engages in premarital sex. as a result, the community kills cassidy according to the relevant honor killing standards. though dupree disagrees sharply with the community’s standards, he does not express any indignation for he has no reason to think his moral standards are superior to the community’s or vice versa. what went wrong in silent honor killing? in the case as stated, dupree does not express his indignation toward the community and thus fails to send any kind of signal at all, costly or not. clearly this is a problem, for it is the sending of costly signals that solves our assurance problem, and dupree sends no such signal in the current case. the more general worry with silent honor killing is that dupree embraces one common—all too common among our undergraduate students—way of responding to the fact of moral disagreement, what we shall call naïve relativism. far from actually having any interesting metaethical commitments, the naïve relativist reasons in something like the following manner: because there is no obvious way to judge between competing moral demands, there is no point in engaging in argumentation over these demands. naïve relativists like dupree believe they lack the moral standing to blame, given that his view is no better than anyone else’s. so he fails to express his reactive attitudes publically. it should be clear why this sort of attitude toward moral disagreement is a problem. on the view advanced in this paper, it is precisely public disagreement with conflicting moral demands that acts as a costly signal capable of solving our assurance m o r a l d i v e r s i t y a n d m o r a l r e s po n s i b i l i t y  downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core problem. but if persons are naïve relativists, then they see no point in disagreeing with others at all and thus will send no signal in the first place. the first presumption our proposal makes when it comes to attitudes toward moral disagreement is thus that persons are not naïve relativists. rather, they think there is at least some point to engaging in substantive moral debate with others. the importance of avoiding naïve relativism seems rather clear. but there is another kind of attitude toward moral diversity that also causes problems for our proposal. to highlight this second problematic attitude, consider another case. trump. guyute blames a trump voter for supporting what guyute believes to be an unconscionable candidate. the trump supporter fights back, telling guyute that he ought to be ashamed for passively standing by and watching his country slowly but surely be torn apart by cheap immigrant labor while simultaneously more and more jobs get shipped overseas. far from being taken aback by such a reprimand, guyute finds the trump supporter’s indignation amusing. he believes trump supporters are not the kinds of people worth taking seriously and finds it quite funny whenever one of them expresses indignation toward him. nevertheless, guyute is often indignant at what trump supporters say and do. now what has gone wrong in this case? perhaps at first glance nothing, for maybe guyute is correct that it is not worth engaging with certain kinds of persons who hold certain kinds of views and thus is correct in ignoring the reprimand aimed at him. but on second glance there is some cause for concern. intuitively, guyute incurs no costs for his actions in the current case, for in not taking seriously the trump supporter’s expressions of indignation, guyute does not suffer the psychological costs we argued are typically associated with moral disagreement. since guyute predictably suffers no costs in these cases, the expression of his own reactive attitudes toward others is cheap. this raises the worry that others in the community (especially the trump supporter herself) might not think that guyute is committed to maintaining good will, leading us back to our original assurance problem. perhaps counterintuitively, taking the trump supporter seriously would be costly for guyute and would thus assure others (and especially the trump supporter herself) that he has a desire to maintain good will. guyute harbors the second problematic attitude toward moral disagreement, what we call hubristic realism. also free from any kinds of interesting metaethical commitments, the hubristic realist reasons in something like the following way: even though people disagree with me when it comes to the appropriate moral standards for governing social life, i need not care about such disagreements because it is my view that is the correct view, and everyone else is deeply misguided. for the hubristic realist, disagreement can often be seen as an insidious effort to undermine community, rather than as genuine evidence that one might be mistaken. this is what may happen in the aftermath of honor killing. dupree’s community may fail to see his blame as a costly signal because, of course, someone who believes that honor killing is wrong must be wicked to the core.  b r i a n ko g e l m a n n a n d ro b e r t h. wa l l ac e downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core the problem here is that when one is a hubristic realist, several of the costs associated with moral disagreement simply vanish. if one thinks that one’s interlocutors are wicked or foolish and not worth taking seriously, then one incurs little psychological costs when one is reprimanded by them. indeed, at the limit, moral reprimand from those one disagrees with can actually provide a net utility gain, for it can be amusing to take cheap shots from what one deems to be the cheap seats. but when this is true, expressing the reactive attitudes in environments of felicity diversity will not be costly; instead, such expressions will be quite cheap. this leaves our assurance problem unresolved. note that it is an implicit assumption of many of the cases we have given thus far that those expressing the reactive attitudes in cases of moral disagreement are not hubristic realists. returning to the original honor killing, if dupree does not care that the rest of his community thinks he is deeply misguided and also does not care about the sanctions imposed on him, then the reprimand he receives for his expressions of blame will not be costly. what was a case of costly signaling is now cheap talk. the same applies to other cases: if the student who is indignant at her fellow classmates for shutting down a campus speech simply does not care about what her peers think of her, then such indignation is no longer costly. if one does not care that one’s twitter followers rake one over the coals for blaming black lives matter protesters, then, again, such an instance of blame is now cheap. and finally, as highlighted by trump, if one thinks the backlash one receives from trump supporters is funny or amusing after one blames them, then one’s blaming them is no longer costly. to some, these conclusions about the function of moral disagreement may sound surprising. but it should not surprise us that hubristic realism undermines assurance in the good will of other persons in conditions of moral diversity. indeed, the avoidance of hubristic realism is related to one of the characteristics of a reasonable person. for, as rawls argued, the burdens of judgment are those factors that give rise to genuine good-faith disagreements among persons (rawls [] : –). part of being a reasonable person (according to rawls’s definition) is to accept the burdens of judgment as an explanation as to why persons disagree (rawls [] : ). but in accepting this it is hard to see how one could also be a hubristic realist. for if one accepts that a set of factors leads to good-faith disagreements, then it is hard to see how one could also think others are so deeply misguided to the point that they are not worth taking seriously. this just means, though, that one is not a hubristic realist. thus, engaging in moral responsibility practices in cases of felicity diversity acts as a costly signal only if we have the right kinds of attitudes toward moral diversity. first, we must avoid being naïve relativists when confronted with disagreements for, if we are naïve relativists, then we likely will not send any signal at all in the first place. and second, we must avoid being hubristic realists for, if we are hubristic realists, then we may not incur sufficient costs when we express our  hubristic realism makes several, but not all, costs vanish. sometimes there are more than psychological costs one bears when one vocally expresses moral disagreement—indeed, one could suffer serious bodily harm from such an act. being a hubristic realist does not make these costs go away. m o r a l d i v e r s i t y a n d m o r a l r e s po n s i b i l i t y  downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core reactive attitudes in an environment of moral heterogeneity. to sum up: we must engage in moral discourse as if there is something important at stake to be resolved, but also with the humility that our positions on these moral questions may be wrong and that those we disagree with—sometimes radically disagree with —may in fact be right. when a community is constituted by persons so described in which there is also sufficient felicity diversity with high levels of token homogeneity, then we have reason to believe that all will be assured to continue displaying good will toward all. . conclusion it is by no means the case that our communities will be well-functioning. indeed, though many of us are fortunate enough to live in western liberal democracies where we are reasonably sure that others will display good will toward us and where others are reasonably sure that we will display good will toward them, much of the world lives in chaos rather than harmony. beyond contributing to the literature on moral responsibility, we hope that our paper offers one small insight concerning why this disparity might exist. in communities where differences are stark, the intentions of our fellow citizens may be more transparent than in cases where we are characterized by sameness. though perhaps a bit counterintuitive, such a fact might help explain why some of us do in fact live better together. brian kogelmann university of maryland bkogel@gmail.com robert h. wallace university of arizona rhwallace@email.arizona.edu references arpaly, nomy. 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([] ) ‘responsibility and the limits of evil: variations on a strawsonian theme’. in michael mckenna and paul russell (eds.), free will and reactive attitudes (burlington: ashgate publishing), –. m o r a l d i v e r s i t y a n d m o r a l r e s po n s i b i l i t y  downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://ssrn.com/abstract= https://ssrn.com/abstract= https://www.cambridge.org/core 	moral diversity and moral responsibility 	abstract 	introduction 	the possibility and fragility of mutual good will 	communicating good will 	when blaming is costly 	refining the moral diversity solution 	the right kind of moral diversity 	taking disagreement seriously 	conclusion 	references microsoft word - nlcercós.docx.pdf . /te . . temps d’educació, , p. - ( ) universitat de barcelona n otes d e lectura el testimoni de tara westover: sobre l’educació a casa en el context d’una pedagogia fonamentalista raquel cercós i raichs (universitat de barcelona) tara westover, una educació. memòries. barcelona, més llibres, , pàgs. més índex ens trobem davant d’un llibre certament ben especial atès que es tracta d’una con- fessió, a manera d’un relat de formació (récit de formation) que recorda el gènere clàssic de la novel·la de formació (bil- dungsroman). recordem que una de les característiques d’aquest gènere literari consisteix en posar de relleu la importàn- cia de l’autoaprenentatge en el procés d’assolir la maduresa personal i intel·lec- tual a través de la cultura (cura animi). i això succeïa sobretot en el marc de la cul- tura burgesa centreeuropea, de l’època de la belle époque, que recorria al conreu de la literatura i de la música. És obvi que la pro- tagonista d’aquesta història –la tara wes- tover, nascuda el i instal·lada als es- tats units– va d’haver de traçar el seu propi camí sense l’embolcall d’una família benestant que cultivés les arts i les lletres i al marge de la tradició cultural europea. amb tot, els seus avantpassats noruecs procedien d’aquells emigrants del vell continent que des dels ports del mar del nord van marxar cap nord-amèrica amb la bíblia sota el braç, després d’haver escoltat uns missioners mormons, que van posar- los en antecedents del seu profeta joseph smith ( - ) que els va captivar. tothom sap que en aquella època la bíblia, a més de ser una lectura intensiva (quan s’acabava es tornava a començar), constituïa un referent no només religiós i moral sinó també vital, per tal de portar a terme una existència plena de dificultats, que comptava amb el suport de déu tot beneint aquelles famílies creients i confia- des en la voluntat divina que buscaven una mena de terra promesa, anticipi i pre- ludi de la vida eterna. fet i fet, la lectura de la bíblia i el llibre del mormó ( ) que va escriure joseph smith, van guiar els passos d’aquells que es van expatriar i abandonar la vella europa per establir-se a amèrica que així va esdevenir un veritable nou món, en què era possible començar una nova vida en els assentaments mormons, tot i la cruesa del salvatge oest, en una cru- ïlla on coincidien la fe religiosa i l’esperit aventurer dels pioners. És fàcil intuir que la trajectòria familiar que ens conta l’autora d’aquest llibre ens reporta la situació límit en què es va veure abocada, fins al punt d’haver d’abandonar el domicili paternal, on havia iniciat la for- mació en un ambient d’una família fona- mentalista mormona, que evitava el con- tacte amb l’exterior, inclòs amb la resta de la família (avis, oncles) i, nogensmenys, amb la comunitat mormona, llevat d’al- guna excepció. en efecte, tara westover ens narra la seva infantesa i adolescència en una família que va renunciar a inscriure- la al registre, que no la va escolaritzar per evitar que els mestres la malmetessin amb llurs falòrnies, que negava els beneficis de les vacunes, que refusava la medicina clí- temps d’educació, , p. - ( ) universitat de barcelona n ot es d e le ct ur a nica dels metges i que confiava en els re- meis casolans basats en les herbes natu- rals. segons la manera de fer dels seus pa- res, es tractaria d’organitzar-se autosufici- entment, en plena natura, amb el rebuig de les institucions i instàncies convencio- nals (escola, medicina, hospitals) per fo- mentar un nou estil de vida radical, en què l’herbologia es converteix en la clau de volta de qualsevol curació, al marge de la indústria farmacològica. cal fer notar que els parts no tenien lloc en instal·lacions mèdiques sinó als domicilis particulars, per mitjans naturals amb l’ajut de les plan- tes remeieres i així la mare es va convertir en una llevadora sense títol, però amb co- neixements acumulats per l’experiència, encara que en situacions extremes va cal- dre recórrer a l’ajuda de la medicina hospi- talària. en aquesta mateixa direcció, les fonts d’energia es produïen de manera au- tònoma amb generadors, al marge dels in- teressos de les grans empreses elèctri- ques, representades per la utah power, que també responen als interessos del maligne. en fi, tot estreba en una preparació per a l’arribada dels últims dies quan només els justos podran sobreviure en aquest món decadent per la vida dissipada dels homes que s’han allunyat de déu i corrom- put pels il·luminats de tot tipus que bus- quen la saviesa humana, una expressió perversa d’orgull en no acceptar la volun- tat i els designis de déu. per consegüent, els pares es malfien de la policia i de les au- toritats federals que són presentades com una manifestació del dimoni o, el que és el mateix, del mal. no debades, les autoritats federals havien posat setge en alguns ca- sos a famílies que seguien aquest mateix estil de vida, quasi bé sense contactes amb l’exterior. vist en perspectiva, no pot estra- nyar les malfiances respecte les autoritats federals, que són tingudes per hostils, si te- nim en compte que el territori d’utah (nom que procedeix de la tribu índia «ute», poble de les muntanyes) va seguir una vida independent fins que el va pas- sar a ser un estat més de la unió. lògicament, les universitats –fins i tot mormones com la byu (brigham young university)– també són rebutjades pels pares, que temorosos de déu es prepara- ven per la segona vinguda de déu, és a dir, pels temps finals, una situació que es va aguditzar quan el calendari anunciava el canvi de mil·lenni amb l’arribada de l’any . no debades, la teologia mormona representada per dotzenes de grups i ten- dències i en la qual s’ha fet un lloc comú la poligàmia que es va deixar de practicar el (smith va tenir quaranta esposes i brigham cinquanta sis) es caracteritza per posar l’accent en els darrers moments, tal com es desprèn del fet que els mormons s’identifiquin amb l’església de jesucrist dels sants dels Últims dies. paga la pena assenyalar que joseph smith, que va ser assassinat per una torba, simbolitza el pro- feta de la nova religió, alhora que va es- criure el llibre del mormó ( ), una de les poques lectures permeses als mormons ortodoxos al costat de la bíblia. val a dir que smith va voler tornar a restaurar el cristianisme originari, pervertit al llarg dels anys, després de les revelacions que va te- nir a palmyra, a tocar de nova york, on avui s’aixeca un esplèndid temple de granit blanc. «el meu pare –escriu tara– volia vi- sitar el bosquet sagrat de palmyra, a nova york, el bosc on, segons joseph smith, déu se li havia aparegut i li havia ordenat que fundés l’església vertadera» (p. ). per la seva banda, brigham young ( - ) va presidir l’església de jesucrist dels sants dels Últims dies entre i , i així va fundar el la ciutat de salt lake city, capital de l’estat d’utah, un referent de la comunitat mormona que és una de los po- ques esglésies cristianes que creix actual- temps d’educació, , p. - ( ) universitat de barcelona n otes d e lectura ment al món pel que fa al nombre de fi- dels. a propòsit d’això, cal tenir en consi- deració que els joves de la comunitat són enviats a servir en missions de l’església mormona i que en ocasions han fet osten- tació del seu compromís religiós, tal com va succeir amb la campanya que va afectar al jugador de bàsquet brandon davies – avui en les files del fc barcelona– després que el seu entrenador de la byu el va se- parar de l’equip per mantenir relacions amb la seva novia. per tal de donar suport a l’entrenador en qüestió, els seguidors van fer una samarreta que deia i can’t. i’m mormon, que es pot adquirir per la xarxa. a banda d’aquest fet que confirma la rigidesa de la moral mormona, es pot afe- gir que després de la mort accidentada de joseph smith, brigham young va traslla- dar les caravanes de mormons, que així van esdevenir veritables pioners, de l’est cap a l’oest per tal d’instal·lar-se en territo- ris més segurs però alhora àrids i, a voltes, desèrtics. És per aquest motiu que el pare de tara, com els mormons en general, fos un ferm defensor de l’ideari dels pares fun- dadors de la pàtria amb noms com georg washington, thomas jefferson i james madison que tara havia llegit i coneixia perfectament (p. ). en aquest punt, es fa ben palesa la convergència entre el pro- cés d’independència nord-americana ( ) i la colonització dels territoris de l’oest que ha recreat manta vegades el ci- nema (amb les pel·lícules del far west) i les creences religioses que, d’una manera o altra, van configurar el pensament del wasp (white anglo-saxon protestant) que explica tantes coses sobre la història dels estats units i la realitat que es viu avui (es- crivim això el juny de ) quan la pro- testa de les comunitats negres s’ha escam- pat altra volta per tot el país enfront de la contundència de la repressió policial amb la població afroamericana, que va acabar amb la mort de george floyd el de maig de , una denúncia que s’ha estès a al- tres llocs del planeta fins fer-se global, al crit de black lives matter que pregona que les vides negres són importants. així les coses, la comunitat mormona es va establir a l’oest, integrada majoritàri- ament per població blanca que professa el culte als pares de la independència i que el va establir la byu (brigham young university). en aquest context, no pot sob- tar que el pare de tara –que també partici- pava d’una actitud antisemita, més encara si tenim en compte que els pioners proce- dien del nord d’europa, amb la qual cosa participaven del mite de la raça ària– fos membre de l’associació nacional del rifle nord-americana (nra), i al seu torn posseïa diverses armes per a la protecció de la fa- mília que vivia apartada del món, alhora que convertia la granja en un fortí capaç de foragitar qualsevol setge dels federals o dels enemics que feien perillar la seva identitat i manera de viure. al seu parer, aquells adversaris havien escoltat les doc- trines dels socialistes de califòrnia i els consells dels il·luminats saberuts que se- guien estratègies per seduir la joventut cap als estudis, i trencar amb la tradició, un aspecte que assoleix el paroxisme en el cas del francès, una llengua forastera que el pare considerava que era socialista (p. ). la casa familiar, amb condicions higiè- niques deficients, estava situada en l’estat d’idaho als peus de les impressionats mun- tanyes buck’s peak, en ple corredor mormó, format per una zona que s’estén per l’occident dels estats units en territoris d’utah i nevada. de més a més, la granja va esdevenir una mena d’abocador pel desballestament de ferralla i on la mare, nascuda el i seguidora de la cinesio- logia que utilitzava per diagnosticar terà- pies de la medicina alternativa a base de plantes, va generar una creixent manufac- tura de remeis casolans a base d’herbes, temps d’educació, , p. - ( ) universitat de barcelona n ot es d e le ct ur a que comercialitzava amb gran èxit de ven- des. així, doncs, aquest rerefons que hem descrit va constituir el teló de fons en què tara es va formar, en mig d’una família nombrosa, on la violència d’un pare bipo- lar i d’alguns germans (en especial de shawn) era una cosa freqüent. en resum, una vida a l’aire lliure, amb feines feixu- gues i perilloses des de la infància, man- cada de l’escalf d’amics i companys en no poder assistir a l’escola. això significa que ens trobem davant d’un cas típic dels efectes negatius que pot comportar una educació a casa (ho- meschooling) quan la família adopta una actitud tancada, que a més respon a un es- quema maniqueu entre el bé i el mal, com sovint fan algunes fórmules sectàries. fora de nosaltres, del grup, no hi ha salvació. tal com ella reconeix, el seu pare l’havia «en- senyat que en cap tema no hi podia haver dues opinions assenyades: hi ha la veritat i hi ha les mentides» (p. ). segons aquest criteri, entre ambdós bàndols s’alça una frontera infranquejable, atès que si la su- peres i abandones la veritat hom cau en el terreny fangós de llucifer, de l’error i del pecat. per tant, qualsevol persona es troba, quan arriba a l’adolescència, en la disjun- tiva de triar entre obeir les indicacions dels pares o bé agafar el propi camí, i així poder escapolir-se com va fer tara de la pressió familiar que va esdevenir un autèntic mal- son. el pare només acceptava, i sempre en sentit literal sense cap interpretació her- menèutica, lectures religioses –la dels pro- fetes mormons, de la bíblia– a banda dels pares fundadors dels estats units que, com hem vist, formen una unitat, de manera que la colonització de l’oest s’havia fet sota la protecció divina a partir de les idees dels pares de la pàtria. amb tot, sembla evident que el fet que visquem en un món emparaulat permet despertar la consciència de tara encara que no comptés amb el suport de cap es- pecialista en matèries històriques i literà- ries. només podia comptar amb la fe in- destructible dels seus progenitors, en l’or- todòxia fonamentalista del pare i amb la bona disposició de la mare que posseïa una sensibilitat que el pare desconeixia. aquestes consideracions són per fer cons- tar que la lectura va esperonar les ganes d’aprendre de tara, tal com ella explica: vaig llegir dues vegades el llibre de mormó. vaig llegir el nou testament, una vegada de pressa, després una segona vegada més lenta- ment, fent pauses per prendre notes, per fer referències creuades, i fins i tot per escriure curts assaigs sobre dogmes com ara la fe i el sacrifici... tot seguit, vaig treballar l’antic testa- ment, després vaig llegir els llibres del pare, la majoria compilacions dels discursos, cartes i diaris dels primers profetes mormons. el seu llenguatge era del segle dinou (encarcarat, si- nuós, però exacte) i al principi no vaig enten- dre res. però amb el temps els ulls i les orelles se’m van adaptar, de manera que vaig comen- çar a trobar-me com a casa amb aquells frag- ments de la història de la meva gent: històries de pioners, els meus avantpassats, travessant les terres verges d’amèrica. mentre que les his- tòries eren vitals, els sermons eren abstractes, tractats sobre obscurs temes filosòfics, i a aquelles abstraccions vaig dedicar la major part de l’estudi. en retrospectiva, veig que aquella va ser la meva educació, la que importaria: les hores que vaig passar asseguda en un escriptori prestat, lluitant per disseccionar brins fins de la doctrina mormona per mimetisme amb un germà que m’havia abandonat. l’habilitat que estava aprenent n’era una de crucial: la pacièn- cia per llegir coses que encara no podia com- prendre (p. - ). no obstant, el fet que aprengués a lle- gir en aquest tipus de llibres va determinar que la seva escriptura fos encarcarada, cir- cumstància que la primera professora de llengua que va tenir a la universitat va sa- ber copsar d’immediat. «no li vaig dir que havia après a llegir i escriure llegint només la bíblia, el llibre del mormó i discursos de joseph smith i brigham young» (p. ). també podem esmentar que en aquella família, i sempre sota la mirada autoritària temps d’educació, , p. - ( ) universitat de barcelona n otes d e lectura del pare, «els llibres que no eren de déu quedaven proscrits; eren un perill, pode- rós i irresistible en la seva astúcia» (p. ). per tant, ella mateixa va promoure als setze anys un procés de canvi i de transfor- mació, de metamorfosi, a fi d’assolir una independència de criteri i una maduresa intel·lectual que l’apropés a una majoria d’edat que fos capaç de sostreure’s al pes de l’ortodòxia fonamentalista, tot i l’enfu- rismament i contrarietat dels pares. cal re- cordar que l’autoaprenentatge constitueix el punt clau de la novel·la de formació, fe- nomen que també es dóna en el cas que ens ocupa. «a la nostra família, l’aprenen- tatge era completament autodidacta: po- dies aprendre qualsevol cosa que et po- guessis ensenyar, després de fer la teva feina» (p. ). a tot estirar, i com uns dels pocs ensenyaments rebuts, tara assenyala que quan tenia deu anys només havia es- tudiat el codi morse, perquè el pare insistia que l’aprengués per si les autoritats talla- ven les línies de comunicació amb l’exte- rior. de tal manera que aquest llibre es con- verteix en una mena de descàrrec de cons- ciència en què tara –que posseeix una molt bona veu, que li va permetre cantar en el cor de l’església– ens explica la seva història personal que pot servir d’exemple per altres persones que es puguin trobar en un atzucac vital com el que ella va ex- perimentar en un ambient corrosiu i de- gradant que funciona sobre la base d’un esquema binari (amic/enemic per dir-ho a la manera de carl schmitt) en què el cultiu de l’esperit, la cura de l’ànima, quedava col·lapsada per les creences religioses, sense oblidar les fatigoses jornades de tre- ball enmig de la ferralla amb perills evi- dents que van ocasionar més d’un acci- dent greu entre la colla d’operaris que di- rigia el pare amb mà ferma i formada prin- cipalment pels seus fills. així s’entén que la família es mostrés oposada a què els fills es relacionessin amb la resta de la comunitat, llevat del diu- menge al temple. el contrast era evident, atès que bona part de les famílies mormo- nes acceptaven que els fills estudiessin, as- sistissin als espectacles com el cinema i el teatre, practiquessin esport, freqüentessin escoles, instituts i biblioteques, i tot això sense renunciar a les obligacions domini- cals amb el bisbe, nomenclatura mormona de pastor. però els pares de tara conside- raven que la saviesa humana és niciesa da- vant de déu, de manera que la saviesa ter- renal adquireix la condició d’una mena de prostituta que ens allunya del veritable camí (p. ). d’aquí l’oposició familiar als professors considerats liberals que, tot i ser mormons, ensenyen doctrines contrà- ries al seu credo religiós (p. ). en el fons, amb la seva actitud de renunciar a la vida de la granja i seguir els estudis tara es va exposar a sofrir la ira divina, d’acord amb la visió d’un déu venjatiu, que judica i cas- tiga, més propi de l’antic testament que no pas del mandat amorós del nou testa- ment. altrament, els diumenges la família de tara havia d’observar el sàbat de manera que seguia estrictament les disposicions religioses, per tal d’estar preparats per a la fi dels temps que són propers. no es tracta que tara perdés la fe religiosa, més encara si es té en compte que va rebre suport per part del bisbe (pastor) de l’església per en- degar els estudis, sinó que després d’una sèrie d’esdeveniments que es van produir en la vida familiar va decidir allunyar-se d’un cercle enrarit que la deshumanitzava, en un context patriarcal on els mascles (ja sigui el pare o algun germà) exercien una tutela asfixiant sobre la nostra protago- nista que va ser qualificada de meuca quan va intentar tenir cura del seu abilla- ment personal, sempre masculinitzat amb temps d’educació, , p. - ( ) universitat de barcelona n ot es d e le ct ur a pantalons texans de noi. fet i debatut, as- sistim a través del seu relat a un despertar de la consciència promoguda per les ga- nes de saber, d’estudiar i així tara va des- cobrir un altre món fora de l’entorn corro- siu de la família. un relat que al capdavall la va conduir fins a l’agnosticisme, proba- blement per rebuig de l’actitud paternal, tal com es desprèn de la sensació que va experimentar en veure el temple existent a palmyra, aixecat l’any i que es troba coronat per una estàtua daurada de l’àn- gel mormoni: «el pare i jo vam mirar el temple. ell hi va veure déu: jo hi vaig veure granit. ens vam mirar. ell va veure una dona condemnada; jo vaig veure un ancià inestable, literalment desfigurat per les se- ves creences. i tanmateix, triomfant» (p. ). per descomptat, la intenció de tara va ser ingressar a la universitat, cosa que va aconseguir després de dos intents, des- prés de superar l’act (american college testing, és a dir, l’examen d’accés a la uni- versitat). d’aquesta manera, tara va tallar amb la inèrcia de moltes noies de la comu- nitat mormona que estaven lligades a un cicle vital que contemplava, després de l’adolescència, un casament precoç i una nombrosa descendència. en una instància que no va saber fer, però que va formalit- zar amb l’ajuda de tyler, un germà que es- tudiava també i comprenia la decisió de tara, va fer constar que «havia rebut una educació segons un programa rigorós dis- senyat per la meva mare, que s’havia asse- gurat que compliria tots els requisits per graduar-me» (p. ), quelcom que no era cert perquè si va poder aprovar va ser grà- cies a l’esforç personal i a les ganes d’aprendre, en una actitud solitària d’auto- aprenentatge, la qual cosa ens transmet la imatge d’una dona forta i corretjosa que no cedeix fàcilment davant l’adversitat. en una actitud rebel i d’autoafirmació, tara va xerraquejar la lògica que havia pas- sat de pares a fills i va optar per traçar un itinerari independent (p. ), la qual cosa l’obligava no només a anar-se’n de casa sinó també a arrossinar els lligams en bona part de la seva família que no entenia la seva decisió de cercar nous rumbs. És obvi que es tracta d’un llarg itinerari, més en- cara si tenim en compte que quan ella va arribar a la universitat desconeixia el que significava la paraula «holocaust», cosa que va generar la malfiança dels com- panys. malgrat tot, la sorpresa va ser que a la brigham young university va obtenir bones notes que van permetre que gaudís de beques, atès que l’ajuda familiar era nul·la. això establert, podem destacar que durant aquells anys de formació va rebre el xoc de la població negra que lluitava des de feia dècades pels drets civils. fins lla- vors, només havia vist una nena negra, «la filla adoptiva d’una família de l’església» (p. ). tot i que coneixia l’episodi de l’es- clavitud, les classes del dr. richard kimball –expert en història de l’esport– van des- pertar-li la consciència dels mals tractes i del bandejament de la població negra. per aquesta via, tara va arribar a assabentar-se del moviment dels drets civils amb el nom de rosa parks que el es va negar a seure al darrera de l’autobús, en el lloc re- servat pels negres, per la qual cosa va ser condemnada. més tard, va descobrir el moviment feminista, un referent per algú com ella que buscava models d’emancipa- ció de l’esclavatge mental al que havia es- tat sotmesa (p. ). els èxits acadèmics de tara van fer que pogués obtenir una beca per visitar el king’s college de cambridge amb altres estudiants de la byu. allà va gaudir de la tutorització del professor jonathan stein- berg, especialista en l’holocaust, que va elogiar un assaig de tara en què compa- temps d’educació, , p. - ( ) universitat de barcelona n otes d e lectura rava «edmund burke amb publius, el pseu- dònim sota el qual james madison, ale- xander hamilton i john jay havien escrit els documents federalistes» (p. ). en ser reconeguda com una jove de talent va po- der aconseguir ajuts, com la beca gates (a la xarxa es pot trobar una conversa entre bill gates i tara westover, a propòsit del lli- bre que comentem), que van permetre que pogués assolir el doctorat en història, després de passar pel trinity college. en- mig de tot plegat, no deixa de ser signifi- catiu que un dels seus tutors –el professor david runciman de la universitat de cam- bridge– li suggerís que estudiés el mormo- nisme, des d’una nova perspectiva, des- prés que ella descobrís «ecos de la teolo- gia mormona en els grans filòsofs del segle xix» (p. ). la recomanació del seu tutor va anar en aquesta direcció: «pots exami- nar el mormonisme no tan sols com un moviment religiós, sinó com un d’intel·lec- tual» (p. ). així fou com tara westover va obtenir el doctorat amb la dissertació the family, morality and social science in an- glo-american cooperative thought, - defensada el a la universitat de cambridge. gairebé no caldria ni dir que tara westover s’ha convertit en un refe- rent d’abast mundial, després de posar en perill les relacions familiars a benefici de la seva formació. d’aquí que la nostra prota- gonista hagi estat convidada com a confe- renciant en moltes universitats nord-ame- ricanes per presentar i comentar el llibre que dona peu a aquesta recensió que posa de relleu els perills del fonamentalisme ideològic i religiós quan coarta la llibertat humana i les possibilitats de creixement personal, en negar una educació pública i lliure en contacte amb altri, aspectes que hom ha de tenir en compte quan es valora l’educació a casa (homeschooling), una de les tendències que ha fet forat en el món de la pedagogia postmoderna, és a dir, d’aquells que desconfien de l’educació pú- blica. ps • july business annual meeting announcement council nominations editor's report of perspec- tives on politics new editors of perspectives on politics apsa rbsi scholars briefs congressional fellowship office placements washington insider center page apsa members of the month mena report august apsa council meeting minutes apsa contributors apsa bylaws & all-member business meeting minutes ©american political science association, the quest for legitimacy: actors, audiences and aspirations ashley vande bunte, director, meetings and events apsa looks forward to welcoming political scientists, faculty, and stu-dents in san francisco for the th annual meeting this august. join apsa and your colleagues, old and new, for four days of panels, roundtables, and special events for scholars to present, learn, and network at the largest political science conference. dis- cuss many of the latest issues facing political science, including issues related to the theme, “the quest for legitimacy: actors, audiences, and aspirations.” celebrate with colleagues at the opening reception and the reception honoring teach- ing. delve more deeply into topics with a short course on wednesday, august , or inter- act with fellow apsa members at the apsa all-member business meeting on thursday, august , at : p.m. along with special events and networking, the apsa annual meeting provides attendees with worthwhile services, such as the ejobs interview servic- es for onsite interviews, and an exhibit hall hosting publishers, think tanks, classroom technology, software companies, and more. the quest for legitimacy: actors, audiences and aspirations conference program cochairs, amaney jamal, princeton university, and susan hyde, university of california, berkeley, select- ed this year’s theme panels, which focus on tackling questions of legitimacy. the theme pertains to both the determinants of legiti- macy and the consequences of legitimacy (or a lack thereof ). it also includes those who are viewed as legitimate or potentially legitimate actors and those audiences who may have the power to confer or revoke legitimacy. the theme panels include: • the authority trap: strategic choices of international ngos • authors meet critics: parties, movements, and democracy in the developing world • black lives matter: racial politics and social justice in the age of obama and the new trump era • causes and consequences of legitimacy in areas of limited statehood • classical reflections on democracy and legitimacy • democracy, distrust, and digital publics • democratic legitimacy and violence against women: policymaking in the global south • divided societies: comparative historical perspectives on legitimacy • the emergence of donald trump: did political science see this coming? • europe’s perfect storm • experiments in state capacity and popular legitimacy • the first days (but who’s counting?): sex, gender, race, class • the gendered consequences of armed conflict • global populisms • how political scientists can create effective public engagement • identity politics and the us presidential election • information and legitimacy: results from the first egap metaketa th apsa annual meeting & exhibition san francisco, ca august –september , ps • july business ©american political science association, • legitimate authority in conflict-ridden states • the “legitimate authority of the people” in american political thought • legitimate people, legitimate territory? critical perspectives on sovereigntism • l e g i t i m i z i n g p o s t - c o n f l i c t states: empirical and theoretical microfoundations • measuring legitimacy • migration and border politics in africa • muslim american identity and political behavior • muslims in the american imagination • perspectives on trumpism • political competition, religious authority, and orthodoxy in muslim world • the political effects of forced migration on states • populism, immigration, race, and lgbt rights in the united states and europe • quest for legitimacy: understanding threat, fear, and political exclusion • race, gender, sexuality, and the politics of legitimacy: months in trumplandia • reconstructing legitimacy: approaches to post-conflict reconciliation • revitalizing legitimacy: integrating concepts, measurement, and analysis • role of legitimacy in counterinsurgency • threatening the legitimacy of the us supreme court nomination process • where to with the liberal order? find full theme panel details online at web.apsanet.org/apsa /theme-panels/. annual meeting website the apsa annual meeting homepage can be found at http://web.apsanet.org/ apsa /. find panel dates, times, and more information in the online, interactive program before arriving in san francisco. locations will be added in august. the con- ference mobile app will launch in august, providing personal scheduling, event type sorting, division sorting, cross-event type keyword search functionality, interactive maps and exhibit hall floorplans, and col- league connections with in-app messaging. registration is now open on the website. june was the deadline for program partici- pants to register, and july is the last day for early bird discounted rates. current apsa members receive lower registration rates, so we encourage nonmembers to consider joining to take advantage of reduced regis- tration fees and other valuable services the association offers. while you are registering, you can also reserve your hotel room. august is the dead- line to book hotel rooms in the discounted blocks. featured plenary sessions and capstone events join your colleagues for dynamic presen- tations and discussions on timely news- worthy topics. on thursday, august , join us at : p.m. for the presidential address by apsa president david lake, university of california, san diego. this will be imme- diately followed by the opening reception. all apsa attendees are invited to attend the reception, featuring complimentary hors d’oeuvres and networking. it’s a great kick off to the conference! featured paper panels: minute presentations make plans on friday at noon to attend a featured paper panel session. the confer- ence program chairs selected a group of panels that feature three -minute paper presentations on it, allowing authors and audiences to delve into the topic and have ample time for discussion. you can see a full list of these panels online, as well as other new presentation format panels: web.apsanet.org/apsa /special-presen- tation-formats/. short courses each year, on the wednesday prior to the start of the annual meeting, apsa hosts half- and full-day short courses that pro- vide opportunities for meeting attendees to enhance knowledge and reinvigorate teaching or research skills. short courses are only open to registered annual meeting attendees and preregistration is required. view details on the annual meeting web- site’s short course page: http://web.apsanet. org/apsa /short-courses/. ■ san francisco is known for its fine dining and diverse culture. photo courtesy of san francisco travel association. photos courtesy of san francisco travel association (photo by scott chernis). http://web.apsanet.org/apsa /theme-panels/ http://web.apsanet.org/apsa / http://web.apsanet.org/apsa / http://web.apsanet.org/apsa /special-presentation-formats/ http://web.apsanet.org/apsa /special-presentation-formats/ http://web.apsanet.org/apsa /short-courses/ http://web.apsanet.org/apsa /short-courses/ the problem is not populism, but the failure of liberal democracy: comments on schmitter's essay symposium: on populisms. comments on schmitter’s “the vices and virtues of ‘populisms’ ” https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / sociologica. v. n. ( ) issn - the problem is not populism, but the failure of liberal democracy: comments on schmitter’s essay gianpaolo baiocchi* published: august , abstract a comment on philippe schmitter’s essay “the vices and virtues of ‘populisms’ ” (sociologica, ( ), ) philippe c. schmitter’s recent essay on populism provides an interesting starting point for a conver- sation on recent political phenomena in europe and elsewhere, particularly on the future of democracy. schmitter has been an insightful analyst of european politics for decades and this essay is no exception. it makes a number of important points while avoiding the usual (and wordy) pitfalls on the discussion: that populism, until recently, has almost always been a pejorative term; that what we understand as pop- ulism belongs to both right and left, and has an indeterminate class content; that populism gives voice to surplus societal demands not represented by traditional parties; and that populist parties can unsettle existing established party structures. the essay’s admittedly condensed format identifying general fea- tures makes some of the more specific claims about the way that populist movements operate difficult to assess, as does the mostly european referent. while italy’s five star movement seems to clearly fit the mold, it is not clear if spain’s podemos, la france insoumise, or the uk’s momentum do. and once we leave europe to, say, latin america, does brazil’s workers’ party or uruguay’s frente amplio fit the bill? but my main disagreement with the essay is more fundamental. while sharing the underlying sense of alarm, my worry is not with populism per se, but with liberal democracy and its institutions thirty years into neoliberalism. i also do not think that all populisms are the same, or operate in the same way. there is indeed a political contest over “the people” between different political projects, but left and right projects operate entirely differently in this regard. in contrast to political projects that further elite interests and narrow the boundaries of the political community (right-wing populisms), the opposite project is redistributive and seeks to broaden boundaries. there is, in other words, an emancipatory political project to be carried out in response to the failures and limits of liberal democracy. i prefer pop- ular sovereignty to “left-wing populism.” i briefly sketch out each of these arguments in turn, though * gallatin school of individualized study, new york university (united states of america);  gb @nyu.edu;http://orcid. org/ - - - copyright © gianpaolo baiocchi the text in this work is licensed under the creative commons by license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / the problem is not populism, but the failure of liberal democracy sociologica. v. n. ( ) in the same condensed format as schmitter’s essay. the fuller version of these arguments is in my recent book-length essay, we, the sovereign (baiocchi, ). first, we need to interrogate what the surplus, unvoiced needs are that provide the fodder for right- wing populism. my contention is that after three decades into neoliberalism, liberal democracy and political parties working within its framework have reached a limit in terms of their ability to represent large swaths of the world’s majority. take europe (schmitter’s reference) or north america in the last three decades and the conditions of the majority of the population of the continent: increased inequality, insecurity, lessened social mobility, and existential threats like climate change. with the vanquishing of state socialism, the very idea of an alternative to liberal democracy and free markets seemed to vanish, nearly overnight. as terribly flawed as state socialism had been, it provided a counterpoint of some kind to the existing order. we have witnessed a global rightward policy tilt so sharp over our lifetimes as to be dizzying. relatively common-sense social democratic ideas — market regulation, unquestioned and universal provision of healthcare and education, that in the s would have been a baseline against which leftists might push for equality and empowerment, are now fringe ideas of the far left. in response, increasingly rigid social democratic and labor parties have tilted right in an attempt to capture an electoral “center” only to have their social base taken from them in many countries, where right-wing movements have been better able to give expression, however distortedly, to discontentment and existential fears. in response to the right’s organizing and full-throated political talk of the “people,” (however narrow) these parties have responded with arid and pro-market policies, in an odd way becom- ing defenders of an establishment that has not worked for so many. and leftist parties, here meaning the broad swath of political formations to the left of social democracy, have not fared much better. i tend to see the wave of horizontalist movements starting in the early s as an attempt to voice societal demands that could not be expressed by this ossified political system. nearly everywhere these movements came into tension with liberal democracy and existing political parties: spain’s indignados, portugal’s desperate generation movement, the greek indignant citizen movement, the chilean win- ter, the us occupy and black lives matter, among many others. there is also a strong uniting theme that representative democracy has failed on its promises: it has failed to deliver meaningful representa- tion, meaningful connection to common condition, and a meaningful experience of control over the conditions of peoples’ lives. whether we are talking of world-cup mega projects in brazil, runaway po- lice violence in the united states, or market fundamentalism in portugal, in each and every case activists insist that the institutions of representative democracy do not allow regular people to make decisions over things that impact them. in each and every case there are elites (sometimes named, like “the %”) making those decisions and benefitting from them. the institutions of democracy — political parties, elections, consultations — serve only as a buffer behind which powerful interests can hide, and further as a limit on people’s imaginations by dictating what is sensible. the political project to give voice to these types of demands is sometimes described as left-wing pop- ulism, but popular sovereignty is a better label. popular sovereignty is an emancipatory project. it is a radical reinvention of the idea of democracy, one in which a historic block of the oppressed makes up the center of a political community that is open, egalitarian, and democratic, and is sovereign over its own fate, fundamentally empowered to reclaim public grounds and institutions. it recognizes that in order for this egalitarian political community to fully emerge, state actions are necessary to continue to democratize society. and it also recognizes that existing state institutions are not structured for popular sovereignty and that they need to be transformed as they are enlisted, constantly held in check by both democratizing popular pressures imbricated in its midst and counterweights outside of its boundaries. this transformation is a political project that will encounter resistance from those used to benefitting from previous arrangements, so the popular politics activated by state reforms need to act as a counter- weight to elite power. popular sovereignty is much more common in the left in latin america and southern europe, where the idea of combining the energies and democratizing forces of social movements with strong state institutions in a mutually transformative relationship to advance social justice is commonplace and has many different inflections. popular sovereignty finds expression, in different ways in barcelona en comú, podemos, portugal’s bloco de esquerda, the workers’ party of brazil in its heyday, bolivarian revolution, the zapatistas, radical movements in bolivia, ecuador and uruguay, among many others. as https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / the problem is not populism, but the failure of liberal democracy sociologica. v. n. ( ) well, momentum, la france insoumise, die linke, syriza, bernie sanders’s political revolution, all to some extent reflect this political project as well. it is a mistake, in my view, to consider these redistributive, pro-democracy, inclusive, and ultimately emancipatory political projects and movements as variants of the right-wing chauvinism and xenopho- bic political projects that have gained what seems to be an indelible foothold in europe and elsewhere. they do indeed share some similarities in form, but this is because they are stepping into the same vac- uum left behind by institutions and parties eroded by three decades of neoliberalism. references baiocchi, g. ( ). we, the sovereign. cambridge: polity press. schmitter, p. c. ( ). the vices and virtues of “populisms.” sociologica, ( ), – . https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / gianpaolo baiocchi: gallatin school of individualized study, new york university (united states of america)  http://orcid.org/ - - -  gb @nyu.edu;  http://gianpaolobaiocchi.net/ gianpaolo baiocchi is a sociologist and an ethnographer interested in questions of politics and culture, critical social theory, and cities. he has written about and continues to research instances of actually existing civic life and partici- patory democracy. his most recent work is popular democracy: the paradox of participation (stanford university press, ), which he co-authored with ernesto ganuza. the civic imagination: making a difference in ameri- can political life (co-authored with elizabeth bennett, alissa cordner, stephanie savell, and peter klein; paradigm publishers, ) examines the contours and limits of the democratic conversation in the us today. he is also the author, along with patrick heller and marcelo k. silva, of bootstrapping democracy: experiments in urban gover- nance in brazil (stanford university press, ) and militants and citizens: local democracy on a global stage in porto alegre (stanford university press, ). he is the editor of radicals in power: experiments in urban democracy in brazil (zed press, ). an engaged scholar, baiocchi was one of the founders of the ‘participatory budgeting project’ and continues to work with groups improving urban democracy. he heads gallatin’s urban democracy lab, which he launched in and which provides a space for scholars and practitioners to collaborate and exchange ideas for cultivating just, sustainable, and creative urban futures. https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / http://orcid.org/ - - - http://gianpaolobaiocchi.net/ https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / 	references rachel kuo visible solidarities: #asians blacklives and affective racial counterpublics rachel kuo* stss vol / issue studies of transition states and societies abstract this article examines how uses of ‘asian-ness’ as racial presence becomes used discursively and visually to form affective racial counterpublics around #asians blacklives/#justice akaigurley and #savepeterliang/#justice liang. specifically, i look at how asian american racial positioning becomes deployed in order to produce feelings of solidarity. approaching hashtags as both indexical signifiers of solidarity and as an indexing system that archives together an array of media objects, i track media objects across multiple sites in order to examine visual modes of storytelling that affectively mobilize publics and investigate solidarity as discursively mediated, embodied, and affective phenomena. i closely examine how #savepeterliang protestors create narratives of victimization in response to the singularity of liang’s racial body and how the #asians blacklives selfie project uses representational visibility to activate affective politics. key words: race, activism, affect, asian american, digital media. on november , in new york city, akai gurley, a -year old black man was shot to death by nypd officer peter liang. two facts about liang are widely circulated by us national media: ) he is chinese american and ) he became the first new york city officer in over a decade to be convicted of shooting in the line of duty. it is also known that liang and his partner waited at least minutes to report the shooting and failed to provide any medical aid in response. on february , liang was indicted of second-degree manslaughter, criminally negligent homicide, assault, reckless endangerment, and misconduct—while he faced up to years of prison, he was sentenced to hours of community service (fang, ). since the end of november , drawing on a longer history in which asian american movements have benefited from black-led social justice movements, local new york city and national asian american organizations across the country worked with black lives matter activists to address police violence and demand justice for gurley. many of these efforts were indexed under the hashtags #apis blacklives and #asians blacklives . yet, other asian americans, predominantly members of the chinese american community, saw liang’s indictment as also unjust. they asked, why was liang convicted of manslaughter when the murderers of so many others go free? they evoked the lack of accountability in the murders of michael brown, eric garner, tamir rice, aiyana stanley-jones, and rekia boyd where so many black lives continue to be taken by police, and where no justice is given. while there should have been indictments and convictions in all of these cases, including the indictment of liang, they challenged liang’s conviction as a pointedly racist act against asian americans, revealing anxieties about historical and current anti-asian discrimination. in brooklyn, new york, nearly , people protested liang’s conviction, chanting “no selective justice!”—there were more than forty protests throughout the nation, with protestors being mostly chinese american. these protests * e-mail of corresponding author: rachel.kuo@nyu.edu throughout this article, i use ‘asian americans’ as a way to collectively address heterogeneous ethnic groups. ‘asian amer- ican’ as political formation (and as an academic field of study) emerged out of racial justice movements in the s and s as a way to organize asians across class, nation, religion, language, class, and ethnicity. this article focuses primarily on asian american and black solidarity across race, but i also want to note there are multiple negotiations and positioning of racial meanings in relation to solidarity, such as between east asian, southeast asian, and south asian and also the relationship between asian and pacific islander communities. mailto:rachel.kuo% nyu.edu?subject= visible solidarities: #asians blacklives and affective racial counterpublics have been criticized as both perpetuating and exposing anti-black racism within asian american communities. mainstream news coverage framed gurley’s murder and liang’s indictment as an ‘issue’ that left asian americans ‘divided’ and ‘fractured’. this presumes two problematic tensions: that asian americans have always been one collective unit and that asian american politics is inherently corrupted by internal diversity. pan-ethnic racial groups, when understood as a political category, are presumed to share a unified collective consciousness and that their political embodiment should reflect this idealized consensus. yet, as cristina beltrán ( ) suggests, this “command logic of unity” (p. ) conceals ongoing political conflict as well as the agonies, instabilities, and complexities of racial solidarity. the particular case of protests around liang’s indictment reveal a contentious politics of racial identification, where state-sanctioned racial violence has mobilized asian americans in different, yet parallel directions. these protests further expose contending visions of freedom and justice within asian american publics as well as ideological and affective attachments to these different freedoms. such affective attachments serve as both barriers and opportunities towards building cross-racial solidarities in racial justice movements. this article examines how the visual uses of asian ‘racial presence’ produces affective frames that shape political formations. i examine ways affective racial counterpublics around #asians blacklives (also #apis blacklives) /#justice akaigurley and #savepeterliang/#justice liang discursively and visually produce and circulate racial meaning to construct ideas around ‘asian american- ness’. extant scholarship has established the historical and ongoing shifting discursive uses and constructions of ‘asian-ness’ in the realm of the state, law, and economy (lowe, ; kang, ; ngai, )—thus, this paper takes up the contradictions and complexities of asian american racial positioning in our present moment. focusing on #asians blacklives and #savepeterliang offers insight towards how ‘asian-ness’ becomes visually deployed as a political argument for both multiracial coalition and conflict. this study joins a limited amount of scholarship in the area of asian american digital media activism, namely lori kido lopez’s ( ) foundational work on ways asian americans use media to fight for ‘cultural citizenship.’ i also build on scholarship examining digital media content, political expression, and collective formation, particularly zizi papacharissi ( )’s work on ways online media facilitate political formations of affect and how publics are activated and sustained by feelings of solidarity. i draw upon hashtags as indexical signifiers of ‘solidarity’—through hashtags, solidarity circulates as an act of visualized and visible claims-making. by studying hashtags as sites where counterpublics negotiate racial positionality (brock, ; jackson & welles, ), this article also elucidates upon how racial ideologies are mediated through technological design and information practices (nakamura & chow-white, ; tynes & noble, ). i focus on how hashtags function as discursive spaces towards “collectively constructing counternarratives and reimagining group identities” and function as an “indexing system in both the clerical sense and the semiotic sense” (bonilla & rosa, , p. - ). for my analysis of this case, i look at different communicative forms of online media indexed by the hashtag. by taking hashtags as an indexing system that assembles together different media, i look at tweets, videos, images, and articles circulated through the hashtag in order to examine modes of storytelling that affectively mobilize publics and also investigate solidarity as discursive, embodied, and affective phenomena. specifically, i closely examine how #savepeterliang protestors create narratives of victimization in response to the singularity of liang’s racial body and how the #asians blacklives selfie project uses representational visibility to activate affective politics. rachel kuo historical context: anti-blackness and asian america akai gurley’s murder and peter liang’s conviction is situated within the historical context of us racial formations, and the discourses produced about this case work as ‘racial projects’, the co- constitutive ways racial meanings are translated and organized into social structures and become racially signified (omi & winant, ). asian-ness, particularly the banned, the barred, the excluded ‘asiatic’ has historically been in flux as the u.s. state determines the barometers for inclusion/exclusion. the challenge has been how to simultaneously grapple with asian identity as both a political formation yet also in collision with state and institutional power and interests. asian americans have an ongoing history of struggle in order to belong politically and culturally in the us (lowe, ). however, the reliance upon the nation-state as a site of material struggle and guarantor of ‘rights’ has enabled some communities to thrive at the expense of others. the constraining terms of the ‘race for citizenship’, as bids for national inclusion, compels racialized subjects to produce narrow, developmental narratives in order to achieve political, economic, and social incorporation (jun, , p. ). claims towards ‘citizenship’ tend to consolidate axes of privilege—thus promoting an “ascendancy of whiteness” (puar, ) . whiteness becomes a significantly problematic object of desire that produces feelings of attachment across racial lines, while also compromising particular conditions of possibility. for both white and non-white people, reproducing whiteness becomes oriented around a politics of return, where distributing whiteness gives particular bodies and things ‘affect’ and ‘value’ (ahmed, ). this distribution requires an investment into political and affective economies of anti-blackness. after the immigration act, the asian american population in the us rose from million to million people within three decades; most who immigrated during the earlier part of this period were from educated elite and middle classes, and working class migration didn’t begin until later (prashad, ). class divisions in migration patterns contributed to the racialization of asian americans as ‘model minorities’. the model minority myth was created as a rhetorical tool during s cold war liberalism and popularized during the late s and s. the economic successes of some asian americans could be the evidence the nation needed that the american dream was attainable. these narratives promoted a myth of meritocracy directed towards black americans demanding racial justice—the lesson was that hard work alone could supposedly erase struggles caused by racial injustice. the myth of the ‘model minority’ figure functions as a form of human capital, governed by market values and embodying infinite capacities for self-development (jun, ). the ‘model minority’ myth, as an interpretive frame about racial exceptionalism deployed as popular narrative and cultural practice, has been one way asian americans gain proximity to and power from whiteness and in conscious and unconscious participation in anti-black racism (yang-stevens & quan-pham, ). asian-ness thus functions as a wedge category—from plantation enslavement , when the asian contract labourer as figure functioned as a tool to ‘replace’ slave labour to the historical and present uses of the model minority myth. we also find the creation of new interracial dynamics given the migration of diverse populations of asian immigrants. conditions of globalization transformed the black working poor into a surplus population and indexed foreign asian capital as a force of gentrification in black displacement (jun, ; gilmore, ). the red apple boycott in brooklyn, new york and l.a. riots at the beginning of the s —conflicts between korean small business owners and black community residents—marked two historical flashpoints that exposed the difficulty of multiracial coalitions for example, the cases of takao ozawa vs us ( ) and us v. bhagat singh thind ( ) demonstrate the ‘construction’ of race and implicate asian american quests for citizenship as a quest for whiteness and repudiation of blackness. both ozawa and thind’ sought access to us citizenship by pronouncing a measurable difference and distance away from racialized sub- jectivity. brought to the americas to supplement and ‘replace’ slave labor, the asian contract worker occupied an ambiguous, intermediary position that obscures the labor performed by enslaved people while also differentially distinguished from en- slavement. portraying asian contract workers a ‘free race’ disguised how freedom continued to be foreclosed for indigenous and enslaved people. see lowe, l. ( ) the intimacies of four continents. durham, nc: duke university press. visible solidarities: #asians blacklives and affective racial counterpublics to engage conflict within and between communities of colour (zia, ; kim, ). these events marked tensions within asian american pan-ethnic solidarity and also brought up questions on how to build and maintain relations with black communities and other communities of colour while also advancing ‘equal rights’ for asian americans (zia, ). the formation of the ‘black/asian racial tandem’ (jun, ) reproduces ideologies of u.s. neoliberal citizenship that uplifts the ‘self-enterprising subject’ and pathologizes the ‘dependent’ and/or impoverished subject. asian globalization occurs alongside the expansion of the carceral state, which renders black and brown people of colour disposable (kelley, , p. ). further, as jared sexton ( ) writes, the terms of the debate around u.s. black-asian relations must attend to the intersection around both race and class hierarchies and also for asian americans to take on the question of agency in organized, state-sanctioned violence that structures anti-blackness. in this vein, asian american-ness functions as a key site for better understanding the discursive mediation of solidarity between and across communities of colour. hashtags as field site and discursive intertextual chain hashtags such as #asians blacklives and #savepeterliang serve as speech acts—performative language that actualizes a particular relationship or affinity towards a community. such claims- making towards racial identity is focused on positioning race as a relation rather than an essence (lowe, ). hashtags can also function as a collective action framing tool (goffman, in benford & snow, ) to help enable a shared understanding of a problematic social condition and mobilize action through the circulation of discourse (kuo, ). given their capacity to ‘frame’, hashtags serve as a digital site that can enframe and re-frame race as information. this project examines hashtags as a field site (bonilla & rosa, ) to examine asian american politics, where hashtags ‘performatively frame’ racial meaning. additionally, hashtags work as discursive spaces where racial relations and encounters happen. as participants connect their own experiences, identities, and perspectives to the hashtag, the hashtag also archives and links together racial discourses as part of an “intertextual chain” (bonilla & rosa, ). at the time of study, tweets were only allowed to be -characters max. by constraining the word count, twitter affords a particular kind of discourse that needs to be “linguistically economical” (chen, ). in order garner and sustain attention, tweets may also need to be affectively saturated. however, users can extend the limited textual content within a tweet by attaching an image or video, and/ or embedding shortlink that connects to another body of text. nathan rambukkana ( ) writes that hashtags are “hybrids in the taxonomy of types of information /…/ both text and metatext, information and tag.” in this way, the hashtag’s indexing function connects together multiple communicative forms. further, hashtags extend beyond twitter—they’re used on other social media sites, news articles, and even on handwritten signs. their function can be used across different platforms to produce an extensive discursive network. this study looks at an array of multi-sited media objects archived together under one given hashtag, which allows for examining different sites of social formation and also the networked spread of racial information. for example, while #asians blacklives may use twitter as a primary platform for circulating discourse, #savepeterliang is less active on twitter itself, instead using facebook as a primary space for discussion and also using chinese-language media sites such as weibo and the text-messaging app wechat (poon, ). to examine the words, phrases, and images that construct racial meaning, i sample the ‘top’ tweets and content archived under #asians blacklives, #justice akaigurley, #savepeterliang, #freepeterliang, and #peterliang between february , and april , —the time period between liang’s indictment and his sentencing by brooklyn supreme court justice danny chun. i also sample these tweets alongside content archived under #blacklivesmatter (used alongside #asians blacklives) and #alllivesmatter (used by those supporting liang); because of the quantity of content archived under those two hashtags, i only examined posts in february , following rachel kuo liang’s indictment. further, because counterpublics tend to be both multi-sited and follow accounts that centralize discourse, i closely examine the @justice liang and @asians blklives twitter handles and ’justice for peter liang’ facebook group as well as #apis blacklives facebook page. i also cross-referenced this content alongside mainstream media articles that also circulated through these hashtags. i use critical technocultural discourse analysis (ctda) (brock, ) to study the hashtag’s discursivity. while i examine the broader thematic of asian american racial positioning and subjectivity circulated via #asians blacklives and #savepeterliang, i focus specifically on the role of visual images and visibility in forming affective counterpublics. thus, i also draw upon lisa nakamura’s ( ) uses of visual culture as methodology, where she examines ways racial bodies circulate as visual capital in order to better understand how digital modes of cultural production contribute to digital racial formation. this method also best allows me to examine power relations in and between networks, platform aesthetics, and also genealogies of media use. hashtags function as a discursive form that links together streams of information that allows people to ‘feel their way’ into politics. by looking at the broader media ecology archived through the use of hashtags, i can locate how racial publics are both produced and consumed through the presence of racialized bodies. miranda joseph ( ) articulates a performative theory of social relations by discussing how consumption is site of performance for both the collective and also for the individual subject. identity and community can be constructed by products that flow through the marketplace—this can be located as well in the distribution of digital ‘activist’ media, such as tweets, selfies, etc. that all circulate within a highly regulated attention economy. social formations circulate vis-a-vis media objects intended for wide circulation and consumption in the digital media space. racial presence: representing affective racial publics wnyc radio host brian lehrer opened his february , show “chinese americans express frustration over liang conviction” with the observation, “for something you don’t see in the streets every day, hundreds of thousands of chinese americans protesting a jury verdict.” lehrer remarks upon the visibility of asian american political action as exceptional. similarly, other news articles have written that this case has ‘awoken’ asian american activism, as if it had been dormant. jay caspian kang’s new york times article, “how should asian americans feel about the peter liang protests”, while inaccurate in its discussion of asian american political silence, also draws attention to the affective politics of this case. kang ( ) writes, “all these anxieties, born out of these small but crucial referendums on our place in america, have been reignited by liang’s conviction.” the political responses to gurley’s murder and liang’s indictment are shaped around public displays of emotion and demonstrate ways affect can be mobilized towards political purposes. asian american political formations in this case can be defined as affective racial counterpublics, connecting what zizi pappacharissi ( ) calls ‘affective publics’, or “networked public formations that are mobilized /…/ through expressions of sentiment” (pp. - ), with catherine squire’s ( ) conceptual framework of black counterpublics. squires’ approach engages the socio-political and historic contexts of racialized groups who circulate counter-discourses to create different interpretations and representations of racial positioning (squires, ). existing scholarship on black and feminist digital counterpublics (steele, ; jackson & welles, ; clark, ) demonstrate ways that hashtags can be used as to build and maintain community as well as organize collective action on and offline. while racialized online publics tend to pursue particularly defined racial interests, using racial identity as a common ground (byrne, ), discussions of asian american political formations should be attentive to differences as well as ways these differences are socially constructed to create one singular identity. the significance of understanding both the construction of ‘asian american’ identity as well as the community response to this construction offers the potential to “mobilize otherwise disparate groups around shared experience” and the formation of these identities as a “political instrument” (collet & koakutsu, ). visible solidarities: #asians blacklives and affective racial counterpublics as a way to better understand the role of ‘coherence’, the emotional dimension of racial solidarity bears closer attention. emotions create the effect of boundaries, thus securing collectives through the way in which they read bodies of others (ahmed, ). how we feel about others aligns us with a collective, which paradoxically ‘takes shape’ only as an effect of such alignments—“it is through how others impress upon us that the skin of the collective begins to take shape” (ahmed, , p. ). affect mediates between the individual and social, negotiating boundaries between self, others, and community. the vague, tangled messiness of affect becomes more tangible and also more significant in that they are part of collective swells of feeling—such as alienation, confusion, frustration, and anger. the affective responses to liang’s racial presence are “related to the histories, political practices, and experiences that give them resonance” (beltrán, ). liz lin ( ) reflects on the complicated affective landscape around the indictment. while she positions herself as desiring justice for gurley and agrees that liang should be indicted, she also expresses ways she cares for liang and his family and ways she feels tied to him personally: when i first see a picture of peter liang…my reactions are all over the map. he looks so familiar, he could be one of my brother’s friends. one of my friends, even … his parents — probably immigrants like mine. they must be so sad. (lin, ) the aesthetics of liang’s race and ethnicity mark him as intimately familiar to lin, reminding her of friends and family. visuals of liang’s tearful reaction after the indictment circulate as a symbol of grief and generate feelings of confusion, unrest, and frustration. images of gurley’s murder are not circulated in this way—and, they should not have to be. the circulation of eric garner in a chokehold saying, “i can’t breathe” or the circulation of cedrick chatman’s shooting turn black trauma and state violence into viewer spectacles (noble, ). yet, what is clear from these circulations and public responses is that feelings around what is unjust are often directed towards racial presence. to think about the aesthetics of liang’s racial identity through an affective framework demonstrates the significance of racial presence and visibility (beltrán, ). liang’s ‘asian-ness’ and ‘chinese- ness’ generates a political response. networked affective counterpublics have opportunities to bring together activist discourses with mainstream media narratives in order to create an “affective flow of information” (jackson & welles, , p. ). in organizing alongside #blacklivesmatter , some activists recall asian american victims who have been murdered and beaten by police (linshi, ). some of these victims include -year old kuanchung kao was shot to death in because an officer was scared of his ‘martial arts moves.’ in , year-old cau bich tran was shot by police while holding a vegetable peeler—she is described as -feet and inches tall and -pound mother of two. in , -year old fong lee was shot and killed by an officer, and an all-white jury ruled that the officer did not use excessive force. the details circulated about these victims also invoke affective images of family and friends. qinglan huang, whose brother yong xin huang was killed by nypd in for playing with a bb gun, writes: twenty-one years ago, my family was denied justice for the killing of my brother. i can’t stay silent when i see that our justice system is about to let another police officer off the hook for killing another young man … (huang, ). huang bridges the connection between mobilizing around those who merely look asian towards a shared sense of affective experience. moving past racial aesthetics, here the appeal is to think about family and loss of family. liang’s sentencing has mobilized asian americans either to work with black lives matter and prioritize ending anti-black racism, or has mobilized asian americans to seek ‘justice’ for liang by ‘freeing’ him from the judicial system. asian american politics “hinges on a balance between the hashtag #blacklivesmatter was started by three queer black women—alicia garza, opal tometi, and patrisse cullors—and has become a critical framing tool that centered blackness when discussing racial injustice. rachel kuo individual loyalties to ethnic/ancestral communities and a periodic sense of identification with a racial coalition in the presence of discrimination” (collet & koakutsu, ). as affect is “historically constituted and publicly and politically shared even when they are interpreted as personal experiences”, legitimacy circulates among political subjects as a “common feeling of rightness” (anker, ). in this way, legitimacy can work to generate more intense affective responses and also determine what representative claims can be made about justice. the different responses to affective experiences expose contestations over claims to legitimate representation. representation as performative claims-making ‘creates space for creative normative work on radicalizing our notions of who, and what, may count as representative politically’ (saward, , p. ). the representative claim reveals the capacity of a potential representative and functions as a political gesture of recognition—who we think and talk about, who we form connections with, the narratives we use or don’t use to incorporate other people into our lives (rodriguez, ). consider this quote by reappropriate blogger jenn fang, who has written multiple, widely circulated articles covering the case: liang is the sole police officer in recent memory to be convicted for killing an unarmed, innocent black person. asian americans, regardless of our politics on liang’s conviction, share outrage over this fact. given this perspective, we can either fight for special treatment for asian americans along the margins of a racially unjust system, or we can work with other communities of colour to dismantle this systemic injustice outright. (fang, ) fang points out that the ‘outrage’ shared by asian americans over liang’s indictment is politically incentivizing. both #asians blacklives and #savepeterliang rely on the uses of racial presence as an affective political frame; in the examples that follow, i look at the different ways ‘asian-ness’ as racial presence becomes used discursively and visually to form affective counterpublics. ‘one tragedy, two victims’: affective productions of liang as rookie and scapegoat the ‘save’ peter liang campaign singularly focuses on liang’s racial presence to “evoke the represented” (saward, ) and create affective political formations. they discursively construct liang as a victim of the justice system through the narrative frame of ‘one tragedy, two victims’ and also ‘accident not tragedy.’ in order to do so, they rely on racially positioning liang as a ‘rookie cop’ and as a ‘scapegoat’, both of which are also corroborated through mainstream media coverage. reports of the shooting consistently refers to liang as an unexperienced, rookie officer. below are headlines and opening sentences from local new york city news sites in initial coverage of the shooting: panicked rookie nypd officer fatally shoots unarmed -year-old man in brooklyn's pink houses project - “a panicked rookie cop in a pitch-black housing project stairwell killed an unarmed man … the officer fumbled around in the darkness …” (new york daily news, november ) nypd rookie calls fatal shooting of unarmed man an ‘accident’ - “a rookie cop working the most dangerous beat in the city killed a man in an unlit housing- project stairwell in brooklyn — firing off an “accidental” shot …” (new york post, november ) rookie officer fatally shoots 'total innocent' in pink houses, nypd says - “a rookie police officer fatally shot an unarmed man late thursday in a "pitch black" pink houses stairwell …” (dnainfo, november ) supporters of liang use these media frames to construct the image of liang as innocent and the narrative of the shooting as ‘one tragedy, two victims’. by drawing attention to the ‘pitch-black’ and visible solidarities: #asians blacklives and affective racial counterpublics ‘unlit’ stairwell, they claim that the shooting was unintentional. references to liang as a ‘rookie’ cop uses his inexperience as cause for ‘accident’: it is a shame to throw a rookie under the bus. (@cindy , feb ) i feel sorry for the victim, but i also feel sorry for the unlucky rookie peter liang. one tragedy, two victims! (@meizhang , feb ) we need to stick to correct legal terms here if we want to come across as effective and not discriminatory ourselves … we believe peter liang should not be criminalized. because the legal definition of criminal is to have intention in the action. liang is also a victim. he was a rookie police with no adequate training. (helen yue, feb ) liang as the unlucky, fumbling, and inexperienced ‘rookie cop’ is used by media, the justice system, and also protestors who were against his manslaughter conviction. when applied to liang, the term ‘rookie’ becomes a racially coded and indirect way of applying a passive and infantilizing stereotype of asian men as “slit-eyed, buck-toothed buffoons” (yang-stevens & quan-pham, ). in addition to his description as the inexperienced ‘rookie’, liang is also described as a ‘scapegoat’. the term scapegoat here has been defined in a several different ways: ) “someone who doesn’t do anything wrong or didn’t do anything wrong. and in this case, [liang] did do something wrong: he killed akai gurley” (dang, ); and ) “somebody who’s being blamed for far more than he’s actually being guilty of” (liu, ). again, this framing is deployed by both protestors and also mainstream media. for those organizing on behalf of liang, the term ‘scapegoat’ generates fear and anxiety over the precariousness of asian american subjectivity. minority officer is the scapegoat, an excuse for white privilege and police brutality. #justice liang (@gracelongisland, feb ) #justice liang peter liang should not be a scapegoat! tragic accident ≠ manslaughter! unfair… (@zuzu , feb ) we showed up for equal justice peter liang because we don't want to be the next scapegoat. selective justice is no justice! #justice liang (@ujchen, feb ) nypd is responsible for the killing of akai gurley. liang should take responsibility, but he should not be made a scapegoat. #justice liang (@rosiewoo , feb ) the term scapegoat invokes a history of xenophobia and racial violence directed towards asian americans that has included hate crimes, state-sanctioned exclusion and surveillance policies, and internment . by claiming liang as the scapegoat for other previous non-indictments of white officers who murdered black people, supporters of liang affectively draw upon and respond to racial anxieties. many protestors supporting liang demonstrate affective attachments to the fantasy of the ‘american dream’, and the framing of liang as ‘scapegoat’ illuminate the failures of this dream. as liang’s case is tied to racial and ethnic affiliations, one must be attentive to the additional complex intersections of social identities that make up these organizing groups. language, generation, class, and education all play a key role in ways communities have oriented around this case—however, views casting all liang supporters as under-educated or misinformed because they lack capacity to understand systemic racism is inaccurate. some of the more vocal supporters of ‘freeing’ liang deftly use language that critique white supremacy and anti-black racism—they for example, during world war ii, japanese americans were interned for national security purposes after japanese military bombed pearl harbor; or after the september attacks, muslims—or those who “look” muslim—have become targets of hate crimes and also state surveillance. rachel kuo invoke ways that the model minority myth is used as a lever for anti-black racism and retell historical narratives around asian and black racialization. figure : fusion video interview with -year old jess fong for example, one widely circulated and watched video features a chinese american woman who says, "we are angry, because we are also hurt by the systemic injustices and the structural oppression and the racism that continues to pervade this country” . she goes on to express that as “asian americans, we feel deeply sorry” for akai gurley and his family and that ‘we’ understand that black lives matter. she also defines white privilege and distances asian americans from the “sense of superiority and supremacy” that defines whiteness. she describes the protest as about critiquing an ‘unfair’ criminal system, in which liang “took the fall for the sins of a country”. viewed almost million times, her interview was also translated and shared on internationally on chinese- language media. other key spokespeople of the movement have been former new york city comptroller and new york city mayoral candidate john c. liu, as well as dr. frank wu, who was the first asian american professor at howard university, a historically black university. wu’s scholarship has examined histories of asian-black racial relations and ways the model minority myth is used as a lever of anti-black racism. however, in his op-ed on huffington post ( ), wu refers to liang as a scapegoat in ‘black and white’ racial dynamics: “how strange, how wrong, it is, that the face picked to represent police brutality toward blacks is yellow.” historically and currently, the ways asian american identities have been constructed as ‘model minorities’ and ‘perpetual foreigners’ has created unjust conditions for asian american communities as well as created fraught asian-black racial dynamics. wu’s attention to these racial inequities is still directed individually on ways the state has failed liang because of his ‘asian-ness.’ wu’s frustration with the ways asian americans have been racially cast, while valid, overshadow his ability to see a larger picture, where injustice reaches across communities of colour. the individuated, narrow focus on liang reveal a failure to consider justice on a broader scale. the framing of liang as a scapegoat ignores the larger problem of how anti-black state violence is institutionalized and legitimated by local police. as soya jung ( ) points out, racial and ethnic identity holds a deep meaning for asian american communities as a space for mutual recognition fusion video interview with -year old jess fong. visible solidarities: #asians blacklives and affective racial counterpublics and empowerment, thus we may form solidarity with 'those who look and talk’ like us. however, such forms of solidarity may also obscure capacities to identify across difference. affective visibility: selfies for black lives on december , , a solidarity statement was published under the hashtag #asians blacklives: as asians, we recognize the ways in which we’ve been used historically to prop up the anti-black racism that allows this violence to occur. we are an extremely diverse community. some of us have been targeted, profiled, and killed by u.s. government institutions. many of us came to the u.s. as a result of the devastation and displacement caused by the us military and its “partners” in asia, only to find a country uses police to devastate and displace black communities. however, we also recognize the relative privilege that many of us carry as asians living in the u.s. (#asians blacklives ) the statement draws attention to the uses of asian-ness as a tool to ‘prop up’ anti-blackness and acknowledges the specific racial hierarchy created by white supremacy that gives asians ‘relative privilege.’ in addition to this statement, #asians blacklives indexed many articles on an array of online media, including salon, huffington post, npr, quartz, everyday feminism, yes magazine, colorlines and more, with appeals to the larger asian american community to be in solidarity with #blacklivesmatter rather than standing with peter liang. the description for the #apis blacklives facebook page says, “#apis blacklives brings visibility to the ways asian and pacific islanders have stood and are standing in solidarity with #blacklivesmatter.” the use of solidarity here implies a defined relationship between two publics and is also a claims- making gesture of recognition. this form of solidarity claims a ‘we’ alongside a plural ‘you’, however does not reveal the reciprocity that solidarity seeks—how ‘we’ become accepted and understood by ‘you’. as a response to the visibility of chinese americans responding to liang, the committee against anti-asian violence (caaav) , created a selfie campaign as a way to raise the visibility of asian americans supporting black lives matter and justice for akai gurley (see figure ) and also show community support of black-led organizing. in addition to demonstrating the visibility of asians in support of black lives matter, the campaign also intends to respond to mainstream media coverage that framed asian american as ‘divided’. the campaign uses visual representations of ‘asian-ness’ as a way to activate politics. the call for selfies asks people to a) take a photo holding a sign with the hashtags #justiceforakaigurley, #holdallcopsaccountable, and #blacklivesmatter b) write a short, text-only paragraph with the prompt, ‘i am a ___________, and i demand justice for akai gurley because_____________’; and c) share the action on social media (tom, ). the call invites participants to perform solidarity by displaying one’s body alongside text. caaav has been working alongside both akai gurley’s family, community organizers in east new york, brooklyn, and other groups since the shooting. as an organization, they have worked for many years on the issue of police brutality and participated in ongoing coalitions for police accountability and reform. my analysis of the selfie campaign is by no means a cri- tique on the organization’s decades of community-based organizing, but rather an analysis of the affordances and constraints of digital media and visible representation in racial politics. rachel kuo figure : #justice akaigurley selfie campaign all of the submitted photos show either individual or multiple participants who place their bodies behind a handwritten sign. the photos are meant to circulate on the individuals’ networks across platforms including twitter, instagram, and facebook, but are also assembled together in the #apis blacklives facebook group’s photo album; the album itself currently has photos. together, the photos work as a way to communicate shared politics, visibly represent ‘asian-ness’, and also position asian americans alongside the black lives matter movement, rather than in opposition. most of the photos have the same text (#justice akaigurley, #asians blacklives, #blacklivesmatter), and several of the photos show different people in the same location and background with the same handwritten sign. user-generated media allow individuals the means to self-create identities that challenge dominant ways of seeing and knowing and also produce alternative public visibilities by drawing on the conceptual relationship between representational visibility and political power (pham, ). these selfies use forms of self-presentation and self- promotion for purposes beyond self-interest. in several of the images, the person covers their face with the piece of paper holding hand written text. the aesthetics of the selfies—the body alongside text—evokes another genre of digital self- representation: the confessional notecard video (chun, ). the logic of revealing and ’outing’ in making oneself seen—this shift from the seemingly invisible to visible—depends on the singular confession as a reaching towards community. the selfies produce a ‘we’ through exposure and repetition—communicating a feeling of community. as a visual archive, the campaign itself evokes a long-standing desire among asian americans for representational visibility as a means towards cultural and political recognition (kido lopez, ). further, the address of this image collection signals a call for participation and recognition towards other asian americans, while simultaneously reflecting a desire for black recognition and coalition. in visually communicating solidarity across the “distance of extreme inequality” (sexton, ), the selfie functions within what kara keeling describes as the “digital regime of the image” (keeling, visible solidarities: #asians blacklives and affective racial counterpublics ). the selfie indexes and puts into circulation a common sense of coalition and belonging. digital identity politics, predicated on the notion of difference as a ‘collective logic of belonging' and characterized through the formulation of ‘i=another’ attempts to facilitate a mode of engagement through representation. in a discussion on asian america and performative solidarity, pakou her ( ), wrote about the ease of publicly proclaiming solidarity, to “publicly announce to radicals around us that we’re not like the other apolitical model minorities /…/ public-facing actions also make it easy to perform solidarity in an enthusiastic attempt to prove that – despite our preassigned racial script – asians are here for the struggle, too.” while the selfies themselves make visible claims towards solidarity, they do less to directly confront internal and collective anti-blackness within and amongst asian americans . conclusion: affordances and uses of asian american racial positioning the informative and communicative capacities and limitations of digital media become crucial in relation to racial justice movements. in addressing the relationship between digital platforms, cross-racial solidarities, and the pursuit of racial justice, this article focuses on the role of affective visibility in how and why communities coalesce—more specifically, how the organization of visual information can also organize experiences, meanings, and feelings that form (and inform) communities, claims, and practices around racial solidarity. peter liang has often been incorrectly compared to vincent chin, a chinese american who was beaten to death in detroit by two white men, who had been laid off after the increasing marketshare of japanese automakers. the two men were sentenced to years of probation. liang has also been compared to private danny chen, a chinese american from manhattan’s chinatown who committed suicide after being physically, emotionally, and mentally tortured for his racial identity by other soldiers. shirley ng ( ) wrote an opinion piece for the new york post that stated, ‘whether the name is chin, chen or liang, asian-americans have long been told that their pain and humiliation don’t register.’ ng pulls these names together to claim that chinese americans have historically never had justice, using chin and chen’s deaths as rationale to support liang. however, as annie tan, chin’s niece responded, vincent chin and akai gurley have far more in common than chin and liang (tan, ). like gurley, neither chin nor chen received justice for their deaths. liang’s only commonality with vincent chin and danny chen is that he is also a chinese american man who is similar in age. aesthetically, liang “looks like” chin and chen. for some, this is enough to provoke feelings of kinship with liang that can be mobilized politically. affective solidarities and ties to community based solely on racial aesthetics and on ethnic or national identity alone are limited. for example, many that felt so affectively tied to liang based on racial aesthetics alone, didn't feel affectively compelled to hit the streets and seek justice for -year-old sureshbhai patel, a man who was visiting his son in alabama from india. patel was slammed to the ground by a police officer and left partially paralyzed. here, the concept of ‘who’ is part of ‘asian america’ remains narrow. in a speech at the asian law caucus, mari matsuda ( ) declared “we will not be used.” the uses of asian-ness, both by asian americans and also by dominant groups, can be used to sustain and also subvert white supremacy. in order to better understand the relationship between digital media technologies and social movements, there must be more clarity around ‘race’ as a connective tissue towards forming solidarities, given that race is not a “fixed singular essence” but rather a locus in which “contradictions converge” (chun, ). racialization processes are mutually constitutive, thus cannot happen in a vacuum but must occur relative to and in interaction with other racial positions and dynamics. race shapes what bodies ‘can do’ (ahmed, ), thus, revisiting processes of racialization, racial identification and claims-making pushes for a rethinking of justice. in organizing across ‘difference’, ‘difference’ becomes a contradictory, political, and representational strategy that brings together and holds in suspension the conflicting goals of self-preservation and the needs of those who bear the cost of that preservation (hong, ). rachel kuo across asian american groups, racial justice includes a desire to be seen as a visible political entity. for example, groups like million rising emphasize the sizable population represented, recognized, and connected under the asian american umbrella to create racial presence. however, this doesn’t necessarily mean that visible politics are a unified politics. these different protests work as ‘embodied action’ among asian americans that “actively constructs communities and solidarities within the public realm” (beltrán, , p. ). through different communicative modes, asian americans discursively position themselves politically within their own communities and in relation to others. further research might examine the discursive shifts in #asians blacklives as the hashtag continues to index new flows of information, including political education events, such as work-shops and teach-ins. for example, discourses have shifted from demanding ‘solidarity’ towards confrontations of anti-blackness. or, network analysis of #asians blacklives may also be a way to examine the potential and limitations of cross-racial solidarity in digital spaces of encounter. references ahmed, s. 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( ). asian american dreams: the emergence of an american people. new york, ny: farrar, straus and giroux. rachel kuo is a phd student at new york university in the department of media, culture, and communication studying at the convergence of critical race and digital studies. centering the perspective of queer, feminist of colour organizing, her research focuses on solidarity within and across communities of colour by examining the politics, affects, and aesthetics of online social movements. her work has been published in new media and society and the routledge companion to asian american media. © the author(s), . published by cambridge university press. this is an open access article, distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. research article a critical investigation of y students’ perceptions of roman slavery as evidenced in the stories of the cambridge latin course ella parodi key words: roman slavery, cambridge latin course, critical pedagogy, critical consciousness, decolonisation introduction in an article, ‘the slaves were happy’: high school latin and the horrors of classical studies, erik robinson, a latin teacher from a public high school in texas, criticises how, in his experience, clas- sics teaching tends to avoid in-depth discussions on issues such as the brutality of war, the treatment of women and the experience of slaves (robinson, ). however, texts such as the article ‘teaching sensitive topics in the secondary classics classroom’ (hunt, ), and the book ‘from abortion to pederasty: addressing difficult top- ics in the classics classroom’ (sorkin rabinowitz & mchardy, ) strongly advocate for teachers to address these difficult and sensi- tive topics. they argue that the historical distance between us and greco-roman culture and history can allow students to engage and participate in discussions that may otherwise be difficult and can provide a valuable opportunity to address uncomfortable topics in the classroom. thus, robinson’s assertion that classics teaching avoids these sensitive topics may not be so definitive. regardless, robinson claims that honest confrontations in the classroom with the ‘legacy of horror and abuse’ from the ancient world can be sig- nificantly complicated by many introductory textbooks used in latin classes, such as the cambridge latin course (clc), one of the most widely used high school latin textbooks in use in both amer- ica and the united kingdom (robinson, ). in particular, rob- inson views the presentation of slavery within the clc as ‘rather jocular and trivialising’ which can then hinder a reader’s perspec- tive on the realities of the violent and abusive nature of the roman slave trade (robinson, ). as far as he was concerned, the prob- lem lay with the characterisation of the clc’s slave characters gru- mio and clemens, who, he argued, were presented there as happy beings and seemingly unfazed by their positions as slaves. there was never any hint in the book that grumio or clemens were unhappy with their lives or their positions as slaves, even though, as the clc itself states in its english background section on roman slavery, roman law ‘did not regard slaves as human beings, but as things that could be bought or sold, treated well or badly, according to the whim of their master’ (clc i, , p. ). one might argue, therefore, that there seems to be a disconnect between the english language information we learn about the brutality of the roman slave trade provided in the background section of stage , and what we can infer about roman slavery from the latin language stories involving our two ‘happy’ slaves. the clc has been criticised already on its presentation of women and gender bias, with the criticism that ancient women are not responsibly portrayed or represented through the stories used in the textbooks as they unconsciously reinforce negative modern social norms in students (upchurch, , p. ). the gender inequality witnessed in the classics textbooks is perhaps reflective of gender inequality in the classics discipline as argued by chur- chill in her work ‘is there a woman in this textbook?’ (churchill, , p. ). churchill claims that latin teaching is still perceived as an elitist, male discipline and this historical gender bias persists ‘however unintentionally and unconsciously, in contemporary text- books, readers and methods of teaching latin’ (churchill, , p. ). churchill criticises how the classics discipline has been slow to address these issues of gender bias in textbooks even as class- room demographics have changed to be ‘more representative of the population as a whole than they were fifty, even twenty-five, years ago’ (churchill, , p. ). the most current edition of the clc, used predominantly in the us, has addressed these criticisms to an extent by introducing a daughter and sister to caecilius’ family. the clc has further been criticised for its lack of inclusivity and people of colour, and for its positive depictions of imperialism (bracey, ). this criticism was recently recognised by the cam- bridge schools classics project in a statement in response to the black lives matter movement. in their statement the cscp pledged that the new uk/international th and all future editions of the cambridge latin course ‘will better represent people of colour and promote critical engagement with matters such as imperialism, slavery and cultural subjugation’ (cscp, ). this research was planned and executed prior to the black lives matter movement in march and subsequent statement from cscp and thus played no part in the initial inspiration for this research. however, it is author of correspondence: ella parodi, e-mail: parodieb@gmail.com cite this article: parodi e ( ). a critical investigation of y students’ perceptions of roman slavery as evidenced in the stories of the cambridge latin course. the journal of classics teaching , – . https://doi.org/ . /s the journal of classics teaching ( ), , – doi: . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core ella parodi important to note that the cscp has now recognised an issue with the portrayal of slavery within its textbook, warranting a change in how the topic is addressed in future editions. most research to date that addresses the teaching of roman slav- ery focuses on teacher’s perceptions of approaching the sensitive issue of slavery with some criticism of source materials such as the clc or ecce romani (robinson, ; bostick, ; dubois, ). even though there has been criticism for the presentation of slavery there has not been much research on how this presentation and characterisation of slavery affects, if at all, the students engaging with these texts. therefore, i decided to conduct my own research into this issue to see how the presentation of slaves in the clc seemed to affect students’ perceptions of slavery by asking about their opinions of the characters grumio and clemens. my research was conducted in a uk classroom, where atti- tudes towards slavery and race ‘matters differently’ to the us (umachandran, ). dugan in their research ‘the “happy slave” narrative and classics pedagogy: a verbal and visual analysis of beginning greek and latin textbooks’ analyses how current greek and latin textbooks used to discuss ancient slavery ‘directly and indirectly engage with the racist language and imagery of th-century pro-slavery american literature, propaganda, and performance’ and subsequently helps to propagate racist dis- course that permeates the american education system. (dugan, , p. ). these ideas are evidently felt by american latin teachers who recount their struggles in combatting these positive presentations of greco-roman enslavement with the horrors and injustice of the transatlantic slave trade, the latter taught exten- sively in the american classroom (robinson, ; bostick ). in the uk, it is compulsory for secondary schools to address the history of uk colonialism and the transatlantic slave trade which is heralded as ‘one of the most widely taught topics in secondary schools’ history curricula’ (mohamud et al. ). however, gen- erally the uk does not engage as heavily in discourses on racism compared to the us, despite racism being a prevalent issue in british society. the inherent problem lies in the way the uk’s issues with structural racism are overlooked in comparison to the us. eddo-lodge writes in ‘why i’m no longer talking to white people about race’; ‘while the black british story is starved of oxygen, the us struggle against racism is globalised into the story of the strug- gle against racism that we should look to for inspiration — eclipsing the black british story so much that we convince ourselves that britain never had a problem with race.’ (eddo- lodge, , pp. - ) as umachandran notes in her piece ‘more than a common tongue: dividing race and classics across the atlantic’, race is ‘not explicitly part of the cultural atmosphere in the uk’ in the same way that it is in the us, but that does not mean that racism does not exist in the uk (umchandran, ). we cannot simply take american ‘tem- plates’ and ‘formulations’ of race and use them to describe and deconstruct british racism. instead of using american terminology, umachandran advocates for the uk to develop ‘more culturally and historically specific ways of doing critical self-reflection around race, class, and empire’ (umachandran, ). therefore, it is important to approach the topic of teaching slavery in the uk class- room, not just with american issues surrounding slavery and mod- ern-day racism in mind, but also britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade and successful global empire. this ‘happy slave narra- tive’ carries different issues and connotations in the uk classroom; for example, the positive portrayal of empire makes it difficult to see rome (and subsequently britain) as the villain. i carried out my research at an all-girls’ selective grammar school which teaches latin as a compulsory subject to all students in key stage , starting in september of year . whilst slavery is a concept that is addressed in other latin coursebooks (such as sub- urani, ecce romani, the oxford latin course), i have chosen to use the clc because it is the most popular course used to teach latin at secondary schools in the uk and is the course followed at my place- ment school. due to its commercial success, the clc is responsible for providing the majority of students in the uk their first and pos- sibly only introduction to the institution of ancient slavery. at my placement school, the classics department was determined that students were able to explore every story in the textbooks as well the background information, meaning that the students had every opportunity to familiarise themselves with the characters and their storylines. as students had two -minute lessons a week dedicated to latin during key stage , there was no need to rush the students through the books and focus on the language alone. as a result, the nature of how the latin course was taught in my placement school allowed for my research to focus on the student perceptions of the slave characters and roman slavery. literature review should students think critically in the classroom? to understand why i feel it is important for students to look at the presentation of slaves within their textbook, i will first introduce and consider some general discussion about the role teachers and education play in getting students to think critically about their subjects and the wider world. discussion surrounding the role edu- cation plays in the promotion of critical thinking beyond the class- room has been highly debated for many years. critical pedagogy is a teaching approach that advocates for students to question their views of accepting social norms and to think critically about the world around them beyond the boundaries of their curriculum. the critical pedagogic advocate and educator, ira shor, defines crit- ical pedagogy as; habits of thought, reading, writing, and speaking which go beneath surface meaning, first impressions, dominant myths, official pronouncements, traditional clichés, received wis- dom, and mere opinions, to understand the deep meaning, root causes, social context, ideology, and personal conse- quences of any action, event, object, process, organization, experience, text, subject matter, policy, mass media, or dis- course. (shor, , p. ). in the context of my research, shor’s critical pedagogy would advo- cate thinking deeply about our first impression of clemens and grumio and going beyond the surface meaning of their characters within the medium of the textbook to help us then question the root causes behind their apparently jovial characterisation and understand the social context and ideology of slavery within ancient and modern society. thus, by critically evaluating our learning resources, we are able to develop ideas about social justice and gain a critical consciousness, defined by freire as ‘the develop- ment of the awakening of critical awareness’ (freire, , p. ). this is understood as an in-depth understanding about the world which can lead to freedom from oppression (mustakova-possardt, ). such a teaching approach can be said to have a home in the modern classroom when teachers invite students to question the https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core the journal of classics teaching status quo explicitly ‘in the name of justice, democratic rights and equality’ (macrine, , p. ). thus, it is our role as teachers to encourage students to examine critically the world around them and their own perceptions of it in the name of social justice and the promotion of equality. the presentation of slavery allows the per- fect opportunity for students to question their own ideologies as well as the ones presented by their textbooks, to seek a deeper meaning and understanding about the issues and to gain a deeper critical consciousness for themselves. however, not everyone believes that critical pedagogy has a place within the modern classroom. some argue that a knowl- edge-rich curriculum is a better route for the development of stu- dents as critical thinkers (ashman, ). one common criticism of critical pedagogy is that the input is dependent on the teachers themselves. teachers who encourage students to question social norms may do so with their own bias and instead of allowing stu- dents to decide for themselves, often reinforce one bias with another – perhaps their own. therefore, when asking students to think critically in the classroom it is important that the teacher does not have a correct answer in mind when scaffolding a discussion as they may consciously, or subconsciously lead the students to that answer. it is also possible that through such scaffolding teachers could promote simplistic ideology on complex societal issues or even extremist views (hairston, , p. ). consequently, i believe is important to consider current concerns about two main aspects of applying the concept of critical pedagogy within the classics classroom. firstly, how do we advance a student’s ideas about social justice through classics teaching without inflicting our own personal bias on the students? secondly, is the subject matter of classics by its nature problematic in this regard? how can classics advance ideas about social justice? it is generally agreed that classics as a discipline has historically been enlisted in arguments to legitimise war, conquest and the con- cept of imperialism as medieval and early modern empires in the west compared themselves to the image of rome (kumar, , p. ; goff, ). a shining example can be seen during britain’s colonial years as the british used classical scholarship and the his- torical past to establish imperial legitimacy during britain’s indian empire from - (sundari mantena, ; vasunia, ). over recent years there has been a steady increase in research com- batting this centuries-old elitism entrenched within the subject and it has started to tackle the decolonisation and diversification of classics (joffe, , p. ; turner, ; giusti, ; bracey, ). giusti gives a definition for decolonisation based off the keele uni- versity’s manifesto for decolonising the curriculum, stating; “decolonisation must not be equated with ‘integration’ or ‘token inclusion’ of non-white cultures and people in aca- demic curricula. rather, decolonisation necessitates ‘identi- fying colonial systems’ and oppressive power structures in order to work ‘to challenge those systems’ and create a ‘para- digm shift from a culture of exclusion and denial to the mak- ing of space for other political philosophies and knowledge systems’” (giusti, ; gokay & panter ). the movement of decolonising classics has truly picked up speed; from student campaigns in universities (turner, ), to the deconstruction and reconceptualisation of western culture itself (appiah ), to various discourses examining inherent issues still prevalent within modern classical scholarship, for example the use of marble statues from the ancient world as a platform of white supremacy (bond, ). joffe summarises this movement of self- awareness to the three most basic yet pivotal questions at the heart of classical identity: ‘who studies latin and greek, whom we study in the ancient world when we do so, and to whom this cultural patrimony belongs in the first place.’ (joffe, , p. ). a critical and often referenced example in this field of self-reflection comes from bracey in his article ‘why students of color don’t take latin’. bracey examines the reasons behind why in america, students of colour typically do not opt to study classical subjects. bracey, an african american latin teacher from massachusetts, shared his own personal experience in secondary school: ‘at no point in my mind did i think that would be a place where i would fit in. based on the reputation of latin, there is no way i would have tried it’ (bracey, ). this piece, along with a student-written article ‘the classics major is classist’ (bertelli, ), together highlight the elitist nature of classics within american culture - an elitism, i fear, that was learnt from britain. the study of classics was brought to the colonial settlements of north america as part of the education of the elite. the ability to read greek and read, write and speak latin gave children of the elite a path straight into college and then into positions of rank in the state or church (wyke, , p. ). in the uk, prior to the s latin was a gateway into the most prestigious universities in the country. one could not attend oxford or cambridge without an o level in latin, regardless of their degree (mcmillan, , p. ). as forrest notes, it was mostly in independent and grammar schools that students got the opportunity to study latin, and it was rare for students to study the subject in the state sector (forrest, , p.  ). thus, latin was a gateway to oxbridge wide open to the elite and privileged, yet often barred to those who attended state schools or were of a lower social class. still today latin and ancient greek are most commonly taught in the private sector meaning that only a small, wealthier percentage of the country have access to these subjects. in the cambridge assessment analysis, for the percentage of students taking gcse subjects in , the ratio of state:private examination entries at gcse is around : for latin and : for greek (gill, , pp. - ). yet whilst universities and scholars grapple with these dis- courses on classics and social class, joffe notes that younger stu- dents are also becoming aware of this growing movement and claims that classrooms are changing as a result and that as teachers ‘…we must better equip ourselves as instructors to have these diffi- cult conversations with [students]’ (joffe, , p. ). many scholars would argue that there has always been a place within the classics classroom to approach sensitive and controversial subjects (hunt, ; sorkin rabinowitz & mchardy, ). thus, if there is room to tackle subjects like slavery or the treatment of women, then argu- ably there is room to promote social justice as well. it is clear within other subjects of the school curriculum that teaching students how to approach and address sensitive topics is considered a vital part of the education system. claire and holden ( ) advocate in their book ‘the challenge of teaching controversial issues’ that whilst it can be ‘safer’ to steer clear of controversial issues and topics in the classroom, we cannot nor should we deny to our students the real- ity of the world we live in. learning how to deal with sensitive or controversial topics in a structured setting, through topics introduced into the class- room, can be a rehearsal for dealing with more immediate controversy in the playground, home or community. it is also a part of preparation for living in a democratic society where https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core ella parodi controversial topics are debated and discussed without recourse to violence. (claire & holden, , p. ). hunt, along with many other classicist educators, believes that classics should be no different (hunt, , p. ). this notion is exemplified by the department of education, who promoted the study of classics in their pamphlet curriculum matters: classics from - by highlighting the distinctive contribution classics could make to a student’s education and their understanding of controversial issues in the world around them. according to the text, ‘…there are two main reasons for studying the classical world: its intrinsic interest and its capacity to increase pupils understand- ing of themselves and of the world in which they live’ (des, , pp. - ). through exemplars of ‘moral judgements and religious views drawn from other societies’ classics could provide students with ‘valuable points of entry into some central questions of human life’ (des, , ). the document continued: discussion of greek or roman attitudes to slavery, the status of women in society, the olympian gods or gladiatorial con- tests can help them to articulate fundamental moral ques- tions, discover something of the cultural conditioning on which many of a society’s judgements depend, and gain a greater sensitivity to and tolerance of the diversity of values and religious practice in their own world. (des, , p. ). thus, many would argue that if there is already a space for address- ing sensitive topics in the classics classroom, then ideas of social justice could also have a place. whilst the use of classics to advance social justice can be seen as contentious, i would argue that the critical awareness surrounding the classics discipline being used to promote and uphold elitist ideology, both historically and in the present, and the subsequent movement to eradicate this ideology moving forward, can be seen as a critical consciousness within the discipline. freire’s ‘freedom from oppression’ can be achieved as teachers and practitioners seek to diversify and improve the inclu- sivity of the classics classroom (freire, ; mustakova-possardt, ). the classics educationalist sharwood smith in his book ‘on teaching classics’ ( ) advocated that teachers have a responsibil- ity not only to follow the syllabus but also then to utilise elements of this in order to prepare students for adulthood. in this way teach- ers would be providing not only ‘an education in classics’ but ‘an education through classics’ (sharwood smith, , pp. – ). inspired by the des pamphlet, i decided to centre my research project around roman slavery with the hopes of helping my stu- dents gain that ‘greater sensitivity’ towards the subject. conscious of the articles written by robinson and bostick, as mentioned in my introduction, these two american high school teachers discussed their own personal experiences of dealing with students’ percep- tions of slavery influenced by their textbooks and so i was moti- vated to focus my research more closely into how influential the clc’s approach to teaching the sensitive topic of slavery was on my students. examples of latin teaching sensitive topics the discussion so far has revolved around the discipline of classics in general and its role in advancing critical pedagogy by teaching students to think critically about the world around them through the medium of classics. however now i would like to consider the role latin solely can play in the classroom and in particular, the clc. thus, i now want to consider some examples of the clc being used to discuss controversial topics and look at some evidence for the presentation of stereotypes in latin course books specifically, as my interest lies in the presentation of slaves. the study of latin in the uk often involves the study of literature and the society of the romans through the medium of the latin language. therefore, many students are exposed to sensitive topics from roman society. the clc is by far the most popular of the uk latin course books, with an estimated % of the latin course book market share (cambridge school classics project, ; hunt, , p. ). the clc follows the reading-approach method using stories and a continuous narrative which contains many sociocul- tural topics often introduced both through the characters and sto- ries in latin and then through cultural background information at the back of each stage. as hunt summarises, in book one of the clc, which is typically taught during ks , students are introduced to topics such as the role and treatment of women (stages , and ), roman attitudes to slavery (stages and ), perceptions of foreign- ers (stages and ), and of religious minorities (stage ), beliefs on death (stage  ), and to the everyday violence of the gladiators (stage ). these sensitive topics are not explicitly highlighted by the clc; however, they are there for teachers to use to elicit discussions. thus, it is the role and duty of the teacher to address these issues and guide students towards a critical consciousness by allowing them to engage critically with the content (hunt, , p. ). as sorkin rabinowitz and mchardy note, by addressing these topics, the subsequent open discussions of issues of race and social class can make studying clas- sics attractive as well as be beneficial to students. (sorkin rabinowitz & mchardy, , p. ). the benefits of teaching diversity through clc have also been researched. barnes ( ), in his research paper ‘developing stu- dents’ ideas of diversity in the ancient and modern worlds through the topic of alexandria in the clc, book ii’ highlights how the cen- tral aspect of his study was the student responses to the cultural diversity in third century alexandria presented to them in the sec- ond book of the clc (barnes, , p. ). these opinions devel- oped by teacher-led discussions included sensitive issues surrounding race and ethnicity. in the cultural background mate- rial on third century alexandria presented in clc book , stu- dents are introduced to discourses of power in which lighter-skinned greeks and romans have imposed colonial supe- riority over the native, darker-skinned egyptians. furthermore, students encounter egyptian characters as members of the lower classes, either as slaves or craftsmen, whereas the european greeks and romans are members of the cultural elite (barnes, , p. ). in her paper, ‘latin for all identities’ ( ), sawyer advocates the importance of acknowledging diversity and also representing it in the learning environment and in the school curriculum (sawyer, , p. ). sawyer claims that the representation of diversity, where it goes unacknowledged and remains invisible, is an issue as ‘cultural privilege’ would then enable ‘people of majority groups to go through life with more ease than other groups’(sawyer, , p. ). sawyer proposes that our goal as teachers should always be to include and represent members of all identifies in our class- room, and that within classics there are many opportunities to do so, in mythology, poetry and history (sawyer, , p. ). bracey acknowledges through his own experience of teaching latin that it is very easy for the ‘most well-intended teacher’ to ‘alienate’ stu- dents of colour through the teaching of the clc which contains a positive and uncritical presentation of roman imperialism, and a lack of images of people of colour (bracey, ). however, as arab and earl ( ) note, there is a bias towards the representation of persians and the near east within the classics teaching community https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core the journal of classics teaching suggesting ‘many european academics and scholars still appear so caught up in the idea of european identity being founded in the ancient civilisations of greece and rome, but the simultaneous and often predating achievements of eastern civilisations seem only of interest in so much as they relate to their own supposed european forefathers’ (arab & earl, , p. ). thus, when teach- ing about diversity it is important that teachers and historians alike think critically about the presentation of these cultures and not just as a reflection of greek or roman ideology. arab and earl strongly advocate for teachers to address issues of cultural relativ- ism within the classics classroom to enable pupils to look at the people who form the subject of their studies from a multicultural viewpoint. they conclude, ‘where does the near eastern world and its influence on the european world belong in european teaching? a europe whose schools are populated with peoples originating from these countries[?]’ (arab & earl, , p. ). this idea strengthens sawyer’s argument to acknowledge diversity in the classical world as within our own diverse classroom, and, as barnes has noted, the clc provides the perfect opportunity for the teacher to do so. barnes claimed that his students enriched and deepened their perceptions of the diversity of the ancient world, concluding that ‘involving students with different perspectives in the ancient world can produce new insights and positive engage- ments with classics in the classroom’ (barnes, , p. ). bracey in his article ‘restoring color to the ancient world’ advocates the importance of representing and teaching rome as the multi-racial society it was, not just for the sake of historical accuracy but also so that all types of students feel represented (bracey, ). thus, there seems to be ample opportunity within the clc to enrich students’ ideas surrounding sensitive topics such as slavery. however, whilst the opportunity to address sensitive issues such as cultural diversity is presented in the subject matter of the clc, as the research of both barnes ( ) and arab & earl ( ) make clear, the clc is still promoting aspects of the ancient world which are problematic. we as adults and teachers may know how to pick these issues out and help the students negotiate the latent issues in the text and images. however, for the students, they will often take their textbooks at face value and their perceptions are coloured by first impressions. does the clc override these first impressions or are teachers needed to help students guide and unpick these latent issues. in regard to slavery, the students only know grumio and clemens and their happy lives working for caecilius. it is not till stage that the clc addresses this presentation and introduces the concept of slavery as bad. is that enough to override the student’s positive introduction to slavery or is a teacher’s help needed to fully tackle these issues. the clc’s latent cultural bias in the presenta- tion of diversity further cemented my desire to research the presen- tation of slavery, to see if perhaps there is a running theme of bias with the clc’s presentation of characters. presentation of slavery in classics textbooks. whilst there has been a lot of research advocating the promotion of multiculturalism in the classroom and questioning the presentation of women and diversity within the clc, there has not been much research on teaching the sensitive topic of slavery and the presenta- tion of slaves within classics textbooks. however, there does appear to be a clear concern about the presentation of slaves within latin textbooks. bostick, an american latin teacher, wrote in an article for in medias res (an online magazine published by the paideia institute), how it is impossible to teach or learn about latin without encountering slavery and because of the role slavery played in america’s history it is vitally important that latin teachers teach the subject accurately (bostick, ). although in the usa, the word ‘slave’ does have a particular nuance and powerful historical pres- ence, the ideas presented by bostick about teaching slavery in the us still have a strong resonance in the uk. britain was the leading slave trader in the north atlantic between and when the british slave trade was abolished, it is estimated that britain trans- ported . million africans (of whom . million arrived) to the british colonies in the caribbean, north and south america and to other countries (the national archives). in the same way that clas- sics is undergoing a vast reform in regard to social consciousness and decolonisation, the british history curriculum has also been criticised in the past by teachers and academics for its inherent bias and emphasis on british history and nationalism. an anonymous article in the guardian written by a teacher laments how ‘…pupils are brought up learning about the strength and heroism of this country and its once ‘grand’ empire rather than about how other countries have suffered under its rule’. (the guardian, ). slav- ery is accepted as a defining historical element in the shaping of the western world and its abuses are common educational themes in modern history, both in the us and in the uk. however, it can be noted that slavery carries different modern-day political ramifica- tions depending on the country it is taught in. by looking at the apparatus of slavery in the ancient world, students are afforded a different, more objective critical engagement with the topic, help- ing them gain a critical consciousness which can then be applied to modern history or any other subject where the topic applies. in the case of bostick (teaching in the us), she teaches latin using the ecce romani course and laments how the presentation of davus, an enslaved person met in chapter , could lead students to believe that ancient slavery was ‘tolerable, even acceptable’ (bostick, ). throughout ecce romani, davus’ life is portrayed as quite pleasant and he has a positive opinion of his master. for example, during a story in the first ecce romani book, a new slave has arrived at cornelius’ house and davus, the overseer slave, shows him around and answers questions. when the new slave says ‘the slaves of gaius cornelius are happy. do they love their master?’, davus responds ‘sure! i am the overseer of a good man!’ (ecce romani, , p. ). we learn from the culture section ‘the slave market’ in the course book that after davus was purchased, he was initially worried about his future with his new master, but that ‘…he needn’t have worried. old titus proved to be the kindest of masters’ (ecce romani, , p. ). bostick states that it was this kind of repetitive rhetoric that led many secondary students to gain the impression that ancient slavery was ‘not that bad’. even though ecce romani does acknowledge the poor treatment of some slaves, bostick argues that reducing the institution of slavery to a mere question of mistreatment is ‘superficial and fails to capture the horrors of the larger institution’ (bostick, ). even if davus had a kind master, students needed to understand that all slavery was a dehumanising abomination. the presentation of slaves in ecce romani sounds rather similar to that of the clc. bostick circumvented the latin coursebooks rhetoric by teaching students to think critically about the language used to talk about slavery in english as well as discuss- ing the history of slavery in the ancient world. bostick concludes that it is vitally important to present students with a richer defini- tion of slavery that goes beyond the information in the textbook; this allows students to understand ancient slavery and also ‘… avoids feeding into dangerous myths and misconceptions about american slavery’ (bostick, ). this concluding statement of ‘american slavery’ can easily be changed to apply to the uk teach- ing of the transatlantic slave trade in the school curriculum. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core ella parodi dugan, in her research on the verbal and visual presentations of slaves in greek and latin textbooks, discovered ‘a complex web’ of discourse surrounding slavery and comedy resulting in the ‘happy slave narrative’ (dugan, , p. ). dugan identifies the ‘happy slave’ narrative as ‘the systemic portrayal of enslaved people as joy- ous recipients in the institution of slavery’ which often ‘emphasises the quality of provisions and lodgings for enslaved people along with their loyalty to and close friendship with their enslavers’ ( , p. ). this narrative reflects back to greek and latin literature where depictions of slavery were often intertwined with comedy, and enslaved people were common central characters in ancient comedy. furthermore, modern classics textbooks reflect such a traditional narrative through their word choice, rhetoric and sup- plementary visual materials. as robinson notes, the presentation of slavery in the clc seems to be purposely designed to reflect the characterisation of slavery in ancient texts (robinson, ). thus, the clc provides students with the ‘roman attitude’, allowing slaves to be viewed in a comedic sense. dugan concludes that, unfortunately, this sanitation and normalisation of slavery as demonstrated by the characterisation of clemens and grumio in the clc has enabled the uncomfortable topic of slavery to be made comfortable for students and to enable them to escape the much- needed critical analysis that would allow them to deepen their understanding about the reality and horrors of the ancient slave trade (dugan, , p. ). after reading about this pervading nar- rative of ‘happy slaves’ and considering the experiences of two latin teachers (bostick and robinson) and their perceptions about how this narrative has affected the beliefs of their students, i became interested in whether the presentation of slaves in the clc did have an effect on students’ ideas on roman slavery. research question the focus of my research will be how much the students under- stand about the presentation of slaves in the clc gained from read- ing the stories and looking at the pictures. to guide my research, i broke down the broader title of my study into three research ques- tions; . how do students perceive the characterisation and presenta- tion of slaves in the clc? . what the range is of student responses- how broad are they? . what do students think of their own perceptions? do they think the characters grumio and clemens are accurate repre- sentations of roman slavery? methodology as my study is focused on the issue of the happy slave narrative within latin textbooks by investigating students’ perceptions of slaves in the clc, therefore, after researching more widely into dif- ferent educational strategies to guide my research plan, i found that a case study would be the most suitable approach for my research title. as taber states, a ‘case study is often used when we want to develop a clearer, more detailed picture of something, or to under- stand what is going on in some complex situation’ (taber, , p. ). my study has identified the complex situation of the presen- tation of slaves and how that may affect student perceptions. my research followed the instrumental case study approach as i am interested in following a ‘general theoretical issue’ as opposed to studying a case because there is an intrinsic interest that relates to my own professional practice (taber, , p. ). taber defines this general interest as: where a teacher-researcher selects one class, one lesson, one topic, one group of students, as a suitable context for under- taking theory-directed research, rather than because the issue derives from concerns about that class, topic, etc. (taber, , p. ). as the focal point of my research is on student perceptions, i wanted to investigate how the complex educational phenomenon of the ‘happy slave’ was received within my own classroom so that i could develop an understanding of the issue. however, bearing in mind the common criticism of teacher bias in critical pedagogy, i did not want to influence my students’ opinions nor suggest that there could be an issue with the presentation of slaves in the clc. one disadvantage raised about case study research is that it can be difficult to generalise from a single case (simons, , p. ). however due to the already small-scale nature of this research, the scope of my enquiry was limited in terms of time, content and stu- dent participation, and therefore i would not be able to generalise from the results anyway. however, that does not mean my case study cannot produce useful results, as ‘a case study can generate both unique and universal understandings’ when focused through an in-depth and holistic perspective (simons, , p. ). research methods using my research questions as a guide, i wanted to carry out research methods that would gather the most effective evidence in a case study. i initially decided on two methods: a questionnaire and stu- dent interviews. my questionnaire was directed towards the entire class and allowed me to survey the opinion of all students in it, asking identical questions of each student but also receiving more individu- alised responses using some open-ended questions. my interviews were intended to be semi-structured with six students randomly selected from the class and interviewed together in three sets of pairs. my reasoning behind the semi-structured interview was it would allow the students to comment and express fully their ideas. inter- viewees can talk in depth and choose their own words. i would be able to probe their responses and develop a real sense of the students’ understanding of the presentation of slaves (mcleod, ). however due to the government shut-down of schools i was unable to carry out my group interviews with students and so had to adapt my research and so instead, students were emailed the interview questions and they provided written responses. whilst i was unable to further probe their responses and gain deeper insight into their opinions, there are still benefits to using written data while conducting research, particularly concerning sensitive issues. nesbitt in ‘researching children’s perspectives’ ( ) advocates that individualised, written responses to a series of questions can pre- vent any ‘individualised blocking in the conveyance of student meaning’. furthermore, nesbitt highlights how, particularly when discussing sensitive topics, allowing students to write down their opinions is important as it can prevent any experience of embar- rassment from the student (nesbitt, , p. ). teaching sequence i have chosen to focus on a year class, comprised of students, as in my placement school students are first introduced to book of the clc and the slave characters in year . for many students in the class, the start of stage in the clc will be their first formal intro- duction to roman slavery. thus, i wanted to investigate their initial perceptions of slavery that have not been developed through years of studying the ancient world. furthermore, this year class i had https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core the journal of classics teaching taught since the beginning of my placement, so i felt that the class was more suitable as i knew the class well. as my research was focused on student voice and opinion around slavery and not con- tent or activities, i did not plan a sequence of teaching lessons. however, i did structure a sequence of lessons around my question- naire and the interviews i intended to carry out. i wanted the class to complete their questionnaire before i started teaching them about the background of slavery as i did not want to influence their perceptions of the clc’s slave characters grumio and clemens with information about some of the realities and horrors of roman slavery. for many of the pupils until those background lesson on roman slavery in stage , their only point of reference for roman slaves in an educational setting came from the characters of gru- mio and clemens. therefore, i only gave a brief introduction to my research and explained i was investigating student perception of slave characters in their textbooks. the questionnaire asked students to consider the ways grumio and clemens are represented in pictures and the ways in which they engage with other characters in the latin stories. i provided the students with a checklist of pages where the slaves appeared previ- ously in the book up until stage (see table below). i provided prompts with each section to refresh students’ memories of plot or of what is happening in those pictures as well as prompting ques- tions to provide a starting point for their responses. students were asked to check through their textbooks to the relevant pages and to note down any thing they could observe or tell from those pictures and stories about clemens’ and grumio’s characterisation and rela- tionships with other characters. before the students started to answer the questionnaire, i talked them through each section as well and added further explanations about what they needed to do. i dedicated minutes to this questionnaire as students only needed to write short responses; however, i was flexible with my timing to allow students adequate time to go over all the sections. i did not want to influence student opinions of grumio and clem- ens, so i waited until after the questionnaire to start focussing on the history of roman slaves to provide them with richer knowledge about the ancient slave trade. i intended to conduct my interviews after the students had their background lessons so that they had deeper understanding of the roman slave trade. however, due to delays in getting parental per- mission to record and then transcribe these interviews for data, i was unable to conduct these interviews in person before schools shut. table : questionnaire sections section : page , pictures how are the slaves presented in these pic- tures? section : pages - , pictures what do we learn about their roles in the familia? section : page , cerberus “the cook is sleeping in the kitchen.” what does this line tell us about grumio? section : page , questions & “the slave is in the atrium; the friend greets the slave.” how is clemens treated by people outside the family? section : pages - , questions - the text states that grumio is anxious. what does that tell us about his relation- ship with metella? section : page , in triclinio “grumio eats the food and drinks the wine…. the cook dines in style in the din- ing room.” what does this story tell us about grumio? table : interview questions question : what do you think about the slave characters grumio and clemens? can you describe their personalities? what are their relationships like with the rest of their household? question : do you think the characters grumio and clemens are realis- tic portrayals of household slaves in roman society? please explain your answer. question : has the textbook changed your opinion of roman (or any other type of) slavery? question : do you think the book is presenting a particularly idealised image of slavery through the characters grumio and clemens? data and findings in this next section i shall present the key aspects of my data collated from the questionnaire and extracts from the written interviews. five students participated in the written interviews and have been given fake names for the purposes of this report; alex, bea, charlie, daya and emma. i have collated the responses to the questionnaire into tally charts so that i can determine the range and frequency of the student opinions and ideas. it should be stated that due to the nature of my sample size i will only be drawing tentative conclusions from this data in the light of the literature which has been discussed previously. my questionnaire was mainly focused on the first of my research questions, how do students perceive the characterisation and presenta- tion of slaves in the clc? however, by collecting the student responses and turning them into tally charts recording the frequency of ideas i am able to consider the range and breadth of student responses. in order to identify the breadth of responses i have identified whether the student’s opinions suggest a positive, negative or neutral response con- cerning their perceptions of the representation of the slaves. sections and are concerned with the initial pictures where we are introduced to grumio and clemens and students took note of how the slaves are presented and what the pictures tell us about their roles in the household. table : section opinions frequency positivity clothes are simple neutral look sad negative slouching and hunched shoulders negative less proud/dignified than caecilius negative healthy positive relaxed positive standing tall positive table : section opinions frequency positivity grumio is the cook neutral clemens does loads of jobs neutral clemens works in the garden neutral they were treated well positive hard labour negative the slaves work all day negative https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core ella parodi many students seemed to compare the opening pictures of grumio and clemens on page to those of the rest of the family, noting that the slaves wore simple clothes and had a different posture to those of the free upper-class family members. inter- estingly in section (see table ) ten students identified the pictures showing their roles within the household as depicting ‘hard labour’ perhaps in reference to clemens working in the garden. there was only one positive response to those pictures ‘that they were treated well’ whilst the remaining were neutral or negative. section asked students to turn to the story cerberus and focus on the line at the end of the story ‘the cook sleeps in the kitchen’ and were asked what that told us about grumio’s char- acter. here the responses vary. there is a division between students who believe he is sleeping because he is tired or work- ing hard whereas nine students believed he is sleeping as he is laid back and lazy. perhaps this idea of the slaves being worked hard is continuing from the responses shown in table . some students reasoned the kitchen doubled as grumio’s bedroom so saw no issue with him being asleep. seven students character- ised grumio as hard-working in a positive sense and thus excused his need to sleep during the day. interestingly two stu- dents believed that grumio felt there would be no repercussions or consequences if he was caught sleeping by his master. another student also identified that he was free to do what he wanted. within the stories we never see grumio or clemens punished for sleeping or not fulfilling their roles as slaves which may explain why the students believe this. i identified these two points as positive as they depict as positive image of slavery whereby the slave is confident that he will not receive violent punishment for disobedience. table : section opinions frequency positivity he lives there/ this is where he sleeps neutral he is laid back positive he works hard positive he’s tired neutral lazy negative unafraid of getting caught/his master positive free to do what he wants positive section (table ) referred to the opening sentences of stage when a friend came to visit the familia. the friend greets all the members of the family including clemens and the students were asked how clemens was treated by this person from outside the family. the majority of the class believed that, because the friend acknowledged clemens and included him in his greetings, he was showing respect to the slave and treated him in a warm and friendly manner, thus having a positive response to the depiction of slavery. one pupil however noticed the difference in the pictures stating how the friend greeted the rest of the family warmly often touching them, but with clemens he was ‘distant’ as in the picture he greeted him from across the room. table : section opinions frequency positivity like a normal person positive with respect positive in a warm/ friendly manner positive fairly positive very well positive distant neutral section (see table ) focused on grumio’s relationship with metella. the cook has prepared a meal for the family and metella has come to taste it. the text states that grumio is anxious and the students were asked what this told us about his relationship with metella. the class was split between positive and negative responses. i identified grumio’s desire ‘to avoid punishment’ as negative as it is reflective of the idea that there will be a stronger negative outcome if he displeases metella than just being told off. table : section opinions frequency positivity he is afraid of her negative grumio respects metella positive wants to please/ impress her positive trying to avoid punishment negative metella doesn’t trust grumio negative he looks up to her positive metella is strict negative he wants to be a good slave positive the final section, section (see table ) asked students to look at the end of the story in triclinio when grumio comes into the din- ing room and eats the food he prepared and drinks the wine while his master and guests sleep on. we are told that the slave ‘dines in style’; students were asked what this story tells us about grumio’s character. again, we see evidence of grumio acting naughtily and four students identified that grumio knows he will not be punished for his actions and three other students acknowledged that he has a lot of freedom and is treated well. one student said that grumio was ‘clever’ to wait for his master to be asleep so he could get the good food whilst two other interpreted this as grumio being ‘sneaky’. table : section opinions frequency positivity he knows he can get away with it positive disobedient/ naughty negative confident positive daring positive greedy negative he has a lot of freedom/treated well positive he is hungry neutral unafraid positive clever positive sneaky negative https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core the journal of classics teaching for my interview questions i wanted to move from asking the students personal questions about their opinions of the characters grumio and clemens to more conceptual questions on their thoughts on whether the textbook was being idealistic in its presen- tation of slavery. the students’ full responses have been provided within the appendix at the end of this report. for question one students were asked in general what they thought about the charac- ters grumio and clemens, expanding on the questionnaire. alex, charlie and daya all stated that they thought grumio and clemens were ‘happy’ and alex, bea, charlie and daya all thought the slaves were treated well, had good relationships with their masters who provided for them and they had a lot of ‘freedom’. emma, however, said despite having a good relationship they were still treated like lower citizens and were not equal to their masters. these opinions on the slave characters fit with dugan’s definition of the happy slave character as ‘joyous recipients in the institution of slavery’ and hav- ing ‘close friendship with their enslavers’ (dugan, , p. ). so it is interesting to see that the students picked up on this. my next question, whether the students thought these charac- ters to be realistic portrayals of household slaves in roman society, allows us to see how much the students understand about the pre- sentation of slaves in the clc. the students were mixed in their responses. alex and bea thought they were unrealistic because some slaves would have been beaten by their masters. in contrast, charlie, daya and emma all thought they were realistic: although some slaves did have cruel masters, they thought, some masters treated their slaves in a kindly way and clemens and grumio were portrayals of that. emma stated: ‘some slaves would not have liked being slaves and wanted to be freed, whilst others would have been happy like clemens and grumio’. this again repeats the idea of happy slaves. to emma, it seemed realistic to presume that some slaves would be happy being slaves because they could see it demonstrated by the clc. this kind of belief could be problematic if transferred in the student’s mind to modern slavery. however, in the next question when asked if the textbook had changed their perceptions of roman or any other slavery, emma disagreed, saying that they still thought slavery was wrong. what the textbook had taught emma was ‘about the lives they [the slaves] led away from the work they did and that they can be freed’. alex pointed out that the apparently positive portrayal of clemens and grumio had not changed her opinion of slavery as every roman household would have been different. bea stated that it did change her opinion, say- ing initially she thought slavery was a cruel ‘job’ but now she knows that not all the slaves get treated like that and some are treated as if they ‘were a normal man and not a slave’. the language used to describe slavery so far by these students seems to liken slavery to being similar to a ‘job’, with grumio and clemens having work to do, but also having time off to go to the theatre or meet up with their girlfriends. daya wrote: ‘yes, it has made me see why there was a point of slaves, and now i can come to the grip with that it is acceptable for some reasons.’ this opinion follows in line with what bostick found when teaching slavery in an american high school that students found roman slavery to be ‘acceptable’ (bostick, ). finally, i asked students if they felt the textbook presented an idealised image of slavery. as i was not there to explain the ques- tion, i added a definition for idealised as perfect or better than in reality so that students understood the clear difference between this question and question two which asked if it was realistic. bea agreed saying, ‘life as a slave in real life wouldn’t be as nice as gru- mio’s and clemens’.’ charlie said that clemens and grumio pre- sented ‘one image of slavery’ and suggested that the textbook should have a broader range of slave characters to include ‘different ways slaves were treated’. daya said that grumio and clemens did reflect an idealised image, although the textbook also showed ‘some of the struggle that different roman slaves go through’. here daya is probably referring to the background section of the textbook that does reveal that slaves were not considered ‘human beings’ (clc: , , p. ). emma claims the book is idealised as ‘it only shows the good parts of their lives’ and the work they are given is ‘easy’. through these interviews these students showed awareness of some of the cruelties that ‘other slaves’ may have suffered from cruel mas- ters or from working in coal mines or in agriculture. they tended to have a simplistic view of grumio and clemens having a happy life. to them the biggest problem that they perceived about roman slavery was dependent on who your master was or what your job/ role was, not the inherent evil of slavery itself. this research thus raises further questions: is it a problem that the students can accept or reject clemens and grumio as realistic or idealised examples of slaves, but that they ignore the fundamental problem of the idea of slavery? although one may be inclined to conclude that the latin stories of the clc of itself do present a sanitised image of slavery that students appear to pick up on, it is important to consider whether this is a matter of pedagogy: is the clc misleading in its presentation of slaves: or is it a matter of maturity? this research was carried on a singular class of year students after all. whilst it has been established that sensitive topics are present in the clc, they are not highlighted or discussed deeply. it is up to the teacher to decide whether to draw out discussions about slavery. one would hope the teacher would go into greater detail and present different perspectives on slavery. however not all teachers will have the time to do this. some teachers will only be able to focus on the stories themselves. in the stories our slave characters are likeable, the situ- ations they find themselves in are mildly comic but never distress- ing and, overall, the visuals and texts present a comfortable and sanitised view of the roman world and roman slavery. regardless of the age of the students, it is important to acknowledge that it is a problem that the clc does this. if the teacher feels the need to excuse the representation of the roman world which the textbook displays, then the book is misleading and wrong and thus should be considered unsuitable for today’s classroom. conclusion my study investigating students’ perceptions of slavery in the clc has raised a number of interesting points. it seems the fears raised by robinson ( ) and bostick ( ) about the trivialising nature of the clc’s presentation of slavery could lead to students becoming desensitised to the topic. furthermore, as dugan notes, this presentation of ‘happy’ enslaved people is a narrative that has transcended time and place. dugan advocates for critical thinking both in the classroom and by textbook makers themselves so that the classics community can grow beyond ‘the centuries of desen- sitisation to the violence and inhumanity of enslaving another human being’ (dugan, , p. ). although my research is small scale, i do believe there may be an issue with the presentation of slavery within the clc based on the perceptions of my year class towards the characters grumio and clemens. whilst the books are pitched towards children within ks , the textbook, by creating these light-hearted slave characters who have nice mas- ters and do not appear to suffer at all, has made the topic of slav- ery comfortable. however, as dubois notes, it is sometimes our job at teachers to make students uncomfortable (dubois, , p. ) and so i would advocate for teachers to encourage students to think beyond this presentation of slavery to consider the inher- ent evil of slavery itself. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core ella parodi many teachers of classics will naturally address the sensitive topic of slavery when it comes up in the clc, which often starts on the very first page of the book as students are inclined to translate servus as servant instead of slave and thus the distinction is made in the first latin lesson. however, as teachers we should be aware that it could be possible for students’ ideas of slavery to become con- fused. they know slavery is bad, a judgement they have learnt from society long before they enter a classics classroom. but then they are presented with the stories of two slaves who seem happy and content with their lives. whilst the background section of slavery, and i imagine most teachers, correct this idealised image to an extent by touching on the harsh realities of the slave trade, this image of the happy slave still nevertheless can be embedded into the students’ minds every time they read a story containing the two characters. students gain a deep level of familiarity with these char- acters and clearly enjoy reading about their stories and characteri- sation. as teachers, i think it is important that we critically evaluate our own source material and fully consider the damaging legacy of teaching students about the happy slave. we should question what the purpose is behind presenting slave characters in this way: is it to reflect roman attitudes towards slaves as witnessed in roman com- edies with the clever slave caricature? if so, how do students benefit from this 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which shows that caecilius trusts clemens, giving me more reason to believe they are close and when the ex-slave came to visit grumio prepared a fantastic meal and they were all happy and clemens called caecilius and the rest of the household to greet him and grumio and the others were pleased and excited to greet him and the reason they might be so excited could be because they hadn’t seen him in a long time and that means they probably miss him and this is further evidence on the fact that they are very close but we must remember that grumio did holdback secrets from them but then again that was very per- sonal. another piece of evidence is when quintus saved clemens and grumio from the dog that was in the streets and was attacking the and instead of teasing them quintus helped them and they overpowered the dog and the slaves then praised. this gives me more reason to believe that they are close because quintus also could have left them to die as dogs can also kill people well some dogs can. i think they have great personalities as they always seem happy vut one time grumio was drunk and a painter was painting a lion and grumio because he was drunk thought that it was a real lion and called clemens and said ‘there is a lion in the kitchen {or somewhere} and clemens replied with ‘and there is a drunk man in the kitchen’ and that made me laugh and it shows that clemens is a bit more responsible then grumio as he didn’t get drunk, but that doesn’t necessarily mean grumio is a bad person, it just shows that he was having some fun, because you need that once in a while and if i didn’t have that i would never be able to live. bea: i think grumio and clemens are treated well; they are well dressed, and they don’t get beaten or hit by their masters. they have the freedom to go anywhere because grumio goes to meet poppaea and clemens can go to the theatre. but they must do a lot of manual labour and grumio doesn’t have a separate bedroom (he sleeps in the kitchen). charlie: i think the slave characters clemens and grumio are happy where they live and get along like friends. they have a lot more freedom compared to other slaves. i also think they get along with the rest of their household because they have more freedom and that gives them more work ethic. daya: i think they were respectfully to their master, and were happy to do what they were asked for. i personally think that they were closer to their masters than other slaves they were sometimes even treated like equals. emma: the book doesn’t really say anything about the personalities or the characters of the slaves but there relationship with the rest of the household is quite good compared to other households. they are still treated like they are a lower status and are not equal. question - do you think the characters grumio and clemens are realistic portrayals of household slaves in roman society? please explain your answer. alex: i do not think they are as this could not be true in all house- holds as there must have been lots of slaves who weren’t treated in the right way though be true though it is very unlikely there is still a chance that it could be true. although in a way they are realistic because they do some sneaking around like they once stole food of the table because they might have been hungry but it doesn’t mean that they have been starved by anyone it most likely means that they were going to eat after the merchant had left and sometimes you just can’t hold in your hunger and i would do that. bea: i don’t think they are realistic portrayals of household slaves in the roman society; some slaves get beaten if they do the slightest mistake, others have to do perilous jobs- working in the mines- without wearing the proper clothes or using the needed equipment. grumio and clemens must be lucky to have such masters as caeci- lius and metella as some don’t have freedom and some don’t get paid either. charlie: i think they are realistic in some ways because some slaves were treated kindly like that, but some slaves did not have as much freedom and did not enjoy working as much as clemens and grumio. daya: i think they are a type of realistic slaves. i think this as some masters were nice to their slaves and let them free once they have earnt it. but some different masters were cruel and tortured their slaves at any chance they could and treated them like dirt. i think grumio and clemens fit into the first type of master. emma: i think they are quite close to what real slaves would have been like but not completely accurate. as some slaves would not have liked being slaves and wanted to be freed, whilst others would https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/ /may/ /secret-teacher-history-bias-school-fear-student-future https://www.theguardian.com/teacher-network/ /may/ /secret-teacher-history-bias-school-fear-student-future https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/british-transatlantic-slave-trade-records/ https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/british-transatlantic-slave-trade-records/ https://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/help-with-your-research/research-guides/british-transatlantic-slave-trade-records/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ / / /cambridge-university-decolonisation-row-spreads-students-target/ https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/ / / /cambridge-university-decolonisation-row-spreads-students-target/ https://eidolon.pub/more-than-a-common-tongue-cfd edeb https://eidolon.pub/more-than-a-common-tongue-cfd edeb https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core ella parodi have been happy like clemens and grumio. it also depends on the master because if they didn’t like their master, they would have been sadder or quieter. question - has the textbook changed your opinion of roman (or any other type of) slavery? alex: no, it hasn’t because in the book i don’t think this example is necessarily true with all households as every household is different and not everything would be the same in every house because in other houses the masters might beat them or something like that. and some slave owners that are still around in dubai pour hot oil over their slave for spilling something so not everything is the same around the world or even in one city or country. bea: the textbook did change my opinion of roman slavery. i thought it was a very boring and cruel job. it came in my night- mares when i was young as i was scared after reading a book about it. now i know that not all the slaves get treated like that and some are treated as if they were a normal man and not a slave. charlie: it has changed my opinion a little bit, but it has also upgraded my knowledge on romans and roman slavery. it has made me realise that even today we have slaves that are treated as badly as that or even worse. daya: yes, it has made my see why there was a point of slaves and now i can come to the grip with that it is acceptable for some reasons. emma: not really, i still think it is wrong and people shouldn’t have used them but the textbook has shown me more about the lives they led away from the work they did and that they can be freed. it also says what kind of work they did so how in many rich households there were more than one slave and that they all did different jobs. question - do you think the book is presenting a particularly idealised image of slavery through the characters grumio and clemens? alex: i do not think so because not everything is the same every- where and some masters might be even more lenient, and some slaves might work outside in the boiling sun and others might work in coal mines. also, it is harder to work outside because you have the sun beating on you and if you work in a coal mine or under- ground it could be dangerous because of the air you breathe and the toxic gases in the air that are bad for your lungs and heart or other organs in your body. bea: yes, because i don’t think the slaves’ lives would be as good as the lives of grumio and clemens. there would be some struggles and disappointments and there would be less chances of the slaves going to the theatre. there are more chances of the slaves being punished and beaten than being praised. i think life as a slave in real life wouldn’t be as nice as grumio’s and clemens’. charlie: yes and no. i feel like clemens and grumio presented one image of slavery. but the latin textbook could have included a dif- ferent type of way slaves are treated. daya: yes, i do but it also shows some of the struggle that different roman slaves go through. so even though grumio and clemens are some of the better treated slaves we also understand what has hap- pened to other slaves who were less fortunate. emma: yes, their master caecillius is nice and does not beat them. they were also allowed to go to the theatre but the book doesn’t show them doing any of their jobs it only shows the good parts of their lives. it doesn’t sound as if it is that hard a work that they do and that the work they are given is easy. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core freedom after neoliberalism beaumont, alexander orcid: https://orcid.org/ - - - and kelly, adam ( ) freedom after neoliberalism. open library of humanities, ( ). downloaded from: http://ray.yorksj.ac.uk/id/eprint/ / the version presented here may differ from the published version or version of record. if you intend to cite from the work you are advised to consult the publisher's version: http://dx.doi.org/ . /olh. research at york st john (ray) is an institutional repository. it supports the principles of open access by making the research outputs of the university available in digital form. copyright of the items stored in ray reside with the authors and/or other copyright owners. users may access full text items free of charge, and may download a copy for private study or non-commercial research. for further reuse terms, see licence terms governing individual outputs. institutional repository policy statement ray research at the university of york st john for more information please contact ray at ray@yorksj.ac.uk https://www.yorksj.ac.uk/ils/repository-policies/ mailto:ray@yorksj.ac.uk freedom after neoliberalism how to cite: beaumont, a and kelly a freedom after neoliberalism. open library of humanities, ( ):  , pp.  – , doi: https://doi. org/ . /olh. published: october peer review: this article has been reviewed internally as an editorial for open library of the humanities, which is a journal published by the open library of the humanities. copyright: © the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (cc-by . ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. open access: open library of humanities is a peer-reviewed open access journal. digital preservation: the open library of humanities and all its journals are digitally preserved in the clockss scholarly archive service. https://doi.org/ . /olh. https://doi.org/ . /olh. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / alexander beaumont and adam kelly, ‘freedom after neoliberalism’ ( ) ( ): open library of humanities, doi: https://doi.org/ . /olh. freedom after neoliberalism freedom after neoliberalism alexander beaumont and adam kelly york st john university, uk university of york, uk corresponding author: alexander beaumont (a.beaumont@yorksj.ac.uk) over the last four decades, the rise of the socio-political formation widely referred to as neoliberalism has seen a particular model of freedom – the freedom of free markets, property rights, and entrepreneurial self-ownership – gain prominence in a variety of ways around the globe. more recently, there has been a surge in critical activity around neoliberalism, which has led to the emergence of an increasingly settled understanding of its political, economic, and cultural mechanics. most critiques, however, have proven reluctant to engage neoliberalism on the territory that it has conspicuously made its own: namely, freedom. this special collection aims to rethink, re-evaluate, and renovate the many meanings of freedom beyond its limited economic function in neoliberal theory and practice, and to imagine what freedom might look like in a world beyond neoliberalism. the introduction provides an overview of the current conjuncture, in which there is a growing realisation that neoliberal governance has failed to deliver on its promises of freedom. we argue that this realisation has made possible, and necessary, the exploration of new histories and new futures of freedom. the introduction concludes with a brief summary of the articles that comprise this special collection. https://doi.org/ . /olh. mailto:a.beaumont@yorksj.ac.uk beaumont and kelly: freedom after neoliberalism if in the first attempt to create a world of free men we have failed, we must try again. the guiding principle that a policy of freedom for the individual is the only truly progressive policy remains as true today as it was in the nineteenth century. – f. a. hayek people were in prison so that prices could be free. – eduardo galeano in , which on many accounts represents the year zero of the neoliberal era, the american prison population reached its post-war low. at about , inmates in total, or roughly convicts per , residents, the rate of imprisonment had been relatively stable for decades at what was increasingly being viewed by criminologists as its ‘normal’ social level (wacquant, : , ). with this stability in mind, a report submitted to president richard nixon by a national criminal justice body recommended freezing prison construction for a decade. in addition to a spare capacity of beds, the report cited ‘overwhelming evidence’ that incarceration did not lead to reform or rehabilitation, ‘that these institutions create crime rather than prevent it’ (qtd in wacquant, : ). two years later, french sociologist michel foucault’s surveiller et punir: naissance de la prison (discipline and punish: the birth of the prison) unveiled a historical narrative whereby the physical prison—which emerged in its modern form in the th century and whose social centrality was consolidated in the early th century—could now be considered the relic of a prior age. the prison had lost its preeminent purpose, according to foucault ( : ), owing to the diffusion of modern forms of institutional control across ‘all the disciplinary mechanisms that function throughout society’. over the latter half of the s, in a series of lecture courses that would not be published until long after his death, foucault ( : ) went on to revise and supplement this disciplinary narrative, constructing a history of ‘the liberal art of government’ focused around the concept of freedom. in an unusual step for him, foucault brought this history explicitly up to date, devoting his lectures in the spring of beaumont and kelly: freedom after neoliberalism to the work of ‘neo-liberal’ thinkers in europe and america in the period since world war ii. it was in the ideas of these figures that foucault located the outline of a post- disciplinary society. neoliberalism would represent a governmental order in which the mechanisms of the market replaced the controlling apparatus of the state, and in which ‘action is brought to bear on the rules of the game rather than on the players … in which there is an environmental type of intervention instead of the internal subjugation of individuals’ (foucault, : ). foucault’s intellectual dalliance with neoliberal ideas—was he, wasn’t he, a neoliberal sympathiser?—has been the subject of much recent scholarly fascination (mirowski, ; dean, ; zamora and behrent, ). far less attention has been paid, however, to the fact that foucault’s overarching story about the intertwining fates of the prison, the disciplinary state, and freedom in late modernity—written avowedly as a ‘history of the present’ (foucault, : )—turned out to be quite misleading in its implications for his time and our own. indeed, at the very moment discipline and punish appeared, incarceration rates in the united states shifted abruptly onto a steep upward curve. by , the prison population had increased fivefold to almost two million inmates, many of them held in ‘conditions of overpopulation that defy understanding’ (wacquant, : xv). the correctional industry had become the third- largest employer in a country that otherwise saw social expenditure slashed. under the democratic administration of bill clinton, welfare was transformed into ‘workfare’, the obligation for unemployed citizens to accept any job offered to them, no matter how demeaning, underpaid, or unskilled. for the penal theorist loïc wacquant ( : ), the closing decades of the th century witnessed nothing less than a wholesale transformation in the ideology and practice of welfare and ‘prisonfare’: the operant purpose of welfare has shifted from passive ‘people processing’ to active ‘people changing’ … while the prison has traveled in the other direction, from aiming to reform inmates (under the philosophy of rehabilitation, hegemonic from the s to the mid- s) to merely warehousing them (as the function of punishment was downgraded to retribution and neutralization). beaumont and kelly: freedom after neoliberalism this retributive turn, over a period during which crime itself was not increasing, should be seen as part of a coherent governing philosophy, a ‘new politics and policy of poverty’ (wacquant, : ). in the american context, this constituted a politics of racial and class warfare, since it was precisely those lower-class citizens (mostly black and latino) who had formerly been on welfare rolls who were now being sent to prison instead. the british prime minister margaret thatcher once famously remarked that ‘economics are the method: the object is to change the heart and soul’ (thatcher, : n. pag.). in the us, britain, and many other societies in the global north, those hearts and souls that could not be changed by neoliberalism’s economic methods were, it seems, made unfree by its punitive ones. meanwhile, in the global south, neoliberalism and unfreedom were even more deeply intertwined in practice. as naomi klein outlines in her bestselling book the shock doctrine, the imposition of neoliberal ‘reforms’ in latin america, eastern europe, the middle east, and africa came about not through the decisions of free democracies, but through the actions of dictatorships, nondemocratic governments, and international non-governmental organisations—the imf, the world bank—all underpinned by ‘a powerful ruling alliance between a few very large corporations and a class of mostly wealthy politicians’ (klein, : ). the ‘shock therapy’ involved in the capitalist makeovers of countries including chile, bolivia, poland, russia, south africa, and iraq was the the racial dimension of american mass incarceration is likewise emphasised in recent popular accounts such as michelle alexander’s the new jim crow ( ) and ava duvernay’s oscar-nominated documentary th ( ). for a summary of scholarship in this area, see berger ( ). although the ‘generalized carceral hyperinflation’ that characterizes the us example has not been as stark in other advanced democracies—only russia, the subject of radical neoliberal reforms following the collapse of communism, has outstripped the us, having doubled its incarceration rate between and —the trends in western europe have also been upwards (wacquant, : , ). the post-thatcher uk is a standout case, with tony blair ‘presiding over the single largest increase of the convict population in the country’s history’ (wacquant, : ). as well as challenging foucault’s history of the prison, this upsurge in incarceration also places in question gilles deleuze’s ( : – ) much-cited claim that the transition from disciplinary societies to societies of control means an end to ‘environments of enclosure’ like the prison: ‘everyone knows that these institutions are finished … it’s only a matter of administering their last rites and of keeping people employed until the installation of the new forces knocking on the door’. beaumont and kelly: freedom after neoliberalism original brainchild, according to klein, of the university of chicago economics professor milton friedman, author of capitalism and freedom ( ). the so-called ‘chicago boys’ who assisted the chilean dictator augusto pinochet in revamping that country’s economy following his coup in were products of friedman’s ‘chicago school’, also the institutional home of other key neoliberal thinkers including gary becker, ronald coase, aaron director, robert lucas, and george stigler. what foucault ( : ) dubbed friedman’s ‘anarcho-liberalism’ was characterised in the chilean case by ‘a rapid-fire transformation of the economy—tax cuts, free trade, privatized services, cuts to social spending and deregulation’ (klein, : ). the social costs of such a transformation—including incarceration, torture, and execution—would simply have to be borne in the service of economic liberalisation, as the uruguayan writer eduardo galeano pithily explained in a line that provides this introductory essay with its second epigraph (qtd in weschler, : ). freedom after neoliberalism, the title and topic of our special collection, thus emerges against the material background of high levels of unfreedom among populations subjected to neoliberal reforms over the last four decades and more. but our collection also—and perhaps more centrally—responds to the fact that this account of unfreedom is far from the official story told about this period. incarceration rates, dictatorships, and nondemocratic decision-making have for a long time been rendered opaque and often invisible through a rhetoric of freedom on the political right that has proven astonishingly resilient, at least until very recent times. indeed, david harvey ( : , ) begins and ends his influential brief history of neoliberalism by highlighting the ideological centrality of freedom to neoliberalism, noting that while ‘[c]oncepts of dignity and individual freedom are powerful and appealing in their own right’, the assumption that they are ‘guaranteed by freedom of the market and of trade is a cardinal feature of neoliberal thinking’. the key political claim of thinkers such as friedman and friedrich hayek is that personal freedom can only be vouchsafed by a state that is organised around the protection of individual property rights, the promotion of competition, and the maintenance of ‘free markets’. in reality, as harvey and others have argued, the economic consequences of neoliberalism ultimately trumped any of the political aims it may in theory have been organised around. far beaumont and kelly: freedom after neoliberalism from functioning primarily in the service of personal liberty, the neoliberal state’s fundamental role became the extrication of capital from the various constraints that were erected around it during the immediate post-war period, when the maintenance of peace and prosperity in western societies was perceived to depend upon a social contract that regulated the market and formalised the bargaining power of labour within a substantial welfare system. this post-war context was marked in many societies by dramatically increased access to educational and parliamentary institutions for the lower and working classes. in , the british reformer william beveridge characterised his call for a comprehensive welfare state—significant parts of which were implemented by clement attlee’s labour government after world war ii—as ‘the way to freedom from want’ (british government, : ). yet, only two years later, friedrich hayek would characterise beveridge’s way as the road to serfdom ( ). one measure of neoliberalism’s political success lies in the extent to which hayek’s roadmap—based on freedom from coercion—would in the late th century come to displace the one espoused by beveridge, founded on freedom from want. this emphasis on freedom from coercion over liberation from want was bound up with the global victory of capitalist ideals over socialist ones. for hayek, as for friedman, capitalism and freedom were inextricably linked. the historical basis for this claim is important to recognise: although hayek does not discuss feudalism directly in the road to serfdom, it is clear (not least from the book’s title) that he viewed all forms of contemporary political collectivism—whether totalitarian, socialist, or social democratic—as marking a reversion to relations of hierarchical dependency that had existed through the medieval period right up to the french revolution in (and in russia, to the emancipation of the serfs in ). the rise of the bourgeois class of small property owners, and their political breakthrough in north america, france, and britain over the course of the th century, resulted in new formal legal and political freedoms as well as the capacity to sell one’s labour power in the competitive marketplace. the the road to serfdom in fact began life as a memo written to beveridge in , when both he and hayek were working at the london school of economics. the memo is reproduced in hayek ( : – ). the concluding lines of the road to serfdom provide us with our first epigraph (hayek, : ). beaumont and kelly: freedom after neoliberalism latter was a form of freedom—freedom of contract—that, as karl marx was among the first to recognise and theorise, had not been available to those born into dependency under feudalism. hence hayek’s ( : ) statement (which in marx is a historical claim, in hayek a normative one) that ‘only capitalism makes democracy possible’. in hayek’s view, not only was the free market the great economic and political achievement of the th century, it was also the most advanced epistemological system available to humans. the price mechanism, he argued, combined the knowledge of countless individual minds into a spontaneous, organic, and efficient system of resource allocation. if we understand economic freedom to be the principal mode of individual freedom, then the free market constitutes the only bulwark against the neo-feudalist threat of contemporary ‘planning’. even with the best intentions, planning must lead to the concentration of power in few hands and eventually to totalitarianism, a process hayek ( : ) claimed to have witnessed in his native austria and was now observing again in britain and elsewhere. ‘so long as property is divided among many owners’, hayek ( : ) contended, ‘none of them acting independently has exclusive power to determine the income and position of particular people—nobody is tied to any one property owner except by the fact that he may offer better terms than anybody else’. this formal freedom from coercion—the ability, at least in theory, to escape from ties to any instance of hierarchical power—clearly trumped in hayek’s view the importance of freedom from freedom of contract was of course a double-edged kind of freedom that, as karl polanyi ( : ) famously argued, led to the ‘great transformation’ of the th century: ‘in practice [freedom of contract] meant that the noncontractual organizations of kinship, neighborhood, profession, and creed were to be liquidated since they claimed the allegiance of the individual and thus restrained his freedom’. in polanyi’s ( : ) narrative, the new science of political economy was tasked with reimagining freedom in line with this new way of life: ‘the stubborn facts and the inexorable brute laws that appeared to abolish our freedom had in one way or another to be reconciled to freedom’. the identification of economic freedom as the paradigmatic mode of freedom, and the consequent extension of economic models into previously non-economic spheres of life, is a key distinguishing factor between classical liberalism (in which spheres of social reproduction were understood to exist outside the market) and neoliberalism (in which markets should operate in virtually every sphere). see brown ( ). the centrality of individual freedom to the neoliberal worldview is defended as a higher form of intellectual insight in milton friedman’s introduction to the edition of the road to serfdom: ‘the argument for collectivism is simple if false; it is an immediate emotional argument. the argument for individualism is subtle and sophisticated; it is an indirect rational argument’ (qtd in hayek, : ). beaumont and kelly: freedom after neoliberalism want. ‘the fact that the opportunities open to the poor in a competitive society are much more restricted than those open to the rich’, he averred in one of the road to serfdom’s most telling formulations, ‘does not make it less true that in such a society the poor are much more free than a person commanding much greater material comfort in a different type of society’ (hayek, : ). of hayek’s influence on the present character of neoliberal society, one recent journalistic account has remarked that ‘[w]e live in a paradise built by his big idea’ (metcalf, : n. pag.). but how has this ‘paradise’ been brought to bear? how has want—that is, a life driven by the ongoing necessity of meeting basic material needs—come to be positioned not as a form of bondage but as an index of freedom? one way to answer these questions is to point to structural transformations in the capitalist economy—and policy responses to those transformations—underpinning the shift from a fordist to a post-fordist order, an order organised around flexible entrepreneurialism and financial responsibilisation. melinda cooper ( : ) has argued that the response of the neoliberal right in the us to the crisis of fordism in the s ‘was not a return to the fordist family wage (that particular nostalgia would be a hallmark of the left), but rather the strategic reinvention of a much older, poor- law tradition of private family responsibility, using the combined instruments of hayek’s vision of freedom as non-coercion can also usefully be contrasted with the republican conception of freedom as non-domination, as influentially theorised by philip pettit. for the classical liberal, it is only direct interference in the basic choices of a person that can deny them freedom, and thus any imbalance in power or wealth between contracting parties does not impinge on the freedom enjoyed by each party. for the classical republican, by contrast, a person who is subject privately to a master, or publicly to an arbitrary power—‘say, the despotism of a prince or party; or the colonial rule of an imperial power’—is considered unfree, regardless of how much or little interference that person encounters in practice (pettit, : ). domination can also be established through want: pettit ( : ) cites a statement by thomas jefferson as the locus classicus of the republican critique of liberal freedom of contract: ‘and with the laborers of england generally, does not the moral coercion of want subject their will as despotically to that of their employer, as the physical constraint does the soldier, the seaman, or the slave?’ despite his emphasis on coercion over want, hayek’s argument in the road to serfdom does shade into a critique of domination when the power in question is the socialist ‘planner’. he is much more sanguine when it comes to capitalist modes of domination, arguing that for the losers in a competitive market society, their inequality is easier to accept ‘if it is due to impersonal forces than when it is due to design’ (hayek, : ). for more on hayek’s conception of freedom, and its relationship to his epistemology of the market, see paul ( ). beaumont and kelly: freedom after neoliberalism welfare reform, changes to taxation, and monetary policy’. the effect of these policy shifts has been to entangle the contemporary subject with capitalist financialisation in a way that ultimately undermines the very freedom in whose name these policies have been adopted. david graeber ( : ) has connected the promise of home ownership, a central plank in the neoliberal reforms of thatcher and reagan, to the vast expansion of mortgage-refinancing schemes and consumer credit since the s, commenting that ‘for many, “buying a piece of capitalism” slithered undetectably into something indistinguishable from those familiar scourges of the working poor: the loan shark and the pawnbroker’. even for those who could afford to save rather than borrow, a heightened engagement with financial markets became inescapable. christian marazzi ( : ), for instance, notes that ‘the diversion of savings to securities markets, initiated by the “silent revolution” in pension funds’, had as its aim ‘to eliminate the separation between capital and labour implicit in the fordist salary relationship by strictly tying workers’ savings to processes of capitalist transformation/restructuring’. the point of these shifts away from the fordist social order is to produce workers and citizens who are invested in the success of capitalism not only insofar as it guarantees the income they receive in the form of wages, but also to the extent that the financial mechanics through which capitalism operates underpin any future prosperity. their freedom thus becomes dependent not only upon economic growth—as was also the case during the various keynesian settlements of the post- war period—but on a growth that can only be guaranteed through a reorientation of life towards the management of credit and debt. for the working and middle classes in the era of neoliberal financialisation, freedom has thus become hedged all around by virtually unavoidable entanglement with indebtedness. on the rise of indebtedness over the neoliberal period, see streeck ( ). see also wendy brown’s ( : ) distinction between the liberal model of the market and the neoliberal scenario: ‘rather than each individual pursuing his or her own interest and unwittingly generating collective benefit [as in adam smith’s invisible hand theory], today, it is the project of macroeconomic growth and credit enhancement to which neoliberal individuals are tethered and with which their existence as human capital must align if they are to thrive’. beaumont and kelly: freedom after neoliberalism when it comes to shackling neoliberal subjects to an understanding of freedom that appears to require their accommodation to structures of debt, no less important than these structural and policy shifts have been the ideological shifts that accompanied them. remarking on the neoliberal ‘exaltation of a life in uncertainty as a life in liberty’, wolfgang streeck ( : ) suggests that: [n]eoliberal ideological narratives offer a euphemistic reinterpretation of the breakdown of structured order as the arrival of a free society built on individual autonomy, and of de-institutionalization as historical progress out of an empire of necessity into an empire of freedom. (italics in original) such ‘neoliberal ideological narratives’ have emerged from the realm of culture. in places where the ‘liberation’ of capital was not (or not wholly) performed using the brute force of the state, neoliberal restructuring was instead enabled by a powerful cultural appeal to individual freedom. this appeal represented a particular challenge for the left, resulting in a longstanding and ongoing debate concerning the relationship between solidarity and difference. as harvey ( : ) remarks, ‘[a]ny political movement that holds individual freedoms to be sacrosanct is vulnerable to incorporation into the neoliberal fold’. thus, despite the real social and political advances secured by the various countercultures of the s and s, the identity movements of the new left and the revolutionary fervour of the soixante huitardes have all ended up providing grist to neoliberalism’s mill in one way or another. according to harvey ( : – ), this was because it proved difficult, within the context of such movements, to ‘forge the collective discipline required for political action to achieve social justice without offending the desire of political actors for individual freedom’. while neoliberalism’s conceptualisation of liberty was, in theory, really quite minimal, in practice it was sufficiently diffuse and pragmatic as to be capable of neutralising and even arrogating movements that had the potential to challenge it. from our historical vantage point, it seems clear that neoliberalism has, in adam tooze’s ( : n. pag.) words, repressed ‘the impulse to know, the will to intervene, the freedom to choose not privately but as a political body’. as melinda cooper ( : ) remarks, ‘there is no form of social liberation, it would seem, that the neoliberal economist cannot incorporate within a new market for contractual services or high-risk credit’. beaumont and kelly: freedom after neoliberalism from here it is a short step to harvey’s more brazen contention that the retreat from a class-based politics was ultimately the handmaiden of neoliberalisation. yet it should be noted that he is emphatic in arguing that it is pointless to ‘wax nostalgic for some lost golden age when some fictional category like “the proletariat” was in motion’; the conditions of class formation are—just as they always have been—‘full of the complexities that arise out of race, gender, and ethnic distinctions that are closely interwoven with class identities’ (harvey, : ). efforts to distinguish between what harvey calls mid-century ‘embedded liberalism’ and late-century neoliberalism have sometimes prompted unwarranted nostalgia for an earlier brand of capitalism whose benefits were more evenly spread, but in which basic inequalities (not least on a global level) still existed as a motor of the system. but, just as the route towards a renewed social solidarity will not be identified by pining for the lost stability of the fordist family unit, so it will not arise through the straightforward renunciation of identity politics counselled by some commentators (lilla, ; luce, ). instead, this special collection claims, it is more likely to emerge from a project that seeks to reimagine freedom in new and rich ways. with this in mind, and given that appeals to freedom have been far from uncommon in the history of left, left-liberal, and progressive thought, the circumspect, provisional, and even suspicious way in which the left has engaged with the concept of freedom over recent years and even decades becomes notable and disappointing. one plausible reason for the resilience of neoliberalism’s ideological monopoly on freedom is the earnestness with which a philosophically narrow conceptualisation of liberty deriving from the libertarian right (and combined with stylistic trappings from the new left) has been espoused by leaders—and major shareholders—of the information technologies industry, an industry which dominates the means of communication and, increasingly, exchange. but beyond these tiny elites, the even an otherwise harsh critic of neoliberalism’s erosion of democracy such as wendy brown ( ) has been taken to task by others on the left for her perceived lionisation of mid-century democratic capitalism as an alternative to the contemporary status quo (brouillette, : – ; mcclanahan, ). philip mirowski ( : ) goes so far as to argue that the products of the technology industry have altered the very notion of a consistent self, making a more embedded and temporally extended conception of freedom—which could challenge neoliberalism’s minimal model of freedom from beaumont and kelly: freedom after neoliberalism ability of neoliberal ideologues to reposition precarity as freedom in a way that is ideologically persuasive across a broad cross-section of political constituencies continues to be remarkable, and may explain why so few critics have been fully willing to claim the concept of freedom for the left. nevertheless, since the us-led invasion of iraq in , and certainly since the economic crisis of , neoliberalism’s manifest failure to bring about the very thing around which it is organised—freedom—has been remarked upon with growing frequency. responding to harvey’s ( : ) prompting that ‘the meaning of this word should be subjected to the deepest scrutiny’, some critics on the left—including those associated with the social movements alluded to above—have sought with growing trenchancy to question the role and status of freedom under neoliberalism. the poststructuralist critique of the voluntarist subject of liberalism has, of course, been in motion for decades. in recent years, however, this critique has become increasingly pointed, with scholars addressing the affective mechanisms by which coercion—increasingly into an impossibility: ‘the key to comprehension of the neutralization of time- honored traditions of positive liberty comes with the progressive fragmentation of the self, both in economic theory and in everyday life. … absent such a self, there is nothing left of a “positive” notion of freedom to preserve and protect’. for the classic articulation of the distinction between negative freedom and positive freedom, see berlin ( ). the ability of regimes to instrumentalise freedom as a technique of governance has been noted for a while: see, for instance, rose’s powers of freedom ( ) and dean’s governmentality ( ), both first published in . the connection between freedom and precarity has recently been explored by isabell lorey ( : ), who examines the rise of ‘precarization as an instrument of governing’ and argues that ‘[w]hen domestic security discourses are correlated with normalized social insecurity in neoliberalism, then the fundamental dispositive of liberalism shifts. instead of freedom and security, freedom and insecurity now form the new couple in neoliberal governmentality’. in south america, the association between neoliberal economics and the tyranny of state violence never really disappeared, since the latter was so visibly the means by which the former was instantiated in this part of the world. in africa, the apparent failure of imf-sanctioned structural adjustment programmes to fulfil amartya sen’s ( ) prospectus of development as freedom has resulted in a growing number of critiques. in europe, a combination of asset-inflating quantitative easing and deep cuts to social provision under the governing economic rubric of ‘austerity’ has produced a profound set of legitimacy crises at both national and supranational levels, considered below. and in the united states, scholars and activists have continued to question the neoliberal ‘centre’ ground, while there has emerged an increasingly visible division between right-wing libertarian and populist movements — the tea party and donald trump — and left-wing social justice and democratic socialist movements — black lives matter and bernie sanders. beaumont and kelly: freedom after neoliberalism neoliberal subjects are encouraged to cathect to a promise of freedom that cannot possibly be delivered upon. for instance, sara ahmed ( : ) argues that ‘the freedom to be happy is a fantasy of freedom that conceals how happiness directs us towards some life choices and not others’. this affective logic has been harnessed to discipline and quiesce subjects who might otherwise begin to question it, an insight that underpins lauren berlant’s influential concept of ‘cruel optimism’. ‘why’, berlant ( : ) asks, ‘do people stay attached to conventional good-life fantasies—say, of enduring reciprocity in couples, families, political systems, institutions, markets, and at work—when the evidence of their instability, fragility, and dear costs abounds?’ one answer she points to concerns the ‘gaps of disappointment’ that opened up when ‘[f]lexibility was sold as a freedom both for corporations responding to an increasingly dynamic or unstable economy and for people who saw being tied down to jobs as a hindrance both to pleasure and to upwards mobility’ (berlant, : , ). harvey’s call for us to be sceptical about neoliberalism’s claims regarding freedom was, in fact, being answered even before he articulated it; what has changed in recent years is the precision with which these answers have been attached, within cultural discourse, to the failure of neoliberalism to realise its own promises. ahmed’s and berlant’s critiques are among the signs that the long-established ideological alignment among capitalism, freedom, and democracy is beginning to unravel. we can witness this unravelling even within narratives emerging from outposts of the traditional centre ground. though it does not deal expressly with the question of freedom, a key text in this shifting alignment—read and remarked on in a wide array of venues—is thomas piketty’s capital in the twenty-first century ( ). authored by a neoclassical economist, the book has nonetheless been crucial in reviving an interest in the distributional questions raised by keynesian macroeconomics. but commentators’ preoccupation with the key economic dynamic identified by piketty—that the rate of return on capital tends to outpace the rate of growth of income in a way that deepens structural inequality over the longue durée—has sometimes led to the book’s accompanying political logic being overlooked. as piketty ( : ) argues, in circumstances marked by this economic dynamic, ‘capitalism automatically generates arbitrary and unsustainable beaumont and kelly: freedom after neoliberalism inequalities that radically undermine the meritocratic values on which democratic societies are based’. it should not be surprising, therefore, that technical questions of economic management have recently ballooned, particularly in europe, into much larger questions of political legitimacy. streeck ( : – ) goes so far as to characterise the situation since the financial crisis as a ‘delayed crisis of democratic capitalism’, and calls for the revival of the marxist crisis theory of the s and s in order to understand it fully. his core insight is that, far from resolving the legitimation crisis that was wrestled with by western states during the trente glorieuse following world war ii, the neoliberal experiments of the following forty years simply delayed it. in europe today, the economic challenge of managing sovereign debt within the institutional structures of the eu masks a much deeper and potentially much more destabilising phenomenon, in which the key mechanism by which capitalism had managed to justify itself for decades—its association with democratic forms of freedom—appears to have been exhausted. to shift the focus away from economic management and towards legitimation in this manner—thereby reversing the polarities in william davies’s ( : ) definition of neoliberalism as ‘the disenchantment of politics by economics’—is necessarily to generate opportunities for political contestation. quite suddenly, ground has opened up on either side of the ‘centrist’ neoliberal doxa that previously dominated the political arena. on the right, new forms of cultural revanchism are propelling political parties into power whose presence in national assemblies would have been unthinkable during the s. and while centre-left parties have borne a great deal of political pain in the decade since the financial crisis, it is also the case that opportunities have opened up for the reinvigoration of leftist politics. according to some commentators, ‘freedom’ is not the keyword for this new era of turbulence and possibility. in his keynote contribution to the ‘freedom after neoliberalism’ conference hosted at the university of york in june , nikolas rose ( : ) ‘rather than the production of surplus-value’, streeck ( : – ) writes, ‘the problem was the legitimacy of capitalism as a social system; not whether capital, converted into the economy of the society, would be able to keep society supplied, but whether what it was able to supply would be enough to make its recipients continue playing the game. thus, for the crisis theories of the s and s, the impending crisis of capitalism was not one of production but of legitimation’. beaumont and kelly: freedom after neoliberalism revisited his earlier work on governing through freedom only to end his paper by arguing that the most important concept for the contemporary moment is not ‘freedom’ but ‘security’. in making the case for the continued significance of freedom, we therefore find ourselves—rather unusually—positioned against a high- profile contributor to the very project we ourselves have established. yet we remain convinced—and this collection takes as its point of departure—that reconsidering and re-evaluating the meaning of freedom in a contemporary setting can provide a way not only to explore, in rose’s ( : , ) words, the ‘new rationalities’ of the present, but also to locate ‘their potential for progressive re-articulation’. before moving to describe the essays in this special collection that seek to reconsider and re-evaluate the meaning of freedom, it is important to clarify that we are not arguing that the present era exists ‘after’ neoliberalism in any clear temporal sense. rather, the essays included here constitute acts of historical imagination, conducted in the main through the study of recent literary texts that themselves stage imaginative projects in which the idea of an ‘after’ is engaged—sometimes negatively, sometimes positively—while proceeding from the recognition of contemporary neoliberal conditions. rather than attempt to summarise what this ‘after’ signifies, then, we leave it to the individual essays to make their own arguments via their own aesthetic engagements. but this aesthetic element may also need some explanation: why should we look to literature (or to cognate aesthetic fields) in order to imagine freedom after neoliberalism? we have already acknowledged that culture is one of the means by which neoliberalism established its ‘empire of freedom’, so it stands to reason that cultural texts—including literature, film, and even popular examples of ‘theory’—played a significant role in this process. there has long existed a body of critical material that positions ‘the cultural turn’ in the humanities and social sciences as a left-neoliberal canard which substituted a depoliticised identitarianism the conference—which emerged from a project run by the co-editors of this special collection between and —was organised by three phd students at the university of york, adam bristow-smith, harriet neal, and joe rollins. details of the conference and the wider project are available at: freedomafterneoliberalism.wordpress.com. https://freedomafterneoliberalism.wordpress.com/ beaumont and kelly: freedom after neoliberalism for substantive ideological disagreement (badiou, ; michaels, ). more recently, some on the left have condemned ‘cultural’ marxism as a profound historical error, sought to renounce its origins in the poststructuralist inheritance of phenomenology, and called for the development of an ‘ultra-realism’ in its stead (hall and winlow, ). yet it is notable that, even where scepticism regarding the cultural turn is heard, literary studies and its cognate fields continue to produce some of the most robust and productive critiques of capitalism broadly and neoliberalism in particular. if, as sarah brouillette ( : , ) argues, literature of the neoliberal period has been complicit in valorising ‘the reflexive individual’s enterprising and expressive labor’, it has also offered us ‘more tangled forms of self-consciousness, far distant from any celebratory self-appreciation’. and if cultural production under neoliberalism has incubated the paradigmatic post-fordist labourers of the ‘creative class’ (florida, ), it is aesthetic criticism that has tended to offer the most subtle, sustained, and responsive critiques of not only the cultural products in question but also the economy from which they emerge. thus, over recent years, a growing body of scholarship has emerged that works to explore and establish the relationship(s) between neoliberalism and contemporary aesthetics. one aspect that unites this work is a concern about the validity and precision of the category of ‘neoliberalism’ itself. in their introduction to a special issue on genres of neoliberalism, jane elliott and gillian harkins ( : ) were already worrying about academic ‘neoliberalism fatigue’, that the contemporary proliferation of the term now ‘signals the absence of a specific political economic, historical, or cultural critique rather than a precise engagement with the conditions of the later twentieth and early twenty-first centuries’. emily johansen and alissa karl ( : ) likewise acknowledge early in their introduction to neoliberalism and the novel that ‘[i]t is now fairly routine to note that neoliberal capitalism, or neoliberalism plain and simple, is a notoriously slippery and capacious signifier’. noting this slipperiness, and distinguishing between neoliberalism as a period, a doctrine of governance, a movement, one notable development within recent literary criticism is a return to the modernist preoccupation with the autonomy and exceptionality of art. see, for example, pendakis et al. ( ) and beech ( ). beaumont and kelly: freedom after neoliberalism and an order of normative reason, leigh claire la berge and quinn slobodian ( : ) remark in a review essay that ‘[w]hich definition will come to dominate in literary and cultural studies remains an open question, as does the question of what literary studies will itself offer’. in their introduction to neoliberalism and contemporary literary culture, mitchum huehls and rachel greenwald smith ( : ) express more confidence that ‘literature can help us better understand some of the more confounding contradictions that appear to exist within theories of neoliberalism’. these introductions to, and overviews of, the relationship between neoliberalism and culture are thus much taken up with establishing the conceptual validity of the neoliberal paradigm and with exploring, on that basis, how neoliberalism influences, or is influenced by, literary and cultural texts. our aim is to build on these valuable critical precursors by engaging with contemporary texts as a resource for new critical possibilities and new visions of freedom after neoliberalism. the essays in this special collection thus examine the ways in which literature, film, and theory of the st century offer an understanding of the ongoing resonance of freedom as a multivalent and promissory political concept. the overall aim of freedom after neoliberalism is to suggest that ‘freedom’ continues to provide opportunities for the development of new political imaginaries, and to highlight how and when the notion of freedom has been misaligned with neoliberal projects that have in reality produced forms of unfreedom at an economic, political, and affective level. we begin with two case studies that characterise the historical arrival of neoliberalism not as a rediscovery of freedom, but either as a catastrophic episode of violence directed by the state against the lives and livelihoods of its own citizens, or as a capitulation to the imperatives of a market society that commodifies cultural production and erodes the public sphere. interestingly, these essays reverse the accepted geography for these two dynamics: the latter, peaceful and cultural capitulation to neoliberal hegemony takes place in post-dictatorship chile, while the former—violent, militarised, and profoundly undemocratic—is located in the uk. christopher vardy’s opening article positions gb ( ), david peace’s for a still more thorough taxonomy of neoliberalism, see gilbert ( ). beaumont and kelly: freedom after neoliberalism dramatisation of the uk miners’ strike, as the very opposite of the hopeful defeat that concludes Émile zola’s germinal ( ). for peace, the victory of margaret thatcher’s government in this industrial dispute represents the terminal episode in a millennium-long project of violent subjugation and class war that has seen the denizens of his native yorkshire denied even a scintilla of freedom. vardy interrogates the meaning of such longue durée historicising: on the one hand, peace’s novel powerfully mourns the singularity of the miners’ conflict with a leviathan that deprives its subjects of liberty; on the other, gb struggles to avoid a historical determinism—the flipside of fukuyama’s neoliberal end-of-history thesis—that would make impossible the imagining of alternative forms of freedom. the referendum on chile’s transition to democracy—represented in pablo larraín’s film no ( )—was a relatively peaceful affair, not only by comparison with the british miner’s strike but more pertinently with the post- regime of neoliberal dictatorship under augusto pinochet. indeed, chile under pinochet is perhaps the premier historical example that gives the lie to neoliberalism’s sanctification of liberty as a primary virtue and end. but while the plebiscite might easily be positioned as marking the arrival of freedom, eugenio di stefano argues in our second article that ‘no is less about a break than a continuation of neoliberal policies that make chile one of the most unequal countries on earth’. larraín’s film is another st-century historicisation that seeks to explain the way in which neoliberalism’s relationship with freedom became attenuated as it established itself as a governing logic. but whereas for peace this attenuation is total—never again will england enjoy liberty—larraín’s films identify a new opportunity to locate freedom in the logic of mimesis itself. in his reading of larraín’s more recent film neruda ( ), di stefano explores how larraín’s art creates an autonomous space beyond the marketplace where freedom might be located and harnessed to ends that are not just aesthetic but political too. vardy’s and di stefano’s focus on the historical origins of actually existing neoliberalism is continued in the third article in the collection. adam kelly’s exploration of the changing role played by the idea of freedom in the fiction of colson whitehead begins by outlining some of the significations of ‘freedom’ within beaumont and kelly: freedom after neoliberalism american—and particularly african american—culture before and during the period of neoliberal hegemony. via an extended comparison between whitehead’s novels apex hides the hurt ( ) and the underground railroad ( ), the essay then moves to considering the author’s shifting engagement with freedom in his work. in apex— published against the background of the bush doctrine and the american wars in iraq and afghanistan—whitehead treats freedom ironically. the underground railroad, by contrast, emerges in the context of the black lives matter movement and a growing public awareness of the implications of mass incarceration policies for african americans, and seems to call for a more sincere reckoning with the notion of freedom. the article concludes with a discussion of time in whitehead, arguing that his fiction’s distinctive temporal structures lie at the heart of the vision of freedom after neoliberalism offered by his writing. kelly’s reading thus offers a hinge between the broadly historiographic focus of the first two essays in the collection, and the more concerted engagement with the ‘after’ of neoliberalism that marks the following four essays. in moving to explore new horizons for freedom in the literature of the new millennium, the collection first examines an existing debate that has been the focus of much energy on the academic left. over the last two decades, cosmopolitanism has provided some of the most fertile ground for identifying and critiquing the depredations of emergency biopolitics; thus, we devote two articles to excavating this area of critical enquiry so as to identify emancipatory opportunities that might not have been fully realised or reckoned with in the existing scholarship. david mitchell’s novel cloud atlas is a text that has been widely celebrated for its fractious aesthetic of cosmopolitan belonging that gestures beyond teleological accounts of citizenship inherited from the european enlightenment. yet, as alexander beaumont argues, critics have tended to overlook the ways in which cloud atlas’s cosmopolitan imaginary actually serves to limit a contrasting emancipatory imaginary which would seek to locate a route beyond neoliberal unfreedom. although the novel cannot quite resolve the tension between these two imaginaries, in its failures and near-successes cloud atlas provides a useful insight, beaumont contends, into how cosmopolitan thought might be reconfigured so as to place political action—and not an ethical account of human ontology—at the heart of contemporary praxis. beaumont and kelly: freedom after neoliberalism emily johansen’s article likewise engages cosmopolitan discourses, arguing that they dovetail with neoliberal imaginaries in their understanding of risk. the liberal inheritance of cosmopolitanism, johansen contends, can be understood to provide the basis for neoliberalism’s speculative and entrepreneurial logics. yet just as the emancipatory imaginary of cloud atlas offers an opportunity to identify, rethink, and refurbish key elements of its cosmopolitan commitments, so, in a countervailing manoeuvre, johansen argues that cosmopolitanism offers an opportunity to reconfigure iniquitous dynamics within neoliberal thought. through an analysis of john le carré’s novel the constant gardener, johansen suggests that a vision of ‘risky cosmopolitanism’ provides the basis for radically rethinking the uneven distribution of risk within neoliberal globalisation. this vision necessitates an active valorisation of neoliberal unfreedom as cosmopolitan freedom, alongside a thoroughgoing critique of the ways in which neoliberalism’s fetishisation of liberty has served to perpetuate colonial logics that continue to subjugate populations in the global south. read together, beaumont and johansen’s articles seek to identify the limits and opportunities of cosmopolitanism in st-century literary culture, and how cosmopolitan thinking provides a site for reengaging the concept of freedom beyond its narrow understanding within neoliberal discourse. the final articles in the collection set out more positive accounts of what freedom after neoliberalism might look and feel like. although ralph clare is emphatic in arguing that we do not today live in a period after neoliberalism, he nonetheless uses the collection’s title as an occasion to critique neoliberalism’s ‘cynical presentism[,] in which time seems to stand still and change seems impossible’. for clare, the temporality hinted at by our title resonates with the temporality of ben lerner’s novel : , a text that offers an immanent critique of neoliberal time by emphasising the ways in which the everyday present, ‘if properly attended to’, functions as a reservoir of affective potentiality. the identification of such a form of potentiality, clare argues, undermines the temporality of neoliberalism—most visible in the temporality of debt—wherein freedom is made equivalent to a future of dramatically limited options that, in reality, are so limited as to represent no freedom at all. what is most promising about this critique is that, in order to locate freedom after beaumont and kelly: freedom after neoliberalism neoliberalism, it suggests that it is not actually necessary to be ‘after’ neoliberalism at all: what is more important—and what literature can offer us uniquely—is an account of temporality that makes the imagination of such a freedom possible in the face of the remorseless presentism of neoliberalism itself. finally, in a similar vein of immanent critique, matthew mullins argues from a quite different perspective that neoliberalism contains within it the seeds of its own overcoming. engaging in a sustained analysis of political economy and critical theory over the longue durée, mullins suggests that, in the same way that marxism offered a materialist critique of liberalism that shared the latter’s humanism, so the new materialism of object-oriented ontology critiques neoliberalism by weaponising the latter’s theoretical decentring of the human subject. what is at stake in this manoeuvre is a thoroughgoing revision of the meaning of freedom itself. where the primacy of the human subject under the liberal moral economy causes freedom to be equated with the absence of coercion, under the neoliberal economy freedom is equated instead with the absence of impediments to economisation. this permits a dramatic recalibration of the concept of freedom, because while neoliberalism maintains the essential separateness of the subject and the world in which the subject lives, it no longer treats the subject as sacred: ‘neoliberal humanism conforms the human to the market, rather than orbiting the market around the human.’ the result is what new materialists call a ‘flattened ontology’, a refusal to ‘imagine the human as ontologically distinct from nature’. thus, what new materialism’s immanent critique of neoliberalism offers is an antihumanist recalibration of freedom that is no longer centred upon the human subject but rather upon the world itself, and that emphasises ‘a politics that can account for the freedom of things, from rivers, to pipelines, to waste-water treatment plants’. freedom after neoliberalism thus ends with a fundamental rethinking of the concept of freedom that nonetheless insists upon the ongoing importance of this term to any critical left politics. as a whole, this special collection first historicises the bankruptcy of neoliberal freedoms in reality; it then identifies the promise of freedom still living, subterraneously, within the critical manoeuvres of the intellectual left; and finally it offers a route to the affirmation of what david harvey ( : ) beaumont and kelly: freedom after neoliberalism describes as ‘freedom’s prospect’ in and for our current moment. in a recent account of what he terms the ‘punitive neoliberalism’ of the post- period, william davies ( : ) argues that ‘[n]eoliberalism has become incredible, but that is partly because it is a system that no longer seeks credibility in the way that hegemonies used to do, through a degree of cultural or normative consensus’. ‘freedom’ was the term that underpinned the credibility and hegemony of neoliberalism in its ascendant phase. our collection contends that it is high time to recapture this key idea as a resource for immanent critique and a route to a different future. competing interests the authors have no competing interests to declare. references ahmed, s the promise of happiness. durham: duke university press. doi: https://doi.org/ . / badiou, a ethics: an essay on the understanding of evil. trans. p hallward. london: verso. beech, d art and value: art’s exceptionalism in classical, neoclassical and marxist economics. leiden: brill. doi: https://doi.org/ . / berger, d how prisons serve capitalism. public books, august. available at: 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this article: beaumont, a and kelly, a freedom after neoliberalism. open library of humanities, ( ): , pp.  – , doi: https://doi.org/ . /olh. published: october copyright: © the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (cc-by . ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. open access open library of humanities is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by open library of humanities. https://doi.org/ . /olh. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / 	competing interests 	references the maternal death drive: greta thunberg and the question of the future original article the maternal death drive: greta thunberg and the question of the future lisa baraitser department of psychosocial studies, birkbeck, university of london, london, uk. e-mail: l.baraitser@bbk.ac.uk abstract the centenary of freud’s beyond the pleasure principle (freud, a/ ) falls in , a year dominated globally by the covid- pandemic. one of the effects of the pandemic has been to reveal the increasingly fragile interconnectedness of human and non-human life, as well as the ongoing effects of social inequalities, particularly racism, on the valuing of life and its flourishing. drawing on earlier work, this paper develops the notion of a ‘maternal death drive’ that supplements freud’s death drive by accounting for repetition that retains a relation to the developmental time of ‘life’ but remains ‘otherwise’ to a life drive. the temporal form of this ‘life in death’ is that of ‘dynamic chronicity’, analogous to late modern narratives that describe the present as ‘thin’ and the time of human futurity as running out. i argue that the urgency to act on the present in the name of the future is simultaneously ‘suspended’ by the repetitions of late capitalism, leading to a temporal hiatus that must be embraced rather than simply lamented. the maternal (death drive) alerts us to a new figure of a child whose task is to carry expectations and anxieties about the future and bind them into a reproductive present. rather than seeing the child as a figure of normativity, i turn to greta thunberg to signal a way to go on in suspended ‘grey’ time. psychoanalysis, culture & society ( ) , – . https://doi.org/ . / s - - -y; published online september keywords: time; temporality; greta thunberg; death drive; motherhood; future � springer nature limited. - psychoanalysis, culture & society vol. , , – www.palgrave.com/journals time and why should i be studying for a future that soon will be no more, when no one is doing anything whatsoever to save that future? (greta thunberg) this paper is late. not just a little late but seriously forestalled. there is some pressure – an urgency produced by the centenary of freud’s beyond the pleasure principle falling in – and the desire and pleasure in partaking in a collaborative, timely celebration of the work. there are the ordinary repetitions that are holding this up: a chronic relation to my own thoughts, veering towards and away from the satisfactions and disturbances of ideas connecting or linking; the chronic overwhelm produced by the difficulty of saying ‘no’ and resisting the temptations of an overloaded life; and the realities of overload brought on not by a chronic relation to limits but by their obliteration by the institutions and systems that govern our lives. then, of course, as has deepened, there have been the temporalities of illness, care and grief; of the suspension of time under conditions of lockdown; the stop-start of uncertainty and helplessness. for some, it has been a time of permanent and dangerous work; of intolerable waiting for others; and of the fault-lines of inequality and racial injustice urgently rupturing the otherwise monotonous rhythm of a global pandemic. in , everything and nothing went on hold. during this time, i continued to work with patients, albeit ‘remotely’, in the strange temporality of a five times per week psychoanalysis. even with so much time, the wait between sessions can be felt to be intolerable. to be in an analysis is to be held in suspension from one session to the next. one of my patients describes the wait as an agonizing ‘blank time’, like the crackling of an old- fashioned tv. it is not dead time as such but the incessant noise of nothing happening. to be in the session, however, produces a different kind of disturbance: an utterly absorbing kind of time that they liken to the colour blue. we move between the absorbing blue time of the sessions to the blank, crackling, maddening time between them. there is a ‘session-time’ analyst, who is blue, and a ‘between-session-time’ analyst, who maddens with a blank, crackling absence. time is both interminable – a wait between the sessions that feels like it goes on forever – and chronic: the repetition of blue, blank, blue, blank, blue, blank… beyond the pleasure principle is freud’s meditation on the temporalities of repetition and return as species-time articulates with the time of the subject. in many ways, the death drive is a temporal concept, holding together the paradoxical time in which repetition contains within it a backwards pull towards the no-time of the living organism, even as the shape of this relation describes ‘a life’. years later, time in the early decades of the st century � springer nature limited. - psychoanalysis, culture & society vol. , , – baraitser appears oddly analogous: it seems to loop or repeat but is undercut by a pull towards no-time, since the human and planetary future is not just foreshortened but now ‘foreclosed’ by the immanent twin disasters of capitalist and (neo)colonial expansion (baraitser, a, p. ). franco ‘bifo’ berardi has long argued that our collective human future has come and gone and that the future has outlived its usefulness as a concept (berardi, ). time after the present will come, but it will not bring the promises of bettering the conditions of the now for most, this having been a central aspect of european and north american future narratives in the post-war period (toffler, ; lee, ; luhmann, ). in fact, as naomi klein ( ) argues, the very folding of disaster into capitalist discourses, governmental policies and institutional practices does not stave off disaster but profits further from it, pushing the relations between the human and non-human world to the brink of sustain- ability. what this implies is that disaster is not a future horizon we must urgently draw back from but a condition we have already incorporated, profited from and continue to sustain in the present. in these conditions of ‘crisis capitalism’, whole populations are kept in a ‘chronic state of near-collapse’ (invisible committee, , p. ), a kind of temporal hiatus in which one goes on but without a future. amy elias ( ) has noted the intensive discussions about the ‘presentism’ of post-wwii globalized societies that have revolved around the idea of the loss of history (p. ). in these narratives, a sense of a saturated, elongated, thin present is a product of a traumatized western collective consciousness confronting the unprecedented ‘event’ of wwii. however, these narratives, she argues, have given way in the st century, as humankind ‘has created its own version of durational time inside (rather than outside) the box of historicity’ (p. ). this durational time is not bergson’s duration that teams with experience (bergson, / , / ) but the empty, timeless time of a ‘marketplace duration’ (elias, , p. ), closer to the maddening crackling of nothing happening that my patient describes. in addition, as time is increasingly synchronized in the post-war period in terms of economic, cultural, technolog- ical, ecological and planetary registers, the ‘present’ itself becomes the management of a tension between time that is felt to be synced or simultaneous and time that is multiple or heterogeneous to simultaneity (burges and elias, , p. ). we could think of this tension as produced by the dominating effects of european models of time (mills, , ). european time is constantly imposed by the west on ‘the rest’ through the temporal structures of empire and enacted through colonization, exploitation, extraction and enslave- ment. european time comes to mediate representations of the world through the imposition of a particular account of the world-historical present on other temporal organizations – cosmic time, geological time, earth time, soil time, indigenous time, women’s time, queer time, to name a few (chakrabarty, ; freeman, ; kristeva, / ; nanni, ; puig de la bellacasa, ). � springer nature limited. - psychoanalysis, culture & society vol. , , – the maternal death drive another way to put this is that, although freud proposes that repetition leads to the ultimate suspension of time – the return to non-being – the state of non- being produced by temporal suspension in the early st century is radically unequally distributed. writing under conditions of lockdown during the covid- pandemic, achille mbembe ( ) states: for we have never learned to live with all living species, have never really worried about the damage we as humans wreak on the lungs of the earth and on its body. thus, we have never learned how to die. with the advent of the new world and, several centuries later, the appearance of the ‘industrialized races,’ we essentially chose to delegate our death to others, to make a great sacrificial repast of existence itself via a kind of ontological vicariate. non-being, or death, is a luxury that hasn’t yet been learnt by the ‘human’, non-being having been delegated to slaves – those humans who are denied status as humans against which the category of ‘human’ is both founded and flounders – as well as to non-human others. unless we recognize the ‘universal right to breath’ (emphasis added) for all organic matter, mbembe argues, we will continue to fail to die for ourselves, the death drive being projected, that is, into the body of that which is deemed non-human. if we go on collectively refusing to die for ourselves, we could say that the temporality of the current human predicament is closer to what martin o’brien calls ‘zombie time’ (o’brien, ). as an artist and writer living with cystic fibrosis, which gives rise to symptoms very similar to covid- (coughing, shortness of breath, exhaustion), o’brien has now outlived his own life expectancy. he writes: zombie time insists on a different temporal proximity to death. like the hollywood zombie which holds within it a paradox, in that it is both dead and alive, those of us living in zombie time experience death as embodied in life […].we had come to terms with the fact that we are about to die, and then we didn’t. freud’s movement towards death is circular: a repetitive arc that leads us back to the inorganic, so that in some sense it too describes zombie time, the fact we have always already surpassed our death date, whereby a life is an act of return. each organism follows its own path, he tells us, to death, and that deviation is a life. a path, however, is not quite what o’brien is suggesting. here the presence of death is sutured to every aspect of life, closer perhaps to melanie klein’s insistence on the death drive as a permanent unconscious phantasy that must be managed as a life-long psychic struggle (klein, / ). � springer nature limited. - psychoanalysis, culture & society vol. , , – baraitser two questions arise from this. firstly, does recognizing ‘death as embodied in life’ lead us to begin to die for ourselves? in this ‘hour of autophagy’, as mbembe ( ) puts it, we will no longer be able to delegate death to an other. we do, indeed, have to die not just in our own fashion but on our own behalf. in one reading of freud’s death drive, it is associated with the freedom to do one’s own thing, follow one’s own path and stands as a marker of an independent life in many ways free from others – even if, as lacan would have it, not free from the big other. but, as so many feminist, queer, disability, and black studies scholars have attested, living an independent life is a fantasy; it is always premised on dependency or interdependency, which so often requires the temporary or permanent tethering of the life of an other, or, more profoundly, the harnessing of ‘life’ itself. judith butler ( ) writes in the force of non- violence that we are all born into a condition of ‘radical dependency’ (p. ), that no-one stands on their own, that we are all at some level propped up by others. freud’s suggestion of ‘eternal return’ requires practices of maintenance that have largely been accorded to women, people of colour, animals, and other non-human others. these practices of maintenance entail the temporalities of often mind-numbing repetition: reproductive and other forms of labour that support, sustain, and maintain all living systems. in order to ‘deviate’, someone or something else needs to preserve, maintain, protect, sustain, and repeat. those ‘others’ stay on the side of life, not as progression or even deviation towards death but as a permanent sustaining of life-processes. death in life requires a simultaneous articulation, in other words, of life in death, in which the temporalities of progression, regression, and repetition can be understood as supported and supplemented by another temporal element within the death drive that operates through ‘dynamic chronicity’: an element that animates ‘life’ in such a way as to allow the subject to die in its own fashion. i call this life in death the ‘maternal death drive’ (baraitser, a) to distinguish it from the pleasure principle or the ‘life’ drive. secondly, if the time of the ‘now’, as i’ve elaborated above, takes the form of dynamic chronicity, a suspended yet chronically animated time that pushes out temporal multiplicity, what work needs to be done in order that this form of time retains some connection to a futurity for all? do the repetitions of ‘blue blank’ in their own circular fashion retain within them a relation to futurity, even if they don’t exactly lead us somewhere else? i would hope, after all, that my patient may eventually, with time, come to experience the ‘blue-session’ analyst and the ‘blank-absent’ analyst as one and the same analyst, even as the agonies of having and losing may continue to be difficult. from a kleinian perspective, the time that this requires is the time in which what is hated and what is loved come to have a relation to one another, which klein calls ‘depression’ (klein / ) and which may entail ‘depressing time’. we could say that it is the time in which we come to be concerned about the damage done to what is loved, the time whereby what is loved and what is hated can � springer nature limited. - psychoanalysis, culture & society vol. , , – the maternal death drive come to matter to one another, making the time of working through that of ‘mattering’ itself. furthermore, mbembe ( ) writes: community – or rather the in-common – is not based solely on the possibility of saying goodbye, that is, of having a unique encounter with others and honoring this meeting time and again. the in-common is based also on the possibility of sharing unconditionally, each time drawing from it something absolutely intrinsic, a thing uncountable, incalculable, price- less. (emphases in original) this would suggest that, supplementary to the time of blue-blank (saying goodbye again and again), there is another time: that of the ‘in-common’. this is a time of permanent mattering, which also takes time to recognize. it is, if you like, the time in which depressive guilt survives and hence the time it takes for a future to be recognized within the present, rather than being the outward edge, the longed-for time that is yet to come. in what follows, and taking my cue from beyond the pleasure principle itself, i attempt to rework freud’s death drive by drawing attention to a particular form of developmental time that lies inside the time of repetition, which i link to ‘life in death’. in chapter ii of freud’s essay, in the midst of his struggle with the meaning of repetition, pleasure and unpleasure, he turns to a child. the function of the child at this point in the text is to provide the case of ‘normalcy’ – the play of children – in order to help him understand the ‘dark and dismal topic of traumatic neurosis’(freud, b/ , p. ). the child will be ‘light’ (read white) and playful but turns out to be deeply troubled. instead of dragging the cotton reel along the floor as the adults intended, so it could turn and check its existence at any point, the child, standing outside the cot, throws the reel into the cot, accompanied by an o-o-o-o sound, so it cannot be seen, and then pulls it out with a ‘da!’ that freud describes as ‘joyful’ (p. ). the pleasure of re- finding, however, is postponed – in the time between ‘gone’ and ‘found’, the child plays at waiting, as it attempts to remaster the experience, freud tells us, of its ‘gone’ mother. this is of course also an attempt to deal with its own gone- ness from the imagined place of the mother; the child is standing outside the cot, after all. the passivity of being left is repeated but transformed through an act of ‘revenge’, a repetitive act of aggression in which, through psychic substitu- tion, something essentially unpleasurable is turned into something ‘to be remembered and to be processed in the psyche’ (p. ). the child does this by identifying with the mother, waiting in her place. my aim is to repeat freud’s impulse, re-inserting a mother and child into the scene of the death drive ‘proper’ as a way to signal how to die on our own behalf and therefore how to go on in the suspended hiatus we appear to be living through. the maternal, as i will elaborate, appears as a non-normative developmental temporality within the death drive. in my account, the child � springer nature limited. - psychoanalysis, culture & society vol. , , – baraitser reappears, however, in the figure of the child-activist greta thunberg. she is the child who has been invested in symbolically to carry hope for the future, a hope that she is decidedly pushing back towards those of the generation who came before her, calling on them to take action now, before it is too late. although thunberg names her vision of the world in terms of ‘black and white’ thinking, i draw on laura salisbury’s notion of ‘grey time’ (salisbury, in press) in order to understand what to do with the time that remains in which action can still take place. life in death: the maternal death drive it is always an uncomfortable thing to do, to insert a mother and child into a scene where they are ostensibly not wanted. it carries the sour smells of heteronormativity and essentialism that still cling to discussions of the maternal and relegate mother-child configurations as the counterpoint to those who are ‘not fighting for the children’, as lee edelman ( ) suggested in his famous polemic no future. for edelman, the death drive is a queer refusal of futurity that allows negativity to operate as a ‘pulsive force’ that would otherwise trap queer as a determinate stable position (p. ). the child and mother come to represent the ultimate trap, that of development itself – the unfolding of the normative temporalities of birth, growth, development, maturation, reproduc- tion, wealth generation and death. in some ways, this is what makes the insertion of mother-child back into discourses about the death drive rather ‘queer’. in doing so, i deliberately refuse the association between motherhood and normativity and suggest that motherhood is the name for any temporal relation of ‘unfurling’ whereby the unfurling of one life occurs in relation to the unfurling of another, albeit out of sync. in fact, as i will elaborate below, for a life to unfurl there needs to be the presence of another life that is prepared to wait whilst life and death can come to have a relation to one another. this suspended time of waiting for life to unfurl is a non-teleological, crystalline form of developmental time based on the principle of life in death (baraitser, a, p. ). whilst motherhood is always in danger of being squeezed out of this kind of queer theory, it is also in danger of being squeezed out of feminist theories that purport to make space for the maternal. julia kristeva’s essay ‘women’s time’ ( / ), for instance, conceptualized female subjectivity as occupying two forms of time: cyclical time (repetition) and monumental time (eternity without cleavage or escape). these two ‘feminine’ forms of time, she argued, work to conceal the inherent logic of teleological, historical, ‘masculine’ time, which is linear, progressive, unfolding and yet constantly rupturing, an ‘anguished’ time (p. ). masculine time rests on its own stumbling block, which is death. cyclical time and ‘monumental’ or eternal time, kristeva argued, are both � springer nature limited. - psychoanalysis, culture & society vol. , , – the maternal death drive accessed through the feminine, so that the feminine signifies a less ‘anguished’ time because it is uncoupled from the death of the subject and more concerned with suturing the subject to extrasubjective time. although this has been rightly critiqued for essentializing ‘the feminine’ through the normative positioning of the female subject on the side of the biological, as well as mobilizing a non- political appeal to ‘nature’, i have argued elsewhere that, in attempting to separate the feminine from cyclical and monumental time, feminist theory designates the maternal as the keeper of species-time, in which the mother becomes a biologistic and romanticized subject attached to the rhythms of nature (baraitser, , p. ). toril moi ( ) writes of kristeva’s essay that the question for kristeva was not so much how to valorize the feminine but how to reconcile maternal time with linear (political and historical) time (p. ). without a theory of the desire to have children (a desire that can permeate any gender configuration and that i name as maternal regardless of the gendered body that desires it), we leave the door open to the consequence of a failure to theorize and the maternal falls out of signification, time and history. moreover, motherhood is not just the desire for children but a particular form of repetitive labour relegated largely to women and particularly, in the global north, to women of colour and women from the south. although the concept of ‘social reproduction’ has been expanded to incorporate a much broader array of activities than caring for children, maternal labour remains distinct from other forms of domestic labour. joy james ( ) argues that the ongoing trauma and theft involved in slavery, for instance, produces not only western democracy but a repudiated ‘twin’ within western theory that she names ‘the black matrix’ (p. ). where mothers in captivity and slavery have always provided the reproductive and productive labour that underpin wealth and culture, they are systematically erased – not just in culture but in what she calls ‘womb theory’ (theory, for instance, that accommodates feminism, intersectionality and antiracism, whilst still denying the maternal captive). despite this, she claims, the black matrix can act as a ‘fulcrum’ that leverages power against captivity (p. ). i would argue that this power comes, in part, from the impossibility of the maternal captive remaining indifferent to her labour. subsistence farming, cooking, cleaning, household maintenance, support work and the production of status are forms of repetition from which it remains possible to emotionally disattach. but the ‘labour’ of maternity is ‘affective, invested, intersubjective’ (sandford, , p. ) and retains an ethical dimension that is distinct. here the maternal emerges as a figuration of the subject that is deeply attached to its labouring, whose labouring is a matter of attachment to that labour, as well as providing the general conditions for attachment (the infant’s psychic struggle to become connected to the world) to take place. we could say, then, that the time of repetition under the condition that is maternity becomes the time of mattering, as opposed to the ‘meaningless’ time of reproduction: the time, that is, in which repetition may come to matter. this � springer nature limited. - psychoanalysis, culture & society vol. , , – baraitser time can be felt as obdurate, distinctively uncertain in its outcome, both intensive and ‘empty’, and bound to the pace of the unfurling other. what is at play is a kind of crystalline developmental time within the time of history. it takes the form of repetition, but this repetition holds open the possibility of something coming to matter, rather than the death drive understood only as a return to non-being. a maternal death drive? what might this conjunction mean? freud always maintained that the two elements of psychic life that couldn’t be worked through were the repudiation of femininity in both men and women, by which he meant the repudiation of passivity; and the death drive, the repetitive return again and again to our psychic dissolution or unbinding. in ‘analysis terminable and interminable’, written in the last years of his life, freud ( / ) named these the ‘bedrocks’ of psychic life, evoking an immoveable geological time. the permanent fixtures of psychic life that an analysis cannot shift are the hatred of passivity and the simultaneous impulse to return to an ultimate passive state, suturing the feminine to death in psychoanalysis. earlier, in beyond the pleasure principle, freud had offered an hypothesis in which, despite his conception of drives as exerting the pressure that presses for change, they are constrained by a conservatism, meaning they do not operate according to one singular temporality. this double temporality within the death drive is drawn out by adrian johnston ( ), who has noted freud’s ( / ) developmental account of the drive in three essays on the theory of sexuality and later in ‘instincts and their vicissitudes’ ( / ), where the drive is articulated as maturing over time. johnston ( ) maintains that freud’s drive is simultaneously timeless and temporal, both interminable (it repeats) and containing an internal tendency to deviate, to change its object and its aim (it develops or alters) (p. ). after all, something happens, according to freud, that shifts the human organism from one that dies easily to one that diverges ever more widely from the original course of life (that is, death) and therefore makes ever more complicated detours before reaching death. for johnston, alteration can be understood as an intra-temporal resistance to the time of iteration, a negation of time transpiring within time. this means that the death drive therefore includes rather than negates developmental time. this is not a developmental tendency separated off and located within the self- preservative drives or a ‘life’ drive but a death drive that contains within it its own resistance to negation. i would want to reclaim this doubled death drive as ‘maternal’, the drive that includes within it the capacity for development, for what johnston calls ‘alteration’, which always mediates the axis of repetition or ‘iteration’ (p. ). the maternal death drive would describe the unfolding of another life in relation to one’s own path towards death and marks the point that alteration and iteration cross one another. if we move from freud to klein, we see how this double temporality plays out between the maternal and child subject. i have described elsewhere how, in � springer nature limited. - psychoanalysis, culture & society vol. , , – the maternal death drive love, guilt and reparation, klein ( / ) tells us that anxiety about maternal care and dependency on the maternal body in very early life – the relationship, that is, with a feeding-object of some kind that could be loosely termed ‘breast’ – is a result of both the frustrations of that breast (its capacities to feed but also to withhold or disappear at whim) and what the infant does with the hatred and aggressive feelings stirred up by those experiences of frustration that rebound on it in the form of terrifying persecutory fantasies of being attacked by the breast itself (pp. – ; see also baraitser, b, p. ). klein’s conceptual infant swings in and out of psychic states that are full of envious rage and makes phantasized aggressive raids on the maternal body in an attempt to manage the treacherous initial experiences of psychical and physical survival. klein ( / ) moves us closer to a more thing-like internal world permeated less with representations and more with dynamic aggressive phantasies of biting, hacking at and tearing the mother and her breasts into bits, and attempts to destroy her body and everything it might be phantasized to contain (p. ). in klein’s thinking, libido gives way to aggression, so that the defences themselves are violent in their redoubling on the infant in the form of persecutory anxiety. one’s own greed and aggressiveness themselves become threatening, along with the maternal object that evokes them, and have to be split off from conscious thought. coupled with this are feelings of temporary relief from these painful states of mind (p. ) and these ‘good’ experiences form the basis for what we could think of as love. it is only as the infant moves towards a tolerance of knowing that good and bad ‘things’ and experiences are bound up in the same person (that is, both (m)other and self) that guilt arises as an awareness that we have tried to destroy what we also love. whilst this can overwhelm the infant with depressive anxiety that also needs to be warded off, there is a chance that this guilt can be borne and a temporary state of ambivalence can be achieved that includes the desire to make good the damage done. ‘unfurling’, then, arises out of the capacity to tolerate the proximity of love and hate towards the mother, but the mother also needs to tolerate the time this takes – to be prepared to go back ‘again and again’ to the site of mattering without becoming too overwhelmed or rejecting. it is here that futurity emerges, not as that which is carried forward by the child but as this element within the death drive that i am naming as maternal, which is a capacity to tolerate repetition within the present. to return to a lacanian formulation, chenyang wang ( ), in his work on differentiating real, imaginary and symbolic time in lacan, shows how lacan’s death drive is not so much the reinsertion of the bodily or biological into the human subject but the traumatic intrusion of the symbolic into the organism at the expense of the imaginary, which evokes the real body. wang describes how what he calls the ‘real future’ (p. ) does not involve the human subject. where the ego may continue to imagine a future of fulfilled wishes, hopes and expectations, in which the present is characterized as a mode of ‘waiting’ until the future � springer nature limited. - psychoanalysis, culture & society vol. , , – baraitser unfolds, the death drive in fact interrupts the fantasy of the future as something unreachable or unattainable and instead returns the future to the subject as something that has already structured it. for wang, real time opens the subject to the real present that is neither instantaneous or immediate but the freedom of returning to the same place in one’s own way. he sees this as the offer of the possibility of freedom that transcends the isolated, egoic individual, otherwise trapped in its established temporal order (p. ). we could say, then, that the death drive includes rather than negates developmental time and holds out the possibility of a time that breaks free of the ego’s imaginary sense of past, present and future. developmental time, from this perspective, is precisely a suspension of the flow of time, a capacity to wait for the other to unfold. maternity, in its failure to be indifferent to the specificity of its labour, implies a return, again and again, to a scene that matters, a kind of repetition that is not quite captured by the death drive as excessive access to jouissance, nor to the death drive as a deviation towards a unique form of death, but that might after all have something to do with generativity, indeed with freedom, not of the self, but of the other. the return to a scene that matters is not a kind of flowing time (anyone who has spent time with small children will know this) nor the stultifying time of indifferent labour, but living in a suspended or crystalline time, which is the time it takes for mattering to take place. finally, we can link the maternal death drive to elizabeth freeman’s ( ) concept of ‘chronothanatopolitics’ (p. ) that extends mattering beyond the mother-child relation to the politics of mattering in the contemporary moment. in her discussion of ‘playing dead’ in th century african-american literature, freeman notes that many african-american stories involve ‘fictive rebirths’(p. ). these are stagings of death and rebirth, not just once but multiple times, so that in these stories slaves and their descendants are constantly moving towards and away from death. feigning death, she argues, does not solve the problem of having not been ‘born’ as human – a position well established within afropessimist thought – but allows an engagement through repetitive staged dying with what jared sexton ( ) has called ‘the social life of social death’ (quoted in freeman, , p. ). freeman therefore builds on freud’s death drive to develop a concept of ‘chronothanatopolitics’ in which life is not simply the opposite of death but the opposite of the ‘presence’ of death (p. ), a temporary ‘disappearing’ of death within life, the counterpart to the maternal death drive as life in death. staging one’s death again and again, she states, is a way of managing the life/death binary, rather than simply a commitment to life or an acceptance of unchanging black deathliness. where freud’s death drive does refuse any simple opposition between life and death, freeman notes, it nevertheless proposes a universal and purely psychic drive. she calls instead for recognition of a socio-political death drive enacted by white supremacy: chronothanatopolitics is the ‘production of deathliness and nonbeing by � springer nature limited. - psychoanalysis, culture & society vol. , , – the maternal death drive historical forces external to the subjectivity it creates for nonblack people, and forecloses for people of african descent’ (p. ). in the st century, we see ‘playing dead’ resurfacing in the ‘die-ins’ revived by the protest movement black lives matter. time becomes central, creating what freeman terms ‘temporal conjoinments’ with death (p. ) through counting ‘i can’t breathe’ times, as eric garner did. we have seen this repeated in , when protesters hold a silence or take the knee for minutes and seconds, the time that george floyd had his neck knelt on by the police officer who killed him on may. ‘mattering’, in the sense of black life coming to matter, freeman notes, captures the double meaning of coming to importance and becoming-inert substance or matter, giving the phrase an ambivalent valence. mattering refuses the afropessimist insight that black life is structurally foreclosed and instead implies a more open stance towards non-being. by miming death rather than life, black lives matter activists ‘commit to an (a)social life within death even as they fight for an end to the annihilation of blackness’ (p. ). here, life in death is the ‘social’ work of activism that counts the time that is left within black life even as it is extinguished, just as it is the social work of mothering that waits for life to unfurl towards its death without knowing when or how this will take place. miming death, again and again, is analogous to returning to the scene of mattering again and again, the hiatus within the path towards death that i have described as the maternal death drive. however, freeman’s work provides the corrective to an easy universalizing of the drive, pointing us towards the way that black lives matter politicizes repetition in the name of life in death. greta thunberg recently i’ve seen many rumours circulating about me and enormous amounts of hate. (greta thunberg) in the child to come: life after the human catastrophe, rebekah sheldon ( ) charts a recent shift in the use of the child to suture the image of the future. the child, metonymic with the fragility of the planetary system and therefore in need of protection, has become ‘the child as resource’ (p. ). as resource, the child is used to carry both expectations and anxieties about the future. unlike earlier iterations, the child as resource is premised on a future that cannot be taken for granted. much of the affect around ecological disaster – anxiety, fear, terror, hopelessness, despair, guilt, determination, protectiveness – comes not so much from an awareness of the current effects of global climate change as they play out in the present but from the projected harm to the future that it portends. and the future, sheldon reminds us, is the provenance of the child. � springer nature limited. - psychoanalysis, culture & society vol. , , – baraitser sheldon describes the history of this relationship between child and future as emanating from the th century at the same point as modern theories of ‘life’ begin to proliferate in darwin and of course in freud. ‘the link forged between the child and the species’, she writes, ‘helped to shape eugenic historiography, focalized reproduction as a matter of concern for racial nationalism, and made the child a mode of time-keeping’ (p. ). in the face of anxious concerns about the deep biological past of the human species, the child held open a future through a coordination of the trio ‘life, reproduction and species’ with that of ‘race, history and nation’. freud’s child, for instance, caught both in the relentless unfolding of developmental time and the timelessness of unconscious life, is also the site of the regulation of ‘life’ itself. whilst these two axes of temporality (development and timelessness), as we saw above, cross one another, the figure of the child is nevertheless a ‘retronaut, a bit of the future lodged in the present’ (p. ). yet, at the same time, sheldon’s child is already melancholic. it knows its childness can’t be preserved; it will be lost; just as the future is felt also to be something constantly slipping away. as a melancholic figure, sheldon suggests that the child as resource has a very specific task right now: to cover over the complex systems at work in biological materiality. as non-human animacy becomes more visible in conditions of planetary crisis, with it comes the terrifying potential (at least for the human world) of nature to slip its bonds. the child stands in for life itself at a time of vibrant and virulent reassertion of materialisms in all their forms. the child’s new task, according to sheldon, becomes one of binding nonhuman vibrancy back into the human, into something safer, and into the frame of human reproduction. this perhaps helps us modulate how we might respond to the figure of greta thunberg, the climate activist who describes herself as both ‘autistic’ and living with asperger’s, and to her work as a ‘cry for help’ (thunberg, , p. ). during , when she was years old, thunberg started to skip school to sit outside the swedish parliament with a sign reading ‘skolstrejk för klimatet’ [school strike for climate]. as a result of the school climate change movement that grew around thunberg’s ‘fridays for future’ actions during , there has been an intensive, rapid sanctification of the plain-speaking, white, plaited- haired child now simply known as ‘greta’. although she herself acknowledges that she is not unique and is part of a network of youth movements in the global south who bear the brunt in the present for the effects of climate disaster largely produced by the global north, she has nevertheless become an enormously influential figure through whom climate discussions now pass. some describe her influence as simply the ‘greta effect’ (watts, ). there is a specific and careful simplicity to the way thunberg talks. in a speech entitled ‘almost everything is black and white’, she states, ‘i have asperger’s syndrome, and to me, almost everything is black or white’ (thunberg, , p. ). utilizing what others may see as a disability, a difficulty in seeing shades of grey, she speaks against the need for more � springer nature limited. - psychoanalysis, culture & society vol. , , – the maternal death drive complexity, more reflection, more science; in short, a more ‘grown up’ approach to climate chaos: ‘we already have all the facts and solutions. all we have to do is to wake up and change […] everything needs to change. and it has to start today’ (p. ). it is this rhetorical insistence that there is no more time and that the future of her generation has been stolen by the inaction of the generation that has come before that positions her as not so much future-orientated but backed up against a closing future, looking back towards those who came before her as they continue to gaze ahead towards what they imagine is her future. as she states, ‘we children are doing this to wake the adults up. we children are doing this for you to put your differences aside and start acting as you would in a crisis. we children are doing this because we want our hopes and dreams back’ (p. ). in many ways, we could see thunberg as performing a call, in the name of a human reproductive future, for the binding of nonhuman vibrancy back into the human, into something safe and stable, the child’s new task that sheldon describes. we could also make a critical reading of the ways thunberg – as a contemporary incarnation of maisie in henry james’ ( / ) what maisie knew, where the child-protagonist is sacrificed to save a negligent and damaged society – re-mobilizes a discourse that re-stabilizes the differences between the generations in the name of the reproduction of the white heteronormative social bond. however, i want to read thunberg’s ‘black and white’ thinking as metonymic with my patient’s blank and blue: the oscillation between the absorbing blue of the analytic session and the suspended time of nothing happening between the sessions; the time of no-analyst and the agonies of waiting. thunberg ( ) states: ‘there are no grey areas when it comes to survival. either we go on as a civilization or we don’t. we have to change’ (p. ). in many ways, she refuses ‘development’ in the sense of klein’s depressive position functioning, where blue and blank come to be understood as having a relation to one another, and insists instead on their separation, on what klein would call ‘paranoid-schizoid’ thinking, in which blue and blank are radically split apart, as a viable place to speak from. indeed, she goes on insisting she is a child and that development is precisely what has got us into so much trouble. she warns us that, from the perspective of blank time (the time of nothing happening), blue time is absorbing for sure, but it is short, cannot last, and time itself needs to urgently come to matter if we are to find a way out of the current predicament. if we want to repair a relationship with monumental time, there is only action or no action, blue or blank, as we have now run out of time. despite the obvious occlusion of the many brown and black children who have protested, spoken out, organized school strikes and presented to the un over the years and gained no coverage, what is striking is that the white child claims that it is her unusual perspective, in which black and white remain separate, that is our only way out. � springer nature limited. - psychoanalysis, culture & society vol. , , – baraitser in describing what she calls ‘grey time’, laura salisbury (in press) reminds us that grey is not, strictly speaking, a colour at all; rather, it is a shade. as such, it is achromatic, composed of black and white in various shades of intensity, rather than hues. moving from colour to time, salisbury claims that grey time can be thought of as similarly a time that contains intensities of affect, naming grey time as ‘anachromistic’, a form of intensive temporality that belongs to and traverses the perceiving subject and the aesthetic object. to speak of grey time as anachromistic is to evoke an aesthetic experience that is against colour or hue, but, with its echo of anachronism, also produces a slub in the fabric of time as it is usually thought. the double gesture of the term anachromism is the attempt to speak to time’s intensity rather than, as is more usual, concentrating on its flow or movement, while trying to capture an atmosphere where there is a weaving or binding in of blank, uncertain, colourless ‘colour’, and affect into what is felt of time. (emphasis in original) grey time, then, is an intensity of time that moves us beyond the impasse of action and no action, or blue and blank, by acting as a slub or thickening in the oscillation between the two. this thickening, if we follow salisbury, both reveals time’s stuck oscillation between black and white at the same point as it acts to bind greyness into what is felt of time. grey inhabits black and white without resolving the oscillation, both intensifying the sense of time’s stuckness but also drawing attention to the affect of greyness, of uncertainty. whilst the time for grey thinking, as thunberg states, may have passed, perhaps salisbury’s attention to grey time is important. as the existential dangers facing humanity deepen – by mbembe’s description, the destruction of the biosphere, the criminalization of resistance and the rise of determinisms, whether genetic, neuronal, biological or environmental – so perhaps greta thunberg’s urgency cannot be heard until we bind the blank, uncertain, colourless affect of the grey ‘now’ into what is felt of time. mbembe ( ) writes of the covid- virus: of all these dangers, the greatest is that all forms of life will be rendered impossible. […] at this juncture, this sudden arrest arrives, an interruption not of history but of something that still eludes our grasp. since it was imposed upon us, this cessation derives not from our will. in many respects, it is simultaneously unforeseen and unpredictable. yet what we need is a voluntary cessation, a conscious and fully consensual interrup- tion. without which there will be no tomorrow. without which nothing will exist but an endless series of unforeseen events. (emphasis in original) this is, indeed, grey time – a voluntary cessation, a conscious and fully consensual interruption to business as usual as a response to the profound � springer nature limited. - psychoanalysis, culture & society vol. , , – the maternal death drive uncertainty that is the reality of the interdependencies of all forms of life. although i know that there is no way for ‘couch time’ to have an effect without a ‘session-time’ analyst and a ‘between-session-time’ analyst eventually coming together in the time that is an analysis, it may be that we have simply run out of time. then a new psychoanalytic temporality may be needed, one that understands the simultaneous need for and suspension of development in the name of really knowing about the death drive; one in which action would no longer be simply understood as acting out but in which the mutative interpretation, the one that brings about change, can be grey, ill-timed, coming too soon and too late, before it is too late. funding the research in this paper was funded by a wellcome trust collaborative award, ‘waiting times’, grant number [ /a/ /z] (see waitingtimes.ex- eter.ac.uk). data sharing is not applicable as no datasets were generated and/or analysed for this study. about the author lisa baraitser is professor of psychosocial theory in the department of psy- chosocial studies, birkbeck, university of london, and a psychoanalyst and member of the british psychoanalytical society. notes .see the invisible committee, the nom de plume of an author or group of authors of the coming insurrection ( ), to our friends ( ), and now ( ). .see chenyang wang’s excellent book subjectivity in-between times: exploring the notion of time in lacan’s work ( ) for an account of the death drive understood as the demand the symbolic makes on the body, rather than the ‘instinctual’ bodily or biological demand made on the mind. .see, for instance, freeman ( ), halberstam ( ), hartman ( ) and hedva ( ). .in doing so, she was perhaps unwittingly building on a long history of school strikes, certainly dating back at least years in the uk, in which schoolchildren mobilised against caning in and later came out on strike as part of a number of localised general strikes in . see bloom ( , ). references baraitser, l. 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( ) introduction: time studies today. in: j. burges and j. elias (eds) time: a vocabulary of the present. new york: new york university press, pp. – . butler, j. ( ) the force of non-violence. london: verso. chakrabarty, d. ( ) the climate of history: four theses. critical inquiry ( ): – . edelman, l. ( ) no future: queer theory and the death drive. durham: duke university press. elias, a.j. ( ) past/future. in: j. burges and j. elias (eds) time: a vocabulary of the present. new york: new york university press, pp. – . freeman, e. ( ) time binds: queer temporalities, queer histories. durham and london: duke university press. freeman, e. ( ) beside you in time: sense methods and queer sociabilities in the american nineteenth century. durham: duke university press. freud, s. ( / ) three essays on the theory of sexuality. standard edition . london: hogarth press, pp. – . freud, s. ( / ) instincts and their vicissitudes. standard edition . london: hogarth press, pp. – . freud, s. 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( ) introduction to women’s time. in: t. moi (ed.) the kristeva reader. oxford: blackwell press, pp. – . nanni, g. ( ) the colonisation of time: ritual, routine and resistance in the british empire. manchester, uk: manchester university press. o’brien, m. ( ) you are my death: the shattered temporalities of zombie time. wellcome open research : . https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/ - , accessed may . puig de la bellacasa, m. ( ) matters of care: speculative ethics in more than human worlds. minneapolis and london: university of minnesota press. salisbury, l. (in press) grey time: anachromism and waiting for beckett. in: k. velodi and a. vinegar (eds) grey on grey: in the threshold of philosophy and art. edinburgh: edinburgh university press. sandford, s. ( ) what is maternal labour? studies in the maternal ( ): – . sexton, j. ( ) the social life of social death: on afro-pessimism and black optimism. intensions : – . sheldon, r. ( ) the child to come: life after the human catastrophe. minneapolis and london: university of minnesota press. thunberg, g. ( ) no one is to small to make a difference. london: penguin, random house. toffler, a. ( ) future shock. new york: random house. wang, c. ( ) subjectivity in-between times: exploring the notion of time in lacan’s work. london: palgrave macmillan. � springer nature limited. - psychoanalysis, culture & society vol. , , – baraitser http://www.thecarceral.org/cn / _womb_of_western_theory.pdf http://www.thecarceral.org/cn / _womb_of_western_theory.pdf https://critinq.wordpress.com/ / / /the-universal-right-to-breathe/ https://critinq.wordpress.com/ / / /the-universal-right-to-breathe/ https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/ - watts, j. ( ) the greta thunberg effect: at last, mps focus on climate change. the guardian. april. https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ /apr/ /greta- thunberg, accessed august . publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. � springer nature limited. - psychoanalysis, culture & society vol. , , – the maternal death drive https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ /apr/ /greta-thunberg https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ /apr/ /greta-thunberg 	the maternal death drive: greta thunberg and the question of the future 	abstract 	time 	life in death: the maternal death drive 	greta thunberg 	funding 	references japan association for language teaching jalt • teacher efficacy, learner agency november – , • nagoya, japan do black lives matter in japan?: teaching race in efl michael ellis international christian university high school reference data: ellis, m. ( ). do black lives matter in japan?: teaching race in efl. in p. clements, a. krause, & p. bennett (eds.), teacher efficacy, learner agency. tokyo: jalt. https://doi.org/ . /jaltpcp - politically polarizing issues are generally avoided in elt materials. however, as political divides grow wider around the world, it is the responsibility of teachers to tackle these tough topics and inform their students about them. in this study, i conducted a -month unit on american slavery for japanese high school efl learners (n = ). the goal was to impart to students the historical knowledge necessary to understand race relations in america today and then apply those lessons to their own lives. the film twelve years a slave (mcqueen, ), the accompanying graded reader (rollason, ) and a teacher-made workbook were the main materials used. each step of the unit is introduced and student learning outcomes are analyzed. test results and response papers indicated that students were largely able to acquire the target language and understand the text but had variable success in comprehending the themes and deeper concepts of the unit. 政治的に意見の分かれる題材は、一般的に英語教授法の教材としては避けられてきた。しかし、政治的分断が世界で広が る中、教師が生徒にそれらの難しい題材を提示し、考えさせることは教師の責務であるといえる。本論では、日本人高校生の 英語学習者（n= ）に対して、米国の奴隷制度について ヵ月間の授業を実施した。目的は、米国における人種間の関係性を 理解するために必要な歴史的知識を生徒に伝え、そこから得られた教訓を生徒自身が活かすことができるようにすることで ある。映画『それでも夜は明ける』(mcqueen, )、その関連の段階別リーダー本（rollason, )、教師作成のワークブック を主な教材として使用した。授業の各段階を紹介し、学習成果を分析する。試験結果と感想文からは多くの生徒が目的言語を 習得し、文章を理解することができたが、授業の主題とより深いコンセプトの理解についてはばらつきがあることが示された。 the history of american slavery and its connection with modern day race relations may seem irrelevant to the lives of japanese efl learners. however, given the declining japanese population and increasing reliance on foreign residents (coulmas, ), there are many lessons that japanese people can learn from this history in order to more peacefully and productively integrate non-japanese and multiracial japanese citizens and residents into society today. though . % of japanese society is still considered ethnically japanese, the number of foreign residents is growing and is projected to continue to do so (central intelligence agency, ). despite this, japan has a reputation of being unwelcoming to foreigners, even to foreign-looking japanese people (diene, ). one well-known example of this is beauty pageant contestant ariana miyamoto, who was born to a japanese mother and african american father and grew up largely in japan. as the japanese representative at the miss universe pageant, she was subjected to persistent vitriol from her compatriots for not appearing sufficiently japanese, even as a citizen with native japanese-language proficiency (fackler, ). this hostile attitude towards non-“pure” japanese people is reflected by the government as well, which continues to give financial incentives to foreign workers of japanese descent to leave the country (green, ). for this reason, it may be more sensible to look to japanese youth for hope. though they are known for low voter turnouts and political apathy (brasor, ), this lack of engagement may reveal an opportunity for educators to better inform their students and equip them to fight prejudice, thus supporting japan’s future socioeconomic stability. currently there is a lack of research on multicultural education in a japanese efl context, so we must turn instead to models from around the world. au ( ) offered many principles for effective approaches, including creating classroom environments in which students can engage with social issues in ways that relate to their own lives. bell ( ) emphasized the power of stories in education about racism and injustice to better understand and dismantle them. adams and bell ( ) further found that education about racism can be a productive starting point for an intersectional understanding of other forms of discrimination such as sexism, classism, and ableism, which is relevant as japan diversifies in multiple dimensions. one model of this is the american black lives matter (blm) movement, which originally began as a response to the acquittal of japan association for language teaching • jalt  teacher efficacy, learner agency ellis: do black lives matter in japan?: teaching race in efl george zimmerman’s unjust murder of a black child, travyon martin, in , and has since grown into a network of over chapters around north america with principles of fighting for restorative justice and the promotion of intersectional diversity with respect to age, gender, and sexual orientation (“herstory,” n.d.). sawyer and gampa ( ) studied this movement and found that the incorporation of such antiracist demonstrations in education can have positive impacts in promoting equity by reducing prejudice among individuals in both racial minorities and the racial majority. as there is no blm chapter in japan and political demonstrations are rare, it may be productive to use america’s racist history as a backdrop to appreciate the principles of antiracist movements today. a unit based on this content may be effective in educating japanese young people about these social issues and encouraging them to push their own country in a more culturally inclusive and diverse direction. the study and research questions the purpose of this study is to determine whether race relations in america can be a worthwhile topic for japanese efl students and to provide one model for how educators might introduce it using a content and language integrated learning (clil) approach in a japanese high school context (mehisto et al., ). drawing from the studies summarized above, i designed a unit around a single narrative story that i hoped would enable students to make connections from america’s past to america’s present and then ultimately to japan’s future. i posed two research questions: rq . can studying american race relations help japanese efl learners acquire english? rq . can studying american race relations help raise awareness and understanding among japanese efl learners about the need for racial equity? methods teaching context this study was conducted at a private high school in western tokyo. the school is known for its large returnee population and reputable english program; it generally attracts students who are highly motivated to learn english. english classes at this school are divided into five levels ranging from native or near-native proficiency to efl. the unit was delivered in the lowest level, a compulsory th-grade efl course to high school students in two sets of and . the main goal of this course was to foster students’ communicative english abilities across the four skills. classes were conducted in three -minute periods a week. in total, class periods were dedicated to this unit between early september and late october . materials and procedures solomon northup’s true story as a free black man kidnapped from his home in new york in and forced to work as a slave in the american south was the central topic of this unit. the main materials were the film twelve years a slave (mcqueen, ) and the accompanying graded reader (rollason, ), which depict northup’s journey through his life as a slave and ultimately the reclamation of his freedom. the reader is , words long with , headwords, a standard length and complexity for intermediate high school or university japanese learners of english. this reader and a teacher-made workbook were used to scaffold students’ understanding of northup’s story and its themes. as the first step in the unit, students were assigned summer homework at the end of the spring term in june to be completed by their first class back in september. this summer homework included a vocabulary list of key words for the unit presented bilingually in english and japanese, a reading on the history of american race relations from the slave trade through the civil rights movement, and a research task to find and summarize an article on modern day race relations in the united states. the reading was meant to contextualize northup’s story in america’s history, and the research task was designed to help students understand the state of race relations in america today. in the first class back in the fall, students took a standard vocabulary quiz that asked them to identify word-level stress, change word forms to different parts of speech, translate from japanese to english, translate from english to japanese, and fill in blanks by putting the target vocabulary into context. after that, students shared the article summaries that they found in small groups. students were then given the teacher-made workbook that included a schedule to read years a slave, divided into four subunit sections, for the rest of the unit. subsequent classes began with a simple comprehension quiz to confirm students’ close reading of the text. these questions were straightforward with simple answers clear to those who read carefully. after checking the quizzes, class time was spent on deeper questions that encouraged inference making and elicited critical thinking. there were also extended speaking tasks such as roleplays and co-construction of a map tracing northup’s journey. homework such as paragraph writing was also assigned. after japan association for language teaching • jalt  teacher efficacy, learner agency ellis: do black lives matter in japan?: teaching race in efl reading the full book, students watched a short video explaining the black lives matter movement and its activities and completed a jigsaw reading on four important racial issues that affect african americans today, including systemic racism, racial profiling, police brutality, and political activism. they were asked to make connections between these topics and northup’s story, and a study guide that explained these connections in detail was provided at the end of class. a sample subunit containing this jigsaw reading is included in the appendix. in the final three class periods before the midterm exams, students watched the film years a slave in english with english subtitles. they were given a warning that some scenes are brutally violent and invited to step out to the bathroom or the nurse’s office for as long as necessary if they ever felt uncomfortable. one student who is sensitive to blood spent all three classes in the nurse’s office and took the dvd home to watch at his own pace. the midterm exam on this unit had three main sections. the first was a reading comprehension section divided into three parts. first, students were provided events and asked to place them in order in the story. second, they were provided quotes and asked to identify who said them to whom. third, they were provided a map similar to the one they constructed in class and asked to name key places in the story. the second section of the test was short answers. students were given six questions similar to the ones in their workbook and asked to choose three to respond to with detailed reasons supported by evidence from the text. the final section was paragraph writing. students were asked to choose one of four prompts and respond in an academic paragraph. student learning outcomes and the instruments used to assess them are described in the following section. findings and discussion using massler et al.’s ( ) framework, instruments were used to measure student learning outcomes with respect to language and content. a holistic measurement was also added to gauge students’ general response to the unit. these specific instruments are listed in table below. table . instruments to assess student learning outcomes language content holistic response • vocabulary quiz scores • use of target vocabulary in two paragraphs (analyzed for frequency, variety, and accuracy) • reading comprehension quiz scores • exam reading comprehension scores • paragraph (assigned as homework) • paragraph (part of the exam) • end-of-year class evaluation learning outcomes are described and analyzed by type in the following sections. all the students gave informed consent, and the study was approved by the school administration. language the first instrument used to measure student acquisition of the target language was the vocabulary quiz students took after studying the list over summer vacation. the average score on this quiz was %, which did not differ significantly from other vocabulary quizzes delivered throughout the year of different words from a similar frequency range presented in the same style. this result suggests that acquiring passive knowledge of these words was not too difficult for these students. the second instrument was student use of this target vocabulary in two paragraphs, one assigned as homework and one as part of an exam. this instrument was designed to assess students’ ability to actively use the target language in environments with and without time constraints. table below summarizes these results. table . target vocabulary use across the two paragraphs measure average minimum maximum total word length tokens of unique vocabulary words . total tokens of vocabulary words . japan association for language teaching • jalt  teacher efficacy, learner agency ellis: do black lives matter in japan?: teaching race in efl the length of students’ writing varied widely, but most were able to write at least words total. their use of the target vocabulary was also variable. an average student wrote roughly tokens of four different words. this usage is broken down by word in table . table . target vocabulary use across the two paragraphs by word word frequency number of unique tokens number of unique students who used the word (n = ) percent of accurate tokens ache k- awful k- civil rights k- civil war k- cotton k- cruel k- dealer k- emancipate k- employ k- era k- lash k- lawyer k- master k- racial k- rebellion k- refuse k- slave k- timber k- violence k- whip k- total: average: note. frequency was determined using the bnc/coca word family lists developed by nation ( ). k- refers to the first thousand most frequent word families ( - , ); k- refers to the second thousand ( , - , ), and so on. all the words were used at least once by the students, and most tokens were accurate with respect to spelling, grammatical form, and meaning. there was a weak positive correlation of r = . between word frequency and number of tokens, with some exceptions for lower frequency words that were key to the text such as lash and racial. overall, it seems that through the unit the students became able to actively and accurately use a large range of the target vocabulary. content the first two instruments to assess student acquisition of the target content were their scores on reading comprehension quizzes and the reading comprehension section of the exam (see table ). table . reading comprehension scores (n = ) measure average score quizzes % exam part : events of the story % exam part : character quotes % exam part : places on the map % these scores suggest that students understood the content of the text to a high degree. from the exam results, it may be said that they understood the events of the story and characters better than the physical locations, which is logical when considering the relative relevance. lessons from the bonds of northup with his slave friends, for example, are more applicable to the students’ lives than the knowledge of where louisiana is on a u.s. map. the next two content instruments are student responses to the two sets of paragraph prompts. in table , the prompts of the homework paragraph are listed with the themes it was hoped would be evident in students’ writing. following the table, some student responses that illustrate common patterns are included unedited with errors. japan association for language teaching • jalt  teacher efficacy, learner agency ellis: do black lives matter in japan?: teaching race in efl table . homework paragraph prompts and target themes (n = ) prompt target themes number of students who chose a) how did the slave trade role play make you feel? you can focus on one of the roles or write about all three (slave, dealer, and master). • connections between slavery and students’ lives • weight of slavery b) if slavery were a common practice in japan today, would you feel comfortable owning slaves? • connections between slavery and students’ lives • weight of slavery c) where and how does slavery still exist today? find one example of modern slavery. research and describe the lives of those slaves. • connections between slavery and students’ lives • connections between history of slavery and its current forms of the paragraphs, all but one had a clear topic sentence with relevant and logical support, suggesting that the students were able to form coherent arguments on this heavy topic. there was, however, a vast range of maturity and depth in their responses. most students seemed to appreciate that slavery is a horrifying practice that must never be repeated. one student wrote, “the way of thinking of slave dealers is quite strange. they think slaves as animals or tools, not as humans.” another wrote, “we are the same human. however, the slaves are always ordered by their owner. this is overt discrimination. i think my heart will always ache for them.” some students, unprompted by the teacher, were able to make connections between dark history in america and their own country. one wrote, “japanese junior high school students were told that it was evil that there is discrimination by status that is called ‘eta’ or ‘hinin’ during the edo period. slavery is to rank among people and i cannot admit it.” the students who chose prompt c were all successful at researching and making connections with forms of modern- day slavery such as sexual slavery and forced labor in places such as pakistan and north korea. however, other students seemed to lack this appreciation for of the weight of slavery. one wrote, “today’s slaves are not unhappy. that is because, we know it is bad to hurt people. therefore, almost everyone who employ the slaves do not hurt slaves. we can be good partner with slaves.” another wrote, “if there were people who help me and communicate with me at home, and also there were no violence, i would want to be a good partner or friend of them.” these students seem to see a benevolent slave owner as a hero and would celebrate such owners rather than dismantle systems like slavery from the ground up. this may be a natural conclusion from the story, as northup passes through several masters who treat him with varying levels of cruelty. table . exam paragraph prompts and target themes (n = ) prompt target themes number of students who chose a) when solomon learns that eliza has died, he says “she was free at last.” is it better to live as a slave in the american south, or to die and become “free”? • historical knowledge of u.s. slavery b) contrast the lives of male and female characters in the story. was life during this time more difficult for the slave men or women? • historical knowledge of u.s. slavery • intersectionality of discrimination and resulting suffering c) do people today have any responsibility for what happened in their country in the past? why or why not? • importance of learning from history d) what can we (as japanese people or people living in japan) learn from solomon’s story? use specific examples to illustrate how we can apply these lessons. • importance of learning from history • relevance to students’ lives these paragraphs all had clear topic sentences with relevant and logical support. % of them included specific references to the text as evidence in forming their japan association for language teaching • jalt  teacher efficacy, learner agency ellis: do black lives matter in japan?: teaching race in efl arguments. like the homework paragraphs, these also exhibited a wide range of depth of understanding of the target themes. some students were able to tie discrimination of blacks in america to other forms of discrimination currently seen in japan. one student wrote, in the solomon’s story, bass said ‘in the sight of god, there’s no difference between a white man and a black man.’ it is not only for race relation but also for any public problems. there’s no difference between a man who loves woman and a gay … my friend hates people in china or korea by relations between japan and those country … we must not see a person through race, country, and so on. we have to see a person is only a person, equally. however, others failed to see the relevance of this story to life in japan. one student wrote, “we can think about racial problem when we read this story. in japan, there are no black people and all is same race [so it is a good opportunity for us].” one student failed to understand female slaves’ extra burden in having to work while being tasked with raising children and coping with promiscuous masters. he wrote, “facts are more important for men, but emotions are important for women. if they are bought as slaves, men can keep their hopes because of thir living. however women lose their hopes.” we can see through these comments that students seemed to take vastly different lessons from the content of this unit. holistic an end-of-year class evaluation was the instrument used to measure students’ holistic responses to the unit. in the final class in march, students were asked to evaluate the usefulness of everything they did that school year on a -point scale. their responses are summarized in table . compared to all activities over the full school year, students on average found the movie years a slave to be the most useful and the book to be the third most useful thing that they did in class. despite the lack of understanding of the target themes by some students described above, this is an indication that students, if nothing else, enjoyed learning about the content. limitations and further research the main limitation of this study is that students were not required to respond to every single paragraph prompt, providing only a limited view into their understanding of table . end-of-year class evaluations was _____ useful? rating* years a slave (movie) . presentation : a place . years a slave (book) . expository essay . opinion essay . presentation : a person . northstar unit . presentation : a plan (pechakucha) . vocabulary lists . endangered languages speaking test . northstar unit . timed essay writing . northstar unit . northstar unit . conversation strategies . fat tax speaking test . vocabulary cards . northstar unit . vocabulary tests . error correction . xreading . graded readers . reading reports . * -point scale ( = not at all, = very much). japan association for language teaching • jalt  teacher efficacy, learner agency ellis: do black lives matter in japan?: teaching race in efl the deep themes of the unit. this choice has pedagogical benefit, by allowing students to demonstrate how much they have learned in a best-case scenario, but also makes it difficult for researchers to determine exactly which themes students did and did not understand. for this reason, further studies in this field would benefit from more precise instruments to measure student understanding of the target content. for example, interviews conducted in japanese with a sample of students before and after the unit might give a clearer view into if and how their perspectives on diversity and multiculturalism changed. conclusions regarding the first research question about american race relations’ utility in teaching english, these results show that students were able to both understand and use some low frequency vocabulary words with a high level of accuracy. this suggests that this topic may be fertile content for efl classes. the second research question regarding student acquisition of the target content is a bit trickier. most students seemed to readily grasp that slavery is a horrible part of human history, but one that we must learn from in order to create a better future. a small minority were able to make connections between racism and other forms of discrimination, supporting adams and bell’s ( ) finding that multicultural education can lead to broader intersectional tolerance and understanding. however, some students did not demonstrate this level of mature thinking. this result is a predictable one, as students in this program are divided into levels based on language proficiency, not academic aptitude. the critical thinkers were able to make these connections on their own and flourished in this challenging unit. though this does not refute sawyer and gampa’s ( ) study about the benefits of introducing social activism in class, it suggests that more content scaffolding may be necessary in foreign language classes to support weaker students’ understanding of these complex issues. to evaluate the overall success of this unit, it is necessary to clarify the role of the language teachers in relation to the target content, either as facilitators who encourage students to develop their own beliefs or mediators who feed them knowledge (thomas, ). if as teachers we are passive facilitators of knowledge, perhaps it is not a problem that some students expressed problematic or undeveloped viewpoints in their writing. the unit gave the students opportunities to share their opinions using the target language, and they generally succeeded at this. in devising this unit, however, i took mason’s ( ) stance that as language teachers we are critical mediators of knowledge. i felt that part of my role was to encourage students to make the connections between american slavery and their own lives and to reflect on ways that japan can become more culturally diverse and inclusive. it was therefore disappointing that some students missed this message. i thought that the connections would be easy to make in a school with a significant number of mixed race students, including students with african roots, but even at this school students needed more explicit instruction than i had anticipated. particularly on politically charged topics such as this one, teachers must consciously develop their own balance between facilitation and mediation. based on these results, in the future i plan to calibrate my own classes by reducing time dedicated to understanding the text and instead dedicating more time to the adjacent topics of modern day slavery, political activism, and explicit connections with japan as well as to opportunities for students to unpack each other’s views. in particular it may be useful to highlight japanese demonstrations to help students better understand the nature and importance of political activism. ultimately it is not a problem if a student disagrees with my beliefs about the importance of diversity in securing japan’s future. i just hope that, as a result of this unit, they can disagree using more sophisticated language and better informed arguments. bio data michael ellis is the efl program coordinator at international christian university high school. he is interested in teachers’ reflective practice among many other topics and is currently program chair of td sig. <maikeru.desu@gmail.com> references adams, m., & bell, l. a. (eds.). ( ). teaching for diversity and social justice. oxford, england: routledge. au, w. ( ). rethinking multicultural education: teaching for racial and cultural justice. milwaukee, wi: rethinking schools. bell, l. a. ( ). storytelling for social justice: connecting narrative and the arts in antiracist teaching. oxford, england: routledge. brasor, p. ( ). voter apathy can threaten democracy. the japan times. retrieved from https://www.japantimes.co.jp central intelligence agency. ( , february ). the world factbook: japan. retrieved from https://wwaw.cia.gov/library/publications/the-world-factbook/geos/ja.html coulmas, f. ( ). population decline and ageing in japan—the social consequences. oxford, england: routledge. japan association for language teaching • jalt  teacher efficacy, learner agency ellis: do black lives matter in japan?: teaching race in efl diene, d. ( ). report of the special rapporteur on contemporary forms of racism, racial discrimination, xenophobia and related intolerance. mission to japan. united nations: united nations commission on human rights. retrieved from https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/ undoc/gen/g / / /pdf/g .pdf?openelement fackler, m. ( ). biracial beauty queen challenges japan’s self-image. new york times. retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com green, d. ( ). as its population ages, japan quietly turns to immigration. migration policy institute. retrieved from https://www.migrationpolicy.org/ herstory. (n.d.). untitled. retrieved from https://blacklivesmatter.com/herstory/ mcqueen, s. (director). ( ). years a slave [motion picture]. united states: fox searchlight pictures. mason, m. ( ). teachers as critical mediators of knowledge. journal of philosophy of education, ( ), - . https://doi.org/ . / - . massler, u., stotz, d., & queisser, c. ( ). assessment instruments for primary clil: the conceptualisation and evaluation of test tasks. the language learning journal, ( ), - . https://doi.org/ . / . . mehisto, p., marsh, d., & frigols, m. j. ( ). uncovering clil content and language integrated learning in bilingual and multilingual education. oxford, england: macmillan. nation, p. ( ). the bnc/coca word family. retrieved from www.victoria.ac.nz/lals/about/staff/ paul-nation rollason, j. ( ). years a slave. new york, ny: scholastic. sawyer, j., & gampa, a. ( ). implicit and explicit racial attitudes changed during black lives matter. personality and social psychology bulletin, ( ), - . https://doi.org/ . / thomas, g. ( ). facilitator, teacher, or leader? managing conflicting roles in outdoor education. journal of experiential education, ( ), - . https://doi.org/ . /jee. . . appendix sample unit https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/g / / /pdf/g .pdf?openelement https://documents-dds-ny.un.org/doc/undoc/gen/g / / /pdf/g .pdf?openelement https://www.migrationpolicy.org/ https://doi.org/ . / - . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . % f https://www.researchgate.net/deref/http% a% f% fdx.doi.org% f . % fjee. . . japan association for language teaching • jalt  teacher efficacy, learner agency ellis: do black lives matter in japan?: teaching race in efl japan association for language teaching • jalt  teacher efficacy, learner agency ellis: do black lives matter in japan?: teaching race in efl 	_heading=h. fob te 	previous : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	online: 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	full screen: 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	previous : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	front : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : 	page : homeland -acceptedms the university of manchester research “this show does not represent the views of the artists” doi: . / . . document version accepted author manuscript link to publication record in manchester research explorer citation for published version (apa): strowe, a. ( ). “this show does not represent the views of the artists”: translation, non-translation, activism, and access in the homeland graffiti hack. translation studies, ( ), - . https://doi.org/ . / . . published in: translation studies citing this paper please note that where the full-text provided on manchester research explorer is the author accepted manuscript or proof version this may differ from the final published version. if citing, it is advised that you check and use the publisher's definitive version. general rights copyright and moral rights for the publications made accessible in the research explorer are retained by the authors and/or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. takedown policy if you believe that this document breaches copyright please refer to the university of manchester’s takedown procedures [http://man.ac.uk/ y bo] or contact uml.scholarlycommunications@manchester.ac.uk providing relevant details, so we can investigate your claim. download date: . apr. https://doi.org/ . / . . https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/this-show-does-not-represent-the-views-of-the-artists( b b b- ba- e -bb -bffbf c a ).html /portal/anna.strowe.html https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/this-show-does-not-represent-the-views-of-the-artists( b b b- ba- e -bb -bffbf c a ).html https://www.research.manchester.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/this-show-does-not-represent-the-views-of-the-artists( b b b- ba- e -bb -bffbf c a ).html https://doi.org/ . / . . this is a manuscript of an article accepted for publication by translation studies. (accepted june ). “this show does not represent the views of the artists”: translation, non-translation, activism, and access in the homeland graffiti hack abstract: the october hack of the television show homeland by three graffiti artists hired by the production company is a fascinating case of linguistic and translational activism. this article examines the event from several perspectives in translation studies, exploring how the brief creates space for the action of the artists as well as how their work intersects with notions of narrative irony, linguistic and cultural hospitality and hijacking, media access, and authenticity. the case reveals how the work of the artists challenges the narrative spaces of the show while still fulfilling the given task. it shows the power of linguistic access, and illustrates how forms of access can be manipulated by activists in order to achieve wider dissemination. the analysis intersects as well with some discourses on intersemiotic translations and multimodal texts, as well as considering the relationship between writing as verbal expression and writing as visual image. keywords: activism, intersemiotic, multimodality, irony, hospitality, access on october , , episode two of season five of the controversial showtime series homeland was broadcast in the u.s. (raff et al. ). the episode, titled “the tradition of hospitality”, included what has perhaps become one of the most publicized recent examples of culture jamming, or subversion of media or mainstream communication to broadcast alternative political messages. the episode, set in a syrian refugee camp in lebanon (filmed in germany) included arabic graffiti spray- painted on the walls that actually contained pointed critiques of the show itself as well as some political and cultural statements. the graffiti artists, heba amin, caram kapp, and stone (don karl), released a statement on october described what they had done (amin, kapp, and karl a), although viewers who could read arabic might already have noticed the trick. much ink, print and digital, has been used already to discuss the critiques themselves, the appalling lack of arabic knowledge on set, and the brilliant and creative tactic of the graffiti artists (see the website of heba amin for an incomplete but lengthy list of mentions in print, audio, and video). this article looks more specifically at the intersections between this creative act of translation and several concepts of translation studies. this exploration moves from the practical elements of the translation brief and the contradictions inherent in it (see in general vermeer and nord on the notion of the brief), to an analysis of how the distance between commissioners and translators can be viewed as a form of translational irony along the lines of hermans’ work with irony and echoic speech ( ). the work is then considered in the context of theories of hospitality (ricœur ) and the ironic performance as a type of hijacking. access, as a conceptual notion that allows both hospitality, hijacking, and reception, is explored next, followed by a discussion of the ultimate “authenticity” of the work, borrowing a term from the brief. the case points to a number of significant areas of potential activist interest in language and translation, highlighting how the cultural gaps of translation and the translator’s agency can be exploited to create powerful messages. in order to consider this event from a translation studies perspective, it is necessary to outline precisely how it can be viewed as translational. there are three moments in the timeline that seem particularly relevant and that are highlighted by various parts of the analysis that follows. chronologically, the first is an example of translation more broadly considered. the artists were given both a general description of what was desired and models in the form of pictures. their process in creating the graffiti based on those descriptions and models can be considered as a form of both intermodal translation—turning the producers’ articulated idea of graffiti into actual text—and of visual and physical translation—bringing the visual appearance of graffiti from the samples in the photographs they were shown onto the actual walls of the set. the second translational moment begins immediately and lasts through the months after the filming, and is actually a refusal or more simply a withholding of translation, as the artists initially did not tell the producers the meaning of the graffitied words they had painted. the third moment is the moment of impact, when the artists finally release a statement about their work, including descriptions and translations as well as photographs, allowing not only the producers but also the general audience to understand the whole arc. these moments will be discussed in more detail in what follows, and analyzed as constructing a whole, translational activist project. it should also be noted that this analysis fits in, to greater or lesser extents, with both discourses on intersemiotic translation (see jakobson / , ) and multimodal translation, while belonging completely to neither category. in what follows, the graffiti will be examined as a product of intersemiotic shifts that turn verbal and written description into a visual object as well as imitating existing visual forms and genre expectations of graffiti. however, the analysis also examines the graffiti as simultaneously containing visual modes, insofar as the form of written arabic is visual, and semantic modes, insofar as that written arabic also has semantic content. furthermore, the graffiti becomes located in a television show, and as such is part of a larger multimodal text as well. it will be shown, however, that a significant aspect of this work actually lies in its simultaneous acceptance of and rejection of the separation of the visual and the semantic modes. homeland the series premiered in the u.s. on the cable channel showtime in . it features claire danes as cia agent carrie mathison, following her through the political intrigues and occasional physical danger of her role in counterterrorism. from the beginning, the show has been critically acclaimed and controversial. it has won a number of industry awards, including emmys, screen actors’ guild awards, and golden globes. however, the portrayal of muslims and of the middle east on the show has attracted a good deal of negative attention. various critics have observed that almost all of the muslim or arab characters turn out to be terrorists or sympathizers, or are killed relatively quickly (see for example beaumont ; d’addario ). the contrast between this perceived muslim threat and western vulnerability is displayed in the promotional poster for season four, in which lead character carrie mathison is pictured turning her head toward the camera, wearing a red scarf over her head, in the midst of a crowd of figures clad in black burqas. the image has been described as “a blonde, white red riding hood lost in a forest of faceless muslim wolves” by one critic, who cites it as “the perfect encapsulation of everything that’s wrong with this show” (durkay , n.p.). this interpretation in itself could provoke accusations of islamophobia, in that it attributes physical threat to the people pictured largely because they are wearing burqas. the expression on mathison’s face, however, of slightly undirected fear, does suggest some type of threat, and the anonymity of the other people gives no indication of whether they may or may not be part of that threat. furthermore, by leaving mathison as the only identifiable person, the picture simultaneously humanizes her and dehumanizes the other characters, and perhaps by extension, all of the muslim characters in the show. apart from the general critiques about overwhelmingly negative representations of islam and of muslims, the show has accumulated a long list of specific complaints about errors and misinformation. part of the sense of a monolithic muslim threat to the west is achieved by subsuming sectarian differences to create, for example, the unlikely alliance between the shi‘a hezbollah and the sunni al- qai‘da (al-arian , n.p.). lebanese tourism minister faddy abboud threatened to sue the show over its representation of hamra street in beirut, a prosperous and relatively safe area with homes and shops, as the perilous and dilapidated haunt of terrorists (“homeland angers minister” ). and speakers of arabic complain about persistent mispronunciation of names and phrases as well as language errors (see massad ). the graffiti artists themselves, in their statement, point to a number of these issues as examples of the lack of care in representation and the lack of accuracy and research (amin, kapp, and karl a, n.p.), connecting this type of inaccuracy with other issues of stereotyping and representation (amin, kapp, and karl b, n.p.). indeed, the show’s reputation almost led them to refuse the task, before they decided to use it as an opportunity for activism (amin, kapp, and karl a, n.p.). the brief and the project the artists write in their statement about both how they were put into contact with the producers of the show (as commissioners of their work) and the way in which the task was presented to the artists (as translators or transmitters) in the initial meeting. at the beginning of june , we received a phone call from a friend who has been active in the graffiti and street art scene in germany for the past years and has researched graffiti in the middle east extensively. he had been contacted by “homeland’s” set production company who were looking for “arabian street artists” to lend graffiti authenticity to a film set of a syrian refugee camp on the lebanese/syrian border for their new season. ... in our initial meeting, we were given a set of images of pro-assad graffiti- apparently natural in a syrian refugee camp. our instructions were: ( ) the graffiti has to be apolitical ( ) you cannot copy the images because of copyright infringement ( ) writing “mohamed is the greatest, is okay of course”. (amin, kapp, and karl a, n.p.) the brief is phrased in terms of implied interlingual translation (from the english “mohammed is the greatest”) and visual reproduction from the images. in more general terms it calls for the creation of visual textual material from a set of guidelines. as a translation, or translational, brief there are a few noteworthy aspects. from the outset of the interaction between the commissioners and the translators, there is a significant lack of cultural awareness on the part of the commissioners, which is explicitly noted by the translators. the ignorance of the commissioners regarding the text they are commissioning, and the language and culture that the text would belong to, is highlighted by the phrase “arabian street artists”, highlighting the conflation of geographical and linguistic attributes. the lack of an appropriate cultural starting point in the commission is further noted by the translators as they remark on the images that the artists were to imitate: “pro-assad graffiti- apparently natural in a syrian refugee camp”. a part of this ignorance will return as highly relevant in terms of access and distribution. the cultural ignorance displayed in the presentation of the brief is in some ways a form of the complaint that translation commissioners often have no idea what translation might entail and thus make demands of the translator that are impossible or at the very least implausible in the context of the particular language pair, the situation, or the purpose of the translation (see for example hönig , - ; nord , ). such a contradiction at the heart of the commission sets up a situation in which the translator must be unfaithful to some aspect of the task, putting pressure on the relationship between commissioner and translator. if the translators followed the suggestions and models of the commissioners, incorporating inaccurate religious statements and pro-assad graffiti, they could produce graffiti in arabic that would, however, be culturally inauthentic and implausible in the fictional setting. they could produce political and religious graffiti that would be plausible and culturally acceptable, and could lend authenticity, but only by ignoring the injunction that their work not be political. it is worth noting that the various aspects of the brief related to content come from a variety of sources. caram kapp has clarified (personal communication, december ) that there was no official contract, and that the graffiti that was shown to the artists as examples was provided by someone hired by the production team: we were indeed shown an assortment of graffiti from across the middle east, including some work by friends of ours and including images of pro-bashar scrawls. the set designers did not speak, or read arabic, so they may have not been aware of what they were showing us. once we explained what it was they were showing us, they, if i recall correctly, found it as strange as we did- they did apparently have a syrian researching the graffiti for them. i still wonder how he was briefed (and if he ever visited the set). although the information that is presented as part of the brief coming from several sources, there is a consistency in their lack of understanding of arab and islamic cultures. the phrase “mohammed is the greatest is ok, of course” came from an email from one of the set designers, not from the initial meeting, but as kapp observes (personal communication, december ), “[i]t is very indicative, as is their use of ‘arabian’, of the mindset with which they approached us”. the fragmentation of the brief and the lack of a specific, written contract thus allow for a variety of odd articulations and misunderstandings to creep into the instructions that were given to the artists. also significant in the brief is that fact that the purpose being attributed to the graffiti text is fixed, and in some ways unrelated to its actual content or the actual text type. the graffiti is intended to lend authenticity to the setting, not for its contents so much as for its visual symbolism. it is the form of the words and their physical presence that is seen as conveying the ‘message’ of authenticity and helping set the scene for the episode’s audience, not their content. in effect, the text that is requested is almost silenced, as far as the producers are concerned. as the artists write in their statement, the content of what was written on the walls, however, was of no concern. in [the producers’] eyes, arabic script is merely a supplementary visual that completes the horror-fantasy of the middle east, a poster image dehumanizing an entire region to human-less figures in black burkas and moreover, this season, to refugees. (amin, kapp, and karl a, n.p.) the dehumanization is accompanied by a desemanticization: the use of text as image without meaning, where it is the written vehicle that has semiotic value rather than any content that it might convey. almost silenced, however, is not the same as silenced, and the producers do want to maintain some control over the contents of the text. the instructions of the brief are, however, contradictory, both with regard to each other and with regard to the purpose of the text. to say that the texts should be “apolitical” while also admitting the possibility of writing “mohammed is the greatest” (even sidestepping the cultural error of replacing “allah” with “mohammed”) is to ignore the politicization of islam both in the arab world and outside it. such a demand from a show that itself is accused of politicizing and stigmatizing islam is particularly problematic. in addition, however, the demand that this graffiti, intended to lend authenticity to the set, be “apolitical”, ignores the often-political nature of graffiti itself (see for example abaza ; grigore and sitaru ; gröndahl ; nicoarea ), thus further silencing the text and its implied producers, the inhabitants of the fictional syrian refugee camp, as well as diminishing the text’s authenticity. the artists’ response appears to be based in part on the immediate instances of cultural insensivity and ignorance as well as to the general context of the show, perceived as racist and islamophobic; furthermore, as we will see, it is authentically in keeping with its text type. the three artists decorated the set with texts ranging over a variety of topics (see appendix for a table of transcriptions of the texts along with translations and explanations). some comment on the show itself—“homeland is a watermelon”, meaning that it is a sham; “homeland is racist”—or issue disclaimers—“this show does not represent the views of the artists”. others provide humor and wordplay based on cultural and political references—“repetition teaches bashar” playing on the saying “repetition teaches the donkey”, or “#gasewsew”, which refers obliquely to a popular television puppet character (amin, kapp, and karl a). the instruction “mohammed is the greatest is ok of course” appears transliterated into arabic, as does “black lives matter” in an expression of solidarity. poignantly, the artists also question what “homeland” itself is, using both a transliteration of the english word and a translation of it at different times; the statement “homeland [translated] is not a series” challenges the use of people’s countries and lands solely for entertainment value, a reading that is mirrored by an excerpt of poem by nizar qabbani included at the end of a video directed by the artists (amin, kapp, and karl c, : - : ; see appendix for the text of the poem and amin, kapp, and karl’s translation) content temporarily aside, and within the boundaries of the brief, the artists provide text on the walls in arabic, in a variety of styles. their work functions perfectly well in its capacity as “arabic script... merely [as] a supplementary visual” (amin, kapp, and karl a, n.p.). in line with the demand for authenticity, they do not recreate texts that they perceive would be out of place in the context (e.g. pro-assad statements or inaccurate renderings of islam based on the producers’ errors such as an actual translation of “mohammed is the greatest”). many of their messages remain apolitical in relating to the show itself and to the artists’ relationship to it, but others veer into the political by mentioning or referring to politicians (assad) or political movements (black lives matter). in both cases, the authenticity of the work as graffiti is preserved insofar as graffiti delivers messages from its creator and often in opposition to established power. irony the explicitly graphic translation that is requested by the producers, with only small input regarding content, is thus exploited as a form for expression. still under the remit of the brief itself, the translators are performing something akin to what theo hermans ( ) calls “ironic” translation— translation in which the translator, seen as reporting a previous utterance, takes a dissociative stance regarding that utterance, through clues in the text that allow the reader to separate the translator’s voice from the voice of the author. citing hutcheon ( ) and giora ( ), hermans ( , ) observes “irony involves two things being said at the same time, the dictum and the implicatum”, and that the perception of irony involves both of those things being received and interpreted in relation to each other. obviously for a translation to be ironic in the way that hermans suggests, the separation of the translator’s voice from the author’s voice is necessary, in order to perceive the dictum as being a meaning created by the one and the implicatum as being facilitated by the other. hermans discusses a variety of ways in which irony can manifest in translation, including the explicit dissociation that can be part of a translator’s paratext and which can then be read back into the translation itself ( : - ) and one case in which a translator from chinese to english occasionally used latin instead of english to hide erotic content while still translating it ( : ). in the case of homeland, the initial communicative act is performed both using visual models and verbal description, and the “utterance” that constitutes or would constitute the source text is never actually present; it is instead an ideal utterance represented only by the description of the commissioners. the commissioners requested not a particular text but examples of writing as semiotic symbols in themselves, represented in the commission by the sample graffiti that the artists are shown and the culturally and politically uninformed descriptions of the graffiti imagined for the set. the translation is the eventual visual representation that is created by the artists in the form of graffiti, and the distance the artists take to dissociate themselves lies in the semantic content they choose to present in their visual material form. thus both dictum and implicatum cohabit, with one serving the purposes of visual representation and the other creating meaning within and alongside that representation through the actual semantic value of the words. this suggests that irony must be allowed to be a multimodal activity. that is, the dictum and the implicatum must be allowed to belong to different sign systems, here a visual sign system and a linguistic-semantic one. the examples that hermans gives are all examples that are contained within systems of linguistic (non-visual) interpretation, but this is not a necessary limitation; hutcheon’s work on irony ( ) includes the possibility of irony in other semiotic forms, including painting, music, and theatrical performance. in this case, the translator’s voice is expressed in the form of written verbal communication while the voice of the commissioner is visual and representational or descriptive. the irony is created not just in the semantic meaning of the text itself, but in the intersection between text- as-visual and text-as-semantic. furthermore, in this case, the two aspects almost reverse the nature of dictum and implicatum. the dictum, in this case, is a visual statement, seen by the commissioners as devoid of internal meaning, but representing through physical forms, implying even, a set of cultural, social, and political ideas that the commissioners wanted to invoke. arabic graffiti, for the commissioners, appears to imply the combination of circumstances in a refugee camp in the middle east, whatever particular aspects that might entail, which is why it would be able to lend “authenticity”. in this sense, the dictum is not said at all, but implied. conversely, the implicatum of irony, the space where the reporter’s distance is demonstrated and the reporter’s meaning (compared to the original speaker’s meaning), is in this instance located in the actual semantic content of the visual sign. the reported sign, the visual appearance of arabic script requested by the commissioners, is made to carry with it this second meaning. in addition, the artists address one of the potential problems of irony and ironic translation explicitly. hermans observes that “irony demands considerable processing effort on the part of the receiver” (hermans , ); in this case the demands of the irony are perhaps even more considerable, but then also facilitated to a certain extent by the artists. the demands of unmediated processing are not only that the viewer be able to read arabic, but also that they notice the graffiti in the background of the show’s action, a tricky task as the few pieces of graffiti that make it onto the show are generally passed by quickly, and are mostly out of focus and only partially visible. however, the artists eventually cut down on the processing effort by spelling out the exact terms of their ironic message in their statement, released after the broadcast of the episode and reported through news articles, blogs, and links around the world. like the paratexts that hermans describes, the announcement serves to frame the translation itself. their announcement foregrounds the graffiti for the arabic-reading viewer, but it also describes both the graffiti and the irony for the rest of the viewing public (and indeed even a wider public). the irony, created through the execution of the first translational moment and hidden from the producers by a withholding of translation, is partly available first to an arabic-reading audience and then made explicit and accessible to both arabic readers and others through photographs, video, translations, and explanations. hospitality and hijacking in part because of the shift in priority of the visual aspect and the semantic content, it is easy to see the ironic content as being hosted within the visual semiotics desired by the commissioner. indeed, for the majority of viewers, who cannot read arabic, the visual semiotics subsumes the semantic content unless the viewer has been told about it already, and for those who can read arabic, the processing of the semantic content is made difficult by the speed of the action, the camera focus, and the only partial visibility of the texts. the average viewer thus receives the visual message and perceives the graffiti, if it is noticed at all, as a part of the fictional setting. the graffiti is simply part of the space that hosts the actions of the show itself and has no additional meaning in and of itself. the visual semiotics of a space created as “arab” are thus made to contain and witness a kind of betrayal of hospitality, as the show itself perpetuates stereotypes about arab people, the middle east, and islam. translation has occasionally been conceptualized as linguistic hospitality (ricœur , ; see also inghilleri , - ), a way of showing our willingness to host another culture within our own. ricœur uses translation as a philosophical category that is broader than many other conceptions, and this can prove useful here. in the case at hand, any linguistic hospitality in the arabic script is part of a larger framework of what appear to be acts of hospitality. germany physically hosts the set of the show, which hosts the production itself. the show hosts ideas and values from a number of points of view, although as noted earlier, its representation of arab and muslim points of view is offensively limited. these nested layers of hospitality, however, are also layers of fiction and reality. the physical presence of the set in germany is true, and the physical filming of the show on the set is true. the presence of muslims in the script, however, is engineered, and the presence of the characters in the “middle east” is, at least in this case, a carefully manipulated image. homeland creates its own vision of the arab world that then plays host to its characters and plots. in this regard, it is relevant to note an error in the construction of this image in a previous episode, also related to language and script. don karl has noted that "in another episode they had hebrew price tags on clothes in a market in an arab country. they had shot the scene in a fake souq in tel aviv" (quoted in meerman , n.p.). the fiction of the hosting here is given away by inauthentic written texts. such errors point out not only that the arab settings are a fiction, but that the producers do not feel the need to make them more than superficially authentic, and sometimes not even that. as amin put it to the guardian, “it is clear they don’t know the region they are attempting to represent” (phipps , n.p.). it is merely a representation of arab settings that is playing host to the show, and any actual cultural details, including arabic script itself, are coopted into participating in that hospitality. in this way, the work of amin, kapp, and karl responds to the contradictions of hospitality already present in the work. the arabic script acts, on behalf of the producers, as part of the fictional spatial host for the show, and on behalf of the artists, as a host for its own content. the semantic content that the artists use as an excuse for the existence of the script, rather than being hosted, then, is a stowaway in the visual text: unseen, silent, and perhaps unwanted. for the viewer who knows what the texts say (the secondary aspect that is less specified in the brief and which constitutes the ironic perspective of the artists), the visual aspect is no longer hospitable to the story. the stowaway becomes a hijacker (a loaded term, but justified perhaps in the context of hijacking as an activist translation strategy ), causing the arabic script to resist the hospitality that the producers tried to demand of it. the text is lifted from a supporting role as a “supplementary visual” (amin, kapp, and karl a, n.p.) to be the protagonist of a new ironic meaning created by the artists. in addition, however, the graffiti includes another type of hosting/hijacking, and one that in addition to challenging the nested layers of hosting also challenges the division between host and guest, or hijacker and hijacked. a few of the phrases painted on the set walls are english transliterated into arabic-- “black lives matter”, “now in” from “freedom, now in -d”, and “mohammed is the greatest is ok, of course”. the language of the graffiti is no longer stable in these cases, and the host is uncertain. the arabic alphabet hosts the english sounds and meanings, but equally the english could be said to host the arabic letter forms and the visual aspect of writing. however, the instability of the language points to another important aspect of the graffiti. it is no longer “in” a language in any commonly accepted way, but rather perhaps “of” two languages at the same time, confusing them in a single site. thus, even in linguistic terms, the graffiti occupies seemingly contradictory positions, further transgressing boundaries. access of course, the entire project hinges on the ability of the artists to transmit their material, be it ironic, hijacked, transgressive or otherwise. the artists write that made their choice to take on the job based on the information that “a moment of intervention could relay about our own and many others’ political discontent with the series. it was our moment to make our point by subverting the message using the show itself” (amin, kapp, and karl a, n.p.). their motivation is to “relay” their own message by hijacking the message of the show and using the show’s ability to reach audiences that the artists could not reach previously. in some ways this is a bit of a truism: of course a television show is broadcast in order to allow people to watch it. access to subversive or resistant material, however, can be harder to facilitate for a variety of reasons. institutional means of facilitating access through publishing and broadcasting are traditionally controlled by larger interests, and broadcasting in particular is tightly regulated, so that it is not a simple matter to secure a license to broadcast. furthermore, in cases where particular texts are subverted for political or activist purposes, the original owners of those texts may be in a legal position to block the dissemination of the subverted text in certain channels, although in the age of the internet, unregulated dissemination might occur with such speed that the owners’ only recourse is punishment after the fact in the form of fines or other penalties. the language of texts also, of course, affects its potential to reach audiences, and translation can be conceptualized in terms of an action that helps to grant linguistic access to a particular text within a certain language community. again, however, there are obstacles to activist translation, that is, facilitating linguistic access to texts for activist purposes. copyright holders can refuse to allow legal translations and censors can ban translations. even before that point, however, funding may not be available for a translator of particular texts or with particular aims, effectively foreclosing on the possibility of creating linguistic access for practical reasons. one of the possible activist functions of translation is providing a means to provide access to information related to activist ideologies, or to prioritize meanings that are relevant to an activist stance regarding the text (see tymoczko and sources cited). of course, such actions also involve closing off particular meanings or lines of interpretation, however, and any representation implicitly closes off the possibility of certain other, conflicting, representations of both a st and of an underlying agenda in writing or translating. the activist message can thus be furthered not only by strategies that facilitate particular ideologically motivated interpretations, but also by strategies that block others, restricting access to particular interpretations. in this case, the eventual physical dissemination of the message, through the hijacked medium of the show’s broadcast, depends on an even more particular game of access, involving not just closing off some of the multiple options for interpretation, but closing off, or refusing to open, interpretation itself, at least temporarily. the mechanisms that are used to provide access to the show, and through the show to the graffiti itself, are not managed or directed by the artists, although it is through their action that the graffiti becomes part of the show. instead, the artists are able to exploit the dynamics of linguistic access in order to achieve the kind of dissemination that the show could guarantee. the artists’ success depended entirely on the producers’ lack of linguistic access to their text and on the artists’ temporary refusal to translate. so long as the producers had access only to the visual element that they had specifically requested—the appearance of arabic graffiti—the message was safe, hidden in plain sight. the barrier to linguistic access for the producers and for the majority non-arabic-literate viewers was lifted only later, with the statement of the artists that included translations into english and english explanations for the graffiti that had, by then, been broadcast as part of the episode. in this sense, the graffiti, and its path to dissemination, also becomes a sort of meta-commentary on the fact of that initial lack of access. in addition to being a commentary on the show itself, and on the commissioners’ lack of cultural awareness, the graffiti highlights through its transmission the linguistic inadequacy of the show. the commissioners and indeed the entire production team, who represent among other things arabic-speaking people and the arab world in their show, are exposed as lacking one of the major tools that seems necessary to fulfil that task of representation responsibly. the realization that the graffiti had been there on the set all along and nobody had been able to read it becomes an indictment of their dramaturgical process. they had physical access to the set of texts but apparently nobody could read arabic on the set of a show that has largely up to this point focused on issues in the middle east related to arab politics. it is not simply a question of having someone check the “accuracy” or relevance of the graffiti texts, as a translation agency might have an editor to check the accuracy of translations before they are sent out to clients. the lack of linguistic access, however, points to the larger issue raised by critics of a lack of sensitivity and understanding in dealing with issues relating to islam and politics in the arab world, and its relationship to the west in general and the u.s. in particular. as the artists observe in an article released on cnn.com after their initial statement, the fact that the ruse was not “picked up by a single regional or language consultant on their team speaks volumes about how serious” the show is about honest representations and conversations about the middle east and about security (amin, kapp, and karl b, n.p.). in any case, the issues of access remain. the final provision of physical access to the texts through broadcasting depended on the lack of linguistic access of at least the key decision-makers and on the initial non-translation of the text. the creator and producer of the show, alex gansa gave a statement that suggests that had there been such access the graffiti would have been removed, changed, or edited out: “we wish we’d caught these images before they made it to air” (tartaglione , n.p.). authenticity visually, however, for the audience without access to arabic, the impact is limited to a consciously understood problem. the arabic graffiti has significance in its visual aspect and the connotations of arabic script, which can be perceived unconsciously. its contents, and thus the irony, must be comprehended separately, according to a different interpretive framework that is provided by the artists or by media reporting on the case. in this sense the visual authenticity of the creation, the object of the commission, is maintained even as it is undermined. the progress of creation, blocked access, and then full access exposed another cognitive dissonance in the system, this one within the fiction of the show. by drawing the fiction itself into question, the act and its subsequent translation expose other dynamics of authenticity as well. as noted earlier, the graffiti avoids several types of diegetic inauthenticity by avoiding the culturally or politically incorrect or inappropriate statements (pro-assad, “muhammed is the greatest” in arabic) that were suggested by the commissioners. also within the world of the show, however, the graffiti creates a certain tension in perceptions of authenticity. as noted above, visually it serves to authenticate the setting, but semantically, it disrupts that same setting. one guardian article hints at this, describing how in one scene, “lead character carrie mathison... can be seen striding past a wall daubed with arabic script reading: ‘homeland is racist’” (phipps , n.p.). once the reader has been granted access to the irony, the fiction is exposed by the knowledge that the characters are ignoring incongruous messages that would be inauthentic in the diegetic world of the show. the diegetic inauthenticity is a paradoxical result of an initial commission aimed at creating authenticity, but only once the irony has been revealed, and only in one dimension. however, this inauthenticity can even more paradoxically lead to a new kind of trans-diegetic authenticity, in which the critiques themselves, from outside of the show, combine with the incongruity of the exposed fiction to create an even stronger comment. marina hyde describes in the guardian the “deeply authentic scenes of american intelligence experts failing to have a clue what stuff in arabic meant”, and calls it “accidental cinéma vérité” to have the “local contact leading carrie mathison past the graffiti declining to enlighten his charges as to the messages directed at them” ( , n.p.). thus, the dissonance created by the ironic translation of the artists actually acquires additional meaning; in addition to the explicit indictment of the show, the graffiti becomes a commentary on the methods and pursuit of actual real-world policy, and the conduct of political and military intelligence outside of the fiction of the show. furthermore, the graffiti also transcends its commissioned role of art-representing-art, in the sense that it refuses to be located solely in the realm of arabic writing that is designed to look like arabic graffiti, with all of the political and cultural burdens that actual graffiti would have. instead, it is in fact what it is intended to merely portray. parallel to the “accidental cinéma vérité” of the american intelligence experts, the graffiti in a sense becomes actual graffiti rather than simply the television set- piece imitation of it. the transgression is then not only of certain aspects of the brief, but, again, of the diegetic borders of the show. these layers of authenticity and inauthenticity weave through the layers of fiction and reality, and through the hospitality of the arabic language itself, its perception or representation on the show, and the show itself as a host space. the multiple messages of the text, carried through both visual and linguistic semiotic modes, construct relationships of translational irony and ironic translation, while at the same time exposing some of the truths of the initial commission. as an activist work, this case exposes how languages and translation can be used in the service of ideology both in their presence and in their refusal or resistance. physical and linguistic access are played off against each other in order to reach an ultimate goal of broader dissemination of the activists’ message. this interplay suggests that the mechanisms of translational and linguistic activism are not solely deployed to facilitate access or to block it, but at varying times and in varying ways to do both, involving different audiences and differing levels of interpretive access. the final step, in this case, is the opening of the text to the widest possible audience, including the commissioners, the broadcast audience, and an internet audience who might read about this event even if they do not watch the show. however, that step is only possible because of previous restrictions, and it is reasonable to assume that eventual goals of limiting access might similarly be reached in other activist cases by a different set of relationships of access and limitation. furthermore, and significantly, it is the brief itself, and its gaps and errors, that facilitates the activism, and it is arguable that beyond that, it actually validates it. as a mechanism of control, the brief both depends on a context in which the commissioner is able to either expect compliance or force it, but this in part depends on the ability of the commissioner to articulate a brief that can be complied with. in this case, the inconsistencies within the brief (for example, the desire for authenticity opposed to the problematically inauthentic examples and models suggested) themselves create the space for an activist intervention that is able to respect a large part of the brief while simultaneously undermining the entire project. references abaza, mona. . “walls, segregating downtown cairo and the mohammed mahmud street graffiti.” theory, culture & society ( ): - . al-arian, laila. . “tv’s most islamophobic show.” salon. december. accessed december . http://www.salon.com/ / / /tvs_most_islamophobic_show/ amin, 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translated as narrative discourse. translated by jane lewin. ithaca: cornell university press. giora, rachel. . “irony and negation.” discourse processes ( ): - . grigore, george and laura sitaru, eds. . graffiti, writing and street art in the arab world. special issue of romano-arabica . gröndahl, mia. . gaza graffiti: messages of love and politics. cairo: the american university of cairo press. hermans, theo. . “positioning translators: voices, views and values in translation.” language and literature . : - . “homeland angers minister over depiction of beirut.” . bbc entertainment and arts. october. accessed december . http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/entertainment-arts- hönig, hans g. . “positions, power and practice: functionalist approaches and translation quality assessment.” in translation and quality, edited by christina schäffner. clevedon: multilingual matters, - . hutcheon, linda. . irony’s edge: the theory and politics of irony. london and new york: routledge. hyde, marina. . “the latest twist in homeland’s racist plot: the realistic graffiti episode.” the guardian.com. october. accessed november . http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /oct/ /homeland-racist-arabic-grafitti-artists- protest?cmp=share_btn_fb inghilleri, moira. . interpreting justice: ethics, politics, and language. london: routledge. jakobson, roman. / . “on linguistic aspects of translation.” in on translation, edited by r.a. brower. cambridge, ma: harvard university press, - . reprinted in the translation studies reader, edited by lawrence venuti. nd ed. london: routledge, - . massad, joseph. . “‘homeland,’ obama’s show.” al jazeera english. october. accessed december . http://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/opinion/ / / .htmls meerman, ester. . “‘homeland is racist’: graffiti artists ‘bomb’ award-winning tv show.” egyptian streets. october. accessed november . http://egyptianstreets.com/ / / /homeland-is-racist-graffiti-artists-bomb-award-winning-tv- show/ mulder, stephennie and erika marie bsumek. . “subverting the script: ‘homeland’ graffiti artists use same techniques as native americans. the huffington post blog. october. accessed november . http://www.huffingtonpost.com/stephennie-mulder/subverting-the- script-hom_b_ .html nicoarea, georgiana. . “interrogating the dynamics of egyptian graffiti: from neglected marginality to image politics.” revista română de studii eurasiatice ( - ): - . nord, christiane. . translating as a purposeful activity: functionalist approaches explained. manchester: st jerome. ---. . “loyalty and fidelity in specialized translation.” confluências: revista de tradução científica e técnica : - . o’sullivan, carol. . translating popular film. new york: palgrave macmillan. pérez-gonzález, luis. . “co-creational subtitling in the digital media: transformative and authorial practices.” international journal of cultural studies ( ): - . phipps, claire. . “‘homeland is racist’: artists sneak subversive graffiti on to [sic] tv show.” the guardian. october. accessed november . http://www.theguardian.com/tv-and- radio/ /oct/ /homeland-is-racist-artists-subversive-graffiti-tv-show qabbani, nizar. / . “ة ا���ب؟	 
ن و�	�� ��� ” [when do they announce the death of arabs?] adab.com. accessed january . http://www.adab.com/modules.php?name=sh er&dowhat=shqas&qid= raff, gideon, patrick harbinson, charlotte stoudt, alex gansa, and howard gordon. . “the tradition of hospitality.” dir. lesli linka glatter. homeland series , episode . ricœur, paul. . on translation. translated by eileen brennan. london and new york: routledge. tartaglione, nancy. . “‘“homeland” is racist’ graffiti airs on showtime series; showrunner alex gansa admires act of ‘artistic sabotage.’” deadline. october. accessed november . http://deadline.com/ / /homeland-is-racist-graffiti-street-artists-showtime-alex-gansa- / tymoczko, maria. . “translation and political engagement.” the translator ( ): - . vermeer, hans. . “skopos and commission in translational action”. in readings in translation theory, edited by andrew chesterman, - . helsinki: oy finn lectura ab. von flotow, louise. . “feminist translation: contexts, practices and theories.” ttr ( ): - . zoghbi, pascal and don karl. . arabic graffiti. extended edition. berlin: from here to fame publishing. appendix : graffiti text and translations arabic graffiti (transcribed from photographs in amin, kapp, and karl [ a, n.p.] except where otherwise noted; entries following an asterisk are visible in the episode itself, although not all clearly) english translation and explanations (quoted translations and explanations from amin, kapp, and karl [ a, n.p.] except where otherwise noted) ”calamities “ أ�� ���� و ����* ”jokes “ أ�� ���� و ���� �� إن��� �� �	 “if your darling is made of honey, don’t lick them all up” (personal communication from caram kapp, february ) #$'ك %$#" �	!� this is a transliteration of “black lives matter”. “#blacklivesmatter” ”repetition teaches bashar“ ا����ار ���+ $*	ر* from a proverb “repetition teaches the donkey”, playing on the fact that “donkey” (ر	,�), pronounced “homar” rhymes with “bashar” (ر	*$). *
 a reference to the egyptian abla fahita puppet“ #.	س
س on spying” (abla fahita is a puppet character from egyptian television; the word “س
 means “spy”. abla ”.	س fahita was accused in of having broadcast coded messages to the muslim brotherhood in an advertisement for vodaphone, an accusation that was looked into by the state security service.) ���� (amin, kapp, and karl c, : ) freedom .د����٣ �	و ان the arabic word for “freedom” (����) is combined with a transliteration of “now in” ( و	� .(د) and the letter daal ,(٣) the number ,(ان “freedom... now in d” we didn’t resist, so he conquered us riding on a“ س�� 	�� � $ ,	ره donkey” �: !,� ھ ي� � س, (amin, kapp, and karl c, : ) fish, milk, tamarind drink [this is a phrase to indicate something disgusting, foul, or incomprehensible, as if these three things were mixed together.] ”against the red, blue and purple devil“ ا;زرق و ا�� # <: = ا�*�>	ن ا;�,� و (“a muslim brotherhood reference”) a	ن �	 ��	ن (amin, kapp, and karl c, : ) once upon a time... *� 	b� ا�,< �*�	ب ا� (amin, kapp, and karl c, : ) “glory to the sprayers” (amin, kapp, and karl c, : ) 
رس c إز آُك اف g ���. , إز ذى� the arabic is a transliteration of the english. (amin, kapp, and karl c, : ) “mohammed is the greatest is ok, of course” (amin, kapp, and karl c, : ) �	رف jرةأ�kز ا�
c :� �� (amin, kapp, and karl c, : ) “they cannot tell the difference between the letter alif and a corn cob” (amin, kapp, and karl c, : ) �'�
 * �#�j ھ “there is no homeland” 
ع �� انّ =
 ”the situation is not to be trusted“ ا�, �	س ! *	ل ��� ا��اس و�	س $	�<"م ! اس (amin, kapp, and karl c, : ) some people are put at your head [i.e. up high; respected] and some people are put under your feet. 
ت ,� * “ready to die” �: رأي ا��س	��: �� this show does not represent the views of the“ ھkا ا�, � � % �� artists” q�<$ :ط
 ”homeland is a watermelon“ ا� (“watermelon is a word often used to indicate that something is a sham or not to be taken seriously”) ”homeland is racist“ ا�
ط: ��s ي* *� � � j� :ط
 ”homeland is not a series“ ا� ا�
ط: ���� (amin, kapp, and karl c, : ) “homeland is a joke” (amin, kapp, and karl c, : ) ”homeland is a joke and it didn’t make us laugh“ * ا�
ط: ���� و �	 = � 	 (amin, kapp, and karl c, : ) 
ا$�� $���: t ر و	ت ا�"�
 و�, (amin, kapp, and karl c, : ) “the flute player dies, and his fingers keep playing”. (amin, kapp, and karl c, : ) appendix excerpt from 
ن و 	ة ا���ب؟” ��� ���“ �	�u �"ار v u وط 	أ� w�
ك � � � ر��. excerpt from “when do they announce the death of arabs?” by nizar qabbani oh my homeland: they have turned you into a horror series ا�, ]ء.ه u ث��	$x أ� ا 
ا ا�\�$	ء؟؟�<v اك إذا�� ��� (qabbani / , n.p.) that we follow in the evening. how do we watch you when they cut off the electricity? (amin, karl, and kapp c, : - : ) see baker ( , ) on the expansion of translation to “a wide range of activities and products that do not necessarily involve an identifiable relationship with a discrete source text” and desjardins ( ) on forms of translation between visual and verbal mediums in newscasting. these points are also noted by a number of articles online about the event, including mulder and bsumek ( ) on hijacking as a feminist activist translation strategy, see in the first instance von flotow ( , - ). the notion of prepositions as indeterminate terms comes from ferguson ( , ), who traces it to john locke’s idea “that knowledge ‘consists in prepositions.’” of course, it is possible that there were people on the production team who could read arabic, who did see and understand the graffiti, but decided to keep silent about it. their silence would in part ensure that the graffiti remained long enough to be transmitted outside of its original physical sphere—the set itself—to the television audience. it would be almost impossible to prove the non- existence of such a person. these levels of authenticity are playing out in what genette ( / , - ) calls “narrative metalepsis”: instrusions across narrative boundaries. see pérez-gonzález ( , - ) and o’sullivan ( , - ) for examples of how similar forms of metalepsis can be created through creative titling in audiovisual texts. the politics of border and nation in nepal in the time of pandemic comment the politics of border and nation in nepal in the time of pandemic mallika shakya # springer nature b.v. as most of south asia faces a surge in covid- incidence following the end of a -month- long lockdown setting off a public uproar about a states’ inability to respond to the pandemic with empathy and effective policy measures, it is timely to reflect on the changing geopolitics of borders in the region, and its implications for the future of nationalism and humanitarianism especially for two countries nepal and india which are currently engaged in an intense border conflict triggering speculations about internal power-shuffling as well as bilateral diplomacy. this dispute involves a -square kilometre stretch of land on nepal’s far-western border with india which is not far from china. unwittingly, this border dispute came immediately ahead of the violent face-off between the indian and chinese military in the galwan valley just over km from the disputed territory with nepal, resulting in the death of indian soldiers. it should be noted however that the nepal-india border dispute is not new by any means; it can be dated back to the treaty that nepal was forced to sign with the colonial british administration following a -year violent war, a treaty which conceded about one-third of nepal’s territory to the british empire. my proposition in this commentary is that this ongoing border dispute, also known in nepal as the kalapani dispute, should be read within the contexts of (i) the regime change in nepal following the end of the cold war, (ii) the india-nepal standoff amid nepal’s promulgation of its constitution which brought a formal closure to the people’s war waged by its maoist rebels and (iii) the rising heavy-handedness on part of the nepali state especially during the country-wide lockdown involving the covid- crisis. i also wish to remind the readers that while india continues to receive extensive coverage in most global policy and media platforms as well as academic deliberations, the same cannot be said about its smaller neighbours including nepal. this commentary presents a non- hegemonic account of nepal’s growing border tensions with a bigger neighbour india in the context of the india-china face-off whose roots can be traced to the end of the cold war and an unprecedented rise of neoliberal capitalism in south asia in the s. https://doi.org/ . /s - - -x * mallika shakya mallika@sau.ac.in department of sociology, south asian university, akbar bhawan, chanakyapuri, new delhi , india published online: august dialectical anthropology ( ) : – http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - -x&domain=pdf http://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:mallika@sau.ac.in the border dispute: the tip of an iceberg on june , months after it imposed a strict national lockdown, the nepalese house of representatives unanimously endorsed the second amendment to the constitution of nepal to update the country’s new political map in its national emblem. the bill was endorsed unanimously by the upper house the day after. the cabinet had issued the concerned map on may which incorporated limpiyadhura, lipulekh and kalapani, a -square-kilometre strip on its far west frontiers disputed with india, within nepal’s borders (ghimire ). india reacted strongly to this. its army chief general mm naravane made a public statement that nepal “might have raised this problem at the behest of someone else” thus implying an alleged chinese role. india’s ministry of external affairs stated that nepal’s revised map included parts of indian territory and urged kathmandu to correct this “unilateral act” and “to respect india’s sovereignty and territorial integrity”. the right-wing media in india openly claimed that nepal had taken the “drastic” moves on kalapani to “appease” china through the latter’s aggressive offensive against india. some far-right media journalists even raised sexist and misogynist speculations about a possible “honey-trap” involving the role of ms. hou yanqui, the chinese ambassador for nepal known for her bold diplomacy. the mainstream media in india distanced itself from such misogynist attacks but treated this border dispute with outrage and anticipated a strong indian backlash. on june , when an indian citizen was killed and three others injured in the nepalese side of the border in sitamadhi, some km southeast of the disputed kalapani territory, the indian media was quick to link this with the kalapani dispute and anticipate a military escalation from the indian side. the diplomats from both countries later clarified that the sitamadhi incident was not a military dispute but a local law and order matter involving the enforcement of the covid- lockdown (india today ). two days later, as a violent face-off erupted between the chinese and indian military forces on the galwan valley in ladakh—about km northeast of the site of nepal-india dispute —killing indian soldiers and triggering a major backlash from the opposition party within india, its diplomats came forth to suggest that it is within india’s interest to reconcile the matter with nepal than to escalate, and that disputes with nepal should not be entwined with the embroiling dispute with china. in an interview with karan thapar, a former nsa advisor and a seasoned nepal expert shivshankar menon, responded to a question suggesting a chinese role in nepal’s standoff with india by saying “nepal is a friendly neighbour with whom we have intimate ties of various kinds and we should deal with it accordingly rather than mixing it up into a much more complicated and difficult and larger geopolitical problem” (thapar ). the intellectuals and the civil society activists in both countries echoed and fed in to the mainstream media narrative: on may , , the indian defence minister virtually inaugu- rated an -km-long road which had been recently built to facilitate a hindu pilgrimage to the s e e n d t v n e w s b r o a d c a s t e d a n d a l s o t w e e t e d o n m a y . h t t p s : / / t w i t t e r . com/ndtv/status/ (accessed on july ) just days after a video clip went viral in nepali social media, of an indian television journalist suggesting that pm oli might have been “honey-trapped” by hou yanqi, the chinese ambassador to nepal, nepal’s cable and satellite television providers stopped airing indian news channels to register their objection to this. the kathmandu post, the largest english daily in nepal, wrote a sharp editorial on july , objecting to a “vicious disinformation campaign [against pm oli and ambassador yanqi] run by a section of the right-wing, nationalist indian television media in the past few weeks”. m. shakya https://twitter.com/ndtv/status/ https://twitter.com/ndtv/status/ sacred mount kailash on the chinese/tibetan side of the himalayas, and by doing this, it also established a strategic land link between delhi and the tibetan plateau. the chinese side recognised the indian sovereignty in this stretch of land by agreeing to expand trade through the lipulekh pass even when nepal had routinely registered its opposition to this road project from the point of its construction in . basu ( ) was among the few intellectuals from india who acknowledged a -year-long series of discussions between nepal and india on this dispute. a veteran indian marxist intellectual and nepal expert anand swaroop verma went a step ahead to clarify that kalapani and lipulekh are nepalese territory which india had “borrowed” from nepal to set up an army camp during the sino-indian war (indo-nepal news ). from the nepali side, historian ramesh dhungel referred to the maps issued by the colonial survey of india in and which had clearly stated that the source of the border river mahakali was limpiyadhura—and not the lipu khola (a small tributary) as is now being claimed by the current indian establishment—thus clarifying that the entire disputed territories did belong to nepal (thapa ). several civil society activists and political leaders con- nected this border dispute with previous political conflicts where india had leveraged on its border control to put pressure on nepal (shrestha ; jacob ). in , as nepal promulgated its constitution which formally brought a closure to its maoist rebellion, an unofficial blockade was imposed by india for over months amid indian reservation that the new constitution did not adequately address its concerns. popular griev- ance against india’s blockading move stirred a nationalistic current in nepal which later resulted in a massive election victory for the nepal communist party (ncp) led by the current prime minister kp oli. earlier in , when the bilateral trade and transit treaty expired, india officially sealed its borders with nepal for over months resulting in acute shortage of fuel and other everyday household goods throughout the country. the blockade ended only after nepal had a regime change that ended king birendra’s direct rule and ushered in multi-party democracy in nepal. the constitution promulgated by the democratic parliament made headways for an ambitious economic liberalisation programme in nepal so much so that the world bank declared nepal a “best practice” on its structural adjustment programme within few years of democratisation. a young generation in nepal grew up equating democracy with neoliberal capitalism and consumeristic freedom, thereby triggering an unprecedented wave of the commodification of land, labour and money (shakya ). power crisis in the ruling communist party in nepal just weeks after the much-hyped new map was enshrined on the national emblem of nepal, prime minister oli who had led through this grand nationalistic mustering seemed certain to be unseated, not by those in the opposition party but the opposition within his own nepal communist party (ncp). it is important to remember that ncp had been founded just years ago through a merger of the two major streams of the communist movement in the country: one which had aligned itself with the liberals to oust monarchy and usher in multi-party democracy in nepal (i.e. the communist party of nepal-united marxist leninist, or the cpn/ uml) and the other which had waged an armed rebellion against the democratic alliance (i.e. the communist party of nepal-maoist centre, or the maoists). ncp’s permanent committee meeting held on july , concluded that pm oli must resign obeying the party whip. the former maoist party president prachanda who had chaired the politics of border and nation in nepal in the time of pandemic this meeting warned that pm oli (earlier from cpn/uml) must resign if he wanted to “save the unification of the two communist parties”. oli’s supporters responded that such a move will force the prime minister to dissolve the ongoing parliamentary sessions and also register his own new party. rumours were rife that a new cpn/uml had indeed been registered anonymously in the election commission under suspicious circumstances, and the formerly dissolved cpn/uml leaders might have had a role in this. the story of anti-oli stance within ncp is not simply a rift between the two communist factions. several ncp leaders from the democratic stream (or uml) openly sided with former revolutionary prachanda to demand pm oli’s resignation both from national premiership and party chairmanship. allegations were made against oli about corruption, crony capitalism and unilateralism. several protests ongoing in the kathmandu streets overlooking global guidelines about social distancing raised a gamut of issues ranging from serious lapse of law and order in public covid- quarantines to massive corruption in sourcing of public medical supplies, and a spate of caste and gender violence. pm oli, known for his unrelenting satires against the opposition, came under pressure in both public and social media for his denial of the severity of covid- in nepal and dismissal of humanitarian concerns raised both by the opposition party and the civil society. his own comrades accused pm oli of functioning through a narrow coterie and acting unilaterally without party consultations. the internal debate on whether or not to sanction a massive foreign aid package under the millennium challenge corporation (mcc) was particularly acrimonious. however, the biggest objection raised by the party permanent committee during the july meeting was that pm oli had publicly alleged his fellow comrades of sabotaging his cabinet at an indian behest. media hyped in its reportage of the july ncp meeting that comrade prachanda had directly confronted pm oli by saying, “it is not india who is asking for your resignation, it’s me demanding it” (dhakal ). several consultations were held between comrade prachanda and pm oli following this confrontation, and the power corridors in kathmandu were rife with rumours that the chinese ambassador had been very active behind the scenes mediating between the two rivals. within the public sphere, the country saw few mass rallies in support of pm oli and demanding that ncp leaders play politics based on policy than individual showmanship (“neta haina neeti hera”). lockdown and the politics of border the corona virus caught nepal off guard. despite having a thick aviation network with china, possibilities of a covid- crisis had not really been discussed in nepal until february. on february , when nepal mustered a grand nationalistic gesture by evacuating as far as the pm’s resignation was concerned, political commentators in nepal mulled that a sitting prime minister may resign only after losing a no-confidence motion in the parliament, and that the communist tradition of a party committee demanding the resignation of the sitting prime minister was not democratically binding. after reports surfaced of pm oli sending a messenger to the largest opposition party nepali congress, its spokesperson formally clarified that this meeting was not about forming a new coalition cabinet and that the nepali congress will not take over the government even if pm oli resigned. there are over flights arriving at kathmandu every week from various chinese cities. as far as land border is concerned, however, although nepal shares a long border with china, much of it is sealed by the high himalayas. also, unlike its border with india which is one of the few “open borders” in asia where citizens of both countries can crisscross without any formal reporting whatsoever, china and nepal have maintained strict border surveillance especially after the tibet crisis of . m. shakya nepalis, mostly students, stuck in the chinese province of hubei, the returnees were put in strict quarantine, and with this, the young secular republic seemed to wash off its hands from all public duties involving the pandemic. it did nothing for the next weeks to restrict the incoming international traffic, not only from china but also the rest of asia and europe. any suggestion that flights from china should be suspended was seen as an anti-china—and by extension anti-communist—voice. on february , as part of its regular reporting on the global scenario on covid- , the leading national daily carried an opinion piece by ivo daalder, a former us ambassador to nato, condemning that china’s secrecy had made the corona virus crisis worse for the world. this article was previously published in the seoul-based korea herald, and with it came a stock photo showing mao tse tung donning a surgical mask. this was met with a sharp criticism from the chinese embassy in kathmandu. initially came a sharp tweet from the chinese ambassador hou yanqi, and later the chinese embassy in kathmandu issued a formal statement on the same day which criticized that article for “..ignorance and prejudice on china, [and that the reproduction of that image in the tkp had] deeply hurt the feelings of the chinese people…” a group of nepali editors affiliated with various media houses in kathmandu collectively denounced the chinese statement (chhetria patrakar ; the wire ). the situation changed dramatically within a month. as the who declared covid- a pandemic and india suspended all international flights, nepal followed suit on march . four days later, it temporarily sealed its borders both with india and china, bringing to a halt all on- foot, informal border-crossings especially on its open border with india. the country-wide lockdown declared on march , initially for a week but extended till mid-june and further continued in partial forms for the next month, dramatically altered everyday life on its border towns especially involving migrant workers who had crossed thisopen-border to seek liveli- hood abroad. india’s tragedy about migrant workers being caught off guard and having to walk several hundred kilometres to their hometowns is well documented (vasavi ). in the wake of the country-wide lockdown, nepal saw similar exodus on part of its own internal migrant workers although these were not widely reported. no concerted efforts came out of the civil society including trade unions towards helping the migrant workers on their perilous journey. as the bourgeois middle class turned its blind eye to this, the state easily shrugged off the woes of the migrant labour as a “necessary evil” to save the country from corona virus. instead, as the media highlighted that all of the five cases of covid- reported in nepal in march were “imported” and that the migrant workers returning from india may potentially be covid- carriers, the border surveillance became stricter. pm oli made an off-the-cough remark in the parliament that % of the corona virus cases in nepal had come from india. few footages circulated of some nepalis sneaking into their villages by crossing the indian borders through green fields and rivers without notifying the authorities. further, global media narratives of “super-spreaders” added stigma and fear of the “foreign-returnees” in nepal (shrestha ). bundled up with class discrimination, the migrant workers became an especially suspicious demographic category who had to be contained and kept away in order to keep the bourgeois middle class safe. a series of draconian police crackdowns were unleashed both on the nepal-india border and in kathmandu. even then, the government hardly addressed the burning issue that there were very few public quarantines and test centres, and that the national stocks of ppes and ventilators were grossly inadequate. on april , al-jazeera produced a sensational coverage of a man who had swam across the bordering mahakali river risking his own life, only to surrender to police arrest as he landed on the politics of border and nation in nepal in the time of pandemic the bank. he boldly spoke of the sufferings of hundreds stranded on the other side of the border with inadequate food and medical facilities “sleeping like animals on the ground”, and urged that the country needed to save them (shrestha ). this raised concerns about over two million nepalis working in india, many working as low-wage labourers, but the govern- ment kept the borders sealed. only on june nepal and india opened border points to allow their stranded citizens to cross the border and come home. further concerns were raised as the pandemic swept through the gulf states, and measures were taken to expel the already-repressed migrant workers without any care for their repatri- ation. in early july, nepal facilitated nine repatriation flights to evacuate thousand or so nepali citizens, mostly migrant workers who had been stuck in qatar, uae, saudi arabia, kuwait, the maldives and malaysia. more repatriation flights are being scheduled in the following weeks. for a country that relies on remittance to cover % of its gdp and with an estimated . million nepalis working in the gulf states, evacuation of a couple of thousands is clearly too little and too late. even so, there is very little public cry about this in nepali media and among political and social activists. covid- nationalism: governance and protest nepal had mustered a grand nationalistic gesture mid-february when it evacuated the nepalis stuck in hubei. that nationalistic euphoria went decisively downhill as nepal registered several covid- cases within the country and imposed a country-wide lockdown mid-march. the lockdown was harsh, and the public saw the police act increasingly brutally towards those who could not afford to confine themselves within private homes. but the state was in denial about covid economics, and no measures had been taken to provide even a bare minimum cushioning to help those who lost livelihoods because of the lockdown. this gross oversight did not raise much criticism from the elite, and it seems that the global grammar of lockdown had already accomplished its coercive justice on the working poor in nepal. the rhetoric about covid- being a “foreign” disease stirred stigma against the “foreign- returnees” thus leading to sheer neglect of the plight of the low-wage labourers, especially dalits, who also bear the double brunt of class and caste discrimination. reports came in june that a -year-old dalit worker from a nepal-india border town had died in the isolation ward after several weeks in a badly catered public quarantine which denied him even a packet of oral rehydration solution as he lay in bed suffering from diarrhoea after having undertaken a - km journey from ahmedabad on foot. another dalit citizen had died in police custody under suspicious circumstances. the dalit struggle committees took up both these issues and staged protests. as the black lives matter protests swept through euro-america, several public intellec- tuals and social activists spoke about violence against dalits in nepal. kathmandu intellectuals openly condemned two particularly gruesome incidents that had recently occurred. during the lockdown, six young men had died in mob attack in a remote district as navaraj bk (a dalit) sought to meet his girlfriend from the higher caste who he wanted to persuade to marry him. a -year-old dalit girl angira pasi was found hanging from the tree after the community raju sada’s relatives claimed that he had died because of the neglect by the hospital while the hospital claimed that he was under treatment in the isolation for encephalitis. m. shakya leaders of her home town ordered a -year-old man of a higher caste who had raped her to marry her as his “punishment”. however, this wave of dalit movement did not gain much momentum. instead, a youth-led protest to sweep through kathmandu took the banner “enough is enough” to raise attention on a sheer lack of government policy and programme on corona virus. frustrated with the forced confinement to their homes for months in the name of covid- control, the urban—and arguably elite—youth staged “socially distanced” protests to hold the government accountable for the covid- mismanagement. the government essentially dismissed these protests and continued financial opaqueness in its disbursement of covid- funds. when asked in the parliament where the government had spent the billion nepali rupees of covid- funds, pm oli shrugged off the question by saying that the focus right now should be on fighting the corona virus and not petty financial calculations. another round of public rallies, mostly staged on the nepal-india border towns, protested a bill on citizenship act which would make it mandatory for foreign women married to nepali men to wait for years before they can apply for nepali citizenship and passports. while the state argued that a -year waiting period would make nepali citizenship provision commen- surable with india’s, opposition parties criticized that the bill is targeted against the border communities who have traditionally married across the border. post-pandemic border and nation just a few months ago, “lockdown” was a word unheard by majority of nepalis, and “quarantine” was something associated with pets than humans. while the elite nepalis closely following the global media lead on covid- had enough time to digest the new global grammar of lockdown and social distancing, the lower strata were caught off guard as a country-wide lockdown was imposed abruptly with draconian measures restricting people’s movements. the state did not consider the lockdown’s effects on the working poor who immediately lost their livelihoods. no relief measures were announced for those who had nothing to eat. the middle class being confined within their homes meant that no people-to- people aid came forward for the poor, thus breaking the chain of cultural charity which had historically stepped in when the government did not do enough. the global grammar of covid- seems to have unleashed a degree of totalitarian ambitions in democratically elected governments elsewhere and in nepal. a case in point is the overnight shutting of the open border between nepal and india and rapid withdrawal of public transport in countries where less than % of the population own a private car. thousands of nepali migrant workers were caught off guard on the indian side of the border after they had walked thousands of miles to return home from various indian cities when they had earlier migrated to work. the police on both sides treated migrant workers brutally, forcing them to spend months in hazardously run quarantine centres. there was very little coverage of the border miseries in the national media. for a country so heavily invested in foreign remittance, it is ill-advised to have turned a blind eye on the repatriation of its migrant workers. instead of rescuing its citizens stuck he was also mocked in social media for dismissing corona virus fears by stating that nepalis have a strong immunity system due to their food habits and geographic location at the foot of the himalayas which apparently produced cool and healthy air that would save people from the corona virus (himal ma thokieko cheeso hawa). the politics of border and nation in nepal in the time of pandemic abroad in dire circumstances and rehabilitating them with dignity, the government seems to indulge in empty rhetoric that nepalis must now “go back to the basics” and repopulate “beautiful mountains with fresh air”. no policies or programmes have been announced to address the concerns of those who were forced to work in the gulf and malaysian factories after finding mountain-living back home simply unsustainable. grave concerns should also be raised about the political lull which unleashed ultra- nationalistic ambitions among those who are ruling. the modi government in india deemed it timely to inaugurate a hindu pilgrimage route in the middle of its own lockdown despite knowing this would trigger border disputes with its neighbours. nepal responded with equal grit, building on the kind of inward-looking ultra-nationalism which had brought pm oli to power in the first place and strengthened his position within his own party following the indian border blockade of . it did not help that china seems set to adopt a policy of gaining strategic advantage on its neighbours especially on sensitive fronts such as military control of acrimonious borders. the open border between nepal and india built around the concept of “bride and bread relations” is probably the biggest casualty of the covid- pandemic as the popular acrimony about the new map played in the hands of brazen showmanship of pm modi in india and pm oli in nepal. as of today, india has surpassed russia to become the third worst-affected country by the corona virus pandemic, and nepal is registering an explosive rise in the number of covid- cases. as worrying as it sounds, covid- has not received the kind of public concern as it should. instead, the public discourse both in nepal and india is so much more about the hollow national prides than the actual measures of public safety and humanitarian relief measures for those who lost their livelihoods. references basu, tapan kumar. ( ). the kalapani imbroglio: has india pushed nepal too far? the wire. https://thewire.in/south-asia/kalapani-india-nepal . accessed july . chhetria patrakar. ( ). a picture of malicious intention. on the chinese embassy’s undiplomatic letter to a nepali newspaper. himal southasian, february , . dhakal, ameet. ( ). sahakarmika taukoma pm olile jhundyayeko adhyadesh ko talwaar! [the sword of ordinance pm oli has hanged on his co-worker’s head!. in setopati.com. https://www.setopati. com/opinion/ (accessed on july , ). ghimire, binod. ( ). constitution amendment bill to update nepal map endorsed unanimously at the lower house. the kathmandu post, june , . https://kathmandupost.com/national/ / / /constitution- amendment-bill-to-update-nepal-map-endorsed-unanimously-at-the-lower-house (accessed on july , ). india today. 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( ). memoirs of the ‘super-spreader’. setopati.com april . . https://www.rajan. com/calendar/convertn.asp (accessed on july, ). m. shakya https://thewire.in/south-asia/kalapani-india-nepal http://setopati.com http://setopati.com http://setopati.com https://kathmandupost.com/national/ / / /constitution-amendment-bill-to-update-nepal-map-endorsed-unanimously-at-the-lower-house https://kathmandupost.com/national/ / / /constitution-amendment-bill-to-update-nepal-map-endorsed-unanimously-at-the-lower-house https://youtu.be/ h usjaczqs https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgjp ehey o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vgjp ehey o https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnf ujixos https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=bnf ujixos http://setopati.com http://setopati.com http://setopati.com thapa, saroj. ( ). lipulekh is ours, the government must not shake feet (lipulekh hamro ho, sarkaarle khutta kamaaunu hundaina: interview with historian prof dr ramesh dhungel in himalaya television’s daily discussion series samaya sandarva. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=da s xqpfpy (accessed on july , ). thapar, karan. ( ). chinese behaviour has been very different from anything in the past: former nsa shivshankar menon. the wire. june , . https://thewire.in/external-affairs/shivshankar-menon- interview-china (accessed on july , ). the wire. ( ). nepali editors condemn chinese embassy for statement criticising newspaper”. staff reporting. the wire. february . https://thewire.in/south-asia/nepali-citizens-anand-teltumbde- gautam-navlakha-arrest-statement (accessed on june , ). vasavi ar. ( ). india’s lockdown tragedy: bleeding along the fault lines of a nation. corona times. june . https://www.coronatimes.net/india-lockdown-tragedy-fault-lines-nation/ (accessed on august, ). publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. the politics of border and nation in nepal in the time of pandemic https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=da s xqpfpy https://thewire.in/external-affairs/shivshankar-menon-interview-china https://thewire.in/external-affairs/shivshankar-menon-interview-china https://thewire.in/south-asia/nepali-citizens-anand-teltumbde-gautam-navlakha-arrest-statement https://thewire.in/south-asia/nepali-citizens-anand-teltumbde-gautam-navlakha-arrest-statement https://www.coronatimes.net/india-lockdown-tragedy-fault-lines-nation/ 	the politics of border and nation in nepal in the time of pandemic 	the border dispute: the tip of an iceberg 	power crisis in the ruling communist party in nepal 	lockdown and the politics of border 	covid- nationalism: governance and protest 	post-pandemic border and nation 	references [pdf] promoting intergroup openness and support for equality in a new cultural context: replicating the effects of internal criticism | semantic scholar skip to search formskip to main content> semantic scholar's logo search sign increate free account you are currently offline. some features of the site may not work correctly. 	doi: . / . . corpus id: promoting intergroup openness and support for equality in a new cultural context: replicating the effects of internal criticism @article{mcdonald promotingio, title={promoting intergroup openness and support for equality in a new cultural context: replicating the effects of internal criticism}, author={melissa m. mcdonald and samantha brindley and e. halperin and tamar saguy}, journal={the journal of social psychology}, year={ }, volume={ }, pages={ - } } 	melissa m. mcdonald, samantha brindley, + author tamar saguy 	published 	psychology, medicine 	the journal of social psychology abstract exposure to an outgroup member voicing criticism of his or her own group fosters greater openness to the outgroup’s perspective. research suggests that this effect owes its influence to a serial process in which participants’ perception of the risk involved in voicing internal criticism leads to an increase in the perceived credibility of the speaker. the credibility makes it possible for the speaker to be viewed as open-minded, which subsequently inspires greater hope. this process… expand view on taylor & francis docs.wixstatic.com save to library create alert cite launch research feed share this paper citations view all topics from this paper 	promotion (action) 	fear (mental process) 	confidence intervals one citation citation type citation type 	all types 	cites results 	cites methods 	cites background has pdf publication type author more filters more filters filters sort by relevance sort by most influenced papers sort by citation count sort by recency inclusion of a somatic approach in post-conflict societies as a component for increased inclination to peacebuilding and reconciliation: preliminary evidence from the field 	r. zupancic, laurie leitch 	 	pdf 	view excerpt save alert research feed references showing - of references outgroup members’ internal criticism promotes intergroup openness: the role of perceived risk 	melissa m. mcdonald, samantha brindley, e. halperin, tamar saguy 	psychology, medicine 	the british journal of social psychology 	 	 	pdf 	view excerpts, references results, background and methods save alert research feed exposure to outgroup members criticizing their own group facilitates intergroup openness 	tamar saguy, e. halperin 	psychology, medicine 	personality & social psychology bulletin 	 	 	pdf save alert research feed keeping it to ourselves: effects of audience size and composition on reactions to criticisms of the ingroup 	t. elder, r. 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criticism 	european journal of social psychology, 	 social influence and social change 	s. moscovici, c. sherrard, greta heinz 	psychology 	 	 	view excerpt, references background save alert research feed related papers 	abstract 	topics 	 citations 	 references 	related papers stay connected with semantic scholar sign up about semantic scholar semantic scholar is a free, ai-powered research tool for scientific literature, based at the allen institute for ai. learn more → resources datasetssupp.aiapiopen corpus organization about usresearchpublishing partnersdata partners   faqcontact proudly built by ai with the help of our collaborators terms of service•privacy policy the allen institute for ai by clicking accept or continuing to use the site, you agree to the terms outlined in our privacy policy, terms of service, and dataset license accept & continue wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if 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what it is, who it affects and how care leaders can manage it shale s. bmj leader ; : – . doi: . /leader- - moral injury and the covid- pandemic: reframing what it is, who it affects and how care leaders can manage it suzanne shale , commentary to cite: shale s. bmj leader published online first: [please include day month year]. doi: . / leader- - oxleas nhs foundation trust, dartford, uk department of security and crime science, university college london, london, uk correspondence to dr suzanne shale, oxleas nhs foundation trust, dartford, kent, uk; suzanne. shale@ clearer- thinking. co. uk received june revised june accepted june © author(s) (or their employer(s)) . no commercial re- use. see rights and permissions. published by bmj. the term moral injury has achieved widespread circulation among care leaders during the pandemic, and has been influential in prompting care providers to give fresh consideration to the psychological support available to staff. the notion of moral injury that has come to prominence is one that some label ‘occupational moral injury’. this arises during work such as armed combat or emergency response when people carry out, fail to prevent, or become aware of, human actions that violate deep moral commitments. occupational moral injury is often associated with psychological distress, and moral responses including guilt, anger and disgust. here i draw attention to a broader notion of moral injury found in moral philosophy. in this version, a moral wound can be experienced by anyone. it arises from sources that include injustice, cruelty, status degradation and profound breaches of moral expectations. the moral- philosophical version of moral injury associates it with moral and psychological anguish, and feelings such as bewil- derment, humiliation and resentment. according to this formulation of moral injury, it could affect patients, service users, families and loved ones as well as care staff. experiences of moral injury among the wider public, as well as staff, will call for attention from care leaders long after the pandemic surge. understanding moral injury prior to the pandemic, care leaders did not commonly use the term ‘moral injury’. they most likely use it now to refer to ‘occupational moral injury’. however, many will recognise moral injury in the moral- philosophical sense from their ordi- nary experience of leadership. this is because it is conceptually grounded in recognisable moral behaviours. care leaders may already possess an implicit understanding of how this type of moral injury arises, and tacit knowledge of what to do about it. by making the implicit explicit, this commentary aims to support care leaders to respond well to forthcoming challenges. trauma-based accounts of moral injury the notion of occupational moral injury that is prev- alent in the clinical literature originated in therapy for us war veterans. shay’s insight, as a psychi- atrist, was that some veterans experienced trau- matic existential crises that differed in important ways from post- traumatic stress disorder (ptsd) as then defined. shay viewed veterans’ suffering as a ‘character wound’ associated with annihilation of trust that undermined their personal moral foun- dations. shay appears to have been the first to use the term moral injury in a therapeutic context, defining it by reference to how it arose in combat situations: ‘a betrayal of what’s right by someone who holds legitimate authority in a high stakes situ- ation’. litz et al subsequently proposed a wider definition of moral injury, ‘perpetrating, failing to prevent, bearing witness to or learning about acts that transgress deeply held moral beliefs and expec- tations’. this definition has been widely adopted in studies of public service professions. the heightened interest in a conception of moral injury derived from combat experience is consis- tent with some familiar rhetorical tropes of the pandemic: talk of fight, battle, front lines, winning the war and circumstances said to be unprece- dented. some of this is justified, and attentiveness to the psychological well- being of care providers is to be welcomed without reserve. but to view moral injury as a newly discovered phenomenon that primarily affects professionals is to overlook first, how moral injury befalls citizens; second, a history of lived experiences of moral injury in care organisations; and third, the understanding care leaders already possess of how to prevent and address moral injury. as papadopoulos has written, those who work with people affected by human conflict and other catastrophes know all too well that ordinary citi- zens find life- changing adversity deeply morally disturbing. “troubled by the unpredictable and catastrophic turn of events, and facing the life- shattering consequences of the experienced adver- sities, they are shaken to the core of their being, and in deep anguish they struggle to make sense of what has befallen them and to reassess most aspects of their lives”. adversity has the potential to become morally injurious because, as we are told by those who have experienced it, it shakes people to their founda- tions. it feels as though ‘the rug has been pulled from underneath my feet’, that ‘my whole world has been turned upside down’. moral assumptions that ground us, expectations about what and who we can rely on, are placed in jeopardy. such citizen experience of moral injury is a dimension to human tragedy not quite captured in narrow conceptions of trauma, just as veterans’ experiences of moral injury could not be captured by the terminology of ptsd. o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jle a d e r.b m j.co m / le a d e r: first p u b lish e d a s . /le a d e r- - o n ju ly . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://bmjleader.bmj.com/ http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /leader- - &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://bmjleader.bmj.com/ shale s. bmj leader ; : – . doi: . /leader- - commentary care leaders most frequently encounter citizen experiences of moral injury while responding to care harm. patients who have suffered serious adverse events, loved ones affected by the harm done to the patient, and loved ones bereaved by unex- pected death in a care setting, often express the sentiments in the paragraph above. moreover, there is growing awareness among care providers of the ‘second harm’ inflicted on patients and loved ones by defensive, dishonest, unempathetic or other- wise unhelpful responses to adverse events in care. this notion of second harm is most often couched in psychological terms, but when we listen to the ways patients describe it (disorienta- tion, disbelief, a sense of betrayal, loss of trust in institutions and processes for instance) the impact is clearly akin to the moral injury that papadopoulos recognises in other traumatic events. moral and philosophical accounts of moral injury accounts of moral injury based in psychology of trauma date back several decades. however, moral philosophers find a recognis- able concept of moral injury in the eighteenth century works of bishop joseph butler and adam smith. both butler and smith associated moral injury with citizens’ experiences of cruelty and injustice, and they argued that an attitude of resentment was a morally important form of anger that arose in response. butler’s insights on moral injury and resentment were recalled some two centuries later by hampton and murphy. these modern authors viewed moral injury as actions that profoundly insult or degrade others, thus damaging ‘self- respect, respect for others as moral agents, and respect for the rules of morality or the moral order’. more recently, philosopher margaret walker provided a contemporary account of moral injury which i draw on here. it is helpful first to understand how so- called ‘normative expectations’ underpin our day to day moral life, making trust- based moral relationships possible. normative expectations are, broadly, beliefs about what people should do combined with predictions about what they will do. they are both moral (should) and predictive (will) expectations. citizens who trust care providers have a normative expectation that they should keep them from harm, and also that they will keep them from harm. staff who trust care providers have a normative expecta- tion that employers should provide appropriate personal protec- tive equipment (ppe), and that they will provide appropriate ppe. when normative expectations are mostly met, individuals and communities are able to have trust, confidence and hope in the future. violation of normative expectations can invoke strong emotions, notably the attitude of resentment described by butler and smith. resentment can be understood as a ‘kind of accusing anger at something done’, in particular when a thing done appears to be a significant violation without any adverse conse- quences for the violator. resentment directed towards those with the authority to take a situation in hand is a form of ‘moral address’, a demand to restore respect for breached normative expectations. resentment is uncomfortable, but reminds us that moral relations are in need of repair. to return to the example of care harm, resentment does not automatically follow in the wake of harm itself. rather, resentment more often arises when harmed patients or their loved ones apprehend that their norma- tive expectations of respect, truthfulness or meaningful reme- dial action are not being met. it is not the initial harm, but the violated expectations about what constitutes a proper response to it, that disrupt moral repair. all in all, resentment is valuable because it helps to sustain moral community by triggering a response to breaches of normative expectation. but resentment can also be destructive when it festers in individuals and institutions, mutating into cynical withdrawal or angry retaliation. when we learn that we cannot rely on each other, or authority, to uphold fundamental normative expectations we suffer a loss of trust and confidence in (among other things) people, principles, rules, processes and institutions. the common thread that binds trauma- based theories of moral injury and moral- philosophical theories of moral injury is, therefore, that both emphasise how we build a stable foundation for our psychological, emotional and social existence through being able to rely, more or less, on our moral expectations being met. unfortunately, we do not always know what our own, or others’, normative expectations are until the point that they are breached. even then, feelings of resentment are merely the clue that underlying expectations require examination. although the terms moral injury and moral repair may not have been widely used in care leadership circles in the past, it will hopefully be apparent that the experiences they refer to have in fact been an ordinary part of care leadership. poten- tially morally injurious circumstances arise whenever patients are harmed; when staff are poorly treated for raising concerns; when patients or staff suffer discriminatory behaviour; when inadequate resources put staff and patients at risk; when there is avoidance of accountability at the highest level of public institu- tions and so on. before going further, we should note that on any account of it, leaders may potentially be the commissioner or the subject of moral injury, or the author of moral repair. in future months and years, care leaders may find themselves occupying any, or indeed all, of these positions. what might be potential sources of moral injury following the pandemic? i was writing this commentary during a period of public outrage that started with the behaviour of the uk prime minister’s special advisor dominic cummings and was shortly followed by the police killing of black us citizen george floyd. these events afford us insight into three notable sources of moral injury, anal- ysed below. it is important to state that it is not possible, within the scope of this commentary, to do justice to the meaning of the protests that followed george floyd’s death. situations in which it is not possible to fulfil cherished moral commitments are the first source of moral injury. cummings was widely perceived to have violated lockdown by driving from london to durham when infected and taking his family on an excursion during his recuperation. this news was met by an outpouring of grief and anger. it came from people not allowed to be with parents, children and partners when they died; unable to attend or invite people to funerals; not permitted to be present at births; unable to greet newborns, or to visit to support new mothers. it was not just those directly affected who expressed outrage, but many who empathised with them and who had themselves followed the rules. preventing the spread of coronavirus needed millions of people to treat the good of strangers as more important than their own preferences, and in some cases even more important than obli- gations of love and care they felt they owed to those close to them. people who made this sacrifice can rightly claim it as a profoundly moral act, but it is not without cost. being prevented from doing what we normally believe to be right, when deeply felt needs and obligations are calling us to do so, is morally inju- rious. for citizens, being prevented from meeting fundamental o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jle a d e r.b m j.co m / le a d e r: first p u b lish e d a s . /le a d e r- - o n ju ly . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://bmjleader.bmj.com/ shale s. bmj leader ; : – . doi: . /leader- - commentary moral commitments associated with birth, love and death is akin to the moral injury experienced by care workers when they are unable to provide the care they believe they should. for a man who asked others to set their own moral commitments aside, to then insist he was morally justified in not making the same sacri- fice, adds insult to injury. turning now to george floyd’s death, this violated basic normative expectations of police behaviour including that they should act justly towards every citizen, irrespective of race. the brutality of his treatment prompts us to recall that cruelty and injustice were at the heart of bishop butler and adam smith’s understanding of moral injury. and, the black lives matter movement highlights the many ways systemic racial inequality injures bame (black, asian and minority ethnic) people, through showing lack of respect for them and for moral equality. this type of abuse is central to hampton and murphy’s concep- tion of moral injury. finally, resentment in both these cases has served to call attention to unpunished violations of significant moral expec- tations. in cummings’ case, he has apparently broken morally demanding rules and subsequently escaped without censure. in floyd’s case, widespread expressions of resentment were a ‘moral address’ to authorities to bring floyd’s killers, and other police officers, to account. how might identifying these sources of moral injury help leaders prepare for the moral injury that may emerge following the pandemic? drawing on walker, i have categorised poten- tially morally injurious problems below into harms, losses, exploitation and demotions of others’ status. the issues i flag are all breaches of normative expectation. whether they turn out to inflict deep moral injuries will depend to some extent on whether they are met with early moral repair. so, following this list, i turn to moral repair. harms ► nosocomial infection with coronavirus. ► additional non- covid- deaths following disruption of normal care pathways, for example, diabetes, sepsis, asthma and renal failure. ► physical and/or mental harm following delay or cancel- lation of treatment during the pandemic, and from long waiting lists once non- urgent, non- covid- treatment restarts. ► injury to the physical or mental health of long- term care residents (older people, people with learning disability and so on) during the lockdown. ► disproportionate impact of covid- on bame staff and communities. losses ► psychological distress among families not permitted to attend deaths, births and so on during the surge. ► psychological distress in staff who have foregone their own family contacts to promote infection control; witnessed repeated bereavement and grief; or who have not been able to provide care they thought patients deserved. ► withdrawal or reduction in services such as mental health support, face- to- face appointments, or care (such as hydro- therapy) for people deemed able to get by without it. ► additional loss of personal freedom for some (eg, people with learning disabilities or mental health inpatients) owing to difficulties arranging leave, exercise and so on. ► impact on residents, staff and families should private resi- dential care providers become unviable owing to financial and other pressures. exploitation ► colleagues perceived to be ‘free riders’ or to have ‘not pulled their weight’ during the pandemic, for example, abusing self- isolation rules or refusing to alter working patterns. ► leaders using the pandemic as a cover to make contentious changes in service provision, such as closing emergency departments. demotions ► exclusion of patients’ families from care and decision- making at end of life during the pandemic. ► people who need care for long- term conditions perceiving they have been treated as a lower priority during the pandemic than people with covid- . ► patient and lay representatives excluded from system recovery planning or consultations around service reconfiguration. responding to moral injury with moral repair both kaplan’s ‘law of the instrument’ (to a man with a hammer, everything looks like a nail) and the french concept of ‘deforma- tion professionelle’ lead us to expect that adherents to a trauma- based conception of moral injury will favour psychological interventions, while adherents to a moral conception will favour actions based in moral repair. it would not be helpful to place these two modes in opposition, and indeed one of the reasons for writing this commentary is the conviction that each should inform the other. greenberg and tracy have written in this journal about a preventive, psychological approach to supporting staff at risk of occupational moral injury. they advocate reinforcing social bonds between colleagues and supervisors, meeting basic staff needs, being alert to early signs of distress and avoiding ‘medicalisation’ of uncomfortable responses to trauma. moral repair, which can be preventive as well as reparative, aims to re- establish a sense of moral equilibrium within individuals and between people. the principles outlined below seek to restore trust, confidence and hope. as i have discussed in detail elsewhere, theorists and prac- titioners view seven acts of acknowledgement as central. acknowledgement is a combination of deep listening, altered understanding and mutually agreed reparative action. . acknowledging an injured party as a moral equal. moral re- pair will not succeed if one party is placed in an inferior mor- al position, seen as having less right to define the situation than those in authority. when people are told by authority ‘this is how we see it and how we see it is what counts’, they are not being treated as moral equals. . acknowledging the authority of shared norms. moral repair requires that we recognise the existence of shared norms, make clear that these norms remain important even though they may have been violated, and treat them as action guid- ing. . acknowledging injury. a suitable context must be created in which the nature of (moral) injury can be spoken of, ex- plained, heard and understood. attending to the testimony of those affected by moral injury is critical. . acknowledging responsibility. moral repair requires that those who are truly responsible for something acknowledge that responsibility. this is not the same as laying blame. in ac- knowledging responsibility, the person or institution recog- o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jle a d e r.b m j.co m / le a d e r: first p u b lish e d a s . /le a d e r- - o n ju ly . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://bmjleader.bmj.com/ shale s. bmj leader ; : – . doi: . /leader- - commentary nises that others have placed reliance on them and have been let down. acknowledging responsibility reinforces the view that the norms are valid, and it is reasonable to rely on them. . acknowledging that remedy is due, and that the injured par- ty may define what is owed. the first part of this can be dif- ficult, and the second part even more challenging. failure to acknowledge that remedy is due is, to paraphrase archbishop desmond tutu, equivalent to saying sorry for stealing your pen and then refusing to give it back. moral repair obliges us to ask what we can do to rectify the wrong. in cases of medical harm we cannot change the past, and patients know this. what they ask us to do is take steps to prevent the same thing happening again. the remedy of future prevention has, unfortunately, been somewhat debased by organisations claiming to have ‘learnt’ from events while not implementing effective improvement. . acknowledging righteous anger, or other negative feelings, in those who have been injured. while most will recognise the validity of resentment, anger, hurt and so on, it may need to be acknowledged for much longer than the commissioner of the injury feels comfortable with. it is common to com- plain that someone or some group now needs ‘to move on’. it is not for anyone who has (morally) injured another to determine the timescale for recovery or restoration. . acknowledging that in injuring another, we should experi- ence sorrow and regret. this is often viewed as a requirement for apologies. it is more than that. this is not about words but making it apparent that there is genuine sorrow and re- gret, perhaps remorse for moral injury one has inflicted. conclusion the term ‘moral injury’ was not widely used by care leaders before the pandemic, nor has the term moral repair been in lead- ership common parlance. however, even if the terminology is relatively new, examples of moral injury and practices of moral repair will be recognisable to many. coronavirus has presented leaders with exceptional chal- lenges. some leaders may feel that they themselves have suffered moral injury during the pandemic, according to any of the defi- nitions. some will be concerned that they have inadvertently commissioned it. and some may feel daunted at the prospect of having to repair it. the same can also be said about the grievous patterns of racial inequality that have been exposed both by covid- and the recent protests. drawing attention to potential moral injuries more far- reaching than those already well- rehearsed may not be welcome at a time when care leaders face extraordinary clinical and organisational demands. but when moral injuries do not receive due attention, they weigh down both people and institutions. the pandemic may be unprecedented, but moral injury in care organisations is not. an important message to take from this commentary is that within the community of care leaders, there are those who understand, at least implicitly, how moral injury is caused; and there is considerable scope to draw on and learn from previous experiences of attempting moral repair. twitter suzanne shale @ethicsconsult contributors ss is the sole author. funding the authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not- for- profit sectors. competing interests ss works as an independent ethics consultant providing services to the nhs, public bodies, private health providers and not- for- profit organisations. she chairs the charity action against medical accidents. patient consent for publication not required. provenance and peer review commissioned; externally peer reviewed. this article is made freely available for use in accordance with bmj’s website terms and conditions for the duration of the covid- pandemic or until otherwise determined by bmj. you may use, download and print the article for any lawful, non- commercial purpose (including text and data mining) provided that all copyright notices and trade marks are retained. references greenberg n, docherty m, gnanapragasam s, et al. managing mental health challenges faced by healthcare workers during covid- pandemic. bmj ; :m . williamson v, murphy d, greenberg n. covid- and experiences of moral injury in front- line key workers. occup med . doi: . /occmed/kqaa . [epub ahead of print: apr ]. williamson v, stevelink sam, greenberg n. occupational moral injury and mental health: systematic review and meta- analysis. br j psychiatry ; : – . shay j. achilles in vietnam: combat trauma and the undoing of character. simon and schuster, . shay j. odysseus in america: combat trauma and the trials of homecoming. simon and schuster, . walker mu. moral repair: reconstructing moral relations after wrongdoing. cambridge: cambridge university press, . shay j. moral injury. psychoanal psychol ; : – . litz bt, stein n, delaney e, et al. moral injury and moral repair in war veterans: a preliminary model and intervention strategy. clin psychol rev ; : – . haight w, sugrue e, calhoun m, et al. a scoping study of moral injury: identifying directions for social work research. child youth serv rev ; : – . papadopoulos rk. moral injury and beyond : understanding human anguish and healing traumatic wounds. milton park, abingdon, oxon; new york, ny: routledge, . ottosen mj, sedlock ew, aigbe ao, et al. long- term impacts faced by patients and families after harmful healthcare events. j patient saf . doi: . / pts. . [epub ahead of print: jan ]. kenward l. when the healthcare system causes harm. therapy today ; : – . butler j. fifteen sermons preached at the rolls chapel: botham, . smith a. the theory of moral sentiments. dd raphael & al macfie liberty fund, . murphy jg, hampton j. forgiveness and mercy. cambridge university press, . greenberg n, tracy d. what healthcare leaders need to do to protect the psychological well- being of frontline staff in the covid- pandemic. bmj . shale s. moral leadership in medicine: building ethical healthcare organizations. cambridge university press, . anderson- wallace m, shale s. restoring trust: what is ’quality’ in the aftermath of healthcare harm? clin risk ; : – . o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://b m jle a d e r.b m j.co m / le a d e r: first p u b lish e d a s . /le a d e r- - o n ju ly . d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://twitter.com/ethicsconsult http://dx.doi.org/ . /bmj.m http://dx.doi.org/ . /occmed/kqaa http://dx.doi.org/ . /bjp. . http://dx.doi.org/ . /a http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.cpr. . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.childyouth. . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /pts. http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://bmjleader.bmj.com/ 	moral injury and the covid- pandemic: reframing what it is, who it affects and how care leaders can manage it 	understanding moral injury 	trauma-based accounts of moral injury 	moral and philosophical accounts of moral injury 	what might be potential sources of moral injury following the pandemic? 	harms 	losses 	exploitation 	demotions 	responding to moral injury with moral repair 	conclusion 	references european journal of media studies www.necsus-ejms.org how black lives matter in ‘the wire’: a video essay jason mittell necsus ( ), spring : – url: https://necsus-ejms.org/how-black-lives-matter-in-the-wire-a- video-essay/ as black lives matter activists pushed the issue of police violence against af- rican-american citizens onto the broad public agenda in the summer of , my mind turned to the wire. i had watched the landmark hbo series five times, written a fair amount about it, and taught courses about the series, which portrayed the lives of the black urban underclass and inner-city polic- ing in more depth and complexity than previously seen on television. alt- hough it is fiction and i always am sceptical toward claims of its perfect ver- https://necsus-ejms.org/how-black-lives-matter-in-the-wire-a-video-essay/ https://necsus-ejms.org/how-black-lives-matter-in-the-wire-a-video-essay/ https://vimeo.com/ necsus – european journal of media studies vol ( ), isimilitude, the wire is driven by a journalistic impulse to reveal many reali- ties of urban america that remain invisible to many white americans, includ- ing me. as ferguson, missouri was gripped in protests, i thought back to the wire and its fictionalised baltimore, trying to reconcile what i was watching on live newscasts with what i had seen many times on hbo. the absence of police violence against black citizens on the series was striking, and my mind kept replaying a scene from the second episode, one of the very few instances of such a representation. my support for the black lives matter movement and suspicions of the police felt dissonant with my love and respect for the wire. as months and years passed, that dissonance lingered in the back of my mind, and i tried to write about my thoughts, but to no avail – nothing i wrote effectively captured either intellectual insights or emotional responses to the imperfect reconciliation between my political and aesthetic commitments. in the summer of , i decided to try to express my thoughts via moving images and sounds instead of written words, embarking on a videographic essay on the topic. working with footage from both the series and the news, grappling with the ethics of showing actuality footage of police violence, and watching officer pryzbylewski cold-cock a kid in slow-motion allowed me to move forward with this project. i hope this video succeeds in conveying this dissonance, and recreates the challenges of working through the fraught pol- itics of representation in an era when police regularly murder black citizens without legal consequence. author jason mittell is professor of film & media culture and american studies and founder of the digital liberal arts initiative at middlebury college. his books include complex television: the poetics of contemporary television storytelling (nyu press, ), the videographic essay: criticism in sound and image (with christian keathley; caboose books, ), and how to watch television (co- edited with ethan thompson; nyu press, ). he is project manager for [in]transition: journal of videographic film & moving image studies and co-di- rector of the neh-supported workshop series scholarship in sound & image. 	how black lives matter in ‘the wire’: a video essay microsoft word - poetrypost-truth-final.doc title poetry in the post-truth era: formal structures in claudia rankine’s citizen: an american lyric author olivia djawoto publication forum: university of edinburgh postgraduate journal of culture & the arts issue number issue date autumn publication date / / editors vicki madden and maria elena torres-quevedo forum claims non-exclusive rights to reproduce this article electronically (in full or in part) and to publish this work in any such media current or later developed. the author retains all rights, including the right to be identified as the author wherever and whenever this article is published, and the right to use all or part of the article and abstracts, with or without revision or modification in compilations or other publications. any latter publication shall recognise forum as the original publisher. 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 	 university of edinburgh postgraduate journal of culture and the arts issue | autumn 	 forum | issue 	 poetry in the post-truth era: formal structures in claudia rankine’s citizen: an american lyric olivia djawoto nanyang technological university	 in the unbridled relativism of this post-truth era, poetry seems more out of place than ever before. in particular, works with an impulse towards fiction are perceived as incapable of participating in the non-fictional world at large. yet, writers like claudia rankine still return to the poetic form to confront the issue of race in an america that sees itself as post-racial. rather than contest such existing claims of “truth” with one of her own, rankine, in citizen: an american lyric, chooses instead to examine what it means to be a “citizen” as an african-american. through a self-reflexive mode of inquiry, she provokes readers to consider the state of race-relations within america. this article thus argues that poetry can have a stake in our reality not merely in spite of, but precisely because of the dissonance arising out of so many competing “truths”. jan mukařovský claimed that "the question of truthfulness does not make sense at all in poetry” because of its discursive role as a form of expression rather than documentation ( ). according to this belief, the aesthetic agenda of poetry not only precludes it from contending with the ontological realities of the non-fictional world, but places it in an entirely separate belief system. even though the experience of poetry is inevitably situated in reality, the implication of mukařovský’s claim is that we are always able to maintain a boundary between the two. truthfulness, or the inclination towards the making of accurate claims about the non-fictional world, operates in a different “sense” than poetry does as incompatible systems of logic. poetry’s relationship to the question of veracity thus goes beyond disinterest or inaptitude. rather, mukařovský is sceptical about whether this relationship exists in the first place. the lines that mukařovský wishes to draw between fiction and reality, however, do not seem to fall into place as neatly as he envisioned. poetry, or any act of fiction, can in fact introduce and birth its own veracity. to illustrate through an example from john hayden woods, events and characters that were once a figment of the imagination can be reified into truth-statements like, “sherlock holmes lives on baker street” ( ). these statements do not inhabit the same degree of reality we are in, but are nonetheless significant in the way they instantiate a once-imagined item into language, language that we participate in to describe, alter, and represent the world. sherlock holmes and baker street might not exist tangibly as a person and place in our world, but they exist as signifiers that invoke concepts understood and shared by those who are familiar with the fictional detective. even in their immateriality, these signifiers that originate from within fiction “‘call into existence’ …possible worlds” that are poised to become ours in the way that they persist in our language as words that embody meaning within collective consciousness (doležel ). it is through his fiction that sir arthur conan doyle could turn the utterance “sherlock holmes” into a recognizable name. forum | issue 	 poets and authors of fiction thus inadvertently expand our semiotic reality with the introduction of new signs and symbols. what happens, however, when this semiotic reality is denied? in this era of post-truth, signs become untenable. factual evidence is dismissed and displaced by a reckless and uninhibited relativism that renders any claim convincing through “appeals to emotion and personal belief” (oed). the notion of “post-truth” has developed new implications within the context of the u.s presidential election. with a presidency that has consistently demonstrated blatant disregard for facts, america has quickly become the site in which the anxiety between truth and fiction has pervaded political rhetoric and public discourse, proliferating down to the everyday. it is this quotidian conflation of truth and fiction that claudia rankine foreshadows in her collection of poetry, citizen: an american lyric. rankine’s interests lie within an intersection of a post-truth culture and the experience of being black in america. african-americans’ subjectivity — their intimate knowledge of the minority experience in america — is constantly at odds with a public that often thinks of itself as post-racial. in mark orbe’s study conducted across more than three hundred individuals about the public’s sentiment towards then-president barack obama, a large number of participants reflected the desire to circumvent the issue of race in their responses. there were calls “[not to] bring up race, because it doesn’t matter” ( ), and at least one invoked the phrase itself by referring to obama as “a post-racial president” ( ). most problematically, one respondent said that “a lot of things about [barack obama] radiate ‘white’ and not ‘black.’ and maybe that’s why i don’t think about his race” ( ). this last response perhaps encapsulates the misguided notions about what a post-racial society entails, in which the concept of “post-race” here is thought of as synonymous with “not black”. what is more concerning, however, is the respondent’s lack of awareness to the irony of his or her statement: that in speaking of obama’s “whiteness”, they have already and explicitly started a conversation about race. in his analysis of the results, orbe reflects that the responses of participants who think that america has progressed into a post-racial state proves that this is not the case ( ). we see this more recently in the “all lives matter” and “blue lives matter” counter-movements that arose in response to the “black lives matter” campaign, which sought to highlight the unjustified brutalities black people face on a quotidian basis. the former positioned themselves rhetorically as supporters of an egalitarianism that they accused “black lives matter” of forgetting. the truth that those of “all lives matter” forget, however — which is also the truth that white america wants to forget — is the one that individuals like w.e.b. du bois capture with his metaphor of the colour-line or the veil in the souls of black folk ( , ). it is the spectre of slavery that haunts america and the implications of those systematic differences that manifests itself as a pervasive racism. the truth is that even though all lives should matter, black lives are often denied this condition—a condition they have to contend with as part of their hyphenated identity of african-american, while others who are white can afford to feel unimplicated by this injustice. the truth is that america is not as post-racial as it believes itself to be. african-americans are confronted with these self-effacing moments of post-truth when told to “get over” slavery (patterson ) or when the television news-show host interviewing ta-nehisi coates would rather direct the audience to a photograph of a black child hugging a white police officer forum | issue 	 in wake of the ferguson shootings than deal with coates’ answer to the question of “what it meant to lose [his] body” (coates , ). they are confronted with an unwillingness to recognize america’s struggle with race when football player colin kaepernick’s body, genuflected to the sound of the star- spangled banner, is read by the white majority as unpatriotic and even treacherous rather than an emphatic response to the state of race-relations in the country. the post-truth era is the time of a burgeoning fiction in which its own authors are unaware of their own complicity. instead of critiquing those questionable representations of the world or offering a counter-argument, however, rankine seeks to lift the veil from the eyes of post-truth believers themselves by casting doubt upon the veracity of their claims of america’s post-racial state, and revealing the artifice of their fiction. rather than add to the multiplicity of voices clamouring for their own version of truth, poetry opens these truth-claims up as sites of contestation by revealing the fiction behind them. intercorporeality and intersections the title of citizen: an american lyric suggests a hesitance to include “american” in the same breath — that there is something amiss in a declaration of citizenship that most can take for granted as part of their own identity. already, we see the beginnings of rankine’s self-reflexive impulse in unsettling the ease with which the phrase “american citizen” comes, splitting it across the two rows of title and subtitle rather than allowing the reader to apprehend it as a whole. “american citizen” has to be put together in the reader’s mind as a product of their mental association. before this can happen, however, the reader also has to contend with a photograph of david hammons’ installation titled in the hood that takes up most of the front cover of citizen. in this image, the decapitated hood of a black sweatshirt is suspended against a white wall or, in this case, a white background. it is a provocative emblem that hearkens back to a history of slavery and lynchings, and foreshadowed the murder of trayvon martin, whose hoodie became a symbol of racialized violence almost a decade after hammons’ installation. with this image, rankine directly places the issue of race within the declarative statement of individual citizenship. it is a necessary part of constructing an american identity, rankine insists, and even those who believe in america’s post-racial state will have trouble ignoring the visceral resonances of hammons’ evocative image. for those who are black, the voice that demands to be seen as american belongs to a body that is broken by the very thing it calls upon. in an interview with the guardian, rankine reflects: “i called it citizen because i wanted to ask: who gets to hold that status—despite everyone technically having it? how is it embodied and honoured? the title contains a question.” (kellaway). rankine’s method of contesting the prevalent post-truth, post-race rhetoric thus begins not with an answer, but with a question. it cuts through the white noise of multiple “truths”, a deluge of various beliefs and opinions that buries the issue of race in america instead of giving it more clarity. in the midst of this epistemological impasse, rankine’s deliberate and inquisitive pause here provides a space within which a meditation on the visceral experience of racism in america can replace the competition of truths. if cerebral arguments have failed to sway public discourse away from its post-racial inclinations, rankine looks towards forum | issue 	 phenomenology and individual expressions of blackness as another possible way to contend with it. it is not just the singular experience that she is interested in, however. rather, in examining race which has implications upon a certain kind of body shared by many, rankine engages in what gail weiss calls an “intercorporeal” discourse in which the racism is not just reckoned with by the individual alone, but by attending to the heterogeneity of experiences of racism ( ). even though its subtitle implies a series of poetry written in the first person, rankine writes from the perspective of the many black individuals who have spoken about their experiences of being black in america to form this series of microaggressions captured as vignettes. in an interview with national public radio (npr), rankine reveals to her audience the kind of fictionalizing of reality in which she partakes: many of the anecdotes in the book were gathered by asking friends of mine to tell me moments when racism surprisingly entered in, when you were among friends or colleagues, or just doing some ordinary thing in your day. ( : : - : : ) in contrast with mukařovský’s insistence that there is no place for reality in fiction, we observe, in citizen, a correspondence between the two that makes sense considering today’s discursive climate: what is the state of fiction when the line between fiction and reality has been blurred, and the former begins to supplant the latter? if that which is posited as “truth” now yields suspicion more than anything else, then fiction is perhaps left as the only recourse to accessible meaning. unlike the misinformation that thrives in a climate of epistemological confusion as it operates under the guise of “alternative facts”, fiction that is forthcoming about its own contrivances and constructed nature appears to be the most authentic. in citizen, rankine gestures towards this idea by offering fiction as the possible site in which some semblance of truth can be reclaimed. yet, her poetic impulse is not directed towards a sense of veracity in the sense of affirming that something is real and has happened. rather than offering up proofs, rankine is more interested in renegotiating the persona-reader relationship in a way that places the reader directly within the moment of recollection, at the intersection of these everyday experiences of racism, shared amongst many individuals. amalgamated into the singular voice of a persona that transcribes them into the second-person, the events described in the book are told to us by a voice that refers to the reader as “you”, placing them within the text. the acousmatic voice and discursive authority invoking readers as part of the text forces them to relinquish the sense of autonomy that exists for them outside the realm of the text. personal motivation or beliefs no longer function as the reader’s subjective experience, which is the only kind of experience they can have. rather, it is replaced by the awareness of someone else’s self, someone else’s phenomenological experience that the persona puts the reader through. the persona begins the first vignette with this: “you smell good. you are twelve attending sts. philip and james school…” (rankine ). the comparison of the persona’s diction to the language of hypnotic induction becomes compelling here as an acousmatic voice, an unseen voice that coaxes the listener. behind closed eyelids, the hypnotist’s patient stares into the veil of darkness as an acousmatic voice provides the “guidelines of the gaze” — the reader’s forum | issue 	 gaze in this instance (dolar ). the notion of the acousmatic voice hearkens back to the story pythagoras who would sit behind a curtain talking to his disciples, teaching them only through the use of his voice (dolar ). self-consciousness of one’s presence detracts from apprehension of the voice and presents an impediment to learning and listening. the sense of assured selfhood and autonomy that pervades in the awareness of one’s body is read as a distraction that needs to be curtailed in order to clearly apprehend the significance of the voice. as the acousmatic voice supplants the patient’s awareness of their body, rankine likewise denies the reader the comforts of their own identity as they are subjected to the visceral experience of another. returning to that first vignette in citizen, rankine introduces this complex dynamic through the simple and nondescript statement of “you smell good”. engaging in the sense of smell is also an experience of the body that the smell emanates from, even if unseen. to qualify it as a good smell further attests to a consciousness that is aware of the presence of its own body, but one that still remains unable to visually apprehend its own materiality. it is a figurative disembodiment, a blinding of readers to their own bodies in a corporeal curtailment that introduces, in its place, the re-embodying of a “citizen” according to the persona. the reader’s discursive experience of the text is thus oriented towards the persona’s voice. michel chion elaborates on the mechanics of the acousmatic voice as it appears in film, which yields some resonances with the act of reading involving the imagined image. he describes the acousmatic voice occurring in several ways, one of which involves a sound with unknown source before the speaker is revealed in image, thus “de-acousmatizing him” ( ). likewise, the persona in citizen assumes a largely unseen position in which the readers are first made privy to the persona’s phenomenological experience before being able to identify it as a person; the vignettes in citizen turn the reader into a witness of what has happened to the persona rather than a testament to who the persona is. yet, steven naylor gives the reader reason to anticipate that by the end of the book, the identity of the persona—the titular “citizen”—might be clarified. he suggests that the acousmatic voice acts “as an invisible source, rather than an unidentifiable or ambiguous one”, that the persona occupying the acousmatic role is not interested in making herself unknowable, but just unseeable, to have her body recede as her voice resounds ( ). likewise, the use of the second-person voice estranges the reader from his or her own phenomenology and effaces his or her sense of an autonomous self so that the visceral accounts of racism can come through more emphatically. the anxiety of unanswerable questions citizen rarely leaves space in which the reader might feel comfortable. rankine unceasingly denies readers any convenient sense of hope or respite that might be engendered by offering a solution to america’s difficulties with race. rather, she keeps readers in this state of tension through a series of questions that yield no immediate answers in order to demonstrate the impossibility of arriving at a totalizing truth. although citizen, at first glance, appears to be the prelude to a personal and patriotic exaltation of america, rankine abandons the first-person “i” and the lyric form entirely as if to say that her experience of citizenship is always qualified by the second-person “you” with which she articulates her critique instead. racism in the american context is thus never something forum | issue 	 that can be claimed or denied by an individual, but exists beyond them as a shared condition of being an american citizen. as to whom “you” or “i” actually refers, rankine refuses to satisfy readers with an answer. the figure of the citizen becomes more indeterminate as rankine appears to oscillate between speaking from her own perspective and taking on the voice of the poetic persona — readers are thus not entirely sure who is speaking at which moment. ultimately, however, it is the way in which she has collected the observations and events that occur in citizen that forces us to rethink the idea of a totalizing, singular mode of citizenship that many who subscribe to a post-truth ideology often take for granted. colin kaepernick’s critics, to return to an earlier example, operate on the notion that the experience of american citizenship can be united into a single demonstration of solidarity such as standing during the national anthem. rankine, in collecting these anecdotes, thus frames citizen as a project that is still in the process of figuring out the question of “who gets to hold that status [of being an american citizen]”, but remains nevertheless aware of the capaciousness of that question and the difficulty in arriving at a straightforward answer. indeed, citizen thrives in its frequent moments of ambiguity in spite of the discursive authority of the acousmatic voice; the events in the texts are often brought forth with more questions than explanation, a recollection of visceral rather than cerebral reactions that sometimes catches even the persona herself by surprise. in an instance exemplifying this, the persona recalls a situation in which a classmate asked “us” to help her cheat in an exam, and gets away with it even under the strict supervision of sister evelyn. “sister evelyn must think these two girls think a lot alike… or she never actually saw you sitting there” (rankine ). these are neither suggested thoughts for the reader, nor are they facts. the hypothetical “or” also reveals this comment as part of the persona’s own extrapolation and evaluation of the situation, even if she insists on articulating it in the second- person. in the span of that brief sentence, the persona assumes that narrative space as an almost confusingly autobiographical moment in which their sarcasm transitions into the realization that sister evelyn’s ignoring of “you” could also potentially imply an unwillingness to acknowledge them. the persona is thus not an omniscient narrator, but experiences the very same epistemological limitations she accuses “us” of having—limitations that she tries to reveal. “and you never called her on it (why not?)” ( ), she asks in another one of the early scenes. this parenthetical aggression makes no sense in a hypothetical scenario to which the reader cannot possibly offer an answer. it is only the persona, the one who has invoked those moments to begin with, who can offer us an answer to that question. as with the case of sister evelyn, however, she relinquishes that discursive authority and leaves readers in a questioning silence that no one can seem to answer. yet, the space of a question also impels the reader to consider the difficulties in filling that silence and experience the disabling effects of the impulse to do so. in many ways, therefore, citizen is about being captured off-guard and acknowledging the possible vulnerabilities that arise in reaction to racism, and, more importantly, the vulnerabilities that are engendered within one’s experience of racism. oftentimes the underlying question in each of these episodes is, “is this racist behaviour?”, or, “why am i feeling this way?”. it is the destabilising of that phenomenological sense of judgment that ultimately makes the individual feel vulnerable, a constant second-guessing and undercutting of the self that rankine wishes her readers experience. it is in the forum | issue 	 unrelenting indeterminateness of the situation and in the giving of the benefit of the doubt that a black person is reminded of the possibility that someone might have just called him or her out for their race. the persona itself is as mystified as the reader here, with no answer as to whether or not sister evelyn was ignoring “you” because of appearance. rankine, in modelling this indeterminateness through the formal structures of her poetry, thus creates an environment where questions are frustrating in their unanswerability — where any attempt at uncovering the truth ceases to make sense because the experience is characterized by its complexity. a return to self-reflexivity all these instances of inscribing the reader within the text so far involve a play on perspectives: a shift from the state of autonomous self-assured individual to a character subjected to the suddenness and indeterminateness of a racial discourse that cannot be escaped. no version of the “truth” can efface the pervasive, visceral implications of race—or at least, rankine refuses to allow this to happen within the pages of citizen. she affirms that, in spite of beliefs in america’s post-racial state, race itself exists as a project that has been under construction for a long time. if the design of citizen’s cover evokes the ways in which the notion of the “american citizen” has been constructed and the artifice that it engenders, then it is at the end of the third chapter where rankine continues this endeavour, explicitly framing the relationship between black bodies and white america as an image-object with an explicit attention to the agents responsible for its creation. here, she turns to another artwork: two out of four drawings made by glenn ligon in his work, untitled: four etchings (see fig. ). two sentences appear, each occupying facing pages across a full spread: the left is occupied by the phrase “i do not always feel coloured”, and the right by “i feel most coloured when i am thrown against a sharp white background” (rankine - ). these recognizable lines are taken from zora neale hurston’s essay “how it feels to be colored me,” in which she recounts the moment in her childhood when she realized what it means to be “coloured” for the first time. as an attempt to speak of blackness from a personal perspective, hurston’s essay fits in with the rest of citizen’s biographical leanings. rankine here joins ligon in addressing the issue of race through modern forms of representation. their confluence of voices provides a reinterpretation of hurston’s dyadic refrains, “i do not always feel coloured” and “i feel most coloured when i am thrown against a sharp white background” ( ). hurston’s words are repeatedly printed down the page as a seemingly endless string of text. here, the conventions of typesetting we have been following to this point fall apart. the words in their repetition immediately run onto the next line once they hit the margins. unpunctuated and uninterrupted, they carry a momentum that refuses to adhere to the formal structures of poetry or the progression of prose—they have no visible end or beginning. forum | issue 	 figure . detail of untitled: (four etchings), by glenn ligon; of etchings. credits: © glenn ligon; courtesy of the artist, luhring augustine, new york, regen projects, los angeles, and thomas dane gallery, london. set in a bigger and bolder type, the words are typographically stylised to look like spray- painted lettering that has been stencilled upon a surface. representing the words as a physically printed object gives them a certain texture. the illusion of being written on a wall and the text’s resemblance to graffiti resists the flatness of the page upon which it is marked. it is in this moment that citizen shows its temerity as it uses ligon’s work to play with the conventions of textual production with which citizen must reckon as a book of poetry. we observe, turning the page, how the words we were reading previously are now starting to operate beyond a merely textual level in which the reader is made aware of its existence as printed matter. adding to a sense of tactility, the words eventually blur in a manner that resembles the smudging of ink. in this way, rankine brings our attention to the constructed nature of the image by incorporating it within the moment of failure when the creator’s artistic vision is compromised: when the smudging of ink reveals the unintentional brushing of hands, the moment when that perfect image on the page fails. the resonances between the corporeal form of the black body and the image thus suggest the presence of greater forces at play that forcibly inscribe the body, like an image, onto a surface. the moments of microaggresions rankine discusses in citizen reflect the dynamics between foreground and background in which the black body comes forth more conspicuously. more significant, however, is rankine’s subtle interpretative gesture where she construes blackness as text and image. the confluence of mediums shared between her and hurston now interact with each other to suggest that blackness is a product of reading and construction which can and should be dismantled, just as the smudging of the stroke and texture of the ink are indicative of the hands of the artist this moment of forum | issue 	 self-reflexivity in citizen therefore compels the reader to observe the dirt upon their fingers, and interrogate their own complicity in the racializing of the black body. conclusion citizen demonstrates an alternative way to address the post-truth rhetoric prevalent in contemporary public discourse in america. instead of offering a series of counterarguments, rankine makes use of poetry’s openness to unique formal structures in order to displace the reader from any pretensions of personal belief and ideology. the use of the second person, the persona’s relinquishing of their discursive authority, and self-reflexive impulses compel the reader to consider not merely cerebral truth, but also the visceral realities of racism in a society that is often tempted to consider itself post-racial. in doing so, rankine demonstrates that poetry can indeed grapple with reality in the post-truth era, perhaps even as a necessary part of its opposition in a time where claims of truth are more suspicious than ever. in this moment, a fiction that is more interested in attending to the experience of the individual than making claims about the world may emerge as a more resonant voice. forum | issue 	 works cited coates, ta-nehisi. between the world and me. new york: spiegel & grau, . print. chion, michel. audio-vision: sound on screen. new york: columbia university press, . print. doležel, lubomír. “truth and authenticity in narrative.” narratology i: poetics of 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( ): - . print. dolar, mladen. a voice and nothing more. cambridge: mit press, . print. du bois, w.e.b. the souls of black folk. chicago: dover publications inc., . print. hammons, david. in the hood. , installation, mnuchin gallery, new york. hurston, zora neale. “how it feels to be coloured me.” in zora neale hurston: folklore, memoirs, and other writings, edited by cheryl wall. new york: library of america, , pp. - . print. kellaway, kate. “claudia rankine: ‘blackness in the white imagination has nothing to do with black people’”. the guardian, december , theguardian.com/books/ /dec/ /claudia- rankine poet-citizen-american-lyric-feature. accessed august . web. mukařovský, jan. on poetic language. translated by john burbank and peter steiner.new haven: yale university press, . print. naylor, steven. “voice: the persistent source.” organized sound, . 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"post-truth, adj." oed online, oxford university press, june , www.oed.com/view/entry/ . accessed september . web. rankine, claudia. citizen: an american lyric. minneapolis: graywolf press, . print. —. interview by eric westervelt. npr, january , npr.org/ / / / /in-citizen- poet-strips-bare-the-realities-of-everyday-racism. accessed august . web. weiss, gail. body images: embodiment as intercorporeality. london: routledge, . print. woods, john hayden. the logic of fiction. a philosophical sounding of deviant logic. paris: mouton, . print. forum | issue 	 	 author biography olivia djawoto is currently pursuing an m.a. in english literature at nanyang technological university. her primary field of research is in the representation of the black body in contemporary african-american literature, and her thesis specifically examines works by ta-nehisi coates, claudia rankine, and suzan-lori parks. her other research interests include performativity and the intersections of phenomenology and space. olivia has also previously been published in moving worlds: a journal of transcultural writings and the online culture magazine mackerel.life. in addition to her own research, she is currently involved in research projects related to digital humanities and literature pedagogy. untitled kent academic repository full text document (pdf) copyright & reuse content in the kent academic repository is made available for research purposes. unless otherwise stated all content is protected by copyright and in the absence of an open licence (eg creative commons), permissions for further reuse of content should be sought from the publisher, author or other copyright holder. versions of research the version in the kent academic repository may differ from the final published version. users are advised to check http://kar.kent.ac.uk for the status of the paper. users should always cite the published version of record. enquiries for any further enquiries regarding the licence status of this document, please contact: researchsupport@kent.ac.uk if you believe this document infringes copyright then please contact the kar admin team with the take-down information provided at http://kar.kent.ac.uk/contact.html citation for published version garbin, david and millington, gareth ( ) ‘central london under siege’: diaspora, ‘race’ and the right to the (global) city. the sociological review . issn - . doi https://doi.org/ . / link to record in kar http://kar.kent.ac.uk/ / document version author's accepted manuscript 	 	 	 	 accepted version ‘central london under siege’: diaspora, ‘race’ and the right to the (global) city 	 	 david garbin school of social policy, sociology and social research, university of kent, uk gareth millington department of sociology, university of york, uk 	 the sociological review 	 https://doi.org/ . / © the author(s) 	 	 	 abstract	 	drawing	 upon	 an	 ethnography	 of	 recent	 congolese	 diasporic	 protests	 in	 central	 london,	 this	 article	 pays	 attention	 to	 the	 traversal	 histories	 of	 ‘race’	 and	 the	 postcolonial	dynamics	that	precede	the	emergence	of	a	contemporary	diasporic	‘right	to	 the	city’	movement.	the	authors	critically	engage	with	henri	lefebvre’s	‘right	to	the	city’	 as	a	way	of	explaining	how	the	urban	is	not	only	the	site	but	also,	increasingly,	a	stake	in	 urban	protests.	in	doing	so	the	authors	relocate	urban	centrality	–	its	meaning,	symbolic	 power	and	heuristic	status	 in	protests	–	 in	a	context	where	activists’	claims	are	not	 restricted	 to	 one	 city	 or,	 simply,	 the	 political	 present.	 rather,	 protestors	 talk	 about	 making	geopolitical	connections	between	local	and	global	scales	and	contemporary	and	 historical	 injustices.	 drawing	 upon	 simone’s	 notion	 of	 ‘black	 urbanism’,	 the	 authors	 claim	to	enrich	lefebvre’s	original	formulation	by	unpacking	the	complex	performative	 dimensions	of	protest	as	they	intersect	with	race	and,	more	specifically,	blackness	and	 postcolonialism.	it	is	concluded	that	activists’	experience	is	fundamentally	ambivalent;	 they	are	at	once	enchanted	and	disenchanted	with	protest	in	central	london.	 	 	 	 	 ‘central london under siege’: diaspora, ‘race’ and the right to the (global) city we marched all over central london! central london was under siege by the congolese. people were marching in central london at one point! how many times did we protest in london? yet nothing in the media… our story is not told. (british congolese activist, public meeting, soas, london, ) introduction henri lefebvre’s notion of the ‘right to the city’ is evoked routinely in discussions about protests and contemporary urban social movements, ranging from occupy, the -m /indignados anti-austerity movement in spain, the gezi park protests in istanbul to even the occupation of tahrir square in cairo during the arab spring. the revolutionary spirit conjured by lefebvre has also been identified in the uprising in the parisian banlieues and the london riots (garbin and millington, ; millington, ). the imaginary of the right to the city implies a transurban connection between centres of political resistance and also infers a transtemporal dimension, linking the contemporary mood for insurrection with foundational urban political moments such as the paris communes and les évènements of may . the attraction of the right to the city as an organising concept for critical urbanists is that goes further than explaining how the city has become the principal site for myriads of protests against neoliberalism and stresses how the city and urban life are very much stakes in these struggles (harvey ). the aim of the article is to extend and advance discussions of urban protest and the right to the city by paying greater attention to the traversal histories of ‘race’ and the multi-scalar postcolonial dynamics that provide the context for the emergence of contemporary, diasporic movements. more specifically, our analysis draws upon an ethnography of urban demonstrations organised by the congolese 	 	 	 	 diaspora in london – the type of political protests and performances that have, thus far, remained at the periphery of urban enquiry and ‘right to the city’ sociological debates in particular. data were collected during participant observation of demonstrations in central london and through fifteen semi-structured interviews conducted with young british congolese activists and protestors in their s and their s . many interviewees are members of a youth platform which, through websites, blogs, youtube channels and email lists reaches beyond the uk. while data collection took place between and , it was during the winter of - that the ethnographic work was at its most intense. this period saw a large and at times spectacular mobilisation of the congolese diaspora in the context of an electoral campaign which led to the contested re-election of joseph kabila as president of the drc (garbin and godin ). moreover, in the us, canada, france, belgium, germany, holland and many other countries, demonstrators opposed to the government of joseph kabila also organised public demonstrations and pickets in front of congolese embassies or iconic sites of power. protestors also denounced the neo-colonial involvement of western governments in africa, the role of congo’s neighbours in fuelling the regional conflict, the exploitation of minerals by armed groups and multinationals, the widespread sexual violence in the east and the relative silence of mainstream media about the situation of the drc. in public demonstrations and global online campaigns, activists stressed the link between items such as mobile phones or laptops and the plunder of natural resources in eastern congo. the specific contribution of the paper is an acknowledgement—empirically and theoretically—of the ‘rhetorical force of a constellation of historical and political experiences 																																																													 	 	see	vice	online	article	for	instance:	http://www.vice.com/en_uk/read/congo-election-protests-london- saturday- -december	 	 	 	 	 inherent in black urban experiences to bring into existence a transurban domain that both includes and goes beyond the prevalent notions of the black diaspora’ (simone : ). such an intervention necessitates conceiving of a right to urban life beyond the city singular that is inscribed within transnational social (and urban) fields (see also levitt and glick schiller ). not only do ‘racial’, black and colonial histories and dynamics determine why and how oppositional movements must take up different strategic positions from each other within the city (mayer : ), but an awareness of these forces allows for a nuanced understanding of how black, african and diasporic claims on the city are imagined, articulated, strategized and publically received. moreover, understanding the complex politics intertwined with these claims enables a greater critical sensitivity towards the potentialities and constraints of the global and, some would say ‘post-political’ city (see also brenner ; davidson and iveson, ; harvey, ; madden, ; marcuse, ; merrifield, ; ; ; pinder, ; swyngedouw, ). and yet, it is crucial that blackness and diaspora are not conflated. for example, it is often the diasporic aspects that distinguish congolese protests from other urban social movements; but, we suggest, these transurban and transnational actions—and their responses—are always shaped by historical and contemporary framings of race; or rather, by competing but always highly contextualised understandings of blackness. the paper is structured as follows. it begins with a discussion of the right to the city and how, for lefebvre, this also necessitates the right to centrality. there follows a brief review of relevant literature on the ‘global city’, protest and post-politics. our analysis of ethnographic material commences with a discussion of the continued attraction of the ‘enchanted’ democratic centre of london before considering the politics of performance and finally 	 	 	 	 emphasising the ambivalent experience of young congolese demonstrators vis-à-vis the idea of what simone ( ) calls ‘black urbanism’ by examining their growing disenchantment with urban-based protest and political coalition. centrality and the right to the city for lefebvre, the right to the city denotes a ‘superior right’ concerned with inhabiting the city in the fullest possible manner. this implies more than owning or renting a place in the city, or being allowed to work or contribute to decisions made there. it is, he suggests, a ‘cry and demand’ rather than a right that is formally granted (lefebvre : ). in the spirit of lefebvre’s formulation the right to produce and enjoy the city are integrally linked (marcuse : ). full and profound participation in urban life opposes technocratic and capitalist control, freeing the city to flourish as a work of art, an oeuvre that is accomplished by individual and collective actors under historical conditions. indeed, the right to urban life (lefebvre : ) is often suppressed by a combination of markets and government. many city inhabitants are disqualified from participation in the oeuvre (purcell : ); they are excluded—in terms of say, housing, culture or politics—from the centre. and, for lefebvre ( : ), ‘there is no urbanity without a centre’. in a pessimistic tone, he mourns how: [t]he historic centre has disappeared […] all that remains are, on the one hand, centres for power and decision making and, on the other, fake and artificial spaces. it is true, of course, that the city endures, but only as museum and as spectacle. the urban, conceived and lived as social practice, is in the process of deteriorating and perhaps disappearing. (lefebvre : ) lefebvre’s point is that the right to the city is unlikely to be realised in our inherited urban centres (lefebvre : ). as huyssen ( : ) argues, the historic democratic centre is 	 	 	 	 an ‘urban formation that really belonged to [an] earlier stage of heroic modernity, rather than to our own time’. on one hand, it is perplexing that lefebvre’s notion of the right to the city has become so vital at the moment when the historical reality of the democratic urban centre is in decline. the puzzle, as harvey ( : xv) puts it, is that: ‘to claim the right to the city is, in effect, to claim a right to something that no longer exists’. on the other hand, the right to the city feels so pressing because we have never required the democratic opportunities of the city so urgently. protest, post-politics and the global city? as sassen ( ; ; ) argues, the ‘global city’ offers a distinctive kind of centrality (on london as a global city see imrie et al ). transformed since the s from a major city and former metropole into a command point for the organization of the global economy, london is now one of the leading ‘transnational market spaces’ or ‘nodes of accumulation’ on the planet (sassen, : xii). the role of the state in this accumulation strategy is to promote global city regions as favourable locations for transnational capital investment. the state must also manage political opposition and resistance to the uncoupling of global cities from their national economies as well as the growing separation from the social interests of their own inhabitants (brenner ; sassen ). the global city concept has faced scrutiny from many sources. for example, marcuse and van kempen have ( ) have suggested that all cities participate in globalization and thus all cities, rather than just a select few, are globalizing. rather than posit a hierarchy of cities or suggest that cities are differently positioned within flows of capital and communications, 	 	 	 	 others have suggested instead that all cities be considered ‘ordinary’ (amin and graham ; robinson ). this article is in agreement with glick schiller and Çağlar ( : ) that this critique tends to flatten the unevenness of globalization. it is important to recognise how ‘the spatialization of capital is uneven and unequal’ (ibid: ) and also that some cities are more implicated in histories of globalization, colonialism and postcolonial than others. london is not simply a convenient stage for protests by young congolese. the type of centrality that london symbolises is important; the central city is constitutive of the meanings of the protests. however, the notion of the global city does infer globality in too limited a sense. if a truly global city is imagined—where the social is given priority over the economic and technological—it should be possible for movements to coalesce in opposition to global inequalities and perceived shared risks. it should be possible for right to the city movements of the first world to connect with struggles in cities of the global south, where the fight against privatization, dispossession, evictions, and displacement is even more existential (mayer : ). such a process of subjectivation is akin to the process nancy ( ) refers to as mondialisation, an alternate or contrary form of globalization that concerns the ‘world as a globality of sense’ and the emergence of a world as subject (madden : ). in later work, lefebvre ( : ) similarly recognised that, ‘we are currently in a transitory period of mutations in which the urban and the global crosscut and reciprocally disrupt each other’. adopting a similar line, merrifield ( : ) reflects how a radical urban citizenship might be formed, where ‘a citizen of the block, of the neighbourhood, becomes a citizen of the world, a universal citizen rooted in place […]’. here, citizenship extends from the city, not only because of migration but also because of ‘the multiplicity of communication 	 	 	 	 technologies’ and ‘the becoming worldwide (mondialisation) of knowledge’ (lefebvre : ). such an urban citizenship traverses frontiers and engenders a subjectivity that exceeds the borders that confine bodies and acts (isin : ). the global city paradox is that as inequalities widen and the injustices of austerity urbanism become more apparent, there is greater demand—often from poor and minority residents— for the city to perform a democratic function. the historic symbolic resonance of the central city means it is still understood as the place from which to claim recognition. yet, as swyngedouw ( : ) argues, the polis is retreating as a space of dissent, disagreement and democracy. elsewhere, he writes there has been a ‘reduction, accelerating rapidly over the past few decades, of the political terrain to a post-democratic arrangement of oligarchic policing’ (swyngedouw : ). iveson ( ) also points to how protest in the city has become increasingly regulated and rule-governed. in these accounts, politics and/or democracy becomes concerned merely about the management of agreed-upon ‘problems’ by an administrative and economic elite. and so, as mayer ( : ) argues, demands for the ‘right to the city’ are not simply about inclusion in a structurally unequal city—such as london—but about democratizing cities and their decision-making processes more radically. contemporary claims upon the city (and centrality) include the gestures of occupy and appropriation of highly symbolic central sites such as wall street (zuccotti park) and lsx (st. pauls, london). occupy appears in mimesis of events such as the paris commune of and the occupation of the sorbonne. indeed, recent urban movements are abound with nostalgia for the revolutionary, yet decidedly ethnocentric history of ‘spectacular paris’ 	 	 	 	 (lawrie van de ven ). but occupy is not all there is. there are also oppositional movements comprised out of those whom mayer ( ) refers to as the ‘outcast groups’ of the city. the london riots are an example of this (see millington a), but there are also organised protests, such as those led by young, diasporic congolese, who campaign vigorously in postcolonial western cities like london against historical and contemporary injustices. simone ( ) uses the notion of ‘black urbanism’ to capture the particular situations and spaces where black people in cities have tended to operate. placing emphasis upon this is, for simone, a ‘tactical manoeuvre’ that brings certain dimensions of urban life from the periphery into clearer view. black urbanism gives credence to the importance, still, of transforming ‘the objectifying and alienating spatial arrangements that racialized encounters produce in urban life’ (ibid: ). the exclusion of ‘blackness’ from dominant accounts of the city, including critical urban theory, ‘implies the existence of undocumented worlds of limited visibility […] or posits radically different ways of being in the city’ (ibid: ). because black urbanism brings practices and experiences that are not given their analytical due into focus, a critical understanding of the city as a whole is also advanced, while a conception of the right to the city is enriched. this involves, as simone ( : ) suggests, a respect for ‘the complexity of things’—in this case, diasporic urban protests—and a willingness to accept a lack of clarity when it comes to agreeing upon what a right to the city looks and feels like. diasporic, black urban social movements raise questions for critical urban theory. how can it be that through claiming their right to one city (london), protestors seek also to challenge injustice in other urban centres (e.g. brussels, paris, kinshasa). how do congolese protestors use blackness as a tool to materialise ‘connections among all the disparate things black 	 	 	 	 people across the world have experience’ (simone : )? how does ‘race’ constrain protestors’ actions (or limit how their actions are interpreted)? does the introduction of ‘black urbanism’ fundamentally challenge the class basis upon which the right to the city was originally conceived? whilst these are theoretical puzzles for scholars, protestors themselves have a more intuitive sense of what they are doing; they already have a respect for complexity: that doesn't mean that you being here, you cannot get involved, it means that you being here have to do what someone over there cannot do: being the voice of the people, being a media person, being the person that brings that issue forward to the government […] someone in kinshasa cannot tell downing street what's going on, but you can. it's a case of really understanding what is your role within this complex structure […]. (british congolese activist, male, ) ‘banging on the door of downing street’: the enchanted centre what can be seen, among congolese youth, is the continued draw of london’s historic centre and locations such as downing street, houses of parliament and the west end. these sites represent a ‘bank of symbolic capital’ (wacquant, : ) or, as lefebvre ( : ) puts it, they are ‘monuments’ that are repressive in how they signify power, but also vital in symbolising democracy and possibility. assembling in the centre of london remains a thrilling, even transcendent experience. for the congolese diaspora, london has an added meaning; it is the ‘unexpected’ postcolonial centre from which to ‘speak from’. in comparison to brussels (or even paris), london promises to enable you to be seen and heard. as one interviewee says, ‘london is like the “it” place out of all the european cities’ (british congolese female, ). 	 	 	 	 adopting a multi-layered citizenship of londoner, british and congolese gives protestors a ‘particular right to speak out, an upper hand’, as one protester put it, to denounce, in front of downing street, the role of the british government in the congolese crisis : downing street. that’s where the prime minister is. to the congolese community this is where the prime minister lives. this is his home… our home is being disturbed… so we’re going to disturb your home. it’s like being that annoying child… i’m going to keep banging on your door until you let me in. if the prime minister is the man who has the final say, who decides on these things and if he’s working with rwanda and so forth—if that’s the case—then that’s the person we want to deal with. (british congolese activist, female, ) here we encounter the image of ‘banging on the door’ to disturb the prime minister in his home, implying both domestic and nation-state setting. it is also a relational sense of home in that it is compared to ‘our’ home, in this instance referring to the drc. there is an acknowledgement of lacking power, but also of using this status to act as an irritant, as a child that cannot be pacified or ignored. also, this quote effortlessly reveals a transnational claim to the right to the city. protests in london are about british policy but also concern injustices in other cities and other continents thereby linking perceived responsibilities as a citizen across geopolitical scales: ‘our tax money is funding the war in the congo’, as one youth put it. such protests bring a dispersed chain of citizens, places and experiences closer together in acts of ‘world forming’ or mondialisation. the central city (still) makes such gatherings (and processes) possible. one female activist described participating in a central london demonstration as being ‘moved by a purpose’ and not feeling inhibited because ‘everybody’s growing from 																																																													 	the uk being an important bilateral donor to kagame’s government in rwanda, accused of fuelling proxy wars in mineral-rich eastern congo 	 	 	 	 everybody’s strength’. and yet, despite this ‘enjoyment’ of protest (isin ), we should not ignore the courage it takes for young black people to enter such a stage or underestimate the risks of exposure. there was people that got arrested outside leicester square, i was at that march. what happened was, a lot of young people, not just young people but a lot of people got arrested. […] (british congolese activist, male, ) central london is not, for congolese protestors, a neutral space; rather, it is a space charged with meaning. this is especially the case for black british groups who, for historical reasons, have learnt they cannot afford to adopt the blasé attitude of the (white, male)	flâneur when it comes to laying claim to the centre of the city. while there has been a recent ideological shift towards an ‘anti-racialism’ that pulls a veil over the colonial past and post-colonial present (kapoor ); and whilst various political and promotional strategies now communicate the western metropolis is somehow ‘post-race’ (millington b), it is important to acknowledge the risks that young congolese face in attending demonstrations. the politics of performance and the performance of politics in contrast to the many positive feelings voiced by interviewees, it was also expressed how rivalries among first generation congolese ‘community leaders’ are a source of factionalism and discontent. these conflicts were discussed during youth activist meetings and on social media and even led some to question the extent to which they would continue to take part in demonstrations organised by elders. while all the youth expressed dissatisfaction with the current government of the drc, some criticized members of the congolese opposition party 																																																													 	these	older	activists	are	members	or	affiliated	with	congolese	opposition	parties	such	as	udps	or	 apareco	 	 	 	 	 for pursuing what they believed to be a limited agenda that minimizes the globalized and postcolonial dimensions of the crisis in the drc. in their eyes, the tensions between different political factions of the congolese opposition—played out during demonstrations and across the online diasporic public sphere—threatened to demoralize the movement. demonstrations in london are performed with the aim of communicating beyond the city. pastors leading prayer groups in front of downing street (garbin ), activists delivering memos addressed to the prime minister and outspoken elders in military outfits filmed for youtube clips are embodied enactments of opposition that help constitute a diasporic economy of images (and sounds). these performances are given credence by their staging in central locations rich in historically accumulated symbolic capital. in bourdieu’s ( : ) terms, symbolic capital describes how domination is transformed into charisma; or, how power, via symbolic alchemy, is able to evoke affective enchantment. these performances—with central london performing the role of an ‘enchanted’ stage and set—are attempts to convert the prestige of a central city location into political capital; a process made possible by mediatization and transnational circulation. being visible and vocal in london protests endows diasporic, transurban actors (mostly male, first generation) with esteem beyond the local and the immediate. the symbolic value of sites in central london is therefore pivotal to the ‘success’ of political performances that are transmitted across the diaspora via social media, popular diasporic websites or congolese satellite tv channels. often dismissed by youth as ‘youtube resistance’, these performances, measured by ‘likes’, ‘shares’ and ‘comments’ and archived for repeated consumption, are perceived to be motivated by a quest to accumulate personal political capital, not only in a context of 																																																													 	supporting	the	opposition	candidate	during	the	presidential	campaign	and	then	contesting	their	 electoral	defeat.	 	 	 	 	 competition between those seeking to represent the congolese community in the uk, but also the internal struggle for leadership within transnationally located opposition parties. as one -year-old male activist who believes protests should address a broader geopolitical agenda put it, ‘for some of our leaders, it’s all about leadership—being filmed so that they can be noticed by people in kinshasa’. it is important therefore to qualify the simple equation drawn between urban protest and the ‘use value’ of urban space that is often a feature of neo-lefebvrian readings of the right to the city and/ or the act of ‘reclaiming commons’ (harvey ). protest does not simply recover the use value of the central city. the predominance too of exchange value—derived from equivalences between symbolic and political capital—warns against pitting the appropriation and fetishization of space against each other. the representational value of the image of the central city plays an important role in congolese demonstrations. another important aspect of diasporic urban protest concerns the politics of representation (and objectivation). young congolese are acutely aware of how their presence in the central city may be interpreted. interviewees talked about what their urban, masculine, blackness signifies in the eyes of the police and public, especially in confrontational situations. in the context of british citizenship becoming more exclusive or embounded (tyler ), congolese protestors are aware of the limitations that being black imposes on their rights as citizens. there are also debates about the objectivation of their performance as protesters. youth are concerned, for instance, about how using drums, chanting and singing in lingala creates the impression of a ‘joyful carnival’ that could be misconstrued through a white lens 	 	 	 	 of exoticisation. language is also deliberated. using english in slogans, placards and leaflets was justified by young protestors in many ways: to reach a wider audience, to be efficient and legible in the public sphere, and for the protest to connect with social groups and political causes outside the diaspora, to achieve more than ‘just chanting in lingala against kabila [congo’s president] like the elders do’ as one interviewee put it. ‘blood mobiles’ and emergent mondialisation: traversal politics in the postcolonial city some people even said “well you guys weren't colonised by the british, you were colonised by belgium, why don't you go and do something over there?” (british congolese activist, female, ) congolese activists attempt to ‘repostcolonize’ london. in other words, they seek to relocate the city within a postcolonial framework of intertwining places, spaces, relations and histories that are not limited to the drc-belgium binary . in doing so they are engaging with the multidimensionality of the postcolonial city in a revised context of neo-liberal (and post- political) globalization, re-establishing connections between old and new forms of domination, between historic and emerging centres and peripheries. engaging with the excavation and recovery of a postcolonial reality means challenging the ‘bundle of silences’ (trouillot , wemyss ) inherent in britain’s post-imperial identity. congolese youth react angrily when told that since congo is not a former british colony, their claims and protest had no place in london. this double othering—combining a temporal dimension (‘your diasporic history is not part of our national history’) with its spatial corollary (‘your protests don’t belong here’)—is vigorously contested. as one interviewee put it, ‘british 																																																													 	see	the	‘memory	matters’	project	for	more	on	congolese	postcolonial	spatiality	in	brussels	 (http://www.memory-matters.net/)		 	 	 	 	 have always had their hands in congo since the colonial period, but then that’s not talked about’. the most important aspect of repostcolonizing london is highlighting continuities between colonial exploitation and the contemporary plunder of minerals in the drc for the electronic industry. one participant in a ‘flash mob’ in piccadilly circus—organised to raise awareness of this connection—expressed this explicitly: many people are blind to the fact that we are carrying blood in our laptops and mobile phones; that coltan is being plundered in the congo…hundred years ago, congo produced % of the total production of rubber before latin america and asia took over the production. congolese people were massively killed during that period of mass production, for financial reasons. […] so we have decided that we are not letting our history be erased… (british congolese activist, male, ) rejecting the idea that conflict in the congo/great lakes region was driven by ethnicity or ‘tribalism’, activists are concerned with establishing new political spatial and temporal linkages, using slogans such as “the real cost of your iphone is genocide in the congo”; or through the symbolic resonance of protest sites such as the apple store in regent street. raising awareness of how consumers fetishize ‘blood mobiles’ and ‘blood laptops’ reflects a diasporic engagement; and represents, at the same time, a way of locating and connecting london and the drc on a global map of injustice and human rights abuses. some young activists participated in the ‘carnival of dirt’ alongside anti-capitalist campaigners, global environmental organisations and other migrant activists. the carnival of dirt was a parody of funeral procession, staged across the city of london, during which protesters commemorated victims of human rights abuses in regions such as latin america, asia, africa and the pacific that are exploited for their natural resources. dressed in black, 	 	 	 	 with ash covering their faces and carrying coffins, the protesters picketed the discrete and little known headquarters of mining companies and trading institutions, such as the london metal exchange. these inconspicuous buildings host global organisations whose activities negatively impact developing countries such as the congo. these symbolic, but not immediately recognised locations are used to ground expressions of a transversal citizenship, which might also be seen as evidence of an emergent mondialisation. and, as lefebvre ( ) points out, the right to the city itself includes the right to appropriate time and space. this is what is attempted here by congolese activists; to ‘make’ and make heard (and visible) a geopolitical past and present that too often is inaudible and/or hidden: we protest against those who have their hands everywhere but who don't leave their fingerprints anywhere. london is the best place to protest against capitalism. globalisation is a good idea but it’s in the hands of the wrong people. globalisation is attached to racism and capitalism and what’s going on in the congo today is unacceptable. (british congolese activist, male, ) contact was made between congolese and occupy london (lsx). this assertion of political identity promised to allow young congolese to carve out an autonomous, extra-diasporic space of political engagement apart from the ‘narrow’ or self-serving concerns of first generation leaders. as one male activist claims, ‘the exploitation is global and that’s why we need to explore ways of working with people outside our community’. yet while many congolese are enthusiastic about bridging with occupy, some questioned the willingness of such movements to engage across ethnic/race boundaries. in their eyes occupy movement was class-based and consequently did not value or understand attempts to link the injustices of global capitalism with its imperial roots: we are happy to build alliances with occupy […] but we can’t wait for them… marx says that the proletarians of the world should unite but it’s the white working class really that he was talking about (british congolese activist, male, ) 	 	 	 	 if we occupy we will be criminalised even more. it is not a good strategy for us…we have done stuff with occupy but we are not middle-class whites with lawyers advising us. if we occupy, we’ll just be seen as black immigrants causing problems and we’ll become easy targets for racists and the media… like during the riots it was like: “black youths again!” (british congolese activist, male, ) in addition, the act of occupying—appropriating symbolic public space in a durable and visible manner—was felt to run an unnecessary risk of criminalisation (the congolese always make sure they have official authorization, even for small-scale pickets and demonstrations). in the second quote, an activist comments on the vulnerability that arises from sharing in ‘a politics of those who do not move’ (isin : ). racism and potential media stigmatization must also be negotiated. his comparison with the riots reveals how congolese protestors may feel their urban experience—of being black and perceived by authorities and the media as an ‘immigrant’ and/or a threat to law and order—is closer to the thousands of black and minority ethnic youth who were arrested and imprisoned during these disturbances than it is to those ‘middle-class whites with lawyers’ who camped outside st pauls. in congolese claims on the city, time and space are—out of necessity—appropriated differently to mainstream right to the city movements. disenchantment and the spatial politics of race despite the attraction of central london there is also considerable disenchantment with protesting in such settings. much disillusionment stems from how demonstrations outside downing street are policed and ‘rationalised’ in accordance with a bureaucratic booking system that allocates times and spaces to any group wishing to protest. consequently, this space is used by a variety of groups, including extreme right-wing organisations such as the 	 	 	 	 english defence league. creating ‘equality’ between social movements devalues the symbolic value of the space in the eyes of some congolese. at pm the police follow strict instructions to disperse protestors: […] doing that protest there, everything started fine, it was again in downing street, and then the police started pushing for people to go home because obviously it was past six, and people did not want to go home […] (british congolese activist, male, ) as well as anger, doubt was expressed as to whether the centre of london really does offer a forum where recognition can be gained, or whether this is just an illusion, an effect of london’s ‘monuments’ to democracy. as testified earlier, the central city remains the obvious place to ‘speak from’ and, undoubtedly, it can be an exhilarating experience to amass there. but, it can feel difficult to be seen or heard amidst the cacophony of ‘noise’ (dikeç ) created by daily protests and the routinized form in which these are permitted to occur. these two accounts convey this frustration: i really wanted to understand why it was always during the winter season we would protest, why it's just november, and then one guy told me, he goes “you've got to understand, we applied for them to allow us to protest during the warm season but they wouldn't allow us”. (british congolese activist, male, ) it is like you are wasting your time, and i started to see that after i got nicked. i just thought, you know what, it is bullshit. why am i going to these protests? (british congolese protestor, male, ) the first quote reveals how the downing street protests are far from spontaneous events and are planned well in advance. groups apply to demonstrate, with some ‘slots’ proving more popular than others. the second points to how the police attention that accompanies protest in central london—especially on occasions when demonstrations exceed allotted times and 	 	 	 	 spaces—can make activists question their commitment to further events (though not necessarily to politics itself). although the intended audience of protests for most is transnational, a common complaint is the lack of mainstream political, media (and therefore public) recognition for the congolese plight; this, despite the sheer size of their demonstrations. one banner held by protestor during a protest in whitehall claimed the bbc ignored the congolese demonstrations because the participants ‘were black’ . this was understood as a deliberate slight or snub: […] there was no headline coverage, there was no mainstream coverage. and can you imagine, this is happening in the centre of london you have , maybe people gathered in one place to demonstrate and to make a whole lot of noise. […] the coverage was terrible… to me it was not surprising but people felt that they were let down by the bbc for not covering… not only not covering it but avoiding it purposely altogether…. (british congolese activist, male, ) this demonstrates a paradox that gets to the heart of the restrictions on democracy found in the post-political global city. although congolese protestors found themselves ignored by domestic politicians and media they were not ignored by police or authorities. the contradiction is between being visible, in the sense of being identified and policed as ‘black youth’; and frustration with being invisible in relation to the lack of media, political and public recognition of their activities. again, the riots are raised as a point of comparison, making a connection with london’s postcolonial history of so-called ‘race relations’ into which young congolese are inserted: the police arrested kids during one of the marches, they took them to the police station telling them if they come back anywhere near downing street, they can get arrested. the police had the [ ] riots in mind. (british congolese activist, male, ) 																																																													 	the	banner	read:	‘the	bbc	has	turned	its	back	on	the	congolese	because	we	are	black’	 	 	 	 	 race, i mean the darker you are, when you are dealing with the police, it is gonna be a tough time. we are unconsciously conditioned to know that, growing up as a young black man in london… you just know that the police don’t like you and you don’t like the police… you don’t really know why, you don’t really know the history of it…(british congolese activist, male, ) the tension between managerial post-politics and increased demands for london to continue offering spaces of democracy is articulated through the ambivalent syntax of black urbanism. this is why, as simone ( : ) explains, black residents of the city tend to modulate between two strategies. the first concerns adherence to conventional narratives of ‘efficacy, propriety and citizenship’, more as a residual form of social anchorage than a sign of true conviction. the second strategy—usually in response to disappointment with the first— concerns a mix of inventiveness and a ‘complicated elaboration of relations’ in response to manifold constraints. this would include the deliberated visions of purpose and contested criteria for the success of protests (discussed earlier). the risk of both strategies, as evidence suggests, is growing disenchantment with politics and the city. in light of stuart hall’s ( ) argument that there are no pure or essential forms of black culture, it is important to caution against using ‘black urbanism’ to infer a singular black urban experience, or to use it as a political trope in and of itself. to reveal the distinctive experiences of black residents of the city—forged against the context of institutional and public racisms—is a critical and tactical intervention; but, simone ( : ) is adamant that black urbanism is not a claim for ‘some kind of overarching identity or authenticity’, but rather about recovering the claims for solidarity or ‘being together’—in this case, the proliferation of multiple, overlapping public spheres—that are ignored but refuse to disappear from cities. one interviewee discusses such issues at length, comparing the political potency 	 	 	 	 of blackness in different contexts, before discussing his own recent experience of a black lives matters demonstration in london: when it’s white and black in terms of power relation, it's much easier for people to understand. that’s why american race politics is so popular around the world, because it’s really simple for people to understand…race simplifies the narrative…but congo is more complicated…so we know that the uk was involved in the assassination of patrice lumumba. that uk have consistently supported dictators, mobutu, kagame, kabila. even now the congolese police force and the military are trained by the us. so when police brutality happens in congo, us imperialism is directly involved in that. race can allow connections with non-african black activists but also hinders it because there’s again essentialised notions about what blackness is…but the direct assumption of blackness is not africa, it’s caribbean-ness or black american-ness…it’s too narrow, in the sense that they hear black and they relate to american-ness…. the first pan-african congress was in london. in the s there was a strong connection between blackness and africa, but from the s onwards it became more narrow. so race doesn't always operate the same way, it’s a different kind of reaction when it’s about black africans i’d say. american blackness has a lot of aura. people feel concerned, it’s like…if something happens to black people in the states, black people here, they feel….as if it’s happening to them, there is a strong culture. the black lives matters demo in london, i was there, it was big, very big. but a young somali prisoner was killed in pentonville – i went to that demo too, that was in london…. and hardly anyone was there, people max…( british congolese activist, male, ) the congolese movement is grounded in diasporic politics and imperial/ neo-imperial relations between africa and the west. but race—or rather racism—becomes indivisible from how young activists understand and project themselves, especially in the context of london and its enduring structures of racism (see keith ; ). racialised interpretations are used to explain the presence of the congolese in the heart of the city, often in ways that are limiting and that, in part, constitute a misrecognition, implying more often than not african american or british african caribbean notions of blackness. a ‘generic blackness’ (simone ) can be a unifying and mobilising resource, consolidating prior recognition claims and gains, but can also be a hindrance in that the meaning of the 	 	 	 	 congolese struggle and the specificity of an african experience of blackness in london becomes obfuscated. on such occasions, as our interviewee states, ‘race simplifies the narrative’. if it is anything at all, black urbanism refers to contending with a semantic and transurban complexity ‘that is both a resource for the imagination and an impediment to action’ (simone : ). conclusion this article uses a contemporary diasporic urban movement to expand the vision of critical urban enquiry and place under scrutiny the concept (and rallying cry) of the right to the city. it is suggested here that lefebvre was right to attempt to reconfigure this notion in later work, as a form of ‘revolutionary citizenship’ based upon the mondialisation of knowledge and praxis (lefebvre ). it also seems that ‘[t]he specificity of the city seems to be that there’s no longer any specificity; the right to the city is a global struggle for citizenship that needs to be grounded in the city’ (merrifield : added emphasis). the city—in this case london—is a pivot for claims that are transurban and transnational. the city is used to ground and unify, rather than contain, political action that operates across a variety of scales. a further point, in relation to congolese protests in london, is how ‘[b]y following the various dispersions, displacements, and diasporas of black people, architectures of urbanity emerge which connect disparate cities and regions to each other’ (simone : ). the diasporic urban subject is transfigured by participation in such protests. against the delimited ‘globality’ of twenty-first century london they participate in a contradictory process of mondialisation. as isin ( : ) puts it, ‘[c]itizens without frontiers […] traverse frontiers and produce political subjectivities that are creative, inventive and autonomous despite limits imposed upon them’. young congolese in london are claiming rights that do not formally 	 	 	 	 exist, that are not granted to them and whose possibilities remain, as yet, unbounded. they are reconfiguring the right to the city for their own times and circumstances. there are, however, two ways in which congolese protests in london are concerned with more than the right to the city, as it is has usually been conceived. first, this analysis warns against prioritising use value in understanding contemporary claims to the right to the city. as lefebvre ( : ) intimates, in an era of unrestrained urbanization it is the image or ideology of the city that persists rather than the actuality of ‘the city’ itself. indeed, it is the thrill of being in the historic urban centre—and all that this continues to connote—that draws protestors to central london. but, images of these sites are prized also for their (symbolic) exchange value in circuits of diasporic struggle. as important as use value is how bodies, political performance and architecture are captured digitally and circulated in novel visual and aural forms. attention to symbolic and moral (political) economies is crucial to understanding the kinds of transurban citizenship being claimed by protestors. second, whilst being in central london is of enormous symbolic significance for congolese protestors, their claims extend way beyond the times and spaces of the present city. it is for such reasons that simone’s notion of black urbanism is useful in terms of understanding the creativity and constraints of protest, aspects which must be considered central (rather than peripheral) to how the right to the city is understood in the future: black urbanism thus concerns how such platforms of engagement can be built. it concerns how connections are built across cities in ways that circumvent the dominant histories, frameworks, and policies […] it concerns the inextricable experience of possibility and precariousness […] it concerns the willingness to leap forward into new affiliations, new versions of what had been familiar and comforting, and new ways of expressing the refusal to disappear in provisional new friendships and collaboration that could easily disappear. (simone : ) 	 	 	 	 the above encapsulates the inventiveness, thought, energy that goes into the claims on london made by young congolese protestors, as well as the divisions and jeopardy that impede their involvement. the experience of protest for young congolese is ambivalent because of the tension between visibility (as black youth in the city) and invisibility (how black diasporic political concerns are ignored or marginalised). black urbanism appears fated to operate between incessantly shifting lines of inclusion/ exclusion and overregulation/ autonomy (ibid: ). the affiliations that are created and/ or threatened as a result of situated urban protest by young congolese in london are manifold and have a diasporic reach that calls to, while at the same time deconstructs the ‘present pasts’ (huyssen ) of other postcolonial centres such as brussels and paris, as well as addressing political struggles in kinshasa and the drc (and examples of ‘new imperialism’ in africa more generally). race is always implicated in the struggles of protestors but it can also mystify the conflicts or injustices they seek to bring attention to. what is also apparent is the decline of, or restrictions placed upon the democratic function of the city, constraints that nullify dissent by managing protest, a process that is intensified for black citizens. the price of neither protecting nor enhancing the fragile and/or retreating political spaces of the global city is further disenchantment with the act of protest and with the city itself. drawing upon an ethnographic study of young british congolese protestors in central london this paper suggests ways we might understand contemporary claims for the right to the city that are attuned to the complexities and ambivalence of ‘black urbanism’. 	 	 	 	 references amin, a. and graham, s. 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( ) ‘les deux visages du ghetto’, actes de la recherche en sciences sociales, ( ), - . ecas - .docx ama journal of ethics, october ama journal of ethics® october , volume , number : - ethics case expanding ethics review processes to include community-level protections: a case study from flint, michigan commentary by kent d. key, mph, phd abstract as the flint community endeavors to recover and move forward in the aftermath of the flint water crisis, distrust of scientific and governmental authorities must be overcome. future community engagement in research will require community-level protections ensuring that no further harm is done to the community. a community ethics review explores risks and benefits and complements institutional review board (irb) review. using the case of flint, i describe how community-level ethical protections can reestablish a community’s trust. all irbs reviewing protocols that include risk to communities and not merely individual participants should consider how community members are engaged in the proposed research and identify and respond to questions and domains of concern from community members. case all researchers who use federal funding to do their work, including those interested in investigating effects of lead water contamination on health in the aftermath of the flint water crisis, are required to have their protocols reviewed by an institutional review board (irb) to motivate compliance with federal human subject research regulations. a team of researchers from university x has proposed a protocol that involves investigating acute changes in kidney function, new onset of high blood pressure and gout, and each of these conditions’ relationship with changes in flint water composition. they hope to arrange for community members’ blood tests, urine tests, blood pressure measurements, and joint aspiration and fluid analysis. furthermore, they hope to enter community members’ homes to sample and test their tap water for lead, phosphates, and trihalomethanes. the protocol is being reviewed by an irb from university x. some members of the flint community have raised strong opposition to this research, citing no reasonable basis for trusting the researchers or their institutions to do the research ethically or to justly share the risks and benefits of their work with the community. commentary the community of flint, michigan, suffered a manmade public health crisis based on the decision of a governor-appointed emergency manager (em) to change flint’s water www.amajournalofethics.org source from lake huron to the flint river, which began in april [ ]. however, the root of the flint water crisis (fwc) began in march , when the michigan state government passed the local government and school district fiscal accountability act [ ]. this law allowed state-appointed ems to replace community-elected representatives in executive and legislative branches of city government. ems were charged with protecting the health, safety, and welfare of citizens with a focus on fiscal “belt-tightening” [ ]. community members in flint and other parts of michigan organized and protested this law, which resulted in the law being overturned in november [ ]. months later, the state government passed a very similar law, the local financial stability and choice act [ ]. two critical components of the law were met with opposition from the flint community: ( ) the implementation of the em, which undermined the local community’s democratic processes [ ]; and ( ) the switch to the flint river as an intermediate water source, which was made from a fiscal perspective with no consideration of health risks to residents. although required by law in water systems serving more than , residents [ ], anticorrosive chemicals were not added to the water supply due to cost (less than $ a day) [ ]. these decisions resulted in damage to public health from elevated lead levels and legionella in flint’s water as well as over $ million in flint water infrastructure damage [ ]. because the government, at all levels, failed to protect the flint community [ ], the residents were harmed [ ], and their trust in government and other institutions eroded [ ]. purpose and ethical principles of institutional review boards the belmont report, written by the national commission for the protection of human subjects of biomedical and behavioral research, established three ethical principles to protect research subjects and provide a framework of accountability and responsibility for researchers: ( ) respect for autonomy, ( ) beneficence and nonmaleficence, and ( ) justice [ - ]. these principles provided new levels of protection for research participants following the outrage of the tuskegee syphilis study [ ]. this was a first step in the evolution of ethical protections in human subject research. the institutional review board (irb) process was established to protect research participants [ ]. irbs typically deliberate about whether risks are reasonable and whether participants, especially those from vulnerable populations, are adequately informed to consent to participate and are aware of the benefits and risks of participating [ , ]. irbs are often housed within academic institutions or community institutions, such as hospitals [ ], but some irbs are corporate entities. in either case, community considerations are often missing from irb deliberations [ , ], although irbs are federally required to have community members and consider community concerns, according to title of the code of federal regulations (cfr) [ ]. some irbs do not fully assess community protections, consent, risks, or benefits, restricting their http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /pfor - .html ama journal of ethics, october main focus to individual protections [ ], and thus failing to incorporate another important ethical principle, respect for communities [ ]. to understand why flint residents in the case scenario did not trust researchers, it is worth examining how the ethical principles guiding irbs and the belmont report were violated in the flint water crisis. • respect for autonomy. community members’ autonomy and the democratic processes in place to support it were undermined by the governor-appointed em and the em’s decision to switch the water source [ ] and the state’s decision not to add anticorrosion chemicals [ ]. • beneficence. the em model was designed to maximize fiscal savings in selected communities experiencing financial hardship, but it provided no consideration for maximizing the health of the community residents. • nonmaleficence. the harm experienced by the flint community manifested in various forms: biological, psychological, environmental, financial, social, and cultural. • justice. undercurrents of racism and socioeconomic classism led to the fwc. results of the michigan civil rights commission’s report highlighted environmental racism as a contributor to the fwc [ ], legitimizing some flint residents’ claims that the crisis occurred because flint was a predominantly black city and inciting the “flint lives matter” movement, derived from the ongoing black lives matter movement. community engagement would allow members of the community to take on the responsibility of distributing risks and benefits that they identify. this process could address, and possibly alleviate, distrust and restore key relationships between the community and research institutions by giving the community a sense of co-ownership and co-leadership. evolution of community ethics reviews the first community consultation on the responsible collection and use of samples for genetic research of the national institute of general medical sciences took place in . this consultation yielded ten recommendations, three of which included: ( ) defining community in appropriate meaningful ways, ( ) obtaining broad community input in all phases of the research, and ( ) establishing appropriate review mechanisms and procedures [ ]. although these recommendations helped move the needle in a positive direction for community-engaged research, other problems remained. over the past decade, there have been a growing number of concerns regarding the inconsistency of community representation on irbs [ , ]. community-based researchers have expressed deep concerns about the ethics of community partnership and engagement processes, social justice, and the need to expand the boundaries of ethical reviews to include community-level considerations [ ]. in addition, some university irbs have struggled to recognize the role of community partners since it was not customary to http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /medu - .html www.amajournalofethics.org view community partners as equals with academic researchers, which has created challenges in obtaining irb approval [ ]. community-based research shifts the traditional power dynamic, raising questions of equity, co-ownership of data, and mutual benefit. shore et al.’s [ ] study of community-engaged researchers’ experiences with irbs revealed that there is a need to expand the ethical analysis to include community- level considerations, which they posit is often missing in the irb process. community-based participatory research (cbpr) practitioners have argued that the belmont principles must be reconceptualized in order to address community-level considerations in ethical reviews [ , , , ]. the community-level ethical principles (see table ) of veracity, sustainability, nonmaleficence, and justice are meant to expand the frame and ethical lens of the traditional belmont principles. as community engaged research has evolved, it has become evident that efforts to incorporate diverse community stakeholders in the research process have progressed from “subject”- focused-only engagement to include a “community-partnered” focus. http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /jdsc - .html ama journal of ethics, october table . comparison of internal review boards and community ethics review boards [ ] internal review board community ethics review board ethical principles respect for autonomy veracity • right to know, informed consent • respect for dignity and recognition of worth within community frame • “right to know” expanded to “right to know and understand,” transparency beneficence sustainability • maximize benefit • maximize benefit not only for the group but also for the individual and over time, for generations to come • research efforts sustain the broader ecologic and local community to which individuals are connected nonmaleficence nonmaleficence • do not harm the subject • do not harm the community justice for study subjects justice for the community • fair distribution of costs and benefits to research subjects • fair distribution of costs and benefits to the community other key differences narrow focus on individual research subjects broader focus on the community regardless of participation in research institutional lens community lens individual autonomy community autonomy individual benefit community benefit expanding the boundaries of ethical reviews in flint in , the author, who is the executive deputy director of the community based organization partners (cbop), founded the cbop community ethics review board (cerb) in flint to establish a community-level ethical protection entity led by local residents [ ]. members of the cerb are community members with years of experience in research and in serving on regional and national ethics review committees. they www.amajournalofethics.org review proposed studies and work with researchers to ensure compliance with human research protections outlined in the cfr and to ensure community protections and mutual benefit. the cerb partners with two local universities to continue ongoing research ethics training for its members, who are required to obtain cfr human subjects protections training certificates from one of the two universities. in a community experiencing psychological stress and mistrust from failures of government at all levels [ ], in spring the cerb also partnered with the healthy flint research coordinating center as the vetting arm for research in flint. the cerb process is a win- win for both the community and researchers. cerb services include: ( ) community ethics reviews and critiques of proposals; ( ) identifying and assisting in developing a community advisory board for research projects, if needed; ( ) identifying community partners, research participants, and community research sites; ( ) suggesting strategies for community engagement; ( ) vetting research ideas; and ( ) issuing letters of support for particular projects. case analysis as illustrated by the case scenario that opened this essay, an overarching concern for researchers is residents’ lack of trust in research and government institutions. the proposed research in this case includes blood draws and other biospecimen extractions, in addition to physical space intrusion through home visits. to an already overburdened, stressed, and distressed community, community-specific questions need to be addressed, including: what are the community-level protections? what are the community-level benefits and risks? what are best methods of community engagement to obtain community-level buy-in? it is critical to approach this study with the aforementioned considerations in order to respond to distrust and to reach a level of effective community participation. given that in this case the research protocol has been reviewed only by a university irb and has had some opposition from the community, it will be necessary for a respected community entity to review and possibly endorse this research project to ensure the protocol’s compliance with community interests, priorities, and ethical standards. hence researchers in this ethics case should engage with the cerb. upon completing the cerb’s review process, a letter of support or endorsement could be granted confirming that the research has been reviewed and deemed appropriate by community members. considering the current climate of mistrust and the historical mistrust of communities of color toward research [ ], the local irb in this case study should recognize and respond to ethical concerns, such as community protections, and partner with the cerb. this approach would expand the lens of the ethics review that researchers would receive. national implications nationally, the ethics review process should not protect institutional power at the expense of community [ ], but instead reconstruct its review domains to include questions that assess community-level protections, risks, benefits, and issues of social ama journal of ethics, october justice. this reorientation would ensure that irb research protocols explicitly address community-level considerations. specific questions to assess studies’ risk of community-level harms—biological, psychological, environmental, and socio-cultural— are ideal. questions could include, but are not limited to: are the risks and benefits from this study different for the individual participant than the collective community? if so, how are they different? is there a fair distribution of these risks and benefits on a community level? additional questions should focus on the consent process. irbs should ask researchers how they are verifying that participants understand all the risks and benefits before giving consent. the concept of the “right to know” should be expanded to include the “right to understand.” is there a level of “community understanding” regarding the study? is there acceptable or sufficient transparency with community members? will this study protect the dignity of the community? there are three recommended strategies to assist irbs in including community-level ethical protections: ( ) irbs should partner with local cerbs to conduct a joint-review process; ( ) irbs should include community members from local cerbs; and ( ) irbs should reroute researchers to local cerbs for protocol review prior to the irb review and consider the results of the cerb review in their deliberations. furthermore, risks and benefits of research should be justly distributed by engaging the community in the process of identifying and assessing those risks and benefits. conclusion in conclusion, research is a critical component in the growth and evolution of knowledge aimed at making the lives of people healthier and better. research institutions are working to develop more effective approaches to engage communities in their studies, which require a reconstructed frame for assessing ethical protections. irb review processes would be enhanced by incorporating community ethics reviews to ensure community-level protections and to maximize the impact of engaging communities in research across the disciplines. flint is an excellent example of how city residents came together to develop and set in place a mechanism for the community to access proposed research to ensure protection of the community. references . flint water advisory task force. flint water advisory task force: final report. lansing, mi: state of michigan. https://www.michigan.gov/documents/snyder/fwatf_final_report_ mar ch _ _ .pdf. accessed march , . . local government and school district fiscal accountability act, hr , th leg, reg sess (mich ). https://www.legislature.mi.gov/documents/ - /publicact/htm/ -pa- .htm. accessed august , . www.amajournalofethics.org . miller ds, wesley n. toxic disasters, biopolitics, and corrosive communities: guiding principles in the quest for healing in flint, michigan. environ justice. ; ( ): - . . longley k. flint emergency: timeline of state takeover. mlive. december , . http://www.mlive.com/news/flint/index.ssf/ / /flint_emergency_timelin e_of_st_ .html. accessed april , . local financial stability and choice act, h , leg, reg sess (mich ). . https://www.legislature.mi.gov/documents/ - /publicact/pdf/ -pa- .pdf. accessed august , . . butler lj, scammell mk, benson eb. the flint, michigan, water crisis: a case study in regulatory failure and environmental injustice. environ justice. ; ( ): - . . maximum contaminant level goals and national primary drinking water regulations for lead and copper; final rule. fed regist. ; ( ): - . . kaffer n. why didn’t flint treat its water? an answer, at last. detroit free press. march , . http://www.freep.com/story/opinion/ / / /flint-water- crisis/ /. accessed august , . . burke mn. epa gives flint $ m to help repair pipes. detroit news. march , . http://www.detroitnews.com/story/news/michigan/flint-water- crisis/ / / /flint/ /. accessed august , . . michigan civil rights commission. the flint water crisis: systemic racism through the lens of flint. lansing, mi: michigan civil rights commission; february , . http://www.michigan.gov/documents/mdcr/vflintcrisisrep-f-edited - - _ _ .pdf. accessed february , . . national commission for the protection of human subjects of biomedical and behavioral research. the belmont report: ethical principles and guidelines for the protection of human subjects of research. https://www.hhs.gov/ohrp/regulations-and-policy/belmont-report/index.html. published april , . accessed august , . . bromley e, mikesell l, jones f, khodyakov d. from subject to participant: ethics and the evolving role of community in health research. am j public health. ; ( ): - . . mikesell l, bromley e, khodyakov d. ethical community-engaged research: a literature review. am j public health. ; ( ):e -e . . gilbert sg. supplementing the traditional institutional review board with an environmental health and community review board. environ health perspect. ; ( ): - . . stoecker r. challenging institutional barriers to community-based research. action res. ; ( ): - . . shore n, brazauskas r, drew e, et al. understanding community-based processes for research ethics review: a national study. am j public health. ; (suppl ):s -s . ama journal of ethics, october . flicker s, travers r, guta a, mcdonald s, meagher a. ethical dilemmas in community-based participatory research: recommendations for institutional review boards. j urban health. ; ( ): - . . irb membership, cfr sec . ( ). https://www.accessdata.fda.gov/scripts/cdrh/cfdocs/cfcfr/cfrsearch.cfm?fr= . . accessed august , . . mcgrath mm, fullilove re, kaufman mr, wallace r, fullilove mt. the limits of collaboration: a qualitative study of community ethical review of environmental health research. am j public health. ; ( ): - . . quinn sc. ethics in public health research: protecting human subjects: the role of community advisory boards. am j public health. ; ( ): - . . grignon j, wong ka, seifer sd. ensuring community-level protections: proceedings of the educational conference call series on institutional review boards and ethical issues in research. community-campus partnerships for health; . https://ccph.memberclicks.net/assets/documents/focusareas/finalresearcheth icscallseriesreport.pdf. accessed july , . . de vries r, forsberg cp. who decides? a look at ethics committee membership. hec forum. ; ( ): - . . malone re, yerger vb, mcgruder c, froelicher e. “it’s like tuskegee in reverse”: a case study of ethical tensions in institutional review board review of community- based participatory research. am j public health. ; ( ): - . . martin del campo f, casado j, spencer p, strelnick h. the development of the bronx community research review board: a pilot feasibility project for a model of community consultation. prog community health partnersh. ; ( ): - . . community based organization partners. community ethics review board. http://cbop-national.org/index.php/community-ethics-review-board. accessed august , . . gostin lo. lead in the water: a tale of social and environmental injustice. jama. ; ( ): - . . cobie-smith g, thomas sb, st. george dm. distrust, race, and research. arch intern med. ; ( ): - . kent d. key, mph, phd, is the director of the office of community scholars and partnerships at the michigan state university college of human medicine in flint, michigan. he is also the chair of the community based public health caucus of the american public health association and a robert wood johnson foundation fellow for the culture of health leader program. his research interests include both racial and ethnic health disparities research, workforce development, and community-engaged research. www.amajournalofethics.org related in the ama journal of ethics communicating results of community-based participatory research, february the history and role of institutional review boards, april identifying the challenges in community-based participatory research collaboration, february improving institutional review of community-based participatory research applications, february the national clinician scholars program: teaching transformational leadership and promoting health justice through community-engaged research ethics, december physician, researcher, neighbor—conflicting roles in community-based participatory research, february setting the agenda for community-based participatory research, february the people and events in this case are fictional. resemblance to real events or to names of people, living or dead, is entirely coincidental. the viewpoints expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the ama. copyright american medical association. all rights reserved. issn - http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /ccas - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /pfor - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /jdsc - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /jdsc - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /jdsc - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /medu - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /medu - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /ccas - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /ccas - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /ccas - .html 	communicating results of community-based participatory research, february 	 tuthe history and role of institutional review boardsu t, april 	identifying the challenges in community-based participatory research collaboration, february 	improving institutional review of community-based participatory research applications, february 	the national clinician scholars program: teaching transformational leadership and promoting health justice through community-engaged research ethics, december 	physician, researcher, neighbor—conflicting roles in community-based participatory research, february 	setting the agenda for community-based participatory research, february black lives matter and the removal of racist statues. perspectives of an african black lives matter and the removal of racist statues perspectives of an african caesar alimsinya atuire : inquiries into art, history, and the visual # - , pp. – https://doi.org/ . /xxi. . . https://doi.org/ . /xxi. . . caesar alimsinya atuire abstract the killing of george floyd by minneapolis police officers and the subsequent black lives matter protests have been accompanied by calls for the removal of statues of racists from public space. this has generated debate about the role of statues in the public sphere. i argue that statues are erected to represent a chosen narrative about history. the debate about the removal of statues is a controversy about history and how we relate to it. from this perspective, the black lives matter movement is not a drive to remove or topple statues, but a call for an honest examination of systemic racism and the residual effects of slavery. this call can be a kairos to engage in a constructive dialogue about the societies we aspire to live in. the result of this dialogue, which includes a re-examination of dominant narratives, will decide which statues and monuments can occupy public space and represent our societies. keywords black lives matter; statues; racism; slavery; dialogue. black lives matter and the removal of racist statues premise i begin this paper with a confession. i cannot be neutral in the black lives matter conversation because mine is a black life and i would like it to matter. nevertheless, as an academic philosopher, i can only try to be rational and possibly dispassionate. the residual effects of the north atlantic slave trade and its essentially racist framework have always been present in my life. my ethnicity, the bulsa of northern ghana, is linked to the slave trade. the unity of the bulsa as a distinct ethnic group came about when various clan and village leaders united to defend themselves and their families from the frequent attacks of slave raiders. the feok festival, celebrated by the bulsa every year in december, affirms the bulsa identity by commemorating and reenacting the defeat of baabatu, the last notorious slave raider of the upper east region of ghana. the architecture of the bulsa homes also bears witness to defence against human and livestock raiders. all domes- tic animals are kept within the courtyard of walled compounds, where, amidst the thatched roofs, there is always a flat-roofed ter- race which serves among other things as an observation tower. growing up in the northern territories of ghana, i was quite oblivious of racism. this changed when i left ghana for the uk at the age of seventeen to continue my education. it was only then that i was made to become conscious of the weight of being black. yet, apart from a few isolated incidents of being verbally and physically attacked because of the colour of my skin, the weight has been present principally in two subtle forms. first is a sort of burden of proof that i am a normal law-abiding, honest person and an intel- lectual. if we consider that onus probandi incumbit ei qui dicit, non ei qui negat (the burden of proof lies with the one who affirms and not the one who negates), this is tedious. when a burden of proof is needed for such basic human characteristics, there is an implicit assumption that by claiming to possess these qualities i am making an affirmation that requires proof because it is not the accepted view about persons like me. the qualities which have often been assigned to me gratuitously and generously, such as being a good dancer, an athlete, a party freak, and possessing ‘joints’ or being able to procure them, are qualities which i unfortunately do not possess. the second aspect of this weight is alienation. even though i have lived, studied and worked in the uk, ireland, spain and italy, and i speak four modern european languages fluently (whereas i can barely get by with two african languages), i have always been considered a foreigner in europe, an outsider. i do not really belong. with hindsight, i realize how this has conditioned some of my reac- tions, especially on those occasions when i should have spoken up. the feeling of alienation, accompanied by the burden of justi- fication, has made me think speaking out is counterproductive or amos yaw ademin, indigenous resistance to slavery by the builsa people of northern ghana, ma thesis, university of ghana, legon . caesar alimsinya atuire pointless. i have been perhaps more fortunate than other persons of african descent born in europe and america, since i always have a home to return to in africa, whereas for them it must be more difficult because the only home they have and they know is the one that alienates them. when i returned to ghana after living in europe for twenty- nine years, i chose to settle in a small fishing town on the atlantic coast called apam. there are three things i notice whenever i am returning home to apam: the distinct smell of fish as i drive by the port; the apam skyline, which is an endless series of bamboo sticks, none perfectly perpendicular to the ground, holding up tv antennas from low-rise rusting roofs; and, above all, the imposing structure of slave fort lijdzaamheid (fort patience), built by the dutch from to , standing on top of the promontory over- looking the town. it is an indelible and jarring reminder of the north atlantic slave trade and its racist agenda. it is with this baggage that i write about black lives matter and the removal of statues of racists. i. introduction. una passeggiata estiva romana (a roman summer walk) cities and towns around the world are adorned with monuments and statues commemorating events, deities and persons that have shaped the present. i write this paper from rome, a city whose centre can be described as an open-air museum. i walk from via cola di rienzo – named after the renaissance demagogue and pop- ulist, mythologized by the leaders of the italian risorgimento – to piazza risorgimento towards piazza san pietro and the imposing saint peter’s basilica. from the piazza i look up to the loggia bal- cony from which popes over the centuries have sent out messages of peace and fraternity through urbi et orbi blessings at christmas and easter. many thoughts about the meaning of monuments race through my mind. this magnificent monument of catholicism was built with money raised through dubious means, such as selling papal noble titles and indulgences. as i walk away from the basilica along the via della conciliazione – built by fascist leader musso- lini – towards castel sant’angelo, which was originally built as a mausoleum for emperor hadrian ( – ) before becoming a papal fortress with a secret passage to the vatican and finally a prison where the likes of giordano bruno and il cagliostro were detained and where executions were carried out, i begin to wonder whether there are any monuments without a dark side? from castel sant’angelo, i descend the steps from ponte sant’angelo with its ten statues of angels holding sponges, lances, whips, crown of thorns and other religious symbols. away from the traffic and walking on the riverbanks, i head towards isola tiberina, where the temple of aesculapius, the greek god of medicine lies underneath what is now the church of saint bartholomeus. along the way, i find black lives matter and the removal of racist statues myself wishing that the river tiber, witness to all these events of the past as well as all the ways each era has rewritten history, could speak. across the river, now from the isola tiberina overlooking the jewish ghetto, i see the cupola of rome’s major synagogue. i ask myself, what is the jewish version of the history of papal rome and its ubiquitous christian monuments? the building of monuments and statues is a symbolic represen- tation of a heritage. as simon john puts it, statues “are symbolic of the fixed ideas of a specific community regarding its past, as cap- tured at a particular point in time”. in fact, most monuments and statues are erected to immortalize a retrospective interpretation of events and lives of persons. statues, unlike other monuments which are not always celebratory, tend to exalt the persons they represent. for example, monuments like the holocaust memorial in berlin inaugurated in may is a grim reminder of a dark page in human history. on the contrary, most of the statues of historical persons that occupy the public spaces in cities and towns around the world are celebrations of the achievements of persons who are believed to have made positive contributions to their societies. from this perspective, as pippa catterall points out, it is hardly sur- prising that “another perennial facet of statues throughout history” is that “they have mostly been of men, usually from the military. the database of the public monuments and sculpture association suggests that only . per cent of the civic statues in britain are of non-royal women.” from this perspective, statues are symbolic representations of an interpretation of history. this often takes the form of a secular or religious hagiography of historical persons based on the views of the persons who commissioned them. it is worth noting that these narratives do not always coincide with the honoured one’s own perception of themselves. a recent example is the case of professor john attah mills, a president of the republic of ghana who died in office in . he has become known as asomdwee hene (king of peace) and the park where his mortal remains lie has been renamed asomdwee park. even though studies undertaken after his death have sustained the idea that attah mills championed a peaceful agenda in politics, the humble professor would have never considered himself a ‘king’, let alone ‘a king of peace’. and yet, future generations will know him as the ‘king of peace’. an even more astonishing example of how later epochs can represent simon john, statues, politics and the past, in: history today , , september , https:/ /www.historytoday.com/archive/behind-times/statues-politics-and-past ( . . ). pippa catterall, on statues and history: the dialogue between past and present in public space. british politics and policy at lse ( ), https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/ statues-past-and-present/ ( . . ). jacob anderson and eric ziem bibiebome, analysing john evans atta mills’ speeches projecting him as ‘a man of peace’, in: international journal of language and translation studies , , – . https://www.historytoday.com/archive/behind-times/statues-politics-and-past https://www.historytoday.com/archive/behind-times/statues-politics-and-past https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/statues-past-and-present/ https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/statues-past-and-present/ caesar alimsinya atuire historical facts and find novel meanings to suit their contexts is the case of the most widely diffused christian symbol: the crucifix. in the roman empire, crucifixion was a gruesome execution, so much so that in the first century it was applied only to non-citizens of the empire. for the first three centuries of christianity until the era of helen and constantine, the crucifix was not the symbol of christianity. early christians preferred other symbols like the fish and would perhaps have been horrified to see an instrument of torture and capital punishment as a representation of their beliefs. yet later theological interpretations have constructed a narrative that portrays the crucifix as a symbol of love and salvation. three points have emerged so far: first, statues are not an objective historical representation of the figures they represent. second, they represent an attempt by those who commissioned them to celebrate and perpetuate their version of history. third, these attempts to fix history can be unfixed – meaning can change with time. ii. do statues die? metaphorically, we may ask: when does a statue die? if we agree that statues die, then who is the coroner to determine and certify the death? the pulling down of statues is not a twenty-first-century discovery. controversies around artistic representations have taken place in different moments and for different reasons in history. thomas noble, in his book on iconoclasm, offers a key to interpret- ing these controversies: throughout history, heated debates about artistic represen- tations, and the actual destruction of public and private works of art, have been by-products of other kinds of social, political, or religious movements. one thinks immediately of protestant iconoclasm in the sixteenth and seventeenth cen- turies; of the political iconoclasm of the french revolution; of the ideological iconoclasm of both fascist and communist states and their successors; or of contemporary american disputes over flag burning and public subsidies for artis- tic work that some people deem blasphemous or obscene. the iconoclastic moment in these movements almost always provides the careful observer with a sharp view of the stresses and tears in the social fabric of a given time or place. thomas noble talks of “stresses and tears in the social fabric”. these can sometimes be long-pent-up frustrations within a society that erupt into social movements when groups of people within thomas f. x. noble, images, iconoclasm, and the carolingians, philadelphia , . black lives matter and the removal of racist statues a society feel misrepresented or marginalized. anger is directed towards monuments and statues which are perceived to represent a perpetuation of the narrative that the movements want to change. in , when the american revolution was in full swing, anger was directed at the equestrian statue of english king george iii on bowling green in new york. with the help of george washington’s troops, protestors pulled down the statue “from its plinth and broke it into pieces”. much of the lead was shipped to connecticut and melted down to make , bullets. a british officer who had the decapitated head rescued from a tavern before it reached the fur- nace noted that the nose was severed, the laurels were awry, and a musket ball was lodged “part of the way through his head”. he had it shipped back to london “to convince them at home of the infamous disposition of the ungrateful people of this distressed country”. the destruction of statues of perceived disreputable persons was not only an american phenomenon. in the uk, in , a year after the english king charles i was condemned and beheaded, parliament ordered that his statue at the exchange in london “be demolished, by having the head taken off, and the scepter [taken] out of his hand”. a few decades later, in , it was the turn of catholic king james ii’s statue in newcastle to be removed, dragged along the streets, and tossed into the river. the removal of statues by the british not only took place within the confines of the british isles. hermann von wissmann, a german explorer, colonizer and governor of german east africa, was famous among other things for his ruthless exploits on natives and their villages. in , four years after his death, a statue was erected to his honour and placed in dar-es-salaam, today tanzania. after the defeat of germany in the first world war, the british took control of the former ger- man territory of east africa. they removed wissmann’s statue and transported it to london where it was put on display as a trophy at the war museum. the story doesn’t end there. during the weimar republic, when germany exalted her colonial heroes, the country succeeded in repatriating the statue. it was placed in front of the university of hamburg. later, when the narrative about colonialism and relations with africa changed in the s, the student move- ment sprayed and toppled the statue of wissmann in . the uni- versity of hamburg decided that wissmann’s statue had no right to be in this public space. the statue was removed and transferred to the hamburg observatory where, “in order to create a visualization of germany’s relationship to its colonial past, the curatorial team at the deutsches historisches museum decided that the exhibition andrew lawler, pulling down statues? it’s a tradition that dates back to u.s. independence, in: national geographic, july , https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/ / /pulling-down-statues-tradition-dates-back-united-states-independence/ ( . . ). ibid. https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/ / /pulling-down-statues-tradition-dates-back-united-states-independence/ https://www.nationalgeographic.com/history/ / /pulling-down-statues-tradition-dates-back-united-states-independence/ caesar alimsinya atuire should similarly feature the monument lying on the ground”. to date, the statue of wissmann remains in this position. in the twenty-first century, the most emblematic fall was per- haps that of the statue of saddam hussein in baghdad on april . the attack on the statue was initiated by khadim al jabourri, an iraqi motorbike repairer wielding a sledgehammer. he was joined by american marines who used an armoured vehicle to top- ple the statue before witnessing crowds rushed in, unleashing their anger and frustration on the fallen statue. ironically, al jabourri, in a interview published in the guardian newspaper, regretted the toppling of the statue: “then we had only one dictator, now we have hundreds”, he said, echoing a popular sentiment in a country mired in political problems and corruption, where killings still occur on an almost daily basis. “nothing has changed for the better.” the toppling of a statue is not a guarantee that the desired change will indeed occur. some initial conclusions can be drawn from the foregoing. first, statues represent an interpretation of history. the stories they tell are often partial, if not decidedly ideological. second, statues can become obsolete when the narrative they portray or the persons they represent can no longer be upheld as worthy occupants of public space. third, the process of removal of statues can be insti- tutional, but quite often it is not. fourth, removal of a statue from public space does not always entail destruction; the statue can be placed in a context and in a way that corresponds to the current narrative (wissmann). fifth, the removal of statues when driven by a surge of public emotion can become regretful (al jabourri). finally, the toppling of a statue is not a guarantee the change hoped for will be achieved. a more difficult question to address, however, is why the removal of some statues is more controversial than others? the famous via dei fori imperiale in rome, leading to the colosseum, which was built by fascist mussolini, is lined with statues of four roman emperors: caesar, augustus, nerva and trajan. none of these figures will survive ethical scrutiny if we consider their mili- tary exploits and the internal power-grabbing manoeuvres they used to rise to the highest ranks of the roman empire, not to men- tion their endorsement of discriminatory attitudes towards classes of citizen and non-citizens. yet, we do not witness an outcry from descendants of roman slaves and citizens of former roman colo- nies calling for the removal of the statues of the emperors. the acceptance of their presence in public space cannot merely be attributed to the aesthetic value of the statues, which are in fact memorial to hermann von wissmann. deutsches historisches museum, https://www.dhm .de/blog/ / / /memorial-to-hermann-von-wissmann/ ( . . ). peter beaumont, saddam’s statue: the bitter regrets of iraq’s sledgehammer man, in: the guardian, march , https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /mar/ /saddam -hussein-statue-kadom-al-jabourir-sledgehammer ( . . ). https://www.dhm.de/blog/ / / /memorial-to-hermann-von-wissmann/ https://www.dhm.de/blog/ / / /memorial-to-hermann-von-wissmann/ https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /mar/ /saddam-hussein-statue-kadom-al-jabourir-sledgehammer https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /mar/ /saddam-hussein-statue-kadom-al-jabourir-sledgehammer black lives matter and the removal of racist statues copies. the original statues are conserved in the capitoline muse- ums. a possible reason for this could be that there is consensus that the imperial dreams and ideals of a superior and invincible roman empire are no longer a threat. in the words of simon john, the debate about controversial statues concerns “wider conflicts between competing visions of history”. with all this in mind, we shall now look at the current move- ment for the removal of statues of racists and promoters of slavery, especially in the light of the black lives matter movement that has garnered more energy in the wake of the killing of george floyd. iii. the debate: statues of racists in public space since the public killing of george floyd by officers of the minne- apolis police department on may , a long list of statues of historical figures known to be racists have been removed from public space in the usa and the uk. among these are charles linn, may (birmingham, alabama); robert e. lee, june (montgom- ery, alabama); raphael semmes, june (mobile, alabama); john b. castleman, june (louisville, kentucky); edward colston, june (bristol, uk); jefferson davis, june (richmond, virginia); and albert pike, june (washington, d.c.). many confederate monu- ments and statues of christopher columbus have been removed or toppled. not everyone agrees with the removal of these and other statues. the african american writer sophia a. nelson believes that removing statues is to run away from the past and to gag freedom of expression. similar views have been expressed by oxford university’s vice-chancellor, louise richardson. in the face of renewed calls for the removal of the statue of cecil rhodes overlooking the high street from the façade of oriel college, she commented “that hiding our history is not the route to enlighten- ment”. the university and oriel college have since modified their position and have set up a committee to investigate, deliberate and advise on the question. others, donald trump, for example, see the toppling and defacing of statues and monuments as a sustained assault on revered american monuments carried out by “arsonists and left-wing extremists” adding that those “who have carried out and supported these acts have explicitly identified themselves with ideologies – such as marxism – that call for the destruction of the united states system of government”. as a result, on june, he simon john, statues. sophia a. nelson, don’t take down confederate statues. here’s why, in: nbc news, june , https://www.nbcnews.com/think/news/opinion-why-i-feel-confederate -monuments-should-stay-ncna ( . . ). sean coughlan, don’t hide history, says oxford head in statue row, in: bbc news, june , https://www.bbc.com/news/education- ( . . ). https://www.nbcnews.com/think/news/opinion-why-i-feel-confederate-monuments-should-stay-ncna https://www.nbcnews.com/think/news/opinion-why-i-feel-confederate-monuments-should-stay-ncna https://www.bbc.com/news/education- caesar alimsinya atuire issued an “executive order on protecting american monuments, memorials, and statues and combating recent criminal violence” to “prosecute to the fullest extent permitted under federal law, and as appropriate, any person or any entity that destroys, damages, vandalizes, or desecrates a monument, memorial, or statue within the united states or otherwise vandalizes government property”. the controversy around the removal of statues has become such a major issue in the debates surrounding the black lives mat- ter movement that it risks transforming questions of racism, white privilege, justice and equality into questions of law and order, or, worse still, a question of patriotism, where to be patriotic means subscribing somehow to the narrative that created the statues in question. from conversations with persons who are concerned about the current drive for the removal of statues of racists from public spaces, i have collected reasons that i discuss in the next paragraphs before going on to present a possible paradigm for addressing the controversy. . no one really cares about statues these days. we do not even notice them. by pulling them down we are opening a hornet’s nest. in fact, apart from a few exceptions like narendra modi of india, few leaders today are concerned about erecting statues in honour of past heroes. the statuomania era of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries seems to have died down. what is more, even in cities where statues abound, many citizens hardly notice them or know what they stand for. bristolians and the world at large knew very little about edward colston and his engagement in the slave trade until calls for the removal of his statue started becom- ing louder in . this view also holds that, it is more urgent to address the existential, practical and systematic issues of racism. when these questions have been addressed sufficiently, the narra- tive about the past will change and monuments that misrepresent the past will either be removed or complemented with newer ones which tell the other side of the story without too much controversy. this argument embodies a lot of common sense. indeed, the removal of a statue is not a guarantee that the underlying issues of racial injustice will be addressed. it may just become an occasion to vent frustration at lifeless objects, all the while allowing authorities to sweep the vexed questions of systemic reform under the carpet by calling for calm and making promises of systemic change that will not be fulfilled. on the flip side, allowing statues of racists a permanent place in the public sphere does have a negative effect on victims of racism. the white house, executive order on protecting american monu- ments, memorials, and statues and combating recent criminal vio- lence, issued june , https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions /executive-order-protecting-american-monuments-memorials-statues-combating-recent- criminal-violence/ ( . . ). https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-protecting-american-monuments-memorials-statues-combating-recent-criminal-violence/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-protecting-american-monuments-memorials-statues-combating-recent-criminal-violence/ https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential-actions/executive-order-protecting-american-monuments-memorials-statues-combating-recent-criminal-violence/ black lives matter and the removal of racist statues when public space is adorned with figures with which black people cannot identify, even if they are not aware of the full story of these persons, a feeling of alienation is created. a similar argument can be made for the absence of statues of women in public space. stat- ues celebrate people who have contributed to making history. the absence of figures of blacks and women in public space reinforces the idea that our societies are led by white men and that only white men are worthy of commemoration in our societies. it is worth pointing out moreover that victims often experience what miranda fricker has described as hermeneutical injustice. this is when victims of injustice perceive something wrong and yet, on account of a deficit in shared tools for interpretation, victims or marginal- ized groups may not have the epistemic concepts to express what they are feeling. it is often quite difficult for persons of african descent to express the contours of racism, but this does not mean that the effects are not perceived. the predominance of figures of colonialists, racists, slave owners and traders, and the absence of monuments and statues of slaves and black anti-racists, can contrib- ute to making public space silently but perceptibly unwelcoming towards people of african descent. . persons pulling down statues are violent criminals. law and order must prevail. images of angry demonstrators defacing or pulling down statues have accompanied some of the demonstrations in favour of the black lives matter movement. this has led to authorities placing protective coverings around statues that risk being damaged by demonstrators. on june, the statue of winston churchill in lon- don’s parliament square was covered up to protect it from being attacked by demonstrators. the executive order issued by presi- dent trump on june interprets the defacing and pulling down of statues as acts of violence against the state. on this premise of aggression towards the state, the president threatened to use the army to defend these monuments and to ensure that law and order are observed. for many persons opposed to the pulling down or defacing of statues, the demonstrations in favour of the black lives matter movement are being hijacked by violent persons whose actions need to be suppressed. this line of reasoning is practically relevant from a social view- point. however, logically, it may be riddled with a fallacy of chang- ing the subject because it shifts the question from whether statues of racists should be allowed in the public space to a question of how demonstrators are expected by law to express their frustrations. concentrating on vandalism by some of the demonstrators is a dis- traction that can lead to a missed opportunity to address issues of importance regarding identity and history. miranda fricker, epistemic injustice. power and the ethics of knowing, oxford . caesar alimsinya atuire there is no doubt that it is part of the duty of government to ensure that law and order prevail. the state cannot allow citizens to express their frustration by damaging property or objects. however, the appropriate response, in this case, may not be to increase the coercive powers of the police and military. the black lives matter movement was galvanized by a viral video showing police violence towards george floyd, an african american man. this act of vio- lence, which led to his death, was perpetuated by members of the police force. the police force is an arm of government that is sup- posed to protect citizens. if there was already a perception that the police do not discharge this duty equally to all citizens, and indeed, a lack of trust in their impartiality, then this event was a confirmation of that belief. therefore, escalating the coercive powers of the police and other armed forces towards demonstrators is perhaps not the best way to restore the trust required for successful policing. other ways of engaging with demonstrators and isolating radical elements need to be explored. what is more, a deeper understanding of civil protests is needed. these arise when social groups feel that the existing channels of dialogue for change are not open to them or do not heed their calls for change. it is the absence of adequate fora to engage in constructive dialogue that fosters the need for mass protests. a better response to protests would be to create space for the protesting parties’ voices to be heard and to follow up with real responses that seek to address their concerns. this would be a more inclusive approach. . the statues are an important part of our collective history which we cannot and should not erase. the removal of statues is an act of damnatio memoriae which is always negative. various persons, including the vice-chancellor of oxford univer- sity, have warned against trying to erase history by pulling down statues. the persons who are represented by the statues are protag- onists of events that have made us who we are. the removal of statues would seem to be an act of damnatio memoriae in which con- scious attempts are made to cancel positive traces of ignoble per- sons from the annals of history. such actions may in turn contribute to greater ignorance about the past and a poorer understanding of the present. this argument is problematic because it encapsulates many questionable assumptions. first, statues represent an interpretation of history. in fact, many statues are erected to reinforce a narra- tive that does not always present a complete picture. many of the confederate statues in the usa were erected during jim crow, an era known for its affirmation of white supremacy. the claim that statues teach history is a tall one; at best, they reinforce a particular narrative of history. secondly, the removal of a statue cannot be equated to the ancient practice of damnatio memoriae. as charles w. hedrick argues, the damnatio was an effort to repress and obliterate the representation of a person. it was not so much a question of black lives matter and the removal of racist statues oblivion as of disgrace. the removal of the statue of a racist from public space does not obliterate, it is an act of refusing to celebrate the achievements of the person either because those achievements are ethically questionable or other important aspects of the person’s life cast a large dark shadow on their achievements. to continue to keep statues of infamous persons in the public space might require re-interpreting our understanding of statues, that is, as representing not persons we celebrate but also those we vilify. it is difficult to imagine, for now, statues of villains in public space. would it be advisable to erect statues of villains standing on high plinths and in postures denoting success? . it is unfair to judge persons from the past with today’s criteria. when i visit the slave forts along the coast of ghana, which i often do, i walk down into the dark dungeons, breathing in the damp air of the large cells where young black women and men were chained and held for weeks whilst waiting to be led through the infamous ‘doors of no-return’, onto ships to be carried away forever across the seas to the new world. the experience of visiting these forts is so hid- eous that most visitors exit with a feeling of sadness. for whites, the sadness is tinged with guilt; for blacks, the sadness is tinged with anger. exiting these forts, i have on many occasions asked myself the hypothetical question of what i would have done if i had been born into a white slave-trading family years ago? of course, i have no answer to this question. the context in which a person is born and lives is part of the moral heritage which influences their choices and decisions. however, it is difficult to subscribe to total moral relativism. a moral distinction can be made between those who actively enslaved people, engaged in the slave trade or went to war to defend slavery, and those who perhaps benefitted from it without actively engaging in slavery. there is also something to be said about those who did not challenge the institution of slavery but in their own little ways tried to be humane towards slaves. and, of course, there were those who actively fought to put an end to slav- ery. in other words, even within the era of the north atlantic slave trade, there were different moral positions and there was room for choices even if the choices were narrower and conditioned by the general climate of acceptance of slavery. thus, active engagement in the slave trade or fighting battles to defend slavery was arguably a matter of choice and not just a result of the era in which the slave traders lived. to judge figures like colston, jack lee and rhodes negatively is not just an opinion of the twenty-first century. there were con- temporaries of these persons who did not agree with their choices and would not buy into a narrative that celebrates these figures. the difference today, perhaps, is that these critical voices have become charles w. hedrick, history and silence. purge and rehabilitation of memory in late antiq- uity, austin , . caesar alimsinya atuire louder. statues are erected to immortalize narratives about persons. when that narrative no longer holds in public opinion, the statue can be perceived as a monument that is propping up a lie or an injustice. . all human characters have flaws. to demand that persons represented by statues are flawless is a tall order. it will ultimately lead to an end of human statues in the public space. there is a benevolent view towards statues of fallen heroes which holds that it is impossible or almost impossible to come across a human character that has no flaws. the persons represented in stat- ues are humans who had their flaws and failings, but they also had achievements worth celebrating. it is unfair to fail to recognize their achievements just because they had some failings like all humans do. what is more, since flaws can be found in almost every human being, if we continue along this path, perhaps the only statues that will remain are those erected in honour of unknown or mythical persons, like molly malone on dublin’s grafton street or some of botero’s statues. perhaps we are heading towards the end of the era of statues of historical persons. and this, some hold, might not be a desirable end. it is true that one can find faults in any human character. it is virtually impossible to find human beings that are perfect or blame- less on all fronts. when mother theresa of calcutta was declared a saint by the roman catholic church, critics argued that she was a cynical activist making money and building a brand out of the suffering of the poor. nevertheless, in the context of the current discussion about the removal of statues of racists from public space, there are some considerations that need to be taken into account when following this line of reasoning. first, in the context of the black lives matter movement, the persons whose statues are being challenged are those whose ach- ievements relied on slavery and racism. this is not about other flaws linked to character or virtue in the strict sense. the calls for the removal of the statue of winston churchill from parliament square in london are not because of the stories or myths that he was a heavy drinker. edward colston built up wealth through slavery, cecil rhodes through white supremacy. the confederate generals fought bravely in a war which, for them, was a battle to uphold slavery. douglas robertson, mother teresa wasn’t a saintly person – she was a shrewd operator with unpalatable views who knew how to build up a brand, in: the independent, septem- ber , https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/mother-teresa-wasnt-a-saintly-person -she-was-a-shrewd-operator-with-unpalatable-views-who-knew-how-a .html ( . . ). on the question whether churchill was an alcoholic or not, see an analysis by michael richards at https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/myths/alcohol-abuser/ ( . . ). https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/mother-teresa-wasnt-a-saintly-person-she-was-a-shrewd-operator-with-unpalatable-views-who-knew-how-a .html https://www.independent.co.uk/voices/mother-teresa-wasnt-a-saintly-person-she-was-a-shrewd-operator-with-unpalatable-views-who-knew-how-a .html https://winstonchurchill.org/resources/myths/alcohol-abuser/ black lives matter and the removal of racist statues there are other cases where a statue is erected to celebrate a person’s admirable achievements in fields not directly related to slavery or racism, yet the person has a deeply flawed record. an example is the famous twentieth-century italian journalist, indro montanelli, who as a young man of twenty-four, during the invasion of abyssinia, bought, married, and regularly raped a twelve-year- old local girl. montanelli later abandoned the fascist camp, became a champion of press freedom against fascists and dictators, was imprisoned, even suffered an assassination attempt by the brigate rosse terrorist group, and remained throughout his long life an uncompromising sharp leader of italian independent journalism. this earned him awards and a public statue in milan. however, throughout his lifetime montanelli remained unrepentant about his actions towards the young girl in abyssinia. even decades after these events, as an old man and a celebrated hero of italian journal- ism, he tried to justify his actions by saying, “that was the way it was done in abyssinia”. and he added: the young girl was a “docile little animal”. in the wake of the black lives matters movement, pro- testors splashed red paint on the statue of montanelli, wrote ‘rapist and racist’ on the plinth, and called for its removal. the mayor of milan, giuseppe sala, replied that he is open to dialogue, however, he is of the opinion that the statue must remain because “lives are to be judged in their complexity”, adding that whereas it is possible to demand an unblemished life from all, if we pursue this line, there will be few persons left to remember. mayor sala is perhaps right in his assessment, but his conclu- sion is debatable. great thinkers and philosophers like voltaire, hume, and kant all made explicitly racist and white supremacist affirmations. yet, their works are still studied, admired and com- mented on by students of philosophy from all races. the perdurance of their intellectual legacy cannot be attributed to statues that have been erected in their honour. persons like montanelli, whose unde- niable contribution to good journalism and press freedom in the face of tyranny and dictatorship is enviable, can perhaps be better analysed, studied and understood in contexts of reasoned dialogue. a mute statue in a public square may not provide the best context for a pondered evaluation of the ideas of a person like montanelli. annalisa teggi, «lei, signor montanelli, violentò una bambina di anni?» chiese elvira banotti, in: aleteia, august , https://it.aleteia.org/ / / /indro-montanelli- elvira-banotti-violenza-bimba- -anni-africa/ / ( . . ): “regolarmente sposata, in quanto regolarmente comprata dal padre. aveva anni, ma non mi prendere per un bruto: a anni quelle lì sono già donne. […] avevo bisogno di una donna a quell’età. me la comprò il mio sottufficiale insieme a un cavallo e un fucile, in tutto lire. […]. lei era un animalino docile; ogni giorni mi raggiungeva ovunque fossi insieme alle mogli degli altri.” sala: “la statua di montanelli resta, le vite si giudicano nella loro complessità”, in: adnkronos, june , https://www.adnkronos.com/fatti/ cronaca/ / / /sala-statua-montanelli-resta-vite-giudicano-nella-loro-complessita_ vaypmlbg xfrxreldpfxcm.html ( . . ). björn freter, white supremacy in eurowestern epistemologies. on the west’s responsi- bility for its philosophical heritage, in: synthesis philosophica , , , – . https://it.aleteia.org/ / / /indro-montanelli-elvira-banotti-violenza-bimba- -anni-africa/ / https://it.aleteia.org/ / / /indro-montanelli-elvira-banotti-violenza-bimba- -anni-africa/ / https://www.adnkronos.com/fatti/cronaca/ / / /sala-statua-montanelli-resta-vite-giudicano-nella-loro-complessita_vaypmlbg xfrxreldpfxcm.html https://www.adnkronos.com/fatti/cronaca/ / / /sala-statua-montanelli-resta-vite-giudicano-nella-loro-complessita_vaypmlbg xfrxreldpfxcm.html https://www.adnkronos.com/fatti/cronaca/ / / /sala-statua-montanelli-resta-vite-giudicano-nella-loro-complessita_vaypmlbg xfrxreldpfxcm.html caesar alimsinya atuire what is more, the statue of a person who is declaredly unrepentant about being a paedophile and racist rapist is not a reassuring pres- ence to children who need to grow up with a certainty that their society is willing to protect them. . many statues are works of art that have aesthetic value which goes beyond the persons they represent. destroying them is similar to burning libraries or ‘bad’ books. there is no doubt that some statues have an aesthetic value that needs to be preserved irrespective of the historical facts they rep- resent. michelangelo’s pieta, david, moses and other statues are of immense value even though historians or theologians could raise questions about his depiction of these figures. the equestrian statue of marcus aurelius has influenced political sculptures for centuries. more modern statues, those from the era of romanticism, which may have lesser artistic value, are worthy of conservation because they represent an era of artistic expression, which is always a win- dow into understanding the spirit of the times. from this point of view, the destruction of statues can deprive citizens and art students of important pieces that enrich our aes- thetic experience and enhance our understanding of the past and the present. a counter argument could be made that the removal of statues from public space does not mean destroying them. indeed, some will be better conserved over time if they were kept in a museum where they can be protected, preserved and presented within a framework that allows people to understand and interpret them bet- ter. one might ask: what about statues carved into natural spaces, the bas-relief of the three confederate leaders, for example, which cannot be transferred to museums or other sites? here, perhaps the only alternative is to widen the narrative by ensuring the silenced voices are also heard. iv. black lives matter as a kairos when we look at the timeline (chronos) of slavery and racism, the current black lives matter movement could be a kairos, a propi- tious moment for decision and action. much has been achieved, and the condition of africans in europe and america today is much better than it was years ago or even sixty years ago. the north atlantic slave trade, which was unique because it used race as the deciding element in who was to become a slave and who was not, has been abolished. the united states of america can boast of even having elected a man of african descent to the highest office in the nation. as an african, i have studied and worked in some of the most prestigious institutions in europe, where a few centuries ago i would only have been admitted as a janitor or a domestic servant. black lives matter and the removal of racist statues nevertheless, it is also true that racism and white male suprem- acy are still present in many parts of the world. we are a long way from achieving equal opportunities for all. the current covid- pandemic has raised a curtain on some of the underlying inequal- ities. at the end of april, covid- -related deaths were almost twice as high in the bronx, as in manhattan ( versus per , residents). life expectancy across geographic, income and racial groups can vary by up to thirty years. for example, inner-city residents of chicago, who are more likely to be black, can expect to live to sixty years, a lower age than countries like zimbabwe, burundi and mali. yet, in suburban areas, persons who are typically white, live to ninety. the list of prolonged and systemic depri- vations of equal opportunities for persons of african descent is endless. at oxford university’s oriel college, which has benefitted from the generosity of cecil rhodes and whose statue towers over the entrance to the college from the high street, a mere six black students were admitted from to . the black lives matter movement is not a debate about statues. neither is it about george floyd or derek chauvin. it is about the conditions that allow events like the killing of george floyd to happen. the famous words of george floyd as he struggled under the knee of derek chauvin, ‘i can’t breathe’, are a symbolic cry of black persons who live with the weights i alluded to at the beginning of this paper. black lives matter is a call to lift those weights so that persons of african descent may breathe freely and have the same opportunities that are available to white citizens. even though the issues to be resolved deal with the present and the future, the roots of inequality and racism can be traced back to the past, to slavery and to colonialism. the structural and individual racisms of today are mainly residual effects and a contin- uation of historical slavery and colonialism. unfortunately, neither the european nations nor the usa have ever really made a concer- ted effort to deal with this past by carefully examining its impact on the present. discourses on racism tend to focus on programmes of inclusion, which are useful but avoid an honest confrontation with the past. a more organic programme aimed at putting an end to racism and promoting greater harmony in society would require an uncomfortable dialogue about past injustices. after all, true reconci- liation requires the identification and admission of errors together with a future commitment to justice. this is what makes the contro- harald schmidt, vaccine rationing and the urgency of social justice in the covid- response, in: hastings center report , , – (https://doi.org/ . /hast. ). harald schmidt, the way we ration ventilators is biased, in: new york times, april , https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/covid-ventilator-rationing- blacks.html ( . . ). number of black students in oxford rises, but low numbers admitted to colleges, in: itv news, june , https://www.itv.com/news/ - - /number-of-black-students-in -oxford-rises-but-low-numbers-admitted-to-colleges ( . . ). https://doi.org/ . /hast. https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/covid-ventilator-rationing-blacks.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/covid-ventilator-rationing-blacks.html https://www.itv.com/news/ - - /number-of-black-students-in-oxford-rises-but-low-numbers-admitted-to-colleges https://www.itv.com/news/ - - /number-of-black-students-in-oxford-rises-but-low-numbers-admitted-to-colleges caesar alimsinya atuire versy around history important in the black lives matter debate. this debate is not primarily about statues, it is about how to position ourselves today given the common and unequal past we share. v. concluding remarks about statues of racists in public spaces a general comment about statues of human persons is that they aim to immortalize mortals. they do this by keeping the mortal alive through a legendary narrative. when that memorializing runs into difficulty, the project of immortalization of the person also enters into difficulty. the person may be condemned to a second death, the death of a legend. whether this second death requires the statue memorializing this person to be removed from public space is a question that has to be agreed upon through dialogue, not through imposition or vandalism. the public sphere should be a place in which all the members of the community can feel at home or at least represented. if the story told by public space is skewed, this story can be corrected by complementing it with other stories, or by removing those elements that are in full contradiction with who we are or aspire to be as a society. the task is to create the space needed for constructive engage- ment and dialogue. black lives matter is an occasion, a kairos, to finally commit to engaging in that dialogue about racism and the residual effects of slavery that has been pending for centuries. in the meantime, the statues may remain (many have been around for decades and a year or two longer would not make such a difference). when a consensus has been reached, a statue can be de-commis- sioned or other monuments erected to give a more complete view of history. when this happens, entire communities will hopefully emerge victorious as a people, not as a particular group gaining victory over another. acknowledgements i would like to thank prof. karen lang for encouraging me to write this paper; prof. catherine conybeare for her insightful suggestions and comments; my roman friends, maru, andreina, ivana, maria, sara, oreste for the useful conversations on this theme. caesar alimsinya atuire is a senior lecturer in the philosophy and classics department at the university of ghana, legon. he is also a visiting fellow at all souls college, university of oxford. dr. atuire’s work draws from african and european philosophical traditions to reflect on normative issues in bioethics, health, and intercultural relations. he is co-editor of the volume bioethics in black lives matter and the removal of racist statues africa: theories and praxis. he has also lectured and published on epistemic decolonization in academia. the asm journals committee values the contributions of black microbiologists editorial the asm journals committee values the contributions of black microbiologists patrick d. schloss,a,# chair, asm journals committee, melissa junior,b director, asm journals, rebecca alvania,b assistant director, asm journals, cesar a. arias,c,d editor in chief, antimicrobial agents and chemotherapy, andreas baumler,e editor in chief, infection and immunity, arturo casadevall,f editor in chief, mbio, corrella detweiler,g editor in chief, microbiology and molecular biology reviews, harold drake,h editor in chief, applied and environmental microbiology, jack gilbert,i editor in chief, msystems, michael j. imperiale,a editor in chief, msphere, susan lovett,j editor in chief, ecosal plus, stanley maloy,k editor in chief, journal of microbiology and biology education (jmbe), alexander j. mcadam,l,m editor in chief, journal of clinical microbiology, irene l. g. newton,n editor in chief, microbiology resource announcements, michael j. sadowsky,o editor in chief, microbiology spectrum, rozanne m. sandri-goldin,p editor in chief, journal of virology, thomas j. silhavy,q editor in chief, journal of bacteriology, peter tontonoz,r editor in chief, molecular and cellular biology, jo-anne h. young,s editor in chief, clinical microbiology reviews, craig e. cameron,t isaac cann,u a. oveta fuller,a ariangela j. kozikv adepartment of microbiology and immunology, university of michigan, ann arbor, michigan, usa bamerican society for microbiology, washington, dc, usa ccenter for antimicrobial resistance and microbial genomics and division of infectious diseases, university of texas health science center, mcgovern medical school, houston, texas, usa ddepartment of microbiology and molecular genetics, university of texas health science center, mcgovern medical school, houston, texas, usa edepartment of medical microbiology and immunology, university of california, davis, california, usa fdepartment of molecular microbiology and immunology, johns hopkins bloomberg school of public health, baltimore, maryland, usa gdepartment of molecular, cellular & developmental biology, university of colorado, boulder, colorado, usa hdepartment of ecological microbiology, university of bayreuth, bayreuth, germany idepartment of pediatrics, university of california, san diego, california, usa jdepartment of biology, brandeis university, waltham, massachusetts, usa kdepartment of biology, san diego state university, san diego, california, usa jcm accepted manuscript posted online july j. clin. microbiol. doi: . /jcm. - copyright © american society for microbiology. all rights reserved. o n a p ril , a t c a r n e g ie m e l l o n u n iv l ib r h ttp ://jcm .a sm .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://jcm.asm.org/ lboston children’s hospital, boston, massachusetts, usa mharvard medical school, boston, massachusetts, usa ndepartment of biology, indiana university, bloomington, indiana, usa obiotechnology institute, university of minnesota, st. paul, minnesota, usa pdepartment of microbiology and molecular genetics, university of california, irvine, california, usa qdepartment of molecular biology, princeton university, princeton, new jersey, usa rdepartment of pathology and laboratory medicine, david geffen school of medicine, university of california, los angeles, california, usa sdepartment of medicine, university of minnesota, minneapolis, minnesota, usa tdepartment of microbiology & immunology, university of north carolina, chapel hill, north carolina, usa ucarl r. woese institute for genomic biology, university of illinois, urbana, illinois, usa vdepartment of internal medicine, university of michigan, ann arbor, michigan, usa ed. note: this editorial is being published by the following asm journals: antimicrobial agents and chemotherapy, applied and environmental microbiology, clinical microbiology reviews, ecosal plus, infection and immunity, journal of bacteriology, journal of clinical microbiology, journal of microbiology and biology education, journal of virology, microbiology and molecular biology reviews, microbiology resource announcements, microbiology spectrum, molecular and cellular biology, mbio, msphere, and msystems. #address correspondence to patrick d. schloss, pschloss@umich.edu. black lives matter. the ongoing problem of police brutality and the resulting deaths of george floyd ( ), breonna taylor ( ), and many other black people in the united states ( ) has rightly shaken the country. acts of racism should cause us to question the level to which we have personally participated in the systems of racial inequity that facilitate such acts. we all have an obligation to identify the ways that systemic racism functions in our society and in science. as scientists, we prefer to believe that we are driven by data and are immune to such detrimental behaviors. yet, if we are honest, we know that this is not always true. between and , the horrific tuskegee syphilis study was performed to observe the natural history of latent syphilis infection in black men ( ). the premise of the study was driven by the racist pseudoscience of social darwinism. the study directors hypothesized that black men were inferior to white men. the study directors lied to the men about their condition, leading the men to infect their partners and children. furthermore, when penicillin was shown in to treat syphilis, the doctors hid the treatment and refused to treat the men. leading peer-reviewed journals of the time published o n a p ril , a t c a r n e g ie m e l l o n u n iv l ib r h ttp ://jcm .a sm .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://jcm.asm.org/ results from the study. this textbook example of racism in microbiology underscores the historic role of scientific publishers in disseminating racist ideologies and points to the potential for scientific publishers to prevent the spread of racism. as the journals committee of the american society for microbiology, we are committed to promoting the work of black microbiologists and the issues that impact the black community. to do this, we must improve the representation of black microbiologists across the peer review process, recruit black authors to publish their research in asm’s journals, and identify aspects of peer review where there is opportunity for bias to affect our decisions to publish their research, something that we wish to avoid. we must also reassess the scopes of our journals to ensure that the microbiological problems that are important to the black community are published within the journals of this society. issues that affect the black community matter. black people in the united states in are, and historically have been, disproportionately and negatively impacted by infectious diseases ( ). the flint, mi, water crisis brought significant suffering to the primarily black community, including outbreaks of legionnaires’ disease ( ). black women are more likely to have a preterm birth, of which half are associated with a microbial etiology ( ). black children are more likely to have asthma, a disease which is associated with increased bacterial burden in the lungs ( ). black people are more likely to have a severe case of and die from coronavirus disease (covid- ) ( ). in new york city and elsewhere, the death rate due to covid- for black people is twice that for white people ( ). black people are also far more likely to be affected by sexually transmitted infections, including hiv, and evidence suggests a role for underlying structural inequities, such as mass incarceration and unequal treatment when seeking medical care ( , ). these disparities in health are an outcome of differences in socio-economic factors and the corresponding disenfranchisement. these include less access to health care, food deserts where nutritious and affordable food is not available, and poorly funded public health infrastructure. a person’s race provides no biological basis for the observed health disparities, and to assert otherwise will slow the identification of solutions to these disparities. unfortunately, research related to solving such problems is often discounted. a recent analysis of research project (r ) proposals reviewed by the national institutes of health found that the community- and population-level research topics of interest to black scientists placed them at a disadvantage for a fundable outcome and accounts for much of the reduced success rate of black scientists ( ). as an academic publisher, we have a responsibility to help to promote the importance and legitimacy of work that is important to the black community. black scientists have made significant contributions in spite of the systemic racism that they have faced throughout their lives. these scientists should be able to put their energy into their science rather than into overcoming the bias and prejudice that deters their efforts and devalues their humanity. as an example, george washington carver was born into slavery yet went on to become a preeminent plant biologist, chemist, and microbiologist despite many barriers to safely obtaining an education (https://www.tuskegee.edu/support-tu/george-washington-carver). he improved the lives of farmers by developing alternative crops to cotton, harnessing the power of rhizobia to help improve soil health, and fighting fungal plant pathogens. he impacted the lives of many black and non-black people. numerous black microbiologists have had significant impacts on topics that are particularly relevant to black communities and beyond, including drs. william hinton, ruth moore, jane hinton, and many others. in an interview at the microbe meeting in new orleans, la, dr. marian johnson-thompson (university of the district of columbia) recounted the lives of many of these and other black microbiologists ( ). she told the story of dr. moore, a professor at howard university who attended a general meeting of the asm. because of segregation, she was not able to stay at hotels within the city or eat at any of its restaurants. although we want to believe that such systemic racism no longer exists o n a p ril , a t c a r n e g ie m e l l o n u n iv l ib r h ttp ://jcm .a sm .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://jcm.asm.org/ within our discipline, we must constantly question that assumption. the stories of these microbiologists emphasize that representation matters. they underscore the fact that unless the perspective and challenges of black communities are represented, then they will not be addressed. in a recent msphere of influence article, dr. michael johnson recounted his shock that although there was a % increase in the number of biomedical ph.d.’s awarded to black people and those from other underrepresented groups (urgs) between and , there has not been a meaningful change in the number of assistant professors from urgs over that time ( ). in his article, he asks how he wound up at a research-intensive university as a black professor. he asks two questions of himself: “by what miracle did i beat the odds to get here?” and “what can i do to get other urms [underrepresented minorities] in a similar position as myself?” yet, it is not dr. johnson’s responsibility alone to remove these barriers. as a publisher of microbiology research, we acknowledge the important role that we have in the career development of junior scientists and the role that we have in giving legitimacy to scientific questions. for too long, we have not promoted the work of junior black and other scientists from urgs as much as we could have. we have been too passive in recruiting these scientists to publish in our journals. scientists like dr. johnson should not think that their success is a “miracle.” we also must ask ourselves what we can do to get more scientists from urgs into faculty and leadership positions. although we should always strive to recruit more people from urgs into science, the data that he reports indicate that the problem also lies with retention of this talent. as leaders of the asm journals program, we need to take a greater role in mentorship. we can recruit more junior scientists from urgs to be peer reviewers, put them in leadership positions, and publicly recognize them. as the journals committee, we seek to improve the representation of black microbiologists and therefore take on the responsibility to do the following.  learn from the stories of black microbiologists, past and present. we will listen. black microbiologists should not have to shoulder the burden of dismantling systems of inequality on their own.  ensure that diverse voices and viewpoints are represented among the editors in chief. we will conduct open searches that actively recruit black scientists and scientists from urgs. we will not constrain the candidate pool to current or past editors and editorial board members, which have traditionally been the source of candidates.  appoint editors in chief who understand that the impact of their journal is dependent on the diversity of their authors, reviewers, and editors. we will ask candidates to state their experience fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion in their application.  improve the representation of black scientists and those from other urgs across the peer review system. each journal will develop a plan that will be regularly evaluated and used as a criterion to determine whether an editor in chief should be reappointed.  be alert to implicit and overt bias when handling manuscripts from black and other scientists from urgs. we will work with our editors and others to understand bias and study where it can manifest itself in peer review. o n a p ril , a t c a r n e g ie m e l l o n u n iv l ib r h ttp ://jcm .a sm .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://jcm.asm.org/  more fully represent the scope of how microbiology impacts the black community. we will solicit input from black microbiologists for topics that are not being addressed adequately within asm’s journals and revise the scopes of the journals accordingly.  promote black microbiologists. we will ensure that their representation is equitable when selecting papers for editor spotlights, authors for commentaries, and subjects for biographical reports.  help develop the next generation of microbiologists and more actively listen. we will participate in opportunities to serve and mentor black scientists and those from other urgs through the annual biomedical research conference for minority students (abrcms) and the annual conference for the society for advancement of chicanos/hispanics & native americans in science (sacnas).  identify appropriate methods for identifying and quantifying representation of black microbiologists. we will collaborate closely with the asm taskforce on diversity, equity, and inclusion. there is no place for anti-black or for any form of racism within microbiology. to solve the most important microbiological problems of today and prepare for those of the future, we must leverage the experiences, perspectives, and expertise of everyone. references . boone a. june . one week that shook the world: george floyd’s death ignited protests far beyond minneapolis. star tribune, minneapolis, mn. https://www.startribune.com/george-floyd-death- ignited-protests-far-beyond-minneapolis-police-minnesota/ /. . gardner h. june . ‘this is for you, baby’: days of protests are about more than breonna taylor. courier-journal, louisville, ky. https://www.courier- journal.com/story/news/local/ / / /louisville-protests-more-than-breonna-taylor-lmpd- shooting/ /. . peeples l. . what the data say about police brutality and racial biasand which reforms might work. nature : – . https://doi.org/ . /d - - -z. . brandt am. . racism and research: the case of the tuskegee syphilis study. hastings cent rep : – . https://doi.org/ . / . . cyrus e, clarke r, hadley d, bursac z, trepka mj, devieux jg, bagci u, furr-holden d, coudray ms, mariano y, kiplagat s, noel i, ravelo g, paley m, wagner ef. may . the impact of covid- on african american communities in the united states. medrxiv https://www.medrxiv.org/content/ . / . . . v . o n a p ril , a t c a r n e g ie m e l l o n u n iv l ib r h ttp ://jcm .a sm .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://jcm.asm.org/ . byrne bg, mccolm s, mcelmurry sp, kilgore pe, sobeck j, sadler r, love ng, swanson ms. . prevalence of infection-competent serogroup legionella pneumophila within premise plumbing in southeast michigan. mbio :e - . https://doi.org/ . /mbio. - . . fettweis jm, serrano mg, brooks jp, edwards dj, girerd ph, parikh hi, huang b, arodz tj, edupuganti l, glascock al, xu j, jimenez nr, vivadelli sc, fong ss, sheth nu, jean s, lee v, bokhari ya, lara am, mistry sd, duckworth ra, iii, bradley sp, koparde vn, orenda xv, milton sh, rozycki sk, matveyev av, wright ml, huzurbazar sv, jackson em, smirnova e, korlach j, tsai yc, dickinson mr, brooks jl, drake ji, chaffin do, sexton al, gravett mg, rubens ce, wijesooriya nr, hendricks-muñoz kd, jefferson kk, strauss jf, iii, buck ga. . the vaginal microbiome and preterm birth. nat med : – . https://doi.org/ . /s - - - . . akinbami lj, moorman je, garbe pl, sondik ej. . status of childhood asthma in the united states, – . pediatrics :s –s . https://doi.org/ . /peds. - c. . tai dbg, shah a, doubeni ca, sia ig, wieland ml. june . the disproportionate impact of covid- on racial and ethnic minorities in the united states. clin infect dis https://doi.org/ . /cid/ciaa . . yancy cw. april . covid- and african americans. jama : . https://doi.org/ . /jama. . . . hallfors dd, iritani bj, miller wc, bauer dj. . sexual and drug behavior patterns and hiv and std racial disparities: the need for new directions. am j public health : – . https://doi.org/ . /ajph. . . . institute of medicine committee on understanding and eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in health care. . unequal treatment: confronting racial and ethnic disparities in health care. the national academies press, washington, dc. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/nbk /. . hoppe ta, litovitz a, willis ka, meseroll ra, perkins mj, hutchins bi, davis af, lauer ms, valantine ha, anderson jm, santangelo gm. . topic choice contributes to the lower rate of nih awards to african-american/black scientists. sci adv :eaaw . https://doi.org/ . /sciadv.aaw . . asm microbe. june . early african american microbiologists: making contributions/overcoming barriers. youtube video posted by asm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqaozdcl gm. . johnson m. . msphere of influence: hiring of underrepresented minority assistant professors in medical school basic science departments has a long way to go. msphere :e - . https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - . o n a p ril , a t c a r n e g ie m e l l o n u n iv l ib r h ttp ://jcm .a sm .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://jcm.asm.org/ utilizing pedagogy for disrupting white supremacy religions article utilizing pedagogy for disrupting white supremacy shannon frediani , practical theology, claremont school of theology, claremont, ca , usa; sfrediani@cst.edu practical theology, starr king school for the ministry, a member school of the graduate theological union, berkeley, ca , usa received: september ; accepted: october ; published: october ���������� ������� abstract: this article focuses on how practical theology and interreligious education can utilize pedagogy for disrupting white supremacy and coloniality. it draws primarily from postcolonial studies, practical theology, ethics, and interreligious studies. creating learning crucibles that privilege those most impacted by systemic injustice, incorporating their knowledges, their experiences, and their agency in countering specific oppressions, has the capacity to change how students approach scholarship, change what they consider knowledge, and change their relationship to religious leadership. this article also draws upon the scholar’s experiences teaching at starr king school for the ministry (sksm), which has an institutional commitment to creating religious leaders in the world dedicated to structural change through their educating to counter oppressions (eco) philosophy. keywords: interreligious education; theological education; pedagogy; white supremacy; counter oppressive education; practical theology . introduction the question this article asks is: how can practical theology and interreligious education utilize pedagogy for disrupting power framed, wielded, and perpetuated by white supremacist patterns? without trying to oversimplify disrupting the power of white supremacy, this article will cover four basic aspects of pedagogy designed to re-distribute power based on decolonial theory and the pedagogy of starr king school for the ministry, part of the graduate theological union in berkeley ca: ( ) inversion of power, ( ) knowledge formation utilizing subjugated knowledges with the intention of creating liberative and emancipatory knowledge, ( ) recognition of trauma, and ( ) creating a religious leadership threshold requiring commitment to countering oppressions. before articulating uses of pedagogy to redistribute power in various forms and levels, i will clarify definitions. through the lens of critical race theory, ‘white supremacy’ is understood as systemic control of power and resources “in which white dominance and non-white subordination exists across a broad array of institutions and social settings” (ansley ). psychologist william liu articulates that white supremacy privileges not only whiteness, but white masculinity, heterosexual patriarchy and white property as “territory and white women” (liu , p. ). historian ibram kendi elaborates that being antiracist encompasses not only awakening to how racism impacts bodies, spaces, ethnicities, cultures, colorism, classism, gender identity, sexuality and power in all of its forms but involves contributing to an equitable society (kendi ). critical race methodology, while focusing on the intersectionality of race, gender, class, and other forms of subordination, also views all forms of subordination as “experiences as sources of strength”, which can be utilized for liberative means (solórzano and yosso ). i define white supremacy as a matrix of patterns termed coloniality of knowledge, coloniality of being, and coloniality of power based on the scholarship of decolonial scholars and theologians such as aníbal quijano, enrique dussel, walter mignolo, ramón grosfuguel, nelson maldonado-torres, religions , , ; doi: . /rel www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /rel http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions religions , , of and others (quijano ; dussel et al. ; mignolo ; grosfuguel ; maldonado-torres ). coloniality of knowledge, being, and power refers to patterns that control knowledge formation, perpetuate heterosexual patriarchy, and dictate forms of governance, respectively, established by colonialism/capitalism created to exploit populations justified by narratives racializing a religious or ethnic other. i prefer using a decolonial lens because it articulates in detail the many patterns of subordination including use of narratives prevalent in our world. coloniality impacts current policy and erases the harm and suffering of those bearing the brunt of systemic injustice and demonizing narratives. coloniality also persists through normalized patterns in every aspect of our lives. what do patterns of coloniality look like in western education? a few examples are: faculty as experts, acquiring knowledge is focused on the written word (reading texts and writing papers), and productivity and competition are emphasized over relationship building (okun ). critical scholars in the field of interreligious education (ire) recognize that in interreligious classrooms patterns of coloniality have begun to be challenged, as the emphasis has shifted to learning and building relationships across difference where dialogue and experience are centered. ire also relies on the subjugated knowledges of peace studies, transformational leadership, and relational learning incorporating feminist and womanist pedagogy. given these shifts in power away from a few patterns of white supremacy in ire, how do these intersect examining power in the wider field of practical theology? womanist practical theologian phyllis sheppard noted the field of practical theology is facing the need to address the “the invisibility of lived raced bodies” without “reproducing the negative cultural reproductions of raced experiences” (sheppard ). invisibilized raced bodies are an issue in both ire and practical theology. postcolonial and decolonial studies, as well as the black lives matter movement, are testaments to the suffering of those living in raced bodies that have been unrecognized, unacknowledged, and unaddressed. beyond the skills needed to serve congregations, such as spiritual care, religious education, liturgy, and homiletics, closing the gap between the ideals of religions and the lived realities of those participating in religious and spiritual life also lies within the field of practical theology. pedagogy for disrupting white supremacy demands that we understand how to close the gap of lived reality of raced bodies and unrecognized harm in all aspects of practical theology, spiritual care, religious education, liturgy, etc., as well as how to counter logics of white supremacy embedded within academia, practical theology, and interreligious classrooms involving experiential learning. . pedagogy and the inversion of power brazilian educator paolo freire introduced the world to student centered learning which incorporated critical pedagogy fifty years ago when he published his work pedagogy of the oppressed (freire [ ] ). this liberationist approach to education incorporates learning about the systemic oppressions impacting the life of the students and acknowledges that the teacher is also a learner. freire’s emphasis on the conscientization process, defined as developing awareness of oppressive social structures, integrates the lived reality of those present and transforms the teaching environment into a cooperative learning space. this concept is further applied in pedagogy of the poor, a work by poverty scholar, activist, and organizer willie baptist and philosopher jan rehmann (baptist and rehmann ), who debunk the paradigm that frames trained theological scholars as “experts” when working with communities or congregations. what pedagogy of the oppressed does for students in an educational environment, pedagogy of the poor does for community outreach, shifting the paradigm from communities or people being served as recipients of charity, whether by churches, nonprofits, or the government, to communities and people as organic intellectuals. it centers those most impacted by poverty as the most knowledgeable about poverty, and most capable of sustained leadership for cooperative grass roots organizing. creating learning crucibles that privilege those most impacted by systemic injustice, whether inside the classroom or in experiential learning involving community outreach, shifts students’ frame of reference regarding where knowledge is formed, who is the subject, and who has agency. deconstructing the hierarchal relationship of teacher/student, expert/learner, and subject/object also mirrors peace work, religions , , of where it is understood that those closest to a problem are the experts. creating environments where reflection in community is integral to hearing perspectives from everyone present, especially those who may have nondominant perspectives, opens the way for options that would otherwise not have been considered. pedagogy that creates participatory learning environments inverts where power is located, honors the multiple experiences of participants’ lived oppressions, disrupts white supremacy patterns in education, disrupts the concept of charity, and disrupts charity’s inherent hierarchal power structure. . utilizing subjugated knowledges: creating liberative and emancipatory knowledge from an emphasis on inverting power in teacher/student, charity giver/receiver, or community learning environments, this section examines power between students in learning crucibles in order to create emancipatory knowledge. in any classroom, aspects of classism, racism, sexism, patriarchy, ableism, etc. interfere with a genuinely cooperative and democratic learning environment. given our nation’s history of chattel slavery, multifaceted attempts at native american physical and cultural genocide, orientalism embedded in scholarship, and continuing patterns of coloniality embedded within academia and larger society, pedagogy needs to take into account and examine how each of these impact those with raced bodies and racialized religions. this requires exploring power in and between the students themselves and examining the legacy of the logics of white supremacy. andrea smith in her contribution “ pillars of white supremacy” (smith ) outlines three logics of white supremacy: the logic of genocide, primarily targeting american indians; the logic of slavery and capitalism that includes the historic erasure of the suffering of black people; and the logic of orientalism that perpetually keeps arabs, now labeled as muslims, or islam itself, as the feared ‘other’ along with mexicans and others labeled “perpetual immigrants” (smith , pp. – ). all three pillars of white supremacist ideology are embedded in coloniality. another aspect of white supremacy that is a current issue is the rise of the alt right. the work of sociologist ed pertwee elaborates that although much research has been done on the alt right, that the alt lite or transnational counterjihad movement is also salient and has received less attention (pertwee , p. ). through researching these two movements and their ideologies he distinguishes between the two in several ways, yet one easy identifier is that the alt right are anti-semitic compared to the alt lite being pro-israel as exemplified by the trump administration (pertwee , p. ). another aspect of the counterjihad movement noted by pertwee is that it has co-opted human rights language with the term islam being used as an ethnic or civilizational reference that is framed as aligned against the west (pertwee ). educators in religious education and interreligious education in particular have new reason to utilize pedagogy that fosters conscientization regarding logics of white supremacy given the growth of the alt lite and its successful reliance on social media to propagate disinformation and garner resources and followers to impact miseducation about islam (pertwee , p. ). the issue of raced bodies and the need to counter logics of white supremacy has been addressed in the field of ethics by womanist and ethicist katie cannon. in her work, “pedagogical praxis in african american theology” (cannon ), she articulates the components of womanist pedagogy needed to deconstruct ideologies of traditional academia that, as she states, “taught black women to be complicit in their own oppression” (cannon , p. ). first presented in , this work of womanist theology centers the experiences of those living in racialized gendered bodies as the experts on what it is to live within bodies targeted by the intersectionality of racism, sexism, classism, homophobia etc. (cannon ). this highlighting of epistemology is, like pedagogy of the poor, a crucial element of womanist theology. cannon’s work exemplifies the criteria of liberationist educational theory, incorporating the knowledge of organic intellectuals in pedagogy by highlighting the experience of those who have borne the brunt of oppression within academia, specifically within the field of theology and ethics. we as scholars need to understand that our pedagogy, how we teach and what we teach, is harmful to others if we are teaching them ideologies that reinforce their own complicity in religions , , of oppression as noted by cannon. countering and reversing ideologies that are complicit in oppression are critical aspects of pedagogy in practical theology including interreligious and religious education. cannon’s work outlines womanist pedagogical praxis as consisting of three components. in brief, the first is “historical ethos” which includes embracing one’s “rich cultural heritage” in the classroom, where in the past certain cultural perspectives were unwelcome or seen as inappropriate (cannon , p. ). the second is “embodied pathos” which cannon states, “ . . . centralizes personal experience in teaching for justice-making transformation” (cannon , p. ). integrating how one’s body, gender, sexual orientation, or skin color provide epistemological insights that white cisgendered heterosexual people of privilege do not have. it also highlights that just by being present with black skin, or being female in academic environments, or being muslim or perceived as being muslim, one can be viewed as a disruption by those with white christian heterosexual normative privilege. the third component is creating a “communal ethos” (cannon , p. ), which is prioritized over individualism, thus creating a learning environment that upholds the ethic of communal well-being. cannon refers to these three components as “emancipatory historiography” that in her words, “questions whose experience is validated, what groups are left out, what ideology accompanies the analysis and what is the framework that provides meaning and holds conflicting elements together” (cannon , p. ). creating safe learning environments encourages students stepping fully into subjecthood and integrating their conscientization, including aspects of their identity that are not welcome in traditional hierarchal educational environments assuming white male heterosexual christian privileged lives. in recognizing that their very presence is a disruption to white supremacy, students have many opportunities to reverse internalizations encoded by dominant society. emancipatory historiography engages critical pedagogy, cultural and cognitive diversity, and makes visible raced, gendered bodies and racialized religions in an effort to unveil systemic injustice and to expose lived reality that also includes unaddressed grief and loss. teaching at starr king school for the ministry (sksm), an institution committed to student centered learning, often times students of multiple sexual expressions and orientations share about realizing their call to religious leadership and service in youth ministries as teens, then when they came out, being shunned by the conservative churches and communities of their upbringing and stripped of any youth religious leadership role. teaching in the claremont school of theology context, with a more international student body, students’ shared experiences more often reflect navigating multicultural or multireligious backgrounds and their sharing about a diversity of forms of religious intolerance based on their country of origin and/or residence before attending seminary. in both learning environments, tremendous learning occurs based on their own collective experiences about various forms of oppression and intersectionality that religious leaders face. this critiquing of the epistemological assumptions of academia encourages what sociologist bonaventura de sousa santos refers to as “cognitive justice” (de sousa santos ), which integrates alternative forms of learning with critical assessment of material or content. cognitive justice also increases awareness of different cosmologies, perhaps multiple religious belonging, or an entirely different cosmology, such as an indigenous worldview. cognitive justice is more than multiple perspectives of cosmologies and power awareness, it is cross cultural and multicultural respect and sensitivity. experiencing cognitive justice also allows for growth in epistemic humility as noted by otto madero (madero ), whether across cultures, gender expressions, class lines, religious identities, or beyond racialized narratives of others. cognitive justice and epistemic humility are invaluable in interreligious and secular encounters as they signal a willingness to learn outside of one’s own habitus and build capacity regarding awareness of the privilege such habitus usually incorporates, as noted by miguel de la torre (de la torre ). the work of cannon and santos was reflected recently in a comment made by theologian rev. stephen lewis during a wabash center webinar when he said, “cognitive diversity is embodied” (lewis ). katie cannon’s emancipatory historiography addresses intersectional pieces such as cultural heritage, race, and gender oppression. santos’ and madero’s concepts of cognitive justice and epistemic religions , , of humility similarly address intersectional pieces of non-hegemonic western academic knowledge from global south and indigenous perspectives. what these scholars have in common is attention to creating relational learning conditions that require pedagogy that expands the boundaries of thinking about form and content in academic environments. adhering to formal lecture processes without critical examination of power asymmetries and without dialogic and dialectic reflective practices that include students’ embodied cognitive diversity and epistemological privileges denies students opportunities to engage in skill building for learning across complex differences. justice, then, is reflected in the process of both form and content being employed for liberative means to counter systemic injustice, particularly within academia. critical pedagogy mirrors justice in its multiple forms within academic settings. drawing from my experience at sksm in creating learning environments that reflect on systemic injustice and intersectionality as an interdependent matrix, and the need to counter injustice in our world, engaging in collective reflection while building spiritual community is a way to unveil systemic injustice, expose unaddressed grief and loss, and form religious leaders and activists more empathetic to multiple oppressions beyond those students know personally. pedagogy integrating emancipatory historiography understands the learning process as a crucible for surfacing, naming, and acknowledging unaddressed grief and loss. this process is not for engaging pastoral counseling work, but for articulating one’s conscientization, or personal experience dealing with systemic injustice, inextricably as both process and content. this can also translate into spiritual formation and restoring one’s own identity and become a catalyst for healing, as well as for growing into religious, interreligious, and multireligious leadership. in peace education, specifically within conflict resolution, the expression of grief is recognized as the second step in breaking the cycle of violence. the first step is establishing safety (yoder ). in my mind, cannon’s components of emancipatory historiography are what constitutes safety in the learning environment by accounting for the lived reality of everyone in the room. creating this kind of safety is quite different than maintaining academic standards of “respectful behavior” while denying systemic injustice and its impact. . recognition of trauma in pedagogy another benefit of engaging emancipatory historiography is preparing religious leaders and spiritually grounded activists to be aware of and monitor their own historical trauma exposure as manifested in their particular circumstances, whether due to racism, assimilation practices imposed on native americans, or being racialized religiously to name a few. if we are truly bridging lived reality and theological education, then trauma exposure is part of the equation. this was first brought to my attention by the theologian and ethicist dr. gabriella lettini, who founded the master of arts in social change (masc) program at sksm in to address the need for training transformational leaders interested in social justice work based in spirituality without being on a particular denominational ordination track. the dual understanding that justice work entails trauma exposure and recognition of the fact that many students called to justice work have histories of personal traumas requires attention and engagement of resilience practices in training leaders. simultaneously building spiritual community as well as assignments, which culminate in creating a selfcare plan based on students’ increased awareness of their own trauma exposure, is foundational for engaging in sustained long-term social justice work. the masc program also highlights counter oppressive pedagogy. sksm had already initiated an institutional commitment to educating to counter oppression (eco) in . part of comprehending trauma is surfacing the many ways that traumas have been erased in academic settings. although epistemicide may not seem like a form of inflicting trauma to dominant euroamerican christian centric thinkers, an awareness of epistemicide combined with an awareness of intersectionality and accurate histories of populations contending with ongoing narratives of demonization over generations that account for violence and systemic injustice begins to broaden the concept of trauma. dr. lettini designed an introductory survey course on addressing justice making intersectionally with a focus on economic and racial justice, which is a required course for all incoming students. religions , , of teaching eco to students from a variety of backgrounds mirrors my experiences in jail ministry that those bearing the brunt of systemic injustice often have high levels of being exposed to trauma. this perspective was reinforced during a wabash webinar when dr. angela sims, president of colgate rochester crozer divinity school, noted that, “as the browning of theological education continues there is a need to provide time and space for people to process trauma” (westfield et al. ). in the same webinar, the president of chicago theological school, dr. stephen ray, jr. noted the need for quality theological education that connects the systemic injustice of the world with one’s faith and god’s power in a broken world. he continued that theological education provides support for how to live into the tensions that exist in our world while grounding spiritually (westfield et al. ). growing into the tensions, connecting systemic injustice, providing time and space for people to recognize their trauma exposure, bridging lived reality with theological education, imagining a new world, and building relationships with people living in the midst of trauma due to the legacy of coloniality all need to be an integral part of theological education and interreligious engagement to disrupt patterns of white supremacy. it has been my experience that pedagogy involving emancipatory historiography benefits from emphasizing people’s discomfort as a growing edge as something sacred that will continue to reveal additional insights over time. for whites, holding the discomfort, the grief, the moral injury, the parts of ourselves that never want to be perpetrators, yet parts that are perpetrators, requires our spiritual formation to be able to simultaneously hold ourselves in love while also seeing the reality of our world and our part in it. for all students, noticing what brings discomfort and what pulls them away from being present reinforces the skills needed by practical theologians and educators. in conclusion, recognition of trauma in pedagogy disrupts patterns of white supremacy that seeks to erase suffering, grief, and loss due to systemic injustice. recognition of trauma teaches religious and social justice advocates not only to recognize the truth of living in today’s conditions, to face the accurate histories of our nation, and to face and monitor one’s own trauma exposure, but to maintain resilience and hope in a broken world. spiritual community acknowledging trauma is a form of resistance and resilience (johnson ). . sksm threshold and eco commitment in the context of the eco course, site visits of local nonprofits are incorporated. by balancing theoretical academics with experiential site visits, engaged pedagogy involves modeling procedural knowledge, modeling a democratic learning environment, as well as witnessing and reflecting on social justice ministries that are based on developing grass roots leadership of those most impacted by issues of systemic injustice. during covid- , as on-site visits are limited, one adapted assignment is for students to find online a non-profit or social justice ministry that focuses on each student’s main area of interest or social justice issue that also fulfills the eco course criteria of power distribution. students later share briefly how and why they chose that particular non-profit. after a class of short student presentations done on zoom, many students commented on how much hope this assignment had generated. their critical awareness had increased as to the way that organizations and ministries working for various causes integrated organic intellectuals and redistribution of power for grass roots organizing. this is a key element for effective social justice advocacy. sksm integrates another aspect of student development regarding their eco philosophy. sksm has defined thresholds as part of the student requirements. crossing a threshold in life is often accompanied by changes in one’s relationship with the world, and how one perceives it. creating a significant rite of passage, dedicated to countering oppression is core, especially in the formation of religious leaders, lay people, or scholars. a pedagogy that names a threshold of countering oppressions as an educational philosophy and goal, assessed by witnessing transformation and spiritual formation, exemplifies an academic rite of passage that is designed to counter white supremacy. when experiential learning and scholarship change comprehension of how to relate to and respond to systemic injustice by countering epistemicide and seeking out the knowledges of those religions , , of bearing the brunt of intersecting oppressions, academia participates in disrupting white supremacy rather than continuing to be complicit. regarding assessment, sksm is designed for cooperative institutional implementation. there is a standard sksm evaluative rubric that assesses each student in every course on the basis of students’ affirmation of sksm’s eco philosophy and principles as well as academic performance. based on students’ term papers, class discussion and presentations, reflective essays, and online posts, faculty fill out narrative student evaluation forms and categorize students’ performance with a pass, middle, or fail unless a student requests a letter grade at the beginning of the course. examples of student assessment criteria in sksm’s eco philosophy from the evaluative rubric are as follows: • demonstrates sufficient flexibility to deal with differing/multiple paradigms of inquiry. • demonstrates sensitivity to and responsible handling of ethical problems if they occur. • is guided by starr king’s eco philosophy and demonstrates consistency with eco practices in class participation. an example of fulfilling the first criteria from the evaluative rubric in the eco course is gleaned from utilizing reflective exercises from my grandmother’s hands (menakem ), which draw on somatic learning to illuminate how racism lives in our bodies regardless of background. these reflective practices examine the individual body and psyche as it has been impacted by media, society, and messages often internalized unconsciously. a student’s willingness to engage in somatic learning is instrumental in assessing one aspect of flexibility dealing with non-dominant learning. this paradigm of inquiry bridges the wisdom of bodily existence and reality with the theoretical underpinnings of intersectionality and multiple oppressions and how they are interdependent. the reflective exercises given to monitor trauma exposure, drawing from trauma stewardship (van dernoot lipsky and burk ), integrate another paradigm of inquiry. some students initially resist the exercises, some admit openly that they will revisit the exercises after hearing the insights other students gained from engaging the practices. it is apparent which students have shown sufficient flexibility as their insights and dialogue express the level of engagement. the second and third evaluative rubrics can be assessed by monitoring the willingness and capacity of students to see beyond the lens of their own oppressions and grapple with how their own oppressions intersect with the oppressions of others during class discussions, integrating the multiple required readings on intersectionality and experiences shared in the co-participatory learning environment. student capacity to see beyond the lens of their own oppression or privilege becomes apparent in discussion and small group settings. thinking intersectionality also ties into the second assessment of students demonstrating sensitivity to the sharings and readings about oppressions of others while also being accountable for harm caused by one’s insensitivity. in addition, the course requires each student to lead an opening or closing ritual at the beginning or end of each class session whether residential or online. the guidelines are for students to draw upon their own belief system while mindful that class participants embody multiple cosmologies, religious traditions, and worldviews. leading and participating in the many varied rituals also provide insights into the integration of students’ sensitivity to navigating environments of spiritual diversity and provides numerous opportunities for faculty to evaluate consistent or perhaps inconsistent student behavior with the eco philosophy. students have an opportunity to build a spiritual learning community across differences and learn from their mistakes. did the rituals succeed at being inclusive? why or why not? ethical problems, small and large, do arise in various forms; for example, a white woman soothing the emotions of a white male peer challenged by me for exerting privilege, only to realize later she was playing out an indoctrinated role. or a straight cisgendered woman interrupting a black trans student sharing. facilitating the conversation back to the first student and making note of the interruption provides insights into student accountability and reveals student willingness to learn while making missteps. or perhaps a more serious encroachment of a student unable to realize their comments are harmful to others in the course which requires intervention. the mistakes are not evaluated as much as the response when religions , , of the behavior is noted. is there a change in sensitivity levels? do they stop interrupting? what level of inclusion do students display in countering white supremacy in all of its forms at the graduate seminary level? for more on this topic i recommend willie james jennings’ most recent work, after whiteness: an education in belonging (jennings ), as well as the edited works of eleazar fernandez, harold recinos, and kwok pui-lan (fernandez ; fernandez ; kwok ; recinos ). this pedagogy/process changes how students approach scholarship and knowledge formation, as well as changes what students consider knowledge. honoring organic intellectuals, witnessing transformation, assignments incorporating somatic reflection and self-examination, as well as stepping into interreligious leadership, foster the ability and capacity to articulate transformation of oneself. students’ own life experience takes on new meaning and relevance. this also augments their own sense of leadership in honoring organic intellectuals in their social justice work environments. . conclusions pedagogy is a form of justice when focused on the reversal of harmful white supremacist ideologies embedded in societal structures. pedagogy is a form of justice when requiring the reversal of desensitization. pedagogy is a form of justice when highlighting and embedding cognitive justice in relational learning environments. pedagogy is a form of justice requiring seeing the suffering and impact of the colonial legacy and intergenerational trauma. pedagogy is a form of justice requiring the recognition of systemic injustice and proactive countering of oppressions in their multiple structural implementations. pedagogy is a form of justice entailing a decolonial learning crucible where all can actively work to rid themselves of logics of white supremacist ideologies, be they sexist, racist, systemic academic eurochristian centric expectations, theological and ethical normatives, or other unveiled patterns complicit in oppressions. pedagogy is a form of justice embodying relational learning with epistemic humility integrating form, content, and context through emancipatory historiography and praxis. imagining a new world where these issues are addressed is the call of love. it includes shaping religious leaders, scholars, and educators to change public perceptions about relations between the religious other, the indigenous, and our secular state as interreligious issues. theological training, social theory, and knowledge of accurate histories provides the necessary skills. since we are all the legacy bearers of our nations’ policy makers who incorporate the patterns of coloniality that continue to harm specific populations, coming together to witness the suffering of those bearing systemic injustice, and understanding our relation to trauma is the beginning. awareness of loss is the pathway of our relationship to hope. funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. references ansley, frances lee. . stirring the ashes: race, class and the future of civil rights scholarship. cornell law review : – . baptist, willie, and jan rehmann. . pedagogy of the poor: building a movement to end poverty. new york: teachers college press. cannon, katie g. . wheels in the middle of wheels. journal of feminist studies in religion : – . cannon, katie. g. . pedagogical praxis in african american theology. in the oxford handbook of african american theology. edited by katie cannon and anthony pinn. new york: oxford university press, pp. – . de la torre, miguel. . doing christian ethics from the margins. maryknoll: orbis books. de sousa santos, bonaventura. . epistemologies of the south: justice against epistemicide. boulder: paradigm publishers. religions , , of dussel, enrique, alejandro a. vallega, nelson maldonado-torres, eduardo mendieta, yolanda angulo, and camilo pérez bustillo. . ethics of liberation: in the age of globalization and exclusion, st ed. durham: duke university press. fernandez, eleazar s. . teaching for a culturally diverse and racially just world. eugene: cascade books. fernandez, eleazar s. . teaching for a multifaith world. eugene: pickwick publications. freire, paulo. . pedagogy of the oppressed, th anniversary ed. new york: continuum international. first published . grosfuguel, rámon. . colonial difference, geopolitics of knowledge, and global coloniality. utopian thinking : – . jennings, willie james. . after whiteness: an education in belonging. grand rapids: eerdmans publishing. johnson, cedric c. . race, religion, and resilience in the neoliberal age. new york: palgrave macmillan. kendi, ibram. . how to be an antiracist. new york: one world. kwok, pui-lan. . teaching global theologies: power and praxis. edited by kwok pui-lan, cecelia gonzález-andrieu and dwight hopkins. waco: baylor university press. lewis, rev stephen. . organizational change, collaboration and creativity. wabash center webinar series. available online: www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/webinars (accessed on june ). liu, william ming. . white male power and privilege: the relationship between white supremacy and social class. journal of counseling psychology : – . [crossref] madero, otto. . an(other) invitation to epistemological humility: notes toward a self-critical approach to counter-knowledges. in decolonizing epistemologies: latina/o theology and philosophy. edited by ada maría isasi-diaz and eduardo mendieta. new york: fordham university press, pp. – . maldonado-torres, nelson. . on the coloniality of being. cultural studies : – . [crossref] menakem, resmaa. . my grandmother’s hands: racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies. las vegas: central recovery press. mignolo, walter. . the darker side of modernity: global futures, decolonial options. durham: duke university press. okun. . tema white supremacy culture. available online: https://www.dismantlingracism.org/uploads/ / / / / /okun_-_white_sup_culture.pdf (accessed on august ). pertwee, ed. . donald trump, the muslim far right and the new conservative revolution. ethnic and racial studies : – . 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[crossref] van dernoot lipsky, laura, and connie burk. . trauma stewardship: an everyday guide to caring for self while caring for others. san francisco: berrett-koehler publishers. westfield, nancy, angela sims, and stephen ray jr. . what is still true? survival of theological education. wabash center webinar series. available online: www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/webinars (accessed on may ). yoder, carolyn. . the little book of trauma healing: when violence strikes and community security is threatened. intercourse: goodbooks, p. . publisher’s note: mdpi stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/webinars http://dx.doi.org/ . /cou http://dx.doi.org/ . / https://www.dismantlingracism.org/uploads/ / / / / /okun_-_white_sup_culture.pdf https://www.dismantlingracism.org/uploads/ / / / / /okun_-_white_sup_culture.pdf http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / www.wabashcenter.wabash.edu/webinars religions , , of © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	pedagogy and the inversion of power 	utilizing subjugated knowledges: creating liberative and emancipatory knowledge 	recognition of trauma in pedagogy 	sksm threshold and eco commitment 	conclusions 	references a conversation between joseph osborne and thomas hope d i s c u s s i o n s w i t h l e a d e r s a conversation between joseph osborne and thomas hope joseph r. osborne and thomas a. hope weill cornell medicine, new york, new york; and university of california, san francisco, san francisco, california joseph r. osborne, md, phd, was interviewed by thomas hope, md, an associate professor and director of molecular ther- apy for the molecular imaging and therapeutics clinical section in the department of radiology and biomedical imaging at the university of california, san francisco. osborne is a professor of radiology and chief of molecular imaging and therapeutics at weill cornell medicine and an attending physician at newyork– presbyterian/weill cornell medicine (both in new york, ny). he earned his md at columbia college of physicians and surgeons (new york, ny) and his phd in biochemistry at columbia’s graduate school of arts and sciences. after an internship at the washington hospital center (dc), osborne completed a residency in diagnostic radiology at columbia presbyterian hospital, fol- lowed by fellowship training in nuclear medicine. he also com- pleted postdoctoral training at memorial sloan kettering cancer center (new york, ny). osborne is the director of the mi (molecular imaging innovations institute for inclusion; https://radiology.weill.cornell. edu/research/mi ) at weill cornell medicine, where his goal as a physician and scientist is to promote practical, value-added mo- lecular imaging closely aligned with precision medicine. he is currently the principal investigator on a national institutes of health academic–industrial partnership r grant for ‘‘a new technique to make ga-labeled pharmaceuticals widely avail- able for clinical use’’ and a recipient of the dean’s health disparity research award for the prostate cancer health impact program. he is the investigator development core director at the weill cornell center for health equity (https://centerfor- healthequity.cornell.edu/). he has served as program director of the nuclear medicine residency program at new york–presbyterian/ weill cornell medical and memorial sloan kettering. among his extramural duties, he is a member of the u.s. food and drug administration medical imaging drug advisory committee and a reviewer for the damon runyon cancer foundation innovation award. dr. hope: let’s start in the beginning. why nuclear medicine? dr. osborne: i had finished doing an md/phd at columbia. i realized in my third year of medical school that i was quite visual and so was looking for something that matched that realization. a lot of what we had done at the time in the lab in mice was looking at green fluorescent protein and other optical markers for neuron guidance. the combination of science and nuclear medicine seemed like the perfect fit. dr. hope: what are you currently doing in nuclear medicine, and what do you find most exciting about some of the projects on which you’re working? dr. osborne: i made the decision to go into radiology and nuclear medicine because there’s a lot of flexibility with the application of science in the field of nuclear medicine. also, there’s a lot of patient interaction in nuclear medicine, and that was appealing. these days, i am interested in making sure radionu- clides are readily available to academic and nonacademic sites. i get excited when one of our brilliant radiochemists puts together a really interesting com- pound to look at diseases like prostate cancer. we’re currently looking at many different prostate-specific membrane antigen (psma) compounds that are being developed. finding patient populations that would benefit most from those compounds is equally exciting. dr. hope: going back to your beginnings, can you talk a little bit about mentorship early on and how that got you into nuclear medicine? dr. osborne: i’d have to give a lot of credit to my phd advisor, richard axel. one of the things that i loved about being in his lab was the approach that focused on asking the question rather than just doing the science. he won the nobel prize in for cloning the first set of olfactory receptors and pheromone receptors. while he was cognizant of the small details, he was more in- terested in the big questions: what’s out there? what should be done next? when he heard what i wanted to do and where i wanted to do it, he started asking questions. at the time, he was on the board of scientific advisors at sloan kettering. he knew a lot of urologists and said, ‘‘you know, you’ve been here years in the lab. you have all these big questions. so what are you going to do about it?’’ the challenge has to be there. we can’t be complacent in where we are or what we’ve done. it’s about what you’re going to do next. that’s all that really matters. the person you mentor shouldn’t aspire to be you—i don’t want to mentor a clone of me. i want to mentor somebody who wants to do something dif- ferent. it’s about asking different questions and building on what’s been done. it’s about making an impact and looking at things through a different lens. dr. hope: when you went to your first snm annual meeting, what was that like? and what did you think of the first one you attended? dr. osborne: i attended my first snm meeting with steven larson. when i finished medical school, i decided to take a gap year to do a postdoc in molecular imaging over at sloan kettering with steve and ronald blasberg, md. as part of my fellow year, we went to the snm in san diego. it was a bit overwhelming. i joseph r. osborne copyright © by the society of nuclear medicine and molecular imaging. discussions with leaders • osborne and hope https://radiology.weill.cornell.edu/research/mi https://radiology.weill.cornell.edu/research/mi https://centerforhealthequity.cornell.edu/ https://centerforhealthequity.cornell.edu/ had been to the society for neuroscience, so i had been to big meetings before but hadn’t been to something where i felt like this is what i was going to do next. it felt like a community, and that inspired me. at the time, i wasn’t sure how i was going to fit in or how i would make an impact in the snm community. my greatest concern when i went to san diego was that minority representa- tion was quite low. the phd and nuclear medicine communities are similar in that the percentage of underrepresented minorities is below that in the rest of the population. i speak with steve regu- larly, so some things stay the same. i’m still talking to him about what i’m going to do next, and he’s still there guiding me. dr. hope: let’s change direction. you spoke about fitting in, and i think that’s an important question right now. can you com- ment a little bit on the differences related to being black and being a minority? is there a difference? dr. osborne: i would say that the dividing line for me is a little bit different. what are the questions being asked, and what has been done in the recent past? diversity, sex diversity, and racial diversity are very different things. you can have progress in one without having progress in another, because the issues are so different. there are few underrepresented minorities in fields like radiol- ogy, radiation oncology, and nuclear medicine. organizational societies have to be very intentional. if you want to be inclusive, then you have to go out and find the talent. you can’t sit back and wait for the talent to come to you, or no one will come. i think medical specialties should aim to mirror the populations they serve. if that’s not a primary goal, then it’s only a matter of time before these societies fade away. it’s the patients and understand- ing the varying population demographics and the disease burdens that impact those populations, especially in underserved areas, that will determine what happens next in health care. dr. hope: one of the things that would be nice to think about are what types of granular changes that snmmi as an organiza- tion could make to help break down barriers that prevent minority representation or to encourage people of color to join the field. dr. osborne: what we’re doing right now in this interview is incredibly important. if people don’t believe that underrepresented minorities are already in the field and thriving, they just won’t come. if these issues aren’t being discussed, then no one will ever come. it’s important from a leadership perspective to always have this be a part of the conversation. we also have to look at leadership and take a deep dive at recruiting processes. we have to be very intentional about how we hire and how we think about who needs to come next and why. we have to push ourselves to do the opposite of what we’ve been doing for the past years. for example, steve larson is not like me at all. we have similar interests, but we’re very different. my current chair, robert min, md, is not like me, but he recognized that ‘‘different’’ is what we needed at weill cornell. dr. hope: in terms of increasing diversity, particularly in terms of underrepresented minorities, it is key to get people to go into medical school and then for those in medical school to choose this field. what would you tell black trainees who are considering nuclear medicine as a field about whether this is a place where they can feel included and have the opportunity to grow? dr. osborne: new york city, since about , has been a majority minority city. there are defined disparities in prostate cancer and prostate cancer deaths in the city and its boroughs. when i started, imaging was not the answer to bending the curve in prostate cancer but is now quite relevant. we have the oppor- tunity to make a positive clinical impact and improve outcomes. in brooklyn, we’re seeing . times the mortality rate for prostate cancer. can we bend that curve with psma? absolutely! espe- cially as psma is about to be approved and we work to ensure access to trials for the patients who need them most in the new york city metropolitan area. we need our trainees to mirror the community, understand the gaps because they or people they know have experienced them, and ask questions that drive the science. dr. hope: you bring up a very good point: there are huge disparities in the setting of trials and access to patients. is there anything you thought about doing or have been able to enact to address any of these issues? dr. osborne: we wrote a paper a few years back with daniel spratt, md, looking at castrate-resistant prostate cancer, and this disparity was very clear. at the time, we were looking at genes and other factors that might be different between the populations. a couple of years later, in , we reported in jama oncology that if results from black patients are pooled together in data from all castrate-resistant prostate cancer clinical trial populations, their outcomes are very similar to those of individuals of european descent. this suggests that if you are able to get people into trials, a lot of this disparity may go away. even more so than genes, it’s really about access to the trials. the question at weill cornell—and our focus—is how do we expand access to our clinical trials to more demographics, espe- cially in underserved areas? if we do a clinical trial here for prostate cancer and % of participants are of european descent, then we haven’t answered the question. we have to pool our resources as a system and find ways to provide access and enroll patients from areas like queens and brooklyn. we have to accrue as aggressively in queens and brooklyn as we do on the upper east side. we also should be looking at clinical trial data carefully on a rolling basis, not just at the end of recruitment, making sure we have an acceptable balance. if you look at black male represen- tation in the prostate cancer database of the cancer genome atlas, there are too few to make any conclusions—so you might as well have had zero. if you can’t do genetic discovery, then why try at all? my priority here at weill cornell is ensuring that everybody is on a clinical trial who should be. the underlying goal is to get to the point where more people are being treated or imaged who need it. dr. hope: one of the things that the black lives matter move- ment really highlighted for me is the extent of how systems in place in our society reinforce disparities. i don’t think many white people are aware of the history of systematic disparities and the ways in which they’ve played a role in medicine. do you think you can take a minute to talk about how medicine has been influenced by this? `̀ change has to come from the majority. . . . if you want to be inclusive, then you have to go out and find the talent. you can't sit back and wait for the talent to come to you, or no one will come.’’ the journal of nuclear medicine • vol. • no. • september dr. osborne: people don’t like to think of new york city as being segregated, but it is. as i said earlier, it is a majority minority city, but only in certain communities. you’ll find it to be % minority in bedford–stuyvesant in brooklyn but only % on the upper east side around weill cornell. when someone in brooklyn needs medical assistance, they will go to brooklyn methodist if they have insurance and probably kings county hospital center if they don’t. if they’re on the upper east side, they come to weill cornell. that alone drives a huge disparity, because if the hospitals that serve minority communities are suboptimal, then that’s the kind of care someone there will get. these disparities are happening right now. it’s not something that happened years ago. in , i bought a brownstone in harlem. at the time, harlem was not quite gentrified, and no one would lend to me. the only large bank that considered me was wells fargo. a few comm- unity banks offered subprime loans. although i had finished my md/phd, was about to start radiology residency, had plenty of money, and had perfect credit. still, i could barely get a loan for a house in harlem. redlining—that is the story of those neighbor- hoods and the people of color trying to secure loans. the access to good health care isn’t great, and neither are some of the neighbor- hoods. but part of the problem is that no one will lend money. the same thing happens for the hospitals. if hospitals have a bad payer mix, they may struggle to deliver the same kinds of services because they know it may impact the bottom line. dr. hope: the field of nuclear medicine is very white. it’s not your job as a black leader at weill cornell to drive this change by yourself. it also has to be the responsibility of everyone. that’s part of the point here: to make people aware of the issues so that it’s not just the black population in our field who are driving change. dr. osborne: there are so many other things going on pro- fessionally and personally with black physicians that asking them to bear the burden alone is not the answer. if you want to go around the hospital and ask which practitioners are most likely to have hypertension or diabetes, it’s usually the black physicians. that’s where things like allyship become so important in driving change. the most important thing that our field should know is that in order to drive change, that change must be both organic and intentional. change has to come from the majority. i really believe that without intentional change, groups or medical societies will ultimately fail. i think we’re onto some really brilliant things scientifically, but without an audience, without the patients, with- out resembling our society, it’s just a matter of time. snmmi has to be more inclusive in order to preserve itself. dr. hope: are there any anecdotes from your experience of how important it is to have the physician workforce mirror that of your patient population? dr. osborne: here at weill cornell, recruitment has been in- tentional, especially the hiring from the top, which has changed the appearance of the workforce, even at the resident level. new york–presbyterian has hired its first black chair in years, and her vice chairs include blacks as well as latinas in the residency workforce. we are currently trying to mirror these changes in radiology with our incumbent vice chair in diversity equity and inclusion, kemi babagbemi, md, and in my mi equity lab. i’ve talked to many of these individuals about their experiences with patients, which have changed dramatically, in part because pa- tients now come here because they have that connection. whether at sloan kettering or here at weill cornell—great institutions with brand recognition—people will not come just because of who we are. there has to be trust and not only in the science. my father, who just passed away, was a dentist. he would never, ever have come to sloan kettering or weill cornell. he just wouldn’t do it. he would feel that he could get his care somewhere else where he ‘‘knew’’ the people and where care was personalized to who he was as a patient and as a human being. that’s the thing that people find the most surprising. they think because we’re great and we’ve done a lot of wonderful things, that people will come; they are not correct. dr. hope: to put that together, a diverse workforce increases inclusion, which then breaks down disparity in access—it’s a great point. thank you for taking the time to talk about these issues. they are a little bit difficult to talk about, but your per- spective is incredibly valuable. hopefully some people will learn about different approaches that we can take to help make things better. dr. osborne: i really applaud you for coming to discuss things that aren’t easy to discuss. most often we talk about different things, such as trials and radionuclides. but sometimes we need to talk about these issues, too. they’re important as well. and i’m always here. discussions with leaders • osborne and hope community during the pandemic and civil unrest commentary community during the pandemic and civil unrest ronald e. anderson received: july /accepted: july / # springer nature switzerland ag abstract beginning with the concept of community, this editorial describes the essence of community as connectedness, sharing and caring. the notion of cultural trauma helps clarify the meaning and impact of the pandemic and concurrent racial unrest. evidence is offered of sharp decline in community wellbeing from these traumas. as in other major disasters, communities of support have arisen to help neighbors and others who need urgent assistance repairing their lives and their torn social fabric. keywords community . well-being . pandemic . racism . kindness . trauma the word ‘community’ appears in so many contexts that we tend to forget its essence for human beings. community principally means bonds of interconnectedness made strong by sharing, commitments, coordination, caring and trust. often the ‘social fabric’ meta- phor is used to refer to the strength of these bonds among people in a community. the most human aspect of sharing is caring, as caring can be highly personal and intimate. caring and kindness build even stronger bonds of cooperation and sharing. discovering such bonds within a group signals most clearly that the group is a community. the roots of the word community include the latin word ‘communitas’ and notions of shared equality. etiologies of the word also tend to mention the phrase “public spirit,” and sharing of goods and services. sharing and caring relationships are much more common and pronounced in communities. thus, kindness, generosity and altruism become more visible and feasible in communities. pandemic and racial protests in early , millions of communities were traumatized by the pandemic as deaths piled up, stoking fear of disease and deprivation. amidst this uncertainty, the visuals of george floyd’s death on may left people bewildered and sparked protests around international journal of community well-being https://doi.org/ . /s - - -x * ronald e. anderson rea@umn.edu university of minnesota, minneapolis, mn, usa http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - -x&domain=pdf http://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:rea@umn.edu the world. within only three weeks, protest demonstrations moved into over cities and towns in the united states and many more in over additional countries. in the us, at least cities had imposed curfews and at least , people were arrested, according to wikipedia, which keeps a list of the protest locations. as george floyd took his last breaths, the viral video showed the police officer not only kneeling on floyd’s neck but enjoying the cruelty. it symbolized the complete absence of care and caring of white men toward black men. by mid-june additional cases of police brutality had become prominent in the media. they all implied black lives did not matter, which increasingly had become unacceptable. gradually, the protests came to be labeled both the george floyd and black lives matter (blm) protests. the leadership of the blm movement helped focus protests on both police brutality and systemic racism. cultural trauma sociologist jeffrey alexander ( ) introduced the theory of cultural trauma, defining it as a greatly disturbing and distressful event shared by a collectivity and which changes their identities in irrevocable ways. the pandemic produced a cultural trauma because not only did it force many disturbing lifestyle changes, but our identities became intertwined with the systems and leaders making public health policy. in countries like the us, where pandemic practice became politicized, people suffer additional trauma associated with their stands on such practices as the wearing of masks and social distancing. the specter of incompetent leadership unable to contain the virus added another type of trauma, to say nothing of isolation and severe financial distress, all of which in the us were borne much more heavily by the black and native minority communities. the death of george floyd and the protest marches around the world created a second cultural trauma. unlike many shorter-term protest movements, this one pro- duced greater support for taking action on police reform and reduction in institutional racism. alexander ( ) argues that the enormous weight of the pandemic and the racial protests upon our pre-existing cultural traumas will lead us through a process of weighing competing narratives to determine responsibility for the conditions of the latest crises. he also speculates that both cultural traumas may not be resolved, leaving behind even greater holes in the social fabric over time. coping with the cultural traumas next, consider policy changes needed to reduce our cultural traumas from the pandemic and racial unrest. a useful way to frame the problem is: what can be done to restore trust at all levels of communities and societies? the pandemic is a public health problem, and so we need decision-makers who can make and execute wise public health policy and gain the trust of all citizens. reducing the trauma of the racial protests requires a different set of priorities. around the world, the protests call for radical reduction in racial discrimination at all levels of each community. even countries lacking a long history of ethnic and racial strife, may suddenly face racial conflict. the best hope for curtailing the growth of racism and racial conflict is to ensure that racial tolerance is engrained into social institutions, especially legal, political and educational systems. international journal of community well-being in the united states, the most immediate need is to change the police culture in individual community police departments. it may be necessary to disband police departments and start over as did the camden, nj police department did in . community policing needs to be developed in all police departments in the us that don’t already have it. for many police departments this will involve letting go many officers, hiring new officers and totally revamping police training. extracting racism from police departments will not be enough. we also need to fix basic social problems such as failing schools and preschools in low income communities; generate low- income housing solutions; create new job opportunities for minorities; and so on. community well-being plunged during the pandemic over the past decade, global well-being, as measured by the gallup world poll, has been mostly flat. with the global lockdowns this year, polling in many countries closed down too; thus, global estimates are not yet available. however, gallup has released trends for the united states (gallup ). the percent who said they “experienced anger most of yesterday” doubled (from % to %) in june of this year compared to , as did the percent feeling sadness. the rise in negative feelings of worry and stress did not double but rose substantially as well. corroborating this rise in negative affect are the findings of the general social survey (norc ), which has since been tracking happiness among americans. during the pandemic, the percent who said they were “not too happy” jumped from % to %, and the number “very happy” dropped from % to %. this was the lowest level of american happiness in nearly years. the norc also asked about isolation and loneliness; those who felt isolated jumped from % in to % in . also, the number saying they “often lack companionship rose from % in to % in may . this rise in loneliness and companionship undoubted contributed to the sharp fall in well-being. the most serious evidence of pandemic degradation in community well-being in the us comes from the national center for health statistics (nchs) early release program conducted by the u. s. census bureau. they found that % of adults in june “delayed getting medical care in the last four weeks but did not get it because of the coronavirus pandemic.” this program also reported that % in june had either “an anxiety disorder or a depressive disorder.” respondents qualified as anxious or depressive only if they said they were anxious or felt little interest or pleasure in doing things for “more than half of the days over the past two weeks.” from june to june the percent with such a disorder rose from % to %. this startling rise in self-reported mental health disorders suggests that the cultural traumas are deeper than many imagined (nchs ). very similar estimates of anxiety during the pandemic were found in britain in surveys done by their office for national statistics (ons ). in a nationwide survey of randomly selected people during the second week of april, % reported “high anxiety levels,” which dropped to % by the end of june. this reveals a very similar pandemic-linked mental health problem in the uk as in the us. with respect to well-being more broadly, in the uk over half of adults ( %) agreed with the statement “my well-being is being affected by covid- ” in early april, and it dropped international journal of community well-being only slightly to % by late june. this implies that not only is the pandemic diminishing community well-being but that its effect remained fairly constant over the first four months of the pandemic. assuming that these data from the us and the uk reflect the rest of the world, the pandemic has done havoc to global community well-being. many countries have not been hit as hard by the pandemic as have the us and the uk, but most countries do not have the health facilities needed to care for a lot of cases. furthermore, no one knows what the damage will be, were the pandemic to continue for years. kindness during the pandemic in the early days of the pandemic, newspapers and other media frequently carried stories of how people had gone out of their way to be kind to others. in july of , i googled ‘pandemic kindness’ and got million hits. also, i found thousands of newspaper stories about kindness during the pandemic. surveys are a better way to gage kindness. the best surveys on this were done in britain by their office for national statistics (ons ). in their first wave in april , % agreed “people are doing more to help others since the coronavirus outbreak.” of those surveyed, % said he or she had checked on their neighbors at least once, while almost a half ( %) said they had helped someone who lived nearby by shopping for them, walking their dog or something similar (ons ). these three questions were repeated three months later, and the percentages had dropped only about %. also the uk survey found that % of adults reported caring for a “sick, disabled or person over in their home.” these statistics together suggest that kindness is a part of the social fabric of every community’s response to a pandemic. evidence of british caring and compassion during the pandemic was found in another uk survey by populus ( ). in early april they surveyed persons asking them to rank their top three values out of the following list of nine attributes: “good judgment, being reflective, being compassionate/caring, courage, community awareness, service to others, resilience, motivated, and wisdom.” the most valued of these character qualities was “compassionate/caring.” when asked to give their most valued qualities for “leaders/senior political figures,” the highest valued was “good judgment,” but compassionate/caring was next highest. so, even for political leaders, compassion and caring were deemed extremely important. in an earlier article, i urged community researchers to look to compassion and caring as a core aspect of community solidarity (anderson ). the pandemic reinforces that position. disaster brings out the best sometimes cultural traumas bring out the worst in people. looting and burning of buildings began two days after george floyd’s killing. and some people defied the pandemic by packing into crowded bars. ironically, cultural traumas also produce outpourings of positive deeds and feelings. disaster researchers have long wondered about the implications of the idiom “all in the same boat,” and why it evokes a drive to help each other out. apparently, the idiom originated with the ancient greeks and the need to remind everyone in a shipwrecked little boat international journal of community well-being that it does no good to complain. instead, crisis gives everyone an incentive to contribute to the common good. after studying the five worst natural disasters since , solnit ( ) wrote “disasters require us to act, and act altruistically, bravely, and with initiative in order to survive or save our neighbors, no matter their wealth or how they vote. legendary psychologist william james ( ) visited the great earth- quake that destroyed san francisco and was so impressed by the positive attitude of the survivors that he wrote “a civic temperament of social engagement ... and extraordinary selflessness, heroism, transcendence, and sacrifice” were created by the disaster. one of the early pioneers of disaster research, sociologist charles fritz ( ), headed a team of researchers at the norc at the university of chicago. together they extracted conclusions from interviews across disaster sites. fritz concluded that a major catastrophe produces a “community of sufferers” that allows individuals to experience an immensely reassuring feeling of connection to others. he believed this feeling of “being in the same boat” was also made possible by the utopian idea of freedom from differences in social status. after reviewing this research, bregman ( ) concluded that major social crises tend to produce altruistic behaviors that by far outweigh any of the negative outcomes. i live ten miles from where george floyd was murdered, and buildings were burned down in two days in may. it felt like a disaster zone. but the days immediately thereafter also felt like renewal. even as thousands joined the marchers, hundreds moved among the shop-owners to help them pick up trash, sweep the sidewalks, wash off the graffiti, board up windows, and supply the grievers with food and shelter. many local volunteers also helped coordinate the marching to minimize violence and injury. two months after the riotous protests, a gofundme site surpassed $ million for the rebuilders. the spirit of goodness still can be seen at work as neighborhood groups, local churches, and nonprofits continue to work hard for those in need of help in rebuilding, as well as programs supplying food and other assistance in low income neighborhoods. conclusion the cultural traumas of the pandemic, and to some extent the unrest over racism, likely have devastated global community well-being, already the world news has given us a portrait of grave differences in communities and countries in their resilience to respond to the pandemic. hopefully, research on community resilience will help even more communities protect themselves from the spread of the coronavirus. the pandemic indirectly makes a case for building resilience and solidarity through compassion and caring. the upswing in kindness is one of the few rays of light and hope in this challenging time. compliance with ethical standards conflict of interest none. international journal of community well-being references alexander, jeffrey c. ( ) cultural trauma and collective identity. univ. of california press. alexander, jeffrey c. ( ). yale’s jeffrey alexander on how today’s crises might shape tomorrow. yalenews (june ), pp – . anderson, r, e. ( ). “community functioning that fosters sustainable social well-being. pp. - in handbook of community well-being research, springer. bregman, rutger ( ). humankind: a history of hope. little, brown & co. fritz, c. ( ). disasters and mental health: therapeutic principles drawn from disaster studies. newark: university of delaware disaster research center. gallup. ( ). in u.s., negative emotions surged, then declined in june. https://news.gallup. com/poll/ /negative-emotions-surged-declined-june.aspx. accessed jun . james, w. ( ). memories and studies. green: longmans. nchs ( ). mental health household pulse survey. centers for disease control and prevention. accessed on july at https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid /pulse/mental-health.htm norc. ( ). covid response tracking study. national opinion research center: university of chicago. ons ( ). opinions and lifestyle survey. office for national statistics. https://www.ons.gov.uk/ populus. ( ). character in crisis survey. jubilee centre for character and virtues: university of birmingham accessed at https://www.jubileecentre.ac.uk/media/news/article/ /polling-shows- british-public-still-value-compassion-in-others-but-place-less-value-on-civic-virtues. solnit, r. ( ). a paradise built in hell: the extraordinary communities that arise in disaster. penguin books. publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. international journal of community well-being https://news.gallup.com/poll/ /negative-emotions-surged-declined-june.aspx https://news.gallup.com/poll/ /negative-emotions-surged-declined-june.aspx https://www.cdc.gov/nchs/covid /pulse/mental-health.htm https://www.ons.gov.uk/ https://www.jubileecentre.ac.uk/media/news/article/ /polling-shows-british-public-still-value-compassion-in-others-but-place-less-value-on-civic-virtues https://www.jubileecentre.ac.uk/media/news/article/ /polling-shows-british-public-still-value-compassion-in-others-but-place-less-value-on-civic-virtues 	community during the pandemic and civil unrest 	abstract 	pandemic and racial protests 	cultural trauma 	coping with the cultural traumas 	community well-being plunged during the pandemic 	kindness during the pandemic 	disaster brings out the best 	conclusion 	references human rights questioned: a queer perspective all rights reserved © nick j. mulé, this document is protected by copyright law. use of the services of Érudit (including reproduction) is subject to its terms and conditions, which can be viewed online. https://apropos.erudit.org/en/users/policy-on-use/ this article is disseminated and preserved by Érudit. Érudit is a non-profit inter-university consortium of the université de montréal, université laval, and the université du québec à montréal. its mission is to promote and disseminate research. https://www.erudit.org/en/ document generated on / / : p.m. canadian social work review revue canadienne de service social human rights questioned a queer perspective nick j. mulé volume , number , uri: https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar doi: https://doi.org/ . / ar see table of contents publisher(s) canadian association for social work education / association canadienne pour la formation en travail social (caswe-acfts) issn - (digital) explore this journal cite this article mulé, n. j. ( ). human rights questioned: a queer perspective. canadian social work review / revue canadienne de service social, ( ), – . https://doi.org/ . / ar https://apropos.erudit.org/en/users/policy-on-use/ https://www.erudit.org/en/ https://www.erudit.org/en/ https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/cswr/ https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar https://doi.org/ . / ar https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/cswr/ -v -n -cswr / https://www.erudit.org/en/journals/cswr/ canadian social work review, volume , number ( ) / revue canadienne de service social, volume , numéro ( ) human rights questioned a queer perspective nick j. mulé with the rise of populism, we find ourselves in particularly troubling times. many of the gains hard fought for that resulted in human rights legislation to recognize and protect some of the most vulnerable and disenfranchised groups are now being trampled on by veiled and sometimes not-so-veiled messages and actions by groups of people, who themselves feel disaffected. as threatening as the current circumstance can feel, it also provides us with an opportunity to take a more in-depth and nuanced look at human rights as a concept. what is it about human rights that have put some people on edge to the point of lashing out against those most in need of them? have human rights fallen short in educating the public as to its role and contribution to society? are human rights effectively addressing the multiple imbalances experienced in society (including the disaffected critical of human rights)? the focus of this paper is from the perspective of a progressive queer lens regarding the human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transsexual, transgender, -spirit, queer, questioning, and intersex (lgbtqi) people, based on a history of human rights abuses against people who identify as, or are perceived to be, lgbtqi (adam, ; smith, ; warner, ). this focus and lens need not be limited to gender and sexual diversity but can be extended to anyone concerned about human rights. intersectionality of social locations has always run through gender and sexually diverse people, and as such, the human rights issues raised herein are applicable to society in general. in this paper the importance of human rights will be discussed while simultaneously looking at its limitations and the dialectical implications this has. the erosive position human rights are currently in will be examined from a socio-political perspective that captures those who promote human rights and those who question them. canada likes to present itself as being on a solid ground of human rights legislation, nick j. mulé is associate professor in the school of social work at york university and chair of the caswe-acfts queer caucus. revue canadienne de service social, volume , numéro but there is no denying the numerous imbalances that continue to exist and the challenges they create not only for those directly affected, but for canadian society and the very notion that human rights are a tool of recognition and protection. such imbalances and the challenges they pose will be decontextualized. i propose a more liberating response, one that albeit includes human rights but is not constrained by its limitations. importance and limitations of human rights human rights and advocacy hold an important place in social work ethos as outlined by various social work codes of ethics and principles of practice (iassw, n.d.; ifsw, a, b; casw, ). hence, social work has a history of social reform advocating social justice for the marginalized, disenfranchised and oppressed (hutchinson crocker, ). this now includes sexual orientation and gender identity and expression (ifsw, ). in canada, the battle to get lgbtqis included in formal human rights legislation has happened incrementally over time and is an ongoing initiative of the lgbtqi movement (mulé, forthcoming). for example, human rights recognition of lgbtqis was initially advocated for and achieved by the movement for enumerated characteristic of sexual orientation (warner, ). it has only been in the last number of years that provinces and territories, and eventually the federal government, included gender identity (and expression) in human rights legislation (canadian bar association, ; equaldex, ). yet, recognition still eludes these populations, such as the employment equity act and the omission of intersex people in formal legislative human rights. beyond incrementalism, a problem that underscores the concept of human rights is the premise of equality over equity. too often human rights are fought for and designed to achieve equality in the eyes of the law. this in turn creates a limitation in formal human rights by constructing a form of legal justice that falls short of substantive material human rights, the latter of which, is only achievable via social justice. formal human rights legislation, achieved through the conservatizing legal justice process, sets equality measures based on the status quo, which inevitably tends to be white, middle class, heterosexual, and cisgendered. for many who fall outside this normative realm (including many lgbtqis), legal justice is out of reach. it is in the broader scope of social justice that those marginalized by human rights hope to be taken up. discontent among the populace if an underscoring tenet of human rights is to be based on equality, has this been achieved? groups who have traditionally sought human rights recognition and protections (i.e. characteristics based on race, ethnicity, gender, gender identity/expression, age, accessibility, sexual orientation, canadian social work review, volume , number class, creed, among others) have had to be vigilant due to ongoing human rights abuses or lack of implementation. groups who do not necessarily fall into any of the traditionally-based recognized and protected human rights categories are feeling excluded and lacking a sense of the role human rights play in the reparation and equalization of a system that is innately oppressive to those who fall outside the majority or lack power. the lgbtq movement from its earliest days as a liberationist front, learned from the black liberation and women’s liberation movements that came before, the importance of consciousness raising (jay & young, ). this calls for a better understanding of human rights along with a continued commitment to decontextualize and reformulate them to reflect the ongoing shifting needs of the populace. the public in turn then needs to be educated about human rights, in its shape shifting form, to understand how this concept is to serve all in our respective social locations. challenges of imbalance on the surface it may appear that canada is a very progressive country regarding human rights in general and lgbtq populations in particular, especially in comparison to many other countries throughout the world. what is not to be forgotten is that these rights were a result of long, hard battles on the part of lgbtq activists following years of heterosexist and homophobic abuse and oppression (smith, ; warner, ) that is still far from being eradicated (mccaskell, ). also, rights acquisitions for lgbtqs have been incremental, initially based on sexual orientation, eventually extending to relationship recognition, parenting, adoption, and marriage (equaldex, ; my big gay family, ). only recently has gender identity and expression become an enumerated characteristic in human rights legislation (kirkness & macmillan, ). yet, those with variant sex characteristics, referred to as intersex, continue to be absent in formal human rights protections (dreger, n.d.). hence, the varied groups that are captured under the growing category of gender and sexually diverse populations have, over time, experienced varying degrees of human rights recognition and protection, if at all, creating imbalances within the lgbtqi communities along the way. returning to equality being at the premise of human rights is also problematic to the point of inadvertently creating inequities down the line. when examining human rights legislation for lgbtqs in canada it has inevitably been pursued via an equality agenda by equality-seeking lgbt groups. it is not surprising that the human rights lgbtqs have attained have been along the lines of traditional heterosexual standards (think marriage, reproduction, and adoption within a family unit led by a couple). by contrast, equity-seeking queer groups who tend to be more critical, radical, and progressive in their agenda are less interested in revue canadienne de service social, volume , numéro replicating heterosexual and cisgender norms than creating recognition and protection for a lifestyle that is not restricted by heteronormativity and cisnormativity (mulé, ). importantly, it is essential we not lose sight of the impact intersecting social locations have on our existence. the social and power imbalances within the lgbtq communities are quite pronounced for those who are female identified, racialized, impoverished and/or facing barriers to accessibility. groups such as black lives matter have brought these issues to the fore, disrupting not only mainstream society but lgbtq communities themselves from continuing to think that human rights are evenly distributed (black lives matter, ). the power imbalances within minority communities, such as lgbtqs, are not accounted for in human rights legislation. the most marginalized of minoritized communities find formal human rights inaccessible due to financial and emotional costs, not to mention human rights legislation being devoid of intersectional recognition. once again, formal human rights legislation falls far short of being able to extend itself to on-the-ground, material, social justice issues that these individuals experience. there are numerous examples of intersectional imbalances. hiv/ aids, which continues to significantly affect gay and bisexual men, has seen major progress in medical science shifting the disease from at one time being terminal, to a manageable chronic illness. the anti-retroviral medications now available in canada have the ability to suppress the virus to being undetectable, resulting in significantly lowered levels of contagion (challocombe, ). yet, social policy has not caught up with the science. criminalization of gay sex continues with regard to hiv- positive men regarding non-disclosure of their status (fink, ), not to mention that most hiv-positive men charged with non-disclosure have been racialized. also, there continues to be restrictions on men who engage in same-sex relations donating blood due to dated fears regarding hiv (dryden, ). two-spirit peoples advocated for inclusion in the truth and reconciliation commission, only to be given a mere half page space in the , -page report and they continue to be excluded from the inquiry into missing indigenous women and girls (robertson, ); black members of the lgbtq communities continue to be at risk of being carded, overly surveilled and targeted for crimes (naacp, ). it is for these reasons they feel unsafe in the presence of the police, including at pride events, a time of freedom and celebration, only to have the presence of uniformed law enforcement officials to remind black lgbtqs of their vulnerabilities (janus, ). currently, one of the largest investigations is underway regarding a serial killer in toronto’s gay community, with questions being raised as to the slow response by the police and whether this is tied to the majority of the victims being racialized gay men (asaap, ). canadian social work review, volume , number further examples include lesbian, bisexual, and trans women who continue to be at risk of sexual harassment or assault regardless of their sexual orientation, gender identity or expression (veldhuis, drabble, riggle, wootton, & hughes ). as with all women they also continue to be on the lower end of the wage gap between the traditional binary sexes (queer ontario, ). similarly, with the disabled, society has socially constructed an able-bodied and minded system that leaves lgbtq disabled people with numerous barriers and limitations to live their lives freely (kattari, ). the very oppressions imposed on lgbtq people result in many unable to live to their full potential, impoverishing them in the process. poverty is little understood in the lgbtq communities but is prevalent (defillippis, ). additionally, intersex members of the lgbtq community are absent from human rights protections, allowing the medical system to decide for them in their infancy the sex they will be assigned based on their ambiguous genitalia (meoded-danon & yanay, ). this is an example of how systems can oppress, when in most cases other options are available including allowing the child the agency to make their own decisions when they have matured. the above examples of intersectional imbalances illustrate challenges to human rights. towards a liberating approach as enticing as it is to entrench and cloak ourselves in the concept of human rights it may be more beneficial to step back from it and consider what has and has not been gained and how do we improve upon them to better address the challenging state of affairs we find ourselves in. in times of turmoil and instability, such as where we find ourselves these days, it can be helpful to return to some of the tenets of emancipatory work to remind ourselves of what needs to be focused on and how we can go about creating systems that are liberating rather than oppressive. an important tenet of gay liberationists at the dawn of the lgbtq social movement was that seeking human rights was a means to an end, not an end in and of itself (warner, ). they knew then, as we should not lose sight of today, that human rights claims are but one tool in the fight for recognition, but human rights alone will not achieve liberation (mulé, ). formal human rights legislation is ensconced in a legal justice framework, which in and of itself is confined within a conservatizing construct that prioritizes equality with assimilationist, status quo tendencies. human rights policies, although increasingly comprehensive of many social locations, are still designed monolithically, with little if any attention to intersectional existences and experiences. the emphasis on equality, limits the extent of human rights to the status quo, usually defined by the most powerful in society and whose life experiences are distant from the diverse, marginalized, and disenfranchised populations. developing a liberating revue canadienne de service social, volume , numéro system calls upon us to take a critical look at human rights, who specifically they benefit, how they can be improved, inclusions and omissions therein, how accessible they are, and to be cognizant of their limitations. even more importantly, gay liberationists called upon us to be imaginative, creative, and innovative in developing a system that goes beyond a restricted human rights legal justice focus to a broader emancipatory liberating system that frees people regardless of their sexual orientation, gender identity, and expression and/or sex characteristics (mulé, ). what a liberated society would ultimately look like is one that recognizes and values differences within all social locations at the ground level. it is at this level that social justice mobilizes and works its way up. a society committed to liberation would place equal value, if not greater, to social justice, recognizing the conservatizing limitations of legal justice. from a queer liberation perspective, it would mean a society in which all are free to embrace the sexual orientation, gender identity or expression of their choosing and accept people’s sexual characteristics. from a broader liberation perspective, it would mean a society for which all social locations are accepted and celebrated without the need to tie the most mainstream of them to human rights protections. conclusion in this forum piece i have looked at both the importance and limitations of human rights as a concept. the current discontent in society in general was briefly looked at before engaging in an in-depth critical analysis of the challenges human rights are faced with due to numerous societal imbalances. i proffer a liberation approach that is more freeing than the inevitable limitations of human rights. an alternative way of looking at this is to consider that there could be good reasons for the erosion of human rights that we are currently witnessing, particularly if such human rights are not serving those they were meant to serve nor informing privileged others as to the importance of such rights. additionally, working towards a society that liberates beyond the limitations of human rights is an initiative that social workers can contribute to along with the liberationists of all stripes towards a broader form of social 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(forthcoming). “sexual and gender diversity.” in r. harding, d. jeyapal & c. walmsley (eds.) canadian social policy for social workers. don mills, on: oxford university press. my big gay family. ( ). lesbian access to ivf and iui in canada. retrieved from http://www.mybiggayfamily.com/lesbian-access-to-ivf-and- iui-in-canada/ national association for the advancement of colored people (naacp), ( ). born suspect: stop-and-frisk abuses and the continued fight to end racial profiling in america. naacp: retrieved february , from: http:// action.naacp.org/page/-/criminal% justice/born_suspect_report_ final_web.pdf queer ontario ( ). queer ontario supports ending gender pay gap: calls on provincial government to provide pay transparency on variety of genders. queer ontario. retrieved february , from http://queerontario. org/page/ / robertson, d. c. ( ). meet the two-spirit people fighting to be included in canada’s reconciliation process. daily xtra. retrieved from https:// www.dailyxtra.com/meet-the-two-spirit-people-fighting-to-be-included-in- canadas-reconciliation-process- smith, m. ( ). lesbian and gay rights in canada: social movements and equality –seeking, – . toronto, on: university of toronto. veldhuis, c. b., drabble, l., riggle, e. d. b., wootton, a. r., & hughes, t. l. ( ). “we won’t go back into the closet now without one hell of a fight”: effects of the presidential election on sexual minority women’s and gender minorities’ stigma-related concerns. sexuality research & social policy, ( ), - . warner, t. ( ). never going back: a history of queer activism in canada. toronto, on: university of toronto. https://www.labourandemploymentlaw.com/ / /federal-government-adds-gender-identity-and-gender-expression-to-canadian-human-rights-act/ https://www.labourandemploymentlaw.com/ / /federal-government-adds-gender-identity-and-gender-expression-to-canadian-human-rights-act/ https://www.labourandemploymentlaw.com/ / /federal-government-adds-gender-identity-and-gender-expression-to-canadian-human-rights-act/ http://www.mybiggayfamily.com/lesbian-access-to-ivf-and-iui-in-canada/ http://www.mybiggayfamily.com/lesbian-access-to-ivf-and-iui-in-canada/ interculturalism and responsive reflexivity in a settler colonial context religions article interculturalism and responsive reflexivity in a settler colonial context amanda kearney college of humanities, arts and social sciences, flinders university, bedford park sa , australia; amanda.kearney@flinders.edu.au received: february ; accepted: march ; published: march ���������� ������� abstract: this article explores interculturalism in australia, a nation marked by the impact of coloniality and deep colonising. fostering interculturalism—as a form of empathic understanding and being in good relations with difference—across indigenous and non-indigenous lived experiences has proven difficult in australia. this paper offers a scoping of existing discourse on interculturalism, asking firstly, ‘what is interculturalism’, that is, what is beyond the rhetoric and policy speak? the second commitment is to examine the pressures that stymy the articulation of interculturalism as a broad-based project, and lastly the article strives to highlight possibilities for interculturalism through consideration of empathic understandings of sustainable futures and land security in australia. legislative land rights and land activism arranged around solidarity movements for sustainable futures are taken up as the two sites of analysis. in the first instance, a case is made for legislative land rights as a form of coloniality that maintains the centrality of state power, and in the second, land activism, as expressed in the campaigns of seed, australia’s first indigenous youth-led climate network and the australian youth climate coalition, are identified as sites for plurality and as staging grounds for intercultural praxis. keywords: interculturalism; coloniality; deep colonising; empathy; indigenous australia; reflexivity . introduction this article explores interculturalism in the context of a settler colonial nation. in this instance the context is australia, a nation marked by the prevailing impact of coloniality and deep colonising (bradley and seton ; grosfoguel ; marchetti ; rose ). grosfoguel ( , ), taking the lead from quijano ( ), conceptualizes coloniality as the entanglement of power, and the ‘coloniality of power’ as being “based in race and racism as the organizing principle that structures all of the multiple hierarchies of the world-system” (quijano ). coloniality is dependent upon deep colonising, a condition in which the process of conquest remains embedded within institutions and practices aimed at reversing the effects of colonisation, “where colonial authority can still define indigenous reality through the creation of classes such as the haves and have nots” (bradley and seton , p. ). this is authority expressed through policy interventions, land rights law, and economic interventions in some, but not all aboriginal lives, families and communities as distinctive cultural and social units set within and apart from the australian white population (bradley and seton , pp. , ). fostering interculturalism, as a form of empathic understanding and bridging of cultural differences, across indigenous and non-indigenous lived experiences, amidst the conditions of structural inequality has proven difficult in australia. this paper offers a preliminary scoping of existing discourse on interculturalism, asking firstly, what is interculturalism, that is, what is it beyond the rhetoric and policy speak? the second commitment is to examine the pressures that stymy the articulation of interculturalism as a broad-based project, and lastly the article strives to highlight religions , , ; doi: . /rel www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /rel http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions religions , , of possibilities for intercultural praxis through consideration of empathic understandings of sustainable futures and land security. examining how interculturalism might support land related matters, such as ecological health and land security for indigenous and non-indigenous australians, within the context of coloniality, progresses the theme of intercultural health, whereby the health and well-being of those marginalised through the violence of settler colonialism and its structural legacy is taken seriously by the nation. the driving questions for this and current wider research are: how might white australians begin to appreciate the need for land security as living justice among aboriginal people, and how might collective action for sustainable futures articulate something of an intercultural commitment? it is proposed that intercultural commitments require the cultivation of reflexive responsibility, a move away from individualism, and greater empathic learning across cultural gaps. the expansion of care and concern over matters of land rights, and sustainable futures is treated as a moral commitment, a kind of practical, instrumentalist and educational expression and more expansive recognition of value. in the tense field of settler colonialism, cultural wounding (see kearney ) and the failure to care, as an ethical retreat from the hardships or lived realities of others, form into a lack of care diffused across a range of perceptible and imperceptible habits. yet if adjusted through a broader commitment to responsive reflexivity and empathy as a site of learning then new axiological habits, which support plurality and interculturalism may be cultivated. . australia as a settler colony australia is a settler colony, brought into political and social reality in , with british invasion. predating and surviving this arrival, the nations that make up aboriginal australia include distinct ethnic groups that claim their ancestry along linguistic lines and associated bodies of knowledge and law. it has been recorded that prior to the arrival of the british in , there were approximately distinct indigenous languages mapping onto as many diverse ethnic groups (mcconvell and thieberger , p. ; walsh and yallop ). language groups were and are distinct in that they are linked to homelands and particular terrestrial and marine territories that are owned by the group and marked by the actions of specific ancestral beings. through their linguistic specificity, they come to develop distinct patterns for defining the group and understanding its place in the world. genocide and other violent acts aimed at cultural wounding have resulted in the physical loss of entire populations and indigenous nations (kearney ; roberts ; tatz , ) and significant drops in language proficiency and transmission as well as abilities to practice cultural expressions and adherences to law. history has shown that the effects of cultural wounding have not been the same across the country, with hardships and survivals mapping differently onto remote, rural and urban communities (kearney ) . there are discrete local histories and experiences that have shaped group responses to cultural wounding, and yet at the same time, for some there has emerged a nationwide sense of aboriginality as an ethnic distinction. this has been supported, in part, by aboriginal political organisations and protests, which began in the s (maynard , , p. ), and flourished throughout the s and s (clark ). self-determination and unity of purpose distinguish the s in terms of aboriginal solidarity and protest, with many actions underscored by the prevailing commitment for land and sustainable futures, ensuring the value in sustaining a strong pan-aboriginal movement. concurrently, from the s, multiculturalism entered the australian national political discourse and has held, despite the fact that the very nature of diverse ethnic citizenries remains underexplored and widely misrepresented in popular visions of the nation and its emergence as a reconciled state (curthoys ; foster and stockley ; povinelli , p. ; wimmer ). located within this cultural wounding is the violation of persons and their cultural lives through insult and injury, motivated by the desire to destroy or significantly harm this culture and its bearers (kearney ). religions , , of space are identity politics that circulate around and between citizens of indigenous and non-indigenous descent. how these populations conceive of themselves and interact or fail to recognise the experiences of the other are at the center of much political and social reflection. both the australian state and its citizens have vested interests in the identity politics that spring forth from assertions of indigeneity in this settler colonial space. since the very arrival of british settlers, woven into the nation’s fabric has been a logic of separation, that sustains discrete formulations and treatments of bodies and citizens according to categories of “aboriginal or indigenous”, “migrant”, “white”, “new settler” and “multicultural”. the bounded nature of these formulations has in many respects foreclosed the possibility of interculturalism as a historical or contemporary practice of responsive reflexivity across categories of difference. in more recent decades the nation has been shaped according to a principle of multiculturalism (curthoys ). as curthoys ( ) along with mccallum and holland ( ) reflects however, the conflation of “indigenous” and “multicultural” has been an “uneasy conversation”. ideologically and physically, these categories have resulted in the reinforcement of difference across the nation and, in turn, the problematising of this perceived difference. indigenous ethnicities have been subject to particular scrutiny and allowed only a peripheral place within the multicultural imaginary. never granted full or equitable status within the nation, indigenous groups have been inscribed as “different” and “beyond”. this has led to and validated non-indigenous violence and the delivery of cultural wounding to indigenous ethnic groups as groups beyond “domestication” and thus posing a threat to the white nation (hage , ). domesticating a nation’s constituents, as a population made up of various ethnic citizenries, is a process guided by national imaginaries in which certain identities, ideals, and expectations are privileged. domestication does not accommodate an intercultural logic, rather instead it preferences assimilative logics whereby some cultural expressions must give way to dominant others. how difference will be understood in these nationalist efforts is a historical and contextual affair, bound to ideologies of who belongs, who can be tamed, and who cannot fit. the discourse around multiculturalism in australia has contributed to a vision of the nation as an assemblage of diverse and proliferating social identities. that this diversity be treated with respect is the cornerstone of popular multiculturalism, yet how this is achieved remains a point of ongoing tension within intellectual, political, and popular debate. according to povinelli ( ) and hage ( ), multicultural policies have led to monoculturalism in australia through their oversight of the nature of differences. yet in more recent years, interculturalism has entered the vernacular, a new ideological pose for the settler colony, in the wake of struggling reconciliation projects at the national level (short ). reconciliation as a peacemaking paradigm emerged as a response to colonial injustice (commonwealth of australia a, b; short ) and social instability (short ), formally shaping australian social and political life, policy reform, and activism around indigenous and non-indigenous relations. in a review of australia’s political and practical commitment to reconciliation, short ( , p. ) notes that the process began in the s, as an “open-ended” initiative, aimed at educating the non-indigenous majority about the “aboriginal problem”, as a necessary precursor to any treaty making. the reconciliation process was to be a high level political commitment coordinated at all levels of government and in close coordination with indigenous leadership and governance bodies, to address aboriginal disadvantage and aspirations in relation to land, housing, law and justice, cultural heritage, education, employment, health, infrastructure, and economic development, in the lead up to the nations centenary of federation in (council for aboriginal reconciliation act ; preamble, cited in short , p. ). political commitment was not consistent, and the decade from – marks a period in which significant political dedications were made to efforts that worsened the state of indigenous affairs, particularly in relation to land rights, health provisions, governmental representation and overall truth-telling as restituted justice (see short , p. ). this is not mere cynicism directed at a political era and its key players, but rather it reflects a failure to deliver measurable outcomes as part of a religions , , of reconciliation action plan. as short ( , p. ) astutely notes, australian reconciliation represents a paradox in the broader field of international post-colonial/settler-colonial restorative justice. since there has been no official political and social commitment to progressing reconciliation in australia, there have been only isolated acts of parliament and legislative interventions aimed at bettering the experiences of indigenous peoples on the terms of the state. these do not add up to a nationwide consciousness or empathic engagement with reconciliatory or reparatory principles that encourage co-existence and intercultural understanding. the national agenda of an official decade long program of reconciliation ( – ) did not deliver radical outcomes, yet has surely influenced the discourse of interculturalism that has emerged in its aftermath (antar ). this marks both a shift in language and approach, and whilst the legacy of reconciliatory principles remain at the heart of interculturalism, the doing of an intercultural praxis remains uncertain. as a nation, australia has held the centre (as the nexus of power) through acts of colonising, assimilating, reconciling, and co-existing, none of which have promoted empathy, transformation or intercultural health and proficiency. recognitions have occurred as to the nature of past wounding and a formal apology was issued by the australian government in , recognising the atrocities that involved the forced removal of aboriginal children from their families (see read ; australian government ). despite these efforts, however, the extent to which indigenous cultural recognition contributes to the vision of australian nationalism is minor. the combination of “restrictive policy framing and lack of political will” has prevented australia from transitioning into a political and social space characterized by indigenous and non-indigenous australians united in pursuit of equal living standards (short ). cultural recognition and acknowledgment of injustice are no antidotes when social justice and equity are missing from the reconciliatory and restorative inventory. dysfunction remains at the core of these relationships, and interethnic tensions continue to pivot around land, sea, and resource rights, equitable access to the resources needed for a good life, protection from publically sanctioned racism and violence, and paternalism through “management” of indigenous lives. cowlishaw ( , p. ) has engaged heavily in documenting “the active part aborigines were taking in adjusting (or adapting) to the situation they found themselves in”. challenging notions of authenticity and the binary of possession and loss of ethnic identity, cowlishaw ( , , , ) draws attention to the adaptations made by indigenous people across the country, the strategic and rational judgments made under conditions of a judging gaze, and the “physical intrusion of those with superior power”. as cowlishaw ( , p. ) reminds us, for aboriginal people, survival and emergence is a key part of ethnic becoming and reimagining, alongside the cultural character that the group might choose to occupy. in order to recognise the emerging forms of cultural identity that spring forth from settler colonial conditions, a form of responsive reflexivity must be cultivated, in opposition to master narratives of tradition and belonging. seeing and knowing the existence of another requires knowing the conditions of the self. in a settler colonial context, this knowing is also tinged with knowing the historical conditions and contemporary realities that support the power of a white majority over aboriginal nations and peoples. these apprehensions are vital for interculturalism. yet what makes responsive reflexivity so challenging and often beyond the mainstream, is the enduring effect of coloniality and deep colonising. both present obstacles to the cultivation of responsive reflexivity and interculturalism, in ways that are now explored. . coloniality and deep colonising settler colonialism is both the event and a structure of behaviours through which indigenous space is colonised and brought under the control of an incoming presence (wolfe ). according to quijano ( ) coloniality allows us to understand the continuity of colonial forms of domination after the end of colonial administrations, produced by colonial cultures and structures in the modern world-system. coloniality is expressed in the vast and under-detected processes that support and allow the structure of settler colonialism to occur in the first instance and then to prevail to the point religions , , of of normativity. one cannot have settler colonialism without coloniality, either as what is left behind after the initial frontier is launched in a historical moment, or in order to facilitate the march of newly configured frontiers of colonialism which continue to take indigenous people’s lands and waters in australia. by extension, coloniality is a functioning and powerful social determinant that impels the need for interculturalism and its reception among the socially progressive and those aligned with decolonising consciousness. decolonising consciousness is a reflexive orientation that reforms the ways in which indigenous and non-indigenous lived experiences are navigated and mutually apprehended in a settler colonial context (bradfield , p. ii). decoloniality is the praxis/action of identifying, unsettling and undoing both the vast and under-detected processes which support the structure of settler colonialism, and also redressing the history of the event of settler colonialism and its structural legacy (see nakata et al. ). this consciousness is a vitally important mode of being as it exposes the conditions that contribute to power imbalances that arise from privileging eurocentric epistemologies, as governing ways of knowing, in colonial contexts and encourages new approaches to understanding socio-cultural difference (bradfield ). coloniality identifies and describes the living legacy of colonialism in contemporary societies in the form of social discrimination that outlives formal colonialism and becomes integrated in succeeding social orders (quijano ; see also grosfoguel ; mignolo ; wynter ; and maldonado-torres ). coloniality of power refers to a crucial structuring process in the modern/colonial world-system that articulates peripheral locations in the international division of labor and rights. in this sense, there is a periphery outside and inside the core zones. the core zones are treated here as the colonial order that dominates social, political, legal and economic life in australia. in the context of this particular research the aboriginal population and its nuanced epistemological, ontological and axiological expressions across the vast range of indigenous identities is rendered peripheral, that is outside of the core zone of the settler colonial nation. this has been witnessed historically and at present, in such acts as the referendum vote to include aboriginal people as citizens of the country (where previously they were not), in three instances of suspending the racial discrimination act to serve political desires of direct intervention in aboriginal lives (including the hindmarsh bridge case, amendments to the native title act and, the northern territory emergency response, see behrendt , p. ) and in the gap identified in access to education, health, life expectancy, infant mortality and community safety. herein lies the condition of deep colonising, as traced to the seemingly benign acts of government that constitute a process of “conquest that remains embedded within institutions and practices . . . aimed at reversing the effects of colonization” (bradley and seton , p. ). coloniality is what lends depth to this colonising, in that legislation and political interventions in indigenous lives, can be cast as benevolent acts aimed at delinking the nation from its violent past, a restorative gesture, yet by design these acts carry the inequalities inherent in demanding aboriginal people operate within the core zone should they want rights, recognition and restitution. the core zone’s identification of a gap and exclamation of the need to bridge this, on terms set by non-indigenous political leaders, speaks to the absence of a space of centrality for aboriginal australians in the nation. instead, aboriginal lives are pressed, through the coloniality of power, to the edges, visited and acknowledged only in special cases of political consciousness, articulated through the ambiguous language that emanates from the core, that is, for example “closing the gap is a natural extension of the dream this government has for every australian, safety, security and prosperity, and a fair go for all” (commonwealth of australia ). the failure to articulate the gap in terms of settler colonial causation and the merging of aboriginal presence, cultural life and hardship in the dream of the nation diffuses the existence of real people and first nations’ sovereignty. quijano ( , p. ) elaborates, stating: one of the fundamental axes of this model of power is the social classification of the world’s population around the idea of race, a mental construction that expresses the basic experience of colonial domination and pervades the more important dimensions of global power, religions , , of including its specific rationality: eurocentrism. the racial axis has a colonial origin and character, but it has proven to be more durable and stable than the colonialism in whose matrix it was established. coloniality is not equivalent to colonialism, nor is it derivative from, or antecedent to, modernity (grosfoguel , p. ). coloniality and modernity constitute two sides of a single coin. new identities (settler colonial/national), rights, laws, and institutional expressions of modernity such as nation-states, citizenship and democracy, and, in the case of australia, the importation of british common law, were formed in a process of colonial interaction with, and domination and exploitation of, non-western people (grosfoguel , p. ). for mignolo ( ) coloniality refers to a condition and an epistemological frame that binds historical projects of expansion and invasion to modernity in inseverable ways. thus global coloniality is not reducible to the presence or absence of a colonial administration (grosfoguel ) or to the political and economic structures of power. instead it is left behind and maintained in structures of everyday life as notions of race, racism and inequitable experience. it is invisible and everywhere, linking back to the colonial enterprise, which prescribed value to certain peoples while disenfranchising others, and its retention is found in the persistent categorical and discriminatory discourse that was reflected in the social and economic structure of the colony (quijano ). how then does a campaign of interculturalism take hold among the conditions of coloniality and deep colonising, and what does it mean when the rhetoric is mobilised by the state, the very institution held responsible for the maintenance of these conditions of daily life? . interculturalism: myth and meaning this discussion of interculturalism begins with a cautionary consideration, put forward by grosfoguel ( ) as to the contexts in which a dialogic and empathic social encounter across difference might operate. as per the interventions generated by the emergence of coloniality and deep colonising as frameworks for understanding the modern world, there is an imperative to read the emerging discourse of interculturalism in modern life as born of social, political, economic and geographic realities, and potentially both reinforcing and toppling the conditions of these in the past and present. for grosfoguel ( , p. ), inspired by quijano ( ) “one cannot hope for transparent communication, or aspire to an ideal communication community . . . without identifying the relations of global power and the silenced, excluded others, ignored or exterminated by global coloniality of power”. intercultural dialogue can only operate in alignment with the premise that we do not live in a horizontal world of cultural relations (grosfoguel , p. ). horizontality implies a false equality that does not contribute to a productive dialogue between cultures. grosfoguel ( , p. ) reminds us that “we live in a world in which relations between cultures are vertical, between dominated and dominators, colonized and colonizers”. this verticality inspires deep challenges for interculturalism, one of these being how “privileges—won through the exploitation and domination of global coloniality—impact communication, intercultural exchange and dialogue” (grosfoguel , p. ). “before any such dialogue can occur, one must begin by recognizing the inequalities of power and the complicity of the north in the south’s exploitation” (grosfoguel , p. ). according to walsh ( , p. ), interculturality means “not only horizontal relationality, but also and most importantly, the rebuilding (in decolonial terms) of a vastly different social project for all”. it is radical and requires delinking from the coloniality of power. it refers to relationships, negotiations and cultural exchanges, seeking to develop an interaction between people, knowledge, practices, logics, rationalities and culturally different principles of life; an interaction that allows and starts in the social, economic, political and power asymmetries (walsh ). it represents a counter hegemony that emerges, for walsh ( , ) in social movements (her own work focused on social movements in latin america). it fights to transform problems, with a local and contextualized view, thus interculturality; the action of interculturalism is transformational, local, and contextualized. religions , , of increasingly cited across the broad fields of settler colonial critique (as embedded within the disciplines of anthropology, critical race studies, policy and peace studies), interculturalism is treated as both concept and practice, yet remains under-theorised and under-actualised. intercultural communication, intercultural competency, intercultural sensitivity, and intercultural dialogue are flagged as solutions to social discord and ill communication, in a political sense, as commitments to support education and business and as forms of practical justice in contexts where cultural tensions remain ever present. as a way of smoothing over or bridging difference it is resoundingly treated as something good and ethical, while less often are its deeper needs traced to coloniality explored. in many instances it risks reduction to a form of political doublespeak or policy speak. interculturalism may be configured as action and thinking, which occurs in the space between cultures, or a new form of action, derived of and from different cultures. this space is made up of ontological, epistemological and axiological expressions, that is the relations between bodies in a practical sense of geographical placement and proximity in daily life, the knowledge forms that distinguish ways of being and knowing the world and each other, and the value based structures that inform life and relating. in relation to australia, these distinctions as sites of interculturalism make for very different encounters with plurality. in the first version of interculturalism, that is the formation of an interstitial point between cultures, a delinking of coloniality is not necessarily required, nor is a decolonising consciousness, rather the action and thinking that is born in this space is of another kind. it is akin to bhabha’s ( ) earlier work on “third space”. here neither culture a nor culture b retain eminence, nor must they change, but yet they must transform when operating in the interstitial, a space born of, yet somehow distinct from, the “contact zone” of conflict and settler colonial violence. this has as its guiding quality a concessionary approach, which is adopted in the agreeance to create new relations, emerging from the interactions between the settler colonial state and indigenous nations, families and persons. on such terms the intercultural premise that emerges should, in theory, work to benefit both cultural groups. what is problematic in this model of human encounter is the presumption of equitable loss and gain, both as historical fact and future outcome, as one embarks on the creation of an intercultural premise or way of co-existing. cultural traumas and the wounds born of the colonial enterprise do not dissipate with time, as world histories evidence, and the presumption of political will to facilitate agreeance is not a distinguishing feature of coloniser/colonised relations. it is also the case that when not operating in the interstitial then cultural differences can reinforce and thus remain vulnerable to tension (see kearney ). it is proposed that the weight of concession, in such relations, cannot be modeled as evenly distributed across the settler state and an indigenous presence, instead it must lay on the side the coloniser, thus beginning a delinking with coloniality, as articulated powerfully by quijano ( ). this is more likely facilitated by a second modeling of interculturalism, explained below. the second proposition: interculturalism as a new form of action derived of and from different cultures, is much more radical and holds richer potential for negotiations and cultural exchanges that transform, seeking to develop an interaction between people, knowledge, practices, logics, rationalities and culturally different principles of life. in australia, this is imagined as a project in which the new form of action that guides cultural dialogue is one of plurality, with differences coexisting. but, rather than retaining the borderlands of the settler colony’s power, the settler colony must instead move closer to understanding indigenous epistemologies, ontologies and axiologies (as the holistic engagement of knowledge, behaviours and value habits), thus availing itself to the greater shift. it is the ways of knowing, being and valuing the world that distinctively demarcate indigenous ways of relating that come to the fore in this instance. indigenous cultures, have been subject to the assimilatory and domesticating project of settler colonialism since , yet the state has not been subject to any assimilatory equivalent. there has been no adoption of bicultural politicking as seen elsewhere (for example, in new zealand), nor has there been advancements towards indigenous governance and control of political, social and/or economic religions , , of life. this form of interculturalism calls for an assimilatory mode on the behalf of the settler state that has historically and continuously denied the value of indigenous ways of knowing and being. the onus is on the state to move across to coexist in closer relation to indigenous cultures, open to their influences. the new form of action is one distinguished by the dominant power changing through empathic learning, which encourages more elaborate and novel insights, discourages belief rigidity and lastly encourages cognitive and personal flexibility, and thus being with difference. interculturalism is not an easy project. it requires deliberate and broadly sanctioned political, social, and emotional commitment, launched across the fields of politics, sociality, economics and everyday citizenry. in the context of australia, it also requires a greater burden of effort be carried by the state, as opposed to evenly distributed across the state and indigenous nations. in order to progress interculturalism i argue that, in line with the guiding premise of this special issue, cross-cultural understandings must be held to rely upon the witnessing of distinction but also realisation of the intersections across categories, whereby cultures and identities are not unknown to one another, instead they are apprehended by one another as deeply relational encounters of human life, expressed in myriad forms. compelled to apprehend the settler state, through generations of institutional control and structural designs that imbibe the coloniality of power, it is not indigenous australians who must give most to the propagation of plurality and intercultural sensitivity, rather the duty lies now with the state to delink from its colonial roots and the systems that retain their hold. this is now explored further through a close reading of land rights and land activism as sites of intercultural encounter in australia. . land rights and land activism in australia, land rights and forms of land activism, in the wake of dispossession, have been a central part of living justice for many indigenous groups, with campaigns prioritising indigenous perspectives on land and sustainability matters. land security is derived from the success of such campaigns and is envisioned in one form as security of tenure (as freehold or stakeholder status), but more expansively as rights to ecological certainty, as recognition of the kincentric bonds that link people to their lands and waters . security in this sense refers to a certainty and a state of being free from danger or threat derived of uncertain residence and occupation of home territories. it is the right of aboriginal australians to effective protection by their government against forcible evictions and denials of sovereign rights and also their right to campaign for and to ensure the safety and certainty of health across their lands and waters. the appeal to maintaining health in local ecologies is also what inspires a growing presence of non-indigenous participation in land activist movements, particularly in an era of growing concern over climate change, and sustainable futures. thus land rights and land activism are examined here for their potential as sites for cultivating intercultural understanding. land rights as engaged by indigenous australians, are part of a multi-pronged expression of cultural autonomy and sovereignty, which seeks to: (a) redress threats to indigenous knowledges associated with lands and waters; (b) respond to loss of rights; (c) resist and interrupt harms against lands and waters as an expression of responsibility and kinship. land rights in this context are a response to the historical event of land dispossession and colonisation. the colonial project was dependent upon the doctrine of discovery and the presumption of terra nullius as governing the ontology of settler expansion. in and justice woodward headed a royal commission into aboriginal land rights in the northern territory of australia. he reported a primary aim of land rights as “the doing of simple justice to a people who have been deprived of their land without their consent and without compensation” (woodward , p. ). the commission’s reports (woodward , ) kincentricity is a view of “humans and nature as part of an extended ecological family that shares ancestry and origins” (salmón ; senos et al. , p. ). kin includes all elements of an ecosystem and kincentricity is a form of total interconnectedness to “all that is relatable” (senos et al. , p. ). this form of kinship entails familial responsibility to the world around and establishes relational terms of engagement across all species and environments. religions , , of lay the foundation for the aboriginal land rights act northern territory (alra), and a raft of state based land rights acts that have followed in proceeding years. the overwhelming scholarly focus on land rights has been on legal frameworks and limitations (fletcher ; reeves ; rose ; bradley and seton ). the s and early s were a fertile time for indigenous writing on land rights as the potentials and problematics were explored and examined through a series of test cases (gale ; peterson and langton ; yunupingu ), whilst others (altman ; altman and pollack ; peterson ) investigated the economic ramifications of land rights, linking this to indigenous socioeconomic advancement (altman et al. ). prevailing interest remains focused on how land rights inform contemporary land use (yunupingu and muller ), and the limited provisions for water rights under land rights legislation (marshall ). in sum, legislative land rights have interested the nation and its intellectuals for decades, with equal attention paid to the opportunity this presents to redress past wrongs, and also the latent paradox in a legal process determined by the settler state, which demands aboriginal people continue to fight (on the state’s terms) for the return of something that they never ceded (see kearney ). legislative land rights are the product of settler colonial ontology, epistemology and axiology. whilst they are designed and configured as action, which occurs in the space between cultures, they are, by design not capable of delivering social reform that is derived of and from different cultural perspectives. in other words legislative land rights, as the aboriginal land rights act northern territory (alra), a raft of state based land rights acts, and the federal native title act , do not operate with or from an indigenous ontology, epistemology and axiology. instead they are carved from the centre of colonial power, thus becoming instruments of deep colonising (see bradley and seton ). legislative land rights are a controlled expression of redress, which places upon indigenous claimants huge evidentiary burdens. by extension, statutory definitions of aboriginality and traditional ownership place pressure on people to meet certain, potentially impossible criteria associated with tradition and ancestral knowledge. community tension is known to arise out of land claim evidence and findings, and there is evidence to suggest this also impacts on people’s health, and community cohesion. elsewhere, in new zealand, o’regan ( ) reports that fighting for land rights generates the conditions for multiple forms of identity remake among maori, changing the ways in which groups identify and configure their futures. o’regan ( , p. ) cautions that it is not yet fully known what happens to identities (and people) through this process, one which is known to reduce indigenous “history and tradition [to] mere opinion, blown by political winds”. land restitution processes which rely upon the settler colonial state and its legal structures compel a form of social transformation as indigenous claimants present themselves to fit the demands of the dominant culture. this is a far cry from the cultural plurality that might come with the settler colony making redress as it moves closer to understanding and working with indigenous epistemologies, ontologies and axiologies and thus appreciating in full the motivation and aspirations for land rights as a form of living justice. for this to occur, a project of liberation is called for, that involves delinking land rights and restitutive acts from coloniality and modernity. a delinking of this kind, according to mignolo, lies in the primacy of the epistemic in undoing coloniality (see cheah ). this is an epistemic habit, which has material dimension; in this case, legislative acts which lead to piecemeal returns of aboriginal lands. this materiality is the corporeal experiences of those who have been excluded from the production of knowledge by modernity. it is the lived experience of aboriginal people seeking the return of their lands and waters across the country on terms set entirely by the state. mignolo campaigns for a border thinking or border epistemology, which inches closer to an interculturalism, whereby western knowledge (the colonial state) is, on the one hand, recognised as unavoidable and, on the other, highly limited and dangerous (cheah ). for land rights to articulate an intercultural commitment to a new field of projection and articulation which places onus on the state to move across, to comprehend and operate with principles of land and sea restitution that reflect and honour indigenous expectations and ways of being is required. religions , , of the epistemic spaces, which distinguish aboriginal ways of configuring rights to lands and waters, are qualitatively different from a western logic, and remain heavily marginalised through the legal process. these rights are distinguished as kincentric (see salmón ). many indigenous epistemologies rely on a kincentric way of being-in-relation. according to salmón ( ); bradley and families ( ) this way of being is encoded in language, and represents a worldview, a way of thinking, and overall cognition. not only affecting the way people think, a kincentric way of being brings ontological and axiological specificity, namely it affects human behaviour and systems of value. kincentricty is interdependency, whereby the survival of people is intertwined with that of the health of lands and waters, and vice versa. there are a great number of cultural contexts in which relational co-presences in place are indivisible from their human kin, and contribute vital elements to the greater whole that is life (salmón ; senos et al. ; hogan ; cajete ). a land right configured on such terms is one whereby the health and well-being of human kin is comprehended as vitally linked to the health of lands and waters as a relational part of the kincentric circle in which human life is one part. if one part of this circle is alienated, destroyed, poisoned or stolen, then the whole begins to suffer. research has drawn powerful links between aboriginal people’s health and rights to, as well as caring for their lands and waters (burgess et al. ; jackson and ward ; kingsley et al. ; schultz and cairney ; reid ). the importance of country (consisting of lands, waters and a full universe of elements and phenomena) to communal wellbeing has been explored through the positive physical health outcomes that come from living or working on country (see ganesharajah ). the positive effects are more expansive however, and reach beyond the benefits generated by the physical acts of caring for country, and participating in land and sea management programs. given the diversity of experience that distinguishes aboriginal people’s lives across the country, in urban centres, rural towns and remote communities, it is health not only derived of more traditional modes of being with country that is a measureable benefit of land rights. equally, benefits come from the accordance of rights, as ownership requiring no physical action on country. the right to safeguard, limit interventions and restrict harmful acts against lands and waters, in the interest of an indigenous ontology, and axiology, also brings the potential for health across the kincentric field of human and non-human kin. the right to make and influence decisions in relation to lands and waters is also a key part of communal health and well-being. a more fully configured sense of being with country and holding the right to make decisions that impact on the country’s physical environments as linked to social, cultural, emotional and political health is a pathway to a fuller suite of rights that operates with the needs of aboriginal people from all different backgrounds as central. land activism, as an alternative to legislative land rights is increasingly presenting as the platform for change and rights assertion, as taken up by younger generations of aboriginal australians. land activism does not require the same levels of participation, nor exposure to legislative process, statutory declarations and evidentiary burdens, that state, territory and national based legislative land rights and native title instruments demand. land activism as a distinct form of rights seeking, is now a language to express a distinctive connection on the behalf of aboriginal people, and the means by which to enact this connection in the eyes of a wider national audience. that a wider national audience understands and appreciates the enduring fight for rights to aboriginal homelands is at the very core of a potential cultural plurality in australia. in brief i will now outline the context in which land activism presents itself in contemporary australia. land activism offers aboriginal people the opportunity to participate in collective actions without having to have their aboriginality tested through statutory declarations, yet does not deliver any legal/exclusive rights. this is however a self-determining space, which brings wholly different rights to participate in and seek personal and communal security through culturally prescribed interests, cultivating a strong aboriginal centric political commentary and voice among younger generations, shifting rhetoric around matters of sustainable futures and agents of change. activism is a critical social site for interpreting the cultural complexity and power relations of public life. an religions , , of anthropological examination of the motives and aspirations that underscore activism gives rise to greater understandings of social tension, and social change, for activisms brings lived contradictions to light, revealing the deep structural factors at play within the nation (demetrious , p. ). one of the rare fields in which australia witnesses a degree of move across to coexist in closer relation to indigenous cultures, open to its influences, has been in the field of natural resource management as aligned with indigenous cultural resource management. whilst often still vulnerable to the vacillations of the state, through unpredictable funding models and continued political support and practical engagement, federally funded indigenous ranger programs now total around nationwide, and a number of dedicated indigenous protected areas now exist (n = ) as do models of co-management and conservation (see bauman and smyth ; hill et al. ; ross et al. ). the adoption of indigenous land and sea management practices, campaigned for by arabena ( ) has been configured as a call for nation-based values that are restructured to incorporate on country and indigenous values of sustainability. whilst some national programs of environmental safeguards and protection have engaged with indigenous knowledges and principles of management, broadly speaking the adoption of culturally prescribed management principles remains under developed, despite these showing considerable potential in regards to coastal and oceanic health, climate change and sea level rise, seasonal shifts, reef conservation, feral species and weed eradication, fire management and the restoration of biodiversity (see prober et al. ). the principle of moving across is also detectable in the desire for sustainable futures and a growing environmental consciousness and increased concern over climate change, drought, species loss, and the impact of resource industries, shared among australians, indigenous and non-indigenous. historically not an easy alliance (see vincent and neale ; vincent and neale ), “black-green” relations found shared sites of meaning from the s, yet mutuality cannot be assumed of indigenous/non-indigenous environmental agendas then or now. vincent ( ) reminds, that there should also be refrain from invoking assumptions about a “pan-aboriginal” environmental imperative (see waterton and saul ). the aim is not to simplify the complexity of these relational encounters, but rather to reflect on the increasingly growing and generationally nuanced space of shared concern that is emerging among younger generations of australians. this does exist and expresses itself through movements like seed and the northern territory protect country alliance and in the international activist scene of global support for movements such as black lives matter, and idle no more . seed is australia’s first indigenous youth led climate network, and in will run, in conjunction with the australian youth climate coalition (aycc), climate justice bootcamps across the country, bringing together aboriginal and torres strait islander, and non-indigenous young people for training, skill sharing and networking (seed n.d.). promoted as “a launchpad for real action and hard-hitting campaigns to protect country and fight for climate justice”, participants are encouraged to “meet other people who care as much as you do about protecting country” (australian youth climate coalition n.d.). seed is at the forefront of youth movements aimed at sustainable futures and political pressure for change, doing so with a resounding commitment to the alignment of environmental health with aboriginal and torres strait islander cultural health. supported by the australian youth climate coalition, seed campaigns include “protect country”, “land rights not mining rights” and “don’t frack the nt”. the first of these invokes a distinctive relationship to the land and sea as country, articulating an indigenous ontology of relating. so too protection is configured through indigenous approaches, which include on the one hand safeguarding the physical environment but equally idle no more is an ongoing protest movement, founded in december by four women: three first nations, saskatchewan women jessica gordon, sylvia mcadam, and nina wilson and one non-indigenous canadian woman sheelah mclean. it leads as one of the largest transformative movements for indigenous rights in canada, emerging from a shared desire to safeguard the lands and waters of canadian aboriginal people (graveline , p. ). hashtag #idle no more went global, accompanied by declarations of solidarity across aboriginal protest movements and social media campaigns in australia. like the black lives matter movement, social media has fanned global interest and cultivated sites for solidarity across divides of black and white, indigenous and non-indigenous. religions , , of important is the moral responsibility that accords to knowing language, songlines, culture and the dreaming (as an ancestral past and present). these commitments sit within the national youth campaign run by the aycc, and heavily influence the ethos and principle of youth protest as it operates nationally. for example, the aycc, which boasts a membership of over , nationally, declares, we see the climate crisis as an issue of social and environmental injustice. the climate crisis affects everyone, but not equally. it is often the most marginalised in our societies that have done the least to cause the problem who are hit first and worst by the climate crisis and carry the burden of polluting industries. this is particularly true for aboriginal and torres strait islander people who are already experiencing the impacts of climate change and fossil fuel extraction on community, culture and country. it is also true for indigenous peoples the world over, people in the majority world, people of colour, poor communities, workers, fossil fuel communities, young people and future generations. the aycc and seed draw links between environmental crisis as a governmental failing and threats to aboriginal land rights, most potently in their anti-fracking campaign in the northern territory. here the blame is placed heavily on the settler colonial state and the threats are expressed as the toxifying of aboriginal lands and waters, loss of culture and threats to sacred sites, and people’s health and wellbeing. aboriginal control over the futures of their lands and waters is pivotal to local and national health, as explained “only when communities have the freedom to define their own path, can our people truly heal” (nancy mcdinny, seed n.d.). such health is not presented as being at the cost of national interest, rather as central to national interest. it would seem that the , members of aycc and seed agree. there is no skirting the issue of the prevailing effects of settler colonialism in this activist space, as it is acknowledged and taken as justification for action. as a unifying axiology, there is a direct line drawn between sustainable futures, security as a form of living justice achieved through aboriginal self-determination and land rights as a right to safeguard ecological integrity. the context of activism and solidarity oriented towards land matters, and sustainable futures, may be a space that shows striking capacity for the shaping of something totally new, a radical new way of relating, where indigenous ontologies, and epistemologies are held up as references for the nation’s future existence, as a state of ecological and social health. it also shows potential as a space in which interactions between people, knowledges, practices, logics, rationalities and culturally different principles of life are welcomed. in which case, concern and action in this conscious space, which seek to instate sustainable living practices, are derived of and from different cultural perspectives and are aligned centrally with a cornerstone of aboriginal land rights and social justice, that is the drive to resist and interrupt harms against lands and waters as an expression of kincentric responsibility. this expression of responsibility outweighs any impulse to safeguard, as primary, the human right. an axiological orientation that implicates human responsibilities to one another and to the environment will generate a vastly different ontology to that guided by the human right as an individuated concept. such propositions are explored below in relation to responsive reflexivity, as a step towards new relations. destabilising the primacy of the individuated human right, an ontology of modernity and coloniality, and also the master narrative of australian national identity provides an opportunity to be in better relations with another, both human and non-human (as in the ecologies we share in). commitments of this kind may support a move closer, away from the centre of colonial power, towards the margin, increasingly delinking the present moment and future aspirations from coloniality and the stifling elements of modernity. i propose that these terms of relating deserve considered attention, as they may in fact hold important insights for the praxis of interculturalism. being in better relations with another is evident in the solidarity supported by movements such as seed and the aycc, and more broadly may be proposed of the alliances emerging in relation to sustainable futures more broadly. they may not yet be or ever be entirely intercultural, nor are the alliances always easy, but there is potential to be explored. religions , , of at the very heart of solidarity movements is something of a shared concern, a shared need, and desire to gather around a problem perceived by all parties to be one in need of a solution. in the context of indigenous and non-indigenous sustainable future alliances, expressed is a shared need to identify better practices. there is also evidence of a recognised value in indigenous ways of knowing and being, as promoted by indigenous participants and as taught to (or assumed by) non-indigenous counterparts and their activist platforms. whether this suffers for issues of translation or romanticism around aboriginal approaches to sustainability can be debated, yet surely it is a context ripe for examination of interculturalism and plurality. there is a striking sense of respect for indigenous ontologies in the operating principles of organisations such as seed and the aycc, and in identified pathways towards sustainable practices. this suggests they are operating with a capacity to listen and be in the gap that exists between indigenous and non-indigenous concerns for sustainable futures, land rights and living social justice (see hokari ). the gap, most easily configured as a distance between two cultures, might be recast then as an opportunity, a site of interculturalism. not somewhere to be bridged or a gap to be closed but rather somewhere to inhabit, to accommodate the colony/coloniser as it strives to move across. it is a place to be sat in, thus facilitating a break away from the centre of coloniality and modernity. being in the gap requires a willingness to let go, delink, and unsettle, all of which are conditions for a decolonising consciousness (bradfield ). as a non-indigenous australian myself, the invitation to be in the gap, excites for the promise that this location provides context for new action, derived of and from different cultures, with the onus of listening to an indigenous expression of action and learning to substantively rethink about the world we occupy and how we occupy it. how being in the gap affords opportunities to learn through empathy is now explored, for its links to a praxis of interculturalism and the habit of cultivating responsive reflexivity in relation to another culture. . learning through empathy and responsive reflexivity empathy is, put simply, the ability to understand and share the feelings of another (see segal ). it is dependent upon awareness, rapport, affinity, sensitivity and fellowship. it occurs through relational encounters, which begin with knowing the nature and the limits of the self. the first step in developing empathy is to know the self, that is, coming to know one’s own capacity to understand; the baseline of a reflexive ontology. reflexivity is treated here as that state of being in which the self is encountered as a communal and individual actor, consistently problematised in relation to other presences (finlay and gough ). the self is constructed as a participant in social life, operating in relation to structures and dispositions, which expand in their relational capacity to shape the way we know, act, care, perceive and configure the world (finlay ; gough ). it is by knowing the reflexive self that one can begin to decentre this self, thus creating space for a fuller relational encounter with another to occur. this allows for opportunity to apprehend and witness another, as a positioned and knowing presence. listening and attending to another is the disposition of steadied non distraction that counters the disposition of distraction when the individuated self is paramount. by listening and attending, the ontology of looking away, the dismissal of some to the periphery and others to the centre, a habit that distinguishes life in the settler colony, is no longer a first impulse. the cognitive benefits associated with empathy in the context of any learning are written off as: fostering insight into different perspectives and promoting open-mindedness, discouraging hasty and superficial problem examination (in the face of new knowledge and practices), facilitating construction of more elaborate and frequently novel insights, discouraging belief rigidity and lastly encouraging cognitive and personal flexibility (gallo , pp. – ). it is flexibility and a mobility of mind, characterised by the ability to extend one’s perceptual capacity and thus epistemic habit, that renders learning through empathy such a key step in cultivating a practice of interculturalism. it is by being with and accepting another story or knowledge habit, and critical intimacy as an ethical way of coming to know something, and hearing and seeing another in its epistemological, ontological and axiological richness that distinguishes the treatment of interculturalism offered here. religions , , of learning through empathy requires contexts for information exposure to and with another, and exchange of experiences. as this discussion of land rights and land activism highlights, the legislative arena of land restitution has not adequately sought indigenous views on the nature of a land right, nor the security that is achievable through the recognition of preexisting and ancestral rights. being with another in their epistemological, ontological and axiological richness is not a central tenet of legislative land rights. rather those occupying the margin are compelled to act in response to the centre and enter their field for participation in acts of land rights and restitution. as such, these processes are likely to suffer for the consequences of not delinking from a coloniality that maintains at its centre, the state as the nexus of power. here the colonial authority can continue to define aboriginal people’s realities through the creation of haves and have nots which pivots on recognition or denial of land rights and sovereignty (bradley and seton , p. ). what then of the activist space? qualitatively there is a distinction between legislative land rights and land activism, namely that land activism does not lead to legal freehold title or recognised native title. in which case, it is by no means a substitute for restitutional pathways. the reason however i have chosen the example of land activism and solidarity in the context of sustainable future movements is that it invokes a different principle of relating that may be taken as an example of being in better relations. it is not the ultimate solution, for legal rights must compliment other rights, but operates on principles that may transfer across into the legislative land rights space if a commitment is made to interculturalising the terms for relating and delivery of rights. in the examples of seed and the aycc, there is evidence of a responsive reflexivity, whereby reflexivity beyond the centre (the white majority) is realised. reflexive awareness is extended to imagine and more fully witness the experiences of inequality, hardship and oppression, which are lived through by others. in the first instance, responsiveness is receptiveness to the acknowledgement of value in another and legitimacy of another’s claim, as to the need for sustainable futures, which in turn become key platforms for action. accenting human responsibility over human rights, in these sustainable future movements, works to highlight the relationship between human loss and suffering and other localised presences. this deepens the recognition of loss of ecological health by noting the extent to which it impacts on all that are in relation. the state’s failure to reparate and restitute aboriginal lands and waters works to impoverish the nation, for it holds in place, relations of discord and dysfunction. by striving for national growth based on new forms of action derived of and from different cultures ensures the project becomes a multi-sited commitment in which the rights and freedoms of all are more fully realised. that this is taken up locally in the form of activism and solidarity for environmental causes and sustainable futures highlights the everyday space of citizenry as being more receptive to principles and practices of interculturalism than the state, thus raising questions of the state’s capacity to ever fully launch interculturalism as a national agenda. it is the colonial state that falls behind, as a younger generation of indigenous and non-indigenous australian’s seek out ways to co-exist and listen. a shift of this kind, in perceptual capacity, invokes the willingness to be with another in a manner which shifts the self, to practice a critical intimacy as an ethical way of coming to know something, and witnessing the other in its axiological richness. these three steps take us deeper into a relational encounter. i conclude this paper with encouragement to sit in the gap, drawing from quijano’s ( ) own reflection on being in better relations. whilst writing of latin american revolution and resistance, these words ring true also in the australian context, where a delinking with coloniality will reveal the richer and at present under-appreciated qualities of the nation as a site of plurality. australia is not only a settler colony, it is also a vast number of distinct countries belonging to aboriginal people, and distinguished along lines of ancestry, descent, language and exclusive rights of possession. quijano ( , p. ) states, “it is time to learn to free ourselves from the eurocentric mirror where our image is always, necessarily, distorted. it is time, finally, to cease being what we are not”. funding: this 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[crossref] © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/_files/research/dp/dp .pdf http://www.aiatsis.gov.au/_files/research/dp/dp .pdf http://dx.doi.org/ . /taja. http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . /ncr. . http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	australia as a settler colony 	coloniality and deep colonising 	interculturalism: myth and meaning 	land rights and land activism 	learning through empathy and responsive reflexivity 	references liberal arts for social change humanities article liberal arts for social change ken mondschein , , university of massachusetts-amherst, amherst, ma , usa; ken@kenmondschein.com the ronin institute for independent scholarship, montclair, nj , usa massachusetts historical swordsmanship, worcester, ma , usa received: july ; accepted: august ; published: august ���������� ������� abstract: the author makes a strategic argument for the liberal arts grounded in realpolitik (that is, the “realistic” manipulation of the levers of power). in a time of neoliberal university governance, it is useful for fields of study to base appeals for their continued existence on their utility to their institutions. the growth of equity and diversity initiatives in the academy, particularly in the aftermath of the black lives matter protests of , gives us a means of making this argument, as the liberal arts have utility in questioning the structures of white supremacy and received history and values. by exploiting the cognitive dissonance between the demands of neoliberal governance and the need for diversity and equity, we can make a persuasive case for reinvestment in the liberal arts. further, this reinvestment ought to be democratized and carried out through all levels of higher education, including, and especially, non-selective, vocationally oriented institutions. keywords: critical theory; neoliberalism; critical race theory; humanities; liberal arts; race; class; american higher education; white supremacy; black lives matter . introduction the liberal arts have long been the shibboleth of the privileged and a tool for exclusion—a fact that will be of no surprise to anyone with even an undergraduate-level familiarity with bourdieu’s writings on habitus (bourdeau ). this exclusion obviously is in conflict with the goals of “equity”, “diversity”, and “inclusion” that the modern academy purports to uphold . this contradiction, in turn, gives us a powerful argument for making deep and meaningful education in history, literature, languages, music, and other fields a universal part of the college experience. yet, in a time of neoliberal governance of higher education, we see the reverse: the liberal arts are being defunded and marginalized. institutions’ stated values are thus in conflict with their actions. my aim in this essay is to show how the cognitive dissonance inevitably produced by these two facts can and should be used as an argument for reinvestment in the liberal arts. as the late derrick bell pointed out (bell ), advances in social justice come only when they serve the needs of the dominant white group. i wish to show that reinvestment in the liberal arts in the name of racial justice is in the interest of those who hold power. the alternative is nothing more than blatant hypocrisy that delegitimizes the power structure and, ultimately, as a result of activism, may result in remedies such as lawsuits or even re-regulation that will put federal funds or even accreditation at risk. reinvestment in the liberal arts is thus, i argue, in the interest of academic leadership and boards of trustees. i would additionally argue that such reinvestment must reach far beyond the top-tier schools where the liberal arts are most securely established. as i was once told by the president of a private, this emphasis ultimately descends from the six-point plan devised by university of michigan president harold shapiro in response to racial tensions present on that campus in the late s and implemented by his successor, james duderstadt. the influence of the bakke decision must also be taken into account. see bowen et al. ( ). humanities , , ; doi: . /h www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities http://www.mdpi.com http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /h http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities humanities , , of non-selective college whose undergraduate population was composed primarily of first-generation students of color coming from underserved school districts and families living below the poverty line, the school’s “curriculum has to be very practical, and it really has to focus on those kids who are trying to make a better life for themselves. we don’t need to be designing our english classes so that they can analyze and take apart the brontës and louisa may alcott and things; we need to have english courses that make kids read better and write better”. i could not disagree more: such a statement not only implies that exposure to classic literature and attaining college-level literacy are fundamentally incompatible; it also seems to me to be profoundly classist and racist, implying that “brontës and louisa may alcott and things” (let alone my own field of medieval studies) are not for the underprepared, low-income students of color at this school. indeed, for reasons i will discuss below, they may not be—but many would dispute the entire way in which the question is posed, as it is redolent of a worldview where “works of literary value” is synonymous with “old and white” and literary analysis is a leisure activity for the elites that is not in any way “practical”. further, it paternalistically implies that these students are not and will never be capable of analytical work—which belies the fact that liberal arts education changes how everyone engages in life as a whole, regardless of their specific situation such as the socioeconomic status of their family of origin or access to schooling. my sole aim in this essay is to show the necessity of reinvesting in the liberal arts to those who make decisions, such as the college president i just mentioned, by pointing out the hypocrisy inherent in the discrepancy between their stated values and their actions. it is a persuasive essay, written in an editorial vein, and fueled by anger and grief that the private, non-selective college headed by the aforesaid president fired both tenured professors in the history department just before the fall semester began, eliminated the major, and is hiring adjuncts to teach their remaining sections (including the school’s only classes in african-american studies) for $ per -credit class per semester. i am therefore going to ask the reader’s indulgence in one thing: i am going take the postulates advanced by critical race theorists—“crits”—as true. these claims include the idea that racism is not aberrant, but normal and embedded within society; and that legal, scholarly, and social norms are, like the idea of race itself, social products that need to be critically analyzed and dismantled in order to create a moral, fair, just, and equitable world. i am not making any claims herein as to the epistemological truth of critical race theory (crt), nor am i aiming to explain its ever-evolving literature in any systemic way . rather, i will merely assert that crt is ascendant within the academy and that it is particularly socially relevant in the wake of the black lives matter movement as it has played out in . arguing from a position of realpolitik (that is, practical application of the levers of power based on empirical study), i believe that all involved will admit that the idea that we must actively confront and dismantle racism—in other words, the idea of antiracism as articulated by such thought leaders as ibram x kendi (kendi )—has been rapidly gaining ground in american academia. at the risk of committing the bandwagon fallacy, i therefore ask the reader to accept crit ideas as accurately describing the world we live in and a necessary course of action. in this vein, i will point out that this reinvestment in the liberal arts that i am calling for must also be a reevaluation. many proponents of crt hold that we must teach the liberal arts in new ways and rewrite the “canon” to not only include new and diverse perspectives, but also incorporate and interrogate the power dynamics and power systems related to those diverse perspectives. crt holds i am very aware of conservative criticisms of crt, many of which have been made to me during the back-and-forth with the editor for this journal issue, in private correspondence with senior colleagues, and in certain facebook groups. to name some of these criticisms, they include whether crt is the best or even a good lens with which to view the past; whether the ideas of race, gender, sexuality, and other matters from any particular period are congruent enough with those of twenty-first-century america to make comparison even possible; whether past periods were “diverse” in the modern sense; whether we can usefully trace the birth of modern race-regimes to a particular historical period; or whether efforts to do so are redolent of what used to be called “presentism”. whether or not i personally agree with either side is not relevant; this is not the place to debate such matters, or to introduce the reader to the full scope and nuance of crit thought (though the latter would be a worthy project). humanities , , of that if we are to create a more truly equal and just world, then we must not stop at empowering students hailing from historically excluded communities to share their own narratives, nor should we merely continue the well-established trend of including the voices of women and people of color in the curriculum (see parker ) for a brief history). rather, all fields must be rallied to question the elitist, eurocentric past, and all students should confront these questions in their classes. as medievalists of color put it in their collective statement of , “if we find that the scholarly paradigms of critical race and ethnic studies, postcolonialism, and decolonization do not speak fully to the historical moments we study, we are obligated to enter, and even expand, the conversations they engender”. this sensibility puts a codicil on w. e. b. du bois’s famous passage from the souls of black folk (du bois ): “i sit with shakespeare, and he winces not. across the color line i move arm and arm with balzac and dumas, where smiling men and welcoming women glide in gilded halls . . . . i summon aristotle and aurelius and what soul i will, and they come all graciously with no scorn nor condescension. so, wed with truth, i dwell above the veil . . . ” du bois was writing in opposition to booker t. washington’s “atlanta compromise” that asserted that education for african-americans should be vocational and asserting the fundamental equality of the black intellect. history has taken du bois’s side in this debate. but “truth”, to the crt eye, is socially contingent: “if we wish medieval studies to engage meaningfully in the modern world of which it is a product, and in which it is an agent, then medievalists must also rigorously engage with the fields that examine the ideologies and distributions of power that define the modern world” (medievalists of color ). we must ask if du bois read shakespeare in the same way that his contemporary, harvard professor of english bliss perry, did. if we are to “sit with shakespeare”, we must, as every generation does, ask new questions of him: the otherness of othello; the monstrosity of shylock. if we introduce homer, chaucer, or shakespeare to undergraduates—or for that matter murasaki shikibu or the rigveda—then maybe we should do so in dialogue with more modern authors and critical sources. it often seems that the study of other european writers—medieval german poets, for instance—is only useful to this epistemology insofar as these sources can be read with a critical eye to reveal, say, the origins of western racism or the construction of “whiteness”. to be sure, as other essays in this volume make clear, such a study is a good in its own right—but it does not generate the sorts of useful truths that are central to the strategy i put forth in this essay, and so i will be leaving this question aside. in my own field, crit ideas have been most advanced by the medievalists of color collective, the associated in the middle blog, and their allies . for instance, dorothy kim, in her widely read and widely debated essay “teaching medieval studies in a time of white supremacy”, puts forward our mutual field as one that upholds the beliefs and practices of a society that systemically excludes people of color (kim ). to counter this white supremacy, kim exhorts readers to activism: “[c]hoose a side” because “[d]oing nothing is choosing a side. denial is choosing a side. using the racist dog whistle of ‘we must listen to both sides’ is choosing a side”. kim therefore directs the reader to engage in “overt signaling of how you are not a white supremacist and how your medieval studies is one that does not uphold white supremacy”. the assumptions underlying kim’s deployment of “white supremacy” were more fully articulated by carol symes on the american historical association blog in a post of november (symes ). symes addressed “white supremacism’s (latent or blatant) influence in the shaping of various disciplines, including medieval studies” and stated that: the informed study of “what happened” during those eras (variously defined) is therefore inextricable from the ongoing interrogation of when, how, and why these categories were there is a vast literature on race and medieval studies; the best resource is jonathan hsy and julie orlemanski’s crowd-sourced and continually updated race and medieval studies: a partial bibliography (https://docs.google.com/ document/d/ jclsma bmkycxvgewqwpej zscrqxlalxbl cdqwme/edit, accessed august ). i will not be addressing this literature here, as it is superfluous to my purpose. https://docs.google.com/document/d/ jclsma bmkycxvgewqwpej zscrqxlalxbl cdqwme/edit https://docs.google.com/document/d/ jclsma bmkycxvgewqwpej zscrqxlalxbl cdqwme/edit humanities , , of invented. in fact, “medieval” europe was co-created in tandem with white supremacism, the “scientific” racialization of slavery, and modern european imperialism. moreover, previous generations of medievalists, often working in the service of these modern projects, have not only shaped the terms of our engagement with historical sources, their work has shaped the sources we have. the medieval archive has been (and continues to be) selected, edited, translated, censored, packaged, and destroyed by forces beyond the control of the people who generated the components of that archive. there is no way to do medieval history responsibly without engaging its modern and postmodern entanglements. i am arguing that the study of the liberal arts is worthy of reinvestment by pointing out that such “engaging . . . modern and postmodern entanglements” is necessary to crit efforts to dismantle the white-supremacist regime as embodied in the modern american college curriculum. the statements and assumptions such as those of the aforesaid college president would most certainly be considered symptomatic of this regime, and are therefore unacceptable. furthermore, i am arguing that deploying crit arguments in such a manner is of utility to the modern university, and beneficial to imperiled humanities departments in making an argument for their continued survival in a time of tightened belts and increased neoliberal governance (altbach et al. ). i also maintain that a study of crit thought can reinvigorate a field such as medieval studies by suggesting new approaches and avenues of research. as i said in my previous essay “words and swords: a samizdat on medieval military history and the decolonization of the academy” (mondschein ), “an “intersectional” perspective could provide a useful tool for us to explore some of the core questions in our field in new and interesting ways”. speaking specifically of medieval military history, i continued: if we are to understand imperialism and exploitation of subject peoples, and the ideology that justifies it, we can not neglect the norman conquest of wales and ireland or the subjection of livonia any more than we can neglect the spanish conquest of the americas or the belgian congo, as they are all linked in a long history of thought, institutions, and ideas. just as historians of the latter subjects should appreciate the importance of our work for their areas of concern, so those of us working on the former topics need to take account of the new scholarship on modern imperialism, which can provide us with invaluable perspectives, the origins of medieval studies in the united states are most definitely patrician. we can regard charles homer haskins as the grand dean: from his seminars (a system he imported from germany) came more eminent historians than greek warriors from the trojan horse. haskins earned his phd from johns hopkins at a young age, spent most of his career at harvard, and notably aided woodrow wilson in the post-versailles carving up of europe. haskins’s scholarly choices are very interesting. in his article with dean putnam lockwood, “the sicilian translators of the twelfth century and the first latin version of ptolemy’s almagest” (haskins and lockwood ), he states: . . . the norman sovereigns were still far-sighted and tolerant enough to allow each people to keep its own language, religion, and customs, while from each they took the men and the institutions that seemed best adapted for the organization and conduct of their own government. greek, arabic, and latin were in constant use among the people of the capital and in the royal documents; saracen emirs, byzantine logothetes, and norman justiciars worked side by side in the royal curia; and it’s a matter of dispute among scholars whether so fundamental a department of the sicilian state as finance was derived from the diwan of the caliphs, the fiscus of the roman emperors, or the exchequer of the anglo-norman kings” (pp. – ). however, in his norman institutions (haskins ) haskins drops this line of thinking, notes a lack of documentary evidence, and says only that the “feudalism of the south [w]as an offshoot from the parent stem in normandy” (p. ). similarly, for haskins’s student joseph strayer (who also consulted with the u.s. government—in his case on “state-building” with the cia), in his medieval origins of the modern state, the “modern state” of the title came only from the growth of institutions in northern europe. the idea that the far more sophisticated societies of the mediterranean may have influenced northern europeans in administration as they did in matters as diverse as architecture, art, astronomy, literature, and medicine does not enter the picture. this aside is intended as but one small example of what questions historians ask and what lines of inquiry they pursue reflect implicit bias as much as any explicit statement. for more on neoliberalism in the academy, please see tom willard’s article in this volume. humanities , , of questions, methodological examples, and theoretical frameworks . . . . it is but a small step to include a postcolonial approach that looks at the effects of these interactions on both colonizers and colonized. asking questions such as “how is a welsh archer fighting for the english crown like, or unlike, a sepoy?” can only enrich our understanding of our subject of study. the same can hold true for the study of medieval trade, institutions, or literary production. let us not, therefore, see crt as a foreign insertion into our fields of study, but rather as new roots onto which we can graft old vines and which will not only reinvigorate the fruit thereof, but also, incidentally, save us from systemic rot. . liberal arts in the united states let us look at the crit supposition, as expressed by symes’s essay, that we cannot separate knowledge from the system in which such knowledge is generated. we must therefore understand that systemic inequality in american higher education is rooted not only in a systemically racist society, but in the unique nature of the system. this differs from that of most other nations in several important ways—namely, american higher education’s insistence on a broad course of study; the historical conditions of its development; the idea that, while students must pay for their own education, a college degree is necessary for all; and its self-appointed activist role in society. regarding the first, an american college degree requires a certain distribution of general-education credits. the united states does not have polytechnics or vocational colleges; rather, literature majors must be familiar with the scientific method; scientists must take courses in writing. regarding the second, american schools also retain their own unique sociological environment, including a longstanding distinction between the liberal arts colleges, which helped to frame a northeastern elite, and the religious- and state-sponsored land grant universities and (former) normal schools and polytechnics of the masses (mondschein ; geiger ). to these, i must also add historically black colleges and universities, which have their own unique history. at the bottom rung, of course, are the non-selective schools like the one headed by our aforesaid college president, where most students are enrolled in vocationally-oriented majors and are disinterested in their gen-eds, and many, or even most, core courses are taught by over-stretched, under-paid adjuncts. the rise of such institutions was aided in the past years by the ubiquity of higher education. after world war ii, the gi bill, which educated million veterans, led to the vast expansion of the american higher education system. in , there were only , college graduates in the us; in , there were , . the baby boomer generation followed their parents: there were . million college students enrolled in , . million in , and over million in . this led to a profound shift in the nature of higher education. no longer something only for the leaders of society, a college degree (and, increasingly, a postgraduate degree) was seen as the prerequisite for a middle-class lifestyle. in conjunction with this, the higher education act of and the higher education amendments of , which established a national system of direct loans and grants, enabled not only the expansion of large state universities, but the flourishing of the aforesaid small, non-selective colleges. at the institution in question, for instance, % of students receive pell grants. i should note here that with the increased expense of running a college coupled with competition for a declining number of potential students, many of these schools are facing existential financial threats and have been forced both to become even less selective in whom they admit and to cut corners in other ways. the aforesaid institution, for instance, boasts an : student/faculty ratio that it achieves only by employing an army of adjuncts whom it pays the aforesaid $ per course. (this is at a school that charges almost $ , a year for non-discounted tuition, room, and board, which necessitates that many, if not most, students take out loans to pay for their education.) simultaneously with the expansion of higher education in america came a new role for the university—that of the left-wing social critic and even incubator of countercultural sentiment. schools from berkeley to chicago to new york became hotbeds of protest against jim crow, the cold war, humanities , , of and the overall political milieu of the world war ii generation. no aspect of higher education has remained untouched by this tendency. title ix coordinators and diversity and inclusion officers have long been mandatory staff positions and, more recently, universities and their culture have been profoundly influenced by the #metoo and black lives matter movements. medieval studies, for instance, has participated in this as well, such as the marxist turn of the s, the women’s and lgbtq history that came to the fore in the s and s, and, more recently, the adoption of the “global middle ages” and crt. this does not mean, of course, that there has been universally greater equity in professional ranks; in particular, the progress of african-americans in securing tenure-track jobs has been called “snail-like” (journal of black higher education – ). rather, academics have called for change while largely leaving existing power structures intact—which is to say largely white and middle class . further, because college tuition in america is paid for privately (even the aforesaid pell grants take the form of aid to individuals), there has been, simultaneously with the rise of the university-as-thought incubator, a call for tangible returns on investment. this renewed emphasis on accountability and fiscal results in american education, coupled with the traditional vocational/liberal-arts divide, has similarly renewed the debate over the value of the humanities. traditionally, it was the elite who studied greek, latin, history, and other “arts” subjects, and the sub-elites who received vocational training. a passing familiarity with homer, voltaire, and monteverdi was part of the elite habitus, a cultural symbol, like a custom-tailored suit or the grand tour, that marked one as a member of the ruling class—thus, the general-education requirements. land-grant universities, as part of their imperative, sought to bring this knowledge to the masses even as most courses were taken outside of the humanities. in the immediate post-world war ii era, the gap between the upper middle class and the upwardly striving middle class briefly lessened. newly prosperous parents bought pianos, sent their college-age children to europe with travelers’ checks and eurorail passes, and bought season tickets to the opera. high culture had no longer become the exclusive province of the elite. however, in an era of increased income inequality, how does understanding shakespeare help today’s student become a better worker? why does a primary school teacher need to take world civilizations? why do future healthcare workers need to be able to give public presentations? effectively, what those such as the college president i interviewed are saying is that those who are destined for non-elite schools have no business being educated the “finer things”, and, indeed, it is foolish to become interested in them. high culture is returning to the prewar state of being the exclusive province of the well-heeled, not for upwardly-mobile strivers, who will never learn the idioms of the true masters of the universe, and certainly not for those from disadvantaged backgrounds. for these people, college is not for personal development, but for learning a trade. as for medieval studies, the middle ages may be fine when it comes to mass-culture entertainment that portrays a grimdark past from which enlightened modernity arose—think game of thrones—but why would anyone ever want to study that professionally, when one can find out as much “accurate” medieval history as one likes online, from video games, or from medievalist hobby groups such as the society for creative anachronism? with the contraction of higher education due to falling birthrates and market saturation; the financial downturn of and ; and now with the covid- crisis, even elite education has become marketed as career-oriented. however, this is only an acceleration of a trend that has been present since the s. an excellent early case study of these tendencies is elizabeth coleman’s tenure to be sure, there have been repeated calls to reconsider curricula (especially general-education requirements), governance, and behavior in the light of critical race and gender theory. this has led to both a renewed emphasis on the liberal arts, especially as gen-ed requirements, and a suspicion of the same; while originating as a legal discourse, crt has found some of its staunchest advocates in humanities departments (delgado and stefancic ; parker ). at the same time, more reactionary elements in society have blamed these same humanities departments as breeding reactors for malcontents. conservative websites are filled with the supposed outrages committed by the “stalinist thought police” in modern academia. america’s traditional anti-intellectualism has thus taken a new role in the culture wars. humanities , , of as president of bennington college. her actions, deplored at the time, now seem prescient. bennington was formerly known as a haven for the artistically inclined scions of the east coast elite and had a reputation for producing well-known figures in writing, music, and other cultural endeavors. in the postwar period, it became the province of newly affluent jewish families. there was no formal tenure system in place, but rather a system of “presumptive tenure”; many of the professors lived in campus housing, and it can be truthfully said that the tiny college in the middle of the vermont woods was the center of their intellectual, social, and professional lives. coleman was hired by the college’s board of directors in , and was widely, and justly, credited with saving the school from financial disaster. however, as part of this, the board passed a “plan for changes in educational policy and reorganization of instructional resources and priorities” in april that included the elimination of entire departments (which, in some cases, consisted of a single faculty member), the reorganization of the school in favor of a “practitioner-teacher” model, and the elimination of “presumptive tenure” in favor of pro-term contracts (american association of university professors a, b). the ostensible reason was to make bennington more competitive in the marketplace, but the effect was to eliminate much of what made the school unique—including many of the liberal arts and social sciences faculty. language and music instruction were outsourced to the local “community”. (remember this was in rural vermont, which limits available resources). dance and music teachers were to be professionals whose work was currently being performed; literature faculty was to be active writers instead of scholars of literature; art historians were dismissed in favor of working visual artists. this, needless to say, was unparalleled and went against the entire idea of an independent, professional liberal arts faculty that considers its subject from a scholarly, critical perspective and takes part in communal governance. rather, it made the professorate dependent on an administration that considers matters primarily from a financial perspective. such disinvestment has a profound effect on equity. by deprofessionalizing the professorate, the adjunct system presupposes that those with the luxury of teaching the liberal arts already possess a fair degree of privilege and security and perpetuates race, class, and gender discrimination (american association of university professors ; coalition on the academic workforce ; american association of community colleges ; bérubé and ruth ). these assumptions are in no way accurate. finley ( ) states that, depending on the field, between % and % of contingent faculty are women, and that “while the pay gap between men and women in the united states is related in no small part to discrimination, it is also related to the fact that women tend to be employed in areas of the market that pay less than those where more men work”. fields that employ more contingent faculty tend to also employ more women, making relying on adjunct labor part of the devaluing of women’s work. further, as boris et al. ( ) put it, “adjuncts are ‘feminized’ by their position as flexible, low-paid workers, a paradigm designed to cut costs . . . . work conditions conspire to make them feel isolated. many teach at multiple institutions to earn a living, never establishing connections within their departments . . . . some internalize the lack of respect, choosing not to address their situation head on because it is painful. they fear losing classes”. the same with race: according to the u.s. department of education ( ), “of all full-time faculty in degree-granting postsecondary institutions in fall , percent were white males; percent were white females; percent were asian/pacific islander males; percent were asian/pacific islander females; and percent each were black males, black females, hispanic males, and hispanic females. those who were american indian/alaska native and those who were of two or more races each made up percent or less of full-time faculty”. these two imperatives in higher education—social justice and neoliberalism, certainly polar opposites—are therefore mutually irreconcilable. besides the fact that we are asking a machine that was designed as a marker of class status to perform a task it was not designed to do—that is, promote equality—to accomplish the aims of social justice requires investment in the very liberal arts that seem pointless to those who think only of market value. only by thinking critically about our society at large can we begin the vital questioning of values required by the university’s new, self-appointed humanities , , of mandate—dismantling white supremacy and promoting equality. however, this gaze must be inward as well, since in reestablishing the liberal arts curriculum, we must also critically evaluate and even rewrite what purposes the “liberal arts” serve. . the social purpose of higher education just as we cannot consider the liberal arts outside of the context of american higher education, we must also consider the liberal arts in the context of society itself. there has been no shortage of ink spilled protesting cutbacks to the liberal arts in higher education; the present volume is but the latest salvo in a long barrage. these responses are usually penned by pundits answering neoliberal critiques by speaking in some version of the critics’ own terminology of economics and seeking to justify traditional humanistic studies according to some notion of abstract value or the socratic examined life. however, if we look at how universities function in society, another picture emerges. figure is an image that i draw on the board in the first week or so of all my introductory classes: humanities , , x of at large can we begin the vital questioning of values required by the university’s new, self-appointed mandate—dismantling white supremacy and promoting equality. however, this gaze must be inward as well, since in reestablishing the liberal arts curriculum, we must also critically evaluate and even rewrite what purposes the “liberal arts” serve. . the social purpose of higher education just as we cannot consider the liberal arts outside of the context of american higher education, we must also consider the liberal arts in the context of society itself. there has been no shortage of ink spilled protesting cutbacks to the liberal arts in higher education; the present volume is but the latest salvo in a long barrage. these responses are usually penned by pundits answering neoliberal critiques by speaking in some version of the critics’ own terminology of economics and seeking to justify traditional humanistic studies according to some notion of abstract value or the socratic examined life. however, if we look at how universities function in society, another picture emerges. figure is an image that i draw on the board in the first week or so of all my introductory classes: figure . diagram of the social order. obviously, i have been highly influenced here by any number of marxist-based historical schools, particularly the annalistes—all ultimately rooted in the “three estate” idea. despite its european origins, one can make the argument that this system has been inherent to all post-neolithic societies ever since the peasants gathered around the ziggurat to ask why they had to render tribute to the great king gilgamesh and the priest descended the steps to tell them it was because the great god marduk said it must be so. in imperial china, the legitimacy of the imperial power was explained by the official confucian philosophy. in medieval europe—in which, of course, the modern university system was birthed—the rulers were the feudal nobility; the workers were, for the most part, the peasants; and those who explained the world were the clergy. universities, of course, fit into the “clergy” role, and had their origins within the medieval church. in early modern europe, the power structure of society changed, as did scholarship. copernicus, and, after him, galileo, overthrew the ptolemaic cosmos and aristotelian physics; hobbes justified absolutist monarchy, and, after him, locke justified the glorious revolution and parliamentary rule; newton showed how the divine plan for the cosmos could be understood and explained through mathematics. as peter gay put it in his landmark the enlightenment: an interpretation ( ), modernity came from the idea of a mechanistic universe posited by the ancient latin poet lucretius in his de re natura, together with the newtonian idea of humanity’s ability to know and master these laws. the entire positivist project—that the universe, including human society, functions by knowable laws, and that by mastering these laws, we can perfect the world—followed. the task of achieving the kingdom of heaven had been wrested from the hands of the saints and placed in those of the savants. however, the interpretation of the human world will always follow the dictates of the power structure. malthus and ricardo used smith’s economic theories to explain how it was a net benefit to society to pay the laboring classes below subsistence-level wages. darwin’s ideas were used in nineteenth-century “scientific” racism to justify slavery and imperialism, explain how the irish were those who rule those who explain the world those who work figure . diagram of the social order. obviously, i have been highly influenced here by any number of marxist-based historical schools, particularly the annalistes—all ultimately rooted in the “three estate” idea. despite its european origins, one can make the argument that this system has been inherent to all post-neolithic societies ever since the peasants gathered around the ziggurat to ask why they had to render tribute to the great king gilgamesh and the priest descended the steps to tell them it was because the great god marduk said it must be so. in imperial china, the legitimacy of the imperial power was explained by the official confucian philosophy. in medieval europe—in which, of course, the modern university system was birthed—the rulers were the feudal nobility; the workers were, for the most part, the peasants; and those who explained the world were the clergy. universities, of course, fit into the “clergy” role, and had their origins within the medieval church. in early modern europe, the power structure of society changed, as did scholarship. copernicus, and, after him, galileo, overthrew the ptolemaic cosmos and aristotelian physics; hobbes justified absolutist monarchy, and, after him, locke justified the glorious revolution and parliamentary rule; newton showed how the divine plan for the cosmos could be understood and explained through mathematics. as peter gay put it in his landmark the enlightenment: an interpretation (gay ), modernity came from the idea of a mechanistic universe posited by the ancient latin poet lucretius in his de re natura, together with the newtonian idea of humanity’s ability to know and master these laws. the entire positivist project—that the universe, including human society, functions by knowable laws, and that by mastering these laws, we can perfect the world—followed. the task of achieving the kingdom of heaven had been wrested from the hands of the saints and placed in those of the savants. however, the interpretation of the human world will always follow the dictates of the power structure. malthus and ricardo used smith’s economic theories to explain how it was a net benefit to society to pay the laboring classes below subsistence-level wages. darwin’s ideas were used in nineteenth-century “scientific” racism to justify slavery and imperialism, explain how the irish were barely human, and tout the benefits of eugenics. the soviet union invested in “scientific humanities , , of marxism-leninism” and lysenko’s genetics for political purposes. critical race theory, such as embodied in symes’s statement that “[t]he informed study of ‘what happened’... is therefore inextricable from the ongoing interrogation of when, how, and why these categories were invented” both participates in and questions this sentiment. i would argue that one subtext of the work of the scholar, from the priest of ancient egypt to the mandarin of imperial china to the modern political scientist or economist, is ultimately to justify a particular distribution of power in a society. in modern america, this function is justified by financial exigency. the humanities neither produce wealth nor wield power, and attempts to justify their existence in the language of neoliberalism are doomed to failure. what we do is give a narrative that implicitly defends the order of things and trains the next generation to continue it—thus, the canon of great white males working in the tradition of socrates, plato, and aristotle, or, since the s, the counterargument critiquing this power structure. in the end, this is the same thing, as it merely rearranges the pieces in the hierarchy rather than upending it entirely. in the end, the hierarchy itself is unchanged. the stories that are useful to us are those that tell narratives that further present-day agendas—to wit, the movements towards both neoliberalism and inclusivity, diversity, and globalism. these mandates have affected even remote provinces such as medieval studies, which is, i believe, why attempts to put the middle ages on the forefront of the fight against white supremacy have found such fertile ground in medievalist fields. the carrot-and-stick system is the same as it ever has been: create useful truths, and you will be rewarded. lest i be accused of undue cynicism by scholars of a more conservative bent, let me be clear that i am not speaking here of the disinterested, scholarly study of ars pro gratia artis that one might see advocated amongst the elder generation of tenured scholars. as the editor pointed out in initial reviews of this essay, “studying brecht or d. h. lawrence does not make one a defender of traditional society”. however, again, to one steeped in crt, there are no disinterested scholars: anyone who is not actively anti-racist, anti-misogynistic, anti-homophobic, anti-transphobic, and anti-imperialist in fact contributes to these epistemes (or more properly, what bourdieu would call “these doxas”, or common beliefs; it is crt itself that is the true episteme, or scientific knowledge). the very emphasis on studying brecht or d. h. lawrence, or at least on studying them without references to the doxas they support, is itself a symptom of a racist system that one can hardly perceive, just as a fish does not know it is swimming in water. such crit beliefs are widespread amongst younger scholars, and no matter whether one agrees or disagrees, there is no doubt that first, these sentiments are useful when applying for a position or persuading an administrator to approve the same; and that, second, they are rapidly becoming the new disciplinary orthodoxy. the problem is, as i pointed out above, the goals of neoliberalism and social justice are mutually irreconcilable, and we wind up merely paying lip service to the latter while continuing the structures of the former unchanged. we are not dissimilar to an education department simultaneously wrestling with irreconcilable questions of how to improve outcomes in poor districts as measured by the metrics of government-mandated standardized testing even as they deal with profound inequality between students’ socioeconomic situations compared to their more privileged peers. the task is sisyphean. the task is additionally complicated by the class structure of academia. education signifies pedigree and serves as a social network and vetting process, which is why the question of where one went to university is akin to the homeric question of parentage. for instance, a recent study found that half of history faculty openings went to the graduates of approximately eight schools (clauset et al. ). yet, ironically, to be admitted into one of these schools, let alone consider a career in the liberal arts professorate, requires quite a bit of privilege in the first place. crt most certainly considers issues of class in its theories: the tenets of intersectionalism as expressed by the combahee river collective ( ), kimberlé crenshaw (e.g., crenshaw ), patricia hill collins (collins ) show that one cannot merely consider oppression in light of race; one must also consider factors such as social class and gender. this intersectional perspective is fully present in medieval studies: as the cover of the volume , issue (september ) issue of postmedieval put it (riffing off of falvia humanities , , of dzodan), “my medieval studies will be intersectional, or it will be [useless]”. (the obscenity that properly belongs within the brackets has been removed at request of the editor). however, what is disturbing to me is, considering that status-conscious nature of academia, the possibility of the radical, hierarchy-upending ideas expressed by crit writers being weaponized by colleagues against colleagues as a means of gaining resources within a shrinking field, when in fact we should be weaponizing them against the administration in order to spread the teaching of the liberal arts; admit women, people of color, and other historically excluded groups into a revitalized and financially secure professorate; and to spread the epistemology of crt to all stakeholders. to be sure, those who manifestly enable racism, bully those with less power, or consort with admitted white supremacists must be “called out”; on the other hand, when dealing with those who, like many of our colleagues, merely express “white fragility” (see diangleo ) or who display an imperfect understanding of the tenets of crt, i would instead urge “calling in”: acting with compassion and patience to ask people who see themselves as allies to act in more thoughtful, less harmful ways. this would, in turn, build a broader coalition between those spreading progressive ideas and those who already have positions of power and/or influence within the field. further, if we are truly going to do what crit writers say we must do, then we must do it in accessible ways that do not replicate previous exclusionary practices to create in-groups and out-groups—not only in the professorate, but among our students and in society at large. for instance, the tenets of crt should be readily explained in a way that first-year college students freshly arrived from underserved school districts can readily understand. hiring committees should be given explicit mandates to diversify the professorate. articles and essays should avoid baroque, “academic” language, and must not be hidden behind paywalls. perhaps most controversially, i believe that those who hold old-fashioned assumptions cannot be merely “cancelled” (that is, socially excluded and deprived of employment) and left to fester in a corner; rather, we must utilize bell’s “convergence theory” by “calling them in”, making them see that reading and adopting crt is in their best interests, recruiting them by explaining why “studying brecht or d. h. lawrence” in an unexamined way does, from the crt perspective, make one a “defender of traditional society”, and thus establishing the cognitive dissonance that leads to self-reflection. (and, needless to say, it is not acceptable to fire the liberal arts professors at a school that serves low-income students, particularly when those professors are the ones who spread a message of social justice). in whose hands, then, are we placing the power? who will be in possession of this canon? is the power of interpreting the humanities only for those few who “make it” to elite schools and land a tenure-track job—those with pedigree, fortunately recognized talent, or just luck? who is given the power of having their narratives heard? who gets to teach and interpret “the brontës and louisa may alcott and things”? better yet, who will teach and interpret ibram x kendi, ta-nehisi coates, kimberlé williams crenshaw, or angela davis? who will be the next ibram x. kendi, ta-nehisi coates, kimberlé williams crenshaw, or angela davis? critical race theory cannot be allowed to become another tool for the ruling class. in other words, we cannot let administrations adopt the language of social justice while doing nothing to create a more empowered and diverse professorate. one can, for instance, easily see a school dismissing tenured professors on the basis of “financial exigency”; hiring adjuncts of color to cover their classes; paying said adjuncts far less than they paid the full-timers, and then boasting of the “diversity” of its teaching staff. another way in which systemic racism is perpetuated every day is by failing to post salaries in a transparent fashion. a personal anecdote: when i was contracted as a lecturer in the umass system to do a teach-out of the remnant students at a newly acquired campus, i asked for the same per-class salary that i had received in the state college system. the chemistry professor, a woman who was born in africa, asked for and received thousands less. (we were, in fact, both being paid under the contracted rate, and eventually, the union stepped in and demanded we be paid on par with what was legally required, including back pay). unless we keep incidents like these from happening then, much as the corporate world has done, we merely pay lip service to diversity and inclusion while not making any real change. only by humanities , , of educating the broadest number of people the most deeply can we in the broadest, most humanistic way possible, remove “the liberal arts” from the precincts of the privileged and pave the path for a more equal and just world—and we can, in turn, only accomplish this goal by creating a fair and just workplace for the labor of education. . whose episteme, then? the liberal arts, as they have been traditionally constituted, constantly harken back to the past either by studying it or reacting to it. the problem is that, from the perspective of crt, the past that “the brontës and louisa may alcott” harkens back to is a white, eurocentric past, a past in which the voices of people of color were frequently marginalized. to deign homer and shakespeare the pinnacle of high culture is to say that the past of white european males is normative for human experience and that today’s elites stand in a tradition of mostly-male writers that goes back to plato and aristotle. we have begun including the voices of women in this canon, as our college president’s quote shows, but in groping for “the brontës and louisa may alcott”, he still chose works in which elites can “see themselves”. (this is beginning to change—nyu’s core curriculum is notably global in scope—but at a disappointingly slow pace. for instance, columbia college still bases its core curriculum around masterpieces of western literature and philosophy and contemporary civilization in the west) . so, while the students at our underserved school might not want or need to “analyze and take apart the brontës and louisa may alcott”, the questions i ask, with a critical race theory-informed eye, are: why should they? why would they? maybe they should instead be asked to analyze and take apart olaudah equiano, phillis wheatley, solomon northup, frederick douglass, harriet jacobs, sojourner truth, harriet wilson, w. e. b. du bois, booker t. washington, and marcus garvey—to name but a handful of possible writers that we could put on the syllabus. such a study of what critical race theorists call “narrative analyses” (delgado and stefancic , ch. passim) would serve to awaken the moral and empathetic sensibilities and serve to, in the words of mary wollstonecraft, “ . . . strengthen the body and form the heart. or, in other words, to enable the individual to attain such habits of virtue as will render it independent”. for, as she continues, “ . . . it is a farce to call any being virtuous whose virtues do not result from the exercise of its own reason”. from my personal experience, i will say that centering voices that are relevant to my students has been critical in maintaining their interest—and as contingent faculty, i am very conscious of the precariousness of my employment and the necessity of “keeping my customers happy” (as impossible as that might be in the age of covid). i am fully aware that my previous statements vis-à-vis crt are controversial to some. why throw out the entire historiography of a discipline for a new approach? what is the relevance of modern categories of race to, say, the middle ages? my point is that even such seemingly irrelevant-to-crt subjects as medieval studies, like any professional study of the humanities, exist only in the context of the academy. if we wish them to survive in this context, we must “get with the program”. further, as i have argued previously, these approaches suggest fruitful new avenues of research (mondschein ). i know they have certainly given me new perspectives in my own writing on subjects as diverse and seemingly irrelevant to race as fencing books, medieval warfare, and the history of timekeeping. the sentiments i have expressed in this essay are far from new, and in my opinion only describe a process that is well underway. my contribution to this discourse is that, given that the crits seem to be well on their way to winning the argument in the liberal arts, the study of these subjects should the editor, in commenting on the initial drafts of this essay, commented that it matters not if we offer western literature or south asian literature because “masterpieces” offer universal understanding and values. however, from a crt perspective, we cannot divorce the studied from the scholar, nor any topic from issues of race and gender. rather, we must center voices of color in order to be explicitly antiracist and achieve our goals of equity and inclusion. contra this, the editor has commented that “reading any author only because s/he is black” is essentialist and racist in and of itself. crt would counter that it is the voice of color, of the lived experience of discrimination, which is itself valuable. uncle tom’s cabin is thus not as valuable a narrative as twelve years a slave: the latter is a primary source for the experience of enslavement; the former was written by a white contemporary. humanities , , of not be limited. rather, i demand the professional interpretation and teaching of the humanities by an empowered and economically secure faculty which is necessary for all students at all schools. the episteme must be spread as widely as possible. we cannot let the “woke” language and reasoning of social justice become the new homer, a new shibboleth for a ruling class that remains unchanged. not only does this do nothing to serve the greater good—it betrays the intent of crt by placing what was supposed to be a tool of liberation in the hands of those who already have privilege. in other words, we cannot replace one class structure with another while doing nothing to reset the inequality that is at the root of injustice. the fundamental nature of the explainers—to justify a certain order of society—would then remain intact. only by democratizing this knowledge can we effect a new order of the world. in other words, i am demanding a reinvigorated humanities professorate, and i hold that these subjects should be taught especially by people of color, lgbtq individuals, and other historically excluded groups. the question remains that, if the neoliberal university chooses to have no stake in this effort by defunding the liberal arts, who is to pay for all this education? unless we are to rely on an army of adjuncts whom we pay poverty wages, such an effort will obviously require money. to ask historically disenfranchised groups to come into our classroom to teach this new canon and then to pay them less than a living wage is as unacceptable as continuing to teach a curriculum of dead white males. achieving this may mean re-regulation in terms of accreditation and increased eligibility for grants and student loans, making such education, delivered by fairly compensated professionals, mandatory and broadly available. perhaps it will require massive public investment in forms such as scholarship funds, direct aid to colleges, and student loan forgiveness. it will no doubt need to be litigated at some point. the critiques from the right suggest themselves—but consider, for a moment, that this public investment is already happening: the school headed by our professor-firing, brontë-hating college president is run by white administrators who are paid ample salaries from federal money (in the form of student loans and pell grants) given to black and brown students. because of the pandemic, increased public investment in the higher education sector is already necessary to prevent collapse and college bankruptcies. i ask only that this initiative be expanded to reinvest in the liberal arts, and that the liberal arts be considered as the spearhead in the fight for equality. from the perspective of crt, to do otherwise is to turn a blind eye to white supremacy, and therefore to be complicit in it. funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. references altbach, philip g., patricia j. gumport, and robert o. berdahl. . american higher education in the twenty-first century: social, political, and economic challenges. baltimore: johns hopkins university press. american association of university professors. . the status of non-tenure-track faculty. available online: http://www.aaup.org/aaup/comm/rep/nontenuretrack.htm (accessed on july ). american association of university professors. a. academic freedom and tenure: bennington college. available online: https://www.aaup.org/file/academic-freedom-and-tenure-benningtoncollege_ .pdf (accessed on july ). american association of university professors. b. bennington college: a supplementary report on a censured administration. academe : – . 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http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	liberal arts in the united states 	the social purpose of higher education 	whose episteme, then? 	references wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ . /primer. . impact of a discussion series on race on medical student perceptions of bias in health care h. reeve bright, md, mph, ms | keith nokes, md, mph primer. ; : . published: / / | doi: . /primer. . abstract background and objectives: racial bias in health care is increasingly recognized as a factor in health inequities, yet there is limited research regarding medical school education around race and racism and its impact on medical students. the purpose of this study was to understand attitudes of medical students on race and racism in health care and to study the impact of participation in a voluntary structured program on race and racism. methods: first-year medical students had the opportunity to participate in a series of discussions ( hours total) on race and racism. a -question survey addressing comfort, knowledge, and the adequacy of education on race and racism was sent to all xrst-year medical students (n= / , response rate %), and was administered to series participants (n= / , response rate %) in a pre/post format. results: participant and nonparticipant attitudes were similar at baseline, with the exception that participants were less likely to feel that the medical school curriculum provided adequate education on race and racism, and reported higher levels of knowledge around these issues. following the discussion series, participants showed signixcant changes regarding knowledge and awareness, as well as comfort level discussing race and racism. conclusions: participants were more likely than nonparticipants to think that the curriculum should include more discussion on race and racism. postparticipation analysis demonstrated signixcant increases in comfort level, knowledge, and awareness in discussion of race and racism. introduction racial bias in medicine, including implicit, or unconscious bias, is increasingly recognized as a factor in health inequities affecting communication and the care offered to patients. recent efforts have begun to engage health professionals in this issue, encouraging them to identify their own biases and identifying ways of combating health care disparities through allyship. however, information regarding medical school education around race and racism and its impact on students is limited. discomfort with discussions of race outside of a biomedical context is common among medical students and health care professionals alike. creating open discussions regarding race has shown benexts in health care work settings and in faculty development, but we have found no research addressing the impact of such forums in medical schools. without adequate training, no improvement in cultural and racial sensitivity can be expected. a prerequisite for this is the creation of a safe environment in which students can acknowledge their biases, explore intentional behavior change, and increase conxdence in addressing racial disparities. students at one medical school implemented a program called the race dialogues series (rds), in order to have a forum for these discussions. - , , , . /primer. . of the purpose of this study was to examine baseline perceptions of xrst-year medical students about race and health care as well as the impact of participation in the rds. we hypothesized that participants and nonparticipants would vary signixcantly at baseline, with participants reporting greater comfort, knowledge, and awareness of racism, and that rds participation would increase comfort and knowledge regarding these issues. methods intervention in spring , xrst-year medical students (“participants”) at a single institution self-selected to participate in the rds. first-year students who did not participate in the rds were dexned as “nonparticipants.” this series of xve -hour dialogues was based on a predexned curriculum and was lead by facilitators from ywca boston with experience in fostering safe environments for these didcult conversations. participants verbally agreed to keep the content of these discussions conxdential. participants engaged in a variety of discussion topics including vocabulary around race, discrimination, and prejudice; self-identixcation, self-dexnition, stereotyping, and self- awareness; racism and bias in medicine; and strategies to address these issues. survey (figure ) as a review of the literature did not identify a validated instrument measuring our targeted outcomes, we designed a -question likert scale survey to assess attitudes toward inclusion of race and racism in the curriculum (questions and ), knowledge and awareness of racism and bias in health care and medical training (questions , , and ), and conxdence in talking about race and racism (questions , , , and ). lower values on the -point scale indicated greater knowledge, comfort, or agreement with each question. basic demographic information was obtained by self-report. we administered the survey to rds participants on paper in a pre/postformat, and concurrently to all xrst-year medical students via email. to avoid double counting, the email version included a question regarding rds participation, and participants were reminded in person and via email not to respond to the online survey. the paper survey included the option to create a personalized code allowing for paired analysis. participation was voluntary and anonymous. the tufts university institutional review board exempted the survey and the odce of educational affairs at tufts university school of medicine approved it. data analysis we compared the responses of nonparticipants to pretest responses of participants using an unpaired t test. we also analyzed pre- and posttests of participant responses using an unpaired t test. sixteen of the participants created individualized codes and were included in a paired pre/post t-test analysis. we performed data analysis with spss v (spss statistical software, armonk, ny: ibm, inc). results twenty-three ( %) of the rds participants took the pre/posttest survey. sixteen ( %) of these participants created an individualized code allowing for paired t-test analysis. sixty-one ( %) of the nonparticipants completed the online survey. general demographic information was collected by self-report (table ). participants vs nonparticipants (table ) nonparticipants were more likely to identify as white ( . % vs . %), and as not hispanic/latino ( . % vs . %). at baseline, participants were signixcantly more likely than noparticipants to feel that the medical school curriculum should provide more discussion on race and racism (q : . vs . , p<. , % ci - . , - . ; q : . vs . , p<. , % ci - . , - . ). additionally, participants were signixcantly more likely to self-report an understanding of the impact of race on medical care and health outcomes (q : . vs . , p<. , % ci - . , - . ). . /primer. . of unpaired participant pre/post t test (table ) the unpaired t-test analysis of participants (n= ) showed statistically signixcant changes in several domains. participants reported increased knowledge and awareness of racial bias (q : . vs . , p=. , % ci . , . ; q : . v . , p= . , %ci . , . ; q : . v . , p<. , % ci . , . ), as well as an increased level of comfort talking about race and racism (q : . vs . , p=. , % ci . , . ; q : . vs . , p=. , % ci . , . ). paired participant pre/post t-test (table ) paired pre/posttest analysis demonstrated signixcant changes in responses to the same questions as the unpaired analysis (q : . vs . , p<. ; q : . v . , p= . ; q : . vs . , p<. ; q : . vs . p=. ; q : . vs . , p<. ), while additionally showing a signixcant increase in self-reported comfort talking about race (q : . vs . , p<. ). we did not perform within-group variance due to small sample sizes in certain categories. discussion despite growing recognition of the role of race and racism in health inequities, there is little information regarding interventions to address these issues during medical training. in this study, participants in a structured discussion series reported increased awareness of race and racism, specixcally demonstrating increased recognition of others’ experiences of racism and greater understanding of the role of race in medical care and health outcomes. participants also reported increased comfort talking about race and racism with other health professionals, with patients, and with people from different racial backgrounds. notably, these changes occurred despite the fact that participants were a self-selected group with a higher initial knowledge of these concepts.  study limitations include the small sample size and the short timeline of the intervention and postparticipation survey. rds participants may have been affected by selection bias, as participation was voluntary, and participants may have been predisposed toward sensitivity and awareness on issues surrounding race and racism. selection bias may also have minimized the baseline difference between participants and nonparticipants as the nonparticipating students who responded to the class-wide survey may be more attuned to issues surrounding racial bias in health care than nonresponders. additionally, rds occurred in the context of highly visible discussions of race and racism such as the black lives matter movement. this is a potential confounder, though the limited study time frame may make this less likely. a separate concern is program generalizability. organizers of the rds benexted from the availability of a community partner with trained facilitators, but the program as designed requires student commitment, openness to self- renection and discussing racism, and structured groups. providing resources to support this program for all students would be didcult, and requiring participation could jeopardize the underlying ethos of safe and open discussion, potentially affecting total program impact. finally, it is didcult to know the true impact of small but signixcant changes on a likert scale, but addressing these issues is an ongoing process and the race dialogues series offers one potential model to create change. potential future steps include expanding this curriculum to more students, beginning similar discussions at other institutions, and evaluating for future program sustainability. it is imperative that we as medical educators move the discussion on race and racism forward if we are to address their impact in our practice of medicine and in patient outcomes and health inequities. tables and figures . /primer. . of . /primer. . of acknowledgments the authors acknowledge the sam w. ho health justice scholars program (formerly tufts student service scholars), ywca boston, and tufts university school of medicine. financial support: this study received xnancial support from the jonathan m. tisch college of civic life, tisch fund for civic engagement; and from thetufts university school of medicine, department of family medicine. presentations: this study was presented as a completed peer paper at the society of teachers of family medicine . /primer. . of conference on medical student education on february , in anaheim, california. corresponding author h. reeve bright, md, mph, ms montexore medical center, department of family and social medicine, jerome ave, bronx, ny . - - . fax: - - . hbright@montexore.org author abliations h. reeve bright, md, mph, ms - montexore medical center, department of family and social medicine, bronx, ny keith nokes, md, mph - tufts university school of medicine, department of family medicine, boston, ma references . institute of medicine committee on understanding and eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in health care. in: institute of medicine (us) committee on understanding and eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in health care; smedley bd, stith ay, nelson ar, editors. washington, dc: national academies press; . . nelson sc, prasad s, hackman hw. training providers on issues of race and racism improve health care equity. pediatr blood cancer. ; ( ): - . https://doi.org/ . /pbc. . williams dr, mohammed sa. discrimination and racial disparities in health: evidence and needed research. j behav med. ; ( ): - . https://doi.org/ . /s - - - . blair iv, steiner jf, havranek ep. unconscious (implicit) bias and health disparities: where do we go from here? perm j. ; ( ): - . . sabin ja, greenwald ag. the innuence of implicit bias on treatment recommendations for common pediatric conditions: pain, urinary tract infection, attention dexcit hyperactivity disorder, and asthma. am j public health. ; ( ): - . https://doi.org/ . /ajph. . . wu d, saint-hilaire l, pineda a, et al. the edcacy of an antioppression curriculum for health professionals. fam med. ; ( ): - . https://doi.org/ . /fammed. . . zhang al. race in medical education. brown medicine magazine. winter . https://medicine.at.brown.edu /article/race-in-medical-education/. accessed december , . . roberts jh, sanders t, wass v. students’ perceptions of race, ethnicity and culture at two uk medical schools: a qualitative study. med educ. ; ( ): - . https://doi.org/ . / - - . dennis sn, gold rs, wen fk. learner reactions to activities exploring racism as a social determinant of health. fam med. ; ( ): - . https://doi.org/ . /fammed. . . nunez-smith m, curry la, berg d, krumholz hm, bradley eh. healthcare workplace conversations on race and the perspectives of physicians of african descent. j gen intern med. ; ( ): - . https://doi.org / . /s - - - . white-davis t, edgoose j, brown speights js, et al. addressing racism in medical education: an interactive training module. fam med. ; ( ): - . https://doi.org/ . /fammed. . . . lee m, coulehan jl. medical students’ perceptions of racial diversity and gender equality. med educ. ; ( ): - . https://doi.org/ . /j. - . . .x . chapman en, kaatz a, carnes m. physicians and implicit bias: how doctors may unwittingly perpetuate health care disparities. j gen intern med. ; ( ): - . https://doi.org/ . /s - - - . ywca. yw boston presents: a taste of the dialogues. . http://www.slideshare.net/ywboston/yw-boston- presents-a-taste-of-the-dialogues. accessed december , . copyright © by the society of teachers of family medicine . /primer. . of cm : communication and media xi( ) – © cdi media traumatization, symbolic wounds and digital culture allen meek massey university, new zealand doi: . /comman - abstract: do media images really traumatize the public? if they do not, then why do so many commentators – from those commemorating the holocaust to those analys- ing the impact of / – claim that trauma can be transmitted to specific ethnic groups or entire societies? while these claims can be based on empirical data or used to justify political agendas, psychoanalysis also continues to influence conceptions of collective trauma and to offer important perspectives for evaluating these conceptions. this paper explores these questions of mediated trauma and collective identity by tracing a neglected historical trajectory back to the work of psychoanalyst and anthropologist geza roheim. roheim produced studies of australian aboriginal culture that applied the theory of col- lective trauma outlined in freud’s totem and taboo. he also produced an ethnographic film, subincision, documenting an initiation rite, that was subsequently used in psycho- logical studies of so-called “stress films”. putting aside roheim’s psychoanalytic interpreta- tions of indigenous culture, psychologists used his film to measure the impact of images of violence and pain. these studies from the s have recently been rediscovered by scholars of holocaust film and video testimony. this paper seeks to recover the concept of “symbolic wounds” developed in psychoanalyst bruno bettelheim’s later commentary on roheim’s work. the mass media of newspapers, film and television have supported the idea of cultural trauma shared by large societies. the concept of symbolic wounds that enhance group membership and mobilize collective action may be more useful for under- standing how violent and shocking images are put to more diverse uses in digital culture. keywords: trauma, stress film, symbolic wounds, september , isis, black lives matter contact with author: a.meek@massey.ac.nz. original scientific paper submitted: . . . accepted for publication: . . . media traumatization, symbolic wounds and digital culture allen meek cm : communication and media xi( ) – © cdi . introduction research on media traumatization has attempted to explain the psycho- logical impact of images showing violent and catastrophic events (holmes & bourne, ). images that show pain and suffering can be understood to cause pain and suffering for viewers, even if the experience shown and the experience of seeing are understood as qualitatively different. psychoanalysis has made an important contribution to this area of research by explaining how identification with “traumatic” images is driven by unconscious fears and desires, and how the psyche protects or “numbs” itself against the impact of shock (freud, ; lifton, ). psychoanalytic accounts that emphasize the role of interior pro- cesses of identification, however, have tended to be discounted in research that focuses on the traumatic impact of media images as external stimuli. in order to address this neglected perspective the following discussion seeks to recover a conception of “symbolic wounds” from the works of psychoanalysts geza roheim and bruno bettelheim (roheim, ; bettelheim, ). roheim and bettelheim both argued, in different ways, that violence can have symbolic value that enables social participation and group membership. the following discussion proposes that media images can function as symbolic wounds invit- ing active identification. i propose that discourses about media traumatization have been dominated by the idea of cultural trauma, which depends on a one- source-to-many-viewers model of mass media. the idea of symbolic wounds better describes the situation made possible by digital media, where new com- munities emerge in relation to images of violence and suffering, revealing how such images can not only distress or desensitize but also enhance and empower those who look at them. claims that media images can induce or transmit traumatic experience have been made about photographs, documentary films, television news and video testimony (sontag, ; felman & laub, ; hirsch, ; neria, di grande & adams, ). these claims have been associated with the mass media of print, cinema and television because they assume that a single source of information is being received by potentially very large audiences. when entire societies are likely to encounter particular images of violence and catas- trophe then public figures, intellectuals and media professionals engage in the discursive construction of cultural traumas (alexander, ): when everyone sees the same images they can be said to experience similar emotional responses. media traumatization, symbolic wounds and digital culture allen meek cm : communication and media xi( ) – © cdi probably the most widely known example of this construction of a cultural trauma is the narrative about americans’ shocked response to witnessing the events of september , . the possibility that there has never actually been such uniformity of feeling becomes more evident with the greater multiplicity of images and narratives available on the internet, showing that violent im- ages invite a range of responses that include not only dismay and rage but also “inappropriate” ones such as fascination and amusement. the shift to digital technologies has allowed media users to navigate almost limitless amounts of information, develop individual user profiles and participate in social networks. the proliferation of media images and texts potentially available at any time or place, along with the intensification of explicit violence and horror, make this less predictable encounter with the “traumatic” image a significant feature of media use today (meek, ; morpurgo, ). psychoanalysis can help us to understand how the social and cultural value of symbolic wounds has changed in response to historical developments in modern media. freud understood identity formation in terms of the child’s relation to his/her parents in the private domestic space: the child internalized parental authority in the form of the super-ego, which was understood by freud as specifically patriarchal and middle-class. in freud’s time parental authority over the child’s auto-erotic tendencies was commonly expressed through threats of castration (poster, : – ), a symbolic wound that structured cul- tural identity through sexual repression. mark poster argues that because child- hood development today is strongly shaped by media technologies, the private relationship between a child and his/her parents has been displaced by the child as a consumer and member of specific target markets. young people now use a diverse range of media, over which parents exercise limited control (poster, : – ). this situation developed gradually in the second half of the twentieth century, when private life was increasingly characterized by the con- sumption of newspapers, magazines, television and movies. during this period mass media assumed the role of constructing narratives about national identity and collective traumas. the televisual nature of these traumas can be seen in examples such as the eichmann trial, the assassination of john f. kennedy and the / attacks. new traumatic images of war, famine and death became available but remained centrally controlled and censored by corporate media. in psychoanalytic terms these traumatic images could be understood as induc- media traumatization, symbolic wounds and digital culture allen meek cm : communication and media xi( ) – © cdi ing castration anxiety and thereby prompting identification with a national or ethnic superego. in the mid- s trauma studies suggested new approaches to the question of media traumatization by bringing together psychoanalysis, psychotherapy with holocaust survivors, and recorded testimony in film and video. the influ- ential work of cathy caruth and shoshana felman sought to recover forgotten historical experience through the transmission of traumatic shock in literary, film and video texts (felman & laub, ; caruth, ). psychoanalysis explains traumatic experiences as overwhelming conscious understanding, al- lowing the unconscious memory of the event to return in symptoms such as nightmares, compulsive behaviours, and other neuroses and pathologies. by analogy, these trauma theorists argued that extreme events resist understand- ing at the time of their occurrence and reappear as symptomatic disruptions in later representations of history. the emphasis on the collective experience of catastrophe, however, implicitly leads us back to the question of media as an apparatus of power. the political implications of identification with trau- matic histories became clearer after the “live” transmission of the / attacks on television, when many media commentators almost immediately made claims about collective trauma for americans (trimarco & depret, : ). the “superego” effect of the state and mass media was revealed in subsequent military interventions and intensified national security and social surveillance. the televisual replay of numerous different video recordings made by private citizens appeared to act out the experience of the events as an intrusive memory. national surveys conducted after the / attacks led to claims of substantial levels of stress and ptsd among the general population (young, : ). in this case psychological research appeared to directly serve the interests of a nar- rative of national trauma. both these theoretical and empirical accounts of the psychological impact of ‘traumatic’ images assumed a single-source-to-multiple-viewer model. at- tempts to understand the impact of traumatic images tend to assign roles of perpetrator and victim, using actions in real life events to define a relation be- tween media and viewer. psychoanalysis, however, includes more complicated accounts of relationships between perpetrator and victim, including fantasy and guilt. nevertheless, as ruth leys ( , ) has shown, both trauma theory and psychological studies of traumatic images have tended to reproduce the media traumatization, symbolic wounds and digital culture allen meek cm : communication and media xi( ) – © cdi model of impact from an external source and to discount the ways in which trauma is also shaped by interior processes of imaginative investment and iden- tification (which may not be limited to a single position or role). one way to address this imbalance is to consider how viewers can make their identification with images of pain and suffering the basis of socially transformative acts. cultural trauma narratives attempt to capture mass identification, but digi- tal media are allowing and revealing a greater diversity of identifications with symbolic wounds. for example, according to w. j. t. mitchell, the / attacks initiated a ‘war of images’ that included the torture of detainees in abu ghraib prison, the execution of saddam hussein, and the decapitation of hostages by radical islamists. but mitchell’s account of this war of images, which he claims is “designed to shock and traumatize the enemy” (mitchell, : ), remains within the logic of perpetrator and victim transferred onto media image and viewer. in mitchell’s analysis, the word “trauma” tends to connote an external force or event impacting on a body or psyche and leaving an injury or wound. examples of more complex interactions with digital images as symbolic wounds can be seen in political struggles such as the arab spring (wallace, : ) and black lives matter. images of violence and death that have been rapidly disseminated through digital networks have provoked communities to engage in political protest and resistance. concerns about the psychological effects of media violence need to be understood in the larger context of modern experience. walter benjamin’s adaptation of freud’s account of trauma in beyond the pleasure principle ( ) stressed that shock had become the “norm” (benjamin, : ) in metropolitan culture. freud proposed that the perceptual apparatus devel- ops a “protective shield” (freud, : ) to insulate it from the potentially damaging effects of intrusive stimuli. only the experience of fright (a sudden and unexpected disturbance) is able to pierce the stimulus shield and thereby cause trauma. benjamin made a parallel between the protective shield and the camera, which mediates shock and thereby deflects any deeper psychological impact. ever since the invention of photography viewers have been adjusting their perceptual apparatus to cope with visual shock, leading to an ever-increas- ing intensity of media effects to capture viewers’ attention. the experience of mediated shock in modern consumer societies has accelerated the destruction of earlier cultural taboos and traditional values: what was shocking yesterday media traumatization, symbolic wounds and digital culture allen meek cm : communication and media xi( ) – © cdi may be just boring today or next week. whereas the media-saturated viewer in technologically advanced societies is often assumed to be morally jaded and un- responsive to shock, digital technologies are allowing individuals and groups to transmit and circulate images that can help to re-invigorate community belong- ing and collective action. images of police violence against african americans, for example, may be ‘old news’ but recent events captured on mobile-phone cameras and posted on the internet have prompted acts of protest, mourning and retaliatory violence. . subincision in the following discussion i want to reconsider debates about media trau- matization by focusing on a specific film that has been used in research on stress films: subincision rites of the arunta, made by psychoanalyst geza roheim in while conducting fieldwork with the aboriginal tribe in australia. this film has been repeatedly used in research studies for the purpose of deliberately causing distress to american viewers (lazarus et al., ; horowitz, ). none of these studies has considered the cultural significance of the ritual shown in the film, which roheim interpreted using freud’s theory of the primal horde: the violence acted out the collective guilt for the murder of the primal father by the younger males (freud, ). in the s, psychoanalyst bruno bettelheim discussed the cultural practice of subincision in terms of “sym- bolic wounds” allowing for self-transformations that enhanced social status and group membership. what such psychoanalytic theories stressed, which was discounted in later laboratory-based research on media traumatization, was the ways in which violence could enable individual self-transformation and group participation. digital culture has provided new evidence to suggest that symbolic wounds can be seen as functioning in new technologically-mediated forms. those who required audiences to watch subincision expected them to be disturbed by what they saw. today, however, a quick google videos search of ‘subincision’ reveals a sub-genre of pornography in which genital mutilation is presented to induce sexual excitement and pleasure, even if for others it may be the object of horror or disgust. viewers may now use the internet to access the decapitation videos produced by isis, for example, and engage in a range of possible identifications with this violent scenario. these videos are designed, as indeed were the / media traumatization, symbolic wounds and digital culture allen meek cm : communication and media xi( ) – © cdi attacks, not only to shock but also to recruit. the internet allows us to see this range of different negotiations articulated in videos and commentaries posted by non-professional users. for example, counter to the televisual narrative depicting america as the innocent victim of a terrorist attack, the internet has helped to foster new political communities, such as the / truth movement, that challenge the dominant account. jeffrey alexander has described cultural traumas as “wounds to social iden- tity” (alexander, : ). in subincision the wounds inflicted by genital muti- lation define group membership. psychological studies showed that the viewing of subincision also produced effects that suggested a shared experience of stress in an entirely different cultural context. today individuals interact with com- munication technologies and information networks that allow more private negotiations of thresholds of shock and potential psychological disturbance. the wounds that serve as a basis of identity in tribal communities suggest that violence may continue to define social belonging in more ‘advanced’ societies, if only in the increasingly dislocated and disembodied forms made possible by technological media. in traditional societies ritual defines social membership; in modern mass societies, mass media construct narratives about collective memory and identity; in networked societies, images can prompt the forma- tion of less centrally-controlled political communities. in each case symbolic wounds play a role in mobilizing and managing group membership. symbolic wounds now perform an important function in alternative, subcultural and counter-hegemonic narratives about identity in digital culture. in the study that he led at the university of california observing the psy- chological stress caused by watching a film, richard lazarus selected subinci- sion. lazarus describes the contents of the film: “it depicts one of the important ceremonials of this tribe and very vividly presents a sequence of crude operations performed with a piece of flint on the penis and scrotum of several adolescent boys. the running length is minutes and the film is silent.” (lazarus et al., : ) evaluating the effects of watching this film, lazarus and his team used personality assessment and measured skin resistance and heart rate and ana- lysed urine samples to assess biochemical response (lazarus et al., : ). the screening was followed by a questionnaire-interview asking the subjects to describe their responses to the film and recall what they saw. the participants media traumatization, symbolic wounds and digital culture allen meek cm : communication and media xi( ) – © cdi were recruited from psychology courses at the university of california. in their concluding remarks lazarus et al. suggest that further research might consider “what types of content produce stress in a given amount and pattern and in particular classes of people,” given the “nudity of the natives” and “the homo- sexual implications of their behaviour”, and also “what might happen if the same subject watched the film over and over again” (lazarus et al., : ). these directions for further research point to questions of cultural meaning and social identity and of technological effects (possibly inducing desensitization) that were excluded from consideration in this initial study. in his study, mardi horowitz used subincision again because of its previous use in such experiments. he provides a more detailed description of the film’s content: “the film setting is the australian bush, and it depicts naked natives en- gaged in a harsh puberty rite. scenes of extensive penile surgery, bleeding wounds, and adolescents writhing and wincing with pain are repeated sev- eral times. the boys appear to volunteer for this painful procedure, which is conducted by older men.” (horowitz, : ) both lazarus and horowitz mention the explicit visibility of the boys’ genitals – something that was taboo in television and hollywood cinema in the early s (and indeed remains largely so today). fifty years later (perhaps due to the cultural impact of the / attacks) this research was reconsidered in the new context of trauma theory. for example, in his study of holocaust films, joshua hirsch refers to the research by lazarus and horowitz that uses subincision as evidence that “film viewing can lead to symptoms of posttraumatic stress” (hirsch, : ). hirsch combines this proposition with the psychotherapeutic concept of “vicarious trauma” trans- mitted from a traumatized person to a witness, loved one or family member. whereas he acknowledges that watching a film can be more emotionally re- moved than a direct experience of trauma or contact with one who has had such an experience, he nevertheless proposes that the effects of film viewing might include “shock, intrusive imagery, grief, depression, numbing, guilt feelings, and loss of faith in humanity” (hirsch, : ). hirsch’s own example of film causing vicarious trauma is the footage taken during the liberation of the nazi death camps. hirsch uses earlier research, in which visually taboo mate- rial was used to disturb an american audience, to explain how these images of media traumatization, symbolic wounds and digital culture allen meek cm : communication and media xi( ) – © cdi emaciated, naked corpses and mass death were traumatic. psychological studies in which the cultural context was discounted are used by hirsch to make much larger claims about the cultural trauma of the holocaust. these broader claims, however, remain within the perpetrator-victim/media-viewer analogy. ruth leys also refers to horowitz’s research in the context of discussing the holocaust. according to leys, horowitz distinguished between different types of images, including “memory fragments, reconstructions, reinterpreta- tions, and symbols” (leys, : ). traumatic images, therefore, need not be understood as the literal trace of an event but can involve role-playing, imagination and fantasy shaped by “unconscious wishes, fears, and memories” (leys, : ). leys argues that the studies by lazarus and horowitz that used subincision also tended towards a literal conception of the image and em- phasized the impact of external stimuli, thereby excluding from consideration more complex models of identification (leys, : – ). this argument could also be applied to hirsch’s claims, which do not adequately address how viewers see the holocaust as part of their cultural identity. these arguments by hirsch and leys draw out some of the wider implications of the research on stress films and how it raises questions about historical context and unconscious motivation. in his discussion of the studies by lazarus and horowitz and the later commentary by leys, amit pinchevski emphasizes the central role of media technologies, which tends to be downplayed in all of this research. pinchevski argues that the understanding of traumatic memories as intrusive images “must owe something to the film apparatus” and “presupposes the technical ability both to record stressful events and to replay these events so as to reproduce stressful effects” (pinchevski, : ). pinchevski then moves from this proposition to pose the question: “is it possible to be traumatized by watching a catastrophic event on television?” ( : ). pinchevski’s emphasis on the role of media is important, but he tends to return to the problem of external stimuli rather than internal identification. both the psychological research of the s and more recent research in trauma studies has repeatedly returned to subincision. the following section considers how this film might also prompt us to reconsider the notion of symbolic wounds as a way of understanding media traumatization in digital culture. media traumatization, symbolic wounds and digital culture allen meek cm : communication and media xi( ) – © cdi . roheim, bettelheim and the symbolic wound the psychological studies of the effects of subincision did not consider cul- tural factors as a defining influence on viewers’ response. nor did they acknowl- edge that the man who produced the film, geza roheim, was a close associate of freud and that his study of initiation rituals in a tribal society was framed by freudian theories of group identity. roheim did his clinical training at the budapest institute of psychoanalysis. his conception of “psychoanalytic an- thropology” initially involved interpretations of folklore and mythologies, but his ethnographic fieldwork in the south pacific between and led to specific studies of totemism in australian aboriginal culture. roheim was heav- ily influenced by freud’s theory that the totem animal used in sacrificial ritual was a substitute for the primal father who had been murdered by the young males in the tribe, who were envious of his sexual power over women (le barre, : – ; robinson, : – ). the sense of shared guilt for this crime led to the establishment of the incest taboo (freud, ). without at- tempting to resuscitate freud’s theories of the primal horde, we must neverthe- less acknowledge that the repeated use of this film opens up a range of questions about cultural identity, cross-cultural understanding and social belonging that have often been excluded from research on the media transmission of trauma. mediated trauma is intrinsically bound to these questions. roheim’s psychoanalytic interpretations of myth and ritual were completely out of favour in the academic environment that later used his film of the sub- incision rite to induce stress in viewers. an important difference between ro- heim’s interpretation and the psychological research that uses his film was that he sought to understand aboriginal ritual (if only from a eurocentric, evolu- tionist perspective) whereas for these researchers in the s both the cultural context and symbolic meaning were discounted in the research findings. the historical context for research on stress films would have to include the mass media of television and newspapers that, especially after the revelations of the nazi death camps in , made available more shocking and disturbing im- ages that pre-war censorship did not allow. this media exposure to violence and catastrophe would further intensify as the s progressed. this was also the era of cold war ideology and propaganda, with its campaigns of fear about the bomb and mass destruction. media traumatization, symbolic wounds and digital culture allen meek cm : communication and media xi( ) – © cdi in his study of initiation rituals, symbolic wounds, bruno bettelheim dis- cusses the use of subincision by the arunta with specific reference to roheim’s research. he argues against roheim’s interpretation of the ritual as sadistically imposed by the male elders (as embodiments of the tribal superego) and argues instead that symbolic wounds also enhance cultural identity and empower the participant (bettelheim, : – , – ). to support his argument bettelheim cites an example from s america: “the contention that these physical traumata may be felt as painful but not as cruel, and hence not as traumata in the psychological sense, seems sup- ported by the experience of persons undergoing cosmetic plastic surgery. nobody i know has regarded such surgery as “cruel”; even the pain seems reduced by the desire with which the operations are approached.” (bettel- heim, : ) following the logic of bettelheim’s argument one could also argue that the emphasis on the subincision ritual being distressing for americans to watch fails to acknowledge the positive, enhancing value that the physical transformation has for its participants. as bettelheim explained, initiation is not only endured and demanded by social hierarchies but is also invested with desire ( : ). bettelheim suggested an important perspective on the subincision ritual that has been ignored in the subsequent research that uses roheim’s film. if the violence and pain shown in the film could be used to induce discomfort for viewers, then the affirmative value of the ritual for the participants in the film could also potentially be transferred onto the viewing experience. the viewer might endure the stress provoked by a film or media image as a means of self-transformation and group participation. this possibility is implied but not directly acknowledged in hirsch’s discussion of holocaust films: such visual documents can be used not only to transmit trauma but also in new contexts to affirm jewish identity through collective acts of grieving (hirsch, : ) (or to support more sinister identifications with the perpetrators). as viewers ne- gotiate shocking images on the internet or disseminated through social media, they can choose to engage with the image in ways that are no longer framed by the discourses of academic researchers, media professionals or politicians. the second half of the twentieth century was characterized by the emer- gence of narratives about collective identity linked with media images of war, atrocity, genocide and terror. the breakdown of visual taboos and the political media traumatization, symbolic wounds and digital culture allen meek cm : communication and media xi( ) – © cdi uses of fear and terror have been accompanied by the refashioning of national narratives around extreme events such as the holocaust and / (alexander, ). in the twenty-first century digital technologies are reconfiguring this use of images and showing how smaller groups and communities can be empow- ered rather than positioned as passive victims and docile subjects by corporate media or the state. . digital wounds: after / digital media allow a proliferation of traumatic images that generate a mul- tiplicity of competing discourses and identifications. newspapers and network television are losing some of their monopoly on cultural trauma narratives. this development is not all good news. for example, although television and cinema have popularized the holocaust as a cultural trauma, internet users can more freely engage with ‘alternative’ narratives, such as holocaust denial. a substan- tial archive of video material on youtube expounds conspiracy theories related to national traumas such as the assassination of j.f.k. or the / attacks. universalizing claims about media traumatization are becoming less convinc- ing due to growing evidence online that media images invite a wider range of responses and interpretations. when specific events, such as the / attacks, are given the status of ‘traumatic’ for large populations, they are elevated from ‘just another’ image of death and suffering to a cause of psychological stress or a cultural and political crisis. the numerous video recordings made by ordinary citizens of the attacks were subsequently ‘captured’ by network television and orchestrated into a nar- rative of national trauma. images of the attacks were re-played obsessively on television in the hours and weeks that followed them. this repetition helped to establish the events as a social wound inviting collective identification. these recordings, nevertheless, continue to have an afterlife on youtube, revealing a range of responses to the unfolding events that includes not only distress but also conspiracy theorizing and even amusement. mitchell describes / as an attack on the collective nervous system, producing “a state of panic, anxiety, or depression, or even worse, in a psy- chotic state, generating hallucinations and paranoid fantasies” ( : ). here mitchell ascribes a collective psychological state to the american people. but it would be more accurate to see what he calls a “war of images” as conforming to media traumatization, symbolic wounds and digital culture allen meek cm : communication and media xi( ) – © cdi a logic that is a long established feature of technologically mediated societies. the isis decapitation videos are a clear example of this logic: they present an image of otherness or barbarism, a kind of absolute threat to western “civilized” values. yet in their presentation styles, their use of digital cameras and editing, their production of high definition images and musical soundtracks etc., they participate in a visual language that is also used in advertising, music videos and numerous other audio-visual genres. they do not necessarily pose a trau- matic intrusion into the collective nervous system or a penetration of collective psychological defences. rather they participate in a cultural system of image consumption attracted and repelled by shock and voyeuristic fascination. isis decapitation videos use ritual slaughter to make a symbolic challenge to west- ern hegemony. the ‘correct’ response to these videos in the west is outrage and disgust. but these executions of hostages are performed in the name of many innocent victims of western military interventions in the middle east. the videos act out the traditional sovereign power of god and state and in doing so invite others to dedicate their lives to a political struggle. these images, deemed “traumatic” for western viewers, can also be understood as symbolic wounds inviting positive identification for those who support physical violence as a challenge to western interests and interventions in the middle east. images of violence and catastrophe are consumed, self-censored and ne- gotiated as a regular occurrence for the contemporary media user. for most media users psychological defences are relatively secure unless the violence or catastrophe poses some immediate threat to their lives or loved ones. discourses about the psychological vulnerability of large populations can be seen as part of the apparatus of surveillance (meek, : ) but they also invite viewers to self-examine and regulate their consumption of stress-inducing images. in a neoliberal society where individuals are required to manage higher levels of risk and therefore also higher levels of fear and anxiety, the media user learns to monitor his/her own resilience, coping mechanisms and levels of distress. the assumption of research on media traumatization appears to be that it measures psychological damage and social cost. but shock and trauma can also be a ‘gain’, marking a transition into a new identity and increasing the power of the body and the group to sustain itself despite experiencing physical or psychological distress. media traumatization, symbolic wounds and digital culture allen meek cm : communication and media xi( ) – © cdi this potential for traumatic images to function as symbolic wounds mobi- lizing political action became clear in the arab spring. in june nedā Āghā soltān was shot during election protests in iran and her subsequent death, two minutes later, was recorded and posted on the internet. she became an icon of the political struggle in iran. in khaled said was beaten to death by police in egypt. the image of his battered face was recorded on a mobile-phone camera by his brother and circulated to thousands of other phones. a facebook group “we are all khaled said” was also established (howard & hussain, : ). the new digital image-producing technologies and social networks allowed traumatic images to challenge the authority of the arab states. the violence per- petrated by the state against the people could be transformed by digital media into symbolic wounds mobilizing struggles for democracy. established media, particularly the al jazeera television network, also played important roles in these political movements. but it was mobile cameras that made it possible for ordinary citizens to capture and circulate traumatic images in ways that eluded the control of the state (khondker, : ). distinctions between victim, perpetrator, witness and bystander remain important for understanding the shifting subject positions of traumatic identi- fication (kaplan, : ), but the relations between these different positions can be complex. to support acts of violence and their technological recording and transmission for political purposes requires identification not only with the perpetrators, but also with those other victims in whose name the violence is perpetrated. recording and transmitting images of suffering and death may be done out of sympathy with the victims, but can also be used to justify further acts of violence. looking at any image of violence and suffering may be driven by mere curiosity or voyeuristic desire. what the term “symbolic wound” po- tentially contributes to our understanding of this shifting dynamic of suffering, perpetrating and witnessing is that wounds have symbolic currency, transmit- ting cultural meanings about social membership. the meaning of pain is not ‘traumatic’ in any single sense but is unstable and transformative. to under- stand mediated trauma we need to move beyond the fundamental distinction between who induces and who suffers pain. once violence and suffering are recorded and transmitted to viewers the images enter a new symbolic economy that allows for various positions of identification, interpretation and responsive action. media traumatization, symbolic wounds and digital culture allen meek cm : communication and media xi( ) – © cdi in america digital media have also made more visible the violence perpe- trated by the state against african americans. in , the shooting and killing by police of alton sterling in louisiana and philando castile in minnesota were both recorded on mobile-phone cameras and posted on social media, again leading to widespread protest and further violence. castile’s actual death was streamed “live” on facebook by his partner diamond reynolds. the pro- tests against the killings of african americans by police have become associated with the increasing public visibility of black lives matter (blm), a civil rights movement that began on facebook in . this use of communication tech- nologies made visible to a potentially unlimited viewing public what many had known about for decades. the killing of african americans by police, whether judged lawful or not, acts out the state’s power over life and death. the videos that show this exercise of state power provoke others to challenge the legitimacy of this violence. as a contemporary civil rights movement blm is distinguished from its forerunners by its dissociation from established organizations like the church and democratic party and by its lack of reliance on charismatic leaders such as martin luther king or jesse jackson. blm is a decentralized movement that emphasizes localized action but, as in the arab spring, it retains links with corporate media. celebrity singer beyoncé posted messages about the shootings of sterling and castile on her website and “black lives matter” appears as graf- fiti in her “formation” music video. the movement has spread to other coun- tries, for example australia, where it addresses similar issues for aborigines. . conclusions the dominance of centrally controlled media such as newspapers, cinema and television made possible the wide dissemination of narratives about col- lective trauma that were linked to specific images such as those of the nazi death camps or the vietnam war. the / attacks saw a transition to a new multiplicity of recordings of the event made by ordinary citizens that were later orchestrated in presentations by television news and documentary. more recent developments such as the arab spring, the emergence of black lives matter as an international movement, and the propaganda videos produced by isis, show that ‘traumatic’ images can be captured by groups and used to mobilize political struggles that challenge hegemonic power. media traumatization, symbolic wounds and digital culture allen meek cm : communication and media xi( ) – © cdi psychological research on media traumatization involved deliberately in- ducing stress by showing violent and taboo images to unprepared audiences. this research was extended to entire populations after the / attacks. psy- choanalytic perspectives on the transmission of trauma using photographs and audio-visual media suggest a more complex understanding of cultural identification. academic developments informed by psychoanalysis in trauma and holocaust studies, however, have often tended to reproduce the model of trauma as external stimuli impacting on viewers. developments in digital cul- ture allow us to see a more proactive production and mobilizing of traumatic images by a more diverse range of individuals and groups. the idea of ‘symbolic wounds’ as a means of self-transformation and group participation may offer a useful corrective to the dominant idea of cultural trauma. individual media users and social networks share potentially shocking or disturbing images as a means of constructing social identity. what research in the s called stressful can now be seen as enhancing knowledge, social participation and pleasure. modern visual media has played a significant role in redefining political identity through images of violence and catastrophe. digital media technologies are enabling new modes of social and political participation in which ‘traumatic’ images define what constitutes a threat, what is permissible to look at, what can be endured and what can mobilize collective identification and political struggle. media traumatization, symbolic wounds and digital culture allen meek cm : communication and media xi( ) – © cdi references alexander, j. 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  è	
  il	
  luogo	
  degli	
  eventi	
  incorporei	
  e	
  degli	
  attributi	
  distinti	
   dalle	
  qualità.	
  mentre	
  kronos	
  era	
  inseparabile	
  dai	
  corpi	
  che	
  lo	
  riempivano,	
  come	
  cau-­‐‑ se	
  e	
  materie,	
  aiôn	
  è	
  popolato	
  da	
  effetti	
  che	
  lo	
  frequentano	
  senza	
  riempirlo.	
  […]	
  sem-­‐‑ pre	
  già	
  passato	
  ed	
  eternamente	
  ancora	
  da	
  venire,	
  aiôn	
  è	
  la	
  verità	
  eterna	
  del	
  tempo:	
   pura	
  forma	
  vuota	
  del	
  tempo	
  che	
  si	
  è	
  liberata	
  dal	
  suo	
  contenuto	
  corporeo	
  presente	
  e	
   così	
  ha	
  spiegato	
  il	
  suo	
  cerchio	
  (deleuze	
   :	
   -­‐‑ ).	
   	
   È	
  infatti	
  dal	
  punto	
  di	
  vista	
  dell’aiôn,	
  modalità	
  extracorporea	
  e	
  ineffettuale	
  del	
  tempo	
   che	
  si	
  divide	
  in	
  passato	
  e	
  futuro	
  sfuggendo	
  alla	
  trappola	
  dell'identità,	
  che	
  devono	
  essere	
   compresi	
  i	
  divenire	
  dell’alice	
  di	
  carroll.	
  se	
  con	
  kronos	
  possiamo	
  raccontare	
  la	
  storia	
  del	
   susseguirsi	
  degli	
  accadimenti	
  e	
  dei	
  nostri	
  gesti,	
  con	
  aiôn	
  ci	
  è	
  dato	
  affrontare	
  gli	
  eventi	
   che	
  accadono	
  su	
  di	
  un	
  altro	
  piano,	
  quello	
  del	
  pensiero	
  che	
  sperimenta,	
  contro-­‐‑effettua	
  e	
   in	
  tal	
  modo	
  ricava,	
  all'interno	
  degli	
  accadimenti,	
  il	
  senso	
  delle	
  nostre	
  azioni	
  e	
  passioni:	
   «l'evento	
  è	
  […]	
  in	
  ciò	
  che	
  accade»	
  (ivi:	
   ).	
  e	
  questo	
  pensiero,	
  come	
  insegna	
  logica	
  del	
   senso,	
  si	
  muove	
  per	
  paradossi,	
  ossia	
  mediante	
  il	
  superamento	
  delle	
  opinioni,	
  del	
  senso	
   comune	
  e	
  delle	
  immagini	
  che	
  la	
  filosofia,	
  la	
  politica,	
  la	
  scienza,	
  il	
  potere	
  –	
  dalla	
  religione	
   al	
  mercato,	
  dallo	
  stato	
  alla	
  cultura	
  –	
  impongono	
  o	
  suggeriscono	
  per	
  pensare	
  e	
  per	
  veder-­‐‑ ci	
  allo	
  specchio.	
   in	
  tal	
  senso,	
  la	
  deleuziana	
  desidera	
  pensare	
  il	
  divenire	
  di	
  alice	
  come	
  un	
  divenire-­‐‑ donna	
  tanto	
  nella	
  sua	
  a-­‐‑cronologica	
  paradossalità	
  teoretica,	
  quanto	
  in	
  quella	
  politica	
  che	
   l'attualità	
  esprime.	
  consapevole	
  ed	
  entusiasta	
  dell'inscindibilità	
  delle	
  due	
  dimensioni,	
   teoretica	
  e	
  politica,	
  nel	
  pensiero	
  e	
  nella	
  scrittura	
  di	
  deleuze,	
  la	
  rivista	
  suggerisce	
  un	
  per-­‐‑ corso	
  di	
  senso	
  il	
  cui	
  ingresso	
  risiede	
  nella	
  ricognizione	
  più	
  generale	
  del	
  divenire,	
  come	
   movimento	
  del	
  pensiero	
  che	
  si	
  svolge	
  attraverso	
  i	
  suoi	
  personaggi	
  concettuali.	
  si	
  tratta,	
  a	
   ben	
  vedere,	
  di	
  un'entrata	
  particolare,	
  o	
  appunto	
  paradossale,	
  in	
  quanto	
  apre	
  immedia-­‐‑ tamente	
  alla	
  terra	
  di	
  mezzo	
  tra	
  filosofia	
  e	
  letteratura,	
  da	
  cui	
  proviene	
  la	
  stessa	
  alice	
  di	
   deleuze.	
  È	
  infatti	
  nell'interstizio	
  tra	
  il	
  concetto	
  e	
  la	
  scrittura,	
  da	
  cui	
  «si	
  ritorna	
  con	
  gli	
   occhi	
  rossi»	
  (deleuze	
   b:	
   ),	
  che	
  avvengono	
  tanto	
  i	
  divenire	
  (divenire	
  donna,	
  bam-­‐‑ bino,	
   animale,	
   impercettibile	
  ecc.)	
  quanto	
   la	
   creazione	
  dei	
  personaggi	
   concettuali.	
   la	
   porta	
  d'ingresso	
  per	
  il	
  divenire	
  ci	
  permette	
  così	
  di	
  entrare	
  nel	
  fuori,	
  per	
  «respirare	
  un	
   po'	
  di	
  possibile»,	
  vale	
  a	
  dire	
  sentire	
  ed	
  osservare	
  le	
  linee	
  di	
  fuga	
  che	
  il	
  pensiero	
  deleuzia-­‐‑ no	
  mette	
  a	
  disposizione	
  di	
  fronte	
  a	
  un	
  presente	
  sì	
  da	
  schivare,	
  ma	
  per	
  poterlo	
  sorvolare	
  e	
   inventare	
  così	
  le	
  strategie	
  in	
  grado	
  di	
  criticarlo.	
   perché	
  alice?	
  perché	
  diviene	
  ragazzina	
  (jeune-­‐‑fille)	
  e	
  donna	
  nel	
  medesimo	
  istante.	
  È	
   qui	
  opportuno	
  ricordare	
  che,	
   tra	
   tutti	
   i	
   “divenire”,	
   il	
  divenire-­‐‑donna	
  è	
  per	
  deleuze	
  e	
   guattari	
  la	
  precondizione	
  e	
  l’inevitabile	
  punto	
  di	
  partenza	
  per	
  l’intero	
  processo	
  del	
  dive-­‐‑ nire	
  minoritario	
  (deleuze,	
  guattari	
   ).	
  le	
  ragioni	
  di	
  tale	
  incipit	
  sono	
  essenzialmente	
   politiche	
  e	
  rinviano	
  alla	
  valenza	
  fallogocentrica	
  inscritta	
  nella	
  costituzione	
  della	
  sogget-­‐‑ tività	
  occidentale.	
  l’uomo	
  (maschio)	
  è	
  infatti	
  «il	
  referente	
  privilegiato	
  della	
  soggettività,	
   portabandiera	
  della	
  norma/legge/logos	
  [che]	
  rappresenta	
  la	
  maggioranza,	
  il	
  cuore	
  mor-­‐‑ la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  rivista	
  online	
  di	
  filosofia	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  e	
  lo	
  specchio to	
  del	
  sistema»	
  (braidotti	
   :	
   ).	
  di	
  conseguenza,	
  il	
  maschile	
  può	
  essere	
  soltanto	
  il	
   luogo	
  della	
  decostruzione	
  e	
  della	
  critica	
  –	
  non	
  vi	
  è	
  divenire	
  se	
  non	
  minoritario	
  –	
  ma	
  so-­‐‑ prattutto	
  il	
  divenire-­‐‑donna	
  è	
  da	
  intendersi	
  come	
  «il	
  passaggio	
  fondamentale	
  nel	
  proces-­‐‑ so	
  del	
  divenire,	
  per	
  entrambi	
  i	
  sessi».	
  È	
  in	
  tal	
  senso	
  che,	
  per	
  deleuze	
  e	
  guattari,	
  «anche	
  le	
   donne	
  devono	
  divenire	
  donna»,	
  mentre	
  oggi,	
  dalle	
  alpi	
  alle	
  piramidi,	
  dal	
  manzanarre	
  al	
   reno,	
  sembra	
  che	
  la	
  tendenza	
  sia	
  quella	
  di	
  diventare	
  ragazzine	
  –	
  e	
  i	
  selfie	
  o	
  l'uso	
  auto-­‐‑ espositivo	
  delle	
  bacheche	
  digitali	
  della	
  soggettività	
  come	
  facebook	
  rappresentano	
  i	
  sin-­‐‑ tomi	
  di	
  questa	
  puerescenza.	
  	
   chiaramente,	
  la	
  deleuziana,	
  come	
  alice	
  donna	
  e	
  ragazzina	
  nello	
  stesso	
  divenire,	
  non	
   ha	
  alcuna	
  intenzione	
  di	
  scagliarsi	
  né	
  contro	
  un	
  fenomeno	
  di	
  massa	
  né	
  tanto	
  meno	
  contro	
   le	
  tendenze	
  di	
  un	
  genere	
  di	
  cui	
  all'anagrafe	
  anch'essa	
  farebbe	
  parte	
  –	
  e	
  poi,	
  anche	
  lei	
  è	
  su	
   facebook...	
  È	
  quindi	
  venuto	
  il	
  momento	
  di	
  esplicitare	
  il	
  senso	
  dell'essere	
  ragazzina	
  oggi,	
   riprendendo	
  la	
  teoria	
  concepita	
  alla	
  fine	
  del	
  secolo	
  scorso	
  da	
  tiqqun,	
  per	
  cui	
  la	
  jeune-­‐‑ fille	
  è	
  una	
  sorta	
  di	
  aggiornamento	
  dell'antropomorfosi	
  capitalista	
  (cesarano	
   ),	
   il	
   risultato	
  della	
  descrizione	
  fenomenologica	
  del	
  movimento	
  al	
  tempo	
  stesso	
  antropizzante	
   e	
  antropopoietico	
  del	
  capitale.	
  quest'ultimo	
  si	
  fa	
  uomo,	
  si	
  incarna	
  in	
  esso,	
  e	
  così	
  fa	
  di	
   ogni	
  uomo	
  una	
  parte	
  di	
  sé	
  –	
  costruendo	
  l'umano	
  a	
  partire	
  dai	
  propri	
  assiomi.	
  in	
  tal	
  sen-­‐‑ so,	
  ci	
  sentiamo	
  di	
  aggiungere,	
  andrebbe	
  indagata	
  concettualmente	
  anche	
  la	
  paradossale	
   femminilizzazione	
  del	
  lavoro	
  che	
  colora	
  di	
  affetti	
  e	
  di	
  soprusi	
  il	
  capitalismo	
  cognitivo	
  al	
   di	
  là	
  e	
  al	
  di	
  qua	
  di	
  qualsiasi	
  distinzione	
  di	
  genere.	
  oltre	
  a	
  ciò,	
  e	
  in	
  linea	
  con	
  il	
  poscritto	
   sulle	
  società	
  di	
  controllo,	
  mediante	
  la	
  jeune-­‐‑fille	
  ci	
  è	
  possibile	
  comprendere	
  in	
  modo	
  ot-­‐‑ timale	
  la	
  valorizzazione	
  delle	
  differenze	
  individuali	
  da	
  parte	
  del	
  marketing	
  e	
  del	
  data	
   behaviourism	
  (rouvroy	
   ),	
  in	
  quanto	
  loro	
  promozione	
  e	
  messa	
  a	
  valore	
  economico,	
   caratteristica	
  delle	
  società	
  di	
  post-­‐‑disciplinari.	
  	
   perché	
  la	
  jeune-­‐‑fille?	
  innanzitutto	
  perché	
  “essa”	
  non	
  è	
  un	
  concetto	
  sessuato	
  o	
  gene-­‐‑ razionale	
  e	
  quindi	
  confinabile	
  in	
  una	
  singola	
  figura	
  sociale,	
  la	
  ragazzina	
  appunto,	
  dato	
   che	
  può	
  identificare	
  qualsiasi	
  soggetto	
  –	
  il	
  maschio,	
   in	
  primis	
  –	
  che	
  incarni	
  il	
  divenire	
   merce	
  dell'umano.	
  perché,	
  in	
  sostanza,	
  «non	
  è	
  altro	
  che	
  il	
  cittadino	
  modello	
  quale	
  la	
  so-­‐‑ cietà	
  mercantile	
  lo	
  ridefinisce	
  a	
  partire	
  dalla	
  prima	
  guerra	
  mondiale,	
  in	
  risposta	
  esplicita	
   alla	
  minaccia	
  rivoluzionaria»	
  (tiqqun	
   :	
   ).	
  perché,	
  infine,	
  in	
  quanto	
  prodotto	
  della	
   messa	
  a	
  valore	
  della	
  differenza,	
  la	
  jeune-­‐‑fille	
  diviene	
  una	
  singolarità	
  perennemente	
  allo	
   specchio	
  e	
  «sarà	
  dunque	
  quell'essere	
  che	
  non	
  avrà	
  più	
  alcuna	
  intimità	
  con	
  se	
  stesso	
  se	
   non	
  in	
  quanto	
  valore,	
  e	
  di	
  cui	
  tutta	
  l'attività,	
  in	
  ogni	
  dettaglio,	
  sarà	
  finalizzata	
  alla	
  propria	
   autovalorizzazione»	
  (ivi:	
   ).	
  ecco	
  allora	
  il	
  selfie,	
  come	
  specchio	
  attuale	
  della	
  jeune-­‐‑fille,	
   lo	
  schermo	
  contemporaneo	
  che,	
  nell'autovalorizzazione	
  dell'utente,	
  dà	
  sfogo	
  al	
  sintomo	
   della	
  nevrosi	
  della	
  presenza	
  e	
  del	
  presente;	
  una	
  nevrosi	
  che	
  si	
  sposa	
  con	
  la	
  miseria	
  sim-­‐‑ bolica	
  generata	
  dall'ipertrofia	
  della	
  comunicazione	
  sui	
  social	
  networks	
  e	
  dai	
  loro	
  modelli	
   comunicativi.	
  	
   a	
  differenza	
  di	
  tiqqun,	
  però,	
  non	
  (ci)	
  pensiamo	
  dall’alto	
  di	
  una	
  immunità	
  teorica	
  e	
  po-­‐‑ la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  rivista	
  online	
  di	
  filosofia	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  e	
  lo	
  specchio litica,	
  come	
  adamantine	
  soggettività	
  rivoluzionarie ,	
  poiché	
  siamo	
  consci	
  del	
  milieu	
  del	
   controllo	
  capitalista,	
  quello	
  appunto	
  degli	
  schermi	
  digitali,	
  nel	
  quale	
  bagnano	
  i	
  nostri	
   inconsci.	
  occorre	
  del	
  resto	
  essere	
  consapevoli,	
  come	
  indica	
  véronique	
  bergen	
  in	
  questo	
   numero,	
  della	
   tendenziale	
   cattura	
  dell’aiôn,	
   ossia	
  dei	
  divenire,	
  da	
  parte	
  del	
  mercato:	
   l’aiôn	
  è	
  sempre	
  più	
  riterritorializzato	
  e,	
  quindi,	
  cronologizzato.	
  tuttavia,	
  o	
  forse	
  proprio	
   per	
  tale	
  ragione,	
  se	
  non	
  fossimo	
  già	
  pericolosamente	
  immersi	
  in	
  questo	
  presente	
  crono-­‐‑ logico	
  che	
  offre	
  solo	
  differenze	
  e	
  nomadismi	
  sterilizzati,	
  sarebbe	
  forse	
  impossibile	
  desi-­‐‑ derare	
   l’aiôn,	
   impossibile	
  dunque	
  sarebbe	
   il	
  divenire,	
   in	
  primis	
  quello	
   rivoluzionario.	
   sarebbe	
  come	
  voler	
  essere	
  degni	
  di	
  quel	
  che	
  accade	
  agli	
  altri.	
  per	
  lo	
  stesso	
  motivo,	
  non	
   piangiamo,	
  non	
  speriamo,	
  ma	
  proviamo	
  a	
  trovare	
  nuove	
  armi,	
  seguendo	
  il	
  suggerimento	
   parodistico	
  di	
  un’arte	
  del	
  controllo	
  che	
  deleuze	
  indicava	
  nella	
  lettera	
  a	
  serge	
  daney:	
   	
   la	
  televisione	
  è	
  la	
  forma	
  sotto	
  la	
  quale	
  i	
  nuovi	
  poteri	
  del	
  “controllo”	
  divengono	
  im-­‐‑ mediati	
  e	
  diretti.	
  andare	
  al	
  cuore	
  di	
  questo	
  confronto,	
  significherebbe	
  chiedersi	
  se	
  il	
   controllo	
  non	
  possa	
  essere	
  rovesciato,	
  messo	
  al	
  servizio	
  della	
  funzione	
  supplemen-­‐‑ tare	
  che	
  si	
  oppone	
  al	
  potere:	
  inventare	
  un’arte	
  del	
  controllo,	
  che	
  sarebbe	
  come	
  una	
   nuova	
  resistenza	
  (deleuze	
   a:	
   ).	
   	
   ieri	
  la	
  televisione,	
  oggi	
  il	
  selfie	
  e	
  social	
  networks:	
  termini	
  quasi	
  incompossibili	
  per	
  un	
   marziano	
   che	
   volesse	
   imparare	
   l'inglese,	
   ma	
   tuttavia	
   funzionali	
   l'uno	
   all'altro	
   per	
   lo	
   sfruttamento	
  capitalistico	
  delle	
  relazioni	
  (stiegler	
   )	
  e	
  gemellati	
  da	
  sua	
  santità	
   la	
   comunicazione.	
  che	
  il	
  selfie,	
  sorta	
  di	
  monadografia	
  del	
  xxi	
  secolo,	
  abbia	
  preso	
  così	
  cam-­‐‑ po	
  da	
  essere	
  diventata	
  la	
  pratica	
  più	
  gettonata	
  sulle	
  cosiddette	
  reti	
  sociali,	
  non	
  può	
  non	
   far	
  riflettere.	
  probabilmente	
  è	
  una	
  reazione	
  per	
  qualcosa	
  che	
  non	
  c'è	
  più,	
  e	
  proprio	
  per-­‐‑ ché	
  manca,	
  il	
  capitalismo	
  –	
  artista	
  della	
  mancanza	
  –	
  ne	
  ostenta	
  la	
  presenza.	
  già	
  tempo	
  fa	
   deleuze,	
  con	
  klee,	
  diceva	
  che	
  “manca	
  il	
  popolo”,	
  oggi	
  diremmo	
  che	
  è	
  “il	
  sociale	
  che	
  man-­‐‑ ca”.	
  il	
  social	
  sembra	
  infatti	
  sostituire	
  il	
  sociale,	
  svuotandolo	
  di	
  significato,	
  al	
  punto	
  che	
   l'individuazione	
  psichica	
  e	
  collettiva	
  (simondon	
   )	
  si	
  perde	
  nei	
  fiumiciattoli	
  dell'in-­‐‑ dividualizzazione,	
  e	
  la	
  cura	
  di	
  sé	
  e	
  degli	
  altri	
  (foucault	
   )	
  –	
  senza	
  cui	
  non	
  vi	
  è	
  com-­‐‑ plicità,	
  né	
  solidarietà	
  –	
  degenera	
  nella	
  cura	
  del	
  selfie	
  e	
  degli	
  avatar	
  –	
  ossia	
  il	
  grado	
  zero	
   della	
  socialità,	
  in	
  cui	
  si	
  è	
  uniti	
  solo	
  dall'adesione	
  pulsionale	
  a	
  quel	
  che	
  ci	
  viene	
  offerto,	
   come	
  monadi	
  che	
  possono	
  toccarsi	
  solo	
  attraverso	
  gli	
  schermi,	
  nemmeno	
  di	
  profilo,	
  ben-­‐‑ sì	
  di	
  profiling.	
  e	
  se	
  lo	
  specchio,	
  come	
  quello	
  d'acqua	
  in	
  cui	
  è	
  caduto	
  narciso,	
  forse	
  è	
  stato	
   il	
  primo	
  schermo,	
  nel	
  caso	
  del	
  mito	
  non	
  si	
  è	
  trattato	
  di	
  selfie,	
  né	
  di	
  stupidità,	
  perché	
  en-­‐‑ trambi,	
  per	
  come	
  li	
  conosciamo,	
  sono	
  i	
  prodotti	
  del	
  più	
  soporifero	
  dei	
  poteri,	
  quello	
  capi-­‐‑ talista,	
  che	
  oggi	
  scatena	
  le	
  pulsioni	
  per	
  annichilire	
  il	
  desiderio.	
  la	
  jeune-­‐‑fille	
  in	
  selfie	
  e	
   per	
  selfie	
  esprime	
  perciò	
  il	
  regredire	
  a	
  merce	
  pulsionale	
  dei	
  processi	
  di	
  soggettivazione,	
  i	
   quali	
  funzionano	
  come	
  percorsi	
  recintati	
  in	
  vista	
  di	
  una	
  jouissance	
  essenzialmente	
  cieca	
   ed	
  entropica,	
  in	
  quanto	
  interamente	
  appiattita	
  sul	
  consumo.	
  	
   	
   per	
  una	
  critica	
  delle	
  posizioni	
  e	
  dell’auto-­‐‑posizionamento	
  di	
  tiqqun,	
  cfr.	
  consigliere,	
  paravagna	
   . la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  rivista	
  online	
  di	
  filosofia	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  e	
  lo	
  specchio se	
  il	
  desiderio	
  è	
  per	
  deleuze	
  e	
  guattari	
  una	
  forza	
  sociale	
  produttiva,	
  neghentropica	
  e	
   vitale,	
  non	
  è	
  certo	
  un	
  caso	
  che	
  tiqqun	
  descriva	
  la	
  jeune-­‐‑fille	
  come	
  un	
  cadavere	
  truccato	
   in	
  modo	
  impeccabile,	
  oggi	
  anche	
  grazie	
  a	
  tutti	
  i	
  filtri	
  e	
  i	
  ritocchi	
  di	
  instagram,	
  photoshop	
   o	
  degli	
  smartphones.	
  alice,	
  invece,	
  anche	
  se	
  di	
  fronte	
  allo	
  specchio,	
  non	
  ha	
  bisogno	
  di	
   trucco,	
  né	
  di	
  pose	
  sexy	
  o	
  sbarazzine,	
  di	
  tag	
  o	
  condivisioni,	
  non	
  ha	
  neanche	
  un'identità	
  o	
   un	
  nickname,	
  il	
  suo	
  divenire	
  sfugge	
  ai	
  cookies	
  e	
  ai	
  profiling	
  e	
  non	
  le	
  serve	
  nemmeno	
  fare	
   un	
  login,	
  poiché	
  ha	
  già	
  la	
  sua	
  «carta	
  d'intensità».	
  ci	
  piace	
  perciò	
  immaginare	
  che	
  alice,	
   tra	
  i	
  suoi	
  divenire,	
  divenga	
  anche	
  la	
  deleuziana,	
  e	
  viceversa.	
  	
   non	
  solo,	
  ma	
  con	
  questo	
  numero	
  vogliamo	
  provare	
  a	
  concretizzare	
  ciò	
  che	
  avevamo	
   scritto	
  nel	
  manifesto	
  d'esordio:	
  	
   	
   in	
  quanto	
  donna,	
  la	
  deleuziana	
  è	
  la	
  risposta	
  alla	
  jeune-­‐‑fille	
  del	
  capitalismo,	
  dunque	
   alla	
  soggettività-­‐‑merce	
  verso	
  cui	
  il	
  desiderio	
  viene	
  sistematicamente	
  indirizzato	
  e,	
  in	
   tal	
  modo,	
  distrutto	
  a	
  favore	
  del	
  calcolo	
  algoritmico	
  delle	
  pulsioni.	
  se	
  almeno	
  una	
  vol-­‐‑ ta	
  nella	
  vita	
  è	
  necessario	
  osare,	
  vorremmo	
  che	
  la	
  deleuziana	
  fosse	
  un	
  po'	
  come	
  l'an-­‐‑ ti-­‐‑edipo	
  di	
  quest'epoca,	
  l'anti-­‐‑jeune-­‐‑fille	
  che	
  prova	
  a	
  tracciare	
  la	
  linea	
  di	
  fuga	
  dalle	
   passioni	
  tristi	
  in	
  cui	
  spesso	
  finisce	
  il	
  pensiero .	
  	
   	
   osiamo	
  dunque,	
  magari	
  solo	
  per	
  una	
  volta,	
  e	
  assieme	
  a	
  chi	
  lo	
  desidera,	
  sferrare	
  una	
   raffica	
  di	
  concetti	
  che	
  provino	
  ad	
  esser	
  incisivi	
  sul	
  presente.	
  insomma,	
  ci	
  sembra	
  che	
  il	
   momento	
   sia	
   maturato	
   affinché,	
   come	
   (la)	
   donna,	
   anche	
   la	
   deleuziana	
   divenga	
   deleuziana.	
   	
  perché,	
  infine,	
  abbiamo	
  scelto	
  la	
  donna?	
  perché	
  l'unica	
  arma	
  che	
  ci	
  rimane,	
  il	
  senso	
   critico	
  come	
  potenza	
  di	
  creazione,	
  la	
  possiamo	
  affilare	
  solo	
  con	
  la	
  scrittura	
  –	
  in	
  qualsiasi	
   forma,	
  anche	
  quella	
  digitale	
  –	
  e	
  per	
  deleuze	
  scrivere	
  è	
  divenire-­‐‑donna,	
  «un	
  divenire	
   donna	
  che	
  si	
  può	
  ottenere	
  solo	
  con	
  il	
  combattimento»	
  contro	
  le	
  forze	
  che	
  tentano	
  di	
  farci	
   regredire	
  nelle	
  forme	
  sempre	
  attuali	
  di	
  stupidità	
  e	
  di	
  micro-­‐‑fascismo.	
  e	
  la	
  donna	
  può	
  es-­‐‑ sere	
  tutto,	
   tranne	
  che	
  fascismo.	
  più	
   in	
  generale,	
   il	
  gesto	
  vitale	
  ed	
  emancipativo	
  della	
   scrittura	
  consiste	
  nel	
  congiungere	
  i	
  flussi	
  molecolari	
  che	
  attraversano	
  i	
  soggetti	
  e	
  i	
  loro	
   segmenti	
  identitari	
  (genere,	
  specie,	
  etnie,	
  età,	
  classi,	
  ecc.)	
  per	
  portarli	
  alle	
  soglie	
  della	
   dis-­‐‑indentificazione,	
  che	
  sola	
  può	
  permettere	
  alleanze	
  rivoluzionarie	
  tra	
  le	
  minoranze	
  –	
   e	
  c'è	
  da	
  stare	
  certi	
  del	
  fatto	
  che,	
  in	
  politica	
  e	
  nel	
  sociale,	
  finché	
  c'è	
  vita	
  c'è	
  minoranza.	
   inoltre,	
  il	
  divenire-­‐‑donna	
  della	
  scrittura,	
  l'essere	
  minoranza	
  persino	
  di	
  fronte	
  alla	
  pro-­‐‑ pria	
  identità,	
  che	
  deleuze	
  vede	
  praticato	
  da	
  moltissimi	
  scrittori	
  (kafka,	
  james,	
  lawrence,	
   miller,	
  e	
   la	
  stessa	
  virginia	
  woolf),	
  non	
  consiste	
  nello	
  “scrivere	
  come”	
  una	
  donna,	
  così	
   come	
   il	
  divenire-­‐‑animale	
  non	
  si	
  raggiunge	
  “imitando”	
  o	
  “facendo”	
   l’animale,	
  bensì	
  al-­‐‑ leandosi	
  con	
  chi	
  subisce	
  gli	
  effetti	
  di	
  una	
  maggioranza.	
  	
   ecco	
  dunque	
  un	
  primo	
  passo	
  per	
  ricostruire	
  il	
  sociale	
  che	
  manca:	
  scrivere	
  per	
  traccia-­‐‑ re	
  una	
  linea	
  che	
  ci	
  dis-­‐‑identifica	
  e	
  incontrarne	
  un’altra	
  che	
  riesca	
  a	
  congiungersi	
  con	
  la	
   	
   il	
  manifesto	
  è	
  consultabile	
  alla	
  pagina:	
  http://www.ladeleuziana.org/manifesto/ la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  rivista	
  online	
  di	
  filosofia	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  e	
  lo	
  specchio nostra.	
  anche	
  per	
  questo	
  motivo,	
  donna	
  ci	
  pare	
  il	
  nome	
  da	
  dare	
  alle	
  strategie	
  di	
  trasfor-­‐‑ mazione	
  e	
  di	
  contro-­‐‑effettuazione	
  del	
  torrente	
  di	
  eventi	
  che	
  sta	
  annichilendo	
  il	
  pensiero	
   critico.	
   donna	
   come	
   la	
   grecia,	
   come	
   lampedusa,	
   come	
   la	
   luna	
   e	
   la	
   terra,	
   come	
   la	
   (geo)filosofia.	
  	
   	
   	
   contenuti	
   	
   abbiamo	
  deciso	
  di	
  aprire	
   il	
  numero	
   	
  della	
  rivista	
  con	
  una	
  specie	
  di	
  omaggio	
  che	
   véronique	
  bergen	
  ha	
  inviato	
  alla	
  redazione,	
  dopo	
  aver	
  letto	
  la	
  call	
  for	
  paper.	
  È	
  un	
  ritrat-­‐‑ to	
  di	
  la	
  deleuziana,	
  che	
  il	
  lettore	
  può	
  trovare	
  in	
  francese	
  (nella	
  sua	
  versione	
  originale),	
   in	
  inglese	
  e	
  in	
  italiano.	
  questo	
  ritratto,	
  generoso	
  e	
  critico,	
  lucido	
  e	
  visionario	
  al	
  tempo	
   stesso,	
  rappresenta	
  per	
  noi	
  una	
  sorta	
  di	
  secondo	
  manifesto,	
  del	
  quale	
  cercheremo	
  di	
  di-­‐‑ venire	
  degni.	
   come	
  nei	
  numeri	
  precedenti,	
  la	
  deleuziana	
  propone	
  un	
  percorso	
  di	
  senso	
  attraverso	
   le	
  sue	
  rubriche,	
  al	
  fine	
  di	
  dischiudere	
  gli	
  elementi	
  principali	
  indicati	
  dalla	
  call	
  for	
  paper.	
   così,	
   all’interno	
  della	
   sezione	
   “necessità/concetti”,	
   si	
   trovano	
   tre	
  diversi	
  approfondi-­‐‑ menti	
  teorici	
  relativi	
  a	
  ciò	
  che	
  può	
  significare	
  il	
  punto	
  di	
  vista	
  di	
  alice	
  sul	
  nostro	
  presen-­‐‑ te.	
  il	
  testo	
  di	
  rosi	
  braidotti,	
  vitalismo	
  –	
  materia	
  –	
  affermazione	
  (trascrizione	
  di	
  una	
  le-­‐‑ zione	
  tenuta	
  a	
  bologna	
  il	
   	
  ottobre	
   ),	
  si	
  concentra	
  su	
  diverse	
  questioni	
  propria-­‐‑ mente	
  contemporanee,	
  tra	
  cui	
  la	
  “seconda	
  vita”	
  digitale,	
  il	
  cibo	
  geneticamente	
  modifica-­‐‑ to,	
  le	
  protesi	
  avanzate,	
  la	
  robotica	
  e	
  le	
  tecnologie	
  di	
  riproduzione.	
  anche	
  grazie	
  al	
  suo	
   profondo	
  impegno	
  nei	
  women	
  studies,	
  braidotti	
  conduce	
  il	
  lettore	
  a	
  una	
  questione	
  fon-­‐‑ damentale	
  per	
  questo	
  numero	
  di	
  la	
  deleuziana,	
  ossia:	
  “la	
  donna	
  è	
  anthropos?”.	
  dietro	
  a	
   tale	
  domanda	
  si	
  cela	
   la	
  necessità	
  di	
  un’indagine	
  relativa	
  al	
   fallocentrismo	
   latente	
  nel	
   senso	
  e	
  nelle	
  posture	
  della	
  civilizzazione	
  occidentale	
  –	
   indagine	
  a	
  cui	
  braidotti	
  ha	
  da	
   sempre	
  consacrato	
  il	
  proprio	
  lavoro.	
   il	
  saggio	
  di	
  eleonora	
  de	
  conciliis,	
  il	
  divenire	
  donna	
  dell’idea	
  e	
  la	
  verità	
  della	
  jeune-­‐‑fille,	
   afferra	
  da	
  un	
  altro	
  angolo	
  la	
  questione	
  filosofica	
  relativa	
  alla	
  donna,	
  al	
  genere	
  e	
  al	
  capita-­‐‑ lismo.	
   partendo	
   da	
   una	
   lettura	
   approfondita	
   della	
   decostruzione	
   derridiana	
   dell’immagine	
  della	
  donna	
  nella	
  storia	
  della	
  filosofia	
  e	
  nella	
  civiltà	
  occidentale,	
  de	
  conci-­‐‑ liis	
  suggerisce	
  di	
  utilizzare	
  tale	
  lettura	
  per	
  indagare	
  quanto	
  valido	
  possa	
  essere	
  il	
  concet-­‐‑ to	
  di	
  jeune-­‐‑fille	
  elaborato	
  da	
  tiqqun	
  nel	
  descrivere	
  l’antropomorfizzazione	
  del	
  capitale.	
   se	
  la	
  femmina,	
  seguendo	
  tiqqun,	
  sembra	
  divenire	
  l’immagine	
  del	
  capitalismo	
  contempo-­‐‑ raneo,	
  l’autrice,	
  passando	
  attraverso	
  lacan,	
  derrida	
  e	
  baudrillard,	
  indica	
  la	
  donna	
  come	
   il	
   soggetto	
   in	
   grado	
   di	
   fuggire	
   tanto	
   dal	
   tradizionale	
   fallogocentrismo	
   della	
   filosofia	
   quanto	
  dalle	
  imposizioni	
  del	
  neoliberalismo.	
   È	
  proprio	
  per	
  tale	
  percorso	
  emancipativo	
  che	
  l’articolo	
  di	
  gianluca	
  de	
  fazio	
  (etica	
  del-­‐‑ le	
  composizioni.	
  sul	
  divenire-­‐‑donna	
  e	
  le	
  linee	
  di	
  fuga	
  della	
  corporeità)	
  può	
  rappresentare	
   un	
  utile	
  strumento	
  nella	
  sua	
  descrizione	
  del	
  concetto	
  deleuziano	
  di	
  “divenire-­‐‑donna”.	
   la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  rivista	
  online	
  di	
  filosofia	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  e	
  lo	
  specchio come	
  spiega	
  l’autore,	
  se	
  tale	
  concetto	
  può	
  essere	
  pensato	
  all’incrocio	
  di	
  due	
  tematiche	
   deleuziane	
  maggiori,	
  ossia	
  il	
  corpo	
  e	
  l’evento,	
  il	
  divenire	
  come	
  movimento	
  di	
  trasforma-­‐‑ zione	
  del	
  sociale	
  indica	
  inoltre	
  la	
  sua	
  attualità	
  etica	
  e	
  politica,	
  di	
  cui	
  il	
  saggio	
  evidenzia	
  la	
   necessità.	
   la	
   sezione	
   “sintomatologie”	
   ospita	
   anch’essa	
   due	
   articoli	
   focalizzati	
   sul	
   “divenire-­‐‑ donna”	
  deleuziano,	
  sebbene	
  i	
  loro	
  obiettivi	
  si	
  indirizzino	
  verso	
  “quel	
  che	
  ci	
  accade”.	
  in	
   particolare,	
  stefano	
  dughera,	
  nel	
  saggio	
  per	
  una	
  lettura	
  deleuziana	
  del	
  capitalismo	
  cogni-­‐‑ tivo.	
   sul	
   divenire-­‐‑donna	
   del	
   lavoro	
   contemporaneo,	
   propone	
   di	
   utilizzare	
   il	
   divenire-­‐‑ donna	
  come	
  una	
  lente	
  per	
  indagare	
  le	
  trasformazioni	
  del	
  panorama	
  lavorativo	
  attuale	
   all’interno	
  del	
  cosiddetto	
  capitalismo	
  cognitivo.	
  l’ampio	
  spettro	
  di	
  autori	
  richiamati	
  da	
   dughera	
  permette	
  sia	
  una	
  profonda	
  ricognizione	
  del	
  movimento	
  contraddittorio	
  che	
  ca-­‐‑ ratterizza	
  il	
  capitalismo	
  contemporaneo,	
  sia	
  la	
  comprensione	
  dei	
  rapporti	
  tra	
  il	
  divenire	
   deleuziano	
  e	
  la	
  produzione	
  sociale	
  e	
  politica	
  del	
  comune.	
   il	
  secondo	
  articolo,	
  scritto	
  da	
  Öznur	
  karakaş	
  (la	
  petite	
  fille	
  de	
  la	
  surface	
  comme	
  figure	
  de	
   la	
  dissolution	
  du	
  soi)	
  indaga	
  le	
  possibili	
  tracce	
  della	
  jeune-­‐‑fille	
  contenute	
  in	
  logica	
  del	
   senso,	
  i	
  cui	
  sintomi	
  contemporanei	
  sono	
  stati	
  descritti	
  da	
  tiqqun.	
  dopo	
  una	
  ricognizione	
   dei	
  concetti	
  principali	
  impiegati	
  per	
  descrivere	
  il	
  femminile	
  nel	
  libro	
  di	
  deleuze,	
  kara-­‐‑ kaş,	
  con	
  l’ausilio	
  di	
  luce	
  irigaray,	
  evidenzia	
  la	
  differenza	
  fondamentale	
  tra	
  la	
  jeune-­‐‑fille	
   e	
  il	
  divenire-­‐‑donna:	
  mentre	
  la	
  prima	
  rappresenta	
  il	
  risultato	
  dell’apparato	
  di	
  cattura	
  ca-­‐‑ pitalista,	
  il	
  secondo	
  fa	
  segno	
  verso	
  una	
  concezione	
  del	
  femminile	
  in	
  lotta	
  contro	
  qualsiasi	
   sistema	
  patriarcale,	
  sia	
  esso	
  simbolico,	
  politico	
  o	
  economico.	
   la	
  rubrica	
  “regioni”	
  ospita	
  la	
  traduzione	
  italiana	
  di	
  un	
  articolo	
  di	
  theresa	
  senft,	
  the	
   skin	
  of	
  the	
  selfie	
  (la	
  pelle	
  del	
  selfie),	
  che	
  rappresenta	
  una	
  riflessione	
  circa	
  la	
  posta	
  in	
  gio-­‐‑ co	
  politica	
  dell’aisthesis	
  nell’epoca	
  dei	
  touch	
  screens	
  e	
  dei	
  selfie.	
  al	
  centro	
  del	
  saggio	
  vi	
  è	
   la	
   disseminazione	
   pubblica	
   delle	
   immagini	
   che	
   contengono	
   il	
   volto	
   di	
   sandra	
   bland,	
   un’attivista	
  afro-­‐‑americana	
  del	
  movimento	
  black	
  lives	
  matter,	
  arrestata	
  a	
  seguito	
  di	
  un	
   normale	
  controllo	
  stradale	
  e	
  morta	
  in	
  prigione,	
  lasciandoci	
  solo	
  le	
  tracce	
  della	
  sua	
  vita	
   sui	
  social	
  networks.	
  muovendo	
  da	
  questo	
  fatto,	
  senft	
  sviluppa	
  un	
  discorso	
  puntuale	
  sulle	
   immagini	
  pubbliche	
  della	
  vita	
  privata	
  e	
  sulla	
  morte	
  individuale,	
  il	
  cui	
  obiettivo	
  è	
  una	
  ri-­‐‑ configurazione	
  del	
  rapporto	
  tra	
  estetica	
  e	
  politica.	
  per	
  senft	
  questa	
  nuova	
  relazione	
  poli-­‐‑ tica	
  all’estetica	
  dovrebbe	
  focalizzarsi	
  sulla	
  superficie	
  delle	
  nostre	
  esistenze,	
  ossia	
  sulla	
   loro	
  e	
  nostra	
  pelle.	
   la	
  sezione	
  “occhi	
  rossi”	
  presenta	
  due	
  articoli	
  dedicati	
  al	
  rapporto	
  tra	
  deleuze	
  e	
  la	
  let-­‐‑ teratura,	
  da	
  cui	
  anche	
  lo	
  stesso	
  numero	
  della	
  rivista	
  prende	
  in	
  qualche	
  modo	
  le	
  mosse.	
   l’articolo	
  di	
  valentina	
  maini,	
  “io	
  sono	
  grande	
  e	
  piccola	
  insieme”:	
  divenire	
  amelia	
  rosselli,	
   suggerisce	
  un	
  parallelismo	
  tra	
  il	
  lavoro	
  della	
  poetessa	
  italiana	
  amelia	
  rosselli	
  e	
  l’alice	
  di	
   deleuze.	
  maini	
  ritrova	
  tale	
  parallelismo	
  nella	
  comune	
  tensione	
  verso	
  quella	
  forma	
  para-­‐‑ dossale	
  del	
  divenire,	
  attraverso	
  cui	
  sia	
  la	
  poetessa	
  che	
  il	
  personaggio	
  concettuale	
  di	
  de-­‐‑ leuze	
  esprimono	
  le	
  loro	
  identità	
  instabili:	
  divenire	
  più	
  grande	
  e	
  più	
  piccola	
  allo	
  stesso	
   tempo.	
  questa	
  specie	
  di	
  paradosso	
  concerne	
  tendenzialmente	
  tutte	
  le	
  questioni	
  politiche	
   la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  rivista	
  online	
  di	
  filosofia	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  e	
  lo	
  specchio che	
  il	
  presente	
  numero	
  solleva,	
  ed	
  in	
  tal	
  senso	
  testimonia	
  la	
  forte	
  relazione	
  tra	
  la	
  politica	
   e	
  la	
  letteratura	
  che	
  anima	
  la	
  scrittura	
  deleuziana.	
   l’articolo	
  di	
  olga	
  lópez,	
  proust-­‐‑deleuze	
  :	
  les	
  signes	
  des	
  jeunes-­‐‑filles,	
  analizza	
  non	
  tanto	
   il	
  divenire-­‐‑donna	
  quanto	
  il	
  divenire-­‐‑ragazzina	
  nell’opera	
  di	
  marcel	
  proust.	
  seguendo	
  una	
   suggestione	
  deleuziana,	
  lópez	
  mostra	
  come	
  l’estetica	
  di	
  proust	
  non	
  possa	
  essere	
  separa-­‐‑ ta	
  da	
  una	
  tensione	
  verso	
  il	
  divenire-­‐‑donna	
  e	
  questa	
  da	
  un	
  divenire-­‐‑ragazzina,	
  poiché	
  è	
   precisamente	
  per	
  mezzo	
  di	
  tale	
  divenire	
  che	
  sembrano	
  essere	
  creati	
  gli	
  affetti	
  in	
  À	
  la	
  re-­‐‑ cherche	
  du	
  temps	
  perdu.	
  descrivendo	
  questa	
  sorta	
  di	
  metodo	
  artistico,	
  il	
  lavoro	
  di	
  lópez	
   sviluppa	
  parimenti	
  un	
  punto	
  di	
  vista	
  singolare	
  o,	
  più	
  precisamente,	
  la	
  propria	
  singolare	
   metodologia	
  in	
  relazione	
  al	
  numero	
  della	
  rivista.	
  se	
  la	
  maggior	
  parte	
  degli	
  articoli	
  de-­‐‑ scrivono	
  il	
  divenire-­‐‑donna	
  in	
  generale	
  o	
  dal	
  punto	
  di	
  vista	
  della	
  donna,	
  anche	
  quando	
   scritti	
  da	
  maschi,	
  lópez	
  prova	
  a	
  fornire	
  un’alternativa	
  paradossale,	
  sull’onda	
  dell’intero	
   numero:	
  da	
  donna,	
  descrivere	
  il	
  divenire-­‐‑donna	
  e	
  persino	
  ragazzina	
  di	
  uno	
  scrittore.	
   nella	
  sezione	
  “nuove	
  armi”,	
  il	
  lettore	
  troverà	
  l’articolo	
  di	
  angela	
  balzano,	
  tecno-­‐‑corpi	
   e	
  vie	
  di	
  fuga	
  postumane,	
  e	
  la	
  ragione	
  di	
  tale	
  scelta	
  è	
  di	
  immediata	
  evidenza.	
  riprendendo	
   gli	
  assunti	
  teoretici	
  del	
  post-­‐‑strutturalismo	
  (deleuze	
  e	
  foucault	
  in	
  particolare)	
  e	
  i	
  con-­‐‑ tributi	
  del	
  neo-­‐‑materialismo	
  femminista,	
  il	
  saggio	
  descrive	
  la	
  metamorfosi	
  delle	
  sogget-­‐‑ tività	
  nell’epoca	
  delle	
  biotecnologie.	
  sulla	
  scorta	
  di	
  rosi	
  braidotti	
  e	
  donna	
  haraway,	
  bal-­‐‑ zano	
  prova	
  a	
  tracciare	
  un	
  percorso	
  teoretico	
  e	
  politico	
  basato	
  sulla	
  dimensione	
  politico-­‐‑ trasformativa	
  del	
  cyborg	
  e	
  della	
  soggettività	
  nomadica.	
  l’obiettivo	
  diviene	
  perciò	
  quello	
   di	
  segnalare	
  le	
  condizioni	
  di	
  possibilità	
  per	
  l’invenzione	
  di	
  nuove	
  armi	
  critiche	
  ad	
  uso	
  di	
   una	
  soggettività	
  non-­‐‑antropocentrica	
  e	
  non-­‐‑fallocentrica	
  –	
  una	
  soggettività	
  dunque	
  an-­‐‑ cora	
  a	
  venire.	
   l’articolo	
  di	
  daniel	
  ross,	
  touch/screen,	
  è	
  contenuto	
  nella	
  sezione	
  “anomalie”,	
  attra-­‐‑ verso	
  cui	
  la	
  deleuziana	
  prova	
  ad	
  approcciare	
  le	
  questioni	
  maggiori	
  del	
  numero	
  da	
  un	
   punto	
  di	
  vista	
  differente.	
  se	
  gli	
  schermi	
  sono	
  uno	
  degli	
  argomenti	
  principali	
  del	
  numero	
   ,	
  non	
  era	
  infatti	
  ancora	
  stata	
  messa	
  in	
  evidenza	
  la	
  questione	
  del	
  cinema	
  e	
  delle	
  teletec-­‐‑ nologie	
  in	
  rapporto	
  alla	
  soggettività,	
  al	
  desiderio	
  e	
  al	
  divenire.	
  tale	
  questione,	
  tuttavia,	
  è	
   inaggirabile	
  al	
  fine	
  di	
  comprendere	
  gran	
  parte	
  delle	
  cause	
  che	
  ci	
  hanno	
  condotto	
  di	
  fron-­‐‑ te	
  alla	
  jeune-­‐‑fille,	
  ai	
  selfie	
  e	
  agli	
  altri	
  problemi	
  della	
  soggettività	
  segnalati	
  nella	
  call	
  for	
   papers.	
  a	
  tal	
  proposito,	
  ross	
  sviluppa	
  una	
  critica	
  genealogica	
  di	
  queste	
  cause,	
  col	
  fine	
  di	
   mostrare,	
  sulla	
  scorta	
  di	
  bernard	
  stiegler,	
  come	
  il	
  cinema,	
  la	
  televisione	
  e	
  gli	
  schermi	
   contemporanei	
  non	
  solo	
  descrivano	
  o	
  addirittura	
  pervertano	
  il	
  nostro	
  desiderio,	
  ma	
  par-­‐‑ tecipino	
  essenzialmente	
  alla	
   sua	
  costituzione	
  e	
  possibilità.	
  comprendere	
  questo	
   fatto	
   può	
  permettere	
  di	
  sviluppare	
  quell’arte	
  del	
  controllo	
  deleuziana	
  segnalata	
  in	
  preceden-­‐‑ za,	
  un’arte	
  che	
  è	
  diventata	
  possibile	
  precisamente	
  a	
  partire	
  dagli	
  effetti	
   invasivi	
  della	
   televisione.	
   conclude	
  il	
  numero,	
  nella	
  sezione	
  “precursori”,	
  il	
  testo	
  di	
  alexander	
  wilson,	
  comment	
   choisir	
  ce	
  qui	
  aura	
  été	
  ?	
  réflexions	
  sur	
  l’optimisme	
  prométhéen	
  contemporain.	
  se	
  tale	
  se-­‐‑ zione	
  ospita	
  saggi	
  eterogenei	
  rispetto	
  al	
  tema	
  del	
  numero,	
  ma	
  che	
  fanno	
  segno	
  verso	
  il	
   la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  rivista	
  online	
  di	
  filosofia	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  e	
  lo	
  specchio numero	
  successivo,	
  l’articolo	
  di	
  wilson	
  rappresenta	
  dunque	
  un	
  ponte	
  tra	
  il	
  testo	
  “ano-­‐‑ malia”	
  di	
  ross	
  e	
  il	
  numero	
   	
  della	
  rivista.	
  wilson	
  pone	
  infatti	
  sullo	
  sfondo	
  delle	
  sue	
  ri-­‐‑ flessioni	
  circa	
  il	
  pessimismo	
  e	
  l’ottimismo	
  riguardo	
  al	
  climate	
  change	
  e	
  all’accelerazione	
   tecnologica	
  due	
  film,	
  melancholia	
  di	
  lars	
  von	
  trier	
  e	
  interstellar	
  di	
  christopher	
  nolan.	
   l’occasione	
  è	
  allora	
  quella	
  di	
  riflettere,	
  con	
  filosofi	
  contemporanei	
  come	
  deleuze,	
  stie-­‐‑ gler	
  e	
  classici	
  quali	
  leibniz,	
  su	
  cosa	
  può	
  significare	
  vivere	
  nell’assenza	
  di	
  un	
  futuro	
  com-­‐‑ possibile	
  con	
  il	
  cambio	
  climatico,	
  nel	
  rischio	
  cioè	
  di	
  una	
  morte	
  generalizzata,	
  non	
  (solo)	
   dell’uomo	
  ma	
  della	
  stessa	
  terra.	
  l’obiettivo	
  diviene	
  quello,	
  ancora	
  una	
  volta,	
  né	
  di	
  pian-­‐‑ gere,	
  né	
  di	
  sperare,	
  ma	
  trovare	
  nuove	
  armi.	
   	
   	
   	
   bibliografia	
   	
   braidotti,	
  r.	
  ( )	
  “degli	
  insetti	
  e	
  delle	
  donne,	
  in	
  vaccaro,	
  s.	
  (ed.),	
  il	
  secolo	
  deleuziano.	
   milano:	
  mimesis.	
  pp.	
   -­‐‑ .	
   cesarano,	
  g.	
  ( ).	
  manuale	
  di	
  sopravvivenza.	
  torino:	
  boringhieri.	
   consigliere,	
  s.,	
  paravagna,	
  s.	
  ( ).	
  “da	
  dentro:	
  relazioni	
  con	
  il	
  possibile”.	
  in	
  p.	
  coppo,	
  s.	
   consigliere,	
  s.	
  paravagna,	
  il	
  disagio	
  dell’inciviltà.	
  milano:	
  colibrì.	
  pp.	
   -­‐‑ .	
   deleuze,	
  g.	
  ( ).	
  logica	
  del	
  senso.	
  milano:	
  feltrinelli.	
   deleuze,	
  g.	
  ( a).	
  “lettera	
  a	
  serge	
  daney”,	
  «bianco&nero»,	
  n. -­‐‑ .	
  pp.	
   -­‐‑ .	
   deleuze,	
  g.	
  ( b).	
  critica	
  e	
  clinica.	
  milano:	
  cortina.	
   deleuze,	
  g.,	
  guattari,	
  f.	
  ( ).	
  mille	
  piani.	
  capitalismo	
  e	
  schizofrenia.	
  roma:	
  castelvec-­‐‑ chi.	
   foucault,	
  m.	
  ( ).	
  la	
  cura	
  di	
  sé.	
  storia	
  della	
  sessualità	
   .	
  milano:	
  feltrinelli.	
  	
   rouvroy,	
  a.	
  ( ).	
  “the	
  end(s)	
  of	
  critique	
  :	
  data-­‐‑behaviourism	
  vs.	
  due-­‐‑process”,	
  in	
  hil-­‐‑ debrandt,	
  m.	
  &	
  de	
  vries	
  e.,	
  (eds.).	
  privacy,	
  due	
  process	
  and	
  the	
  computational	
  turn.	
   philosophers	
  of	
  law	
  meet	
  philosophers	
  of	
  technology.	
  london:	
  routledge.	
   simondon,	
  g.	
  ( ).	
  l’individuazione	
  psichica	
  e	
  collettiva.	
  roma:	
  deriveapprodi.	
   stiegler,	
  b.	
  ( ).	
  la	
  société	
  automatique	
  i.	
  l’avenir	
  du	
  travail.	
  paris:	
  fayard.	
   tiqqun,	
  ( ).	
  elementi	
  per	
  una	
  teoria	
  della	
  jeune-­‐‑fille.	
  torino:	
  boringhieri.	
   	
   s jra .. “inoculations: the social politics of time, labor, and public good in covid-america” jennifer klein “we are becoming a / workforce.” —fair workweek initiative “i can’t breathe” —eric garner, george floyd, manuel ellis, derrick scott, byron williams, vincente villela, ngozi mbegu, willie ray banks, james brown… on may , , justa barrios, a new york city home-care worker and labor activist, passed away from covid- . after working twenty-four-hour shifts for fourteen years, barrios had injuries and compounding medical issues, includ- ing asthma, stomach difficulties, and heart problems. her doctor determined that she could no longer work twenty-four-hour shifts. yet when the home- care agency received a letter from the doctor requesting barrios be assigned to eight-hour shifts, the agency dropped her. barrios fought back. she found her voice in the “ain’t i a woman?!” campaign; comrades described her as a “fearless leader.” stemming from an alliance among female immigrants and us-born garment, plastics, office, and home-care workers, via workers’ centers such as the national mobilization against sweatshops, this organizing effort has sought to end twenty-four-hour days—and the legally permissible practice of paying for only thirteen hours—in new york state through direct action, the courts, union arbitration, and state legislation prohibiting twenty- four -hour shifts. women such as justa barros, lai yee chan, mei kum chu, seferina rosario, and sileni martinez see the “aint i a woman?!” campaign as a “new women’s movement fighting for control over our time, health, respect and payment.” as a cross-racial group, members chose to invoke sojourner truth, who tied together the causes of slavery abolition and women’s rights, emancipation from coerced labor and from patriarchy, the dignity of women’s labor and the dignity of release from work. but this legisla- tion, which would seem so obviously humane and jarringly anachronistic, has been stalled in the new york legislature and ignored by governor andrew cuomo for over a year. then, in march , the rapid onset of the covid- pandemic in new york translated into both intensified health risks and expectations for longer hours off the clock for nursing home aides and home-care workers. the fear spawned by precarious jobs doubled into fear of deadly exposure, “ain’t i a woman” thus expanded demands to the cuomo administration to include ppe, regular testing, and safe transportation. international labor and working-class history , page of # international labor and working-class history, inc., doi: . /s h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms owing to an extraordinary convergence of two distinct forms of violence and risk—a novel pandemic and the exposure of the systematic violence of the state through policing—the us working class has become visible as a class. covid- became one more assault added onto the lives of black americans. policing, as a class project, is about disciplining the poor, making sure they’re not disrupting the decorum of public space—they’re either at work or unseen, not there, constricted, pushed out. the police secure the city for the worthy and deserving and purge public space of the undeserving. policing and surveillance perpetuate the devaluation of black bodies in partic- ular spaces: spaces of consumption, leisure, and residence. black lives matter is by necessity a class struggle. breonna taylor worked as an emergency room technician and had done four overnight shifts at the hospital just before she was killed by a police invasion while she slept. the convergence brought to the fore what have been fundamental issues of the working class for over two centuries: bodily safety and health; community well-being; repression through violence workers of the state (police, state militias, national guard); the attempt to recapture time from the boss; and the redistribution of power. the coronavirus pandemic spread through the united states amid an his- torical phase characterized by the shattering of predominant liberal “work time” norms. capitalism, from its inception, has always entailed the appropria- tion, restructuring, and domination of time. the wage contract cedes to the employer the prerogative to shape how workers’ bodies and energies and capac- ities will be used. the pressures of competition, the logic of accumulation, and the drive for cheaper production impelled capitalists to take over and master time—that of the worker-producer, the shop, and the transport of goods. the ability to extract value depended on the ability to control time. as people became dependent on the market for survival, individuals and families lost control not only over what constituted work time but also over their ability to allocate time between wage work and other aspects of their lives. along with abolitionism, the eight-hour day movement became one of the powerful, transnational mass movements of the nineteenth century, calling for time, dignity, and emancipation. the simple elegance of its declaration—“eight hours for work, eight hours for rest, eight hours for what we will”— entailed profound claims. shorter hours with just recompense had to be accom- panied by rights: wages that would provide sustenance for physical comfort and health; a right to participate in the market without degradation; and the time and opportunity for political and social well-being, including family time, educa- tion and intellectual development, civic or religious involvement, leisure and recuperation, or designing revolution. both female and male proponents believed long hours would have a debilitating effect on the nation’s polity and culture. the new deal and mass industrial unionism changed the division or arrangement of time as part of the project to extend democracy to the workplace and security for those with or without work. industrial democracy entailed the social pooling of risk, democratization of power, and due process on the job. ilwch, , month h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms security required collective power and a working-class challenge to corporate titans. in the united states, fair labor standards act (flsa), social security act, and national labor relations act (nlra) finally institutional- ized the long struggle for the eight-hour day. unemployment insurance and old age pensions were built upon the assumed normativity and desirability of the eight-hour day and forty-hour work week. after world war ii, “the push to shorten work time and to gain more control over time found new expression in efforts to gain a shorter work year and a shorter work life,” according to dorothy sue cobble. that effort took the form of paid vacations, paid holidays, paid sick leave, and retirement pensions. it ignored women’s demands for a shorter working day, since they had to work a second shift at home. at the same time, new deal labor laws embedded new forms of social stratification. the formal classification of “employee” became the gateway to these benefits. they also specifically excluded service occupations and sectors that employed predominantly women, african americans, and latinos. from the late s– s, much of the political economic struggle aimed to widen the coverage of labor rights and social security to those who had been left in the margins. in the words of the union of hospital and health care employees local , their fight to win inclusion in the flsa, nlra, and social security was a campaign for civil rights and “first-class citizenship.” the coronavirus pandemic of and its attendant economic crises hit the united states as the last structural vestiges of new deal labor standards were petering out. antilabor employers and conservatives had devised mechanisms that subverted the functioning of the national labor relations board, turning it into labyrinth that could stymie and derail unionization campaigns and decertify existing unions. union membership in the united states has been in steady free-fall since the late s, with courts, management consul- tants, personnel departments, republicans, conservative think tanks, and lobby- ists arrayed against them. state legislatures allowed both the tax rate and the collection of unemployment compensation taxes to lag and unemployment funds ended up the red. the disaggregation of the eight-hour day and forty- hour work week hastened this outcome. the dissipation of organized worker power enabled american workplaces to once again become insular spaces shielded from independent or external health and safety inspections. american business developed a new mode of operation to utterly fragment the employer-employee relation upon which “industrial democracy” was pre- mised: the temp industry. beginning at first, in the s, as an agency service providing supplemental office or retail work done by women during seasonal high points, temp agencies pushed their way into myriad labor markets across the economy over the following decades, providing everything from dental hygienists, custodians, accountants, paralegals, writers, editors. eventually, entire job categories were permanently subcontracted out, resulting in what david weil has called “the fissured workplace,” where it appeared that no one was really in charge of labor conditions. for the supplier or franchisee at the bottom of the labor supply chain, the labor costs were the only variable. inoculations h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms so they had to slice and dice labor time to gain the extra profit margin. the parent company thus used high turnover to its advantage, churning out those at the bottom. in the final decades of the twentieth century, widening circles of american workers became excluded from the legal classification and protec- tion of “employee,” with almost a third of the american workforce no longer covered by the flsa. temp agency employment and the fissured workplace shook the founda- tions of the eight-hour day, the standard work week, the coverage of the nlra and flsa, and the welfare state. temp agencies themselves aggressively worked to eviscerate the income support that linked employment and the welfare state. evading workers’ compensation and unemployment claims became a particular expertise of theirs. temp agencies disputed such claims per- sistently and with success, using the courts to subvert statutory benefits. being able to appear in court posed enormous and costly barriers for precarious workers. further, the industry lobbied to influence labor law—such as the laws that denied temps’ claims for unemployment insurance. on the flip side of underemployment, mandatory, forced overtime became a common practice. more than one in five workers in the united states is forced to work overtime, a practice steadily on the rise in the decade leading up to the covid- pandemic. regular mandatory overtime added, on average, almost ten hours a month to work schedules. nurses at major hospitals had to do two shifts of overtime on top of their regular ones. working in a factory, call center, or warehouse, bathroom breaks were not allowed. when workers have little control over time, their exposure and susceptibility to risks rise. subcontractors are often paid low wages and receive minimal or no health care. in these cases, workers experienced “pay or workplace conditions that violate one or more workplace laws.” in fissured industries, violations included off-the-clock work, unpaid overtime, and failure to pay minimum wage. yet, studies by the national employment law project, have found that “more than million workers in the u.s. cannot sue their employers[who break the law] due to forced arbitration clauses, with women, people of color, and low- wage workers disproportionately impacted.” forced arbitrations prevented workers earning less than $ from recovering $ . billion in stolen wages in . the logical extreme of this instability was reached with the technological revolution of the platform economy: the app-based income earning activities of uber, task rabbit, fiverr, and instacart. through these task service brokers, people used their own cars and tools to provide one-time and quick ser- vices directly to individuals. there was no workplace, no boss, and often only a race to the bottom bidding for work. there were unending hours of work but not enough work. the precarity of temp and low-paid part-time work had already driven many to use these apps. they now tried to cobble together a living in the app economy, working as much as seven days a week, hustling to assemble a living from one-off gigs. if the company changes its model or rules, a “pro- vider” has little recourse. it’s a survival game. ilwch, , month h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms we have to keep in mind, therefore, that the politics of the last three decades aimed not only at the privatization of public services and benefits but the privatization and individuation of risk. both shifts rested on the tenets that markets more effectively distribute resources, that regulations impede flex- ible adaptation and innovation, and so individuals should see themselves as con- sumers whose needs can be met through private markets and the family. individuals should work, save, compete, and embrace “personal responsibility” for one’s own education, housing, medical care, safety, disability, and long-term security. although plenty of americans lived a reality that hardly matched these claims, the fantasy and powerful hold of the ideology tenaciously hung on. the privatization agenda from reagan to trump “would have each of us pay for the specific services we can afford rather than establishing a baseline of democratic rights that are available to all regardless of their ability to pay,” argues donald cohen. and, the fact is, we have an economy and political culture that has long been based on and accepted shifting or offloading risk onto others: onto slaves, immigrants, women. then came covid- , a once-in-a-century pandemic. the covid- pandemic impelled into bold relief the stubborn fact that risk is social as well as individual. for the privatization of risk had left the american population in a distinctively vulnerable position to meet the major social crisis of a new path- ogen, as a generation of marketization brought us lead-poisoned and chemical- poisoned water, dismantled public health systems, delayed routine medical care, degraded schools and housing, and overcrowded prisons. it even left us bereft of the ability to act and argue for a common public good or public interest. unchecked racist violence, economic insecurity, and a rapidly-spread contagious disease have driven back to the surface the question of how we will socially manage risk. we need an elemental restructuring of employment around new conceptions of time and we need to socialize risk and democratize power. american work at the turn of the twenty-first century one of the chief ways in which workers have been denied the rights of freedom of speech, freedom of assembly, legal protection, and security is to deny the work they do recognition as “real work.” lawmakers, politicians, judges, and conservative pundits and think tanks, for example, persistently deny that home-health aides and personal attendants are a modern, global service work- force and the linchpin of long-term care in the united states. workers who perform intimate daily tasks for the elderly and persons with disabilities— bathing bodies, putting on clothes, cooking meals, doing laundry—get mischar- acterized as “just moms” or daughters who perform such labors out of duty and love. many of them also work part-time hours as aides in nursing homes or res- idential facilities for the disabled. in each spatial setting, the service labor they provide carries out the on-the-ground work of the state, caring for people who receive state benefits or subsidies in some form. law and ideology, however, perpetuate the notion that emptying bedpans and producing humane conditions inoculations h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms for living are not the labors that drive the economy. surely the labor of those who bend steel and scale buildings are more important. instead of hazard pay, workers’ incur a wage penalty, owing to feminization and racialization of the tasks, the work site, and historical legacies of servitude and slavery. while these have been the fastest growing jobs in the economy of the twenty-first century, regardless of the overall booms and busts of the us economy, care workers have had to struggle continuously for inclusion in labor rights and labor standards. over the last two decades the stigmatization of a whole workforce and its labor spiraled out to ensnare public workers. the size and scope of the govern- ment workforce that carries out public services grew substantially in the united states from the s through the s, and then for the most part, held steady through the turn of the twenty-first century. in , it actually stood at percent higher than it had prior to the period of conservative republican ascen- dance. state and local governments employed over , , million full- time workers; at the end of that number, including federal employees, stood at , , . california’s local and state workforces had grown to , . they became political targets of vitriolic rhetorical, ideological, and legal attacks. governors scott walker and chris christie deploy typical conser- vative anti-unionism but also draw from the deep wells of racialized and gen- dered disdain for the work itself and those who do it—which they willfully brandish as tainted by associations of dependency and nonproductivity. the burgeoning public sectors, especially at the state and local level, in fact were filled by women and people of color. african americans had long been concentrated in public sanitation, custodial, and parks jobs, and women had been filling the ranks of teachers. but, with the great society programs of the s, women, african americans, and latinos moved into an array of semi- skilled and skilled jobs, semi-professional and professional occupations, notably in social and human services. the most effective gains from the war on poverty of the s were realized by those who secured public jobs. it also sparked new opportunities for union organizing by formerly invisible, mar- ginalized, and low-paid workers, from sanitation workers and social workers to teachers, hospital workers, and police. this upsurge became a continuous wave for the next two, even three decades, upgrading the status of these jobs. with the decimation of unionism in the private sector, public sector unionism became the most dynamic, as well as inclusive segment of the american labor movement. in , percent of all government workers (including percent of all local government workers) in the united states were union members, contrasted to only . percent of private sector workers. public sector workers in the united states are roughly four times as likely to be union members today as their private sector brothers and sisters. beyond simply the clout of numbers, unionized public sector workers have had the coherence to act politically: to fight for the public social budget, to mobi- lize support for it or against cuts, and to bring together allies around essential programs. they are not only the implementers and enforcers of the regulatory ilwch, , month h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms and welfare state, they are its political advocates. thus, antiwelfare state conser- vatives, unable to fully dismantle the service state, aimed to dehumanize the service workers, representing them as leeches and parasites. the eight-hour work day and standard work day were further eroded by the proliferation of “just-in-time scheduling” software that predicts consumer demand and allegedly matches hours to busy and slow periods. for workers, this mode of scheduling means unpredictable shifts, last-minute changes, unsta- ble and insufficient hours, and short-notice cancellations leaving them with no pay. employees are expected to be on call at all times but accommodate being sent home when “not needed” and therefore not paid. erratic scheduling has become standard practice in retail, restaurants, and hospitality—the largest employing sectors in the nation. the retail industry in los angeles employs about , workers. a survey by the ucla labor center and laane found that out of workers do not have a set schedule from week to week, and percent get less than a week’s notice of their schedule. in philadelphia, which has the highest poverty rate in the united states, more than percent of service workers report irregular schedules. a disproportion- ate share of these workers are african american and female. transformation of the health care sector, in particular from a nonprofit to aggressively for-profit, competitive industry has been another major source of work degradation. from the s and s into the early twenty-first century, health care restructuring relied integrally on downsizing the workforce at a given institution, understaffing, and squeezing more labor out of fewer employees—the latter masked as “multiskilling” by management consultants and training programs. “managed care,” writes historian jean-christian vinel, “is precisely designed to force a reduced number of nurses to care for a larger number of patients who are likelier to have serious conditions.” more pointedly, managed care companies “directly aimed at the size of nursing staffs because nurses constitute the largest component of the workforce in what remains a labor-intensive industry. . .”as with retail, hospitals turned to management con- sultants and scheduling algorithms that broke down labor tasks, estimated time per task, predicted labor hours “needed,” and drew up efficient staff scheduling plans. such taylorization did what it has always done: reduced worker auton- omy, sped up the pace of work, left less time for recuperation, and shifted the burdens of restructuring onto workers. mostly, those working in health care set- tings experienced it as “organizational dysfunction.” from week to week, nursing staff could face not enough hours or compulsory overtime. training and education programs, ariel ducey found in her study of new york city’s largest employer, the health care sector, “reveal how individual health care workers are pressured to compensate for the irrationalities of america’s ‘system’” and pro-market policy. the managerial and economic strategies of health care amounted to “an unequal obligation to continually work more.” managed care hedged risk for investors but heightened risk exposure for workers. following a decade of mergers, corporate takeovers, and conversions of nonprofit health centers, hospitals, and nursing homes, those employees inoculations h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms (nurses, technicians, therapists, counselors, aides) were already voicing com- plaints in the late s, specifically regarding insufficient staffing, overly stress- ful working conditions, lack of support or safety equipment, and low pay. a decade later, statistics show, nurses faced an occupational injury and illness rate double that of workers in all private-sector industries. nursing assistants experience exceptionally high rates of occupational injury, whether working in residential care facilities, assisted living facilities, continuing care facilities, nursing homes, hospitals, group homes, or private homes. in fact, occupational injury rates for direct care workers are among the highest in the country, owing to lifting and moving patients, various events on the job, overexertion, inadequate staffing and exposure to violence. yet two thirds of these . million workers have no paid leave and therefore have little time for self-care or recuperation. the insecurity of the job and managerial culture discourage care workers from reporting injuries. covid- , therefore, is also the crisis of the full-throttle marketization and corporate consolidation of american health care. the american market- driven, for-profit health care system and private insurance system are based upon denial of care. gatekeeping, co-pays and ever larger deductibles, refusal to cover pre-existing conditions, and dropping high-risk individuals—or cover- ing only fully healthy ones—ensure higher revenues or profits and are consid- ered legitimate forms of “risk management.” the bodily insecurity of americans in low-paying jobs and unstable labor markets and those whose con- nection to wage work is tenuous is perpetuated by this so-called risk manage- ment; it creates the imperative of a constant hustle. work has left them, as fast food workers put it, “just sick and tired of being sick and tired.” annelise orleck’s book, we’re all fast food workers now, a global investigation of low-wage worker uprisings, shows that from back-to-back shifts to walking home late at night after work to poisons, toxins, and burns on the job, “danger is still a daily reality for workers” in the united states and around the world. notably, police murders of black people have taken place outside fast food restaurants (rayshard brooks and george floyd) and -elevens (treyvon martin). whether in the philippines, bangladesh, brazil, or the united states, worker demands converged: “regular employment, - hour day, . . . just wages, safe workplace.” this is the world the virus bur- rowed into and took over, swiftly breaking us down cell by cell. class we’ve heard plenty of post-mortems for “the working class” —allegedly owing to technological change, politics, or culture—but, in one of the most remarkable and stark cultural shifts in response to the covid- pandemic, the working class became visible and recognizably important as a class. a panoply of service and logistics jobs—blue-collar, pink-collar, white-collar, semi-profes- sional, and professional—of connecting and keeping people alive have been, in an unprecedented way, bundled and represented together. across race, ilwch, , month h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms gender, and ethnicity, those performing such jobs became “frontline workers” and “essential workers.” it’s been fascinating to see so cogently the claim of the national domestic workers alliance, “we do the work that makes all other work possible.” corporations couldn’t rush fast enough to get commercials into production that offered paeans and salutes to “front-line workers” and “essential workers.” burnished and wistful, with swelling music, the camera focuses in on a montage of working-class jobs: warehouse workers, hospital nurses and aides, postal deliverers, pickers and packers in fields, cashiers and supermarket workers, bus drivers and truckers, and food preparers. it was breathtaking how many low-wage and exploitative employers spent big money for television commer- cials, full-page newspaper ads, social media ads, and outdoor billboards or elec- tronic signs to explicitly praise the working class. walmart, amazon, dunkin’, uber, dove (soaps and beauty care products), fedex, hefty, budweiser, oakland international airport, and fast food companies aired prime time ads of gratitude. mcdonalds even pledged to give frontline workers free sodas— plus for its own workers, a whole week’s worth of “thank you meals.” on the one hand, i think it’s worth registering the positive. it’s been decades since we’ve seen public culture acknowledge the essential contributions of a diverse and extensive working class and take seriously the central economic role that service workers, food chain workers, and care workers perform in holding together our society. highlighting the work of african americans, women, and immigrants, it has valorized the labors that keep us alive, transport us, bring us our consumer goods, food, and basic necessities, and even connect us to our common human experiences. nor did such recognition simply take the form of symbolic, nostalgic masculinity that often gets trotted out and flexed at election time. millions more americans work in health care or in retail or in logistics than in auto or steel manufacturing combined. there are twice as many home health aides. the retail industry is the largest employer in the united states. according to the national retail federation, retail supports one in four us jobs, or million working americans. in , health care, retail trade, and state and local government were three of the top five employing sectors. it finally became culturally visible and meaningful that they stand at the center rather than the margins of the american economy. on the other hand, these paeans did not mark any shift in power. indeed, it could be argued these tributes—meant to hit emotional registers—were made specifically to head off any shift in power. they emphasized “self-sacrifice”— as if to say low-wage service workers, especially women and people of color, should be prepared to sacrifice themselves for others. the rush to post public salutes to front-line workers can be seen as a class action by corporate elites, a class strategy to muffle workers’ voices in a gauzy haze of charitable impulses and service. such corporate representations of “frontline work” in the covid- era imply that the standardized workday, codified by the new deal’s fair labor standard act, can and must be stretched, pulled, and unshackled into the open-ended arbitrariness that characterized hospital, nursing home, and inoculations h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms domestic labor before labor standards. or pressed into shifting and precarious part-time shifts. given the degree to which the pandemic is exposing the structural failures and inequities of market-based care, this corporate propaganda attempts a double shrouding of the class relation. first, the corporate propaganda from health-care companies and hospital-medical chains cloaks the ways in which capitalist elites determine the rules for health care as a profit-maximizing indus- try with “service to the public” rhetoric that absolves business of the conse- quences of a managerial and insurance strategy based fundamentally on the denial of care, making the crisis of covid- utterly unmanageable. second, it deflects the fact that inordinate class power exercised by corporations and employing institutions had placed these workers in such harmful positions for years leading up to this moment. particularly ironic were tribute ads from hefty, since direct-care workers lacking ppe had to turn to using large plastic garbage bags to protect their bodies. there is another way in which class has become visible and salient. what has been revealed about being an essential worker or being labeled as such by opportunistic employers is the inability to say “no.” being essential meant risk of exposure to health and bodily threats was bound up with risk of exposure to economic insecurity. whether working without adequate protection, feeling ill, or having inadequate information on virus cases in one’s work place, we’ve been hearing from people across the economic spectrum who had to report for work. the threat could be explicit or internalized, immediate cash flow need or impending financial insecurity, but refusal is not an option and the stakes of trade-offs are too high. class power and class struggle have also been palpable insofar there are companies that have the political as well as eco- nomic weight to claim their production process and profit stream as essential, even if it meant using replacement workers or subcontracted workers to do the labor of its allegedly essential workers. if we think of class as a process, class is defined by “the practices and rela- tions within which [consent, exploitation, and domination] are secured, created, and challenged,” writes political theorist kathi weeks. amid the pandemic, who works and who doesn’t, or who works in a safe or unsafe place, lays bare the “the relationship of domination and submission that is authorized by the waged labor contract and that shapes labor’s exercise.” the compulsions of market labor have become publicly clear again; pandemic conditions have, however brief the moment may be, punctured the ideological obfuscations that markets are the very source of liberation, opportunity, and autonomy. with every person who has said i felt sick, but i had to go to work; i felt at risk but i couldn’t afford to lose my job; i had to take care of someone else, but i had no paid leave—we see how much contemporary work has become associated with unfreedom. they know they are dispensable, the power arrangements of work make that clear. but now that has become clear as a class process— through extensive media attention and political attention. the managerial response to covid- ratcheted up management’s ability to compel those in ilwch, , month h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms their employ to work continuously. unfortunately, political officials never thought to compel employers to see a different employment policy as a rational response to pandemic: rotational schedule (without loss of pay) that would promote safety, distancing, and recuperation. for example, why not assign three days on, three days off, to allow recuperation and reduction of risk expo- sure? why can’t we talk about a rearrangement of work time that would recog- nize risk as social? “the practices and relations within which [consent, exploitation, and dom- ination] are secured” simultaneously pierced the veil regarding policing and the suppression of black people’s freedom of movement, freedom of speech and assembly, autonomy, and physical bodily integrity. essential workers, who know how much the company manipulates their dispensability and insecurity, recognized themselves and the processes of command and control, disregard and devaluation among the targets of police racial violence. amazon workers had already been staging nationally coordinated walk-outs over safety condi- tions and the lack of protection and workplace information in relation to covid- . adrienne williams, an amazon driver and leader of bay area amazonians, said “i realized that amazon doesn’t give a crap . . . here’s this place where people are getting hurt or dying . . . they’re bullies—and i am so not about being bullied.” they extended their labor resistance and walked out for black lives matter. the next day, williams said, she turned on the tele- vision. “the first thing i saw: ‘black lives matter. amazon stands in solidarity with the black community’ [ad].” she responded, “if amazon really stood in solidarity with the black community, they wouldn’t pay us slave wages. they wouldn’t retaliate against us for speaking up when people’s bodies are in danger. what a crock of shit.” yet another facet of capitalist class political power of the state has impeded workers’ attempts at self-protection during the pandemic. prior to the onset of the pandemic, the occupational safety and health administration (osha), under the trump administration, had “the lowest number of on-site inspectors in the last years.” despite harvard business school, uc-berkeley business school, and rand corporation independently concurring that osha inspection programs resulted in substantially fewer injuries and occupational illnesses, osha staffing levels declined continuously during the trump years, with at least five thousand fewer employees than under the obama or bush administrations, and key positions, such as director of enforcement and regional directors, have been left vacant. consequently, workers in american work- places already labored in health-compromising environments structured by imbalances of the power. this accumulated, long-term disregard for workers’ health and safety on the job merged with the government’s hands-off approach to virus containment. according to the national employment law project, “osha has completely abdicated its responsibility to ensure that employers keep workers safe on the job.” although thousands of complaints and grievances had been submitted to the agency by late april , “osha has not issued any enforceable inoculations h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms covid- -specific requirements, practices or policies that employers must implement to protect workers.” nor is osha conducting covid-specific on- site inspections. mostly, the agency is dismissing whistleblower complaints. so, this brings us to the question: do workers have economic rights when we come up against a crisis of need? how, then, can this newly cohered and rec- ognized working-class act collectively, especially since single-actor whistle- blowers are subverted? what is the bridge from recognition to collective action to system-changing power? labor and collective action the abuse of workers and the abuse of black people by police have provoked walkouts and wildcat strikes across a surprising array of occupations. teachers, physician residents, hospitality workers, auto workers, grocery workers, apple pickers, librarians, and university staff have engaged in work stoppages, ranging from the eight minutes george floyd suffocated with a policeman’s knee on his neck to open-ended refusals to work under existing conditions. work refusals among bus drivers were sparked when detroit bus drivers struck in detroit on march ; as a result, they won demands for ppe, extra cleaning, riders using the rear doors, and an end to fare collection. bus drivers in a number of other states subsequently followed suit. nurses have engaged not just in local walkouts but in nationally coordinated labor actions, under the banner “ppe over profit.” included in their demands were “nation- alizing the health care-medical industry” and universal health insurance. labor journalist jane slaughter reported that “national nurses united went to washington, d.c. may with an ‘empty shoes’ protest, demanding that president trump use the defense production act to order mass production of ppe, ventilators, and test kits. they lined a sidewalk with white nurses shoes to commemorate fallen coworkers.” ge workers in massachusetts, virginia, texas, and new york coordinated protests to demand ge switch to ventilator production, rather than shutdowns and layoffs. since the s, formally called strikes by unions had been disappearing from american economic life. but the covid- pandemic actions emerged from a different well-spring. one forerunner is the effervescence of organizing among poor, black, latinx, and immigrant women from the s– s: domestic workers’ movements, farm worker unionism, public sector unionism, acorn, and workers’ centers. these led to new labor organizing strategies, unions, and collectives among those who had been on the margins, such as home-care workers, childcare workers, taxi drivers, custodians, and day laborers. the other antecedent is the direct action, take-it-to-the-streets mobilizations of the last decade: the fight for $ campaigns among fast-food workers and ware- house workers, our walmart and its black friday walk-outs and pickets, action now in chicago, onepa in philadelphia, laane (los angeles alliance for a new economy), city life/vida urbana in boston, ain’t i a woman?! in ny, and black lives matter. through these groups, working-class folks took to ilwch, , month h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms the streets, won higher wages, fought housing evictions, and began to change working conditions. more recently, they’ve launched the battle to wrest control of time and roll back the control of working-people’s lives held by the employing class. since , this effort has taken the form of fair workweek campaigns, which aim to pass local ordinances that establish workers’ rights over scheduling. a fair workweek ordinance includes fourteen days notice of worker’s schedule, the right to ten hours rest between shifts, ability to request schedule change or refuse changes without retaliation, option to obtain full-time hours before an employer hires more workers. philadelphia, chicago, and seattle enacted ordi- nances. the struggle to pass the ordinance in los angeles has been waged for two years. thus, even prior to covid- , the fair workweek movement con- nected class stress, health problems, lack of leisure time, lack of sleep, and inabil- ity to plan or sustain education, care responsibilities, or life sustaining activities to employer manipulation of time hitched to disposability. workers had begun building an offense and a codification of rights around the problem of time. in kathi weeks’ terms, it asserts “the refusal of work’s domination over the times and spaces of life.” the dramatic work stoppages by nba and wnba professional athletes in august are powerful, even if athletes are not among the struggling working-class. they used a labor tactic and their considerable cultural clout to insist that business as usual could not continue under conditions of racist vio- lence. the fact that they could pull it off and win political objectives has symbolic value in boosting the confidence of others to engage in refusal. union locals rep- resenting a cross-section of service and industry workers (locals of seiu, unite here, afscme, ue, ufcw, and a number of teachers unions) issued a public solidarity statement that connected black lives matter and working-class struggle: “they remind us that when we strike to withhold our labor, we have the power to bring an unjust status quo to a grinding halt. the status quo—of police killing black people, of armed white nationalists killing demonstrators, of millions sick and increasingly desperate—is clearly unjust and it cannot continue.” we’ve had a pandemic year of walk-outs, mass marches, wildcats, and local and state hours initiatives. wildcats, of course, are ephemeral and episodic. what will give this upheaval sticking power? that question comes back to insti- tutions and how institutions educate and prepare people for long-term fights and power-building. to begin with, unions have to be nimble in their tactics, insistent on their possession of the fundamental rights of freedom of association and speech, broad in their issues, and ready to act in coalition with non-union- ized people. instead of “training” consisting of preparing workers for the taylorized speed-ups set by management, new labor approaches to training now teach workers it’s within their rights to fight when terms and conditions seem to be violated. seiu new england home-care officials explained they are retraining organizers and stewards on how to lead a shop fight—to take on coercive bosses, to demand timely fair payment, to fight for consistency inoculations h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms in hours, to fight when due process is denied. the goal is “concerted training” explicitly “to build a fighting organization,” affirms norma martinez-hosang, an organizer for both oregon’s public-sector seiu local and new england’s home care division. seiu new england ( ne) has taken an additional step by creating rank and file workers’ education sessions and the home care leadership academy. “we want workers to understand where their power comes from,” says puya gerami, ne education director. they’re no longer speaking the ameliorative language of the afl- cio about protecting the “middle class” and “the middle-class pay check.” this is now about the ruling class versus the working class. “we’re building an organization that can take on the power of the ruling class,” as gerami puts it. they also aim to build a solidarity economy. political education combines units on labor history, structural racism, intersectionality, the legislative process, and the mechanisms of economic inequality; it also includes building political skills among members. seiu, unite here, and the ue have implemented these principles and programs. the success of the chicago teachers union and united teachers los angeles strikes followed a decade of rank-and-file groundwork for engagement. the pandemic has reminded us that not everyone works—either because they cannot or because they’ve been let go or fired. and the great majority of americans are outside unions and work under “at-will” terms. that means the bridge to the solidarity economy must be built by a range of organizations and collective associations. starting from within unions, the bargaining for the common good is one strategy. bargaining for the common good aims to lever- age union bargaining and strike capacity into contracts that include community priorities: education, housing, health care access, and racial justice and equity. “campaigns must deeply engage memberships of both unions and community organizations…[with] joint visioning between members of the different organi- zations.” taking the offense requires directly challenging the agents extracting resources from communities and perpetuating repression, from banks to corpo- rations to police. laane is a different entity but committed to building a new economy and democracy through grass-roots organizing and community-ori- ented policy. branching out from an living wage and worker retention ordi- nances to “community benefits” agreements that tie city development to specific protections and benefits for communities, laane has become a leading partner in campaigns for immigrants’ rights, water access, environmental protection and elimination of toxicity from working-class communities, green jobs, and fair workweek ordinances. each of their campaigns (e.g., wages and economic development; education; energy and water) is rooted in an alli- ance with community groups, unions, racial justice organizations, student groups, and other worker organizations. taxing the rich and redistributing wealth is an explicit demand of both movements. they’ve been scaling up by forging national organizations, but national organizations that stay rooted in local mobilization and local community power. laane is a co-founder of the national partnership for working families. the bargaining for the ilwch, , month h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms common good network is now mapping a national index of union contracts and expiration dates to sync campaigns and strikes more broadly—to change the temporalities of previously fragmented and localized collective bargaining contracts and use them to leverage power. it’s taken a generation to revive the notion that there is a common good, we can put racial and gender justice at the center of it, we can take back the wealth elites have stolen, we can reclaim public space, and we must recommit to social and physical infrastruc- tures that will keep us alive as we face unprecedented pathogens, extreme weather events, water and food shortages, the right of people to move and migrate, and the ability to claim a distinction between work time and nonwork time. americans have been asked to pin their hopes for the future on two improbable outcomes: the return of a heyday of manufacturing jobs or the vast expansion of service jobs. neither will happen, nor on their own would they provide any change in the insecurity, hazards, or hierarchal power relations of work. we’ve entered a stage in which large-scale, oligopolistic capitalism needs far fewer workers. it’s not just steel, auto, and electronics factories that have mechanized. anything with a check-in or check-out counter just needs a kiosk or touch screen: supermarkets, parking garages, airlines, hotels, leisure/ entertainment venues. food packing is done by robots. distribution centers have rovers that identify, pick up, and load. even uber, with its push to use “self-driving cars,” is now seeking to displace drivers who were already dis- placed workers, expunged from other sectors of the economy. in fact, this process has only been sped up by the pandemic conditions and the need for social distancing: check-in and payment for salons, dental offices, and medical centers is done on-line without any need for person-to-person interaction. we should also wonder what will result after a year’s worth of online primary, sec- ondary, and higher education. the class challenge to the economic and political elite must mount a new set of demands and on different terrain, not a fight to return to how we worked before covid- . work, nonwork, and investment should be seen together in collective terms, as care workers’ activism has long suggested. we should envision policies that create work sharing and sustainability with less work—defining human life not subordinate to work. the politics of time must be linked to feminist re-imaginings family life, family care, and community care. the solidarity economy is a local economy that defends its public spaces without surveillance, reclaims its public services, builds community wealth by supporting worker and resident-owned and -directed enterprises, enhances people’s capabilities at whatever level of physical or cognitive ability, and builds new avenues for resident participation in democratic social and economic development. then we maybe we could all breathe and flourish. new concep- tions of time may also enable us to break free of the obstinately rapacious imper- ative of economic growth and grasp the temporal responsibilities we owe to a sustainable earth. inoculations h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms notes . the new york times, june , , “three words. cases. the tragic history of ‘i can’t breathe’.” . “ain’t i a woman!?” fall newsletter; “ain’t i a woman?!” fall newsletter; joann lum, letter to supporters, ain’t i a woman campaign, october , ; correspondence, joann lum to jennifer klein, may , , email in author’s possession. justa barrios tells her story in a video: https://www.facebook.com/aiwcampaign/videos/vl. / /?type= . . the new york times, june , , “when you are paid hours for a -hour shift,” e. tammy kim. https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/coronavirus-nursing-homes. html. . the new york times, august , , “breonna taylor’s life was changing. then the police came to her door,” rukimini callimachi. . lawrence glickman, a living wage: american workers and the making of a consumer society (ithica, ny, ); lara vapneck, breadwinners: working women and economic independence - (urbana-champagne, il, ); tobias higbie, labor’s mind: a history of working-class intellectual life (urbana-champagne, il, ). . jennifer klein, for all these rights: business, labor, and the shaping of america’s public-private welfare state (princeton, nj, ). . dorothy sue cobble, the other women’s movement: workplace justice and social rights in modern america (princeton, nj, ), – . . erin hatton, the temp economy: from kelly girls to permatemps (philadelphia, pa, ), – ; – . . david weil, the fissured workplace: why work became so bad for so many and what can be done to improve it (cambridge, ma, ; ), – . . hatton, the temp economy, . . tom juravich, at the altar of the bottom line: the degradation of work in the st century (amherst and boston, ma, ), , – . . weil, , . . hugh baran, “forced arbitration enabled employers to steal $ . billion from workers in low-paid jobs in ,” national employment law project data brief, february , https://nelp.org/s .pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads. . precent of black workers and . percent of women workers, . percent of hispanic workers are subject to forced arbitra- tion. class/collective action waivers are routinely included, which “prevent employees from banding together with colleagues to challenge their employer lawbreaking, whether in court or arbitration.”; national employment law project, “a state agenda for america’s workers: ways to promote good jobs in the states,” december , , https://www.nelp. org/publication/state-agenda-americas-workers- -ways-promote-good-jobs-states/. . the new york times, august , , “in the sharing economy, workers find both freedom and uncertainty,” natasha singer. . donald cohen, “privatization--chipping away at government.” in labor in the time of trump, edited by jasmine kerrissey, eve weinbaum et al. (ithica, ny, ), . . cohen, – . . eileen boris and jennifer klein, caring for america: home health workers in the shadow of the welfare state (oxford, ); employment of home health aides and personal care aides is projected to grow percent from to , much faster than the average for all occupations. on wage penalty, see paula england and nancy folbre, “the cost of caring,” annals of the american academy of political and social science , (jan. ): – . . jake rosenfeld, what unions no longer do (cambridge, ma, ), – . . “state and local government employment: monthly data,” governing, august , . http://www.governing.com/gov-data/public-workforce-salaries/states-most-government- workers-public-employees-by-job-type.html. . klein, “what wisconsin was really about,” democracy, may , . https:// democracyjournal.org/arguments/what-wisconsin-was-really-about/. . joseph a. mccartin, “bringing the state’s workers in: time to rectify an imbalanced u.s. labor historiography,” labor history , ( ). ilwch, , month h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. https://www.facebook.com/aiwcampaign/videos/vl. / /?type= https://www.facebook.com/aiwcampaign/videos/vl. / /?type= https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/coronavirus-nursing-homes.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/coronavirus-nursing-homes.html https://nelp.org/s .pcdn.co/wp-content/uploads https://www.nelp.org/publication/state-agenda-americas-workers- -ways-promote-good-jobs-states/ https://www.nelp.org/publication/state-agenda-americas-workers- -ways-promote-good-jobs-states/ http://www.governing.com/gov-data/public-workforce-salaries/states-most-government-workers-public-employees-by-job-type.html http://www.governing.com/gov-data/public-workforce-salaries/states-most-government-workers-public-employees-by-job-type.html https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/what-wisconsin-was-really-about/ https://democracyjournal.org/arguments/what-wisconsin-was-really-about/ https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms . daniel hosang and joseph lowndes, “parasites of government: racial antistatism and representations of public employees amid the great recession,” america quarterly, ( ): – . . fair workweek la, “hour crisis: unstable schedules in the los angeles retail sector,” fairworkweekla.org@fairworkweekla; los angeles times, march , , “erratic schedules a part of life for l.a. retail workers,” andrew khouri. . center for popular democracy, fair workweek initiative, and one pa, “certain uncertainty: low wages and unpredictable hours keep philadelphia hourly workers in poverty, data brief, october , http://static .squarespace.com.static; michaela winberg, “city council might set regular hours for every mcdonald’s employee in philly,” october , , billy penn, billypenn.com. . jean-christian vinel, the employee: a political history (philadelphia, pa, ), ; – . . ariel ducey, never good enough: health care workers and the false promise of job training (ithica, ny, ), – . . stephen campbell, “workplace injuries and the direct workforce,” phi issue brief, april , https://phinational.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /workplace-injuries-and-dcw. . annelise orleck, we’re all fast food workers now: the global uprising against poverty wages (boston, ), – . . orleck, . . https://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/national-retail-federation-nrf.asp. . https://nrf.com/insights/economy/about-retail-jobs; u.s. bureau of labor statistics, employment by major sector, - ” september , , https://www.bls.gov/emp/ tables/employment-by-major-industry-sector.htm. . chris brooks, “using trash bags for gowns,” labor notes, march , . . kathi weeks, the problem with work: feminism, marxism, antiwork politics, and postwork imaginaries (durham, nc, ), – . . rosa astra, “bay area amazon workers fight for safe working conditions: interview with adrienne williams,” july , , liberation, liberationnews.org. . paul bowd and mary jirmanus saba, “amazon, fedex workers fought exploitation in a pandemic, then joined an uprising,” the intercept, july , , https://theintercept.com/ / / /amazon-fedex-essential-workers-coronavirus-blm-protests/. see also video inter- view clip of williams, filmed and posted by saba. . national employment law project, “worker safety in crisis: the cost of a weakened osha,” data brief, april , www.nelp.org//s .pcdn.co. . ibid. . https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/ -nurses-protest-for-ppe-outside-white-house- you-throw-us-to-the-wolves. . jane slaughter, “finding new and old ways to fight new and old foes,” labor notes, may , . . weeks, the problem with work, ; . . statement from the labor movement in support of work stoppages for black lives,” august , , https://www.laborforblacklives.org/statement/statement-from-labor-movement- in-support-of-work-stoppages-for-black-lives-english. . norma martinez-hosang interview by author, february , , new haven, ct. in september , norma martinez-hosang became common good project director, seiu connecticut state council. puya gerami interview by author, february , , new haven, ct. . http://bargainingforthecommongood.org; http://laane.org. inoculations h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. mailto:fairworkweekla.org@fairworkweekla http://static .squarespace.com.static https://phinational.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /workplace-injuries-and-dcw https://www.investopedia.com/terms/n/national-retail-federation-nrf.asp https://nrf.com/insights/economy/about-retail-jobs https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-sector.htm https://www.bls.gov/emp/tables/employment-by-major-industry-sector.htm https://theintercept.com/ / / /amazon-fedex-essential-workers-coronavirus-blm-protests/ https://theintercept.com/ / / /amazon-fedex-essential-workers-coronavirus-blm-protests/ https://www.nelp.org//s .pcdn.co https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/ -nurses-protest-for-ppe-outside-white-house-you-throw-us-to-the-wolves https://thehill.com/policy/healthcare/ -nurses-protest-for-ppe-outside-white-house-you-throw-us-to-the-wolves https://www.laborforblacklives.org/statement/statement-from-labor-movement-in-support-of-work-stoppages-for-black-lives-english https://www.laborforblacklives.org/statement/statement-from-labor-movement-in-support-of-work-stoppages-for-black-lives-english https://bargainingforthecommongood.org http://laane.org https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms 	“inoculations: the social politics of time, labor, and public good in covid-america” 	american work at the turn of the twenty-first century 	class 	labor and collective action 	notes keep ps informed let us know about your new book. email ps at ps@apsanet.org to submit your title. ■ ps • january books by our readers © american political science association, all roads lead to power: the appointed and elected paths to public office for us women kaitlin sidorsky university press of kansas american bonds: how credit markets shaped a nation sarah l. quinn princeton university press the american untouchables: america and the racial contract andre smith vernon press american while black: african americans, immigration, and the limits of citizenship niambi m. carter oxford university press asia’s regional architecture: alliances and institutions in the pacific century andrew yeo stanford university press building the compensatory state: an intel- lectual history and theory of american administrative reform robert f. durant routledge cabinets, ministers, and gender claire annesley, karen beckwith, and susan franceschet oxford university press china’s urban champions: the politics of spatial development kyle a. jaros princeton university press de-moralizing gay rights: some queer remarks on lgbt+ rights politics in the us cyril ghosh palgrave macmillan the great broadening: how the vast expansion of the policymaking agenda transformed american politics bryan jones, sean theriault, and michelle whyman university of chicago press s p o t l i g h t stay woke: a people’s guide to making all black lives matter tehama lopez bunyasi and candis watts smith nyu press in this essential primer, the authors inspire readers to address the pressing issues of racial inequality and provide a basic toolkit that will equip readers to become knowledgeable partic- ipants in public debate, activism, and politics. from activists to students to the average citizen, stay woke empowers all readers to work toward a better future for black americans. tehama lopez bunyasi is assistant professor of conflict analysis and resolution at george mason uni- versity. candis watts smith is associate professor of political science and african american studies at the penn- sylvania state university. interpretive research design: concepts and processes peregrine schwartz-shea and dvora yanow routledge keeping the peace: spatial differences in hindu-muslim violence in gujarat, raheel dhattiwala cambridge university press ordinary jews: choice and survival during the holocaust evgeny finkel princeton university press pork barrel politics: how government spending determines elections in a polar- ized era andrew sidman columbia university press presidential privilege and the freedom of information act kevin m. baron edinburgh university press representation and the electoral college robert m. alexander oxford university press subordinating intelligence: the dod/cia post-cold war relationship david p. oakley university press of kentucky transgender rights: from obama to trump susan gluck mezey routledge unrivaled: why america will remain the world’s sole superpower michael beckley cornell university press ■ mailto:ps@apsanet.org for peer r eview o nly unsettling intersectional identities: historicising embodied boundaries and border crossings journal: ethnic and racial studies manuscript id rers- - manuscript type: ers review – book symposium keywords: a, b, c, d, e, f url: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/rers ethnic@surrey.ac.uk ethnic and racial studies for peer r eview o nly unsettling intersectional identities: historicising embodied boundaries and border crossings ann phoenix thomas coram research unit, department of social science, ucl institute of education, london, uk helsinki collegium for advanced studies, university of helsinki, helsinki, finland abstract at a time when the pace of global change has led to unprecedented shifts in, and unsettling of, identities, brubaker brings ‘trans/gender’ and ‘trans/racial’ creatively into conversation to theorise the historical location of identity claims and to examine the question of whether identities are optional, self-consciously chosen and subject to political claims rather than biologically pre-given. his main argument is that the distinction between sex and gender allows us to construct gender identity as personal, individual and separate from the (biologically) sexed body. in contrast, other people always have a stake in allowing or challenging identity claims to racial identity. brubaker’s argument is persuasive. however, he treats both race and sex/gender as solipsistic and neglects the wider social context that has produced the conditions of possibility for the entrenched differences he records. an intersectional approach would have deepened his discussion of the place of categories in ‘trans’ arguments. keywords: historical location; identities; intersectionality; performativity; race; sex/gender; structural context the plethora of publications on identity have produced a number of commonplaces about how to theorise it. these include notions that identities are multiple and in constant flux; that ‘insider’ understandings do not necessarily accord with ‘outsider’ constructions and that there are differences between people within any social identity category as well as commonalities across groups constructed as different (foresight, ; wetherell, ). at a time when there is also general agreement that the pace of global change has led to unprecedented shifts in, and unsettling of, identities, questions of what leads to change in identities, for whom and why is less clear. the centrality of these questions to brubaker’s new book makes it an inviting read for anyone interested in identities and particularly, gender, race and intersectionality. the main heading ‘trans’ adds intrigue as well as timeliness. as with many academic publications, this text had an unexpected genesis. in spring , brubaker’s attention was caught by two us news stories that generated ‘vernacular’ sociological debate in the media, including the blogosphere and social media. briefly, caitlyn jenner, a former male olympic gold medal decathlete and a member of the media-savvy kardashian family, gained public support and acclamation when she made public her transition from male to female. the following week, rachel dolezal, then president of a chapter of the naacp (national association for the advancement of colored people, spokane branch, usa) was reported to be white, rather than black, as she had claimed. her parents’ affirmation that she was definitely not black, led to her resignation from the leadership of the spokane naacp chapter and much public vilification on the grounds that it is not possible to change one’s race. dolezal’s claim that she identifies as black was largely dismissed, while jenner’s identification as a woman was generally supported. indeed, transgender and plural sexualities have rapidly gained legislative purchase in the us and many other countries after centuries of being undeclared, while changing race is no longer officially sanctioned in most countries. email: a.phoenix@ioe.ac.uk page of url: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/rers ethnic@surrey.ac.uk ethnic and racial studies for peer r eview o nly the temporal juxtaposition of the two stories led to gendered/racialized comparisons that germinated brubaker’s desire to explore the ‘unsettled identities’ of gender and race. brubaker calls his book an essay, not a monograph, because it is ‘exploratory, tentative, and incomplete’, trying-out new ideas. the resulting short book is a thought experiment that constitutes a nuanced consideration of similarities and differences in these two identity categories. it is undoubtedly a highly scholarly, well-referenced book, accessibly written with an admirably light touch. brubaker goes beyond the syllogisms that characterized the public debate, which asked the question ‘if transgender is acceptable, is transracial also acceptable and recognizable?’ instead, he treats the two events as an intellectual opportunity to ‘think with trans’, rather than about trans. he is not interested in lived experience, but ‘contemporary transformations of, and struggles, over, gender and race as systems of social classification’ (p.xi). in thinking ‘with’ brubaker distinguishes conceptually the trans of ‘migration’ (moving from one to another category), ‘between’ (defining self in relation to existing binaries, but as different) and beyond (e.g. transcending categorization). bringing transgender and transracial creatively into conversation allows brubaker to recognize the historical location of identity claims and to examine a range of questions that are central to current social science puzzles. for example, a key feature of the book is whether identities are optional to the extent that they have become the focus of self-conscious choices and political claims rather than being biologically pre- given. brubaker also explores how the boundaries between categories is controlled and policed, as well as how new categories come into being. in addressing these issues, he lays out current thinking and contestations about the fluidity/fixity and contingency/essentialism of different kinds of identities. the simultaneous examination of transgender and transracial allows brubaker to analyse the discourses of ‘essentialists’, ‘voluntarists’ and those who combine voluntarism with essentialism. methodologically, this book helpfully shows the utility of conducting thought experiments, in this case of bringing together concepts that are everyday and that are much debated by both public and academics. in examining processes of change in two major social categories, gender and race, brubaker illustrates how each can enable consequential sociological analysis of the other and so add to social analysis. brubaker’s main argument is that the tension between choice and ‘givenness’ plays out differently for sex/gender in comparison with race because, while both are becoming increasingly unsettled, the distinction between sex and gender allows us to construct gender identity as personal, individual and separate from the (biologically) sexed body. brubaker refers to this as the ‘objectivity of the subjective identity' (p. ). as a result, only individuals themselves can claim knowledge of their gender identification, even though transgender people may be asked to prove their commitment to their identification before being granted access to medical interventions. ‘the sex-gender distinction thus allows gender identity to be both disembodied and re-embodied’ (p. ). in the absence of a comparable separation in racialization, there is no easy way to stake a claim to identification as black in the absence of phenotypical evidence and/or demonstrable black ancestry. in brubaker’s terms, ‘subjectivity is understood as an expression of racial identity, not as its ground’ (p. ). as brubaker points out, the inheritance of sex is not dependent on family history. thus, while sex/gender are more fundamental and biologically consequential categories than racialized categories, other people always have a stake in allowing or challenging identity claims to racial identity in a way that they do not for claims to gender identities. thus, ‘our conceptual and linguistic resources for thinking about race make it nearly impossible to imagine racial identity in a similar way to gender identity’ (p. ). ‘passing’ for white or black is understood as inauthentic and dissimulation by getting others to ‘misperceive’ one’s race and, in the case of the ‘reverse passing’ of which rachel dolezal was accused, of dishonestly appropriating a culture, history and social position. it is for these reasons, brubaker suggests, that as projects of self-transformation, transgender and transracial produce different results despite their apparent similarities, with transgender being viewed as more transgressive and having disruptive potential. page of url: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/rers ethnic@surrey.ac.uk ethnic and racial studies for peer r eview o nly this might seem surprising given that there have been enormous changes in racialized demography in the us (as well as in other countries in the minority world). in particular, there have been marked increases in ‘mixed’ relationships and children born to parents from different racialized and ethnicised groups as well as demands for ‘multiracial’ categories to be recognized. however, as brubaker suggests, the persistent influence of the ‘one-drop rule’ continues to limit choices for racialized identities. thus, while brubaker points out that some feminists strive to restrict access to women’s spaces to ‘women-born women’, he suggests that access to blackness is now more closely policed (unlike in the periods of slavery and ‘jim crow’ laws). both instances of policing are unidirectional in that transgender men’s access to male spaces is not policed in the same way and access to whiteness is not similarly policed. brubaker suggests that the policing of migration is connected to concerns about cultural appropriation (for race) and access to spaces reserved for black people or women. brubaker’s argument is persuasive, that sex/gender and race have different logics and moral orders. however, this is a partial explanation in that it treats both race and sex/gender as solipsistic and neglects the wider social context that has produced the conditions of possibility for the entrenched differences he records. he therefore takes too voluntaristic or optional a view of identity choices for gender. yet, brubaker recognizes that the world is ‘crisscrossed by dense classificatory grids’ (p. ) and briefly discusses intersectionality and its use to critique analogical reasoning of the kind invoked in comparisons of caitlyn jenner and rachel dolezal (p. ). he recognizes that categories are internally differentiated and mutually constituted, but since he does not employ intersectional analysis, his essay does not sufficiently engage with differences within racialized and gendered categories or their simultaneity. what, for example, of transgender black people? what of white ones? an intersectional approach would also have buttressed his arguments for how categories are treated in ‘trans’ arguments since, for example, notions of going beyond race and gender categories have been much discussed in intersectional work following leslie mccall’s ( ) delineation of inter-, intra- and anti-categorical intersectional approaches. brubaker also downplays (although he does mention) the structural context that facilitates or constrains identity claims and how they are received by different others. this makes some of brubaker’s conclusions too simplistic. for example, he describes the ‘performative turn’ as interlinked with identities and structures, but focuses attention on the identity element, rather than the structural. yet, they are inextricably linked. butler ( : ) introduced performativity as more than reiterated performances, but ‘repeated acts within a highly rigid regulatory frame that congeal over time’ so that they appear natural and constitute ‘a political genealogy of gender ontologies’. this process is psychosocial, reiterating and creating identities as well as socioeconomic structures, but it is not as optional as brubaker sometimes makes it seem since there are always ‘highly rigid regulatory frames’. equally, brubaker’s formulation sometimes renders the exclusionary processes (re)iterated in racialized identities silent because the history and contemporary enactments of racialization and racism are absent from his formulation. as a result, racialized identities seem deficient in being more essentialist than gendered identities. brubaker’s formulation of race as an ‘unsettled’ and unsettling identity is unsatisfactory in paying insufficient attention to current theorisations of (racialized) identities. for example, it does not attend to internal differences between people in particular racialized categories. this matters because, as brubaker recognizes, racialized ‘border crossings’ are more open to some than others in that the legacy of the ‘one- drop rule’ excludes those phenotypically legible as black, asian, arab etc., from inscription into whiteness. outside the domain of data collection, of course, options for meaningful and effective choice of racial and ethnic identity are unequally distributed. a dark-skinned person in the united states does not have a socially meaningful option to identify as white. (p. ) page of url: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/rers ethnic@surrey.ac.uk ethnic and racial studies for peer r eview o nly perhaps more important is the issue of what it means for categories to be socially constructed. what does it mean to be white in a context when the unmarkedness of whiteness makes it difficult for many white people to identify what constitutes whiteness other than skin colour. difference within the category of blackness is also important in relation to the essentialism brubaker discusses. from the s onwards paul gilroy (e.g. ), amongst others, has explored the pervasiveness of ‘ethnic absolutism’ on both sides of the atlantic. his critique makes clear that the internal policing of blackness is not absolute. equally, scholars who explore ‘post-race’ positions do so from understandings of the relative genetic insignificance of race, the unsettled nature of racialized identities and the relevance of performativity and new ways of ‘doing’ blackness in different historical era (e.g. ali, ; nayak, ). they do not advocate those popular positions that suggest that ‘race’ no longer matters. brett st louis ( : ), for example, suggests that ‘while there might be semantic mileage in the theoretical and analytical obsolescence of race, it remains a primary ascriptive marker of individual and group characteristics in the social world and also serves, at times, as a validation of discrimination and an incitement to violence’. brubaker clearly recognizes this at various points in his essay. he says, for instance: with the memory still fresh of the charleston church massacre and the deaths that inspired the wave of black lives matter protests, one needs no reminder of the analytical and political limits of a focus on passing and performance (p. ). however, his ‘trying out’ of ideas appears to render invisible the discrimination and violence associated with race, even though he mentions the ‘black lives matter’ campaign. yet, in making his case, brubaker sometimes leaves a gap between such sociostructural issues and the sometimes individualising rhetoric of notions of choice and self-transformation. for example, the paragraph following the one above suggests: still, the declining authority of ancestry over racial and ethnic classification…has substantially enlarged the space for choice, affiliation, and self-transformation. this holds even for a substantial and growing share of those whose ancestry, a few decades ago, would have unambiguously led them to classify themselves and to be classified by others, as black’’. it would have been helpful to have these two paragraphs linked by more than the suggestion of simultaneity. this is particularly the case, since, as brubaker recognizes, concern about separating ‘mixed’ categories from blackness were partly about the potential dilution of political power through the reduction of numbers in the ‘black’ category. while it is entirely reasonable that brubaker does not conduct empirical research in this area or wait to do so before theorizing these issues, drawing on some of the empirical work done in related areas would have helped to deepen understanding of why the issues he addresses remain controversial. in this regard, it is instructive to consider signithia fordham’s ( ) sustained attention to academically successful black young people in the us, what she calls their strategy of ‘acting white’ to generate success and the controversy with which such ideas have frequently been greeted. similarly, jefferson’s ( ) memoir historicises socioeconomic and status divisions between african americans. a related point, and one to which brubaker returns, is that part of the resistance to white people passing as black, asian or first nation is related to attempts to prevent cultural appropriation. this is undoubtedly, contentious for those who point out that, for example, white hip-hop artists are often more successful than black ones. brubaker argues that crossover practices have come to be seen ‘as potentially more affiliative than appropriative’, subverting racial hierarchies rather than reinforcing them as deceptive and fraudulent. there are, of course, many instances where this is the case. however, the argument here would have been deepened by consideration of the now considerable work that has examined the contexts within which what is considered ‘cultural appropriation’ becomes acceptable and for whom. early uk examples include work by roger hewitt ( ), les back ( ) and phil cohen ( ), but this issue has also been addressed page of url: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/rers ethnic@surrey.ac.uk ethnic and racial studies for peer r eview o nly in the us (e.g. fordham, ). the lack of an intersectional approach also means that that the highly gendered nature of ‘cultural appropriation’ of, for example, hip-hop is omitted from discussion here. in a text that he makes clear is ‘exploratory, tentative, and incomplete’, it may seem unfair to ask for more than brubaker provides. however, by bringing these two concepts together, he encourages us to think even more broadly, about other boundaries and border crossings. what might be gained, for example, by considering ‘trans’ as in ‘transnational’ (migration or families). perhaps the notion that people who move (countries) are both ‘here and there’ (hondagneu-sotelo and avila, ), leave some behind as they forge new relations and are subject to the inextricable linking of relationality and national politics might have served to elucidate the relationality of positioning. it is true that brubaker considers the ‘trans’ in ‘transracial adoption’. however, he glosses over the numerous pieces of research published in this, and related areas, by suggesting that ‘the dolezal affair wrenched “transracial” out of the adoption context and brought it into conversation with “transgender”’ and the new forms of ‘unsettled identities’ it produces (p. ). this misses a chance to think further about the complexity of ‘transracial’ and its commonalities with, and differences from ‘transgender’ as well as why various political and conceptual contestations persist despite the marked changes over time that brubaker identifies (see, for example, phoenix and simmonds, ). as lamont and molnár ( ) suggested there is still a need for improved understanding of social and symbolic boundaries and the cultural mechanisms that produce them. despite the above critique, it is important to recognize that brubaker’s decision to interrogate the notion of ‘trans’ as used in ‘transgender’ and ‘transracial’ in the caitlyn jenner and rachel dolezal cases has, as he intended, been a tool to think ‘with’ rather than ‘about’ race, ethnicity, gender and their intersections. as such it is highly productive and stimulating. it will certainly encourage, and indeed provoke, novel reflection about ‘the contingency and arbitrariness of racial categories, while remaining sensitive to the ways in which gender and race operate as different systems of embodied difference’ (p. ). references ali, s.. . mixed-race, post-race: gender, new ethnicities and cultural practices. berg. butler, j. . gender trouble, feminist theory, and psychoanalytic discourse. feminism/postmodernism. fordham, s. . “beyond capital high: on dual citizenship and the strange career of “acting white”.” anthropology & education quarterly, ( ), - . fordham, s. . “passin' for black: race, identity, and bone memory in postracial america”. harvard educational review, ( ), - . foresight . . future identities: changing identities in the uk–the next years. dr : social media and identity. gilroy, p. . against race: imagining political culture beyond the color line. harvard university press. hondagneu-sotelo, p. and avila, e. . ”“i'm here, but i'm there” the meanings of latina transnational motherhood.” gender & society, ( ), - . lamont, m. and molnár, v. "the study of boundaries in the social sciences." annual review of sociology, - . mccall, l. . “the complexity of intersectionality.” signs, ( ), - . nayak, a. . “after race: ethnography, race and post-race theory”. ethnic and racial studies, ( ), - . page of url: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/rers ethnic@surrey.ac.uk ethnic and racial studies for peer r eview o nly st louis , b. . “post-race/post-politics? activist-intellectualism and the reification of race.” ethnic and racial studies, : , - , doi: . / wetherell, m. (ed.) . theorizing identities and social action. basingstoke: palgrave macmillan. page of url: http://mc.manuscriptcentral.com/rers ethnic@surrey.ac.uk ethnic and racial studies editorials - /© australian nursing and midwifery federation. all rights reserved.https://doi.org/ . / . . australian journal of advanced nursing ( ) • . . we acknowledge the sovereignty of first nations peoples across the earth as the traditional custodians of country and respect their continuing connection to culture, community, land, waters, and sky. we pay our respect to elders past and present and in particular to those who led the way, allowing us to realise our own aspirations to be healers and carers, ushering our people from and to the dreaming. “you need to take your blindfolds off and come back to the fire”. these were the words of a first nations elder and a custodian of the sacred fire speaking to congress of aboriginal and torres strait islander nurses and midwives (catsinam) delegates and educational researchers during a recent visit to the aboriginal tent embassy in canberra. these words called to us to remember and to acknowledge our ways of knowing, doing and being as first nations health professionals and researchers. they also called to all who were present to critically reflect on our professional stance and practices as nurses, midwives and researchers in the light of the fire. this editorial responds to and draws on the words of a first nations elder, to remind us all of the importance of who we are, where we have come from and our place, position, and traditional practices within the australian nursing and midwifery profession. these words are a reminder of the importance of our shared role and responsibility to continue to challenge racism and oppressive practices in australian healthcare for transformation and for better health outcomes for first nations peoples. decolonising nursing and midwifery research and education is a clear transformational reform process to address oppressive practices and racism including attitudes, ignorance and bias, generalisations, assumptions, “taking our blindfolds off”: acknowledging the vision of first nations peoples for nursing and midwifery* * please note the term “first nations peoples” is used here to be respectful and inclusive of all indigenous peoples whose countries and nations have been and still are impacted by colonisation. the first peoples of australia represent over aboriginal and torres strait islander nations who have never ceded sovereignty. in this editorial we use the term first nations peoples to specifically refer to the peoples from the first nations of australia. https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . editorials - /© australian nursing and midwifery federation. all rights reserved. uninformed opinions and commit to developing and embedding cultural safety in the nursing and midwifery professions. as a collective of first nations nurses and midwives, we acknowledge the distinctive countries we belong to that position our identities, experiences, roles, rights and responsibilities as educational researchers in nursing and midwifery. collectively, we represent a growing community of researchers involved in decolonising nursing and midwifery research and professional education, united by a deep conviction to work together to counteract the repressive ways that sustain deficit approaches towards first nations patients and nurses and midwives in education, health, and research contexts. the elder’s words reminded us that as nursing and midwifery professionals we needed to “take off our blindfolds” to be able to see what we may not be able to see yet. what he reminded us about was the way we view or approach the ethics of care as both first nations and the wider nursing and midwifery workforce and spoke to the ways in which racialising first nations peoples in education, research or in clinical practice is still the norm in australia. we are grateful for the invitation to write the first guest editorial for for the australian journal of advanced nursing, and seek to take off our blindfolds and come back to the fire to build better and effective relationships within the australian nursing and midwifery professions toward a shared commitment to cultural safety praxis. in particular, we seek to examine the nursing and midwifery professional socialisation that informs the lens through which nurses and midwives view first nations people’s rights to culturally safe healthcare. in doing so we acknowledge that current curriculum innovations involving first nations peoples, their health needs, and our roles in addressing them in nursing and midwifery, present a defining challenge for our professions at this time. in the nursing profession was first introduced to the concept of cultural safety through the work of maori nurse irihapeti ramsden and her work has now changed nursing and midwifery education and practice. at the same time, first nations nurses in australia were establishing a collective identity and voice in research and healthcare through catsin, the congress of aboriginal and torres strait islander nurses. almost years later the international year of the nurse and midwife saw an australian first nations collaboration with over nursing and midwifery leaders issue a call to action advocating for a unified professional response to the black lives matter movement, highlighting the continuing inequities in the australian healthcare system. to heed the words of our elders and remove any blindfolds we call for all of us to look with fresh eyes at the way nursing and midwifery education, research and practice can perpetuate these unjust practices under our watch if left unchecked. , https://doi.org/ . / . . sherwood j, west r, geia l, et al. • australian journal of advanced nursing ( ) • . . in this editorial, we outline why we need to take off our professional blindfolds and look at the elephant in the room in nursing and midwifery. as health professionals, we need to see how our education and research theories, methods and methodologies socialise our clinical worldview and the way our respective professions relate to australia’s first peoples. this means being able to see and acknowledge the impact of our own cultural backgrounds on what we bring into quality and standards in nursing and midwifery care. we also need to make a commitment to transformative approaches in the life-long learning journey that growing culturally safe nurses and midwives entails. to enable this, we propose that indigenist and decolonising ethics and approaches in research, education, the academy and in healthcare are critical tools to expedite first nations people’s right to access culturally safe care from, and within, the nursing and midwifery profession. – as a research collective, we are united by the shared values and principles embedded in contemporary indigenist and decolonising research approaches. decolonising and indigenist approaches refocus the object of the professional gaze more towards the professions, institutions and structures that frame first peoples as objects in research and care. , applying first peoples knowledges and lived experiences to inform research praxis is challenging to articulate and frame in research and requires addressing core tensions and differences in the assumptions that underpin research. it does this by consciously and critically engaging with the need to transform the discourse, or the way we view, talk about, and create first nations health. , for first nations researchers and educators in nursing and midwifery this often involves addressing how our bodies, families and communities are perceived and storied in first nations health research. – cultural safety is both a philosophy and strategy for reducing professional and institutional racism. we argue that health practitioners have a responsibility to employ critical consciousness to developing strategic frameworks that promote and make space for a culturally safe working environment, and safe healing environment for aboriginal and torres strait islander people. history informs us that broader nurses and midwives in the not so distant past practiced as agents for government control. complicit in enforcing government assimilation policies these health practices were discriminatory and experienced by first nations nurses, midwives and patients as racism. , while cultural safety training is mandatory in nursing and midwifery education, the effectiveness of this in practice is unclear. there is currently a lack of published literature to document the impact of cultural safety curriculum innovations and the reduction of health inequities through creating safe work environments. cultural safety is both a right for aboriginal and torres strait islander peoples to experience in nursing and midwifery and in healthcare and a responsibility for health nurses and https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . editorials - /© australian nursing and midwifery federation. all rights reserved. midwives to uphold and commit to. many untold stories of the role played by nurses and midwives in government control and assimilation policies underpin the history of nursing and midwifery amongst first nations peoples in australia and the racism that first nations nurses, midwives and patients continue to experience within healthcare. – our collective work is focussed on how cultural safety is researched, monitored and evaluated, as a critical component of patient safety inextricably linked to clinical safety, in australia and importantly one not possible without the other. our approach to cultural safety research also involves being culturally safe researchers. we seek to do this by being critically conscious and developing robust research theory and methodology that accommodate and value different ways of knowing, being and doing, and build a sense of ownership and community through research practice partnerships that contribute to the strategic goals of catsinam. advocating and employing indigenist and decolonising research approaches enables us to navigate a range of tensions that are common in cross cultural research and evaluation contexts. these tensions include:  • balancing multiple accountabilities – – to the families and communities who as first nations peoples we are accountable to. – to the nursing and midwifery professions that as nurses and midwives we are accountable to. – to universities and schools of nursing and midwifery that as nursing and midwifery academics we are accountable to. – to health organisations that as health professionals we are accountable to. • upholding cultural responsibilities and obligations; and • addressing differing expectations of research.    the research we collectively do involves the broader cultural and social determinants of health. including indigenous, nurses and midwives’ unique ways of knowing, doing and being in this work helps us navigate complex health spaces for our communities and for our non-indigenous colleagues grappling with understanding the impact of their cultural backgrounds on nursing and midwifery education and research. as a collective we advocate for an approach within indigenous nurses and midwives research that aligns with the three fundamental and interrelated imperatives of indigenist research namely:  • resistance as the emancipatory imperative in research • political integrity in indigenous research • privileging indigenous voices in indigenist research our approach to research also aligns with the values and principles that guide the ethical conduct of research with aboriginal and torres strait islander peoples and communities in australia of the national health and medical research council (nhmrc) and the australian institute of aboriginal and torres strait islander studies (aiatsis). https://doi.org/ . / . . sherwood j, west r, geia l, et al. • australian journal of advanced nursing ( ) • . . while we acknowledge these values and principles in research, we call for others to recognise and understand that these approaches hold value for the professional aspirations of nursing and midwifery education, and research. in growing our research and education approach with others, we seek to use our collective indigenous voice to raise and address critical health issues and create a legacy in indigenous nursing and midwifery research. this is in part political, necessarily so – but it is also personal because of our position, responsibility and accountability to our communities. the international year of the nurse and midwife marked a year of great change and challenges for the nursing and midwifery workforce, we have experienced social and health upheavals that have shocked and called us to attention, and reflect on who we are as nurses and midwives collectively. we can no longer be silent on issues that are unjust and oppressive. our elders call for us all to “take off our blindfolds” and “come back to the fire” and they remind us to acknowledge our shared responsibility to be transformational in how we story and conduct research in nursing and midwifery. this editorial marks the beginning of developing our community of practice as first nations nurses and midwives, educators, practitioners and researchers. we invite our nursing and midwifery colleagues to also return to the fire and critically reflect on what its light reveals for the nursing and midwifery profession and for those within our care. we urge you to not remain silent but to join us to speak into the silence that surrounds the tacit acceptance of culturally unsafe care. prof juanita sherwood wiradjuri office of indigenous engagement, charles sturt university, bathurst, new south wales, australia prof roianne west kalkadoon and djaku-nde peoples school of nursing and midwifery, griffith university, brisbane, queensland, australia dr lynore geia bwgcolman, culturally linked to kalkadoon, birri gubba and the torres strait college of healthcare sciences, james cook university, douglas, queensland, australia ali drummond meriam, wuthathi school of nursing, queensland university of technology, brisbane, queensland, australia dr tamara power wiradjuri susan wakil school of nursing, faculty of health and medicine, university of sydney, new south wales, australia dr lynne stuart mandandanji school of nursing, midwifery and paramedicine, university of the sunshine coast, queensland, australia associate prof linda deravin wiradjuri faculty of science, charles sturt university, bathurst, new south wales, australia https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . editorials - /© australian nursing and midwifery federation. all rights reserved. references power t, geia l, adams k, drummond a, saunders v, stuart l, et al. beyond : addressing racism through transformative indigenous health and cultural safety education. j clin nurs. ; available from: 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[cited jan ] available from: http://unsworks.unsw. edu.au/fapi/datastream/unsworks: /source ?view=true sherwood j, anthony t. ethical conduct in indigenous research: it’s just good manners. in: george l, tauri j, te ata o tu macdonald l, editors. indigenous research ethics: claiming research sovereignty beyond deficit and the colonial legacy; . rigney li. a first perspective of indigenous australian participation in science: framing indigenous research towards indigenous australian intellectual sovereignty. aboriginal research institute, university of south australia. adelaide. . 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https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . michigan journal of community service learning spring , pp. – review essay facing, embracing, and tracing social justice in service- learning kari grain university of british columbia service- learning to advance social justice in a time of radical inequality alan tinkler, barri tinkler, virginia jagla, and jean strait, editors charlotte, nc: information age publishing, in the weeks following an intensification of gun violence in the united states (us), a popular in- ternet meme emerged in – “things are not getting worse, they are just getting uncovered. we must hold each other tight and continue to pull back the veil” (brown, ). penned by black lives matter writer- activist, adrienne maree brown, the quote quickly went viral. it offered a concise and accessible way for readers to reflect upon the histo- ry of social injustices, and implored them to sum- mon the courage to learn despite fear of what might be found through that act of seeking. to “hold each other tight” is to value the role of closeness and relationships as a salve to the difficult knowledge that may be revealed. it is precisely this message that service- learning to advance social justice in a time of radical inequality presents. this volume, edited by alan tinkler, barri tinkler, virginia jag- la, and jean strait, reckons with the indispensabil- ity of relationships and political orientations to the field of service- learning and community engage- ment. as with brown’s excerpt, this book reminds readers that injustice is not new, even when it is uncovered in great waves through first- hand or vi- carious experience. if brown’s suggestion is true – that the most judicious response to injustice is a turning- toward one another rather than a turning- away – then this book offers a scholarly forum for such work without sacrificing a healthy exploration of resistance and critique. service- learning to advance social justice in a time of radical inequality continues the important work of stitching together the currently fragment- ed relationship between social justice as a concept [and sometimes as a concept that bocci in chapter calls “superficially social- justice- oriented” (p. )] and social justice as a lived reality in diverse service- learning programs. although i would like to have seen the notion of social justice explored in depth from the outset, this edited volume more than compensates for this through some authors’ critical engagement with the theoretical roots and practical application of social justice in service- learning. the - chapter book is structured into four sections: (a) service- learning to reach across disciplinary boundaries in higher education; (b) service- learning to support a reimagining of teacher education; (c) addressing unconscious bias and racial inequality through social justice and critical service- learning; and (d) service- learning to advance community inquiry. each section contains a short introduction written by one of the four editors and briefly lays out concepts and considerations that connect the chapters. this review essay elaborates on two primary strengths of the book and raises one key suggestion for how we, as a community invested in social jus- tice and community engagement, might approach similar volumes moving forward. first, i suggest that service- learning to advance social justice in a time of radical inequality offers readers a rich collection of critical theoretical approaches, rooted in an examination of systemic power and privilege. here, the book faces important and uncomfortable root causes of inequities. second, i describe ways in which the book exemplifies brown’s ( ) apt metaphor: to be an act of embrace and turning- toward. it is as much a relational embrace amongst authors as a collaborative conversation about the different theoretical and disciplinary approaches they use. third, as a fellow scholar and practitioner who grapples with my own privileged identity vis- à- vis the deeply rooted structural issues that we at- tempt to address through critical service- learning, review essay i suggest that social justice must not be a taken- for- granted term, as it appears to be at the outset of this volume. instead, the ways that social justice is conceived must be traced through time and space. especially in work that relies on – and aims to up- hold - the efficacy of social justice, we render our inquiry more rigorous when we are explicit about our own theoretical foundations, positionality, and definitions. through the implicit thoughtfulness of fleshing out a term as loaded as social justice, we also might do well to commit to an ongoing dis- comfort surrounding the contradictions and com- plications that imbue it. i close with a brief sum- mary of my impressions and some questions for further reflection. facing power and privilege at the heart of many conversations about social justice is the problematization of inequality and the examination of power and privilege. multiple chapters in this book take up these discussions by drawing on prolific critical service- learning schol- ars such as dan butin and tania mitchell. for those readers wishing to deepen their understanding of power and privilege in the context of service- learning, some authors discuss important concepts such as complicity, imperialism, resistance, and white privilege. for example, chapter ushers in an important exploration of feminist approaches to service- learning as a vehicle for social justice education. using a community activism service- learning course entitled, “take back the halls: ending vi- olence in relationships and schools,” catlett and proweller extend the ongoing dialogue about the vital role that feminist and critical theory plays in the use of service- learning. they underline ways in which the interrogation of structures of power and privilege are destabilizing, but nonetheless vital, to college students’ participation in social justice service- learning. the authors’ posit that destabi- lization galvanizes learners to both identify and deconstruct systemic inequalities in three areas: (a) students’ perceptions of white privilege, (b) stu- dents’ “understanding of interpersonal violence” as it is affected by structural inequality, and (c) “ways in which new insights translate into a trans- formational orientation to advance social justice” (p. ). importantly, this chapter outlines a theo- retical framework that provides a context for the authors’ conception of social justice, interweaving complementary principles of feminist scholarship and critical service- learning (mitchell, ). they also highlight black feminist theory, which frames systems of power as “relational, structural, politi- cal, and ideological” (p. ). i read this chapter as a call for continued “existentially disturbing” (butin, , p. ), “destabilizing,” (catlett & proweller, p. ) and “unsettling” (p. ) pedagogies. to be effective, the authors are careful to point out that such pedagogies must be paired with a professor’s commitment to and demonstration of a turning- toward – a sense of encouragement, openness, and a nurturing push in the direction of exploring criti- cal connections. in a continued demonstration of butin’s influ- ence, seher and iverson’s chapter illustrates a discipline- specific study in which the researchers explore how dietetic educators frame and teach service- learning courses. they effectively artic- ulate the relevance of social justice in their field, particularly through the illustration of inequities related to healthcare access and opportunities for a variety of well- being measures. as with many in this volume, the authors suggest that the roots of their approach to social justice service- learning can be found in butin’s ( ) political approach to service- learning: underlining issues of power imbalances, voiced versus silenced perspectives, and understandings of objectivity versus neutrality, among others. through a critical content analysis of service- learning research in dietetics and nutrition over a five- year period, the authors discover that an overwhelming majority of articles ( . %) are oriented within butin’s ( ) technical concep- tualization of service- learning, in which service- learning is situated as a tool with which to achieve academic and professional socialization objectives. in contrast, only % of the research in dietetics ap- proached service- learning in terms of social justice- oriented or politically- engaged understanding. in response to what the authors call the “apolitical and atheoretical” enactments of service- learning in di- etetics, the chapter offers useful recommendations for those who educate health professionals through community engagement work: (a) incorporate re- flection (informed by critical and feminist peda- gogy) into teaching, (b) consider sustainability in community partnerships, and (c) consider and ex- amine reciprocity. overall, the chapter argues for a reconceptualization of service- learning within di- etetics and health, and as a reader, i was left with a greater understanding not only of why social justice matters in dietetics, but also how service- learning tends to be conceptualized and used in that field. casting a continued spotlight on power and priv- ilege, chapter , by dowell, barrera iv, sall, and meidl, contains an excellent theoretical section outlining “a socially just framework for teacher preparation” (p. ). the authors state that, “as a foundation, social justice teaching acknowledg- grain es oppression and seeks educational practices that provide ‘full and equal participation of all groups in a society that is shaped to meet their needs’” (full quote, bell, , p. ; partial quote, p. ). understood through this lens, each of the four teacher educators share a unique case study of non- traditional field experience placements, emphasiz- ing the need for critical service- learning (mitchell, ) in teacher education. the introduction to section iii presents concepts that, to this point in the volume, receive little at- tention, including deficit beliefs pertaining to mar- ginalized communities, white privilege, racism, and unconscious bias. in presenting section iii, strait offers a short primer of these notions and positions their relevance to service- learning. boc- ci picks up this conversation in chapter through a judicious reframing of service- learning based on her experience with participatory action research (par). what is noteworthy about this chapter is its in- depth analysis of three specific critiques that bocci argues need to be taken seriously if service- learning is to move toward criticality in more than a superficial way. the first critique ex- amines the form that service- learning takes, with a special focus on charity and “voluntourism” (for more explorations of this critique, see chapters , , and ; also see bruce, ; cole, ; dew- ey, / ; grain & lund, ; lewis, ; mitchell, ; morton, ). bocci’s second em- phasis falls on the deficit ideology that often under- pins service- learning (i.e., “the idea that oppressed people are responsible for their relative lots in life due to their individual and collective deficiencies” [gorski, , p. ]). finally, she problematiz- es the assumption of/focus on servers as socially privileged. bocci offers youth par – and its the- oretical underpinnings – as a way for researchers and practitioners to simultaneously address these three critiques and “seek to empower participants as critically- conscious change agents in their com- munities” (p. ). together, these highlighted chapters face sys- temic issues of power and privilege embedded in service- learning scholarship. the second strength of this edited volume extends a social justice- oriented dialogue through a focus on embracing relationships and collaboration. embracing: an act of turning- toward drawing on brown’s ( ) quote that com- menced this article, readers may consider what it means to “hold each other tight” in the context of service- learning and social justice. i take it to mean an embrace of others, in addition to an act of turning- toward; in the case of this book, it is ex- emplified through a diversity of disciplinary and theoretical approaches to service- learning for so- cial justice. what seems to cut across the different approaches, however, is a focus on relationality, working “with” rather than “for” community, as well as working toward reciprocity. section i, comprised of five chapters, high- lights the capacity of “service- learning to reach across disciplinary boundaries in higher educa- tion” (p. ). chapter , for example, is a multi- voiced reflection on social justice service- learning in teacher education. it is a creatively generated conversation amongst the five co- authors, practi- tioners, and students who elucidate the impact of a service- learning field component within a teach- er education program. in particular, this article is valuable in its illustration of specific social justice concepts embedded in student placements. for example, service- learners are engaged in critical conversations around the factory model of educa- tion, the justice- oriented implications of systemic emphases on standardized test scores, and, perhaps most importantly, the many ways teachers and service- learners are themselves complicit in ongo- ing inequities. the dialogues shared in this chapter exemplify the power of embracing one another in discussions of social justice. further facilitating a form of embrace, jagla’s section ii introduction posits that service- learning is a relational and caring pedagogy that can teach education students about empathy and engagement, both of which they can carry forward into their own teaching practices. extending the use of critical service- learning for teacher education, chapter offers findings from research on a fascinating service- learning program that partners pre- service teachers with local hispanic families for a cultural and linguistic immersion experience. the strength of chapter authors grassi and armon’s research is rooted in the creative design of the program, where- by preservice teachers – many of whom cannot af- ford international study abroad programs – can still gain the impactful learning benefits of an immer- sion experience and engage in a paradigm shift that positions local hispanic family members as expert mentors, particularly in the realm of language and culture. in a continued emphasis on relationships in service- learning, nemeth and winterbottom re- view shifting perspectives in the field in chapter , particularly those that reject the charity model and reconceptualize the notion of working “for” communities to a working “with” communities (p. ). their chapter pivots on lave and wenger’s ( ) notion of “communities of practice” and review essay its relationship with service- learning. nemeth and winterbottom ask how service- learning can nurture overlapping communities of practice, and in part answer this question by applying butin’s research on antifoundational service- learning ( ) and poststructuralist service- learning ( ) to their inquiry. the authors propose through their theo- retical analysis that “the victory narrative” (p. ) is a danger inherent in service- learning research and “not every student is going to change through service- learning, nor are all students going to align themselves, ideologically, with a justice- oriented framework” (p. ). overall, this chapter con- tributes to an important, ongoing conversation that remains committed to examining the fluid, shift- ing, and often unpredictable student outcomes of service- learning. similar to chapter , chapter takes up the idea of “with” rather than “for;” however, harsh- man and duffy are inspired primarily by critical pedagogy and freire’s pedagogy of the oppressed ( ), wherein transformation toward liberation is achieved through collaboration and solidarity with the oppressed rather than through service or education for them. unlike the majority of previous chapters up to this point, this chapter delves into a study of service- learning in the context of high school social studies. the authors – a university faculty member and high school teacher – use their research project to inquire whether students desired deeper and more meaningful service opportunities than those typically presented to them, and what role a teacher can play in bolstering student interest and motivation “to become more engaged citizens rather than just volunteers taxed with completing a task” (p. ). their findings suggest that criti- cal reflection combined with a critical pedagogical framework can lead students to increased desire for meaningful service and a deeper understanding of the roots of inequities within their community. the final section of the book consists of four chapters that explore issues of community, commu- nication, critical reflection, and cultural humility. section iv’s introduction gestures to two final con- cepts that undergird social justice service- learning: community and communication. i suspect these are the key themes that the editors would like to see readers reflect upon, and the final four chapters do much to nurture this. for example, in chapter , getto and mccunney propose a three- pronged model of critical service- learning which uses re- flexivity, reciprocity, and place as “key consider- ations for enacting and supporting service- learning in a critical manner” (p. ). their deeper look at reciprocity in both the literature and their own in- stitutional context offers important considerations for any program looking to strengthen its socially just engagement. similarly, lund and lee’s chapter does an excellent job of outlining their argument that “the inherent reciprocity of community- led service- learning initiatives can be mutually beneficial” (p. ; emphasis added). they arrive at this by an- alyzing findings from both students and commu- nity partners involved in a social justice- oriented service- learning course in a canadian teacher ed- ucation program. not only does the study reveal that students gain a greater cultural awareness and a deeper understanding of the “hidden curriculum” (p. ), but it also shows that community partners notice in pre- service teachers an increased appre- ciation for community programming. the study also reveals that community partners, in turn, often see their work with education students as laying a foundation for future alliances between the schools and social service agencies. lund and lee also sug- gest that premising the course on cultural humility (tervalon & garcia, ), as opposed to cultur- al competency, is one of its promising features, which makes more space for community voices and bolsters context- dependent learning. while this chapter would have been more aptly placed in section ii, which focuses on teacher education, it nonetheless offers valuable insights into the rela- tionships forged between community agencies and pre- service teachers. overall, the book’s strengths are to be found in its role as a forum both for facing and critiquing power and privilege, and for generating a scholarly sense of collaborative embrace, which happens be- tween diverse authors and even more importantly, among community members, learners, host orga- nizations, and faculty. having discussed some key strengths, i now turn my attention to a supportive critique meant to strengthen the future work of service- learning for social justice. name that social justice social justice, as an eponymous term for this volume, deserves to be unpacked, explored, trou- bled, deconstructed, and named. although this is done – and done well – in some of the chapters, i was hoping for a thoughtful conversation from the editors up front, or in some of the section introduc- tions. what does social justice mean and to whom? whose version is being used and why? what are the explicit and implicit goals of social justice in service- learning? what theoretical frameworks un- derlie the term and the practice? how does the use of social justice as a goal in service- learning or ed- ucation generate the potential for harm? what are grain some historical considerations embedded in social justice, and how can they inform the future of our work? when such questions are left un- asked, and when the meaning of a loaded term is left unexam- ined, it can dilute its power to affect change and further play into the hands of a normative construc- tion that supports the status quo. the good news, however, is that this volume has done a great deal to engage in some of the conversations that our field so desperately needs. as a supportive scholar working with similar values as the editors and authors, my own future work is made better through this book, as i can learn from what has been included, and in- terrogate some of the questions that were omitted. one chapter that demonstrates a deep analysis of the intersection of service- learning and social justice is chapter by hussain. it takes a critical look at the history of service- learning and expands upon it in great depth. while it offers findings from a fascinating study on a college- prison collabora- tion, it also provides a well- researched, six- page section that delves into the historical and theoreti- cal roots of both the charity and critical/collabora- tive approaches to service- learning; it is also a sec- tion that could have aptly been used in the book’s introduction. hussain’s connections to historical events such as the campus uprisings of the s are another reminder that social justice issues have long been of concern in both higher education and service- learning. this reminder highlights the mes- sage from brown ( ) that we are not necessarily witnessing a resurgence in social injustices, but that we could instead be uncovering injustices that were not previously as visible. hussain does a brilliant job of bringing this history to bear on her own re- search, while also imploring liberal arts colleges to become more critical as a way to truly empower the learning process. conclusion the reason i found this book so enjoyable to read is its carefully chosen diversity of authors, all of whom offer different perspectives from their teaching experiences, and all of whom are patent- ly invested in a critical exploration of the service- learning field. depending on the readership, there is something uniquely valuable for anyone inter- ested in social justice- oriented service- learning. among those who can benefit are faculty members, researchers, practitioners, community partners, students, and teacher educators. researchers, for example, can gain new methodological insights from authors who employ case studies (chapter ), participatory action research (chapter ), mixed methods (chapter ), content analysis (chapter ), critical ethnographic inquiry (chapter ), and a variety of other qualitative methods that have a social justice bent. for teacher educators, there is no shortage of inspiration, as chapters , , , , , and all gesture to innovative and critically- informed strategies for engaging future teachers to be socially just in their approach to curriculum and pedagogy. for those readers interested in a strong theoretical grounding for social justice service- learning, this volume is a cornucopia of perspec- tives, with particularly strong arguments captured in chapter – examining feminist and critical the- ory – as well as in chapter , with its insightful analysis of the potential misrepresentation of social justice. as a practitioner- scholar, i felt inspired by the innovative program ideas and analyses present- ed in nearly every chapter, but especially grassi and armon’s (chapter ) service- learning model that simulates a global immersion program through service- learning with local hispanic families, and lee and lund’s (chapter ) program design that highlights cultural humility in training pre- service teachers to work closely with diverse children and youth. importantly, the volume includes chapters that would be of interest to any person invested in service- learning. i plan to use hussain’s ( ) es- say as required reading in future service- learning courses i teach. in it, hussain explores the histor- ical roots and contemporary expressions of the di- vergent charity versus collaborative approaches to service- learning, and offers a poignant “dream for service” that transcends individual readership and could be used to guide large institutions in their framing of service. as the contributors to this volume make abun- dantly clear, service- learning calls for epistemo- logical openness, agility, and humility – charac- teristics doubly relevant in the context of social justice work. service- learning to advance so- cial justice in a time of radical inequality is a book that happily turns toward diversity. it sends readers a strong message that service- learning for social justice eludes capture in a universal set of principles or tidy categorization; rather, its rich- ness is to be found in its complexity. just as we may be shaken by the troubling current events that provide a context and backdrop for service- learning education, this volume demonstrates how we can best respond to destabilizing events: to face the systemic issues that render social justice a necessary focus; to trace the historical, personal, and theoretical roots of the notion of social jus- tice; and to embrace the importance of relation- ships – to “hold each other tight and continue to pull back the veil” (brown, ). review essay note lave & wenger define communities of prac- tice as “a set of relations among persons, activity, and world, over time and in relation with other tan- gential and overlapping communities of practice. a community of practice is an intrinsic condition for the existence of knowledge, not least because it provides the interpretive support necessary for making sense of its heritage” ( , p. ) references astin, a. & sax, l. ( ). how undergraduates are af- fected by service participation. the journal of college student development, ( ), - . bell, m.a. ( ). theoretical foundations for social jus- tice education. in m. adams, l.a. bell, & p. griffin (eds.), teaching for diversity and social justice (pp. - ). new york: routledge. brown, a. ( ). retrieved from http://www.adrienne- mareebrown.net bruce, j. ( ). service learning as a pedagogy of inter- ruption. international journal of development educa- tion and global learning, ( ), - . butin, d. ( ). of what use is it? multiple conceptual- izations of service learning within education. teachers college record, , - . butin, d. ( ). service- learning in higher education. new york: palgrave macmillan. butin, d. ( ). the limits of service- learning in high- er education. the review of higher education, ( ), - . butin, d. ( ). service- learning in theory and prac- tice: the future of community engagement in higher education. london, england: palgrave macmillan. cole, t. ( , march, ). the white- savior indus- trial complex. the atlantic. retrieved from http:// www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/ / / the-white-savior-industrial-complex/ dewey, j. ( ). the moral self. in l.a. hickman & m.a. alexander (eds.), the essential dewey: ethics, logic, psychology. cambridge, ma: harvard universi- ty press. (original work published ). engle, j. & tinto, v. ( ). moving beyond access: col- lege success for low- income, first- generation students. pell institute for the study of opportunity in higher education. retrieved from http://www.pellinstitute. org/downloads/publications-moving_beyond_ac- cess_ .pdf freire, p. ( ). the pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: continuum. gorski, p. ( ). peddling poverty for profit: elements of oppression in ruby payne’s framework. equity and excellence in education, ( ), - . grain, k. & lund, d. ( ). the social justice turn in service- learning: cultivating critical hope in a time of despair. michigan journal of community service learning, ( ), - . lave, j. & wenger, e. ( ). situated learning: legit- imate peripheral participation. cambridge, england: cambridge university press. lewis, t. ( ). service learning for social change? lessons from a liberal arts college. teaching sociol- ogy, ( ), - . mitchell, t. d. ( ). critical service- learning as social justice education: a case study of the citizen schol- ars program. in d.w. butin (ed.), service- learning and social justice education: strengthening justice- oriented community based models of teaching and learning (pp. - ). new york: routledge. morton, k. ( ). the irony of service: charity, project and social change in service- learning. michigan jour- nal of community service learning, ( ), - . tervalon, m., & murray- garcia, j. ( ). cultural hu- mility versus cultural competence: a critical distinc- tion in defining physician training outcomes in multi- cultural education. journal of health care for the poor and underserved, ( ), - . author kari grain (kari.grain@gmail.com) is a phd candidate and vanier scholar in the university of british columbia’s (ubc) department of educa- tional studies, where her research focuses on ex- periential learning, community engagement, and international education. her doctoral work exam- ines critical hope and the interplay of emotion and power relations in a ugandan service- learning pro- gram. kari has worked in multicultural education and immigrant settlement services in the nonprofit sector, and served as manager of the university of calgary’s centre for community engaged learn- ing, where she designed and facilitated internation- al service- learning programs. kari also conducted her master’s research in schools and communities throughout rwanda. having spent the past three years researching, supporting, and developing service- learning programs at ubc, kari is now co- editing the upcoming handbook of service- learning for social justice. http://www.adriennemareebrown.net http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/ / /the-white-savior-industrial-complex/ http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/ / /the-white-savior-industrial-complex/ http://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/ / /the-white-savior-industrial-complex/ http://www.pellinstitute.org/downloads/publications-moving_beyond_access_ .pdf http://www.pellinstitute.org/downloads/publications-moving_beyond_access_ .pdf http://www.pellinstitute.org/downloads/publications-moving_beyond_access_ .pdf feminist studies in english literature vol. , no. ( ) http://dx.doi.org/ . /fsel. . . . hijacking the type: cathy park hong’s poetry against conceptual whiteness robert grotjohn (chonnam national university) since the beginning of her career, cathy park hong has published poems with women speakers, characters, and personae that resist sexist constructions. her inclusion in gurlesque: the new grrly, grotesque, burlesque poetics, the notorious anthology edited by lara glenum and arielle greenberg, solidifies her position in the poetry of third-wave feminism, a “version of feminism” that, among other things, claims to be “more inclusive and diverse than the second wave,” “to have a broader vision of politics,” and “to focus on more than just women’s issues” (snyder , ). the work in that anthology “assaults the norms of acceptable female behavior by irreverently deploying gender stereotypes to subversive ends” (glenum ). subversion is at the core of four recent poems in which hong continues in her robert grotjohn feminist poetic while engaging in the racial politics of the avant-garde. in an essay published in new republic online in october , hong identifies what she calls “a new movement in american poetry.” according to hong, this movement has been “galvanized by the activism of black lives matter” and “spearheaded by writers of color who are at home in social media activism and print magazines.” while these poets write from various aesthetic perspectives, “they share a common belief that as poets, they must engage in social practice” (“there’s a new movement”). the four poems i consider below engage in that practice, but, before i turn to them, i will contextualize hong’s recent statement as part of a much larger ongoing discussion. that larger discussion is part of what ramón saldívar has argued is a “post-race aesthetic,” a “new aesthetic” that “is creating” ways “to deal with the meaning of race in a time when race supposedly no longer matters” (“historical fantasy” ). this aesthetic builds on traditional identity politics but “will be racially undetermined in its reflection of american identities, requiring a blend of [ethnic] identities, necessitating a move beyond the american racial binary of black and white” (“imagining cultures” ). i. context: challenging the avant-garde establishment in the new republic essay, hong identifies the conceptual poet kenneth goldsmith as an example of the old against which the new poetics of social practice is moving. “conceptual poetry,” reconstruction in public history and memory sesquicentennial reconstruction in public history and memory sesquicentennial david m. prior, nancy bercaw, beverly bond, thomas j. brown, eric foner, jennifer taylor, salamishah tillet the journal of the civil war era, volume , number , march , pp. - (article) published by the university of north carolina press doi: for additional information about this article [ access provided at apr : gmt from carnegie mellon university ] https://doi.org/ . /cwe. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ https://doi.org/ . /cwe. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ r o u n d ta b l e reconstruction in public history and memory sesquicentennial the public memory of reconstruction has long been a complex and fraught subject in the united states. but where do we stand now, and what will reconstruction’s sesquicentennial entail? what issues confront scholars, civil rights advocates, public history practitioners, and teachers devoted to deepening conversations about reconstruction? what opportunities does reconstruction’s sesquicentennial present? the following discussion of those questions took place from may to may , , through a secure webpage that allowed the moderator and the participants to post comments and questions in sequence. the modera- tor and the journal’s editors edited the completed conversation for length, in consultation with the participants. this final version has been condensed slightly for the readers’ benefit, while maintaining the open-ended and free- flowing nature of the original conversation. david m. prior, assistant professor of history at the university of new mexico, served as moderator. nancy bercaw is a curator at the smithsonian institution’s national museum of african american history and culture. beverly bond is associate professor of history at the university of memphis and the codirector of the memories of a massacre: memphis in project. thomas j. brown is professor history at the university of south carolina and has served on historic columbia’s interpretation committee for the woodrow wilson family home since . eric foner is dewitt clinton professor of history at columbia university and the author of reconstruction: america’s unfinished revolution, among many other works. jennifer taylor is staff attorney at the equal justice initiative, a nonprofit civil rights organization in montgomery, alabama. salamishah tillet is associate professor of english and africana studies at the university of pennsylvania and author of sites of slavery: citizenship and racial democracy in the post–civil rights imagination. r e c o n s t r u c t i o n i n p u b l i c h i s t o r y a n d m e m o r y dp: we are in the early stages of the sesquicentennial of the complex and divisive period in american history known as reconstruction. in your own perspectives, what is most striking about this commemorative moment? what is it about reconstruction’s sesquicentennial that stands out to you as you engage with the public, research, advocate, and teach? tb: i’m struck by the number of people, if mostly academics, calling atten- tion to the anniversary. i don’t think the centennial of the progressive era generated comparable emphasis on the period, as distinct from individ- ual landmarks like adoption of the sixteenth amendment. promotion of the reconstruction anniversary doubtless represents in part a pushback against some tendencies of civil war commemoration. it stresses that the big story didn’t end at appomattox. it suggests that reconstruction was a broadly transformative moment and a demonstration of potential that the country has not yet realized. jt: it is striking how deep and pervasive the legacies of that era’s devel- opments—including advancements, failures, and missed opportunities— continue to be. at the same time, this period is not widely understood for how it has shaped our world. its lessons should be a foundation for under- standing some of the most difficult problems we now face. it is encourag- ing to see efforts among academics, agencies like the national park service (nps), and some community coalitions to mark and discuss the th anniversary of events like the memphis massacre of , the develop- ment of black codes, and the passage of the thirteenth and fourteenth amendments with explicit exceptions for the criminally convicted. we have to expand this work among community members and increase public consciousness to change the narrative around what this history means and what we can learn from it. at the equal justice initiative (eji; eji.org), we see the links between reconstruction-era events, laws, and the current challenge of mass incar- ceration as at once clear and under-discussed. our reports on the mont- gomery slave trade and lynching aim to bridge the gap between private knowledge and public awareness, precisely because the failure to consider this past in our political and policy conversations has dire consequences. ignorance has helped to create harsh sentencing policies and a tolerance and acceptance of racially disproportionate rates of arrest and imprisonment. reconstruction’s th anniversary provides an opportunity—a “hook”—to discuss in broader media this crucial period between the end of slavery and the start of the civil rights movement. the sesquicentennial is a hopeful moment in which we might finally see these stories properly acknowledged. j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , v o l u m e , i s s u e bb: our community is nearing the culmination of a semester-long com- memoration of the th anniversary of the memphis massacre, and the past two days have been absolutely amazing. after months of wrangling with the tennessee historical commission (thc; https://tn.gov/environ- ment/section/thc-tennessee-historical-commission) over language, the memphis naacp (http://www.naacpmemphis.org/) and the nps dedi- cated a marker on sunday, may , commemorating the suffering and hero- ism of the massacre’s victims rather than highlighting the power of the massacre’s perpetrators. the backstory of this contested language is the old debate over which people, places, and events we memorialize and how we do this. what is most striking about commemorating reconstruction is that it pushes us to define who we are as a twenty-first-century nation. today’s (monday, may ) events included a luncheon hosted by the mem- phis bar association foundation (http://www.memphisbar.org/about/ the-memphis-bar-foundation/) and a public forum on aspects of the memphis massacre and the impact of this event on the adoption of the fourteenth amendment. our memphis journey began nearly a year ago, when the nps ap- proached my colleague susan o’donovan and me with a question. what were our plans for commemorating the memphis massacre, the open- ing act in the long drama of the “reconstruction” of the federal union and, more importantly, the “construction” of african american freedom? the nps was willing to help, which was the nudge susan and i needed to start a project that had been percolating in our heads. we accepted the chal- lenge and began formulating plans for memories of a massacre: memphis in (http://www.processhistory.org/remembering-reconstruction/), an examination of slavery, emancipation, and reconstruction. we quickly realized that “memory” takes time and money, both of which are scarce on campus today. the memphis naacp was also in the midst of plans for a commemora- tive marker and was just beginning to feel the impact of twenty-first-century southern conservatism. “you can’t change history!” seemed the justifica- tion for maintaining flawed interpretations of these historical moments. a statue of confederate general nathan bedford forrest and parks honor- ing both confederate president jefferson davis and the confederacy itself were part of the city’s landscape. but the city’s “reconstruction” history had been erased from public memory. the university of memphis’s history department (http://www.memphis. edu/history/) joined forces with the memphis naacp in a community- wide project to recover, contextualize, and commemorate reconstruction- era events. over the past ten months, support for the memories of a r e c o n s t r u c t i o n i n p u b l i c h i s t o r y a n d m e m o r y massacre project has grown, and the list of our collaborative partners includes the city’s other educational institutions as well as the public li- brary, museum system, historical society, and local affiliates of national organizations. memories of a massacre evolved into a series of public lectures, teacher workshops, book discussions, and exhibitions. with the support of our university, we’ve established a website (http://www.mem- phis.edu/memphis-massacre/) and entered the world of social media. there is a growing realization that it is important for our community to confront our reconstruction past and that this cannot be confined to the massacre. nb: reconstruction serves as a mirror to america. as the second found- ing of the united states, it informs and reflects our society today: from the grassroots and multifocal insistence that black lives matter to the rollback of the voting rights act to resurgent capitalism under citizens united to the election of our first african american president to the often visceral outrage directed at his presidency. we are still living through reconstruction’s afterlives. this was partially recognized in the pairings of the emancipation proclamation ( ) with the march on washington ( ) in sesquicentennial commemorations. yet the anniversaries in maintained a hushed silence about the immediate present; perhaps this is because reconstruction resonates throughout the open wounds (and continued promises) embedded within the nation and refuses to be consigned neatly to “the past.” how can history offer a usable past when this past is so much a part of a contested present? as a curator at the national museum of african american history and culture (nmaahc; http://nmaahc.si.edu/) co-curating a permanent exhibition on slavery and freedom, i have been navigating these waters and have been impressed with openings created by the mission stated by our founding director, lonnie bunch (http://nmaahc.si.edu/about/ mission). as the newest smithsonian museum, the nmaahc aims to rep- resent the american story through the african american lens. the past cannot be logically viewed along separate shattering axes. our emphasis is always on this shared story—a national story—that is not confined to a region, to black or white, or even to the past. coupled with this mission is our mandate to, in the words of john hope franklin, “tell the unvarnished truth.” as historians, we know this is easy to do in a monograph and it is somewhat easy to do in a classroom where students are required to learn and participate. however, it is harder to tell the unvarnished truth in pub- lic, where we want to invite audiences to engage with and contribute to our understanding of the past. j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , v o l u m e , i s s u e reconstruction is not an easy subject to do that with. students and the general public find it either too fact-filled or too paradoxical to grapple with. most avert their attention. in the museum, we have learned, perhaps unintentionally, how to engage with a wide variety of audiences around issues of slavery and freedom in the process of collecting for the exhibi- tion. we have found that diverse communities have come forward and connected in unexpected ways because of the power of objects and the stories attached to them. often a humble artifact provides the past with immediacy. think of harriet tubman’s shawl. many people know about tubman. they can probably recite something about her striking heroism. but when these stories are paired with her shawl, we begin to imagine her with it wrapped around her shoulders. she becomes deeply, tangibly human. objects open doors. they invite conversation and reveal connec- tions. so we continue to collect objects with living histories that encourage audiences to consider how african americans changed the united states during this second founding and to reflect upon how this remarkable influ- ence was the product of many generations. ef: while it will not rival the civil war’s, i am impressed by the amount of public interest in reconstruction’s sesquicentennial. (i judge this in no small measure by the number of speaking invitations i have received lately from venues outside the academic world, including conferences of federal judges and public forums of one kind or another.) the continuing “relevance” of reconstruction helps account for this. but what i find most striking, compared with when i started focusing on the era, is that then, our task as scholars was still to disabuse people of deeply rooted mytholo- gies about reconstruction. today, the more common problem seems to be lack of knowledge. people bring a kind of blank slate to these discussions. they have a sense that reconstruction was important but have little idea what happened or why. i suppose this represents progress, and it certainly is more satisfying to lecture about the actual history and why it matters than to spend part of a talk explaining why what people were taught in school was wrong. i am also impressed by how journalists seem finally to have woken up to the fact that reconstruction cannot be lazily described as a period when vindictive northerners oppressed white southerners. i well recall r. w. apple, a distinguished new york times reporter in the s, writ- ing that he hoped that after the bosnian civil war the victors would treat the losers less vindictively than during reconstruction. today, journalists seem to be aware that reconstruction was in some ways a forerunner of r e c o n s t r u c t i o n i n p u b l i c h i s t o r y a n d m e m o r y the modern civil rights movement, not a tragic era à la claude bowers. that’s progress. st: what is striking to me, particularly at what we can consider a twin moment of, on the one hand, reconstruction’s sesquicentennial and, on the other, what henry louis gates has called our current “end of the second reconstruction,” is the dizzying nature of such analogies. as a cul- tural critic who primarily studies how and why americans remember and represent slavery in popular culture and national memory, i’m also struck by how few contemporary artists engage the period of reconstruction. for example, on the heels of hollywood films on slavery, which really came on the heels of african american novels, reparations demands, and visual art on slavery, we now have a number of new television shows and films— pbs’s mercy street, wgn’s underground, the history channel’s reboot of roots, and the forthcoming the birth of a nation, all of which fore- ground a nuanced negotiation between freedom and slavery, black resis- tance and white domination. such tensions make for a good plot and, more importantly, a straight line between the racial politics of the past and our troubled present. in these cases, reconstruction is not an afterthought but rather a historical aberration—a liminal space that defied both slavery and its offspring jim crow. ironically, this aesthetic privileging of slavery skips over what i consider the other links between our present moment and reconstruction proper. these connections are primarily rhetorical, as gates suggests: the age of obama itself cast as a reconstruction lite, while the consummate racial backlash to the symbolic value of his presidency is considered comparable to the coming of segregation after slavery and the rise of a nixon-reagan southern strategy after the civil rights move- ment. while artists might find this period ripe for commemoration and recognition, it has yet to become a dominant setting for their inspiration or remembrance. perhaps this year will change that. dp: would it be correct, then, to say that scholars, public intellectuals, and civil rights advocates face a dual challenge as they work to engage with broader audiences during the sesquicentennial? on the one hand, there is still committed opposition in some quarters to an honest accounting of the horrors of white supremacy following the civil war. on the other hand, many people do not have a strong frame of reference one way or the other when it comes to reconstruction. if that is an accurate characterization, what is the best way forward? how do we, for example, both critique argu- ments that deny the pervasiveness of klan violence and engage with people j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , v o l u m e , i s s u e who do not know much about it? what advice would you offer about how to tackle these issues in practice, how to prioritize them, or how to conceptual- ize them in the first place? ef: i find that the best way to engage people about reconstruction— whether in lectures, museum exhibitions, teachers’ institutes, interviews with journalists, or other modes—is to link it to issues of the present. of course, there is a danger of forgetting the past-ness of the past. but i usually start off with a litany of issues of the present that arose out of reconstruction or were radically redefined then. who is or should be a citi- zen of the united states? what rights should citizens enjoy, and who has the primary responsibility for enforcing them, the federal or state govern- ments? what is the relationship between political and economic democ- racy? how can interracial political coalitions be built? what is the proper response to terrorism? who should be entitled to vote? how was it that the first time african americans held major public offices was in the aftermath of the civil war? what were the long-term consequences for our political system of the abandonment of reconstruction? without knowing something about reconstruction, you cannot under- stand the origins of these questions, which remain on the front pages of our newspapers. laying out these ideas makes audiences sit up and listen. of course we live in a different time, and the answers to reconstruction- era questions are not necessarily guidelines for the present. forty acres and a mule is not the answer to the economic gap today between black and white americans. the racial situation today cannot be reduced to a black-white template. class differences within the black community are far more pronounced than during reconstruction. but many seem to want to know more about reconstruction, which is a foundation to increase public awareness. tb: your question underscores that how we envision the audience can shape our presentation strategies. the woodrow wilson family home (wwfh; www.historiccolumbia.org/woodrow-wilson-family-home), a longtime presidential shrine that historic columbia transformed into a community museum of reconstruction that opened in , is a case in point. we recognize that our primary constituency will be residents of columbia, south carolina, though we are delighted to attract out-of- town visitors. the local landscape is therefore our best point of entry into reconstruction. the current city hall was built as a federal courthouse and post office, which connects to the reconstruction-era invigoration of the federal judiciary and the party-building appointments that gave columbia r e c o n s t r u c t i o n i n p u b l i c h i s t o r y a n d m e m o r y one of the country’s first african american postmasters. all county build- ings are reminders that the reconstruction constitution created counties and local government in south carolina. the cityscape is full of rem- nants of massive industrialization in the s, which underscores that republicans were right to try to promote textile manufacturing in the s. the canal they wanted to power the mills is now one of the most popular recreational resources in town. the wwfh would achieve a great success if the occasional stroller along that canal wondered how the his- tory of columbia might have been different if a biracial government had accomplished its desired economic transformation. jt: i agree with eric. illuminating the links between the salient issues of the reconstruction era and those prominent today is an excellent way to make this history less abstract and to recast it as information that is rel- evant and valuable to the pressing matters at hand. the dedicated racial history project at eji (www.eji.org/raceandpoverty) is new within the context of the organization’s nearly thirty-year history as a nonprofit law office representing indigent men and women on alabama’s death row. but the links in the deep south between reconstruction-era violence, lynch- ing, and racial terror and the modern death penalty were always too clear to ignore. for our staff, working as legal advocates grew into a desire to develop a project that would facilitate public conversations exploring what that legacy means and what it requires of us today. we can’t ignore these roots when discussing and responding to the problems of a death penalty system that disproportionately charges, con- victs, and executes poor people and people of color, that systematically excludes people of color from serving on juries in capital cases, makes a death sentence more likely to be imposed on a person convicted of kill- ing a white person than a person convicted of killing a black person, and finds the highest rates of death sentences and executions in the former confederate states. eji is a law office, and we have been fortunate to have the work and advice of historians and other experts while also having the freedom to craft a narrative that pulls from and responds to our expertise: the current state of american criminal justice. indeed, facilitating greater engagement with how reconstruction-era history affects our lives requires challeng- ing public perception of who can participate in these conversations and who has something of value to offer to them. anecdotally, i believe that is happening. over the past several years, i have seen a significant increase in the number of substantive historical references serving as foundations for journalistic pieces about contemporary issues, which in turn invites j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , v o l u m e , i s s u e community members and social service practitioners to evaluate their experiences and their work through the lens of this long arc. that feels like progress, and it makes me excited. i believe changes that come from reflec- tion on history’s lessons are among the most enduring and promising. we need those kinds of changes. nb: reconstruction was an era of immense possibilities. it was a time when an older order cracked open. citizenship was reconfigured, labor chal- lenged capital by harnessing local and state governments, and as a result of both processes, race was dislocated or jarred loose from its moorings. and yet the public imagination jumps from slavery to jim crow without skipping a beat, the moments of possibility forgotten. embedded within these moments of possibility were deeply developed political philosophies that had been generations in the making. convict labor, sharecropping, the memphis massacre, and the ku klux klan were responses to a perceived threat—to new foundations of freedom. these foundations haven’t entered into popular consciousness, and not for want of trying on the part of scholars. the closest we have come might be the concept of the long civil rights movement, which has tapped into the popular imagination, because it takes a knowable present and grounds it in a longer past. yet the “rights” as defined by civil rights legislation were but a small slice of a much bigger pie articulated by the first generation of freedmen. but successes are also worth noting. i think the work of the eji has marked the landscape of structural inequality based on thirty years of work with death row prisoners. the connection is immediate and direct and has sparked the intended conversation. the relative popular success of the long civil rights narrative coincides with the waning years of the second reconstruction. a current empha- sis on structural inequalities coincides with the end of this moment, with our nation teetering on the brink of another nadir. can we prepare for this nadir? can we reach back to both the possibilities of the first reconstruction and its dismantling to provide a language and narrative to shepherd ourselves through the present moment? i am persuaded by the importance of engaging in national discussions. yet i should add that while “reconstruction” might not be a familiar label to many americans, its politics are present in families and communi- ties. so perhaps reconstruction is not entirely forgotten or unknown. our definition of the public may be clouding our vision. the fact that these complex histories are remembered has been made clear to me over the past three years, as my colleague mary elliott and i began collecting what many said was unrepresentable—slavery and the african american experience r e c o n s t r u c t i o n i n p u b l i c h i s t o r y a n d m e m o r y of enslavement. we began to focus on collecting within local contexts. working with families, history museums, and historical societies, objects and the stories and teachings associated with these objects began to come forward. people had been waiting for us—for the museum, which has been over a hundred years in the making. our task is not to introduce the his- tory to the people but to bring the imprimatur of our institutions to these histories that have been stewarded over time. st: what we say about the reconstruction era is as important as what we do not say. i am thinking of how toni morrison grapples with these ques- tions of competing narratives and multiple interpretations in her novel, beloved. she sets the story in cincinnati, ohio, in , but the the book’s characters moves back and forth between slavery and reconstruction. i’ve always been intrigued by how morrison represents reconstruction as a set of laws and institutions that make certain forms of racial freedom possible and as a site of an ongoing black precarity. it is telling that she condenses reconstruction proper to a paragraph or two and, by doing so, reveals how there were certain actors who administered unprecedented gains, oth- ers who remade themselves as a form of political agency, and others who restricted the fullness of american citizenship for african americans. it has been said that beloved posits reconstruction as a historical occurrence and a metaphor—sethe, paul d, this community, and ultimately, the coun- try have to undergo some “reconstruction” of their own past in order to reimagine freedom or, better yet, democracy in the present. though this novel is almost thirty years old, i still teach it, alongside w. e. b. du bois’s souls of black folks, as a way to understand how different authors, at dif- ferent times, do not romanticize this era but present it as an already lim- ited potential. bb: we can keep arguing with those who deny the pervasiveness of racial violence during reconstruction, but i don’t think we’ll ever convince them. instead, it’s important to give the public, especially students, a basis for questioning these flawed perspectives. we can encourage them to ask why, in southern communities, particularly, there are so many monuments and memorials to the losers and so few to the winners? how could the union win the civil war, then lose reconstruction? dp: let me pick up on another theme present in your comments. several of you have mentioned relating reconstruction to the problems of the present, and that raises questions about framing. there are many ways to think of reconstruction, and addressing this may also get us back to salamishah’s j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , v o l u m e , i s s u e point about the dizzying nature of analogies. scholars, for example, have presented reconstruction as a continuation of the civil war, a new birth of freedom, a second founding, a process of sectional reconciliation, and a transformation in labor and gender relations, to name a few approaches. but how do these ideas relate to reconstruction’s commemoration? how does our framing of reconstruction shape our engagement with different audiences, whether through museums, the courtroom, social media, or the classroom? or are we best off drawing attention to specific events, laws, and individuals instead of reconstruction in general? bb: focusing the process of reconstruction on the “construction of free- dom” is an effective strategy for drawing academic and public audiences (which are not mutually exclusive) into discussions of the era’s successes and failures. concentrating on the social, political, and economic events of the era through this racial lens allows me to bring the past into the present in a “this may be how we got to where we are today” scenario. but i also point out that there are other intervening events and situations between the post–civil war era and today and that there’s no straight line from the past to the present. as martin luther king jr. said in his “letter from a birmingham jail,” “human progress never rolls in on wheels of inevi- tability.” so, i favor an approach that frames reconstruction as a part of a long struggle for human rights. and in the postemancipation “con- struction of freedom,” freedom was sometimes defined by vastly different goals and agendas. why do so many people not have an understanding of reconstruction? perhaps because our educational systems, the pub- lic landscape, and the media have been influenced by differing ideas of freedom—what it should mean, who can claim it, and how it should be exercised. one of the most effective presentations for our memphis massacre commemoration project was a lecture by dr. andre e. johnson linking the current black lives matter movement to the testimonies before the military and congressional investigating committees. he captivated his audience with the question “does black truth matter? – .” the lecture skillfully wove together past and present in a way that had aca- demic and nonacademic listeners trying to piece together the answer and asking why they knew so little about this important historical event. jt: in her previous response, beverly asks “how could the union win the civil war, then lose reconstruction?” yes! that one question includes and leads to so many others that link that past and our present. how did the union lose reconstruction—and what were the results of that loss, that r e c o n s t r u c t i o n i n p u b l i c h i s t o r y a n d m e m o r y failure, that incomplete commitment, that grant of rights followed by decades of denying the duty to provide enforcement and protection? what do centuries of slavery—and the foundational narrative of racial differ- ence and black inferiority—do to a country and its people? when slavery ends, what is required to reset the path toward black rights and citizenship rather than the same exploitative and dehumanizing goals and justifica- tions? which did we do and which future did we build? as w. e. b. du bois described reconstruction in , “the slave went free; stood one moment in the sun; then moved back again toward slav- ery.” the historical record is painfully rich with evidence of the truth in that observation. we see the violent repression of black voting rights in memphis ( ); new orleans ( ); colfax, louisiana ( ); vicksburg, mississippi ( ); and elsewhere. we see andrew johnson issue seven thousand pardons to secessionists by , advocate that black labor be funneled into the economic dead-end of sharecropping, and publicly claim that black americans had “less capacity for government than any other race of people” and would “relapse into barbarism” if left to their own devices. we see the resurgence of discriminatory laws and state constitutions aimed at making black people second-class citizens and enabling the racially biased administration of criminal justice. we see the development of convict leasing as states learn to use the criminal excep- tion within the thirteenth amendment—which prohibits involuntary ser- vitude, “except as punishment for crime.” we see judicial decisions like the u.s. supreme court’s opinion in the civil rights cases, declaring the civil rights act unconstitutional and condemning such legislation as an effort to render black americans “the special favorite of the laws.” and we see black people like jefferson long, born into slavery in , elected as georgia’s first black representative in the u.s. congress in . we see him become the first black person to speak on the house floor when he opposed a plan to grant amnesty to confederate leaders and predicted that, if the u.s. government went forward with such a plan, “you will again have trouble from the very same men who gave you trouble before.” specifics like these illustrate the reality of the reconstruction era in ways broad summaries cannot, and we do well to uncover and share them. the examples above are included in our reports, slavery in america: the montgomery slave trade and lynching america: confronting the legacy of racial terror, taken from primary source documents and the work of leading historians. that work is necessary and rich. but we can’t aban- don the difficult task of also crafting a larger interpretive frame for the reconstruction era that draws from these examples to create meaning and a path forward. we can frame this era as one of disappointment, lost j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , v o l u m e , i s s u e opportunity, violence, oppression, and an illustration that white suprem- acy and black exploitation could and did outlive slavery. without specific evidence, that claim falls flat, but that evidence without a larger interpre- tive frame becomes abstract factual knowledge rather than dynamic infor- mation that impacts how we conceptualize the challenges of today. what legacies of the slavery era did the union’s defeat in reconstruction permit to persist into the modern day, through the legal and political institutions that continue to shape our lives? what can we do to reengage that battle? creating a frame through which to interpret reconstruction, for a broader public audience most traditionally focused on the present, is the harder work—but it can lead to new questions that directly flow from beverly’s question above and that have the potential to reset us on the path toward realizing reconstruction’s promise. st: this is an important moment to tease out the distinctions between reconstruction as a series of events and a particular period, on the one hand, and reconstruction as a trope for american race relations, on the other. by that, i mean i agree with a historical emphasis on those acts, individuals, and institutions that were supposed to protect the vulnerable rights of newly freed black men and women and help them, and the nation, transition into full freedom while also understanding the battles among and beyond these pro-reconstruction advocates that ultimately undermined them. from a cultural vantage point, i am quite excited about amanda claybaugh’s forthcoming book, the literary history of reconstruction. in many ways, reconstruction was a nadir in what we now know as african american literary production, squeezed in between the proliferation of slave narratives on one side and postbellum autobiographies, poetry, and novels on the other. claybaugh hopes to recuperate the “lost writings of the time,” including accounts of freedmen’s bureau agents who assisted onetime slaves in the postwar years, the writings of northern volunteers who went south to help rebuild, fiction by southern authors, and turn-of- the-century writings by african american authors who were educated and influenced during reconstruction. taken together, this is one way we can get a complex and contradictory portrait of the era on its own terms. but, the past is never simply the past, and the very desire to commemo- rate it speaks to our concerns today. as such, the issue of loss is as impor- tant as the victories we inherited. when we think about reconstruction as a new birth of freedom, whose gains we seek to extend and live out today, we should also think about the undermining forces in the same cyclical way. returning to the idea that we are watching the end of the second reconstruction, i have serious concerns about our inability to r e c o n s t r u c t i o n i n p u b l i c h i s t o r y a n d m e m o r y predict (or prepare for) what history would tell us is an inevitable white backlash to racial progress. in other words, how might the ending of the first reconstruction give us insights into how we can better strategize and mobilize against our current forms of racial retrenchment and violence? how can we understand reconstruction differently in order to stave off the backlash against the gains of the civil rights movement and the age of obama? tb: museums and social media are venues that are different from each other but that are even more different from courtrooms and classrooms. although specificity is valuable in engaging a broad public, it is impor- tant to promote a sense of reconstruction as broader than even its high- est highlights. it had further potential that was wrongfully thwarted. reconstruction is extraordinary for the extent to which it suggests that the country is capable of profound reinvention after searching self-exam- ination, despite our many failures. unlike the recent enthusiasm for the generation of washington, adams, and hamilton, the emphasis is not on how much the united states got right at a magic moment and now needs to hold onto. that open-ended quality characterizes a cardinal highlight of reconstruction, the fourteenth amendment’s definition of citizenship and legislative framework for judicial enforcement. this mechanism continues to transform the nation in unforeseeable ways. our goal at the wwfh was primarily to highlight radical possibility, and we offer a range of individual stories that can appeal to different visitors. ef: i suppose i am an optimist, but i believe what we need to learn about reconstruction is the struggle itself—the effort of ordinary men and women to breathe substantive meaning into the freedom they had achieved as a result of the civil war, and the way racism bent for a while so that remarkable advances were made in the definition of citizenship and the legal and political status of blacks. we need to also portray the violence and the various forms of oppression under the jim crow system that fol- lowed. we want to frame reconstruction as a story that inspires hope as well as teaches harsh lessons about the exercise of power. to track back to salamishah’s earlier point about beloved, i too teach it, but in a slightly different way. as she notes, the novel is set during reconstruction, but there is no allusion to black politics and empower- ment in the south. the racial landscape is exceedingly bleak. morrison chooses this stance for her own aesthetic reasons. but a more optimis- tic account of the reconstruction situation (or for that matter, a portrait of the resiliency and creativity some have found in the slave experience) j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , v o l u m e , i s s u e would presumably conflict with morrison’s overall theme about the way the history of slavery (to paraphrase marx) weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. in any event, beloved is not likely to stimulate a posi- tive image of the reconstruction era. nb: what a rich discussion! for me, the issue that is resonating through- out all the recent responses is that “black truth matters.” reconstruction’s lost writings have been skipped over much in the same way that people skip from slavery to segregation. i agree with beverly that it is hard for the public to grasp reconstruction because it remains fractured. it was fractured at the time, as salamishah reminds us, and it remains fractured now because, as beverly writes, “our educational systems, the public land- scape, and the media have been influenced by differing ideas of freedom.” perhaps we can, in jennifer’s words, “reset the path toward realizing reconstruction’s promise” by listening more acutely to the visions of free- dom coming from the era. these visions, i might add, are not completely locked in the past but have been taught and passed down—perhaps in bits and pieces like a game of telephone, but passed down just the same. we have had trouble making sense of reconstruction because black truths matter. the works of many scholars recognize this and have recaptured and reflected these truths. yet the public at large has no nar- rative within which to place these truths, for the reasons beverly sug- gests. instead, slavery and jim crow remain more knowable. i suspect this is because they accommodate a narrative of opposites, a black history and a white history. with reconstruction, however, black truths enter the public sphere and the foundations of law and government in ways that are undeniably constitutive of the nation. to bring reconstruction to the forefront of the popular imagination requires a resetting of the national narrative to recognize the black truths that formed it, before, during, and long after reconstruction. dp: let me pose another question that picks up on the points about inevita- bility, unpredictability, and opportunity raised by the previous comments. how do we handle the topic of “redemption”? by my reading, much of the scholarship on reconstruction finds little room for hope for the survival of african american rights from the s onward. the collapse of northern support for federal intervention in the south and the unrelenting nature of white supremacist violence there, historiography suggests, made a sweep- ing rollback of freedom and equality inescapable. if this reading of the past stands, how do we speak to our many audiences about both the great promise of the early post–civil war years and the seemingly irrepressible r e c o n s t r u c t i o n i n p u b l i c h i s t o r y a n d m e m o r y suppression of that promise? does one come to overshadow the other? should one overshadow the other in our accounts? tb: the nature of the audience matters in striking an interpretive balance between possibility and constraint. in an original work of scholarship, someone might be interested in achieving the freshest insight into either element of the equation. historiographical disputation alone is not enough to create significance, but academic literature values correction and recog- nizes the usefulness of opposing perspectives. public history, however, puts a premium on demonstrating possibility. the practical alternative is often to suggest impossibility in the present as well as the past. so in address- ing the foreseeable collapse of reconstruction, i would emphasize that its achievements went well beyond a hypothetical midpoint in the range of plausible outcomes. history can surprise us, sometimes because people are resilient and resourceful and sometimes because forces of oppression press their advantages too far. it’s also important to look at constraint as something other than inevitability, at least as applied to the present day. some of the tactics that overthrew reconstruction have been discredited. other constraints, like the disinclination of the postwar northern public to finance law enforcement in the south, are useful in drawing comparisons with causes for which americans have shown patience or willingness to pay elevated taxes. ef: redemption poses a difficult problem for the public presentation of reconstruction. we do not want to suggest unrealistic optimism about the prospects of “success” for reconstruction. yet it is important avoid the trap of inevitability. like other aspects of this period, redemption is a teaching opportunity. it reminds us of the fragility of our liberties and that rights in the constitution are never sufficient without the will to enforce them. it reminds us that all gains are contested and that, in the words of thomas wentworth higginson, “revolutions may go back- wards.” to call reconstruction a “failure” is not helpful as many gains of the period—the solidification of black families, the establishment of independent institutions like churches, the beginnings of black educa- tion—survived redemption and became the seedbed of future struggles. moreover, redemption did not take place at a single moment, as the cur- rent scholarly emphasis on a longer reconstruction makes clear. that said, we have to get people thinking about the causes behind redemption, whether racism, class conflict, political change, or a combination of all of these, and, as with other aspects of reconstruction, what parallels may exist today. j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , v o l u m e , i s s u e bb: it’s important to recognize the changes taking place in the south but to move beyond the idea that there is a beginning, middle, and end to the process of reconstruction. as eric notes, the curtain doesn’t fall on the drama of “reconstruction” across the former confederacy at one specific time. there isn’t a sudden, sweeping rollback of freedom and equality; redemption is fragmented process. across the south, even with the insti- tution of poll taxes and other restrictions, african american men voted in some counties and states into the twentieth century. disfranchisement might be complete in one county while in the neighboring county black men (and later black women) voted. in tennessee, african american men were elected to the general assembly into the s, and these men pro- posed and supported legislation that might benefit all tennesseans. after a brutal lynching of six black men in rural shelby county, julia hooks (the grandmother of civil rights leader benjamin l. hooks) stressed the need for black men to find ways to pay their poll taxes and vote. and, although there were no african american legislators in the tennessee general assembly from the end of the nineteenth century to the mid-twentieth century, that did not mean that the political activities of african americans, particu- larly in cities like memphis, had ended. i try to communicate to audiences (usually my students) that they need to focus as much on how african americans are negotiating or challenging the suppression of their rights as on the suppression. jt: the redemption chapter of the reconstruction story was not inevitable in the sense that it was the only possible outcome, but it was the foresee- able consequence of inaction and indifference on the part of empowered actors, and that is perhaps the most valuable lesson the period has to teach. reconstruction yielded the premature restoration of confederate cit- izenship and the granting of black voting rights without a commitment to protect that franchise. this resulted in more powerful and ostensibly legitimate white supremacist state governments that, in exchange for shedding the confederate label, gained the privilege of counting their for- merly enslaved and still voteless black residents as whole people rather than three-fifths of one. similarly, the emancipation of enslaved people without a commitment to create and maintain the infrastructure required to prevent their reenslavement through new but eerily similar systems of sharecropping and convict leasing enabled the development of more prof- itable systems of exploitation requiring less investment. oversimplifying the problem as “slavery” and the solution as “citi- zenship rights” conflates surface-level innovation (three constitutional r e c o n s t r u c t i o n i n p u b l i c h i s t o r y a n d m e m o r y amendments, among other examples) with the deeper work of implemen- tation. the latter requires unearthing the roots that threaten to spread and sprout anew if not exposed and destroyed. the victorious union found it much easier to denounce and destroy the most obvious systems that were unique to the south, without committing to exposing and confronting deeper scourges—white supremacy, economic exploitation—that under- girded those southern systems and their northern branches. the work was abandoned before it took hold. as the mississippi supreme court observed in ratliff v. beale in , when reviewing the racially discriminatory mo- tives of the state’s constitution: “within the field of permissible ac- tion under the limitations imposed by the federal constitution, the [state constitutional] convention swept the circle of expedients to obstruct the exercise of the franchise by the negro race. . . . restrained by the federal constitution from discriminating against the negro race, the convention discriminated against its characteristics and the offenses to which its weaker members were prone.” there is nothing unfamiliar in that narrative. federal courts’ indif- ference to the persistent segregation (and in some cases re-segregation) of public school systems post brown v. board; the u.s. supreme court’s mccleskey decision, and its preference for piecemeal reform rather than a commitment to grappling with proven racial bias in administration of the death penalty for fear that it would open the floodgates to racial bias claims; even the recent denial of the voting rights act’s continued rel- evance—all reveal a national, institutional, political, and legal will to go only so far and disrupt only so much. redemption did not have to happen, but, in the absence of full-bodied obstacles erected against it, there was no reason to believe that it wouldn’t happen. african american progress and resistance is an invaluable topic of study for its powerful inspiration and for its inability to stem the tide of redemption. through studying reconstruction, we can better recog- nize when we have erected insufficient barriers to injustice. this history reminds us to be unsatisfied with barriers that go no deeper than the sur- face and to recognize when stripping the land just leaves a field cleared and plowed with the same seeds buried. we can embrace the apparent conflict between the hope of reconstruction and the disappointment of redemption as a moment to teach this story, reevaluate our present and more recent past, and explore ways to build a different future. st: though much more popular in the collective memory and tourist industry, and now inspiring television shows, the underground railroad j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , v o l u m e , i s s u e in ways occupies a similar space in american culture as reconstruction. it is considered a vehicle and institution of interracial cooperation and black agency that exists because of and despite the backdrop of deep racial violence. with the exception of henry box brown’s narrative, the underground railroad also occupies (and for understandable reasons of safety and security) a huge void in the writings of former slaves. and yet now we accept that contradictory narratives can coexist—the underground railroad was a vehicle to freedom but was not quite freedom itself. i think a similar approach (as i think we have said in some form) can be taken with our approach to teaching reconstruction as well. i realize that narra- tives of failure overshadow much of the reconstruction discourse, but as eric noted earlier, that is a big mistake. the apparatus of racism does not mean that the ideals and goals of reconstruction were not met but rather that we must consider it as movement toward something much more pro- found and experimental than even the founding of the united states. this suggests that we could think of it less as collapse or even redemption than as a pathway or process. this gives it a more dynamic and less static (and perhaps binary) place in our present and our past. nb: redemption, unlike reconstruction, is knowable to most audiences. it is what most expect—an almost seamless flow from slavery to segregation. they anticipate the message of “redemption” and are not surprised by the brutal violence and the legislative, constitutional, and court-mandated restrictions and assaults on black lives. at the nmaahc, we therefore see our challenge as slowing visitors down. to engage audiences and invite them to take a second look, we juxtapose the familiar with the unfamiliar. the showstopper tends to be that there were african american officehold- ers in the nineteenth century. this startles many visitors and captures their attention, perhaps because it signals a successful, organized opposition. once we’ve sparked their curiosity, we can enable visitors to experience a moment that made black office holding possible—a moment that stretches from reconstruction into the antebellum period by suggesting organizing traditions with deep roots running back into slavery. i can almost hear the gasp of horror that history’s linearity is blasted apart by the description above: redemption overlapping reconstruction and spilling backward into a past before the civil war. yet this is how exhibitions operate, at least in part. an exhibition is a visual medium that permits multiple layers of communication at once; that can disrupt a strict beginning, middle, and end. exhibitions provide a flash of insight. the task of a historian in this context is to create a shift in perception that lives long after the visitor leaves the museum. r e c o n s t r u c t i o n i n p u b l i c h i s t o r y a n d m e m o r y dp: what do you find to be the most challenging problem—whether prac- tical, theoretical, legal, institutional, or otherwise—in working on these issues? that is to say, when you engage with and/or reflect on the com- memoration of reconstruction, what is it you find most vexing, daunt- ing, or perplexing? finally, based on your experiences and research—with the above issue and/or in general—what advice would you offer to others involved in the commemoration of reconstruction? st: the challenge of commemorating reconstruction—what seems its formidable absence in public memory—gives us so many opportunities to fill in those gaps with the groundbreaking and rigorous research that has already shaped so much of our scholarship and public histories. each year, when i teach either slavery in the american imagination or introduction to african american literature, i am puzzled by the fact that so few students even know what constitutes the meaning of the word “reconstruction,” much less what were its promises and paradoxes (unless they have taken a southern history class or nineteenth-century american history course). in other words, reconstruction is not as burdened or overdetermined by its signifier status as the civil war or civil rights movement are. an interesting approach for me would be teaching a cultural history on reconstruction by highlighting the paradox of this absence. for example, what would a more extended timeline of reconstruction look like if we thought of it not only in the strict terms of political history? i am again influenced by henry louis gates, especially his “the trope of a new negro and the reconstruction of the image of the black” ( ), in which he charts the artistic arm of reconstruction as flourishing during what we typically think of as the “nadir” of african american life: i see this period between and , rather than the narrower one between and , as the crux of the period of black intellectual reconstruction. for the literary critic, there is little choice. between and , for example, black people published as books only two novels, one in and one in . between and , however, black writers published at least sixty-four novels. while the historical period known as reconstruction seems to have been characterized by a dramatic upsurge of energy in the american body politic, the corpus of black literature and art, on the other hand, enjoyed no such apparent vitalization. . . . i find gates’s periodization provocative and poignant, and i’d be inter- ested in adding to his timeline by staging his paradox as a debate—what were the forms of cultural expression that african americans and white j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , v o l u m e , i s s u e americans created from to to wrestle with the questions of nationhood, insecurity, citizenship, race and gender? what do the appar- ent silences in literature reveal? what do these silences respond to? and what other forms of art (photography, poetry, or letters) did people use to remember the past and the paradox of their present? i then would also expand it to include the twin moment of the nadir and “the new negro” as a way of reimagining reconstruction as a process and as having an after- life. this can be done through a number of ways in a syllabus, exhibition, film, or public reading—following how one figure, community, or text gets formed, stages its new identity, and then reimagines itself or gets reimag- ined in literature or art after . the goal is not to create new myths, but through art to understand how the questions and concerns that we have now were dealt with either in real time or in the shadow of the period. bb: i think the most challenging problem is generating and sustaining interest in reconstruction; so many people see it as just the period between the civil war and jim crow segregation or between the old south and the new south. how do we get people to see that this is a critical period in american history, a period when questions of civil, social, political, and economic inclusion and equality are on the table? how do we encourage this reflection when the events are so complex? our memphis project has given us an opportunity to take an event that’s rooted in slavery, civil war, and emancipation; examine it in the context of post–civil war struggles in the urban south; and reflect on the possibilities for the nation of sustaining social, political, economic, and constitutional changes. what advice would i offer from my experience with this project? realize that communitywide commemorations are educational opportunities and should involve broad collaborations and coalitions. the more extensive these are, the better the possibilities for deeper and richer understanding of this period. our project began as a plan by two historians, with support from our department and the nps, for a two-day academic symposium. when another possible funder told us we needed more community engagement, we included a few presentations at local libraries and on campus to edu- cate the public about the event. then we realized that the whole pro- cess had to involve more than just one department at one university. at the same time the memphis naacp, engaged in its own struggle with the thc over the wording of a proposed marker commemorating the massacre, approached us for assistance. out of this relationship grew a broader com- munity collaboration that included all of the major postsecondary edu- cational institutions (public and private), the public library, the museum system, as well as some private donors and supporters. commemorations r e c o n s t r u c t i o n i n p u b l i c h i s t o r y a n d m e m o r y like this should not be the purview of a single educational institution or organization. the significance of this event could easily be dismissed if only a few academics or just one organization was involved. the months-long controversy between the memphis naacp and the tch over the wording on the marker heightened awareness of the con- tinuing importance of memory and commemoration. a community that has often been mired in conflict over civil war iconography (statues, parks, and memorials to confederate “heroes” in a predominantly african american city) now seems poised for deeper discussions of race and mem- ory. but the challenge will be sustaining this commitment to reflection or, as a local newspaper columnist termed it, to “retroactive honesty.” the greater the chronological distance from these events, the more difficult it is to generate and sustain this interest, except when people have (or are persuaded that they should have) some compelling personal, political, eco- nomic, or social investment in these events. tb: a lot of people are uncomfortable confronting the legacy of white supremacist violence and fraud in replacing a lawfully established politi- cal order with a long-term racist regime. the basic narrative poses other problems. allegations of republican corruption were an important part of reconstruction politics. some of those allegations were true. that corrup- tion had a nationwide context in the dramatic expansion of a postwar secu- rities market that prioritized state credit, which also tempted northerners and southern democrats when they were in power. but it’s common for audiences to see corruption as a disqualification from respect or proof of politics as usual, which obscures the larger importance of the republican party in the south. many people point to the complexity of reconstruction as an obstacle to effective public presentation, which is not a point without foundation. state variations in the process were significant. federal measures on topics like amnesty involved a long series of partial steps. explaining the incom- plete rollback of reconstruction requires nuance. disciplinary boundaries can reinforce these complications. civil war and reconstruction histori- ans perhaps tend to leave it to law professors to interpret the part of the enforcement act of codified as u.s.c. § and the jurisdiction and removal act of , which can result in theoretically rich but often ahistorical understanding of the profound reconstruction-era remaking of the federal court system. another challenge is the flipside to eric’s observation that reconstruction is at heart a story about ordinary people defining freedom. it is not a story that lends itself to telling through a few leading figures like the women’s j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , v o l u m e , i s s u e suffrage movement or the jacksonian or progressive eras. biography may oversimplify all of those stories, but the famous names provide a hook that reconstruction largely lacks. my advice is to seize the moment. current public curiosity about the reconstruction era may not match that focused on the federalist era, but it compares well with interest in any other period that precedes liv- ing memory. that interest reflects contemporary politics rather than the sesquicentennial, but the anniversary is a genuine season of opportunity. and consider the local possibilities: many communities could generate something exciting. i have been very impressed by the memphis obser- vance that beverly has described, and i’d like to think that the wwfh in columbia offers a model for broadening the presentation of a historic house museum. it’s no coincidence that these initiatives have taken place in the south, and i expect the nps to concentrate on the former confederacy as well, but there are also rich prospects elsewhere. it’s a grassroots story that would benefit from grassroots remembrance. ef: the first problem is not unique to reconstruction—it is the slow decline in the study of history at all levels of education as stem subjects get prioritized and the humanities, which do not seem to contribute to eco- nomic productivity, become more and more devalued. thus the opportuni- ties for acquainting young people with reconstruction steadily diminish. then of course reconstruction inevitably seems to get overshadowed by the civil war. in addition to emphasizing reconstruction’s modern relevance, as has been discussed, i think we ought to frame the era in part as the beginning of a long struggle for our society to come to terms with the consequences of the end of slavery. lincoln alluded to this obliquely in his second inaugural when he spoke of the years of unrequited labor. what is the nation’s obligation for this? what system of labor, politics, social life, and race rela- tions will replace slavery? the reconstruction generation was the first to grapple with this on a massive scale. in some ways, we are still trying to answer those questions. nb: where do we go from here? how do we put our ideas into practice in a way that will bring reconstruction to the forefront of the public imagination? i agree with everyone about the difficulty of this project. reconstruction is complex; there is no linear, straightforward narrative that does justice to its looping afterlives. reconstruction is unknown to most; i recently pitched it to a reporter and was met with a blank stare. r e c o n s t r u c t i o n i n p u b l i c h i s t o r y a n d m e m o r y reconstruction cannot easily be slipped into tropes of what it means “to be american.” so how do we change this? like tom, i think commemoration is an important first step and per- haps our only way in. but it will take a full-court press. commemorations won’t make reconstruction memorable unless they are made deeply rel- evant. a short anecdote by way of example. recently, many of us were active in commemorating the th anniversary of the emancipation proclamation. at the museum, we co-curated an exhibit with the national museum of american history. together, we collaborated with the national endowment for the humanities (neh) and the american library association to tour a film series and traveling exhibit to spark local dis- cussion. we organized a national youth summit via webcam. and we set up programming around musicians, artists, and poets. our work and the work of others brought the past to the present moment. yet i was con- scious that something was missing from this anniversary. in the past, anniversaries of the emancipation proclamation served as a time of reckoning. celebrants marked the past to debate, analyze, and assess the present moment and to chart avenues forward. think of frederick douglass’s “on the twenty-first anniversary of emancipation” and w. e. b. dubois’s “celebration of the semicentennial anniversary of the act of emancipation.” these celebrations represent the work of many conferences, congresses, and expositions organized around emancipation. these, in turn, brought many different people together to organize their thoughts and propose new ways forward using the emancipation proclamation as their springboard. the march on washington is perhaps the most iconic of these coalitions. the anniversary did not produce the same results. the commemoration remained largely locked in the past without serving as a moment of reflection and deliberation. the past was not used to debate the present and to map ways forward; this is vexing, daunting, and perplexing. i can think of all sorts of reasons why this anniversary differed, but one sticks in my craw. in , national museums, national parks, and national humanities centers were hosting and organizing these events. this is won- derful. these pasts are recognized as americans pasts! the smithsonian, the nps, and the neh offer a strong spotlight that can reach local commu- nities. yet concomitant with the national is the fact that voices can become muted and less distinct. therefore, it is vital that we collaborate with oth- ers. we need to build relationships among universities, social justice net- works, artists, museums, and archives. commemorations will come and go unless we can work these moments to our advantage by harnessing these j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , v o l u m e , i s s u e relationships. it’s not so much that we have different audiences but rather that we have different voices and therefore varying abilities to speak. i think we should begin with a thoughtful accounting of what we all bring to the table and open ourselves to vigorous public conversation. jt: i think the most vexing and challenging thing about engaging with reconstruction’s history and legacy has been the extent to which it is so much more complex and nuanced than most of our audiences have been taught to believe. the main obstacle to learning what this history has to teach is the broad-brushed narratives that box it away as a brief, inevita- bly ineffectual period after the civil war that somehow proved the folly of federal interference into state affairs and the law’s inability to create and sustain social change. without understanding reconstruction’s short- comings and premature end as a political and moral failure that enabled the resurgence of racial hierarchy and subordination, we cannot properly recognize similar acts of resurgence when they occur. what rhetoric does such a resurgence use? what justifications and fears does it cloak itself in to appear reasonable and necessary? in the wake of the u.s. supreme court’s brown v. board decision, white elected officials and community members opposed to the ruling quickly relied upon confederate states’ rights rhetoric. many of the his- torical markers and monuments to confederate history and figures stand- ing today were civil rights–era statements of white supremacy’s history of resistance. political rallies and anti-desegregation protests were filled with confederate flags and messages resisting efforts at a so-called second reconstruction. when attorney general robert f. kennedy came to montgomery, alabama, in april to urge alabama governor george c. wallace to abandon his vow to defy federal school desegregation orders, pro-wallace protesters placed a brass marker where jefferson davis had taken the oath of office years before. a note left with the marker, explaining its inten- tion to “keep any enemy from standing on the star where jefferson davis was inaugurated,” was signed “unreconstructed.” similarly, the south carolina legislature raised the confederate flag over the state capitol in april and refused to move it from the capitol grounds for more than fifty years. we still witness the persistent misuse of reconstruction as a benign or even heroic narrative by those who continue to defend policies and cus- toms rooted in white supremacy and racial equality. we need a public his- torical narrative that reveals that rhetoric for what it is and makes it an uncomfortable position to defend. the widespread efforts to commemorate r e c o n s t r u c t i o n i n p u b l i c h i s t o r y a n d m e m o r y reconstruction right now are encouraging, and i hope we will continue to use these anniversaries to retell familiar stories in deeper, new, and needed ways that highlight truth and complexity while shining light on damag- ing, still-festering legacies. there are so many people engaged in this valu- able and important work, we have already seen meaningful movement in public awareness and shifting narratives; i’m excited to see that progress continue. notes . the equal justice initiative is a nonprofit organization that provides legal repre- sentation to indigent defendants and those who have been denied fair treatment in the legal system. through its reports on the slave trade in montgomery, alabama, lynching in america, and other issues, eji examines the nation’s history of racial injustice, its implication in structural poverty, and its impact on contemporary society. . equal justice initiative, slavery in america: the montgomery slave trade (montgomery, ala.: equal justice initiative, ); equal justice initiative, lynching in america: confronting the legacy of racial terror, d ed. (montgomery, ala.: equal justice initiative, ). . the national museum of african american history and culture partnered with the smithsonian’s national museum of american history to create an exhibit, which was open through september , that examined these events in comparison. the smithsonian maintains an online version of this exhibit at http://americanhistory. si.edu/exhibitions/changing-america. . see claude bowers, the tragic era: the revolution after lincoln (cambridge, mass.: riverside, ) . henry louis gates jr., “is this the end of the second reconstruction,” the root, october , , available online at: http://www.theroot.com/articles/history/ / / is_this_the_end_of_the_second_reconstruction/. . the congressional report, “memphis riots and massacres,” can be found in u.s. serial set, no. , house report , th cong., st sess. – ( ). dr. andre johnson, “does black truth matter: black lives and the disregard and recovery of black truth,” lecture, university of memphis, february , . the text of dr. johnson’s lecture is available online at https://blogs.memphis.edu/memphismassa- cre / / / /does-black-truth-matter-black-lives-and-the-disregard-and-re- covery-of-black-truth/. an audio recording of his lecture is available online at https:// soundcloud.com/memphis-massacre/does-black-truth-matter. . w. e. b. du bois, black reconstruction in america: an essay toward a history of the part which black folk played in the attempt to reconstruct democracy in america, – (new york: harcourt, brace, ), . . the quotation comes from johnson’s third annual message to congress in and is quoted in equal justice initiative, lynching in america, . for johnson’s entire message, see “message of the president of the united states,” appendix to the congressional globe, th cong., d sess. ( ). j o u r n a l o f t h e c i v i l wa r e r a , v o l u m e , i s s u e . civil rights cases, u.s. ( ). . cong. globe, st cong., d sess. ( ). . thomas wentworth higginson, army life in a black regiment (boston: fields, osgood, & co., ), . . in its decision in mccleskey v. kemp, the supreme court decided that racial bias in the application of the death penalty generally was not grounds to vacate an individual death penalty sentence, unless it could be proven that such bias was con- scious and intentional. see equal justice initiative, lynching in america, . . henry louis gates jr., “the trope of the new negro and the reconstruction of the image of the black,” representations (autumn ): . . u.s.c. § ; stat. , march , . . frederick douglass, “address by hon. frederick douglass, delivered in the congregational church, washington, d.c., april , ; on the twenty-first anniversary of emancipation in the district of columbia” (washington, d.c.: ) w. e. b. du bois testimony, hearing on u.s. senate bill , “celebration of the semicentennial anniversary of the act of emancipation” (february ). emerald_er_er .. international living wages: a us perspective stephanie luce murphy institute, school of professional studies, city university of new york, new york, new york, usa abstract purpose – the purpose of this paper is to provide background on the us living wage movement, with particular attention to recent victories, and also the ways in which the us movement differs from living wage movements in other countries. it begins with some technical distinctions of terms, then analyzes the campaigns and movement for higher wages, and considers some of the challenges the campaigns have faced. it will conclude with some discussion about the future of the movement. design/methodology/approach – this is a general review of living wage campaigns in the usa. this is based on a review of existing literature and the author’s own prior research and participant observation. findings – the author argues that the initial living wage movement that began in the early s was limited in scope but successful in building coalitions and political power to launch a much more expansive movement to raise wages in . originality/value – this paper is a general summary of the last years of living wage campaigns. it does not include new research. keywords labour, living wage, minimum wage paper type general review introduction the usa has had a federal minimum wage since , but the initial legislation, the fair labor standards act, contained no formula for setting the wage level; neither did it contain a mechanism for adjusting it in the future. instead, the wage was increased only with an act of congress – something unlikely to happen without strong pressure from social movements or trade unions (us department of labor, ; waltman, ). the wage was raised at various times in the first years, but peaked in , and was raised infrequently afterwards. by the early s, the federal minimum wage had fallen far below the hourly wage a worker with a family needed to meet the federal poverty line (bernstein and schmitt, ). advocates appeared unable to pressure congress to raise wages at the national level. in response, labor unions and community organizations began to launch local “living wage” campaigns. these were limited in scope but began to put in place the foundation of a much larger movement that would over the next years form one of the most successful recent social movements in the country (luce, ; moberg, ). this paper provides background on the us living wage movement, with particular attention to recent victories, and also the ways in which the us movement differs from living wage movements in other countries. it begins with some technical distinctions of terms, then analyzes the campaigns and movement for higher wages, and consider some of the challenges the campaigns have faced. it concludes with some discussion about the future of the movement. the paper is based primarily on a synthesis of existing literature as well as the author’s own experience working with and researching living wage campaigns for years. employee relations vol. no. , pp. - emerald publishing limited - doi . /er- - - received july accepted july the current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on emerald insight at: www.emeraldinsight.com/ - .htm ©stephanie luce. published by emerald publishing limited. this article is published under the creative commons attribution (cc by . ) licence. anyone may reproduce, distribute, translate and create derivative works of this article (for both commercial and non-commercial purposes), subject to full attribution to the original publication and authors. the full terms of this licence may be seen at http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/ . /legalcode living wages http://creativecommons.org/licences/by/ . /legalcode developing minimum wages and the living wage the first minimum wage in the usa was passed by the state of massachusetts in , and a few other states passed similar laws in the next few years. it was not until that congress passed the federal labor standards act that set the minimum wage at cents per hour, with no particular rationale or formula behind it. over the years the law has been amended to cover new categories of workers, change the exemptions, and, periodically, raise the wage level (waltman, ). in addition to the federal minimum, states can set their own state minimum wage. some states have greater coverage than the federal. for example, the state of hawaii covered domestic service workers before the federal law did. and while the federal minimum wage sets a much lower minimum wage for tipped workers, eight states mandate that tipped workers receive the full state minimum wage. furthermore, some states give cities the authority to establish their own minimum wage regulations (us department of labor, ; dalmat, ; sonn, ). while the minimum wage level has varied over time, recently it has been relatively low. the usa has a formula to set a poverty threshold for different family sizes: single adult, adult with child, two adults and one child, two adults and two children, and so on. for most of recent history, a worker working full-time ( hours per week) and earning the minimum wage would just pass the poverty threshold for a single adult, but would not earn enough to support a family (waltman, ). most experts agree that the poverty threshold is outdated and inadequate for measuring the true cost of living, particularly because the formula does not vary by geography, but also for other technical problems (pollin et al., ). instead, researchers have developed various formulae to measure the true wage needed to cover basic costs. there are variations of these formulas, such as the “self-sufficiency standard” developed by the wider opportunities for women, the basic family budget calculator created by the economic policy institute, and the living wage calculator developed by dr amy glasmeier and the massachusetts institute of technology (glasmeier, ). each of these methodologies uses publicly available data, adjusts wages by geography, and constructs an hourly wage needed to cover basic costs for different family sizes (such as one adult/no children; one adult/one small child; two adults/two children). these three methodologies all include the following categories of expenses: housing and utilities, food, transportation, childcare, healthcare, personal and household necessities (such as clothing, toothpaste, soap), and taxes (including tax credits). these methodologies vary depending on some additional costs that could be considered as part of a basic living wage such as savings for higher education, emergencies and retirement. for much of the s and s, there was a great gap between the minimum wage, poverty threshold, and what the methodologies defined as a wage needed to cover basic needs. for example, when boston enacted its living wage in , the minimum wage was $ . per hour and the new living wage started at $ . per hour. by , the state had raised its minimum wage to $ . and the city living wage had increased to $ . . but according the economic policy institute basic family budget, a worker in a household with two adults and two children would need to earn $ . per hour just to cover basic needs. a single adult with two children would need to earn $ . per hour (brenner and luce, ). it was in this context that the modern living wage movement was born. the evolution of living wage campaigns in the usa: recent history the first modern living wage campaign in the usa was launched in baltimore, maryland in . activists from community organizations, the public sector union american federation of state, county and municipal employees (afscme), and faith-based groups built a campaign to pressure the city to raise wages. the mayor asserted that the city had no authority to set a citywide wage. a coalition launched a campaign and eventually pressured the city council and er , mayor to pass a living wage ordinance. that ordinance set a minimum wage of $ . per hour for any firm holding a service contract with the city. this meant the impact was relatively small, covering around , employees on contracts for services such as school buses, janitorial and security guard work at city buildings (niedt et al., ). within a few years, a national living wage movement blossomed. coalitions formed in cities around the country, demanding their city councils pass ordinances. these primarily took a similar form: activists lobbied their elected representatives and used public education, media, rallies and protests over one to two years in order to get the city to pass a law. the law mandated firms doing business with the city to pay the higher wage, which included holding service contracts but also sometimes included firms receiving economic development assistance from the city (such as low-interest loans). in some cases the ordinances covered direct city employees, and employees on city-owned property such as an airport or sports arena (luce, ). the living wage campaigns were fairly successful, in that over cities and counties passed variations of living wage ordinances between and . most of these set the wage to the federal poverty line for a family of four, and the wage was indexed to increase each year with the cost of living. some of the ordinances included additional provisions, such as supplemental pay if the employer did not provide health insurance, unpaid and paid days off, and some job protections for workers (luce, ). however, there were a few concerns raised about the ordinances. first, the wage rate, $ . per hour, was not a “living wage” as defined by a basic needs budget. instead, it was the hourly rate needed to reach the poverty line for a worker with children. some critics asserted that setting a poverty wage as a “living wage” was a setback. others argued that it was a large jump from the current minimum wage and a way to begin a stronger movement for higher wages. for example, madeline janis, lead organizer for the los angeles living wage campaign, remarked in that beyond winning a raise for workers, the goals of the campaign included to “develop a tool for union organizing and to promote successful organizing actions” (pollin and luce, ). amaha kassa, an organizer in oakland noted the way in which the living wage concept was useful for building political alliances, “as important as the policies we pass are the coalitions we build. the coalition will outlast any policy if we do our job right” (moberg, ). second, the ordinances covered only a small portion of the low-wage workers in the country. whereas approximately - percent of all us workers earned wages below the poverty line (about million workers in ), the ordinances covered only a small fraction of those. this was in part due to the wage level but mostly the low coverage was also due to the way the ordinances were structured. they covered workers connected to city contracts or subsidies, and not all low-wage workers. some cities tried to establish citywide wages in the s and s but faced legal challenges and stiff opposition. only three cities succeeded in establishing a citywide wage: san francisco, california; and albuquerque and santa fe, both in new mexico, all enacted citywide minimum wages in . (washington, dc, its own legal entity, had its own minimum wage for decades). for the most part, living wage advocates understood these limitations but persisted with the campaigns for several reasons. first, the movement still hoped to raise and improve the federal minimum wage but lacked the power to do so. the local living wage campaigns were seen not as an alternative to raising the legal minimum wage, but a complementary step. the campaigns helped build new alliances and coalitions and develop political experience pressuring candidates to take wages on as a priority. second, the campaigns were a way to build worker power and, in many cases, assist union organizing. one of the main players in the movement was the hotel employees and restaurant employees union, but other unions, including seiu, afscme, the national education association, and others, played a role in different campaigns. for unions, the campaigns were a living wages way to work with low-wage workers that were not yet organized into unions. by fighting together for a living wage, workers could gain confidence to unionize. living wage campaigns were also a way to assist already unionized workers in collective bargaining. particularly in the public sector where it was difficult to win raises, unions could work with community allies to pressure public authorities to grant higher wages in collective bargaining agreements. organizers were correct on their assessment: the local living wage campaigns did help build momentum to raise state minimum wages. by , states had minimum wage rates above the federal level. then in , the federal minimum wage was increased, to go up from $ . to $ . over three years (us department of labor, ). the movement regains momentum after years of success with wage campaigns, the economic crisis hit, and brought wage campaigns to a halt. for several years after there was little progress, despite promises made by president obama for an increase. even some democrats in congress stated that raising the minimum wage would be a “job killer.” the democratic city council in new york city would not even allow a proposal to expand the city’s living wage ordinance to come to a vote. then in , occupy wall street emerged, bringing the issue of inequality and low wages to the forefront. the next year, fast food workers went on strike in new york city, demanding $ per hour and union recognition. at the time, the new york state minimum wage was the same as the federal: $ . per hour. the city of new york had a living wage ordinance in place that set the living wage at $ per hour. the demand for $ seemed impossible, as it would mean more than doubling the minimum wage, and even far surpassing the established “living wage” (rolf, ). where did the $ demand emerge from? there are a few explanations, suggesting that the demand was brewing in difficult locations and happened to coalesce at the same moment. in new york, seiu had been working through a coalition called fight for a fair economy (ffe). this coalition has been working for several years to create a broad political coalition with community organizations to knock on doors, identify potential voters and talk to them about their issues, and be able to turn out voters for important elections and issues. through the door knocking efforts, ffe organizers found a lot of low-wage workers disgruntled with their jobs, and a large number of people employed in the fast food sector. ffe decided to pull together some of these workers to see if they could launch a campaign. according to some sources, when it came time to form their wage demand, workers thought the current new york city “living wage” rate of $ was far too low to live off. they thought $ was likely too hard to win. they settled on $ . there was no formula or methodology behind the demand, but it seemed like a good one (luce, ). low wages were not only a problem in new york, but throughout the country. at the same time new york fast food workers were organizing, unions were working to organize airport workers in washington state, particularly at the seattle airport, located in the town of sea-tac, washington. as part of that campaign, organizers decided to put an initiative on the ballot for voters to approve a minimum wage for sea-tac of $ per hour. the state of washington already had one of the highest state minimum wages in the country, at $ . , but still, $ would be a large jump. sea-tac organizers say they picked $ per hour because the current living wage ordinance rate covering airport workers on the west coast were around $ or $ per hour, and so $ seemed an appropriate demand (rolf, ; rosenblum, ). fight for $ the fast food strikes spread quickly around the county. from to workers and allies launched one-day strikes in hundreds of cities with the same demands: $ per hour wage and union recognition. on december , , the national day of action included er , strikes in over cities (gittleson, ). an action on november , , saw strikes in cities. other workers joined the actions along the way, including home care, airport, childcare, university adjuncts, walmart associates and others, all demanding a $ hour wage (berman, a; greenhouse, ). in addition to the us strikes, the campaign garnered international support. solidarity actions and protests in support of domestic wage increases took place in hundreds of international cities in countries including japan, brazil and the uk (berman, b). the effort was bold and innovative. first, as mentioned, the wage demand was much higher than prior minimum wage and living wage campaigns. second, the call was somewhat open-ended: who should pay the $ ? who was the target? workers struck at multiple fast food chains, including mcdonald’s, burger king and wendy’s. it was unlikely they could win an agreement from each of these large transnational corporations, and each of them was run under a franchise model, making it difficult to see how to win a union campaign or set collective bargaining unless agreed at the corporate level (rosenblum, ). instead the campaign took shape as a legislative effort, building pressure for cities or states to raise wages. in , only four cities had citywide minimum wage ordinances. unlike a city living wage ordinance, a citywide minimum wage, higher than the state wage, covered all workers in the city, public and private. in late , voters in sea-tac, washington approved the $ per hour ballot initiative. the following year the seattle, washington city council approved a $ minimum wage spreading, passed citywide wages. by , more than cities and counties had set their own local wages, ranging from $ . to $ per hour. in most cases the higher wage was phased-in over several years. many included indexing. in the same period, dozens of states raised their statewide minimum wage, to rates ranging from $ . to $ (while the federal level remained at $ . ). others added in indexing; there are now there are states with automatic adjustment to the state minimum wage. the fight for $ has blurred the line between the “living wage” campaigns and the minimum wage. now, the standard wage demand is for $ per hour, which is higher than the federal poverty line for a worker with a family (about $ . per hour in ). while $ is still not a “living wage” for workers in many cities, it is a major jump from what it had been. impacts of living wage on workers and employers when the modern living wage movement began in the s the dominant mainstream view within the economics profession was that wage mandates were a destructive policy. when employers were forced to pay wages higher than a worker’s marginal productivity they would choose to cut jobs. policymakers often echoed this sentiment, claiming that living wage ordinances were “job killers.” opponents further argued that living wages could lead to higher prices for consumers, higher taxes in cities, and industries leaving cities for fear of an anti-business climate (janis, ). by the late s as more living wage ordinances were enacted, it became difficult for opponents to maintain their arguments. while a few studies asserted harmful impacts on employment, an increasing number of “natural experiments” compared cities and counties with higher wage mandates (in the form of living wage ordinances or state minimum wages) to those that did not raise their wage. increasingly, the studies found little to no impact on employment. furthermore, surveys of employers found some positive impacts: lower turnover, higher productivity, and in some cases, greater efficiency (chapman and thompson, ; schmitt, ; d’arcy and davies, ). still, a few studies still find evidence of job loss, particularly for teenagers (neumark et al., ; neumark, ). some critics argued that the wage increases would have little impact on workers lives because higher incomes would mean that workers lose eligibility for government programs, living wages such as food stamps and tax credits (burkhauser and sabia, ). worker surveys find that there is a range of outcomes, with some workers ( particularly single parents with several young children) losing more benefits, but that on average, workers are better off with the pay rise (chapman and thompson, ; pollin et al., ). the us experience of living wage campaigns living wage and minimum wage issues are now common in many countries, but there are three factors that are relatively unique to the usa. first, compared to the uk and canada, the living wage campaigns have primarily aimed at passing compulsory regulation on employers, rather than persuading employers to voluntarily adopt higher wage policies. this is perhaps because the usa has a strong reliance on “hard law” vs “soft law,” and it may be because us unions view us corporations with great distrust. there is little or no tradition of social dialogue or much reliance on partnership in the usa. in fact, activists saw one of the benefits of municipal living wage ordinances was that they could provide additional mechanisms to monitor employers, and penalties for employers who violate labor laws. federal labor law is relatively weak and not always enforced. a local living wage ordinance can provide workers with some additional protections for organizing on the job. for example, the los angeles living wage ordinance protects workers who discuss their wages with co-workers. under federal law, employers can fire workers for discussing their wages at work, but the los angeles ordinance includes “non-retaliation” language that has provided some protections for workers who want to organize. second, the us case may differ from other countries in that the line between “living wage” and “minimum wage” is blurry. the activists involved in each have not seen the efforts as distinct or in contradiction. rather, the living wage campaigns were an effort to organize at the local level to raise wages, but also build political power to eventually increase state and federal minimum wages. this distinction has been stronger in other countries, such as canada, where there have been some tensions in strategies for raising wages (evans and fannelli, ). (however, the distinction is less clear in the uk now that the government set a national “living wage” for workers age and above in ). finally, the third aspect that characterizes the us movement is that it has been a vehicle for building coalitions between labor unions, faith-based organizations, community groups and other elements of civil society. while other countries have had some degree of alliance and movement building, it has not usually taken to the same degree as the usa. in other countries the campaigns have tended to be led primarily by unions, such as in japan, where the public sector union jichiro has been the main advocate (suzuki, ), community organizations in the uk (holgate, ), or policy organizations in canada (evans and fannelli, ). the living wage movement in the usa was unusual in that while there were a number of national organizations involved, the local campaigns were led by a variety of different forces. each city and campaign looked different. the main actors included some unions, and some central labor councils, as well as the community organization acorn, the faith-based group industrial areas foundation, and the labor-community coalition jobs with justice. but a long list of local organizations was also heavily involved. in many cities, the living wage campaign was launched in particular as a way to build a coalition of allies – ideally for longer-term political work (luce, ). the fight for $ campaign has been particularly notable for its linkages to the black lives matter movement and the immigrant rights movement (jaffe, , ). in part because many low-wage workers, and fast food workers in particular, are black, the campaigns seem natural allies but that alliance was not inevitable. many union campaigns have steered away from addressing race and racism directly – indeed, the union movement has a sordid past in many dimensions of race relations (roediger, ; korstad and er , lichtenstein, ). the alliance took an intentional effort and nurturing on behalf of some activists key to both movements, as well as faith-based movements. labor organizer and author jonathan rosenblum ( ) notes that the fight for $ campaign brought together an “unlikely alliance of sea-tac airport workers, union and community activists, and clergy” and united a “diverse, largely immigrant workforce.” challenges and questions for the us living wage movement there is no doubt that the movement for higher wages has been very successful in the last few years in the usa. but some major challenges exist. first, the movement continues to demand $ per hour, but there is no methodology or formula to support the rate. there is also major regional variation in cost of living, with $ per hour in new york city actually impacts a smaller share of workers than $ . per hour in upstate new york (milkman and luce, ). while a few scholars have proposed formulas for calculating a regional wage, there is nothing close to consensus – or even a move by policymakers – in that direction. what is the right wage? some economists who support a higher wage have suggested that the wage should be high enough to improve worker incomes but not so high that it leads to job loss (krueger, ). they have attempted to find the right “tipping point” at which employers can withstand the higher cost without cutting jobs. indeed, the uk minimum wage was set according to this exact principle from to , when a national “living wage” was established for workers age and older. others argue that the wage should be set primarily based on the cost of living – workers’ basic needs – rather than employer needs or job losses. this argument suggests that some job loss may be acceptable if it means a larger number of workers are able to earn a self-sufficient income. the minimum wage could be supplemented with public programs to reduce some of the major expenses workers face – in particular, free or subsidized childcare. this would mean that workers with small children would not need such a high hourly wage to survive (howell et al., ). second, higher wages are of limited use if workers do not have access to full-time work hours. in many low-wage industries there has been an increase in involuntary part-time scheduling, and the rise of practices such as on-call and irregular hours. this means that even with a big wage increase, total take-home pay may not go up by much (prowse and fells, ). as with the “zero-hours” campaigns in the uk and new zealand, the us activists have worked to address the problem of work hours through legislative campaigns, media attention and workplace organizing. for example, a coalition led by the labor-community group jobs with justice got the san francisco city council to pass a “retail worker bill of rights” in . this applies to all businesses with or more employees in san francisco, and or more locations globally. before a covered employer can hire new direct or temporary agency employees it must first offer all current part-time employees the right to more hours of work. employees must receive their schedules two weeks in advance, and employees must be compensated when “on-call” shifts are canceled (depillis, ). in the new york city council passed “fair workweek” legislation that outlaws on-call scheduling, requires two weeks’ notice for posting schedules, and mandates that employers offer new shifts to existing employees before hiring new ones. if an employer changes a schedule within two weeks they must pay a bonus (city of new york, ). similarly, in addition to low wages and low and variable hours, workers have little job security, few or no benefits, and no grievance procedure. some of these jobs, particularly fast food, are dangerous as well. in industries like retail and fast food, workers can be stuck for years with few pay rises or promotion opportunities. the career ladders are weak in these industries. and even a promotion to management might still be a low-wage job. the higher wages movement is only addressing one single issue. many of these problems could be improved if workers had a union, which is the second demand made by fight for $ . but while the fight for $ campaigns has had major living wages success on raising wages, it has had almost no success on its other demand: unionization. union density in the “restaurant and other food services” industry is only . percent. in other large low-wage sectors, like department stores, it is . percent (hirsch and macpherson, ). unions remain rare in many of the workplaces where we see job growth. could it be that employers and policymakers are willing to allow higher wages as a way to keep out unions? (logan, ; royle, ). indeed, more than a dozen major companies have raised their internal starting wages in the wake of the fast food strikes and labor protests (carew, ). several of these companies, such as walmart and target, are known for their anti-union practices. the effort to unionize large numbers of low-wage workers will be quite challenging – not only due to direct anti-union practices – but also due to the franchise system utilized by many fast food companies. this would mean that workers would have to establish a union restaurant by restaurant, for tens of thousands of workplaces across the country. but if a group of workers at one mcdonalds was successful in unionizing, it could mean that store would threaten to close. another concern is the threat of mechanization. this is not new, of course: employers have always threatened to replace workers with machines when wages increased. certainly the technology already exists to establish self-check-out lines in grocery stores and fast food restaurants. to what extent should workers worry that their demand for a higher wage (and union) will lead to displacement? as noted above, the research to date does not find that the higher wages are resulting in job loss. of course, the $ wage is a significant increase that is only now being implemented, so the longer-term impact is not yet clear but there is nothing inevitable about a labor-technology trade-off. in some industries, employers have implemented technology only to find it was not successful: customers preferred human interaction, or the machines were unreliable and costly to maintain. the use of technology instead of human labor is political, and contested, and the outcomes are not certain (frase, ). future directions of the us living wage movement the living wage movement that began in baltimore in had considerable success. the campaigns won in most places they were launched, with over cities and counties passing ordinances over years. the ordinances did not cover a large share of low-wage workers but they helped unionized some groups of workers, and more importantly, built coalitions and alliances that were then in place to help expand the movement to the bolder, more expansive efforts to raise wages to $ per hour. on november , , voters approved four new ballot measures to significantly increase state minimum wages. with those victories, the number of workers receiving minimum wage increases since reached million – a good portion of the low-wage workforce (national employment law project, ; hirsch, ). not only are more workers now receiving wages, but the wage increases are much higher than they had been in previous eras of state minimum wage rises. minimum wage increases remain popular among voters, including among those who voted for donald trump for president but what can we expect now that he is in office, along with a republican majority in congress that opposes minimum wage increases (and some of whom even oppose any minimum wage legislation at all)? every move president trump has made to date suggests a minimum wage increase is unlikely. on the other hand, the last increase to the federal minimum wage came under president george w. bush, in , after democrats fared well in the mid-term elections. in some ways, it could be a wise move on trump’s part to approve a minimum wage increase that is so popular with voters. but if this were to happen, it would likely come along with exemptions or other cuts. for example, some policymakers (republicans and democrats) have approved statewide minimum wage increases along with new restrictions on localities setting their own minimum wage (ritsche, ). note that this is similar to the uk experience when the chancellor george er , osborne announced the creation of the new “living wage” in . this came alongside an effort to cut back in-work benefits (clarke and d’arcy, ). according to some analyses, many voters who elected trump did so because they felt the mainstream candidates and parties had ignored working class issues. this suggests the wage issue is still ripe for organizing, and public support will remain high. a current bill to raise the federal minimum to $ by would benefit million workers (owens, ). however, the movements must stay resolute in their demands to make the minimum wage a living wage, and not agree to concessions that divide the movement – such as concessions that might exempt new categories of workers and undermine the ability of unions to organize. conclusion the last few decades have seen a sharp increase in attention to minimum wage and living wages in many countries. as inequality continues to rise, and low-wage work expands even in the context of economic growth, policymakers and activists look for solutions. the us living wage movement attempted to challenge this burgeoning low-wage labor market growth in the s. it had some success in passing local ordinances, but for the most part, these covered a very small fraction of workers and did little to slow the growth of low-wage jobs. the emergence of occupy wall street, and then the “fight for $ ” movement, created an opportunity to raise wages to much higher levels and for many more workers. the national employment law project estimates that in four years, from the first fast food strike in november to november , over million workers won raises via local and state increases, for a total of almost $ billion (national employment law project, ). still, the federal minimum wage remains at $ . per hour and it seems unlikely to be raised any time soon. instead, organizers are focusing heavily on the local and state level where political coalitions are stronger and they have greater opportunities to influence legislators. the usa case provides a few lessons that may be relevant for other countries. first, the success of us campaigns suggests that at this point, workers may have more power in the legislative arena than in the workplace. this does not mean that workplace action is ineffective. indeed, the huge success of fight for $ may be a result of the rolling strikes and workplace actions. but the wage gains have come via policy, for the most part. organizing unions and winning demands solely through strikes is still possible, but much harder than winning gains through legislative action. it may be that both components are necessary. second, legislators are unlikely to set or raise wages on their own without pressure from movements. however, once a movement has begun and the issue is popular, some legislators may take advantage of the opportunity to increase wages in order to garner political support. activists must be wary of compromises that cut benefits or rights alongside wage increases. third, while there is considerable time and effort put into developing the best formula or methodology to determine minimum wages and living wages, the us movement has for the most part, treated this issue as of secondary importance. the early living wage campaigns chose to use the federal poverty line for a worker with a family of four as a target rate while realizing that that level was not a true living wage based on the cost of living. there are several methodologies available to calculate a more realistic living wage but the campaigns have not utilized them. in fact, the most recent successful movement has adopted a wage demand, $ per hour, with no formula behind it at all. on the one hand, this may be a weakness for the movement, and it results in a real wage that varies greatly by region ($ per hour is much higher in a low cost of living city than a high cost of living city). on the other hand, a single demand of $ per hour is clear, consistent and bold, and this has perhaps fostered more excitement for the movement. this suggests that while finding a living wages credible formula has been an important component in the canada and uk living wage campaigns, it might not be necessary for success everywhere (richards et al., ; living wage foundation, ). fourth, the living wage movement has had some success raising wages but higher wage mandates are only one policy of many, and on their own, they will not be enough to dramatically improve workers lives. workers also need regular and stable hours of work, job protections, health benefits and pensions. the best mechanism to provide these outcomes is more likely through union representation and a collective bargaining agreement. some employers and policymakers that may be open to higher minimum wages will be the same to vigorously oppose unionization. finally, reversing the extreme inequality found in most countries and altering the shape of the labor market will take major political restructuring. to that extent, the promise of the higher wages movement lies heavily in the ability to continue using the campaigns as a vehicle for building alliances and broader political movements. in the earlier years of the movement, living wage campaigns successfully united labor unions with faith-based and community organizations. in more recent years, the fight for $ movement has been building alliances between labor groups and racial justice groups like black lives matter. any effort to seriously restructure labor markets will require strong and broad alliances and the popularity of minimum wage and living wage may be the issue on which to build. references berman, j. 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( ), the politics of the minimum wage, university of illinois press, urbana, il and chicago, il. corresponding author stephanie luce can be contacted at: stephanie.luce@mail.cuny.edu for instructions on how to order reprints of this article, please visit our website: www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/licensing/reprints.htm or contact us for further details: permissions@emeraldinsight.com er , www.policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/publications/bc% office/ / /ccpa_bc_living_wage_ .pdf www.policyalternatives.ca/sites/default/files/uploads/publications/bc% office/ / /ccpa_bc_living_wage_ .pdf www.nelp.org/content/uploads/ / /citywide-minimum-wage-brief-may- .pdf www.nelp.org/content/uploads/ / /citywide-minimum-wage-brief-may- .pdf www.dol.gov/whd/minwage/america.htm www.dol.gov/whd/minwage/america.htm introduction to special issue: urban public art: geographies of co-production this is a repository copy of introduction to special issue: urban public art: geographies of co-production. white rose research online url for this paper: http://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ / version: accepted version article: zebracki, m orcid.org/ - - - and palmer, jm ( ) introduction to special issue: urban public art: geographies of co-production. city & society, ( ). pp. - . issn - https://doi.org/ . /ciso. © by the american anthropological association. this is the peer reviewed version of the following article: zebracki, m. and palmer,j. m. ( ), introduction to special issue: urban public art: geographies of co production. city & society, : - , which has been ‐ published in final form at https://doi.org/ . /ciso. . this article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with wiley terms and conditions for self-archiving. uploaded in accordance with the publisher's self-archiving policy. eprints@whiterose.ac.uk https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ reuse items deposited in white rose research online are protected by copyright, with all rights reserved unless indicated otherwise. they may be downloaded and/or printed for private study, or other acts as permitted by national copyright laws. the publisher or other rights holders may allow further reproduction and re-use of the full text version. this is indicated by the licence information on the white rose research online record for the item. takedown if you consider content in white rose research online to be in breach of uk law, please notify us by emailing eprints@whiterose.ac.uk including the url of the record and the reason for the withdrawal request. mailto:eprints@whiterose.ac.uk https://eprints.whiterose.ac.uk/ ! university of leeds university of new mexico this document is an author’s copy of the article zebracki m and palmer j m ( ) introduction to special issue: urban public art: geographies of co-production, city & society, vol. , no. , – , first published online on march , https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ . /ciso. . w s public art is commonly considered to consist of material- or performance-based artwork on sites with free physical and/or visual access (zebracki ). because or in spite of public art being a polemic term, phenomenon, and practice, there has been a recent upsurge of interest in public art among scholars across this journal's anthropological readership (e.g., ingram ; sorensen ; lee ) and the geohumanities more widely (e.g., dear et al. ; lossau and stevens ; cartiere and zebracki ; zebracki and palmer ). across these various literatures, public art has been recognized for its potential to connect with everyday users of urban public spaces, reshape the built environment, and provide people with meaningful, transformative experiences of everyday city life. hence, the term co! production has gained currency within broader social and cultural discourses and within arts practice to address those efforts that actively communicate with and involve specific members of the public, or “publics,” in the arts’ ambits of design, execution, and everyday engagement (see davies ; verschuere, brandsen, and pestoff ; warren ; zebracki ). present-day urban societies increasingly face challenges in light (or under the yoke, depending on one's perspective) of impactful forces, including neoliberalization, this document is an author’s copy of the article zebracki m and palmer j m ( ) introduction to special issue: urban public art: geographies of co-production, city & society, vol. , no. , – , first published online on march , https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ . /ciso. . this document cannot be cited in any publication and/or reproduced without the express written permission of the authors. cite the original article only. gentrification, city marketing/branding, immigration, and securitization (e.g., smith ; sharp, pollock, and paddison ; zimmerman ; miles ; grodach and ehrenfeucht ). changing political priorities in these contexts have led to the deregulation of art markets and draconian budgetary cuts that have hit the arts and cultural industries especially hard (zebracki ). of particular note, scholars have critiqued how financially challenged community art practices have deliberately exploited the free or “cheap” labor of artists and participation by members of the public (e.g., kester ; bishop ; zebracki a). additionally, the intersecting conditions of austerity, super- diversity, and urban gentrification have posed serious challenges to achieving policy goals of social justice and inclusion (pratt ; lees and melhuish ; zebracki a), which can be at odds with overly optimistic claims of social inclusiveness often aspired to in public art practice (sharp, pollock, and paddison ; zebracki, van der vaart, and van aalst ). with all this in mind, the guest editors of this issue circulated a call for papers to further the conversation about spaces of public art co-production. the five thought-provoking contributions reveal the shifting and ambiguous roles of producers and public users and, hence, multidisciplinary concerns with regard to authorship, ownership, belonging, and citizenship, alongside the complex realities of inclusiveness or exclusiveness (e.g., belfiore ; sharp, pollock, and paddison ; knight ; vickery ; cartiere and zebracki ). philosophies and terminologies of public art and its uses traverse myriad disciplines, geographical contexts, and temporal frameworks (including the artwork's lifespan, and user experiences of its presence[s] and absence[s]) (see hutchinson ; hein ), thereby revealing the ontologically multifaceted social, spatial, and material grounds of co-production. in this issue, we—the editors and contributing authors—adopt a comprehensive working definition of co!production, which implicates joint action and a more than just cooperation between actors to create a common good. co-production is a fluid process between formal agents—whom martha radice references as the “curatoriat” (danto cited by crehan a, ) to describe public art's usual suspects, so to speak, who include professional artists, policymakers, commissioning parties, and the like—cum any interested public parties to realize an artwork with publics rather than merely for them. therefore, it is not necessarily and immediately clear who initiates, organizes, follows, invents, imitates, finalizes, and so on. this document is an author’s copy of the article zebracki m and palmer j m ( ) introduction to special issue: urban public art: geographies of co-production, city & society, vol. , no. , – , first published online on march , https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ . /ciso. . this document cannot be cited in any publication and/or reproduced without the express written permission of the authors. cite the original article only. ideally, co-production would imply an egalitarian (in lieu of a hierarchical) production mode—one that is an active, or pro-active attitude of all parties involved. collective endeavor and awareness-making are, therefore, indispensable (values) to understanding the embodied nature of the co-production of a public artwork. seeing a public artwork for the first time can simply be rendered as a primordial, bodily encounter, and therefore a co- production in immediate visual and emotional terms. in this issue, we advance the definition of co-production by attending to input and social relations, as well as rethinking public art as a greater, concerted good that is engaged and problematized. some of the questions pursued, as well as suggested, in this issue are: how do active creators/engagers place both thought and labor into the conception, manufacturing, or execution of a public artwork? how are these artworks placed in public spaces and public minds, and melded together with the actions of those who use the mutually constituted artwork and space? public art, in this logic, suggests both a public space and public timeline along which encounters and meanings shape, and reshape, its lived realities, both real and imagined. this kind of practice adds additional layers of significance and possibilities for engagement to the original formation of the artwork. this process can sometimes continue for a considerable period of time after the initial material appearance (if any) of a public artwork, whereby co-production may continue the incorporation of physical, discursive, and emotional appropriations. tilted arc, in federal plaza in new york city, is a well-trodden textbook case of failure in this regard (weyergraf- serra and buskirk ). upon installation, everyday users of the square largely perceived the design of this artwork to be blocking the passage across the plaza, and the artwork was taken down in , after a prolonged period of public support for its removal. interestingly, co-production involved the radical act of its entire material removal. yet the aftermath of tilted arc's demise has been characterized by a growing antagonistic and immaterialist discourse within both the academe and urban practice, revolving around the perceived uses and misuses of art in global urban public spaces. in our view, this “anti-case” of public art has shown how a contested city space has become embedded not only in the local public mindscape but also in the international urban public sphere and academic discourse. martin zebracki and dirk de bekker, in their analysis of socially engaged public art practice in the city of 's-hertogenbosch, with its toponymical shorthand den bosch, in the netherlands, indicate that an artwork might become embraced as a positive city symbol, offering “contact zones” for meaningful encounters and social bonding as time progresses (see askins and this document is an author’s copy of the article zebracki m and palmer j m ( ) introduction to special issue: urban public art: geographies of co-production, city & society, vol. , no. , – , first published online on march , https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ . /ciso. . this document cannot be cited in any publication and/or reproduced without the express written permission of the authors. cite the original article only. pain ). therefore, the permanence of public art is not a requirement for a constructive ongoing co-production (see also: radice, this issue, ). zebracki and de bekker engage with the theoretical “trialectic” between the physical, social, and spatial (after lefebvre and harvey ) to examine public art in the spectrum between flagship art and community art. in doing so, the study authors uncover common grounds and differences between hegemonic policy discourses and everyday publics’ experiences and concerns regarding the potentials and problems of social engagement with both types of public artwork. zebracki and de bekker, moreover, critically engage with the notion of common sense (crehan a, b, in reference to gramsci ), which is part and parcel of the assumed social benefits of urban public art as commonly found in higher- order policy discourse. they argue that participation and dialogue play a pivotal role in making art public in the first place. zebracki and de bekker contrast an iconic, flagship artwork, the hieronymus bosch statue, with that of a community art project, the four seasons, in the dutch city of den bosch. their examination suggests that presumed social values, as well as the potential for public art to operate as an object for profound engagement, can be challenging to develop and identify in the first place. zebracki and de bekker's analysis of the community art project shows how it was possible to elicit community discussion about place attachments on the basis of the straightforward theme of the four seasons. a strong element of co-production was cultivated, as the artist incorporated participants’ drawings into the final design of panels that were placed on the sidewalls of houses in the neighborhood. flagship artworks, such as the hieronymus bosch statue, are often situated in lively, “branded” city-center localities. such works typically involve a widely marketed, mediated, and hence dispersed public space, as well as a multiplicity of passersby and therefore dispersed publics. as such, the publicness of urban sites of flagship art might be potentially more difficult to pin down in comparison to the residential makeup of a neighborhood space. zebracki and de bekker's study uncovers the ambiguous realities of how co-production—and hence the construction of a broader consciousness of public art—may evolve alongside the “mere aesthetics” (i.e., beautification) of the material dimensions of the public artwork, as well as the urban environment and the “deeper matters” of social inclusivity, or the perceived lack thereof. martha radice draws conceptual and empirical attention to how co-production revolves around public art that is deliberately designated as a temporary intervention. the author presents an ethnographical analysis of how public art is interactively created by everyday this document is an author’s copy of the article zebracki m and palmer j m ( ) introduction to special issue: urban public art: geographies of co-production, city & society, vol. , no. , – , first published online on march , https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ . /ciso. . this document cannot be cited in any publication and/or reproduced without the express written permission of the authors. cite the original article only. users in a “spatio-technological” sphere. in time transit (in the canadian city of regina, saskatchewan), bus riders produced text messages in a mixed-media installation while riding in an operational city bus. radice compares this case with the spontaneous (and often unanticipated) encounters of situated cinema, a mobile demountable micro-cinema in winnipeg, manitoba, canada. this cross-case analysis addresses the relevance of digital and mobile technologies in mediating public engagement with contemporary art in urban public space, which can be construed as an “internet of bodies and (art) matter” (see zebracki b; zebracki, forthcoming). radice argues that these technologies enable the interconnection of city spaces as well as the creation of new spaces for contemplation by empowering incidental participants as co-producers. this contribution, along with the other analyses featured in this issue, explains unequivocally how an ethnographic research approach is beneficial to unravelling public art's ordinary fields of actions, and everyday interactions, with art matter, people, and public space. as the study's bottom line, radice imparts that co-production puts the public in public art practice and, as such, enhances the public artwork's publicness by mediating communication and thereby connecting everyday uses and meanings of public spaces, layer by layer, with the broader urban public sphere. furthermore, co-production, as argued in this issue's intermezzo “thought piece” by joni m palmer, is a story of affect (thus, anything but a condition of indifference). people's levels of co-productive engagement ensue from ascertaining that the work of art resonates with them, along with any positive and/or negative emotional and intellectual appreciations and values as exchanged, and potentially relayed to others, over time. palmer especially recognizes public art's potential to trigger social changes to urban communities and environments, a belief that finds common ground across the empirical analyses presented in this issue. willie jamaal wright and cameron “khalfani” herman critically attend to the transformative social potentials of public art via their examination of manifestations instigated by the black artist collectives mf problem and the black guys, both of which are located in the predominantly black community of the third ward in houston, texas. the authors indicate how co-productions constituted various public art forms including murals, art houses, block parties, sunday socials, conceptual work, and films. wright and herman critically juxtapose financial exchange values, which drive urban gentrification (see smith ), with residents’ cultural use values, where public art operates as an antidote to the former. residents’ participation in the sometimes unsolicited and illegal public art performances co-produce this document is an author’s copy of the article zebracki m and palmer j m ( ) introduction to special issue: urban public art: geographies of co-production, city & society, vol. , no. , – , first published online on march , https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ . /ciso. . this document cannot be cited in any publication and/or reproduced without the express written permission of the authors. cite the original article only. spatial realities and imaginaries—or, drawing on lipsitz ( ), momentary black geographies—that steer a critical course through the contrasting ambiguities that are inherent in the discursive constructions and real-life realities of the ghettoization and gentrification of the neighborhood. wright and herman's contribution dovetails black geographies (see hooks ) to public art scholarship to address intersectionalities across the social identity markers of race and class in particular (see sieber, cordeiro, and ferro in this journal). although black geographies have still been given marginalized attention (see hudson and mckittrick ), scholarly interest has been emerging along with the black lives matter movement that started in . this movement has been fighting systemic racism and the often violent disenfranchisement of black people (e.g., derickson ), which invests the study by wright and herman with further topical social relevance. as well, the study by pauline guinard contributes to this niche at the nexus of public art, race, and class. guinard geographically expands these controversies beyond the dominant global north context of public art research. the author presents a study of made in musina, an ongoing participatory community art project that was originally part of the reasons to live in a small town program. the latter was introduced during the fifa world cup to support public art projects outside city centers in areas with limited cultural infrastructure. in addition to steering our attention to the global south, guinard's contribution attends to public border art (and its broader geopolitical context) as situated within a subaltern and migratory “mobile” space of the post-apartheid city—more precisely, in the musina township along the northern south african border with zimbabwe. guinard tells the story of two johannesburg-based artists who moved to this township without any predetermined plans about how to work with local artists and members of the public in addressing community needs. to date, co-production has involved arts festivals, theatre performances, and workshops. social networks, both off-line and online, have been established to enhance social welfare through the arts—for example, by promoting creative job opportunities. unorchestrated attempts have also been made to provide publics, working alongside the artists, with the agency to define the parameters of made in musina, and accordingly gain authorship of the project and ownership of the shared spaces of everyday life. the project especially aims to empower marginalized and underrepresented populations (including migrants, artists, and unemployed people), and to challenge power relationships that define today's still highly socially segregated south african urban society. this document is an author’s copy of the article zebracki m and palmer j m ( ) introduction to special issue: urban public art: geographies of co-production, city & society, vol. , no. , – , first published online on march , https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ . /ciso. . this document cannot be cited in any publication and/or reproduced without the express written permission of the authors. cite the original article only. co-production, as conceptualized throughout this issue, is founded on the role of publics as full participants, and artists as both producers and community builders, who therefore become, as guinard puts it, active members of the local community. these community art projects, as seen in the contributions by guinard and wright and herman, were not focused on producing material outcomes as such. following new genre public art (lacy ), it was the social process itself, as well as the tacit knowledges generated along the way, that comprised the public artwork as grounded in the dynamism of local community life. public art in this sense, as conveyed by guinard, constitutes a social medium rather than an aesthetic tool. the study by guinard critically engages with how co-production may offer renewed reflections on divided urban spaces (in this case, towns/townships) and on marrying segregated positionalities, including white/black and south african/foreigner, within the idiosyncrasies of musina's border context. this study provides deeper empirical insights into how public art practice may articulate and bridge the intersectional spaces and identities of race, nationality, class, and gender, which are deeply segregated in the border region concerned and in the super-diverse south african society more widely. guinard's analysis, similar to the other contributions, speaks of the power of public art to not only disentangle the social complexities of cities but also to imagine and instigate more socially inclusive urban living. the case study on musina does so by seeking and deepening inter-connections between central urban spaces, small border towns on the periphery, rural interstices, and urban professional work spheres. the contributions to this issue, each on its own terms, critique recurrent essentialisms as particularly integrated into the goals of social inclusion as embedded in contemporary urban policies and public art practices. the authors challenge homogenous understandings of social identity as well as normative dualisms of, amongst others, indoor/outdoor, public/private, center/periphery, here/there, urban/non-urban, now/then, and us/them. the analyses overall indicate that co-production implicates an amalgamation of formal and informal actors whose practiced, lived places should be comprehended through fluidity rather than duality. this is at variance with hierarchical and fairly reductive understandings of top-down vs. bottom-up practices, which are frequently used notions in public art policy blueprints (see zebracki, van der vaart, and van aalst ). on a methodological level, the contributors to this issue further elucidate the complex social and spatial fluidities of public art co-production. rather than gauging social impacts through this document is an author’s copy of the article zebracki m and palmer j m ( ) introduction to special issue: urban public art: geographies of co-production, city & society, vol. , no. , – , first published online on march , https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ . /ciso. . this document cannot be cited in any publication and/or reproduced without the express written permission of the authors. cite the original article only. “hard” statistical and cost-benefit evaluative models and the like, the focus of this issue is on ethnographic and participatory methodologies, where the public is part of both the public art and the public art research. although the studies do include some quantitative elements, such as numbers and descriptive figures in the empirical data analyses, the methodological remit is defined by, as phrased by zebracki and de bekker, the qualitative “meaning- making” of the findings. accordingly, the types of ethnographic research employed are based on socially grounded involvement, site-specific input and complexity (see kwon ), and, therefore, situated knowledges (see haraway ; rose ). hence, this collection attends to the social activities of diverse actors, the social relational (mal)functions of public art (see massey and rose ), and how public art endures and is contested along material and immaterial frameworks of lived urban spaces. co-production, as we have defined it, pushes dialogue into action and, hence, presents a diagonal understanding of the production of public art through social relations beyond formal actors, institutionalized spaces, and preconceived audiences (which are still too often rendered as uniform dummies). we hope that this special issue offers a useful analytical lens for scholars with a genuine interest in how urban public spaces are socially grounded, constructed, and reconstructed through artistic engagement. this collection of articles critically pursues a site of knowledge exchange about how cultural spaces of cities are lived through public art practices and imbued with associated vernacular meanings. in so doing, this issue contributes new scholarly work and encourages further scholarship on the co-production of urban public art and how it fluidly navigates through social diversity and different regimes of interest, structure, and agency (e.g., the individual, urban community, local governance). through the lens of public art, we hope this issue offers critical reflections on the past, our present understandings of everyday life, and our imaginings of inclusive urban futures. s notes acknowledgements. the call for this special issue was the result of various related special conference sessions convened by us, the guest editors, at the annual international conference of the royal geographical society (rgs) with the institute of british geographers (ibg) in london in , and the annual meeting of the association of american geographers (aag) in chicago in . most of the contributors to this issue presented their this document is an author’s copy of the article zebracki m and palmer j m ( ) introduction to special issue: urban public art: geographies of co-production, city & society, vol. , no. , – , first published online on march , https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ . /ciso. . this document cannot be cited in any publication and/or reproduced without the express written permission of the authors. cite the original article only. papers in earlier incarnations in these contexts. we are grateful to suzanne scheld, sheri gibbings, and joshua barker for handling the review process of this invited collection, to tom cho for copyediting the manuscripts, and, last but not least, to the authors who “co- produced” this special issue. on all sides, patience was a virtue. askins, kye, and rachel pain. . “contact zones: participation, materiality, and the messiness of interaction.” environment and planning d: society and space ( ): – . belfiore, eleonora. . “art as a means of alleviating social exclusion: does it really work? a critique of instrumental cultural policies and social impact studies in the uk.” international journal of cultural policy ( ): – . bishop, claire. . artificial hells: participatory art and the politics of spectatorship. new york: verso. cartiere, cameron, and martin zebracki, eds. . the everyday practice of public art: art, space, and social inclusion. london: routledge. crehan, kate. a. community art: an anthropological perspective. oxford: berg. crehan, kate. b. “gramsci's concept of common sense: a useful concept for anthropologists?” journal of modern italian studies ( ): – . davies, sue. . “the co-production of temporary museum exhibitions.” museum management and curatorship ( ): – . dear, michael, jim ketchum, sarah luria, and douglas richardson, eds. . geohumanities: art, history, text at the edge of place. london: routledge. derickson, kate. . “urban geography ii: urban geography in the age of ferguson.” progress in human geography ( ): – . gramsci, antonio. . selections from the prison notebooks. edited by quentin hoare and geoffrey smith. london: lawrence & wishart. grodach, carl, and renia ehrenfeucht. . urban revitalization: remaking cities in a changing world. london: routledge. haraway, donna. . simians, cyborgs, and women: the reinvention of women. new york: routledge. this document is an author’s copy of the article zebracki m and palmer j m ( ) introduction to special issue: urban public art: geographies of co-production, city & society, vol. , no. , – , first published online on march , https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ . /ciso. . this document cannot be cited in any publication and/or reproduced without the express written permission of the authors. cite the original article only. harvey, david. . social justice and the city. athens, ga: the university of georgia press. hein, hilde. . public art: thinking museums differently. new york: altamira. hooks, bell. . yearning: race, gender, and cultural politics. boston, ma: south end press. hudson, peter, and katherine mckittrick. . “the geographies of blackness and anti- blackness: an interview with katherine mckittrick.” the clr james journal ( / ): – . hutchinson, mark. . “four stages of public art.” third text ( ): – . ingram, mark. . “the artist and the city in ‘euro-mediterranean’ marseille: redefining state cultural policy in an era of transnational governance.” city & society ( ): – . kester, grant. . conversation pieces: community and communication in modern art. berkeley, ca: university of california press. knight, cher. . public art: theory, practice and populism. malden, ma: blackwell. kwon, miwon. . one place after another: site!specific art and locational identity. cambridge, ma: mit press. lacy, suzanne, ed. . mapping the terrain: new genre public art. seattle, wa: bay press. lee, doreen. . “‘anybody can do it’: aesthetic empowerment, urban citizenship, and the naturalization of indonesian graffiti and street art.” city & society ( ): – . lees, loretta, and clare melhuish. . “arts-led regeneration in the uk: the rhetoric and the evidence on urban social inclusion.” european urban and regional studies ( ): – . lefebvre, henri. . the production of space. translated by donald nicholson-smith. oxford: blackwell. lipsitz, george. . “the racialization of space and the spatialization of race: theorizing the hidden architecture of landscape.” landscape journal ( ): – . lossau, julia, and quentin stevens, eds. . the uses of art in public space. london: routledge. massey, doreen, and gillian rose. . personal views: public art research project. milton keynes, uk: artpoint trust and milton keynes council. this document is an author’s copy of the article zebracki m and palmer j m ( ) introduction to special issue: urban public art: geographies of co-production, city & society, vol. , no. , – , first published online on march , https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ . /ciso. . this document cannot be cited in any publication and/or reproduced without the express written permission of the authors. cite the original article only. miles, malcolm. . “critical spaces: public spaces, the culture industry, critical theory, and urbanism.” in re!imagining public space: the frankfurt school in the st century, edited by diana boros and james glass, – . new york: palgrave macmillan. pratt, andy c. . “a world turned upside down: the creative economy, cities and the new austerity.” in proceedings of smart, creative, sustainable, inclusive: territorial development strategies in the age of austerity, edited by auréliane beauclair and elizabeth mitchell, – . brighton, uk: regional studies association. rose, gillian. . “situating knowledges: positionality, reflexivities and other tactics.” progress in human geography ( ): – . sharp, joanne, venda pollock, and ronan paddison. . “just art for a just city: public art and social inclusion in urban regeneration.” urban studies ( / ): – . sieber, tim, graça Índias cordeiro, and lígia ferro. . “the neighborhood strikes back: community murals by youth in boston's communities of color.” city & society ( ): – . smith, neil. . “new globalism, new urbanism: gentrification as global urban strategy.” antipode ( ): – . sorensen, andré. . “neighborhood streets as meaningful spaces: claiming rights to shared spaces in tokyo.” city & society ( ): – . verschuere, bram, taco brandsen, and victor pestoff. . “co-production: the state of the art in research and the future agenda.” voluntas: international journal of voluntary and nonprofit organizations ( ): – . vickery, jonathan. . “art, public authorship and the possibility of re- democratization.” visual culture in britain ( ): – . warren, saskia. . “ ‘i want this place to thrive’: volunteering, co-production and creative labour.” area ( ): – . weyergraf-serra, clara, and martha buskirk, eds. . the destruction of tilted arc: documents. cambridge, ma: the mit press. zebracki, martin. . “does cultural policy matter in public-art production? the netherlands and flanders compared, –present.” environment and planning a ( ): – . this document is an author’s copy of the article zebracki m and palmer j m ( ) introduction to special issue: urban public art: geographies of co-production, city & society, vol. , no. , – , first published online on march , https://anthrosource.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ . /ciso. . this document cannot be cited in any publication and/or reproduced without the express written permission of the authors. cite the original article only. zebracki, martin. . “the search for publics: challenging comfort zones in the co- creation of public art.” cultural geographies ( ): – . zebracki, martin. a. “regenerating a coastal town through art: dismaland and the (l)imitations of antagonistic art practice in the city.” cities. advance online publication. zebracki, martin. b. “queerying public art in digitally networked space.” acme: an international journal for critical geographies ( ): – . zebracki, martin. forthcoming. “digital public art: installations and interventions.” in the routledge companion to urban media and communication, edited by zlatan krajina and deborah stevenson. london: routledge. zebracki, martin, and joni m palmer, eds. . public art encounters: art, space and identity. london: routledge. zebracki, martin, rob van der vaart, and irina van aalst. . “deconstructing public artopia: situating public-art claims within practice.” geoforum ( ): – . zimmerman, jeffrey. . “from brew town to cool town: neoliberalism and the creative city development strategy in milwaukee.” cities ( ): – . ! biron - birkbeck institutional research online asibong, andrew ( ) beyond a carnival of zombies: the economic problem of ‘aliveness’ in laurent cantet’s vers le sud. studies in french cinema , issn - . (in press) downloaded from: http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/ / usage guidelines: please refer to usage guidelines at https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/policies.html or alternatively contact lib-eprints@bbk.ac.uk. http://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/ / https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/policies.html mailto:lib-eprints@bbk.ac.uk beyond a carnival of zombies: the economic problem of ‘aliveness’ in laurent cantet’s vers le sud andrew asibong (a.asibong@bbk.ac.uk) school of arts, birkbeck, university of london, gordon square, london wc h pd abstract laurent cantet’s film vers le sud ( ), based on three short stories by the haitian- canadian author dany laferrière, explores the problems of ‘aliveness’ and ‘deadness’, both physical and psychical, questioning the systemic and emotional methods by which these states become racialised and concomitantly commodified. central to the film’s living potency is the acuity of its politicised analysis: from start to finish, vers le sud shines an unswerving spotlight on the simultaneous precariousness and over-exposure of certain kinds of black (in this case poor haitian adolescents’ and children’s) lives. the film’s politics, grounded in a lucid presentation of the material and ideological conditions of racialised inequality on which neo- colonial, neo-liberal (and, in this case, sexualised) tourism takes place, are combined with a specifically cinematic critique of the gaze of the wealthy, white female subject who buys the power not only to look at this life, but also, vampirically, to ingest its perceived qualities of vitality. politics and aesthetics come together in the film to deconstruct a set of (frequently masked and insidious) operations formed at the disavowed crossroads of capitalist, racist and child-abusing phantasies of corporeal and emotional appropriation. keywords: tourism; neo-liberalism; neo-colonialism; biopolitics; racialisation; ‘aliveness’ voilà que les zombies chantent un chant, mais c’est celui de la vie […] entre la mort apparente du dedans […] et la mort définitive du dehors […] les nappes de vie intérieure […] se précipitent (deleuze , ). laurent cantet’s film vers le sud/heading south ( ), based on three short stories in a collection by the haitian-canadian author dany laferrière ( ), explores, in cinematic terms, the problems of ‘aliveness’ and ‘deadness’, both physical and psychical, questioning the systemic and emotional methods by which these states become racialised and concomitantly commodified. central to cantet’s film’s living potency is the acuity of its politicised analysis. as martin o’shaughnessy ( ) puts it in his monograph on cantet, the film ‘challenges any preconceptions that we may seek to bring to bear, and makes us question our own privileged position as western/northern consumers in relation to what we see. importantly too it includes the director himself in the circle of critique’ ( ). from start to finish, vers le sud shines an unswerving spotlight on the simultaneous precariousness and over-exposure of certain kinds of black (in this case, haitian) life. the film’s politics, grounded in a lucid presentation of the material, ideological and affective conditions of racialised inequality on which neo-colonial, neo-liberal (and, in this case, sexualised) tourism takes place, are combined with a post-spectacular critique of the gaze of the white subject who buys the power not only to look at this life, but also, vampirically, to ingest its perceived qualities of vitality. politics and aesthetics come together in the film, then, to deconstruct a set of (frequently masked and insidious) operations formed at the disavowed crossroads of plutocratic and racist phantasies of corporeal and emotional appropriation. what i want to demonstrate in this article is the way in which cantet’s film version of vers le sud is able to put on cinematic display a series of essentially deathly economic, political, sexualised and racialised mechanisms of power and control, carefully unpicking and revealing their mutual inter-dependence, whilst at the same time dynamising the representation of those processes via the viewer’s exposure to aspects of unprecedented (within the universe of the film itself) ‘aliveness’. whereas the emotionally ‘cut-off’ protagonists have, for the majority of the film’s diegesis, appeared to subscribe to the hyper-capitalist notion that aliveness can be bought, whilst at the same time manically denying their own and others’ pain and vulnerability, the film itself manages to bring surprising representations of spontaneous grieving and unprecedented relating into the frame. these new states of mind subvert, in what i would argue is an emotionally radical manner, the narcissistic status quo which gets acted out throughout the film at the level of both state and individual. the viewer is invited to occupy a position beyond satire or social critique. whilst this new position is, of course, only ever provisional – it must jostle for survival, right to the end, with the protagonist brenda’s renewed commitment to ‘undead’ tourist-mania and the spectatorial fascination which that perhaps inevitably provokes – it nevertheless remains present, at least for this viewer, beyond the end credits, facilitating a continued engagement with the question of how metamorphosed modes of feeling, allied with further reflection and potential action, might be deployed to transform a context of death-driven, racialised capitalism into something altogether different. the reader may well ask herself at this point what i am trying to convey with my repeated use of the potentially mystifying term ‘aliveness’. am i interested in how the film under discussion represents the physical living and the dead, how the state of a human being’s biological heartbeat becomes bound up in ‘race’, economic inequality and power relations? or am i concerned rather with the film’s representation of emotional states of vitality and blankness, and the passage between two distinct psychical positions? i am, i think, using cantet’s film in an attempt to explore both these things: to argue that, in many of the situations depicted in vers le sud, a character’s bio-political relationship to the market-driven state cannot be thought about separately from the context of that same character’s capacity to experience her or himself as vital, living, relational and real. aliveness is a concern that is, for me, at once bio-political, psycho-existential and cultural. theorists as dissimilar as the british psychoanalyst d. w. winnicott and the italian philosopher giorgio agamben, both of whom i draw on in my attempt to derive new ontological insight from cantet’s vers le sud, resist the temptation ever to offer a total definition of what they might mean by ‘aliveness’. but in some of their most canonical writings about the concept (e.g. winnicott ; agamben ), they make it clear that it certainly stands in opposition to the zombifying horrors of compliant, conformist and coerced functioning. if, for winnicott, the arena par excellence for the thorough exploration of such phenomena is the dyadic relationship between baby and mother, for agamben it is in the tyrannical dynamic created between a dehumanised individual and the ‘sovereign’ state. this article attempts to filter both winnicott’s and agamben’s ideas about the ‘management’ of the more vulnerable partner’s capacity for living through three different levels of film and cultural analysis. moving from a consideration of the specifically political assaults of state-sponsored structures on both the white and the black characters in the film vers le sud and their subsequent power to remain under the umbrella of biological life, i turn to the characters’ emotional metamorphoses, via inter- and intra-psychical processes of enlivening and deadening, especially as they are mediated by the racialised and commodified gaze of the camera. over the course of my discussion, i attempt to create links between the different levels of aliveness and deadness which are brought into the viewer’s consciousness, asking which kinds of lives can be said truly to ‘matter’ within the hyper- racialised logic of the film’s plantation-like spaces, before tentatively pointing towards the film’s potential psycho-political transformation of the spectatorial consciousness itself. the plot of vers le sud is relatively straightforward, despite being a composite of three different stories by laferrière. it is summer in port-au-prince, at the end of the s. jean-claude duvalier, nicknamed ‘baby doc’, son of the late dictator ‘papa doc’ françois, is unelected president of haiti. brenda (karen young), a blandly pleasant, blonde, forty- something american divorcee from savannah, georgia, arrives alone to pick up where she left off three years ago with the poor but handsome teenage haitian beach boy, legba (ménothy césar). although she easily manages to renew the physical relationship in exchange for the money, food and gifts she is able to offer, she finds that she must compete for legba’s time and attention with ellen (charlotte rampling), an attractive, caustic, - year old british teacher of french literature, who lives in boston. the two women spiral into increasingly acute states of hostile anxiety, while legba himself becomes more and more exposed to the casual – but extreme – violence of the totalitarian duvalier regime. all three characters are casually observed by albert (lys ambroise), the stern haitian hotel manager, and sue (louise portal), a cheerful, middle-aged québecoise factory-worker, who is enjoying a summer fling with another haitian teenager, neptune (wilfried paul). legba is eventually slaughtered by the henchmen of a powerful colonel whose young mistress (anotte saint ford) he has made the mistake of getting involved with. brenda is briefly distraught, before pulling herself together and resolving to tour the rest of the caribbean indefinitely, while ellen, superficially the more brutal of the two women, returns to boston in a state of unexpected grief. cantet’s film, to an even greater extent than the three witty short stories by laferrière on which it is based, presents, from its outset, a series of disturbingly commodified and sexualised haitian bodies, both male and female. objects of potential sale because of their simultaneous poverty, vulnerability and beauty, these bodies, carriers of neglected and seemingly negligible life, are depicted in dangerous proximity to violence and death. watching cantet’s film and reading laferrière’s stories, a viewer familiar with twentieth-century haitian literature and culture cannot help but think of the terrifying writings of the great, exiled author marie vieux-chauvet. vieux-chauvet’s fiction is relentless in its mission to demonstrate the all-consuming perversion at the core of the two duvalier regimes. in her monumental triptych amour, colère et folie ( [ ]), vieux- chauvet had explored the various ways in which, under the dictatorial presidency of françois duvalier, the black (and especially ‘mulatress’) female body underwent a series of increasingly painful and sexualised experiences on its way, via state-sanctioned rape, to eradication. vieux-chauvet’s three loosely-linked texts must be read not as hallucinatory fantasies, nor as dystopian satires, but rather as alarmingly accurate, albeit highly literary, reflections of a dreadful historical truth. vieux-chauvet’s reader is presented with a landscape saturated in violence of every imaginable kind. flippant massacres of peasants occur in all three stories, alongside the ritualistic sexual mutilations and murders of various young women and the makeshift executions of troupes of hapless artists and poets. the situation of haiti under both duvaliers was one in which entire villages could be wiped out in a day, and where one might have to carry on selling one’s blood (as happens in vieux- chauvet’s posthumously published novel les rapaces [ ]) until one was literally sucked dry, a barely sentient cadaver. beyond her indisputable talent as a novelist, one way in which vieux-chauvet remains of crucial cultural importance is the way in which she unflinchingly sexualises – like the marquis de sade before her – the deranged logic of the abusive law. in vieux-chauvet’s world, there is no thirst for slaughter without a concomitant commitment to rape. laferrière’s stories of haitian life under duvalier fils extend vieux-chauvet’s feminist analysis of state-level sexualisation, making the observation that any vulnerable life – and this can include men and small boys – can become sexualised in a way that is both totalitarian and deathly. fascinated by the way in which baby doc’s regime managed to present a surface appearance of increased relaxation and liberalisation underneath which nestled a reality as bloodily violent as anything presided over by his father françois, laferrière’s fiction teases out the relationship between the commodified-sexualised body and the expendable-death-bound body, with an uncannily destabilising wit. reading from the opening text of la chair du maître, the collection of short stories from which cantet’s film is principally drawn, laferrière ( ) remarks, à propos of jean-claude duvalier’s s haiti that ‘le fils, lui, ouvrait les portes de la maison à la musique étrangère (le jazz, le rock), à la coiffure afro, au cinéma porno, aux films violents (les westerns italiens) et à la drogue’ , thus creating an atmosphere of neo-liberal ‘fun’ which could all the more effectively mask an ongoing reality of generalised corporeal expendability. he goes on: c’est simple: un petit groupe de gens possède dans ce pays tout l’argent disponible. et, comme on le sait, avec l’argent on peut tout acheter: les êtres et les choses. alors les filles (et les gars) se servaient de leur corps pour se payer des trucs (vêtements, repas dans les restaurants chics, soirées dans les boîtes de nuit de pétionville, drogues, bijoux, voyages). le sexe comme monnaie d’échange (laferrière ). for the wilfully blind outside world – for the north american and european tourists – beginning to peer excitedly now into this previously closed island, haiti emerges as a newly ‘open’ space, a pleasure-ground in which people are free to do what they want, where desire is ‘different’, where their desire can be ‘different’. but this is merely a pseudo- transgressive landscape: the same repression exists under ‘baby’ as it did under ‘papa’, only now it is channelled efficiently and effectively into an exchange scheme in which the poor haitian body, instead of being played with and/or killed only by other, stronger haitians, will be played with and paid for, before perhaps being handed back to be killed, by innocent- ignorant whites with dollars, propping up a system of slaughter akin to what the philosopher giorgio agamben ( ) designated ‘bare life’. bare life is the name agamben gives to the kind of human existence that is consigned, in the wake of the law’s suspension, to casual extermination, the kind of human existence that does not – and can never – deserve truly to live, or be helped truly to live. the homo sacer – ‘sacred man’ – is the bearer of an existence that has been stripped quite bare in this specific sense, an existence that is deemed irrecoverable for any social function whatsoever. in the first volume of the homo sacer project ( ), before he focuses, in the later remnants of auschwitz ( ), on the specific phenomenon of the european death-camps, agamben uses the concept in a peculiarly versatile manner. homo sacer is variously evoked as a kind of living statue, a being who, incompatible with the human world, has an intimate symbiosis with death but is not yet properly deceased, and, with reference to marie de france’s lai ‘bisclavret’, as a bestial creature in the throes of a peculiar metamorphosis, not properly distinct from the non-human animal. when he shifts his attention to concrete cases, agamben alludes not only to the nazi camps, but also to the outlaws of ancient rome who could be killed by anyone with absolute impunity (these were the original homines sacri), to present-day asylum seekers, to americans on death row. the field of applications is wide, then, perhaps problematically so; it provides us, however, with a provocative range of scenarios to be examined through the lens of one clear theoretical concept. when agamben puts this concept in the most general terms possible we understand simply that the homo sacer is ‘the human body […] separated from its normal political status and abandoned, in a state of exception, to the most extreme misfortunes’ (agamben , ). the opening scene of vers le sud visually whispers the obscenities of which chauvet’s fictions verbally shrieked, but this whisper is remarkable in its power to unnerve the unprepared viewer. the middle-aged port-au-prince hotel-keeper albert has gone to the airport to collect brenda, when he is approached by a woman who asks him to take her - year old daughter off her hands. she wants him to keep the child safe from unspecified harm: for there are those, she says, who would, all-powerful, seek to possess the girl and make her their own, even if it means killing the mother. the girl – we catch a brief glimpse of her, small, child-like, in a yellow dress – is apparently a kind of sexualised thing, a being with no agency whatsoever, to be given by one adult, her mother, to another, albert; in the background hover rapacious figures, whose intentions and potential actions we can only guess at. the viewer, like albert, is thrown into a kind of nightmare. what is this hell we have landed in? brenda’s arrival – blonde hair, hesitant smile, friendly demeanour: the quintessential innocent american abroad – would appear to ‘normalise’ the situation. and yet we will find out before long that brenda is in haiti to grab at her own sexualised child. legba, fifteen and starving when she first had sex with him three years previously, is eighteen now, but he is still starving, and she will still exploit that fact in order to enjoy his flesh. in vers le sud, then, the stench of cannibalisation, rendered in vieux-chauvet’s fiction or in agamben’s critical theory as an essentially sadeian process of biopolitical mass extermination, is deftly ‘made over’ – in precisely the fashion outlined by laferrière in his overview of the baby doc ‘turn’ – dyed, perfumed and ‘brenda-fied’ until it becomes something superficially sweet. albert’s airport interlocutor, the mother of the vulnerable young girl in the yellow dress, will leave him with a cryptic declaration – ‘il y a des bons masques et des mauvais; mais tous portent un masque’ – and it is to the work of systematic unmasking that cantet’s film will subsequently devote its entire energy. the viewer must actively participate in this work of unmasking in order, firstly, to gain the essential insight that ‘bare life’ and a sexualised death drive are cloaked, in this s neo-liberal tourist hotspot, by the appearance of pleasure and liberation, and secondly, that a more genuine experience of aliveness can only potentially arise on the other side of narcissistic disavowal. throughout the film, the beach operates as a striking metonymic image of neo-colonial capitalism’s capacity to disguise deathliness with the appearance of venal happiness. ellen, brenda and sue eat and drink on the beach; they chat there, swap confidences and life stories; and it is on this same beach that their young haitian escorts must beg their white mother-lovers for a share of food, or face starvation. legba frolics and sleeps on the beach; he flirts and has sex there; and it is on this same beach that his dead body, and that of his black female friend, will be dumped once they have been despatched by the colonel’s executioners. in cantet’s film, the beach is never a space of carefree play; it simply masquerades as that. we come to see it instead as the sunny market-place of economic and corporeal exchange, a space which quietly accommodates the over-exposure and eventual erasure of the black lives that work hard for their sustenance on it. whatever economic and sexual autonomy the three white women have managed – in a context of north american feminist partial-liberation – to appropriate for themselves, this is quickly revealed to be dependent for its functioning on a phantasmatic, plantation-like setting, in which poor, haitian bodies can be bought. o’shaughnessy makes the point well: ‘representatives of a post-feminist rather than a feminist mind-set, cantet’s women are unable to make common cause either with each other or with oppressed haitians. instead, they are used to show the illusions and exploitative nature of apparently empowered consumption’ ( , ). the neo-liberal gaze of these women is scarcely a liberating one. if, as jane gaines ( ) has argued, white women are only able to enjoy the subjectivity of their own gaze by projecting it onto non-white or colonised others, the dynamic of the interaction retains something fundamentally violating and abusive. nowhere is the simultaneously penetrating and deathly quality of the women’s interactions with the young men illustrated more neatly than in ellen’s delight in photographing the naked legba while he lies on his stomach, playing dead, his buttocks exposed to her lens, to cantet’s camera, and to the viewer’s gaze. the white woman pays to play voyeuse to the safely passive young, black haitian male; hers becomes the directing gaze of the scene, a gaze seeking to domesticate, to pin down, to master. throughout the film, this violent logic of sexual-visual domination is repeated, as the camera approaches legba, via either brenda or ellen’s gaze, from behind, whether he is lying face down on the beach, or on the bed; frequently a deathly effect is created – are we beholding a corpse, the viewer wonders? – until, of course, legba’s final beach scene, the one in which he has really, definitively, physically died. the extent to which ellen’s – and particularly brenda’s – ‘liberated’ desire assumes a violence that can be seemingly visited only on starving black bodies is underlined by the ease with which the young boy eddy (jackenson pierre olmo diaz), not more than nine or ten, metamorphoses into a sexual object for the women, another young body to be potentially bought. not only does brenda, under the influence of marijuana, seem close to initiating a sexual encounter with the child, but even sue, at many other moments the ethical compass of the film, sanctions the potentially child-abusing transgression with the delighted cry: ‘everything’s different here!’ her cry appears to convey something resembling joy; but beneath this simulacrum of joyful aliveness is a sanctioning of destructive, sexualised intrusion. the women’s treatment of both the adolescent legba and the child eddy cries out to be explored not only within the context of a racist and capitalist space of corporeal appropriation, but also through a psychoanalytically-inflected lens of psychical vampirism. both these boys become receptacles for the sexualised narcissism of the middle-aged tourists and, as a result, we might speak of the progressive ‘deadening’ of both children as taking place on simultaneously economic and emotional axes. winnicott, whilst never exploring in any detail the implications of specifically sexualised or racialised abuse of the child by what he calls the ‘facilitating environment’, nevertheless offers a very useful theoretical framework for understanding the process whereby the child’s sense of both ‘realness’ and ‘aliveness’ is eroded by the narcissistic adult’s implicit or explicit demand that she perform the false role which has been dictated to her within the abusive interaction: [t]he infant gets seduced into a compliance, and a compliant false self reacts to environmental demands and the infant seems to accept them. through this false self the infant builds up a false set of relationships, and by means of introjections even attains a show of being real, so that the child may grow to be just like mother, nurse, aunt, brother, or whoever at the time dominates the scene. ( , ) developing this idea, and building on clinical research carried out by andré green ( ), who himself was deeply influenced by winnicott when elaborating his own paradigm- shifting work on narcissistic psychical ‘deadness’, christopher bollas writes of the ghastly, deadening ‘interject’, an internal object that arrives in the internal world either due to a parental projective identification, interjected into the self, or to a trauma from the real that violates the self, or both […] an interject is an interruption of the self’s idiom by the forceful entry of the ‘outside’. differing types of hesitation, uncertainty, blankness, and stupor reflect the presence of an interject which as the work of the other (or real) bears no internal sign of unconscious meaning: it simply ‘sits’ inside the self, its ideational content bounded by seizures of thought or behaviour. ( , ) nothing loving or human can survive for very long within this space of systemic violation. as fanon so memorably puts it, describing his own experience of a racialised psychical interjection: ‘j’explosai. voici les menus morceaux par un autre moi réunis’ ( , ). the developing psyche forced to endure the various interruptions of the interject is rendered stupefied and blank, slowly bled of its dynamic aliveness. little eddy is psychically deadened by his boundary-breaking white mamas brenda and sue at the same time as he is physically over-exposed to the rupturing violence of the larger ‘facilitating environment’ that is the murderous haitian state. in a later scene, the boy will come close to being annihilated by a local government bully (a so-called tonton macoute, perhaps), whose random act of cruelty against a street-seller incenses the empathic little boy. legba comes to his rescue, just as he does at eddy’s moment of near-violation by brenda (see figure ); but the scene serves to establish a link between the various different butchers at work in the society. brenda may wear a different mask from that of the terrifying tonton, but they are connected by their equal readiness to treat eddy as an object, whose rights over his own body may be suspended with impunity. insert figure figure . brenda takes advantage of eddy (soda pictures). cantet’s film suggests, again and again, that the ‘innocent’ desiring-fantasies of the white protagonists of vers le sud need to be read and revealed in the context of the forms of physical exposure, trafficking and violence that they prop up economically. the film is an exercise in unmasking the pleasantly false and self-deceiving faces brought to haiti by baby doc’s dollar-worshipping zeal, keenly examining the human damage upon which these permanently frustrated tourists’ desire insouciantly feeds. the film can be read as one of a number of french films from the s in which the camera is turned on the agreeable façades behind which essentially vampiric forms of post-colonial white phantasy shelter. not unlike the white parisian couple played by daniel auteuil and juliette binoche, whose smugly bourgeois life, built on the corpses of dead algerians, finds itself intruded upon in michael haneke’s caché/hidden ( ); not unlike isabelle huppert’s earnestly romantic – but perfectly deranged – white coffee-plantation owner in claire denis’s white material ( ); not unlike the well-meaning white teacher struggling to bring the imperfect subjunctive to his th arrondissement pupils in cantet’s more-celebrated film adaptation entre les murs la classe ( ), it is the white subject’s desire, not only to gaze on his or her neo-colonised inferiors, but to receive a gaze of adoration and gratitude in return, that is so effectively exposed and shredded within this intriguing sub-genre. in all these films, the narcissistic – psychoanalysts like jean-luc donnet and andré green ( ) might call it ‘blankly psychotic’ – post-imperial gaze is destabilised, unseated from its position of uncontested sovereignty by a multiplication of fragmented alternative cinematic gazes, which scrutinise the mask worn by the white gazer with such spectral heat that the mask has no choice but eventually to melt. throughout vers le sud, brenda is shown to have a certain intellectual awareness of the racialised injustices which structure life and relationships within neo-colonial haiti. we witness her legitimate outrage at albert’s unsuccessful attempt to ban legba from joining the women for dinner at the hotel restaurant, as she cries out to her amused white women companions: ‘they can be so racist!’ she is aware, then, of the apartheid-like mechanisms around which her own white privilege is organised, aware too of the generalised contempt for black haitian life that flows all around, practised by haitian blacks on other haitian blacks. after a fruitless search for the briefly missing legba at the police station, she remarks to sue that the police have treated her as if she were a mad person, being, as she is, ‘a white woman who’s worried about a black guy’. brenda’s anti-racist indignation with regard to practices and utterances she rightly regards as morally unacceptable emerges in stark contrast with ellen’s often deliberately provocative expressions of racism and cultural snobbery. where ellen dismisses haiti as ‘un tas de fumier’, disdains port-au-prince’s souvenir markets, and sneeringly refers to the american blacks as ‘nègres de harlem’, brenda, appalled at ellen’s insulting discourse, enthuses positively about the caribbean island and its men’s soft skin. what cantet’s film manages to do so vibrantly is to rip to shreds the mask of anti-racism worn by brenda, the better to explore the way in which her discourse of liberalism is the very thing that allows her to objectify and oppress in a more truly death-driven way than anyone else in the film. brenda’s romantic pursuit of legba as putative love-object is gradually revealed to be a blood-chilling enactment of narcissism, its heartfelt ‘sincerity’ structured merely by a more elaborate phantasy of domination than that of the camera-wielding ellen, a phantasy according to which legba, ultimately, may be substituted for any other ‘othered’ man. the film’s final sequences serve to underline more starkly than ever the anti- relational dimension of the feelings brenda has attempted throughout to present as essentially loving. following albert’s discovery of legba’s dead body on the beach, brenda stares more and more deeply into her own reflection in the hotel bathroom mirror. while brenda is staring at herself, sue tries to communicate with her from the other room. the scene has a baldly horrific quality: if, up to that point, brenda’s emotional vampirism was only hinted at, here it becomes almost literalised, as if she were truly an un-dead entity, struggling to find herself in the glass. sue struggles to reach her ‘friend’, but is met only with coldness and contempt. the idea, floated by an ever-optimistic sue, that brenda might try to ‘make peace in [her] heart’, is flatly derided. ‘les touristes, ça ne meurt jamais.’ this is the sentence which, just moments before, the police inspector investigating legba’s death has just tossed at ellen. and here, as we watch brenda watching herself in the mirror (see figure ), a passage into uncanny deathlessness really does seem to have taken place. brenda has crossed over into a journey with no conception of ending: sexual tourism unlimited, across a boundless plantation-archipelago. just before the end credits roll, we hear brenda narrating her determination to travel on through the caribbean, to discover island after island, to fall in love anew with exotic name after exotic name, exotic space after exotic space, each one – true to the tantalising promise at the heart of capitalist phantasy – somehow more exciting than the last, yet bearing the stamp of essentially unthreatening novelty. insert figure figure . brenda lost in the mirror (soda pictures). vers le sud exposes narratives of white emancipation and progress within the haitian context, fragmenting these hypocritical notions at both a discursive level (e.g. ‘feminism’, ‘anti-racism’) and a psycho-geographical one (‘the beach’). but in its most radical development of the already satirical basis of laferrière’s stories, the film manages to ‘explode’ the desiring gaze of the neo-colonial tourist, exposing it not only as complicit with forms of extreme anti-poor, anti-black violence, but also as inherently, quasi-psychotically narcissistic, dependent upon the adoration of poor black others in order to feel alive or real. much earlier in the film, for example, the viewer is offered a glimpse of brenda’s ‘tourist- self’ potential for slipping, almost ontologically, it would seem, into a semi-fantastical plane. dancing with legba after the two of them have defied ellen at the dinner table, she appears to pass into a kind of trance, seemingly provoked by the musicians. as the camera pans around the dancefloor we see that everybody is staring at her – young, old, black, white, male, female – with looks ranging from amusement to confusion, embarrassment to fascination. brenda (still dancing, oblivious) exudes frenzied, uncontrolled energy in this scene, an energy which seems to emanate not from her but from some external source: it is as if she has become the ‘horse’ (to use the haitian vodou metaphor) of some kind of lwa (a haitian vodou deity). but her conversion is not straightforwardly transcendent, liberating or appropriating: this is no ‘like a prayer’ moment, and brenda is not the pop star madonna, dancing merrily among a gospel choir and burning crosses. the scene is actually a more remarkable one than that polemical music video. for in it we do nothing less than witness brenda lose control not only of her buyer’s power to gaze at others, but also of her (later explicitly stated) control over the way in which she is gazed at. the scene refuses to repeat either the misogynist paradigm of woman as knowable object ‘to-be-looked-at’ (cf. mulvey ) or the revisionist paradigm of (white) woman as bearer of a neo-colonial, objectifying gaze (cf. gaines ). instead, we are offered a scene that spins – somehow, inexplicably – out of control, a proliferation of multi-gendered, multi-racial, multi- generational gazes, criss-crossing around the strange, unexpected, dancing spectacle of brenda, but impossible to domesticate or to reduce to the binary logic of either ‘classic’ or ‘subversive’ sexualised or racialised identifications. brenda fails, in this strange scene, on the suddenly magical dancefloor, to be either the subject or the object of a coherent or identifiable gaze – and therein, i would argue, lies the scene’s exciting potential for a vulnerabilising spontaneity beyond the dictates of the predictable exchanges of the tourist marketplace. it is impossible to say whose desire drives the narrative of this particular scene, or in whose interest the fantasy unfolds. like jessica (christine gordon), the blonde female spectre at the centre of jacques tourneur’s caribbean film melodrama i walked with a zombie ( ), like the fantastically hybrid, sometime-sow narrator of marie darrieussecq’s controversial novel truismes (set partially within a dystopian antillean plantation paradise named aqualand), brenda has started, in this scene, to incarnate a non- identity which echoes giorgio agamben’s ( ) concept of a ‘form-of-life’: that which escapes the prescription of conventionally understood attributes of category or belonging. something resembling unplanned aliveness can be glimpsed in this scene. we might talk of the emergence – albeit both nascent and ephemeral – of some form of ‘true self’ functioning: being beyond categorisation. as winnicott puts it, with his characteristically elliptical plainness: ‘the true self comes from the aliveness of the body tissues and the working of body-functions, including the heart’s action and breathing’ ( , ). whilst brenda’s usual modus operandi is fundamentally narcissistic, she being both internally deadened and unconsciously intent on projecting that deadness into the minds and bodies of the sexualised black children around her, in this startling scene the viewer finds her miraculously enlivened by an energy which seems to come from outside her own zombified ego. jed sekoff, in a brilliant analysis of some of the implications of andré green’s ( ) theory of the ‘dead mother complex’, remarks that the complex is a kind of death march within the mind, or more specifically, a kind of war in the mind against the self, against the soma, and against the affective resonances of the psyche. all spontaneous uprisings of the emotions, of the body, of phantasy, represent a threat to the regime of the dead mother ( , ). if, both prior to and following this remarkable scene, brenda is characterised by a kind of predictable, internal, sexualised death-march named perversion – we can almost imagine her preconscious mind muttering robotically dictates to itself: must get back to haiti/must find legba on the beach must seduce him/will feel beautiful again/try not to say anything racist – here the narcissistic television script gets ripped up: there is a spontaneous uprising within her; and ‘she’ is not at its helm. the incoherence of brenda’s trance-dance, the strange, awkward energy it releases, and the multiplicity of gazes it facilitates, could all be said to reflect the most ‘alive’ aspects of the entire vers le sud project. the film offers no solutions – how could it? – to the problems either of pathological, sexualised, paedophilic narcissism or of cannibalistic, neo-colonial neo-liberalism. what it does manage to put on display is a series of energising breaches in a pseudo-carnivalesque system, a system which might otherwise appear unassailable in its postmodern simulacrum of pleasure. revealing the essential deathliness underpinning brenda’s dealings with legba (and with the caribbean in general), the film goes on to offer the viewer visions of that deathliness spinning out of control, losing its capacity to pin down colonised subjectivities, no longer able to be looked at in precisely the way it would like to be. even if we leave brenda, in the film’s final moments, to pursue a still more manic programme of self-affirmation through tourism, cantet facilitates the viewer’s exposure to the intrusion of things that are emotionally real, beyond the carnival of zombies: the disruptive images of the dead bodies of legba and his friend; the unexpected grief and humanity of rampling’s ellen; and the almost intolerably painful mourning of little eddy. it is this vision of little eddy, refusing comfort in the wake of legba’s death, refusing to look at anyone, tears streaming down his face, that stays most with me once the film is over. if the figure of eddy has been used by the film, up until this point, to hint menacingly at the haitian child’s proximity to violence and death (at the hands of the state), and to sexualised assault (at the hands of brenda and, potentially, the other women), here he functions as a vehicle of emotion more powerful than trade. his capacity to weep – to reveal, in the face of his dead protector’s meaningless suffering, depths of pain and despair which so many other characters are unable to access – rises above the soulless structures of the island on which he has been born (see figure ). the viewer is reminded – if s/he needed any reminding – that no matter what zombifying conditions appear to hold sway, in any given regime: black lives matter. more important than the film’s aesthetic deconstruction of real and symbolic violence (cf. bourdieu ), then, are these threateningly ‘alive’ aspects inherent to its own existence as a cultural object, characteristics which undercut the represented processes of post-imperial thanatos with something arguably resurrectional. the film succeeds – albeit in a sporadic and sometimes inconsistent manner – in creating psychical links in the mind of the viewer to potentially disavowed, lost or ‘dead’ objects, links which, at times, run counter to the narcissistic – at times frankly psychotic – functioning at work in the characters and social structures privileged by the narrative. whilst these characters and structures often find themselves unable to mourn – as they are not able to acknowledge having lost anything in the first place – the viewer is offered some capacity for grieving, feeling and thinking more generally. insert figure figure . eddy weeps (soda films). returning, by way of conclusion, to winnicott, whose concerns about the transmission of emotional health between mothers and babies in post-war britain might seem a long way indeed from either contemporary french cinema or the racialised death- beaches of baby doc’s s haiti, we might say that – despite all the physical and psychical deadness that surrounds him – eddy has, in that moment of helpless weeping, found a way of accessing an aspect of his ‘true self’, a simultaneously somatic and psychical energy capable of putting him in touch with his own subjective feelings, rather than with the narcissistically projected desires of a gang of faux-maternal north american tourists. in so visibly and movingly identifying with his own grief rather than with the sexual and economic demands of the white mamas or the thuggish state, eddy points the way, via his tears, to a radical break with organised, systemic deadness, whether relational or political. near the end of homo sacer, agamben writes that ‘it is on the basis of these uncertain and nameless terrains, these difficult zones of indistinction, that the ways and form of a new politics must be thought’ ( , ). and whilst eddy, in the emotional state in which he is empathically framed by cantet, most certainly does not resemble the dissociated, barely sentient beings whom agamben evokes on the threshold of the ‘new politics’ beyond bios and zoe, what he does resemble is a form of life that cannot be pinned down. it has traversed both falseness and dissociation to emerge on the other side, as something that feels more real than the zombie-structures of murder and manipulation which have produced, violated and nearly killed it. by allowing this image of one haitian child’s fleetingly non-commodified, non- sexualised psyche to supervene in the mortiferously venal landscape we have hitherto had to witness, cantet’s film places itself – and the spectator – ecstatically on the side not only of post-colonial aliveness, survival and resurrection, but also places us, whether we like it or not, and if only for a moment, in the potential position of being a new, non-narcissistic mother to eddy. look at this child; look at him weeping. we are, in a way, returned to precisely the same ethical exhortation we overheard at the film’s perplexing opening, when albert, the hotel manager, was begged by the terrified haitian mother to take in her young daughter in danger of rapture by various sexual vultures. albert declined to take up any kind of parental position. my sense, though, is that the viewer has an agency, a potential capacity for relationality, beyond that of the characters on screen. we may, like albert, prefer (literally) to mind our own business; or, we may, like brenda, prefer to remain adrift in a world of mirrors. like so much in this age of neo-liberalism – or so they tell us – ‘we’ are free to choose. contributor details andrew asibong is reader in film and cultural studies at birkbeck, university of london, co- founder and co-director of the research centre birkbeck research in aesthetics of kinship and community, and a psychodynamic psychotherapist. he is the author of françois ozon (manchester up, , reprinted ) and marie ndiaye: blankness and recognition (liverpool up, ), and is currently writing a book on the relationship between film- watching and the psychotherapeutic process, something to watch over me: aliveness, affliction and the moving image, scheduled for publication with karnac in . filmography caché, , michael haneke, france/austria. entre les murs, , laurent cantet, france. i walked with a zombie, , jacques tourneur, united states. vers le sud, , laurent cantet, france/canada. white material, , claire denis, france/cameroon. works cited agamben, giorgio. . homo sacer: bare life and sovereign power. translated by d. heller-roazen. stanford: stanford university press. agamben, giorgio. . remnants of auschwitz: the witness and the archive. translated by d. heller-roazen. new york: zone books. agamben, giorgio. . means without end: notes on politics. translated by c. casarino and v. binetti. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. bollas, christopher. . “dead mother, dead child.” in the dead mother: the work of andré green, edited by 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( ). “mourning and melancholia.” in the standard edition of the complete psychological works of sigmund freud, volume xiv ( – ): on the history of the psycho-analytic movement, papers on metapsychology and other works, – . london: hogarth press. gaines, jane. . “white privilege and looking relations: race and gender in feminist film theory.” cultural critique : – . green, andré. . « la mère morte. » in narcissisme de vie, narcissisme de mort, – . paris: Éditions de minuit. hooks, bell. . “madonna: plantation mistress or soul sister?” in black looks: race and representation, – . london: turnaround. hurbon, laennec. . comprendre haiti. paris: karthala. laferrière, dany. . la chair du maître. montreal: lanctôt. laferrière, dany. . ‘dany laferrière, la chair du maître, deux extraits du roman, lus par l’auteur’. accessed july . http://ile-en-ile.org/dany-laferriere-la-chair-du-maitre/ laferrière, dany. . vers le sud. paris: grasset. michelmann, judith. . “re-organising cultural values: vers le sud by laurent cantet. ” cinej cinema journal : – . mulvey, laura. . “visual pleasure and narrative cinema.” screen ( ): – . o’shaughnessy, martin. . laurent cantet. manchester: manchester university press. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /nov/ /all-lives-matter-racist-trump-weekend-campaign-rally-proved-it https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /nov/ /all-lives-matter-racist-trump-weekend-campaign-rally-proved-it https://www.theguardian.com/film/ /jan/ /oscars- -charlotte-rampling-diversity-row-racist-to-white-people https://www.theguardian.com/film/ /jan/ /oscars- -charlotte-rampling-diversity-row-racist-to-white-people http://ile-en-ile.org/dany-laferriere-la-chair-du-maitre/ de raedt, thérèse. ( ). “vers le sud: de la violence, du pouvoir, du sexe et de l’argent.” in violence in french and francophone literature and film, edited by james day, – . amsterdam: rodopi. sekoff, jed. . “the undead: necromancy and the inner world.” in the dead mother: the work of andré green, edited by gregorio kohon, – . hove: routledge. trouillot, michel-rolph. . haiti, state against nation: the origins and legacy of duvalierism. new york: monthly review press. vieux-chauvet, marie. [ ]. amour, colère et folie. paris: zulma. vieux-chauvet, marie. [ ]. les rapaces. port-au-prince: l’imprimeur. winnicott, d. w. [ ]. “ego distortion in terms of true and false self.” in the maturational processes and the facilitating environment: studies in the theory of emotional development, – . london: karnac. ‘hence zombies sing a song, but it is that of life […] between the apparent death from inside and the definitive death from outside […] the sheets of internal life extend with increasing speed’ (deleuze , ). o’shaughnessy’s unexamined question of who exactly ‘we’ spectators are assumed to be (in either gendered, economic or racialized terms) is, of course, enormous, and cannot be satisfactorily unpicked in the space of this article. for a helpful discussion of the complex relationship between laferrière’s original stories ( ) and cantet’s film ( ), as well as the added layer of intertextual complexity introduced by laferrière’s post-film novel, itself entitled vers le sud ( ), see brangé ( ). o’shaughnessy ( , – ) also provides a wonderfully comprehensive analysis of the implications of some of cantet’s choices when adapting laferrière. for a useful discussion of the way in which the white characters are shielded – and shield themselves – from this regime of violence, see de raedt ( ). laferrière writes the ‘postface’ for the edition of vieux-chauvet’s long-inaccessible classic novel. when i spoke to him in paris in of my doctoral research on vieux-chauvet, he told me that he considered her to be one of the most important haitian authors of all time, living or dead. for comprehensive sociological accounts of haiti under the duvaliers see trouillot ( ) and hurbon ( ). as trouillot ( ) explains in the fifth chapter of his book, duvalier’s rule normalised the state of emergency, instituting a new everyday reality in which nobody, no matter how high up the social ladder, was safe from being labelled as a dangerous, guilty enemy of the country. whilst victims were frequently perceived as belonging to a particular kind of group – women, peasants, ‘mulattos’ – they were just as often indefinable in strictly political terms: for example, boy scouts, relatives of former victims, even people sharing the same first name as an undesirable would find themselves targeted. ‘as for the son, he opened the doors of the house to foreign music (jazz, rock), afro hairstyles, porno cinemas, violent movies (spaghetti westerns) and drugs.’ ‘it’s simple: one small group of people owns all the available money in the land. and, as we know, money can buy anything: people and things. so girls (and boys) used their bodies to pay for stuff (clothes, meals in smart restaurants, evenings out in the night-clubs of pétionville, drugs, jewellery, trips). sex as currency.’ for a reading of vers le sud which remains, to some extent, sympathetic to the tourist characters in their quest for new experience, see michelmann ( ). the original italian for ‘bare life’ is ‘nuda vita’, and has been rendered by some english translators as ‘naked life’ (e.g. in agamben, ). homo sacer is ‘sacred’ not because he is holy or worthy of veneration, but in the more ambivalent sense of the latin term sacer: outside both social and worldly categorisations, untouchably ‘post-human’. ‘there are good masks and bad ones, but everyone wears a mask.’ my discussion expands on and converses with that of de raedt ( ), who is also interested in this question of the mask and its various functions in cantet’s film. winnicott seems influenced here by ferenczi’s ( ) pioneering work on children’s widespread emotional (and indeed sexual) exploitation by narcissistically perverse adults. ‘i burst apart. now the fragments have been put together again by another self’ (fanon , ). ‘a dungheap’. ‘harlem niggers’. ‘tourists never die.’ for a brilliant critique of the singer madonna’s pop video in racialised terms, see hooks ( ). this statement is, as i write, one which finds itself being contested – at an ideological, physical and psychical level – on an everyday basis, throughout the world, a world in which a star like charlotte rampling, commenting on the absence of black nominees for the academy awards (see child, ), is able to suggest that entrenched structures of institutionalised, anti-black racism simply do not exist. a film like vers le sud offers powerfully living forms, affects and representations (including, ironically, those incarnated in the film by rampling herself) in the service of thinking, feeling and acting against the violence of deadening, racialised privilege. freud’s essay ‘mourning and melancholia’ ( ) has been crucial in helping to develop a body of theoretical literature (often kleinian in orientation) devoted to the psychical and social problems caused by the refusal or inability to mourn. recalibrating oppositional politics review essay recalibrating oppositional politics charles t. lee arizona state university, tempe, az , usa. ordinary democracy: sovereignty and citizenship beyond the neoliberal impasse ali aslam new york: oxford university press, . ix+ pp., isbn: confrontational citizenship: reflections on hatred, rage, revolution, and revolt william w. sokoloff albany: state university of new york press, . ix+ pp., isbn: contemporary political theory ( ) , s –s . doi: . /s - - -z; published online june the surge of multiple social movements in the last decade has instigated critical theoretical rumination on how to upend the neoliberal order through new ways of practicing democracy, citizenship, and oppositional politics. ali aslam’s ordinary democracy and william sokoloff’s confrontational citizenship emerge as two latest texts in this genre that infuse new streams of thought into the conversation. while providing critical diagnoses of the neoliberal present, both authors also offer prescriptions for what needs recalibrating in leftist political thought and opposi- tional politics to more effectively combat neoliberalism. as i suggest, however, while aslam and sokoloff succeed in engendering renewed insights and perspectives to reanimate contentious politics, both recapitulate certain linear and binary modes of oppositional thinking. in ordinary democracy, aslam draws insights from several distinctive social movements (e.g., idle no more, occupy wall street, the egyptian revolution, occupy sandy, and strike debt) to impart lessons on how activists and citizens involved in them reinvigorate citizenship and democratize sovereignty amidst the neoliberal deadlock of devitalized agency. invoking john locke, aslam fore- grounds the political need to shore up popular sovereignty in order to restore its ‘tensional relationship’ with prerogative sovereignty (p. ). he characterizes the � macmillan publishers ltd., part of springer nature. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s www.palgrave.com/journals contemporary neoliberal moment as being pervaded by a widespread sense of impasse and unfreedom among citizens. specifically, the prevailing modes of market rationality and emergency politics result in the sacrifice of the will of the people (who are reduced to passive spectators and consumers) and the bolstering of undemocratic decision-making authority by the sovereign state in the name of protecting national interests and security. in this context, the recent rise of social movements, as ‘emerging counterpublics … that are defined by their opposition to prevailing norms’ (p. ), signals a desire for agency that reveals vital signs of democratic life and popular sovereignty. as aslam suggests, participants in these movements engage in varied ‘micro-practices of sovereignty’ (e.g., occupations, public assemblies, disruptive dances, religious prayers) in order to challenge hegemonic common sense and the habitual mode of liberal consumerist citizenship (p. ). importantly, these movement practices that are aimed to redirect citizens’ habitual attachments and democratize sovereignty do not merely stay at the level of resistance; rather, they involve concentrated efforts to transform juridical institutions ‘through laws, treaties, and constitutional reforms’ to make the state ‘more responsive to the claims made by citizens’ (p. ). indeed, at the heart of aslam’s argument is an admonition to critical scholars and activists that social movements cannot refuse but must engage state sovereignty and work to democratize it through ordinary democratic practices of reforming laws and political institutions in order to effectively counter neoliberal norms and actualize macro-level change. for him, this popular reclaiming of sovereignty critically departs from the contemporary trend of democratic theory ‘that has focused primarily on smaller-scale and episodic political phenomena’ and ‘separate[d] the practice of democracy from its historical association with sovereignty and the state’ (p. ). ceding the state, aslam cautions, would dangerously leave it ‘open to takeover’ by corporate elites, state officials, and neo- fascists (p. ). positioning his methodological approach as what james tully calls ‘public philosophy’, aslam goes beyond the disciplinary practice of close reading in political theory by ‘taking philosophy to the streets’ (p. ), actively analyzing how citizen activists within these social movements make sense of their life conditions and formulate their agendas and strategies vis-à-vis ‘unilateral assertions of state sovereignty’ (p. ). hence, in chapter , aslam traces the ways in which the indigenous grassroots movement in canada, idle no more, challenged the harper legislation that undermined aboriginal sovereignty protected in existing treaties by staging the round dance in shopping malls in order to express what cristina beltrán calls ‘festive anger’ (p. ). these micro-practices of sovereignty drew on indigenous cultural and spiritual resources to bring about an active and affective dimension of dissonant citizenship in a settler colonial state. as aslam observes, these direct actions do not merely signal a ‘refusal of state prerogatives’ (p. ), but are integrally tied to the indigenous activist group’s demand for sovereignty, ‘both s � macmillan publishers ltd., part of springer nature. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s review essay in terms of the renewal of treaty agreements and the restoration of self-governing provisions outlined in … the federal constitution’ (p. ). in other chapters, aslam draws on similar threads of thought though with nuances in each case. for instance, chapter engages with judith butler’s commentary on the tahrir square protests during the egyptian revolution as an enactment of ethical responsibility originating from the protestors’ ‘recognition of their mutually bodily vulnerability’ (p. ). as aslam suggests, butler’s attempt to ‘define democracy in opposition to practices of state sovereignty … [and] … in terms of ethical practices alone’ (p. ) overlooks the fact that egyptian activists ‘sought constitutional reforms to protect the gains of the revolution’ (p. ) and to preserve their ‘extra-juridical forms of [popular] sovereignty’ (p. ). again, for aslam, democracy can only be meaningful if it directly engages (rather than refuses) sovereign power. chapter juxtaposes occupy sandy (the mutual aid and disaster relief network formed in the aftermath of hurricane sandy) with lauren berlant’s reflection that mutual aid diy practices, given their reciprocity and mutuality, help reorient citizens’ attachments away from the impasse and cynicism in neoliberalism. as aslam cautions, however, the diy citizenship manifested in occupy sandy is ultimately inadequate because its focus on self-help initiatives feeds into an anti-statism that fails to unsettle prerogative sovereignty and reorient state governance in the interests of citizens rather than the interests of capital. lastly, chapter counters jodi dean’s assertion that contemporary capitalism and liberal democracy have become so entwined that ‘only post-democratic political formations [specifically, the return of communism] have any hope of overturning neoliberal hegemony’ (p. ). by chronicling how strike debt, a debt-resistance movement, ‘ameliorat[es] the indebtedness that defines ordinary life for many americans’ (p. ), while building a utopic horizon where citizens engage in ‘democratizing the quasi-sovereignty of capital’ (p. ), aslam argues instead that radical change can come from the ‘immanent conditions and experience’ internal to ordinary life in capitalist democracy (p. ). like aslam, sokoloff in confrontational citizenship also aims to make political theory ‘politically relevant for social and political transformation’ (p. xviii) in order to ‘overcome the current political impasse and state of intellectual paralysis’ (p. xix). arguing that leftist oppositional politics must go beyond mere critique to recenter ‘revolutionary strategy as a political-pedagogical undertaking’ of our time (p. , n. ), sokoloff asserts that ‘the most important forms of political change are the result of confrontation, not compromise’ (p. xiii). if aslam eyes the revitalized linkage between the micro-practices of citizen–subjects and the macro- practices of state sovereignty as the key to challenge the neoliberal order, sokoloff sees the ‘current explosion of political passion’ in our contemporary political landscape (p. xiii) – in particular, anger, hatred, and rage (and their accompanied constant political protests) directed towards the mainstream political establishment and status quo – as the essential and healthy conduit to engender substantive � macmillan publishers ltd., part of springer nature. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s s review essay political change. against the backdrop of consensus, commonality, and harmony that dominate the script of democratic theory, sokoloff advances ‘unconventional modes of popular agency’ (p. xvii) opened up by radical democratic theorists to foreground political contestations and counterhegemonic narratives at the center of citizenship. as he writes, ‘confrontational modes of citizenship (e.g., civil disobedience, protest, strikes, walkout, boycotts, occupation, etc.) can reconnect political institutions to the people, provide outlets for widespread frustration, lead to positive change, and renew/transform political institutions to ensure their authority and legitimacy’ (p. xii). similar to aslam, sokoloff does not simply gesture to a politics of refusal or permanent disruption without sovereign ends. while suggesting that ‘utopian theorizing is … needed to inject a critical dimension into democratic theory’, he indicates that this utopian dimension involves a critical dialectical balance between popular sovereignty and prerogative sovereignty, such that ‘institutions and counterinstitutions [would] sustain the tension between insurrection and constitu- tion’ (p. ). moreover, he urges the cultivation of a dialectical political emotion, i.e., confrontational citizens use rage that is triggered by oppression but control it through self-reflection in order to enact a strategic response at opportune moments, engendering a nuanced and thoughtful state of permanent revolt that ‘keeps reform and revolution on the table as viable political options without getting struck on either side of the opposition’ (p. ). while sokoloff organizes the book in a more conventional way that aligns with the disciplinary practice of close reading of particular theorists, he indicates that his methodology can be considered unconventional, both in terms of his nonstandard interpretations of canonical political theorists and the wider range of voices outside the usual confines of political theory that he brings to the table (pp. xxii–xxiii). for instance, chapter rereads niccolò machiavelli as a theorist of hatred, suggesting that his thought productively exemplifies how hatred directed at the ruling class through extra-institutional means can be enlisted for positive political change by inspiring ‘a permanent force of insurrection and … a mass popular movement’ (p. ) to put pressure on the governing regime and ensure ‘elite accountability to the people’ (p. ). chapter reinterprets immanuel kant as a revolutionary anarchist, whose concept of genius, defined as ‘a good revolutionary force … [that] promotes freedom and independent thought’ without the constraint of rules (p. ), locates radical transformative potential within the human rational faculties of unlimited cognitive growth, flexibility, and creativity – essential to liberate the humankind from old rules and to regenerate society. extending machiavelli’s and kant’s insights, chapter reconfigures hannah arendt’s notion of political resistance as a double concept wherein a regime’s political authority is precisely ‘constituted via active resistance to it’ (p. ). sokoloff finds in arendt’s theorization of political resistance a dialectical movement that ‘overcomes either/or political dichotomies, including order/ s � macmillan publishers ltd., part of springer nature. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s review essay anarchy, law/violence, obedience/revolt’ (p. ). for him, this move carves out an expansive terrain of politics that neither blindly trusts the state (à la john rawls) nor rejects it altogether (à la michel foucault), allowing for ‘the permanent critique of the state and … the [redemptive] possibility for positive political change and the renewal of political life’ (p. ). such a dialectical reading is similarly exerted in sokoloff’s consideration of two black political thinkers, frederick douglass (chapter ) and w.e.b. du bois (chapter ). he elucidates an inspiring account of dialectical rage in the writings of douglass, who, as a former slave, used it militantly to nurture a resistant political life, yet calibrated it with thoughtful consideration and restraint ‘as an engaged (non)citizen living in dark times’ (p. ). he further captures the essence of du bois’s political thought as embodied in the pan-africanist’s advocacy for thoughtful revolt as a way of life, specifically, ‘a tactical political stance involving a permanent and protracted dissent against the concentration of wealth, the legacies of imperialism/colonialism, and the rejection of political oppression and racism’ (p. ). such thoughtful revolt involves a discerning incorporation of both reform and revolution in one’s politics, whereby one moves ‘beyond a liberal frame, but without becoming unreflective, dogmatic, and dismissive in the process’ (p. ). finally, sokoloff adds the queer chicana feminist writer gloria anzaldúa (chapter ) and the brazilian philosopher of education paulo freire (chapter ) as two grossly understudied political theorists in order to supplement and expand his conception of confrontational citizenship. he finds in anzaldúa’s work on borderlands and mestiza consciousness a historically informed, nondualistic, and fluid conception of identity politics that blurs and transgresses boundaries across differences in order to expansively and creatively rebuild collective solidarity and coalitional politics (most recently manifested in black lives matter and the standing rock protests). he also locates a vital utopian hopefulness in freire’s critical pedagogy that reclaims educational institutions as ‘a space for revolutionary struggle and revolt’ (p. ) where teachers and students cultivate an ongoing ‘awakening of critical awareness’ (p. ) through mutual learning and dialogical praxis. for sokoloff, freire’s transformative vision provides a hopeful antidote to the recent critical political theorizing such as in the hands of wendy brown, whose ‘apocalyptic leftist version of the ‘‘end of history’’’ undermines any possibility of meaningful resistance to neoliberalism (p. ). overall, both aslam and sokoloff enrich leftist thinking by injecting renewed passion, hopefulness, and pragmatics into oppositional politics. they provide a critical reminder on the need to engage the state when much of recent critical scholarship has sought to shield oppositional politics from any ‘contaminated’ engagement with the sovereign power. both also offer fruitful insights by centering a dialectical mode of oppositional politics that moves beyond the dualistic dilemma between gradual reform and radical change. nevertheless, both authors inherit and recapitulate certain linear and binary modes of oppositional thinking that undercut � macmillan publishers ltd., part of springer nature. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s s review essay the nuance and complexity of their theoretical analyses. as such, some existing issues of oppositional politics remain in their political paradigms – especially in their approaches to agency, the state, the market, and political emotions – that need to be further expanded to maximize the prospects of transformative change. first, both aslam and sokoloff deploy a series of binary constructs in their theoretical discourses – e.g., active versus passive, participatory versus depoliti- cized, rupture versus routine, revolt versus acquiescence, and utopian versus status quo – in which the former (counterhegemonic) modes are always favored and evoked as an oppositional critique of the latter (hegemonic) elements. as such, political agency in their hands is conceived in a directly oppositional way, manifested in citizens’ collective undertaking of direct action, protests, strikes, and occupation. but such binary-oppositional understanding of agency negates the possibility that many subjects may cross over both elements in their agential enactment. specifically, there are moments/contexts when we may be active and participatory, just as there are other moments/contexts when we may choose to lay low and be quiet for the time being (which may not always be interpreted as being apolitical but rather exercising agency in mobile and complex ways). there is a nuanced variability in the ways we enact our political agency within the existing social institutions and power structures. in fact, as the black historian robin d.g. kelley ( ) and political anthropologist james scott ( ) have explored, sometimes what appears to be acquiescence to the hegemonic condition may actually belie a hidden swirl of resistance that interrupts normativity in unseen and unpredictable ways. such a nonlinear and polyvalent account of political enactment and resistance remain missing in both authors’ renewed renditions of oppositional politics and deserve considerate incorporation for a more complex understanding of popular sovereignty and revolt. second, both authors rightly emphasize the need for the left to engage (rather than renounce) the sovereign state. however, like much of existing critical thought, there are no specifics in their oppositional frameworks on exactly how to strategically engage the state to render meaningful and effective policies and changes. it is unlikely that operating in a strictly oppositional way will directly get one’s way, especially when it comes to making political claims on the state. more likely than not, political demands advanced by social movements will be compromised and circumscribed in the process of negotiation with the sovereign power. in fact, there is a critical under-examination of refugees and undocumented migrants in both authors’ accounts as these nonstatus subjects stand in an even more challenging position to enact revitalized and confrontational citizenship vis-à-vis a sovereign state of which they are not formally considered a part. while some refugees and unauthorized migrants do engage in radical democratic politics to take rights and liberties in spite of their nonstatus, their efforts do not come unscathed by what peter nyers calls ‘sovereign re-takings’ – that is, the sovereign power also possesses ‘a diversity of tactics’ at … [its] disposal’ to subversively s � macmillan publishers ltd., part of springer nature. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s review essay deflect, absorb, and retake foreigners’ political claims on its own terms (nyers, , p. ). while echoing aslam’s and sokoloff’s call to make the state accountable and produce relevant reforms, my point here is to suggest a more sobering and mobile framework that centers negotiation (rather than strict opposition) in dealing with the state so that social movements can expend valuable time and energy not only on building oppositional visions and contentions but also on the nitty–gritty details/logistics of how to operate, strategize, and maneuver to obtain more concessions and rights from the sovereign power. third, both authors also inherit and recapitulate similar oppositional sentiment and disposition towards the market in existing leftist political thought. to his credit, aslam displays a more dialectical thinking on this when cautioning readers not to ‘minimize the strength of the affective bonds citizens have to both the market and the forms of devitalizing state sovereignty’, suggesting that change can come ‘from within rather than from outside … the existing political and economic order’ (pp. - ). but he stops short of applying this dialectical insight directly to the market in analyzing the ways in which practices of consumption may be reoriented towards progressive ends/possibilities. as commodification in neoliberal times has saturated every sphere of social life including activism (banet-weiser and mukherjee, ), a conventional denunciation of (rather than a revitalized engagement with) market consumerism may well end up constricting rather than expanding the possible channels and sites of social change. lastly, this is particularly regarding sokoloff’s approach to political emotions, as he suggests that ‘intense emotions (e.g. anger, hatred, and rage) are good as sources of political empowerment, motivation, and engagement’ (p. ). what accompanies these intense political emotions is an ‘identification of the political and economic enemy … to clarify the terms of political struggle (e.g., us versus them)’ (p. ; emphasis in the original). yet, vision-wise, one may ask whether such a binary-oppositional mode of affective politics does not recreate boundaries and divisions among human subjects that a leftist emancipatory politics may actually wish to deconstruct and transform. in fact, some critical scholars and activists are also motivated and called to action by their feelings of empathy, compassion, and love for human (and nonhuman) beings. such actually is the case of anzaldúa: it is thus both interesting and contradictory that sokoloff includes her as an exemplar for his argument, for while anzaldúa’s writing chronicles a painful process of permanent struggles battling racism, classism, sexism, and homophobia, she has not reduced her political affect to mere hatred and rage, and so directed it at an opposite enemy. rather, as analouise keating ( ) suggests, anzaldúa’s political thinking embodies a radically inclusive vision of planetary citizenship where one constantly crosses boundaries and embraces differences in forging complex commonalities. empathy and openness, rather than hatred and rage, take center stage as ‘pathways to investigate possible points of connection’ ( , p. ). what anzaldúa’s poetic � macmillan publishers ltd., part of springer nature. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s s review essay imaginary inspires is a metaphysics of radical interconnectedness that views political struggles and conflicts not from oppositional standpoints but relational perspectives in order to ‘move [us] toward healing … [and] facilitate the development of post-oppositional resistance and nonbinary forms of oppositional consciousness’ ( , p. ). anzaldúa’s transformative affective politics thus generates critical reflection on whether oppositional politics, by conceiving social relations in primarily ‘antagonistic, conflict-driven terms,’ has not reached its limits in radically transforming society as it locks us ‘in an embattled, us-against-them status quo’ that ‘often subtly reinforce[s] the very systems against which we struggle’ ( , p. ). a more deeply transformative post-oppositional vision and politics constitute a new vantage point that we may wish to adopt in our continuing recrafting of radical thinking and politics. references banet-weiser, s. and mukherjee, r. (eds.). ( ). commodity activism: cultural resistance in neoliberal times. new york: new york university press. keating, a. ( ). transformation now!: toward a post-oppositional politics of change. chicago: university of illinois press. kelley, r. d. g. ( ). race rebels: culture, politics, and the black working class. new york: free press. nyers, p. ( ). abject cosmopolitanism: the politics of protection in the anti-deportation movement. third world quarterly ( ): – . scott, j. c. ( ). domination and the arts of resistance: hidden transcripts. new haven: yale university press. s � macmillan publishers ltd., part of springer nature. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s review essay 	recalibrating oppositional politics 	references afterword: reflections on humanities engagements with the cultural politics of climate change: histories, representations, practices humanities editorial afterword: reflections on humanities engagements with the cultural politics of climate change: histories, representations, practices julie doyle centre for spatial, environmental and cultural politics, university of brighton, brighton bn gj, uk; j.doyle@brighton.ac.uk received: august ; accepted: september ; published: september ���������� ������� understandings of, and responses to, climate change are culturally and historically specific, informed and shaped by a complex set of intersecting social, historical, economic and political systems and representational practices. the black lives matter movement and the covid- global pandemic have brought the historical legacies of structural and systemic racism, and their lived experiences for black, indigenous and people of colour (bipoc) communities, to the fore. at the same time, feminist and bipoc scholars and activists call for an intersectional approach to climate and social justice that recognises the ongoing extractivist legacies of capitalism and colonialism, and of racism and white privilege, in the systemic creation and impacts of climate change (malik ; heglar ). taken alongside the fridays for future global youth climate strikes (figure ) that have focused attention on the generational and temporal impacts of climate change—that is, upon young people’s hopes and aspirations for their (imagined) futures—a critical cultural moment in the politics of climate change is occurring. this moment requires us to work together across disciplines and practices, and ensure a diversity of perspectives, stories and voices are heard. humanities , , x; doi: for peer review www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities editorial afterword: reflections on humanities engagements with the cultural politics of climate change: histories, representations, practices julie doyle centre for spatial, environmental and cultural politics, university of brighton, brighton bn gj, uk; j.doyle@brighton.ac.uk received: august ; accepted: september ; published: september understandings of, and responses to, climate change are culturally and historically specific, informed and shaped by a complex set of intersecting social, historical, economic and political systems and representational practices. the black lives matter movement and the covid- global pandemic have brought the historical legacies of structural and systemic racism, and their lived experiences for black, indigenous and people of colour (bipoc) communities, to the fore. at the same time, feminist and bipoc scholars and activists call for an intersectional approach to climate and social justice that recognises the ongoing extractivist legacies of capitalism and colonialism, and of racism and white privilege, in the systemic creation and impacts of climate change (malik ; heglar ). taken alongside the fridays for future global youth climate strikes (figure ) that have focused attention on the generational and temporal impacts of climate change—that is, upon young people’s hopes and aspirations for their (imagined) futures—a critical cultural moment in the politics of climate change is occurring. this moment requires us to work together across disciplines and practices, and ensure a diversity of perspectives, stories and voices are heard. figure . #climatestrike protestors in cape town, september . photo: masixole feni/ groundup. figure . #climatestrike protestors in cape town, september . photo: masixole feni/groundup. humanities approaches to climate change help lend important insights into the ways in which climate change understanding is shaped by intersecting cultural, social and historical forms and humanities , , ; doi: . /h www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities http://www.mdpi.com http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /h http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities humanities , , of processes which both enable and constrain particular forms of climate action. as the interdisciplinary papers in this special issue demonstrate, exploring the role of cultural values, power relations, and representational and socio-material practices in the formation and (re)interpretation of climate change knowledge and action are key contributions of the humanities. such perspectives can help to situate climate change within everyday cultural forms and practices as they relate to broader socio-political and economic systems. as such, humanities scholarship is well placed to respond to the calls from climate justice and youth activists to acknowledge and respond to climate change as an intersectional issue of historical, political and cultural importance. yet, climate change has not always been a focus of humanities scholarship. when i wrote mediating climate change (doyle ) ten years ago, there was significantly less humanities and social science scholarship examining climate change as a cultural and communicative issue. written at a specific scholarly moment, and as a white feminist writing from a north-western perspective, mediating climate change also reflected its socio-political time through the cultural and media examples it examined: the communication strategies of an emerging uk climate movement that coalesced around the copenhagen conference but which failed to influence its political outcomes; uk news media coverage of the copenhagen conference that grappled with questions of scientific (un)certainty and the urgency of (in)action; emerging ngo campaigns that began to frame meat and dairy consumption as a climate issue; and a growing climate arts movement that offered the potential for more imaginative, embodied and emotional engagements. these visual and textual examples were preceded and informed by an historical analysis and critique of dominant scientific knowledge systems and the representational practices of science, environmentalism and media. these systems and practices, i argued, had come to shape climate communication, understanding and action in problematic ways that separated humans and culture from nature, and rendered climate change as a distant and future threat. in doing so, my intention was to show how historical knowledge systems and representational practices inform contemporary climate understanding and action, with the hope that new forms of climate communication could offer more nuanced understandings of human-environmental relations that link climate change to the cultural politics of the everyday. over the last ten years, humanities approaches to the study of climate change have expanded exponentially, helped by the work of journals such as environmental communication (since ) and environmental humanities (since ). scholarship on the cultural and communicative aspects of climate change has contributed to and reflects a significant cultural turn in our understanding of climate (moser ). the work in this special issue testifies to the diverse and rich range of critical and creative approaches to the study of climate change that humanities disciplines provide. encompassing cultural history, literature, anthropology, geography, philosophy, music and art, the papers in this issue draw upon these disciplines to offer interdisciplinary perspectives that contend with key concerns and tensions in understanding climate change as a socio-cultural issue. these perspectives address a number of interwoven and overlapping themes: climate histories, climate representations, climate practices. addressing climate histories, nigel clark demonstrates how a reinterpretation of the socio-material practices of the holocene can provide critical reflections on contemporary climatic displacements and emplacements. gillen d’arcy wood explores how current climate catastrophe narratives have historical precedence in th-century philosophy. climate representations are examined in anne pasek’s exploration of different scalar visualisations of climate change and the tensions this produces for facilitating climate engagement and action at the global and everyday level. ben de bruyn focuses upon the fictional representations of climate futures that utilise migrant narratives of the present to ground climate change in the everyday and offer more nuanced understandings of climate justice. anna boswell demonstrates how a focus upon non-human perspectives can reveal colonial narratives the only other monographs on climate communication and culture published at this time were hulme ( ) and boykoff ( ). humanities , , of of biodiversity that ignore climate lifeworlds of care and reciprocity. climate practices are examined in jeroen oomen’s analysis of the speculative claims of climate geoengineering and their problematic structuring through the conceptual frameworks of western science. rosamund portus and claire mcginn explore how creative practices of sonic media and participatory arts can offer more embodied climate engagements. whilst i have situated the papers within these three themes, all of the papers engage with the inter-relations between histories, representations and practices, demonstrating their importance to socio-cultural understandings of climate change. i began this afterword by situating our understandings of climate change as culturally and historically specific, and drew upon contemporary climate justice politics that highlights the urgency of intersectional understanding and practice. i finish this afterword by taking the opportunity to bring these perspectives together with the work of humanities climate scholarship to foreground the need for scholars, practitioners, educators and activists to work collaboratively together to contribute more ethically and carefully to the critical intersections of the present and future. for example, whilst humanities research can reveal the colonial and capitalist legacies of climate change (see pasek, this issue), more work needs to be undertaken on exploring how these systemic and representational legacies continue to impact the imaginaries and social practices of everyday climate cultures in raced, gendered and classed ways. in terms of educational contributions, humanities scholars are well placed to collaborate with and contribute to young people’s calls for the teaching and learning of climate justice. for example, young people in the uk are campaigning for educational reform through establishment of an english climate emergency education act that would state ‘an expectation on education providers at all levels to deliver teaching and learning on the climate emergency, climate justice (the social injustice issues pertaining from global heating) and ecological crisis’ (teach the future ). part of this process is addressing climate change as a multidisciplinary issue, beyond the parameters of science and geography. humanities scholars could provide important collaborative opportunities to work with schools on the reformation of education towards a multidimensional engagement with climate change and climate justice. creative humanities approaches that utilise participatory methods can, for example, help to engage young people in ways that foreground multidimensional climate learning and agency (doyle ). more work in this emergent area of creative engagements with climate change should be undertaken (boykoff ; see portus and mcginn, this issue), with a focus upon foregrounding marginalised voices and perspectives. finally, a significant challenge for the humanities is how to contribute to the re-imagining and creation of more socially equitable futures that require us to live in/with a climatically changing world (brown and imarisha ; haraway ). this requires the capacity to understand current societal conditions and to re-think and imagine futures beyond the inequities of the present. a significant strength of humanities scholarship that could help contribute to new social visions has been the focus upon non-human, or more-than-human, species as a means of questioning binary distinctions between nature and culture (tsing ) as products of the racist and gendered politics of colonial extractivism and capitalism. given the relative lack of media and cultural narratives about equitable climate futures and zero-carbon societies, i suggest foregrounding the importance of these speculations taking place within and through media and popular culture, and actively prioritising marginalised voices and perspectives in this re-imagining (doyle ). going forward, humanities research on climate change and climate justice needs to urgently navigate the tensions between researching socio-cultural histories and practices to understand the intersecting power relations and representational practices of present societal conditions, and providing imaginative spaces to explore visions for ethical climate futures. attending to these needs requires working across disciplines and practices in collaborative and participatory ways, and ensuring research practices have an effect beyond the academy. funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. humanities , , of references boykoff, maxwell t. . who speaks for the climate? making sense of media reporting on climate change. cambridge: cambridge university press. boykoff, maxwell t. . creative (climate) communications: productive pathways for science, policy and society. cambridge: cambridge university press. brown, adrienne maree, and walidah imarisha, eds. . octavia’s brood: science fiction stories from social justice movements. oakland: ak press. doyle, julie. . mediating climate change. abingdon: ashgate. doyle, julie. . how the media can help young people create zero carbon societies. the conversation, september . available online: https://theconversation.com/how-the-media-can-help-young-people-create- zero-carbon-societies- (accessed on june ). doyle, julie. . creative communication approaches to youth climate engagement: using speculative fiction and participatory play to facilitate young people’s multidimensional engagement with climate change. international journal of communication : – . haraway, donna. . staying with the trouble: making kin in the chthulucene. durham: duke university press. heglar, mary annaïse. . we don’t have to halt climate action to fight racism. huffpost us, december . available online: https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/climate-crisis-racism-environmenal-justice_n_ ee b c b b cbc c d?ri n=true (accessed on june ). hulme, mike. . why we disagree about climate change. cambridge: cambridge university press. malik, laila. . we need an anti-colonial, intersectional feminist climate justice movement. awid, october . available online: https://www.awid.org/news-and-analysis/we-need-anti-colonial-intersectional-feminist- climate-justice-movement (accessed on june ). moser, susanne. . reflections on climate change communication research and practice in the second decade of the st century: what more is there to say? wires climate change : – . [crossref] teach the future. . available online: https://www.teachthefuture.uk (accessed on june ). tsing, anna lowenhaupt. . the mushroom at the end of the world: on the possibility of life in capitalist ruins. princeton: princeton university press. © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). https://theconversation.com/how-the-media-can-help-young-people-create-zero-carbon-societies- https://theconversation.com/how-the-media-can-help-young-people-create-zero-carbon-societies- https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/climate-crisis-racism-environmenal-justice_n_ ee b c b b cbc c d?ri n=true https://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/entry/climate-crisis-racism-environmenal-justice_n_ ee b c b b cbc c d?ri n=true https://www.awid.org/news-and-analysis/we-need-anti-colonial-intersectional-feminist-climate-justice-movement https://www.awid.org/news-and-analysis/we-need-anti-colonial-intersectional-feminist-climate-justice-movement http://dx.doi.org/ . /wcc. https://www.teachthefuture.uk http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	references monstrum . (september ) | issn - love/hate: supernatural then and now lorna jowett “i have my version, and you have yours.” — dean, “fan fiction” ( . ) i love supernatural. i hate supernatural. the things i love about supernatural are very close to the things i hate about it. when i started watching it, when it was first broadcast, it appealed because it was a mixture of genres i enjoyed (and still enjoy): horror, action, melodrama. i never imagined i would be watching it for years, and + episodes. marking the th episode, a retrospective in variety noted that “the show weathered the conversion from the wb to the cw, survived the - writers' strike, and transitioned through several showrunners—and there's no end in sight” (prudom ). “since that first apocalypse, the series has garnered a loyal fandom and, after thirteen seasons and four showrunners, shows no signs of wear,” florent favard comments, going on to explain its position in the us television landscape. “along with grey’s anatomy ( -), criminal minds ( -) or ncis ( -), this is one of the few scripted primetime television series of the mid- s still on the air. it is a relic from another time, before the rise of svod content producers, when networks and cable channels alike aimed for niche markets and an increasing narrative complexity” (favard , ). and this is what makes it so interesting. there are few drama series that have survived this long and from the s to the s has been a period of massive change for television, in the usa and elsewhere. but this sheer longevity is why i can see how far tv has come, how well tv adapts (or doesn’t) from the then to the now. in the age of vod and svod, supernatural’s position as a network series with + episodes per season (for a “normal” season) means that watching it just takes so long. these days only a loyal audience will watch episodes per season for seasons. viewer loyalty has served supernatural well. it is housed on a ______________________ dr. lorna jowett is a reader in television studies at the university of northampton, uk. she has published many articles on television, film and popular culture, with a particular focus on gender and genre. she is author of dancing with the doctor: dimensions of gender in the doctor who universe ( ), sex and the slayer: a gender studies primer for the buffy fan ( ), co-author with stacey abbott of tv horror ( ), and editor of joss whedon vs. the horror tradition ( ) and time on tv ( ). her recent research is engaged with issues of representation and inequality in the television industry. monstrum . (september ) | issn - relatively new network that has had to struggle in competition with the traditional “big ” us networks. partly for this reason, supernatural has relied on audience for survival, and has a long, if chequered, history of producer/ creator and fan interaction. this sense of viewer engagement and the shifts in how a series’ relationship or ‘contract’ with the audience operates also shows me how far i’ve come: supernatural’s final episodes will air within months of my th birthday and a fair amount has changed for me since i was . unlike other long-running (though interrupted) franchises like doctor who, star trek or star wars i did not start watching supernatural as a child and, unlike those big name properties, its continuing niche status means it has not become part of culture at large. yet supernatural’s continuous, unbroken run and reluctance to change its fundamental structure means that its problems are magnified. florent favard writes, “any series reaching more than ten seasons may begin to look like a ship of theseus, rebuilt over and over again to renew interest: supernatural is particularly interesting in that the only original ‘nail and plank’ of the ship are the winchester brothers, around whom the whole storyworld recombines itself season after season” (favard , ). the winchester brothers. i feel conflicted admitting that i watch supernatural for dean. dean is macho and brusque and hates emotions and feelings, he verges on sexist, racist, homophobic, he rejects social norms, is seen living almost entirely among men and is exceptionally violent … but those things, that blue collar masculinity is always, obviously, performed. over and over, dean is shown to be needy, abject, full of despair and self- hate, believing he is not worth love and not worth saving (from sacrificing himself to save sam in “no rest for the wicked” . to a series of deep depressions across subsequent seasons). as someone who has lived with social anxiety and clinical depression most of my life, how can i not identify with dean? sometimes i feel conflicted admitting i watch supernatural at all. it might seem inevitable that a show focused on masculinity, with two main characters (rather than an ensemble cast), would end up being both intermittently misogynist and queerbait-y. it is, after all, focused on the relationship between the winchester brothers. as the series continued, reinventing itself in some ways, but not in others, always potentially at the end but never actually ending, actor jared padalecki (sam winchester) commented: “there were times i thought there were one too many dick jokes, every now and then i felt like we were straying off course, but the fans stuck with us” (quoted in prudom ). the “dick jokes” and “jerk/bitch” language of the series can be wearing, as can its queerbaiting. early seasons have the brothers continually taken for a gay couple as they travel the country together (since “bugs” . ), and slash pairings abound (two of the most monstrum . (september ) | issn - famous being wincest [sam/ dean] and destiel [dean/ castiel]) in fan readings and fanfic. the series finds fans among women and gay men partly because it demonstrates that masculinity is a performance, and darren elliott-smith argues that supernatural’s early seasons engage in “comic yet homoerotic parodying of masculinity” ( , ). despite the subtext, however, almost all male characters in supernatural remain ostensibly, some stubbornly, heterosexual. moreover, some of its actors are not comfortable answering questions about slash pairings in panels and at conventions. in an article titled “jensen ackles is a homophobic douchebag,” joseph brennan tackles “ackles” supposed homophobia, a debate that is itself framed by certain “politics”—of representation, visibility, and identity, for example ( , ). queerbaiting debates have moved on, much as ideas about sexual and gender identity have moved on. society then might necessitate queerbaiting but society now suggests that queer identities or queer relationships need not remain subtextual rather than being textual and canonical. whether slash fiction is conceptualised as “romantopia” or “intimatopia” (see tosenberger , . )—and male intimacy is certainly a continuing focus in supernatural—brennan registers caveats about the political value of slash: “while slash may posit an explicit critique of the heterosexual/ homosexual binary, in ‘playing with’ homosexualised bodies it is often conceived more as a form of ‘romance’ than as a ‘political’ gesture” ( , ). that is, depictions and valorisation of male intimacy in slash are often more about renegotiating masculinity for reader/ viewer pleasure than about making queerness visible. the winchester brothers, the wayward sons. there is no room in this series for female characters and female stories. i love how supernatural negotiates and renegotiates masculinity (not queerbaiting). i hate how supernatural repeatedly, emphatically, kills women. in the last years i have become very intolerant of stories, films, tv series, books, comics whatever, that are all “white man pain,” and more recently “white man pain and cis- het bullshit.” i happily tell others that i don’t have time to waste on stories that mean nothing to me because they never acknowledge me. yet i’m still watching supernatural. “female characters have been used to motivate and drive the plot of this show from its pilot,” notes bronwen calvert ( , ) and agata ᴌuksza also points out, “we encounter a vast range of women in the series, but none of them survive for long or reach the position of a main character” ( , ). the variety th episode article includes in a “by the numbers” sidebar: “ : number of women sam has slept with who subsequently died” (prudom ). both calvert and ᴌuksza debate how “many female characters have been written out of the narrative due to poor fan reaction … while those women who do not pose such a danger because of their age, sexual orientation or clear enemy status are usually warmly monstrum . (september ) | issn - received by fans” (ᴌuksza , ; see also calvert , ). female comic book fans have a term for the way “female characters have been used to motivate and drive the plot” of stories about male heroes: fridging. in other words, the female characters are only in the story to affect the male characters (heroes and villains), and they do this by dying, thus being removed from the narrative as real presence but continuing to haunt it as mythical, idealised absence. from the death of mary winchester in the first episode, violently dispatched women form the motivation for the brothers to save people and hunt things. if they need reminding of their purpose, another female character dies horribly (and unnecessarily) as with the fridging of charlie bradbury (“dark dynasty” . ). “in this narrative a strong female character is often seen as taking up too much space,” explains calvert ( , ). supernatural has some great female characters. it’s just most of them are dead. “i don’t know if they had a plan for mary when resurrecting her,” one spnatural confession on tumblr notes, “i was excited for her storyline … but they don’t do anything with her unless it’s needed for the plot” (n.d.). and, note, bringing back women you’ve killed (mary, charlie) because there aren’t any female characters isn’t really that cool—especially when you kill them again, as with mary. witch rowena mcleod had the longest tenure of a female character in the series yet, surprisingly, she ticks only some of boxes described above: working on the age of the actors she is less than two years older than dean, though admittedly she is crowley’s mother; she spends much of her time as an enemy or, at best, morally dubious. once she is converted to the side of ‘good’, her time is up. in “the rupture” ( . ) she uses a spell that requires her death to return escaped souls and demons to hell, with sam actually delivering the fatal blow. supernatural does have some great female characters who have survived and deserve their own show but the backdoor pilot “wayward sisters” ( . ) featuring these characters did not get picked up. according to cw president mark pedowitz, “we did not feel creatively that the show is where we wanted it to be” (in yahr ). the washington post article quoting pedowitz notes that “the network also only has a finite amount of room on its schedule, and pedowitz said they had more confidence in the new drama ‘legacies,’ a spinoff of ‘the originals’ and ‘the vampire diaries’” (yahr ). see the website ‘women in refrigerators’ by gail simone for more detail. https://lby .com/wir/ like mary winchester, rowena is later brought back as queen of hell (season ). like mary, this does not mitigate her being used to motivate the ‘boys.’ i repeat, bringing back women you’ve killed because there aren’t any female characters is not cool. monstrum . (september ) | issn - jerk/ bitch. so why am i still watching supernatural? it does, after all, (through episodes like “the real ghostbusters” . and “fan fiction” . , for instance) acknowledge that its loyal audience consists of women and gay men—not entirely, of course, but these are the fans that invest in it, talk about, critique it and live with it. arguably, it lends itself to slash fiction and/or reading queerly and it has tried to address its lack of diversity, if not always very successfully. so, i wallow in dean’s beautiful pain and i feel his despair, even though i resist the series’ queerbaiting and will never really know whether jensen ackles is homophobic. joseph brennan points to how fans’ “assessment of ackles’ conservatism, in particular as at odds with other members of the supernatural main cast (padalecki and collins), resonates with the increasing interest within celebrity studies between stars and politics” ( , ). i write this piece as the covid- pandemic locked down nations across the world, and the black lives matter movement gained global traction. as a potentially apocalyptic event threatens humanity and causes us to question society’s unequal power relationships, star wars actor john boyega spoke at a blm protest in london, expressing doubts about how it might affect his future career but clearly feeling that the injustices being protested were too important for him to stay silent. harry potter author j. k. rowling’s tweets about “biological sex” and gender identity, aka transphobia (which i will not repeat here), dismayed many of her fans and prompted several actors who starred in the film adaptations of her books to speak out. in a statement published on the website of the trevor project (a crisis intervention/ suicide prevention organisation for lgbtq+ youth) daniel radcliffe told fans: i really hope that you don’t entirely lose what was valuable in these stories to you. if these books taught you that love is the strongest force in the universe, capable of overcoming anything; if they taught you that strength is found in diversity, and that dogmatic ideas of pureness lead to the oppression of vulnerable groups; if you believe that a particular character is trans, nonbinary, or gender fluid, or that they are gay or bisexual; if you found anything in these stories that resonated with you and helped you at any time in your life—then that is between you and the book that you read, and it is sacred. and in my opinion nobody can touch that. it means to you what it means to when the official star wars social media feed posted messages of support and praise for boyega, some fans pointed out that they had remained silent when he was fighting racist comments and criticism about his role in the films. monstrum . (september ) | issn - you and i hope that these comments will not taint that too much. (radcliffe ) while i respect what radcliffe is trying to say to disappointed fans here, i am inclined to disagree. personal meaning, or interpretation, may well be important, as queer reading has been historically to queer readers and viewers. public meaning, clear unambiguous signalling and valuing of diverse identities, is, however, necessary in order to shift the dogmatic ideas that shore up oppressive systems. it’s time, therefore, for supernatural, its queerbaiting, its dead women and its cis-het white saviours, to be laid to rest. i, for one, will be relieved to put my love-hate relationship with it behind me and move on to series i find more valuable, series that value my identities more. that was then, this is now. dean: can i give you a little advice? let it go. the past is ... there's nothing you can do about it now so it's just baggage. let it go. you'll feel a lot lighter. (“nightmare logic” . ) references brennan, joseph. “‘jensen ackles is a (homophobic) douchebag’: the 'politics of slash' in debates on a tv star's homophobia.” celebrity studies , no. ( ): – . “bugs.” supernatural, season , episode, , aired october , , on the wb/the cw. calvert, bronwen. “angels, demons and damsels in distress: the representation of women in supernatural.” in tv goes to hell: an unofficial road map of supernatural, edited by stacey abbott and david lavery, - . toronto: ecw press, . “dark dynasty.” supernatural, season , episode , aired may , , on the wb/the cw. elliott-smith, darren. “‘’go be gay for that poor, dead intern’: conversion fantasies and queer anxieties in tv’s supernatural.” in tv goes to hell: an unofficial road map of supernatural, edited by stacey abbott and david lavery, - . toronto: ecw press, . monstrum . (september ) | issn - favard, florent. “angels, demons and whatever comes next: the storyworld dynamics of supernatural.” series. international journal of tv serial narratives , no. ( ): – . “fan fiction.” supernatural, season , episode , aired november , on the wb/the cw. Łuksza, agata. “boy melodrama: genre negotiations and gender-bending in the supernatural series.” text matters , no ( ): – . “nightmare logic.” supernatural, season , episode , aired november , , on the wb/the cw. “no rest for the wicked.” supernatural, season , episode , aired may , , on the wb/the cw. prudom, laura. . “achievement: supernatural @ : the war between angels and demons spawns cw hit.” variety , no ( ): – . radcliffe, daniel. “daniel radcliffe responds to j. k. rowling’s tweets on gender identity.” the trevor project ( june ). accessed august . https://www.thetrevorproject.org/ / / /daniel- radcliffe-responds-to-j-k-rowlings-tweets-on-gender-identity/. spnatural confessions. n.d. “honestly, i still forget that mary came back to life …” tumblr (post). accessed august . https://spnaturalconfessions.tumblr.com/post/ . “the real ghostbusters.” supernatural, season , episode , aired november , on the wb/the cw. tosenberger, catherine. "’the epic love story of sam and dean’: supernatural, queer readings, and the romance of incestuous fan fiction.” transformative works and cultures (september ). accessed august . https://journal.transformativeworks.org/index.php/twc/article/vie w/ . “wayward sisters.” supernatural, season , episode , aired january , , on the wb/the cw. yahr, emily. “cw explains surprising decision to pass on supernatural spinoff, wayward sisters.” washington post ( may , ). accessed august . https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and- entertainment/wp/ / / /cw-explains-surprising-decision-to- pass-on-supernatural-spin-off-wayward-sisters/ monstrum . (september ) | issn - _________________ - / - monstrum is published in montréal, québec by the montréal monstrum society. intellectual rights are held by the individual author(s). this work is licensed under a creative commons attribution . international license (https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). diversifying mir: knowledge and real-world challenges, and new interdisciplinary futures research diversifying mir: knowledge and real-world challenges, and new interdisciplinary futures georgina born challenges of diversity are being raised around the world, for example in response to #metoo and black lives matter. against this background, this article, adapted from a keynote lecture to the th ismir conference, asks how mir can refresh itself and its endeavours, scholarly and real world, by addressing diversity. it is written by an outsider, yet one who, as a music anthropologist, is intensely concerned with mir and its influence. the focus is on elaborating auto-critiques that have emerged within the mir community: social, cultural, epistemological and ethical matters to do with the diversity of the profession, of the music with which mir engages, and of the kinds of knowledge produced. one theme is interdisciplinarity: how mir would gain from closer dialogues with contemporary musicology, music anthropology and sociology. the article also considers how the ‘refresh’ might address mir’s pursuit of research oriented to technological innovation, often linked to the drive for economic growth; concerns about sustainable economies, it argues, suggest the need for other values to guide future science and engineering. in this light, the article asks what computational music genre recognition or recommendation would look like if, under public-cultural or non-profit imperatives, the incentives driving them aimed to optimise imaginative self- or group development, pursuing not a logic of ‘similarity’ but diversity, or took human musical flourishing as their goals. the article closes by suggesting that the time is ripe in mir for sustained interdisciplinary engagements in ways previously unseen. keywords: mir; diversity; ontology; interdisciplinarity; music sociology; music anthropology . introduction . mir and diversity: critiques from within diversity was a theme of the th ismir annual conference held in ; the conference ‘tagline’ was ‘across the bridge’, which was taken to reflect the ‘diversity of scientific disciplines, seniority levels, professional affiliations, and cultural backgrounds’ characterising mir as a field. yet when the conference chairs invited me to give a conference keynote, they asked me to speak to insufficient diversity in two senses: they wanted insights into how to create ‘a more diverse ismir in terms of discipline’, and they also noted that ‘[w]e are trying hard to overcome the current bias [towards] western male engineers’. this article is a revision of the keynote address that resulted from their invitation. together, these observations suggest that the mir community embraces diversity as a positive value, with some believing that it already embodies this value, while others consider it to be a goal towards which ismir should be moving, while acknowledging that it currently has a deficit. diversity is one of those values perhaps too often carelessly invoked. it can also be controversial, particularly if the language of ‘diversity’ is employed in ways that occlude older concerns – notably matters of inequality, injustice or bias. in the words of influential writers, the elevation of diversity in recent public and policy debates can mean ‘that other kinds of vocabularies are no longer used,… including terms such as “equal opportunities”, “social justice”, “anti-racism” and “multiculturalism”’, terms with complex histories linked to the histories of political movements such as feminism and anti-racism. for ‘when the terms disappear from policy talk, a concern is that such histories might also disappear’ (ahmed and swan : ). this warning is especially salient in the current moment, when the world is reeling from the events that impelled movements like #metoo and black lives matter, as well as their sometimes violent consequences. because, of course, it is not so much the events – although they matter in themselves – but their chronic, repeated nature and structural foundations that are the terrain on which efforts towards diversity must be built. academic and scientific fields are just as likely to host these structural foundations as other areas of intellectual, cultural and social life. they, too, are likely to be sites in which those inequalities, injustices or biases made more palatable by the term ‘diversity’ may become apparent and may require to be addressed. and if we think music born, g. ( ). diversifying mir: knowledge and real-world challenges, and new interdisciplinary futures. transactions of the international society for music information retrieval, ( ), pp. – . doi: https://doi.org/ . /tismir. faculty of music, university of oxford, oxford, uk gemb @cam.ac.uk https://doi.org/ . /tismir. mailto:gemb @cam.ac.uk born: diversifying mir is immune to such issues, then the recent furore that has arisen within the academic music theory community over accusations that it embodies and upholds a ‘white racial frame’ should give pause for thought. evidence of gender imbalances in mir is provided by hu et al. ( ), who also describe the organisational response: the creation at the ismir conference of ‘women in mir’ or wimir sessions ‘in order to identify current issues and challenges female mir researchers face, and to brainstorm ideas for providing more support to female mir researchers’ (hu et al., : ). a complementary perspective comes from a wide-ranging, reflexive discussion of ‘ethical dimensions of mir’ by holzapfel, sturm and coeckelbergh ( ), which identifies bias in several senses. among them are demographic biases stemming from the fact that the mir community, ‘as many engineering research communities’, is characterised by researchers who ‘are typically weird (white, educated, industrialized, rich, operating within democracies) (henrich et al., ), from a limited set of geographical origins, and a majority is male’ (holzapfel et al., : ). also significant for these authors are ‘technical biases’ apparent in how ‘[d]atasets are biased towards eurogenetic forms of music, and consequently mir tasks are biased towards challenges that are meaningful in these idioms’ (ibid.). the consequence is that ‘[m]usic that is under- represented in mir datasets, or that does not fit mir tasks and evaluation measures, is unlikely to be interpreted in a semantically correct way by methods that emerge from the biased mir community’ (ibid.). holzapfel, sturm and coeckelbergh link these obser- vations to a further point: they trace the ‘mir value chain’, suggesting that mir researchers do not have clear through-lines of influence to the several ensuing stages their research feeds into: software development, product design, publishing and thence to the end-user. ‘mir research, as most engineering research, is often not immediately involved in the following steps through the value chain. this leads to a barrier between mir research and the higher levels of constraints on system design’ (ibid.). certainly, this describes a dilemma; yet while their analysis is valuable, arguably it does not go far enough. they present this problem as an ethical one stemming from a delinked value chain that results in a ‘remoteness from users’ (ibid.). but that understates the effects of this fragmentary value chain, which is that mir, by delivering a music-‘information infrastructure’ (kornberger et al., ), acts as a perhaps unwitting participant in reproducing and favouring the normative, restricted repertoire of commercial popular music and associated types of musical expression proffered to consumers by the global digital music industries. indeed, the authors detail one such outcome: ‘an example can be conceived of in relation to rhythm, where most mir tools focus on common time signatures, which finds its continuation in tools within digital audio workstations’ (ibid.). i return later to the risks of a collusive relationship between mir and the digital music industries. my task, then, is to offer suggestions about how to diversify ismir and, by implication, mir as a field. i take this as an ambitious challenge: to try to help the mir community understand the scope, scale and depth of the undertakings entailed by responding to calls for greater diversity in the structural sense. for these challenges may not be obvious and, importantly, they are not singular but several. i frame the concerns i want to raise not by a narrow understanding of diversity but a broad one, asking: how can mir refresh itself and its endeavours, scholarly and real world, by addressing diversity? what can diversity mean for a field like mir? . messages from vermeer at this point, i return to the ismir conference, which took place in the city of delft, home of one of the world’s greatest painters, johannes vermeer. i want to draw three initial messages, or prompts to thought, from reflections on vermeer, whose works are striking for their capacity to convey dutch domestic life in the th century. among their many virtues and innovations is to dwell sympathetically on women’s interiority, their everyday activities and their creativity – for example, when conversing with one another, when writing a letter (figure ), or when seated to perform at the virginal (figure ) – through a compelling visual humanism focused on facial expressivity and embodied experience. this prompts a first message for the mir community: women as bearers of diverse modes of subjectivity, and subjectivity as coloured by embodied experience, which in human societies is mediated by such social differences figure : ‘mistress and maid’, by johannes vermeer (pub- lic domain), c. – , the frick collection, nyc, usa. (source https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/ commons/ / /vermeer_lady_maidservant_hold- ing_letter.jpg). https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/ / /vermeer_lady_maidservant_holding_letter.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/ / /vermeer_lady_maidservant_holding_letter.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/ / /vermeer_lady_maidservant_holding_letter.jpg born: diversifying mir as gender, class, race and ethnicity – so that subjectivities, experience and embodied experience are not everywhere the same. a second fascinating message for the mir community, and for the era of big data, stems from the fact that a mere thirty-four works are attributed to vermeer: it is that cultural value does not equate with scale, size or ubiquity. a third message arises from the ways in which vermeer experimented with rare pigments, with the portrayal of light, and with perspective, for he is believed to have employed optical aids like the camera obscura to achieve his most spectacular effects. what we witness in vermeer, then, is early science in the service of art – which prompts a question for ismir: which masters or mistresses does the science and engineering of mir serve? . addressing mir from the outside before proceeding, it is important to acknowledge that i write as an outsider to mir – i am not a scientist but a qualitative social scientist – and it is perhaps foolhardy to advise colleagues whose methodologies i would be hard pressed to understand. nonetheless, i am emboldened because in recent years i have been in dialogue with some colleagues in mir. on the other hand, as someone who has worked for decades on the anthropology and sociology of music, media and digital cultures, i have had to confront and analyse matters of gender, class, race and ethnicity in my research, issues that arose vividly in my ethnographic studies of computer music (born, ) and the bbc (born, a), as well as in a european research council (erc)-funded interdisciplinary research program that i led involving ethnographic studies tracing the impact of digitization and digital media on musical practices worldwide (born and devine, ; born, ). these experiences caused me to develop a theoretical account of how social relations of gender, class, race and ethnicity enter into – or mediate – the musical and media fields and institutions that my team and i researched (born, ). it is on this basis that i developed the framework set out below. to take one element of the erc project: in a mixed qualitative and quantitative study, kyle devine and i showed that of the young people entering higher education in the uk to study music technology degree courses over a five year period, per cent were male, and that they came from a lower social class background and had only slightly higher representation of black, asian and minority ethnicity (bame) students than the average demographic profile for all british undergraduate students (born and devine, ). this is a restricted gauge of humanity entering music technology, and it appears to correlate with the gender equality challenges for ismir, as shown also by statistics on gender representation at ismir that the chairs ran for the conference. in what follows i will certainly address questions of diversity in this demographic sense. however, i will do more. . four interrelated dimensions of diversity i want to draw out four interrelated dimensions of diversity with which i suggest ismir should engage. each has a certain autonomy and matters in itself. but they are also interrelated and together present a formidable lattice of challenges. ) the first is the one just referred to: who gets to be a member of ismir, which is to say, what is the demographic makeup of mir as a profession? could it be more diverse? and how do the field’s feeder educational and employment structures result in these ‘typically weird’, male (gendered) and white (raced) demographics? but while matters of educational and employment equality and equity are critical goals in themselves, diversity raises much more than this. ) the second dimension of diversity is to do with whose music and which music, among the vast ocean of sounds in the world, gets to be the focus of mir’s influential scientific practices. as shown above, it is an accepted strand of criticism within the mir community that the techniques and parameters employed in mir tend to derive from, and reflect, commercially dominant areas of global popular music. yet those techniques and parameters come to be applied in powerful technologies as though they were universal, with inevitable what might be called ‘de-pluralizing’ effects. why is this the case? could mir be more responsive to musical diversity – which is likely to equate with social and cultural diversity? and linking back to the first dimension: might a more diverse population of mir practitioners favour awareness of and sensitivity to a wider spectrum of the world’s musics? figure : ‘lady seated at a virginal’, by johannes vermeer (public domain), c. – , the national gallery, london, uk. (source https://upload.wikimedia.org/wiki- pedia/commons/ / /lady_seated_at_a_virginal% c_ vermeer% c_the_national_gallery% c_london.jpg). https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/ / /lady_seated_at_a_virginal% c_vermeer% c_the_national_gallery% c_london.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/ / /lady_seated_at_a_virginal% c_vermeer% c_the_national_gallery% c_london.jpg https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/ / /lady_seated_at_a_virginal% c_vermeer% c_the_national_gallery% c_london.jpg born: diversifying mir ) the third aspect of diversity is directly implicated in the previous point: it concerns the foundational epistemological and ontological premises that currently undergird mir as a field. in the face of greater musical diversity, can such premises be sustained or will they necessarily be pluralised – and therefore fundamentally challenged? how can mir equip itself with epistemologies and ontologies of music responsive to a greater diversity of musical cultures? might that demand new interdisciplinary partnerships, bringing areas of humanistic and social scientific music scholarship into dialogue with mir in ways that are currently undeveloped? ) the fourth and final dimension of diversity, an overarching question, also follows on. this returns to my earlier question, riffing on vermeer: which masters or mistresses does mir serve – the profit-seeking imperatives of commercial music tech corporations and online music services, entangled as they are in the recorded music industries? and which mistresses should mir serve in order to diversify its goals, partners and worldly effects? in sum: could mir cultivate a more plural set of orientations and institutional partners so as to include non-commercial, publicly-oriented initiatives aimed at enhancing human musical flourishing, and – given escalating anxieties about impending climate catastrophe – the need to create sustainable music economies? as one of the escala- ting preoccupations of our time, should this issue be foregrounded within the mir community? the remainder of the article elaborates on these four facets of diversity, drawing out connections between them. . the social diversity of mir as a profession and its consequences regarding the first dimension of diversity, important insights come from research in science and technology studies (sts) that probes how certain kinds of social relations come to be immanent in technological design. as the sts scholar madeleine akrich has argued, design is a key stage in which engineers ‘script’ envisaged uses into their technologies, in this way ‘configuring’ potential user identities and preferring certain patterns of use (akrich, ). to exemplify: the workings of gender, in particular, have been probed by nelly oudshoorn and her colleagues, who undertook empirical research on the design of information and communications technologies (icts). through comparative case studies of the design cultures of two online ‘digital cities’ developed in the netherlands, oudshoorn et al. found that in both cases the designers worked with an ‘i-methodology’ (oudshoorn et al., ). although the designers aimed to create technologies with all-embracing appeal and usability – to configure the user as ‘everybody’ and ‘anybody’ – a key slippage was evident in a guiding assumption that the designers themselves, and their own subjective and corporeal experiences of the technologies, represented a universal user. since ict designers are predominantly male, their ‘i-methodology’ hindered their ability to imagine the potential and actual diversity of the eventual population of users. the technologies resulting from these processes, emerging from gendered conditions and assumptions, embodied and entrenched existing norms – prominent among them gender norms. in their words, ‘the dominance of the i-methodology…resulted in a gender script: the user who came to be incorpo- rated into the design of [the ict] matched the pref- erences and attitudes of male rather than female users. as almost all designers were male and tech- nologically highly competent, they made [the ict] into a masculine technology.’ (oudshoorn et al., , p. ) to design technologies and interfaces that respond to real social diversity, then, oudshoorn et al. argue that i-methodology, along with its universalising projections, must be reflexively acknowledged and consciously changed. in this way they offer a powerful cautionary tale relevant to all those fields feeding into the design of new technologies, including mir. in suggesting that social relations and imaginaries are scripted into technological design, i am not making an essentialist point that gender identities always determine design; nor do i imply that actual users are entirely constrained to follow the scripts inscribed in the technologies. as akrich argues, the uses made of any technology cannot be read off design assumptions; user-configurations are not wholly determinant of actual uses. rather, i am suggesting that wider social relations of gender, race, class and so on, on the one hand, and practices of technological design, on the other, exist in relations of mutual constitution. in other words, they mediate one another and result in the conception and design of certain kinds of technologies. that is why who gets to engineer matters. now, there is clearly a danger that such ideas can become too crude; nonetheless, the point is that all kinds of experience – including gendered experiences, but not limited to this – will affect design paradigms. so this is not just a matter of equal opportunities for those currently marginalized, whose talents may be unrecognised by the engineering profession, although that is important in itself. it is equally about the likely benefits of enriching, by diversifying, the social ecology of research groups, and thus the collective imagination and design practices of which they are capable – so that everyone gains, potentially including end-users. the underlying point is that scientific and engineering fields like those of mir, which are all too easy to envision as spaces isolated from wider social forces, are in fact consequential sites in which these social forces are played out, and therefore ripe for a politics of diversity. a first reflexive challenge for mir as a field, then, is to recognize mir as a site in which existing cultural categories, as they relate to social inequalities, injustices and biases, are being reproduced or amplified, and that it could be otherwise. whoever is doing the science and engineering, i-methodology and its normative drive needs to be born: diversifying mir altered, and consciousness of the diversity of users and user needs – and also of musics and musical communities – should take its place, resulting optimally in more diverse knowledge and technologies. as to the problem of attracting and educating a next, larger generation of women engineers and engineers from bame communities, this remains a key challenge for the stem (science, technology, engineering and mathematics) disciplines at large, and one without easy solutions. the recursive weight of history is great, as judy wajcman, a leading feminist scholar in sts, comments regarding the gendering of stem: ‘in contemporary western society, the hegemonic form of masculinity is still strongly associated with technical prowess and power.… notwithstanding the recurring rhetoric about women’s opportuni- ties in the new knowledge economy, men continue to dominate technical work. … these sexual divi- sions in the labour market are proving intransigent and mean that women are largely excluded from the processes of technical design that shape the world we live in.’ (wajcman, : ) for wajcman, long-standing ideologies of masculinity are a core force behind the scarcity of women in stem and the gendering of the cultures of stem, suggesting that masculinity itself might benefit from being reflexively scrutinized. is this an exercise for ismir and its feeder fields? can it be avoided? finally, here, it is salutary to invoke the philosopher peter-paul verbeek’s work on the politics and ethics of technological design, notably his paper ‘materializing morality: design ethics and technological mediation’ (verbeek, ). verbeek has long argued that sts should enter into direct dialogue with engineers and engineering discourses, thereby helping to foster among engineers a self-critical and self-reflexive paradigm such that ‘the ethics of engineering design… take more seriously the moral charge of technological products and rethink the moral responsibility of designers accordingly’ ( ). his eloquent point is one that might inform reflections within mir about the moral seriousness of matters of diversity. . mir and musical diversity: whose music, which music? the second dimension of diversity is the question of whose music and which music become the focus of mir’s scientific practices and their influential applications, for example in recommendation systems. it is well accepted that, as emilia gómez and her colleagues put it, ‘since the beginning of [mir],… most of its models and technologies have been developed [on the basis of] mainstream popular music in the so-called “western” tradition’ (gómez et al., : ). they continue, however, that the last few years have seen ‘an increasing interest in applying available techniques to the study of traditional, folk or ethnic music’ (ibid.). this is certainly laudable, and it is clear that computational ethnomusicology has been developing as a key test-bed for opening up and diversifying the musical sounds and cultures with which mir engages. recently, for example, xavier serra and his team have put rigorously to the test the limits of the kinds of musical sounds, knowledge and representations dealt with by mir in the erc-funded compmusic project ( – ). as they describe it: ‘we work on computational approaches to describe music recordings by emphasizing the use of domain knowledge of particular music traditions … focusing on five music cultures’ from the maghreb, china, turkey, north and south india (serra, : ; serra, ). ‘a target application for this work’, they continue, ‘is a system with which to browse through audio music collections of the chosen cultures; being able to discover specific characteristics of the music and relationships between different musical concepts’ (ibid.). while they assume that ‘there are universal musical concepts, like melody and rhythm’, they stress ‘that many important aspects of a particular music recording can be better understood by considering cultural specificities’ ( : ). they focus on non-western ‘art music traditions, [and] thus on types of music that have been formalised and for which theoretical frameworks have been proposed for their understanding’ ( ). the team consulted expert musicians and musicologists in each tradition to select recordings for the corpora being put together, and their efforts seem exemplary in these terms. addressing similar challenges, olmo cornelis and collaborators aimed to test the presumed universality of existing analytical approaches to pulse and tempo by examining how existing ‘automated tempo estimation approaches perform in the context of central-african music’ (cornelis et al., : ). advocating a ‘multidisciplinary approach’, they employed a range of musicological and ethnomusicological scholarship to hone the study, from fred lerdahl and ray jackendoff to kofi agawu and justin london. while they acknowledge that ‘a major difficulty is… the dominance of western musical concepts in content-based analysis tools’ ( ), it is surprising that this team was nonetheless content to check whether existing beat trackers can or cannot be used reliably for central african music – rather than taking the cue from that music’s difference with regard to pulse and tempo and, in that light, asking: which tools might be needed to address it, and how radically does mir’s existing conceptual and computational toolset demand to be revised in order to tackle the salient aesthetic features of this non- western music? there is, in other words, surely a risk of teleology in beginning with existing tools derived from the analysis of western pop and seeing if they ‘work’ for some fragmentary, decontextualised trait extracted from the total socio-musical existence of central african music. indeed, this teleology is registered in their preliminary comment that ‘the research in this paper relies on existing computational tools, and does not aim to introduce novel approaches in beat tracking and tempo estimation’ ( ). born: diversifying mir although an auto-critique of the elevation of western pop music as a universal model for all music is beginning to develop within mir, then, it seems that the profound challenges posed by ‘other’ musics have not yet been sufficiently registered and worked through (born and hesmondhalgh, ). one kind of challenge stems from all those acoustic, electronic and computer art, popular and folk musics in which melody, harmony, tempo and rhythm do not capture key aesthetic features, which are likely to include qualities such as timbre, ‘gesture’, microtonality, melisma, spatialisation (smalley, , ), and the rhythmic subtleties identified by steven feld and charles keil as ‘groove’ or ‘participatory discrepancies’ (keil, ; keil and feld, ). the problem is that decades after the musicological debate began over these less readily quantized and notated, multidimensional aesthetic qualities, musicology still has great difficulty analysing them. perhaps the musicologist anne danielsen’s work – which combines quantitative and qualitative research on microrhythm in groove-based popular musics (danielsen, , ) – casts light and might be adapted into computational analytical tools of great subtlety. but this seems to be the scale of the problem. it is also notable that, in reaching across disciplines, there is a risk of going backwards into the future: the work of the ethnomusicologist alan lomax (lomax , ), for example, is cited approvingly in some computational ethnomusicology; but his reductive quantitative approach to the analysis and classification of non-western musics has long been controversial and criticised within his own field (feld, ). the points made so far about the challenges posed by non- western and other musics have been limited to their subtle intra-musical features. when it comes to broader cultural understandings of these musics, the problems for mir are of another order, and can include the very assumption that such musics can or should be represented and made available globally through recordings, and digital corpora, at all. the nature of these problems can be conveyed by a case study from my erc research program carried out in north india by aditi deo (deo, ). deo wanted to investigate the digital recording and archiving of north indian folk musics, particularly music from low caste communities, part of a current wave of archiving initiatives in the region stimulated by ideas of cultural heritage and facilitated by the ease of digital recording. in rajasthan one focus of her work was a cultural collective called lokayan run by high caste young male activists. lokayan was in partnership with a bangalore-based organization called the kabir project led by middle class artists and intellectuals, funded mainly by national and international charities and development agencies. together, lokayan and the kabir project were digitally recording a number of elderly, illiterate, low caste hereditary women folk singers renowned for their repertoire of songs devoted to kabir, a th century hindu mystic poet and saint popular among low caste communities. through a secular pluralist reinterpretation of kabir, the kabir project sought to use ordinary people’s devotion to kabir’s poetry and related folk music to attract local people to a politics of secular nationalism. however, among the low caste adherents, the saint and related cultural and musical traditions have a different significance, for they are associated with resistance to caste-based discrimination and, thus, with opposition to the pervasive inequalities of caste and class to which these groups are subject. hence, the very use that the kabir project was making of kabir and related folk traditions entailed a wilful erasure of the affective and political meanings of the saint and the music for local low caste communities. one of the most renowed singers in the local community was the blind, elderly woman folk singer gavara-devi gosayi. in this film clip, shot by deo in , gosayi was performing live at an annual festival called the kabir yatra. the sheer pleasure and joy of the audience, drawn largely from surrounding rural communities, is palpable as gosayi and her musicians perform live. the second clip, in contrast, shows gosayi singing, accompanied by her own harmonium playing as well as two young male percussionists, inside a local recording studio where she was being recorded by lokayan activists. gosayi is visibly uncomfortable; she had never experienced recording before these recording sessions, and she preferred to play live performances out of doors for her usual audience – local followers of kabir. what comes across is how social inequalities of gender, caste and age permeate the recording session, shaping the sociality of the studio and its musical results. as deo notes in her analysis of the sessions, the young men overrode the singer on focal aesthetic matters: ‘critical aspects of the energy of this genre came from its improvisatory form, interactions between vocalist and instrumentalists, and the open-air contexts of its customary performance. the cramped studio, and gavara-devi’s unfamiliarity with studio techniques, skewed the recording process…. the recording studio emerged… as a space of negotiation over musical sounds and technical practices between those with unequal social status and power’ (deo, : ). in lokayan recording sessions, then, social relations of gender, caste and age influenced both the recording process and the ensuing musical sounds. gosayi’s music was made for live performance, not recording, and she was not in a position to understand the implications of recording in the sense either of the sounds being abstracted, frozen, commodified, and lifted into global circulation online, or of any potential monetary reward. in general, ideas of individual authorship, ownership and copyright are quite alien to these musicians. it was when we took this research to an anthropology conference in delhi that we became aware of the intensity of the issues that it raises. for a clamorous debate occurred about all digital archiving projects focused on indian folk musics, coming as these musics do from low caste and ‘tribal’ groups. the accusation made by critics of these practices was deeper than musical accuracy, https://musdig.web.ox.ac.uk/digital-archiving-oral-vernacular-musics-northern-india https://musdig.web.ox.ac.uk/digital-archiving-oral-vernacular-musics-northern-india born: diversifying mir cultural sensitivity or even turning this music into a commodity. it was, rather, that the very disembedding of this music from its live, local communities of practice by recording perpetrated a form of ontological violence, an ontological violence fuelled by the social, cultural and economic distance between local musicians – whose music is profoundly embedded in communal socialities and religious cosmologies – and development-aid-funded activists, and a violence that those who value and respect gosayi, her music and her community must call out. so the challenge posed to mir by non-western musics is not just to get the rhythmic or timbral analysis right, or to take the cues about musical difference from such musics and not impose inappropriate musical values, qualities and systems on them. it is also to recognize that all musics – and most spectacularly those non-western musics that have as yet resisted incorporation into the global archives of digitized recorded music – have an ontology, that those ontologies are plural and often deeply social as well as religious or cosmological (bohlman, ; born, ; sykes, ), and that they may be antithetical to, or profoundly different from, the universalised music ontologies assumed by mir and companion disciplines. this poses ethical and political tests akin to those posed by discourses of sustainability – but here, tests of musical and cultural sustainability. . musical diversity and mir’s epistemological and ontological assumptions the third aspect of diversity follows on: it concerns certain epistemological and ontological assumptions underpinning mir as a field, which turn on the way that ontology is understood. if mir intends to embrace a wider diversity of musical cultures, can such assumptions be maintained? how could mir equip itself with tools suited to analysing and modelling a greater diversity of musics? these questions arise from the very different approaches to analysing ontologies of music that characterise mir, on the one hand, and contemporary musicology and ethnomusicology, on the other. in computer and information sciences, ‘an ontology defines a set of representational primitives with which to model a domain of knowledge or discourse. the representational primitives are typically classes (or sets), attributes (or properties), and relationships (or relations among class members)’ (gruber, : ). similarly, for music informatician darrel conklin, applying this approach to a corpus of basque folk songs, ‘an ontology is an encoding of concepts and their relations in a domain of knowledge’ (conklin, : ). in these disciplines, ontology is therefore conceived in terms of modelling concepts, knowledge and representation. in marked contrast, in contemporary musicology and ethnomusicology, such an approach would be identified with the analysis and modelling of an epistemology of music – that is, conceptual knowledge about a certain music. for in these disciplines, ontologies of music are considered to exceed knowledge and representation. if, in philosophy, ontology is ‘the study of what there is’ (hofweber ), or ‘the study of being or existence’ (gruber ibid.), then contemporary musicology and ethnomusicology adhere more closely to this approach when analysing ontologies of music: they are interested in analysing ‘what music is’ in any particular musical culture in terms that include but exceed knowledge and representation by taking into account the embodied, social and material aspects of any musical culture (bohlman, ; born, b, ). currently, mir takes a range of digital data as an appro- ximation of the contours of a musical culture. in this sense mir itself embodies a theory of ‘what music is’, or what might be called an analytical ontology (born, : ): one that assumes that music can universally be represented by datasets of digital sound recordings, perhaps with added digitised scores or other kinds of metadata, various kinds of knowledge and representation, perhaps with human annotations, and that such representations capture the most salient aesthetic and ontological features of all musics. but we have just seen through deo’s rajasthan case study that this is not the case. for the music of gavara-devi gosayi and her community is immanently bound to live performance, to the socialities engendered in such performance situations, and to the cosmologies and poetry associated with a th century poet-saint as they are infused with a politics of resistance to caste oppression. all of these qualities – this rich embodied, social and material assemblage – together constitute the actors’ ontology of music, and many of them are shed once the sounds are captured by recording, digitised and put into circulation on the internet. so what gets lost in mir’s epistemological and ontological assumptions? to presume mir’s theory of music is to foreclose on many living musics, and to prioritise ontologically those sounds that, through recording, have been disembedded from originating bodies, socialities and locales – a process that r. murray schafer named ‘schizophonia’: how recording splits sounds from its originating sources (schafer, ). turning this around, the question arises for the mir community: if more musical diversity is sought, and if respecting the musical ontologies of the source communities is ethically responsible and aesthetically desirable, then what kind of knowledge practices might support mir to analyse and model these kinds of musical cultures ‘as a whole’ (serra, : ), or at least more adequately and less reductively? would it not make sense to consider whether there are ways to bring the cultural, social and material dimensions immanent in diverse ontologies of music into mir’s analytical frame? this means going far beyond thinking of ‘a musical culture as a stylistically coherent musical repertory’ that can only be accessed via ‘available digital traces’ (op cit. ). to tackle this challenge would mean prizing open those base epistemological and ontological premises of mir through close dialogue with those music scholars and disciplines whose specialism is the analysis of music’s cultural, social and material as well as sonic dimensions: that is, music anthropologists and sociologists. implicit in this move would be another challenge: to break with ‘mentalist’ born: diversifying mir conceptions of music, an abstraction that is perhaps so axiomatic in computation, given its long-standing links to cognitive and information-theoretical ontologies, that it has become second nature in mir. what, then, if we began again, refreshing mir by building a new kind of relationship between the field and music anthropology and sociology? and by taking the terms of the ontology at issue from each musical culture, rather than by squeezing it into the existing template of what can most readily and efficiently be formalised, computationally represented and modelled? doing this entails recalibrating how interdisciplinarity proceeds in this field. instead of taking computer and information sciences to be keystone disciplines around which other disciplines revolve and to which they are subordinate, another approach would entail enabling the distinct disciplines to dialogue without hierarchy, and to ask music informaticians to consider alternative epistemological and ontological grounds, perhaps by inventing novel hybrids of qual-quant modelling in ways as yet unimagined and unforged. such a reshaped interdisciplinary practice is actually envisaged in a uk economic and social research council-funded research project on interdisciplinarity that i co-directed, which examined empirically different kinds of interdisciplinary practice in several major interdisciplinary fields and adduced three basic forms (barry and born, a, b). the first, which we call the ‘additive’ or ‘synthesis’ mode of interdisciplinarity (and which is close to what is often called multidisciplinarity), involves bringing different disciplines to the table and allowing each to contribute as they are, without any of them being changed. the second, the ‘subordination’ or ‘service’ mode of interdisciplinarity, is akin to the situation now in mir: a core discipline or disciplines, the computer and information sciences, supervise inputs from other, subordinate disciplines, so that a ‘dash’ of the social or cultural may be added to the framework without this disturbing the premises of the master disciplines. this subordination mode is a common way in which the physical and natural sciences bring in aspects of the qualitative humanities and social sciences; and this is what mir is doing when it adds a touch of ethnomusicology to its research, but without this threatening to alter or disturb its core epistemological and ontological premises. in effect, nothing much need change. in contrast, the third mode, the ‘agonistic’ mode of interdisciplinarity, is the most promising because in this mode there is no hierarchy, and the potential is that all contributing disciplines might change through mutual transformations and the genesis of entirely unforeseen, novel methodologies and theories. this third, agonistic mode of interdisciplinarity therefore takes the form neither of a synthesis nor a hierarchy. rather, it is driven by an agonistic relationship to existing forms of knowledge – that is, by a common sense of the problematic limits of established disciplines. what we are highlighting is how agonistic interdisciplinarity stems from a collective desire to contest or transcend the prevailing epistemological and ontological assumptions of given or established disciplines through innovative knowledge practices that aspire to render the new hybrid interdiscipline irreducible to the simple addition of its antecedent disciplines – in this case, mir plus music anthropology/sociology. the leading information theorist geoffrey bowker portrays something akin to this mode of interdisciplinarity as key to the ‘new knowledge infrastructures’ demanded in the present. as he puts it, ‘the epistemic cultures of the academy all have their own historical “ways of knowing”… [but today], the objects of study… require the triangulation of multiple methodologies, both qualitative and quantitative, and call upon… investigators to integrate multiple epistemic viewpoints’ (bowker, : ). indeed, in finding inventive ways to overcome or finesse the qual-quant divide, an agonistic interdisciplinarity between computational musicology and music anthropology and sociology could prototype new methodologies that are urgently required by the digital humanities in general. two further points follow. such a new interdisciplinarity is not limited to music anthropology and sociology. if they can bring social, cultural and material dimensions of music to mir, then psychoacoustics can bring auditory perception – and more generally, the natural sciences of music can bring greater acuity in analysing features relevant to cognition (aucouturier and bigand, ) – and music analysis can throw light on higher dimensions of musical structure. and the benefits potentially flow both ways: these disciplines will in turn be nourished by what mir brings to the interdisciplinary exchange. to take two examples: mir can ‘bring unprecedented signal- processing sophistication to cognitive neuroscience and psychology’ (ibid.: ); while the tarsos platform developed by joren six, olmo cornelis and marc leman offers tools for enhancing the analysis of pitch organization beyond prevalent concepts in western music theory – ‘octave equivalence, stability of tones, equal tempered scale and so on’ (six et al., : ). tools like tarsos respond to the extraordinary diversity of pitch distribution in non-western classical and folk musics and some areas of th century art music; and research of this kind conveys vividly how much music theory has to gain, in terms of diversifying its conceptual range and resources, from dialogues with mir. . diversifying the real-world masters/mistresses that mir serves i come finally to the fourth dimension of diversity: the question of which masters or mistresses mir serves. mir is an international field based mainly in academia, but it has strong links to industry and the burgeoning start-up ecology of music ai. my sense is that its culture is ambiguous, oriented both by the ethos of academia and by responsiveness to the commercial goals of the digital music economy. it is as though, fortuitously, mir serves both; and this seems to go along with certain commercial precepts being transferred almost born: diversifying mir unconsciously into the field. in an area of application like music recommendation, the focus is on a series of goals – attracting and retaining consumers, increasing user engagement, boosting revenues – that find their way into scientific analysis and matters of design. so just as a theory of music is manifest in mir, where music is conceptualized, after western pop, as everywhere taking the form of a ‘track’ or ‘song’, a theory of the human subject is built into recommendation – a human subject who is existentially overwhelmed by the scale of the global digital music archive, whose evolving taste is structured by a preference for ‘similarity’, who is individualized, and who seeks to maximize her/his listening events (born et al., ). built into machine learning applications, these models are likely performatively to shape, rather than merely reflect, listener practices (prey, ): another potential reduction of human cultural diversity. against this background i want to ask: which mistresses should mir serve in order to diversify its goals, partners and worldly effects? if mir’s pursuit of scientific research oriented to technological innovation often comes to be tied, directly or indirectly, to the drive for economic growth, then the escalating criticisms of the faang corporations along multiple vectors (among them transparency, accountability, privacy and security), and parallel concerns about sustainable (music) economies (devine, ), remind us of the urgent need for other goals and values to guide future science and engineering. we might ask: what would computational genre recognition and recommendation look like if, under public-cultural or non-profit imperatives, the incentives driving them aimed to optimise musical self- or group- development, linked to goals of human flourishing (nussbaum, ; hesmondhalgh, )? or if they aimed to foster not a logic of ‘similarity’ but diversity? or if they were built to enhance the potential cultural and social as well as musical riches and benefits of music discovery? or if, rather than honing normative models of genre, computational genre systems could be tuned so as to respond to and give insight into different individual and collective perspectives on genre? such questions would imply rendering the interface both legible or transparent and modifiable; it might mean enabling the user to call up and browse among the genre systems – that is, the musical universes – of, say, angélique kidjo, kim gordon or diamanda galás, of indonesian noise music scenes or canadian first nation country musicians. being less normative may be less commercially viable, but it might well enhance and enliven our music-computational tools, experiences and futures, while empowering users and responding to, and stimulating, the sociable nature of our musical lives. . conclusions diversity has many potential meanings. it is often understood in terms of the social makeup of a profession or discipline – whether mir or music anthropology. and this certainly matters. but one of the ways it matters is by fostering a population of practitioners harbouring a more variegated cache of cultural and musical experiences to inform practice – in mir, ways of computationally analysing and modelling music. this article has set out four key interrelated components of diversity relevant to mir, each of which has an autonomy, while together they add up to a series of potential interlocking changes. for progress to occur, it should be clear by now, the new forms of interdisciplinarity envisaged should have ambitions not only of epistemological and ontological kinds but of ethical and social kinds. to be clear: this is not a call to reinvent an already discredited wheel – one example is the repeated return to data-rich but impoverished conceptions of the social in the lineage linking adolphe quetelet, the early th century inventor of empirical social research and of the idea of ‘social physics’ (donnelly, ; adolf and stehr, ), through gabriel tarde, the early th century sociologist who held that ‘society is imitation’ fuelled by collective flows of affect (tarde, ), to the ‘social physics’ espoused by mit’s alex pentland (pentland, ). today’s exponents of this lineage risk repeating conceptual and methodological errors while neglecting the abundant resources of contemporary social theory. it is essential, then, to avoid resuscitating outdated paradigms, and a good way to do this is to create an ‘agonistic’ interdisciplinarity integrating current thinking in relevant disciplines: to put mir into interdisciplinary dialogue with today’s ethnomusicology, music anthropology and sociology. the time is ripe for sustained interdisciplinary engagements in ways previously untried, and the new hybrid knowledge forms suggested in this article demand cumulative and coordinated efforts. the recent concept of ‘responsible innovation’, the title of a journal founded in , offers a stimulus; it foregrounds the benefits of reflexivity, inclusion and responsiveness in emerging technological design, suggesting that these are favoured by ‘an open organisational culture, emphasising innovation, creativity, interdisciplinarity, experimentation and risk taking; … [and] commitment to public engagement and to taking account of the public interest’ (stilgoe et al., : ). this suggests the importance of creating new institutional ecologies, collective efforts within which such values can be cultivated, for example when transforming mir through the four facets of diversity. and this in turn prompts a call for action: an invitation to mir colleagues to join myself and others from relevant disciplines in forming a think tank or similar initiative to develop and take forward these ideas. think tanks in this vein have recently arisen to address ethical issues surrounding the development and application of ai. music informatics, given its prominent position in the ongoing evolution of the data and computational sciences as they affect culture, surely deserves its own initiative of this kind. notes see the statement about the conference posted on july : https://transactions.ismir.net. email to the author from the conference chairs, may . https://transactions.ismir.net born: diversifying mir i wrote this article (in late august ) as the protests erupted in kenosha, wisconsin, over the shooting of jacob blake by a police officer, one of a series of acts of police violence in the usa that inflamed the black lives matter movement. the paper that set this controversy in motion was written by dr. philip a. ewell, originally a plenary talk at the society for music theory meeting: https://mtosmt. org/issues/mto. . . /mto. . . .ewell.html. for a journalistic account of what ensued, see: https:// w w w. i n s i d e h i g h e r e d . c o m / n e w s / / / / m u s i c - t h e o r y - j o u r n a l - c r i t i c i z e d - s y m p o s i u m - supposed-white-supremacist-theorist. on the history of responses to lomax’s cantometrics, see savage ( ). the acronym faang stands for facebook, apple, amazon, netflix and google. on quetelet, tarde and their relationship in relation to the history of criminology, see beirne ( ). on ‘social physics’ in quetelet and pentland, and the connections between them, see adolf and stehr ( ). see the data and society institute (https://datasociety. net), ai now institute (https://ainowinstitute.org), and a institute (https:// ainstitute.cecs.anu.edu.au). acknowledgements i am grateful for dialogues with bob l. t. sturm, fernando diaz and others from the ‘ai, recommendation, and the curation of culture’ workshop in paris, october , notably jeremy morris and ashton anderson. i am also grateful to emilia gómez for conversations, information and for inviting me, with cynthia liem, to give a keynote at the th ismir conference. my thanks, finally, to andrew barry and kyle devine, with whom many of these thoughts were incubated. competing interests the author has no competing interests to declare. references adolf, m., & stehr, n. 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( ). diversifying mir: knowledge and real-world challenges, and new interdisciplinary futures. transactions of the international society for music information retrieval, ( ), pp. – . doi: https://doi.org/ . / tismir. submitted: march accepted: september published: october copyright: © the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (cc-by . ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. transactions of the international society for music information retrieval is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by ubiquity press. open access https://doi.org/ . /j.respol. . . https://doi.org/ . /j.respol. . . https://doi.org/ . / - https://doi.org/ . / - https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . /cje/ben https://doi.org/ . /tismir. https://doi.org/ . /tismir. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / 	 . introduction 	 . mir and diversity: critiques from within 	 . messages from vermeer 	 . addressing mir from the outside 	 . four interrelated dimensions of diversity 	 . the social diversity of mir as a profession and its consequences 	 . mir and musical diversity: whose music, which music? 	 . musical diversity and mir’s epistemological and ontological assumptions 	 . diversifying the real-world masters/mistresses that mir serves 	 . conclusions 	notes 	acknowledgements 	competing interests 	references 	figure 	figure () this is an open access document downloaded from orca, cardiff university's institutional repository: http://orca.cf.ac.uk/ / this is the author’s version of a work that was submitted to / accepted for publication. citation for final published version: karatzogianni, athina, miazhevich, galina and denisova, anastasia . a comparative cyberconflict analysis of digital activism across post-soviet countries. comparative sociology ( ) , pp. - . . / - file publishers page: http://dx.doi.org/ . / - <http://dx.doi.org/ . / - > please note: changes made as a result of publishing processes such as copy-editing, formatting and page numbers may not be reflected in this version. for the definitive version of this publication, please refer to the published source. you are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite this paper. this version is being made available in accordance with publisher policies. see http://orca.cf.ac.uk/policies.html for usage policies. copyright and moral rights for publications made available in orca are retained by the copyright holders. a comparative cyberconflict analysis of digital activism across post-soviet countries athina karatzogianni university of leicester, uk athina.k@le.ac.uk galina miazhevich university of leicester, uk gm @leicester.ac.uk anastasia denisova university of westminster, uk a.denisova @westminster.ac.uk abstract it is more common for digital activism scholarship to focus on a political event, movement or organization, or the use of information communication technologies (icts) in a single country, case study or incident, rather than utilizing a comparative politics and sociology approach across several countries. this article analyses digital activism comparatively in relation to three post-soviet regions: russian/anti-russian during crimea and online political deliberation in belarus, in juxtaposition to estonia’s digital governance approach. we show that in resistant civil societies in russia, ukraine and belarus, cultural forms of digital activism, such as internet memes, thrive and produce and reproduce effective forms of political deliberation. in contrast to estonia, which tops the internet freedom table and is innovating in digital governance with the e-residency program, in authoritarian regimes actual massive mobilization and protest is forbidden, or is severely punished with activists imprisoned, persecuted or murdered by the state. this is consistent with use of cultural forms of digital activism in countries where protest is illegal and political deliberation is restricted in government-controlled or oligarchic media. humorous political commentary might be tolerated online to avoid mobilization and decompress dissent and resistance, yet remaining strictly within censorship and surveillance apparatuses. our research affirms the potential of internet memes in addressing apolitical crowds, infiltrating casual conversations and providing symbolic manifestation to the burning resistant debates. yet on the other hand, the virtuality of the protest undermines its consistency and impact on the offline political deliberation. without knowing each other beyond the social media debates, the participants are unlikely to form robust organisational structures and mobilise for activism offline. keywords comparative digital activism – russia – crimea – belarus – estonia – internet memes – digital governance – resistance introduction scholarship on issues surrounding digital activism is booming. over the past twenty years there has been extensive work on surveillance and censorship issues (morozov ; fuchs et al. ; bauman and lyon ); the impact of icts on the ideology, organization, mobilization and structures of new socio- political formations (mccaughey and ayers ; van de donk et al. ); the role of digital networked everyday media in supporting social movements and protest groups around the globe (karatzogianni ; dahlberg and siapera ; castells ); and the influence of non-state actors in deliberating in the digital public sphere the ethics and rights in all levels of governance, connecting with important issues such as migration, the environment, the rights of cultural and other minorities (zuckerman ; karatzogianni et al. ; gerbaudo ). there is, however, limited systematic comparative sociopolitical research in the digital networks and communication domain. in particular, there is little work which not only directly addresses digital activism, cyberconflict, and questions of digital governance and resistance, such as censorship, surveillance and cybersecurity, but also provides comparative perspectives on media industries, political institutions, and socio-cultural processes, across regions, countries, and continents. this article offers a limited glimpse of such an undertaking. it advocates that a comparative cyberconflict approach could offer new insights into the interaction between different types of regimes and the corresponding resistances they confront, intersecting with the political economy of digital everyday-networked media and its material influence on the political cultural systems across different geographical regions. the transnational character of digital media does not forbid a comparative digital activism approach across countries. on the contrary, a broader comparative sociopolitical and cultural approach into the study of digital activism is long overdue. current efforts by scholars in this area of initiating permanent observatories, in national and regional terms, points still to the relevance of nation states and their influence in policy making and regulation of digital spaces, despite the globalizing nature of the technology. in fact, in the past five years in particular, states and corporations have been competing and blaming each other for conflicts and tensions relating to issues of privacy, cyber-security, intelligence and data protection of citizens and consumers alike. civil society actors in turn, often times funded by governments and corporations, find themselves in the position of defending civil and human rights, fighting censorship, surveillance and state prosecution of dissidents, activists, artists, investigative journalists, and whistleblowers, such as edward snowden, chelsea manning, julian assange, ai wei wei, glenn greenwald, laura poitras, amy goodman, and other less prominent individuals, groups and populations, which are striving for liberalization, democratization, transparency, freedom of information, and the protection of digital as human rights. state secrecy privilege, attempted extradition and national legal jurisdictions have often been at the center of these combative exchanges. this article is co-authored by three scholars researching particular themes and regions using diverse research techniques ranging from semiotics, digital ethnography and in-depth interviews. methodologically, we utilize a two-fold strategy which combines cyberconflict analysis with comparative political sociology. in mid-level theory terms, cyberconflict theory (karatzogianni ; ) initiates a comparative examination of digital activist networks in belarus and the crimea during the ukraine-russia conflict in juxtaposition to estonia. cyberconflict integrates social movement, digital media network theory in conjunction with international conflict analysis to examine the following elements: a. historical, socio-political, economic and digital environment; b. mapping the levels of mobilization in each country and ideological orders of dissent against which socio-political code, within what labor process, with which type of agency and social logic; c. the impact of icts on mobilizing structures, framing processes and the political opportunity structure within each country environment d. the ethnoreligious and cultural elements produced and reproduced in digital networks; e. the control of information, surveillance, censorship, political discourse dominance, and digital effects on policy. the second broader theoretical strategy is drawing the cyberconflict frame into dialogue with rezaev et al. ( ) and their marxian materialist interpretation. the purpose of this is to compare agency, processes and structures of digital activism in the three countries, following broader lines of inquiry within comparative political sociology research. going beyond the necessary injection of marx into internet studies (fuchs and dyer-witheford and subsequent contributions of fuchs in this area), we follow the argumentation by rezaev et al.: “the materialist interpretation of history does not postulate determinism of the ‘economic’, but rather asserts that the social relations have their own causal importance structuring the entire human life process” (rezaev et al. : ). furthermore, digital cultural economies (garnham [ ]; matthews ) form the material cultural structures within which digital activism thrives and produces and reproduces itself, especially under authoritarian regimes where actual massive mobilization and protest is forbidden, or is severely punished with activists imprisoned, persecuted or murdered by regimes. the digital cultural terrain is therefore, where we turn to next. digital political culture and resistance publics over the last two decades, the development of new technologies and virtual networks has led to the emergence of new types of mediated interaction between individuals. in the internet-enabled ‘participatory culture’ (jenkins ), any person with digital access can become a user and producer of media at the same time. bruns ( ) calls this new practice “produsage”, a portmanteau of “production” and “usage” that implies that anyone can post a story, share a story or become a media of his own by sharing personal information and updates online. participatory culture has transformed the ways people talk and coordinate for civil and political causes, circulate cultural products and interact on a personal and social level (o’reilly ; szilvasi ). yet digital space is not inherently democratic: intellectuals often dominate the production of authentic ideas and viewpoints (scholz ; chomsky ). jenkins ( ), scholz ( ) and chomsky ( ) argue that social media and participatory culture may equally promote or limit democracy, depending on a variety of factors. the more resourceful actors such as large institutions and corporations possess more influence over the discourse than individual users. moreover, their own public relations elements have undergone a generation shift in the last decade, rendering them more comfortable in a demassified media environment (morozov ). despite these challenges, new digital communication formats, such as self-expression and discussions on social media networks, have become an important tool for political talk and protest mobilizations (bennett ). the online political communicators can use different kinds of framing and styles of language to attract the previously passive and disengaged users (garrett, ). van laer ( : ) applies the term “political socialization” to describe the online political discussion that users accidentally fall into – it may start as mundane talk in a digital network, transform into a political debate and then result in further political mobilization and action in the offline realm. social media networks thrive on open communication, and the ability to follow or to broadcast to an array of communities at any given time. zuckerman’s ( ) theory of “latent capacity” (or the “cute cat theory” of political activism) is valuable for this research: even those users who are normally neither interested nor involved in politics can receive political information and ideas when they browse the newsfeed produced by their network of friends. these politically disengaged users may notice the political memes and other light versions of political information, shared by their contacts. should an issue arise that appeals to a politically passive person and incites them to raise their voice, he or she is already equipped with the audience of networked “friends” to share the political content with. people may suddenly “use their online presence” (zuckerman ) for political purposes and join the pre-existing dissent communities. accordingly, as li ( ) notes, even casual conversations and gossip on social networks play the role of a subtle digital adhesive that assists in building trust among the members of the conversation. popular social media networks advance the personalized self-expression online: people tweet or post images and text under their names and pseudonyms; they do not need to belong to a forum, a community or any group to benefit from the visibility and feedback of the others (estevesand meikle ; meikle, ). the development of digital media has contributed to the increasing power of emotions and storytelling in contemporary dissent practices (karatzogianni ; papacharissi ; theocharis ). interactive social media amplify the tradition of storytelling and “invite people to feel their own place in current events, developing news stories, and various forms of civic mobilisation” (papacharissi : ). karatzogianni ( : ) has suggested that “affective structures mediate between the actual and the digital virtual”; they create a new realm of engagement and of experiencing the pro- test. participants of digital mobilizations construct and promote “virtualities” of hope, freedom, aspiration, fear and hatred (karatzogianni : ). social media users can connect, respond and further shape these virtualities and digital narratives: they can supplement their own subjective interpretations and express their endorsement or disagreement with the suggested stories (papacharissi ). clearly, the rise of digital social media has boosted the capacity of individuals to express themselves online and become noticed by the others. theocharis ( : - ) asserts that what we understand by “political participation” has significantly changed in the era of digital media. any manifestation of one’s political views, persuasion of others and politicized artistic contributions to the digital sphere (memes, tweets, jokes and other casual conduits of communication) can qualify as the practices of political participation. the act of “mobilization”, therefore, can be defined as the deliberate activation of social networks to diffuse political information and influence the opinions of others (theocharis, : ); it does not call for offline action of establishment of organizations or structures. networked political participation constitutes the alternative logic of political engagement, when online, individualistic motives and modes of expression prevail over collective ones. instead of brokering differences between formal groups and organizations, negotiating collective identity frames, individuals now co-operate and share personalized frames and expressions of individual ideas, opinions and creativity (bennett and segerberg ). the internet provides numerous platforms and networked communities that facilitate the rapid articulation of political views and beliefs to individuals and groups. bennett and segerberg ( ) note the change of discourse in political discussions and mobilizations. they use the open occupy mobilization as an example of a shift of narrative, where the conventional “who we are” discourse of classic political communities was replaced by personalized frames. however, in order for these frames to acquire attention amid the multitude of other individual frames, collective processes are required. bennett and segerberg ( ) offer the idea of “connective action” as the contemporary substitute for collective action in protest mobilization. by connective action, they refer to political mobilizations that do not require established leaders and organizations, but aggregation of users who self-organize via digital platforms. however, they note that in most current mobilizations, both types of action are present in hybrid ways. from a different perspective, social media users not only emotionally engage with the political discourse, but also often deliberately utilize social networks to change the public opinion or popular ideas. they seek to fill the gap left by the mainstream media and disrupt the hegemonic ideology, pro- vide alternative perspective and articulate nonconventional issues (lievrouw ; lasn ). four main characteristics define alternative media: “the use of medium as content, the rejection of ideology, the merging of politics and art, and appreciation of the ability of digital information to directly make things happen” (braman , cited in lievrouw : ). following lievrouw ( ) and atton ( ), we view artful political communication as alternative activist media; their accounts serve as participatory, non-commercial liberating channels and practices that unite political content, social responsibility and artful expression. atton calls these alternative new media “actions in their own right”, rather than a platform for broadcasting about “real” actions (atton : ; see also raley : - ). in the last decade, politically active users in different countries have exploited the internet memes for deliberation (li ; pearce ; bennett and segerberg ). internet memes are the viral units of digital communication that flourish on user adjustment and replication (see knobel and lankshear ; shifman ). media and communication scholars assessed memes as the folklore and casual language of the digital crowds (milner ; esteves and meikle ), aesthetic artifacts of electronic communication (goriunova ) and strategic discursive weapons of political activists (metahaven ; li, ), among others. according to the latest group of thinkers, politically active citizens exploit memes as the “mindbombs”, or symbolic texts with condensed ideas and ample connotations, that help to attract attention to the political issues, suggest alternative interpretations to the news and encourage debates among users (see shifman ; zuckerman ). these metaphoric codes have proved to be an effective way to escape government surveillance, yet still inform other users of alternative viewpoints and spread a more critical perspective. in the following section, we examine the use of internet memes, imagery and humor in russian/ukraine digital activism over crimea and also belarus to provide empirical evidence and engage in a comparative analysis between these and the digital environment in estonia, which is chosen here to illustrate the importance of regime type in explaining how activism occurs in digital political culture. crimea and belarus: the intersection of historical, political and digital conflicts crimea the russian media environment of the s has become a turbulent space for the deliberation of alternative political discourses. the government has been promoting its agenda through a variety of national broadcasting, radio, press and internet outlets; the level of indoctrination significantly increased by the mid- s (kachkaeva ). by this time, the state had successfully shut down or curbed the influence of leading independent media that used to hold the elites to account. liberal publics have largely relocated to social networks and various internet media as the nonconventional sources of information, opinion and political ideas (yuhas ). due to the lack of established independent media, many resistant russian citizens have exploited social networks to criticise the kremlin. resistant microbloggers have actively employed satirical means of expression, such as ironic tweets, parody and internet memes (bugorkova ). internet memes are viral texts that proliferate on mutation and replication. they often contain a humorous ambiguous joke that calls for the user’s awareness of the broader context for interpretation (knobel and lankshear ; shifman ; meikle ). russian social media users utilised memes to suggest non-hegemonic ideas around the inner motives of the russian elites, to oppose the misrepresentation of facts by hegemonic media and absence of opportunities for dissent (bugorkova ; yuhas ). the proliferation of these viral digital artefacts prompted us to examine internet memes as innovative practices of political activism and communication of the state supporters and resistant publics in russia. the crisis started in february , when russia intervened in the domestic conflict in ukraine and facilitated the independence referendum in the ukrainian peninsula of crimea, known for its russian- speaking majority. russia incorporated the peninsula into its territory in march , prompting harsh international criticism and domestic debates in russia over the legitimacy of this move. during the crimean episode, social media users were actively discussing the legitimacy of kremlin’s actions, commented on the instances of state propaganda and encouraged criticism of the elites. since , internet memes have gained a reputation as the in-jokes of digitally perceptive users: the main opposition politician alexey navalny has been constantly using memes in his twitter, blog and standalone website (bugorkova, ; rothrock, ). many meme sharers from our sample agreed that this was a smart rhetorical strategy: independent liberal users enjoyed memes as the celebration of informal internet communication. from this perspective, the exploitation of memes by liberal users enhanced the role of memes as discursive weapons and ‘mindbombs’. in the russian political environment, interviewees suggested, satire and memes can be meaningful and precious in offering “a specific lens that can often convey the essence of a political event much sharper than ten highly intellectual newspaper columns” (a. kovalev, personal communication, june ). in political discussion on russian twitter, dissent users employed memes as symbolic manifestations of protest discourse that operated the language of the internet crowds and appealed to other dwellers of digital networks. curiously, during the - anti-government protests in russia, many memes from the facebook resistant groups, transferred to the offline posters of the activists in moscow and st petersburg. this example shows that, when figure an example of the internet meme that compares vladimir putin and barack obama to the characters of rocky iv ( ). retrieved from twitter, the public gatherings were allowed, the activists were inclined to connect the virtual space with offline mobilization. however, once the harsh fines and possibility of a prison sentence were enforced in russian against any political protest exceeding six people (malgin ), the offline protest public ceased attending rallies. accordingly, the memes stopped appearing in the protest demonstration. nonetheless, memes still sometimes appear in the offline realm in anti-corruption cases. politicians and their communication professionals utilize the language and visual format of memes to address their potential electorate. alexey navalny, who has been promoting the exploitation of memes in his blogging and microblogging, still employs memes for his political campaigning, including posters and leaflets (navalny ). his efforts are for the moment among the very few examples of the memes’ fluidity between the electronic and material spaces. memes are not limited to the liberal and resistant users. interviewees pointed out that familiarity with the logic and formats of communication in social networks may signify tendency towards independent thinking yet does not serve as an objective steady identifier of dissent users, (@kermlinrussia july ; @fake_midrf september ). furthermore, the pro- government public also employs digital networks; half of the country is registered on and frequently logs in to social media ( % of russians and % of muscovites (volkov and goncharov )). however, these users are more likely to spend their time on major domestic networks, such as odnoklassniki and vkontakte, which are mostly in russian and unite people of various ages and backgrounds, with a significant number of middle-aged and senior users (volkov and goncharov ). facebook, twitter and instagram are considered figure an example of the internet meme that compares vladimir putin to gollum from the lord of the rings ( ). retrieved from twitter, trendier among the citizens of large cities with the ability to post in english and share links in different languages. liberal meme makers from our sample (see, for instance, @kermlinrussia july ) complained that the majority of the country’s population is online yet prefers other realms than those with progressive views. from this perspective, communication in social networks and digital literacy are not reserved to the liberal users. pro-government users also share memes and post them to various networks, from odnoklassniki to twitter. therefore, there is not enough evidence to claim that meme literacy is the identifier of the politically active and digitally perceptive user. instead, memes are the casual format of expression, contemporary lingua franca of the internet crowds, which people with various political standpoints can exploit to their liking. yet liberal meme makers pointed to a specific feature of memes that helps to employ them in liberal communication and building trust among disperse critical users. one of the popular liberal media lenta.ru largely exploited internet memes in their twitter channel in - . this style of communication enabled journalists to oppose the verbose formal narrative of traditional media and promote relationship that is more personal with their social media followers. through jokey tweets and memes, this popular liberal news website appeared as a “warm” media that consisted of people with emotions, sympathies and opinions, rather than a distant, cold information outlet (belkin june ). this finding suggests that dissent users may attribute more value to communication via memes than pro-government crowds may. for the resistant social media users, networking platforms and memes are among the few remaining conduits of free expression and deliberation of ideas, which makes every element of them more precious. overall, the analysis of the crimean memes and interviews with the prominent russian resistant meme sharers has demonstrated that the role of memes as discursive weapons is constantly evolving. the challenges of the authoritarian environment placed increasing pressure both on traditional and new media. nonetheless, they encourage the liberal accounts to sustain alternative discourse by all available means. social network spaces are becoming the ultimate sources of uninhibited data and commentary. although many liberal users perceive memes as pleasurable additions to the meaningful textual discourse, they nonetheless affirm their potential in addressing apolitical crowds, infiltrating casual conversations and providing symbolic manifestation to the burning resistant debates. on the one hand, it suggests studying their online personas as independent actors of communication. yet on the other hand, the virtuality of the protest undermines its consistency and impact on the offline political deliberation. without knowing each other beyond the social media debates, the participants are unlikely to form robust organisational structures and mobilise for activism offline. belarus belarus became an independent country after the fall of the ussr in . formerly a western periphery of the russian imperial state and then the soviet union, belarus is now a buffer zone between the eu and russia. it is an authoritarian state governed by president a. lukashenko since (rice-oxley ). belarus remains closely ideologically linked to its soviet past and is frequently referred to as the “last soviet republic” (parker ). belarus has two official languages – russian and belarusian. majority of the population ( % of the . million people in belarus) uses russian language (population census ). in common with other former soviet union republics, state control over traditional media and media self-censorship is pervasive in belarus (rice-oxley ). the establishment tends to use strict libel legislation and unrelated laws (e.g. on hooliganism) frequently to maintain a “tight rein on information” (aliaksandrau ). freedom house ranks belarus as rd out countries, having a “not free status” as it lacks freedom of speech and press. additionally to control over traditional media there are restrictions on what online content can be accessed (freedom house, ). a particular path of new media development and lack of theorisation of new media potential for digital activism in belarus makes this inquiry particularly timely. the belarus media landscape – previously dominated by relatively low internet penetration and high cost of internet usage – is changing rapidly, as the internet becomes more accessible and affordable (especially) via mobile devices. the speed of internet take up places belarus in one of the top countries in the world; broadband use has increased from % in to almost % in (aliaksandrau ). in , approximately half of the population of belarus used the internet ( %) and mobile phone web-connectivity is on the rise. % of belarus’s urban population accesses the internet via a mobile phone or smartphone. the g standard is becoming more affordable (pet’ko, ), as the mobile internet providers compete for a market share. the internet users are predominantly young ( % of the online audience are between and ) and well-educated – nearly % have higher degree (aliaksandrau ). the most popular social platform is russian-language vkontakte followed by odnoklassniki. while cyber-optimists perceive online platforms as (almost) the only avail- able public space to exercise local governance in emerging democracies, there are various obstacles counteracting the process of democratization in belarus. as the case of post-soviet belarus demonstrates, new media ecologies play out differently in such a socio-political environment. despite several successful online public initiatives to date, such as a protest after the unfair use of force by traffic police as discussed by lobodenko and kozlik ( ), the new media interventions remain mostly sporadic one-off localised initiatives. a number of factors nested in the post-soviet communication ecologies can explain this. in order to clarify this, one needs to look into a so-called “virtual democracies” phenomenon (wilson ) or a lack of well-established and functioning vertical structure of credible institutions in the post-soviet region. as a result, an essentially horizontal communication network galvanized by the rise of the internet frequently stays at the level of predominantly online (rather than offline) civic initiatives. the fall of the communism and irregular transition to a new ideological system resulted in misunderstanding of the notion of democracy, its principles and values. for instance, semetko and krasnoboka ( : ) state that “while democratic principles, norms and procedures may be admired, the political party, a primary institutional feature of established democracies, is not”. belarusians “mostly trust public organizations supported by the state believe that civil society is controlled by the former [and] do not see civil society as an intermediary between them and the state” (brel ). the weak civic society translate into passivity and a narrow set of issues of public concern (artsiomenka ). the weak civil society manifests online as a pronounced self-censorship, fear and mistrust (herasimenka ). fossato et al. ( ) states that russian state officials contact the individuals often and pressured to con- form to “rules”. in the case of belarus – a relatively small country – the self- censorship stems from the fact that “anonymity” of online activists can be even easily uncovered and their identity/location is traced. this is an opinion disclosed to us in a confidential interview by one of the prominent belarusian independent political analysts in . it exerts a pronounced impact on online civic engagement among belarusian digital activists based in the country. overall, the patterns of internet usage mimic the importance of informal offline networks. online users and groups tend to seek advice via established informal networks and to engage in discussions within confined online circles (fossato et al. ). a related dilemma to the democratising potential of the internet is its regulation. similarly to other post-soviet states, belarus adopted stringent legislation preserving centralised access and expanding the surveillance powers. the sorm ict monitoring system used in russia is also employed in belarus (freedom house report : ). together with to the first generation of control mechanisms (e.g. surveillance of internet cafes and filtering), the state uses the second generation of control – a legal and normative environment to block access to information or (deibert and rohozinski ). in fact, a regulation presupposed a “compulsory registration of all websites and the collection of personal data in belarus” (edri- gram ). the “active surveillance and data mining” (deibert and rohozinski : ) is combined with the state- sponsored dissemination of propaganda, misinformation and kompromat (compromising material) online. these features comprise more sophisticated third- generation control mechanisms. operating in parallel to these measures, there are some other more “subversive” tactics involving promotion of stability and affordable entertainment, such as access to the latest films online. in addition to the infotainment tactic (miazhevich ), cyberspace can be used for managing dissent. by monitoring online space for a public dissent, the establishment ensures early control over key dissenters/issues and encourage “slacktivism”, a feel-good online activism that has zero political or social impact (morozov ). nevertheless, subversive tactics online can be employed by various actors. similar to the crimean incident, also in belarus, internet memes have become one of the wider spread non-hegemonic tactics due to the ease and relative safety of their production and dissemination. the circulation of these online grassroots satirical images explicates the difficulties involved in controlling information flows online. this is partially due to the impossibility of exerting control over “multiple” readings of the satirical messages. three examples below contextualize challenges to authoritarian governments seeking to maintain control over media output and reception. figure an example of the internet meme that uses a rammstein album cover. posted on lipkovich’s blog, (http://lipkovichea.livejournal.com/) figure is the altered image of the band rammstein from kerrang magazine. this version has the blogger lipkovich, who published the item in question, on the far right with a black censure tape across his eyes. on the far left of the photo we can see a superimposed images of the head of the union of writers, m. charhinets. access to the blog was temporarily blocked and he faced criminal charges for desecrating a flag, which were later dropped. one of the motives behind the prank stemmed from the fact that charhinets, as the head of public morality council, considered banning rammstein’s performance in minsk (khvoin ). figure has three layers of satirical meaning to it. the first one refers to these three militiamen (police officers) who were photographed chasing after a car in the capital of belarus, minsk. this caption was used in a number of satirical images. here they are superimposed on a previously circulated image – a special unit chasing presumably an oppositional protestors after presidential elections (http://kaputmaher.livejournal.com/ .html). however, the text refers to an economic crisis in belarus, which happened afterwards. shortages of foreign currency and some of the food supplies (e.g. buckwheat) marked it. so the dialogue underneath is the following: an old woman coming out of the foreign exchange office: “my sons, do you have any foreign currency?” they reply to her: “no, mother, we are in a rush to get some buckwheat”. figure an example of the internet meme that plays on shortages of foreign currency and deficit of buckwheat in in belarus. http://kyky.org/life/istoriya-belorusskoy-valyutnoy-fotozhaby figure an ironical illustration of how belarus supports russia after the russian food embargo of certain western foods. belarusdigest, (http://belarusdigest.com/cartoon/ cartoon-russia-bans-western-food-we-will-help- ) figure is one of the most recent examples of online satire: a reaction to a ban of western produce in russia. belarus became a grey importer of the banned products such as french cheese, norwegian salmon, polish apples, etc. presenting them as “produced in belarus”. thus, these grassroots satirical images explicate the subversive potential on online satire in a constrained post-soviet mediascape. the comparison to estonia so far, we have examined online satire and memes, demonstrating their strengths in providing a flexible and accessible way to challenge regimes and counter-hegemonic discourses on the one hand and their limitations in affecting the organization and mobilization of protest in authoritarian regimes on the other. estonia is juxtaposed here as a post-soviet state which differs significantly from the two regions explored, due to the stark different approach to digital governance, which in turn is influenced by the historical and political material processes within which it is produced. estonia represents a fascinating control case because of its rather different post-soviet trajectory. undertaking a much more radical shift in its conceptualization of the role of media and communications, it abandoned a public service ethos in favor of rapid market liberalization. thereafter, censorship in estonia and indeed across all the baltic states was largely self- regulation. some have argued that, within a relatively immature civic and media culture, estonia has developed a unique form of ‘reversed’ censorship in which we not only see a very liberal media, but also a deliberate media effort to limit the any suggestion that there might be limits placed on the new-found freedom of expression. this ideology of a free expression is in part an expression of the power of the media that have been hostile to external criticism (lauk and jufereva, ). one might also add that historians suspect that sovietization during the cold war was not as deep in estonia as that witnessed in places like belarus and the ukraine (kreegipuu and lauk, ). accordingly, the map of internet freedom by freedom house saw estonia ranking the highest in terms of internet freedom (transitions online november ). this is despite what is now a famous cyberconflict incident occurring in , when ethnic russians brought the internet down for a month in protest of a war statue memorial removal from the center of tallinn and the reaction of the estonian government asking nato to evoke article against russia (see karatzogianni, . in the same report, belarus, kyrgyzstan, and russia remained “not free”, as “increased access to user data and closer surveillance by authorities, as well as increased persecution of social media users were registered in all three countries, while russia also saw an increase in physical violence against social media users”. the freedom house report (freedom on the net : estonia) refers to estonia as “a model for free and open internet access as a development engine for society”. it refers to the country’s digital agenda , which outlines how both technological and organizational conditions will be developed to ensure that people will always know and be able to decide when, by whom, and for what purpose their personal data is being used in the public sector. the same agenda also launched an “e-residency” program to offer its secure and convenient online services to the citizens of other countries. services include digital authentication, digital signatures, encrypted transmission of documents and other electronic communications, and access to all estonian public and private sector online services. the stark contrast of the crimea and belarusian digital activism to estonia lies in the fact that the estonian government is riding the wave of demands for digital rights, and transparency, as they have become the country’s public, social and digital policy agenda. nevertheless, lorraine weekes ( ) explains in her ethnographic study of digital governance in estonia that the government embraces the neoliberal agenda of platformizing citizenship full stock and barrel by utilizing corporate rhetorical devices as well as cutting edge technological tools (i.e. blockchain-related innovations): even as e-residency’s main selling point is that the individualizing digital-identification service it offers is provided by a state, i.e. that people any- where in the world can be bureaucratically mediated by the government of estonia in a manner that has historically been available only to citizens and residents, the e-resident “subject position” that emerges in the elite dis- courses surrounding e-residency and the day-to-day work of the team is that of a consumer or user. in other words, the political dimensions of the state- citizen relationship are obscured or erased by the techno-legal infrastructure of e-residency. conclusion our analysis has revealed several issues regarding digital activism in the post- soviet sphere by displaying two examples within authoritarian regime structures and briefly juxtaposing this to a country, which has embraced digital democracy, transparent electronic governance and freedom of information to the full. the structural conditions, the materiality of government, digital, socio- economic and political infrastructures exert significant influence, not only on the level of internet freedom, but also directly define the type of digital activism occurring under diverse regimes. further, social media networks are not the causes of digital activism; they are expressive enablers for political participation and deliberation as in our case here. they may well accelerate mobilization, as they did during the “arab spring”. nevertheless, with neoliberal structural adjustment programs creating inequalities, food crises, youth unemployment and precarity, corruption and deep cleavages acting as the material conditions defining the social and political relations and resistances produced in that period (karatzogianni, ). they resulted in regime change, but not in a social revolution. in other cases, social media participation may act as substitute for actual mobilization depending on the regime type (for instance see research on chinese dissidents. ibid.). significantly, the geopolitical and international relations context is crucial, and in the post-soviet case here, it is influenced by the legacy of cold war rhetoric. for instance, the dc leaks of the summer revealed that soros through his open society foundation funded research on how the crimea crisis was perceived in the media of various countries, which accompanied revelations about soros also funding the black lives matter movement, and subsequent allegations that he similarly funded the anti-trump protests after the american election result in november . the dnc leaks, which are attributed by the obama administration to the russian state, is another example of the high importance of icts in current geopolitics. in that broader context, digital activism has become a fabric of everyday political life with diverse types, levels and ideological orders of dissent. whether online dissent will result in offline mobilization is not a question of technology only, but of digital governance embedded in offline structural material conditions (i.e. the military, policing, surveillance and security infrastructure). tech corporations control the digital environment and nation states which strive to embody and barricade digital space for profit in the former case and national security in the latter. the role of the state and capital, in backing non-profit platforms as providers of public service, making up what the state cannot provide and corporations can redeem as social responsibility tokens, is a red herring concealing the dismantling of local work forces into transnational online labor markets, which are unregulated in terms of liability, taxation, insurance and social protection. in this sense, digital activism in all its variations is a symptom of citizens demanding rights and social justice in societies dissenting against transnational capital and the neoliberal order, the local, regional and national elites serving this order. in the cases we examined comparatively here, the softer humorous internet memes and political commentary are tolerated as decompressors by authoritarian regimes, because they act as welcome alternatives to protest mobilizations, which have real potential for regime change. yet, by offering an outlet for political deliberation and dissent, these cultural forms of digital activism, materialize resistance bring the revolutionary virtual closer to its capacity to affect sociopolitical change. bibliography aliaksandrau, a. . “belarus: pulling the plug” (index on censorship). retrieved october (https://www.indexoncensorship.org/wp-content/uploads/ / / idx_belarus_eng_webres.pdf ). artsiomenka, a. . “(de)-consolidation 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and j. light. cambridge: mit press. s jed .. editorial: on moving and being moved   tania bruguera’s commission for the tate modern, london (october –february ) responds to the recent global migration crisis by offering visitors, and the local community, opportunities to engage with some of its data, imagery and effects. a central feature of the turbine hall installation is a heat-sensitive floor, which when touched or laid upon by visitors releases bodily imprints in ghostly grey. a portrait of yousef – killed while fleeing syria for london – materializes if enough bodies lie on the floor at the same time. surging from speakers along the back wall, kode’s (steve goodman) unnerving ,-watt electronic soundscape makes it difficult to get too comfortable in this deceptively frivolous playpen. the given title of the cuban artist’s piece is actually an ever-escalating figure that captures the number of recorded migrations the year prior to the artwork’s opening, and the number of deaths since the project began – at the time of writing, ,,. an updated figure is stamped on each visitor’s arm as we enter the crying room, a small space to the side of the main floor which is flooded with a tingly menthol compound that quickly leads to tears. the accompanying statement claims that the room is intended to provoke ‘forced empathy’, explained as bruguera’s attempt to counter apathy through emotional display. ‘crying together in public breaks down our social barriers and leads to a shared emotional encounter’, the text reads. bruguera’s installation invites us to engage with some of the sensorial and emotional effects of migration through movement – often subtle, sometimes coercive. but it also asks us to think about the relationship between different forms of movement, including migration processes, performed gestures, emotional responses and sociopolitical formations. can bodies playfully moving together in a gallery (or theatre) adequately summon or honour migration’s recent traumas? does a reflex physiological response expose or precipitate emotional conviction? might a physical action index a genuine political commitment, or contribute to – even inaugurate – a movement? during a time when the free and safe movement of people (and goods) is under threat, including along uk borders as it prepares to leave the european union, can performance help us to conceive or craft new lines of action and connection? the articles in this issue are all concerned with movement and its formal dimensions, sociopolitical underpinnings, emotional registers and cultural effects. of course, you could argue that all theatre is concerned with movement at some level, but the writings gathered here share an interest in the particularities of different movement forms and dynamics, across diverse theatre and performance practices and contexts. authors explore how the interactions of staged, mediated and worldly movement expand or remap our understandings of history, tradition and culture by theatre research international · vol.  | no.  | pp– © international federation for theatre research  · doi: . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core attending to the ways in which the effects of discrete and large-scale gestures ripple outwards, or are frustrated and fixed in place. one of the greatest obstacles to transnational movement, wendy brown argues, has been the construction of walls by nation states to assert sovereignty and confer a sense of ‘protection, containment and integration’. walls, for brown, represent a ‘theatricalized and particularized performance of sovereign power’, which can both assert and undermine state authority through their necessity or inadequacy. from trump’s ever-promised (ever-deferred) wall around mexico, to the deliberate fencing off of european countries to deter migration (e.g. austria, bulgaria, france, greece, hungary, macedonia, slovenia), to the as yet unsealed fate of the irish border post-brexit, it feels like we are living though a moment of significant geopolitical restructuring in which the threat of partition and isolation looms large. against this backdrop, rather ironically, some of us find ourselves more globally connected than before – as if walls and their clearing are caught in a perpetual dance. but some obstacles are easier to outmanoeuvre than others. in the past couple of years, for instance, we have witnessed how communication technologies can rapidly spread and amplify singular performative gestures to become the building blocks of larger global movements (e.g. me too or black lives matter, to name a couple). social media have been instrumental in this shift, and the first three articles in this issue address some of the ways they interact with live performance, extending or subverting its reach. but the barriers that contain and divide us are not just material entities, but also symbolic formations. for many of us, including the authors represented in this issue, theatre and performance hold hope for circumnavigating or dismantling cultural divides, through the movement of bodies and objects in ‘real’ and virtual space. we turn first to a field in which the mass choreographed actions of a site-specific performance usher participants back through time. in ‘remembering the finnish civil war: embodied empathy and fellman field’, hanna korsberg, laura-elina aho, iris chassany and sofia valtanen examine fellman field: a living monument to , people by kaisa salmi. the artwork took place in  in fellman park, lahti, finland, where in  thousands of civil war prisoners were held before being taken to a camp. the article argues that salmi used choreography on the site to produce ‘embodied empathy’, as part of an attempt to reckon with the impact of historical trauma on the present. unlike bruguera, however, the authors do not find empathy instantly achievable, but perceive it as a mode of bodily engagement to be practised over time and across different sites. they discern evidence for their claims in the performance event itself, but especially in the trail of testimony and discussion which was recorded on the event’s facebook page. with the olympics, movement isn’t just sport, but also theatre and politics on an international stage. physical training, display and competition are central to the olympic movement’s goal to ‘contribute to building a peaceful and better world by educating youth through sport practised in accordance with olympism and its values’. in ‘staging sochi : the soft power of geocultural politics in the olympic opening ceremony’, susan tenneriello exposes gaps between a movement’s global ideals and their more localized pursuance. tenneriello analyses how spectacle was used in the walsh editorial: on moving and being moved https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core  sochi winter olympics opening ceremony to warmly reimagine a new post-soviet russia for a world audience, mediated across television, news and social media. the opening ceremony, according to tenneriello, can be understood as the creative deployment of ‘soft power’, mobilized and moulded to project a progressive image of russia to the world – contrary to the reality of putin’s conservative regime. but even russia’s tightly engineered pr complex could not prevent stories of behind-the-scenes corruption and abuse filtering through social media and news, which offered an entirely different perspective on proceedings. matthew cohen’s article also attends to the ways in which social media are used to extend artistic communities and audiences, bypassing the limitations of physical geography. in ‘wayang in jaman now: reflexive traditionalization and local, national and global networks of javanese shadow puppet theatre’, cohen explores how social media platforms such as facebook and youtube are being used by traditional indonesian shadow puppet theatre to create new opportunities for international exposure, comment and debate. while wayang has historically been dependent upon the intricate handiwork of local puppeteers and spectators, cohen’s article charts how social media have enabled the art form to grow dispersed, global audiences. instead of heralding the end of traditional crafts, as some claim digital culture inevitably does, cohen argues that social media have been central to the mobility of the puppetry form. this issue also includes a dossier of writings on theatre and migration, which emerged from different working groups at iftr’s  conference in belgrade. these articles are largely intended to provide snapshots of research projects or processes in progress. each piece is concerned with how forms of movement and performance have been central to the sustenance of migrant communities and/or their diaspora. continuing with a concern for communication technologies, sabine kim’s ‘haitian vodou and migrating voices’ examines a development in haitian vodou in the s and s that saw migrants who fled to florida to escape the duvalier dictatorship communicate with relatives back home by ‘writing letters’. these were tape cassette recordings that allowed people to still participate in the ritual practices of home, thus sustaining vodou culture among the diaspora. in ‘maritime migrations: stewards of the african grove’, anita gonzalez considers how maritime performance in the nineteenth century provided an important scene for cultural dialogue and exchange for free and enslaved people, and supplies the backdrop to the establishment of the african grove in  – the first african american theatre company. ankush gupta’s ‘trans-lating hijra identity: performance culture as politics’ examines how the identity of south asia’s hijras (often translated as ‘eunuchs’ or ‘hermaphrodites’, which gupta critiques) is constituted through a locally situated performance culture, which resists imperial and contemporary western definitions of sexuality. with ‘performing public presence: african migrant women create uncomfortable conversations in london’, lesley delmenico describes her work with a group of london-based migrants, who have been fiercely stigmatized by their experience of migration and the tenor of current debate. delmenico’s article exposes the identity walsh editorial: on moving and being moved  https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core concerns that many of the female participants articulated, and the emotional and psychological impact of their experiences. the dossier also includes a collaboratively written article by members of iftr’s performance and disability working group. in ‘responding to per.art’s dis_sylphide: six voices from iftr’s performance and disability working group’ the authors analyse the serbian company per.art’s dis_sylphide, a dance performance including a disabled cast which featured as part of the belgrade programme, but which has also toured widely. reading the work from different critical standpoints, the article demonstrates how performance and modes of scholarly response can intervene in some of the rigid movement conventions and bodily ideals of the twentieth-century dance canon, as well as some of the difficulties and possibilities encountered by disabled scholars and artists in accessing theatre and performance. in ‘no manifesto’ (), yvonne rainer somewhat notoriously argued for a restrained dance aesthetic, by ending with the charge ‘no to moving or being moved’. rainer would later clarify that the manifesto itself was a gesture, intended to ‘clear the air at a particular cultural and historical moment’, and not a prescription for inert, affectless performance. indeed, reading these articles we are made aware not only of the relationship between bodily movement and forms of social and political (in) action, but also of the connection between movement and feeling. the word ‘emotion’ comes from the latin emovere, meaning ‘to move out, remove, agitate’. to feel, in light of this etymology, necessitates moving beyond ourselves, even if this shift often makes our individual selves more intensely felt. yet this feeling does not just move us outwards, but can also attach us to people and places. as sara ahmed reminds us, ‘what moves us, what makes us feel, is also that which holds us in place, or gives us a dwelling place’. for many of the articles in this issue, theatre is what moves us (in every sense), but also what holds us in place. this journal’s editorial board is not immune to such comings and goings, and in some instances, holding place. over the past three years i’ve had the pleasure to work with outgoing senior editor paul rae and assistant editor sarah balkin – often as fuzzy and sometimes freezing images skyping across time zones – and i thank them for all i have learned from our working together. how paul’s meticulous and imaginative editorship has enriched the journal will be self-evident to readers, but as i take over the role i am particularly grateful to have been exposed to his steadfast commitment to the often slow, delicate and complex collaborative work required for running an international journal with aims such as ours. i’m delighted to be joined by silvija jestrovic (university of warwick) as the new associate editor, and tanya dean (ulster university) as assistant editor. caoimhe mader mcguinness (kingston university) is our new senior books reviews editor, and europe and africa editor, and she will work with mary p. caulfield (farmingdale state), our americas editor, and charlene rajendran (national institute of education, singapore), our asia pacific editor, to publish book reviews across regions. marcus tan (national institute of education, singapore) assumes the new role of online content manager, and we will work together to enhance the journal’s digital provision in the coming months. walsh editorial: on moving and being moved https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core for most readers, the journal’s editorial board is a column of names silently guarding its inside cover. but in practice it is very involved in representing the journal, reviewing submissions or advising on decisions. we extend thanks to the outgoing cohort, and welcome new (and continuing) members: nobuko anan, susan bennett, elin diamond, david donkor, dirk gindt, katherine hennessey, lee hyunjung, andrés kalawski, peter marx, ameet parameswaran and paul rae. our editorial board includes members working in institutions in australia, canada, chile, germany, india, japan, kuwait, sweden and the usa, though no one’s expertise is confined to their country of work. during my tenure, my immediate and most daunting task is to maintain the high standards i’ve inherited. i also hope to expand the journal’s online provision with cambridge university press. it’s my wish, too, that readers will have the chance to discover more about underrepresented research emerging from iftr’s working groups, starting with this issue. from the next issue onwards, the book reviews section will take a dip into our archives to assess the longer-term impact on our field of texts already reviewed in the journal. although i write this editorial in october  as an eu resident – originally from ireland, now based in london – around the time this issue comes to print in march , the uk is at least scheduled to bob alone in newly unfamiliar seas. with these articles to hand, i take heart from the ways theatre and performance can move us into a deeper understanding of global history, tradition and culture, and of how, when faced with breaches and barriers, its gestures still hold the power to reorient and rebuild. notes  wendy brown, walled states, waning sovereignty (new york: zone books, ), p. .  ibid., p. .  ‘leading the olympic movement’, at www.olympic.org/the-ioc/leading-the-olympic-movement, accessed  october .  yvonne rainer, feelings are facts: a life (cambridge, ma: mit press, ), pp. –.  ibid., p. .  ‘emotion’, online etymology dictionary, at www.etymonline.com/word/emotion, accessed  october .  sara ahmed, the cultural politics of emotion (new york: routledge, ), p. . walsh editorial: on moving and being moved  https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at http://www.olympic.org/the-ioc/leading-the-olympic-movement http://www.etymonline.com/word/emotion https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core 	editorial: on moving and being moved 	notes sociology and anthropology ( ): - , http://www.hrpub.org doi: . /sa. . political discussion on social media and the public sphere sarah brenne independent based out of selcuk, turkey copyright© by authors, all rights reserved. authors agree that this article remains permanently open access under the terms of the creative commons attribution license . international license abstract the internet is both a remediation and a cause of the destabilization of participatory democracy. this paper argues that social media fails as a functional public sphere; nevertheless, social media encourages civic engagement in nuanced ways. social media imitates a structural public sphere; defined by jurgen habermas as an arena where citizens discuss public affairs. social media fails as a public sphere because continuous surveillance and examination undermine public opinion. instead social media succeeds through communicating political myths. ronald barthes defined political myths as cultural narratives that are encapsulated within an icon. in addition, using kendall walton’s theory on mimesis, it is argued that political discourse online is experienced as a game with the use of icons. previous research suggests a correlation between political discourse online and civic engagement offline; researchers continue to search for a causal relationship between political discourse on social media and attendance to civic engagement activities. in conclusion the culmination political myths, power, and mimesis drive social media users to participate in civic engagement activities. the black lives matter movement following the killing of michael brown in in ferguson, missouri is used as a case study. keywords social media, public sphere, civic engagement, political myths . introduction on november , there were , social media posts with #ferguson within five minutes following the announcement that there would be no indictment for ferguson police officer darren wilson in the shooting of unarmed african american teenager michael brown. this was a record breaking number of tweets concerning a single, hot-button topic [ ]. the shooting of michael brown raised concerns throughout united states about police use of excessive force directed at african american men. in the week leading up to the grand jury hearing over a million mentions of ferguson were made on social networking sites nationwide and worldwide [ ]. the story of michael brown became a rallying point for the black lives matter movement. racial inequality, expressed through police use of excessive force against african american men in the united states, became embodied in the hashtags #ferguson, #handsupdontshoot and #blacklivesmatter. protests for michael brown accounted for just over a third of the nearly one thousand demonstrations on racial inequality worldwide in one year from mid-july to mid- july [ ]. ongoing research suggests a correlation between social media and attendance to protests [ ], [ ]. the arab spring in tunisia and egypt in , turkey’s taksim square protests in istanbul in the summer of , and the nationwide protests on racial inequality in the united states; these events illustrate the increasing prevalence of social media use in political movements. there are a variety of social networking sites, each with the same function: to share information. friend based platforms, such as facebook, google+, linkedin, and tumblr, where communication circles are based off of individuals’ set of ‘friends’ or ‘followers.’ these sites are primarily used for sharing photos or personal blurbs with a hyper-enlarged group of peers, friends and family. twitter creates a news feed out of ‘tweets’- character blurbs, with the capability of linking to other sources. individuals choose to ‘follow’ the authors of tweets at which point they become a ‘follower.’ twitter is a common platform for organizing protests and sharing news clips [ ]. traditionally news sources work harmoniously with social networking sites. newspapers, television channels, and tabloids facilitate sharing news stories via social media with links and pre-scripted messages. the structure of social media as a platform for political discussion combines classic democratic values, such as the freedom of speech, with a new framework for political discussion. there has been on ongoing, academic debate since the s about the existence of a public sphere on the internet, including social media [ ]. the public sphere is a term coined by german philosopher and sociologist jurgen habermas in the s. habermas defined the public sphere as a theatre, distinct from the economy and the state, where political participation is acted through discourse [ ]. ideally, it is an arena for individuals to gather on an equal basis as a public to discuss issues relating to the common good. the sociology and anthropology ( ): - , public sphere is important for generating public opinion, which should not be influenced by the economy and which should influence government action. public spheres are theoretically necessary to assess the functionality of participatory democratic governments. the question has been: does political discussion on social media qualify social media as a viable public sphere? the answer is two-fold. first, the qualifiers of the public sphere have changed in order to illustrate how social media could be a public sphere [ ]. peter dahlgren, maria bakardjieva, and nick couldry argued that new definitions of civic engagement and the public sphere should be used to evaluate political discussion on social media. peter dahlgren suggests that citizens are social agents with specific cultural factors behind their agency; this is dahgren’s concept of what he termed “civic cultures” to propose an alternative perspective to the significance of political discourse online. dahlgren argues that meaning, identity, and subjectivity are important dimensions of online discussion, because they are essential attributes to political communication. therefore, the fundamental practice on social networking sites of interaction and discussion between citizens lies at the forefront of an evolving public sphere [ ]. maria bakardjieva argues that citizens use social media to make sense of political issues and that social media provides a platform for civic engagement activities in everyday life. bakardjieva argues that “subactivism,” or micro-communications, occur through everyday practices of citizenship on social networking sites [ ]. these actions include reposting an article, sharing an original thought or feeling about a political issue, “liking” or sharing something that someone else has posted. bakardjieva concludes that through participation on social networking sites, individuals will identify more with common values as well as the “common good.” finally, in a study by nick couldry et al., researchers recorded diary entries of social media participants and their involvement in civic engagement. he found that citizens feel they are engaged with a larger community when they contribute to an online community through social networking sites [ ]. with new parameters for civic engagement and political discourse, previous scholars have argued that social media is a new form of public sphere. social media does generate civic engagement; but does social media generate public opinion? while social media creates a structural platform for a public sphere, political discussion on social media is subject to forms of power that inhibit what habermas defined as public opinion. the commercialization of social media and a nuanced form of surveillance, on social media manufactures public opinion and creates a homogenous public. this second reading of political discourse on social media refutes the social media as a public sphere. social media mimics a public sphere in that it provides a platform for communicating ideas related to the public good; however it succeeds by communicating social narratives through icons [ ]. icons on social media are symbols with hashtags, images, or links to outside articles. these icons are not isolated; they represent narratives that provide significance to political circumstance. political myths on social media are often historical events that represent a larger social narrative. roland barthes, a french literary theorist and philosopher, created a framework for identifying myths in contemporary society [ ]. political myths have increased exposure on social media; political myths now have unprecedented opportunities to become pervasive [ ]. citizens interpret political myths and engage with them as though a game of make believe [ ]. engaging with political myths on social media encourages participation in civic engagement activities, such as attendance to black lives matter protests. kendall walton’s theories on mimesis and game theory create this vital link from political discourse on social media to participation in civic engagement activities offline. habermas’s model of the public sphere is useful to understand the structure of political discussion on social media [ ]. however, social media fails as a formal public sphere [ ]. instead, social media mimics the structure of a public sphere and succeeds in communicating political myths through icons. mimesis, identifies parallels between political discourse on social media to experiencing a play, a novel, or a film. therefore, political discussion on social media does directly influence civic engagement in political movements, though not through candid political discourse. . social media as a false public sphere: how political discussion on social media leads to protests public spheres are communicative spaces where information and ideas circulate; a public sphere is a space where private persons come together to discuss the common good and to formulate public opinion [ ]. three dimensions are fundamental to conceptualizing the public sphere in relation to online discussion [ ]. the first dimensions are the structural and representational features. this dimension focuses on classic democratic rights such as the freedom of speech and equal access to a public sphere. the representational dimension considers the output of symbols- phrases, signs, or images- and their communication. the third dimension of the public sphere is the interactional dimension. habermas argued that the public sphere should include discursive interactional processes. the interactional dimension is two-fold. citizens first encounter pieces of media, then there is the communicative process of interpreting the output; and second, citizens engage in discussion about the output between themselves. these three dimensions provide an analytical framework for examining the public sphere in relation to the internet and social media [ ]. social media formally has these three structural features. social media is a platform that allows equal accessibility. political discussion on social media and the public sphere social networking sites are free to use and to sign up for. furthermore, wifi hotspots and internet access through cell phones has made social media accessible. for example, during the tunisian uprising and the ensuing arab spring, around ninety percent of the population had access to social networking sites through either the internet or cell phones [ ]. social media also offers freedom of speech, furthermore providing an audience. the second dimension, the output of symbols, images or signs is the very foundation of social media; sites which are designed to share symbols. finally, social media users are able to encounter media, interpret the output, and engage in discussion instantaneously. while previous forms of communication were discussed in terms of “one to one,” personal communication, or “one to many,” which is typical of mass media. social media has attributes of both mass communication and personal interaction. this is integral to the interactional aspect of the public sphere that social media strongly supports [ ]. these three indications suggest that social media provides a framework that enables a public sphere. additionally, habermas emphasizes two criteria that allowed for the rise of the public sphere in the th and th centuries in continental europe. the first condition was the rise of the reading public. the bourgeoisie would meet in coffee houses to critically discuss literature [ ]. the rise of a reading public resulted in an array of popular literature critiquing the regimes of the th century [ ]. the second condition was the rise of private spheres, specifically freedom of religion and land ownership. the bourgeois public sphere that habermas uses as a model arose under these initial circumstances, but remains a common framework for assessing a functional deliberative democracy. can a new public sphere be reconstructed under different socio-economic, cultural and political conditions? and with the internet as a new medium? the structure of the public sphere and the conditions for the rise of a public sphere are parallel with the rise of political discussion on social media. it would appear that social media as a functional public sphere is based on geopolitical circumstance. under oppressive regimes with limited rights and censored news outlets, social media allows each citizen the equal access to a public sphere that is denied to them by their government. in the tunisian uprising and the ensuing arab spring around ninety percent of the population had access to social networking sites, if not through the internet then through their cell phones. in addition, women had the opportunity to engage in political discourse in countries where they had previously been discouraged from engaging in public debate [ ]. in junction with more access to social media is the rise of an informed and reading public. the internet has provided unlimited access to information and news. this parallels some of the ways in which continental europe excelled with a larger reading public. for instance, the underground book trade in pre-revolutionary france featured porn, fantasy, and slander which were often dismissed as being unrelated to the ensuing revolution and rise of a democratic government. however, the popular literature illustrated seeds of discontent in pre-revolutionary france and informed the public to alternatives [ ]. the circumstances for the rise of habermas’s public sphere in bourgeois coffee houses parallels the appearance of social media in providing a platform for debate among citizens, access to a winder body of knowledge, equal access to participation and freedom of speech. social media fails as a public sphere in habermas’s terms. habermas described the downfall of the public sphere as being connected to the mediatization of politics and the commercialization of the media [ ]. the mediatization of politics on social media creates a cynical public body [ ]. on social media, where everyone is their own media outlet, there is a cacophony of actors and mediators [ ]. instead of critical debate, participants share supporting articles with friends of the same opinions and different spheres form that rarely consider the opposing viewpoint. social media is a commercial platform. on facebook, for example, users’ news threads are interspersed with advertisements that have been cleverly crafted for each user using data that includes everything from age, relationship status, interests, messages, comments, likes, and browser history. social media is an extension of what habermas described as the reason for the downfall of the public sphere: the mediatization of politics and the commercialization of the media. habermas also argued that public opinion deteriorated as the public sphere became intertwined with the economy. when the bourgeoisie began to use the coffee shop for economic affairs the public sphere waned as an idyllic form of participatory democracy. social networking sites such as facebook or twitter have become platforms for advertisements and have been incorporated. creating an environment that does not allow for genuine political discourse. finally, habermas claimed that the public sphere became a platform for promoting consumer culture. social media is used to promote a consumer culture. psychologically social media drives users to promoting a style or brand of themselves and companies use this data to sell more products. furthermore, habermas argues that the public sphere became a utility for managing consensus and less a space for public information and for debate [ ]. social media has become a tool for managing consensus through continuous surveillance and examination, two terms defined by michel foucault. foucault’s panopticon thesis argues that surveillance is a mechanism of power. periodic yet unpredictable surveillance creates a conscious state of permanent visibility [ ]. in a conscious state of permanent visibility power functions automatically. the same utilitarian purposes are applied to social networking sites where the users’ profiles are structured to make differences visible and the participant is aware of constant surveillance [ ]. interestingly, social media has a phenomenon that distinguishes it from foucault’s panopticon. notably, surveillance operates on social networking sites through desired visibility and a threat of invisibility [ ] [ ]. social networking sites are designed such that visibility is perceived sociology and anthropology ( ): - , to be scarce and therefore desirable [ ]. social media is designed around sharing and receiving desired attention. surveillance and examination filter and reward discussion on social networking sites through the citizens’ desire for attention. therefore, social media operates not as a public sphere for candid political discussion, but instead social media operates as a platform that manages consensus through forms of power. using habermas’s models for both the rise of a public sphere and its decline, it is clear that social media fails as a functional public sphere. nevertheless, social media mimics a public sphere. social networking sites have two fundamental differences from the bourgeois coffee houses defined as the public sphere by habermas. the first is obvious: a coffee shop is a physical space while the internet is in virtual space. this has less obvious consequences. the most important is that on social media each person has the ability to be their own media outlet, as lee rainie and barry wellman argue in networked [ ]. the result is in the process between representation and interaction; social media users create media output as they consume the media themselves [ ]. therefore the communication process of the public sphere is no longer a linear or even circular transaction. this leads to the second key difference: the production of messages. stuart hall, a cultural theorist, proposed a circular stage theory to describe the way in which messages are produced, circulated, distributed, consumed, and reproduced through televised mass media [ ]. on social networking sites the stage theory is no longer circular; the production of messages is more of a convoluted web [ ]. therefore messages on social networking sites are produced, circulated and consumed simultaneously. social media is able to spread messages about a black lives matter protest faster than traditional news outlets. these differences influence the interactional dimension of the public sphere. citizens encounter and interpret news in real time and can engage in discussion immediately. social media produces messages or fragments that encourage civic engagement, especially in the form of protests or demonstrations. the use of images, icons, gifs and symbols make claims to truth on social media, defined as fragmentary references. fragmentary references refer to larger narratives, and as the references become more pervasive, the narratives become interpreted as claims to truth. social media has an unprecedented ability to spread fragmentary references. with an increase in messages as well as an increase of sources, fragmentary references have a greater likelihood to be interpreted in ways that are further from the messages intended meaning [ ]. therefore, the reliance on fragmentary references creates an unwieldy source for information. fragments refer to political myths, large social narratives. political myths are the continual production and reproduction of a common narrative used by citizens to ascribe significance to political circumstance [ ]. common narratives arise from historic events. the ‘myth’ is the narrative used to explain the event. in discussing myths there are no claims to truth or to fiction. the focus is on narratives that shape and reshape political discourse. hans blumenberg defined myths as the continual “work” on a narrative core [ ]. blumenberg argues that the work on myth arises out of the human need to ascribe significance to inexplicable circumstance. the production, reception, and reproduction of a narrative constitute the “work on myth.” myths become political as they reproduce significance and address political conditions [ ]. political myths are “worked on” through cumulative exposure to the work on them, through speeches, art, community gatherings, and social practices. myths are condensed into “icons,” which are interpreted by citizens as narratives that appear to be fixed or natural [ ]. all forms of media are a platform for the production, reproduction and reception of icons. icons are economical yet influential because they are small, but communicate narratives that create significance for citizens. political myths are not simply what we perceive about politics, but also the lenses through which we perceive politics. roland barthes, author of mythologies, a catalogue of modern day myths, defines myths as a meta-language adapted from saussure’s theory of linguistics. language is composed of a signifier and a signified which create a sign. a signifier is the word used to describe a thing, while the signified is the thing itself. therefore, language is a series of signs that denote reality. barthes uses this foundation to argue that with myths, the linguistic sign becomes the signifier plus a new signified, creating a new “meta” sign. the new sign conveys the myth. the language used on social media follows this framework. for example, the hashtag #handsupdontshoot was commonly used on social networking sites in relation to the death of michael brown. the signified, a young, unarmed, african american male shot by a white police officer; and the signifier, “hands up, don’t shoot,” create a sign. the sign is the excess use of force against african american males by police officers, a result of a long history of racial oppression. the fragmentary reference, “hands up, don’t shoot,” packs a history racial oppression from the foundation of the united states into seventeen characters. even after the court determined that brown’s hands were not above his head when officer wilson shot him, “hands up, don’t shoot” remained a rallying cry of a movement created to draw attention to racial inequality in the united states. therefore the fragmentary reference, one example of racial oppression, is able to communicate a narrative that is interpreted by the citizen in the form of a myth. political myths, spread through social media, are influential in the non-virtual sphere. despite these drawbacks, it is the interpretation of political myths that lead citizens who participate in political discussion on social media, a virtual platform, to physically attend civic engagement activities. how can a political myth create civic engagement in the form of protests such as the black lives matter movement? i argue that we experience political discussion on social media, in the form of political myths, in political discussion on social media and the public sphere the same way we experience fictional narratives, art or theatre, we are lead to participate in civic engagement activities. social media operates as a stage for communicating political myths, as opposed to a stage for candid political discussion, or a public sphere. using kendall walton’s theory on mimesis, i argue that political discussion on social networking sites can be re-conceptualized as an interactive game of make-believe to create the link between political discussion on social media and civic engagement [ ]. participants, spectators, props, and a stage create a virtual experience of art or fiction that can transfer emotions to “real life.” participants contribute to a political discussion through blogging, commenting, and sharing articles of relevance to the community or group. props can be anything from the articles that are linked through url’s to personal opinions shared in posts. spectators read into a discussion, in comment feeds or group discussions. more importantly, the participants are acting with the knowledge of being watched by faceless thousands. the stage is social networking sites, and the webs of communication that occur on these sites [ ]. the conventions governing the game are that participants must go along with the claims to truth. imagine a card game where players do not follow the rules: this removes both the fun of the game as well as its purpose. this is similar to how participants engage on social media; there are claims to truth, and in order to contribute to the discourse, one must acknowledge that previous participants have made legitimate claims to truth in order to rebuke or highlight those claims. mimesis explains how political discussions in the virtual sphere lead to large scale protests. #ferguson, #blacklivesmatter, and #handsupdontshoot do not embody the problem of racial discrimination in the united states. for instance, someone may tweet about an incident that incurs feelings of prejudice and include any one of these hashtags as a symbol for systemic racism nationwide. moreover, attendance to protests was rallied through social networking sites, indicating that participants and spectators of online discussion take the claims made through social media seriously [ ]. a specific example is of the two main organizers for the protests in ferguson following the grand jury hearing. together they reached over , followers. one of them tweeted: “we protest because we know that we will get killed if we are silent and the risks of speaking are worth it. we protest to live. #ferguson” [ ]. from #ferguson it is understood that there is another layer to his claim. it is understood that the “we” is the african american community; and the “we will get killed” is reference to the expression of racism in the united states where % of the victims of homicides are african american men, a minority that makes up % of the whole population [ ]. the hashtag, #ferguson, is emblematic for racial discrimination in the united states. therefore a reading of this tweet culminates a social narrative into a character text through an icon. similar to the how we watch a film or read a novel; one generates a mental experience in relation to the narrative purported by topics discussed on social media. walton argues that while we do not relive the emotions from the fictional world when we see a film or read a novel, we do experience a quasi-emotional overlapping of the depicted emotion [ ]. therefore, we use a dual consciousness to appreciate games of make believe: one that can go along with fictional worlds, and the other that generates our responses to the fictional world. for instance, if a father plays a monster with his child, the child recognizes that it is a game of make believe and appreciates their role of running away in mock fear. the child is experiencing the quasi-emotion of fear, but is also experiencing joy at the game [ ]. as individuals we find gratification in games of make-believe when the separate spheres of consciousness cooperate. this mental and internal experience is similar to engaging in or viewing political discourse on social networking sites. there is a quasi-overlapping of emotion through social networking sites. participants can appreciate games of make believe with an “avatar” that engages in political discourse on social networking sites. however, engaging in social media generates changes outside of the virtual world [ ]. this is exemplified with the turnout to protests that are in part inspired by the dispersion of information through social networking sites [ ] [ ], [ ]. racism in america is often ambiguous and often denied. political movements need narrative to make use of icons and signs in order to encourage political action [ ]. . conclusions social media does provide a formally equal platform, or a stage, for engaging in political discourse in accordance with the structural features of a habermasian public sphere. there are clear caveats to social media as a platform for candid political discussion. nevertheless, social media remains a popular platform for organizing political movements. i suggest that the impact of social media arises from the ability to spread icons that represent political myths. furthermore, that political myths and discourse on social media are experienced in accordance with how we experience fiction in art and theatre. i propose that this perspective could allow for citizens to recognize their participation in a game when engaging in political discourse online; this perspective would allow for participates to engage mindfully with social media and recognize that it is one minor tool for enacting political change. the ways in which we experience these myths is fundamental to political action movements such as black lives matter. i predict that political action similar to these movements will become closer to the norm. these movements create hyper-sensitivity to political problems for a brief amount of time although what is being communicated through social media references systemic problems. the alleviation of the political injustices that each of these movements have protested have not been successful. it is clear that social media works as a stage for political discourse, but the long term effects have not proven to be liberating. sociology and anthropology ( ): - , acknowledgements i am grateful to dr. olaf tas of amsterdam university college and dr. andre lambelet of quest university canada. references [ ] l. lohuis, “social media listening lab sees record posts on ferguson,” wyff , -nov- . [ ] a. robinson, “at least black lives matter demonstrations have been held in the last days.” elephrame, -jul- . [online]. available: https://elephr ame.com/textbook/protests. [accessed: -jul- ]. [ ] p. n. h. and a. d. and d. f. and m. h. and w. m. and m. mazaid, “opening closed regimes: what was the role of social media during the arab spring?” . [ ] j. tucker, “tweeting ferguson: how social media can (and cannot) facilitate protest,” the washington post, -nov- . [ ] p. dahlgren, “the internet, public spheres, and political communication: dispersion and deliberation,” political communication, vol. , no. , pp. – , apr. . [ ] j. habermas, the structural transformation of the public sphere. cambridge: the mit press, . [ ] n. fraser, “rethinking the public sphere: a contribution to the critique of actually existing democracy,” social text, no. / , pp. – , jan. . [ ] m. bakardjieva, “subactivism: lifeworld and politics in the age of the internet,” the information society, vol. , no. , pp. – , mar. . [ ] n. couldry, s. livingstone, and t. markham, “connection or disconnection? tracking the mediated public sphere in everyday life,” in media and public spheres, r. butsch, ed. basingstoke, uk: palgrave macmillan, , pp. – . [ ] r. barthes, mythologies. new york: hill and wang, . [ ] c. bottici and b. challand, “rethinking political myth the clash of civilizations as a self-fulfilling prophecy,” european journal of social theory, vol. , no. , pp. – , aug. . [ ] k. walton, mimesis as make-believe: on the foundations of the representational arts. cambridge, mass.: harvard university press, . [ ] m. foucault, discipline & punish: the birth of the prison. new york: random house, . [ ] r. darnton, the forbidden best-sellers of pre-revolutionary france. new york: norton and company, . [ ] b. olivier, “facebook, cyberspace, and identity,” psychology in society, no. , pp. – , jan. . [ ] t. bucher, “want to be on the top? algorithmic power and the threat of invisibility on facebook,” new media society, vol. , no. , pp. – , nov. . [ ] d. fletcher, “how facebook is redefining privacy,” time, -may- . [ ] l. rainie and b. wellman, networked: the new social operating system. cambridge: mit press, . [ ] s. hall, “encoding, decoding,” in the cultural studies reader, new york: routledge, . [ ] l. rainie, a. smith, k. l. schlozman, h. brady, and s. verba, “social media and political engagement,” pew research center’s internet & american life project, -oct- . [ ] j. ronson, “how one stupid tweet blew up justine sacco’s life,” the new york times, -feb- . [ ] h. blumenberg, work on myth. cambridge, mass.: mit press, . [ ] r. m. fillion, “how ferguson protesters use social media to organize,” -nov- . [ ] j. leovy, ghettoside: a true story of murder in america, reprint edition. spiegel & grau, . [ ] o. tans, “the imaginary foundation of legal systems - a mimetic perspective,” law and society review, pp. – , . [ ] “there have been black lives matter demonstrations in the last days.” elephrame. [online]. available: https://www.elephrame.com/textbook/protests. [accessed: -mar- ]. [ ] h. l. j. gates, the signifying monkey: a theory of african-american literary criticism. new york: oxford university press, . 	 . introduction 	 . social media as a false public sphere: how political discussion on social media leads to protests 	 . conclusions 	acknowledgements 	references .. racism in science we need to act now elife, like the rest of science, must tackle the many inequalities experienced by black scientists. michael b eisen i do not know how any white american like myself can respond to the murder of george floyd by police officers in minneapolis, min- nesota with anything but sadness, horror, and above all else, an abject sense of failure. we have, obviously, failed as a society when our social structures not only fail to prevent – but in many ways actively encourage – atrocities like this. and we have failed as individuals and organizations by not transforming the anger and sadness we felt after the deaths of breonna tay- lor, botham jean, stephon clark, philando cas- tile, freddie gray, tamir rice, michael brown, eric garner and many others into any kind of meaningful action. i know it matters to some people to hear people like me say the right things in response: that black lives matter; that racism is a malig- nancy; that we want science to be a safe and welcoming place for black scientists; and that we are all complicit when the power of the state is used to enforce a racist social structure by kill- ing black americans. i think and feel all of these things. but i also feel like a charlatan in saying them. because it is not the first, or the second, or the third time i have done so, and what do these words mean if they do not lead those say- ing them to do anything tangible in response? the disconnect between words and actions is everywhere, but as scientists we should be focusing a particularly harsh eye on our institu- tions and on our individual roles in supporting the systemic racism that pervades them. and i will start with myself. i like to think of myself as a progressive who has made a persistent effort to promote diversity in science. but of the grad- uate students and postdocs i have trained, none are black. i have volunteered in diversity efforts at my university and elsewhere, i have sat on diversity panels, and i have reviewed diversity fellowships. but none of the many faculty search committees that i have served on made an offer to a black candidate. one of the things that drew me to pursue the job as editor-in-chief at elife was the interest the organization had shown in promoting diver- sity in science. when i took over last year, i immediately began to address the lack of diver- sity on our editorial boards. you can judge the success of our efforts how you will, but we have unquestionably failed when it comes to race. the entire leadership team of elife is white. we have no senior editors who are black. and despite the rapid growth of our board of reviewing editors, very few are black. (see this blogpost for more details). so inured are we to the exclusion of black colleagues from the halls of science that many of us do not notice it at all, despite claiming to want racial justice. it is easy to make excuses – the legacy of his- toric racism is so strong that there are not a lot of senior black scientists to choose from, and those that have survived the gauntlet are in demand and overcommitted, and so on and so forth. but these excuses are lame. how can we think that scientists can figure out a way to cure covid, but not figure out a way to increase the number of black scientists and involve them as leaders in the field? the reality is this is a solv- able problem: we have just chosen not to solve it. it is impossible for elife to be true to our mission of encouraging and recognizing the most responsible behaviors in science without copyright eisen. this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license, which permits unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited. eisen. elife ; :e . doi: https://doi.org/ . /elife. of editorial https://elifesciences.org/about/people https://elifesciences.org/inside-elife/ d e /black-lives-matter-a-commitment-from-elife http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://doi.org/ . /elife. https://creativecommons.org/ https://creativecommons.org/ http://elifesciences.org/ http://elifesciences.org/ http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/open_access http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/open_access also becoming a model for dismantling white supremacy in science. we will begin by recruiting black scientists at all levels of the organization and empowering them in planning and decision making. but that is obviously not enough. there is ample evi- dence that the entire system of science evalua- tion of which elife is a part is structurally biased against black scientists, and that significant changes are required to fix it. where we can take tangible action now, we will: for example, we will ensure that our scope, policies and edito- rial board composition lead to fair consideration of work from fields with higher concentrations of black scientists (hoppe et al., ). and we will build on ongoing efforts to root out implicit bias in our peer review and editorial decision- making processes, working with experts on bias in science evaluation to identify additional areas where we are directly or indirectly biased against black scientists, and determine how best to respond. however there is the real possibility that a system built around dispensing limited markers of prestige is fundamentally incompatible with true fairness, and cannot be fixed by restructur- ing. this is one of the reasons i have long advo- cated scrapping the journal system and rebuilding science publishing from the ground up. but i am conscious that a lack of bias is not the default state in new systems, and that we must be eternally vigilant in making the elimina- tion of bias our top priority. it might seem weird to be talking about science publishing with people being murdered on the streets. but the deep and pervasive prob- lems in policing in the united states do not exist in isolation – they are product of the ongoing legacy of white supremacy that pervades all aspects of society – and science is no exception. we need direct and decisive action to end police violence targeted at black ameri- cans. but we also need to eliminate the societal structures that fuel and support it. i know that people will be skeptical about our willingness to deliver on these promises – and empirical evidence suggests they should be. none of these words matter if we fail to turn them into action. white scientists of the world, it really is time for us to put up or shut up. michael b eisen is the editor-in-chief of elife mbeisen@gmail.com https://orcid.org/ - - - x competing interests: the author declares that no competing interests exist. published june references hoppe ta, litovitz a, willis ka, meseroll ra, perkins mj, hutchins bi, davis af, lauer ms, valantine ha, anderson jm, santangelo gm. . topic choice contributes to the lower rate of nih awards to african- american/black scientists. science advances : eaaw . doi: https://doi.org/ . /sciadv. aaw , pmid: we will begin by recruiting black scientists at all levels of the organization. eisen. elife ; :e . doi: https://doi.org/ . /elife. of editorial racism in science we need to act now https://orcid.org/ - - - x https://doi.org/ . /sciadv.aaw https://doi.org/ . /sciadv.aaw http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ https://doi.org/ . /elife. wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ spatiotemporal patterns and driving factors on crime changing during black lives matter protests international journal of geo-information article spatiotemporal patterns and driving factors on crime changing during black lives matter protests zhiran zhang , , , dexuan sha , , beidi dong , shiyang ruan , agen qiu , yun li , , jiping liu , ,* and chaowei yang , school of resource and environmental sciences, wuhan university, wuhan , china; zhangzhiran@whu.edu.cn nsf spatiotemporal innovation center, george mason university, fairfax, va , usa; dsha@gmu.edu (d.s.); yli @gmu.edu (y.l.); cyang @gmu.edu (c.y.) chinese academy of surveying and mapping, beijing , china; qiuag@casm.ac.cn department of geography and geoinformation science, george mason university, fairfax, va , usa; sruan@gmu.edu department of criminology, law and society, george mason university, fairfax, va , usa; bdong@gmu.edu * correspondence: liujp@casm.ac.cn received: september ; accepted: october ; published: october ���������� ������� abstract: the death of george floyd has brought a new wave of black lives matter (blm) protests into u.s. cities. protests happened in a few cities accompanied by reports of violence over the first few days. the protests appear to be related to rising crime. this study uses newly collected crime data in u.s. cities/counties to explore the spatiotemporal crime changes under blm protests and to estimate the driving factors of burglary induced by the blm protest. four spatial and statistic models were used, including the average nearest neighbor (ann), hotspot analysis, least absolute shrinkage, and selection operator (lasso), and binary logistic regression. the results show that ( ) crime, especially burglary, has risen sharply in a few cities/counties, yet heterogeneity exists across cities/counties; ( ) the volume and spatial distribution of certain crime types changed under blm protest, the activity of burglary clustered in certain regions during protests period; ( ) education, race, demographic, and crime rate in are related with burglary changes during blm protests. the findings from this study can provide valuable information for ensuring the capabilities of the police and governmental agencies to deal with the evolving crisis. keywords: crime; pandemic; statistical analyses; socioeconomic factors; burglary . introduction investigating spatiotemporal distribution patterns and driving factors of crime are continuing concerns within the geography of crime and criminological research [ , ]. the general hypothesis is that social disorganization theory, low economic status, ethnic heterogeneity, residential instability, and family disruption lead to community social disorganization and lack of informal social control, which, in turn, increases crime and delinquency rates [ , ]. the routine activities theory argues that (macro-level) social changes introduce adjustments in people’s lifestyles and, subsequently, contribute to the supply of crime opportunities (i.e., the agglomeration in space and time of motivated offenders, suitable targets, and the absence of capable guardians) [ , ]. these two foundational, place-based criminological theories relate socioeconomic factors (i.e., demographic, ethnicity, economic, social, family disruption, marital status, and urbanization) to criminal events [ – ]. black lives matter (blm) is a decentralized movement advocating for non-violent civil disobedience in protest against incidents of police brutality and all racially motivated violence isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , ; doi: . /ijgi www.mdpi.com/journal/ijgi http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijgi http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /ijgi http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijgi isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , of against black people [ ]. the death of george floyd sparked widespread protests in cities across the united states in support of blm [ ]. to record, the protests that sustained throughout june, july, and august, are the largest protests to take place in the united states. while many protests remained continuously peaceful, some instigated violence and crime. protests happened in a few cities accompanied by reports of violence over the first few days [ ], several robbings occurred and dozens of buildings were vandalized during protests periods. these events are usually centered around the gathering places of protests. unlike the former incidents (such as trayvon martin on july , michael brown on august , in ferguson), the george floyd protest happened in the context of the covid- pandemic. social distancing regulations, large-scale lockdown, and stay-at-home orders are designed to limit the spread of covid- but may also alter and disrupt the contextual conditions under which crime may occur [ – ]. after these routine activities changed, a variety of evidence began to emerge indicating dramatic decreases in crime [ , ]. felson et al. found burglaries increase in block groups with mixed land use, but not blocks dominated by residential land use during the covid- pandemic [ ]. mohler et al. found a marginal decline in residential burglaries, a marginal increase in auto thefts, and an increase in domestic violence calls, pointing to shifts in crime patterns [ ]. dodd reported major crime declines in the uk, while dutch news reported a % drop in burglary, a % decline in bike thefts, and a % drop in pickpocketing [ ]. this research indicated that major declines in crime have been reported while those declines depend on crime type and may differ by parts of a city and land uses. however, many researchers are focusing on the impact of covid- on different types of crime, yet few researchers have explored crime changes during the blm protest period. crimes are most likely to occur when possible criminals converge in space and time with appropriate criminal targets in the absence of capable crime preventers [ ]. for example, when people are located near businesses whose owners and customers are absent, those businesses become vulnerable targets for crime. as mentioned, the covid- pandemic had some effects on routine activities and crimes because of the effect of measures taken by the government. owners and customers of business locations moved away, leaving businesses highly vulnerable to burglary and trespassing. in particular, when dozens or hundreds of people gathered in support for blm, the dense crowds, closed business stores, and the absence of police all provided opportunities to criminals. rosenfeld et al. reported that the sharp rise of nonresidential burglaries is likely associated with the property damage and looting at the beginning of protests against police violence [ ]. a paper tested for the “ferguson effect” on crime rates in large u.s. cities, and revealed that robbery rates, declining before ferguson, increased in the months after ferguson [ ]. however, the existing research has focused on metropolitan areas of large cities, and not many studies have examined suburban and rural areas. in summary, protests are likely to trigger rises in crime while those rises depend on crime type. locations where protests occur are more prone to crimes. therefore, there are strong reasons to expect that both the volume and distribution of crime and disorder will be altered. however, the overall trend of crime cannot reflect all types of crime, and heterogeneity will exist across counties/cities in the u.s. this leads us to explore ( ) changes in different types of crime; ( ) the spatiotemporal variations of burglaries; and ( ) the driving factors of burglary changes during blm protest. despite the increased media attention, the black lives matter protest has received comparatively less scholarly attention than that of covid- [ ]. our study is one of the first to analyze the crime changes and its influencing factors induced by the blm protest (in the background of covid- ). in this study, we use comprehensively recorded crime data in counties/cities of different scales to identify the spatiotemporal variations of crime and illustrate the relationship between burglary and social, economic, and demographic factors under the blm protest in the u.s. these results make an important contribution not only to the government in dealing with emergencies and adjustment of policy instructions, but also to the prediction of crime during large-scale social events. isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , of . materials and methods . . workflow figure shows the workflow of the entire analytical process. first, the collection and processing of the dataset are described in sections . . and . . . next, methods are introduced from two aspects in sections . . and . . . then, the research contents are divided into four parts: ( ) an overall temporal trend of crime during the covid- pandemic (section . ); ( ) an overall change in different crime types (section . ); ( ) spatiotemporal variations of burglary during blm protects (section . ), and ( ) impacts of driving factors on burglary changing (section . ). note that based on the results of sections . and . , the change in burglary accurately reflects the change in crime during the blm protest compared to other crime types or total crimes. therefore, sections . and . will also focus on burglary instead of total crime. isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , x; doi: for peer review of . materials and methods . . workflow figure shows the workflow of the entire analytical process. first, the collection and processing of the dataset are described in sections . . and . . . next, methods are introduced from two aspects in sections . . and . . . then, the research contents are divided into four parts: ( ) an overall temporal trend of crime during the covid- pandemic (section . ); ( ) an overall change in different crime types (section . ); ( ) spatiotemporal variations of burglary during blm protects (section . ), and ( ) impacts of driving factors on burglary changing (section . ). note that based on the results of section . and . , the change in burglary accurately reflects the change in crime during the blm protest compared to other crime types or total crimes. therefore, sections . and . will also focus on burglary instead of total crime. the analysis time (from may to june ) encompasses the entirety of protests, including george floyd’s death ( may ) and the outbreak of urban protests. in this paper, multiple spatial and statistical analysis methods were used in the research process. first, we created a simple descriptive graph to depict crime counts for the entirety of the data. to take account of the spatial nature of the data, average nearest neighbor (ann) [ ] and hotspot analysis [ ] were used to analyze the spatial distribution and its changes. finally, to detect the impact of the influencing factors on the burglary changes during blm protests, we made use of the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (lasso) and binary logistic regression model for feature selection and driving factors analysis. all the methods were accomplished through programs python or r. methods geocoding data filtering analysisdata crawler part : impact of driving factors on burglary during blm protests part : spatiotemporal variations of burglary during blm protests part : changes in different crime types during blm protests crime data demographic education raceeconomicpoverty preprocessing preprocessing collection ann & hotspot lasso&logistic regression statistical graph part : overall trend of crime during covid- pandemic figure . workflow of the analytical process including datasets collected (yellow), data processing tools (blue), analyses methods (pink) and analytical results (purple). . . dataset . . . crime dataset the crime events data were obtained from the spotcrime website [ ], which is a crime incident aggregator and public crime visualization service. the spotcrime website collects crime events data from police departments, verified news reports, user-generated content submissions, and other validated sources [ ]. a comprehensive crime data scheme is provided in the spotcrime dataset, including description, referral source, and spatiotemporal attributes, e.g., date, time, location address, and coordinates by latitude and longitude. crime types are classified into categories, including assault, arson, arrest, burglary, robbery, shooting, theft, vandalism, and others. the crime events data are organized and presented by a combination of county/city name and date under web pages. in this research, crime incidents between january and june , and were collected by a customized web crawler and geocoded geocoder library in python. in addition to this, counties/cities (including cities and counties) were selected from the overall regions in the spotcrime website based on the following requirements. figure . workflow of the analytical process including datasets collected (yellow), data processing tools (blue), analyses methods (pink) and analytical results (purple). the analysis time (from may to june ) encompasses the entirety of protests, including george floyd’s death ( may ) and the outbreak of urban protests. in this paper, multiple spatial and statistical analysis methods were used in the research process. first, we created a simple descriptive graph to depict crime counts for the entirety of the data. to take account of the spatial nature of the data, average nearest neighbor (ann) [ ] and hotspot analysis [ ] were used to analyze the spatial distribution and its changes. finally, to detect the impact of the influencing factors on the burglary changes during blm protests, we made use of the least absolute shrinkage and selection operator (lasso) and binary logistic regression model for feature selection and driving factors analysis. all the methods were accomplished through programs python or r. . . dataset . . . crime dataset the crime events data were obtained from the spotcrime website [ ], which is a crime incident aggregator and public crime visualization service. the spotcrime website collects crime events data from police departments, verified news reports, user-generated content submissions, and other validated sources [ ]. a comprehensive crime data scheme is provided in the spotcrime dataset, including description, referral source, and spatiotemporal attributes, e.g., date, time, location address, and coordinates by latitude and longitude. crime types are classified into categories, including assault, arson, arrest, burglary, robbery, shooting, theft, vandalism, and others. the crime events data are organized and presented by a combination of county/city name and date under web pages. in this research, crime incidents between january and june , and were collected by a customized web crawler and geocoded geocoder library in python. in addition to this, counties/cities (including isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , of cities and counties) were selected from the overall regions in the spotcrime website based on the following requirements. • the crime events data missing days for each region should be less than days in to maintain data consistency for long period time-series analysis. • the average number of all crime events is higher than each day in individual regions to avoid data noising by small samples. the selected counties/cities list and spatial distribution in the u.s. are shown in table and figure , respectively. fifty counties/cities are distributed in states and cover over about , square miles. thirteen counties/cities with a population of over one million people, and counties with a population of fewer than , people. additionally, the u.s. median household income was $ , in . seven cities and twenty-one counties with a median household income in above average. major, medium, and small counties/cities are all considered in this research. the research results thus will partly represent crime changes during blm protest in the u.s. table . selected counties/cities list from the spotcrime website. id county/city name id county/city name id county/city name tarrant county, tx suffolk county, ny boston, ma franklin county, oh ada county, id washington, dc larimer county, co miami-dade county, fl montgomery county, tx travis county, tx new york, ny baltimore county, md bexar county, tx hamilton county, tn henrico county, va sonoma county, ca skagit county, wa minneapolis, mn volusia county, fl riverside county, ca newport news, va orange county, ca shelby county, al chicago, il pierce county, wa fairfax county, va horry county, sc weld county, co thurston county, wa st. paul, mn el paso county, co collier county, fl denver, co newberry county, sc ottawa county, mi san francisco, ca yakima county, wa frederick county, va norfolk, va sarasota county, fl anne arundel county, md harrison county, wv pinellas county, fl olmsted county, mn knox county, il hillsborough county, fl escambia county, fl baltimore, md los angeles county, ca honolulu, hi isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , x; doi: for peer review of • the crime events data missing days for each region should be less than days in to maintain data consistency for long period time-series analysis. • the average number of all crime events is higher than each day in individual regions to avoid data noising by small samples. the selected counties/cities list and spatial distribution in the u.s. are shown in table and figure , respectively. fifty counties/cities are distributed in states and cover over about , square miles. thirteen counties/cities with a population of over one million people, and counties with a population of fewer than , people. additionally, the u.s. median household income was $ , in . seven cities and twenty-one counties with a median household income in above average. major, medium, and small counties/cities are all considered in this research. the research results thus will partly represent crime changes during blm protest in the u.s. to validate the crime dataset collected from spotcrime, we randomly selected and downloaded the available crime events data from publicly available official datasets. a quantitative comparison with the spotcrime data collection and data sources was conducted from a statistical and spatiotemporal perspective. we found that the data match well in consistency and accuracy. additionally, we checked the operationalizations of crime included in spotcrime and found that “arrest” and “other” are not part i index crimes according to the fbi’s uniform crime reporting (ucr) program [ ]. therefore, “arrest” and “other” categories are excluded from this research. figure . selected counties regions from spotcrime website. table . selected counties/cities list from the spotcrime website. id county/city name id county/city name id county/city name tarrant county, tx suffolk county, ny boston, ma franklin county, oh ada county, id washington, dc larimer county, co miami-dade county, fl montgomery county, tx travis county, tx new york, ny baltimore county, md bexar county, tx hamilton county, tn henrico county, va sonoma county, ca skagit county, wa minneapolis, mn volusia county, fl riverside county, ca newport news, va orange county, ca shelby county, al chicago, il pierce county, wa fairfax county, va horry county, sc weld county, co thurston county, wa st. paul, mn el paso county, co collier county, fl denver, co newberry county, sc ottawa county, mi san francisco, ca yakima county, wa frederick county, va norfolk, va sarasota county, fl anne arundel county, md harrison county, wv figure . selected counties regions from spotcrime website. isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , of to validate the crime dataset collected from spotcrime, we randomly selected and downloaded the available crime events data from publicly available official datasets. a quantitative comparison with the spotcrime data collection and data sources was conducted from a statistical and spatiotemporal perspective. we found that the data match well in consistency and accuracy. additionally, we checked the operationalizations of crime included in spotcrime and found that “arrest” and “other” are not part i index crimes according to the fbi’s uniform crime reporting (ucr) program [ ]. therefore, “arrest” and “other” categories are excluded from this research. . . . driving factors datasets inspired by social disorganization theory and routine activities theory, relevant factors including demographic, education, poverty, race, and economic factors are collected in our study. as an estimated value, population, age, sex, race, education, and poverty were collected from u.s. census bureau reports. after the preprocessing, the factors of population density, population under years, population over years, age dependency ratio, males per females, less than th grade, bachelor’s degree, median household income, below poverty level, white population, and black or african american population were obtained. the diversity index captures the racial and ethnic diversity of a geographic area in a single number, from to [ ], and is provided by esri [ ]. additionally, the crime rate per , people from january , to june , is considered as a driving factor in our study. this is because the counties/cities with higher crime rates have environments that are more likely to cause crime. it is necessary to detect the relationship between the crime change during blm protests with the crime rate in the same period last year. the descriptive statistics for these variables are provided in table . table . descriptive statistics for independent variables. category factors minimum mean median maximum standard deviation demographic population density . . . , . . population under years, % . . . . . population over years, % . . . . . age dependency ratio, % . . . . . males per females, % . . . . . education less than th grade, % . . . . . bachelor’s degree, % . . . . . economic median household income, $ , . , . , . , . , . poverty below poverty level, % . . . . . race white, % . . . . . black or african american, % . . . . . diversity index . . . . . crime crime rate per , . . . . . source: u.s. census bureau, esri and spotcrime; calculations by the author. . . methods . . . spatial distribution analysis to identify the space concentration level and distribution of crime during blm protests, we utilized the ann model and hotspot mapping analysis. here, the ann method measures the distance between each crime point and its nearest neighbor’s location [ ]. it is used to quantify and compare the spatial distribution of crime within a county/city over time. if the ann ratio is less than , the pattern exhibits clustering. if the value is greater than , the trend is toward dispersion. the ann ratio of county/city c is defined as follows: annc = do de = n∑ i= di/nc . / √ nc/ac , ( ) isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , of where do is the mean distance between each crime point and its nearest neighbor. de is the expected mean distance for n points given in a random pattern. di represents the distance between the point i and its nearest neighboring feature. nc corresponds to the total number of points in county/city c. ac represent the area of county/city c. note that we use the great-circle distance as the calculation method of distance. hotspot mapping is a popular analytical technique in the geography of crime. kde model, a hotspot mapping technique, is regarded as the most suitable spatial analysis technique for visualizing crime data. it can be used for visually identifying hotspots of crime, and spatially interpreting location, size, shape, and orientation of clusters of crime incidents [ ]. the folium package in python was used in hotspot analysis. . . . logistic regression model the logistic regression model was used to estimate the effect of driving factors on the crime changing during blm protests. binary logistic regression is a statistical technique used to predict the relationship between predictors (independent variables) and a predicted variable (the dependent variable). in this section, we built the model from three steps: dependent variable definition, independent variables selection, and modeling building. ( ) dependent variable definition we calculated the changing rate of crime to represent the changing degree in crime during the blm protests. the higher the growth rates, the higher the crime than the average. the changing rate is defined as follows: r = avgn a f ter − avgn be f ore avgn be f ore ∗ %, ( ) where, avgn a f ter is the n days’ average crime rate after the start date of protests, avgn be f ore represents the n days’ average crime rate before the start date of protests. n is decided based on the peak crime duration. the start dates of protests were collected from news reports. it is not appropriate to directly use the changing rate as the dependent variable of the linear model, because we did not eliminate random fluctuations caused by seasonality and periodicity of crime. however, minor random fluctuations of crime will be ignored through classification. this is also the reason we selected the logistic regression model for our research. therefore, we divided counties/cities into two categories based on the value of the changing rate, defined as follows: yc = { , i f r < σ , i f r ≥ σ , ( ) where, r represents the changing rate during the blm protests. σ is the threshold value. yc = means that crime in the city c has a big variation during blm protests, yc = means the opposite. y = { y , y , · · · , yn } is defined as the dependent variable, n is the number of counties and cities. the result of the classification is defined as the dependent variable. ( ) independent variables selection independent variable selection is one of the main techniques for selecting an important subset of features as a specific factor in model development, particularly for variables with collinearity. variable selection methods target removing excess or insignificant variables [ ]. lasso is a regression analysis method that performs variable selection while in regression analysis, to enhance the interpretability of the statistical model it produces [ , ]. lasso regularization is easily extended to generalized isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , of linear models (gml). when the response variable is binary, the optimization objective for a logistic regression model is defined as [ ]: β̂(λ) = argβmin  n n∑ i= ρ(β)(xi, yi) + λ‖β‖ , ( ) where y represents the outcome, consisting of n cases. x = (x , x , · · · , xm) is the covariate. λ is a prespecified free parameter in constant that multiplies the l term. the larger the value of λ, the greater the amount of shrinkage. r glmnet function has been used in experiments. ( ) modeling building finally, the binary logistic regression model is defined as follows [ ]: logit(p) = ln p − p = β + β x + · · ·+ βnxn, ( ) where p is the probability of the event occurring, p = p(yc = ). xi := (x , x , · · · , xn) is the independent variable selected by the lasso model. β , β , · · · , βn are regression coefficients of variables. . results . . overall trend of crime during covid- pandemic this subsection tends to offer overall analytics on crime trend during the covid- crisis and provide a background that blm protests took place. in figure , we display the distribution of the total crime rate per , people from january , , to june , , based on a boxplot. each box represents a county/city, plotted by county/city id (table ) on the horizontal axis and crime rate per , people on the vertical. the boxes are sorted by a median of the crime rates (shown as the orange line). the overall trend of crime rate in figure illustrates the counties/cities with lower crime rates are tighter than counties/cities with higher crime rates, and counties/cities with higher crime rates have more outliers (shown as red circles). isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , x; doi: for peer review of ( ) modeling building finally, the binary logistic regression model is defined as follows [ ]: ( ) logit ln n n p p x x p β β β= = + + + −  , ( ) where p is the probability of the event occurring, ( ) cp p y= = . ( ) : , , ,i nx x x x=  is the independent variable selected by the lasso model. , , , nβ β β are regression coefficients of variables. . results . . overall trend of crime during covid- pandemic this subsection tends to offer overall analytics on crime trend during the covid- crisis and provide a background that blm protests took place. in figure , we display the distribution of the total crime rate per , people from january , , to june , , based on a boxplot. each box represents a county/city, plotted by county/city id (table ) on the horizontal axis and crime rate per , people on the vertical. the boxes are sorted by a median of the crime rates (shown as the orange line). the overall trend of crime rate in figure illustrates the counties/cities with lower crime rates are tighter than counties/cities with higher crime rates, and counties/cities with higher crime rates have more outliers (shown as red circles). figure . boxplot of the total crime rate per , people including outliers (red circles), mean values of crime rates (orange circles), and median value of crime rates (yellow lines inside boxes). we manually selected nine typical counties and cities from counties/cities with different scales to visualize the current patterns. the daily time series (from january , to june ) for the total crime in several counties/cities are shown in figure . the results do not show the same trend of crime in different cities or counties during the covid- pandemic. in figure a–e, crime dropped between the date that the first confirmed case was reported and the date that the stay-at-home order was implemented, then slowly increased or remained stable when the stay-at-home order was implemented. meanwhile, in (f)-(i), crime did not change during the covid- pandemic. the overall trend of crime during the covid- pandemic concur with those seen in other studies. however, we only provide an analysis of the total number of crimes, noting that not all crime types have the same trend under the covid- pandemic. as shown in figure a–f, crime rose sharply in a few cities/counties during the blm protests. the trend of crime in figure g–i performs a consistent fluctuation with other periods. additionally, there were no outliers (greater than or less than three standard deviations) in the days before and figure . boxplot of the total crime rate per , people including outliers (red circles), mean values of crime rates (orange circles), and median value of crime rates (yellow lines inside boxes). we manually selected nine typical counties and cities from counties/cities with different scales to visualize the current patterns. the daily time series (from january , to june ) for the total crime in several counties/cities are shown in figure . the results do not show the same trend of crime isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , of in different cities or counties during the covid- pandemic. in figure a–e, crime dropped between the date that the first confirmed case was reported and the date that the stay-at-home order was implemented, then slowly increased or remained stable when the stay-at-home order was implemented. meanwhile, in (f)-(i), crime did not change during the covid- pandemic. the overall trend of crime during the covid- pandemic concur with those seen in other studies. however, we only provide an analysis of the total number of crimes, noting that not all crime types have the same trend under the covid- pandemic. isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , x; doi: for peer review of after the blm protests for all counties/cities. this suggested that the blm protest took place in the backdrop of relative crime stability. for the current stage, we only provide an analysis of the total number of crimes; trends in different types of crime are needed. to summarize, figure does not show the same trend of crime in different cities or counties during the covid- pandemic and blm protests, i.e., heterogeneity exists across cities/counties. the heterogeneity between counties/cities may be related to their socioeconomic difference. we will explore the changes in different types of crime, the spatiotemporal variations of burglary, and the driving factors of burglary changes during blm protests in the next three subsections. figure . time series of crimes per day (a) los angeles county, ca; (b) new york city, ny; (c) chicago, il; (d) san francisco, ca; (e) washington, d.c.; (f) minneapolis, mn; (g) shelby county, al; (h) olmsted county, mn; (i) newberry county, sc. yellow vertical line indicates the date first confirmed case reported, red vertical line indicates the date stay-at-home order implemented, and blue vertical line indicates the death date of george floyd ( june ). . . changes in different crime types during black lives matter protests from the overall time series analysis, crime changed a lot in a few counties/cities during the blm protests, and there is heterogeneity across counties/cities in the context of the covid- pandemic. however, the overall trend of crime cannot reflect all types of crime. the daily time series for the various crime types are shown in figure . lines with different colors represent seven different crime types. figure a–f show that there are sharp changes in burglary in both cities. minor increases exist in vandalism and assault in several cities, such as vandalism increasing slightly in san francisco and chicago, along with assault in los angeles county and minneapolis. the trends of other crime types changed less, and they exhibited a consistent fluctuation in relation to other periods. that means other crime types except burglary were not seriously affected by blm protests. this is likely because the covid- epidemic shifted routine activities by moving owners and customers away from business locations, leaving them highly vulnerable to burglary and trespassing [ ]. in addition, figure . time series of crimes per day (a) los angeles county, ca; (b) new york city, ny; (c) chicago, il; (d) san francisco, ca; (e) washington, dc; (f) minneapolis, mn; (g) shelby county, al; (h) olmsted county, mn; (i) newberry county, sc. yellow vertical line indicates the date first confirmed case reported, red vertical line indicates the date stay-at-home order implemented, and blue vertical line indicates the death date of george floyd ( june ). as shown in figure a–f, crime rose sharply in a few cities/counties during the blm protests. the trend of crime in figure g–i performs a consistent fluctuation with other periods. additionally, there were no outliers (greater than or less than three standard deviations) in the days before and after the blm protests for all counties/cities. this suggested that the blm protest took place in the backdrop of relative crime stability. for the current stage, we only provide an analysis of the total number of crimes; trends in different types of crime are needed. to summarize, figure does not show the same trend of crime in different cities or counties during the covid- pandemic and blm protests, i.e., heterogeneity exists across cities/counties. the heterogeneity between counties/cities may be related to their socioeconomic difference. we will explore the changes in different types of crime, the spatiotemporal variations of burglary, and the driving factors of burglary changes during blm protests in the next three subsections. isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , of . . changes in different crime types during black lives matter protests from the overall time series analysis, crime changed a lot in a few counties/cities during the blm protests, and there is heterogeneity across counties/cities in the context of the covid- pandemic. however, the overall trend of crime cannot reflect all types of crime. the daily time series for the various crime types are shown in figure . lines with different colors represent seven different crime types. isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , x; doi: for peer review of protests happened in a few cities accompanied by reports of burglary, and dozens of shops and stores have been stolen from and damaged during protests periods. although there are reports that the numbers of homicides and victims shot increased during blm protests [ , ], the increase was less obvious compared with burglary. additionally, burglary peaked between may , and jun , and continued three to five days since the start of the early protests. then, the number of burglaries decreased to their regular value. hence, the effects of the protests on burglary appear to be somewhat transitory and fade over the short-run period, as the violence and scope of the protests abate. thus, the protests in these cities that were accompanied by crime became peaceful after three to five days. figure g–i shows that crime has no obvious changes in these counties in late may or early june when it would be expected to increase. compared with bigger counties/cities with higher populations (i.e., los angeles county, new york city), shelby county, olmsted county, and newberry county had smaller protests and were not seriously affected by the blm protests. in summary, figure does not show the same trend in different crime types and cities/counties during the blm protests. the change in burglary accurately reflects the change in crime during the blm protest compared to other crime types or total crimes. the heterogeneity of burglary between counties/cities may be related to their socioeconomic difference. we will analyze the spatiotemporal patterns and driving factors of burglary changes (instead of total crime changes) during blm protests in the next two subsections. figure . number of crimes for different types (a) los angeles county, ca; (b) new york city, ny; (c) chicago, il; (d) san francisco; (e) washington d.c.; (f) minneapolis, mn; (g) shelby county, al; (h) olmsted county, mn; (i) newberry county, sc. figure . number of crimes for different types (a) los angeles county, ca; (b) new york city, ny; (c) chicago, il; (d) san francisco; (e) washington dc; (f) minneapolis, mn; (g) shelby county, al; (h) olmsted county, mn; (i) newberry county, sc. figure a–f show that there are sharp changes in burglary in both cities. minor increases exist in vandalism and assault in several cities, such as vandalism increasing slightly in san francisco and chicago, along with assault in los angeles county and minneapolis. the trends of other crime types changed less, and they exhibited a consistent fluctuation in relation to other periods. that means other crime types except burglary were not seriously affected by blm protests. this is likely because the covid- epidemic shifted routine activities by moving owners and customers away from business locations, leaving them highly vulnerable to burglary and trespassing [ ]. in addition, protests happened in a few cities accompanied by reports of burglary, and dozens of shops and stores have been stolen from and damaged during protests periods. although there are reports that the numbers of homicides and victims shot increased during blm protests [ , ], the increase was less obvious compared with burglary. additionally, burglary peaked between may , and jun , and continued three to five days since the start of the early protests. then, the number of burglaries decreased to their regular value. hence, the effects of the protests on burglary appear to be somewhat transitory and fade over the short-run period, as the violence and scope of the protests abate. thus, the protests in these cities that were accompanied by crime became peaceful after three to five days. isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , of figure g–i shows that crime has no obvious changes in these counties in late may or early june when it would be expected to increase. compared with bigger counties/cities with higher populations (i.e., los angeles county, new york city), shelby county, olmsted county, and newberry county had smaller protests and were not seriously affected by the blm protests. in summary, figure does not show the same trend in different crime types and cities/counties during the blm protests. the change in burglary accurately reflects the change in crime during the blm protest compared to other crime types or total crimes. the heterogeneity of burglary between counties/cities may be related to their socioeconomic difference. we will analyze the spatiotemporal patterns and driving factors of burglary changes (instead of total crime changes) during blm protests in the next two subsections. . . spatiotemporal variations of burglary during black lives matter protests we analyzed the spatial distribution changes in burglary instead of total crime. it should be noted that geocoding the locations of these crimes introduces error. we made topologic analysis and deleted points outside the boundary of cities/counties. this may slightly affect the results of the average nearest neighbor analysis. the resulting ann shows that counties/cities with higher changes in burglary showed spatial aggregation during protests. this is probably because burglaries centered around the protests. the spatial distribution of counties/cities with lower changing rates is not obvious. figure illustrates the average nearest neighbor values in burglary for six sample counties/cities. bars with brown color mean that the p values are greater than or equal to . , and ann values are statistically significant. the red line represents the start day of protests in each city/county. ann values decrease after the start of the protest, compared to before in both cities. the trend of ann values illustrates that the activity of burglary clustered in several certain regions during the protests period. additionally, different from los angeles county and san francisco, burglaries in chicago, washington dc, and minneapolis are considered more clustered than ever before. isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , x; doi: for peer review of . . spatiotemporal variations of burglary during black lives matter protests we analyzed the spatial distribution changes in burglary instead of total crime. it should be noted that geocoding the locations of these crimes introduces error. we made topologic analysis and deleted points outside the boundary of cities/counties. this may slightly affect the results of the average nearest neighbor analysis. the resulting ann shows that counties/cities with higher changes in burglary showed spatial aggregation during protests. this is probably because burglaries centered around the protests. the spatial distribution of counties/cities with lower changing rates is not obvious. figure illustrates the average nearest neighbor values in burglary for six sample counties/cities. bars with brown color mean that the p values are greater than or equal to . , and ann values are statistically significant. the red line represents the start day of protests in each city/county. ann values decrease after the start of the protest, compared to before in both cities. the trend of ann values illustrates that the activity of burglary clustered in several certain regions during the protests period. additionally, different from los angeles county and san francisco, burglaries in chicago, washington d.c., and minneapolis are considered more clustered than ever before. figure . average nearest neighbor value (a) los angeles county, ca; (b) new york city, ny; (c) chicago, il; (d) san francisco; (e) washington d.c.; (f) minneapolis, mn. red vertical line indicates the first protest date reported of each county/city. furthermore, the hotspot maps of burglary in six sample counties/cities are shown in figures – . we selected the day with the peak value of burglary, the th day before, and the th day after the peak day for each county/city. the second figure (i.e., (b)) in figures – shows the hotspots maps of the peak day. hot spots can be found in both counties/cities during blm protests. figures – shows that burglaries are spread throughout the city in the usual time and mainly occur in the downtown areas during blm protests. this means burglaries gathered in space on the peak day, figure . average nearest neighbor value (a) los angeles county, ca; (b) new york city, ny; (c) chicago, il; (d) san francisco; (e) washington dc; (f) minneapolis, mn. red vertical line indicates the first protest date reported of each county/city. isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , of furthermore, the hotspot maps of burglary in six sample counties/cities are shown in figures – . we selected the day with the peak value of burglary, the th day before, and the th day after the peak day for each county/city. the second figure (i.e., (b)) in figures – shows the hotspots maps of the peak day. hot spots can be found in both counties/cities during blm protests. figures – shows that burglaries are spread throughout the city in the usual time and mainly occur in the downtown areas during blm protests. this means burglaries gathered in space on the peak day, coinciding with the ann analysis. furthermore, the spatial distribution of burglary in chicago, san francisco, and minneapolis exhibits a clear spatial concentration pattern along the street. this is because burglaries occurred in non-residential areas where protests gathered, where there are many commercial buildings and shops along the street. therefore, both the volume and distribution of burglaries were altered during blm protests. the spike in burglaries is characterized by its abruptness, size, brevity, and clustering. isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , x; doi: for peer review of coinciding with the ann analysis. furthermore, the spatial distribution of burglary in chicago, san francisco, and minneapolis exhibits a clear spatial concentration pattern along the street. this is because burglaries occurred in non-residential areas where protests gathered, where there are many commercial buildings and shops along the street. therefore, both the volume and distribution of burglaries were altered during blm protests. the spike in burglaries is characterized by its abruptness, size, brevity, and clustering. figure . hotspots of burglary in los angeles county, ca (a) may ; (b) may ; (c) june . figure . hotspots of burglary in new york city, ny (a) may ; (b) june ; (c) june . figure . hotspots of burglary in chicago, il (a) may ; (b) may ; (c) june . figure . hotspots of burglary in los angeles county, ca (a) may ; (b) may ; (c) june . isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , x; doi: for peer review of coinciding with the ann analysis. furthermore, the spatial distribution of burglary in chicago, san francisco, and minneapolis exhibits a clear spatial concentration pattern along the street. this is because burglaries occurred in non-residential areas where protests gathered, where there are many commercial buildings and shops along the street. therefore, both the volume and distribution of burglaries were altered during blm protests. the spike in burglaries is characterized by its abruptness, size, brevity, and clustering. figure . hotspots of burglary in los angeles county, ca (a) may ; (b) may ; (c) june . figure . hotspots of burglary in new york city, ny (a) may ; (b) june ; (c) june . figure . hotspots of burglary in chicago, il (a) may ; (b) may ; (c) june . figure . hotspots of burglary in new york city, ny (a) may ; (b) june ; (c) june . isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , of isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , x; doi: for peer review of coinciding with the ann analysis. furthermore, the spatial distribution of burglary in chicago, san francisco, and minneapolis exhibits a clear spatial concentration pattern along the street. this is because burglaries occurred in non-residential areas where protests gathered, where there are many commercial buildings and shops along the street. therefore, both the volume and distribution of burglaries were altered during blm protests. the spike in burglaries is characterized by its abruptness, size, brevity, and clustering. figure . hotspots of burglary in los angeles county, ca (a) may ; (b) may ; (c) june . figure . hotspots of burglary in new york city, ny (a) may ; (b) june ; (c) june . figure . hotspots of burglary in chicago, il (a) may ; (b) may ; (c) june . figure . hotspots of burglary in chicago, il (a) may ; (b) may ; (c) june . isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , x; doi: for peer review of figure . hotspots of burglary in san francisco, ca (a) may ; (b) may ; (c) june . figure . hotspots of burglary in washington d.c. (a) may ; (b) may ; (c) june . figure . hotspots of burglary in minneapolis, mn (a) may ; (b) may ; (c) june . . impact of driving factors on burglary during black lives matter protests . . . changing rate of burglary the results of sections . and . lead us to explore which counties/cities have changed obviously with burglary during the blm protest. to explain the degree of effect of protests on burglary, we calculated the changing rate using equation ( ). in addition, the parameter n is , because burglary usually peaked and continued three to five days from the start of the early protests. figure . hotspots of burglary in san francisco, ca (a) may ; (b) may ; (c) june . isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , x; doi: for peer review of figure . hotspots of burglary in san francisco, ca (a) may ; (b) may ; (c) june . figure . hotspots of burglary in washington d.c. (a) may ; (b) may ; (c) june . figure . hotspots of burglary in minneapolis, mn (a) may ; (b) may ; (c) june . . impact of driving factors on burglary during black lives matter protests . . . changing rate of burglary the results of sections . and . lead us to explore which counties/cities have changed obviously with burglary during the blm protest. to explain the degree of effect of protests on burglary, we calculated the changing rate using equation ( ). in addition, the parameter n is , because burglary usually peaked and continued three to five days from the start of the early protests. figure . hotspots of burglary in washington dc (a) may ; (b) may ; (c) june . isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , of isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , x; doi: for peer review of figure . hotspots of burglary in san francisco, ca (a) may ; (b) may ; (c) june . figure . hotspots of burglary in washington d.c. (a) may ; (b) may ; (c) june . figure . hotspots of burglary in minneapolis, mn (a) may ; (b) may ; (c) june . . impact of driving factors on burglary during black lives matter protests . . . changing rate of burglary the results of sections . and . lead us to explore which counties/cities have changed obviously with burglary during the blm protest. to explain the degree of effect of protests on burglary, we calculated the changing rate using equation ( ). in addition, the parameter n is , because burglary usually peaked and continued three to five days from the start of the early protests. figure . hotspots of burglary in minneapolis, mn (a) may ; (b) may ; (c) june . . impact of driving factors on burglary during black lives matter protests . . . changing rate of burglary the results of sections . and . lead us to explore which counties/cities have changed obviously with burglary during the blm protest. to explain the degree of effect of protests on burglary, we calculated the changing rate using equation ( ). in addition, the parameter n is , because burglary usually peaked and continued three to five days from the start of the early protests. it is worth noting that when the number of burglaries is less than two per day, the rate will have a large fluctuation when adding or subtracting a small number. therefore, we removed the cities/counties with fewer than two burglaries per day. the changing rates of burglary in the remaining cities/counties are provided in table . the higher the growth rates, the higher the burglary than the average. the changing rate reflects the severity of burglaries and the effect of protests on crime. table shows that the changing rates of cities/counties differ greatly. all the cities listed in table were accompanied by mainstream media reports of burglaries on protests. specifically, minneapolis, fairfax county, boston, st. paul, chicago, and washington dc had more burglaries than ever before. the result of the classification is shown in the fifth and tenth columns in table . table . changing rates of burglary. county/city name avgbefore avgafter r class county/city name avgbefore avgafter r class collier county, fl . . − . pinellas county, fl . . . baltimore county, md . . − . shelby county, al . . . honolulu, hi . . − . sarasota county, fl . . . miami-dade county, fl . . − . denver, co . . . montgomery county, tx . . − . baltimore, md . . . orange county, ca . . . hillsborough county, fl . . . pierce county, wa . . . los angeles county, ca . . . riverside county, ca . . . san francisco, ca . . . thurston county, wa . . . new york, ny . . . bexar county, tx . . . minneapolis, mn . . . suffolk county, ny . . . fairfax county, va . . . escambia county, fl . . . boston, ma . . . hamilton county, tn . . . chicago, il . . . knox county, il . . . st. paul, mn . . . weld county, co . . . washington, dc . . . additionally, figure shows the distribution of research regions with and without a % increase in burglary. the changing rates in areas exceed %, and there are areas (except minneapolis and isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , of st. paul) with a population of more than , people. this means big changes in burglary exist in large counties/cities. however, not all major counties/cities have experienced a sudden increase in burglaries during blm protests, such as orange county, ca, and miami-dade county, fl. isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , x; doi: for peer review of it is worth noting that when the number of burglaries is less than two per day, the rate will have a large fluctuation when adding or subtracting a small number. therefore, we removed the cities/counties with fewer than two burglaries per day. the changing rates of burglary in the remaining cities/counties are provided in table . the higher the growth rates, the higher the burglary than the average. the changing rate reflects the severity of burglaries and the effect of protests on crime. table shows that the changing rates of cities/counties differ greatly. all the cities listed in table were accompanied by mainstream media reports of burglaries on protests. specifically, minneapolis, fairfax county, boston, st. paul, chicago, and washington d.c. had more burglaries than ever before. the result of the classification is shown in the fifth and tenth columns in table . additionally, figure shows the distribution of research regions with and without a % increase in burglary. the changing rates in areas exceed %, and there are areas (except minneapolis and st. paul) with a population of more than , people. this means big changes in burglary exist in large counties/cities. however, not all major counties/cities have experienced a sudden increase in burglaries during blm protests, such as orange county, ca, and miami-dade county, fl. table . changing rates of burglary. county/city name beforeavg afteravg r class county/city name beforeavg afteravg r class collier county, fl . . − . pinellas county, fl . . . baltimore county, md . . − . shelby county, al . . . honolulu, hi . . − . sarasota county, fl . . . miami-dade county, fl . . − . denver, co . . . montgomery county, tx . . − . baltimore, md . . . orange county, ca . . . hillsborough county, fl . . . pierce county, wa . . . los angeles county, ca . . . riverside county, ca . . . san francisco, ca . . . thurston county, wa . . . new york, ny . . . bexar county, tx . . . minneapolis, mn . . . suffolk county, ny . . . fairfax county, va . . . escambia county, fl . . . boston, ma . . . hamilton county, tn . . . chicago, il . . . knox county, il . . . st. paul, mn . . . weld county, co . . . washington, dc . . . figure . distribution of burglary changing rate. red circles denote the research regions where the burglary has increased by more than %. figure . distribution of burglary changing rate. red circles denote the research regions where the burglary has increased by more than %. . . . independent variables selection the person correlation coefficient (pcc) [ , ] for these variables are provided in table . the correlations shown in table exhibit a surprising relationship, with the highest of these correlations involving the years and overpopulation and age dependency ratio (r = . , p-value < . ). owning a bachelor’s degree has a strong positive relationship with the median household income (r = . , p-value < . ). strong positive relationships are present between the less than th grade and diversity index (r = . , p-value < . ), and population under years with males per females (r = . , p-value < . ). with regard to the statistical modeling below, some correlations do cause some concerns for collinearity. table . correlations for driving factors. x x x x x x x x x x x x x x . x . . x . . . x . . ** . ** . x – . . ** . * . ** . x . ** . * . . . . x . ** . . . . ** . . x . * . ** . . . ** . . ** . x . . ** . * . ** . ** . ** – . – . . x – . . ** . ** . ** . ** . . . . * . x . ** . . . . . . . . – . ** . x . ** . ** – . . . ** . ** . ** . ** . * . . . x . ** . . * . . . . . . – . . ** . . notes: * p < . ; ** p < . . x : population density; x : population under years; x : population over years; x : age dependency ratio; x : males per females; x : less than th grade; x : bachelor’s degree; x : median household income; x : below the poverty level; x : white population; x : black or african american population; x : diversity index; x : crime per , people. the effect of collinearity makes the regression coefficients unreliable. therefore, feature selection is needed in choosing a subset of important features to be specific factors for model development. lasso was used in our experiments. figure demonstrates the variable importance with their isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , of probabilities. during the feature selection process, the variables that still have a non-zero coefficient are selected to be part of the model. for the value of λlse (λlse gives a model such that error is within one standard error of the minimum), the following five variables were selected: bachelor’s degree, diversity index, age dependency ratio, population density, and crime rate per , people. this means education, race, demographic, and crime rate in are related to burglary changes during blm protests. specifically, the crime rate in has a significant relationship with burglary changes compared with other variables. isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , x; doi: for peer review of . . . independent variables selection the person correlation coefficient (pcc) [ , ] for these variables are provided in table . the correlations shown in table exhibit a surprising relationship, with the highest of these correlations involving the years and overpopulation and age dependency ratio (r = . , p-value < . ). owning a bachelor’s degree has a strong positive relationship with the median household income (r = . , p-value < . ). strong positive relationships are present between the less than th grade and diversity index (r = . , p-value < . ), and population under years with males per females (r = . , p-value < . ). with regard to the statistical modeling below, some correlations do cause some concerns for collinearity. table . correlations for driving factors. x x x x x x x x x x x x x x . x . . x . . . x . . ** . ** . x – . . ** . * . ** . x . ** . * . . . . x . ** . . . . ** . . x . * . ** . . . ** . . ** . x . . ** . * . ** . ** . ** – . – . . x – . . ** . ** . ** . ** . . . . * . x . ** . . . . . . . . – . ** . x . ** . ** – . . . ** . ** . ** . ** . * . . . x . ** . . * . . . . . . – . . ** . . notes: * p < . ; ** p < . . x : population density; x : population under years; x : population over years; x : age dependency ratio; x : males per females; x : less than th grade; x : bachelor’s degree; x : median household income; x : below the poverty level; x : white population; x : black or african american population; x : diversity index; x : crime per , people. the effect of collinearity makes the regression coefficients unreliable. therefore, feature selection is needed in choosing a subset of important features to be specific factors for model development. lasso was used in our experiments. figure demonstrates the variable importance with their probabilities. during the feature selection process, the variables that still have a non-zero coefficient are selected to be part of the model. for the value of lseλ ( lseλ gives a model such that error is within one standard error of the minimum), the following five variables were selected: bachelor’s degree, diversity index, age dependency ratio, population density, and crime rate per , people. this means education, race, demographic, and crime rate in are related to burglary changes during blm protests. specifically, the crime rate in has a significant relationship with burglary changes compared with other variables. figure . variable importance with least absolute shrinkage, and selection operator (lasso). figure . variable importance with least absolute shrinkage, and selection operator (lasso). . . . driving factors analysis the result of binary logistic regression is shown in table . the pseudo r square is . , and the p-value of this model is less than . . somewhat surprisingly, except for a bachelor’s degree, the p values of other independent variables are all greater than . . there is no significant statistical evidence that x , x , x , x are related to the changing rate of burglary in this logistic regression model. to check the reliability of the results, we also performed experiments with a linear regression model, and the results were consistent. table . regression results for change rate of burglary. variable coefficient standard error z p > |z| odds ratios const – . . – . . . population density . . . . . age dependency ratio – . . – . . . bachelor’s degree . . . . . diversity index . . . . . crime rate per , people . . . . . we observed that a bachelor’s degree had a strong and significant positive effect on the changing rate of burglary. current research suggests that education is shown to reduce crime [ , ]. different from the effect of education on crime, counties/cities with higher educated rates have a positive effect on the burglary changing rate. during the protests, burglaries are more likely to occur in counties/cities with a higher percentage of bachelor’s degrees. additionally, the odds ratios of crime rate per , people in are greater than the other four variables. for every one-unit increase in crime rate per , people in , there is an increase of . for burglary changing rate during protests. that means the crime rate per , people in has a positive effect on the changing rate of burglary. this is consistent with the result of lasso. it is worth noting that the percent of white or black people are not selected as determinant factors in lasso, although blm is a movement in protest against incidents of all racially motivated violence isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , of against black people. this is probably because the majority of americans, across all racial and ethnic groups, have expressed support for the black lives matter movement [ ]. . discussion although society and social media have widely reported the protests and responded to the george floyd incident, the incident was not a sentinel incident in changing the direction of the overall decline in crime. our analysis was well-positioned to identify the variables of crime and driving factors during blm protests among the samples of u.s. cities examined to date. we observed sharp increases in burglaries for a particular time period in some locations, but no widespread changes were detected in overall crime trends among the counties/cities in our study. we also found that the burglary case number went back to a normal level that did not change substantially days later. therefore, our analysis confirms the long-standing understanding that the cause of crime reflects a slow process and is not affected by emergencies [ , ]. the change of crime number, no matter increase or decrease, in a short time would go back to a normal stage soon after the end of the emergency event. additionally, there are several limitations to the present study. this study is not the final word on the crime variations. we did not consider the persistent changes of burglary after june due to a lack of data, which is a missing of seasonal analysis during the blm period. similarly, since we only calculated the change rate for (instead of a difference in difference, e.g., comparing the change rate with data), we essentially could not account for potential trending in the data. secondly, the spatiotemporal variations reflect the locations of protests. while the six cities in figures – account for both a large-scale hotspot in the peak day of burglaries, it omits more precise area analysis such as residential and nonresidential areas. there may be apparent differences based on the land use type that our analysis does not capture. in addition, the distribution of burglaries may also have a connection with the distributions of commercial districts such as shops and stores. police and business owners could take steps to prevent these events from happening again in the future. this is a typical data mining method used to test the effect of driving factors on crime by identifying the importance of the features. different from the statistical models, the significance could not be easily interpreted. additionally, tragic events such as the death of trayvon martin, michael brown, george floyd, have sparked widespread attention and discussion over such as police accountability and police legitimacy. such discussion, however, should be informed by solid data and detailed analysis. policy decisions that are not based on evidence can have a negative impact on public safety and reduce government credibility. we sought to bring empirical evidence to the effect of protests on crime. we hope that our results will help provide evidence-based discussions about the crime variations and its reasons during blm protests, especially a broader discussion of changes in crime trends. . conclusions this research offers one of the first empirical analyses of the spatiotemporal patterns and influencing factors on crime rates during the blm protests, which has been a point of concern among public safety and health officials and the media. specifically, we use multiple spatial (ann and kde) and statistical analysis (lasso and logistic regression) methods to model the spatiotemporal trend and driving factors of burglary during blm protests in counties and cities, u.s. the results reflect the overall crime changes during blm protests in the united states to a certain extent. from the results of the experiments and statistics, we show that ( ) crime in the u.s. appears to be going down overall during the covid- pandemic, but the blm protest took place in the backdrop of relative crime stability; ( ) different temporal patterns of crime rates emerge during the blm protests in the u.s.; ( ) only certain types of crime, i.e., burglary, have a sharp change in numbers and spatial distribution; and ( ) education, race, demographic, and crime rate in are related with burglary changes during blm protests. specifically, counties/cities with higher education rates have isprs int. j. geo-inf. , , of a positive effect on the burglary changing rate. the results offer suggestions and a basis for the police and governmental agencies to take steps in preventing the diffusion of violent protests and the increase in crimes. finally, as a future augmentation of our work, detailed spatiotemporal analysis [ , ] at a block- level or community-level will better reflect crime changes in the county/city. additionally, violent assault and gun violence are important areas of research in criminology, and more attention will be paid to these two crime types in metropolitan cities. the spatial distribution character inspired us to conduct further study on the impact of point-of-interests on crime using various methods such as the poisson regression model and arima [ ]. more detailed data, e.g., the crime incident attributes, including the suspect anonymized background, would help explain the changes. for example, does the influx of people with lower education flooding to an area with a well-educated population drive up the crime rates? author contributions: conceptualization, chaowei yang, zhiran zhang, and dexuan sha; methodology, zhiran zhang, shiyang ruan and yun li, formal analysis, beidi dong and dexuan sha; data curation, zhiran zhang and dexuan sha; data analysis, zhiran zhang, dexuan sha, and shiyang ruan; writing—original draft preparation, zhiran zhang and dexuan sha; writing-review and editing, beidi dong, chaowei yang and jiping liu; validation and supervision, jiping liu and chaowei yang; funding acquisition, agen qiu and chaowei yang. all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. funding: the research was funded by national key research and development program of china (no. yfb ), and nsf (no. , and ). acknowledgments: z.z. acknowledges the joint ph.d. studentship from china scholarship council for the financial support. the nsf spatiotemporal innovation center covid- rapid response task force provides foundational support to this research. crime data are obtained from the open accessible spotcrime website. fayez beaini supported language proofreading. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. references . roth, r.e.; ross, k.s.; finch, b.g.; luo, w.; maceachren, a.m. spatiotemporal crime analysis in u.s. law enforcement agencies: current practices and unmet needs. gov. inf. q. , , – . 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[crossref] publisher’s note: mdpi stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/ / / / -days-of-protests- -dead/# d ca de https://www.forbes.com/sites/jemimamcevoy/ / / / -days-of-protests- -dead/# d ca de http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . /ss/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /j. - . . .x https://tinyurl.com/ycslfon . http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	materials and methods 	workflow 	dataset 	crime dataset 	driving factors datasets 	methods 	spatial distribution analysis 	logistic regression model 	results 	overall trend of crime during covid- pandemic 	changes in different crime types during black lives matter protests 	spatiotemporal variations of burglary during black lives matter protests 	impact of driving factors on burglary during black lives matter protests 	changing rate of burglary 	independent variables selection 	driving factors analysis 	discussion 	conclusions 	references drivers of differential views of health equity in the u.s.: is the u.s. ready to make progress? results from the national survey of health attitudes research article open access drivers of differential views of health equity in the u.s.: is the u.s. ready to make progress? results from the national survey of health attitudes vivian l. towe , linnea warren may * , wenjing huang , laurie t. martin , katherine carman , carolyn e. miller and anita chandra abstract objectives: the public health sector has long recognized the role of the social determinants of health in health disparities and the importance of achieving health equity. we now appear to be at an inflection point, as we hear increasing demands to dismantle structures that have perpetuated inequalities. assessing prevailing mindsets about what causes health inequalities and the value of health equity is critical to addressing larger issues of inequity, including racial inequity and other dimensions. using data from a nationally representative sample of adults in the united states, we examined the factors that americans think drive health outcomes and their beliefs about the importance of health equity. methods: using data from the national survey of health attitudes, we conducted factor analyses of survey items and identified three factors from items relating to health drivers—traditional health influencers (thi), social determinants of health (sdoh), and sense of community health (soc). health equity beliefs were measured with three questions about opportunities to be healthy. latent class analysis identified four groups with similar patterns of response. factor mixture modeling combined factor structure and latent class analysis into one model. we conducted three logistic regressions using latent classes and demographics as predictors and the three equity beliefs as dependent variables. results: nearly % of respondents comprised one class that was characterized by high endorsement (i.e., rating the driver as having strong effect on health) of thi, but lower endorsement of sdoh and soc. logistic regressions showed that respondents endorsing (i.e., rated it as a top priority) all three health equity beliefs tended to be female, older, black or hispanic, more educated, and have lower incomes. the class of respondents that endorsed sdoh the most was more likely to endorse all three equity beliefs. (continued on next page) © the author(s). open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's creative commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article's creative commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. the creative commons public domain dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/ . /) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated in a credit line to the data. * correspondence: linneam@rand.org rand corporation, fifth avenue, suite , pittsburgh, pa , usa full list of author information is available at the end of the article towe et al. bmc public health ( ) : https://doi.org/ . /s - - -z http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - -z&domain=pdf http://orcid.org/ - - - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/ . / mailto:linneam@rand.org (continued from previous page) conclusions: results suggested that people historically impacted by inequity, e.g., people of color and people with low incomes, had the most comprehensive understanding of the drivers of health and the value of equity. however, dominant beliefs about sdoh and health equity are still generally not aligned with scientific consensus and the prevailing narrative in the public health community. keywords: health equity, population health, health disparities, social determinants of health background in the who commission on the social determi- nants of health called reducing health inequities an “ethical imperative” [ ]. in america today, racial inequity is now a significant part of the discourse, spurred by the unequal burden of the covid- pandemic and nation- wide demonstrations calling for police and systems reform. incomes have been rising, but most gains have been concentrated among the top earners, resulting in increasing income inequality [ ]. inequity in the united states is driven by a lack of just and fair access to oppor- tunity, rooted in historical and social context, including a history of racism [ ]. there are emerging efforts to en- act policies and even restructure government to disman- tle systemic barriers that have impeded the realization of equity in the u.s. as we continue to hear demands to break down these entrenched structures, assessing prevailing mindsets about health equity becomes critical to addressing larger inequity issues. the u.s. is currently undergoing a set of experiences that further underscore a persistent lack of equity across numer- ous sectors—sectors that create major disparities in health by race/ethnicity, income, education, and other inequities. prior to the events of , equity concerns had been a focus of some health departments, mayor’s offices, philan- thropies, and an explicit goal of the u.s. public health community for over a decade [ ]. this focus emerged from persistently poor health outcomes disproportionately affect- ing low-income people and people of color [ , ], and entrenched negative influences on health in some commu- nities that can compound over generations. called the social determinants of health, factors such as income, edu- cation, employment, and housing (including where people live) contribute to % of the variability in the distribution of length and quality of life [ ] and are largely responsible for the disparities in health we observe. the data from sectors that influence health are hard to ignore: black americans are . times more likely than white americans to be incarcerated [ ]. in , black americans earned cents for every dollar white americans earned (and his- panic americans earned cents), disparities which have remained largely unchanged over the last years [ ]. within racial/ethnic groups, lower income people are more likely than higher income people to lack access to care and have poorer self-reported general health [ ]. despite growing scientific consensus about the social determinants’ role in achieving health equity [ , – ], evidence to date shows that most americans are un- aware of these health gaps, do not understand what causes them, and do not necessarily find them to be “un- fair” (a cornerstone of perceptions of inequity) and thus not worthy of action. with regards to health disparities, a survey conducted in – based on a national sample showed that most respondents ( %) were aware of health differences between the poor and middle class people, but less than half ( %) reported awareness of health differences between white and black americans [ ]. furthermore, american mindsets place the respon- sibility for these outcomes on individual behaviors such as smoking, diet, and exercise, as well as access to clinical care as the primary drivers, and less so the social determinants of health [ – ]. for example, while % of respondents of the same survey considered individual behaviors to drive health, only % considered where a person lives to be a factor [ ], a belief more commonly held by white respondents than non-white and his- panic respondents. (a comparable survey of wisconsin residents found similar results [ ].) finally, political and community action are often motivated by perceptions of unfairness, so an understanding of the extent to which people believe health inequity is unfair is critical to inspiring actions that improve health [ ]. previous research has examined the degree to which americans believe health disparities and differences in access to health promoting resources are unfair, perceptions about the source of those disparities (race, income, education, etc.), and the level of support for actions to address dis- parities. across studies, survey respondents perceived systemic barriers to accessing health care as being some- what unfair yet experiencing disparate life expectancies by race/ethnicity was perceived as less unfair. in general, the belief that individual choices mainly drive health outcomes has inhibited perceptions that disparities in health outcomes are unfair and thus warranting policy action [ , , ]. this evidence suggests examining whether demands for equity reported in the media truly translate into broad public support for policies to improve health equity. the lack of consensus around equity documented in the litera- ture also calls into question the role “echo chambers” towe et al. bmc public health ( ) : page of (social environments where individuals only encounter be- liefs similar to their own) which can fuel polarization and perceptions of “otherness,” and have perpetuated the conditions that cause inequity and inhibited widespread public support for systems change [ – , , ]. given that most studies on beliefs about health disparities and equity were completed years ago and much has chan- ged regarding shared dialogue, a more recent assessment of health equity views is needed [ – ]. previous work based on a – national survey provided evidence of a lack of understanding about the relationship between social determinants and health equity [ ]. misalignment between beliefs in health equity as a value and the contribution of the social de- terminants to health outcomes highlights a potential misunderstanding about the fundamental origins of inequities in upstream drivers of health. since the latest research on similar questions was conducted, move- ments like black lives matter have elevated the dialogue about race inequity. this study allows us to examine whether beliefs changed as awareness increased. this re- search contributes further by examining perceptions of fairness around the distribution of the social determi- nants or health equity, which is critical for motivating community action. past research has not examined dom- inant health narratives by examining the relationship be- tween understanding of health drivers and beliefs about health equity by demographic subgroup. finally, rather than measuring complex concepts such as social deter- minants with one question, this study reflects multiple aspects of complex concepts through scales and identifies groups of respondents with similar perspectives by analyzing their response patterns. to answer our research questions fully, analyses were designed to handle both adjustment and correlation across variables. methods study aims this paper contributes to our understanding of the american mindset around social determinants of health and health equity with recent data from the national survey of health attitudes (nsha) [ ], a survey devel- oped and fielded by the robert wood johnson foundation (rwjf) and the rand corporation, to address two aims: . to examine what factors people in the u.s. think drive health, whether and how levels of understanding vary, and how these levels of understanding may differ by demographic characteristics. . to assess the relationship between someone’s level of understanding of the drivers of health and their beliefs about the importance of achieving health equity in the u.s., with attention to demographic differences. survey this study uses data from the nsha. the nsha was developed as part of rwjf’s efforts to understand national perspectives related to the culture of health, with a primary focus on the action area making health a shared value [ , ]. relevant drivers of making health a shared value include the value of health; the role that social determinants of health play in influencing health; and a shared sense of community to influence health. these drivers were operationalized through the follow- ing measures: whether respondents ( ) recognized the influence of behavioral, social, physical and other factors on health, ( ) had an awareness of the role of commu- nity in health, and ( ) believed in the importance and fairness of health equity. respondents were recruited from two nationally repre- sentative online panels: the rand american life panel (alp) and the knowledgepanel (which was administered at the time by gfk custom research but has since been sold to ipsos). both panels: ( ) are nationally representa- tive internet panels whose members are recruited via probability-based sampling methods; ( ) provide com- puters and internet connections for respondents who do not have them at the time of panel recruitment; ( ) com- pensate respondents for their participation; and ( ) collect and provide demographic information about respondents [ , ]. the implementation of the survey was identical in the two panels. we fielded the survey using the alp because of the rich historical data collected through that panel that can be linked to new data collection [ , ]. these historical data include not only the previous survey that we ran in the alp in , but also any other surveys previous run in the alp. however, to boost sample size, we also conducted the survey in the knowledgepanel. in previous work, we compared responses across the two panels [ , ]. to test the feasibility of combining the two samples, we investigated whether there were system- atic differences between responses to the two surveys, after controlling for demographic characteristics, and found no meaningful differences. data were collected between july and august , . the two survey efforts combined resulted in a final total sample of completed surveys: from the alp and from the knowledgepanel. we used data from a subset of respondents ( ) who answered the survey items on drivers of health and well-being and health equity. measures beliefs about drivers of health and well-being and sense of community health respondents reviewed a list of items, each represent- ing a known driver of health and well-being. these items covered a range of topics, including health-related behaviors, towe et al. bmc public health ( ) : page of access to health care, knowledge about health, and social and place-based factors (e.g., employment, housing quality) and were based on existing survey questions about drivers of health developed by robert and booske ( ) [ ]. for each item, respondents were asked on a -point scale what effect that driver has on health and well-being, with repre- senting “no effect” and representing a “very strong effect.” we dichotomized each item by grouping responses of and into one category representing respondents believing the driver to have a strong effect and responses of – into a category representing respondents not believing the driver to have a strong effect. an additional set of four items asked respondents about their beliefs about their community’s ability to drive health, which were adapted from the sense of community index (sci) [ , ]. we dichotomized each item by grouping responses “mostly” and “completely” into one category representing respondents believing their com- munity does have the ability to drive health and responses “somewhat” and “not at all” into a category representing re- spondents not believing their community has the ability to drive health. beliefs about health equity a review of existing survey questions on topics related to health disparities, drivers of health, and social deter- minants found few existing survey questions about health equity beliefs. one previous study had surveyed u.s. residents about their views on health equity and these items were adapted for this survey by research team members with experience in health equity theory and survey development [ ]. three questions about health equity beliefs were included in order to assess performance of different types of wording. in particular, we kept the language broadly inclusive and focused on concepts of fairness, justice, and equality. to assess beliefs about health equity, respondents were asked to place a priority value to a set of three statements about opportunities to be healthy: . “making sure that the disadvantaged have an equal opportunity to be healthy.” . “it would be unfair if some people had more of an opportunity to be healthy than other people.” . “our society needs to do more to make sure that everyone has ‘an equal’/ ‘a fair and just’ opportunity to be healthy.” questions and were included in a previous survey conducted and tested by norc [ ]. question was modified from a question included in the american na- tional election study on equal opportunities in general, to focus specifically on opportunities to be healthy [ ]. response options for item were a -point scale: top pri- ority, important but not a top priority, or not a priority at all. response options for items and were a -point scale where represented “strongly disagree” and represented “strongly agree.” for item , the item’s wording was ran- domized in presentation to respondents as either “an equal” or “a fair and just opportunity.” there were no differences in distribution of response patterns between the two presentations, so for analytic purposes, they were combined into one item. all three items were dichoto- mized by separating responses at the highest level of endorsement from the other levels for each item. results of this study show consistency in the perform- ance of all three items based on similar response patterns and associations with other survey items. factor analyses we assessed the items representing health drivers indi- vidually and then grouped them into factors to facilitate data analysis and assessing broader linkages between drivers of health and health equity. we first conducted an exploratory factor analysis (efa) on the items and identi- fied three factors, which we labeled traditional health influencers (thi), social and economic determinants of health (sdoh), and sense of community health (soc) (see results for more information). we followed up with a confirmatory factor analysis (cfa) to examine factor load- ing patterns with the goal of defining groupings of items with minimum cross loadings. model fit was evaluated for efa and cfa to find the best fitting model for the items. items were deleted from future analyses if they did not contribute to the differentiation of responses. latent class analysis (lca) we used lca to identify participant groups with similar patterns of response to the items and three factors. models specifying up to classes were run and com- pared on their ability to tease out distinct patterns of response aligned to factors and fit statistics, including akaike’s information criteria (aic) [ ] and bayesian information criterion (bic) [ ]. these statistics assess model fit while penalizing the number of estimated pa- rameters. yang ( ) [ ] demonstrated adjusted bic [ ] to be the best indicator of the information criteria considered for lca. as more classes were extracted, the model fit improved until the adjusted bic stabilized and the number of classes was still interpretable. respon- dents were assigned to classes based on their highest probability of membership [ ]. the classes were mutu- ally exclusive. factor mixture modeling (fmm) fmm is a type of structural equation modeling that allows the simultaneous inclusion of factor analysis (continuous) and lca (categorical) [ ] in the estimation process [ , ]. fmm also accommodates the estimation of towe et al. bmc public health ( ) : page of covariates on both latent factors and latent classes in the same modeling step. fmm can identify profiles in the sample while simultaneously estimating a latent factor model for each profile. for simplicity, we assumed the same latent factor model for each profile (i.e., constraining all factor loading estimates to be the same across the la- tent classes). the inputs used for fmm were: ) the pre- defined number of factors from efa, ) how each factor was defined by the items from cfa, and ) the number of latent classes from the best solution in lca. we examined how observable demographics differed across latent classes using fmm. we incorporated basic demographics such as respondent’s age, gender, race/eth- nicity, marital status, employment status, education level, household size, household income, health insurance sta- tus, urbanicity, and residence in a large city. marital status was dichotomized as married or living with a partner vs. separated, divorced, widowed, or never married. employ- ment status was dichotomized as working or not working. household size comprised three categories: one, two, or three or more people living in a household. household in- come was converted into a five-level categorical scale. race consisted of the following categories: non-hispanic white, non-hispanic black, hispanic, asian, and non- hispanic all other races. education level was defined as: less than high school; high school diploma; some college or associate’s degree; and bachelor’s degree or more. logistic regression latent classes from fmm results were used to examine how latent class membership and observable demo- graphic characteristics influenced respondents’ beliefs about health equity. latent class membership and demographics were used as predictors in three separate logistic regressions, each using one of the three belief statements as the dependent variable to identify which characteristics predict endorse- ment of health equity beliefs. we modeled the probability of endorsing the highest response category, i.e., the re- sponse option “top priority” for belief statement and the response option “strongly agree” for belief statements and . all analyses in this paper were carried out using mplus v [ ] with the exception of the logistic regres- sions, conducted using stata mp [ ]. results aim . factors driving health identifying factors that drive health: traditional health influencers, social determinants of health, and sense of community health of items used for efa and cfa, we retained items based on model fit and reasonable loading. the three items dropped were smoking, genetic makeup inherited from parents, and having health insurance. three factors were extracted from these items to represent health drivers: factor (f ) represents trad- itional health influencers (thi) and is defined by four indicators; factor (f ) represents social and economic determinants of health (sdoh) and is defined by ten in- dicators; factor (f ) represents sense of community health (soc) and is defined by four indicators. fmm results for factor loadings (table ) show how each factor is represented by its composite indicators. loading values are all moderate to high. among these, the highest loading indicator for f (thi) is access to afford- able healthcare, for f (sdoh) is housing quality, and for f (soc) is endorsement of the statement my community works together to make positive change for health. revealing varied comprehension of drivers of health: classes of respondents by patterns of indicator and factor endorsement fmm results for lca specify “classes” of respondents based on their pattern of endorsement of health drivers. table factor loadings for each factor driving health, assuming fixed values across latent classes factors and composite indicators standardized loadings f : traditional health influencers . access to affordable healthcare . . stress . . knowledge about health . . personal health practices other than smoking . f : social determinants . having a job . . neighborhood options for healthy food and exercise . . amount of social support . . physical environment such as clean air or water . . income . . community safety . . housing quality . . education . . where a person lives . . race/ethnicity . f : sense of community health . my community can work together to improve its health . . my community has the resources to improve its health . . my community works together to make positive change for health . . i know my neighbors will help me stay healthy . towe et al. bmc public health ( ) : page of figure presents the four extracted latent classes. the x-axis presents the indicators in the following order (or see table ): indicators – define thi; – define sdoh; and – define soc. each class is represented by a set of color-coded lines. the dots on the lines correspond to conditional prob- abilities (on the y-axis) of endorsing each indicator given class membership. for example, those in class have ap- proximately a % probability of endorsing indicator (“access to affordable health care”) as being an important or very important driver of health. each class exhibits a distinctive pattern of indicator and factor endorsement. class is defined by a near % endorsement of indicators for both thi and sdoh. classes , , and all have relatively high endorsement of indicators defining thi (greater than % probability for all indicators). classes and are high endorsers of sdoh (greater than % probability for most indicators), but probability of class endorsement of sdoh indica- tors generally hovers around %. notably, for all groups, indicator , which assesses race/ethnicity as a driver of health, was endorsed at a substantially lower percentage for classes , , and compared to endorse- ment of other sdoh indicators. in class , all other sdoh indicators were endorsed at % of the sample or higher, but race/ethnicity was endorsed at approximately %. for soc indicators, classes , , and endorsed them at low percentages (all indicators under were %). class endorsed soc indicators at a higher percentage (approximately – %) compared to the other classes, though these percentages are still low. examining the distribution of survey respondents within classes, class is the largest class at . % of the sample. this class represents high endorsers of thi, moderate endorsers of sdoh, and low endorsers of soc. as the majority of respondents are in class , it was used as the reference group in later analyses. all other classes contain very small percentages of respondents: class , . %; class , . %; class , . %. respondents of class are of particular interest as they are high endorsers of both thi and sdoh, and the highest endorsers of soc, potentially representing the group with the most comprehensive understanding of the factors that drive health. examining variation in class membership by demographics we examined how these four classes differed by key demographics. table presents summary statistics of demographics by class. class lca results indicated that class respondents were, on average, high endorsers of both thi and sdoh as drivers of health (though not soc). compared to other fig. endorsement of factors driving health by class*. *note: class refers to classes identified by the latent class analysis towe et al. bmc public health ( ) : page of classes, class respondents were least likely to be male ( %) and most likely to be living in large cities ( %). they had the second highest percentage of respondents with at least some college ( %) after class ( %). they had higher household incomes compared to other clas- ses, i.e., they have the highest percentage of respondents in the highest income category ($ , +, %) and the lowest percentage of respondents in the lowest income category (less than $ , , . %). class had the sec- ond highest percentage of black respondents ( %) after class and non-hispanic whites were the majority ( %) in this class. class class respondents were identified in the lca as hav- ing the broadest comprehension about what drives health, as evidenced by high endorsement of thi and sdoh, as well as a distinctly higher endorsement of soc, compared to other classes. class respondents were more likely to be male ( %), living in rural areas ( . %), and least likely to be living in large cities ( %). they had lower household incomes compared to other classes, i.e., they had the highest percentage of respondents in the lowest income category (less than $ , , . %) and the lowest percentage of respondents in the highest in- come category ($ , +, %). class had the highest percentages of black ( %) and hispanic ( %) respondents of all classes and class is the only class in which non- hispanic whites were not the majority ( %). class lca results indicated that most of the sample was rep- resented in class ( %) and they were high endorsers of thi but had lower likelihood of endorsing sdoh and soc. class had the highest percentages of married re- spondents ( %) and respondents having at least some college ( %) education. about one-third of them were in the highest household income category, similar to class . a vast majority of respondents in this category were non-hispanic white ( %), which is higher than all other classes. class class were low endorsers of all three drivers of health. they had the highest percentage among all classes of unemployed respondents at . %. they had moderate table demographic characteristics of respondents by classa class class class class percent of total sample . % . % . % . % age mean (sd) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) % male . % . % . % . % % married or living with partner . % . % . % . % % unemployed . % . % . % . % % some college or more . % . % . % . % % household size of person . % . % . % . % % living in rural area . % . % . % . % % living in large city . % . % . % . % % has insurance . % . % . % . % household income in dollars less than , . % . % . % . % , to , . % . % . % . % , to , . % . % . % . % , to , . % . % . % . % , to , . % . % . % . % , or more . % . % . % . % race black . % . % . % . % hispanic . % . % . % . % non-hispanic white . % . % . % . % asian . % . % . % . % other . % . % . % . % anote: class refers to classes identified by the latent class analysis towe et al. bmc public health ( ) : page of to low household incomes with % falling into the low- est three income categories ($ , and lower). non- hispanic whites were the majority ( %) in this class. aim . association between understanding of health drivers and health equity views examining differences in perceptions of the importance of health equity, we observed differences by demograph- ics and class membership across equity beliefs (table ). table provides the average partial effect of each in- dependent variable on the probability of endorsing each equity belief. a separate logistic regression was run for each belief. for a categorical variable, the average partial effect is interpreted as the average difference in the probability of endorsing the belief item for that category compared to the reference group, where the average is over the possible values of all the other covariates. for a continuous variable, the average partial effect represents the average effect of a one unit increase in the variable on the probability (on a scale of to ) of endorsing the belief item, where the average is over all the possible values of all the other covariates, including the continuous table average partial effects from regressions of demographics (independent variables) on health equity beliefs (dependent variables) health equity beliefs (dependent variable) . making sure that the disadvantaged have an equal opportunity to be healthy . it would be unfair if some people had more of an opportunity to be healthy than other people . our society needs to do more to make sure that everyone has ‘an equal’/ ‘a fair and just’ opportunity to be healthy n, % endorsing highest response category , . % , . % , . % class membership (ref = class ) class . * . * . * class . * . * . * class − . * − . * − . * age . * . * . * education (ref = high school diploma) less than high school . − . . some college, associate’s degree . * . * . * bachelor’s degree or more . * . * . * household size (ref = ) household size person − . * − . − . household size or more − . − . − . household income (ref = between $ , and $ , ) < $ , . * . * . * $ , to $ , . * . * . * $ , to $ , . * . * . * > $ , − . − . − . has insurance (ref = none) . − . − . being male (ref = female) − . * − . * − . * married (ref = not married) − . * − . − . unemployed (ref = not unemployed) . . * . * race/ethnicity (ref = non-hispanic white) black . * . * . * hispanic . * . * . * asian − . * − . − . other . . * . living in rural area (ref = not living in rural area) − . − . * − . * living in large city (ref = not living in large city) − . . . * note: *p values <. towe et al. bmc public health ( ) : page of variable. intuitively, the average partial effects can be interpreted in a similar manner to the coefficients in a lin- ear probability model. for example, looking at the effect of gender on belief , the estimate of − . for gender in- dicates that on average, the probability that men endorsed belief is . points lower than the probability that women endorsed this item, where the average is over all the possible values of the other covariates. men are, on average, . points less likely to think this item is import- ant compared to women. across three health equity beliefs, we observed some consistent endorsement patterns. respondents who were more likely to endorse all three beliefs tended to be female, older, black or hispanic (vs. non-hispanic white), have more education (some college or bachelor’s degree compared to those with only a high-school de- gree), and have lower household incomes (less than $ , vs. between $ , and $ , ). we also found that respondents who strongly agreed with beliefs and were more likely to be unemployed and living in non- rural areas. class membership was examined in the logistic regres- sion. we found the same endorsement response patterns across all three health equity beliefs by class in terms of direction of association and significance. class on aver- age, had a significantly higher probability (. percentage points) of endorsing belief compared to class (the reference group), and in previous analyses, class was found to have the highest comprehension of health drivers overall, strongly endorsing thi and sdoh and endorsing soc higher than the other classes. class had similar patterns of significantly higher probabilities of endorsement of the two other beliefs compared to class (. and . , respectively). members of class had, on average, a significantly higher probability (. percentage points) of endorsing belief compared to members of class , and this pattern was similar for the other beliefs. members of class were also strong endorsers of both thi and sdoh in previous analyses. by contrast, class had, on average, a significantly lower probability (. % points) of endorsing belief compared to class and ’s endorsement patterns and were similar for the other be- liefs. they were also weak endorsers of any health driver factors in previous analyses. discussion this study contributes to the evidence around americans’ understanding of the factors that impact health, as well as offers new insight into the extent to which they value health equity and differences in these beliefs by subgroup. despite efforts by the public health community, equity advocates, and a growing coalition of nonprofits, govern- ments, and foundations, our research shows that the dom- inant narrative about drivers of health and health equity is powerful and resistant to change: most americans believe that health is predominantly influenced by individual be- haviors and access to health care, as opposed to structural and social factors, and health equity is not a widespread priority. findings from the latent class analysis show that the majority of americans surveyed in still lack know- ledge about the social determinants of health or the role of community on health outcomes. nearly % of re- spondents were members of a class (class ) character- ized by high endorsement of thi (including access to health care, stress, and health behaviors), but lower endorsement of sdoh (including having a job, neighbor- hood options for healthy food and exercise, social support, housing quality, and race/ethnicity), and very low endorsement of soc (including beliefs that the com- munity can work together to improve its health, has the resources to improve its health, and works together to make positive changes for health). hallmarks of belong- ing in this class are that members were predominantly white ( %), educated ( % reporting at least some col- lege education), and high-income (nearly half the mem- bers reported annual household incomes in the highest two categories). each of these percentages were highest for this class compared to the other three classes. in contrast, the class found to have the broadest compre- hension about what drives health (class ), as evidenced by high endorsement of both thi and sdoh and the highest endorsement of soc of all classes, was also the class representing only . % of respondents. members of this class were the most racially and ethnically diverse out of all classes, with the highest percentages of black ( %), hispanic ( %), and asian ( . %) members. this class was also the poorest, with % of individuals reporting a household income in the lowest two categor- ies. the stark differences between these two classes in terms of their understanding of what drives health sug- gest that lived experiences based on race and/or income may be instructive about how sdoh and soc can im- pact health. findings from the logistic regression examining health equity beliefs echoed previous findings and revealed new ones [ , , ]. none of the three health equity beliefs received over % endorsement of the highest response category. in fact, only % of the sample strongly agreed that it would be unfair if some people had more of an opportunity to be healthy than other people. respon- dents endorsing all three health equity beliefs tended to be female, older, black or hispanic, have more educa- tion, and have lower incomes. the relationship between income level and perceived importance of health equity showed a dose-response pattern in which the lower a re- spondent’s income level, the higher the likelihood of per- ceiving health equity to be important (observed across towe et al. bmc public health ( ) : page of all three beliefs). in terms of class membership, class (which had the broadest understanding of what drives health) had significantly higher probabilities of endorsing all three health equity beliefs compared to the reference class (class ). class shared the same pattern of health equity belief endorsement as class ; class ’s similarities to class include racial and ethnic diversity ( % black and % hispanic representation) and high endorsement of both thi and sdoh as drivers of health. the differ- ences between these two groups are also important to understand. class is overall richer ( % reporting in two highest income categories) and more educated ( % more members reporting some college education) than class . therefore racial/ethnic minority status was the factor most strongly associated with understanding of health drivers and the perceived value of health equity, even beyond the role of income, which was also significant. these findings also have implications for how we understand the roots of beliefs about the sdoh and health equity, and the role of demographics in those beliefs. we found evidence that those who may have experienced disadvantage as a result of their race or income may more readily connect social and economic circumstances to health-related challenges. on the flip- side, those who experience relative privilege based on their sociodemographic characteristics may fall back on cultural schemas regarding the role of individual behav- iors, rather than considering structural influences [ ], and prior research shows they may even actively oppose efforts to level the playing field, citing “reverse discrim- ination” [ ]. prior to this work, there has been limited research on the role of demographics and lived experi- ence on beliefs about factors that determine health and values of health equity. as with any study, there are important limitations to note. the nsha is being fielded approximately every years, but this paper only reports on the survey. as such, it will be useful to look at the relationship between health mindset and understanding and health equity, if and how that evolves over time, and why. we are poten- tially living through an inflection point when it comes to demands for racial equity, and it will be valuable to con- tinue to track health equity beliefs among this nationally representative sample in future iterations of the survey. the health equity belief items used in this survey have been used previously and adapted for this study; how- ever, further use of these items would produce more evi- dence for their construct validity. for this study, we used all three items in our analyses to better understand their performance. the results as shown in table indicate that these items performed consistently across a range of demographic predictors, suggesting that they were all understood similarly by respondents of different backgrounds. additionally, the items we used to capture perspectives on health equity are mostly based on broad beliefs, and we do not know yet if different groups might respond differently to more specific aspects of health equity, such as race, income, class, etc. while we built on established scales of sdoh recognition, the items we used to assess soc, while adapted from existing scales, are com- paratively new given the limited research on this topic. conclusion increasing inequities across health, social, and economic outcomes, which have only been highlighted by the im- pacts of the covid- pandemic on low-income com- munities and communities of color, and widespread social unrest related to the topic of race, underscore the urgency of influencing americans’ beliefs in the import- ance of achieving health equity. many perceive that pub- lic sentiment has been shifting over the past decade, through movements like occupy wall street, black lives matter, and others, toward values of equity and dismant- ling historically unjust systems that have perpetuated disparate health outcomes. however, this research sug- gests that an understanding of specific mechanisms of inequity across all sectors, including health, may have not yet penetrated the american mindset. without a more detailed understanding of the issues driving in- equality, some americans will be unable to participate fully in public discourse about how to make policy, eco- nomic, and system-based changes needed to shift the u.s. toward equitable outcomes. and a current understanding of true public sentiment is important because issues looked upon favorably by the public can drive policy change (e.g., federally recog- nized marriage equality, where evolving positive views and widespread publicity about states’ positions on the issue played roles in bringing a case to the supreme court [ ]). based on what we know about the factors influencing health--factors related to the places where people live, work, and play--we must make systems more fair as a critical part of achieving health equity. people need to know what truly drives health (e.g., social deter- minants) so that they can understand how and why the u.s. has not yet achieved health equity. to understand the role of social determinants on health is to see that the real levers for improving health equity are through systems change, as opposed to individual behaviors or health care interventions alone. public opinion about the impact of systems in health, the perceived unfairness of injustice embedded in those systems, and consequently, the level of public support for changing systems so that they improve health, all contribute to policy makers’ motivations to change those policies [ ]. moreover, systems change demands leadership from individuals who are well-versed in the interaction across health care, towe et al. bmc public health ( ) : page of criminal justice, social services, education, and neighbor- hood influences on health. the perceived legitimacy of this leadership is partially determined by the predomin- ant narratives we observe and our ability to transcend the boundaries we have established between individuals of different disciplines, political parties, and stations in life. as our research shows, siloing the call for health equity in the public health and social justice sectors has proven relatively futile in moving public opinion about the sdoh and importance of health equity. if our coun- try is to realize the true change that recent calls to action have demanded, it will be critical to heed these insights about the dominant mindset in the u.s. abbreviations aic: akaike’s information criteria; alp: american life panel; bic: bayesian information criterion; cfa: confirmatory factor analysis; efa: exploratory factor analysis; f : factor ; f : factor ; f : factor ; fmm: factor mixture modeling; lca: latent class analysis; nsha: national survey of health attitudes; rwjf: robert wood johnson foundation; sdoh: social determinants of health; soc: sense of community health; thi: traditional health influences acknowledgements we thank dr. jessie coe for her analytic support and ms. martina todaro for her careful review of the paper. authors’ contributions vt interpreted the results of the analysis and was a major contributor in writing the manuscript. lwm performed the literature review and was a major contributor in writing the manuscript. wh performed the statistical analyses and interpreted the results. lm reviewed and edited the manuscript. kc managed the survey data, consulted on analyses, and reviewed the manuscript. cm reviewed and edited the manuscript. ac reviewed and edited the manuscript. all authors read and approved the final manuscript. funding this research was funded by the robert wood johnson foundation (award no. ). the funding body offered input on the study design and interpretation of data, but ultimately the rand study team had final determination of all research design, analysis, and interpretation choices. the manuscript was written by the rand study team and a representative of the funding body reviewed it. availability of data and materials data were collected by the research team and have been deposited at icps r. data are located at https://www.icpsr.umich.edu/ and can be accessed by registering to access study data. ethics approval and consent to participate data collection was approved by rand’s human subjects protection committee, which acts as rand’s internal review board. survey participants receive consent materials once per year consenting to participate in surveys from the alp or the knowledgepanel and are given the right to skip any survey or question. for both panels, consent to participate was obtained via website confirmation (participants clicked to consent.). consent for publication not applicable. competing interests a representative of the funding body (the robert wood johnson foundation) reviewed and edited the manuscript, but the rand study team had final determination over the research design, analysis, interpretation, and write-up (see “funding” declarations). author details patient-centered outcomes research institute (pcori), washington, d.c., usa. rand corporation, fifth avenue, suite , pittsburgh, pa , usa. robert wood johnson foundation, princeton, nj, usa. received: august accepted: january references . who commission on social determinants of health. closing the gap in a generation: health equity through action on the social determinants of health: commission on social determinants of health final report. geneva: world health organization; . . horowitz jm, igielnik r, kochhar r. trends in income and wealth inequality: pew reseach center; . available from: https://www.pewsocialtrends. org/ / / /trends-in-income-and-wealth-inequality/#fn- - . accessed dec . . bailey zd, krieger n, agénor m, graves j, linos n, bassett mt. structural racism and health inequities in the usa: evidence and 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statacorp. stata statistical software: release . college station: statacorp llc; . . cogburn cd. culture, race, and health: implications for racial inequities and population health. milbank q. ; ( ): – . . kinder dr, sears do. prejudice and politics: symbolic racism versus racial threats to the good life. j pers soc psychol. ; ( ): . . rosenfeld mj. moving a mountain: the extraordinary trajectory of same-sex marriage approval in the united states. socius. ; : . publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. towe et al. bmc public health ( ) : page of https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/ . /hblog . /full https://www.healthaffairs.org/do/ . /hblog . /full 	abstract 	objectives 	methods 	results 	conclusions 	background 	methods 	study aims 	survey 	measures 	beliefs about drivers of health and well-being and sense of community health 	beliefs about health equity 	factor analyses 	latent class analysis (lca) 	factor mixture modeling (fmm) 	logistic regression 	results 	aim . factors driving health 	identifying factors that drive health: traditional health influencers, social determinants of health, and sense of community health 	revealing varied comprehension of drivers of health: classes of respondents by patterns of indicator and factor endorsement 	examining variation in class membership by demographics 	class 	class 	class 	class 	aim . association between understanding of health drivers and health equity views 	discussion 	conclusion 	abbreviations 	acknowledgements 	authors’ contributions 	funding 	availability of data and materials 	ethics approval and consent to participate 	consent for publication 	competing interests 	author details 	references 	publisher’s note elementa: science of the anthropocene | university of california press skip to main content close 	ucpress 	about us 	blog 	support us 	contact us search search input search input auto suggest search filter all 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goals. we will strive to be an active network of allies and active promoters of change. join us in this endeavor! we call for everyone from all ethnic backgrounds to share their story, information, and scientific achievement with the mcaa by contacting blog@mariecuriealumni.eu. we call all researchers who want to make a positive impact in this direction to contact the genders, equity, diversity & inclusion (wg-gems@mariecuriealumni.eu) and policy working groups (policy@mariecuriealumni.eu) of the mcaa to lead projects that foster mutual respect, diversity, and inclusion in current and future research society and higher education. [ ] https://euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/charter/european-charter [ ] https://www.mariecuriealumni.eu/news/referent-mentoring-initiative-msca-early-career-researchers https://twitter.com/search?q=% blackintheivory&src=typeahead_click https://twitter.com/search?q=% blackintheivory&src=typeahead_click https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/ https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/ https://euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/charter/european-charter https://euraxess.ec.europa.eu/jobs/charter/european-charter https://www.mariecuriealumni.eu/news/referent-mentoring-initiative-msca-early-career-researchers s jed .. editors’ introduction we have long cheered on, and sought to participate in, the now decades-long expansion of historians’ conception of progressivism. although some scholars still, often compel- lingly, argue for a unitary vision of the progressives and a coherent narrative to the pro- gressive era, we are much more inclined toward a complex and multifaceted conception that includes—as our last issue attests—members of the society of american indians as much as theodore roosevelt and woodrow wilson. julie greene’s presidential address is an admirable expression of this pluralist vision. no longer is the panama canal simply a far-sighted instrument that sped up global commerce. nor is the canal simply an imperial imposition on a helpless and victimized populace and country. rather, in greene’s thoughtful view, the canal was just one node in a “movable empire” where workers from throughout the world came to seek a new life while negotiating power relations that were definitely not in their favor. at the same time, what happened in panama didn’t stay in panama: the political ideology and technical knowledge that provided the foundation for empire in central america had been learned in and was transportable back across the globe to places like the philippines. greene provides us with eloquent testimony from migrant barbadian workers as part of her contribution to our rethinking the politics and political economy of american empire. yet by no means does she neglect the old-fashioned major players. william howard taft, along with his wife helen, also perform active roles, in her telling, as con- structors of and thinkers about the new empire. greene’s address is an exemplar of how the profession has largely transcended the now-archaic binary of a history of ordinary people, or of elites. thus it is fitting that we are able to match her provocative message with a forum on theodore roosevelt and europe. curated by edward kohn, and shepherded largely by former jgape editor alan lessoff, the forum in many ways does some of the same work as greene, although from a very different angle. while recognizing tr’s intense and often bellicose americanism, the authors de-nationalize the bull moose and reveal some of the many ways that roosevelt cared about europe and how much, in turn, he influenced events in that continent. the progressive presidents are, however, not just ghosts in the pages of this hoary his- torical journal. they continue to be very much involved in current public affairs even a century after their presidencies. tr’s old home, sagamore hill in oyster bay, new york, reopened in the summer of with much fanfare and a massive $ -million restoration under the auspices of the national park service. and the republican presidential debate in november was held in the same milwaukee venue where, in , tr unfolded his blood-flecked notes and delivered a nearly hour-long speech just after being shot in the chest by a would-be assassin. more intense as we go to press is a national controversy over woodrow wilson at princeton university. with the possible exception of thomas jefferson, no president is more connected to a university than his fellow virginian wilson, who served as both pro- fessor and president at what for decades had the most southern feeling of any of the ivies. the journal of the gilded age and progressive era ( ), – doi: . /s © society for historians of the gilded age and progressive era h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms in mid-november, the black justice league at princeton occupied the president’s office for a day and a half. the league centrally advocated a general reckoning with the th president: “we demand the university administration publicly acknowledge the racist legacy of woodrow wilson and how he impacted campus policy and culture.” the league also called on the administration to change the name of the university’s renowned woodrow wilson school of public and international affairs and wilson college as well as to remove wilson’s portrait from public display at a dining hall. princeton’s president, christopher eisgruber, ultimately agreed to “initiate conversations concerning the present legacy of woodrow wilson on this campus,” including a possible removal of wilson’s name; to solicit campus opinions on the desirability of changing the wilson school; and to seek removal of the portrait. the black justice’s league’s demands have inspired a vigorous dialogue and debate about issues that the university has sanitized. and to be sure, the call for what might be deemed a de-wilsonization of princeton correctly asserts how foundational progressive racism was to forging american white supremacy a century ago. yet such calls for justice unfortunately seem to point toward a view of history as light and dark—might one say black and white?—rather than an intellectual and cultural resource that might help us wrestle with the complex legacies of a difficult past. however one might evaluate the federal reserve system, the creation of the department of labor, and the league of nations—not to mention the segregation of the federal civil service—wilson was funda- mental in creating the world we live in. pushing the delete button risks severing the con- nection between past and present, thus making a true and genuine reckoning of oppression all the more difficult. perhaps rather eerily, what the justice league seems to be calling for, in part, is quite congruent with the vindictive eliminationist stance toward wilson of conservative pundit glenn beck, who has said that the anniversary of the death of the totalitarian liberal wilson is each year the happiest day of his life. indeed, beck has come out commending the substance (although not the tactics) of the league’s actions. beck, fulminating against a professoriate supposedly in love with the founding progressive, responded to the events at princeton by noting that wilson “was one of the worst, racist, awful president’s [sic] we’ve ever had. i hate this guy.” princeton junior zeena mubarak has offered a different vision of how to confront an ugly past. arguing against her fellow black princetonians in the pages of the student newspaper, she asserts that: we must not erase woodrow wilson, because to do so is to play into an almost dystopian mentality where the things we do not like are simply thrown down the memory hole. it is true that it is wrong to deify historical figures. thus, acknowledging wilson’s racism is important. we cannot allow him to be portrayed as the infallible patron saint of princeton when his words are hurtful to so many current princetonians. however, wiping out his name and face would do nothing to spur on dialogue or to change racist institutions. it would only allow us to try to forget that we have in- herited a legacy that was created by people whose personal views we do not agree with. the value of mubarak’s approach is that it recognizes the dangers of erasure and denial as well as of uncritical adulation. we need to talk–and, arguably learn to talk–about the past in an intellectually complex, democratic fashion that finds history to be troubling as well as inspiring, humbling as well as clarifying. editors’ introduction h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms regardless of one’s stance on this challenging issue, the princeton protest above all demonstrates that the gilded age and progressive era continue to matter. that alone should be heartening to the readers of this journal. finally: if you would like to continue the conversation, please write to us at johnsto @ uic.edu and bjohnson @luc.edu. our dialogue may well even continue in the pages of the journal. robert d. johnston and benjamin h. johnson n o t e s hannah waman and do-hyeong myeong, “updated: students “walkout and speakout,” occupy nassau hall until demands of black justice league are met,” daily princetonian, nov. , ; princeton black justice league, #occupynassau meet black student’s demands,” change.org, nov. , https://www. change.org/p/princeton-university-administration-occupynassau-meet-black-student-s-demands; princeton office of communications, “university, students reach agreement on campus climate concerns,” princeton news, nov. , , http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/s / / e /index.xml?section=topsto- ries; liam stack and gabriel fisher, “princeton agrees to consider removing a president’s name,” new york times, nov. , ; andy newman, “at princeton, woodrow wilson, a heralded alum, is recast as an intolerant one,” new york times, nov. , . princeton is actively soliciting scholars, and all others, to contribute to the discussion of wilson at http://wilsonlegacy.princeton.edu/. for a strong argument in favor of a general wilsonian delete button that pre-dates the events at princeton, see randy barnett, “expunging woodrow wilson from official places of honor,” volokh conspiracy blog, washington post, june , , https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/ / / / expunging-woodrow-wilson-from-official-places-of-honor/. for dueling perspectives on how to view wilson’s racism, see dylan matthews, “woodrow wilson was extremely racist—even by the standards of his own time,” vox, nov. , , http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/ / / / / woodrow-wilson-racist; and andrew burstein and nancy isenberg, “woodrow wilson is not the confederate flag: scrubbing his name from princeton is a bad idea,” salon, nov. , . for vigorously opposing per- spectives on how to best proceed with issues of wilson, historical racism, and democratic debate, see, on one side, corey robin, “we have the woodrow wilson/p.c. debate all backwards: protesters are forcing a debate princeton has whitewashed for decades,” salon, nov. , ; and, on the other, geoffrey r. stone, “woodrow wilson, princeton university, and the battles we choose to fight,” huffington post, nov. , and james livingston, “don’t repress the past,” chronicle of higher education, nov. , . see also the statement by princeton african american studies faculty members, “princeton faculty letter in support of student protests,” nov. , , aas , http://aas .com/ / / /support-letter/ and the unambivalent statement of the new york times editorial board supporting the renaming of the wilson school in “the case against woodrow wilson at princeton,” new york times, nov. , . tré goins-phillips, “black lives matter activists continue sit-in demanding erasure of ‘racist’ woodrow wilson—and glenn beck says they are right,” the blaze, nov. , , http://www.theblaze. com/stories/ / / /black-lives-matter-activists-continue-sit-in-demanding-erasure-of-racist-woodrow-wilson- and-glenn-beck-says-they-are-right/. johnston has written about beck and the surprisingly complex views of his intellectual associates about wilson and the progressives in “long live teddy/death to woodrow: the polar- ized politics of the progressive era in the election,” journal of the gilded age and progressive era, (july ): – . for a libertarian attack on progressivism–past and present–that accepts the postulates of the black justice league, see virginia postrel, “progressive and racist: woodrow wilson wasn’t alone,” bloombergview, dec. , , http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/ - - /woodrow-wilson-wasn- t-the-only-progressive-racist. for an anti-progressive scholar opposing both the black justice league and princeton, see richard a. epstein, “does woodrow wilson belong at princeton?,” defining ideas, nov. , , http://www.hoover.org/research/does-woodrow-wilson-belong-princeton. zeena mubarak, “we must not erase woodrow wilson,” daily princetonian, nov. , . editors’ introduction h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . mailto:johnsto @uic.edu mailto:johnsto @uic.edu mailto:bjohnson @luc.edu https:// https:// http://www.change.org/p/princeton-university-administration-occupynassau-meet-black-student-s-demands http://www.change.org/p/princeton-university-administration-occupynassau-meet-black-student-s-demands http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/s / / e /index.xml?section=topstories http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/s / / e /index.xml?section=topstories http://www.princeton.edu/main/news/archive/s / / e /index.xml?section=topstories http://wilsonlegacy.princeton.edu/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/ / / /expunging-woodrow-wilson-from-official-places-of-honor/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/ / / /expunging-woodrow-wilson-from-official-places-of-honor/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/volokh-conspiracy/wp/ / / /expunging-woodrow-wilson-from-official-places-of-honor/ http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/ / / / /woodrow-wilson-racist http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/ / / / /woodrow-wilson-racist http://www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/ / / / /woodrow-wilson-racist http://aas .com/ / / /support-letter/ http://aas .com/ / / /support-letter/ http://www.theblaze.com/stories/ / / /black-lives-matter-activists-continue-sit-in-demanding-erasure-of-racist-woodrow-wilson-and-glenn-beck-says-they-are-right/ http://www.theblaze.com/stories/ / / /black-lives-matter-activists-continue-sit-in-demanding-erasure-of-racist-woodrow-wilson-and-glenn-beck-says-they-are-right/ http://www.theblaze.com/stories/ / / /black-lives-matter-activists-continue-sit-in-demanding-erasure-of-racist-woodrow-wilson-and-glenn-beck-says-they-are-right/ http://www.theblaze.com/stories/ / / /black-lives-matter-activists-continue-sit-in-demanding-erasure-of-racist-woodrow-wilson-and-glenn-beck-says-they-are-right/ http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/ - - /woodrow-wilson-wasn-t-the-only-progressive-racist http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/ - - /woodrow-wilson-wasn-t-the-only-progressive-racist http://www.hoover.org/research/does-woodrow-wilson-belong-princeton https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms 	editors' introduction w omen, people from minority ethnic groups, first-generation university students and disabled people — to name but a few — are woefully under-represented in the basic sciences worldwide. reports by the association of american medical colleges and the us national science foundation show that this under-representation is pervasive at every level of academia, including among graduate students, postdocs and faculty members. as scientists, we need to ensure that the basic sciences are more welcoming and inclu- sive. the covid- pandemic has created a tipping point at which no one can ignore the growing public outcry for justice and equality, particularly in light of the black lives matter movement, which quickly became global. we already know that diverse perspectives increase productivity and creativity. so we must reimagine our spaces, behaviour and processes to promote a sense of belonging. d.m. actively works to diversify her clinical field as chair of the committee on diversity and inclusion in anaesthesiology at weill cornell medicine in new york city. for more than two decades, r.g. helped weill cornell’s tri-institu- tional md-phd program to become a nationally recognized leader in recruiting and retaining students from under-represented groups. she also ran a popular summer programme in bio- medical science for undergraduate students psychological defence mechanisms that lead us to mis-categorize our experiences as trivial — to say to ourselves, ‘they’re just little things’ — are part of the problem. there are no ‘little things’ when it comes to racism. the explicit racism of my past is now superseded by subtler discrimination. for years, i have struggled with the fact that some founders of my field are still idolized as if their racist and eugenicist views were unimportant. (only in has this problem finally been acknowledged by the society for the study of evolution, based in st louis, missouri, which is renaming one of its prizes to avoid such associations.) i welcome this step, but i fear there remains little general suggestions to reduce racism in academia increase awareness • give undergraduates tutorials on racism, bias and the benefits of a diverse team. • create opportunities for staff and students to have conversations on racism, and be willing to listen. • review curricula to ensure that black, asian and minority ethnic (bame) academics are fairly represented and that no groups feel marginalized. provide support • develop clear procedures for people to report workplace bullying and prejudice, with support for complainants. • set up bame staff and student networks, and provide a bame counsellor in student- support centres. • lobby universities to address bame pay and promotions gaps. deliver opportunities • develop robust, transparent recruitment procedures that ensure all job ads also target minorities. • adopt guidelines for the organization of diverse conferences and workshops. • ensure bame representation on interview panels, paying for external members if required. make role models visible • organize a prestigious annual public lecture by a bame researcher. • nominate worthy researchers from minority ethnic groups for prizes and honorary degrees. • lobby universities to appoint bame staff to senior positions. more suggestions and links to resources are at go.nature.com/ hftk d. k.n.l. understanding of how academic cultures inadvertently exclude some groups. and for decades, i’ve also been attending scientific conferences in europe and north america and have seen barely any bame representation. i probably would have been less successful as an academic if my father hadn’t anglicized our family name. his original surname was lala, which he changed in the hope that his children would experience less prejudice. even today, people with names associated with minority ethnic groups are substantially less likely to get a job interview, according to a report by sociologists valentina di stasio and anthony heath (see go.nature.com/ egysnh), and bame researchers receive fewer and smaller grants than their white counterparts. names still matter in , yet name-blind procedures are applied only haphazardly across academia. that said, for me, academia has been a haven. others are not so fortunate, and i regularly hear reports of harassment of bame students across the sector. we delude ourselves if we think that there is no racial discrimination in academia because racist expletives are rarely uttered. statistics show that the bame popu- lation is under-represented at many uk and us universities (particularly at top-ranked institutions, and at more senior levels), that ethnic-minority staff are less likely to get pro- moted than their white counterparts, and that there exists a pay gap between white and bame university employees (see kalwant bhopal’s book the experiences of black and minority ethnic academics). sadly, many uk and us bame academics continue to feel like outsiders, and that they have to reach higher standards to have the same level of success (as bhopal also describes). for the ethnic diversity of our universi- ties to improve, actions are required that increase awareness and provide support (see ‘suggestions to reduce racism in academia’). these are small steps, but they can have lasting effects, too. our policies need to reach out to the excluded, to give them opportunities, and help them to perform at their best. it is better to regard actions, rather than people, as racist. each stereotype, social slight or micro-aggression propagates inequality, as does every case of someone being overlooked for promotion or admission to an institution, and every unfairly rejected grant application. many of us, including me, have spent too long viewing our experiences as too trifling to complain about, but we were wrong. the black lives matter movement has helped me to appreciate this. redressing racist brutality is surely the priority, but it is not enough. all of us must speak up and take responsibility for our corner of the world. racism will be defeated only when people understand that these ‘little things’ matter. kevin n. laland is professor of behavioural and evolutionary biology at the university of st andrews, uk, and a long-standing participant in equality, diversity and inclusion initiatives in academia. tips for boosting campus diversity reimagine spaces to promote belonging. by danielle mccullough and ruth gotian. | nature | vol | august work / careers © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. from minority ethnic groups. micro-aggressions and racist language and behaviour create a feeling of exclusion. as a black woman and clinical faculty member, d.m. had several such experiences, including intro- ducing herself as a physician but being mis- taken for a janitor or a food-services worker. she subtly modified her own behaviour: she changed her hairstyle when entering a profes- sional environment, always introduced herself as ‘doctor’ rather than using her first name, and spent less time exchanging pleasantries with colleagues for fear of seeming unserious. feeling forced to take particular measures in the hope of receiving equal treatment reinforces a sense of demoralization. institu- tions can take specific actions now to create a more welcoming and inclusive environment, rather than placing the burden of change on those against whom discrimination is directed. here are five strategies that can help. identify sources of recruitment. organ- izations such as the us-based society for advancement of chicanos/hispanics and native americans in science, the annual bio- medical research conference for minority students and the leadership alliance have established systems and programmes to develop a diversified scientific workforce. for decades, they’ve trained tens of thousands of students and postdocs from under-repre- sented groups to find research opportunities, present their research and identify mentors and collaborators. their national conferences are a magnet for junior scientists and physi- cian-scientists. such conferences, most of which are virtual now, are a wonderful oppor- tunity to establish relationships with potential students, postdocs and their advisers. institutions might also wish to consider developing their own pipeline. in , the us national academies of sciences, engineer- ing, and medicine produced a comprehensive report on effective mentoring in science, technology, engineering, mathematics and medicine. the authors outlined interventions that included programmes with mentoring experiences, such as the gateways to the labo- ratory program (r.g. led) and the us national institutes of health programme maximizing access to research careers. consider the speaker roster. institutions that invite speakers need to examine their choices. do the speakers look the same as those who were invited last year? do they offer a diver- sity of perspective? institutions might wish to ask others for recommendations on thought leaders in a particular field or to access a curated database of diverse scientists such as  women scientists or editors of color. re-evaluate physical spaces. walking down the hallway and not seeing anyone who looks like you can be demoralizing. hanging formal por- traits of previous leaders is a long-standing tra- dition in academic institutions, but department heads, administrators and others should not dis- count the value of informal photographs from laboratory meetings, conferences and retreats. these images from camaraderie-building events showcase the diversity of people in the labs and in the institution. celebrate small wins of everyone in the lab. if a lab member publishes a paper, presents a poster, gives a talk or wins a grant or fellow- ship, principal investigators (pis), department heads and administrators should show support by amplifying those achievements in depart- ment newsletters and websites and on personal and departmental social-media platforms. social-media posts of photos should include a congratulatory remark. this will amplify their achievement for everyone in their network, while underscoring support for their work. gather educational materials. we know that informal chats within us institutions are often focused on racism in the nation: the protests and calls for police reform have trickled into our offices. pis and department heads should offer voluntary training to lab members now, because many are likely to be ready to engage on this subject, and should invest resources to make anti-bias training available to every staff member. learners’ attention will be more focused when they actively volunteer for training, rather than fulfilling a mandate. capitalize on this interest by making educational materials available to the lab. strong anti-bias resources should be vali- dated, easy to complete and free of charge to participants. the implicit-associations test is a quick way to start diversity training. it’s free online and can be completed in about minutes. the assessment aims to reveal the test-taker’s unconscious biases against many groups, including women, people from minority ethnic groups and people who are obese or who have disabilities. those who are administering the test should emphasize that the results are completely pri- vate and only for self-reflection. other options include a series of short videos published in by the new york times that show how implicit biases affect everyday life for every- one. ‘how to overcome our biases? walk boldly toward them’, a tedx talk by lawyer verna myers, a us national activist in diversity and inclusion, has been celebrated for its aim of gently giving permission to people to accept their own biases in order to dismantle them. it is important to note that everyone has subconscious or implicit biases, and that the first step towards overcoming them is self-awareness. normalizing the fact that everyone has biases helps to create a safe space for learning; more robust and long-term initia- tives such as formalized training programmes can be implemented later and can create lasting cultural change within organizations. diversifying the scientific workforce will not happen overnight, but we can take these steps today to change the landscape, improve productivity and help people to feel that they are a vital part of the team. danielle mccullough is an assistant professor of clinical anaesthesiology and chair of the committee on diversity and inclusion in anaesthesiology at weill cornell medicine in new york city. ruth gotian is the chief learning officer in anaesthesiology and assistant professor of education at weill cornell medicine in new york city. researchers validate covid- antibody tests in new york city. m is h a f r ie d m a n /g e t t y nature | vol | august | © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. volume edited by howard williams and liam delaney aims and scope offa’s dyke journal is a peer-reviewed venue for the publication of high-quality research on the archaeology, history and heritage of frontiers and borderlands focusing on the anglo-welsh border. the editors invite submissions that explore dimensions of offa’s dyke, wat’s dyke and the ‘short dykes’ of western britain, including their life-histories and landscape contexts. odj will also consider comparative studies on the material culture and monumentality of frontiers and borderlands from elsewhere in britain, europe and beyond. we accept: . notes and reviews of up to , words . interim reports on fieldwork of up to , words . original discussions, syntheses and analyses of up to , words odj is published by jas arqueología, and is supported by the university of chester and the offa’s dyke association. the journal is open access, free to authors and readers: http://revistas.jasarqueologia.es/index. php/odjournal/. print copies of the journal are available for purchase from archaeopress with a discount available for members of the offa’s dyke association: https://www.archaeopress.com/ editors professor howard williams bsc ma phd fsa (professor of archaeology, university of chester) email: howard.williams@chester.ac.uk liam delaney ba ma mcifa (doctoral researcher, university of chester) email: @chester.ac.uk editorial board dr paul belford bsc ma phd fsa mcifa (director, clwyd-powys archaeological trust (cpat)) andrew blake (aonb officer, wye valley area of outstanding natural beauty (aonb) partnership) christopher catling ma fsa mcifa (secretary, the royal commission on ancient and historical monuments of wales) dr clare downham ma mphil phd (reader in irish studies, institute of irish studies, university of liverpool) dr seren griffiths ma msc phd fsa mcifa (senior lecturer in public archaeology and archaeological science, manchester metropolitan university; honorary research associate, cardiff university) david mcglade ba dms (chairman, offa’s dyke association) professor keith ray mbe ma phd fsa (honorary professor, school of history, archaeology and religion, cardiff university) submissions: odj@chester.ac.uk copyright © authors front cover: poster-style representation of offa’s dyke at springhill by richard o’neill, , to promote the offa’s dyke path (copyright: the offa’s dyke association). cover and logo design by howard williams and liam delaney. offa’s dyke journal volume for edited by howard williams and liam delaney collaboratory, coronavirus and the colonial countryside howard williams two chimeras in the landscape mark bell the ‘wall of severus’: pseudoarchaeology and the west mercian dykes keith fitzpatrick-matthews saxon kent versus roman london? presenting borderland heritage at the faesten dic in joyden’s wood, kent ethan doyle white living after offa: place-names and social memory in the welsh marches howard williams offa’s and wat’s dykes david hill grim’s ditch, wansdyke, and the ancient highways of england: linear monuments and political control tim malim offa’s dyke journal volume for offa’s dyke journal , – offa’s dyke journal volume manuscript received: november accepted: november collaboratory, coronavirus and the colonial countryside howard williams introducing the second volume of the offa’s dyke journal (odj), this five-part article sets the scene by reviewing: (i) key recent research augmenting last year’s introduction (williams and delaney ); (ii) the key activities of the offa’s dyke collaboratory in ; (iii) the political mobilisation of offa’s dyke in the context of the covid- pandemic lockdowns; (iv) the ramifications of accelerated efforts to decolonise the british countryside on both archaeological research and heritage interpretation on linear monuments; and (v) a review of the contents of volume . together, this introduction presents the context and significance of odj volume for both research on the welsh marches and broader investigations of frontiers and borderlands. keywords: archaeology, borderlands, colonialism, coronavirus, frontiers, linear earthworks introduction as the first and only open-access peer-reviewed academic journal about the landscapes, monuments and material culture of frontiers and borderlands in deep-time historical perspective, the offa’s dyke journal (odj) has a concerted focus on the anglo-welsh borderlands given its sponsorship from the university of chester and the offa’s dyke association in support of the offa’s dyke collaboratory (williams and delaney ). yet odj also provides a venue for original research on frontiers and borderlands in broader and comparative perspective. while offa’s dyke and wat’s dyke remain key foci, the contents of volumes and together illustrate the wider themes, debates and investigations encapsulated by odj concerning boundaries and barriers, edges and peripheries, from prehistory through to recent times, as well as considerations of the public archaeology and heritage of frontiers and borderlands. before discussing the six articles in odj , recent new work on linear monuments, frontiers and borderlands is reviewed, and then the specific activities of the offa’s dyke collaboratory during is surveyed. next, the article explores both the effects of the covid- pandemic lockdowns on the politicised rhetoric surrounding offa’s dyke, and the implications of the black lives matter movement on ongoing discussions of the british colonial countryside. as well as shaping and structuring the activities of the offa’s dyke collaboratory in this unprecedented year, the dual themes of coronavirus and decolonisation promise to shift debates regarding the present-day significance of ancient frontier works. i conclude by showing how the articles published in odj , in multiple fashions, herald such endeavours. offa’s dyke journal recent publications the introduction to odj reviewed recent work on frontiers and borderlands (williams and delaney ). this section reviews recent literature missed last year and relevant new publications from . one recent survey omitted from last year’s review was peter spring’s ( ) great walls and linear barriers. this is a bold venture exploring the often scant evidence for linear monuments from across eurasia. it contains a discussion of the more prominent later prehistoric and early medieval linear monuments of ireland and britain and promotes a military thesis for understanding their creation and use. in the context of the articles in this volume (especially bell and malim), tom moore’s recent discussions of late iron age oppida and other ‘polyfocal’ or ‘networked’ sites deserves recognition. he considers these clusters of sites as ‘landscape monuments’, incorporating banjo enclosures and dyke systems and socio-political, economic and ceremonial gathering places. his multi-scalar approach has considerable potential to inform our understanding of linear earthworks of both later prehistoric and early medieval date as monumental strategies for managing and manipulating landscapes. moore considers linear monuments in this context as serving to funnel people, animals and resources across landscape interfaces rather than operating as territorial boundaries (moore , ). also of direct relevant to our discussions is recent analyses into roman-period frontier works. for example, a novel application of lidar data, taking it beyond visualisation and site prospection, is implemented in a high-resolution metric survey, evaluating the projected extent of the mid-second-century ad antonine wall in relation to its famed distance-slabs (hannon et al. ). symonds ( ) conducts an evaluation of the development of hadrian’s wall by considering historic fording places. moreover, symonds iterates the significance for understanding seemingly static frontiers in terms of transforming and controlling mobilities in the landscape (see also murrieta-flores and williams ). for early medieval linear earthworks, nigel jones’ ( ) report on recent excavations along the course of the whitford dyke concluding that, while still undated, it remains disconnected from wat’s dyke and offa’s dyke (see also hill this volume). the principal investigation of early medieval linear monuments published since odj is tim malim’s ( ) consideration of wat’s dyke around old oswestry. reviewing previous work, malim hints at the possibility that wat’s dyke, incorporating old oswestry hillfort at a key node in prehistoric routeways, might have enshrined an older line of significance in the prehistoric landscape implied through association with at least three standing stones (malim : – ). again, as with the work of moore and symonds, we are prompted to consider the broader connections of linear earthworks to the manipulation and reconfiguration of past mobilities. williams – collaboratory just as historic routes provide an inspiration for understanding the design and utility of hadrian’s wall (symonds ), so do contemporary paths inform the interpretation of a new study of chinggis khan’s wall. deploying high-resolution satellite imagery, shelach- lavi et al. ( ) explore this km-long wall spanning the steppes of modern mongolia, russia and china and identify a series of rectangular and circular structures in clusters situated at regular intervals along its line. rather than lookout points, these auxiliary structures were located in association with water sources and present-day paths. built to bisect the lowlands between two mountain ranges, most likely by the medieval liao dynasty, they infer that the wall was not a border or military defensive work but was constructed and garrisoned to monitor and control the movements of pastoral nomadic groups. together, these studies reveal valuable new methodological approaches and insights gained from investigating the landscape contexts of linear monuments. yet linear earthworks were clearly only one strategy for iterating and consolidating socio-economic, territorial and military arrangements. reynolds extends his earlier work exploring the significance of anglo-saxon execution graves by providing a fresh interpretation of graves at werg near mildenhall (wiltshire), close to the ruins of the former roman town of cventio. looking to the wider landscape, he suggests that the kennet valley was part of a late eighth-century contested frontier between wessex and mercia (i.e. contemporary with offa’s dyke). he argues that wansdyke and offa’s dyke were each named after imagined ancestors of the respective west saxon and mercian royal houses to bolster their legitimacy and efficacy in the landscape (reynolds : ; see also seaman ). notably, reynolds indicates a late eighth-century strategy of granting land to powerful and loyal kin in this frontier zone as a means of socially and politically fortifying contested territory alongside dyke-building. execution sites, charters and dyke-building are thus all material dimensions and territorial expressions of the evolving judicial and military authority of anglo-saxon kings. another new and significant study relating to early medieval engineering has ramifications for understanding linear earthworks. werther et al. ( ) explore the archaeological and historical evidence for charlemagne’s failed attempt at building a canal (‘big ditch’) linking the rhine and danube, arguing that this hydraulic work was inspired by the writings of vitruvius. they report on archaeological investigations which reveal from dendrochronological dating that the canal was commissioned in ad with work beginning in the spring of ad and abandoned later that same year. this work as implications for understanding the speed and scale of early medieval engineering projects and the potential for further careful study of how linear earthworks interacted with, and manipulated, water courses. the methodological implications for the potential dating of linear earthworks in locations where waterlogged remains might be preserved is also apparent. offa’s dyke features in a recent survey of fifty ‘things’ which serves as a valuable introduction to students and general readers for early medieval europe’s material cultures offa’s dyke journal and monuments (deliyannis et al. ). furthermore, setting linear earthworks in a longer- term and broader context, lindy brady ( ), writing the welsh borderlands in anglo-saxon england, deserves mention. brady provides valuable literary perspective to the biography of the welsh borderlands as a ‘distinctive territory’ of both conflict and peaceful interactions between peoples from the seventh to the eleventh centuries ad (brady : ). in addition to these recent works that feature frontiers and linear earthworks, it is important to reiterate the persistent neglect of linear earthworks in syntheses of early medieval history and archaeology. the most recent example in this tradition is martin carver’s ( ) formative britain: an archaeology of britain, fifth to eleventh centuries. despite pages dedicated to ‘monumentality’ as part of this far-ranging and distinctive archaeological survey, dykes are completely absent from the interpretation of the societies and landscapes of early medieval britain, illustrating the need for ongoing detailed analyses but also new syntheses in later prehistoric and early historic archaeologies which incorporate them into discussions of not only military activity, but also landscape and society (see also grigg ; williams and delaney ; bell this volume). frontiers are not merely a challenge for how they are interpreted in the human past, but also their effects today. therefore, these new studies of past frontiers are complemented by research on contemporary walls and barriers from the perspective of refugees and those living in their shadow over the longer term. two key books have been published recently which are deserving of note, although neither fully integrates contemporary archaeologies with past linear monument constructions and uses (hicks and mallet ; mcatackney and mcguire ). contemporary administrative and political barriers can divide archaeological organisations and communities and their research into past frontiers. regarding the archaeological professional and heritage sector themselves, paul belford ( ) focuses on the complex and fragmented ecosystems within which archaeology and cultural heritage which operate in the anglo-welsh borderlands, showing how administrative boundaries hinder rather than help archaeological understandings and practices at every turn. to combat this, he proposes a multi-agency cross-border initiative to foster and support what he argues is a ‘cultural coherence’ and ambiguity of the borderlands. similar challenges face heritage agencies and organisations worldwide and combatting the imposition and back-projection of contemporary political and administrative divides onto the human past is a constant challenge. this leads to a consideration of how public archaeology is conducted within present-day borderlands and interpret past frontiers and linear monuments. for the anglo-welsh borderlands, two publications deserve specific note. first, there is the recent collection of studies on old oswestry hillfort and its landscape (malim and nash ) which also considers wat’s dyke as a component of both protests against housing development in the proximity of the hillfort, and as a further element of the rich heritage of north- williams – collaboratory west shropshire incorporated in the creation of a heritage ‘hub’ with archaeological, historical, heritage and natural conservation dimensions (clarke et al. ; see also mcmillan-sloan and williams ). finally, the publication of the proceedings of a conference organised, in part, under the auspices of the offa’s dyke collaboratory, explores public archaeologies of frontiers and borderlands (gleave et al. ). this first-ever collection dedicated to the public archaeology of past, present and fictional frontiers and borders, the collection includes multiple investigations of linear monuments worldwide as well as in the anglo-welsh borderlands. for example, ray ( – see below) reviews the public archaeology of offa’s dyke, while further studies explore wat’s dyke’s heritage interpretation (williams a) and new initiatives for public engagement along its line (swogger and williams ). the power of walls in contemporary perceptions of frontiers is underpinned by reflections on fictional frontier works in this collection too. drawing this literature together, we can see that across periods and regions, there are innovative new thinking and methodological approaches to frontiers and borderlands, including their linear monuments, drawing upon expertise from across disciplines. in particular, taking landscape perspectives and incorporating fresh methodologies, studies are moving beyond either purely military or symbolic approaches to linear earthworks. moreover, it is clear that the odj is part of a broader conversation linked to the legacies and traces of linear monuments in the contemporary world. the offa’s dyke collaboratory in the research and conservation forum, january the offa’s dyke collaboratory is now operating effectively to facilitate new conversations and research on linear monuments in the anglo-welsh borderlands and beyond. there were three principal public events organised by, and one significance conference involving the participation of, multiple convenors and members of the offa’s dyke collaboratory during . in this section we also want to note a new significant research project investigating linear monuments. the first collaboratory event of took place at cardiff university, organised by professor keith ray. eighty heritage professionals and academics were invited to discuss future directions in the investigation, conservation and management of offa’s dyke, wat’s dyke and their related short dykes in the anglo-welsh borderlands. opened by eminent early medieval archaeologist dr alan lane (figure a), the event comprised of presentations by convenors and members of the collaboratory, including talks by local groups offering new insights regarding the line and significance of offa’s dyke in flintshire and in gloucestershire (figure b). among other talks, professor andrew reynolds of ucl introduced a brand-new leverhulme trust-funded project offa’s dyke journal (see below), offa’s dyke association chairman dave mcglade addressed conservation issues for offa’s dyke (figure c) and ian mackay presented about the community stewardship of mercian monuments (cosmm) initiative (figure d). the event was closed with a discussion which flagged up the need for our work to be responsible and have integrity, in order to guard against extremist and political appropriations of the past. the more archaeologists and heritage professionals raise awareness of these ancient frontier works and borderlands, the more our expertise can be applied to effectively combat false narratives (see also williams et al. ). special offa, april complementing the cardiff event which had been aimed at heritage professionals and academics, a public conference was planned for april on the theme ‘special offa: communities and offa’s dyke’. it was organised together with pauline clarke (doctoral researcher, university of chester) and andy heaton of the trefonen rural protection group. the schedule of a morning of talks by academics, heritage experts figure : four images from the cardiff university research and conservation forum, jan- uary . (a) top-left: dr alan lane introducing the day; (b) top-right: ray bailey presenting about the northern stretches of offa’s dyke; (c) below-left: david mcglade revealing the new art commissioned by the offa’s dyke association (see also front cover); (d) below-right: ian mckay discussing cosmm (photographs: howard williams, ) williams – collaboratory and local enthusiasts was to be followed by a guided walk along offa’s dyke in and around trefonen, shropshire. the aim of the day was to explore different relationships between communities and offa’s dyke, past and present, from a range of perspectives and showcasing the latest research and thinking. the choice of trefonen was not arbitrary: the village sits on offa’s dyke and has many local groups working hard to promote and bring benefit to the local area’s history and heritage. however, due to the covid- pandemic, sadly the talks in figure : looking north along offa’s dyke north of trefonen (point on the map in figure ) (photograph: howard williams, ) figure : the advertisement for the digital special offa event by archaeosoup productions offa’s dyke journal the village hall and the walk along offa’s dyke had to be reconsidered. rather than cancel or postpone the event completely, it was decided to ‘go digital’ (figure ). to this end, special offa became perhaps the first public archaeology and heritage event to be delivered virtually during the pandemic lockdowns in the uk. every confirmed speaker generously agreed to present via digital media, but the virtual format provided the opportunity of inviting many additional contributions. the results were presented via the collaboratory’s blog, and disseminated further via posts on the collaboratory’s facebook and twitter accounts. furthermore, i created a youtube playlist of the video contributions which included a video launching this second volume of the journal coinciding with the publication online of the first article (malim). moreover, the trefonen tragical history tour of offa’s dyke went ahead digitally as a series of videos posted on youtube at points along offa’s dyke and the offa’s dyke path within and around the village, including a well-preserved stretch of offa’s dyke to trefonen’s north (figures and ). this virtual tour was supported by a map of the locations where the videos were shot (figure ). wrapping up the day, archaeology soup’s youtube channel hosted a special live event linked to the special offa conference (figure ). the result is that, despite the short notice, the extra work for all involved, and many additional technical challenges related to delivering this event during the early part of the covid- pandemic lockdown, the special offa free public conference was a distinctive and experimental public-facing virtual showcase, with videos attracting fromo c. – views. as well as a legacy of digital resources for those wishing to learn more about wat’s dyke, offa’s dyke, and the landscapes of the anglo-welsh borderlands, special offa provided a viable template for future public events in wales and elsewhere. a full round- up of the event collated posts from various social media platforms (williams b). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-xynjhfgwco&list=pllb pyw nj fsfvxvmjyhvi grr ce-ze. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q zrurrtfuo&list=pllb pyw nj f ewz tmaj znwp fapxts. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p f yfypck figure : howard williams filming the special offa tragical history tour (photograph: kara critchell, ) williams – collaboratory the borders of early medieval england conference, – july while not organised by one of the collaboratory co-convenors, this far-ranging conference organised by dr ben guy brought together a host of historical views on early medieval frontiers in early medieval britain. exploring how borders operated and evolved prior to the norman conquest of ad , the presentations addressed a host of themes and multiple collaboratory members participated. establishing boundaries at the eaa, august the third collaboratory-organised event in took place on august , the culmination of a year of planning resulted in a successful and far-reaching conference session https://bordersconference.wordpress.com/ figure : the special offa tragical history tour map (designed by liam delaney and howard williams) offa’s dyke journal exploring boundaries, frontiers and borderlands across europe (figure ). co-organised by liam delaney, astrid tummuscheit, howard williams and frauke witte, session at the th (virtual) annual meeting of the european association for archaeologists (#s , #eaa virtual) explored establishing boundaries: linear earthworks, frontiers and borderlands in early medieval europe (part of session theme : from limes to regions: the archaeology of borders, connections and roads). this was a session sponsored by the medieval europe research community (merc). the session demonstrated the ability of the offa’s dyke collaboratory to address european, and indeed global, archaeological themes linked to frontiers and borderlands past and present, their history, archaeology and heritage. attracting a significant audience of c. archaeologists, the eaa plan to release a video recording of the presentations and discussions in due course. linear earthworks in britain a new project was launched by the institute of archaeology, ucl, and durham university’s department of archaeology titled ‘monumentality and landscape: linear earthworks in britain’. funded by the leverhulme trust, the project aims to explore iron age and early medieval linear monuments in comparative terms by fresh analytical mapping, volumetric analysis using lidar data, plus new field investigations across the island of britain. https://submissions.e-a-a.org/eaa /sessions/overview/preview.php?id= https://www.linear-earthworks.com/ figure : screen shot from the special offa livestream on the archaeology soup youtube channel williams – collaboratory offa’s dyke and coronavirus the relationship between ancient linear monuments and contemporary politics has become more prominent during . keith ray ( ) notes the ongoing geopolitical relevance of offa’s dyke for the soft border between england and wales where no single topographical feature can stand in lieu as a descriptor. he used the tory prime minster david cameron’s statement from to show how offa’s dyke continues to be appropriated as ammunition to support particular political positions (henry ). like hadrian’s wall (see bonacchi et al. : ), debates have intensified since the indyref and brexit (brophy ). ray sensed that the political ‘weaponisation’ of offa’s dyke has ‘increased many times over’ (albeit not based on quantitative data) (ray : ). ray ( : – ) identifies that offa’s dyke serves a purpose in colloquial speech, not as a specific historical reference. intead, it defines a physical marker, popularly imagined to be built by an ‘english’ king to define a ‘border’ against the welsh for the entire length of the land-border between england and wales. this fits into a wider pattern identified by bonacchi et al. ( ) of the mobilisation of the past in polemical figure : the eaa session poster by liam delaney offa’s dyke journal discussions over brexit since . however, i would identify a threefold conflation of border, national trail and early medieval linear earthwork at play in current popular understandings when the phrase ‘offa’s dyke’ is deployed. the reality is that archaeologists still do not know whether offa’s dyke was conceived of and built as a continuous line, whether it operated as a ‘border’ in a modern sense. yet the surviving line of offa’s dyke only follows the modern border for a small fraction of its surviving length (let alone the tinier fraction this would be had it actually run ‘from sea to sea’). ray ( : ) estimates ‘less than one tenth’ of offa’s dyke coincides with the modern border. however, for those living far east and west of offa’s dyke and not in the borderlands, such details must appear technicalities and only relevant to those who live in the borderlands itself. therefore, ‘offa’s dyke’ stands in proxy for a complex historical process of anglo-welsh inequalities, rivalries and antagonisms as well as providing a geopolitical quasi-historical shorthand for the contemporary border. yet for many locals and visitors alike, it also means the ‘offa’s dyke path’; indeed as ray ( ) has shown, there remain many confusions persist between the line of the path which does run from ‘sea to sea’ and the dyke which does not. whether it was built as a colonial monument, over the centuries it certainly has become one, at least to some sections of the uk population. ray concludes by expressing concern over the exploitation of offa’s dyke in relation to brexit, but also a broader breakdown of consensus regarding ‘britishness’ too (gardner ). conversely, wat’s dyke is clearly too obscure and only makes sense for the northern part of the frontier, and so seems to have received no comparable attention (see williams a). indeed, on nov , plaid cymru leader adam price, in a positive response to the accusations that a ‘hard border’ with english would be the result if welsh figure : map showing the relationship between the modern anglo-welsh border (red), offa’s dyke (violet), wat’s dyke (purple) and the small areas of coincidence between the border and offa’s dyke (white) used in the archaeodeath youtube video and blog-post (map by liam delaney) williams – collaboratory independence transpired, stated: ‘wales has never had a hard border, there was one attempt by a seventh-century saxon king called offa: built a dyke and tried to keep the welsh out. didn’t work’ (see williams c). while getting the century of presumed construction wrong, price was mobilising the popular nationalist perspective that offa built the dyke against the welsh to assure listeners that a ‘hard border’ is neither desirable nor feasible as a future dimension of welsh independence. yet unlike subsequent commentators, he did not conflate offa with the ‘english’ or ‘england’ today (williams c). despite this long tradition of conflating offa’s dyke with the anglo-welsh border, few could have anticipated how the covid- pandemic lockdowns would not only see a dramatic impact on the heritage and tourism sectors, including the offa’s dyke association and the offa’s dyke path, but would also witness offa’s dyke becoming itself mobilised in political and popular discourse. often through attempts at humour, but also in aggressive and chauvinistic ways, in discussions of the covid- pandemic lockdown the dyke has been repeatedly evoked. specifically, hard-border perception and militaristic associations are made explicit in these evocations, thus equating and conflating past and present divisions between the ‘welsh’ and the ‘english’ via references to the ancient linear earthwork. the context for this was the ongoing, fluctuating and increasingly conflicting positions of political administrations of a conservative-run westminster administration and the welsh labour-domination of the senedd cymru in response to the covid- pandemic. early on, from march , tourists and day-visitors poured into rural districts of wales despite lockdown restrictions, causing an outcry and demands for ‘offa’s dyke’ to be fortified/ rebuilt. as the lockdown persisted into may , liam delaney identified the problem and a blog-post and youtube video was composed in response (figure ) (williams c; see also jonson ; morgan ; smith et al. ). while recognising that it was often said in jest, and even by academics alongside politicians, celebrities and the wider public, i pointed out that offa’s dyke never was a border between ‘england’ and ‘wales’ (neither having existed in the eighth century, and conflating intermittently surviving monument with both the offa’s dyke path and the anglo-welsh border is geographically illiterate and irresponsible in contemporary political discourse (williams c). tensions rose sharply again, however, when local areas of wales were on lockdown again in september and early october , especially in the context that english visitors were able to visit from areas with high infection rates whilst those in local lockdown areas in wales could not do the same. further still, when wales entered its two-week firebreak national lockdown on october and england refused to follow similar measures, further jokes and bile were posted online in which offa’s dyke was again deployed to refer to the border being ‘rebuilt’ or ‘fortified’, as well as castigating the first minister, mark drakeford for imposing allegedly unfair restrictions and ‘declaring war’ on the economy (e.g. lynn ). the mail online, for example, featured photographs of the offa’s dyke path and signs to the offa’s dyke centre in discussing how the border town of knighton was divided by the new restrictions (weston and martin ) (figure ). this situation offa’s dyke journal was then flipped, with wales coming out of its two-week lockdown and england going back in to a four-week national lockdown through november. in this context, some commented that offa’s dyke need to be ‘reversed’ as the welsh might attempt to leave. the full and significant impact on tourism and the economy of the anglo-welsh borderlands has yet to be fully evaluated, with many sections of the offa’s dyke path, and the offa’s dyke centre, closed to visitors (figure ). equally, the public use of offa’s dyke to articulate frustrations and dissent regarding the lockdown regulations is a study deserving of systematic analysis of social media posts. how offa’s dyke and hadrian’s wall are being perceived and deployed in popular and political discourse is a focus of ongoing attention through big data analysis (see bonacchi et al. ; bonacchi and krzyzanska ). still, the impression is clear from a brief survey of twitter posts mentioning ‘offa’s dyke’ that myths of both conquest by, and resistance to, the anglo-saxons of the past and the english of today, are being mobilised through the dyke (cf. bonacchi et al. ). who knows what coming weeks and months will bring in uk politics but these instances show that ray is only partly correct in saying that offa’s dyke is a popular shorthand for the anglo-welsh soft border. in addition, its past military and ethno-linguistic dimensions are explicily used within english and welsh nationalistic discourse and the latent potential of it being reinstated as a hard border, and rebuilt as a military frontier, either by its original ‘english’ creators, or ‘reversed’ by the ‘welsh’. for example, welsh journalist reacting to a column by right-wing writer toby young tweeted on october : ‘fortify offa’s figure : covid frontiers: (above-left) the pandemic lockdown signs in knighton outside the offa’s dyke centre and (above-right) the door of the centre (photographs by david mcglade, ) williams – collaboratory dyke now’. indeed, season of the last kingdom, first aired in early , had already presented a fictional early tenth-century context in which the famous hywel dda proposes to do just what present-day commentators are suggesting and rebuild and reverse offa’s dyke (williams d). this popular cultural reference and wider political mobilisations of the monument in the context of covid- reveal the place of offa’s dyke in a wider public consciousness as the border and a zone of confusion and dispute between both england and wales, ostensibly between cardiff and westminster. the dyke thus mediates a sense of threat felt between both english and welsh people, albeit often framed in humour, in which the concept of a hard or even fortified frontier drawing upon a -year- old precedent is a seductive fantasy. while ray is surely correct that the local scale of community engagement provides the rejoinder to nationalistic and chauvinistic discourses (ray : ), academics must work to responsibly counter the repeated appropriations of the past to serve contemporary political ends (e.g. brophy ; williams et al. ). if offa’s dyke has emerged as an ongoing weaponised tool for popular dissonance, in the heartland of mercia, the anglo-saxon period and its material culture has taken on a positive dimension during the pandemic lockdown. evoked to encourage support for pandemic social distancing measures, tamworth borough council devised two ‘shield yourself’ posters. one depicted shields emblazoned with the yellow cross on blue background of tamworth’s coat of arms, held up by stick figures to articulate the m rule. meanwhile, a replica sutton hoo mask is shown against a (now) commonplace fabric one with the humorous motto: ‘you don’t have to be exactly like saxons…. this will be fine’ (figure ). this light-hearted message reminds us that evocations of a martial early medieval past need not always be negative, and early medieval linear earthworks too might be deployed as positive forces in today’s society. https://twitter.com/simon_price /status/ figure : covid- posters encouraging social distancing by tamworth borough council (reproduced with permission) offa’s dyke journal dykes and the colonial countryside britain’s colonial landscape has been the focus of intense and passionate debate during in the aftermath of the black lives matter protests. from the toppling of colston’s statue in bristol (e.g. figes ; hicks ; olusoga ; siddique and skopeliti ), to the protests and counter- protests in london, the uk debates rapidly spread far beyond public statuary and monuments to consider how the colonial legacy is recognised in the british landscape and what steps should be taken to highlight and explore often overtly obscured and hidden traces of slavery and colonial connections in the countryside. the national trust are one of the organisations that have gone beyond passive recognition of the black lives matter movement and have enacted initiatives to reflect and develop engagement with the colonial legacies of a selection of the properties in their care, having commissioned an interim report focused on the slaving links in the histories of many of their country houses (huxtable et al. ). despite largely spurious outrage by some politicians and sections of the british media (bush ), this is a welcome and far-reaching report that speaks a pervasive theme for the study and heritage conservation, management and interpretation of the historic landscape. the publication focuses on the historical personages who once built and occupied country houses and their economic interests and politics, as well as the presence and representation of black people. these are all necessary and essential foci for tackling the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade and colonialism more broadly. yet, to date, the estates of the national trust properties, and the town and country landscapes in which they are situated, have yet to be tackled in this exploration of colonial connections and legacies. moreover, the broader backcloth of ancient and medieval colonialisms in relation to country houses has yet to be addressed in any systematic fashion (williams f, g; see also gosden ). e.g. see the legacies of british slave ownership project: https://www.ucl.ac.uk/lbs/ figure : the statue of offa at powis castle: an anglo- saxon ruler in a colonial context (photograph: howard williams, ) williams – collaboratory in the context of this discussion of linear monuments, it is therefore important to recognise that colonialism in the modern era can be set against deep-time ancient and medieval processes of colonialism in the british landscape. one manifestation of these are linear frontier works built by the roman empire, hadrian’s wall and the antonine wall. yet, the great linear earthworks constructed by the mercian kingdom in the late eighth and early ninth centuries, wat’s dyke and offa’s dyke, can also be conceptualised as colonial monuments, implementing and articulating the control of the landscape through hegemonic power (ray and bapty ) and thus requiring post-colonial interpretations in the contemporary world. dykes were not only frontier and military constructions, but also instruments of colonial and colonising strategies inherent in their design, affordances and legacies down to the present day (ray ). arguably, engaging in fresh ways with early medieval dykes, therefore, is a further fruitful basis for decolonising the countryside through their reinterpretation alongside efforts to revaluate the colonial impact of the modern era. this is important since these ancient monuments not only continue to frame ethnonationalist discourses in recent centuries (bonacchi et al. ), but also there are figure : looking north along a much-denuded line of offa’s dyke beside the national trust car park at chirk castle. the dyke is unmarked and without heritage interpretation, yet every car or coach-driven visitor to chirk castle crosses the monument to reach the car park, and then most pedestrian visitors will walk over the dyke past the adventure playground (photograph: howard williams, ) offa’s dyke journal multiple heritage sites and landscapes where ancient, medieval and modern colonialisms intersect and, arguably, interact, whether by happenstance or active consideration, shedding light on histories of slavery and colonial exploitation. for the anglo-welsh borderlands, for example, it is possible to consider the colonial legacy of roman, anglo- saxon and later medieval settlements and peoples alongside the modern history of the city of chester and its environs. likewise, the immediate proximities between offa’s dyke and wat’s dyke and multiple country estates with great houses with imperial and colonial connections include the national trust properties of powis castle and chirk castle to erddig hall (huxtable et al. : , ). at each, the connections between the modern colonial era and the early medieval linear earthworks in their proximity are striking yet completely overlooked in present-day heritage interpretation. powis castle (powys) contains the collections of robert clive (of india) and his son became st earl of powis (huxtable et al. : ). a medieval borderlands castle in origin, the residences has spectacular views overlooking the severn valley with offa’s dyke crossing the valley slopes to the east. king offa is one of two anglo-saxon monarchs (the other being king edgar) whose statues frame the main northern entrance; the early medieval past is thus materially and spatially connected to the residence’s colonial legacy (williams ) (figure ). figure : erddig hall national trust property looking south-south-east towards the house from the line of wat’s dyke which formerly ran along the ridge-top but is now lost due to landscaping (photograph: howard williams, ) williams – collaboratory originally a strategically sited thirteenth-century castle, the national trust property of chirk (wrexham) was home to an investor in privateers and the sugar trade, sir thomas myddleton (huxtable et al. : ). moreover, the castle is located adjacent to the surviving line of offa’s dyke. the monument is large but denuded on the chirk estate but dramatic in scale as it descends south of the castle into the glyn ceiriog. however, there are no heritage interpretation panels or details in the visitor guide book about the linear earthwork. this is despite the fact that almost every visitor walks and/ or drives over the monument at least twice during their visit; the dyke is disconnected from the successive stories of colonialism to be found in the castle and its landscape (williams a) (figure ). there is also an absence of interpretation for wat’s dyke at erddig hall where the mercian frontier work ran through the estate and was later incorporated into an anglo- norman motte-and-bailey castle (see also belford ). erddig hall had been built by joshua edisbury, one of whose main benefectors was elihu yale. yale made his fortune with the east indian company (huxtable et al. : ; williams g). yet, neither existing heritage interpretation nor the recent report recognise the slaving links of yale figure : a monument of resistance to mercian colonisation? the early ninth-century cross now known as the pillar of eliseg, survives in fragments and re-positioned on top of the early bronze age burial mound close to valle crucis abbey, denbighshire (photograph: howard williams, ) offa’s dyke journal to the wider landscape including his former residence at plas grono or his tomb in nearby wrexham. equally, there is no recognised connection between these country house and the earlier phases of colonialism revealed by the late eighth-/early ninth- century dyke and the late eleventh-century castle (figure ). these case studies reveal intersections between the colonial countryside’s ancient, medieval and modern dimensions which need to be tackled alongside the specific historical personages with slaving links. others surely exist linking the anglo-welsh borderlands and early medieval liner earthworks to the legacy of colonialism and slavery (e.g. williams e). such instances illustrate the work still be to be done, not only by the national trust but also other heritage organisations and practitioners aspiring to rethink how best to conserve, manage and interpret the british landscape through a decolonising lens. i contend that recognising and explaining walls and borders past and present, not only the traces of recent divisions (e.g. mcwilliams ) but also those of the distant past, must be a key ingredient in such endeavours to explore movement and memory, domination and resistance, imperialism and colonialism, in the landscape. this involves considering broader alterities of power and hegemony but also subaltern stories in the landscape (e.g. murrieta-flores and williams ; cf. ray and bapty ), so that monuments such as figure : wat’s dyke at soughton farm, looking south-east (photograph: howard williams, ) williams – collaboratory the pillar of eliseg, inscribed to commemorate the dynasty of powys in close proximity to offa’s dyke and wat’s dyke, can be conceptualised as material components of the complex biographies of conflict and collaboration in the borderlands from the early middle ages to the present day in relation to both mercian linear monuments (figure ). in doing so, specific sections of preserved linear monument, such as wat’s dyke at soughton farm, northop (figure ), cannot be neglected without a narrative for local communities and visitors. we must strive to contextualise these monuments in relation to the wider inhabited historic environment in which identities and senses of place are configured and negotiated (see williams this volume). reviewing volume this context amplifies the necessity of an open-access, digital and peer-reviewed venue for the publication of academic work on frontiers and borderlands in the human past and in today’s world. for the offa’s dyke journal, our remit set for volume was to re- publish classic reports that shed light on linear monuments and their relationships with frontiers and borderlands that, while published elsewhere, have remained difficult to access and thus were sometimes overlooked or ignored (a. williams ; worthington hill ). moreover, volume set the precedent for the dissemination of the latest fieldwork, analyses and syntheses from across differing disciplines exploring linear earthwork’s functions and significance in the human past (belford ; seaman ; tummuscheit and witte ), and in today’s world (swogger ) extending far beyond offa’s dyke. indeed, as our introductory essay made crystal clear and evidenced by only two of the six articles tackling offa’s dyke directly (williams and delaney ), the title offa’s dyke journal was explicitly used to create a focus and a tone for the journal’s content, not to set this one linear monument as the journal’s primary subject. this second volume repeats and extends this broader remit in the study of linear monuments and their landscape contexts past and present. the volume opens with mark bell’s original article, building off his book-length survey (bell ). focusing on two sets of linear earthworks in southern britain, bell shows how they have been tenacious chimera and despite being long debunked and re-dated to later prehistory, they continue to conjoin and perpetuate popular accounts of the early middle ages. yet despite bell’s lead, and other discussions of antiquarian and early archaeological accounts of linear monuments (e.g. ray and bapty ; ray ; williams ), there remains a wider dearth of in-depth critical historiographies of linear monuments. the offa’s dyke collaboratory has identified this as a required principal focus of ongoing research by historians of antiquarianism and archaeology. linked to challenges of dating and interpreting linear monuments, keith fitzpatrick- matthews writes a definitive critique of key pseudoarchaeological narratives about britain’s linear earthworks. for while there is a demonstrable global bias away in the application of pseudoarchaeological theories to non-european sites and monuments, offa’s dyke journal wansdyke and offa’s dyke in particular have attracted occasional fantastical narratives attributing them as ‘prehistoric canals’, the deeds of roman emperors or sub-roman ‘arthurian’ military stop-lines. crucially, fitzpatrick-matthews also identifies the dangers of elevating provisional dating and tentative interpretations within mainstream academic discourse to the status of unequivocal facts. in combination, bell and fitzpatrick-matthews reveal how the difficulties within defining the dates, extents and contexts of linear earthworks make it difficult to debunk old-fashioned conceptions surrounding them and renders them ripe for use and misuse for dubious and spurious pseudoarchaeological narratives. this is the very reason that the aforementioned select linear monuments equated with modern borders – hadrian’s wall and offa’s dyke – are particularly powerful and dangerous within contemporary political discourses. this leads us to the heritage interpretation of linear earthworks in the contemporary landscape. doyle white focuses on kent’s faesten dic, an undated linear earthwork which has been afforded interpretation panels and sculpture which promotes an old-fashioned interpretation as a military defence demarcating saxon kent from roman london. doyle white reviews the (ambiguous) evidence for its date and function and proceeds to explore the difficulties and political context of the recent narrative for the monument. exploring the material cultures and landscapes of contemporary landscapes in relation to ancient linear earthworks is a theme taken up by williams, exploring naming practices in the welsh marches associated with wat’s dyke and offa’s dyke. williams argues for both the unrecognised significance of naming practices for materialising monuments hiding in plain sight and constituting an ingrained element of borderland identities constituted by them, but also the untapped potential of these place-names for mobilising localities to engage with these monuments’ histories and significances in today’s world (see also williams a). the collection concludes with two ‘classic revisited’ articles. first there is david hill’s survey of the offa’s dyke project’s fieldwork on both wat’s dyke and offa’s dyke in flintshire, and then a re-publication of tim malim’s consideration of grim’s ditch and wansdyke. individually, in combination, and in juxtaposition with the original articles, these pieces have enduring value for students and scholars seeking to interpret britain’s later prehistoric and early historic linear earthworks. conclusion set against a broader backcloth of growing ethno-nationalism and xenophobia in the uk, manifest in the debates surrounding both indyref and the brexit process, and the divisive – trump administration in the usa, i am writing this article on saturday november when biden/harris have been projected by global and us media as winners of the us presidential election. on the aftermath of both the black lives matter movement and the ongoing coronavirus pandemic, this is a momentous day. williams – collaboratory likewise, one of the very foundations of trump’s original presidential campaign and ongoing rhetoric, the us-méxico ‘trump’s wall’, can now be firmly regarded as fictitious, with only a short stretch of new wall built where none had existed before, even if existing border walls have been replaced over hundreds of miles. in short, the border has been fortified but a distinctive ‘trump’s wall’ is little more than rhetoric (rodgers and bailey ). yet barriers, ancient and modern, do not evaporate with violent regime changes or democratic elections. for the uk, the brexit process has encouraged a new tide of antagonisms within and beyond the uk, building off (among other things) the indyref process and the refugee crisis and its aftermath. in this political environment, the material remains of britain’s past have been politicised in all manner of fashions (see brophy ), set against a broader strategies of militarised and hard borders, as well as localised community wall-building, during the late twentieth-/early twenty-first-century (mcatackney and mcguire ). having provided something of the unique context the offa’s dyke collaboratory finds itself in , specifically the black lives matter movement and the covid- pandemic in which have enhanced and sharpened the popular debate and political mobilisation of already contested linear earthworks and their perceived relationship with contemporary borders, i argue that the academic study of linear monuments and their frontier and borderland contexts has never been more crucial. wall-building and wall-uses dominate our popular consciousness like never before within these global circumstances ad this has directly impacted upon both hadrian’s wall for ongoing scottish-english relations, and for welsh-english relations attention has intensified around offa’s dyke. indeed, his mobilisation of ancient monuments is particularly uniquely powerful and distinctive: this pair of ancient monuments materialise modern tensions and discourses in a fashion unparalleled elsewhere in the britain, ireland and across europe. following spring’s ( : – ) projection, the neglect of walls and linear monuments for critical and scholarly attention is long overdue systematic redressing across disciplines. reflecting on the enduring mythology of the maginot line as a failed line of defence and a broader mentality of fixed barriers as negative and futile, exacerbated by the legacy of the ‘too successful’ semi-permanent trenches of the first world war, spring recognises scholars’ ‘unconscious horror of linear obstacles’ (spring : ). this builds upon a cluster of theoretical, methodological and practical factors behind this which have worked against the serious study of linear monuments past and present (see also mcguire ). spring’s ( ) advocacy of a shared primacy of the military function of pre-modern linear barriers (see also grigg ) and his naturalisation of them as a common human response to a similar set of problems throughout human history should be moderated. still, the need to rectify the neglect and biases he rightly specifies is fair and clear. specifically, together with the contemporary archaeological work of mcatackney and mcguire’s offa’s dyke journal ( ) collection and the public archaeology perspectives of gleave et al. ( ), the articles published here together demonstrate the timely and necessary role of the offa’s dyke journal in collating and disseminating academic research across disciplinary divides and to wider publics (e.g. clarke et al. ; swogger and williams ). to reflect the importance of ancient borders as not a means of valorising military works, but celebrating the redundancy of borders and barriers past, i end with frank noble’s words, written in his guide to the offa’s dyke path he was instrumental in creating. in reflecting on the official opening of the path on july , noble reminds us of the positive power of ancient, now defunct, frontiers and borderlands to reflect on new ways to construct shared pasts and new connections, rather than misguided attempts of creating new fashions to divide us. at a time when britain’s entry into the common market was being negotiated, the largest frontier earthwork dating back to the period when the present nations of europe had their origins, was being put to peaceful use. as a precedent for the adaption of redundant european frontiers – preserving national identities without provoking conflicts – it may have come at a remarkably apposite moment. twelve hundred years lie behind the dyke. there is no excuse for looking short-sightedly along this path (noble : ). acknowledgements thanks to dr kenneth brophy, pauline clarke, dr kara critchell, dr gary duckers, dr clare hickman and john g. swogger for suggestions and guidance on earlier drafts of this article. the university of chester and the offa’s dyke association have continued sponsorship of this publication venture and i offer my sincere thanks. likewise, i’m grateful to jas arqueología for facilitating and hosting the digital product. archaeopress are recognised for distributing the print version of the journal. odj’s editors also extend gratitude also to the peer-reviewers for their work and support. sincere thanks all the speakers and the audience of the special offa day. many thanks to andy heaton, pauline clarke and liam delaney for facilitating the trefonen event. special thanks to dr kara critchell and archaeosoup productions who came to the rescue at short notice by offering support and guidance. bibliography belford, p. . hidden earthworks: excavation and protection of offa’s and wat’s dykes, offa’s dyke journal : – . belford, p. . borderlands: rethinking archaeological research frameworks. the historic environment: policy and practice, https://doi.org/ . / . . williams – collaboratory bell, m. . the archaeology of the dykes: from the roman to offa’s dyke. stroud: amberley. bonacchi, c. altaweek, m. and krzyzanksa, m. . the heritage of brexit: roles of the past in the construction of political identities through social media. journal of social archaeology ( ): – . bonacchi, c. and krzyzanksa, m. . digital heritage research re-theorised: ontologies and epistemologies in a world of big data. international journal of heritage studies ( ): – . brady, l. . writing the welsh borderlands in anglo-saxon england. woodbridge: boydell. brophy, k. . the brexit hypothesis and prehistory. antiquity ( ): – . brophy, k. . hands across the border? prehistory, cairns and scotland’s independence referendum, in k. gleave, h. williams and p. clarke (eds) public archaeologies of frontiers and borderlands. oxford: archaeopress: – . bush, s. . the national trust is under fire for a crime it didn’t commit, november , https:// www.newstatesman.com/politics/uk/ / /national-trust-under-fire-crime-it-didn-t-commit carver, m. . formative britain: an archaeology of britain, fifth to eleventh centuries london: routledge. clarke, k., phillips, n. and malim, t. . oswestry heritage gateway: a landscape of opportunity, in t. malim and g. nash (eds) old oswestry hillfort and its landscape. oxford: archaeopress: – . clarke, p., gleave, k. and williams, h. . public archaeologies from the edge, in k. gleave, h. williams and p. clarke (eds) public archaeologies of frontiers and borderlands. oxford: archaeopress: – . deliyannis, d., dey, h. and squatriti, p. . fifty early medieval things: materials of culture in late antiquity and the early middle ages. ithaca: cornell. figes, l. . pushed off the pedestal: who was the slave trader edward colston? art uk june , https://artuk.org/discover/stories/pushed-off-the-pedestal-who-was-the-slave-trader-edward-colston hannon, n. rohl, d.j. and wilson, l. . the antonine wall’s distance-slabs: lidar as metric survey. journal of roman archaeology : – . hicks, d. . why colston had to fall, artreview, june , viewed november , https://artreview.com/why-colston-had-to-fall/ hicks, d. and mallet, s. . ‘lande’. the calais jungle and beyond. bristol: bristol shorts research. huxtable, s-a., fowler, c., kefala, c. and slocombe, e. 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charlemagne’s canal project: craft, nature and memory. early medieval europe ( ): – . weston, k. and martin, h. . border farce! confusion in town that straddles both england and wales as it faces being in tier and ‘fire break’ lockdown at the same time, october , https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article- /border-farce-confusion-town-straddles- england-wales.html williams, a. . offa’s dyke: ‘the stuff that dreams are made of’, offa’s dyke journal : – . offa’s dyke journal williams, h. and delaney, l. . the offa’s dyke collaboratory and the offa’s dyke journal. offa’s dyke journal : – . williams, h. a. dyke denial at chirk castle? october , https://howardwilliamsblog. wordpress.com/ / / /dyke-denial-at-chirk-castle/ williams, h. b. more dyke confusion: wat’s dyke at erddig, october , https:// howardwilliamsblog.wordpress.com/ / / /more-dyke-confusion-wats-dyke-at-erddig/ williams, h. . offa and edgar at powis castle, july , https://howardwilliamsblog. wordpress.com/ / / /offa-and-edgar-at-powis-castle/ williams, h. a. interpreting wat’s dyke in the st century, in k. gleave, h. williams and p. clarke (eds) public archaeologies of frontiers and borderlands. oxford: archaeopress: – . williams, h. b. special offa: communities and offa’s dyke #specialoffa. april , https://offaswatsdyke.wordpress.com/ / / /__roundup/ williams, h. c. coronavirus and offa’s dyke. why offa’s dyke has never divided the english and the welsh and still doesn’t, may , https://howardwilliamsblog.wordpress.com/ / / /coronavirus- and-offas-dyke-why-offas-dyke-has-never-divided-the-english-and-the-welsh-and-still-doesnt/ williams, h. d. dyke is all! offa’s dyke in the last kingdom season , https://howardwilliamsblog. wordpress.com/ / / /dyke-is-all-offas-dyke-in-the-last-kingdom-season- / williams, h. e. colonialism and the anglo-welsh border. giants and offa’s dyke at piercefield, september , https://howardwilliamsblog.wordpress.com/ / / / colonialism-and-the-anglo-welsh-border-giants-and-offas-dyke-at-piercefield/ williams, h. f. defend the memorials or topple the racists? july , https:// howardwilliamsblog.wordpress.com/ / / /defend-the-memorials-or-topple-the-racists/ williams, h. g. yale and offa; reflecting on statues, naming practices and the heritage of the welsh marches. presentation at the webinar ‘whose heritage is it anyway? managing changing historical interpretations’, historic towns and villages forum, kellogg college, university of oxford, november . williams, h. with clarke, p., bounds, b., bratton, s., dunn, a., fish, j., griffiths, i., hall, m., keelan, j., kelly, m., jackson, d., matthews, s., moran, m., moreton, n., neeson, r., nicholls, v., o’conner, s., penaluna, j., rose, p., salt, a, studholme, a. and thomas, m. . public archaeology for the dark ages, in h. williams and p. clarke (eds) digging into the dark ages: early medieval public archaeologies. oxford: archaeopress: – . worthington hill, m. . wat’s dyke: an archaeological and historical enigma. offa’s dyke journal : – . howard williams, professor of archaeology, department of history and archaeology, university of chester, parkgate road, chester ch bj email: howard.williams@chester.ac.uk journal of applied learning & teaching vol. no. ( ) brookfield, s. & associates ( ). teaching race. how to help unmask and challenge racism. jossey-bass. jürgen rudolph head of research & senior lecturer, kaplan higher education, singapore; editor-in-chief, journal of applied learning & teaching doi: https://doi.org/ . /jalt. . . . content available at : journal of applied learning & teaching vol. no. ( ) journal of applied learn ing & te ac hi n g jalt http://journals.sfu.ca/jalt/index.php/jalt/index issn : - x if you can't speak out against this kind of thing, a crime that's so unjust, your eyes are filled with dead men's dirt, your mind is filled with dust. your arms and legs they must be in shackles and chains, and your blood it must refuse to flow, for you let this human race fall down so god- awful low! (bob dylan, the death of emmett till, ) one evening in august , -year-old emmett till, while visiting his uncle in a mississippi village, went to a grocery store to buy candy. emmett is said – and even this is disputed – to have whistled admiringly at the sight of the attractive white storekeeper, carolyn bryant. this was a violation of the unwritten racial code that still prevailed in the southern states at the time. a few days later, roy bryant and his half-brother j.w. milam kidnapped and tortured the black teenager, shot a bullet in his head, weighted his body with metal and barbed wire, and threw him into a river, seriously injured and still alive (pitzke, ). despite the overwhelming evidence against bryant and milam, the all-white male jury acquitted the accused. bryant and milam admitted killing emmett till in an interview shortly thereafter, but remained unmolested as they were protected against double jeopardy. figure : part of display with racist quote from murderer of emmett till - national civil rights museum, downtown memphis, tennessee, usa. photo taken by adam jones on may, , cc by . . https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/ file:display_with_racist_quote_from_murderer_of_emmett_ till_-_national_civil_rights_museum_-_downtown_ memphis_-_tennessee_-_usa.jpg the photos of emmett till’s disfigured body and the scandalous acquittal became a symbol of resistance and an icon of the u.s. civil rights movement (pitzke, ). figure : mississippi freedom trail marker in money, mississippi, explaining how emmett till’s visit to bryant’s grocery led to his murder. photo taken by eames heard on may, . cc by . , https://commons.wikimedia.org/ wiki/file:bryant% s_grocery_mississippi_freedom_trail_ marker.jpg fast forward years later after emmett till’s gruesome, racially-motivated murder. the killing of a black man, george floyd, by a white policeman in broad daylight in minneapolis, invoked memories of america’s long history of racial injustice. “i’m still crying for emmett till”, read one note decorated with hearts, beside a sketch of the -year- old lynched in (the economist, a). george floyd, in some ways, is perhaps the st century emmett till. in the u.s., racial injustice began with the original sin of slavery, but even after its hard-fought abolition, it has endured due to white supremacist beliefs and racial journal of applied learning & teaching vol. no. ( ) discrimination. george floyd’s death has provoked protests around the world, strengthening the global black lives matter movements and providing them with widespread multiracial, multi-generation support. global outrage was caused by floyd’s killing having been filmed in excruciating detail. also, police brutality against minorities is rife in many countries around the world. the economist magazine ( b) drew a parallel between the #blacklivesmatter and #metoo movements: “just as women on every continent found common cause in the #metoo movement, despite the range of their experiences, so protesters around the world have united around the cry that black lives matter”. thanks to the recent black lives matter protests and their creating awareness about the systemic racism and racial discrimination in the u.s. and elsewhere, the importance of brookfield and co-authors’ book under review should be glaringly obvious. although teaching race was published before the murder of george floyd, there is an extremely helpful discussion of violence in the book (george floyd is of course but one of the many unarmed black people killed by the police in the u.s.). citing galtung (in ), the structural violence of racism manifests itself as “unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances”, while the cultural violence of racism refers to cultural aspects (assigning individual characteristics such as ‘inferior’, ‘lazy’, ‘stupid’, or ‘inherently violent’) “that can be used to justify or legitimate direct or structural violence”. structural and cultural violence are then “used to justify direct violence, as housing is destroyed in gentrification, calls for justice are repressed as riots, and unarmed people of color are disproportionately killed by police” ( ). another indication of systemic racism is the mass incarceration of black people. the collective trauma of black people is invisible to other communities for whom it is not a daily reality. “physically and emotionally, people of color find themselves drained, more marginalized, and less hopeful about the future” ( ). violence in communities of colour is a symptom, and not the cause, of poverty. teaching race is led by stephen brookfield and co-authored by “associates” of the lead author and editor. it first and foremost aims to be a guidebook to teach about the emotionally-charged and contentious issues of race and racism. teaching race provides numerous activities, exercises, resources, techniques and strategies to examine racism in the classroom, and some of them may also be helpful to teachers involved in adult and higher education in different contexts. the target audience is “anyone interested in antiracist practice” (xvii). stephen brookfield is a world-famous educational thought leader who hardly requires an introduction, also not to the faithful readers of this journal. jalt’s previous issue saw a review of the second edition of brookfield’s classic becoming a critically reflected teacher (rudolph, ), and he also granted us an interview in which he disclosed that his forthcoming th book will be on creating an anti-racist white identity (brookfield et al., ). while we are wishing brookfield all the best for his impending milestone, a review of his th book, teaching race, is in order. “in which public policies, institutional practices, cultural representations, and other norms work in various, often reinforcing ways to perpetuate racial group inequity. it identifies dimensions of our history and culture that have allowed privileges associated with ‘whiteness’ and disadvantages associated with ‘color’ to endure and adapt over time. structural racism is not something that a few people or institutions choose to practice. instead it has been a feature of the social, economic and political systems in which we all exist” ( ). in higher education (he), “racism is glaringly evident in admission policies, disciplinary guidelines, curricula, hiring practices, attrition rates for faculty and students of color, and the composition of boards of trustees” ( - ). apart from racism, related key terms in the book are white supremacy, racist microaggressions, and repressive tolerance. white supremacy does not refer so much to obvious examples such as the ku klux klan (kkk), aryan nations and other extreme white nationalist terrorist groups, but rather “the idea that whites, because of their superior intellect and reasoning power, should be in control of decision-making for society as a whole” ( ). the book’s authors perceive white supremacy as the all-pervasive “philosophical foundation of racism” ( ). another useful key term highlighted by the authors is microaggressions. they are at the level of everyday behaviour that enacts the ideology of white supremacy and keeps racist systems in place. microaggressions are defined as “daily verbal, behavioural, and environmental indignities, whether intentional or unintentional, that communicate hostile, derogatory, or negative racial, gender, sexual- orientation, and religious slights and insults to the target person or group” (sue, cited in ). teaching race is “a work of passion intended to address one of the greatest scars on america’s soul” (xv). brookfield writes that “this is not a book of analysis (though there certainly is analysis in here) but a book of action” (xv). such practicality as well as modesty is typical for the self-deprecating brookfield, but the latter is quite unnecessary. while the techniques and activities described in the book are undoubtedly very useful (brookfield and co-authors are highly reflective experts on a plethora of participatory teaching and learning methods), i appreciated the analytical aspects of the book at least as much as the practical, actionable aspects. every chapter comes with helpful references and there is a -page bibliography at the end with more than items as well as an eight-page index (in addition, the authors’ biodata are included over eight pages at the beginning of the book). brookfield’s introductory chapter damningly states that we “live in a time of rampant racism fuelled and legitimized by racist political leaders” ( ). racism is hugely damaging, as it excludes “large groups of people from full participation in political, social and economic life” ( ). racism is discussed largely as a structural rather than an individual problem. racism is a system of beliefs and practices journal of applied learning & teaching vol. no. ( ) brookfield also warns to watch out for repressive tolerance, a brilliant term originally coined by herbert marcuse. repressive tolerance refers to institutions managing threats to their authority and legitimacy by only appearing “to be changing while keeping things as they are” and making “small, symbolic changes to institutional functioning” and presenting them “as substantial and important” ( - ). at the end of brookfield’s magisterial introduction to the book, he states that the rawness of teaching about race will mean that teachers may constantly feel out of their depth. hence, approaches to address racism and white supremacy by the book’s authors can be classified into the three umbrella categories of scaffolding, modelling and community building. in chapter , george yancy, a black philosopher and leading public intellectual on race, describes “whiteness” as a site of power, privilege and hegemony. yancy models vulnerability for white students by describing his own sexism, thus hoping to change their understanding of racism so they can begin to see themselves as racist. labelling white students as racists does not imply that they are horrible people. this is quite an important point that is made on various occasions throughout the book. for instance, klein in chapter emphasises that the point of such a critical pedagogy is “not to assign blame or wallow in guilt, but to critically assess normative assumptions and to free ourselves from racist social constructions so we can pursue education as the practice of freedom” ( ) – referring to paolo freire and bell hooks (whose name is intentionally in small letters). buffy smith also states helpfully that “white guilt is not the desired educational outcome” ( ). however, yancy’s rather persuasive argument is that white people benefit from white systemic racism and thus contribute to the maintenance of that system. a white person in the u.s. cannot be exempt from the “relational dimensions of white privilege and power”, as they are “in socially, politically, and economically oppressive relations” ( ). however, with reference to the iconic bell hooks, he classrooms continue to be locations of possibility in which we can be radically open and “transgress and oppose all manifestations of oppressive structures” ( ). in chapter , susan hadley (a professor and director of music therapy at slippery rock university, pennsylvania) discusses teaching whiteness in predominantly white classrooms. one of hadley’s educational techniques is to provide the example of ‘handedness’ (with the world being wired for right- handed people) before moving on to a critical discussion of white privilege. the whole book provides references to excellent documentary film resources, and hadley is the first of several authors in teaching race that refers to lee mun wah’s ( ) important and difficult-to-watch documentary the color of fear – a film in which eight men of different racialised backgrounds talk about the state of race relations in north america. lucia pawlowski is an assistant professor at the university of st. thomas, minnesota, and the author of chapter that is about the creation of brave space classrooms through writing assignments and social media to help students explore racial identities. pawlowski regards the creation of safe spaces as a learning and teaching environment (in which learners ‘agree to disagree’, ‘avoid personal attacks’, and ‘respect each other’) as a platitude and replaces it with brave space, where controversy is invited and embraced. like other authors in teaching race, pawlowski justifies her approach by referring to bell hooks who, in teaching to transgress ( ) referred to classrooms as enactments of bourgeois democracy. the “idea of classrooms as calm, reasonable, even-tempered analytical havens means that white students are never confronted with the raw anger and hostility expressed by students who have spent their lives being insulted and dismissed by racism” ( ). in chapter , mike klein (an assistant professor at the department of justice and peace studies at the university of st. thomas, minnesota) writes about “teaching intersectionality through ‘i am from…’” intersectionality refers to the interconnected nature of social categorisations such as race, class, gender and age as they apply to a given individual (or group), thus creating overlapping and interdependent systems of discrimination and disadvantage. identities are complex and plural, and the ‘i am from…’ exercise assists students in identifying their own constructed identities. importantly, klein argues against “black and white (pun intended)” categories that prevail in popular culture, as race is socially constructed and complicated by categories such as “ethnicity, nationality and hybridity” ( ). reference is made to freire’s key concept of conscientização that requires “learning to perceive social, political, and economic contradictions, and then taking action against oppressive elements of a society” ( ). chapter is authored by pamela barnett, at present the dean of the school of arts and sciences at la salle university in philadelphia. her chapter discusses various approaches how to build trust and negotiate conflict: the teacher as ‘the good doctor’, naming exercises, hopes-and-fears feedback, and structured questioning. to me, the most memorable part of barnett’s contribution was her narration of the story of white supremacist derek black (the irony of his surname is difficult to escape), and black’s transformation is also picked up in other pieces of teaching race. in , black disavowed white nationalism, after he studied arabic to better understand the islamic culture of the early middle ages. two chapters later, cavalieri and co-authors state: “stories such as that of derek black… illuminate how relationships and the knowledge from our professions can be powerful tools in reforming even the most avowed white supremacists” ( ). lisa merriweather (an associate professor of adult education at the university of north carolina at charlotte), talmadge guy (a retired professor of adult education), and elaine manglitz (most recently, a vice president for student affairs at clayton state university) in chapter discuss how to create the conditions for racial dialogue. this involves teachers carefully researching their students and ideally leads to the realisation of the illusion of ‘colour blindness’ as well as unrecognised racial bias and unacknowledged white privilege. chapter is another multi-authored piece by consuelo cavalieri, bryana french and salina renninger, who are journal of applied learning & teaching vol. no. ( ) all associate professors of professional psychology at the university of st. thomas. their collaborative work takes students deep into uncovering systemic racism. systemic racism is also found in universities where white teachers are usually in charge and assess students. although students are not completely disempowered (they can be disruptive in various ways or provide negative teaching evaluations), the teachers’ power is undeniable. cavalieri and co-authors state that when “good relationships guide our teaching, good relationships become an important outcome” ( ). buffy smith is a sociology professor at the university of st. thomas whose chapter is entitled “forming classroom communities to help students embrace discomfort”. smith shares her practice of building ohana communities before inviting her students to consider privilege and white supremacy. ohana is a native hawaiian word which means ‘no one gets left behind’, an approach that smith uses with humour, patience, mercy and grace. students are reminded “that it was healthy for family members to talk about difficult topics” ( ), with care and empathy being essential building blocks in creating a strong learning community. comfortingly, smith proclaims that “we are all works in progress” ( ). smith – like brookfield, yancy and others in this volume – convincingly argues against the “myth of meritocracy”, i.e. the “illusion that people have earned their privileges by their own intellect and hard work ethic”. white students’ realisation that their privileges are based on their skin colour more than on merit leads to an awakening of their racial consciousness, with them becoming socially responsible leaders a much-preferred outcome to mere ‘white guilt’. in chapter , brookfield reviews six specific discussion protocols that can be adapted to the analysis of racial issues. he makes the excellent point that it would be a “simplistic mistake” to assume “who uses discussion is dedicated to social justice and anyone who lectures is an authoritarian demagogue”, also referring to paterson’s notion of counterfeit discussion ( ). brookfield discusses six discussion techniques (that are described also in his earlier work: brookfield & preskill, ) and applies them to the topic of antiracist discussions: todaysmeet, circle of voices, chalk talk, circular response, bohmian dialogue, and appreciative pause. in the th chapter, wendy yanow (an adult educator with adult learning unleashed) teaches against a colour-blind perspective and builds on critical race theory (crt) to explore community writing projects, documentary analysis, and the juxtaposition of story and counter-story. a ‘colour-blind’ ideology leads to the inability to see white privilege. coates is cited ( ): “if i have to jump six feet to get the same thing you have to jump two feet for – that’s how racism works”. white privilege is oftentimes unintended racism, and the impact of the ‘colour-blind’ ideology is negative both for the receiver and the perpetrator. crt sounds like a most meaningful approach as, methodologically, it understands how white supremacy operates by learning from people whose everyday lived experiences are centred on dealing with racism. the crt tenet is “that racism is pervasive and endemic in the united states, and that one of the ways that situation is secured is through the widespread acceptance of color-blind ideology” ( ). in chapter , dianne ramdeholl (an associate professor at suny empire state college in new york city) and jaye jones (the executive director for literacy studies at lehman college – cuny) unearth students’ positionalities through learning histories, questioning, decoding media, and integrating current events into the curriculum. they evaluate the “rise of trump and his cadre of billionaire populists” as “the most visible expression of an institutional contempt for black and brown people” ( ). in chapter , mary hess (a professor of educational leadership at luther seminary) uses “digital storytelling to unearth racism and galvanize action”. her chapter contains an important quote about the data – information – knowledge – wisdom (dikw) pyramid, a key knowledge management concept, that reads: “it is as if the ladder of inference that once stretched upward from data to information to knowledge to wisdom has been truncated, with people rarely climbing as far as knowledge, let alone all the way up to wisdom” ( ). hess’s piece is not short of other quotable quotes, for instance: “the insidious stock narratives of neoliberal capitalism – that persons are individuals, not relational beings; that truth is best arrived at through competition; that value accrues only to what you do, not to who you are; that if you are not successful it is due to your own worthlessness, or to someone else’s cheating… – these stock narratives effectively rule out of order a systemic analysis of the social construction of race” ( ). chapter is entitled “examining mistakes to advance antiracist teaching”, and authored by bobbi smith, a teacher and education consultant in british columbia (canada). smith describes how her world exploded when she asked participants in a workshop to conduct an antiracist power analysis of her own teaching, before eventually achieving a positive outcome. brookfield’s final chapter builds on smith’s previous chapter as well as samuel beckett’s notion of failing well to review some common misperceptions that block white teachers’ efforts to do antiracist work. brookfield discusses the following eight avoidable mistakes: ‘i can control what happens’, ‘i need to stay calm’, ‘i must fix racism and transform my students’, ‘i’ve finally escaped racism’, ‘i understand your pain’, ‘please confess your racism’, ‘i mustn’t dominate, so i’ll stay silent’, and ‘i’m your ally’. teaching race is a major contribution to the analysis of race and racism as well as to the practice of teaching about racism. even if you never had the inclination or opportunity to teach about race, i would nonetheless highly and unreservedly recommend this book. it is a powerful tool in triggering off self-examination and critical reflection of our own potential racism and our attitudes towards race and racialised others. i would also like to disclose that i read this book, especially initially, with some resistance and little joy. nobody likes to be called names, least of all a ‘racist’. eventually, i realised journal of applied learning & teaching vol. no. ( ) the power of the idea that if at all a ‘racist’, it may not be at an individual, but at a systemic level. while i continue to think of myself as an anti-racist cosmopolitan, the book is highly persuasive on its key points, including (but not limited to) the ideas of white privilege, the fallacy of ‘colour blindness’ and the omnipresence of repressive tolerance. i wholeheartedly embrace the idea of cosmopolitanism that incidentally, is also discussed in this volume: one “can become, indeed should aspire to be, a citizen of the world, able to embrace local ties and commitments, but also to extend well beyond them, engaging a wider human community, even across divides of seemingly irreconcilable differences” (avila & pandya, cited in ). i personally also prefer the concept of intersectionality to the sole focus on race and applaud the application of the decolonial concept of the pluriverse (a sense of multiple coexisting differences) to teaching and learning (mcleod et al., ). my own sociological studies – as well as the book at hand – advise me that “race is a social construct (not a biological reality) and that our concept of white racial identity is socially constructed just as other racial identities are (e.g. asian and black)” ( ). however, it would be wrong to see racism as some sort of phantom that can be eradicated by simply deconstructing it. racism, of course, causes real physical and mental consequences for the people affected by it. there is no other book in recent memory that triggered off as many memories as teaching race. without wanting to take too much time from the reader in this overly long book review: it made me recall an early childhood scene on a staircase in the bavarian village where i grew up and where i, a three-year-old boy, was frightened of the black family that i encountered for the first time in my life; white and black gi’s befriending female high school students from my gymnasium; my being the only white person in various ‘heartland’ neighbourhoods in singapore (white people normally stay in condominiums, not in housing and development board flats); my teaching of the colgate / darkie toothpaste case (the packaging originally showed a white man pretending to be a black man!) in an international management module; amongst many other recollections. with stephen brookfield’s critical pedagogy inviting critical interrogation, he would be probably displeased by an entirely laudatory review. i do have one critical issue with the book and that is its america-centrism. the book is largely written by u.s.-americans about their experiences in the u.s., and bobbi smith’s canadian contribution (in chapter ) is the only exception. this raises the question of applicability of the book’s methods and findings beyond north america. from my own experience (having lived in singapore for more than half of my life), it is, for instance, doubtful whether the brave space advocated by pawlowski would work well in too many asian cultures. it could be perceived as culturally insensitive, and the safe space concept may be preferred. pawlowski may not even see the need for such a brave space in asian countries, as white people do not get to racially discriminate against black people much there anyway? while i continue to ponder about the point just made, a much larger issue is the concept of racism. racism was the central pillar of nazi ideology during their nefarious reign from – that caused the holocaust and the death of many millions of innocent people. the main victims of the nazis were jews, roma and slavs (and not black people), who were all to be exterminated and replaced by the german ‘master race’. i wonder whether critical race theory (crt) and other ideas from the book can be applied to other countries – including those where black people may be less affected. is non-white racism a possibility? is racism dependent on the amount of melanin of victim and perpetrator? can racism be purely understood in terms of skin colour? within orientalism, the so-called ‘orientals’ (whose skin colour could be as fair as that of whites) were pejoratively characterised as “backward, degenerate, uncivilized, and retarded” in order to be subjected and colonised by white supremacist, ethnocentric imperialists (said, , p. ). is such orientalism not also racist? if this excellent book had any limitation, it would be the editorial decision to not discuss race and racism outside north america. brookfield, as a leading expert on critical reflection, did perhaps not want to give us all the answers and make us think critically about issues that go beyond the gamut of this outstanding and highly commendable work. perhaps a sequel, entitled teaching race in a global context could be considered? references brookfield, s. d. 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( ). book review: brookfield, s. d. ( ). becoming a critically reflected teacher ( nd ed.). san francisco, ca: jossey bass. journal of applied learning & teaching, ( ), - . said, e. w. ( ). orientalism. penguin modern classics. journal of applied learning & teaching vol. no. ( ) the economist. ( a, june ). america’s protest turn jubilant. https://www.economist.com/united- states/ / / /americas-protests-turn-jubilant the economist. ( b, june ). the killing of george floyd has sparked global soul searching. https://www.economist. com/international/ / / /the-killing-of-george-floyd- has-sparked-global-soul-searching copyright: © jürgen rudolph. this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license (cc by). the use, distribution or reproduction in other forums is permitted, provided the original author(s) and the copyright owner(s) are credited and that the original publication in this journal is cited, in accordance with accepted academic practice. no use, distribution or reproduction is permitted which does not comply with these terms. death of family members as an overlooked source of racial disadvantage in the united states death of family members as an overlooked source of racial disadvantage in the united states debra umbersona,b, , julie skalamera olsona,b, robert crosnoea,b, hui liuc, tetyana pudrovskaa,b, and rachel donnellya,b apopulation research center, the university of texas at austin, austin, tx ; bdepartment of sociology, the university of texas at austin, austin, tx ; and cdepartment of sociology, michigan state university, east lansing, mi edited by mary c. waters, harvard university, cambridge, ma, and approved december , (received for review april , ) long-standing racial differences in us life expectancy suggest that black americans would be exposed to significantly more family member deaths than white americans from childhood through adulthood, which, given the health risks posed by grief and bereavement, would add to the disadvantages that they face. we analyze nationally representative us data from the national longi- tudinal study of youth (n = , ) and the health and retirement study (n = , ) to estimate racial differences in exposure to the death of family members at different ages, beginning in childhood. results indicate that blacks are significantly more likely than whites to have experienced the death of a mother, a father, and a sibling from childhood through midlife. from young adulthood through later life, blacks are also more likely than whites to have experienced the death of a child and of a spouse. these results reveal an underappreciated layer of racial inequality in the united states, one that could contrib- ute to the intergenerational transmission of health disadvantage. by calling attention to this heightened vulnerability of black americans, our findings underscore the need to address the potential impact of more frequent and earlier exposure to family member deaths in the process of cumulative disadvantage. race | life expectancy | bereavement | family | disparities the evidence for racial disparities in life expectancy andmortality risk in the united states is long-standing and irre- futable ( – ), but the potentially substantial damage to surviving family members is a largely overlooked area of racial disadvan- tage. the death of a family member has well-documented adverse effects on health and other life outcomes, particularly when the death occurs “off time” or earlier than expected ( ). however, no prior study has assessed racial disparities in exposure to the death of multiple family members over the life course. doing so is important given that, despite a recent decline, the large mortality differential between blacks and whites persists today, especially at younger ages ( , , ). these statistics lead us to hypothesize that the death of specific and multiple family members is more common among black than among white americans from childhood through mid to later life. we draw on fundamental cause theory and a life course per- spective to argue that exposure to death is a unique source of adversity for black americans that contributes to lifelong racial inequality. this approach emphasizes that strains and resources associated with stratified social conditions accumulate through- out the life course to produce advantages and disadvantages in wide-ranging life outcomes including socioeconomic status, the formation and quality of relationships, and mental and physical health ( – ). indeed, stress experienced in childhood undermines health years and even decades later—a fact at the cornerstone of theoretical work on race and cumulative disadvantage across the life course ( – ). geronimus et al. ( , ) describe a process of “weathering” whereby repeated exposure to stressors associated with racial discrimination and disadvantage contribute to early- onset disability and death for black americans, particularly from young adulthood to midlife. loss of a family member could be central to this process of cumulative disadvantage, with each ad- ditional loss furthering the weathering process. indeed, research shows that losing a child, spouse, or parent is the most stressful life event people experience and one that affects them for years ( , ). that stress may be widely disruptive to life in ways that in- crease the likelihood of exposure to more stressful life events (e.g., residential disruption, divorce, job loss) and lead to chronic stressors (e.g., poverty, relationship strain) is well established ( – ). in these ways, a loss at one point in the life course can fuel cumulative disadvantage—and the weathering resulting from this disadvantage—over time ( ). surprisingly, although recent news reports and protests highlight the trauma of premature deaths of blacks in the united states, repeated and earlier exposure to loss of family members as a unique source of disadvantage and in- equality for black americans has never been documented. there are many reasons to expect that the death of a family member is a powerful and unique type of adversity resulting from social inequality. developmental psychologists emphasize that social connections are essential to human development ( , ), and social epidemiologists have clearly established that social ties are fundamental to human health ( , ). a substantial literature on bereavement shows that the death of even one family member (whether spouse, child, parent, or sibling) undermines physical health and increases mortality risk ( , , ). notably, not all losses have the same effects. a loss may be particularly consequential if it occurs earlier in the life course than expected ( – ). for example, the death of a parent in childhood is particularly likely to trigger biopsychosocial sequelae that undermine health ( , – ). off-time losses in adulthood—such as losing a spouse as a young adult—may also have a more pronounced impact ( , ). such early or off-time significance due to historical racial inequalities in the united states, in- cluding poverty, inadequate health care, and criminal victimi- zation, black americans die at much higher rates than white americans. how the consequences of these elevated rates re- verberate across family networks warrants attention. if blacks die at higher rates and earlier in the life course than whites, then blacks lose more loved ones from childhood through adulthood. through the damaging effects of grief and other mechanisms, such losses are likely to undermine multiple life course outcomes. by analyzing nationally representative datasets to compare black and white americans on the likeli- hood of losing family members over the life course, this study documents an intergenerational process with corrosive effects on black families and communities. author contributions: d.u. designed research; d.u., h.l., and t.p. performed research; j.s.o., h.l., t.p., and r.d. analyzed data; and d.u. wrote the paper with contributions from j.s.o. and r.c. the authors declare no conflict of interest. this article is a pnas direct submission. freely available online through the pnas open access option. see commentary on page . to whom correspondence should be addressed. email: umberson@prc.utexas.edu. this article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental. www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. pnas | january , | vol. | no. | – so c ia l sc ie n c es se e c o m m en ta r y d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /pnas. &domain=pdf mailto:umberson@prc.utexas.edu http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. losses may trigger a cascade of adverse social consequences and maladaptive biopsychosocial responses that disrupt life course trajectories well after the losses occur. for example, one qualitative study suggests that death of a parent during childhood or adoles- cence may increase risk for residential instability and homelessness, putting young women’s long-term futures at risk ( ). another qualitative study found that the murder of close friends and rela- tives—a common life course experience for young black men—was often a turning point in behaviors, relationships, and outlooks ( ). thus, if losing a family member is a disadvantage in the present in ways that disrupt the future, racial disparities in these losses over the life course is a tangible manifestation of racial inequality that needs to be systematically documented. in this spirit, this study provides a population-based investiga- tion of racial disparities in the extent and timing of life course exposure to the death of family members in the united states. conducting survival analysis with nationally representative longi- tudinal datasets, we compare non-hispanic blacks and whites on exposure to the death of biological mothers, biological fathers, siblings, children, and spouses while also considering the total number of such deaths experienced by different ages. in doing so, we draw attention to an underexplored racial disparity (i.e., ex- posure to death) that likely contributes to racial disadvantage in multiple and intersecting outcomes (e.g., health behaviors and health) at the heart of the weathering process over the life course. results we estimated racial differences in exposure to family member deaths with data from two national datasets that are represen- tative of an earlier birth cohort [health and retirement study (hrs); born – ] and a later birth cohort [national longitudinal survey of youth (nlsy- ); born – ]. we replicated results with two additional datasets that include an earlier birth cohort [national longitudinal survey of youth (nlsy- ); born – ] and a later birth cohort [national longitudinal study of adolescent to adult health (add health); born – ]. these two replication datasets yield patterns consistent with those based on the hrs and nlsy- reported below (tables s –s and figs. s –s ). description of data and measures provides details on measurement of variables, including all control variables. in the hrs and nlsy- analyses (and in replication datasets), we consider deaths of mothers, fathers, siblings, spouses, and children. to take into account variability in risk of death exposures, we limit analyses of sibling deaths to respondents who report ever having a sibling, we restrict analyses of child death to respondents who report ever having a live birth, and we restrict analysis of spouse death to those who were ever married. additionally, for mother and father death, we restrict the analysis to biological parents, including noncustodial parents. measures of parental death were coded as missing if the re- spondent reported not knowing whether their parent was alive. we now turn to results from the hrs and nlsy- . risk of exposure to specific family member deaths. our non- parametric life table approach compares blacks and whites on the cumulative risk of exposure to specific family member deaths at different ages. table presents the cumulative probabilities of family member loss at each age for blacks and whites; fig. sum- marizes ratios of cumulative risk for blacks compared with whites. table (nlsy- ) and fig. a report on black/white comparisons with the nlsy- (n = , ); and table (hrs) and fig. b show results from the hrs (n = , ). overall, the results suggest that, for each type of family member death and by each age considered, the cumulative risk of death exposure is greater for blacks than whites in both datasets. for example, in the younger nlsy- cohort (fig. a), blacks were at three times greater risk than whites of losing a mother, more than twice the risk of losing a father, and % more likely to have lost a sibling by age . blacks were also . times more likely to have lost a child by age . in the older hrs cohort (fig. b), the patterns were similar. blacks were at twice the risk of losing a mother and about % greater risk of losing a father by age . blacks were also at much greater risk than whites of losing a child during mid to later life—about two times more likely to lose a child between the ages of and , and over three times more likely to lose a child between the ages of and . blacks were also nearly twice as likely to lose a spouse by age , and % more likely to lose a sibling by age . although the magnitude of effects fluctuates according to family member type, varies by age, and differs across cohorts, effects are consistently in the same direction. the overall point is that they are sub- stantial and always show more loss among black than white americans. cumulative exposures to family member death. next, negative bi- nomial regressions test whether blacks are at greater risk for cumulative death exposures—the total number of deaths accu- mulated throughout the study period in each dataset and up to the respondent’s age during the last survey assessment. results in table indicate that, in both the nlsy- and hrs, blacks experience more family member deaths than do whites, net of controls for age, gender, educational attainment of parents, currently living in the south, mother’s age at respondent birth, table . cumulative risk of family member deaths before an individual reaches age t mother father spouse sibling child age t black white black white black white black white black white nlsy- . . . . — — . . — — . . . . — — . . . . . . . . — — — — . . hrs . . . . — — — — — — . . . . . . — — — — . . . . . . — — — — . . . . . . — — — — . . . . . . — — — — . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . note: cumulative risk of specific family member deaths for blacks and whites by age t. | www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. umberson et al. d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. si.pdf?targetid=nameddest=st http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. si.pdf?targetid=nameddest=st http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. si.pdf?targetid=nameddest=sf http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. si.pdf?targetid=nameddest=sf http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. si.pdf?targetid=nameddest=stxt http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. si.pdf?targetid=nameddest=stxt www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. and household size at baseline; for hrs respondents, additional controls include born in the south and birth cohort. we also estimated logistic regressions to predict the odds of experiencing two or more losses by age in the nlsy- and four or more losses in the hrs by age , net of controls. fig. a shows that, in the nlsy, blacks have significantly lower odds than whites of experiencing no family losses by the age of (p < . ), but over three times higher odds of experiencing the death of two or more family members by the age of (p < . ). fig. b shows that, in the hrs data, blacks are about % more likely than whites to have experienced four or more deaths by age (p < . ). in stark contrast, whites are % more likely than blacks to have never experienced a family loss by age (p < . ). life course timing of death exposures. to shed light on the life course timing of specific deaths, we calculated the age-specific hazard of death exposures for blacks and whites. results are il- lustrated in figs. and . hazards are shown for ages at which data were available and sufficient sample sizes were present. in the nlsy- (fig. ), age-specific hazards indicate that, compared with whites, blacks were at greater risk of losing a mother from early childhood through young adulthood, losing a father through their midteens, losing a sibling in their teens, and losing a child through their late twenties. we also estimated semiparametric cox hazard models to predict black–white disparities in each type of death taking into account background variables that might help to explain the overall pattern of results (control variables noted above) (table s ). in the nlsy- data, racial differences were statistically sig- nificant and robust to controls with the exception that the race dif- ference in father and sibling death was no longer significant, although in the expected direction; thus, family social and demographic contexts help to explain racial disparities in father and sibling deaths. even net of controls, however, blacks experience greater risk of losing a mother and of losing a child up to age in the younger nlsy- cohort. fig. illustrates the losses that occurred in the older hrs co- horts. the race gap in the age-specific hazard of exposure to death of mother, father, spouse, and sibling is apparent at most ages until later in life. blacks are at greater risk of losing a parent (mother or father) until their mid- s, and a spouse or a sibling through their s. the racial disparity in death of a child occurring after age grows with advancing age without convergence even at the oldest ages, consistent with the cumulative disadvantage mechanism. the significantly greater risks for blacks than whites were robust to controls in cox regression models (table s ). discussion this study provides a population-based documentation of earlier and repeated bereavement experiences for black americans, who are more likely to experience the deaths of mothers, fathers, siblings, spouses, and children and to experience multiple family member deaths. moreover, racial differences in exposure to death of mothers, fathers, and siblings appear early in childhood. by early to mid- adulthood, racial differences in exposure to the death of children and spouses are also significant. understanding exposure to family deaths from childhood through mid to later life is important because be- reavement experiences almost certainly add to cumulative disadvan- tage in multiple life outcomes. past research has generally focused on the effects of only one loss on subsequent life outcomes, clearly demonstrating adverse effects of bereavement on socioeconomic status, mental health, health behaviors, physical health, and mortality risk ( ). few studies have considered the impact of repeated be- reavements ( ), and none has focused on racial differences in life course exposure to the death of family members, which may be central to processes of cumulative disadvantage associated with race. death of family members is highly likely to disrupt and strain other family relationships as well as the formation, duration, and quality of relationships across the life course, further contributing to a broad range of adverse life outcomes ( , ). again, bereavement is a known risk factor for mental and physical health ( ), and childhood through early adulthood may be a period of the life course during which bereavement is especially likely to have lasting consequences ( – ). although the united states has made progress in recent decades in reducing the life expectancy gap between blacks and whites, significant racial differences persist ( , ), with important implications for surviving family members. clearly, the most effective strategy for reducing risk of family member losses for black americans would be to eliminate racial disparities in life expectancy, but current patterns of life expectancy in the united states call for immediate attention to the extent and impact of loss on surviving family members. future research should address limitations of this study and ex- tend the scope. first, some of the measures of family death relied on retrospective accounts, which likely underestimated the actual table . negative binomial regression models predicting cumulative number of family member deaths race irr [ % ci] hrs black . *** [ . , . ] nlsy- black . *** [ . , . ] n = , for hrs and n = , for nlsy- . each cell contains incidence rate ratios (irrs) based on negative binomial regression models; % confi- dence intervals (cis) are in parentheses. ***p < . . a national longitudinal survey of youth b health and retirement study . . . . r at io o f b la ck /w hi te c um ul at iv e r is k respondent's age death of mother death of father death of sibling occurring by age death of child occurring after age . . . . . r at io o f b la ck /w hi te c um ul at iv e r is k respondent's age death of mother death of father death of sibling occurring after age death of child occurring after age death of spouse fig. . ratio for black/white cumulative risk of specific family member deaths. (a) national longitudinal survey of youth ; (b) health and retirement study. values above reflect greater risk for blacks; age refers to the age by which the death occurred; lines cover the ages when respondents reported on each death. umberson et al. pnas | january , | vol. | no. | so c ia l sc ie n c es se e c o m m en ta r y d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. si.pdf?targetid=nameddest=st http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. si.pdf?targetid=nameddest=st http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. si.pdf?targetid=nameddest=st number of deaths experienced ( ). second, the datasets we exam- ined lacked detailed information about family size at different points in the life course or about family members and family-like friends beyond parents, children, siblings, and spouses. in light of the im- portant role of extended kin networks in black communities ( ), future studies should collect information on a broader range of kin and kin-like ties that may contribute to additional death exposures for children raised by extended kin. future work should also consider other forms of family member loss that vary by race and add to cu- mulative loss of family members; for example, black children are much more likely than white children to experience the effects of parental loss due to incarceration of the parent ( ). third, future research should go beyond the simple black–white comparison con- ducted here to consider disparities across diverse populations. fourth, this study focused on several age cohorts, but future studies should investigate the potentially different experiences of a range of cohorts. earlier birth cohorts were characterized by greater racial disadvantage ( ), which may have resulted in higher levels of early-life exposure to death, but family deaths may be even more consequential for later birth cohorts because these deaths are less expected. future research should also consider possible variation in racial patterns of death exposures based on geographic concentrations of poverty ( ) and violence ( ) that may vary across urban/rural and south/non-south regions as well as across neighborhoods and cities; this approach may reveal variation in spatial concentrations of disadvantage ( , ). conclusion bereavement is a risk factor for varied and interconnected life outcomes, and black americans are more likely to experience the death of multiple family members from childhood through mid to later life compared with whites. indeed, experiences of loss are central themes in african american literature as well as critical race and black feminist theory ( – ). in this study, we almost certainly underestimated racial differences in exposure to death due to lack of information on the deaths of other important people in black americans’ lives. the effects of losing nuclear family members, extended family, friends, and other loved ones may be further compounded by the highly publicized deaths of black americans, especially youth, in the united states. the frequent news accounts of young black people dying as a result of police shootings and gang violence almost certainly add to a sense of collective loss and personal vulnerability ( ) as dramatized in decades of poetry, literature, and nonfiction writings by and about black americans, and as underscored in the black lives matter movement. scholars and policymakers need to attend to the ways in which such losses have reverberating effects throughout family networks. indeed, earlier and more frequent exposure to death is a distinctive stressor that adds to racial disparities in overall stress exposure and almost certainly results in lifelong cumulative disadvantage for children, adults, and families. our findings highlight the spiraling damage of racial disparities in life expectancy and point to the need for interventions and policies that address bereavement and loss in high-risk populations. materials and methods we analyzed data from the hrs and the nlsy- . the hrs is a longitudinal study of men and women aged and older in the united states who were not institutionalized at baseline. the study began in with individuals born in – and their spouses. participants have been interviewed approximately every y since then, and several other cohorts have since been added to the original hrs participants. data are publicly available (hrsonline.isr.umich.edu). the hrs analytic sample included , respon- dents who were either non-hispanic black (n = , ) or non-hispanic white (n = , ). the nlsy- follows a nationally representative sample of youth born – . respondents were interviewed at times points, from to – . we used data from the baseline survey and from the most recent data collection in , which are publicly available (https:// www.nlsinfo.org/investigator). the analytic sample included , youth who were either non-hispanic black (n = , ) or non-hispanic white (n = , ). the nlsy- sample was selected by household; household infor- mants were asked whether there were any persons for whom the housing unit was the usual place of residence but who were away from the housing unit at the time of the survey (e.g., college students, persons in the military, and persons in prisons or other institutions); imprisoned/institutionalized respondents were excluded from the analysis. additional information on datasets is available in description of data and measures. analyses occurred in three steps using stata. first, we estimated a non- parametric life table approach to consider whether blacks were at greater cumulative risk for exposure to specific family member deaths compared with whites by different ages. an abridged life table was constructed based on each individual’s age, grouped into -y age intervals. the life table esti- mates are based on the following parameters: i) the number at risk: the number of individuals at age t who are at risk for a given family member’s death: lt; ii) the number of deaths: the number of deaths between ages t and t + n: ndt = lt – lt+n; iii) age-specific hazard: the probability of a given family member’s death between ages t and t + n: nqt = ndt/lt; iv) survival: s � tj � = ∏ k j= � − dj lj � ; v) cumulative hazard: h = − logðstÞ. we calculated cumulative risk for exposure to family member death by each age for blacks and whites by assessing the number of deaths that oc- curred by that age and dividing this by the number of black (or white) re- spondents in the sample. then, risk ratios for -y intervals (shown in fig. ) were calculated by dividing the risk of blacks by the risk of whites by age t (i.e., by the time the respondent was age , age , age , etc.). a national longitudinal survey of youth b health and retirement study no family member death by age two or more family member deaths by age . no family member death by age four or more family member deaths by age *** *** *** *** fig. . odds ratios for no family member deaths and multiple family member deaths for blacks compared with whites. (a) national longitudinal survey of youth ; (b) health and retirement study. n = , for hrs and n = , for nlsy- . ***p < . . | www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. umberson et al. d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , http://hrsonline.isr.umich.edu/ https://www.nlsinfo.org/investigator https://www.nlsinfo.org/investigator http://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental/pnas. si.pdf?targetid=nameddest=stxt www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. second, we estimated negative binomial regression models predicting multiple family member death exposures and tested whether blacks were at greater risk for cumulative death exposures—the total number of deaths accumulated up to the respondent’s age during the last survey period (table ). count of cumulative death exposures was calculated for all respondents, including those with missing data on one of the specific deaths considered. we also estimated logistic regression models and used those results to illustrate calculated odds of exposure to no family member death or mul- tiple family member deaths for blacks compared with whites in fig. . all negative binomial and logistic regression models control for respondent age at baseline, gender, educational attainment of the respondent’s parents (measured in years), binary indicators of whether the respondent resided in the south at baseline, maternal age at respondent’s birth, and household size at baseline. given the multicohort design of the hrs and the older age of the aage-specific ha . . . . . . . . . a c azard of family age at mothe age at child y member death er's death 's death hs to age : na . . . . . . . . ational longitud b d dinal survey of age at father's dea age at sibling's de youth ath ath fig. . age-specific hazard of death exposures for blacks and whites; hazard ratios shown with % confidence intervals. (a) maternal death; (b) paternal death; (c) sibling death; (d) child death. fig. . age-specific hazard of death exposures for blacks and whites; hazard ratios shown with % confidence intervals. (a) maternal death; (b) paternal death; (c) spousal death; (d) sibling death; (e) child death. umberson et al. pnas | january , | vol. | no. | so c ia l sc ie n c es se e c o m m en ta r y d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , hrs sample, we also adjust for birth cohort (born before ; – ; – , – , and – ), and, given lower life expectancy in the south, we control for whether the respondent was born in the south. more detailed geocode data are not publicly available for the hrs and nlsy- . stata’s mi suite of commands do not allow the combination of survival analysis and weights; therefore, we use listwise deletion. in total, we deleted % of hrs cases and % of nlsy- cases due to missing data on mortality, and % of hrs cases and % of nlsy- cases due to missing data on controls. as a sensitivity check, however, missingness on control variables was multiply imputed, and results were consistent with those presented. third, we evaluated age-specific hazard ratios for black and white ex- posure to family member death (figs. and ) and estimated semiparametric cox hazard models to predict black–white disparities in each type of death including the control variables described above. the hazard function for individual i at time j is modeled as follows: h � tij � = h � tj � exp � raceiβl + z ’ iω � , where h(tij) is the hazard of a given family member’s death at the ith indi- vidual’s age tj, h (tj) is the baseline hazard function, β is the coefficient for the effect of race (coded for black and for white participants), zi are time-invariant control variables, and ω is a vector of parameters. across datasets, hazards were estimated for all ages at which data were available and sufficient sample size was present. all analyses apply sampling weights appropriate to each dataset, and re- gression models also adjust for clustering by household in the nlsy- and hrs. sampling weights were used to adjust for differential probability of selection into the sample and differential nonresponse. with the use of sampling weights, the nlsy- and hrs are designed to be nationally representative. we replicated the hrs and nlsy- analyses with two additional datasets: the nlsy- and the add health; these datasets are described in description of data and measures, and replication results are provided in tables s –s and figs. s –s . acknowledgments. this research uses data from add health, a program project directed by kathleen mullan harris and designed by j. richard udry, peter s. bearman, and kathleen mullan harris at the university of north carolina at chapel hill, and funded by grant p -hd from the eunice kennedy shriver national institute of child health and human develop- ment, with cooperative funding from other federal agencies and foundations. special acknowledgment is due ronald r. rindfuss and barbara entwisle for assistance in the original design. information on how to obtain the add health data files is available on the add health website (www.cpc. unc.edu/projects/addhealth). no direct support was received from grant p - hd for this analysis. we gratefully acknowledge support from an in- frastructure grant (grant r hd ) to the population research center from the eunice kennedy shriver national institute of child health and human development. this research also received support from grant t hd , training program in population studies, awarded to the population research center at the university of texas at austin by the eunice kennedy shriver national institute of child health and human development, and k award k ag (to h.l.) from the national institute on aging. . hummer ra, chinn jj ( ) race/ethnicity and u.s. adult mortality: progress, pros- pects, and new analyses. du bois rev ( ): – . . kochanek kd, arias e, anderson rn ( ) how did cause of death contribute to race differences in life expectancy in the united states in ? nchs brief (national center for health statistics, hyatsville, md). . williams dr, jackson pb ( ) social sources of racial disparities in health. health aff (millwood) ( ): – . . stroebe m, schut h, stroebe w ( ) health outcomes of bereavement. lancet ( ): – . . geronimus at, bound j, colen cg ( ) excess black mortality in the united states and in selected black and white high-poverty areas, – . am j public health ( ): – . . olshansky sj, et al. 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that it would exacerbate the already deepening inequalities in our society was a shock even to most seasoned of observers. the chilling words used by boris johnson in early march , ‘many will lose their loved ones before their time’, have sadly become a grim reality for so many. the healthcare profession must now help shape the narrative that will help the nation learn, heal and move on from this dark chapter. this past year has borne witness to a great amount of societal change. we saw the black lives matter movement gain traction and worldwide climate emergency strikes – issues that affect us all. in this edition, danso and danso and sotubo touch upon the structural racism encountered by black, asian and minority ethnic (bame) patients and staff in the nhs and call for a strategy to tackle the inequalities that blight the healthcare experience of many. i myself am the child of immigrants, and my parents consider themselves fortunate that this land has provided them with ample opportunity; however, for some the reality of seeking a better life in uk couldn’t be more different, and worthing and colleagues examine the policies that have led to a ‘hostile environment’ for some nhs users. meanwhile, gopal et al’s review on implicit bias offers insights on how we can best limit the damage of this human frailty in clinical practice and the wider healthcare setting. we require our current political leaders to wake up to the reality laid bare before us, not only in this past year, but in the austerity- dominated preceding decade. how can we have an almost -year difference between life expectancy for men in the most deprived parts of the uk compared with the least deprived? it is encouraging that the rcp is at the forefront of striving for change, with the convening of over organisations as the inequalities in health alliance. that such a diverse range of organisations are uniting to fight this issue sends a powerful message to our political elite and i would urge all healthcare organisations to heed the rcp president’s call to action. looking to the future, it is exciting to see the grassroots medical student organisation nutritank campaigning for positive change in the undergraduate medical curricula. nutritank highlight the current lack of training in the very thing that makes us healthy – nutrition – and propose their ‘vision’ for the doctor of the future. i believe that nutrition-based interventions must be integrated within our healthcare system at every level as a fundamental part of chronic disease management. this is further highlighted by dixon and ornish, who stress the need for greater social prescribing and encourage clinicians to be bold in the way they approach their communities – ‘out of the consulting room and on to the streets’. we know that the early years of life are extremely important; this is determined by many factors, not least parental health, and it is important that we consider the arguments for more robust postpartum care as proposed by womersley and colleagues to help reduce the health burden in new mothers. like many, this past year has given me extra cause for reflection, and it strikes me that there are more people who need help now than when i started medical school in . fitzpatrick and colleagues discuss the arguments for reform in medical education in order to equip the profession to deliver meaningful improvements in health inequalities. post-pandemic, politicians and healthcare professionals must work actively together towards a more equitable and just society where we invest in and empower the marginalised to lead better healthier lives. just like the prime minister has announced a roadmap out of the current pandemic situation, we must all call on him for a roadmap out of the equally devastating health inequalities plaguing our society. to this end i invite you to consider the arguments by coggon and adams, who examine the current strategy on obesity and conclude that we need a more equitable and effective approach to achieving better public health. i hope you enjoy this edition. i wanted to bring together a diverse range of authors from different personal and professional backgrounds to add their perspective on how we can tackle inequality and contribute to the prevention of ill health; i am especially honoured that hrh the prince of wales has contributed to this edition and hope that you all wholeheartedly embrace his call for a more systemic and community-based approach to tackling ill health and inequality. finally, i would like to reiterate my thanks to dr michael dixon of the college of medicine and dr farhang tahzib and prof carol brayne from the faculty of public health among many others. dr mohsin choudry gp registrar, ealing general practice vocational training scheme (north west london), and national medical director’s clinical fellow references whitehead m, taylor-robinson d, barr b. poverty, health, and covid- . bmj ; :n . danso a, danso y. the complexities of race and health. fhj ; : – . ajayi (sotubo). a perspective on health inequalities in bame commu- nities and how to improve access to primary care. fhj ; : – . worthing k, mojarrieta galaso m, kellett wright j, potter jd. patients or passports? the ‘hostile environment’ in the nhs. fhj ; : – . gopal dp, chetty u, o’donnell p, gajria c, blackadder-weinstein j. implicit bias in healthcare: clinical practice, research and decision making. fhj ; : – . williams e, buck d, babalola g. what are health inequalities? the king’s fund, . www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/what-are-health- inequalities. goddard a. the road to the inequalities in health alliance. fhj ; : – . xie jy-y, abramovich n, burridge b et al. nutrition education in core medical curricula: a call to action from tomorrow’s doctors. fhj ; : – . downer s, berkowitz s, harlan ts et al. food is medicine: actions to integrate food and nutrition into healthcare. bmj ; :m . dixon m, ornish d. love in the time of covid- : social pre- scribing and the paradox of isolation. fhj ; : – . womersley k, ripullone k, hirst je. tackling inequality in maternal health: beyond the postpartum. fhj ; : – . fitzpatrick meb, badu-boateng c, huntley c, morgan c. ‘attorneys of the poor’: training physicians to tackle health inequalities. fhj ; : – . coggon j, adams j. ‘let them choose not to eat cake…’: public health ethics, effectiveness, and equity in government obesity strategy. fhj ; : – . hrh the prince of wales. a message from hrh the prince of wales, honorary fellow of the royal college of physicians. fhj ; : – . © royal college of physicians . all rights reserved. editorial future healthcare journal vol , no : hde .indd commentary human development ; : – doi: . / illuminating pathways to civic purpose commentary on malin, ballard, and damon anthony l. burrow  cornell university, ithaca, n.y. , usa key words adolescence · civic engagement · purpose in life a multitiered sculpture entitled the illuminated crowd adorns a popular street in montreal. the sculpture depicts a diverse group of people confronting a new idea. the people on the foremost tier, where the sunlight shines brightest, are best posi- tioned to see and appreciate the idea for what it is. there is a collective attention among them, with all eyes concentrating on the spectacle ahead. yet, the view forward is increasingly obscured for people standing on the lower tiers. heavy shadows grad- ually swell and eventually blanket those positioned furthest behind, leaving them seemingly disorganized, disengaged, and directionless. the spread of new scientific insights bears a resemblance to the narrative em- bodied by this sculpture. new ideas rarely penetrate society deeply enough to impact all of its members uniformly. even seemingly well-known strategies for promoting greater happiness, health, and longevity are not embraced or enacted by everyone. indeed, there are discernible impediments, both personal and structural in nature, that influence how and by whom new ideas are accessed, construed, and utilized. thus, whenever scholars advance promising new ideas, a parallel need emerges to consider the barriers that prevent it from being fully actualized by all potential ben- eficiaries. in what follows, i attend to this need in the context of malin, ballard, and damon’s target article [this issue], by first acknowledging the insights they advance and then considering some potential impediments to the proliferation of those in- sights. i take this approach not to leverage opposition to the ideas they put forward but instead to add further dimensionality to them in hopes of broadening their im- pact. anthony l. burrow department of human development g d martha van rensselaer hall ithaca, ny - (usa) e-mail alb   @   cornell.edu © s. karger ag, basel – x/ / – $ . / www.karger.com/hde e-mail karger@karger.com http://dx.doi.org/ . % f human development ; : – doi: . / burrow civic purpose among youth malin et al. introduce a new idea to existing scholarship on youth civic engage- ment. they label this new concept civic purpose and define it as “a sustained inten- tion to contribute to the world beyond the self through civic or political action.” the novelty of their contribution flows from the use of civic purpose as a starting point for unifying personal motivations and prosocial aspirations to form a richer kind of engaged citizenship. in line with notions of youth thriving [bundick, yeager, king, & damon, ], malin and colleagues view purpose as a life-organizing aim with personal and social benefits. indeed, having purpose has been routinely discussed as a developmental asset for positive youth development [benson, ; damon, me- non, & bronk, ], and a compelling research literature supports these claims, linking purpose with indicators of psychological health and positive behavior during adolescence [bronk, finch, & talib, ; burrow, o’dell, & hill, ; taubman- ben-ari, ]. it is also worth noting that these findings resonate with studies of purpose in adulthood [ryff, ], suggesting that early cultivation of purpose may yield dividends across the lifespan. as a specific form of purpose, cultivating a civic aim for one’s life may offer a valuable context for establishing this important re- source. for malin and colleagues, that all youth should feel empowered to participate civically and politically is not just an ideal but a necessity for a healthy, functioning democratic society. yet, there is an important nuance in their theorizing that should be highlighted: they believe that traditionally marginalized youth represent a key barometer in this endeavor. specifically, the authors contend that marginalized youth must cultivate “a sense of themselves as effective civic agents with the respon- sibility and capacity to cause change in their communities, in u.s. society and in the world.” without youth participation, including those who have been historically marginalized, malin and colleagues assert that our democracy cannot flourish. based on their claim, it is essential to identify marginalized youth and begin to illuminate factors that might limit their capacity to develop and fully pursue a civic purpose. of course, there are myriad ways youth can experience marginalization within society, yet some appear particularly prominent in traditional civic and po- litical arenas. minimum age requirements in national voting laws, for example, cat- egorically disenfranchise adolescents younger than from participating in political elections. moreover, other demographic distinctions may contribute to marginaliza- tion with respect to inadequate representation among existing leaders. data show that ethnic minorities, women, sexual minorities, and youth from immigrant and low-income families each are vastly underrepresented in political leadership at state and federal levels [cobb, ; reflective democracy campaign, ]. hence, like the sculpted figures positioned farthest back in the illuminated crowd , individuals with marginalized group memberships or interests may feel disconnected from op- portunities to cultivate a civic purpose. in the next section, i begin to articulate the nature of barriers that may jeopardize marginalized youths’ actualization of civic purpose by considering (a) the pathways they may take to find it, (b) the personal content they may use to define it, and (c) the partnerships they may rely on to culti- vate it. http://dx.doi.org/ . % f illuminating pathways human development ; : – doi: . / pathways to civic purpose despite robust evidence of the advantages of having a purpose in life, how youth find a purpose remains an understudied issue. recent work [e.g., hill, sumner, & burrow, ; kashdan & mcknight, ], however, suggests three plausible path- ways to finding a purpose: proactively (an aim that emerges after sustained engage- ment with consistent goals over time), reactively (an aim that emerges in response to a specific life event), and social learning (an aim that emerges based on observations of others). for marginalized youth, cultivating a civic purpose may follow any of these pathways, yet success along each may also require navigating unique barriers. for example, maintaining proactive involvement in civic activities (e.g., campaigning, at- tending protests) over time may be difficult for youth from low-income families where household responsibilities and the need to work may be greater. youth with limited resources such as time and money may be constrained and feel less in control over their ability to participate in activities, thus increasing the likelihood of disengag- ing from civic goals [haase, heckhausen, & koeller, ; mcbride, sherraden, & pritzker, ]. with respect to reactive pathways, the types of events that might spur civic pur- pose among traditionally marginalized youth and the manner in which they respond to them may find minimal support from the broader society. as malin et al. found among ethnically diverse youth with a sense of civic purpose, many were motivated by specific “identity group attachments.” but such group attachments may also rein- force perceptions of social distance between themselves and out-group members. for a recent example, the slogan “black lives matter,” used by many youth as an expres- sive act of protest against police brutality perpetrated against black citizens [brunson & miller, ], has been frequently changed in other venues to “all lives matter,” reflecting a more inclusive sentiment. despite its inclusivity, however, this alteration may discourage some youth from engaging in expressive civic acts that they believe will eventually be co-opted in ways that lose their personal significance. thus, efforts to support the development of civic purpose among marginalized youth may require greater sensitivity to constraints on resources and an ability to help youth reconcile their chosen modalities of civic expression with realistic expectations of how others will likely construe them. personal content of civic purpose an important caveat in malin et al.’s investigation is that only a small percentage of the youth they assessed met criteria for having civic purpose; less than nine percent of youth demonstrated a full civic purpose of any type. the remaining youth showed either no evidence of civic purpose or some moderate but precursory form of civic purpose. contributing to these estimates may have been the fairly exclusive charac- terization of purpose examined. the authors contend that “the motivation that drives purpose cannot be antisocial or immoral: individuals who aspire to have an impact on society but use harmful or immoral means are not, by definition, acting with pur- pose.” while their position on this issue is clear, from whose perspective “immoral means” should be determined is far from settled. thus, another challenge to actual- izing a civic purpose is simply lacking the ability to self-determine what qualifies as http://dx.doi.org/ . % f human development ; : – doi: . / burrow such. there is evidence to suggest that although youth are capable of discerning be- tween good and bad purposes presented to them [staples & troutman, ], indi- viduals may rarely nominate the content of their own purpose as reprehensible de- spite the number other people willing to promptly label it as such. this issue becomes even more salient in the context of marginalized youth such as those from religious minority groups or even those who have street gang affilia- tions. the specific content and nature of purposes cultivated by these youth may be shaped by the fact they are often tasked with balancing civic responsibility and par- ticipation with what they view to be their religious, ordained rights or desire to be loyal to protective peers. because the circle of community for these youth may be much more circumscribed than for others, stakeholders may fail to recognize the amount of community service, volunteering, and interest in helping others that may actually be present. going forward, researchers must continue to unpack what suc- cessful adaptation within these specific communities is truly required of youth so as not to deem individuals as lacking purpose based simply on a top-down scheme of which contents count and which do not. this issue is not trivial since some of the very youth who may fail to qualify as civically purposeful according to researchers’ defini- tions may subsequently reveal themselves as invested in aims that contribute mean- ingfully to communities engaging in harmful acts of violence. partnerships for civic purpose based on interviews conducted with youth exemplars, malin and colleagues con- clude that guidance from adults figures prominently in the development of civic pur- pose. specifically, they state, “teachers, counselors, church group leaders, family members, and older classmates were likely to pick them out for opportunities, bring civic opportunities to their attention, and recommend them for opportunities that relate to their interest – if they were alert to those interests.” unfortunately, not all youth interact with adults who are capable of or willing to guide such development; therefore, even some youth who express interest may receive little invitation to par- ticipate in civic or political activities. in such cases, civically-oriented adult mentors could play an important role. however, while the available data generally support benefits associated with adult-youth mentoring relationships [e.g., dubois & neville, ], there is also evidence to suggest that, for youth at greater risk for personal problems (e.g., engaging in risky behavior, less socially competent), adult mentors with little specialized training can potentially adversely affect their development [du- bois, holloway, valentine, & cooper, ]. thus, it is important to consider how relationships with adults whom youth naturally nominate as mentors may be capital- ized on and provided with additional guidance and strategies for promoting civic purpose. beyond limited opportunities for individual adult partnerships, some marginal- ized youth may find it difficult to establish momentous connections with organiza- tions or specific programs that foster civic purpose. for instance, youth living in rural areas may have fewer opportunities or be required to travel much further distances in order to participate in service learning or volunteer with community engagement programs [ley, nelson, & beltyukova, ]. thus, what may be interpreted as apa- thy for civic issues among these youth may actually reflect constrained opportunities http://dx.doi.org/ . % f illuminating pathways human development ; : – doi: . / for involvement. in addition, organizations that are not sensitive to youths’ perspec- tives in their programing may fail to sustain civic interests of marginalized youth whose voices may otherwise go ignored. there is promising evidence that when youth are invited and encouraged to actively participate in the construction of programs that serve them, they are much more likely to remain engaged and feel supported in developing a sense of purpose [foster-fishman, law, lichty, & aoun, ; moran, bundick, malin, & reilly, ]. therefore, successful programs may require estab- lishing true partnerships that elevate youth voices to be equal with adults and will- fully incorporating aspects of what youth nominate for themselves to be worthy of civic purpose. conclusions in conclusion, the notion of civic purpose as introduced by malin et al. reflects an innovative idea that expands and strengthens existing scholarship on civic engage- ment. my aim in this commentary was to suggest that, as the study of civic purpose unfolds, it would be wise to consider simultaneously the characteristics of those who have it and the challenges facing those for whom it has not yet fully materialized. i stand in agreement with malin et al. that it is only then that we can begin to effec- tively create and illuminate pathways for all citizens to fully participate in and con- tribute to our democracy. references benson, p.l. ( ). all kids are our kids: what communities must do to raise caring and responsible chil- dren and adolescents. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. bronk, k.c., finch, w.h., & talib, t.l. ( ). purpose in life among high ability adolescents. high abil- ity studies, , – . brunson, r.k., & miller, j. ( ). gender, race and urban policing: the experience of african american youths. gender & society, , – . bundick, m., yeager, d., king, p., & damon, w. ( ). thriving across the lifespan. in w.f. overton & r.m. lerner (eds.), handbook of lifespan human development (pp. – ). new york, ny: john wiley and sons. burrow, a.l., o’dell, c., & hill, p.l. ( ). profiles of a developmental asset: youth purpose as a context for hope and well-being. journal of youth and adolescence, , – . cobb, j. ( , october). voting by numbers. the new yorker. retrieved from: http://www.newyorker. com. damon, w., menon, j., & bronk, k.c. ( ). the development of purpose during adolescence. applied developmental sciences, , – . dubois, d.l., holloway, b.e., valentine, j.c., & cooper, h. ( ). effectiveness of mentoring programs for youth: a meta-analytic review. american journal of community psychology, , – . dubois, d.l., & neville, h.a. ( ). youth mentoring: investigation of relationship characteristics and perceived benefits. journal of community psychology, , – . foster-fishman, p.g., law, k.m., lichty, l.f., & aoun, c. ( ). youth react for social change: a method for youth participatory action research. american journal of community psychology, , – . haase, c.m., heckhausen, j., & koeller, o. ( ). goal engagement in the school-to-work transition: beneficial for all, particularly for girls. journal of research on adolescence, , – . hill, p.l., sumner, r.a., & burrow, a.l. ( ). understanding the pathways to purpose: examining per- sonality and well-being correlates across adulthood. journal of positive psychology, , – . kashdan, t.b., & mcknight, p.e. ( ). origins of purpose in life: refining our understanding of a life well lived. psychological topics, , – . http://dx.doi.org/ . % f human development ; : – doi: . / burrow ley, j., nelson, s., & beltyukova, s. ( ). congruence of aspirations of rural youth with expectations held by parents and school staff. journal of research in rural education, , – . mcbride, a.m., sherraden, m.s., & pritzker, s. ( ). civic engagement among low-income and low- wealth families: in their words. family relations, , – . moran, s., bundick, m., malin, h., & reilly, t.s. ( ). how supportive of their specific purposes do youth believe their family and friends are? journal of adolescent research, , – . reflective democracy campaign ( ). who leads us? retrieved from: http://www.womendonors.org/ what-we-do/strategic-initiatives/reflective-democracy/. ryff, c.d. ( ). psychological well-being revisited: advances in the science and practice of eudaimonia. psychotherapy and psychosomatics, , – . staples, j.m., & troutman, s. ( ). “what’s the purpose?”: how urban adolescents of color interpret and respond to noble and ignoble purposes constructed in media texts. journal of urban learning, teaching and research, , – . taubman-ben-ari, o. ( ). how are meaning in life and family aspects associated with teen driving behavior? transportation research part f: traffic psychology and behaviour, , – . http://dx.doi.org/ . % f 	citref_ : 	citref_ : 	citref_ : 	citref_ : 	citref_ : 	citref_ : 	citref_ : 	citref_ : 	citref_ : 	citref_ : 	citref_ : 	citref_ : 	citref_ : 	citref_ : 	citref_ : dance/movement therapists of color in the adta: the first years editorial dance/movement therapists of color in the adta: the first years meg h. chang published online: october � american dance therapy association abstract one of a collection of six scholarly essays solicited by this journal to celebrate the first half-century of the american dance therapy association, this paper looks at current practices in dance therapy education, clinical practice, and professional leadership as inclusive of, or excluding to, individuals who identify as a person of color. recommendations for more inclusive attitudes and practices are provided. keywords dance/movement therapy supervision � multicultural practice � diverse and inclusive education � dance/movement therapy education � dance the journal editors have graciously asked me to write an essay about people of color (poc) and dance/movement therapy (dmt) at this juncture of years of the american dance therapy association’s (adta’s) organizational life. as a person who identifies as being ‘‘of color’’ and having written about, initiated conversations, and advocated for diversity and multicultural inclusion since (chang, , , , ), i am deeply appreciative that such an opportunity exists. i also appreciate the generous colleagueship of many other dance/movement therapists who are working in this contested arena. specifically, thanks to angela greyson, maria rivera, hilda wengrower, and lysa monique jenkins-hayden for comments on this article, and kiki nishida, elissa white, warin tepayayone, and forestine paulay for conversations that have inspired and fortified me. & meg h. chang meg.chang@umassmed.edu center for mindfulness, university of massachusetts medical school, maple ave., shrewsbury, ma , usa am j dance ther ( ) : – doi . /s - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &amp;domain=pdf http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &amp;domain=pdf understanding the ways that life experiences and personal history shape our racial, gendered, cultural, and ethnic identity is one of the key principles underlying the development of cultural competence, defined as ‘‘the ability to understand, appreciate, and interact with people of cultures [races] or belief systems different from one’s own’’ (sue in deangelis, ). in that spirit, the life perspective that influences my comments here are those of a biracial chinese (shanghainese) and midwestern american (british ancestry) cisgender woman born in the last mid- century into an educationally privileged but economically marginal family on the east coast of the united states. this, then, is the identity that looks at what has changed over years regarding people who identify as ‘‘of color’’ in the adta. as a dance/movement therapist, i have been honored to serve on the adta board of directors under three different presidents. such inclusion has heightened a (possibly confucian) sense of responsibility towards the dmt field. how we as a profession relate to our own and others’ race, culture, gender, ethnicity, class, and able-bodiedness is urgently important. inclusion is demonstrated by the way in which our field sets standards and manages disagreement—and whether we respond to challenges to be inclusive or miss those opportunities entirely. as an educator i acknowledge the privilege i had when teaching in graduate dmt and somatic psychology programs, yet often the only person of color in the room. in this role i have sought out ways that dmt students can bring all of who they are, in all the ways that they identify—even those ‘‘subjugated identities’’ as ken hardy says ( ) to their education and hence to their clients and the public. therefore, this essay focuses on graduate education and the professional development of dance/movement therapists in the u.s., including students from other countries who are perceived as ethnically, culturally, or racially different when they come to study in the u.s. one obvious change in the past years is that there are now consistently more graduate students ‘‘of color’’ entering dmt programs—people who visibly appear to be from an african-american, arab-muslim, latina/latino, native american, or south or east asian/asian-american background—many more than there were when i attended hunter college, – . also changed is the attention paid to race, culture, and to some extent gender, difference in graduate education. in the period from the s through the s, the field was predominantly white- european in appearance and in dance forms: laban’s movement taxonomy was the uncontested norm, and conventional western psychology’s hegemonic assump- tions had not yet been challenged in counseling or psychotherapy. consequently, the pernicious intersection of socioeconomic inequity, race, gender, and sexual- identity placed any blame for non-normative thinking, feeling, and acting on the individual, who was often pathologized or silenced. with the notable exception of irma dosamantes’ contributions to dmt praxis ( a, b, ), forestine paulay and irmgard bartenieff’s ethnography (in paulay & lomax, ), and anthropological perspectives provided by fancizca boas ( / ) and judith lynne hanna ( , ), sociocultural background was largely ignored in dmt. there is now heightened student awareness of the impact of racial, cultural, and gender identity, and new educational guidelines for graduate dmt programs are am j dance ther ( ) : – written to emphasize inclusion. there is a growing awareness that structural racial inequities negatively impact health (marmot, ). graduate dmt programs now strive, with varying degrees of commitment and student satisfaction, for cultural competency in syllabi and supervision. most importantly, there is the beginning of a dialogue—talking together about the difficulties and joys—and a recognition of the need for having the difficult conversations (mcgoldrick & garcia-preto, ). to the extent that members of the adta, educators, those new to the field, and colleagues around the world are exploring how privilege (mcintosh, ), structural racism (adams & bell, ), colorism (hunter, ), microaggression (sue et al., ), stereotype threat (steele, ), colonialism (back & solomos, ), and gender identity (meyers, )—not to forget ableism (longmore & umansky, ; caldwell, ), misogyny (meyers, ), and heterosexism (meyers, )—manifest in our professional and personal lives, dmt becomes more resilient, inclusive, and a force for change within our own community and towards those we serve. since , structural changes within the adta include updating graduate educational standards and making substantive changes to the ethical standards. elissa queyquep white (who identifies as ‘‘filipina and jewish,’’ personal communication, november , ) was elected as our first president of color, and the adta board of directors has added a multicultural and diversity committee. affinity groups representing students and clinicians from african- american, latino, white allies, asian & asian-american, and lbgtqa (jenkins- hayden, ; greyson, ) communities have a voice and a place to share unique experiences. workshops and seminars presented at the adta’s annual conference address diversity and multicultural applications; and a full scholarship to the conference is provided to a self-identified multicultural or gender-diverse student or beginning clinician, funded through member donations to the annual conference scholarship. such organizational improvement is establishing new norms with a goal of fostering a more inclusive and welcoming climate. there has been less change in the tacit understandings of ‘‘systems and structures that have evolved, for centuries, to privilege and to subordinate, all based on race and color’’ (magee, in press). the culture of the adta’s founders reflected a particular time and set of social conditions that reified the water of privilege in which our predominately female, heterosexual, white, upper middle-class, and urban profession, still swims (bourdieu, ). the habitus of privilege is to be taken for granted as ‘‘natural.’’ a durable example is evident in the ratio of faculty of color to white european faculty. statistically, little has changed since elissa queyquep white and irma dosamantes were on the dance therapy faculty of hunter college and university of california, los angeles, respectively. when faculty of color are not evident in higher education, there is lower student of color retention, and the burden of pointing out microinsults, and bearing microassaults (sue, ), and cultural misunderstandings falls upon those individuals who are already in the racial minority. these students, faculty, and emerging professionals of color may feel and experience being ‘‘othered’’ for maintaining cultural identities that look, sound, or dance differently, and who hold contrasting beliefs from the power structure of their institutions. compounding such microaggressions, the worldview am j dance ther ( ) : – of poc is minimized and made invisible through colorblind platitudes. particularly in the arts, cultural artifacts, dances, and expressions are appropriated and promoted as novel and exciting (picart, ; unruh, ). it is possible that between and years ago, as the field was being developed, there was more openness to self-examination and social activism (schmais, ). if so, where are we now when compared to ? what happened to the african- american dance therapists who joined in co-founding the adta? why are the spanish-speaking founding members disaffiliated? have predominant attitudes towards ‘‘passive’’ east asian students changed, really (pallaro, )? more importantly, after years of reflecting, what needs to change? in the s, when dmt education embraced a systems perspective (birdwhistell, ; bateson, ), the field was attuned to the broader social environment. as blanche evan frequently stated, ‘‘thought without action is the great perpetrator of the neurotic life’’ (evan, ). the following examples were generated from graduate and alternate route dmt programs, with students who identify as different regarding race, gender, class, or culture. as personal and immediate actions, the following recommendations apply equally well to all dance therapists. students and professional dance/movement therapists continue to experience subtle and unconscious racial, cultural, gender, and ethnic bias within the classroom and clinical setting from faculty, other students, and clinical supervisors (phelps et al, ; jenkins-hayden, ; greyson, ). steps toward reducing disruptive microaggressions in the form of thoughtless microinsults: ‘‘[h]e tells you his dean is making him hire a person of color when there are so many great writers out there’’ (rankine, , p. ), and unconscious microinvalidations, such as not being called on as frequently as a white or european speaker in a classroom or in group setting are not uncommon. recommendations: at the personal and individual level • acknowledge and speak to the historical power differentials of race, culture, and ethnicity, especially as these intersect with gender, class, and able-bodiedness in the classroom; this will lead to greater facility in the treatment room. in clinical practice, as well as education, we need to be alert to how debilitating it is to hide or minimize such essential elements of body image and self. • it follows that identity and identifiers belong to the subject. despite the tendency for a member of the dominant group to objectify and name the other–‘‘what kind of asian are you?’’ (helpmefindparents, ), ‘‘funny, you don’t look ___’’, or ‘‘where are you from, really?’’—it is the person of color who makes the choice of how to self-identify and self-authorize. it is a presumptuous form of microaggession for someone who is recognizably from the dominant group to feel authorized to make assumptions about poc without knowing how the person perceives their own heritage. • having to keep silent or be labeled with a microinsult as ‘‘the one who always rocks the boat,’’ can motivate a dance therapist of color and difference to look elsewhere for professional community. am j dance ther ( ) : – • issues that arise with more subtle identity manifestations are students whose racial and cultural background is freighted by the concept of ‘‘passing.’’ ‘‘passing for white’’ has been fallaciously construed as a benefit by people who operate from a colorblind perspective. praising biracial or multiracial persons for having a light skin tone or telling them that they ‘‘don’t look’’ like persons of their racial identity can comprise an erasure of identity, of authenticity, of culture, and negates identities linked to ancestors. failing to understand the conflict this perspective stimulates effectively silences an individual, and amounts to microinvalidation: ‘‘communications that subtly exclude, negate or nullify the thoughts, feelings or experiential reality of a person of color’’. the struggles this raises for someone with intersecting identities is often ignored or minimized. • in a similar manner, asians or asian-americans are considered the next group to become assimilated into white privilege. accrued status presents a risk of undervaluing heritage and identity, either by inducing assimilation or through colorblind assertions. • for lgbtq individuals, the intersectionality of color and gender (among other possibilities) raises questions of whether there is safety and encouragement to speak in class, so as to be and represent all of who they are. • therefore, for many white europeans, the need to do our own work means engaging in a rigorous, personal/social, and honest self-investigation into our own racial, cultural, ethnic, and gendered background in order to become more culturally competent (mcgoldrick, giordano, & garcia-preto, ). such a revealing process may require specialized, professional assistance and training. attaining cultural humility certainly requires consistent reading, self-study, and interrogation of dominant norms surrounding the home we grew up in and the things we heard and came to believe about ‘‘others.’’ similar to the way that dance/movement therapists learn to decipher and experience their own movement preferences, we can bring that same excited discovery to self-study of our own bias. developing what legal scholar rhonda magee calls colorinsight practices (copyright ) is a stimulating and on-going process of self-awareness. similarly, francine kendall ( ), who writes about white privilege, recommends that whenever someone uses ‘‘black’’ as a personal modifier, it is useful to interject ‘‘white,’’ in reference to caucasians, as an equivalent conversational identifier. • being the only person of color in any professional setting is isolative. being ‘‘the only’’ in a class—especially when the espoused norm is colorblind invisibility— on a clinical team, in supervision, or on a professional board can be corrosive and also leads to attrition. to support the only requires recognizing the need to take time to recuperate, to nourish oneself, to not burn out or drop out while doing this work—a regimen of good self-care and prioritization of life-affirming aspects. such a departure from striving can be supported rather than questioned. am j dance ther ( ) : – recommendations: at the institutional level • in the adta, in the next years, it would be heartening for there to be multiple representatives from diverse racial and cultural backgrounds on the board, as full-time faculty teaching in graduate programs, as clinical supervisors, as community leaders. this acknowledgment and intentionality encourages more students and young professionals to stay in the field as they recognize professors and models who look like them. the same is true of international students. • introduce more dance/movement therapists of color to public service and leadership roles and provide well-defined professional mentoring at national and regional levels. explicit and tangible support is especially necessary for new board and committee members as the tendency is for female intellectuals and trailblazers of color to be ‘‘overburdened . . . with duties . . . and committees, advising and mentoring, and outreach and community service . . . hobbled by lack of institutional and financial support . . . and by extreme isolation, overwork, and exhaustion’’ (benjamin, , in priest, ). • the multicultural and diversity committee (mdc) chair has an unusual cross- cutting, cross-functional role. the mdc provides specialized input into the deliberations and processes of the other committees, such as standards & ethics and education when issues that involve race, culture, or ethnicity are presented by membership. the chair also serves as an ombudsperson for persons of color throughout the profession. as such, it is critical that the chair receive commensurate support in resources, whether fiscal or in terms of task participation. in this connection, please note that the chair functions as a de facto chief diversity officer, a responsibility that is compensated in many organizations comparable to the adta. since the adta has a volunteer board, in order to support and promote our members, resources need to be devoted to this committee proportionate to the amount of work required. recommendations: at the clinical level • be alert to how currents such as those underlying the black lives matter movement can contribute to understanding our clients’ lived experience and personal history (degruy, ). in a similar way the impact of the chinese exclusion act on family history helps clinicians understand the etiology of private distress in a more contextual and less individualized way (boggs & kurashige, ). • as educational programs recognize critical issues in students’ identity and strengthen students’ ability to access all of their uniqueness, their future clients will benefit. community work becomes more viable as students and beginning clinicians have avenues to relate to people whose lived experiences are very different from theirs because of skin color, gender identity, country of origin, or socioeconomic background. am j dance ther ( ) : – • continue to offer and promote ongoing training and awareness at the individual and adta level, until social structures that perpetuate prejudice and bias change to become supportive, inclusive, and equitable. recommendations at the education and scholarship level • what is most well-received by students of color, besides faculty of color, are dmt graduate programs and faculty that actively, and independent of accreditation requirements, engage in continuing education and clinical supervision with the specific intention of becoming culturally compe- tent (schelly-hill & goodill, ). clinical creative arts therapy supervisors who were trained in the past millennium, when the best practice was to be colorblind (as in, ‘‘i don’t see color!’’ or ‘‘everyone is the same to me.’’), also benefit personally and professionally from self-study, perhaps in conjunction with dance therapy programs. knowing ‘‘where we come from’’ provides a common ground for conversation with supervisees who identify as racially, culturally, ethnically, gendered, or different due to class background. • a sociocultural framework is needed to grasp the intersectionality of gender, race, culture, class, ethnicity, language, and able-bodiedness. one fertile model comes from the interdisciplinary and multicultural work of monica mcgoldrick and nydia garcia-preto, family therapists trained by murray bowen and betty carter (mcgoldrick, garcia-preto, & carter, ). • recognize long-standing cultural/racial healing forms of dance such as bomba (rivera, ; concepcion, ). engage in finding creative ways to acknowledge and relate to representatives of indigenous healing forms without improperly appropriating them or their work (harris, ). develop cultural humility and promote recognition of local teachers. • acknowledge that dmt emphasizes individualistic values of the global north through dance forms, body use, language, music, use of space, and how emotions are expressed. being open to dance and movement possibilities in countries and cultures with different political structures, psychophysical habitus (chang, ), and language can augment and improve our understanding of how dance heals. • be alert to unconscious tendencies to dominate as a white person, to speak first, assign meaning, and take over; instead be curious, be humble. the ignorance of colorblind racism and the microaggressions and defensive attitudes that are perpetuated can be addressed; steps to become more inclusive, stronger, and speak with one voice are being taken, to build on the vision of years ago. more nuanced understanding of personal and social history underlying the inclusivity of the term poc reduces the black-white binary of discrimination and permits us to see the whole cloth—to see what we all have at stake. am j dance ther ( ) : – conclusion: beyond remediation this assessment has called for an infusion of self-examination and a perspective shift (mezirow, ) to bring the consciousness, policies, and programming of the adta—as the leader in dmt education and application—into alignment with best practices and contemporary scholarship. a diverse membership benefits from multicultural education and is motivated to sustain an equitable and inclusive organization. as dance/movement therapists, we know the struggle for dance and the body to be acknowledged as respected forms of intelligence and that the most effective way to appreciate the power of dance is to experience it directly. just so, to repair bias in education and clinical practice, we must investigate our own cultural history and our personal relationship to the historical conditions that have led to hierarchical distinctions and power differentials. paradoxically, when di-contextualized (birdwhistle, ), the term people of color, can become another superficial designation with the potential of isolating and stigmatizing those who are different. merely thinking additively, of poc and dmt, brings to mind simplistic solutions such as ‘‘add water and stir,’’ as if all that was needed was to mix in more ‘‘of them’’ to create an integrated field and representative professional association. such a one-dimensional solution assumes that the global north aesthetic and power structure is the genuine discipline, and the worldview and leadership of poc is auxiliary — only to be added if there is time. not only does this evade a substantive discussion of historical and economic inequity and hegemonic authority, but until there is direct first-hand knowledge of race, gender, class, culture, and ethnic identity as each of us lives it, unconscious projections based on unexamined status and privilege will prevail. another problem is that a topical identifier separates international students from those who do identify as of color. a distinctly american term, it is frequently off-putting to students and professionals from asia, india, israel, palestine, and arab or muslim nations (among others) who do not self-identify in that way, or who do not perceive race as the primary demarcation. in many countries class distinctions are more salient. south asians, east asians, and asian-americans who are perceived as ‘‘foreigners’’ regardless of years of residence in the united states (nishida, ) have long had to choose whether to sit in the front or the back of the bus (boggs & kurashige, ). the continuing globalization of the adta (dulicai & berger, ) is an opportunity to weigh often-cited platitudes about the universalism (stock, ) of dance and dmt against unconscious colonialist attitudes that perpetuate historic power differentials surrounding race, culture, and language. a fascination with dance from around the world has been a foundation of modern dance and dmt since our profession’s beginnings (boas, / ; levy, ; lomax, barte- nieff, & paulay, ). with instant globalization available through cell phones, it is time to acknowledge the exotification of dance from other cultures along with the projections and stereotypes attached to those who dance the local dances. owing to the history of colonization and domination, the assumption that a trained dancer from outside the culture can learn any dance and blend it into a dance therapy am j dance ther ( ) : – session can be insulting to the person whose dance culture has been appropriated. therefore, in addition to honoring traditional teachers and always naming and giving credit to the originator of the dance, we need to learn enough about the culture from which the dance came to pass along some understanding of the meaning of the dance (kealiinohomoku, ). still another option is to invite equal collaboration in partnership with dancers and dance therapists who live the tradition. the adta can expand its identity to include a multiplicity of life-perspectives and the many dance avenues that bring healing to individuals, interpersonal relationships, and communities. through the kind of group process and respect for individual creativity that is inherent in the discipline of dmt, we are finding ways to share power, learn new dances, and ‘‘dance each other’s dance,’’ not in a cycle of appropriation and dilution, not in the easy ways of exoticism, but in exploration of ways to connect to the oldest roots of dance therapy and reconnect to our own dance healing forms that are older than time. compliance with ethical 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( ). choreometrics: dance and human history, the longest trail, palm play, step style. berkeley, ca: university of california extension, center for media and independent learning. phelps, e., o’connor, k., cunningham, w., funayama, e. s., gatenby, c., gore, j., & banaji, m. r. ( ). performance on indirect measures of race evaluation predicts amygdala activation. journal of cognitive neuroscience ( ): – . published version doi: . / . accessed may , : : pm edt citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn- :hul.instrepos: picart, c. j. ( ). critical race theory and copyright in american dance: whiteness as status property. new york: palgrave macmillan. priest, m. ( ). salvation is the issue. meridians vol. , – . indiana university press. http://www.jstor.org/stable/ rankine, c. ( ). citizen: an american lyric. minneapolis, mn: greywolf. rivera, mara. ( ). healing aspects of bomba an autoethnographic study (unpublished master’s thesis). new york: pratt university. schelly-hill, e. & goodill, s. ( ). international students in american dance/movement therapy education: cultural riches and challenges. presented at the th annual american dance therapy association conference, nashville, tn. october, . schmais, c. ( ). marian chace annual lecture groups: a door to awareness. american journal of dance therapy, ( ), – . steele, c. ( ). whistling vivaldi: and other clues to the stereotypes that divide us. new york: norton. stock, c. ( ). myth of a universal dance language: tensions between globalisation and cultural difference. in s. burridge (ed.), asia pacific dance bridge: academic conference, papers and abstracts (pp. – ). singapore: world dance alliance. sue, d. ( ). overcoming our racism: the journey to liberation. san francisco: jossey-bass. sue, d. w., capodilupo, c. m., torino, g. c., bucceri, j. m., holder, a. m. b., nadal, k. l., & esquilin, m. ( ). racial microaggressions in everyday life: implications for clinical practice. american psychologist, ( ), – . doi: . / - x. . . . unruh, k. ( ). from kitchen mechanics to jubilant spirits of freedom: black, working-class women dancing the lindy hop. the journal of pan african studies, ( ), – . meg h. chang edd, bc-dmt, ncc, lcat- teaches mindfulness based stress reduction (mbsr) at the center for mindfulness, university of massachusetts medical school, worcester, massachusetts. conducted intercultural research in seoul, korea and taipei, taiwan. former chair and core faculty at lesley university in cambridge, ma and also the somatic psychology program at the california institute of integral studies. former dance/movement therapy (dmt) faculty at the new school and pratt university in new york city. founding member of the adta multicultural and diversity committee, two-term national treasurer, and member of educational standards task force. has practiced dmt in psychiatric facilities, medical settings, in shelters for victims of domestic violence, and in private practice for over years. am j dance ther ( ) : – http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn- :hul.instrepos: http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn- :hul.instrepos: http://www.jstor.org/stable/ http://dx.doi.org/ . / - x. . . 	dance/movement therapists of color in the adta: the first years 	abstract 	recommendations: at the personal and individual level 	recommendations: at the institutional level 	recommendations: at the clinical level 	recommendations at the education and scholarship level 	conclusion: beyond remediation 	references microsoft word - mitchell.docx journal of the american association for the advancement of curriculum studies spring, vol. ( ) 	 jorunal hegemonic hues: the problem of imagining frozen space and time reagan patrick mitchell colgate university sound curriculum: sonic studies in educational theory, method, & practice walter s. gershon / routledge / if all things vibrate, then all things have the potential to vibrate with all other things, both internally and externally, over history and time, space, and place. – walter s. gershon, , p. there is also a continuing distancing, a parsing of events that, like the article on cnn.com, at once recognizes individual murders, on rare occasion such as this places them next to one another, and places those police killings in the context of an ongoing national pattern, all without placing multiple murders side-by-side. – walter s. gershon, , p. i am always attempting to understand the variations of violent distancings in space and time that are imposed on communities through a series of refashionings, repurposings, reshapings, and reroutings. one powerful aspect i will elaborate on is how walter’s book helps the reader to confront and thus consider the violent distancings imposed through the conceptual freezing of space and time. while walter’s text is rich in many possibilities to inquire about these impositions created within time via distancing and gaps, one segment of the book i will highlight is situated in walter’s extremely vulnerable discussion in chapter “sound art, social justice: black lives matter.” i would like to share with you an occurrence which happened in the class i taught in fall at colgate university titled “theories of teaching and learning: sonic inquiry” in order to work through my thoughts on walter’s approach to time and space. journal of the american association for the advancement of curriculum studies journal of the american association for the advancement of curriculum studies spring, vol. ( ) 	 in “theories of teaching and learning: sonic inquiry”, i had the privilege and honor re-read walter’s text in the collective with my students. i attempted to strategically position walter’s text to follow r. murray schafer’s book the soundscape ( / ). i realized that for many individuals taking a course, focused solely in sound, post reading of schafer’s text, a range of feelings rooted in the spectrum of confusion and inquiry would emerge regarding the correlation of sound to education. i attempted to situate walter’s text as the proverbial resonate funky downbeat, ala clyde stubblefield and boosty collins, in order to land on, as james brown would say, “the .” i envisioned the entrance of walter’s text into this segment of the course as that build up to “the ” and the resonant touch down of clap from the boom bap being when chapter “sound art, social justice: black lives matter” finally hits, as the arrival of “the .” upon assigning this chapter in class for the following period, i made the decision, along with the request and encouragement of a student via email, prior to the class session that we as class would sit and be vulnerable through listening to the accompanying mixed media composition, whereby walter utilizes compositional techniques situated in editing and mixing of passages of black lynchings in a collective with him improvising melismatic passages on the baritone saxophone. we as a class, during the following class period, sat and listened to the entire : piece. after a pause, i asked “what did you hear?” there was an extended pause and afterwards two younger white women, one after the other, raised their hands and broke up the heavy solemn reflective and reflexive moment of silence in the classroom. the collective of these two women’s responses presented them explaining how the piece was unsettling along with them both mentioning their attempts to find one point in the composition to settle in on in order to gain a sort of stable footing and focus. for both of these women finding that point, as they explained, dealt with them attempting to “find the voice of authority” in the composition. as i inquired about the meaning of the voice of authority, they both followed, explaining that the voice of authority, for them, was the voice of the news anchor. my question to both of them and the entire class following their statements was, “why the anchor and not the witness, who happens to be a community member, calling in response to the cops about to engage in the normalized terrorist action of lynching an unarmed black man?,” as presented in the multiple recorded acknowledgements in the composition. i posed this question, not as one to be answered, or even to call out and/or put them on the spot, but rather as a point to sit in a reflexive space. hegemonic hues mitchell 	 	 with distance from the class discussion, i still remain in that reflexive space. a space charged with inquiry around how formulations of the “voice of authority” is authored/co-authored and carried out through community and vice versa. with consideration of the rationales and/or rubrics, perhaps these ideas call forth michel foucault’s panoptic analysis and ruminations (foucault, / ). specifically, is the idea espoused in the class session around finding “the voice of authority” one which also calls attention to the collective meanings of how body is panoptically policed with attention to listening? this is an inquiry enlivened through fran huckaby’s response. in one segment, huckaby utilizes erica meiners’s terminology the “violence of policing” to unpack chapter further. one vulnerable point, of many, in huckaby’s response, is when she states/writes “not trusting these sounds in darkness, i opened my eye for the remaining minutes of the sound art.” it is the conceptual rocking between the phrases around students discovering “the voice of authority” and huckaby’s “not trusting these sounds in darkness” which caused me to inquire about the larger colonialist project which assigns tensions of non-intentionality to blackness (fanon, / ). i write these critiques as a reminder of how historically through ideological systems, i.e.- “the enlightenment” to eugenics and so on, the perpetrators of colonialism have consistently assigned of monikers of sub- humanity to blackness (mills, ; winfield, ). resulting in the ideological dynamism which constantly reimagines, remaps, and re-embodies. therefore, “the voice of authority” and “not trusting these sounds in darkness” are essentially variations of a system of hegemony whereby sub-humanity is assigned to blackness as a series of pedagogies around actions of policing through doubt and mistrust. similarly, in how the prophetic, the speaking into existence, or radical reclamation of space, as seen with the black church, there is an opposite to considering how the prophetic operates in relation to notions of speaking black sub-humanity in to existence (kelley, ). which brings me to chris osmond’s inquiry of “what are the challenges of inviting students into a sonic interrogation of the world they find when they open to hear it—especially when regarded through the ears of implicit bias, institutionalized racism, and social justice?” the aspect osmond’s inquiry which is most resonant for me is what follows. specifically, his continued inquiry into the whether the student might fall victim to points of reverence. osmond parallels this with an example of the baby boomer generation’s progression towards fetish with the beatles’ sergeant peppers album. the conclusion being the impossibility that no other musical geniuses would follow journal of the american association for the advancement of curriculum studies spring, vol. ( ) 	 however this example serves to articulate the larger issue of falling in the trap of being unable to listen and/or hear due to the lack of improvisational responsibility one or community utilizes in listening practices (mitchell, ). the larger point i drew from osmond’s response was that the invitation to listen is one in which the community brings a series of political rootings and routings to the table (wilson, sandru, &welsch, ). listening, for the invited community, is simultaneously fraught with possibility and the problematic, scored through decolonialist and settler colonialist practices. furthermore, the aporia of the discourse resides in an ungovernable dynamic binary between oppression and liberation which constantly maps and remaps itself upon the body through listening practices (buck-morss, ). the richness of huckaby’s and osmond’s responses speaks to the broader premise as to the relevance of the imagination in listening practices. these imaginaries they speak of in reaction to gershon’s work challenge carceral statehood through posing what a world might sound like minus imprisoned ears (meiners, ). the collective realization which emerged, as a result of engaging chapter , along with the thoughts of fran huckaby and chris osmond was an awareness of how rigid constructs of time and space violently serve to freeze and create dramatic distances between events. furthermore, rigid constructs of space and time imposed through various media outlets and controllers/editors of historical narratives, putting forth a metanarrative of progress when in fact the lynchings presented in this chapter occurred within - years of each other. additionally, chapter presents the violently stolen black lives as those that made headlines with acknowledgement that countless other black lives have remained unmentioned, unaccounted for and/or eventually forgotten by many while never having the chance to be remembered by others. therefore, one major point i took from chapter and the collective text in reference to frozen perceptions of space and time, was in understanding how the implications of rigidity in space and time equate to violence. a sort of violence exercised through rigid conceptualizations of space and time which create the illusion of lynchings of black, brown, queer, economically disenfranchised, and the list goes on, bodies as a sporadic occurrence, when in fact as we read and reflect, several other marginalized community members have been attacked, murdered and/or gone missing. in closing, i would like to thank walter for composing this chapter, and collective text, which does the work of reminding us, hegemonic hues mitchell 	 	 the engagers, of the responsibility to be resistant, through putting forth the need to be engaged consistently in the process of collapsing rigid conceptualizations of time and space in order to be touched and moved to action by the resonances of those stolen lives. journal of the american association for the advancement of curriculum studies spring, vol. ( ) 	 references buck-morss, s. ( ). hegel, haiti, and universal history. pittsburgh, pennsylvania: university of pittsburg press. fanon, f. ( / ). black skin, white masks. new york, new york: grove press. foucault, michel. ( / ). discipline and punish: the birth of the prison. new york, new york: vintage. gershon, w. ( ). sound curriculum: sonic studies in educational theory, method, & practice. new york, new york: routledge. kelley, r. ( ). freedom dreams: the black radical imagination. boston, massachusetts: beacon press. meiners, e. ( ). for the children?: protecting innocence in a carceral state. minneapolis, minnesota: university of minnesota press. mills, c. ( ). the racial contract. ithaca, new york: cornell university press. mitchell, r. ( ). improvisational responsibility: derrida’s call to play. journal of curriculum theorizing, ( ), - . schafer, r.m., ( / ). the soundscape: our sonic environment and the tuning of the world. rochester, vermont: destiny books. wilson, sandreu, and welsh. (ed). ( ). rerouting the postcolonial: new directions for the new millennium. new york, new york: routledge. winfield, a. ( ). eugenics and education in america: institutionalized racism and the implications of history, ideology, and memory. new york, new york: peter lang. mike brown's body: new materialism and black form mike brown's body: new materialism and black form andré carrington asap/journal, volume , number , may , pp. - (article) published by johns hopkins university press for additional information about this article access provided by drexel university ( aug : gmt) https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ asap/journal / mike brown’s body: new materialism and black form andré carrington figure . stowage of the british slave ship brookes under the regulated slave trade act of , library of congress prints & photographs division, digital id cph. a . forum / “ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” —president john f. kennedy, inau- gural address, is colorblindness a queer form? there is something black about spatial prac- tices of incarceration and perishment that dehumanize living matter. the brookes (fig. ) is a figure for the flesh. the flesh is pressed into the brookes and the zong. the flesh becomes knowledge through art: barbara chase- riboud’s echo of lions ( ) and djimon honsou’s performance in amistad ( ); the illustration above and its reproductions; m. nourbese philip’s poetry and amma asante’s film belle. to the putative owners, specula- tors, and underwriters of these ships, the flesh was only so much precious metal temporarily suspended in a perishable state. posterity, the potential for power to reproduce itself and its world through the flesh, spilled out of the hold of those ships. out of the hold of those ships, the lonely, uncovered flesh of michael brown spilled out into the street. millions of eyes to swarm around him spilled out of the hold. the uninvited ghost of renisha mcbride spilled out onto theodore wafer’s porch. olaudah equiano, as he was pressed into the service of making a new world for others, recalled his own flesh being “hurried away even amongst the uncircumcised” and swept up into the hold along with “a people who did not circumcise, and ate without washing their hands.” he would meet distant peoples who cooked in iron pots and sharpened their teeth; he would worry over whether he would be killed and if his flesh was “to be eaten by those white men with horrible looks, red faces, and loose hair.” elsewhere i have written about how black skin and black hair form the sub- strate for a variety of commercial and scientific practices that assign them quantifiable value even as they engender intimacy. our skin and hair belong to us without determining the limits of our belonging because we are more than flesh. our captors insist we have always been flesh, so we can be left to perish like michael brown and renisha mcbride. like equiano, we try to remember when we were pressed into the hold. adapting the new materialism to the task of reckoning with the flesh demands a critique of form, and the work of sylvia wynter, hortense spillers, and alex weheliye articulates this demand in inspiring fashion. this work is all the more urgent in the wake of what ian haney lópez terms “reactionary col- orblindness,” which he traces to the backlash against affirmative action and the contem- porary “renewed penchant for the racial formalism which in an earlier and ignominious version helped defend jim crow oppression.” this doctrine finds expression in legal reason- ing that equates affirmative action with reverse discrimination, “positing whites as black to justify heightened review, but blacks as white to deny the persistence of racial hierarchy.” in the name of colorblindness, a perverse (queer) asap/journal / return to disenfranchisement proceeds by enabling the faceless majority to “reconfigure the existing political process in a manner that creates a two-tiered system of political change, subjecting laws designed to protect or benefit discrete and insular minorities to a more bur- densome political process than all other laws.” supreme court justice sonia sotomayor scrutinizes the form in which a concern for equal protection gets articulated in this new moment by meeting it with a timely critique of her own: a rarely cited “political-process doctrine.” while the ahistorical claims lodged in the name of a strange (queer) resurgent formalism seek to unmake the humanity of racial minority subjects, the political-process doctrine comprises a new, materialist mode of vigilance toward the ruses of form. attention to the processes by which blackness loses its human form, as well as to the processes that enable the human to take on a black form— historical processes—compels us not to abandon the human or the historical while so many possibilities remain “unvoiced, misseen, not doing, awaiting their verb.” what forms of life might be attainable for black bodies in these unspeakable times? christina sharpe does not answer this directly, but instead she calls attention to the continuity between the way “the black body” is debased in death and the way it is made susceptible to debasement in its living form: as the flesh. her attention to “the quotidian unmaking of being that is everyday blackness, the ease with which fun- gibility and killability mark black life forms,” suggests a divergence between black and queer forms of life. keguro macharia cites sharpe to mark a contrast: black queer studies is not so troubled by death. he finds “much black queer scholarship on the contemporary focuses on strategies of livability—on love, on kind- ness, on ecstasy, on community, on resistance, on agency, on possibility.” yet he dwells on the disposability of the black body in order to “think with:about impossible figures, unmade figures, unbeing figures, with the fleshed and unfleshed, with the thing that desires,” because those are the forms of black life. to ask what forms of life might be attainable for black bodies, we have to think about what it takes for us to live as well as why we die. cathy cohen raised the provocative question, “do black lives matter?” in the aftermath of the death that occasioned the title of this essay. this occasion was also characterized by the life of cece mcdonald: a life that she maintained through self-defense. at once a testament to black trans women’s capacity to survive and a protest against the reduction of black bodies to dead flesh, cohen’s question exposes a fault line underlying the apparent alliance between black and queer politics. she makes a distinc- tion between the “performative solidarity” with anti-racist endeavors that is professed by some lgbt/queer advocacy organizations and the substantive solidarity required to curtail the continual violence done by neoliberalism. her address resonates with the dilemma that sara ahmed has called the “non-performativity of anti-racism.” speech acts that proclaim anti-racist aims while declaring whiteness fail, she writes, because “declaring whiteness, or even ‘admitting’ to one’s own racism, when forum / the declaration is assumed to be ‘evidence’ of an anti-racist commitment, does not do what it says.” as an alternative to the (infelicitous) performative register in which anti-racist dis- course takes place, cohen’s gesture to the “substantive” and ahmed’s demand for a “form of action that we could describe as anti-racist” are gestures to the material dimension of rac- ism and anti-racist praxis. living black human beings take such action by demanding to go on living. in the wake of unrelenting “group-differen- tiated vulnerability to premature death,” it is astounding to witness the persistence of what charles mills has called white ignorance. unironically, mills identifies white ignorance as the specific form of an “epistemology of ignorance”: modern mainstream anglo-ameri- can epistemology was for hundreds of years from its cartesian origins pro- foundly inimical terrain for the devel- opment of any concept of structural group-based miscognition. the para- digm exemplars of phenomena likely to foster mistaken belief—optical illu- sions, hallucinations, phantom limbs, dreams—were by their very banality universal to the human condition and the epistemic remedies prescribed— for example, rejecting all but the indu- bitable—correspondingly abstract and general. maintaining the functional coherence of advantaged (white) posi- tions in knowledge systems permeated by hierarchical race thinking permits and even necessitates specific habits of miscognition. how else can a system of thought conceptualize the hanging deaths of sandra bland and lennon lacy in terms so disconnected from lynching that they can name them sui- cide? how else can stylistic conven- tions abide phrasing like “the shooting death of black teen trayvon martin by george zimmerman” and “the death of black teen michael brown by po- lice officer darren wilson,” when the declarative constructions “george zimmerman killed trayvon martin” and “darren wilson killed michael brown” cut to the quick? a critique of form that militates against white ignorance must call the conventions that countenance epistemic and material violence against black bodies by their names. “turning a blind eye to history,” in neil gotanda’s “ a critique of form that militates against white ignorance must call the conventions that countenance epistemic and material violence against black bodies by their names. ” asap/journal / words, the disconnected formalism of col- orblindness observes racial inequality in the present but ascribes its persistence to causes other than white supremacy. because race consciousness insists on taking the form of historical consciousness, i read the following new materialist tableau, inspired by latour’s we have never been modern, with something just short of abject terror: on most days our money has not vanished, our spouse has not left us, our job has not ended, our name has not changed, and our country has not collapsed into civil war. this is not because humans themselves are in- herently stable, but because we lean on nonhuman objects—more durable than we are—to provide the stability for us. uniforms, contracts, wedding rings, passports, bridges, tunnels, and private dwellings are among the thou- sands of entities that prevent the slide of humans into a baboon-like cosmos of permanent social anxiety. coming to terms with the productive ignorance toward racial specificity in this for- mulation is a heady task. it requires a critique of the form in which philosophy disclaims the exceptional quality of being human. losing our money, spouse, job, name, and country have been necessary preconditions for the fash- ioning of black bodies into nonhuman objects for others to lean on. becoming human, for us, has involved redressing this dispossession rather than relying on it. sharon holland points to one endeavor to seek redress in an account of contemporary queer of color critique. she identifies ernesto martínez’s on making sense: queer race narratives of intelligibility with the hypothesis that “the continued skepticism toward the humanist project evinced in queer work and the wishful thinking of a race-blind . . . theory of being in critical studies leads to a continued obfuscation of queer of color contributions to theories of sexuality.” the critique espoused by martínez and others lodges objections to the way a flight from the merely human enacted by contemporary theories, including those brandishing the sigil of queer, takes the form of white flight. like roderick ferguson in aberrations in black and amber jamilla musser in sensational flesh, martínez dwells on the maligned and misrecognized body of queer of color knowledge—sometimes, specifically black and latinx queer knowl- edge—to reanimate the human relation to itself. indigenous humanisms and spatial practices, like those of zoe todd and juanita sundberg, likewise “concede that there are elements of post-humanism, cosmopolitics and the ontological turn that could poten- tially be promising tools in the decolonial project, if approached with an attention to the structural realities of the academy.” doing reparation to structures in the academy can involve taking subjugated knowledges as the point of departure for epistemological trans- formation. an example in a first nations context might be the transition from a reli- ance on the maligned and misrecognized term “berdache” to a strategically pan-indigenous forum / praxis employing the form “two-spirit.” no such reckoning is possible, however, in a space that relies for its stability on nonhuman objects fashioned out of human flesh. the problem posed by the continued prolif- eration of anthropomorphic epistemologies is not that they render too sharp a distinc- tion between “us” and nonhuman objects. the problem is that performative utterances such as “us” and “we”—like “our money,” “our spouse,” “our job,” “our name,” and “our country”—interpellate a narrow “us” for whom the dissolution of nature/culture is novel. yet some of us never became human in the exceptional sense; our flesh was sublimated from nonhuman object into the “baboon-like cosmos of permanent social anxiety” in the fatal sweep of enlightenment modernity. “it has largely gone unnoticed by posthumanists,” zakkiyah iman jackson writes, “that their que- ries into ontology often find their homologous (even anticipatory) appearance in decolonial philosophies that confront slavery and colonial- ism’s inextricability from the enlightenment humanism they are trying to displace.” it remains concerning that the turn away from the human is so dramatic and the materialisms are so “new” when, as kyla wazana tompkins points out, “these are epistemologies and ontol- ogies that can hardly be said to have recently been invented but rather are familiar to, among others, first nations and indigenous peoples; to those humans who have never been quite human enough.” jackson reminds us that when black thinkers such as wynter and lewis gordon called the premises of the posthuman turn into question, “what they aspired to achieve was not the extension of liberal human- ism to those enslaved and colonized, but rather a transformation within humanism.” as if the constant risk of death were not enough, the persistent whiteness of the igno- rance that enjoins us to let go of the human before we are done with it makes me reluctant to articulate the queer forms through which i might enact livability, agency, and resis- tance in terms that are not explicitly black and human. i know that objects can and do resist, but the reason i know this—my episte- mological ground—is that my ancestors were objects. i am wondering what queering the relation between the human and other forms of life, queering the relation between life and non-life, or undoing the sovereignty of rela- tion altogether, will mean for the black body. my inclination is to ask not what form can do to enable or open itself to queerness, but to ask whether form will let blackness live. according to holland, “missing in martinez’s work is some kind of attention to the ways “ my inclination is to ask not what form can do to enable or open itself to queerness, but to ask whether form will let blackness live. ” asap/journal / in which the white critics he mentions— especially donna haraway—might have investments against language or its universality because of their commitments to the animal world, or to something other than that which might be considered human.” martinez is not alone in according language a second chance over the protestations of new philos- ophies. in a gesture to current scholarship in the field, tompkins also expresses reser- vations about “the ongoing citation of ‘the power of language’ or ‘representationalism’ as a problem that is corrected by new mate- rialism.” language and representation, and literature in particular, are close to my heart. but blackness is also “something other than that which might be considered human,” and i am mindful of the violent severability of my blackness from language and humanity. in deference to the complications introduced to feminist, queer, and new materialist critiques by holland, martínez, sharpe, haraway, tompkins, vanessa agard-jones, and zoe todd, among others, i do not want my rela- tionship with the human to end just yet. the body is still warm. notes sharon holland, “(black) (queer) love,” callaloo , no. ( ): . vincent carretta has cast doubt on the veracity of equiano’s account of his african birth and upbringing in equiano the african: biography of a self-made man (new york: penguin, ). but the story is still his. olaudah equiano, the interesting narrative of the life of olaudah equiano; or, gustavus vassa, the african, written by himself, vol. , london [ ],  - . the making of the modern world, proxy.library. upenn.edu: /mome/infomark.do?&source=gale &prodid=mome&usergroupname=upenn_main &t abi d=t &docid=u &t y pe= multipage&contentset=momearticles&version= . &doclevel=fascimile. see alex weheliye, habeas viscus: racializing assemblages, biopolitics, and black feminist theories of the human (durham: duke university press, ); sylvia wynter, “unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—an argument,” cr: the new centennial review , no. ( ): - ; hortense spillers, “interstices: a small drama of words,” in black, white, and in color: essays on american literature and culture (chicago: university of chicago press, ). ian f. haney lópez, “‘a nation of minorities’: race, ethnicity, and reactionary colorblindness,” stanford law review , no. (april ): . ibid, . sonia sotomayor, schuette et al v. bamn, u.s. , . hortense spillers, “interstices,” . christina sharpe, in the wake: on blackness and being (durham: duke university press), . keguro macharia, “black queer studies now,” gukira, personal blog, august , , gukira.wordpress.com/ / / /black-queer- studies-now. cathy cohen, “#doblacklivesmatter? from michael brown to cece mcdonald: on black death and lgbtq politics,” public presentation, annual kessler award lecture, clags: the center for lgbtq studies, new york, ny, december , . sara ahmed, “declarations of whiteness: the non-performativity of anti-racism,” borderlands , no. ( ): www.borderlands.net. forum / au/vol no _ /ahmed_declarations.htm. ruth wilson gilmore, golden gulag: prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing california (berkeley: university of california press, ), . charles mills, “white ignorance,” in race and epistemologies of ignorance, ed. shannon sullivan and nancy tuana (albany: state university of new york press, ), . victor blackwell, “n.c. teen’s hanging ruled a suicide; mother says it was a lynching,” cnn, december , , www.cnn.com/ / / / justice/north-carolina-lennon-lacy. alex mckechnie, “#blacklivesmatter panel discussion at drexel during black history month,” drexel now, february , , drexel. edu/now/archive/ /february/black-lives. graham harman, “demodernizing the humanities with latour,” new literary history , no. - ( ): - . sharon holland, “the practice of discipline: disciplinary practices,” american literary history , no. ( ): . amber jamilla musser, sensational flesh: race, power, and masochism (new york: nyu press, ), . zoe todd, “an indigenous feminist’s take on the ontological turn: ‘ontology’ is just another word for colonialism,” journal of historical sociology , no. ( ): . chelsea vowel, “all my queer relations: language, culture, and two-spirit identity,” indigenous writes: a guide to first nations, métis, and inuit issues in canada (winnipeg: portage and main press, ), . zakiyyah iman jackson, “animal: new directions in the theorization of race and posthumanism,” feminist studies , no. ( ): . kyla wazana tompkins, “on the limits and promise of new materialist philosophy,” lateral , no. ( ): csalateral.org/wp/issue/ - /forum-alt- humanities-new-materialist-philosophy-tompkins. jackson, “animal,” . holland, “practice,” . tompkins, “on the limits,” n.p. andré carrington is assistant professor of african american literature at drexel university. his first book, speculative blackness: the future of race in science fiction ( ) interrogates the cultural politics of race in the fantastic genres. his writing also appears in present tense, sounding out!, callaloo, african & black diaspora, and books including a companion to the harlem renaissance, race/gender/class/media . , and black gay genius: answering joseph beam’s call. throwing your voice: an interview with cathy park hong throwing your voice: an interview with cathy park hong jonathan p. eburne, cathy park hong asap/journal, volume , number , january , pp. - (article) published by johns hopkins university press doi: for additional information about this article [ access provided at apr : gmt from carnegie mellon university ] https://doi.org/ . /asa. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ https://doi.org/ . /asa. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ asap/journal, vol. . ( ): - © johns hopkins university press. jonathan p. eburne & cathy park hong throwing your voice: an interview with cathy park hong p oetry is thought. more than offering an object for aesthetic contemplation, poetry speaks; poetry thinks. it does so, as cathy park hong once put it, in more than one tongue, operating in the spaces between “mangled languages.” as she writes in “zoo,” a poem from her collection translating mo’um, la the word ma speaks ba without you cathy park hong is a poet dedicated to expanding and experimenting with the capacities of a living art. her writing, editing, and performances across media seek to open up the “interactive possibilities” of poetry for the sake of providing “alternative ways of living within the existing real,” as she puts it. “what are ways in which the poetic praxis can be a ritual for social experimentation? the poem as a cathy park hong. photo credit: mores mcwreath. asap/journal / public encounter is entrenched in habit. how many ways can we change this encounter?” hong’s work as a poet is thus deeply immersed in questions of method—attend- ing not only to how poetry looks, sounds, and creates meanings, but also to how encounters with poetry are themselves necessarily sites of experimentation and challenge. as she writes in a essay, “the encounter with poetry needs to change constantly via the internet, via activism and performance, so that poetry can continue to be a site of agitation, where the audience is not a recep- tacle of conditioned responses but is unsettled and provoked into participatory response.” such constant change is at once an activist demand with political significance, as well as an open invitation for the participatory imagination. “a honeycomb of lights. / the world pours in,” to cite a couplet from a poem in hong’s second volume of poetry, dance dance revolution ( ). cathy hong’s poetry is dedicated to multiplying such sites of openness and agitation. this includes undertaking creolized experiments in translation and language-cre- ation that explore “what language can endure while still producing meaning” as well as creating dystopian storyworlds of imperial expansion and corporate global fantasy. such a project extends, significantly, to hong’s investment in forging new channels of aesthetic engagement and political solidarity. a professor of creative writing at rutgers university and poetry editor at the new republic, hong is the author of three volumes of experimental poetry as well as numerous essays and collaborations that meditate on the soundscapes, and also the politics, of experimentalism. throughout her poetry sequences, she develops an ever-changing technopoetics of contraction and expansion that functions—that agitates—in and between languages, in and between poetic forms, and in and between landscapes and cityscapes of power. her debut volume, translating mo’um (hanging loose press, ), received a pushcart prize; her second collection, dance dance revolution (w. w. norton, ), was selected by adrienne rich for the barnard women poets prize. a serial poem in alternating hybrid languages, dance dance revolution is also a work of speculative fiction, which invents an all-too-recognizable future dystopia of planned cities and global tourism, along with a pair of character witnesses who chronicle these worlds in their distinctive poetic voices. hong literally invents a new language for one speaker, the desert guide, whose “sizable mouthpiece role” at once bears the linguistic residue of global migration and testifies to the eburne & hong / art of survival in the volume’s storyworld. in her most recent volume of poetry, engine empire ( ), hong presents a triptych of dystopian “boomtowns,” the murderous wild west of the american s, the accelerated urban-industrial growth of contemporary china, and the sad and quietly terrifying cognitive saturation of our experience by “smart” technology in the imminent silicon valley future. at once conceptual and analytical, at once narratively, formally, and semiotically experimental, hong’s poetry explores what it means to become an instrument, whether an instrument of music and art or an instrument of violence and empire. for all their linguistic experimentalism, her books are also dramas of artistic consequence and political consciousness alike. in addition to her work as a poet, editor, and professor, cathy park hong has increasingly confronted entrenched public habits toward art—and seeks to trans- figure them—in her work as an essayist. in her landmark essay, “delusions of whiteness in the avant-garde” for the lana turner journal, hong took aim at “the luxurious opinion that anyone can be ‘post-identity’ and can casually slip in and out of identities like a video game avatar, when there are those who are consistently harassed, surveilled, profiled, or deported for whom they are.” she was writing about the self-proclaimed canon of avant-garde poetry as upheld by the likes of kenneth goldsmith, vanessa place, and marjorie perloff—to name only the most public figures —but her words just as readily reflect on the racist unconscious on display in whitewashed hollywood films, art world “provoca- tions,” and the violent erasure of people of color in the u.s. police state. hong’s polemic in that essay is twofold: in spite of its “delusions of whiteness,” the avant-garde—like the art world, like the world—can never “escape the taint of subjectivity and history.” in spite of persisting tendencies for poets and scholars to forge canons of experimental art that both exploit and erase the lived phenomenon of race, the avant-garde is never raceless. the answer, however, is hardly just to refurbish the canon so that the art world can once again congrat- ulate itself on its more racially diverse roster of past experiments. the point is instead to create new futures, new sites of agitation. there is a new movement in poetry and art, she writes, with its own networks of distribution and com- mon commitment to participatory social action. it is a “movement galvanized by the activism of black lives matter, spearheaded by writers of color who are asap/journal / at home in social media activism and print magazines.” it is to this movement that hong’s work both contributes and, in recent essays and performances, seeks to conceptualize as well. “fuck the avant-garde,” she writes. “we must hew our own path.” on april , , i spoke with cathy hong while driving to the harrisburg, pa train station after her reading the previous evening at penn state university. during that reading, she performed a number of her poems before reading and discussing an essay she had recently completed on the stand-up comedy of richard pryor. on our way to the train station, we had a further opportunity to discuss her recent writing, the restlessness of the artist, the refusal to stand for racial erasure, and the aesthetics of the stutter. jpe/ in your recent essays, you confront problems of audience and medium that extend from the poetry world to the public, political sphere. in its attention to social groups, echo chambers, irony, the lack of irony, and the question of sincerity, your work as a poet and essayist alike is attuned to the ideology of medium: the spoken word, the sound of language, the look of language, the possibilities of poetic form, the nature of stories, the landscapes of power, and the politics of race. i read an interview where you were talking about, or perhaps joking about, creating a screenplay or film treatment of the “ballad of our jim.” i thus wish to ask you: what are some of the actual mediums you use to address some of these questions? more than just formal experiments, your work seems to be invested in medium-based experiments in particular. cph/ i started off wanting to be a visual artist, and i was inspired by the way artists are more mobile with their mediums. conceptual art is a post-studio practice where the artist starts with the idea and then uses whatever medium fits that process. i see writing that way. i have these questions and, in order to answer or resolve these questions, i think: does this idea fit the lyric form or the novel? because i am restless, the poetic form doesn’t always work for me. with dance dance revolution and engine empire, i’ve always been fascinated with the materiality of language and different constraint-based exercises to make the artifi- cial even more artificial as a way to point out its artifice. in other words, i spray the artifi- cial shell a neon pink so people are aware of its artifice, whether the artificial shell is the lyric form or the artificial shell is the english “ because i am restless, the poetic form doesn’t always work for me. ” eburne & hong / language, and then i undermine the medium to see if there is something else in there that we are trying to get at. my subject matter has always been racially based, but before, my poetry addressed race indirectly, or through a more histori- cal or speculative persona-based approach. lately, i’ve been thinking: what is my racial consciousness? how can i track what i am feeling and thinking in the present, and what medium is most suitable for that? i did not want it to be mediated through various poetic experiments and fictionalized characters: i wanted to write about it in a very direct way. i couldn’t do it through poetry, because i see the lyric medium as ultimately an elevated form, an artificial form. a lot of poets don’t approach it this way, but i approach it this way: when writing in the lyric form, you’re throwing your voice. it’s a dramatic mono- logue, and i didn’t want to do a dramatic monologue. i just wanted to talk. it was really hard for me. i had been so used to throwing my voice, i didn’t know how to just talk. poets approach poetry through song, or talk, or inscription. i couldn’t talk through a poetic medium. it ended up being this nonfiction hybrid. jpe/ one thing that seems abundantly clear, given the types of essays you have been writing recently and what they are about, is that talk is never direct, either—so that the person who is very good at talking “directly” is really a well-oiled machine. that is an interesting confrontation, how even talk is mediated so as to function as direct talk. this bears significantly on the nature of political expression and involvement. cph/ yes, how you even structure a sentence is a well-oiled machine, and i realize that. but i think i am sort of hanging up the notion, for now. i am still interested in tackling the mate- riality of language, but right now, i am trying to ignore all of that for now: even though i am taking it through this rhetorical address that is really artificial, to just trying to get a message across. jpe/ you’ve recently been writing about richard pryor, which seems to be an occasion to reflect on this very topic. that is, much of what comes to the fore in your discussion of pryor’s stand-up comedy is the how bald the anger and violence of his language was, and yet the way he performed his monologues made everyone laugh. as you explain, your first step “ lately, i’ve been thinking: what is my racial consciousness? how can i track what i am feeling and thinking in the present, and what medium is most suitable for that? ” asap/journal / long, whereas i haven’t with prose. i was inter- ested in that directness. when i saw pryor, that was when i was changing directions from the poetry i had written. jpe/ the difference between having anger and, say, using or deploying anger seems particularly significant here. when this anger has been gathering for a long time—and is shared collectively—the idea of what it means to conceptualize it as historical, as directed, as political, takes on particular urgency. to think about how that anger demands shedding one’s formal habits or reevaluating what happens artistically is, i think, a really important process and discourse. can you say more about this? cph/ but it’s also not just anger. one could say i have a very maximalist style, but my poems are also about the unspoken, like theresa hak kyung cha’s or paul célan’s work. there is a tradition of poetry that’s about the limitations of language and how there is something else there that is trying to express itself beyond what is on the page. the way the poem expresses the incommunicable is through the music. i am writing an essay on theresa cha’s dictee. theresa cha high- lights the limitations of the english language, how she cannot really capture her conflicted diasporic conscious through her immigrant stuttering. i have always been attracted to the aesthetics of the stutter, whereby inscripting a word down, this is only a fragment of this racialized conscious that cannot be spelled out—because there is no vocabulary for it was to sit down and transcribe his words. this had the effect of showing how pure his language was, in its anger. but it did not match up with what actually happened on stage, which had to do with his face, his overall performance: that is, the totality of his becoming a material signifier onstage. there are two forms of talk, which are really different. you seem to be interested in both—as well as the difference between them: the written materiality of the word in its directness, as well as all these other kinds of supplements that make up the act of speaking publicly. cph/ through his performance and his deliv- ery, he was so direct. he was just telling it like it is. but when i was transcribing pryor, and reading his script, it was like taking an orchestra and isolating the string section. if you just see the words on the page, you are getting one part of pryor, but there is still that distilled anger on the page. his whole perfor- mance makes it human—it’s not just talk; he turns comedy into song and cinema and trag- edy. in his performances (which i don’t talk about this in the essay), when he talks about the differences of fucking a white woman ver- sus fucking a black woman, which i think is the most taboo of all his subjects. i thought, “he cannot get away with that,” but i was still laughing when i was watching him. i was always writing around my anger, and i don’t know why but i just cannot directly confront it through the poetic form. i can’t get around the mechanisms of the poetic line. maybe it’s because i’ve studied poetry for too eburne & hong / because it’s always obfuscated by western forms and systems of meaning. after watching pryor, i felt limited by always speaking to the limitations of language. i want to try to spell out this racial conscious- ness through prose. i wanted to try to map it out, spell it out for other people, explain it to myself by being as clear as i can about all its contradictions and murky nuances. basically do everything that i refused to do through poetry—explain myself, make my problems clear to the reader (it’s almost like i don’t trust the reader). i always teach lyn hejinian’s the rejection of closure and how there is sort of this interactive relationship between the reader and the writer where reading is like a choose your own adventure. the reader comes to their own conclusion. but i’ve also become sick of how people ask the wrong questions about race literature. they read it the wrong way, claim to not understand it. and for now, i’m hanging up my poetry hat, and forsaking all of this “show don’t tell” business, and saying, hold up—i’m not going to show you, i am going to tell you what’s up. jpe/ i realize, by the way, that i have been trying to lead you toward extrapolating the aesthetics of the stutter into a shift in medium, as if your interest in moving away from poetry were part of that stutter. but this would mean thinking of such a shift as a poetic demand in its own right, consistent with poetry itself, rather than facing up to the insufficiencies of artistic language to do the kind of work you describe. and yet i think it is really wonderful and brilliant to be blowing that off in some ways and saying no, and not trusting the audience and not trusting openness. umberto eco did something similar when he rebutted his own notion of the “open work,” and this is also a key part of pryor’s work, too. he actually says the thing. cph/ he says what everyone is thinking and afraid to say. i’ve seen that a lot of times before—of course baldwin does it as well as audre lorde and adrienne rich. he just spells out what people are thinking, and if they were to say it, it would come out as a stutter. he says it in the baldest and bluntest way pos- sible. that takes balls. jpe/ could you speak about this baldness in terms of teaching and mentoring, too? i think that lorde is especially great in this regard, because in saying the thing that hasn’t been “ [f]or now, i’m hanging up my poetry hat, and forsaking all of this “show don’t tell” business, and saying, hold up—i’m not going to show you, i am going to tell you what’s up. ” asap/journal / spoken, but which people are thinking or not thinking about—specifically anger, anger about the marginalization of black women even within feminism—she thereby allows for the possibility of real solidarity. as for the liberal, democratic ideal of everyone coming up with their own interpretations: well, they don’t, or, if they do, they’re fractious, incommensurate, and often frightening. that fractiousness, those differences and so forth, are not themselves democracy or solidarity. cph/ yeah, they aren’t. i’ve been thinking this before. i want to talk about this essay i’ve been working on that is sort of tangentially related, thinking of fractiousness, brokenness. i am working on this essay about theresa cha. much of the scholarship around has to do with the aesthetics of silence and the stutter, as well as korean colonial history and the war, orchestrated by u.s. cold war tactics, that americans don’t know about. i was reading various secondary sources on her: essays and monographs on her. i just find it fascinating that no one talks about her murder or that she was raped. and no one investigated what happened. instead they skirt around this fact. at first, i thought, “oh, it’s because her death was so brutal, and these scholars don’t want to sensationalize her death and instead really want to foreground her work. otherwise, she is going to be mythologized as this martyr fig- ure.” it was a protective gesture as to why they did this. but then i found it disturbing that there was absolutely nothing about her death, and it was just a bunch of poststructural critique of her writing: one after another. i couldn’t help but feel, in a weird way, that all this academic writing about her was silencing her. many of these scholars, influenced by poststructural thought, wrote that theresa cha’s dictee was a reaction against the s and the ’s mul- ticulturalism where asian american activists demanded that we needed to speak up and find our voice, that kind of audre lorde out- spokenness. some of these scholars argued that theresa cha’s work is moving beyond that, and it’s about deconstructing voice and how having a voice is not enough. but then by outlining or highlighting how she’s doing that, they sort of end up sublimating her as a person, as a struggling artist, and addressing her only as this abstract subaltern subject. if we’re talking about asian americans, then we’re not at that point yet where we can move beyond voice. we are still invisible. if we use theresa cha as an example, she was raped and murdered by a security guard, and no one wrote about it at the time. if you compare her to the central park jogger, there was a ton of “ if we’re talking about asian americans, then we’re not at that point yet where we can move beyond voice. we are still invisible. ” eburne & hong / media surrounding it with her, but, for cha, there was not even a newspaper article. there have been no articles about her death since. i find that interesting. that is a complete depar- ture from what you were talking about. jpe/ not in the least. this is something you talk about in the “delusions of whiteness in the avant-garde” essay: that the subjectivity of the body, that race cannot be erased, must not be erased, no matter how hard people might try. and yet the example of theresa cha is indeed harrowing: in the u.s., dictee has become part of the literary canon (at least at the university level), and yet the prominence of that work seems to have been utterly divorced from cha’s career as an experimental artist and filmmaker, not to mention disembodied from the violence of her death. how do you address this—and how do you think this disavowal, this erasure, can best be redressed? cph/ it’s interesting when you compare cha to sylvia plath where there’s been a cottage industry of biographies surrounding her. because cha is nested within the avant-garde, and the kind of postmodern racial discourse that was popular in the s and early s, critics have made a concerted effort to sepa- rate biography from text, as if writing about her biography would taint everything she was doing, especially since dictee itself is a subver- sion of biographical conventions. as far as her work as an experimental artist and filmmaker, much of it has to do with access. it’s only been recently that the university of california press put out a collected works of cha’s, exilée/ temps morts, that’s everything but dictee. exilée/temp morts is an important addition to cha’s scholarship and i really hope more crit- ics concentrate on that. jpe/ restoring the connection between biography and experimentalism, and between the body and experimentalism, is something you’ve been thinking about a lot. this relates directly to your discussion of richard pryor. as you argue in your essay on his stand-up work, pryor’s ability to tell the truth so baldly is predicated on the way he uses his face, his bodily performance, and the way he becomes his part. in a way, your attention to the critical treatment or non-treatment of theresa cha is a more mortally specific version of this truth. we have to think about the person. whereas there is a way in which the aesthetics of the stutter, however much poststructuralism might present it as politically recuperable—opening up gaps in language, gaps in meaning—still risks this kind of erasure. i’m really struck by how strong a shift this all represents in your work, in terms of the ways in which you confront these questions. i don’t plan to ask you if this is a permanent one or if it’s site specific, and it’s not my place to ask. the fact that you’ve changed mediums to think about this is really something. cph/ i don’t think it is permanent. we’ll see; this is just where i am right now. it’s like i am taking a break and then i am going to go back to writing poetry (although, i have a lot of doubts about poetry right now). i guess it’s asap/journal / jpe/ not to analyze crudely, but i think those are the kinds of books and works, like ta-nehisi coates’s between the world and me, like rebecca solnit’s hope in the dark, that you see people carrying around for precisely the reason you suggest—in the way that people still carry around audre lorde’s sister outsider. there’s a way in which these books, even in their scale, offer something for people to keep close to their hearts as comfort, but also as a provocation, a kind of armature or weapon, even. cph/ definitely. i don’t know if i want to write a rebecca solnit or a ta-nehisi coates, even though i love ta-nehisi coates’s book. i guess it’s just more interest in communicating while questioning. before i was always questioning the medium of communication, and i am still doing that. but i also kind of want to com- municate in as clear a way as possible why the narrative modes or mediums we’ve been using so far, that follow the mythos of the american individual, atomize radical racial thought rather than galvanize it into a movement. jpe/ can you say a few words about how you’ve been pursuing this kind of directness of late? a strong shift, and part of it—i said this last night—is being a mother and rethinking what i should do as a writer. it might change again. jpe/ and perhaps also thinking about what it means to mentor, to teach, to model. that’s not insignificant. cph/ no, it’s not insignificant. i mean, there is a lot more i can say about that. i don’t want to say my concerns have become more practical, just more pressing to what’s happening now. i was doing a reading in western michigan and it was right after trump’s election. there was this one young korean american woman who was a college student, and she came up to me and asked, “can i hug you?” and i said sure. she started crying, and saying, “i feel really isolated out here. i feel really alone.” i think right now i just have a much more direct approach to writing, where i want to speak to people like her. i think there is so little writ- ing that communicates to people like her in the way that i felt before i discovered baldwin, cha, célan, and all those writers. right now, that’s all i want to do. you have to comfort the afflicted and afflict the comfortable. i’d like to afflict the comfortable but also try to comfort the afflicted. “ … there is so little writing that communicates to people like her in the way that i felt before i discovered baldwin, cha, célan, and all those writers. right now, that’s all i want to do. ” eburne & hong / cph/ i’m continuing to work on this col- lection of essays. its seeds are the “delusions of whiteness” essay, but it’s more expansive where i integrate autobiography, politics, and literary criticism to explore how racial expe- rience has been standardized in poetry and fiction. it’s been hard to write about without making it front and center, but i also explore this current administration, and how writers of color can re-evaluate american literature and develop an oppositional poetics and aes- thetic frame-of-thought as a reaction. i see the book as a sort of portrait of an artist but also as a cri de coeur. the subjects are a random assort- ment—right now, for instance, i’m writing about the history of swimming pools as a way to explore questions of diversity—but hope- fully it will all come together! notes see robyn creswell, “cathy park hong on engine empire,” the paris review, august , , https://www.theparisreview.org/blog/ / / / cathy-park-hong-on-engine-empire/. cathy park hong, “zoo,” translating mo’um (brooklyn, ny: hanging loose press, ), . cathy park hong, “a proposition by cathy park hong: stand up @ the new museum,” may , , : : , youtube, https://youtu.be/ kvf cgei nu. cathy park hong, “delusions of whiteness in the avant-garde,” lana turner: a journal of poetry and opinion ( ), http://www.lanaturnerjournal. com/ /delusions-of-whiteness-in-the-avant-garde cathy park hong, “almanac,” dance dance revolution (new york: w. w. norton & co., ), . a. k. afferez, “fluency, fractures, and fabrication in cathy park hong,” the critical flame: a journal of literature & culture, january , , http://cr iticalflame.org/fluency-f ractures-and- fabrication-in-cathy-park-hong/. see also joshua kryah, “an interview with poet cathy park hong,” poets & writers, july , , https://www.pw.org/ content/interview_poet_cathy_park_hong. hong, “delusions of whiteness.” see also hong, “there’s a new movement in american poetry and it’s not kenneth goldsmith,” new republic (october , ), https://newrepublic. com/article/ /new-movement-amer ican- poetry-not-kenneth-goldsmith. for an early overview of this discourse, see the special forum in the boston review on “race and the poetic avant- garde” (march , ), http://bostonreview.net/ blog/boston-review-race-and-poetic-avant-garde. see also dorothy j. wang, thinking its presence: form, race, and subjectivity in contemporary asian american poetry (stanford, ca: stanford university press, ); and timothy yu, race and the avant- garde: experimental and asian american poetry since (stanford, ca : stanford university press, ). hong, “delusions of whiteness.” hong, “there’s a new movement.” hong, “delusions of whiteness.” robyn creswell, “cathy park hong on engine empire.” see also cathy park hong with andy fitch, the conversant, june , , http:// theconversant.org/?p= . see sue j. kim, on anger: race, cognition, narrative (austin: university of texas press, ), esp. - . see also the asap/journal editors’ forum on “angry women at ,” asap/journal , no. (may ): - . asap/journal / jonathan p. eburne is associate professor of comparative literature, english, and french and francophone studies at penn state university, and editor-in-chief and founding coeditor of asap/journal. cathy park hong’s latest poetry collection, engine empire, was published in by w.w. norton. her other collections include dance dance revolution, chosen by adrienne rich for the barnard women poets prize, and translating mo’um. hong is the recipient of a guggenheim fellowship, a national endowment for the arts fellowship and the new york foundation for the arts fellowship. she is the poetry editor of the new republic and is full professor at rutgers university. [pdf] black lives and policing: the larger context of ghettoization | semantic scholar skip to search formskip to main content> semantic scholar's logo search sign increate free account you are currently offline. some features of the site may not work correctly. 	doi: . / . . corpus id: black lives and policing: the larger context of ghettoization @article{logan blackla, title={black lives and policing: the larger context of ghettoization}, author={j. logan and deirdre a. oakley}, journal={journal of urban affairs}, year={ }, volume={ }, pages={ - } } 	j. logan, deirdre a. oakley 	published 	sociology, medicine 	journal of urban affairs abstract president lyndon johnson’s appointment of the national advisory commission on civil disorder (kerner commission) followed a series of inner-city riots in the s. the commission’s report, issued months before martin luther king, jr.’s, assassination, famously concluded that the united states was moving toward separate societies, one black and one white. in recent years, another version of racialized violence has garnered public attention: systemic police brutality and repeated… expand view on taylor & francis europepmc.org save to library create alert cite launch research feed share this paper citationsbackground citations view all topics from this paper 	societies 	united states public health service 	domestic violence citations citation type citation type 	all types 	cites results 	cites methods 	cites background has pdf publication type author more filters more filters filters sort by relevance sort by most influenced papers sort by citation count sort by recency fear and loathing (of others): race, class and contestation of space in washington, dc 	b. t. summers, k. howell 	sociology 	 	 save alert research feed waiting for wakanda: activists challenge black exclusion from the construction industry 	k. epstein 	political science 	 	view excerpts, cites background save alert research feed snatching defeat from the jaws of 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mazurek, shondra l clay, terence hodges 	psychology, medicine 	health & social care in the community 	 	 	 save alert research feed living in a disadvantaged neighborhood affects neural processing of facial trustworthiness 	s. a. chang, a. baskin-sommers 	psychology, medicine 	frontiers in psychology 	 	 	pdf 	view excerpt, cites background save alert research feed the religion of policing: race, riots, and the killing of alton sterling 	landon jay douglas 	sociology 	 save alert research feed ... ... references showing - of references sort byrelevance most influenced papers recency locking up our own: crime and punishment in black america 	james l. forman 	political science 	 	 save alert research feed locking up our own: crime and punishment in black america 	devon w. carbado, ls richardson 	sociology 	 	 	pdf save alert research feed lethal policing: making sense of american exceptionalism 	paul j. hirschfield 	sociology 	 	 save alert research feed metropolitan secession and the space of color-blind racism in atlanta 	m. connor 	sociology 	 	 	view excerpt, references background save alert research feed blue-on-black violence: a provisional model of some of the causes 	devon w. carbado 	political science 	 	 	view excerpt, references background save alert research feed community accountability, minority threat, and police brutality: an examination of civil rights criminal complaints 	b. smith, m. holmes 	political science 	 	 	highly influential 	view excerpts, references background save alert research feed black lives matter: a commentary on racism and public health. 	jennifer jee-lyn garcía, m. sharif 	medicine 	american journal of public health 	 	 	pdf 	view excerpt, references background save alert research feed black metropolis: a study of negro life in a northern city 	st. clair drake, h. cayton 	sociology 	 	 save alert research feed stuck in place: urban neighborhoods and the end of progress toward racial equality 	e. rosenbaum 	sociology 	 	 	view excerpt, references background save alert research feed the iconic ghetto 	e. anderson 	sociology 	 	 	highly influential 	view excerpts, references background save alert research feed ... ... related papers 	abstract 	topics 	 citations 	 references 	related papers stay connected with semantic scholar sign up about semantic scholar semantic scholar is a free, ai-powered research tool for scientific literature, based at the allen institute for ai. learn more → resources datasetssupp.aiapiopen corpus organization about usresearchpublishing partnersdata partners   faqcontact proudly built by ai with the help of our collaborators terms of service•privacy policy the allen institute for ai by clicking accept or continuing to use the site, you agree to the terms outlined in our privacy policy, terms of service, and dataset license accept & continue black lives matter in ecology and evolution editorial black lives matter in ecology and evolution prompted by the black lives matter and shutdown stem movements, nature ecology & evolution acknowledges the systemic racism in scientific research, and the part we play in this. here we outline our commitment to fight this racism. this editorial was first published as a draft on june , in order to solicit feedback from the community. that draft was the result of our thinking over the last few troubling weeks but specifically the result of having spent wednesday th june reading and reflecting as part of #shutdownstem. we did not expect our colleagues in the wider research community, particularly our black colleagues, to do the work of telling us what to say. it is important that we as privileged white editors shout our support for #blacklivesmatter, and it is even more important that we follow our words with actions. however, as editors of this journal we have a privileged platform from which to speak, and we wanted to reflect the concerns and priorities of the diverse members of the community. in particular, we wanted to listen with humility. that is why we took the unusual step of publishing a draft for others to comment on if they so wished. this final published version reflects the feedback we received, although we could not accommodate all comments, especially those that contradicted each other, and the final version is ultimately the word of the editors. the original draft remains on our community site, along with the feedback that was posted publically (although much of it was sent privately). we sincerely thank everyone who took the time to comment. we are a team of six full-time professional editors (one on parental leave who was not involved in writing this), all of whom are white. we are the only editors to have worked on this journal in its relatively short life. we believe that the whole scientific and publishing worlds need to acknowledge and take drastic actions to correct the systemic racism that discriminates against black researchers. it is tragic that we are saying these things now, after the horrific deaths of george floyd, breonna taylor, ahmaud arbery and countless others both in the united states and the rest of the world (for example stephen lawrence in the united kingdom and joão pedro matos pinto in brazil). we should have been loudly challenging racism in all aspects of our lives, with words and deeds, for decades. it is not as if we were not well aware of the suffering of our black neighbours, and the way in which the entire structure of society is stacked against them. our failure up to this point is shaming. it should also be clearly recognized that this is not just an american problem. almost all countries, and particularly those european countries with a long history of colonial exploitation, are riddled with structural racism. the recent and belated removal of a few racist statues in the united kingdom and belgium is just one headline-grabbing indication of this. these huge failings in society are mirrored in science, and in some aspects are even more acute. we, the ecology and evolution community, now need to act, as individual members of society, as researchers and teachers; and nature ecology & evolution needs to act as a journal. as individuals, those of us who do not experience racism directly need to be active allies. we should offer practical and financial help, but we should not expect or hog the limelight. we should be loud when it helps to champion those with lived experience, but defer to their voices. there is useful guidance in places such as here (us-focused) and here (uk-focused). we should be constantly asking questions about diversity and inclusion in every project, event or day-to-day interaction we are involved with, and should not leave doing so as another burden for our black friends and colleagues (see here for an example of this burden in academia). we should be actively questioning our own motives and biases in all our decision-making. we should write to political representatives, institutions and corporations to challenge them to be actively anti-racist. as scientists, we have choices about who we hire, who we collaborate with, who we cite and what we teach. admitting students and recruiting junior researchers and faculty is perhaps where the biggest failing of academic institutions occurs. it is not acceptable to fall back on the assertion that race does not exist genetically, that we are not biased, or that we are ‘colour-blind’. race exists as a very real social construct. we need to reach out beyond those who naturally apply for positions as the end result of systemically racist social and educational structures that consistently disadvantage minorities. when we collaborate and when we cite, we should actively look for researchers outside the prestigious white-dominated institutions that are so often our first port of call. and we should ensure that collaboration leads to authorship on publications rather than mere acknowledgement. those researchers who are involved in funding decisions need to be particularly strong champions of equitable distribution that attempts to combat the burden that non-white researchers will have shouldered in order to get to the equivalent career stage as white researchers. when we teach ecology and evolution, we do not teach in a historical vacuum. we constantly reference the individuals who developed particular concepts and we should make sure we highlight the contributions of black scientists (for example, here, here and here). we also need to confront the racist history of most fields of science and undertake a programme of decolonization (see examples from anthropology, genetics, ecology and conservation). and we need to pay specific attention to the mentoring needs of students and early-career researchers from underrepresented groups, and take steps to counter any financial burdens they may be experiencing. finally, researchers need to acknowledge that as well as structural biases, there are repeated incidences of active racism in science, and we need to call out the individuals involved and take action against them. we need to ensure that ecology and evolution research is a career in which black scientists feel safe and welcome. as a journal, we pledge to take action. this is not the place for special pleadings on what we have already done, so we note it only to illustrate our failings. we have taken action to increase the diversity of our authors and reviewers, but this has focused predominantly on gender (and that only in a binary way), and secondarily on geography. we have not taken specific action on race, mistakenly thinking this would come about as an intersectional by-product. white editors must confront the fact that our own biases, as well as the inadvertent ways we have contributed to systemic racism and discrimination, have most likely made success for black authors more difficult. nature ecology & evolution | vol | july | – | www.nature.com/natecolevol http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf https://natureecoevocommunity.nature.com/users/ -patrick-goymer/posts/black-lives-matter-in-ecology-and-evolution https://www.shutdownstem.com/ https://medium.com/equality-includes-you/what-white-people-can-do-for-racial-justice-f d b e https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/ /jun/ /be-the-change- -positive-ways-to-fight-for-a-fairer-world https://www.nature.com/articles/s - - - https://evolution-outreach.biomedcentral.com/articles/ . /s - - - https://www.molecularecologist.com/ / /the-brief-history-of-african-americans-in-evolutionary-biology-and-why-that-is-the-case/ https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/abs/pii/s https://savageminds.org/ / / /decolonizing-anthropology/ http://genestogenomes.org/understanding-our-eugenic-past-to-take-steps-towards-scientific-accountability/ https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/ . /btp. https://www.geog.ubc.ca/decolonizing-conservation-a-reading-list/ http://www.nature.com/natecolevol editorial we need to take increased steps to ensure submissions from non-white authors are treated fairly. we do not currently have the set-up to document race or ethnicity of authors formally in our submission system, and this is something we will advocate for within the wider structure of nature research, as it will allow us to hold ourselves to account in a more quantitative way. as well as monitoring diversity across our published content and rejected submissions, such data could help us to start to explore whether certain fields that are particularly white-dominated are overrepresented in our pages. in the meantime, as an imperfect solution, we now ask authors, if they wish, to self-identify in their cover letters. we undertake to add an extra layer of editorial oversight to such submissions and will endeavour to provide additional guidance to those that are rejected without peer review, as we are aware that not all authors have access to equivalent networks of peer advice. it should be noted that the information in cover letters does not get sent to peer reviewers, and authors can also opt for double-blind peer review. the editors commit to undertake implicit bias training once a year, and we will encourage reviewers to do the same. we will increase our effort to represent black voices in our commissioned content and publish more content that discusses diversity. we will use our q&a section exclusively to showcase underrepresented groups at all career stages, and would welcome interested researchers contacting us to take part. we will set up a channel on our community site to discuss diversity and inclusion, and particularly encourage lab groups to discuss topics related to race and report their findings on that channel. we will direct our outreach activities towards institutes that are not white-dominated, and actively look for opportunities to talk to minority groups and individuals about publishing in nature journals and editorial careers. we will not take part in all-white (or all-male) panel discussions, and we will only attend meetings that have a robust code of conduct. we will add further checks to our editorial processes for appropriate language relating to race in our published content, drawing on the wider expertise within springer nature and beyond. as a small professional editorial team, with very limited turnover (and no external editorial board), there are limits to what we can achieve alone. therefore, we will use our influence to push for changes within springer nature and the wider publishing industry, such as formal anti-racist policies to empower those who speak out, proactive hiring efforts that are not predicated on the types of experience that white people are more likely to have had access to, and the prioritization of underrepresented groups when allocating funding and sponsorship. finally, we undertake to continue to fight racism and discriminatory structures as an ongoing process, and we will report on our progress in future editorials. ❐ published online: june https://doi.org/ . /s - - - nature ecology & evolution | vol | july | – | www.nature.com/natecolevol https://doi.org/ . /s - - - http://www.nature.com/natecolevol 	black lives matter in ecology and evolution
 review began / / review ended / / published / / © copyright limbachia et al. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license cc-by . ., which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. organizing a mass gathering amidst a rising covid- public health crisis: lessons learned from a chinese public health forum in vancouver, bc jayneel limbachia , hollis owens , maryam matean , sophia s. khan , helen novak-lauscher , kendall ho . digital emergency medicine, university of british columbia, vancouver, can . department of emergency medicine, university of british columbia, vancouver, can corresponding author: jayneel limbachia, jayneel @gmail.com abstract introduction the coronavirus disease (covid- ) evolved from a rising public health concern to a pandemic over mere weeks. before march , , the public health agency of canada had not advised against any mass gatherings. herein, we highlight practical precautions taken by event organizers to adapt to the rising public health threat from covid- and maintain public safety when conducting a health forum for the chinese community of vancouver, british columbia on february , . materials and methods in the pre-forum phase, we advertised the availability of virtual conferencing for remote participation in the forum and also had an official communication from the ministry of health available regarding covid- on our website. at the forum, we ensured that attendees sanitized their hands at registration and had access to sanitizers throughout the forum. additionally, we provided translated health literature on covid- to participants and had our health professional speakers address covid- -related questions. results this year, older chinese adults attended the forum in-person, while participated remotely. the total number of participants compares well to previous iterations of the forum, with twice the amount of participants on average attending online than before. of the participants who attended the forum, % suggested that the forum would be effective in improving their overall health and % cited the forum’s utility in directing them to access community resources. none of the attendees had covid- or are suspected to have contracted it at the forum. conclusion conducting a mass gathering during a crisis required closely following guidance from local public health authorities, constant and clear communication with attendees, and employing practical risk mitigation strategies. categories: preventive medicine, public health, epidemiology/public health keywords: mass gatherings, public health crisis, covid- , pandemic, risk-mitigation, health promotion, chronic disease management, lessons learned, virtual conference, culturally specific introduction the novel coronavirus disease (covid- ) has transformed the way we interact with others and has posed several challenges to our healthcare systems, including healthcare delivery. the world health organization (who) has identified several strategies and public health practices to curb the spread of covid- and its impact on the global population, including maintaining a -metre distance and wearing masks in public [ ]. in addition, the who has emphasized the need to avoid crowded spaces where close contact with others is inevitable, such as during a mass gathering [ ]. a mass gathering is defined by the who as any public event which includes a conglomeration of people who have the potential to spread the infection and place a burden on the local health authorities’ ability to respond to that threat. historically, mass gatherings have coincided with other disease-causing pathogens, such as the pandemic (pdm) influenza a (h n ) or the middle east respiratory syndrome-related coronavirus (mers-cov) and the middle east respiratory syndrome (mers) outbreak [ ]. however, the exact role of such mass gatherings in open access original article doi: . /cureus. how to cite this article limbachia j, owens h, matean m, et al. (december , ) organizing a mass gathering amidst a rising covid- public health crisis: lessons learned from a chinese public health forum in vancouver, bc. cureus ( ): e . doi . /cureus. https://www.cureus.com/users/ -jayneel-limbachia https://www.cureus.com/users/ -hollis-owens https://www.cureus.com/users/ -maryam-matean https://www.cureus.com/users/ -sophia-s-khan https://www.cureus.com/users/ -helen-novak-lauscher https://www.cureus.com/users/ -kendall-ho disease transmission and spread has not been fully documented [ - ]. in addition, the implementation of appropriate public health measures at mass gatherings, based on the world health assembly’s message on preventive approaches to curbing infectious disease spread globally, has reduced the scale of the issue over the last few years [ ]. in the context of covid- , the risk from mass gatherings remains high [ - ]. several mass gatherings across the world have been linked to an increase in covid- cases globally or locally, including religious and professional gatherings like the vancouver dental conference [ - ]. however, few mass gatherings have been documented to have coincided with significant covid- outbreaks. even the one prominent hypothesized example of a mass gathering leading to a massive outbreak (i.e., the carnival in brazil) was not conclusive in determining whether the first case in the country had contact with people attending the mass gathering or if there were other carriers present in the country at the time [ , ]. a more recent example of a mass gathering, in the form of the black lives matter protests across the united states (us), has also not been conclusively identified as a super-spreader event, with other factors, such as infrastructure and population dynamics, contributing to a small increase in case counts [ ]. while part of the reason for such a low number of mass gatherings leading to massive covid- outbreaks may be attributable to a widespread preemptive cancellation of large-scale public events that ensued as soon as the pandemic was officially declared, there may be other factors that warrant further investigation [ ]. interestingly, in the case of covid- , the rapidly evolving situation and uncertainty have led governments and health authorities to largely focus on avoidance rather than conducting an independent assessment of the risks involved when it comes to mass gatherings [ ]. while it is important to promptly adopt the least risk-averse options by preemptively canceling mass gatherings before research-informed interventions are considered [ ], a careful risk evaluation and employing appropriate public health practices may reduce the risk of transmission, as seen with the success of the hajj pilgrimage [ , ]. thus, despite the lack of clarity on the role of mass gatherings in the spread of covid- , it is reasonable to consider novel risk mitigation strategies that can be effectively employed in the wake of a public health crisis to reduce the impact of canceled mass gatherings on its beneficiaries. the intercultural online health network (icon) program, funded by the bc ministry of health’s (bc moh) patients as partners initiative, is a community engagement initiative that brings together healthcare practitioners, community members, patient advocacy groups, and media partners to disseminate health education surrounding chronic diseases among multicultural populations [ ]. the program, which primarily caters to chinese and punjabi-speaking communities across bc, has hosted over public health workshops and forums since its inception in . icon’s annual flagship health forum(s) for the chinese and south asian communities are notably popular events. since the last two iterations of the forums, icon has been bringing together a group of healthcare professionals, including physicians, nurses, dietitians, pharmacists, occupational therapists, and physiotherapists, who deliver culturally specific health education to patients and caregivers in their native language through panel discussions, presentations, and health screenings. these forums have attracted to participants on average and focus on aspects of chronic disease prevention and management at home under the theme of “healthy @ home.” this year, the public health landscape preceding icon’s chinese health forum, which was scheduled to take place on february , , was changing by the day. covid- grew from a rising public health concern into a pandemic over mere weeks. the who declared covid- as an official pandemic on march , . however, before march , , neither the who nor the public health agency of canada (phac) had published any guidelines that advised against mass gatherings [ ]. in fact, the british columbia (bc) provincial health officer only restricted mass gatherings of more than people on march , , and subsequently, of more than people later on march , , as an evolving response to the growing concern over covid- . contemporaneously, public events, such as the international hongkong and shanghai banking corporation (hsbc) rugby sevens tournament, which attracted thousands of attendees, did take place on march - at bc place, while the vancouver canucks games were canceled from march , onward. most movie theatres also remained open and fully functional throughout canada up until march . prior to our event on february , , there were only six cases of covid- in bc, with only one of them not associated with recent travel to china. the risk to the public was judged to be low in bc at that time. the advice from bc’s provincial health authorities and the british columbia centre for disease control (bccdc) around that time were to self-monitor symptoms, such as fever, cough, and difficulty breathing if the person had traveled to china [ ]. people were simply being asked to wash their hands frequently, put on a mask, and report to a healthcare provider if they were symptomatic. over the years, icon forums have highlighted the need for culturally specific health education and assistance in navigating the healthcare system among the multicultural populations of bc [ ]. in addition to the knowledge delivered, forum participants have repeatedly appreciated the dissemination of take-home resources at the forum, which highlights both culturally relevant and language-appropriate tips on how to self-manage chronic diseases at home. furthermore, the forums serve to bridge the gap that many multicultural patients and their caregivers face when accessing healthcare services by bringing all the allied healthcare providers and their beneficiaries under one roof [ ]. prior to the icon chinese health forum, several participants who had pre-registered for the forum contacted us and emphasized their reliance on such culturally specific health education, all the while citing their concern for safety from covid- . as healthcare practitioners and providers interested in improving the health of vulnerable populations, we limbachia et al. cureus ( ): e . doi . /cureus. of acknowledged the need for this forum but also understood the gravity of organizing a mass gathering during such an unprecedented public health crisis. at the time, a completely virtual forum delivery option would have been difficult for our target audience of older chinese adults, given their limited access to technology. thus, employing a combination of in-person and online options with appropriate risk assessment based on local guidance in organizing our forum was well warranted. in this paper, we highlight the precautionary steps and risk mitigation strategies employed by our team in enabling the smooth implementation of the icon chinese health forum on february , in vancouver, bc and upholding public interest in receiving culturally specific health education to improve their health. materials and methods setting in february , the phac had not yet developed an official risk assessment tool with information on when to conduct or cancel mass gatherings to reduce the spread of covid- (issued on march , ) [ ]. at the time, official guidelines on screening or testing were also not available from any local health authorities or the bccdc. being closely associated with the bc moh and partnered with the vancouver coastal health authority (vcha), we were well-positioned to carry out the event based on our local risk assessment and guidance from the vcha. the february , icon chinese health forum was scheduled to take place at the chinese cultural center in downtown vancouver without any cost to the public. given the information at the time, we identified the risk involved based on the homogeneity of the local population attending, the little chance of intermingling throughout the event, and an indoor setting that could accommodate approximately people. our team assessed the need for an approach that would keep the attendees safe and informed but also encourage those who had traveled to china around the time to not attend the forum in-person. strategy we established a three-pronged approach for risk mitigation and prevention of spread prior to and at the forum. first, in the pre-forum phase, approximately two weeks leading up to the event, we made a traditional chinese translated official communication on covid- , developed in partnership with the bc moh, available on our program website (figures - ). this communication brief was strategically placed on our website, such that prospective participants would encounter this information prior to completing their registration for the forum. the message was designed to raise awareness about reducing the spread of covid- , highlighting information on the current risk to the public from covid- , precautions to employ at home, and reminded people to self-monitor if they had recently traveled to china. simultaneously, we assessed the need to promote our live webcast option more, which has been traditionally offered as an alternative to older adults who cannot attend the forum in-person due to mobility issues. the live virtual conference webcast was set up in three languages, including english, cantonese, and mandarin, with live interpretation. our purpose in providing the bc moh communication brief and leveraging the use of our language-specific live virtual conference option more was to help potential attendees understand the seriousness of the public health crisis and opt for remote attendance while providing older chinese adults with the opportunity to benefit from the forum. through these measures, we particularly emphasized the need for people who had recently traveled to the hubei province of china (based on the official messaging of that time) to avoid attending in-person and reduce the risk of disease spread at the forum. limbachia et al. cureus ( ): e . doi . /cureus. of figure : the traditional chinese version of the official communication on covid- developed in partnership with the british columbia ministry of health for prospective forum attendees hosted on the intercultural online health network's website derived from the intercultural online health network's website in february . available for public use. covid- : coronavirus disease limbachia et al. cureus ( ): e . doi . /cureus. of https://assets.cureus.com/uploads/figure/file/ /lightbox_ c eba f bc - -fig- .png https://assets.cureus.com/uploads/figure/file/ /lightbox_ f e eba ba e ee af -screen-shot- - - -at- . . -pm.png figure : official communication on covid- developed in partnership with the british columbia ministry of health for prospective forum attendees hosted on the intercultural online health network's website derived from the intercultural online health network's website in february . available for public use. covid- : coronavirus disease at the forum, we provided traditional chinese translated health literature produced by the bc moh to all our participants, as well as an english version, as part of their registration package (figures - ). this document included extensive information on the virus itself, how to prevent spread, and guidelines on self-isolation based on travel history. our purpose behind providing this document was to ensure participants were well- informed on the epidemic through official messaging. in addition, we had a dedicated time set for attendees to ask our health professional speakers their covid- -related questions during the question-and-answer session. we acknowledged the anxiety and uncertainty that our participants faced regarding an emerging public health crisis that was still developing, yet prevalent, among their community at the time. thus, we had notified our health professional speakers to anticipate such questions prior to the forum and also had an official public health expert from vcha specifically address the audience on covid- . figure : excerpt from the traditional chinese-translated version of the limbachia et al. cureus ( ): e . doi . /cureus. of https://assets.cureus.com/uploads/figure/file/ /lightbox_c c a d eb a b af b b e- -fig- .png figure : excerpt from the traditional chinese-translated version of the health literature developed by the british columbia ministry of health highlighting information on covid- provided as part of the participant welcome package at the intercultural online health network's chinese forum derived from the british columbia ministry of health's website in february . available for public use. covid- : coronavirus disease figure : excerpt from the health literature developed by the british columbia ministry of health highlighting information on covid- provided as part of the participant welcome package at the intercultural online health network's chinese forum derived from the british columbia ministry of health's website in february . available for public use. covid- : coronavirus disease limbachia et al. cureus ( ): e . doi . /cureus. of https://assets.cureus.com/uploads/figure/file/ /lightbox_ f b eb e dc c-fig covid.png finally, we ensured that every participant sanitized their hands at the registration desk prior to entering the forum hall and had access to an adequate number of hand sanitizers throughout the forum hall. in addition, we ensured that every attendee received their own separate snack package at the registration desk to minimize person-to-person contact during the forum. results there were older chinese adults who attended the icon chinese health forum in vancouver, bc on february , (table ). from the total number of participants, attended the forum in-person at the chinese cultural centre, while attended remotely through the live virtual conference option. this was a two-fold increase in online attendance compared to previous years, on average ( in and in ). attendees number % number % number % in-person . . . online . . . total table : number of participants attending icon chinese health forums conducted under the theme of "healthy @ home" over the years of the participants that completed the post-forum survey, % self-reported that attending the forum would help them improve their overall health and quality of life to some degree. finally, % of the participants reported that they learned about community resources and services that they can access to manage their chronic conditions as a result of attending the forum. to our knowledge, none of the participants had visible signs or symptoms of covid- . although we did not follow-up with forum attendees regarding transmission after the event, we have not been contacted by the vcha or the bccdc regarding concerns of community spread at our forum. thus, none of the participants are suspected to have contracted covid- as a result of attending the forum. discussion using the february , icon chinese health forum as an example, we call attention to practical and local official guidelines-based risk mitigation tools that can be implemented to efficiently conduct a mass gathering during a crisis, without sacrificing the public benefit from the event. our icon chinese health forum attracted a similar amount of people compared to previous years (ever since the onset of the “healthy @ home” theme) with twice as many participants opting to participate via the online option than previously. the modest attendance (overall and in-person) of older chinese adults at the forum may be attributable to our effective risk mitigation strategies. first, our use of a culturally specific communication strategy prior to and during the forum may have served to reinforce their confidence in our organization. in fact, according to the who, proactive communication in times of crisis is one of the most important ways of mitigating conflict and building trust [ ]. the official communication from bc moh we made available on our website prior to the forum and the health literature from the bc moh given out at the forum were both translated into traditional chinese. seeing their cultural beliefs represented, our participants may have been more likely to feel safe while attending and act on that information [ ]. in fact, given the now well-documented disproportionate amount of burden shared by ethnic minorities with regards to covid- , it becomes even more important to emphasize the need for culturally tailored programming when passing on health messages or to promote safe practices when conducting mass gatherings in the future [ - ]. second, the increase in the number of people attending the icon chinese health forum online may suggest that our promotion of the language-supported live virtual conference option encouraged more people to attend and potentially avoid any non-essential contact with others. most importantly, it may have provided a reasonable alternative for those who had traveled to china at the time to stay at home without sacrificing the benefit of receiving culturally-specific health education. in fact, since the outset of the pandemic, several groups have highlighted the advantages of virtual approaches for event organization. perhaps the provision of an online virtual conference is something many mass gathering organizers can consider, given its cost-effectiveness, feasibility, and inclusivity, wherever appropriate [ - ]. options to participate online could even be beneficial in maintaining public safety while organizing events as the world limbachia et al. cureus ( ): e . doi . /cureus. of economy opens up during the next phase of the pandemic [ ]. third, our dedicated question and answer session with the healthcare experts at the forum may have allowed our participants to feel engaged - a critical step in alleviating confusion and misunderstanding during a crisis. several recent studies, including who’s official guidelines on risk communication and community readiness to covid- , have emphasized the importance of appropriate strategies to communicate risk when organizing an event during a crisis [ , - ]. the who document highlights the importance of a transparent dialogue between healthcare experts and members of the public to clearly communicate the perception of risk involved, which may often differ between the two parties [ ]. yezli and khan stressed the necessity of the involvement of official authorities in such communication to ensure compliance and uptake by the public [ ]. this supports our approach for the icon chinese health forum. we ensured the public attending the forum were well-informed on the potential risks involved by organizing the question- and-answer session between experts and participants, in addition to providing official health literature from the vcha at the forum. finally, our provision of sanitizers and individual food packets throughout the forum was necessary, given that covid- primarily spreads through droplets and contaminated hands/surfaces [ ]. this was also in line with the who’s messaging around frequent hand washing and sanitizing as being the best ways to prevent infection and covid- spread [ ]. in fact, according to a recent paper by pradhan et al. evaluating the best preventive care approaches to curbing infection spread, including covid- , hand sanitization has been cited as the second most important strategy, with disinfecting surfaces being the first [ ]. accordingly, making sanitizers widely accessible may be a good strategy to not only ensure participant safety but also environmental safety when organizing events during and after covid- [ ]. there are several broader implications of our approach, even though we are unable to empirically assess any direct effects of the precautionary measures and the risk mitigation strategies that we employed on the health status of the older chinese adults who attended the forum. with only six cases in bc at that time, there were no official guidelines from the local health authorities that instructed organizers to screen or test participants for covid- prior to or follow-up with them after mass gatherings. it is possible that the fact that there were no positive cases of covid- which could be traced back to our forum is because no one who had tested positive attended the forum in the first place, reducing the possibility of potential spread. we cannot completely discount the possibility of chance in curbing the spread of infection at the forum. however, even if this is true, it further supports the effectiveness of the precautionary steps we had in place. our practices of using official translated communications from the bc moh, asking people who were symptomatic or had traveled to china recently to stay at home and participate online was unconventional at the time. moreover, the forum’s effectiveness in improving older chinese adults’ perceived ability to self- manage their chronic diseases is an important benefit that cannot be overlooked. a majority of attendees reporting a foreseeable benefit in their overall health and well-being, in addition to their understanding of accessible community resources, highlights the importance of this event and supports our decision to proceed with it by addressing foreseeable risks through the measures we took. future events may benefit from adopting our risk mitigation strategies, which involved the dissemination of timely and culturally specific communication with our target audience, as safe practices when adapting to a local context during crises. strategies, such as official communication from government and health authorities to inform attendees, options to participate online, and sanitizer provisions, could be beneficial ubiquitously, whenever appropriate. based on the lessons learned from the forum, we also recognize that additional safety precautions may be warranted should an event be organized at another point in time. in fact, based on the current landscape and public health authorities’ guidance, we have already transitioned to a completely virtual programming strategy for subsequent icon workshops and forums to maintain public safety while disseminating culturally specific health education. widespread adoption of all such public health measures and adapting to the local threat to public safety will be essential for reinstating the public trust in authorities as the economy opens up and we move towards the next phase of this pandemic [ ]. conclusions this paper provides insights into practical and evidenced-based strategies that we employed to conduct a mass gathering at the outset of covid- while upholding public interest in our event. organizing the february , , icon chinese health forum required careful consideration of local public health guidelines, adopting clear communication strategies that addressed attendee specific needs, and risk mitigation alternatives. additional information disclosures human subjects: all authors have confirmed that this study did not involve human participants or tissue. animal subjects: all authors have confirmed that this study did not involve animal subjects or tissue. conf licts of interest: in compliance with the icmje uniform disclosure form, all authors declare the following: payment/services info: the intercultural online health network (icon) program is supported limbachia et al. cureus ( ): e . doi . /cureus. of by funding from the british columbia ministry of health, which covered the cost of organizing and executing the icon chinese health forum on february , . financial relationships: all authors have declared that they have no financial relationships at present or within the previous three years with any organizations that might have an interest in the submitted work. other relationships: all authors have declared that there are no other relationships or activities that could appear to have influenced the submitted work. acknowledgements the authors gratefully acknowledge the british columbia ministry of health patients as partners initiative for funding to support the intercultural online health network (icon) program. references 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( ). accessed: december , : http://www.who.int/publications/m/item/interim-recommendations-on- obligatory-hand-hygiene-against-transmission-of-cov.... . pradhan d, biswasroy p, kumar naik p, ghosh g, rath g: a review of current interventions for covid- prevention. arch med res. , : - . . /j.arcmed. . . limbachia et al. cureus ( ): e . doi . /cureus. of https://dx.doi.org/ . /jtm/taaa https://dx.doi.org/ . /jtm/taaa https://dx.doi.org/ . /cureus. https://dx.doi.org/ . /cureus. https://dx.doi.org/ . / https://dx.doi.org/ . / http://www.who.int/publications/m/item/interim-recommendations-on-obligatory-hand-hygiene-against-transmission-of-covid- http://www.who.int/publications/m/item/interim-recommendations-on-obligatory-hand-hygiene-against-transmission-of-covid- https://dx.doi.org/ . /j.arcmed. . . https://dx.doi.org/ . /j.arcmed. . . 	organizing a mass gathering amidst a rising covid- public health crisis: lessons learned from a chinese public health forum in vancouver, bc 	abstract 	introduction 	materials and methods 	setting 	strategy 	figure : the traditional chinese version of the official communication on covid- developed in partnership with the british columbia ministry of health for prospective forum attendees hosted on the intercultural online health network's website 	figure : official communication on covid- developed in partnership with the british columbia ministry of health for prospective forum attendees hosted on the intercultural online health network's website 	figure : excerpt from the traditional chinese-translated version of the health literature developed by the british columbia ministry of health highlighting information on covid- provided as part of the participant welcome package at the intercultural online health network's chinese forum 	figure : excerpt from the health literature developed by the british columbia ministry of health highlighting information on covid- provided as part of the participant welcome package at the intercultural online health network's chinese forum 	results 	table : number of participants attending icon chinese health forums conducted under the theme of "healthy @ home" over the years 	discussion 	conclusions 	additional information 	disclosures 	acknowledgements 	references . psychosocial aspects of covid- pandemic review article how to cite: kartikey, d., kumar, s., mishra, a.k., & mishra, m. ( ). psychosocial aspects of covid- pandemic: a brief overview. journal of psychosocial wellbeing, ( ), - . quick response code this is an open access journal, and articles are distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-non commercial-share alike . license, which allows others to remix, tweak, and build upon the work non-commercially, as long as appropriate credit is given and the new creations are licensed under the identical terms. website : www.jpsw.co.in access this article online doi: https://doi.org/ . /zenodo. psychosocial aspects of covid- pandemic: a brief overview introduction a n a i r b o r n e i n f e c t i o u s respiratory disease (covid- ) has been spreading worldwide since december . from being just a small virus, a non- living entity, it has now become a full blown pandemic by using the human biological system to spread worldwide and disrupt every sphere of our life, be it health, financial, psychological or social. the losses borne out of this pandemic are immense. over a million people have died and around million infected. all the major economies have either shrunk or have entered into recession. the lockdown i m p o s e d w o r l d w i d e h a s resulted in job loss and financial insecurity. according to the imf (international monetary fund), the pandemic will result in loss of jobs and loss of trillion dollars worldwide. at this time, nature also seems to be very wild and chaotic, natural disasters like forest fires of amazon and california and water calamities in india, china and bangladesh. m o n e t a r y l o s s e s c a n b e calculated and compensated in due time but what about u n a c c o u n t e d l o s s e s l i k e psychological. the cost of all this are psychological shocks, to indian journal of psychosocial wellbeing, ( ), correspondence address: subodh kumar, research scholar, department of psychology, banaras hindu university, varanasi, up, india. email: bhu.subodh@gmail.com divye kartikey, subodh kumar alok kumar mishra, meena mishra intern, brain behaviour research foundation of india (bbrfi), new delhi, india research scholar, department of psychology, banaras hindu university, varanasi, up, india. joint secretary, association of indian universities chairperson, brain behaviour research foundation of india (bbrfi), new delhi, india abstract since the start of the covid- pandemic everything has changed, from our daily routine activities to how we think and plan for the future. as we progress into the later stages of the pandemic, both our thinking and society will change and it is in this backdrop, taking a psychosocial perspective is important in understanding the psychological effect of covid- pandemic on society. psychological impacts due to such catastrophic events are largely subtle and hidden in nature due to stigma related to mental health issues. this review paper aims to uncover and demystify the extent to which societies were affected psychologically, and how it has impacted the course of the pandemic. a comprehensive analysis is presented on mental health problems in patients infected from covid- , frontline health workers, old age people and women, also of the people who are facing problems due to unemployment and loneliness. the social behaviors like anti-lockdown protests, anti-racial discrimination protests, anti-vaccine protests and panic buying are also discussed. finally, some solutions are suggested as learning that we can take from this pandemic so that our society is better prepared psychologically for any future pandemic. covid- , pandemic, quarantine, mental health, lockdownkeywords: submitted: . . revised: accepted: . . published: . . . . which everyone is subjected to at a personal level. these psychological shocks are in the form of depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder and inability to cope with grief and loss. these psychological effects led people to irrational social behaviors like panic buying, stockpiling, defying quarantine rules, not wearing masks, attending parties or large gatherings and most recently into anti-lock down protests and anti-vaccine protests. in this article we are focusing on the psychosocial perspective of covid- pandemic. psychosocial perspective means studying the problems from the view of psychological impacts on society. this is important because we have seen it for the first time in the history of humanity when every human is subjected to the same problem at the same time irrespective of caste, religion, color, creed, ethnicity and country. it is important to answer a few i m p o r t a n t q u e s t i o n s l i k e , ' h o w m u c h psychologically we were prepared for a crisis like this?', 'how we adapted or mal-adapted to this crisis?', 'how will we cope with loss and grief?', 'what is the psychological cost of such a crisis?', 'what type of irrationality were we subjected to?' and last but not the least 'what psychological pitfalls led to social unrest and worsened the pandemic?'. we have to answer all these questions if we want to have any learning to safeguard humanity from future pandemics. we will first look into broad psychosocial impacts of covid- like, mental health problems in patients infected from covid- , mental health of frontline workers in essential services, mental health of vulnerable sections of society i.e. old age people, women, youth and adolescent, and workers in informal sector. then we will make an attempt to inquire about the general attitude of masses during pandemic like, street protests, believing in conspiracy theories and not following the guidelines and the necessary health practices of wearing masks and practicing physical distancing. the role of cognitive biases will be taken into account and how it has led many people to make wrong decisions during pandemic, and how it has shaped the outcomes of the pandemic. at the end, some recommendations and important lessons will be given which we need to learn, so that our society is better prepared psychologically to handle such kind of future pandemics. psychosocial impacts of covid- : mental health problems in patients infected from covid- researchers are now concluding that the effect of this virus is beyond the normal physical symptoms. virus can now cross the blood- brain barrier to influence the brain and mind. the first evidence of this was the common covid- symptom of loss of smell and taste. there is evidence where patients after being discharged from successful treatment of covid- , suffered from depression, anxiety and post- traumatic stress. a study conducted among patients infected from covid- in san raffaele hospital, italy, found that more than half recovered patients suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, insomnia, anxiety and depression. out of the patients studied, % suffered from post-traumatic stress disorder, % in depression, insomnia in %, anxiety in % and obsessive compulsions in % of the patients. the severity of these psychological problems was in proportion with the severity of covid- infection (parodi, ). an online study conducted in spain among people, who had mild covid- and were not hospitalized, found that . % were in depression, . % in anxiety and . % showed symptoms of post traumatic stress disorder (gonzalez & austin, ). mental health problems in frontline health workers mental health problems among frontline health workers have been serious. inadequate personal indian journal of psychosocial wellbeing, ( ), kartikey et al: psychosocial aspects of covid- pandemic protective equipment, underpayment after long hours of duty and lack of psychological support is causing mental health problems like depression and anxiety. recently, health workers in italy and america even committed suicide due to fear that they might have infected other patients with covid- (rahman, & plummer, ). study on romanian medical residents found a high prevalence of burnout syndrome (dimitriu, et al., ). similarly, a study found burnout symptoms among singapore health professionals (tan, et al., ). health anxiety in public health anxiety is the anxiousness that a person feels when bodily symptoms are misinterpreted or misjudged in an exaggerated form, based on limited knowledge. the anxiety resulting from this fixes the belief in a person's mind that they are suffering from a disease, which in reality may not be the case. this is fear-based self-diagnosis, which is reinforced every time whenever those bodily symptoms are present. the failure to take the objective view on this leads to more fixation of the belief and more impairment in the functioning of daily life (tyrer, ). the most common symptom for covid- was shortness of breath and it was a common site in society that normal body symptom of shortness of breathe due to daily activities was usually feared with contracting covid- (kartikey, ). health anxiety was also present with people, who were already suffering from physical illness/es such as blood pressure, diabetes, heart ailments and cancer, and also those who were already suffering from mental illness like depression and anxiety before pandemic started. fear of loneliness social distancing and quarantine were one of the first measures by every country to stop the spread of sars-cov- virus. nationwide lockdowns were imposed and everyone was forced to live in the confinements of their house. in countries like india, nationwide lockdowns were imposed with strict curfews to make sure that there are no large public gatherings. as the rate of infection reduced in countries, lockdowns were lifted, however, these continued in the form of localized lockdowns or area specific lockdowns. it is during these times that people suffering from mental illness like depression, anxiety, post-traumatic stress disorder etc. lost their social support from friends, relatives and neighbors. this either aggravated their symptoms of pre- existing mental illness or triggered relapse into previous cured mental illness (chaurasiya & chaurasiya, ). financial insecurity and unemployment mental health is closely linked to financial insecurity and unemployment. covid- , from being a health crisis it has turned into an economic crisis and now transformed into a mental health crisis. various surveys have shown that public mental health has worsened due to stated reasons. people working in sectors, which are heavily affected due to covid- pandemic like hospitality industry, tourism industry, sports industry and above all those who are working in the informal sector, faced a significant amount of distress due to loss of livelihood and financial security. those working in jobs are now in fear of losing their job or if they have lost their job then the big challenge in front of them is to re-skill them or update them to be market ready for any future employment. in a cross sectional study conducted in lebanon, a developing country, among participants, all were over years, it was found that there was a direct link between poor mental health and a crashing economy. lebanon has been under economic crisis for a long time due to civil war and political turmoil, but due to covid- pandemic it never recovered, thereby resulting in job loss and the closing of many businesses. significant stress and anxiety also was noted in people who were getting reduced salary as a result of pandemic (salameh, et al., ). food insecurity and mental health food insecurity during covid- pandemic took place in two ways. first, the inability to buy food for indian journal of psychosocial wellbeing, ( ), kartikey et al: psychosocial aspects of covid- pandemic indian journal of psychosocial wellbeing, ( ), the family due to loss of job or daily wages and second, from the shortage of food supplies to cities. in a survey conducted in vermont city, united states of america, among people, an increase in food insecurity was found. people who had lost their job faced obstacles in finding access to food and were eating less. this not only made them vulnerable to malnutrition but also to stress and anxiety (niles, et al., ). in many african countries, iran, pakistan and india, locusts, a crop devouring insects, threatened the food security by attacking several agricultural fields and damaging tonnes of crops. one of the main reasons was failure to check the population of locusts due to pandemic and lockdowns. (koshy, ). women mental health during covid- pandemic, women became more vulnerable to mental health issues because they play multiple roles in the family like being a homemaker and earning income for the family. whether a woman is working or nonworking, lockdowns affect the lives of women like never before. women now had to bear the burden of devoting extra time in the care of their families, in addition to their work from home. women working in the informal sector lost their financial freedom due to loss of jobs. pregnant women suffered from anxiety as they were subjected to not only the emotional and mood swings due to pregnancy but also from fear of going for delivery to hospitals which had themselves turned into covid- centers. social distancing and restricted movement made them even more emotionally vulnerable which affected pregnancy. domestic violence increased as women now had no choice but to spend more time with their abusive partners with whom they have turbulent relationships. they become silent sufferers of their own home environment (matiti, et al., ). youth and adolescent mental health the age of adolescence and youth is always considered vulnerable for mental health. it is known for depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress. in a study of the psychological condition of participants in china, of age group to , through online questionnaires it was found that most of the participants suffered from depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress. as social contacts got shrunk due to lockdowns, most of the youth and adolescents adopted many mal-adaptive, coping strategies like, tobacco, alcohol, marijuana, psychedelics and spending too much time surfing videos on the internet and social media. such mal-adaptive coping techniques only perpetuate psychological distress in the long term (liang, et al., ). geriatric mental health mental health of older people has worsened during covid- pandemic due to social restrictions. their inability to use technology to connect with others has shrunk their social support. if at all, they connect with others through technology, the element of realistic care and love was not there. in addition, mental health problems aggravated when older people were left without any social support and were not able to access health services, banking services, transport services and inability to get groceries. study conducted on geriatric mental health during covid- pandemic in the arab countries of the middle east and north africa region, which included countries like, lebanon, kingdom of saudi arabia, egypt and united arab emirates, found depression to be highly prevalent among old aged people. elderlies with dementia and parkinson's disease also had depressive symptoms (hayek, et al., ). panic buying, 'black lives matter', anti-lockdown protests and anti-vaccine movement panic buying or stockpiling is an irrational phenomenon wherein people buy more than usual in order to save their family from unforeseen adversities. the reason people reacted to the pandemic with panic buying was because of misinformation and fake news that items in shops will run out. to generate a sense of control over the kartikey et al: psychosocial aspects of covid- pandemic indian journal of psychosocial wellbeing, ( ), situation, panic stricken people hoarded food items. the fall out of such incidences was that lower income people were not able to afford food items due to rise in price. had there was no panic buying then it could have benefited everyone(arafat, et al., ). all over the world, protests are also happening against the racial injustices and corrupt governance. but why during and pandemic? the possible explanation behind these is, as lockdowns and social distancing put people out of their daily busy routine, and with continuous active use of social media, they become more sensitive to old social and economic problems. the psychological impact of pandemic made individuals lose their personal life meanings only to move towards larger social meaning. people associated their personal identity with a larger social identity of people suffering racial discrimination. the element of enlarged social identity created a sense of common fate and shared interests among people, which when reached a tipping point resulted in black lives matter protests. (duncan, ) a study conducted in eight cities in the united states of america, where protests took place due to the george floyd incident. in all the cities there was an abnormal increase in covid- infection. in six of the eight cities, the increase was significant. this was because the guidelines for social distancing given by the centre for disease control were not followed (valentine, et al., ). there were many anti lockdown protests in many parts of the world. protests due to financial insecurity are understandable. but what explains anti- lockdown protests happening out of complete denial of covid- pandemic? in the atmosphere of fear and uncertainty fake news and conspiracy theories are easily spread through social media platforms to misinform the general public. through the media, fake information was spread to downplay the seriousness of the pandemic and false hopes were given that lockdowns will be lifted soon.two cognitive biases, motivation perception and confirmation bias played crucial roles in this scenario. people formed false and unscientific beliefs related to pandemic and became motivated to see lockdown lifted, these beliefs were confirmed every time they spent some time on social media platforms (bartholomew, ). similarly in the anti-vaccine movement, fake information and conspiracy theories like vaccines can cause measles and autism, were spread through social media (pierre, ). there has been a considerable psychological cost of covid- pandemic. to deliver mental health services, online platforms were used everywhere. however, these were not able to reach people who are either not comfortable with technology or are unable to use technological devices. poor people are also not able to access such services due to financial hardships. although tele- mental health services are no match to face-to-face services, there is still a need to make them more user friendly, cost effective and easily accessible (moreno, ). study on romanian medical residents has shown that many methods can be used to reduce mental health issues, like- encouraging residents to keep a balance between work and home, and sharing problems with colleagues (dimitriu, et al., ). similarly, study on burnout among singapore healthcare workers has shown that avoiding prolonged shifts of more than hours helped in reducing burnout and other mental health issues (tan, et al., ). for vulnerable sections of the society like women, it is important to promote community based organization in delivering mental health services and to make strict laws against domestic violence (matiti, et al., ). for youth and adolescents, it is important to engage them in healthy ways of coping with their mental health (liang, et al., ). for old age people, there is a need of geriatric mental health specialists which can provide services as per their age (hayek, et al., ). study from lebanon among people who are facing financial insecurity and unemployment, shows that there should be screening of mental health among discussion kartikey et al: psychosocial aspects of covid- pandemic people who are poor and financially insecure. their poverty should not become a barrier to avail any mental health services, because recovery from psychological problems can help them to overcome financial challenges (salameh, et al., ). study on panic buying has shown that to avoid such happenings there should be strict regulation of essential commodities and tough laws against black marketing and hoarding. for food insecurity related mental health issues, policies should be made to encourage food assistance programme and home delivery businesses (arafat, et al., ). those people for whom lockdowns and quarantine were the time to re-skill and learn something new had positive outlook towards pandemic and were optimistic about their career and financial security in near future.it is important to have a mindset where people have internal locus of control, which means that situation can improve if right actions are executed. this is better than having a mindset which is based on external locus of control, in which the belief is that nothing can be done as outside events are more powerful in deciding the outcome. this pandemic is witnessing many social movements but also irrational social behaviors. it is because people are using a more top-down approach to pandemic than bottom-up approach. in top-down approach the perception of reality is blurred by pre- existing distorted ideas and opinions, thereby inhibiting the capability to see the real problem in a novel way. in the absence of any prior belief system in mind of the general public, people fell in the trap of their own cognitive biases and accepted distorted perception floating on social media and in the community. for example, people still have this belief system that wearing a mask is not effective against covid- , despite the availability of all the scientific evidence that masks are very effective in curbing the spread of infection. in bottom-up approach, the belief is formed but is not corrupted by pre-existing distorted beliefs and ideas. those people who did not have any prior ideas and beliefs, as to how to act in such turbulent time, practiced mindfulness to come to the right conclusion by believing in science and hence acted much better in protecting themselves and others from getting infected. it is important for science to spread its clear message before misinformation and fake news reach the public through social media, and identify all the possible cognitive traps that people can fall into, so that scientific messages can be modified into people friendly language. responsible journalism is the need of the hour to safeguard public rationale. to counter rumors more emphasis has to be on framing of messages for the target audience so that there is always clarity among people regarding what the stand of science is (pierre, ). covid- pandemic is impacting our lives like never before and it is still unclear how long it will be like this. psychosocial impacts of covid- are so diverse that this article alone cannot cover everything under the sun. however, papers we reviewed for our topic have successfully given us information on the extent to which societies are psychologically affected and also solutions that can be implemented. we now know that people from all age groups are getting affected psychologically. people who were infected from covid- were also psychologically affected, but the role of sars-cov- virus in creating psychological problems needs more investigation. deteriorating mental health among general public and social unrest shows us that to achieve real psycho-social well-being we not only have to stop covid- from spreading but also work collectively on many socio-economic issues. affordable and easily accessible mental health services, and right socio-economic government policies is the way forward. the papers we reviewed also throw light on how we should adapt to new challenges posted by new threats like pandemics. on one side it shows the bright side of the human capability to be adaptive and resilient but on other side it exposes our psychological vulnerabilities. these useful learning will help us to prepare for any future pandemic and make us proactive in our collective responses to ensure psycho-social well-being. conclusion indian journal of psychosocial wellbeing, ( ), kartikey et al: psychosocial aspects of covid- pandemic references arafat, s. y., kar, s. k., menon, v., kaliamoorthy, c., mukherjee, s., &mohamed, a. a.et al. 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( ). relationship of george floyd protests to increases in covid- cases using event study methodology. journal of public health. , - .doi: https://doi.org/ . /pubmed/ fdaa . kartikey et al: psychosocial aspects of covid- pandemic indian journal of psychosocial wellbeing, ( ), psr_ .. american political science review ( ) , , v–vii doi: . /s x © the author(s), . published by cambridge university press on behalf of the american political science association notes from the editors the new editorial team of the american politicalscience review began its term on june , . itwas a day marked by black lives matter pro- tests throughout the united states and much of the world following the killing of george floyd by minne- apolis police officers. in a speech in the rose garden that afternoon, the american president referred to the protesters as “terrorists” and threatened to send the military into cities and states that failed to “control” them. he then authorized the use of tear gas, rubber bullets, and flash grenades to disperse the peaceful crowd that had assembled near the white house in lafayette square so that he could pose for photographs at st. john’s episcopal church, holding a bible. mean- while, muriel bowser—the black woman mayor of the district of columbia, whose residents have no repre- sentation in the us legislature—planned her response to the president’s bold assertion of power. also on that first day of june, the government of hong kong announced it would ban the annual vigil commemorat- ing the victims of the chinese military’s crackdown on the tiananmen square protestors in . more than . million cases of covid- had been reported worldwide, the death toll in the united states alone had exceeded , , and the stay-at-home orders issued by many governments to control the virus’s spread had triggered a global recession. our team had come together more than a year earlier to propose to edit the flagship journal of the discipline of political science. what brought us together initially, and what motivated us as we began our work as editors, was our shared conviction that the questions political scientists need to ask include those that were on full display that first day in june. political scientists need to study power, domination, ideology, political violence, and structural injustice. we need to ask questions about protest and social movements and how oppressed people exercise their agency. we need to study policing and the carceral state, racialized and gendered health and economic inequalities, populism, the political aspects of religion, and political corruption. in our first editorial meetings that afternoon, as we discussed manuscripts and reviews and the ins and outs of the online peer review system, some of us acknowledged having mixed feelings about focusing on journal editing at such a moment. but then we reminded ourselves of why we were doing this work: because of our commit- ment to political science research that helps answer the questions that were so vivid that day. we believe that political science risks becoming irrelevant if it cannot help answer these critically important questions. and we worry that all too often our discipline operates with an overly narrow view of what counts as political science. “that’s an interesting idea, but you need to change your focus so you can generate causal inferences. let’s re-think your project.” “we don’t have large enough sample sizes to study african-american attitudes about those issues. why don’t you look at white racial attitudes instead?” “people don’t answer survey questions about sexual- ity honestly. you should study something other than lgbtq politics.” “if you want to study social movements, switch to sociology.” “that’s a normative question! in political science, we ask empirical questions.” no doubt, many readers of this journal have received counsel along these lines from well-meaning advisors, mentors, and colleagues. our discipline does not shy away from signaling its norms and expectations about what does and does not count as a valid research question and about which methods and approaches are and are not legitimate. as political scientists, we like to tell ourselves that our data and methods are cutting-edge. but all too often, we let our data and methods dictate the questions that we ask. we let our tools tell us what we can and cannot study, when we would be better served by acknowledging the ways our toolkit is incomplete and seeking to expand it. our team came together, in part, around our deep respect for those scholars who push the boundaries of our discipline. these scholars ask questions that require talking to people whom political scientists often ignore; reading as “political” phenomena that many in our discipline view as outside the realm of politics; and adopting approaches, epistemologies, and methods that many political scientists would reject as inappro- priate or inapplicable. those who wield disciplinary power often send such scholars none-too-subtle signals, which announce, “you’re welcome to join us, but only if you do political science the way we do it.” that’s how our discipline disciplines. it’s how gatekeepers tell would-be members that, if they want admission to a top phd program, if they want to get or to keep that tenure-track job, if they want to be read and heard and recognized—then they need to use this set of tools and no others, and they need to ask the questions that these tools can answer. that’s how our discipline trains us, as students of the political. it’s how it turns many of us away from investigating a wide range of crucially important political problems. we believe that research should be well-designed and rigorously executed. and, of course, we believe that a common set of questions, approaches, and methods define our discipline; that’s what it means to be a discipline. in addition, we believe that many of the questions political scientists traditionally have focused on are important ones. however, they don’t come close to exhausting the range of questions that we must ask in order to truly understand politics. our team is commit- ted to making space for work that adopts approaches, epistemologies, and methods that challenge dominant v d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s x https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x disciplinary norms and boundaries and to making room in the apsr’s pages for work by scholars who ask questions about political phenomena to which political science has too often given short shrift. we approach these commitments with deep humil- ity, with sincere respect for the journal and its history, and with a profound awareness that there are limita- tions to what any single editorial team can do. we also approach this task with the knowledge that journal editors often function as gatekeepers, preventing scholars who ask the “wrong” questions, or who answer them using unfamiliar tools, from gaining access. we recognize that, inevitably, we will perform a gatekeep- ing function to some degree, but our hope is that we will also be able to serve as a gateway, creating space for work that asks critically important questions about power and politics of the sort that were so palpable on that first day in june. we hope that under our editorship, the apsr will reflect the diversity of the subfields, geographic areas of study, methods, approaches, and identities that are encompassed by the discipline of political science at its most pluralistic. as of the date of this publication, we have been editing the apsr for five months. the work has been challenging and rewarding. our team is nonhierarchi- cal, interdisciplinary, and collaborative. in place of the typical model of a single lead editor directing a group of associate editors, each of whom is assigned the manu- scripts that correspond to a disciplinary subfield, we’ve adopted a rotating co-lead editorship, which is staggered to ensure continuity. our team meets weekly to discuss manuscripts and to deliberate about decisions. each manuscript that our team desk rejects is read by at least two editors, who carefully consider whether it might survive our peer review process. we often deliberate about those manuscripts that we do send for review as well, discussing whether and how they are exemplars of well-conceptualized, well-executed, problem-driven research that addresses timely or timeless questions about power and politics. our team has also adopted a set of rigorous ethical standards for research that involves human participants. we are the first editors to implement the new principles and guidance for human subjects research adopted by the american political science association council in april . six members of our editorial board who have been leaders in recent discussions within the dis- cipline—catherine boone, scott desposato, macartan humphries, lauren maclean, layna mosley, and peri schwartz-shea—have agreed to serve as our advisory board for ethical research. scholars who have submit- ted to or reviewed for the apsr since june will have noticed the changes in the journal’s ethics procedures. details are available through our submissions guidelines and faq page. because research ethics is an important focus of our editorship, we plan to devote our next “notes from the editors” to an in-depth discussion of this topic. at the same time, we’ve begun the important work of modernizing the journal’s outreach to and communica- tion with the apsa membership and broader audi- ences. among the first steps we’ve taken on this front are leveraging social media through our new twitter and facebook accounts and facilitating blog posts that feature apsr authors’ research and inform readers about the editorial team’s vision. look for our new cover design, which will be in place beginning with the first issue of . starting in the new year, each issue of the apsr will feature cover art that makes it visually distinct from the association’s other journals. in addition to conveying some of each issue’s key themes, our covers will signal the scholarly diversity, inclusivity, and collaboration that is the hall- mark of our team. finally, our team has been working with the editors of other journals in the discipline to identify short-, medium-, and long-term responses to the unique chal- lenges that the covid- pandemic poses for scholarly research and publishing. working with cambridge uni- versity press, we have been collecting data about the pandemic’s effects on research productivity, patterns of submissions to the journal, reviewer availability, and time-to-decision. we plan to devote a future “notes from the editors” to sharing these data, discussing some of the best practices identified by political science editors across multiple journals, and outlining our own response. we want to emphasize that none of what our team has accomplished thus far, nor anything that we accom- plish over the course of our term, is or will be a result of our efforts alone. although space constraints prevent us from being able to thank all of the many people who have helped us, we want to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to the staff at both the american political science association and cambridge univer- sity press, who have devoted enormous amounts of time and energy to assisting us in our work. we are particularly grateful to apsa’s executive director, steven rathgeb smith; director of publishing, jon gurstelle; publishing associate, henry chen; presi- dent, paula mcclain; past president, rogers smith; and president-elect, janet box-steffensmeier; as well as cup’s executive publisher, mark zadrozny; politics journals editor, david mainwaring; and senior online peer review controller, wendy moore. we are deeply grateful to thomas könig and the rest of the members of the mannheim team for working with us to make this transition a smooth one, and we want to emphasize that they deserve credit for the articles in the current issue, all of which were submitted under their editorship. the mannheim team’s man- aging editor, alyssa taylor, generously agreed to stay on during our first month. she often took emergency calls at what were, no doubt, exceedingly inconvenient hours in germany. more generally, she provided indis- pensable guidance and reassurance that first month as we began our work. our own managing editor, dragana svraka, has been an indispensable member of our team from day one. we are deeply appreciative of her dedication, and we look forward to working with her in the coming years. further, we appreciate our terrific team of edi- torial assistants, who have helped us move manuscripts along: zoe ang, jessica burch, carolyn anh dang, notes from the editors vi d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s x https://connect.apsanet.org/hsr/principles-and-guidance/ https://connect.apsanet.org/hsr/principles-and-guidance/ https://www.apsanet.org/apsr-submission-guidelines https://www.apsanet.org/publications/journals/american-political-science-review/faqs https://twitter.com/apsrjournal https://www.facebook.com/american-political-science-review- https://www.cambridge.org/core/blog/author/apsr-authors/ https://www.cambridge.org/core/blog/ / / /a-new-era-for-the-american-political-science-review/ https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x james fahey, jack greenberg, kimberly killen, mon- ica komer, jenna pedersen, radha sarkar, kristen smole, thomas vargas, and yufan yang. finally, we are grateful to the distinguished members of the apsr editorial board, who have agreed to work with and to advise us over the next four years, and to all of the authors and reviewers whose scholarly work makes it possible for the apsr to publish cutting-edge research about politics and power. throughout the course of our term, we welcome suggestions and feedback from our colleagues. we know that our success will depend on the active engage- ment and contributions of scholars across the discipline, and we invite you to work with us, forging a partnership to sustain a leading journal and to maintain and to improve the quality and integrity of the american political science review, while broadening its contribu- tor pool, readership, and relevance. notes from the editors vii d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/information/editorial-board https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x 	notes from the editors american political science review november volume , issue issn: - american political science association d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s lead editors clarissa hayward washington university in st. louis, usa julie novkov university at albany, suny, usa editors sharon wright austin university of florida, usa michelle l. dion mcmaster university, canada kelly m. kadera university of iowa, usa celeste montoya university of colorado, boulder, usa valeria sinclair-chapman purdue university, usa dara strolovitch princeton university, usa alli mari tripp university of wisconsin, madison, usa denise m. walsh university of virginia, usa s. laurel weldon simon fraser university, canada elisabeth jean wood yale university, usa managing editor dragana svraka advisory board for ethical research catherine boone london school of economics and political science, uk scott desposato uc san diego, usa macartan humphries wzb berlin and columbia university, usa lauren m. maclean indiana university, usa layna mosley princeton university, usa trisha phillips west virginia university, usa peregrine schwartz-shea university of utah, usa editorial board claire adida uc san diego, usa phillip ayoub occidental college, usa lisa baldez dartmouth college, usa lawrie balfour university of virginia, usa karen beckwith case western reserve university, usa catherine boone london school of economics and political science, uk janet box-steffensmeier ohio state university, usa pamela brandwein university of michigan, usa david broockman uc berkeley, usa nadia e. brown purdue university, usa renee buhr university of st. thomas, usa pradeep chhibber uc berkeley, usa cathy cohen university of chicago, usa katherine cramer university of wisconsin - madison, usa paisley currah cuny, usa christian davenport university of michigan, usa alexandre debs yale university, usa jacqueline h. r. demeritt university of north texas, usa scott desposato uc san diego, usa shirin deylami western washington university, usa james n. druckman northwestern university, usa thad dunning uc berkeley, usa elisabeth ellis university of otago, new zealand tanisha fazal university of minnesota, usa evgeny finkel johns hopkins university, usa jason frank cornell university, usa jill frank cornell university, usa robert j. franzese university of michigan, usa lorrie frasure ucla, usa elisabeth jay friedman university of san francisco, usa lisa garcia-bedolla uc berkeley, usa daniel gillion university of pennsylvania, usa farah godrej uc riverside, usa stephan haggard uc san diego, usa kerry haynie duke university, usa errol henderson pennsylvania state university, usa yoshiko herrera university of wisconsin - madison, usa juliet hooker brown university, usa macartan humphreys wzb berlin, germany, and columbia university, usa vince hutchings university of michigan, usa turkuler isikel columbia university, usa alan jacobs university of british columbia, canada amaney jamal princeton university, usa juliet johnson mcgill university, canada michael jones-correa university of pennsylvania, usa kimuli kasara columbia university, usa helen m. kinsella university of minnesota, usa brett ashley leeds rice university, usa ines levin uc irvine, usa jacob t. levy mcgill university, canada pei-te lien uc santa barbara, usa sheryl lightfoot university of british columbia, canada jinee lokaneeta drew university, usa catherine lu mcgill university, canada juan pablo luna pontificia universidad catolica, chile ellen lust university of gothenburg, sweden marc lynch geroge washington university, usa lauren m. maclean university of indiana, usa samantha majic cuny - john jay college, usa melanie manion duke university, usa isabela mares yale university, usa valerie martinez-ebers university of north texas, usa seth masket university of denver, usa peace a. medie university of bristol, uk jamila michener cornell university, usa michael minta university of minnesota, usa sara mclaughlin mitchell university of iowa, usa burt monroe pennsylvania state university, usa layna mosley princeton university, usa tamir moustafa simon fraser university, canada byron d’andra orey jackson state university, usa elizabeth maggie penn emory university, usa ravi perry howard university, usa justin phillips columbia university, usa trisha phillips west virginia university, usa mark pickup simon fraser university, canada melanye price prairie view a&m university, usa karthick ramakrishnan uc riverside, usa gina yannitell reinhardt university of essex, uk andrew reynolds university of north carolina, usa emily hencken ritter vanderbilt university, usa molly roberts uc san diego, usa melvin rogers brown university, usa nita rudra georgetown university, usa burcu savun university of pittsburgh, usa ken scheve stanford university, usa melissa schwartzberg new york university, usa peregrine schwartz-shea university of utah, usa maya sen harvard university, usa elizabeth sharrow university of massachusetts amherst, usa kathryn sikkink harvard university, usa laura sjoberg university of florida, usa/royal holloway, uk anand sokhey university of colorado, boulder, usa sarah song uc berkeley, usa dietland stolle mcgill university, canada kathleen thelen massachusetts institute of technology, usa cameron thies arizona state university, usa jakana thomas michigan state university, usa erica townsend-bell oklahoma state university, usa ethel tungchan york university, canada antonio y. vázquez-arroyo rutgers university, usa lisa wedeen university of chicago, usa jessica weeks university of wisconsin - madison, usa ismail k. white princeton university, usa jennifer wolak university of colorado, boulder, usa janelle wong university of maryland, usa deborah j. yashar princeton university, usa association office address and membership information: american political science association individual membership dues are: regular members with in- come of $ , +, $ ; $ , –$ , , $ ; $ , –$ , , $ ; $ , –$ , , $ ; $ , –$ , , $ ; $ , –$ , , $ ; $ , –$ , , $ 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press, journals fulfillment department, one liberty plaza, th floor, new york, ny . © american political science astsociation . all rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced, in any form or by any means, electronic, photocopying, or otherwise, without permission in writing from cambridge university press. policies, request forms, and contacts are available at http://www.cambridge.org/rights/permissions/permission.htm permission to copy (for users in the u.s.a.) is available from copyright clearance center, http://www.copyright.com, email: info@copyright.comd o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s american political science review volume , number , november table of contents notes from the editors . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . v articles which identity frames boost support for and mobilization in the #blacklivesmatter movement? an experimental test tabitha bonilla and alvin b. tillery jr.. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the distinctive political status of dissident minorities david schraub . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . representing silence in politics mónica brito vieira . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . women’s representation and the gendered pipeline to power danielle m. thomsen and aaron s. king . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . respect for subjects in the ethics of causal and interpretive social explanation michael l. frazer . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . institutionalized police brutality: torture, the militarization of security, and the reform of inquisitorial criminal justice in mexico beatriz magaloni and luis rodriguez . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . gender, law enforcement, and access to justice: evidence from all-women police stations in india nirvikar jassal . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . party competition and coalitional stability: evidence from american local government peter bucchianeri . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the quality of vote tallies: causes and consequences cristian challú, enrique seira, and alberto simpser . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . buying power: electoral strategy before the secret vote daniel w. gingerich . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . carving out: isolating the true effect of self-interest on policy attitudes jake haselswerdt . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . polarized pluralism: organizational preferences and biases in the american pressure system jesse m. crosson, alexander c. furnas, and geoffrey m. lorenz . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . what you see is not always what you get: bargaining before an audience under multiparty government lanny w. martin and georg vanberg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . deterrence with imperfect attribution sandeep baliga, ethan bueno de mesquita, and alexander wolitzky . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . how much is one american worth? how competition affects trade preferences diana c. mutz and amber hye-yon lee . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . learning about growth and democracy scott f. abramson and sergio montero . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . does property ownership lead to participation in local politics? evidence from property records and meeting minutes jesse yoder . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . does political affirmative action work, and for whom? theory and evidence on india’s scheduled areas saad gulzar, nicholas haas, and benjamin pasquale . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s autocratic stability in the shadow of foreign threats livio di lonardo, jessica s. sun, and scott a. tyson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . from tyrannicide to revolution: aristotle on the politics of comradeship jordan jochim . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . bridges between wedges and frames: outreach and compromise in american political discourse andrew stark . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . when to worry about sensitivity bias: a social reference theory and evidence from years of list experiments graeme blair, alexander coppock, and margaret moor . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . the political economy of bureaucratic overload: evidence from rural development officials in india aditya dasgupta and devesh kapur . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . letters does aid reduce anti-refugee violence? evidence from syrian refugees in lebanon m. christian lehmann and daniel t. r. masterson . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . news and geolocated social media accurately measure protest size variation anton sobolev, m. keith chen, jungseock joo, and zachary c. steinert-threlkeld . . . . . . . . . . . . . . a framework for measuring leaders’ willingness to use force jeff carter and charles e. smith jr. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . wildfire exposure increases pro-environment voting within democratic but not republican areas chad hazlett and matto mildenberger . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . who governs? a new global dataset on members of cabinets jacob nyrup and stuart bramwell . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . mobilize for our lives? school shootings and democratic accountability in u .s . elections hans j. g. hassell, john b. holbein, and matthew baldwin. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . can charter schools boost civic participation? the impact of democracy prep public schools on voting behavior brian gill, emilyn ruble whitesell, sean p. corcoran, charles tilley, mariel finucane, and liz potamites . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . corrigenda censorship as reward: evidence from pop culture censorship in chile—corrigendum jane esberg . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . administrative records mask racially biased policing—corrigendum dean knox, will lowe, and jonathan mummolo . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s frank j. goodnow albert shaw frederick n. judson james bryce a. lawrence lowell woodrow wilson simeon e. baldwin albert bushnell hart w. w. willoughby john bassett moore ernst freund jesse macy munroe smith henry jones ford paul s. reinsch leo s. rowe william a. dunning harry a. garfield james w. garner charles e. merriam charles a. beard william bennett munro jesse s. reeves john a. fairlie benjamin f. shambaugh edward s. corwin william f. willoughby isidor loeb walter shepard francis w. coker arthur n. holcombe thomas reed powell clarence a. dykstra charles grove haines robert c. brooks frederic a. ogg william anderson robert e. cushman leonard d. white john gaus walter f. dodd arthur w. macmahon henry r. spencer quincy wright james k. pollock peter h. odegard luther gulick pendleton herring ralph j. bunche charles mckinley harold d. lasswell e. e. schattschneider v. o. key, jr. r. taylor cole carl b. swisher emmette s. redford charles s. hyneman carl j. friedrich c. herman pritchett david b. truman gabriel a. almond robert a. dahl merle fainsod david easton karl w. deutsch robert e. lane heinz eulau robert e. ward avery leiserson austin ranney james macgregor burns samuel h. beer john c. wahlke leon d. epstein warren e. miller charles e. lindblom seymour martin lipset william h. riker philip e. converse richard f. fenno aaron b. wildavsky samuel p. huntington kenneth n. waltz lucian w. pye judith n. shklar theodore j. lowi james q. wilson lucius j. barker charles o.jones sidney verba arend lijphart elinor ostrom m. kent jennings matthew holden, jr. robert o. keohane robert jervis robert d. putnam theda skocpol susanne hoeber rudolph margaret levi ira katznelson robert axelrod dianne m. pinderhughes peter katzenstein henry e. brady carole pateman g. bingham powell, jr. jane mansbridge john h. aldrich rodney e. hero jennifer hochschild david lake kathleen thelen rogers smith former apsa presidents officers president janet m. box-steffensmeier ohio state university vice-presidents michelle deardorff university of tennessee, chattanooga mala htun university of new mexico john sides vanderbilt university president-elect john ishiyama university of north texas past president paula d. mcclain duke university – adam j. berinsky massachusetts institute of technology ann o’m. bowman texas a&m university julia s. jordan-zachery university of north carolina, charlotte lori j. marso union college alberto simpser instituto tecnológico autónomo de méxico charles smith university of california, irvine rocío titiunik princeton university lisa wedeen university of chicago – ben ansell university of oxford erik bleich middlebury college alexandra filindra university of illinois at chicago rebecca gill university of nevada, las vegas soo yeon kim national university of singapore david leal university of texas, austin suzanna linn penn state university melanye price prairie view a&m university treasurer david lublin american university executive director steven rathgeb smith council founded in , the american political science association (apsa) is the leading professional organization for the study of political science and serves more than , members in over countries. with a range of programs and services for individuals, departments, and institutions, apsa brings together political scientists from all fields of inquiry, regions, and occupational endeavors within and outside academe in order to deepen our understanding of politics, democracy, and citizenship throughout the world. the direct advancement of knowledge is at the core of apsa activities. we promote scholarly communication in political science through a variety of initiatives including publishing four distinguished journals: american political science review, perspectives on politics, ps: political science & politics, and the journal of political science education. about the american political science association (apsa) american political science association new hampshire avenue, nw washington, dc - - | www.apsanet.org – menna demessie congressional black caucus foundation terry l. gilmour midland college catherine guisan university of minnesota, twin cities nancy j. hirschmann university of pennsylvania nahomi ichino emory university tamara metz reed college ido oren university of florida jillian schwedler hunter college d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s organized section journals www.apsanet.org/journals american political thought journal of law and courts political behavior presidential studies quarterly interest groups and advocacy journal of race, ethnicity, and politics political communication publius journal of experimental political science legislative studies quarterly politics & gender review of policy research journal of health politics and policy law journal of information technology and politics political analysis policy studies journal urban affairs review new political science politics & religion state politics and policy quarterly journal of d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s american political science review ( ) , , v–vii doi: . /s x © the author(s), . published by cambridge university press on behalf of the american political science association notes from the editors the new editorial team of the american politicalscience review began its term on june , . itwas a day marked by black lives matter pro- tests throughout the united states and much of the world following the killing of george floyd by minne- apolis police officers. in a speech in the rose garden that afternoon, the american president referred to the protesters as “terrorists” and threatened to send the military into cities and states that failed to “control” them. he then authorized the use of tear gas, rubber bullets, and flash grenades to disperse the peaceful crowd that had assembled near the white house in lafayette square so that he could pose for photographs at st. john’s episcopal church, holding a bible. mean- while, muriel bowser—the black woman mayor of the district of columbia, whose residents have no repre- sentation in the us legislature—planned her response to the president’s bold assertion of power. also on that first day of june, the government of hong kong announced it would ban the annual vigil commemorat- ing the victims of the chinese military’s crackdown on the tiananmen square protestors in . more than . million cases of covid- had been reported worldwide, the death toll in the united states alone had exceeded , , and the stay-at-home orders issued by many governments to control the virus’s spread had triggered a global recession. our team had come together more than a year earlier to propose to edit the flagship journal of the discipline of political science. what brought us together initially, and what motivated us as we began our work as editors, was our shared conviction that the questions political scientists need to ask include those that were on full display that first day in june. political scientists need to study power, domination, ideology, political violence, and structural injustice. we need to ask questions about protest and social movements and how oppressed people exercise their agency. we need to study policing and the carceral state, racialized and gendered health and economic inequalities, populism, the political aspects of religion, and political corruption. in our first editorial meetings that afternoon, as we discussed manuscripts and reviews and the ins and outs of the online peer review system, some of us acknowledged having mixed feelings about focusing on journal editing at such a moment. but then we reminded ourselves of why we were doing this work: because of our commit- ment to political science research that helps answer the questions that were so vivid that day. we believe that political science risks becoming irrelevant if it cannot help answer these critically important questions. and we worry that all too often our discipline operates with an overly narrow view of what counts as political science. “that’s an interesting idea, but you need to change your focus so you can generate causal inferences. let’s re-think your project.” “we don’t have large enough sample sizes to study african-american attitudes about those issues. why don’t you look at white racial attitudes instead?” “people don’t answer survey questions about sexual- ity honestly. you should study something other than lgbtq politics.” “if you want to study social movements, switch to sociology.” “that’s a normative question! in political science, we ask empirical questions.” no doubt, many readers of this journal have received counsel along these lines from well-meaning advisors, mentors, and colleagues. our discipline does not shy away from signaling its norms and expectations about what does and does not count as a valid research question and about which methods and approaches are and are not legitimate. as political scientists, we like to tell ourselves that our data and methods are cutting-edge. but all too often, we let our data and methods dictate the questions that we ask. we let our tools tell us what we can and cannot study, when we would be better served by acknowledging the ways our toolkit is incomplete and seeking to expand it. our team came together, in part, around our deep respect for those scholars who push the boundaries of our discipline. these scholars ask questions that require talking to people whom political scientists often ignore; reading as “political” phenomena that many in our discipline view as outside the realm of politics; and adopting approaches, epistemologies, and methods that many political scientists would reject as inappro- priate or inapplicable. those who wield disciplinary power often send such scholars none-too-subtle signals, which announce, “you’re welcome to join us, but only if you do political science the way we do it.” that’s how our discipline disciplines. it’s how gatekeepers tell would-be members that, if they want admission to a top phd program, if they want to get or to keep that tenure-track job, if they want to be read and heard and recognized—then they need to use this set of tools and no others, and they need to ask the questions that these tools can answer. that’s how our discipline trains us, as students of the political. it’s how it turns many of us away from investigating a wide range of crucially important political problems. we believe that research should be well-designed and rigorously executed. and, of course, we believe that a common set of questions, approaches, and methods define our discipline; that’s what it means to be a discipline. in addition, we believe that many of the questions political scientists traditionally have focused on are important ones. however, they don’t come close to exhausting the range of questions that we must ask in order to truly understand politics. our team is commit- ted to making space for work that adopts approaches, epistemologies, and methods that challenge dominant v d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s disciplinary norms and boundaries and to making room in the apsr’s pages for work by scholars who ask questions about political phenomena to which political science has too often given short shrift. we approach these commitments with deep humil- ity, with sincere respect for the journal and its history, and with a profound awareness that there are limita- tions to what any single editorial team can do. we also approach this task with the knowledge that journal editors often function as gatekeepers, preventing scholars who ask the “wrong” questions, or who answer them using unfamiliar tools, from gaining access. we recognize that, inevitably, we will perform a gatekeep- ing function to some degree, but our hope is that we will also be able to serve as a gateway, creating space for work that asks critically important questions about power and politics of the sort that were so palpable on that first day in june. we hope that under our editorship, the apsr will reflect the diversity of the subfields, geographic areas of study, methods, approaches, and identities that are encompassed by the discipline of political science at its most pluralistic. as of the date of this publication, we have been editing the apsr for five months. the work has been challenging and rewarding. our team is nonhierarchi- cal, interdisciplinary, and collaborative. in place of the typical model of a single lead editor directing a group of associate editors, each of whom is assigned the manu- scripts that correspond to a disciplinary subfield, we’ve adopted a rotating co-lead editorship, which is staggered to ensure continuity. our team meets weekly to discuss manuscripts and to deliberate about decisions. each manuscript that our team desk rejects is read by at least two editors, who carefully consider whether it might survive our peer review process. we often deliberate about those manuscripts that we do send for review as well, discussing whether and how they are exemplars of well-conceptualized, well-executed, problem-driven research that addresses timely or timeless questions about power and politics. our team has also adopted a set of rigorous ethical standards for research that involves human participants. we are the first editors to implement the new principles and guidance for human subjects research adopted by the american political science association council in april . six members of our editorial board who have been leaders in recent discussions within the dis- cipline—catherine boone, scott desposato, macartan humphries, lauren maclean, layna mosley, and peri schwartz-shea—have agreed to serve as our advisory board for ethical research. scholars who have submit- ted to or reviewed for the apsr since june will have noticed the changes in the journal’s ethics procedures. details are available through our submissions guidelines and faq page. because research ethics is an important focus of our editorship, we plan to devote our next “notes from the editors” to an in-depth discussion of this topic. at the same time, we’ve begun the important work of modernizing the journal’s outreach to and communica- tion with the apsa membership and broader audi- ences. among the first steps we’ve taken on this front are leveraging social media through our new twitter and facebook accounts and facilitating blog posts that feature apsr authors’ research and inform readers about the editorial team’s vision. look for our new cover design, which will be in place beginning with the first issue of . starting in the new year, each issue of the apsr will feature cover art that makes it visually distinct from the association’s other journals. in addition to conveying some of each issue’s key themes, our covers will signal the scholarly diversity, inclusivity, and collaboration that is the hall- mark of our team. finally, our team has been working with the editors of other journals in the discipline to identify short-, medium-, and long-term responses to the unique chal- lenges that the covid- pandemic poses for scholarly research and publishing. working with cambridge uni- versity press, we have been collecting data about the pandemic’s effects on research productivity, patterns of submissions to the journal, reviewer availability, and time-to-decision. we plan to devote a future “notes from the editors” to sharing these data, discussing some of the best practices identified by political science editors across multiple journals, and outlining our own response. we want to emphasize that none of what our team has accomplished thus far, nor anything that we accom- plish over the course of our term, is or will be a result of our efforts alone. although space constraints prevent us from being able to thank all of the many people who have helped us, we want to take this opportunity to express our gratitude to the staff at both the american political science association and cambridge univer- sity press, who have devoted enormous amounts of time and energy to assisting us in our work. we are particularly grateful to apsa’s executive director, steven rathgeb smith; director of publishing, jon gurstelle; publishing associate, henry chen; presi- dent, paula mcclain; past president, rogers smith; and president-elect, janet box-steffensmeier; as well as cup’s executive publisher, mark zadrozny; politics journals editor, david mainwaring; and senior online peer review controller, wendy moore. we are deeply grateful to thomas könig and the rest of the members of the mannheim team for working with us to make this transition a smooth one, and we want to emphasize that they deserve credit for the articles in the current issue, all of which were submitted under their editorship. the mannheim team’s man- aging editor, alyssa taylor, generously agreed to stay on during our first month. she often took emergency calls at what were, no doubt, exceedingly inconvenient hours in germany. more generally, she provided indis- pensable guidance and reassurance that first month as we began our work. our own managing editor, dragana svraka, has been an indispensable member of our team from day one. we are deeply appreciative of her dedication, and we look forward to working with her in the coming years. further, we appreciate our terrific team of edi- torial assistants, who have helped us move manuscripts along: zoe ang, jessica burch, carolyn anh dang, notes from the editors vi d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://connect.apsanet.org/hsr/principles-and-guidance/ https://connect.apsanet.org/hsr/principles-and-guidance/ https://www.apsanet.org/apsr-submission-guidelines https://www.apsanet.org/publications/journals/american-political-science-review/faqs https://twitter.com/apsrjournal https://www.facebook.com/american-political-science-review- https://www.cambridge.org/core/blog/author/apsr-authors/ https://www.cambridge.org/core/blog/ / / /a-new-era-for-the-american-political-science-review/ https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s james fahey, jack greenberg, kimberly killen, mon- ica komer, jenna pedersen, radha sarkar, kristen smole, thomas vargas, and yufan yang. finally, we are grateful to the distinguished members of the apsr editorial board, who have agreed to work with and to advise us over the next four years, and to all of the authors and reviewers whose scholarly work makes it possible for the apsr to publish cutting-edge research about politics and power. throughout the course of our term, we welcome suggestions and feedback from our colleagues. we know that our success will depend on the active engage- ment and contributions of scholars across the discipline, and we invite you to work with us, forging a partnership to sustain a leading journal and to maintain and to improve the quality and integrity of the american political science review, while broadening its contribu- tor pool, readership, and relevance. notes from the editors vii d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/american-political-science-review/information/editorial-board https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s a m e r i c a n po l i t i c a l s c i e n c e a s s o c i a t i o n • n e w h a m s p h i r e av e . , n w, wa s h i n g t o n , d c , - • w w w. a p s a n e t . o r g the american political science association (apsa) has several major programs aimed at enhancing diversity within the discipline and identifying and aiding students and faculty from under- represented backgrounds in the political science field. these programs include: ralph bunche summer institute (rbsi) (undergraduate juniors) the rbsi program is an annual, intensive five-week program held at duke university. it is designed to introduce to the world of doctoral study in political science those undergraduate students from under-represented racial and ethnic groups or those interested in broadening participation in political science and pursuing scholarship on issues affecting underrepresented groups or issues of tribal sovereignty and governance. application deadline: january of each year. for more information, visit www.apsanet.org/rbsi. apsa minority fellows program (mfp) (undergraduate seniors or ma and phd students) (fall cycle for seniors and ma students, spring cycle for phd students) mfp is a fellowship competition for individuals from underrepresented backgrounds applying to or in the early stages of doctoral programs in political science, designed to increase the number of individuals from under-represented backgrounds with phd’s in political science. application deadline: october and march of each year. for more information, visit www.apsanet.org/mfp. minority student recruitment program (msrp) (undergraduates and departmental members) the msrp was created to identify undergraduate students from under-represented backgrounds who are interested in, or show potential for, graduate study and, ultimately, to help further diversify the political science profession. for more information, visit www.apsanet.org/msrp. apsa mentoring program the mentoring program connects undergraduate, graduate students, and junior faculty to experienced and senior members of the profession for professional development mentoring. apsa membership is required for mentors. apsa staff makes mentor matches twice a year: once at the beginning of the fall semester and once at the beginning of the spring semester. to request a mentor or be a mentor, visit www.apsanet.org/mentor. apsa status committees apsa status committees develop and promote agendas and activities concerning the professional development and current status of under-represented communities within the political science discipline. for a listing of all apsa status committees, visit www.apsanet.org/status-committees. for more information on all diversity and inclusion programs and to read the apsa diversity and inclusion report, visit us online at www.apsanet.org/diversityprograms. please contact kimberly mealy, phd, senior director of diversity and inclusion programs with any questions diversityprograms@apsanet.org. to contribute to an apsa fund, such as the ralph bunche endowment fund, visit us at www.apsanet.org/bunchefund, or the hanes walton jr. fund, visit www.apsanet.org/donate. apsa diversity & inclusion programs d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s 	psr_ _web.pdf 	notes from the editors reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism: an interview with todd gitlin and michael schudson symposium “value and values in the organizational production of news” https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / sociologica. v. n. ( ) issn - https://sociologica.unibo.it/ reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism: an interview with todd gitlin and michael schudson jiang chang* todd gitlin† michael schudson‡ submitted: september , – accepted: september , – published: september , abstract reflecting on more than four decades in dual scholarly careers that cut across the bound- aries between communication, the sociology of culture, and journalism studies, professor todd gitlin and professor michael schudson discuss the growth, evolution, and strengths and weaknesses of the media studies field with professor jiang chang. the three reflect on the origins of the research, the gap between the field of journalism studies and the field of sociology, the role played by journalism in the growing conflict between china and the united states, the relationship between media and political protest, and whether there ought be any cause for optimism regarding the state of democracy in the twenty-first cen- tury. keywords: american sociological association; china; culture; fox news; journalism studies; sociology. * shenzhen university (china);  criver@protonmail.ch;https://orcid.org/ - - - † the columbia university graduate school of journalism, and chair of the ph.d program in communica- tions (united states) ‡ the columbia university graduate school of journalism (united states) copyright © jiang chang, todd gitlin, michael schudson the text in this work is licensed under the creative commons by license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / art. # p. https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://sociologica.unibo.it/ https://orcid.org/ - - - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) jiang chang: thank you both. okay. i’m really honored to do this. the first question is, can you describe your own intellectual history in graduate school? you were involved enrolled in the prestigious sociology department, but you ended up writing dissertation on journalism and media. so was this common at the time? why was there such a flowering of media studies within sociology in the s? michael schudson: so that’s really two questions i guess: how did i get to this topic and why was sociology in general moving toward this topic. the answer of how i got to the topic is somewhat accidentally! i wasn’t strictly interested in media, i was interested in professions. and the dissertation that i wrote compared the emergence of notions of professionalism and objectivity in journalism and in law. and later, after that was finished, and i was considering turning the dissertation into a book, i sent it around to a few people, all of whom said the journalism part is really interesting. the law part really isn’t. so, it became a book about the rise of objectivity in journalism. there was still little general interest in the media at the time, within sociology. i remember telling people that it was my “watergate dissertation” — that law and journalism were the two professional fields (or professionalizing fields in the case of journalism) that were constantly in the news at the time i was coming to a dissertation topic. so those were the ones i worked on. it took a while, in some ways not until my second book — on advertising, that i said, “oh, i study media.” and as you know, although the institutionalization of journalism studies as such came many years after that, there was a turn more broadly to studies of media, popular culture in the news media, particularly because of the political moment — the anti-war move- ment, the various rights movements evolving at the time, all very much present among younger sociologists and graduate students. and everyone i knew was a critic of the news media. todd [gitlin]’s work was very important in pushing people further in that direction, the whole world is watching comes out , i think soon after discovering the news. so does dan schiller’s book, on objectivity in the news. gaye tuchman’s “news as a strategic ritual” ap- peared prominently in american journal of sociology in . i think she was a real pioneer. i’d also heard that [herbert] gans was also working on the news media but that he’d been working on this for many years off and on, finally publishing deciding what’s news in , i believe. but i think this was all a response to public events and a new, critical take on journalism, and the fact that a great many standard practices of journalism seemed to be inadequate to the mo- ment. todd gitlin: i’m not sure what the right answer is. let me explain about my own gradu- ate school trajectory. it was unusual. i did a master’s degree at the university of michigan in political science in to . when i was deeply involved in student radical activity. i was involved with the organization students for a democratic society and very much involved in organizing for civil rights, against south african apartheid and american corporate connec- tions, and then against the vietnam war. for the next nine years i worked as a political organizer or community organizer, and a journalist, and that was the core of my life. i wrote quite a lot of poetry too, and a book about communityorganizinginchicago, butprimarilyipublishedjournalisminwhatwethencalled the “underground press,” which was not literally underground but was alternative, a more im- passioned form of journalism than the traditional kind. when i decided to go back to the university i wasn’t originally planning to write about me- dia. i decided to go to berkeley, i was living in san francisco. i was looking for a program that would be unconfining, that would be relatively open to my various interests, which were not only sociological but cultural and literary. i also had grand — and i would now say grandiose https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) — theoretical ambitions when in the late s i started to become influenced by the idea that we had entered into a post scarcity society. and i was interested in the concept of scarcity. so when i decided to go back to get a ph.d. at berkeley, my initial thought was that i would try to write an intellectual history of the idea of scarcity. now, i had not intended to go on with media studies. after taking a year of courses and passing my qualifying exams, for which i submitted quite a lot of previously published work, one of my professors, bob blauner, told me that he liked an article i had written in early about the mutual influences of the media and the student movement. he thought that was a promising topic. i had written this piece for a new left nonacademic journal, leviathan, while out of school. i had read very little of the sociological literature on media; or on movements, for that matter. but i had a lot of experience and i had observations which were, i would say, both intuitive and earned through reflection on experience. the article, “ notes on television and the movement,” was quite speculative. but it had in it some of the ideas about the interaction between media and the new rough that i later developed. a couple of years later i revised it (“sixteen notes”) for publication in the literary journal tri-quarterly. so bob blauner said to me, “i thought that was a very interesting piece. why don’t you develop it?” and that was actually the first time i thought about doing so. a professor’s sug- gestion can be mighty powerful! in fact, if i had been stubborn and kept to my plan of writing the intellectual history of the idea of scarcity, i would still be working on that, i’m sure. in any event, i had been interested in media for years, in a way that combined curiosity and lack of discipline. in graduate school at berkeley, i spent a whole year catching up on the disciplinary field, and was rather astonished and appalled, frankly, at how thin it was. that led me, in , to write my critique of the dominant paradigm (which was published in theory and society in ). i wrote it because i wanted to digest and react to my underwhelming experience of reading the field. then i startedto encounter other sociologistsof more or less mygeneration who were working on media in a fresh way. one was michael schudson, the other was gaye tuchman. they were the prime ones, along with the slightly older harvey molotch, then at the university of california, santa barbara, who had written an important article after the big oil spill in , first in a popular journal and eventuallyin an academicjournal. “accidents, scandals and routines,” he and his co-author called it — a very detailed attempt to reconstruct the process by which events become news. now, at that time, i was largely unaware that there was a field called communications. there was a ph.d program in communications at stanford, but for me their behaviorist em- piricismwouldhavebeentoonarrow. iwasinasociologydepartmentbecauseiaspiredtoward a sociological imagination. my advisors were quite sympathetic to my pursuit of a sociological understanding of media. in fact, my thesis advisor, bill kornhauser, many years earlier, as a graduate student at the university of chicago, had participated in some pioneering research in about television’s representation of a parade to honor general macarthur after pres- ident truman fired him as commander in korea. gladys and kurt lang positioned graduate students around the parade in real time and then compared what they observed with the me- dia coverage. bill kornhauser was one of the observers, and moreover, he was interested in the concept of mass society. so he was very encouraging. my committee in general, i think, appre- ciated that the field of sociology, of media or as we then said, mass communication, was quite thin. i knew herb gans’ work, which i appreciated, but there wasn’t much else. i still don’t understand quite why the three of us, michael, gaye and myself, stumbled into the field more https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) or less at the same time. jc: but how did the study of media institutionalize? because it has been a quite mature discipline worldwide. why do so many sociologists who studied the media finally decide to leave sociology? ms: in my case, just to be autobiographical again, the faculty at harvard sociology who most influenced me were the least sociological in terms of professional connection. my dis- sertation advisor was daniel bell, who was given a ph.d at columbia in sociology for already published work in journalism in several different magazines. he was basically a magazine jour- nalistwithaninsatiablethirstforsocialandpoliticalknowledge. hecametocolumbiatoteach undergraduates and he wrote an early book about the undergraduate curriculum at columbia, which is quite an interesting book on general education that contains seeds of several of his later, more famous works. but he never studied in a graduate school. the other great influence on me was david ries- man, whose only advanced degree was in law. he learned what sociology he learned by teaching undergraduatesattheuniversityofchicago. hetaughtinthesamecoursethatdanielbellalso taught in — and at the same time. there’s a great story riesman told me about teaching under- grads there in a room next to daniel bell’s classroom. he could hear the clamor and excitement of students’ voices in bell’s class through the wall. it was intimidating when his own students were practically silent! when i knew him, of course, he was world-famous and didn’t need to be intimidated by anyone. but i was not socialized in graduate school into learning about the american sociological association. i’m not sure bell or riesman ever went to an asa meet- ing. if they did, they did so as outsiders. they would never have been on committees. they probably never voted in asa elections. they were sociologists in intellectual orientation, but not in professional orientation or training. now at some point, i don’t remember the dates, but i started attending asa meetings. i organized a small, informal group of sociologists there who were interested in culture, popular culture,andsoon,andwestartedmeeting,withoutanagenda,excepttolearnwhatoneanother were doing. maybe this lasted for three years or so? had i known more about the asa, i would have said, “hey, we should be a section! we should organize ourselves formally within the asa.” but this never occurred to me because i didn’t know what a section was, you know, no one had ever taught me that. or mentioned it to me so far as i know. and so the sociology of culture section at asa got founded maybe five years after that. and people who knew more about institutions than i did put it together and did all the work to make it happen. so people drifted elsewhere looking for jobs in a tight job market — and communication was a growing field. and it was, i think it’s fair to say, it was an intellectually limited field and one that borrowed almost everything from social psychology and sociology. a little bit from political science, a little bit from elsewhere, but it was an importer of ideas and intellectual tra- ditions, and at that point a lot of people, some of us who sort of accidentally started studying the media, benefited from that. my initial job in university of chicago was in sociology. there was no communication department there. but my next job, at the university of california, san diego, also in sociology, came with the understanding that i would teach in the undergradu- ate communication program that was an interdisciplinary program that only later became a department. tg: i had a sociological imagination before i went back to graduate school. i carried soci- ology with me in my head, or at least aspired to do so. i did not care what was the departmental setting for my thinking. but when i think back on it, in the s, if one wanted to write about https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) media, one might write straight history, or undertake some empirical research on media effects in political science. for a deeper look, sociology was the place to be. in my view this was partly because sociology was not as confined as it later became — not as quantified. berkeley, i’m happy to say, was the least quantified of the major american departments. what happened in sociology was a boom in the study of culture. the culture section of the american sociological association rather quickly grew large. it was so large, in fact, that it was in a way ungainly. for better or worse, it became difficult to demarcate the media as such — media institutions, media flows, the relation between media and ideology, between media and other institutions. perhaps the sociological study of media later dwindled in part because it was subsumed within the larger currents of the sociology of culture. jc:mynextquestionisaboutthedifferencesbetweenthestudyofjournalismandthestudy of media. how is the study of journalism different than the study of the media? are we too focused on journalism and not enough on larger media systems or is the opposite true? tg: i am inclined to believe that the study of the media generally is the over-arching frame- work and that the study of journalism is largely nested within it. i felt this more and more acutely over the years. when i was first writing about media in the s, in my dissertation, i was operating on the premise that the way in which media operate on people is primarily through ideology, through framing, through conceptual impact, and i wrote on that premise. for many years thereafter, some intuition about the shortcomings of that approach nagged at me. i came to think my initial approach to media was too intellectualized. i did a second study in – , on television entertainment. occasionally i had odd thoughts about what i called the ontology of television — what kind of phenomenon is this, the presence of televi- sion, the attention to it? what is the nature of its presence in our social life? i scribbled notes and put them in an ontology file. in the end i used almost none of it in my book, inside prime time, which came out in . i had the intuition that if we look at the interaction that takes place between people and media — and here i was thinking particularly about television — the interaction was far more enmeshed in emotional life than purely cognitive life. and that in fact, cognition floated on the surface of emotion. so this long period of rethinking culminated in the book that i wrote in , , and published in , called media unlimited. there i tried to reconstruct the history of media, including the history of journalism as a subset within the context of the history and sociology of emotion. now, some journalists who resent seeing journalism enclosed within the area of media stud- ies. i remember one review of media unlimited by a journalist who liked the book very much but said, “i don’t understand what all this is about the media,” because that’s not how he thought of his profession. but i think in a way it’s a seed of professional arrogance to think that the way people at large approach journalism is essentially different from the way in which they approach any other kind of media content. i had a trace of this intuition in my dissertation, the whole world is watching — that the ways in which journalism gets our attention is not essentially different from the way which it approaches us as entertainment or mood or whatever you want to call it. in other words, a headline or a news photo or even the structure of an article, the forms of emphasis and so on, use a repertory of appeals and approaches which is not essentially different from what a movie maker does or a musician does. there are differences, of course. journalism is a special style of media. but i did feel more and more strongly, and continue to feel very strongly, that journalism is an art of human sensa- tion and attention-getting. that it is, in aristotle’s terms, a form of rhetoric. and that among https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) its rhetorical devices and commitments is to a certain conception of truth. journalism should not operate the same way cartoonists do. i don’t want the walt disney company producing the news. but the human interaction is not so different. ms: right. well, again, i’ll start autobiographically. in around , probably about or or so, i began work on what later became the sociology of news in a ww norton series thatjeffalexanderedited. andwhathehadaskedmetodowaseither, ican’trememberexactly now, a sociology of culture book, or a sociology of popular culture book. and i said that that’s beyond my capacity. it’s just too vast a topic. i wouldn’t know where to begin. how about a sociology of news? and he said okay. that was what i thought i could handle and what i would enjoy doing and that was my entry (published ) in the series. there is such a thing as a sociology of news. and at that time, we still didn’t have jour- nals like journalism or journalism studies. we would have many others later, but those were just getting off the ground or hadn’t started yet. so there gets to be an institutionalization of this study of journalism. (what year did the “journalism studies” section of the international communication association begin? i suspect a few years after that.) journalism quarterly (later journalism and mass communication quarterly) existed but it drew contributors and readers largely from j-school faculty with very little interaction with or interest in sociology or history or political science or the more adventuresome developments in communication stud- ies. when i wrote the sociology of news, you know, i was still teaching at the ucsd depart- ment of communication. which had at that point , , faculty. it was deeply interdisci- plinary. all of the early hires had to be appointed in some other department, because commu- nication couldn’t make appointments. so michael cole was in psychology, carol padden was in linguistics. dan hallin was in political science. i was in sociology, chandra mukerji was in sociology, and so forth, with a % appointment in the program on communication. and i think for all of us it was communication that quickly became our real home because it was so much fun. so interesting. and the interdisciplinarity of it was absolutely crucial. people there just loved it and didn’t want to be confined to the discipline they had done in graduate school. so journalism studies now has its own journals. it has its own section of the ica. it has its own book series though different university presses. it has some affiliations with outside fields. it’s notably mixed up with political science through a jointly sponsored journal, political communication. i think political science especially has been a strong influence on it over the years. but sometimes i do feel that my younger and intellectually talented colleagues settle too comfortably into “journalism studies” as the world that defines them. people are too content to focus only on journalism as if it were the whole universe. journalism’s a very important insti- tution. but so are political parties. party systems matter. and so on and so forth. the economy matters. and if you are thinking and writing only about journalism, you’re going to miss stuff. and i think media-centrism is an endless danger in journalism studies. looking at the culture of cultural studies, or the study of culture, more widely would help but so, you know, so would knowing a little about political power. there’s a lot besides the news that makes a difference. i once told graduate students that the concept most sorely absent in communication studies is the concept of “institutions.” institutions matter, both in and around the media. jc: i totally, with you on that journalism scholars sometimes are too satisfied with the field. you know, in china, we even give phd degrees on just journalism to people and there are a lot of scholars have been advocating for, like a pure journalism studies field for many years. so, maybe these are very different contexts, but still, i think the symptoms are alike everywhere. https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) my next question is about this special issue, which takes a look at web metrics. there’s an argument that web metrics contribute to the potential rationalization of journalistic work, a la max weber. but the politics of the last three years seem anything but rational. so is rationaliza- tion still a viable thesis in journalism or elsewhere? or are we in a different era? one that goes beyond this rationalization framework? tg: there are still elements of journalistic practice that conform to weber’s model of ra- tionalization — which doesn’t mean that the products are rational. it means that there are impersonal procedures which are brought into play by the practitioners. they are instrumen- tally rational. there are usually unwritten rules of the form: if x happens, you should do y. if you talk to one witness about an event you should talk to another witness. those are rational procedures. those still apply. however, the entire ecology of journalism has been transformed by the proliferation of the means of media. now, i argued in media unlimited that such transformations are not entirely unprecedented and that if we look at the history of consumption in the west, and the role of media in helping to constitute experience, we see a continuity of development in which new forms develop, new technologies develop, and then take their place among the other technologies. at different times, different ones come to the fore and others retreat into the background. but the spirit or the sensibility of media is governed by a hunger for speed — speed of transmission and speed of apprehension — and by a search for what i call disposable emotions. the astounding multiplication of media that was taking place in the late s was both new and not new. i mean the magnitude of it was new, the ability to publish, the ability to start a platform with no capital, et cetera, but within a framework of technology diffusion in general. let’s lookattheearlyhistoryofradio. radiowasfirstdevelopedintheusasbothamilitary communicationdeviceandthenasacommercialdevice. butduringthatperiodbetweenworld war one and , radio was basically an amateur pursuit, decentralized, a sort of hobby, using shortwave. and it was completely chaotic, which is why the us government stepped in, with the federal radio act in , to rationalize it so that broadcasters did not interfere with each other’s frequencies. so even in the case of radio you have this diffusion of initiative. you have this decentralization of the use of media. and then there was a largely successful attempt by institutions, in that case the state, and of course also commercial enterprises, to rationalize the allocations through licensing. so when you look into that history, what happened in the late s is not quite so surprising. you have a dynamic of expansion and also a dynamic of control and concentration. ms: i’m struggling with this question. and i did not go back to my weber see how much he saw rationalization as a description of what was happening, or as normative, something that was good. and maybe we still have that question. is rationalization a good thing or not? i mean for him it was clearly part of modernization, part of the, as he said at least in the english translation, the “disenchantment of the world,” rationality and schemes and systems of ratio- nality and reasoning on the basis of data like people keeping credit and debit account books in businesses as they had not done before the th century. i don’t know. weber wrote at length about religion, he was very interested in religion, and whether he saw the displacement of religion as a good thing i don’t know. a weber scholar would probably be able to answer that, but leaving aside what weber thought, we can see web metrics and such as a good example of rationalization. let’s leave less to chance and guesswork. let’s know how many people are out there reading how much and for how long and we can measure our impact. you know, we do it too in academia with journal “impact factors.” maybe https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) we should eliminate and forbid the reporting of journal impact factors and just make our own judgments about whether this journal or that one publishes good work or not. we have not ultimately rationalized how we, at least here in the united states, deal with hiring and promotion of faculty. it’s peer review. and there’s some wonderful research on how peer review is conducted and what kind of factors influence it and i have just spent three years on a committee at columbia that is advisory to the university provost on all tenure decisions across the university. and there’s no question there: the numbers matter. and for a scientist, dollars matter: how many and how big the grants are that you’ve received (ideally from the federal government from nih or nimh or nsf. all of that does count, but it is not all that counts. in the end, i would say from my experience, people still ask and want answers to the question of, did this person’s work make a difference in this person’s field or subfield? i mean my first book is my most cited work. it’s not my best work, but it’s the most cited one. it would also be very interesting to know whether cited work is cited accurately. from what i have seen, maybe or % of those who cite my claims in discovering the news misunderstand what i claimed! so what? well, when it comes to what matters in tenure decisions, that’s not what matters or what should matter. what matters is whether the work is intellectually sound work or not, of a quality deserving of a permanent position at this or that college or university. the numbers help but they don’t answer the question. js: well, i like to respond a little bit to your comment about your first book. you know, as your official chinese translator of that book, i did my very best to at least make the translation clear and accurate. but i don’t know how people are going to cite it. but i still think it is a very good contribution. and maybe even if when people are setting it in the wrong way, they still get inspired and enlightened by the book. so maybe it’s not that bad thing. that is just my opinion. ms: you’re right. i hope you’re right. jc: well, it seems that many of the most passionate critics of the institutional press have in the past decade become its defenders, at least in its ideal form. so why do you think this might be? tg: my goodness. that’s a good question. i would say because the political and cultural landscape has changed so dramatically. when i and people like me criticized the mainstream journalism in the s, we were in a sense presupposing the model of rational discourse. we believed that media should be judged by immanent critique. that is, we had in our minds a model of journalism as an approach to transparency in relation to the truth. we then criticized existing journalism against that standard. we pointed out that, contrary to naïve ideas of ob- jectivity, there were frames. judgements were being made through institutions that had their preferences and priorities, not necessarily self-consciously. we had, in a funny way, an ideal not so different from habermas’s idea of the ideal speech situation. that is we believed in not only the goodness but the practicality of a model of ratio- nal critical discourse, as habermas called it. so then we held the new york times or cbs or any other institution to account against that standard. but we were naïve about how durable that standard was. at just the moment when we were criticizing the performance of the me- dia, the basis for that standard was eroding. nobody imagined the internet. now if we go forward to the s, it’s clear both in the politics in the us and many other countries, and also throughout the cultural apparatus, that the standard has dissolved. now we’re contending with the world of competing propaganda. let me go back for a sec- ond. the model of journalism whose development michael wrote about in his book governed a certain period of american journalism. in fact, it ran more or less from the progressive era https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) through the evolution of television up through the s. that triumphalist model exalted journalism at its most heroic. journalism as the institution that exposes the king, that stands as an independent force to hold power accountable. there was a golden age, institutionally so, so that at the time when i was writing in the s about how cbs covered the s, the three network news broadcasts accounted for more than three quarters of the viewing public. so when walter cronkite, the renowned anchorman on cbs, closed his broadcast by say- ing, “that’s the way it is,” he was articulating a norm which had a great deal of credibility. of course some people disagree: there was a right-wing critique of him. but the norm was rein- forced by the great successes of american journalism in those years. number one, reporting on civil rights activity. number two, critical reporting on the vietnam war, which was slow to develop but then did develop very aggressively. third, coverage of the crimes of the nixon administration. those were the years when young people flocked into journalism schools because now a journalist was a hero, as in “all the president’s men.” that world is gone. because it’s gone, thoseofuswhowerecriticalofthemainstreamforitsdistortionsandomissions, cametorealize thedegreetowhichweactuallydependedonanassumptionofcommongrounding, acommon standpoint that more or less rational people could share and on the basis of which we could make judgements and come to act, as walter lippmann famously wrote in public opinion. i would just add to what you said before about the golden age of journalism. as you know, the myth of american journalism is that it was always a truth-seeking operation, that it was an enlightenment product, that it was proof of our conviction that you shall know the truth and the truth shall make you free. but in fact, that’s not how american journalism began. ameri- can journalism was scandalous, wild, often deliberately misleading in order to both accomplish political missions and also to increase readership. in fact, the golden age is not typical of the history of journalism in america. it’s the exception. and we’ve now gone back to the period of the s and s and s and s when the news was polemical, partisan, rather hysterical, frequently misleading or straight-out deceitful. in this longer view of the history of american journalism, the golden age of journalism is a parenthetical period. it’s not the norm. we have now returned to what was originally the norm, which was wild. ms: yeah, i like that question. i think that the premise of the question is right. and i remember noticing that in the british case, when much of the most interesting academic work on the news media was highly critical, it came from scholars on the political left (and that’s still the case). but at a certain point as british politics moved to the right in the thatcher years, some of those scholars started to think, maybe the bbc isn’t as bad as we said! and maybe its “even-handedness” is not selling out, maybe it’s actually upholding some kind of unintentional modesty that accepts fairness as a professional ideal and turns out to be useful to society. journalism has moved strongly (especially since the late s in the united states) to a more interpretive style. and i think the extent to which it has done that has not been recognized by american journalists. and i think insufficiently recognized in journalism studies as well. we still worry about what i would like to call an “old fashioned notion of objectivity problem.” my own contribution to this was with a former graduate student, katherine fink, on the rise of what we called contextual journalism and the extensive move towards providing the audi- ence more contextual information. and there are half a dozen other published papers by other people with comparable results, showing that “hey, guess what? the criticism of standard ob- jectivity from the s and s, took hold! somebody listened! they listened less to the academics then than to other journalists who were making similar criticisms. but the criticisms took hold; if you’re just saying,”he said she said,” and not making your own judgments about https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) what actually happened, you’re not doing the public a favor. you have the new journalists who are experts in science, sometimes in medicine or public health, or politics in particular. they may have phds or m.d.’s but, more often, they don’t. they’re just smart and savvy writers with a close acquaintance with the people who do help produce new expert knowledge. and these journalists are in a position to say, “some things are plausible, some things are wrong.” and today journalists need to say that, obviously in the us with a president who can’t stop lying, when the leader of the world’s most powerful nation has an unending thirst for winning attention and for just winning, and not a passing thought for making a distinction between what’s true or what is likely to be true and what’s sheer fantasy or self-serving wishes. well, “he said, she said” doesn’t do the job. i think more journalists should take courses, or at least listen to a lecture or two on the recent history of journalism. in the us they like to say, “oh, well, journalism all goes back to the first amendment and the founders believed in the press as watchdogs on government.” well, not really. thomas jefferson — who stands as a statue outside columbia journalism school — thought prosecuting newspapers for libel was a fine idea: only the states, not the federal government, should do it. you don’t hear that very often. jefferson had very different notions about what the press was about, and the press they were talking about has changed dramatically over time, especially in the last fifty years. and we don’t recognize that. jc: okay, thank you for this. i wanted to get a bit more contemporary now. particularly i want to talk about several very big protests that have been shaking both journalism and the word, the #metoo movement or the more recently black lives matter. and it seems that jour- nalism is increasingly taking aside in these political disputes. do you agree that this is happen- ing? ms: yes, i’d agree for the most part. granted my reading is limited, particularly since the pandemic. the newspaper i read most carefully, the new york times, has long been criticized for being too liberal. at one point, (july , ) daniel okrent, the first “public editor” at the paper (whose task was to fearlessly assess criticism of and complaints about the paper and publish his conclusions) asked in a headline, “is the new york times a liberal newspaper?” and answered in the column’s first sentence: “of course it is.” this was an informal look, not a quantitative study, and he emphasized that the paper was liberal on social issues, notably on same-sex marriage. that was a very interesting column for a new york times insider to write, pointing to a one-sidedness to the kinds of issues and topics that get taken up in in the paper. it doesn’t mean you don’t quote people accurately, it doesn’t mean you don’t occasionally have a profile of an interesting anti-abortion activist, but in the preponderance of the news, the liberal bias was obvious years ago. so in that sense, i think, yeah. it might be more even-handed in someothermainstreamnewsmedia, likelythebroadcasttelevisionnetworks, butpubliceditors there would probably still find a liberal tilt. jc: but the fact that mainstream journalism is more and more taking a position, do you think it is good or bad for democracy? tg: is mainstream journalism increasingly taking sides? yes, with a caveat. the major news organizations are socially liberal, not economically liberal. so for quite a while, in part because of the social classes from which the media elites emerge, they were (eventually, at least) sympathetic to feminism, they were sympathetic to equal rights activities, to gay rights, to the disabled, to minorities of different kinds. liberal on social questions — not on economic ques- tions. on the subject of economic inequality, the public is actually to the left of the media. but on matters that directly connect to the social experience of the news organizations, they are liberal. so it’s not astonishing that the #metoo movement would find a welcome within https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) mainstream media. and if we look at coverage of the black lives matter demonstrations, i see a direct continuity from coverage of the civil rights movement and violations of civil rights in the late s to the coverage of the murder of george floyd in the present. now we have videos, so we get more intimate and more decentralized images, but the effect ofthebroadcastof, let’ssay,therodneykingbeatingin andthenthetrayvonmartinand michael brown killings, and so many others, all the way up to george floyd and jacob blake. the coverage of those events conforms to the premise that journalism is obliged to show abuses of power. and so the coverage of the birmingham demonstrations in , which were elec- trifying, where we saw police dogs used against demonstrators, we saw high velocity fire hoses being used as weapons, that coverage which was very important to expanding the civil rights movement and sympathy for what african americans were going through — the same spirit is at work now. the difference is that now there are many more points of entry to large audiences, so that a george floyd video becomes immense even though (or maybe partly because) it was recorded by amateurs. the scale of these uprisings is of such magnitude that i have to say, even against the back- ground of what i’ve described, i’m astonished at how widespread the coverage has been and how receptive in spirit, if not always in detail, it’s been to the demands and the activities of black lives matter. so that very quickly we saw it became the big story. now, of course, there are many reasons why that story spread. i don’t have a hypodermic model of why that hap- pens. but very quickly it became clear that this was to be a big story. anguish, horror, and rage erupted from just beneath the surface. perhaps the movement of was also swept along by all the thwarted energy — pent up by the pandemic and quarantine — finding an affirma- tive outlet. journalism’s attention to black lives matter was immense and surprising. but the outlines were not brand new. jc: but the fact that mainstream journalism is more and more taking a position, do you think it is good or bad for democracy? tg: i think that the commitment of mainstream journalism to truth — primarily the truth that is discomforting, uncomfortable, disturbing — that commitment is absolutely essential. sometimes mainstream journalism goes rather too far in its alignment with the vocabulary or the spirit of the protests, whether it’s the #metoo movement or black lives matter or others. but in general i think that it’s a step forward to demolish the fantasies about objectivity which were always overrated, always overambitious. all the more so because of the rise of the right- wing propaganda, committed to lying and distortion and falsehood, that took hold of a seg- ment of our population. then mainstream journalism, obsessed with a need for “balance” and “nonpartisanship,” learn how stupid — how distorting — it is to say: “well, some people say the moon is a rock miles from earth and some people say it’s made of green cheese.” some have learned, some haven’t — not enough. when the green cheese caucus is so large, it’s essential to try to arrive at the truth. now that doesn’t mean you abandon the ideal of fairness. it doesn’t mean that you write falsehoods. it doesn’t mean that you neglect contrary views. no, it’s important to resist the appeals of propaganda. but still and all, when even the aspiration to truth is being trampled thousands of times every day, i think it is a matter of enlightenment conviction to recommit bringing the truth to light. ms: when i was teaching undergraduates at uc-san diego, and these are very good stu- dents, they were top of their high school classes in california, they did not understand there was a difference between an editorial and a straight news story and a news analysis. for them, it was basically, it’s either in the newspaper or it’s not in the newspaper. but from inside jour- https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) nalism, there’s a big difference. and newspapers were, you know, advocates of policies and persons and parties for several hundred years. but the rise of a notion of objectivity more or less amounted to “let’s separate what we advocate as a news organization in relation to our pol- itics and our citizenship, and what we describe as going on in the world and keeping people up to date with what’s going on in the world.” that was the first change. and then at some point accelerating quickly in the s there was, as i said earlier, an increase in overt interpretation, or contextualizing of the news. half or more of each front page these days is interpretation — interpretation is sort of taken for granted as part of the job of journalism. how otherwise could an ordinary reader understand this complicated and quickly moving world of ours? within some kind of limits that i can’t define, that’s good for democracy. i think that the move toward interpretation has been good for creating news that goes deeper and communi- cates more fully than the flat (and frankly boring) news i read in the s and early s. jc: should that be without limits? ms: you know, i think that that’s a question that journalists themselves know is on their agenda. if i were in a decision making role in a news organization, i think i’d have to figure it out. day by day and moment by moment and situation by situation. i don’t have a general ruling. i do think it’s a question for journalists to figure out — without government intervention. thereareotherissuesaboutthepublicationofhatespeechandthepublicationofsheerliesthat the big online platforms have to deal with every day and i think it would be a public service for them to share publicly how they go about this, how they define the principles by which they make their judgments. i haven’t thought through the whole question here where european countries are quite different from us in terms of forbidding hate speech. i mean, at present, it doesn’t look like european policies been any more successful than the us government’s more “hands off” policy in preventing resurgence of not just hate speech but hate parties. jc: okay. all right. okay. that’s pretty much about mainstream journalism in the us. and my next question is of special interest of mine. it’s about so many readers of this journal are very interested in the tensions between china and the united states and how it has been increasingly playing out in the realm of speech. tg: correct. jc: we see that journalists are being expelled and technology companies subject to increas- ing pressures from the state and so on. so do you think we are headed to another cold war, which is a very hot topic here in china at this moment? tg: i think it all depends on the decisions of the leadership of the two countries. i think it could go toward a bitter, more polarized cold war. probably not military conflict, though perhaps skirmishes at the edges. but i think the situation is also manageable if leadership is wise on both sides. obviously our current political leadership is the opposite of wise. it is both belligerent and stupid, a toxic combination. relations will be complicated and difficult but neither the united states nor china is going to go away. jc:: no. tg: they’re both immense and powerful within different spheres. and they are also, as we all know now, or should know, deeply interdependent. jc: yeah, that’s true. tg:: what is an american corporation? what is a chinese corporation, etc.? my com- puter came here from china. and i don’t know where skype came from. i don’t know who invented skype. in any event, i think the most likely scenario is one of managed conflict and managed cooperation simultaneously. and wise leadership can contain the antagonisms. https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) jc: so what role should journalism play in managing this new superpower of confronta- tion? tg: well, i think journalists should do what they should be doing in any case. they should be trying to hold power accountable, they should be trying to explain realities. journalism in the us anyway, in the west in general and perhaps in china too, is too often imprisoned in events rather than social and institutional developments. so the very existence of supply chains, so crucial to understanding what’s happened in china-us relations over the recent decades, needs to be described and explained. and not just once. again and again and again because there are illusions. first of all, that china is “stealing our jobs.” there’s some truth there, but it’s exaggerated. there is the illusion that the us must bow down to dictatorship. there is the illusion that the us is golden and china is wicked. all this stuff has to be stopped and the picture needs to be filled out as it evolves. sometimes chi- nese leaders and people will be angry at why the americans are so interested in the uighurs and sometimes americans will be angry because they think chinese propaganda is undermining our democratic system. trump, accused on the basis of much evidence of collaborating with putin, now conjures a fantasy of millions of fraudulent ballots being deposited by the chinese government in amer- ican mailboxes. this is insane. so all such crazy claims need to be cleared away. but there’ll continue to be us-china frictions. there are different ideas about journalism, about hong kong, about other matters. that’s okay. we’ll see what evolves. but i do think journalism can inflame things. we saw that in the early cold war and in the s very dramatically in both the us and the soviet union. but it needn’t go that way. it needn’t fan the flames of just raw, stupid hatred — and shouldn’t. ms: well, look, theoptimist inmeisstrong. lookatthenewsthismonth. thefirstwoman of color to be on a major party ticket in the history of the country is a sign of progress. i mean, it’s more a sign of progress if biden and harris get elected and that’s yet to be seen. but i think a second four years of a person as ill equipped to lead a constitutional democracy as mr. trump could be really disastrous for this country and for the world and certainly for us-china rela- tions. so far as i know trump still thinks that covid- is a chinese invention. there was the eisenhower cabinet officer who said what’s good for general motors is good for the coun- try. trump seems to think what’s good for mar-a-lago is good for the country. if he actually thinks about what’s good for the country at all. trump will pull out all the stops to be reelected. i think this would be dreadful for us- china relations. and that would be very bad for the world. would there be a new kind of cold war? i think right now it’s mostly an economic cold war which is not the same thing as a cold war. trump’s views about the coronavirus notwithstanding. i don’t think fighting the chinese is as much on his mind as appeasing russia seems to be. you know, every time that a journalist is expelled from china, the western news media are horrified. but at the same time. any time physically attacking a reporter is encouraged by the president of the united states, every journalist in the country is also horrified. so when the police enter a newsroom in hong kong, it’s on the front page of the new york times. even if it’s pure, old fashioned, here’s what happened reporting. you have to make a judgment about where in the paper that belongs. and they made a judgment and it was the front page. that’s a valuejudgment. youcan’tescapevaluejudgmentsinjournalism. andthat’swhattheacademic analysis of ideology and ideal of objectivity (including my own) has never fully come to terms with. and now it’s in our faces. and somehow we have to come to terms with that. jc:somylastquestionwouldbewhatcanbothsociologyandthestudyofnewscontribute https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) to the situation? tg: well, sociology is always, i think, called upon to try to clarify the dynamics of societies, to clarify what’s at stake in history, which entails trying to see events within a context of pro- cesses and institutional power. parenthetically i think sociology would be far more successful and influential in america if it were less jargon-ridden and more concerned with accumulating a popular public, which is not technically proficient but which deserves to have a deeper view than simply the hysteria of the moment. so i think sociology would be all the more effective if it reached out to a larger public. and to some extent we’re seeing this. i mean one of the fascinating things in the black lives matter period is how some social scientists have gotten an important extensive hearing for their explanations of, and debates on, the history of racism in america. the idea of insti- tutional racism, which used to be highly controversial (as counterposed to “prejudice,” which was strictly a matter of individual consciousness), is far more acceptable today. you now hear politicians speaking of it. twenty years ago, it would have been a taboo, left-wing phrase. soci- ologists can take some credit for altering the discourse for the good. jc: and what could the study of news, the journalism studies, could contribute? tg: it’s always important to see how the institutions actually work as opposed to how they say they work and i’m sure this is true in china as it’s true in the united states. so if we understand that news doesn’t come from nowhere but that it’s a product of social decisions, that institutions are at work, that human beings are producing the news, and that the news is not growing on trees, that’s enlightening. the details are enlightening. at the same time, journalism has a serious struggle today because it is itself an embattled institution. it’s embattled mostly by commercial pressures, in particular the collapse of the newspaper industry. so, in addition to trying to make mainstream journalism more thorough and smart, journalists also need to create new platforms for reaching people and attempting to explain why we’re in this crisis and what might be done about it. ms: i think what journalism does — various forms of journalism, from the most profes- sionalized objective journalism to advocacy journalism and all the things in between- they are all trying to make sense of information in an incredibly interdependent globalized world. i keep teaching and keep going back and reading walter lippman’s public opinion, which has been pretty heavily attacked in recent years. i mean, he’s dead, but so it doesn’t matter to him, but various scholars have attacked him for being an elitist, for wanting experts to rule; he never wanted experts to rule. he did say that none of us in a world that has become so complicated can take in and assimilate all the information that bombard us. he was writing long before twitter. and he felt overwhelmed, overwhelmed by how much information there was. and he noticed members of congress couldn’t absorb it all, let alone the rest of us for whom politics is not a full-time job. and — i think he was wrong about this — but he also said there was a world of small, self-contained communities where people had enough knowledge of everybody else in town, and everything else going on in town, that they could make well informed judgments about what to do. but he assumed that the problem was not the people were stupid. the problem was that the world had become overwhelmingly complex. and that, you know, we have lives to lead, we have jobs to do, we have children to take care of, we have elderly to take care of, we have lots to do. and we can’t be spending the entire day reading the new york times, or better still other news outlets, or these days easily other news outlets that that’s just not within human capacity. and that’s the problem. that’s why we have to rely on experts who devote their lives to trying to get a fair handle on some specific small micro domains so that somebody https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / reflecting on forty years of sociology, media studies, and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) knowshowtodoacolonoscopyandsomebodyelseknowshowtoteachfreshmencomposition and on and on. and that’s why we need journalists, to translate for us to help translate for us. journalists can’t do it all and they won’t do all of it. but they do take a remarkable lunge at this unbearably large task and that’s why journalism matters so much. we’d like it to be as good as possible. and the world is not about to get less complicated, as we can see. jc: ok, thank you both. i think that’s pretty much all the questions that i want to ask. i would like to thank you for all these very inspiring and enlightening comments you just give, especiallyforme, ajournalismresearcherinanauthoritariancountry, strivingtostayoptimistic. so i want to really, you know, show my appreciation for your time and your energy. jiang chang: shenzhen university (china) https://orcid.org/ - - -  criver@protonmail.ch;  https://szu.academia.edu/jiangchang jiang chang, ph.d., is distinguished professor of media and communication studies at shenzhen uni- versity, china. he’s currently working on the politicsof digital countercultures in contemporary china, and the theorization of digital journalism. he has published three books and over eighty research papers in chinese, english and french, and won several awards for his academic achievements, including out- standing young scholar of the china communication academy awards and the swiss government excellence scholarship. he could be reached via e-mail: criver@protonmail.ch. todd gitlin: the columbia university graduate school of journalism, and chair of the ph.d pro- gram in communications (united states)  http://toddgitlin.net todd gitlin has written eighteen books, including history from the last century (the sixties: years of hope, days of rage) and contemporary (occupy nation: the roots, the spirit, and the promise of occupy wall street), sociology (the whole world is watching: mass media in the making and unmaking of the new left); communications theory (media unlimited); and four novels, including sacrifice, which won the harold ribalow award for fiction on jewish themes, and the opposition, to be published in by guernica editions. he is a frequent contributor to the new york times, the washington post, usa today, and other periodicals. michael schudson: the columbia university graduate school of journalism (united states)  https://sociology.columbia.edu/content/michael-s-schudson michael schudson received a b.a. from swarthmore college and m.a. and ph.d. in sociology from harvard. he taught at the university of chicago from to and at the university of california, san diego from to . from on, he split his teaching between ucsd and the columbia university graduate school of journalism, becoming a full-time member of the columbia faculty in . he is the author of eight books and co-editor of four others concerning the history and sociology of the american news media, advertising, popular culture, watergate and cultural memory. he is the recipient of a number of honors; he has been a guggenheim fellow, a resident fellow at the center for advanced study in the behavioral sciences, palo alto, a macarthur foundation “genius” fellow, and has received honorary degrees from the university of groningen (netherlands) and hong kong baptist university. his most recent books are journalism: why it matters (polity, ), the rise of the right to know: politics and the culture of transparency - (harvard, ) and (with c.w. anderson and leonard downie, jr.), the news media: what everyone needs to know (oxford, ). https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://orcid.org/ - - - https://szu.academia.edu/jiangchang http://toddgitlin.net https://sociology.columbia.edu/content/michael-s-schudson https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / edinburgh research explorer crime and justice research citation for published version: sparks, r , 'crime and justice research: the current landscape and future possibilities', criminology and criminal justice. https://doi.org/ . / digital object identifier (doi): . / link: link to publication record in edinburgh research explorer document version: peer reviewed version published in: criminology and criminal justice publisher rights statement: the final version of this paper has been published in criminology & criminal justice, vol/issue, month/year by sage publications ltd, all rights reserved. © richard sparks, . it is available at: https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/ . / general rights copyright for the publications made accessible via the edinburgh research explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. take down policy the university of edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that edinburgh research explorer content complies with uk legislation. if you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please contact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. download date: . apr. https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/crime-and-justice-research( a c -f - -bab - cfed cf e).html crime and justice research: the current landscape and future possibilities richard sparks university of edinburgh introduction – the ‘brief’ and its context early in i was invited by the economic and social research council (esrc) to prepare a concise ( page) paper – a ‘think piece’ – on the scope for future research council investments in research on crime and justicei. this was one of thirteen such invitations. these were issued to scholars working in fields that for various reasons (in some cases perhaps their comparative newness, in others their interdisciplinary character, among other possible reasons) seemed to have attracted comparatively little investment in recent years. the papers were to be prepared on a common template in three main parts. these were: i) an overview of the current landscape, including some indication of its current scope, the identification of major ‘gaps’ and some observations on needs regarding data and capacity building; ii) key opportunities and future directions, including topics such as interdisciplinarity, internationalization, impact and collaboration; iii) recommendations on where esrc might best focus its future funding in order to make a distinctive contribution to developing research in the area. the authors had roughly three months in which to prepare these pieces, during which time they were encouraged to consult as widely as possible with people in the field, both researchers and users or commissioners of research, and with one another. a crucial part of the context of this mission (for i chose, rashly, to accept it) was the transition then taking place from the seven existing research councils, understood as distinct albeit collaborating organizations, to the creation of uk research and innovation (ukri)ii as an over-arching body. although these papers were written primarily for the purpose of advising esrc council and staff on their strategy, there was also an intention that they should be widely discussed and at least their executive summaries published. i interpreted the injunction to consult to mean trying to open the invitation to comment or contribute as widely as possible. i asked the british society of criminology (bsc) to publicize this to its members, and i sent out emails to about one hundred people in the uk and around the world. these included everyone i could identify as head of a criminology department or centre, with a request to pass the message on to colleagues. i received about forty responses from a range of individuals and groups (for all of which i remain very grateful). at the time of writing i do not know what use esrc have determined to make of any suggestion of mine. the project, however, has had a bit of an afterlife, of which this exchange of views in criminology and criminal justice (ccj) is a significant extension. in april we held a day of discussion in edinburgh under the auspices of bsc and ccj at which i presented the outline of my position, with responses from a number of people and a lively debate from the floor. it was evident both from the responses i received to my initial request for input, and from the discussions in april that there is a keen appetite for a serious, structured and from inclusive conversation about the future of research on crime and justice. we also know that there are widely divergent views on these matters. this has always been a plural and contentious area, often characterized (as ian loader and i have pointed out in other contextsiii) by its capacity to generate heat. part of my responsibility, as i interpreted it, was to convey some of that diversity in what i wrote for esrc as a source of strength and vitality, even if i was also required to offer some definite propositions. i acknowledge full responsibility for the propositions, therefore, whilst also affirming that i made a serious and grateful effort to reflect the range of views that people took so much time and trouble to formulate and send to me. all i am able to present here, then, is a condensed version of my argument. i have removed some of the more technical aspects, concerning data sharing or impact pathways for example, in order to focus on some ‘big picture’ questions about the shape of the field now and, so far as we can glimpse it, in the next couple of decades. i cannot speak for decisions that esrc may ultimately take, and that in my view is in any case no longer the main topic. i have therefore removed explicit recommendations to esrc from what follows. the issue is rather how we, as producers and users of research, organize our thinking on actual and emergent problems of crime and control, and in which ways we consider it important to respond to them. : an overview of the current landscape what is the current scope of research in this area? the scope of research in the fields of crime and justice is in principle extremely large. it has always been the case that it is difficult – and on some views impossible in principle – to draw boundaries around the questions of crime and justice so as to say that only some topics, concepts, approaches or methods are relevant. we should not begin by regarding this expansiveness as a problem, or only as a problem. what it means is that crime and justice intersect with many other societal questions and developments. they cannot be successfully ‘thought’ in isolation but go alongside other key institutions, processes and approaches. this is key to their contemporary significance, and central to the contributions that crime and justice researchers can make to interdisciplinary approaches to current and emergent challenges. here, in order to try to gain some perspective on this question of ‘scope’, i organize this research area into six broad themes, in roughly ascending order of scale. these are in no sense evaluative judgements (all the themes noted here are vital and intensely topical ones), but they may disclose different opportunities for investment, and different potential impacts amongst readers and users of research. i) crime-as-conduct. although explaining or otherwise understanding the actions of people identified as having contravened criminal law (or of other people in interaction with them – victims of crime, for example) is the most traditional goal of ‘criminological’ iv inquiry it is by no means the sole or even dominant raison d’être of the field today. nevertheless, some of the best work internationally on crime, social exclusion and urban fortunes (characterized by strong observational research practice and grounding in place) has been done in the uk, sometimes with esrc supportv. the gradually gathering awareness of the centrality of gender in social relations generally, and in questions of crime and justice in particular, has informed much of the most imaginative and compelling recent work. work has addressed the violences of men against women and children in domestic contexts (coercive control, intimate partner violence) and in public spacevi (including both antique and seemingly more fully contemporary phenomena such as online threats and abuse). ii) pathways and trajectories. longitudinal studies of pathways and transitions, often of a cohort drawn from a single city (edinburgh, peterborough)vii, are designed to illuminate questions such as the differing outcomes in terms of crime and victimization amongst people growing up in different areas or subject to other influences or disadvantages. the resources required to sustain such studies over time, and to enable them to interact with other large-scale, life-course studies, are clearly considerable. amongst the most significant recent extensions of criminal careers research – and one in which uk-based researchers have been in the vanguard - has been the refocusing on questions of desistance from crime (or to follow farrall, of how people ‘start to stop’)viii. such work often requires qualitative longitudinal designs, complementary to the larger quantitative studies noted above. iii) controls and regulations. another principal focus of research in crime and justice concerns criminal justice institutions and decision-making (domestically, comparatively and – increasingly – internationally). uk-based researchers have been at the forefront of new work posing questions concerning the scale, priorities, and effectiveness of actually-existing institutions of crime controlix. increasingly this concerns not just the activities of public police forces or probation or prison services and other familiar state agencies but also a host of other regulatory actors in and beyond criminal justice, including those in private and voluntary or ‘third’ sectors. what was once a radical, disruptive perception, that controls and regulations are not necessarily or intrinsically benign, or without harmful consequences of their own, is increasingly widely acknowledged. the questions therefore come to concern a much wider and more demanding array of debates and opportunities, of which regulation through criminalization is just one, bringing in train its own special capacities for harm or help. iv) new technologies and affordances. there is an obvious yet expansive and extremely complex dialectic between the opportunities for harm and exploitation made available by new technologies (the many forms of cyber-crime and computer-enabled crime, and the other varieties of harm made feasible by new media – social media bullying, grooming, trolling and stalking, for example) and the regulatory and surveillance capacities of new technologies. the relations between crime and justice and technological development are thus of central and constantly growing significance. they include bioethical questions, questions of data privacy and intellectual property, changes in justice process and the nature of adjudication itself, the infrastructural dimensions of situational crime prevention, and many other topics that reach across traditional boundaries between the natural and social sciences and the humanities. v) globality and trans-national flows. crime and justice research is no longer defined and limited by entirely ‘domestic’ preoccupations. rather it increasingly concerns questions such as people trafficking and ‘modern’ slavery, drugs and other criminal networks, money laundering, illegal antiquities and other high-value commodities and a host of other illicit ‘flows’, both mundane and exoticx. a major focus in recent uk-based and other european work has been the phenomenon of ‘crimmigration’xi, and the consequent concern with borders, detention and deportation as responses on the part of the wealthy countries of the north to the disruptive aspects of new mobilitiesxii. there are major challenges and opportunities here to re-think the problem-spaces of crime and justice research beyond the primacy of single-jurisdictional specificities, and beyond an unreflexively northern projection of the world. vi) alternative conceptions. exciting new directions have started to emerge that invite us to re-evaluate traditional conception of ‘the criminal question’ in light of a wider range of disciplinary resources. whilst the notion of ‘decriminalizing criminology’xiii is not in itself entirely novel, the tasks of rethinking harms and risks (to environment, security, health and human development) and the appropriateness of political and policy responses to these have gained focus and energy. for example, current work in law enforcement and public healthxiv, new regulatory frameworks, peace-processes (including their domestic applications and analogies)xv, the security implications of architecture and urban design (as well as of computer ‘architectures’ and other socio- technical developments), amongst others, all disclose exciting practical opportunities at the same time as opening dialogues between disciplines. : what are some important gaps in the current research profile in this area? the expansive scope of crime and justice, together with their dynamically changing character and their inherent connections to major questions of policy and practice mean that ‘gaps’ are similarly numerous, varied and emergent. as one senior commissioner and user of research put it to me, “the gaps are everywhere”: i) dimensions of violence: actions, reasons, contexts. violence menaces, perplexes and troubles us. its protean character demands interdisciplinary attention. it presents both explanatory and practical problems at all levels – the interpersonal, the collective, the ‘mass’, the political. earlier generations of research largely kept such ‘scalar’ problems separate by erecting disciplinary fences, whereas now the opportunity arises to explore those problems differently. whereas in the past studies of violence often stood accused of having individuated the problem, contemporary work specifically addresses group-supported and collective action, including at large scale (for example the actions of armies and other parties in and after armed conflictxvi). some of the great mobilizations of our time - #metoo, black lives matter, the demonstrations after parkland, the currently gathering agitation around gun crime in london and elsewhere – are themselves responses to violence. interest on the part of research users and practitioners in and beyond government, in media and amongst wider publics is both diverse and massive. the gendered basis of violence still demands much further inquiry, not least in light of current legislative activity and international agreements. there is major scope for international comparative and collaborative activity, spanning the global north and south. there is also a need for further research on questions of hate and extremism, domestically and internationally. this is one of many areas in which work with perpetrators is difficult to accomplish yet entirely necessary. empirical evidence is key to the development and implementation of more effective responses. ii) crime, punishment and after: despite the excellence of some recent work on pathways into and out of crime (such as the recent turn in research and policy towards questions of desistancexvii) and on aspects of social control and regulation there are also some striking gaps. as noted below, promising lines of inquiry arising from cohort studies – including more convincing evidence than previously on the frequently counter-productive effects of early contact with the criminal justice systemxviii - risk not being built-upon in the absence of new longitudinal work. research on prisons is now a significant strengthxix, and suggests what can be accomplished with some investment and a highly focused and committed research community. elsewhere, however, systematic studies of criminal process and decision- making are more scattered and this leaves very considerable areas of policy and practice (courts, judgements and sentencing, parole decision-making, systems of surveillance and supervision, re-entry after punishment, and indeed law-making itself) severely under-served by research. in some of these areas – such as sentencing and its social consequences, including with respect to questions of equity in respect of race, class and gender, for example – there is surprisingly little current empirical research and few noteworthy concentrations of expertise. yet it is also clear that new technologies and innovations (in estimations of risk and the emergence of so-called ‘algorithmic justice, for example, or new surveillance and monitoring technologies) are occurring continually, with major implications for conceptions of justice and the practices of the relevant professions. similarly questions of race and increasingly also of citizenship and nationality loom large. this goes to on one hand to familiar yet intransigent questions concerning policing (for example in controversies about stop-and-search practices and police use of armed force), prosecution and punishment in relation to racialized disparities, and on the other to new configurations about the treatment of foreign nationals at every stage of criminal process. iii) crime and technology: the social and human dimensions of technology extend far beyond the theme of ‘cybercrime’ as such, and many of these are at early stages of explorationxx. in respect of crime and justice this clearly includes a host of aspects of technology-facilitated risks (grooming, radicalization, hate-discourse among others), but it also relates to technological developments in respect of investigation, adjudication, surveillance and supervision – in short every stage of criminal process. iv) representations, discourses, politics: an area of major contemporary concern and one with obvious interdisciplinary resonance (with cultural studies, social history, film and media, applied linguistics and other interests), is the representations and discourses in terms of which questions of crime and justice are circulated and socially shared. there are new and promising lines of inquiry – the turn to visual criminology, for example – that offer opportunities to more fully explore these connectionsxxi. yet in general terms there is a paucity of new work of empirical depth and theoretical ambition. this is despite the pressing nature of some current controversies (from phone hacking, to ‘fake news’, to the ubiquity of images of crime and law enforcement in popular culture, and their implications of these for questions of knowledge, trust, security, public participation and other aspects of contemporary life.) v) global challenges, global harms: whilst some aspects of globalization have received attention others remain to be explored. crime and justice research has much to offer current debates about security, perhaps not least in respect of commitments to empirical precision and to grounding and to situating these discussions in respect of real places and everyday social practice. there are major challenges for empirical research on smuggling, piracy and other international crimes, and on illicit flows in finance and services, amongst many other problems. the level of mutual knowledge between the majority of crime and justice researchers and those working in international law, international relations, development studies and related fields, or indeed of the work of key international agencies and institutions, is very low. : key opportunities and future directions what are the opportunities for interdisciplinary research in this area? to say that crime and justice are interdisciplinary questions is both to state the obvious, and to understate the challenges and opportunities that they present to us. it has never been possible for a single discipline – criminology, for example – to claim exclusive ownership over crime and justice, even to the same degree that economics ‘owns’ economics relations or geography exercises jurisdiction over questions of space and territory. to the contrary these problems are shared (excitingly, if not always entirely peaceably) between law, sociology, psychiatry, psychology, politics, geography, demography, ethics, literary studies and history, to name only some of the more traditionally prominent. latterly, these have been joined by a new constellation of discourses – public health, organization and management studies, computing and informatics, bioethics and genomics, international political economy, behavioural economics and many othersxxii). there is thus massive scope for interdisciplinary collaboration, but within which the contributions of the social sciences require to be defined and affirmed. there are also, thanks to developments such as the creation of sentencing councils in both england and wales and latterly scotlandxxiii, a wider and more diverse set of potential research users than has traditionally been the case. there is a host of current problems that can only be explored fully in interdisciplinary modes, but we cannot at present always be confident that interdisciplinary working will take place successfully. for example, amongst social scientists knowledge of ‘cyber-crime’ remains the domain of a limited number of specialists, and this is some distance from enhancing wider understanding of the spectrum of relationships between new technologies and questions of crime and justice. yet such questions are central to every aspect of contemporary security, from the most commonplace retail purchase to the stability of entire institutions, economies and political orders. this therefore invites greater integration between crime and justice research and social studies of technology and its uses more broadly considered. in other words both the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ problems pose important challenges. it seems arbitrary to pick out only a few of these. however, in the interests of space i will nominate just three: i) crime, justice and public health: we know that gradients identified by health researchers in terms of unequal exposure to risks of disease, incapacity and mortality have counterparts in the lives of perpetrators and victims of crime. this has major implications for mapping, documenting and explaining these distributions, their consequences and their persistence. but it also draws problems of crime and justice into diverse policy spaces, presenting challenges that involve those working in the domains of children and families, education, health, housing, and de-centring the predominance of policing and criminal justice as responses. thus the emphasis above (and extended in conclusion) on the multiple dimensions of violence is by definition plural in disciplinary terms, but necessarily regards health as crucial. ii) empirical legal research remains, on the whole, at small scale more than a decade after the nuffield foundation’s important reportxxiv. similarly, the specifically legal dimensions of many crime and justice problems receive limited attention from social scientists. this inhibits the development of certain forms of work in crime and justice, perhaps especially with regard to legislation, law reform, adjudication and sentencing. iii) the relations between conventional conceptions of crime and justice and the production of environmental harms on a planetary scale (such as climate change, the reduction of biodiversity by, for example, logging and deforestation, the pollution of the atmosphere, waterways and oceans) present unprecedented challenges for interdisciplinary cooperation, and of course for intervention. these and other consequences of human action for life on earth are literally un- thinkable from within the horizon of single disciplines, and they certainly pose questions about security that reach far beyond, though they doubtless include, traditional debates about criminalization, enforcement, sanctions and so onxxv. in these respects the absence of ‘disciplinary’ purity or unity amongst scholars working on crime and justice is an undoubted, if paradoxical, strength. it enjoins interdisciplinary co- working on these matters and it emphasises their connection with other problems and other fields. what are the opportunities for international research perspectives in this area? the scope for comparative and trans-national research in this field is also enormous. it is true that historically the connection between conceptions of crime and justice and the sovereign powers of individual nation-states has tended to lead to a degree of particularity and sometimes insularity. many factors combine to invite us to move beyond that state of affairs. many of the most urgent and difficult problems of our times are inherently trans-national in character, whether that be the illicit movement of money, people, and commodities or the flow of images and information. both security threats and enforcement efforts increasingly exist in trans-national, cross-jurisdictional networks and spaces. whist international collaborative enterprises in the fields of crime and justice research are not new (and indeed reach back far further than many are aware) they have also increased in scope and intensity lately. recent years have seen the emergence of confident, critical and active research communities in asia and latin america. these developments both invite new collaborative and comparative initiatives and challenge researchers in the global north to decolonize their received conceptions of their disciplines. the impetus provided by the emergence of an explicitly self-described southern criminology has latterly given additional focus to these reversals of flow, from ‘core’ to ‘periphery’. thus, for example, we see new work on environmental hazards emerging from countries directly impacted by deforestation, mineral extraction, population displacement or rising sea levelsxxvi. similar trends seem apparent in relation to studies of the (often intensely conflicted) place of crime and justice in transitions to democracy; of memory and denial in respect of atrocity crimes, disappearances and other legacies of dictatorship; state crime, corruption and police brutality; constitutional change, the development of human rights cultures and the reform of state institutionsxxvii. three propositions for investment in crime and justice research violence: the opportunities for new conceptual development and new interdisciplinary discovery are large. methodologically, violence can be explored in a host of ways from the minutely observed (biographical, ethnographic) to the collective and political levels. it demands exploration in disaggregated ways, most obviously in respect of gender; but it also speaks to a wide range of trans-national and comparative questions and to issues of human development, global public health and so on. violence raises a host of policy enigmas, inviting contrastive evaluations as between ‘traditional’ criminal justice-focused responses and approaches grounded in public health, peace-making, and a range of regulatory alternatives. scope for collaboration is thus very considerable. also very large therefore are the impact potentials, not just among the ‘usual suspects’ in police services and other state agencies but a wide variety of ngos and civil society groups. the diversity of possible topics and approaches under this theme tends to encourage a network or programme model that invites multidisciplinary contributions from a wide range of potential participants. punishment, conviction and beyond?: the post-conviction phases of criminal justice have received little attention, relative to their significance. yet there is much promising and some outstanding work taking place in and beyond the uk on themes of incarceration, supervision, desistance, restorative processes, re- entry (and more broadly on work, citizenship and the social consequences of intervention). there is very little serious, current, well-funded empirical work on sentencing, and almost none on major current controversies such as the parole system. the scope for interaction with philosophy, history and law is great. scope for international comparison is very large here, including for north-south collaboration. the politics of punishment are prominent (and intimately related to understandings of such contemporary phenomena as populism, on one hand, and of global diffusion of human rights consciousness, on the other). any such initiative should specifically seek new conceptual development (including ‘purely’ theoretical pieces) and invite explorations of alternative conceptions of regulation that depart from, challenge and critique established responses. this theme thus incorporates questions of technology, data, comparison, representation, governance and trust. it thus seems ripe for active collaboration across council boundaries, most obviously between esrc and ahrc in the first instance and may lend itself to consideration for centre funding. global challenges, global harms: crime and justice have historically been so identified with nation-states and their sovereignty that current realities of their relation to world-systemic problems of governance, regulation and co-operation under international agreements still seem to take us by surprise. transnational organized crime is an aspect of this; as are crimes within the global financial system. such an initiative would therefore expressly be concerned with relationships between questions of crime and justice (and conceptions of harm) and other current arenas of ‘security’ discourse. specific dimension might include, questions of mobility and borders (migration detention, deportation etc); liabilities for and responses to environmental harms (marine environments, deforestation, trafficking in endangered species etc); international criminal law properly so-called (including crimes of war and crimes against humanity). many disciplinary dimensions are engaged here, but they include (more explicitly than previously) the relations between empirical social science research on these questions and problems of international law, and by extension of political coordination, the roles of international agencies and ngos and so on. : final thoughts researchers want to see investments that produce new knowledge, generate debate, develop early career colleagues and help make change in the world. interestingly, research users tend to define the unique contributions of larger-scale publicly funded research in strikingly similar terms. opportunities for researchers to migrate between disciplines appear important, as do specific efforts to encourage the formation of multi-disciplinary collaborative teams. cyber- crime, broadly considered, and environmental harms are two areas in which crime and justice researchers might play fruitful roles within such extended groupings. above all, i want to argue for the internationalization of perspectives on questions of crime and justice and towards fully grasping the contribution of social science perspectives on new dimensions of technology (especially including risks to the natural environment). this favours comparison and collaboration generally, and especially co-working with colleagues in the global south. nonetheless, certain deep and intractable problems remain at the core of the enterprise: violence; justice and punishment; harm, security and risk in the international sphere. endnotes i esrc is the uk’s principal public research funding body. see further: https://esrc.ukri.org/ ii https://www.ukri.org/ iii amongst others, i. loader and r. sparks ( ) public criminology?, london: routledge iv this term is used here sparingly and advisedly. it simply denotes work concerned to understand dynamics of rule-infracting and rule-enforcing action, especially across the boundary of the criminal law. it offers no privilege to work that self-nominates as criminology, nor conversely does it exclude any other disciplinary starting point. v see in this context the body of work by robert macdonald and colleagues on youth, the 'underclass' and social exclusion on teesside: http://www.researchcatalogue.esrc.ac.uk/grants/l /read. see also, for example: hall, steve, winlow, simon and ancrum, craig ( ) criminal identities and consumer culture : crime, exclusion and the new culture of narcissism. willan publishing vi for example: marianne hester’s project on justice, inequality and gender-based violence: http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fm % f ; a number of projects by sylvia walby and colleagues: http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fk % f . the prospectus of course is currently widening to include the range of online/social media forms of threat – see for example the project by claire hardaker and others on twitter rape threats: http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fl % f vii see p-o wikstrom, peterborough adolescent and young adult development study (pads+): http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fe % f ; viii esrc has supported a number of desistance studies, notably in scotland where this line of inquiry has been strong. they include mcneill et al.’s imaginative knowledge exchange project: http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fi % f ; and beth weaver’s ‘co-producing desistance from crime’: http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fl % f ix thus we have seen some support of work in prison studies (notably around the cambridge prisons research centre (e.g. http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fl % f ); a modest amount of new work on policing, including one ambitious recent project by stott and others (http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fr % f ). most other areas of criminal justice decision-making have not recently figured in very prominent ways. see, however, crawford on ‘markets in policing’: http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fm % f . x support for work on trafficking and modern slavery appears to be embryonic, but see the recent project by rose broad: http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fr % f . there has also been some recent support for new work on illegal financial flows, for example by nicholas lord: http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fp % f and michael levi: http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fe % f . xi this term generally refers to the blurring of boundaries between migration law and criminal law, and hence the imposition of criminal sanctions or other impositions on people for infractions committed n the course of attempting to migrate. xii the body of work known as border criminology is associated in this country with the work of mary bosworth and her collaborators, of the oxford university centre for criminology, among others. xiii shearing, c. ( ) ‘decriminalizing criminology’, canadian journal of criminology, ( ): - xiv see for example the various conferences organized under the auspices of the centre for law enforcement and public health (https://leph toronto.com/conference), the innovations introduced by bodies such as the anu-based regnet (http://regnet.anu.edu.au/about-us); and a wide variety of scholarly networks and ngos interested in transitional justice, justice alternatives, peace-making (for example: https://www.ulster.ac.uk/research/institutes/transitional-justice-institute). xvwork by john braithwaite and colleagues at australian national university is somewhat exemplary in this regard http://regnet.anu.edu.au/research/research-projects/details/ /peacebuilding-compared-project. see similarly the activities of christine bell and her collaborators through edinburgh university’s global justice academy: http://www.globaljusticeacademy.ed.ac.uk/ xvi for example esrc has supported the network on gender violence across war and peace, (christine chinkin, pi): http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fp % f . xvii some of the best of this work has received esrc support, but it is a bare handful of studies. the post- conviction phases of criminal justice have received shockingly little research council support in recent years – a search on the word ‘parole’ for example produces nothing whatsoever. nor has there been any systematic https://esrc.ukri.org/ https://www.ukri.org/ http://www.researchcatalogue.esrc.ac.uk/grants/l /read http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/ / http://nrl.northumbria.ac.uk/ / http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fm % f http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fk % f http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fl % f http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fe % f http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fi % f http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fl % f http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fl % f http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fr % f http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fm % f http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fr % f http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fp % f http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fe % f https://leph toronto.com/conference http://regnet.anu.edu.au/about-us https://www.ulster.ac.uk/research/institutes/transitional-justice-institute http://regnet.anu.edu.au/research/research-projects/details/ /peacebuilding-compared-project http://www.globaljusticeacademy.ed.ac.uk/ http://gtr.ukri.org/projects?ref=es% fp % f collation of such work in the uk since the body of research reports commissioned by the last royal commission on criminal justice in the early s. xviii for example mcara, l and mcvie, s. ( ) ‘youth crime and justice: key messages from the edinburgh study’, criminology and criminal justice, , : - xix for example ben crewe’s excellent work on very long-term imprisonment: http://gtr.ukri.org/person/ ecd - f f- - b - a abc ; yvonne jewkes and dominique moran’s recent work on prison architecture: http://gtr.ukri.org/person/a a e - c- fa- d - ee a d aa xx the recent collaborative initiative involving esrc, the netherlands organisation for scientific research (fwo) and nordforsk under the aegis of the nordic societal security programme is a salient example of what new, imaginative, international projects may look like: https://www.nordforsk.org/en/news/nordforsk-invests-in- cyber-security xxi michelle brown and eamonn carrabine (eds) ( ) the routledge international handbook of visual criminology, london: routledge. xxii see further i. loader and r. sparks ( ) ‘situating criminology’, oxford handbook of criminology, th edition, oxford: oup; m. bosworth and c. hoyle (eds) ( ) what is criminology?, oxford: oup xxiii the sentencing council for england and wales has existed in its current form since . it is an expert body consisting principally of senior members of the judiciary, with some academic representation. the council issues and monitors ‘definitive guidelines’ on specific offences. in preparing these it conducts both analytic (legal, doctrinal) and social research (principally on public opinion and attitudes to sentencing). the scottish sentencing council was established in . it too has research and knowledge exchange functions and its statutory aims include that of ‘promoting greater awareness and understanding of sentencing’. xxiv genn h., partington m. and wheeler s., ( ) law in the real world: improving our understanding of how law works, nuffield foundation http://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/sites/default/files/law% in% the% real% world% full% report. pdf xxv see here the essays recently brought together in c. shearing and c. holley (eds) ( ) criminology and the anthropocene, london: routledge xxvi consider here for example the contributions in k. carrington et al (eds) ( ) palgrave handbook of criminology and the global south by white, brisman and goyes. xxvii whilst latterly a growing proportion of such work is produced in universities, sometimes with adequate support from funding bodies (perhaps especially in brazil, and in chile), much of it has been accomplished by ngos. for example in argentina organizations such as the centro de estudios legales y sociales (cels) have played and continue to play critical roles: https://www.cels.org.ar/web/ http://gtr.ukri.org/person/ ecd - f f- - b - a abc http://gtr.ukri.org/person/a a e - c- fa- d - ee a d aa http://gtr.ukri.org/person/a a e - c- fa- d - ee a d aa https://www.nordforsk.org/en/news/nordforsk-invests-in-cyber-security https://www.nordforsk.org/en/news/nordforsk-invests-in-cyber-security http://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/sites/default/files/law% in% the% real% world% full% report.pdf http://www.nuffieldfoundation.org/sites/default/files/law% in% the% real% world% full% report.pdf https://www.cels.org.ar/web/ frontispiece . standing m high, the broch of mousa is exceptionally well preserved. the monumental drystone tower is located close to the shore of mousa island, overlooking the km-wide strait that separates the island from the east coast of mainland, shetland. brochs such as this were constructed across scotland between the fourth century bc and first century ad. mousa broch has been the subject of terrestrial laser scan surveys as part of the ahrc-funded doctoral project ‘visualising the crucible of shetland’s broch building’. this artificially coloured point cloud shows a cross-section of the broch, revealing details of its double-wall construction and various cells and galleries. image: li sou and james hepher. © historic environment scotland and university of bradford. © a n tiqu ity p u blication s l td , frontispiece . the latest commission for the fourth plinth in trafalgar square, ‘the invisible enemy should not exist’ by michael rakowitz, was unveiled on march . fashioned from iraqi date-syrup tins, it represents the lamassu that guarded the nergal gate at nineveh from c. bc until its destruction in by isis. in , trafalgar square hosted a reconstruction of another monument destroyed by so-called islamic state, palmyra’s triumphal arch. the latter has subsequently visited new york, dubai, florence and the archaeology museum in arona, italy. photograph: robert witcher. © a n tiqu ity p u blication s l td , editorial saa in washington, d.c. when john f. kennedy described washington, d.c. as a city of southern efficiency and northern charm, it was presumably not intended as a compliment. nonetheless, like all good quotes, it captures a wider truth—a capital city as the pivot of a vast and diverse nation, a symbolic and political, if not geographic, centre. in this sense, the choice of washington, d.c. to host the rd annual meeting of the society for american archaeology (saa), – april , was more than coincidence. with a still relatively new administration in the white house making policy changes with significant implications for the nation’s cultural heritage, the gathering of more than archaeologists from the usa and beyond offered the opportunity to lobby politicians and policymakers on their home turf. delegates were accordingly encouraged to contact their elected representatives, and the saa government affairs program pursued meetings on capitol hill to press the case for the protection and promotion of cultural heritage. the theme was reinforced through the saa presidential sponsored forum, entitled ‘bears ears, the antiquities act, and the status of our national monuments’, where the panel reflected on the effectiveness of the antiquities act of (now safeguarding over one million square kilometres of us territory) and the emerging threats to the protection it provides. in particular, the unprecedented proposal by the new administration to reduce significantly the size of one of the most recent additions to the list, the bears ears national monument in utah (as well as grand staircase-escalante national monument), has led to concerns— and lawsuits—over political interference and the weakening of the protection that the act provides for sites and landscapes across the usa. as if to reinforce the political slant of this year’s saa, the meeting coincided with the second international march for science on april, with thousands descending on washington, d.c., and other cities around the world, to advocate to politicians and lawmakers the importance of evidence-based policies and the use of science for the common good. despite a packed conference schedule, some saa delegates were able to head downtown to join the march and to represent archaeology alongside other disciplines from astronomy to zoology. as in previous years, antiquity attended the saa meeting with an exhibit stand, providing the opportunity to meet some of our editorial advisory board members, contributors (several of whom feature in this issue), reviewers and readers, and to discuss and encourage ideas for future submissions. we were also pleased to support the saa student paper award. the winning paper, ‘untapped potential—why weren’t ceramic arrowheads invented? theoretical morphology for understanding the human past’, was commended by the judges for its elegant research design, flawless execution and thoughtful conclusions. our © antiquity publications ltd, antiquity ( ): – https://doi.org/ . /aqy. . https://doi.org/ . /aqy. . editorial congratulations to joint authors michelle bebber and mike wilson from kent state university! mount vernon attending a conference such as the saa involves academic sessions and networking, but also offers the opportunity to explore the host city and to reflect on its heritage. the national mall, in the heart of washington, d.c., is a powerful example of nation- building through the commemoration of the many individuals, groups and events that shape us history: the washington monument and the lincoln memorial; the second world war and vietnam war memorials; and two of the more recent additions to the smithsonian institution, the national museum of the american indian and the national museum of african-american history and culture. each contributes, in its own unique way, to the complex story of the usa. a short boat trip down the potomac river, however, is an altogether less monumental place, but one that is freighted with no-less- powerful symbolism. mount vernon, the virginia house and estate of george washington, is something of a national shrine. through the figure of washington, the history of mount vernon is that of the nation itself. it is, to borrow a term from the historian pierre nora, a ‘lieu de mémoire’, a place invested with material memory and symbolic meaning. the home of america’s founding father, revolutionary patriot and the original citizen-soldier- farmer, mount vernon embodies and legitimises the political values of the usa. and this symbolism is not accidental, for washington himself consciously set out to encode these values into the house and estate. the plants and trees selected by washington, for example, were almost exclusively american species, and his garden design eschewed european planting schemes for a more informal design. the great political symbolism of the site was underlined less than a fortnight after the saa meeting, when the current white house incumbent descended on mount vernon with the french president, emmanuel macron. a focus of attention was the bastille key, given by lafayette to washington and now on display in the house. mount vernon also holds a significant place in the history of conservation and heritage management in the usa. by the mid nineteenth century, the washington family could no longer afford the upkeep of the house and estate, and the growing numbers of visitors were becoming a problem. with the powerful men of d.c. distracted by affairs of state, it fell to a group of women from virginia, spearheaded by ann pamela cunningham, to raise funds and buy the estate. having acquired the site, the mount vernon ladies’ association (mvla)—who still own the site today—set to work preserving it for future generations. cunningham’s stirring words have guided conservation work at the site down to the present: ladies, the home of washington is in your charge. see to it that you keep it the home of washington! let no irreverent hand change it; no vandal hands desecrate it with the fingers of—progress! those who go to the home in which he lived and died, wish to see in what he lived and died! let one spot in this grand country of ours be saved from change! upon you rests this duty. the mount vernon ladies’ association. . historical sketch of ann pamela cunningham: . new york: marion. © antiquity publications ltd, editorial with this philosophy in mind, successive generations of the mvla have organised the careful restoration of the estate’s extant buildings. they have also overseen the reconstruction of others, ranging from washington’s greenhouse, drawing on documentary evidence for the original structure, and, based on archaeological excavations, a dung repository or stercorary (the on-site interpretation panel announces this to be “the first known structure in the united states devoted to composting”!). today, the visitor can also experience a blacksmith’s workshop, a pioneer farm, a distillery and a gristmill amongst other attractions. mount vernon was also the focus of pioneering conservation work to protect the visual setting of the site. during the s, proposed development on the opposite shore of the potomac threatened to blight the view that washington had enjoyed from his verandah. it was through the efforts of local residents that the national park service and congress reached an agreement to protect the view from developments by placing easements on private properties in the piscataway park. although not perfect, the approach has effectively preserved the original setting of mount vernon, and the model has been adopted or advocated elsewhere in the usa. lives bound together washington’s home has been a place of pilgrimage of more than two centuries, and visiting mount vernon today, it is difficult not to detect the hagiographic atmosphere. but there is much more to this place than its association with a single man. not least, integral to every aspect of life at mount vernon was slavery. by the time of washington’s death, the estate owned over enslaved people who laboured in the fields and house alike. today, the existence of these enslaved people is increasingly acknowledged and actively promoted as a core part of the visitor experience. school parties and tourists can step inside the reconstructed barracks to experience where, and how, some of the enslaved people lived, visit the kitchens where they prepared meals for the washington family, and see monuments, erected in and , at the slave cemetery, just a few metres from washington’s own burial place. archaeology has been integral to reinserting slavery into the mount vernon narrative— and, by extension, into the national narrative as well. excavations, past and ongoing, have discovered a wealth of material culture that attests to the burgeoning trade networks of the eighteenth-century estate, including imported ceramics from britain and germany, chinese porcelain, glass vessels and tobacco pipes. that new global economy and its commodities was built substantially on slavery, yet it is the locally made ceramics, such as colonoware (figure ), that speak most directly to the presence of enslaved people at sites such as mount vernon. handbuilt from local clays and never enumerated in the estate’s extensive inventories, these vessels attest the presence of african (as well as native american) groups, maintaining their familiar and distinct cultural forms. but they also point to the complexities of interaction between different communities and traditions; some colonoware vessels, for example, imitate or creolise european forms, and the general presence of these wares in kitchen middens at mount vernon may suggest informal exchange networks. © antiquity publications ltd, editorial figure . a colonoware bowl from the south grove midden excavations at mount vernon. the bowl (rim diameter mm) dates to phase (c. – ) and therefore probably relates to the household of lawrence washington, who passed the estate via his widow to his younger half-brother, george. photograph © mount vernon preservation. drawing on some of this archaeological evidence, the ‘lives bound together: slavery at george washington’s mount vernon’ exhibition (figure ), on show from october to september , presents a powerful insight into the links between the lives of washington and his family and the enslaved people who laboured on the estate. alongside archaeological artefacts are objects handed down to the descendants of mount vernon’s enslaved people, as well as paintings, costumes and a range of documents. the latter include some of the many legal papers dealing with the purchase and sale of individual enslaved people, as well as letters between members of the washington household and their staff, providing glimpses into daily life. these give us the names of some of the enslaved people—caesar, caroline, christopher, doll, hercules, ona, william—and occasionally clues to physical appearance and the briefest of biographical details: about running away, being caught and punished, and, for some, being freed. visitors moving through the exhibition encounter these individuals, and as much of their personal stories as we have, in the form of evocative silhouettes and interactive screens. running parallel to these biographies are thematic displays detailing work and life on the estate, including farming and gardening, clothing and personal ornaments, and, woven throughout, an overview of washington’s own evolving attitude to slavery. ‘lives bound together’ is an eloquent and vital companion to the other displays at mount vernon, clearly speaking to contemporary concerns, not least the black lives matter movement. visitors to the site, whether school parties or presidents, should be sure to spend some time at this exhibition—as well as enjoying the splendid views of the po- tomac preserved by the creative partnership of government agencies and local communities. in this issue following his defeat of the british, washington declined the opportunity to declare himself monarch, returning (briefly) to private life at his virginia estate and earning the © antiquity publications ltd, editorial figure . the ‘lives bound together: slavery at george washington’s mount vernon’ exhibition. photograph © george washington’s mount vernon. title of the ‘american cincinnatus’. fittingly, therefore, when he was laid to rest at mount vernon, first in the family vault and then in a bespoke tomb, these modest structures were less than regal. in contrast, two of the papers in this issue of antiquity deal with more extravagant tomb sites. the first of these, by hassett and sağlamtimur, takes us to mesopotamia and a large cist burial at the third-millennium bc site of başur höyük. here, analysis of grave goods and human bone suggests a retainer burial, which the authors argue reflects a wider trend for human sacrifice during the unstable periods associated with the emergence of stratified—possibly royal—societies. the second paper, by mizoguchi and uchida, moves to china and the site of yinxu. drawing on the s excavations of the royal shang cemetery of xibeigang (hsi-pei-kang), the authors present a new chronological sequence—linking each tomb to a king named in the ancient sources—and explore how the location and orientation of the tombs physically and symbolically positioned both the deceased and the living in relation to the ancestors. in addition, as ever, we have papers that range widely across time, space and topic, from the harvesting of wild cereals in the upper palaeolithic of the yellow river valley, china, through to a detailed analysis of the background to one of the key early twentieth- century articles on stonehenge and the provenance of its bluestones. there is also enormous variation in scale, ranging from an examination of the impact of climate change on the thousands of archaeological sites across the arctic, to the biography of a single russian © antiquity publications ltd, editorial prisoner of war as evidenced through an aluminium canteen from czersk, poland. we also return to Çatalhöyük where a new suite of radiocarbon dates for the west mound permits a wider re-evaluation of shifting settlement and population during the late seventh and early sixth millennia bc. we trust that all of our readers will find something of interest in this issue. antiquity prizes finally, it is a pleasure to announce the winners of the prizes for the two best articles published last year in antiquity, as voted for by our editorial advisory board members, directors and trustees. the antiquity prize goes to ‘identifying ‘plantscapes’ at the classic maya village of joya de cerén, el salvador’ by alan farahani, katherine l. chiou, anna harkey, christine a. hastorf, david l. lentz and payson sheets. thanks to preservation by volcanic ash, the authors were able to examine in extraordinary detail the use of plants in gardens, fields and households at this classic maya site. the winner of the ben cullen prize is ‘the ypres salient – : historical aerial photography and the landscape of war’ by birger stichelbaut, wouter gheyle, veerle van eetvelde, marc van meirvenne, timothy saey, nicolas note, hanne van den berghe and jean bourgeois. coinciding with the centenary commemorations of the battle of passchendaele, this paper demonstrates the insights that aerial photography can provide for our understanding of the archaeological landscape of the western front. congratulations to all! you can read both of these articles, and all of the previous winners, for free at www.antiquity.ac.uk/open/prizes. while you are there, we invite you to explore the rest of the website and to discover a variety of other content from the world of antiquity. robert witcher june farahani, a., k.l. chiou, a. harkey, c.a. hastorf, d.l. lentz & p. sheets. . identifying ‘plantscapes’ at the classic maya village of joya de cerén, el salvador. antiquity : – . https://doi.org/ . / aqy. . stichelbaut, b., w. gheyle, v. van eetvelde, m. van meirvenne, t. saey, n. note, h. van den berghe & j. bourgeois. . the ypres salient – : historical aerial photography and the landscape of war. antiquity : – . https://doi.org/ . /aqy. . © antiquity publications ltd, http://www.antiquity.ac.uk/open/prizes https://doi.org/ . /aqy. . https://doi.org/ . /aqy. . 	saa in washington, d.c. 	mount vernon 	lives bound together 	in this issue 	antiquity prizes what happened to the women in women’s studies? rethinking the role of women’s history in gender studies classes $ € £ ¥ social sciences commentary what happened to the women in women’s studies? rethinking the role of women’s history in gender studies classes lindsey feitz gender and women’s studies program, university of denver, denver, co , usa; lindsey.feitz@du.edu; tel.: + - - - academic editor: manisha desai received: september ; accepted: december ; published: december abstract: this commentary discusses the evolving dynamics and the intergenerational “rifts” that often arise in gender and women’s studies classes. the first section outlines the rise of women’s studies programs in the s and the “women-centered” approach most university women’s studies programs and classes embraced. the second section discusses rd wave feminism’s expanded interest in intersectionality, masculinity studies, and queer studies and concludes by exploring the possibilities of using the history of women’s studies programs as a way to teach students about the shift of “women to gender” studies and to encourage cross-generational dialogue between feminists. keywords: feminism; women’s studies; gender studies; millennial feminism; women’s history last february while stumping for hillary clinton in her bid for the democratic party’s nomination for president of the united states, former secretary of state madeline albright made headlines when she reminded young female bernie sanders’ supporters of the importance of supporting a female candidate. the video footage shows albright saying, “we can tell our story of how we climbed the ladder, and a lot of you younger women think it’s done . . . it’s not done. there’s a special place in hell for women who don’t help each other!” a week later, second-wave feminist icon and activist gloria steinem raised the stakes by implying that young women who supported bernie sanders were doing so to meet boys. the response to steinem and albright’s comments were immediate and angry as millennial feminists took to blogs, internet op-eds, and social media and criticized both steinem and albright for assuming that they needed a “talking to” about the importance of electing women to political office or that their support for sanders stemmed from a desire to please—or find—a man. as the new york times reported, “in numerous remarks on social media over the weekend, female supporters of mr. sanders accused both women of undermining feminism. ‘shame on gloria steinem and madeleine albright for implying that we as women should be voting for a candidate based solely on gender,’ zoe trimboli, a -year-old from vermont who supports mr. sanders and describes herself as a feminist, wrote on facebook. ‘i can tell you that shaming me and essentially calling me misinformed and stupid is not the way to win my vote’ [ ].” this example highlights one of the many internal democratic party rifts surrounding hillary clinton’s candidacy for president of the united states, but it also underscores the intergenerational rifts that seem to plague feminists in the united states today. i was not surprised albright felt compelled to remind young women that clinton’s bid for the highest office in the united states is a profound and ground breaking achievement for all women; nor, however, was i shocked that millennial feminists pushed back by claiming that their desire for social justice encompasses much more than gender equality. as a gen-x feminist who teaches “introduction to gender and women’s studies” undergraduate classes these tensions regularly arise in my classes. i cringe when i hear young women, or frankly soc. sci. , , ; doi: . /socsci www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci http://www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci http://www.mdpi.com http://www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci soc. sci. , , of young people in general, dismiss the hard work of the women who paved the way for our access to college, birth control, legal protections, and the myriad of life choices and opportunities that all of us—men, women, and those in between—often take for granted. on the other hand, i have had an equal number of cringe worthy moments in the company of older, usually white feminists, who still assume “woman” is a universal category without accounting for other forms of difference, like ethnicity, class, sexuality, etc. second-wave feminists, like madeline albright and gloria steinem, are often befuddled by millennial feminists calls for them to “check their privilege” and confused when they hear the word “queer” used as a positive affirmation or as a reference to a political group. add these to discussions about transgender equality, the ongoing battle to secure women equal pay, body autonomy, and at times it feels like we have the makings of a really fantastic intergenerational feminist sitcom where feminists, young and old, speak to each other in different languages. despite these differences, i don’t think we’re at a standstill. if anything, these debates highlight how much progress, even if it often is unacknowledged, has been made in women’s fight for equality. and yet, my time in the undergraduate classroom repeatedly reminds me that the issues facing women and other minorities today need some academic and historical grounding. in this essay, i would like to take a tentative stab at explaining where these rifts might come from, and more importantly, examine ways that women’s studies classes (or in my case, gender and women’s studies classes) and feminist pedagogy can help provide important and much needed historical, academic, and political context for an evolving field that sometimes feels as though it has left its female founders behind. introductory classes are interesting places on college campuses. regardless of our academic training or field, many of us find ourselves in the unique and often challenging position of being the first person to introduce undergraduates to a field of study or a new mode of critical inquiry. my classes are often the first place students have ever encountered critical gender or feminist studies. many enroll to fulfill a diversity or common curriculum requirement while others arrive on the first day ready to set the world on fire in the name of feminism. despite their divergent backgrounds and reasons for enrolling, most, if not all of my students assume that the gender and women’s studies program on our campus has always existed. i think this “taken for granted-ness” attitude stems from the fact that most of them (including their relatively young-ish professor) grew up in a society that told us that attending college and pursuing our professional dreams was a birthright for all us, regardless of our gender. this of course, doesn’t account for the myriad of socio-economic and other barriers that limit access to higher education in our country, but i get the impression that my students don’t seem to think gender inequality is one of them. like me, most of the young women in my classes grew up being told that they too, could be president of the united states, even if they don’t feel obligated to vote for a female candidate. i think they also assume that studying women and other minorities’ experiences has always been part of a well-rounded university experience. thus, the first week of my “introduction to gender and women’s studies” class, i make it a point to tell my students that i hail from a women’s studies department that was founded after thirty undergraduate women barricaded themselves in a building at the university of kansas on february . they refused to come out until the university accepted their demands for an autonomous women’s studies department; free daycare; the hiring and promotion of female faculty to administrative positions; targeted recruitment of young women from high school; ending sexist wage policies; and opening a women’s health clinic [ ]. the february sisters, as they quickly became known, brought enough provisions inside the building to sustain them for a week. spurred by a wave of bad publicity and the fear that these unusually angry midwestern “girls” meant business, university administrators acquiesced to the february sisters demands within thirty hours. and thus, the women’s studies department and the university sexually transmitted diseases (std) clinic, affordable daycare, a vibrant research program, and a slew of up and coming female professors and administrators at the university of kansas was born. soc. sci. , , of i share my intellectual and professional lineage with my students during the first week of class for a number of reasons. part of it stems from pride, but i also think it is important for students to recognize that women’s studies (and other academic programs aimed at expanding minorities’ access to higher education) did not fall out of the sky. the february sisters at the university of kansas did not act out of isolation; most women’s studies programs were born out of student, faculty, and community protest. the university system in the united states and higher education in general, was not built by or for women or people of color, a fact that many of us realize once we find ourselves inside of it. as much as i have always loved and admired horace mann, his famous call for education to be the “great equalizer” in the united states was aimed at providing educational and vocational opportunities for young white men in the early days of the republic and his vision for women stopped at teacher-education training. in my classes, it becomes apparent early on that very few of my students realize this or the degree to which women and other minorities were excluded (and still, unfortunately, sometimes are) from the hallowed halls of higher education and that the very existence of women’s studies programs, along with our allies in black/chicana/native and other ethnic studies programs are indebted to student activists who were inspired by the women’s liberation, civil rights, and gay/lesbian liberation, and anti-war movements of the late s and s. before then, women and minority students had to fight tooth and nail to get into universities in the first place, and once there, found themselves reading textbooks where their life experiences were either invisible or relegated to a footnote. this slight was often compounded when students found themselves listening to lectures given by professors whose life experience looked very little like their own. clearly, these are still pressing problems today on college campuses. and yet, i think it is worth noting that before the late s, the de facto segregation that denied students of color equal access to higher education paralleled many of the challenges female students faced, especially those who attended public universities. young women who were encouraged to pursue a public education outside of high school or vocational training often faced limited choices (e.g., nursing, teaching, or secretarial work) and were often banned from programs like business schools that would open doors to challenging careers where, in theory, they could be financially independent. young women often found themselves seeking out the few female faculty members on their campuses as mentors or taking a patchwork of classes in art history, anthropology or literature that lent insight into women’s or gender related issues. as stephanie evans points out in her book black women in the ivory tower – : an intellectual history, young women of color faced and surmounted extraordinary barriers in gaining access to a formal education at universities before the s [ ]. this lack of understanding is also compounded by the fact that most of my students know very little about u.s. women’s history. during the first week, i remind my students that before single women in the united states were unable to get credit without a male cosigner and had faced significantly higher interest rates. before that, women had few legal protections or support if they wanted to leave abusive husbands or unhappy marriages. marital rape wasn’t criminalized in all fifty states until . for women who worked outside their homes before the s, they had few, if any, legal statutes to protect them from losing their job due to pregnancy or sexual harassment. the equal pay act did not become law until and unfortunately did little to help women, many of whom were women of color, who were relegated to working in informal environments (including in other women’s homes) and who faced even fewer options for upward mobility. considering that throughout u.s. history, and especially during the cold war, women were expected to marry young and raise a family, it is a wonder that they found the time or energy to pursue their dreams of higher education. second wave feminists like betty friedan helped launch second wave feminism and the women’s liberation movement, both of which were marked by public activism aimed at combatting sexism and giving women the opportunity to live equal, independent and free lives. when put into context, it makes sense why second wave feminists believed that young women not only had a right to higher education but that universities also had an obligation to create spaces where soc. sci. , , of women could study their own experiences (the personal is political, after all), as well as supporting research dedicated to unraveling the long and thorny history of patriarchy. in , san diego state became the first university to house an official women studies department and by the national women’s studies association was created. by the mid- s, the nwsa estimates that approximately women’s studies programs existed on college universities across the united states [ ]. many women’s studies programs in the s offered classes where “common-sense,” (i.e., male-centered) ways of knowing and understanding the world would be questioned and critical inquiry would produce new forms knowledge. not surprisingly, many early women’s studies faculty members’ pedagogy and course offerings were inspired by their feminist activism in the s, and more often than not, classes and programs were dedicated primarily to studying women’s oppression and lived experiences. as many feminists correctly pointed out, while well intentioned, many of these classes were taught by white women and spoke to white women’s experiences. discussions of working women, lesbians, and women of color often took a backseat to white, upper-middle class women’s experiences and as bell hooks notes in her book feminism is for everyone, many women engaged in feminist activism and teaching outside the academy were seen as unqualified instructors once women’s studies became institutionalized [ ]. on the reverse end of the spectrum, newly developed women’s studies departments also faced ongoing criticism from people who believed that putting women’s experiences at the center of study amounted to reverse discrimination against men. often seen as the poster child of “man hating” women’s studies professors, mary daly, a radical feminist professor at boston college, famously refused to allow males into her advanced women’s studies classes during the s until , when she was forced to resign after refusing to change her policy at the university’s request [ ]. daly’s forced retirement ironically coincided with rumblings by a new generation of “third wave” feminists, a term coined by rebecca walker, daughter of renowned african american novelist alice walker. walker called for a shift in feminist activism and study that would encompass the multitude of young women’s experiences [ ]. young women of the s, including some who majored in women’s studies at universities across the united states, found themselves living in world where questions about race, globalization, new technology and masculinity started to permeate discussions about feminism on and off campus. scholarship in fields ranging from sociology and new media studies began asking questions about the importance of gender constructions (and constrictions!) for all people, including men and transgender folks. feminists of color increasingly called out white feminists in the academy for our long history of speaking on behalf and for them. young women were encouraged by popular culture and sex-positive feminists to embrace their sexuality and their “girly side”, a move that flew in the face of second wave feminism but coincided with a new burgeoning field of queer studies that challenged heteronormative understandings of human sexuality. these criticisms played out on university campuses and in women’s studies programs where faculty negotiated how to address changing times. the nwsa’s “national census of women’s and gender studies programs in u.s. institutions of higher education” notes that women’s studies departments and programs founded in the s and s began to reevaluate their approach to teaching and researching women’s oppression. many elected to add “gender” and “sexuality” to their institutional titles and now serve as umbrella sites where students engage in intersectional critiques of gender alongside investigations of race, sexuality, class, nation, ability, religion, and other factors that shape systems of oppression and people’s experiences. in , the nwsa estimated approximately women’s and/or gender studies departments and programs exist throughout the united states [ ]. the shift from “women” to “gender” studies in higher education mirrors the shift from “second” to “third” wave feminism that challenged feminists to reevaluate how inequality and patriarchy function. neither are inherently stable or monolith, and third wave feminists’ call for intersectional analysis has not only created a more inclusive view of feminism, but one that is also smarter and accounts for the common sense, inevitable differences that women and men experience as they move soc. sci. , , of through this world. i tend to think that the shift from “women” to “gender/sexuality/queer” studies on college campuses has had a similar effect because it gives students the opportunity study gender inequality from a variety of perspectives and accounts for the important ways other facets of identity and power operate. however, i don’t know if this institutional and theoretical shift from “women” to “gender” has permeated discussions of feminism and women’s equality in the public sphere, as evidenced by the defensive game albright and steinem found themselves playing after their comments last spring. if these conversations are happening, they seem to be limited to the blogosphere or on clickable websites like upworthy where young feminists (including men and gender queer folks) are more likely to turn for updates on feminist issues [ – ]. there’s no doubt that the internet and social media have helped fuel a new and exciting awareness about feminism. but, as an educator and a professor with a deep affinity and appreciation for gender and women’s studies, the lack of historical context in these conversations is frustrating. however, i have increasingly found inspiration in my college classroom, where i have the opportunity to bridge these institutional and generational divides with students from a range of backgrounds. some, as i mentioned earlier, simply want to fulfill their common curriculum requirement, but in the last several years, new batches of students arrive on the first day proclaiming their interest in queer studies, transgender equality, critical race studies, or masculinities. several of my students have already self-identified themselves as “fourth wavers” whose interest in feminism has less to do with women’s inequality and more to do with the discrimination transgender and genderqueer folk’s experience. others talk about their interest in how gender operates in social movements like black lives matter, immigration reform, or climate change. it is exciting to hear their take on where feminism is headed and their desire to refashion it for the challenges facing our world today. my job, as i see it, is to help hone their critical thinking skills and to teach them how to use gender and other categories of identities as tools for analysis with the hopes that they will better understand, and maybe even help solve the myriad of problems that plague our world. but, what my classes are missing, or at least need more of, is the opportunity to hear from women like madeline albright or the february sisters who were on the front lines battling for the right of future generations of women to have the opportunity to both attend—and transform—institutions of higher learning and the world that awaits them after college. in a perfect classroom, i would love to add an “old school” second wave feminist to my mix of students. i have a feeling she could teach my male and female business students about sexism in the workplace and add an important perspective to my “fourth-wavers” understanding of gender fluidity. (i have a feeling she might think sexism and gender fluidity might be at odds with each other in ways that we are still working through as scholars . . . ). i have no doubt it would probably lead to heated discussions about racism and classism that plagued many second wave feminist circles; but i also can’t help but think it would provide young students like zoe an opportunity to understand where women like madeline albright and gloria steinem are coming from and why they seem so irritated that young people have forgotten that “women”—as a singular, yet diverse category—are still worth supporting and fighting for. then again, i can’t help but think that older feminists, especially white women, would benefit from hearing about young people’s concerns, and why many of them see feminism as much more complex than women’s universal fight for equality. as much as i sometimes tire of hearing students telling each other to “check their privilege”, its evidence of smart, intersectional thinking that older feminists might find useful in explaining and thinking through some of the internal rifts that divided some women’s liberation activists. by their nature, introductory classes are limited in terms of what we can feasibly teach students. but providing historical context about the battle to establish women’s studies departments is an important and much needed history lesson that can help students understand the evolution from “women” to “gender” studies, and maybe even foster a more productive cross-generational dialogue outside the classroom. there’s something special about an introductory classroom that mirrors the soc. sci. , , of dynamics of the “real world” and as feminism outside the academy continues to evolve, i’m beginning to realize, so must my pedagogy. for me, this means taking more time to revisit women’s history as we move towards a future fraught with challenges that in many ways mirror those that the women before us experienced. using the singular category of “woman” as the cornerstone for academic studies has gone by the wayside for many of us who teach gender studies and i worry that we may have forgotten, or maybe never realized, the importance of women’s history. feminists have a long history of sharing, supporting, and combatting sexism outside the hallowed halls of higher education, but it is important to remember that women’s studies departments have never had it easy, nor have our allies in ethnic studies or other programs that help students and faculty fight to transform the ivory tower. by incorporating these histories into our classes, i can’t help but think that our students, as well as our universities, might be reminded of the importance and necessity of making higher education the great equalizer for all of us. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. references . rappepart, alan. “gloria steinem and madeleine albright rebuke young women backing berne sanders.” the new york times, february . available online: http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/ politics/gloria-steinem-madeleine-albright-hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders.html?emc=eta &_r= (accessed on august ). . ku history: the university of kansas. “sisters act: february .” available online: http://kuhistory. com/articles/sisters-act/ (accessed on august ). . evans, stephanie. black women in the ivory tower, – : an intellectual history. gainesville: university of florida press, . . reynolds, michael, shobha shagle, lekha venkataraman, and national opinion research center. “a national census of women’s and gender studies programs in u.s. institutions of higher education national association for women’s studies report.” national association of women’s studies, december . available online: http://www.nwsa.org/files/nwsa_censusonwsprogs.pdf (accessed on november ). . hooks, bell. feminism is for everybody. cambridge: south end press, , pp. – . . boston college: bc news. “mary daly ends suit, agrees to retire.” available online: http://www.bc.edu/ bc_org/rvp/pubaf/chronicle/v /f /daly.html (accessed on august ). . walker, rebecca. “becoming the third wave.” ms magazine. available online: http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/ rvp/pubaf/chronicle/v /f /daly.html (accessed on august ). . “upworthy.” available online: http://www.upworthy.com/ (accessed on november ). . “everyday feminism.” available online: http://everydayfeminism.com/ (accessed on november ). . “jezebel.” available online: http://jezebel.com/ (accessed on december ). © by the author; licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc-by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/gloria-steinem-madeleine-albright-hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders.html?emc=eta &_r= http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/gloria-steinem-madeleine-albright-hillary-clinton-bernie-sanders.html?emc=eta &_r= http://kuhistory.com/articles/sisters-act/ http://kuhistory.com/articles/sisters-act/ http://www.nwsa.org/files/nwsa_censusonwsprogs.pdf http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/rvp/pubaf/chronicle/v /f /daly.html http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/rvp/pubaf/chronicle/v /f /daly.html http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/rvp/pubaf/chronicle/v /f /daly.html http://www.bc.edu/bc_org/rvp/pubaf/chronicle/v /f /daly.html http://www.upworthy.com/ http://everydayfeminism.com/ http://jezebel.com/ http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. n u m e r o - d i ce m b r e http://in_bo.unibo.it il mutato lutto della guerra di secessione: l’apertura dei memoriali a nuovi significati confederate war grief transformed: the openness of memorials to new meanings phoebe crisman phoebe crisman aia is associate professor of architecture at the university of virginia, usa, where she directs the global environments + sustainability program. her recent publications include chapters in transgression: towards an expanded field of architecture, peripheries, the hand & the soul, and agency. educated at harvard and carnegie mellon universities, she practices with crisman+petrus architects. keywords: social memory, memorialization, war memorials, us civil war, slavery i memoriali della guerra civile negli stati uniti rappresentano la complessa memoria nazionale di una guerra intestina, tutt’ora contestata, su questioni di schiavitù, equità sociale e valori pubblici. oggi si assiste a un acceso dibattito sui monumenti che onorano i comandanti e i soldati confederati. per molti, la memoria sociale originale è scomparsa e i significati ad essi attribuiti si sono spostati dalla relazione con i caduti di guerra, o dal culto della “causa persa”, a simboli di schiavitù e di supremazia bianca. le loro forme sono aperte a nuove interpretazioni legate alla soggettività umana e alla loro localizzazione. questi memoriali glorificano il razzismo o assorbono la memoria storica del lutto? questo articolo esamina il dibattito in corso sui memoriali della guerra di secessione, come prova del ruolo potente dei monumenti nella città e del loro mutevole significato. parole chiave: memoria sociale, commemorazione, memoriali di guerra, guerra civile americana, schiavitù civil war memorials in the united states represent the difficult national memory of a still contested internecine war over slavery, social equity, and public values. today there is a heated debate about physical monuments honoring confederate leaders and soldiers. for many, the original social memory has disappeared and meanings attributed to them have shifted from association with war dead, or the cult of the “lost cause,” to symbols of slavery and white supremacy. their forms are open to new interpretations connected to human subjectivity and situatedness. do these confederate memorials glorify racism or absorb the historical memory of grief? this paper examines the ongoing confederate war memorial debate as evidence of the powerful role of monuments in the city and their changing meaning. http://in_bo.unibo.it n u m e r o - d i ce m b r e physical memorials erected to commemorate grief wrought by war are prominent in contemporary cities around the world. the ongoing debate about confederate memorials in the united states is evidence of the powerful role of monuments in the city and their ever-changing meaning. these memorials represent the difficult national memory of a still contested internecine war over slavery, social equity, and public values (fig. ). for many, the original social memory has disappeared and meanings attributed to them have shifted from association with war dead, or the cult of the “lost cause,” to symbols of slavery and white supremacy. their forms are open to new interpretations that are dependent on human subjectivity and situatedness. do these confederate memorials glorify racism or absorb the historical memory of grief? in the united states over seven hundred public monuments and public symbols honor the confederate side of the american civil war that raged between and . (fig. ) the war was fought over the confederate or southern states’ rights to perpetuate slavery. the northern states fought to end slavery and preserve the union. after , soldiers were killed and more than one million were wounded, the north was victorious, slavery was abolished, and over four million slaves were freed. as noted by historian david blight, “the most immediate legacy of the war was its slaughter and how to remember it. death on such a scale demanded meaning.” for instance, the american national holiday of remembrance, memorial day, began immediately after the civil war as decoration day. over time the history of the losing confederate side was rewritten and collective public remembrance was embodied in physical memorials erected mostly in southern cities and towns. fig. protesters at lee circle in new orleans, may (bryan tarnowski, the new york times) http://in_bo.unibo.it n u m e r o - d i ce m b r e fig. location of confederate symbols in the united states (southern poverty law center, whose heritage? public symbols of the confederacy, , pp. - ) http://in_bo.unibo.it n u m e r o - d i ce m b r e let’s briefly consider the role of the memorial. building on geographer yi-fu tuan’s study of how we use artifacts to give fleeting experience “a semblance of duration and coherence,” historian james mayo has defined the memorial as “an artifact that imposes meaning and order beyond the temporal and chaotic experiences of life.” memorials may reference tragic or non-tragic events. aside from individual death markers; war memorials are the earliest and most common memorials in the united states. because of their politicized nature, depicting winners or losers at a moment in history, war memorials are particularly controversial and may be read in contradictory ways over time. this essay examines how physical memorials initially establish meaning, and how these physical objects are appropriated and invested with new meanings over time. how does this process work and for whom do these monuments speak? in “war memorials as political memory,” mayo has noted “remembrance of the past by communities cannot be separated from the ongoing values that they wish to embrace, but how are their ideals related to the past and the present?... do war memorials provide sanctuaries from the present by idealizing the past through commemoration?” geographer david lowenthal has studied how communities often escape an undesirable present by idealizing the past. this tendency is particularly common in times of turmoil and rapid change. demographics in the united states are shifting away from a largely white and christian population to a more diverse one. the loss of manufacturing jobs and other socio-economic changes are challenging for many. the nation has been radically transformed in the years since the end of the civil war. because of these changes, americans’ understanding of the past and their interpretations of civil war memorials have changed as well. as examined by mayo, “when people accept these changes, they reinterpret the dedicated meanings for memorials to past wars. if the new interpretations are contradictory, the memorials are eventually seen as having conflicting meanings.” this state of conflicting meanings is responsible for the heated debate and violent actions currently unfolding across the country. human subjectivity and individual situatedness play a large role in these differing interpretations. “personal bias affects the perception of what actual history is and what should be remembered and commemorated. war memorials unavoidably present multiple messages, because a range of clientele interprets history differently… when individuals lack knowledge or disagree about actual history, the past is difficult to commemorate. they may sincerely desire to remember past wars, but their assumptions and understanding of history can render commemoration unauthentic.” for instance, many current protectors of confederate monuments ignore significant historical facts, including the role of slavery in the civil war. they are apparently unaware of documents, such as the cornerstone speech delivered by confederate vice president alexander stephens on march , , which explained the foundations of the new confederate government. this speech clearly stated the perpetuation of slavery as the ‘cornerstone” and hence a central reason for confederate succession from the union. “our new government is founded upon exactly [this] idea; its foundations are laid, its corner-stone rests upon the great truth, that the negro is not equal to the white man; that slavery — subordination to the superior race — is his natural and normal condition. this, our new government, is the first, in the history of the world, based upon this great physical, philosophical, and moral truth.” along with intentions, it is crucial to understand when these monuments were erected and by whom. this timeline created by the southern poverty law center (fig. ) shows two major periods when the majority of confederate monuments were built — during the first two decades of the twentieth century when jim crow laws were enacted that re-established racial segregation and as the ku klux klan gained popularity, and throughout the late s and s civil rights movement. these two periods also coincided with the fiftieth anniversary and centennial of the civil war. along with their social and commemorative function, however, monuments are used to create beauty and express power in public spaces. most civil war monuments were erected during the city beautiful movement — a period from the s to the s — when prosperous americans sought to beautify and monumentalized their cities. the world’s columbian exposition of manifested this tendency on a large scale, while towns and cities across the united states created civic monuments, parks and major public buildings to add grandeur to the public realm. unlike other parts of the country, however, in the american south this narrative was coupled with a glorification of the confederate past. for instance, monument avenue in richmond ( ), lee circle in new orleans ( ), and lee park in charlottesville ( ) were built at this time (fig. ). these monuments are located at the center of important urban spaces, near courthouses, libraries and city halls. they demarcate these spaces as centers of white power and privilege, sending a message of authority and control that excluded black citizens. what do these confederate memorials commemorate today… the grief of lost lives, a lost war, a lost way of life? do they represent violence, http://in_bo.unibo.it n u m e r o - d i ce m b r e fig. timeline of confederate iconography in the united states (southern poverty law center, whose heritage? public symbols of the confederacy, , pp. - ) http://in_bo.unibo.it n u m e r o - d i ce m b r e fig. postcard of monument avenue and lee monument, richmond, virginia (richmond news company) http://in_bo.unibo.it n u m e r o - d i ce m b r e death, courage, fortitude, or sorrow? can they still absorb the historical memory of war grief or do they merely glorify racism? whatever the response, civil war memorials today certainly represent the difficult national memory of a still contested internecine war over slavery, social equity, and public values. racial tensions are particularly high in the united states this year, due to current political leadership, heightened awareness of racial injustice due to the effective ‘black lives matter’ campaign, and a series of horrific events. instant communication provided by the internet, which facilitates extremist online communities, has contributed as well. all these events have spurred a heated debate about monuments honoring civil war soldiers and leaders. this issue has become a locus for political protest and physical transformations across the south. many cities, such as new orleans, st. louis, and baltimore have removed confederate monuments. amidst politically charged protest, for instance, four major urban monuments were removed in new orleans in june . they honored confederate heroes or causes, including general robert e. lee and general p.g.t. beauregard— whose statue was spray painted with the words “black lives matter,” and confederate president jefferson davis’ statute marked with the words “slave owner” (fig. ). new orleans mayor mitchell landrieu explained the removals in this way: “these statues are not just stone and metal. they are not just innocent remembrances of a benign history. these monuments purposefully celebrate a fictional, sanitized confederacy; ignoring the death, ignoring the enslavement, and the terror that it actually stood for. after the civil war, these statues were a part of that terrorism as much as a burning cross on someone’s lawn; they were erected purposefully to send a strong message to all who walked in their shadows about fig. general p.g.t. beauregard statue spray-painted with “black lives matter” slogan on june , (eliot kamenitz/the new orleans advocate/associated press); confederate president jefferson davis statue spray-painted “slave owner,” new orleans (wikimedia commons) http://in_bo.unibo.it n u m e r o - d i ce m b r e who was still in charge in this city.” the new orleans monumental task committee, which maintains monuments and plaques in the city, criticized the removal of the memorials from a historical position. “mayor landrieu and the city council have stripped new orleans of nationally recognized historic landmarks… with the removal of four of our century-plus aged landmarks, at years old, new orleans now heads in to our tricentennial more divided and less historic.” are these removals a long overdue iconoclasm, a misguided attempt to erase history, or an effective way to reduce the grief of descendants of enslaved peoples? a battle is raging over the fate of two prominent civil war memorials in the small university town of charlottesville, virginia. both equestrian statues were erected in newly created public squares on gentrified land in the early s. located adjacent to the albemarle county courthouse in court square, the statue of confederate general stonewall jackson was dedicated in during a reunion of the confederate veterans and the daughters of the confederacy. the statue of confederate general robert e. lee was unveiled in lee square three years later during a gathering of the sons of the confederacy. both statues were centrally positioned to memorialize the confederacy and monumentalize the lost cause. amidst heightened racial tensions in the us and after several months of heated debate, the charlottesville city council voted to remove the statues in april . the debate in charlottesville elicited diverse reactions, ranging from respect and possessiveness, as in “hands off our monuments” (fig. ) and “confederate history matters”, to angry rejection of the monuments (fig. ). others considered the role of the monuments in evoking memory — “you cannot change history, but you can learn from it.” while a lawsuit has temporarily stopped their removal, lee park, the central square dominated by the lee statue, was renamed emancipation park two months later. these actions sought to reconcile the history of slavery and racial inequality. these decisions also drew the attention of a range of confederate apologist and white supremacist groups. in august, white nationalists organized a unite the right rally in charlottesville to protest the planned removal of the statues, which they associated with the threat of white “rights’ and their own values. they marched and chanted the slogan, “you will not replace us.” the violence and death that ensued, with one resident killed and many injured, spurred a rapid response by politicians, the press, and citizens on both sides of the issue. many cities decided to remove confederate memorials immediately after the dramatic violence in charlottesville. for instance, two days after the charlottesville protests, a civil war soldier statue was literally pulled down and smashed by an angry mob in durham, south carolina (fig. ). two days later, the baltimore city council voted unanimously to remove all confederate statues that night under cover of darkness. four statues were quickly removed, including a confederate women’s monument. the mayor explained the decision: “for me, the statues represented pain, and not only did i want to protect my city from any more of that pain, i also wanted to protect my city from any of the violence that was occurring around the nation.” the city of charlottesville, unable to remove the memorials due to a court injunction, shrouded both in black (fig. ). clearly, these urban memorials have incited intense passions because they are open to a wide range of interpretations (fig. ). for some they still memorialize the civil war dead, to others they legitimize the southern cult of the “lost cause,” and to others they are symbols of slavery and white supremacy. most of these statues memorialize confederate soldiers in general — “the boys in gray”, rather than referring to specific military or political leaders. yet, protesters see these anonymous figures as embodiments of evil as well. of course, the problem of controversial public memorials is not unique to these confederate statutes. countries around the globe are dealing with the physical reminders of fallen regimes, past ignominious leaders, and dishonorable actions. as americans re-evaluate our racial history amidst the current climate of social, economic, and racial divisions, the original meanings attributed to these memorials must be re-evaluated as well. as a nation, we are coming to terms with both the myths and realities that have been established and embodied in these confederate memorials. amidst a growing focus on the digital and the virtual, this ongoing and very public civil war memorial debate is further evidence of the powerful role of monuments in the contemporary city. notes: . southern poverty law center, whose heritage? public symbols of the confederacy, montgomery, alabama, , p. . guy guggliotta, “new estimate raises civil war death toll” in the new york times, april , . david blight, race and reunion: the civil war in american memory, harvard university press, cambridge, , p. . also see john bodnar, remaking america: public memory, commemoration, and patriotism in the twentieth century, princeton university press, princeton, . yi-fu tuan, “the significance of the artifact” in geographical review, , ( ), pp. http://in_bo.unibo.it n u m e r o - d i ce m b r e fig. residents with “hands off our monuments” signs protesting planned removal of robert e. lee monument, charlottesville, virginia, (wvtf) fig. resident with “fuck yo statue” sign at robert e. lee statue removal rally, july, , , charlottesville, virginia (photographer unknown) http://in_bo.unibo.it n u m e r o - d i ce m b r e fig. durham, south carolina, (reuters) fig. shrouding of the general robert e. lee statue, charlottesville, virginia, august , (andrew shurtleff, the daily progress) http://in_bo.unibo.it n u m e r o - d i ce m b r e . james mayo, “war memorials as political memory” in geographical review, january , ( ), p. . kenneth e. foote, shadowed ground: america’s landscapes of violence and tragedy, the university of texas press, austin, . mayo, p. . david lowenthal, the past is a foreign country, cambridge university press, cambridge, ; svetlana boym, the future of nostalgia, basic books, new york, ; and paul ricoeur, memory, history, forgetting, university of chicago press, chicago, . mayo, p. . mayo, p. . thomas e. schott, alexander h. stephens of georgia: a biography, louisiana state university press, baton rouge and london, , p. . southern poverty law center, p. . william h. wilson, the city beautiful movement, the johns hopkins university press, baltimore, ; charles mulford robinson, modern civic art: or, the city made beautiful, g.p. putnam’s sons, new york and london, ; and peter hall, cities of tomorrow, wiley-blackwell, london, . mitch landrieu, “mitch landrieu’s speech on the removal of confederate monuments in new orleans” in the new york times, may , . associated press, “in new orleans, confederate monuments are finally gone” in new york post, may , . sophie abramowitz, eva latterner, and gillet rosenblith, “tools of displacement” in slate, june , . megan garber, “why charlottesville?” in the atlantic, august , . jacey fortin, “the statue at the center of charlottesville’s storm” in the new york times, august , ; dahlia lithwick, “they will not replace us” in slate, august , ; benjamin wallace-wells, “the fight over virginia’s confederate monuments” in the new yorker, december , . david a. graham, “durham’s confederate statue comes down” in the atlantic, august , ; maggie astor, “protesters in durham topple a confederate monument” in the new york times, august , . nicholas fandos, richard fausset and alan blinder, “charlottesville violence spurs new resistance to confederate symbols” in the new york times, august , . bill niven, “war memorials at the intersection of politics, culture and memory” in journal of war & culture studies, , ( ), pp. - ; isaac stanley-becker. “rewriting history or attending to the past? monuments still confound europe, too” in the washington post, august , fig. confederate soldiers and sailors monument, baltimore, maryland. taken down on august , (jerry jackson, the baltimore sun) psr_ .. american political science review ( ) , , – doi: . /s © the author(s), . published by cambridge university press on behalf of the american political science association which identity frames boost support for and mobilization in the #blacklivesmatter movement? an experimental test tabitha bonilla northwestern university alvin b. tillery jr. northwestern university the black lives matter (blm) movement has organized hundreds of disruptive protests inamerican cities since (garza ; harris ; taylor ). the movement has garneredconsiderable attention from the u.s. media and is well recognized by the u.s. public (horowitz and livingston ; neal ). social movement scholars suggest that such robust mobilizations are typically predicated on clear social movement frames (benford and snow ; snow et al. ). tillery ( b) has identified several distinct message frames within the social media communications of blm activists. in this paper, we use a survey experiment to test the effect of three of these frames—black nationalist, feminist, and lgbtq+ rights—on the mobilization of african americans. we find that exposure to these frames generates differential effects on respondents’ willingness to support, trust, canvass, and write representatives about the black lives matter movement. these findings raise new questions about the deployment of intersectional messaging strategies within movements for racial justice. introduction in august , marcus anthony hunter, an urbanstudies scholar at the university of california, losangeles, was the first to post the hashtag #black- livesmatter on twitter (national public radio ). the hashtag began to go viral on the social media platform after alicia garza, patrisse cullors, and opal tometti posted it on july , to protest a jury’s decision to acquit george zimmerman in the shooting death of trayvon martin, an unarmed african ameri- can teenager, during a confrontation in sanford, florida. in the years since this viral post, #blacklivesmatter has been tweeted more than million times—making it one of the three most used hashtags on the twitter platform (freelon, mcilwain, and clark ; garza ; hockin and brunson ). the phrase black lives matter (blm) has also acquired an off-line life as the animating principle and mantra of the movement against police brutality in black communities in the united states (bonilla and rosa ; jackson and welles ; rickford ; taylor , – ). hundreds of large, disruptive black lives matter protests have been staged in american cities since . public opinion and media studies have reported that these protests have registered in the national consciousness (horowitz and livingston ; neal ; tillery ). as is often the case when new movements emerge (gusfield , ; zald ), the black lives matter movement has also become the subject of scholarly inquiry about how its origins, tactics, and effects fit into existing theoretical paradigms and how it is understood by others (freelon, mcilwain, and clark ; harris ; lebron ; merseth ; rickford ; taylor ; tillery b). the consensus within this burgeon- ing literature is that the black lives matter movement is akin to the new social movements—like germany’s antinuclear movement or the occupy wall street move- ment in the united states—that have emerged in advanced industrialized societies since the s (harris , – ; rickford , – ; taylor , – , – ; tillery b). under this formulation, we can expect the activists associated with the black lives matter movement to evince less concern with mobilizing resources to affect public policy debates or shift the trajectory of political institutions than did their prede- cessors in the civil rights movement of the s and s (johnston, larana, and gusfield ; melucci ; pichardo ). we can also expect black lives matter activists to replace resource mobilization in the service of instrumental demands with a “politics of signification” that seeks to create a space for and repre- sent their distinctive identities within postindustrial cul- tures (johnston, larana, and gusfield ; melucci ). in other words, we should observe black lives matter activists devoting considerable attention to mes- saging about the various identity groups that they pur- port to represent in the public sphere. tabitha bonilla , assistant professor, human development and social policy and political science (by courtesy) and faculty fellow institute for policy research, northwestern university, tabitha. bonilla@northwestern.edu. alvin b. tillery, jr. , associate professor of political science and african american studies (by courtesy), alvin.tillery@northwes- tern.edu. we are grateful to sky patterson for research assistance. we would like to thank professor pearl dowe (emory university), valeria sinclair-chapman (purdue university), daniel gillion (uni- versity of pennsylvania) for insightful comments on an earlier draft of the paper. we also thank fernandes tormos-aponte (university of maryland-baltimore county) and valeria sinclair-chapman (pur- due university) for organizing, hosting, and inviting us to participate in a mini-conference on social movements and intersectionality at spsa . we also thank all participants for their helpful feedback. finally, we thank the three anonymous reviewers and the previous apsr editors, professor thomas koenig and professor ken benoit, for pushing us to significantly improve this paper through the review process. replications files are available at the american political science review dataverse: https://doi.org/ . /dvn/iuzdqi. received: september , ; revised: june , ; accepted: june , . d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://doi.org/ . /s https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:tabitha.bonilla@northwestern.edu mailto:tabitha.bonilla@northwestern.edu https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:alvin.tillery@northwestern.edu mailto:alvin.tillery@northwestern.edu https://doi.org/ . /dvn/iuzdqi https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s scholars of social movements have long acknow- ledged the importance of “social movement frames” both to generate support for and to mobilize individuals to participate in social movements (goffman ; snow and benford ; snow et al. ; tarrow ). indeed, many scholars argue that the difference between successful and unsuccessful movements hinges on the ability of their core activists to behave as “sig- nifying agents actively engaged in the production and maintenance of meaning for constituents, antagonists, and bystanders or observers” (snow and benford , ). the focus on frames within social movement studies has corresponded with the rise of the new social movements. despite this fact, there has not been much empirical work on how the identity frames deployed by the leaders of new social movements shape public opinion and affect micromobilization. instead, social movement scholars have tended to sim- ply catalog the rise of new frames and describe how well they seem to “resonate” with collectivities during pro- tests (benford and snow ; keck and sikkink , – ; snow and benford ; snow and machalek ). in most social movements, the framing of the movement is competitive (carroll and ratner ; benford and snow ; zald )—that is, activists from different branches of a movement tend to com- pete with one another to elevate their message to the position of “master frame” or dominant narrative of what the movement is about (mooney and hunt ; snow and benford , bonilla and mo ). such competition has largely been absent from the history of the black lives matter movement. on the contrary, the most visible black lives matter activists quickly coalesced around the view that intersectionality is the “master frame” of the movement (chatelain and asoka ; garza, tometti, and cullors ). the concept of intersectionality grows out of the rich intellectual tradition of black feminist thought in the united states (collins ; crenshaw ; lorde ). the central idea animating intersectionality the- ory is that marginalized individuals exist and experience their racial, gender, sexual, and class identities concur- rently (hancock ; jordan-zachary ; nash ). this means that interconnected forms of disad- vantage exist for those who identify as part of marginal- ized groups across multiple identities, and this form of discrimination is unique to those with overlapping or intersectional identities, as first defined, described, and documented among african american women (cren- shaw ; hancock ). the corollary of this idea is that marginalized individuals must “confront” what col- lins ( ) calls “interlocking systems of oppression,” based on their class, gender, race, and sexual identities ( ). several recent studies in political science have dem- onstrated that recognition of their intersectionality is a prime motivator of african american women’s behav- ior in politics (brown ; brown and gershon ; simien and clawson ; smooth ). our goal in this paper is to understand how the messages emanating from the leaders of the black lives matter movement about their gender, sexuality, and racial identities work as social movement frames shaping both the attitudes that rank-and-file african americans hold about the movement and their willing- ness to participate in it. we ask whether a framing strategy grounded in intersectionality theory works to mobilize african americans to support and participate in the black lives matter movement. does framing the black lives matter movement as addressing the “inter- locking systems of oppression” lead to the same or greater levels of support for the black lives matter movement and mobilization among african americans as when the movement is framed more broadly as a fight for racial justice? or, do movement frames predi- cated on marginalized subgroup identities function as micromobilizers for those bearing overlapping iden- tities? we answer these questions through a survey experiment designed to test whether the subgroup frames are as potent as a frame based on racial identity for encouraging african americans to adopt positive attitudes about the black lives matter movement and engage in political actions to support the movement. we believe that exploring these questions through experimental methods is warranted for three reasons. first, while there is a wealth of excellent qualitative research on the dynamics of the black lives matter movement (see, for example, chatelain and asoka ; harris ; rickford ; taylor ), there is a dearth of causal research on the movement’s impact on african american communities. second, because black lives matter is the first avowedly intersectional move- ment to gain significant traction in the american public sphere, developing theoretical insights about how it shapes political attitudes and behavior holds great poten- tial to build theory about the larger category of new social movements. finally, the notion that movement frames referencing subgroup identities can be potent micromobilizers of support and action cuts against a lot of accumulated wisdom in multiple fields of study. the remainder of the paper is organized into four sections. in the next section, we provide the theoretical context for our experimental study. we also use this section to present our main hypotheses and expectations based on extant theories. then, in the “methods and data” section, we describe the design of our experiment and data collection. in the “findings” section, we then report the results of our experiment. the main finding presented in this section is that, as compared with mes- sages that focus on group unity, movement frames predicated on subgroup identities can demobilize sup- port for black lives matter in segments of the african american population. the conclusion describes the broader significance of the findings for our larger under- standing of the black lives matter movement as well as the broader literature on social movements. theoretical context and hypotheses this paper falls within the research paradigm on social movements known as the “framing perspective” (ben- ford and snow ; johnston and noakes ). this paradigm emerged as a corrective to the limitations tabitha bonilla and alvin b. tillery jr. d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s inherent in the structuralism that defines the dominant resource mobilization and political process theories of social movements (benford and snow ; snow et al. , ). according to resource mobilization and political process theorists, the ability to take advantage of shifts in the political opportunity structure by mobil- izing resources—for example, labor, money, facilities, etc.—and sending strategic signals to dominant elites is the dividing line between successful and unsuccessful movements (cress and snow ; gamson ; mcadam ; morris ). goffman ( ) initiated the framing paradigm by pointing to the important role that ideational factors play in the micromobilization of a movement’s adherents. goffman ( , ) defines “frames” as “schemata of interpretation that enable individuals to locate, per- ceive, identify, and label” events in their lives and the broader world. in goffman’s view, the most robust social movements occur when there is “alignment” between the interpretive schemata promoted by the leaders of social movements and individual partici- pants. building on goffman’s approach, snow et al. ( , ) argue that “frame alignment is a necessary condition for movement participation, whatever its nature or intensity.” since the mid- s, scholars have devoted considerable attention to the frames that social movement organizations generate to move public opin- ion (bonilla and mo ; lau and schlesinger ) and spur their adherents to take actions in the public sphere (gamson ; klandermans ; snow and benford ). these studies point to the importance of what ben- ford and snow ( ) call “meaning work” to social movements. “meaning work” is “the struggle over the production of mobilizing and countermobilizing ideas and meanings” ( ). under this view, the most import- ant task of activists is to serve as “signifying agents” in the “production and maintenance of meaning for con- stituents, antagonists, and bystanders or observers” ( ). snow and benford ( ) argue that social movement organizations that successfully accomplish these core framing tasks at the beginning of a “protest cycle” are more likely to give rise to dominant or what social movement scholars call “master frames” that “resonate” with the adherents of the movement. ben- ford and snow ( ) define “the concept of reson- ance” as “the effectiveness or mobilizing potency of proffered framings” ( ). snow and benford ( ) further argue that resonance is a function of “empirical credibility, experiential commensurability, and idea- tional centrality” ( ). in other words, the potency of frames is a function of how well they match up with the lived experiences of the movement’s adherents. the most visible activists associated with the black lives matter movement have embraced the concept of intersectionality as a core tenet of their activism. this commitment translates into a framing strategy that views centering the identities of marginalized sub- groups—that is, gender and lgbtq+ identities— within the african american community as the best way to reach and mobilize their adherents (carruthers ; garza ; khan-cullors ; tometti ). garza ( ) gives voice to this commitment in her pamphlet “a herstory of the #blacklivesmatter movement.” she writes: black lives matter is a unique contribution that goes beyond extrajudicial killings of black people by police and vigilantes. it goes beyond the narrow nationalism that can be prevalent within some black communities, which merely call[s] on black people to love black, live black, and buy black, keeping straight cis-black men in the front of the movement while our sisters, queer and trans and disabled folk, take up roles in the background or not at all. black lives matter affirms the lives of black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, black undocumented folks, folks with records, women, and all black lives along the gender spectrum. it centers those that have been margin- alized within black liberation movements ( ). garza goes on to say that this intersectional framing strategy is a necessary “tactic to (re)build the black liberation movement” ( ). in other words, for garza, the black lives matter movement’s robustness as a movement for racial justice depends on the elevation of messages about marginalized subgroups within african american communities. empirical research on the black lives matter move- ment confirms that the type of signification that garza calls for in her pamphlet is widespread among black lives matter activists. tillery’s ( b) content ana- lysis of more than , tweets by six organizations affiliated with the black lives matter movement found that gender, lgbtq+, and racial identities were among the main categories proffered by activists as master frames for the movement. jackson’s ( ) qualitative research on blm activists also confirmed their commitment to intersectional messaging. “black lives matter’s organizational founders, and members of the larger movement for black lives collective,” jackson writes, “have insisted on discourses of inter- sectionality that value and center all black lives, includ- ing, among others, black women, femmes, and queer and trans folk” ( ). despite these stated commit- ments from blm activists, threadcraft ( ) has noted that black female and lgbtq+ victims have received less attention in the movement’s condemna- tions of state violence and rituals of public mourning. kimberlé crenshaw, the progenitor of the term intersectionality, has recognized the “dilemma” that sometimes ensues when social movements have to choose between centering subgroup identities and pointing to unifying messages to mobilize the larger african american community (crenshaw , ). these dilemmas have been recognized by others who have investigated intersectional social movements (ayoub ; einwohner et al. ; gershon et al. ). the potential conflicts between subgroups that crenshaw worried about are precisely the reason that most social movement scholars assert that promoting what gamson ( ) calls a “collective identity” through master frames that downplay the internal diversity is the best way to mobilize adherents (arm- strong ; hirsh ; lichterman ; polletta which identity frames boost support for and mobilization in the #blacklivesmatter movement? an experimental test d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s ; ward ). this viewpoint is bolstered by experimental research conducted by social identity and self-categorization theorists in the field of psych- ology (huddy ; tajfel ; tajfel and turner ; turner et al. ). these related theories, which have been well tested and replicated in dozens of settings, point us to the reality that “individuals are more likely to see themselves as members of social groups under conditions in which the use of a group label maximizes the similarities between oneself and other group members, and heightens one’s differences with outsiders” (huddy , ). for understanding how intersectional identities may alter support and mobilization, we turn to social iden- tity theory, which purports that individuals see them- selves as belonging to various groups—members of sporting teams, neighborhoods, professional guilds, etc. (tajfel ; turner ; turner and tajfel ). once individuals see themselves as part of a group, they engage in a process of evaluating the groups that they are a part of—“in-groups”—and “out-groups” that they do not see themselves as hold- ing memberships in (hinkle and brown ; hogg and abrams ; oakes ; tajfel and turner ). these evaluations then form the basis for judgements about the relative social values of these in-groups and out-groups (hogg and abrams ). thus, an individ- ual’s “social identity” is the end result of this three-step process of self-categorization, group evaluation, and the valuation of one’s group memberships vis-à-vis out-groups (tajfel and turner ; turner ; turner et al. ). our work is based on this idea of social identity as the main lens through which individ- uals engage with social movement frames. further, we argue that, when social movement leaders attempt to propagate master frames to stimulate support and action for their movements, individuals use the three- step process of self-categorization, group evaluation, and the valuations of in-groups and out-groups to determine whether the frame appeals to them. these determinations inform whether or not the movement represents an individual’s group and how one values thier membership within that group. we assert that these questions are even more pro- nounced when the leaders of social movements attempt to build master frames predicated upon multiple social identities in the ways that the core activists in the black lives matter movement have attempted to do over the past several years. this is so because we know that self- categorization, the first step in the process of personal identity formation, “is an active, interpretative, judg- mental process, reflecting a complex and creative inter- action between motives, expectations, knowledge and reality” (turner , ). as a result, the social cat- egory that an individual feels she belongs to can shift quite rapidly in response to a variety of stimuli (oakes ; turner ). the literature is also clear that the stimuli that seem to matter most in generating these shifts for individuals in a given “social context” are the ones that are “salient”—meaning held at “the top of their mind” (oakes ). moreover, building on the same concept of salience, public opinion scholars have also demonstrated that frames generated by elites to engage potential adherents must be both cognitively accessible (chong and druckman ; iyengar ) and perceived as applicable to their lives (eagly and chaiken ; higgins ) in order for individuals to embrace them and modify their attitudes and behavior. both the traditional strategies of social movement leaders and an understanding of social identity theory indicate that black lives matter should gain traction from the black community as a whole by using unifying messages. for decades, public opinion studies have shown that african americans have a strong racial group consciousness (chong and rogers ; dawson ; miller et al. ; shingles ). many studies have also found that racial group consciousness is an important force motivating african americans to par- ticipate in politics at higher levels than those predicted by their relatively low levels of educational attainment and income (harris-lacewell ; hoston ; olsen ; orum ; verba and nie ; white et al. ). dawson ( ) found that african americans also place group considerations at the center of their decision making as they form attitudes and preferences about policies and political candidates. thus, there is ample reason to believe that collective racial identity will matter for the modal subject in our sample, justi- fying our first hypothesis: h : black nationalist frames of the blm movement will increase support of the movement among african ameri- can subjects. black lives matter activists have often cast their commitment to intersectional frames as diametrically opposed to what garza ( ) calls “the narrow nation- alism that can be prevalent in some black communi- ties” ( ). the black lives matter activists’ viewpoint cuts against the findings of public opinion studies that have shown that african americans who believe in some of the key constructs of modern black national- ism demonstrate a greater sense of efficacy and a higher likelihood to participate in politics (brown and shaw ; dawson ). we anticipate the black nation- alist frame of the black lives matter movement to be a potent frame generating the mobilization of positive attitudes and action. there is a further consideration: by centering gender and lgbtq+ identities as the master frames of the black lives matter movement and downplaying trad- itional movement frames centered on racial unity, do the core activists in the vanguard of the movement generate conditions that weaken their ability to maxi- mize the support and mobilization of their adherents? in order to answer this question, we first consider how amplifying messages around gender identity may alter support. again, there are a number of complex factors to consider. several studies have shown that group consciousness grounded in gender identity was a potent mobilizer of women’s participation in both social move- ments and electoral politics (cole, zucker, and ostrove ; fendrich ; rinehart ; weldon ; white ). in addition, a number of public opinion tabitha bonilla and alvin b. tillery jr. d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s studies conducted at the height of the women’s move- ment in the united states found that african american women demonstrated a higher commitment to feminist values than did white women (hooks ; klein ; mansbridge and tate ). more recent studies have also confirmed that feminist consciousness drives afri- can american women to heightened levels of engage- ment, participation, and substantive representation in the politics of the african american community (brown ; brown and gershon ; simien and clawson ; smooth ). building on the findings of these studies, we believe that the gender identity frame will have significant resonance and potency as a mobilizer of african american women. it is less clear how black men will respond to frames of the black lives matter movement that center gender identity because there is very little empirical research on the attitudes of african american men toward gender equality and feminism. one of the few analyses of gender differences in attitudes toward feminism within the african american communities finds that male respondents to the – national black politics study “are equally and, in some cases, more likely than are black women to support black femin- ism” (simien , ). in light of this finding, it is plausible that african american men will also show a positive response to the gender identity frame. how- ever, simien ( ) also found that, despite their abstract commitments to gender equality, the african american men that she studied had a difficult time accepting the premise that gender discrimination was as big a problem as racial discrimination for african american women ( ). simien extrapolates from this finding to theorize that, when asked about both the women’s movement and the movement for racial just- ice, “it is more difficult for black men to uphold the black feminist position because they must consider whether black women experienced sexism within the black movement” ( ). simien’s argument is bolstered by the general findings of davis and robinson ( ) that men are less likely than women are to see gender inequalities in their workplaces and to support the policies designed to reduce them. based on these con- siderations, our second hypothesis follows: h : black feminist frames of the blm movement will increase support of the movement among african ameri- can women, but they may decrease support among male subjects. while the findings of these studies inform our pre- diction that the gender identity frame is likely to demo- bilize support and action among the african american men in our sample, we want to be clear that our theory is not grounded in an empirical analysis of gender relations in the african american community. instead, it is based on our assumptions about how individuals weigh the salience of frames against calculations about their social identities. in short, african american men may not see the framing of black lives matter around gender as salient to their core racial and gender iden- tities. moreover, we believe that frames that center gender while simultaneously using the phrase “black lives matter” likely create what chong and druckman ( ) call a “competitive context” that “will stimulate individuals to deliberate over alternatives in order to reconcile competing considerations” ( ). the public opinion literature on framing also suggests that such deliberations tend to result in individuals choosing the frame that is the most cognitively accessible and applic- able to their individual lives (druckman ; kuk- linski et al. ) as well as the one that invokes deeply ingrained cultural values and norms (chong ; gamson and modigliani ). finally, we turn to how an intersectional identity featuring lgbtq+ identities may be received. rep- resentation of black queer and feminist scholarship is at the forefront of black lives matter and many black activists (carruthers ; khan-cullors and bandele ). while the activism of black lgbtq+ commu- nities is not new to the blm movement, lorde ( , ) details how, through the s, the “existence of black lesbian and gay people was not even allowed to cross the public consciousness of black america.” however, the centering of the black queer feminist organizations, like charlene a. carruthers’s byp , is a shift in the narratives of current black leadership (bailey ; cohen and jackson ; green ). and, as black lgbtq+ individuals continue to be much less represented in discussions of black lives matter (threadcraft ), we expect to find that the lgbtq+ identity frame will be the least potent of the three frames that we test in our survey experiment. indeed, we expect that only those african americans who are in the lgbtq+ community will be mobilized in response to the lgbtq+ identity frame. for those who are not members of the lgbtq+ community, we anticipate much less support as the result of a lgbtq+ frame. public opinion research has documented the wide distribution of homophobic attitudes among the american public (brewer ; herek ; schulte and battle ; sherrill and yang ). while accept- ance of lgbtq+ americans has increased markedly since the s (brewer ; wilcox and norrander ; wilcox and wolpert ), a high number of americans, in general, remains committed to the view that homosexuality is “immoral” (herek ). studies of african americans’ attitudes toward their fellow citizens with lgbtq+ identities have produced indeed, almost all of the public opinion studies that have docu- mented the “gender gaps” between men and women on a wide-range of political issues and candidate evaluations since the s (conover ; mueller ; shapiro and mahajan ; wirls ) have failed to treat racial identity as an important category of analysis. although we focus primarily on lgbtq+ and feminist frames as distinct from each other in this paper, we wish to acknowledge that even these categories overlap. for example, black trans women are highly stigmatized in the united states, and a high level of violence is directed toward them (méndez ). murder rates of black trans women are approximately in , compared with an overall rate of in , (talusan ). which identity frames boost support for and mobilization in the #blacklivesmatter movement? an experimental test d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s interesting and mixed results. on one hand, african americans are significantly more likely than whites are to support government policies and interventions to prohibit discrimination against lgbtq+ americans (lewis ; pew ). at the same time, african americans are less likely than are their white counter- parts to express their personal approval of homosexual relationships and same-sex marriage (lewis ; pew ). in her landmark study of the hiv/aids crisis in black america, cohen ( ) argues that lgbtq+ african americans were frequently “hyper-marginal- ized” within their communities because establishment leaders did not do enough to frame their issues as central to the broader racial group’s agenda. strolo- vitch’s ( ) large-n study also finds that this tendency to “downplay the issues” of “marginalized subgroup populations” was widespread among national advocacy organizations even when they had the “good inten- tions” to provide representations to these subgroups. purdie-vaughns and eibach ( ) have suggested that such dynamics stem from a type of “prototypical think- ing” about social identity that leads to the “intersec- tional invisibility” of marginalized subgroups. building on these findings, our final hypothesis is that h : black lgbtq+ frames of the blm movement will have a positive effect on black lgbtq+ members, but they will have no effect or a demobilizing effect on black subjects who do not identify as lgbtq+. methods and data we tested our three hypotheses using a survey experi- ment that manipulates how the black lives matter movement is framed and measures the resulting effect on an individual’s support for the movement, expressed generally, and willingness to take action in support of the movement by contacting a representative about it. we distributed the survey to an african american sample (census matched on gender, age, and region) of respondents through a qualtrics panel from february , , through february , . as the main objective of this experiment was to determine which identity frames change how the black lives matter movement resonates with potential sup- porters, we presented four different treatments to sub- jects through short introductions to the movement. it is unrealistic to expect that most african american adults have never heard of the blm movement, so, in add- ition, we used a control treatment that provided a basic description of blm: “black lives matter was created in response to the sustained and increasingly visible violence against black communities in the us. they believe in elevating the experiences of black people as american citizens with constitutional rights. they are intentional about amplifying the particular experience of violence black people face.” for our first treatment, the black nationalist frame of the black lives matter movement, we provided an even stronger, unifying statement about the black community. the ideology of black nationalism has a long and complex history in african american com- munities (bush ; moses ; robinson ; tillery ). the earliest variants of black nationalist thought proposed that the solution to the racial oppres- sion and unequal citizenship in the united states was for african americans to establish a separate nation of their own (moses ; robinson ; tillery ). calls for the establishment of a separate nation declined in the wake of the civil rights movement of the s, but several of the core constructs related to nationalist ideology continue to circulate in african american communities (block ; brown and shaw ; davis and brown ; dawson ; harris- lacewell ; price ). to create this first treat- ment, we rephrased the last two sentences of the con- trol treatment to emphasize the black experience “as a distinct nation within a nation through an ongoing call and struggle for reparations for the historic and con- tinuing harms of colonialism and slavery.” (see table for the full treatment texts.) the second and third treatments both signal the intersectionality of the movement in different ways. the black feminist treatment changed the last two sentences by emphasizing the “particular experience” of “black women” as the “most marginalized” group. the black lgbtq+ identity treatment placed emphasis on the particular experiences of black lgbtq+ individuals in the us by denoting their experiences as unique and attending to the “particular experience of non-heteronormative violence that black lgbtq+ individuals face.” after randomly providing respondents with one of these treatments, which highlight different social move- ment frames, we asked the study subjects a series of questions about their support of the black lives matter movement, in general, as well their perceptions of its effectiveness, their trust in its goals, and their assess- ments of the strategic decision making of the core activists guiding the movement. (please see the full text of these questions in appendix a.) in addition, we used a quasi-behavioral metric to measure distinctions between attitudes of support and real behavior. fol- lowing the attitudinal measures, we asked respondents whether they would be willing to write to the speaker of the u.s. house of representatives, nancy pelosi (d- ca), on behalf of the goals of the black lives matter movement, and, if respondents agreed, we gave them space to write her a message. admittedly, writing a letter of support is not the only signal of support that individuals can send. however, we argue that this measure gives a unique opportunity for subjects to the preregistered experiment can be found on as predicted: https:// aspredicted.org/q qq.pdf. ideally, we would have liked to ask each respondent to write to their own representative. however, because elected officials receive cor- respondence with attached names and addresses, it would be impos- sible to directly connect respondents and elected officials without also removing privacy protections. therefore, we asked for letters to the speaker of the house as a proxy for general political support. tabitha bonilla and alvin b. tillery jr. d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://aspredicted.org/q qq.pdf https://aspredicted.org/q qq.pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s demonstrate a greater level of effort to support blm than the attitudinal measures alone and display their perspective of what blm stands for while performing a fundamental feature of blm’s successes: to change dialogues about race in this country (taylor ). results we estimated the effects of the treatments on the dependent variable measures through a standard ols regression with robust standard errors and report the coefficients and % confidence intervals comparing each treatment with the control condition. to more easily interpret the effect of each of the treatments, we first transformed all dependent variable measures to a to scale, meaning that all estimates can be read as � β percentage-point differences between the control and the treatment conditions. we report respondents’ support for blm, perceived effectiveness of blm, and agreement with the goals of blm. as another measure of support, we created an index including three additional variables: trust in people involved in blm, trust in blm leaders, and belief that blm speaks for the individual. on the whole, the sample roughly matches that of african american residents of the united states of america. (table a. in the appendix contains a descriptive summary of all demographic and dependent variables. treatments were fully balanced across various demographic groups—see table a. in the appendix.) as figure illustrates, respondents generally reported that they possess high levels of linked fate (μ = . , se = . ) and that identifying as black is extremely import- ant to most participants (μ = . , se = . ). in general, respondents across treatment groups were relatively familiar with black lives matter (μ = . , se = . ) and strongly supported blm across all dependent vari- able measures (μindex = . , se = . ). (see figure for a visual representation of these variables.) then, we examined the effects of the three different treatments versus the control on the dependent vari- ables for the full sample in figure a. for all dependent variables, the black nationalist treatment, while mostly positive, produced no statistically signifi- cant difference from the control. in contrast, both the black feminist and black lgbtq+ treatments nega- tively affected agreement with and support for the black lives matter movement, though not significantly so. for the index measure, the black feminist treatment is . % lower than the control (p = . ). this effect is less strong for the black lgbtq+ treatment, which negatively affects responses by . percentage points (p = . ). table . full text of experimental conditions condition treatment text control black lives matter was created in response to the sustained and increasingly visible violence against black communities in the us. they believe in elevating the experiences of black people as american citizens with constitutional rights. they are intentional about amplifying the particular experience of violence black people face. nationalist treatment black lives matter was created in response to the sustained and increasingly visible violence against black communities in the us. they believe in elevating the experiences of black people as a distinct nation within a nation through an ongoing call and struggle for reparations for the historic and continuing harms of colonialism and slavery. they are intentional about amplifying the particular experience of the violence the descendants of african people face in their struggle for self- determination. feminist treatment black lives matter was created in response to the sustained and increasingly visible violence against black communities in the us. they believe in elevating the experiences of the most marginalized black people, especially women. they are intentional about amplifying the particular experience of gendered violence that black women face. lgbtq+ treatment black lives matter was created in response to the sustained and increasingly visible violence against black communities in the us. they believe in elevating the experiences of the most marginalized black people, especially those who identify as queer, trans, gender nonconforming, and intersex. they are intentional about amplifying the particular experience of non-heteronormative violence that black lgbtq+ individuals face. indices have been demonstrated to be less prone to estimation error (ansolabehere, rodden, and snyder ). for this index, cron- bach’s α = . , meaning it is a strongly reliable indicator on standard scales. full demographics of the sample as well as balance tests for each of the treatment groups can be found in appendix b. the sample largely matched demographic data of black adults in the united states, compared with the most proximate current population sur- vey in february . in the cps, . % of black respondents were male, the median age was , the median income bracket was , – , , and the modal educational attainment was “high school degree or equivalent” (followed by “some college, but no degree”). a total of . % percent of the sample were men, was the median age, , – , was the median income bracket, and “some college, but no degree” was the modal educational attainment (fol- lowed by a high school degree). overall, our sample was slightly older and slightly more educated but similar on gender and income as the cps. regression tables for this and all subsequent figures can be found in appendix c. the full set of results is in the appendix c, but for brevity we discuss only the index. which identity frames boost support for and mobilization in the #blacklivesmatter movement? an experimental test d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s per our theory, we anticipated a differential response to the black feminist treatment by gender. when we moderated the sample based on the gender of the respondent, we found consistent results across all treat- ments, and we present those results in figure b. for female respondents, we see nonsignificant (positive) effects of the black nationalist (β = . , p = . ) and black lgbtq+ treatments (β = . , p = . ), and nonsignificant (negative) effects of the black feminist treatment (β = - . , p = . ). in contrast, we found that male respondents were much more affected by the intersectional treatments. again, the black nationalist treatment had no significant results on evaluations of blm (βnationalist = - . , p = . ), but both the black feminist and black lgbtq+ treatments decreased figure . distribution of black identity and main dependent variables note: each subfigure shows the distribution of possible responses with the mean as a horizontal dashed line. there is other salient demographic information that may influence the treatment results that are not theorized in this paper. we examine four of these in appendix d: region, religiosity, education, and age. we find that those in the south are consistently less supportive of blm if they receive the lgbtq+ treatment. with weaker results, we also see less support for blm as a result of the feminist treatment among those who are more religious and less support for blm if less religious individuals received the lgbtq+ treatment. tabitha bonilla and alvin b. tillery jr. d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s black male approval of blm (βfeminist = - . ., p = . ; βlgbtq+ = - . , p = . ). we anticipated different results for the lgbtq+ treatment when we moderate by membership in the lgbtq+ community. only subjects identified as members of the lgbtq+ community out of respondents, approximately . % of the sample. as figure c shows, for lgbtq+ members, we see no message having an effect significantly different from zero. because this sample is underpowered, it is impos- sible to draw any conclusions. however, among the non-identifiers, we see similar negative trends for those figure a. the effects of messages on support for black lives matter figure b. the effects of messages on black lives matter, moderated by respondent gender note: these figures display the ols regression coefficients of each group measured against the control condition. the bars show the % confidence intervals. importantly, controlling for linked fate across all conditions min- imizes the feminist treatment effects for black men. while the result is still negative, the p-value decreases so that it does not meet traditional requirements of significance on some variables. this suggests that higher levels of black consciousness may increase support for black feminism among black men. we do not see a similar pattern for the lgbtq+ treatment. in our questionnaire, we ask about gender and sexuality separ- ately, and combine these answers to determine membership in the lgbtq+ community. we recognize that some members of this community may have responded differently to a question directly asking whether they were a member of this community and that this measure may be somewhat noisy, and due to fewer than optimal response options on the gender question, it may also be an under- count. this is relatively consistent with other estimates of the black lgbtq+ population. a gallup poll estimates that . % of black respondents identified as lgbtq+. which identity frames boost support for and mobilization in the #blacklivesmatter movement? an experimental test d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s who received the feminist message and the lgbtq+ message(βfeminist = - . ., p = . ; βlgbtq+ = - . , p = . ), though these numbers do not quite reach trad- itional levels of statistical significance. from our hypotheses, we anticipated that support for blm would be differential among the intersectional treatments, though not among the unifying nationalist treatment. indeed, we see differential effects for the feminist and lgbtq+ treatments; however, instead of mobilizing women or lgbtq+ members, we actu- ally see a small but significant decrease in mobilization among men and those who do not identify as lgbtq+, with strongest results among the black males in our sample. despite these changes, it is important to note that the support for blm among men remains higher than the midpoint of the scale. by using our second set of measures, the open-ended letters to nancy pelosi, we begin to see further differ- ences in the precise results of the three messages. when we examine the effect that the three treatments have on political efficacy, we see further support for the general notion that mentioning specific groups in the general context of blm depresses support of the movement. we also see a hint that, while an emphasis on blm as a nationalist movement does not necessarily increase support, it does change how individuals respond to the movement. of the subjects, ( . %) indi- cated they would be willing to write a letter of support for blm to speaker of the house nancy pelosi. of those, ( % of the total sample) wrote a message to pelosi, and subjects responded with gibberish, an unrelated statement, or indicated that they needed more time to think about what to say. we coded these subjects as noncompliant and excluded them from the substantive analysis that follows. as figure shows, on average, the subjects wrote relatively short messages with . characters (se = . ). overall, the treat- ments did not predict whether or not individuals actu- ally wrote a response to speaker pelosi or whether individuals even said they would write a response. (see appendix table c. .) however, regardless of treatment group, respondents who were more support- ive of blm and had higher levels of linked fate were more likely to write a letter to speaker pelosi. to further investigate whether the various treat- ments affected how individuals wrote, we hand-coded all messages. first, we coded dummy variables for whether respondents specifically mentioned disparities faced by black people generally, black men, black women, or black lgbtq+ identifiers. second, we coded whether or not respondents asked specifically for speaker pelosi to support the blm movement and whether or not individuals specifically mentioned the police. strikingly, while there were mentions of black men, there were only mentions of particular struggles of african american women and no mentions of the black lgbtq+ community. needless to say, the treatments did not cause differences in particular sub- group mentions in the letters. the treatments did, however, alter whether respond- ents asked for support, invoked police brutality, and mentioned injustices faced by black citizens generally, as displayed in figure a. only the black nationalist treatment positively and significantly increased men- tions of the police over the control (βnationalist = . , p = . ; βfeminist = . , p = . ; βlgbtq+ = . , p = . ); similarly, the only treatment that increased mentions of disparities faced by black individuals was the black nationalist treatment (β = . , p = . ), but not significantly so. and, while there was no statistically significant effect, the black feminist treatment reduced petitions for support (β = - . , p = . ). figure c. the effects of messages on black lives matter, moderated by respondent lgbtq+ identity note: these figures display the ols regression coefficients of each group measured against the control condition. the bars show the % confidence intervals. prior to treatment, we asked respondents if they had written a letter to an elected official within the last year. in our sample, . % of respondents ( ) had written to an elected official within the last year. that % of our sample was willing to do so in a survey context is higher than we would expect without prompting. tabitha bonilla and alvin b. tillery jr. d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s we examine how the intersectional definitions of black lives matter changed subject engagement in the messages, displaying these results in figures b and c. it is important to recognize that power decreases signifi- cantly in these analyses because just over half of our respondents wrote a message and the subgroup analyses further decrease our sample size. nonetheless, it is important to note that several differences remain. first, men who received the nationalist treatment were more likely to mention disparities (βnationalist = . , p = . ). although very little differed for men who wrote, their messages were shorter if they received the lgbtq+ treatment (βlgbtq+ = - . characters, p = . ). women who received the nationalist treatment were more likely to mention the police (βnationalist = . , p = . ). the lgbtq+ condition also increased the likeli- hood that women would mention the police, though by a smaller amount (βlgbtq+ = . , p = . ). second, due to the small size of this group, we drew no conclusions from the lgbtq+ group. the % figure . distribution of respondents who wrote a message to speaker pelosi figure a. the effects of messages on letters of support for black lives matter which identity frames boost support for and mobilization in the #blacklivesmatter movement? an experimental test d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s positive shift in asking for support for blm as a result of the lgbtq+ treatment suggests that this group may be more mobilized, but since p = . , we cannot confirm this conclusion here. we saw a significant decrease in the length of messages for the lgbtq+ identifiers if they received the nationalist or lgbqt+ treatments (βnationalist = - . characters, p = . ; βlgbtq+ = - . characters, p = . ). for those not identifying as lgbtq+, we saw a stronger negative effect in asking for support as a result of the feminist treatment than lgbtq+ treatment (βfeminist = - . , p = . ; βlgbtq+ = - . , p = . ). we also saw a significant increase in mentions of the police for non- identifiers who received the nationalist treatment (βna- tionalist = . , p = . ). what is important to note here is that, while we do not necessarily see an increase for women and lgbtq+ members in the content of their letters, we also do not see a decrease in the willingness to ask for support as a result of the intersectional treat- ments among men and non-lgbtq+ members. discussion and conclusion the black lives matter movement has organized hun- dreds of protests against police brutality and other forms of state violence against african americans since (bonilla and rosa ; jackson and welles ; rickford ; taylor ). the most visible activists associated with the black lives matter movement have placed the concept of intersectionality at the heart of their organizing efforts (chatelain and asoka ; garza, tometti, and cullors ), and black lives matter activists practice intersectionality by figure b. the effects of messages on letters of support for black lives matter, moderated by respondent gender note: these figures display the ols regression coefficients of each group measured against the control condition. the bars show the % confidence intervals. figure c. the effects of messages on letters of support for black lives matter, moderated by respondent lgbtq+ identity note: these figures display the ols regression coefficients of each group measured against the control condition. the bars show the % confidence intervals. tabitha bonilla and alvin b. tillery jr. d o w n lo ad ed f ro m h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re . c ar n eg ie m el lo n u n iv er si ty , o n a p r a t : : , s u b je ct t o t h e c am b ri d g e c o re t er m s o f u se , a va ila b le a t h tt p s: // w w w .c am b ri d g e. o rg /c o re /t er m s. h tt p s: // d o i.o rg / . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s consistently centering gender and lgbtq+ identities in the social movement frames that they deploy to reach their adherents (jackson ; tillery b). as we have seen, the leaders of the black lives matter move- ment believe that this type of signification is the key to expanding support for and participation in their move- ment (garza ). we tested this proposition through a survey experiment that presented african ameri- can subjects with four different frames of the black lives matter movement. building on insights from research on social identity theory, we anticipated that the three identity frames would have differential effects on segments of the african american community. we expected that the black nationalist frame would be the most potent of the three frames for mobilizing positive attitudes and stimulating actions in support of the black lives matter movement. surprisingly we found that support for black lives matter movement did not increase overall as a result of the black nationalist treatment exposure, though we did see changes in how individuals asked for support and greater specificity within their messaging. we also predicted that the two frames predicated on marginalized subgroups, black feminist and lgbtq+, would splinter and sometimes depress mobilization among our test subjects, and we found support for this hypothesis. our prediction was that these intersectional frames would increase support among subgroup mem- bers and possibly demobilize non-subgroup members, but we only found evidence that intersectional iden- tities demobilize non-subgroup members. we predicted that the lgbtq+ identity frame would not be salient to most of our test subjects. moreover, given our awareness of cohen’s ( ) research on the “hyper-marginality” and purdie- vaughns’s and eisbach’s ( ) arguments about “intersectional invisibility,” we expected exposure to the lgbtq+ frame to demobilize most of the subjects who were exposed to it. our findings were consistent with this expectation. in addition, while we did see nonsignificant positive mobilization from lgbtq+ members, we simply did not have a large enough subsample to draw conclusions about this group. importantly, the decrease in support across both inter- sectional frames was particularly pronounced for the african american men in our sample. all in all, these data largely support our hypothesis that social movement frames based on subgroup iden- tities can generate segmented public support for those movements. this has broad implications for the study of social movements. as we have seen, the leaders of the black lives matter movement adopted their inter- sectional messaging strategy in part because they believed that it would boost support for the movement in african american communities (garza ; jack- son ). in recent years, feminist scholars of social movements have increasingly argued that we should expect higher rates of participation and greater cap- acity from racial justice movements that utilize inter- sectional frames (brown et al. ; einwohner et al. ; ferree ; lindsey ; terriquez ). the findings from our survey experiment suggest that using gender or lgbtq+ identity frames as the master frame for the black lives matter movement does not mobilize any particular subgroup more, but does demo- bilize african american men. while further investiga- tion is required to parse out precisely why african american men demobilize in response to these frames, this adds to growing literature about the difficulty of creating movements that are both viewed as intersec- tional and are widely supported (ayoub ; thread- craft ). further studies should also focus on determining why african american women are mobilizing more than men in response to every frame that we exposed them to in our survey experiment. a raft of recent studies have demonstrated that, in terms of both their political behavior and their representation of their community’s interests as elected officials, african american women are now the center of gravity in african american politics (brown ; gillespie and brown ; orey et. al. ; philpot and walton ; tillery a). yet in our study, while it is true that the gender identity frame had strength in mobilizing african american women, it was not as potent as the black nationalist frame in boosting their activism on behalf of the black lives matter movement. jackson ( ) points to key differences between political responses of african american women, suggesting that african american women are generally more responsive to threats to the african american community. our research under- lines the greater responsiveness among women, despite the movement message, and points to the importance of investigating how african american women respond in political environments where multiple movement frames compete for their attention. supplementary materials to view supplementary material for this article, please visit http://dx.doi.org/ . /s . replication materials can be found on dataverse 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/majority-of-public-favors-same-sex-marriage-but-divisions-persist/ https://unerased.mic.com/ https://www.csdd.northwestern.edu/research/black-lives-matter-survey.html https://www.csdd.northwestern.edu/research/black-lives-matter-survey.html https://www.csdd.northwestern.edu/research/black-lives-matter-survey.html https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://www.democracynow.org/ / / /part_ _blacklivesmatter_founders_on_immigration https://www.democracynow.org/ / / /part_ _blacklivesmatter_founders_on_immigration https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s 	which identity frames boost support for and mobilization in the #blacklivesmatter movement? an experimental test 	introduction 	theoretical context and hypotheses 	methods and data 	results 	discussion and conclusion 	supplementary materials community change interview with dr. wornie reed themed section highlight community change interview with dr. wornie reed jared keyel and mary ryan 	school	of	public	and	international	affairs,	virginia	tech,	us 	college	of	liberal	arts	and	human	sciences,	virginia	tech,	us corresponding	author:	jared	keyel	(jaredk @vt.edu) special interview for the themed section. keywords: democratic community change; social justice activism; institutional reforms; community struggle mary ryan: we are doing our special issue of community change on the wake of the president trump election and looking at ways of democratic community change and social justice activism and other kinds of responses that are happening within the community to institutional reforms, interpersonal struggles, community struggles, and the work of the race and social policy research center at virginia tech seemed really pertinent to that discussion so we wanted to reach out today to dr. wornie reed, the executive director of that center to have a discussion about a lot of these issues. i am mary ryan and i am on the editorial board of community change and i am a doctoral candidate in the aspect program here at virginia tech, which stands for the alliance for social, political, ethical, and cultural thought and i am doing my dissertation on structural racism in the us federal government. jared keyel: i am jared keyel. i’m a phd candidate here at virginia tech in the planning, governance and globalization program. i am also on the editorial board for community change and my research deals with potential possibilities amongst iraqis who come to the us as refugees since . mary ryan: thank you so much for joining us today dr. reed, i’ll just read your bio briefly. dr. wornie reed obtained his phd in sociology at boston university. currently, he is a professor of sociology and africana studies and director of the race and social policy research center at virginia tech. previously, he developed and directed social science research centers at three universities, including the william monroe trotter institute at umass boston. among his scholarly accomplishments: redirected the project assessment of the status of african americans which involved sixty-one scholars and resulted in the production of a four- volume work published by auburn house publishers. he is the past president of the national congress of black faculty and the association of black sociologists. currently he is a member of the steering committee of the montgomery county dialogue on race project. again, thank you so much for joining us today. this interview is being transcribed for the community change journal which is a peer-reviewed in-house journal here at virginia tech. so, as i mentioned, you are the director of the race and social policy research center at virginia tech. can you tell us a little more about what the center does and what you do in your role there? dr. wornie reed: the center is primarily a research center and it does research on race and, as a result, social policy issues related to race. significantly, for some graduate students, we also have a certificate program in race and social policy where students can get the certificate if they take the course race and social policy and then any of a long list of courses for nine other credits. so, that’s four courses required to get the certificate in race and social policy, so we have two or three students doing that every year. we sponsor an annual workshop that we call the combating racial injustice workshop, and we cosponsor other events on campus with other groups, and we have involved a number of graduate students in the work at the center. so, we are in the process of trying to produce some of that more formally than what we have done in the past. keyel,	jared	and	mary	ryan.	 .	community	change	 interview	with	dr.	wornie	reed.	community	change ( ):	 .	doi:	https://doi.org/ . /cc.v i .a. community change mailto:jaredk @vt.edu https://doi.org/ . /cc.v i .a. keyel and ryan: community change interview with dr. wornie reedart.  ,	page  	of	 	 jared keyel: and dr. reed, you recently spoke at the city works expo in roanoke, virginia. can you briefly summarize for us your discussion there? dr. wornie reed: that might be a little difficult since i’ve given about three or four speeches since then, so let me see. i’m not so sure i remember what that one was all about. let’s see, i remember some of the things i said, but i don’t remember what the whole thing was about. did either of you attend that? mary ryan: unfortunately, i did not. we were both out of town. dr. wornie reed: okay, then you could have reminded me of something and we could have been rolling (group laughter). mary ryan: well, we can jump to the next question if that’s easier. they probably are things that you’re talking about. dr. wornie reed: right, so rather than trying to remember that, why don’t you just ask me what you want to know? mary ryan: so, we will jump into the good stuff. so where do you think we are right now, just kind of starting off broadly, in terms of race and diversity as a country? are these times that we’re in new or different? dr. wornie reed: that’s a good question and i got this question the night before last down in wytheville where i was giving a talk, because some people are questioning, “aren’t we so much better than we used to be?” and “why is there all this discussion about race?” and i say, it’s very difficult to demonstrate that we are a lot better off than we were, in say, a couple generations ago. very, very difficult. so, where we are, is in a pretty desperate, not too pleasant, situation. so, let me demonstrate. as i told the group the other night, a black man in new york state is two or three times more likely to be arrested today than a black man in mississippi in . a black man is more likely to go to prison today than back then. black men and women go to prison at an increasing rate, up until very, very recently—the last few years—that there’s been a little slow down in that. but for several decades there has been an increase in the incarceration of african americans. yet the crime rate has been going down for forty years. there’s only been one little period of time when there was a blip up, but that was just in the late s and early s. other than that, it’s been going down. and we’ve been building so many prisons, like here in virginia, that we have one that was never occupied because people are not being railroaded into prison fast enough to keep up with building the prisons. so, that’s a pretty bad thing that says that we’re not where we think we might be. there are some other examples that i could give, but the most critical one for me is the criminal justice system, which has always been used to kind of keep african americans down and it is in full force right now. in fact, we were beginning to turn a corner, it seemed, with the use of the policies and practices statute that we have to go after police departments, if the department of justice thought that they were committing racial discriminatory acts in their policing. however, right now— last year this time—twenty-five police departments were on investigation, or about to be on investigation. today we have zero, because of the change in policy. so, we are stepping way back, not a half-step back, this is way back. so that’s one of the things that’s happening. so, we are probably not as well off, we are certainly not as well-off as many people think. there was this whole long discussion in the s about the growth of the black middle class and i was always looked at like i had horns when i would go around the country arguing that that’s not so. the issue was that every class increased, but the middle class increased at a slower rate than the lower class of african americans. but that’s not what everybody was sold, including african americans. we have a situation in virginia where blacks and whites use marijuana at about the same rate. yet, blacks get arrested at five times the rate of whites. and, by the way, as i explained this, one of the problems we have of convincing people about this, is people can’t do arithmetic, so we’re way behind in arithmetic too. okay, because as i tell students if somebody gives you a number, but don’t give you a denominator, ignore it. because it doesn’t have much meaning. it’s got to be compared to what? compared to previous data, or something or the other. so, in these lines people are saying, “but yes, are you saying they arrest people for smoking marijuana or having a lot of marijuana when they don’t have it?” and i’d say “no.” and they’d say, “well what’s wrong with that? what’s wrong with arresting someone who’s guilty?” i say, “yes, but you should arrest everyone who’s guilty and at the same rate,” and that’s not what is happening. in virginia, african americans are about % of the population, they are about % of all illegal substances users. but they are % of all people who go to prison. and that has implications all over every aspect of african america life and increasingly the life of everyone else. but, people are not paying any more attention to that than they keyel and ryan: community change interview with dr. wornie reed art.  ,	page  	of	 	 are about climate change. so, if we are better than we were say fifty years ago, it’s marginal. let me give you another example. we have in the center, that i direct, the race and social policy center, we’ve been looking at employment discrimination nationally. so, we’ve been looking at national data from the census on income of employed persons. fully-employed persons so that we cannot have the data be a little more difficult to interpret with people having varied levels of participation and labor force and so on. so, we are talking about people who are just fully-employed and compare their income. okay, in african americans made $. for every dollar that whites earned. in , they earned $. . we particularly look at this period because we started having the laws just a couple years before that instituted against discrimination. see, let’s say in it was perfectly legal to discriminate. okay, it’s not in , but newly not illegal. but we’ve had virtually no change in the discrimination in employment as we look at it for fully-employed people. so, where we are, is not where all too many people think we are. okay, and post-racialists was so absurd that i’ve never entered a conversation about it. so, where we are, is not nearly where we should be. jared keyel: and so then, in light of all of that context and the midst of this current political climate in the united states, has this influenced your work, that you’re working on currently? the election of trump in and some of the other things we’ve seen as progressed. dr. wornie reed: no, it hasn’t influenced my work, not at all. we were already doing it because i’ve been seeing this racism forever. what we have seen with the trump phenomenon is a presidential campaign that was based on race that too few of the national media is willing to admit. this was a white nationalist campaign. simple as that. this is not to say, “this is the way we should interpret it.” these are the words and the same things they did as they were running for office, a white nationalist campaign, and yet people, that is, many analysts and many major newspapers, want to make the argument that it’s about disaffected workers. that’s not true, by the way. studies have been done that show that the voting population that was concerned about their economic futures that had some concerns about the future in terms of economic issues, jobs, and so on, the majority of people having that as a high priority in their thoughts and beliefs and feelings, voted for hillary clinton. the people who thought that minorities were taking the country over, taking it away from whites, the majority of those people voted for trump. so, it was race, and so, one of the differences is, it hasn’t affected my work but it’s sometimes loaded with me trying to agonize over why we can’t get more people to look at the data and admit what’s going on. so, we kind of have a problem there. mary ryan: so, you’ve spoken about your center and the work that you’re doing and in the last answer you started talking about the country’s grappling with race. so, what changes, since the election, have you seen with the way the country is engaging with issues of race and racism? dr. wornie reed: there probably are some changes there, in that we have more discussion about race than we did before, and we have more people willing to say that something is racially discriminatory then we did say two years ago. so, i think that has changed. we don’t have enough of the analysts in the mainstream media addressing how the lives of minority people are being changed by policies that are being implemented. they’re spending too much time talking about the political issues without concern about the content issues. the political means, if they don’t pass the tax bill, then they won’t have done anything. we have very little discussion in the mainstream media. we have discussion, but not enough about what that would mean for everyday lives. for instance, the trump administration has let the chip program expire. okay. there may be dire consequences from that. let me give you a for instance. when mr. reagan came into office in and started cutting all programs in what is now the department of health and human services, he cut the maternal and infant care program, and many of us predicted that it would affect the well-being and the lives of poor people and african americans. and it did. for two years in a row, during the mid- s, the life expectancy of african americans went down for the first time since we’ve been keeping a record of it because of the maternal and infant care. so, the congress eventually put that back in order and things got back to the normal and regular increases in life expectancy. because life expectancy is really based upon how many children live to not be children. it’s not how many old people live to be older. but that’s another discussion. jared keyel: and, so, to kind of preface this next question, we see that some people understand racial disparities in the united states as a product of individual choices and behaviors. and so according to this view, low achievement is due to the fact that people of color are making poor personal choices and not taking responsibility for their own problems. and so how does your work dispel this misunderstanding? keyel and ryan: community change interview with dr. wornie reedart.  ,	page  	of	 	 dr. wornie reed: we spend all of our time basically making an argument against that. that’s kind of what we do. we have even published a piece out of the center in the chronicle of higher ed that’s kind of related to that, but not directly. whatever i talked about at city works, it dealt with this. it dealt with the argument that the assumption that people have is that, “well, what is racism?” racism is something that bigoted individuals do intentionally. and so, there’s kind of two problems with that statement, even though the statement could be correct. but, it does not describe much. it describes a little part of what’s going on. i dispelled the first one, which is intent. intent is irrelevant. it does not matter. so, we spent a lot of time on that. intent is irrelevant in things social. as a sociologist, i argue it is the most irrelevant term for any sociologist and most of the social sciences. intent is seriously relevant in some psychological work and seriously relevant in legal work, because you must have intent sometimes to be convicted of a crime. but it is totally unimportant in things social. so, intent is irrelevant. let’s get back to spending the time looking at individuals and making the assumption that prejudice leads to racism. that is the main tenet of what i call the “institutionalized thought structure” in this country, is that, “well, racism comes from prejudice. people are prejudiced and therefore if they are, and it’s unfortunate, and they therefore commit racism.” that might be true, but that’s the minor direction for the era. the more major direction of the era is from racism to prejudice. because, no one is born prejudiced. it has to come from somewhere. so that is what we do at the center and when i speak about how prejudice comes from racism, more so than the other way around because nobody is born prejudiced. it has to come from somewhere. it doesn’t just pop out of thin air. where does it come from? it comes from racism, and then we begin to talk about something larger than the individual. it’s the environment in which the person grows, it’s the place where they are. whether it’s media, social friends, the geography where they’re from. it’s the racism there. what i mean by the racism there, is not whether someone calls a black person the “n-word,” i’m talking about whether or not they affect how well the black person lives; how well and how long they live. and to me, that’s what real racism is. that’s real racism. the other stuff, i call ‘petty racism.” we spend all too much attention in this society on that. for example, as horrible as the charlottesville riots were, it was all about symbolic stuff. as despicable as i’ve held confederate symbols all my life; it’s still symbolic. and while we’re arguing over that, black people are going to prison, in virginia, at almost four times the rate they should in comparison to whites for drugs. that’s real racism. now, to kind of summarize what i’m trying to argue here is that individual racism is of more minor consequence; but, i do admit that individual racism can be really, really serious. i use the example of the bombing of the church in birmingham that killed those four little girls. this was an act of individual racism, there were three or four people involved, but it was not an institution, just these individuals, and it wasn’t even the ku klux klan, it was people that kind of belonged to it. these individuals bombed this church. now that was horrible, so how can i minimize what they were doing? the most heinous thing that happened then was that they weren’t prosecuted. that was a systemic issue. that was systemic racism. that’s the racism that many of us have been fighting for decades. that they didn’t prosecute it. they prosecuted it like fifty years later, sixty years later or something. okay, i guess fifty years later. so, i probably varied from your question, but that’s my response. mary ryan: so, building off our conversation of racism and bringing in, a little more explicitly, some issues of white privilege and some of these ideas we’re seeing public discourses of racial resentment as a potential motivator or explanation for the election of president trump in . so, what do you make of this? what do you think of racial resentment? dr. wornie reed: if it means that a pretty sizable segment of the population resented the society’s acceptance of more non-whites into positions of power and privilege, and so on. if that’s what it means then i think it was right on; in fact, that’s what the election was about i would argue. it was about people who resented their loosening grip on white privilege. okay, and mr. trump played into it. in fact, mr. trump does not get anywhere in this election without having created the “birther” issue. in the spring of , the majority of mr. trump’s supporters did not believe obama was born in the united states. okay, and even after he was nominated for the presidency, and therefore didn’t have to share the republican side, about % of his supporters thought that african americans should not have been freed at the end of the civil war. now, those were new expressions of what some of us have been pointing out all along and i am a great follower of the southern poverty law center, which kind of keeps tabs on the hate groups and so on. so, i have seen them through the years so i know they’ve been developing. but, yes, i think racial resentment, in that sense, yes, i think racial resentment is a key issue. but it’s a nice way of saying racism. all racial resentment, yeah. keyel and ryan: community change interview with dr. wornie reed art.  ,	page  	of	 	 jared keyel: and you’ve mentioned that you think that this institutional racism, particularly in prisons and the criminal justice system, is a very salient issue. are there other issues that you see as particularly important at the present in the united states? dr. wornie reed: yes, employment has hardly improved. so, i have pointed out some data related to full employment, but we have dat, this data is like years old, but we have data from the eeoc work throughout the period of the s, s, and s showing the discrimination, across the board, by industries. we have data on that. we have the data on that for virginia. we have that data, the eeoc data, but we have some summaries of it in the center. so that’s another area, okay. to me, i spend much of the time on that and i’m trying to avoid getting into another area, which is health and medical care. where i’ve been spending time for years—okay, okay—on health and medical care. so, there are two areas; so, we have health, and we have medical care. in the late s, congress asked the institute of medicine to determine whether what folks, like me, were arguing all the time about the discrimination in the provision of medical care, whether that existed, and to what extent? okay. now, we are talking about the provision of medical care independent of access. we’re saying, “once they get into the medical facility, do we have disparities?” and so, what the most prestigious medical body in the country decided after studying this for several years, they demonstrated with data they studied studies of this and showed that african americans are discriminated against in the provision of medical care service are “watch bread.” okay. and what we mean by that is, typically, to think about it is a white person goes to a physician and has a set of symptoms and has a diagnosis. a black person goes to a physician and has the same set of symptoms and the same diagnosis, but they get different treatment regimens. that’s happening all over the place. and, these are the kinds of things that matter, more than symbolic things. okay. now let’s go to health. what we have come to now is to understand something a little bit more complicated; but, many of us have been pushing this and talking about it for years, is that the society itself has racially discriminatory elements that affect the health of african-americans. to explain it, a couple of pediatricians decided to study this, what they called a hypothesis that this was racism: how is it that these upper-middle-class black women have so many more adverse birth outcomes than upper-middle- class white women. okay. and they came up with the hypothesis that it was racism. and they tested it, and the way they tested it was to take a look at all the birth outcomes for european americans in the united states, and african americans, and africans newly in america. africans newly in america had the same rate of adverse birth outcomes as whites. african americans didn’t have so much higher. and then after africans from africa were here longer adverse birth outcomes became more and more like that of african americans. so, we are talking about a society—so, some people deal with lot of things about society and don’t deal with kind of factual things, like i like to point out, and this kind of supports their work. mary ryan: so, this might seem like an obvious question, but why should people care about these challenges? dr. wornie reed: i used to have a phrase that i was trying to think of it the other day that i used to use to advocate that very point—why…it’s…i’ve forgotten the phrase that i used to use. i know i’m not going to think of it now because i couldn’t think of it the other day. but, just like climate change affects everyone, okay, racial discrimination can have that same effect. it changes communities, such that we can measure communities and that rate of producing ill health. so, the issue is, for example, all of these people who go to prison, get out. and when they get out and are not able to get jobs, things happen that put other people’s life and safety at risk. but, also, what happens in communities are degraded in terms of the kind of climate you have; and, that climate affects everyone okay, and so everyone living near a city is going to be affected by the deterioration of the city. and the more we do this to people, the more we cause a deterioration of some communities. for example, this following on your question, there is an assumption, based on that assumption that the ghettos are the result of some depravity of african americans. when in my courses, we go through details and showing how they would develop, it’s all a part of policies and practices—racist policies and practices—almost always. and then on top of that you have people who have less education and can’t get a job. i mean, and this produces a situation such that , over % of all african american babies born in america are born to single women and we are not talking about morality; but, we are talking about the fact that half of these will be poor. and when you’re poor, you are not going to live as long, and you have more problems; and, you’ll have more problems with the society and it calls for much more money in taxes to educate these people and so on and on and on. so, everybody is in this together. and one of the reasons some people can earnestly, and honestly, ask that question is because we have such a heightened keyel and ryan: community change interview with dr. wornie reedart.  ,	page  	of	 	 sense of individualism in this country. i argue that it is the overriding ethos of this country, individualism such that we say “i” more than “we”, such that it is becoming much easier now for people to say, “why should i care about that person, why should i pay taxes that would benefit somebody else?” a few people used to say that, many more people are saying it now. okay, and they ask these questions because they have those kinds of ideas, but the reason for paying the taxes is it’s a consideration of “we.” and i have been making the argument recently that all the cultural differences between english-speaking people in america and english- speaking people in europe, is european countries have more of a “we” approach. not that they don’t have their problem. but they have more of a “we” approach and therefore they don’t tend to have in the past, until very recently, had that kind of argument about “why should i pay taxes for somebody else?” okay. jared keyel: so, we have covered the “why people should care about these challenges.” and our next question then is, how do we get more people to care about these issues and these challenges? dr. wornie reed: well, i have a belief and it’s a belief that i operate on. that people—this is not new, this came from the black power movement, they used to say it all the time—people proceed as they perceive. and so, i spent a lot of time analyzing and looking at data about what people perceive and then i ask this question another kind of way, “what is it that people know and how do they come to know it?” okay, and that’s a roundabout way of addressing your question of, “what do we do about it?” i think the very first thing we have to do is, to make people aware of these issues. for example, i’ll continue that, to make people aware of them, and then you can maybe talk about what to do to get rid of them. if you make them aware that racism is an attribute of institutions, that it’s kind of a waste of time dealing with individual racism. i spoke at a church the night before last, and i said that the rector of the episcopal church, he can deal with that, but the rest of us we should deal with the real racism. anyway, i made a joke to myself, i forgot my train of thought. but, anyway, so people must have an understanding of things. for example, people talk about having a racial reconciliation in this country. we can’t have racial reconciliation in this country, i argue, this is my position. because we haven’t done the first step. we have to have america, that is a large segment of people in this country, a much larger segment than we have now, of people knowing recent history. we don’t have people, enough people, knowing what happened sixty years ago or seventy years ago or eighty years ago or ninety years ago. so, they can have a reconciliation in south africa because there was no debate on what had happened. they agreed on it. whereas, we have never had a debate on it in this country. too many people say, “well, i didn’t know this,” or “i didn’t know that,” or “i didn’t know the other.” like, for instance, people don’t know when these flags and statues were put up in southern states. some of us, i have known that virtually all of my adult life and others haven’t. we have to have people know things. know stuff. and, they don’t. because we don’t discuss it, we don’t discuss real issues. we do discuss a lot of symbolic stuff, but not real historical issues—from a th, a th, an th, or th grade level—i’m not talking about any advanced historical analysis. i’m just saying what happened here, what happened there. people can say, “oh i didn’t know when i was telling that my father couldn’t go to this school. i didn’t know.” how can they not know that? we can’t get to the next step until people accept that. we’ve never had it, we’ve never had that debate, that argument. i was hopeful many years ago since i was a youthful follower of the argument of reparations. the reason i followed reparations, i was saying that if we had a debate on reparations, then the people pushing it—like the people i was following—would have to explain “why.” but, also the people opposing it would ask, “why do you think we should?” then they would be obligated to hear the “why.” so, we would’ve had that debate. and, to me, that debate is much more important than whether we got reparations. so, that’s what i mean by people proceeding as they perceive. so then, i’ll just give you an example. this fall i’ve given a series of lecture workshops in this southwest virginia [area] sponsored by the episcopal diocese. it kind of stretches all the way down and all the way up to staunton or somewhere. and we’ve operated on the basis of what it is that people have got to—need to—know, more stuff. we’re talking about knowing stuff. and the next step is for people to understand that to address it, we need to address institutional policies and practices. so those two things i try to get across and they’re about to move to the next step: trying to convene people to do things. okay, and with the assumption that some of these people have been moved by our discussions. mary ryan: so, you’ve talked a lot about education and knowledge as things that are absent from the public at large and we’ve already had the discussion. what else, if anything, is missing from current activism and what would you like to see people doing that you don’t see happening right now? dr. wornie reed: well, i have a son who’s years old—the older of my two sons—and i’ve told him all of his life that he is among a unique generation of african americans. he’s a part of the only generation that keyel and ryan: community change interview with dr. wornie reed art.  ,	page  	of	 	 has ever been born and reached adulthood with no self-defining activism. we haven’t had any since like the year he was born and until – years ago with the black lives matter [activism]. we didn’t have any african american activism. and, could you ask your question again? so, i don’t vary off. several things occurred to me. so, i want to make sure that i stay with answering your question. mary ryan: so, it was in two parts- what is missing from current activism and what would you like to see people doing? dr. wornie reed: first of all, there was none. now we have some and i agree and i think they have attacked the most egregious thing going on—the black lives matter movement has—and some people don’t realize it, but the theory behind the way they operate is grounded in a lot of socio-historical stuff. that’s why you don’t see any individual, primary leaders. they’re intentionally following ella baker and septima clark to modern names in black american history that few black americans even know. so, now, what would i like to see? i would like to see less attention to all the symbolic stuff and more attention to real things. for example, i think more important than even black men being shot in the back if the run away by police; which, by the way, was legal in and then it became kind of illegal in , and semi-illegal in . but, anyway, more important than that, is the damage done to african americans, in particular, and america, in general, with the so-called drug war. i was privileged to be on a panel back in the ’s with the guy who discovered the existence of crack and he would say, “if you tell me the community that the crack is in, i can tell you without going there, where it is. but, it’s interesting, the police when they get ready to crackdown on crack, they go to the black communities. when, if blacks and whites use crack, they don’t use crack at about the same rate because blacks use crack at a larger rate than whites; but, that’s the only drug they do. okay. so, what would i like to see is more attention to the criminal justice issues that are not necessarily the police killings, but the drug issues. the fact that, for example, in virginia i think i mentioned this earlier that blacks are % percent of the population and about % of all illegal substance users, but they’re % of all people that go to prison. and, we don’t have much protest about that, very little. so, i would like to see more of that. i think that’s key. if that can be turned around, then many other things could be built with. but that’s, to me, that’s primary, that’s the larger issue than any other one i know. jake keyel: our next question is, how do we go about tackling pervasive, structural, and institutional racism in our society? and maybe we’ve already covered that, so to ask a different way, what would different structures, alternative institutions, look like that are non-racist or are addressing these built-in structural racism issues? dr. wornie reed: i don’t think we should try to establish new institutions. i think we should change the ones we have. because a society’s going to need institutions to do its work and they are going to turn out to be similar things to what we have. so, we have to change the policies and practices. so, i’m an advocate of changing the policies and practices. let’s discover what it is that’s happening under the jurisdiction of this institution and can we trace that to some policies and practices? and i argue, if you ask that question, then you inevitably will. and then, we have to start pushing to change that. one of the things that some new activists like to do is, is say “let’s go confront this legislator, let’s go confront that legislature, or whatever. and, i think that’s the wrong approach. i think the most important things is to get enough people behind you, and then you can send one or two people, and say, “we have this many people, who want this many things.” i argue, and i might be wrong but i don’t think so, that politicians do what people tell them to do. so, like right now, people are arguing about like the tax bill; of course, the people who are doing the larger telling are the ones who provide the big money. that’s what some analysts are saying. but, by and large, if enough people get together to attack something, we may have some movement on it, i think; but i think it has to be specific. i think you have to go after specific things. and, so, a small group requesting specific things. i hate to see large groups—you have an auditorium of over one hundred people—let’s decide what we’re going to do—no—you have to have a few people decide what we’re going to do and then discuss it with the large group and say, “are you with us?” and, if not, we’ll go discuss it with another group to go push the issues. and, i think we can push and one of the things i guess we really need is the education, which i am talking about everyday educational of really what happened: “how did it get like this?” okay, for example, we’re debating right now the whole tax bill. how many people know, that in the s, the top rate was over %? not many people know that. so, we have to educate the public quite a bit. okay, and right now it’s kind of a losing battle. i shouldn’t go into all of this, i guess, but i was an advocate in the late s of the power of talk radio and people thought i was crazy as i was talking about it. but i’ve see one person change keyel and ryan: community change interview with dr. wornie reedart.  ,	page  	of	 	 the seatbelt law in massachusetts, the most liberal voting state in the country. this guy, in , changed the seat belt law—he made it such that only kids had to have/use seat belts—because he ranted and railed against it every day, every day. it was so bad the governor used to call him “the governor” because this guy was pushing stuff. and i say that to say, that the losing battle is that so much of the media are put[ting] out things that are not exactly correct, about the history of things and how they got to be the way they are. so that’s kind of seriously one-sided, so one-sided that i once read an interview with the guy who came up with the idea that the media was, that there was a liberal bias in the media, and the guy said—and this came out by the way in the s, this was not out there in the s—and he said, “nah, i didn’t think it was true. in fact, i didn’t think it would catch on like that. i just thought it was something we could deal with right now.” mary ryan: so, switching gears a little bit from some of what we’ve been talking about, but still in the realm of cultivating social change what role do you see the university, broadly not virginia tech necessarily, but the university at large as a system, what role do you see the university playing in social change? dr. wornie reed: well, people might’ve liked what i said so far, but they might not like what i am going to say from here on. but i have to say it, because you asked me and i have to give you my opinion. i think it is incumbent upon universities to present curricula that reflects the world. okay, so this is going to be a long answer. so, i am going to need you to help me get back to the second part, but i want to do the first part which is almost like a preamble. i argue, and i have been saying this for at least thirty years, that universities are responsible for the racial strife on the campuses. how so? universities play a major role, not the only role, but they play a major role in determining who is important, by who they have students required to study. so, through the years, things have changed a bit in recent years the way the core curriculum works nowadays; but, it used to be, for years and years, that students had to study about dead and alive europeans and european americans, but nobody else was required. now, i don’t know whether even that’s required. so that’s what the change is. so, what happened is, white students could assume that this is their university. when even before my father could have gone here, people his age were working and paying taxes to build this place, that still couldn’t go here. so, they were still assuming it was their university. then even after minority students come, they still assume this is their university. why do they assume that? well, because that’s what they learn. because, they can go over here and take a course on native americans, they can go over here and take something about african-americans and so on, but it’s not required. what is required, is the study about europeans. so, i argue that they are responsible for the strife that occurs. so, what they need to do is to require that everybody, certainly in this country that is of any major segment of it, is required to be studied about. that’s the first thing they should do. and some people get concerned: “well, who are you gonna choose to teach these courses?” see, i don’t care, because i think it is more important to have that as a fact than what’s in the course. okay. so that’s one thing. now, on the other part, other than that, i don’t think the university can have a major role. it can have a minor role, i don’t think it has a major role in the rest of it. now, this has been a soapbox of mine since i was about or . i am old now. you cannot go to an educational system and learn how to change the system. if you do, it’s kind of something extra. it’s a freak, it’s not the typical; because the purpose of an educational system is the maintenance and sustenance of the system. and anything that they do different from that it is counter to the system and it is not going to be accepted. so, that’s why i talk about the definitions of the situations and understanding things such it can be defined differently, so, how we define these issues, how we define who is important and so on. people say, “well, we have to go get people educated.” i say, no, not formally. maybe informally. the civil rights movement had a little formal education behind it, but most of it was informal. and there were a few people, there was a professor i knew, who walked in class one day and told the students he was teaching a class in negro history. i wasn’t in this class, i just wished i was, so i could say i was in this class. and he says to them, “what are you doing in class? what are you doing sitting here? history is being made down on the corner.” but that was not everywhere, that was just a few places where people like that and events like that were happening on that corner. but, by and large, it’s outside of the universities. i don’t think universities have any obligation for change. but i think the universities should have an obligation to have the debates and the discussions. jared keyel: and so then, if not in the university, what and where do you see potential avenues, strategies for change, bright spots and so forth. dr. wornie reed: oh, i could see it happening in the university, but i’m saying not by the university. in the university, but not by the university. yes, i can see it in the university, because a lot of the civil rights keyel and ryan: community change interview with dr. wornie reed art.  ,	page  	of	 	 movement came from universities; but, not anything being taught there. so, i think to the extent to which we wait on that, we will never get change. in fact, i could go further, but i shouldn’t. people are waiting on churches to step up. they didn’t step up in the civil rights movement, churches did but not denominations. now, people don’t know that, so that’s why we need to know these histories. there were very few black denominations that supported the civil rights movements. there were many hundreds and thousands of churches. individual churches, usually protestants and quite often baptists, because in the baptists churches they’re owned by the local people. and most of these other religions, like the methodist churches, are owned by the big body. so, the individual churches, mostly baptists were the ones that did this, but many others did too because the congregations just did it; ok, but not the denominations. so, we can’t wait on those kinds of things. we have to push it where we can. and one of the places, that can be pushed, is on campuses. but it is people, it’s not the university. other than the university having an appropriate curriculum of the society in which it is situated. jared keyel: and where then do the ideas that motivate positive change come from? dr. wornie reed: people who talk about it, push it, i think. i really do. we don’t have enough forums and discussions nowadays; as us old-timers like to say, “you don’t know what it was like when you could have one every week, at a minimum.” so, it comes from those kinds of things. we don’t have enough discussions. and, when we do, many students don’t attend them. in the olden days, they would. you would have to have larger places than we have nowadays for them. mary ryan: so, drawing to a close, but one of the big areas that we haven’t really talked about—directly at least—we have touched on it implicitly; but it wouldn’t be a true interview with a sociologist if we didn’t ask about intersectionalities. if we think about intersectionality and advocacy across multiple issue lines, how can that help us address some of the core problems of racisms that we’re experiencing in the status quo? are there any specific issues that come to your mind related to intersectionality today? dr. wornie reed: well, annette probably told you that i was a good guy, but he didn’t tell you that i come from a different angle a lot of times. okay, and i don’t know whether i am ready to get in trouble with most of the people around here. but, i’d probably try to find a way when i was or so to moderate this. but i am not gonna do that now, i am gonna answer your question; and so, the chips are just going to have to fall where they may. the short answer to your question is no. okay. now, you would obviously want to know why i say no. no, i don’t think that dealing with intersectionality will help anything. i think dealing with every group that has some disadvantage, dealing with everyone of them will. i am not a great proponent of studying intersectionality. but, almost everybody i know is. and here’s why: i was involved with a lot of debates and discussion when we were talking about civil rights and then we started adding in gender rights. and i like to think i was part of a small group of people that helped the women’s movement got kick-started. you know, not as a leader, but as one of the people involved. i am a strong supporter and advocate of women’s rights. however, to me, i am more of a quantitative scholar than not. to me, if you say intersectionality, in quantitative work we have independent variables and we have intersection variables. okay. now, if you can demonstrate to me, that after you take—after you study—let’s say you are looking at race, and gender, and intersectionality. if you analyze race, and then analyze gender over and above race, or race over and above gender, however you wanna go about it. and then if you can come up with some measure of intersectionality beyond those, then i would be with you. maybe there are some, i haven’t been looking for them. i’ve just never heard them explained, like that. i argue that there is nothing left once you’ve studied all about race and all about gender, i argue there’s nothing left. so, intersectionality is just a nice way of saying that we should look at both of these, to me. but people have taken it to mean more. i had a student who was big into it, and we had kind of an argument. she was not a quantitative student, so i brought my quantitative star who knows more statistics than i do. and i said, “what do you think of this?” and she agreed with me, the quantitative model. and she said, “well, there are two books i want you to read and maybe you will change your mind.” my student, who is now a professor herself, said. i haven’t gotten around to reading those books, so that’s why i was hesitant to say. not that i object, but i just haven’t gotten around [to reading those books]. because i would want to read something that would cause me not to have my position, if it is wrong. jared keyel: so, as we come to a close, are there any other issues that we haven’t talked about yet, that you think are important in this current moment historically? anything else we want to discuss before we close? keyel and ryan: community change interview with dr. wornie reedart.  ,	page  	of	 	 dr. wornie reed: well, i guess, not to you guys, but if you were newspaper reporters, i would say they need to stop putting so much credence into symbolism. for example, barack obama was elected. people made up some outrageous assumptions. and i won’t even go into the most substantive outrageous assumption, because you know there was the assumption that he was a liberal. i argue that he wasn’t. so why do you have that assumption? but, in the broad scope of things, i think people would argue and agree that he was a liberal, but not a progressive as some people thought he was. but how was that going to improve, to contribute to racial progress? i didn’t think so. well, now, let me just stop. his election in and of itself, kept nobody alive. and it is not that i wasn’t for his election, as i told a group i cried like a lot of other african americans when he was elected. but, i was not as surprised as others. because colin powell would have won easier, i don’t know whether you know about that or not. colin powell was the leading republican candidate in . and if colin powell had won the republic nomination, i think he would have won the general election a lot easier than barack obama did in . but, that’s all i was saying: we spend too much time with what i call symbolic stuff, and not real stuff. for example, we have gotten to the point of describing racism as a kind of philosophical attribute of individuals, as whether they are racist or not. way away from the meaning of racism, because it doesn’t matter what it is, whether they are deep down in, it’s the “x” that they do. that’s another thing that we need to, we could start with. and we get there by emphasizing this symbolism, i think. jared keyel: thank you very much for taking the time to talking with us this afternoon and thank you for this very interesting discussion. competing interests the authors have no competing interests to declare. how to cite this article:	keyel,	jared	and	mary	ryan.	 .	community	change	interview	with	dr.	wornie	reed.	 community	change	 ( ):	 .	doi:	https://doi.org/ . /cc.v i .a. submitted:	 	july	 									accepted:	 	july	 									published:	 	september	 copyright:	©	 	the	author(s).	this	is	an	open-access	article	distributed	under	the	terms	of	the	creative	 commons	attribution	 . 	international	license	(cc-by	 . ),	which	permits	unrestricted	use,	distribution,	and	 reproduction	in	any	medium,	provided	the	original	author	and	source	are	credited.	see	http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/ . /. community	change	is	a	peer-reviewed	open	access	 journal	published	by	vt	publishing. open access https://doi.org/ . /cc.v i .a. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / 	competing interests “freedom to breathe”: youth participatory action research (ypar) to investigate air pollution inequities in richmond, ca international journal of environmental research and public health article “freedom to breathe”: youth participatory action research (ypar) to investigate air pollution inequities in richmond, ca james e. s. nolan ,* , eric s. coker , bailey r. ward , yahna a. williamson and kim g. harley ���������� ������� citation: nolan, j.e.s.; coker, e.s.; ward, b.r.; williamson, y.a.; harley, k.g. “freedom to breathe”: youth participatory action research (ypar) to investigate air pollution inequities in richmond, ca. int. j. environ. res. public health , , . https:// doi.org/ . /ijerph received: october accepted: december published: january publisher’s note: mdpi stays neu- tral with regard to jurisdictional clai- ms in published maps and institutio- nal affiliations. copyright: © by the authors. li- censee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and con- ditions of the creative commons at- tribution (cc by) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). center for environmental research and children’s health (cerch), school of public health, university of california at berkeley, berkeley, ca , usa; kharley@berkeley.edu department of environmental and global health, college of public health and health professions, university of florida, gainesville, fl , usa; eric.coker@phhp.ufl.edu ryse youth justice center, richmond, ca , usa; baileyrward@gmail.com (b.r.w.); yahna y.w@gmail.com (y.a.w.) * correspondence: jnolan@berkeley.edu abstract: air pollution is a major contributor to human morbidity and mortality, potentially exac- erbated by covid- , and a threat to planetary health. participatory research, with a structural violence framework, illuminates exposure inequities and refines mitigation strategies. home to profitable oil and shipping industries, several census tracts in richmond, ca are among the most heavily impacted by aggregate burdens statewide. formally trained researchers from the center for environmental research and children’s health (cerch) partnered with the ryse youth jus- tice center to conduct youth participatory action research on air quality justice. staff engaged five youth researchers in: ( ) collaborative research using a network of passive air monitors to quantify neighborhood disparities in nitrogen dioxide (no ) and sulfur dioxide (so ), noise pollution and community risk factors; ( ) training in environmental health literacy and professional development; and ( ) interpretation of findings, community outreach and advocacy. inequities in ambient no , but not so , were observed. census tracts with higher black populations had the highest no . proximity to railroads and major roadways were associated with higher no . greenspace was associated with lower no , suggesting investment may be conducive to improved air quality, among many additional benefits. youth improved in measures of empowerment, and advanced community education via workshops, photovoice, video, and ”zines”. keywords: youth empowerment; air pollution; inequity; structural violence . introduction the field of public health has facilitated major gains in improving societal level health, especially over the last years. many of these improvements have been broad strokes interventions, such as removing lead from gasoline and paint, improvements in occu- pational health and safety, improving water quality and ensuring food safety, affecting the majority of people in the us [ , ]. yet, health disparities persist [ , ], and the field is increasingly faced with complex challenges of historically rooted structural determinants of health. these challenges include a lack of socio-historical context, misalignment between community and researcher goals [ ], insufficient data granularity and interventions that address specific downstream symptoms rather than root causes of problems [ ]. scientific- grade youth participatory action research (ypar) studies can help address this gap by leveraging youth’s experiential expertise to fine tune scientific data collection protocols for context-specific scenarios, building relationships between researchers and community, collecting nuanced neighborhood level data responsive to local needs [ ], framing findings in local vernacular and contexts, and disseminating results more effectively. in recruiting youth from impacted communities and providing them with mentorship, afterschool edu- cational opportunities, skills development, paid work, college preparation and amplifying int. j. environ. res. public health , , . https://doi.org/ . /ijerph https://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph https://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph https://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://doi.org/ . /ijerph https://doi.org/ . /ijerph https://creativecommons.org/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://doi.org/ . /ijerph https://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph https://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= int. j. environ. res. public health , , of their voices, ypar can help dismantle long-standing power dynamics [ ]. the model prioritizes centering impacted communities, building local capacity and expanding future opportunities for improved wellbeing [ – ]. from to , the richmond youth air quality initiative utilized ypar to inves- tigate air quality and related environmental justice challenges across neighborhoods facing heightened adversity in richmond, ca, an industrial community in the san francisco bay area with high disadvantage and pollution that is situated on ohlone land [ ]. researchers from uc berkeley’s center for environmental research and children’s health (cerch) partnered with ryse, a community youth center in richmond promoting social justice and development opportunities. the project facilitated empowerment among high school youth through: ( ) training in environmental health literacy (ehl), professional development, paid employment and college preparation; ( ) full partnership in designing and conducting research on the convergence of structural air pollution and community-level health risk factors using both quantitative and qualitative methods; and ( ) interpretation of findings, community outreach and advocacy. youth were facilitated in exploring manifestations of structural violence, explicitly examining features in the built environment that may affect pollution levels in correlation with pre-existing socio-economic burdens, monitoring for disparities in no , so and noise pollution and returning results to the community. . background . . air pollution inequitable distribution of air pollution is a major driver of health disparities. globally, it is estimated that air pollution contributes to seven million preventable deaths each year, largely from respiratory infection, chronic obstructive pulmonary diseases, heart disease, and cancer [ ]. exposure during pregnancy is associated with low birthweight, premature birth and infant mortality [ ]. the vast majority of those most impacted are low-income people of color [ ]. air pollution also presents a significant threat to planetary health, with emissions exceeding earth’s absorption rate, risking global warming, mass extinctions and ecological collapse. the health effects of air pollutants among sub-groups with heightened biological susceptibility and vulnerability remains understudied. susceptible sub-groups include the very young, the very old, those with respiratory diseases and those who face high levels of socio-economic disadvantage and other chronic social stressors. emerging findings indicate that air pollution may exacerbate both the incidence and harm of covid- [ , ], a disease that disproportionately affects communities of color [ , ]. air pollution is classified as outdoor (ambient) or indoor and includes a range of sources and exposure determinants. concerning monitoring and human health effects, the most widely studied air pollutants include particulate matter (pm), ozone (o ), nitrogen dioxide (no ), and sulfur dioxide (so ) [ ]. no can contribute to pm . and ozone air pollution respectively, and is associated with increased risk of pulmonary distress and asthma symptom exacerbation [ ]. so is the leading cause of acid rain, which is devastating to ecological balance and is associated with respiratory distress, exacerba- tion of respiratory disease symptoms, increases in overall mortality and cardiac disease hospitalizations in humans [ ]. emissions generating activities are largely driven by commodity production, transportation and participation in growth-focused global markets, and include stationary sources such as heavy production industries and mobile sources such as trucks and trains. though mobile sources are transient by nature, they generally follow well-established routes, resulting in clusters of heightened emissions. our research focused on anthropogenic air pollutants, which are readily measurable and more amenable to mitigation than natural sources such as forest fires, which themselves may also be increasing in intensity and frequency due to increasing air pollution and subsequent global warming [ ]. specifically, we measured urban ambient no and so concentrations and studied spatial variability of pollutant concentration within richmond, ca. selection of no and so as study pollutants were determined by the following factors: ( ) a priori relationships with localized traffic and industry-related emissions sources; ( ) int. j. environ. res. public health , , of potential for human health impacts; ( ) potential for spatial heterogeneity in concentrations; ( ) potential as a target for future pollutant mitigation efforts; and ( ) ability to be reliably and practicably measured and interpreted using low-cost sampling devices. spot noise pollution data was also collected, as some emerging evidence has suggested a negative relationship with several health outcomes [ , ]. . . structural violence . . . framework contextualizing neighborhood level spatial distributions of air pollution data using a structural violence framework helps illuminate the intrinsically meaningful context within which pollutant emissions and exposures occur. structural violence is defined as “the prevention of individuals or populations from reaching their mental and physical potential without a specific actor committing the violence; when ’violence is built into the structure and shows up as unequal power and consequently as unequal life chances.’ it may be unintended and indirect [ ]”. structural violence analysis unveils clustering of environ- mental harms, such as the inequitable proportion of hazardous sites in disadvantaged communities [ ]. implications support centering populations most affected, and social justice driven pathways for remediation. here, justice may imply not just the cessation of harm, but also recompense for harms already done. . . . transgenerational structural violence histories of structural violence precede, and persist in, contemporary injustices, thus transgenerational violence must be integrated into analysis and intervention. histori- cal violence against marginalized communities sculpt “colonial geographies of harm” [ ]. value-laden borders based on social identity manifest in physical space and morph in response to forces and resistance, fueled by such concepts as “the west”, colonialism and modernity [ ]. these concepts become embedded in contemporary structures, ideological made physical, and normalized over long periods [ ], making them difficult to identify and even more so to act against. examples include western colonist’s attempted genocide against native americans and forced relocation to reservations on “marginal” land [ ], trans-atlantic slavery, and racial segregation in the early th century. in each instance, extreme force was used to establish boundaries, cordoning low income and people of color, and policing behaviors. in the face of resistance, explicit force transitioned to more insidious mechanisms such as withheld gi-bill housing and education support for black veterans of wwii [ ], economic divestment and race-based exclusion via redlining [ ], racially biased federal loan practices favoring white farmers [ ], and the mass incarcera- tion of people of color [ ]. here, the opportunities that groups of people are held back from, and the spaces they are held in, engrained in replicating and obfuscated structures, become violence. . . . contemporary structural violence insidious constellations of inequity make it appear as though individuals, not systems of socio-historical violence, are at fault [ ]. culturally structured white supremacy, coded with alleged racial identifiers and thus transgenerational, shifted to wealth passed on in such forms as company ownership, stocks and estate inheritance [ , ], as well as status, privilege and opportunity access, themselves passed on transgenerationally [ , ]. neoliberalism accelerated wealth accumulation and eroded social services [ ], while fossil fuels accelerated neoliberalism, and air pollution, on a global scale. in , half of the world’s top corporations are fossil fuel companies [ ], and just three white men control more wealth than the bottom % of us residents combined [ ]. of the wealthiest people in the us in , % were male, the vast majority were white and only was black [ ]. in , the average white family had roughly times the wealth of the median black family, and times that of a latinx family with little improvement over the last several years [ ]. those who experience poverty for % or more of their childhood have int. j. environ. res. public health , , of a – % chance of being in poverty themselves as they become middle aged [ ]. income inequality itself can be a significant cause of health disparities [ ]. inequity tracks with exposure burdens and resultant health impacts along strata of race, place and class [ – ]. for example, blacks in the us face roughly % more air pollution relative to their consumption, while whites face % less than theirs [ ]. lauren berlant’s concept of “slow death”—“the physical wearing out or deterioration of people that is very nearly a defining condition of their experience and historical existence [ ]”— speaks to an amalgam of socio-economic factors that compound such that a black child born in a disadvantaged oakland neighborhood is expected to have a year shorter life compared to a white child born in the hills of that same city [ ]. oakland borders berkeley, where this paper was originally written, with berkeley just a few miles from richmond, about which this paper is written. . . . contemporary resistance to symptoms of structural violence millions in the us have been catalyzed by mass social movements in addressing symptoms of structural violence. over the last decade, occupy/decolonize wallstreet, #metoo and black lives matter have focused on mitigating harm in relation to economic disadvantage, gender discrimination and racism respectively. in , george floyd— raised in a low-income, single-mother household, and a black man—was killed by police in an egregious act of violence [ ]. though complex, research indicates a strong con- nection between being low income (male) and black, and higher probability of police arrest, imprisonment [ ], and police violence, with police force being a leading cause of death for young black men [ ]. re-energized by the pursuit of justice for floyd, as well as for many before and after him, the black lives matter movement has become the largest us social movement to date [ ]. the movement is rooted in resistance throughout deep histories of slavery and continuing racial injustice. many such injustices have been overt and acute for years. with advances in video recording and communications technology, contemporary manifestations of these historically rooted injustices can now be transmitted, and better articulated, almost instantaneously across vast networks, perhaps therefore increasing societal level engagement. the “slow death” of oftentimes invisible, gradual, and mechanistically complex air pollution exposures, frequently the result of unintended and indirect forces, oftentimes manifest in a holding back and a holding within marginalized “geographies of harm”, stand in contrast. aptly stated by foucault, in a distinct but complementary context “... invisibility is a guarantee of order [ ].” noteworthy also, is that george floyd, deprived of his “freedom to breathe [ ]” by state violence, was also diagnosed with covid- [ ], itself an airborne respiratory disease disproportionately burdening low income and communities of color in the us, and potentially exacerbated by air pollution. implications, including potential synergies between increasing public awareness around black lives matter, disparities in the effects of covid- , and improved environmental justice are overviewed in the discussion section. . . . structural violence in richmond, ca our study was conducted in richmond, land historically occupied by ohlone native americans and currently occupied by diverse communities of color, including members of the ohlone. in early to mid- s the city had a booming economy and included a high proportion of white residents. as those industries, many based on a war effort, became less profitable, many white residents moved out [ ]. today, . % of residents identify as black, and % latinx [ ]. as many as % of richmond’s residents are undocumented [ ]. the city of richmond has made significant gains in improving housing stock, reducing crime [ ] and establishing a health in all policies campaign for addressing its multifaceted community health challenges [ ] and several personnel have taken notable steps to support this study, as well as others like it. an array of organizations are confronting environmental injustice, marginalization of youth, and community violence. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of despite progress, richmond remains an at-risk community due to structural inequities, including high emissions sources and population-level vulnerabilities [ , ]. roughly , people reside in the neighborhoods of atchison village and north richmond, census tracts ranking in the top – th percentile statewide for combined socio-economic and pollution burden [ ]. the population in these tracts is > % non-white, with asthma burdens in the – th percentiles, and diesel burdens in the – th [ ]. richmond houses the largest oil refinery west of the mississippi, the cause of several air pollution emergencies in recent years including one that hospitalized , residents [ ], resulting in great concern among many in the community. previous community-based participatory research revealed that air toxics concentrations, as well as the variety of air toxics, were substantially higher in richmond than a neighboring, predominantly white and more formally educated community [ ]. richmond faces a violent crime rate almost twice as high as the surrounding county and state as a whole [ ]. while % of those over years of age in the us do not have a high school diploma, this proportion is % or higher in impacted richmond census tracts, as high as % [ ]. physical activity and access to healthy foods are major challenges as well, with nearly half of the population obese or overweight and nearly a third living in food deserts [ ]. . . air quality research gaps in richmond despite regulatory air monitoring networks throughout u.s. cities, major urban air quality data gaps exist. because the primary goal of regulatory monitoring is to assess whether a region’s overall pollution levels fall within air quality standards, these networks are ill-suited to examine spatial heterogeneity of air pollution levels within cities. though several of richmond’s neighborhoods are impacted by emissions from heavy industry and multiple highways, the city has just one regulatory air monitoring site that measures criteria air pollutants regulated by the us epa (e.g., no , so , pm . , ozone, and carbon monoxide). consequently, little is known about differences in air pollution levels between richmond neighborhoods. such limitations leave densely populated areas with potentially insufficient air quality data, which could otherwise guide policymakers in prioritizing local air pollution mitigation efforts. the spatially dense network of air samplers implemented in our study enabled youth researchers to better characterize spatial variability of air pollu- tant concentrations between richmond neighborhoods and associate this variability with features of the built environment, many of which exemplify continuing structural violence. . . youth participatory action research (ypar) model as nuanced socio-economic factors may affect the likelihood that persons of certain groups, especially communities of color, are disproportionately exposed to environmental health challenges such as pesticides [ ], poor air quality [ ], or impaired drinking wa- ter [ ], and the severity of negative health outcomes, it is important to include members of impacted communities in the research process. through lifetimes of experience in af- fected communities, locals gain invaluable insight into mechanisms behind key challenges, intersectional harms and assets to address them. this process of engagement frequently reveals unforeseen synergies between organizations, community members and researchers. the “gold standard” model for community researcher partnerships is community based participatory research (cbpr). cbpr emphasizes strengths-based engagement, equitable community inclusion in all facets of research, co-learning between academics and com- munity members, equitable distribution of resources, local capacity building, research and action, addressing local priorities, and sustained engagement [ ]. cbpr improves “relevance, rigor and reach” [ ]. community input guides study foci and ensures relevance to community needs. rigor is improved as residents have experiential expertise and can highlight contexts affecting local exposure or vulnerability. locals may be perceived as more trustworthy than outsider researchers and granted greater access to sensitive infor- mation or culturally significant locations. cbpr enhances the reach of findings, as locals int. j. environ. res. public health , , of know how to frame results using appropriate language that appeals to those most affected, and ideal venues for dissemination [ ]. this study used ypar, a corollary of cbpr with emphasis on youth empowerment and trajectories of development. there is a great body of research indicating that ypar studies can enhance research, and outcomes for youth themselves [ – ]. some stipulate that pre-adult years constitute a “sensitive period” where experiences can make dispropor- tionately positive effects on overall trajectories of identity and civic engagement [ ]. yet, as they are still learning, youth may be somewhat less able to inform initial study design, and somewhat less able to engage in advanced facets of data analysis. in balance, youth bring a fresh perspective and are more prone to unorthodox and real-time problem solving, often necessary given limited resources. . methods . . ypar methods cerch engaged youth in harnessing scientific grade technologies for granular quan- titative data collection, facilitated youth in enriching this data with qualitative data, com- pensated youth for their time and, on request, provided supplementary skill building workshops. detailed in previous publications, the underlying framework, sequence, and rationale of cerch’s ypar approach is summarized elsewhere [ , ]. cerch staff, in collaboration with ryse and with input from bay area air quality management dis- trict experts, created a ypar project and accompanying environmental health literacy curriculum to engage richmond youth as co-researchers. curriculum drew from years of researcher experience and field-tested activities publicly available on uc berkeley’s ypar hub [ ] as well as from nearly years of cerch ypar expertise. youth researchers were provided a ~ -page reader assembled specifically for this project by staff, which included self-care tips, background readings, tox-fact sheets, relevant research, conceptual frameworks, case studies and potential intervention ideas. meeting content and study design progressed similar to previous cerch ypar studies. sequentially, youth built group trust, learned key foundational concepts and gained increasing control over study activities, engaging in roughly + hours of meetings and activities and dozens of hours working independently. meetings were held at ryse, a location convenient for the youth and where an array of additional youth opportunities were available free of charge, including arts, education and justice, organizing, free meals, and community health. youth drew upon their personal experiences with air quality challenges in their daily lives, identifying potential sources of emissions, and brainstorming risk and protective factors in the vicinity. youth were paid stipends for their engagement. local environmental justice leaders with expertise in air quality, the vast majority of whom were people of color (and offered an honorarium), informed the youth about key achievements, lessons learned and community concerns. speakers included representatives of cerch, the bay area air quality management district, greenaction, west oakland environmental indicators project, air watch bay area and communities for a better environment. youth did background research on each speaker to shape the discussion, creating prompts to acquire information relevant to the study. cerch researchers with expertise in air quality research trained youth in the use of scientific-grade air samplers, including techniques to collect, analyze and interpret air quality data. youth used calenviroscreen community disadvantage maps and, drawing upon their experiential expertise in these specific neighborhoods, brainstormed key loca- tions where vulnerable populations may spend time, such as community centers, hospitals, schools, stores and transit hubs. visualized through these tools, youth discussed known factors related to community vulnerability, air quality and other environmental health threats that could compound the harms of poor air quality, and identified gaps that could be filled by improved data collection in these spaces. a selection of sites from this larger pool of options were voted upon, balancing the potential significance of the site with need for sufficient distance between each sampler to ensure adequate coverage within the target int. j. environ. res. public health , , of census tracts. prior to sampler deployment, study personnel and the youth visited the sites to determine whether they were suitable for sampler installation. considerations included whether there were available streetlight poles to attach samplers to, whether the terrain was safe to use a ladder on for deployment and other physical impediments. minor adjustments were made accordingly. a combination of microsoft excel, google spreadsheets, google docs, microsoft powerpoint, adobe photoshop and google fusion tables were used to explore and co-analyze the data with the youth. the project’s effects on the youth council members was gauged using pre- and post- test questionnaires that included validated scales [ ] coupled with qualitative feedback via answers to reflection questions. to date, empowerment evaluation tools used for this study have been used in several ypar studies conducted by cerch: leadership efficacy, resource mobilization and leadership behavior, community engagement, action self efficacy and socio-political skills [ ]; motivation to control [ ] science attitude, self esteem and motivation to influence; and participatory behavior [ ]. data was collected and managed according to a protocol approved by the university of california berkeley’s committee for the protection of human subjects (protocol no. - - ), by citi certified staff trained in public health. youth empowerment data collection activities were detailed on approved assent forms (for minors under years of age), or consent forms for those over , which were verbally outlined to youth. it was clarified that participation in evaluation was completely optional and that youth’s participation, or lack or participation, in evaluation activities would not affect youth’s ability to participate in the project overall or to access related opportunities. youth under years of age acquired parent signatures on a similar consent form, without which no data would be collected. . . air quality data collection methods with extensive input from the five youth researchers, a cohort limited in size by funding constraints, our research targeted richmond census tracts most impacted by en- vironmental and social burdens. we concentrated sampling efforts in two of the most socio-economically burdened tracts discussed earlier, due to high population density and the presence of sensitive subpopulations (e.g., young children, those with asthma) as iden- tified by the youth researchers. our project combined scientific methods with community engagement to: ( ) better understand spatial features related to between-neighborhood differences in outdoor air quality; ( ) to investigate whether spatial variability in pollutant levels contributes to potential population exposure disparities; and ( ) to better understand how spatial variability in multiple outdoor air pollutants correspond with richmond’s community-level risk factors. passive samplers were selected as they are reliable for gaseous air pollution measurement and well suited for community-involved research. youth researchers selected air sampling sites based on knowledge gained from curriculum on air pollution sources and susceptible sub-populations. before entering the field, youth were quizzed on the functions of key materials, and their use. youth engaged in adapting a protocol and practiced deployment on a pilot day. checklists with images were created to efficiently identify materials, follow the appropriate order of operations and inventory supplies. checklists allowed youth to easily double check equipment and each other, building internal cohesion and teamwork skills. with supervision, youth de- ployed ogawa passive samplers in residential neighborhoods in atchison village, north richmond, and areas south of atchison in proximity to i- . samplers were placed at each site for three weeks, from mid/late-december to mid-january (see figure . spot noise measurements were performed (~ – min per sample site) during deployment and retrieval. data on community-level risk factors in sampled communities were collected and analyzed for cumulative neighborhood vulnerabilities. youth took the lead on commu- nity mapping and photovoice exercises, which helped to further contextualize combined neighborhood risk factors. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of int. j. environ. res. public health , , x of levels contributes to potential population exposure disparities; and ( ) to better under- stand how spatial variability in multiple outdoor air pollutants correspond with rich- mond’s community-level risk factors. passive samplers were selected as they are reliable for gaseous air pollution measurement and well suited for community-involved research. youth researchers selected air sampling sites based on knowledge gained from curriculum on air pollution sources and susceptible sub-populations. before entering the field, youth were quizzed on the functions of key materials, and their use. youth engaged in adapting a protocol and practiced deployment on a pilot day. checklists with images were created to efficiently identify materials, follow the appropriate order of operations and inventory supplies. checklists allowed youth to easily double check equipment and each other, building internal cohesion and teamwork skills. with supervision, youth de- ployed ogawa passive samplers in residential neighborhoods in atchison village, north richmond, and areas south of atchison in proximity to i- . samplers were placed at each site for three weeks, from mid/late-december to mid-january (see figure . spot noise measurements were performed (~ – min per sample site) during deployment and retrieval. data on community-level risk factors in sampled communities were col- lected and analyzed for cumulative neighborhood vulnerabilities. youth took the lead on community mapping and photovoice exercises, which helped to further contextualize combined neighborhood risk factors. . . data analysis sample sites were mapped (figure ) and statistical and spatial analyses of air quality and noise data were performed. analyses were informed based on research questions from youth researchers. together, we determined the following air quality and emissions source indicators: neighborhood differences in no and so concentrations; major road- way density for and m circular buffers around each sampling site; roadway den- sity and pollutant concentrations around sampling sites; railway density in and m circular buffers; greenspace (normalized differential vegetation index (ndvi)) in and m buffers; and federally regulated air emissions site density in and m buffers. to assess possible differences in cumulative impacts of air and noise pollution measurements, and emissions sources, summary scores were computed for the different indices. for example, the summary score for emissions sources was computed by first computing a z-score for the density of each type of emission source indicator and sum- ming these values for each sampling site. univariable and multivariable linear regressions were used to determine the relationships between emission source indicators (e.g., road- way density within m) and air pollutant concentrations. figure . map of sample sites for atchison village, south of atchison (along i- ), and north richmond. darker red colors of sample sites indicate higher no concentrations. figure . map of sample sites for atchison village, south of atchison (along i- ), and north richmond. darker red colors of sample sites indicate higher no concentrations. . . data analysis sample sites were mapped (figure ) and statistical and spatial analyses of air quality and noise data were performed. analyses were informed based on research questions from youth researchers. together, we determined the following air quality and emissions source indicators: neighborhood differences in no and so concentrations; major roadway density for and m circular buffers around each sampling site; roadway density and pollutant concentrations around sampling sites; railway density in and m circular buffers; greenspace (normalized differential vegetation index (ndvi)) in and m buffers; and federally regulated air emissions site density in and m buffers. to assess possible differences in cumulative impacts of air and noise pollution measurements, and emissions sources, summary scores were computed for the different indices. for example, the summary score for emissions sources was computed by first computing a z-score for the density of each type of emission source indicator and summing these values for each sampling site. univariable and multivariable linear regressions were used to determine the relationships between emission source indicators (e.g., roadway density within m) and air pollutant concentrations. . results . . air quality results a summary of measured no and so concentrations and noise levels are in table . a detailed summary of pollution levels for each site is in the supplement (table s ). for context, during the same timeframe of our study, the average no concentration measured in our study ( . ppb) is similar to the average measurements made at the nearest u.s. epa monitoring station ( . ppb) that is located in the neighboring city of san pablo. for so , however, measurements made in our study were not similar to the nearest us epa ambient so monitoring station (see table ). figure displays spatial locations of each of the air sampling sites. significant differences in neighborhood ambient no concentrations were observed (figure ), with a significantly lower level of no observed for sites in north richmond. linear regression models indicated higher levels of greenspace (ndvi) were significantly associated with lower concentrations of no (supplement; figure s ). greenspace within – m of sites explained % (p-value < . ) and % int. j. environ. res. public health , , of (p-value < . ) of no variability, respectively. the spatial density of railroads within m (r = . ; p-value = . ) and major roadway density within m (r = . ; p-value = . ) were associated with higher no concentrations. noise levels were also positively associated with no concentrations (r = . , p-value = . ). while aggregate no concentrations showed little correlation with the density of industrial emissions sites, the site with the highest concentrations of no ( . ppb) was closest to a major oil refinery and was % higher than the no measurements from the nearest u.s. epa ambient air quality monitoring station in san pablo. concentrations of so did not show significant associations with spatial features, with noise levels, or between neighborhoods. as suggested in figure , census tracts with the highest non-hispanic black populations (south of atchison) experienced the highest no concentrations, the highest levels of cumulative air and noise pollution levels, and the highest cumulative density of emissions sources. in addition, tracts south of atchison with the highest proportion of non-hispanic blacks had the lowest levels of neighborhood greenness (supplement figure s ). refer to the supplement (supplement figures s –s ) for further spatial distributions of densities and built environment features considered. we note that although we conducted only spot measurements of sound levels at our monitoring sites, the average site decibel levels recorded in our study exceeded the city of richmond’s noise ordinance limits for exterior noise for every zoning type except for heavy and marine industrial zones (the highest zoned area for noise). the average noise measurement detected in our study reached the heavy and marine industrial zone ordinance threshold of decibels [ ]. table . average air pollution and noise pollution measurement results. no so noise (decibels) average (standard deviation) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) average air pollution measurements for no and so and decibel levels across all sample sites in richmond, ca. during the same time period, the averages from the nearest us epa monitor is . ppb for no and for so is . ppb. int. j. environ. res. public health , , x of . results . . air quality results a summary of measured no and so concentrations and noise levels are in table . a detailed summary of pollution levels for each site is in the supplement (table s ). for context, during the same timeframe of our study, the average no concentration meas- ured in our study ( . ppb) is similar to the average measurements made at the nearest u.s. epa monitoring station ( . ppb) that is located in the neighboring city of san pablo. for so , however, measurements made in our study were not similar to the nearest us epa ambient so monitoring station (see table ). figure displays spatial locations of each of the air sampling sites. significant differences in neighborhood ambient no concentrations were observed (figure ), with a significantly lower level of no observed for sites in north richmond. linear regression models indicated higher levels of green- space (ndvi) were significantly associated with lower concentrations of no (supple- ment; figure s ). greenspace within – m of sites explained % (p-value < . ) and % (p-value < . ) of no variability, respectively. the spatial density of railroads within m (r = . ; p-value = . ) and major roadway density within m (r = . ; p-value = . ) were associated with higher no concentrations. noise levels were also positively associated with no concentrations (r = . , p-value = . ). while aggregate no concentrations showed little correlation with the density of industrial emissions sites, the site with the highest concentrations of no ( . ppb) was closest to a major oil refinery and was % higher than the no measurements from the nearest u.s. epa ambient air quality monitoring station in san pablo. concentrations of so did not show significant associations with spatial features, with noise levels, or between neighborhoods. as sug- gested in figure , census tracts with the highest non-hispanic black populations (south of atchison) experienced the highest no concentrations, the highest levels of cumulative air and noise pollution levels, and the highest cumulative density of emissions sources. in addition, tracts south of atchison with the highest proportion of non-hispanic blacks had the lowest levels of neighborhood greenness (supplement figure s ). refer to the supple- ment (supplement figures s –s ) for further spatial distributions of densities and built environment features considered. we note that although we conducted only spot meas- urements of sound levels at our monitoring sites, the average site decibel levels recorded in our study exceeded the city of richmond’s noise ordinance limits for exterior noise for every zoning type except for heavy and marine industrial zones (the highest zoned area for noise). the average noise measurement detected in our study reached the heavy and marine industrial zone ordinance threshold of decibels [ ]. figure . boxplots displaying measured concentrations. (a) no and (b) so for each richmond neighborhood monitored in our study ( december– january ). asterisk (*) indicates that north richmond had significantly lower (p < . ) no concentrations compared to all other monitored neighborhoods. unfilled circles indicate outliers. figure . boxplots displaying measured concentrations. (a) no and (b) so for each richmond neighborhood monitored in our study ( december– january ). asterisk (*) indicates that north richmond had significantly lower (p < . ) no concentrations compared to all other monitored neighborhoods. unfilled circles indicate outliers. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of int. j. environ. res. public health , , x of figure . boxplots of air and noise pollution, sources and demographics. (a) neighborhood-level summary scores for air and noise pollution measurements (sum of no + so + noise z-scores); (b) neighborhood-level summary scores for air pollution sources (sum of major roadway density + railway density + regulated site density z-scores), asterisk (*) indicates that north richmond had significantly lower (p < . ) no concentrations compared to all other monitored neighbor- hoods; (c) proportion of census tract that are non-hispanic black; and (d) proportion in census tract that are hispanic. unfilled circles indicate outliers. table . average air pollution and noise pollution measurement results. no so noise (decibels) average (standard deviation) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) average air pollution measurements for no and so and decibel levels across all sample sites in richmond, ca. during the same time period, the averages from the nearest us epa monitor is . ppb for no and for so is . ppb. . . ypar results results are drawn from a very small sample size, n = , limited due to funding con- straints. though there were no exclusion criteria for participation other than being of high school age and residing in the richmond area, no youth who remained committed throughout the entire project year identified as white, and all identified as female. similar to previous cerch ypar studies, limited resources meant that extensive qualitative data could not be collected. however, results parallel those of previous cerch ypar evalu- ations that had greater sample sizes. of total fields, and despite relatively high baseline measurements in many fields, results improved in nearly every category. the most notable improvements appeared to be patterned in fields related to youth’s community engagement, attitudes towards one’s neighborhood and voicing one’s opinions (table ). table . validated empowerment measures with strongest pre-post improvement. prompt (some abbreviated) baseline post-test i can make a “real difference” in improving my city % strongly agreed % i can “use research results to come up with realistic recommendations.” % strongly agreed % “if i want to improve a problem in my city, i know how to gather useful data about the issue.” % strongly agreed % “i am inclined to feel like a failure.” % strongly disagreed % “i am satisfied with myself.” % strongly agreed % “i want to have as much say as possible in making decisions in my school.” % strongly agreed % “my neighborhood has lots of things i can use to help make my neighborhood better.” % strongly agreed % “i like my neighborhood.” % strongly agreed % figure . boxplots of air and noise pollution, sources and demographics. (a) neighborhood-level summary scores for air and noise pollution measurements (sum of no + so + noise z-scores); (b) neighborhood-level summary scores for air pollution sources (sum of major roadway density + railway density + regulated site density z-scores), asterisk (*) indicates that north richmond had significantly lower (p < . ) no concentrations compared to all other monitored neighborhoods; (c) proportion of census tract that are non-hispanic black; and (d) proportion in census tract that are hispanic. unfilled circles indicate outliers. . . ypar results results are drawn from a very small sample size, n = , limited due to funding con- straints. though there were no exclusion criteria for participation other than being of high school age and residing in the richmond area, no youth who remained committed throughout the entire project year identified as white, and all identified as female. similar to previous cerch ypar studies, limited resources meant that extensive qualitative data could not be collected. however, results parallel those of previous cerch ypar evalua- tions that had greater sample sizes. of total fields, and despite relatively high baseline measurements in many fields, results improved in nearly every category. the most notable improvements appeared to be patterned in fields related to youth’s community engagement, attitudes towards one’s neighborhood and voicing one’s opinions (table ). personal responses to qualitative reflection prompts indicated youth’s successful ac- quisition of knowledge related to key concepts, that the project was perceived as impactful and that youth improved in environmental health literacy. youth’s successful completion of data collection and peer education activities is also indicative of project success, as is their library of ~ high resolution photographs of assets and challenges in the com- munity, their “zine”, a short video they made about youth’s engagement in science and several successful presentations. anecdotally, staff observed an exceptionally high degree of team building, and an overwhelmingly positive and collegial atmosphere between youth themselves and with staff during meetings and project tasks. beyond the scope of the project, steps were taken to ensure that youth’s needs were met, supporting their access to opportunities. as youth were applying to college, extra workshops were offered on college application personal statement writing, key dates, and application tips. youth were given the option of submitting their statements to staff for review and provided with extensive feedback. youth were also invited to tour uc berkeley and attended a panel with uc berkeley undergraduate students of color who int. j. environ. res. public health , , of spoke about their experiences and provided tips. all youth were accepted to, and attended, leading universities. verbally, % expressed that because of this program they would major in environmental studies or environmental science. the remaining % expressed they planned to integrate lessons learned about environmental health into their fields of study. % applied to external summer employment opportunities that related to environmental health and % were able to secure paid employment, directly addressing air quality concerns. to date, staff have been able to support % of youth in obtaining additional paid placements with environmental health organizations and % in presenting to graduate level classes. though these were not explicit study objectives, they reflect the spirit of participatory research, where researchers take measures to support capacity and facilitate opportunities to access important resources. we recommend that researchers engaging in participatory research take similar measures to ensure organic and iterative support beyond explicit study aims, especially those with the privileges associated with being part of an academic institution, with advanced credentials or with otherwise high socio-economic status. table . validated empowerment measures with strongest pre-post improvement. prompt (some abbreviated) baseline post-test i can make a “real difference” in improving my city % strongly agreed % i can “use research results to come up with realistic recommendations.” % strongly agreed % “if i want to improve a problem in my city, i know how to gather useful data about the issue.” % strongly agreed % “i am inclined to feel like a failure.” % strongly disagreed % “i am satisfied with myself.” % strongly agreed % “i want to have as much say as possible in making decisions in my school.” % strongly agreed % “my neighborhood has lots of things i can use to help make my neighborhood better.” % strongly agreed % “i like my neighborhood.” % strongly agreed % “i try to help people in my neighborhood when they are in need.” % strongly agreed % “if issues come up that affect students at my school, we do something about it.” % strongly agreed % “if issues come up that affect youth in my city, we do something about it.” % strongly agreed % . discussion . . air quality findings show that multiple features of the built environment were significantly associated with no concentrations. these correlations were in the expected directions (e.g., railways were positively correlated with no ). possible cumulative impacts were also observed in our study. noise levels were correlated with higher levels of no , suggesting that communities experiencing higher no levels are doubly burdened with noise pollution. sampled census tracts with the highest proportion of non-hispanic blacks experienced the highest levels of no . again, this suggests that non-hispanic blacks, a historically marginalized group, may be doubly exposed to higher levels of air pollution and social stressors compared to other richmond communities monitored in our study. greenspace was significantly associated with lower no concentrations and was also the strongest predictor of no . this suggests that greenspace may mitigate some air quality concerns. moreover, greenspace has been shown in other studies to be conducive to improvements in physical activity [ , ] and real estate value [ , ], thus investment may address multiple symptoms of structural violence. research further indicates that greenspace may have positive impacts on a range of human health factors [ , ]. a final report was submitted to the funder, the bay area air quality management district. when published, this paper will also be submitted to baaqmd, as well as personnel at the california air resources board, the national institutes of environmental health sciences and additional colleagues. evidence indicates that remedial air quality policies backed by enforcement can yield high socio-economic gains. for example, while it is estimated that actions needed to meet us clean air act benchmarks would require usd billion from to , the positive economic value of air improvements over those years was projected to be usd trillion, a return of more than to [ ]. it has been estimated that the economic int. j. environ. res. public health , , of value of eliminating health disparities more broadly is in the trillions of dollars [ ] with savings from eliminating racial health disparities specifically estimated in the hundreds of billions to trillions over time [ ]. these gains do not account for qualitative gains in human well-being or in overall community level justice. sustainable improvements must address aspects of exposure risk, the natural and built environments, government and social change [ ]. more so, they must be conducive to an accessible and shared humanity. . . community science though baseline responses from youth in this project were somewhat high overall, likely due to self-selection bias wherein already motivated youth had a higher likelihood of seeking out and enrolling in the program, improvements were apparent. the successful completion of major scientific grade tasks by youth in this and several of cerch’s prior ypar studies solidifies the assertion that community members and youth specifically should be meaningfully integrated into all feasible aspects of study design, implementation, analysis, and dissemination of results. though cerch staff supervised all work extensively, their primary role became technical consultant rather than relying on a top-down chain of command. this approach is reflective of a commitment to fostering flat hierarchies and inclusivity across study activities. in early stages, youth continually turned to staff for advice, who in turn facilitated freirean dialogue within the group, with the aim of helping the youth better harness their own collective assets and build a community of practice. as sampling progressed, youth increasingly consulted with each other, drawing on their “experiential expertise” to execute the majority of tasks without staff assistance. in longer term projects, this may make research processes more efficient, reducing the workloads of senior researchers and creating new opportunities for community members to build skills and meaningful opportunities for promotion. central tenets of ypar draw from emancipatory pedagogy, seeking to dismantle systems of structural violence discussed and aimed at dissipating hierarchy between researchers with advanced credentials and members of communities unable to access those opportunities, outlined by freire’s critical pedagogy [ ]. integrating “experiential expertise” of those with lived experiences into scientific research study design and protocols mirrors black feminist standpoint theory [ ], where personal experiences illuminate larger societal patterns of violence and resistance. combined, aspects of cbpr resonate with the concept of strong objectivity [ ], that scientific fields require increased, and innately subjective, reflection and diverse inclusion in order to acknowledge, address, and control for, human researcher’s implicit biases, thus improving aggregate objectivity. greater diversity fosters a broader variety of subjectivities that can then cancel out, acknowledge, or balance biases implicit in demographics currently overrepresented in stem fields. each line of thought emphasizes the underutilization of diverse “everyday” knowledge or “experiential expertise”, asserting multiple ways of knowing, with academic knowledge being just one among many others yet also potentially benefiting from each. voices often excluded from decision-making processes are incorporated with cbpr. community-researcher collaborations foster constructive conditions that extend far beyond data, expanding the perspectives of researchers as they conduct subsequent work and create long term opportunities for communities to access and adapt rigorous research methods, technologies and institutions. ypar can improve local capacity to conduct research, better garner public interest in sciences and create desirable local employment or educational opportunities as well as provide an enriching venue for youth to engage their local community, spend time constructively, socialize with other youth and build team-work skills. cerch takes special measures to support youth in college preparation such as panels with youth of color enrolled in top universities, admissions counselor meetings, personal statement workshops and deadline reminders. the work herein may also be a boon to youth’s resumes as they apply for said positions. thus, ypar can create pathways to int. j. environ. res. public health , , of college success, which may help diversify public health program enrollment and workforce. diversification of stem adds a multitude of perspectives and approaches, increasing the probability that new and effective interventions will be developed. inclusion of marginal- ized folks may lend a more nuanced understandings of how structural violence and social determinants of health function, as these populations have familiarity with their impacts. fostering marginalized group’s attainment of educational and employment opportunities remediates factors associated with increased chances of bearing environmental burdens. thus, diversification is both a means to better data and interventions, and end in itself, reducing the probability of structural harm and improving the probability of developmen- tal success. several youth involved in this study actively continue community outreach efforts, and are pursuing or have already engaged in stem careers. several have also worked to foster youth mentorship, college preparedness and diversifying stem fields for the next generation. short study duration and limited funding were impediments to meaningful and long term community action in the study outlined here. drawing upon the precedent set by this study, a new grant was submitted with more than double the budget and duration. this grant includes twice the formally trained research personnel and supports a cohort of youth researchers twice as large. the new study focuses on real time measurements of indoor air pollution in relation to gas stove use in residences that include a child with asthma. this more targeted focus is more directly amenable to individual intervention and may have more immediate and observable impacts than the previous outdoor study overviewed here. the study focus is also complimentary to specific regional regulations regarding indoor air pollution that are in development, including gas stoves. an iterative, and community informed, learning process has led to a new project wherein potential policy implications are more cohesive and streamlined, a challenge faced by the study outlined in this paper. renewed interest in addressing structural racism, catalyzed by the murder of george floyd, has also prompted the city of richmond to deepen their commitment to racial justice. much of the current focus regards police violence and incarceration inequities. we hope that our research findings, framed in the context of structural violence and indicating patterns wherein low income and people of color bear disproportionate air quality burdens, coupled with the exacerbated impacts of covid- , may help illuminate larger policies and systems of resource distribution that center marginalized communities, and a “freedom to breathe”. . . limitations of environmental monitoring data despite our community science findings, several limitations are notable. first, our air sampling took place during a three-week period starting december and ending in mid-january . therefore, our findings are generalizable only to the time period sampled and do not capture seasonal variations of air pollutant levels. that being said, we note that no concentrations measured with the ogawa samplers were very similar when compared against no measurements made at the nearest us epa ambient air quality-monitoring site (see table ). this finding gives added external validity to our no measurements. we are less confident about the external validity for so since so levels measured were at least an order of magnitude lower than the nearest us epa air monitoring site. we note that the two ogawa samplers in closest proximity to the us epa monitoring site were at least at the same order of magnitude of so concentrations ( . ppb versus . ppb). however, so observations made in our study must be interpreted with caution. further, due to lack of resources, noise measurements were made using spot checks only and do not represent h measurements, as is typically done. however, our spot measurements indicated rather high levels of ambient noise at each site location. these preliminary findings warrant further investigation and follow up. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . conclusions made overt by mass social movements such as black lives matter, communities continue to resist at the crux of structural racism and environmental injustice. by further naming, contextualizing, and quantifying deleterious patterns of environmental disparities, these phenomena are more clearly revealed to be artificial, abnormal, and requiring redress. it is our hope that environmental health disparities, and broader awareness of intersectional structural violence, may be increasingly incorporated into social movements, as well as policy decisions. the imperative nature of issues discussed is exacerbated by the devastation covid- has had, and continues to have, especially on communities of color, and especially among communities exposed to air pollution. in this regard, we encourage researchers to expand their commitment to community based participatory research and contextualize findings within historical and contemporary violence. participatory models help generate more granular data and more efficiently render meaningful results that are actionable for multidimensional interventions, informed by deeper understandings of how structural violence, and eco-apartheid interact to probabilistically determine built and social environments that deeply affect community member’s health. through ypar, youth bring a fresh, often marginalized, perspective and hope, helping researchers and communities reify why efforts for improved health equity are of paramount importance, beyond data and abstraction. if properly conducted, the practice of community inclusion helps erode unbalanced power dynamics and socio-economic inequities, improves the long-term sustainability of actions within affected communities, and bolsters capacity to push for a healthier future. exceeding public health as it is often bound, this may be more conducive to a collective belonging and public healing. supplementary materials: the following are available online at https://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / /s . author contributions: formal analysis, e.s.c.; investigation, e.s.c., b.r.w. and y.a.w.; methodol- ogy, e.s.c., project administration, e.s.c. and k.g.h.; writing—original draft, j.e.s.n. and e.s.c.; writing—review and editing, b.r.w., y.a.w. and k.g.h. all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. funding: the author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, au- thorship, and/or publication of this article: this research was funded by the bay area air quality management district, grant no. pp . institutional review board statement: the study was conducted according to the guidelines of the declaration of helsinki. data was collected and managed according to a protocol approved on / / by the university of california berkeley’s committee for the protection of human subjects (protocol no. - - ), by citi certified staff trained in public health. informed consent statement: informed consent was obtained from all subjects involved in the study, and from their parents if the subject was under the age of years old. data availability statement: non-human subjects raw data is included in this paper as a supple- mental table. acknowledgments: authors thank the ryse center, including bailey ward, yahna williamson, melissa merino, dashia wright, maxine dimalanta, dan reilly, tara malik, francisco rojas, andrew yeung and randy joseph for their support of this project, meetings and an array of materials, trainings and expertise. we also thank regan patterson (baaqmd), and margaret gordan (west oakland environmental indicators project) for informing curriculum materials and outreach. we thank brenda eskenazi and asa bradman for their work supporting the original chamacos ycc model and daniel madrigal for his extensive work developing foundational curriculum and processes for cerch’s ypar. additional thanks to jordyn wallenborn and lucia calderon at cerch for suggesting edits. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. https://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / /s https://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / /s int. j. environ. res. public health , , of references . dignam, t.; kaufmann, r.b.; lestourgeon, l.; brown, m.j. control of lead sources in the 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[crossref] [pubmed] . freire, p. pedagogy of hope: reliving pedagogy of the oppressed; continuum publishing company: new york, ny, usa, ; isbn - - - . . collins, p.h. black feminist thought: knowledge, consciousness, and the politics of empowerment, st ed.; routledge: new york, ny, usa, . . harding, s. rethinking standpoint epistemology: what is “strong objectivity”? centen. rev. , , – . http://doi.org/ . / - ( ) : &lt; ::aid-jcop &gt; . .co; - http://doi.org/ . /bf http://doi.org/ . / http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ https://www.ci.richmond.ca.us/ /point-molate-resort-and-casino http://doi.org/ . /j.healthplace. . . http://doi.org/ . /ijerph http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://doi.org/ . /s https://www.london.gov.uk/sites/default/files/valuing_greenness_report.pdf http://doi.org/ . /j.envint. . . http://doi.org/ . /s - - - http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ https://www.epa.gov/clean-air-act-overview/benefits-and-costs-clean-air-act- - -report-documents-and-graphics https://www.epa.gov/clean-air-act-overview/benefits-and-costs-clean-air-act- - -report-documents-and-graphics http://doi.org/ . /hlthaff. . http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://doi.org/ . /hs. . .c http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://doi.org/ . / gh http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ 	introduction 	background 	air pollution 	structural violence 	framework 	transgenerational structural violence 	contemporary structural violence 	contemporary resistance to symptoms of structural violence 	structural violence in richmond, ca 	air quality research gaps in richmond 	youth participatory action research (ypar) model 	methods 	ypar methods 	air quality data collection methods 	data analysis 	results 	air quality results 	ypar results 	discussion 	air quality 	community science 	limitations of environmental monitoring data 	conclusions 	references bdj in practice | vol | issue upfront sir, i write in regards to the article ‘what are you?’ with the black lives matter (blm) movement, many articles have been published in relation to the topic aiming to raise awareness of what minority groups face on a day-to-day basis. micro-aggressive comments including people questioning our ethnic backgrounds often feature. i may be of the minority but the question ‘where are you actually from?’ doesn’t tend to bother me unless said with racial intent. i will confidently say i am not originally from british heritage as i believe each culture, ethnicity and race should be appreciated and one should not feel out of place for not being originally british. questions often show peoples’ interest in learning about our backgrounds, especially in such a progressive society. on the occasion it’s used with racial intent i’ve tried to see this as a positive teaching moment. every positive contact a patient has with people of colour and minority groups will help reduce prejudice and may reduce future racial incidences. which poses the question, are we as dental professionals able to help combat discrimination and racism? – i believe we are. how you may ask? i think it’s simple, we are in a strong position with our comfortable one-to-one setting as opposed to group settings. patients feel less hesitant to ask questions when there are fewer people to misconceive/judge their questions. dentistry is a field with such diverse backgrounds of professionals. despite the profession still being predominately white dominated the percentage of other ethnic groups entering the field is rising. the gdc released information on the breakdown of ethnicities of their registrants. in july , % of dentists registered were of purely white backgrounds and . % were of other ethnic backgrounds such as south asian, chinese, black or mixed backgrounds. some applicants did not disclose their ethnicity ( . %). between - , british asians made up around % of those accepted into uk dental schools. when analysing the universities and colleges admissions service (ucas) yearly applicants, there is an increase in annual applicants from asian and black groups compared to white british applicants which has plateaued. this shows it is highly likely patients will encounter someone from a minority ethnic background during their lifetime of dental treatment, increasing opportunities to raise awareness. ‘why do you wear that on your head?’ is one of the most frequent questions i get asked as a muslim dentist wearing a headscarf. i take this as an opportunity to educate those asking. ignorance and preconceived views of different religions and cultures are often the reasons behind discrimination against minority groups and those of different faiths/backgrounds. assumptions and misconceptions of religion, race etc often lead to society attacking these groups on false pretences. therefore, when asked about religion, i believe it’s my job to help counteract these common misconceptions. who better than someone within that religious group who can present it positively and factually? you may think, surely within our modern society people should know better? well yes ideally, but unfortunately, we don’t live in a perfect world and it’s become every educated person’s role to help fight against discrimination by passing on their knowledge to those who may be ignorant. i have lived with people of many backgrounds and cultures, four different nationalities in total. i learnt about different traditions, foods, common religions and more. i wouldn’t have learnt as much without asking. had i been made to feel my inquisitive nature came across as micro- aggressive i would still be very ignorant. allow people to ask and learn. with that being said, we mustn’t feel that we need to justify our decisions, opinions or beliefs. a small majority of individuals will attempt to enforce their own opinions or belittle our beliefs, therefore there must be boundaries to when we accept questioning. as long the inquisition is to gain information, said without malicious intent and helps reduce misunderstandings, we should be as open as possible. we all have our own opinions on what we find offensive and we should hope that everyone respects that. we all want to live our lives happy and content without constantly being questioned; but the reality is, in a white, british dominated country our appearance is different. ‘‘but where are you actually from?’ and how many of you who have been asked this question are white?’ in response to this, it is expected that we be the ones questioned about our origin as opposed to white people as we are the minority in this country. similarly, when i visit my home country, i hear the same question being asked to people who are from a white background. these questions aren’t only asked to those who visibly look different, but also those who sound different. britain has become a melting pot of cultures therefore there are many of us with accents from around the world. yes, we are british, but we also have a rich heritage that we should be proud to discuss, proud to share. it’s time we don’t shy away from this, embrace our differences and appreciate what we have to offer. if people avoid asking us questions out of fear of being offensive, when will people learn how amazing each and every background is? let people ask, and be ready to answer with happiness, positivity and excitement! the world is ready for us… dr k. via email references . jamil, h. what are you? bdj in pract ;  :  . . gdc. . request for datasets of ethnicity of registrants number and percentage. general dental council. [online]. available at: https:// www.gdc-uk.org/about-us/freedom-of- information/information-released-under-the- foi-act [accessed: nd august ] . gallagher j e, calvert a, niven v, cabot l. do high tuition fees make a difference? characteristics of applicants to uk medical and dental schools before and after the introduction of high tuition fees in . br dent j ; : - . . ucas. . applicant releases for cycle. ucas. [online]. available at: https://www.ucas. com/data-and-analysis/ucas-undergraduate- releases. [accessed: nd august .] dentistry and the fight against discrimination letters to the editor ‘ ignorance and preconceived views of different religions and cultures is often the reason behind discrimination against minority groups and those of different faiths/ backgrounds’ © british dental association. all rights reserved. https://www.gdc-uk.org/about-us/freedom-of-information/information-released-under-the-foi-act https://www.gdc-uk.org/about-us/freedom-of-information/information-released-under-the-foi-act https://www.gdc-uk.org/about-us/freedom-of-information/information-released-under-the-foi-act https://www.gdc-uk.org/about-us/freedom-of-information/information-released-under-the-foi-act https://www.ucas.com/data-and-analysis/ucas-undergraduate-releases https://www.ucas.com/data-and-analysis/ucas-undergraduate-releases https://www.ucas.com/data-and-analysis/ucas-undergraduate-releases wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ movement. the goal was “to hit pause, to give black academics a break and to give others an opportunity to reflect on their own complicity in anti-black racism in academia and their local and global communities”, said one of the groups organizing this event. time-sensitive research on covid- was able to continue. many are exhausted by the stream of gut-wrenching news. cassandra extavour, an evolutionary and developmental biologist at harvard university in cambridge, massachu- setts, said that reports of police brutality and killings alongside the systemic racism in her field test her will to stay in science. “every time one of us is rejected, beat down, dismissed, ridiculed or murdered, i question why i am still in academia,” she wrote in a series of tweets. “i answer my question by asking myself if today will be the day that another black scientist leaves the field, is pushed out by the toxicity that we have to wade through every day so we can ‘be productive’ and ‘just think about science.’ i answer, ‘not today.’” critical messaging over the past week, scores of universities and scientific societies joined organizations of every stripe in issuing statements about the civil unrest in the united states. some faced criticism that they had missed the mark. for example, several chemists pointed out that the american chemical society (acs) in wash- ington dc left out key words, such as “black”, “police brutality” and “racism”, in a statement released on june, and took issue with the way that the statement criticized the use of vio- lence during the protests themselves. in doing so, they argued, the society missed the core drivers of the current movement and failed to acknowledge the pain its black members were experiencing. according to some analyses, black americans are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white americans. glenn ruskin, vice-president for external affairs and communications at the acs, says that the society followed that “initial response” with a video message from acs president luis echegoyen. “in this message, we condemn racism, stand in solidarity with our black and brown members and commit ourselves to using our resources to addressing issues of racism in all its manifestations,” ruskin says. many scientists challenged organizations to back up their statements with actions that support or elevate black scientists, includ- ing sharing their figures on diversity and ensuring that they hire staff members from diverse backgrounds. some spelt out steps that institutions could take. “although it’s great that universities have made public statements condemning racism, it is important for those statements to include a specific list of anti-racist actions they’re planning to take to support their black stu- dents, faculty and staff, such as increasing recruitment and retention efforts, supporting african american studies programmes and anti-racism education, and providing more funding to support black faculty and stu- dents,” says jioni lewis, a psychologist who studies discrimination and mental health at the university of tennessee, knoxville. advice to allies lesley weaver, a cell biologist who is about to take up a post at indiana university in bloomington, suggested that scientific insti- tutions and societies should ensure that they include people from minority ethnic groups as editors, reviewers and authors of peer-reviewed papers; that they give students, staff and faculty members regular diversity and inclusion train- ing; and that they make diversity sessions at major conferences main events, rather than side acts that must compete for attention with concurrent sessions. “if academia wants to support black scientists, they’ll train and support them instead of using black bodies for a number quota,” weaver wrote. “if academia wants to support black scientists, it won’t take another senseless death and uprising for it to be clear that black lives matter.” addressing her own field of cell biology, she suggested ending the use in research of hela cells, the extraordinary cell line that doctors at johns hopkins hospital in baltimore, maryland, took and cultured without permission from henrietta lacks, a poor black woman, in . jasmine abrams, a behavioural scientist at boston university school of public health in massachusetts and yale school of public health in new haven, connecticut, similarly tweeted ways scientists could be allies to black colleagues: “drop our names for special opportunities or hires. post about our work on your social media. cite us in your papers. vote in favor of our contract renewals, tenure, and promotion.” abrams continued: “say some- thing (instead of secretly coming by our office later) in the faculty meeting, hallway, or class- room when a colleague or student says/does something implicitly or explicitly racist.” the challenges that black scientists face — and that white colleagues are now seeing — aren’t new, she added. “keep in mind that the plantation has been on fire for us and that for most, it is a legit daily struggle to do our work. we appre- ciate you reaching out, but we’d appreciate it more if you helped us put the fire out.” amid the maelstrom, bianca jones marlin, a neuroscientist at columbia university, posted a video message addressed to other black scientists. she spoke out loud something she wished she’d heard at difficult times in her past: “that your presence in science is important, that your purpose in science is seen,” she said. “i’m here to hear your stories. because i get it.” additional reporting by giuliana viglione “we appreciate you reaching out, but we’d appreciate it more if you helped us put the fire out.” cryo-electron microscopy feat will allow the workings of proteins to be probed in unprecedented detail. revolutionary microscopy technique sees individual atoms by ewen callaway a game-changing technique for imaging molecules, known as cryo-electron m i c ro sc o py, h a s p ro d u c e d i t s sharpest pictures yet — and, for the first time, discerned individual atoms in a protein. by achieving atomic resolution using c r yo - e l e c t ro n m i c ro sc o py (c r yo - e m ) , researchers will be able to understand, in unprecedented detail, the workings of proteins that cannot easily be examined by other imag- ing techniques, such as x-ray crystallography. the breakthrough, repor ted by t wo laboratories late last month, cements cryo-em’s position as the dominant tool for mapping the d shapes of proteins, say scientists. ultimately, these structures will help researchers to understand how proteins work in health and disease, and lead to better drugs with fewer side effects. “ there’s really nothing to break any more. this was the last resolution bar- rier,” says holger stark, a biochemist and electron microscopist at the max planck institute for biophysical chemistry in göt- tingen, germany, who led one of the studies | nature | vol | june news in focus © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. average re so lu tio n (Å ) highest imaging atoms the imaging technique known as cryo-electron microscopy can now resolve features at the atomic level — about . ångströms across. s o u r c e : e l e c t r o n m ic r o s c o p y d a t a b a n k p a u l e m s l e y /m r c l a b o r a t o r y o f m o l e c u l a r b io l o g y (k.  m.  yip et al.  preprint at biorxiv http:// doi.org/dx w; ). the other was led by sjors scheres and radu aricescu, structural biologists at the medical research council laboratory of molecular biology (mrc-lmb) in cambridge, uk (t. nakane et al. preprint at biorxiv http://doi.org/dx x; ). both were posted on the biorxiv preprint server on may. “true ‘atomic resolution’ is a real milestone,” adds john rubinstein, a structural biologist at the university of toronto in canada. getting atomic-resolution structures of many pro- teins remains a daunting task because of other challenges, such as a protein’s flexibility. “these preprints show where one can get to if those other limitations can be addressed,” he adds. breaking boundaries cryo-em is a decades-old technique that determines the shape of flash-frozen samples by firing electrons at them and recording the resulting images. advances in technology for detecting the ricocheting electrons and in image-analysis software catalysed a ‘resolu- tion revolution’ that started around . this led to protein structures that were sharper than ever before — and nearly as good as those obtained from x-ray crystallography, an older technique that infers structures from diffrac- tion patterns made by protein crystals when they are bombarded with x-rays. s u b se q u e n t h a rd wa re a n d s of t wa re advances led to more improvements in the resolution of cryo-em structures. but scien- tists have had to rely largely on x-ray crys- tallography for obtaining atomic-resolution structures. however, researchers can spend months to years getting a protein to crystal- lize, and many medically important proteins won’t form usable crystals; cryo-em, by con- trast, requires only that the protein be in a purified solution. atomic-resolution maps are precise enough to unambiguously discern the position of individual atoms in a protein, at a resolution of around . ångströms ( . × – metres). these structures are especially useful for understanding how enzymes work and using those insights to identify drugs that can block their activity (see ‘imaging atoms’). to push cryo-em to atomic resolution, the two teams worked on an iron-storing protein called apoferritin. because of its rock-like stability, the protein has become a test bed for cryo-em: a structure of the protein with a resolution of . ångströms was the previous record. the teams then used technological improve- ments to take sharper pictures of apoferritin. stark’s team got a . -ångström structure of the protein, with help from an instrument that ensures that the electrons travel at similar speeds before hitting a sample, enhancing the resolution of the resulting images. scheres, aricescu and their group used a different tech- nology to fire electrons travelling at similar speeds; they also benefited from a technology that reduces the noise generated after some electrons career off the protein sample, as well as a more sensitive electron-detecting camera. their . -ångström structure was so complete, says scheres, that they could pick out individ- ual hydrogen atoms, both in the protein and in surrounding water molecules. see clearly scheres and aricescu also tested their improve- ments on a simplified form of a protein called the gabaa receptor. the protein sits in the membrane of neurons and is a target for general anaesthetics, anxiety medications and many other drugs. last year, aricescu’s team used cryo-em to map the protein to .  ångströms. but with the new kit, the researchers attained a . -ångström resolution, with even better reso- lution in some key parts of the protein. “it was like peeling off a blur over your eyes,” aricescu says. “at this resolution, every half ångström opens up a whole universe.” the structure revealed never-before-seen details in the protein — including the water molecules in the pocket where a chemical called histamine sits. “that is a gold mine for structure-based drug design,” says aricescu, because it shows how a drug could displace the water molecules, potentially resulting in medications with fewer side effects. an atomic-resolution map of gaba a, which isn’t as stable as apoferritin, would be a challenge, says scheres. “i don’t think it’s impossible, but it would be very impractical,” because of the vast amount of data that would need to be collected. but other improvements, particularly in how samples are prepared, could offer some hope. protein solutions are frozen on tiny grids made of gold, and altera- tions to these grids could hold proteins even more still. “everyone is very excited and amazed by the truly astounding level of performance demonstrated by the mrc-lmb and max planck groups,” says radostin danev, a cryo-em specialist at the university of tokyo. but he agrees that sample preparation is the field’s major challenge for wobblier proteins. the breakthroughs are likely to cement cryo-em’s position as the go-to tool for most structural studies, says scheres. but stark thinks x-ray crystallography will retain some appeal. if a protein can be crystallized — and that’s a big if — it’s relatively efficient to gen- erate structures of it bound to thousands of potential drugs in a short amount of time. but it can still take hours to days to generate enough data for extremely high-resolution cryo-em structures. “there are still pros and cons for each of the techniques,” says stark. “people have pub- lished lots of papers and reviews that say these latest advances in cryo-em will be the death signal for x-ray. i doubt that.” a cryo-electron-microscopy map of the protein apoferritin. nature | vol | june | © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ review of slavoj Žižek ( ). pandemic!: covid- shakes the world reviews caroline green whitcomb published online: july # springer nature switzerland ag postdigital science and education ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - - keywords covid- . pandemic . slavoj Žižek . communism . capitalism . disaster . solidarity covid- and its psychic intensities on a monday in late april , i woke to a gurgling sound in my stomach and a feverish headache. this could not be happening. i had followed all the rules and then some. the few times i had ventured out for groceries, i wore a mask and gloves, showered afterward, and even gone so far as to flush my sinuses and gargle with a disgusting betadine/saline concoction suggested by my physician parents. i simply could not be sick. being confined to our home for weeks on end had been bad enough, knowing i was now going to be relegated to my bedroom, bathroom, and study for days on end made my already irritated stomach roll. questions and thoughts bounced about in my pounding head. would my children get it? who do i call to request a test? what medications can i take? will i be granted extensions on my work? i want my mom and i guess this means i can go back to bed. the following day, i inquired with the local hospital about being tested for covid- and was informed i was not eligible because i was under fifty and ‘non-essential.’ via telemed, i was told to quarantine and follow the guidelines of those with a positive test result. quarantine, the word that makes social distancing seem like a walk in the park. however, after a day or two, i somewhat settled into my bizarre reality. exhausted from the unidentified illness, my days and nights became jumbled. i read, paced, slept, wrote, painted my toenails, surfed the internet, dreamed, and daydreamed. initially, my introverted-self was hanging in there. however, around day , something snapped. my dreams became bizarrely vivid and my thoughts obtusely philosophical, strange, and * caroline green whitcomb cw @georgiasouthern.edu georgia southern university, statesboro, ga, usa review of slavoj Žižek ( ). pandemic!: covid- shakes the world new york and london: or books. pp. isbn (paperback) http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf mailto:cw @georgiasouthern.edu postdigital science and education ( ) : – different than ever before. i missed my children. i wanted to pet my dogs. i needed to be outside. i ached for human connection. springsteen’s ( ) song, ‘human touch,’ was on repeat inside my head. desperate, i flung open the door at the top of the staircase, looked down at my family, and cried. that night, i pulled christopher bollas’ ( ) cracking up: the work of uncon- scious experience from the shelf and began to read. i recalled from my initial reading an inability to connect with bollas’ writing. ‘who thinks like this?’ was scribbled on one of the countless yellow post-it notes scattered throughout the book. that night, on the same note i wrote, ‘i do. it just took a pandemic to make me.’ everyday experiences evoke what freud called ‘psychic intensities,’ as a slightly different ‘degree of interest’ arises in a single moment that awakens memories, instinctual states, and vivid thoughts...something in what the french call le vecu (the lived experience) has had a very particular psychic effect, and records itself as a constellation of the self’s experience at that very moment...a psychic intensity is also something of a questioning, when the individual implicitly asks what has happened, but in doing so unleashes the dispersing forms of the question itself. (bollas : - ) are we all in the same boat? reading slavoj Žižek’s ( ) pandemic!: covid- shakes the world, i began to see i was not alone in my recent psychic intensities and the resulting questions (bollas : ). slavoj Žižek, a slovenian philosopher and cultural critic, impressively churned out this work in the early months of and released it on march th. the hot pink book with the words ‘the most dangerous philosopher in the west’ splashed across the back cover had my attention. this was my first encounter with the internationally known philosopher and his opening sentences fascinated me. ‘touch me not,’ according to john : , is what jesus said to mary magdalene when she recognized him after his resurrection. how do i, an avowed christian atheist, understand these words? ... christ...will be there not as a person to touch, but as the bond of love and solidarity between people–so, ‘do not touch me, touch and deal with other people in the spirit of love.’ (Žižek : ) love without touch. Žižek ( : ) goes on to suggest that a deep look into the eyes of another can offer more than an intimate touch. i wonder at the idea. can we truly love one, deeply and intimately, we have never held? can we look into someone’s eyes virtually and share a life-altering moment? Žižek ( : ) quotes hegel: ‘the beloved is not opposed to us, he is one with our own being; we see us only in him, but then again he is not a we anymore—a riddle, a miracle [ein wunder], one that we cannot grasp.’ Žižek suggests in his introduction that, in our avoidance of others, we are able to truly experience them and grasp their importance in our lives. he believes corporal distancing has the power to strengthen our bond with humanity. postdigital science and education ( ) : – the book’s chapters function as a series of essays centered around Žižek’s call for a new communism. each addresses a different topic, some more compelling than others. the first, ‘we’re all in the same boat now’, does not offer the same enticing writing of the introduction but the martin luther king, jr. quote resonates. i woke this morning to learn magaline eubanks, a kind and gentle soul who has worked for my parents for years, died unexpectedly during the night from compli- cations resulting from covid- . the heartbreaking description of her attempted resuscitation weighs heavily on my mind as i open my computer to continue my review of Žižek’s work. Žižek considers the pandemic as somewhat of an inversion of h. g. wells’ the war of the worlds. the ‘martian invaders’ ruthlessly exploiting and destroying life on earth are we, humanity, ourselves; and after all devices of highly developed primates to defend themselves from us have failed, we are now threatened ‘by the humblest things that god, in his wisdom, put upon this earth,’ stupid viruses which just blindly reproduce themselves—and mutate. (Žižek : ) my parents’ former medical careers could not save mag. the knowledge of the attending staff coupled with state-of-the-art medical equipment could not save mag. the virus won and continues to win in the usa. its victims are often the black and brown bodies traditionally sacrificed throughout the nation’s history. are we all truly in the same boat? yes, in the sense we are all potentially susceptible but no, in light of national statistics and death rates. in Žižek’s second chapter, ‘why are we tired all the time?’, he describes three groups of workers: ‘self-employed and self-exploited workers in the developed west, debilitating assembly line work in the third world, [and] the growing domain of human care workers in all its forms where exploitation abounds...each of the three groups implies a specific mode of being tired and overworked’ ( ). for Žižek, the paid workers, those ‘whose work has to take place outside, in factories and fields, in stores, hospitals and public transport’ are the world’s most vulnerable. he challenges readers to remember only work which benefits the community will bring true satisfaction. in the beginning weeks of state-required social distancing, before becoming ill, i volunteered with an inner-city school’s cafeteria staff packing meals for children who relied on school provisions to survive. after the first few days of standing in the meal- packing assembly line, i was exhausted. the small group of full-time cafeteria staff was primarily african american women in their sixties. i could not hold a candle to the stamina and strength of those ladies. for Žižek, their fatigue, like that of our medical workers, is worthwhile. while i agree, should we not also consider why the ‘worth- while’ sacrifice is continually and primarily asked of those marginalized by society? towards a vision of global solidarity Žižek’s own concern for the world’s forgotten becomes apparent in his description of the refugees caught in the ‘devilish dance between erdogan and putin’ (Žižek : ). here, Žižek asks readers to consider the pandemic’s possible impact in europe and erdogan and putin’s exploitation of refugees in their ongoing attempts to prevent a postdigital science and education ( ) : – unified europe. Žižek suggests ‘it is vital to all to stress tolerance and solidarity towards [those] who are arriving, this...is likely to be much more effective than appeals to abstract humanitarianism…’ ( ). with alternative solutions in mind, Žižek transitions into a description of the society he hopes will emerge as a result of the pandemic. instead of a world plagued by the ideological viruses of ‘fake news, paranoiac conspiracy theories, [and] explosions of racism’, Žižek longs for the spread of a more ‘beneficent ideological virus...the virus of thinking of an alternate society, a society beyond nation-state, a society that actualizes itself in the forms of global solidarity and cooperation’ ( ). he speculates covid- may provide an opportunity to ‘re-invent communism based on trust in the people and in science’ ( ). for Žižek, it is in the dead time, the gelassenheit produced by the virus, we are afforded the opportunity to reflect on the ‘(non)sense’ of our current state ( ). Žižek’s communists of today are those who have pondered how liberal values are threatened and who acknowledge true freedom will only be achieved through radical change in the crisis of global capitalism ( ). for Žižek, this change requires a shift of focus from individual responsibility to a global struggle for a just social and economic system. in his final commentary Žižek ( : – ) writes, ‘disaster communism as an antidote to disaster capitalism...the state [must] assume a much more active role...it is through our effort to save humanity from self-destruction that we are creating a new humanity. it is only through this mortal threat that we can envision a unified humanity.’ currently, the mortal threat of the virus seems lost on the usa. some americans are fighting historic and systemic racism through black lives matter protests. others fearlessly enter indoor arenas in trumpian exaltation, cheering make america great again (maga) at the top of their lungs. bizarrely, americans are collectively ‘over’ the pandemic, periodically pausing from shouting and protesting to jointly storm beaches, restaurants, and shopping malls. the death of magaline eubanks and thousands of others were grieved in accordance with the momentary social distancing guidelines. sadly, they failed to become emblems of societal and governmental negligence and catalysts of radical change. in the usa, Žižek’s hope for a unified humanity appears to be an unrealized dream. while social distancing may have produced a deeper appreci- ation of our loved ones, it does not seem to have transformed societal opposites into bosom buddies or, except for the rarest of pandemic love stories, have unveiled a beloved we have never touched and yet is one with our most intimate being. Žižek’s appendix includes a discussion of two letters from friends. the first suggests we follow the teachings of lacan (simplified) and ‘try to identify with your symptom, without any shame, which means (i am simplifying a bit here), fully assume all rituals, formulas, quirks, and so on, that will help stabilize your daily life. everything that might work is permitted here if it helps to avoid a mental breakdown’ (Žižek : ). the second describes our changed outlook on life: ‘it’s the idea of a world where you have an apartment, basics like food and water, the love of others and a task that really matters, now more than ever. the idea that one needs ‘more’ seems unreal now.’ ( ). prior to the appendix, Žižek’s work left me with a new ache in my stomach. not even a global pandemic could drive us away from greed and power and towards each other. yet, in Žižek’s appendix, i found a glimmer of hope. my quarantine, psychic intensities, and tears were not for naught. i now understood that in the dead time, the aloneness, i found my inmost being, a being previously silenced by life’s cacophony. postdigital science and education ( ) : – i discovered unusual but beneficial coping tools: a mexican blanket, the writing of albert camus, and an app that generates the calming sound of ocean waves. finally, i learned it is the basics, love, and worthwhile tasks we need, and these that satisfy. while we have not unified humanity, maybe the pandemic driven discovery of the necessity of quiet time, personal coping tools, authentic love, and the beauty of basics will move us one step closer towards each other and Žižek’s vision of global solidarity. references bollas, c. ( ). cracking up: the work of unconscious experience. london: routledge. springsteen, b. ( ). human touch [music album]. los angeles: a&m studios. Žižek, s. ( ). pandemic!: covid- shakes the world. new york and london: or books. 	review of slavoj Žižek ( ). pandemic!: covid- shakes the world 	covid- and its psychic intensities 	are we all in the same boat? 	towards a vision of global solidarity 	references s .. reparations for police killings jennifer m. page after a fatal police shooting, it is typical for city and police officials to view the family of the deceased through the lens of the law. if the family files a lawsuit, the city and police department consider it their legal right to defend themselves and to treat the plaintiffs as adversaries. however, reparations and the concept of “reparative justice” allow authorities to frame police killings in moral rather than legal terms. when a police officer kills a person who was not liable to this outcome, officials should offer monetary reparations, an apology, and other redress measures to the victim’s family. to make this argument, the article presents a philosophical account of non-liability hailing from self-defense theory that centers on the distinction between reasonableness and liability. reparations provide a nonadversarial alternative to civil litigation after a non-liable person has been killed by a police officer. in cases where the officer nevertheless acted reasonably, “institutional agent-regret” rather than moral responsibility grounds the argument for reparations. throughout the article, it is argued that there are distinct racial wrongs both when police kill a non- liable black person and when family members of a black victim are treated poorly by officials in the civil litigation process. o n july , , samuel dubose, an unarmed black man, was shot and killed at a traffic stop by ray tensing, a white university of cincinnati police officer. tensing was indicted, and the following january, talks between dubose’s family and the univer- sity of cincinnati produced an agreement containing the following provisions: a substantial monetary redress pay- ment, an official apology from the university president, an on-campus memorial, tuition-free college for dubose’s children, and the establishment of a community advisory council on police reform with a seat reserved for a member of dubose’s family (“university of cincinnati” ). contrast this response to one that occurred after tragic events in another ohio city less than a year earlier. tamir rice, an african american -year-old boy playing with a toy gun, was shot by cleveland police on november , and died the next day. a video recording shows timothy loehmann, a white officer, opening fire on tamir within seconds of arriving at the scene. tamir’s -year-old sister ran to her younger brother’s side, but was handcuffed and placed in the backseat of the patrol car; several critical minutes passed before anyone tried to administer aid. loehmann escaped without criminal charges. prosecutor timothy mcginty recommended non-indictment to the grand jury, arguing that the officer did not know that the gun was a toy and had “a reason to fear for his life” (williams and smith ). tamir’s mother, samaria rice, initiated litigation against the city and the officers. a lengthy, highly public civil lawsuit ensued, with the city of cleveland’s attorneys mounting a vigorous defense against all allegations. focusing on the united states, this article lays out a normative argument for the use of reparative justice measures in responding to fatal police shootings. taking the university of cincinnati’s response to the death of samuel dubose as a starting point, i use the term “reparative justice measures” to refer to monetary redress and a range of other material and symbolic forms of reparations. on my account, police and city officials should offer a monetary sum commensurate with the outcome of a successful wrongful death lawsuit and an official apology, and initiate talks with the family members of the deceased about other redress measures they feel are appropriate. in offering monetary redress, officials should jennifer m. page is a postdoctoral researcher in political philosophy at the university of zurich’s center for ethics (jennifer.page@uzh.ch). she has authored and coauthored essays appearing in social theory and practice, ethnic and racial studies, raisons politiques, and the routledge handbook of ethics and public policy and is working on a book about reparations. versions of this article were presented at the university of connecticut’s political violence workshop, the mancept workshops in political theory, the american political science association annual meeting, the university of iceland’s “who’s got the power?” conference, and the political philosophy colloquium and cis annual colloquium at the university of zurich. the author is grateful for the comments received at all these venues, as well as to aurélia bardon, leonard feldman, jessica simes, and marian page. the financial support of brown university’s center for the study of slavery and justice and the university of zurich’s political philosophy chair made the numerous presentations of this article possible. doi: . /s © american political science association article https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. ip address: . . . , on nov at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:jennifer.page@uzh.ch https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core emphasize that it is not intended as blood money or hush money, but that the aim is to save the family from the emotional stress of a civil lawsuit that is their right to proceed with. in what circumstances should authorities offer repar- ations? don’t complex matters of fact often complicate the question as to whether the use of lethal force was warranted? in the united states the “reasonable officer” standard is used to assess the justifiability of the police use of force (graham v. connor, u.s. [ ]; patrick and hall ). however, reparative justice need not be beholden to traditional legal standards—indeed, it should not be. a norm of reparative justice should apply whenever a police officer kills someone who was not liable to being killed. perhaps confusingly, “liability” to being killed is a moral and philosophical notion, not a legal one. with jeff mcmahan’s (e.g., , , ) work on the ethics of killing, the concept of liability has gained traction as a way of assessing the morality of self-defense. self- defense is not the only reason why police officers use lethal force, but it is the most common reason given, and recent “blue lives matter” activism has moreover focused on the dangerousness of police officers’ jobs. indeed, police officers in the united states do have dangerous jobs. between and , an average of officers were killed by civilian attackers annually. zimring ( , ) computes what this rate means for american police: “in a major city police force of , officers, a fatal assault risk of . per , translates into one killing in an average two-year period.” as such, “the threat of lethal attack is a palpable part of being a police officer in the united states.” however, as i argue in the first part of the article, that police officers’ jobs are dangerous does not negate the duties that arise in the aftermath of killing a non-liable person. i make this argument by subjecting self-defense in the policing context to philosophical analysis, homing in on the distinction between liability and reasonableness. liability is typically understood as a “fact-relative” matter. to determine a person’s liability to being killed, we can ask, taking an objective standpoint, whether she acted in a way that failed to give the moral rights of others the weight that is due. reasonableness, by contrast, is an “evidence-relative” matter and has to do with the evidence available to a self-defender that the other person poses a threat. the distinction between liability and reasonable- ness is important because in the aftermath of a fatal police shooting, officers often refer to the reasonable officer standard, maintaining that any officer at the scene would have been reasonable in using deadly force. but this does not mean that, from a fact-relative standpoint, the shooting was justified. moral duties arise when a non- liable person is killed regardless of whether it was reason- able to use lethal force. this section also considers the role of implicit racial bias in police killings. in the second part of the article, i turn to the idea that moral considerations, and not just considerations of legal justifiability, matter to the aftermath of police killings. reparative justice provides a way for officials to act on those moral considerations. introducing the notion of “institutional agent-regret,” i argue that a reparative justice response is owed even if a police officer acted reasonably in killing a non-liable person. i identify the adversarial structure of traditional civil litigation as an impediment to justice for police killings, one that can moreover perpetuate racial injustice. in the final section, i address two objections. the first is a worry that reparative justice could be instrumental- ized by cities and police departments seeking to enhance their legitimacy in superficial ways. the second concern is that reparative justice unfairly burdens taxpayers. self-defense and liability in police- civilian interactions when police officers use deadly force, they often state that they saw or perceived a gun in the subject’s hand and fired their own weapon in self-defense. philosophers generally agree that an agent is permitted to kill someone who, with a gun or by other means, is threatening her life or the life of another. by threatening someone’s life, an agent makes himself liable to defensive harm. someone who threatens another person’s life inten- tionally and voluntarily opens himself up to liability on this basis. but mcmahan ( ) considers permissible self-defense as extending beyond defensively killing per- sons culpable in this sense. a person can be liable to defensive harm and be permissibly killed even if she does not “deserve” to die. for example, suppose that someone is driving recklessly, loses control of the vehicle, and is about to kill a pedestrian (quong , ). the pedestrian, let us presume, can only save his own life by killing the driver —for example, by throwing a grenade he stumbles on at that moment (lazar , ). though the driver did not threaten the pedestrian’s life intentionally or volun- tarily, she is liable to defensive harm by virtue of recklessly endangering someone else, and it is permissible for the pedestrian to save himself by killing the driver. take another case commonly referred to in the literature (see, e.g., mcmahan , ; quong ). suppose that a serial killer is on a rampage in a small town, and all residents are shown his picture and told that he will murder anyone on sight. implausibly, there exists an unknowingly separated-at-birth identical twin of the killer who happens to have car trouble in this same town. the twin approaches the house of one of the residents, who takes out her gun and is about to pull the trigger. may a superhero observer who grasps the situation —and who is too far away to shout to the resident that she is making a mistake but is within weapon range—kill the resident to save the twin? most agree that even though the perspectives on politics article | reparations for police killings https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. ip address: . . . , on nov at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core resident is no way culpable, she is nevertheless liable to being harmed by the superhero. acting in self-defense is a risky activity, and if one engages in it, one must know that there is a possibility of making a mistake (quong ). one can acquire liability in the complete absence of culpability. since mcmahan’s initial work on the subject, there is general agreement that liability to defensive harm is a more inclusive and ultimately more important concept in evaluating permissible self-defense than culpability. dis- agreement emerges when we ask, “what must a person who does not deserve to die have done to make it the case that he would not be wronged by being killed?” (mcma- han , ). this question matters deeply for the policing context. us law governing the police use of force is based on the “reasonable officer” standard. this standard gives police officers latitude to make subjective judgments, and even mistakes, about the threat a civilian poses so long as their doing so meets the criteria for “reasonableness.” from a moral perspective, depending on the evidence the self- defender has access to, it is sometimes permissible to use force while making a reasonable mistake that the other person poses a threat. inflicting defensive harm on the basis of a mistake does not wrong this person if she nevertheless made herself liable. by contrast, it is a serious thing, a moral wrong, to harm a non-liable person. as we see in the case of the serial killer’s twin, the reasonableness of a self-defender’s action and the other person’s liability to defensive harm do not always align. however, in the aftermath of a fatal police shooting, a police department’s focus is typically on whether the officer’s actions were reasonable, not on whether the civilian was or was not liable. police departments’ failure to make the distinction between reasonableness and liability and to give a civilian’s liability independent consideration has important moral consequences. reasonableness and liability in the case of an improbably unknowingly separated-at- birth identical twin of a serial killer, the resident believed the twin was about to kill her, but the latter was not a threat and was not liable to defensive harm. but consider the following scenario: hostage. a person shows up at a mall with a realistic-looking imitation gun, screams, “i’m going to murder you all!” and pulls a shopper into a supply closet, blindfolding him and barricading the door. the police arrive, and the hostage taker issues threat after threat against the hostage, officers, and shoppers, giving the officers good reason to believe that he is highly dangerous. after several hours of negotiations, the officers break through the door and one kills the hostage taker. as the scene is being cordoned off, the officers see that his only weapon was an imitation gun. despite the obvious difference of the hostage taker seeming to be doing something wrong, hostage and the twin example—from here on out, “twin”—share common features. first, relative to the evidence the resident and the police officers have access to, it is permissible to kill the twin and the hostage taker: inflicting defensive harm is reason- able. second, in neither case does the person perceived as a threat actually pose a threat, as the hostage taker cannot kill anyone with an imitation gun. if only these objective facts mattered, then it would be impermissible for the resident to kill the twin and for the police officer to kill the hostage taker. should a person’s liability to defensive harm depend on the evidence or the facts? in twin, the twin is non-liable because he did not put anyone at risk; he did not do anything that was potentially hazardous to others. this is a fact-relative matter, but on the evidence, the resident reasonably thinks the twin is a killer about to murder her. supposing that the resident herself kills the twin (here the superhero has dropped out of the scenario): she has then committed a reasonable act of self-defense against a non-liable person. however, a retro- spective evaluation is all we have to assess the twin’s non- liability in such a case. an unbiased, hindsight evaluation on the basis of the facts makes it clear that the twin did not do anything to make himself liable. accordingly, whereas the reasonableness of an act of self-defense should be assessed on the basis of the available evidence, liability should be assessed from a fact-relative standpoint. however, this does not mean that anyone who, from a fact-relative standpoint, did not put anyone at risk is non-liable. quong’s understanding of liability to defensive harm goes beyond whether a person objectively risks others’ lives. on quong’s account, agents may not treat others as if they “lack certain important rights that all persons are generally assumed to possess, or else as if those rights or claims do not have the stringency or moral weight that they do in fact possess” ( , ). from a fact- relative standpoint, the hostage taker treats the shoppers, the hostage, and the police as if their claims do not have the moral weight that is due; he has configured the evidence to make it reasonable for the police to shoot him, endanger- ing the hostage. the hostage taker may not be fully culpable in the way a person with an actual gun would be—he may not, in other words, “deserve” to die—but he is nevertheless liable to being killed. let us turn to a case that is quite different from hostage: traffic stop. a police officer pulls over a motorist at a routine traffic stop, asking for his license and registration. she is trained to be alert to situations in which a civilian is drawing a concealed weapon. as the motorist reaches into his pocket, the officer makes a split-second judgment that this is the gesture of someone about to draw a gun. thinking she is acting in self-defense, the officer draws her own weapon and fires, killing the motorist. it is soon clear that the motorist had been reaching for his wallet. traffic stop is a case of a non-liable person being killed that is far more extreme than twin. twin is set up precisely https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. ip address: . . . , on nov at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core to show that a self-defender can be reasonable in killing a non-liable person. in traffic stop, relative to the facts, the driver is clearly non-liable: in reaching for his wallet, he does nothing to violate others’ moral rights or to fail to give them the weight that is due. however, it is far from clear that the officer is acting reasonably. though the officer thought the motorist was reaching for a gun, morally, she is not allowed to defensively kill someone on the basis of this belief in the absence of sufficient evidence. belief- relative permissibility does not entail evidence-relative permissibility, in other words (parfit , – ). assaults on police officers during traffic stops are extremely rare (lichtenberg and smith ), and in such a context, wallets are a much more common thing for civilians to reach for than weapons. in the absence of exceptional countervailing circumstances—for example, police are on the lookout for a fugitive who has recently shot several officers in the area during traffic stops—the officer’s split- second decision to shoot was not supported by the evidence she had access to. but consider a more complicated case: imitation gun. a person is in a public place carrying an imitation gun. the police arrive on the scene, yelling an order for the person to drop his weapon. a split-second later, one officer fires lethal gunshots. the object falls to the ground, and as the officers move in, they see that it is an imitation gun. is imitation gun closer to traffic stop, with an obviously non-liable civilian, or closer to hostage, where the civilian is liable in spite of lacking the objective means to harm anyone? context matters in assessing liability. in japan, a country where gun ownership is rare, a person might be reasonably assumed to pose a threat to others in a scenario like imitation gun and be culpable for the decision to display an imitation weapon. however, it is legal to openly carry weapons in most us states. so, even if the officer thinks the imitation gun is real, she is not entitled to assume that the person holding it intends to use it to kill others. as the scenario is written, nothing the person is doing with the imitation gun suggests his harboring homicidal intent, nor does he issue threats as in hostage. looking at the scenario from a fact-relative perspective, he is non-liable. after a police officer kills a civilian, officials often narrowly focus on whether the officer’s action was reasonable, ignoring the matter of whether the civilian was liable to being defensively killed. but both unreason- able and reasonable acts of self-defense can involve mistakes about the defended-against person’s liability. when an agent makes a mistake, there are distinct moral duties that arise. say i reasonably interpret an ambiguous set of directions in a way that leads me to the wrong rental property; there i find a key under the mat as expected and enter; or consider a case where everyone’s raincoats look alike, and i accidentally take another person’s coat (ripstein , ). once my mistake is realized, i am not allowed to stay in the rental property; otherwise this is trespassing. nor am i allowed to keep someone else’s raincoat; otherwise this is stealing. maintaining that my conduct was reasonable does not mitigate my duties to make things right. i must leave the property and give back the raincoat. in real-world cases where police officers kill non-liable persons, however, mistakes are rarely admitted. that a police officer’s conduct was reasonable is precisely the defense that is given. this defense typically arises in a very specific context, the legal one, but it is not clear why the existence of a legal arena should negate one’s moral duties to admit mistakes once they are perceived. a life lost cannot be restored in a way that is analogous to giving back someone’s raincoat, but the wrong can be acknowledged and reparations offered. conversely, a police shooting victim’s kin can be wronged not only in a first-order sense, by the loss of their loved one, but also in a second-order sense, by the authorities’ failure to admit that their loved one was not liable to being killed and leaving it to the family to bear the entire burden of the loss. so far it has been argued that reasonableness and liability can come apart. whereas reasonableness is measured from the standpoint of the evidence to which a would-be self-defender has access, liability depends on the objective facts of the matter: from our hindsight understanding of the situation, did the person who was killed fail to give the moral rights of others the weight that was due? yet making this judgment is complicated by cases where, objectively speaking, a person imposes a risk of harm on others, but not necessarily lethal harm. to give an example, police officers sometimes shoot and kill civilians who are threatening them with a knife or a blunt object. it seems that objectively, a knife-wielding civilian does not give sufficient moral weight to the rights of others. however, just because a person is liable to harm of some kind does not mean he is liable to being killed. necessity is a classic constraint on self-defense. if it is not necessary to kill someone to avoid serious harm to oneself, then it is impermissible to kill in self-defense (lazar ). though a person may be fully culpable— suppose a knife-wielding civilian tells an officer, “i’m going to kill you!”—he is still only liable to the amount of harm necessary to avert the threat. how much harm is this? the civilian’s distance from the police officer matters, as well as what he is holding and whether he is stationary, moving closer, or moving away. if an officer aims to stop someone from walking around with a knife because this is a public safety risk, and she can do this by removing a bean-bag gun from her vehicle and firing it, from a moral standpoint, it is impermissible for her to use more harmful tactics. of course, when making a split-second decision, it can be difficult to tell whether a person is stationary or moving and how far away he really is. criminologists klinger and brunson ( ) have found that, in lethal-force situations, perspectives on politics article | reparations for police killings https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. ip address: . . . , on nov at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core police officers frequently experience stress-related sensory distortions. because of these distortions, “the decisions that officers make about firing their weapons will fre- quently be based on perceptions of the situation that do not enjoy a one-to-one correspondence with objective reality” ( ). adrenaline and fear might lead an officer to make a mistake about the nature of the threat a civilian poses and use lethal force when it is unnecessary. as klinger and brunson argue, members of the public often misunderstand the experience of police officers who use lethal force, incorrectly using the standard of a calm, composed person who has no perceptual distortions. when “police and public judgments about the appropri- ateness of specific shooting incidents do not align,” write klinger and brunson ( , ), the resulting tensions “are impediments to sound police-community relations.” however, what they identify as the public’s flawed in- terpretation of police reasonableness might instead be a tendency to conceptualize a fatal police shooting in terms of the deceased person’s liability to this outcome. if the public is being asked to expand its understanding of reasonable lethal force, it seems fair to ask police depart- ments to also give a civilian’s liability independent consideration, adopting the standpoint of “objective re- ality” in doing so. liability and race so far, moral liability in the police-civilian context has been examined in the abstract, without considering the role of race. however, i want to claim that there is a distinct racial wrong in killing a non-liable black person. in the united states, the association of blackness with violence and criminality has a long history (alexander ; butler , ; davis ; muhammad ). it was not uncommon for proponents of slavery to defend the peculiar institution on the basis that black people were prone to crime (kennedy , ). amer- ican law rendered the power of masters to use force as virtually unlimited, and “slave codes” were used to regulate black behavior and movement, which any white person, not just state officials, could enforce. in the postbellum era, the victims of lynching were disproportionately black males, with an alleged crime—murder, theft, or raping or sleeping with a white woman—spurring the mob into action (wells ). when millions of african americans left the jim crow south for northern urban areas in the great migration, the newcomers faced racism, poverty, and segregation. the presence in black areas of a white police force willing to use physical violence was pervasive. “the negro’s most important public contact is with the policemen. he is the personification of white authority in the negro community,” as gunnar myrdal ( , ) wrote. by the s, the practice of lynching had all but ceased, but racialized excessive force by the police did not. the watts uprising of in los angeles was prompted by police brutality; echoes of watts thundered loudly in when the los angeles police officers who beat rodney king were acquitted, prompting large-scale civil unrest (saul ). “innocent until proven guilty” is a hallmark of the american justice system. from watts to los angeles to ferguson, throughout the twentieth century, african americans have protested the presupposition of black criminality. implicit bias research over the last decade has shown just how embedded this presupposition is. if shown a picture of a masked robber, individuals in a simulated juror scenario are more likely to construe ambiguous evidence as suggesting a guilty verdict if the robber is black and a not guilty verdict if the robber is white (levinson and young ). in a computer simu- lation directing research subjects to shoot “criminals” brandishing guns and not to shoot “civilians” holding non-weapon objects, both ordinary participants and trained police officers were quicker to shoot black people holding guns and took longer to decide not to shoot those holding non-weapon objects than when the people in the photos were white (correll et al. ). how does this laboratory finding play out in the real world? for individuals killed by police in a sample studied by zimring ( , ), black people were more than twice as likely to be mistakenly perceived as carrying a weapon as white people (see also lee ; richardson and goff ). in light of the foregoing, my claim is the following. when a non-liable black person is killed by the police, recognition of this act as having a distinctive racial dimension is owed to the victim’s family and community because of ( ) the historical meaning embedded in any instance of harming or killing a black person based on a misperception that he or she is a threat, and ( ) the racial biases that present-day individuals are shown to have, which make it more likely that a black person will be misperceived as a threat. the argument for reparations that i make in the next section applies to all cases where non-liable persons are killed by the police, not just non- liable black persons. however, as i later claim, reparative justice measures specifically tied to race are a fitting way of recognizing distinct racial wrongs. toward reparative justice thus far self-defense scenarios from the policing context have been evaluated solely with reference to moral considerations. in the context of academic articles, the difference between moral standards and legal standards is fairly clear-cut. there may be overlap between the two, but one only needs to specify that one is making a moral but not a legal argument, or vice versa, to avoid confusion between the legal and moral realms. real-world practice is more indeterminate. in the united states, police officers who use lethal force rarely face criminal repercussions (butler , esp. – ). according to the standards https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. ip address: . . . , on nov at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core of the law, officers may judge themselves to have been legally permitted, and therefore not wrong, in having used lethal force. not only might they insist on their permission to have used lethal force under the law but also their lawyers, whose professional duty is to act in their clients’ interest, might warn them against saying anything to the contrary. to state that their actions were (morally) wrong is to unnecessarily open themselves up to civil, and possibly criminal, liability—interpreted as within their right to try to avoid. to shield themselves from liability, officers must instead maintain that their actions are ones that any reasonable officer at the scene would have taken. reparative justice, as i argue, involves a self-conscious move by government officials to employ moral standards rather than legal standards in the aftermath of a police killing. legal standards are the default in such cases, and their usage incentivizes actions that can generate fresh moral wrongs on top of the moral wrong of a non-liable person being killed. when a person not liable to being killed is fatally shot by a police officer, the clock cannot be turned back; the victim’s life cannot be restored. but the government can do the best thing under the circum- stances. it can facilitate full moral accountability to the family when legal standards are at odds with this. graham v. connor and the reasonable officer standard when a police officer uses excessive or lethal force, it is typical for administrative, criminal, and civil means of accountability to be seen as the only available options. administrative responses tend to take place within police departments internally and include verbal reprimands, desk duty, administrative leave, and dismissal. in most us states, a criminal procedure begins with a prosecutor presenting the facts of the case before a grand jury, which then makes a determination whether the officer should face criminal charges. civil litigation involves the family of the victim suing the officer, police department, and/or city. like civil litigation, reparative justice is compatible with both an administrative response and charging the officer with a crime. in civil litigation, there are two outcomes that can lead to the defendant paying compensation: either the de- fendant is ordered to do so by the court, or compensation is agreed on in a settlement. civil litigation would seem to be an attractive venue through which justice can be provided. the facts of a given lethal force case are often in dispute, and courts can serve as impartial bodies where a fact-finding inquiry can take place. civil procedures are moreover designed to be fair to both parties. however, in us civil law, a great deal of latitude is given to officers in their use of force. let us consider two examples. first, recall the idea that, for self-defense to be morally permissible, it must be a necessary means of averting a lethal threat. however, as a widely read police manual on self-defense emphasizes, the courts have determined that police officers are not required “to consider alternative levels of force once the ‘imminent danger’ element is satisfied” (patrick and hall , ). what does “imminent danger” mean? according to the manual, it means “simply that the danger could happen at any moment—it does not have to have happened, or be happening yet.” officers are trained to identify “danger signals that are indicative of an imminent attack, such as non-compliance with orders, presence of a weapon or unseen hands, to name a few” ( – ). but defensively killing a person based on signals such as these means that a police officer is almost certainly acting before lethal force has become necessary. second, as per the supreme court case graham v. connor ( u.s. , – ), a “reasonable officer” standard governs the police use of deadly force: “the ‘reasonableness’ of a particular use of force must be judged from the perspective of a reasonable officer on the scene, rather than with the / vision of hindsight.” this standard, as the majority justices wrote, “must embody allowance for the fact that police officers are often forced to make split-second judgments—in circumstances that are tense, uncertain, and rapidly evolving—about the amount of force that is necessary in a particular situation.” the allowance given to the judgment of the officer on the scene was a crucial aspect of the ruling. as the sixth circuit opined in smith v. freland ( f. d , [ ]) three years later, thus, under graham, we must avoid substituting our personal notions of proper police procedures for the instantaneous decision of the officer on the scene. we must never allow the theoretical, sanitized world of our imagination to replace the dangerous and complex world that policemen face every day. what constitutes “reasonable” action may seem quite different to someone facing a possible assailant than to someone analyzing the question at leisure. hindsight is unequivocally rejected as the standpoint from which to apply the court’s reasonable officer standard. and yet, as i have argued, it is precisely the hindsight point of view from which it is possible to determine that a police officer has killed a non-liable person. moreover, retrospective reflection on the use of force and an admission that the person killed was not liable to this fate are owed to the victim’s family. american law pushes precisely in the opposite direction from moral claims such as these. but reparative justice provides a way for government officials to deal with the aftermath of fatal force in moral, rather than legal, terms. the concept of reparative justice when a police officer kills someone who was not liable to being killed, my argument is that city and police officials owe the family a reparative justice response, offering the family the option of obtaining monetary reparations perspectives on politics article | reparations for police killings https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. ip address: . . . , on nov at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core (commensurate with amounts awarded in wrongful death lawsuits), an official apology, and other redress measures that both sides agree to as fair, without having to file a civil lawsuit. a reparative justice response is owed regardless of whether the police officer acted reasonably or not: it is a way of recognizing the wrong of killing a non- liable person. here there are important differences be- tween wrongdoing, or “unjustifiable or impermissible harming,” and wronging, or “action contrary to rights” (coleman , ). wronging may or may not be accompanied by wrongdoing. but even if no wrongdoing was present, killing a non-liable person is nevertheless contrary to his or her rights. reparative justice is an attractive way of acknowledging this. let us delve into the argument for this claim. in anglo-american law and beyond, it is a standard idea that compensation is owed for injuries contrary to rights, that it is appropriate as a “secondary response to some previous damage” (o’neill , ). welfarist accounts stylize compensation as literally correcting an injury: no further claim on the part of the injured party can be made, because a compensated person should be indifferent between her current circumstances and the status quo ex ante. in nozick’s ( , ) formulation, “it compensates person x for person y’s action a if x is no worse off receiving it, y having done a, than x would have been without receiving it if y had not done a.” reparative justice builds on the fundamental compen- satory idea that something of value is owed for a serious injury, but is concerned precisely with injuries where compensation cannot make a person no worse off than she previously was (vermeule ). further, reparative justice is relevant in situations where the injurer and injured parties have a past and a future that go beyond the wrong. the relationship, and not only the injury, is in need of repair (brooks ; walker a, b). in such situations, it is a problem that compensation “by itself need not signal responsibility for injury, much less regret or atonement by those responsible” (walker b, ). by contrast, reparative justice can signal responsibility and regret. in a reparative justice framework, monetary redress plays a symbolic rather than compensatory role. it is a way of publicly recognizing that the life lost was valuable. if one accepts the general idea of reparative justice, it easily follows that a reparative justice response is owed when police kill a non-liable person and the officer acted unreasonably. it is a serious moral matter for a state to kill one of its political subjects. a reparative justice response shows the family that the city and police de- partment recognize the gravity of the irreparable injury, value the life lost, are willing to do what is in their power to mend a fraught relationship, and acknowledge wrongdo- ing. but why should a police department take responsibil- ity, apologize, and pay reparations if a police officer made a reasonable, evidence-based decision that the non-liable individual killed posed a lethal threat—a tragic mistake? to reiterate a previous claim, even if an officer acted reasonably, the non-liability of the person killed itself has moral significance. by definition, a non-liable person does not “deserve” to be killed. reparative justice carves out space for cities and police departments to recognize the moral significance of what has happened in an area where the law is unresponsive. however, this response does not go deep enough in explaining the rationale for reparative justice under such circumstances. let us turn to the notion of what i call institutional agent-regret. in the interpersonal context, agent-regret is distinct from moral responsibility and from regret concerning “states of affairs. . . [which] can be regretted, in principle, by anyone who knows of them” (williams , ). someone who feels agent-regret laments that the regretful state of affairs was brought about, in whole or in part, by actions stemming from her agency, even if the injury was nonvoluntary. williams’s ( ) famous illustration is the lorry driver who, though driving cautiously, hits a child who runs into the street. agent-regret explains the qualitatively different reaction of the lorry driver and of someone who reads about the incident in the newspaper. moreover, we might say that a lorry driver who did not feel agent-regret, who tells the child’s parent, “say what you will, but i’m no more morally responsible for what happened than someone reading about this in tomorrow’s paper,” exhibits a moral failing. the lorry driver owes it to the parents to acknowledge that it was his vehicle that hit the child and to show he regrets the loss. assuming that institutions can be reasonably under- stood as agents (see, for example, pettit ), the concept of institutional agent-regret seems highly plausi- ble. in the case of police killings, the city and police department owe the family members of the person killed a straightforward admission that their loved one was not liable to this fate and that he died at the hands of a police officer in a tragic accident. and, just as williams’s lorry driver “may act in some way which he hopes will constitute or at least symbolise some kind of recompense or restitution, and this will be an expression of his agent- regret” ( , ), the city and police department act appropriately in offering reparations. reparative justice is an appropriate expression of institutional agent-regret— and the opposite of doggedly maintaining that, as a matter of law, the officer acted reasonably. all this being said, however, it is probably rare for a city and police department to bear no responsibility for the evidence-permissible death of a non-liable person. often in such cases, though a tragic mistake was indeed made, larger structural factors within the police depart- ment contributed to the likelihood that a non-liable person would be killed at some point. when https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. ip address: . . . , on nov at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core institutional structures and practices play a contributory role, the city and police department would be wrong to insist that the death was only an accident and nothing more. in such a case, the death was at the very least foreseeable. the city and police department bear moral responsibility and owe it to the family to admit this. before moving on, a final point is worth making. liability to being killed is a moral notion. it is only as good as the moral reasoning ability of the officials who make use of it. some might be tempted to apply it as rigidly as they would if it were a legal standard. again consider the example of a civilian threatening a police officer with a knife or blunt object. such a person may be liable to being defensively harmed, but is only liable to being defensively killed if lethal force is necessary to avert the threat. it is possible to envision officials splitting hairs over this distinction as a way to delay or avoid paying redress while pressuring the family not to undertake a lawsuit. officials who do this go against the spirit of reparative justice, which is designed not to be beholden to rigid legal standards. adversarial procedure in civil litigation and settlements in the previous section, i referred to the shortcomings of the welfarist model of compensation in explaining the turn to reparative justice: when a life is lost, money cannot make a family no worse off than it previously was. but the civil justice system assigns compensatory damages for wrongful deaths all the time. why should police killings warrant different standards? my response has to do with the special nature of the relationship between the government and its political subjects and how the process of civil litigation can impair this relationship. in the united states, civil litigation is characterized by adversa- rial procedure, which can generate new wrongs in the aftermath of a fatal police shooting. this can take place even if a litigated case is eventually settled. what is adversarial procedure? returning to the case of tamir rice, attorneys for the city of cleveland answered the rice family’s initial complaint with a brief stating that the -year-old boy’s death was caused “by the failure... to exercise due care to avoid injury” (heisig ; see also hooker ). this phrase offended rice’s family and sparked widespread public outrage. yet, it probably would not have been used in any other context but an adversarial civil lawsuit, in which the defendant strategizes to avoid liability. a hallmark feature of anglo-american legal systems, the adversary method is characterized by the “respective efforts of the opposing attorneys to maximize the interests of their side” (goodpaster , ). in the criminal law context, the adversary method is sometimes lauded for being protective of individual rights. given the high stakes of criminal punishment and the loss of liberty typically entailed by it, a person accused of a crime is provided the most vigorous defense possible. however, as david luban cautions, the individual rights defense of the adversary method does not apply in the civil context as it does in the criminal one. yet the same duty falls on the lawyer in both contexts: representing the client “zealously within the bounds of the law” (luban , ; here quoting the american bar association code of profes- sional responsibility). civil litigation often features two private parties opposing each other to determine who should bear the burden of a harm that occurred. but importantly, the government and government representatives are not private parties. apart from its political subjects’ interests, a government is not supposed to have interests of its own. salus populi suprema lex, as the slogan goes. in cases where a serious wrong is at stake, it is inappropriate for a government to proceed strategically against its own political subjects in the manner of a private party. as a matter of principle, the government should be willing to take on the burden of the harm if a non-liable person was killed by a law enforcement official. in offering repara- tions, government officials honor this idea. but, one might argue, when a government settles with the family of a lethal-force victim, it adopts a reparative justice rather than an adversarial paradigm. moreover, perhaps surprisingly, the high-profile deaths at the center of black lives matter activism have resulted in settle- ments more often than not. the lawsuit filed by tamir rice’s family was eventually settled, and so were lawsuits concerning the deaths of michael brown, freddie gray, eric garner, ramarley graham, rekia boyd, walter scott, sandra bland, and laquan mcdonald. it is likely that the settlements in these cases are not representative: in a sample studied by zimring ( , ), less than % of police killings resulted in a settlement. however, even in cases where there is a settlement, a monetary payment is not sufficient for justice or moral accountability. the process of civil litigation can undercut the latter, even if a settle- ment is the eventual outcome. consider laquan mcdonald’s case, which is unique because chicago police officers were caught covering up key video evidence of the shooting (schuppe ). nevertheless, when the teen’s family settled, the settle- ment agreement contained the following phrase: “the city of chicago denies allegations of wrongdoing and further denies any liability” (marin and moseley ). clauses such as this one are ubiquitous in settlement agreements. though there are legal reasons for their presence, they often speak to municipal officials’ self- understanding that they are not taking responsibility for the death. this is evident when authorities tell reporters, “the settlement was not a reflection of the police depart- ment’s view of whether the officers did right or wrong but a business decision by insurers” (kim ). moral accountability requires the opposite of a no-liability perspectives on politics article | reparations for police killings https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. ip address: . . . , on nov at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core disclaimer: directly admitting the wrong and the police department’s responsibility, and sincerely apologizing. from a reparative justice perspective, legal principles do not provide refuge from one’s moral duties. no-liability clauses should be replaced with apologies. moreover, before getting to a settlement, cities typically spend hundreds of thousands of dollars in legal fees. the prospect of additional fees in defending against an appeal is often what pushes a city to settle. then, in determining a settlement, lawyers on both sides strategize to minimize or maximize the payment, going “back and forth like a poker game,” as one attorney put it (kim ). one advantage of reparative justice is that the money that would be spent on legal fees defending the city against the victim’s family goes directly to the latter. a final issue with settlement agreements is that they often contain a provision that forbids the plaintiff from disclosing the contents of the settlement. in some cities, it is standard for settlement agreements to prevent plaintiffs from speaking publicly about the events prompting the lawsuit. for the family of the victim, a settlement can feel like hush money, a monetary payment in exchange for their silence about wrongdoing. for members of the public, this can also be frustrating, especially when civil lawsuits are settled with taxpayer dollars. foreclosing information about how much money excessive force is costing taxpayers, and what one’s fellow citizen experi- enced that would prompt a five- or six-figure payment, also goes against basic democratic notions about transparency. reparative justice rejects secrecy, however. the victim’s family may choose a private or a public apology based on their own preferences, but a city may not impose a re- quirement of confidentiality. distinct racial wrongs in adversarial interaction in making the case for reparative justice over civil justice when a non-liable person is killed by a police officer, i have argued that adversarial procedure on the part of the government can lead to its abnegating responsibility for a wrongful death, which itself wrongs victims’ families, and that the practice of settling civil lawsuits falls short of demonstrating the kind of moral accountability that reparative justice aims at. another argument can be added. earlier it was claimed that when police kill a non-liable person, this is a wrong in itself; when police kill a non- liable black person, there coexists a distinct racial wrong. similar claims can be made with respect to the treatment of victims’ families. in addition to engaging in adversarial procedure, sometimes government officials treat family members as adversaries in their interactions with them and, in doing so, can be insensitive or even cruel. though any victim’s family members can be treated in this way, when the victim is black, again there is a distinct racial wrong. consider the aftermath of the fatal shooting of ramarley graham, a black teenager, by a white new york city police officer, richard haste, in . graham was shot in his own home; he was followed there by officers who mistakenly thought he had a gun and perceived the teen as “walking with a purpose.” graham’s grandmother, patricia hartley, was present when haste burst through the locked door, found graham in the bathroom, and fatally shot him when he made a move- ment. when hartley yelled at the officer about why he shot her grandson, haste yelled back, “get the fuck away before i have to shoot you too” (walsh ). the hostility of this statement was indicative of the treatment graham’s family had in store. the police would not let graham’s mother, constance malcolm, near the house when she arrived home from work. without informing her what happened, they drove her to the precinct station, where she met her mother and learned from her that her son was dead. ramarley’s grandmother was then ques- tioned by officers who pressured her to agree with their claim that graham had a gun that he had thrown out a window. (no gun was ever found within or outside the apartment.) the evening of the day her grandson was killed, the police detained hartley for seven-and-a-half hours (walsh ). haste was subsequently indicted, but a judge threw out the charges, and a second grand jury chose not to reindict the officer. the family then filed a civil suit. after some time, news outlets reported that the internal affairs bureau of the nypd was refusing to release the files on graham’s death as a delaying tactic. constance malcolm vented her frustration to reporters: “the police are playing games. they’re stalling, basically that’s what they’re doing, they’re stalling so the case can’t go forward” (hoffer ). the teen’s father, franclot graham, expressed dissatisfac- tion that, two-and-a-half years after his son’s death, the department claimed it was still investigating the shooting. “we just want our day. we want to be heard, we want to know the facts of what happened,” he said. he described a recent visit to his son’s gravesite: “i tell him that we’re fighting, but we just feel like for some reason, it’s a losing battle because nobody’s listening to us” (hoffer ). that black people are disproportionately victimized by fatal police shootings is borne out by the empirics. but when black families are poorly treated by the authorities after losing a loved one to a police shooting, it is not clear how to quantify the phenomenon of race-based second- class citizenship. nevertheless, when police departments and municipalities engage in adversarial tactics and refuse to hold their own officers accountable, this is likely to be experienced by the family and community of a black victim as linked to race. a new york times op-ed by constance malcolm explicitly juxtaposes racial injustice in policing and in the aftermath of police violence, holding the new york city mayor responsible for both: https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. ip address: . . . , on nov at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core in new york city, crime statistics are lower and the overall number of reported stop-and-frisks is down. but black and latino new yorkers are still disproportionately stopped, and multiple police department audits show that around percent of stops go unreported. this harassment continues even though more than percent of stops don’t result in a summons or arrest. at the same time, there is no accountability for police abuses, which has allowed injustices like my son’s killing to go un- punished. mr. de blasio is either willfully ignoring racial disparities and police department abuses in our communities or has a shallow understanding of the problem. either way, the harm continues. (malcolm ) in a reparative justice paradigm, a deferential, humble attitude toward the victim’s family is vital. the authorities should be willing to acknowledge the racial dimensions of any lethal-force death in which the victim is black; they should also be conscious of racial dynamics—for example, if a disproportionately white police force is working in a predominantly black community—that might contrib- ute to the family’s experience of racial injustice. impor- tantly, officials should be willing to work with the family to come up with accountability measures attentive to these racial dynamics. examples include racial bias training sessions, the establishment of community oversight boards explicitly focused on race and policing, truth and recon- ciliation commissions on race and policing in the com- munity’s past and present, and initiatives to end practices like stop-and-frisk that disproportionately harm people of color. however, accountability measures not explicitly linked to race may also be an important part of taking racial wrongs seriously. constance malcolm, for instance, took issue with the fact that the white officer who killed her son had not been fired when the city settled. on the contrary, he received a significant pay increase while on desk duty. in her op-ed, she expressed her straightforward demand: “new york city must fire all the officers who engaged in misconduct in my son’s killing, and ensure the same for officers guilty of misconduct in all incidents of police abuse. these officers are not safe for our commu- nities and need to be off our streets” (malcolm ). wanting the officers responsible for the death of one’s son fired is not necessarily specific to racial injustice. how- ever, it is possible to understand the nypd’s decision to retain haste and increase his salary as a strong marker of white privilege. if firing an officer who has unreason- ably killed a non-liable person is not already a depart- mental policy, authorities conducting a reparative justice process should take a demand of this nature seriously and honor it. objections a normative argument has been laid out for municipal- ities and police departments to take responsibility, apologize, and pay reparations when officers kill persons not morally liable to this fate. let us briefly consider two objections to this argument. the first objection is based on a worry that governments would use reparative justice to enhance their reputation and perceptions of their legitimacy, but that the underlying system would not change. the second objection has to do with fairness to taxpayers: isn’t a city’s defending itself a way to prevent their being overly burdened? a superficial reputation- and legitimacy-enhancing tool? in her op-ed, malcolm ( ) writes about “training, body cameras, police-community relations and neighbor- hood policing” as “not much more than catchy sound bites.” do reparations risk being viewed the same way by lethal-force victims’ families? indeed, there is a risk of municipal governments embracing reparations as a means of improving the image of police departments while, at the same time, rejecting more fundamental changes. two questions are relevant here which should be disentangled: would reparations be politically instrumen- talized, and would reparations preclude more fundamen- tal changes? let us look at the second question first. paul butler ( , – ) distinguishes between “liberal reform,” which can have a “pacifying” effect without fundamentally changing the american criminal justice system, and “actual transformative work” that would overhaul it. a reparations-based approach to police killings could be seen as fitting in with the latter. it requires a complete turnaround in how most police departments and cities react to the shooting of a non-liable person, taking responsibility rather than sloughing it off in a mis- guided act of institutional self-defense. however, one could still argue that reparations are not sufficiently transformative. to really stop police officers from killing non-liable persons, they may need to stop routinely carrying guns (see noack ). to really stop racialized police killings, we may need to end white supremacy (see butler , – et passim). taking this into account, the challenge is that de-weaponizing the police and dismantling white supremacy take time. if we wait until there is a sea change in these areas so as to ensure that reparations are part of a transformative, rather than merely reform, project, this meanwhile leaves victims’ families wronged by both unjustified lethal force and unjust civil justice. accordingly, i suggest that we think of reparations for police killings as part of a mid-range transformative project. reparative justice would not be needed if the police never used deadly force, but as long as they do, a reparative justice response is a transformation from the existing modus operandi. reparations for police killings go hand in hand with what can be thought of as another mid-range transformative project: vastly reducing the kinds of situations where the police intervene and instead perspectives on politics article | reparations for police killings https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. ip address: . . . , on nov at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core deploying mental health professionals, suicide prevention specialists, drug counselors, child welfare specialists, social workers, and so on. in a society with a more just basic structure (to use rawlsian language), the number of - - calls where we need to be dispatching social workers instead of police officers would probably be reduced. but the normative shift that such changes would be a marker of would also signal a transformative movement to a society with a more just basic structure. of course, there is always the risk that governments embrace the idea of reparative justice for the wrong reasons, instrumentalizing the concept to keep demands for more fundamental changes at bay. this challenge, however, is not unique to reparations and speaks to the need for a vigilant public. it will not be lost on victims’ families, their supporters, and the media if the government is merely paying lip service to the concept of reparations while refusing genuine accountability. fair to taxpayers? before addressing the objection about whether the city’s paying reparations is fair to taxpayers, let me make a caveat. it may be desirable from the standpoint of accountability for an officer who has used lethal force unreasonably to personally contribute to the reparations payment. when new york city settled with members of akai gurley’s family, they requested a contribution from the officer responsible for his death. the settlement gave the officer four months to pay his share, $ , , of the $ million amount (fuchs ). it need not only be taxpayers who pay. this being said, one defense of the existing system of civil litigation might be that taxpayers have the right to the best possible defense to prevent their being overly burdened. aren’t reparations too costly? one response has already been given. though we do not have good empirical data on how much cities spend defending themselves against civil lawsuits concerning lethal force, the costs are high enough that this can incentivize five- and six-figure settlements. these are costs that taxpayers often already absorb. but there is a more principled reason why taxpayers should pay. though there may indeed be “bad apple” police officers, an understanding of any given lethal-force death that focuses solely on individual characteristics is implausible. decisions about how officers are trained, what they carry, and so on, evolve over time and involve many different responsible agents. forms of racial bias, both implicit and explicit, influencing a given officer’s decision to shoot are similarly shaped by social and historical circumstances. in short, broader political, in- stitutional, and societal factors are likely to bear on the use of lethal force in any particular case. over the past decade, political philosophers have worked out compelling accounts of why it is fair to distribute the costs of state- sponsored injustice to citizen-taxpayers (see, e.g., beer- bohm ; pasternak ; stilz ;young , ch. ). accounts vary—some emphasize that all are responsi- ble for injustice with a “structural” nature, some emphasize associative obligations, and so on—but the idea of citizens sharing responsibility for the state’s actions and decisions is a common theme. it is these kinds of analyses that can ground a duty for taxpayers to subsidize reparations for police killings. conclusion “the sad part about it all is money can never compensate the loss of a son and the loss of a father of four girls.” “this is not about money.. . . money doesn’t bring their son back.” “the settlement will never take away the pain that the city caused me.” when plaintiffs’ attorneys and victims’ family members talk to reporters after receiving a civil settlement, it is typical for them to express the noncommensurability of the money and the harm. paying reparations will not change this. however, they are a way for the police department and city to apologize, to say “we can at least do better than we have” (vermeule , ). in our existing system, police departments and city officials interpret whether a police officer was justified in fatally shooting a civilian by turning to legal principles. legal principles and moral principles do not necessarily align, however. as i have argued, morality requires the admission of an error when a person is wrongly killed. this applies to police officers and the government whom they serve, no less than anyone else. the government ought to serve the governed, and it can wrong its political subjects by engaging in defensive, adversarial maneuvers in the manner of a private party in civil litigation. though the alternative of reparative justice is not a panacea, by design it is responsive to this issue. notes the successful reparations claim of the torture victims of the chicago police department also involved comprehensive reparative justice measures, not just monetary redress (taylor ). in this article, i do not address questions of punish- ment. the article’s goal is to think through reparations as an alternative to civil—but not necessarily criminal— justice. however, it is important to point out that failures of criminal accountability can undercut the moral meaning of a reparations payment: ray tensing was not convicted for the death of samuel dubose, and to the chagrin of dubose’s family, he received a gener- ous severance package (see note ). n.b. “other-defense” considerations are folded in with self-defense considerations and not given an independent analysis in this article. i believe a focus on self-defense is justified because ( ) much of the existing philosophical literature focuses on https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. ip address: . . . , on nov at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core self-defense, and ( ) empirically, most lethal force cases involve police officers perceiving threats to themselves (zimring , ). however, self- and other-defense considerations do not cover all policing fatalities; for example, eric garner died in an illegal chokehold, and sandra bland died in a county jail cell. nonetheless, because these individuals were not liable for their fates, the reparative justice standard that i argue for applies to these cases. by contrast, in germany, just two officers were killed by civilian attackers in this entire period (zimring , ). zimring ( , ) finds, in the united states, that “the major reason police shoot so often is that guns appear to be in the hands of civilians. because firearms are also the cause of death in more than percent of all fatal assaults on police, the dominant role of fear of opponents with guns is easy to comprehend” (cf. butler , ). n.b. an officer’s ex post facto claim that he fired his weapon in self-defense is not always plausible. for example, walter scott, an unarmed black man, was fatally shot in the back by a white officer, michael slager, from feet away. an onlooker’s video shows the officer subsequently walking over to scott, handcuffing him (without administering aid), and dropping his taser on the ground by scott’s body. in his criminal trial, slager nevertheless testified, “i saw that taser coming at me.. . . i fired until the threat was stopped, like i’m trained to do” (miller , ; see hersher ). see miller , ch. , and fabre on self-defense by police. for the purposes of this article, i follow fabre’s ( ) argument that police officers do not have special self-defense rights beyond those of civilian self-defenders. “permissibility” and “justification” are distinct con- cepts; see tadros , – . in line with recent contributions to self-defense theory, i use the language of “permissible” self-defense rather than “justified” self-defense. note that in the most frequently debated version of mcmahan’s scenario, a conscientious driver loses control of her vehicle through no fault of her own. whereas mcmahan ( ) argues that the driver is liable to being killed, others like lazar ( ) and quong ( ) disagree. see draper’s ( , – ) case, mistake ii. i follow parfit’s ( , – ) distinction between fact-relative, evidence-relative, and belief-relative per- missions and wrongs. zimring ( , ) writes, “attackers who brandish knives and rush at police or who waive blunt objects as they lurch toward an officer never caused a death of an officer in six years. one wonders whether such weapons should really be considered deadly weapons when police in uniform are the targets. if these are not deadly weapons, then the hundreds of killings each year by officers responding to the brandishing of such weapons might not appear to be necessary to protect- ing the lives of american police.” n.b. though officers and civilians exhibited similar levels of bias in terms of response time, officers (unlike civilians) did not show racial bias in “accurately” deciding when to shoot and not shoot in the simula- tion. in her work on self-defense theory, bolinger ( ) argues that, under ideal conditions, it would be desirable to have regulatory norms allowing well- intentioned self-defenders to make mistakes about a person’s liability to harm. however, empirical evidence of pervasive racial bias casts doubt on the justice of such norms. accountability measures should thus interpret mistaken acts of self-defense strictly, and not make allowances for error. an implication of the account i present in this article may be the idea that criminal justice should be concerned with whether an officer acts reasonably, whereas civil justice (or reparative justice) should be concerned with a civilian’s liability. although assessing this notion further is beyond the scope of this article, i am open to bolinger’s ( ) claim that pervasive racial bias argues for factoring liability into questions of criminal punishment. though i focus on the black experience in this article, the idea of a distinct racial wrong also applies to native people, who are often racialized as violent and are killed at similar rates as black people by the police (zimring , ). see woodard for the native lives matter movement. see feldman , , who argues that graham allows “legal indeterminacy to produce legal immu- nity.” the concept of reparative justice is not original to this article. for an overview of reparative justice, books edited by brooks ( ), roberts ( ), and miller and kumar ( ) are all excellent resources. though walker ( b) puts restorative justice and reparative justice in a shared framework, they are more often kept separate, with restorative justice an alternative to traditional criminal justice procedures and reparative justice an alternative to traditional civil justice proce- dures. i thank an anonymous reviewer for bringing up restorative justice. the focus of this article is lethal force, not excessive nonlethal force. if police departments routinely turned to reparative justice when excessive force does not result in a person’s death, i would gladly accept that this follows from my argument, though i do not pursue this matter further here. for more on excessive force, see skolnick and fyfe ; kleinig , ch. . perspectives on politics article | reparations for police killings https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. ip address: . . . , on nov at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core quong ( , , ff) has claimed that there is a prima facie duty of compensation when a non-liable victim is killed. here i do not argue explicitly that it is the city and police department, rather than the individual police officer, that owe a reparative justice response. this matter is discussed in page ( ). balko ( ), for example, discusses the increased militarization of us police departments in recent decades. n.b. though the present article considers reparations to individual families, it is also possible to think that larger-scale reparations are appropriate in the context of a national effort to address harms at the intersection of race and criminal injustice in the united states; see king and page ; page and king . of course, there is still the matter of interpreting whether a person was in fact non-liable. an impartial investigation aimed at determining liability is necessary to determine what happened and moreover can have the benefit of giving family members valuable information about how their loved one died. but conducting the investigation as speedily as possible, being transparent about its progress, giving frequent updates, and treating the victim’s family with respect are essential for the reparative justice effort to be successful. this is my own claim based on a data set of fatalities that have spurred black lives matter protests. though the attorney interviewed here is referring to use-of-force cases, this characterization of settlement negotiations goes beyond this context. see the case of ashley overbey, a baltimore police brutality victim (puente and donovan ). according to malcolm, never once did the police department directly tell her that her son had been killed (walsh ). this is according to hartley; the nypd claimed it only detained hartley for five hours (walsh ). in the op-ed, malcolm’s ( ) main concern is “the lack of accountability for police officers who kill or for police departments that engage in brutality.” though i do think that reparations provide more accountability than civil settlements, termination and forms of punishment may also be needed for accountability. indeed, even though the civil settlement with samuel dubose’s family was reparative in its spirit, it was undercut by insufficient accountability on officer tensing’s part: he faced murder charges, but two trials resulted in two deadlocked juries, and the university of cincinnati (uc) paid him $ , on his resignation. as dubose’s fiancée, dashonda reid, told reporters: “uc has now reversed any of the rights they attempted to do by sam. his blood is not only on tensing’s hands [and] the justice system, it’s now on uc’s hands” (murphy and curnutte ). settlements are paid either from a city’s general fund or through insurance. butler ( , ) suggests that this depends on the size of the city. (smaller cities use insurance.) the first quote refers to rumain brisbon (frank ). the second quote refers to ricardo diaz zeferino (kim ). the third quote refers to ramarley graham (yuhas ). references alexander, michelle. . the new jim crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. new york: new press. balko, radley. . rise of the warrior cop: the militarization of america’s police forces. new york: publicaffairs. beerbohm, eric. . in our name: the ethics of democracy. princeton, nj: princeton university press. bolinger, renée jorgensen. . “reasonable mistakes and regulative norms: racial bias in defensive harm.” journal of political philosophy ( ): – . brooks, roy l. . atonement and forgiveness: a new model for black reparations. berkeley: university of california press. ——., ed. . when sorry isn’t enough: the controversy over apologies and reparations for human injustice. new york: new york university press. butler, paul. . “the system is working the way it is supposed to: the limits of criminal justice reform.” georgetown law journal : – . . . chokehold: policing black men. new york: new press. coleman, jules l. . risks and wrongs. oxford: oxford university press. correll, joshua, bernadette park, charles m. judd, bernd wittenbrink, melody s. sadler, and tracie keesee. . “across the thin blue line: police officers and racial bias in the decision to shoot.” journal of personality and social psychology ( ): – . davis, angela j., ed. . policing the black man. new york: pantheon books. draper, kai. . “defense.” philosophical studies ( ): – . fabre, cécile. . “war, policing, and killing.” in the sage handbook of global policing, eds. ben bradford, beatrice jauregui, ian loader, and jonny steinberg, – . london: sage. feldman, leonard c. . “police violence and the legal temporalities of immunity.” theory & event ( ): – . frank, brieanna j. . “phoenix city council appro- ves $ . million settlement with family of man fatally shot by police.” azcentral.com. http://www.azcentral. com/story/news/local/phoenix/ / / /phoenix- city-council-approves- - -million-settlement-family- man-fatally-shot-police/ /. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. ip address: . . . , on nov at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/ / / /phoenix-city-council-approves- - -million-settlement-family-man-fatally-shot-police/ / http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/ / / /phoenix-city-council-approves- - -million-settlement-family-man-fatally-shot-police/ / http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/ / / /phoenix-city-council-approves- - -million-settlement-family-man-fatally-shot-police/ / http://www.azcentral.com/story/news/local/phoenix/ / / /phoenix-city-council-approves- - -million-settlement-family-man-fatally-shot-police/ / https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core fuchs, chris. . “new york city, peter liang to pay over $ million settlement to family of akai gurley.” nbc news. http://www.nbcnews.com/news/asian- america/new-york-city-peter-liang-pay- - -million- settlement-n . goodpaster, gary. . “on the theory of the american adversary criminal trial.” journal of criminal law and criminology ( ): – . graham v. connor, u.s. 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/ramarley-graham-family-police-reform-nypd https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ /feb/ /ramarley-graham-family-police-reform-nypd https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ /feb/ /ramarley-graham-family-police-reform-nypd https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core boletim de conjuntura www.revista.ufrr.br/boca boletim de conjuntura (boca) ano iii, vol. , n. , boa vista, o boletim de conjuntura (boca) publica ensaios, artigos de revisão, artigos teóricos e empíricos, resenhas e vídeos relacionados às temáticas de políticas públicas. o periódico tem como escopo a publicação de trabalhos inéditos e originais, nacionais ou internacionais que versem sobre políticas públicas, resultantes de pesquisas científicas e reflexões teóricas e empíricas. esta revista oferece acesso livre imediato ao seu conteúdo, seguindo o princípio de que disponibilizar gratuitamente o conhecimento científico ao público proporciona maior democratização mundial do conhecimento. boletim de conjuntura boca ano iii | volume | nº | boa vista | http://www.ioles.com.br/boca issn: - www.revista.ufrr.br/boca boletim de conjuntura (boca) ano iii, vol. , n. , boa vista, the impact of the slogan i can’t breathe on the black lives matter movement: the eric garner case maurício fontana filho abstract the research reports the death of eric garner and explores his circumstances and environment. the goal is to analyze the context with a focus on eric's killing by the police, as well as how the case developed and gained public outcry. from this initial investigation, it works with the black lives matter movement, its origin, organization and objectives. it analyses the various outlines that eric's case has taken over the years and his contribution to the movement, with emphasis on police brutality and its progress over the last few years. finally, it explores this context of death and protest through philip zimbardo's total situation theory. the method is the hypothetical-deductive through bibliographic research, documentary collection and analysis. the initial hypothesis points to the existence of four key elements regarding the garner case that were fundamental to the growth of the blm movement: the filming of the police interaction, its diffusion through social media, the death of the victim, and the history of racism in the country. it concludes by attributing to these four elements a powerful impact on the survival and reach of the black lives matter movement. keywords: daniel pantaleo. eric garner. i can’t breathe. excessive use of force. black lives matter. resumo a pesquisa trata da morte de eric garner e explora suas circunstâncias e ambiente. objetiva-se analisar o contexto com foco no assassinato de eric pela polícia, além de como o caso progrediu e ganhou clamor público. a partir desta investigação inicial, trabalha-se com o movimento black lives matter, sua origem, organização e objetivos. analisa-se os vários contornos que o caso de eric tomou ao longo dos anos e sua contribuição para o movimento, com ênfase na brutalidade policial e sua progressão nos últimos anos. finalmente, explora-se esse contexto de morte e protesto por meio da teoria da situação total de philip zimbardo. o método é o hipotético-dedutivo por pesquisa bibliográfica, coleta e análise documental. a hipótese inicial aponta para a existência de quatro elementos-chave em relação ao caso de garner que foram fundamentais para o crescimento do movimento blm: a filmagem da interação policial, a sua difusão nas redes sociais, a morte da vítima, e a história de racismo no país. conclui-se atribuindo a esses quatro elementos um poderoso impacto na sobrevivência e alcance do movimento black lives matter. palavras chave: daniel pantaleo. eric garner. eu não consigo respirar. uso excessivo da força. vidas negras importam. introduction i can't breathe were the last words of eric garner, an asphyxiating black person surrounded by the police on a new york sidewalk in . these words instantly rose as a symbol of opposition to the excessive use of state force. his eleven pleas became a hymn of protest and social mobilization. the research is on the various outlines of the eric garner case and his contribution to the black lives matter (blm) movement, active since . pós-graduando em ciências sociais pela universidade passo fundo (upf). graduado em direito pela universidade regional do noroeste do estado do rio grande do sul (unijuÍ). bolsista voluntário no projeto de pesquisa finanças partidárias: equilíbrios organizacionais nos partidos políticos brasileiros ( - ). email para contato: mauricio @hotmail.com mailto:mauricio @hotmail.com www.revista.ufrr.br/boca boletim de conjuntura (boca) ano iii, vol. , n. , boa vista, the method is the hypothetical-deductive. the initial aim is to trace the historical context from garner's death and the elements that intensify its social influence until today. it follows the different contours of the slogan i can't breathe and its impact on the blm movement. it also follows police brutality in the united states (us) and its progress over the last few years. the initial hypothesis includes the existence of four main elements linked to eric’s case that corroborate the growth of the blm movement, namely: a) the filming of the police interaction; b) its dissemination through social media; c) the death of the victim; and d) the history of segregation in the us between white and black people. the research follows a collect and analysis of documental and bibliographical material. the first and second sections of the article cement an outline of the facts of eric’s case and the progress of the black lives matter movement, with emphasis on police brutality. in the third, it examines and links the impact of the video, the victim's death, the mass dissemination of the event and the historical racism of the country to philip zimbardo's ( ) total situation theory. in , there were many violent protests in the us in the name of george floyd’s death. this article does not address this event, but the previous causes that gave rise to such a peak of contemporary violence and massive protesting. the eric garner case on july , , new york police received a call regarding the existence of a man, eric garner, selling loose cigarettes in the staten island neighborhood, a crime for which he had already been arrested and twice that same year. when two police officers arrived at the scene, eric denied that he had committed any crime, saying he had suffered from police abuse for a long time and that it had to end. then, the police proceeded to arrest him (baker et al., ; southall, ). it was at this point that police officer daniel pantaleo strangled the suspect, trapping his neck and shoulder. both fell to the ground and the blow persisted even after garner repeated three times that he was unable to breathe. the strangulation relaxed, while the weight of the other police officers (others who arrived at the scene) on the victim's body and the pressure of his head against the ground remained compressed on the sidewalk. there were eleven pleas of i can't breathe before the death, words that would become a critical point in the black lives matter movement in the debate about the excessive use of police force (southall, ; winston, ). the blow lasted seconds. none of the officers attempted any initiatives of cardiorespiratory resuscitation. when the emergency medical staff of richmond university medical center arrived, there www.revista.ufrr.br/boca boletim de conjuntura (boca) ano iii, vol. , n. , boa vista, was no oxygen equipment with them. instead of starting the resuscitation procedure, the team asked the victim to wake up. a neighbor, taisha allen, filmed the arrival of the ambulance, constituting the first video (alexander, ; baker et al., ; crothers, ). the victim was pronounced dead in the hospital. the officers involved reported that a man named eric garner had died during an attempted arrest, citing a nominal witness, taisha allen, who saw them put garner on the floor by the arms. subsequently, the alleged witness denied the reports. there was no mention of the use of force or even the use of the strangulation technique. then, the next morning, the police and the public woke up to a second video, this one clearly showing what happened. the victim's friend, ramsey orta, who was with her at the scene, filmed the whole fact on his cell phone (baker et al., ; benner, ; morales et al., ). then, there were calls for the resignation of the police officers who participated in the event, as well as their criminal indictments, both for excessive use of force and negligence (benner, ). matt taibbi ( ), in his work i can't breathe: a killing on bay street, provides several examples that contribute to the normality that is falsifying police reports and inventing witnesses to corroborate stories, this being the first line of defense in police protection against the errors and excesses of daily life, very common in the work practice. the video shows garner telling the police to leave him alone and asking for the intimidation to stop. when a police officer tried to handcuff him and he withdrew his hand, pantaleo acted on his back. eric's death was only one amid a succession of black people’s deaths in predominantly poor communities. his murder, in collusion with a number of others, gave rise to the i can’t breathe movement, mainly channeled by the video, which guaranteed the veracity of the events. social networks at the same time provided a mechanism for rapid dissemination of information (southall, ). “the hashtag #icantbreathe was created in after the killing of eric garner.” (maci, , p. ). after the video broadcast and the following protests, three institutions began investigating the case simultaneously. the office of internal affairs was investigating whether police protocols were followed; the staten island prosecutor's office analyzed whether any crimes were committed and began to present evidence to a panel of judges; and, finally, the federal court investigated and collected evidence to find out if a police officer violated federal laws (benner, ). each of the events generated more protest mobilization across the country, gaining international support. in large part, they were peaceful protests. disrupted traffic, protesters carrying fake coffins with the names of the victims killed by police and people sitting on the floor in important, high-traffic locations represented the wave of protests (alexander, ; laughland et al., ). www.revista.ufrr.br/boca boletim de conjuntura (boca) ano iii, vol. , n. , boa vista, there were many arrests. two were the main hymns sung by the protesters: i can’t breathe, and who are you protecting? protests ranged from people on some days to more than , on others, occurring mostly in new york, chicago, manhattan and washington (laughland et al., ). in the michael brown case in ferguson, there was no possibility of proving whether the police officer who killed him spoke the truth about the suspect having resisted, which would lead the victim to be shot times until her death. in the garner case, however, there was no debate: the video made it clear there was no resistance. protesters sang i can’t breathe and extolled the coat of arms through social networks like facebook and twitter. four words that represented the fight against the death of a black, poor and unarmed man before the police force (yee, ). police practices have been in use for decades, generating mistrust of poor communities towards them. garner's death, however, sparked protests in a year that has become the most intense since the civil rights search movement. the video channeled this reaction, reporting police violence against poor communities and proving fraud in police reports (glenza; laughland, ). kobe bryant, lebron james and other famous nba players came to their games with i can’t breathe printed t- shirts, but emphasizing that their positions were not anti-racist, but in favor of justice in a broad sense (pincus, ). the initial punishment of pantaleo and sergeant kizzy adonis by the police department resulted in administrative functions, lost weapons and badges. in , the victim's family received nearly $ million in a settlement, after in december a panel of judges refused to accept the crime against the police. shortly after that decision, there was a killing ambush upon two police officers unconnected with the case (morales et al., ; southall, ). only in july did the justice department conclude that none of the police officers involved would answer for federal charges. the reason was that there was insufficient evidence to prove the three essential elements for the process, namely: a) whether the police officer strangled the victim; b) whether the use of strangulation on an unarmed man who was potentially committing a minor offense was justified; c) whether the police intended to kill the victim (morales et al., ). the feeling of injustice in the absence of criminal punishment by police officers dominated social media. “twitter was flooded with the hashtag #icantbreathe, with more than , tweets; and more than , tweets with the hashtag #ericgarner, soon after the sentence was issued. what is more, the hashtag #crimingwhilewhite spread rapidly” (maci, , p. ), conveying the idea among african-americans that if people are white they may commit any crimes and get away with it. the last time the federal government indicted a new york police officer for excessive use of force was in , when there was a trial and conviction of the police officer francis x. livoti for www.revista.ufrr.br/boca boletim de conjuntura (boca) ano iii, vol. , n. , boa vista, strangling anthony baez to death. the vast majority of police officers who kill civilians are never charged, and of the few charged, the majority is not convicted (benner, ; smith, ). the second section of the article presents the empirical evidence for this proposition. the new york police, after five years of administrative work, dismissed pantaleo, but if they had only administratively disciplined him, the public would never know. the new york law enforcement officers' files are secret, so there is little public confidence in this police force. mayor bill de blasio made significant efforts not to disclose the names of the other officers who participated in the operation, but their names are dhanan saminath, mark ramos, justin d'amico and craig furlani (baker et al., ; barrett, ; southall, ). senior police officials also said they fired pantaleo, but it was an extremely difficult decision as his conduct was justified as acceptable under the label that sometimes police officers must decide quickly. after the police officer’s career was over, many organizations criticized the dismissal, saying that the police force would start doing their jobs shyly, contributing to the increase in crime rates (barrett, ). the technique used by pantaleo was banned in by the police department, a consequence of the increase in the number of civilian deaths from its practice. the strangulation technique is widely used due to the lack of training police officers receive. thus, provided with only minimal training, when in the field they tend to disarm or contain a suspect through improvised actions, which contribute to the execution of effective, but prohibited techniques, therefore generating preventable deaths (southall, ; winston, ). before the decision not to apply any federal laws, exempting the police from any illicit connection with eric's death, daniel's defense attorney granted an interview, where he elaborated on the police interaction with the victim. he stated the victim was morbidly obese and had respiratory, heart and diabetic problems, which caused the death, while there was no use of the strangulation technique, but another one instead, that of the seat belt, which is taught at the police academy (morales et al., ). another reasoning used by the lawyer was that the victim was a ticktack time bomb that resisted arrest, while the police carried properly with the approach. the catalyst for the protests was the position of the doctor who examined garner's death. he pointed to the occurrence of a homicide caused by strangulation and compression of the chest by overlapping load (morales et al., ; southall, ). after eric's death, the police department spent more than $ million to train its officers so they would not use the strangulation technique. however, its use is continuous and rarely result in www.revista.ufrr.br/boca boletim de conjuntura (boca) ano iii, vol. , n. , boa vista, punishment. garner's death is the corollary of a crime-fighting strategy carried out by the police and local governments. the objective is to reduce the number of crimes, and this occurs with a focus on petty crimes, considered the gateway to heinous crimes. poorer communities tend to suffer more from this initiative (southall, ). the strategy is commonly called broken windows, referring to that even a window breaker must be punished so that other criminals see the punishment example and the effectiveness of the punitive system, thus do not infringe any laws. the same place where eric died had already had arrests and complaints to the reporting numbers that year, thus being a key point of criminal actions (baker et al., ). the broken windows logic aims at suppressing minor crimes with the purpose of creating a favorable environment so that the most heinous ones do not occur. in this view, a voracious criminal, such as a murderer or a rapist, would not feel comfortable breaking the law in a given environment when it was devoid of the most superficial elements of illegality, such as graffiti on the walls or even small illegal street sales (kelling; coles, ). fixing broken windows: restoring order and reducing crime in our communities is a classic work by george l. kelling and catherine m. coles ( ). its book cover contain a child's slingshot, illustrating how their theory works: even the use of a slingshot by a child to break a window legitimizes repression, this in order as to make the environment exemplary and prevent future and more complex crimes. such is the reasoning of the punishment for prevention rationality. it works as a lead mechanism towards aggressive police strategies applied mostly upon poor communities. the black lives matter context in , the new york police, after chasing the unarmed teenager ramarley graham into his home, shot and killed him. after the indictment of the police officer, the judge acquitted him alleging procedural errors. a few weeks later, a vigilante in florida killed the unarmed trayvon martin, while the judges acquitted his attacker, george zimmerman (benner, ; haag; southall, ). thus, after the deaths of black people by the police with a hiatus of a few days, a favorable field for civil organization was established. it was from then on the black lives matter movement was born, with still incipient organization and operation, and with few defined purposes (benner, ; haag; southall, ). the movement's objectives were general and the dissemination of ideas was restricted. the objective was to oppose the murder of black and poor people who were victims of a racist system. the www.revista.ufrr.br/boca boletim de conjuntura (boca) ano iii, vol. , n. , boa vista, first members and founders of the movement are patrisse khan-cullors, alicia garza and opal tometi. there was not much to connect them, but only a feeling of injustice and helplessness before an organized and vigorous system (khan-cullors et al., ). police murders of unarmed black people and subsequent non-indictments or even acquittals are part of us history, but what has changed recently has been the initiative of the video recording of police interactions. from there, the successive killings and mysterious deaths became concrete and visible to the public. the certainties guaranteed by video and audio recordings took shape and progressively intensified the movement's activities (benner, ). racial segregation is a founding element of the country. the divergences involving blacks and whites has been present for some time. the creation of the movement was a response to a time when it was no longer possible to ignore the implications of events, but it intensified only after michael brown and eric garner’s deaths. they were no longer mere abstract rumors, but unavoidable recordings. strong protests would only happen after the middle of (benner, ; wheeler, ). fifteen months after trayvon martin's death came the acquittal of george zimmerman. soon after, eric garner's fatal police strangulation occurred in new york. three weeks later, michael brown's fatal shooting in ferguson, which finally broke out in a furious wave of protests in several cities of the country. their deaths have reinvigorated the blm movement and demands for police accountability in the case of the death of black people. the appeal of i can’t breathe became a revered anthem in protests that would sweep the world (morales et al., ; wheeler, ; southall, ; alexander, ). in november , the police killed akai gurley and tamir rice with a few days from one murder to the next. the deaths then seemed to create a pattern formed with many other killings, as if the targets were black people and this done without any accountability for police action (benner, ; lee; park, ). there is data capable of questioning this pattern. the new york times launched a survey completed in , within which it analyzes the deaths of black people and what happened to their police killers. the cases varied between and . of the cases, six police officers were dismissed, eight were indicted, eleven cases ended in agreement, and three of them were convicted. most of the time, police shots are legally justified in their fear for his own life or that of others, which makes criminal convictions unusual. agreements, on the other hand, are much more frequent (lee; park, ). the blm movement can be divided into what it was originally designed to be and what it has become. the key episode for the movement’s creation was the death of trayvon martin, while for its www.revista.ufrr.br/boca boletim de conjuntura (boca) ano iii, vol. , n. , boa vista, development, the deaths of eric garner and michael brown. in , the main objective was to create an organizational mechanism for black victims of police and civil violence. however, after consolidating this objective and with the rise of the movement, which had gained international influence, new ends were determined, such as lgbt rights, social justice and opposing immigrant violence. the continued activity of police brutality towards poor black communities was what motivated the movement to remain united (khan-cullors et al., ). after the zimmerman acquittal, the creation of the hashtag #blacklivesmatter symbolized the foundation of the movement and the start of a crusade for police accountability for the deaths of black people. with each recorded deaths of blacks by the police, the movement became more alive and present in society. the recording mechanism represented an indisputable evidence of unjustified police brutality (thompson; samuels, ). without a central leader, the movement had a strong impact, transcending the sphere of social media and entering people's daily lives. after the death of eric garner and michael brown in august , the movement grew, intermediating the dissemination of video recordings of police shootings that routinely take place and whose views have gone viral (thompson; samuels, ). in the two years since garner's death, there has been dozens of blm protests in many cities across the country, in addition to high international impact (alter, ; the associated press, ; tharoor, ; fantz; visser, ; aljazeera, ). it created a new generation of black activists, with thousands taking their protests to the streets, and the hashtag #icantbreathe used more than million times by january . the protests were unpredictable, forming out of casual encounters between friends who, when dealing with social injustices, started movements against police’s excesses. from incipient protests, the movement became an organized institution (lowery, ). the use social media, such as twitter, facebook and tumblr was a dissemination and organization mechanism for the protests. simple hashtags quickly spread and mobilized unknown people with concrete purposes. in march , the hashtag #blacklivesmatter had already been used more than million times, the third largest among all social causes related, while the first, #ferguson, with million hashtags, is linked to the movement (lowery, ). the rapid diffusion of information through social media is a new element in the transmission of ideas and social organization. unlike the past, the age of technology contributes significantly to the publicity of events, thoughts and conflicts. a simple twitter hashtag is enough to mobilize people from different regions and quickly. this is the importance of a well-established slogan, such as the i can’t breathe, for it propagates people towards a cause www.revista.ufrr.br/boca boletim de conjuntura (boca) ano iii, vol. , n. , boa vista, in july , after a black lives matter protest in baton rouge, a new protest took place in the city of dallas, texas, with twelve police officers and five died. amid that happened, in another part of the country, the police killed alton sterling and philando castile. the analysis of the videos was essential for the organization of a protest with high spirits. concomitantly, cities like atlanta, phoenix, san francisco, among others, had their own protests (thompson; samuels, ). in the same month, the blm movement consolidated itself internationally with protests that brought together hundreds of people in london, berlin, amsterdam and the netherlands. they followed the deaths of sterling, in louisiana, and castile, in minnesota. two shootings, two videos and two black persons dead. in the same week, micah xavier johnson killed many police officers in dallas. in the us, there were many arrests in that time: people only during these events amid clashes between police and protesters (mckenzie, ). in august, protests reached britain, canada and france, where protest organizers called for an end to the country's activities as a way to symbolize opposition to police brutality, racial disparities in prisons, convictions and ill treatment of detained immigrants, as well as the crescendo of hate crimes. from here, there are new elements composing the mobilizing object of the blm organization (chan, ). the protests were generally peaceful, but powerful. on some occasions, the protesters connected each other with tubes, holding each other's arms, and the police had to use special equipment to cut the instruments in order to pass by them. the biggest protests occurred on the dates of garner's death anniversary (chan, ). since , more than two dozen states have had laws on police brutality. in , there were many achievements, such as the reform on how to monitor police behavior, which occurred through the inclusion of body cameras to collect data. the following empirical material corroborates this victory, showing results regarding the impact on the number of deaths (thompson; samuels, ). the parameters of excesses in the use of police force are composed of the following aspects: shots against unarmed civilians; asphyxiation against civilians already immobilized; home invasion without clear justification or court order; threat with a firearm against civilians who do not present a potential risk etc. many cases of police brutality do not lead to death and therefore are not qualified as concrete brutality. the numbers of deaths from excessive use of force by the police are high in the country, mainly involving black people. the primary means of database projects are the fatal encounters (burghart, ), the washington post's every fatal shooting report (tate et al., ) and the mapping police www.revista.ufrr.br/boca boletim de conjuntura (boca) ano iii, vol. , n. , boa vista, violence (sinyangwe et al., ). they jointly secure, through empirical instruments and collection of statistical data, that blacks are a minority in the us, but a majority murdered by the police. the aforementioned databases work in the us in the following way: they start their work of collecting information in a specific year. from the year for some, or for others, and they fill in a series of data up to the current period, constantly updating the material. the data divide themselves by graphs with date of the fact, name of the victim, age, gender, race, state, and reference source. with that, statistics are formed, such as the one that concludes only % of the police were indicted for having killed people in the exercise of their duties, this within the period of - . another concludes that there were only days in when the police did not kill anyone (sinyangwe et al., ). in the washington post study (tate et al., ), which occurred within the - period, the results indicate a constant in the number and circumstances of deaths, as well as the demographic element concerning the victims. this means that regardless of the specific deadly events that happen in the country and shock the world, the annual number of shots and deaths by the police remains very close, around a thousand per year. this could mean the body cameras and alternative methods for suppressing police brutality have largely failed, but it is not the case as population’s number keep rising, while deaths stagnate. in , , people were killed by the police; in , , ; in , , ; in , , ; in , , ; in , , ; and finally in , , people were killed. of the total, % of deaths occurred during the police officer’s work period. it may seem that the impact of the protests and the alleged victories of the blm movement do not exist, but the factor of population increase changes the outcome (sinyangwe et al., ). population growth in the country, which has been declining since , also has an impact on the data. the population grows less than in previous years, but its numbers still increase (countrymeters, ) and, with this, it represents a prominent variable on the data of deaths by police officers. if the population level grows and the data remain largely stagnant, it is necessary to recognize social forces acting against the death of victims of police action, as a moral reflection and organization effect provided by the blm movement. to understand the context of the us society in the period, one must examine the general reaction of people and the media when a pepsi commercial in april indirectly diminished the merits of the protests. soda commercials tend not to contain traces of controversy in order to sensitize the largest number of people in a spirit of unity, but the commercial starring model kendall jenner, following this rule, has failed, being taken off the air in just one day of transmission (d'addario, ). www.revista.ufrr.br/boca boletim de conjuntura (boca) ano iii, vol. , n. , boa vista, it was a moment of hostility between police force and protesters, not only in the country, but internationally. the commercial had protesters and police officers interacting among a rising tension that would soon be broken by the happiness and euphoria of a supermodel who walked up to an officer and handed him a can of soda, which he accepted. the friendly atmosphere proposed did not exist at that time. people who protested were at great risk, they were common, and the majority were black and poor (d’addario, ). there were many apologies on behalf of the company. the commercial unintentionally softened the image of protesting and its symbolic character. the strong adverse reaction to the commercial showed how far the black lives matter movement and the momentum of the protests took us society in terms of reflection and critical evaluation (d’addario, ). four elements through philip zimbardo’s total situation theory the empirical experiments of zimbardo ( ) with the stanford prison, stanley milgram ( ) with the electrocuted man, and walter mischel ( ) with the marshmallow test significantly support the idea of a total situation. their respective studies investigate the influence of circumstances, situations and social stimuli on the way of thinking, acting and communicating in society. their perspectives are that different combinations of social stimuli motivate social mobilization and action. zimbardo ( ) did not create the idea behind the total situation, but merely adapted it to a larger field than the original. the rationality is of erving goffman’s ( ) authorship, whose aim was of investigating closed institutions and their capacity to stimulate and change people. this is why he uses the expression total institution. zimbardo ( ), on the other hand, worked in order to analyze open situations. for this reason, he makes use of the term total situation. during the us invasion of iraq in , there was a discovery of attack on human rights, which included torture, death and rape of detainees from the abu ghraib prison by us military personnel. initially, the use of violence aimed at obtaining information, but after a while, they started to seek fun in its practices. the authorities labeled the incident as an isolated case, that is, they were naturally bad individuals who acted accordingly. zimbardo ( ) explains the case through his total situation theory. the total situation concept means that circumstances are favorable to motivate the action or inaction of those who are under its effects. abu ghraib prison was an extremely dangerous environment, either because of internal revolts under the leadership of detainees, who easily obtained weapons, or because of external attacks, with bombing and sniping. there was no sewage system, while there was www.revista.ufrr.br/boca boletim de conjuntura (boca) ano iii, vol. , n. , boa vista, need to ration the water, the food was of poor quality, the smell was terrible and the leadership was negligent and uncertain (zimbardo, ). these are all elements that contribute towards the perversion of the us guards and the use of torture upon the inmates. they stimulated the people in charge, that is, the military, in a bad way, changing their behavior. thus, all the circumstances surrounding the inhabitants of abu ghraib prison were conducive to turning its residents into terrible people. here the total situation works as a system that puts pressure on groups and makes them prone to tear each other apart (zimbardo, ). the garner case did something different to society, as it motivated social mobilization and civil action. through an extensive quote of arthur schopenhauer ( ), it is possible to delineate the true meaning of a total situation. the author’s example, through an analogy with water and the forces that govern and modulate it, make precise the idea of how people can be stimulated in different ways and, as a corollary, become something else entirely: [...] we must imagine a man who, being, for example, on the street, said to himself: “it's six o'clock; my workday is over. i will therefore be able to stroll or go to the casino; i will also be able to go up to the tower to admire the sunset. alternatively, go to the theater, or visit this or that friend; and i will also be able to go out to the outskirts of the city and launch myself into the vastness of the universe for never coming back. all this depends only on me. i have complete and absolute freedom to act as i please; however, i will not do anything as i have said, on the contrary, not less voluntarily i am going home with my wife”. all of this is as if the water had said “i can wave wildly in vast waves (certainly: when the sea is stormy!) - i can meander with precipitating jumps, devastating everything in my path (yes, in a stream jump). - i can fall into a tumult of foam (naturally, in a cascade). - i can rise in the air, free as lightning (no doubt, in the squeak of a spring). - i can finally evaporate and disappear (perfectly: in the heat °c). - however i don't do any of that and i remain quiet, clear and vague, in the mirror of a lake”. (schopenhauer, , p. ). in this narrated case (schopenhauer, ), the water suffers from the situation in which it finds itself, and not before. then, from the conditioning forces of its environment, the water becomes solid, gaseous, hot, cold, faster etc. in the same rationality, abu ghraib's military only became torturers and murderers due to the harmful environment that fomented such arbitrary behavior. in the same way as different forms of stimulus can intervene and transform the water into something else, leading it to one or another state, so too the groups of society change in accord to the stimuli around them. the stimuli are the base of the total situation theory, as they secure motivation and behavior change. the total situation proposes there are elements that create a circumstantial force field around groups in society. this means that people are more prone to think and act in a certain way as long as these circumstances persuade them (zimbardo, ). now, when seeking to understand eric’s case and its impact on the black lives matter movement, it is fundamental to secure these key elements of stimulus. www.revista.ufrr.br/boca boletim de conjuntura (boca) ano iii, vol. , n. , boa vista, the conditioning elements are: a) the recording of the police interaction, making the content of the event unquestionable; b) its massive dissemination through social media with the symbol of i can’t breathe, the victim’s last words, ensuring publicity; c) the death of the victim, representing an extreme punitive excess; d) the historic racism in the us, expanding the issue. the first one is the video. such recording makes the punitive excess on the part of the police unquestionable towards an individual who transgressed the law in a minimum sense, who was morbidly obese and unarmed. therefore, he did not represent a threat at all and died on the spot. the second element is the dissemination through social media. the video, channeled by the symbolic expression i can’t breathe, spread quickly through social networks, causing people's reaction to a vivid injustice. third, the death of the victim. many cases that end up with an abused victim, but alive, do not gain much public publicity. the death of eric garner represents an extreme in the punitive system, but also produces a sentiment of complete brutality from a strong organization against one weak individual. fourth and last, the feeling of us society, which contributed to its reaction. as segregation between whites and blacks is a historic event whose legacy is still present today, the reaction generated by watching the video of a black person killed by whites contributed towards feelings of exclusion and anger. in this way, the total situation worked as a conditioning mechanism. it amalgamated these four aspects and induced society onto collective reflection and action. “people are both the product of different environments and the producers of the environments they encounter.” (zimbardo, , p. ). most of the time, people are agents capable of influencing the course of events, as well as shaping destinations and mobilizing interests. this mean that these four elements, together, amplified over society, which, in adherence to the feeling of revolt provided, set in motion its own mobilizing forces. they formed a stimulus that had repercussions both nationally and internationally, although “the power ... is not in the stimulus itself, but in how it is evaluated mentally: the way of thinking about the stimulus changes the effect of the stimulus on the way of feeling and acting.” (mischel, , p. ). thus, if there is no filming during a police interaction, the brutalizing of an individual will not generate the same social impact when compared to its contrary. without fast diffusion of information, as through social networks, again, there is an inferior influence on society. the same applies to a victim that does not die during a conflict or the absence of a contextual history related to racism. eric's case had all four elements mentioned, contributing to the spread of aggressive feelings, significantly affecting the black lives matter movement, and society itself. www.revista.ufrr.br/boca boletim de conjuntura (boca) ano iii, vol. , n. , boa vista, final remarks eric garner asphyxiated to death while he was supposedly selling loose cigarettes on a sidewalk. the police officers covered the case in their reports with false information. the next day, a video footage with the entire event surfaced on social media. even so, there was no conviction. the victim’s last words, i can’t breathe, became a symbol of resistance, consolidating the black lives matter movement. even before garner, social media had been building narratives and spreading the brutalities experienced largely by black and poor people. sometimes, the image that stays is that the rules of society life only apply to them, and not to the police. if the legal institutions failed to serve the victim's interests, the public immediately knew that it was an irrefutable arbitrariness. the four elements together stimulated and conditioned society in such a way as to suggest immediate and incisive action. the so-called total situation by zimbardo ( ) propelled the people towards a conjoined fight against an institutionalized enemy. this fight is still happening today, with even bigger death numbers on both sides. the police, being knowledgeable about the laws, tend to have privileges compared to the common person. thus, when police excesses are committed it is easier to acquire protection from sanctions. fearing the police is much more impactful than it seems, because fear takes the form of vulnerability. it is a fear of needing immediate help and having no one else to turn yourself to. the movement's demand to compel the police force to use video and audio recorders on their chest alone is frightening. the message that this necessary demand evokes is that, if nobody watches the ones that are supposed to protect the people, then they may become people’s greatest tormentors. references alexander, j. c. “a tomada do palco: performances sociais de mao tsé-tung a martin luther king, e a black lives matter hoje”. sociologias, vol. , n. , . aljazeera. “‘black lives matter’: thousands protest in us cities”. aljazeera [ / / ]. available at:<https://www.aljazeera.com>. access in: / / . alter, c. “black lives matter protest in new york attracts new people”. time [ / / ]. available at:<https://www.time.com>. access in: / / . baker, a.; goodman, j. d.; mueller, b. “beyond the chokehold: the path to eric garner's death”. the new york times [ / // ]. available at: <https://www.nytimes.com>. access in: / / . www.revista.ufrr.br/boca boletim de conjuntura (boca) ano iii, vol. , n. , boa vista, barrett, d. “nypd fires officer at the center of eric garner’s death”. the washington post [ / / ]. available at: <https://www.washingtonpost.com>. access in: / / . benner, k. “eric garner’s death will not lead to federal charges for n.y.p.d. officer”. the new york times [ / / ]. available at: <https://www.nytimes.com>. access in: / / . burghart, d. b. fatal encounters website [ ]. available at: <https://fatalencounters.org>. access in: / / . chan, s. “black lives matter activists stage protests across britain”. the new york times [ / / ]. available at: <https://www.nytimes.com>. access in: / / . countrymeters. united states [ / / ]. available at: <https://countrymeters.info/pt/united_states_of_america_(usa)>. access in: / / . crothers, j. the death of eric garner: how did almost everyone get it so wrong? united states: independently published, . d'addario, d. “why the kendall jenner pepsi ad was such a glaring misstep”. time [ / / ]. available at: <https://www.time.com>. access in: / / . fantz, a.; visser, s. “hundreds arrested in protests over shootings by police”. cnn [ / / ]. available at: <https://www.cnn.com>. access in: / / . glenza, j.; laughland, o. “one year later: eric garner’s death led to most active us protests since the s”. the guardian [ / / ]. available at: <https://www.theguardian.com>. access in: / / . goffman, e. manicômios, prisões e conventos. são paulo: editora perspectiva, . haag, m.; southall, a. “officer who killed ramarley graham leaves new york police department”. the new york times [ / / ]. available at: <https://www.nytimes.com>. access in: / / . kelling, g. l.; coles, c. m. fixing broken windows: restoring order and reducing crime in our communities. new york: simon & schuster, . khan-cullors, p.; garza, a.; tometi, o. “what we believe”. black lives matter [ ]. available at: <https://www.blacklivesmatter.com>. access in: / / . laughland, o.; epstein, k.; glenza, j. “eric garner protests continue in cities across america through second night”. the guardian [ / / ]. available at: <https://www.theguardian.com>. access in: / / . lee, j. c.; park, h. “ black lives ended in confrontations with police. officers convicted”. the new york times [ / / ]. available at: <https://www.nytimes.com>. access in: / / . lowery, w. “black lives matter: birth of a movement”. the guardian [ / / ]. available at: <https://www.theguardian.com>. access in: / / . maci, s. m. “#icantbreathe. ideology and consensus: printed news vs. twitter”. cadaad journal, vol. , n. , june, . www.revista.ufrr.br/boca boletim de conjuntura (boca) ano iii, vol. , n. , boa vista, mckenzie, s. “black lives matter protests spread to europe”. cnn [ / / ]. available at: <https://www.cnn.com>. access in: / / . milgram, s. obediência à autoridade: uma visão experimental. rio de janeiro: francisco alves, . mischel, w. o teste do marshmallow: por que a força de vontade é a chave do sucesso. rio de janeiro: objetiva, . morales, m.; shortell, d.; yan, h. “chants of 'i can't breathe!' erupt as the officer in the eric garner case won't face federal charges”. cnn [ / / ]. available at: <https://www.cnn.com>. access in: / / . pincus, e. “kobe bryant: ‘i can’t breathe’ protest not about race but justice”. the new york times [ / / ]. available at: <https://www.latimes.com>. access in: / / . schopenhauer, a. o livre-arbítrio. rio de janeiro: saraiva de bolso / nova fronteira, . sinyangwe, s.; mckesson, d. r.; packnett-cunningham, b. mapping police violence website [ ]. available at:<https://mappingpoliceviolence.org>. access in: / / . smith, m. “how the eric garner decision compares with other cases”. the new york times [ / / ]. available at: <https://www.nytimes.com>. access in: / / . southall, a. “‘i can’t breathe’: years after eric garner’s death, an officer faces trial”. the new york times [ / / ]. available at: <https://www.nytimes.com>. access in: / / . taibbi, matt. i can’t breathe: a killing on bay street. new york: penguin random house, . tate, j.; jenkins, j.; rich, s. “fatal force”. the washington post [ / / ]. available at: <https://www.washingtonpost.com>. access in: / / . tharoor, i. “black lives matter is a global cause”. the washington post [ / / ]. available at: <https://www.washingtonpost.com>. access in: / / . the associated press. “black lives matter protests worldwide”. the new york times [ / / ]. available at: <https://www.nytimes.com>. access in: / / . thompson, k.; samuels, r. “black lives matter leaders vow to continue the movement”. the washington post [ / / ]. available at: <https://www.washingtonpost.com>. access in: / / . wheeler, r. “michael brown, eric garner, and law librarianship”. law library journal, vol. , n. , july, . winston, a. “despite eric garner and ‘i can’t breathe,’ chokeholds still used”. the new york times [ / / ]. available at: <https://www.nytimes.com>. access in: / / . yee, v. “‘i can’t breathe’ is echoed in voices of fury and despair”. the new york times [ / / ]. available at: <https://www.nytimes.com>. access in: / / . zimbardo, p. o efeito lúcifer: como pessoas boas se tornam más. rio de janeiro: record, . www.revista.ufrr.br/boca boletim de conjuntura (boca) ano iii, vol. , n. , boa vista, boletim de conjuntura (boca) ano iii | volume | nº | boa vista | http://revista.ufrr.br/boca editor chefe: elói martins senhoras conselho editorial antonio ozai da silva, universidade estadual de maringá vitor stuart gabriel de pieri, universidade do estado do rio de janeiro charles pennaforte, universidade federal de pelotas elói martins senhoras, universidade federal de roraima julio burdman, universidad de buenos aires, argentina patrícia nasser de carvalho, universidade federal de minas gerais conselho científico claudete de castro silva vitte, universidade estadual de campinas fabiano de araújo moreira, universidade de são paulo flávia carolina de resende fagundes, universidade feevale hudson do vale de oliveira, instituto federal de roraima laodicéia amorim weersma, universidade de fortaleza marcos antônio fávaro martins, universidade paulista marcos leandro mondardo, universidade federal da grande dourados reinaldo miranda de sá teles, universidade de são paulo rozane pereira ignácio, universidade estadual de roraima caixa postal . praça do centro cívico. boa vista, rr, brasil. cep - . d e b a t e keywords resistance monuments history protests debate should monuments resist? the social outbreak of october defined a new role for monuments in chile. during the demonstrations, not only the statues that paid tribute to spanish conquistadors – namely, those who built a country to the detriment of the native peoples – were torn down, but the historical (therefore constructed) backing of certain buildings’ patrimonial status was also questioned. even the baquedano monument, located in the middle of a roundabout of the same name, at the focal center of the demonstrations in santiago, was completely covered with new meanings during the protests. a r q — s a n t ia g o , c h il e in late may , the death of african american citizen george floyd – at the hands of the minneapolis police, in the u s – reactivated the black lives matter movement, which resists and opposes racism against african american people. in the context of this movement, a series of statues that paid tribute to slave-traders and owners were attacked, generating a surprising parallel (just months away), between what happened in chile and in other parts of the world. considering both events, in the debate on this issue of a r q we asked: should monuments resist in place? or is it preferable to protect them by removing them from the public space? what happens if their meaning changes? are they still considered monuments? what is it that resists in them? after all, if monuments materialize the intersection between history, architecture, and the city, what can resist the most, their meaning or their material? fig. la estatua de edward colston cae en bristol, inglaterra, el de junio de . edward colston statue falls in bristol, england, on june , . © ben birchall, pa wire/ pa image fig. estatua del general baquedano después de las protestas del estallido social iniciadas el de octubre de , santiago de chile. the general baquedano statue after the protests of the social outbreak, which started on october , , santiago, chile. © francisco díaz, de febrero de / february , d e b a t e continúa en / continues in: p. i n , robert musil famously wrote: “there is nothing more invisible than a monument.” nothing seems further from the truth right now. in bristol, protesters recently tossed a statue of slave trader edward colston into the harbor; in antwerp, activists are defacing bronzes of king leopold ii; in the united states, citizens are toppling confederate monuments; and across the world statues of christopher columbus are falling. the toppled, sunken, defaced, vandalized and beheaded statues of these past months speak to the reemergence of rage and discontent against monuments – confederate, federal, patriarchal, colonial, racist, white –, spatial reminders of structural and representational inequality. the recent protests against racism in the united states and across the world reveal a special affinity between monuments and social protests; between citizens occupying the streets to demand justice and the dead bronzes standing in their way. the same can be said about the social upheaval that started in response to a public transportation fare hike in chile on october , . during months of massive protests for equality, justice and redistribution, chilean demonstrators toppled, beheaded and vandalized monuments honoring spanish colonizers and republican war heroes who sought to eradicate native peoples. our current statuophobia is different from that of the th century counter-monument movement reflected in musil’s words, as well as the th century monument disdain. while monuments’ lack of function upset modernists, the growing number of new unregulated monuments troubled city planners a century before. today we are grappling with a different kind of monument malaise: our monuments no longer reflect who we are. the problem is twofold. for the one part, cities have largely failed to build monuments to represent current – or rather – aspirational values: monuments to black lives, to women, to the lg b tq + community, to minorities, to people of color, to immigrants, to the disabled, and to ordinary citizens. for the other part, cities have been reluctant to remove offensive, racist and colonial monuments of the past. in berlin, for example, black and afro-german activists and their allies have been struggling for over a decade to remove colonial and racist street-names from the city center and to build a memorial to the victims of german colonialism. similarly, it took years after the return to democracy, for a central throughway in santiago de chile honoring september , the date of the military coup, to be renamed. most of the monuments that have been toppled in the past few weeks, were removed by sinking monuments: notes on our current statuophobia va l e n t i n a r oz a s - k r au s e becaria postdoctoral y profesora adjunta, university of michigan, ann arbor, estados unidos d e b a t e activists and protesters. one of the only exceptions is the columbus statue in san francisco, which the city removed preemptively as a form of preservation. while protesters’ actions might seem violent, they are a response to decades of veiled and overt racism and indifference combined to perpetuate the monumental status quo. in other words, without protests, much of the robert e. lee, leopold ii, and columbus statues of the world would remain intact, protected by a veil of selective invisibility. in response to our present-day statuophobia most monument supporters claim that removing monuments is an erasure of history. this widely echoed argument not only conflates history with its representation, but also assumes that all monuments were erected with the purpose of preserving the memory of a deed, event, or figure of the past. both assumptions are false. while monuments might tell stories, they are not stone and bronze versions of peer-reviewed history books. on the contrary, monuments are the result of selection and erasure processes, strongly aimed at maintaining dominant narratives. every statue is the product of a specific cultural and political milieu that decided to elevate a certain version of the past over multiple others. the proliferation of confederate monuments erected after the end of the american civil war to spread the false narrative of the ‘lost cause’ illustrates this point. these confederate statues are not historical monuments, but purposefully ahistorical representations of the past. history at large is not in danger, what has been threatened by the recent removal of monuments is a certain version of the past, one that justified colonialism, genocide, slavery and injustice in the name of ‘progress and enlightenment.’ as cities across the world grapple with the monument debris of the ongoing protests against racism and police brutality, i would like to conclude with one photograph (f i g . ). the photograph of the bronze of edward colston being tossed into the avon river, which was located later in the middle of bristol harbor by the witty google maps algorithm. colston, like most of his kind, was rescued from the bottom of the river and stored in an undisclosed location. museums have been our preferred place for defunct objects of the past. however, i would argue that under our current circumstances there are other alternatives to consider besides exhibiting these monuments in an enclosed and regulated space. perhaps some monuments should be left untouched – showing the accumulative signs of vandalism and re-appropriation, perhaps others could be put in dialogue with new monuments that reframe their values, and perhaps some statues deserve to stay underwater. arq valentina rozas-krause <vrozas@umich.edu> architect and master in urban planning, pontificia universidad católica de chile. phd in architecture, university of california, berkeley. she is currently working on her next book memorials and the cult of apology as a postdoctoral collegiate fellow at the university of michigan. uva-dare is a service provided by the library of the university of amsterdam (https://dare.uva.nl) uva-dare (digital academic repository) new ways of seeing (and hearing): the audiovisual essay and television grant, c.; kooijman, j. publication date document version final published version published in necsus license cc by-nc-nd link to publication citation for published version (apa): grant, c., & kooijman, j. ( ). new ways of seeing (and hearing): the audiovisual essay and television. necsus, ( ), - . https://necsus-ejms.org/new-ways-of-seeing-and- hearing-the-audiovisual-essay-and-television/ general rights it is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like creative commons). disclaimer/complaints regulations if you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the library know, stating your reasons. in case of a legitimate complaint, the library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. please ask the library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: library of the university of amsterdam, secretariat, singel , wp amsterdam, the netherlands. you will be contacted as soon as possible. download date: apr https://dare.uva.nl/personal/pure/en/publications/new-ways-of-seeing-and-hearing-the-audiovisual-essay-and-television( d c a-b c - d-a -dcd eb ).html https://necsus-ejms.org/new-ways-of-seeing-and-hearing-the-audiovisual-essay-and-television/ https://necsus-ejms.org/new-ways-of-seeing-and-hearing-the-audiovisual-essay-and-television/ european journal of media studies www.necsus-ejms.org new ways of seeing (and hearing): the audiovisual essay and television catherine grant & jaap kooijman necsus ( ), spring : – url: https://necsus-ejms.org/new-ways-of-seeing-and-hearing-the- audiovisual-essay-and-television/ keywords: audiovisual essay, television in recent years, videographic criticism in the form of remix-based audiovis- ual essays has gained momentum in media and screen studies, with courses and workshops at universities, presentations at international conferences, and publication opportunities in academic journals such as [in]transition: journal of videographic film and moving image studies, the cine-files, : , movie: a journal of film criticism, tecmerin, and necsus. while excited by this development, we cannot help but notice that relatively few audiovisual essays deal with television or use televisual images and sounds as source ma- terial for study. in the retrospective issue of [in]transition, looking back at the first twelve issues published since , jason mittell points out that only two of the featured audiovisual essays focus on television: nick warr’s ‘honolulu mon amour”’ and lori morimoto’s ‘hannibal: a fanvid’, both published in . also necsus, which has incorporated an audiovisual essay section since its autumn issue, has featured only one contempo- rary audiovisual essay that can be considered televisual: juan daniel f. molero’s ‘re-making’, aptly referring to john berger’s iconic television series ways of seeing (bbc, ). as mittell rightly wonders: ‘[g]iven that contem- porary television is often described as more robust, innovative, acclaimed, and culturally important than contemporary cinema, and television studies is more widespread and accepted than ever, why have we not seen examples of a distinctly televisual model of videographic criticism?’[ ] perhaps the historical status of much broadcast television as a far more everyday – or (to nod to raymond williams) ordinary – object has meant that it has not attracted as much of the attention as cinematic objects of those https://necsus-ejms.org/new-ways-of-seeing-and-hearing-the-audiovisual-essay-and-television/ https://necsus-ejms.org/new-ways-of-seeing-and-hearing-the-audiovisual-essay-and-television/ https://necsus-ejms.org/tag/audiovisual-essay/ https://necsus-ejms.org/tag/television/ http://mediacommons.org/intransition/ http://www.thecine-files.com/ http://www. - .dk/ https://www.reading.ac.uk/ftt/research/ftt-movie-journal-film-criticism.aspx https://tecmerin.uc m.es/en/journal/ http://mediacommons.org/intransition/theme-week/ /issue- - http://mediacommons.org/intransition/honolulu-mon-amour http://mediacommons.org/intransition/ / / /hannibal-fanvid https://necsus-ejms.org/re_making/ necsus – european journal of media studies vol ( ), drawn to videographic approaches, which involve the often deeply contem- plative and at times blatantly fetishistic re-use of audiovisual material. in that case, mittell’s call for ‘videographic telephilia’ is apposite and timely. how- ever, there are additional reasons why television may be, as yet, a less fre- quent focus for videographic study. as volker pantenburg points out in his curated audiovisual essay section in the autumn issue of necsus: [t]he absence of television history from the debates around the video essay does not necessarily indicate a lack of interest. it rather results from the invisibility and diffi- culties of access to the treasures in the television archives. [ ] access to contemporary television is also often difficult, mostly limited to random online availability or to dvd boxsets. moreover, the shift away from physical media to audiovisual streaming, and in particular to streaming-only releases, creates new technical (and sometimes legal) challenges in relation to capturing the televisual material to use for audiovisual studies. the digital rights management software employed by streaming platforms makes it hard to obtain high-quality captures of sources, even as fair use and fair dealing exceptions should continue to allow for critical and research re-uses of them. television in videographic criticism is rendered more complicated, then, not only by the size and the nature of the televisual object, but also by issues of access and the ability to capture its image and sound. rather than contemplating why television seems absent from video- graphic criticism, we might also be inspired by both historical and contem- porary examples of art and remix culture that have used the televisual image – works by artists such as harun farocki, björn melhus, and candice breitz (just to name a few), as well as videos like ‘homophobic friends’ by tijana mamula ( ) and ‘mad men: set me free’ by elisa kreisinger ( ). inspir- ing examples of audiovisual essays on television include erlend lavik’s ‘style in the wire’ ( , and which has recently exceeded , views), cristina Álvarez lópez and adrian martin’s ‘short-circuit: a ‘twin peaks’ system’ ( ), and andreas halskov’s ‘echoes of the past: popular music and nostal- gia in modern television drama’ ( ). to add to these examples and to promote videographic criticism of tele- vision, we have selected four recent audiovisual essay works that each, in their own way, use televisual images and sound to reflect upon television as a medium. the first is jason mittell’s ‘how black lives matter in the wire: a video essay’, which connects the ‘real-life’ news coverage of police violence against african-american citizens to the absence of such explicit violence in https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ssq za-j i https://vimeo.com/ https://vimeo.com/ https://vimeo.com/ https://mubi.com/notebook/posts/short-circuit-a-twin-peaks-system http://www. - .dk/ / /nostalgia/ http://www. - .dk/ / /nostalgia/ https://necsus-ejms.org/how-black-lives-matter-in-the-wire-a-video-essay/ https://necsus-ejms.org/how-black-lives-matter-in-the-wire-a-video-essay/ new ways of seeing (and hearing) grant & kooijman the fictional series the wire (hbo, - ). using voiceover, mittell ex- plores what this discrepancy means not only for his own investment in the series, but also for the role of fictional television in the politics of represen- tation. the video cleverly mimics the aesthetics of the series, particularly in its one-minute ‘opening sequence’, which makes the contrast between fic- tional and real life even more striking. originally uploaded to vimeo in , ‘how black lives matter in the wire’ was critically recognised by being listed three times on ‘the best video essays of ’ list of sight & sound magazine. we are delighted now to publish mittell’s audiovisual essay in a scholarly context, in necsus, with an accompanying author’s statement. next, we present a triptych of videos made by catherine grant and janet mccabe (‘flow/cut’, ‘body/matters’, and ‘law/fear’), comparative works that study the graphic figuration of three moments of heightened tension in the first or pilot episodes of season one of the scandinavian noir crime television series bron/broen (svt /dr , - ), and two of its most successful transnational remakes, the tunnel/tunnel (sky atlantic/canal+, - ) and the bridge (fx, - ). grant and mccabe’s work of feminist refram- ing and defamiliarisation (ostranenie) offers a decentring of the television se- ries’ originary thematics, by tripling them (‘in-triplicating’ and intensifying them).[ ] the videos also performatively – multi-vocally – explore, across each of the televisual sources, the political matters raised in the quotations (or epigraphs) figured in the works, as well as in the strikingly allegorical lyr- ics of the theme songs from these series, deployed in slow motion in the sec- ond part of each video to open a space of uneasy contemplation of the repe- titions and variations of the forensic femininities (and masculinities) played out across these different but distinctly connected national and regional spaces. the videos are accompanied by mccabe’s thoughtful and detailed commentary on this research. the third audiovisual essay is juan llamas-rodriguez’ ‘the female narco-trafficker’s tongue / la lengua de la narco-traficante’, which fo- cuses on the figure of the female narcotrafficker in us american and mexi- can television series, most notably in the spanish-language telenovela and english-language drama series adaptations ofla reina del sur, spanish novel- ist arturo pérez-reverte’s international bestseller about globe-trotting nar- cotrafficker teresa mendoza, aka la mexicana. the use of the epigraphic form, presented bilingually, results in a propulsively captivating and at times deliberately confusing mixture of images, sounds, and written texts, inviting https://www.bfi.org.uk/news-opinion/sight-sound-magazine/polls-surveys/best-video-essays- https://necsus-ejms.org/bodies-at-the-border-transnational-co-produced-tv-drama-and-its-gender-politics-in-the-pilots-of-bron-broen-and-adaptations-the-bridge-and-the-tunnel/ https://necsus-ejms.org/the-female-narcotraffickers-tongue-la-lengua-de-la-narcotraficante/ https://necsus-ejms.org/the-female-narcotraffickers-tongue-la-lengua-de-la-narcotraficante/ necsus – european journal of media studies vol ( ), the viewer rapidly to make comparative and contrastive connections be- tween the various depictions of these female characters and their story worlds. like mccabe and grant’s work, llamas-rodriguez’ video lays bare the devices of transnational television adaptation and remaking by reframing them in a work of simultaneous performance that asks the viewer at once to take sides and to see the other side. this is an approach to television studies that is intensively interstitialandrelational, evoking the spirit of laura rascar- oli’s notion of essay filmmaking as the art of gaps.[ ] the section ends with angelo restivo’s ‘breaking bad and surrealism’, a video made to accompany the third chapter of his book breaking bad and cinematic television (duke university press, ). poetically edited and set to the soundtrack of el alacran’s ‘reflejo de luna’, restivo’s video connects im- ages of breaking bad (amc, - ) to avant-garde cinema of the s, s, and s. regardless of whether or not these ‘citations’ were intended (are they conscious influences or remarkable coincidences?), this work invites the viewer to perceive – or better, to watch – breaking bad beyond the plot- driven logic of fictional television, paying attention instead to the series’ aes- thetics. here cinephilia meets telephilia in a productive way, showing how images have histories that can be rendered visible through intermedial inter- textual connections. in ways of seeing, john berger showed how the medium of television al- lowed, or even forced, a new and demystifying perspective on the visual arts. we borrowed his title to emphasise that videographic criticism can help us to watch television differently, adding ‘(and hearing)’ to acknowledge the im- portance of sound, which often is neglected in the study of television. obvi- ously, there is far more (televisual) ground to cover. we have not been able (yet) to include audiovisual essays that focus on typical television genres such as the sitcom, the talk show, the music video, or reality programming. that said, we hope that our selection will at least function as an invitation for yet more, and more varied, videographic telephilia, not limited to so-called ‘quality television’ that stays close to the cinematic, but that also recognises, and explores audiovisually, the qualities of television in all its aesthetic, po- litical, national and transnational, and technical forms. https://necsus-ejms.org/breaking-bad-and-surrealism/ new ways of seeing (and hearing) grant & kooijman authors catherine grantis professor of digital media and screen studies at birkbeck, university of london. a prolific experimental video-essayist, she has au- thored and edited numerous studies of audio-visual film and moving image research and scholarship, including: the videographic essay: criticism in sound and image (co-authored with christian keathley and jason mittell, nded., ); screenstudies.video ( ), a monographic website collecting and re- flecting on her own practice; and another website collection the audiovisual essay ( -present). she is also creator of film studies for free and a co-found- ing editor of [in]transition: journal of videographic and moving image studies. jaap kooijman is associate professor in media studies and american studies at the university of amsterdam and vice director of the amsterdam school for cultural analysis (asca). he is the author of fabricating the absolute fake: america in contemporary pop culture (amsterdam university press, ), which is available in open access. his audiovisual essay ‘success’ was pub- lished in [in]transition. notes [ ] jason mittell, ‘videographic telephilia’, [in]transition . ( ): http://mediacommons.org/in- transition/ /videographic-telephilia [ ] volker pantenburg, ‘towards an alternative history of the video essay: westdeutscher rundfunk, cologne’, necsus, : , autumn : https://necsus-ejms.org/towards-an-alternative-history- of-the-video-essay-westdeutscher-rundfunk-cologne/ [ ] for further discussion of grant’s split-screen audiovisual essay methodologies, see catherine grant, ‘déjà-viewing?: videographic experiments in intertextual film studies’,mediascape: ucla’s journal of cinema and media studies, winter :http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/win- ter _dejaviewing.html.; also catherine grant, ‘”screen memories”: a video essay onsmul- tronstället/wild strawberries’,cinergie:il cinema e le altre arti, , : https://cinergie.un- ibo.it/article/view/ / ; and catherine grant and amber jacobs, ‘persona non grata so- nata’,mai: feminism & visual culture, issue, , spring :http://maifeminism.com/persona-non- grata-sonata/. [ ] see the numerous mentions of gaps, dialectics, the interval and the interstitial in laura rascar- oli,how the essay film thinks(oxford: oxford university press, ). see, for example, the dis- cussion of these concepts in the first chapter of this book, pp. - . https://screenstudies.video/ http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/audiovisualessay/ http://reframe.sussex.ac.uk/audiovisualessay/ https://filmstudiesforfree.blogspot.com/ http://mediacommons.org/intransition https://oapen.org/search?identifier= https://oapen.org/search?identifier= http://mediacommons.org/intransition/success http://mediacommons.org/intransition/ /videographic-telephilia http://mediacommons.org/intransition/ /videographic-telephilia https://necsus-ejms.org/towards-an-alternative-history-of-the-video-essay-westdeutscher-rundfunk-cologne/ https://necsus-ejms.org/towards-an-alternative-history-of-the-video-essay-westdeutscher-rundfunk-cologne/ http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/winter _dejaviewing.html http://www.tft.ucla.edu/mediascape/winter _dejaviewing.html https://cinergie.unibo.it/article/view/ / https://cinergie.unibo.it/article/view/ / http://maifeminism.com/persona-non-grata-sonata/ http://maifeminism.com/persona-non-grata-sonata/ 	new ways of seeing (and hearing): the audiovisual essay and television social media and social change lawyering: influencing change and silencing dissent https://doi.org/ . / x media international australia , vol. ( ) – © the author(s) article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions doi: . / x journals.sagepub.com/home/mia corresponding author: naomi sayers. email: nsaye @uottawa.ca mia . / x media international australiasayers research-article article social media and social change lawyering: influencing change and silencing dissent naomi sayers independent researcher abstract the law society of ontario (formerly, the law society of upper canada) oversees the legal profession in ontario, canada, through the rules of professional conduct (‘rules’). all future lawyers and paralegals must adhere to the rules. the law society sometimes provides guidance on sample policies informed by the rules. in this article, the author closely examines the law society’s guidance on social media. the author argues that this guidance fails to understand how the rules regulate experiences out of the legal profession and fails to see the positive possibilities of social media to influence social change, especially in ways that conflict with the colonial legal system. the author concludes that the law society must take a positive approach and provide some guidance for the legal profession on their social media use, especially around critiquing the colonial legal system. this positive approach is essential to avoid duplicating the systems and structures that perpetuate disadvantage in marginalized communities. keywords feminist legal theory, indigenous feminism, indigenous feminist legal theory, indigenous legal theory, legal theory, professional regulation, social change, social change lawyering, social media, twitter in july , justice wagner (as he was then known) decided to exclude several groups from inter- vening in the appeal by trinity western university (twu), a canadian law school in british columbia (gallant, ). twu was alleged to have a homophobic community covenant ban, prohibiting sexual relations outside of heterosexual marriage (gallant, ). the supreme court of canada’s then chief justice mclachlin added another day of hearings to include the previously excluded and marginalized lgbtq groups as interveners (gallant, ). this variance was only made after strong outrage expressed by many on twitter (gallant, ). https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/journals-permissions http://journals.sagepub.com/home/mia http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . % f x &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - media international australia ( ) disagreement and debate in the legal community is not unusual. however, sometimes disagree- ment between lawyers can be used as a means to silence dissenting views that would otherwise encourage progressive change. allowing space for dissent is challenging given the existing power structures within the legal profession and the silencing of target groups who come from these margin- alized communities. in the context of these power relations, i explore whether lawyers have a profes- sional responsibility to engage in social media as a tool to bring about social change, especially when advocating on behalf of marginalized communities, including indigenous communities. in answer- ing this question, i highlight how social media and social change are interconnected in the canadian context and what this means for social change lawyering. i utilize social change lawyering to call attention to the ways in which ‘systems and structures perpetuate disadvantage’ (farrell, : ). social change lawyering reveals the problems with laws, policies, procedures or the conduct of state or non-state actors (farrell, : ). community lawyering considers how a client’s com- munity, culture or ‘non-legal influences’ affect the client (zuni cruz, : ). i acknowledge non-legal influences in assessing how laws, policies, procedures or conduct of state or non-state actors affect indigenous people. however, i want to call attention to the scholarly gap in discussing social media and social change in the canadian context. although there is scholarship discussing the arab spring, occupy movement and black lives matter (campbell, ; cox, ; de choudhury et al., ; freelon, ; newsroom et al., ), academic research dealing with the idle no more movement is lacking (tupper, ). this is despite idle no more transcending boundaries and impacting australia (idle no more, ). to highlight this gap on social media and social change, i use an autoethnographic approach to ‘disrupt the colonizing process of forgetting’ (fitzpatrick, : ); to speak back to dominant discourses, especially where silencing occurs (tsalach, : ) and to challenge the idea that law is abstract or neutral (matsuda, : – ). throughout this article, i provide evidence of three instances of silencing to draw attention to positive possibilities for social media and social change lawyering as an indigenous lawyer. i see social media as a powerful tool in making space for dissenting perspectives to bring about social change. first, i describe my experiences as being the only first nations woman with lived experi- ence in the sex trade to publicly oppose the then-conservative government’s bill c- , for the protection of communities and exploited persons, which is now law. immediately after i testified (sayers, ), i faced intimidation and harassment from opposing groups. alarmingly, the oppo- sition started to reveal private information about me on social media in an effort to silence me. second, i outline my experiences as being under a good character investigation by the law society of ontario (formerly, the law society of upper canada) as a result of self-disclosures to my regu- lator, while at the same time my regulator was lauding its initiative to require lawyers to describe his or her commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion. during this investigation, my frustration with this initiative grew as some lawyers opposed it on the basis that it was compelled speech (alford, ; pardy, ). this argument ignored how this initiative silenced those who could not speak out in dissent, fearing heightened surveillance. finally, i describe an experience of silencing by a non-indigenous woman of colour at a provincial bar association. through these stories, i want to invite others to remember the historical practice of denying indians, as defined by the indian act, the right to enter law school, practice law or hire lawyers. and, through telling my story, i aim to reveal the systems and structures that perpetuate disadvantage. i also call on the law society to make space for dissenting views by urging the law society, and similar institu- tions, to take a positive approach on social media guidance. indigenous people have a unique relationship with the legal systems of states that emerged out of colonialism. colonial laws and policies legitimize and validate settler colonialism; they do not remain in the past and are omnipresent (arvin et al., ; simpson, : ). similarly, mignolo and grosfoguel contend that coloniality, essential to critiquing decolonization projects, is ongoing (gaztambide-fernández, , ; grosfoguel, : – ). both call on others to think about sayers possibilities of decolonization in a broader, freer sense (gaztambide-fernández, : ; grosfoguel, : ). part of this context, and within coloniality, is how the law and its actors are discussed on social media. that is, social media becomes a tool to challenge a marginalized group’s invisibility and dehumanization (see maldonado-torres, : ). farrell ( ) outlines that ‘[s]ocial media’s greatest strength is encouraging conversations’ (p. ). this is especially true for twitter given how fast users can share conversations (farrell, : ; latina and docherty, : ). farrell ( ) highlights that ‘twitter creates relationships with influencers, policy makers and [travellers]’ (p. ). influencing change is contextual. a user who contributes to discussions from a different perspective has a greater pos- sibility to influence the conversation. although i am not the first indigenous woman to write about her experiences in the sex trade, online or elsewhere, i influenced the discussion (to some extent) around the topic and engaged with policymakers. this kind of influence does not come without its downfalls. after this engagement online, people saw me as an expert on the issue. while i have a unique understanding on the topic that is informed by lived experience and conventional legal education, i neither intended nor wanted to take on this role. some of my writings, to this day, are still being circulated and cited as authoritative sources on the history of prostitution in canada, including the history of such provisions originating in the indian act (sayers, ). given the level of harass- ment against me when i publish work, i now have a members-only blog instead of a public-facing blog. although this provides a small sense of safety, it limits the reach of such communications to a broader audience, which is a form of silencing. self-regulation is one of the hallmarks of the legal profession, but this governance structure is not without its drawbacks in silencing dissenting views. the good character requirement is a legis- lative requirement for all licensing candidates (law society act, rso , c l- , s ( )). an individual must be honest and must disclose any good character issues at the time of applying (law society, n.d-a). this process is not very transparent, thereby calling into question its legitimacy about what is required of a candidate, including the standard to meet and the process involved (ha-redeye, ; woolley, , ; woolley and stacey, ). a group of lawyers in ontario brought forward a motion asking the law society to review and report on the good character requirement and its assessment at the application stage, especially as it concerns indigenous and racialized applicants (mcrobert, ; robinson, ; spratt, ). while there are no reported cases of an indigenous person being denied a license to practice law in ontario (woolley, ), the lack of transparency as to how the law society decides which applications to further investi- gate and on what basis, is troublesome. one could argue that this secretive process does not accord to the law society’s commitment to equality, diversity and inclusion; commitment to access to justice; and commitment to protect the public interest. in fear of inviting increased surveillance, i refrained from utilizing social media to speak out against the law society’s commitments. this is where the law society can offer some guidance to lawyers. the law society develops resources for lawyers licensed to practice law in ontario, canada, as the regulatory body overseeing lawyers and paralegals. such resources include resources on prac- tice management (law society of ontario, n.d.-b). these resources must be read in the context of the rules of professional conduct (‘rules’; law society of ontario, n.d.-b). one resource includes a sample social media policy (‘sample policy’; law society of ontario, n.d.-c). the rules are similar to those enacted and passed by law council of australia ( ) and the sample policy analogous to the law institute of victoria’s ( ) guidelines on the ethical use of social media. while a good starting point, the sample policy misses the mark when it comes to indigenous lawyers. the sample policy simply adopts the rules that regulates all lawyers, including indigenous lawyers, without a critical understanding in how the rules have been used to police and regulate certain experiences out of the legal profession (backhouse, : , , – ; woolley, media international australia ( ) , ; woolley and stacey, ). as such, one must examine the sample policy in an indigenous feminist legal theory (iflt) through a decolonial lens. while some people use the term decolonial to also mean anti-colonial, the use of the term in this way erases the violence done through colonial law (hunt, ; smith, : ). the use of decolonial in this way also erases the violence done through the regulation of indigenous people’s activities through colonial laws and legal means (snyder, : ). i adopt decolonial to mean anti-colonial and anti-violence. this approach recognizes this ongoing practice of settler colonialism while also acknowledging the limitations of other theorizations, like feminist legal theory or indigenous legal theory. snyder ( ) theorized iflt after noticing a gap in feminist legal theory, indigenous feminist theory and indigenous legal theory that ‘speak past one another’ (snyder, : ). feminist legal theory unequivocally accepts colonial law as valid and just, but ignores indigenous legal theory (snyder, cited in sayers, ). indigenous feminist theory views indigenous legal theory as valid, and only sees colonial law as deserving of critique. (snyder, cited in sayers, ). indigenous legal theory develops a romanticized image of indigenous communities, essen- tializing indigenous women’s roles (snyder, : ; snyder et al., : ). i prefer ilft as opposed to an intersectional feminist approach because i often see intersectional feminism being used to silence critique. in this same breath, when i use settler colonialism to call attention to the ways in which this process is present and ongoing in colonial canada, i intend to adopt a particular story – my story – to speak back to settler colonialism as a tool to silence critique. the sample policy developed by the law society suggests that users online must be responsible (law society of ontario, n.d.-b). this term is not defined; rather, there are merely references to other rules. one such rule includes rule . - , encouraging respect for the administration of justice (law society of ontario, ). the commentary following rule . - suggests that an indigenous lawyer who criticizes the colonial legal system risks violating this rule. for instance, the commentary states that a lawyer ‘should take care not to weaken or destroy public confidence in legal institutions or authorities by irresponsible allegations’ (law society of ontario, : rule . – ). this is especially true for those individuals who also use social media or engage in social media as part of their practice. at the time of editing, i am not aware of any lawyer being formally disciplined for their social media use. therefore, i rely on the case of a nurse, another self-regu- lated occupation similar to the legal profession in canada. ms. strom, a nurse, criticized the healthcare system after her grandfather’s treatment (hill, ; saskatchewan registered nurses’ association, ). the investigation committee of the saskatchewan registered nurses’ association ( ) found ms. strom guilty of professional misconduct after she posted comments about her grandfather’s healthcare on her facebook. ms. strom is the first nurse to receive disci- pline for her social media comments (hill, ). another problem with the sample policy implies a reference to the rule of integrity (law society of ontario, : rule . – ; law society of ontario, n.d.-b). the commentary in this section on integrity refers to ‘dishonourable or questionable conduct’, including conduct either in private life or professional practice (law society of ontario, : rule . – ( )). while the law society of ontario ( ) is not concerned with ‘purely private or extra-professional activities’ (rule . – ( )), it is unclear where the line is drawn regarding private activities and purely private activities. the rules or the sample policy become an issue especially for indigenous lawyers who may return to their community to work. as both an indigenous person and a woman, i risk facing harsher scrutiny especially for my private activities. this line is significantly blurred when i inquire about the difference between private activities and purely private activities. parallel arguments are advanced as the law society’s rules are highly discretionary requiring guidance from canada’s highest court (canadian civil liberties association, : – ). i also fear that my past good character investigation may be used to discredit any future work that i do in the community and i fear that speaking out about the effects sayers of such investigation will be viewed as undermining the importance of good character, especially in protecting the public. accordingly, any sample policy from the law society must adopt an ilft lens, acknowledging the racialized and gendered nature of the web and in effect, social media. outside of the regulator, professional associations are intended to provide peer support and men- toring. however, the silencing i experienced in these contexts also causes me to question my rela- tionship with conventional bar associations and their role in the legal profession. although discussions on diversity and inclusion in the legal profession are plentiful, they usually imply that these efforts are contributing to substantial change and can leave little room for how to improve these efforts from an indigenous perspective. near the end of one provincial bar association meeting, i stood up and spoke about the requirement to address diversity and inclusion as it relates to licensing procedures and the accommodations policies adopted by the law society. from my experience, these policies perpetuate the challenges faced by marginalized communities. in response, a black woman lawyer stood up and implied that there was plenty of work being done already. she said, ‘look at me!’, with her hand pointed back at her. her comments and action of pointing back at herself effectively silenced the issues i raised. she concluded by stating that diversity and inclusion has been a problem since the s, and thereby, highlighting that it is still a problem. my response, which was provided for the record, ‘if the problem has been around since the s, why is this still a problem?’ i refused to remain silent, and placed the responsibility of these issues back onto every- one in the room, not just the black lawyer and myself. this incident speaks of the ongoing effects of settler colonialism and its policies or laws that exploit indigenous labour but that this labour does not result in any systemic change to the benefit of indigenous people (see grosfoguel, : ). after i spoke about the diversity and inclusion issues, an older white male lawyer asked me if the diversity and inclusion issue was really an issue. later, when the executives of the same pro- vincial bar association were talking about their diversity and inclusion efforts, they were visibiliz- ing their work but at the same time minimizing the issues i was raising. in distracting from the issues raised, one must ask what are these associations and institutions protecting? hunt asks simi- lar questions when she calls attention to the fact that only certain kinds of violence are made visible in discussions on violence and law (holmes et al., : ). these kinds of efforts to also visi- bilize certain work erase the ongoing effects of settler colonialism and how it impacts indigenous lawyers. when the focus is only on efforts (and in particular, those efforts that silence critique), it is settler colonialism that is protected (see backhouse, : ). hunt ( ) writes about violence and the law from a responsibilities-oriented perspective (pp. – ). hunt’s ( ) work differs in that she links the violence that indigenous women experi- ence as being connected to both physical and state violence (pp. – ; see also maldonado- torres, : – ). i write about silencing as a violence that is rarely acknowledged as such; the kind of violence these institutions, like the law society, produce and promote. and, so, adopt- ing a responsibility-oriented lens towards discussions on proposals by the law society, including the sample policy, is about understanding that each proposal comes with responsibility to ensure that it does not place the burden entirely on the shoulders of those impacted by silencing, like mar- ginalized groups. hunt puts into practice a responsibility-oriented lens when she writes about what it means to witness violence and to take on responsibility to do something about this violence. in taking on a responsibility-oriented lens, the law society’s social media guidance can pay par- ticular attention to how marginalized communities use social media to voice dissenting perspectives. for example, the sample policy’s reference to the rules creates vagueness and does not offer any guidance. i recommend that the law society adopt a positive approach in the context of social change lawyering by providing assurance about what kind of online behaviours would not violate the rules. this guidance would avoid the kind of legal challenges that require a court’s interpretation of the rules (see canadian civil liberties association, ). similar to the sample policy, the law society can provide examples that serve as a guideline. these examples could outline what sort of comments media international australia ( ) or writings will undermine the administration of justice, for example. it is within the law society’s interests to remain timely and relevant, while also refraining from reproducing the structures and systems which have regulated indigenous people out of the legal profession a mere few generations ago. plainly, it is a lawyer’s professional responsibility to engage in social change lawyering through social media. however, guidance from the law society must go beyond vague sample policies and must encourage social media use to encourage innovation and social change. when i write, i know there is risk. matsuda ( ) refers to this risk as backlash. i am no stran- ger to backlash. while writing, however, i position this backlash within the responsibility-oriented lens too. i call others who witness this backlash to also demand better. i hope that others can speak truth to power, similar to matsuda’s ( ) consciousness raising, about their own experiences without carrying the responsibility all on their own. i also have hope that this article will encourage other institutions to see social media as an important tool in facilitating open dialogue as opposed to surveilling and silencing marginalized groups. i believe there is room for these institutions to share this responsibility to facilitate social change without allowing fears of increased surveillance and silencing to continue. in the end, i share this excerpt from my response to the law society in my good character investigation wherein the investigator asked me what i believed good character to entail. i use this excerpt to highlight the risk i face in writing but that i continue to write because i believe it is the right thing to do: i believe that good character, in respect to the practice of law, is a function of honesty. it means to be of strong moral character, an understanding of right and wrong, and the ethical obligations that come with being a lawyer. it means doing the right thing, no matter what, including the personal and professional costs that might follow. while social change lawyering could be viewed as traditional or not innovative, this is not because of the lack of will from indigenous lawyers. this is because indigenous lawyers are regu- lated in a way that perpetuates disadvantage – the coloniality of lawyering. my article brings atten- tion to how innovation in the uses of social media is also restrained by these same powers and that everyone shares the responsibility in creating social change. acknowledgements naomi thanks ian r. smith and amy j. ohler, lawyers based in toronto, for their assistance with her good character investigation which informs part of her paper. naomi also thanks the following individuals for their comments that greatly improved the manuscript: omar ha-redeye, lawyer based in toronto; lori idlout, friend, indigenous colleague and university of ottawa alumni; and megan beretta, msc in social sciences of the internet (oxford internet institute). the views expressed are naomi’s own views. declaration of conflicting interests the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publi- cation of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship and/or publication of this article. notes . i am not saying that these communities are marginalized; rather, i highlight how indigenous communi- ties are described in this same way. it is through these terms that colonial canada has legitimized its settler/colonial state (see hunt, ). sayers . idle no more is an indigenous-led, canadian-based movement that utilized social media to bring to light the realities of indigenous people in canada. i can also recall only one previously peer- reviewed published article discussing idle no more and social media in relation to dissenting view- points (tupper, ). . this private information included both saving and sharing details about one of my old sex working identi- ties and linking this identity to my real name online. the supreme court of canada recognized this as vio- lence in canada (attorney general) v downtown eastside sex workers united against violence society, scc , [ ] scr ( ‘swuav’). justice cromwell, in writing for the court, describes this violence when outlining concerns raised by representatives for sex workers who argued that their clients ‘feared loss of privacy and safety and increased violence by clients’ (cromwell, : para ). this loss of privacy includes being outed or the linking of a sex work identity with a real identity. . see also a website created by a group of lawyers advocating against this initiative, the statement of principles: www.stopsop.com. . as these laws existed over years ago, the changes only recently occurred in the s and, thereby excluding entire generations of indigenous lawyers and thus, many white people and other groups, including black people, though struggling in other ways, benefited from the exclusion of indigenous people from the legal profession (backhouse, : ). . this approach is similar to indigenous feminist writer, lee maracle ( ), who highlights the limitation of theories to capture certain stories. she also contends that her story is theory (maracle, : – ). my story is equally valid. . the law society of ontario ( ) is committed to equality, diversity and inclusion with legislative prin- ciples, like facilitating access to justice and protecting the public interest, to be applied by the society in its work (law society act, s . ). . this term is often employed by white feminists to suggest they engage in an adequate analysis on women’s experiences, especially on those experiences that exist at the intersection of multiple identities, and thereby, silencing any critique of their positions. . there is one example of a judge in ontario, canada, prior to editing, who released an order that stated a lawyer ‘destroyed public confidence in the court’s supervision’ of the indian residential school settle- ments (barrera, ). this does not relate to social media use, however. . the ontario bar association’s submission (oba, ) on the good character inquiry and dispositions of discharge drew on the regulation of nurses in the context of good character. i utilize this as a similar example of regulating social media use. references alford r ( ) an arm of the state should not be forcing lawyers to declare their values. cbc opinion. available at: http://www.cbc.ca/news/opinion/law-society-statement- . 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(eds) reaffirming legal ethics: taking stock and new ideas london: routledge, pp. – . zuni cruz c ( ) [on the] road back in: community lawyering in indigenous communities. american indian law review ( ): – . https://www.oba.org/cmspages/getfile.aspx?guid= cb f-d a - c - a d- f a a http://nationalpost.com/opinion/bruce-pardy-law-societys-new-policy-compels-speech-crossing-line-that-must-not-be-crossed http://nationalpost.com/opinion/bruce-pardy-law-societys-new-policy-compels-speech-crossing-line-that-must-not-be-crossed http://www.lawtimesnews.com/author/alex-robinson/more-transparency-needed-on-good-character- / http://www.lawtimesnews.com/author/alex-robinson/more-transparency-needed-on-good-character- / https://www.srna.org/images/stories/rn_competence/comp_assurance_hearings/srna_discipline_decision_strom_redacted_oct_ _ .pdf https://www.srna.org/images/stories/rn_competence/comp_assurance_hearings/srna_discipline_decision_strom_redacted_oct_ _ .pdf https://www.srna.org/images/stories/rn_competence/comp_assurance_hearings/srna_discipline_decision_strom_redacted_oct_ _ .pdf https://kwetoday.com/ / / /canadas-anti-prostitution-laws-a-method-for-social-control/ https://openparliament.ca/committees/justice/ - / /naomi-sayers- / https://openparliament.ca/committees/justice/ - / /naomi-sayers- / https://kwetoday.com/ / / /doingundoing-justice-violence-through-colonial-law/ http://www.canadianlawyermag.com/author/michael-spratt/apply-the-principles-of-the-gladue-decision-to-good-character-requirements-for-lawyers- / http://www.canadianlawyermag.com/author/michael-spratt/apply-the-principles-of-the-gladue-decision-to-good-character-requirements-for-lawyers- / primary care pivots primary care pivots susan m. dovey mph, phd, frnzcgp(hon) editor-in-chief, journal of primary health care, editor@rnzcgp.org.nz j prim health care ; ( ): – . doi: . /hcv n _ed published june according to the free dictionary, the noun ‘pivot’ refers to ‘the central or crucial factor’ and the verb, ‘pivoting’ is ‘the act of turning on a pivot; a dramatic change in policy, position, or strategy’. i looked up this word because it appears quite frequently in the college’s manifesto of may, and i wanted to be sure of its meaning. for years now the new zealand health system has been stretched, strug- gling to accommodate st century needs for healthcare in a delivery model that has remained essentially unchanged for nearly years. , despite claims of patient-centredness, the bricks and mortar of healthcare institutions up until this time have been the main health system focus. yet, as the manifesto points out, it was not these institu- tions but the often overlooked primary care com- munity that adapted most nimbly to meet the needs of the new zealand people during the sars-cov- (covid- ) pandemic. if any good thing is to come out of this pandemic experience, may it be that it becomes a catalyst for real change in the health systems of hospital-centric countries. the pressures for change are adding up. in this issue askerud et al. discuss the rise of multimorbidity, arguing that ‘the primary care system is no longer a good match for the population it serves.’ before covid- changed everything, we had planned to focus on research for this issue. it is too soon to be able to publish primary research about covid- but not too soon to plan, to start, or to ponder lessons from the experience. we have four covid- -related papers sharing experiences , and drawing attention to things readers need to know , and further papers reporting how phar- macists dealt with another public health emer- gency and how to plan research. , nine doctors (and one medical student) working in rural new zealand hospitals and general practices describe a wide range of experiences during the covid- lockdown, including the influence of the flu pandemic, fellowship exams, being too busy and not busy enough, under- and over-supplied with materials to meet pandemic needs and suffering information vacuums. always devastatingly honest and elegant in her writing, lucy o’hagan reflects on telehealth consulting. equity across many social domains is critical for peaceful and productive societies, and events such as the covid- pandemic starkly expose equity gaps, most recently expressed globally in the black lives matter demonstrations. a group of primary care academics has followed discussions about equity issues arising during and from the manage- ment of the pandemic, and present their observa- tions in the guest editorial. the psychological effects of quarantine on both patients and their healthcare providers is discussed by another editorialist. public health emergencies are not new to new zealand. in august , people in havelock north experienced the world’s largest campylo- bacter outbreak and four people died. we seldom hear about the primary care clinicians who have critical roles in alerting public health authorities and protecting population health. in this issue we publish research describing the activities under- taken by pharmacists working through this out- break. this paper is relevant to post-pandemic considerations about re-structuring the health sys- tem, providing lessons that primary care providers can and do keep society functioning in these events, constraining the need for care from hospitals to manageable levels. the journal has made a decision to publish research protocols as part of a strategy to develop primary care research. the planning stage is often over- looked as a critical part of the research process, but without good planning the end result of research risks being useless. in this issue we publish two quite different research protocols but both are clear about their research question, why their question is worth answering, and how they propose to answer it. these are the key ingredients of a good protocol. editorial editorial csiro publishing journal compilation � royal new zealand college of general practitioners this is an open access article licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives . international license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / one protocol comes from a group of doctors working in new zealand’s rural hospitals and general practices and seeks to test whether the point-of-care tests they have access to are sufficient to safely diagnose heart attacks. the other comes from canadian authors and is about using pub- lished literature to develop a framework to describe the development of access barriers to primary care for refugees. we welcome more protocol papers, which go through the same rigorous review pro- cesses as original research reports, and hope that they will be used as models for emerging primary care researchers. the original research reports in this issue relate to medical education , and clinical issues (chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (copd) and diabetes ). the messages from the medical educa- tion papers are sobering. intercalated degrees are courses of study that allow students (especially medical students) to take a year or more from their medical studies to complete a research project. al- busaidi analysed a database of years of interca- lated degrees by medical students and found that more than / chose to do laboratory-based research for their intercalated degree and only % ended up in general practice as their later career choice. this suggests that general practice may not be adequately modelled to undergraduate medical students as a research-based discipline. in universities, academic work in teaching and research is supposed to take equivalent time so that teaching is research informed. a good research question might be: how often is that obligation realised? the second education paper comes from a team of north american researchers who compare three methods of measuring research outputs from academic departments of family medicine. although no method revealed very adequate research productivity, this paper refers to the con- siderable efforts and funding that the family medi- cine profession in north america has devoted to research development in the past years or so. another good research question might be: how does the research productivity of local academic departments compare? stokes et al. identify the need for health-care pro- viders to be proactive in identifying and managing the unmet health needs of patients with severe copd. this qualitative research has many more clinically useful insights into the lives of these patients. another paper provides evidence of health gains for patients with type diabetes who are encouraged to go for a walk after breakfast, lunch, and dinner. no duration or length of walk need be specified, making this a very simple message for patients. our case report in this issue is about paget- schroetter syndrome, or effort thrombosis, a rare condition but one our reviewers felt that readers would be interested in. related to covid- issues, the cochrane corner reviews the evidence about remote healthcare using telehealth technol- ogies and as we move into winter, the potion or poison column provides up-to-date information about vitamin d. references . pivoting - definition of pivoting by the free dictionary. [cited june ], available from: https://www.thefreedictionary. com/pivoting. . murton s. an equitable, accessible, health-positive model. a manifesto for general practice. wellington: rnzcgp, may . . gorman d. reforming primary healthcare. j prim health care. ; : – . doi: . /hcv n _ed . gauld r. disrupting the present to build a stronger health workforce for the future: a three-point agenda. j prim health care. ; : – . doi: . /hc . askerud a, jaye c, mckinlay e, doolan-noble f. what is the answer to the challenge of multi-morbidity in new zealand? j prim health care. ; ( ): – . . miller r, ward c, marshall b, et al. postcards from the edge. j prim health care. ; ( ): – . . o’hagan l. doing telephone consultations in my socks. j prim health care. ; ( ): – . . hall k, doolan-noble f, mckinlay e, et al. ethics and equity in the time of coronavirus. j prim health care. ; ( ): – . . ng ll. psychological states of covid- quarantine. j prim health care. ; ( ): – . . vicary d, salman s, jones n, aspden t. hawke’s bay pharmacists’ activities during a campylobacter contamination of public water supply in havelock north during . j prim health care. ; ( ): – . . miller r, young j, nixon g, et al. study protocol for an observational study to evaluate an accelerated chest pain pathway using point-of-care troponin in new zealand rural and primary care populations. j prim health care. ; ( ): – . . turin tc, chowdhury n, ferdous m, et al. primary care access barriers faced by immigrant populations in their host countries: a systematic review protocol aiming to construct a conceptual framework using root cause analysis to capture ‘what leads to what’. j prim health care. ; ( ): – . . al-busaidi is. impact of an intercalated research degree on general practice careers: a matched cohort study. j prim health care. ; ( ): – . . liaw w, bazemore aw, ewigman b, et al. advancing bibliometric assessment of research productivity: an analysis of us departments of family medicine. j prim health care. ; ( ): – . editorial editorial journal of primary health care https://www.thefreedictionary.com/pivoting https://www.thefreedictionary.com/pivoting http://dx.doi.org/ . /hcv n _ed http://dx.doi.org/ . /hc . tumilty e, doolan-noble f, latu atfl, et al. ‘a balancing act’. living with severe chronic obstructive pulmonary disease in southern new zealand: a qualitative study. j prim health care. ; ( ): – . . reynolds an, moodie i, venn b, mann j. how do we support walking prescriptions for type diabetes management? facilitators and barriers following a -month prescription. j prim health care. ; ( ): – . . zakaria a, gill j, nishi lm, et al. soccer player with unusual right shoulder and arm pain and swelling. j prim health care. ; ( ): – . . jordan v. coronavirus (covid- ): remote care through telehealth. j prim health care. ; ( ): – . . martini n. vitamin d. j prim health care. ; ( ): – . editorial editorial journal of primary health care chained in silence: black women and convict labor in the new south book review chained in silence: black women and convict labor in the new south talitha l. leflouria, university of north carolina press, chapel hill, , pp., isbn: - - - - , $ . (hbk) the publication of talitha leflouria’s chained in silence is both timely and necessary. given the increase in both activist and scholarly attention to the rise of the carceral state in america, this volume deploys an intersectional lens that has been, until relatively recently, notably absent. the emergence of the black lives matter movement, with its emphasis on the interplay between race, class, gender and sexuality, speaks to the ways in which the experiences of african american women have been marginalised, particularly in relation to issues of police brutality and the prison industrial complex. the #sayhername campaign has developed precisely because of the silencing of women’s experiences in the present. covering the immediate post-emancipation period up until the early s, leflouria’s insistence on naming and remembering african american female convicts within the historical narrative is a powerful reclaiming of the past—it is an insistence that black women’s lives mattered then as well as now. leflouria’s research engages with a rich array of source material including police and courthouse records, commission reports, physicians’ accounts, clemency applications, personal papers, business records and census data. importantly, she also includes a number of photographic illustrations, an image of female convict mattie crawford notable among them, so that the book not only gives voice to these women but also visibility. chapter grounds the reader in an understanding of prevailing ideas of both gender and race, and in particular the pathologisation of black criminality that had its roots in the slavery-era and was refined in the post- emancipation period. emerging in a time in which scientific racism was coupled with the financial incentives offered by the ability to reinstate forms of unfree labour for those convicted of a criminal offense, leflouria deftly shifts between the economic and ideological impetus for the establishment of the convict leasing system in the wake of the abolition of slavery. chapter offers a comprehensive account of the different forms of work the women were compelled to undertake, including work in brick and broom manufacturing, mining, agriculture, the lumber industry, on the railroads and domestic labour. interestingly, she argues that the lack of gender differentiation in the earliest convict leasing programmes afforded women access to areas of the labour market from which they would have been traditionally excluded, for example, skilled trades like blacksmithing. chapter charts the shift away from private commercial mixed-gender convict leasing into more regulated single-sex prison camps. this, she argues, created gender- segregated spaces that conformed to a greater degree with prison reformers’ codes of christian morality. it also provided the first steps towards what we would now recognise as the modern penal system. from the days of slavery, agricultural work had long since been characterised as feminist review ( – ) � the feminist review collective. - / www.feminist-review.com the proper form of labour for african american women. chapter charts the rise of the prison state farm, which forcibly returned african american women to the plantation fields of georgia. the final chapter documents the most common form of female prison labour: the chain gang. the trauma of this intensive labour regime is detailed unflinchingly as leflouria recounts the terrible physical and psychological cost of maintaining productivity. personal stories are central to the book’s narrative style; the reader is introduced to a cast of different women who, despite being subsumed into a system designed to negate their subjectivity, are reanimated through leflouria’s determination to represent them as individuals. one of the most affecting moments within the text is a table drawn up showing punishments of female convicts at georgia state prison farm (pp. – ). the table is accompanied by an image of a confinement chamber or ‘sweat box’—a tool used to physically and emotionally control and contain the women. the table introduces the women by name and asks the reader to consider the nature of their ‘offense’ in relation to the grueling punishments they received. articulating both resistance and retribution, the table functions as a literary memorial to the personal suffering of the inmates. it is these, and other, precise personal accounts of women’s lives, labour and deaths that offer the reader intimate insight into the operations of class, race and gender as a lived experience. the issue of sexual abuse is threaded throughout the text, highlighting the gendered terror inflicted on african american women in the penal system. leflouria is particularly concerned with what she describes as the issue of defeminisation, ‘the demeaning assault on black femininity, through dress and labour’ (p. ). this process, she argues, was designed to exclude african american women from the ‘cult of true womanhood’ making them more vulnerable to sexual violence through a denial of the gendered norms that applied to white women. the levels of sexual exploitation experienced by convict women leads her to revisit orlando patterson’s notion of ‘social death’ under slavery, reconfiguring it for convict women as ‘social rape’ (pp. - ). this, she argues, was the attempt to erase identity through oppression, disempowerment and humiliation—an erasure that leflouria insists could never be fully completed because convict women maintained a sense of self through everyday forms of resistance. her discussion of rape, pregnancy and child-rearing raises important issues as to the gendered difference between slavery and convict labour. rejecting the idea that the system was simply ‘slavery by another name’, leflouria argues convincingly that for women the loss in value of their reproductive labour meant that the penal system was in some ways worse. without the financial gains to be made through the replenishment of the workforce (as under slavery), those who leased convicts had no incentive to support these women’s children. this resulted in appalling levels of neglect, disease and death as the women were forced to maintain their productivity levels at the expense of nurturing their children. there has been an upsurge of scholarly interest in the relationship between slavery and american capitalism in recent years (see johnson, ; baptist, ; beckert, ). whilst these texts pose some problems for leflouria’s periodisation of modernity, they also provide a strong basis upon which to make broader claims for the role of african american labour in the making of the industrial new south. in combination, this body of work underscores the racialised and gendered contours of american capitalism. chained in silence disrupts the narrative shift from slavery to emancipation, highlighting the precarious nature of freedom for african americans. leflouria’s work reminds the reader that even today, unfree labour continues to sit on a spectrum rather than existing in an absolute binary. book review feminist review references baptist, e., . the half has never been told: slavery and the making of american capitalism. new york: basic books. beckert, s., . empire of cotton: a new history of global capitalism. london: allen lane. johnson, w., . river of dark dreams: slavery and empire in the cotton kingdom. london: harvard university press. katie donington university of nottingham doi: . /s - - - feminist review book review 	chained in silence: black women and convict labor in the new south 	talitha l. leflouria, university of north carolina press, chapel hill, , pp., isbn: - - - - , $ . (hbk) 	references woman as a category / new woman hybridity copas—current objectives of postgraduate american studies issue . ( ) editorial paula von gleich, marius henderson, jasmin humburg, julia lange, mariya nikolova, and samira spatzek “i always start out with an idea, even a boring idea, that becomes a question i don't have answers to.” — toni morrison “the best way to work across boundaries is to refuse to believe in them.” — fred moten introduction, or: “i always start out with an idea” last year’s postgraduate forum (pgf) of the german association for american studies (gaas) took place from october – , , at the university of hamburg. in , the pgf was not only jointly hosted by doctoral students of the university of bremen and the univer- sity of hamburg; it also returned finally to northern germany. this issue of copas—current objectives of postgraduate american studies contains a selection of contributions emerging from the annual pgf conference, each article reflecting current debates and concerns in postgraduate american studies in germany. all in all, fifty-seven young americanists—speakers, chairs, auditors, and organizers—from all over germany as well as three young scholars from austrian universities attended the pgf in hamburg. during the three-day conference, twenty-eight of them presented their current research among peers. our call for papers had invited contributions from all the various disciplines and fields that american studies in germany consists of and we arranged the presentations into seven topical panels of four papers each. the conference showcased the broad thematic scope of scholarly work conducted by young americanists in germany. ranging from topics like “reading against the grain” and “tradition and dissent” over “spaces and movement,” “bodies and speculative fictions,” and “writing lives,” to “moving morrison, toni. conversations. edited by carolyn c. denard, univ. of mississippi p, , p. . moten, fred. interview by doni shepard. lunchticket, http://lunchticket.org/fred-moten-poet/. accessed may . http://lunchticket.org/fred-moten-poet/ copas—current objectives of postgraduate american studies issue . ( ) images: tv and film” and “mediality and perception,” each panel attested to the vibrant ‘knowledgescapes’ of postgraduate american studies research. apart from these topical panels, we organized the “pgf café” during which the conference participants discussed career opportunities within and outside of academia with six distinguished experts, thus continuing the previous efforts of the bamberg/bayreuth team to put this topic on the pgf’s agenda. the pgf also invited the postgraduates to participate in two social events, both of which were attended and greeted with enthusiastic responses: the opening of an exhibition of pop art paintings at the amerikazentrum hamburg and a guided performative tour about the colonial legacies of the university of hamburg. in this way, the annual pgf conference not only provided a platform to both generate and share knowledge among peers, it also offered young scholars a shared space to discuss how to navigate the academic landscape more generally—notions that both the president of the gaas, prof. dr. carmen birkle, and the u.s. consul general, richard yoneoka, addressed in their opening statements for the conference. in the face of an increasing competition in academia the pgf acts as a venue for both earnest and rigorous intellectual exchange and networking among peers, fostered by an atmosphere of mutual support and solidarity. the issue’s contributions at a glance together with the copas editors, we edited this issue containing extended and revised contributions from nine speakers of last year’s pgf conference. following the pgf tradition, we did not set a thematic focus but invited papers from all fields within american studies. the present issue thus reflects a broad range of topics and provides a glimpse into current research by emerging young scholars from various fields of american studies: from digital media studies, gender studies, and aging studies to life writing studies, social movement studies, and more. in her article “the function of form, fiction, and faith in elisabeth elliot’s life writing” mareike zapp probes the function of faith in us-american missionary elisabeth elliot’s life writing. she compares elliot’s autobiographical novel no graven image ( ) with her memoir these strange ashes ( ) and journals. with this comparative analysis, she shows that elliot’s autobiographical novel no graven image deploys spirituality as a means to negotiate processes of identity constitution on multiple levels. this also encompasses the struggle of the ‘authoring i’ in becoming a writer. the second article of this issue also focuses on life writing. in “resisting xenophobia: transatlantic mobility and aleksandar hemon’s immigrant autobiography the book of my lives” elvira bolanca-lowman shows how copas—current objectives of postgraduate american studies issue . ( ) hemon’s autobiographical writing belongs to a lesser known archive of u.s. (im)migrant writing that may counter anti-immigrant rhetoric in europe and the united states as well as diversify american conceptions of the self and the other. nicole schneider’s “black protest on the streets: visual activism and the aesthetic politics of black lives matter” connects state-of-the-art research on the role of blackness in conceptu- alizations of what it means to be human with scholarship on aesthetic politics and visuality. the article analyzes instances of visual activism and discusses not only the aesthetics but also the ethics of the movement for black lives in the united states. questions of visuality are also of major concern to the next article, primarily in the form of conceptualizations and representations of visual perception. in her article “‘perceptions and their mutability’ in siri hustvedt’s works” diana wagner illuminates the theoretical premises which underlie literary representations of visual and other modes of perception in siri hustvedt’s works. wagner’s article interweaves discussions of conceptualizations of perception—in hustvedt’s non-fictional essays as well as in contemporary and historical cognitive science, psychology, and philosophy—with elucidating close readings of hustvedt’s fictional works. notions of time and/or technology form the common thread of the next four articles. julia velten delves into the ways in which age is a cultural construct in her article “‘extreme forms of aging:’ the case of sam berns.” by analyzing the depiction of the aging disorder progeria in the hbo documentary life according to sam, she explores the nexus between aging studies and disability studies. in “reading time travel in octavia e. butler’s kindred as sankofa,” alena cicholewski puts science fiction into conversation with the akan concept of sankofa to negotiate whether physically returning to antebellum slavery can heal the wounds that history inflected upon the novel’s african american protagonist. in “the struggle of being alive: laboring bodies in paolo bacigalupi’s the windup girl,” juliane straetz then discusses biotechnology and the marxist question of how value is created through work by reading the android in bacigalupi’s novel as an allegory of the laborer in globalized capitalism. technological visions unite and reassess past and future in kristina baudemann’s article entitled “seeds of a future world: science and technology in the digital art of elizabeth lapensée.” by introducing a visual language in her artwork to both express and to mediate traditional stories and indigenous scientific literacies over and against colonial representations of science and technologies, baudemann argues that lapensée establishes her artistic production as decolonial practice and as a way to imagine different, decolonial futures, respectively. the issue closes with alina schumacher’s article “disenfranchised mothers and maternity insurance: tracing progressive arguments in ernest hemingway’s short stories,” in which copas—current objectives of postgraduate american studies issue . ( ) schumacher explores how contemporaneous progressive discourses inform representations of mother figures and maternity in hemingway’s short stories “a canary for one” and “hills like white elephants.” re-reading those stories through the lens of reformist arguments, she contends, allows us to reassess the extent to which these texts negotiated topics such as women’s disenfranchisement. by way of conclusion, or: “the best way to work across boundaries is to refuse to believe in them” thematic openness and the work across disciplinary boundaries, as reflected by all of this issue’s pieces, has been one of the distinguishing features of the pgf ever since its inception and it has since enabled as many young scholars as possible from all fields of american studies to present and discuss their research among peers in a supportive setting. this tradition will continue in the years to come: this year’s pgf will be hosted in berlin by a team consisting of ph.d. candidates affiliated with humboldt university and the free uni- versity of berlin. in , the pgf will take place in the ruhr area organized by doctoral students from technical university of dortmund, ruhr university bochum, and the univer- sity of duisburg-essen. we are delighted to pass on the pgf responsibilities to these two excellent teams, wishing them all the best. we look forward to continued discussions among young americanists on crucial and topical issues in and beyond our disciplines. we are very grateful to the gaas for the financial aid and continued support of the pgf. the gaas’s generous funding made the pgf conference possible and allowed young scholars to convene in hamburg. the pgf was also kindly and generously sponsored by the univer- sity of hamburg’s institute of english and american studies and the university of bremen’s department of languages and literatures. we would like to express our deepest gratitude to prof. dr. susanne rohr and prof. dr. astrid böger (university of hamburg) as well as to prof. dr. sabine broeck (university of bremen), who encouraged us to embark on the adventure of jointly organizing the pgf conference from the very beginning. we received further funding and support from the u.s. consulate general hamburg, the ica e.v., the hamburgi- sche wissenschaftliche stiftung, the amerikazentrum hamburg, and the publishing houses peter lang and winter verlag, whom we would like to thank cordially as well. finally, we feel that all conference participants, regardless of the particular stages of their projects, and the contributors to this copas issue strongly benefitted from both, the post- graduate forum and the joint venture of working on this issue, respectively. the lively discussions that started during the panel sessions, extended over coffee, lunch, and dinner, and continued even beyond the conference in the networks that these young scholars copas—current objectives of postgraduate american studies issue . ( ) formed during their time in hamburg have found their way into this issue. we would like to thank not only the copas editorial team for working so diligently with us on the essays but also all contributors for their intellectual labor, contemplation, and patience with the editing process. this copas issue shows that postgraduate american studies in germany is alive, up, and running. it’s been a pleasure and an honor! june , paula von gleich, samira spatzek (university of bremen) mariya nikolova (university of potsdam) marius henderson, jasmin humburg, julia lange (university of hamburg) asr_ .. editors’ introduction structural racism, whiteness, and the african studies review like many people over the past months, we have spent time reflecting on our own racism and the racist structures which we inhabit and recreate. in the wake of the horrific public murder of george floyd by minneapolis police officers, the murder of breonna taylor by police in louisville, kentucky, the startling videoed lynching of ahmaud arbery in atlanta by white suburban- ites, the death of adama traoré in police custody in paris, and the impunity following these and countless other killings of black americans, diasporic africans, and african migrants almost too numerous to list, there has been an outpouring of grief and anger. we stand in solidarity with black communities around the world. black lives matter. as a premier journal of african studies, we also must make it our motto: black voices matter. almost two years have passed since the then-president of the african studies association (asa) jean allman delivered a damning account of the history of institutional racism within the structural apparatuses of the asa [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msb_n ly vy&t]. allman’s research revealed how, since its very foundation, african-american members were first marginalized, then displaced from the asa; how african participation was discounted and dismissed; and how specific institutions, such as the hallowed prizes, routinely overlooked or ignored the contributions of people of color, while simultaneously honoring egregious perpetrators of racist exclusivity. allman invited former members who quit the asa in the s to hear and respond to her reevaluation. the print version [https://doi.org/ . / asr. . ] of allman’s keynote is one of our most read and cited articles in recent years. it is a poignant reminder that, even today, the asa and its institutions can be for many scholars of color an unfriendly and unwelcoming space. there is indeed much “unfinished business,” from , from earlier, and certainly from the present. it also reminds us that it is very difficult to break free from the structures that produce us. we are well situated to african studies review, volume , number (september ), pp. – © the author(s), . published by cambridge university press on behalf of the african studies association doi: . /asr. . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=msb_n ly vyt https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . acknowledge the pervasiveness of racism and white supremacy in our socie- ties, in academia, and in the publishing world. in its various iterations, the asr has been hosted by a number of institutions, beginning at northwestern university, then moving to the uni- versity of california, berkeley, and the hoover institution at stanford uni- versity, then boston university, michigan state university, the university of florida, the university of southern california, and more recently, the five colleges. the asr has a long history of privileging white and predominantly male anglophone voices. since its foundation as the bulletin of the asa in by melville herskovits, the journal has had fourteen editors, all white amer- icans. the sole exception was the ghanaian anthropologist maxwell owusu, who served as associate editor for two years in the early s. it was not until that scholars from african institutions appeared on the editorial board. for three years, s. a. aluko at the university of ife and taye gulilat at haile selassie i university served on the editorial board. between and , however, no african scholar was part of the team, and the editorial board was subsequently disbanded. when it was reconstituted in the new millennium, an african and africa-based presence was restored to the journal supervision. insofar as the asr is one of the key asa institutions, a reevaluation of the racial dynamics of the journal’s operations is long overdue. as we look back at the emergence of the asr as a key voice in african studies, we recognize errors, erasures, and racism as consubstantial to the history of asr. and we take responsibility for the ways that the journal is part of the deep-seated problem of whiteness and anti-black racism occupying african studies. for almost sixty years, it has been led almost exclusively by white voices. informed by this current climate of personal and national reckoning, the asr will be instituting a number of new initiatives and reforms to our operations over the next few months. the editorial collective will appoint a taskforce of prominent african studies scholars to investigate institutional racial bias in the asr and its predecessor publications, and specifically to document the participation and exclusion of african american and african voices in the production of scholarly knowledge, while developing strategies and actions to combat racism, institutional bias, and other inequalities of access to power and visibility within african studies. particular attention will be paid to the deeply racist undertones of disciplinary methodologies in any projects of democra- tization of knowledge production. this taskforce will operate autonomously to document the scope of voices of people of african descent within the journal. from an affirmative perspective, will mark the first year of two new prizes, celebrating african studies anthologies/edited volumes and doctoral dissertations completed at african institutions. starting in january , we will have a new position, that of deputy editor, the latest installment in a set of initiatives to decenter the power of single individuals that began three years ago with the creation of the editorial collective [https://doi.org/ . / asr. . ]. in the immediate term, the incoming deputy editor will african studies review https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . supervise the day-to-day operations of the article review process, tasked with identifying which articles to subject to external peer review, creating assign- ments for the eight associate editors, and overseeing internal communica- tions and management of the editorial team. over the medium term, the deputy editor role will serve as the training ground for the future editor-in- chief, to ensure a seamless transition. with these innovations, we think the long-term future of the asr is bright. when the editorship transitioned in , the asr was struggling, because universities, both public and private, were no longer willing to subsidize the costs of production. no university provides financial support to the journal or its operations any longer. the older model is dead. the proposal offered to the asa board was one that entailed a team of scholars, large enough to provide diversity and representation, but also able to permit individual scholars to continue with our own scholarship and not to become completely consumed with journal activities. the proposal embodied a hope that a new model could also generate changes in the types of articles, broaden the types of scholars submitting, and deepen the journal’s engagement with scholars on the african continent. the current editor-in-chief position runs until , at which time we look forward to seeing the journal led for the first time by a scholar of african descent. by , we hope to see half the team comprising scholars based on the continent. before the next transition, it is our goal to ensure that the composition of the editorial review board, the team of associate editors, and the teams of book review and film review editors more accurately reflect the demographic composition of the asa membership and its deep investment in the future of african studies. editors of the african studies review and african editorial involvement ➢ – : melville herskovits (northwestern university), editor of the bulletin of the asa with margaret bates (goddard college) for asa news & notes. ➢ – : david brokensha (uc berkeley) & peter duignan (hoover insti- tution) with “overseas correspondents” bulletin of asa. ➢ – : norman bennett (at boston university) with an all-white, mostly male editorial board, renamed african studies bulletin. ➢ – : john p. henderson (michigan state university), editor of african studies review with two associate editors, james hooker and daniel g. matthews; maxwell owusu joined in ; first africa-based appointments to “advisory editorial board” in , s. a. aluko at univ. of ife, and taye gulilat at haile sallassie i university. ➢ – : alan k. smith (syracuse university), editor, with evelyn jones rich and hans panofsky as associate editors; no african institutions represented on “editorial board.” ➢ – : r. hunt davis, jr., (university of florida), editor, with melvin page as associate editor; editorial board all based in u.s., including african scholars; mid- s, when frank salamone replaced page as associate editor ➢ – : carole b. thompson (university of southern california), editor, with mark delancey as associate editor; no african institutions on editorial board. editors’ introduction ➢ – : mark delancey (university of southern california), with susan dicklich as assistant editor; editorial board disbanded. ➢ – : ralph faulkingham (university of massachusetts) and mitzi goheen (amherst college) as editors; first film review editor, samba gadjigo ( – ). ➢ – : ralph faulkingham, editor, and mitzi goheen as co-editor, film review editor, patrick mensah; recreated editorial board included african scholars. ➢ : ralph faulkingham and mitzi goheen, sean redding (amherst college) and elliot fratkin (smith college). ➢ – : mitzi goheen, sean redding, and elliot fratkin. ➢ – : sean redding and elliot fratkin; cajetan iheka (university of alabama) joined as film review editor. african studies review editorial collective the september issue of the african studies review showcases splendid new research from across the continent, with particular attention to côte d’ivoire, guinea, kenya, liberia, namibia, nigeria, senegal, south africa, tanzania, uganda, and zimbabwe. we are pleased to offer engaging disciplinary and interdisciplinary scholarship, from history, anthropology, linguistics, political science,museumstudies,geography,andfood securitystudies,and thecollected contributions involve a global assemblage of contributors from zimbabwe, nigeria, germany, south africa, belgium, canada, and the united states. we are very pleased to offer a specially commissioned commentary on the covid- pandemic and its relationship to food insecurity in sub- saharan africa [https://doi.org/ . /asr. . ], along with a forum exploring refugee history and african studies [https://doi.org/ . / asr. . ]. this sequence of five articles examines historical and contem- porary refugee trajectories across the continent and beyond. we are also gratified to bring you a number of thoughtful reviews of new books and films. as always, we deeply appreciate the anonymous reviewers of the articles appearing in this issue, along with the many scholars who have volunteered their time authoring book and film reviews. we open this issue with a timely commentary. in “the vulnerability and resilience of african food systems, food security and nutrition in the context of the covid- pandemic” [https://doi.org/ . / asr. . ], editorial review board member bill moseley and his south african colleague jane battersby examine the consequences of the current crisis for well-being and sustainability in sub-saharan africa. food insecurity is an enduring concern among african scholars, and the availabil- ity, access, utilization, and stability of food systems speaks to the broader impact of disease and disease-response. we begin the scholarly articles with a pair of essays reflecting on indig- enous expression of culture and meaning. the first article, by coleman donaldson, reexamines the ajami writing and n’ko in west africa. in “the role of islam, ajami writings, and educational reform in sulemaana kantè’s african studies review https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . n’ko” [https://doi.org/ . /asr. . ], donaldson identifies the renewed attention to ajami to be part of an intellectual move beyond colonial archives. he brings ajami—african languages written in arabic script—into conversation with kantè’s manding-language publications using the n’ko script, a vehicle for afro-muslim vernacular thought. the second article in our volume was awarded the asa graduate student paper prize in . victoria gorham’s “displaying the nation: museums and nation-building in tanzania and kenya” [https://doi.org/ . / asr. . ] explores the construction of national narratives in state-run museums and the links between museum organization and nationalist ped- agogy in east africa. states employ museums to articulate a national vision, and a critical reflection on exhibit contents speaks to the divergence between the national trajectories of kenya and tanzania. the third article continues our focus on east africa, as the anthropolo- gist lydia boyd investigates uganda’s touring orphan choirs. in “circuits of compassion: the affective labor of uganda’s christian orphan choirs” [https://doi.org/ . /asr. . ], boyd highlights the dependent modalities of charity, and the underlying moral economies of humanitarian affect. she finds that choir participants and acolytes conceive of dependency and indebtedness differently, pointing to the broader global inequalities inherent in care-based humanitarian endeavors. mario krämer’s essay entitled “violence, autochthony, and identity politics in kwazulu-natal (south africa): a processual perspective on local political dynamics” [https://doi.org/ . /asr. . ] turns to the uptick in political violence in the ethekwini municipality in the southeastern province. krämer advocates for a processual understanding of local dynamics of violence and reveals how exclusionary identities are mobilized, fomenting conflict around notes of autochthony and community belonging. the final five articles comprise a forum on african refugee histories, convened and introduced [https://doi.org/ . /asr. . ] by chris- tian williams, partly in response to liisa malkki’s call for a “radically histor- icizing” approach to refugees and displacement—an approach that “insists on acknowledging not only human suffering but also narrative authority, historical agency, and political memory” (malkki : ). the first two articles focus on child refuge. bonny ibhawoh takes us to the short-lived republic of biafra and the nigerian civil war of – . in “refugees, evacuees, and repatriates: biafran children, the unhcr, and the politics of international humanitarianism in the nigerian civil war” [https://doi.org/ . /asr. . ], ibhawoh offers his case study as a guiding example of post-colonial moral interventionism and a new form of human rights politics. over , children were evacuated from biafra to neighboring countries and beyond, with the context of wider humanitarian relief efforts. ibhawoh reveals how state interests and interventionist politics created new categories and frameworks as they classified displaced children. the second article in the forum, by christian a. williams, is a biograph- ical study of exile within the wider circuits of refuge in decolonizing southern editors’ introduction https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . africa. in “swapo’s struggle children and exile home-making: the refugee biography of mawazo nakadhilu” [https://doi.org/ . /asr. . ], williams examines the life of a former refugee born to namibian-tanzanian parents in exile in . nakadhilu’s life illuminates the exilic experience, and in particular debates over forced removal and repatriation among exiled liberation communities. the third and fourth essays direct our attention to contemporary itera- tions of refugee identity and historical invocations of migration and displace- ment. in “imagining zimbabwe as home: ethnicity, violence and migration” [https://doi.org/ . /asr. . ], duduzile ndlovu moves beyond the economic migrant/asylum seeker binary to reveal the shifting contours of migration narratives. ndlovu examines how zimbabwean migrants in johan- nesburg memorialize the gukurahundi. remembrances of the post- independence massacres of ndebele people by zimbabwean military in the s contributed both to the formation of formal opposition parties and to the rise in xenophobic violence in south africa, all part of broader contes- tations over national and ethnic identities. maarten bedert’s study of an ivorian refugee community in contemporary liberia zeroes in on tensions embodied in the status attached by displacement. in “refugees, identity, and the limits to inclusion: revisiting landlord- stranger reciprocity relations in contemporary liberia” [https://doi.org/ . /asr. . ], bedert finds that refugees need to articulate a narrative of belonging in order to generate security. refugees from the ivorian civil wars of the first decade of the millennium struggle to navigate landlord- stranger relationships against the bureaucratic refugee identity imposed by global humanitarian discourse. while reciprocity and mutual recognition are the ideal, strangers sense their security stems from what they have to offer their landlords. the final essay in the forum, by katherine luongo, zooms out to consider the reception of african refugees beyond the continent. in “‘the problem of witchcraft’: violence and the supernatural in global african refugee mobil- ities” [https://doi.org/ . /asr. . ], luongo revisits the familiar terrain of witchcraft violence but from the new angle of the refugee category known as the “particular social group.” refugee status determination tri- bunals in canada and australia now regularly hear and deliberate claims of witchcraft violence, which speaks to the importance of cultural knowledge and training for refugee adjudicators. benjamin lawrance university of arizona references malkki, liisa h. . “speechless emissaries: refugees, humanitarianism, and dehistoricisation.” cultural anthropology ( ): – . african studies review https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . 	editors’ introduction 	structural racism, whiteness, and the african studies review s jra .. epidemiology and infection cambridge.org/hyg original paper cite this article: le td, bosworth m, ledlow g, le tt, bell j, singh kp ( ). influences of reopening businesses and social venues: covid- incidence rate in east texas county. epidemiology and infection , e , – . https://doi.org/ . /s received: november revised: december accepted: january key words: covid- ; economic reopening; rural health; sars-cov- author for correspondence: tuan d. le, e-mail: tuan.le@uthct.edu © the author(s), . published by cambridge university press. this is an open access article, distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. influences of reopening businesses and social venues: covid- incidence rate in east texas county tuan d. le , , michele bosworth , , , gerald ledlow , tony t. le , jeffrey bell and karan p. singh department of epidemiology and biostatistics, school of community and rural health, the university of texas health science center at tyler, tyler, texas, usa; u.s. army institute of surgical research, jbsa-fort sam houston, san antonio, texas, usa; center for population health, analytics and quality advancement, school of community and rural health, the university of texas health science center at tyler, tyler, texas, usa; department of healthcare policy, economics and management, school of community and rural health, the university of texas health science center at tyler, tyler, texas, usa and department of family medicine, the university of texas health science center at tyler, tyler, texas, usa abstract as the on-going severe acute respiratory syndrome coronavirus pandemic, we aimed to understand whether economic reopening (erop) significantly influenced coronavirus disease (covid- ) incidence. covid- data from texas health and human services between march and august were analysed. covid- incidence rate (cases per population) was compared to statewide for selected urban and rural counties. we used joinpoint regression analysis to identify changes in trends of covid- incidence and inter- rupted time-series analyses for potential impact of state erop orders on covid- inci- dence. we found that the incidence rate increased to . % ( % ci . – . %) through th april, decreased by . % ( % ci − . − . %) between th april and th may, increased by . % ( % ci . – . %) between st may and th july and decreased by . % ( % ci − . − . %) after july . the study demonstrates the erop policies significantly impacted trends in covid- incidence rates and accounted for increases of . and . cases per populations for the - or -week model, respectively, along with other county and state reopening ordinances. the incidence rate decreased sharply after th july considering the emphasis on a facemask or covering requirement in business and social settings. introduction coronavirus disease (covid- ) caused by severe acute respiratory syndrome corona- virus (sars-cov- ) is an on-going pandemic. the first covid- case in the u.s. was detected on january in washington state and was traced to wuhan, china where ini- tial cases were reported [ , ]. covid- cases have increased exponentially with human-to-human transmission mode in close unprotected contacts [ , ]. as of august it has infected more than million people and killed more than thousand patients globally [ ]. in the u.s., approximately million confirmed cases and more than thousand deaths have been reported since the first u.s. covid- outbreak [ ]. non-pharmaceutical interventions such as early detection and quarantines, travel bans or movement management and restriction on public gatherings, have been reported as effective strategies to prevent or reduce covid- transmission for ‘flatten the curve’ of the pandemic in the outbreak in china and other countries at risk globally [ , – ]. social distancing has been implemented in most states since march and was found to decrease the spread of sars-cov- [ – ]. however, a two-phased reopening of economies was implemented in most states in mid-may , leading to lifting of social distancing requirements that impacted covid- incidence rates [ , ]. reopening businesses during the coronavirus (covid- ) pandemic poses a challenge due to the need for widespread con- tainment and resurgence mitigation strategies [ , ]. however, influence of each phased ‘economic reopening’ on covid- incidence rates along with influence of other events such as those that prompt large gatherings (‘black lives matter’ protests and th july weekend celebrations) along with mask mandates have not been evaluated. the changes of social, political, health and financial activities provide the context of impact on community concordance or attention to guidance intended to reduce the virus spread. it is impossible to remove the fabric of life from the pandemic; decisions are made by individuals, groups, communities and society as a whole in that pluralistic reality. the goal of this study https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/hyg https://doi.org/ . /s mailto:tuan.le@uthct.edu http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://orcid.org/ - - - https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog?doi= . /s &domain=pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core was to analyse pandemic incidence within the construct of com- munity concordance. a simple definition of the construct is community concordance = environmental factors (includes policy, law, enforcement, social norms, social issues etc…) + discip- line/fatigue + group adherence to non-pharmaceutical mitigation or interventions + individual adherence to non-pharmaceutical mitiga- tion or intervention. therefore, higher community concordance should reduce covid- infection rates, whereas less concordance increases infection loads. according to well-published cdc guid- ance, non-pharmaceutical interventions include: ( ) social distan- cing of six feet minimum; ( ) social load (density) that negates larger group gatherings; ( ) individual utilisation of face coverings and ( ) individual responsibility for frequent hand hygiene accord- ing to cdc guidance. disproportionally, covid- studies have been conducted in large populations such as multiple countries, country and urban populations [ ], but not a rural or semi-rural region. therefore, in this study we examined trends and influence of policies or non- pharmaceutical interventions on trends of covid- incidence in a semi-rural county, smith county, with comparisons to statewide trends of texas and other selected urban and rural counties: dallas, tarrant, denton, travis, harris, bexar and galveston. smith county, a semi-rural county in northeast texas, reported its first covid- case on march [ ]. methods patient population the study was a population-based county-level time-series ana- lysis of all residents of smith county, texas between march and august . smith county is basically rural with a small city, tyler, in the centre of the county; semi-rural would be a reasonable designation. publicly available data on covid- consisting of the total number of cases, recovered cases and dead cases for smith county and other comparative counties were extracted from the websites of the texas health and human services (dshs) covid- data [ ] and standar- dised new confirmed covid- cases to county population using the u.s. census bureau data for smith county with an estimated population of persons based on u.s. census on july [ ]. this study was exempted from review by the institution review board of the university of texas health science center at tyler, texas, because the data for this analysis was obtained from a pub- licly available source. study definitions economic reopening phase on may (erop ; week ) [ , ] and phase between may and may (erop ; week ) [ , ] are used as independent variables to investigate whether these policies influenced trends in covid- incidence during the covid- pandemic period from initiation until august . the primary measure of interest was the incidence rate of the covid- defined as number of covid- cases per person-week between march and august ( weeks) with numerators defined by the number of new covid- cases in the respective calendar weeks and denominators by the total population at risk in the corresponding week. the inci- dence rate reflects all ages of the u.s. standard population. statistical analysis data on covid- were used to describe covid- incidence and trends in a semi-rural county and compared to other rural and urban counties in texas during the pandemic period. descriptive analysis was performed using chi-square test for asso- ciation of demographics and covid- distributions. we graphed the average number of new covid- cases daily and weekly; with an estimated incidence rate by gender, race and age groups in the smith county population. we also performed visual comparison trajectories in incidence rates between smith county, other counties and texas as aggregate. temporal trends in covid- incidence rate were evaluated using a joinpoint regression analysis (joinpoint trend analysis software version . . . , april ; surveillance, epidemiology and end results program, national cancer institute) [ ]. joinpoint regression was used to calculate the weekly percentage change (wpc) and fitted to estimate average weekly changes (awpc) to identify joinpoints at which significant changes in trends in covid- incidence occurred during the pandemic period studied. the logarithmic transformation of the covid- incidence was applied and the heteroscedastic errors option was assumed as standard errors. we also estimated % confidence intervals (cis) for each estimate of wpc and awpc and investi- gated whether the wpc for each segment and awpc for overall differed significantly from zero. to assess the change in covid- incidence, we conducted an interrupted time-series analysis (itsa). it is useful and well- known as a simple quasi-experimental design used for evaluating the effect of a defined intervention on an outcome of interest when randomised control trial data are not available. itsa was applied using the following segmented regression model for the outcome defined as trends in incidence of covid- after each intervention [erop (estimated as week of may– may ) and erop (estimated week as week of may– june )] and their synergistic effect. for effect of each inter- vention, the segmented regression analyses were as adapted [ , ]. influence of erop or erop on covid- incidence is described as a change in the level and slope as follows: for sin- gle intervention, erop , covid- incidence rate is (yt =ratet)=b +b weekt +b erop t +b erop t∗weekt + to evaluate influence of independent variable (xi) erop on trend in the covid- incidence after each phase implemented. the yt is the outcome. the β represents an intercept or starting level where time = , β is a change in covid- incidence asso- ciated with an increase of each week in pre-intervention. the β is the level change after erop implemented, and β indicates the slope change or the change in trend between the implementation of erop and erop . the post-intervention trend after introdu- cing of erop or absolute effect of a single intervention of the outcome is calculated as β + β . ϵ is a random error. for additional intervention of erop , the above equation is modified to calculate effect of each single and synergistic effect of erop and erop accordingly as follows: covid- rate = β + β weekt + β erop t + β erop t *week t + β erop t + β erop t *week t + ϵt. the β erop t + β erop t*week t represent the additional intervention (erop ). thus, β represents change in level of tuan d. le et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core covid- rate immediately following the erop , and β indi- cates the difference slopes of covid- rate between the erop and the erop . β indicates the change in covid- incidence rate per week in the pre-intervention segment; the difference trend between pre-erop and the erop trend (β ); the differ- ence trend between the erop and erop (β ); the erop trend was calculated as (β + β ); the erop trend was calculated as (β + β + β ); the difference between the erop and the pre-erop trend was calculated as (β + β ). to estimate the effect of the synergistic effect of the two inter- ventions, we estimated absolute effect of these erop(s) in two models: model for the entire study period ( march– august ) and model for the study period up to week of ( march– july ) when the covid- incidence reaches a peak at week ( july– july ). cumby −huizinga test was also used for autocorrelation and lag = was defined. the series had a unit root defined as more than trend in the series by using an augmented dickey−fuller test. statistical significance was determined at the p < . level. analyses were conducted in stata version (statacorp lp, college station, tx, usa). results patient population between march and august , covid- cases, including confirmed cases were reported, accounting for . % of the smith county population or cumulative incidence rate of . (confirmed + probable) or . (confirmed) cases per residents (table ). a higher incident rate of covid- cases was observed in females than males, . vs. . cases per persons (p < . ). highest incidence rate of covid- was observed in hispanic ( . cases), followed by black ( . cases), then white ( . cases) and asian popu- lation ( . cases) per person-week (p < . ; table ). table . overall demographics and covid- patient characteristics smith county covid- casesa incidence rate p-value no. (%) b ( . ) . – confirmed ( . ) . – probable ( . ) . – recovered, no. (%) all . – confirmed . – probable . – deaths, no. (%) all – . – confirmed – . – probable – . – among contracted sars-cov- (confirmed cases n = ) gender, no. (%) < . male ( . ) ( . ) . female ( . ) ( . ) . race/ethnicity, no. (%)c,d < . white ( . ) ( . ) . black ( . ) ( . ) . hispanic ( . ) ( . ) . asian ( . ) ( . ) . other ( . ) ( . ) . age, year, no. (%) < . – ( . ) ( . ) . – ( . ) ( . ) . – ( . ) ( . ) . ≥ ( . ) ( . ) . covid- , coronavirus disease . adata was abstracted from texas demographics. bcovid- data were abstracted from texas health and human service and net health northeast texas public health district. cestimated race/ethnicity numbers based on u.s. census for smith county of texas from https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/smithcountytexas; accessed on october . destimated covid- cases by race/ethnicity based on distribution of covid- cases from patients with documented race/ethnicity abstracted from https://nethealthcovid .org. epidemiology and infection https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/smithcountytexas https://www.census.gov/quickfacts/fact/table/smithcountytexas https://nethealthcovid .org https://nethealthcovid .org https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core patient age ranged from to years with higher covid- cases in the age group of – (n = ), accounting for . % of total contracted sars-cov- cases in this county and incidence rate of . cases per person-week, followed by age group of – years, then age of ≥ years and age of – (p < . ; table ). approximately % of patients recovered from contracted covid- (n = ) with an overall death rate of . % (n = ). distribution of covid- incidence and its weighted moving average trend the trends of observed daily and weighted -day moving average of confirmed covid- cases (n = ) during the study period are depicted in figure a. daily confirmed number of cases increased since june, reached a peak of cases on july, then declined. the daily cumulative weighted moving average curve also showed that the covid- did not increase until early june then peaked to . cases per population on july then declined. similarly, weekly covid- cases and its corresponding trend demonstrated that covid- cases and its trend began to increase sharply in the week of may– june , reached a peak of cases per person-week in the week of july– july and then declined (fig. b). joinpoint regression analysis for trend in the covid- incidence rate overall, covid- incidence trend significantly increased with an awpc of . % ( % ci . – . %) (table and fig. ). the joinpoint regression model revealed three joinpoints in weeks , and since march at which trends in covid- incidence significantly changed (fig. a); therefore, the defined pandemic study period was segmented into four per- iods: march– april (weeks – ), may– may (weeks – ), may– july (weeks – ) and july– august (weeks – ) with wpc ( % ci) from zero. the trend first increased from week ( . cases per ) to week ( . cases per ) with a wpc of + . % ( % ci . – . %), followed by a slight decrease from week ( . cases per ) to week ( . cases per ) with a wpc of − . % ( % ci − . , − . %). incidence increased again sharply to reach a peak of cases per population – in week ( july– july ) with a wpc of + . % ( % fig. . new covid- cases and incidence rate per population of the smith county daily (panel a) and weekly (panel b). left vertical axis represents num- ber of covid- cases. right vertical axis represents incidence rate of covid- . table . wpc in covid- incidence according to joinpoint regression trend period (weeks) date wpc ( % ci)** – / – / . ( . . )* – / – / − . (− . , − . )* – / – / . ( . – . )* – / – / − . (− . , − . )* overall (awpc) – / – / . ( . – . )*,** ci, confidence interval; awpc, average weekly percentage change. *indicates that the wpc is significantly different from zero at the two-sided p < . level. **indicates that the awpc is significantly different from zero at the two-sided p < . level. tuan d. le et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core ci . – . %) and then declined significantly to the end of study period in week ( . cases per ) with a wpc of − . % ( % ci − . , − . %) (table ). association of economic reopening of business and social venues implementation and changes in covid- incidence there were significant differences in absolute covid- cases and covid- incidence rate between before and after erop and erop phases with means of . vs. . vs. . cases per week or . vs. . vs. . cases per population, respectively (table ). overall trend in weekly data on covid- incidence rate generated by interrupted time-series analysis. it revealed that the series has a unit root with more than one trend tested by dickey−fuller test (mackinnon approxi- mate p-value = . ) as shown in figure b. this trajectory is con- cordant with the joinpoint regression analysis (fig. a) and is corresponding to the time points at which state policies/ordi- nances introduced at week (social distancing), week (erop ), week (erop ) and week (a peak of covid- ), and the facemask or covering requirement in business and social set- tings that was implemented on july (fig. b). regarding influence of the erop and erop on covid- incidence perspective, figure illustrated trends in changes of covid- incidence and points of interest were estimated (table ). the pre-erop trend in weekly covid- incidence rate per persons was unchanged with a slope of . (p = . ) with a starting value (intercept) of . ( % ci . – . ). the covid- rate was not changed immediately by influence of erop after its introduction (β = . , p = . ; model ) and (β = . , p = . ; model ) but covid- incidence rate changed significantly after introducing the erop in both slope and post-erop trend. predicted incidence of covid- trend increased by . ( % ci . – . ) and by . ( % ci . – . ) cases per persons per week. compared to the estimated counterfactual rate, erop and accounted for increases of . ( % ci . – . ) and . ( % ci . – . ) cases per per- sons per week for the entire study period of weeks (model ) and the study of weeks (model ), respectively (table ). covid- trajectories in smith county and other counties in texas inspection of the trajectory of covid- incidence in smith county and seven other counties, including rural and urban countries, as well as the state of texas (fig. ). visual comparison revealed that covid- incidence rate in smith county ( . per ) is slightly higher than denton county ( . per ) but lower compared with other counties, tarrant fig. . incidence rate illustrated trends in changes of covid- incidence and points of wpc were estimated. joinpoint regression model revealed three joinpoints in weeks , and since march at which trends in covid- incidence significantly changed and defined pandemic study period was segmented into four periods: march– april (weeks − ), april– march (weeks − ), may– july (weeks − ) and july– august (weeks − ) with wpc ( % ci) from zero (panel a). panel b depicted interrupted time series with covid- incidence trends with level changes. table . impact of erop policies on covid- cases and incidence rate intervention effect covid- cases covid- incidence rate mean (sd) range mean (sd) range erop pre- . ( . ) – . ( . ) . – . post- . ( . ) – . ( . ) . – . erop pre- . ( . ) – . ( . ) . – . post . ( . ) – . ( . ) . – . erop, economic reopening; sd, standard deviation. epidemiology and infection https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core ( . per ), bexar ( . per ), travis ( . per ), harris ( . per ), dallas ( per ), galveston ( . per ) and overall texas ( . per ). discussion the decisions to phase in business and societal reopening amid the pandemic has an infection cost that can be reduced or miti- gated by high levels of community concordance with social dis- tancing, facial covering in social settings, hand hygiene and good sanitation practices. the significant evidence in this study is the analysed difference between predicted infection rates with- out reopening vs. the predicted infection rate after reopening phases. our study of covid- incidence compared to economic reopening phases revealed time periods that suggest varying levels of community concordance, associated with infection rates, as based on guidelines set forth in the reopening phased plans. there is not a value judgement on the actions and events that impact the covid- infection rate as stated before, the whole social fabric or the plurality of the situation had to be con- sidered. however, each action, those that enhanced community concordance and those that relaxed community concordance, had an impact on infection rate. figure shows covid- inci- dence rate trend after the first phase erop to increase as pre- dicted. during phase , depending on the rurality of the county and having > active cases, services not otherwise considered essential (except bars, beauty/tattoo salons, gyms, public swim- ming pools and interactive amusement venues) re-opened at % capacity in the state of texas [ ]. per the governor’s execu- tive order, texas citizens who accessed essential or non-essential services were advised to follow the health protocol set forth by fig. . impact of reopening business on covid- depicted incidence rate of covid- with observed rate (black dots), estimated counterfactual trend of covid- if economic reopening business (erop) did not happen (dash blue line), predicted trend after erop implemented (solid blue line) and predicted trend after erop implemented (solid red line). vertical lines at weeks and where the erop and erop started. table . estimates from the interrupted times-series analysis of economic reopen business and covid- incidence rate measure of interest model : / / – / / model : / / – / / estimate ( % ci) p-value estimate ( % ci) p-value intercept (β ) . ( . – . ) . . (− . , . ) . pre-intervention (pre-erop , β ) . (− . , . ) . . (− . , . ) . level change immediately after erop (β ) . (− . , . ) . . (− . , . ) . difference trend between pre-erop and erop (β ) − . (− . , − . ) . − . (− . , − . ) . difference trend between the erop and erop (β ) . ( . – . ) . . ( . – . ) . erop trend (β +β ) − . (− . , − . ) < . − . (− . , − . ) < . erop trend (β + β + β ) . (− . , . ) . . ( . – . ) . predicted value for counterfactual model (erop + erop ) . (− . , . ) . . (− . , . ) . predicted value for intervention of eorp and erop . ( . – . ) . . ( . – . ) . difference trend between pre-erop and erop (β + β ) . (− . , . ) . . ( . – . ) . difference between predicted and counterfactual . ( . – . ) . . ( . – . ) . covid- , coronavirus disease ; ci, confidence intervals; erop, economic reopen; pre-erop, pre-intervention of erop. tuan d. le et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core dshs [ , , ]. in brief, the health protocol for individuals consists of wearing a facemask, maintaining feet of social distan- cing, wash/sanitising hands frequently, self-screening for covid- symptoms and avoiding gatherings of > people [ ]. the extent that the individuals followed the recommended health protocol could explain the difference in predicted vs. actual covid- cases. according to seale et al. ( ), there is a multi- tude of psychological, demographic and social factors that impact engagement and compliance with non-pharmacologic interven- tions to slow the spread of a pandemic [ ]. after phase erop opening as depicted in figure , an even wider gap is seen between predicted cases and actual cases (higher). per the executive order for phase reopening, expan- sions of services and capacity were allowed and again recommen- dations to follow the dshs health protocols were advised (eo-ga ) [ ]. phase reopening occurred at the beginning of june and within the subsequent – weeks other factors may have also contributed to community discordance rates to cause a higher than predicted number of covid- cases such as the july holiday weekend and ‘black lives matter’ protests [ ]. incidentally, the governor issued a face mask mandate on july; however, that may have been too close to the holiday week- end to effect behaviour change for planned july celebrations and gatherings as the incidence rate peaked during the week of july through july [eo-ga- ] [ ]. the mask mandate may have accounted for the downward trend after the peak as seen in figures a and b. as evidenced by al-hasan et al. ( ), gov- ernment plays a key role in positive adherence to non- pharmacologic interventions [ ]. non-pharmaceutical interventions such as movement man- agement, social distancing, restriction on public gatherings and facemask or covering requirement in business and social settings were examined in this study to effectively mitigate the risk of covid- transmission and for ‘flatten the curve’ of the pan- demic in the smith county. these non-pharmaceutical interven- tions have affirmed to be helpful in mitigating the risk of covid- globally. advantages and limitations the main strength of this study was to utilise the joinpoint regres- sion, an efficient and flexible statistical method, to determine the change points in time at which trends in covid- incidence changed significantly in different periods. additionally, inter- rupted time-series analysis is considered a quasi-experimental design that is a powerful tool used for evaluating the impact of interventions or policies implemented on outcomes of interest while randomised control trial data are not available. this study has limitations. first, effects of interventions imple- mented may occur with unpredictable time delays, so we used a lag of days. poorly specified intervention points are overcome by using a joinpoint regression analysis to identify joinpoints at which significant changes in trends in covid- incidence occurred during the pandemic period studied along with the dates when the erop interventions implemented. second, the number of covid- cases could be higher than confirmed cases depending on the number of tests conducted. reported covid- cases were limited according to testing capacity, speed and accuracy; however, we reported a mean with % con- fidence intervals. third, population of smith county and other counties used in this analysis were based on u.s. census from july , which does not reflect actual population in march– august ; however, estimated covid- cases and incidence are not much different because of small numerators of covid- cases compared to big denominators of study populations. fourth, the weakness of the itsa is possibly impacted by something else that may have occurred at the same time such as the july holiday weekend and ‘black lives matter’ protests; however, trends in covid- incidence rate predicted were not different under influencing by the erop , erop , or their synergistic effect as shown in figure . furthermore, two models were tested (table ) for two different scenarios in which exogenous factors such as the july holiday weekend and ‘black lives matter’ pro- tests were taken into account. many families desired to get together for special occasions and take possible precautionary measures to evade covid- during such family events or fig. . comparison of daily cumulative incidence rate in selected counties in texas. the figure shows a comparison of covid- incidence rate in smith county (green curve) and compared to other counties in texas, including rural and urban counties, and overall incidence covid- trajectory in state of texas (black curve). epidemiology and infection https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core gatherings. however, an unknown in such events or gatherings is whether the participants are homogeneously immune to the infectivity or heterogeneously risky to contract the virus. amid less clarity, of interest might be how best one can predict the number of covid- cases after the union. in other words, a research goal for the analysts of infectious diseases is to address the similarities vs. differences between the primary and secondary groups in the union. the research goal appears simple and easy on the surface but is actually very complicated and challenging as pointed out in a recent article by ioannidis et al. [ ]. conclusion economic reopening policies influenced the covid- incidence rate along with natural trends. however, the facial covering or mask mandate may have accounted for the downward trend after the peak as seen in the holiday weekend of july. community concordance with mitigation efforts are salient to the decision to reopen sectors of a county’s economic and social businesses and organisations; the analyses illustrated the signifi- cant findings in a semi-rural county. the findings of our study regarding non-pharmaceutical interventions have potential impli- cations to mitigate the risk of covid- globally. acknowledgements. the authors thank all first responders and healthcare professionals caring for covid- patients. author contribution. study concept and design: le, bosworth, ledlow, singh. acquisition, analysis or interpretation of data: all authors. drafting of manuscript: all authors. critical revision of the paper for important intel- lectual content: all authors. statistical analysis: le, singh and le. administrative, technical, or material support: le, singh, le. financial support. the funding organisations had no role in the design and conduct of the study; collection, management, analysis and interpretation of the data; preparation, review, or approval of the paper; and decision to submit the paper for publication. conflict of interest. all authors declare no conflicts of interest. disclaimer. the content of this publication is the sole responsibility of the authors and does not represent the views or policies of the school of community and rural health, university of texas health science center at tyler, the u.s. department of defense, or u.s. army institute of surgical research. data availability statement. the data that support the findings of this study are openly available in the websites of the texas health and human services (dshs) covid- data at https://dshs.texas.gov/coronavirus/addi- tionaldata/, reference number [ ]. references . holshue ml et al. 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available at https://gov.texas.gov/uploads/files/press/eo-ga- -use-of- face-coverings-during-covid- -image- - - .pdf (accessed september ). . al-hasan a, yim d and khuntia j ( ) citizens’ adherence to covid- mitigation recommendations by the government: a -country comparative evaluation using web-based cross-sectional survey data. journal of medical internet research , e . . ioannidis jpa, cripps s and tanner ma ( ) forecasting for covid- has failed. international journal of forecasting. https://doi. org/ . /j.ijforecast. . . epidemiology and infection https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://gov.texas.gov/uploads/files/press/eo-ga- _phase_two_expanding_opening_covid- .pdf https://gov.texas.gov/uploads/files/press/eo-ga- _phase_two_expanding_opening_covid- .pdf https://gov.texas.gov/uploads/files/press/eo-ga- _phase_two_expanding_opening_covid- .pdf https://gov.texas.gov/uploads/files/press/eo-ga- _phase_two_expanding_opening_covid- .pdf https://gov.texas.gov/uploads/files/press/eo-ga- -use-of-face-coverings-during-covid- -image- - - .pdf https://gov.texas.gov/uploads/files/press/eo-ga- -use-of-face-coverings-during-covid- -image- - - .pdf https://gov.texas.gov/uploads/files/press/eo-ga- -use-of-face-coverings-during-covid- -image- - - .pdf https://doi.org/ . /j.ijforecast. . . https://doi.org/ . /j.ijforecast. . . https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core 	influences of reopening businesses and social venues: covid- incidence rate in east texas county 	introduction 	methods 	patient population 	study definitions 	statistical analysis 	results 	patient population 	distribution of covid- incidence and its weighted moving average trend 	joinpoint regression analysis for trend in the covid- incidence rate 	association of economic reopening of business and social venues implementation and changes in covid- incidence 	covid- trajectories in smith county and other counties in texas 	discussion 	advantages and limitations 	conclusion 	acknowledgements 	references technology can’t fix this editorial technology can’t fix this ai tools used in society often enhance inequality, affecting black lives disproportionally. addressing this issue will require more than technological solutions. researchers and experts in the field are overwhelmingly white and need to engage and listen to those experiencing the harm. the black lives matter movement has been a wake-up call for many in academia to reflect on the pervasive effects of racial injustice, both in terms of the underrepresentation of black researchers and the harmful effects of technology, which often plays a discriminatory role in society. while blatant racism may not always be in plain sight, many mechanisms in society are in place that cause racial discrimination, and these mechanisms are often amplified by technology. on wednesday june, thousands of researchers (and editors) around the world joined in a #strike blacklives initiative (also known as #shutdownstem and #shutdownacademia) to spend the day learning about structural racism and finding ways to counter it. this should be the start of a long journey. many have raised the alarm in recent years over the potential for racial discrimination inherent in ai algorithms. black researchers timnit gebru and joy buolamwini, among others, have worked tirelessly to identify and raise awareness of racial discrimination in ai and facial recognition technologies in particular. the harmful effect of facial recognition technologies on black people was recently demonstrated with a real-world example when robert williams, a black man, was wrongfully arrested based on his face being mistakenly matched with a robbery suspect. it is a well-known problem that commercial facial recognition systems have a higher error rate for darker-skinned faces, as they are typically trained on datasets that are insufficiently diverse and phenotypically imbalanced. the solution to fairer ai systems may seem to be training on better, less biased datasets. however, this ignores the deeper problem with technologies like facial recognition, which are not separate from the social structures in which they are built. emily denton, a research scientist on google’s ethical ai team, tweeted recently “ai research and development cannot be decoupled from the social relations that structure our world and ai failures are intrinsically linked to asymmetries with respect to who is driving research agendas and shaping incentives”. answers to questions such as ‘who is developing these algorithms and why’, ‘where does the training data (typically images scraped from the web) come from’ and ‘who decides on how the tools are used’ will reveal numerous underlying structural imbalances. one fundamental problem is that among those developing state-of-the-art algorithms, in computer science departments and the tech industry, the percentage of black researchers is very low. while % of undergraduates in us computer science programmes are black, this drops to – % at the phd and faculty level, while a report found that less than . – % of the workforce across major ai companies are black. the importance of representation is clear when noting how activism among scientists and engineers can be pivotal in changing a company or organization’s course of direction. ibm recently announced that they would no longer sell or develop facial recognition technologies, amazon announced a one-year moratorium in selling their facial recognition systems to law enforcement, while microsoft stated they would not sell such technologies to police forces until a national law governing their use is brought into place. this is welcome progress, but must not replace governmental action to ensure that less visible companies do not fill this gap. beyond facial recognition, there are many more algorithms used in society that discriminate against black people, such as credit risk scoring and predictive policing technologies. as cathy o’neil discussed in her book weapons of math destruction, big data gathering increases inequality and too often lends legitimacy to new forms of social and political oppression. one example is that the gathering of crime data, including for nuisance crime, reinforces the presence of police in poor and mostly black neighbourhoods. this impacts arrests in those neighbourhoods, producing more crime data and a harmful feedback loop. cathy o’neil mentions that those behind big data models like predictive policing often insist that their model, unlike humans, is blind to race and ethnicity. but it’s a mistake to think technology can ever be neutral, as it is simply impossible to abstract away social context. in fact, as ruha benjamin argues in her recent book race after technology, race itself is a tool that is deeply embedded in society. to fully grasp these issues, it will be essential to work with those in marginalized communities who have experienced the harmful effects of technologies. conferences like the association for computing machinery’s meeting on fairness, accountability and transparency (facct), which took place in barcelona earlier this year, and the upcoming workshop ‘participatory approaches in machine learning’ at the international conference on machine learning seek to address the power imbalance by involving those who are directly impacted by machine learning systems. it seems an important and stimulating way forward for the design of ai tools to seek awareness of the power dynamics surrounding the application of those tools from the start. at the same time, it is exhausting for black scholars to keep explaining what they are grappling with on a daily basis in the face of a usual white audience who have not lived through the same experiences and struggle to accept structural racism exists. it is up to those with the power to shape the ai community, including science journals, to actively engage with issues around structural racism and ask difficult, often uncomfortable questions about how ai technologies might consolidate, or even intensify, racism in society. ❐ published online: july https://doi.org/ . /s - - - nature machine intelligence | vol | july | | www.nature.com/natmachintell http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf https://www.npr.org/ / / / /the-computer-got-it-wrong-how-facial-recognition-led-to-a-false-arrest-in-michig?t= http://proceedings.mlr.press/v /buolamwini a/buolamwini a.pdf https://twitter.com/cephaloponderer/status/ https://www.nature.com/articles/s - - - https://www.nature.com/articles/s - - - https://cra.org/crn/ / /expanding-the-pipeline-the-state-of-african-americans-in-computer-science-the-need-to-increase-representation/ https://participatoryml.github.io/ https://twitter.com/rajiinio/status/ https://twitter.com/rajiinio/status/ https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /may/ /why-im-no-longer-talking-to-white-people-about-race https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /may/ /why-im-no-longer-talking-to-white-people-about-race https://doi.org/ . /s - - - http://www.nature.com/natmachintell 	technology can’t fix this
 race and racism in primary care: a special collection from bjgp open dambha- miller h et al. bjgp open ; doi: . /bjgpo. . of race and racism call: practice, policy, & editorials *for correspondence: bjgpopeneditor@ rcgp. org. uk competing interest: see page received: november accepted: november published: november this article is open access: cc by license (https:// creativecom- mons. org/ licenses/ by/ . /) author keywords: primary care, racism, race, primary healthcare, general practice, general practitioners copyright © , the authors; doi: . /bjgpo. . race and racism in primary care: a special collection from bjgp open hajira dambha- miller *, umar ahmed riaz chaudhry , oswald peter adams , editor- in- chief, bjgp open, london, uk; editorial fellow, bjgp open, london, uk; guest editor, bjgp open, london, uk; dean of the faculty of medical sciences, university of the west indies, cave hill campus, cave hill, barbados the black lives matter campaign has highlighted issues of race and racism that are present in all parts of our communities and organisations. we stand in solidarity against racism in all forms and acknowledge that organisations, including those within the publishing world, need to do more. bjgp open must ensure that ethnic minority voices are heard and represented within our leadership, board members, fellows, editorial staff, readers, and authors. the statistics on under- representation of ethnic groups at all levels of publication and academia make uncomfortable reading, and the reluctance to openly acknowledge this is delaying progress. , the tokenistic phrases and well- intended platitudes on the need for greater diversity must be matched with measurable action. as a journal, we need to play our part and demonstrate a commitment to meaningful progress on this issue. accordingly, bjgp open has set out an ambitious programme of work on race and diversity. it starts with this special issue, in which we have collated individual and collective experiences on racism in primary care alongside relevant policy and practice submissions. gps, trainees, medical students, and academics have shared their recent lived experiences of the everyday racism that ethnic minorities face in our discipline today. these challenging experiences range from a gp being doused in alcohol by a patient; a medical student repeatedly overlooked due to race; and a gp required to ignore racial slurs at the request of a senior partner. where is the accountability, they ask? hartland and larkai describe in their article the concept of decolonisation in reforming the medical school curriculum, and explain why this is important in addressing unconscious biases. they highlight their approach to bringing about long- term institutional change, which they suggest is necessary to equip medical students with the tools to manage an increasingly diverse population. bhatti and colleagues in their viewpoint provide us with another historical perspective, emphasising the substantial contribution of migrant labourers to different roles in primary care. the authors highlight the medical workforce race equality standard (mwres) in narrowing the gap in workplace experiences and opportunities, and call for the inclusion of general practice to bring about sustainable change. sarfo- annin takes this further in a commentary that outlines the case for affirmative action in reducing racial exclusion by enabling structural changes to achieve representative diversity, especially for leadership positions. they argue that the term ’bame’ (black, asian and minority ethnic) had too broad a definition to be useful as a metric for ethnic inclusion because of significant heterogeneity in the experiences of different minority ethnic groups. while acknowledging the complex challenges, they call for more detailed data on the ethnicity of gps to raise awareness, generate dialogue, and enhance the organisational accountability that might improve inclusivity. ikpoh's article then presents a very personal trainee perspective. next, gopal and colleagues contribute a discussion on the effect of racial disparities on gps, and question whether the non- minority workforce needs to go further in acknowledging personal prejudices and implicit biases. the authors suggest that improvement will come in the form of greater diversity in leadership and governance structures. their suggestions on the importance of diversity in leadership and governance have not gone unheard. at our journal, we have made strategic appointments, including a new editorial board which represents one of the most diverse in the history of our larger journal family. similarly, our team of editorial fellows and medical students reflects racially diverse voices. led by our editorial board, we https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/open_access https://creativecommons.org/ https://doi.org/ . /bjgpo. . mailto:bjgpopeneditor@rcgp.org.uk mailto:bjgpopeneditor@rcgp.org.uk https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / dambha- miller h et al. bjgp open ; doi: . /bjgpo. . of race and racism call: practice, policy, & editorials have additionally established a new mentoring and outreach programme for students from around the world, particularly those from low sociodemographic and minority backgrounds, who are less likely to attend higher education. we offer virtual placements, student projects, and one- to- one mentoring. this is alongside a mentoring programme to support authors from low- and middle- income countries, who are less likely to have manuscripts accepted across biomedical journals. we provide opportunities for additional feedback and support in the preparation of their manuscripts. we are additionally opening a period of consultation from december to january on the collection of anonymised sociodemographic data, including ethnicity, from all our authors at the point of submission. this will allow us to openly report submissions and acceptance rate by ethnicity, to identify unconscious biases, and to address these as necessary through, for example, blinding of peer reviewers and editorial staff to author details. in turn, we hope that other scientific journals might be encouraged to follow suit. we are already working with colleagues at other journals on our ‘research into publication science’ programme. we are running several studies to collate data and scrutinise evidence on publication science around sex and ethnicity. these strategic programmes are aimed at ensuring that when authors submit their work to us, it is the quality of the scientific content and not race or, indeed, sex that determines acceptance. our efforts at the journal have been complemented by a diverse programme of work currently being carried out at the royal college of general practitioners (rcgp). this is summarised in an editorial included within this collection by professor amanda howe (president), professor martin marshall (chair), and dr valerie vaughan- dick (chief operating officer) of the rcgp. they summarise recent learning, recognise the diversity of the membership, and put forward plans on tackling racism within the discipline. research, alongside the lived experiences shared in this collection, emphasises that racism is very much alive within primary care, and that the world around us is shaped by structural and systemic racism. the expectation in all aspects of primary care is to maintain the highest level of professional and moral standards. it is incumbent upon all of us in primary care to be aware of the issues around race, to speak up, and to support each other in tackling this challenging issue. if you would like to contribute to the discussion or comment on our consultation, please tweet us @bjgpopen, respond through our online e- letters https:// bjgpopen. org/ letters, or email us at bjgpopen@ rcgp. org. uk. funding there are no funders to report for this article. ethical approval n/a provenance freely submitted; not externally peer reviewed. competing interests hdm is the editor of bjgp open. references . richardson jte, mittelmeier j, rienties b. the role of gender, social class and ethnicity in participation and academic attainment in uk higher education: an update. oxford review of education ; ( ): – . doi: https:// doi. org/ . / . . . ginther dk, basner j, jensen u, et al. publications as predictors of racial and ethnic differences in nih research awards. plos one ; ( ): e . doi: https:// doi. org/ . / journal. pone. . ginther d, schaffer w, schnell j. diversity in academic biomedicine: an evaluation of education and career outcomes with implications for policy. ; https:// core. ac. uk/ download/ pdf/ . pdf (accessed nov ). . various authors. viewpoints: race and racism in primary care. ; https:// bjgpopen. org/ page/ viewpoints- race- and- racism- primary- care (accessed nov ). . shahid hj. bjgp open viewpoint: islamophobia: a complex intersectional phenomenon of race, religion, class, citizenship and gender- based oppression. ; https:// bjgpopen. org/ sites/ default/ files/ pdfs/ viewpoints% race% and% racism/ viewpoint% % bs% v . pdf (accessed nov ). https://doi.org/ . /bjgpo. . https://bjgpopen.org/letters https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . /journal.pone. https://core.ac.uk/download/pdf/ .pdf https://bjgpopen.org/page/viewpoints-race-and-racism-primary-care https://bjgpopen.org/page/viewpoints-race-and-racism-primary-care https://bjgpopen.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/viewpoints% race% and% racism/viewpoint% % bs% v .pdf https://bjgpopen.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/viewpoints% race% and% racism/viewpoint% % bs% v .pdf of race and racism call: practice, policy, & editorials dambha- miller h et al. bjgp open ; doi: . /bjgpo. . . gonçalves moreira m. bjgp open viewpoint: the daily experience of racism in brazil. ; https:// bjgpopen. org/ sites/ default/ files/ pdfs/ viewpoints% race% and% racism/ viewpoints% % sg% v . pdf (accessed nov ). . anonymous. bjgp open viewpoint: 'why don't you just ignore it?': the importance of challenging endemic racism. ; https:// bjgpopen. org/ sites/ default/ files/ pdfs/ viewpoints% race% and% racism/ viewpoint% % gc% v . pdf (accessed nov ). . hartland j, larkai e. decolonising medical education and exploring white fragility. bjgp open . doi: https:// doi. org/ . / bjgpo. . . bhatti n, rao m. bjgp open viewpoint: tackling racial disparities in general practice: now is the time. ; https:// bjgpopen. org/ sites/ default/ files/ pdfs/ viewpoints% race% and% racism/ viewpoint% % nb% v . pdf (accessed nov ). . sarfo- annin jk. ethnic inclusion in medicine: the ineffectiveness of the ‘black, asian and minority ethnic’ metric to measure progress. bjgp open . doi: https:// doi. org/ . / bjgpo. . . ikpoh m. broken mirrors: a trainee’s experience of racism in the workplace. bjgp open . doi: https:// doi. org/ . / bjgpo. . . gopal d, waqar s, silverwood v, et al. race and racism: are we too comfortable with comfort? bjgp open . doi: https:// doi. org/ . / bjgpo. . . howe a, marshall m, vaughan- dick v. better for us all — recent learning on how the royal college of general practitioners can reduce racism. bjgp open . doi: https:// doi. org/ . / bjgpopen x https://doi.org/ . /bjgpo. . https://bjgpopen.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/viewpoints% race% and% racism/viewpoints% % sg% v .pdf https://bjgpopen.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/viewpoints% race% and% racism/viewpoints% % sg% v .pdf https://bjgpopen.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/viewpoints% race% and% racism/viewpoint% % gc% v .pdf https://bjgpopen.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/viewpoints% race% and% racism/viewpoint% % gc% v .pdf https://doi.org/ . /bjgpo. . https://doi.org/ . /bjgpo. . https://bjgpopen.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/viewpoints% race% and% racism/viewpoint% % nb% v .pdf https://bjgpopen.org/sites/default/files/pdfs/viewpoints% race% and% racism/viewpoint% % nb% v .pdf https://doi.org/ . /bjgpo. . https://doi.org/ . /bjgpo. . https://doi.org/ . /bjgpo. . https://doi.org/ . /bjgpo. . https://doi.org/ . /bjgpopen x 	race and racism in primary care: a special collection from bjgp open 	funding 	ethical approval 	provenance 	competing interests 	references european journal of american studies, - | european journal of american studies - | special issue: intimate frictions: history and literature in the united states from the th to the st century introduction: encounters hélène quanquin and cécile roudeau electronic version url: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/ doi: . /ejas. issn: - publisher european association for american studies electronic reference hélène quanquin and cécile roudeau, « introduction: encounters », european journal of american studies [online], - | , document , online since june , connection on april . url : http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/ ; doi : . /ejas. this text was automatically generated on april . creative commons license http://journals.openedition.org http://journals.openedition.org http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/ introduction: encounters hélène quanquin and cécile roudeau for naomi wulf encounters are both the object and form of this special issue of the european journal of american studies. edited by a historian and a literary scholar of the united states trained in france,i this issue is designed as a place of encounter and simultaneously takes “encounter” as an analytical object in itself, specifically the articulation or dis- articulation between the disciplines of literature and history, the intersection between aesthetics and politics, and the dialogue between historical versions of the past and their literary reenactment. by arranging these encounters across the atlantic and across disciplines, we have not tried to round off angles or to deemphasize the singularities of approaches, and certainly not to erase differences in methods honed over centuries. to the contrary, building on the old french term encontre, meaning “meeting; fight; opportunity,” we hope to attend to frictions, tensions, and disagreements.ii responding to historian eric slauter’s assessment of the growing “trade deficit” in literary studies when it comes to the transactions between history and literature in transatlantic and early american studies ( ), elizabeth m. dillon noted that while “historians and literary scholars should read one another’s work,” and while “they have much to learn from one another,” “the gap between the two does not need to be bridged so much as attended to: we need to mind (or mine) the gap, not to erase the different methodologies and aims that generate divergent scholarship in the field of atlantic studies” ( ). like dillon, we believe that there is a productivity of difference when it refuses to be mired in mutual exclusion. away from the impasses of such binaries as textualism v. contextualism, historicism v. (new) formalism and presentism, this special issue rather speculates on contingent crossings, unsettling combinations which we understand not as the foundation of a new methodology but as a series of ad hoc responses to specific questions raised by specific texts and objects and the ways they are read today. in doing so we are hardly the first to question the vexing and alluring relationship between history and literature in the united states. following slauter and his (no doubt deliberately) mixed metaphors, the economic stakes of such disciplinary unbalance have introduction: encounters european journal of american studies, - | repeatedly been intertwined with the vocabulary of desire and frustration. when considered over time, the affective politics of cross-encounters proves anything but casual; it has nourished the steady yet tumultuous relationship, the intimate frictions between the disciplines from their infancy until the present day. as hélène cottet shows in her essay for this special issue, conversations between the two disciplines in the united states have a long history, which originated in “the institutionalization of interdisciplinarity as a counter-proposition to the specializing trend then advocated in american research universities” and the promotion of literature as a site of “generalist” scholarship in the early decades of the twentieth century. harvard’s history and literature program, created years ago, was its first concentration but the persistence of this interdisciplinary model is still evident in another program studied by cottet, the master of arts program in history and literature at columbia university in paris created in september in collaboration with two french partner institutions, the École des hautes études en sciences sociales and the École normale supérieure (cottet). in france, where the fault-line between the disciplines falls differently than in the united states, the encounter between history and literature—which is also the product of a turbulent disciplinary history (pouly)—has recently sparked new debates and provocative manifestos. in , in the wake of a strong interdisciplinary turn in the french academia, the historians of the annales. histoire, sciences sociales revisited the articulation between history and (literary) fiction after french and american historians, paul veyne and hayden white among others, had planted a “hermeneutics of suspicion” (ricoeur ) at the heart of the historical discipline. unlike veyne and white, however, etienne anheim and antoine lilti, the editors of the issue of the annales entitled savoirs de la littérature (“what literature knows”), did not aim at reassessing the amount of fiction and the lure of narration that was unmistakably part of the historian’s discourse; rather, the issue examined the extent to which literature might be a reservoir of knowledge, and of historical knowledge in particular. the editors’ purpose was to overcome for good the watertight separation between those who were interested in texts (the literary scholars) and those who took the institutions, the social and political history of the book, of reading or publishing, as their object. what if, they asked, literature for the historian were something else than a piece of evidence, or a dubious representation? what if there were a literary mode of writing history, and, more important still, a literary manner of getting to know the past? intersecting the questions raised by a issue of the french review of american studies (derail and monfort),which proposed to read u.s. history not so much as the object but as the product of literary fictions that never could, nor would, distinguish between the experience and the performance of the past, anheim and lilti, focusing on the french scene, were concerned with the literary experience of the past as one modality of constructing history. this blurring of limits, this questioning of disciplinary categories not only prevails today in france, but has recently been the object of renewed investigation and experimentation. in , an international conference, entitled “littérature et histoire en débats” (literature and history: new debates) revisited the question of the “proximity” between literary writing and history (and historiography) in the political and epistemological and polemical context of the day marked by a renewed interest in archives and the notion of testimony in the work of historians, as well as literary scholars and writers of fiction.iii emerging from these debates, books and edited collections have attempted to put such examinations into practice. quentin deluermoz and anthony introduction: encounters european journal of american studies, - | glinoer’s l’insurrection entre histoire et literature ( - ) ( ), for example, focused on the mutual impact of insurrections on literary writing and, in turn, of literature on the insurrectionary time. on the other hand, ivan jablonka’s essay l’histoire est une littérature contemporaine ( ) proposed to take up the challenge of an encounter between history and literature, and cross literature as a possibility of writing (for the historian) and history as a possibility of knowing (for the writer). he invited scholars, on whichever side they dwelled, to embrace both possibilities, challenge the old disciplinary divides and experiment with what he calls “creative history.” the provocation did not go unnoticed, in france at least. and yet, however much these publications attempted not to be trapped in a national paradigm, they rarely touched on the specificities of an american context and practice. this special issue of ejas has found its impulse in these debates, which have impacted our practices in different ways on both sides of the atlantic and made the necessity of encounter more palpable still. in france, where the explication de texte remains one of the main competencies assessed in literary curricula and continues to inform literary scholarship to this day, historicism still somehow rings offensive, while the institutionalization of “civilization” has not fully succeeded in creating an “interdiscipline” (allen and kitch ).iv in the united states, following a questioning of historicism among literary scholars, which jennifer fleissner has called “historicism blues” (fleissner), and an increasing distrust, among u.s. historians, of literary epistemologies, reading practices are more than ever the target of scholars on either side of the disciplinary divide.v this may be why renewed attention is being paid to what it means to read as a historian, as a literary scholar, and even as both. this issue of the ejas falls within this context and proposes to attend once again to forms of close reading, not, however, as a timeworn tactic targeted against history in the name of a textualist ideology but rather, in the words of peter coviello, as “a way of thickening history: of expanding the range of stories we tell about a place or text or concept, of trying out an expanded repertoire of conceptual possibilities” (quanquin and roudeau). to “thicken history”—isn’t this precisely what both literary scholars and historians do when they read one another, when they accept to be unsettled by one another’s readings? to test this hypothesis, we have therefore asked french and american historians and literary scholars of the united states to read forms, objects, and texts that could be viewed as concrete crystallizations of the dialogue between literature as a mode of writing and institutional practice and history as a series of bygone events, narrative, and process. a periodical like the crisis, nineteenth-century suffrage literature, a poet’s historical gesture (williams carlos williams’ in the american grain), and a novelist’s rewriting of black history from the present of toni morrison’s “black matters” (mat johnson’s pym) are the hybrid objects close-read here by scholars who have agreed to play along and be slightly deported from their usual objects for the sake of this conversation. attending to these objects that could be “both history and literature” (jablonka ), these essays revisit the american history of history and literature as disciplines. because they are concrete attempts at reading across, they gesture towards a practice of literature and history as “interdisciplines” and incite us to think “out of the disciplinary box” today. “from one crisis to the other: history and literature in the crisis from to the early s” investigates the interaction between literature, news-reporting and history in the organ of the national association for the advancement of colored people over one introduction: encounters european journal of american studies, - | decade or so. thecrisis, founded by w.e.b. du bois, was not a literary magazine but, as lamia dzanouni, hélène le dantec-lowry, and claire parfait show, within its format literature coexisted with history and “was always present under one form or another,” sometimes on the margins, in advertisements, political essays, and illustrations, in keeping with its “format of intermediality.” examining the “internal dialogics” of the periodical (ardis ), the authors show that literature was used in its different forms as a political tool to promote the elevation and the political consciousness of the black race (dzanouni, le dantec-lowry and parfait). the suffrage novels, plays, and poems studied by claire delahaye also provide an example of ways in which literature intersected with history and politics at the turn of the twentieth century. in “‘a tract in fiction:’ woman suffrage literature and the struggle for the vote,” claire delahaye argues that, although suffrage literary productions have often been underrated by historians and literary scholars, they should be considered as important “political acts, cultural texts and historical sources.” testifying to the “creativity” of their authors, they “partook to the creation of suffragists’ culture” and “functioned as compensatory modes of political expression to assert women’s power” (delahaye). but literature is not only used as a political tool in editorial policies, nor does it serve only as a source for the historians who consider it as part of their scholarly explorations; as delahaye’s essay suggests, literature also questions the very practice of historical reading. to borrow from dominick lacapra’s introduction to history, literature, critical theory, “historical understanding is challenged by critical (including literary) theories, and literary criticism is not only informed but insistently interrogated by historical questions” ( ). the following two articles, written by literary scholars, may be read as instances of how history as object, context, and narration, unsettles literary criticism as well. revisiting claire delahaye’s assumption that literary modernism can be a power- shifting force and an opportunity for alternative voices to be heard, antonia rigaud’s essay reflects on the writing of history in the modernist context through the study of william carlos williams’ in the american grain ( ). williams’ historical project, rigaud argues in “a phosphorous history: william carlos williams’ in the american grain,” turned history into a literary question. as a poet, williams put language and form at the center of his historical project, not because of a belief, as hayden white would say many years later, that history is literature, but because language is what has shaped the national imagination. through a poetic reshuffling of voices, canonical and otherwise, through a collage of different narratives and perspectives, williams sought to make history by capturing its evanescent reality—“the strange phosphorus of the life”—and correlated the lyrical and the historical in what may be regarded as a modernist biography of the american cultural imagination (rigaud). the last essay in this special issue, “‘black matters’: race and literary history in mat johnson’s pym,” by jennifer wilks, reconsiders the inextricable relationship between literary text and social context(s) through a study of johnson’s satirical novel pym ( ). read together with edgar allan poe’s the narrative of arthur gordon pym of nantucket ( ) but also in the light of toni morrison’s playing in the dark and the black lives matter movement, johnson’s multi-layered neo-slave narrative, wilks contends, encourages its readers to take a long view of history. using satire to confront the paradoxes of his own historical moment, johnson reveals the degree to which the nation’s racist past introduction: encounters european journal of american studies, - | reverberates in the lives of his cast of characters. in the end, it is not poe that matters in johnson’s literary fiction, as much as the troubled, underexamined historical continuum between poe’s antebellum u.s. and the “colorblind” nation of johnson’s protagonists (wilks). how literary works of fiction manage to unsettle their reader’s sense of history; how history itself, as narrative, comes to be questioned by literature, is ultimately what has interested us in this special issue. with the hope of furthering the dialogue between european and american scholars of u.s. literature, we end this issue with an interview with peter coviello, whose work has been central to the unsettling of disciplinary borders both topically and methodologically. our digital transatlantic encounter has reproduced elements of his intellectual and personal trajectory in dialogue with the articles and the larger project presented here. intrigued by our starting point—the contrasted construction of the two disciplines of history and literature in france and in the u.s., as analyzed in part by hélène cottet in the opening essay—coviello provides precisely the kind of “encounter” we hope will feed the conversations between scholars, and across disciplines and national and historical traditions, that are so sorely needed. bibliography allen, judith a., and sally l. kitch. “disciplined by disciplines? the need for an interdisciplinary research mission in women’s studies.” feminist studies, “disciplining feminism? the future of women’s studies,” . ( ): - . print. anheim, etienne, and antoine lilti. “savoirs de la littérature.” annales. histoire, sciences sociales . ( ). print. ardis, ann. “staging the public sphere: magazine dialogism and the prosthetics of authorship at the turn of the twentieth century.” transatlantic print cultures, – : emerging media, emerging modernisms. ed. ann ardis and patrick collier. new york: palgrave macmillan, . print. best, stephen, and sharon marcus. “surface reading: an introduction.” representations . ( ): – . print. cottet, hélène. “american schools of interdisciplinarity: history and literature programs and their early twentieth-century traditions.” european journal of american studies ( ). web. delahaye, claire. “‘a tract in fiction:’ woman suffrage literature and the struggle for the vote.” european journal of american studies ( ). web. deluermoz, quentin, and anthony glinoer. l’insurrection entre histoire et littérature ( - ). paris: publications de la sorbonne, . print. derail, agnès, and bruno monfort, eds. “l’expérience littéraire de l’histoire en amérique au xixe .” revue française d’études américaines . ( ). print. dillon, elizabeth. “atlantic practices: minding the gap between literature and history.” early american literature . 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( ): - . print. lyon-caen, judith, and dinah ribard. l’historien et la littérature. paris: la découverte, . print. moretti, franco. distant reading. london: verso books, . print. pouly, marie-pierre. “analystes et analyses de la curiosité américaniste des anglicistes en france.” debates . nuevo mundo mundos nuevos. web. jan. , . url : http:// nuevomundo.revues.org/ ; doi : . /nuevomundo. quanquin, hélène, and cécile roudeau. “a conversation with peter coviello”. european journal of american studies . ( ). web. ricoeur, paul. freud and philosophy: an essay on interpretation. trans. denis savage. new haven: yale up, . print. slauter, eric. “history, literature, and the atlantic world.” early american literature . ( ): - . print. notes i. hélène quanquin is associate professor of american civilization at université sorbonne nouvelle and cécile roudeau is professor of american literature at université paris-diderot. ii. in history, literature, critical theory, domick lacapra uses the phrases “mutually provocative contact” ( ) and “intricate and variable forms of interaction” ( ). “at issue,” he writes, “is how best to elaborate a form of inquiry where history and literature are brought into mutually provocative contact—where historical understanding is challenged by critical (including literary) theories, and literary criticism is not only informed but insistently interrogated by historical questions” ( ). the rest of the book has a more specific target and is focused on the relation of history and literature (mostly the novel) to extreme violence and exceptional events. lacapra’s introduction: encounters european journal of american studies, - | http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ theoretical framework, however, detailed in the first chapter entitled “the mutual interrogation of history and literature,” remains relevant to our purpose in this special issue. he explains, “i think the most cogent and thought-provoking way to envision that relation, including what might be called the pressure exerted by the historical on the literary, is in terms of intricate and variable forms of interaction, especially modes of mutual interrogation. in other words, history and literature may be seen as posing questions to one another, the answers to which are not foregone conclusions” ( ). iii. this conference was sponsored by some of the most eminent french institutions in the humanities: ecole des hautes études en sciences sociales, ecole normale supérieure, collège de france, university paris -vincennes-saint-denis and paris diderot, a sign, arguably, that the question of the boundaries between these two sister disciplines remains an important subject. the argument and program of the conference is available online: http://www.fabula.org/ colloques/sommaire .php other publications on this contested issue include issues of prominent french journals such as littérature ( ), critique ( ), le débat ( ). see also lyon-caen and ribard; jouhaud, ribard, and schapira. iv. “civilization” is a discipline taught in language studies departments in france. it is an umbrella term that was coined in the s by scholars who did not recognize themselves in literary and linguistic studies, but still valued the study and teaching of history, politics, and society rooted in an interdisciplinary standpoint and textual analyses. v. on surface reading, see best and marcus; love; and freedgood and schmitt. on distant reading, see moretti. on close reading (and) intellectual history, see also lacapra, history and its limits, especially his defense of close-reading as not always and not necessarily approximating a pious practice or taking the place of the religious, let alone by displacing it ( - ). authors hÉlÈne quanquin université sorbonne nouvelle cÉcile roudeau université paris diderot introduction: encounters european journal of american studies, - | 	introduction: encounters science magazine april • vol issue sciencemag.org s c i e n c e il l u s t r a t io n : r o b e r t n e u b e c k e r editor’s note in her working life piece “instagram won’t solve inequality” ( march, p. ), meghan wright examined why she feels conflicted reading #scicomm instagram posts by fellow women scientists. she explained that she recognizes the good they can do, yet it seems unfair that such scientists must devote time to social media outreach to combat systemic inequities. so, she has decided that she prefers to separate her social media use from her scientific activities. wright named a social media role model at her university—the science sam instagram account run by samantha yammine—before detailing why she did not want to participate in this kind of outreach. although she intended to use science sam as an example of social media success, wright’s critical comments about such outreach were interpreted by some as a sexist and mean-spirited personal attack on samantha yammine in particular and women science communicators in general. in this section, samantha yammine and colleagues describe the power of social media, the women scientists organization responds to the working life article, and two scientists recognized by aaas (the publisher of science) for public engagement discuss how outreach and institutional reform can go hand in hand. in the online buzz box, we provide several excerpts from the online eletters we received. jeremy berg editor-in-chief . /science. aat other marginalized scientists must overcome as minorities in science, tech- nology, engineering, and mathematics (stem) ( ), they should not be expected to bear the full responsibility for out- reach—nor should they be penalized for choosing to do this work. diversity among communicators should be encouraged because multiple styles and approaches of science communication can make science more accessible and relatable to more people, including those who may not otherwise seek stem edu- cation. selfies on instagram are optional, but they receive % more engagement than pictures without a face ( ), enabling open dialogue with broad audiences in an effectively personal manner. further research can determine whether shar- ing selfies from a research setting helps confer more trust without sacrificing credibility, and these data will inform strategies for improving the public’s lack of trust in scientists ( , ). social media serve an important role in the movement toward increased equity, diversity, and inclusion within stem because it provides a widely available, readily accessible platform for many to use easily. social media allow high- throughput networking and exploration of careers, which benefits trainees who may otherwise lack access to professional development ( ). although not free from the bias and prejudice inherent in society, social media can connect diverse groups, enable rapid information exchange, and mobilize like-minded communities. this connectivity can allow those same groups to challenge tradi- tional structures, identify and call out systemic barriers, and question hierarchies of power. instagram, for example, allows for visible represen- tation of individuals who are often unseen, and can amplify voices that may go unheard in traditional settings. furthermore, increased representa- tion of those who break stereotypes and are underrepresented creates a more inviting percep- tion of stem careers, and these efforts can improve diversity and inclusion in academia ( – ). for a diverse academic com- munity to thrive, inclusion and acceptance of every scientist, regardless of edited by jennifer sills component of publicly funded research grants, and public engagement activities should have weight in merit, tenure, and promotion assessments. whether scien- tists do outreach themselves or work with communication and media experts, public engagement with science is a responsibil- ity requiring important skills that should be valued accordingly. given the other barriers women and letters insights social media for social change in science although we agree with m. wright (“insta- gram won’t solve inequality,” working life, march, p. ) that there are many systemic structures perpetuating the marginalization of women in science, we view social media as a powerful tool in a larger strategy to dismantle such structures. in addition, scientists have been using social media productively to address several other concerns in aca- demia, including engaging with the public about science, increasing science literacy, promoting trust, exploring career options, networking internationally, and influenc- ing policy. strong public trust in science con- tributes to a democratic, civil society. scientists have a responsibility to engage effectively with society, especially when trust is lacking ( , ) and scientific knowledge is not equitably accessible ( ). within academic science, much of this outreach is done by women ( ) and underrepresented groups ( ). thus, not surprisingly, outreach has been grossly undervalued and sometimes demeaned. instead of urging academia to stop celebrating this essential service, we should ensure sufficient compensation and recognition for public engagement. evidence of outreach is increasingly a da_ letters.indd / / : am published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ april • vol issue s c i e n c e sciencemag.org online buzz scicomm speaks the working life “instagram won’t solve inequality” (m. wright, march, p. ) sparked a wide-ranging discus- sion about the value and purpose of social media in science. excerpts from readers’ reactions to the article are below. read the full eletters and add your own at http://science.sciencemag. org/content/ / / / tab-e-letters. a selection of your thoughts: not every tweet, post, or youtube video that happens to feature a woman sci- ence communicator is uploaded with the express intent of challenging the status quo or systemic and institutionalized bias…. to assume this…fails to under- stand the many reasons why women choose to communicate science to the public. there are indeed activists who constantly challenge the institutional- ized bias favoring men, people who sporadically participate in collective events such as women in science day, and also science communicators who just hap- pen to be women. we should applaud all of their efforts…. victoria j. forster …like the author, i strongly believe that women and other underrepresented minori- ties in science should feel no obligation to take on additional emotional labor for the sake of educating others. i also agree that systemic issues of inequality will likely require systemic solutions to enact lasting change.… it is evident that the author views #scicomm on instagram as a chore, but for some of us it is a labor of love. if build- ing model satellites out of cake…or posing my dog in front of apollo moon trees… weren’t incredibly fun, i wouldn’t be doing it.… instagram has significant and largely untapped potential as a vehicle for science communication. the visual nature of the platform, in conjunction with the large and diverse userbase,…provides tremendous opportunity to reach nontraditional audi- ences. i agree with the author that science communication must be performed in a manner authentic to each individual, but my hope is that we can continue to encour- age each other to promote science in a variety of ways. right now, we need #scicomm more than ever. beth r. gordon …as an early-career researcher, the first in my family to go to university, social media has provided me with both community and opportunities that would have been unimaginable without it. having a window into the lives other academics and scientists from a range of backgrounds has helped me feel i belong and reassured me that there is a place in the academy for people like me…. at the same time, i was recently invited to publish a comment piece… after an editor noticed my tweets. i have also found coauthors on twitter and used it to keep up with recent publica- tions and research…. i have nonetheless begun to limit time spent on social media, realizing that it…distracts me from important work. but the benefits far outweigh the limitations…. glen wright . /science.aat indianapolis, in , usa. louisiana state university, college of science, baton rouge, la , usa. department of chemistry and biology, ryerson university, toronto, on m b k , canada. *corresponding author. email: samantha.yammine@mail.utoronto.ca r e f e r e n c e s . m, “state of science index global report” ( ); https://multimedia. m.com/mws/media/ o/ presentation- m-state-of-science-index- -global- report-pdf.pdf. . s. t. fiske, c. dupree, proc. natl. acad. sci. , ( ). . m. anderson, “the race gap in science knowl- edge,” pew research centre ( ); www. pewresearch.org/fact-tank/ / / / the-race-gap-in-science-knowledge/. . e. h. ecklund, s. a. james, a. e. lincoln, plos one , e ( ). . m. ong, “the mini-symposium on women of color in sci- ence, technology, engineering, and mathematics (stem): a summary of events, findings, and suggestions” (terc, cambridge, ma, ). . n. gupta, c. kemelgor, s. fuchs, h. etzkowitz, curr. sci. , ( ). . s. bakhshi, d. shamma, e. gilbert, “proceedings of the nd annual acm conference on human factors in computing systems” ( ), pp. – ; http://comp. social.gatech.edu/papers/chi .faces.bakhshi.pdf. . a. l. gonzales, commun. res. , ( ). . b. j. drury, j. o. siy, s. cheryan, psychol. inquiry , ( ). . s. d. hermann et al., basic appl. soc. psychol. , ( ). . s. cheryan, j. o. siy, m. vichayapai, b. j. drury, s. kim, soc. psychol. person. sci. , ( ). . /science.aat appearance (whether conventional or not) is necessary. no single post or person on social media should be expected to change the world, but social media have been instrumental in mobilizing grassroots political move- ments, including those related to safety in education, research, and equity, such as the march for our lives, the march for science, black lives matter, #metoo, and the women’s march. thus, we challenge the false dichotomy that use of social media for public engagement with science and working to change policy and remove systemic barriers to inclusion are mutu- ally exclusive. rather, they are intrinsically linked, and we need to harness the poten- tial power of social media to create social change. as scientists, we must look to data and evidence to inform our understanding of the benefits and pitfalls of the use of social media for public outreach and policy change, and uphold the same rigor and analysis in determining what has value and what should be celebrated. samantha z. yammine, * christine liu, paige b. jarreau, , imogen r. coe department of molecular genetics, university of toronto, toronto, on m s e , canada. helen wills neuroscience institute, university of california, berkeley, berkeley, ca , usa. lifeomic, journal editors should not divide scientists we’re writing to express our disappoint- ment at the poor judgment that led to the publication of “instagram won’t solve inequality” (m. wright, working life, march, p. ), which singled out and criticized a successful woman science communicator for her instagram presence promoting and celebrating science. the editor of this piece should have ensured that the message focused on the issues: women and underrepresented minorities take on a great deal of science com- munication, mentorship, and outreach work without recognition or professional reward from their institutions. despite increasing institutional pressure to com- municate about science — whether to increase a university’s public profile or meet the national science foundation’s broader impact requirements — many institutions expect the work to be done on personal time without compensation or additional resources. although the piece hinted at these systemic issues, those arguments were undermined when the editors allowed the author to criticize the work of another woman with an da_ letters.indd / / : am published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ unabashed tone of condescension and did not give the target of the comments an opportunity to respond. rather than address the roadblocks facing women and underrepresented groups in science, technology, engi- neering, and mathematics (stem) or grapple with the author’s personal misgivings around science communica- tion, the piece was framed as an attack. the tone implied that anything beyond basic research is a frivolous waste of time, belittling meaningful approaches to science communication and public engagement. it offered a false choice between an authentic and relatable social media presence and effective advocacy for institutional change. the choice to run this inflammatory article demonstrates a lack of thoughtfulness on the editors’ part. pitting one woman scientist against another is destructive and irresponsible, and it perpetuates unreasonable standards for women and underrepresented groups in stem. it is antithetical to the open, accessible, and inclusive future that we at women scientists envision for science. maryam zaringhalam,* rukmani vijayaraghavan, juniper simonis, kelly ramirez, and jane zelikova, on behalf of women scientists women scientists, boulder, co , usa. *corresponding author. email: info@ womenscientists.org . /science.aat efforts large and small speed science reform the working life article “instagram won’t solve inequality” (m. wright, march, p. ) asserts that science outreach efforts by individual women cannot counteract struc- tural inequities and that women are doing outreach at a cost to their own careers. we concur that collective action and structural change are needed to diversify science and improve meaningful science engagement with the public. however, when such reform is absent or too slow, individual efforts fill the vacuum and should not be condemned. along with hundreds of other scientists, we devote time and energy to individual public engagement initiatives, while pushing for institutional reforms to support more scientists who wish to engage effectively. these reforms would provide support and incentives through professional recognition, financial and logistical resources, networks of support, and an inclusive culture and capac- ity for public engagement. with support, more scientists could develop collabora- tive and innovative engagement practices to broaden participation in science. while changing the culture of public engagement, we must similarly push to dismantle other structural barriers to women and minorities in the sciences. to accelerate these changes, data collection and learning networks would enable us to improve the effectiveness of our efforts to create a diverse workforce and tackle science-societal challenges. individual action versus structural change is not an “either/or” question; it is a “yes, and.” anne j. jefferson * and melissa a. kenney department of geology, kent state university, kent, oh , usa. cmns-earth system science interdisciplinary center, university of maryland, college park, md , usa. *corresponding author. email: ajeffer @kent.edu . /science.aat “...when [structural change] is absent or too slow, individual efforts fill the vacuum...” insights | l e t t e r s da_ letters.indd / / : am published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ editor's note jeremy berg doi: . /science.aat ( ), . science article tools http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / . content related http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions terms of serviceuse of this article is subject to the is a registered trademark of aaas.sciencescience, new york avenue nw, washington, dc . the title (print issn - ; online issn - ) is published by the american association for the advancement ofscience science. no claim to original u.s. government works copyright © the authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee american association for the advancement of o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / . http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/about/terms-service http://science.sciencemag.org/ h t t p : / / d i s e g n a r e c o n . u n i v a q . i t v o l u m e / n . - j u n e i s s n - disegnarecon s t r e e t a rt. d r aw i n g o n t h e wa l l s m a r t a m a g a g n i n i assistant professor of drawing in the school of architecture and design at the university of camerino. her research focuses on media for architectural de- sign representation. her writ- ings include “picarchitecture. il medium è il montaggio” ( ), in which she tracks the purposes and the evolution of montage in architecture. from the wall to the pavement and back. murals in the epoch of drones. [with an interview with the artist giulio vesprini] two phenomena undoubtedly represent our times: drones and street art. both hit the head- lines, are viral, versatile; ignoring them is impos- sible. in recent years, as flagships of technology and contemporary art, they have experienced points of contact and fusion, a kind of ‘symbiot- ic short circuit’ between the two. on the one hand, the image plane of street art has flipped from vertical to horizontal — roofs, the pavement, basketball courts — so passers by do not see the murals on their walks through the streets, but rather through the computer’s eye, which displays satellite maps and drone footage spread through social networks. on the other hand, the movement of drones has changed from predominantly horizontal to ver- tical when used as piloted or automated hands to spray the city walls. this paper retraces and reflects on the fusion in progress between street art, urban planning, keywords: street art; drones; urban planning; horizontal frame. and drones to investigate how these phenom- ena are transforming our cities and societal customs in a context where art and technique no longer maintain their established borders and statutes in their traditional form. the text closes with an interview with giulio vesprini, an internationally renown italian street artist and art director of the collective street art project ‘vedo a colori – street art al porto’ (civitanova marche, since ). . v o l u m e / n . - j u n e i s s n - disegnarecon m a g a g n i n i h t t p : / / d i s e g n a r e c o n . u n i v a q . i t from the wall to the pavement and back. murals in the epoch of drones. s t r e e t a rt. d r aw i n g o n t h e wa l l s drones and the aesthetics of geopolitics. essentially aeroplanes without a cockpit, drones (technically called remotely piloted aircraft) are objects that symbolize the modern day, the pride of technology in military matters and applied to civil uses, where they find the most varied applications. they are emblems of technological progress while also representing low-cost methods. they are low- cost weapons par excellence (chamayou ), but also tools for low-cost filming and aerial photogra- phy, and are now found at any home. there is an aesthetic aspect to each technological object, however, beyond its lethal, military use — which walter benjamin taught us in his short but prophetic essay in , ‘the work of art in the age of mechanical reproduction’ — or its playful use. drone were already immortalized in a photograph from as the eminence of american technologi- cal advancement in the context of beauty that would prophesy a long, even mythical, destiny character- ized by ambiguity. in the photo, a propeller drone is held by someone who, due precisely to that photo, would soon become known as marilyn monroe. that snapshot, thanks to which gregoire chamay- ou was able to backdate the birth of drones by at least years, reveals that drones have always pertained partly to the world of war and partly to staging, and therefore to art. chamayou himself speaks about this birth ‘under the sign of pretence’, not only because drones were used to train sol- diers throughout the second world war. in reality, the first drones of the s, which were called ‘ra- dioplanes’, were the invention of reginald denny, a film actor who had turned to aeromodelling and founded his radioplane company, where norma jean baker worked (fig. ). in fact, drones arrived relatively late to the civilian platforms of film and photography, let alone instal- lation, sculpture, performance art, and theatre. it is from early twenty-first century successes that the global phenomenon today known as ‘drone art’ be- gan, in which the drone is the key player and acts as both subject and medium. as a subject, the drone can only be in motion. when it is not filmed or photographed but acts live, its movement is circumscribed by the spectator’s visual field, and this is why it is mainly vertical, like in installations or performance art or the dancing drones in cirque du soleil. instead as a medium, the drone rises vertically and possibly moves horizontally, but more impor- tant than the movement is the action: capturing horizontal images from above, as in the horizontal networks that distribute its images, a sign of viral- ity, which is likewise horizontal. through its use, the observer’s eye, i.e. the ‘eye’ of the drone, and the horizontal frame may (but may also not, since we increasingly use mobile devices with our heads down) become vertical again in a user’s gaze or on the screen of an operator, who monitors the video or modifies the image. nevertheless, the visual re- sult perceives a three-dimensional nature, recog- nizes the volumes and relates them, because the image is not a horizontal projection, but rather a perspective with a horizontal frame. what is revealed, according to benjamin (benjamin [ ], - ), is an ‘aestheticization of poli- fig - retracing early intertwinings of drone and performance, cinema and photography: a) : demonstration of how to remotely fly a ‘queen bee’(k ), a radio controlled pilotless target aircraft for the royal air force; b) : norma jeane dougherty photographed at the radioplane company factory in burbank, california, by the us army photographer david conover; c) : the first ‘drone photo’ was taken (insert) during a flight over the suez canal and captured the egyptian side of the waterway.. tics’, or better yet, geopolitics. the means of viewing with the aerial images intro- duced by drones in military doctrine has basically sanctioned an epochal change in the manage- ment of aerial power, which no longer moves only via horizontal coordinates, but identifies targets (kill boxes) with three-dimensional coordinates. ‘to put that in very schematic terms, we have switched from the horizontal to the vertical, from the two dimensional space of the old maps of army staffs to geopolitics based on volumes’. space has become a ‘dynamic mosaic’, functional for the counterinsurgency of the american military. ‘we should see it as a patchwork of squares of color, each of which corresponds to specific rules of en- gagement’ (chemayou , p. ). the drone as a medium is increasingly used by street artists to create large-scale works on the urban scale. their work, fundamentally two-di- mensional, ephemeral, is not a photomontage on orthophoto maps, as the artistic duo christo and jeanne-claude might have created, but is shot from . v o l u m e / n . - j u n e i s s n - disegnarecon m a g a g n i n i h t t p : / / d i s e g n a r e c o n . u n i v a q . i t from the wall to the pavement and back. murals in the epoch of drones. s t r e e t a rt. d r aw i n g o n t h e wa l l s above using cameras and videocameras that move closer or away, mounted as they are on drones fly- ing above and around the area. the representation, more than the work, is what aims to shock: desta- bilizing the view ‘expected’ by an observer, who is still unaware of the work and the entire operation. falling between performance — in which the drone is a subject — and a work — where it serves as the medium — is the large-scale vertical graf- fiti made using uavs (unmanned aerial vehicles) ‘armed’ with spray paint and programmed by cra-carlo ratti associati. ufo (urban flying op- era), a technological and artistic project that uses drones to produce culture, civic participation and urban innovation, is the latest development in cra’s research on vertical drawing and participa- tory design (figg. , ). ‘the city is an open canvas, where people can inscribe their stories in many ways’, says carlo ratti. ‘such processes have always been happening; however, with ufo we fig - the quadcopter yesterday and today: a) top view of de bothezat helicopter - the experimental quadcopter built for the united states army air service by george de bothezat in the early s - as depicted in us pat. , , . (b) paint by drone, cg rendering of the project by cra studio and c) uav at work for realizing the participative vertical graffiti ufo (carlo ratti associati © / ph. andrea guermani). fig - cra, ufo-urban flying opera, torino ( ). (carlo ratti associati © / ph. andrea guermani) tried to accelerate them, using drone technolo- gy to allow for a new use of painting as a means of expression’ (ratti ). ‘does art refer to artifacts created by drones?’ this is one question that arises with such a flashy use of technology, however undeniably an allegory of military power and an instrument of death (stub- blefield , ). adorno suggests an answer: ‘it is now obvious that nothing of what concerns art is obvious, neither in art itself nor in its relationship to the whole’ (adorno , ). while with many variations, it is convenient that in the era of emerging drone art, the use of drones has no explicit use for protesting against global power. ‘not only does drone art avoid explicit con- demnation of its subject, but so does it refuse the expectations of protest art more broadly. in fact, next to picasso’s scathing critique of the aerial bombing of civilians in guernica, anselm kiefer’s cathartic postwar ruins, or the antiwar films of the vietnam era, these works appear decidedly neutral and aloof’ (ibid., i). . v o l u m e / n . - j u n e i s s n - disegnarecon m a g a g n i n i h t t p : / / d i s e g n a r e c o n . u n i v a q . i t from the wall to the pavement and back. murals in the epoch of drones. s t r e e t a rt. d r aw i n g o n t h e wa l l s in reality, today’s art in general no longer regards art only for art’s sake, but the artist is more inte- grated in society. the paradigms of artistic pro- duction have changed in relation to technology and new media, but fall increasingly ‘within’ the system; the question of criticism of the system and the dynamics induced by its technologies, becomes increasingly problematic and elusive. this is explained well by marco mancuso, a critic and the curator and director/founder of digicult (http://www.digicult.it/), digimag journal, and digicult editions publishing house, an internation- al platform that observes the impact of technolo- gies and science on art, design, and contemporary culture. he accurately describes the artists of to- day as all-round cultural subjects, the represent- atives of society, within which they move like true professionals. they have the uncommon abilities of entrepreneurship, communication, flexibil- ity, technical capacity, and need to network with a series of elements ranging from the world of art to entrepreneurial creativity, education, and technological, industrial, and scientific research. all of this tends to undermine the role of criti- cism and analysis of the established political and social order, as well as the ability to understand the effect of technologies on them, in favour of a professional who increasingly understands the codes and behaviours of the surrounding society of infotainment. more and more often, they adapt and conform to said codes and behaviours, to the search for those expressive languages moving at the edges of the search for the technical potential of the tool, its capacity for storytelling or its pri- marily aesthetic qualities (mancuso ). examples of this emerging type of artist are also found in the realm of street art, which might seem the furthest from the so-called ‘new media art’ and perhaps one of the few stable bulwarks of political protest. however, from the success of graffiti to today, it has revealed many different modes and strategies, as well as the personalities that have effected them. one example is jr, a french pho- tographer and artist who carpets the world with gigantic portraits, from the favelas of brazil to the moma and the louvre, sought-after by stars and increasingly often lauded by the press. jr works in a team in new york and paris and is represent- ed by a network of international communication. but surprises always flower on the periphery, be- cause the paradigm has now been decreed. the switch to the horizontal plane: a new shared paradigm. the philosopher giorgio agamben has shown how ‘surveillance by means of video cameras transforms the public space of the city into the interior of an im- mense prison’. today this could be completed with reference to the omnipresent drones, under which we are all targets. ‘in the eyes of authority — and maybe rightly so — nothing looks more like a ter- rorist than the ordinary man’ (agamben , ). here, therefore, is a grotesque, frightening puppet drawn on the ground in a gravel pit, framed closer and closer until … boom! an explosion erases it for- ever. sacrilegious, ironic, and revealing, this scene closes the video-portfolio created by ella & pitr, a french artistic duo specialized in gigantic pro- jects on the ground ( – . sq. m.) [ ]. half- way between street art and land art, many of their works cover vast surfaces and are only visible from above a bird’s eye view. their project of sleeping gi- ants started in , when they painted their first drawing, called jump here, on a parachute base and asked some parachutists to take photos. from there they have gone on to draw on every type of horizontal plane: from car parks to abandoned air- fig - clockwise from top left: ella&pitr’s sleeping giants (since ), lying down on a) the parachute base of the aerodrome in montargis, france ( ); b) the courtyard of saint-louis college in saint-etienne, france ( ); c) the rooftop of the paris convention centre, paris ( ). (ella & pitr © / emile parlefort ©) . v o l u m e / n . - j u n e i s s n - disegnarecon m a g a g n i n i h t t p : / / d i s e g n a r e c o n . u n i v a q . i t from the wall to the pavement and back. murals in the epoch of drones. s t r e e t a rt. d r aw i n g o n t h e wa l l s ports, from harbours to crossroads, on grass, sand, or asphalt… but their workhorses are roofs (fig. ). drawings layed on the street are certainly not a novelty — perhaps the first drawing plane was the ground; we certainly have a centuries-old history of street painters, screevers and madonnari. but those made by ella & pitr are marked not only by their size, but also the systematic design process, with which the ephemeral, playful operation is ac- companied by a nonconformist, subversive spirit. this is the kaleidoscopic panorama of street art. bridging painting, illustration, and graphics, street art is an unstoppable phenomenon; its spread is growing continually. drawings are made on any surface of the city: from verti- cal walls, which ‘as one knows, attract writing’ (barthes [ ]), to the horizontal surface of the street, roof, square, basketball court or five-a-side football pitch… anywhere everyone can see them. murals are possible because their goal is precisely to ‘allow anyone to be able to see them’ (serra , ), as signs that interact, ne- gate, or ridicule other signs: prohibitions, limits, and separations (guarini ). the characters or figures in the murals capture and direct the observer’s gaze and movement, under- mining the original hierarchies of the architectural objects. the so-called ‘lateral façades’ of blocks of flats come to mind, anonymous surfaces resulting from architectural planning, which, after an artistic intervention are transformed into picture planes, with the ability to generate new opportunities for the surrounding urban space, precisely by reposi- tioning the point of view. or the unravelling of me- tres and metres of containment walls for subways or city walls: a painting that is often not left alone, a single minimal episode in the overall perception, but is joined by other works by other artists such that the final choral work creates a tangent artistic path that transcends the wall’s original function. in the view of urban decorum, an uncontrolled or eas- ily reviled passage is protected. in the view of urban reallocation of use, the mural slows traffic, directs the flow of pedestrians, cyclists, joggers … the same is also true when intervening on the ground, where one can read the implicit signs of fig - sdarch trivelli associates, piazza della cooperazione, milan, italy ( ): an example of ‘tactical urbanism’ clockwise from top left: a) varvara stepa- nova, handwritten poster ( ): graphical inspiration; b) a photomontage of the project to visualize the realization in the manner of a drone photograph; c) perspective of the square d) opening day (sdarch © / ph. anna galimberti ©). abandonment, ignored signage, places to redis- cover, aspects of excessive power to be declared. but when the plane is horizontal, when it does not coincide with the plane of natural vision, what means can be used to read and decipher a large drawing on the ground? are drones instru- mental for visualization or the primer of con- tending for the plane of action, thereby profan- ing the apparatus? every answer is controversial and depends on the artist. not always, however, are drones needed. this is also because it is not always the drawing with paint on the ground, cheap and reversible, that is the prerogative of more or less illegal art. at times we read abstract, geometric signs, parts of a beautiful large-scale coloured drawing be- cause these are inherent in a focused urban project created from local short-term policies to modify the flows of cars, cyclists, pedestrians, and to define new places to meet, pedestrian ar- eas, areas for play and spaces for events, spaces for bikes, safer crossings with less traffic. these are signs are drawn to be experienced in a less ‘distracted’ way, as benjamin would say, certainly with the senses that pertain to architecture: haptic rather than merely visual perception. hence the emphatic use of an aerial representation becomes superfluous. this approach is known as ‘tactical urbanism’, a contemporary urban-planning prac- tice that aims to involve residents in neighbour- hood urban regeneration processes using low- cost interventions to return the public space to the . v o l u m e / n . - j u n e i s s n - disegnarecon m a g a g n i n i h t t p : / / d i s e g n a r e c o n . u n i v a q . i t from the wall to the pavement and back. murals in the epoch of drones. s t r e e t a rt. d r aw i n g o n t h e wa l l s centre of life of its residents (fig. ). promoters and initiators of these interventions include public administrations around the world, from paris to bogota, new york to mumbai, mexico city to mi- lan, but in the participatory sense of the operation, everyone is called to propose their own ideas and create the works with a spirit of volunteerism [ ]. it so happens that one might find urban palimp- sests defending colour against the grey of the as- phalt. such is the very colourful pigalle basketball court, sandwiched between two buildings be- tween the moulin rouge and montmartre, which grew out of the residents’ desire to have a place for play for their children. together with players on local basketball teams, they began to paint the first playground, which sprouted from the ruins of an old abandoned car park. since then, the court has changed another four times ( , , , ) and has become an internationally famous urban project via a dedicated project curated by stéphane ashpool (the founder of the brand pigal- fig - two (or more) is better than one. clockwise from top left: a) the nike pigalle duperrè in paris as it appears after the latest redesign ( ). the neigh- bourhood court was replicated in beijing and mexico city where b) the same design team (ill studio with stéphane ashpool) signed two twin courts located outside the gimnasio olímpico juan de la barrera ( ); c) titan love court, bgc or lebron james nike hyper court ( ) in manila, philippines. artist: arturo torres; d) zoo lake basketball courts (south africa) with illustrations by faatimah mohamed-luke and karabo poppy moletsane ( ); e) the engie solar graffiti in mexico city: a real solar art work made with organic photovoltaic (opv) thin-film to illuminate at night a very dangerous neighbourhood at night ( ). fig - a giant yellow message: black lives matter. the massive banner-like project was painted as part of the george floyd protests and commissioned by the mayor of washington dc; it spans two blocks of th street, the central axis that leads south straight to the white house and that on june was renamed black lives matter plaza. it now appears on google and apple maps and satellite views. le), nike, and the creative firm ill studio (fig. a). basketball courts are becoming instruments of reappropriation of the city through colour, but it is not all: technology also has a fundamental role in activating wider-ranging actions. in the process of “gamification” of every aspect of contempo- rary society, the courts become “hyper courts”: powered by google technology, nike hypercourts are “on-court digital experiences” that unlock ex- clusive hd basketball content without the need for data, to inspire basketball players across the city to take their game to the next level (fig. c). if playgrounds were originally the monopo- ly of the biggest sport brands, the expression of “commercial creativity”, they are now also local administrators investing in the regeneration of spaces through the pitches or courts spread in their territories. from politics to art and back: politicians have understood the communicational power of coloured surfaces, especially when cap- tured by drones (fig. ). the panorama of contenders on the horizontal plane is now complete: graphics and communi- cation studios, architects, and street artists. the . v o l u m e / n . - j u n e i s s n - disegnarecon m a g a g n i n i h t t p : / / d i s e g n a r e c o n . u n i v a q . i t from the wall to the pavement and back. murals in the epoch of drones. s t r e e t a rt. d r aw i n g o n t h e wa l l s fig - giulio vesprini laying on his playgroung struttura g , fermo ( ). (giulio vesprini © / ph. andrea amurri). ephemeral, low-cost practice of urban interven- tion based on paint is a design opportunity for all. but even where drones do not nullify the operation beforehand, the boomerang may still return, when the resulting aesthetics does not reflect an artistic search but a trend that, as in the current guise of the pigalle basketball court, pertains to (war) vid- eo gaming, or other practices inspired by the war of drones [ ]. within the practice. eight questions for giulio vesprini. presentation giulio vesprini (civitanova marche ) is an ital- ian urban artist, graphic designer, and art director. as a street artist, he has created works through- out italy, in europe, and more recently in new york. after an entire decade focused on graffiti, today his name is tied to projects of strategic public art. some examples include the project ‘shared space’ for cheap festival (sbarbati ) in bologna ( ) — which managed to ‘slow’ traffic on the crowded viale masini, shifting attention to his red post- ers— and the large murals created for the public housing unit of the old ‘pantera rosa’ fascist sum- mer camp (de innocentis ) in cervia ( ). he has received important awards such as the myllennium award — my city ( ) dedicated to enhancing the historical heritage of municipio ii of rome and the city of staffolo cultural prize ( ), which is awarded to people from the marche re- gion who have established themselves in the sec- tor of culture on the national and international stage (da vinci ). his language is minimalist, abstract, with collage inserts that represent nature and organic shapes. since he has curated the project ‘vedo a col- ori – street art al porto’ [i see in colours – street art at the port], which as of today has regenerated more than m of the dock on the eastern pier of the port of civitanova marche, with more than sq m of painted wall and shipyards painted by italian and international artists [ ]. with a bache- lor’s degree from the academy of fine arts in mac- erata, today he is a working student attending the master’s course in architecture at the school of architecture and design in ascoli piceno, because his work project, which he calls ‘archigrafia’ (ves- prini ), is increasingly a design, strategy, and incisive action in the public space. struttura g , created in fermo in , is his first playground (figg. - ). conversation mm: i’m going to jump right to the heart of what i would like to examine with you: walls, that great vertical canvas of the street artist, is turned over and becomes horizontal…why do we call it a ‘playground’? gv: playground is the most respected term. this is an art that has a language and works by codes — like when you say ‘street art’; it means everything and nothing, but it is a word that everyone understands. so playground in this case is the most used term and it works well. in italian we could say ‘dipinto a terra’ [painted on the ground], but it is notas evocative. in reality, a playground is commonly thought of more as a park for children, with swings and so on. the artistic concept of the playground instead most likely began in america and northern europe, with important brands such as adidas and nike, which involved different artists to transform the image of some basketball courts. examining both the effectiveness and impressiveness of the term, i sincerely prefer playground to street art. it immediately recalls something that was once not so appreciated and now, with the drawing, acquires new appeal; one plays outdoors again, sports initiatives are organized. another charac- teristic element is the view from above: power- ful! it makes you understand the entire transfor- mation, from an anonymous grey to a beautiful, coloured, impactful drawing. . v o l u m e / n . - j u n e i s s n - disegnarecon m a g a g n i n i h t t p : / / d i s e g n a r e c o n . u n i v a q . i t from the wall to the pavement and back. murals in the epoch of drones. s t r e e t a rt. d r aw i n g o n t h e wa l l s mm: what difference is there between creating a mural and a playground? gv: i immediately realized the ‘physicality’ of the work that a painting on a playground requires; it is much more tiring than what is usually created on a vertical wall. with a wall you are always in a frontal position. you can work and control the dimensions and balances of the shapes well; you look at it and you can move back at any time to have a clearer view. but with a work on the ground, all of this is impossible. you can use a ladder, but it is not enough. when you paint a horizontal surface, you must necessarily plan everything beforehand: the creation lies entirely in the sketch with its precise measurements. you divide the drawing into areas, you put the meas- urements in scale and then, metre by metre, you reconstruct the whole thing. the principle is very similar to the grid method used in the renais- sance. the work, therefore, is much more techni- cal, but in particular, it is much harder. creating a mural is like working with a performance, cre- ating theatre, or better yet, a dance, in the street; the movements are rhythmic: passing the bucket (slow-fast), the colour draft with paintbrushes, then the roller, the extension pole (high-low) is all very organic. with the playground it is even more so. because while it is true that you should not move up and down in height, there is the path pressed by the roller, a physical mantra that you need to repeat insistently so that the colour pen- etrates well. the most important thing for me, what differentiates the two types of work, is the effort that a playground requires, even before the fact that the visual perspective with which it is painted changes. mm: with regard to perspective: a large drawing on the ground cannot be understood as a whole without a view from above. the common visitor has a distorted view of it. how do you view this perceptual difficulty in your work? gv: true, it is difficult to understand the form, but what seems like a difficulty is in reality a resource. i can concentrate, for example, on other aspects of the project. when you paint a wall, you make a preliminary inspection to frame the context: you take photos, you sample the colours of the sur- roundings, the roofs, the plants, but not too much else. you make tests because you know that the wall will become part of that scenario, you will modify it. but the enjoyment of a mural is an action tied exclusively to vision. this allows you to be fre- er in the preliminary drawing. your work may be more or less appreciated, but this does not affect the other activities at the site. the true difficulty of the playground instead lies precisely in the initial design, because it should make reference to those who use the court or pitch: the bar has been raised! associations, sports players, the real users come to you with precise indications: ‘look, there is the three point line, there is the free throw line…’ and this cannot be ignored. you have to regulate the design based on new instructions: you have to fill in the areas so that when it is created over the game lines, everything works out and is not confusing. the artistic part, then, takes a slight step backwards with respect to the technique, with respect to the function. at least this is what i do, even if i have seen that in reality some peo- ple make their drawings without considering the limits of the game lines. i like the area of play to be functional, for art to become a support. this is why i have been studying visual perception a lot and why i interact directly with basketball asso- ciations to understand how to apply the theory to artistic practice in playgrounds. the first question i wonder is: ‘what colours, when they reflect, do not glare or become annoying? what are the best fig. - struttura g , giulio vesprini at work. (giulio vesprini © / ph. andrea amurri) . v o l u m e / n . - j u n e i s s n - disegnarecon m a g a g n i n i h t t p : / / d i s e g n a r e c o n . u n i v a q . i t from the wall to the pavement and back. murals in the epoch of drones. s t r e e t a rt. d r aw i n g o n t h e wa l l s colours to see the ball well?’ imagine what would happen to the ball if i painted a court orange! the lines are usually white, but they can also be black, so the drawing may be made with light colours to make the dark lines stand out better. still, ‘so that one team does not have an advantage over the other, is it better for the colours to be the same near the free throw circles?’ or even, ‘red indi- cates danger, so it is a strong signal… so where can i fill in with this shade? maybe in the bench areas to highlight the changes?’ here is the entire theory of colours! it is a choice to work like this, to follow my training, my studies: my thesis for the academy of fine arts was precisely on mondrian and de stijl. designing a project for a playground is really another world, if you want to do it well. mm: your way of presenting the work seems to be more like an architect than an artist. can we trace the border between art and architecture on the playground? gv: yes, i think that among all of what i have done, this work is the one in which the design most ap- proaches architecture. and this is the method i intended to investigate when i registered in the school of architecture. i don’t want to stop my research as an artist, but to do so, intuition is not enough; it requires discipline, dedication, and hard work. i am continuing my education so it transmits this message: there are those who do it to protest, some for political reasons, but we have a responsibility in painting a wall that it is equal for everyone, doing it in a public place. even if only for a few years, even if our work modifies the space for a given time, it destroys or enriches a landscape. like a tattoo, it cannot be removed immediately. in the playground, graphics, art, and architecture are truly close and complementary. what one should have is a deep knowledge of the materials for its realization. we could talk of particular res- ins, not just water-based enamels, that is chem- ical solutions that become colours when com- bined with pigments created precisely for game courts or bike paths. but fundamentally they are something else, so to create a well-made work, you should also study the various technical sheets. you have to use tools to calculate the ris- ing damp, which will almost certainly cause the court to become deteriorated within a year if it is higher than %. basically, a new world of creativ- ity and technique is opened. i have gone to speak with paint shops, i have met suppliers, i have attended training courses to choose one product rather than another, the cor- rect additives, etc. this is just to mention only the practical, more technical part. then there is the function: your initial drawing is a plan. you know that line is there, you know the area of play and you have an overall view of the surroundings. art and sports should be together and the important thing is not ever to lose the playability of the game. there are limits, but they aren’t limits for me. rather, they are a stimulus: limits have always characterized my art. i am happy to speak about this. few people rec- ognize the study that lies behind my work; rath- er, they waste time interpreting the form of my drawing, as if it were a rorschach inkblot… but it is a nice opportunity, why not take advantage of it also to send a message about design? mm: going back to the comparison with mu- rals, do playgrounds and murals still have something in common? gv: one of the common points between the sur- faces is undoubtedly deterioration. it is here that playgrounds meet one of the criticisms of street art, because the duration is very ephemeral. they remain two very different projects and perhaps fig. - struttura g , work in progress seen from above the drone’s flight. (giulio vesprini © / ph. andrea amurri) . v o l u m e / n . - j u n e i s s n - disegnarecon m a g a g n i n i h t t p : / / d i s e g n a r e c o n . u n i v a q . i t from the wall to the pavement and back. murals in the epoch of drones. s t r e e t a rt. d r aw i n g o n t h e wa l l s the playground has not even fallen under the clas- sic works of street art as we know it. vulnerability and wear are, however, identical: bad weather, the lack of civic duty, humidity, bike wheels … the difference, however, is that a playground can be maintained. i am usually helped by local peo- ple. i ask for a hand from associations in the area and they ask me how to maintain the work when something happens. i think it is normal to give all the instructions for the specific case. what counts is the idea, and if the idea needs maintenance to persist on a court or a pitch, it is welcome or at least if it fades, after some years the old work is covered and a new one is made. a mural, instead, perhaps because it is intended more as a large canvas, if you touch it up, it falls under the field of restoration and this is entirely another issue. mm: another type of horizontal painting is found on roofs, which has made some of your colleagues fa- mous. would you like to do a roof? and in your opin- ion, what difference is there with the playground? gv: i think that a ‘horizontal mural’ is made on roofs. sometimes they are illegal operations more closely tied to street art at the beginning than current playgrounds are. personally, i have never approached them, but who knows, perhaps in the future, why not? new challenges are always stimulating for me. it is an act that does not have a public if it is not recorded, and i think that it has a much more intimate value than one might think: the perfor- mance lies in itself. there is perhaps a desire to ‘go beyond the limit’, to draw on the roof of a building. in that case, one brings into play in- vention, one draws on chimneys and plays with perspective illusions. it is painting tied to vision, temporary, accidental, and spectacular. it can’t be seen without drones or satellites. in the case of my playground, i wanted a snapshot with a drone because i was looking for a powerful, meaningful image ready to go viral. working on roofs seems to be a more ‘elitist’ operation: those without internet will never experience it, those fig. - the playground in the mentuccia park: sequence of drone photos taken at - - m. (giulio vesprini © / ph. luca antonelli) . v o l u m e / n . - j u n e i s s n - disegnarecon m a g a g n i n i h t t p : / / d i s e g n a r e c o n . u n i v a q . i t from the wall to the pavement and back. murals in the epoch of drones. s t r e e t a rt. d r aw i n g o n t h e wa l l s without google maps will never see it. i think that it is more of a challenge for the artist. the plot twist is certainly created, the ‘wow’ effect upon its discovery, but what counts for the artist is moving ahead in the strategy, as in video games: you don’t know what the final monster is, but you do know the strategy to get there. for me, if there is no social purpose that goes be- yond the message and becomes good practice — if the work is not ‘used’ — i cannot consider it a complete work; it remains an exercise in style. if during my artistic career one day i had the oppor- tunity to experiment with creating a painting on a roof, i would do it, and perhaps a bit of pure mad- ness would come out of it. at heart, most of my works are ‘useful’ and considered, so i could even allow it for myself. mm: you work with the public a lot; on average your works are financed and approved. this is the path that naturally led you to the playground, but what is the history of struttura g ? gv: over time, the message has probably spread that my work is tied to more structured situations, to targeted projects rather than dedicated festi- vals. in reality, i participate in few festivals because those doing abstract art are a bit ‘cut out’ today, except for particular thematic contests. in gener- al, though, figurative artists are more popular and i abandoned figurative art more than ten years ago. i had already painted a wall in fermo and they called me to do another, but repeating the same thing did not seem to make much sense. some months be- fore i had noticed some playground works around the world and i thought i would have liked to ex- periment with one. so at the meeting with the city administration, i mentioned that it was an interest- ing trend and i asked if there was a court or a pitch that could be recovered in the city or nearby. they proposed some, including this one in parco della mentuccia, which is a beautiful park, but half lived, with so much potential but overlooked and in part decidedly left to abandonment and degradation. i thought that creating a playground there might not only give a space for playing back to the city, but also trigger a systematic project to regenerate the park, in which the city of fermo would have great validation in quality of life, as well as be a tourist, sports, and social lure. this is how my playground came to be. already just by colouring those spaces the kids came back to play on that five-a-side football pitch, even without the goals. a great overall regener- ation operation has been planned, which i hope starts soon; it would be a nice redemption of art. mm: what role did the use of the drone play? does a project also lie behind that? gv: the photo from above is the only one in which the whole work is revealed. the orography of the site is also very particular, so i requested photos from three heights: , , and m. by gradu- ally increasing the height the frame expands: at m you see only the court within the forest; at m you see the court, the forest, and the park, which drops with the first houses; then at m you see the whole park up to above the ring of walls. this photo is impressive. the buildings on the road above the park seem to be much taller. it is practically a plan with shadows, but it is impossi- ble to understand the changes in height. you don’t see the walls so they seem enormous, and fermo looks transfigured; it looks like a city suburb in ar- gentina. that photo circled the world and turned the headlights on a still neglected zone. the im- ages remain on the internet over time. this is im- portant: the creation of a mural or a playground cannot be an operation to guarantee a bit of con- sensus without inserting it into a unifying pro- gramme and carrying it to the end. when an artist interacts with social networks, politicians should keep in mind that everything will come to light, the press will arrive, and this will lead to making promises. then those promises should be kept, or they will come back like a boomerang. this is my struggle as an artist, for the serious commitment of all to social improvement. for me, street art is not a trend, but a strategy whose true potential is still undervalued. it is the means to put strategies into action that truly affect the social fabric of the city. this is what blu did up to his retreat, avoid- ing festivals and dedicating himself to the most impoverished situations. this is what has always interested me: turning on the lights, beyond all the individual thinking heads. . v o l u m e / n . - j u n e i s s n - disegnarecon m a g a g n i n i h t t p : / / d i s e g n a r e c o n . u n i v a q . i t from the wall to the pavement and back. murals in the epoch of drones. s t r e e t a rt. d r aw i n g o n t h e wa l l s note [ ] see the full video here: https:// www.youtube.com/watch?time_ continue= &v=uzgin vis u&featu re=emb_logo for the interview with ella & pitr by the mtn-world.com (editorial staff), see: https://www.mtn-world.com/en/ blog/ / / /ella-pitr-give- us-insight-on-their-impressive- heavy-sleepers-video/ [ ] the project piazze aperte by the city of milan is ongoing and can be followed here: https://www.comu- ne.milano.it/aree-tematiche/quar- tieri/piano-quartieri/piazze-aperte [ ] read the story of the pigalle basket court here: https://www. itsnicethat.com/news/ill-studio- stephane-ashpool-nike-pigalle- duperre-basketball-court-archi- tecture- [ ] for an account of the project vedo a colori, see: http://www.art- vibes.com/street-art/vedo-colori- street-art-nel-porto-di-civitanova- marche/ references adorno, th. w. ( [ ]). teo- ria estetica. turin: einaudi. agamben, g. ( [ ]) what is an apparatus? and other essays. stanford, ca: stanford university press. barthes, r. ( [ ]). il piace- re del testo. contro le indifferenze della scienza e il puritanesimo dell’analisi ideologica. milan: ei- naudi. benjamin, w. ( [ ]). the work of art in the age of its technological reproducibility, and other writings on media. english ed. by jennings m. w., doherty b., levin t. y., cambridge: harvard uni- versity press. chamayou, g. ( [ ]) the theory of the drone. new york: the new press. cra- carlo ratti associates ( ). swarms of painting drones, press release july rd, . retrieved may , , from https://carlo- ratti.com/project/ufo/ da vinci, e. ( ). lo spazio per l’opera d’arte | the space for the artwork. genoa: erga. - . de innocentis, i. ( ). viaggio alla scoperta della street art. pa- lermo: dario flaccovio. - . dogheria, d. ( ). street art. storia e controstoria, tecniche e protagonisti. milan: giunti. guarini, r. ( ). introduzione. in alacevich, f. & alacevich, a. scritto sul muro. i graffiti del muro di ber- lino. rome: gremese. mancuso, m. ( ). arte, tecnolo- gia e scienza. le art industries e i nuovi paradigmi di produzione nel- la new media art contemporanea. sesto san giovanni: mimesis. stubblefield t. ( ). drone art. the everywhere war as medium. berkeley (ca): university of califor- nia press. sbarbati, s. ( ). a come ar- chigrafia: intervista a giulio ve- sprini. retrieved april , , from https://www.frizzifrizzi. it/ / / /a-come-archigrafia- intervista-a-giulio-vesprini/ serra, c. ( ). murales e graffiti: il linguaggio del disagio e della di- versità. milano: giuffrè. vesprini, g. ( ). giulio vesprini: speciale archigrafia. illustratore italiano n. (anno i), - . understanding the impetus for modern student activism for justice at an hbcu: a look at personal motivations vol.:( ) the urban review ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - - understanding the impetus for modern student activism for justice at an hbcu: a look at personal motivations camille gibson  · fay williams published online: july © springer nature b.v. abstract this study examined university students’ motivations for engaging in activism for justice. of interest is what moved a sample of university youth at a historically black university to get involved in the jena six protest of september given that cases of injustice have remained fairly commonplace in recent decades for persons of color. to answer this question, a qualitative text analysis of essays that were written by undergraduate students as a requirement for a seat on a bus to the protest was performed. data were coded initially using etic codes from the literature on rea- sons for student activism. the findings indicate that for males anger is a significant catalyst for action. in contrast, females described a transformative future orientation for their offspring as motivating them to stand and to march in the interest of justice. such insights are likely of interest to those leading efforts for social justice. keywords jena six · student protest · activism · social justice · civic engagement introduction student involvement in jena six is an identifiable starting point of modern day black student activism. this start is captivating because there were so many issues in worthy of protest (for example, a lack of accountability for the sub- prime mortgage financial crisis; the virginia tech massacre and related ease of access to firearms; the many persons wrongly convicted of crimes becoming evident through innocence project efforts resulting in exonerations; ongoing police and citi- zen conflicts), one wonders why young black university students, ages –  years old choose the jena six case as a cause worthy of their involvement in protest for justice. of course, since then, many other protests by black university students * camille gibson cbgibson@pvamu.edu justice studies department, prairie view a&m university, ms , p.o. box  , prairie view, tx  , usa lakehead university, orillia, canada http://orcid.org/ - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf the urban review ( ) : – have occurred, such as those related to the death of trayvon martin in and michael brown in , incidents of black male youth who died under questionable circumstances. indeed, it was in response to the death of trayvon martin that the popular black lives matter movement began. of interest in this study is not all stu- dent activism, but black students’ activism specifically for justice, given the unique place of african american blacks in united states history. blacks herein, refer to the descendants of persons who were black slaves in north america until the late s. it is assumed, that these persons constitute the majority of the black univer- sity protestors from historically black colleges and universities (hbcus). in terms of historical experiences influencing cohorts of people, on agency for justice, the generation y group (persons born to ) follows an arguably largely apa- thetic generation x (persons born about to ) and appears more socially conscious as evidenced by a greater willingness to join “old school” activists in gal- vanizing for change. beyond such appearances, this study is an effort to describe the motivations for activism by black university youth. it is likely to be of substan- tial interest to those who desire to advance the cause of justice through protest and political activism. the jena six case involved a melee between african american and white stu- dents at a high school in jena, louisiana. apparently, a tree in the school yard was informally deemed a location for white students only, but september , a black student dared to sit under this tree. the next day, three nooses hung under the tree. a few fights between black and white students followed. subsequently, one of the white students, justin barker, needed medical attention (he was released hours later) and, as a result, five of the six african american students, mychal bell, ; carwin jones, ; jesse ray beard, ; robert bailey jr., ; bryant purvis, and theo shaw, faced adult criminal charges of attempted murder. the district attorney in the case, reed walters, was suspected of partiality given his lack of response to the terroristic threat of the hanging noose and the perceived disproportionate harsh response to the african american males in the student conflict as opposed to the white males. none of the latter were prosecuted; instead, they received  days sus- pension, ignoring the principal’s recommendation for expulsion (jones ). perhaps a few things made september a season ripe for protest: that it occurred in a small southern town, not unlike many other such places where racial conflicts still occurred with regularity. the inter-racial harshness across pockets of the former dixie lands has remained arguably more blatant than more passive aggressive forms of racial conflicts in northern cites. also, the southern town, jena is in louisiana where the frustrations with the hurricane katrina aftermath still lingered. the inept response to this natural disaster indicated an insensitivity to the circumstances of low income persons of color. around this time as well, the news media often reported on the racially polarizing o. j. simpson acquittal on mur- der charges on october , . emotions from his acquittal likely re-surfaced with simpson’s legal troubles concerning a las vegas memorabilia robbery. more per- sonally however, what may have gotten the attention of young university students’ attention was that the jena six conflict may have looked very familiar to them, in that fights between black and white high school students happen in the south with regularity according to student anecdotal accounts recounted to the authors. thus, the urban review ( ) : – plausibly, the jena six case may have “hit close to home” for those young people who chose to participate in the protests. hence, the research question: why did stu- dents participate in the september , jena six protest in jena, louisiana? the jena six protest in jena on september , was largely publicized through the internet and media sources that target a black audience. calls to partici- pate came from the likes of activists such as al sharpton, jesse jackson and young student leaders at universities and colleges across the south. an estimated , attended the protest (jones ). some studies have found a connection between how frequently persons use social media and political interest (valenzuela ). indeed, social media seems to offer youth a safe place from repressors in which to express their objections to perceived injustice. recently, owen ( ) concluded from his study of law enforcement surveillance of activism, that social media spaces are now not as protective as they seem. they offer a multitude of information to per- ceived oppressors. more broadly, the fierce courage of youth, to stand against injustice has been integral to social movements worldwide. internationally, these include the tianan- men square protests in beijing, china in against the country’s politics and eco- nomic structure; and the chilean student protests of to over a lack of necessary education reform. in the united states, black youth activism has included the national association for the advancement of colored people (naacp)’s youth council and the southern negro youth congress (snyc) in the s to s; plus, the southern non-violent coordinating committee of the s. in the s and s black american students protested the vietnam war; in the s the protests are related to the rise of the black panthers and related movements critical of the actions of political structures. in the s, in specific urban areas largely in the northeast and in california, young blacks protested police excessive use of force. since then however, there has been a long drought in large scale black student activism until with the jena six case. while television impacted the reach of the protests of the s and s; by jena six, the widespread use of social media facilitated the reach and galvanization of this modern day activism. social media became spaces in which youth in various places could connect and share their con- cerns about injustices, then organize toward collective actions in response. while it is likely that social media facilitated other regional movement, jena six is one that eventually garnered national attention. the next major youth movement, years later, has been the ongoing black lives matter movement with its genesis after the death of trayvon martin in . it protests a law enforcement disregard for the life of black youth. black lives matter has inspired the high school student-led never again movement which calls for changes in the access to guns in the united states. this is in the wake of the parkland florida school shooting. the recent literature on student activism a context that will allow activism is important to its realization. harre ( ), look- ing at youth activism and service referred to context and experience as significant to generating activism in times of collective crises. at such times, activism might the urban review ( ) : – be indicative of parental modeling, direct or indirect experiences with injustice or pain; being moved by inspiring stories; religious values and organizational affilia- tion. harre also noted that it is important to provide space for youth to engage in activism and to recognize that engagement or other priorities may prevail. some (dikec ; sternheimer ) posited that activism is more common in times of prosperity; consider the s and early s. with prosperity, there is supposedly more time and energy for activism. indeed, johnston ( a) noted that the dearth of protest over the past  years reflects the fact that an increasing num- ber of students do not reside on campus, and, given rising tuition and other costs, they are more likely to be part-timers or commuters with financial strains. others (cleveland ) attributed the activism of the s to personal threat—such as a fear of being drafted. if the latter perspective is correct, involvement in the jena six protest of september might reflect some underlying vicarious fear for some of those who participated. plausibly, there was a fear that what happened to the jena six defendants could have easily been their fate or that of persons close to them. this way of thinking may have also made the trayvon martin case of of strong social justice interest for youth involved in the black lives matter movement. colby and damon ( ) in their study of social activists found that those advo- cating social justice did so with emotions of “righteous anger.” yet, it remains unclear the extent to which emotion matters in agency for justice. it appears that something has to “hit a personal note” for many to take action; but beyond that, what internal processes get an individual to move? externally, in the jena six case, there was an opportunity for a collective response, largely facilitated by internet-based communications of a call to action whereby it was not “i” against injustice but “we”. in this “we” the activists may have experienced a powerful camaraderie or belong- ingness. relatedly, courville and piper ( ) posited that “hope asserts agency”; “it can mobilize various marginalized groups to find collective voice”; “collective hope”; otherwise, “hope without agency is a mere illusion” (courville and piper p. ). given the limited access to resources common among youth, the realization of collective activism often involves cross-age collaborations where older persons serve in at least an advisory capacity (kirshner ). while it is commonly perceived that young people are largely powerless and subject to the control of adults, with adult support they can discover their power in their social context (o’donoghue and strobel ). indeed, much youth activism reflects a continuation of the behavior of their parents (watts and guessous ). franklin ( ) reported that in the s as more blacks grew as a presence on college campuses, a common student paradigm was that the newly educated negroes would be catalysts in advancing their race. further, this way of thinking was encouraged by various magazine articles by w.e.b. dubois and the result was student activism against traditional authorities at lincoln, howard and fisk universities. hence, in addition to the influence of adults on what youth do, there was an inter- est in this study on the extent to which students connect what they may have learned in class with the social and political aspects of context (stake and hoffman ); after all, education and information should raise consciousness (courville and piper p. ). this emphasizes critical thinking (challenging established paradigms) the urban review ( ) : – and an open-mindedness to different worldviews, in particular the extent to which more open mindedness moves persons to a concern about increasing equality; awareness of discrimination; personal confidence and validation of personal experi- ence (stake and hoffman ). certainly, disciplined protest might be interpreted as a sign of developing social consciousness (biddix et al. citing hunter ). theoretically, the literature refers to perceptions of legitimacy of structures as a factor influencing whether students decide to take action. wong ( ) in a news review of student protests identified a theme in a belief amongst the youth that they can still impact or change their world. she cited the work of angus john- ston who identified student protests in fall usually around three issues: police and racism; sexual assault and, student rights at universities. all of these, johnson claimed, had a common perception behind them, that without a change, the future was in jeopardy. johnston ( b) also concluded that students resort to protests when they realize that within the boundaries of their context and its rules of decorum, they are parties with very little power. protests then, are a means of changing the context and the dynamics of power. hope et al. ( ) concluded from their study of college youth that for black freshmen students, political activism seemed protective against stress, but high levels of activism seemed related to exac- erbated indicators of mental health problems (such as anxiety). further, livingston et al. ( ) utilized a quantitative study of an african american midwestern church sample to explain their reengagement in activism. they concluded that racial cen- trality that is, race being central to a person’s identity, psychological empowerment and activism itself predicted behavior. given this knowledge, this study is an effort to describe the voices of youth protestors themselves on motivation for involvement in activism for justice. it also queries the extent to which the educational experience might have impacted the young people’s decision to get involved in protest. method this study is a descriptive, qualitative text analysis of essays from university students on reasons for wanting to participate in the jena six protest on september , . the essays were required by an office of student activities and the campus student government association at a historically black university as a part of the process of joining the university’s student government on a bus to the jena six protest in loui- siana. over a hundred students from the university participated in the protest in jena; but essays were available for analysis. the essays were from males ( %) and females ( %). institutional review board approval was obtained from the univer- sity to access and to analyze these essays. largely based on the literature on student activism a code list and preliminary analysis matrices were prepared. the etic (out- sider knowledge or assumptions based on the existing literature) codes with which the researchers approached the essays were: connections with activism in the past (an inter- personal connection, given that relations with an activist is one of the strongest predic- tors of student activism) (mcadam and paulsen ); influence of academic content (that challenges established paradigms; open-mindedness; and, an awareness of dis- crimination); adult support (that facilitates student collective action and, or serves as an the urban review ( ) : – extension of a social network with experienced activists) (mcadam and paulsen ); personal motivations; and collective motivations (battle and wright ); religiosity; hope; righteous anger; compassion; a desire for egalitarianism, and belongingness. further, from local anecdotal reports to the researchers, there was a suspicion that black youths protested because the jena case “hit close to home” (self-identifica- tion) in that it was possible that persons protesting were either victims or connected to victims in similar racial brawls where they did not receive justice. a common scenario might be one in which a “brawl” was perceived as “not fair”—for exam- ple, if a black youth was outnumbered and severely beaten. often these conflicts go unreported and people sit without the justice that a collective response might bring. similarly, thomas et  al. ( ) explored carl jung’s idea that emotions might be powerful enough to “transform apathy into movement” (p. ). they focused on sympathy which they defined as a concern about the suffering of another without self-identification with the other. herein, we suspect that something more powerful than sympathy, a self-identification moved the students to active protest. this study is valuable because the narratives are from students at a historically black university (hbcu), which the authors suspect still offers students more in the way of sensitization on matters of social justice in that, the education offered might be one that more readily challenges established paradigms—especially those that suggest that “the criminal is young and black.” such challenges are likely to occur amidst an examination of the social, historical, economic and political context behind such skewed worldviews. markedly, the hbcu involved does not have an african american studies program, but african american life and matters of social justice are commonly weaved across its social science curricula, of which a mini- mum of semester credit hours is required of all undergraduates. the qualitative analysis of the text data involved reading and coding the data, then re-reading and re-coding the essays after a gap in time for consistency in cod- ing. the process also involved memoing notes along the side of the text that indicate support or non-support for assumptions about student activism based on the liter- ature. this facilitated identifying emerging patterns and themes across the essays which were then depicted in a table. the researchers’ positionality or paradigmatic lens influencing their interpreta- tion of the data reflect a largely constructionist orientation and to a lesser extent, a critical race conflict perspective. the researchers are females who are originally from outside of the united states who embarked on the project to understand the advocacy of specific united states african american youth in high schools and in university. thus, they approached with an open- mind, but vigilant for narratives that reflect racial conflict given the united states’ racial history, the remnants of which still impact today’s justice system practices. findings the findings may be organized according to four dominant themes in the essays. these are: an opportunity to stand and to take collective action; learning from his- tory; self-identification with the event and, impetus differences by gender. the urban review ( ) : – an opportunity to stand and to take collective action one of the motivational themes that emerged was seizing upon the opportunity to stand and to take collective action. the students at the university in the current study had elected a criminal justice major as their student government president. he had influence over budgetary resources and mobilizing student action, both of which are common ingredients of college student activism (altbach cit- ing levine ). recently, swain ( ) concluded from a statistical analysis of national data from over blacks interviewed after the presidential election that membership in a community or other organization with an african american agenda facilitated black activism; religiosity however, had a negative relationship with non-electoral activism. references to collectivism, that is, an interest in serving the group, namely the black race through collective action to have realistic impact were evident in % of the essays, but mention of religion in only %, which supports the existing literature. one mention of religion referred to a nation of islam duty to act and in all four of the essays that included a reli- gious reference there was mention of the matter being ultimately left to god’s authority. closely related to the concept of collective action was an appreciation of the opportunity provided by the student government (sga) for the students to engage in the collective action. apparently, there had been individual desires to act, but a lack of opportunity to do so until sga. as one person wrote: “when my children gain knowledge of their history, the ‘jena six’ is guaranteed to be in their remembrance. by participating in this historical event, i cannot only speak of the event but i can say that i had the gracious opportunity of experiencing the event directly.” only four essays ( %) directly mentioned adult, usually family support to participate. the researchers had expected this to be higher. there were many essays ( %) that mentioned that it was time to take a stand. to be coded “taking a stand” required the use of the word “stand”. the research- ers suspect that this commonality might reflect the language of faculty when encour- aging the students to participate in the march. references to “taking a stand” were often connected to the value of african american’s history of protest. for example: # : i would like to travel down to jena not only to show that the stereotypes of young african americans are false, but to show that the hard work and lives lost during the civil rights movement were not in vain. their cause stood for a purpose, and it is our time to honor the truth and hard work that they put forth in order for things like this to never happen again. this is a modern day civil rights movement of sorts, and it is our duty to stand up for what is right and not let our voices be silenced as they have been many times when it really mat- tered. # : for a simple school fight these students should receive   years that is very unjust and unfair to these young men. as african americans it is time for us to take a stand against the injustices done towards our race. the “taking a stand” indicated an awareness of discrimination in essays ( %), often followed by a specific comment about wanting these dynamics to change, the urban review ( ) : – coded as egalitarianism, that is, an interest in fairness or justice in essays ( %). an example of egalitarianism is: # : the audacity of law enforcement officials to strip these young men of their last high school memories and replace them with real life images of unforgiv- ing steel bars, concrete walls, and relentless nights is a blatant mockery of our justice system. yet on the other side of the spectrum the trouble makers who began this debacle are free to enjoy their days after only serving a mere three day suspension from school. taking a stand and the interest in collective action were also often connected to the theme of belongingness in essays ( %). this was the idea that the activ- ism was to benefit a group, african americans, in keeping with historical traditions. belongingness, most often, was about being a part of the community of african americans; less often it was about being “american”, for example: # : i feel that in order to do so i must take part, participate and contribute to our community and our civilization…i want to speak truth to those that hold the power in jena, louisiana and all over the world; that injustice to those boys, is an injustice to me, to my people, to all my ancestors who came before me and risked their lives, worked their hands until they bled, were whipped until their skin gaped open…it’s an injustice to harriet tubman, martin luther king jr., rosa parks, malcolm x, and i want to stand and make a difference. regarding support for the etic codes from the literature, taking a stand was a central, present moment, pivot point connecting past protests with hopes for an improved future. for example, # commented: as a [references her university] woman, i am required not to tolerate dishon- esty, but promote brotherhood, and consider others. by joining the rally in jena, louisiana i stand up against dishonesty, promote the uniting of my broth- ers and sisters for change, and become selfless. i sacrifice missing classes and losing sleep just to make sure generations after me will not have to experience the same trials. besides, i stand on the shoulders of pioneers who sacrificed their lives just so i could be able to succeed. learning from history a second thematic category is that of history learned and the possible connec- tion with academics. any reference to history, such as the mention of dr. martin luther king, malcolm x or the african american history of protest was coded as “academic/history” which has the assumption of learning possibly in an academic setting. the researchers however, were not able to discern from the essays where learning took place. the learning could have been from family, peers, religious com- munities, books, television, et cetera. nevertheless, a few essays mentioned the stu- dent being inspired by a faculty and staff who spoke at a jena march informational event. there were essays ( %) that referenced history connected to academics, but only ( %) that directly mentioned a history of activism. the urban review ( ) : – # after the recent tragedy, that has named six young high school boys as attempted murders: i have begun to see these united [stated] states of amer- ica for their true colors. these colors are ones filled with unjust and inadequate practice of the civil rights laws our parents and grandparents fought so hard to obtain only a little over  years prior to this unpleasant incident….a glimpse at his true segregation and tyranny would allow me to see firsthand what type of oppression my people from years past had to tolerate….the catastrophe at hand is a direct example of the old saying ‘history repeats itself’. # : on thursday, september th, i __[full name]_ would like to participate in the peace and protest rally in jena, la. i want to be a part of this historic event that i compare to the marches in washington in the early s. it is up to us to show leaders and innovators of our past, that we can infuse the mod- ern-day civil rights movement with fresh faces and fresh viewpoints. young black people of the hip hop generation have our footprints all over this event and i’m glad to see us come together for this fight against racial inequality. # : dr.___________ spoke about power and i know that is most likely the reasoning behind these charges. i just don’t understand how the whole world can watch these events happen and this town is still able to get away with this blatant form of racism. before the forum tonight? i really did not have the knowledge of what went on in this town of jena, louisiana afterwards i felt really informed and ready to make a difference. i know that i am only one person, but i feel that with this group of students we can make a difference together. dr. w.e.b dubois said “a little less complaint and whining, and a little more dogged work and manly striving, would do us more credit than a thousand civil rights bills.” self‑identification with the event in contrast to a group interest for activism, the researchers wondered about how much self-identification with the circumstances of the jena six motivated participa- tion. this was the third thematic category. it was evident in essays ( %). indeed, essay # was from someone who knew a member of the jena six and who con- cluded that, “he was a very intelligent, ambitious, and athletic young man who had big dreams of going to college and pursuing a career in the nba.” other examples of self-identification references are: # : when i was in middle school, my…caucasian classmate made a ku klux klan mask out of white paper, wrote kkk across the top, and poke[d] holes for eye in it. he then held his hand out in front of him like he was holding a gun and said_________. # my family and i are also from northeastern louisiana and we have been exposed to similar types of injustices that still go on today. so in that respect, i can relate to that lifestyle and i empathize with them because i have been where they are and i have seen what happens when no one stands up for what’s the urban review ( ) : – right and i refuse to be a bystander and watch the system destroy more lives when i can make a difference. # referring to growing up in california noted that: “i’ve seen young black kids get wrongfully convicted of petty crimes and sentences get increase[d] to a felony charge and they get convicted as adult.” # i have family from all parts of louisiana and it would absolutely break my heart if this happened to them. it was never far from my mind that situations like this still occur today in the year , but to be intoned [intuned] into an actual situation just turns flips in my stomach from much anger. this has hit very close to home for me, too close for comfort actually. how can i sit back and not take a stand? how can i know what’s going on and do nothing about it? how could i possibly ignore that this could have easily happened to my brother? i am now presented with the opportunity to make a difference and i don’t want to pass this opportunity up. related to self-identification is the concept of compassion, an extension of caring given the plight of the jena six. this was explicit in essays ( %). one example is # “well, originally i didn’t plan on going to jena, louisiana on behalf of the jena six but after watching a cnn newscast on the case, and after seeing them i can’t help but want to participate.” additionally, there was a related code of personal motivation which required that the student state that the participation was for him or herself. often this included wanting to have a memory/story of being a part of some- thing significant—something to tell others about—to satisfy a personal need (long- ing, urging, passion, deep emotion) to act on behalf of someone else. this, in essays ( %) was always in relation to some broader motivation, for example # , a female stated: “i want to attend the rally not only for myself but for my ancestors and my descendants to come.” impetus differences by gender a fourth category of themes was anger and, or a future transformational orienta- tion. the essays revealed a gender difference in the rationale and language for activ- ism. males were more likely to speak of anger or outrage at their perceptions of injustice ( % of the essays) while females were more likely to use language of empathy, compassion and support for the jena six boys and their families. females (almost % of the essays) were also more likely to connect participation to an inter- est in the future and in particular the lives of their children yet to come. it was strik- ing how the genders differed in this regard—in that, males rarely mentioned children but were more inclined to a personal motivation connected to self-identification and, or anger at the injustice. the future-oriented comments from females, however, sug- gest a commitment to the possibility of social transformations. this should not be interpreted to mean that males do not share this concern, but that it was likely not at the forefront of their motivations to act. a future orientation requires hope and as one male put it: the urban review ( ) : – # the racial injustice that is going on in north louisiana is a tragedy to all americans. this is a clear case of racial hatred toward the black youth in this small town. we, as black men and women, have to support our own people. we have to pull them out of the grips of the white south, because nowadays instead of hanging us with ropes, they lynch us [with] prison bars. in conclu- sion, i want to go to jena because i want to make a change. as one female stated: # this case with the young men regarding our race can lead to change for our african american society in the nation. it can open the eyes [of those] whom do not see the racial factors that are in the united states, and maybe change the way people feel about other people. yet, a rare skeptic in the group, a male wrote: i would like to go because it’s hard for me to know that anybody is getting locked up. especially for something that i don’t see is wrong. yes, i personally don’t think going to louisiana is going to change anything but i would like to go try…personally, i would like to see as many people go out there as pos- sible, because [it] is going to take a lot of support to turn everything around. overall, the codes that were most commonly supported by the essays content were: an awareness of discrimination ( %); collectivism ( %); egalitariamism ( %); references to the value of history ( %) and, time to take a stand ( %) (see table  ). time to take a stand was a novel code. other emic (evolving from the data) codes were utilizing an opportunity and a concern for “my children”, a future orientation specifically voicing concern about the lives of offspring yet to come spe- cifically from the female participants. self-identification and expressions of concern about the boys and their families were also very evident. discussion and conclusion the students largely reported wanting to participate in activism because being united was more likely to have impact than acting alone. further learning from history the importance of taking a stand and acting because the scenario of the jena six was somewhat familiar also mattered. males however, seemed moved more by anger and females more by a concern for the future. the jena six march could be tagged as a significant development in the evolution of the modern era of youth protests. unlike many protests that followed it, this one had a relatively positive outcome. by june the jena six cases ended with five of the african american defendants getting up to  days probation and a five hundred dollar fine after pleading “no contest” to misdemeanor simple battery. this was a much different outcome from what they faced initially with charges of attempted murder. in december , the first of the six to go to trial mychal bell had pled guilty to a reduced charge of second degree battery which meant a sentence of  months incarceration. the urban review ( ) : – ta bl e s tu de nt s’ e xp la na tio ns o f t he re as on s th ey d ec id ed to a ct iv el y pr ot es t c od e fr eq ue nc y (n = ) pe rc en t ( % ) a ct iv is m (r ef er en ce to h is to ry o f a ct iv is m ) a ca de m ic s/ hi st or y (r ef er en ce s to a ca de m ic c on te nt in h ig he r e du ca tio n) o pe n- m in de dn es s a w ar en es s of d is cr im in at io n a du lt su pp or t ( to e ng ag e in a ct iv is m ) o pp or tu ni ty (b ec au se th e op po rt un ity w as p re se nt ed to a ct ; o pp or tu ni ty n ot to b e m is se d) pe rs on al m ot iv at io n c ol le ct iv is m (s er vi ng th e gr ou p, n am el y th e bl ac k ra ce ; n ee d fo r t he p ow er o f g ro up a ct io n/ re sp on se ) r el ig io n (r ef er en ce s to re lig io n as a m ot iv at or ) h op e/ fu tu re (a bo ut im pr ov in g th e fu tu re ) a ng er (a bo ut w ha t h ap pe ne d su ch th at it m ov es o ne to a ct io n) c om pa ss io n (a n ex te ns io n of c ar in g gi ve n th e pl ig ht o f t he j en a ) e ga lit ar ia ni sm (t ow ar d fa ir ne ss ; j us tic e) b el on gi ng ne ss (a s a re su lt of a g ro up id en tit y) se lf -i de nt ifi ca tio n (a s en se th at th e ci rc um st an ce s of th e je na c ou ld h av e ha pp en ed to th em ) t im e to ta ke a s ta nd (s ta te m en t t ha t i t i s tim e to “ ta ke a s ta nd ”) m y ch ild re n (r ef er en ce s to b ei ng in vo lv ed to im pr ov e th e liv es o f t he ir fu tu re c hi ld re n) the urban review ( ) : – undeniably, black university student activism has been an important part of united states’ history. understanding this student activism is important because it deals with the kind of learning environment that institutions might help to create (hope et al. ). for decades, tertiary institutions have been the base for power- ful social change movements dating back to at least the student non-violent coor- dinating committee (sncc) in , out of shaw university, a historically black university in north carolina. a key element in the success of this activism effort was the facilitation by faculty and staff, as students seemed to need the support of their administration to assist them in the realization of their intentions. that was the case here, as these facilitators helped to see to the transportation and other details of the protest effort. grande and srinivas ( ) referring to student health advocacy suggested solidifying students’ knowledge of how to effect social change by offering instruction on strategic planning, team building, coalition building, media advocacy, effectively communication ideas, politics and fundraising. there has been push back to student activism, such as the state of missouri s legislature’s proposed bill to strip athletes of scholarships if they refused to engage in athletics for the purpose of protest. the bill was withdrawn, likely in recognition that student activism would not be diminished; after all, the athletes could simply go elsewhere. a limitation of this study is that the essays were written after an information ses- sion about the jena six hosted by local activists and faculty. some persons men- tioned being moved by the speeches –but the essays were varied (indicating that there was not a large scale regurgitation of remarks made) and no one attributed his or her participation directly to the speeches. this suggests that the students left the meeting with time to seriously reflect on the relevance of the opportunity to themselves as individuals. the fact that most of the essays were typed supports this assumption (as typing takes time). another limitation is that it was not evident to what extent the university education impacted the desire for activism. also, the find- ings of the study regarding reasons for activism are not generalizable as the sample is limited to students at one institution. the essays were also self-reports and might reflect some social desirability effects. future studies could involve in depth interviews with current student activists on their motivations and the evolving role of social media on protests. they might also examine a broader sample and explore the extent to which particular forms of per- ceived injustice evoke particular types of activism. the youth in this study were in a predominantly black context with faculty support. it would be worth documenting the motivations of black youth in predominantly white and other ethnic academic settings. references altbach, p. g. 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( ). the renaissance of student activism. in the atlantic. retrieved february , from https ://www.theat lanti c.com/educa tion/archi ve/ / /the-renai ssanc e-of-stude nt-activ ism/ /. publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. https://doi.org/ . /cdp http://www.tjsl.edu/sites/default/files/files/student% protests% c% then% and% now% -% the% chronicle% of% higher% education.pdf http://www.tjsl.edu/sites/default/files/files/student% protests% c% then% and% now% -% the% chronicle% of% higher% education.pdf http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/theres-no-college-p-c-crisis-in-defense-of-student-protesters- http://www.rollingstone.com/culture/features/theres-no-college-p-c-crisis-in-defense-of-student-protesters- http://www.everydaysociologyblog.com/ / /if-i-could-turn-back-time-regressive-social-movements.html http://www.everydaysociologyblog.com/ / /if-i-could-turn-back-time-regressive-social-movements.html https://www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/ / /the-renaissance-of-student-activism/ / 	understanding the impetus for modern student activism for justice at an hbcu: a look at personal motivations 	abstract 	introduction 	the recent literature on student activism 	method 	findings 	an opportunity to stand and to take collective action 	learning from history 	self-identification with the event 	impetus differences by gender 	discussion and conclusion 	references ideas, | ideas idées d'amériques  | populismes dans les amériques walt whitman, chemins parcourus cécile roudeau Édition électronique url : http://journals.openedition.org/ideas/ doi : . /ideas. issn : - Éditeur institut des amériques référence électronique cécile roudeau, « walt whitman, chemins parcourus », ideas [en ligne], | , mis en ligne le octobre , consulté le septembre . url : http://journals.openedition.org/ideas/ ; doi : https://doi.org/ . /ideas. ce document a été généré automatiquement le septembre . ideas – idées d’amériques est mis à disposition selon les termes de la licence creative commons attribution - pas d'utilisation commerciale - pas de modification . international. http://journals.openedition.org http://journals.openedition.org http://journals.openedition.org/ideas/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / walt whitman, chemins parcourus cécile roudeau to conclude, i announce what comes after me. ainsi s’inaugure l’ultime chant des feuilles d’herbe, salut du poète à son lecteur et compagnon de route, adieu et envoi mêlés dans l’interjection finale, « so long », cri et prière du prophète marcheur, dont le regard arrimé aux lointains s’attarde aussi, en même temps, sur les chemins parcourus, à l’instant de quitter le monde, c’est-à-dire de nous en léguer le texte. ce texte, qui nous parvient à travers l’étendue des ans, nous tient autant que nous y tenons, autant que nous le tenons, corps fugace, labile, et impérieux, entre nos mains. walt whitman, né en , à long island, la même année que l’homme au cachalot, herman melville, que john ruskin et george eliot en angleterre, et un an après frederick douglass, cette autre voix de l’amérique, aurait donc eu deux cents ans cette année, et alors que les États-unis d’amérique célèbrent le poète qui les a tant chantés, qui, de son chant, en a fait « le plus grand poème », whitman – l’homme et le texte, ou peut-être faudrait-il dire, l’homme-texte tant les deux désirent ne faire qu’un – continue de nous interpeller, au gré de ses multiples contradictions. prenant whitman au mot, qui se dépeint, à la lueur chancelante de la première vieillesse, lui et son livre, jetant un dernier regard en arrière, sur les chemins parcourus (« so here i sit gossiping in the early candle-light of old age—i and my book—casting backward glances over our travel'd road »), ce dossier revient sur les lectures de whitman, depuis un présent que le poète lui-même avait anticipé, dont il avait même désiré qu’il se souvînt d’un texte happé par son propre devenir. s’adressant aux poètes à venir (« poets to come ») qui seront les relais de sa voix, rugissante ou intime, le poème/poète sait qu’il faudra au moins un siècle (« nothing less than a hundred years from now ») pour juger de la « valeur » de ce volume qu’il appelle une « sortie » – en français dans le texte. si l’œuvre, toujours inachevée, est ancrée dans le siècle – « ces trente années de à » » qu’elle embrasse et livre « à vous, lecteurs », elle se veut aussi un souffle vivant, fièrement propulsé vers l’avenir. ce « maintenant », emersonien, whitmanien, américain sans doute, ou du moins construit comme tel, est celui du « yawp » poétique et barbare ; instant de l’éjaculation poétique, il est aussi celui de la rencontre, de walt whitman, chemins parcourus ideas, | l’entrecroisement des temporalités, celle du texte et celle du camarade-lecteur, une rencontre, un toucher, que ce dossier réitère par-delà les frontières et les siècles. car si whitman défie la circonscription de l’instant, son écriture se projette aussi hors des contours géopolitiques des nations qu’il voit se constituer dans le bruit et la fureur des guerres et des révolutions : la ferveur démocratique de , le sombre vacarme de la guerre de sécession qui résonne, lugubre et beau, de part et d’autre du livre, comme il traverse les autres écrits en prose du poète : democratic vistas ( ), memoranda during the war ( - ) ou specimen days ( ). ces chants excèdent leur moment, et le terreau d’où ils surgissent. delphine rumeau revient sur un whitman hémisphérique, whitman américain, c’est-à-dire mexicain, brésilien, chilien, enrôlé, dès les années , dans les combats du prolétariat mondial, un whitman démocratique car socialiste, mobilisé, avec et contre la lettre de ses poèmes, contre l’impérialisme états-unien. voix des prolétaires, ce whitman-là, est aussi soviétique, britannique, montre-t-elle, mais si son chant révolutionnaire trouve un écho, à la même époque, dans le harlem de la renaissance afro-américaine, il faillira à emporter dans son élan les voix amérindiennes. de fait, il demeure des ombres dans le whitman solaire et démocratique, qu’il serait vain, voire délétère, de vouloir masquer. kenneth price affronte la question épineuse de ce « whitman noir », dont les écrits en prose révèlent les ambiguïtés, la tiédeur politique quand il s’agit, par exemple, de prendre parti pour le vote afro-américain. serait-il temps de détrôner le barde, voire de ne plus lire, ne plus enseigner, des textes trop vite canonisés peut-être par l’institution littéraire ? comment lire whitman à l’heure de black lives matter, deux siècles après sa naissance, dans une autre amérique ? comment lire whitman est aussi ce que nous invite à penser thomas c. austenfeld qui remet sur le métier la question de l’épique et du lyrique. faut-il se laisser emporter par l’ampleur continentale du verbe whitmanien, l’incommensurable poussée de ses vers dont le rêve fou est d’embrasser l’amérique, ou s’agit-il d’écouter, sous le tumulte et le rugissement patriotique, la voix intime, le lamento déchirant d’un moi en lambeaux, quand le flux turgescent laisse place au ressac et que le « je » lui-même se retire et se perd ? ce lyrisme qu’on a parfois eu tendance à oublier émerge plus que jamais si l’on accepte de se laisser porter par la pulsation du poème dégagé des contraintes d’une forme fixe, sinon d’un genre – par le rythme d’un poème-danse alliant mouvement et beauté. allant à l’encontre des chorégraphies rigides des ballets classiques, whitman, souligne adeline chevrier-bosseau, laisse danser les corps masculins hors des conventions genrées de son temps pour célébrer une sensualité que la danseuse et chorégraphe isadora duncan, « fille spirituelle de walt whitman » – c’est elle qui le dit – saura offrir à la scène américaine. le corps des danseurs, vigoureux, électrique, exulte de santé et incarne l’action. mais est-il aussi opposé à toute forme de régulation que la critique a voulu le dire et le croire ? whitman, auteur sous pseudonyme d’un pamphlet intitulé manly health and training ( ), whitman journaliste au brooklyn eagle, impliqué dans les réformes urbaines des années et défenseur d’une administration municipale démocratique, a sans doute plus à nous dire qu’il n’y paraît sur la pratique politique et esthétique d’un en-commun toujours à venir, d’une organisation moins anarchique que démocratiquement instituée. jeter un regard en arrière sur l’œuvre de walt whitman, comme il nous invite à le faire, deux cents ans après sa naissance, c’est ainsi retrouver, sous l’image que l’on croyait connaître, les contradictions d’un poète rétif à l’embrigadement dans une quelconque catégorie, c’est renouer avec l’énergie des walt whitman, chemins parcourus ideas, | commencements et la beauté trouble, inconclusive, d’une expérimentation toujours continuée. auteur cÉcile roudeau cécile roudeau est professeur de littérature des États-unis à l’université de paris, où sa recherche porte sur le long dix-neuvième américain, l’articulation de l’esthétique et de la politique, de la littérature et de l’histoire. auteur de la nouvelle-angleterre : politique d’une écriture (pups, ), c. roudeau a publié de nombreux articles dans des journaux français, européens et américains (esq, william james studies, rfea, ejas…). récemment, elle a contribué à l’ouvrage whitman & dickinson: a colloquy (u. of iowa p., ), dirigé par eric athenot et cristanne miller, et travaille actuellement à deux monographies : fictions d’un en-commun : lectures de la littérature américaine au xixesiècle et beyond stateless literature : practices of democratic power in nineteenth-century us literature.cécile roudeau est directrice du larca- umr , responsable d’a , le séminaire sur la littérature américaine du xixe siècle à l’université de paris, et co-rédactrice en chef de transatlantica, revue en ligne de l’association française d’études américaines. walt whitman, chemins parcourus ideas, | 	walt whitman, chemins parcourus essential workers, essential services? leitourgia in light of lockdown religions article essential workers, essential services? leitourgia in light of lockdown bryan cones ���������� ������� citation: cones, bryan. . essential workers, essential services? leitourgia in light of lockdown. religions : . https://doi.org/ . /rel academic editor: edward foley received: january accepted: january published: february publisher’s note: mdpi stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. copyright: © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). pilgrim theological college, university of divinity, parkville, vic , australia; bmcones@gmail.com abstract: within days of the outbreak of covid- , the language of “essential work” and “essential workers” became commonplace in public discourse. “church workers” and their in-person liturgical services were largely deemed “non-essential”, and most assemblies shifted worship to online plat- forms. while some reflection on this virtual “church work” has appeared in the intervening months, there has been less evaluation of the gathered assembly’s absence from the public square, along with the contribution its liturgical work might offer in interpreting the pandemic and its effects. this essay imagines a post-covid- agenda for liturgical studies that focuses on a recovery of christian liturgy as public, in-person, and “essential” service done for the sake of the polis—a public example of “church doing world”—that proposes a countersign to the inequalities of contemporary consumer culture laid bare in these last months. it begins by engaging in dialogue with the leitourgia of groups who insisted on the essential nature of their public service, in particular the public protests against police violence that marked the summer of . in doing so, it seeks ways liturgical assemblies might better propose a “public theology” of god’s work in the world understood as the concursus dei, the divine accompanying of creation and humanity within it. keywords: public theology; liturgy; eucharist; covid- ; pandemic; assembly; liturgical theology; protest; black lives matter . introduction: what is “essential work”, and who bears its risks? the outbreak of covid- made immediately commonplace the language of what is “essential” in terms of both work and access to goods and services. those judged “essential workers” included health care providers, first responders, public servants, and many retail sector employees. this designation unveiled the relative value assigned to the work and workers required to maintain “the essential”: many roles are poorly compensated, and many workers belong to gender, racial, and ethnic groups that have suffered historic and systemic policies of inequality and exclusion. these “essential workers” were assigned to take the risk of providing essential services during the pandemic while simultaneously continuing to bear longstanding injustices based on race, gender, and class. “church work” in its customary, in-person forms fell among what was deemed “non- essential” and thus exempt from such risks; churches were even forbidden from engaging them. my own context in this case was as pastor of a mid-size, suburban episcopal church, which was primarily white, largely professional, financially secure with some exceptions, generally “progressive” in terms of politics and theological outlook, if not particularly politically active. few of us were counted among the “essential workers”, though virtually see, for example, the national conference of state legislatures’ ( ) description of the broad range of work deemed “essential” across industries. a u.s. national institutes of health study, for example, connected the higher rates of death due to covid- for non-hispanic blacks directly to their overrepresentation in occupations judged “essential”, especially in the u.s. midwest. researchers conclude, “the racial disparities among essential workers in the united states that we highlight are a byproduct of longstanding systemic racism and structural inequalities, combined with a lack of public policy aimed at protecting the lives of essential workers who risk their lives daily to protect and/or provide for others” (rogers et al. , p. ). the institute for policy studies ( a), a progressive think tank, provides a broad picture of the uneven effects of the pandemic across a range of marginalized populations. religions , , . https://doi.org/ . /rel https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions https://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - https://doi.org/ . /rel https://doi.org/ . /rel https://creativecommons.org/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://doi.org/ . /rel https://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions https://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= religions , , of all members routinely interacted with such workers through their everyday economic activity. soon after the suspension of in-person worship, the congregation began a weekly zoom “liturgy of the word”, which provided the primary moment of interpretation, first, of the pandemic with its uneven effects, and second, of the concurrent public responses to police violence against black bodies. while some of our prayer did attempt to address those events, primarily through the preaching and intercessory “prayers of the people”, its primary audience was members of the church. as i surveyed other local churches, especially others in my episcopal diocese, the judgment seemed to hold: from diocesan communications through to the congregational level, the prayer we engaged served pri- marily as pastoral care for those who took it up, both as a means of maintaining relational connections and of interpreting world events. while preaching and prayer inevitably ad- dressed what was happening “out there”, the conversation was limited to church members in relation to each other and god. it may have been “essential” to us, but likely to few others, nor did it directly engage the “essential workers” at the front lines of exposure to the pandemic and its effects. what follows is my own attempt to interrogate the limited reach of much christian liturgy during the covid- pandemic beyond an assembly’s members. it imagines a post-covid- agenda for pastoral liturgical studies that focuses on a recovery of christian liturgy as public, in-person, and “essential” service done for the sake of the polis. in doing so, the assembly proposes a public example of “church doing world” that actively engages the inequalities of consumer culture laid bare in these last months and proposes a countersign to the political and economic status quo. i take for granted that christian liturgy is a form of “public theology” in dialogue with the world around it undertaken by a “corporate theologian”, the christian assembly gathered as a “primary symbol” that refracts god’s work to the wider polis. it begins by engaging in dialogue with the leitourgia of the secular public protests that marked the summer of for ways liturgical assemblies might better propose their “public theology”. it concludes by imagining a possible expression of such “essential” leitourgia from my then-context in an episcopal church in suburban chicago, illinois, u.s. . what “work” have we been doing, and for whom? beyond my own context, broader reflection on liturgical prayer in an online environ- ment echoes the contention that common prayer during the pandemic has been largely directed to church members. among the topics producing widespread commentary, for example, is whether it is possible to celebrate “virtual eucharist”, with concern primarily my own reflections on our online attempts at common prayer can be found in “how do we gather now? what we have lost—and gained—through virtual worship” (cones a). a representative example from my own local episcopal bishop, jeffrey lee ( ), suffices, in which he encouraged the churches in his oversight to “a lenten fast from public worship”, which has since been renewed in various forms. domenico sartore, developing the work of the late mark searle, describes “pastoral liturgical studies” as a three-step task: “( ) an empirical task: a phenomenological description of the event of celebration, explanation of the meaning of the words and deeds that constitute the rite, liturgical attitudes, and the specific assembly’s receptiveness; ( ) a hermeneutic task: how symbols work and how symbolic language communicates, and whether our contemporaries effectively engage in communication with them; ( ) a critical task: comparison with the results of other disciplines, critical evaluation of the various forms of religious imagination in the various churches, and identification of the various forms in which contemporary liturgy can be alienated and alienating” (sartore , p. ). see also searle ( ). the expression evokes aidan kavanagh’s oft-quoted claim that liturgy “play[s] extremely hard ball with the world by remaining clearheaded about what the world can and cannot do for itself.” just prior kavanagh notes, apropos of the current pandemic, “orthodoxia has every reason to regard a child dead of war or starved by poverty as anything but normal” (kavanagh , pp. – ). elaine graham provides a helpful guide to the genre of public theology, with a nod to the possibility that liturgy might find a place on her “map”: “public theology has a ‘performative’ dimension, since actions may speak louder than words” (graham , p. ). edward foley ( ) gives a more fulsome articulation of the connection between liturgy and public theology. more recently, james farwell ( ) describes liturgy as a “formation” for public theologians. this expression reflects the contention of robert hovda through his many “amen corner” columns in the journal worship. it was most clearly stated in a document of the u.s. bishops’ committee on the liturgy ( , para. ), environment and art in catholic worship: “of all the symbols with which the liturgy deals, none is more important than this assembly of believers.” see also hovda ( ). religions , , of for church members deprived of communion. most anglican, lutheran, and reformed denominational level reflection has discouraged these practices, drawing attention to the necessity of embodied gathering as the sine qua non of eucharist in particular (though not necessarily of other forms of liturgical prayer) and encouraging a focus on the pres- ence of christ in the proclaimed scripture. other commentators have taken a different approach, with deanna thompson ( ) arguing that, although mediated by technology, a virtual gathering remains embodied. diana butler bass has protested what she judges to be a “forced fast”, contending that “the church”—by which she apparently means the clergy—“has been, in effect, hoarding the bread and wine, restraining the healing beauty of eucharist when hungry people most need to feast” (butler bass ). while these argu- ments may make sense among some christians, david jacobsen argues that “to ecclesial outsiders”, such debates may “tend to read like the premise of some home decorating shows on cable: what should be the center of the room, the framed chagall print or the family heirloom reading desk on the opposite wall?” (jacobsen , pp. – ). taken as a whole, then, most liturgical prayer in response to covid- and reflections upon it have focused on the effect of the suspension in gathering on christian communities. there has been comparatively less reflection on the loss of the assembly’s leitourgia in the public sphere, its “essential work” proposing the reign of god as an alternative to the current economic and political order. nevertheless, the consumer economy has continued to function more or less without major interruption, its inequities further magnified by the pandemic. however, maintaining it has been judged worth the risk of infection among “essential workers”. their work has yielded immense profits for a few, exacerbating the already overwhelming wealth and income divide across the very race, class and gender lines traced in the judgment of what is “essential work”. the narrow focus among many church commentators on the eucharistic elements or even their absence suggests “eucharist” as yet another “consumable” product functioning, in the words of carvalhaes, “in tandem, with or against, the economic order” (carvalhaes , p. ), though as belcher ( ) notes, that connection is often veiled. in this case, eucharist does not particularly disrupt or interrogate the marketplace and its effects. this congruity calls to mind daniel rhodes’ ( ) commentary on the failure of christian liturgy to engage “disaster capitalism”, through which public goods are privatized to generate profit in response to disaster. rhodes sees a need for “a liturgy interfused with a counter-politics” (rhodes , p. ), but it would be hard to argue that many churches’ “public service” has yet risen to this task in the matter of covid, much less been ready to bear the risks that might be involved in doing so. this is arguably a “pre-existing condition,” as carvalhaes ( , p. ) makes clear in his description of a “dichotomy” in much liturgical and theological thinking between doxa and praxis, between congregational prayer and christian engagement with the world. this was likely no less true before the pandemic, but its widespread yet uneven effects and the inequalities it has magnified have laid bare the limited ability of most christian leitourgia to propose a divine alternative to the economic status quo. these reflections are both widespread and widely available. by and large, denominational bodies and theologians have discouraged attempts to celebrate eucharist without gathering in person. see, for example, the episcopal church’s presiding bishop michael curry’ ( ) statement, “on our theology of worship”; the evangelical lutheran church in america’ ( ) “worship in times of public health concerns: covid- /coronavirus”; and “using our rites and resources” (anderson et al. ) offered by “theologians and scholars of methodist worship.” gribben ( ) offers a helpful and wide-ranging evaluation of these in his comments on the uniting church in australia’s decision to permit celebration of online communion. see also the uniting church in australia ( ), “temporary arrangements for holy communion”. institute for policy studies ( b) summarizes the results of studies that document an increase of $ trillion among u.s. billionaires through december . kimberly hope belcher argues that there is a direct, if often concealed, connection between sacramental and everyday economic exchanges, with the former proposing a eschatological subversion of the latter: “the christian sacramental revelation is not the separation of the eschatological from the worldly, but the subversion of the worldly into the eschatological” (belcher , pp. – ). elsewhere, carvalhaes ( ) echoes tissa balasuriya, who more than years ago asked, “why is it that in spite of hundreds of thousands of eucharistic celebrations, christians continue as selfish as before? why have the ‘christian’ mass going peoples been the most cruel colonizers of human history?” (balasuriya , p. ). religions , , of at first glance, such challenges seem beyond the reach of any assembly’s leitourgia, no matter how well intentioned. nonetheless, as many have argued, christian liturgy has functioned throughout the ages—for better and for worse—as public acts of theological interpretation, which interact in the public square with those proposed by others. hilton scott ( b) argues that the pandemic has thrust assemblies into an unusual experience of liminality, in which their primary public theology is no longer able to function as it generally has. he sees this time, and i agree, as a creative, open space for assemblies to seek new forms of contextual koinonia and communitas, which, in light of the pandemic, received liturgical practices appear limited in their ability to propose. a promising place to engage this creative space is in dialogue with those who refused to comply with the public orders to suspend their leitourgia in response to the inequalities unveiled in this time. what adjustments do they propose to christian liturgy that might amplify an assembly’s “public service”, even render it “essential”? . learning from others’ leitourgia among those refusing to comply with restrictions on in-person gatherings were the millions who gathered to protest police violence against black bodies. my participation in one of these stirred my own thinking about the leitourgia of the churches, a strategy sharon fennema ( ) has deployed in her own reflections on marches protesting gentrification in oakland, california. the march in question gathered several thousand people in chicago’s lakeview neighborhood, a center of lgbtqia+ culture and entertainment. it is, however (as orga- nizers pointed out), one with a history of excluding black and transgender members of the rainbow. notably, a majority of those gathered were non-black, which became clear as the protest unfolded and reflected the city’s well-documented racial segregation by “neighborhood”, of which i am a part as a white resident of the city’s majority white north side. a number of elements would be familiar to anyone in a church on sunday. first were the litanies that accompanied the mile-long procession, dominated by “say their/her/his name”, depending on the gender identity of the victim of police violence being named. these were interspersed with broadly familiar chants that mark civil rights protests (“no justice, no peace”, “this is what democracy looks like”). the cumulative effect echoed liturgical lament, though in this predominantly white north side assembly, it also had the as edward foley notes, “whether we agree with it or not, societies, cultures, and even countries are already promulgating their own public theologies” (foley , p. ). hilton scott proposes in his south african context a renewed understanding of the concept of ubuntu (“i am because we are”) in light of the indiscriminate nature of covid- infection, “a new status quo that is fully human and therefore able to accept difference and otherness as well as navigate such relationships without discriminating” (scott b). foley argues that dialogue is key to public theology proposed through liturgy, “not simply supplying answers to questions and problems posed by the world, but ritually responsive in the ways it symbolizes, celebrates, and consecrates god’s brooding spirit afoot in the liturgy of the world” (foley , p. ). the connections between liturgy and public protest have long been a thread in liturgical theology, if underdeveloped, at least as a matter of most congregational practice. harold leatherland, for example, argues, “i am predisposed to the view that protest is not alien to liturgy, that protest can be uttered liturgically, and that liturgy itself can be considered, from some aspects, as protest” (leatherland , p. ). the reality and effects of racial segregation in chicago’s “city of neighborhoods” are well-documented. see, for example, the joint report of the metropolitan planning council and urban institute ( ), “the cost of segregation: lost income. lost lives. lost potential.” michael jaycox ( , pp. – ) notes the importance of acknowledging the social location one brings to a direct action, particularly as a white person and academic at a black lives matter protest, including the dangers of appropriating the stories of those marginalized by race, gender, or class. for my own part, as a white, queer, and cisgender male chicagoan, i joined this protest as a regular visitor and participant in the culture of lakeview, and thus see myself as complicit in the injustices raised in the protest, which i also hope to resist and repair. burns ( ) explores the interaction of confession (directed toward individual actions) and lament (“confessing more than sin,” or its larger manifestations) in christian assemblies through the work of gail ramshaw. while the former is quite common across the traditions, burns finds fewer of the latter (apart from ramshaw’s work), which limits many assemblies in their ability to name and mourn much of the inequality the pandemic has unveiled. see also ramshaw ( , pp. – ). suna-koro ( , p. ) proposes a recovery of lament as a “a profoundly counter-hegemonic liturgical practice that can empower christians to name and subvert the polarizing imaginaries of dehumanization, resentment, and hostility” characteristic of anti-migrant and racist policies. religions , , of feel of a confession—perhaps in response to a “call” from the march’s black leadership. the embodied juxtaposition between call and response refracted through those racialized identities calls to mind carvalhaes’s identification of the limits of most “generalized” denominational confessions, which “seldom make us think about real reparations to black and indigenous people” (carvalhaes , p. ). unlike most church litanies, however, these arose from various groups within the processing assembly and were often modified in the chanting and were not directed from “the front”. whatever the character of the litany, it arose from the “body”, not from the “head”. it evoked aidan kavanagh’s description of the “many-to-many” interaction characteristic of liturgical prayer as a “social occasion” (the protest) (kavanagh , pp. – ), which he distinguishes from the “one-to-many” interaction of a lecture hall or the “one-to-one” character of a personal conversation. kavanagh notes that one of the purposes of such a many-to-many “social occasion” is that it produces an “effective symbol of social survival” (kavanagh , p. ). this description is particularly apropos of the protest as a “ritual or quasi-liturgical” activity that allows those gathered to “construct and become a narrative-based collective” (jaycox , p. ). once the procession arrived at a major intersection, the organizer shifted to “presider”, directing this assembly’s attention, proposing and modeling what to do, and yielding to other voices. the call to order began with the presider inviting any black persons present to come “up to the front”, with the rest of the assembly parting to create an aisle and spontaneously applauding as black and transgender persons filtered forward. their appearance at the end of the procession suggested to me the customary place of the vested ordained ministers in an episcopal procession. while i fear it appears clerical there, in this case, it seemed a felicitous “ordering” of the assembly, with black and transgender bodies proposed as privileged norms within a primarily white and presumably cisgender assembly. the presider then proposed the equivalent of an embodied ritual action, instructing those gathered to kneel on the pavement and hold a nearly nine-minute silence to recall george floyd’s suffocation. while i have experienced such silences in christian liturgy, the “sacred space” created by contact with asphalt and the press of people gave it a profound anamnetic character, both “embodied and empathetic”, that fennema finds in oakland. while it echoed one particular “crucifixion”, it refracted those terrible minutes in a way that made present countless others; it further proposed a vicarious identification with its victims among those, such as myself, who had never experienced its direct effects. as fennema writes, it was an act of “remembrance and imagination, when we begin to make the connection between the experience of others and our own in a way that affects us . . . reclaiming the space and making visible the people—the many faces of christ—who have been suppressed or erased” (fennema , p. ). though displaced from minneapolis, the asphalt common to every american city combined with the bodies pressed against it evoked the character of a liturgical “real symbol”, the action effectively made present the place of floyd’s death and referred further to chicago’s own places of similar deaths. . adjusting an assembly’s “public service” this example of protest suggests to me some dimensions of liturgical practice that need attention if liturgies are to offer the “essential public service” of a countersign to the political and economic status quo. first among these is a shift in mentality for many assemblies, my own included: we must adopt the attitude that, like a public protest, our work is directed primarily to the polis, not the ekklesia. the purpose of being “called out” while this interpretation is my own conjecture, one of jaycox ( , p. ) interviewees, “alice”, who is black, wondered if white protesters want black participants “to absolve them of their sin”. michael skelley, interpreting karl rahner, describes a “real symbol” as the “the supreme and primal form of representation in which one reality renders another really present” (skelley , p. ). jaycox ( , p. ) also argues that protest is “symbolic action,” which “has the power to mediate the world that can and should exist, but does not yet exist in its fullness, but which through ritual participation in the action already begins to break into our reality.” religions , , of is to render a “public service” so essential that “salvation”, incarnationally manifested in the flourishing of those made marginal, depends on it. this will likely require a shift in attitude from seeing worship as the assembly’s work offered to god to understanding it as the leitourgia god’s spirit is groaning to do for the world through the assembly. building on that shift in attitude, the correlative need to adjust the assembly’s common action and the manner of its address in prayer becomes clear. i would argue that the relative passivity of many assemblies in relation to the world is directly related to the passivity they experience in most liturgical celebrations: most remain “in their places” from beginning to end; any “marching” is limited to a few designated for that purpose and “chanting” is carefully ordered to certain voices. if liturgy is to be not only an act of public theology or, as sally brown ( ) describes it, formation in “discerning the public presence of god”, the manner of its celebration is every bit as important as the words it voices. brown’s concern about the weak connection between liturgical practices and public forms of action suggests a need for more accessible “ritual vernacular” (to accompany linguistic ones). such common embodied action can propose the essential relationship between christian liturgy and christian mission as manifestations of the church’s participa- tion in the missio dei, which duraisingh describes as “the already up-and-running mission of god in the world” (duraisingh , p. ). while that might lead to an assembly undertaking a public act akin to a protest, an imagination shaped to make that connection needs a regular embodied poiesis—a ritual vernacular—to, in the words of charles fensham, “aid in the formation of collective identity, the creation of free space, the harnessing of emotions, and the shaping of a culture of advocacy and change” (fensham , p. ). in the matter of gathering, then, whenever possible, a more porous entrance from outside the church is in order. in the assembly i served, the “opening procession” obscured this connection by beginning and ending “indoors”, from the front of the space for worship, to the back, and up front again. nothing suggested the completion of a gathering bearing the “liturgy of the world” “in” from “out there”. a fairly straightforward adjustment would be to begin outside and include a more representative procession not limited to those members of the assembly who have roles of leadership. to the extent that such a procession “orders” the assembly, it should reflect as much as possible the differences gathered, particularly those marginalized either outside or within it. every assembly bears differences that are shunted to the side or excluded, whether based on age or ability or neurological function, not to mention race and cultural heritage. i have argued elsewhere (cones b) that these qualities are part of the “text” of any liturgy that can serve as sources for its public theology. the shape of an assembly’s gathering is, in the words of carvalhaes, an opportunity to “ascribe worthiness, or honor, to somebody or something” (carvalhaes , p. ) as the street protest did in calling forward the black and transgender members of that assembly. despite the real risks of failure in the christian assembly, for example, the danger of “tokenism”, the gathering is a i use this term deliberately to evoke aidan kavanagh’s definition of liturgical theology: “the adjustment to deep change caused in the assembly by its being brought regularly to the brink of chaos in the presence of the living god.” see kavanagh ( , p. ). jaycox ( , p. ), more trenchantly than brown, laments that “catholic practices of incorporation have tended to, at best, capitulate to, or, at worst, amplify and affirm the habituating power of white supremacy,” a judgment that could also be applied to my own episcopal context. judith kubicki, among others, argues that liturgical meaning is “primarily non-discursive and exhibitive. that is, meaning is not asserted by means of propositional content in worship, but exhibited or manifested in the interplay of symbolic activity” (kubicki , p. ). thus, while the pandemic, its effects, and responses to it may have appeared in “discursive” forms in many liturgies (in preaching and prayers), these meanings lacked an accessible, non-discursive analog in ritual. fensham argues that ritual, in this case christian liturgy, can do so by bringing “a kind of insight with wider and more encompassing ethical and moral implications” (fensham , p. ). there are many examples of “liturgies after the liturgy” documented by both scholars and practitioners, though i would suggest these remain exceptional among the majority of churches. see, for example, stewart ( ); nóda ( ); and scott ( a). karl rahner proposes god’s self-disclosure in creation as “the terrible and sublime liturgy, breathing of death and sacrifice, which god celebrates and causes to be celebrated in and through human history in its freedom,” which christian liturgy symbolizes, reflects upon, and interprets. see rahner ( , pp. – ). see also skelley ( , pp. – ). religions , , of moment for an assembly to state what qualities in itself it proposes to value, particularly differences that have been made marginal. as to the word and song that gather the assembly, while the “chants” may differ from those found at a protest, the manner of their leadership and performance could better correspond to it. the “call to order”, for example, need not originate from the same voice; indeed, in the case of a procession with some already “in place” and some moving through, the dialogue might be between those groups, laying the groundwork for the “many-to-many” interactions of the liturgy as it unfolds. intercessory prayer offers further opportunity for active, communal engagement beyond their content. the diversity of voices that entered the room needs refraction in its prayers for the world. there is no reason beyond the logistics of finding enough willing voices for there to be a single “prayer leader”, nor to restrict the prayers themselves to what is printed on a page. the korean prayer pattern tongsung kido, which includes an invitation to prayer, space for intercession from the assembly’s members, and a sung response has promising possibilities for contextualizing such “prayer of the people”. after such prayers, most assemblies of my experience turn to the table and its proposal of communitas or koinonia within and beyond the gathered group. this turn is harder to discern in the leitourgia of public protest, though fennema ( , pp. – ) proposes the concept of “pilgrimage” as one promising analog. nevertheless, the nine minutes of silence held by with the “real symbol” of all those bodies pressed to pavement did evoke a unity-across-difference, though perhaps without proposing its reconciliation. regardless of its intent, it embodied a compelling “ritual vernacular” available across differences of race, class, wealth, gender, orientation, age. it suggested a “real symbol” of what m. shawn copeland has called “a praxis of solidarity” (copeland , pp. – ), which she connects to eucharist, embodied at an intersection and in the intersections of those gathered. how often do christian assemblies render their eucharistic “public service” in such accessible and compelling ways? what may be lacking in many assemblies is the “ritual vernacular” that makes the connection between the eucharist and the hunger of the world (or in one’s own backyard) a more accessible dimension of the assembly’s imagination. put plainly, if the poiesis of eucharist had been doing its “essential public service” all along, there would be no hunger at all, at least within reach of any who celebrate it. nevertheless, the (pre-existing) hunger starkly exposed in the pandemic also reveals the relatively weak effect much eucharistic leitourgia has had on the hunger it is meant to contest. belcher ( ) suggests this limit in imagination is the result of a “concealment” of the connection between sacramental eucharistic practice and everyday economic activity, which i would argue has analogs in the practice of many assemblies: it is often difficult to identify the food placed on the altar with what is plucked from the grocery shelf, much less the divine and human exchanges belcher identifies in both. an embodied expression unveiling these relationships, like the march that gathered the assembly, surely must include more than a few representatives bearing meager “gifts” rendered invisible by their containers and handed over to the clergy at a distant table. an assembly might start by never again using something called “a host” in favor of actual food, that is, real bread and wine or other culturally appropriate analogs that meet actual hunger. a more fulsome procession of full hands bearing a wider range of gifts would better propose a “vernacular” real symbol of a meal able to feed everyone and an economy refracting divine abundance. this must surely include the assembly pressing close to its own table—the infrastructure of the meal analogous to the asphalt of the city liturgy—to experience its own eucharistic solidarity with all who hunger. this practice is commended by alexander ( , p. ). see also cones ( ). this expression evokes monika hellwig’ ( ) classic study on eucharist and hunger (originally published in ). see also bieler and schottroff ( ). religions , , of a eucharistic practice with a more outward turn might also call into question any “fencing” of the meal: while “open table” practice —in which any who wishes can receive communion—disrupts the expectation of baptism before communion, it also suggests a broader catholicity in the meal, not least in a culture in which access to food is “fenced”. jacobsen argues this requires a shift in eucharistic imagination from “private visions of ‘family dinner’ in favor of ‘public banquet’” (jacobsen , p. ). granting the concerns documented by jean cotting about “entrapping” the “unbaptized in an unwanted obligation” (cotting , p. ), the qualifying difference between the baptized and others gathered is that the former have a particular christian appreciation of what god is doing in them. a less well-defined or simply different understanding brought by someone who does not share christian faith need not mean exclusion from the symbol. on the contrary, it may contribute to the “surplus of meaning” that is the hallmark of liturgical prayer. to again invoke carvalhaes, “if our worship space is really public, it means it will be a place where anyone can come and be a part of it” (carvalhaes , p. ). this inevitably leads to the adjournment of the assembly’s gathering “until next time” presumably to embody in some form whatever new encounter with the living god it has experienced. while it may not be helpful to add more words to an already language-centric event, it would seem that an exit from the assembly must include a call to engage god’s work in the world. perhaps here the “business meeting” of the church might include an announcement of the “public service” it engages beyond the liturgy. it might also include those sent out immediately from the assembly to do the “liturgy after the liturgy” in the church’s name, whether to carry food to relieve hunger or join others in common efforts to make public the “adjustment to deep change caused in the assembly by its being brought regularly to the brink of chaos in the presence of the living god,” including engaging the risk this work might entail. as the assembly entered, so it goes out, as a body, to do the work the spirit groans to have its members do. moving through the liturgy together, as if in pilgrimage or even protest, might propose what christopher duraisingh has called the concursus dei: “god’s unceasing accompaniment with creation, calling and evoking [the assembly’s] participation in god’s movement as god leads it patiently and persuasively, both in judgment and grace, to its future in god’s future” (duraisingh , p. ). . conclusion: walking together in common vulnerability as i reflect on my own context, a church that shares a parking lot with a local hospital among the first to treat patients with covid- in illinois, i wish i had had the imagination to suggest that we take some of the risk asked of “essential workers”: to gather in the safest way possible for a liturgy of pilgrimage around that hospital. its “stations” might have refracted in lament, confession and prayer the risk borne by the “essential public service” of those caught between a natural pathogen and societal failure to engage it, as well as our own privileged “exemption” from that risk. i can imagine us calling the names of those bearing that risk—nurses’ aides, food service workers, patients and their families—and inviting their prayers in conversation with hospital staff. perhaps family members excluded from accompanying their loved ones might have joined us, enriching the symbol beyond our members and proposing a shared koinonia of common vulnerability to covid- . as that liturgy changed, it may have drawn greater attention to the injustices related to race, gender, and class unveiled and magnified over these many months and invited those gathered to action. we could not have saved anyone, but, as we surrounded and joined those most affected, we might have signified that concursus dei, “mirroring the divine accompaniment through... solidarity and compassion with all” (duraisingh , p. ). funding: this research received no external funding. “open table” refers to practice in some episcopal and other congregations that make an explicit invitation to all gathered to receive communion, regardless of whether they have been baptized or identify as christian. this has been a subject of debate in my own episcopal church. see, for example, cones ( , pp. – ); and malloy ( , pp. – ). religions , , of conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of 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[crossref] https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/covid- -essential-workers-in-the-states.aspx https://www.ncsl.org/research/labor-and-employment/covid- -essential-workers-in-the-states.aspx http://doi.org/ . /wmh . http://doi.org/ . / http://doi.org/ . /hts.v i . http://doi.org/ . / x. . https://uca.ut.je/cudw/worship-resources-and-publications/item/ -temporary-arrangements-for-holy-communion https://uca.ut.je/cudw/worship-resources-and-publications/item/ -temporary-arrangements-for-holy-communion http://doi.org/ . / x. . 	introduction: what is “essential work”, and who bears its risks? 	what “work” have we been doing, and for whom? 	learning from others’ leitourgia 	adjusting an assembly’s “public service” 	conclusion: walking together in common vulnerability 	references gill_the-shifting-terrain rosalind gill and shani orgad the shifting terrain of sex and power: from the ‘sexualization of culture’ to #metoo article (accepted version) (refereed) original citation: gill, rosalind and orgad, shani ( ) the shifting terrain of sex and power: from the ‘sexualization of culture’ to #metoo. sexualities, ( ). pp. - . issn - doi: https://doi.org/ . / © sage publications this version available at: http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/id/eprint/ available in lse research online: january lse has developed lse research online so that users may access research output of the school. copyright © and moral rights for the papers on this site are retained by the individual authors and/or other copyright owners. users may download and/or print one copy of any article(s) in lse research online to facilitate their private study or for non-commercial research. you may not engage in further distribution of the material or use it for any profit-making activities or any commercial gain. you may freely distribute the url (http://eprints.lse.ac.uk) of the lse research online website. this document is the author’s final accepted version of the journal article. there may be differences between this version and the published version. you are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it. the shifting terrain of sex and power: from the ‘sexualization of culture’ to #metoo rosalind gill and shani orgad it is an honour to be part of the th anniversary celebrations for sexualities and to have the opportunity to express appreciation for the space the journal has opened up. it has become a key site for interesting, critical and challenging work; indeed, it is hard to imagine what sexuality studies, queer theory, examinations of sex in the media and popular culture, and studies of intimate life would look like without the journal. we would like to express our gratitude to the editors over the last two decades – and to staff and assistants – for all their work in developing this vibrant and crucial space. in this short article we will aim to do three things. first, we want to use this opportunity to reflect on some of the changes we have seen in the scholarly field of gender, sexuality, and intimacy over this period, and on new emerging directions. second, we want to discuss the move away from discussions of ‘sexualization’ to a more critical and political register interested in a variety of ways in which sex and power intersect. thirdly, we will discuss metoo as an example of this shifted form of engagement, and raise some questions about its possibilities and limitations. gender, media, sexuality and intimacy as media scholars who work around questions of gender, sexuality, and intimacy this has been an exciting time. one of the changes we have observed is the increasing interest in the way that sexual identities and practices are constructed in media, with the take-off of terms such as mediated sex (mcnair, ) mediated sexual citizenship (brady et al , ), intimate publics (berlant, ), media sex (attwood, ) and mediated intimacy (andreasson et al, ; barker et al, ), indicating a growing understanding of the ways in which media are implicated in intimate life. social media in particular have become a major focus of interest with work on feminist and queer digital activisms opening up new questions about social movements, practices of critique and ‘call out’ and new affective ties and solidarities (rentschler & thrift, ; ryan & keller, ; keller et al, ). there has been also a growing body of work examining the role of self-representations in the construction of sexualities and sexual identities and the affordances of social media for curating a digital self (e.g. connell ; dobson , ; fink and miller, ; kanai, ; o’neill ), situated within the broader interest in self-representation (thumim, ), and wider shifts in which the clear-cut distinction between (media) producers and consumers or audiences is breaking down. our own work (barker, gill and harvey, ; elias & gill, ; gill and orgad, , ) also looks at the importance of smartphone apps (e.g. for health, appearance or sex) in intimate life as a relatively underexplored area that contributes to discussions about the quantified self (lupton, ; ajana, ), datafied self and new forms of surveillance (see gill, in press for longer discussion). another profoundly important set of shifts has been the opening up of questions about intersectional, postcolonial and decolonial critique within the field, generating a rich, critical vocabulary for scholars. the multiplication of terms for thinking about gender is having a major effect on the field- moving scholars beyond a taken-for-granted cisgender binary, and in the process introducing radically new ways of thinking about both gendered and sexual experience. trans studies in particular has a significant new visibility, with new journals (e.g. international journal of transgenderism, transgender studies quarterly) research and introductory texts (e.g. haefele-thomas, ). beyond this, it is hopeful to see the flourishing of intersectional research agendas that foreground not simply gender and sexuality but also race, disability, age and body size as well. alongside critical race scholarship, disability studies and fat studies are having a very important effect on the field (mcruer, ; rothblum& solovay, ). the significance of place and cultural context is also increasingly important. the dominance of anglo-american theorising, especially in queer studies, has given way to far greater geographical diversity- with large numbers of studies from latin america and east asia in particular. such research does not simply ‘add in’ new countries or cultures, but, more critically, offers ex-centric or decolonial perspectives that displace the hegemony of white, urban western theorising (comaroff & comaroff, ; willems, ; giraldo, ). early work on ‘transformations of intimacy’ has also been taken up in multiple directions that explore the many and varied ways we live our intimate lives. alongside ongoing interest in the experiences and practices of intimacy in heterosexual households and how they serve to sustain power relations (orgad, ; van hooff ), the agenda has significantly expanded to examine questions around intimacy in queer family forms. polyamory and non- monogamy, increasing numbers of single person households and the ‘gayby boom’ are all topics of research (ryan-flood, ; lahad, ). much attention has also been paid to how digital media are changing our ways of meeting intimate partners (e.g. hobbs et. al) and sustaining intimate relationships (e.g. wilson chivers and yochim, ), with considerable work on internet and mobile dating, including the ways this may be striated by power e.g. trolling and harassment of heterosexual women on tinder (albury et. al., ; thompson, ). theorising of the wider cultural formation via the critical terms postfeminism and neoliberalism (e.g. evans & riley, ; gill, ; mcrobbie ) has also generated increasing interest. it is becoming more common to see neoliberalism understood not simply as a political and economic rationality, but as one that is profoundly connected to intimate life and subjectivity. notions of intimate governance and affective governance are key here, as well as the body of work - our own included – that looks critically at the way that sex is frequently framed in terms of entrepreneurship (harvey & gill, ). barker et al’s ( ) research on smartphone apps for tracking, measuring and monitoring is a good example: showing how such apps exhort us to quantify and evaluate our sex lives, inculcating a tracking mentality. such apps are part of a much wider regime based around framing sex in terms of imperatives (frith, ; tyler, ). more hopefully, it is also exciting to see increasing resistance to such framings including ‘anti’ self-help books like ‘rewriting the rules’ (barker, ) and ‘enjoy sex (how, when and if you want to)’ (barker & hancock, ) as well as critical blogs such as crunk collective ( ; ). it is good to see also new dialogues developing – for example between postfeminism and queer studies (mccann, ; mcnicholas smith & tyler, ). one of the main ways the impact of activism has been felt within academic debates about sexuality has been in relation to the contested term of ‘sexualization’ and it is to this we turn next. sexualization: from moral panic to political engagement at one point in the early part of this century, concerns about ‘sexualization’ were ubiquitous. anxieties and concerns about ‘sexualization’ came to prominence in reports from think tanks (e.g. rush & la nauze, ; apa’s task force on the sexualization of girls, ; fawcett society, ), government reports (e.g. papadopoulos, ; buckingham, ; bailey, ) activist campaigns (for example to change the licensing laws for lapdancing clubs), as well as a variety of well-publicised popular books (eg paul, ; durham, ). news reporting in the period was preoccupied with questions of ‘porno chic’, the ‘premature sexualisation of children’ as well as wider concerns with the impact of what many agreed was a distinctly more ‘sexualized’ culture. academic debate – including in the pages of this journal – also focussed on ‘sexualization’, with divergent positions, including those that welcomed the multiplication of discourses and images of sex as a positive or democratizing shift (mcnair, ; mckee et al, ); those who approached the question from a ‘public morals’ or ‘responsible right wing’ (see duchinsky, ) perspective; and a range of very different feminist positions- ranging from radical feminist perspectives (e.g. jeffreys, ; dines, ) to ‘third wave’ ‘sex positive’ positions (johnson ; church-gibson, ). the topic of sexualisation has always been contested and fights about sexuality have long divided feminism – whether that be about pornography, genital cutting or sex work. these debates have been painful for many, and silencing for many more. too often they have taken place along deep enduring lines of stratification – between feminists of north and south, secular or religious, heterosexual or queer. they have also been marked by battle lines that seemed to have been established years earlier during feminism’s ‘sex wars’. much work has tried hard to avoid being pulled into the polarizations of the ‘sexualization of culture’ debate. feona attwood’s work has been crucially important in resisting this (false) binary, and in complicating or unpacking what ‘sexualization’ means. back in she argued that the term denotes many things which are often collapsed together: 'a contemporary preoccupation with sexual values, practices and identities; the public shift to more permissive sexual attitudes; the proliferation of sexual texts; the emergence of new forms of sexual experience; the apparent breakdown of rules, categories and regulations designed to keep the obscene at bay; [and the] fondness the scandals, controversies and panics around sex' (p. ). this reading helped to open space for a range of more nuanced engagements with ‘sexualized’ culture including seeing it as a neoliberal capitalist phenomenon linked to consumerism and discourses of celebrity, choice, and empowerment (gill, ; coleman, ; ringrose and renold, ; wood ). this latter tradition of work has been critical of the exclusionary nature of many concerns about ‘sexualization’, and in particular its imagined figure of a vulnerable, white, middle- class, north american, assumed-to-be-heterosexual -year-old girl who is the privileged subject of panics about sexualisation (gill, ). some (egan, ; gill, ) have interrogated the classed, racialized and heterosexualized nature of the framing of sexualisation concerns. a second critique highlighted by gill focuses on the way sexualization concerns frame the issue in moral rather than political terms – focusing on how much flesh is shown, how explicit it is, without making distinctions between the kinds of material being discussed. as activist rowan ellis i has shown, sex education material for lgbtq young people on youtube is almost always categorised as ‘restricted’ – therefore not easily accessible to view – almost as if not being heterosexual makes one automatically ‘too sexualized’. the issue has also been divisive for many women who work in the sex industry, as well as for trans people and others who live outside a rigid gender binary. a third area of critique has challenged the individualistic focus of many proposed interventions to challenge ‘sexualisation’ with their emphasis upon media literacy – as if the best we can hope for is to train young women to deconstruct or see through ‘harmful’ images or practices, not actually change them. not only does this seem timid, inward-looking and part of a long-standing tradition that seeks to ‘change the woman rather than change the world’, but also research shows that it simply doesn’t work (gill, ). overall – and again with many others, including as part of the germinal esrc seminar series ‘pornified? complicating the sexualisation of culture’ - we have sought to fashion a position that is ‘sex positive but anti-sexism’, whilst also attending to the differences in the way that bodies may be ‘sexualized’. many of us have chosen to use the term ‘sexualized’ in scare quotes to distance from its assumed meanings. we have also sought to interrogate the fear and shame that sometimes animates discussions of ‘sexualization’ (ringrose et al, ), arguing that this feeds into the difficulty for girls and young women to explore their own desires (fine, ). above all, we have emphasised the need to challenge sexism (and racism, classism, disablism, heterosexism, etc) rather than ‘sexualisation’ per se. this means having a political rather than a moral sensibility about sex. it is to be concerned with power, consent and justice rather than exposure of flesh. from this perspective recent feminist activism such as the #metoo movement represents an exciting development- and it is to this that we turn in our final section. #metoo: a new day on the horizon? the exponential visibility of metoo in the contemporary moment illustrates in interesting ways the shifted engagement we describe, from a concern with ‘sexualization’ to a more critical and political register interested in how sex and power intersect, and the implications of this shift. the movement’s emergence on social media and its subsequent remarkable visibility are situated within many of the various shifts we described above: in particular, the intensifying incorporation of media and especially social media into intimate lives, the explosion of self-representation in the articulation of sexual identities, as well as the popularity of feminism and the important work of preceding feminist and social movements and mobilisations such as slutwalk, black lives matter, the women’s room and everyday sexism. the metoo hashtag has been circulating in countries, and, significantly, beyond the global north, from south korea, to japan, indonesia, ii to palestine iii (see https://metoorising.withgoogle.com/). the movement’s global uptake is arguably due, at least in part, to its broad and inclusive appeal, and its ability to cross lines of stratification. while the #metoo campaign was sparked by the exposure of the experiences of white heterosexual women in the us, it has quickly expanded, with more and more stories of queer women and men, women of colour and women and men in other countries coming into the limelight. also, although the #metoo discussion has focused largely on secular women’s experience, it triggered critical discussion of silenced sexist and sexual violence also in religious institutions. iv at the same time that #metoo has been criticized by many for centring the experiences of white western women, some important non-white figures have spearheaded the movement and contributed to its significant visibility. these include, for example, oprah winfrey whose inspirational golden globes speech in january about a ‘a new day on the horizon’ attracted huge attention, mexican hollywood actress salma hayek, and african-american civil rights activist tarana burke, who founded the original metoo movement in , and endorsed the hashtag movement. indeed, many see #metoo as a hopeful platform for building feminist solidarity across lines of class, race, and sexuality. metoo seems to also represent a challenge to the highly individualised nature of many current discussions and proposals to tackle gender inequality and sexism by ‘fixing’ women’s psyches –a critique we develop in our account of the rise of the confidence culture (gill and orgad, ) and made by other feminist scholars in relation to postfeminism (gill, ) popular feminism (banet-weiser, a) and/or neoliberal feminism (rottenberg, ). as sarah banet-weiser ( b) notes, “one of the most hopeful manifestations of #metoo has been the focus on the sheer numbers of women coming forward, forcing people to deal with the collectivity of it all.” the campaign has provided important spaces for a wider range of women to participate in public debate on sexual harassment, sexism and rape culture (mendes, ringrose and keller, ). these are, of course, still early days, however, there is already encouraging evidence of organizational, legal, policy and cultural changes triggered by #metoo. most notably, many powerful men are being held accountable for abuse and harassment. another visible development has been time’s up, a programme launched by women in hollywood that will raise funds for working-class women facing workplace sexual abuse to file lawsuits. the #metoo movement has also generated discussion around “zero tolerance” harassment policies, and many organizations (e.g. microsoft, new york city council) have already changed their sexual harassment policies in its wake. v more broadly, #metoo is fundamentally concerned with the intersection of sex and power and has framed its concerns in terms of justice. this concern has vividly crystallized in harvey weinstein's indictments in june , and in particular the highly circulated image of him in handcuffs. consent is a focal point of the #metoo-inspired debate, surfaced by stories such as that initially reported in january on babe.net, by an anonymous - year-old woman writing about being coerced by comedian aziz ansari into a sexual encounter. at the same time, and despite the optimism that has surrounded the movement – which, as feminists, we partly share – the trajectory it has taken thus far suggests some profound limitations. notwithstanding the shift from moral panic to political engagement, it seems that many of the fundamental problems identified in relation to the sexualisation debate persist in the context of #metoo, and are manifest in old as well as new and troubling ways. firstly, despite the excitement about metoo’s wide appeal and cross-class, cross-ethnicity and cross-race character, its politics and aesthetics are exclusionary in various problematic ways, echoing similar critiques about previous feminist movements such as slutwalk (see black women’s blueprint, ; mendes ). writing in feministing on her experience as an lgbtq person and survivor of multiple forms of sexual violence perpetrated within her own community, jess fourneir criticized metoo’s ‘footnoting’ of queer experiences, that is, their relegation to the margins of a conversation about pervasive sexual violence that definitely concerns us. vi the rapper cardi b spoke powerfully about metoo’s favouring of a particular femininity that is 'respectable' (skeggs, ) and 'believable', leaving out women like herself (woman of colour, previously a stripper, hip hop artist) who ‘do not matter’. the overwhelming exclusion of disabled women from the metoo movement has been another important criticism (flores, ; wafula strike, ). clare hemmings ( ) argues that #metoo promotes an understanding of sexual gendered violence as primarily experienced through a binary between men and women, thus undermining broader coalitions of those facing harassment in the face of masculinist dominance, including cis-women, trans* men and women and gender non-conforming subjects and queer subjects of colour. highlighting the question of who is able to speak out, dubravka zarkov and kathy davis ( ) note that powerful and privileged women are at the centre of metoo. many others do not have access or could not take the risk of speaking out as the ‘sanctions would be too great’. in this context, zarkov and davis note the contrast between contemporary metoo stories and the fate of nafissatou diallo, the new york maid who stood out against dominique strauss-kahn in . secondly, it is not only sexual identities and subjectivities that have been excluded, marginalised and occluded by #metoo. the primary context within which metoo emerged and with which its cause has been associated is almost exclusively sexual violence. furthermore, within this focus, the #metoo-inspired discussion has foregrounded one particular domain, namely the workplace. following the harvey weinstein exposé and the pouring of stories of (mainly celebrity) women in the media and cultural industries, metoo has come to be preoccupied with sexual violence in paid work contexts. even within these contexts, it has focused predominantly on women in certain roles and certain workplaces; women in sectors such as health and social work, wholesale and retail, administration, accommodation and food services, manufacturing and hospitality– in which female employment is concentrated–have been conspicuously absent from the majority of the discussion. domestic violence has been notably missing from the discussions. domestic violence organizations and activists are trying to capitalize on the visibility of #metoo to advocate their causes vii – an effort that demonstrates their exclusion from (or at least marginalisation within) the movement. the critique of metoo's narrow focus on gendered sexual violence connects to a third limitation. it concerns the question of whether the movement’s popularity and visibility are indeed due to its call for justice, or due to the salacious content of the stories it has brought to light. to put it somewhat crudely, is it sexism or sex that ‘sell’? how should we understand the role of a mainstream media that suddenly seems to believe (some) women, after decades of trivialising and undermining us? does this represent a genuine shift? is a backlash coming? what is more, as research has shown, the proliferation and repetition of sexual violence stories, especially on social media, may make the distribution of online vitriol easy, persistent and vicious, creating a toxic and less safe, not safer, space for women’s expressions of their voices (jane, ; mendes, ringrose and keller, ). finally, for all the celebration of #metoo’s challenge to sexual violence and harassment, so far it seems that a significant part of the debate remains framed in terms ‘bad apples’ and ‘monsters’ who did horrible things, not about the monstrous capitalist, patriarchal and sexist system that has produced, sustained and rewarded these ‘bad apples’ over decades. in this context, it is striking to note that the discussion about the sexist and violent abuse of female actresses by some hollywood senior men’s – dominated and exemplified by the case of harvey weinstein– has been mostly divorced from critical discussion of the huge role played by films (the commodity produced and distributed by this capitalist industry) in naturalizing and normalizing violence against women. thus, as shelley cobb & tanya horeck ( : ) warn, although the current moment “feels like a watershed moment, it is important to proceed with caution and determination… so far, the emphasis on charitable legal funds, changing the face of those in power (e.g. more women ceos etc.), and better corporate policies remains contained by a postfeminist sensibility that ‘is not disruptive’ and is ‘capitalism, neoliberalism and patriarchy friendly’ (gill , )”. while welcoming #metoo for its more politicised engagement with matters of sexual politics, then, we remain ambivalent – hopeful, yet also troubled - by the type of discourses, themes, sexual identities and experiences that it foregrounds, and crucially, by those it renders invisible and unintelligible. we embrace davis and zarkov’s ( ) productive insistence on thinking about #metoo, and more broadly about the intersection of sex and power in the contemporary moment, in terms of dilemmas and ambiguities. #metoo seems to represent a decisive shift away from moral panics about ‘sexualization’, to more politicized understandings that foreground power relations. nevertheless, an entirely ‘new day’ of gendered and sexual relations still seems some way off. references ajana, b. 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( ). ambiguities and dilemmas around# metoo:# forhow long and# whereto?. european journal of women’s studies - notes i https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ /mar/ /lgbt-community-anger-over-youtube-restrictions- which-make-their-videos-invisible ii http://www.globeasia.com/columnists/metoo-paternalistic-indonesia/ iii https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/palestinian-metoo-yasmeen-mjalli-not-your- habibti-woman-west-bank-palestine-israel-a .html iv see for example, http://time.com/ /me-too-church-too-sexual-abuse/ v in april , the new york city council passed the stop sexual harassment in new york city act, which would require employers with or more employees to conduct mandatory annual anti-sexual harassment training for all employeeshttps://www.withersworldwide.com/en-gb/new-york-announces-changes-to- harassment-laws-following-metoo-movement vi http://feministing.com/ / / /metoo-dont-make-trans-and-queer-survivors-a-footnote/ see also: https://medium.com/@lauramdorwart/the-hidden-metoo-epidemic-sexual-assault-against-bisexual-women- fe c a vii https://edition.cnn.com/ / / /health/metoo-domestic-violence-screening-tool/index.html author bios rosalind gill is professor of social and cultural analysis at city, university of london and a professorial fellow at the university of newcastle, nsw. she is author of several books including mediated intimacy (with meg-john barker and laura harvey) and is currently writing about ‘the confidence cult(ure)’ with shani orgad, in a book due for publication by duke university press in . shani orgad is associate professor in the department of media and communications at the london school of economics and political science (lse). she writes and teaches on media, cultural representation, gender and globalisation. her forthcoming book is entitled heading home: motherhood, work and the failed promise of equality (columbia university press, ). racial and ethnic disparities in covid- outcomes: social determination of health international journal of environmental research and public health commentary racial and ethnic disparities in covid- outcomes: social determination of health samuel raine ,*, amy liu , joel mintz , waseem wahood , kyle huntley and farzanna haffizulla ,* nova southeastern university dr. kiran c. patel college of osteopathic medicine, davie, fl , usa; al @mynsu.nova.edu (a.l.); jm @mynsu.nova.edu (j.m.); ww @mynsu.nova.edu (w.w.); kh @mynsu.nova.edu (k.h.) department of internal medicine, nova southeastern university dr. kiran c. patel college of osteopathic medicine, davie, fl , usa * correspondence: sr @mynsu.nova.edu (s.r.); fhaffizull@nova.edu (f.h.); tel.: + - - - (s.r.); + - - - (f.h.) received: september ; accepted: october ; published: november ���������� ������� abstract: as of october , over . million cases of coronavirus disease (covid- ) and . million associated deaths have been reported worldwide. it is crucial to understand the effect of social determination of health on novel covid- outcomes in order to establish health justice. there is an imperative need, for policy makers at all levels, to consider socioeconomic and racial and ethnic disparities in pandemic planning. cross-sectional analysis from covid boston university’s center for antiracist research covid racial data tracker was performed to evaluate the racial and ethnic distribution of covid- outcomes relative to representation in the united states. representation quotients (rqs) were calculated to assess for disparity using state-level data from the american community survey (acs). we found that on a national level, hispanic/latinx, american indian/alaskan native, native hawaiian/pacific islanders, and black people had rqs > , indicating that these groups are over-represented in covid- incidence. dramatic racial and ethnic variances in state-level incidence and mortality rqs were also observed. this study investigates pandemic disparities and examines some factors which inform the social determination of health. these findings are key for developing effective public policy and allocating resources to effectively decrease health disparities. protective standards, stay-at-home orders, and essential worker guidelines must be tailored to address the social determination of health in order to mitigate health injustices, as identified by covid- incidence and mortality rqs. keywords: covid- pandemic; social determination of health; disadvantaged populations; occupational risk; race; gender; poverty; intersectionality . introduction the high incidence of novel coronavirus disease (covid- ) in the united states is concerning; there have been approximately . million confirmed cases and nearly , deaths [ ]. blumenshine et al. described an imperative need for policy makers at all levels to consider socioeconomic and racial/ethnic disparities in pandemic planning [ ]. they developed a conceptual framework to illustrate the three levels by which these disparities might result in unequal rates or illness or death: disparities in exposure, in susceptibility to contracting, and in treatment of the disease [ ]. therefore, identification of social vulnerabilities and disparities may allow for development of focused and culturally sensitive interventions to limit transmission and mortality caused by any pathogen, including covid- . in the united states, the increasing covid- burden has exposed longstanding socioeconomic and health disparities. differences in covid- incidence and mortality vary dramatically, and are int. j. environ. res. public health , , ; doi: . /ijerph www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /ijerph http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph int. j. environ. res. public health , , of apparent between age groups, geographic regions, and races. studies find that black people are dying from covid- at higher rates than any other race or ethnicity [ , ]. examination of the forces which influence the social determination of health may help explain these differences and spur innovation and policy changes to address health injustices. the theory of social determination of health proposes that social dynamics, in addition to risk factors, dictate the health of individuals as a result of the inequalities created [ ]. the world health organization (who) defines social determination as “the forces and systems shaping the collective conditions in which people are born, grow, work, live, and age, as well as the conditions of their daily lives [ ]”. individual social dynamics give rise to the risk factors affecting covid- exposure, susceptibility, and differences in treatment-seeking behavior or access to care. dismantling unjust systems which lead to inequities related to the social determination of health is the foundation of health care justice. equitable allocation and access to resources allows all individuals to attain their highest level of health. studies indicate that chronic disease outcomes and social mobility are more influenced by zip code than immediate family resources [ ]. this suggests that regional differences in community exposure to poverty, food insecurity, oppression, abuse, racism, and environmental hazard exposure contribute to the development of long-term stress, which, in turn, results in physiological maladaptation and perpetuates adverse health outcomes [ ]. there is a well-documented correlation between social dynamics and chronic diseases such as diabetes, hypertension, schizophrenia, depression, and asthma [ ]. however, there are limited data examining the efficacy of public policies to mitigate the social determination of health in the covid- pandemic. between march and june , stay-at-home orders, mandatory face coverings, and social distancing guidelines were instituted across the us. these policies have affected employment, travel, behavior, and mental health [ – ]. however, it is unclear whether these policies have equal impact on risk of exposure, susceptibility to contraction, and access to treatment among all people. in this study, we aim to evaluate national- and state-level racial and ethnic disparities in preliminary covid- cases, outcomes, and identify potential factors that contribute to any disparities. . materials and methods the protocol for our cross-sectional analysis of public-use data was approved by the institutional review board at nova southeastern university. there was no requirement for informed consent as the data were de-identified and made publicly available. to maintain adequate standards of assessment, the strengthening the reporting of observational studies in epidemiology (strobe) guidelines were used in crafting this protocol [ ]. there were objectives to the statistical analysis: ( ) to determine racial/ethnic trends of covid- incidence relative to the us population, and ( ) to evaluate the racial/ethnic distribution of covid- related mortality relative to the us population. . . data sources we analyzed data from the covid tracking project’s racial data tracker, compiled by the center for antiracist research at boston university, which aggregates state-level covid- reporting and tracking databases (supplementary material, tables s and s ) [ ]. the numbers of confirmed covid- cases and mortalities were evaluated by race and ethnicity on an individual state level. we compared the proportion of american indian or alaskan native (aian), black, hispanic/latinx, native hawaiian or pacific islander (nhpi), asian, and white cases and mortality attributed to covid- to the corresponding proportions in the state populations, by using self-reported national and state demographic data from the united states census bureau’s american community survey (acs) year averages (supplementary material, table s ) [ ]. data on white, black, hispanic/latinx, asian, aian, and nhpi people were evaluated. we excluded the multiple race/ethnicity category from our analysis, as there was insufficient data for analysis. covid- incidence data classified by race and ethnicity were available in of us states. racial and ethnic data int. j. environ. res. public health , , of from louisiana, new york, north dakota, and rhode island were not available and were excluded from our analysis. cases and deaths where race or ethnicity were unknown were also excluded. the data were restricted to reports from march to june , when public policy stay-at-home orders were in effect, regardless of their enforceability [ ]. . . statistical analysis a representation quotient (rq) was utilized. rqs were defined as the proportion of a particular subgroup in the total number of covid- cases or mortality relative to the corresponding estimated proportion of that subgroup in the united states population. for example, covid- incidence rq for white people would be given by rq = % white incidence% white population . an rq greater than indicates that a subgroup is over-represented, and a rq less than indicates that the subgroup is under-represented. the magnitude of the rq can be used to evaluate the scale of the under- or over-representation. for example, a covid- death rq of . indicates that the subgroup’s representation in covid- mortality is % greater than the subgroup’s representation nationally. the rq is a useful method in disparity analysis as it contextualizes findings. for example, a reported influenza incidence of % for subpopulation x and % for subpopulation y appears to indicate that subpopulation x is overly affected by influenza. however, this does not consider that subpopulation x comprises % of the total population, and subpopulation y only %. the disproportionate effect of influenza on subpopulation y is not apparent until it is compared to the size of y relative to the size of the general population. using rq to compare the effect clearly illustrates the disparity; subpopulation x rq = . , subpopulation y rq = . . choropleth maps were generated from the state-level rqs using the internet-based data packing platform, displayr (nsw, sydney, australia) [ ]. after calculation of incidence and mortality rq by race and ethnicity, tukey’s test for post-hoc analysis was completed with an anova to evaluate statistically significant (p < . ) differences between the average state rqs between all racial/ethnic groups. . results between march and june , the number of confirmed covid- cases rose from individuals to . million in the united states. the total confirmed deaths during this same period increased from individual to , [ ]. . . racial/ethnic trends in covid- incidence . . . covid- incidence in the us among all racial/ethnic groups, white people had the highest number of confirmed cases, approximately . % of total cases. however, the case rq for white people was only . . this indicates that, for white people, covid- case representation is approximately % of the group’s representation in the total us population. non-white, non-black hispanic/latinx accounted for . % of the confirmed cases in the us and had a rq of . . this indicates that the representation of hispanic/latinx in covid- cases was % greater than the group’s representation in the us population. aian, nhpi, and black people all had rqs > ; . , . , and . , respectively. the case rq for asian people was . . us rq data for all racial and ethnic groups evaluated can be found in appendix a, table a . these rq values suggest that there are racial and ethnic disparities in covid- case incidence on a national level, during the march to june period. table summarizes the national rq data for covid- cases and mortality by race/ethnicity. significant differences between race/ethnicity incidence rqs from tukey’s test for post-hoc analysis can be seen in appendix a, table a . . . . covid- incidence by state within racial and ethnic groups, rq variability by state was observed. among white people (figure a), the average rq = . but ranged from . in texas to . in hawai’i. despite this int. j. environ. res. public health , , of variability, no rq > was observed for white people in any state, indicating that white people had lower covid- case representation relative to representation in the state population across all states. in contrast, the average rq among black people was . (figure b), and ranged from . in texas to . in maine. only states had a case rq < for the black population. the average state-level case rq for asian, aian, nhpi, and hispanic/latinx people was . , . , . , and . , respectively. figure a–f, below, shows choropleth maps of the rqs from the race/ethnicity-specific analysis by state. table . us incidence and morality representation quotients (rq) for covid- by race and ethnicity. race or ethnicity us population incidence mortality incidence rq mortality rq white . % . % . % . . latinx . % . % . % . . black . % . % . % . . asian . % . % . % . . multiracial . % . % . % . . aian . % . % . % . . nhpi . % . % . % . . unknown . % . % . % . . la, nd, and ny did not publicly report case data by race/ethnicity; mt did not publicly report death data by race/ethnicity; unknown racial and ethnic data in the covid tracking project represents a significant portion of covid- cases and deaths due to lack of standardized data collection methods. int. j. environ. res. public health , , x of table . us incidence and morality representation quotients (rq) for covid- by race and ethnicity. race or ethnicity us population incidence mortality incidence rq mortality rq white . % . % . % . . latinx . % . % . % . . black . % . % . % . . asian . % . % . % . . multiracial . % . % . % . . aian . % . % . % . . nhpi . % . % . % . . unknown . % . % . % . . la, nd, and ny did not publicly report case data by race/ethnicity; mt did not publicly report death data by race/ethnicity; unknown racial and ethnic data in the covid tracking project represents a significant portion of covid- cases and deaths due to lack of standardized data collection methods. . . . covid- incidence by state within racial and ethnic groups, rq variability by state was observed. among white people (figure a), the average rq = . but ranged from . in texas to . in hawai’i. despite this variability, no rq > was observed for white people in any state, indicating that white people had lower covid- case representation relative to representation in the state population across all states. in contrast, the average rq among black people was . (figure b), and ranged from . in texas to . in maine. only states had a case rq < for the black population. the average state-level case rq for asian, aian, nhpi, and hispanic/latinx people was . , . , . , and . , respectively. figure a–f, below, shows choropleth maps of the rqs from the race/ethnicity- specific analysis by state. figure . choropleth maps of covid- incidence rq by state among (a): white people; (b): black people; (c): latinx people; (d): asian people; (e): aian; (f): nhpi. . . racial/ethnic trends in covid- mortality racial and ethnic data were available for covid- -related mortality in out of the us states. racial and ethnic mortality data were unavailable for hawai’i, montana, rhode island, south dakota and north dakota. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . . . covid- mortality in the united states white people accounted for the largest proportion of confirmed mortality by race, approximately . % of total us deaths. however, the case rq for white people was only . . this indicates that the white population’s representation in covid- deaths is . % of the white representation in the total us population. black people accounted for only . % of the total number of confirmed deaths in the us, but had a rq of . . indicating that black people account for a larger portion of covid- deaths relative to their representation in the us population. asian, aian, and nhpi people each had rqs less than ; . , . , and . , respectively (table ). these results indicate that there is a significant disparity in covid- deaths between the black population and all other racial/ethnic groups, during the march to june period. significant differences between race/ethnicity mortality rqs from tukey’s test for post-hoc analysis can be seen in appendix a, table a . . . . covid- mortality by state in state-level analysis, the average mortality rq for covid- deaths among white people (figure a) was . , ranging from . in the district of columbia to . in idaho and oklahoma. in contrast, the average mortality rq for black people (figure b) was . and ranged from . in texas to . in kansas. only states had a mortality rq < for black people. compared to all other racial/ethnic groups, black people had the largest state-average covid- death rq. the mortality rq for american indians and native alaskans (figure e) was greater than in many of the states across the southwest and accounted for the population with the highest mortality rq in any state (rq = . in wy). the average mortality rq for asian, nhpi, and hispanic/latinx people was . , . , and . , respectively. it is important to note that the asian, nhpi, and hispanic/latinx groups had mortality rqs > in multiple states. figure a–f shows choropleth maps for the deaths rq from the race/ethnicity-specific analysis on a state-by-state level. appendix a contains the numeric score of racial/ethnic death rqs.int. j. environ. res. public health , , x of figure . choropleth maps of covid- death rq by state among (a): white people; (b): black people; (c): latinx people; (d): asian people; (e): aian; (f): nhpi. . discussion the united states has received global criticism on its response to the covid- pandemic [ – ]. the initial lag in testing combined with the development of faulty test kits severely impaired covid- containment in the united states [ ]. in june, there was a significant rise in the number of new covid- cases which coincided with the reopening of many states, as well as increased politicization of stay-at-home orders and the subsequent reduction in public health measures such as mask wearing [ ]. the following discussion will evaluate the factors contributing to covid- inequality by the three levels of disparity, described by blumenshine et al.: ( ) disparities in exposure, ( ) in susceptibility to contracting, and ( ) in health care-seeking behaviors and treatment of the disease [ ]. . . disparities in exposure . . . essential worker policies the intent of stay-at-home orders and essential worker policies was to limit social gatherings within crowded workplaces and reduce person-to-person transmission. the us cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency (cisa) published categorized the following industries in an advisory memorandum as critical infrastructure sectors, and therefore as essential work: medical and health care, telecommunications, information technology systems, defense, food and agriculture, transportation and logistics, energy, water and wastewater, law enforcement, and public works [ ]. this served as a guideline for individual states in the issuance of stay-at-home orders. according to the center for economic and policy research’s analysis of the essential workforce, over million americans are deemed essential. approximately . % of these workers are in the health care sector, . % in food and agriculture, and . % in transportation and delivery [ ]. figure . choropleth maps of covid- death rq by state among (a): white people; (b): black people; (c): latinx people; (d): asian people; (e): aian; (f): nhpi. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . discussion the united states has received global criticism on its response to the covid- pandemic [ – ]. the initial lag in testing combined with the development of faulty test kits severely impaired covid- containment in the united states [ ]. in june, there was a significant rise in the number of new covid- cases which coincided with the reopening of many states, as well as increased politicization of stay-at-home orders and the subsequent reduction in public health measures such as mask wearing [ ]. the following discussion will evaluate the factors contributing to covid- inequality by the three levels of disparity, described by blumenshine et al.: ( ) disparities in exposure, ( ) in susceptibility to contracting, and ( ) in health care-seeking behaviors and treatment of the disease [ ]. . . disparities in exposure . . . essential worker policies the intent of stay-at-home orders and essential worker policies was to limit social gatherings within crowded workplaces and reduce person-to-person transmission. the us cybersecurity and infrastructure security agency (cisa) published categorized the following industries in an advisory memorandum as critical infrastructure sectors, and therefore as essential work: medical and health care, telecommunications, information technology systems, defense, food and agriculture, transportation and logistics, energy, water and wastewater, law enforcement, and public works [ ]. this served as a guideline for individual states in the issuance of stay-at-home orders. according to the center for economic and policy research’s analysis of the essential workforce, over million americans are deemed essential. approximately . % of these workers are in the health care sector, . % in food and agriculture, and . % in transportation and delivery [ ]. these essential workers risk increased exposure to covid- . low-income and people of ethnic and racial minorities are more likely to work in sectors that remained open [ , ]. in the united states, more than % of essential workers are non-white [ ]. furthermore, non-white workers are over-represented in the ten largest health care occupations, in childcare, and in public transportation employment in the us [ ]. the large number of non-white essential workers, and potential increased risk of sars-cov- exposure among essential workers, may contribute to racial disparity in covid- incidence. for example, in california, where hispanic/latinx people make up . % of the essential workforce, the case rq for hispanic/latinx in california was . compared to . for white residents. the majority of hispanic/latinx essential workers in california are non-health care workers, which may also increase risk due to less availability of protective equipment and workplace precautions. however, there is some variability between states, and exposure of essential workers cannot account for all racial and ethnic disparities observed in covid- case incidence and death rate. for example, essential worker demographics in utah closely resemble state demographics, yet the case and death rq for white residents is < and case and death rqs for black, asian, aian, nhpi, and hispanic/latinx residents are all > . there are distinct differences in the proportion of workers who are eligible to work from home by race and ethnicity. the us bureau of labor statistics reported that in the period – , million wage and salary workers ( %) had the option to work from home. of these, million reported working from home at least occasionally [ ]. while % of white people and % of asian people were able to work from home, only % of hispanic/latinx and % of black people had the option [ ]. there was also an increased likelihood of eligibility to work from home associated with advanced education, indicating that workers with lower levels of education may be more likely to work in an essential sector [ ]. lower levels of educational attainment are also associated with higher unemployment rates and lower median weekly earnings [ ]. the intersection of education and income inequality may result in greater pressure to work, regardless of personal safety. forty-seven percent of those over the age of , with at least a bachelor’s degree worked at home, compared to only % of those with a high school int. j. environ. res. public health , , of diploma and % of those with less than a high school diploma [ ]. individuals who can work from home may have less of an interpersonal and occupational risk for virus exposure. . . . transportation personal transportation methods vary widely across the us. in rural areas, americans rely heavily on personal vehicles to travel to their place of employment [ ]. conversely, urban areas with greater access to public transportation (such as buses, trains, and subways) may have lower rates of car ownership [ ]. in the united states, only % of white households do not own a car, compared with % of black households, % of hispanic/latinx households, and % of asian households [ ]. without access to a vehicle, a larger portion of minority populations are reliant on public transportation services. in us urban areas, black and hispanic/latinx residents comprise % of public transport users ( % of bus, but only % of subway, and % of commuter rail) [ ]. dependence on public transportation increases interpersonal proximity and, subsequently, risk for exposure to covid- [ ]. in a study conducted in new york city, a greater proportion of essential workers residing in a neighborhood was independently associated with higher rates of subway use during the pandemic [ ]. there was also a positive correlation between subway use and lower median income, as well as areas with a greater percentage of non-white and/or hispanic/latinx residents. however, these correlations weaken when controlled for proportion of essential workers, suggesting that essential work is the driver of subway use in lower socioeconomic neighborhoods [ ]. . . disparities in susceptibility . . . housing and environment early reports from japan show covid- incidence rates are heavily influenced by population density [ ]. density driven transmission can also be seen on the micro-level, such as within a crowded household. the acs reports that approximately in families reside in a multigenerational home environment. this differs dramatically by race and ethnicity; only . % of non-hispanic white households are multigenerational, compared to . % of black, . % of aian, . % of asian, . % of hispanic/latinx, and % of nhpi households. essential workers returning home to multigenerational households may be putting those in their homes at increased risk of contracting covid- [ ]. children have been found to be predominantly asymptomatic carriers of the virus, which may increase the risk of transmission to other household members [ ]. this poses a significant threat to elderly members of multigenerational households, who are at higher risk of covid- morbidity and mortality [ , , ]. limited access to potable water or indoor plumbing on native american reservations makes it difficult to follow handwashing guidelines. the study by rodriguez-lonebear et al. found that among aian, increased likelihood of covid- was associated with the lack of indoor plumbing [ ]. the association between infection and indoor plumbing is unsurprising, as handwashing has been heavily purported as an effective means of protection against the infection [ ]. . . . racial discrimination and systemic oppression socially assigned race has been shown to have greater impact on health than self-reported race [ ]. these systems result in disproportionate allocation of resources such as education, employment, housing, and health services, among others. they also lead to the unequal distribution of burden of disease, incarceration, and pollution. for example, there is a higher prevalence of hypertension, diabetes, obesity, and cardiovascular disease among black people, which contributes significantly to covid- vulnerability [ ]. there is a correlation between perceived racial discrimination and hypertension, strengthened by black race [ ]. beginning in may, black lives matter and other social justice movement demonstrations were held nationwide. these public demonstrations were sparked by the murders of unarmed black people by police, including breonna taylor and george floyd, among others. public health officials initially int. j. environ. res. public health , , of raised concerns that these protests could potentially increase the spread of covid- . however, it is unclear whether these large-scale protests have directly impacted covid- outcomes. a notable increase in covid- incidence occurred shortly after the protests began, but this also coincided with the “reopening” of many states and a marked increase in overall social activity. interestingly, studies have shown that cities which had large protests actually had a net increase in social distancing behavior [ ]. many argue that racial injustice, and the longstanding mistreatment of black people by the criminal justice system, is a public health crisis and necessitates these protests. indeed, the incarceration of black people occurs at a rate times higher than their white counterparts [ ]. black and hispanic/latinx communities face similar disparities in incarceration rate as in covid- incidence and mortality. the ratios of incarcerated black people to white people in minnesota, iowa, wisconsin, new jersey, and connecticut are all > , and the hispanic/latinx to white ratios are > . [ ]. in new jersey, where the ratio of black to white inmates is > , almost % ( individuals) of the incarcerated population tested positive for covid- [ ]. structural racism contributes to disproportionate rates of incarceration; there are higher rates of incarceration among black, indigenous, and hispanic/latinx individuals, particularly those of low socioeconomic status and those with mental illness, than their white counterparts [ ]. moreover, incarceration makes it fundamentally impossible to practice social distancing; close contact is nearly unavoidable when prisons are overcrowded. familial and social disruption as a result of incarceration may also predispose those individuals to poverty and poorer long-term health outcomes, increasing risk of chronic and acute illness. although incarceration may not directly increase covid- risk, it may compound other factors which contribute to worse covid- outcomes. . . disparities in treatment and health-promoting behaviors . . . insurance almost million americans do not have health insurance coverage [ ]. although testing is often free, individuals may choose not to seek testing services for concerns over the cost of treatment. in a study of , people receiving covid- testing, only . % were black and . % hispanic/latinx, compared to . % who were white [ ]. many americans receive insurance plans through their places of employment. however, insurance coverage may have been impacted by covid- as almost % of the workforce has faced job termination or employment reduction between february and may of [ ]. health insurance programs may be expensive, inaccessible for many individuals, and have complex policies for covered expenses. even when enrolling in marketplace plans with tax credits, only % of individuals had premiums of <$ per month [ ]. this barrier to accessibility widens the health care gap for low-income individuals. insurance and socioeconomic data of covid- patients are not readily available in regard to race and ethnicity to evaluate impacts in the identified disparities, but opportunities exist to improve insurance coverage to the most in need. proponents of single-payer health care in the us cite this failure of the affordable care act (aca) to reduce individual cost [ ]. they argue that while the aca has increased the number of insured, there are still million uninsured us residents; a single-payer system would lower administrative costs and increase accessibility of health care. recent economic-benefit models of a public option of medicare and medicaid expansion suggest that elective coverage to lower-income, uninsured americans has variable federal cost savings [ , ]. while all conclusions from these models were reliant on a specific set of assumptions surrounding the health care market, opportunities for a more inclusive and just health system should not be dismissed. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . . . access to treatment access to testing and treatment varies across the us. of greatest concern is affordability of care. several states, such as michigan, wisconsin, and new york, have reported that the zip codes most impacted by covid- are also the poorest [ ]. in new york city, the highest concentration of covid- cases was found in brooklyn, queens, and the bronx, where there are larger black, hispanic/latinx, and asian populations. relatively fewer cases have been reported from the predominantly white, upper-class neighborhoods of manhattan [ ]. in an effort to expand services to rural health clinics, the us department of health and human services allocated $ million dollars to support expansion of covid- testing, telemedicine services, and notification/information services [ ]. using these funds, the food and drug administration developed multilanguage covid- health information flyers supporting up to different languages. however, website information is limited to english and spanish, with only a few pages available in six other languages [ ]. therefore, residents with low english proficiency and/or literacy may have difficulty accessing accurate information on symptom identification, testing, and treatment. furthermore, internet access is required to access online health information, which may preclude a large, mainly low-income proportion of the population. in , the federal communications commission identified approximately million americans that do not have internet access, of which, approximately million live in rural areas [ ]. further, million do not operate the internet at broadband speeds, a standard for most americans since [ ]. telemedicine has become increasingly common over the course of the pandemic. remote medical appointments allow patients to receive health care services during the pandemic. unfortunately, this service is inaccessible to those without internet connectivity. this lack of service may further exacerbate health care access disparity in rural and underserved areas of the us. . . . health and nutrition insufficient access to nutritious foods, low health literacy, and lack of culturally appropriate health education compound risk of hypertension, diabetes, and obesity—all of which are risk factors for covid- morbidity and mortality [ – ]. access to healthy, affordable foods is limited in racially segregated and deprived neighborhoods [ ]. while food insecurity is prevalent nationwide and affects all races/ethnicities, a higher incidence is found along the southern belt as well as areas in the midwest [ , ]. black individuals are . times more likely to have diabetes than their white counterparts, which may be partially attributed to food insecurity [ ]. black individuals are more likely to live in lower-income neighborhoods with greater food insecurity as a result of racialized segregation [ ]. native american and alaskan natives are also disproportionately impacted by disparities in health and nutrition. the average age of mortality due to diabetes is . years among aian individuals, compared to . years among their white counterparts [ ]. the social determination of health as a result of food insecurity and related metabolic diseases closely corresponds with our rq findings. higher average covid- incidence rqs are seen in the black and hispanic/latinx populations along the southern belt ( . , . ), where a higher incidence of food insecurity has been reported [ ]. vitamin d deficiency has also been found to be associated with increased risk for covid- , further worsening the outlook for the undernourished [ ]. studies show that living in northern us states may account for lower levels of vitamin d across all races/ethnicities due to lower average daily sunlight hours, especially during the winter [ , ]. vitamin d levels, primarily synthesized by exposure to sunlight, are lower on average in people with darker shades of skin. this may lead to increased covid- vulnerability [ ]. during our study period, there was a general pattern of increasing incidence and death rq with increasing latitude, regardless of race or ethnicity. however, it is unclear whether these trends are a result of lower levels of vitamin d or other geographic variances. further investigation of the relationship between vitamin d levels, geographic location, and covid- incidence and mortality is warranted. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . limitations we suspect that covid- incidence and mortality may be under-reported given the initial difficulty in testing. studies indicate that, after controlling for covid- deaths, the overall mortality rate has increased during the march–may period compared to average mortality rates for the past years [ ]. this suggests that us coronavirus mortality may be under-reported. additionally, asymptomatic individuals may not even seek evaluation. another limitation to this study was the variability in state-level data. there is no standard method for data collection by race, sex, and ethnicity between states. for example, some states categorized more than % of reported cases as “other” race or ethnicity. this aggregation of data may obscure other disparities, yet to be defined, and may have led to underestimation of incidence and mortality rqs. additionally, our study only evaluated state-level incidence and mortality, which may have masked greater disparities between counties and cities within states. during the study period, states had fewer than covid- deaths, some with less than . this may overestimate racial and ethnic disparities due to a low sample size. cases and mortality continue to fluctuate nationwide and as more data become available, repeat analysis may be warranted using an extended time frame. . conclusions national data may mask racial and ethnic disparities in covid- . microcosmic data, from city or state-level reporting, better illustrate the disparate health outcomes during the pandemic. the evidence suggests that there is significant disparity in covid-related health outcomes by race and ethnicity regarding representation by state. we suspect that these disparities would be even more apparent at the county and city level and this warrants further investigation. there is a need for public reporting of disaggregated covid- data by county and zip code. transparency of local data would allow for greater precision in allocation of resources and establishment of effective policy changes to disrupt the social determination of poor health outcomes, moving the united states towards the goal of health justice. infectious disease, including covid- , does not selectively affect individuals based on race. however, the social dynamics which perpetuate racial, economic, and environmental disparity create a system of injustice which sustains health inequality, thereby resulting in disparate susceptibility to infection, morbidity, and mortality among marginalized communities. it is an exercise in futility to search for any single element that predisposes people of color, in particular black people, to adverse covid- outcomes. instead, we need to explore the intersectionality of inequity and the social determination of health. therefore, we believe that racial and societal disparities are not only cultural and economic issues, but also an issue of public health and social justice. many of these inequalities are longstanding and rooted in our society’s infrastructure. the dismantling of systems of oppression which drive the ongoing health injustice epidemic is requisite for a reduction in health disparities and relief of covid- disease burden. limiting and reducing mortality require identification of disparity dynamics in our communities and addressing the social determination of these vulnerabilities through specific, intentional interventions. although systemic change may take time, we hope that health injustices, as exemplified by the covid- pandemic, serve to spark action and create momentum towards achieving social justice and eliminating health disparities. supplementary materials: the following are available online at http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / /s , table s : demographics according to american community survey, table s : covid- racial & ethnic incidence by state from the covid tracking project, table s : covid- racial & ethnic mortality by state from the covid tracking project. author contributions: conceptualization, s.r., j.m. and f.h. (principal investigator); methodology, s.r.; validation, k.h., j.m. and w.w.; formal analysis, s.r. and w.w.; investigation, s.r. and a.l.; data curation, s.r., j.m. and k.h.; writing—original draft preparation, s.r. and a.l.; visualization: s.r.; writing—review and editing, s.r., a.l., j.m., k.h., f.h. and w.w. all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / /s int. j. environ. res. public health , , of funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. appendix a table a . racial/ethnic representation quotients of covid- outcomes by state. state incidence rq mortality rq white black asian aian nhpi latinx white black asian aian nhpi latinx al . . . . . . . . . . . . ak . . . . . . . . . . . . az . . . . . . . . . . . . ar . . . . . . . . . . . . ca . . . . . . . . . . . . co . . . . . . . . . . . . ct . . . . . . . . . . . . de . . . . . . . . . . . . dc . . . . . . . . . . . . fl . . . . . . . . . . . . ga . . . . . . . . . . . . hi . . . . . . . . . . . . id . . . . . . . . . . . . il . . . . . . . . . . . . in . . . . . . . . . . . . ia . . . . . . . . . . . . ks . . . . . . . . . . . . ky . . . . . . . . . . . . la - - - - - - . . . . . . me . . . . . . . . . . . . md . . . . . . . . . . . . ma . . . . . . . . . . . . mi . . . . . . . . . . . . mn . . . . . . . . . . . . ms . . . . . . . . . . . . mo . . . . . . . . . . . . mt . . . . . . - - - - - - ne . . . . . . . . . . . . nv . . . . . . . . . . . . nh . . . . . . . . . . . . nj . . . . . . . . . . . . nm . . . . . . . . . . . . ny - - - - - - . . . . . . nc . . . . . . . . . . . . nd - - - - - - - - - - - - oh . . . . . . . . . . . . ok . . . . . . . . . . . . int. j. environ. res. public health , , of table a . cont. state incidence rq mortality rq white black asian aian nhpi latinx white black asian aian nhpi latinx or . . . . . . . . . . . . pa . . . . . . . . . . . . ri - - - - - - - - - - - - sc . . . . . . . . . . . . sd . . . . . . . . . . . . tn . . . . . . . . . . . . tx . . . . . . . . . . . . ut . . . . . . . . . . . . vt . . . . . . . . . . . . va . . . . . . . . . . . . wa . . . . . . . . . . . . wv . . . . . . . . . . . . wi . . . . . . . . . . . . wy . . . . . . . . . . . . avg . . . . . . . . . . . . table a . post-hoc comparisons for rq incidence. (i) group (j) group mean difference (i−j) p % confidence interval lower upper white black . . * . . white asian . . − . . white aian . . − . . white nhpi . . − . . white latinx . . * . . black asian − . . − . . black aian − . . − . . black nhpi − . . * − . − . black latinx . . − . . asian aian . . − . . asian nhpi − . . − . . asian latinx . . * . . aian nhpi − . . − . . aian latinx . . − . . nhpi latinx . . * . . * statistically significant at p < . . int. j. environ. res. public health , , of table a . post-hoc comparisons for rq mortality. 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[crossref] publisher’s note: mdpi stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.ygyno. . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /jama. . http://dx.doi.org/ . /circresaha. . http://dx.doi.org/ . /ajcn/ . . http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://dx.doi.org/ . /aepp/ppx https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/food-security-in-the-us/key-statistics-graphics.aspx https://www.ers.usda.gov/topics/food-nutrition-assistance/food-security-in-the-us/key-statistics-graphics.aspx http://haasinstitute.berkeley.edu/sites/default/files/structural% racialization http://dx.doi.org/ . /jn/ . . http://dx.doi.org/ . /ajcn/ . . s http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - - http://dx.doi.org/ . /jamainternmed. . http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	materials and methods 	data sources 	statistical analysis 	results 	racial/ethnic trends in covid- incidence 	covid- incidence in the us 	covid- incidence by state 	racial/ethnic trends in covid- mortality 	covid- mortality in the united states 	covid- mortality by state 	discussion 	disparities in exposure 	essential worker policies 	transportation 	disparities in susceptibility 	housing and environment 	racial discrimination and systemic oppression 	disparities in treatment and health-promoting behaviors 	insurance 	access to treatment 	health and nutrition 	limitations 	conclusions 	 	references unconventional protests: partisans and independents outside the republican and democratic national conventions research and politics october-december : – © the author(s) reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalspermissions.nav doi: . / rap.sagepub.com creative commons non commercial cc-by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial . license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . /) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the sage and open access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). protests at national party conventions have long been a part of the political landscape in the united states. for example, on june , , samuel gompers, president of the american federation of labor, led a march for labor rights outside the republican national convention (rnc) in chicago (staff, ). over the years, conventions have seen protests for woman suffrage, civil rights, farm subsi- dies, peace in vietnam and iraq, the right to life and the right to choose, tighter financial regulations on banks, and many other issues. activists travel to conventions to express their viewpoints because these gatherings symbolize the parties as institutions in a way that no other events do (edelman, : ). activists are often motivated to mobi- lize outside conventions because it is a relatively easy way to seize media coverage for their causes (sobieraj, ). convention protests have been especially contentious in the s, which have seen frequent clashes between protest- ers and police, as well as mass arrests (hermes, ). despite the regular appearance of convention protests during the presidential election cycle, relatively little is known about why individuals participate in this type of activism. are they there to help or hurt a candidate? to pro- mote an issue? to express themselves? to see friends? or some mixture of all of these? what factors shape these motivations? this lacuna is unfortunate because protest organizers are among the policy demanders that work to shape party coalitions (bawn et al., ). through these protests, parties and movements meet in the streets outside the conventions in a tangible way. a sizeable body of research has emerged on how leaders in parties and move- ments influence one another (see, e.g., clemens, ; frymer, ; schlozman, ). yet, how parties and movements affect, and are affected by, rank-and-file activ- ists remains less-explored territory (but see heaney and unconventional protests: partisans and independents outside the republican and democratic national conventions michael t. heaney abstract protests at national party conventions are an important setting in which political parties and social movements challenge one another. this article examines the motivations of participants in these events. drawing upon data from surveys of protesters outside the national party conventions, it focuses on how partisan and independent political identifications correspond with the reasons that individuals give for protesting. the results demonstrate that there are some conditions under which independents place a greater focus on issues than do partisans and under which partisans place a greater focus on presidential candidates than do independents. however, there are also conditions under which independents are inclined to work alongside partisans, such as trying to stop the election of a threatening candidate and in championing an issue outside their opposing party’s convention. the article argues that micro-level partisan identifications are thus likely to affect the broader structure of party coalitions. these considerations promise to become increasingly relevant as social movements – such as the tea party, occupy wall street, and black lives matter – launch new campaigns against or within established parties. keywords political party, social movement, partisan identification, independent, democratic national convention, republican national convention organizational studies program and department of political science, university of michigan, ann arbor, mi, usa corresponding author: michael t. heaney, organizational studies program and department of political science, university of michigan, -j ruthven museums building, geddes avenue, ann arbor, mi - , usa. email: mheaney@umich.edu rap . / research & politicsheaney research-article research article mailto:mheaney@umich.edu http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . % f &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - research and politics rojas, , ; layman et al., ; skocpol and williamson, ). in examining this topic, fabio rojas and i (heaney and rojas, , ) theorize that political parties and social movements sometimes come together in a social space that we call “the party in the street.” this space provides an opportunity for activists to pressure a party to pursue a movement’s issues and, reciprocally, to pressure the move- ment to support a party’s candidates. we argue that partisan identification draws activists into politics when it serves the party’s interests, but also pushes activists out of politics when their involvement no longer serves the party’s goals. thus, we see a trade-off between party and movement activism – which is largely to the advantage of parties – at least during periods of high partisan polarization. however, this empirical analysis is limited by the fact that it focuses on issue involvement without considering the actions that activists may try to help or hurt candidates directly. samara klar and yanna krupnikov ( ) also examine how partisan identification affects political participation, though they stress the consequences of the decision by an increasing number of citizens to identify as independents, who avoid making public commitments to one of the major parties. they argue that even though independents may tend to vote as if they are loyal partisans, their embarrass- ment with the parties and with contemporary politics may motivate them to refrain from disclosing their partisan lean- ings. in particular, independents tend to avoid the kind of interpersonal activism that promotes the flow of partisan ideas through social networks, such as talking to friends about politics and displaying partisan bumper stickers, yard signs, and buttons. this avoidance of partisan engagement on the part of independents is an impediment to the parties’ efforts to win elections and govern. in contrast to heaney and rojas’s ( , ) claim that parties gain from the participation of independents when they are allied with partisans, klar and krupnikov emphasize that parties lose when independent identifiers do not participate in politics. yet, klar and krupnikov do not examine what happens when independents do participate in partisan politics. how is their participation different from that of party identifiers? moreover, their empirical analysis focuses on actions that independents may or may not take to help candidates, but does not consider the potentially powerful actions that independents may take to hurt candidates. in this article, i argue that combining the heaney–rojas and klar–krupnikov perspectives on partisan and inde- pendent identifications provides significant insights into the competing motivations of protesters outside the national party conventions. it considers that activists may act to help or hurt a candidate, or speak out on an issue, within the same analysis. i argue that partisan identification – or its absence – affects the mixed conditions under which activ- ists seek to be a resource to parties or movements. the article proceeds, first, by discussing the role of par- tisan identification and independence in individuals’ par- ticipation in activism. second, it outlines the research design based on a survey of demonstrators outside the national party conventions. third, it presents descriptive survey results. fourth, it reports estimates of probit models for protest motivation. it concludes by considering how political parties and social movements relate to one another at the grassroots level. partisans, independents, and activism political activism is a widely prevalent form of political participation, though it receives substantially less attention than does voting behavior. activism reflects individuals’ involvement in politics that takes place informally, such as by participating in demonstrations, writing about issues online, organizing citizens’ groups, and writing letters to elected officials. using data from a longitudinal study of activism from to , catherine corrigall-brown ( ) reports that approximately two-thirds of americans engage in some form of political activism over their life- times. schlozman et al. ( ) argue that this activism redirects the attention of politicians away from the prefer- ences of the median voter and toward the causes champi- oned by activists. i argue that partisan identification – or the lack thereof – is closely linked with the ways that individuals make sense of their participation in political activism. people that identify closely with a political party may turn to party poli- tics to understand and explain their involvement in activ- ism. they are more likely to be attracted to the competitive aspects of elections that are integral to party politics (schattschneider, ). people who describe themselves as independents are likely to have different types of concerns about politics than do partisans. as klar and krupnikov ( ) point out, inde- pendents may be put off by the conflictual aspects of poli- tics to a degree that self-identified partisans may not be. however, they may also reject partisan identities because they are cross-pressured on issues with which they strongly identify (magleby and nelson, ). social identities related to these issues, then, may help to motivate protest participation (polletta and jasper, ). convention pro- tests usually have a strong issue orientation that is likely to amplify these motivations. as a result, the independents who protest at conventions may not be in the “middle of the road” between the democratic and republican parties. rather, they may identify as independents because there is at least one issue on which they do not think that the parties are extreme enough. building on these arguments, it is possible to state a series of hypotheses related to partisan identification, inde- pendence, and the motivation of individuals for participat- ing in activism outside conventions. first, partisans at heaney convention protests are likely to want to help the presiden- tial candidate of their party, especially if they are attending the convention at which that candidate is nominated. thus: h : partisans are more likely than independents to be motivated by the desire to help a candidate if they are protesting at their more-proximate party’s convention. second, it is possible that activists protest to hurt the chances of the candidate from the other party. they are more likely to see the opportunity to do so if they are attend- ing the convention of the opposing party. thus: h : partisans are more likely than independents to be motivated by the desire to hurt a candidate if they are protesting at their more-distant party’s convention. third, partisans and independents are likely to be differ- ently motivated by issues. because their energy is drawn into the competitive aspects of partisan politics, partisans are less likely to articulate their motivations explicitly in issue terms. in contrast, independents are more likely to see issues as closer to their political identities. these propensi- ties underlie the trade-off between party and movement activism. thus: h : partisans are less motivated to protest by issue con- siderations than are independents. underlying these hypotheses is the more general hypothe- sis that independents are differently motivated than parti- sans in attending protests. independents generally eschew working to affect the chances of candidates and instead concentrate on their issue concerns. thus: h : partisans and independents are differently moti- vated to protest in that partisans place a greater empha- sis on candidates and independents place a greater emphasis on issues. convention protest surveys this study is based on surveys conducted of protesters out- side the rnc in st paul, minnesota and democratic national convention (dnc) in denver, colorado. the attitudes of the participants in the protests were assessed using a five-page, pencil-and-paper survey. the questions queried individuals’ motivations for partici- pating in the protest, partisan identification, ideology, emo- tional engagement in politics, social networks with other protesters, where they live, sex/gender, race/ethnicity, age, level of education, and annual income, as well as other atti- tudinal and demographic questions. surveys were collected at all protests using the “anchor sampling” method developed by heaney and rojas ( , , ) as an adaptation of exit-poll sampling. the sur- vey team began by distributing itself throughout the major regions of the crowd. surveyors were instructed to look into the crowd and select a person to serve as an “anchor” for their counting process. this anchor could be anyone they preferred, though the anchor would not be surveyed on the understanding that s/he might be selected with bias. from the anchor, surveyors counted five persons to the right, and then issued a survey invitation; again, counted five to the right, then issued a survey invitation, continuing until three individuals had accepted the survey. once three surveys were completed, the surveyor selected a new anchor and repeated the procedures. non-responses were recorded for the purpose of tabulating response rates. research shows that if these surveys are conducted with attention to ensuring random selection and account for biases in non-response, then they can generate samples that are a good representation of the individuals attending the protest (walgrave and verhulst, ). who are convention protesters? the survey yielded respondents from the dnc, with a response rate of percent, and respondents from the rnc, with a response rate of percent. all of the analysis reported here is weighted according to differences in response rates and accounts for different variances in the two strata of the survey (i.e. the dnc and the rnc). the partisan breakdown of protest participants is pro- vided in figure . the distribution has a strong, overall skew toward non-republicans. republicans and people who lean republican made up about percent of protesters at the rnc and percent of protesters at the dnc. among other participants, there was a greater percentage of inde- pendents at the dnc and a greater percentage of democrats at the rnc. roughly percent of protesters at the rnc were independents, as were percent of respondents at the dnc. democrats and democratic leaners made up per- cent of protesters at the dnc and percent at the rnc. respondents were asked “which are the most important reasons that you decided to come to this convention?” they were shown a list of options (plus “other”) and asked to circle up to three of them. this article focuses on three of these options: ( ) “to help a candidate win this year’s pres- idential election”; ( ) “to help prevent a candidate from winning this year’s presidential election”; and ( ) “to express my view on a particular issue or issues.” respondents who indicated that they were motivated by issues were also asked to “please specify the top issues.” selected motivations are reported by convention in figure . respondents were more likely to seek to help a candidate at the dnc ( %) than at the rnc ( %) and more likely to seek to hurt the chances of a candidate at the rnc ( %) than at the dnc ( %). however, issues pro- vided a more powerful source of inspiration for these research and politics respondents. approximately percent of dnc protesters and percent of rnc protesters were motivated by issues. war and peace was the issue most commonly men- tioned, with percent of respondents volunteering this motivation. there was a significant fall-off after war/peace, with percent concerned about the economy, percent mentioning health, percent calling for group rights, per- cent pointing to problems with the environment, and all other issues falling below this threshold. models of protest motivation this article estimates three probit regression models of pro- test motivation: one for helping a candidate, one for hurting the chances of a candidate, and one for issue motivation. complete-case imputation (little, ) was used to replace the values of missing data, which is an appropriate method given the low percentage of missing data (king et al., ). each equation includes the same independent variables. the first focus variable is more-proximate party convention. this variable takes the value of if a strong democrat, not very strong democrat, or independent who leans democrat is protesting the dnc; or, if a strong republican, not very strong republican, or independent who leans republican is protesting the rnc; otherwise. the second focus variable is more-distant party convention. this variable takes the value of if a strong figure . partisan identification of protesters by convention. figure . selected motivations of protesters by convention. heaney democrat, not very strong democrat, or independent who leans democrat is protesting the rnc; or, if a strong republican, not very strong republican, or independent who leans republican is protesting the dnc; otherwise. the implicit excluded category is independent, which com- bines both middle-independent category and the other- independent category. the remaining variables are included for the purpose of statistical control. ideology is measured on a -point ordinal scale from left to right, with “to the ‘right’ of strong conservative” receiving a score of and “to the ‘left’ of strong liberal” receiving a score of . enthusiasm about politics and anxiety about politics are included in order to account for positive and negative emotional engagement with the political process. they are measured on a -point ordinal scale, with people reporting enthusi- asm and anxiety “almost always” receiving a and peo- ple who “never” experience enthusiasm and anxiety receiving a . social networks at protest accounts for the possibility that people that perceive that they are well con- nected at the protest may be motivated differently than people that perceive that they are poorly connected at the protest. live in state of convention controls for the pos- sibility that local people are differently motivated than those that travel a considerable difference to protest the convention. sex/gender takes the value of for women and for men. race/ethnicity takes the value of for whites and for nonwhites. age is measured in years. education is measured on a -point ordinal scale, with “graduate or professional degree” receiving a score of and “less than high school diploma” receiving a score of . income is measured in thousands of dollars for . probit results are reported in table . the estimates in equation ( ) are consistent with h . they show that when partisans are protesting at their more-proximate party con- vention, they are more likely than independents to do so for the purpose of helping a candidate for president. additionally, consistent with h , the results show that par- tisans protesting at their more-distant party’s convention are also more likely than independents to want to help a candidate for president. that is, they may see their protest of the opposing party directly in terms of being helpful to their home party. on this point, independents are clearly different from partisans: they are very unlikely to protest with the intention of helping a candidate. only about per- cent of independents reported doing so. the estimates in equation ( ) are consistent with h . they show that when partisans are protesting at their more- distant party’s convention, they are more likely than inde- pendents to work to hurt the chances of a candidate. however, the results are not entirely consistent with h . the estimates reveal that independents are significantly more likely than partisans attending their more-proximate party’s convention to protest with the intention to hurt the chances of a candidate. thus, rather than being strictly less interested in candidate politics than are partisans, inde- pendents occupy a middle ground. about percent of independents were motivated to stop a candidate, which was more than the percent of partisans at their more- proximate convention and less than the percent of parti- sans at their most-distant convention. the estimates in equation ( ) support h . they demon- strate that partisans at their more-proximate party conven- tion are less likely than independents to protest because of issue concerns. however, again, the results are not entirely consistent with h . there is no statistically significant dif- ference in the degree to which they are motivated by issues between independents and partisans when they are attend- ing their more-distant party’s convention. about percent of independents and percent of partisans at their more- distant convention came out due to issues. in contrast, only percent of partisans at their more-proximate convention mentioned issues as one of their reasons. the effects of the control variables exhibited variation across the equations. anxiety about politics had significant, positive correlations across all three equations, though enthusiasm about politics only significantly contributes to helping a candidate. women were more likely than men to be motivated by issue politics and to hurt the chances of a candidate, but were no different from men in wanting to help a candidate. older respondents were more likely than younger respondents to be motivated by issues, but age was not associated with differences in motivations about affecting candidates’ chances. ideology, social networks at protest, live in state of convention, race/ethnicity, education, and income were not significantly related to the dependent variables in any of the equations. given that the largest group of issue-focused protesters were concerned with issues of war and peace, i considered what would happen if this group was removed from the analysis. the results of this alternative specification are presented in table . the pattern of direction and signifi- cance (or lack thereof) matches the main analysis for five of six coefficients that were the focus of the hypothesis tests. from these results, we can conclude that if issues of war and peace moved off the agenda (which, for example, was largely the case during the convention protests), the effects of partisan and independent identities would likely remain very similar. conclusion the results of this study exhibit consistencies and incon- sistencies with the extant literature. consistent with klar and krupnikov ( ), the results show that independents are much less likely than partisans to work to help a can- didate. likewise, consistent with heaney and rojas ( ), the results demonstrate a trade-off between issues and party activism, as protesting at one’s own party con- vention is associated with candidate, rather than issue, research and politics motivations. however, in contrast to the argument of klar and krupnikov, the results reveal that independents are more prone than some partisans to protest with the inten- tion of stopping a candidate. one possible explanation, suggested by prospect theory (kahneman and tversky, ), is that independents are more likely to join the par- tisan fray if they see the need to stop a loss (i.e. the elec- tion of a bad candidate), than to achieve a gain (i.e. the election of their preferred candidate). thus, it may be pre- sumptuous to count independents completely out of parti- san politics. in contrast to heaney and rojas, the results indicate there is not necessarily a trade-off between party and issue activism when partisans are protesting their most-distant party’s convention, where partisans are often fighting for issues right beside independents. it is a mistake to see independents as having abandoned electoral politics; though, under certain conditions, they do exhibit less concern than do partisans. yet it must also be con- sidered that a growing share of independents in the population represents an opportunity for movements. if movements can mobilize people based on issue identities – rather than partisan identities – then they may better withstand the vicissitudes of partisan politics. advocates truly committed to issues may be more likely to push back against parties, even when their more-preferred party is in office, thus sowing the seeds for increased relevance by movements in american politics. table . probit models of protest motivation. equation ( ) equation ( ) equation ( ) descriptive imputation help a candidate hurt the chances of a candidate express views on issue statistics percent of cases coefficient (se) mean (sd) more-proximate party convention (= ) . *** ( . ) − . ** ( . ) − . *** ( . ) . ( . ) . % more-distant party convention (= ) . * ( . ) . *** ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . % ideology (right of conservative = , left of liberal = ) . ( . ) . ( . ) − . ( . ) . ( . ) . % enthusiasm about politics (almost always = , never = ) . *** ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . % anxiety about politics (almost always = , never = ) . * ( . ) . *** ( . ) . * ( . ) . ( . ) . % social networks at protest (strong = , weak = ) . ( . ) − . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . % live in state of convention (= ) . ( . ) . ( . ) − . ( . ) . ( . ) . % sex/gender (female = ) . ( . ) . * ( . ) . *** ( . ) . ( . ) . % race/ethnicity (white = ) − . ( . ) − . ( . ) − . ( . ) . ( . ) . % age (in years) − . ( . ) − . ( . ) . *** ( . ) . ( . ) . % education (graduate degree = , less than high school = ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . % income (thousands of dollars) − . ( . ) − . ( . ) − . ( . ) . ( . ) . % constant − . *** ( . ) − . *** ( . ) − . *** ( . ) n mean of the dependent variable . . . strata f( , ) . *** . *** . *** sd: standard deviation; se: standard error. *p ⩽ . . **p ⩽ . . ***p ⩽ . . heaney looking to the future, both the democratic and republican parties in the united states are facing increased contention from social movements – such as the tea party, occupy wall street, and black lives matter – some of which is likely to manifest itself through convention pro- tests. politically oriented scholars would be well-advised to be attentive to these dynamics in order to understand how organized (and disorganized!) groups may be disruptive to party coalitions. acknowledgements data for this paper were collected as a joint effort with dara strolovitch, joanne miller, and seth masket. the author appreci- ates the generosity of his collaborators in allowing the use of the data for this project. an earlier version of this article was presented at the william and flora hewlett foundation conference on “parties, polarization and policy demanders”, university of maryland, college park, – june . for helpful comments, thanks are owed to stephanie evans, stephen garcia, ethan kaplan, ken kollman, michael martinez, lilliana mason, rob mickey, nurlan orujlu, zoe van dyke, and winnie wang. declaration of conflicting interests none declared. funding this work was supported by the national science foundation, small grants for exploratory research (grant numbers and ) and the center for urban and regional affairs at the university of minnesota. table . probit models of protest motivation – no antiwar protesters. equation ( ) equation ( ) equation ( ) descriptive imputation help a candidate hurt the chances of a candidate express views on issue statistics percent of cases coefficient (se) mean (sd) more-proximate party convention (= ) . *** ( . ) − . * ( . ) − . * ( . ) . ( . ) . % more-distant party convention (= ) . ( . ) . *** ( . ) − . ( . ) . ( . ) . % ideology (right of conservative = , left of liberal = ) − . ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) . % enthusiasm about politics (almost always = , never = ) . ** ( . ) − . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . % anxiety about politics (almost always = , never = ) . ( . ) . *** ( . ) . * ( . ) . ( . ) . % social networks at protest (strong = , weak = ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) . % live in state of convention (= ) − . ( . ) . ( . ) − . *** ( . ) . ( . ) . % sex/gender (female = ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) . % race/ethnicity (white = ) − . ( . ) − . ( . ) − . ( . ) . ( . ) . % age (in years) . ( . ) − . ( . ) . * ( . ) . ( . ) . % education (graduate degree = , less than high school = ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . % income (thousands of dollars) − . ( . ) − . ( . ) − . * ( . ) . ( . ) . % constant − . *** ( . ) − . *** ( . ) − . *** ( . ) n mean of the dependent variable . . . strata f( , ) . *** . *** . *** sd: standard deviation; se: standard error. *p ⩽ . . **p ⩽ . . ***p ⩽ . . research and politics supplementary material the replication files are available at: https://dataverse.harvard. edu/dataverse/researchandpolitics. the supplementary files are available at: http://rap.sagepub. com/content/ / notes . the survey questions in this analysis are listed in supplement . this protocol received institutional review board (irb) approval and all participants gave informed consent. . a summary of responses to all motivations is provided in supplement . . respondents were counted as having issue motivations if they wrote a policy issue in the space provided. if they wrote something other than a policy issue (e.g. “to meet people”), then they were counted as a zero on this variable. . of those who said that they sought to hurt a candidate, . percent sought to help a candidate and percent sought to promote an issue. of those who sought to help a candidate, . percent sought to hurt a candidate and . percent sought to promote an issue. of those who sought to promote an issue, . percent sought to help a candidate and . percent sought to hurt a candidate. carnegie corporation of new york grant the open access article processing charge (apc) for this article was waived due to a grant awarded to research & politics from carnegie corporation of new york under its “bridging the gap” initiative. the statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author. references bawn k, cohen m, karol d, et al. 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in protest surveys. mobilization ( ): – . https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/researchandpolitics https://dataverse.harvard.edu/dataverse/researchandpolitics http://rap.sagepub.com/content/ / http://rap.sagepub.com/content/ / rapid community innovation: a small urban liberal arts community response to covid- commentary rapid community innovation: a small urban liberal arts community response to covid- craig allen talmage & christopher annear & kate equinozzi & kathleen flowers & grace hammett & amy jackson & julie newman kingery & robin lewis & kirin makker & audrey platt & travis schneider & caroline turino received: july /accepted: august / # springer nature switzerland ag abstract stories of community resilience and rapid innovation have emerged during the global pandemic caused by covid- . as communities, organizations, and individuals have had to shift modalities during the pandemic, they have identified ways to sustain community well-being. prior to covid- , colleges and universities were hailed as anchors of economic and social resilience and well-being for communities of place. in this light, this commentary highlights stories of rapid community innovation occurring at hobart & william smith colleges in the finger lakes region of new york. a series of vignettes are presented showcasing lessons and on-going questions regarding rapid pivots, community values, and diversity and inclusion during (and after) the pandemic. overall, these insights can inform future local collaborative development efforts post- covid- between colleges/universities and their local community. keywords socialinnovation.communityengagement.school-universitypartnerships. well-being education . service-learning background and purpose communities across the world have been shocked by covid- ; however, stories of resilience (big and small) have arisen, showcasing rapid innovation during this time of crisis. despite quarantine and physical/social distancing, various community stake- holders and institutions have remained steadfast in their foci on community well-being. for some local communities, colleges and universities have been sources of institu- tional support but also models of innovation. this rapid innovation can be purposed to international journal of community well-being https://doi.org/ . /s - - - * craig allen talmage talmage@hws.edu extended author information available on the last page of the article http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:talmage@hws.edu uphold the well-being of the campus community among students, faculty, staff, alumni, as well as local community members. this commentary features vignettes from students, faculty, and staff recounting responses to covid- by hobart & william smith colleges, a small liberal arts institution in the finger lakes region of new york, usa. the rapid community innovations found threaded throughout our interconnected campus and community took place from march to june during the pandemic. they are shared to highlight unique differences, establish common ground, and explore possibilities for community innovation during and post-covid- to better understand how these responses can be leveraged to inform rapid community innovation as a practice to enhance community well-being. prior to covid- , the u.s. economy had climbed out of its recent great reces- sion. during the climb, local colleges and universities were cited as sources of economic recovery and resilience, especially for small to mid-size cities (bach ; davis ). in terms of social and community resilience, college towns have served as anchor institutions for many municipalities, their constituents, and their enterprises (i.e., nonprofit, public, among others) to collectively work towards enhancing community well-being (talmage et al. a). the large exogenous shift caused by covid- has shocked communities both socially and economically, and this crisis has required rapid innovation. colleges and universities can serve as hubs for localized community innovation aimed towards enriching community well-being (talmage et al. , a, b). these innovations need not be aimed at large radical social change; they can be meaningfully small in scale (talmage et al. b). overall, social innovation is more than imitative reaction; it often demonstrates novelty or, in the least, discovery (shockley and frank ). this commentary features multiple stories of rapid small-scale innovation tied to community well-being at hobart & william smith colleges and geneva, new york, a small metropolitan area (~ , residents) along seneca lake, one of the eleven glacial finger lakes. to highlight moments of resilience during a crisis while also attempting to operationalize rapid community innovation, vignettes were collated from faculty, staff, and students across our campus community. unfortunately, the traditional social science literature (e.g. economics, management, community development) is scant on defining rapid, small-scale forms of community innovation, especially during times of crises. other more emergent and critical fields regarding space such as tactical urbanism (e.g., lydon and garcia ; mould ) and diy urbanism (douglas ) can be drawn upon to expand mainstream social science understandings of rapid innovation tied to community well-being. for now, this piece intends to start discussion on these matters in the local development and community well-being literature. centering the responses in place hobart & william smith colleges (hws) is a private liberal arts college serving around two thousand undergraduate students with around two hundred full-time faculty members (i.e., ~ : student ratio). class sizes average around sixteen students per course. the student body is % white, % non-new york students, and % non- usa students. nationally, the school is known for its study abroad programs, alum international journal of community well-being networks, and community engagement and service (hws, n.d.). forbes magazine has also recognized the school as a strong return on investment for students. this accolade comes in contrast to high tuition costs ($ , ; $ , including fees and room and board). to offset the high costs, . % of students receive some form of financial aid (hws n.d.). one of the hallmarks of hws is its center for community engagement and service- learning (ccesl). aside from ccesl’s national recognition demonstrated by its and carnegie community engagement classification, ccesl spearheads collective impact efforts to improve cradle to college/career success for the children and youth in geneva, new york. the initiative is anchored by hws and is aligned with the national strive together consortium and guided by the organization’s theory of action. an advisory and executive board work in partnership with six action teams, and together with many stakeholders are proud that the graduation rate for the local high school has improved for hispanic students by % since and for black students by % over the past six years (geneva ). however, more progress is needed. local children and youth also have improved in regard to summer learning and social well-being, which will indirectly have lasting positive impacts on local well- being (geneva ; talmage et al. a, b). ccesl is supported by a service-learning advisory council (slac), which discusses and reviews programs that advance the teaching and scholarship of commu- nity engagement, including initiatives for curricular and faculty/staff development and assessment tools. slac meets around six times an academic year, corresponding via email/phone as well. this group of faculty and staff, with student and community partner representatives, works with ccesl to: & plan and implement engaged learning programs and events such as service-learning workshops, engaged scholarship initiatives, invited speakers, and other presentations; & provide oversight and feedback on the community-based learning (cbl) score- card, ccesl’s service-learning assessment instrument; & coordinate the annual community engaged scholarship forum (i.e., student pre- sentations of community-based research projects); manage the annual selection of the hws civically engaged faculty award, the community partner of the year award, and compass award for outstanding engaged student scholarship; and, & provide vision and advice to foster and strengthen the engagement of hws with many different communities of place, identity, and interest, among others. geneva consists of around sixteen thousand residents between its city and township. economic inequality and food insecurity are acknowledged as prevailing issues for area residents (talmage et al. b). geneva demonstrates proportionally greater numbers of children living below the poverty line and households needing food assistance/ snap benefits compared to national u.s. figures (talmage et al. b). many local residents are also politically active, holding local protests and rallies even during the pandemic (e.g., post-george floyd death by police in minneapolis, minnesota) (buchiere ; cutillo ). aside from dormant winter months, the area showcases food abundance with robust regional agricultural systems, including farm-to-table restaurants, farmers’ markets, food/farm-stands, food pantries, community-supported international journal of community well-being agriculture, compost/growing cycle programs, alcoholic/nonalcoholic beverage enter- prises, and university research stations. finally, geneva is home to approximately two hundred nonprofit entities (taxexemptworld ). while hws is the fourth largest employer in ontario county, it is only one of many social institutions that has responded to the substantial needs in the area during the pandemic. this commentary continues by supplying a collection of vignettes from individuals affiliated with ccesl (some who serve on slac). these vignettes are presented in no particular order, but they highlight various rapid community innovation that occurred at hws and in/with geneva to sustain or enhance community well-being during the pandemic. after the vignettes, comments are made about commonalties and unique variations to enhance local/community well-being. rapid social innovation vignettes responding through community engagement the ccesl office upholds hws’s commitment to community engagement and community engaged learning across various facets of the hws. community engaged learning, as pedagogy, has had to shift given the challenges presented by the pandemic. conceptually and literally, through interdisciplinary programs, study abroad, intern- ships, and service-learning, ccesl proudly supports student learning in partnership with the regional and local community. yet, social/physical distancing protocols and the necessity to be physically apart has forced us to rethink partnership, reciprocity, and engagement. ccesl staff and slac members have built their careers around a commitment to community engagement and student learning. the group of authors for this piece has been inspired by the innovative and proactive strategies implemented to ensure that community engagement remains a key underpinning of our liberal arts institution and relationships with the geneva community during (and after) the pandemic. our (ccesl) office staff partnered with local communities to create a website connectgeneva.com to help locals and students mitigate the impact of covid- . the website provided bilingual (spanish and english) information regarding community resources and information about covid- . the website featured information and videos from community agencies and individuals. in particular, the website provided information regarding food distribution efforts and financial assistance opportunities. the website also allowed individuals to provide feedback about their pertinent local needs and issues. while individuals needed to be socially/physically distant, the website was aimed to bring people together virtually to share their experiences and address their needs. also, the website provided socially distant in-person and virtual volunteering opportunities to the broader community. finally, ccesl worked with entr – social innovation at hws to garner feedback to enhance the website and corresponding social media to promote user access (hws a). it was important to the local and campus community for ccesl staff to be a part of the connectgeneva.com effort, which primarily focused on geneva community members, given that the vast majority of students had departed campus. when classes are in traditional session, community partners welcome students to their international journal of community well-being http://connectgeneva.com http://connectgeneva.com organizations to collaborate on service-learning, community-based research, and in- ternships. with the unfolding challenges precipitated by covid- and students adjusting to off-campus and on-line learning, ccesl redistributed the time that would have been spent supporting alternative spring break trips, tutoring programs, and the annual hws community sale to connectgeneva.com. through related weekly covid- community task force meetings with social service providers and through co-managing connectgeneva.com, it became apparent to ccesl staff that geneva community members did not have full zoom account privileges or a full familiarity of opportunities available to keep important conversations moving forward with the use of technology. ccesl staff thus hosted numerous advisory board meetings so that sessions would not expire at min, taught partners zoom tips and protocols, co- organized a bike collection for local youth, and helped facilitate a mask distribution effort in the local community. the collective impact initiative, known as geneva , also adjusted and created a youtube channel of america reads tutors who sought to engage students remotely. this initiative cultivated a list of virtual tutors to support summer learning and distributed a list of in-person and virtual summer programs available to k- students that honored ny state covid- guidelines and regula- tions. this shift will hopefully bolster the value that hws and ccesl place on being an active, invested, and engaged partner with the geneva community whether students are physically present or not. a global instructional reflection “environment and development in east asia” is an upper-level social science course that analyzes the relationship between commodities, communities, and conservation in southeast asia. after completing units on rubber cultivation in colonial borneo and shrimp farming in thailand, we prepared to transition into a discussion of the intimate relationship between rice cultivation and rituals in the lives of the balinese. before we could embark on our bali unit, however, the way in which we would interact for the remainder of the semester abruptly shifted from in-person to remote teaching/learning due to the recent emergence of covid- , a novel coronavirus that would soon bring life as we knew it to a halt. as i prepared to teach about bali in an asynchronous teaching/learning environment, i found myself taking refuge in the balinese principle of tri hita karana, which fox ( ) describes as the three pathways for “achiev[ing] well-being” (p.x). the more i read about tri hita karana, the more convinced i became that i needed to dedicate more class time to this idea, particularly in the context of a global pandemic that was “chang[ing] what we do and how we do it” (phillips , p. ) in immeasurable ways. while preparing slides for this new material, i soon settled on a plan that would allow me to first introduce the principle of tri hita karana on an abstract level before transitioning into a series of concrete examples of how tri hita karana manifests in the day-to-day lives of the balinese. i would then draw parallels between this principle and gotong-royong, a similar philosophy common on neighboring java that “takes the collective life as the most important” (bowen , p. ). after spending time highlighting how gotong-royong (or mutual assistance) is practiced through “reciprocal exchange” (bowen , p. ) of labor and resources across indonesia, i would then task each student with identifying an example of how a similar ‘ethics of care’ may in international journal of community well-being http://connectgeneva.com http://connectgeneva.com fact be evident in their own communities as myriad people across the world work together to ‘flatten the curve.’ each student would then report back to the group, sharing details on the type of care work that was emerging in their local area in response to covid- . the morning after the assignment was due, i opened the discussion board and began reading the students’ submissions. some students aptly stressed how staying at home and physical/social distancing when in public are central to an ethics of care. others went on to document specific instances in which individuals united to protect and advance community well-being the face of a common enemy: covid- . for some, care-work involved neighbors pooling resources such as cleaning products and person- al protective equipment (ppe) to redistribute scarce items to those in need. for others, examples of mutual assistance were best captured by local efforts to keep every member of their communities fed, whether through public schools offering free meals to their students and their families or by local businesses delivering prepared meals to those on the front lines of our collective battle with covid- . regardless of the particular example they elected to showcase, each student’s submission expressed a similar sentiment: a desire to see people put the well-being of their communities first from here on out. thus, i am left wondering whether we might be on the cusp of a major shift in how we interact with one another. i only hope that the shift i see on the horizon is one in which leading with kindness is more the norm than the exception. a classroom pivot after the abrupt transition to online learning in march, a faculty member in the psychology department at hws designed two assignments related to the well-being of children and families in the local community in her -level child psychology course. for the first assignment, students were asked to read a brief article about supporting children at home during the coronavirus crisis from the child mind institute website (https://childmind.org). through a discussion thread prompt, students were then asked to identify the following: ) challenges that covid- -related circumstances (e.g., physical/social distancing, schools closed) were creating for children and families; ) unique challenges that particularly vulnerable children living at or below the poverty level might have been facing (a theme emphasized throughout the course); and, ) creative ideas for activities that parents/children (preschool through grade ) could complete at home, with links to online resources when possible. a student in this course who was also a work-study student for the ccesl office on campus was compensated for the time that it took her to compile the links posted by her peers. she organized the activities into categories that touched upon many domains of a child’s life such as indoor activities (e.g., various games, kid-friendly cooking, scav- enger hunts), exercise (e.g., yoga videos for children), outdoor activities (e.g., exploring nature, obstacle course), arts, crafts and science (e.g., origami, lunch doodles, science experiments), online fun (e.g., math lessons, free audible books), and virtual tours (e.g., zoos, museums, theme parks). the course instructor shared this information with the international journal of community well-being https://childmind.org local community by posting a link to a google spreadsheet in a facebook group for parents in the local community, sending it to teachers at a local elementary school and distributing it via email to faculty and staff in the college community. several students in the course also shared the link with their own local communities (e.g., a mother who was an elementary school teacher, neighbors with young children). the students’ contribution to the community did not stop there. the second assignment with implications for the well-being of the local community occurred during the portion of the course focused on emotional development. in a discussion post, students were asked to identify a children’s book dealing with the topic of emotion, to briefly describe the specific emotions included in the book and the lessons conveyed in the story, and to make connections with course material. once again, the books were consolidated onto a google spreadsheet, which categorized the books by type of emotion and included youtube links to full-length versions of most of the books. the spreadsheet included books examining a wide spectrum of emotions including happiness, sadness, anger, fear, anxiety, empathy, compassion, and frustra- tion. the course instructor shared the spreadsheet link with a local community reading organization called geneva reads (https://www.genevareads.org/) who, in partnership with the ccesl office on campus, created a poster containing a brief description of the assignment and a link to the spreadsheet. in addition to being posted on the geneva reads facebook page, the poster was shared through the various channels mentioned previously to serve as a resource for parents who were looking for books aimed at helping children cope with their emotions during this incredibly challenging time when local libraries were closed. creative placemaking through participatory public art on the web as part of an independent study in “creative placemaking,” we, a pair of students guided by a faculty mentor in american studies, set out with a two-part set of goals spaced across the weeks of our spring semester. our first goal was to research the field of creative placemaking as an area of interdisciplinary study bringing together public art, civic engagement, social justice, and community planning (the national consortium for creative placemaking ; webb ; wilson and mantie ). our second goal was to apply our learned theory to practice through the design and implementation of a local project in geneva, ny. within the literature of creative placemaking, we quickly found our focus in public art events and how they impacted the cultural, social, political, and economic well-being of communities. we were particularly inspired by planned events that were accessible to everyone and used the power of shared art-making and interactive storytelling to bring community members together in collaboration with local leadership. in addition to the ideas in creative placemaking, we also found inspiration in the work of two artists doing place-based work, amanda maciuba and sarita zaleha. a c t u a l l i n k : h t t p s : / / d o c s . g o o g l e . c o m / s p r e a d s h e e t s / d / _ r w u - qwv_ fbbxgbpyrfqiihuvo ni vin w ua/edit#gid= . actual link: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/ athqnlc wk_uba udeusk- mdsd sejoahnkfmkuaa/edit#gid= . international journal of community well-being https://www.genevareads.org/ maciuba, who primarily works in printmaking and bookbinding, interested us because she uses local storytelling in her visual work. through community-based workshops and archival research, she assembles human stories, cultural landscape histories, and ecological narratives of the surrounding site to offer a critique of a local place’s values, expression, and ideas. maciuba’s work aims to show how human actions alongside uncontrollable factors of time and nature (including something like covid- ) comingle to affect both what our landscape looks like and what our human agency is there (maciuba n.d.). the artist sarita zaleha similarly engages with local places, but more directly through community dialogue in on-site textile workshops with visitors at her exhibitions. for zaleha, visitor-participant storytelling at the exhibition site is as important as the “art,” the textiles collaboratively produced (zaleha n.d.). both maciuba and zaleha produce political work and directly engage with the public through community-based workshops and dialogue, something we knew we wanted to emulate in our project. in addition to their inspiring approach to art-making and political activism, these two artists taught us to think smaller in order to have a greater impact. we decided we wanted to produce a booklet with which we could direct a storytelling workshop at a community arts event for local children in early may before classes ended. we began working with two books to help guide the final project: once upon a time i was - a self-reflective journal (bakker ), and how to make books (smith ). pulling ideas from these books and our earlier studies, we sought to create miniature books filled with prompts designed to help readers think about their life, experiences, memories, and their sense of place and belonging in geneva. however, as the global covid- pandemic surfaced, we had to alter the project. our faculty advisor would remain in town, but we had to return to our homes in other areas of the country. we would not be able to hold a local event with children and, even more so, there was an obvious new need for home-based activities for children to do might help them notice their locations with rosier glasses. rather than holding an in- person event in our college’s town as we initially intended, we began to pursue online methods of dissemination and move towards a free downloadable booklet geared towards children in grades k- . as we shifted into online meetings and work sessions with our professor and each other, so did our final project! creative placemaking was not something we expected to go online, but that’s where we took it. after several weekly meetings and critique sessions, we produced three educational activities to promote continued learning through child-centered and creative methods. these are: the today i am booklet, the daily comic, and the mind map. all instruc- tions and maps are provided in english and spanish. we produced an informational website to accompany the project and to provide a virtual gallery so that children could share their work and see what their peers were creating. while this project was originally going to run as an activity with children in a park in geneva, ny, the pandemic created an opportunity for much wider impact. during our test of the project in early may, the today i am booklet activity was utilized by children in columbus, oh, geneva, ny, los angeles, ca, and buenos aires, argentina. during summer , today i am will be distributed with report cards to children enrolled in the geneva public school system ( + students), the actual website: https://ceturino.wixsite.com/todayiam international journal of community well-being copies paid for by the geneva initiative, which is supported by ccesl. we have received feedback that these booklets provide families with excellent ways to facilitate challenging conversations with children, giving children the space and tools to reflect on their own terms. in response to the success of the project, we intend to create two additional booklets to help children think about current events in ways that resonate with where they are developmentally. these booklets will guide reflection through drawing and writing regarding the covid- pandemic and the current protests around police brutality and the black lives matter movement. ultimately, we believe that the pandemic’s requirement that we go online for the project portion of the independent study helped us create a project with substantially wider impact not only in terms of the number of children served, but also in terms of being able to provide value to more families during our contemporary pandemic moment. a student group’s strategic answer prior to covid- , hws votes, a non-partisan student group, primarily provided in-person voting-related experiences between students at our institution, ranging from voter registration efforts to civic engagement conferences. after spring break, we were met with the challenge of a dramatic shift to the virtual world and an unprecedented logistical nightmare in regard to voting. with elections continuing to be pushed back, the u.s. census on hold, and in-person polling becoming less of a reality, obstacles began piling up during this pivotal presidential election year. geneva political engagement groups also sprung into high gear maneuvering through a newly virtual world and learning how to communicate and spread information to their voters like never before. we began to work closer with the local league of women voters’ chapter, discussing the ontario county elections and the political process in general. after spring break, hws votes team began to discuss how to keep students civically engaged as well as brainstorm ideas for the ambiguous nature of the fall. in april , we began to hold weekly political couch parties over zoom to have a space for students to ask any questions regarding voting. we ran these meetings until the end of the semester and plan to extend them through summer as we prepare incoming first- year students for a momentous presidential election season. along with these zoom meetings, hws votes leaders also partnered with the intercultural affairs office on campus to host a meeting to discuss the election changes and help students register to vote. while developing our all in democracy challenge plan for – this spring, we took into account that our efforts in the fall may be entirely virtual, entirely on- campus, or a mix of the two. with a historic presidential election coming in november, plan a, plan b, and plan c will all have to rely on many campus and community partnerships to boost voting registration, voter education, and voting rates at hws. during this time of quarantining and physical/social distancing, hws votes has virtually built, fostered, and bridged community connections—and will continue to do so in the fall. committed to inspiring a greater desire for political literacy, local residents and the student body can continue to come together. we are proud that despite the many things competing for the attention of our colleges’ president during the spring of , she signed the all in campus democracy challenge (hws b), international journal of community well-being which affirms a non-partisan institutional commitment to encourage students become politically engaged and participate in voting and bridge the disparity between voter registration and the voting rate. despite the pandemic, hws votes recognizes that these efforts remain needed on campus (even virtually) during these continually shifting and challenging times. voices of protest and love: a zoom teach-in this project emerged as a first step to meet civic, academic, and psychosocial needs made front-stage by the killing of george floyd at the knee of a minneapolis police officer on may , . students, long-term community members, and faculty of color, most notably, demanded to be heard; while all of us sought to listen, learn, and mobilize politically in geneva in which around three out of every four residents is classified as white (u.s. census bureau – ). just as local and national in- person protests have been modified due to the epidemiological context of covid- , we sought to construct an appropriate framework for this gathering that safely met the needs of all participants while also acting to extend our reach outside the geneva area. the vice president for diversity, equity, and inclusion on campus facilitated a small planning committee comprised of activists, faculty, and staff members to create the -h zoom platform entitled, “voices of protest and love: liberatory knowledge in the hour of george floyd” on june , , as the first of an ongoing series. those of us on the planning committee felt compelled to provide a platform to amplify the work of the blm (black lives matter) geneva activists (unaffiliated with hws), an academic framework for ongoing learning about systemic racial violence and inequity, and a safe discussion space. the program that materialized digitally through these tenets prioritized such voices and worked to enable learning and healing. a recent alumna of the academic institution acted as emcee, fore-fronting her role as community organizer. two additional blm activists who opened the session with this call to purpose joined her: we are here to think about what is happening and what to do about it. we are going to ask: what does true liberation mean? does it mean the same thing for each of us? how do we go about achieving it? who does the ‘educating’? which voices are privileged and which are silenced? these are vexed and contested questions but when you live in a society where too many are taken from us too often, in a place where even requests to breathe are fatally ignored, these are conversations that we cannot afford to delay. the program continued with a young poet’s spoken work, followed by a wide-ranging scholarly discussion about the intersection of racism and pandemic with a geneva focus. this estimate includes the following proportions: % of white, non-hispanic/latinx residents plus % of white residents who also identify as hispanic/latinx. cosponsoring programs included africana studies, intercultural affairs, and the office of the president; all of which worked closely with the non-collegiate local activist organization, blm geneva: the people’s peaceful protest. international journal of community well-being as the teach-in continued, civic and academic voices alternated. a husband and wife team representing the local reverend martin luther king jr. committee and the african american men’s association, respectively, spoke about the importance of voting and community support. colleagues at hws presented condensed histories of anti-black violence in the making of the u.s. and the second compared black oppression and decolonization of the mind in apartheid south africa with that of african americans. between these lectures, blm geneva activists built on this knowledge with perspectives situated outside of academic discourse by asking, what is going on locally? what is activism like? what are the challenges? what are your hopes? how is this connected to a national movement? the program concluded with facilitated zoom breakout sessions to allow participants to reflect upon what they learned and to discuss how these ideas can be mobilized into action for social change. one hundred and five people attended this first-in-a-series event, the great majority of whom stayed for the entire four hours. this session sparked empathy and renewed calls to action, but also productive and pointed critiques about the use of words and how relational authority can be applied to silence others. these could be interpreted as indicators of success. voices of protest and love was created to promote a wide variety of voices, especially those of persons of color, from inside and outside of the academic institution that initiated it. future plans include a physically distanced viewing and discussion of the documentary th at a nearby drive-in movie theater and a virtual symposium on belonging. despite the dangers posed by covid- to physical grouping, these discussions and concurrent political mobilization could not wait. this geneva project, resonant of global imperatives, emerged from the need to rectify fundamental social inequities constructed by systematic racism. the specific public health circumstances imposed by covid- forced innovation in concert with accommodation. positive results from this initiative suggest that during this dual alarm, productive bridges can be built between institutions and from the local to the global. seeking commonalities and unique differences these vignettes highlight important intersections and differences in rapid community innovation spurred by covid- . common intersections found across the vignettes are reflected in the set of questions below. the royal “we” is used below to encompass roles such as community members, leaders, policy-makers, scholars, educators, and artists, among others. . rapid pivots: a. how can we enable rapid innovations that spur substantial localized impact? b. how can we not over-rely on large-scale social innovations from big entities (e.g., corporations, governments, etc.) when opportunities for community innovation may be right under our noses? c. how can short-term, rapid innovation be linked to long-term, community resilience? international journal of community well-being d. how do rapid innovations take on “lives of their own” after the “school” project or the planned project timeline has ended? how do those engaged in such projects continue them forward or replicate/innovate them in the future? . community values: a. how can we promote thoughtful reflection among our communities regarding community needs and assets, which can tie to rapid community innovation? b. how have we rethought and recorded our community needs and assets, which can be used when designing future community innovations? what have we learned from virtual/remote engagement that will allow us to “do better”? c. how does working under these unique constraints (e.g., pandemic, remote- learning, physical/social distancing, etc.) expand/inhibit local capacity- building? d. how does the pandemic and its many impacts offer students and community members a sense of what is possible with their projects that would not have been part of their conventional learning experience? . diversity and inclusivity: a. how have covid- and large-scale events such as the george floyd killing (and blm protests) provided avenues for greater inclusivity in community development and education work? b. how have forced shifts to physical/social distancing and utilization of digital technologies showcased inclusivity and exclusivity in community develop- ment and education work? c. how have forced shifts to digital modes of work fostered unique opportunities to share local work on a larger scale locally, regionally, nationally, and globally? d. in regard to digital technologies, which lessons have been learned that can be carried into post-covid- life in order to enhance community well-being? unique differences and conclusion can we come together while staying physically apart? this commentary documents a number of ways teachers, students, and activists have adapted to covid- , but also have embraced the opportunity to innovate. several have underscored how empathy and kindness can be bolstered amidst increased isolation or taking on the challenge to make one’s work accessible and useful to those beyond one’s immediate community; still others have highlighted transnational connections during a time when distances between local and global lives are digitally condensed. these are hopeful and perhaps enduring innovations that can be applied to a post-covid- world, though all are dependent on the resiliency of our social institutions. it should not be a surprise that calls for racial justice have emerged during this period of enforced distancing. greater social equity and access for all citizens will strengthen the institutions that knit us together. this commentary describes initiatives to overcome physical distance through pedagogical connection. all of the examples originate from an academic institution. several of them express the intention to connect, support, and international journal of community well-being give voice to neighbors who are not affiliated with the college. while connections are being made, the town-gown divide between the campus and local community that often exists remains an ongoing challenge, despite the economic and social benefits noted at this commentary’s outset (maranto and dean ). social resilience is both the interwoven strength of a society to endure and respond to challenges such as covid- , but also a process of weaving together various institutions within a given community. these examples showcase this process in action. different actors (i.e., students, faculty, staff, locals, etc.) will take on different roles, as demonstrated in our examples. still, these various actors can and likely must act together to bolster community resilience and well-being. what if these efforts were better woven together from the outset? where might communities be economically, socially, politically, or environmentally, among other domains? the pandemic and our community (campus and locality) have unearthed new strategies and partnerships to build upon even after covid- . hopefully, others will be inspired to share their responses and act similarly (or uniquely, with their own creativity!) in the future. references bach, t. 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(n.d.). work. retrieved june from www.saritazaleha.com/. publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. affiliations craig allen talmage & christopher annear & kate equinozzi & kathleen flowers & grace hammett & amy jackson & julie newman kingery & robin lewis & kirin makker & audrey platt & travis schneider & caroline turino christopher annear annear@hws.edu kate equinozzi kate.equinozzi@hws.edu kathleen flowers kflowers@hws.edu grace hammett grace.hammett@hws.edu amy jackson sellers@hws.edu julie newman kingery kingery@hws.edu international journal of community well-being https://doi.org/ . /s - - - https://www.taxexemptworld.com/organizations/geneva-ny-new-york.asp https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/storytelling-peace-and-creative-placemaking/id ?i= https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/storytelling-peace-and-creative-placemaking/id ?i= https://censusreporter.org http://www.saritazaleha.com/ robin lewis lewis@hws.edu kirin makker makker@hws.edu audrey platt audrey.platt@hws.edu travis schneider travis.schneider@hws.edu caroline turino caroline.turino@hws.edu entrepreneurial studies, hobart & william smith colleges, pulteney street, geneva, ny , usa anthropology, hobart & william smith colleges, pulteney street, geneva, ny , usa william smith student, hobart & william smith colleges, pulteney street, geneva, ny , usa center for community engagement and service learning, hobart & william smith colleges, pulteney street, geneva, ny , usa psychological science, hobart & william smith colleges, pulteney street, geneva, ny , usa environmental science, hobart & william smith colleges, pulteney street, geneva, ny , usa american studies, hobart & william smith colleges, pulteney street, geneva, ny , usa hobart student, hobart & william smith colleges, pulteney street, geneva, ny , usa international journal of community well-being 	rapid community innovation: a small urban liberal arts community response to covid- 	abstract 	background and purpose 	centering the responses in place 	rapid social innovation vignettes 	responding through community engagement 	a global instructional reflection 	a classroom pivot 	creative placemaking through participatory public art on the web 	a student group’s strategic answer 	voices of protest and love: a zoom teach-in 	seeking commonalities and unique differences 	unique differences and conclusion 	references is there a “ferguson effect?” google searches, concern about police violence, and crime in u.s. cities, – https://doi.org/ . / socius: sociological research for a dynamic world volume : – © the author(s) reprints and permissions: sagepub.com/journalspermissions.nav doi: . / journals.sagepub.com/home/srd creative commons non commercial cc by-nc: this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution- noncommercial . license (http://www.creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . /) which permits non-commercial use, reproduction and distribution of the work without further permission provided the original work is attributed as specified on the sage and open access pages (https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/nam/open-access-at-sage). original article among the many remarkable political developments in the united states of the past few years, one will surely stand out to future scholars of race, law, and cities: the significant mobilization against police violence associated with the black lives matter movement. gaining ground in the after- math of protests and civil disturbances prompted by the police killing of michael brown in ferguson, missouri, in august of and the failure of a staten island grand jury later that year to indict the officers involved in the death of eric garner, by the black lives matter movement had become a force to be reckoned with. in the democratic presi- dential primaries, all the candidates staked out policy posi- tions on racial inequalities in policing and criminal justice. in cities around the country, mayors and police chiefs were forced to address accusations of police bias, often following incidents caught on video and spread widely through social media. public opinion shifted as well. a gallup poll released in june showed that public confidence in the police had plummeted to record low levels not seen since the trials of the officers who took part in the arrest and beating of rodney king in (jones ). as the black lives matter movement picked up, however, another thread emerged in the public conversation. the year also saw a non-negligible increase in violent crime in some u.s. cities. although at the national level crime remained low, with analysts pointing out that after years of declines a floor in crime rates may have been reached around which one would naturally expect some fluctuation, other commentators and public officials expressed alarm. some linked the uptick to the protest movement against police violence, coining the term ferguson effect to refer to a hypothesized chain of events where (in the most popular ver- sion of the argument) public anger at police mistreatment of african americans would lead police officers to be more cir- cumspect in their behaviors in high-crime neighborhoods with large black populations. as police pulled back from dis- cretionary activity such as “stop and frisk” or investigatory traffic stops, criminals would find expanded opportunities. the ferguson effect hypothesis also proved politically powerful. fbi director james comey said he believed it to be true. after the targeted killings of five police officers in srdxxx . / sociusgross and mann research-article colby college, waterville, me, usa duke university, durham, nc, usa corresponding author: neil gross, department of sociology, colby college, mayflower hill, waterville me , usa. email: nlgross@colby.edu is there a “ferguson effect?” google searches, concern about police violence, and crime in u.s. cities, – neil gross and marcus mann abstract between and , the rate of homicide and other violent crime in the united states rose. one hypothesis discussed in the press and by some social scientists is that this increase was tied to political mobilization against police violence: as the black lives matter movement gained support following protests in ferguson, missouri, perhaps police officers, worried about the new public mood, scaled back their law enforcement efforts, with crime as a consequence. in this article, we examine the association between public concern over police violence and crime rates using google search measures to estimate the former. analyzing data on large u.s. cities, we find that violent crime was higher and rose more in cities where concern about police violence was greatest. we also find that measures of social inequality predict crime rates. we conclude by discussing the implications for future research on the “ferguson effect” and beyond. keywords crime, police, internet searches, black lives matter https://us.sagepub.com/en-us/journals-permissions http://journals.sagepub.com/home/srd http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . % f &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - socius: sociological research for a dynamic world dallas and three in baton rouge, the theme of restoration of law and order—and support for the police—became central to the successful presidential campaign of donald j. trump. yet as most who have written on the ferguson effect acknowledge, only a few social-scientific studies test the hypothesis. pyrooz et al. ( ) ask whether the trajectory of crime rates in cities was altered by the events of august in ferguson. morgan and pally ( ) look for evi- dence that the ferguson protests and unrest and then protests surrounding the death in police custody of freddie gray changed patterns of policing and crime in baltimore. rosenfeld ( ) studies the rise in homicide in . he considers whether the available evidence supports the theory that declines in police legitimacy lie behind the murder spike that year or whether other hypotheses—such as those to do with a surge in the drug trade—are more plausible. while these studies are valuable, they share a limitation. all recognize that attitudes toward the police are an impor- tant part of the causal chain described by the ferguson effect hypothesis. but none examines systematically the associa- tion between crime and police-related attitudes, in part because local-level attitudinal data have been unavailable. this article uses a relatively novel methodological tech- nique to explore the association. we estimate changing levels of public concern about police violence in large american cities between july and june by examining pat- terns in google search activity. we find that the increase in such concern, as registered by searches for phrases like black lives matter and police brutality, is associated with the increase in certain violent crimes that occurred between and and more ambiguously with the further (and more modest) increase that occurred between and the first half of . at the same time, our models indicate that fac- tors relating to social inequality are linked with violent crime. violent crime is most prevalent and has risen the most in cities characterized by (among other things) higher levels of residential segregation by race, higher rates of poverty, and lower levels of educational attainment. while the find- ings on public concern in no way represent proof of the ferguson effect hypothesis—not least because we have no data on the activities of the police—alongside the findings of morgan and pally ( ) and rosenfeld ( ), they provide empirical warrant for further study of it. our article proceeds in three steps. first, we briefly review previous research on the ferguson effect. second, we discuss our data, methods, and findings. third and finally, we address implications for future research. research on the ferguson effect has there been a ferguson effect? meaningful discussion of this question begins with recognition of how far crime rates fell in the decades following the early s—what zimring ( ) calls “the great american crime decline.” at that time, the country was in the midst of a crack cocaine epidemic that fueled a wave of gun violence. but crack was not the only driver of high crime rates, which peaked for vio- lence in at incidents for every , persons and older (truman and langton ). in fact, crime had been rising since the s for what social scientists now think were a host of reasons, including the growth of concentrated poverty (sampson and wilson ), the presence of envi- ronmental contagions such as lead linked to violent behavior (reyes ), and inefficient policing that could not keep up with developments on the urban landscape (zimring ). by the late s and s, crime and fear of crime were part of the american way of life, especially in big cities. responding to the public clamor to do something, politi- cians pushed through legislation that considerably increased the severity of punishment for those convicted of violent and property offenses, as well as drug crimes, and ramped up spending on prisons and jails to accommodate the influx of prisoners. as critics of “mass incarceration” have noted (e.g., alexander ), african americans and to a lesser extent latino americans were disproportionately affected by these changes. imprisonment rates for black and latino men soared. crime had already started to trend downward by the time the most far-reaching crime bills were passed, though, and it would continue to drop, eventually reaching lows not seen since the early s. in , there were . violent incidents nationwide for every , persons, a percent decline from years prior (truman and langton ). while advocates of harsh sentencing see this as evidence that tough on crime policies work, the social-scientific consensus is that the crime drop was a consequence of various factors, from incarceration-backed deterrence to improved policing techniques (revolving around targeted deployment of per- sonnel in response to local crime patterns) to gentrification and the revival of america’s urban cores. it is against this backdrop that evidence of a recent uptick in crime is both disturbing and puzzling. it is important to be clear that while the increase that began in is, for a few cities, large in both percentage and absolute terms, in most places violent crime remains near historic low levels. in his paper on the ferguson effect and homicide, rosenfeld ( ) focuses on developments in of the largest cities in the country. he finds that between and , forty cities experienced homicide increases and saw declines or, in one case, no change. homicides in of the cities increased by more than percent; the increase exceeded percent in cities. the skewed distribution of the homicide changes indicates that a relatively small number of cities accounted for most of the increase in the sample. (rosenfeld : – ) he goes on to observe—correctly in our view—that “had homicides not risen in these cities, it is likely the homicide increase of would have generated far less attention and the peak appears somewhat earlier using other measures. gross and mann controversy” (p. ) since elsewhere the changes were small. the cities that experienced the largest increases in homicide, according to rosenfeld’s analysis, were baltimore, chicago, houston, milwaukee, cleveland, washington, d.c., nashville, philadelphia, kansas city, and st. louis. as we discuss in more detail in the following, a compari- son of first half to first half homicide numbers for the big cities in our sample shows that while some cities experienced larger spikes, the average increase across all cit- ies was percent. in the majority of american cities, homi- cide and other violent crimes are still quite rare—just about as rare as they have been during any other late-stage point in the long crime drop. yet in cities where violence is on the rise—and especially in the neighborhoods most affected—it is a matter of great urgency to figure out what’s driving the upward movement. in chicago, for example, there were an astonishing homicides in the first half of —as com- pared to for the entire year in —along with , nonfatal shootings and , reported robberies. by year’s end, according to news reports, chicago had recorded more than murders, a nearly percent increase from (bosman and smith :a ). not surprisingly, fear of crime in chicago is high. do the lessons learned from the “great american crime decline” no longer apply? the ferguson effect hypothesis arose as a possible answer to the question of why violent crime was trending upward in some places. as rosenfeld ( ) notes, the hypothesis was first floated by samuel dotson, the chief of police in st. louis. but it was most fully developed by political commen- tator heather mac donald. mac donald works for the manhattan institute, a think tank. in a wall street journal op-ed from may —and then in her book, the war on cops (mac donald )—mac donald, pointing to recent crime statistics and a spate of “riots, violent protests, and attacks on the police,” claimed that “the most plausible explanation of the current surge in lawlessness is the intense agitation against american police departments over the past nine months” (mac donald ). the mechanism she iden- tified was police pullback from discretionary stops and law enforcement activities. one of the police practices thought by some to have contributed to the post- s crime drop was “broken windows” policing—a strategy of vigorously enforcing public disorder laws, such as those prohibiting public drinking or panhandling, so that a message would be sent to those contemplating more serious criminal behavior that the eyes of law enforcement were on a neighborhood (kelling and coles ; cf. harcourt ; sampson ). mac donald speculated that broken windows policing was waning as police came to fear that interactions gone awry with citizens could cost them their job, or worse. pedestrian or traffic stops that might lead to searches for guns or drugs could also be declining in a political climate where police behavior was under intense scrutiny and where senior police officials, responding to pressure from activists, were per- ceived to be willing to throw line officers under the bus if improprieties were alleged. while mac donald’s argument appears politically moti- vated, it is broadly consistent with social-scientific research on “de-policing.” for example, rushin and edwards (forth- coming) assess the effect of officer pullback on crime rates by studying what happened in jurisdictions whose police departments were the object of “federally mandated reform” between and —either put on notice that their activities were being scrutinized or subject to actual federal oversight. the authors find higher than expected crime rates in cities after their police departments become subject to oversight as police withdraw from aggressive and some- times unconstitutional behavior. they also find that crime returns to expected levels once departments adjust their work routines. an alternative version of the ferguson effect thesis focuses less on policing per se than on citizens. beyond broken windows policing, another police innovation seen as contributing to the crime drop is “problem-oriented policing,” which is where police work together with citi- zens and other local agencies to identify and remediate neighborhood public safety problems (like abandoned houses where drugs may come to be sold) before they spiral into full-blown sources of crime and violence (braga and weisburd ). often bundled together with “community policing,” problem-oriented policing requires cooperation and trust between citizens and the police, who must be viewed as a legitimate source of authority. some writing on the ferguson effect (e.g., rosenfeld ) reason that out- rage over police mistreatment of citizens—african americans in particular—might undermine citizen trust in the police and lead to a crime-inducing decrease in coop- eration (for discussion, see cook ; tyler, goff, and maccoun ). more routine police activity such as investigating leads following a shooting or tracking down people with arrest warrants could also be affected. that there has been outrage over police violence is clear. police mistreatment of african americans has long been a source of frustration and anger in the black community and has long spurred activism. but even by historical standards, the recent wave of mobilization is notable. the black lives matter movement began when a san francisco bay area– based activist, alicia garza, wrote a facebook post in lamenting that george zimmerman had been found not guilty in the death of trayvon martin. “i continue to be sur- prised at how little black lives matter,” she wrote. a fellow activist soon created a twitter hashtag around that phrase. after the death of michael brown, the hashtag became a ral- lying point for protesters who streamed into ferguson and the new york times reported that “the number of murders [nation- ally] in was about the same as the , committed in . still, the . percent increase in the murder rate in is the most since a rise of more than percent from to ” (williams and davey :a ). socius: sociological research for a dynamic world for others who were already demanding criminal justice reform in their communities (cobb ). an analysis of tweets by freelon ( ) shows that by august , more than , people were following the black lives matter movement on social media. this number grew to almost , by late november of that year, when darren wilson, the officer who shot brown, escaped indictment. as a steady stream of cell phone and body camera videos showing more police killings of unarmed african american men emerged in the months that followed, protests broke out in cities around the country. according to a washington post data- base, police officers shot and killed people in and in . a crowdsourced database indicates that in response, there have been more than , demonstrations loosely linked to the black lives matter movement, with the largest ones taking place in chicago, new york, st. louis, ferguson, minneapolis, washington, d.c., and oakland. the movement resonated with public opinion. a reuters/ipsos poll from early showed that percent of all americans, percent of african americans, and percent of latinos agreed that “police officers tend to unfairly target minorities” and that trust in the police was especially low among young people (schneider ). by the first quarter of , a pew survey found that percent of all americans and percent of african americans sup- ported black lives matter, with a majority of respondents saying they understood the movement’s goals (horowitz and livingston ). the question is whether the rapid spread of protest and criticism of the police has somehow affected crime rates. one of the reasons there have been so few studies of the ferguson effect is the recent nature of the social changes referred to by the hypothesis. while many police depart- ments make crime report data available in real time, the fbi’s uniform crime report, which standardizes this infor- mation for every jurisdiction in the country, lags behind. victimization surveys, a more reliable source of data on criminal activity for all violent crimes except homicide (which are almost all reported), are even slower to be released. cautious researchers have been hesitant to test an explanation for a social phenomenon—an increase in crime—before the usual data are in that would show the phe- nomenon has actually occurred. but as police department data are the source for the uniform crime report system, other researchers have felt comfortable using these as the basis for their studies of the ferguson effect. pyrooz et al. ( ) assemble information on monthly crime from august to august . they focus on cities with populations over , and examine both violent and property offenses. they find that “the total crime rate was decreasing in the months prior to ferguson” and that there is “no evidence” to support the idea of a “sys- tematic change in crime trends in large u.s. cities . . . after the shooting of michael brown, and the subsequent social unrest and social media responses” (pyrooz et al. : – ). they do find an increase in robberies but declare this “the lone exception” (p. ) to the pattern of city-level trends in crime continuing along roughly the same linear path before and after ferguson. only in a few select cities—including baltimore, st. louis, newark, new orleans, washington, d.c., milwaukee, and rochester—did homicides pick up after the ferguson protests, but they note that these were high-crime cities already with characteristics predisposing them to violence, such as a large proportion of residents liv- ing in poverty. without factoring such characteristics into the analysis, pyrooz et al. ( ) conclude, it would be difficult to tell whether the homicide increase was driven by public concern over policing practices or more typical sociological factors. morgan and pally ( ) take a different approach. eschewing growth models of the sort used by pyrooz et al. ( ), they extend the analysis temporally and zoom in on developments in baltimore. their study begins from recog- nition of a disconnect in popular discussions of the ferguson effect. police pullback is key to most of these discussions, but the data cited in popular accounts often pertain to crime rates, not police activity. morgan and pally remedy this by analyzing crime report and arrest data for the baltimore police department. their crime report data stretch from to and their arrest data from to . they find that in the period of time between the ferguson events and the events surrounding the arrest and death of freddie gray, there was no meaningful change in crime rates in baltimore— only “trendless fluctuation” (p. ). during that same period, however, overall arrests declined by percent. arrests for minor offenses dropped off the most, which they see as con- sistent with the idea of a ferguson effect. it was after the freddie gray events that homicides and nonfatal shootings went up, rising percent and percent in just three months, from april to july . arrests continued to decline, “consistent with the widely discussed conjecture that the baltimore police pulled back from some routine policing in response to a perceived lack of support from the city’s leadership” (p. ). morgan and pally argue that their data do not allow them to conclude that crime increased in the second period because of the police pullback in the first and second periods—but they note that the data suggest such an effect. they raise the possibility that in baltimore “the crime spike is a ferguson effect that might have remained dormant had it not been ignited by a localized gray effect” (morgan and pally : ). rosenfeld ( ) also forefronts issues of timing. after analyzing the nature and extent of the homicide increase in , he considers whether it might be tied to developments in the drug trade. the illicit market for heroin and prescrip- tion drugs like oxcycontin has been expanding, as indicated see https://www.washingtonpost.com/graphics/national/police- shootings/. see https://elephrame.com/textbook/blm. gross and mann by an upward trend in deaths from heroin and prescription opioid overdoses. but rosenfeld points out that the heroin market was booming by – , whereas the homicide spike did not happen until . “it is not obvious,” he writes, “why the increase in homicide would lag at least five years behind the explosive growth in the demand for heroin, if the expansion of urban drug markets spurred the homicide rise” (rosenfeld : ). a second possibility he explores— one for which there is more evidence—has to do with pris- oner release. rosenfeld points out that imprisonment rates began to fall nationally in and that the country is now at the point where we are releasing more people from prison than we are locking up new inmates (although the u.s. imprisonment rate remains high in comparative terms). he notes that former prisoners are at increased risk of commit- ting crime and that research shows a lag between time of release and time of reoffending. while this research focuses on robbery and property crimes, it is not implausible that prisoner release trends that started a few years ago could be linked with the rise in homicide rates today, though he con- cludes that more localized data would be needed to test the theory. finally, rosenfeld ( ) turns to the ferguson effect idea, fleshing out in particular the legitimate authority inter- pretation. to do so, he draws on the work of historian randolph roth ( ) and crime scholar gary lafree ( ), who argue that american homicide patterns are tied to trust in government. although more proximate causes are involved as well, the claim is that ultimately people resort to murder to settle disputes when they do not believe public officials or the legal system relevant for dispute resolution. in the wake of widely publicized police killings of african american men and protests against racism in policing, there is not much trust in the police in impoverished african american neighborhoods, rosenfeld observes, citing polls that show large gaps between whites and african americans in confidence in the police. after ferguson confidence actu- ally dropped more for whites than for blacks, but both the timing of the homicide spike—coming on the heels of ferguson and black lives matter—and its location in cities with large and poor african american populations imply to him a connection to perceptions of police legitimacy. rosenfeld concludes his paper with a call for further study of the topic using new data sources. our study follows rosenfeld’s call. using an untapped data source—google searches—we ask: is there evidence directly linking public concern about police violence to the recent increase in crime? data and methods one limitation in existing work on the ferguson effect is that measures of public concern about police violence are not fac- tored into statistical models. there is a good reason for this: surveys and public opinion polls might be seen as the only way to gauge such concern, while the few polls that have been conducted are national in scope and do not allow researchers to get at local variation in attitudes that could be associated with city-specific patterns of criminality. we side- step this limitation by using google search activity as a rough indicator of attitudes, in line with the work of stephens- davidowitz. in a paper on racial attitudes and the and presidential elections, stephens-davidowitz ( ) demonstrated that google search queries can be used to esti- mate racial “animus” and argued they may complement tra- ditional survey methods in that google searches are conducted in the relative privacy of one’s computer, tablet, or smart phone, such that desirability bias in survey response does not come into play. we turn to google queries partly for the same reason—in a highly politicized climate, people may not feel comfortable revealing their true feelings about the police to poll takers. more important, search query measures allow us to look at local variation, which we would expect to be meaningful in light of demographic differences across cit- ies and different local histories of police-citizen interaction and conflict. it is certainly possible that the police could pull back from discretionary law enforcement, potentially triggering an increase in crime, not just because of actual citizen attitudes in a community but also because of perceptions of such atti- tudes (which may be accurate or inaccurate), or perceptions of attitudes nationally, or perceptions of the local political or legal climate (which may or may not be tied to citizen beliefs.) we analyze the connection to actual concern about police violence on the part of local residents because this is the causal link most often mentioned in discussions of the ferguson effect, even though data have been scarce. our measure of concern about police violence is the fre- quency of searches in large u.s. cities for phrases that sig- nal an interest in the topic and/or a personal commitment around it. these phrases are black lives matter, police brutal- ity, police shooting, cop shooting, police shootings, cop shoot- ings, i hate cops, or i hate police. black lives matter was an obvious phrase to include given the ferguson effect hypothe- sis. police brutality, police shooting, cop shooting, police shootings, and cop shootings are phrases that google indicated a related body of research examines the “legal cynicism” that may arise in poor neighborhoods where residents perceive they are not being treated fairly by the justice system or where the system is seen to be ineffective. crime may go up when, as a result of legal cynicism, people withdraw their cooperation from police and the courts. see desmond, papachristos, and kirk ( ); kirk and papachristos ( ); and sampson and bartusch ( ). other studies that use internet searches to estimate attitudes or public interest include digrazia (forthcoming) on anti-immigrant sentiment and swearingen and ripberger ( ) on interest in can- didates for the u.s. senate. socius: sociological research for a dynamic world were related to one another in their search corpus (“related searches”)—that is, phrases often searched for in connection with one another. i hate cops and i hate police we included to identify internet users with strongly anti-police views. to measure search frequency, we used google adwords, the commercial interface google offers that allows customers to target advertising to search term activity. we relied on google adwords rather than the more popular google trends for two reasons: ( ) unlike google trends, which shows frequency of search activity for a specified geographic area and time period relative to the highpoint for searches within that area and time period, google adwords gives estimates of actual search counts, which fit better into a regression framework; and ( ) unlike google trends, where the finest geographic resolution is “demographic market areas”—local television markets, as identified by the nielsen company—google adwords allows us to zoom in on municipal boundaries (or approximations thereof) and hence link these data with city-level crime and demographic information. google trends does have the advantage of adjusting results for trends in overall google search volume—seasonal spikes in searches, for example, or incremental growth as the number of internet users in a locale increases. again taking a cue from stephens-davidowitz, we built an adwords equiv- alent of the same adjustment, gathering city-specific search frequency data for the generic search term recipe—a reason- ably proxy for overall google search volume—and then using this to standardize our police violence-related search measures. (stephens-davidowitz [ ] did something simi- lar using the search term weather.) google adwords allows one to examine search term activity in a moving two-year window. we gathered our data in july and so have data dating back to july , one month before the shooting of michael brown. we standardized by constructing a simple additive index of police violence–related searches for each city under study for each month from july to june and then dividing by the number of monthly searches for recipe in each of those cities. how good a measure of public concern about police violence are these google search data? we think they pro- vide a decent but imperfect measure. on the one hand, it seems entirely plausible that some of those americans who are worried about police mistreatment of citizens would turn to the internet for more information. as word of black lives matter began to spread, for example, we would expect some people open to its message to google the movement so that they could find out more about it. similarly, people might use google to research the general topic of police brutality or find and watch for themselves the latest tragic police shooting video. it also seems plau- sible that people with more strident anti-police views might google phrases like i hate cops in order to connect with online communities of the likeminded and that the views of such persons would not show up in traditional polling or survey data. on the other hand, americans who are already well informed about police brutality, either from personal experi- ence or exposure to other sources of news and information (e.g., social media), might not need to do any googling. there is also the problem that some of the phrases on our list are ones that people are likely to google only a few times. while someone closely following the issue of police vio- lence might conduct a search for police shooting after every incident, we suspect that after gaining initial information from a search query like black lives matter, many people would be unlikely to google it again, such that search fre- quency would measure the exposure of new people to the movement and could be expected to decline once knowledge saturation levels were reached in the population. another issue is that we narrowed our search term list to phrases that could in principle have been searched for during any point in the study’s timeframe. the list is thus centered on relatively abstract topics rather than specific people or events, whereas the latter (e.g., samuel dubose shooting—referring to a man killed in by a university of cincinnati police officer) might be more common search targets. it is also surely the case that not everyone who googles phrases like black lives matter is concerned about police violence; critics of the movement might make queries for information as well. in addition, some people are simply more active googlers than others, on this or any other subject, such that our measures might be seen as capturing, at best, the share of active googlers concerned about police violence, not the share of we experimented with other search terms. the ones we settled on seemed to capture naturally occurring search activity, though we are not aware of any formal procedures that would allow us to establish their optimality. for these and other search terms used in the analysis, google adwords generates frequencies reflecting how often the terms were searched for by themselves or with common variants. two significant downsides of google adwords are: ( ) the moving two-year window makes it impossible to study anything other than recent phenomena (for us, this means we cannot examine the asso- ciation between pre-ferguson spikes of public concern about police violence and earlier crime patterns), and ( ) once time has moved on, one cannot go back and generate new data for periods that are now out of the window. the second problem raises questions about repli- cability. we have dealt with this, to the extent possible, by retaining the original output files produced by adwords. we double-checked the procedures used to generate these files by having research assis- tants replicate searches for select cities within the current window. also note: when we first collected the data, in the summer of , adwords did not charge for search frequency information. they sub- sequently revised their terms of service. now, unless one pays for a “campaign,” one can generate only broad search volume ranges. in a following note, we discuss a version of our models that side- steps this problem. relatedly, so far as we are able to tell (google adwords was not designed for social science research and aspects of the algorithm are not transparent), search numbers are not adjusted for repeated searches from the same ip address. gross and mann all americans thus concerned. finally, not every internet search is conducted using google. these problems are real. but we believe that in the absence of a huge and repeated time series survey of american atti- tudes toward the police—with a sufficiently large sample that reliable estimates could be made of attitudes in particular cit- ies at multiple points in time—google search data, imperfect though they are, represent the best available measure for our purposes of public concern with police violence. as we will see, the over-time patterns of search activity across the cities in our sample correspond well with national events, such as the freddie gray protests in baltimore. this lends credibility to the notion that google search data can be used to help track public interest and attitudes. it is also the case, as we will note, that the overall pattern in the search data roughly mir- rors that revealed in national-level public opinion polls track- ing confidence in the police. our outcome variables are violent crimes reported to the police in , (full year and first half year), and the first half of in the same cities. like rosenfeld, we draw on crime information compiled by the major cities chiefs police association (mcca). although not every large city is included in the mcca data—new york city is not, for example (at least in this time period)—the cities rep- resent a large swath of urban america, with a combined pop- ulation of almost million. the mcca data in fact cover more large police jurisdictions than this, but we have excluded from our data set most sheriff’s departments with urban policing responsibilities (e.g., the los angeles county sheriff’s department) because the geographic boundaries of their jurisdictions do not match up with the municipal bound- aries in our google search data. (the one exception to this is the jacksonville sheriff’s office, which primarily serves jacksonville, florida, along with a few smaller communities in duval county.) we also excluded the city of phoenix, which did not submit complete data to the mcca, and wichita, which submitted first half and data but not full year and data. a full list of cities in our sample can be found in the appendix. the mcca data contain information on reported homi- cides, rapes, robberies, aggravated assaults, and nonfatal shootings. there is a great deal of missing data for nonfa- tal shootings, however, so we do not include nonfatal shootings in our final analysis. our goal is to account for variation in violent crime levels in and across the cities in our sample from to —when the initial spike in violence was first observed and linked to the ferguson uprising—as well as from the first half of to the first half of (for seasonal comparability). while the crime reports include crimes that happened in the first half of the year—before our google search data series begins— we see no problem with accounting for change from a baseline with data on a “treatment” that starts somewhat later. our models incorporate a number of adjustment variables. our lone time-variant adjustment is the number of local police killings of citizens in the period covered by the google search data series. we might expect concern about police violence to be very much affected by these local incidents. the numbers we use here are from another crowdsourced database tied to the black lives matter movement, map- pingpoliceviolence.org. unlike the database maintained by the washington post, this database contains information on all police killings, not just shootings. as for time-invariant adjustments, these are the number of police officers per cap- ita as well as sociodemographic characteristics drawn from the american community survey and u.s. census data: pop- ulation size ( estimate), percent of residents who are to ( ), percent african american ( ), percent latino ( ), percent of residents with a bachelor’s degree ( ), percent of young adults ( – ) who are unemployed ( ), and percent of city residents in poverty ( ). we look at the percent of residents who are african american or latino because if research on police bias is any indication, substantial african american and latino communities should mean more tension in interactions with law enforce- ment (epp, maynard-moody, and haider-markel ; rios ). the other variables speak to either the availability of policing resources or to social disadvantage; the latter has long been shown to be linked with crime rates. we include as well a standard measure of residential segregation—the white-black dissimilarity index —and as a further measure of economic distress, the percent of homes in each city that are underwater ( ) along with the percent of occupied residences that are owner occupied ( ). during the short period covered here, we would not expect significant year- to-year change in these time-invariant measures, and in any event, most of the variables are not available for all the time points in our study. we structure our data in a panel format and analyze it using both fixed and random effects regression, with a nega- tive binomial specification to deal with the highly disbursed distribution of the crime counts. since our regression analy- sis uses four different panels ( , , first half , and first half ), our main search variable in each analysis is crime data for the second half of were not available when we conducted the bulk of our analysis. for the midyear and data, see https://www.majorcities- chiefs.com/pdf/news/mcca_violent_crime_data_midyear_ . pdf. for the and numbers, see https://www.majorcities- chiefs.com/pdf/news/vc_data_ .pdf. the latest numbers here are from and reported at http:// www.governing.com/gov-data/safety-justice/police-officers-per- capita-rates-employment-for-city-departments.html. drawn from http://www.censusscope.org/segregation.html and based on census numbers. drawn from http://files.zillowstatic.com/research/public/ne summary_ q _public.csv. socius: sociological research for a dynamic world the monthly average of the adjusted search term index for each panel. while we report unstandardized numbers when characterizing the extent of the crime increase and trends in searches, our regression models use z-score standardized versions of the predictor variables to facilitate model inter- pretation. we also render the regression coefficients as inci- dence rate ratios, or the rate at which we expect our dependent variable (homicide and other violent crimes) to increase or decrease per one unit change in our predictors. results the crime increase before presenting the findings from our regression models, we discuss significant descriptive results. we begin by character- izing the crime increase our models seek to account for. rosenfeld’s ( ) paper does an admirable job describing the to increase in homicide. what about change between the first half of and the first half of ? as noted previously, the cities in our sample saw a mean increase in homicide of percent between the two periods, as compared to a gain of percent between the full years and . as is true for the – data, significant per- centage increases were concentrated in a relatively small num- ber of cities. seventeen of the cities saw increases of percent or more, and —arlington, boston, las vegas, louisville, orlando, and san jose—saw increases of per- cent or more. (chicago is just under this mark, at . per- cent.) on the other hand, cities saw decreases in homicide. only of the cities in the sample—aurora, louisville, omaha, and orlando—experienced homicide gains of more than percent in both – and first half –first half . given the infrequency of homicide, these percentage changes do not necessarily reflect a large number of incidents. as mentioned previously, we do not include nonfatal shootings in our regression analysis because many cities do not report them to the mcca. among those that do, how- ever, one sees about a percent gain on average between and and then a percent gain between the first half of and the first half of . of the cities in our data set that reported increases of more than percent in nonfatal shootings between – (out of with non- missing data), only charlotte, fresno, and louisville saw continued increases of that magnitude between the first half of and the first half of . charlotte and chicago saw the biggest gains during this latter period, with spikes in non- fatal shootings of and percent, respectively. moving on to robberies, one observes small upward movement over time. for the cities in our sample, robberies increased percent in – and then percent between the first half of and the first half of . in the most recent period, cities out of experienced increases in rob- bery of more than percent: aurora, chicago, fort worth, and salt lake city. the average gain across all the other cit- ies in the sample was percent. the story is similar for reported rape: small upward move- ment. there was an percent gain on average in reported rape for the cities in our sample between and and a percent gain between the first half of and the first half of . as with other crime types, these increases were not evenly distributed. in the most recent period, cities saw increases, while saw decreases or no change. finally, aggravated assaults rose about percent on aver- age between – and percent again between the first half of and the first half of . in the most recent period, of the cities experienced either no change or decreases in aggravated assaults. the upshot of all this is that there is only one type of vio- lent crime—homicide—for which our data show a clear and significant increase from to across more than a handful of cities. while increases have been registered in other types of violent crime as well, in many cities these increases are not large and do not appear to be sustained. homicide seems the most likely candidate for the effect for which a rise in public concern about police violence would be the cause. accordingly, in the following regressions, we model homicide separately from other violent crimes, con- structing an additive index for the latter. concern about police violence we turn next to the matter of search frequency. figure shows total police violence–related search activity over months for the cities under study. the vertical axis displays the adjusted search volume. two things stand out to us from this graph. first, there are four obvious surges in search activity, with the timing corresponding to large-scale protest events. while one sees a rise in concern about police violence from the very begin- ning of the time series to august and september —the time of the initial ferguson protests—this pales in compari- son to the increase that comes in december , when protests were taking off around non-indictments in the death of eric garner. the biggest surge by far, however, comes around the freddie gray protests in baltimore in april , when in some cities there are nearly twice as for orlando, we have not included numbers from the pulse night- club massacre as this is an instance of terrorism. on its face, a rise in homicide alongside no substantial rise in other violent crimes would seem to be inconsistent with certain ver- sions of the ferguson effect hypothesis. if the ferguson effect is a matter of reduced deterrence, for example—of potential crimi- nals being emboldened by the withdrawal of police from the street occasioned by public criticism—why would this affect killers but not robbers? we return to this issue in our conclusion, where we speculate about some of the causal mechanisms that might underlie the associations we report. gross and mann many police violence–related searches as searches for rec- ipe. a fourth surge—one that displays more heterogeneity across cities—comes around august , as a second wave of ferguson protests broke out and black lives matters protestors successfully shut down a campaign event for senator bernie sanders. these surges are a function of both local/regional and national interest. newark and st. louis have the highest search volume during the first surge; newark, boston, washington, d.c., and baltimore during the second (recall again that new york city is not in our data set); and baltimore in the third. the city with the highest police violence–related search volume during the fourth surge is washington, d.c. but most cities trend in the same direc- tion during these events. because concern about police vio- lence, as indexed by google search patterns, only goes very high in response to events in baltimore, we think it could be appropriate to rename the ferguson effect hypothesis the baltimore effect. measured by google searches, concern about police violence rose dramatically between and . across all the cities in our sample, adjusted searches rose percent. ten cities experienced gains of at least percent in this regard: cincinnati ( percent increase), austin ( percent), fort worth ( percent), louisville ( percent), las vegas ( percent), chicago ( percent), arlington ( percent), seattle ( percent), philadelphia ( percent), and raleigh ( percent). st. louis and baltimore saw smaller increases, of and percent, respectively. the second thing to note is how much police violence– related searching has dropped off since the surges. at the end of the series, it is higher than at the start but nowhere near peak levels. this could be because of a saturation effect, as discussed previously. it could also indicate that public concern has begun to move on, consistent with research in political science on “issue-attention cycles” (downs ). polling by gallup shows that public confi- dence in the police began to fall in , bottomed out in , and then rebounded by the middle of (newport ). while, again, the highly partisan political climate may be affecting these polling numbers, they are in line with the issue-attention cycle interpretation—and at the same time suggest that our google search measure may indeed be getting at attitudes, as figure shows the approximate inverse of this pattern. how much googling was there of police violence–related phrases during the surges? in april , during the baltimore surge, google adwords estimates there were about , searches in our cities for black lives matter, about , searches for police brutality, , for police shooting, , for cop shooting, , (combined) for police shoot- ings and cop shootings, and searches (combined) for i hate cops and i hate police, for a total of about , searches. this is far below the actual number of americans who were then concerned about police violence; recall that twice that many were following black lives matter on twitter alone (though the twitter data covered the entire united states). while these counts suggest the value of concentrating on relative changes, not absolute levels, it is not the case that only a tiny number of searches is driving our results. multivariate findings are these search patterns associated with changes in crime? we begin by considering the to panels before moving on to the panels covering first half and first half . table displays the results from a fixed effects negative binomial regression in which google search activity from figure . police violence–related google searches in large u.s. cities, – . as mentioned previously, morgan and pally ( ) discuss the connection between the ferguson effect and a “gray effect” in baltimore. socius: sociological research for a dynamic world and is used to predict variation in homicide rates and all other violent crimes within the cities in our sample. most of the variation in these crime data is across cities, not within them. however, the google search variable is a significant pre- dictor of within-city change in both models. the incidence rate ratios indicate that every standard deviation increase in search activity during this period is associated with a change in homi- cides by a factor of . —in other words, with a percent rise in homicides. likewise, a one standard deviation increase in search activity is associated with a rise in other violent crimes of about percent. while this would seem to be prima facie evidence that public concern about police violence is indeed tied to violent crime, we turn next to random effects models that allow us to analyze variation across cities as well and to break out the contribution of our adjustment variables. table displays the random effects results for the – panels, with the models nested to compare fit with and without the google search variable. looking first at the homicide models, we see that when the google search variable is not included, population size and racial segregation are positively associated with homicide, while the percent of city residents with a bachelor’s degree and the percent of city residents who are young are negatively asso- ciated. these variables remain statistically significant once the google search variable is introduced, and it too is positively associated with the outcome. bayesian information criterion (bic) and akaike information criterion (aic), measures of model fit, improve with the fuller model. the better (lower) bic score for the google search model is especially notable since it imposes a harsher penalty on the additional parameter than the aic. from the fuller model, we see that a one standard devia- tion increase in search activity is associated with an percent rise in homicide. this is indeed meaningful since between and the average increase in search activity across all cities amounted to about four standard deviations. the incidence rate ratio for the white-black dissimilarity index is larger; every one standard deviation increase in this measure ( points, which is about the difference between the level of segregation in oklahoma city and newark) is associated with about a per- cent increase in homicide. likewise, every one standard devia- tion increase in the proportion of city residents with a bachelor’s degree ( percentage points, or the difference between atlanta and less educated pittsburg) is associated with a decline in homicide by a factor of . —that is, a percent decline. the story is somewhat different in the “other violent crime” models. in the restricted model, educational attain- ment is not a statistically significant predictor. population size and residential segregation are, along with the percent of dwellings that are owner occupied and the percent of city residents below the poverty line. these all remain significant once the google search measure is introduced. for that mea- sure, the results mirror those of the fixed effects model. here a one standard deviation increase in searches is associated with about a percent rise in other violent crime. introducing this variable improves model fit. interactions with the google search variable are also worth noting, though we do not reproduce the results in tabular form. several of these interactions are consistent with the ferguson effect hypothesis. with homicide as the outcome, model fit improves when the search variable is interacted with percent african american, percent latino, and percent of city residents age to . with other violent crime as the outcome, there are a greater number of significant interactions. model fit measures improve when the search variable is interacted with percent african american, percent latino, number of police killings, number of police per ten thousand residents, percent of homes under water, population size, and percent of city residents age to . to put this in different terms, in – public concern about police violence, as measured by google searches, was especially associated with crime in big cities with large minority and youth populations and intensive policing. what about in – ? table shows the results of our fixed effects models for these panels. according to the models, in the most recent period there is no statistically sig- nificant relationship between public concern about police violence and homicide or other violent crime. this may be table . negative binomial fixed effects models predicting homicide and other violent crime, – . homicide other violent crime google searches . *** . *** (. ) (. ) observations akaike information criterion . . note: standard errors in parentheses. ***p < . . while random effects models do not offer the same benefit as fixed effects models in controlling for all time-invariant variables, hausman tests indicate that our random effects models are not sig- nificantly different in their estimations. for hausman test statistics, we used ordinary least squares models with logged dependent vari- ables. we also note that allison and waterman ( ) have raised doubts about the implementation of fixed effects negative binomial regressions in leading statistical software packages, including the one we used, stata—which is another reason to consider the ran- dom effects models. the finding from criminological research is that cities whose pop- ulations skew young tend toward more crime if youth populations are “disengaged” from mainstream institutions like colleges and universities and the labor market but tend toward less crime where engagement is high (mccall et al. ). our models effectively control for disengagement. tests on the full homicide model for – —as well as on the full homicide model reported in the following for – — show that outlier cities, including baltimore and chicago, are not skewing the model estimates and that the panel data display no sig- nificant heteroskedacticity or cross-sectional dependence. gross and mann due to the fact that with only half-year data we are losing some variance in our measures. table switches back to random effects modeling. looking first at homicide, the table shows that in – the white-black dissimilarity index was no longer a statistically significant predictor but that educational attainment and population size remained significant, with incidence rate ratios roughly similar to those found in the – models. more police per capita was also posi- tively associated with homicide, while more young people was associated with less homicide. unlike in the fixed effect models, the random effects models indicate that in the most recent period google search activity is a signifi- cant predictor of homicide, although we see no improve- ment in model fit between the restricted and fuller models as judged by aic and bic. in the other violent crime models, we see once again there was more crime in larger cities. where there were more police killings of civilians, there was somewhat less crime. cities with a more youthful population saw less crime, while cities with more impoverished residents saw more. public concern about police violence, as measured by google search activity, was associated with more violent crime, and here there is a small improvement in model fit between the restricted and fuller models. in line with the relative fragility of the google search variable as a crime predictor in the – panels, we table . negative binomial random effects models predicting homicide and other violent crime, – . homicide other violent crime population . *** . *** . ** . *** (. ) (. ) (. ) (. ) police per , people . . * . . (. ) (. ) (. ) (. ) killings by police . . . . (. ) (. ) (. ) (. ) percent african american . . . . (. ) (. ) (. ) (. ) white-black dissimilarity index . * . * . ** . ** (. ) (. ) (. ) (. ) percent latino . . . . (. ) (. ) (. ) (. ) percent bachelor’s degree . * . * . . (. ) (. ) (. ) (. ) percent population – . * . * . . * (. ) (. ) (. ) (. ) percent young adults unemployed . . . . (. ) (. ) (. ) (. ) percent of dwellings owner occupied . . . ** . ** (. ) (. ) (. ) (. ) homes under water . . . . (. ) (. ) (. ) (. ) percent below poverty line . . . * . ** (. ) (. ) (. ) (. ) google searches . *** . *** (. ) (. ) observations akaike information criterion . . , . , . bayesian information criterion . . , . , . hausman chi-square . . note: standard errors in parentheses. *p < . . **p < . . ***p < . . table . negative binomial fixed effects models predicting homicide and other violent crime, (quarters and ) and (quarters and ). homicide other violent crime google searches . . (. ) (. ) observations akaike information criterion . . note: standard errors in parentheses. socius: sociological research for a dynamic world find fewer meaningful interactions. we improved the fit of the homicide model when we interacted google searches with the percent of city residents who are young and the percent below poverty. with other violent crime as the out- come, google searches were more predictive only in larger cities and those with bigger latino populations. finally, for all the panels, there is the question of direction- ality. where we find an association between crime and police violence-related google searches, which of the two variables (if either) points to the social fact doing the causal work? the answer could be crime. perhaps crime began increasing for another reason—for example, because of social inequality, as our models indicate was in fact part of the story—and as a by- product people became more concerned with issues of fairness and justice in policing. we cannot rule out this possibility. three things lead us to be skeptical, however. first, if a rise in crime were to have generated a rise in searches around police violence, on the idea that criminal justice issues in general became more salient, it stands to reason that it should also have generated a rise in searches for the term crime itself and that crime searches should then be associated with police violence-related searches. however, a google trends graph covering the entire united states for the time period of our study and comparing searches for crime to searches for police brutality and black lives matter shows only a weak relation- ship. crime and police brutality have a correlation of . , while crime and black lives matter have a correlation of . . second, unless one holds the view—for which there is no empirical basis—that political mobilization around the michael brown, eric garner, and freddie gray cases specifi- cally was somehow a result of rising crime rates, then we can infer from the fact that the search spikes in figure cor- respond so well to national protest events that relatively auton- omous concern with police violence was behind the search table . negative binomial random effects models predicting homicide and other violent crime, (quarters and ) and (quarters and ). homicide other violent crime population . *** . *** . *** . *** (. ) (. ) (. ) (. ) police per , people . * . * . . (. ) (. ) (. ) (. ) killings by police . . . ** . ** (. ) (. ) (. ) (. ) percent african american . . . . (. ) (. ) (. ) (. ) white-black dissimilarity index . . . . (. ) (. ) (. ) (. ) percent latino . . . . (. ) (. ) (. ) (. ) percent bachelor’s degrees . * . * . . (. ) (. ) (. ) (. ) percent population – . * . ** . * . * (. ) (. ) (. ) (. ) percent young adults unemployed . . . . (. ) (. ) (. ) (. ) percent of dwellings owner occupied . . . . (. ) (. ) (. ) (. ) homes under water . . . . (. ) (. ) (. ) (. ) percent below poverty line . . . ** . *** (. ) (. ) (. ) (. ) google searches . * . ** (. ) (. ) observations akaike information criterion . . , . . . bayesian information criterion . . , . , . hausman chi-square . . note: standard errors in parentheses. *p < . . **p < . . ***p < . . see https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date= - - % - - &geo=us&q=crime,black% lives% matter, police% brutality. https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date= - - % - - &geo=us&q=crime,black% lives% matter,police% brutality https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date= - - % - - &geo=us&q=crime,black% lives% matter,police% brutality https://www.google.com/trends/explore?date= - - % - - &geo=us&q=crime,black% lives% matter,police% brutality gross and mann patterns. third, the uptick in homicide evident in our data and discussed by rosenfeld ( ) was a phenomenon, while the first two spikes in police violence–related searches in our time series occurred in . consistent with this point, we were able to obtain monthly homicide numbers for several of the cities in our study that saw increases in murder in (e.g., baltimore, chicago, st. louis, milwaukee). when we plotted these against the search data, we found that the police violence–related search spikes generally preceded the upticks in homicide (though one series did not “granger predict” the other.) in baltimore, for example, we found a rise in searches in april (corresponding with freddie gray’s death and civil unrest) and then the beginnings of a rise in murder in may (corresponding with the withdrawal of national guard troops that had been deployed.) along these same lines, a recent jour- nalistic analysis of national “assault deaths” in the united states from to suggests that the homicide rise took the form of a more substantial than normal spring and summer escalation (verbruggen ). discussion we think there are two takeaways from our regression mod- els. first, public concern about police violence, as measured by google search queries, is associated with elevated rates of homicide and other violent crime. the evidence for this asso- ciation is strongest in the data from – and weaker in the – data. second, though it is not the case in every model we ran, we find generally that there is more crime and more of a rise in crime in large cities characterized by racial segregation, lower levels of educational attainment, and poverty. concerning the predictiveness of the google search mea- sure, we would be the first to insist that it is not a standalone test of the ferguson effect hypothesis. to reemphasize a point we have been making throughout, there are competing ideas in popular discussion and in the emerging scholarly literature as to what the ferguson effect means. it is often seen to involve “de-policing.” but is this driven by heightened public scrutiny in a community? by angry crowds that form on street corners when police stop people? by police fear of being caught on video? by a slowdown in work activity intended to protest the erosion of public support? or perhaps the ferguson effect isn’t about de-policing but rather about citizen perceptions that affect people’s willingness to cooperate with the police? our findings speak only to the public concern aspect of the thesis. it is also the case, as we have noted, that measuring public concern about police violence with google searches is not unproblematic. beyond the points made previously, we would add here that ( ) it is not clear how exactly a rise in google searches for police violence–related topics translates into con- ventional social-science concepts like attitudinal change in a population, so it is uncertain how to interpret the substantive meaning of the incidence rate ratios we report—not least because we are measuring google searches for police violence– related phrases, not necessarily the number of individual search- ers; and ( ) given the possibility mentioned previously that for some of our search queries (like black lives matter) there could be a saturation effect, it is unclear whether the aggregate decline in search activity from to signals a real decline in public concern or simply that members of the public had by that time acquired enough information to form an opinion. more generally, as is true for all social science research, our empirical findings are to some extent dependent on the conceptual and methodological choices we have made. yet despite this complex of issues, we think our results have value. in the final analysis, google searches do seem to get at public concern about police violence, and meaning can be found in the fact that between and most clearly, crime rose more in cities where, by our (limited) measure, there was more public concern. this could well be because of police pullback or declining public cooperation. a related possibility, suggested to us by patrick sharkey, is that in the aftermath of police violence and then protests in cities like baltimore and st. louis—protests that were met with shows of force by local authorities—young people’s perceptions of the legitimacy of core social institutions changed. some who were on the fence about participating in criminal enterprises may have gotten the message that the wider society did not care about them and became more likely to take part in the life of the street. perhaps this led to a surge in involvement with street gangs. a spike in killings and nonfatal shootings (less so other crimes) could have then ensued as a product of intensified competition between and within gangs in the context of the opioid crisis flagged as potentially significant by rosenfeld. (this argument harks back to merton’s [ ] theory of anomie and crime; for a more contemporary discussion, see duneier .) another possibility is that our finding of an association between public concern over police violence and a rise in vio- lent crime is spurious. it is surely the case that in some cities, a qualification is in order here: oliver ( ) and others argue that crime, mass incarceration, and political mobilization in african american communities are linked in that the build-up of urban law enforcement resources in the s grew out of an earlier effort to contain urban riots and repress the black power movement. if reliable monthly crime data were available for more cities, we could have employed a different design for our study, one with many more panels. a benefit of such an approach would be the pos- sibility of controlling for generic time trends that might be affecting both our predictor and outcome variables. we sought to address this issue in a limited fashion in an alternative version of our models, using dummy variables to represent years. in these models, the effect sizes of our google search variables were slightly reduced, and the variables were no longer statistically significant. this might be interpreted as suggesting the presence of period effects. more fine-grained data and data stretching over a longer period of time would be required to assess this and other possible interpretations. against the saturation effect interpretation, we obtained similar results to those reported here when we reran our models excluding the query black lives matter. socius: sociological research for a dynamic world racism and racial exclusion are more deeply entrenched than in others. it would not be surprising to discover more people wor- ried about police violence in cities where racial exclusion is entrenched and more people quickly mobilizing around it in response to specific incidents—and also to discover that such cities are conducive to criminality in the sense that among the concrete manifestations of such exclusion are residential segre- gation by race, poverty, and reduced public investment in education, all of which are associated with crime. on this inter- pretation, the increase in crime that occurred in the spring and summer of would reflect not a demonization of the police but a boiling over of long-simmering racial tensions as some city residents—those not given to protesting—took out their frustrations on one another. a great deal more research will be required to identify the mechanisms underlying the associations we report if, in fact, those associations prove robust. our results also provide evidence that social disadvantage is the larger context in which violent crime grew between and and more slowly between and . since our measures of residential racial segregation, educa- tional attainment, and poverty did not change over the course of the time series, they cannot be responsible, in a statistical sense, for year to year increases or decreases in our outcome variables. but there is another way to think of them. it seems to us both reasonable and productive to character- ize cities—and within cities, neighborhoods—as varying not just in their rates of crime but also in their susceptibility to cycles of violent criminality. while social scientists have learned much in recent years about how neighborhood context matters for crime, disorder, and the reproduction of poverty (harding ; sampson ; sharkey ), we are also learning from ethnographic and network-based studies that there is an important endogenous component to urban violence: it occurs not simply because an individual perpetrator of vio- lence has been exposed to predisposing social conditions but often as part of a long, escalating chain of social interaction. gang wars may be the leading example of this, as the work of papachristos ( ) illustrates. gang homicides are frequently acts of retaliation for other homicides, such that, sociologically speaking, what we are really seeing are not individual killings but spatio-temporal clusters of linked violence. these dynam- ics can be understood through the lens of networks and culture but also in terms of the qualities of violence itself. if, as collins ( ) has argued, humans have a natural aversion to violence, and if, as luft ( ) has found in her work on the rwandan genocide, humans overcome this aversion the more they kill or are surrounded by killing, then we should expect that as vio- lence escalates it will bring more violence in its wake. the in an important but neglected paper on the crime drop that bears on the ferguson effect, winship ( ) argued that homicides fell in boston in the s in part because police officers and ministers trusted each other enough to begin working together to reduce com- munity tensions and ensure that initial incidents of conflict between young men did not turn into larger episodes of violence. point we wish to emphasize, in line with ethnographic work by bourgois ( ), contreras ( ), and other scholars oriented to political economy, is that there is an obvious exogenous aspect to this endogeneity: structurally based individual pro- pensities for violence aside, cycles of violent crime are more likely to get started in some communities than others. one way of interpreting our findings on racial segregation, educational attainment, and poverty is as suggesting that even in periods when crime is generally low, it is subject to more upward cyclical movement (of varying magnitude and dura- tion) where one sees socially isolated communities with blocked opportunities. in these settings, cycles of criminality may be triggered by any number of events or processes, from rapid shifts in economic conditions to product innovations in local markets for illicit goods to—potentially—declines in the legitimacy of police authority. if the ferguson effect proves to be a case of an upward cycle of this sort, then close study of it could reveal important features of urban social dynamics. appendix sample cities arlington atlanta aurora austin baltimore boston charlotte-mecklenburg chicago cincinnati cleveland columbus dallas denver el paso fort worth fresno jacksonville las vegas long beach los angeles louisville miami milwaukee nashville newark oklahoma city omaha orlando philadelphia pittsburgh raleigh sacramento salt lake city (continued) gross and mann acknowledgments for helpful comments, we thank stephen morgan, richard rosenfeld, gabriel rossman, patrick sharkey, christopher winship, and participants in seminars at columbia university and the sorbonne. chris bail offered useful suggestions on research design. for research assistance, we thank henry ackerman, susan fleurant, tim harris, paige hartnett, and paige shortsleeves. daanika gordon and emma shakeshaft helped with fact checking. funding the author(s) disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or 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in , f.b.i. finds.” new york times, september , p. a . winship, christopher. . “the end of a miracle? crime, faith, and partnership in boston in the s.” pp. – in long march ahead: the public influences of african american churches, edited by d. r. smith. durham: duke university press. zimring, franklin e. . the great american crime decline. new york: oxford university press. zimring, franklin e. . the city that became safe: new york’s lessons for urban crime and its control. new york: oxford university press. author biography neil gross is the charles a. dana professor of sociology at colby college. marcus mann is a phd candidate in sociology at duke university. antiracism: a neoliberal alternative to a left antiracism: a neoliberal alternative to a left adolph reed jr. # springer science+business media b.v., part of springer nature at a conference at the harvard law school, where he was a tenured full professor, i heard the late, esteemed legal theorist, derrick bell, declare on a panel that blacks had made no progress since . i was startled not least because bell’s own life, as well as the fact that harvard’s black law students’ organization put on the conference, so emphatically belied his claim. i have since come to understand that those who make such claims experience no sense of contradiction because the contention that nothing has changed is intended actually as an assertion that racism persists as the most consequential force impeding black americans’ aspirations, that no matter how successful or financially secure individual black people become, they remain similarly subject to victimization by racism. that assertion is not to be taken literally as an empirical claim, even though many advancing it seem earnestly convinced that it is; it is rhetorical. no sane or at all knowledge- able person can believe that black americans live under the same restricted and perilous conditions now as in . the claim therefore carries a silent preface: b(this incident/ phenomenon/pattern makes it seem as though) nothing has changed.^ it is more a jeremiad than an analysis and is usually advanced in response to some outrage. as i have pointed out elsewhere (henwood ), for the claim to have the desired rhetorical force, those making it must assume that things have changed because the charge is fundamentally a denunciation of objectionable conditions or incidents as atavistic and a call for others to regard them as such. attempting to mobilize outrage about some action or expression through associating it with discredited and vilified views or practices is a common gambit in hortatory political rhetoric, more or less effective for a rally or leaflet. but this antiracist politics is ineffective and even destructive when it takes the place of scholarly interpretation or strategic political analysis. new orleans provides a useful illustration of the limitations of contemporary antiracism as a politics. antiracist political critique failed abysmally after katrina to mobilize significant opposition to elimination of low-income public housing or to the ongoing destruction of public schools. that politics, which posits an abstract bblack community^ against an equally abstract bracism,^ could not provide persuasive responses to the blend of underclass ideology that dialect anthropol ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - - * adolph reed, jr. reedal@sas.upenn.edu department of political science, university of pennsylvania, market street, suite , philadelphia, pa , usa http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf mailto:reedal@sas.upenn.edu stigmatizes public housing as an incubator of a degraded population (reed a, b: – ). nevertheless, race-reductionist argument continues to dominate the political imagination of those who would challenge structures of inequality. it has remained, without critical reflection or strategic reassessment, the default stance of putatively insurgent or oppositional black politics in the city and was most recently on display in a controversy over removal of monuments erected in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries to celebrate the confederacy and white. in the spring of , the city, at the mayor’s initiative and with support of six of the seven council members, removed from public display four odious monuments to the treasonous confederate insurrection that had been a nasty affront to egalitarian values for more than a century (reed b). mayor mitch landrieu announced his intention to remove them after south carolina governor nikki haley took down the confederate battle flag from the statehouse grounds, where its presence had been the source of long-standing controversy, in the wake of dylan roof’s racially inspired murder of parishioners at a black charleston church. activists linked to black lives matter and the black youth project (byp ), a group organized through the center for the study of race, politics and culture at the university of chicago, created an ad hoc alliance, take ‘em down nola, to agitate for removal not only of the four monuments but of ball the public symbols – monuments, school names, and street signs dedicated to white supremacists^ (reed c; black youth projectx; bentley ). the city is certainly a better place for being rid of those monuments, and having removed them from public display could be a step toward finally defeating the lost cause/heritage ideology that remains too useful a tool of the right for making class power invisible in both the past and the present. but, while the group’s efforts contributed appreciably to pressing the issue and mobilizing some public support for removal, take ‘em down nola’s campaign also obscured class power, ironically in the same way as did the fin-de-siècle ruling class that erected the monuments. for take ‘em down nola and other antiracist activists, the monuments’ significance is allegorical; they are icons representing an abstract, ultimately ontological white supremacy that drives and reproduces racial inequality in the present as in the past. the monuments, that is, are props in the broader race-reductionist discourse that also analogizes contemporary inequality to jim crow or slavery. instructively, take ‘em down nola’s goal is not simply to remove every vestige of commemoration, no matter how obscure or trivial, of any historical figure associated with the confederate insurrection or slavery. despite their hyperbolic contention that the monuments inflict daily injury on and bpsychologically terrorize^ black new orleanians (smith ; take ‘em down nola), take ‘em down nola’s agitation for removal is the instrument of a more evanescent project. their goal, as poet and harvard graduate student clint smith described it in a new republic puff piece, is ban ongoing attempt to foster an honest reckoning with the past.^ as to what that the monuments were to the confederate insurrection’s commanding general, robert e. lee; the insurrectionist confederacy’s president, jefferson davis; rebel gen. p. g. t. beauregard, who had new orleans connections; and commemoration of the crescent city white league’s armed, explicitly racist revolt against the city’s reconstruction government; the white league, which was the terrorist face of the local democratic party, represented itself as bdefenders of a hereditary civilization and christianity menaced by a stupid africanization,^ and in the city added an inscription to the commemorative obelisk, erected in , that praised the insurrection in explicitly white supremacist terms. all the monuments were erected between (lee) and (beauregard), the precise period of white supremacist consolidation (reed, b). a. reed honest reckoning might look like or produce, neither he nor they have much concrete to say. bentirely erasing tributes to the confederacy from new orleans might never happen,^ smith allows, bbut the work of take ‘em down nola forces us to consider what it might say about us if we did – and what it says about the fact that we have not yet done so^ (smith ). that is, the group’s agitation is driven more by demanding that bracism^ be recognized as the source of inequality than by pursuing specific policy goals. this is a feature of contemporary antiracist discourse generally. antiracist activism and scholarship proceed from the view that statistical disparities in the distribution by race of goods and bads in the society in which blacks appear worse off categorically (e.g., less wealth, higher rates of unemployment, greater incidence of hypertensive and cardiovascular disease) amount to evidence that brace^ remains fundamentally determinative of black americans’ lives. as merlin chowkwanyun and i argue, however, disparity is an outcome, not an explanation, and deducing cause simplistically from outcome (e.g., treating racially disparate outcomes as ipso facto evidence of racially invidious causation) seems sufficient only if one has already stacked the interpretive deck in favor of a particular causal account (reed and chowkwanyun , – ). we also discuss a garbage in, garbage out effect in studies that rely on large-scale aggregate data analysis; gross categories like race may mask significant micro-level dynamics that could present more complex and nuanced understandings of causality. put another way, if you go out looking for racial effects in data sets that are organized by race as gross categories, you will be likely to find them, but that will not necessarily lead to sound interpretations of the factors that actually produce the inequalities. as likely as not that purblind approach can lead to missing bthe extent to which particular inequalities that appear statistically as ‘racial’ disparities are in fact embedded in multiple social relations^ (reed and chowkwanyun , – , – ). this issue is not a concern for antiracist politics because its fundamental goal is propagation of the view that inequalities or injustices suffered by black americans should be understood as resulting from generic white racism. its objective, that is, is rhetorical and ideological, not political and programmatic. antiracist discourse posits white supremacy/racism as a totalizing phenomenon, a force impervious to changing institutional circumstances—a primordial foundation of being, just as the white league contended in the last quarter of the nineteenth century. the thrust of the take ‘em down nola argument, for example, is that: ( ) the monuments were erected to celebrate white supremacist power, which was the foundation of slavery, lynching and brutalization of black new orleanians, disfranchisement, imposition of jim crow, and denial of blacks’ basic civil rights. ( ) the fact that they remain on display in the present underscores the continuity of white supremacy’s power. ( ) that continuity indicates that, as in the past, contemporary racial inequalities most meaningfully result from white supremacy, which therefore must be the primary target of struggles for social and racial justice. but adducing a causal dynamic that underlay a political conjuncture in the past to support a claim about causality in the present presumes that the same dynamics operated in the past and present. that is, the race-reductionist formulation advanced to validate the claim of white supremacy’s overarching power presumes what it needs to demonstrate. sociologist mara loveman follows rogers brubaker, pierre bourdieu, and others in arguing that this interpre- tive problem and the confusions that generate it can be addressed by babandoning ‘race’ as a category of analysis to gain analytical leverage to study ‘race’ as a category of practice^ (loveman , – ; brubaker and cooper ; bourdieu ). she embraces historian barbara j. fields’s assessment that battempts to explain ‘racial phenomena’ in terms of ‘race’ are no more than definitional statements^ and argues that brejection of ‘race’ as an antiracism: a neoliberal alternative to a left analytical concept facilitates analysis of the historical construction of ‘race’ as a practical category without reification, and thus provides a degree of analytical leverage that tends to be foreclosed when race is used analytically^ (loveman , – ; fields , ). in the current political context that interpretive pathology is pernicious politically because the claim of continuity demands ignoring historical specificities of both past and present that are crucially important for making adequate sense of either. the point of analogizing current conditions to slavery or earlier regimes of openly white supremacist hierarchy is to subordinate consideration of the discrete, complex mechanisms through which contemporary inequalities are reproduced in quotidian life to the meta-historical contention that generic white supremacy, or racism, most significantly explains disadvantages and injustices that black americans suffer today. but even in the nineteenth century, at the nadir of the defeat of reconstruction and imposition of disfranchisement and the jim crow order, black politics was not adequately reducible to a unitary struggle against white supremacy; differences of perspective, agendas, and programs pertained among blacks and determined strategic directions, including pursuit of allies (stein ). in addressing another racially charged issue—how we should regard rachel dolezal’s embrace of a transracial identity in relation to caitlyn jenner’s embrace of a transgender one— historian susan stryker neatly describes the appeal and limitations of argument by analogy: analogy is a weak form of analysis, in which a better-known case is compared to one that is lesser known, and thereby offered as a model for understanding something that is not yet well understood…analogy’s rhetorical strength is to be found precisely in its ability to condense complicated forms of similarity into singularly powerful linguistic gestures and acts of speech, while its analytical weakness lies precisely in the non- identity of the things being compared (stryker ). even if we were to accept bracism^ as a label summarizing the various factors involved, noting those apparent similarities does not tell us how inequalities are reproduced today and has nothing to say practically about how to combat them. and it is important to interrogate why it is paramount within the antiracist framework that we understand the present through analogy to the past. in the antiracist political project white supremacy/racism is—like bterrorism^—an amor- phous, ideological abstraction whose specific content exists largely in the eyes of the beholder. therefore, like antiterrorism, antiracism’s targets can be porous and entirely arbitrary; this means that, also like antiterrorism, the struggle can never be won. clint smith’s romantic assessment of take ‘em down nola’s contribution indicates as much and makes clear, as does everything that ta-nehisi coates has ever written (e.g., coates , a, b, ), that winning anything concrete is not the point. the bpolitics^ that follows from this view centers on pursuit of recognition and representation on groupist terms—both as symbolic depiction in the public realm and as claims to articulate the interests, perspectives, or bvoices^ of a generic black constituency or some subset thereof, e.g., byouth^ or bgrassroots.^ it is not interested in broadly egalitarian redistribution. notwithstanding its performative evocations of the s black power populist bmilitancy,^ this antiracist politics is neither leftist in itself nor particularly compatible with a left politics as conventionally understood. at this political juncture, it is, like bourgeois feminism and other groupist tendencies, an oppositional epicycle within hegemonic neoliber- alism, one might say a component of neoliberalism’s critical self-consciousness; it is thus in fact fundamentally anti-leftist. black political elites’ attacks on the bernie sanders a. reed presidential nomination campaign’s call for decommodified public higher education as frivo- lous, irresponsible, or even un-american underscores how deeply embedded this politics is within neoliberalism (richardson ; sheinin ; johnson ). during the campaign, antiracist activists and commentators routinely attacked sanders for being inattentive to black concerns, which they insisted are separate from political economy and capitalist class dynamics and reduced to pro forma rehearsal of slogans like bblack lives matter^ and denunciation of an abstract bsystemic racism.^ after the election, antiracist hostility toward efforts to generate broadly working class-based, social-democratic alternatives to democratic neoliberalism, if anything, intensified. coates ( ), for example, denounces as white supremacist any suggestions that working-class whites’ votes for trump stem from anything other than commitment to white supremacy. social scientists and other public opinion experts have provided steady grist for antiracist and other identitiarian ideologues’ incessant rehearsal of the trope of a hopelessly backward, racist, sexist, homophobic, and xenophobic white working class as the main danger to progress in the society. in this insistence, they join clintonoid neoliberal democrats of all races, genders, and sexual orientations who reject downwardly redistributive politics for more openly class-based reasons. thus, as mark dudzic points out in a superb essay originally written before the election: joan walsh, among many others, opined that sanders’ substantial support among white workers (who overwhelmingly supported clinton in ) is because bshe has been damaged by her association with the first black president.^ and paul krugman, that eternal guardian of the left gate of the ruling class, pontificated that the sanders campaign failed to understand the importance of bhorizontal inequality^ between groups (dudzic ). dudzic’s assessment of liberals’ reaction to the social-democratic enthusiasm sanders sparked applies equally to antiracist activists and commentators: the sanders campaign was so disorienting to both conservatives and liberals because it did not embrace these naturalized categories [racism and sexism] but, instead, revealed them as social relationships established by real human beings and, thus, open to change through the application of political and economic policies. after stumbling a bit in the early months around how to give voice to the outrages of police violence and mass incarceration, it laid out a working class politics of hope that was both visionary and practical. in the process, it helped lay bare the actual mechanisms of capitalism that drive inequality. and it exposed the fault lines created by decades of neoliberalism that are impeding real change in the labor, racial justice and other social movements (dudzic ). although its attraction to black power bmilitancy^ suggests insurgent racial populism, the current race-reductionist politics centers on exposé and demands for recognition, not egalitar- ian redistribution. its project is elimination of disparities within a regime of intensifying economic inequality, which antiracism takes as given. as warren et al. put it: antiracists…remain attuned to a vision of justice defined by ensuring equal access to hierarchically distributed social goods such as family wealth (and redressing historical impediments to the accumulation of wealth rooted in discrimination). indeed in making frequent recourse to the adjective bnarrow^ in chastising a politics that roots inequality antiracism: a neoliberal alternative to a left in economic exploitation, antiracists and identitarians have positioned the idea of racial justice as a critique of, rather than an expected consequence of, socialism. it is largely for this reason that, as walter benn michaels has noted…‘the commitment to identity politics has been more an expression of…enthusiasm for the free market than a form of resistance to it (warren et al. .). even when its proponents believe themselves to be radicals, this antiracist politics is a professional-managerial class politics. its adherents are not concerned with trying to generate the large, broad political base needed to pursue a transformative agenda because they are committed fundamentally to pursuit of racial parity within neoliberalism, not social transfor- mation. in fact, antiracist activists’ and pundits’ insistence during the election campaign that bernie sanders did not address black concerns made that point very clearly because every nearly item on the sanders campaign’s policy agenda—from the robin hood tax on billion- aires to free public higher education to the $ /h minimum wage, a single-payer health care system, etc. (sanders for president)—would disproportionately benefit black and hispanic populations that are disproportionately working class. most of all, the gains that black americans have won have been the product of alliances condensed around broad egalitarian agendas. historian touré f. reed notes: emancipation and even reconstruction were produced by a convergence of interests among disparate constituencies—african americans, abolitionists, business, small free- holders, and northern laborers— united under the banner of free labor. the civil rights movement was the product of a consensus created by the new deal that presumed the appropriateness of government intervention in private affairs for the public good, the broad repudiation of scientific racism following world war ii, and the political vulner- abilities jim crow created for the united states during the cold war. to be sure, reconstruction, the new deal, the war on poverty, and even the civil rights movement failed to redress all of the challenges confronting blacks. but the limitations of each of these movements reflected political constraints imposed on them, in large part, by capital (reed ). as a. philip randolph, bayard rustin, martin luther king, jr., and two generations of labor-oriented black activists—including the entire spectrum of radical to conservative black civic elites and trade union leaders collected in historian rayford logan’s volume, what the negro wants—understood, first, the exploitation and oppression of black americans was linked to more general dynamics of exploitation and oppression and, second, the only way to attain and especially to secure benefits for black americans is to win them for everyone. that lesson has been lost for many antiracist activists and commentators enamored with contem- porary race reductionism; instead, they channel the performative militance associated with black power politics as the insurgent, racially authentic tendency in the late s and s. yet black power politics consolidated as a less potentially transformative, class-skewed alternative to the black-labor-left, social-democratic approach advocated by rustin, randolph, and others (a. philip randolph institute ; randolph a, b; rustin , ; reed , a, a; le blanc and yates ; logan ). black power politics was fundamentally a petition politics, albeit a loud and flamboyant one. for all their overheated rhetoric about self-determination, including even in some cases what now might be called cosplay fantasies of armed struggle, black powerites generally depended on ruling class largess for realization of their programmatic objectives. that was their alternative to trying a. reed to form broad, popular coalitions and to navigate the compromises and constraints that sort of politics requires. as a practical politics, black power was fundamentally directed toward government institutions, private or philanthropic funding sources, and other agencies capable of conferring or ratifying claims to represent a generic bblack community^ (some referred to the style at the time as bmilitant begging^; i suppose today it could be considered an institutional species of aggressive panhandling.) contemporaneous critics like harold cruse ( , – ) and robert l. allen ( ) pointed out the black power program’s class character, and rustin presciently suggested that its most likely outcome would be bcreation of a new black establishment^ ( , ) (emphasis in original). black power, at least in the ethnic pluralist form in which it congealed as bblack politics,^ was at bottom a bookerite politics of elite-brokerage, as is the essence of ethnic pluralism. the core bookerite project, under the rubric of racial uplift or advancement, has always been— since washington and the stratum of black racial advocates that emerged from the context of disfranchisement at the turn of the twentieth century—bsubstitution of black professionals, managers, and intellectuals for their white counterparts within those institutions charged with administering to the needs of black populations.^ the political goal, that is, was establishment of bmanagerial authority of the nation’s negro problem^ within whatever larger political and economic order prevailed (warren , ). warren’s critique, which he elaborated further in what was african american literature ( ), sheds light on contemporary antiracists’ singular commitment to the reductionist view that race/racism is the foundation and source of all injustice and inequality affecting black americans. it also thus helps to make sense of the affective power that explaining current inequalities through analogy to slavery or jim crow has in antiracist discourse. antiracist politics is a class politics; it is rooted in the social position and worldview, and material interests of the stratum of race relations engineers and administrators who operate in democratic party politics and as government functionaries, the punditry and commentariat, education administration and the professoriate, corporate, social service and nonprofit sectors, and the multibillion-dollar diversity industry. that stratum comes together around a common- sense commitment to the centrality of race—and other categories of ascriptive identity—as the appropriate discursive framework through which to articulate norms of justice and injustice and through which to formulate remedial responses. it has grown and become deeply embedded institutionally throughout the society as an entailment of the victories of the s. as the society moves farther away from the regime of subordination and exclusion on explicitly racial terms to which race-reductionist explanations were an immediately plau- sible response, race has become less potent as the dominant metaphor, or blanket shorthand, through which class hierarchy is lived. and as black and white elites increasingly go through the same schools, live in the same neighborhoods, operate as peers in integrated workplaces, share and interact in the same social spaces and consumption practices and preferences, they increasingly share another common sense not only about frameworks of public policy but also about the proper order of things in general. those quotidian realities put pressure on the reductionist premise that racial subordination remains the dominant ideological or material framework generating and sustaining systemi- cally reproduced inequalities and class power. this tension underlies a source the appeal of ontological views of racism as an animate force that transcends time and context. because it is an evanescent evil that is disconnected from specific human purposes and patterns of social relations, racism, again like bterrorism,^ can exist anywhere at any time under any manifest conditions and is a cause that needs no causes or explanation. that is why statistical antiracism: a neoliberal alternative to a left demonstration of apparent racial disparities seems within antiracist discourse to be self- sufficient evidence of the persistence of racism’s paramount impact on black americans, despite the fact that findings of disparity: ( ) are not surprising considering how entrenched inequalities work; ( ) do not tell us much, if anything, about the proximate sources of the disparities; and ( ) do not point to remedial responses, although those retailing the findings often present them as though they do. as chowkwanyun and i indicate, moreover, relentless commitment to finding disparities and insistence that manifest inequalities be understood in those terms despite those interpretive failings suggests the presence of other ideological factors: [disparitarian discourse’s] commitment to a fundamentally essentialist and ahistorical race-first view is betrayed in the constantly expanding panoply of neologisms – binstitutional racism,^ bsystemic racism,^ bstructural racism,^ bcolourblind racism,^ post-racial racism,^ etc. – intended to graft more complex social dynamics onto a simplistic and frequently psychologistic racism/antiracism political ontology. indeed, these efforts bring to mind [thomas] kuhn’s account of attempts to accommodate mounting anomalies to salvage an interpretive paradigm in danger of crumbling under a crisis of authority. and in this circumstance as well the salvage effort is driven by powerful material and ideological imperatives (reed and chowkwanyun , ). that ontological view of racism is what enabled bell’s insistence that nothing has changed for black americans since without having to confront apparently disconfirming evidence of his own biography and the context of his declaration. it also underlies the preference for invoking historical analogies in lieu of argument. the point of those analogies is not to explain the mechanisms through which contemporary inequalities are reproduced. it is to preserve the interpretive framework that identifies racism as the definitive source of those inequalities. antiracism’s class character helps to understand why its adherents are so intensely com- mitted to it even though it is so deeply flawed analytically and has generated so little popular traction politically. one layer of its appeal derives simply from habit buttressed with a simulacrum of familiarity engendered by the naïve conceptions of black political history that prompted willie legette’s deathless observation that bthe only thing that hasn’t changed about black politics since is how we think about it^ (warren et al. ). people think about black politics as a unitary, transhistorical bfreedom movement^ or bliberation struggle^ because that is how scholarly and popular discussion of black americans’ political activity has been framed almost universally since the academic study of black politics and political thought took shape during the s and s, and especially after the institutionalization of black studies as a field of study in the academic mainstream through the s to s. the guild interest in carving out and protecting the boundaries of a field of study and interpretive authority over its subject matter converges with the broader class interest in maintaining managerial and interpretive authority in the political economy of race relations (reed ). crucial to making sense of the current political moment and how to navigate the real perils that face us after november is recognition that, no matter how it may have been aligned in the past, antiracist politics now is fundamentally antagonistic to a left politics of broadly egalitarian social transformation. key elements of the black professional-managerial strata have been embedded in and are agents and minions of what we now call neoliberalism—as public functionaries, contractors, and aspirants—since its emergence in the s and s. in the s and s, underclass ideology rationalized claims to a special tutelary role for the black professional-managerial class in relation to a rank-and-file black population that that a. reed politics rendered invisible as postal workers, teachers, truck drivers, carpenters, clerks, ware- house workers, electricians or line workers, nurses, cable technicians, etc. or members of a constantly expanding industrial reserve army and represented as an undifferentiated mass to be ventriloquized and buplifted.^ underclass ideology came with a remedy of inculcating bpersonal responsibility,^ which conveniently permits public officials to deflect concerns with retreat from social service provision and other social wage policies in an era increasingly defined by regressive transfer. neoliberal privatization also has produced greatly expanded commercial and career opportunities for black (and latino, female, etc.) entrepreneurs under the rubric of community bempowerment,^ brole modeling,^ or bsocial entrepreneurialism^ in a vast third sector economy driven by a nonprofit sector likely as not committed to privatizing public goods in the name of localist authenticity and doing well by doing good, as well as the steadily growing diversity industry. these developments legitimize an ideal of social justice shriveled to little more than enhancement of opportunity for individual upward mobility— within the strictures of neoliberal accumulation by dispossession. black professional-managerial class embeddedness has become increasingly solidified with the clinton/obama/emanuel wing of the democratic party’s aggressive commitment to a left- neoliberalism centered on advancement of wall street and silicon valley economic interests and strong support for social justice defined in identity group terms. but that is necessarily a notion of social justice and equality that is disconnected from political economy and the capitalist class dynamics that generate the most profound inequalities in the society. and militant opposition to conventional left norms of justice that center on economic equality unites the clintonite neoliberal democrats and race-reductionist antiracists. in this regard, the most telling moments of the democratic presidential nomination campaign included when the random, self-selected black lives matter activists attacked sanders for supposedly not declaring his opposition to racism in a way that suited their tastes and when former civil rights movement icon rep. john lewis (d-ga) and other prominent black functionaries denounced sanders’s calls for greatly expanding social wage policy and shifting national priorities toward addressing the needs of working people as irresponsible. perhaps most telling of all, though, was when and most of all how hillary clinton blithely and disingenuously blew off sanders’s concerns with economic injustice. on the eve of the nevada primary, she declared to a rally of her supporters bnot everything is about an economic theory, right? if we broke up the big banks tomorrow – and i will, if they deserve it, if they pose a systemic risk, i will – would that end racism? would that end sexism? would that end discrimination against the lgbt community? would that make people feel more welcoming to immigrants overnight? would that solve our problem with voting rights, and republicans who are trying to strip them away from people of color, the elderly, the young?^ (weigel ). since the election, that alliance against class politics has become even more aggressive in red-baiting sanders and the left via a new sort of race-baiting—attacking socialism, and advocates of socialism or social-democratic politics, as racist or white supremacist. it has closed ranks around condemnation of working-class whites who voted for trump as loathsome and irredeemable racists with whom political solidarity is indefensible and in the process reducing bworking class^ to a white racial category and synonym for backwardness and bigotry. antiracists and neoliberal democrats unite in high moral dudgeon to denounce suggestions that more than racism operated to generate the trump vote and that some working people, particularly those whom les leopold describes as obama/sanders/trump voters—and not necessarily only white ones—felt betrayed by both parties (leopold ; lopez ; parenti ; edwards-levy ; shepard ; skelley ; cohn ). the practical antiracism: a neoliberal alternative to a left upshot of that moral stance is that there can be no political alternative outside neoliberalism. that is why it is important, as we look toward the daunting prospect of building a movement capable of changing the terms of debate in american politics to center the interests and concerns of working people—of all races, genders, sexual orientations, and whatever immi- gration status—who are the vast majority of the country, that we recognize that race- reductionist politics is the left wing of neoliberalism and nothing more. it is openly antago- nistic to the idea of a solidaristic left. it is more important than ever to acknowledge that reality and act accordingly. references a. philip randolph institute. . a bfreedom budget^ for all americans: budgeting our 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literature? cambridge & london: harvard university press. warren, kenneth. . so black and blue: ralph ellison and the occasion of criticism. chicago & london: university of chicago press. weigel, david. . bclinton in nevada: ‘not everything is about an economic theory.’^ washington post. february at https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/ / / /clinton-in-nevada-not- everything-is-about-an-economic-theory/?utm_term=.a bfd a . antiracism: a neoliberal alternative to a left https://www.commondreams.org/views/ / / /monumental-rubbish-statues-torn-down-what-next-new-orleans https://www.commondreams.org/views/ / / /monumental-rubbish-statues-torn-down-what-next-new-orleans http://thelensnola.org/ / / /dont-be-duped-take-em-down-nola-falls-short-of-a-truly-radical-movement/ http://thelensnola.org/ / / /dont-be-duped-take-em-down-nola-falls-short-of-a-truly-radical-movement/ https://www.jacobinmag.com/ / /bernie-sanders-black-lives-matter-civil-rights-movement/ https://www.jacobinmag.com/ / /bernie-sanders-black-lives-matter-civil-rights-movement/ http://thehill.com.blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/ -clyburn-sanderss-plan-would-kill-black-colleges http://thehill.com.blogs/ballot-box/presidential-races/ -clyburn-sanderss-plan-would-kill-black-colleges https://berniesanders.com/issues/ http://www.politico.com/story/ / / /trump-obama-voters-poll- http://politics.blog.ajc.com/ / / /john-lewis-on-bernie-sanders-nothing-free-in-america/ http://politics.blog.ajc.com/ / / /john-lewis-on-bernie-sanders-nothing-free-in-america/ http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/just-how-many-obama- -trump- -voters-were-there/ http://www.centerforpolitics.org/crystalball/articles/just-how-many-obama- -trump- -voters-were-there/ https://newrepublic.com/article/ /young-black-activists-targeting-new-orleanss-confederate-monuments https://newrepublic.com/article/ /young-black-activists-targeting-new-orleanss-confederate-monuments http://blog.historians.org/ / /caitlyn-jenner-and-rachel-dolezal-identification-embodiment-bodily-transformation/ http://blog.historians.org/ / /caitlyn-jenner-and-rachel-dolezal-identification-embodiment-bodily-transformation/ http://nonsite.org/editorial/on-the-ends-of-black-politics http://nonsite.org/editorial/on-the-ends-of-black-politics https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/ / / /clinton-in-nevada-not-everything-is-about-an-economic-theory/?utm_term=.a bfd a https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/post-politics/wp/ / / /clinton-in-nevada-not-everything-is-about-an-economic-theory/?utm_term=.a bfd a 	antiracism: a neoliberal alternative to a left 	references safety, dignity, and the quest for a democratic campus culture copyright ©, sigal ben-porath ce document est protégé par la loi sur le droit d’auteur. l’utilisation des services d’Érudit (y compris la reproduction) est assujettie à sa politique d’utilisation que vous pouvez consulter en ligne. 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   safety,  dignity  and  the  quest  for  a   democratic  campus  culture   sigal ben-porath university of pennsylvania in his excellent paper, callan ( ) differentiates intellectual safety, which fosters smugness, indifference and lack of effort, from dignity safety, which is needed for participation, learning and engagement. he suggests that college classrooms that reject the first and espouse the second would be ones that focus on “cultivating open-mindedness in a context of disagreement and fostering the civility that would secure dignity safety for all” (p. ). this is an important goal, and callan makes here a significant contribution to the current discussion—both scholarly and public—on free speech, academic freedom and dignity safety. in what follows, i ( ) expand on the suggestion that dignity safety is a threshold condition, contextualizing its role in providing access and on its place in the continuum of safety requirements, ( ) consider the overlaps between dignity safety and intellectual safety, and subsequently reject nobility as an appropriate basis for creating a democratic atmosphere, and ( ) suggest a democratic alternative to nobility and (callan’s version of) civility for the advancement of a democratic campus culture. ( ) safety as access callan makes the following note on dignity safety: the value at stake here is not something to be maximized; it is rather a threshold condition that will ordinarily be taken for granted when people are secure in the knowledge that others can be relied on to treat them as equals, even when disagreement or conflict arises. (p. ) callan does not expound on the role of dignity safety as a threshold condition, and i suggest that dignity (and dignity safety) as a threshold condition to participation should be seen as an aspect of the overall debate regarding the expansion of access to higher education. what is a threshold condition for intellectual engagement in an institutional setting? access is the basic condition an institution needs to satisfy in order to create an environment where open exchange is encouraged. individuals can face many types of hurdles on their way to full access. first, to access an institutional context such as a college classroom, a student needs to be allowed in. denial of access was common among higher education institutions for members of many groups, such as women and various minority groups in the past, and is still limited for undocumented students. beyond formal permission to attend, a prospective student needs to have the required credentials too—a high school philosophical inquiry in education diploma, appropriate sat scores and the like. members of many groups see their access as limited by structural hurdles to achieving these requirements. the debate on affirmative action and class- or race- conscious admissions policies is tied to the efforts to overcome these structural barriers, and it parallels the current debate in its search for conditions that allow equality for all. finally, once a student arrives on campus, having been permitted to apply as a member of her group (women, people of color, non- citizens, etc.) and found to be eligible by her credentials, one last hurdle (or set of hurdles) remains. the threshold for full participation for students in a given classroom is constituted of less tangible but no less real requirements to fit in with the norms and expectations of an academic classroom generally, and of the particular classroom in which they are seated. dignity safety is one such norm, which should be key to all classrooms, as its absence limits the substantive access of some members of the community. without dignity safety, as callan shows, students fear humiliation, ridicule and rejection and are therefore partially or wholly barred from taking full advantage of their learning opportunities. but it is hard to fully understand the impact of limited dignity safety—or, in other words, the impact that an unsafe classroom context would have on those who experience it as such—without recognizing that this is the last in a series of hurdles that members of some groups face on the road to the college classroom. dignity safety in this sense is an aspect of access. limiting the access of members of a group merely because of their gender, racial or other identity traits constitutes an unjustified harm to them, and also impoverishes the academic environment for all. the hurdles and barriers that are unequally distributed across different social, racial and other groups in society must be recognized if we are to properly interpret the demand for dignity safety. for many, the road to the classroom was longer and fraught with difficulties that others never faced. for them to then regularly have to justify their presence, their eligibility and their capacity to contribute is an insult added to injury. in addition to being another one in a set of barriers to access, dignity safety is also an aspect of the overall safety considerations that higher education institutions, and especially some of their students, grapple with. i agree with callan that stereotype threat offers a possible lens into these less concrete but no less significant aspects of access. while the literature and interventions around stereotype threat are directed toward performance rather than dignity, they are informative in regards to the emotional and social barriers created by an atmosphere that is not dignity safe. i suggest though that the focus on stereotypes and their related threats and harms is a limited lens through which to look at the kind of limitations posed before members of stereotyped identity groups. terms like “threat” and “harm” as well as “safety” are used in much of this debate as metaphors, or at most as pertaining to hurdles to academic pursuits. but for members of stereotyped groups— sexual minorities, racial minorities, religious minorities, women—these terms are all but metaphors. the attacks on their dignity safety in the classroom are but one aspect of the ongoing harms that they face: intellectual, physical, social and sexual harms or threats, all lobbed at them as they try to make their way into the academic context from which their ancestors or predecessors were barred. imagine jasmine, a black student living in a dorm that carries the name of a slaveholder. she is experiencing an ongoing challenge to her dignity safety, a challenge to her sense of belonging in the institute where she is pursuing her education. this is part of her overall experience as a member of the academic community. she witnesses in person or online the physical assaults on members of her race, and shares their experience of facing an ongoing sense of physical vulnerability in certain social contexts. as a woman on campus, she is aware of being the potential subject of sexual harassment, sigal ben-porath threats and violence. the toll of this ongoing demand to resist and respond to threats is heavy, but often remains unspoken and thus unintelligible to those not experiencing it. the resilience required for sustaining one’s commitment to intellectual pursuits through this effort often goes unrecognized. the stereotype threat that jasmine faces in the classroom, expressed in the assumptions that some of her peers or professors would have that she is less adequate, less prepared, or has less to contribute than others in the room, is one on a long list of threats she has to overcome every day. the demand for dignity safety in the classroom is better understood in light of this compound context of threats and harms. for jasmine to demand that she is recognized as an intellectual equal in the classroom, and that she is not humiliated or dismissed when voicing her ideas, is part of an effort to establish an overall sense of safety in a social context that is often unsafe in more ways than one for members of some groups, which together constitute the majority of members on campuses and in society. the affirmation of dignity safety as a threshold condition for access should thus be understood not only as part of the psychological effort to reduce stereotype threat or the overall liberal effort to allow all members the necessary conditions to participate in shared intellectual pursuits; it should also be understood as part of the struggle against the marginalization of, and assault against, members of various groups in society, and in this light it should be seen as a way of promoting various forms of safety which are necessary for extending the concept and reality of human dignity to all members of the community. ( ) dignity versus nobility callan suggests that education “must often take on an agonistic spirit as settled beliefs and values are subject to critique that some students will find distressing or exhilarating, or both at the same time” (p. ). challenging intellectual safety, or the attachment to one’s unquestioned beliefs, requires maintaining the conditions where every student’s dignity is affirmed while many students’ intellectual boundaries and foundations are contested. this vision of education has long informed the kind of intellectual exploration that philosophers espouse. it brings to mind socrates’ gadfly, his suggestion that the role of philosophers—and of intellectually honest teachers—is to sting, to disturb, to knock their students off their path. the best education questions taken-for-granted habits of mind, callan suggests in light of this long liberal tradition. it awakens, enlightens, forces us to reconsider our assumptions and the foundations of our world view. thus callan’s rejection of demands for intellectual safety on the grounds that it limits the desirable exchange of ideas in the classroom parallels the traditional notion of academic freedom: the protection of openness and honesty even in the face of the potential rattling of safe, accepted assumptions. but the neat distinction between the acceptance of dignity safety and the rejection of intellectual safety, while valid on paper and in some teaching contexts, is not always possible in the reality of the campus. specifically, realizing a culture of equal dignity requires a stronger opposition than callan is willing to acknowledge between the culture of nobility and the democratic context that diverse institutions of learning are struggling to produce. callan suggests that being disabused of a sense of superiority need not be humiliating, and does not need to produce a sense of inferiority (p. ). but the geometric vision of equality here is no more than an abstract notion, dismissed by those whose sense of superiority as members of self-appointed upper class groups sustains their self-worth and therefore philosophical inquiry in education their dignity. understanding themselves as belonging to a group that is either objectively better— stronger, smarter, more deserving—or at least one that merits others’ deference because of long- standing and well-grounded traditions constitutes a key aspect of their identity. therefore, giving up that aspect as a result of encountering a feminist campus culture, the demands of black lives matter activists and supporters, and the like, can truthfully be described by some of them as causing dignity harm. consider joe, a traditionally raised young man, who views his dignity as intimately tied with and expressed by his physical and intellectual superiority over women, his sexual “conquests,” or his sense of his significance as a chivalrous protector of women. this young man does not see himself as a throwback relic of a lost era, but rather perceives his view on the gendered division of space and roles as stemming from a commitment to religious, cultural and social values. perhaps all of these are more sensed than articulated in his mind—he was raised to be a good man, and he is committed to being this particular type of good man. joe’s confidence in his capacities, along with his skills and upbringing, win him a spot in a selective college. there he encounters to his utter surprise the demand to abandon his vision of himself as a good man, of the relational demands it puts on him and the ethical expectations he worked hard to fulfil. these are to be replaced by a view of women as his equals, completed by a rejection of his previous worldview as antiquated and offensive. clearly, shaking joe’s views is acceptable, and in a sense required by both principles callan endorses. his female classmates’ dignity safety—or true access—would be harmed if he protests their presence in the classroom, or insists on questioning their intellectual abilities. his education will additionally express the laziness and indifference termed “intellectual safety” if his views are left unchallenged. but is there any price being paid for challenging his views? at least in a small way, requiring joe to abandon his views as offensive to women actually constitutes a breach of both his intellectual safety and his dignity safety, as he is expected to put aside a part of himself, a dimension of his core values, in order to enter the classroom. this type of dignity harm, while based in disabusing people of mistaken notions of superiority, is hard to distinguish (at least psychologically) from the dignity harms caused by racism, sexism, and other forms of morally reprehensible and ungrounded superiority claims. “of course,” callan tells us, “disparities of power and wealth still routinely mean that some get away with treating others as if they were servile. but for people who exercise that power, those of us who care about human dignity reserve ... contempt” (p. ). however, contempt was not due to those whose nobility meant that they were allowed to treat others as servile. in fact, one of the casual benefits of nobility was the blameless permit to give orders, to present oneself as superior, to exploit. the rejection of joe’s views at least partially constitutes an environment of intellectual safety, where ideas are rejected for the sake of a more accepting atmosphere, because clearly they are challenged more readily than the views of those who come to campus with a clear intellectual and social commitment to gender equality. this of course is the line of argument espoused regularly by conservative thinkers who challenge liberals to accept—or at least continue hearing and debating—their positions. it is also the line of argument famously suggested by the former president of harvard when he publicly considered—for the sake of intellectual exploration, as he tried to clarify—whether women’s brains, and perhaps also social upbringing, make them less fitting to pursue math and science at the highest levels. he saw the uproar that resulted from this intellectual exploration as an expression of intellectual safety, of laziness of thought in the face of his daring hypothesis, and he also may have seen it as sigal ben-porath hampering the dignity safety of those who would like to explore ideas like his but who are shut down in campus classrooms as a result of their views. for his critics, this was a case of a higher education leader questioning the capacities of many of his constituents, and in this way limiting their full access to the classroom (as students and teachers) by exploring ideas that characterized western thought for a very long time. it is harder to address the claim that ensuring dignity safety for joe’s female peers constitutes not only a challenge to joe’s intellectual safety—which is a good step—but also a challenge to his dignity safety, which is to be rejected, if we continue to hold on as callan does to the analogy between the dignity of nobility and the dignity associated with mass democracy. a main aspect of nobility status was the opportunity to take advantage of lower-class others, and of women, as an expression of one’s higher standing. this would include taking advantage of their manual labor, demanding sexual favors of them, as well as benefiting from other established rights of nobility. it is unclear how those benefits translate into a mass democratic context, and if they do not, as i assume, it is unclear that the status that remains is similar enough to the original one in ways that make it useful for a discussion about college campuses in a democratic environment. moreover, the dignity harms to women or members of racial minorities that result from the cumulative acts of subtle humiliation (or “microagressions”) are often the result of unplanned and unintended acts of those who hold a clear and untroubled sense of superiority. overcoming those, as callan recognizes, is necessary for establishing the threshold condition of dignity safety. but to achieve it, disabusing more privileged members of the community of their unearned sense of superiority would be a painful but unavoidable step. in the next and final section i consider an alternative to extending the rights of nobility to all and instituting civility as a classroom norm as a way to ensure dignity safety. ( ) civility versus equality civility represents for callan an effort to reconcile the tensions between academic freedom and dignity safety. i suggest that civility falls short of this goal, essentially because the version of it that callan promotes is based on the extension of nobility, whereas what is needed to reconcile the challenges common to contemporary college classrooms and campuses are solutions rooted in democratic, egalitarian principles. the demands of civility parallel the current discussion on political correctness. opponents of “pc culture” claim that overly sensitive millennials are leading a ridiculous effort to cleanse the language, and corresponding social norms and culture, of any reference to differences among social groups. in other words, they view pc as a way to protect the indifference and laziness that characterize intellectual safety, or as expressing a refusal to take intellectual risks and consider different opinions, views and positions. proponents see pc as a way to create a space where all are appreciated, feel welcomed, and enjoy an environment in which their contributions and questions are appreciated rather than ridiculed. in other words, they see (certain forms of) political correctness as a way to ensure dignity safety for all. the version of civility espoused by callan fails to respond to this tension and therefore to reconcile current challenges on campus because is too closely tied to the demands of nobility. it arises from the expectation that people behave appropriately, according to social norms that were often established philosophical inquiry in education when the social composition of the institution or the citizenry was vastly different than it is today: “it parallels the honorable comportment by means of which nobles could evince due respect for their peers within an aristocratic society” (p. ). civil candor and charitable interpretation do not sufficiently recognize the continuum of access and safety i discussed. it therefore forbids outright mocking, racist or misogynistic declarations and physical harm, but it still might not affect the use of “muted and surreptitious attitudes of disdain” (p. ). these serve as the basic currency of dignity harms, and as an effective and persistent mechanism of shutting members of marginalized groups out of the conversation, and out of the loci of power. the widespread sense of members of groups newer to the institution—women, first generation students, members of many minority groups—that they do not belong, that they are imposters, is at least in part a result of messages expressed through these muted responses to their contributions, or even to their presence. moreover, the civility expectation of the college classroom, if and where it is implemented, prioritizes a certain decorum, as callan seems to suggest, and restricts expressions of emotions like anger, frustration and disaffection. in that it leaves limited tools in the hands of those who continue to feel underserved by the now-civil institutions they were finally allowed to join. “the virtue [of civility] shines particularly bright in circumstances of conflict or disagreement, when anger or frustration inclines us to hostility and recrimination. civility constrains speech, as any virtue does” (p. ). the form of respect expected by callan’s civility seems to allow only “appropriate” or “noble” forms of expression to count as civil, whereas those traditionally ascribed to women and to “lesser” cultures— excitement, anger, tears—continue to be rejected and censored. the master’s tools, as audre lorde noted, will never dismantle the master’s house. the universalization of the benefits of nobility, which callan endorses from waldron’s work, and the extension of the benefits of nobility to all who were its subjects—women, persons with disabilities, ethnic, racial and sexual minorities—is unlikely to ensure dignity safety, and other crucial forms of access and safety, to members of these groups on campus. suggesting that this type of civility is a key tool for creating a welcoming atmosphere in the college classroom amounts to silencing those who prefer forms of expression that go beyond the norms of nobility. a democratic, egalitarian classroom culture, rather than one built on the norms of nobility, could promote full access to the learning opportunities that colleges should offer all students. such culture would be based on three principles: ensuring equal substantive access to the campus and to the classroom; maintaining dignity safety along with, and as part of a commitment to, other forms of safety; and encouraging varying forms of expression and the freedom to speak and question both within and beyond the classroom. this view is surely not in opposition with callan’s. my goal in outlining these principles has been to offer a broader contextualization and possible ways to extend callan’s vision so as to ensure a healthier, more democratic campus culture. references callan, e. ( ). education in safe and unsafe spaces. philosophical inquiry in education, ( ), – . sigal ben-porath about the author sigal ben-porath is professor of education, philosophy and political science at the univesity of pennsylvania. she can be reached at sigalbp@upenn.edu writing human rights: the political imaginaries of writers of color review writing human rights: the political imaginaries of writers of color crystal parikh university of minnesota press, minneapolis, pp., isbn: - contemporary political theory ( ) , s –s . https://doi.org/ . /s - - -x; published online march crystal parikh’s writing human rights: the political imaginaries of writers of color is a timely and ambitious work that makes an impassioned claim for both reclaiming and problematizing contemporary human rights discourse. as a literary critic with explicitly political concerns, a thinker interested in counter-hegemonic ideas but one who doesn’t abandon the quest for ethical life, parikh issues a challenge to contemporary political theorists interested in thinking through radical critique and racial justice during our reactionary times. human rights discourse, as has well been documented and thoroughly discussed, is nothing short of complex. on the one hand, since the end of the second world war, it has been a crucial tool for the most vulnerable people to mobilize against the horrors authoritarianism, domination, exclusion, and violence. on the other hand, it has historically been coopted for dangerous ends – just think of invocations of humanitarian intervention, us’s wars for spreading democracy and peace abroad, and all the efforts associated with neoliberal privatization and financial austerity. critics thus insist that human rights are ineffective at best, or nothing more than instruments of hegemony at worst. they are seen as powerful words on paper that only matter to the extent they are truly secured, but are usually proclaimed by states to mask their own geopolitical interests in the pursuit of free market capitalism and political order – rather than democracy. the upshot here is that human rights have very little to do with making life more livable for the poor, women, people of color, and the disabled. parikh’s work insists that such pessimism, while historically justified and intellectually understandable, relies on a narrow notion of human rights. in her view, we haven’t fully appreciated the political potential in the meaning of both humanity and rights precisely because we haven’t fully engaged the terrain in which these two terms have been most fruitfully explored, namely what she calls � macmillan publishers ltd., part of springer nature. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s www.palgrave.com/journals the ‘minor literatures’ of writers of color, such as toni morrison, ernest gaines, maxine hong kingston, jessica hagedorn, chang-rae lee, and susan choi, among others. parikh’s ambition is not to romanticize such minor literatures as inherently radical or emancipatory – or even claim that the ideas embedded within them could be easily applied to politics. instead, the intention is to show a counter-vision of human rights that emphasizes shared human precariousness, unveiling the fantasy of invulnerability, and endorsing the construction of personal and familial relationships not governed by pernicious ideals of what is socially respectable. indeed, if human rights discourse relies on a notion of universality but smuggles in a provincialized account of what is properly human (white, american, male, heterosexual, invulnerable), parikh aims to provincialize such dominant narratives. the aim is to shed light on the ethical viability of that, which is more attentive to difference and pluralism and more capable of addressing suffering and degradation in ways responsive to the citizens for whom human rights are said to matter the most. on the one hand, she writes that ‘human rights provide deeply meaningful methods of political and moral imagining, especially for subjects whose recognition by the state is tenuous, if not altogether foreclosed’ (p. ). on the other hand, she emphasizes ‘bodily and social vulnerability’ and stresses the way ‘minor literatures give voice to the complex desires of these subjects’ and how they ‘mediate the subject’s experiences of vulnerability and agency’ (p. ). political theorists who read writing human rights will see the work as enacting three main projects: the post-colonial attempt to provincialize american and western universalism (dipesh chakrabarty, gayatri spivak), the post-structural critique of power (michel foucault, jacques derrida), and developing a sense of global responsibility based in shared precariousness (stephen white, judith butler). for these reasons, at a moment when the term ‘identity politics’ is used by critics to denigrate movements on the left that call for justice for marginalized identities, parikh’s work offers a corrective. following recent work by critical race theorists, queer theorists, and feminists, an implicit argument of the book is that all politics is, in some sense, based in specific identity standpoints that it often obscures. put differently, identity, then, is an inescapable source of political claim making, whether or not it is seen as such. one of the things that makes writing human rights an important work and will surely interest political theorists is parikh’s ability to successfully and effortlessly move between different methodological approaches – literary criticism, us intellectual history, critical race theory, legal theory – without sacrificing intellectual rigor or political purpose. part of why parikh’s readings are so theoretically generative is that they provide a method to see literature (narrative, review s � macmillan publishers ltd., part of springer nature. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s plot, dialogue) as harboring both critical and normative insights, but also that they express a theoretical imagination that is not bound by traditional argumentative conventions (like didactic claiming or deductive logical reasoning) or simple resolutions. the texts she explores, many of which have been examined by critics before, are given a fresh take. for instance, in the introduction, she reads toni morrison’s classic novel, beloved ( ) (based on the nineteenth century historical figure of margaret garner), as a work that exposes how ‘humanness’ is a construction. in the novel, an enslaved person, sethe, who has no rights is nonetheless considered criminal when she kills her child, beloved – who also will have no rights – in order to save her from slavery. sethe sees herself as human, even as her sense of self is haunted by the past and the dangers in the world as a black woman in the post-reconstruction era. this vulnerability doesn’t preclude her from persisting and reconstructing new family networks, as well as attempting to love and be loved. these themes are continued throughout the book. the first chapter considers how the work of gaines and kingston complicates the idea of afro-asian solidarity in a way that radicalized the impulse towards global antiracism. through a reading of novels by hagedorn and lee, the second chapter examines how human rights have a life of their own, escaping ideas of humanity found within liberalism. the third chapter, centered on susan choi’s the foreign student, considers how minor literature evokes an idea of vulnerability in ways that expand the right to security and escape narrow ideas of community. the final three chapters zoom in on novels by julia alvarez, jhumpa lahiri, and ana castillo and aimee phan to tackle the rights to revolution, to health, and to family in ways that make us rethink ideas about what it means to flourish, and make autonomous choices about the good life. despite its overwhelming strengths and clear interest for contemporary political theorists, writing human rights is not primarily a work of traditional political theory. although parikh fluidly invokes arendt, foucault, levinas, and fanon among others throughout, her concern is less with placing minor literature into conversation with american political thought or the western tradition and more with the boundaries of literary criticism and american studies. for all of the crucial and provocative questions the book generates, it still leaves some unresolved: what would a national or international politics, or even social movements like black lives matter, #metoo, or dakota access pipeline protests, based in the minor literature of human rights, look like? is there a tension between questions of institutional politics (geopolitical interests, grassroots struggle, state activity, and ngo work that tries to advance human rights) and the radical normative project of ethico-political thinking? answering these questions is, of course, not central to the review � macmillan publishers ltd., part of springer nature. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s s book’s success, but they could be taken up in future work that tries to grapple seriously with rethinking key political institutions and discourses that affect people’s everyday lives. nonetheless, parikh’s work serves as an important model of an engaged and probing mode of writing for our contemporary moment when democratic faith and norms are being thrown into question. thinking human rights is perhaps more important now than ever before, given the global the rise of authoritarianism, white supremacy, racism, xenophobia, the assault on women’s reproductive rights, ongoing war, occupation, torture, and ethnic cleansing. as writing human rights reminds us, however, accepting the spirit behind human rights – justice, equality, self-determination, dignity – does not require succumbing to its dominant formulations. alex zamalin university of detroit mercy, detroit, mi , usa zamalial@udmercy.edu review s � macmillan publishers ltd., part of springer nature. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s 	writing human rights: the political imaginaries of writers of color 	crystal parikh university of minnesota press, minneapolis, pp., isbn: - blending integrated knowledge translation with global health governance: an approach for advancing action on a wicked problem review open access blending integrated knowledge translation with global health governance: an approach for advancing action on a wicked problem katrina marie plamondon , * and julia pemberton abstract background: the persistence of health inequities is a wicked problem for which there is strong evidence of causal roots in the maldistribution of power, resources and money within and between countries. though the evidence is clear, the solutions are far from straightforward. integrated knowledge translation (ikt) ought to be well suited for designing evidence-informed solutions, yet current frameworks are limited in their capacity to navigate complexity. global health governance (ghg) also ought to be well suited to advance action, but a lack of accountability, inclusion and integration of evidence gives rise to politically driven action. recognising a persistent struggle for meaningful action, we invite contemplation about how blending ikt with ghg could leverage the strengths of both processes to advance health equity. discussion: action on root causes of health inequities implicates disruption of structures and systems that shape how society is organised. this infinitely complex work demands sophisticated examination of drivers and disrupters of inequities and a vast imagination for who (and what) should be engaged. yet, underlying tendencies toward reductionism seem to drive superficial responses. where ikt models lack consideration of issues of power and provide little direction for how to support cohesive efforts toward a common goal, recent calls from the field of ghg may provide insight into these issues. additionally, though ghg is criticised for its lack of attention to using evidence, ikt offers approaches and strategies for collaborative processes of generating and refining knowledge. contemplating the inclusion of governance in ikt requires re-examining roles, responsibilities, power and voice in processes of connecting knowledge with action. we argue for expanding ikt models to include ghg as a means of considering the complexity of issues and opening new possibilities for evidence-informed action on wicked problems. conclusion: integrated learning between these two fields, adopting principles of ghg alongside the strategies of ikt, is a promising opportunity to strengthen leadership for health equity action. keywords: integrated knowledge translation, global health governance, health equity, health inequities, knowledge-to-action, wicked problems, complexity * correspondence: katrina.plamondon@ubc.ca university of british columbia, university way, kelowna, bc, canada interior health, doyle avenue, kelowna, bc, canada full list of author information is available at the end of the article © the author(s). open access this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons license, and indicate if changes were made. the creative commons public domain dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/ . /) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. plamondon and pemberton health research policy and systems ( ) : https://doi.org/ . /s - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:katrina.plamondon@ubc.ca http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/publicdomain/zero/ . / background problems described as ‘wicked’ earn the label from their in- herent resistance to resolve; they are convoluted, reactive problems entangled in competing social interests and values [ , ]. the persistence of health inequities [ , ] is a wicked problem [ ] shaped by systems of power [ – ] and the social and structural determinants of health [ – ]. robust evidence provides clear insights into their socio-political, economic and historic causes [ ], and offers actionable policy solutions [ – ], making the persistence of health inequities a knowledge-to-action problem. however, efforts to advance evidence-informed action unfold in the same systems of social and political power that disproportionately advantage the already privi- leged and are generative of health inequities’ wicked na- ture. additionally, despite recognition of their wickedness, attempts to respond often reduce health inequities into component parts, examining ‘symptoms’ rather than causes [ – ] in ways that ‘fit’ with dominant political ideologies [ – ]. these factors fuel the wickedness and tenacity of health inequities. the purpose of this review article is to explore the complementarities of two promising approaches of ap- plied research and practice that might support meaning- ful processes for advancing evidence-informed health equity action. it began with informal conversation about our experiences as doctoral students doing research for health equity, where we found ourselves grappling with contradictions and tensions within our field. though we witnessed a broad commitment to ‘good’ equity intentions, we simultaneously observed processes and leadership that contradicted the evidence on causes and applauded super- ficial responses to health inequities. critically examining how to move beyond good intentions for health equity became central to both of us in our doctoral research, with katrina focusing on integrated knowledge translation (ikt) and julia on global health governance (ghg). as our dialogue became more purposeful and structured, we discovered that the challenges we encountered in our respective fields were met by strengths in the other. adopting an intentionally optimistic lens, we explored how these fields might complement each other and, through deeper attentiveness to issues of political power, could collectively contribute to more productive health equity action. we understand both ikt and ghg to be primarily con- cerned with processes. ikt brings together people who do and use research as equal contributors to processes of col- laboratively identifying and responding to knowledge-to-ac- tion challenges [ – ]. ideally, ghg brings cross-sector actors together to deliberate and guide mechanisms for resolving complex global issues through intentional collab- oration [ , ]. both are promising, yet the strengths of each mirror weaknesses in the other. poor governance suffers from accountability and administrative failures, and a lack of strategy for integrating evidence-informed, con- textual and tacit knowledges [ – ]. emerging from health systems settings with clearly defined and con- tained contexts (e.g. clinical practice sites), ikt suffers a lack of attention to power dynamics and complexity in decision-making [ ], making it difficult to apply to ‘wicked’ knowledge-to-action problems. further, despite much inter- est in both ikt and ghg within the field of health equity, their respective bodies of literature are disconnected. in this article, we draw on freire and shor’s metaphor of a ‘dialogic table’ [ ], inviting contemplation of how blending ikt approaches with ghg principles could support meaningful health equity action. below, we lay a foundation for deeper, critically reflective consider- ation of the complementarities of ikt and ghg. we are inspired by the potential of critical pedagogy as an epistemological guide for ‘how’ we (society, scientists, practitioners, decision-makers, etc.) might collectively inspire transformative possibilities. in their reflective con- versation about learning, freire and shor described a ‘dia- logic table’ as an enabler of transformative co-learning. they suggested an “object to be known is put on the table between subjects…[who] meet around it and through it for mutual inquiry” ([ ], p. ). the “object to be known” in this dialogue is evidence-informed health equity action. the ‘subjects of knowing’, each with their own insights, knowledges (e.g. tacit, institutional, professional knowl- edges), evidences and epistemologies, are people situated within the fields of ikt and ghg. we set this dialogic table by discussing the wickedness of health inequities, the strengths and limitations of ikt and ghg, and how to leverage their mutually beneficial characteristics. unpacking the wickedness of health inequities health inequities are systematic differences in health rooted in socioeconomic and political injustices [ ]. the who commission on social determinants of health de- scribed health inequities as avoidable, arising from “…the conditions of daily life in which people are born, grow, live, work, and age” shaped by social, political and economic forces, and requiring response from the “whole of govern- ment” [ ]. evidence shows that the greater the gap be- tween a population’s richest and poorest, the greater the differences in health between them [ , , ]. unequal and unfair systems of power between and within nation states are widely recognised as driving forces in the cre- ation of structures that disproportionately advantage some lives at the cost of others [ , , ]. though the evidence about causal roots is clear, and a robust suite of tested pol- icy recommendations widely available [ – ], the imple- mentation of policy solutions is far from straightforward. calls for social policy reform to improve health have been documented for more than years [ , ], revealing plamondon and pemberton health research policy and systems ( ) : page of deep resistance to resolve. indeed, the causes of health inequities are tenacious because they are rooted socio-pol- itical systems and structures designed to reinforce the sta- tus quo of power distribution, locally and globally. connecting knowledge to action on root causes of health inequities implicates a reconstruction of the sys- tems and structures that shape how society is organised. this infinitely complex work demands sophisticated examination of drivers and disrupters of inequities and a vast imagination for who (and what) should be engaged. this work is challenging for many reasons, not the least of which is a fundamental clash between health inequities’ inherent complexity and the dominant lens through which the world is observed and responded to in the field of health and science generally. this lens involves linear, reductionist and hierarchical assumptions (table ) stemming from seventeenth-century mechanistic suppositions about reality [ ]. a repercussion of these assumptions is a persistent western habit of understanding “the world as a collection of separable and thus independent units and assumes linear cause-and-effect relationships between these units, and that these relationships are reversible” ([ ], p. ). when these as- sumptions are at play, our collective capacity to recognise the depth and tenacity of root causes remains elusive. lending to a particularly narrowed and superficial lens through which the social determinants of health [ ] and health inequities are framed [ , ], mechanistic assump- tions effectively mask complex mechanisms that entrench inequities. rather than focusing on the intersecting nature of the social determination of health [ ], efforts to advance health equity under these assumptions place inordinate at- tention on behavioural interventions and insufficient atten- tion on structural causes [ , ]. for example, even when there is agreement about causes, public health efforts tend to focus on interventions that place responsibility for health on individual behaviours [ , ]. despite the recognised value of upstream and structural interventions, research shows a predominantly downstream focus in policy and public health efforts [ , – ]. behavioural interventions for healthy eating, for example, distract attention away from complex issues of affordability and accessibility, whereas a more structural intervention might involve advocacy to ad- vance socially protective policy for living wages. further, the role of power in establishing systematic ad- vantage and disadvantage, recognised as a pivotal driver of health inequities [ ], is only occasionally acknowledged and infrequently used to guide study goals and objectives [ ]. decades of dominant neoliberal ideology [ ] have contributed to policy environments incompatible with the kinds of social protection known to mitigate health inequi- ties [ , , ]. compounding these incompatibilities is a preoccupation with individualism and bio-behaviourism in health sciences that conflicts with the best available evi- dence and often distracts attention from where it might be most productive [ , , , ]. whether inadvertent or strategic, the absence of power analysis in efforts to ad- vance health equity action can undermine possibilities of uprooting the tenacious systems of power that lead to inequities. the fields of ghg and ikt span practice, policy and re- search outside the confines of a particular topic. both fields bring something important to the table in response to health inequities. further, because of their relational nature, they both offer platforms for the kind of dialogue necessary to challenge reductionism and mitigate power imbalances. greater integration across disciplines interested in health equity is recognised as necessary evidence-informed action for health equity [ , ]. if there is indeed desire and cap- acity to begin unravelling equity-harming structures, power and policy environments, then there is an urgent need to understand how to mobilise knowledge into action – both in terms of increasing the application of existing knowledge and informing emerging research. unpacking these influ- ences could provide a useful means of deconstructing underlying assumptions that lend themselves to consistent failures to advance health equity. table mechanistic assumptions and their application to social determinants of healtha assumption description how the assumption circumvents complexity of health inequities reductionism assumes the whole system can be understood by identifying, describing and analysing all of its constituent parts breaks social determinants of health into separate, distinct factors (rather than a set of complex intersecting factors) draws attention to symptoms or expressions of root causes that are more immediately visible (e.g. considering ‘race’ a determinant of health instead of ‘racism’) linearity assumes that ( ) output changes proportionally with input, and ( ) the effect of combined inputs can be understood and predicted by dissecting the input–output relationships of individual components, or a direct summative and predictive cumulation of constituent parts simplifies interconnectedness justifies use of proxy indicators that reflect symptoms rather than causes of health inequities (e.g. monitoring maternal and child mortality rates as indicators of equity) hierarchy assumes central power and control, which diffuses systematically from proximal to more distal parts places responsibility for acting on health within individuals or groups, rather than society legitimises a focus on health damaging behaviours rather than health damaging conditions, systems or structures aadapted from jayasinghe, [ ] plamondon and pemberton health research policy and systems ( ) : page of what does ikt bring to the table? efforts to respond to health inequities include explicit calls for connecting research to action [ , ]. these calls align with the growing recognition of the import- ance of knowledge translation (kt) [ – ]. ikt offers strategies for bringing diverse perspectives together to understand and respond to problems through processes of knowledge generation and refinement [ – ]. inherently relational [ ], ikt is non-linear and challenges trad- itional notions of the dispassionate, objective ‘expert re- searcher’ [ ] whose work, once released into the world through scholarly publication, carries de facto impact. it involves participatory, inclusive processes where people who ‘use’ research work alongside people who ‘do’ re- search [ ]. recognising a ‘social contract’ between society and science, ikt brings stakeholders into a social process of problem solving through research [ ] emphasising knowledge co-production in partnership [ ]. by virtue of this collaborative approach to knowledge production, re- finement and use, an ikt approach necessitates dialogue and trust building [ – ]. these characteristics are well suited to overcoming mechanistic assumptions by foster- ing ‘change from within’; however, the application of ikt to wicked problems is constrained by underlying assump- tions that limit the scope and scale of contexts for which it was originally envisioned. frameworks for ikt consistently describe it as a way of collaboratively leveraging the research processes as a means for generating context-sensitive, complexity-embracing, real-life solutions grounded in evidence. among evolving models for ikt are encouraging innovations, such as the use of critical realism and arts in kt [ ], systems thinking [ ], and even reflexive frameworks for equity-focused kt [ ]. common among these models is a recognition that “both communities [of knowledge users and producers] hold distinct norms and values but they also bring valuable knowledge to the problem; and the work of knowledge gener- ation is done collaboratively” ([ ], p. ). a distinguishing feature of ikt is, however, that “knowledge users usually have the authority to invoke change in the practice or policy setting” [ ]. this presumes that knowledge users are indi- vidual ‘stakeholders’ who represent particular portfolios within a health system or community setting. when the context and knowledge-to-action problem implicates social organisation and structure, however, the idea of including everyone, or even of finding just one set of stakeholders who may have authority to invoke change over some aspect of policy or practice relevant to health equity can be para- lysing. the need for engaging people who can be part of decision-making mechanisms that lead to action opens a question of governance. although ikt models demonstrate promise for micro- (e.g. clinical practice unit) and meso- (e.g. health sys- tems) contexts [ ], their utility is limited when applied to the multiple, complex actors that contribute to shap- ing political, social and cultural environments that either drive, do nothing or disrupt wicked problems like health inequities. this is, in part, due to the difficulty of navi- gating meaningful engagement within the vastness of potential actors to include. rather than focusing stake- holder analysis [ ] in a defined setting, the range of po- tential actors implicated in wicked problems extends to networks of knowledge producers and knowledge users, many of which are not single entities, but conglomerates that also produce multiple competing interests and values. identifying the ‘right’ actors to engage could become in and of itself a wicked problem, resistant to resolve and surely beyond the scope of any individual study or programme of research. further, these models lack direc- tion for how to achieve cohesiveness toward a common goal. additionally, despite a need for evidence-informed policy and practice for health [ , ], there are few exam- ples of using ikt approaches to respond to wicked prob- lems. these features that constrain the application of ikt in the face of wicked problems could be redressed through adoption of the principles of ghg, particularly its mecha- nisms of legitimacy and collaboration between multi-sector transnational actors, with an emphasis on civil society. what does ghg bring to the table? as a reaction to the intensifying wickedness of health prob- lems that defy state borders, governance processes consist of stakeholders working through formal international insti- tutions both within and across borders. heavily influenced by major globalisation events such as hiv/aids and sars, current mechanisms and processes for ghg stem from the disciplines of political science, health economics and health policy [ , ]. in the absence of a singular global government, ghg platforms convene a plurality of major actors to define shared values, establish standards and regulatory frameworks, set priorities, mobilise and align resources, and promote research. ghg often requires individual governments to forgo aspects of their individual sovereignty in order to collaborate and participate with international agencies such as who [ ]. for example, the who international health regulations establishes stan- dards for how individual countries respond to international health risks [ ]. these regulations refer to the need for the director-general of who to consider scientific evi- dence, but do not provide recommendations for how this evidence could inform decision-making. ultimately, ghg is a polycentric system that provides a mechanism for collective decision-making for improved health through the interplay of different institutional forms and actors at different levels in pursuit of common goals [ , , ]. the imperfect decision-making pro- cesses of ghg are, however, embedded in historical and socio-political contexts of colonialism and heavily plamondon and pemberton health research policy and systems ( ) : page of influenced by power relationships, values, norms, organ- isational structures and resources. ghg is political; it can serve to reinforce or challenge existing institutional exclu- sion and power inequalities and has direct impacts on health system equity whereby the decisions made through ghg processes shape who accesses benefits and whose voices are heard [ ]. continued processes of globalisation and increasing influence of private sector actors in global health bring new layers of political power to the govern- ance scene [ ], while innovations in technology, data, communications and networks open possibilities for reim- agining the mechanisms and processes relied upon post world war ii [ ]. the time is ripe for reimagining how ghg might better support collective responses to global problems. at the turn of the twenty-first century, health sectors worldwide were acutely aware of their limited capacity to deal with emerging challenges in isolation. global vulnerability to pandemics, climate change and political instability all contribute to a growing recognition of a need for multi-sectorial action and broad public and pri- vate partnerships at national and international levels [ ]. further, civil society and political leaders are chal- lenging notions of an isolated, technocratic health sector and call for more unified attention to issues of equity and human rights [ ]. society writ large voiced a desire to be part of the political sphere that shapes their life circumstances, opportunities and experiences of health and healthcare. in response to a confluence of heightened awareness of the globalised nature of health issues and growing demand for collective responses, complex net- works of international agencies and philanthropic founda- tions collaborated to set global targets for progress toward a more equitable word through the millennium develop- ment goals and the more recent sustainable development goals [ , ]. these and other examples of governance for health equity (e.g. the who commission on social determinants of health) are key demonstrations of the kinds of platforms and mechanisms ghg offers. import- antly, these mechanisms also demonstrate how the legacy of colonialism contributes to health equity failures. global health crises exemplify how health equity is tied up to socio-political and economic contexts, including the histories of colonisation. the – ebola epidemic is an important example of the consequences of govern- ance failures. as outbreaks emerged, the world witnessed vulnerabilities and fragmentation in public service sectors that became determinants of who lived and who died – revealing intense inequities between and within countries [ – ]. leaders in health systems and governments alike recognised the need for strong global institutions, mecha- nisms and funding for development of global public goods that contribute to resolving global health threats. in the case of the ebola crisis, ghg leadership (e.g. who) failed to respond in a timely manner, which lead to other key ac- tors stepping up to fill the leadership gap. the response was openly criticised as “too little too late” to halt an epi- demic reflective of the “pathology of society and the global and political architecture” [ ]. like many contemporary ghg challenges, this crisis unfolded through the legacy of colonialism [ ] that holds the roots of inequities in place. by revealing the differential value placed on human life globally, these failures illuminated the tenacious nature of health inequities and the lack of political will to uproot their causes. while ghg provides a platform for responding to wicked problems through global collaboration, cooperation and leadership among a diverse set of actors, ghg deliver- ables still lack strategies to ensure evidence- [ ] and equity-informed [ ] policy, practice and decision-making. the lancet–university of oslo commission on glo- bal governance for health also pushed for evidence- and equity-informed ghg, recommending mandatory health equity impact assessments for all global institutions and strengthened sanctions against non-state actors for rights violations [ ]. surprisingly, there are few examples of looking to ikt to support processes for the same [ ]. shared governance and public dialogue about our social and economic architecture is needed [ ], where public moral norms can be re-constructed and internalised (e.g. recreating constructs of health equity as a public good). ikt approaches and strategies could support this kind of dialogue in engaged, inclusive ways that support connect- ing this kind of evidence and other knowledges with ac- tion. in table , we offer an overview of recognized steps in the knowledge-to-action cycle [ ] alongside comple- mentary ghg processes and mechanisms. this blended ikt–ghg approach, done alongside a critical examination of power, presents a promising pathway toward health equity action. additional ‘objects’ of consideration on this dialogic table in addition to our interest in leveraging the relational-dia- logic nature of ghg and ikt to counter reductionism and mitigate power imbalances, we propose placing a few add- itional objects on this dialogic table, namely accountability, leadership and inclusion. it is beyond the scope of this dis- cussion to resolve the intricacies of any of these issues, but we hope that they serve as sparks for continued dia- logue and reflection. in ghg, the lack of accountability of major global health organisations (i.e. who), and its rela- tionship to systems of power, has been a significant chal- lenge [ ]. unclear accountabilities, particularly for leadership, can play a role in legitimising investments in research, ikt, or policy in ways that overlook evidence about causal roots or reinforce inequitable power dy- namics. without frank acknowledgement of the legacies plamondon and pemberton health research policy and systems ( ) : page of of colonisation, and particularly at a time when neo- liberal reason and monetisation of socio-political pro- cesses undermine democratic governance [ , ], it is insufficient to assume health equity is the responsibility of governments, government agencies or civil society, nor of international institutions, such as who or united nations, whose political leverage falls under the shadow of powerful financial bodies such as the world trade organization, international monetary fund, world bank and, more recently, influential and well-endowed philan- thropic foundations such as the bill & melinda gates foundation [ , ]. neither can the roles, responsibilities table blending processes and mechanisms for a blended integrated knowledge translation (ikt) – global health governance (ghg) approach moments in the ikt cycle complementary ghg processes and mechanisms examining power in an ikt–ghg approach identify problem and identify, review, select knowledge ↓ adapt knowledge to local context ↓ governance bodies that work together to identify problems and knowledge consideration of the composition of non-traditional actors, such as civil society and private sector, in governance bodies guidance for meaningful engagement between actors, particularly in shared governance models promising example: gavi mitigates known global power imbalances through the composition of their board, which includes neutral individuals who speak to public interests, government representatives each from donor and recipient countries, expert in research and technology, industry representative each from the global south and global north, civil society representative, and representative each from who, unicef, world bank and bill & melinda gates foundation taking steps to balance power between global north and global south promoting transparency and accountability in decision-making about the composition of governance bodies attentiveness to how particular ways of framing health and governance influences how a ‘problem’ is being understood attentiveness to how historical conditions and power dynamics privilege particular assumptions assess barriers to knowledge use ↓ select, tailor, implement interventions ↓ guidance on how to resolve discrepant norms and values between engaged actors guidance on how to ensure legitimacy of leadership guidance on how political will and power influence this process platforms for coordinating global-level responses to wicked problems promising example: the lancet commission on ghg offered specific recommendations for governance mechanisms and processes, with detailed calls to make the examination of issues of power an explicit responsibility of ghg. they called for attention to democratic deficit, institutional and structural inflexibility, strengthened accountability, identification and involvement of missing institutions and voices, and to create a policy space for health. their report offers specific guidance on how to do so. among the commission’s recommendations were specific mechanisms, including a proposed un multi-stakeholder platform on global governance for health attentiveness to how historical conditions and power dynamics give rise to inequities in inclusion and voice exploration of how processes of historical exclusion (e.g. due to race, class, gender, indigeneity, etc.) can be mitigated monitor knowledge use ↓ evaluate outcomes ↓ sustain knowledge use generation and maintenance of mechanisms provide infrastructure for monitoring and evaluation norms and expectations for transparency in decision-making promising example: two advisory bodies, the technical review panel and a technical evaluation reference group, provide independent audit and monitoring of programmes funded by the gfatm. their reports highlight lessons learned from funding requests and reviews, including perspectives of applicants, technical partners, the secretariat and the board. they consist of external experts in hiv, tb and malaria as well as experts in human rights, gender, health systems and sustainable financing. their reports are made publicly available through the gfatm website attentiveness to who decides what knowledge count as legitimate attentiveness to who decides what outcomes count as legitimate consideration of who owns knowledge, with efforts to promote publicly owned and accessible data attentiveness to equitable distribution of resources and benefits plamondon and pemberton health research policy and systems ( ) : page of and accountabilities of ‘researchers’ and ‘research users’ in ikt be simply assumed because they agree to work together. these are critical considerations in moving toward evidence-informed, equitable governance for health equity action. systems for enabling accountability and transparency must be agreed to, which raises questions of meaningful participation and responsibility [ ]. despite intense im- balances in power and interests, the challenge for ghg and ikt strategists alike will be to engage a plurality of actors in ways that enable collective agreement on a com- mon goal. accountability extends to issues of inclusion and exclusion and how power is distributed. though in- clusion is widely recognised as important for ghg and kt, how to achieve it is elusive. global events exemplify ways in which civil society is pushing back on systems of exclusion, voicing a desire to transform what are, in es- sence, governance processes. responses to global health issues evolve in politicised systems that exclude the voices of those most burdened by health inequities [ ]. the idle-no-more [ ], occupy [ ], black lives matter [ ] and the more recent #metoo movements share a common outcry for justice and equity in society, pointing to the in- equities generated by power and policy structures that sys- tematically privilege the wealthy and white. collectively, these movements reflect a growing public demand for pol- itics of inclusion where government and non-government actors are held accountable for the consequences of their action (or inaction). they are demonstrative of how intri- cately tied up health inequities are in complex, competing systems of power within which there is a need for critical analysis and mitigation. further, the likelihood of understanding complexity be- comes much greater by directly fostering balanced repre- sentation that includes a pluralism of voices. on a larger scale, this is reflected in the evolution of the major ghg players in the world. historically, who and the world bank have been primarily responsible for ghg, but given the significant frustration with each of these institutions’ poor ghg, two new organisations have risen, namely the global fund for aids, tb, and malaria (gfatm) and global alliance for vaccines and immunization (gavi); what separates these two institutions from their counter parts are their commitment to ghg. these commitments include a wider, more inclusive, board of governors (civil society, the private sector, and philanthropic organisations), as well as providing clear and transpar- ent (i.e. publicly available) decision-making regarding funding decisions and priority-setting processes. both organisations rely on external review for their ac- countability for decision-making processes like fund- ing decisions. we believe that theory and practice in both ikt and ghg would benefit from these new exam- ples of creating organisations that work toward governance models based on inclusion, voice, transpar- ency and accountability. without clear leadership and a commitment to accountability through transparency by all global health actors, the current response to health inequi- ties will be ad hoc and exclusive of these civil society voices, as well as highly fragmented with little to no for- mal mandate between the players. importantly, the re- sponse would be at risk of remaining distracted by the tendency to focus on symptoms rather than causes. as the field of ikt evolves, so too do opportunities for theory and practice refinement. governance processes could enhance current ikt frameworks to open consider- ations of how to weave evidence into decision-making while acknowledging conflicting norms and values within the political sphere under which it operates. using shared health governance theory to drive this examination can contribute to more transparent and equity-centred ap- proaches to understanding how these norms and values shape health problems [ ]. expanding ikt models to in- clude governance would require re-examining legitimacy, transparency, power and inclusion in the process of con- necting knowledge with action. this broader conceptual- isation extends the application of ikt into a complex public sphere, across domains and outside the control or context of any one institution or set of actors. we are much more likely to approach understanding complexity through systems of inclusion that directly engage multiple socio-political arenas. systems of inclusion can be expli- citly addressed by adopting principles of ghg alongside the strategies of ikt. exploring a blended ikt–ghg approach could extend insights from the success of ikt in clinical and health sys- tems settings [ , ] to wicked problems. this approach could illuminate new ways of thinking about how we might influence the trajectory of wicked problems to fair, equit- able governance informed by high quality, rigorous and relevant research. in the example we offer here, of moving toward health equity, ikt implicates an all-of-society ap- proach because the root causes involve all of society. ikt models already acknowledge the process of connecting knowledge with action as inherently social, but this is often used as a way to describe the processes involved in well-defined settings. wicked problems are not confined to singular contexts. although attending to social processes are important, they need to be considered in the broader sphere of how society is organised. this means thinking about and connecting the best available knowledge about a wicked problem to evidence-informed action as a ‘public good’, wherein the process is integrated as part of the social fabric around which communities are organised. we be- lieve broadening the application of approaches to ikt across multiple layers of complex social interactions can support evidence-informed influence and, again, ghg can support the achievement of coherency in doing so. plamondon and pemberton health research policy and systems ( ) : page of conclusion in this article, we set a dialogic table to explore how blending principles of ghg with ikt strategies could le- verage the strengths of both, enhancing the possibility for effective and evidence-informed answers to wicked problems. we situated this table in a global political economy that unfairly distributes power, resources and money. by focusing on explicit examination of power and overcoming mechanistic assumptions that draw at- tention away from the root causes of health inequities, there is tremendous potential to be leveraged in a com- bined ikt and ghg approach. such an approach would require leadership from academic, policy and civil society arenas wherein existing ghg platforms explicitly embrace a commitment to connecting knowledge (evidence about causes) with action. we encourage those pursuing an ikt–ghg approach to engage in bold and inclusive dia- logue about how socio-political histories (e.g. colonisation) are at play in the ways they frame or respond to health in- equities. in contemplating governance-focused ikt, actors involved in advancing health equity can take promising steps toward inclusion of a broad spectrum of actors and a pathway for stimulating the collective agency needed to affect change on this wicked problem. abbreviations ghg: global health governance; ikt: integrated knowledge translation; kt: knowledge translation acknowledgements we wish to acknowledge the mentorship, encouragement and scholarly guidance we receive from our supervisory committees as doctoral candidates. for kp, at the university of british columbia, this includes dr joan bottorff, dr susana caxaj, dr ian graham, and dr michael burgess. for jp, at mcmaster university, this includes dr lisa schwartz, dr susan jack, dr claudia emmerson, and dr brian cameron. funding this paper was commissioned by the integrated knowledge translation network (iktrn). the iktrn brings together knowledge users and researchers to advance the science and practice of ikt and train the next generation of ikt researchers. honorariums were provided for completed papers. the iktrn is funded by a canadian institutes of health research foundation grant (fdn# ). further, the article emerged from the doctoral dissertation work of both authors. kp’s doctoral studies are funded through a banting and best canada research scholar award from the canadian institutes of health research. jp’s doctoral studies are funded through banting and best canada research scholar and the douglas kinsella award in bioethics from the canadian institutes of health research. availability of data and materials not applicable. authors’ contributions kp provided coordination and leadership for the preparation of the manuscript. the content for this debate article was generated through a series of conversations to which kp and jp contributed equally. both authors brought a strong grounding research and science related to health equity. kp provided more content related to integrated knowledge translation, jp provided more content related to governance. both authors read and approved the final manuscript. authors’ information kp is a regional practice leader for research & knowledge translation at interior health. in her role, she supports ikt through teaching, mentoring, consulting, and leading ikt and equity-centred research. ethics approval and consent to participate not applicable. consent for publication not applicable. competing interests the authors declare that they have no competing interests. publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. author details university of british columbia, university way, kelowna, bc, canada. mcmaster university, main street west, hamilton, on, canada. interior health, doyle avenue, kelowna, bc, canada. received: november accepted: february references . rittel hwj, webber mm. dilemmas in a general theory of planning. policy sci. ; : – . . waddock s. the wicked problems of global sustainability need wicked (good) leaders and wicked (good) collaboraative solutions. j manag glob sustain. ; : – . . labonte r, schrecker t. the state of global health in a radically unequal world: patterns and prospects. in: benatar sr, brock g, editors. global health and global health ethics. cambridge: cambridge university press; . p. – . . donkin a, goldblatt p, allen j, nathanson v, marmot m. global action on the social determinants of health. bmj global health. ; (suppl ):e . . petticrew m, tugwell p, welch v, ueffing e, kristjansson e, armstrong r, et al. 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https://doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - https://doi.org/ . /s - ( ) - https://doi.org/ . /s - - -y https://doi.org/ . /s - - -y https://doi.org/ . /si.v i . https://doi.org/ . /si.v i . https://doi.org/ . /tsq. https://doi.org/ . /s - - - 	abstract 	background 	discussion 	conclusion 	background 	unpacking the wickedness of health inequities 	what does ikt bring to the table? 	what does ghg bring to the table? 	additional ‘objects’ of consideration on this dialogic table 	conclusion 	abbreviations 	acknowledgements 	funding 	availability of data and materials 	authors’ contributions 	authors’ information 	ethics approval and consent to participate 	consent for publication 	competing interests 	publisher’s note 	author details 	references ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... doi: . /s © american political science association, ps • october the teacher think globally, act locally: community- engaged comparative politics amy risley, rhodes college abstract  this article describes how comparative politics specialists can adopt community- engaged strategies and other innovative pedagogies to emphasize local–global connec- tions. it discusses a comparative course on urban social movements that requires sustained, community-based learning. students are placed in organizations advocating for refugee families, latinx communities, and people in situations of homelessness. engagement with community partners supports student learning in meaningful ways. students apply social-movement theory to real-world situations, develop an understanding of activists and the communities they seek to empower, and gain intercultural competency by working with diverse groups. they also grapple with different modes of social action and models of citizenship. most important, students learn to investigate activism comparatively through analysis of overseas cases. bridging the local and the global in a single semester can be an arduous task, but undergraduates have embraced this challenge. students at rhodes college have earned a national rep-utation for community engagement. for two years in a row, newsweek magazine ranked the institution as the # service-oriented college in the united states. wash-ington monthly identified rhodes as the top college in the nation for the number of hours students committed to service (rhodes college ). institutional support for experiential and community-engaged pedagogies inspired me to create these new opportunities for students interested in comparative and inter- national politics. this article describes a community-engaged course titled “the politics of social movements and grassroots organizing” that requires students to work at least hours with local community partners involved in different types of service, advocacy, and activism. the course challenges students to think globally and act locally. i argue that community-engaged pedagogies can significantly enhance comparative courses seeking to connect the local and the global. i suggest further that several elements contribute to the success of those courses. first, the instructor must be intentional about connecting activism observed on campus, in one’s city, in other us urban centers, and overseas. second, to the extent possible, service-learning activities should be integrated into the course content. instructors must dedicate class time to structured reflection and discussions of diversity, intercultural competence, and related issues. third, exposing students to conceptual and theoretical frameworks allows them to ponder different modes of social action and deeper questions surrounding democratic citizenship. the course focuses on urban movements both in the united states and abroad seeking to represent communities that have been politically marginalized on the basis of class, race, ethnicity, gender, and/or sexuality. students examine how activists mobilize resources, build alliances, deploy discursive strategies, influ- ence policy making, and shape the broader political culture. the most relevant social-movement theories and concepts include intersectionality, collective-action frames, political-opportunity structure, resource mobilization, and transnational advocacy networks. students apply these theoretical and conceptual tools to case studies of activism in countries as varied as bangladesh, mexico, and russia. they investigate volunteers who assist ref- ugees in germany and sweden, protestors who demand their right to housing in spain, child laborers who have unionized in bolivia, and lgbtq activists in brazil and argentina, among other sets of actors. in the us context, we discuss cases ranging from black lives matter and environmental-justice movements in the mississippi river’s “chemical corridor” to living-wage and migrants’-rights campaigns. we also take advantage of our loca- tion in memphis by visiting the national civil rights museum during the unit on non-violent resistance (syllabus details are in the appendix). one of my primary responsibilities as a comparativist is to underscore how pressing challenges facing communities and college campuses all over the country—combating racial amy risley is professor of international studies at rhodes college and currently serves as department chair. she can be reached at risleya@rhodes.edu. https://orcid.org/ - - - x mailto:risleya@rhodes.edu ps • october ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... t h e te a c h e r : c o m m u n i t y - e n g a g e d c o m p a r a t i v e p o l i t i c s discrimination, sexual violence and misconduct, and economic injustice, for instance—are issues that mobilize activists around the globe on a daily basis. many of our students’ concerns stem from a much larger set of problems that often are transnational in scope, as illustrated by the existence of global initiatives (e.g., v-day, the movement to end all violence against women and girls). borrowing from enloe ( ), i ask students to investigate how the personal is political and international. the course carries international studies and urban studies credit and fulfills a general requirement that students participate in activities that connect the classroom and the world. it has no prerequisites and is open to all. enrollment is capped at to keep the logistics manageable. students are placed in organiza- tions that serve and empower refugee families, migrants, latinx communities, and people in situations of homelessness. they are required to submit a community-based–learning agreement, participate in any required orientations and training sessions, create a work schedule with their site supervisor, keep track of their hours, and write a community-based–learning log. in addi- tion, students engage in extensive, structured reflections about experiences in their site placements to facilitate connections to our course materials and linkages between the local and the global. specifically, they write papers on their goals and expec- tations for community-based learning, issues of importance to community partners, and activist and advocacy strategies (assignment guidelines are in the appendix). i adjust the course workload to accommodate time spent in the community: i do not administer the usual midterm and final examinations; nor do i assign a longer research paper. it is vital to dedicate time in the first part of the course to pre- pare students for successful community engagement. we discuss diversity and intercultural competence, empathy, and humility. i caution against swooping into an organization with aspirations of “fixing” everything. we also read several chapters of stoecker, tryon, and hilgendorf ’s ( ) the unheard voices: community organizations and service learning, which provides a wealth of insight into partnerships that are genuinely reciprocal and mutually beneficial. later, i facilitate structured reflections dur- ing several class sessions in both small and large groups. these discussions allow students to share experiences at their work sites, challenges that have arisen (and how they overcame those obstacles), special opportunities, and benefits of working there. we ask whether their experiences connect with the overseas cases of activism that we examine and if they align with any of the social-movement theories, conceptual tools, and empirical find- ings discussed in class (discussion questions are in the appendix). engagement with community partners supports several learn- ing objectives. students apply social-movement theories to real- life situations and develop a better understanding of activists and the communities they seek to empower. importantly, they gain intercultural competence through their work with diverse com- munities. students increasingly view themselves as members of a larger community that exists both locally and globally (colby et al. ). by “immersing themselves in a real-world environ- ment,” students see the “complexity of situations faced by the people with whom they interact” and the relevance of broader issues “globally and locally, in theory and in practice” (krain and nurse , ). additionally, service learning promotes an “understanding of the engaged role individuals must play if com- munities and democracies are to flourish” (zlotkowski , ). political scientists obviously have a stake in debates surrounding citizenship and civic engagement. it is surprising, however, that service-learning courses remain “outside of mainstream political science departmental offerings” (dicklitch , ). in particu- lar, community-engaged–learning experiences in comparative politics and international relations courses are not extensively documented. political scientists who have experimented with community- based learning bring different perspectives on engaged citizenship to their courses. some implement service learning to underscore the importance of public service and enhance the welfare of the community. patterson ( ) required students of international relations to work with a refugee resettlement ngo and to pack- age household items for donating to a refugee family. the project encourages students to “value and practice responsible global citizenship” through their interactions with the families (patterson , ). in contrast, walker ( ) wondered if directly helping another person is the most effective way to make a difference in one’s community. walker ( , ) challenged those who regard ser- vice as a “morally superior alternative” to other forms of political engagement. if students conceptualize civic engagement merely as an individual-level mode of action, “[t]hey are not necessarily challenging institutions in power. feeding the hungry does noth- ing to disrupt or rethink poverty or injustice” (walker , ). robinson ( , ) also lamented the relative absence of activ- ities designed to address the structural roots of social problems and encourage political organizing more explicitly. supporters of service learning harbor apolitical views: they prefer to “channel students into narrowly defined, direct-service, therapeutic activ- ities” geared toward “needy populations”; service learning risks becoming “a glorified welfare system.” before teaching the social-movements course, i was mindful of these critiques and concerned that many potential community organizations in my city were positioned on the “helping-the- needy” end of the spectrum. i ask students to engage with these debates at the beginning of the course, and we revisit them all semester. early on, we draw from westheimer and kahne’s ( ) framework, which contrasts personally responsible, participatory, and justice-oriented modes of citizenship. table summarizes one of my primary responsibilities as a comparativist is to underscore how pressing challenges facing communities and college campuses all over the country—combating racial discrimination, sexual violence and misconduct, and economic injustice, for instance—are issues that mobilize activists around the globe on a daily basis. ps • october ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... their three proposed categories. throughout the semester, stu- dents must grapple with these debates and the contending approaches toward social action found within their community sites and within themselves. are they “helpers” lending a hand to someone “in need,” advocates for policy change, or “rebels” chal- lenging systemic injustices (training for change )? my job is to give students the conceptual tools they need to think through these issues and to encourage open dialogue without privileging a certain mode of action. over time, many students perceive changes in themselves and/or within their community organizations. individuals who at first identify with the personally-responsible-citizen description frequently move toward the justice-oriented perspective (and vice versa). similarly, students who initially view themselves as “rebels” eventually may gain a greater appreciation for service providers and “helpers.” meanwhile, students with an affinity for the “helper” role sometimes find themselves questioning the ade- quacy of such an approach by the end of the semester. the course entails several forms of assessment. as the semes- ter concludes, site supervisors evaluate each student’s progress toward the goals agreed on in the community-based–learning agreement and assess their overall work performance, profession- alism, dependability, ability to complete projects, and ability to communicate and cooperate with team members. students also have the opportunity to evaluate their community-based–learning experiences and the course. the feedback from the latest ver- sion of the course, taught in fall , indicated that students are more willing to get involved in advocacy, activism, and/or service work in the future, as follows: % responded that they were more likely to get involved ( . % indicated that they were “much more likely”); . % described their progress toward gain- ing knowledge about different activist communities both within the united states and overseas as “substantial” or “exceptional”; % described their progress toward gaining knowledge about problems and issues that activists tackle in local, national, and/ or overseas communities as “substantial” or “exceptional”; and . % described their progress toward developing intercultural competence that allows for meaningful interaction with a diver- sity of people and communities as “substantial” or “exceptional.” in short, students reported significant progress toward the course’s learning objectives. i would be remiss, however, if i failed to mention downsides of teaching or enrolling in the class. one challenge is the academic calendar that marks our time as profes- sors and students. semester-long experiences rarely coincide with the amount of time needed to complete meaningful projects within partner organizations. a few of my students—especially those who had worked closely with refugee families—indicated their interest in continuing at their sites. however, many had other plans, includ- ing studying abroad, doing service work elsewhere, graduating, and starting new jobs. by the end of the term, we all had a sinking feeling that we were somehow abandoning our posts and disappointing our partners. moreover, existing scholarship frequently notes the extra resources and effort that community-engaged teaching entails. if one’s home campus lacks a teaching and learning (or community- engagement) center, the process can be even more burdensome. faculty who integrate service learning and similar activities into their courses spend more than the typical amount of preparation time arranging, accommodating, coordinating, readjusting, and mentoring. implementing these pedagogies requires a level of com- mitment that many instructors are not able or willing to give. the obstacles are not insurmountable. existing literature advises faculty to connect service learning to their scholarly agen- das (furco ). when i first offered the course in , i had researched civil society and social movements for almost years; early on, we draw from westheimer and kahne’s ( ) framework, which contrasts personally responsible, participatory, and justice-oriented modes of citizenship. t a b l e kinds of citizens personally responsible citizen participatory citizen justice-oriented citizen description acts responsibly in his/her community works and pays taxes obeys laws recycles gives blood volunteers to lend a hand in times of crisis active member of community organizations and/or improvement efforts organizes community efforts to care for those in need, promote economic development, or clean up environment knows how government agencies work knows strategies for accomplishing collective tasks critically assesses social, political, and economic structures to see beyond surface causes seeks out and addresses areas of injustice knows about social movements and how to effect systemic change sample action contributes food to a food drive helps organize a food drive explores why people are hungry and acts to solve root causes core assumptions to solve social problems and improve society, citizens must have good character; they must be honest, responsible, and law-abiding members of the community to solve social problems and improve society, citizens must actively participate and take leadership positions within established systems and community structures to solve social problems and improve society, citizens must question and change established systems and structures when they reproduce patterns of injustice over time source: westheimer and kahne ( ). ps • october ......................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................... t h e te a c h e r : c o m m u n i t y - e n g a g e d c o m p a r a t i v e p o l i t i c s however, during my years as a professor, i had never offered an elective on those topics. needless to say, i was motivated to do so. additionally, as noted at the outset, the broader aims of the course align with my institution’s service-oriented culture. the college location in a major metropolitan area is obviously a key asset. i also benefited from the help and encouragement of numerous faculty, staff, and members of the memphis community. most important, the students are definitely up to the task. they have embraced the challenge of combining experiential learning with comparative, theoretical, and intersectional modes of analysis. they work enthusiastically in their organizations. they make a difference in the lives of individuals and the broader community. students gain an appreciation for (and a stronger understanding of ) different modes of political action and contending models of citizenship. in the process, they become more aware of the many possibilities that exist for them to effect change at local, national, and global levels. students also grapple with the “moral and civic dimensions” of social and political issues (colby et al. , xxvi). it is necessary for all participants in the course to put their knowledge and values into dialogue with each other. this dialogue is integral to a liberal arts education. as cronon ( , ) observed, “[t]ruly educated people love learning, but they love wisdom more…. they understand that knowledge serves values, and they strive to put knowledge and values into constant dialogue with each other.” supplementary material to view supplementary material for this article, please visit https://doi.org/ . /s acknowledgments this project would not have been possible without the mellon foundation’s support of faculty development at rhodes college. specifically, a grant titled “supporting academic innovation in a liberal arts setting” funded a faculty innovation fellowship, which i received in . i developed the course discussed in this article with considerable help from members of the mellon inno- vation fellows steering committee; the faculty and staff involved in the community of practice; and two student fellows, kirkwood vangeli and dominique defreece. i am grateful for the support and encouragement that elizabeth thomas, shannon hoffman, and elizabeth poston provided. mostly, i am indebted to the stu- dents who enrolled in the course and the community partners who welcomed them into their organizations. thanks also to organizers of the apsa teaching and learning conference (february – ) in baltimore, where i presented a longer version of this analysis. n r e f e r e n c e s colby, anne, et al. . “introduction.” in civic responsibility and higher education, ed. thomas ehrlich, xxi–xlii. westport, ct: the american council on education and the oryx press. cronon, william. . “‘only connect’: the goals of a liberal education.” the key reporter, winter – , ( ): – . dicklitch, susan. . “blending cognitive, affective, and effective learning in civic engagement courses: the case of human rights–human wrongs.” in teaching civic engagement: from student to active citizen, ed. alison rios millett mccartney, elizabeth a. bennion, and dick simpson, . washington, dc: american political science association. enloe, cynthia. . “the mundane matters.” international political sociology ( ): – . furco, andrew. . “institutionalising service learning in higher education.” in higher education and civic engagement: international perspectives, ed. lorraine mcilrath and iain maclabhrainn, – . aldershot, england: ashgate. krain, matthew, and anne nurse. . “teaching human rights through service learning.” human rights quarterly ( ): – . patterson, amy s. . “it’s a small world: incorporating service learning into international relations courses.” ps: political science & politics ( ): – . rhodes, college . “community service.” available at www.rhodes.edu/student- life/get-involved/activities-organizations/community-service (accessed march , ). robinson, tony. . “service learning as justice advocacy: can political scientists do politics?” ps: political science & politics ( ): – . stoecker, randy, elizabeth tryon, and amy hilgendorf. . the unheard voices: community organizations and service learning. philadelphia: temple university press. training for change. . “tornado warning: four roles of social change.” available at www.trainingforchange.org/training_tools/tornado-warning-four-roles-of- social-change (accessed january , ). walker, tobi. . “the service/politics split: rethinking service to teach political engagement.” ps: political science & politics ( ): – . westheimer, joel, and joseph kahne. . “educating the ‘good’ citizen: political choices and pedagogical goals.” ps: political science & politics ( ): – . zlotkowski, edward. . “the case for service learning.” in higher education and civic engagement: international perspectives, ed. lorraine mcilrath and iain maclabhrainn, . aldershot, england: ashgate. https://doi.org/ . /s http://www.rhodes.edu/student-life/get-involved/activities-organizations/community-service http://www.rhodes.edu/student-life/get-involved/activities-organizations/community-service http://www.trainingforchange.org/training_tools/tornado-warning-four-roles-of-social-change http://www.trainingforchange.org/training_tools/tornado-warning-four-roles-of-social-change envisioning a democratic culture of difference: feminist ethics and the politics of dissent in social movements vachhani, s. j. ( ). envisioning a democratic culture of difference: feminist ethics and the politics of dissent in social movements. journal of business ethics, , - . https://doi.org/ . /s - - - publisher's pdf, also known as version of record license (if available): cc by link to published version (if available): . /s - - - link to publication record in explore bristol research pdf-document this is the final published version of the article (version of record). it first appeared online via springer nature at https://link.springer.com/article/ . /s - - - . please refer to any applicable terms of use of the publisher. university of bristol - explore bristol research general rights this document is made available in accordance with publisher policies. please cite only the published version using the reference above. full terms of use are available: http://www.bristol.ac.uk/red/research-policy/pure/user-guides/ebr-terms/ https://doi.org/ . /s - - - https://doi.org/ . /s - - - https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/publications/daf e c - ae - e a- c - c f c https://research-information.bris.ac.uk/en/publications/daf e c - ae - e a- c - c f c vol.:( ) journal of business ethics https://doi.org/ . /s - - - o r i g i n a l pa p e r envisioning a democratic culture of difference: feminist ethics and the politics of dissent in social movements sheena j. vachhani received: july / accepted: december © the author(s) abstract using two contemporary cases of the global #metoo movement and uk-based collective sisters uncut, this paper argues that a more in-depth and critical concern with gendered difference is necessary for understanding radical democratic ethics, one that advances and develops current understandings of business ethics. it draws on practices of social activism and dissent through the context of irigaray’s later writing on democratic politics and ziarek’s analysis of dissensus and democracy that proceeds from an emphasis on alterity as the capacity to transform nonappropriative self-other relations. therefore, the aims of the paper are: (i) to develop a deeper understanding of a culture of difference and to consider sexual difference as central to the development of a practical democratic ethics and politics of organizations; (ii) to explore two key cases of contemporary feminist social movements that demonstrate connected yet contrasting examples of how feminist politics develops through an appreciation of embodied, intercorporeal differences; and (iii) to extend insights from irigaray and ziarek to examine ways in which a practical democratic politics proceeding from an embodied ethics of difference forms an important advancement to theorising the connection between ethics, dissent and democracy. keywords alterity · democracy · difference · feminism · feminist ethics · irigaray · radical politics · gender · ziarek introduction whilst the field of business ethics and corporate social responsibility (csr) have made strides in considering gen- der, grosser and moon ( ) note there is rarely explicit reference or substantive exploration of feminist theory to understand gendered differences and issues in business eth- ics. as borgerson ( , p.  ) attests, “feminist ethics has been consistently overlooked, misunderstood, and improp- erly applied within business ethics and corporate social responsibility”. feminist ethics offers rich theoretical and conceptual resources for understanding and representing diverse interests, effectively critiquing corporate business ethics, corporate sovereignty and offering alternative forms of ethics for organizations (burton and dunn ; liedtka ; rhodes ) by exploring the intersections between relationships, responsibility and experience (borgerson ). in particular, these perspectives offer insight into the politics of difference, namely how gendered differences are constructed and how they enable and constrain the dynamics of corporate power and privilege in organizations (karam and jamali ). to translate this further into organizational terms, femi- nist ethics and politics offer ways of disturbing organiza- tions, pushing beyond constructed categories assigned to us, such as gender, race and class, and engaging in a politics of disturbance of organizational order “through critique, resistance and opposition to the self-interested sovereignty of business and to the pretense of corporate immutability in the name of capitalism” (rhodes , p.  ). importantly, this provides a practical ethics for understanding dynam- ics of oppression and discrimination that go beyond nar- rowly defined and reductive notions of gender in mainstream business ethics and corporate social responsibility literature, such as the focus on instrumental approaches to women’s empowerment, gender equality and corporate leadership (grosser and moon ; grosser and mccarthy ). this paper thus contributes to debates around democracy and business ethics by showing how dissent, in the form of activist, grassroots organizations, collectives and networks, * sheena j. vachhani s.vachhani@bristol.ac.uk department of management, school of economics, finance and management, university of bristol, howard house, queens avenue, bristol bs   sd, uk https://orcid.org/ - - - x http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf s. j. vachhani representing different individuals and groups are able to effectively resist and how feminist movements rethink gen- der, race and class differences and the challenges this entails. “this ethics finds practical purchase in forms of dissent that redirect power away from centres of organized wealth and capital, returning it to its democratically rightful place with the people, with society” (rhodes , p.  ). a practi- cal, democratic business ethics on this basis is where the actions and practices of social justice groups hold institu- tions and corporations to account and challenge and disrupt corporate sovereignty (rhodes ). the theoretical critique developed here draws on the feminist philosophy of luce irigaray and ewa plonowska ziarek whose work on dissensus and radical democracy offers important theoretical perspectives for a practical and gendered, democratic organizational politics. irigaray sees “the contemporary ethical project as a recall to dif- ference, rather than equality, to difference between women and men—that is, sexual difference” (fermon , p.  ). irigaray contends that overlooking the symbolic organization of power (fermon ) reifies the subordinated position of the feminine and if democracy is to be real, considera- tion needs to be given to the status of women in democratic thinking rather than recourse to a universalised, masculine subject of democracy. ziarek ( , p.  ) develops and extends irigaray’s concern for a radical female imaginary and operationalises the idea that, although women have won the formal rights of citi- zenship in western democracies, the liberal discourse of rights has not yet been transformed to express a culture of sexual difference. without a culture of dif- ference constructed within the larger horizon of eco- nomic equality, women, irigaray argues, are caught in a double bind between ‘the minimum of social rights they can obtain…and the psychological or physical price they have to pay for that minimum’. in this sense, irigaray and ziarek both enable the devel- opment of a practical democratic ethics whereby “women under these conditions require imaginative ways to recon- figure the self, to subvert the melancholy and regression of masculinist economies and envisage a future in which women would not be ashamed of the feminine, would expe- rience it as a positivity worth emulating” (fermon , p.  ). in light of the challenges many women face to be heard and the effects economic cuts have on the most vul- nerable, women’s democratic participation, modes of dis- sent and the complexities surrounding women’s differences continue to be an important and necessary conversation for advancing ethical debates. therefore, the contributions of the paper are: (i) to develop a deeper understanding of the politics of differ- ence and to consider sexual difference as central to the development of a democratic business ethics and politics of organizations; (ii) to explore two key cases of contempo- rary women’s social activism that demonstrate connected yet contrasting examples for how feminist politics develop through an appreciation of embodied, intercorporeal dif- ferences and a commitment to holding organizations and institutions to account built on a nonappropriative relation to the other (pullen and rhodes ; ziarek ), namely the recent global #metoo movement (see tyler ; vach- hani and pullen ) and sisters uncut collective, a uk- based direct action collective; and (iii) to extend insights from irigaray and ziarek to examine ways in which a radical democratic politics proceeding from an embodied ethics of difference forms an important advancement to theorising the connection between ethics, dissent and democracy. the paper is structured as follows: firstly, the politics of difference are explored and the implications this has for thinking about dissensus, resistance and activism. this is done in the context of business ethics and csr and outlines the importance of considering sexual difference. following this, irigaray’s ethics of sexual difference (irigaray a) and ziarek’s ethics of dissensus are developed as a way of rethinking the possibilities of democratic engagement with sexual difference at its heart. ziarek challenges and builds on irigaray’s work to suggest that a more radicalized view is needed if sexual difference still has a political future and ethical relevance for feminism. two important examples of grassroots, social activist groups are then discussed that illustrate feminist activism based on recognition and embod- ied ethics of difference. the paper ends by offering a series of observations for developing a democratic culture of dif- ference and what this brings to democratic business ethics (rhodes ) that furthers our understanding of ethics, dis- sensus and radical democracy. the politics of difference—conceptualising gender differences and sexual difference in the context of dissent, ethics and democracy feminist, poststructuralist approaches in particular high- light ways in which categories of the feminine and femi- nine subjectivity and difference become subordinated and constructed in relation to masculine subjectivity (irigaray a). this subordination of the feminine raises crucial ethical questions that foreground discussions of democratic ethics and feminist politics, namely: what political future(s), if any, does sexual difference have? (cheah and grosz , p.  ). what is contended here is that the politics of differ- ence, especially sexual difference, has not been sufficiently attended to in the ethics literature and that feminist ethics, envisioning a democratic culture of difference: feminist ethics and the politics of dissent… through irigaray and ziarek, enriches a reflexive rethinking of dissent and democratic action in organizations. how difference is constructed in business ethics and csr literature is intimately related to positions of power and needs to be understood in relation to the political and social contexts in which organizations function (grosser ; grosser and moon ; karam and jamali ; keenan et al. ). for example, gender equality and wom- en’s empowerment have become popularised as corporate ethical discourses and as part of mainstream csr agendas, mobilised in terms of competitive advantage and legiti- mised by the business case, namely economic arguments for improving profitability of organizations (grosser and moon ; grosser ). this agenda has been limiting and conceives of gender difference in narrow, reductive terms and the rise of corporate power and corporate discourses of gender equity provides challenges to feminist movements working to resist these reductive discourses (grosser and mccarthy ). critiques of corporate business ethics and managerial discourses suggest that differences between individuals and groups are constructed and brought into being in order to be appropriated (zanoni et al. ). tyler ( , p.  ) notes these reificatory processes render lived multiplicity, differ- ence and intersectional complexity knowable and therefore manageable categories and characteristics ready to be co- opted as organizational resources. thus, difference can be defined as “those points of disidentification and dissimi- larity that come to be experienced or perceived as socially, politically and ethically significant” (tyler , p.  ) that manifest through context-specific processes (zanoni et al. ) and which reflect, sustain or transform relations of power. within and evolving from these debates has been a con- cern with sexual difference (fotaki et al. ; oseen ; pullen and vachhani ; vachhani ) that questions the philosophical, political, practical and social basis on which gender differences are demarcated and constructed within the context of phallocratic and patriarchal culture, namely the prevalence of a singular, hegemonic masculine subject as opposed to a welcoming otherness or alterity (fermon ). the latter is premised on an inter-corporeal understanding of alterity as situated within embodied rela- tions of mutual vulnerability and ethical openness (pullen and rhodes ; dale and latham ). in grosz’s terms, “sexual difference entails the existence of a sexual ethics, an ethics of the ongoing negotiations between beings whose differences, whose alterities, are left intact but with whom some kind of exchange is nonetheless possible” (grosz , p.  ). thus, what becomes important are the lived, social dimensions of sexual difference, not as biological differences between bodies but as the ontological status of the sexed body. irigaray and an ethics of sexual difference irigaray’s work has been explored in management and organization studies to consider the conceptual potential of a feminist psychoanalytic approach to gendered and sexual differences across a variety of contexts such as leadership, academia and writing practices (fotaki ; fotaki et al. ; pullen and vachhani ; vachhani ). fotaki ( , ) shows how sameness and difference become reinforced in academia by masculine discourses that centre around the presence or absence of the phallus that suggests the existence of a singular, hegemonic masculine subject that is unable to recognise a feminine subject. oseen ( ) and pullen and vachhani ( ) challenge corporate women’s leadership discourses in order to enable the creation of “a space for women other than as imitation men or excavated women” (oseen , p.  ). in comparison, vachhani ( ) discusses sexual dif- ference by addressing ethical and political dilemmas of the subordination of the feminine in organizations. recent discussions turn to irigaray to write differently using femi- nine writing or feminist écriture, that does not suppress and conceal possibilities for understanding difference as a rec- ognition of the feminine (fotaki et al. ; höpfl ; vachhani ). this approach insists on the transformative and activist potential of feminine writing one that offers a practical politics for changing organizations. despite these advances, less attention has been paid to irigaray’s later work that focuses attention on civil rights, responsibilities and democracies. je, tu, nous (iriga- ray. b), thinking the difference (irigaray ), and democracy begins between two (irigaray b), in par- ticular, draw on the development and practical implications of a theory of sexual difference for feminist politics, sexed rights and democratic culture (ziarek ). debates sur- rounding the politics of difference have arguably paid more attention to differences between groups which have resulted in the problematic homogenisation of identity and culture of any group to which particular or special rights might be ascribed (deutscher ; see ashcraft ; grosser ; tyler ). as hekman ( , p.  ) discusses, a culture of difference involves the idea that differences involve power and, “if we challenge those differences by asserting their opposites, the challenge is necessarily parasitic on the dif- ference itself, not an escape from it.” drawing on michele le doeuff, deutscher ( , p.  ) explains that “respect for cultural and sexual difference is regularly selective, oppor- tunist, and cynical”. thus, for irigaray amongst others, sameness and difference need to be reconceived in order to pursue an ethical recognition of political, social and demo- cratic difference to enable social change. irigaray’s work is important in this regard as she argues for a culture of differ- ence for ‘a self-defined woman who would not be satisfied s. j. vachhani with sameness, but whose otherness and difference would be given social and symbolic representation” (whitford , pp.  – ; irigaray a; martin ) and endorse “politi- cal equality while maintaining concerns about its terms” (deutscher , p.  ). it is important to note critiques of irigaray’s work which have primarily centred around being read as essentialist, elitist and inaccessible (whitford ; deutscher ). despite these critiques, many have read irigaray’s meto- nymic and poetic writing as figurative rather than literal such that charges of biological essentialism are seen more as a strategic, rhetorical gesture to instal the embodied feminine subject into the text rather than a reflection of biological femininity or womanhood (fuss ; whitford ; vach- hani ). taking what fuss calls ‘the risk of essentialism’, that one could argue is largely tactical, irigaray attempts to inscribe difference and conjure up an ‘other woman’. butler ( , p.  ) notes that “irigaray’s task is to reconcile nei- ther the form/matter distinction nor the distinctions between bodies and souls or matter and meaning. rather, her effort is to show that those binary oppositions are formulated through the exclusion of a field of disruptive possibilities… those binaries, even in their reconciled mode, are part of a phallogocentric economy that produces the ‘feminine’ as its constitutive outside”. thought of in this way, an ethics of sexual difference cre- ates new conditions for the articulation of difference (gatens ) in the context of business ethics rather than invoking a monolithic, binary notion of gendered differences between men and women that reasserts or re-inscribes essentialist presumptions or reproduces gendered stereotypes. this calls for emphasis on the fluidity of sexual difference alongside race, class and other differences where such a construction requires an openness to alterity in the context of democracy (weiss ; ziarek ). fermon ( , p.  ) writes that “irigaray warns that if civil and political participation is construed in overly narrow terms, if focus is on economic or judicial ‘circuits’ alone, we overlook the symbolic organi- zation of power—women risk losing ‘everything without even being acknowledged’”. instead an interval of recogni- tion, which concerns how alterity is not about subsuming the other, can expand the political and include the concerns and activities of different groups of women (fermon ), through democratic organizational practices and settings such as social movements. recognition in this sense is the “embodied, practical and cooperative character of the self- other relation” (harding et al. , p.  , also cited in tyler p. ) generated through embodied practice. in democracy begins between two, irigaray’s ( b) concern is how to operationalise this approach to sexual difference and situate it within social [and organizational] practice. she initiated a working collaboration with the commission for equal opportunities in emilia-romagna, italy to challenge civic rights, citizenship and otherness. this enables rethinking dissent and resistance as demo- cratic engagement and action in the following way: how women’s movements centre around challenging different forms of political life and their related power relations and values, are about modifying women’s status within democ- racy. however, “when these same movements aim simply for a change in the distribution of power, leaving intact the power structure itself, they are resubjecting themselves, deliberately or not, to a phallocratic order. the latter ges- ture must of course be denounced, and with determination, since it may constitute a more subtly concealed exploitation of women.” (irigaray b, p.  ; irigaray a). this approach aims to challenge the context and framework of difference to reconceptualise its bounds and rethink a model of subjectivity (irigaray b). it also provides important insight into the way in which difference can be tactically, reflexively mobilised in a rethinking of radical democracy in the context of organizational ethics. ziarek develops this point in irigaray’s work to argue for an ethics of dissensus to which i now turn. ziarek and an ethics of dissensus if culture, under patriarchy, is concerned with the existence of one subject, the logic of the one and the feminine as its shadow of the other, then a radicalized feminine symbolic or female imaginary must, in part, suspend this state. sexual difference is then not the positive recovery of truth but “an articulation of the disjunctive temporality characteristic of the emergence of the new modes of life” (ziarek , p.  ), new imaginary and symbolic identifications that offer the opportunity for change, which can be seen in the cases discussed below. therefore, what is at stake is an eth- ics and politics of recognition, proceeding from an embod- ied, tactical mobilisation of difference. irigaray brings this to the fore by claiming a space for a radical female imaginary (ziarek ; dale ) which is developed and extended by ziarek ( ). ziarek’s ( , p.  ) development of an ethics of dissen- sus refers to the “irreducible dimension of antagonism and power in discourse, embodiment, and democratic politics” where “an ethics of dissensus does not transcend politi- cal and subjective antagonisms…but rather articulates the difficult role of responsibility and freedom in democratic struggles against racist and sexist oppression” (ziarek , p.  ). ethics can be read as the dilemma between freedom, responsibility and obligation and, for ziarek, an ethics that concerns an “ethos of becoming” and “ethos of alterity” which lead not only to a nonappropriative relation to the other, as levinas argues (see rhodes ), but considers how obligation based on respect for such an alterity and accountability for the other “can motivate resistance and envisioning a democratic culture of difference: feminist ethics and the politics of dissent… the invention of…new modes of life” (ziarek , p.  ). thus, freedom can be redefined as relational and understood through the ethical and political significance of sexuality and embodiment “as an engagement in transformative praxis motivated by the obligation for the other” (ziarek , p.  ) that moves us beyond the binary relation of freedom and responsibility. ziarek’s work is of importance here for business ethics literature because it seeks to understand ethics as a contested terrain in a way that does not occlude the role of sexual and racial differences. to summarise, rather than seeking ethical resolution or resolving antagonistic relations of power, eth- ics concern embodied relations of dissent that can motivate resistance and an attention to alterity that results in a non- appropriative, nonviolent relation to the other. this results in seeing ethics as a contested terrain, one that contests the disembodied notion and universalising tendencies of democratic citizenship and addresses the tensions “between ethical responsibility for the other and democratic strug- gles against domination, injustice, and inequality, on the one hand, and internal conflicts within the subject, on the other” (ziarek , p.  ). an ethics of dissensus is thus about how we account for the plurality and conflicts of irreduc- ible differences such as class, race and gender which form a more suitable basis for understanding radical democracy and the antagonisms and dissent that it depends on. bell hooks ( , cited in ziarek , p.  ) notes that critiquing the universal democratic citizen is not the rejection of common bonds or commonality “but that we want to find the basis of commonality in something other than a notion of shared experience or common oppression”. to distinguish ziarek and irigaray further, ziarek cri- tiques irigaray’s inability to address the antagonistic dif- ference among women to draw on a broader, more radical- ized notion of sexual difference, one that is more dynamic and open to transformation. such a theory enables thinking about sexual difference in futural terms and “as a condition of becoming” (ziarek , p.  ; pullen et al. ). using irigaray’s conceptualisation of the negative, ziarek refers to the work of “disappropriation,” where “the assump- tion of sexual difference reveals the limits of the symbolic positions rather than an identification with a positive identity” (ziarek , p.  ). the labour of the negative entails how we are never the whole of the subject: “i is never simply mine in that it belongs to a gender…i am objectively limited by this belonging. the reluctance to recognize the importance of sexual difference seems to me to derive from this negative in the self and for the self it entails.” (irigaray , p.  ). in this sense, irigaray engages in a politics of impossible differ- ence (deutscher ) where the negative is “the condition of the actualization of the negative in the subject—what she calls ‘taking the negative upon oneself’” and “reveals the internal division and self-limitation of the sexed subject” (ziarek , p.  ). this marks sexual difference not as a universalised particularity but where “the assumption of sexual difference reveals the limits of the symbolic positions rather than an iden- tification with a positive identity” (ziarek , p.  ). this recognition of the negative means challenging stereotypes of gender, race and class and ‘norms’ that become naturalised and homogenised in pursuit of a universal democratic subject. so, it is not simply the recognition of the rights of women to construct their own political identities, as advocated by iri- garay, but a broader and more fundamental contestation of the abstract and universalizing subject of liberal citizenship. this echoes nancy fraser’s notion of political justice, which combines the politics of redistribution, such as economic redis- tribution, with the cultural claims of difference (ziarek ). negative or impossible sexual difference must become radi- calized and foregrounded such that “’the impossible’—contra- dictions, conflicts, incompletion—in the formation of all iden- tities, the labor of the negative in sexual difference prevents the reification of the existing gender and racial stereotypes into political or ‘natural’ norms, thus opening the possibility of their refiguration” (ziarek , pp.  – ). this radical- ized view focuses not on the transformation of existing gender identities which would reproduce heterosexual, middle-class subjectivities as political norms but emphasises the impossible as the limit of all political positions (ziarek ). thus, the ways in which proliferating differences become reified into disembodied political subjects is of crucial ethical concern if we are to advance a democratic business ethics (rhodes ) based on restoring democratic action and dissent to individuals and groups that challenge the corporate status quo. having explored a number of theoretical claims around difference, notably sexual difference through irigaray and ziarek, the next section explains the methodology and two cases, the global #metoo movement and uk-based direct action collective sisters uncut, to suggest that a democratic feminist ethics built on the nonappropriative relation to the other emerges out of contemporary feminist, social activist movements and from this we can learn lessons for under- standing a radicalized sexual difference. feminist activism furthers our understanding and potential for radical demo- cratic organizational practices. this is premised on an inter- corporeal understanding of alterity situated within embod- ied relations of mutual vulnerability and ethical openness (pullen and rhodes ; dale ) and centralises the ethical and political significance of gendered readings of democracy. methodological engagement this paper draws on empirical sources from two illustrative cases of feminist, social movements, using online sources such as websites, news stories, online interviews with key s. j. vachhani individuals and commentaries to explore unique and contem- porary examples of social activism from grassroots move- ments. such a “methodology of dissent” exemplifies aspects of radical democracy and an ethics of dissent explored in the theoretical discussion above in complementary and contrasting ways. this methodological approach has also been termed a “netnography” (kozinets ), which uses social science methods to explore the lived experiences of individuals and the ways in which online communities and networks create “networked sociality”. combining elements of ethnography and social media research, the aim of net- nography is to understand how “individuals joined into net- works partake in a complex world that not only reflects and reveals their lived experiences but is also, itself, a unique social phenomenon” (kozinets , p.  ). it focuses atten- tion on new social forms advanced by online, virtual spaces of social interaction and what they make possible (kozinets , p.  ), combining archival and online communications. online access to social interaction “demonstrates an evolving ecosystem of social and individual data and cap- tured and emergent communications” and “netnography is positioned somewhere between the vast searchlights of big data analysis and the close readings of discourse analysis’ (kozinets , p.  ). this approach demonstrates the con- tested and shifting notions of community and collectives that underpin social movements and the potential for empower- ing and self-reflexive research designs in feminist research (lather ; harding ). i draw on elements of this approach to surface contentions, contradictions and tensions in feminist politics by analysing empirical sources from the online presence of feminist social movements. this provides a sense of their practices and how they enable rethinking dissent and protest, analysed through an awareness of sexual difference and in light of tensions in the shift from protest to engagement with the state and other institutions that many feminist social movements face (walby ). the analysis below offers narrative fragments and inter- pretations, not with the intention to present either illus- trative case as an homogenous collective of voices but to use accounts, narrations and stories of their development into collectives as important sites of democratic action and engagement, contexts that are often neglected in discussions in business ethics and csr. this involves recognition of dif- ferent spaces of dissent and resistance and the fluid bounda- ries between spaces of activism—visible protests, online communication and virtual communities. such an approach also necessitates exploring supportive and contradictory accounts; collaboration and contestation that shapes feminist social activism (see just and muhr , for a methodologi- cal discussion of studying the women’s march). the cases were chosen for being prominent feminist and intersectional movements: #metoo as an example of a global phenomenon facilitated by its media presence and use of social media to organize (see ozkazanc-pan ); and sisters uncut for its focus on resistance against austerity at a national level in the uk, using local consensus-driven practices of demo- cratic engagement. the analysis below combines accounts of online and physical sociality in response to resisting sexual and gendered violence. it explores embodied relations in the form of visible events, imagery and iconography and the organizational dynamics and processes of ethical delibera- tion and democratic action. the #metoo movement and sisters uncut— dissent in action at global and national levels to develop the first case, the recent #metoo movement has advanced a global platform for feminist politics (ozkazanc- pan ). #metoo gained momentum in as an inter- national movement against assault and harassment and its global presence has made it an important example of femi- nist activism and politics. devised as a grassroots campaign by tarana burke in , the movement has been mobi- lised into consciousness raising and social activism aimed to empower women through empathy (see https ://metoo mvmt.org/). as a pro-feminist movement, along with the women’s marches (see tyler ), it is a salient example of globalised feminist politics, with a remit for inclusion and celebration of difference. whilst it can be said that these contemporary movements form part of a longer history of feminist activism (vachhani and pullen ) they also rep- resent new and possibly unique moments in the development of feminist politics. munro ( ) and walby ( ) suggest that we may be in a fourth wave or “circuit” of feminism one that is mobilised by social media and the development of online, networked sociality. the platform #metoo has gained, certainly in the global north, included the presence of a number of social activ- ists at the oscars cefremony and association with a number of high profile women actors and flim directors (see seales ). this demonstrated the movement’s presence in an elite context and world stage. #metoo founder tarana burke along with other feminist activists were named time’s person(s) of the year for their consciousness raising efforts (vachhani and pullen ). the significant profile of the movement has catalysed debates on the backlash, effects and future of #metoo (bennett ). this elicited a number of claims around a shift away from the emphasis on celebrity culture and the media industry, such as the case of harvey weinstein, towards shaping and critiquing cultural and soci- etal narratives that shape behaviour in more varied organi- zational contexts. this entails moving away from focusing on individuals towards more nuanced, meaningful discus- sions of democratic organizational processes and collective https://metoomvmt.org/ https://metoomvmt.org/ envisioning a democratic culture of difference: feminist ethics and the politics of dissent… women’s agency (ozkazanc-pan ) that enables speaking out against harassment and oppression. the purpose of the movement, espoused by burke, has been to promote empathy and solidarity at an individual and collective level and to mobilise social change (see https :// metoo mvmt.org/). central to this claim is that the momen- tum gained by #metoo could change policies and law and promote the development of democratic practices, whether it be re-evaluating sexual harassment policies, destigmatis- ing issues around sexual misconduct in organizations, or addressing policy-based changes around reporting and dis- closure of harassment charges within workplaces. #metoo has raised a series of issues around women’s agency, dif- ference and how one kind of justice can overshadow other injustices. how #metoo relates to racial justice campaigns such as black lives matter and #sayhername for exam- ple, is yet to be extensively studied as a way of working across intersectional concerns in activist movements. rot- tenberg ( , n.p.) explains, for alicia garza, another cofounder of black lives matter, “the importance of ‘me too’ lies in the ‘power of empathy, this power of connec- tion, is really about empowering people to be survivors, to be resilient, and also to make really visible that sexual vio- lence is not about people’s individual actions, that this is a systemic problem’”. however, the public status of #metoo has raised criti- cisms around the groups of women neglected by such cel- ebrated movements. for example, it has been accused of neglecting disenfranchised groups such as incarcerated women. rottenberg ( ) offers another critical perspec- tive, asking “can #metoo go beyond white neoliberal femi- nism?” given its inception in as a grassroots movement aimed to serve sexual assault survivors in underprivileged communities, its resurgence and contemporary shape has been charged with a surprising lack of focus on women from low socio-economic groups. vachhani and pullen ( , p.  ) note, “it might even be that neoliberal feminism has thrived on shaming women to stay silent, fixing themselves rather than working collectively to address institutional and structural sexism and harassment in organizations”. social movements can only offer the possibilities of social change and transformation if they include women of all backgrounds and whilst such movements might create awareness they may not produce the appropriate tools for dialogue and reflection (munar ; vachhani and pullen ). whilst #metoo has built social awareness and change, there are a number of challenges it raises around the politics of empathy (pedwell ), that is who is offered empathy and what effects this has, alongside how to transfer discus- sion from consciousness raising to the institutional envi- ronment (munar ). rottenberg ( , n.p.) notes how #metoo has shifted “debates about workplace norms” and “created new and surprising alliances”. for example, the transnational reach of #metoo prompted a group of women lawyers to offer support to survivors in india, pakistan and bangladesh (hemery and singh ). one lawyer set up #metoo meetups and explained how it offers sisterhood to women and a forum to listen (hemery and singh ). however, the focus on individualism, especially the hero- ism of the individual’s resilience may prevent mobilising people politically and collectively. this risks neglecting socio-economic and cultural structures and disarticulating the systemic nature of gendered and sexual violence (rot- tenberg ). the recent focus on celebrity culture also means its historic roots to focus on low income and women vulnerable to violence have been overwritten. “from the outset, the movement had a very specific therapeutic and political vision that helps explain its affective pull, as well as why women feel empowered when speaking about their painful and often traumatic experiences. as burke puts it: ‘me too’ is about ‘using the power of empathy to stomp out shame.’” (rottenberg , n.p.). the primary tension is how to empower and embolden women to create ethical and responsible dialogue as collec- tives and communities that challenge the language of shame whilst recognising the systemic violence and intersecting systemic oppressions that underpin these acts (ibid ). for example, as flynn ( ) notes, some indigenous cul- tures may not want to speak out for fear of inciting racism or further stereotyping men of their community. the complex dynamics of collective community over individual rights and the transnational dynamics of a complex, global feminist movement illustrate how democratic ethics is a contested terrain; one that engages in an ethics of dissensus as plurality and irreducible differences of class, race and gender (ziarek ). this necessary contestation and deliberation calls for addressing the antagonistic differences between women and sexual difference as a “condition of becoming” (ziarek , p.  ). see https ://black lives matte r.com/. social movements such as #sayhername aim to build a substan- tial social media presence that link race-based justice movements. #sayhername was aimed at resisting police brutality against black women (see http://www.aapf.org/sayhe rname /) and to highlight the mistreatment of black women in the criminal justice system in the united states. art and poetry play a significant role in this movement. a particularly poignant example can be found on the #sayhername website, entitled: ain’t i a woman?": the poetics of #sayhername ( week of action), found at: http://www.aapf.org/sayhe rname -video s- . included in which is the powerful line “i cannot tell if i’ve been frightened to death or frozen alive”. patrisse cullors, a founder of black lives matter, and tarana burke have engaged in conversation about the role of class, gender and race-based activism and the issues they face as activists - see https ://www.youtu be.com/watch ?v=_omi j gknnw . https://metoomvmt.org/ https://metoomvmt.org/ https://blacklivesmatter.com/ http://www.aapf.org/sayhername/ http://www.aapf.org/sayhername-videos- http://www.aapf.org/sayhername-videos- https://www.youtube.com/watch% fv% d_omi jgknnw s. j. vachhani the second case, sisters uncut, is a direct action group against domestic violence that fights against different forms of oppression in the united kingdom. sisters uncut pro- vides a contrast to the #metoo movement which has been criticised for its focus on privileged groups of women. their powerful feministo states that “austerity is a political choice” (http://www.siste rsunc ut.org/femin isto/). formed in by a group of intersectional feminists concerned with trans- forming society their feministo states, as intersectional feminists we understand that a per- son’s individual experience of violence is affected by interconnecting and mutually reinforcing systems of oppression….the systems of power and privilege in our society enable and protect the actions of perpe- trators. this creates a cycle of violence, which can only be broken through transforming society. to those in power, our message is this: your cuts are violent, your cuts are dangerous, and you think that you can get away with them because you have targeted people who you perceive as powerless. we are those people. we are sisters uncut. we will not be silenced. sisters uncut use direct action as a way of revealing struc- tural problems, alternatives and solutions to tackling social issues that take many forms. by occupying spaces, hanging banners to draw attention to social issues, blocking bridges and calling out sexual harassment, “whatever form it takes, its purpose is to be disruptive”. this forms a powerful way of effecting change through dissent and the embodied relations it entails where “even if you don’t see the exact result you want immediately, over time it can contribute to changing the conversation.” (see http://www.siste rsunc ut.org/faqs/) in contrast to #metoo, sisters uncut have engaged in a variety of resistance-based direct action protests aimed at challenging the status of women, such as: hijacking advertis- ing on the london underground to protest cuts to domestic violence services; occupying spaces (such as the visitors centre at holloway women’s prison); flash mobbing south- wark council offices; blocking waterloo bridge to protest cuts to refuge shelters and the disproportionate effects they have on black, disabled and migrant women ; and putting on community festivals. their activities aim to shine light on issues affecting marginalised and vulnerable groups of women. they challenged the prison industrial complex by raising attention to the vulnerability of women at the yarls wood detention centre and reclaimed the visitors centre of holloway prison in (holloway prison was closed in july ) in protest of the erasure of the women who suffered there. the multiple axes of oppression addressed by sisters uncut, and campaigns such as #sayhername, briefly explored above, suggest a radical democracy aimed at embracing the embodied vulnerabilities of difference. sisters uncut arguably offers a more localised and inter- sectional approach than #metoo. their focus on collective, direct action is a way of changing how politics is done, sometimes being labelled as modern suffragettes (o’hagan ). groups have been formed across the country since high profile protests such as lying down on the red carpet at the premiere of the film suffragette (kwai ) and dying trafalgar square fountains blood red (deardon ) alongside key, local achievements such as getting women’s aid reinstated in doncaster (spratt ). this combina- tion of intervening in public spaces and consciousness rais- ing shows how contrasting avenues of democratic action forces people to confront issues and how politics considers women’s issues (spratt , n.p.) aimed at creating greater insight and further action against the austerity cuts, state violence and the effects on different vulnerable groups of women. their aim is to create safe social spaces through values such as community accountability using an accountability toolbox with principles of transformative justice as a way of healing if a sister is harmed (see http://www.siste rsunc ut.org/safer space s/). they organize not around the sharing of particular feminist values but on the desire to campaign for better domestic violence services that recognise particu- lar experiences and needs for women (see http://www.siste rsunc ut.org/faqs/). the groups expressly state no hierarchy or leaders, use dialogue and consensus decision-making aimed to give members an equal say and meet to provide inclusive and supportive survivor-centred spaces for women, nonbinary, agender and gender variant people. whilst there are criticisms of consensus building in relation to the co- optation of marginalised groups, consensus decision-making in this context is used as a practical tool for understanding embodied, ethical relations between individuals in pursuit of social change. this is opposed to consensus building in the context of liberal democracies that aims to elide or silence differences. the ultimate aim of such an ethos is to foster dissensus at the heart of a culture of difference. the approach aims to cultivate and sustain creative and dynamic ways of fostering for a list of news articles on action taken by sisters uncut in pro- test of austerity cuts, see http://www.siste rsunc ut.org/press /. see http://www.gal-dem.com/servi ces-not-sente nces-siste rs-uncut -occup y-hollo way-women s-priso n/ for further details on the activi- ties of sisters uncut and the importance of remembering holloway women’s prison. for further details, see http://www.siste rsunc ut.org/faqs/. see also uk uncut for a related anti-austerity grassroots movement using direct action and civil disobedience: https ://www.ukunc ut.org. uk/about /. http://www.sistersuncut.org/feministo/ http://www.sistersuncut.org/faqs/ http://www.sistersuncut.org/saferspaces/ http://www.sistersuncut.org/saferspaces/ http://www.sistersuncut.org/faqs/ http://www.sistersuncut.org/faqs/ http://www.sistersuncut.org/press/ http://www.gal-dem.com/services-not-sentences-sisters-uncut-occupy-holloway-womens-prison/ http://www.gal-dem.com/services-not-sentences-sisters-uncut-occupy-holloway-womens-prison/ http://www.sistersuncut.org/faqs/ https://www.ukuncut.org.uk/about/ https://www.ukuncut.org.uk/about/ envisioning a democratic culture of difference: feminist ethics and the politics of dissent… discussion, committed to finding solutions that are actively supported (see www.seeds forch ange.org.uk/short conse nsus), in a spirit of creating respectful dialogue between equals using techniques such as active listening, summaris- ing and synthesis to achieve democratic decisions. a “fish- bowl spokescouncil” can be used, especially for large scale decision-making, an approach aimed to spread power for decision-making across small groups rather than concentrat- ing power in the hands of individuals. one member states, “there’s a lot of discussion and it isn’t easy. consensus is a lot harder than voting, straight up democracy or whatever. but, at the end of the day, people are happier in the long run” (spratt , n.p.). one frustration noted by members is how sisters are por- trayed and the co-optation of femininity—“those of us who do the media side of things are really aware of our image and how it has come across—that we are young and female—the media loves to fetishise young women—even when we do our big marches we’ll have a really diverse group of peo- ple—in terms of ages and races—but the pictures that end up being taken and appear in mainstream media are of young, slim, white able-bodied women—that doesn’t reflect all that we are” (spratt , n.p.; see also, charles and wadia ). spratt surmises that this fetishization may stem from how anonymity is par for the course when engaging in direct action and how it is important that no sister gets more credit than another. one member states, “we see a lot of hierar- chies in activism and in politics…it just perpetuates the kind of structure that we are trying to fight against. we are creat- ing the world we want to see through the way we operate” (spratt , n.p.). this approach to democratic action, such as consensus-based approaches to decision-making, are used to challenge individuals vying for power, focusing on the structural problem rather than the individual—“it’s not a challenge to the existing ego problems of politics if we rep- licate the very system that perpetuates it. we stay clear of the structures of traditional politics” and “it shows that it’s the same tactics that need to be used everywhere—direct action.” (spratt , n.p.). spratt shows how inter-gen- erational feminism plays a part with a strong presence of younger feminists passionate about domestic violence cuts and how they have also attracted those who would not have normally considered protest before joining. the focus on direct action and physical presence are core to sisters uncut in contrast with online activism prevalent in contemporary feminism: “but that’s nothing in comparison to being in that room, being in that safe space, taking to the streets, using your body and just being there” (spratt , n.p.). ziarek ( , p.  – ) notes that attention to the contradictions, conflict and incompleteness of identities thus opens up possibilities to reconfigure norms of gender, class and race and challenge the presumption of a universal demo- cratic subject. sisters uncut shows how an intercorporeal understanding of alterity is enabled through embodied rela- tions of dissent, mutual vulnerability and ethical openness (pullen and rhodes ). these two cases demonstrate contrasting yet connected feminist social movements and their related power rela- tions. however, whilst the advancement of women’s rights help to modify women’s status within democracy, they are also at risk of becoming institutionalised or absorbed into existing structures, thus leaving those structures intact and concealing further exploitation of women (irigaray b; walby ). #metoo, as a movement beyond a hashtag, and sisters uncut engage in different forms of democratic ethics that challenge the context and framework for under- standing difference, and more fully appreciate the complexi- ties of women’s differences within the structures they are a part (irigaray b). sisters uncut, in particular, provides insight into ways in which difference can be tactically and reflexively mobilised (tyler ) through collective acts as a rethinking of radical democracy, by using shock, pro- tests and accountability-driven practices. global and local initiatives such as these cases may offer new modes of life, through imaginary and symbolic identifications, as ziarek imagines. this manifests from an ethics of dissensus that recognises irreducible dimensions of power and political and subjective antagonisms (ziarek ). #metoo and sisters uncut demonstrate a commitment to engage in an “ethos of alterity” which transforms practices of dissent informed by an “obligation for the other” (ziarek , p.  ; robinson ). these two cases are connected in their engagement with embodied relations of dissent but offer contrasting contexts and methods by which democratic engagement is achieved to challenge institutional and structural social change. the paper now develops these arguments by examining their relevance for rethinking democratic organizational prac- tices, especially for a democratic business ethics understood through sexual difference. read through the earlier theo- retical discussion of irigaray and ziarek, as fermon ( , p.  ) notes, the strategic challenge of sexual difference is a basis for democratic rights, that “will allow women space and time to generate an economy open to women’s interac- tions with each other, to reach beyond sex-neutral citizen- ship to an open future”. in contrasting and connected ways, see www.seedsforchange.org.uk for an elaboration of techniques used for consensus decision-making in collectives and non-hierar- chical activist groups. in a “fishbowl spokescouncil” groups sit in an outer circle around spokes of a wheel. groups are clustered behind the spokes and spokespeople (or spokes) from each group can feed back to the spokescouncil to reduce repetition of information. on the basis of the discussion, the spokescouncil can build a series of pro- posals which are discussed back in individual groups to check for agreement or change. http://www.seedsforchange.org.uk/shortconsensus http://www.seedsforchange.org.uk/shortconsensus s. j. vachhani the cases above speak to a democratic feminist politics built on nonappropriation of the other as a way of building and cultivating a culture of difference, but one that is always at risk of the appropriation of women’s identities. towards a democratic culture of difference—feminist politics and contemporary ethics of dissensus these cases highlight ways in which democratic dissent involves a tactical reassertion of difference, reasserting feminine difference in its multitude. this tactical reasser- tion politicises sexual difference and develops capacities for solidarity and democratic engagement not based on shared experiences of oppression that collapses or elides other forms of lived difference but on shared goals (vachhani and pullen ). when difference is managed, the problem- atic insistence on identity must lead to “taking stock of the constitutive exclusions that reconsolidate hegemonic power differentials, exclusions that each articulation was forced to make in order to proceed” (butler , p.  ). this returns us to two key questions that have wider relevance for feminist organization studies and feminist ethics: how do feminist politics expand the terrain on which democratic organizational practices, and democratic business ethics, are understood; and how does the strategic challenge of sexual difference enable us to foster and cultivate a more expan- sive and radicalized notion of difference in organizations that responds to an intercorporeal and embodied ethics? the remainder of the paper offers a number of observations that move these discussions forward to enable a richer theoriza- tion of gendered difference in democratic business ethics. feminist politics of difference offer ways of disturbing organizations, as intimated earlier, pushing beyond con- structed categories assigned to us and engaging in a politics of disturbance of organizational order through critique and resistance to the sovereignty of business. accordingly, cor- porate masculinity “is not so much a rejection of the femi- nine, but more a co-optation of it for the purpose of mas- culine public glory” where the feminine “is not absent, but rather is rendered as being at the service of the masculine” (rhodes and pullen , p.  ). the embodied ethics and politics of activism seen in fem- inist movements, such as #metoo and sisters uncut, have a dialogic and often problematic relation to formal organiza- tions such as corporations and the state. approaches that seek to explore the “embodied, practical and cooperative character of the self-other relation” (harding et al. , p.  , cited in tyler , p.  ) and recognition of never fully knowing the other (ahmed ) require more atten- tion in business ethics, especially the complex relationship between feminist ethics, direct action and the possibilities of a democratic ethics of organization. this challenges the idea that “the corporation has extended the market, if not the civil freedoms on which it was predicated” (fermon , p.  ). sexual difference offers a contestation of corporate masculinity and sovereignty and attention to embodied dif- ferences that are constitutive and generative of other differ- ences that need to be addressed (gherardi ). a democratic culture of difference enables fruitfully rethinking democratic business ethics by reconfiguring feminine difference where collective action disturbs corpo- rate sovereignty in business ethics. irigaray’s elaboration of sexual difference, as developed earlier, establishes rec- ognition and respect for difference as “prior to productive and generative relations” between genders (fermon , p.  ). these politics defy easy categorization and offer no immediate solutions (fermon ) but dissensus, thought through this lens, is not negative but “a productive means through which democracy can be pursued.” (rhodes , p.  ). “feminism still needs a theory of sexual difference, but a theory that is more dynamic, more democratic and more ethical—a theory capable of foregrounding not only the futurity of democracy and the antagonistic differences among women but also the ethical respect for alterity in all its forms” (ziarek , p.  ). this prompts us to acknowledge the ethical and political dimensions of dif- ference in its multitude as central to a democratic business ethics. for radical democracy in feminist social movements, “the public sphere is understood as a contested space where agonistic differences should come into productive conflict without recourse to any hope of ideal consensus”. (rhodes , p.  ). these social movements challenge individ- ual sovereignty and direct public attention to inequality but beyond this offer the possibility of a collective, democratic ethics of openness and appreciation of self-other relations. they offer hope in bleak times and show the vibrancy of feminist activism and the political spaces and strategies used to frame, structure and enact social change (grosser and mccarthy ). difference is never accomplished or completed but involves reasserting feminine difference and highlights the importance of alterity, involving “obligation for the other and the agency of the subject, between responsibility and the struggles against sexist, racist and class oppression, and finally, between the desire for justice and embodiment, affect, and sexuality.” (ziarek , p.  ). embodied ethical relations (thanem and wallenberg ) are central to this endeavour and reconceptualises ethical obligation without collapsing into unconditional responsibility or “an indiffer- ent struggle of heterogenous forces without ethical stakes” (ziarek , p.  ). a democratic culture of difference, understood through sexual difference, thus offers a conceptual framework envisioning a democratic culture of difference: feminist ethics and the politics of dissent… through which to re-imagine the constitutive exclusions faced by marginalized or vulnerable groups where “our desire to install a new kind of social system does not pre- clude us from living in the one that exists” (irigaray a, b, cited in fermon , p.  ). beyond this, an ethics of dissensus enables the confrontation of power and politi- cal differences without “the utopian vision of justice tran- scending antagonisms of race, class, sexuality, and gender” (ziarek , p.  ). valuing dissensus as a source of ethics, one that can account for “vulnerability to difference without assuming that such difference can be known”, is central to the development of a practical and democratic business eth- ics (rhodes , p.  ). concluding thoughts discourses around women’s empowerment and corporate ethical discourses of equity, such as the business case for gender equality, have arguably come to be seen as part of the corporate business ethics and csr architecture of organi- zations. however, critiques of these approaches highlight their selective recognition of difference and studies clearly demonstrate how difference is adopted in problematic ways in formal organizations (grosser and moon ; karam and jamali ). feminist social activism and protest offer a new way of understanding gendered differences in busi- ness ethics, where complex events and the tensions and chal- lenges that arise remind us “what is possible when feminists assemble the combined forces of our bodies, practices, and ethics” (tyler , p.  ). the two cases discussed present opportunities to under- stand the complex dynamics of dissent and radical democ- racy based on intercorporeal and embodied differences that offer “a better place to locate business ethics…in practical modes of dissent and disturbance to corporate sovereignty arising within civil society.” (rhodes , p.  ). this could be termed a democratic ethics of difference that takes into account gendered differences and reconceptualises ethi- cal obligation as a challenge to corporate business ethics. differences can be tactically and reflexively mobilised in rethinking radical forms of democracy, as explored earlier. this tactical reassertion demands questioning the basis on which the feminine is constructed in organizations, it necessitates and leads to an ethical questioning from which arise an ethics of becoming and ethos of alterity, in ziarek’s terms. it requires an understanding of negation and the impossible: “what divides, as a negativity, is also that which can bring us close: ‘i defend the impossible’ [irigaray ] ” (fermon , p.  ). we can hope that new possibilities emerge from this endeavour. activist politics at the heart of feminism have much to teach us about how difference is constructed, man- aged or even negated in formal and informal organizations and this advances thinking about the importance of and ten- sions within democratic business ethics. tyler ( , p.  ) recognises that “what is needed, politically and ethically, is a destabilization of the regulatory ideals that shape” differ- ence in organizations. feminist politics and activism through movements, protests and collective acts promise embodied, ethical and political practices that challenge normative regimes that categorise difference (see ashcraft ). the latter is an “an exploitation of our basic relationality, fore- closing rather than supporting genuine recognition (tyler , p.  ) and impeding nonappropriative self-other rela- tions. the new ways of organizing seen in contemporary feminist movements challenge systems of oppression and the constitutive exclusions faced by different women with the promise of hope and vulnerability of the embodied and generous ethical relation. many of us know, when we name a problem, we often become the problem (ahmed ). this means instaling ourselves as problems. the power of dissent and antagonism at the heart of these movements suggest perhaps, beyond irigaray, a literal labouring against the negative where the disavowal of women’s existence and the negation of the feminine can be recovered as a source of invention and possibilities through the power of dissent, critique and protest. acknowledgements this article has benefitted from the close atten- tion and insightful critique of the reviewers and special issue editors. particular thanks go to alison pullen and melissa tyler for their close attention to the theoretical ideas and for their continued support and wise counsel. i dedicate this article to a new addition to my family who i hope will inherit the fire to fight injustice and live in better times. funding this article received no funding. compliance with ethical standards conflict of interest sheena j. vachhani declares that he/she has no conflict of interest. research involving human participants and/or animals this article does not contain any studies with human participants or animals per- formed by any of the authors. open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attri- bution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adapta- tion, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article’s creative commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article’s creative commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this licence, visit http://creat iveco mmons .org/licen ses/by/ . /. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / s. j. vachhani references ahmed, s. 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(p/b), isbn - . keywords: artificial intelligence, bots, democracy, social media, trolls. democracy is under fire thanks to advances in silicon valley technologies such as social media, artificial intelligence, and cryptocurrency, argues jamie bartlett, veteran tech journalist and director of the centre for the analysis of social media. the metathesis in “the people vs tech: how the internet is killing democracy (and how we save it)” is a warning about the current trajectory of unfettered technological progress without regulation or ethical concerns. while his book’s subtitle parenthetically provides hope for the future, such suggestions only occur in an appendix following the conclusion as an abridged list, featuring ideas like “policing” algorithms, expanding the middle class, and regulating bitcoin, all of which expose the book’s unclear audience, as most general readers do not have the ability to spread wealth across a socioeconomic class or revise media law. with the exception of this afterword, bartlett’s book is not hopeful but pessimistic, aligning it with recognizable media texts like neil postman’s amusing ourselves to death ( ) and kalle lasn’s culture jam ( ). generally, bartlett questions the optimism of silicon valley’s desire to create a “global village” and chastises the middle class’ acceptance of tech privatization – focusing on examples tim posada: department of journalism and new media, saddleback college, mission viejo, ca, usa- email: tposada@saddleback.edu w e b p a g e : h t t p s : / / j c s s . u t . a c . i r . e m a i l : j c s s @ u t . a c . i r print issn: - . e-issn: - . doi: . /jcss. . journal of cyberspace studies volume no. jan pp. - book review tim posada jo ur na l o f c yb er sp ac e st ud ie s v ol um e n o. j an the united states and the united kingdom – that allows rich corporations and individuals to dictate the terms of use. the people vs tech is an introduction to a series of topics commonly addressed in mass media survey courses. bartlett even draws upon crowning moments from media history like the invention of the gutenberg printing press, marshall mcluhan’s memorable phrase “the medium is the message,” and the nixon/kennedy debate. he also attempts to layer several key points with critical theory, drawing upon the philosopher jeremy bentham’s analysis of the panopticon in chapter , “the new panopticon,” though he only refers to the term a few times without a clear definition and never calls attention to michel foucault’s more in-depth usage of the concept within political discourse. in chapter , “the everything monopoly,” he even warns about the pending dangers of “cultural hegemony,” invoking antonio gramsci’s key concept without citation, misinterpreting it as something that could happen, what he calls the “final stage” of “economic power,” when gramsci used hegemony in his prison notebooks to describe the ruling class’ dominance present in a cultural context right now, always and already present. bartlett’s primary weakness is sourcing, which affects his choice of language. he relies more on ethos as an argumentative tool, assuming his personal experience supports claims made without factual support. for example, again in chapter , he claims google “killed” the stop online piracy act through an online protest campaign. such a statement without citation ignores the other major online organizations like wikipedia, aol, facebook, reddit, and yahoo, along with the other , websites, who participated in the same campaign. therefore, when he follows this statement with concern that too much power resides in one company’s hands, google here, his point rings untrue or remains questionable without evidence. his ethos also leads to another key problem with his writing: speculation without proof. in the introduction, for example, he claims the future will become “a shell democracy run by smart machines and a new elite of ‘progressive’ but authoritarians technocrats,” a statement reinforced in chapter , “crypto-anarchy.” he sees a doomsday scenario in which “your smart coffee machine will be hacked with ransomware – and you are asked to pay a small ransom just to regain access to your morning caffeine.” whether this is hyperbole or a joke remains unclear, and it serves as one of many examples of prediction loosed from evidence. in addition, bartlett sets up several topics, like artificial intelligence or cryptocurrency, by first stating he is not an expert – “i am not a futurist, but,” he says before inserting his opinion in a futurist topic – and then review of “the people vs tech: how the internet is killing democracy (and how we save it)” jo ur na l o f c yb er sp ac e st ud ie s v ol um e n o. j an predicts what will happen next in those areas. a more problematic contradiction occurs in his analysis of tribalism, or “re-tribalism” as he calls it in chapter , “the global village.” he notes how the internet brings together like-minded groups, from black lives matter to alt-right ones. while he clearly says these groups are not morally equivalent and can be beneficial in uniting folks behind a cause, he later asserts the opposite. “tribalism is understandable,” he says in a concluding remark on the topic, “but ultimately it is damaging to democracy, because it has the effect of magnifying the small differences between us, and transforming them into enormous, unsurpassable gulfs.” in essence, he argues black lives matter, whom he clearly identifies as tribalist, merely magnifies small differences (racial inequality for bartlett is a “small difference”), which is both a gross oversimplification of systemic prejudice and the myriad functions of digital spaces. even though jamie bartlett’s central argument does not pass rigorous academic muster, it remains a beneficial introduction to many topics related to online media, and it is strongest when he draws upon his own experiences. particularly in chapter , he provides a detailed, first-person encounter with the marketing team of the united states’ president, donald trump, and its dealings with cambridge analytica, who together data minded facebook users’ accounts to target key voters during the presidential election campaign. bartlett’s experiences in evolving media are beneficial; however, his efforts to diagnose the current and future state of all media and technology’s impact on democracy mark him as one of many “male” tech authors, the guardian’s emily bell says in her review of the people vs tech, who converts from “techno-optimist to techno-sceptic to techno-panicker.” this “panic” favors exaggerated language like the fear he expresses about british citizens’ use of the isidewith app as a resource when voting. removing voter agency entirely, bartlett overdetermines the app’s influence on the public without concrete proof, assuming users rely on it entirely regarding ballot choices. “the fact that five million people asked an app that they barely understood how to fulfill their most important duty as a citizen bothered exactly no one,” he writes. this final example shows that the people vs tech is written free of jargon, making complicated ideas simpler to understand; nonetheless, bartlett often simplifies his many topics at the expense of a more nuanced analysis of the current state of technology and democracy. workplace diversity and intercultural communication: a phenomenological study econstor make your publications visible. a service of zbw leibniz-informationszentrum wirtschaft leibniz information centre for economics evans, adam; suklun, harika article workplace diversity and intercultural communication: a phenomenological study cogent business & management provided in cooperation with: taylor & francis group suggested citation: evans, adam; suklun, harika ( ) : workplace diversity and intercultural communication: a phenomenological study, cogent business & management, issn - , taylor & francis, abingdon, vol. , http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . this version is available at: http://hdl.handle.net/ / standard-nutzungsbedingungen: die dokumente auf econstor dürfen zu eigenen wissenschaftlichen zwecken und zum privatgebrauch gespeichert und kopiert werden. sie dürfen die dokumente nicht für öffentliche oder kommerzielle zwecke vervielfältigen, öffentlich ausstellen, öffentlich zugänglich machen, vertreiben oder anderweitig nutzen. sofern die verfasser die dokumente unter open-content-lizenzen (insbesondere cc-lizenzen) zur verfügung gestellt haben sollten, gelten abweichend von diesen nutzungsbedingungen die in der dort genannten lizenz gewährten nutzungsrechte. terms of use: documents in econstor may be saved and copied for your personal and scholarly purposes. you are not to copy documents for public or commercial purposes, to exhibit the documents publicly, to make them publicly available on the internet, or to distribute or otherwise use the documents in public. if the documents have been made available under an open content licence (especially creative commons licences), you may exercise further usage rights as specified in the indicated licence. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / www.econstor.eu evans & suklun, cogent business & management ( ), : https://doi.org/ . / . . operations, information & technology | research article workplace diversity and intercultural communication: a phenomenological study adam evans * and harika suklun , abstract: for decades, the united states has seen an increasing number of im- migrants, which has led to a significant increase in cultural diversity in the united states. this phenomenological study examines the contextual history of professional non-native english-speaking women in the united states to form a basis of com- parison with native english speakers. it attempts to compare their lived communi- cative experiences with those of non-native english speakers in the workplace. in this study, professional, native english-speaking women currently working in the us were interviewed. participants in this study were asked to describe professional and intercultural experiences through interactions with non-native english-speaking coworkers, any expectations of the interactions or violations of those expectations, and any miscommunications that may have occurred. many native english speak- ers positively reflected upon these intercultural interactions and shared examples of their vocal adjustments and challenges of verbal and intercultural communica- tion. to overcome these challenges, professional native english speakers described trying to slow speech or asking confirming questions such as “do you understand?” to mitigate verbal conflicts and miscommunication. based on the trends within the responses, however, there is a potential for unintentional and often offensive conse- quences to occur. several coping mechanisms were found to be considered rude or off-putting by non-native speakers, while the intent of a more direct message was often misinterpreted by native english speakers. in addition, it seems that native *corresponding author: adam evans, business administration, transylvania university, lexington, ky, usa e-mail: aevans@transy.edu reviewing editor: sandy nunn, foreign affairs council, usa additional information is available at the end of the article about the author i have participated substantially in the conception and design of research related to the interpersonal communication in the workplace. as a native of turkey and longtime resident of the united states, i have witnessed first-hand the many strategies used by professionals; some were effective and others were not. i hope to increase the effective strategy list through my ongoing research. especially in current times, the ability to communicate across cultures will only become more vital. that is why through instances such as this work, which specifically takes a look at cultural demographics in the workplace, we must strive to further our knowledge of effective communication. public interest statement for decades, the united states has seen an increasing number of immigrants, which has led to a significant increase in cultural diversity in the united states. in this study, professional, native english-speaking women currently working in the us were interviewed. participants in this study were asked to describe professional and intercultural experiences through interactions with non- native english-speaking coworkers. many native english speakers positively reflected upon these intercultural interactions and shared examples of their vocal adjustments and challenges of verbal and intercultural communication. based on the trends within the responses, however, there is a potential for unintentional and often offensive consequences to occur. in addition, it seems that native english speakers often may have good intentions in their actions but do not have the skillset to better facilitate communication with non-native english speakers. received: august accepted: november first published: november © the author(s). this open access article is distributed under a creative commons attribution (cc-by) . license. page of harika suklun http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - mailto:aevans@transy.edu http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / page of evans & suklun, cogent business & management ( ), : https://doi.org/ . / . . english speakers often may have good intentions in their actions but do not have the skillset to better facilitate communication with non-native english speakers. subjects: intercultural communication; interpersonal communication; human resource management; international business; organizational studies keywords: communication; multicultural; workplace communication; non-verbal communication . introduction this study is a continuation of the qualitative study, professional immigrant women in medium and large organizations in the usa: a phenomenological study exploring communication conflicts that arise from language barriers (suklun, ). diversity initiatives in the workplace are trending up- ward in (biggs, ) and improving the language and context of multiculturalism will only increase in importance. perspectives such as this continuing study may help native english-speaking professional women better understand their non-native english-speaking coworkers. biggs believes that through conscious practice, we are able to enhance our consciousness to be more in tune with our environment. it is the hope that improved engagement with others will lead to improved rela- tionships and better workplace results. when visiting a foreign place, individuals attempt to integrate and assimilate into the foreign culture. the desire to “fit in” and avoiding negative reactions or misunderstandings have often been found to be the motivators for assimilation (glenn & kuttner, ). for many, the diverse workplace can also be a challenging new land, adding cultural elements that can complicate communication and understanding. this research focuses on the phenomenon of the interactions between native and non-native english-speaking women based on the experiences of the native english speaker and the growing cultural diversity in organizations in the united states. for the sake of both consistency and comparison, the guidelines utilized in the suklun ( ) re- search are reflected in this study. however, the primary participant has shifted from non-native english speakers to native english speakers, and an expansion of modern literature focusing on native and non-native approaches to communication have also been integrated to update the former study. . . literature review professionals often relocate in search of better job opportunities, a trend that has increased in re- cent years (dewaele & stavans, ). with increased travel, intercultural workplaces and social diversities have also increased (aneesh, ; breckenridge & moghaddam, ). developed coun- tries such as the united states have seen a significant growth in multicultural workplace environ- ments (oudenhoven & ward, ). innovations in communication technologies such as skype and other online mediums have only expedited and facilitated this process, making it easier to create asynchronous, online workplaces that are culturally diverse and globally connected (biggs, ). . . cultural diversity in the workplace the meaning of the term “diversity” has evolved over time from an initial focus on racial differences, to include sex, political affiliation, cultural affinity, gender identity, religion, and sexual orientation in (roberson, ryan, & ragins, ). diversity has become a trending topic in literature (borjas, ; neault & mondair, ; selmer, lauring, & jonasson, ; wolfson, kraiger, & finkelstein, ), yet effectively managing diversity seems an elusive challenge for many firms and organiza- tions. this challenge is particularly taxing for countries with higher immigration rates due to the complex nature of mixed cultures (hellerstein & neumark, ; selmer et al., ). in , lead- ers across the globe struggle to find ways to promote tolerance and respect for diverse group identi- ties; from to present, this topic has been an intense area of sociological study for scholars researching non-christian immigrants and ethnic minority groups such as the black lives matter movement (morris, ). page of evans & suklun, cogent business & management ( ), : https://doi.org/ . / . . workplaces that embrace diversity gain the potential to recruit, retain, and engage employees while improving their job satisfaction (neault & mondair, ; selmer et al., ; wolfson et al., ). damelang and haas ( ) concluded that culturally diverse employees also bring unique skillsets and perspectives to workplace challenges. pieterse, knippenberg, and dierendonck ( ) found that a homogeneous workplace is not only a discriminatory practice and unwise, but may also sacrifice the competitive advantage cultural diversity often provides an organization. . . . verbal communication people shape meanings (hofstede, hofstede, & mink, ; lakoff, ) and relationships when they verbally communicate (glenn & kuttner, ; malafouris, ). verbal communication differs among people because of their lived experiences. visual cues such as subtle facial gestures can lend clues to importance, direction, emotional context, and intent (ventrella, ; zabetipour, pishghadam, & ghonsooly, ). waltman and wagner-marsh ( ) note that previous experi- ence helps formulate our present dialog; the reliability factor between the sender’s message and experiences and those of the receiver determines the efficiency of the communication taking place. non-native english speakers have different experiences than their native english counterparts; in verbal communication, they communicate differently as well. that difference is often first recog- nized by the accent of the non-native english speaker. the accent is often listed as a major contributor to communication barriers even among native speakers. accented speech can be particularly challenging to understand (stevenage, clarke, & mcneill, ) and receives less positivity than native speech (tsurutani & selvanathan, ). the determination that a speaker has an accent often occurs very quickly. southwood and flege ( ) found that a native speaker of any language could identify an accent after just hearing a few sylla- bles of a sentence. munro and derwing ( ) noted that miscommunication could be caused by an accent because the native speaker is not able to recognize phonetic segments, particular words, or distinguish between large groups of words and a large word. . . study objectives within the context of the current literature and theory, the intent of the current study was to identify and compare verbal conflicts that occur between non-native english professional women and native english-speaking professional women who work in, or are retired from, mid-sized to large organiza- tions. comparison of the intercultural communication deficiencies in the workplace may help deter- mine the root of intercultural communication conflict by assessing the expectations for each side of the communication and dependence on intercultural communication skills. by understanding the conflict, future suggestions for improved communication may be narrowed and utilized. in addition, as most mid-sized and large organizations in the united states have at least one non-native english- speaking employee, this study will have practical applications for many professional organizations. finally, a third objective of this study is to increase scholarly interest in intercultural communication and conflicts, which arise from language use and other cultural barriers. . method and procedures this research expanded suklun’s ( ) study to include the views of professional native english- speaking professional women. this expansion was undertaken to better understand a new perspec- tive of communicative conflicts that arise from language and cultural barriers in the workplace. in the original study, professional non-native english-speaking women were interviewed. these women worked or had worked in mid-sized and large organizations and were years of age or older. suklun’s transcripts of their experiences are included in this study as a basis for comparison with native english-speaking professional women. the same essential criteria were used for the native english-speaking professional women recruited to participate in this study. participants’ names and the organizations are kept confidential. in recruiting, the invitation letter sent to partici- pants addressed the confidentiality process and security of the records, and a consent form was signed by each participant before participating in the interview. page of evans & suklun, cogent business & management ( ), : https://doi.org/ . / . . it was critical to maintain not only the confidentiality of the participants, but also their personal experiences with non-native english-speaking women. an identification code consisting of numbers and letters was assigned to each participant to further protect her anonymity. to help mitigate po- tential bias on the part of the participants, the interviews were conducted by a native english speak- er. thus, the participants were able to freely answer questions about their experiences without fear of offending a non-native english speaker. in phenomenological methodology, coding data is a necessary step in the process of analyzing in-depth interviews. to enable coding, the recorded digital files were manually transcribed and to protect participants’ identity, the recorded files did not include any type of personal information about the interviewees. in this study, a snowball sampling strategy was utilized and semi-structured interview questions were developed. semi-structured interview questions included questions about the participants’ experiences of working as professional women in the united states, experiences of communication barriers with female, non-native english-speaking coworkers, and situations that influenced their experiences of communication barriers. the questions were carefully developed and sought to provide an understanding of the common experiences of the participants. other open- ended questions were included as well. the data analysis of the coded transcripts explored the lived experiences of language conflicts between native english-speaking professional women with non- native english-speaking professional women. the questions were asked of the native english- speaking professional women without inference or influence of the researchers’ own opinions. during the analysis, the transcripts were read multiple times and each sentence was parsed to ex- plore what was revealed about the lived experiences. transcripts from suklun’s ( ) study are in- cluded to compare those findings with the results of the current study. . . data analysis the three questions that drive the current study are listed here and described in the following sections. ( ) what is the perception of the woman’s role in communication as a professional in the workplace? ( ) do the professional native english-speaking women recognize communication conflicts in their lived experiences? ( ) how do the professional native english-speaking women perceive and feel when interacting with a professional non-native english speaker? . . native english-speaking professional women findings after reviewing all transcripts at the conclusion of the interviews, all professional native english- speaking women interviewed had noted a generally positive workplace experience in the united states. simultaneously, many of them mentioned having to work harder than male peers to obtain similar results. despite noticing this inequity, many also felt professionally supported in workplaces, especially if the respondent had a strong and consistent mentor. however, some also noted support was limited for their personal and professional growth. . . . communication and conflict all of the participants stated that even though they could think of no personal conflicts or examples of ill will, that when communicating with non-native english-speaking women the language barriers often caused misunderstanding. some rationales given for misunderstanding included words in english having different connotations and denotations and the non-native english speaker using those words in an unexpected manner; a communicative style related to a strong personality that may detract focus from the communication itself; and unfamiliarity with idiomatic phrases that can be perceived as offensive or off-putting. some observed that these language barriers caused non- native english-speaking women to become defensive or quiet. page of evans & suklun, cogent business & management ( ), : https://doi.org/ . / . . . . . foreign accent some participants blamed themselves for not understanding the accent of the non-native english- speaking women and others described being unable to hear well in general. all of the respondents specifically mentioned having no personal problems with the non-native english speakers, but hav- ing witnessed others complaining about not understanding non-native english-speaking women’s accents. they also mentioned that some accents are harder to understand than others and that they often felt able to recognize the speaker’s background of origin or would hypothesize where the non-native speaker was from. all participants stated that it takes time at the beginning of any con- versation with a non-native english speaker to grow accustomed to hearing those accents. due to the accent of non-native english-speaking women, native english-speaking women often misunder- stood word selection. all native speakers also noted empathy toward non-native english speakers, recalling instances non-native english-speaking women were excluded in the workplace due to the accent or delay in understanding. . . . affect and understanding all participants recalled overall positive experiences with non-native english-speaking women and noted a general positive opinion of them. a majority of participants stated that they attempt to be re- spectful and appreciative, especially when they slow a conversation to better ensure understanding. some participants observed that non-native english-speaking women tend to be more reserved and less talkative in interactions. all of the participants experienced instances of non-native english- speaking women pretending to understand the conversation with the native english speaker only to later find that their understanding was often incorrect or incomplete. when questioned, the partici- pant believed that the reason for the non-native english speaker to pretend to understand was to avoid appearing foolish or inept and to maintain good standing or not offend the native english speaker. . . . directness although all of the participants agreed that non-native speaking women are more direct than the native english-speaking women they were familiar with, they believed that being a direct person is related to culture and often reminded themselves within those conversations that the directness was not confrontational but cultural. some of the participants felt appreciative for the non-native english speakers’ direct nature and found they would deliver a point quickly and efficiently. others found a direct nature simply blunt and without elaboration. as one participant described, “i always thought this person [referring to a non-native english speaking woman] a very critical and direct person.” another participant stated, “i would say that it is uncomfortable because i am not used to people doing it,” referring to the directness of the non-native english speaker. another issue men- tioned was that non-native english-speaking women try to be direct to simplify communication and limit what they are asking. some of the participants stated that they have been socialized locally to be “nice” as an expectation of gender and they like it when other women are not. directness not being a challenge for native speakers but for non-native english-speaking women is also a common theme of the interviews. some suggested that non-native english-speaking women being direct are not perceived positively in the workplace. they all agreed that in the us, native english speakers are far more accustomed to positive word choices, using elaboration or even “sugar-coating” words to increase the likelihood of a positive reception even though a more direct manner of speech would be less time consuming and more honest. . . . coping with language barriers participants described personal coping strategies including: asking the non-native english speaker to repeat statements; asking confirmation questions such as “do you understand?” to clarify under- standing; asking “do you know what i mean?” to clarify meaning; observing facial expressions for contextual cues such as a smile or frown, confusion or understanding; rephrasing sentences; using “easier” vocabulary words; slowing speech pace; asking the recipient to repeat back what was said or what is expected of her when making a request; making attempts to be friendly so the non-native english speaker might feel welcomed; avoiding idiomatic expressions; and attentive listening. page of evans & suklun, cogent business & management ( ), : https://doi.org/ . / . . . . non-native english-speaking women these notes are summarized from the findings of the study by suklun ( ). . . . working as professional women although non-native english-speaking professional women had a generally positive experience working as professional women, they felt they have had to work harder than native english speakers to prove themselves and faced many language and cultural challenges. . . . communication the suklun ( ) study noted that non-native english-speaking professional women felt stressed about not knowing all of the complex meanings and ever-changing rules of english, and they were aware that not knowing enough words to rephrase sentences sometimes led to misunderstanding. they specifically mentioned having problems with idioms. non-native english-speaking women ex- pressed having a fear of not being understood and making mistakes. they sometimes felt offended, as some words used daily in their native language were not culturally accepted in the united states. non-native english speakers were also offended when native english speakers slowed their speech to a noticeable degree. . . . speaking with an accent non-native english-speaking women also stated that native english speakers sometimes claimed not to hear them, which they found offensive. some wished that they did not have an accent, though all stated that their accent was part of their personal identity. the native english speaker’s interest in a foreign accent was mentioned as well. the participants expressed that not being a native english speaker and having an accent often prevented them from advancing their careers. . . . directness non-native english-speaking women associate directness with honesty. they believe that in a work environment, being direct is necessary because it is efficient and without useless or invaluable lan- guage. instead, direct language places the focus on work. they all said that directness is prevalent in their native land and stems directly from their culture. . . . coping with language barriers non-native english-speaking women noted they establish ways within a foreign culture to cope with communication problems, including: warning the listener about their english; making fun of them- selves (humor); observing body language for contextual cues; and using only the words they know and feel comfortable using in dialog with a native english speaker. . discussion a comparison of the results of the two studies revealed that native english-speaking professional women and non-native english-speaking professional women had similar experiences and even shared the same challenges working as professional women in the united states. both groups identi- fied the complexity of the english language as a cause for misunderstanding. the idiomatic phrases of the language are particularly challenging in the lived experiences of both groups within their com- munication. the study seems to confirm that the language barriers and miscommunication for both non-native and native english-speaking professional women can cause defensive responses and un- intended consequences. furthermore, both studies confirmed that an accent, though a part of a personal identity for both native and non-native english speakers, is major source of challenges from assumptions of origin to hindrances in advancement in career due to verbal misunderstandings it might cause. native english-speaking professional women felt that non-native english-speaking women feel less empowered to advance their careers because of their accents and non-native english-speaking professional women confirmed that they were correct in that assumption. in this study, it was discovered among all participants, native english-speaking professional wom- en found non-native english-speaking professional women more direct in communication. this page of evans & suklun, cogent business & management ( ), : https://doi.org/ . / . . finding echoes the previous study (suklun, ), which found non-native english-speaking profes- sionals recognize and identify as being more direct. both studies revealed that directness is related to culture. native english-speaking professional women and non-native english-speaking profes- sional women developed similar coping strategies for language barriers between cultures. molinsky ( ) noted that in multicultural environments, there are standards or cultural norms for behaviors that are considered appropriate and acceptable. those behaviors vary based on the native culture. when cultures blend, these new norms that form may also violate previously in- grained values and beliefs creating conflict. although professional immigrant women consciously attempt to assimilate and adapt, those efforts often contradict native characteristics, such as ac- cents (molinsky, ). the challenge instantly becomes a struggle between losing one’s personal identity in an effort to fit into the new culture (suklun, ). blume, baldwin, and ryan ( ) note that multicultural appreciation awareness is “showing openness, tolerance, and interest of a diver- sity of individuals” (p. ). thus, to mitigate potential negative conflicts, organizations could foster an environment where all employees generally accept and find ways to appreciate the differences among one another. this study revealed that native english-speaking professional women express empathetic inten- tions toward non-native english speakers in the workplace. they utilize their coping mechanisms intending to improve communication with the non-native english-speaking professional women. it is within these coping mechanisms that a potential conflict was identified, as native english speak- ers attempting to slow down speech can be offensive to the non-native english-speaking women. . . limitations of the study there were multiple limitations to this study, one of which was the sampling size. the location of the participants was convenient, since they reside in a general geographic area which was convenient to the researchers; however, regional differences may influence the results of this study. similarly, while common themes emerged when coding the data, the sample is not large enough and findings cannot be generalized to a larger population. in addition, the participants for this research work or have worked in establishments of higher education. after initiating the interviews, multiple partici- pants revealed their professional experience in scholarly research in the field, which added an ele- ment of possible outliers when comparing general knowledge to specialized knowledge. that is, the study participants held a level of understanding about the topic that would not be generalized to a broader population, and therefore, may have affected the findings. all participants were familiar with the interviewer, which provided familiarity and comfort, but also created the potential for their answers to not be as honest or direct. since the participants were all women and the interviews specifically explored women’s experiences, the fact that the inter- viewer was male also may have influenced the honesty of the responses. finally, as in suklun’s ( ) study, this study explored the experience of communication conflict only among native english-speaking professional women under the definitions set by the researcher. “professional” is a subjective term and there may be more to discover about this subject by studying the reflections of non-professional native english-speaking women. . . implications of the study blau and kahn ( ) noted that women are still working on balancing work and life. the authors contend that although the gender gap is slowly closing, there are many issues, such as parental leave, that create the “double jeopardy” of a positive benefit (such as expanding options for infant care) while simultaneously creating a hindering bias that could slow or halt progress for the profes- sional woman’s career. along similar lines, this study suggests that while diversity is increasingly valued in the workplace, the implications of those things that accompany diversity, such as the ac- cent of a non-native english speaker, may actually hinder the progress of the non-native english- speaking professional woman. for organizations that have non-native english-speaking employees, a comparison of the two studies may help reduce communication conflicts between native english page of evans & suklun, cogent business & management ( ), : https://doi.org/ . / . . speakers and non-native english speakers in the workplace. the results of this study and continuing research may also help native english-speaking professional women better understand their non- native english-speaking coworkers. this study may also help non-native english-speaking profes- sional women understand how native english-speaking professional women coworkers perceive and feel about them. biggs ( ) posited that through conscious practice, we are able to enhance our consciousness to be more in tune with our environment. therefore, improved engagement with oth- ers will lead to improved relationships and better results. . . suggestions for future research the primary suggestion for future research is to expand the sampling size. that expansion could in- clude a larger number of participants and/or a broader variety of participants for comparison to improve generalization of the findings. as most participants in this study reside in the same general geographic area, expanding beyond the state of kentucky or outside of establishments of higher education may lead to new findings. after initiating the interviews, multiple participants revealed having professional experience in scholarly research in the field of cultural studies. adding a ques- tion to measure and compare general knowledge to specialized knowledge in this area may prove useful. future research might include a screening question to separate those with advanced knowl- edge or training for multicultural affairs. as the participants were asked to recall memories during the interview and in some instances the events described might have occurred long before the interview, it may be wise to create a field study or controlled interaction between a native and non-native english speaker for better or instant memory recall. this process could potentially be accomplished by having the participant watch a video of an interaction between a native and non-native speaker for convenience and consistency among participants. more recommendations include anonymous interview questions via online sur- vey to increase the likelihood of honest responses, and employing a female interviewer who may or may not be familiar with the participants. finally, future research could include non-professional women to acquire new perspectives using similar methodology and questions. funding the authors received no direct funding for this research. author details adam evans e-mail: aevans@transy.edu orcid id: http://orcid.org/ - - - harika suklun , e-mail: harika.suklun@gmail.com orcid id: http://orcid.org/ - - - x business administration, transylvania university, lexington, ky, usa. business administration, sullivan university, lexington, ky, usa. agu, kayseri, turkey. citation information cite this article as: workplace diversity and intercultural communication: a phenomenological study, adam evans & harika suklun, cogent business & management ( ), : . references aneesh, a. 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( ). adapting for diversity: overcoming key communication barriers for human resource professionals. journal of international diversity, , – . wolfson, n., kraiger, k., & finkelstein, l. ( ). the relationship between diversity climate perceptions and workplace attitudes. psychologist-manager journal, ( ), – . doi: . / . . zabetipour, m., pishghadam, r., & ghonsooly, b. ( ). the impacts of open/closed body positions and postures on learners’ moods. mediterranean journal of social sciences, ( ), . https://doi.org/ . /chicago/ . . https://doi.org/ . /chicago/ . . https://doi.org/ . /bjos. . .issue- https://doi.org/ . /bjos. . .issue- https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . /(issn) - https://doi.org/ . /(issn) - https://doi.org/ . /casp. https://doi.org/ . /hequ. https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . /ijsl- - https://ventrellathing.wordpress.com/ / / /the-tail-wagging-the-brain/ https://ventrellathing.wordpress.com/ / / /the-tail-wagging-the-brain/ https://doi.org/ . / . . 	abstract:  	 . introduction 	 . . literature review 	 . . cultural diversity in the workplace 	 . . . verbal communication 	 . . study objectives 	 . method and procedures 	 . . data analysis 	 . . native english-speaking professional women findings 	 . . . communication and conflict 	 . . . foreign accent 	 . . . affect and understanding 	 . . . directness 	 . . . coping with language barriers 	 . . non-native english-speaking women 	 . . . working as professional women 	 . . . communication 	 . . . speaking with an accent 	 . . . directness 	 . . . coping with language barriers 	 . discussion 	 . . limitations of the study 	 . . implications of the study 	 . . suggestions for future research 	funding 	references review of doug selwyn ( ). all children are our children reviews review of doug selwyn ( ). all children are our children new york: peter lang. pp. isbn (paperback) caroline green whitcomb published online: july # springer nature switzerland ag postdigital science and education ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - -x keywords education.unitedstatesofamerica.health.inequality.covid- .solidarity an incredulous crisis the united states of america is in crisis. the pandemic continues to rage across the nation. ongoing police violence, racism, psychotic statements by the president, and contradictory news sources have polarized the nation. many americans are, for the first time, coming to grips with the fact that we are not a great nation. i was born in the late s to a family that prided itself on generational military service. i grew up believing this country is a christian nation. a nation determined to protect the abused and exploited of the world. i recall the welcome home reception for my father after his tour in saudi arabia during the gulf war. surrounded by friends and family decked out in red, white, and blue, i remember holding back tears as the song, ‘god bless the u.s.a.’ (greenwood ) played through the speakers. it was not until i began my doctoral journey at the age of that my beliefs about america began to change. as i read and listened to the voices of the nation’s marginalized, my deep-seated patriotism began to wane and questions replaced once intrinsic beliefs. doug selwyn experienced a similar awakening. selwyn, a veteran of the public school system and a professor of education, had in his own words, ‘a front-row seat to the train wreck’ of american education (selwyn : ). written pre-pandemic in , selwyn recognized the disparity between what americans want to believe and what was actually occurring at the local, state, and national levels. the disaster of education in the usa has been the subject of countless articles and books; however, selwyn’s ( ) all children are our children offers a fresh perspective. he guides his readers towards an honest understanding of the state of the nation by situating the * caroline green whitcomb cw @georgiasouthern.edu georgia southern university, statesboro, ga, usa http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - -x&domain=pdf mailto:cw @georgiasouthern.edu postdigital science and education ( ) : – [o]ngoing health crisis and the role that education plays within the larger picture of inequality, of the complex interplay of systems based on class, privilege, racism, sexism and on maintaining a status quo that serves those in power. (selwyn : ) in addition, selwyn provides clear steps towards bringing safety, well-being, and health to our children. amidst today’s cries for change and the pandemic- forced rethinking of education, selwyn’s articulation of the intentional weaving of societal evils for the ill of our children and his vision for a more just and equitable future make this work a necessary read. for selwyn, an understanding of us population health is necessary for understand- ing the failed educational system. selwyn ( : ) quotes jean anyon: ‘[t]rying to fix an urban school without fixing the neighborhood in which it is embedded is like trying to clean the air on one side of a screen door.’ his research unveils facts and statistics which counter the american perception that the united states of america is a benevolent, generous, christian nation. the oecd ranks the usa th out of countries in infant mortality, and yet the nation spends twice as much on per-person healthcare than the average of the other oecd countries. after rolling out pages of statistical truths, selwyn ( : ) states, ‘[i]n the oecd the u.s. ranks th out of th in terms of poverty and inequality.’ while the rest of the world may have a far clearer picture of the usa, nothing will change until americans move beyond blind patriotism and see ourselves as we truly are. in a article, selwyn continues this work, explaining us health and inequality in terms of the pandemic. people living in poverty are more likely living in environmentally unsafe envi- ronments and are more likely to develop asthma and other respiratory diseases, heart problems, high blood pressure, and diabetes. they are most vulnerable to the virus because they are more likely to have these pre-existing conditions, more likely to have to keep working to feed their families, and less able to isolate at home. they may well be the people we are standing next to, or who are serving us. (selwyn ) selwyn maintains the pandemic has highlighted the nation’s health crisis, and trump’s attempt to eliminate the affordable care act in the midst of a national catastrophe must be recognized by americans as an epitome of historic cruelty. chronic stress and children, an evidence of values much of selwyn’s book is given to identify the issues which prevent students from receiving a liberatory, democratic education. the chapters focus on inequality, chronic stress, environmental factors, corporate capitalism, the purpose of education, high stakes standardized testing, and how we deny our children (selwyn ). selwyn’s comprehensive explanation demonstrates how these are wreathed together, ultimately resulting in the continued oppression of the american subaltern. selwyn’s weaving of practical solutions and examples of reform within his critical research sets this work apart. selwyn describes finland’s educational postdigital science and education ( ) : – transformation from a mediocre system in the s to one of the world’s best today. currently, finland’s child poverty level is under %, while the us is over %. ‘every school has equally educated teachers and equivalent facilities, with equivalent resources, equivalent class sizes, and equal expectations for the education that each student will receive’ (selwyn : ). this is a sharp contrast to the us historic and present-day educational system which supports ongoing societal stratification. finland’s educational philosophy, based on the work of american theorist john dewey, states: ‘all pupils can learn if they are given proper opportunities and support, that understanding of and learning through human diversity is an important educational goal, and that schools should function as small-scale democracies’ (selwyn : ). through fin- land, selwyn demonstrates there are alternatives if the usa is willing to change. resisting an ivory tower critique, selwyn’s goal is not to catapult readers into a state of depression but to provide doable solutions that will hopefully ignite greater winds of change. selwyn’s chapter on chronic stress is eye-opening, and when one considers the additional stress resulting from the pandemic and rise in racism, these truths become alarming. selwyn’s examination of the stresses experienced by the oppressed includes perceived discrimination, socioeconomic status and environment, efforts to adapt to the dominant culture, and daily and long-term poverty (selwyn : ). in his discussion of the stress caused by high stakes standardized tests, selwyn quotes a test booklet instruction manual. a student who becomes ill and vomits on his or her test booklet or answer document and is able to continue the test should be given a new test booklet or answer document so that he or she can continue. later, the student’s responses and demographic information must be transcribed into the new test booklet...do not return the soiled test materials to pearson. (selwyn : ) selwyn’s response is perfect: ‘what kind of people set up a system that assumes it likely that at least some students are going to be so upset by what they are required to do that they vomit? and i confess it was tempting to send dozens of bags of vomit-covered test booklets to the testing office.’ (selwyn : ) while the thought of shipping vomit-covered test booklets to pearson probably brings a smile to the face of most educators, this example represents the heart of selwyn’s message. ‘we present ourselves to ourselves and to the world as a society that values life, that values children, that values family. our actions at the state and legislative levels do not come close to matching our words.’ (selwyn : ) in chapter eight, selwyn continues this vein of thinking by discussing the ways we deny our children language, culture, point of view, the reality of maturation and development, play, the fact that people learn differently, and hope. when everything is determined by others, from what is studied, to how it is studied, to when it is studied and the pace of that study, and then how it is assessed, students learn that their voices, views, and values do not matter. and when they are denied their language, their culture, their history, their interests, postdigital science and education ( ) : – and their voices, it becomes clear that the only meaning they can make it is that they don’t matter. (selwyn : ) what can be done? the usa is in a state of disarray, and we are desperate for a new vision, a vision we can all be proud of. to this, selwyn asks and answers, ‘what can schools do?’ (selwyn : ). he offers specific advice to teachers and advice to society at large. many of his suggestions are based upon personal experience, the changes he made in his classroom, and teaching which proved transformative. selwyn focuses on relationships. ‘everyone i spoke with and everything i read places relationships as the most signif- icant of the factors that make it possible for students to be healthy, happy, and academically successful’ (selwyn : ). he posits relationships must extend outside of the teacher/student relationship and involve families and the community. advisory systems are critical in middle school and high school as students move from one teacher to many. relationships are key, not only in the educational setting but at large. empathy grows as we become intimate with those labeled different from ourselves. in regard to society, selwyn suggests building free healthcare clinics adjacent to schools, connecting schools with the farming community, backpack programs, extend- ing recess, and p.e. and all while providing opportunities to grow and learn. ‘schools are places in which students can further their understanding of how and why systems intersect and why those systems have an impact on their lives’ (selwyn : ). in the final chapter, selwyn reminds readers that neutrality is a political act. interestingly, he highlights the black lives matter movement in seattle’s schools in . while selwyn primarily focuses on the roles we must play at the school and community level, he also offers some insight into what must also take place at state and national levels. today, as we stumble towards the coming elections amidst heightened racism, horrific killings, protests, and the continual rise of covid- cases, selwyn’s calls for solidarity, active citizenship, and critical thinking are all the more necessary. while writing this review, i had the opportunity to seek selwyn’s current perspective on the state of the nation. for selwyn, the united states of america is in a different place than it was just or years ago. today, city officials, school boards, administrators, and educators have the historic opportunity to question who we are, what it means to educate, how we define curriculum, and how we create a more just educational system for our children. for once, the status quo will not work, the pandemic has forced educational change. the question now becomes what will teachers do and what will we do with this opportunity? with a clarion call, selwyn’s book concludes: ‘we have a choice to make, about whether to allow ... greed and ... lust for power and profit to continue to destroy our health and our democracy, or whether we will stand and say no to them and yes to our health and well-being, and to our children’ (selwyn : ). i have only one critique of this work, the cover. in creole ( ), stephen cosgrove, an american children’s book author, writes, ‘[n]ever judge someone by the way he looks or a book by the way it’s covered; for inside those ... pages, there’s a lot to be discovered’ (cosgrove : ). do not judge a book by its cover, sage advice. i have to admit i judged the humdrum cover and in so doing nearly missed out postdigital science and education ( ) : – on a book every american educator should read. through selwyn’s all children are our children ( ), we have been given a fresh glimpse into the hidden aspects of our societal ills and an opportunity to evoke true change. read the book, heed the wisdom, implement the solutions, and do not let the cover stop you. references cosgrove, s. ( ). creole. clovis: price stern sloan, inc.. greenwood, l. ( ). god bless the u.s.a. [song]. nashville, tn: mca nashville. selwyn, d. ( ). all children are our children. new york: peter lang. selwyn, d. ( ). covid reveals underlying truths about our society. greenfield recorder, april. https://www.recorder.com/my-turn-selwyn-covid- revealsunderlyingtruths- . accessed june . https://www.recorder.com/my-turn-selwyn-covid- revealsunderlyingtruths- 	review of doug selwyn ( ). all children �are our children 	an incredulous crisis 	chronic stress and children, an evidence of values 	what can be done? 	references edward murphy : for a proper home: housing rights in the margins of urban chile, – . pittsburgh: university of pittsburgh press b o o k r e v i e w s in some regards, the compilation reads as a foil to the long-developing and com- plex narrative of movement-aligned local organizing observed in some of today’s us cities and suburbs. indeed, not all anger is created equal. contemporary us formations such as black lives matter, right to the city alliance and national domestic workers alliance contrast with the alinskyist tradition in theories of change and community care practice. on the other hand, organizers within these formations often deploy power analysis adapted from the alinskyist tradition. more recently, several non-alinsky for- mations developed strategic alignments with alinskyist institutions npa and pico. the pragmatic choice for the astute organizer and student of urban democracy is to read people power for its examples and its silences. schutz and miller contribute an invaluable account of the pitfalls and advantages of tried alinskyist approaches. when considered in the more expansive context of transgressive struggle, the lessons drawn from these approaches remain apt for winning ‘non-reformist reforms’ of urgent and strategic need. marnie brady, city university of new york edward murphy : for a proper home: housing rights in the margins of urban chile, – . pittsburgh: university of pittsburgh press from the s to , chile experienced an unprecedented increase in social consumption, largely caused by import-substitution industrialization policies that rap- idly brought a massive influx of the rural poor to the main cities (especially santiago). from onwards, thousands of homeless households began squatting at the edges of santiago and other cities. these squats were characterized by high levels of political organization. as their clamour for social housing grew, the state responded with an increasingly sophisticated system which was nevertheless insufficient to meet the bur- geoning demand (that overwhelmed not only the public sector’s limited resources but also the country’s insufficient economic and construction capacity); however, both the increasing number of politically organized land seizures (known as campamentos) and the considerably enlarged public housing provision of the late s and early s contributed to transform the traditionally segregated socio-economic structure of santiago. in the country saw the advent of one of the harshest and bloodiest military dictatorships ever seen in latin america. under general pinochet’s rule, the public housing sector was progressively dismantled and soon replaced by a neoliberal subsidy- on-demand system. for strategic military reasons, the campamentos dwellers were repressed and urban segregation was reinforced by the eradication of thousands of poor households occupying expensive land (who were then sent to the worst fringes of the city). although these pobladores proved to be key political actors in toppling the pinochet regime, when democracy was restored in the state only reinforced its neoliberal rules of housing provision, since its primary goal was to rapidly meet the demand for a million housing units left in the dictatorship’s wake. this enormous amount of housing needed in the country was provided by progressively reducing construction quality (both dwellings and surrounding areas were reduced to their minimum acceptable quality level) since state-led subsidies did not meet the increasingly higher returns that private developers expected the story of chile’s housing sector is not uncharted territory; numerous inci- sive books and papers have been written about it. however, edward murphy’s book con tributes in two novel ways: first it offers an original chronological perspective (cov- ering the – period in its entirety); and second it attempts to build  a  sub jec- tive narrative from grassroots’ oral memoires. murphy’s hypothesis is also interesting: grassroots’ demands and state policies were always on convergent paths, promoting b o o k r e v i e w s property ownership and social recognition. as housing policies transformed squatted land into regularized environments, pobladores were turned into homeowners; in fact, historically, the chilean housing sector can be seen as a transition from marginalization to a unique form of deprived citizenship. the ideology of property intertwined with propriety (understood as a certain good behaviour and right to recognition) was so embedded in the nation’s culture that even the socialist government of allende could not escape from it; in fact, in the three years that allende’s government was in power, it issued more property titles per year than at any time in chilean history up to the late s. murphy’s long-term analysis is indeed effective and also reinforces previously known stories. some expert readers will probably find certain passages superfluous, but younger readers who need to know more about the evolution of the chilean housing sector will be fascinated by this book. the work’s most interesting and informative passages come from the author’s careful scrutiny of existing data, books and papers, especially when referring to the s to s period. i found one of the most illuminating chapters to be where mur phy discloses several letters written to general pinochet by poor supporters demanding a rapid resolution to their crucial housing needs, a demand the regime could not entirely meet. murphy shows how people’s ideology, the social support the mili tary  regime needed for implementing the neoliberal project in the country, the much needed co- optation of the grassroots, and even connections between pobladores and appointed government officials, were four intertwined variables that greatly deter mined the level of housing provision. even the previous socialist government of allende had to clash with this ‘cry and demand’ from the marginalized ones. however, the book’s aspiration to provide a deep grassroots’ perspective is not entirely achieved. there is an excess of anecdotal evidence, making the book longer than is necessary. the beginning of the book has plenty of detail on how the author actually built a relationship with his research subjects (ethnographically interesting yet irrelevant to the topic); readers have to endure long descriptions of material deprivation, unemployment, social unrest, etc., in almost every chapter, but these accounts are ultimately predictable and of questionable relevance to our understanding of the chilean case. i found the sole exception to be in part iv (on the dictatorship), where grassroots’ narratives are driven into more concrete spheres of political struggle. here the author’s analysis of the period helps readers to understand how much people suffered in the course of their personal and social lives under military dictatorship. overall, i wondered why murphy did not also interview others more directly engaged with the whole process: housing activists, revolutionary architects and planners, geographers, etc. they would have given additional interesting perspectives too, that would have bridged mainstream people’s accounts and the ‘official’ history. an additional critique is that the book focuses almost entirely on santiago, contradicting the countrywide perspective that the title implies. despite these quibbles, this is a much-needed contribution to the topic, essential reading for anyone who wants to have, in a single book, a complete and very detailed critical depiction of the last years of chile’s housing and urban struggles. ernesto lópez-morales, university of chile glen s. coulthard : red skins white masks: rejecting the colonial politics of recognition. minneapolis: university of minnesota press in red skins white masks, glen coulthard exposes how the contemporary poli- tics of indigenous recognition in canada has come to so intricately serve the interests of continued colonial domination, and what we should do about it. coulthard com pellingly demonstrates how colonial power has merely changed register, no longer  rest ing the elephant in the room: talking race in medical education the elephant in the room: talking race in medical education malika sharma • ayelet kuper , , received: september / accepted: october / published online: november � springer science+business media dordrecht abstract the deaths of black men and women while in police custody, rising anti-im- migrant sentiment and rhetoric in high-income countries, and the continued health dis- parities experienced by indigenous communities globally have brought race and racism to the forefront of public discourse in recent years. in a context where academic health science centres are increasingly called to be ‘‘socially accountable,’’ ignoring the larger social context of race and racism is something that medical education institutions can little afford to do. however, many such institutions have largely remained silent on the issue of race and racism, both within and outside of healthcare. most medical education continues to emphasize a primarily biological understanding of race. we argue that a different approach is needed. highlighting the social construction of race is an essential starting point for educators and trainees to tackle racialized health disparities in our clinics and to challenge racism in our classrooms, educational and research institutions, and communities. keywords race � racism � social responsibility � social accountability � medical education as we write this, it has been two years since the shooting of michael brown in ferguson, missouri brought the issue of racialized police violence to the fore of american thought. it has been two months since the beating and death of abdi abdirahman while in police & malika sharma malika.sharma@mail.utoronto.ca maple leaf medical clinic, college st, suite , toronto, on m g k , canada the wilson centre, university health network/university of toronto, toronto, canada division of general internal medicine, sunnybrook health sciences centre, toronto, canada department of medicine, faculty of medicine, university of toronto, toronto, canada adv in health sci educ ( ) : – doi . /s - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &amp;domain=pdf http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &amp;domain=pdf custody in canada’s capital city, sparking national discussion and outrage. it is also a time of unprecedented migration, with million displaced people globally. indigenous com- munities worldwide continue to grapple with social inequities and health disparities. it is impossible to discuss these issues, or their health implications, without discussing race. and yet race is a topic on which medical schools and medical educators are largely silent. when we do use the term race in medical education we use it messily, relying on a ‘common-sense’ understanding of race as biological truth and valid unit for comparison or analysis. trainees learn of race as a social determinant of health, as a predictor of healthcare access, quality, and outcomes (who ), whereas they are rarely taught about patient (and trainee) experiences of racism (montenegro ; beagan ). they are increasingly taught about advances in genomic research, which has led to renewed interest in a genetic basis for racialized health disparities (frank ). this ‘common- sense’ understanding of race as biological truth, however, is in fact a political and con- tested understanding that was rejected as early as by the united nations educational scientific and cultural organization (unesco ). viewing race as biological truth ignores major scientific limitations to the use of race as a biological and genomic predictor, and positions attendant health risks as inevitable. in so doing, it functionally teaches students that while race-based health disparities exist, there is little to be done about them. in contrast, understanding race as a social construction can fundamentally change how medical educators, trainees, and education researchers conceptualize racialized health disparities. while this notion is widely accepted outside of medicine, uptake within medicine has occurred at a glacial pace. the idea of ‘race’ has been historically fluid, highly contextual, and contested. rather than biological truth, race is a social process that ascribes (usually hierarchical) meaning to physical and cultural differences between people (beagan ; dei ). this does not mean that race is not real in its consequences for individuals and communities, for there is an incredible ‘‘salience and centrality of race’’ in peoples’ lived experience (dei ). the term racialization is useful here, allowing an interpretation of race and racism as fractured, multilayered, and actively occurring pro- cesses by which socially constructed ‘racial’ and ethnic categories are ordered. the term racialization shifts our gaze away from the racialized subject and towards race as a mutual and dynamic process (ford and airhihenbuwa ). in other words, it is not that medical educators should avoid discussing race as a social determinant of health, or that researchers should shy away from understanding the deep and undeniable health consequences of racialization and racism. rather, these endeavours must be undertaken in a way that acknowledges the socially constructed nature of race as a concept and classification. it is not the differences, but the meanings ascribed to them, that matter. in medical education, this means a potentially painful discarding of claims of cultural and racial neutrality both in clinical practice and in education research. as beagan ( , p. ) notes: we tend to deny the relevance of differences, in an effort towards greater equality, proclaiming proudly, ‘i’m colour blind. i don’t even notice the ‘‘race’’ of my stu- dents.’… not to notice a social feature that profoundly affects the life chances and everyday experiences of whole groups of people is an act of privileged ignorance. we need, rather, to learn to acknowledge differences without reinforcing hierarchies of superiority and inferiority. this can be done in a number of ways. at the admissions level, equity issues must be addressed to improve diversity and representation in our classrooms (kuper ). in our classrooms, we can challenge our assumptions: around ‘normal ranges’ based on primarily m. sharma, a. kuper caucasian populations, or of ‘‘white’’ being the default race when none is mentioned (turbes et al. ). as educators, this means simultaneously employing and challenging the notion of race as we study and teach about racialized disparities. central to this process is cultivating a race consciousness—the acknowledgement and explicit study of racial dynamics personally and socially (ford and airhihenbuwa ). such consciousness entails reflexivity into our own privileges and oppressions, recognizing that all of us— white, black, brown—are part of a process of racialization, and experience this process and its impacts differently. it involves recognizing that medicine and its purveyors do have a culture, and it is not enough to become ‘‘culturally competent’’ by versing ourselves in how to ‘‘deal with’’ the cultured or racialized other (taylor ). race consciousness also involves paying attention to who is marginalized in our classrooms, clinics, and research communities, and how. educators are thus called to challenge the ordinariness of ‘‘everyday racism’’—when the phillipino medical student is mistaken for an orderly, or when the brown-skinned junior resident is asked repeatedly where she is from and where she learned to speak english so well—and to work towards uncovering the colonial and racist foundations of medical knowledge (beagan ; ford and airhihenbuwa ). explicit and conscious explorations of the ways in which medicine has participated in colonial and racist practices are critical to unpacking medi- cine’s complicated relationship with the notion of race. when teaching about contemporary race-based disparities, educators must also stop reinforcing discourses of biological dif- ference and foster an intersectional approach to health that considers race, class, gender, culture, and sexuality as part of our individual and collective identities. here, educators can learn from trainees, who have been active in calling for these perspectives in the midst of the black lives matter movement (charles et al. ). in research, race consciousness means recognizing ourselves as situated knowers whose racial vantage points influence our ontologies, epistemologies, and methodologies. knowledge production as a site of racialization—where racialization can shape a project’s ontology, epistemological groundings, and methodological choices, or where a project can serve to reinforce prevailing beliefs about racialized groups or phenomena (ford and airhihenbuwa ). researchers must be wary of ‘epistemological racism,’ whereby our current epistemologies, born out of dominant social and historical discourses, reflect and reinforce certain ways of viewing the world (scheurich and young ). scheurich and young ( ) note that our current range of research epistemologies—positivism to postmodernisms/post- structuralisms—arise out of the social history and culture of the dominant race, that these epistemologies logically reflect and reinforce that social history and that racial group (while excluding the epistemologies of other races/cultures), and that this has negative results for people of color in general and scholars of color in particular (p. ). even progressive scholarship can ‘‘silence race through supposedly acknowledging racism (and not race) as the problem,’’ as is the risk when such scholarship assumes race to be a biological truth rather than a human-made construction (dei , p. ). in contrast, scholarship can make conscious efforts to ‘‘center in the margins,’’ shifting knowledge production to the issues and concerns of the most marginalized, attempting to privilege the voices of the marginalized, highlighting creativity, resilience, and resistance (ford and airhihenbuwa ). a commitment to addressing race and racism in education scholarship involves going beyond the documentation of health inequities (ford and airhihenbuwa ). we must the elephant in the room: talking race in medical education certainly name and identify racialized health disparities, but to do so without further analyzing power and privilege can be considered a form of institutional racism and often serves to reinforce prevailing beliefs about racialized groups (scheurich and young ). rather, to truly change how race-based disparities are taught about and acted upon, edu- cation researchers should analyze and take action against the power differentials and privilege that create and perpetuate such inequities (ford and airhihenbuwa ). challenging a discourse as pervasive as ‘race as biological truth’ is not easy. however, can we afford not to do so? conceptualizing race as a social construction could allow us as educators and trainees to tackle racialized health disparities in our clinics and to challenge racism in our classrooms, educational and research institutions, and communities. acknowledgements m. sharma wish to thank drs. tina martimianakis, andrew pinto, nanky rai, and faraz vahid shahidi for their thoughtfulness and inspiration in thinking about these issues. references beagan, b. l. ( ). ‘is this worth getting into a big fuss over?’ everyday racism in medical school. medical education, , – . charles, d., himmelstein, k., keenan, w., barcelo, n., & white coats for black lives national working group. ( ). white coats for black lives: medical students responding to racism and police brutality. journal of urban health: bulletin of the new york academy of medicine, , – . dei, g. ( ). speaking race: silence, salience, and the politics of anti-racist scholarship. in m. wallis & a. fleras (eds.), the politics of race in canada (pp. – ). don mills: oxford university press. ford, c. l., & airhihenbuwa, c. o. ( ). the public health critical race methodology: praxis for anti- racism research. social science and medicine, , – . frank, r. ( ). what to make of it? the (re)emergence of a biological conceptualization of race in health disparities research. social science and medicine, , – . kuper, a. ( ). when i say… equity. medical education, , – . montenegro, r. e. ( ). my name is not ‘interpreter’. jama, , – . scheurich, j. j., & young, m. d. ( ). coloring epistemologies: are our research epistemologies racially biased? educational researcher, , – . taylor, j. s. ( ). confronting ‘culture’ in medicine’s ‘culture of no culture’. academic medicine, , – . turbes, s., krebs, e., & axtell, s. ( ). the hidden curriculum in multicultural medical education: the role of case examples. academic medicine, , – . united nations educational scientific and cultural organization (unesco). ( ). statement by experts on race problems. accessed september . http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/ / / eb. pdf. world health organization. ( ). what are social determinants of health? accessed july . http://www. who.int/social_determinants/sdh_definition/en/. m. sharma, a. kuper http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/ / / eb.pdf http://unesdoc.unesco.org/images/ / / eb.pdf http://www.who.int/social_determinants/sdh_definition/en/ http://www.who.int/social_determinants/sdh_definition/en/ 	the elephant in the room: talking race in medical education 	abstract 	acknowledgements 	references wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not 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copyright © the authors. doi: . / information for users of the institutional repository users who receive access to an article through a repository are reminded that the article is protected by copyright and reuse is restricted to non-commercial and no derivative uses. users may also download and save a local copy of an article accessed in an institutional repository for the user’s personal reference. for permission to reuse an article, please follow our process for requesting permission ecr collective response: the future of criminology and the unsustainability of the status quo for ecrs sarah anderson shane horgan fiona jamieson cara jardine ashley rogers https://uk.sagepub.com/en-gb/eur/process-for-requesting-permission https://doi.org/ . / ecr collective response: the future of criminology and the unsustainability of the status quo for ecrs sarah anderson (university of the west of scotland, uk) shane horgan (edinburgh napier university, uk) fiona jamieson (university of edinburgh, uk) cara jardine (university of strathclyde, uk) ashley rogers (abertay university, uk) we were delighted to be asked to respond to richard spark’s paper. we are encouraged by the themes and issues highlighted, and feel passionately about many of the areas of future research identified in the piece. indeed, many of the areas of scholarship (such as research with the global south, practices and experiences of crime and punishment, violence in all its forms, crime and technology, socio-legal research, and political discourses around crime) are areas with which we - as a collective group of early career researchers (ecrs) - are currently engaged, often in collaboration with other ecrs within and outwith the uk. we commend both prof. sparks and the esrc for this important and timely reflection on the direction and possible futures of criminology. we also highly commend the editors of ccj who have sought a contribution from a group of academics who are at risk of being marginalised within the discipline generally, and from these conversations, specifically. as a collective, we feel the piece raises a number of questions and contingencies related to occupational conditions and culture in uk higher education. in this brief response, we wish to consider and highlight how certain features of our field may limit the extent to which this exciting criminological future is realised. for brevity, our response will focus on these structural issues. however, we also recognise that the precarity experienced by many ecrs also has a high human cost including, but not limited to: exploitative working conditions; financial insecurity; being unable to make future plans; and rising mental and physical ill health (jones and oakley, ; gill, , ; ucu, ; thwaites and pressland, ). as sparks’ notes, inter- and multidisciplinary work is essential if we are to engage fully and critically with the societal issues of our time (e.g. the climate crisis, technology- related risks). arguably, this possible future has already begun to manifest, but this is not without its pitfalls. firstly, interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary work involves developing a methodological and philosophical lingua franca with disciplines often far from our own (e.g. climatology, computer science). while desirable, it should be recognised that these developments take time and, in the context of a ‘fast-paced’ and ‘ref ready’ research environment, there is little appetite for risky investment. this research context constrains the possible designs and methods available to us (e.g. long-term ethnographic fieldwork), restricts the development of fully critical accounts, and risks a criminology that itself contributes to systems of oppression and subjugation. secondly, silo-bridging conversations may or may not lead to outputs that satisfy both funders and university promotion-track demands, as well as moral and ethical commitments. the extent to which this work is tenable, therefore, both in terms of securing funding or continuing work, for those who risk non-renewal or promotion to permanency, is unclear. the commitment required for such work extends far beyond the generosity or passion of those precariously employed, if employed at all. even for those on permanent contracts, it far exceeds already unrealistic workload models. in light of these tensions, it is perhaps unsurprising that phd students are often at the forefront of multidisciplinary research. the phd can afford the space to nurture relationships, read, and think; allowing researchers the time required to navigate complex methodological and conceptual barriers and move the discipline forward. however, the extent to which this will remain the case is questionable, and we should exercise caution regarding where and with whom the responsibility to push disciplinary boundaries lies. while there had been some welcome discussion within funding bodies of increasing the number of years of funding available, it appears this will not be the case. while the time to complete becomes shorter, the list of achievements phd students are expected to demonstrate grows; to publish in prestigious journals, have real world impact, acquire sufficient teaching experience, and do so while navigating an increasingly competitive and precarious job-market. thus, focusing on phd candidates, or those equally precarious, to drive forward the establishment of multidisciplinary connections is misguided and unjust. we can also observe a shift towards larger scale, inter-disciplinary research projects which has implications for the types of employment that ecrs move into. often, these projects adopt a model of working more familiar to stem disciplines; a principal investigator (the grant holder) leads the project and is supported by one or more postdoctoral researchers. this has coincided with a decreasing number of permanent academic posts, creating a situation whereby many ecrs will become ‘serial’ post- docs; employed on a succession of fixed-term, temporary, and precarious contracts across different projects. this results in numerous difficulties for ecrs, not limited to: a lack of recognition of the additional time inter-disciplinary research requires (e.g. to learn new skills, methodologies and literatures); difficulties maintaining professional autonomy and an independent identity; and barriers to developmental opportunities (jones and oakley, ). with regard to progression, post-docs can face a disconnect between their careers and traditional measures of “success”, such as producing sole-authored papers. moving between subjects can leave these ecrs without a disciplinary ‘home’, and with what appears to be a disjointed narrative to their work history, they may struggle to market themselves in a competitive job market. for inter-disciplinary work to be sustainable, these issues of progression and transitions must be resolved. for funders, this model of working has significant implications for the resulting number and quality of research outputs. ‘serial post-docs’, for example, often move into new posts with unfinished outputs from previous projects and have limited time to engage in knowledge exchange activities (jones and oakley, ). it is not always guaranteed that they will continue to be included in any future writing projects and outputs from the original research team. academia often lacks awareness, kindness and fairness in this respect. this raises serious questions about whether this model of working hampers both academic scholarship and publication, and meaningful engagement with wider audiences. indeed, a recent survey of nearly , casualised staff found that % felt that this was not a cost-effective way to fund research, while % felt that more secure employment would support more genuinely innovative scholarship (ucu, ). funders may also see limited returns when ecrs move from their phd to teaching- heavy posts. the prevalence of teaching only contracts, which may or may not be permanent, has grown rapidly and over a third of academics involved in teaching are now on a contract of this type (ucu, ). these roles often have limited (or no) paid time to do research or to publish from their (often research council funded) phd research. even where ecrs are successful in securing a lecturer post, staff in combined teaching and research posts spend more than double the time on teaching than on research (reportedly accounting for only % of their time), with increased demands around administration, pastoral care, marking and internal quality assurance (ucu, ). furthermore, the disparity in the realities of such posts in russell group and post- universities must be acknowledged. in the latter, teaching loads may be higher and there are greater difficulties securing research funding in criminology, and yet ecrs within many of these institutions are subject to similar expectations (from their own institution and for future career progression) regarding ref and income generation. embracing spark’s call to reflect on how criminology might develop, we can imagine one future where the above structural issues remain unaddressed, entrenching and intensifying precarity within the academy. an almost inevitable effect of this will be the limiting of diversity within criminology, as those with the least resources and capital face the highest barriers to an academic career. this is concerning as women and non-white academics are already marginalised in parts of the discipline which attract the most power and prestige, as institutional practices reproduce within the academy the racial and gender discrimination prevalent in neo-liberal societies (chesney-lind and chagnon, ). this has clear implications for the nature of knowledge production, but also for future students. in a climate of black lives matter and #metoo, students demand and deserve to be taught about matters of race, gender and inequality from diverse faculties. yet, we suggest that an alternative future is possible. we persist with hope and desire to be part of the future of criminology, but importantly, we strive for change within and outwith the discipline to ensure that our work in academia is sustainable. while we exist here in a collective response to more dominant voices, we ask that ecrs be included more formally and centrally in funding bodies and their visions. only then can research objectives and expectations be considered fairly alongside the lived realities of a career in academia more generally, and in criminology, more specifically. revising the visions of funders and institutions in light of the structural difficulties experienced by ecrs offers an opportunity to challenge practices which are to the detriment of all. as rosalind gill powerfully argues, precarity is inextricably linked to other damaging and disabling features of the neo-liberal university, such as the intensification of work, a demand to be ‘always available’, and the stress, exhaustion and overwork that this entails (gill, ). we hope, then, to forge intergenerational solidarities that will allow us to tackle this culture, and in turn avoid reproducing within the discipline the power and intersectional inequalities that frame so much critical work in criminology. acknowledgements we are very grateful for comments provided by dr. ellie bates on an earlier draft of this response. declaration of conflicting interest the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. references chesney-lind m & chagnon n ( ) criminology, gender, and race: a case study of privilege in the academy. feminist criminology ( ): – . gill r ( ) breaking the silence: the hidden injuries of the neoliberal university. in flood r and gill r (eds) secrecy and silence in the research process: feminist reflections. london: routledge routledge, pp. – . gill r ( ) academics, cultural workers and critical labour studies. journal of cultural economy ( ): - . jones s and oakley c ( ) the precarious postdoc. durham: working knowledge/hearing the voice. available at: http://www.workingknowledgeps.com/wp- content/uploads/ / /wkps_precariouspostdoc_pdf_interactive.pdf (accessed on august ) thwaites r and pressland a ( ) introduction: being an early career feminist academic in a changing academy. in thwaites r and pressland a (eds) being an early career feminist academic. london: palgrave macmillan, pp. - . ucu ( ) workload is an education issue: ucu workload survey report . available at: https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/ /workload-is-an-education-issue-ucu- http://www.workingknowledgeps.com/wp-content/uploads/ / /wkps_precariouspostdoc_pdf_interactive.pdf http://www.workingknowledgeps.com/wp-content/uploads/ / /wkps_precariouspostdoc_pdf_interactive.pdf https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/ /workload-is-an-education-issue-ucu-workload-survey-report- /pdf/ucu_workloadsurvey_fullreport_jun .pdf workload-survey-report- /pdf/ucu_workloadsurvey_fullreport_jun .pdf (accessed on august ) ucu ( ) counting the costs of casualisation in higher education: key findings of a survey conducted by the university and college union. available at: https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/ /counting-the-costs-of-casualisation-in-higher- education-jun- /pdf/ucu_casualisation_in_he_survey_report_jun .pdf (accessed on august ) https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/ /workload-is-an-education-issue-ucu-workload-survey-report- /pdf/ucu_workloadsurvey_fullreport_jun .pdf https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/ /counting-the-costs-of-casualisation-in-higher-education-jun- /pdf/ucu_casualisation_in_he_survey_report_jun .pdf https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/ /counting-the-costs-of-casualisation-in-higher-education-jun- /pdf/ucu_casualisation_in_he_survey_report_jun .pdf https://www.ucu.org.uk/media/ /counting-the-costs-of-casualisation-in-higher-education-jun- /pdf/ucu_casualisation_in_he_survey_report_jun .pdf black lives matter principles as an africentric approach to improving black american health black lives matter principles as an africentric approach to improving black american health kaston d. anderson-carpenter received: may /revised: august /accepted: august # the author(s) abstract although public health has made substantial advances in closing the health disparity gap, black americans still experience inequalities and inequities. several theoretical frameworks have been used to develop public health interventions for black american health; yet the existing paradigms do not fully account for the ontology, epistemology, or axiology of black american populations. the black lives matter (blm) movement provides a basis for understanding the constructs that may contribute to black american health. by drawing from the blm principles, this paper presents an alternative approach for developing, implementing, and evaluating public health interventions for black populations in the usa. furthermore, the approach may inform future public health research and policies to reduce health disparities within and across black populations in the usa. keywords public health interventions . african american . black american . populationhealth . health disparities . black lives matter “when black people get free, everybody gets free.” ~alicia garza, co-founder of the black lives matter movement introduction despite substantial improvements in reducing the health dis- parity gap in the usa, black americans still fare far worse than their white peers across almost every health indicator [ , ]. these disparities often affect black americans as early as childhood and extend throughout the lifespan. not only do black americans have a shorter life expectancy relative to their white counterparts [ , ] but also social and environmental determinants of health have a substantially harmful effect on black americans. even among subgroups of black american populations, such disparities exist. black women experience greater decrements in health outcomes such as obesity, diabetes, and cancer compared with women from other racial/ethnic groups [ , ]. additionally, black men who have sex with men (msm) and black transgender women have greater odds of housing instability, substance use, and incarceration relative to their heterosexual black peers [ ]. numerous perspectives have delineated potential mecha- nisms to explain health disparities in black american popula- tions. historically, public health is grounded in a postpositivist epistemology, which has allowed researchers and practi- tioners to examine the epidemiology of health conditions such as hiv, diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and obesity in black communities. the ecological systems theory (est), initially proposed by bronfenbrenner [ , ], offers a robust conceptu- alization of the interacting determinants of public health. whereas bronfenbrenner proposed the est as nested levels (e.g., microsystem is nested in the mesosystem), other scholars [ ] have argued that ecological levels are better un- derstood as networked—that is, microsystems interact with one another through a common individual. in public health research and practice, these systems include individual or in- trapersonal characteristics, interpersonal processes, although there is disagreement on whether to use black or african american, i will use the black identifier throughout this article to underscore that some people of african descent living in the usa are descendants of africans from across the transatlantic slave trade. * kaston d. anderson-carpenter kaston@msu.edu michigan state university, east lansing, mi, usa journal of racial and ethnic health disparities https://doi.org/ . /s - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://orcid.org/ - - - x mailto:kaston@msu.edu institutional and community factors, and public policy. although the two approaches differ in how ecological levels interact, the implications for addressing health disparities in black american populations are well-documented [ , , ]. still, public health research has shown that other models have utility in improving black american health. three such models are the theory of planned behavior, the social determinants of health model, and the health equity measurement framework (hemf). the theory of planned be- havior [ ] posits that attitudes, norms, and perceived behav- ioral control (or skills) interact to influence one’s intention to engage in a health behavior and that both intentions and per- ceived skills influence health behavior engagement. to under- stand how knowledge, attitudes, and perceived skills impact behavior, however, one must consider broader ecological fac- tors defined by the social determinants of health (sdh) model [ ]. based on whitehead’s pioneering work [ ], the sdh model, similar to the ecological systems theory, posits that multiple, and often fixed, environmental factors play a role in one’s health behavior and outcomes; such factors often lie outside the control of individuals. specifically, the sdh mod- el highlights individual factors (e.g., age, gender, sexual ori- entation, and race/ethnicity); social and community networks (e.g., family involvement and functioning, sense of commu- nity); and general socioeconomic, cultural, and environmental conditions (e.g., living and working conditions, racism and discrimination, homophobia, biphobia, and transphobia) that may be outside individual control. the hemf [ ] built on previous models by introducing a social stratification process. this process highlights the man- ner in which social hierarchies affect health outcomes through systemically unequal distributions of power, prestige, and re- sources. the hemf provides an inclusive process of investi- gating health equity while integrating multiple frameworks of social determinants of health and identifying potentially stra- tegic points of intervention for diverse populations. despite acknowledging that race, gender, and socioeco- nomic status are important in understanding health inequities, the postpositivist underpinnings of many public health models may prevent them from explicitly demonstrating how black queer and trans people, older black adults, and black women are critical partners—and not merely participants—in under- standing health from a black-centered perspective. the blm movement differs by affirming those identities; specifically, it asserts those identities as fundamental to understanding black diversity in the usa. by affirming the identities, the blm also validates those experiences and realities. such validation may contribute to developing, implementing, and evaluating public health interventions for black american health through a critical and intersectional lens. to address some of the lim- itations of the aforementioned models, i introduce an alterna- tive approach grounded in the black lives matter (blm) principles and informed by the ecological systems theory, theory of planned behavior, and social determinants of health model for understanding black health from a critical africentric epistemology (an expanded discussion on africentrism can be found elsewhere) [ – ]. challenging the reality of black health questions of scientific inquiry hinge on ontology, epistemol- ogy, and axiology. from these three philosophical assump- tions come methods, evaluation procedures, and sustainability processes. to better understand the relationship between on- tology, epistemology, and axiology, we can reference the nested structure depicted in fig. . the ontology of public health prompts us to ask, “what is reality?” scholars have argued that the ontology of public health interprets the “pub- lic” as individual and/or collective and “health” as mechanis- tic and/or dialectic [ ]. other scholars [ ] posited that, based on nijhuis and van der maesen’s propositions [ ], ontological positions that focus on individual health (as op- posed to collective health) will produce interventions that less likely to be adopted by communities. historically, public health’s ontological positioning has been notably aligned with postpositivism, operating under the assumption that a single reality exists for population health. much of public health research and practice has been anchored in the notion that there are universal mechanisms that influence health behavior and outcomes in black popula- tions in the usa and, perhaps, globally. ontological assump- tions guide research in investigating the reality of black pop- ulations experiencing public health outcomes such as hiv risk behavior, substance use, and cardiovascular and metabolic ontology: what is reality? axiology: what values drive the work? epistemology: what "counts" as knowledge? axiology: what values guide the work? fig. nested model of philosophical assumptions j. racial and ethnic health disparities diseases. although not explicitly stated, ontological position- ing in public health research influences the epistemology through which research and practice are implemented. epistemology (see fig. , middle sphere) provides the pa- rameters and assumptions that determine what types of evi- dence “count” as knowledge, what standards are used to de- fine rigorous evidence, and how one obtains knowledge about the reality. epistemological assumptions provide a framing to discern whether data meet a minimum threshold to be consid- ered evidence. in postpositivism, knowledge is obtained from systematic investigations of phenomena with minimal interac- tion between the researcher and participant. to be sure, postpositivism is not the sole epistemology in the field. in fact, whitehead’s pioneering work in health equity [ , ] helped substantially shift public health language from being deficit oriented to more socially and contextually oriented perspec- tives. in turn, public health research included more epistemo- logical assumptions to address complex and interlocking con- tingencies that influence community and population health. thus, critical epistemologies and theories (e.g., critical race theory, feminist theory, queer theory) have been highlighted as germane to understanding the reality of black american health. whereas many philosophical analyses stop at ontology and epistemology, a catholic conceptualization must also include axiological assumptions (fig. , inner sphere). axiology is the philosophy of values [ ], which may include ethics and so- cial validity [ ]. more specifically, axiological matters com- pel us to ask, “what values do we bring to the area of scientific inquiry?” following the ontological and epistemological is- sues highlighted previously, it is incumbent upon public health to evaluate its own values toward black health. the fundamental question we must ask ourselves is, “what value do we place upon black lives?” from this question, we can further proceed to reflect upon the following: what are our attitudes and beliefs toward black americans? what biases, toward or against, black people do we bring to scientific inquiry? what is the importance of achieving social validation of goals, procedures, and effects from black communities in public health research and practice? by addressing the axiological questions that are specific to black population health, public health research can strengthen its ethical and philosophical underpinnings in ways that en- hance black health holistically. realizing the ontology, epistemology, and axiology of black health requires a critical analysis of the philosophies that guide intervention development and testing. although public health research has been guided historically by postpositivism, the field has recognized the need for critical epistemological investigations to understand the ontology of black american health more fully. however, many existing approaches do not integrate philosophical thoughts and values that are unique to black populations. however, the blm movement provides a basis for developing an approach to account for such limitations. why blm? following george zimmerman’s acquittal, three black organizers—alicia garza, patrisse cullors, and opal tometi—mobilized black communities and their allies to pro- test the mistreatment of, and disregard for, black lives in the usa. however, it was not until the murder of mychal brown by former ferguson, mo officer darren wilson that the movement was brought to the forefront of the national discourse on racial inequities. originated in the #blacklivesmatter hashtag, the movement quickly expanded to platforms outside social media. the blm movement also symbolized a reaffirmation of black lives in the usa despite systemic acts of discrimination perpetuated upon black indi- viduals and families. to date, blm has chapters across the usa and canada. since its inception, blm has challenged anti-black policy makers, facilitated the passage of critical legislation to support black americans, and, on a broader scale, arguably changed the national conversation on blackness and the lived experiences of black individuals [ ]. the blm movement has principles that guide its phi- losophy and work for social change (table ). several of its principles—namely, queer- and trans-affirming and empowering black women—are firmly grounded in an inter- sectional understanding of the diversity of black american experiences. unlike previous social movements to redress sys- temic oppression, blm places intersecting identities and transformative frameworks at the forefront of its epistemolog- ical grounding. taken together, the principles put forth a more africentric public health approach for understanding and empowering black lives, families, and communities. furthermore, the principles can be used to identify additional theories and frameworks for understanding black health through black lives. a proposed alternative approach for black american health the alternative approach proposed in this article has three major constructs: ( ) honoring diversity; ( ) knowledge, atti- tudes, beliefs, and behaviors; and ( ) group dynamics. this approach asserts that the concepts contribute to the develop- ment and implementation of effective public health interven- tions in black populations, which then facilitate improved public health outcomes (fig. ). these constructs are bounded j. racial and ethnic health disparities by the africentric philosophy of “holism,” which refers to the interdependence between the whole person and the environ- ment [ ]. this concept is evident throughout the blm prin- ciples. specifically, the honoring of individual identities (e.g., age, sexual orientation, gender identity, and womanhood) is inextricably linked to the knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors of black americans. these constructs, in turn, are interdependent with group dynamics (e.g., globalism, families and villages, restorative justice, and collective value). together, these constructs help address the diversity in the black american experience. thus, through holism, the blm principles work in concert to support intervention develop- ment and implementation, as well as positively impact health and social outcomes regarding black american health. the proposed approach to black american health fits squarely within a networked conceptualization of the ecolog- ical systems theory while drawing on the strengths of the social determinants of health framework and theory of planned behavior. not only can the model be tested for inter- vention development and implementation but it may also im- pact health and social outcomes for black americans. for instance, public health research can empirically test the degree to which the three major constructs contribute to intervention development and implementation. honoring diversity the fundamental construct is honoring diversity, which relates to both individuals and microsystems in neal and neal’s [ ] networked model of ecological systems. because black americans are not a monolithic group, it is critical to begin by acknowledging the heterogeneity within these communities across the usa. here, honoring diversity is con- ceptualized as acknowledging, embracing, and celebrating intersecting identities across black american populations. it requires the inclusion of marginalized groups within black populations not only as participants but also as citizen scien- tists in participatory research and action. in application, public health research might affirm transgender (trans) identities by creating an intellectual environment that allows black people of trans experience to convey their lived experiences through oral histories to inform intervention development. other ap- proaches may affirm black queer and trans identities through multicomponent interventions that integrate africentric sym- bolism, spiritual rituals, and a celebration of their identities in traditional african cultures [ , ]. still, public health can— and should—acknowledge and address the contributions of slavery on black american health, the harmful effects of geo- graphical and cultural dislocation on black american health, and how those factors work in tandem to disempower black americans in a capitalist economic framework [ ]. honoring diversity also includes embracing multiple affirming constructs simultaneously, denoted by double ar- rows in fig. . this is an important feature because it high- lights the intersecting identities present within black american communities. thus, maximizing efforts to honor diversity requires research and practice to consider not only an individual’s race but also one’s gender identity, sexual orientation, age, and social role simultaneously. knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors as azjen [ ] noted, one’s knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and perceived behavioral control influence the extent to table blm principles principle description diversity acknowledging, respecting, and celebrating similarities and differences restorative justice working together vigorously for freedom and justice for black people and, by extension, all people black affirming black people do not have to qualify their position globalism black people are part of a global black family; acknowledgement of differential privileges within and across black communities collective value all black lives matter transgender (trans) affirming embracing and making space for people of trans experience black women creating space for black women free from misogyny, sexism, and male-centrism black villages supporting black people as extended families and villages empathy engaging others with intent to learn about and connect with their contexts black families supporting family-friendly spaces for parents to fully participate with their children queer affirming fostering queer-affirming spaces free from heteronormativity age affirming all people, regardless of age, have the capacity to lead and learn loving engagement embodying and practicing justice, liberation, and peace in interpersonal engagements adapted from black lives matter (https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-we-believe/) j. racial and ethnic health disparities https://blacklivesmatter.com/what-eelieve/ which individuals engage in healthy behaviors. recently, studies have demonstrated the utility of assessing black populations’ attitudes, perceived barriers, and perceived benefits of public health and medical interventions. research based on the theory of planned behavior found that, among black american women, fear of condom ne- gotiation was negatively associated with behavioral intent and condom use [ ]. still, later investigations suggest that barriers such as hiv stigma, lack of social support, and negative perceptions of healthcare providers are sub- stantial barriers to engagement in the hiv continuum of care for black individuals living with hiv [ , ]. on the other hand, having social support, having a good re- lationship with healthcare providers, and reassurance about one’s health served as facilitating factors of care engagement [ , ]. despite the strengths of azjen’s theory, other scholars have argued that the constructs within the theory must be placed in the proper cultural, social, and historical context to improve health outcomes among black americans. using the africentric principles noted by randolph [ ] and banks, public health interventions for black americans should use multidimensional approaches that include storytelling and oral histories, as well as harmonious integration of emotional, cog- nitive, and behavioral aspects of the whole person. such ap- proaches may include acknowledging the health impacts of slavery and ongoing anti-black policies and practices, honor- ing and integrating the diverse spiritual traditions that influ- ence black american health behaviors, and focusing on the process of changing health behavior and not only on the out- come itself [ ]. improving knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors requires empathy and loving engagement. rooted in the nguni bantu philosophy of ubuntu (often translated as “i am because we are”), this construct invites public health research and practice to adopt a radical commitment to effective public health interventions improved public health outcomes group dynamics loving engagement black families and villages collective value globalism transgender affirming honoring diversity queer affirming black affirming black womenage affirming knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and behaivors empathy restorative justice fig. a proposed alternative approach to black american health through the blm principles. the unshaded circles represent the blm principles and their interrelationships. the blm principles are grouped into the three shaded constructs of honoring diversity, group dynamics, and attitudes and values. together, the shaded areas, through the blm principles, support the development and implementation of effective public health interventions for black american communities, which may then positively impact public health outcomes j. racial and ethnic health disparities improving black american health from an africentric perspective. to effectively practice empathy and loving engagement, it is imperative for public health to draw from queer and black feminist theories. for example, black womanhood challenges the notion of the nuclear family (described in more detail below) because it is de- fined in part by black american women’s experiences as “blood mothers, othermothers, and community othermothers.” [ ](p. ) in this vein, understanding the critical role of black womanhood in black american communities can enhance initiatives to improve health outcomes. by also anchoring research and interventions in the understanding of identities such and queer and trans identities in the traditional african context [ , ], pub- lic health can foster empathy and promote loving engage- ment among black americans regarding health behaviors, which may ultimately change black americans’ health- related knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors. thus, constructs such as empathy and loving engagement necessitate expanding the field of public health to effec- tuate community-oriented interventions that include black community members as integral partners in development, implementation, evaluation, and sustainment. group dynamics group dynamics refers to behavioral and psychological pro- cesses occurring within or between social groups [ , ]. in terms of the ecological systems theory, group dynamics in- clude both microsystems and mesosystemic interactions. distally, it includes mechanisms that support upstream (or exosystemic) efforts, such as policy changes and widespread practice changes. in the proposed approach, group dynamics accounts for interpersonal behavioral and psychological mechanisms across the social ecology. in sum, the construct is an amalgamation of community-oriented actions rooted in empathy, love, and diversity, in which the liberty of the col- lective unit is the sum of individual liberties. at its most basic ecological level, the approach promotes positive psychological and behavioral change by promoting black families and villages. contrary to western conceptual- izations of the family unit, an africentric perspective views family as far more extensive than the nuclear family. in black american families, as davis and davis note [ ], the horrors of families being ripped apart due to slavery meant that black families could not conform perfectly to the eurocentric model of the nuclear family. as such, public health research and practice must account for the fact that “family” often extends beyond the nuclear or household unit. it also requires public health research and practice to examine epistemological as- sumptions about black families and villages while challeng- ing patriarchal norms. this charge can be kept by integrating black feminist and queer theories into understanding the realities, processes, and health behaviors in black american subpopulations. another key construct is restorative justice. to understand its positioning in the overall proposed approach, we turn to the blm movement in its framing of restorative justice: we work vigorously for freedom and justice for black people and, by extension, all people. we intentionally build and nurture a beloved community that is bonded together through a beautiful struggle that is restorative, not de- pleting. , para. given the movement’s framing, it stands to reason that restorative justice extends beyond areas of criminal jus- tice. rather, it includes areas such as psychosocial, behav- ioral, and environmental determinants of health, educa- tion, and chronic disease. to be sure, research is clear regarding the effectiveness and utility of restorative jus- tice efforts in diverse settings. recent work such as the young women’s empowerment project [ ] has been ef- fective in enhancing resistance to harm, re-centering un- derstanding of empowered safety, and reorienting atti- tudes and beliefs in self-care to address harm. other work has demonstrated positive effects in improving student outcomes [ , ], suggesting that youth who participate in restorative justice interventions are more likely to re- ceive disciplinary referrals and suspensions while emerg- ing as participatory leaders. to address black health from a public health perspective, it is necessary to reorient how the field understands restorative justice. using the aforementioned framing, public health in- terventions can capitalize on the knowledge within black communities by including them as community experts. additionally, public health research and practice can build capacity in black communities to conduct community assess- ments, mobilize and plan action, implement and evaluate ac- tion plans, and sustain their efforts. although there are many ways that public health efforts can integrate restorative justice, the core component of the construct is to develop and imple- ment public health interventions that bring diverse black pop- ulations together in ways that also promote empathy and lov- ing engagement. considering the implications of intervention development in black families, one should also understand the concept of black villages. according to the blm movement, black vil- lages have two goals: (a) to contest the western-dominated conceptualization of family structure (i.e., two-parent nuclear family) and (b) to support one another as part of extended families “to the degree that parents and children are comfortable” (emphasis added). these goals suggest that, based on the networked ecological systems theory [ ], it is j. racial and ethnic health disparities important to investigate the impact of multiple mesosystemic interactions from an africentric perspective. a fundamental assumption is collective value—that is, all black lives matter. all black lives across the globe should be honored, respected, and celebrated regardless of identity, privilege, citizenship status, or worldviews. without this core assumption, one cannot fully examine group dynamics in black populations. and, by extension, this proposed approach would be inconsistent with itself. a corollary to collective value is globalism or the position that each black individual is a member of a global, dia- sporic black family. within the position of globalism lies the understanding that diversity of experience exists across black subpopulations such that some black com- munities may experience privileges that are foreign to others. because privilege is intersectional, it stands to rea- son that factors such as socioeconomic status, gender identity, and sexual orientation may place some black subgroups in positions of relative privilege than others. thus, systematic investigations in the role of constructs such as collective value and globalism not only contribute to identify effective interventions but they also support the black-affirming nature of the alternative approach proposed here. limitations, considerations, and future directions as argued in this article, the proposed approach may provide a more refined approach for addressing health outcomes in black american populations. by concentrating efforts on hon- oring diversity, promoting prosocial attitudes and values, and fostering group dynamics, public health research and practice can support more effective interventions, thus yielding im- proved public health outcomes for black populations. furthermore, the proposition put forth in this article allows public health research to develop instruments to measure more specific constructs such as restorative justice through an africentric lens. a critical feature is its focus on affirming black lives—not only in research and practice but also in theory development and testing. nevertheless, many considerations must be acknowledged. first, it is important to note that the proposed approach is applicable to black populations in the usa; as such, it may not hold for other black populations across the world. furthermore, this approach is not intended to co-op the impor- tant work of the blm movement. rather, it provides an ave- nue to anchor public health research and practice in a concep- tual understanding of the collective lived experiences, core values, and ideals of black people in the usa from an africentric perspective. additionally, many constructs are interrelated, and empir- ical research is needed to investigate the strength of those relationships across multiple communities of the african diaspora. it must also be noted that the proposed approach in this article is not a panacea for conceptualizing black american health for all black populations across the african diaspora. rather, it provides an alternative approach by which rigorous, culturally responsive scientific investigations can be conducted. furthermore, the two-dimensional nature shown in fig. suggests that constructs of honoring diversity and knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors mediate the rela- tionship between group dynamics and effective public health interventions. that is not the case. a correct interpretation would require a three-dimensional structure depicting the unique contributions of each major construct (i.e., group dy- namics; knowledge, attitudes, beliefs, and behaviors; honor- ing diversity) on developing and implementing effective pub- lic health interventions. thus, future work can empirically test the relative contributions of each constructs on public health outcomes for black communities. additionally, the proposed approach may afford public health research and practice a basis for creating culturally responsive instruments to measure implementation fidelity of interventions from a more africentric perspective. considerations notwithstanding, the proposed alternative conceptualization of black american health is rooted in the principles of the blm movement and africentrism and in- formed by the ecological systems theory and social determi- nants of health model. unlike most public health theories and frameworks, this approach integrates africentric thought to inform the development, implementation, and evaluation of public health interventions regarding black american health. in addition, it shows the interactive and iterative nature of core principles in understanding black health and well-being. first, it demonstrates that each major construct is networked with the others. second, within each major construct lie subconstructs that intentionally yield themselves to robust measures of core dimensions. for example, measuring collec- tive value may include dimensions such as self and perceived identity, as well as situational value in law enforcement, edu- cational institutions, and social structures. finally, it provides linkages between theoretical and methodological advances in improving population-level health outcomes for black communities. the approach presented in this article calls for public health to re-examine its prevailing ontology, epistemology, and axi- ology regarding black american health. embracing a more critical, africentric perspective requires public health to honor the collective reality of black american health that has been damaged by racial trauma, economic capitalism, and social silencing. it also calls for the field to adopt alternative means for understanding that collective reality that align with africentric values, such as spiritual traditions through j. racial and ethnic health disparities storytelling and oral histories. as an alternative conceptuali- zation of improving black american health outcomes, i hope the approach presented here offers public health researchers a useful manner of thinking about and addressing black american health and that this article serves as a first step in further conceptual refinement and intervention development. open access this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution . international license, which permits use, sharing, adap- tation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, pro- vide a link to the creative commons licence, and indicate if changes were made. the images or other third party material in this article are included in the article's creative commons licence, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. if material is not included in the article's creative commons licence and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. to view a copy of this licence, visit http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. references . belgrave fz, abrams ja. reducing disparities and achieving equi- ty in african 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black american health 	abstract 	introduction 	challenging the reality of black health 	why blm? 	a proposed alternative approach for black american health 	honoring diversity 	knowledge, beliefs, attitudes, and behaviors 	group dynamics 	limitations, considerations, and future directions 	references microsoft word - senft.doc la	
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  credere	
  che	
  le	
   fotografie	
  possano	
  avere	
   una	
   forza	
   attuale	
   o	
   potenziale	
   sui	
   corpi	
   umani	
   sembra	
   un	
   po’	
   misticheggiante.	
   le	
   * il	
   presente	
   saggio,	
   disponibile	
   in	
   due	
   versioni	
   inglesi	
   (abridged	
   e	
   unabridged)	
   su	
   academia.edu	
   (https://www.academia.edu/ /the_skin_of_the_selfie_unabridged_version_),	
   e	
   pubblicato	
   nella	
  sua	
  versione	
  ridotta	
  in	
  ( )	
  ego	
  update:	
  the	
  future	
  of	
  digital	
  identity	
  (ed.	
  by	
  a.	
  bieber),	
  düs-­‐‑ seldorf:	
  nrw	
  forum	
  publications,	
  è	
  qui	
  stato	
  tradotto	
  in	
  italiano	
  su	
  gentile	
  concessione	
  dell’autrice.	
   scelta	
   del	
   traduttore	
   è	
   di	
   riportare	
   tra	
   parentesi	
   tonde	
   la	
   dicitura	
   inglese	
   qualora	
   sia	
   significativa	
   nell’economia	
  del	
  testo	
  (ndt). 	
   molti	
   pensatori	
   hanno	
   influenzato	
   questo	
   saggio,	
   ma	
   gregory	
   seigworth	
   e	
   brittney	
   cooper	
   hanno	
   fornito	
  la	
  spalla	
  intellettuale	
  sulla	
  quale	
  mi	
  sono	
  trovata	
  a	
  poggiare	
  ancora	
  ed	
  ancora.	
  voglio	
  anche	
   ringraziare	
  hagi	
  kenaan	
  per	
  avermi	
  fatto	
  conoscere	
  amichai	
  e	
  l’estratto	
  che	
  inizia	
  questo	
  saggio. la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  rivista	
  online	
  di	
  filosofia	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  e	
  lo	
  specchio immagini	
  sono	
  cose.	
  non	
  fanno	
  altro	
  che	
  mostrarsi	
  a	
  chi	
  le	
  guarda.	
  come	
  questo	
  mo-­‐‑ strarsi	
   possa	
   conformarsi	
   nella	
   frase	
   “dimostrazione	
   di	
   potere”	
   richiede	
   una	
   lezione	
   sulle	
  relazioni	
  tra	
  immagini,	
  simboli,	
  icone	
  e	
  marche.	
   storicamente,	
  queste	
  lezioni	
  hanno	
  avuto	
  diversi	
  maestri.	
  per	
  freud,	
  la	
  connessione	
   tra	
  immagine	
  e	
  potere	
  avviene	
  nella	
  prima	
  infanzia,	
  quando	
  il	
  bambino	
  inizia	
  ad	
  associa-­‐‑ re	
  il	
  visto	
  col	
  noto,	
  quando	
  entra	
  nella	
  fase	
  del	
  “guardare”.	
  restare	
  in	
  questa	
  fase	
  troppo	
   a	
  lungo	
  è	
  sviluppare	
  una	
  scopofilia	
  feticistica	
  comunemente	
  intesa	
  attraverso	
  la	
  figura	
   dell’uomo	
  “voyeur”	
  o	
  della	
  donna	
  narcisista	
  (freud	
   ).	
   marx	
  ha	
  coniato	
   il	
   termine	
  “feticcio	
  della	
  merce”	
  per	
  spiegare	
  come	
   il	
   capitalismo	
   incoraggi	
  un	
  culto	
  dei	
  beni	
  per	
  distrarre	
  i	
  lavoratori	
  dal	
  fatto	
  che	
  il	
  valore	
  (e	
  dunque	
  il	
   potere)	
  non	
  risiede	
  nelle	
  merci	
  stesse,	
  ma	
  nel	
  sistema	
  attraverso	
   il	
  quale	
   tali	
  oggetti	
   circolano	
  (marx	
   ).	
  facendo	
  eco	
  ai	
  diari	
  dei	
  coloni	
  europei	
  che	
  riportavano	
  come	
  gli	
   africani	
  accettassero	
  con	
  felicità	
  perline	
  senza	
  valore	
  in	
  cambio	
  di	
  terra,	
  marx	
  conside-­‐‑ rava	
   il	
   feticismo	
   contemporaneo	
   una	
   forma	
   di	
   “ferocia”	
   nella	
   quale	
   una	
   relazione	
   ossessiva	
  con	
  una	
  parte	
  è	
  vista	
  come	
  più	
  significativa	
  che	
  una	
  relazione	
  misurata	
  con	
   l’intero,	
  e	
  il	
  desiderio	
  personale	
  vince	
  i	
  fatti	
  materiali.	
   “misero	
  il	
  feticista”,	
  recita	
  il	
  detto,	
  “al	
  quale	
  è	
  offerta	
  una	
  donna,	
  quando	
  ciò	
  che	
  vuole	
   è	
  una	
  scarpa”.	
  in	
  quanto	
  accademica	
  conosciuta	
  per	
  gli	
  articoli	
  pubblicati	
  sulla	
  cultura	
   selfie,	
  spesso	
  mi	
  trovo	
  a	
  dialogare	
  con	
  giornalisti	
  incaricati	
  di	
  rispondere	
  una	
  volta	
  per	
   tutte	
  alla	
  questione,	
  posta	
  dai	
  loro	
  lettori,	
  se	
  fare	
  e	
  diffondere	
  foto	
  di	
  se	
  stessi	
  costituisce	
   un	
  atto	
  potenziante	
  o	
  depotenziante.	
  quando	
  chiedo,	
  “ma	
  cosa	
  intendi	
  per	
  potenziamen-­‐‑ to,	
  in	
  questo	
  contesto?”,	
  solitamente	
  mi	
  trovo	
  di	
  fronte	
  ad	
  occhi	
  rovesciati	
  ed	
  evidenze	
   aneddotiche	
  tratte	
  dalle	
  proprie	
   interviste.	
  a	
  volte	
  mi	
  si	
  parla	
  di	
  ricerche	
  scientifiche	
   che,	
  come	
  ho	
  sostenuto	
  altrove,	
  sono	
  difettose	
  nelle	
  loro	
  premesse	
  e	
  inconcludenti	
  nei	
   loro	
  risultati	
  (senft	
  &	
  baym	
   a).	
   ho	
  anche	
  sentito	
  parecchie	
  volte	
  parlare	
  dell’importanza	
  della	
  “viralità”	
  online,	
  che	
   tende	
  ad	
  essere	
  considerata	
  la	
  teoria	
  quasi-­‐‑magica	
  del	
  fatto	
  che,	
  nello	
  spazio	
  digitale,	
  i	
   sentimenti	
  sono	
  trasformati	
  «in	
  una	
  proprietà,	
  come	
  fossero	
  qualcosa	
  che	
  si	
  ha,	
  e	
  che	
  si	
   può	
   dunque	
   trasmettere,	
   come	
   se	
   ciò	
   che	
   si	
   trasmette	
   fosse	
   la	
   stessa	
   cosa»	
   (ahmed	
   :	
   ).	
  nel	
  suo	
  lavoro	
  sul	
  contagio	
  emozionale,	
  sara	
  ahmed	
  sostiene	
  che	
  tutti	
  sanno	
   come	
  «i	
  sentimenti	
  raccontati	
  non	
  fanno	
  sentire	
  le	
  stesse	
  sensazioni»,	
  ma	
  nonostante	
  ciò	
   è	
   difficile	
   negare	
   la	
   forza	
   delle	
   sensazioni	
   moltiplicate	
   attraverso	
   la	
   diffusione	
   sui	
   network.	
  cercando	
  di	
  sviluppare	
  una	
  spiegazione	
  per	
  questa	
  forza,	
  ahmed	
  afferma	
  che	
   «è	
  l’oggetto	
  dell’emozione	
  che	
  circola,	
  piuttosto	
  che	
  l’emozione	
  in	
  quanto	
  tale	
  […]	
  tali	
   oggetti	
  diventano	
  viscosi,	
  o	
  saturati	
  di	
  affetti,	
  siti	
  di	
  tensione	
  personale	
  o	
  sociale	
  ( :	
   ).	
   se	
   li	
   vediamo	
   come	
   oggetti	
   emozionali,	
   è	
   allora	
   abbastanza	
   comprensibile	
   perché	
   possiamo	
   considerare	
   potenzianti	
   dei	
   selfie	
   prodotti	
   per	
   raccogliere	
   fondi	
   per	
   cause	
   caritatevoli,	
   o	
   selfie	
   che	
   ritraggono	
   individui	
   intrattenere	
   comportamenti	
   accettabili	
   soltanto	
  per	
  una	
  parte	
  della	
  popolazione	
  (donne	
  al	
  volante	
  in	
  arabia	
  saudita,	
  peli	
  facciali	
   la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  rivista	
  online	
  di	
  filosofia	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  e	
  lo	
  specchio negli	
  stati	
  uniti,	
  gay	
  che	
  si	
  baciano	
  in	
  uganda,	
  soldati	
  che	
  si	
  rifiutano	
  di	
  entrare	
  in	
  guerra	
   in	
  ogni	
  parte	
  del	
  mondo).	
  allo	
  stesso	
  modo,	
  quando	
  vediamo	
  un	
  “meme”	
  malizioso	
  che	
   “prende	
  in	
  prestito”	
  una	
  foto	
  generata	
  per	
  un’audience	
  totalmente	
  diversa,	
  o	
  appren-­‐‑ diamo	
   di	
   un	
   attivista	
   ucciso	
   dopo	
   essere	
   stati	
   rintracciati	
   grazie	
   ai	
   dati	
   di	
   una	
   foto	
   postata	
  su	
  twitter,	
  o	
  leggiamo	
  di	
  un	
  bambino	
  suicidatosi	
  in	
  seguito	
  ad	
  atti	
  di	
  bullismo	
  in	
   rete	
  iniziati	
  da	
  una	
  foto	
  “sbagliata”,	
  comprendere	
  i	
  selfie	
  come	
  qualcosa	
  di	
  depotenziante	
   ha	
  tutto	
  il	
  suo	
  senso.	
   lo	
  psicanalista	
  octave	
  mannoni	
  ha	
  una	
  volta	
  osservato	
  che	
  il	
  grido	
  del	
  feticista	
  è	
  “sì	
  lo	
   so,	
   ma	
   comunque”.	
   anche	
   non	
   avessi	
   appreso	
   altro	
   nel	
   tempo	
   passato	
   a	
   studiare	
   la	
   cultura	
  selfie,	
  ho	
  ben	
  compreso	
  come	
  tali	
  questioni	
  a	
  proposito	
  del	
  de/potenziamento	
   non	
  hanno	
  nulla	
  a	
  che	
  vedere	
  con	
  le	
  immagini,	
  e	
  tutto	
  con	
  il	
  desiderio	
  di	
  un	
  senso	
  di	
   controllo	
   sull’ambiente	
   nel	
   quale	
   le	
   immagini	
   circolano.	
   la	
   logica	
   feticistica	
   aiuta	
   a	
   consolidare	
  tale	
  senso	
  di	
  controllo	
  psicologico	
  nascondendoci	
  temporaneamente	
  le	
  forze	
   sociali,	
  e,	
  per	
  molti	
  di	
  noi,	
  lo	
  scotoma	
  sembra	
  un	
  prezzo	
  ridotto	
  da	
  pagare	
  in	
  cambio	
  di	
   un	
  senso	
  di	
  certezza	
  su	
  quale	
  tipo	
  di	
  oggetto	
  materiale	
  deve	
  essere	
  importante	
  on	
  e	
  off-­‐‑ line,	
  e	
  quale	
  invece	
  no.	
  	
   	
   	
   occhi	
  morenti,	
  mani	
  viventi	
   	
   il	
  mantra	
  “sì	
  lo	
  so,	
  ma	
  comunque”	
  non	
  fornisce	
  soltanto	
  il	
  senso	
  di	
  una	
  temporanea	
   sicurezza	
  in	
  un	
  mondo	
  insicuro.	
  aiuta	
  anche	
  a	
  riconciliare	
  le	
  due	
  principali	
  (e	
  contrad-­‐‑ dittorie)	
  tesi	
  sulle	
  immagini	
  mediate	
  che	
  circolano	
  di	
  questi	
  tempi	
  tra	
  esperti	
  e	
  studiosi.	
   la	
  prima	
  tesi,	
  sopra	
  provata,	
  concerne	
  il	
  potere	
  delle	
  immagini	
  di	
  modellare	
  le	
  azioni	
  su	
   di	
   un	
   livello	
   psicologico,	
   sociale,	
   politico	
   ed	
   economico.	
   la	
   seconda,	
   resa	
   famosa	
   dal	
   filosofo	
   jean	
   baudrillard,	
   è	
   che	
   siamo	
   ormai	
   tanto	
   frequentemente	
   bombardati	
   da	
   immagini	
  da	
  essere	
  diventati	
   insensibili	
  a	
  ogni	
  potere	
  capace	
  di	
   influenzare	
   il	
  nostro	
   pensiero	
  o	
  comportamento	
  che	
  queste	
  potevano	
  una	
  volta	
  avere.	
   nei	
  suoi	
  lavori	
  su	
  media,	
  visione	
  ed	
  etica,	
  hagi	
  kenaan	
  ( )	
  sostiene	
  che	
  l’occhio	
  ha	
   ormai	
  raggiunto	
  uno	
  «stato	
  di	
  morte	
  clinica»	
  a	
  causa	
  del	
  processo	
  chiamato	
  appiattimen-­‐‑ to.	
   l’estetica	
   dell’appiattimento	
   (che	
   inizia	
   con	
   la	
   pittura	
   basata	
   sulla	
   prospettiva,	
   e	
   raggiunge	
  il	
  suo	
  apice	
  con	
  l’avvento	
  dell’industria	
  pubblicitaria)	
  è	
  tale	
  per	
  cui	
  passiamo	
   la	
   maggior	
   parte	
   delle	
   nostre	
   vite	
   di	
   fronte	
   a	
   schermi,	
   di	
   modo	
   che	
   la	
   profondità,	
   il	
   tempo,	
  gli	
  errori,	
  le	
  crepe	
  ed	
  altri	
  invisibili	
  sono	
  interamente	
  eliminati.	
  in	
  quanto	
  vedenti	
   funzioniamo	
  come	
  drogati,	
  afferma	
  kenaan,	
  allo	
  stesso	
  tempo	
  bramanti	
  e	
  dissanguati	
  da	
   ciò	
  che	
  usiamo	
  per	
  prevenire	
  il	
  nostro	
  impegno	
  nel	
  mondo.	
   così	
   come	
  generalmente	
  accade	
  nella	
  dipendenza,	
   la	
   responsabilità	
  etica	
   tende	
  ad	
   essere	
   la	
  prima	
  vittima	
  dell’appiattimento,	
  conferma	
  kenaan.	
  per	
  fornire	
  un	
  esempio,	
   utilizza	
  la	
  famosa	
  metafora	
  della	
  finestra	
  sviluppata	
  dal	
  filosofo	
  emmanuel	
  levinas	
  in	
   totalità	
  e	
   infinito.	
  quando	
  guardiamo	
  una	
  persona	
  vivente	
  attraverso	
   il	
  vetro	
  di	
  una	
   la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  rivista	
  online	
  di	
  filosofia	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  e	
  lo	
  specchio finestra	
  chiusa,	
  spiega,	
  «apparentemente,	
  l’altra	
  persona	
  è	
  precisamente	
  di	
  fronte	
  a	
  noi,	
   pienamente	
   lì».	
   infatti,	
   continua,	
   «guardarla	
   o	
   ascoltarla	
   attraverso	
   la	
   finestra	
   può	
   insegnarci	
  molte	
  cose	
  sull’altra	
  persona,	
  forse	
  addirittura	
  tutto	
  quello	
  che	
  c’è	
  da	
  sapere».	
   comunque,	
  con	
  la	
  finestra	
  chiusa,	
  «restiamo	
  sempre	
  da	
  una	
  parte	
  del	
  vetro,	
  a	
  casa,	
  tra	
  di	
   noi»	
  ( :	
   ).	
   sebbene	
  sia	
  difficile	
  rifiutare	
  questa	
  visione	
  quando	
  applicata	
  ai	
  mass-­‐‑media,	
  perso-­‐‑ nalmente	
  la	
  trovo	
  incompleta,	
  per	
  lo	
  meno	
  in	
  relazione	
  agli	
  utenti	
  dei	
  network	
  digitali.	
   david	
  bothroyd	
  ( )	
  mostra	
  come,	
  nell’ambiente	
  digitale,	
  le	
  immagini	
  non	
  esistono	
   unicamente	
   in	
  quanto	
  oggetti	
  statici	
  visti	
  passivamente	
   in	
  maniera	
   frontale,	
  ma	
  sono	
   anche	
  il	
  prodotto	
  del	
  processo	
  che	
  mark	
  hansen	
  chiama	
  “imaging”,	
  il	
  quale	
  implica	
  una	
   continua	
  collaborazione	
  uomo-­‐‑macchina.	
  notando	
  il	
  legame	
  tra	
  la	
  parola	
  “digitale”	
  e	
  le	
   dita,	
  elo	
   ( )	
  afferma	
  che	
   il	
  dito	
  è	
  oggi	
  un	
   fattore	
  almeno	
  altrettanto	
  significativo	
   dell’occhio	
  nel	
  modo	
  in	
  cui	
  le	
  immagini	
  sono	
  create	
  e	
  ricevute,	
  e	
  il	
  tatto	
  lo	
  è	
  alla	
  pari	
   della	
  vista.	
   consideriamo	
  come	
  vista	
  e	
  tatto	
  si	
  incontrano	
  nel	
  selfie.	
  nel	
  primo	
  passo	
  della	
  produ-­‐‑ zione	
  di	
  un	
  selfie,	
   il	
   fotografo	
  regge	
   in	
  qualche	
  modo	
  la	
   fotocamera	
  per	
  vedere	
  come	
   appare	
  realmente	
  la	
  pelle	
  del	
  suo	
  viso,	
  puntando	
  l’occhio	
  della	
  camera	
  verso	
  la	
  sommità	
   del	
  suo	
  capo.	
  soddisfatto	
  di	
  questa	
  sovrapposizione	
  di	
  occhi,	
   il	
   fotografo	
   tocca	
   il	
   suo	
   dispositivo	
  per	
  scattare.	
  dopodiché,	
  manipola	
  l’immagine	
  con	
  le	
  sue	
  dita,	
  mettendo	
  di	
   nuovo	
  in	
  dialogo	
  occhi	
  e	
  mano,	
  non	
  tanto	
  per	
  verificare	
  che	
  ciò	
  che	
  prima	
  aveva	
  visto	
   sullo	
  schermo	
  corrisponda	
  a	
  ciò	
  che	
  ora	
  appare,	
  ma	
  per	
  accertarsi	
  che	
  ciò	
  che	
  ora	
  vede,	
   dopo	
  rifiniture	
  e	
  filtri,	
  è	
  ciò	
  che	
  ora	
  desidera.	
  quando	
  sente	
  che	
  la	
  foto	
  ha	
  compreso	
  ciò	
   che	
  vuole,	
  allora	
  tocca	
  nuovamente	
  il	
  dispositivo	
  per	
  salvarla.	
   il	
  dialogo	
  occhio-­‐‑dito	
  (ancora,	
  a	
  volte	
  sulla	
  veridicità,	
  ma	
  spesso	
  su	
  di	
  un	
  altro	
  tipo	
  di	
   desiderio)	
  si	
   ripete	
  ancora	
  una	
  volta	
  quando	
  qualcuno	
  (a	
  volte	
   il	
   fotografo,	
  altre	
  no)	
   carica,	
  scarica	
  o	
  magari	
  trasferisce	
  la	
  foto	
  attraverso	
  i	
  portali	
  dei	
  social	
  media,	
  dove	
  poi	
   tale	
  immagine	
  viene	
  discussa,	
  alterata,	
  classificata,	
  estratta	
  e	
  in	
  vari	
  modi	
  toccata	
  dalle	
   pelli	
  di	
  altre	
  mani	
  su	
  altre	
  superfici.	
   	
   	
   toccare	
  ed	
  essere	
  toccati	
   	
   secondo	
  levinas,	
  l’unico	
  modo	
  per	
  incontrare	
  veramente	
  l’altro	
  è	
  aprire	
  la	
  finestra	
  e	
   affrontare	
  l’individuo	
  in	
  questione:	
  esperire	
  se	
  stesso	
  come	
  simultaneamente	
  vedente	
  e	
   visto.	
   in	
   quel	
   momento,	
   sostengono	
   kenaan	
   e	
   stein,	
   ritroviamo	
   il	
   potenziale	
   della	
   visione:	
  «la	
  sua	
  libertà	
  e	
  concomitante	
  responsabilità,	
  la	
  sua	
  capacità	
  di	
  essere	
  coinvolto,	
   il	
  suo	
  costante	
  coinvolgimento,	
  la	
  sua	
  abilità	
  nel	
  criticare,	
  nell’essere	
  intimo,	
  nel	
  provare	
   pudore,	
  nel	
  rifiutare»	
  ( :	
  xvii).	
  	
   mentre	
  il	
  processo	
  di	
  appiattimento	
  è	
  progettato	
  per	
  eliminare	
  l’apertura	
  delle	
  fine-­‐‑ stre	
  per	
  creare	
  un’estetica	
  nella	
  quale	
  «ciò	
  che	
  vedi	
  è	
  ciò	
  che	
  ottieni,	
  e	
  dietro	
  non	
  c’è	
   la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  rivista	
  online	
  di	
  filosofia	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  e	
  lo	
  specchio altro»	
  ( :	
  xvii),	
  il	
  progetto	
  estetico	
  della	
  sensazione	
  aptica	
  (coinvolgimento	
  attraver-­‐‑ so	
   il	
   tatto)	
   offre	
   diverse	
   opzioni	
   potenziali.	
   nei	
   mondi	
   delle	
   neuroscienze	
   e	
   dell’ingegneria,	
  la	
  sensazione	
  aptica	
  esiste	
  su	
  almeno	
  sei	
  registri,	
  afferma	
  mark	
  paterson	
   ( ).	
  può	
  esserci	
  contatto	
  cutaneo	
  (basato	
  sulla	
  pelle);	
  propriocezione	
  (la	
  posizione	
   del	
   corpo	
   sentita	
   come	
   tensione	
   muscolare);	
   cinestesia	
   (il	
   senso	
   del	
   movimento	
   del	
   corpo	
  e	
  degli	
  arti);	
  il	
  senso	
  vestibolare	
  (un	
  senso	
  di	
  equilibrio	
  derivato	
  dalle	
  informazio-­‐‑ ni	
  dell’orecchio	
  interno);	
  il	
  senso	
  di	
  prossimità	
  della	
  distanza;	
  e	
  il	
  toccare	
  come	
  metafora	
   per	
  un	
  fenomeno	
  psicologico,	
  come	
  nella	
  frase	
  “è	
  toccante”.	
   il	
  registro	
  metaforico	
  del	
  tatto	
  –	
  “deep	
  touch”	
  –	
  ha	
  implicazioni	
  profonde	
  a	
  livello	
  di	
   linguaggio,	
  mentre	
  la	
  visione	
  tende	
  ad	
  essere	
  narrata	
  attraverso	
  metafore	
  dove	
  è	
  la	
  luce	
   che	
  «delinea	
  il	
  mondo	
  fenomenico	
  cognitivamente,	
  creando	
  così	
  le	
  basi	
  per	
  un	
  discorso	
   uniforme	
  della	
  verità»,	
  sostiene	
  elo.	
  per	
  contrasto,	
  il	
  toccare	
  è	
  una	
  metafora	
  che	
  «sman-­‐‑ tella,	
  scompone,	
  e	
  differenzia	
  il	
  linguaggio»	
  ( :	
   ).	
   la	
  storia	
  del	
  dubbio	
  di	
  san	
  tommaso	
  ci	
  ricorda	
  che	
  quando	
  la	
  vista	
  e	
  il	
  tatto	
  si	
  so-­‐‑ vrappongono,	
   viene	
   attivato	
   quel	
   senso	
   di	
   sicurezza	
   (e	
   potere)	
   descritto	
   da	
   freud	
   e	
   marx.	
  quando	
  non	
  lo	
  fanno,	
  nasce	
  una	
  sorta	
  di	
  confusione	
  di	
  base.	
  È	
  piuttosto	
  semplice	
   immaginare	
  di	
  toccare	
  una	
  superficie	
  che	
  non	
  corrisponde	
  a	
  ciò	
  che	
  pensiamo	
  dovrem-­‐‑ mo	
  sentire	
  quando	
  inizialmente	
  la	
  vediamo,	
  o	
  immaginare	
  due	
  persone	
  essere	
  d’accordo	
   sul	
  fatto	
  di	
  vedere	
  la	
  stessa	
  cosa,	
  ma	
  sentirsi	
  toccati	
  diversamente	
  (o	
  non	
  toccati	
  affatto)	
   da	
  tale	
  visione,	
  e	
  perciò	
  comportarsi	
  in	
  maniera	
  diversa.	
   gli	
  ultimi	
  dieci	
  anni	
  hanno	
  visto	
  una	
  crescita	
  in	
  ciò	
  che	
  sara	
  ahmed	
  e	
  jackie	
  stacey	
   hanno	
  soprannominato	
  “dermografia”:	
  un	
  tipo	
  di	
  analisi	
  che	
  «assume	
  la	
  pelle	
  non	
  solo	
   come	
   proprio	
   oggetto,	
   ma	
   anche	
   come	
   punto	
   di	
   partenza	
   per	
   un	
   modo	
   differente	
   di	
   pensare»;	
  che	
  pensa	
  «la	
  pelle,	
  ma	
  anche	
  con	
  o	
  attraverso	
  la	
  pelle»	
  ( :	
   ).	
  una	
  volta,	
   scrivendo	
  a	
  proposito	
  dei	
  cambiamenti	
  nelle	
  tecnologie	
  cibernetiche	
  negli	
  anni	
   ’ ,	
   la	
   teorica	
  femminista	
  donna	
  haraway	
  si	
  chiedeva:	
  «perché	
  il	
  corpo	
  dovrebbe	
  concludersi	
   con	
   la	
  pelle?».	
  nel	
   ,	
   in	
  epoca	
  di	
  reti	
  neurali,	
   innesti	
  di	
   tessuto	
  e	
  diffusione	
  delle	
   cellule,	
  e	
  di	
  ciò	
  che	
  i	
  teorici	
  della	
  comunicazione	
  chiamano	
  “politiche	
  affettive”	
  molti	
  di	
   noi	
  si	
   trovano	
  a	
  dover	
  porre	
  una	
  questione	
  ulteriore:	
  «perché	
   la	
  mia	
  pelle	
  dovrebbe	
   finire	
  col	
  mio	
  corpo?».	
   coprendo	
  e	
  connettendo	
  corpi,	
  la	
  pelle	
  ha	
  molteplici	
  funzioni.	
  rappresenta	
  un	
  conte-­‐‑ nitore	
  per	
  il	
  sé,	
  una	
  superfice	
  per	
  l’altro,	
  e	
  una	
  frontiera	
  fra	
  i	
  due.	
  ciò	
  vale	
  se	
  parliamo	
  di	
   umani,	
   macchine,	
   o	
   corpi	
   digitali	
   in	
   forma	
   di	
   simboli,	
   icone,	
   avatar,	
   o	
   marche.	
   «per	
   pensare	
  attraverso	
  la	
  pelle»,	
  sostengono	
  ahmed	
  e	
  stacey,	
  dobbiamo	
  riflettere	
  «non	
  tanto	
   sul	
   corpo	
   come	
   l’oggetto	
   smarrito	
   del	
   pensiero,	
   ma	
   sull’inter-­‐‑incorporazione	
   (inter-­‐‑ embodiment)	
  sul	
  modo	
  di	
  essere-­‐‑con	
  ed	
  essere-­‐‑per,	
  dove	
  uno	
  tocca	
  ed	
  è	
  toccato	
  da	
  altri»	
   ( :	
   ).	
   coprendo	
  e	
  connettendo	
  corpi,	
  la	
  pelle	
  ha	
  molteplici	
  funzioni.	
  rappresenta	
  un	
  conte-­‐‑ nitore	
  per	
  il	
  sé,	
  una	
  superfice	
  per	
  l’altro,	
  e	
  una	
  frontiera	
  fra	
  i	
  due.	
  quando	
  graffiamo	
   (skin)	
  un	
  altro,	
  commettiamo	
  un	
  atto	
  di	
  violenza.	
  quando	
  graffiamo	
  noi	
  stessi,	
  soppor-­‐‑ la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  rivista	
  online	
  di	
  filosofia	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  e	
  lo	
  specchio tiamo	
  una	
  ferita	
  temporanea	
  che	
  ci	
  rende	
  più	
  consapevoli	
  di	
  qualcosa	
  o	
  qualcuno	
  che	
  ha	
   il	
  potere	
  di	
  toccare	
  la	
  nostra	
  carne.	
   	
   	
   per	
  una	
  fenomenologia	
  della	
  dermografia	
   	
   una	
  delle	
  qualità	
  più	
  significative	
  della	
  pelle	
  in	
  quanto	
  significante	
  visivo	
  è	
  che	
  essa	
   cambia.	
  ogni	
  ricercatore	
  sa	
  che	
  il	
  materiale	
  visivo	
  statico	
  può	
  essere	
  misurato	
  attraverso	
   processi	
   come	
   computo,	
   inquadratura,	
   mappatura,	
   e	
   codifica/decodifica.	
   ma	
   come	
   dovremmo	
  relazionarci	
  a	
  materiali	
  visivi	
  che	
  mutano,	
  si	
  muovono,	
  o	
  si	
  spostano	
  quando	
   entrano	
  in	
  contatto	
  con	
  altri?	
  qui,	
  sostiene	
  kenaan,	
  «ciò	
  che	
  sembra	
  essere	
  richiesto	
  è	
   una	
  fenomenologia:	
  un	
  modo	
  di	
  pensare	
  o	
  un’attenzione	
  riflessiva	
  che	
  si	
  concentra	
  sul	
   fenomeno	
  mentre	
  lo	
  permette…	
  per	
  mostrarlo	
  dal	
  suo	
  interno»	
  ( :	
   ).	
   coloro	
  che	
  desiderano	
  azioni	
  concrete	
  nel	
  senso	
  di	
  costruire	
  un	
  pensiero	
  fenomeno-­‐‑ logico	
  della	
  pelle	
  possono	
  trovare	
  utile	
   il	
   lavoro	
  di	
  un	
  gruppo	
  di	
  scrittori	
  vagamente	
   conosciuti	
  come	
  teorici	
  degli	
  affetti.	
  se	
  i	
  teorici	
  della	
  rappresentazione	
  visiva	
  tendono	
  ad	
   usare	
  termini	
  come	
  soggetto,	
  oggetto	
  e	
  testo	
  per	
  parlare	
  di	
  ciò	
  che	
  le	
  cose	
  significano,	
  i	
   teorici	
  degli	
  affetti	
  impiegano	
  piuttosto	
  parole	
  come	
  evento,	
  performance	
  e	
  flusso,	
  per	
   poter	
  capire	
  ciò	
  che	
  le	
  cose	
  fanno	
  mentre	
  si	
  muovono	
  attraverso	
  spazi	
  fisici,	
  sociali	
  e	
   psichici	
  –	
  e	
  cosa	
  al	
  contempo	
  viene	
  fatto	
  ad	
  esse.	
   nel	
  suo	
  lavoro	
  su	
  spinoza	
  (presumibilmente	
  il	
  primo	
  teorico	
  degli	
  affetti),	
  gregory	
   seigworth	
  ( )	
  afferma	
  che	
  l’affetto	
  è	
  meglio	
  comprensibile	
  se	
  inteso	
  su	
  tre	
  diversi	
   registri,	
  che	
  egli	
  compara	
  ad	
  un	
  punto,	
  una	
  linea	
  e	
  un	
  piano.	
  il	
  primo	
  registro	
  è	
  l’affectio	
   (affezione):	
   un	
   momento	
   puntuale	
   di	
   incontro	
   con	
   qualcuno	
   o	
   qualcosa.	
   seigworth	
   utilizza	
  il	
  termine	
  “impatto”	
  (impingement)	
  per	
  descrivere	
  questa	
  dinamica.	
  il	
  secondo	
   registro	
  è	
  l’affectus	
  (affetto),	
  «l’effetto	
  dell’impatto	
  (impingement)	
  nel	
  suo	
  movimento	
  da	
   corpo	
  a	
  corpo»	
  ( :	
   ).	
  il	
  terzo	
  registro	
  è	
  chiamato	
  da	
  spinoza	
  immanenza:	
  il	
  potere	
   dell’affetto	
  di	
  creare	
  ciò	
  che	
  poi	
  percepiamo	
  come	
  l’interezza	
  del	
  mondo.	
  seighworth	
  si	
   riferisce	
   ad	
   essa	
   come	
   all’«infinita	
   potenzialità	
   di	
   tutto	
   ed	
   ogni	
   cosa	
   di	
   piegarsi	
   ed	
   intrecciarsi	
  su	
  e	
  giù	
  lungo	
  il	
  piano	
  dell’esistenza».	
   al	
  rischio	
  di	
  semplificare	
  sia	
  spinoza	
  che	
  seighworth,	
  penserei	
  l’affetto	
  attraverso	
  tre	
   termini	
  –	
  sentimento,	
  forza,	
  potenziale	
  –	
  e	
  tre	
  domande.	
  la	
  prima,	
  «cosa	
  questo	
  provoca,	
   e	
  a	
  chi?»,	
  è	
  pensata	
  per	
  scavare	
  nelle	
  percezioni	
  individuali.	
  la	
  seguente,	
  «quali	
  forze	
   contiene	
  questo	
  evento?»,	
  mi	
  ricorda	
  come	
  le	
  percezioni	
  individuali	
  sono	
  sempre	
  avvolte	
   da	
  tre	
  forze	
  congiunte:	
  sociali,	
  macchiniche	
  e	
  fisiche.	
   le	
  forze	
  sociali	
  sono	
  quelle	
  reificate	
  nei	
  concetti	
  come	
  identità,	
  amici,	
  spazio,	
  comuni-­‐‑ tà,	
  economia,	
   legge,	
  corporazione,	
  nazione,	
  e	
  così	
  via.	
  le	
   forze	
  basate	
  sulle	
  macchine	
   tendono	
  ad	
  essere	
  descritte	
  negli	
  ambienti	
  dei	
  social	
  media	
  con	
  termini	
  tipo	
  larghezza	
  di	
   banda,	
  connettività,	
  memoria,	
  copia,	
  classificazione,	
  riconoscimento,	
  scarto,	
  eccetera.	
  le	
   forze	
  fisiche	
  e	
  biologiche	
  entrano	
  in	
  gioco	
  quando	
  consideriamo	
  un	
  evento	
  in	
  contesti	
  di	
   la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  rivista	
  online	
  di	
  filosofia	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  e	
  lo	
  specchio nascita,	
  vita,	
  danno	
  o	
  morte	
  di	
  corpi	
  biologici	
  o	
   fisici	
   (umani,	
  animali,	
  morbi,	
   risorse	
   naturali,	
  eccetera).	
   la	
  domanda	
   finale	
  che	
  cerco	
  di	
  porre	
  è	
  questa:	
  «che	
  potenziale	
  esiste	
  qui?».	
  ogni	
   evento	
  accaduto	
  nel	
  presente	
  può	
  essere	
  compreso	
   in	
  due	
  sensi:	
   come	
   il	
   risultato	
  di	
   forze	
  del	
  passato,	
  o	
  come	
  un	
  nuovo	
  tipo	
  di	
  forza	
  in	
  sé.	
  quando	
  tale	
  forza	
  è	
  avvertita	
  nel	
   corpo	
  o	
  nella	
  mente	
  ma	
  non	
  ancora	
  visibile,	
  la	
  chiamiamo	
  “potenziale”.	
  così	
  come	
  tutte	
   le	
  forze,	
  il	
  potenziale	
  –	
  di	
  apprendimento,	
  di	
  alienazione,	
  di	
  rivoluzione,	
  di	
  evoluzione,	
  di	
   distruzione,	
  di	
  crescita,	
  di	
  alterazione	
  –	
  può	
  prendere	
  molte	
  strade	
  tra	
  molteplici	
  corpi	
  in	
   rete,	
   specialmente	
   quando	
   entra	
   in	
   collisione	
   con	
   altre	
   forze	
   nelle	
   dinamiche	
   che	
   usualmente	
  chiamiamo	
  di	
  “potere”.	
   	
   	
   selfies,	
  presi	
  e	
  catturati	
  (grabbing	
  and	
  grabbed)*	
   	
   come	
  possiamo	
  applicare	
  le	
  precedenti	
  domande	
  alle	
  immagini	
  visive	
  che	
  circolano	
   su	
   internet?	
   in	
   lavori	
   precedenti	
   ( ,	
   ,	
   )	
   ho	
   sostenuto	
   che	
   gli	
   utenti	
   dei	
   social	
   media	
   producono,	
   consumano	
   e	
   fanno	
   circolare	
   materiali	
   visivi	
   non	
   fissando	
   (come	
   si	
   farebbe	
   nel	
   caso	
   di	
   un	
   film	
   tradizionale	
   trasmesso	
   al	
   cinema),	
   non	
   dando	
   un’occhiata	
   (come	
   si	
   fa	
   con	
   una	
   televisione	
   accesa	
   in	
   una	
   stanza),	
   ma	
   in	
   un	
   modo	
   segmentato	
  e	
  tattile	
  che	
  ho	
  pensato	
  come	
  un	
  catturare	
  (grabbing).	
  	
   in	
  quanto	
  allo	
  stesso	
  tempo	
  sensazioni	
  personali	
   incorporate	
  e	
  metafora	
  sociale,	
   le	
   frasi	
   basate	
   sulla	
   presa	
   (grab)	
   hanno	
   il	
   potere	
   inserito	
   nella	
   propria	
   sintassi:	
   basti	
   considerare	
  come	
  le	
  espressioni	
  economiche	
  e	
  psicologiche	
  “furto	
  di	
  terra”	
  (land	
  grab)	
  e	
   “catturare	
  l’attenzione”	
  (attention	
  grabbing)	
  suggeriscano	
  nell’ascoltatore	
  un	
  immagine	
   di	
  un	
  corpo	
  passivo	
  sul	
  quale	
  si	
  esercita	
   l’attività	
  di	
  un	
  corpo	
  attivo,	
  o	
  come	
  usiamo	
   l’espressione	
   “in	
   palio”	
   (up	
   for	
   grabs)	
   per	
   descrivere	
   un	
   evento	
   in	
   cui	
   l’esito	
   della	
   potenza	
  non	
  è	
  chiaro,	
  e	
  non	
  siamo	
  sicuri	
  di	
  chi	
  (o	
  cosa)	
  sarà	
  il	
  vincitore.	
   nel	
  processo	
  di	
  produzione	
  del	
  selfie,	
  il	
  catturare	
  (grabbing)	
  inizia	
  con	
  la	
  decisione	
   del	
  fotografo	
  di	
  farsi	
  una	
  foto.	
  la	
  ragione	
  politica	
  che	
  sta	
  dietro	
  alla	
  decisione	
  di	
  farsi	
  una	
   foto	
  è	
  varia:	
  a	
  volte	
  è	
  perché	
  vogliamo	
  controllare	
  come	
  si	
  produce	
  la	
  nostra	
  immagine;	
   altre	
  volte	
  saremmo	
  tranquillamente	
  disposti	
  a	
  cedere	
  il	
  controllo,	
  ma	
  non	
  c’è	
  nessuno	
   che	
   può	
   scattarci	
   una	
   foto.	
   una	
   volta	
   premuto	
   il	
   pulsante	
   della	
   fotocamera,	
   e	
   che	
   l’immagine	
   digitale	
   è	
   catturata	
   (grabbed)	
   e	
   salvata	
   sul	
   nostro	
   telefono	
   o	
   computer,	
   abbiamo	
   la	
   possibilità	
   di	
   editarla,	
   dove	
   la	
   presa	
   (grabbing)	
   lavora	
   tagliando	
   e	
   rico-­‐‑ struendo	
  immagini	
  sullo	
  schermo.	
   anche	
  tale	
  trasformazione	
  è	
  nutrita	
  da	
  una	
  serie	
  di	
  motivazioni	
  differenti.	
  a	
  volte	
  un	
   fotografo	
  rifinisce	
  o	
  applica	
  filtri	
  a	
  una	
  foto	
  per	
  ragioni	
  che	
  appartengono	
  alla	
  nostra	
   nozione	
  generale	
  di	
  sociale:	
  ad	
  esempio,	
  quando	
  tenta	
  di	
  emulare	
  (o	
  rifiutare)	
  precise	
   norme	
   di	
   bellezza,	
   proprietà,	
   civiltà,	
   cittadinanza,	
   amore.	
   altre	
   volte,	
   le	
   modifiche	
   *	
   l’autrice	
  attua	
  un	
  gioco	
  di	
  parole	
  difficilmente	
  traducibile	
  in	
  italiano	
  (ndt). la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  rivista	
  online	
  di	
  filosofia	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  e	
  lo	
  specchio avvengono	
   per	
   ragioni	
   personali	
   profonde:	
   per	
   replicare	
   uno	
   stato	
   dell’infanzia,	
   per	
   documentare	
  uno	
  stato	
  mentale,	
  per	
  zoomare	
  su	
  elemento	
  del	
  volto	
  come	
  se	
  si	
  stesse	
   usando	
  uno	
  specchio.	
   alle	
  volte,	
  la	
  ragione	
  per	
  cui	
  la	
  foto	
  viene	
  editata	
  in	
  un	
  modo	
  particolare	
  è	
  riferibile	
   alla	
  necessità	
  di	
  renderla	
  adeguata	
  come	
  parte	
  di	
  una	
  serie,	
  o	
  come	
  parte	
  di	
  una	
  conver-­‐‑ sazione	
  –	
  cosa	
  che	
  spesso	
  accade	
  quando	
  una	
  foto	
  è	
  inviata	
  come	
  risposta	
  alla	
  foto	
  di	
   qualcun	
  altro.	
  anche	
  la	
  posizione	
  geografica	
  e	
  gli	
  hashtags	
  possono	
  essere	
  usati	
  in	
  senso	
   affine,	
  per	
  segmentare	
  e	
  ricostruire	
  materiali	
  in	
  modi	
  che	
  sono	
  a	
  volte	
  personali,	
  a	
  volte	
   sociali,	
  a	
  volte	
  onesti,	
  altre	
  no,	
  a	
  volte	
  chiari,	
  altre	
  deliberatamente	
  oscuri.	
   una	
  volta	
  scattata	
  ed	
  editata,	
  la	
  foto	
  rimane	
  sul	
  telefono	
  o	
  computer	
  dell’utente	
  fino	
  a	
   quando	
  non	
  decide	
  (o	
  qualcuno	
  lo	
  fa	
  al	
  suo	
  posto)	
  di	
  metterla	
  in	
  circolazione,	
  circolazio-­‐‑ ne	
  che	
  consiste	
  in	
  un’altra	
  serie	
  di	
  catture	
  (grabs).	
  anche	
  se	
  una	
  foto	
  non	
  è	
  mai	
  stata	
   diffusa	
  al	
  di	
  fuori	
  del	
  proprio	
  telefono	
  o	
  computer,	
  è	
  comunque	
  importante	
  comprendere	
   come	
  sia	
   i	
   suoi	
  dati	
  visivi	
  che	
  quelli	
  meta	
  (orario,	
  marcatori	
  geografici,	
   ip,	
   indirizzo)	
   sono	
  catturati	
  (grabbed)	
  da	
  un	
  server,	
  dove	
  l’immagine	
  staziona	
  in	
  ciò	
  che	
  è	
  a	
   livello	
   colloquiale	
   chiamato	
   “il	
   cloud”.	
   quando	
   capiamo	
   che	
   le	
   foto	
   che	
   presumiamo	
   essere	
   private	
  possono	
   in	
  realtà	
  essere	
  copiate	
  dai	
  server	
  di	
   immagazzinamento	
  da	
  agenzie	
   governative,	
  collettivi	
  hacker,	
  o	
  (ciò	
  che	
  accade	
  più	
  frequentemente)	
  da	
  qualcuno	
  che	
   conosce	
   la	
   nostra	
   password,	
   la	
   ramificazione	
   politica	
   della	
   cattura	
   (grab)	
   diviene	
   piuttosto	
  evidente.	
  se	
  pensiamo	
  ai	
  selfies	
   in	
  termini	
  di	
  pelle	
  che	
  cattura	
  (grabs)	
  ed	
  è	
   catturata	
  (is	
  grabbed),	
  possiamo	
  paragonare	
  il	
  suo	
  contenuto	
  visuale	
  all’epidermide,	
  e	
  i	
   metadati	
   al	
   materiale	
   sottocutaneo.	
   in	
   un	
   corpo,	
   la	
   pelle	
   esposta	
   è	
   in	
   effetti	
   meno	
   vulnerabile	
  di	
  quella	
  non	
  esposta,	
  e	
  in	
  genere	
  nelle	
  conversazioni	
  pubbliche	
  a	
  proposito	
   di	
  selfie	
  domina	
  la	
  superficie.	
  consideriamo	
  le	
  battaglie	
  che	
  imperversano	
  in	
  relazione	
   alla	
   scelta	
   consapevole	
   di	
   un	
   fotografo	
   di	
   caricare	
   immagini	
   specifiche	
   in	
   un	
   social	
   media,	
   dove	
   queste	
   vengono	
   catturate	
   (grabbed)	
   da	
   altri	
   grazie	
   a	
   like,	
   condivisioni,	
   amicizie,	
  voti,	
  commenti,	
  remix,	
  parodie	
  e	
  meme.	
  dal	
  momento	
  che	
  questa	
  informazione	
   lascia	
  tracce	
  visive,	
  i	
  ricercatori	
  si	
  concentrano	
  su	
  di	
  essa	
  come	
  chirurghi	
  che	
  esaminano	
   un	
  trapianto	
  di	
  pelle,	
  notando	
  come	
  un	
  materiale	
  viene	
  accettato	
  o	
  rigettato	
  nel	
  momen-­‐‑ to	
  in	
  cui	
  viene	
  inserito	
  in	
  quel	
  corpo	
  associato	
  coi	
  termini	
  “i	
  miei	
  amici”,	
  “i	
  miei	
  colleghi”,	
   “la	
  gente	
  che	
  conosco	
  su	
  instagram”,	
  “la	
  mia	
  comunità/fede/nazione”,	
  e	
  così	
  via.	
   se	
  questo	
  tipo	
  di	
  ricerca	
  ha	
  un	
  valore	
  nel	
  caso	
  di	
  immagini	
  che	
  circolano	
  in	
  rete,	
  da	
  un	
   punto	
  di	
  vista	
  aptico	
  si	
  fermano	
  a	
  un	
  livello	
  di	
  contatto	
  cutaneo,	
  di	
  pelle,	
  dove	
  il	
  “toccare”	
   viene	
   inteso	
   semplicemente	
   in	
   termini	
   di	
   ciò	
   che	
   può	
   essere	
   letto	
   in	
   superficie.	
   per	
   arrivare	
  a	
  questioni	
  come	
  tensione,	
  movimento,	
  equilibrio	
  e	
  percezioni	
  di	
  prossimità	
  o	
   distanza,	
  abbiamo	
  bisogno	
  di	
  andare	
  più	
  a	
  fondo.	
  come	
  afferma	
  l’espressione	
  «dov’è	
  il	
   tasto	
  “non	
  mi	
  piace”?»,	
  evitare,	
  snobbare,	
  bloccare,	
  ignorare	
  e	
  rifiutare	
  hanno	
  almeno	
  lo	
   stesso	
  valore	
  comunicativo	
  di	
  riconoscere,	
  aggregare,	
  allineare,	
  attestare	
  ed	
  affermare.	
   a	
  di	
  quanto	
  potere	
  sociale	
  esercito	
   in	
  un	
  dato	
  ambiente,	
  quando	
  mi	
  catturi	
  (grab)	
   posso	
  essere	
  d’accordo,	
  posso	
  catturarti	
  a	
  mia	
  volta	
  (grab	
  you	
  back),	
  posso	
  spostarmi	
  da	
   la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  rivista	
  online	
  di	
  filosofia	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  e	
  lo	
  specchio un’altra	
  parte,	
  e	
   così	
  via.	
  queste	
  azioni	
  possono	
  essere	
  chiaramente	
  visibili,	
  possono	
   essere	
  oscurate	
  da	
  altri	
  tipi	
  di	
  attività,	
  o	
  intenzionalmente	
  nascoste	
  alla	
  vista.	
  anche	
  le	
   persone	
   che	
   in	
   principio	
   affermano	
   «su	
   internet	
   ogni	
   gioco	
   è	
   pulito»	
   operano	
   scelte	
   individuali	
   su	
   come	
   comportarsi	
   rispetto	
   alle	
   immagini	
   “in	
   palio”	
   (up	
   for	
   grabs),	
   dal	
   momento	
  che	
  attraversano	
  spazi	
  e	
  tempi.	
  questo	
  meme	
  è	
  accessibile	
  a	
  londra	
  ma	
  non	
  a	
   shanghai?	
  se	
  sono	
  uno	
  studente	
  cinese	
  all’estero,	
  magari	
  ci	
  penserò	
  due	
  volte	
  prima	
  di	
   inviarlo	
  ad	
  amici	
  che	
  potrebbero	
  essere	
  soggetti	
  a	
  censura	
  governativa.	
  questa	
  immagi-­‐‑ ne	
  sexy	
  ha	
  cominciato	
  come	
  scambio	
  uno-­‐‑a-­‐‑uno,	
  come	
  messaggio	
  personale,	
  prima	
  di	
   arrivare	
  in	
  un	
  sito	
  “porno-­‐‑vendetta”	
  di	
  pubblico	
  accesso?	
  questo	
  può	
  influire	
  su	
  come,	
  o	
   se	
  me	
  ne	
  interesso,	
  nel	
  momento	
  in	
  cui	
  appare	
  nella	
  mia	
  casella	
  di	
  spam.	
   se	
  per	
  i	
  ricercatori	
  interessati	
  ai	
  social	
  media	
  è	
  relativamente	
  semplice	
  tracciare	
  le	
   dinamiche	
  sociali	
  online	
  quando	
  avvengono	
  a	
  livello	
  visivo,	
  e	
  diviene	
  chiaramente	
  più	
   difficile	
  quando	
  queste	
  avvengono	
   in	
  modo	
   invisibile,	
   è	
  quasi	
   impossibile	
  arrivare	
  al	
   terzo	
  livello	
  di	
  cattura	
  (grabbing)	
  online.	
  penso	
  qui	
  al	
  “livello	
  algoritmico”	
  proprietario,	
   attraverso	
  il	
  quale	
  le	
  compagnie	
  di	
  social	
  media	
  assoggettano	
  tutti	
  i	
  dati	
  visivi,	
  i	
  metadati	
   e	
  i	
  dati	
  generati	
  dagli	
  utenti	
  che	
  stanno	
  sui	
  loro	
  server	
  a	
  formule	
  matematiche	
  concepite	
   per	
  prevedere	
  il	
  trend	
  dei	
  comportamenti	
  futuri.	
  da	
  un	
  punto	
  di	
  vista	
  fenomenologico,	
   potremmo	
  dire	
  che	
  tali	
  compagnie	
  usano	
  gli	
  algoritmi	
  per	
  due	
  ragioni:	
  per	
  monitorare,	
   predire	
  e	
  direzionare	
  i	
  flussi	
  affettivi	
  dei	
  contenuti	
  generati	
  dagli	
  utenti	
  (questo	
  è	
  ciò	
  che	
   permette	
  a	
  news	
   feed	
   e	
  post	
  personalizzati	
  di	
  arrivare	
   sulle	
  pagine	
  personali);	
   e	
  per	
   bersagliarli	
  emozionalmente	
  sul	
  piano	
  del	
  mercato	
  economico	
  (ciò	
  accade	
  attraverso	
  il	
   processo	
   algoritmico	
   chiamato	
   “mining”,	
   che	
   prende	
   i	
   dati	
   sui	
   comportamenti	
   dei	
   consumatori	
  per	
  poterli	
  bersagliare	
  di	
  annunci	
  pubblicitari	
  specifici).	
  	
   infine,	
  esiste	
  un	
  livello	
  disciplinare	
  del	
  selfie,	
  per	
  il	
  quale	
  i	
  governi	
  pretendono	
  il	
  dirit-­‐‑ to	
   di	
   impadronirsi	
   dei	
   dati	
   aziendali	
   (sia	
   grezzi	
   che	
   ottenuti	
   algoritmicamente)	
   per	
   favorire	
  le	
  loro	
  attività	
  di	
  riconoscimento	
  facciale,	
  applicazioni	
  di	
  leggi,	
  o	
  iniziative	
  anti-­‐‑ terrorismo.	
   come	
   chiunque	
   abbia	
   subito	
   la	
   politica	
   del	
   “vero	
   nome”	
   di	
   facebook	
   sa,	
   questo	
  è	
  il	
  piano	
  su	
  cui	
  uno	
  non	
  esiste	
  per	
  la	
  struttura	
  di	
  una	
  corporate	
  fino	
  a	
  quando	
   un’identificazione	
  prodotta	
  dal	
  governo	
  contenente	
  l’immagine	
  del	
  suo	
  volto	
  non	
  viene	
   effettuata.	
  come	
  chiunque	
  sia	
  stato	
  mai	
   licenziato	
  da	
  un	
  posto	
  di	
   lavoro	
  per	
  una	
  foto	
   chiaramente	
   falsificata	
   in	
   cui	
   la	
   persona	
   è	
   ritratta	
   in	
   un	
   comportamento	
   illegale	
   o	
   inappropriato	
  sa,	
  questo	
  è	
  il	
  livello	
  in	
  cui	
  la	
  pelle	
  del	
  selfie	
  è	
  molto	
  più	
  importante	
  della	
   propria	
  (the	
  skin	
  of	
  the	
  self).	
   	
   	
   dall’epistemologia	
  all’etica	
   	
   in	
  questo	
  saggio,	
  ho	
  sollecitato	
   i	
   ricercatori	
  ad	
  allontanarsi	
   (almeno	
  per	
  un	
  po’	
  di	
   tempo)	
   dalle	
   domande	
   epistemologiche	
   e	
   rappresentazionali	
   su	
   cosa	
   significa	
   un’immagine	
   digitale	
   nel	
   momento	
   in	
   cui	
   appare	
   sui	
   nostri	
   schermi.	
   per	
   contro,	
   ho	
   la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  rivista	
  online	
  di	
  filosofia	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  e	
  lo	
  specchio suggerito,	
  concentriamoci	
  su	
  domande	
  fenomenologiche	
  su	
  ciò	
  che	
  le	
  immagini	
  fanno	
  in	
   quanto	
  oggetti	
  emozionali,	
  tecnologici,	
  economici	
  e	
  politici,	
  nel	
  loro	
  circolare	
  attraverso	
   corpi	
  connessi.	
  credo	
  che	
  concentrarsi	
  sulla	
  doppia	
  qualità	
  del	
  catturare	
  (grabbing)	
  ci	
   permetta	
  di	
  capire	
  le	
  narrazioni	
  sulla	
  natura	
  potenziante	
  o	
  depotenziante	
  delle	
  immagini	
   per	
  quello	
  che	
  sono:	
   feticci	
   frontali	
  e	
  basati	
   sullo	
  sguardo,	
   la	
  cui	
   forza	
  dipende	
  dalla	
   fantasia	
  che	
  la	
  percezione	
  di	
  potenza	
  di	
  un	
  guardante	
  sia	
  più	
  importante	
  che	
  le	
  esperien-­‐‑ ze	
  degli	
  altri.	
   quando	
  pensiamo	
  alle	
  immagini	
  sia	
  in	
  termini	
  di	
  oggetti	
  statici	
  che	
  appaiono	
  sui	
  no-­‐‑ stri	
  schermi	
  che	
  in	
  quanto	
  entità	
  viventi	
  che	
  si	
  innestano	
  sulla	
  nostra	
  pelle,	
  possiamo	
  per	
   un	
  istante	
  rompere	
  la	
  “morte	
  dell’occhio”,	
  per	
  considerare	
  come	
  individui	
  e	
  comunità	
   toccano	
  e	
  sono	
  toccati	
  dalle	
  immagini	
  degli	
  altri.	
  quando	
  arriviamo	
  a	
  concepire	
  il	
  toccare	
   sia	
  come	
  una	
  sensazione	
  personalizzata,	
  sia	
  come	
  il	
  risultato	
  di	
  forze	
  sociali,	
  macchini-­‐‑ che	
  e	
  biologiche,	
  ci	
  spostiamo	
  dallo	
  spazio	
  della	
  fenomenologia	
  per	
  arrivare	
  al	
  campo	
   dell’etica,	
  nel	
  quale	
  ci	
  ritroviamo	
  a	
  chiederci	
  cosa	
  dovremmo	
  fare	
  con	
  ciò	
  che	
  ci	
  sta	
  di	
   fronte.	
   	
   	
   cosa	
  è	
  successo	
  a	
  sandra	
  bland?	
   	
   È	
  con	
  in	
  mente	
   l’etica	
  che	
  torno	
  ora	
  alla	
  questione	
  con	
  la	
  quale	
  ho	
  iniziato	
  questo	
   saggio:	
   che	
   cosa	
   dovremmo	
   fare	
   con	
   la	
   faccia	
   di	
   sandra	
   bland,	
   una	
   donna	
   che	
   si	
   è	
   intenzionalmente	
  offerta	
  al	
  nostro	
  sguardo,	
  ma	
  che	
  non	
  può	
  più	
  voltarsi	
  per	
  rispondere?	
   È	
  una	
  domanda	
  che	
  difficilmente	
  riesco	
  a	
  prendere	
  in	
  considerazione	
  senza	
  fare	
  riferi-­‐‑ mento	
  al	
  catturare	
  ed	
  essere	
  catturati	
  (grabbing	
  and	
  being	
  grabbed).	
  	
   in	
   questo	
   stesso	
   momento	
   vedo	
   sullo	
   schermo	
   del	
   mio	
   laptop	
   uno	
   streaming	
   live	
   ripreso	
  (grabbed)	
  da	
  reporter	
  nelle	
  strade	
  di	
  ferguson,	
  missouri.	
  la	
  settimana	
  scorsa,	
  a	
   ferguson	
  è	
  stato	
  dichiarato	
  uno	
  stato	
  di	
  emergenza	
  federale,	
  mentre	
  stanotte	
  la	
  polizia	
   sta	
   permettendo	
   agli	
   uomini	
   bianchi	
   di	
   vagare	
   per	
   le	
   strade	
   con	
   le	
   pistole	
   (townes	
   ).	
   su	
   twitter,	
   accademici	
   che	
   si	
   stanno	
   organizzando	
   per	
   discutere	
   di	
   giustizia	
   razziale,	
   parlano	
   di	
   quanto	
   i	
   semplici	
   raggruppamenti	
   di	
   persone	
   nel	
   paese	
   siano	
   a	
   rischio	
  di	
  essere	
  attaccati	
  dalla	
  polizia	
  con	
  lo	
  spray	
  urticante,	
  mentre	
  i	
  raduni	
  sotto	
  la	
   bandiera	
  della	
  federazione	
  e	
  le	
  marce	
  del	
  kkk	
  ricevono	
  una	
  piena	
  protezione	
  (jenkins	
   ).	
  su	
  vari	
  blog,	
  gli	
  attivisti	
  di	
  black	
  lives	
  matter	
  discutono	
  il	
  fatto	
  che	
  le	
  foto	
  dei	
  loro	
   volti	
  siano	
  state	
  caricate	
  in	
  sistemi	
  computerizzati	
  di	
  riconoscimento	
  facciale	
  e	
  le	
  loro	
   comunicazioni	
  personali	
  monitorate	
  da	
  forze	
  “anti-­‐‑terrorismo”	
  finanziate	
  dalla	
  federa-­‐‑ zione	
  (jenkins	
   ).	
   nel	
   frattempo,	
  sulle	
  mie	
  pagine	
  di	
  facebook,	
   i	
  sostenitori	
  di	
  sinistra	
  del	
  candidato	
   presidente	
  bernie	
  sanders	
  si	
  preoccupano	
  del	
  fatto	
  che	
  i	
  membri	
  di	
  black	
  lives	
  matter	
   che	
  hanno	
  “duramente”	
  interrotto	
  sanders	
  per	
  chiedergli	
  di	
  affrontare	
  temi	
  di	
  giustizia	
   sociale	
   nella	
   sua	
   piattaforma	
   si	
   stiano	
   “sparando	
   sui	
   piedi”	
   (lind	
   ).	
   nel	
   mio	
   la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  rivista	
  online	
  di	
  filosofia	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  e	
  lo	
  specchio newsreader,	
  ho	
  evidenziato	
  (flagged)	
  un’alert	
  generata	
  algoritmicamente	
  che	
  descrive	
  la	
   pressione	
  per	
  creare	
  un	
  darren	
  wilson	
  day	
  per	
  commemorare	
  l’ufficiale	
   le	
  cui	
  azioni	
   diedero	
  luogo	
  alle	
  proteste	
  di	
  ferguson	
  l’anno	
  scorso	
  (moore	
   ),	
  e	
  cancellata	
  una	
   sull’attrice	
   jennifer	
  aniston,	
   che	
  non	
  avrebbe	
   invitato	
  né	
   il	
   coprotagonista	
  di	
  friends	
   matthew	
  perry	
  né	
  matthew	
  leblanc	
  al	
  suo	
  matrimonio.	
   nel	
  mio	
  indirizzo	
  mail	
  di	
  lavoro	
  c’è	
  una	
  lettera	
  di	
  una	
  studentessa	
  di	
  colore,	
  che	
  mi	
   chiede	
  perché	
  dovrebbe	
  tornare	
  a	
  scuola	
  quando	
  nel	
  mondo	
  c’è	
  tanto	
   lavoro	
  da	
  fare.	
   dopo	
  di	
  questa,	
  ce	
  n’è	
  un’altra	
  che	
  mi	
  chiede	
  di	
  mandare	
  questo	
  saggio	
  al	
  più	
  presto,	
   perché	
  io	
  scrivo	
  in	
  inglese,	
  e	
  qualcuno	
  vorrebbe	
  tradurre	
  le	
  mie	
  parole	
  in	
  tedesco	
  per	
  un	
   catalogo	
   di	
   una	
   mostra.	
   per	
   quanto	
   le	
   questioni	
   poste	
   in	
   questo	
   saggio	
   mi	
   possano	
   sembrare	
   affrontate	
   in	
   maniera	
   inadeguata,	
   ho	
   bisogno	
   che	
   le	
   mie	
   parole	
   vengano	
   assorbite	
  o	
  rifiutate	
  altrove.	
  	
   È	
  attraverso	
  queste	
  pelli	
  che	
  scrivo	
  della	
  pelle	
  di	
  sandra	
  bland,	
  una	
  donna	
  che,	
  mi	
   piace	
  dirlo,	
  ho	
  incontrato	
  inizialmente	
  attraverso	
  i	
  video	
  da	
  lei	
  postati	
  su	
  facebook,	
  nei	
   quali	
  denunciava	
  apertamente	
  la	
  violenza	
  della	
  polizia	
  a	
  nome	
  di	
  black	
  lives	
  matter.	
  in	
   realtà,	
  come	
  quasi	
  tutti	
  gli	
  americani	
  bianchi,	
   la	
  mia	
  prima	
  esperienza	
  di	
   lei	
  è	
  stata	
  il	
   video	
  del	
  suo	
  arresto	
  girato	
  da	
  uno	
  spettatore.	
  qui,	
  ho	
  visto	
  un	
  ufficiale	
  della	
  polizia	
  del	
   texas	
   tirare	
   sandra	
   bland	
   giù	
   dalla	
   sua	
   macchina	
   e	
   spingerla	
   per	
   terra.	
   l’ho	
   sentita	
   gridare	
  di	
  dolore,	
  e	
  urlare	
  allo	
  spettatore	
  «grazie	
  di	
  riprendere».	
  nel	
  momento	
  in	
  cui	
   vedevo	
  il	
  filmato,	
  bland	
  era	
  stata	
  dichiarata	
  morta	
  nella	
  sua	
  cella	
  in	
  texas,	
  dopo	
  essersi	
   presumibilmente	
  impiccata	
  dopo	
  tre	
  giorni	
  di	
  custodia.	
   siccome	
  combacia	
  precisamente	
  con	
  la	
  mia	
  esperienza	
  mentre	
  vedevo	
  questo	
  video,	
   citerò	
   un	
   lungo	
   brano	
   del	
   resoconto	
   della	
   scrittrice	
   afro-­‐‑americana	
   roxanne	
   gay,	
   pubblicato	
  recentemente	
  in	
  un	
  editoriale	
  del	
  new	
  york	
  times:	
   	
   il	
  signor	
  encinia	
  (l’ufficiale	
  di	
  polizia)	
  aveva	
  chiesto	
  alla	
  signora	
  bland	
  perché	
  era	
  ir-­‐‑ ritata,	
  e	
  lei	
  glielo	
  aveva	
  detto.	
  aveva	
  riposto	
  alla	
  domanda	
  che	
  le	
  era	
  stata	
  fatta.	
  la	
   sua	
  voce	
  era	
  ferma,	
  sicura	
  di	
  sé.	
  al	
  signor	
  encinia	
  non	
  piacque	
  il	
  suo	
  tono,	
  come	
  se	
   avesse	
  dovuto	
  essere	
  contenta	
  di	
  essere	
  stata	
  fermata	
  nel	
  traffico.	
  le	
  chiese	
  di	
  spe-­‐‑ gnere	
  la	
  sigaretta,	
  e	
  lei	
  rifiutò.	
  la	
  situazione	
  degenerò.	
  encinia	
  la	
  minacciò	
  di	
  darle	
   una	
  scossa	
  con	
  il	
  suo	
  taser.	
  la	
  forzò	
  ad	
  uscire	
  dalla	
  macchina.	
  lei	
  continuava	
  a	
  pro-­‐‑ testare.	
  le	
  misero	
  le	
  manette.	
  la	
  trattarono	
  orribilmente.	
  in	
  modo	
  inumano.	
  si	
  la-­‐‑ mentò	
  di	
  questo	
  trattamento.	
  conosceva	
  e	
  affermava	
  i	
  suoi	
  diritti,	
  ma	
  non	
  era	
  impor-­‐‑ tante.	
  la	
  sua	
  vita	
  nera	
  e	
  il	
  suo	
  corpo	
  nero	
  non	
  erano	
  importanti	
  (gay	
   ).	
   	
   ho	
  una	
  forte	
  reminiscenza	
  di	
  due	
  conversazioni	
  che	
  ho	
  avuto	
  la	
  notte	
  in	
  cui	
  ho	
  guar-­‐‑ dato	
  il	
  video	
  di	
  sandra	
  bland.	
  in	
  una,	
  un	
  amico	
  stava	
  cercando	
  di	
  convincermi	
  che	
  i	
  casi	
   di	
  suicidio	
  in	
  carcere	
  sono	
  molto	
  difficili	
  da	
  fingere	
  per	
  la	
  polizia.	
  nell’altra,	
  un	
  collega	
   insisteva	
  che	
  i	
  fatti	
  del	
  caso	
  bland	
  non	
  combaciavano.	
  era	
  istruita,	
  una	
  professionista,	
  e	
   un’attivista.	
  aveva	
  parlato	
  con	
  membri	
  della	
  propria	
  famiglia	
  che	
  stavano	
  lavorando	
  per	
   pagarle	
   la	
   cauzione.	
   anche	
   se	
   aveva	
   sofferto	
   di	
   depressione	
   in	
   passato,	
   al	
   momento	
   la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  rivista	
  online	
  di	
  filosofia	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  e	
  lo	
  specchio dell’arresto	
   era	
   di	
   ottimo	
   umore,	
   pronta	
   per	
   iniziare	
   il	
   lavoro	
   dei	
   suoi	
   sogni	
   nell’amministrazione	
  dell’università,	
   la	
  sua	
  stessa	
  università,	
   il	
  mese	
  successivo	
  (san-­‐‑ chez	
   ).	
  potevano	
  essere	
  queste	
  realtà	
  entrambe	
  vere?	
  chiedendosi	
  la	
  stessa	
  cosa,	
   roxanne	
   gay	
   rispondeva	
   affermativamente,	
   argomentando	
   che	
   «anche	
   se	
   la	
   signora	
   bland	
  si	
   fosse	
   suicidata,	
   c’è	
  un	
   intero	
  sistema	
  di	
   ingiustizia	
   che	
   le	
  ha	
   lasciato	
   le	
   sue	
   impronte	
   digitali	
   come	
   lividi	
   sul	
   collo»	
   ( ).	
   dopodiché,	
   racconta	
   la	
   sua	
   propria	
   esperienza	
  quotidiana	
  di	
  queste	
  impronte,	
  scrivendo:	
   	
   ogni	
   volta	
   che	
   salgo	
   in	
   macchina,	
   mi	
   assicuro	
   di	
   avere	
   la	
   patente,	
   il	
   libretto	
   e	
   l’assicurazione.	
  mi	
  assicuro	
  di	
  avere	
  la	
  cintura	
  allacciata.	
  metto	
  il	
  mio	
  cellulare	
  nel	
   dock	
  vivavoce.	
  controllo	
  questi	
  dettagli	
  una,	
  due	
  e	
  tre	
  volte,	
  perché	
  quando	
  (e	
  non	
   se)	
  mi	
  fermano,	
  voglio	
  che	
  non	
  ci	
  sia	
  dubbio	
  sul	
  fatto	
  che	
  sto	
  seguendo	
  le	
  leggi	
  alla	
   lettera.	
  e	
  lo	
  faccio	
  pur	
  sapendo	
  che	
  non	
  importa	
  veramente	
  se	
  seguo	
  la	
  legge	
  o	
  no.	
   	
   i	
  giorni	
  sono	
  diventati	
  settimane	
  dal	
  momento	
  in	
  cui	
  la	
  storia	
  dell’arresto	
  di	
  sandra	
   bland	
  ha	
  fatto	
  la	
  sua	
  comparsa	
  su	
  internet.	
  come	
  quasi	
  ogni	
  altra	
  persona	
  che	
  riceve	
  le	
   notizie	
  tramite	
  social	
  media,	
  alcune	
  volte	
  mi	
  sono	
  ritrovata	
  perplessa	
  in	
  attesa	
  che	
  gli	
   investigatori	
  federali	
  assegnati	
  a	
  questo	
  caso	
  fornissero	
  il	
  loro	
  rapporto.	
  	
   personalmente,	
  non	
  ho	
  grande	
  fiducia	
  sul	
  fatto	
  che	
  un	
  rapporto	
  possa	
  cambiare	
  gran	
   ché:	
   ne	
   è	
   l’esempio	
   ferguson,	
   una	
   città	
   dove	
   gli	
   investigatori	
   esterni	
   hanno	
   trovato	
   evidenza	
  incontrovertibile	
  di	
  pregiudizi	
  razziali	
  e	
  corruzione	
  della	
  polizia,	
  e	
  dove	
  ancora	
   la	
  maggior	
  parte	
  della	
  società	
  civile	
  si	
  trova	
  in	
  sospeso	
  con	
  mandati	
  di	
  arresto,	
  ed	
  altri	
  ne	
   sono	
  emessi	
  ogni	
  giorno	
  (ellis	
   ).	
  	
   dal	
  momento	
  della	
  morte	
  di	
  sandra	
  bland,	
  sono	
  stati	
  riportati	
  più	
  casi	
  di	
  violenza	
   della	
   polizia,	
   più	
   rivolte	
   contro	
   la	
   violenza,	
   più	
   matrimoni	
   tra	
   celebrità.	
   come	
   tutti	
   i	
   video	
  simili,	
  la	
  ripresa	
  dello	
  spettatore	
  dell’arresto	
  di	
  bland	
  sembra	
  essere	
  già	
  scompar-­‐‑ sa	
  dalla	
  pubblica	
  vista.	
  eppure	
  è	
  interessante	
  come,	
  seppure	
  cercando	
  su	
  google	
  appare	
   sicuramente	
  la	
  sua	
  immagine	
  segnaletica,	
  tale	
  ricerca	
  appare	
  ora	
  dominata	
  dai	
  selfie	
  che	
   bland	
   si	
   era	
   fatta,	
   i	
   quali	
   rimangono	
   pubblicamente	
   accessibili	
   sulla	
   sua	
   pagina	
   fa-­‐‑ cebook.	
  in	
  queste	
  foto,	
  appare	
  vestita	
  in	
  abiti	
  professionali,	
  sorridente	
  e	
  (nel	
  caso	
  dei	
   suoi	
   video)	
   parlando	
   direttamente	
   in	
   camera	
   sulla	
   realtà	
   del	
   profilaggio	
   razziale	
   in	
   america.	
   cliccando	
  tra	
  questo	
  primo	
  set	
  di	
  immagini	
  sorridenti	
  su	
  google	
  immagini,	
  porta	
  chi	
   guarda	
  ad	
  incontrare	
  una	
  serie	
  di	
  meme	
  per	
  i	
  quali	
  è	
  stata	
  presa	
  (grabbed)	
  la	
  faccia	
  di	
   bland,	
  e	
   la	
  sua	
  pelle	
  marcata	
  da	
   tag	
  come	
  #whathappenedtosandrabland,	
  #blackli-­‐‑ vesmatter,	
  #sayhername	
  e	
  #ifidieinpolicycustody.	
  clicchiamo	
  ulteriormente,	
  e	
  si	
  vedrà	
   come	
  il	
  sorriso	
  di	
  sandra	
  bland	
  sembra	
  essere	
  stato	
  catturato	
  (grabbed)	
  diverse	
  volte	
  –	
  e	
   probabilmente	
  monetizzato	
  –	
  sia	
  dai	
  conservatori	
  di	
  fox	
  news,	
  sia	
  dagli	
  auto-­‐‑proclamati	
   razzisti	
   del	
   sito	
   storm	
   front	
   (dove	
   di	
   tanto	
   in	
   tanto	
   sembra	
   essere	
   stata	
   sostituita	
   dall’immagine	
   della	
   professoressa	
   afro-­‐‑americana	
   brittney	
   cooper	
   della	
   rutgers	
   university).	
   la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  rivista	
  online	
  di	
  filosofia	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  e	
  lo	
  specchio affrontando	
  la	
  pelle*	
   	
   che	
  cosa	
  dobbiamo	
  fare	
  con	
  la	
  faccia	
  sorridente	
  di	
  sandra	
  bland?	
  da	
  un	
  punto	
  di	
  vista	
   etico,	
  ciò	
  che	
  più	
  importa	
  di	
  un	
  viso	
  in	
  un	
  selfie,	
  è	
  che	
  esso	
  appartiene	
  (o	
  appartenva)	
  a	
   un	
  essere	
  umano	
  effettivo.	
  levinas	
  vede	
  la	
  faccia	
  sia	
  come	
  un’immagine	
  che	
  viene	
  vista,	
   sia	
  come	
  una	
  finestra	
  «che	
  sta	
  qui	
  perché	
  deve	
  essere	
  aperta,	
  per	
  permetterci	
  di	
  vedere	
   attraverso	
  e	
  di	
  riconoscere»	
  l’altro,	
  spiega	
  kenaan.	
  anche	
  gli	
  psicotici	
  che	
  si	
  guardano	
  in	
   faccia	
  non	
  possono	
  fissarsi	
  a	
  lungo	
  come	
  in	
  uno	
  specchio,	
  prima	
  che	
  uno	
  non	
  disturbi	
  le	
   fantasie	
  dell’altro.	
  per	
  levinas,	
  aprire	
  la	
  finestra	
  del	
  viso	
  dell’altro	
  offre	
  un’esperienza	
   potenzialmente	
  rivelatoria	
  dalla	
  quale	
  non	
  c’è	
  ritorno.	
   scrivendo	
  a	
  partire	
  da	
  una	
  tradizione	
  quacchera,	
  alfred	
  north	
  whitehead	
  vede	
  tale	
   atto	
  come	
  qualcosa	
  di	
  meno	
  trascendente,	
  che	
  implica	
  piuttosto	
  una	
  sorta	
  di	
  circolo	
  tra	
   etica	
  ed	
  estetica,	
  e	
  tra	
  piacere	
  ed	
  ansia	
  (whitehead	
   ,	
  in	
  shaviro	
  n.d.).	
  questa	
  specie	
   di	
  circolo	
  può	
  essere	
  riconosciuto	
  nella	
  frase	
  «affrontare	
  la	
  realtà»	
  (facing	
  reality),	
  nella	
   quale	
  ci	
  muoviamo	
  dall’esperienza	
  largamente	
  soggettiva	
  di	
  qualcosa	
  o	
  qualcuno,	
  ad	
  uno	
   stato	
   in	
  cui	
  sono	
  prese	
   in	
  considerazione	
   le	
  esperienze	
  di	
  quelli	
  che	
  stanno	
  fuori	
  dal	
   proprio	
  sé.	
   paul	
  frosh	
  ( )	
  costruisce	
  una	
  connessione	
  piuttosto	
  simile	
  quando	
  sostiene	
  che	
  la	
   qualità	
   del	
   gesto	
   del	
   selfie	
   segnala	
   sia	
   un’agency	
   individuale	
   (scegliamo	
   di	
   esibire	
   la	
   nostra	
   faccia	
   sotto	
   forma	
   di	
   immagine),	
   che	
   una	
   riflessività	
   sociale	
   (scegliamo	
   di	
   far	
   circolare	
  l’immagine	
  tra	
  gli	
  altri,	
  prendendoci	
  il	
  rischio	
  che	
  la	
  loro	
  percezione	
  del	
  mio	
   volto	
  non	
  sia	
  corrispondente	
  alla	
  nostra).	
   da	
  un	
  punto	
  di	
  vista	
  ottimistico,	
  l’idea	
  che	
  un	
  selfie	
  possa	
  avere	
  il	
  potenziale	
  di	
  incu-­‐‑ nearsi	
   nella	
   finestra	
   chiusa	
   a	
   doppia	
   mandata	
   del	
   cosiddetto	
   “torpore	
   mediatico”	
   è	
   allettante,	
  sia	
  che	
  lo	
  si	
  prenda	
  come	
  una	
  rivelazione	
  che	
  come	
  qualcosa	
  di	
  più	
  prosaico.	
   ma	
   l’ottimismo	
  non	
  sembra	
  essere	
  proprio	
   la	
  giusta	
   risposta	
  emozionale	
  nel	
   caso	
  di	
   sandra	
  bland	
  –	
  almeno,	
  non	
  più.	
  per	
  quanto	
  animata	
  apparisse	
  nelle	
  sue	
  foto,	
  per	
  quanto	
   informata,	
  intelligente,	
  composta	
  e	
  piena	
  di	
  speranza	
  fosse	
  una	
  volta,	
  sandra	
  bland	
  ora	
  è	
   morta,	
  anche	
  se	
  la	
  sua	
  pelle	
  continua	
  a	
  innestarsi	
  tra	
  le	
  reti	
  digitali	
  e	
  non.	
   la	
  morte	
  è	
  quando	
  qualcuno	
  continua	
  a	
  chiamarti	
  e	
  non	
  ti	
  giri	
  più	
  a	
  guardare	
  chi	
  è,	
   scrive	
  yehuda	
  amichai.	
  roxane	
  gay	
   lo	
  mette	
   in	
   termini	
  più	
  diretti,	
   scrivendo	
  «come	
   donna	
  nera	
  in	
  america,	
  non	
  mi	
  sento	
  viva.	
  mi	
  sento	
  come	
  se	
  non	
  fossi	
  ancora	
  morta»	
   ( ).	
  che	
  cosa	
  facciamo	
  con	
  la	
  faccia	
  di	
  bland	
  e	
  le	
  parole	
  di	
  gay,	
  che	
  emanano	
  da	
  un	
   corpo	
  che	
  ora	
  è	
  morto,	
  e	
  da	
  uno	
  che	
  non	
  lo	
  è	
  ancora?	
  le	
  affrontiamo	
  (we	
  face	
  them).	
   non	
   come	
   la	
   levinasiana	
   “finestra	
   sull’altro”,	
   ma	
   come	
   elementi	
   costitutivi	
   di	
   una	
   pelle	
  sociale	
  nella	
  quale	
  tutti	
  ci	
  troviamo	
  cuciti.	
   sostenere	
  che	
  tutte	
  le	
  pelli	
  sono	
  cucite	
  insieme	
  non	
  è	
  lo	
  stesso	
  che	
  contrapporre	
  a	
   “black	
  lives	
  matter”	
  un	
  “all	
  lives	
  matter”	
  (tutte	
  le	
  vite	
  sono	
  importanti).	
  il	
  mantra	
  “tutte	
   * l’autrice	
  prosegue	
  in	
  questo	
  paragrafo	
  un	
  gioco	
  di	
  parole	
  che	
  abbina	
  la	
  parola	
  per	
  “viso,	
  faccia”	
  (face)	
   al	
  verbo	
  “affrontare”	
  (to	
  face).	
  ndt.	
   la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  rivista	
  online	
  di	
  filosofia	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  e	
  lo	
  specchio le	
  vite	
  sono	
  importanti”	
  opera	
  a	
  livello	
  di	
  feticcio:	
  sappiamo	
  molto	
  bene	
  (perché	
  ce	
  lo	
   dicono	
  le	
  statistiche)	
  che	
  i	
  corpi	
  neri	
  sono	
  sempre	
  stati	
  a	
  rischio	
  maggiore	
  di	
  violenze	
  di	
   stato	
  negli	
  stati	
  uniti,	
  ma	
  ancora	
  intoniamo	
  il	
  nostro	
  credo	
  morale	
  di	
  uguaglianza:	
  tutte	
   le	
  vite	
  hanno	
  lo	
  stesso	
  valore.	
   per	
  affrontare	
  sandra	
  bland,	
  è	
  necessario	
  spostarci	
  da	
  affermazioni	
  generiche	
  sulla	
   moralità	
   a	
   un’etica	
   della	
   specificità.	
   per	
   me	
   è	
   assolutamente	
   possibile	
   opporsi	
   all’aumento	
  della	
  violenza	
  della	
  polizia	
  e	
  della	
  sorveglianza	
  dei	
  governi	
  nel	
  mondo	
  e	
   simultaneamente	
   rispettare	
   il	
   fatto	
   che	
   corpi	
   diversi	
   abbiano	
   di	
   questi	
   fenomeni	
   un’esperienza	
  diversa.	
  il	
  mio	
  avvertire	
  a	
  denti	
  stretti	
  mio	
  nipote	
  di	
  non	
  scherzare	
  con	
   l’ufficiale	
  che	
  ci	
  aveva	
  fermati	
  per	
  eccesso	
  di	
  velocità	
  in	
  virginia	
  (dove	
  siamo	
  guardati	
   come	
  gente	
  del	
  nord)	
  non	
  è	
  l’equivalente	
  dell’assalto	
  a	
  sandra	
  bland,	
  al	
  suo	
  arresto	
  e	
  alla	
   sua	
  morte	
  in	
  cella	
  dopo	
  essere	
  stata	
  ritenuta	
  irrispettosa	
  e	
  maleducata	
  con	
  la	
  polizia	
  in	
   texas.	
  né	
  la	
  mia	
  certezza	
  di	
  essere	
  sotto	
  sorveglianza	
  governativa	
  per	
  il	
  mio	
  endorse-­‐‑ ment	
  a	
  black	
  lives	
  matter	
  è	
   l’equivalente	
  alla	
  stessa	
  certezza	
  espressa	
  da	
  coloro	
  che	
   usano	
  l’hashtag	
  #ifidieinpolicycustody.	
   affrontare	
  sandra	
  bland	
  è	
   rifiutare	
  una	
  moralità	
  generalizzata	
  che	
  sacrifica	
   l’etica	
   della	
  situazione.	
  È	
  anche	
  rifiutare	
  una	
  forma	
  particolare	
  di	
  narrazione	
  responsabilizzan-­‐‑ te	
  che	
  porta	
  il	
  nome	
  di	
  “politiche	
  della	
  rispettabilità”.	
  in	
  questa	
  narrazione,	
  ai	
  corpi	
  più	
  a	
   rischio	
  viene	
  detto	
  che	
  se	
  soltanto	
  fossero	
  stati	
  presi	
  in	
  un	
  luogo	
  diverso,	
  in	
  un	
  momento	
   diverso,	
  se	
  avessero	
  usato	
  un	
  tono	
  di	
  voce	
  differente,	
  se	
  fossero	
  stati	
  di	
  un	
  altro	
  genere,	
   di	
  un’altra	
  età,	
  classe	
  o	
  di	
  un	
  altro	
  livello	
  di	
  istruzione,	
  avrebbero	
  potuto	
  prevenire	
  la	
   violenza	
  contro	
  di	
  loro.	
  quando	
  la	
  smettiamo	
  con	
  la	
  fascinazione	
  feticistica	
  nei	
  confronti	
   dell’immagine	
  e	
  ci	
  rivolgiamo	
  ad	
  un’analisi	
  più	
  considerevole	
  delle	
  pelli,	
  comprendiamo	
   come	
  le	
  politiche	
  della	
  rispettabilità	
  per	
  quello	
  che	
  sono:	
  biasimare	
  la	
  vittima.	
  affrontare	
   sandra	
  bland	
  è	
  combattere	
  per	
  e	
  al	
  fianco	
  degli	
  altri	
  che	
  possono	
  assomigliarci	
  o	
  no,	
  e	
  le	
   cui	
  tattiche	
  personali	
  e	
  politiche	
  possono	
  piacerci	
  o	
  meno.	
  lo	
  facciamo	
  non	
  per	
  ragioni	
   morali,	
   né	
   per	
   ragioni	
   caritatevoli,	
   ma	
   per	
   interesse	
   personale.	
   lo	
   facciamo	
   perché	
   capiamo	
  che	
  di	
  questo	
  passo,	
  il	
  prossimo	
  selfie	
  che	
  mostra	
  il	
  viso	
  di	
  un	
  morto	
  potrebbe	
   essere	
  il	
  nostro.	
   	
   	
   	
   bibliografia	
  	
   	
   ahmed,	
   s.	
   ( ).	
   the	
   cultural	
   politics	
   of	
   emotion.	
   edinburgh:	
   edinburgh	
   university	
   press.	
   ahmed,	
  s.	
  &	
  stacey,	
  j.	
  ( ).	
  thinking	
  through	
  the	
  skin.	
  new	
  york:	
  routledge.	
   amichai,	
  y.	
  ( ).	
  “i	
  lost	
  my	
  id”	
  (in	
  hebrew),	
  the	
  hour	
  of	
  grace.	
  tel	
  aviv:	
  schocken,	
  p.	
   .	
   boothroyd,	
   d.	
   ( ).	
   ‘touch,	
   time	
   and	
   technics:	
   levinas	
   and	
   the	
   ethics	
   of	
   haptic	
   la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  rivista	
  online	
  di	
  filosofia	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  e	
  lo	
  specchio communications”,	
  theory,	
  culture	
  &	
  society,	
   ( -­‐‑ ),	
  pp.	
   – .	
   ellis,	
  b.	
  ( ).	
  “one	
  year	
  later,	
  ferguson	
  is	
  still	
  pumping	
  out	
  arrest	
  warrants”,	
  cnn	
   money,	
   august	
   .	
   available	
   at	
   http://money.cnn.com/ / / /news/ferguson-­‐‑ arrest-­‐‑warrants/	
   elo,	
  m.	
   ( ).	
   “digital	
   finger:	
  beyond	
  phenomenological	
   figures	
  of	
   touch”,	
   journal	
  of	
   aesthetics	
  &	
  culture,	
  issue	
   .	
   freud,	
  s.	
  ( ).	
  three	
  essays	
  on	
  the	
  theory	
  of	
  sexuality.	
  united	
  states:	
  basic	
  books.	
   frosh,	
   p.	
   ( ).	
   “the	
   gestural	
   image”,	
   international	
   journal	
   of	
   communication	
   ,	
   feature	
   – .	
   gay,	
  r.	
  ( ).	
  “on	
  the	
  death	
  of	
  sandra	
  bland	
  and	
  our	
  vulnerable	
  bodies”,	
  the	
  new	
  york	
   times,	
   july	
   .	
  available	
  at	
  http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/on-­‐‑the-­‐‑ death-­‐‑of-­‐‑sandrabland-­‐‑and-­‐‑our-­‐‑vulnerable-­‐‑bodies.html?_r= .	
   haraway,	
  d.	
  ( ).	
  “a	
  cyborg	
  manifesto”,	
  in	
  simians,	
  cyborgs	
  and	
  women:	
  the	
  reinven-­‐‑ tion	
  of	
  nature.	
  new	
  york:	
  routledge,	
  pp.	
   -­‐‑ .	
   jenkins,	
  j.	
  ( ).	
  “after	
   	
  years,	
  confederate	
  flag	
  in	
  ‘the	
  last	
  capitol	
  of	
  the	
  confede-­‐‑ racy’	
   comes	
   down”,	
   think	
   progress.org,	
   august	
   .	
   available	
   at	
   http://thinkprogress.org/culture/ / / / /danvilleconfederate-­‐‑flag-­‐‑ comes-­‐‑down/.	
   joseph,	
   g.	
   ( ).	
   “exclusive:	
   feds	
   regularly	
   monitored	
   black	
   lives	
   matter	
   since	
   ferguson”,	
   firstlook.org,	
   july	
   .	
   available	
   at:	
   https://firstlook.org/theintercept/ / / /documents-­‐‑showdepartment-­‐‑ homeland-­‐‑security-­‐‑monitoring-­‐‑black-­‐‑lives-­‐‑matter-­‐‑sinceferguson/.	
   kenaan,	
  h.	
  ( ).	
  the	
  ethics	
  of	
  visuality:	
  levinas	
  and	
  the	
  contemporary	
  gaze.	
  united	
   kingdom:	
  i	
  b	
  tauris	
  &	
  co.	
   levinas,	
  e.	
  ( ).	
  totality	
  and	
  infinity.	
  united	
  states:	
  pittsburgh,	
  duquesne	
  university	
   press.	
   lind,	
  d.	
  ( ).	
  “black	
  lives	
  matter	
  versus	
  bernie	
  sanders,	
  explained”,	
  vox.com,	
  august	
   .	
   available	
   at:	
   http://www.vox.com/ / / / /bernie-­‐‑sanders-­‐‑black-­‐‑ lives-­‐‑matter.	
   marx,	
  k.	
  ( ).	
  capital:	
  volume	
   .	
  new	
  york:	
  penguin	
  books.	
   moore,	
  d.	
  ( ).	
  “police	
  organization's	
  'darren	
  wilson	
  day'	
  in	
  columbia,	
  mo.,	
  sparks	
   protest,	
   criticism”,	
   st.	
   louis	
   post-­‐‑dispatch,	
   august	
   .	
   available	
   at:	
   http://www.stltoday.com/news/local/metro/police-­‐‑organization-­‐‑s-­‐‑darrenwilson-­‐‑ day-­‐‑in-­‐‑columbia-­‐‑mo-­‐‑sparks/article_abdc -­‐‑ ff-­‐‑ b -­‐‑ -­‐‑db b b f.html.	
   paterson,	
  m.	
  ( ).	
  the	
  senses	
  of	
  touch:	
  haptics,	
  affects	
  and	
  technologies	
  (senses	
  and	
   sensibilities).	
  berg	
  publishers.	
   sanchez,	
   r.	
   ( ).	
   “who	
   was	
   sandra	
   bland”,	
   cnn.com,	
   july	
   .	
   available	
   at	
   http://www.cnn.com/ / / /us/sandra-­‐‑bland/.	
   senft,	
  t.	
  &	
  baym,	
  n.	
  ( ).	
  “what	
  does	
  the	
  selfie	
  say:	
  investigating	
  a	
  global	
  phenome-­‐‑ non”,	
  international	
  journal	
  of	
  communication	
   ,	
  feature	
   – .	
   la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  rivista	
  online	
  di	
  filosofia	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  e	
  lo	
  specchio senft,	
  t.	
  ( b).	
  “microcelebrity	
  and	
  the	
  branded	
  self”,	
   in	
  j.	
  hartley,	
   j.	
  burgess,	
  &	
  a.	
   bruns	
   (eds.),	
   a	
   companion	
   to	
   new	
   media	
   dynamics	
   (pp.	
   – ).	
   malden,	
   ma:	
   wiley-­‐‑blackwell.	
  	
   senft,	
  t.	
  ( ).	
  camgirls:	
  celebrity	
  and	
  community	
  in	
  the	
  age	
  of	
  social	
  networks.	
  new	
   york,	
  ny:	
  peter	
  lang.	
   seigworth,	
  g.	
  ( ).	
  “affect	
  and	
  ambush”.	
  unpublished	
  manuscript	
  from	
  talk	
  delivered	
   at	
  blue	
  stockings	
  bookstore,	
  new	
  york,	
  new	
  york,	
  april	
   .	
   shaviro,	
  s.	
  (n.d.).	
  “self-­‐‑enjoyment	
  and	
  concern:	
  on	
  whitehead	
  and	
  levinas”.	
  available	
  at	
   http://www.shaviro.com/othertexts/modes.pdf.	
   townes,	
  c.	
  ( ).	
  “white	
  militiamen,	
  openly	
  carrying	
  large	
  guns,	
  descend	
  on	
  fergu-­‐‑ son	
   after	
   state	
   of	
   emergency	
   declared”,	
   thinkprogress,	
   august	
   .	
   available	
   at	
   http://thinkprogress.org/justice/ / / / /whitearmed-­‐‑militiamen-­‐‑ appear-­‐‑in-­‐‑ferguson-­‐‑after-­‐‑state-­‐‑of-­‐‑emergency-­‐‑declared/.	
   whitehead,	
  a.n.	
  ( ).	
  modes	
  of	
  thought.	
  new	
  york:	
  the	
  free	
  press.	
   ce v n pp - bender critical education volume number february , issn - 	 black lives matter reflections on ferguson and creating safe spaces for black students mariah bender saint louis university citation: bender, m. ( ). black lives matter: reflections on ferguson and creating safe spaces for black students. critical education, ( ), - . retrieved from http://ojs.library.ubc.ca/index.php/criticaled/article/view/ critical education special issue – the legacy of ferguson: a referendum on citizenship denied abstract higher education, and more specifically, teacher education, despite claims of being a liberal progressive space is entrenched in white privilege. this essay recounts my experiences as a black woman traversing activism in the #occupyslu movement and my pre-dominantly white pre-service teacher education program. i share how the white gaze reinforces power regardless of claims to do otherwise. readers	are	free	to	copy,	display,	and	distribute	this	article,	as	 long	as	the	work	 is	attributed	to	the	author(s)	and	 critical	education,	it	is	distributed	for	non-commercial	purposes	only,	and	no	alteration	or	transformation	is	made	in	 the	work.	more	details	of	this	creative	commons	license	are	available	from	http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by- nc-nd/ . /.	all	other	uses	must	be	approved	by	the	author(s)	or	critical	education.	critical	education	is	published	by	the	institute	for	critical	 educational	 studies	 and	 housed	 at	 the	 university	 of	 british	 columbia.	 articles	 are	 indexed	 by	 ebsco	 education	 research	 complete	 and	 directory	of	open	access	journals.	 	 c r i t i c a l e d u c a t i o n on august , , i first saw the tweets about a father holding a sign claiming the police just murdered his son, i felt disturbed. the reality is that the murders of black and brown people by police are so frequently documented i initially felt desensitized. which led me to a deeper reflective question of what conditions exist in society that allow the death of black and brown people to be the norm—so much that my the first response to the incident was to “just keep scrolling”? the mechanism of “just keep scrolling” functions as a means of survival in this culture for a black person like myself. in america, the devaluation of black life is so pervasive that if i were to become intensely emotional after every death (which by the hands of police is every hours), i would not be able to survive. as black people, our entire existence in white spaces is based on our survival and constant resistance at all levels. ferguson, which is in north county saint louis, only a few miles from where i live, confirmed my knowledge of saint louis racial politics. the racial segregation is skewed so that north of the city is mainly black and disenfranchised, and the south and west of the city is extremely white. ultimately, the fact that all the reporting and exposure of the murder initially came from social media helped to startup a movement calling for justice for mike brown. as social media exploded with a photo of mike’s body and a pool of blood lying in the street which was retweeted again and again, people got the message of the importance of justice for michael and his family. although social media can be a powerful tool, for me it was sensory overload. was there no privacy for his family and friends who would not have wanted to see their child’s body online? i now realize that the image is being used as a tool to shock america into consciousness. the shock value of grabs viewers from complacency and forces them to take a stance, the now famous “which side are you on?” further validates the image. when i returned back to my teacher education program at saint louis university (slu), i kept asking myself: “what am i going to tell my black students? who i can tell them to go to for help when distressed?” they can’t go to their neighbors like reneisha mcbride who was shot dead by a white man while seeking help after a car crash in detroit. students cannot go to fellow patrons in stores like eric crawford shot dead in walmart after walking around with a toy gun. and students definitely cannot go to police officers who murdered ezell ford, kajieme powell, michael brown jr, vonderrit myers jr, eric garner, amadou diallou—all unarmed. so again, where are my black students supposed to seek refuge in this country in which their blackness is threatening to the white supremacist structure? as i headed into fall semester, i looked to my university for guidance, support, and a space to process these events but more importantly to search for tools on how to have these conversations with my future black students. i ultimately felt unprepared to discuss racism in the classroom and the implications of the events in ferguson. yet, i was eager to finally have this kind of conversation. while, i missed the teaching ferguson event sponsored by the school of education, i appreciated the effort. i was proud to be a part of a department that was willing to be bold and respond to the events taking place a mere miles from saint louis university’s midtown campus. then, disappointment sunk in. classes returned to normal, business as usual, field experience logs, service learning reflection, and business as usual attitude in slu teacher education classes. and i wondered where the discourse on ferguson went. when is the time for us to move away from our privileged and insular lives on campus to discuss and stand up in solidarity with people only miles away? i wondered what it would take to bring the humanity and citizenship of black americans into classroom discussions with a critical lens. if national 	 c r e a t i n g s a f e s p a c e s f o r b l a c k s t u d e n t s discussions and the publicity of the death of an unarmed teen at the hands of police wouldn’t bring these conversations about i became disenchanted with the idea that they would ever come about. it is only through race critical theories, anti-oppressive, and anti-sexist frameworks that preservice teachers can begin to comprehend the complexities in our american system. silence and fear in teacher education the death of mike brown ought to affect all of us, the publicity of his death, the rightfully directed rage and frustration at police departments as a manifestation of systematic racism within the united states, and the dehumanization of black lives everywhere is an issue that all institutions should discuss critically. in reality, my frustration lied in the fact that a jesuit institution that claims students that are “men and women for and with others” and who have a “higher purpose for a greater good” were eerily silent on all things. of course, discussion came in my african american studies courses as expected, but why not in theology, philosophy, and leadership courses as well? why was it that the responsibility for these difficult discussion on race and privilege fell on the most underfunded and neglected departments on campus? how was it that saint louis university managed to snake its way out of a widespread campus effort to stand in solidarity with black saint louisans whose daily lives were so threatening that the only response was to shoot them dead for “walking while black”? in my education classes, discussions on ferguson focused on anecdotal explanations of a professor’s remembrance of life in the s and the fear of protesters. comments about how a cousin who lives in ferguson’ home value is now $ . . i wondered why we didn’t deliberate the value of a black life, like the one whose blood flowed in the streets for four and a half hours? was he worth $ . or $ . ? what was his value? furthermore, what caused that fear my professor spoke of? were the protesters threatening to take his life? for the black community, the death of mike brown illuminated the reality and fear that unarmed black men and youth face every day, that a person can be killed easily by those sworn to protect them. i wondered what truly caused my white professors fear of black americans protesting. to hear professors spew biased, ignorant, and “unintentionally racist” comments caused me to shirk in my desk and watch the clock waiting for classes to end. maybe his fear was a response to encountering disruptions caused by the protesters, like when protestors bought tickets to the stl symphony and interrupted the program and sung songs for freedom for mike brown. this same professor lamented this act of civil disobedience because “she likes the symphony.” did a symphony performance reign as more important that racial equality? i just suggested that as an act of civil disobedience, we should be proud to see young people advocating for an end to police brutality. each time i spoke up like that, i felt positioned to represent all black americans, forced to constantly challenge professors and peers to see humanity behind the protests, the humanity of black people. i did not want to discuss the irrelevant politics or the ridiculousness of due process in a case where the killer has not even be indicted. i wanted peers to see the situation and humanity of people like mike brown’s parents, the real frustrations of the protestors, and the fear of the young man who witnessed his death. these efforts left me fatigued and quickly disillusioned. 	 c r i t i c a l e d u c a t i o n ferguson october a coalition of community activist organized ferguson october, which included a series of protests and events scheduled throughout the month october to keep discussion of ferguson alive. i attended one event that included a march in downtown saint louis and strategy sessions with activists; i looked to my black peers to stand with me as we participated in protests, heard from civil rights leaders, and connected with organizers combating police brutality and asserting the humanity of black citizens. the culmination of the weekend was an interfaith coalition of speakers with keynote speaker dr. cornel west at slu’s campus arena. as the string of speakers rehashed familiar rhetoric speech after speech, younger activists then stood up and turned their backs to the speakers as a rejection to the repeated mlk quotations and comparison to the movements in the s. perhaps, the most poignant moment occurred when local rapper tef poe rightfully stated: “this ain’t your mama and daddy’s civil right movements.” meaning: this is not the movement of polished, well-spoken pastors and “respectability politics,” because ultimately the goals of those “respectable negroes” still have failed to penetrate the white supremacist power structure. the leaders and participants in this current movement emerging from ferguson were armed with their voices, bodies, and commitment to justice for mike brown. we would not tolerate one more black life being lost to racist killer cops. tef touched on a very serious generational divide between the supporters and tactics of the ’s movement and ferguson organizers. now, a common theme held that simply voting and participating in the political process would do little to reduce police violence within the saint louis area and in the united states. racism against black and brown bodies has become imbedded in every major system and institution in this country. furthermore, the overemphasis on voting ignores this structural reality. the activists understand this too well and expressed this truth in their chant: “indict, convict, send that killer cop to jail—the whole damn system is guilty as hell.” slu: the whole damn system is guilty as hell… on that same evening that tef poe addressed concerns of youth activists, the #occupyslu movement began. given that slu is a part of a system built on white supremacy, imperialism, and historical gentrification of saint louis’s midtown, local activists known as tribe x, which also included slu students, chose this space for a mass action in which protestors marched on campus and held nightly “teach-ins” about racism, oppression, and systematic injustices for five days. the occupation of the clock tower plaza in the center of campus symbolized our attempt to fulfill our mission, which was, according to talal ahmad, a member of tribe x, to “empower, educate, and organize.” he further explained the reasons behind occupying saint louis university: “the objective of the sit-in was to bring awareness to this privileged community of the issues that the disenfranchised community has to deal with. to induce dialogue and garner support from the university to use its clout to advocate for the oppressed community outside of its bubble.” due in part to the absence of a widespread university effort to address systemic injustices that black and brown people face in saint louis and in america, the following mass marches and actions worked to remedy the prevalence of ignorance and the “violence of indifference” facing many slu students. during occupy slu, many white students felt “attacked” given the direct and uncensored conversations by tribe members around terms they’ve had the privilege to ignore: 	 c r e a t i n g s a f e s p a c e s f o r b l a c k s t u d e n t s “white supremacy,” “colonialism,” “police brutality,” and “white privilege” were constantly in the conversation. even so, the parent piranhas on slu’s facebook page threatened to withdraw their students given that “thugs” and “jobless bums” who were believed to be violent had taken over slu. they fears for their children’s safety on campus. white students wrote and circulated a letter attempting to agitate the students involved in the encampment and made false claims that protestors were armed. the actions of these students who were simply inconvenienced by the presence of protestors and the encampment failed to recognize the daily inconvenience of being a person of color at a pwi (predominately white institution). what about the emotional and mental safety for students of color on pwi where racial slurs and hate speech are the norm? the american flag which was hung upside down during the encampment struck a chord for many white students. when the flag is upside down it represents distress. black america and especially saint louis is certainly in distress and has been for years. white students demanded the flag be removed, especially when it touched the ground, again prioritizing the power of property over black life. and as we talk about citizenship as social studies teachers, when white privilege invades the spaces in which second class citizens are exercising agency it is problematic. but, black students felt empowered by the encampment, humanized, and found communion and love in the clock tower plaza. now the plaza represented a space reclaimed by voices and bodies who were previously silenced and disregarded. during the encampment, oftentimes i found myself engaging in one-sided conversations with white students where i, for once, was the sole voice, and it was not up to me to break things down to my white peers or “lean into the discomfort” that the plethora of diversity speaker series, diversity cabinet, political round table discussions encourage. but, for three years, i’d been leaning in, listening to ignorant, racist, privileged commentary. on october , , we had taken back campus and claimed it as a space for black voices to speak, for voices of the oppressors of saint louis university to be silenced, and for the oppressed to express frustration with university policies and the lack of solidarity from a so-called “jesuit” school to charge students to move towards action. it was empowering, the clock tower at the center of slu had become transformed into a sanctuary for black voices; there was love, support, laughter, and difficult stories shared by all in this sacred space. in the wake of occupy slu there have been meetings with administrators and tribe members, black student alliance members, and other student activists to call for change and widespread awareness on the slu campus. in what is now titled “the clock tower accords,” tribe x, slu president dr. fred pestallo and the black student alliance agreed upon demands. a few of these included: an increased budget for the african american studies program; increased financial aid resources for retention of african american students at slu; evaluation of slu's current scholarship programs to better serve african american populations; creation of a race, property, and inequality steering committee; and an appointment of a special assistant to the president for diversity and community empowerment which would become a permanent position at the university. as of late, there has also been university support for student activists in the wake of a non-indictment. the university made space on campus for students to demonstrate and stand in solidarity with the ferguson and shaw communities, which experienced racial violence against blacks. this level of support would never have been available prior to the occupation of campus. 	 c r i t i c a l e d u c a t i o n which emergency? as of november , governor jay nixon of missouri called in the national guard and issued a state of emergency for missouri for days. to this notion, however, i argue that black america has been in a state of emotional, physical, spiritual, political, and economic emergency since enslaved africans were stolen and brought to this country. ultimately, the true meaning of the state of emergency incites a belief that protestors will somehow erupt into a violent rage and become destructive to property which is overall more important than the value of black citizens. property value over the value of black lives has characterized american race relations historically. as critical scholars, it is our duty to provide spaces for students to engage in critical dialogue. we, as teachers, must recognize these systems of oppression and give students the tools to analyze these power structures and forms of injustice worldwide and to destroy the systems of white supremacy, imperialism, colonialism, racism, sexism, able-ism, and all other “isms,” which dehumanize all groups that have been “otherized” historically. author mariah bender is an undergraduate student in education at saint louis university. critical education criticaleducation.org	 issn - editors stephen petrina, university of british columbia sandra mathison, university of british columbia e. wayne ross, university of british columbia 	 associate editors abraham p. deleon, university of texas at san antonio adam renner, - editorial collective faith ann agostinone, aurora university wayne au, university of washington, bothell	 jeff bale, university of toronto theodorea regina berry, u of texas, san antonio amy brown, university of pennsylvania kristen buras, georgia state university paul r. carr, université du québec en outaouais lisa cary, murdoch university anthony j. castro, university of missouri, columbia alexander cuenca, saint louis university noah de lissovoy, the university of texas, austin kent den heyer, university of alberta gustavo fischman, arizona state university 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public portal for the purpose of private study or research. • you may not further distribute the material or use it for any profit-making activity or commercial gain • you may freely distribute the url identifying the publication in the public portal if you believe that this document breaches copyright please contact us providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. this coversheet template is made available by au library version . , october coversheet this is the accepted manuscript (post-print version) of the article. contentwise, the post-print version is identical to the final published version, but there may be differences in typography and layout. how to cite this publication please cite the final published version: robison, j., & moskowitz, r. ( ). the group basis of partisan affective polarization. the journal of politics, ( ), – . https://doi.org/ . / publication metadata title: the group basis of partisan affective polarization author(s): joshua robison, rachel l. moskowitz journal: the journal of politics, ( ), – doi/link: https://doi.org/ . / document version: accepted manuscript (post-print) https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / the group basis of partisan affective polarization joshua robison postdoc department of political science aarhus university bartholins alle aarhus, denmark jrobison@ps.au.dk rachel l. moskowitz assistant professor of public policy and law public policy & law program trinity college summit st. hartford, ct rachel.moskowitz@trincoll.edu abstract what explains rising partisan animosity in the united states? we argue that mass partisans’ feelings toward the social group coalitions of the parties are an important cause of rising affective polarization. we first leverage evidence from the anes time series to show that partisans’ feelings toward the social groups linked to their in-party (out-party) have grown more positive (negative) over time. we then turn to the - and - anes panel surveys to disentangle the inter-relationship between partisan polarization and social group evaluations. individuals with more polarized social group evaluations in or report substantially more polarized party thermometer ratings and more extreme, and better sorted, partisan identities four years later. notably, these variables exerted little reciprocal influence on group evaluations. our study has important implications for understanding affective polarization and the role of social groups in public opinion. key words: partisan polarization, social groups, affect, panel analyses acknowledgements earlier versions of this article were presented at the annual meetings of the midwest political science association and american political science association. we thank rube stubager, damon cann, soren jorden, and participants at the apsa and mpsa annual meetings for comments on earlier drafts that have substantially improved the manuscript; all errors remain our own. mailto:jrobison@ps.au.dk mailto:rachel.moskowitz@trincoll.edu biographical statement: joshua robison is a postdoc at aarhus university in the department of political science, aarhus, denmark . rachel moskowitz is an assistant professor in the public policy & law program at trinity college, hartford, ct . supplementary material for this article is available in the appendix in the online edition. replication files are available in the jop data archive on dataverse (http://thedata.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/jop). http://thedata.harvard.edu/dvn/dv/jop mass partisans in the united states increasingly dislike the other side, a phenomenon called partisan affective polarization (abramowitz and webster ; iyengar, sood, and lelkes ). a leading explanation for this growing polarization points less to the role of ideology and more to the increasing group distinctiveness of the parties and concomitant identity-based motivations to impugn the other side (ahler and sood n.d.; mason , ). broadly, this perspective calls attention to the increasing social homogeneity of the parties due to changes in the voting behavior of racial, geographic, gender, and religious groups (achen and bartels ; layman ; zingher ). better-sorted social groups may mean that partisans are less able to see themselves, and their kind of people, in the other side thereby leading to greater social distance between these group coalitions and ultimately enhanced animosity. we take up this argument and address a key empirical limitation facing existing work. while this group-oriented explanation for affective polarization calls attention to changing evaluations of group/party relationships, e.g. a growing association between the out-party and disliked groups, existing work has not examined whether these evaluations have actually changed over time. however, without this analysis we cannot truly know whether beliefs about social groups are a cause of the overtime change in partisan affective polarization. we leverage anes time series and panel data to address two questions: ( ) have partisans’ attitudes toward the social groups linked to the parties also polarized over time and ( ) is any such social group polarization associated with higher levels of partisan affective polarization? we find that partisans’ have indeed grown to increasingly like (dislike) the groups associated with their in-party (out-party). in addition, polarization in these group evaluations is substantially related to later levels of partisan affective polarization, party identity extremity, and party/ideological sorting. our study thus builds on, and contributes to, existing work connecting social groups to partisan affect and identity by exploring a broader array of social groups over a longer period and thus provides novel evidence for the group bases of partisan affective polarization and ultimately partisan conflict. study : social group polarization over time we turn to evidence from the american national election study (anes) time series to investigate partisans’ evaluations of the parties’ social group coalitions. to do so we fit a confirmatory factor analysis on the social group feeling thermometers contained on each presidential year anes survey from - . this method has the advantages of enabling a correction for systematic differences in the use of the thermometer scale by respondents and also enables the groups to differentially contribute to the calculation of a respondent’s latent evaluation of the parties’ group coalitions (weisberg, haynes, and krosnick ; wilcox and cook ). in each survey-year we began by fitting a two-factor model on which all social group feeling thermometers (including those for the two parties) were included: a ‘substantive’ dimension and a ‘measurement’ dimension on which the thermometers were constrained to load equally and which was constrained to be uncorrelated with the ‘substantive’ dimension. this second dimension captures the aforementioned individual differences in thermometer use by respondents. how the groups loaded on the ‘substantive’ dimension affected how we treated them in the ensuing three- dimension (democratic groups, republican groups, and measurement) model. those groups that loaded in the same direction as the democratic party were sorted into a “democratic groups” factor in the ensuing model while those loading in the opposite direction were sorted into the “republican groups” factor. common ‘democratic’ groups included ‘liberals,’ ‘feminists’, ‘unions,’ ‘environmentalists,’ and ‘blacks’, while common ‘republican’ groups included ‘conservatives’, we focus on this period because it captures the period of growing partisan affective polarization (iyengar et al. ). in addition, affect toward the democratic and republican parties is not asked until ; before then, the anes asked about “democrats” and “republicans” which may elicit slightly different reactions among respondents. ‘big business’, ‘christian fundamentalists’, and the ‘military’. it should be noted that we omitted the democratic and republican party thermometer items in this second three-factor model so that the ensuing factor scores capture affect specifically regarding the social groups linked to the parties and not the parties themselves. online appendix a provides the model results for these models. in figure we plot the predicted evaluations of the democratic and republican group coalitions from these models with separate sub-graphs for democratic and republican respondents. figure also plots the difference between in-group (e.g. democrats’ evaluations of democratic groups) and out-group evaluations (e.g. democrats’ evaluations of republican groups). figure shows that partisans evaluated in-party associated groups more positively than out-party associated groups in all survey-years. these ratings, moreover, have diverged over time with a jump in polarization from the s to the s and then again in ; this is notably similar to the time trends in partisan antipathy shown in iyengar and krupenkin ( ). however, figure also shows some slight differences by respondent partisanship and target. for instance, republicans’ evaluations of their party’s group coalition became only slightly more positive between and before a jump in . on the other hand, republicans grew substantially more negative in their evaluations of democratic-aligned groups during this period save . democratic respondents show an inverse pattern: slightly growing positive affect toward in-party aligned groups before a recent acceleration, but more consistency in their evaluations of republican-aligned groups some additional points. first, we recoded missing data to a score of to maximize the data available to us. second, the / results focus on non-online sample respondents; online appendix a shows that this leads to lower levels of group polarization in than would otherwise occur. second, items would occasionally load negatively on their assigned dimension in the -factor model implying that the group did not belong on this dimension. in these cases the group was removed (or constrained to load at ) from the group dimension in question such that it would no longer contribute to the estimation of the latent evaluation. we investigate a variety of alternative specifications for these models the online appendices with broadly similar results emerging (in particular, appendices c, e, f, and g). before . figure thus demonstrates evidence in favor of increasing social group polarization over time akin to the partisan affective polarization observed in other studies. study : panel evidence in the preceding section we found evidence of increasing social group polarization; partisans evaluate in-party aligned groups more positively than out-party aligned groups and this gap has increased over time. we turn to data from the - - and - - anes panel surveys to investigate the inter-relationship between social group polarization and partisan affective polarization. the use of panel data here is crucial as it enables us to untangle the potentially reciprocal relationship between these concepts. however, panel data are no panacea for causal inference with observational data particularly insofar as omitted variables cause changes in both our independent and dependent variables (finkel ; gerber, huber, and washington ). for both panels we estimated social group polarization in the same manner as we did in the time series analyses. for all three waves of each panel survey we fit a three-factor model on the social group thermometers in the same manner discussed above and predicted each respondent’s factor score from the model. we then sorted these scores along partisan lines to produce partisan in- group and out-group evaluations much as we did earlier. we finally subtracted out-group evaluations from in-group evaluations to obtain our measure of social group polarization. we rescaled this variable to fall on a - scale where increasing values indicate a growing bias toward in-groups relative to out-groups. we will investigate three variables related to partisan affective polarization due to unevenness in the variables available across the two panels. first, we use data from the - - panel to look at partisan affective polarization, i.e. the difference between a respondent’s thermometer rating of their in-party and out-party. higher scores on this variable indicate greater in- party bias (scale: - ). unfortunately, this variable is only available in this particular panel so we will also explore two variables theoretically and substantively related to partisan affective polarization. we investigate party identity extremity using data from both panel surveys. more extreme partisan identities are associated with a greater degree of partisan affective polarization (mason ). as we are interested in the changing reactions of partisans, identity extremity ranges from leaning partisan (= ) to strong partisan (= ) in the first year of the panel (i.e. ) and from independent (= ) to strong partisan (= ) in subsequent years. this accounts for the possibility that some partisans in / may identify as an independent in the later waves. finally, we will examine partisan-ideological sorting in both the - - and - anes panels. sorted partisans also report more partisan affective polarization (mason ); if social group polarization predicts sorting, then it should also be related to partisan affective polarization as well. it is also plausible that social group polarization will predict sorting given that ideological self- placements are also predicated upon social group evaluations (zschirnt ). we measure partisan-ideological sorting in a manner following mason ( ). specifically, a respondent’s sorting score is formulated by taking the absolute value of their -point party identification and - point (reverse coded) ideology scores and then multiplying this difference by both partisan identity and ideological strength. we then re-scaled this variable to range from - with higher scores indicating greater identity alignment. we estimate the reciprocal relationship between social group polarization and these three variables via cross-lagged panel models (finkel ). for instance, we regress time t values of partisan affective polarization on its t- values as well as t- values for social group polarization. in other words, sorting = |pid – ideology|*pid extremity*ideological extremity. we investigate alternative specifications in online appendix b. we first show results from cross-lagged ols models for each wave dyad (i.e. - , - , and - ). we then explore fixed-effect panel models that enable us to control for unobserved time invariant variables (finkel ). these specifications yield substantially similar results. likewise, time t values for social group polarization are regressed on its t- values as well as t- values for partisan affective polarization. we estimate both models simultaneously for each year dyad (i.e. -> and -> ) using a structural equation modeling estimator (finkel ). because we control for lagged values of the dependent variable we can thus assess whether prior social group polarization is associated with changes in subsequent levels of partisan affective polarization, etc., and vice versa. moreover, we can test for whether the relationship between prior social group polarization and later partisan affective polarization, etc., is equivalent to, or alternatively greater/lesser than, the inverse pathway. we include a series of control variables measured in the first wave of the panel survey: age, education, race, gender, political interest, racial resentment, ideological extremity (in the non-sorting analyses), and issue extremity. table provides an overview of the relationship between social group polarization and our three affective polarization related variables; we provide full model results in online appendix b. if the group based account of partisan affective polarization is accurate than we should see a positive relationship between social group polarization and the three “party” even while controlling for prior values of the dependent variable. and, indeed, table shows that social group polarization measured in year t has a significant and substantive relationship with subsequent levels of party affective polarization, pid strength, and party/ideological sorting in all models save for the - model of pid strength. moving from minimum to maximum levels of social group polarization in year t is associated with - % more partisan polarization, to % more extreme partisan identities, and - % higher scores on the sorting variable in year t+ . on the other hand, the three party polarization-related variables have a much more inconsistent relationship with later social group polarization and one that is generally substantially smaller in scope. indeed, as the wald tests at the bottom of table attest, the pathway from social group polarization to these party variables is nearly always significantly greater than the inverse pathway. table lends novel and substantive support to the claim that social group evaluations lead, rather than follow, party affective polarization and associated variables. conclusion we have explored an untested implication of group-based theories of partisan affective polarization, and of party conflict more generally: that partisans’ evaluations of the parties’ social group coalitions have polarized over time and that these evaluations are related to subsequent levels of partisan affective polarization. in the former case, we saw evidence that the polarization that has emerged along partisan lines also extends to evaluations of these social group coalitions. in the latter case, we saw consistent evidence that social group polarization is a driving force behind increased partisan affective polarization rather than vice versa. we thus provide novel and substantial evidence in favor of the group interpretation of partisan affective polarization. there exist several notable paths that future research could take to expand upon our results. first, a similar methodology as used here could be exploited to explore the origins of partisan identification itself and its roots in group evaluations. second, the role of partisan elites in this process deserves special attention. elites may matter in two non-exclusive ways. first, the demographic composition of party elites provide signals concerning the types of groups at home in a partisan coalition (e.g., evans and tilley ). party elites may thus serve as a heuristic enabling voters to ascertain changes in the party’s group coalitions. second, elites appeal to social groups in society via rhetoric and also use rhetoric designed to prime group considerations (e.g., valentino and neuner n.d.). this raises an important question for further research: what role does such rhetoric play in the development of both social group and partisan affective polarization? references abramowitz, alan i. and steven webster. . “the rise of negative partisanship and the nationalization of u.s. elections in the st century.” electoral studies : – . achen, christopher h. and larry m. bartels. . democracy for realists: why elections do not produce responsive government. princeton, nj: princeton university press. ahler, douglas and guarav sood. n.d. “the parties in our heads: misperceptions about party composition and their consequences.” the journal of politics. bischof, daniel. . “new graphic schemes for stata: plotplain and plottig.” stata journal ( ): – . evans, geoffrey and james tilley. . the new politics of class in britain: the political exclusion of the working class. oxford: oxford university press. finkel, steven e. . “linear panel analysis.” pp. – in handbook of longitudinal research: design, measurement, and analysis, edited by s. menard. burlington, ma: academic press. gerber, alan s., gregory a. huber, and ebonya washington. . “party affiliation, partisanship, and political beliefs: a field experiment.” american political science review ( ): – . iyengar, shanto and masha krupenkin. . “the strengthening of partisan affect.” advances in political psychology ( ): – . iyengar, shanto, gaurav sood, and yphtach lelkes. . “affect, not ideology: a social identity perspective on polarization.” public opinion quarterly ( ): – . layman, geoffrey. . the great divide: religious and cultural conflict in american party politics. new york: columbia university press. mason, lilliana. . “‘i disrespectfully agree’: the differential effects of partisan sorting on social and issue polarization.” american journal of political science ( ): – . mason, lilliana. . “a cross-cutting calm: how social sorting drives affective polarization.” public opinion quarterly : – . valentino, nicholas a. and fabian g. neuner. n.d. “the changing norms of racial political rhetoric and the end of racial priming.” the journal of politics. weisberg, herbert f., audrey a. haynes, and jon a. krosnick. . “social group polarization in .” pp. – in democracy’s feast: elections in america. chatham, nj: chatham house publishers, inc. wilcox, clyde and elizabeth cook. . “some like it hot: individual differences in responses to group feeling thermometers.” the public opinion quarterly ( ): – . zingher, joshua n. . “an analysis of the changing social bases of america’s political parties: - .” electoral studies : – . zschirnt, simon. . “the origins & meaning of liberal/conservative self-identifications revisited.” political behavior : – . figure : democratic and republican respondents’ evaluations of partisan group coalitions notes: the first two subgraphs provide the predicted factor score for democratic party and republican aligned groups (with % confidence intervals) separately for democratic and then republican respondents. for the final graph we sorted these scores into in-groups (i.e. evaluations of democratic groups by democrats), out-groups (i.e. evaluations of democratic groups by republicans) for each respondent and took the difference; positive scores thus indicate a positive bias in favor of in-party related groups. the bandwidth for the lowess regression line is . . figure schemes courtesy of bischof ( ). table : the reciprocal relationship between social group polarization & party affective polarization, pid strength, and party/ideological sorting - - ; “party” = - - ; “party” = party polarization pid strength sorting pid strength sorting cross-lag coefficient t sgp -> t party . ** ( . ) . * ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) t sgp -> t party . ** ( . ) . * ( . ) . ** ( . ) . * ( . ) n/a t party -> t sgp . + ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t party -> t sgp . * ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) - . ( . ) n/a n = wald tests (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p < . p < . p = . p < . (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p = . p < . p < . p < . n/a notes: each column provides the results from a different model differentiated by which party variable is involved. cell entries provide the unstandardized coefficients for the party variables (party polarization, pid strength, and partisan/ideological sorting) and for social group polarization (sgp). t = or ; t = or ; t = or . the cross-lagged coefficients show the reciprocal influence of these variables on each other after controlling for the lagged values of the dv. the wald tests test whether we can reject the null that the partyt- -> sgpt path is equivalent to the sgpt- -> partyt path. full model results, including estimates for control variables and stability coefficients, can be found in online appendix b. ; + p < . , * p < . , ** p < . the group basis of partisan affective polarization online appendices . appendix a: anes times series results/analyses . appendix b: anes panel analyses – models for analyses in text, sureg results, and fixed effect regression models . appendix c: replication of results with ‘common’ items only . appendix d: replication of results while accounting for group ‘closeness’ . appendix e: replication of results while omitting racial groups from group dimensions . appendix f: replication of results while omitting ‘liberals’ and ‘conservatives’ from group dimensions . appendix g: free vs. fixed thermometer loading results appendix a in this appendix we provide the results from our anes time series confirmatory factor analyses. figure oa provides a different way of showing the level of group polarization over time; the left hand sub-graph in this figure shows the mean rating given to ‘in-groups’ and ‘out-groups’ while the right hand sub-graph explicitly focuses on its difference. table oa , meanwhile, provides a comparison of results between models conducted on the full sample of the and anes time series with models based on just those that completed the survey with an interviewer present. these latter analyses are the ones reported in text. we focus on the ftf only sample in-text to maintain comparability across the time series waves. as homola, jackson, and gill ( ) have shown, for instance, feeling thermometer ratings on the anes time series yield more variable or extreme patterns of responses than the face-to-face ratings. table a shows this in effect albeit only for democratic respondents. an analysis of the full sample would thus reveal even higher levels of group polarization in . notably, the exclusion of the online sample does not materially influence the predicted evaluations in , suggesting that mode had a reduced influence in this year. figure oa further delves into the ts analyses by presenting the mean ratings of the social group coalitions by independents. if partisanship and associated party evaluations are driven by evaluations of party-group images (e.g., green, palmquist, and schickler ), then one plausible supposition would be that independents are individuals with more muted evaluations of the party’s group coalitions perhaps due to cross-pressures (e.g. positive evaluations of some groups associated with party x and negative evaluations of other groups associated with party x). figure oa is consistent with this supposition; evaluations of the group coalitions among independents hover around with overlapping confidence intervals. tables oa to oa , meanwhile, provide the factor loadings from the cfa analyses. figure oa : social group polarization over time notes: the left-handed sub-graph provides the mean score for evaluations of party in-groups (i.e. evaluations of ‘democratic’ aligned groups by democratic respondents) and party out-groups (i.e. evaluations of ‘republican’ aligned groups by democratic respondents) over time with % cis. the right- hand graph explores the difference between these two scores. table oa : comparison of results: full sample vs. ftf only in & anes anes full sample only ftf full sample only ftf democrats democratic groups . [ . , . ] . [ . , . ] . [ . , . ] . [ . , . ] republican groups - . [- . , - . ] - . [- . , - . ] - . [- . , - . ] - . [- . , - . ] republicans democratic groups - . [- . , - . ] - . [- . , - . ] - . [- . , - . ] - . [- . , - . ] republican groups . [ . , . ] . [ . , . ] . [ . , . ] . [ . , . ] social group polarization in-groups . [ . , . ] . [ . , . ] . [ . , . ] . [ . , . ] out-groups - . [- . , - . ] - . [- . , - . ] - . [- . , - . ] - . [- . , - . ] difference . [ . , . ] . [ . , . ] . [ . , . ] . [ . , . ] notes: cells provide the mean scores on the factor dimensions and polarization measures separately for models of the full sample and the non-online sample. figure oa : group ratings by ‘pure’ independents notes: markers provide the mean ratings given to the two parties social group coalitions by independent respondents in the anes ts. table oa . cfa results democratic dimension republican dimension unstandardized standardized unstandardized standardized liberals . (fixed) . blacks . . civil rights leaders . . black militants . . ppl. on welfare . . unions . . women’s movement . . hispanics . . environmentalists . . conservatives . (fixed) . whites . . big business . . businessmen . . military . . southerners . . workingmen . . middleclass . . fit statistics rmsea . cfi . Χ (p-value) . ( . ) Χ /df . stand. root square mean residual . correlations: w/republican dimension - . w/democratic party therm. . - . w/republican party therm. - . . notes: the following groups are constrained to load only on the measurement dimension: poor people, government employees, and evangelicals table oa . cfa results democratic dimension republican dimension unstandardized standardized unstandardized standardized liberals . (fixed) . blacks . . civil rights leaders . . black militants . . unions . . ppl. on welfare . . poor . . hispanics . . women’s mvt . . women . . gays . . conservatives . (fixed) . big business . . evangelical . . anti-abortion . . military . . fit statistics rmsea . cfi . Χ (p-value) . ( . ) Χ /df . stand. root square mean residual . correlations: w/republican dimension . w/democratic party therm. . - . w/republican party therm. - . . notes: the following groups are constrained to load only on the measurement dimension: whites, middle class, and elderly table oa . cfa results democratic dimension republican dimension unstandardized standardized unstandardized standardized liberals . (fixed) . blacks . . civil rights leaders . . hispanics . . illegal immigrants . . unions . . ppl. on welfare . . poor . . environmentalists . . homosexuals . . feminists . . catholics . . conservatives . (fixed) . big business . . military . . anti-abortion . . christian fundamentalists . . evangelical . . fit statistics rmsea . cfi . Χ . Χ /df . stand. root square mean residual . correlations: w/republican dimension . w/democratic party therm. . - . w/republican party therm. - . . notes: the following groups are constrained to load only on the measurement dimension: whites, women, jews, and the elderly table oa . cfa results democratic dimension republican dimension unstandardized standardized unstandardized standardized liberals . (fixed) . blacks . . unions . . hispanics . . ppl. on welfare . . poor people . . women’s mvt . . feminists . . environmentalists . . homosexuals . . illegal immigrants . . lawyers . . conservatives . (fixed) . whites . southerners . . big business . . military . . police . . christian fundamentalists . . catholics . . fit statistics rmsea . cfi . Χ . Χ /df . stand. root square mean residual . correlations: w/republican dimension - . w/democratic party therm. . - . w/republican party therm. - . . notes: the following groups are constrained to load only on the measurement dimension: jews, asians, immigrants table oa . cfa results democratic dimension republican dimension unstandardized standardized unstandardized standardized liberals . (fixed) . unions . . blacks . . hispanics . . ppl. on welfare . . women’s mvt . . environmentalists . . homosexuals . . conservatives . (fixed) . big business . . military . . christian fundamentalists . . christian coalition . . fit statistics rmsea . cfi . Χ (p-value) . Χ /df . stand. root square mean residual . correlations: w/republican dimension - . w/democratic party therm. . - . w/republican party therm. - . . notes: the following groups are constrained to load only on the measurement dimension: poor people, whites, and the elderly table oa . cfa results democratic dimension republican dimension unstandardized standardized unstandardized standardized liberals . (fixed) . unions . . ppl. on welfare . . women’s mvt . . feminists . . environmentalists . . homosexuals . . conservatives . (fixed) . big business . . military . . christian fundamentalists . . christian coalition . . catholics . . protestants . . whites . . fit statistics rmsea . cfi . Χ (p-value) . Χ /df . stand. root square mean residual . correlations: w/republican dimension - . w/democratic party therm. . - . w/republican party therm. - . . notes: the following groups are constrained to load only on the measurement dimension: blacks, hispanics, poor people, asians, jews, and the elderly. table oa . cfa results democratic dimension republican dimension unstandardized standardized unstandardized standardized liberals . (fixed) . unions . . welfare . . environmentalists . . homosexuals . . illegal immigrants . . feminists . . muslims . . blacks . . poor . . asians . . conservatives . (fixed) . whites . . southerners . . big business . . business . . military . . christian fundamentalists . . men . . rich . . catholic church . . catholics . . middle class . . fit statistics rmsea . cfi . Χ (p-value) . Χ /df . stand. root square mean residual . correlations: w/republican dimension - . w/democratic party therm. . - . w/republican party therm. - . . notes: the following groups are constrained to load only on the measurement dimension:. working class, women, jews, hispanics, elderly, and the young table oa . cfa results democratic dimension republican dimension unstandardized standardized unstandardized standardized liberals . (fixed) . unions . . ppl. on welfare . . blacks . . hispanics . . asians . . jews . . feminists . . environmentalists . . homosexuals . . illegal immigrants . . muslims . . hindus . . atheists . . conservatives . (fixed) . southerners . . big business . . military . . christian fundamentalists . . christians . . catholics . . rich . . middle class . . fit statistics rmsea . cfi . Χ (p-value) . Χ /df . stand. root square mean residual . correlations: w/republican dimension - . w/democratic party therm. . - . w/republican party therm. - . . notes: the following groups are constrained to load only on the measurement dimension: whites table oa . cfa results democratic dimension republican dimension unstandardized standardized unstandardized standardized liberals . unions . . blacks . . hispanics . . ppl. on welfare . . poor . . asians . . homosexuals . . illegal immigrants . . feminists . . muslims . . atheists . . conservatives . whites . . big business . . military . . christian fundamentalists . . christians . . catholics . . rich . . mormons . . tea party . . fit statistics rmsea . cfi . Χ (p-value) . Χ /df . stand. root square mean residual . correlations: w/republican dimension - . w/democratic party therm. . - . w/republican party therm. - . . notes: the following groups are constrained to load only on the measurement dimension: middle class; working class table oa . cfa results democratic dimension republican dimension unstandardized standardized unstandardized standardized liberals . feminists . . unions . . poor . . gays & lesbians . . muslims . . transgender . . scientists . . black lives matter . . asians . . hispanics . . blacks . . illegal immigrants . . conservatives . christian fundamentalists . . big business . . rich . . christians . . tea party . . police . . fit statistics rmsea . cfi . Χ (p-value) . Χ /df . stand. root square mean residual . correlations: w/republican dimension - . w/democratic party therm. . - . w/republican party therm. - . . notes: the following groups are constrained to load only on the measurement dimension: whites and jews appendix b in this appendix we provide the full model results for the results reported in text. these are provided in tables ob to ob . table ob , meanwhile, provides an overview of analyses wherein we focus not on the polarization between in and outgroup evaluations but on them separately as predictor variables. there is some evidence here that the out-group dimension is more strongly related to party polarization and sorting, and the in-group dimension to pid strength, but this evidence is rather uneven at best. in the foregoing analyses we estimate the inter-relationship between social group polarization and our dependent variables via a three-wave cross-lagged model estimated using stata’s structural equation modeling (sem) estimator. in the remainder of appendix b we analyze the data via alternative modeling strategies. first, we provide results looking at cross-lagged ols models (estimated via seeming-unrelated regressions) for each of the panel dyads (i.e.  ,  , and  ). this is analogous to what we do via the sem model but broken up into separate pieces. these analyses are presented in tables ob -ob . second, we leverage the panel nature of the data to fit fixed effect panel regressions, which are akin to estimating first differences (i.e. does the change in x predict the change in y); these analyses are presented in tables ob -ob . in these analyses, we fit two sets of models; for the first we focus only on those respondents who completed all three of the panel waves (as we do by necessity in the sem models reported in text), while the latter focus on all respondents. in these models we control for time variant predictors common to all waves of the panel as well as dummy variables for panel wave. these results are substantially similar to those reported in the sem models, although we see a weakened influence of social group polarization on pid strength in the - fixed effect models. back to contents page table ob . party polarization and social group polarization, - - ( ) party polarization ( ) party polarization ( ) social group polarization ( ) social group polarization ( ) party polarization (t- ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . + ( . ) . * ( . ) social group polarization (t- ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) issue extremity ( ) . + ( . ) . ( . ) - . ( . ) . ( . ) ideology strength ( ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) follow politics ( ) - . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) . + ( . ) racial resentment ( ) - . ( . ) . * ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) gender . ( . ) . ( . ) - . ( . ) - . ( . ) race - . ( . ) . ( . ) - . ( . ) - . ( . ) education ( ) - . ( . ) . ( . ) . * ( . ) . ( . ) age ( ) . ( . ) - . + ( . ) - . ** ( . ) - . ( . ) constant . + ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) - . ( . ) error covariances wave . ** ( . ) wave . ** ( . ) n log-likelihood . chi . rmsea . cfi . srmr . wald tests p = (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) . (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) . standard errors in parentheses; + p < . , * p < . , ** p < . table ob . social group polarization and pid strength, - - ( ) pid strength ( ) pid strength ( ) social group polarization ( ) social group polarization ( ) pid strength (t- ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) social group polarization (t- ) . * ( . ) . * ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) issue extremity ( ) . ( . ) - . ( . ) - . ( . ) . ( . ) ideology strength ( ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) follow politics ( ) - . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . + ( . ) racial resentment ( ) - . ( . ) - . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) gender . ( . ) - . ( . ) - . ( . ) - . ( . ) race - . ( . ) . ( . ) - . ( . ) - . ( . ) education ( ) - . * ( . ) . ( . ) . * ( . ) . ( . ) age ( ) . + ( . ) - . ( . ) - . ** ( . ) - . ( . ) constant . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) error covariances wave . ( . ) wave - . ( . ) n log likelihood . chi . rmsea . cfi . srmr . wald tests p = (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) . (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) . standard errors in parentheses; + p < . , * p < . , ** p < . table ob . social group polarization and party/ideological sorting, - - ( ) partisan/ideological sorting ( ) partisan/ideological sorting ( ) social group polarization ( ) social group polarization ( ) partisan/ideological sorting (t- ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) social group polarization (t- ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) issue extremity ( ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) - . ( . ) . ( . ) follow politics ( ) - . ( . ) - . ( . ) . ( . ) . * ( . ) racial resentment ( ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) gender - . ( . ) - . * ( . ) - . ( . ) - . ( . ) race - . ( . ) - . ( . ) - . ( . ) - . ( . ) education ( ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . * ( . ) . ( . ) age ( ) - . ( . ) - . ( . ) - . ** ( . ) - . ( . ) constant - . ** ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) error covariances wave . ** ( . ) wave . ** ( . ) n log likelihood . chi . rmsea . cfi . srmr . wald tests (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) . (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) . standard errors in parentheses; + p < . , * p < . , ** p < . table ob . social group polarization and pid strength, - - ( ) pid str ( ) pid str. ( ) social group polarization ( ) social group polarization ( ) pid str. (t- ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) - . ( . ) social group polarization (t- ) . * ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) pol. interest ( ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . * ( . ) . ** ( . ) avg. issue extremity ( ) - . ( . ) - . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) ideology str. ( ) - . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) racial resentment ( ) - . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) - . ** ( . ) gender . ** ( . ) . + ( . ) - . ( . ) . + ( . ) race . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) - . ** ( . ) education - . * ( . ) - . ( . ) . * ( . ) . + ( . ) age ( ) . ( . ) - . ( . ) . ( . ) - . ** ( . ) constant . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) error covariances wave . ** ( . ) wave . ** ( . ) n log-likelihood . chi . rmsea . cfi . srmr . wald tests (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) . (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) . standard errors in parentheses; + p < . , * p < . , ** p < . table ob . social group polarization and party sorting, - ( ) sorting ( ) social group polarization ( ) sorting ( ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) social group polarization ( ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) pol. interest ( ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) avg. issue extremity ( ) . ( . ) . ( . ) racial resentment ( ) . * ( . ) . ( . ) gender . ( . ) - . ( . ) race . ( . ) . ( . ) age ( ) . + ( . ) . * ( . ) education ( ) constant - . * ( . ) . ( . ) n log likelihood . chi . rmsea . cfi . srmr . wald tests (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) . standard errors in parentheses + p < . , * p < . , ** p < . table ob : the reciprocal relationship between social group polarization & party affective polarization, pid strength, and party/ideological sorting - - - - party polarization pid strength sorting pid strength sorting cross-lag coefficient t in-groups -> t party . * ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) t out-groups -> t party . ** ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) t in-groups -> t party . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) n/a t out-groups -> t party . * ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) n/a t party -> t in-groups . + ( . ) - . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) t party -> t out-groups . + ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t party -> t in-groups . ( . ) . ( . ) . * ( . ) . ( . ) n/a t party -> t out-groups . ** ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) - . ( . ) n/a n = wald tests t in-groups = t out-groups p = . p = . p < . p = . p = . t in-groups = t out-groups p = . p = . p = . p = . notes: cell entries provide the unstandardized coefficients for the party variables (party polarization, pid strength, and partisan/ideological sorting) and for the in-groups and out-groups dimensions. t = or ; t = or ; t = or . the cross-lagged coefficients show the reciprocal influence of these variables on each other after controlling for the lagged values of the dv. the wald tests test whether we can reject the null that the influence of t in-groups on the party variable is equivalent to the t out- groups variable on the same party variable. note that the out-groups variable here is reverse coded such that higher scores indicate increasing dislike for groups associated with the out-party rather than increasing like. table ob . social group polarization and party polarization, - - (sureg models) - - - party polarization ( ) sgp ( ) party polarization ( ) sgp ( ) party polarization ( ) sgp ( ) party polarization . ** . * . ** . . ** . * (t- ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) social group polarization (t- )) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) ideology strength (t- ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . + ( . ) . ** ( . ) - . ( . ) . ** ( . ) issue extremity (t- ) . ( . ) - . ( . ) . ( . ) - . ( . ) . + ( . ) - . ( . ) follow politics (t- ) . * ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . * ( . ) . ( . ) . * ( . ) racial resentment ( ) . * ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) age (t- ) - . ( . ) - . ** ( . ) . ( . ) - . ( . ) . * ( . ) - . ( . ) education (t- ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) - . ( . ) . ( . ) - . ** ( . ) . * ( . ) female . ( . ) - . ( . ) . ( . ) - . ( . ) . + ( . ) . ( . ) non-white - . ( . ) - . ( . ) - . ( . ) - . ( . ) . ( . ) - . ** ( . ) constant . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . * ( . ) observations r . . . . . . chi . . . . . . standard errors in parentheses + p < . , * p < . , ** p < . table ob . social group polarization and pid strength, - - (sureg models) - - - pid strength sgp pid strength sgp pid str sgp pid strength (t- ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) - . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) social group polarization (t- ) . * ( . ) . ** ( . ) . * ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) ideology strength (t- ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) issue extremity (t- ) - . ( . ) - . ( . ) - . ( . ) - . ( . ) . ( . ) - . ( . ) follow politics(t- ) . ( . ) . ( . ) - . ( . ) . * ( . ) - . ( . ) . * ( . ) racial resentment ( ) . ( . ) . ( . ) - . ( . ) . ( . ) age (t- ) - . ( . ) - . * ( . ) . ( . ) - . ( . ) . ** ( . ) - . ( . ) education (t- ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) - . ( . ) . ( . ) - . * ( . ) . * ( . ) female - . ( . ) - . ( . ) . ( . ) - . ( . ) . + ( . ) . ( . ) non-white . ( . ) - . ( . ) - . ( . ) - . ( . ) . ( . ) - . ** ( . ) constant . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) observations r . . . . . . chi . . . . . . standard errors in parentheses + p < . , * p < . , ** p < . table ob . social group polarization and pid strength, - - (sureg models) ( ) ( ) ( ) - - - sorting sgp sorting sgp sorting sgp partisan/ideological sorting (t- ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) social group polarization (t- ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) issue extremity (t- ) . ( . ) - . ( . ) . * ( . ) - . ( . ) - . ( . ) - . ( . ) follow politics(t- ) - . ( . ) . ( . ) - . ( . ) . * ( . ) . ( . ) . * ( . ) racial resentment (t- ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) age (t- ) - . ( . ) - . * ( . ) - . ( . ) - . ( . ) - . ( . ) - . ( . ) education (t- ) . ( . ) . * ( . ) . + ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . + ( . ) female - . * ( . ) - . ( . ) - . + ( . ) - . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) non-white - . ( . ) - . ( . ) - . ( . ) - . ( . ) - . * ( . ) - . ** ( . ) constant . + ( . ) . ** ( . ) - . ( . ) . ** ( . ) - . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) observations r . . . . . . chi . . . . . . standard errors in parentheses + p < . , * p < . , ** p < . table ob . social group polarization and pid strength, - - (sureg models) ( ) ( ) ( ) - - - pid st. (t) sgp (t) pid st. (t) sgp (t) pid st. (t) sgp (t) pid str (t- ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) - . ( . ) social group polarization (t- ) . * ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . * ( . ) . ** ( . ) pol. interest (t- ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) . * ( . ) - . ( . ) . ** ( . ) avg. issue extremity . ( . ) . ( . ) - . ( . ) . ( . ) ideology str. (t- ) . * ( . ) . ** ( . ) - . ( . ) . * ( . ) - . ( . ) . ** ( . ) racial resentment ( ) . * ( . ) . ( . ) - . ( . ) - . * ( . ) gender . ( . ) - . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . + ( . ) race . ** ( . ) . ( . ) . * ( . ) - . * ( . ) . ( . ) - . ** ( . ) age (t- ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) - . ( . ) . ( . ) - . * ( . ) education - . ( . ) . ** ( . ) - . + ( . ) . * ( . ) - . ( . ) . ** ( . ) constant . ** ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . * ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) observations r . . . . . . chi . . . . . . standard errors in parentheses + p < . , * p < . , ** p < . table. ob social group polarization and party/ideological sorting, - (sureg models) ( ) sorting ( ) social group polarization ( ) sorting ( ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) social group polarization ( ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) pol. interest . ( . ) . ** ( . ) avg. issue extremity . ( . ) . ( . ) racial resentment ( ) . * ( . ) . ( . ) gender . ( . ) - . ( . ) race . ( . ) . ( . ) age - . ( . ) . ( . ) education . + ( . ) . * ( . ) constant - . * ( . ) . ( . ) observations r . . chi . . standard errors in parentheses + p < . , * p < . , ** p < . table ob . social group polarization and party polarization, fixed effect regression model; - - panel ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) - - only - - only all all social group polarization . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) pol. interest . * ( . ) . + ( . ) ideology strength . ( . ) . ** ( . ) issue extremity . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) age . ( . ) - . ( . ) education - . ( . ) - . ( . ) constant . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) observations respondents r _within . . . . r _between . . . . r _overall . . . . standard errors in parentheses + p < . , * p < . , ** p < . table ob . pid strength and social group polarization, fixed effect regression; - - panel ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) - - only - - only all all social group polarization . ( . ) - . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . * ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) pol. interest . ( . ) . * ( . ) ideology strength . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) issue extremity . ( . ) . ( . ) age - . ( . ) . ( . ) education - . ( . ) - . ( . ) constant . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) observations respondents r _within . . . . r _between . . . . r _overall . . . . standard errors in parentheses + p < . , * p < . , ** p < . table ob . party/ideological sorting and social group polarization, fixed effect regression ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) - - only - - only all all social group polarization . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . * ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) pol. interest . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) issue extremity . * ( . ) . ** ( . ) age . ( . ) . ( . ) education . ( . ) . ( . ) constant . ** ( . ) - . ( . ) . ** ( . ) - . ( . ) observations respondents r _within . . . . r _between . . . . r _overall . . . . standard errors in parentheses + p < . , * p < . , ** p < . table ob . pid strength and social group polarization, fixed effect regression; - - panel ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) - - only - - only all all - social group polarization . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . * ( . ) . * ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) pol. interest . ( . ) . + ( . ) . ( . ) ideology strength . ** ( . ) constant . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) observations respondents r _within . . . . . r _between . . . . . r _overall . . . . . standard errors in parentheses + p < . , * p < . , ** p < . table ob . party/ideological sorting and social group polarization, fixed effect regression ( ) ( ) sorting sorting social group polarization . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) - . + ( . ) - . * ( . ) pol. interest . ( . ) constant . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) observations respondents r _within . . r _between . . r _overall . . standard errors in parentheses + p < . , * p < . , ** p < . appendix c in this appendix we investigate the consequences of restricting the group dimension factor analyses to a ‘common’ core of social groups across the various time series or panel waves. time series the analyses in in-text rely on models that include a panoply of social group feeling thermometers. one question may be whether the increasing polarization on display is the result of momentarily salient social groups. to explore this possibility we have investigated models wherein we restrict the group dimension to ‘common’ social groups. the results from our first attempt at this process are presented in figure oc -oc . our models here attempt to strike a balance between restricting the models to common groups while maintaining a good deal of coverage across relevant groups. this involves two compromises. first, between the years of and the anes consistently asked respondents about these groups: blacks, whites, big business, labor unions, liberals, conservatives, the military, hispanics, people on welfare, and poor people. however, the anes also asked respondents during this time frame to record their evaluation either of christian fundamentalists or evangelicals and either between feminists and the women’s movement. these two attitude objects are not interchangeable, but they do load on the same dimensions (i.e. the republican groups dimension in the former case or the democrats in the latter case) and are thematically quite similar. thus, for our initial analyses we maintain these groups within the model. second, the anes time series asks about the foregoing groups but leaves off the military and people on welfare. for this initial analysis we do not omit these two groups form the - analyses. the key difference, as figure oc - oc show, concerns evaluations of the republican groups dimension where evaluations are generally more positive (negative) among republicans (democrats) when we restrict our attention to these ‘core’ groups. this is perhaps not surprising given that whites and the military may serve as societal reference groups for many people, even if associated with the republican party, and thus earn broadly positive evaluations. the results is greater initial polarization in the [mostly] common items analyses that nevertheless slopes upwards over time. one obvious drawback to the above process is that we are not quite comparing apples to apples. while feminists and the women’s movement likely both tap into similar affective responses among respondents, they are of course not quite the same; the same can be said for evangelicals and christian fundamentalists. moreover, we cannot easily go from the - to time points due to the further dropping of social groups in this last year. we have thus refit our models focused only on those groups common to the entire - time frame: liberals, blacks, unions, conservatives, whites, big business, the poor, and hispanics. however, we should note that we are still not quite comparing apples to apples in these analyses at least when comparing against the original model results below. to quote the stata guide to structural equation modeling, “it can be devilishly difficult for software to obtain results for sems,” and this was true in this case. in particular, cutting the group models back so far led to convergence issues in several cases in the - sample, issues that we could only circumscribe by restricting some thermometers to not load on the substantive dimension it loaded on in the original analyses. this frequently involved the hispanics and poor thermometers and particularly so in the s analyses. one likely reason for these groups to stand out is that they loaded rather weakly on the group dimension in question (democratic groups) to begin with. regardless, we provide a comparison between the original models, presented in text, and these restricted models in figures oc -oc . we see a similar pattern of results as in figures oc -oc ; affect toward the republican group dimension is more polarized to begin with in the common items models than in the in-text models, albeit again with a growing degree of group polarization, albeit one that is more uneven in the common groups models shown in figure oc . what does these results tell us? first, we can still detect polarization in affect toward the parties group coalitions even when restricting our attention to a small number of groups likely to lie close to the center of the party’s group coalitions. second, polarization in affect toward these groups still appears to have increased over time, albeit in a less even way. however, this ‘unevenness’ is, to us, likely a remnant of omitting social groups that are likely key to how partisans view the parties, i.e. gender groups such as feminists and religious groups such as christian fundamentalists (e.g., ahler and sood n.d.). panel the panel analyses in text also use group dimensions that vary in their group inputs. here, we compare our original model results to ( ) results from analyses wherein the group dimensions are restricted only to those groups common to all three waves within a panel survey (i.e. & & ) and ( ) to analyses where the group dimensions are composed of evaluations of groups common to all six surveys across the two panels. these results are presented in tables oc -oc . importantly, we continue to see the same patterns as before; while the coefficients jump around, social group polarization continues to influence later partisan affective polarization, pid strength, and party/ideological sorting even when social group polarization is measured via these restricted models. back to title/contents page figure oc : evaluation of groups by democrats, original model and [mostly] ‘common’ groups figure oc : evaluation of groups by republicans, original model and [mostly] ‘common’ groups figure oc : social group polarization, original model and [mostly] ‘common’ groups figure oc : democrats ratings of group coalitions, original model vs. only common figure oc : republican ratings of group coalitions, original model vs. only common figure oc : in and out group ratings of group coalitions, original model vs. only common figure oc : social group polarization, original model vs. only common table oc . overview of results from original models, restricting to social groups common within panels, and common on all six panels: party polarization & social group polarization - - original common to all three panels common to all six panels cross-lag coefficient t sgp -> t party . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t sgp -> t party . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t party -> t sgp . + ( . ) . ( . ) . * ( . ) t party -> t sgp . * ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) n = wald tests (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p = . p = . (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p = . p = . p = . table oc . overview of results from original models, restricting to social groups common within panels, and common on all six panels: pid strength & social group polarization - - - - original all three all six original all three all six cross-lag coefficient t sgp -> t party . * ( . ) . * ( . ) . * ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . * ( . ) t sgp -> t party . * ( . ) . * ( . ) . * ( . ) . * ( . ) . * ( . ) . * ( . ) t party -> t sgp . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . * ( . ) t party -> t sgp . ( . ) . * ( . ) . ** ( . ) - . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) n = wald tests (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p < . p < . p = . p = . p < . (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p < . p < . p < . p < . p = . table oc . overview of results from original models, restricting to social groups common within panels, and common on all six panels: party ideological sorting & social group polarization - - - original all all six pid strength all three all six cross-lag coefficient t sgp -> t party . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t sgp -> t party . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) n/a n/a n/a t party -> t sgp . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t party -> t sgp . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) n/a n/a n/a n = wald tests (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p < . p < . p < . p < . p < . (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p < . p < . n/a n/a n/a appendix d one potential questions concerns identification and, in particular, the role of the individual’s own identifications in affecting social group polarization, party polarization (etc.), and their inter- relationship. in the models reported in text we include gender and race as control variables. in the models described in this appendix we also add religious preference (catholic, protestant, jewish, other [base: none]). these items capture one element of identification (membership) but not another (psychological attachment). unfortunately the anes does not contain the type of identity measures for social groups that have grown in acceptance due to the work of mason, huddy, greene and others drawing upon the social identity framework (e.g. bankert, huddy, and rosema n.d.; greene ; huddy and khatib ; huddy, mason, and aarøe ). so, we are limited in our ability to speak to the role of group identification in this broader story. however, respondents in both panels were asked to indicate which social groups they felt “close” to in and with the list of groups asked about partially overlapping with the social groups in the feeling thermometer battery. one potential solution is to leverage these items to address the potential role of identification. however, there are some drawbacks to such an approach. in particular, these “close to” items are not an ideal measure of identification as individuals may report feeling ‘close to’ a group for reasons other than membership + a psychological attachment. for instance, . % of male respondents on the anes reported feeling close to “women”. “closeness”, moreover, may reference feelings of shared interests but not necessarily indicate that the individual has incorporated the group into their broader self- concept, so even in the case where this item overlaps with group membership it may be the case that group identification is not being precisely addressed. regardless we investigate how their inclusion as control variables affects the panel analyses in a new appendix, online appendix d. we use these items in two ways; tables od -od provide an overview of the cross-lagged results from our original models and in these two alternative models. first, we simply add each of these binary items ( = close, = not close) as control variables; this does not affect the relationship between the thermometer-based group affective dimension and the outcome variables save for the - pid strength analyses where the coefficient turns for social group polarization turns insignificant (see below). second, we create a similar differenced measured from these “close to” items to include as a control. we first take the mean of all of the “close to” groups typically related to the democratic party and then again those typically associated with the republican party; we use a mean here because there are more groups in this battery traditionally linked to the democrats than the republicans. then, much as with the thermometer based measure, we sort this by respondent partisanship into in-party group closeness and out-party group closeness and take the difference between the items such that higher scores indicate greater ‘closeness’ to groups associated with one’s in-party. this resulting difference measure is positively correlated with the latent affective dimension formed from the cfa (r = . [ ]; r = . [ ]). we see three key results from its inclusion as a control variable in the panel analyses: ( ) the measure does not significantly predict later levels of social group polarization; ( ) it as a side note, insofar as group identities influence t values in social group polarization and our other outcome variables, then the lagged values of these variables should capture some of the effects of identification. democratic groups in the - panel: poor, liberals, blacks, unions, feminists, hispanics, women, working class, and asians. republican groups in this panel: southerners, business people, conservatives, and whites. democratic groups in the - panel: poor, asians, liberals, blacks, unions, feminists, hispanics, and women. republican groups were: whites, southerners, business people, and conservatives. does predict later levels of the three party variables (particularly the party sorting measure), and ( ) it does not significantly alter the relationship between social group polarization and our outcome variables in the - analyses or on the sorting analyses in the - panel, but does lead to an insignificant social group thermometer coefficient in the - - pid strength analyses. notably, in these last analyses this differenced item is a substantial predictor of later pid strength. as we note, these items are not very well suited for investigating identity or identification, but they may be the closest such measure for identification with social identities beyond partisanship in the anes. ultimately, we are heartened to see them have a similar influence on the later party variables as we believe this provides further evidence of a group-based dimension to party polarization, whether they are tapping identification or serve as an alternative measurement of group polarization. back to title/contents page table od . overview of results from original models, models controlling for individual group closeness items, and group closeness ‘differenced’ items [party affective polarization, - anes panel] - - original group closeness group closeness: differenced cross-lag coefficient t sgp -> t party . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t sgp -> t party . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t party -> t sgp . + ( . ) . + ( . ) . + ( . ) t party -> t sgp . * ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t group difference -> t sgp - . ( . ) t group difference -> t sgp . ( . ) t group difference -> t party . ** ( . ) t group difference -> t party - . ( . ) n = wald tests (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p = . p < . (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p = . p = . p = . table od . overview of results from original models, models controlling for individual group closeness items, and group closeness ‘differenced’ items [pid strength, - anes panel] - - original common to all three panels common to all six panels cross-lag coefficient t sgp -> t party . * ( . ) . * ( . ) . * ( . ) t sgp -> t party . * ( . ) . + ( . ) . + ( . ) t party -> t sgp . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) t party -> t sgp . ( . ) . + ( . ) . ( . ) t group difference -> t sgp . ( . ) t group difference -> t sgp . ( . ) t group difference -> t party . ( . ) t group difference -> t party . * ( . ) n = wald tests (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p = . p = . (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p < . p < . table od . overview of results from original models, models controlling for individual group closeness items, and group closeness ‘differenced’ items [party/ideological sorting, - anes panel] - - original common to all three panels common to all six panels cross-lag coefficient t sgp -> t party . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t sgp -> t party . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t party -> t sgp . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) t party -> t sgp . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t group difference -> t sgp . ( . ) t group difference -> t sgp . ( . ) t group difference -> t party . * ( . ) t group difference -> t party . * ( . ) n = wald tests (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p < . p < . (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p < . p < . table od . overview of results from original models, models controlling for individual group closeness items, and group closeness ‘differenced’ items [pid strength, - anes panel] - - original common to all three panels common to all six panels cross-lag coefficient t sgp -> t party . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) t sgp -> t party . * ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) t party -> t sgp . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t party -> t sgp - . ( . ) . ( . ) - . ( . ) t group difference -> t sgp - . ( . ) t group difference -> t sgp . ( . ) t group difference -> t party . * ( . ) t group difference -> t party - . ( . ) n = wald tests (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p = . p = . p = . (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p = . p = . table od . overview of results from original models, models controlling for individual group closeness items, and group closeness ‘differenced’ items [sorting, - anes panel] original common to all three panels common to all six panels cross-lag coefficient t sgp -> t party . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t party -> t sgp . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t group difference -> t sgp . ** ( . ) t group difference -> t party . ** ( . ) n = wald tests (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p < . p < . appendix e racial groups are a key element in perceptions of political parties and in recent accounts of partisan antipathy (e.g., abramowitz and webster ; ahler and sood n.d.; mason ). how does the inclusion of racial groups within our group coalition measurement analyses influence our subsequent results? in this appendix we replicate our in-text analyses after excluding racial groups from the construction of the group coalition latent dimensions. figures oe -oe provide a comparison of our time series results between the in-text models and the ones excluding racial groups. there is one notable deviance that shows up in and, to a lesser extent, in . in these years, democratic (republican) respondents record less positive (negative) evaluations on the democratic groups dimension. scores on the republican groups dimension are virtually unaffected. this does not yield a change in the overall level of group polarization in but does yield less polarization in . these changes are perhaps not entirely surprising given the relationship between presidents obama and trump and the racialization of party conflict (e.g., piston ; schaffner, macwilliams, and nteta ; tesler ). on the whole, though, the patterns in the time series analyses are highly consistent regardless of whether the racial groups are omitted or not. tables oe -oe , meanwhile, provide an overview of results comparing the estimates of the relationship between t sgp and t+ party variables, and the reciprocal relationships, between the original models and those based on group dimensions expunged of racial groups. omitting the racial groups from the groups dimension does not materially influence our conclusions. back to title/contents page this requires removing the following thermometers: blacks, civil rights leaders, black militants, hispanics, asians, whites, illegal immigrants, immigrants, and blacks lives matter figure oe : comparing results across models, democratic respondents figure oe : comparing results across models, republican respondents figure oe : comparing results across models, in- and out-groups figure oe : comparing results across models, social group polarization table oe . overview of results from original models and models excluding racial groups from group dimensions [party affective polarization, - anes panel] original excluding racial groups cross-lag coefficient t sgp -> t party . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t sgp -> t party . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t party -> t sgp . + ( . ) . ( . ) t party -> t sgp . * ( . ) . ** ( . ) n = wald tests (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p < . (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p = . p = . table oe . overview of results from original models and models excluding racial groups from group dimensions [pid strength, - anes panel] original excluding racial groups cross-lag coefficient t sgp -> t party . * ( . ) . * ( . ) t sgp -> t party . * ( . ) . * ( . ) t party -> t sgp . ( . ) . ( . ) t party -> t sgp . ( . ) . * ( . ) n = wald tests (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p < . (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p < . table oe . overview of results from original models and models excluding racial groups from group dimensions [party/ideological sorting, - anes panel] original excluding racial groups cross-lag coefficient t sgp -> t party . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t sgp -> t party . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t party -> t sgp . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t party -> t sgp . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) n = wald tests (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p < . (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p < . table oe . overview of results from original models and models excluding racial groups from group dimensions [pid strength, - anes panel] original excluding racial groups cross-lag coefficient t sgp -> t party . ( . ) . ( . ) t sgp -> t party . * ( . ) . * ( . ) t party -> t sgp . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t party -> t sgp - . ( . ) - . ( . ) n = wald tests (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p = . p = . (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p < . table oe . overview of results from original models and models excluding racial groups from group dimensions [sorting, - anes panel] original excluding racial groups cross-lag coefficient t sgp -> t party . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t party -> t sgp . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) n = wald tests (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p < . appendix f one question that may arise is the role of more or less ideological groups in driving the results we see in text. one potential suspicion is that the less ideological groups are driving our patterns as they get folded into the mix over time. alternatively, it may be the more ideological groups that are at fault. a robustness check we investigate in this appendix involves the omission of ‘ideological groups’. however, this raises the question of which groups to omit. while liberals and conservatives are perhaps clearly ‘ideological’, it is less clear with regards to many of the other groups that we could look at. indeed, we think it is plausible that many individuals assign ideological meaning to many other groups in the data that are not explicitly ideological. a novel study by swigger ( ), for instance, shows that candidate advertisements randomly featuring visual images of african americans, senior citizens, blue collar workers, latinos, or soldiers (e.g. the military) substantially influenced subjects subsequent ideological and issue placement of the candidate involved (see also: brady and sniderman ). while they do not explore perceptions of candidate ideology per se, campbell, green, and layman’s ( ) shows that cueing an evangelical identity with regards to a candidate substantially influences how partisans respond to the candidate. we’re hesitant then to draw clear lines in the sand with groups other than liberals and conservatives. we thus simply replicate our intext results by re-estimating the group dimensions absent liberals and conservatives. figures of -of compare our original model results to these replications. the key difference that emerges concerns evaluations of the democratic group coalition, with less positive evaluations emerging among democratic respondents when we omit liberals from the mix and more positive (or, less negative) evaluations for republicans. polarization still exists but it now grows more slowly until where we see a dramatic upsurge in antipathy. tables of -of , meanwhile, focus on the panel results; here we see little change in the partisan affective polarization models but some reduced precision in the pid strength and party/ideological sorting models. back to title/contents page figure of : democrats ratings of democratic & republican group dimensions – original models vs. those without liberals and conservatives figure of : republicans ratings of democratic & republican group dimensions – original models vs. those without liberals and conservatives figure of : in groups and out groups group dimensions – original models vs. those without liberals and conservatives figure of : social group polarization – original models vs. those without liberals and conservatives table of . comparison of results: original models to those excluding liberals and conservatives from group dimension [partisan affective polarization, - - anes panel] - - original excl. ideological groups cross-lag coefficient t sgp -> t party . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t sgp -> t party . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t party -> t sgp . + ( . ) . ( . ) t party -> t sgp . * ( . ) . ** ( . ) n = wald tests (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p < . (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p = . p < . table of . comparison of results: original models to those excluding liberals and conservatives from group dimension [pid strength] - - - - original excluding ideological groups original excluding ideological groups cross-lag coefficient t sgp -> t party . ** ( . ) . * ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) t sgp -> t party . ** ( . ) . ( . ) . * ( . ) . ( . ) t party -> t sgp . + ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ( . ) t party -> t sgp . * ( . ) . ( . ) - . ( . ) - . ( . ) n = wald tests (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p < . p = . p = . (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p = . p = . p < . p < . table of . comparison of results: original models to those excluding liberals and conservatives from group dimension [party/ideological sorting] - - - original excl. ideol groups original excl. ideol groups cross-lag coefficient t sgp -> t party . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t sgp -> t party . ** ( . ) . + ( . ) n/a n/a t party -> t sgp . ** ( . ) . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t party -> t sgp . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) n/a n/a n = wald tests (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p < . p < . p < . (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p = . n/a n/a appendix g feeling group thermometer ratings contain measurement error, particularly due to differences in how individuals use the thermometer scale points (wilcox and cook ). we follow prior work in accounting for this error by fitting a thermometer measurement dimension on which all the thermometer load equally and which is uncorrelated with our more substantive dimensions (weisberg, haynes, and krosnick ). however, in a recent article highton and kam ( ) also take this approach to dealing with error in the thermometers, but they allow the thermometers to load ‘freely’, e.g. not constrained to equality, on the thermometer dimension. in this appendix we investigate the importance of this choice. we see two key results from the analyses reported below. first, the models wherein the thermometers are allowed to load freely on the measurement dimension possess superior fit to those that use a fixed loading. second, this difference does not influence our subsequent results; the factor scores that emerge from the ‘free’ loading analyses are highly correlated with those that emerged from the fixed analyses and vary by trivial margins. back to contents page table og . cfa results (standardized loadings) democratic dimension republican dimension fixed loadings on measurement free loadings on measurement fixed loadings on measurement free loadings on measurement liberals . . blacks . . civil rights leaders . . black militants . . ppl. on welfare . . unions . . women’s movement . . hispanics . . environmentalists . . conservatives . . whites . . big business . . businessmen . . military . . southerners . . workingmen . . middleclass . . fit statistics fixed free rmsea . . cfi . . Χ (p-value) . ( . ) . ( . ) Χ /df . . stand. root square mean residual . . correlations dem groups (fixed) dem (free) . rep (fixed) - . - . rep (free) - . - . . dem. party . . - . - . rep. party - . - . . . pid (high = str. rep) - . - . . . ideology (high = conservative) - . -. . . notes: the following groups are constrained to load only on the measurement dimension: poor people, government employees, and evangelicals table og . cfa results democratic dimension republican dimension fixed loadings on measurement free loadings on measurement fixed loadings on measurement free loadings on measurement liberals . . blacks . . civil rights leaders . . black militants . . unions . . ppl. on welfare . . poor . . hispanics . . women’s mvt . . women . . gays . . conservatives . . big business . . evangelical . . anti-abortion . . military . . fit statistics fixed free rmsea . . cfi . . Χ (p-value) . ( . ) . ( . ) Χ /df . . stand. root square mean residual . . correlations dem groups (fixed) dem (free) . rep (fixed) . . rep (free) . . . dem. party . . - . - . rep. party - . - . . . pid (high = str. rep) - . - . . . ideology (high = conservative) - . - . . . notes: the following groups are constrained to load only on the measurement dimension: whites, middle class, and elderly table og . cfa results democratic dimension republican dimension fixed loadings on measurement free loadings on measurement fixed loadings on measurement free loadings on measurement liberals . . blacks . . civil rights leaders . . hispanics . . illegal immigrants . . unions . . ppl. on welfare . . poor . . environmentalists . . homosexuals . . feminists . . catholics . . conservatives . . big business . . military . . anti-abortion . . christian fundamentalists . . evangelical . . fit statistics fixed free rmsea . . cfi . . Χ . . Χ /df . . stand. root square mean residual . . correlations dem groups (fixed) dem (free) . rep (fixed) . . rep (free) . . . dem. party . . - . . rep. party - . - . . . pid (high = str. rep) - . - . . . ideology (high = conservative) - . - . . . notes: the following groups are constrained to load only on the measurement dimension: whites, women, jews, and the elderly table og . cfa results democratic dimension republican dimension fixed loadings on measurement free loadings on measurement fixed loadings on measurement free loadings on measurement liberals . . blacks . . unions . . hispanics . . ppl. on welfare . . poor people . . women’s mvt . . feminists . . environmentalists . . homosexuals . . illegal immigrants . . lawyers . . conservatives . . whites . southerners . . big business . . military . . police . . christian fundamentalists . . catholics . . fit statistics fixed free rmsea . . cfi . . Χ . . Χ /df . . stand. root square mean residual . . correlations dem groups (fixed) dem (free) . rep (fixed) - . - . rep (free) - . - . . dem. party . . - . - . rep. party - . - . . . pid (high = str. rep) - . - . . . ideology (high = conservative) - . - . . . notes: the following groups are constrained to load only on the measurement dimension: jews, asians, immigrants table og . cfa results democratic dimension republican dimension fixed loadings on measurement free loadings on measurement fixed loadings on measurement free loadings on measurement liberals . . unions . . blacks . . hispanics . . ppl. on welfare . . women’s mvt . . environmentalists . . homosexuals . . conservatives . . big business . . military . . christian fundamentalists . . christian coalition . . fit statistics fixed free rmsea . . cfi . . Χ (p-value) . . Χ /df . . stand. root square mean residual . . correlations dem groups (fixed) dem (free) . rep (fixed) - . - . rep (free) - . . . dem. party . . - . - . rep. party - . - . . . pid (high = str. rep) - . - . . . ideology (high = conservative) - . - . . . notes: the following groups are constrained to load only on the measurement dimension: poor people, whites, and the elderly table og . cfa results democratic dimension republican dimension fixed loadings on measurement free loadings on measurement fixed loadings on measurement free loadings on measurement liberals . . unions . . ppl. on welfare . . women’s mvt . . feminists . . environmentalists . . homosexuals . . conservatives . . big business . . military . . christian fundamentalists . . christian coalition . . catholics . . protestants . . whites . . fit statistics fixed free rmsea . . cfi . . Χ (p-value) . . Χ /df . . stand. root square mean residual . . correlations dem groups (fixed) dem (free) . rep (fixed) - . - . rep (free) - . - . . dem. party . . - . - . rep. party - . - . . . pid (high = str. rep) - . - . . . ideology (high = conservative) - . - . . . notes: the following groups are constrained to load only on the measurement dimension: blacks, hispanics, poor people, asians, jews, and the elderly. table og . cfa results democratic dimension republican dimension fixed loadings on measurement free loadings on measurement fixed loadings on measurement free loadings on measurement liberals . . unions . . welfare . . environmentalists . . homosexuals . . illegal immigrants . . feminists . . muslims . . blacks . . poor . . asians . . conservatives . . whites . . southerners . . big business . . business . . military . . christian fundamentalists . . men . . rich . . catholic church . . catholics . . middle class . . fit statistics fixed free rmsea . . cfi . . Χ (p-value) . . Χ /df . . stand. root square mean residual . . correlations dem groups (fixed) dem (free) . rep (fixed) - . - . rep (free) - . - . . dem. party . . - . - . rep. party - . - . . . pid (high = str. rep) - . - . . . ideology (high = conservative) - . - . . . notes: the following groups are constrained to load only on the measurement dimension:. working class, women, jews, hispanics, elderly, and the young table og . cfa results democratic dimension republican dimension fixed loadings on measurement free loadings on measurement fixed loadings on measurement free loadings on measurement liberals . . unions . . ppl. on welfare . . blacks . . hispanics . . asians . . jews . . feminists . . environmentalists . . homosexuals . . illegal immigrants . . muslims . . hindus . . atheists . . conservatives . . southerners . . big business . . military . . christian fundamentalists . . christians . . catholics . . rich . . middle class . - . fit statistics fixed free rmsea . . cfi . . Χ (p-value) . . Χ /df . . stand. root square mean residual . . correlations dem groups (fixed) dem (free) . rep (fixed) - . - . rep (free) - . - . . dem. party . . - . - . rep. party - . - . . . pid (high = str. rep) - . - . . . ideology (high = conservative) - . - . . . notes: the following groups are constrained to load only on the measurement dimension: whites table og . cfa results democratic dimension republican dimension fixed loadings on measurement free loadings on measurement fixed loadings on measurement free loadings on measurement liberals . . unions . . blacks . . hispanics . . ppl. on welfare . . poor . . asians . . homosexuals . . illegal immigrants . . feminists . . muslims . . atheists . . conservatives . . whites . . big business . . military . . christian fundamentalists . . christians . . catholics . . working class - . - . rich . . mormons . . tea party . . fit statistics fixed free rmsea . . cfi . . Χ (p-value) . . Χ /df . . stand. root square mean residual . . correlations dem groups (fixed) dem (free) . rep (fixed) - . - . rep (free) - . - . . dem. party . . - . - . rep. party - . - . . . pid (high = str. rep) - . - . . . ideology (high = conservative) - . - . . . notes: the following groups are constrained to load only on the measurement dimension: middle class table og . cfa results democratic dimension republican dimension fixed loadings on measurement free loadings on measurement fixed loadings on measurement free loadings on measurement liberals . . feminists . . unions . . poor . . gays & lesbians . . muslims . . transgender . . scientists . . black lives matter . . asians . - . hispanics . . blacks . . illegal immigrants . . conservatives . . christian fundamentalists . . big business . . rich . . christians . . tea party . . police . . fit statistics fixed free rmsea . . cfi . . Χ (p-value) . . Χ /df . . stand. root square mean residual . . correlations dem groups (fixed) dem (free) . rep (fixed) - . - . rep (free) - . - . . dem. party . . - . - . rep. party - . - . . . pid (high = str. rep) - . - . . . ideology (high = conservative) - . - . . . notes: the following groups are constrained to load only on the measurement dimension: whites and jews figure og : in-group ratings (fixed vs. free) figure og : out-group ratings (fixed vs. free) figure og : difference scores (fixed vs. free) table og . overview of results from original models and models with ‘free loadings’ on measurement dimension [party affective polarization, - anes panel] original ”free loading” modles cross-lag coefficient t sgp -> t party . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t sgp -> t party . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t party -> t sgp . + ( . ) . + ( . ) t party -> t sgp . * ( . ) . ** ( . ) n = wald tests (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p < . (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p = . p = . table og . overview of results from original models and models with ‘free loadings’ on measurement dimension [pid strength, - anes panel] original ”free loading” models cross-lag coefficient t sgp -> t party . * ( . ) . * ( . ) t sgp -> t party . * ( . ) . * ( . ) t party -> t sgp . ( . ) . ( . ) t party -> t sgp . ( . ) . ( . ) n = wald tests (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p < . (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p < . table og . overview of results from original models and models with ‘free loadings’ on measurement dimension [party/ideological sorting, - anes panel] original excluding racial groups cross-lag coefficient t sgp -> t party . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t sgp -> t party . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t party -> t sgp . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t party -> t sgp . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) n = wald tests (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p < . (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p < . table og . overview of results from original models and models with ‘free loadings’ on measurement dimension [pid strength, - anes panel] original ”free loading” models cross-lag coefficient t sgp -> t party . ( . ) . ( . ) t sgp -> t party . * ( . ) . * ( . ) t party -> t sgp . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t party -> t sgp - . ( . ) - . ( . ) n = wald tests (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p = . p = . (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p = < . table og . overview of results from original models and models with ‘free’ loadings on measurement dimension [sorting, - anes panel] original cross-lag coefficient t sgp -> t party . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) t party -> t sgp . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) n = wald tests (sgpt -> partyt ) = (partyt -> (sgpt ) p < . p < . 	au cover 	robison_group_basis_of_polarization s jme .. obituary obituary: paul oliver ( – ) the headline achievements in paul oliver’s extraordinary career as a blues scholar are easy enough to list. after all, the body of work he produced in this field is gen- erally accepted as the single most influential contribution; his writings and talks probably introduced more people to blues music, created more fans and inspired more researchers than anyone else’s; he pioneered the use of commercial blues recordings as key material for blues scholarship; he played a major role in establish- ing what became the dominant narrative driving understandings of blues history and of its meanings; and, bringing together textual analysis, archival, documentary and oral history, and anthropology (including fieldwork), he established a persuasive model of interdisciplinary work – the sort of model that most popular music scholars have seen as essential in their field. all this has been said often enough – for example, in this journal’s own tribute to paul to mark the occasion of his th birthday (popular music, / [ ]), as well as in the many obituaries – and it merits repeating, often. here, though, i want to write something with a more personal slant. despite my huge respect for paul’s work, and affection for the man, it would be false to attempt to disguise the fact that our approaches to blues, and to popular music studies more generally, diverged in several ways. while eulogies from whatever source are entirely appropriate, a trib- ute from a ‘critical friend’ is surely particularly telling. the wry grin from the subject that i visualise at this point suggests to me that he would not disagree. i came to blues as a student in the early s via jazz and then r’n‘b – a not unfamiliar story. when the moment arrived to contemplate doctoral study – which i was determined would be in popular music – an obvious focus seemed to me to be the role of blues in the development of pop: from elvis to the rolling stones, its cen- trality seemed clear; and besides, the music knocked me out. at that point i’m pretty sure i had never heard of paul oliver – a measure of the naivety of my enthusiasm (if it had been longer established, i would have discovered the many articles he had con- tributed to jazz journals during the s). this ignorance didn’t last long. i soon dis- covered blues fell this morning ( ) and conversation with the blues ( ), which were eye-opening, the first for its acute insights into ways in which the meanings of blues lyrics were embedded in the fabric of african american life, the second for its revelations through interviews with singers of the emotional significance of the music to them – its authenticity. at the same time, though, i was discovering other material, and some of it was pointing me in different directions. while paul seemed to portray a very bounded and disappearing culture – a ‘folk past’ – and had at best mixed feelings about both the white-driven blues ‘revival’ and the com- mercialisation of black music, i was interested in the relationship between blues and (mainly white) pop music and was becoming convinced that this could only be understood in the context of a very long history of inter-racial and inter-cultural popular music ( ) volume / . © cambridge university press , pp. – doi: . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core encounter. leroi jones (amiri baraka), though a black nationalist, took very much this line in his blues people ( ): african american music, while absolutely specific, was – precisely and importantly – an american music; and ralph ellison, expanding on the message of his wonderful novel, invisible man ( ), made a similar point in shadow and act ( ). then there was charles keil’s urban blues ( ) which, far from lamenting the decline of ‘down-home’ traditions, set its ethnomusicological sights on the present, on the big city, on the glitzy modern styles of b. b. king, bobby bland and ray charles. this was the world of soul music, civil rights and black power, which seemed to me exactly where the blues lineage was headed. notoriously, keil caricatured a certain approach to the quest for ‘genuine’ blues singers as the ‘moldy fig mentality’. to qualify, discoveries had to be old, toothless, blind, obscure, with a small output and connections to one of the legendary figures in the deep south past. paul was no ‘moldy fig’. his first book was a biography (the first) of bessie smith, who enjoyed huge commercial success in the s and a col- ourful show-biz life-style. nevertheless, there was an unmistakable tinge of nostalgia in the writing – a sense that the best of the vernacular wonder that was blues had gone and the culture was fading under pressure from mass entertainment. even if the otherness of blues was an important part of what appealed to pop musicians and to white adolescents in general, i wanted to ask if there wasn’t a more differen- tiated, hybridising music culture than was being presented here, and if it wasn’t pos- sible for blues to mutate and to maintain an aesthetic and cultural value even within the belly of the commercial beast. some of these doubts were assuaged by the story of the blues ( ) and savannah syncopators ( ). in the first of these, it’s true, the same overall narrative framework, with its decline-and-fall element, is still present, but this is significantly qualified by new emphases on geographical differentiation, on the importance of migration (with a particular focus on the northern city ghettos) and on the broader, often hybrid musical field within which blues developed. the wonderful collection of images, drawn from many different types of source, helps create this sense of a more complicated history. in addition, some musicians who had previously been ignored – t-bone walker, ray charles, buddy guy – now make an appearance. savannah syncopators had a terrific appeal to me. influenced by reading the anthropologist, melville herskovits, i had myself tried to point to the importance of the likely reten- tions of african traits in african american music, including blues. paul now offered a persuasive and innovative theory built on inter-disciplinary research: fieldwork in ghana, historical data and linguistic and musical analysis. i wasn’t qualified then, and am not now, to give an authoritative assessment of the theory – but i trust john baily when he cites in support the judgement of his fellow ethnomusicologist, gerhard kubik, whose expertise in this area is unrivalled (in popular music, / , p. ). over a decade later, in , the sense produced by these two books of a stead- ily broadening vision in paul’s work on blues was confirmed, and extended again, by songsters and saints, a pioneering study, drawing on early th-century recordings, of african american religious music on the one hand, and the repertoires of black ‘songsters’, which often included blues but many other song genres as well, on the other. the overall picture of the career that emerges (and continues after the s) is of a capacity to change, to re-assess, to move on, that offers an exemplary model for scholars. underpinning this trajectory, there is, i believe, a distinct theory of culture. however, it is never really articulated as theory. this points to the biggest divergence obituary https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core of all between paul and myself. like many coming into popular music studies in the s and after, i was convinced of the need to theorise what i was doing, and was indeed captivated by theory (perhaps too much). paul, in contrast, insisted on the primacy of the material; he wanted to rescue it and rub our noses (or rather our ears) in it, and he was sceptical about ‘theory’. i think we each knew that we would never agree on this. if i now try to balance the critical edge in my remarks with (in addition to the sheer bulk of the achievements listed in my opening paragraph) a summary of those dimensions of paul’s work that i personally most value, it’s actually his ‘empiricism’ that comes first. however problematic one might consider this position to be, remin- ders of the irreducibility of the concrete material, of the stuff of what marx liked to call ‘real life’, are always salutary. moreover, in a strange way, moves within cultural the- ory itself – first with post-structuralism, where ‘stuff’ always evades the rule of the signifier, and even more with the heideggerian turn (from lacan to badiou) – result, ironically, in the sense of a doubling back to an encounter with the sheer ‘thisness’ of particular experience. a second point of great value arises, again ironically, from the folk model with which paul worked. whatever its limitations, the focus on vernacular creativity, on what people make for and by themselves, shines ever more brightly as the seemingly unstoppable forces of commodification continue to simultaneously tighten and expand their grip. if in art nothing ever truly dies, we can be confident that the ‘archeology’ of blues for which paul strove will continue to have an active effect. this leads me to a third point. for paul, as for me (and indeed for all popular music scholars), the vernacular is also necessarily the subaltern; and validating the culture of the subaltern necessarily involves, in the case of black music, an anti-racist position. it is impossible to over-emphasise the strength of this element within paul’s scholarly life, and in the age of trump and black lives matter, it could hardly be more significant. at the same time, any white, middle-class scholar engaging with the subaltern, especially the black subaltern, and seeking to enter and interpret that world, is inevitably entering a relationship that unsettles all theoretical assump- tions, and i believe that paul thought about and worried away at this issue at least as much as i did. paul was of a somewhat older generation than most of the early proponents of popular music studies and, as i have tried to suggest, his perspective differed in some ways from approaches that became prevalent. perhaps it’s the obvious enduring value of those deeply humane principles that i have just summarised which helps to explain why, nevertheless, he could commit himself so enthusiastically to the emergent institutions and activities of this new area of work. he was a founding and active member of the international association for the study of popular music, and, coming closer to home, a founding board member of this journal and subsequently a member of the editorial group. his wise and thoughtful editorial contributions were as valued as the pieces he published with us. he will be greatly missed. r i c h a r d m i d d l e t o n obituary https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core tributes to the life, work and legacy of paul oliver came relatively quickly following his passing in august . obituaries in the new york times, the washington post, the telegraph and the guardian are a simple but clear indication of the transatlantic reach and influence of his work. referred to as a ‘pre-eminent authority on the blues’, the ‘scholar who helped spur a blues revival’, and someone who ‘inspired many peo- ple to discover the blues’, there is widespread recognition of his role in shaping the appreciation of the blues as a distinct form of african american music and since the late s. letters in response to the guardian’s obituary corroborate these tributes but also commemorate oliver’s generosity, and influence on younger scholars eager to learn more about the blues during the s and beyond. unlike many that knew and worked alongside oliver during the post-world war ii blues revival years, i find myself writing about him from a very different gen- erational perspective. indeed, many of those paying tribute to him are historians, musicologists, cultural critics and even musicians whose work i have also greatly admired since i became interested in the blues as a teenager in the early s. while i had the fortune of interviewing and getting to know oliver personally between and as i worked on my book blues, how do you do? (michigan, ), he had made his mark on me many years earlier. it is no exagger- ation to attribute my transition from a mere blues aficionado to (eventually) a cul- tural historian to the work of paul oliver. to explain, i must indulge in the old cliché of reminiscing about my first experi- ence of hearing the blues, much like w.c. handy’s fabled tale of hearing ‘the weird- est’ sound he’d ever heard while waiting for a train in tutwiler, mississippi back in , or even oliver’s story of hearing african american gis singing while working in suffolk in . my ‘handy moment’ was of the mass media and television age. i first heard howlin’ wolf’s ‘smokestack lightning’ as the soundtrack to a budweiser advert (which in itself signals another interesting transition in the use of the blues for marketing and consumer capitalism in the late th century), in which a lone man travelled by train across the american desert. like many blues afi- cionados, i fell for this romantic imagery and was captivated by the song’s eerie and compelling sound. similar to many adolescents growing up in the s, i was already fascinated by american popular culture in terms of music and movies, but the blues seemed to open up another more mysterious world. shortly after that, i started down a conventional road of collecting blues records and learning to play the guitar. while at university, i became much more interested in the lives of the musicians i’d been hearing and the places where the music came from, and became william grimes, ‘paul oliver, pre-eminent authority on the blues, dies at ’, the new york times, august , https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /arts/music/paul-oliver-authority-on-the-blues-dies- at- .html (accessed october ); matt schudel, ‘paul oliver, scholar who helped spur a blues revival, dies at ’, the washington post, august , https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obitu- aries/paul-oliver-scholar-who-helped-spur-a-blues-revival-dies-at- / / / (accessed october ); ‘paul oliver, scholar of housing and expert on the blues – obituary’, the telegraph, august , http://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/ / / /paul-oliver-scholar-housing-expert-blues-obitu- ary/ (accessed october ); elain harwood and tony russell, ‘paul oliver obituary’, the guardian, august , https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/ /aug/ /paul-oliver-obituary (accessed october ]; mick gidley, john gleinster and giles oakley, ‘letters: paul oliver obitu- ary’, the guardian, september (accessed october ). obituary https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /arts/music/paul-oliver-authority-on-the-blues-dies-at- .html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /arts/music/paul-oliver-authority-on-the-blues-dies-at- .html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /arts/music/paul-oliver-authority-on-the-blues-dies-at- .html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/paul-oliver-scholar-who-helped-spur-a-blues-revival-dies-at- / / / https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/paul-oliver-scholar-who-helped-spur-a-blues-revival-dies-at- / / / https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/obituaries/paul-oliver-scholar-who-helped-spur-a-blues-revival-dies-at- / / / http://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/ / / /paul-oliver-scholar-housing-expert-blues-obituary/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/ / / /paul-oliver-scholar-housing-expert-blues-obituary/ http://www.telegraph.co.uk/obituaries/ / / /paul-oliver-scholar-housing-expert-blues-obituary/ https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/ /aug/ /paul-oliver-obituary https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/ /aug/ /paul-oliver-obituary https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/ /aug/ /paul-oliver-obituary https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/ /aug/ /paul-oliver-obituary https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core particularly curious about the manner in which this music emerged amid the troubled experience of jim crow segregation. i was essentially echoing the question asked by the music critic robert palmer in his book deep blues ( ): ‘[h]ow much history can be told by pressure on a guitar string?’ i soon found out that oliver had gone a long way to answering this question. oliver’s major books on the subject, blues fell this morning ( ), the story of the blues ( ) and conversation with the blues ( ) covered almost every aspect about the origins, development and meaning of the music, as has been widely acknowledged in recent tributes. however, there much more to oliver’s work. central to his blues scholarship was the relationship between the blues and the african american experience from the legacies of slavery to the rise of segregation in the american south. the ‘composers of the blues’, he argued ‘sang of their imme- diate world: of their work, their personal relationships and private predicaments and in doing so gave expressions to their loves, hopes, repressions, superstitions and fears’. throughout his work oliver was determined to bring this world to life, and where possible, to let the musicians and their songs speak for themselves. the pinnacle of this effort was the photo-documentary style conversation of the blues, based on photographs from his first trip to the usa in and excerpts from inter- views. very much a product of its age in terms of its emphasis on a social history of the forgotten, the imagery of conversation was indicative of the popular aesthetic of the revivalist impulse of the s. however, it also indirectly challenged the wide- spread use (or what many believed to be appropriation) of the music by young white, and in many cases british, musicians. in other words, you may be singing about roos- ters, levees and the delta, but you know not the world they are from. oliver’s work helped to infuse a healthy dose of historical realism into the powerful romantic imagery of the blues revival. importantly, one could confidently argue that the imagery oliver captured in this book still holds a spectral presence in popular under- standings of the blues as the music of a fading generation from the rural expanses of the american south. one need only think of the popular appeal of the somewhat controversial self-styled bluesman seasick steve. conversation with the blues was significant also because it demonstrated oliver’s versatility as a scholar (and this is without even mentioning his academic career in architecture). on his first trip to the usa, he became an astute oral historian capti- vated by the folkloric impulse of capturing as much direct information as possible from a people and culture that were perceived to be on the wane. he clearly had an ability to form meaningful relationships with blues singers and musicians, some- thing which he had developed during the s when singers like big bill broonzy, lonnie johnson and brother john sellers first arrived in britain. this ability was inter- twined with his close textual analysis of song lyrics as living texts, and was comple- mented by a sensitive appreciation of the historical context, what he often referred to the blues’ ‘cultural milieu’. while oliver’s work is not exempt from criticism, particu- larly in terms of the folkloric paradigm that shaped a considerable proportion of music scholarship in the first half of the th century, his approach was extremely progressive in its interdisciplinarity. it is no surprise that he was widely respected by historians, ethnomusicologists and sociologists, not to mention musicians. paul oliver, blues fell this morning: rare recordings of southern blues singers. ( ). these comments appeared on the liner notes to the record which accompanied oliver’s book. obituary https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core aside from being the foremost contributor to knowledge about the blues, oliver was inspirational in terms of providing a scholarly role model. in the years in which i got to him, i also learned that this was not at the expense of modesty or generosity. i greatly admired his unrelenting patience as he was hounded by telephone calls from those eager to get a moment of his time, and somehow finding the tolerance for my questions. he was therefore not only a unique scholar, but a beautiful human being. c h r i s t i a n o ’ c o n n e l l obituary https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core 	obituary: paul oliver ( – ) time to look in the mirror june • vol issue s c i e n c e sciencemag.org editorial t his is a grave time in american history. both the public health and economic problems of corona- virus disease (covid- ) were foreseeable. but even more predictable is the racial tension gripping the united states in the wake of the brutal killing of george floyd. it is easy to think that the problem is isolated to individual racists in the community and in the government, and that the scientific enterprise is immune to racism. scientific in- quiry produces knowledge, and that ultimately leads to justice, right? not so fast. the u.s. scientific enterprise is predomi- nantly white, as are the u.s. institutions that science’s authors are affiliated with. the evidence of systemic racism in science permeates this nation. why are so few science authors from historically black colleges and universities? why are the scien- tific areas studied more frequently by people of color continuously un- derfunded by the government? why do students who are people of color have to remind society that they are almost never taught by someone who looks like them? why has the united states failed to update its ways of teaching science when data show that people of color learn bet- ter with more inclusive methods? if there had been more diversity in science, would we have the pain- ful legacy of the tuskegee syphilis study and the shameful nonrecogni- tion of henrietta lacks’s contribu- tion to science? dr. lisa white, a professor at the university of california, berkeley, and chair of the american geo- physical union’s diversity and inclusion advisory committee, pointed out recently that environmental racism wouldn’t be such a problem if there were a more diverse science professoriate. for example, only % of tenured and tenure track faculty in the top geoscience departments in the united states are peo- ple of color. not surprisingly, dr. martin luther king jr. de- scribed this problem in in his “letter from a bir- mingham jail”: “first, i must confess that over the past few years i have been gravely disappointed with the white moder- ate. i have almost reached the regrettable conclusion that the negro’s great stumbling block in his stride to- ward freedom is not the white citizen’s counciler or the ku klux klanner, but the white moderate, who is more devoted to ‘order’ than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice; who constantly says: ‘i agree with you in the goal you seek, but i cannot agree with your methods of direct action’; who paternalistically believes he can set the timetable for another man’s freedom; who lives by a mythical concept of time and who constantly advises the negro to wait for a ‘more convenient season.’” the reckoning dr. king calls for has not happened in the intervening years. the failure of the white mod- erates to heed the call of the birmingham jail is just as integral to today’s systemic racism as the racist actions of some law enforcement. it’s not just abusive police that need to be reminded that black lives matter. it is time for the scientific estab- lishment to confront this reality and to admit its role in perpetuating it. the first step is for science and scientists to say out loud that they have benefited from, and failed to acknowledge, white supremacy. and then science and scientists finally need to listen to, and make space for, people of color to lead laboratories that publish great science and pro- duce influential scientists, run insti- tutions and their scientific units, and propel science and other journals to promote structurally underfunded scientists and areas of science. someone i turn to for wisdom and leadership on this issue is dr. valerie sheares ashby, the dean of the trinity college of arts and sciences at duke university. as an african- american woman, she claims that she is leading to- day only because a few people decided to let her into this exclusive club—something she says hardly ever happens. “how much creativity are we leaving on the table,” she asks, “because science repeatedly fails to come to terms with our narrowly defined processes and our limited ways of determining success?” as in the past, the scientific community is express- ing anguish, outrage, and renewed commitment to promote equity and inclusion. but when the protests wind down and disappear from the headlines, science will be at a familiar fork in the road. let’s have the courage to take the right path this time. –h. holden thorp time to look in the mirror h. holden thorp editor-in-chief, science journals. hthorp@aaas.org; @hholdenthorp published online june ; . /science.abd p h o t o : c a m e r o n d a v id s o n “…scientists finally need to listen to, and make space for, people of color to lead…” published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ time to look in the mirror h. holden thorp originally published online june , doi: . /science.abd ( ), . science article tools http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / content related http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions terms of serviceuse of this article is subject to the is a registered trademark of aaas.sciencescience, new york avenue nw, washington, dc . the title (print issn - ; online issn - ) is published by the american association for the advancement ofscience science. no claim to original u.s. government works copyright © the authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee american association for the advancement of o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/about/terms-service http://science.sciencemag.org/ ucla ucla previously published works title student activism, diversity, and the struggle for a just society permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ q p t journal journal of diversity in higher education, ( ) issn - author rhoads, robert a publication date - - doi . /dhe peer reviewed escholarship.org powered by the california digital library university of california https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ q p t https://escholarship.org http://www.cdlib.org/ introduction student activism, diversity, and the struggle for a just society robert a. rhoads university of california, los angeles this introductory article provides a historical overview of various student move- ments and forms of student activism from the beginning of the civil rights movement to the present. accordingly, the historical trajectory of student activism is framed in terms of broad periods: the sixties, the postsixties, and the contem- porary context. the author pays particular attention to student organizing to address racial inequality as well as other forms of diversity. the article serves as an introduction to this special issue and includes a brief summary of the remainder of the issue’s content. keywords: student activism, student movements, student organizing, social justice, campus-based inequality during the early s, as a doctoral student in sociology and higher education, i began to systematically explore forms of activism and direct action on the part of u.s. college stu- dents. my dissertation work focused on gay and bisexual males, including most notably their coming out experiences and the subsequent en- gagement by a subpopulation of my sample in queer politics and related activism. as i noted in coming out in college: the struggle for a queer identity (rhoads, ), the book ver- sion of my dissertation, identifying as “queer” was in part a recognition of “a political effort designed to create greater awareness and achieve increased rights and visibility for all queer people” (p. ). the queer students in my study engaged in a variety of direct action strategies, most notably organizing coming out rallies, queer pride events, protest demonstra- tions, and facilitating “straight talks” (con- sciousness raising presentations) throughout the campus, including in classrooms and residence halls. the students also participated in the march on washington for lesbian, gay, and bisexual rights. i too joined the march and re- corded many of the students’ experiences and reflections, some of which are included in com- ing out in college. studying gay and bisexual males was just the beginning of a long research journey focused on the role college students play in addressing a range of diversity issues. in freedom’s web: student activism in an age of cultural diversity (rhoads, ), i centered the struggles of stu- dents to address a variety of multicultural con- cerns that emerged on u.s. campuses during the s. cases of student activism included in freedom’s web represented an array of issues related to race, gender, and sexual orientation, primarily in terms of campus opportunity struc- tures that may promote or limit diversity. around this time, i also conducted research on student outreach in the form of engagement in community service projects, leading to the book, community service and higher learn- ing: explorations of the caring self (rhoads, ). more recently, my work in the area of student activism turned to student-initiated re- tention and recruitment projects in which i ex- amined race- and ethnic-based student organi- zations and their contributions to strengthening college access and success (maldonado, editor’s note. this is an introduction to the special issue “student activism.” please see the table of contents here: http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/dhe/ / /.—rlw correspondence concerning this article should be ad- dressed to robert a. rhoads, graduate school of education and information studies, university of california, los an- geles, moore hall, box # , los angeles, ca - . e-mail: rhoads@ucla.edu t hi s do cu m en t is co py ri gh te d by th e a m er ic an p sy ch ol og ic al a ss oc ia ti on or on e of it s al li ed pu bl is he rs . t hi s ar ti cl e is in te nd ed so le ly fo r th e pe rs on al us e of th e in di vi du al us er an d is no t to be di ss em in at ed br oa dl y. journal of diversity in higher education © national association of diversity officers in higher education , vol. , no. , – - / /$ . http://dx.doi.org/ . /dhe http://psycnet.apa.org/journals/dhe/ / / mailto:rhoads@ucla.edu http://dx.doi.org/ . /dhe rhoads, & buenavista, ). with the help of several doctoral students (often with them tak- ing the lead), i continue to work on studies of race- and ethnic-based organizing, as well as undocumented student and ally activism, and union-related organizing. my work in the area of student activism and diversity was what led the editors of the journal of diversity in higher education (jdhe) to ask me to serve as guest editor for this special issue. the goal of this issue is to examine current and recent trends in student activism as it pertains to advancing diversity. jdhe’s initial call for pa- pers stressed the importance of recent activism related to issues such as #blacklivesmatter, sexual violence on campuses and title ix, im- migration reform and the dreamers movement, and economic concerns such as those high- lighted by the occupy wall street movement, among other issues. tragic killings of black males such as eric garner, michael brown, freddie gray, and tamir rice at the hands of police have been particularly compelling, as colleges and universities throughout the country have witnessed a rise in student organizing to address racism both in terms of local campuses and the broader society. but many of the con- temporary challenges student organizers face have important historical antecedents, some of which i explore in this article. my historical analysis is in keeping with assumptions i hold as a critical theorist, including the contention that challenging oppression and marginality in- volves coming to terms with history and culture. with the preceding in mind, my intent in this introductory article is to provide a historical overview of student activism in the united states as a way of framing this special issue. i pay particular attention to race and racial issues, but consider other aspects of diversity as well. the period of interest for me begins around the time of the civil rights movement (crm) and then proceeds to the present. i place significant emphasis on key developments of the s, given their long-lasting impact on political and cultural life in the united states. following the historical overview, i summarize the key con- tributions of the other seven articles selected for this special issue. the commitment of the editorial staff of jdhe and myself as guest editor reflects a belief that student activism deserves greater research atten- tion than it typically receives, especially when one considers the key role students have played and continue to play in forging diversity-related reforms. furthermore, i have argued in previous work that scholars of higher education have not given adequate attention to the role of social movements—including student movements—in fostering the conditions for higher education reform (rhoads, ; rhoads & liu, ; rhoads, saenz, & carducci, ). conse- quently, this special issue begins to address some of these concerns. we see the papers included herein contributing in significant ways to expanding knowledge of the com- plexities and importance of diversity-related student activism and movements. student activism in “the sixties” on february , four black students at north carolina a&t—david richmond, ezell blair, jr., joseph mcneil, and franklin mccain— occupied four lunch counter seats at woolworths in downtown greensboro. the seats were in the “whites only” section of the department store. woolworths refused to serve them but the students did not relinquish their seats. when the department store closed the students left, only to return the next day to prolong their protest of segregated services. newspapers throughout the united states reported the events in greensboro and in subsequent days similar protests broke out throughout the south. the four north carolina a&t students thus helped to launch what many believe to be the most important period of student activism, known to many as simply “the sixties.” as college students assumed center stage in protesting segregated facilities, the sit-in was restrategized in the form of stand-ins in some locales, such as when students in the nashville student movement (nsm) worked to integrate the city’s movie theaters. john lewis, then stu- dent leader of the nsm and today u.s. repre- sentative for georgia’s th congressional dis- trict, described the strategy in his memoir walking with the wind (lewis, ): we would approach the ticket window of each theater, form a long line, and one by one ask for a seat inside. when refused, we would either return to the end of the line or move to a line at the next theater. not only were we visibly demonstrating against the segregationist policies of these theaters, we were tying up their ticket lines as well. (p. ) rhoads t hi s do cu m en t is co py ri gh te d by th e a m er ic an p sy ch ol og ic al a ss oc ia ti on or on e of it s al li ed pu bl is he rs . t hi s ar ti cl e is in te nd ed so le ly fo r th e pe rs on al us e of th e in di vi du al us er an d is no t to be di ss em in at ed br oa dl y. while a student at american baptist theologi- cal seminary, lewis went on to participate in the freedom rides as groups of civil rights activists rode interstate buses throughout the south to integrate interstate bus terminals. the freedom rides followed the supreme court’s, boynton v. virginia decision in which segregated bus terminals were ruled to be in violation of the interstate commerce act. black students in particular played a pivotal role in shaping campus activism of the s (flowers, ; morris, ). for example, anne moody, a student at tougaloo college, helped to register voters and integrate segre- gated facilities while volunteering with main- stream civil rights organizations such as the congress of racial equality (core) and the national association for the advancement of colored people (naacp). her autobiography, coming of age in mississippi (moody, ) is considered a classic in terms of its first-hand account of segregated life in the south and the courage required to challenge it. in one passage she described her feelings after participating in a lunch-counter sit-in in jackson, mississippi: after the sit-in, all i could think of was how sick mississippi whites were. they believed so much in the segregated southern way of life, they would kill to preserve it. i sat there in the naacp office and thought of how many times they had killed when this way of life was threatened. i knew that the killing had just begun. (p. ) although moody’s activism was primarily tied to organizations promoting gandhian civil disobedience, other black students adopted more confrontational approaches while seeking to advance “black power.” stokely carmichael, a freedom rider and later chairman of the stu- dent nonviolent coordinating committee (sncc), played a major role in advancing black power as an idea and strategy, building on the thinking of writer and activist richard wright. in a speech delivered at uc berkeley in november , carmichael described black power as a call to group empowerment, as op- posed to what he saw as the kind of individu- alized struggle encouraged by the larger white- dominated society. he stressed that blacks “are oppressed as a group because we are black . . . and in order to get out of that oppression, one must feel the group power that one has” (car- michael, , p. ). he saw black power in part as a form of self-representation, cathartic in some sense: “we have to wage a psychological battle on the right for black people to define their own terms, define themselves as they see fit and organize themselves as they see fit” (p. ). the epitome of black power was captured by the black panther party (bpp), originally orga- nized in by huey newton and bobby seale, two students at merritt college in oak- land (the college was later renamed oakland city college). the bpp produced a -point plan aimed at improving the living standards of blacks, including demands that addressed full employment, decent housing, education that ex- poses the true nature and history of american society, exemptions from military service for black men, and an end to police brutality and murder of black people. the panthers, of course, captured the attention of the u.s. media by deploying guns while monitoring police with the goal of deterring police brutality against blacks. the story of how the panthers raised money to buy guns in oakland is shared by bobby seale in the documentary film berkeley in the sixties: he describes purchasing hundreds of mao tse-tung’s (also mao zedong) the lit- tle red book for cents a piece with fellow panthers huey newton and bobby hutton and then selling them for a dollar at sather gate on the uc berkeley campus. but the bpp did much more than simply monitor police officers; they also developed and implemented food and clothing banks (provided for free), child devel- opment centers, free breakfast programs (for children), employment services, community health classes, and a variety of community- oriented counseling programs (brown, ; hilliard & cole, ). the bpp also played a critical role in shaping university curricula, getting involved in promot- ing the black student union (bsu) movement and the development of black studies programs (biondi, ; joseph, ; rojas, ). this was the case at san francisco state college (sfsc), now san francisco state university, in the late s, when the bpp and sncc sup- ported the efforts of student activists such as sfsc’s bsu leader jimmy garrett. included among a host of direct action tactics promoted by garrett and other student activists were cam- pus demonstrations, consciousness-raising pro- grams and lectures (aimed at advancing black nationalism), the development and offering of student activism and diversity t hi s do cu m en t is co py ri gh te d by th e a m er ic an p sy ch ol og ic al a ss oc ia ti on or on e of it s al li ed pu bl is he rs . t hi s ar ti cl e is in te nd ed so le ly fo r th e pe rs on al us e of th e in di vi du al us er an d is no t to be di ss em in at ed br oa dl y. student-led black-themed courses, and the dis- ruption of classes in the form of a student strike (biondi, ; rojas, ). taking full advan- tage of opportunities offered through sfsc’s experimental college, student activists created the first black studies curriculum. the fact that the earliest black studies programs were ad- vanced primarily by student activists offers ev- idence of the power students hold when com- mitted and well organized. the chicano/a student movement (csm) also gained strength in the late s, with los angeles arguably serving as a touchstone for the broader movement. csm organizing strate- gies often encompassed collaborations among students at both the university and high school levels. this was the case in when college students from university-based student organi- zations such as the united mexican american students (umas) and the mexican american student association (masa), along with sup- port of the community-based brown berets, helped to organize a walkout by more than , students at several east la high schools (known to many as the “east la blowouts”). the students’ concerns focused on deplorable educational conditions, including overcrowded classrooms, a lack of cultural understanding among teachers, dilapidated buildings, and rac- ism on the part of teachers and administrators aimed at undermining educational and career aspirations. seeking to refashion narratives about chi- cano/a student activism, in light of previous scholars neglecting the work of chicanas, dolores delgado bernal ( ) analyzed the east la blowouts by focusing on the critical role women played in organizing and advanc- ing the overall movement. using a methodol- ogy combining oral history and “critical fem- inisms . . . strongly influenced by women of color” (p. ), delgado bernal highlighted the contributions of eight key female stu- dents. as part of reconceptualizing grassroots leadership, she delineated five contributions involving developing consciousness, holding an office, networking, organizing, and acting as a spokesperson (p. ). delgado bernal not only sought to refashion historical narra- tives by incorporating women’s counter sto- ries, but essentially she worked to challenge androcentric notions of leadership in the con- text of activism. the fact that women might be excluded from historical analyses of the s student movements is hardly surprising, especially when reading accounts of women’s marginal- ity within the crm and peace movement (in opposition to u.s. involvement in the viet- nam war). for example, in personal politics, sara evans ( ) pointed to shortcomings within both the crm and the new left that limited the roles of women, but which ulti- mately helped give rise to a stronger wom- en’s liberation movement. in james miller’s ( ) treatment of students for a democratic society (sds), he documented how female activists in sds sought refuge in women’s restrooms at various conferences and meet- ings as a means to escape male chauvinism. doug mcadam’s ( ) freedom summer, which focused on a major civil rights initia- tive led by activist and organizer robert mo- ses, revealed similar forms of bias against women evident in the day-to-day interactions and endeavors of student activists (see also mcadam, ). and more broadly speaking, michelle wallace’s ( ) black macho and the myth of the superwoman, originally pub- lished in , called out black power poli- tics for the silencing of black women’s sub- jectivity, which she argued was the result of black assimilation into u.s. society and a loss of cultural continuity. the experience of marginality within movements supposedly driven by egalitarian values contributed to a growing awareness among women activists that they too needed their own struggle, in part adding verve to an increasingly influential women’s liberation movement. consequently, as various race- and ethnic-based student organizations in the late s and throughout the s sought to develop academic programs to meet their needs, female students and faculty also orga- nized to push colleges and universities to adopt women’s studies programs as well as address a wide array of issues affecting wom- en’s lives (boxer, ). given the important role of campus organizing around women’s issues, it is not surprising that many of the bastions of women’s liberation were college towns sprinkled across new england and the midwest (evans, ). these movements though tended to reflect a limited positionality rooted in white middle-class values, which rhoads t hi s do cu m en t is co py ri gh te d by th e a m er ic an p sy ch ol og ic al a ss oc ia ti on or on e of it s al li ed pu bl is he rs . t hi s ar ti cl e is in te nd ed so le ly fo r th e pe rs on al us e of th e in di vi du al us er an d is no t to be di ss em in at ed br oa dl y. eventually became the target of criticism by feminist scholars of color such as patricia hill collins, kimberlé crenshaw, bell hooks, and audre lorde, among others. their work called attention to the importance of intersec- tionality, both in terms of scholarship and activism; issues of intersectionality continue to influence the thinking and organizing of contemporary student activists. the final year of the decade of the s was a pivotal one for race- and ethnic-based student organizing. this was the year mexi- can american students and activists met in santa barbara and produced el plan de santa barbara, essentially a manifesto delineating strategies and responsibilities for chicano/a student activists and a defining document for student organizations such as the movimiento estudiantil chicano de aztlán, or mecha, as it is more commonly known. the year also was a pivotal one for the nation’s amer- ican indian population as about activists, including many california college students, occupied the abandoned alcatraz island, claiming it in the name of an existing treaty promising all abandoned federal land be re- turned to american indians. although the al- catraz island occupation was not carried out officially by the american indian movement, aim nonetheless benefited from the success- ful -month occupation in terms of generat- ing increased interest and commitment to the ongoing struggle of american indians. the year also marked the culmination of the third world liberation front (twlf) strike at sfsc leading to the founding one of the first black studies programs. finally, for many marks the rise of a truly forceful gay liberation movement with its birth often linked to the stonewall rebellion in green- wich village in june. although it was not a student-led revolt, it became a key event in establishing a more assertive and prideful ap- proach among student activists committed to gay liberation. “the sixties”—as a form of zeitgeist—is often seen as extending into the early to mid- s, perhaps up until the withdrawal of the last u.s. troops from saigon in april, (gitlin, ). although civil rights initia- tives were key in defining this era of activism, antiwar efforts targeting u.s. involvement in vietnam were also critical in shaping this period of youth-led upheaval. campus-based antiwar activism grew from many of the larg- est university campuses such as the univer- sity of wisconsin and the university of cal- ifornia berkeley. just as black power influenced a more confrontational approach to civil rights organizing, antiwar efforts led by college students too adopted more aggressive tactics, adopting slogans such as “bring the war home” and “from protest to resis- tance.” the shift in strategy to actually trying to block or prevent the u.s. government from waging war in vietnam largely emerged out of frustration with civil disobedience tactics and perception that u.s. military involvement in vietnam was in fact increasing as the de- cade unfolded. early antiwar strategies cap- tured by the use of petitions, rallies, sit-ins, and teach-ins, such as those organized by the uc berkeley vietnam day committee (vdc) in may, (degroot, ), and then later evidenced by draft-card-burning demonstra- tions (following reenactment of the selective service act in ), did not seem to have the impact student organizers sought. frustration thus contributed to the rise of the weather- men (also known as the “weatherman” and “weather underground”), a group within sds that gained control of the organization and proceeded to wage war against the u.s. government mainly by bombing federal build- ings (heineman, ). there continues to be disagreement about the degree to which student-led antiwar activ- ism— both in terms of peaceful protest and more confrontational tactics—actually im- pacted u.s. policy in vietnam, but there is no disputing the fact that j. edgar hoover, for- mer fbi director, saw the antiwar movement, as well as the civil rights movement, as clear threats to domestic security, as he defined it. the perceived threat of protest movements led hoover to launch cointelpro—the fbi’s counter intelligence program employ- ing covert and illegal tactics to undermine various organizations contributing to antiwar and civil rights movements (u.s. senate, ). post-sixties student activism as civil rights struggle faced growing op- position in the form of rising conservatism student activism and diversity t hi s do cu m en t is co py ri gh te d by th e a m er ic an p sy ch ol og ic al a ss oc ia ti on or on e of it s al li ed pu bl is he rs . t hi s ar ti cl e is in te nd ed so le ly fo r th e pe rs on al us e of th e in di vi du al us er an d is no t to be di ss em in at ed br oa dl y. against progressive social change and legisla- tion (apple, ; rhoads, saenz, & car- ducci, ), the movement to expand wom- en’s rights continued throughout the s and into the s and shared the stage to some extent with a growing gay liberation movement. some of the first gay organiza- tions to show up on university campuses, and following in the footsteps of the stonewall rebellion, adopted the term “homophile” such as at pennsylvania state university, where the key organization in the early s was “homophiles of penn state” or “hops.” the organization served to protect and ad- vance rights and equal opportunities for les- bian, gay, and bisexual (lgb) students, while also seeking to raise campus awareness. ac- tivists in hops had much to confront in the early s, given the nature of societal atti- tudes toward homosexuality, including the fact that the american psychiatric associa- tion’s diagnostic and statistical manual of mental disorders (dsm–ii) classified homo- sexuality as a mental illness until . hops actually offers a good example of the chal- lenges confronting lgb students of the s, as was highlighted in coming out in college. although my research focused on the emergence of a more activist-oriented queer movement among gay and bisexual stu- dents during the early s, in reviewing the history of penn state relative to its treatment of lgb students i came upon a particularly egregious case offering insight into the kinds of challenges student activists such as those in hops faced in the s. joseph acanfora was a penn state under- graduate education major conducting his stu- dent teaching assignment (a necessity for graduating with a teaching certificate at penn state) in when the university pulled him from his site after finding out he was a mem- ber of hops. after a board of six deans constituting penn state’s teacher certifica- tion council split their vote on whether to certify acanfora, the case went before penn- sylvania secretary of education, john c. pit- tenger, who eventually decided in acanfora’s favor. some years later, queer students in penn state’s lesbian, gay, and bisexual stu- dent alliance (lgbsa) continued to battle a hostile campus climate as they pushed a highly resistance board of trustees and pres- ident joab thomas to add a sexual orientation clause to the university’s statement of nondis- crimination. ultimately, they were successful, but not until years of consciousness raising activities in the form of gay pride rallies, marches, kiss-ins, and straight talks. a threat to take over the president’s office also helped, at least according to several queer activists in lgbsa (rhoads, ). the divestment movement of the s connected u.s. student activism to a more international cause, as students around the country engaged in direct action activities aimed at forcing universities to end their in- vestments in companies doing business in south africa. a mainstay of student strategies was the construction of shanty towns on cam- puses as a means of raising awareness about the impoverished lives of blacks in south africa under the brutal system of apartheid. student organizing at columbia university was one such example when in april, student activists participating in the coalition for a free south africa (cfsa), founded at columbia in , conducted a blockade of hamilton hall that lasted three weeks. five months following the end of cfsa’s block- ade, columbia’s trustees divested (hirsch, ). in freedom’s web ( ), i sought to cap- ture the tenor of student activism during the early to mid- s, which i argued built on the energy generated by the divestment move- ment while extending the democratic ideals associated with the earlier civil rights move- ment (crm). a difference though with stu- dent organizing of the s— by comparison to the s—was a shift from a focus on rights to paying greater attention to opportu- nity, especially in terms of improving higher education access and campus climates for un- derrepresented and marginalized populations. ideals linked to multiculturalism and cultural diversity were the defining concerns, high- lighted by several cases in freedom’s web. a central goal of freedom’s web ( ) was to counter arguments advanced by schol- ars of both conservative and liberal ilk— including the likes of nathan glazer ( ) and arthur schlesinger, jr. ( )—that u.s. cam- puses were “balkanized” by forms of “ethnic tribalism” representing a betrayal of the amer- ican dream of a pluralist democracy (essen- rhoads t hi s do cu m en t is co py ri gh te d by th e a m er ic an p sy ch ol og ic al a ss oc ia ti on or on e of it s al li ed pu bl is he rs . t hi s ar ti cl e is in te nd ed so le ly fo r th e pe rs on al us e of th e in di vi du al us er an d is no t to be di ss em in at ed br oa dl y. tially, the “melting pot” idea). accordingly, i pointed to several significant campus move- ments including protests at rutgers university in which a multiracial coalition of students (united student coalition or usc), led by af- rican american students, challenged racist com- ments made by then rutgers president francis lawrence. another case involved ucla stu- dents organizing across racial lines (conscious students of color or csc) to push for the ele- vation of chicano studies from interdepartmen- tal program to a lone-standing academic depart- ment. michigan state university’s native american students, assisted in significant ways by members of msu’s mecha, engaged in an extended mid- s battle with then republi- can governor john engler over his intent to end the michigan indian tuition waiver program (mitwp). other cases of student activism, in- cluding the mills college strike and the free burma coalition (fbc), an international movement centered at the university of wis- consin, revealed the willingness of students to work across racial and ethnic lines—and even national lines in the case of the fbc—in the name of equity and advancing democracy. in light of charges of rejecting the ameri- can pluralist dream, it is no wonder that to- day’s student activists, often led by students of color working in opposition to the idea of a color-blind society, have come to see the “melting pot” suggestion as a form of micro- aggression resistant to recognizing the racial diversity of u.s. society (schmidt, ). in- deed, racial issues, including the struggle for racial equality and opposition to difficult-to- extinguish racism, have come to play a central role in contemporary student activism. the contemporary context in the early years of the st century, the university of michigan (um) and two court cases relating to the consideration of race in university admissions—grutter v. bollinger and gratz v. bollinger—revealed the deep commitment of african american student ac- tivists to addressing racial equality. coalesc- ing around bamn (coalition to defend af- firmative action, integration and immigration rights and fight for equality by any means necessary), student organizers engaged in a variety of protests in support of affirmative action, including organizing a , person proaffirmative action march on washington, dc in april, (organized in conjunction with the original california-based bamn). the roots of african american student activ- ism at um though extended back to the late s in the form of the black action move- ment or bam, which waged a long struggle to diversify the university racially as well as challenge racism on campus. bam demands over a period of three decades not only fo- cused on the makeup and experiences of the student body, but also raised issues about faculty of color underrepresentation. in part, it was the response of the university to bam’s demands and a belief in the necessity of the university to diversify through affirma- tive action that ultimately led to challenges brought by white applicants in the grutter and gratz cases. the verdict, of course, was that the university could focus on diversifying the student body, but only in a manner con- sistent with more holistic application reviews conducted by the um law school (grutter). the direct action of bamn is consistent with an argument offered by rhoads, saenz, and carducci ( ), who contended that so- cial movements better explain the success or failure of reforms such as affirmative action, and that claims of constitutionality often serve to mask the ideology and politics un- dergirding support or opposition to particular reforms. given such a context, they argued that the activism of bamn among other pro- gressive groups is critical to advancing equi- ty-oriented reform. in building their argu- ment, they posited that progressive reforms associated with the earlier crm, enacted leg- islatively and policy-wise in the form of the great society, represented the effectiveness of social movement politics. affirmative ac- tion, for example, emerged in the context of an increasingly influential crm, combined with growing urban rebellion by black amer- icans dissatisfied with the opportunity struc- ture and racism of u.s. society. but no sooner than progressive politics asserted itself, con- servatism offered an aggressive counter re- sponse to affirmative action and other social reforms characteristic of a progressive era. this shift, which apple ( ) described as the “conservative restoration,” was clearly student activism and diversity t hi s do cu m en t is co py ri gh te d by th e a m er ic an p sy ch ol og ic al a ss oc ia ti on or on e of it s al li ed pu bl is he rs . t hi s ar ti cl e is in te nd ed so le ly fo r th e pe rs on al us e of th e in di vi du al us er an d is no t to be di ss em in at ed br oa dl y. tied to ideologically driven political organiz- ing. as rhoads et al. ( ) noted: the s . . . signaled a change in the prevailing political and judicial winds. in time, years of judicial appoint- ments under presidents reagan and george bush effec- tively reshaped the ideological landscape of the federal bench and provided the impetus for opponents to renew their attacks on affirmative action. (p. ) the authors concluded that support from orga- nizations such as bamn “may prove crucial in preserving and strengthening affirmative action in the coming years” (p. ). more recently, bamn has played a key role in challenging declines in the quality and opportunity structure of public education, while also protesting police violence in mi- nority communities, especially against males of color. bamn at uc berkeley, for exam- ple, organized a campus rally in march, , making a number of demands, including the following: adoption of a uc berkeley/ oakland % plan, make uc berkeley a sanctuary for undocumented students and workers by denying immigration and cus- toms enforcement (ice) access to the univer- sity, stop racist attacks against youth of color, and remove janet napolitano as president of the uc. another demand was to “jail the killer cops,” with students stressing that “a badge is not a license to kill.” occupy wall street (ows) was an econom- ically driven struggle born in and involv- ing protests on wall street over the growing power of corporations and the wealthiest one percent to control much of life for the remaining %, including economic and social policies. the original movement quickly produced hun- dreds of offshoots, with student-led encamp- ments forming at many of the nation’s colleges and universities. one of the most noteworthy cases were the protests of students at the uni- versity of california davis and the horrific de- cision by campus police to pepper spray nonvi- olent student protesters engaged in a sit-in (bell, ). although student activists generally stood in solidarity with the fundamental con- cerns of the ows movement, including support for labor and poor communities, they further translated the movement’s vision “by organiz- ing on campuses to fight back against tuition hikes and the general privatization of colleges and universities” (mccarthy, , p. ). as was the case with the later #blacklivesmatter movement, ows was greatly strengthened by social media, especially twitter, with such in- fluence described as “twitter revolutions” (tremayne, , p. ). #blacklivesmatter, a movement founded by patrisse cullors-brignac, alicia garza, and opal tometi, also has sought to address police violence. initially, it started simply as a hashtag appearing subsequent to the trial and acquittal of george zimmerman in the shooting death of -year-old trayvon martin under florida’s controversial “stand your ground” law. other deaths, specifically at the hands of police offi- cers (zimmerman was a neighborhood watch coordinator in a gated community), including the ferguson, missouri shooting of michael brown, the statin island chokehold death of eric garner, and the cleveland police shooting of -year-old tamir rice, among others, have further fueled the activism of the #blacklives- matter movement. writing for the huffington post, tometi, garza, and cullors-brignac ( ) explained their rationale: when we founded #blacklivesmatter in , we wanted to create a political space within and among our communities for activism that could stand firmly on the shoulders of movements that have come before us, such as the civil rights movement, while innovating on its strategies, practices and approaches to finally centralize the leadership of those existing at the mar- gins of our economy and our society. the article went on to share that all three founders are black women with two identify- ing as queer and a third emphasizing her nigerian american identity. the three women stress the intersectionality of marginalized identities as part of their strategic vision, not- ing that, black trans people, black queer people, black immi- grants, black incarcerated people and formerly incar- cerated people, black millennials, black women, low income black people, and black people with disabili- on the day this article was completed and submitted for the final production stage for publication the u.s. supreme court ruled - in favor of the use of race-conscious ad- missions in fisher v. university of texas at austin. the decision came some four months after the passing of su- preme court justice antonin scalia, a staunch opponent of affirmative action. points here derive from bamn’s web site: http://www .bamn.com/social-justice/uc-berkeley-march-public-education- for-all-not-segregation-privatization-and-police-repression rhoads t hi s do cu m en t is co py ri gh te d by th e a m er ic an p sy ch ol og ic al a ss oc ia ti on or on e of it s al li ed pu bl is he rs . t hi s ar ti cl e is in te nd ed so le ly fo r th e pe rs on al us e of th e in di vi du al us er an d is no t to be di ss em in at ed br oa dl y. http://www.bamn.com/social-justice/uc-berkeley-march-public-education-for-all-not-segregation-privatization-and-police-repression http://www.bamn.com/social-justice/uc-berkeley-march-public-education-for-all-not-segregation-privatization-and-police-repression http://www.bamn.com/social-justice/uc-berkeley-march-public-education-for-all-not-segregation-privatization-and-police-repression ties are at the front, exercising a new leadership that is bold, innovative, and radical. the black lives matter website describes this as a “tactic to (re)build the black liberation movement.” the #blacklivesmatter move- ment also serves to highlight the ways in which social media have transformed direct action or- ganizing. although not specifically a campus move- ment, #blacklivesmatter certainly has found much support at colleges and universities throughout the country. for example, faculty at dartmouth college constructed a new course focused on racial inequality and violence in america titled “ weeks, professors: #blacklivesmatter.” a professor commented on the impetus for the course: “it reflects faculty support for student activism over the past sev- eral years around issues of inclusion, social justice, and campus climate” (dickerson, ). a student-led example of support for #black- livesmatter took place in april, during cal day, when students in uc berkeley’s black student union (bsu) blocked entrance to the campus at sather gate, while holding the ban- ner “#blacklivesmatter,” and temporarily in- conveniencing visitors. “this inconvenience is nothing compared to the inconvenience that black students feel on this campus,” explained myles santifer, chair of the bsu (wen, ). these sorts of campus protests have become quite common, including at harvard university, where student activists hoped to avoid “the slow fizzle that ended the occupy wall street move- ment in ” by implementing a series of protests including a die-in with the goal of bringing “new momentum to the ‘black lives matter’ movement” (bohlen, ). another key struggle taken up by contempo- rary student activists concerns the plight of un- documented students. the issues here have been examined by a number of scholars who have identified several major challenges facing un- documented college students, including limited financial aid, inadequate institutional resources, inability to seek employment to support their education, and psychological distress tied to their undocumented status (albrecht, ; ol- ivérez, ; perez, ; perez & cortes, ). although numerous asian american and chicano/a student organizations have actively supported improved conditions for undocu- mented students, including the passage of leg- islation enabling them to benefit from federal and state financial aid programs, perhaps the greatest progress has come through undocu- mented students pursuing their own forms of activism. often described as “dreamers,” be- cause of their support for the development, relief, and education for alien minors (dream) act, students have risked deporta- tion to raise awareness of a host of immigration- related issues (chen & rhoads, ). early on, dreamers focused primarily on pas- sage of the dream act, but as the movement evolved it took on a broader more long-term vision: the civil disobedience reflects how the undocumented youth movement has transitioned and transformed— from a movement that was initially focused on building support for the dream act to one that has increas- ingly used direct action to bring attention to broader issues of immigrant, civil, and human rights as a strat- egy for social and policy change. (zimmerman, , p. ) the activism of dreamers, and the risks they take, has inspired others to become more en- gaged as well. for example, and based primarily on the initiative of one of my doctoral students, we found that an institutional allies movement of supportive faculty and staff was largely the outgrowth of undocumented student activism. indeed, nearly everyone interviewed as part of the project acknowledged that if not for undoc- umented student organizing there likely would not have been an allies movement at the uni- versity studied (chen & rhoads, ). although race- and immigrant-related equity concerns have marked a good deal of student activism during the early part of the st cen- tury, violence against women and related title ix issues have also been highly influential in generating student direct action. few such pro- tests drew more publicity than columbia uni- versity undergraduate student emma sulkowicz carrying her mattress on her back around cam- pus to protest the university’s treatment of rape allegations she made against a fellow columbia student. as lauren gambino ( ), writing for the guardian, noted, sulkowicz and her mattress became a powerful symbol of the movement to reform campus sexual assault http://blacklivesmatter.com/ student activism and diversity t hi s do cu m en t is co py ri gh te d by th e a m er ic an p sy ch ol og ic al a ss oc ia ti on or on e of it s al li ed pu bl is he rs . t hi s ar ti cl e is in te nd ed so le ly fo r th e pe rs on al us e of th e in di vi du al us er an d is no t to be di ss em in at ed br oa dl y. http://blacklivesmatter.com/ proceedings after she decided to drag it around campus for her visual arts senior thesis, titled mattress perfor- mance (carry that weight). she vowed to carry the mattress across the university’s new york campus and into classes until the school expelled the man she accused of raping her. the actions of sulkowicz, along with other reactions by universities to sexual assaults, raised issues about the challenges u.s. colleges and universities face in seeking to aggressively confront accused students as part of supporting victims, while balancing the rights of the ac- cused. many campus activists seeking to further victim’s rights have pushed for more aggressive university policies against the accused, and stu- dent activists have brought great pressure on both government and university officials. for example, in july, a small group of students and former students protested outside the de- partment of education in washington, dc, call- ing on the department’s office for civil rights (ocr) “to better enforce federal laws to protect students from sexual assault.” the protesters were surprised when under secretary martha kanter approached them and received box after box containing over , signed petitions in support of their cause (grasgreen, ). be- yond title ix-focused campaigns, annual cam- pus events such as take back the night marches and the clothesline project help to raise awareness about sexual assault and vio- lence against women more generally. when in the past campus assault cases may have simply been swept under the rug, today’s activists (often sexual assault victims them- selves) are taking full advantage of social media to share their stories as well as key information. arguably, there is a sea change in attitudes leading to greater action by students and in- creased attention from both politicians and uni- versity administrators. student organizers “have waged a grass-roots but sophisticated lobbying campaign on capitol hill. . . . victims of sexual assault, once stigmatized, are gaining courage to challenge institutions publicly, representing a generational and cultural shift” (steinhauer, ). there is modest evidence to support such a claim: in may, , a story in the new york times reported that colleges and universities were in fact under investigation for their han- dling of sexual assault cases, including harvard, princeton, florida state, ohio state, and uc berkeley (pérez-peña & taylor, ). clearly, student activism was having an impact. there have been other notable manifestations of contemporary student activism, including in the international realm, such as the ongoing tension surrounding the israeli-palestinian issue, which has generated widespread student rallies and counter rallies throughout the united states. but conceptions of student activism should go beyond simply public demonstrations or protests. al- though less likely to generate newspaper head- lines, college students working in low-income and disadvantaged communities may constitute one of the most common forms of campus-based activ- ism. for example, college students across the country commonly volunteer in organized activi- ties and programs to support academic achieve- ment and college going, typically at high schools in underrepresented minority communities. such projects in many instances also offer academic support for underrepresented students already en- rolled in college and many are student-initiated and student-run and typically affiliated with race- and ethnic-based student organizations (maldo- nado, rhoads, & buenavista, ). the roots of such projects often go back to a previous genera- tion of students involved in the early ethnic stud- ies programs, given that many such programs stressed supporting and maintaining close ties with communities of color. summary comments the title for this article comes from an un- dergraduate course i teach at ucla, a course i have taught for going on two decades now. typically, i offer the course in the fall and it tends to enroll to students, many of them self-defined student activists. class discussions can be intense, as we deal with a host of sensi- tive and highly politicized issues, including the complex ways in which racism continues to operate on u.s. campuses. such discussions necessitate that i be at my best in terms of keeping up with what’s going on in their lives and in terms of closely following campus move- ments such as concerned student , #black- livesmatter, and carry that weight. based on my experience teaching the course, plus years of research on student activism, including the work for this article and special issue, there are several points to keep in mind. rhoads t hi s do cu m en t is co py ri gh te d by th e a m er ic an p sy ch ol og ic al a ss oc ia ti on or on e of it s al li ed pu bl is he rs . t hi s ar ti cl e is in te nd ed so le ly fo r th e pe rs on al us e of th e in di vi du al us er an d is no t to be di ss em in at ed br oa dl y. first, it is necessary to recognize the serious risks student activists often assume as they engage in direct action strategies to forge campus and broader social change. ranging from threat of life and limb, to emotional and psychological strain, to the basic costs of neglecting one’s studies as a consequence of devoting time and energy to or- ganizing, students clearly incur serious costs. but their decision making rarely involves a cost- benefit analysis, as hirsch ( ) pointed out in his study of the divestment movement at colum- bia university: “increased costs do not always result in decreased participation in the movement; protesters often respond to threats of repression by developing a greater willingness to ignore per- sonal costs in favor of the collective struggle” (p. ). at times, the costs can be deeply personal, such as when nashville student movement leader, john lewis, became alienated from his parents as a consequence of his efforts to challenge jim crow laws: i lost my family that spring of . when my parents got word that i had been arrested—i wrote them a letter from the nashville jail explaining what had happened and that i was acting in accordance with my christian faith—they were shocked. shocked and ashamed. my mother made no distinction between being jailed for drunkenness and being jailed for demonstrating for civil rights. “you went to school to get an education,” she wrote me back. “you should get out of this move- ment, just get out of that mess.” (lewis, , p. ) but, of course, lewis was getting an “educa- tion,” one that contributed to his eventual decision to serve his country as a georgia congressman. second, although involvement in student ac- tivism can at times detract from a student’s academic pursuits given time constraints and intense distractions, clearly such students have vast opportunities for developing more ad- vanced organizational and social skills. i have seen evidence of this time and time again, based both on my research as well as interactions with student organizers in my course. the sophisti- cated insights and forms of knowledge acquired in facilitating and guiding an array of student actors toward a collective endeavor should not be underestimated. these are complex learning outcomes that are unlikely to be developed through course readings and class discussions. for example, understanding the meaningful ways in which social identities influence lived experience and interpretations of various events are powerful insights into the human condition. a third point to consider is the need for a broad definition of student activism and recog- nition that a good deal of contemporary engage- ment in campus change strategies involves forms of outreach to marginalized and disad- vantaged communities and populations. some of the students involved in efforts such as stu- dent-initiated recruitment and retention projects may be less likely to take to the streets, but they can be just as committed to social change as their more visible and outspoken peers. fourth, social media and the tools of the internet clearly are transforming contemporary student activism. the “digital era” requires high-tech skills and media literacy, as today’s student activists seek to take full advantage of the tools at their disposal (tremayne, ). from occupy wall street to #blacklivesmatter to the black bruins (spoken word)—sy stokes—the latter a video production by ucla students in protest of the underrepresentation of african american males on campus—students demonstrate the sophisticated deployment of technology and media. a final point to consider is the continuing role social justice idealism plays as the defining frame of reference for student activism. and issues of diversity are front and center in terms of how social justice is considered. accord- ingly, racism continues to be the most powerful and compelling force in necessitating student organizing for a just society, but also issues linked to sexism, classism, and heterosexism shape the work of contemporary student activ- ists. recent campus movements noted in this article profoundly highlight the frustrating real- ity that many of the most powerful forms of social inequality are deeply entrenched within u.s. society. but despite the seemingly intrac- table quality of discrimination, student activists continue to bring great energy and verve to their struggles. in many ways, this special issue pays respect to their efforts and accomplishments and further supports the power of student protest. special issue on student activism: what follows the authors of the articles contained within this special issue offer important insights into diversity-related concerns and how students may serve as agents of campus change as well as broader social change. following this article, student activism and diversity t hi s do cu m en t is co py ri gh te d by th e a m er ic an p sy ch ol og ic al a ss oc ia ti on or on e of it s al li ed pu bl is he rs . t hi s ar ti cl e is in te nd ed so le ly fo r th e pe rs on al us e of th e in di vi du al us er an d is no t to be di ss em in at ed br oa dl y. hope, keels, and durkee ( ) in “participa- tion in black lives matter and deferred action for childhood arrivals: modern activism among black and latino college students” present findings from a survey of black and latino college students, highlighting both the rates of participation in activism as well as the complex ways in which psychological factors influence involvement in activism. in “califor- nia dreamers: activism, identity, and empow- erment among undocumented college stu- dents,” deangelo, schuster, and stebleton ( ) share findings from interviews con- ducted with undocumented students by offering insights into the ways in which activism con- tributes to an empowering sense of undocu- mented identity. in “from margins to main- stream: social media as a tool for campus sexual violence activism,” linder, myers, riggle, and lacy ( ) use internet-related ethnography to call attention to the growing role of social media in student organizing, specifi- cally addressing campus sexual violence. kimball, moore, vaccaro, troiano, and newman ( ) in “college students with dis- abilities redefine activism: self-advocacy, storytelling and collective action” rely on a constructivist grounded theory approach to of- fer important insights into the ways in which students with disabilities challenge traditional conceptions of student activism. in “‘the poor kids’ table’: organizing around an invisible and stigmatized identity in flux,” warnock and hurst ( ) utilize qualitative data from semistructured interviews to examine the for- mation and maintenance of a support group involving low-income, first-generation, and/or working-class students (lifgwc); a key find- ing notes that lifgwc students differed in their comfort level in terms of engaging in so- cial class based campus activism. hoffman and mitchell ( ) in “making diversity ‘every- one’s business’: a discourse analysis of insti- tutional responses to student activism for eq- uity and inclusion” adopt a case study approach to examine how administrative response can at times undermine students’ diversity efforts. fi- nally, lantz et al. ( ) in “grad students talk: development and process of a student- led social justice collective” share insights from a collaborative autoethnographic project focused on graduate students in psychology and their reactions to acts of racial injustice; their results address both systemic challenges as well as recommendations for social change. references albrecht, t. j. ( ). challenges and service needs of undocumented mexican undergraduate stu- dents: students’ voices and administrators’ per- spectives (doctoral dissertation). the university of texas at austin. retrieved from dissertations & theses: a&i database (publication no. aat ). apple, m. w. ( ). between neoliberalism and neoconservatism: education and conservatism in a global context. in n. c. burbules & c. a. torres (eds.), globalization and education: critical per- spectives (pp. – ). new york, ny: routledge. bell, m. 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http://www.dailycal.org http://www.dailycal.org 	student activism, diversity, and the struggle for a just society 	student activism in “the sixties” 	post-sixties student activism 	the contemporary context 	summary comments 	special issue on student activism: what follows 	references ethnic inclusion in medicine: the ineffectiveness of the ‘black, asian and minority ethnic’ metric to measure progress sarfo- annin jk. bjgp open ; doi: . /bjgpo. . of race and racism call: practice, policy, & editorials *for correspondence: jason. sarfo- annin@ bristol. ac. uk competing interest: the author declares that no competing interests exist. received: september accepted: november published: november this article is open access: cc by license (https:// creativecom- mons. org/ licenses/ by/ . /) author keywords: service organisation, ethnic groups, minority groups, primary healthcare, general practice copyright © , the authors; doi: . /bjgpo. . ethnic inclusion in medicine: the ineffectiveness of the ‘black, asian and minority ethnic’ metric to measure progress jason kwasi sarfo- annin * nihr academic clinical fellow in primary care, centre for academic primary care, university of bristol, bristol, uk the medical profession is a success story for ethnic diversity. approximately % of hospital doctors and at least % of gps in the united kingdom are from minority groups. , fourteen per cent of the uk population is non- white, with a further . % identifying as a minority white group. however, success is marred by problems of ‘inclusion’ of minority ethnic doctors. inclusion is defined as ‘the achievement of a work environment in which all individuals are treated fairly and respectfully, have equal access to opportunities and resources, and can contribute fully to the organisation’s success.’ the king’s fund, a health think- tank, has recently highlighted that senior leadership and managerial positions are predominately held by white british and male persons. there has been longstanding discussion regarding inclusion in medicine on the basis of characteristics such as gender and socioeconomic status. , however, the events of — such as the death of george floyd, the black lives matter protests, and the impact of covid- on ethnic minority groups — have led to a focus on race and ethnicity. the use of a ‘rooney rule’, a form of affirmative action to improve racial diversity and/or inclusion, has been touted as a solution to a lack of ethnic inclusion in british medicine. this rule was created in by the national football league (nfl) — where at least one candidate from a minority ethnic group must be interviewed by an american football team for the head coach position. affirmative action is a quick way to reduce — or attempt to reduce — racial inequality and exclusion. that does not necessarily make it the best or the only way. in , when the rooney rule was introduced by the nfl, there were three black head coaches. as of august , there are three black head coaches. the nfl has since amended the rule, implicitly acknowledging the rule’s failure to achieve the outcome desired. affirmative action will likely fail in the long run if there is a failure to engage with the hard and complex work of making the structural and cultural changes required to improve racial inclusion. whether accurate or not, there is a concern that the introduction of affirmative action will lead to a group of sub- prime minority ethnic doctors in leadership roles. for many people, the journey matters just as much as the destination. some, given the choice, would prefer to become a millionaire by building and owning a business rather than winning a lottery jackpot. similarly, there are minority ethnic doctors who want to be seen as having reached a position of authority as a result of their skills and personal qualities, and not primarily because of a protected characteristic. advocates of affirmative action need to bear this in mind. a major problem with affirmative action for minority ethnic doctors in the uk is that the widely used term ‘bame’ (black, asian and minority ethnic) is presumed to be the best metric to use. it has a dreadful utility in general, and in british medicine particular. doctors of south asian heritage represent two- thirds of the bame population. , this size confers influence and power. concerns regarding racial bias in the clinical skills assessment, the examination that gp registrars in the uk undertake as part of their training, affected doctors from all minority ethnic groups. however, it was the british https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/open_access https://creativecommons.org/ https://doi.org/ . /bjgpo. . mailto:jason.sarfo-annin@bristol.ac.uk mailto:jason.sarfo-annin@bristol.ac.uk https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / sarfo- annin jk. bjgp open ; doi: . /bjgpo. . of race and racism call: practice, policy, & editorials association of physicians of indian origin who took the royal college of general practitioners (rcgp) to court. , for a ‘rooney rule’ to achieve representative diversity, roughly – % of leadership positions should be held by people of minority ethnic backgrounds. approximately one in every three of these representatives shouldn’t be of south asian heritage. affirmative action on the basis of inclusion in the bame definition would treat smaller minority ethnic groups equally to the largest. therefore a situation could arise where there are greater numbers of minority ethnic peoples in leadership roles, but they are overwhelmingly of south asian heritage. there are already many examples of south asian doctors in leadership roles: the current chair of the british medical association (bma), who is also the immediate past chair of the general practice committee; the current nhs medical director of primary care and the immediate past- president of the rcgp and of the royal college of paediatrics. looking at medical leadership though the lens of someone with chinese heritage, there have been few individuals with chinese heritage who have reached posts of national standing. similarly, through an afrocentric lens, there has never been a black president or chair of a royal medical college, nor chair of the bma. doctors of chinese heritage are outnumbered by an order of twelve by south asian doctors, and black doctors are outnumbered by an order of six. , differences in representation between various minority groups in senior positions is to be expected, but need not be potentially exacerbated by affirmative action. as bame is defined widely as a term for non- white ethnic groups, it is often overlooked that a bame ‘rooney rule’ excludes minority groups such as white europeans, and those from gypsy or traveller backgrounds. where do we go from here to improve inclusion? the first step is to collect and use much more granular data on ethnicity. the ethnicity data provided by the general medical council on gps is poor without a full breakdown of ethnicity categories. the use of the uk census ethnicity groups should be the minimum standard for any organisation in health care. there are justifiable reasons for census categories such as ‘black african’ to be further subdivided to ‘black west african’, ‘east african’, and so on. the term ‘asian’ or ‘south asian’ is also not granular enough a descriptive term. it is well known that educational attainment in uk schools of pakistani and bangladeshi pupils is below that of indians. , it is important to track the progress of these groups independently in health care, as entry to medical school is based on educational attainment at school. most importantly, while there are some cultural overlaps between some different ethnic groups, the worldview and experiences of a black caribbean person will not be the same as that of a chinese person. it is crucial that people recognise and remember the diversity within and between minority ethnic groups. the next step is to devise strategies to make sure that talented people from minority ethnic groups are noticed and given the opportunities they deserve. tools to hold organisations to account on their progress and targets are critical. it is key that minority ethnic groups are engaged in defining these targets and the accountability process. factors that impact on inclusion but are poorly defined and/ or difficult to measure will be fundamental to improvements. however, i believe that this ‘grey area’ — which is overlooked in favour of measurable targets — is what requires the hardest work. this will require numerous different approaches throughout organisations. within this, there are two areas that deserve specific mention: mentorship and engagement. the phenomenon where mentors (and mentees) are inclined to voluntarily engage in a mentoring relationship with those who remind them of themselves can be problematic. there must be some shared familiarity and ease for any mentoring relationship to work. that said, within medicine, there is a growing number of women and ethnic minority doctors, who have a small pool of mentors to choose from — if they are seeking people who reflect them. both mentors at a senior level and mentees must be open to seeking out relationships with people of the opposite sex or of different ethnicity. it is very important for individuals and organisations to keep engaged and to continuously talk to each other. this provides the opportunity for people to express and learn from nuances that are rarely spoken about. creating a culture where people from minority ethnic groups can discuss topics that are very difficult, or perhaps others wouldn't have previously been interested in hearing, takes time. how to go about building in mechanisms to make sure these voices are heard will require tailoring to the organisational and local needs. criticism should be expected and embraced by organisations. yet, activities performed by organisations must clearly evidence the learning from listening exercises and criticisms. accountability to minority ethnic groups is essential to avoid accusations of paying corporate lip service. https://doi.org/ . /bjgpo. . of race and racism call: practice, policy, & editorials sarfo- annin jk. bjgp open ; doi: . /bjgpo. . bame is far too broad a term to use as a metric of ethnic inclusion or affirmative action as there is heterogeneity within and between minority ethnic groups. refined data on the ethnicity of doctors is required to picture and improve awareness of this, alongside open discussion and organisational accountability of actions. these should be prerequisite steps before considering affirmative action, to avoid its failure to improve inclusion in the long term. inclusion of ethnic minorities is a complex challenge which will need continuous efforts. doing nothing favours the status quo and those who are currently more likely to obtain senior and management roles within health care. funding jksa is funded by a national institute for health research (nihr) academic clinical fellowship. the nihr had no input into this article. ethical approval not applicable. provenance freely submitted; externally peer reviewed. references . uk government. ethnicity facts and figures - nhs workforce. ; https://www. ethnicity- facts- figures. service. gov. uk/ workforce- and- business/ workforce- diversity/ nhs- workforce/ latest (accessed nov ). . general medical council. what our data tells us about general practitioners working for the nhs in england and scotland. ; https://www. gmc- uk. org/-/ media/ documents/ what- our- data- tells- us- about- gps_ pdf- . pdf (accessed nov ). . office for national statistics. census. ; https://www. ons. gov. uk/ census/ census (accessed nov ). . limb m. nhs doctors face racism, exclusion, and discrimination, report finds. bmj ; : g . doi: https:// doi. org/ . / bmj. g . society for human resource management. diversity and inclusion initiative. ; https:// community. 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https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/workforce-and-business/workforce-diversity/nhs-workforce/latest https://www.gmc-uk.org/-/media/documents/what-our-data-tells-us-about-gps_pdf- .pdf https://www.ons.gov.uk/census/ census https://doi.org/ . /bmj.g https://doi.org/ . /bmj.g https://community.shrm.org/higherlogic/system/downloaddocumentfile.ashx?documentfilekey= d d- c - ded- -eb fbfde https://community.shrm.org/higherlogic/system/downloaddocumentfile.ashx?documentfilekey= d d- c - ded- -eb fbfde https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/workforce-race-inequalities-inclusion-nhs https://www.kingsfund.org.uk/publications/workforce-race-inequalities-inclusion-nhs https://doi.org/ . /s - ( ) -x https://doi.org/ . /s - - - https://www.si.com/nfl/ / / /rooney-rule-explained-nfl-diversity-policy https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/ / /nfl-owners-have-problem-coaches-color/ / https://www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/ / /nfl-owners-have-problem-coaches-color/ / https://www.nfl.com/news/nfl-instituting-changes-to-rooney-rule https://www.nfl.com/news/nfl-instituting-changes-to-rooney-rule https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/landmark-legal-case-rule-whether-gp-exam-discriminates-against-asian-and-black-doctors- .html https://www.independent.co.uk/life-style/health-and-families/health-news/landmark-legal-case-rule-whether-gp-exam-discriminates-against-asian-and-black-doctors- .html https://www.bapio.co.uk/csa-judicial-review https://www.bapio.co.uk/csa-judicial-review https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/style-guide/ethnic-groups https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/style-guide/ethnic-groups https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education-skills-and-training/a-levels-apprenticeships-further-education/students-aged- -to- -achieving- -a-grades-or-better-at-a-level/latest#by-ethnicity https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education-skills-and-training/a-levels-apprenticeships-further-education/students-aged- -to- -achieving- -a-grades-or-better-at-a-level/latest#by-ethnicity https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education-skills-and-training/a-levels-apprenticeships-further-education/students-aged- -to- -achieving- -a-grades-or-better-at-a-level/latest#by-ethnicity https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education-skills-and-training/ -to- -years-old/gcse-results-attainment- -for-children-aged- -to- -key-stage- /latest#by-ethnicity https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education-skills-and-training/ -to- -years-old/gcse-results-attainment- -for-children-aged- -to- -key-stage- /latest#by-ethnicity https://www.ethnicity-facts-figures.service.gov.uk/education-skills-and-training/ -to- -years-old/gcse-results-attainment- -for-children-aged- -to- -key-stage- /latest#by-ethnicity https://doi.org/ . /bmj.h 	ethnic inclusion in medicine: the ineffectiveness of the ‘black, asian and minority ethnic’ metric to measure progress 	funding 	ethical approval 	provenance 	references “what matters now”: reading fanon’s call for decolonization and humanization in the contemporary united states “what matters now”: reading fanon’s call for decolonization and humanization in the contemporary united states courtney l. gildersleeve college literature, volume , number , winter , pp. - (article) published by johns hopkins university press doi: for additional information about this article [ access provided at apr : gmt from carnegie mellon university ] https://doi.org/ . /lit. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ https://doi.org/ . /lit. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ college literature: a journal of critical literary studies . winter print issn - e-issn - © johns hopkins university press and west chester university “what matters now”: reading fanon’s call for decolonization and humanization in the contemporary united states courtney l. gildersleeve in a passage from the “conclusion” of the wretched of the earth, some of frantz fanon’s last printed words before his death in , he cautions his comrades throughout the decolonizing world against adopting any aspects of the model through which “a par- ticular europe” had long brutalized humanity. fanon identifies colonialism and capitalism, and the racism and racialized violence on which they are predicated, as systems that must be thoroughly overcome for human life to persist, making clear that the work of decolonization is not complete after formal independence. with a palpable sense of urgency, he writes: what matters now is not a question of profitability, not a question of increased productivity, not a question of production rates. . . . it is the very basic question of not dragging man in directions which mutilate him, of not imposing on his brain tempos that rapidly obliterate and unhinge it. the notion of catching up must not be used as a pretext to brutalize man, to tear him from him- self and his inner consciousness, to break him, to kill him. (fanon , ) courtney l. gildersleeve | critical forum speaking from his lived knowledge of the colonial order in marti- nique, algeria, and france, fanon advocates a categorical rejection of colonialism at all levels of society, and within the body and mind of the human being. as we see in the passage, this task crucially involves renouncing a capitalist notion of progress. such efforts would inaugurate a radical transformation, ultimately effecting, in fanon’s words, the creation of a “new man.” fanon’s work reso- nates strongly today because “not dragging man in directions which mutilate him” arguably remains a “very basic question.” from ongo- ing drone strikes, to mass deportations, to military occupation, to assaults on basic social services, to various forms of terrorism, not only can one name countless instances of the breaking of human bodies and minds, and the destruction of lives, but the “mutilation of the human” seems to stand as a dominant feature of this age. it is not enough, however, simply to lament the current state of the world, in which the dehumanizing conditions that fanon so fiercely contested in his work and his life persist. we know that his meth- odology, grounded in psychiatric practice, involves a precise naming of the ills of a society and an attempt to diagnose their origin, and, as a revolutionary, taking actions to fundamentally transform what causes harm. with regard to the still-existing colonial rule in his time, fanon theorized what one might call the corrective role of vio- lence in destroying colonialism. rather than assert an absolute posi- tion toward fanon’s analysis of violence, much less speak of violence in abstract terms, i want to locate this matter within another core preoccupation of his work. coming to fanon with a concern for the current proliferation of extreme brutality, but wary of merely moral- istic appeals to nonviolence, what i am most interested in highlight- ing is the capacious notion of human agency that his work develops, and of which violence is but one part. when he states that “the dreams of the colonial subject are dreams of action, dreams of aggressive vitality,” fanon identifies that fundamental to colonialism’s pathology is a reliance on inhib- iting, even destroying, the mobility and agential capacity of a whole group or groups of people ( , ). it is such petrification—and the means of reproducing it—that must be challenged. one of the most generative aspects of fanon’s work is his advocacy of human agency—his foregrounding of the human as a being who can act in and upon the world, and in history. for one thing, this way of think- ing presents an antidote against the threat of powerlessness that one might experience before the problems of our time, and arguably college literature | . winter against systems of oppression at large. in this spirit, and in order to move beyond a general commentary on the unjust global order, another moment in the “conclusion” begs our attention. in urging his comrades in the anti-colonial struggle to choose a path very different from that of europe, fanon provides a warn- ing through the counter-example of the united states. as he writes: “two centuries ago, a former european colony took into its head to catch up with europe. it has been so successful that the united states of america has become a monster where the flaws, sickness, and inhumanity of europe have reached frightening proportions” ( , ). reading his assessment nearly sixty years later from the location of the united states, many of us will recognize this picture all too well: a country marred by social and economic inequality, systemic racism, and seemingly unable to acknowledge its colo- nial provenance or its continuing imperialist position in the world. while fanon himself seemed to have little hope for the united states, given its history of slavery, and the rampant lynching and economic disenfranchisement of african americans which he saw persist throughout his lifetime, his thought nonetheless pushes one to consider the possibility of recreating one’s society, rather than resigning to the inevitability of a dehumanizing order. in my view, it is imperative to receive fanon’s appraisal as the first dose of a remedy; truth-telling is an initial move toward confronting, among other things, the harmful nationalist mythologies that one is often asked to consume and that have long-lasting and damaging effects on the social body. recognizing colonialism’s reliance on operative fictions about matters such as who has the “right” to rule, who “deserves” to have more, whose lives are of most “value,” and so on, fanon was able to state unequivocally: “truth is what hastens the dislocation of the colonial regime” ( , ). in a resonant mode of critique, there are now many people energized to transform the united states into a new country: many who are articulating an emergent national consciousness that does not accept the propagation of brutality and seeks to both face and, to the fullest extent possible, rectify the inju- ries of the past. one of the most sobering aspects of fanon’s work, as one reads it from the contemporary united states, is that it actually gives one tools to name the coloniality of the country and to iden- tify how racism is central to maintaining that order. in the space that remains, i want to thematize a few ways that fanon’s work may courtney l. gildersleeve | critical forum help us further address these matters. in so doing, i will highlight specific elements of his praxis that may serve as points of counsel as we face the ills of the present: a concern for the reality of the body and an understanding of the human person as a being constituted in relation to and therefore responsible to others. despite the formal end of segregation, the “compartmentalized world” that fanon described as defining colonialism continues to be reproduced in countless ways throughout us society. one of the most devastating manifestations of this “compartmentalized world” is the use of physical violence and intimidation, most frequently against people of color. in recent years, the wave of murders of afri- can american men, women, and children by police officers on public streets—including jamar clark (in november ) and philando castile (in july ) who were killed in the twin cities, where i live—bear painful witness to this order. thinking structurally, we can also see how people who serve in the role of defending the state often do so through denying the humanity of their fellow citizens, increasingly with the aid of military-grade weapons. if we understand colonialism as a fundamentally dehumanizing order, we can recog- nize how operating in this capacity also diminishes the humanity of those who perform that role. however, there are important dis- tinctions to be made. the violence of those who work for the state usually is seen as legitimate, whereas any kind of action, perceived as transgressive, by civilians—and often, simply the fact of existing as someone marked “other” in the society—is viewed as worthy of retributive violence and other forms of punishment. fanon’s insight into how a colonial state often tries to rationalize such acts, and the consequent lack of justice for those victimized by them, remains poignant: “confronted with a world configured by the colonizer, the colonized subject is always presumed guilty” ( , ). in other words, a principal way in which the colonial order preserves itself is through racialization. the racism that underlies such killings also permeates recent acts of violence undertaken by individuals who do not occupy official roles in defense of the state, but who, nonetheless—often despite their own forms of economic and social disenfranchisement—uphold a colonialist mentality and seek to maintain a “compartmentalized world.” we see in the hate crimes of recent years, the deep internal- ization of this order: to name just two incidents within roughly the last year, the murder of khalid jabara, a lebanese american man, by college literature | . winter his white neighbor, vernon majors (august ); and the murder of indian-born engineer, srinivas kuchibhotla, by a white man he did not know, adam purinton (february ). if previously unrecog- nized by a considerable sector of the us population, the very recent tragedies of the neo-nazi rally in charlottesville, virginia (august ) have brought to the fore the widespread malady of racializa- tion in this country. another relevant aspect of fanon’s work is the space it provides for working through the psychological and lived dimensions of rac- ism, and perhaps also a sense of hope of eventual liberation from racism and racialized thought at large. in black skin, white masks, fanon speaks of the alienation produced by a racist order, noting in particular how under such a system, “there are times when the black man becomes locked in his body” ( , ). while this bodily con- finement is a way of inhibiting agency, it also has the capacity to mark the black person as only a body, or, as scholars like sylvia wyn- ter and donna jones have articulated, a body that is seen and treated either as not human, or as lacking a distinct, individualized life. the group black lives matter has been working tirelessly to redress this reality through deep social transformation, and its mobiliza- tion relies on an understanding of a subject that is arguably much more intersectional and specific than either fanon’s articulation of the human as “man,” or his rather exclusive discussion of the black person in terms of manhood. a way in which fanon’s thought may surpass some contemporary conversations about race, however, is in the understanding of racial- ization through the broader idea of “compartmentalizing,” including within the human being: specifically, the separation between the mind and body, so fundamental to historical colonialism. we con- sidered fanon’s assessment of how, within the racist order, the black person becomes “locked” in his or her body. his work also seems to suggest the counterpart of that problem: denying that white people have or are bodies, and also that their lives, while treated as partic- ularly “grieveable,” to use judith butler’s term, are in fact no more valuable than those of anyone else. in other words, while the lives and capital of the white population are typically defended by the dominant society, they are often so defended with the glorifica- tion of spiritual categories. this is a mystification that contributes considerably to a racialized order. ta-nehisi coates has identified this dynamic in the united states as the singled-minded effort to “preserve the dream” ( , ). in the face of similar conditions courtney l. gildersleeve | critical forum in his own time, fanon made an impassioned claim for the reality of the body, recasting it as the grounding site of thought and activ- ity. articulating a desire for a restored internal unity, he declares in quite intimate terms at the end of black skin, white masks: “o, my body, make of me always a man who questions!” ( , ) in the wretched of the earth, fanon also opposes ways of thinking that deny bodily experience and rely on a perversion of the intellect. he denounces colonialism’s practice of deploying idealist notions in order to cover up or justify brutality and deprivation. such practices both disavow the rawness of life (as he puts it, the living-dead real- ity) for the colonized, and attempt to disable certain tools of resis- tance. however, fanon makes clear that colonized peoples are not duped. in a memorable passage, he writes: for a colonized people, the most essential value, because it is the most meaningful, is first and foremost the land: the land, which must provide bread, and, naturally, dignity. but this dignity has nothing to do with “human” dignity. the colonized subject has never heard of such an ideal. all he has ever seen on his land is that he can be arrested, beaten, and starved with impunity; and no sermonizer on morals, no priest has ever stepped in to bear the blows in his place or share his bread. (fanon , ) while he remains unflinching in his effort to name the conditions of life for the colonized, fanon also foregrounds what he sees as one of the most lacking elements of the colonial system and the racist, capitalist system of modern life at large: the poverty of the notion of the human as an individual who is only accountable to himself or herself. again in black skin, white masks, he offers a profound rebut- tal to that notion. recalling a lesson from a philosophy professor of his in martinique, who was warning students about the propagation of anti-semitism, fanon arrives at the conclusion, “i [am] answer- able in my body and in my heart for what [is] done to my brother” ( , ). today, while we in the united states face many challenges to such an ethic, i think there are indications of a shift toward a more relational concept and practice of the human. the protests and mass mobilizations for a range of social justice issues that have been grow- ing across the united states provide one site of hope in this vein. communities of color, and other historically marginalized commu- nities, have long been at the helm of this effort, and foregrounding that work is itself part of the effort of decolonization. in my view, college literature | . winter what is most significant about the current mobilizations is that they, not unlike violence in fanon’s discussion of decolonization, are also self-making activities which put one’s body in a space with the bod- ies of others. these interactions also provide opportunities to share narratives that disrupt reified national fictions. they can transform a person’s consciousness of himself or herself and the world, and cre- ate a sense of being an agent in history, someone with a capacity to change the current order. while protest may not have eliminated the drive to war, genocide, and occupation, it is among those things that can contribute to dismantling the injurious “compartments” that are continuously reproduced and held as sacred by racism and capitalism. if what one wants to achieve instead is a fundamentally deracialized and anticolonial society—one that is not predicated on the mutilation of the human being or the mystification of violence— fanon’s work continues to provide a steeling clarity, and a resound- ing voice of both fellowship and revolutionary counsel. notes throughout the essay i use richard philcox’s retranslation of the les damnés de la terre. this phrase is that of fanon’s mentor, aimé césaire, in discourse on colo- nialism, a text which heavily influences this reflection on fanon. speaking of the enterprising europe at the height of colonialism, césaire writes: “the great historical tragedy of africa . . . was . . . to encounter that par- ticular europe on our path, and that europe is responsible before the human community for the highest heap of corpses in history” ( , ). see judith butler’s work, precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence, which carefully illuminates this reality, and presents a theori- zation of the stakes of the increasingly common experience of bodily precarity. see homi k. bhabha’s “foreword: framing frantz fanon,” preceding philcox’s translation of the wretched of the earth ( , vii). see sylvia wynter ( ), “no humans involved,” forum n.h.i.: knowl- edge for the twentieth century : . stanford, ca; and donna v. jones ( ), “invidious life,” in the racial discourses of life philosophy: négritude, vital- ism, and modernity. new york: columbia university press. if space permitted, i would detail the work of groups like the black pan- thers, who were dedicated to a multifaceted program social transforma- tion, and of course were careful readers of fanon. i would also go into further depth about the range of multi-issue groups currently involved in social justice efforts. courtney l. gildersleeve | critical forum works cited butler, judith. . precarious life: the powers of mourning and violence. london: verso. césaire, aimé. . discourse on colonialism. translated by joan pinkham. new york: monthly review press. coates, ta-nehisi. . between the world and me. new york: spiegel & grau. fanon, frantz. . black skin, white masks. translated by charles lam markmann. london: pluto press. . . the wretched of the earth. translated by richard philcox. new york: grove press. courtney l. gildersleeve is a ph.d. candidate and instructor in the department of cultural studies and comparative literature at the university of minnesota-twin cities. in , she participated in the black jacobins revisited: rewriting history conference, in liverpool, uk to mark the th anniversary of the publication of c.l.r. james’s monumental text on the haitian revolution. cur- rently, she is working to complete her dissertation, “writing beyond redress: slavery and the work of literature.” statement of solidarity from the graduate association for food studies graduate journal of food studies statement of solidarity from the graduate association for food studies maria carabello , cormac cleary , jessica fagin , maya hey , katherine hysmith , shayan lallani , jessica carbone , erica zurawski , molly mann , james edward malin , alanna higgins , archish kashikar , carlynn crosby university of michigan, university of edinburgh, university of exeter, concordia university, university of north carolina, university of ottawa, harvard university, university of california santa cruz, st. john’s university, new york university, west virginia university, chatham university, university of mississippi published on: jun , license: creative commons attribution . international license (cc-by . ) https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / graduate journal of food studies statement of solidarity from the graduate association for food studies the graduate association for food studies (gafs) stands in solidarity with the black community, demands justice for those murdered by police—george floyd, breonna taylor, ahmaud arbery, david mcatee and too many others—and vehemently condemns the ongoing police brutality and white supremacy across the united states and the world. gafs condemns the systemic and institutional racism that permeates the daily lives of black people. this is a pattern that has played out across the world that is neither new nor acceptable. this pattern also precludes the resilience, joy, and solidarity of the black community. we are not authorities on anti-racist work or organizing and certainly acknowledge the overwhelming whiteness of our gafs student board, but we want to explicitly express solidarity with our black members, as well as black colleagues, black scholars, black students, black mentors, and black communities across the world. we stand with you and will listen to you because black lives matter and black voices matter.  we call upon fellow scholars in food studies, as well as the institutions and organizations that facilitate their work, to acknowledge that these systems and inequalities exist and to enact tangible steps to dismantle them. we do a disservice to the black community, ourselves, our research, and the world at large by remaining silent. we also call upon our fellow scholars, institutions, and organizations to utilize our research, our knowledge, and most importantly our privileged positions to respond to this moment. not only must we stand together to combat systemic racism and violence, but we must also cede space to the voices of those who have been historically — purposefully — excluded from the conversation.  we recognize that a public statement does not equate with creating material and systemic change, and offer this letter, and following action items, as an effort to keep ourselves and the field of food studies accountable and uncomfortable. it is through this discomfort that we create a growing edge within ourselves and our institutions and create change. gafs pledges to fight against anti-blackness, white supremacy, and institutional racism with the following action items to begin enacting immediately: we are dedicating our next reading collective (june , ) to discussing anti- black racism within food and agriculture. we are also opening this platform for our members to discuss the current events and police brutality. discussions like these — with and among ourselves, friends, colleagues, institutions, and communities — give space for evaluation of our own organization and efforts, as well as broader processes. if you want to be part of this discussion, we encourage you to connect graduate journal of food studies statement of solidarity from the graduate association for food studies our job is not only to step up to condemn these actions, systems, and patterns, but to listen to and amplify the voices of our members and of the black community. we are open to discussion and self-examination, and commit to continually pushing ourselves to learn more because we believe this is what support in scholarly communities ought to look like.  in solidarity, the student board of the graduate association for food studies june , with us via our social media platforms (instagram, twitter, and facebook) or via email at graduatefoodassociation@gmail.com. we are ready to listen. we will be sharing reading lists and resources about anti-blackness, white supremacy, and institutional racism and violence within food and agriculture. we will be strategizing ways to address the institutional inequalities perpetuated by the financial burdens of scholarship and low and unpaid labor associated with graduate life, which takes its greatest toll on first generation scholars and scholars of color. we are taking steps to being intentionally mindful about how we reimagine scholarship, mentoring, teaching, and building community in this moment while also acknowledging that this involves raising up the voices of those who have done the work to reimagine our world. the graduate journal of food studies recently shifted its publication format to emphasize short-form pieces and now welcomes submissions on a rolling basis. this new approach will allow for more flexibility in creating timely commentary, appropriate for thinking through institutional racism in all its insidious manifestations. additionally, we have been thinking through ways to incorporate public advocacy within gafs programming and strategies to use our platform to address these issues within food and agriculture and our own institutions and work. http://www.instagram.com/gradfoodstudies http://twitter.com/gradfoodstudies http://www.facebook.com/gradfoodstudies mailto:graduatefoodassociation@gmail.com https://gradfoodstudies.org/ / / /letter-from-the-editors/ https://gradfoodstudies.org/submit/ s jxx .. constancy and change: an editorial introduction a.j. angulo and jack schneider this issue of the history of education quarterly (heq) marks an editorial transition. the journal’s home has moved from the university of washington, where heq received excellent stewardship for five years, to the university of massachusetts lowell. during the transition that began in summer , our new edito- rial team anticipated certain challenges. fortunately, we inherited a well-organized system created by the outgoing team of nancy beadie, joy williamson-lott, kathy nicholas, and isaac gottesman, who provided blueprints for everything from manuscript intake to final distribution. what none of us anticipated during the transition, however, was that the world would turn upside down. by the time heq changed hands in july , the united states was roiled in conflict over racial inequality, remained in the grip of the global coronavirus pandemic, and was facing a highly contested presidential election. at the same time, changes in academic publishing began moving faster than any of us expected. cambridge university press, for example, has recently announced plans to expand open access for its journals through a vari- ety of agreements with us and non-us institutions. with this as backdrop, our vision for heq responds to the impor- tance of continuity and the pressures for change, both in form and in function. on the one hand, we have every interest in preserving the well-deserved reputation that the journal established under past edi- torships. to our minds, the journal must and will continue to serve as a leading international, peer-reviewed outlet for historians of education. on the other hand, merely replicating what has served heq well in previous decades will not automatically secure a viable future. emerging challenges require new solutions. in light of this, we envision the journal not only serving as an out- let for historical scholarship of the highest quality but also as a venue that brings historians into direct conversation with current trends in wider research and policy communities. we want to make heq essen- tial for professionals within and beyond history of education circles to history of education quarterly vol. no. february copyright © history of education society doi: . /heq. . h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /h eq . . d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /heq. . https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms read, reflect on, and cite. we plan to achieve this vision through work that can help us make sense of our era’s most pressing problems as well as through innovations in the organization and delivery of the journal’s content. in terms of scholarship, our team will prioritize submissions that both contribute to our understanding of the past and creatively shed light on current challenges. a long line of work in our field has struck this balance without compromising the integrity of the historical research process, and we aim to extend that tradition by encouraging submissions that emphasize urgent questions facing all levels and forms of education. our editorial team has a particular interest in the themes of identity and inequality, accountability and autonomy, public health and the environment, costs and finance, and the problems and promises of technology. across all of these areas, we seek works that look increasingly outward—situating histories of education more fully within global history. to highlight some of these priorities, we have organized several special issues for volume of the journal. the present issue, our first, concentrates on race and education, with a particular focus on african american education. while we recognize that no direct parallels can be made between events past and present, we also acknowledge the current black lives matter movement to be part of a long-standing struggle to affirm the value, dignity, and security of the black commu- nity. in that spirit, this issue speaks to the ongoing struggle for equality within the black community and to the future we might collectively make. our second and third issues will continue to focus on identity and inequality. associate editor christopher carlsmith has spearheaded a special issue on gender and socialization in medieval and early modern education. contributing authors take us back to neglected periods in our field and offer new perspectives on the ways in which schooling has shaped opportunity. the third issue of examines economic inequality, analyzing past attempts to expand and retract access to higher education through tuition policy and the politics of taxation. the histories in that issue deepen our understanding of present efforts to reduce student debt and the cost of college, underscoring the impor- tance of the past. as these three special issues suggest, our editorial team is inter- ested in organizing the manuscripts we receive into themes whenever possible. doing so gives us all an opportunity to think through selected topics in greater depth and with greater coherence. when we see sub- mitted works coalescing around an engaging theme, we will do our best to put them together. but our first priority is to treat all manu- scripts—whether solicited or unsolicited—with the same standard of history of education quarterly h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /h eq . . d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /heq. . https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms care. this includes a rigorous internal review and double-blind exter- nal review, ensuring the kind of high-quality research articles readers expect from heq. no works are exempted from this process, regardless of topic or author. in terms of innovations, and in keeping with our editorial vision, the journal will now include a new feature: policy dialogues. this fea- ture will pair historians of education with scholars in policy-related fields to explore the intersection between what once was and what might be. these conversations will be animated by such questions as: how might urgencies of the present shape the questions we ask about the past? how might story lines with longer arcs change the way we conceive of the future? and how should scholars approach the task of thinking across space and time? our goal with these exchanges is to stimulate dynamic conversations about important top- ics through spirited and informed exchanges. for heq’s inaugural policy dialogue, we are honored to include in this issue a lively con- versation between james anderson of the university of illinois and gloria ladson-billings of the university of wisconsin. other heq innovations planned for this year include expanding the journal’s digital footprint. generous support from umass lowell has made it possible to fund editorial assistants who are working with authors to expand the reach of their scholarship by announcing updates on twitter, editing wikipedia entries to include recent work from the journal, and creating short-form versions of heq arti- cles. in addition, the journal will soon announce the launch of a podcast called heqþa. the goal of the podcast is to bring scholarship from heq to a broader audience, highlighting the importance of history and enhancing the influence of historians. our overall vision, in short, includes a healthy dose of continuity and change. we remain committed to leading heq with the same care and consideration that prior editorial teams established as a standard. while we recognize the journal’s strong scholarly foundation, decades-long in the making, the challenges now facing academic pub- lishing call for creative experimentation and risk-taking. we envision heq as a venue for stimulating new discussions, opening up new lines of inquiry, and shedding the clarifying light of the past onto our current context. with support from the history of education society’s board of directors and members, we believe this vision is not only achievable but also a pathway toward securing the future well-being of the society and the journal. constancy and change h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /h eq . . d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /heq. . https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms 	constancy and change: an editorial introduction confronting the big challenges of our time: making a difference during and after covid- full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rpxm public management review issn: (print) (online) journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpxm confronting the big challenges of our time: making a difference during and after covid- janine o’flynn to cite this article: janine o’flynn ( ): confronting the big challenges of our time: making a difference during and after covid- , public management review, doi: . / . . to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / . . published online: sep . submit your article to this journal article views: view related articles view crossmark data https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rpxm https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rpxm https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showcitformats?doi= . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rpxm &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rpxm &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - confronting the big challenges of our time: making a difference during and after covid- janine o’flynn melbourne school of government, university of melbourne, melbourne, australia abstract this article explores key challenges emanating from covid- and how public man- agement and administration research can contribute to addressing them. to do this i discuss the ‘big questions’ debate and then sketch two big thematic challenges. in articulating these, i point to interconnections across various levels of analysis and argue we need to work across a range of boundaries and get more comfortable with complexity. my key argument being that both during and in the aftermath of a catastrophic global pandemic, it is at the intersections, not in silos, that we are likely to move forward intellectually and practically. keywords covid- ; public management; public administration; research introduction the director-general of the united nations (un), antónio guterres, declared covid- a health crisis like we had never seen in our lifetimes; one that requires us to come together collectively to mount a war on the virus (guterres ). by july , the un declared that covid- was wiping out years of gains that had been made towards the sustainable development goals; that more than half a billion people may move into poverty; and that intimate partner violence was increasing around the world (united nations ; patterson ). at the same time, some . billion workers in the informal economy, many in developing countries, looked likely to lose their livelihoods; poaching and deforestation have soared as people around the world try to make a living; million americans had applied for unemployment benefits; and the eu had agreed to a € bn spending package in an attempt to rescue the european economies (patterson ; gowen ; parliament ). by july , almost million people have been infected with covid- and more than , thousand are dead. the world has been shocked by images of mass graves being dug in many countries to cope with the dead including brazil, iran, bolivia, south africa, and the united states of america (usa). worse may still come (e.g. will ). the full scale and scope of covid- is still unknown. at worst, covid- may be something we need to live with, rather than something we beat and current experience is showing that waves keep coming in nations who thought they had the contact janine o’flynn janine.oflynn@unimelb.edu.au public management review https://doi.org/ . / . . © informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group http://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.tandfonline.com https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - virus under control (e.g. beech and doan ). this is a disruptive moment in history, with more questions than answers, but what is clear is that many complex, interconnected challenges lie ahead. some of these are new, but others are old, like poverty and inequality. here, covid- is acting as a sort of accelerant. facing up to these challenges will be complex, requiring integrated and interconnected responses that draw on diverse expertise, a range of actors and various disciplines. public administration and management scholars can play a major role here, but recent commentary has questioned whether we are up to the task. talbot ( ), for instance, argued that the public administration ecosystem in britain is ‘dead’ and perry ( ) discussed how public administration was ‘vanishing’. nabatchi and carboni ( ) have questioned whether public administration scholars can respond to the grand challenges facing the world: at precisely the moment in which we confront serious political, economic, social, cultural and environmental challenges on a truly grand scale, the field of public administration seems reluctant (and perhaps incapable) of responding in a meaningful way. as covid- morphs into one of the great disasters of our times, public administra- tion and management scholars, can, indeed must, make a difference and show that the field is not incapable, vanishing or dead. as the united nations ( ) has highlighted in its pleas for global collaboration during the pandemic: we cannot teach children remotely without technology, wash hands without water, or fight a pandemic without functioning health systems. we must work together. scholars who want to be part of confronting the big issues that a post-covid project will pose need to move across boundaries, work across disciplines, and move outside our comfort zones. many will be primed for this, coming from different backgrounds and with existing interdisci- plinary collaborations in place. the knowledge that has developed in our fields can inform others; but we also need to be ready to learn, to challenge some of our assumptions and to work in different ways. our best shot to make a difference during and after the crisis is, in my view, at the intersections, not in silos. this is where we are likely to move forward intellectually and practically. in this piece i want to set out some areas where we can focus our attention in a way that can do this. to do that i first look at the ‘big questions’ of the field, and i then go on to sketch out two big thematic challenges. i focus in particular on the role of govern- ment, trust, and the citizenry; and justice, inequality and entrenched disadvantage. i conclude the article by setting out several key points from the preceding discussion that focus on the future of our field. a field of big questions: but what are they? what the big questions and challenges will be as we move forward and how we can contribute to them is, of course, a prediction business. i will do a little of that in the next section, but first these need to be situated in a broader context. there have been long and protracted debates about the ‘big questions’ of public management and administration; what they are, but also what they should or might be. this debate has been very usa-centric (mingus and jing ) and in modern times has spun off of behn’s ( ) attempt to articulate the big questions (or types thereof). he articu- lated three: the micromanagement question – how to break the micromanagement cycle; the motivation question – how to encourage people to work towards achieving j. o’flynn public purpose; and the measurement question – measuring achievement. these have been critiqued for being too narrow, instrumental, and focused primarily at the organizational level (kirlin ). behn’s ( ) questions were, in kirlin’s view, too much about ‘doing’ and not enough about ‘consequences and value for the larger society in which public administration is embedded’ (kirlin , ). he argued that big questions needed to focus on ‘how public administration affects society . . . [on] understanding the role of public administration in influencing society historically and understanding its use to shape society in the future,’ not on instrumental issues (kirlin , ). this meant the big questions needed to be more about institutions than organizations and needed to have ‘meaning’. in seeking to bridge these views, callahan ( ) set out an integrative approach bringing together questions about institutions and organizations. more recently, haque ( ) has argued that both behn and kirlin missed the big paradigmatic questions of public administration, the former being too narrow, and the latter focused on mid-range questions. and mingus and jing ( ) have addressed the us-centricity of the debate somewhat by reflecting on behn’s questions and developing seven big questions for chinese public administration. in recent years, the most comprehensive articulation has been by sowa and lu ( ) who point to three questions that have dominated the field in the s: how do we deliver public services; how effective is public management; and, how do we understand public problems? here the big questions where driven by what we were expending our energy on. we are now years on from the initial ‘big debates’ about the ‘big questions’ and we have seen some refinement of them. reflecting on them in a time of the global pandemic, exploding social movements such as black lives matter and #metoo, and rising populism and authoritarianism, makes some of these ‘big questions’ seem not so big at all. rather, many seem conservative and to be missing the big picture. we see in real time that covid- is finding its way into every crack in society hitting the already worse off harder and faster than others and pouring accelerant on deeply divided and fractured communities. in this historic moment we see a range of big gnarly, wicked problems converging and demands for a remaking of institutions and societies. if ever there was a time to focus on what matters, as kirlin ( ) challenged us to do, it is now. to do this we will need to challenge ourselves. what matters is shaped by context and power – where we are in the world and who has the power to define the field. it is uncontroversial, i would think, to say that in our field that power has been narrowly held regardless of how we measure it – geography, race, culture or gender. the product of this has been that ‘the field’ has reflected the interests of few and been blinkered to other perspectives. while such tensions are inherent in any field, they have been coming to the fore in recent times in ours. various aspects of this are explored by alexander and stivers ( ), blessett et al. ( ), and feeny, carson, and dickinson ( ). carboni and nabatchi ( ) recently reflected on how these tensions played out at the minnowbrook conference held in the usa. debate was had on whether the field should be more normative or more instrumental and calls were made for a reckoning to acknowledge the role our field has played in ‘initiating and perpetuating injustices and oppressions’ (p. ). some conference participants . . . expressed alarm and anxiety about issues that were not being addressed: climate change, wealth and income inequality, social justice and human rights, and democratic roll backs, among many others. many of these participants asserted that the field should advocate or take a stand on current issues. they decried the silence of the field’s intellectual leaders and public management review professional associations on these and other important issues, and called for the assertion of our role as stewards of democracy and justice. others argued that these issues are not within the purview of public administration, and are more appropriate for other disciplines such as political science, sociology, and philosophy. they felt that public administration should stay focused on the more conventional issues of management and policy analysis, and that our professional associations and representatives should remain objective and neutral (carboni and nabatchi , ). alongside these important debates, many scholars are deeply concerned about whether our work has impact where it is most needed; in other words, whether we are making a difference. abouassi et al. ( , ) have argued it is not clear if our work informs important decisions and actions, and lamented whether or not: our voice is important in the public discourse surrounding today’s critical public administra- tion and governance issues, such as poverty, policing, racism, xenophobia, and immigration . . . concerns still persist that our academic focus is, at least in part, more of an intellectual and theoretical exercise than an attempt to produce a real change in societal structures and outcomes. at this moment, space is opening up for a fundamental reshaping of the field, or even more radically, a rethinking of what our ‘field’ even is. ‘what matters’ and the ‘big questions’ are being shaped by new generations of scholars. the shifts we are seeing signal that the big questions might be less binary and more integrated, bridging levels of analysis and be much more embracing of complexity and controversy. this is a positive development and, in my view, we must engage with a much broader set of issues and challenges. we should not leave these concerns to others because they are ‘too hard’ or push them to the margins because they are not ‘part of our field’. it is also time for a reckoning of sorts. we must look at the role that our field has played in creating these injustices and harms, many of which are now being amplified by covid- . whilst these may have been at the margins, these themes are both broad and deep and run through the historical contours of our field, ranging from: moral inversion and administrative evil (adams and balfour ); race and police brutality (menifield, shin, and strother ); administrative burdens and abortion access (herd and moynihan ); the oppression of indigenous or first nations peoples (sunga ), to the warehousing and commodification of asylum seekers and prison- ers (o’flynn forthcoming). in these cases (and many more) public servants, public sector organizations, and political actors are central; and power is a critical dynamic we need to grapple with. not only do we need to think about what a disruptive event like covid- will mean to the field, we need to think about what ‘the field’ even is. the big questions are changing, and important issues are being addressed in our field. it is important to recognize that this (r)evolution is being led by our newest generations of scholars. covid- , in my view, will accelerate this transformation and i believe that our field will be all the better for it. from big questions to big thematic challenges in the previous section i examined the ‘big questions’ debate and i highlighted the importance of focusing on what matters. in this section i want to switch from big questions to big thematic challenges, because a focus on challenges draws attention to where we can have a substantial impact. it is also true that these big thematic challenges offer potential to work across disciplines, to do important bridging work (moynihan j. o’flynn ) and to incorporate a fuller range of topics so we can more fully grasp the complex, dynamic nature of various phenomena (o’flynn ). such an approach sits well with the current focus on ‘grand challenges’ (gerton and mitchell ) and the notion of integrative public administration which is more problem-oriented, contextually grounded, and interdisciplinary (carboni and nabatchi , ). in taking stock of the covid- experience to date and reflecting on public administration and manage- ment i identified a series of potential big thematic challenges that cut across levels of analysis and disciplinary boundaries, and also where we can make a difference. here i draw out two themes which offer substantial potential to do work that matters. i also make that point here that scholars in our field have not neglected these; indeed, many have dedicated their lives to these topics. the issue that is these have not necessarily been centrestage. in the coming years we need to redraw these boundaries and rethink what the big questions might be and then anchor them around what matters. it is at these intersections that we are able to move forward intellectually and make the most sub- stantial impact practically. in this piece i will focus my attention on sketching out two big thematic challenges: (i) the role of government, trust and the citizenry; and (ii) justice, inequality and entrenched disadvantage. at this moment in time, these two in my view, are the most pressing. the role of government, trust and the citizenry as moynihan has recently argued ‘crises reveal government capacity’ ( , ). they also draw into stark relief the role of government, which has always been a central question in public administration and management studies. for some decades now writers have stressed that we can expect a future filled with fast-moving, continually- morphing, cascading and cross-jurisdictional challenges or disturbances (williams ; fuerth and faber ; oecd ). it is clear that as the covid- pandemic has taken hold that people from every corner of the world expect government to be ‘out front’ battling the virus and providing services and support for citizens (edelman ). the ability of governments to do so, however, has been mixed, despite years of warning that an unpredictable pandemic of this description was inevitable (organization , ). in the worst-case scenario these warnings were ignored (the economist a, june). these mixed results will not be a surprise to those that have been making the case over many years that governments have been faltering. it has been argued that our public administration systems are ill-equipped to confront these big complex chal- lenges (bourgon ). many reasons have been put forward to explain this: every- thing from the disarticulated nature of the state (frederickson ) to the skill mix of the public service workforce (oecd ; chine et al. ). others have focused on the role of so-called ‘deep state’ (osnos ) or the end of expertise (mishra ) as factors impeding government capacity. capacity often rests on a ‘cadre of experts who are thinking about low-visibility problems when few others are’ (kelman ) and success of government can often be hidden (see lipton and steinhauer ). for example, ‘public health is an enterprise with an intrinsic problem: people can’t see sicknesses avoided or deaths averted’ (achenbach et al. ). commentary on the current crisis has revealed in some nations ‘degraded administrative systems and capacities’ and systems where ‘public officials [have] career incentives to avoid risks, downplay long-terms threats and enact administrative burdens’ (deslatte , ). public management review as well as revealing the limits of our capacity, crises also reveal the limitations of political leadership as moynihan ( , ) has argued: [in the united states] covid- brought to the fore many elements of democratic backsliding under trump, while revealing the limits of his philosophy of governing. career officials were sidelined. trump repeated unproven theories about medical solutions while promising a crisis response that he proved unable to deliver. his political appointees had not prepared for pandemics despite warnings, and seemed asleep at the switch when the threat turned into reality. similar outcomes have been a long time in the making across many nations, a point lewis ( ) made in the fifth risk. he laid bare what happens when those in charge don’t understand how government actually works, or don’t care to know. covid- is reminding us that politics matters profoundly to public administration and manage- ment – shaping it in old and new ways. the covid- experience will challenge many who see politics as being in a separate domain to the practice of public administration. it is becoming harder, if it was ever possible anyway, to draw hard boundaries that insulate public administration from politics in the way that many classical scholars suggested (haque ). covid- is showing us that politics matters across many aspects of the crisis. for example, emerging evidence from the study of the political determinants of health shows that the spread of covid- is being fuelled by populism and also stoking it (mckee et al. ). in some of the worst-performing governments during the pandemic – united kingdom (uk), india, usa, brazil and russia, for instance – leaders have ridden populist waves to power which bred con- tempt for institutions, denialism, suspicion of elites and embedded the practice of blaming victims and outsiders. in these places it has been much more difficult to put in place effective governmental responses (mckee et al. ). in the usa, for example, mask-wearing, social distancing and governmental responses have become an extra- ordinary political battleground. in brazil, russia, iran and the usa, politicians have been comfortable ‘contradicting their experts on basic facts about the pandemic, publishing implausible numbers on covid deaths or propagating conspiracy the- ories’ (the economist b, july ). the pandemic has shown us that politics matters: from international cooperation, or the lack thereof, to the influence on individual behaviour, the nature of politics shapes responses and outcomes. this is happening as much through public administration systems, public services, and relationships with citizens, as it is through social media platforms. a challenge for public administration and management scholars will be to expand out what we mean by capacity and the factors that influence it. capacity is also shaped by relations with other parties, in some cases radically so. public administration and management scholars have for many years been exploring these questions. there has been extensive work on the range of costs and benefits of engaging external parties and the types of value these relationships seek to create (alford and o’flynn ; o’flynn a). covid- is showing both the power of these relationships as well as the fragility and burdensome nature of them. as will be discussed later in this section, government is relying heavily on service users and citizens to co-create value; we need to think in more depth about the nature and dynamic of this relationship and what factors impact on it (oecd ). government has also become increasingly reliant on private sector firms to deliver on its objectives and must grapple with the tensions that occur in these attempts at value creation. j. o’flynn experiences during covid- have bought into stark relief the fragility and proble- matic nature of these relationships. in britain, for example, test-and-trace services provided by the private firm serco have been problematic, costly and ineffective (mueller and bradley ). in australia, a major covid- outbreak in the state of victoria has been tracked to a hotel quarantine programme where a combination of poor governmental decision-making, reliance on private security firms, exploitative work practices, poor training and low wages have combined to help fuel the second wave of infections (thorne ). in the same state, an explosion of cases in aged care facilities operated by private firms has shown up intergovernmental conflicts, lax compliance and enforcement of standards leading to out-of-control infections and deaths (handley ). the ongoing tension between the pursuit of public and private value in these relationships has borne out in these examples, demonstrated how relationships have been poorly designed to create shared value, undermining govern- mental capacity to protect its citizens. we have long known that the deep cuts under austerity have undermined public services across the world, but the true extent is now on display for all to see (kim ; thomas ). as mazzucato and quaggiotto ( ) have argued ‘effective govern- ment, as it turns out, cannot be conjured up at will, because it requires investment in state capacity.’ in britain, for instance, austerity has left the health and care systems lacking the resources and resilience needed to confront the scale and scope of the pandemic (thomas ). the state is now over reliant on the private sector to carry out what many see as core public service roles during a pandemic (mueller and bradley ). thomas ( , ) argued that covid- has shown that this was ‘neither productive, nor efficient . . . [with] lost capacity in public health meaning poorer population health, creating unnecessary risk.’ despite notions that public and private actors can work together to create public value (moore ; o’flynn ; alford and o’flynn ), the experience of recent times has questioned whether this promise has been realized. mishra ( ) put it more brutally: over the last decade, successive conservative governments have ruthlessly shredded what was left of the social safety net in the name of budgetary ‘austerity’, hastening britain’s decline into a flailing – if not failed – state that can’t even secure supplies of gowns and masks for its hospital workers. alongside the increase complexity of challenges and questions of capacity has been increasing dismay at a parallel trend: the erosion of trust in government. whilst declining trust calls into question the capacity of governments to act, it is also true that government competence, or a lack of it, undermines trust (oecd ). on the cusp of one of the most complex challenges to confront governments, the oecd reported that in only % of people trusted government (oecd ). however, as governments around the world have acted to respond to covid- , we have seen a rapid uptick in trust. the edelman trust barometer, for example, saw an -point improvement for trust in government from january to may indicating that trust is back; at least for now. since , government had languished in distrust globally, as gridlock in the eu over greek debt and several corruption scandals in developing nations eroded trust. the [may results] shows a striking comeback for government: at percent trust (+ points since january), the public is relying on government to protect them in a manner not seen since public management review world war ii. trust in government is not only up by double digits in six of markets surveyed, it is the only institution trusted by the mass population ( percent). across the world we have seen wildly differential responses to covid- . one area where public administration and management scholars can contribute will be to explore these links between levels of trust and the capacity to act, especially how this relates to whether government can connect with citizens in processes of value co- creation (osborne ). covid- has shown in detail just how reliant the imple- mentation of government action is on a range of parties, including citizens who are being asked, or directed, to modify their behaviour – handwashing, mask-wearing, limiting movement, physically distancing (world health organization ). how we conceptualize, or reconceptualize these dynamics is important, as are notions of value – individual vs. collective, public vs. private; or personal well-being through to societal value (strokosch and osborne ). for example, osborne’s ( ) work encourages us look at notions of value co-creation, which depends on how individuals engage with the ‘offering’ of public sector organizations. recent work by strokosch and osborne ( ) indicates the importance of goal congruence between actors and how this can constrain and enable value creation. others such as alford ( , ), frame these interactions as various types of co-production in pursuit of public value and differentiate between the various client roles that can shape these dynamics. citizens are also bearing the ramifications of wide-spread unemployment as entire industries are shuttered to protect public health. and whilst currently citizens express a desire to save lives over jobs (edelman ), such other-regarding attitudes may be difficult to sustain over time as the world enters a period of economic meltdown. as lockdowns continue around the world, we need to understand these links, but also how some sort of compliance fatigue may undermine even the best strategies that govern- ment develops to combat covid- . in other words, will some sort of ‘goal con- gruence’ hold or fall apart over time (strokosch and osborne )? will citizens continue to respond positively to calls on them, or will they refuse? the virus has: . . . laid bare one of the gnarliest problems facing all governments. convincing people to change their behaviour in the ways needed to prevent new waves of covid- will rely on people worrying about others as well as themselves. in most places the disease has become one that threatens the elderly, the poor and marginalised minorities. but beating back a virus that has spread around the world with such ferocity will be impossible unless most people play by the rules of the new normal (the economist b, july). in the most extreme lockdown cases the state is determining almost every aspect of our lives; how we work, who can enter our homes, and how we exercise. when the state of victoria, australia declared a ‘state of disaster’ in early august it deployed “the country’s most intrusive bureaucracy since its days as a penal colony (cave ) and handed control of the public service to the police and emergency services minister (morton ). the victorian lockdown has included the use of military personnel to enforce movement restrictions within the city of melbourne and between the metro- politan centre and regional areas; permit systems now exist for border crossing, childcare and working on site. as altshuler and hershkovitz ( , ) have argued, such action would have been unimaginable in democratic nations prior to covid- : this fear prompted citizens of all democratic countries to obey orders and voluntarily surren- der some of their basic freedoms, in exchange for maintaining their health. in parallel, the very same fear has led democratic governments to place restrictions on freedom, demonstrating j. o’flynn their immense power and control, in ways which would have been deemed quite inconceivable before the pandemic. whether trust matters for citizen co-production or the co-creation of value and how this links to capacity is important to understand. for example, in new zealand where the government implemented a hard lockdown and sought elimination of covid- there were pre-existing high levels of trust in government (macaulay ). studies have shown that trust has remained high – % of new zealanders trust government to make the right decisions regarding covid- (compared to % across the g ), and there is renewed faith in public institutions (shaw ). in contrast, in the us pre- covid levels of trust in government were at historic lows (pew research center ), in a nation shaped by ‘underlying anti-statist political culture . . . [and a] pathological distrust of government’ (fukuyama ). this has made coordinated governmental approaches extraordinarily challenging, with claims that communities are picking up much of the organizing work (yong ). it has also turned state requests or demands of citizens for behavioural adaptation into a battleground. as covid- continues to challenge governments around the world, citizens turn to them to for solutions. such solutions though are proving hard to find, especially given that the arrival of such a pandemic has been predicted for many years (world health organization , ). so, as much as governments have been shocked, they should not be surprised. what is clear is that citizen behaviour will play a critical role in addressing the pandemic; here issues of co-production (alford ) and/or co- creation of value (osborne ) can help us to understand these dynamics. as can the emerging work on ecosystems of value creation which can cope with multiple actors, conflict, power and processes of value creation and destruction (strokosch and osborne ). how covid- will shape our sense of the role of government moving forward is an area for attention – clearly big government is back in many nations – and the pandemic has shown us how much government does matter. or more specifically, it has shown us how much government capacity matters. how capable governments are in dealing with the virus may well impact on trust with government; perceived failures are likely to burst the current ‘trust bubble’. and citizens who we are relying on to change behaviours and bear substantial burdens in doing so may well suffer fatigue and disillusionment, thus undermining the energy and engagement needed to fight the virus. how these patterns connect or lock together both now and post-covid is an area that matters for public administration and management scholars. here there is plenty of scope to contribute, learn, and build new knowledge with others. justice, inequality and entrenched disadvantage the covid- pandemic has acted as an accelerant for many entrenched issues across the world, highlighting injustice, systemic inequality and entrenched disadvantage. global evidence shows that a growing sense of unfairness negatively impacts on trust in institutions; recent data also shows that people believe that those with less are bearing more of a burden of suffering, illness, and sacrifice during the pandemic (edelman ). these perceptions are playing out in real time, with the poorest and most vulnerable bearing the biggest burdens of the covid- crisis. those least able to cope and already in dire circumstances are suffering: ‘without urgent socio-economic public management review responses, global suffering will escalate, jeopardizing lives and livelihoods for years to come’ (patterson ). the un estimates that as many as . billion workers in the informal economy will lose their livelihoods, most in developing countries (patterson ). in the uk, evidence is showing that those with the least are being impacted the most (social metrics commission ). at the same time that covid- is amplify- ing these issues, a mass social movement, black lives matter, has taken hold around the world centring racial injustices and demanding transformational changes to society. together these phenomena form the second big thematic challenge i want to emphasize as an area for public administration and management scholars to make a difference. in my view two areas in particular emerge. the first area is an acknowledgement of the marginalization of these topics in the field itself and a commitment to change. wicked problems related to justice, inequality and entrenched disadvantage have been important themes in public administration and management for many years, but it is fair to say that these have not been at the centre of the field. to be clear, many excellent scholars have focused on these issues for a long time, seeking to address them and improve the lives of communities through various means; they have made a profound difference. as a field, however, these issues have not been seen as foundational. recent work, however, is challenging this. blessett et al. ( , emphasis in original) recently argued: ‘as a discipline and practice, we have not adequately anchored social equity to the foundation of public administration.’ they argued that within the public sector there existed numerous inequities, across myriad policy areas, and these ‘result in detrimental harms for subjugated and margin- alized communities’ (p. ). a key principle of their manifesto is for social equity to be positioned as a foundational anchor of public administration. black lives matter, and the broader social movement it has inspired, also brings to light the limited attention that public administration has given to racial issues. again, this is not to argue that excellent work has not been done; it has. rather that these issues have not been seen as central which goes to my earlier points about who has had the power to define the field. a call to action has been made by alexander and stivers ( , ) who argued that public administration has given limited attention to: . . . the dynamic of race as manifest in patterns of policy interpretation and discretionary judgements of individual administrators . . . scholarship in the field has failed to come to terms with how this neglect has contributed to maintaining long-standing policies and prac- tices with racist implications. the intersection of a global pandemic with a global movement for change which directly challenges the role and operation of government is an area that public administration and management must confront. now is the time for the debate about race in our field – how race matters, the injustices and subjugation that has been built into scholarship and practice, and how we must change this. the second area of focus is on the intersection of issues of justice, inequality and disadvantage at this historic moment. what does it mean for how we think about the practice of public administration and how our research can drive social change. it is clear now that across the world the repercussions of covid- will be catastrophic, plunging millions into unemployment and poverty and destroying livelihoods. some . billion children have already been forced out of physical schooling – million of them in developing countries. it is estimated that million children may never return to school, with young girls primed to be the most impacted (the economist c, j. o’flynn july). it is also true that decades of economic, social and political change have come to a head during the crisis; in other words decades of policies founded on neoliberal- ism, individualism, and a market-based society (sandel ). in the usa and uk, for instance, mishra ( ) argued: anglo-america’s dingy realities – deindustrialisation, low-wage work, underemployment, hyper-incarceration and enfeebled or exclusionary health systems – have long been evident. nevertheless, the moral, political and material squalor of two of the wealthiest and most powerful societies still comes as a shock to some. the links between poverty, race and covid- are critical to understand. evidence is emerging, for example, of a bi-directional relationship between poverty and covid- . in other words, poverty exacerbates the effects of covid- and is also exacer- bated by it. and despite many commentators arguing that covid- does not discriminate, evidence is showing that clearly it does. in the usa, black and latino americans are contracting and dying from covid- more than white americans (board ). in brazil, black and indigneous brazilians are dying at higher rates, with predications that indigneous tribes will lose a generation of leaders (andreoni, londoño, and casado ; phillips ; ruball and araujo jnr. ). in the uk, those already overrepresented in poverty are being hit the hardest – black and asian groups have been more negatively than white groups; people with a disability are more likely to have negative labour market outcomes (social metrics commission ). predictions for the future are dire with those already in poverty expected to move more deeply into it, and those that were close to the poverty line will cross it. the study also showed that those in poverty reported higher, and increasing levels of loneliness, with around one-third fearing for their future. in the uk, a recent report laid out just how devastating covid- has been to those who already experience disadvantage. public health experts are showing that disadvantaged people are more vulnerable to infection because they are more likely to live in overcrowded accommodation, work in occupa- tions where there aren’t work from home options, are more likely to have unstable work and income, present later for health care services, and often have reduced access to health-care covid- presents a much higher health risk for the already disad- vantaged groups in society (patel et al. ). getting help, however, has been challenging despite the action of many govern- ments to provide stimulus and support. the capacity issue here has been critical, but so is the nature of burdens placed on those in need, and the philosophical and moral underpinnings of public service systems. the welfare system in the usa, for exam- ple, has crumpled under the pressure. by july, million americans had applied for unemployment claims which overwhelmed state-based systems. in oklahoma for instance, hundreds of people camped out overnight to get the ticket needed for an appointment so they could submit their details (gowen ). in that state ‘mega- processing events’ are being held at large sporting arenas. even when people apply the backlogs are massive; social security and welfare systems have been overwhelmed around the world. in washington d.c., the story is similar with people waiting months to have applications processed and falling into poverty and homelessness during the process. the complex intersections between state schemes and federal emergency coronavirus schemes makes the situation worse – applicants for the federal assistance scheme in the usa need to be rejected by their state scheme first before they can access the pandemic programme (swenson ). the experience is public management review highlighting in many nations the underinvestment in systems and outdated pro- cesses, the administrative burdens (herd and moynihan ) in place, how difficult it remains for governments to work together, and also the degrading encounters that many citizens have with the state when they are at their most vulnerable. there are important areas where public administration and management scholars can make a difference. another area of global concern has been in aged care services, a magnet for covid- the world over given the mix of high-risk residents, insecure workforces, and lax regulations in many countries. covid- has torn through this vulnerable sector of the community: ‘runaway coronavirus infections, medical gear shortages and govern- ment inattention are woefully familiar stories in nursing homes around the world’ (stevis-gridneff, apuzzo, and pronczuk ). tens of thousands of elderly people have died due to a combination of warnings being ignored, a lack of preparedness, and neglect; in many nations aged care was not even included in preparedness plans. elders have been warehoused away from sight, invisible. in some places it has been argued that elderly people were simply left to die – in belgium, for instance, hospitals refused infected patients and denied them care and it took weeks to determine who was responsible for care as various parts of governments passed the buck (stevis- gridneff, apuzzo, and pronczuk ). the situation was so dire that médecins sans frontières dispatched teams of experts into nursing homes to care for residents. similarly, in sweden emergency doctors turned away the elderly and in spain inves- tigations are under way to determine is aged care residents were abandoned and left to die (stevis-gridneff, apuzzo, and pronczuk ). in australia, an outbreak in aged care facilities in victoria has highlighted issues of responsibility between levels of government, with complex mixes of public and private providers and regulatory regimes administered by the federal government. a disaster that was entirely predict- able given the many reviews and inquires that have been done into this sector (lucas and cunningham ). this experience also raises questions of whether these com- plex hybridic models may have serious defects that only truly come to light in crisis, thus raising questions of how different governing models interact with vulnerability (o’flynn b, forthcoming). justice, inequality and entrenched disadvantage is a big thematic challenge that demands attention from public administration and management scholars. from our most vulnerable citizens, through to how we design public services and welfare systems, matters. public administration and management scholars have wrestled with the boundaries of the field, as was discussed earlier – whether we should be normative or instrumental, and whether big social issues should be left to others or constitute central themes. covid- has shown us that it is time for the multiple, complex, and uncomfortable issues that relate to justice, inequality and entrenched disadvantage to become critical to public administration and management. as blessett et al. ( , – ) argued recently: . . . in light of the current state of affairs across the globe, those who constitute the field – both practitioners and scholars – must engage in intentional, active, and ethical efforts to serve and safeguard all people, especially the most vulnerable in our society. no longer can we engage in functional activities that do harm, nor can we passively stand on the sidelines. this is a defining moment that will reveal what we value. j. o’flynn covid- has amplified this call. by design or default, in many countries we are returning to an era of big government. mass unemployment, catastrophic health outcomes, decimated industries, exploding state debt, growing inequality, and extreme poverty are all likely effects of an unprecedented pandemic. public administration and management must play a part in shaping the responses intellectually and practically. we can do this by working with others and also by acknowledging that our field needs to transform. the future of our field what comes post-covid remains to be seen. what we do know is that the experience of a global disruption of this scale and scope raises a series of critical challenges for societies and for us as scholars. i have highlighted two big thematic challenges; areas where i think that public administration and management scholars can make a difference and where there are many interconnections to be made. in doing so i don’t claim to define the field or to push other topics to the side, but rather to spotlight important areas for us to grapple with. in summing up there are several important points to emphasis. public administration and management matters; both as a field and as a craft. as a field we need to confront the big challenges of our times and develop and deploy knowledge that helps to address them. in this way i echo the call from kirlin , ) more than two decades ago: public administration is a central part of the grandest of human endeavors – shaping a better future for ourselves and those yet unborn. the institutions crafted to achieve human aspira- tions require administration, including public agencies; however, the measure of success is not at the instrumental level, but in its enduring value not only to those in a particular nation, state, or city, but worldwide to all who aspire for improved lives . . . we should take our role in society very seriously – the big questions of public administration must address how we make society better or worse for citizens. as a field this means we must also pay heed to the catastrophic effects that covid- looks likely to have on the next generation of scholars and the big ideas that they are developing. for many entering into what is already a tough labour market, the coming years will be worse. for those in precarious positions which are likely to be cut as universities look to tighten their belts and reduce expenditure, this is dire. our field will be all the poorer for it. not just the scholarship that may never be done, but our gifted colleagues who won’t be in classrooms with the next generation of people driven to serve the public. this will be an inter-generational disaster for us all. and we need to try and stop it. covid- has shown us that the craft of public administration and management also matters. the current situation demonstrates clearly the role that government plays and the value creation it can catalyse, often in conjunction with citizens. citizens lean heavily on government, and vice versa, but without trust, redundancy, resilience and capacity the ability to confront these challenges is severely diminished. indeed, these relationships can be as value destroying as they can be value creating (flemig and osborne ). the depletion and long-term deterioration of aspects of public sector systems has left us more vulnerable to complex challenges. this is a dynamic shown clearly in some of the public-private failures that have come centrestage during the crisis. building in redundancy and adaptive capabilities is critical as we move forward. public management review in the uk calls for this are already being made: ‘now, the uk government should take the opportunity to create a system where resilience is considered efficient, where long- term thinking is encouraged, and where resources ae allocated to delivery on it’ (thomas , ). it also means that this moment offers ample opportunity for deep learning and adaptation and for looking at how to rebuild many systems that have been shown to be problematic or which have themselves exacerbated the effects of the pandemic. for example, the heavy reliance on private actors to pursue public value has deep fault lines that must be explored in much more detail. any short-term gain made in such relationships can be quickly overshadowed by big, catastrophic value destruction during crisis. it is likely that the wave of examples illustrating this will continue for some time to come. what is happening under the cover of covid- matters immensely. as the world grapples with the covid- catastrophe, we need to keep an eye on the undercurrents; developments that will be out of the spotlight, but which need our continued attention. for instance, there has been increased violence against women across the world (un women ); harsher border action by the usa (the economist d, july); increased surveillance of citizens in many nations (altshuler and hershkovitz ); and challenges to democracy in countries as diverse as pakistan (afzal ), hong kong (yam ), the usa (goldberg ), bolivia (pagliarini ), india (raza ), and australia (kelly ; murphy ). each of these developments, and many more, happening under the cover of covid has the potential for profound impact on public administration and management but is also demands input and guidance from our field. covid- has been a disruptive force in our field and much attention is turning to understanding the impacts. but we should also be mindful to connect up to pre- covid developments that were already underway. alongside big thematic challenges are shifts in the field that have already started, and which will lock in with these challenges in interesting ways. the emerging work by mergel, ganapati, and whitford ( ), for example, on agile governance provides a new way of thinking about public administration and management and can be an important influence. or the manifesto developed by douglas et al. ( ) on positive public administration which focuses on success and positive contributions in the field rather than just failure. also critical to the field moving forward is the notion of integrative public administration developed by carboni and nabatchi ( , ) which ‘reframes and expands the role of public administration scholar as integrator and connector of research and practice.’ this approach is anchored in: . . . a strategic approach to improving the social contract, governance, and policy implementa- tion that puts scholars at the nexus of scholarship and practice. instead of emphasizing whether the scholarship-practice divide is abysmal or necessary, we call for public administration scholars to understand their unique position to help address complex puzzles related to public values and the administrative state.” (carboni and nabatchi , ) i began this piece with the notion that we have big thematic challenges to address during, and after, covid- . and i stressed that we need to move out of our silos to do this, to work at the intersections to make a difference. as davis ( ) has argued: ‘pandemics and plagues have a way of shifting the course of history, and not always in a manner immediately evident to the survivors . . . the covid pandemic will be j. o’flynn remembered as such a moment in history, a seminal event whose significance will unfold only in the wake of the crisis.’ if ever there was a time for public administration and management scholars to make that difference, it is now. notes . global data is available from the johns hopkins coronavirus resource centre online at: https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/map.html. accessed july . . on brazil see phillips and maisonnave ( ), on iran see borger ( ), on bolivia see abc news ( ), on south africa see besent ( ) and on the united states see samuels and usero ( ). . the seven that i identified were: the role of government, trust and the citizenry; working together; justice, equity and entrenched disadvantage; leadership, workforce and service; the digital and data revolution; performance, innovation and reform; and, covid undercurrents. . this quote from the edelman launch site for the spring report ( may ) online at: https://www. edelman.com/research/trust- -spring-update the full spring report on the edelman trust barometer available online at: https://www.edelman.com/sites/g/files/aatuss /files/ - / % edelman% trust% barometer% spring% update.pdf. both accessed july . . for detailed cataloguing of government responses see the blavatnik coronavirus response tracker online at: https://www.bsg.ox.ac.uk/research/research-projects/coronavirus- government-response-tracker acknowledgments disclosure statement the author has no conflicts of interest to report in relation to this article. notes on contributor janine o'flynn is professor of public management at the university of melbourne and her research interests focus in particular on reform and relationships. this covers topics as diverse as the creation and evolution of public service markets, collaboration and joined-up government, and devising effective performance management systems. increasingly her focus is on the intersection of public management practices and morality in areas of policy complexity. she has received several academic awards with colleagues including: best articles in public administration review and review of public personnel administration; and a best book and several best paper awards at academy of management. orcid janine o’flynn http://orcid.org/ - - - references abc news. . “coronavirus update: mass graves dug in bolivia to cope with rising death toll, pubs reopen in england.” abc news. july. https://www.abc.net.au/news/ - - /coronavirus- update-covid- -us-donald-trump-fourth-of-july/ abouassi, k., a. amirkhanyan, g. billingsley, and r. lyon. . “reflections on the persistent issue of relevance in public administration.” perspectives on public management and governance ( ): – . doi: . /ppmgov/gvz 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https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/coronavirus-unemployment-delays-dc/ / / / -c - ea- ffe- be d _story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/coronavirus-unemployment-delays-dc/ / / / -c - ea- ffe- be d _story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/local/coronavirus-unemployment-delays-dc/ / / / -c - ea- ffe- be d _story.html https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/public-administration-uk/ https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/politicsandpolicy/public-administration-uk/ https://www.ippr.org/files/ - /resilient-health-and-care-july .pdf https://www.ippr.org/files/ - /resilient-health-and-care-july .pdf https://www.abc.net.au/news/ - - /victoria-coronavirus-hotel-quarantine-inquiry-day- -in-melbourne/ https://www.abc.net.au/news/ - - /victoria-coronavirus-hotel-quarantine-inquiry-day- -in-melbourne/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-is-what-national-decline-looks-like/ / / /ef fd -c f - ea-b -f f ee _story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/this-is-what-national-decline-looks-like/ / / /ef fd -c f - ea-b -f f ee _story.html https://doi.org/ . / - . https://www.unwomen.org/-/media/headquarters/attachments/sections/library/publications/ /brief-covid- -domestic-violence-in-the-world-of-work-en.pdf?la=en% vs= https://www.unwomen.org/-/media/headquarters/attachments/sections/library/publications/ /brief-covid- -domestic-violence-in-the-world-of-work-en.pdf?la=en% vs= https://www.unwomen.org/-/media/headquarters/attachments/sections/library/publications/ /brief-covid- -domestic-violence-in-the-world-of-work-en.pdf?la=en% vs= https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid- % -july- https://www.who.int/dg/speeches/detail/who-director-general-s-opening-remarks-at-the-media-briefing-on-covid- % -july- https://hongkongfp.com/ / / /weaponising-covid- -how-state-suppression-breeds-distrust-and-disinformation-in-hong-kong/ https://hongkongfp.com/ / / /weaponising-covid- -how-state-suppression-breeds-distrust-and-disinformation-in-hong-kong/ https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/ / /coronavirus-american-failure/ / https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/ / /coronavirus-american-failure/ / 	abstract 	introduction 	a field of big questions: but what are they? 	from big questions to big thematic challenges 	the role of government, trust and the citizenry 	justice, inequality and entrenched disadvantage 	the future of our field 	notes 	acknowledgments 	disclosure statement 	notes on contributor 	orcid 	references revised perchard sage and routledge_edhw 	 review article growing old together: pop studies and music sociology today to be published in twentieth-century music / ( ) andy bennett and steve waksman, eds, the sage handbook of popular music (los angeles and london: sage, ), isbn - - - (hb). john shepherd and kyle devine, eds, the routledge reader on the sociology of music (new york and london: routledge, ), isbn - (hb) - - - - (pb). popular music and society had been thought inseparable long before the union was made official, at first in the title of pop’s original academic journal ( ), later in that of a much-taught textbook ( ). in many minds at late-century, sociologies of music were sociologies of pop: western art music’s true believers could still easily imagine that repertoire existing on another plane – the historical literature was devoted to the minute detailing of its mucky creative contexts, but that didn’t have to matter – and critically minded, social-science trained pop scholars usually didn’t care enough to argue. yet music sociology’s first, halting steps had actually been taken in approaching the classical canon, and the movement of the s and s that was the new musicology seemed radical precisely because it opened so many doors onto the social. that, then, was the situation years ago, at least in the anglophone countries: a popular music studies reaching maturity but still largely embedded in 																																																								 the journal popular music and society is published by routledge. brian longhurst, popular music and society (cambridge: polity, ). 	 sociology and media/communications departments, and a musicology gradually transforming into a discipline in which music was much more openly reconciled with the worlds of its making. time passed, and now the academics who pioneered both the new musicology and popular music studies are at retirement. as they go, so does the post-war liberal consensus that afforded their world-view and work; simultaneously arriving in earnest are new forms of social networking that completely rewire the cultures of creativity, knowledge and taste that those scholars knew and described. this is a useful time to take stock of the ways that academic discourses have framed musics in their social dimension, and, in light of those changes, to think about the ways those topics are being positioned for the future. the volumes under review here aim to do some of that work. as befits the patchy career of its subject, the routledge reader on the sociology of music is the first collection of its kind. by contrast, sage’s handbook of popular music is only the latest big-book attempt to define its field of study. i’ll begin this essay by tackling the handbook, and then turn to the reader; my evaluation of both books is often focused less on the qualities of specific chapters, and more on what editorial shaping says – or doesn’t say – about their respective fields at what could turn out to be a critical moment of social, political and disciplinary regeneration. *** if popular music studies is a much-defined field, then the handbook’s co-editor andy bennett is definer-in-chief: he was also part-responsible for the routledge popular music studies reader, and his works on youth and subcultures have similarly 	 aimed to orient what are broad areas of study. it’s tempting to compare bennett’s routledge and sage volumes in a search for shifts of concern and method, but it turns out that those books, like the intervening ashgate research companion to popular musicology ( ), explore an almost identical range of topics through very similar theoretical approaches. perhaps a field’s fundamental shape and history can’t be expected to mutate that much over years, and in any case, that doesn’t mean the new volume is redundant. on the contrary: comprising commissioned essays rather than greatest hits, this is an ambitious collection full of excellent primers on pop music’s classic study areas. and there is an effort to move things along by way of a consideration of the digital (non-)economies that characterise the music industry’s chaotic present. yet that editorial model, where landmarks are dutifully staked out and the field extended in directions within easy methodological reach, can only succeed within limits. so while this volume points towards what it identifies as new frontiers for popular music studies, also visible are some methodological lacunae that make it difficult for pop scholars get beyond these reference-book rituals of consolidation. to begin with, the title: the sage handbook of popular music is about the field and its scholars more than the music that might seem to be signalled. here, things do not generally begin at the level of practice or genre and work upwards, and the relationship between the descriptive and the theoretical, between popular music and its study, is often uneasy. even if a theoretical register is usually privileged, the area’s central problems are not always articulated, and that titular ambiguity is only deepened by the editors’ lack of interest in defining what ‘the popular’ might and might not mean. you can’t blame them: more-or-less tortured attempts to answer that important but impossible question took up a lot of space in works by first-generation 	 popular music thinkers. but without explicitly posing or reframing the problem, we are bound to be left with popular music in know-it-when-i-see-it form; almost inevitably, the book betrays a familiar (and very anglo-american) idea of what pop music’s creative contexts, businesses, audiences, communicative properties and analytical methods look like. the same might be said of the volume’s methodological slant. topic sections, each consisting of three to five mid-length essays and an introduction, include theory and method, the business of popular music, popular music history, the global and the local, the star system, body and identity, media, technology, digital economies. these groupings, the editors write, describe both foundational and emergent areas of popular music studies. if it’s a subject list that says more about sociological or media studies concerns than music, well, those are the bragging rights won way back when few musicologists gave a hoot about pop. but things have changed, and a corollary of popular music’s increasing presence in music departments across the global north has been a growth in the study of creative practice, the hands- on stuff that bird’s-eye sociologies of ‘production’ so often miss. studio work, songwriting, the technical and aesthetic intricacies of any kind of performance: if there is an emergent study area in popular music, surely this is it. as i’ve been hinting, it’s not so much novelty as purpose that this book can seem to lack, and this is made plain in the volume’s somewhat scattershot survey of sociological, musicological and cultural studies methods. as all that would suggest, this field has never been anything other than methodologically heterodox. but this has left it prone to bouts of anguished self-reflection, during which scholars either lament the lack of a more defined theoretical toolkit, or else defend its analytical 	 improvisation and empiricism. that history is left largely unacknowledged here, and rather than cutting to the chase, this gives the opening section a rather arbitrary feel. it’s not just that we don’t fully know what’s at stake, or why the broad approaches described here have been singled out above others; without pinpointing popular music’s ‘problem set’, we’re not always sure what it is these methods might be trying to accomplish. in this, the book reflects a wider situation. there will never be a shortage of emergent contexts in which favourite concepts can be reapplied – mediation, identity construction – and originality achieved. yet here is where pop music studies can betray a slide into middle-aged routine: ready answers for everything, but difficulty remembering the question. so the first essay we read in this guide to popular music studies is kevin dawe’s piece on ethnomusicological approaches. however surprisingly placed the piece might appear, it says something important about the current direction of studies in popular music, as distinct from ‘popular music studies’. it’s been noticeable over the last few years that more and more job announcements have invited applications from ethnomusicologists working on global popular musics. as much as that suggests an acknowledgement of pop’s ubiquity (and students’ desire to study it), the common refusal to advertise for a popular music scholar per se likely speaks of other institutional concerns. whatever those may be, in both research and appointment terms the centre of gravity in academic popular music studies seems to be shifting 																																																								 see, for instance, lawrence grossberg, ‘reflections of a disappointed popular music scholar’, in rock over the edge: transformations in popular music culture, ed. roger beebe, denise fulbrook and ben saunders (durham, nc: duke university press, ), - , and simon frith’s response in his review of that volume in popular music / ( ), - . 	 away from the sociology/media focus described above (and this at a time when scholars in media departments are increasingly concerned with non-musical new media). as both dawe’s headline status and the later ‘global and the local’ section attest, editors bennett and waksman clearly recognise this shift. but the changing purview can’t be said to receive its due here, especially with that section’s chapters all written by white, anglophone men. the practicalities of commissioning and editing will always get in the way of any ideal project, but still, of the book’s contributors, work in the uk, north america or australia. given the importance of music’s making, industries and scholarship in many areas across asia and the global south, this can only be an opportunity missed. here, then, is the first of those lacunae that needs desperately to be filled. writing in from the book’s self-defined geographical margins – but tasked with describing sociological methods always central to the field – is the israeli motti regev. in the same vein as his work on pop-rock cosmopolitanism and, again, the relation between global and local phenomena, regev’s piece typifies now-current pop and ethnomusicological takes on the workings and values of globalisation: what regev calls ‘expressive isomorphism’ ( ), that is, activity within multiply-mediated genre shapes shared across continents, is a positive recasting of the old folklorist’s ‘cultural grey-out’. (elsewhere in the volume, several authors side-eye ageing ideas of mcdonaldization and disneyfication in the same spirit.) in regev’s piece, as in several other orienting chapters of sociological bent, bourdieu remains the touchstone. but by the end of the book, the venerable frenchman is being shadowed by richard 																																																								 see motti regev, pop-rock music: aesthetic cosmopolitanism in late modernity (cambridge: polity, ). 	 peterson and roger kern’s much-cited figure of the omnivore – this the ever-flitting fan who has replaced the subcultural exclusionist in popular musical imagination – and problems with fundamentally structural descriptions of taste are beginning to be raised. still, given their centrality to early popular music studies, it’s quite right that old subcultures should get their due. gilbert b. rodman’s skilful gloss of pop music in cultural studies describes and contextualises that work as it emerged from birmingham’s centre for contemporary cultural studies from the s; rodman illustrates the cccs’s monumentally influential analysis of ideology, communication and class via a discussion of stuart hall’s concepts of articulation, and encoding and decoding, displaying as he does so a systematic and critical approach that is not always to be seen elsewhere. serge lacasse’s sort-of-survey of analytical methods is a case in point. were the aims of the book better defined, this might have been a useful discussion of the problems of and debates around the musicological study of pop. but those techniques themselves are only alluded to here; we end the chapter being almost none the wiser as to what they actually are, and what they might or might not be able to do that others can’t. instead of a systematic description of efforts made across the popular music studies corpus, lacasse offers a ruminative and introverted institutional history of the position of analysis within professional culture. an article that cites at length a society for music theory subgroup’s mission statement, but none of the analytical work it means to support, will win no-one over to what is an often-maligned but, to some of us at least, sorely needed set of approaches to music study. here is a second project unfulfilled. 																																																								 	richard a. peterson and roger m. kern, ‘changing highbrow taste: from snob to omnivore’, american sociological review / ( ), - . 	 the balance of description and theorisation is not always problematic. in the section on the business of pop, reebee garofalo provides a typically rich (if us- centred) historical sketch of the business and its power relations. devon powers’ subsequent piece on intermediaries and intermediation takes a more conceptual approach to related problems: she argues for a shift of attention from the conflicted notion of the cultural intermediary, to mediation more broadly conceived, and a new focus on the active circulation of both music and power across the overlapping fields of production and consumption. the same dynamic shapes the section on stardom, in which david shumway’s authoritative, cross-media history of the icon is followed by philip auslander’s critical rumination on the performance of star identity. it may be that the book’s uneasy conjunction of narrative and reflection is not a product of editorial decision, but symptomatic of a problem fundamental to popular music studies: it has never really known what to do with pop’s history. this is the third, and for me most important gap in popular music scholarship to date. ‘for a long time’, catherine strong writes in her chapter on memory, ‘popular music’s association with youth and the fact that it was still a relatively new cultural form meant that questions about its past were not of major concern’ ( ). as i’ve suggested, that youthful moment has passed. but add to strong’s observation the generally present-minded sociological and cultural studies approaches that have been central to pop studies, and a piecemeal approach to history and historical method is assured: pop’s past, as is sometimes the case here, will be selectively mined for background to a contemporary problem rather than treated in its own right. this is not to ignore the fine historical work done by scholars working in those disciplines, or in literary and area studies. but those efforts do not amount to a thoroughgoing address of pop’s broader historical domain and problems, nor one that will engage with 	 creative practices and their representation with the tenacity that music specialists might. a proper address of pop’s past is a major challenge for the future. the editors should be thanked, then, for including a short section on popular music history at all, since earlier summations of the field have not. but their introduction nevertheless describes ‘history’ in a rather presentist way, with pop music, they write, finally being recognised as ‘a cultural form deemed worthy of celebration and preservation as a form of cultural heritage’ ( ). it’s true that writing on pop’s history as heritage industry, or its remnants as material culture, accounts for many of the pop studies that engage theoretically with the historical. yet a competing, growing body of work – much of it appearing in the relatively young journal popular music history – centres on problems more classically (and perhaps more profoundly) historical: causation, narrative and interpretation, structure and agency. with more confidence, and a more secure theoretical understanding of what problems popular music historians might need to address, this topic section might have done important work in removing the historical project from its cult-studs present. but that’s not to fault the component chapters in themselves. an extract from keir keightley’s project on tin pan alley offers a forensic examination of that place and concept in a shifting creative economy and cultural discourse. david brackett’s outline of the workings of genre in historical context, and matt brennan’s gloss of the live music industries, are more wide-ranging but equally engaging. readers can flip forwards to construct other bits of pop narrative for themselves, finding accounts of the elvis epiphany in david shumway’s article, or a partial history of hip hop in kembrew mcleod’s. indeed, while the book’s basic ‘pop-rock’ stylistic focus is what has served popular music studies for decades, hip hop is allocated an amount of space not seen in earlier guides to the field. tony mitchell revisits his work on the form outside the us 	 in the volume’s most combative piece: us hip hop scholars and artists are taken to task for what mitchell suggests is their parochialism and lack of political critique. mitchell’s material on creative and academic production in and on that form globally is interesting, but parts of his strongly stated argument against american hip hop work are misjudged. ‘[c]urrently prominent artists such as jay-z and kanye west simply perform their own celebrity and have nothing politically conscious to say’, he writes; ‘[t]his task is now left to hip hop artists in the rest of the world’ ( ). but both those stars have for years been widely understood as doing highly visible and highly contemporary kinds of political work. that hasn’t always meant the classic protest politics mitchell describes and venerates, but sometimes it has; at the time of trump and the black lives matter movement – and with high-profile statements sounded by kendrick lamar, killer mike, a tribe called quest and dozens of others – mitchell’s dismissal of american hip hop engagement seems hubristic at best. detail of that new politics comes later in the book, with c. riley snorton’s supple piece on race and stardom. as well as a thoughtful appraisal of kanye west’s conflicted public critique of both those concepts, snorton provides what is the book’s only real consideration of latin american music. the material he covers, like his analytical approach, has a welcome freshness. contrasting in method but not in quality, jon stratton’s survey of critical race theory in pop music studies is a lively, systematic and critical literature review eminently useful for teaching and basic research. the closing section of the book betrays a desire to bring things up to date, featuring essays on technology, digital and internet economies, and the attendant problems of intellectual property and its exploitation. there is some excellent writing here: peter doyle is characteristically, stylishly engaging on the development of 	 amplification in pop, and joanna demers gives a good, legalistic history of musical copying and sampling. but again, the book is somewhat flustered by its own format, and that bid for contemporaneity is doomed by the rapidity of change in this area. viewed at the distance of a matter of months, some of the final essays already read like reports from another time: by one calculation, in the year of the book’s publication streaming use grew by % in the us, and yet this enormous change in consumption practice receives little attention here. of course, this is not the fault of the editors or contributors. still, the book might have shown more enduring paths into pop’s digital future were it more given to methodological development than reportage. that’s perhaps the luxury, and certainly the strength, of the chapters that close john shepherd and kyle devine’s admirable routledge reader on the sociology of music. again centring on digitised mediation, these pieces are part of a project that is evidently less conflicted in its interplay of narrative and theory. that shared contemporary interest is far from the only one common to both these volumes, and the sections here – including approaches, sites, and debates, politics, industries, technology and mediation, new directions – read like a recasting of the sage volume’s own. this mixture of abridged reprints and new articles even features some of the same contributors as the sage handbook of popular music (though on the whole the authors here are slightly more geographically dispersed). so what do these similarities signify? is it that much in contemporary popular music studies is only accidentally about ‘popular music’, and that its real concerns are not defined by 																																																								 mark mulligan, ‘the labels still don’t get youtube and it’s costing them’, music industry blog, january . https://musicindustryblog.wordpress.com/ / / /the-labels-still-dont-get- youtube-and-its-costing-them/ (accessed february ). 	 musical kind at all? or is it that music studies more generally has been so deeply influenced by work on pop and its disciplinary sources that there is by now little to choose between its various branches? whatever the case, this is an important volume: for the first time, it draws together and contextualises what has, in the editors’ own description, been a broken tradition of sociological work on music. that some of it is sociology at all might surprise – schütz’s proto-hippy phenomenology of players ‘tuning in’, mcclary’s text-based cultural readings – but that’s to be expected, shepherd and devine argue: ‘the sociology of music’, they write, ‘is not merely the application to music of established sociological theories and empirics’, but is instead a range of variegated attempts to read music and the social as mutually infused (xi). that might be an ideal rather than a description of fact, since the editors also identify what has been the project’s basic problem, namely, ‘the tendency to reify both social structures and musical structures, in the service of ensuring a smooth analytical fit between the two’ ( ). so adorno, the cccs, howard becker, the new musicologists, these and other figures are evoked and often excerpted in setting out what shepherd and devine identify as music sociology’s central themes: music and (or as) social interaction; the construction of identities of whatever kind; processes of commerce; the material. but the book usefully reaches back to a time before those hallowed names and topics had emerged, its chapters proper beginning with herbert spencer’s and georg simmel’s mid- th–century speculations on the social and bio-cultural origins of music. these are beholden to the ideas of primitivism and progress that mark similar work then being written by music specialists; coming straight after, a extract by the little- known john h. mueller is like a coconut shy in which old tenets are knocked down 	 one by one. this is an exciting piece, one not just marking the start of music’s engagement with the sociological project as most now know it, but also ushering in what remain so many contemporary articles of faith. mueller’s radical relativism, his dismissal of high-cultural, ahistorical mythmaking, seems to belie the piece’s date of composition; notions of timelessness, zeitgeist and universalism are all packed off. perhaps most important is mueller’s recasting of the aesthetic as a primarily social category, where beauty is not inherent to music, but something that ‘happens’ to it ( - ). many early music sociologies focused on the western art tradition, and pop music studies took up the baton in the s. but the editors contend that a contemporary sociology cannot be so stylistically delimited, and a number of writers here continue that argument; lisa mccormick’s enjoyably rugged piece takes simon frith to task for positioning pop as exceptional in its bringing together of ‘the sensual, the emotional, and the social as performance’ ( ). as is often the case, adorno got there first – even if ironically – and reprinted here is the introduction to his sociology of music, including the demand for analyses of both ‘what is rightly called “corn”’ and ‘the truth content of authentic works’ ( ). without trying to overlook the german’s aesthetic hierarchy or read him as the progenitor of everything, it’s interesting that he also advocates work on the language people use in talking about music, something central to the now-burgeoning study of listening – even if adorno wanted his subjects’ guiding ideologies unmasked, and those contemporary researchers are at pains to take informants at their word. 																																																								 see for instance david hesmondhalgh, ‘audiences and everyday aesthetics: talking about good and bad music’, european journal of cultural studies / ( ), - ; raphaël nowak and andy bennett, ‘analysing everyday sound 	 for musicology’s old school, the characteristic sociological refusal to settle on single instances of music making, to really dig into them analytically in terms of their sound workings, betrays the discipline’s fundamental inability to cope with such a task. in a sub-section on that old stager, ‘the music itself’, peter martin takes on this charge, providing as he does so a critical primer on points of disciplinary discussion and disagreement between music and sociology. for martin, sociology wins: it’s possible, he says – and writing no farther away than the sage volume surely bears this out – to have an analysis of music as practice that is meaningful without saying anything about sound or its experience; he is dismissive of a music studies that still wants to focus on the singular work. there is no text without context, martin writes ( ). when this writing was first published in , musicologists might have responded that neither is there any context without a text. but the most contemporary chapters in this collection show that scholars working with the relational methods now coming to prominence routinely imagine those two categories as fictional, impossible to disentangle. taken together, the volume’s chapters on creation and consumption provide a systematic, critical consideration of key methodological approaches: becker’s art worlds, bourdieu’s fields, hennion’s mediation. some of the more topic-specific chapters in the middle of the book – mary fogarty on dance, simon frith on live music, dave laing on recording, paul théberge on digitalisation – are necessarily more descriptive than theoretical, and here again is a great amount of overlap with the sage volume. 																																																																																																																																																															 environments: the space, time and corporality of musical listening’, cultural sociology / ( ), - . 	 a final section identifies new directions of research. the editors write that the authors it collects – tia denora, georgina born, nick prior, jeremy gilbert – are looking for ‘resolutely non-reductive accounts of the realities of social processes and the specifics of musical sound’ ( ). if their approaches are new, then this quandary has nevertheless been encountered repeatedly throughout the book; after denora and born have outlined various ideas around the mutual enabling and mediation of social and aesthetic phenomena, it is only gilbert’s piece that attempts in any musical detail to chart that move ‘from signification to affect’, as his title has it. those wondering what vocabulary sociology will finally use to discuss the experience of sound might be disappointed to find that it is something a lot like broadsheet music criticism. personally, i like it – so will many musicologists after kerman still wishing for a scholarly rehabilitation of critical method – but others will worry that, however sure it is with the verbal and the visual, sociology still can’t tell us much about discourses that trade sonically. yet there’s a sense by the end of the volume that staging musicology and sociology as distinct enterprises is an outdated way of doing it (this thanks in part to the editors’ canny chapter plotting). the latter pieces show that so many areas of music studies are now imbricated (born’s word) with concepts of social mediation as to make that disciplinary division seem arbitrary. this leads shepherd and devine to wonder whether, despite and because of this new methodological richness, ‘the need for a distinctively sociological approach to music is no longer clear’ ( ). the same might be said for popular music studies, albeit in reverse. if style is so distant a concern as to warrant nary a consideration in the sage handbook – and if genre boundaries are so little respected in the age of spotify as to be meaningless for many listeners – is there a need for a music studies distinguished, confined, by that 	 ‘popular’? the question has been asked before, receiving its most extensive answers in a popular music symposium in . ‘rather than designating a particular genre or group of genres’, alf björnberg remarked then, pop music could, to an increasing extent, ‘be said to define the general conditions of music in contemporary information society’. isn’t it then time to convene a broadly conceived ‘music studies’, one not inflected by these old pop- or socio- qualifiers? not really, replied most of those symposium participants, and they were right. if not as a descriptive tool, then the ‘popular’ still served – and today continues to serve – a discursive purpose, articulating a complex set of cultural-political affinities, and making plain the inequitable distribution of power that endures in arts administration, education and research institutions concerned to promote pop’s high other. expressly sociological approaches must still be mobilised in the same way, and for the same reasons. but shepherd and devine recognise what those pop academics didn’t in , and by the looks of the sage handbook, still might not: good ideas spread, and get taken up with or without permission from their original guardians. across the field of music study, scholars and students are engaging with popular music apart from ‘popular music studies’, and sometimes apart from its classic sociological tenets. if that hard-won disciplinary territory is to remain valuable, then pop specialists need more often to move outside their own circles, and to prove what it is that they know better than everyone else. if the methodological address of 																																																								 ‘can we get rid of the “popular” in popular music? a virtual symposium with contributions from the international advisory editors of popular music’, popular music / ( ), - . the ‘descriptive/discursive’ distinction was richard middleton’s. ‘can we get rid of the “popular” in popular music?’, . 	 sociality and mediation are now almost common currency, it’s not that alone. but pop scholars’ ways of listening, their aesthetic literacies, their sympathy for identity and cultural memory, these remain distinctive; at the centre of a rejuvenated popular music studies should lie the close and imaginative study of pop’s creative practices and histories, in all their globally interconnected forms. tom perchard <t.perchard@gold.ac.uk> bibliography ‘can we get rid of the “popular” in popular music? a virtual symposium with contributions from the international advisory editors of popular music’. popular music / ( ), - . frith, simon. review of rock over the edge: transformations in popular music culture, ed. roger beebe, denise fulbrook and ben saunders. popular music / ( ), - . grossberg, lawrence. ‘reflections of a disappointed popular music scholar’, in rock over the edge: transformations in popular music culture, ed. roger beebe, denise fulbrook and ben saunders. durham, nc: duke university press, . - . 	 hesmondhalgh, david. ‘audiences and everyday aesthetics: talking about good and bad music’. european journal of cultural studies / ( ), - . longhurst, brian. popular music and society. cambridge: polity, . mulligan, mark. ‘the labels still don’t get youtube and it’s costing them’. music industry blog, january . https://musicindustryblog.wordpress.com/ / / /the-labels-still-dont-get- youtube-and-its-costing-them/ (accessed september ). nowak, raphaël and andy bennett. ‘analysing everyday sound environments: the space, time and corporality of musical listening’. cultural sociology / ( ), - . peterson, richard a. and roger m. kern, ‘changing highbrow taste: from snob to omnivore’. american sociological review / ( ), - . regev, motti. pop-rock music: aesthetic cosmopolitanism in late modernity. cambridge: polity, . the national elections: an american reckoning: israel journal of foreign affairs: vol , no skip to main content log in  |  register cart 	 home 	 all journals 	 israel journal of foreign affairs 	 list of issues 	 volume , issue 	 the national elections: an american .... search in: this journal anywhere advanced search israel journal of foreign affairs volume , - issue journal homepage , views crossref citations to date altmetric american currents: point–counterpoint the national elections: an american reckoning jeffrey herf view further author information pages - published online: sep 	 download citation 	 https://doi.org/ . / . . 	 crossmark   translator disclaimer 	 full article 	 figures & data 	 citations 	 	 metrics 	 reprints & permissions 	 get access /doi/full/ . / . . ?needaccess=true click to increase image sizeclick to decrease image size additional information notes on contributors jeffrey herf jeffrey herf is distinguished university professor in the department of history at the university of maryland, college park, where, since , he has taught modern european history with a focus on german history in the twentieth century. his most recent books are undeclared wars with israel: east germany and the west german radical left, – ( ) and nazi propaganda for the arab world ( ). in , with anthony mcelligott, prof. herf co-edited antisemitism before and since the holocaust: altered contexts and recent perspectives. his essays on contemporary history and politics have appeared in the american interest, the new republic, the washington post, frankfurter allgemeine zeitung, die welt, and die zeit. prof. herf’s “israel’s moment: the united states and europe between world war ii and the cold war” is forthcoming ( ). log in via your institution loading institutional login options... access through your institution log in to taylor & francis online log in shibboleth log in to taylor & francis online username password forgot password? remember me log in restore content access restore content access for purchases made as guest purchase options * save for later item saved, go to cart pdf download + online access 	 hours access to article pdf & online version 	article pdf can be downloaded 	article pdf can be printed usd . add to cart pdf download + online access - online checkout issue purchase 	 days online access to complete issue 	article pdfs can be downloaded 	article pdfs can be printed usd . add to cart issue purchase - online checkout * 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limited privacy policy cookies terms & conditions accessibility registered in england & wales no. howick place | london | sw p wg accept we use cookies to improve your website experience. to learn about our use of cookies and how you can manage your cookie settings, please see our cookie policy. by closing this message, you are consenting to our use of cookies. s .. liberal democracy in question? jeffrey c. isaac a specter is haunting world politics: the specter of “illiberal democracy.” the project of instituting a new form of illiberal democracy in place of the supposedly outmoded form of liberal democracy is most closely linked to hungarian prime minister viktor orban, who has repeatedly an- nounced this intention. but the idea is commonly associated with a broader range of political leaders, from jaroslaw kaczyński in poland, recep tayyip erdogan in turkey, and vladimir putin in russia to marine lepen in france, boris johnson and nigel farange in the uk, and donald trump in the united states. such leaders claim the mantle of democratic legitimacy. they seek and obtain power through elections, profess to represent the “nation” against cosmo- politan and liberal elites, and embrace a harsh majoritarian- ism that is hostile to countervailing forces—independent judiciaries, independent media institutions, human rights and activist ngos—that might limit their political projects. in the first instance this phenomenon is ideological and party-political, and relates to the ways that such actors seek to use governmental power to reshape domestic political institutions in an “illiberal” or even anti-liberal way, repudi- ating long-standing features of liberal democratic systems (some of these features are discussed below in bernard yack’s “political liberalism: political, not philosophical”). but it is also a global and transnational phenomenon, because these developments are actively promoted or opposed by the foreign policies of global powers like the u.s., russia, and china; because there are transnational diffusion processes and broader dynamics of globalization behind them; and because the fate of the european union, and of “europe,” looms large behind these developments. central to many of these issues is the political fate of turkey, a country at the border of europe and the middle east and north africa; a member of nato and a candidate for membership in the eu; a country on the front lines of overlapping global crises associated with isis-related violence in syria, iraq, and libya and an epic flow of refugees; and a “new democracy” viewed by some as a model of “islamist moderation” that is on the verge of falling into a new form of authoritarianism if it has not already done so. turkey indeed figures in three of this issue’s four research articles, and furnishes a lens through which to view all four of them. francisco gutiérrez-sanín and elisabeth jean wood’s “what should we mean by ‘pattern of political violence’? repertoire, targeting, frequency, and technique” is a contribution to a burgeoning literature on the comparative politics of violence. in it, the authors “provide a new conceptualization of political violence, defining an organization’s pattern of violence as the config- uration of repertoire, targeting, frequency, and technique in which it regularly engages. this approach adds precision to the documentation and analysis of political violence, clarifies the evaluation of rival theories, and opens up new research questions.” while they develop this conceptu- alization via an analysis of violence by insurgent and paramilitary non-state organizations against civilians in colombia, their approach would seem relevant to any situation where violence is being organized for political purposes, whether by insurgent or paramilitary organ- izations, groups with state-like aspirations—such as isis, which they discuss—or even states themselves. it is a commonplace of political science that wherever there are states there are “patterns” and “repertoires” of violence. even in liberal democratic states violence is organized and deployed to enforce “criminal justice” (see our september special issue on the political science of policing and incarceration), to “maintain public order,” and at times to limit dissent and political protest (e.g., the violence recently deployed against protestors at standing rock by sheriffs and local police—agents of the state—that was featured on the cover of our december issue). at the same time, the processes of liberal democratization are widely believed to constrain and minimize such political violence, by instituting relatively fair, open, and legitimate forms of civil association and political organization and a system of regular, peaceful competition for and rotation of office. such measures, if they succeed, can incorporate aggrieved groups into the political process and “domesticate” their grievances. stephen brooke’s “from medicine to mobilization: social service provision and the islamist reputational advantage” addresses an aspect of such political incorpo- ration via the case of the egyptian muslim brotherhood. the brotherhood is perhaps the most important islamic social and political movement in the world. through its mobilizational power and its political party, the freedom doi: . /s © american political science association march | vol. /no. from the editor https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core and justice party, it played a central role in the uprisings of . as brooke writes: “from to the muslim brotherhood dominated politics, winning elections for parliamentary seats and presidential office, and mustering the popular support to push through constitutional referendums. in july of egypt’s military dislodged the brotherhood and seized control of the country, inaugu- rating a sweeping campaign of state violence. in addition to mass killings and widespread torture and imprisonment, the regime has also shuttered and seized thousands of the brotherhood’s social institutions in an attempt to strip the group of the mechanisms which, for decades, served to connect them with average egyptians.” in his article, brooke employs a mixed-method approach to analyze the role of the muslim brotherhood’s provision of high-quality medical services in establishing its political reputation and political linkages with voters. he finds that “respondents exposed to factual information about the brotherhood’s medical pro- vision are significantly more likely to consider voting for the brotherhood in elections,” and argues more gener- ally that “professional and businesslike social-service provision—rather than ideological indoctrination or lockstep organizational discipline-generates powerful reputation-based linkages with voters.” brooke makes clear that while his study centers on egypt’s brotherhood, the issues raised relate to a wide range of cases—indonesia, lebanon, yemen, and turkey—where party-based social movements, especially islamist ones, employ social service provision as a means of building political support. in the egyptian case, political success generated a crisis that led to repression of the movement by the military. in the turkish case, the political successes of the justice and development party—formed by erdogan in and modeled on the muslim brotherhood—led to a somewhat different result: the growing authoritarianism of president erdogan, leading to strong political opposition, a mass protest movement symbolized by the gezi park protests of , and the repression of the opposition by a more emboldened authoritarian regime. s. erdem aytaç, luis schiumerini, and susan stokes’s “protest and repression in new democracies” centers on these dynamics of mobilization and repression in regimes in the process of some measure of (perhaps halting and fragile) democratization. (see also this issue’s critical dialogue between emily beaulieu, author of electoral protest and democracy in the developing world, and john medearis, author of why democracy is oppositional.) as they write: “elected governments sometimes deal with protests by authorizing the police to use less-lethal tools of repression: water cannons, tear gas, rubber bullets, and the like. when these tactics fail to end protests and instead spark larger, backlash movements, some governments reduce the level of violence but others increase it, causing widespread injuries and loss of life.” their article seeks to explain the variation in governmental response to protest, by analyzing “three recent cases of governments in new democracies facing backlash movements”—the turkish government’s response to the gezi park demonstrations that began in istanbul in late may, ; the brazilian government’s response to protests that began in são paulo in early june, ; and the ukrainian government’s response to the euromaidan protests that began in kiev in late november and lasted until february, . in each case protest was initially met with a measure of repression. but while in brazil and ukraine the govern- ments pulled back the police and offered some concessions to protestors, in turkey the erdogan government allowed violence to escalate, refusing to make concessions and “upping the level of repression to very high levels, resulting in several deaths and dozens of injuries.” aytaç, schiumerini, and stokes argue that the explanation for this variation can be sought in the political power, and self-confidence, of the government in question, and that “elected governments that rest on very stable bases of support”—such as erdogan’s in turkey—“may be tempted to deploy tactics more commonly associated with authoritarian politics.” such authoritarian moves are matters of “domestic” politics taken by the leaders of particular nation-states. but they are also transnational and international matters. they often involve the demonization, regulation, or repression of international ngos. they are often justi- fied as responses to domestic or international “terrorism.” they often involve “taking sides” in global ideological disputes (about “islam” or “the west” or “eurasianism” or “democracy”) and they always involve questions of international law and global governance. jennifer dixon’s “rhetorical adaptation and resistance to international norms” addresses precisely such questions, by analyzing how states accused of violating international human rights laws and norms deal with these accusations on the world stage, and especially discussing how state elites employ rhetorical strategies that involve apparent compliance with international norms while continuing to violate them. she advances this account through a “plausibility probe” of a particularly illuminating example of “rhetorical adaptation” in the service of avoidance—turkey’s post-world war ii narrative of the armenian genocide. dixon traces the evolution of official policy regarding public education and public commemoration of the genocide and especially regarding whether it can be publicly acknowledged as a genocide. her rich account makes clear that the politics of historical memory is important both to international governance and to the domestic politics of nationalism. the turkish failure to come to terms with the genocide is linked to other illiberal regime commitments, from the repression of expressions of kurdish national identity to a broadly hostile approach to political dissent and political opposition. perspectives on politics from the editor | liberal democracy in question? https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core such a posture is not unique to “new democracies” inclined toward an “illiberal” turn to authoritarianism. one case in point is the u.s. itself. our september issue featured similar themes, all centered on the u.s. experience. georgia warnke’s “philosophical hermeneutics and the politics of memory,” lawrie balfour’s “ida b. wells and ‘color line justice,’” and desmond jagmohan’s “slavery and the making of american capitalism” all centered on the enduring legacies of slavery and jim crow, and the failure of american political culture to reckon with these legacies. and christopher j. coyne’s “the militarization of u.s. policing and the future of american politics,” william smith’s “policing democracy: race, riots, and protest,” alexander gourevitch’s “police work,” and lynda g. dodd’s “the rights revolution in the age of obama and ferguson” all dealt with the deployment of violence by the u.s. state, and with similar dynamics of violence, back- lash, and response discussed by aytaç, schiumerini, and stokes with regard to brazil, turkey, and ukraine. these dynamics were not far from the rhetorical surface of the exceptionally heated u.s. presidential election contest. donald trump’s winning campaign message—“make america great again”—centered on tapping and mobilizing fear and promising a hardline response to the purported dangers. whether the question was isis (“we’re going to kick the ass of isis”), fears of terrorism in “the homeland” (“a total and complete shutdown of muslims entering the united states”), fears of undocumented immigrants (“they’re bringing drugs. they’re bringing crime. they’re rapists”), or outrage at black lives matter (“they certainly have ignited people and you see that . . . it’s a very, very serious situation and we just can’t let it happen”), trump stood for, and stands for, the forceful repudiation of liberalism, represented as too “soft,” in favor of something much more decisive and much more nationalist. why did trump win? what constituencies did he most effectively activate? what are likely to be his policies, and what are likely to be the consequences of these policies? these are enormous questions, and political scientists will no doubt be engaging and debating them for years to come. at the same time, it is beyond doubt that the phenomenon of trump is part of the broader phenome- non of the rise of populist leaders playing on public insecurity and fear, and promising to “protect” and “restore the nation” by moving liberal democracy in an illiberal direction. while this issue contains no articles on u.s. politics, the review section contains discussion of some very important books that center on what might be called the mobilization of “irrationalism.” our symposium on christopher achen and larry bartels’ democracy for realists: why elections do not produce responsive govern- ment, includes commentaries by a range of americanists, comparativists, and theorists: elizabeth cohen, isabela mares, neil roberts, andrew sabl, antje schwennicke, and gerald wright. david o. sears’ review essay, “an ignorant and easily duped electorate?” discusses jennifer hochschild and katherine einstein’s do facts matter?: information and misinformation in american politics, arthur lupia’s, uninformed: why people seem to know so little about politics and what we can do about it and efren o. perez’s unspoken politics: implicit attitudes and political thinking. and one of our critical dialogues places kyle mattes and david redlawsk’s the positive case for negative campaigning into conversation with diana mutz’s in-your-face politics: the consequences of uncivil media. this issue also contains discussions that perhaps point in a more hopeful direction. carmen sirianni’s review essay, “civic innovation: yesterday, today, and tomorrow,” discusses three books that consider alternatives to a politics of alienation and fear: hollie russon gilman’s democracy reinvented: participatory budgeting and civic innovation in america, susan moffitt’s making public policy: participatory bureaucracy in american democracy, and beth simone noveck’s smart citizens, smarter state: the technology and the future of governing. and two critical dialogues address the importance of social movements in invigorating liberal democratic politics: michael d. heaney and fabio rojas’ party in the street: the antiwar movement and the democratic party after / is in dialogue with daniel schlozman’s when movements anchor parties: electoral alignments in american history, and deva r. woodly’s the politics of common sense: how social movements use public discourse to change politics and win acceptance is in dialogue with charles t. lee’s ingenious citizenship: recrafting democracy for social change. liberal democratic politics would appear to be at a crossroads, in the united states, in europe, and those other places where it has seemed to flourish or at least to emerge. if in it was possible for many to talk seriously about “the end of history,” there can be no doubt that this supposed “end of history” is now ended. political science, in all of its pluralism of methodological, theoret- ical, and ethical perspectives will be challenged to engage and to explain the trials currently facing liberal democracy and the possible paths forward. meeting the challenge will not be easy. as timothy v. kaufman-osborn suggests in his “disenchanted professionals: the politics of faculty governance in the neoliberal academy,” the conditions under which we work, and the emerging structures of knowledge production and dissemination, present serious challenges of their own to “the liberal arts” and to the very idea that university-based scholarship and teaching can be agencies of public enlightenment and civic education. at the same time, political scientists, and university-based scholars and teachers more generally, have faced similar challenges before. if one job of scholarly journals such as march | vol. /no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core ours is simply to publish the very best research and writing, come what may, a second is to nurture the conditions, and the intellectual passions, that will promote further research and writing. this involves the deliberate cultivation of a kind of hopefulness about inquiry itself. and so i end this introduction where this issue of perspectives actually begins, with the apsa presidential address of jennifer hochschild. “left pessimism and political science” is a provocative piece. it is a provocation of hopefulness about the possibilities of political science. it seems especially fitting that its author is the founding editor of this journal. to paraphrase the oft-quoted antonio gramsci, i am not sure whether jennifer is criticizing a “pessimism of the will” or a “pessimism of the intellect.” i personally think that her piece is usefully read against the much more pessimistic account of timothy-kaufman-osborne, and in light of the question that heads this very introduction—the question of liberal democracy’s future itself. at the same time, i am certain that the message of her piece echoes the hopefulness of this journal itself as “a political science public sphere.” jennifer’s presidential address is the last one that will be published in this journal under my editorship. i am very happy to publish it. because everything that we have done with this journal over the past decade and more has been possible only because of her work to create the journal. i share her hopefulness that political science can continue to improve as an agency of public enlightenment and public education. perspectives on politics from the editor | liberal democracy in question? https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core statement of mission and procedures perspectives on politics seeks to provide a space for broad and synthetic discussion within the political science pro- fession and between the profession and the broader schol- arly and reading publics. such discussion necessarily draws on and contributes to the scholarship published in the more specialized journals that dominate our discipline. at the same time, perspectives seeks to promote a complemen- tary form of broad public discussion and synergistic under- standing within the profession that is essential to advancing scholarship and promoting academic community. perspectives seeks to nurture a political science public sphere, publicizing important scholarly topics, ideas, and innovations, linking scholarly authors and readers, and pro- moting broad refl exive discussion among political scien- tists about the work that we do and why this work matters. perspectives publishes work in a number of formats that mirror the ways that political scientists actually write: research articles: as a top-tier journal of political sci- ence, perspectives accepts scholarly research article sub- missions and publishes the very best submissions that make it through our double-blind system of peer review and revision. the only thing that differentiates perspectives research articles from other peer-reviewed articles at top journals is that we focus our attention only on work that in some way bridges subfi eld and methodological divides, and tries to address a broad readership of political scien- tists about matters of consequence. this typically means that the excellent articles we publish have been extensively revised in sustained dialogue with the editor—me—to address not simply questions of scholarship but questions of intellectual breadth and readability. “refl ections” are more refl exive, provocative, or pro- grammatic essays that address important political science questions in interesting ways but are not necessarily as systematic and focused as research articles. these essays often originate as research article submissions, though sometimes they derive from proposals developed in con- sultation with the editor in chief. unlike research articles, these essays are not evaluated according to a strict, double- blind peer review process. but they are typically vetted informally with editorial board members or other col- leagues, and they are always subjected to critical assess- ment and careful line-editing by the editor and editorial staff. scholarly symposia, critical book dialogues, book review essays, and conventional book reviews are developed and commissioned by the editor in chief, based on authorial queries and ideas, editorial board suggestions, and staff conversations. everything published in perspectives is carefully vetted and edited. given our distinctive mission, we work hard to use our range of formats to organize interesting conver- sations about important issues and events, and to call atten- tion to certain broad themes beyond our profession’s normal subfi eld categories. for further details on writing formats and submission guidelines, see our website at http://www.apsanet.org/ perspectives/ https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core miranda, | miranda revue pluridisciplinaire du monde anglophone / multidisciplinary peer-reviewed journal on the english- speaking world  | staging american nights journée d’étude : « l'heure de nous-mêmes a sonné » : Étude transatlantique et transdisciplinaire des contre-représentations noires de à nos jours université de picardie jules verne, décembre Élisa geindreau, françois-rené julliard, anaïs nzelomona et Étienne prevost Édition électronique url : http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ doi : . /miranda. issn : - Éditeur université toulouse - jean jaurès référence électronique Élisa geindreau, françois-rené julliard, anaïs nzelomona et Étienne prevost, « journée d’étude : «  l'heure de nous-mêmes a sonné » : Étude transatlantique et transdisciplinaire des contre- représentations noires de à nos jours », miranda [en ligne], | , mis en ligne le avril , consulté le février . url : http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ ; doi : https:// doi.org/ . /miranda. ce document a été généré automatiquement le février . miranda is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives . international license. http://journals.openedition.org http://journals.openedition.org http://journals.openedition.org/miranda/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / journée d’étude : « l'heure de nous- mêmes a sonné » : Étude transatlantique et transdisciplinaire des contre-représentations noires de à nos jours université de picardie jules verne, décembre Élisa geindreau, françois-rené julliard, anaïs nzelomona et Étienne prevost cette journée d’étude était organisée par pierre cras (université saint-quentin en yvelines), lamia dzanouni-brousse de laborde (université picardie jules verne), olivier mahéo (université de poitiers/université sorbonne nouvelle) et alice morin (université sorbonne nouvelle). les communications étaient divisées en trois panels suivis d’une table ronde conclusive. panel : « le sport comme espace de (mise en) visibilité et de mémoire » la communication inaugurale de françois-rené julliard (université clermont- auvergne et nanterre) a porté sur la très célèbre photographie du podium du mètres, lors des jeux olympiques d’été de mexico ( ). on y voit le vainqueur de la course, tommie smith, et le troisième, john carlos, lever un poing ganté de noir tandis que retentit l’hymne américain, « the star-spangled banner ». les deux athlètes, mais également l’australien blanc peter norman, deuxième de la course, arborent un badge de l’olympic project for human rights (ophr). cette organisation avait conçu le projet d’un boycott noir américain des jeux olympiques, pour protester contre la situation des noirs aux États-unis. après ce geste, smith et carlos furent suspendus de la compétition. f.-r. julliard est revenu sur la mise en scène conçue par les deux athlètes, journée d’étude : « l'heure de nous-mêmes a sonné » : Étude transatlantique e... miranda, | en la resituant dans un contexte de mobilisation politique des sportifs noirs américains. cette politisation de la scène olympique a pour cadre plus général le mouvement protéiforme du black power. la médiatisation accrue des grands événements sportifs à l’échelle mondiale a permis à cette image de se diffuser au point de devenir incontournable dans l’imaginaire sportif contemporain. ce poing levé illustre une rupture nette avec la représentation stéréotypée des athlètes noirs, performants mais peu susceptibles d’intervenir sur le plan de la contestation politique. la « mise en mémoire » actuelle de ce geste, à travers les médaillons, les statues et les diverses cérémonies officielles qui ont honoré les deux athlètes, montre une évolution dans la manière dont cet acte a été perçu. tommie smith et john carlos sont progressivement passés du statut de parias de l’olympisme à celui de héros courageux de la lutte contre le racisme. la présentation de yann descamps (université de besançon-franche comté) portait sur la dimension politique de l'autoreprésentation des athlètes afro-américains, dans leurs autobiographies. de par leur appartenance à une même communauté et à des milieux sociaux relativement proches, les athlètes noirs partagent un héritage culturel commun. yann descamps relève des similitudes dans les écrits de ces athlètes, telles que la place prépondérante du terrain de jeu, le rôle joué par la communauté noire, ou encore l'influence majeure des figures politiques et contestataires noires sur lesquelles les athlètes se penchent de façon parfois approfondie. À travers leurs écrits, ces athlètes noirs dénoncent le racisme qu'ils subissent, qu’il vienne des blancs en général, des institutions telles que la national basketball association (nba) ou du gouvernement qui, à l'instar des médias, est accusé de véhiculer des stéréotypes sur les athlètes noirs. y. descamps distingue quatre périodes : l'ère de la politique (années - ), celle des symboles ( - ), du corporatisme ( - ), et enfin l’ère du progrès ( à nos jours). les joueurs noirs, encouragés par la présidence de barack obama, s’engagent alors davantage. dans l'ensemble, il apparaît un besoin commun de prendre la parole, dans le but de lutter contre les prénotions qui dépeignent les athlètes afro- américains comme de simples corps. À travers l'écriture, les athlètes noirs s'émancipent et prennent le contrôle de leur image. ils deviennent plus que des athlètes, en offrant une autre représentation d'eux-mêmes. panel : « une esthétique de lutte : patchworks » le deuxième panel déplaçait la focale du sport vers les arts graphiques. thomas bertail (université rennes ) a consacré son exposé à la production iconographique des journaux du courant du black power. les artistes concernés, en quête d’une « black aesthetic » (addison gayle), ont opéré une critique du pouvoir américain et donné une identité visuelle au mouvement. th. bertail a développé plus particulièrement le cas d’emory douglas. celui-ci intègre le black panther party (bpp) fondé à oakland en par huey newton et bobby seale, et collabore au périodique du parti, the black panther. son travail, fait de lignes puissantes, de personnages déterminés et de références africaines, devient l’identité visuelle du parti. douglas s’inscrit dans la tradition de la contestation graphique, incarnée naguère par daumier, william hogarth, ou encore john heartfield dans les années . ses représentations stylisées mettent en scène le peuple noir au travail, en manifestation ou en révolution ; les leaders du parti, h. newton, b. seale ou e. cleaver, sont aussi représentés. la récurrence des motifs journée d’étude : « l'heure de nous-mêmes a sonné » : Étude transatlantique e... miranda, | rayonnants rappelle le réalisme soviétique ou maoïste, des références dont douglas s’est beaucoup inspiré. l’organisation du bpp s’inscrit ainsi dans un espace mondialisé et s’identifie aux luttes des peuples du tiers-monde. l’empowerment promu par le black power a inspiré les politiques minoritaires : red power des amérindiens, yellow power, mouvements féministes et lgbt. de même, les militants chicanos du young lords party (ylp) reprennent cette imagerie et l’utilisation du photomontage. plus proche de nous, le mouvement black lives matter a réactivé des codes esthétiques comparables. les artistes noirs britanniques du blk art group évoqués dans l’exposé de ian sergeant (birmingham city university) s’inspirent des mouvements sociaux et artistiques étatsuniens. avant eux, dès les années , des noirs issus des colonies (la « windrush generation ») viennent participer à la reconstruction de la « mère patrie » au lendemain de la seconde guerre mondiale. c’est dans ce contexte qu’arrivent en grande-bretagne des artistes tels qu’aubrey williams et frank bowling. cependant, même si leurs œuvres ne peuvent être dissociées de leur expérience et de leur héritage propres, et bien que certaines expositions leur aient été refusées à cause de leur couleur de peau, ces artistes refusent d’être catégorisés comme « artistes noirs ». la «  windrush generation » est accueillie avec hostilité par la population britannique blanche. le racisme et ses manifestations concrètes de pauvreté, de violence et de discriminations, sont alors omniprésents. À la génération suivante, la désindustrialisation touche les jeunes noirs de manière particulièrement forte. parallèlement, des « black studies » britanniques émergent sous l’impulsion du centre for contemporary cultural studies (cccs) de birmingham. c’est dans ce contexte que naît le blk art group. composé de keith piper, marlene smith, eddie chambers et donald rodney, il donne naissance à une représentation inédite des victimes du racisme. en a lieu la première national black art convention, lors de laquelle sont exposées des œuvres du groupe. on trouve chez eux, comme chez leurs aînés, la volonté de ne pas être simplement vus comme des artistes noirs, mais comme des artistes tout court. c’est véritablement récemment que le mouvement a accédé à la notoriété et à la reconnaissance. panel : « contre-représentations : subvertir et/ou dépasser les stéréotypes » les exposés du troisième panel invitaient à s’interroger sur la manière dont certains artistes revisitent et détournent des représentations autrefois négatives. vivian braga dos santos (inha, paris) a centré son intervention sur deux artistes afro-brésiliens contemporains, rosana paulino et tiago gualberto, qui contribuent à l’écriture d’une nouvelle histoire visuelle des noirs au brésil. l’œuvre de rosana paulino, spécialiste de la gravure, de la céramique et du dessin, porte en particulier sur l’héritage de l’esclavage. elle met en avant des corps souffrants. tiago gualberto met pour sa part en scène des personnages qui ont vécu dans les favelas. son entreprise critique traite aussi de l’exploitation minière et de ceux qui y travaillent. on observe des différences importantes entre ces deux œuvres, mais on y retrouve le thème commun de l’assujettissement du corps noir dans la société brésilienne. ces artistes se réapproprient aussi les représentations exotiques du noir par les naturalistes et artistes européens. tiago gualberto revisite les gravures de jean-baptiste debret, produites dans les années . debret avait effectué un voyage au brésil, et ces journée d’étude : « l'heure de nous-mêmes a sonné » : Étude transatlantique e... miranda, | gravures représentaient des scènes entre maîtres et esclaves. quant aux autoportraits photographiques d’auto-retrato ( ), ils font une référence ironique aux photos qui accompagnaient les traités eugénistes de francis galton. c’est la même logique que l’on retrouve dans le cabinet de curiosité ( ) et la muse du paradis ( ) de rosana paulino : là aussi, il s’agit d’une critique de l’exotisme collectionné. le thème du crâne évoque les crânes étudiés par le criminologue cesare lombroso, qui au xixe siècle formula la théorie du criminel-né. figure de la série bastidores (coulisses), . rosana paulino. image transférée sur tissus, cercle à broder, fil à coudre, cm de diamètre. © rosana paulino. avec l’aimable autorisation de l’artiste. journée d’étude : « l'heure de nous-mêmes a sonné » : Étude transatlantique e... miranda, | figure de la série paraíso tropical (paradis tropical), . rosana paulino. impression digitale sur papier, linoléogravure, pointe sèche et collage, , x , cm. © rosana paulino. avec l’aimable autorisation de l’artiste. figure de la série dots, . tiago gualberto. matrice de styromousse sur papier, x cm. © tiago gualberto. avec l’aimable autorisation de l’artiste. journée d’étude : « l'heure de nous-mêmes a sonné » : Étude transatlantique e... miranda, | figure détail de l’installation navio negreiro (navire négrier), . boîtes d’allumettes et photocopies des portraits, x cm. © tiago gualberto. avec l’aimable autorisation de l’artiste. fabiana senkpiel (bern university of the arts) a ensuite présenté le travail de l’artiste noire ntando cele. celle-ci réalise des performances où est interrogée la représentation que les noirs ont d’eux-mêmes. sud-africaine, diplômée de durban en arts du théâtre, ntando cele vit maintenant à berne. depuis et jusqu’à son spectacle le plus récent, black off ( ), elle développe des performances où elle développe son propre style, où l’humour joue un rôle central. elle invite à une réflexion sur les rapports raciaux et montre un goût certain pour l’humour noir et les mauvaises blagues. elle joue avec les identités noires et blanches. dans black off, ntando cele incarne d’abord le personnage de bianca white, maquillée en blanc (whitefacing) et vêtue d’un kimono. elle s’adresse au public, et suscite à dessein un certain malaise et parfois une irritation chez lui. en incarnant un personnage didactique, elle invite chacun à s’interroger sur sa propre expérience raciale. la performance continue par une incarnation de vera black, une militante noire affirmée et indépendante. cele se démasque au milieu du spectacle, ce qui semble suggérer une identité plus vraie, mais c’est une illusion. bianca white et vera black sont deux identités fictives. l’artiste rend tangible le concept de « double conscience » forgé par le sociologue étatsunien william du bois : dans son appréhension de lui-même, l’individu noir est forcé de faire avec le regard blanc posé sur lui. de son propre aveu, ntando cele questionne son itinéraire personnel de femme sud-africaine arrivée en suisse. enfin dans une dernière communication, claudine le pallec (chercheuse indépendante) étudie deux films : l’afrance d’alain gomis ( ) qui a obtenu plusieurs prix au festival du film de locarno, et surtout le documentaire d’alice diop, la mort de journée d’étude : « l'heure de nous-mêmes a sonné » : Étude transatlantique e... miranda, | danton ( ). steeve, le comédien noir sujet du documentaire, se forme aux études théâtrales classiques au cours simon, à paris. interviewé par alice diop, face caméra, il exprime son malaise et son isolement dans la classe de théâtre. il sent que son professeur est mal à l’aise face à un élève noir et voudrait lui faire jouer des « scènes de noirs » ou des extraits de pièces d’auteurs noirs. la grammaire cinématographique du film consiste notamment dans l’usage de gros plans. ces œuvres ne sont pas des modèles de happy ends et donnent à la question de la souffrance corporelle et psychique une place centrale. table ronde et conclusion cette journée s’est terminée par une table ronde avec comme objectif de tracer des lignes de convergence entre les différents exposés, dont les thèmes se rejoignent ou se répondent. yann descamps et vivian braga dos santos ont discuté de la validité, réelle selon eux, de la notion foucaldienne de biopolitique appliquée à l’histoire noire. vivian braga dos santos souligne à quel point la biopolitique laisse des traces dans le présent, notamment à travers la manière dont l’autre se voit lui-même. cette perception est le produit d’une distorsion de l’image de soi et des autres. olivier maheo souligne que les contre-images proposées par les artistes, mais aussi les militants, les athlètes, ont pour but de faire échec à cette image déformée. la suite de la discussion a principalement porté sur la question de l’identité : l’artiste est-il d’abord un artiste noir, ou veut-il se définir comme un artiste français, britannique, américain… ? pierre cras indique que le militant, l’artiste, l’athlète etc. a toujours des choix à faire. bien souvent, les deux dynamiques se retrouvent dans les mêmes œuvres. il y a une inscription dans les traditions européennes, mais bien souvent aussi une manière de les revisiter de manière personnelle. mais une question se pose : pour un artiste, un militant, un sportif noir, n’est-ce pas finalement un autre stéréotype que d’être toujours considéré comme racialement conscient ? vivian braga dos santos souligne que ce débat existe parmi les artistes afro-brésiliens : certains traitent de la condition noire, d’autres réclament le droit de parler de tout et pas seulement de la condition noire, ce qui est aussi une position politique. françois-rené julliard fait remarquer que cette question est ancienne dans la littérature noire américaine : dans sa critique du livre native son de richard wright, james baldwin (notes of a native son, « everybody’s protest novel ») défendait le droit pour les écrivains noirs de parler de la condition humaine, et pas seulement de la condition noire. baldwin regrettait le fait que le héros du roman de wright soit uniquement rivé à son identité noire. thomas bertail indique que le black arts movement (bam) étatsunien était également conscient de cet enjeu, à savoir le droit pour un artiste de pouvoir se définir lui-même tel qu’il le souhaite. pour conserver sa liberté, le bam s’efforçait de ne pas dépendre d’institutions particulières. Élisa geindreau françois-rené julliard anaïs nzelomona Étienne prevost journée d’étude : « l'heure de nous-mêmes a sonné » : Étude transatlantique e... miranda, | index keywords : race relations, black identities, art and politics, reversal of stigma, black atlantic, postcolonial art, politicization of sport, blk art group, black power thèmes : american art mots-clés : relations raciales, identités noires, art et politique, retournement du stigmate, atlantique noire, art postcolonial, politisation du sport auteurs Élisa geindreau masterante université de picardie jules verne elisa.geindreau@etud.u-picardie.fr franÇois-renÉ julliard doctorant universités clermont-auvergne et paris nanterre f-rene.julliard@uca.fr anaÏs nzelomona masterante université de picardie jules verne anais.nzelomona@etud.u-picardie.fr Étienne prevost masterant université de picardie jules verne etienne.prevost@etud.u-picardie.fr journée d’étude : « l'heure de nous-mêmes a sonné » : Étude transatlantique e... miranda, | mailto:elisa.geindreau@etud.u-picardie.fr mailto:f-rene.julliard@uca.fr mailto:anais.nzelomona@etud.u-picardie.fr mailto:etienne.prevost@etud.u-picardie.fr 	journée d’étude : « l'heure de nous-mêmes a sonné » : Étude transatlantique et transdisciplinaire des contre-représentations noires de à nos jours genealogy , , . https://doi.org/ . /genealogy www.mdpi.com/journal/genealogy article new blacks: language, dna, and the construction of the african american/dominican boundary of difference aris moreno clemons department of spanish and portuguese, the university of texas at austin, austin, tx , usa; amc @utexas.edu abstract: given the current political climate in the u.s.—the civil unrest regarding the recognition of the black lives matter movement, the calls to abolish prisons and u.s. immigration and customs enforcement (ice) detention, and the workers’ rights movements—projects investigating moments of inter-ethnic solidarity and conflict remain essential. because inter-ethnic conflict and solidarity in communities of color have become more visible as waves of migration over the past years have complicated and enriched the sociocultural landscape of the u.s., i examine the ways that raciolin- guistic ideologies are reflected in assertions of ethno-racial belonging for afro-dominicans and their descendants. framing my analysis at the language, race, and identity interface, i ask what mecha- nisms are used to perform blackness and/or anti-blackness for dominican(-american)s and in what ways does this behavior contribute to our understanding of blackness in the u.s.? i undertake a critical discourse analysis on youtube videos that discuss what i call the african american/do- minican boundary of difference. the results show that the primary inter-ethnic conflict between dominican(-americans) and african americans was posited through a categorization fallacy, in which the racial term “black” was conceived as an ethnic term for use only with african americans. keywords: race; blackness; latinidad; raciolinguistics; language and identity . introduction on tuesday june , belcalis almenzár, better known as cardi b, took to insta- gram live in order to defend her blackness. her aim was to clarify confusion about her ethno-racial identity following a wave of criticism resulting from her black entertainment television (bet) album of the year and best female hip-hop artist awards. people ar- gued that she should not be eligible for the awards because she is not black, maintaining that her use of the spanish language and her previous claims of latinidad precluded her from blackness. this policing of blackness is not new (fanon ; davis ; shange ); however, increased migration from latin america and the caribbean over the last fifty years has complicated and enriched the sociocultural landscapes of the u.s. in her response, cardi b attempts to dispel the myth of the mutual exclusivity between black- ness and latinidad (flores and román ; cahuas ). “people don’t be understand- ing shit. it’s like, ‘cardi’s latin, she’s not black’. and it’s like, ‘bro, my features don’t come from… white people f—ing, ok’?… but because cardi speaks spanish to people, she’s not black even though we have similar features, same skin complexion. but no, they want to not put cardi in it because i speak spanish”. she then goes on to explain that the problem is a fundamental misunderstanding of the differences between race, ethnicity, and nation- ality. attributing this ignorance to a lack of proper education in the u.s. school systems, cardi b arrives at the core of the matter regarding public discussions of race in the united states: first, that as a society we have not yet agreed upon set definitions for terms of identity that are used in everyday language; and second, that part of the reason that we have not agreed is because there are societal institutions that either willfully obscure our citation: clemons, a.m. new blacks: language, dna, and the construction of the af-rican ameri- can/dominican boundary of differ- ence. genealogy , , . https://doi.org/ . /geneal- ogy received: october accepted: december published: december publisher’s note: mdpi stays neu- tral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and insti- tutional affiliations. copyright: © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses /by/ . /). genealogy , , of understandings or that at the very least have done very little to historicize the rise of these notions (nagel , ; telles ). i recognize these moments of identity negotiations as both personal and political. in my own life, being the child of an african american father and an afro-caribbean mother, i have lived on the margins of identification. often, these choices were made for me, given my dark complexion and racialized features. nonetheless, significant travels outside the united states has shown me that my features can be (and are often) read differently in different locations. moreover, i have learned that the political projects of race and raciali- zation in different sociopolitical contexts often bear heavily on my own construction of self. the complexity of racial constructions becomes acute when considering the political implications of who gets to authentically claim identification within a particular group. think for example of the ways that barack obama has been positioned as the first black president and kamala harris as the first black vice president elect. these politicians and the political organizations on which they have situated their careers have relied on the maintenance of racial formations developed during u.s. colonial formations. the mutability of racial categories has led the majority of social and natural scientists to an agreement that race is constructed socially (boas ; montagu ; omi and winant ). literature across the social sciences investigates the use of race as a tool to construct and maintain power within a society (fanon ; lopez ; hall [ ] ; crenshaw ; delgado and stefancic ). it is this organization of power that leads sociologists omi and winant ( ) to posit race as a “master category”, noting that “race is a fundamental organizing principle of social stratification. it has influenced the defini- tion of rights and privileges, the distribution of resources and the ideologies and practices of subordination and oppression” (p. ). moreover, the authors assert that the corporeal aspects of race, i.e., the distinction created between “white men and the others whom they ruled as patriarchal masters” (p. ), gives “race” its ability to dominate all other social categories including gender, social class, and sexuality. nonetheless, omi and winant note a key conundrum for those who theorize race, in that “race and racial meanings are neither stable nor consistent” (p. ). the mutability of racial meaning suggests that cate- gories that are used to define racial identity are in constant flux, with emerging categories alongside the reconstitution of existing categories in the struggle for sociopolitical, eco- nomic, and cultural power. nonetheless, boundaries exist and individuals are ultimately unable to escape some form of category ratification—an inevitable click on a u.s. census classification for race and ethnicity, a school or grant application, a health care form. in making these selections, individuals are collectively defining the bounds of these catego- ries, pushing up against the walls of what has been dictated to them. the question re- mains, how exactly are these boundaries created and what are the effects of the bounda- ries? given the differential social constructions of race and ethnicity in contexts of origin and migration, the competition for scarce resources among marginalized groups, and the complex relationships with differing colonial histories, it is nearly impossible to have a comprehensive understanding of blackness in the united states from a singular discipli- nary lens. this study thus takes up concepts developed in linguistics, sociology, anthro- pology as well as critical race theories from both black and latinx studies. in doing so, i attempt the development of an initial framework for an understanding of blackness as it currently exists for differing ethnic groups that represent black subjectivities in the u.s. i situate blackness as an organizing concept of american life (hartman ; wilder- son ; kendi ). that is, much like hartman’s construction of the subjugated liberal individual that is at once equal yet forever inferior, american society exists within a hier- archy—one that necessitates the continual reconstitution of white supremacy for a repro- duction of all that has been defined as “american life”. blackness, as a concept, therefore becomes the tool by which white supremacy can claim social capital. this capital, which can be traced back to the rules and regulations that structured the u.s. as a slaveholding society, manifests in the ability to enact policies, both legal and social, over its public. “here i want to focus on a singular aspect of the slave’s existence in civil society—the genealogy , , of submission of the slave to all whites… to be sure, the laws of slavery subjected the en- slaved to the absolute control and authority of any and every member of the dominant race. at the very least the relations of chattel slavery served to enhance whiteness by ra- cializing rights and entitlements, designating inferior and superior races, and granting whites’ dominion over blacks” (hartman , p. ). hartman describes the condition of blackness in the united states as always posited in relation to the dominant, such that allowing black self-determination becomes a threat to the very existence of whiteness. moreover, whiteness is forever reliant on blackness as a way to re-imagine, re-construct, and re-insert itself as the dominant race (bloom, forthcoming). nevertheless, this refashioning of whiteness has never been able to successfully stifle the move toward black self-determination, evidenced by ever-growing movements such as the black power movement of the s and more recently the black lives matter move- ment (hooker ). i argue that to understand black self-determination, we must look beyond the black/white binary in negotiations of race and identity in the americas. the current project therefore explores several moments of cross-ethnic conflicts and solidari- ties and the role that language plays in mapping the margins of identity and ethno-racial categorizations for dominican(-american)s in the united states. i use the term ethno-ra- cial throughout this article to note the inextricable link between ethnicity, as heritage linked to a particular nation state, and race, as the corporeal manifestation of colonial cat- egorization projects. in certain cases, i will refer to the use of nationality as a distinguish- ing characteristic that was taken up in my data. in these cases, nationality refers to the political belonging or citizenship in a particular nation state as it is currently defined. lastly, i use the terms pan-racial to refer to racial categories that cannot be linked to one particular ethnicity or nationality. what should be noted is that all of these categories are constructed in contextualized and flexible ways. as such, the marking of boundaries of belonging is complex and should be considered in relation to sociohistoric moments, nar- ratives of identity, and political commitments (yuval-davis ). through investigations of interactions between members of the pan-racial group—black—we are able to theorize about the ways that we define boundaries of belonging [at a particular time in a particular place and context]. in other words, we are able to negotiate where afro-latinxs, afro- caribbeans, and africans and their u.s.-born children fit into the schema of blackness in this country. more importantly, and for our purposes here, we can begin to empirically theorize race through analyses of language and language ideologies. in this study, i ex- amine how four raciolinguistic ideologies are reflected in assertions of ethno-racial be- longing for afro-dominicans and their descendants in the united states. i formulate my investigation with two guiding questions. what linguistic ideologies are implicated in the construction of blackness for dominicans and dominican-americans in the united states? and, what mechanisms are used to create what i call the african american/dominican boundary of difference? in centering blackness in the united states, i focus on dominican(-american)s for a variety of reasons, including the numerous linguistic repertoires to which dominicans have access and employ in their daily lives (bailey , ; nilep ; rubinstein- Ávila ); research has shown that dominicans contest socially constructed race in the united states (bailey , ; duany , ); and the unique historical situation of the enslaved and freed african populations in the spanish-controlled region of quisqueya (the indigenous name of the island which now hosts the dominican republic and haiti) (torres-saillant ; candelario ). further, dominicans have been racialized both in the dominican republic—as a result of the tumultuous history of colonialism and subse- quent imperialism—and in the united states, as transnational beings. thus, in the move toward dominican self-determination, there is often an abrupt and contradictory negoti- ation of the ideological rupture between blackness and latinidad. in this case, a focus on dominican subjectivities allows us to understand how the project of latinidad is impli- cated in the refashioning of blackness as it has historically existed in the united states. genealogy , , of examining people’s choices in regards to identity (terms) can be taken up through the lens of linguistics. it has long been understood that language performances shift in relation to interaction (ochs et al. ; fairclough ; alim et al. ; rosa and flores ), and that these interactions are integral in the understanding of self and others (bu- choltz and hall ; coupland ). in other words, processes of dialectical language production are closely aligned with the processes of dialectical ethno-racial construction (ochs et al. ; nagel ). further, as ochs ( ) argues, “speakers attempt to estab- lish the social identities of themselves and others through verbally performing certain so- cial acts and verbally displaying certain stances” (p. ). in order to explore the combined process of ethno-racial identification and shifting linguistic practices, i call on the concept of raciolinguistic enregisterment. rosa and flores ( ) submit raciolinguistic enregister- ment as “an overarching framework with which to investigate relations among prevailing sociolinguistic concepts that are often approached as distinct phenomena, such as code- switching, style-shifting, footing” (p. ). so, where the concept of linguistic enregister- ment was previously defined as the process “whereby distinct forms of speech come to be socially recognized (or enregistered) as indexical of speaker attributes by a population of language users” (agha , p. ), rosa and flores incorporate the “racial emblematiza- tion” inherent in many of these processes. thus, raciolinguistic enregisterment refers to processes whereby distinct forms of linguistic practices become racialized. in this study, i expand the concept of raciolinguistic enregisterment to theorize about how certain ideo- logies that link language, race, and identity are central to our understanding of category binding. the framework of raciolinguistic enregisterment not only allows for an analysis of identity performances of individuals, but also for an analysis of the discourses complicit in the construction of ethno-racial boundaries, therefore allowing for a more nuanced un- derstanding of blackness as it currently exists in the united states. in addition to the linguistic expressions of identities taken up through raciolinguistic enregisterment, the “external validation of individual or group ethnic boundaries” is an important aspect in the discursive processes of ethnic categorizations. according to bon- nie urciuoli ( ), linguistic forms (i.e., language practices), are “the shape in which bor- der making elements come [to be]” (p. ). urciuoli describes “borders” as the place where commonalities end and notes the symbolic possibilities for language to do that work. a border can therefore be a place where mutual intelligibility is no longer possible. while this was originally applied to the actual ability to understand linguistic forms, i contend that mutual intelligibility also occurs at the ideological level, whereby a disagree- ment on ideological premises is more difficult to overcome than a linguistic misunder- standing. thus, my analysis of linguistic ideologies becomes an analysis of the construc- tion of bounded ethno-racial categories and their connected bounded linguistic categories. i, therefore, take up the concept of stance in the interactional ideological construction of self and others. stance is defined, in this case, as the way that individuals signal relation- ships to particular concepts through linguistic choices (johnstone , ). in the cur- rent paper, the multilectal nature of ethno-racial performance and negotiation are enreg- istered through explicit pronouncements of raciolinguistic ideologies examined through a critical stance-taking analysis, adapted from kiesling et al. ( ). . materials and methods . . procedures in order to explore the construction of afro-latinidades through the ethno-racial pro- nouncements of dominican americans and other black diasporic beings, i begin with a critical discourse analysis (fairclough ) of ten youtube videos and selected com- ments posted between and . i follow with a critical conversation analysis of stance taking in the comment section of the original posts. i adapt an approach developed by kiesling et al. ( ) in their analysis of reddit online forums. the concept of stance is defined by kiesling et al. as “the discursive creation of a relationship between a language genealogy , , of user and some discursive figure, and to other language users in relation to that figure” (p. ). while the authors use a grounded theory approach to investigate the emergence of discursive figures—called stance foci in their study—my adaption phenomenologically proffers the existence of four raciolinguistic ideologies as the stance foci of investigation, including discussions of blackness, latinidad, spanish or english usage and competences, or ethno-racial identifications. the videos each take up the topic of dominican identity and blackness and are produced by dominican(-american)s, african americans, and oth- ers who identify as afro-latinx. titles, subject positionalities, dates and metadata of the videos analyzed can be found in appendix a. several notions taken up in the construction of racialized and linguistic value can be located in what flores and rosa ( ) term raciolinguistic ideologies. these are ideolog- ical frames that conflate racialized bodies to objective linguistic practices. work in the emerging field of raciolinguistics has begun to explore the remapping of race onto lan- guage so that we can understand the ways that language ideologies are implicated in re- inforcing already existing hierarchies of power (lawrence and clemons, forthcoming). for the purposes of this paper, i take up three raciolinguistic ideologies that have been previously defined in the literature (rosa and flores ; lippi-green ), as well as a dominant racial ideology that has structured much of the previous understandings of race in fields such as anthropology and linguistics: (i) co-naturalization of language and race; (ii) regimentation of linguistic and racial categories; (iii) standard language ideology; and (iv) genetic race. each of these ideologies was adapted based on a grounded theory ap- proach, which allowed me to explore how they appeared in the data set. using the themes drawn out from my discourse analysis as well as the theoretical framework of rosa and flores ( ), i demarcate four novel raciolinguistic stance foci that i applied and analyzed in my data: (i) genealogy, dna ideology; (ii) categorization fallacy; (iii) co-naturalization of language and race; and (iv) accent ideology. definitions of these ideologies are pro- vided in table . the appearance of these ideologies in explicit pronouncements makes central the stances that individuals are taken towards blackness as a named category. table . focal raciolinguistic ideologies. raciolinguistic ideology definition dna ideology this is any reference to the body, blood, or features in relation to claims of a particular race or ethnicity. this is also any reference to heritage or genetic connections to a particular space. lastly, this included references to genetic testing and dna as indicative of ethno-racial identifications. categorization fallacy this is any reference to conflation of race and ethnicity; a confusion about how to categorize race or ethnicity; or the actual conflation of race and ethnicity. co-naturalization of language and race this is when participants conflate their racial identity with a language category. in some cases, this will also refer to someone not belonging to a race because of a lack of ability to speak a particular language. accent ideology this is any reference to increased belonging in a particular ethnic group because of an accent (or lack thereof), or it is references to accents as indicative of belonging to a particular ethnic group. video data amounted to min of footage, which was hand transcribed and then entered into the qualitative analysis software dedoose (dedoose , version . . ). collection of the video data consisted of the transcription of each youtube video in its entirety, as well as a selection of comment threads from each video. comment selections were taken from the most recent threads that had between and responses in order to ensure that there was enough conversation to analyze engagement with the ideologies presented in the parent comments. parent comments that did not engage any raciolinguis- tic ideology were excluded from analysis. for each video, five comment threads display- ing raciolinguistic ideologies were selected for coding by hand, with between and child comments coded by two independent raters for the parent comment ideology along- side any additional ideologies that emerged in the discussion. excerpts were extracted at genealogy , , of the sentence level in the content videos, while each comment represented an individual excerpt in the conversation analysis. . . measures to evaluate attitudes toward the stance focus (the focal raciolinguistic ideologies), i weighted three stance dimensions of affect, investment, and alignment for each excerpt on a to -point likert scale, with higher scores indicating greater alignment and invest- ment or more positive affect toward coded ideologies. these measures are operationalized as follows: affect represents “the polarity or quality of the [raciolinguistic ideology]” (kiesling et al. , p. ). for this measure, we identify the interlocutor’s positive or negative evaluation of the raciolinguistic ideology. investment is “the dimension of how strongly invested in the talk the speaker is, [and] how committed they signal their rela- tionship to the [raciolinguistic ideology]” (p. ). this was evidenced through interlocu- tors’ recognition of and perceived willingness to qualify and take part in discussion of the indicated raciolinguistic ideology. last, alignment refers to interlocutors’ agreement, or “alignment”, with the respective raciolinguistic ideology. alignment ranged from explicit agreement to outright objection. stance dimension definitions can be found in table . table . stance dimension definitions. stance dimension definition affect the positive or negative attitude (or affect) toward the raciolinguistic ideology. coders take into account additional emoticon symbols for affective power. a score of indicates highly negative feelings toward the ideology, with indicating highly positive feelings toward the ideology. investment the level of interaction with the posited ideology. coders ask whether the commenters take up the ideology in their responses. a score of indicates that the ideology was not taken up at all. in these cases, the ideology is not marked for affect or alignment. a score of indicates a complete focus on the ideology and received a score for affect and alignment. alignment the level of support for the posited ideology. coders asked whether the author agrees or disagrees with the posited ideology. a score of indicates high disagreement and indicates complete accord with the ideology. the evaluation of these stance dimensions can be illustrated with the youtube com- ment in ( ), which was left on the “gina rodriguez miss bala (spanish)” video. her spanish is good. what y’all talking about? it’s a new era for me. i came to this country when i was and i have problems with my spanish because my goal was to learn perfect english with no accent. so now i speak spanglish. it’s a new culture and i love it. for this comment, the interlocutor is discussing the public figure’s spanish speaking abil- ity as demonstrated in the content video. the topic is reflective of accent ideology as it refers to good or bad language abilities. thus, “accent ideology” is coded as the stance focus or raciolinguistic ideology. the affect is coded as positive through the evaluation of this ideology expressed through “good” and “i love it”. the investment is high, as the commenter committed to the evaluation of language as a deviation of certainty toward the ideology. the alignment is high because the commenter is demonstrating agreement with standard language ideology through the evaluation of the public figure’s language proficiency. other indicators of affect, alignment, and investment came with the analysis this video was analyzed for the purposed of a tangential study and is used here purely for illustrative purposes. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zpsmnsmclfs. genealogy , , of of emojis. symbols such as � were evaluated and incorporated into the weighted scores. scale rating definitions can be found in appendix b. . . analyses descriptive analyses were completed for the presence of each ideology, represented by the number of tokens over the entire data set. analyses were also conducted to capture differences in frequency of ideologies based on the subject positionality of the original video posters—dominican, african american, or afro-diasporic. additional analyses were run to ascertain how ideologies co-occurred and whether co-occurrence differed based on subject positionality. lastly, each ideology was run separately for the three stance dimensions: affect, investment, and alignment, represented by average weighted scores for each stance dimension. co-occurring ideologies were analyzed as sets to indi- cate shifts in stance dimension when both ideologies were present in a statement. exem- plars were extracted from representative excerpts. . . methodological limitations and future directions drawing data from online social media platforms allows for a widescale surveying of ideas and language sampling. however, the use of this data is not without its compli- cations. though the current study focuses on the ways that race—blackness in particu- lar—is taken up, there is no legitimate way of surveying the ethnic, racial, gender, sexu- ality, or other social identifications of the participants. in his twitter analysis of linguistic presentation of null subjects in two varieties of spanish, adrian rodriguez riccelli ( ) notes the drawbacks of using online language data by noting that “[o]ne drawback to this methodology is the difficulty in accessing sociolinguistic and language background, as well as biographical information. information posted on a user’s profile may be inaccurate or absent all together and is currently not easily extracted. nevertheless, the relative ease of access and exorbitant amounts of data makes for a tempting tool of use. so long as its limitations are acknowledged” (p. ). in our case, the extraction of large-scale ideologi- cal constructions can still be achieved, though we are not able to immediately assess the ways that other characteristics such as gender or sociocultural subjectivity impact the pro- nouncements. further, the use of conversation analysis relies on the words being pro- duced, leaving space for an analysis of non-verbal communication in the production of ethno-racial ideologies on these platforms. nonetheless, the use of the current methodol- ogy allows us to move beyond anecdotal or interview data regarding racial ideologies by providing access to large amounts of data with relative ease. in the future, this work could be combined with digital media studies investigating the ways that subject positionality informs social media interaction in order to submit a framework for understanding the subjective nature of race construction on these platforms. . results in this section, i present the appearance of the raciolinguistic ideologies. first, an overall description of the amount of times each raciolinguistic ideology appeared over the entire data sample is presented. each ideology is then evidenced with a sample of exem- plar tokens from the overall data set. lastly, i provide a brief description of the ways that the ideologies occurred together, showing the inter-relatedness of some of these concepts in strengthening or contesting the boundaries of difference between african americans and dominicans. after the presentation of raciolinguistic ideologies, i provide a descrip- tive analysis of the public engagement through a discussion of the weighted stance di- mensions associated with each raciolinguistic ideology in the comments. additionally, i note the ways that many of these ideologies appear with explicit moments of conflict, sol- idarity, or anti-blackness. across the entire data set (with videos and comments), there was a total of ex- cerpts, which yielded tokens of the focal raciolinguistic ideologies identified. table genealogy , , of provides an overall summary of the number of times each raciolinguistic ideology ap- peared. dna ideology was the most prevalent with appearances. this was closely followed by categorization fallacy with . overall, the data set suggests that people are still heavily dedicated to negotiating and discussing both scientific race and the modern conceptions of nation state and identity. language, on the other hand, took a backseat in conversations about race, with co-naturalization of language and race only presenting tokens and accent ideology producing . the ideologies are discussed in order of magni- tude, with the most frequent occurring first. table . raciolinguistic stance foci frequency. ideology frequency dna ideology categorization fallacy co-naturalization of language and race accent ideology total . . dna ideology while social scientists and the major scholarly organizations to which they belong have generally moved away from race as a biological or scientific concept (morning ), an adherence to eugenic and scientific projects of race persist (omi and winant ; morning ; williams ). these notions are reified through public narratives of iden- tity based on dna testing, ultimately linking the life sciences to popular culture (nelson ; yudell et al. ; roth and ivemark ). dna ideologies were the most prevalent in the current data set, with genetics as an indicator of racial belonging appearing most often in discussions of ethno-racial belonging. thus, despite an apparent shift in academic knowledge about race, scientific race is not only persisting, it is dominating ideas about identity and belonging. references to dna, blood, african, indian, and european ances- try and heritage were all called on to validate or contest blackness for dominicans on the island and in the united states ( ). moreover, we see reference to dna as something that is quantifiable, present in the qualifier “more”. ( ) dominicans acknowledge their african ancestry just like they do their indian and european. i’ve never heard a dominican that has obviously african features say that he doesn’t have african blood. . the average dominican has more european dna than they do african. yet we don’t run around saying we’re european. . i’d be just as ashamed to claim african ancestors as i am to claim whites/europeans. like y’all say “whites were rapist”, but you forget that the africans sold their own to the whites making their rape and mistreatment possible. that’s one of the reason we as well as other nations in latin america developed our own identity. in this case, we see the calling of the dna ideology into the construction of a unique latin american identity that transcends the bounds of blackness or whiteness. genetic declarations were also found in insistences of phenotypic characteristics as indicative of race ( ). here we see dark skin and african features as demonstrative of both african heritage and supposed belonging in the ethno-racial category black. in this way, the commenter is privileging notions of “ascribed race”, i.e., race assigned to an individual by others and “street race”, i.e., the race you think you would be ascribed on the street (lopez et al. ), which cannot be subverted by self-identification since they rely on examples are represented exactly as drawn from source, including orthographic irregularities. as internet talk allows for the creation of new forms of talk, respecting the original form of the post provides a more nuanced reading. additionally, it allows for a more pointed understanding of negotiations of meaning occurring at the level of the word. genealogy , , of undeniable physical attributes. this comment is representative of the use of genetic nar- ratives and ideologies to reify notions of phenotype as a marker of racial difference. the commenter goes further to indicate that the sociopolitical aspects that are indexed by black as a racial category are responsible for the disconnect between true racial categori- zation—indicated by skin color—and the claiming of racial categorization. additionally, the commenter notes the historical subjugation that indicates an alignment with blackness and indigeneity, despite the recognition of the negative conditions that such an alignment produces. ( ) la verdad es que hay muchos dominicanos de piel oscura y con rasgos africanos que rechazan su herencia africana. si la raza negra estuviera en buenas circunstancias, apuesto a que más dominicanos se clasificarían como negros orgullosamente. sin embargo, como dices, mucha gente latina/dominicana si tiene herencia mezclada y no quiero decir que todos los latinos son “africanos”. solo refiero a los dominicanos que se ven muy africanos. además muchos españoles son racistas contra los latinos así que no podemos olvidar lo que hicieron a nuestros ancestros nativos y africanos � no se debe ser tan orgulloso de tener sangre española cuando a ellos no les importa un carajo de la cultura caribeña. [the truth is there are a lot of dark skinned dominicans with african features who deny their african heritage. if the black race was in better conditions, i bet more dominicans would identify themselves as proudly black. in any case, like you say, a lot of latin@/dominican people do have mixed heritage and i don’t want to say all latin@s are “african”. i am only referring to the dominicans who look very african. plus, many spanish people are racist against latin@s so we can’t forget what they did to our native and african ancestors � we should not be proud of having spanish blood when they could give a f—k about caribbean culture.]. commenters who ascribed to the dna ideology often relied on percentages of an- cestry ascertained through dna profiling services such as andme and ancestrydna to posit belonging in one group or another, or to contest belonging in any particular group ( ). these percentages were often mobilized in conjunction with assertions of phenotype as indicative of racial belonging ( ). for hundreds of years, the united states has func- tioned on a racialized dichotomy of black and white, characterized by what is popularly known as the one-drop rule of hypo-descent, which cast anyone with / or more african blood into the category of “black” in the united states (omi and winant ). in addition to comments about dna, phenotype and ancestry, genetic distinctions were called into the ratification or contestation of notions of hypo-descent, noting that a small percentage or “one drop” of african blood was not enough to cross into blackness as a racial identifier ( ). ( ) it’s mostly black americans who want you to be black lol, if you go to any dominican dna video you will see black americans commenting. even though the person is only % black lol. and most dominicans are too mixed to be black. they don’t have the skin or hair texture. ( ) i am only %african that doesn’t make me only african. some people are delusional and thinks dominican are only black. in these examples, we again see the tension between dna as indicative of racial categori- zation and imagined phenotypic representations of these boundaries. nonetheless, with hypo-descent as the organizing principle for racial stratification in the united states, com- menters often relied upon these zero sums categorizations of blackness indicated by af- rican dna ( ). others contextualized the rule of hypo-descent as an american invention that did not function to categorize people in other parts of the world ( ). ( ) when was the last time you did a dna analysis? if no sub-saharan dna shows up i’ll personally call you: a white person, okay. genealogy , , of ( ) yes, in america. but america isn’t the entire world. the reason why obama is viewed as “black” and not biracial is because of the racist one drop rule that ameri- cans love holding on to. quite to the contrary of the one-drop rule in the united states, in the dominican republic, one drop of european blood meant that you were cast out of the racial categorization of “black” and into a racialized concept of “mixed”, creating a tripartite conceptualization of race in which black, white, and mixed can co-exist (duany ). “mixed” as a racial category is quite common in latin america, stemming from notions of mestizaje devel- oped by vasconcelos, as the defining characteristic of latinidad (hooker ). in contesting the rule of hypo-descent, many relied on notions of mestizaje as an or- ganizing principle for racial stratification ( ). instead of the racial binary created by the rule of hypo-descent, notions of mestizaje are called upon in order to allow for a third category of “mixed”, referencing afro, euro, and indigenous descended peoples ( ). this incongruency between notions of hypo-descent and mestizaje often prompted conflict ( ) and ( ). while the dominican commenter refuses to accept categorization, they attribute the incorrect classification to “black americans”, which places the blame on a group of people who have acquired systems of racial categorization from the ruling class ( ). at the same time, when the african american commenter questions dominican racial identifica- tion practices, it evidences an adherence to concepts of hypo-descent by presupposing that a lack of desire to be categorized as black must be indicative of a denial of african ancestry ( ). ( ) there is a such thing as multiracial dumb ass...and the majority of us… almost the whole island is multi racial ( ) ok i am claiming i’m not black but i’m multi racial … beautiful white lovely native american… gorgeous african… so is this offensive .... ( ) the problem is when black americans claim mixed race latinos as black...we not black we mixed. ( ) why do a lot of them [dominicans] just refuse to acknowlege that they’re black though? … or at least have african ancestry? that is wild and bizarre mestizaje is weaponized against african americans in a way that does not allow for mixed-ness to be applicable to african americans. mestizaje is thus called into the con- struction of latinidad in a way that reinforces the mutual exclusivity between blackness and latinidad. additionally, it at once claims a genetic understanding of race, while re- jecting it completely. the contradiction must be maintained in order to reinforce the boundary of difference between dominicans and african americans ( ). ( ) … you self haters are nowhere near as mixed as dominican are ... so stfu..the average dominican is more european than they are african..i’m not claiming black when i’m % european and % african..the average black american looks like whoopi goldberg and obviously black..most of y’all are to % african, look at the dna videos..slavery in the dr was a breeze compared to america..there was no segrega- tion or jim crow laws and the spaniards freely intermixed with the african and in- digenous people. the british on the other hand were ruthless..we have been mixing for more than years..mixed and proud �” nonetheless, the dna ideology was also used to promote solidarity between african americans and dominicans. similar physical features were marked as indicative of shared “roots”, which indicates alignment with a dna ideology as a way to engender intra-racial solidarity. additionally, the comments suggest an adherence to race as a static category that can be achieved with a named and bounded category determination, as shown through the suggestion to “google the different races” ( ). in example ( ), the com- menter says that mixed cannot be a marker of latinidad since several latinxs are not genealogy , , of mixed. this is a result of atrocities of colonization and slavery that were perpetrated against afro cubans as well as african americans, and indicates a desire to form solidar- ities based on historical oppression of enslaved ancestors. ( ) cardi may not be a percent black like most are these days but she does have black roots. look at cardi and hennessy’s features, their skin tone and afros as kids. once again google the different races and place them in the one they most identify with. contrary to what most ignorant people think spanish is not a race bc i’m sure we are not english white men and women. ( ) … that’s not fair to us afro latinos who are not mixed. my entire afro cuban lineage has no white ancestry. we are not mixed but are just as latino as anyone else having been in cuba since slavery. you wanna claim latino to cover up the multitude of sins committed against blacks and indigenous people by hiding behind mixed identity. there are more white latinos than mixed latinos. idk why we lie about this. the dna ideology presented a frame for claiming an identity; it was used as a way to place dominicans both within the boundaries of blackness that includes african amer- icans and other afro-descended people and also as a way to mark them as separate due to a claimed unique mestizaje not shared by african americans (or haitians). the way that commenters took up this ideology is explored later in this paper with stance dimen- sions that nuance the utilization of this ideology. . . categorization fallacy much like cardi b warned, the presence of a categorization fallacy in the data sug- gests a general discord in the definition of ethnicity, race, and nationality. as such, much of the debates surrounding who was able to claim blackness or latinidad were bound up in the conflation of these categorical notions, such that race and ethnicity were often of- fered up as simultaneous categorizations. in these cases, “black” was no longer a racial identification that could be used to promote some sort of solidarity, but rather an ethnic term to create a boundary between african americans and those who had claim to another national or ethnic “culture”. many of the comments that demonstrated this ideology were offered to “educate” fellow commenters about the distinction between the categories ( ) and ( ). ( ) dominicans come in variety of races, not just white dummy. there are also black dominicans, taino dominicans and asian dominicans. dominican is only a nationality. any race can be dominican as long as they are native born citizens of the island. ( ) i don’t think you get the point. dominican is a nationality. if you say you want a black girl, how do i know if you want jamaican, trinidadian, bahamas, haitian. if she’s darker completed then she’s afro latina race wise. if your trying make point with black & dominican then you have generalized it with different type of black women. its c’mon man let’s educate each other. others justified dominican denial of blackness as a result of the term being applied as an ethnic, rather than a racial term ( ) and ( ). in ( ) and ( ), we see the explicit connec- tion of black as an ethnic marker for african americans rather than a racial marker incor- porating a more wide-range of subject positionalities. moreover, the mention of % in example ( ) indicates the frame under which blackness is constructed in the dominican republic, with one drop of european ancestry as indicative of a move out of the category of black. ( ) tu tiene razon en mucha cosas k dijiste aki hermano ... pero cuando se dice “no soy black soy dominicano” es cuando los dominicans estan hablando de los afroamericanos, a ellos se llaman “black” en usa. genealogy , , of [you are right about a lot of things you say here brother. but when they say, “i am not black, i’m dominican” it’s when dominicans are speaking about african americans. they are called black in the united states] ( ) black means african american. i have african in me and that doesn’t make me percent black. silly americans. the categorization fallacy was often contested in comment threads, where disambig- uating notions of ethnicity, race, and nationality were often accompanied by commentary about levels of intelligence ( ). it was in these comments that latinidad was also imagined as a racial category rather than an ethnic one. additionally, “dominican” is posited as an all-encompassing category that supersedes race and ethnicity, while insisting on nation- ality as the defining characteristic of racial categorizations ( ). these comments support narratives of “racial democracy”, where latinidad gives all those who lay claim to it an ability to transcend ethno-racial categorizations as they exist in the context. ( ) they think you telling them they are african americans, if you call a white dominican hey white boy they will tell you i’m dominican, because they think you calling them americans. in dominican everyone is dominican black dominican or light skin or white dominicans. in dominican republic there is colorism but is not like in the us that black and white are divided in dr everyone is dominican. ( ) dominican is based on territory and culture of a home land which is a nationality so yeah dominican is a race. these comments rely on a comparison with racial structures in the united states, such that racism is a feature unique to the united states. this is similar to christina sue’s ( ) concept of an ideology of non-racism in mexico, which is maintained through a variety of strategies including the postulation of the u.s. as the only society organized by race. in our case, the prioritization of ethnicity and nationality as the defining category of differ- ence allows dominicans—or those speaking about race in the dominican republic—to negate the existence of a racial hierarchy and of anti-blackness as an organizing principle of both societies. categorization ideologies often relied on citizenship ties in the ratification of ethno- racial belonging ( ). additionally, it allowed for the creation of categories of difference based on historical notions of race in a particular location ( ). in this way, the categoriza- tion fallacy often called on racialized narratives (or scripts) rather than full historical knowledge in an attempt to create solidarities ( ). ( ) obviously you don’t because of what you just said ... % africans who become a citizen in america are the true african-americans. ( ) i think afro indigenous and latina might be mutually exclusive politically speaking but let’s consider the implications of putting these three political locations identities together what we might be referring to is a desire to identify the ways in which people are of african descent indigenous descent and from places and geographies that were established through spanish. ( ) … love your comment!!!! thank you for looking at it from the correct perspective. many people don’t know that slavery and all that it entailed in america lasted way longer than it ever did in the dominican republic. the british and their descendants and the spaniards, french and portuguese and their descendants did not act in the same manner. in the dominican republic, the initial wave of slavery was brutal. however, the new “criollos”, which is the name given to the generation of the children of spaniards who were born in the dominican republic and all their descendants just continued to mix with each other without any slavery involved. and this is our real history. so we cannot disqualify one or embrace one when generationally, we haven’t been taught that. i understand that in america, the one genealogy , , of drop rule has been established and applied as the one and only rule of thumb for anyone of color. this is not a european concept. the descendants of the english created that rule! at the end of the day, there is no such thing as race. we are one race, the human race and the concept of race has only served the purpose of dividing and not uniting us as a human race. so when i see ignorant comments about race or even when they concern my people, i don’t entertain those conversations because they’re useless! however, i really liked your comment and needed to let you know. while the dna ideology provided the basis and justification for racial belonging, the categorization fallacy was more so implicated in the formation of a boundary between dominicans and other blacks. this ideology posited dominican-ness as a racial category in order to blur the stark line between blackness and latinidad while also drawing a strong line between themselves and other blacks both on the island of hispaniola and in the united states. this ideology was often accompanied by anti-black sentiments, which will be taken up in subsequent sections. . . co-naturalization of language and race language is often posited as the unifying factor in the construction of latinidad in the united states (aparicio , b; flores ). as such, the current project hypoth- esized a large proportion of dominicanidad and latinidad to be attributed to the co-nat- uralization of language and race—that is the conflation of race into the bounded notion of a particular language variety such that one who speaks spanish takes on “spanish” as their racial category ( ). nonetheless, only five percent of the tokens were represented through the co-naturalization of language and race ideology. these comments not only used language categorizations as racial categorizations but also called on language in or- der to justify belonging to a particular ethno-racial category ( ). ( ) spanish is a different category from black even though obviously we know now that it’s not it is when people use it it’s a different category from black… ( ) i am dominican i am hispanic i speak spanish you know. there were also contestations of the co-naturalization of language and race ( ). these contestations often called into question the use of other bounded language categorization in the identification of individual speakers who have not traditionally been labelled by their language affiliation ( ). assuming the commenter in example ( ) speaks both english and spanish, they note the absurdity of using one language as a racial marker, while the other remains solely an indicator of linguistic ability. further, if it were used as a racial identifier, it would be reserved for those in england, which would erase the existence of a large group of people who use and speak english as a native language and who are not racialized as english. ( ) stop talking about education when you said spanish people. spanish is a language not an ethnicity, nor a race. wow the ignorance is appalling. ( ) contrary to what most ignorant people think spanish is not a race bc i’m sure we are not english white men and women. in some cases, the co-naturalization of language in race was used to block entry into a particular racial category. in this case, the inability to speak a particular language inval- idated belonging ( ). in this example, the speaker was referring to a poster who self-iden- tified as both cuban american and bilingual in the original video. the comment came after another individual who asked if the original poster could do a version of the video in spanish in order to educate more people about the existence of black latinos. in the context of the united states, where english is the dominant language, the manifestation of this ideology was couched in claims of bilingualism with spanish representing latinidad and english representing a belonging within the borders of the united states. genealogy , , of bilingualism as a marker of difference was also posited alongside anti-black and misogy- noir declarations. bilingualism, thus, becomes a mark of mestizaje, where ideals of the tri- racial were transposed onto multilingualism in the u.s. context ( ). more specifically, the comments take up the bounds of blackness, constructing racial categories by dictating language as the marker for true identity categorization ( ). ( ) … he can’t only dominicans are bilingual. ( ) … envy jealousy .. why .. cause ys wanna be us .. have our mixture be bilingual.. dominican men chase dominican women..black men chase white girls and latinas .whites sre not afraid of us .we mixed with white black native american..no one sees us as black they see african americans as black ... were never slaves in america. african american never beat white man british.. dominican beat both white man spain & black man haitians.... dominican was in usa before blacks..black men ur men get on planes to travel to date a poor dominican girl than educated with bling black woman.....dud i answer u.. dominican women are desired soooo much. ( ) dominicans need to stop acting black. y’all are dominican. act spanish. commenters also took part in assigning blame for the creation of these disjunctive categories, indicating black americans as the creators of the co-naturalization of language and race, rather than recipients of colonial frames of socialization ( ). ( ) it has to be jealousy, in all honesty i can’t imagine why else they would take time out of their day to come here and other platforms to tell dominicans they should identify as “black” and not dominican. that’s why i don’t agree with all these new terms like “latinx, and afro latino”. latinos who do that are just playing in to what black americans want. and americans are never satisfied. i remember back in the day when i first moved out here, americans (specifically black americans) would notice a person speaking spanish and instead of taking the time to find out where that person was from they would just label them as spanish. now it seems to upset some of them when we say we’re spanish. which isn’t accurate, but that’s one of the labels that america has placed on us. now they’re trying to do even more with these new r—d terms. i’m dominican, i may go further to identify as latino, but that’s where it ends. . . accent ideology attributing one’s ethno-racial identity to an accent ideology was limited but did man- ifest in key ways: first, individuals ratified belonging in a particular ethnic category based on accent presentation ( ). the ellipsis at the end of this example can be assumed to rep- resent the subtext that her accent provided the evidence of her authentic belonging in the ethnic category, dominican. ( ) i thought she was a black girl from some random place n not dominican when i first click the vid until her accent then... secondly, some enacted an accent to embody a particular ethnic stance ( ). this comment came from a video in which a nigerian american imitated a dominican accent while he disavowed belonging in the racial category black. in this case, the accent ideology ap- peared in mocking dominicans who denied blackness. while accent ideology did not ap- pear in the smaller data set examined here, notions of language and the performance of language as indicative of belonging were suggested. ( ) he try to salsa that shit off and be like “no it’s not the same. i no black negro no no nunca nunca no i no black”. i’m like no, you’re black. “no no no i no black dominican”. i go, i know but you’re black. . . co-occurrence of raciolinguistic ideologies genealogy , , of examinations of the raciolinguistic ideologies that were presented together give us an indication of how these ideologies are marshaled in the creation of ethno-racial bound- aries between dominicans and african americans. of all of the co-occurrences the most common co-occurrence of ideologies was categorization with (or alongside) the dna ide- ology, with instances of overlapping between the ideologies. the second-most com- monly co-occurring ideology was the categorization fallacy alongside co-naturalization ( ), followed by the dna ideology with the co-naturalization ideology ( ). overall, the co-occurrences reinforced the strength between genetic conceptualizations of race and the terminology that is used to categorize individuals in different contexts. from this analysis, it seems that while language often functions to create and uphold notions of latinidad (often being mobilized as evidence that dominicans are not black but rather spanish), dna functions to confirm (or to disprove) blackness. the lack of co-occurrence between dna and co-naturalization of language and race suggests the stronghold of a mutual ex- clusivity between blackness and latinidad in these data. nonetheless, there was a strong co-occurrence between ideologies that aided in the definition of the african american/do- minican boundary of difference with the dna ideology being used to support the cate- gorization fallacy that conflated ethnicity, race, and nationality marking dominican as a racial category. table provides an overview of the number of tokens that were coded for two ideologies at the same time. table . co-occurrence of focal raciolinguistic ideologies. ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) accent - ( ) categorization - ( ) co-naturalization - ( ) dna - . . stance dimension weights by ideology while the frequency of ideologies gives us an indication of how racial categories are being constructed, the mention of the ideology does not tell us whether the public is taking the ideology up or contesting it in their comments. the following analysis allows for a more refined understanding of the ways that these ideologies were represented in con- versations about dominicans and blackness. the stance dimensions (affect, investment, alignment) for each excerpt were weighted on a – -point likert scale, with higher scores indicating greater alignment and investment or more positive affect toward coded ideo- logies. across all of the data, the mean scores for each (affect, alignment, and investment) are presented for each raciolinguistic ideology as seen in table . as we can see, the scores reflected a narrow window of variation between each raciolinguistic ideology. table . mean stance dimension weights by ideology. accent categorization co-naturalization dna affect . . . alignment . . . investment . . . . nevertheless, the variations provide interesting information about the ways that the ideologies are being mobilized to create boundaries of difference. taking each raciolin- guistic ideology separately, the highlighted scores demonstrate some key differences as shown in table . scores were measured for the stance dimension by subject positionality note, accent ideology was eliminated from this analysis as it only appeared in two instances. genealogy , , of for each raciolinguistic ideology investigated. averages were taken across each ethno-ra- cial identifier, with one video from an african american, two from panamanian, one from cuban, one from nigerian, and five from dominican subject positionalities. overall, the categories analyzed for the stance dimensions confirm the strength of the dna ideology in the construction of race, with alignment being the highest for all subject positionalities. the dna ideology displayed an average score of . on alignment, followed by co- naturalization of language and race ( . ) and then categorization fallacy ( . ). it is im- portant to note that the scores presented for each ideology do not indicate a neutrality but rather a trend toward an equal number of individuals who were not aligned ( – ) along- side those who were completely aligned ( ). in fact, there were rarely times where an ex- plicit score of was given as most commenters had strong feelings and opinions associ- ated with their comments. table . raciolinguistic ideology by subject positionality. co-naturalization ideology by subject positionality african american cuban dominican nigerian american panamanian affect . . . alignment . . . . . investment . . . . dna ideology by subject positionality african american cuban dominican nigerian american panamanian affect . . . . . alignment . . . . . investment . . . . . categorization fallacy by subject positionality african american cuban dominican nigerian american panamanian affect . . . . . alignment . . . . investment . . . . . though the co-naturalization of language and race was not as prevalent in the data as hypothesized, investment scores show the ideology to be taken up more by non-do- minicans than by dominicans themselves. in fact, the dominican videos not only elicited minimal participation in the ideology, but also when the ideology was introduced, it was mostly contested eliciting a slight trend toward disagreement with the ideology ( . ). in other words, when people brought up the co-naturalization of language and race, it was mostly to oppose its validity. the scores indicate a lack of participation in the deployment of co-naturalization of language and race as a valid tool for the construction of racial iden- tity. lastly, the video produced by the nigerian american elicited the most investment in the categorization fallacy ( . ). . . anti-haitian and anti-african american sentiments taken up in conflict and solidarity another fruitful example of the way boundaries of difference were created was ex- plored through an examination of moments of conflict and solidarity. three codes were developed in order to explore these moments: (i) anti-blackness; (ii) inter-ethnic conflict; and (iii) inter-ethnic solidarity. anti-blackness referred to moments where there was a combined use of the n word with derogatory comments against “black” identity catego- rizations ( ). inter-ethnic conflicts, on the other hand, were characterized by an explicit mention of disagreement between individuals regarding identification practices ( ). inter- genealogy , , of ethnic solidarities were characterized by explicit moments of racial accord between indi- viduals from different black subjectivities ( ). ( ) i never seen a dominican as black or blacker than godfrey, this n—a burnt y’all got us confused with haitians … the darkest we go is will smith color ( ) … parts of our culture may come from west africa (nothing to do with american blacks) … but american blacks themselves, yes they envy us dominicans becuz of our mixed race heritage. ( ) she never said that she wasn’t black and being that this ignorant ass comment got pinned disgusted me. you do know that the freeways from west africa came over to the caribbean and latin america first right? before the slave trade. how can black people be so ignorant to black history. latina is a culture not a damn race. what is interesting is the ways that these moments of anti-blackness, conflict, and solidar- ity appeared in conjunction with the raciolinguistic ideologies explored. in table , we see the number of times a raciolinguistic ideology appeared alongside an instance of anti- blackness, conflict, or solidarity over the entire data set. table . conflict and solidarity by raciolinguistic ideology. dna co-naturalization category accent anti-blackness inter-ethnic conflict inter-ethnic solidarity based on frequency, the data indicate a high presence of moments of solidarity ( ) along- side genetic explanations of race, which evidences a pan-racial solidarity. nonetheless, moments of anti-blackness alongside the dna ideology show that genetic race is also used to create boundaries of separation and to contest belonging in a pre-determine racial group ( ). genetic race prevailed in anti-haitian sentiments, with comments noting phe- notypical differences between haitians and dominicans ( ). it is assumed here that mor- gan freeman, who has a deep brown skin complexion, is more representative of blackness than arod, who has a caramel-colored skin complexion. in this case, a caramel skin com- plexion shows mixed-ness, which pushes him out of the categorization of black. this strat- egy was also used to distance dominicans from african americans ( ), with african american culture often being aligned with notions of paucity and depravity, even in mo- ments of attempted solidarity ( ). ( ) haitian look like morgan freemen ..so do afro americans. dominican look like arod ( ) if dominicans are so “racist” and “confused” why do you african-american men go down there for an orgasm? i never see you self haters visiting haiti or africa? or predominantly black countries..y’all stay going to dominican republic to fuck mixed light skin women with good hair..you guys hate your own black women you hate black features so much so that you have to go down to a predominately mixed country to chase after light skin women! you black men need to worry about your community and being a father! y’all stay praising light skinned mixed women but don’t like ur own women..sad existence..worry about your own damn self instead of worrying about people of a different culture and background than you. ( ) i don’t think that they hate africans or african americans. i think it is the negative image given to them by the media many times, especially about african americans. what i think many dislike are the street life/culture of african americans which gets more promoted everywhere and make people think thats how all african americans are or act even though i know thats not the case. stupid media just pick the bad apples to represent african americans just like i see many african americans picking genealogy , , of the bad apples to represent all of us dominicans and say that were like that which is bs. african americans contested the anti-blackness, suggesting that dominicans (as well as others) benefited from black culture while also creating a hierarchy of superiority over african americans ( ). they also contested the idea of mestizaje, re-inserting notions of hypo-descent as the prevailing racial ideology ( ). ( ) kings n queens of colorism, nationalistic pride and coat tale riding off black culture but hate blackness. n feel superior for reason. ( ) african american question: why do a lot of them just refuse to acknowlege that they’re black though?..or at least have african ancestry? that is wild and bizarre. it is worth noting that the videos represented an even split of black diasporic solidar- ity and inter-ethnic conflict and boundary justifications. of the five videos presented by those who claimed dominican identities, just two represented inter-ethnic conflict. none- theless, the comment sections of each video contained the majority of the discord, with . % of the anti-blackness and . % of the inter-ethnic conflict being located in the com- ments. while social media influencers and content producers intended to create solidari- ties, narratives of dna and categorization fallacies prevailed, ultimately resulting in a strengthened boundary of difference between african americans and dominicans. . discussion the subject of inter-racial conflict forms the cornerstone of many race studies, but inter-ethnic conflict is far less studied in the united states (examples of ethnic conflict studies can be found in european contexts). in fact, the boundaries of difference drawn between groups that can exist within one census box is rarely examined, though many have noted the effects of homogenization in studies of latinidad (oro ; aparicio a, ). additionally, the way that the terms race, ethnicity, and nationality have been operationalized in these contexts offers a foundation for the development of u.s. racial logics (e.g., blackness, whiteness, and racism) (de genova and ramos-zayas ; hoy ). the current study presented several examples of raciolinguistic ideologies from individual youtube users. while many of these examples seem to come from one user, each excerpt represented a unique assertion by different individuals. although the methodology did not allow for a survey of the subject positionality of each of these users, the fact that—even down to the phrasing—the ideologies represented were repeated by different users is indicative of the scripted nature of raciolinguistic ideologies in this con- text. nevertheless, focusing on the ways that the raciolinguistic ideologies surfaced within inter-ethnic conflict allows for a nuanced understanding of racial construction. while the construction of blackness continues to rely on colonial logics of scientific race, taken up in the dna ideology, the mobilization of national borders and language allowed for a novel racialization of latinidad that marked it as distinct from blackness. nonetheless, the use of language as a distinguishing feature of latinidad seems to be part of the larger project of latinidad, not necessarily taken up by dominicans themselves, who often recognize that you can both fit into the scientific racial logics of blackness while possessing the cul- tural norms that are being marked as mutually exclusive. since language is enregistered as the boundary making element between blackness and latinidad, dominicans are often forced into a position of either accepting or contesting the boundary in a move towards their own self-determination. nevertheless, dna narratives were often posited as objective fact adding to the lit- erature showing the subjective nature of “scientific race” (morning ; williams ). users evoked dna as a way to both construct and deconstruct boundaries of belonging. further, the use of this ideology in conjunction with the categorization ideology was often mobilized in order to promote a conflation of race and ethnicity that supported a mutual exclusivity between black and latino as pan-racial categories. this mutual exclusivity was genealogy , , of further constructed by the co-naturalization of language and race ideology, which posited language ability as the true indication of race. data from the current study provide evi- dence of the ways that language is being used to transcend the boundaries of “ascribed” and “street race”, such that individuals are able to take a stance toward or away from assigned racial categories and even physical representations of race through the use or knowledge of particular language not generally indexed to their ascribed or street race. although many latinxs may transcend the boundaries of blackness and latinidad, black- ness has been a defining characteristic of u.s. social order, linking individuals to notions of poverty, violence, ignorance, and laziness (fanon ; yancy ). therefore, it is no surprise that for dominican(-americans) a negotiation and possible distancing from blackness may be employed in the performance of racial identity. in looking at the presented data from an anti-racist stance, i turn to the question of social justice and liberation. i ask, “what happens when you fight for the visibilization of african descended people without disrupting the colonial logics under which you were socialized”? it seems that without centering decoloniality in constructions of self and oth- ers, one ultimately reproduces colonial logics. ethno-racial logics may manifest differently based on the terminology and language given to the structures. however, the result is the same—erasure and dehumanization via the indexing of blackness with stereotypes of ur- ban crime (ghetto) and undesirability. in this paper, anti-black stereotypes were most of- ten attributed to african americans. as the most established afro-descended population within the colonial frame of the united states, it makes sense that these ideologies would have taken hold, even for newly arrived populations. the fact that these ideologies occur even within a population that may suffer from negative stereotypes related to anti-black- ness proves the strength of colonial formations of power. so terminology matters—the way that we marshal identity categories for ourselves and others has an effect on our abil- ity to create inter-ethnic solidarity. when does one get to claim a black identity? do they have to look black? do they have to have a certain percentage of african dna? do they have to speak a certain language? or have a certain accent? the debate about blackness in these forums often called on colonial logics of scientific race and reproduced structures of white supremacy. those who have limited ability to negotiate blackness through lan- guage or culture because of physical characteristics such as skin color and hair texture were often the ones who engaged in acts of policing blackness, calling on notions of hypo- descent while also questioning authenticity based on linguistic and cultural practices that were seen as mitigating whiteness. the policing of blackness is a direct re-formulation of colonial structures of power. in trying to fight for pieces of this power, afro-descended people often rely on the same tools that uphold white supremacy. in doing this, they are often forfeiting liberatory action for debates on description and a place in the already de- fined system. funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. appendix a. video data video title subject positionality date posted url # of overall comments # of views (as of / / ) dominicans are not black explained � (read description below) dominican november https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=oseip_fm fds �� are dominicans black??? final answer! (with pictures of my family dominican august https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= tcfxrx nco , genealogy , , of why dominicans say they are not black they dominican cuban february https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=azlbpxl _zje , dominicans—“the self-hating black latinos…” �� dominican february https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=asmcm ax ba , i’m not black, i’m dominican dominican and panamanian december https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jkbezkci tj dominican girl says shes not black goes viral what are your thoughts? dominican january https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wzdqjp x -le&feature=youtu.be , cardi says she’s afro latina black (u.s.) june https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w- sbx qppa , , cardi b is an afro latino now|an afro latina opinion panamanian june https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lr njzcq y g , godfrey impersonates dominicans refusing to accept they’re black (flashback) nigerian american june https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xxpgx d ts w , blacks vs dominicans dominican (woman) june https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vfbe if rbdm appendix b. stance dimensions stance dimension affect this indicates strong negative feelings towards the stance focus this indicates negative feelings towards the stance focus this indicates neither negative nor positive feelings towards the stance focus this indicates positive feelings towards the stance focus this indicates strong positive feelings toward the stance focus investment this indicates very minimum investment in the claim towards the stance focus this indicates low investment in the claim towards the stance focus this indicates neither high nor low investment in the claim towards the stance focus this indicates medium investment in the claim towards the stance focus this indicates high investment in the claim towards the stance focus alignment this indicates high disalignmentin the orientation towards the stance focus as either the original poster, or the commenters prior this indicates some disalignment in the orientation towards the stance focus as either the original poster, or the commenters prior this indicates neither alignment or disalignment in orientation towards the stance focus as either the original poster, or the commenters prior. this indicates some agreement (or alignment) in orientation towards the stance focus as either the original poster, or the commenters prior this indicates high agreement (or alignment) in orientation towards the stance focus as either the original poster, or the commenters prior genealogy , , of references alim, h. sami, john r. rickford, and arnetha f. ball. . introducing raciolinguistics: racing language and languaging race in hyperracial times. in raciolinguistics: how language shapes our ideas about race. new york: oxford university press, pp. – . agha, asif. . voice, footing, enregisterment. journal of linguistic anthropology : – . aparicio, francis. . reading the “latino” in latino studies: toward re-imagining our academic location. discourse : – . aparicio, frances r. a. 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theo soc psychol. ; : – .	 	 	 | 	 wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/jts   |   i n t r o d u c t i o n this special issue of the journal of theoretical social psychology taps into one of the more interesting debates in social psychology over the last decade: whether intergroup contact or collective action are strate‐ gically incompatible in fostering social change (wright & lubensky, ). as these authors put it (p. ), “… they may not be compatible at all. in fact, the underlying psychology required by these two ap‐ proaches may place them in direct conflict with each other.” as a brief backdrop, the social psychology of collective action (e.g., klandermans, ; for a meta‐analysis see van zomeren, postmes & spears, ) suggests that there is collective agency among in‐ dividuals to achieve social change, and that such action typically takes forms that are conflictual and antagonistic (e.g., social protest). through collective action, it is assumed, groups make use of their power in numbers while trying to achieve group goals, such as social change. the black lives matter movement is a good example of such a collective and conflictual push for social change, which seeks to enforce equal rights and treatment through collective action. the real problem, in this view, is structural inequality and the real solu‐ tion is to engage in intergroup conflict to enforce structural change. social change can also be achieved, however, by more harmoni‐ ously reducing the prejudice of those who hold it. in the context of black lives matter, for example, one could argue that if only the prej‐ udice toward blacks would be reduced, the group would be treated equally and thus the movement would be obsolete. specifically, theory and research on intergroup contact has long promoted the idea that positive and frequent contact between different groups may lead its members to forego their prejudices and treat each other in more equal ways (allport, ; pettigrew, for a meta‐analysis, see pettigrew & tropp, ). thus, the real problem, in this view, is individuals’ prej‐ udice and the solution is establishing positive and frequent contact be‐ tween members of different groups in order to harmoniously reduce it. received:	 	july	   | revised:	 	july	   | accepted:	 	july	 doi: . /jts . o r i g i n a l a r t i c l e intergroup contact and collective action: a match made in hell, or in heaven? martijn van zomeren social psychology, heymans research institute, university of groningen, groningen, the netherlands correspondence martijn van zomeren, department of social psychology, heymans research institute, university of groningen, grote kruisstraat / , groningen ts, the netherlands. email: m.van.zomeren@rug.nl abstract since wright and lubensky ( ) suggested that intergroup contact and collective action seem strategically incompatible when it comes to social change, social psy‐ chologists have been inclined to see their potential match as one made in hell, rather than in heaven. against this backdrop, i review and discuss the contributions to this special issue, most of which seem to suggest that intergroup contact and collective action are a match made in heaven, not hell. to account for these seemingly divergent perspectives, i suggest that both intergroup contact and collective action be concep‐ tualized as relational, interaction‐based phenomena within which the forces of har‐ mony and conflict—intergroup contact and collective action, respectively—reflect two sides of the same coin, namely individuals’ need to regulate their relationships within their social network. as such, it is individuals’ embeddedness in (networks of) social relationships that determines whether intergroup contact and collective action work together, or against each other, toward social change. i discuss the need for a broader and integrative theoretical perspective that does justice to the underlying psychology of these phenomena in terms of relationship regulation. © the authors. journal of theoretical social psychology published by wiley periodicals, inc. this is an open access article under the terms of the creative commons attribution license, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. mailto: http://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:m.van.zomeren@rug.nl   |     van zomeren the presumed incompatibility between the two seems to rely on a belief that the psychological forces of conflict and harmony are mutually exclusive—you cannot fight friends, and you cannot like enemies. indeed, wright and lubensky ( ) argued that creating harmony between groups lowers the disadvantaged group’s moti‐ vation and ability to achieve actual social change (coined the irony of harmony; e.g., saguy, tausch, dovidio, & pratto, ; see also dixon, durrheim, & tredoux, ). similarly, engaging in collec‐ tive action may exacerbate intergroup differences and thus fuel, rather than reduce, prejudice (e.g., reynolds, oakes, haslam, nolan, & dolnik, ). as such, although both approaches may appear to aim for similar goals, they also seem strategically incompatible. to only very slightly overstate this claim from the perspective of those valuing social change, the match between intergroup contact and collective action is one made in hell. by contrast, the key message of this article is that the match be‐ tween intergroup contact and collective action, at least when con‐ sidering the contributions to this special issue, actually seems to be one made in heaven. indeed, a number of contributions show that intergroup contact facilitates collective action (e.g., carter et al., hoskin, thomas, & mcgarty, römpke, fritsche, & reese, ), which can, tongue‐in‐cheek of course, be considered the irony of the irony of harmony. moving beyond these findings, however, i will also explain them by identifying the underlying psychology of both inter‐ group contact and collective action as one based in individuals’ need to regulate social relationships in their social networks (fiske, ; van zomeren, ). this is most clearly visible in the operationaliza‐ tion of intergroup contact as intergroup friendships (e.g., carter et al., ; macinnis & hodson, ). yet the very same observation has been made in the collective action literature, where a key predictor of participation in such action is: whether one has been asked to participate by a friend (e.g., schussman & soule, ). yet, what seems to be lacking in the literature is the integration of such an emphasis on so‐ cial relationships, social interaction, and social networks. i will develop this argument further with an eye to what i think is a dire need for a broader and more integrative perspective on how intergroup contact and collective action promote social change. before doing this, however, i will first review what we can learn from the interesting contributions to this special issue when it comes to social change. i will then outline a relational perspective on intergroup contact, collective action and social change and review some recent findings about intergroup contact and collective action that support such a perspective. finally, i close with recommenda‐ tions for the future by suggesting that we need to better understand when and why intergroup contact and collective action can be a match made in hell or heaven.   |   t h e c o n t r i b u t i o n s t o t h i s s p e c i a l i s s u e each of the articles in this special issue have their own unique mes‐ sage to bring to the table, nicely fitting the call for papers on this topic. first, the article by macinnis and hodson, entitled extending the benefits of intergroup contact beyond attitudes: when does in‐ tergroup contact predict greater collect action support?, reviews the paradox that “intergroup contact is generally associated with lower collective action participation and support for disadvantaged group members, but heightened collective action participation and support for advantaged group members” (p. ). the authors discuss how being friends with outgroup members may have so‐called “sedative” effects, decreasing perceived injustice and collective action motiva‐ tion; while being friends with outgroup members may have what one may call “awareness‐raising” effects, increasing perceived injustice and collective action motivation. importantly, on the basis of their review the authors propose that for intergroup contact to foster collective action among the disadvantaged and the advantaged, a certain contact threshold is required (with which they mean: potential intergroup friendships), as well as consensus about group differences and inequalities. the authors thus argue that intergroup friendships can be called upon to mobilize individuals for collective action, but only when all involved already agree about the need for social change. this suggests that we need harmony (e.g., contact) in order to mobilize for conflict (e.g., collective action). in fact, this may be why intergroup frienships are so important—individuals will be structurally invested in friendships more than more superficial forms of contact, and thus need to regu‐ late this relationship more. second, the article by carter and colleagues entitled the racial composition of students’ friendship networks predicts perceptions of injustice and involvement in collective action asks whether positive and frequent intergroup contact, once again in terms of intergroup friendships (specifically between college students from disadvan‐ taged or advantaged groups) predicts individuals’ motivation to en‐ gage in collective action. as such, this article can be interpreted in the context of the threshold argument as articulated by macinnis and hodson. carter et al.’s findings showed that for disadvantaged group members, intergroup contact had sedative effects, whereas for advantaged group members, it had awareness‐raising effects. the authors thus conclude that (p. ): “students’ involvement in collective action on campus is influenced, at least in part, by their perceptions of the injustice that marginalized students experience on campus, and the racial composition of students’ friendship net‐ works predict these perceptions of injustice.” this is interesting in at least two ways. first, it supports the idea that individuals’ need for relationship regulation—in terms of inter‐ group friendship—may be part of the underlying psychology of both sedative and awareness‐raising processes. furthermore, it explicitly links this to social networks, which provide structural opportunities to form and maintain such friendships. second, it is also interesting to observe what is not explicitly mentioned—for example, the article does not report or discuss other aspects of psychology related to collective action, such as individuals’ group identification and their group efficacy beliefs—yet these are core motivations for collective action (van zomeren et al., ), and arguably the more unifying and empowering aspects of engaging in collective action (drury &      |   van zomeren reicher, ). as such, the carter et al. article does not speak to whether intergroup contact can unify and empower individuals to‐ ward fighting for social change. the latter is important because, third, thomas and colleagues offer an answer to this question in their contribution, entitled transnational contact and challenging global poverty: intergroup contact intensifies (the right kind of) social identities to promote solidarity‐based collec‐ tive action for those low in social dominance. in their study, they offer a longitudinal test of the idea that (transnational) contact promotes (solidarity‐based) collective action because it intensifies supportive (opinion‐based) social identities among advantaged group members. these authors draw on the notion of (opinion‐based) group identities, which basically entail macinnis and hodson’s second criterion—that of consensus about a need for collective action. indeed, hoskin et al.’s notion of opinion‐based group identity is based on opinions about how the world should be, and by identifying with such a psychological group, all involved effectively share the same opinion. contact, in their view, “intensifies” that shared reality and thus motivation for collective action. they find support for these ideas in their study, although only for individuals who score low on social dominance orientation, which i interpret as meaning that they would be very likely to score high on valuing social change toward inter‐ group equality. hoskin et al. interpret their findings as suggesting that “coming into contact with ostensible outgroup members may allow group members to develop an awareness that what ‘is’ is not what ‘should be’ and therefore provides an impetus for the intensi‐ fication of social identities based on opinions about how the world should be” (p. ). this line of thought seems to imply different types of “we” in the underlying psychology of intergroup contact and collective action. one implies intergroup friendships within which “we” think alike (for instance about the need for social change), whereas the other im‐ plies psychological group membership within which “we” think alike (for instance through identification with an opinion‐based group). yet it remains unclear, from the contributions in this special issue at least, how these two types of “we” should be conceptualized and understood in conjunction. clearly, hoskin et al. have little faith in the first type of “we,” claiming that: “if the effects of positive intergroup contact are to en‐ dure beyond the lab to promote collective action among advantaged group members then we need to go beyond inter‐personal friend‐ ships and consider alternative forms of affiliation and connection with others based on shared identity” (p. ). likewise, both macinnis & hodson and carter et al. did not include group identification in their analysis (yet focused on perceived injustice), despite meta‐ana‐ lytic evidence that if one wants to predict collective action, it would be wise to include measures of multiple motivations for collective action (i.e., group identification, anger, and efficacy beliefs; van zomeren et al., ). these gaps points to a barrier toward theoreti‐ cal integration that needs to be remove, if we want to understand the underlying psychology of intergroup contact and collective action, with an eye to social change. indeed, to this end i believe we need to start taking each type of “we” seriously to the same degree. the tendency toward category‐based forms of “we” is continued in the fourth contribution by römpke et al., entitled get together, feel together, act together: international personal contact increases identifi‐ cation with humanity and global collective action. the authors propose that although intergroup contact may have sedative effects in inter‐ group conflicts, such contact may actually be ideal for bringing peo‐ ple together from different groups to act collectively against global crises (e.g., climate change). they predict and find across a number of studies that individuals engaging in international contact identify more strongly with “all of humanity” and are more willing to engage in relevant forms of action. as such, intergroup contact and collective action once more seem joined at the hip, in this case through the notion of transna‐ tional contact and identification with all humanity. at the same time, it is important to note that global crises are fundamentally different from the contexts within which wright and lubensky ( ) identi‐ fied the strategic imcompatibility between intergroup contact and collective action. in fact, it is difficult to see the same tension be‐ tween harmony and conflict when focusing on a collective problem relevant to everyone involved. moreover, one can wonder about the meaning and sustainability of group identities that comprise all “hu‐ manity.” in the absence of a clear outgroup, one might expect that in‐ dividuals need to feel distinct within such an abstract, encompassing psychological group. once more, then, the underlying psychology here requires a view on different types of “we.” finally, zagefka’s paper is entitled triadic intergroup relations: studying situations with an observer, an actor, and a recipient of be‐ haviour. her key theoretical observation is that intergroup contact and collective action researchers typically conceive of social in‐ equality in dichotomous ways, for instance, reducing such a con‐ text to members of disadvantaged and advantaged groups. zagefka argues convincingly that unlocking a triadic perspective, although modestly increasing the number of collective actors from just two to just three, already offers more scope for understanding contact, collective action, and social change. i agree whole‐heartedly with this suggestion, not in the least be‐ cause this raises rather fundamental questions about what type(s) of “we” can be expected in contexts that move beyond dichotomous intergroup relations. although some may argue that such contexts evoke an even stronger psychological need for individuals to cate‐ gorize	the	world	in	ingroup‐outgroup	dichotomoties	(e.g,.	subašić,	 reynolds, & turner, ), the emphasis in the other contributions on intergroup friendships may suggest that more complex contexts evoke a need to regulate relationships within the social networks we are part of. to this end, in the next section i will describe a recent line of research (klavina & van zomeren, ) that shows how inter‐ group contact facilitates collective action in such a triadic context.   |   a r e l at i o n a l p e r s p e c t i v e in this section, i apply a relational perspective on what moves and motivates individuals in their lives to the underlying psychology of   |     van zomeren intergroup contact and collective action. in doing so, i conceptualize both intergroup contact and collective action as different forms of relationship regulation, and thus of regulating potentially different types of “we” (be it friendships or psychological group memberships). whereas the rationale for conceptualizing collective action as rela‐ tional interaction can be found in detail elsewhere (van zomeren, , , ), the case for intergroup contact seems even more clear‐cut, especially given the operationalization of such contact as intergroup friendship (carter et al., macinnis & hodson, ). the simple observation in either case is that both phenomena occur within (networks) of social relationships, and would be hard to imag‐ ine outside of them. social psychology is rife with pointers toward the pivotal im‐ portance of social relationships, social interaction, and embed‐ dedness in social networks for individuals’ health and happiness. indeed, humans are an ultra‐social species with a strong need to belong (baumeister & leary, ). individuals can empathize with others in need (batson, ), suffer psychologically and physically from loneliness (cacioppo & patrick, ), and dis‐ play attachment behavior regulate relationships long before our self‐concept arises (ainsworth, , ; bowlby, , , ; mikulincer & shaver, a, b). social interaction and the development of relational ties provide us with “safe havens” (to seek shelter in; e.g., van zomeren et al., ) or “secure bases” (on which to explore the world), which need to be maintained and regulated (fiske, ). this also implies that individuals need to continuously cope with what they dread most: social exclusion and social loss (bowlby, , , ; williams, ; see also eisenberger, ; eisenberger, lieberman & williams, ; macdonald & leary, ). this is not without good reason: a meta‐analysis suggested that a lack of social relationships increases mortality risk (holt‐lunstad, smith & layton, ), while social loss increases the risk of severe depres‐ sion (bowlby, , , ; stroebe & stroebe, ; stroebe, schut & stroebe, ). furthermore, networks of relationships provide individuals with instrumental and emotional support that facilitate coping with stress (e.g., lazarus, ; stroebe, stroebe, abakoumkin, & schut, ) and buffer them from the effects of negative life events (berkman, glass, seeman, & brisette, ; heaney & israel, ). interestingly, research on psychological group membership has basically come to the same conclusion in re‐ cent years (jetten, haslam, haslam & branscombe, ), namely that social connection makes us healthier. a relational perspective offers a number of additional insights. first, embeddedness in social relationships imply restrictions to in‐ dividuals’ degrees of freedom. in this view, individuals are assumed to prioritize maintaining relationships over terminating them, which means that social relationships require continuous and effortful regulation. for instance, expecting others to be available and re‐ sponsive to your needs also implies that others expect you to be available and responsive to their needs—an obligation that is called upon when, for example, a friend asks you to come to a demonstra‐ tion next week. a second addition is that relationship regulation implies forces of harmony as well as conflict—in this view, these are different sides of the same relational coin. for instance, if maintaining harmony within the group (e.g., one’s family) is more important to a black individual than risking conflict with whites in one’s neighborhood, then there is no necessary tension between engaging in collective action to‐ gether against racial discrimination. fiske and rai ( ) even went as far as to suggest that our embeddedness in social relationships is so fundamental that it also explains why people turn violent. for instance, honor killings are, in this view, not acts of mad men, but of individuals trying to regulate their relationships within the group (e.g., defending the family reputation) through such violence against others (that threaten the family reputation). taken together, a relational perspective offers an underlying psy‐ chology of intergroup contact and collective action that may help to explain why their match can be one made in hell, or in heaven. this perspective acknowledges that there is one type of “we,” for example derived from intergroup friendship, that is fundamentally different from another type of “we” that is derived from psycholog‐ ical group membership. individuals’ regulation of the first type of “we” needs to fit with their regulation of the second type of “we,” if we want intergroup contact and collective action to be a match made in heaven (such as when participation in collective action is predicted by being asked by a friend). this fits with macinnis and hodson’ notion of a contact threshold and with hoskin et al.’s notion of opinion‐based groups, but a relational perspective considers both types of “we” within the same analysis, and bases them in the under‐ lying psychology of relationship regulation, thus offering a broader and integrative view on intergroup contact and collective action.   |   e m p i r i c a l i l l u s t r at i o n s o f a r e l at i o n a l p e r s p e c t i v e in this section, i illustrate a relational perspective with relevant empirical findings. for instance, individuals’ participation in collec‐ tive action depends crucially on the social networks in which they are embedded (schussman & soule, ; see also klandermans, van der toorn, & van stekelenburg, ). their embeddedness in specific activist networks, for example, offers them structural op‐ portunities to participate in collective action, as one’s friends may frequently ask one to join an action (and one may ask others in the network in turn). this is a clear example of relationship regulation in (collective) action, suggesting that individuals’ hearts and minds are certainly important, but that our hearts and minds are intimately connected to those of others around us. furthermore, the relation‐ ships in our networks provide us with a safe haven to seek shelter in, or as a secure base to explore (and potentially change) the world around us. activist networks, however, are rather rare, as most people are not embedded in such networks. so what happens in non‐activist networks? van zomeren et al. ( ) surveyed indonesian ethnic minority members in two studies, linking individuals’ seeking shelter      |   van zomeren in their social relationships (i.e., turning to friends and significant oth‐ ers in times of trouble) and their ethnic group identification to well‐ being and collective action against ethnic discrimination. results across the two studies showed that despite perceiving their group to be discriminated in society, individuals’ shelter‐seeking positively predicted their well‐being above and beyond their ethnic group identification; furthermore, neither of those variables predicted their collective action tendencies. thus, whereas activist networks may be great mobilizers because of individuals’ need for relation‐ ship regulation, non‐activist networks may be great harmonizers for the very same reason. importantly, in either case ethnic group identification did not explain unique variance in these psychological processes. furthermore, górska, van zomeren, and bilewicz ( ) ex‐ amined whether nation‐level institutionalization of minority rights (in this case lesbian, gay, and bisexual, or lgb, rights) may influ‐ ence more positive attitudes toward this group. this is relevant because such institutionalized progressive change is precisely the type of social change people engaging in collective action may be after. in this sense, gorska et al. ( ) asked whether such top‐down changes in the social structure, once they occurred as presumably enforced in conflictuous ways through collective ac‐ tion, affected individuals’ prejudice toward this group. using rep‐ resentative eurobarometer data from european union member states, gorska et al. found that such progressive changes in laws and institutions indeed reduced prejudice toward lgb groups; fur‐ thermore, this appeared to be due to increasing possibilities for intergroup contact with lgb individuals. thus, we see here the importance of how the hearts and minds of individuals may change as a function of increased opportunities for intergroup contact— not unlike collective action participation is increased by increased structural opportunities to participate (schussman & soule, ). the underlying psychology here, i would argue, is one in which (changes in) social structure affords individuals’ relationship regu‐ lation, with prejudice reduction and collective action as potential downstream consequences. finally, let me describe a set of three studies we conducted (klavina & van zomeren, ) on the underlying psychology of intergroup contact and collective action. in this line of work, zagefka ( ) would be overjoyed to see that we focused on tri‐ adic contexts in which intergroup contact and collective action were both psychologically and contextually relevant. we exam‐ ined whether the same core motivations for collective action that we typically find to apply to disadvantaged and advantaged group members (i.e., group identification, anger, and efficacy beliefs; van zomeren et al., ) also apply to “third groups” —groups outside of an unequal intergroup relationship (e.g., blacks and whites) that nevertheless could be psychologically or actually affected (e.g., latinos in terms of police brutality in the us). the research ques‐ tion we asked across three studies with different triadic contexts was whether third group members would be motivated for collec‐ tive action to protect their own ingroup from future disadvantage, or to protect the disadvantaged outgroup from actual disadvantage. furthermore, we explored how intergroup contact (with the dis‐ advantaged outgroup) would affect individuals’ motivation for col‐ lective action on behalf of that group. the third and final study of this set was conducted in the us, with latino participants eying the intergroup relationship beween whites and blacks. but the other two studies had perhaps lesser‐ known contexts that require somewhat more explanation. study was conducted in latvia, after the russian annexation of the crimea (formerly in the ukrain). we thus asked latvians about their moti‐ vations for collective action in order to protect themselves, or to protect the ukrainians. similarly, in study we used a dutch con‐ text within which a government‐associated gas extraction company came under scrutiny after the emergence of earthquakes in the populated gas extraction area in the north of the netherlands. we surveyed those close to, yet still outside of, the affected areas about their willingness to engage in collective action to protect their own region from becoming part of those areas in the future, or to protect those in the affected areas. across the three studies, and consistent with previous work, we found that individuals’ willingness to engage in collective action to protect their ingroup was predicted by their ingroup (rather than out‐ group) identification, anger, and efficacy beliefs. thus, latinos were more likely to act to protect latinos against police brutality in the us, when they identified more strongly with their ingroup (measured with often‐used items such as “i identify with latinos”). furthermore, we found that individuals’ willingess for collective action to protect the disadvantaged outgroup was predicted by their outgroup (rather than ingroup identification, anger and efficacy beliefs. thus, latinos were more likely to act to protect blacks against police brutality in the us, when they identified more strongly with that outgroup (mea‐ sured with the very same often‐used items yet applied to this out‐ group, such as “i identify with blacks”). the same core motivations for collective action thus applied to third group members’ collective action intentions. we then explored the role of intergroup contact, especially with an eye to the notion of “outgroup identification” (which, in the theoretical universe of social identity and self‐categorization theory, cannot and hence does not exist, as identification with a group implies this group psychologically being or becoming an in‐ group). across the studies, we consistently found that intergroup contact (measured as frequent and positive contact with outgroup members) with the disadvantaged outgroup positively predicted identification with this outgroup, which in turn positively pre‐ dicted collective action intentions. furthermore, across the stud‐ ies we also found that individuals’ so‐called relational models (i.e., their endorsement of specific ways of relationship regulation such as communal sharing and equality matching; fiske, ) positively predicted identification with the disadvantaged outgroup. taken together, this supports the idea that third group members’ inter‐ group contact with disadvantaged outgroup members, and their regulation of the specific relational model, positively predicted their identification with and collective action on behalf of this outgroup.   |     van zomeren   |   l o o k i n g f o r wa r d so far i have looked back on the debate sparked by wright and lubensky ( ) about the presumed strategic incompatibility be‐ tween intergroup contact and collective action, and observed that most of the contributions to this special issue come to a somewhat different conclusion. i have also offered a theoretical explanation for this in terms of an underlying psychology of relationship regulation and supplied a number of empirical findings supporting key insights from this relational perspective. but what does this imply for the future? there are at least three vistas that follow from the relational perspective on intergroup contact and collective action that i have suggested. first, i believe it is time to start combining individual and structural levels of analysis, with the latter including social networks as well as cultural or political systems (e.g., gorska et al., ). this implies asking questions about actual and perceived network struc‐ tures and what people do in these networks (in terms of relation‐ ship regulation); about how political and cultural structure affords opportunities for contact and collective action; and how all of this affects individuals’ motivations for intergroup contact and collec‐ tive action. such a multi‐level approach to intergroup contact and col‐ lective action will also be informative for empirically examining wright and lubensky’s ( ) claim about the two being incom‐ patible strategies toward social change. indeed, most work on the irony of harmony, together with the current contributions raising the irony of the irony of harmony, have restricted their line of thought and empirical tests to the individual level of analysis—that is, the level of individuals’ hearts and minds. but a relational per‐ spective suggests that to understand social change, we need to better understand how to change network and/or broader norms about how individuals go about regulating which relationships, in‐ cluding both types of “we” encountered in the contributions to this special issue. second, a relationship regulation account does not negate the importance of group identification and group membership in the psychology of intergroup contact and collective action. indeed, group identification appears to be a key variable in both literatures. what this account does assume, however, is that psychological groups are formed through regulating relationships within the net‐ works in which individuals are embedded. as a consequence, indi‐ viduals are able to identify with outgroups (without self‐categorizing as part of them or as part of a superordinate category), as discussed in the studies with the triadic context (klavina & van zomeren, ). what group identity means, in this view, is thus dependent on the networks within which people put them to use through rela‐ tionship regulation. one important implication of this line of thought is that collective action can be viewed as a (safe) form of intra‐group contact, which develops individuals’ ingroup identity as a secure base on which to ex‐ plore and change the world (bowlby, ; van zomeren et al., ). similarly, intergroup contact can be viewed as an expansion of one’s network with outgroup members—however, incidental forms of in‐ tergroup contact (outside of one’s comfort zone) may differ fom more structural forms of intergroup contact that bring a stronger psycho‐ logical investment to the relationship (such as intergroup friendships, within one’s comfort zone), and this may precisely be why the latter seems more effective in reducing prejudice. thus, we need a better understanding of the different types of “we” toward reaping the pro‐ verbial best of both worlds with an eye to social change. third and finally, a relational approach adds considerably to the intergroup contact and collective action literature by implying that psychological theories about social relationships and relationship regulation are missing from these literatures without good reason (mackie & smith, ). in fact, theoretical integration between these perspectives may help substantiate the “relations” in “inter‐ group relations,” and force researchers to include, rather than to pre‐ emptively dismiss, measures of different types of “we” in studies of intergroup contact and collective action. this may help explain why scholars are arguing more and more for structurally positive and fre‐ quent forms of intergroup contact (such as close friendships); and why scholars are coming to the conclusion that participation in col‐ lective action is best predicted by the structural availability of others (in one’s network) who ask you to be responsive and put your money where your mouth is. one concrete example of this is including the role of attachment style, or more precisely, the working models people develop over the course of their lifetime that suggest what can be expected from others and the self in terms of availability (of/for others) and respon‐ siveness (bowlby, ). indeed, reis and gable ( ) concluded that responsiveness is the key predictor of what makes close re‐ lationships harmonious. hence, a perceived lack of availability and responsiveness of the other (or the perceived obligations about availability and responsiveness that others may force upon you) is what makes them conflictuous. a concrete suggestion for future re‐ search, then, would be that individuals’ attachment styles and work‐ ing models should be strongly predictive of both intergroup contact and collective action.   |   c o n c l u s i o n i am certainly not the first to suggest that theory and research on group processes and intergroup relations can learn something from theory and reseach on interpersonal processes, and vice versa (e.g., mackie & smith, ). i am also certainly not the first to suggest that social networks and social structure matter in intergroup con‐ tact and collective action (e.g., gorska et al., ; klandermans et al., ), and that we need a more diverse theoretical and meth‐ odological repertoire in order to better understand whether, for example, intergroup contact and collective action work against, or together with, each other (pettigrew, ). i am probably the first, however, to be in a position to discuss the interesting contributions to this special issue, and from that position i have expressed pretty much all the above things. the      |   van zomeren key message here is that wright and lubensky’s ( ) argument about intergroup contact and collective action as a match made in hell does not seem to do justice to their underlying psychology in terms of relationship regulation, which can also lead to their match as one being made in heaven. indeed, those who engage in collective action and intergroup contact are ultimately engaged in regulating relationships with other people around them. perhaps, then, the current special issue signals that the time has arrived to start treating them as such. o r c i d martijn van zomeren http://orcid.org/ ‐ ‐ ‐ r e f e r e n c e s ainsworth, m. d. 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( ). the struggle for social equality: collective action versus prejudice reduction. in s. demoulin, j.‐p. leyens, & j. f. dovidio (eds.), intergroup misunderstandings: impact of divergent social realities (pp. – ). new york, ny: psychology press. zagefka, h. ( ). triadic intergroup relations: studying situations with an observer, an actor, and a recipient of behavior. journal of theoretical social psychology, ( ), – . https://doi.org/ . / jts . how to cite this article: van zomeren, m. intergroup contact and collective action: a match made in hell, or in heaven? j theo soc psychol. ; : – . https://doi.org/ . /jts . https://doi.org/ . /jts . https://doi.org/ . /jts . https://doi.org/ . /jts . i gnorance of history is a badge of honour in silicon valley. “the only thing that matters is the future,” self-driving-car engineer anthony levandowski told the new yorker in (ref.  ). levandowski, formerly of google, uber and google’s autonomous-vehicle subsidiary waymo (and recently sentenced to months in prison for stealing trade secrets), is no out- lier. the gospel of ‘disruptive innovation’ depends on the abnegation of history . ‘move fast and break things’ was facebook’s motto. never look back. another word for this is heed- lessness. and here are a few more: negligence, foolishness and blindness. much of what technology leaders tout as original has been done before — and long ago. yet few engineers and developers realize that they’re stuck in a rut. that lack of awareness has costs, both economic and ethical. consider the strange trajectory of the simulmatics corporation, founded in new york city in . (simulmatics, a mash-up of ‘simulation’ and ‘automatic’, meant then what ‘artificial intelligence (ai)’ means now.) its controversial work included simulating elec- tions — just like that allegedly ‘pioneered’ by the now-defunct uk firm cambridge analytica on behalf of uk brexit campaigners in and during donald trump’s us presidential election campaign in . journalists accused trump’s fixers of using a “weaponized ai propaganda machine” capable of “nearly impenetrable voter manipulation”. new? hardly. simulmatics invented that in . they called it the people machine. as an american historian with an interest in politics, law and technology, i came across the story of the simulmatics corporation five years ago when researching an article about the polling industry . polling was, and remains, in disarray. now, it’s being supplanted by data science: why bother telephoning someone to ask her opinion when you can find out by tracking her online? wondering where this began took me to the massachusetts institute of technology (mit) a cold-war-era corporation targeted voters and presaged many of today’s big-data controversies. a f p v ia g e t t y protests against racism in detroit, michigan, and many other us cities in prompted attempts to forecast future demonstrations. scientists use big data to sway elections and predict riots — welcome to the s jill lepore | nature | vol | september setting the agenda in research comment © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. in cambridge, to the unpublished papers of political scientist ithiel de sola pool. he helped to establish the simulmatics corporation and led the cold-war-era campaign to bring behavioural science into the defence industry, campaigning and commerce. this story struck me as so essential to modern ethical dilemmas around data science, from misinformation and election interference to media manipu- lation and predictive policing, that i wrote a book about it: if then: how the simulmatics corporation invented the future ( ). s i m u l m a t i c s , h i re d f i r s t by t h e u s democratic party’s national committee in and then by the john f. kennedy campaign in , pioneered the use of computer sim- ulation, pattern detection and prediction in american political campaigning. the company gathered opinion-poll data from the archives of pollsters george gallup and elmo roper to create a model of the us electorate. they split voters into types — demo- cratic female blue-collar midwesterner who voted for democratic presidential candidate adlai stevenson in but for the republican dwight d. eisenhower in , say. and they assigned issues of concern, such as the impor- tance of civil rights or a strong stand against the soviet union, into clusters. it was, at the time, the largest such project ever conducted. it involved what simulmatics called “mas- sive data” decades before ‘big data’ became a buzzword. simulmatics was staffed by eminent scientists. led by pool, the group included researchers from mit, yale university in new haven, connecticut, johns hopkins university in baltimore, mar yland, and columbia university in new york city. it also included alex bernstein from ibm, who had written the first chess-playing computer program. many of them, including pool, had been trained by yale political scientist harold lasswell, whose research on communication purported to explain how ideas get into people’s heads: in short, who says what, in which channel, to whom, with what effect? during the second world war, lasswell studied the nazis’ use of propaganda and psychological warfare. when those terms became unpalatable after the war ended, the field got a new name — mass-communications research. same wine, new bottle. like silicon valley itself, simulmatics was an artefact of the cold war. it was an age obsessed with prediction, as historian jenny andersson showed in her brilliant book, the future of the world. at mit, pool also pro- posed and headed project comcom (short for communist communications), funded by the us department of defense’s advanced research projects agency (arpa). its aim, in modern terms, was to try to detect rus- sian hacking — “to know how leaks, rumors, and intentional disclosures spread” as pool described it. the press called simulmatics scientists the “what-if men”, because their work — pro- gramming an ibm — was based on endless what-if simulations. the ibm was billed as the first mass-produced computer capable of doing complex mathematics. today, this kind of work is much vaunted and lavishly funded. the encyclopedia of database systems describes ‘what-if analysis’ as “a data-intensive simulation”. it refers to it as “a relatively recent discipline”. not so. winning ways john f. kennedy won the us presidential election by the closest popular-vote margin since the s — . % to richard nixon’s . %. before kennedy’s inauguration, a storm erupted when harper’s magazine featured a shocking story: a top-secret computer called the people machine, invented by mysterious what-if men, had in effect elected kennedy. lasswell called it “the a-bomb of the social sciences”. kennedy had been trailing nixon in the polls all summer. he had gained on nixon in the autumn for three reasons: kennedy championed civil rights and increased his share of african american votes; as a catholic, he took a strong stance on freedom of religion; and he outperformed nixon in four televised debates. simulmatics had recommended each of these strategies. uproar broke out. the new york herald tribune called the people machine kennedy’s “secret weapon”. the chicago sun-times wondered whether politicians of the future would have to “clear it with the p.-m.”. an oregon newspaper expressed the view that simulmatics had reduced voters to “little holes in punch cards”, and that, by denying the possi- bility of dissent, the people machine made “the tyrannies of hitler, stalin and their forebears look like the inept fumbling of a village bully”. worse, kennedy had campaigned against automation. in st louis, missouri, in september he’d delivered a speech warning about the “replacement of men by machines”. a kennedy campaign brochure asked: “if automation takes over your job … who will you want in the white house?” newspaper editors and commenta- tors charged him with hypocrisy. the ensuing debate raised questions that are still asked today — urgently. can computers rig elections? what does election prediction mean for democracy? what does automation mean for humanity? what happens to privacy in an age of data? there were no answers then, as now. lasswell merely admitted: “you can’t simulate the consequences of simulation.” the most prescient critique came from another of lasswell’s former collaborators, eugene burdick. his dystopian novel the , published in , described a barely fic- tionalized organization called simulations enterprises. in a sober preface, burdick, a polit- ical scientist at the university of california, berkeley, and bestselling novelist — known for co-authoring the ugly american in — warned against the political influence of what is now called data science. “the new underworld is made up of innocent and well-intentioned people,” he wrote. most of them are “highly educated, many with phds”. they “work with slide rules and calculating machines and computers which can retain an almost infinite number of bits of information as well as sort, categorize, and reproduce this information at the press of a button”. although none of the researchers he had met “had malignant political designs on the american public”, burdick warned, their very lack of interest in contemplating the possible consequences of their work stood as a terrible danger. indeed, they might “radically recon- struct the american political system, build a new politics, and even modify revered and ven- erable american institutions — facts of which they are blissfully innocent”. burdick knew these researchers, and he had worked with pool as well as lasswell. he spied in their ambition, in their enthralment with the capacities of computers, the wide-eyed heedlessness that remains silicon valley’s achilles heel. big business buoyed by the buzz of kennedy’s election, simulmatics began an advertising blitz. its initial stock offering set out how the company would turn prediction into profit — by gather- ing massive data, constructing mathematical models of behavioural processes, and using them to simulate “probable group behaviour”. “their very lack of interest in contemplating the possible consequences of their work stood as a terrible danger.” nature | vol | september | © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. the firm pitched its services to media companies, government departments and advertising agencies, with mixed success. it persuaded executives from the motion picture association of america, mgm film studios and columbia records to set up forms of analysis that would ultimately, when it was possible to collect enough data to make this work, lead to netflix and spotify. it proposed a “mass cul- ture model” to collect consumer data across all media — publishing houses, record labels, magazine publishers, television networks, and film studios — to direct advertising and sales. it sounds a lot like amazon. simulmatics introduced what-if simulation to the advertising industry, targeting con- sumers with custom-fit messages. in , it became the first data firm to provide real- time computing to a us newspaper, the new york times, for analysing election results. for the government, it proposed models to aid public-health campaigns, water-distribution systems, and, above all, the winning of hearts and minds in vietnam. i n , o n b e h a l f o f t h e ke n n e d y administration, simulmatics simulated the entire economy of venezuela, with an eye to halting the advance of socialism and com- munism. a larger project to undertake such work throughout latin america, mostly designed by pool and known as project camelot, became so controversial that the next president, lyndon b. johnson, dismantled it. a f te r , s i m u l m a t i c s c o n d u c te d psychological research in vietnam as part of a bigger project to use computers to predict revolutions. much of this work built on ear- lier research by lasswell and pool, identifying and counting keywords, such as ‘nationalism’, in foreign-language newspapers that might indicate the likelihood of coups. such topic- spotting is the precursor to google trends. growing unrest simulmatics brought those counter-insurgency methods home in and , as protests against racial injustice broke out on the streets of us cities such as los angeles, california, and detroit, michigan. the company attempted to build a race-riot prediction machine for the johnson administration. it failed. but its cockeyed ambition — the drive to forecast political unrest — was widely shared, and has endured, not least in the ethically indefensible work of predictive policing. civil-rights activists, then as now, had little use for such schemes. “i will not predict riots,” james farmer, head of the congress of racial equality, said on cbs tv’s face the nation in april . “no one has enough knowledge to know that.” the real issue, he pointed out, was that no one was addressing the problems that led to unrest. “i am not going to predict rioting here,” martin luther king jr told the press in cleveland, ohio, in june . but the fantasy of computer-aided riot prediction endured, as widely and passion- ately held as the twenty-first century’s dream that all urban problems can be solved by ‘smart cities’, and that civil unrest, racial inequality and police brutality can be addressed by more cameras, more data, bigger computers and yet more what-if algorithms. predictive demise simulmatics began to unravel in . student protesters at mit accused the company of war crimes for its work in vietnam. they even held a mock trial of pool, calling him a war criminal. “simulmatics looks like nothing more than a dummy corporation through which pool runs his outside defense work,” the new republic reported. “simulation companies are not so popular as they once were; their proprietors are often regarded as cultists, and the generals who were persuaded to hire them by liberals in the kennedy and early johnson administra- tions are sour on the whole business.” there were problems with early predictive analytics, too. data were scarce, computers were slow. simulmatics filed for bankruptcy in , and vanished. pool went on to become a prophet of technological change. “by it will be cheaper to store information in a computer bank than on paper,” he wrote in , in a con- tribution to a book called toward the year (ref. ). tax returns, social security and crimi- nal records would all be stored on computers, which could communicate with one another over a vast international network. people living in would be able to find out anything about anyone, he wrote, with- out ever leaving their desks. “the researcher sitting at his console will be able to compile a cross-tabulation of consumer purchases (from store records) by people of low iq (from school records) who have an unemployed member of the family (from social security records).” would he have the legal right to do so? pool had no answer: “this is not the place to speculate how society will achieve a balance between its desire for knowledge and its desire for privacy.” collective amnesia before his early death in , pool was also a key force behind the founding of the most direct descendant of simulmatics, the mit media lab. pool’s work underlies the rules — or lack of them — that prevail on the internet. pool also founded the study of “social net- works” (a term he coined); without it, there would be no facebook. pool’s experiences with student unrest at mit — and especially with the protests against simulmatics — informed his views on technological change and ethics. look forward. never look back. in , pool described the social sciences as “the new humanities of the twentieth century” . although leaders in times past had consulted philosophy, literature and history, those of the cold-war era, he argued, were obli- gated to consult the social sciences. given a choice between “policy based on moralisms and policy based on social science”, he was glad to report that the united states, in conducting the war in vietnam, had rejected the former in favour of rationality. to me, this sounds a lot like levandowski. “i don’t even know why we study history,” levandowski said in (ref. ). “it’s entertain- ing, i guess — the dinosaurs and the neander- thals and the industrial revolution and stuff like that. but what already happened doesn’t really matter.” except, it does matter. attempt- ing to thwart revolt and defeat social unrest by way of predictive algorithms has been tried before; it failed, and was ethically indefensible. this summer, under pressure from the black lives matter movement, us police depart- ments are abandoning predictive policing, an industry led by the data-analytics firm predpol in santa cruz, california. ibm and google have, at least publicly, pulled back from another form of algorithm-driven surveillance, facial recognition. maybe these detours might have been avoided if the people developing them had stopped to consider their origins in the vietnam war. it’s worth remembering, too, that protesters at the time understood that connection. in , mit activists objecting to companies such as simulmatics asked what, really, was the point of making human behaviour a predictive science, in a world of agonizing inequalities of power. what was it all for? how was it likely to be used? as one student protester asked in an anti- war pamphlet: “to do what? to do things like estimate the number of riot police necessary to stop a ghetto rebellion in city x that might be triggered by event y because of communi- cations pattern k given q number of political agitators of type z?” it’s a question worth asking today, all over again. the author jill lepore is professor of american history at harvard university in cambridge, massachusetts, a staff writer at the new yorker, host of podcast the last archive, and author of if then: how the simulmatics corporation invented the future ( ). . duhigg, c. ‘did uber steal google’s intellectual property?’ the new yorker ( october ). . lepore, j. ‘the disruption machine’ the new yorker ( june ). . lepore, j. ‘politics and the new machine’ the new yorker ( november ). . mesthene, e. g. (ed.) toward the year (foreign policy association, ). . de sola pool, i. backgr. , – ( ). | nature | vol | september comment © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. psc_ .. how we can best proceed collectively during the pandemic and its aftermath, especially concerning the unique challenges we face in our field. of course, no single discussion can speak to every concern or challenge that educators will face in a discipline as diverse as ours. additional avenues of inquiry will emerge as classes resume; indeed, we close this spotlight with recommendations for add- itional scholarship on this topic. emergency e-learning is distinct in many ways from traditional online coursework; in this way, it is new for all of us, as well. however, this assembly of scholars thoughtfully reflects on many of the key challenges that instruct- ors of political science and international relations face moving forward, and their commentary can inform important discussions within departments and across universities. it is our sincerest hope that this spotlight contributes to a wider conversation about how we can best serve students throughout this pandemic and in the years to come.▪ notes . survey participants were enrolled in one of four political science courses that i taught in spring : american minority politics (two sections), picking a president, and political science research methods. there were approximately students across these four sections; students completed the first survey ( . % response rate) and students completed the second survey ( . % response rate). slightly more than half of the sample was female ( %) and slightly less than % of students were white. the average respondent was . years old, and approximately % had previously taken at least one online course. . the six statements were presented in random order; respondents arranged them such that the issue they were most concerned about was at the top and the issue they were least concerned about was at the bottom. the full text for the six items is as follows: my final grade in the course; my learning of the course material; figuring out remote learning technology; missing my social experience on campus; being able to communicate with my professor; and being able to communicate with my peers. . for an extended discussion of literature related to teaching political science online, see loepp . references dickinson, amber. . “communicating with the online student: the impact of e-mail tone on student performance and teacher evaluations.” journal of educators online ( ). available at https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ej . glazier, rebecca. . “building rapport to improve retention and success in online classes.” journal of political science education ( ): – . loepp, eric. . “teaching political science online.” available at https:// seagull.wwnorton.com/teachingpoliscionlineguide. taylor, jean, margie dunn, and sandra winn. . “innovative orientation leads to improved success in online courses.” online learning ( ). available at https:// eric.ed.gov/?id=ej . when teaching is impossible: a pandemic pedagogy of care oumar ba, morehouse college doi: . /s x i teach at morehouse college, an all-male, historically black institution. historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) were established to provide opportunities for access to higher education for african americans when legal segregation characterized the united states. currently, there are accredited hbcus, both public and private. located predominantly in the southeastern united states, hbcus enroll , students, % of whom are african american and % of whom are from low-income families. although there is variation among these institutions, to a large extent they nevertheless share many features. they tend to be burdened by a lack of financial resources, even before the challenges resulting from the covid- pan- demic. for instance, in , only . % of total major gifts (i.e., more than million dollars) to us colleges and universities went to hbcus (price ). in such a climate of scarcity, how do we adjust the classroom in response to the disruption caused by the pandemic in the middle of the spring semester? the mission of morehouse college is “to develop men with disciplined minds who will lead lives of leadership and service.” the college also “assumes special responsibility for teaching the history and culture of black people.” brotherhood, belonging, and community are essential in the making of the “morehouse man.” therefore, the disruption that the pandemic caused, and the closure of the campus, presented a challenge to maintain that educational and social community for the students. this article focuses on my introduction to ir course. the majority of the students in the class were freshmen and sophomores pursuing a degree in political science or international studies. a few students from other departments across campus also take the course to fulfill their general education requirement. in mid-march , with only one week to prepare, we were forced to switch to remote delivery of all courses for the second half of the semester, and all students were required to evacuate their campus housing. i adopted what has been referred to as “pandemic pedagogy,” with a range of e-learning strategies dictated by the emergency situation. a pandemic pedagogy, as defined by smith and hornsby ( , ), refers to “the approaches we employ in our learning environments to teach and foster learning in the context of a serious health crisis and the spread of a new disease.” as the authors explain, this pandemic moment and its meanings and responses to them are infused with power, pedagogy, and politics. instruction during the pandemic occurs in moments of pro- found disruption in the lives of the students—and instructors—and anxiety associated with trying to establish a new normal under extraordinarily abnormal circumstances. moreover, for an insti- tution like morehouse, an adaptive pedagogy must be mindful of the technological gap and digital divide that many students experience. for instance, the college had to raise funds to provide computers, tablets, and internet access for some students. emer- gency housing also had to be provided for those who could not simply “go home.” during the pandemic, some students also notified me that they had family members who were either sick or had died from covid- . this calls for a pedagogy of care, not because our students are incapable of facing and surmounting challenges but rather because they are already in a disadvantaged position, which compounds the effects of the pandemic. a peda- gogy of care entails a commitment to ensure that students will have the support they need to submit all assignments and com- plete the course. the making of a “morehouse man” rests on the building and sustaining of a community of brotherhood and learning. when the course moved to an online format, it therefore was essential to maintain such a community of learning and intellectual support, especially for freshmen and sophomores in a course designed to introduce them to the ir subfield. this process was accomplished through a hybrid model of asynchronous lectures with synchron- ous class discussions, which ensured the continued social presence of students. i prerecorded the video lectures and posted them on the course website the day before class meetings. therefore, the synchronous class sessions—twice a week—over zoom would not ps • january ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ej https://seagull.wwnorton.com/teachingpoliscionlineguide https://seagull.wwnorton.com/teachingpoliscionlineguide https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ej https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ej be devoted to lectures but rather to discussion and student engagement through collaborative work. despite the challenges of working remotely, i also maintained group projects and ensured that students would complete them and present their findings to the class. although the syllabus content and reading materials remained unchanged, the class discussions tied our current collective pre- dicament to ir theories and concepts. the final exam, which— under normal conditions—would have consisted of a set of short answers and multiple-choice questions, was changed to a long essay. the exam asked, “what ir theories and concepts can help us make sense of the global spread of the covid- pandemic and its implications on world politics (broadly defined)?” students’ responses to this question demonstrated a range of serious and personal engagement with ir theories and the pan- demic, as well as the ways in which it disproportionally affected racial and ethnic minorities, low-income families, and otherwise vulnerable populations in the united states. drawing from marx- ist and postcolonial theories and a critique of capitalism, many students argued that covid- was one of numerous other medical and social “pandemics” that can be traced to the legacies of unequal distribution of power and opportunities in the united states and around the world. a pandemic pedagogy of care therefore opens up the possibility of “doing ir as if people mattered.” in this instance, for a student population of young black men in america, the covid- pan- demic along with the police and state violence and black lives matter movement that flared up this summer are all central to how we make sense of and relate to the world of (international) politics. ultimately, if we accept inayatullah’s ( , ) polemic that “teaching is impossible. learning is unlikely… [w]e enter the classroom to encounter others. with them, we can meditate on the possibility of our own learning,” perhaps then a pandemic peda- gogy of care is simply that: encountering our students so we may all meditate on our collective predicament.▪ notes . united negro college fund, “hbcus make america strong: the positive impact of historically black colleges and universities.” available at https://cdn.uncf.org/ wp-content/uploads/hbcu_consumer_brochure_final_approved.pdf?_ ga= . . . - . . . morehouse college’s mission, available at www.morehouse.edu/about/mission. html. . see morehouse college’s campaign to raise funds to support students experien- cing hardship. available at https://ignite.morehouse.edu/project/ . . i am grateful to jonneke koomen, from whom i first heard this expression. references inayatullah, naeem. . “teaching is impossible: a polemic.” in pedagogical journeys through world politics, ed. jamie frueh, – . london: palgrave macmillan. price, gregory n. . “ in hbcus were financially fragile before covid- endangered all colleges and universities.” the conversation, june . available at https://theconversation.com/ -in- -hbcus-were-financially-fragile-before- covid- -endangered-all-colleges-and-universities- . smith, heather ann, and david hornsby. . “towards a pandemic pedagogy: power and politics in learning and teaching.” available at doi: . / rg. . . . . teaching in times of crisis: covid- and classroom pedagogy ayesha ray, king’s college doi: . /s covid- brought unexpected challenges to institutions of higher learning. like most academics, as a full-time faculty member teaching political science at a liberal arts college, i also experienced the dramatic changes that came with the transition to distance delivery and remote instruction. my institution shifted to online instruction in mid-march. although there are major barriers to online teaching (keengwe and kidd ), this article outlines positive lessons i drew from the transition: what worked and what did not. the methods i used applied to all of my courses for spring . i teach relatively small classes between and students. this allows for better engagement and made online teaching via zoom simpler. i found the use of zoom and panopto especially helpful in adapting students to a smoother online delivery (mohanty and yaqub ). both zoom and panopto allowed me to combine elements of both synchronous and asynchronous teaching. first, i held my classes during regularly scheduled times to mimic the in-class experience. the delivery was mostly a mix of slides and discussions, sometimes using the chat feature and breakout rooms. synchronous lectures were recorded on panopto and uploaded to moodle for students who were unable to attend live meetings. this helped many students who suggested in their end-of-course assessment that recorded lectures kept them informed about the course material when they were unable to attend the synchronous classes. students who were working, had difficult home environments, or were experiencing personal hard- ships and could not regularly attend the live lectures benefited most from the recorded lectures. second, given the difficult circumstances in which students found themselves, i relaxed my attendance rules for spring . it was not mandatory for them to be present during synchronous sessions, especially for those who had additional jobs or who could not attend due to time constraints and other reasons. third, a significant component of my online pedagogy was the use of a discussion forum. based on each week’s course readings, i posted one focused question and students were given a two-to- three-day window to submit their responses. the same questions, including student responses, were revisited during synchronous lectures. maintaining an overarching theme/question enabled students to address the learning outcomes for the course. this this calls for a pedagogy of care, not because our students are incapable of facing and surmounting challenges but rather because they are already in a disadvantaged position, which compounds the effects of the pandemic. ps • january teac her s potlight: covid - and emer g enc y e-lear ni ng in political s cience a nd ir ............................................................................................................................................................................................................................................................. https://cdn.uncf.org/wp-content/uploads/hbcu_consumer_brochure_final_approved.pdf?_ga= . . . - . https://cdn.uncf.org/wp-content/uploads/hbcu_consumer_brochure_final_approved.pdf?_ga= . . . - . https://cdn.uncf.org/wp-content/uploads/hbcu_consumer_brochure_final_approved.pdf?_ga= . . . - . https://cdn.uncf.org/wp-content/uploads/hbcu_consumer_brochure_final_approved.pdf?_ga= . . . - . http://www.morehouse.edu/about/mission.html http://www.morehouse.edu/about/mission.html https://ignite.morehouse.edu/project/ https://theconversation.com/ -in- -hbcus-were-financially-fragile-before-covid- -endangered-all-colleges-and-universities- https://theconversation.com/ -in- -hbcus-were-financially-fragile-before-covid- -endangered-all-colleges-and-universities- https://doi.org/ . /rg. . . . https://doi.org/ . /rg. . . . american medical association journal of ethics october , volume , number : - second thoughts #blacklivesmatter: physicians must stand for racial justice white coats for black lives (wc bl) national working group racism is one of the major causes of health problems in the united states. between and , the black-white mortality gap resulted in more than . million excess black deaths [ ], making racism a more potent killer than prostate, breast, or colon cancer [ ]. physicians are intimately involved with institutions that contribute to the victimization of black people and other people of color. as is widely documented, black and latino patients are less likely to receive the care they need, including adequate analgesia, cancer screening, and organ transplants [ - ]. this is due both to physician bias and to the health care payment structure’s financial disincentives for the care of people of color [ ]—clinicians are paid less to care for patients who are uninsured, underinsured, or publicly insured, and these patients are disproportionately people of color. as a consequence, people of color are often denied access to the health care they need [ , ]. these disparities in access to health care exacerbate the harm that social structures and policies cause to the health of people of color. black and latino people are disproportionately victimized by police violence, mass incarceration, and poverty [ - ]. moreover, despite perceived improvements, rates of racial segregation across the country remain comparable to levels in the s, and people of color face discrimination in their efforts to access adequate housing, quality education, and meaningful employment [ - ]. the harmful effects of structural inequity are augmented by the subjective experience of racism: for example, awareness of one’s race is correlated with increased diastolic blood pressure among black patients [ ]. addressing racism and its consequences, therefore, should be a central task of american medicine; physicians must work both within and outside the health care system to eliminate inequities in access to and delivery of care. health professionals and community organizations ranging from the black panther party to the national latina institute for reproductive health have long proposed effective strategies for addressing racism to improve the health of people of color, including expansion of free clinics, increased research on diseases affecting people of color, and legislative establishment of paid parental leave [ , ]. recent incidents and protests in charleston, baltimore, new york, and other cities across the country have reminded us of the urgency of acting on these and other proposals to address racism in medicine. www.amajournalofethics.org http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /msoc - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /medu - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /stas - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /stas - .html in particular, we, as members of the national working group of the medical student organization white coats for black lives, suggest four ways that physicians and other health professionals can immediately pursue racial justice. the first is to more aggressively recruit, support, and promote black, latino, and native american people in medicine to ensure that the physician workforce reflects the diversity of the united states. black and latino people represent roughly percent of our nation’s population but make up only . percent of the physician workforce [ ]. physicians of color are more likely to provide care for america’s underserved communities, and patients of color report higher satisfaction when their doctor shares their racial background [ - ]. despite the association of american medical colleges’ project by [ ], the past three decades have witnessed little growth in the population of latino, black, and native american physicians [ ]. increasing the numbers of black, latino, and native american doctors is a key step in eliminating health inequities. secondly, hospitals and practices must take action to eliminate the significant impact of implicit racial biases on the care of patients of color [ ]. to counteract these subtle forms of racism, institutions must routinely administer implicit association tests to their medical staffs to make them cognizant of their unconscious biases and then train their medical staffs to consciously overcome those biases when delivering care [ ]. furthermore, hospitals should create formal and informal structures to encourage accountability for incidents that may have involved racism. this can be done by fostering a work environment that makes it safe for colleagues to question each other’s biased actions and by using structured venues such as morbidity and mortality conferences to discuss ways that racism may have impacted the quality of patient care. thirdly, physicians should join community members in advocating for a single-payer health care system as a means of eliminating cost-associated barriers to care. in addition to improving access for all patients, a single-payer system would eliminate insurance- status discrimination and ensure that reimbursements for services provided to white patients and patients of color are equal. finally, health care workers must recognize that our responsibility to our patients goes beyond physical exams, prescriptions, and surgical interventions; we must work to alter socioeconomic and environmental factors, including structural racism, that directly affect our patients’ health. the manifestations of structural racism are varied and ubiquitous; addressing them will require joining movements to increase the minimum wage, end criminalizing school discipline practices, and develop mixed-income housing, among many others. in doing so, physicians will need to partner with and take direction from community members who have experienced systemic oppression and are dedicated to working to dismantle it. we will not be able to solve the problems of racism in our society and in our health care system without the input of those most affected by it. in working to combat structural racism, physicians must not only listen to people of color in their ama journal of ethics, october http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /oped - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /medu - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /oped - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /oped - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /oped - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /ecas - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /spec - .html practices and communities, but also amplify those voices while advocating for equitable social structures. the privilege that physicians possess within society and within the professional hierarchy of medicine provides them with power that can be used to spearhead policy changes to advance racial justice locally and nationally. using this “physician privilege” to advocate for social change is necessary if we are to eradicate the systemic illness that is racism. references . rodriguez jm, geronimus at, bound j, dorling d. black lives matter: differential mortality and the racial composition of the us electorate, - . soc sci med. ; - : - . . american cancer society. estimated deaths for the four major cancers by sex and age group, . http://www.cancer.org/acs/groups/content/@editorial/documents/document/a cspc- .pdf. accessed june , . . agency for healthcare research and quality. national healthcare quality and disparities report. rockville, md: agency for healthcare research and quality; may . http://www.ahrq.gov/research/findings/nhqrdr/nhqdr / nhqdr.pdf. accessed june , . . tamayo-sarver jh, hinze sw, cydulka rk, baker dw. racial and ethnic disparities in emergency department analgesic prescription. am j public health. ; ( ): - . . agency for healthcare research and quality. national healthcare quality report. rockville, md: agency for healthcare research and quality; may . http://www.ahrq.gov/research/findings/nhqrdr/nhqr / nhqr.pdf. accessed june , . . churak jm. racial and ethnic disparities in renal transplantation. j natl med assoc. ; ( ): - . . chapman en, kaatz a, carnes m. physicians and implicit bias: how doctors may unwittingly perpetuate health care disparities. j gen intern med. ; ( ): - . . hing e, decker s, jamoom e. acceptance of new patients with public and private insurance by office-based physicians: united states, . nchs data brief. ;( ): - . . kaiser family foundation. health coverage by race and ethnicity: the potential impact of the affordable care act. march , . http://kff.org/disparities- policy/issue-brief/health-coverage-by-race-and-ethnicity-the-potential- impact-of-the-affordable-care-act/. accessed june , . . sadler ms, correll j, park b, judd cm. the world is not black and white: racial bias in the decision to shoot in a multiethnic context. j soc issues. ; ( ): - . www.amajournalofethics.org http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /coet - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /ecas - .html . kramer mr, hogue cr. is segregation bad for your health? epidemiol rev. ; ( ): - . . the sentencing project. reducing racial disparity in the criminal justice system: a manual for practitioners and policymakers. washington, dc: the sentencing project; . http://www.sentencingproject.org/doc/publications/rd_reducingracialdisparity.p df. accessed june , . . shapiro t, meschede t, osoro s. research and policy brief: the roots of the widening racial wealth gap: explaining the black-white economic divide. waltham, ma: brandeis university institute on assets and social policy; february . http://iasp.brandeis.edu/pdfs/author/shapiro-thomas- m/racialwealthgapbrief.pdf. accessed june , . . fryer rg jr, pager d, spenkuch jl. racial disparities in job finding and offered wages. j law econ. ; ( ): - . . american psychological association presidential task force on educational disparities. ethnic and racial disparities in education: psychology’s contributions to understanding and reducing disparities. august , . http://www.apa.org/ed/resources/racial-disparities.pdf. accessed june , . . williams dr, collins c. racial residential segregation: a fundamental cause of racial disparities in health. public health rep. ; ( ): - . . brewer lc, carson ka, williams dr, allen a, jones cp, cooper la. association of race consciousness with the patient-physician relationship, medication adherence, and blood pressure in urban primary care patients. am j hypertens. ; ( ): - . . nelson a. body and soul: the black panther party and the fight against medical discrimination. minneapolis, mn: university of minnesota press; . . center for reproductive rights; national latina institute for reproductive health; sistersong women of color reproductive justice collective. reproductive injustice: racial and gender discrimination in us health care: a shadow report for the un committee on the elimination of racial discrimination. . http://www.reproductiverights.org/sites/crr.civicactions.net/files/documents/c erd_shadow_us.pdf. accessed july , . . association of american medical colleges. diversity in the physician workforce: facts & figures . http://aamcdiversityfactsandfigures.org. accessed june , . . marrast lm, zallman l, woolhandler s, bor dh, mccormick d. minority physicians’ role in the care of underserved patients: diversifying the physician workforce may be key in addressing health disparities. jama intern med. ; ( ): - . ama journal of ethics, october . saha s, komaromy m, koepsell td, bindman ab. patient-physician racial concordance and the perceived quality and use of health care. arch intern med. ; ( ): - . . cooper la, roter dl, johnson rl, ford de, steinwachs dm, powe nr. patient- centered communication, ratings of care, and concordance of patient and physician race. ann intern med. ; ( ): - . . nickens hw, ready tp, petersdorf rg. project by : racial and ethnic diversity in us medical schools. new engl j med. ; ( ): - . . green ar, carney dr, pallin dj, et al. implicit bias among physicians and its prediction of thrombolysis decisions for black and white patients. j gen intern med. ; ( ): - . white coats for black lives (wc bl) is a national medical student organization devoted to safeguarding the lives of patients through the elimination of racism. the wc bl national working group endeavors to raise awareness of racism as a public health concern that threatens the lives and health of people of color, end racial discrimination in the delivery of health care, and prepare future physicians to be advocates for racial justice. wc bl encourages medical professionals to create a physician workforce that reflects the diversity of our nation by actively recruiting and supporting black, latino, and native american people through medical school and into their careers. related in the ama journal of ethics education to identify and combat racial bias in pain treatment, march structural competency meets structural racism: race, politics, and the structure of medical knowledge, september complex systems for a complex issue: race in health research, june race: a starting place, june “vulnerable” populations—medicine, race, and presumptions of identity, february race, discrimination, and cardiovascular disease, june a call to service: social justice is a public health issue, september advocacy by physicians for patients and for social change, september the ama code of medical ethics’ opinion on physician advocacy, september the viewpoints expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the ama. copyright american medical association. all rights reserved. issn - www.amajournalofethics.org http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /medu - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /spec - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /spec - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /stas - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /msoc - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /msoc - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /stas - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /ecas - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /jdsc - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /coet - .html microsoft word - -article text - no abstract- - - - (proof ).docx journal of urban mathematics education july , vol. , no. b (special issue), pp. – ©jume. https://journals.tdl.org/jume jacqueline leonard is professor of mathematics education in the school of teacher educa- tion, university of wyoming, e. university avenue, department , laramie, wy ; email: jleona @uwyo.edu. her research interests include computational thinking, self-efficacy in stem education, culturally specific pedagogy, and teaching mathematics for social justice. black lives matter in teaching mathematics for social justice jacqueline leonard university of wyoming prior to becoming a mathematics educator, i was a teacher in prince george’s county, maryland. because of the success i experienced with culturally relevant pedagogy (crp), it became part of my research agenda along with teaching mathe- matics for social justice (tmfsj). databases like andme and ancestry can be used as a context for crp and tmfsj. data related to education, occupation, mili- tary service, and voting records can be accessed online. our ancestors’ experiences can shape our identity and serve as powerful tools for contextualizing mathematics. the stories and counterstories of african americans can be problematized to show black lives matter. keywords: #blacklivesmatter, culturally relevant pedagogy, identity, teaching mathematics for social justice this article was first published by the urban education collaborative of the university of north carolina at charlotte: leonard, j. ( ). black lives matter in teaching mathematics for social justice. in s. richardson, a. davis, & c. w. lewis (eds.), proceedings of the third international conference on urban ed- ucation (pp. – ). urban education collaborative. https:// e dd d - - d - a - a cef c.filesusr.com/ugd/a a _e a a b a db e ae.pdf permission to reprint was given to the journal of urban mathematics education by dr. chance lewis on june , . leonard black lives matter in teaching mathematics journal of urban mathematics education vol. , no. b (special issue) hen alex haley ( ) wrote his poignant novel, roots, it was not only ground-breaking for black america but an opportunity for america to come to grips with its historical past. the subject of slavery tends to draw angst from broad sectors of the u.s. population, both black and white alike. yet, haley’s story, while painful, was a powerful story of survival and resilience. at the time of the production of the mini-series, i wondered how haley conducted the research to find his ances- tors. sheltered in a close-knit family that welcomed few relatives, i had no idea how to find my own roots. then in , as a mathematics teacher in prince george’s county, maryland, i chose to use genetics and genealogy as a way to engage my students in culturally relevant mathematics. i used the base two pattern to help students understand expo- nentiation. beginning with themselves ( ), their parents ( ), and grandparents ( ), students could easily see how they had ( ) third great-grandparents. after being given a simple family tree, some students went to the national archives in washing- ton, d.c., to learn more about their family history. four students’ projects exceeded my expectations. one african american female student reported on six generations in her family, ending with a woman who was born into slavery and simply known as lizzy. a white female student engraved a tree into a wooden countertop. her father brought the artifact to class, where she reported on her ancestry. another white fe- male student brought a dot matrix printout to class that revealed relatives born in the th century. she also discovered that she was related to benjamin franklin, one of the nation’s founders. the fourth student, who was white and male, learned that his grandparents married at the age of fourteen. he was twelve at the time and clearly rejected the idea. their enthusiasm encouraged me to go to the national archives as well. there, i found census records showing my grandmother at the age of two in and twelve in . her grandfather, who was years old, was living in the same household according to the census. it was surreal to imagine what their lives as sharecroppers were like in oktibbeha county, mississippi. at the archives, i was able to trace the maternal side of the family back to my fourth great-grandfather, who was born in south carolina about . purpose some teacher educators and k– teachers realize the importance of the soci- opolitical context in schooling but often ponder how to engage students in discourse that is meaningfully connected to mathematics content. the purpose of the paper is to show mathematics teacher educators and teachers of mathematics how to prob- lematize issues of significance to the community, teach mathematics for social jus- tice, and advocate for equality in education and society more generally. one issue that has emerged in the black community in recent years is racial profiling and state violence. after the death of trayvon martin in florida, w leonard black lives matter in teaching mathematics journal of urban mathematics education vol. , no. b (special issue) #blacklivesmatter (#blm) became a national cry when three women—patrisse cullors, opal tometi, and alicia garza—created the hashtag (taylor, ). #blm uses decentralized leadership and local chapter organizing methods similar to the oc- cupy movement of to speak to all issues related to human dignity while assert- ing the value of black life (taylor, ). quality education (ladson-billings, ), equal protection under the law (hill, ), equal housing (rothstein, ), and health and wellness (akom, ) are topics that can be mathematicized to teach mathematics for cultural relevance and social justice. some justice-oriented lessons have already been produced and can be used to link mathematics to #blm. himmelstein ( ) used stop-and-frisk as the basis for learning about central tendency. similarly, gustein ( ) investigated driving while black or brown with his students in chicago, illinois. in these lessons, students used probability to compare the actual number and percentage of traffic stops by race. using data as evidence, students may engage in letter writing, public service announcements, and other forms of civic engagement to advocate for justice and equality. yet, even more powerful, as my experience teaching in prince george’s county revealed, is using such lessons to help students to develop personal and social identity. the case for student identity the advent of the internet and dna testing has changed genealogy research. while my research at the national archives more than years ago ended with dis- coveries on the maternal side of the family tree, dna testing provided matches on the paternal side of my family that were historical and eye-opening. moreover, these discoveries changed how i viewed myself as an american citizen (i.e., personal iden- tity) and my relationship to others (i.e., social identity). furthermore, the intersection of race, nationality, gender, and class (i.e., intersectionality) had an impact on my self-efficacy and career goals. the results of my dna tests as reported by andme and ancestry are shown in table below. leonard black lives matter in teaching mathematics journal of urban mathematics education vol. , no. b (special issue) table ancestry reports countries of origin andme ancestry west african . % % ghana/ivory coast - % cameroon - % nigeria - % benin/togo - % senegal - % bantu (cultural group) - % european . % % great britain, ireland, scotland, & wales . % . % scandinavian (i.e., norway, sweden, & denmark) . % % other european (i.e., france, finland) . % . % south & southeast asian . % % data like these can be used to create pie charts for students to study and com- pare their ancestry. a pie chart of my ancestry based on ancestry.com is shown in figure below. figure . percentage of dna from different countries of origin through dna matches, evaluation of family trees, and census records, i learned that i am related to notable figures in american history. some of these figures dna analysis: countries of origin benin/togo cameroon/congo ivory coast/ghana germany mali ireland/scotland england/wales philippines leonard black lives matter in teaching mathematics journal of urban mathematics education vol. , no. b (special issue) are pre-civil war presidents of the united states, famous statesmen, and patriots who fought in the revolutionary war. furthermore, u.s. census records revealed power- ful information about my black ancestors. on the census (the first census listing former slaves and newly freed blacks), the racial category for some of my ancestors was mulatto, which is a derogatory term used to indicate mixed african and euro- pean ancestry. my second great-grandfather was a harrison slave who was born in sumter, alabama. yet, once freed, the former harrison slave registered to vote in sumter, alabama, in (see figure , data obtained from ancestry.com). figure . voting record while black men had the right to vote after , exercising the right to vote in the south was usurped through poll taxes and literacy tests. the poll tax in bir- mingham, alabama (see figure ), which was $ . in , can be used as a math- ematics problem (leonard, ). wages for farm labor in alabama were approxi- mately $ . per month in . thus, the poll tax was roughly equivalent to an entire week’s work. few sharecroppers could afford to pay the tax, and, conse- quently, the number of black voters in alabama decreased substantially. engaging in this type of problematizing connects issues of voting rights to the current sociopo- litical context where voter suppression laws are in place (leonard, ). figure . poll tax receipt (publication granted by the smithsonian institute) leonard black lives matter in teaching mathematics journal of urban mathematics education vol. , no. b (special issue) the knowledge that this ancestor voted so early after the civil war is awe- inspiring considering the hardships and the violence that he must have endured. as a result, the stories of my ancestors became deeply personal. roots was no longer a story about someone else’s family. it signified my story and the stories of my slave and slaveholding ancestors, some of whom fought in the revolutionary war, signed the constitution, served as president of the united states, and served in political of- fice. shortly after the civil war, one the presidents in my family tree proposed federal education funding and voting rights enforcement for african americans but was un- successful. how does one reconcile the right to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happi- ness while also refusing to grant those same rights to others? this is the american dilemma. nevertheless, knowing my background has reshaped my identity and en- couraged me to continue breaking down racial and gender barriers as a professor, researcher, and scholar. as the first african american to receive the fulbright can- ada research chair award in stem education at the university of calgary in al- berta in , i engage in culturally relevant pedagogy by encouraging indigenous, african american, and latinx students in north america to tell their stories. solutions in this era of anti-blackness and white nationalism, it is more important than ever to discover one’s roots and to learn how people of every race and background are interdependent and interconnected. teachers of mathematics should use students’ culture and history to mathematize problems to show that black lives matter. perhaps the common ancestry shared among descendants of former slaves and slaveholders will help us to recognize our humanity. lessons related to #blacklivesmatter have already been developed on racial profiling and equal housing. additional lessons may be developed around voting rights and wages as illustrated above. the stories and counterstories of generations who lived before us provide the backdrop for culturally relevant and social justice-oriented mathematics lessons. the data for these lessons are only a click away. references akom, a. ( ). eco-apartheid: linking environmental health to educational outcomes. teachers college record, ( ), – . gutstein, e. ( ). understanding the mathematics of neighborhood replacement. in e. gutstein & b. peterson (eds.), rethinking mathematics: teaching mathematics by the numbers ( nd ed., pp. – ). rethinking schools. haley, a. ( ). roots: the saga of an american family. doubleday. hill, m. l. ( ). nobody: casualties of america’s war on the vulnerable from ferguson to flint and beyond. atria books. leonard black lives matter in teaching mathematics journal of urban mathematics education vol. , no. b (special issue) himmelstein, k. ( ). racism and stop-and-frisk. in e. gutstein & b. peterson (eds.), rethinking mathematics: teaching mathematics by the numbers ( nd ed., pp. – ). rethinking schools. ladson-billings, g. ( ). “makes me wanna holler”: refuting the “culture of poverty” discourse in urban schooling. the annals of the american academy of political and social science, ( ), – . https://doi.org/ . % f leonard, j. ( ). culturally specific pedagogy in the mathematics classroom: strategies for teach- ers and students ( nd ed.). routledge. https://doi.org/ . / rothstein, r. ( ). no blacks allowed. the crisis magazine, ( ), – . taylor, k-y. ( ). from #blacklivesmatter to black liberation. haymarket books. copyright: © leonard. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of a crea- tive commons attribution-noncommercial-sharealike . international license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ s x .indd du bois review, : ( ) – . © hutchins center for african and african american research - x/ $ . doi: . /s x editorial introduction race and environmental equity david t. takeuchi school of social work , boston college lisa sun-hee park departments of asian american studies , sociology , and feminist studies , university of california , santa barbara yonette f. thomas association of american geographers samantha teixeira school of social work , boston college aldon morris’ book, a scholar denied: w. e. b. du bois and the birth of modern sociology ( ), provides compelling biographical, historical, and sociological insights about the influence of w. e. b. du bois to the core of social science knowledge. while the science at the turn of the twentieth century explained behavior and social positions with genetic or cultural theories, du bois was one of the few scholars who conceptual- ized and tested ideas about how racial and economic stratification influenced people’s social circumstances and lives. unfortunately, du bois’s ideas were frequently ignored or dismissed by his peers in the emerging discipline of sociology. morris notes that even today, du bois’s theoretical, empirical, and methodological contributions are infrequently discussed in sociology textbooks and courses. the underappreciation of du bois extends to research on the environment. over the past two decades, a large body of evidence shows that environmental factors are strongly associated with a wide range of social, educational, developmental, psycho- logical, and health outcomes. du bois’s work is rarely seen as a foundation for this expanding area of research. for example, about a century and a half ago, du bois combined archival records, census statistics, interviews, and observations to examine the social conditions that shaped the behavior and health of philadelphia residents. the philadelphia negro ( ) is a classic study in which du bois showed how slavery, unequal economic power, and frayed racial relations strongly influenced crime, educa- tional outcomes, and other social problems. at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core david t. takeuchi et al. du bois review: social science research on race : , this issue of the du bois review acknowledges and builds on the seminal impact of du bois’s legacy and presents the range and depth of research on race and environ- mental equity. the articles are the result of a special call on the topic and the result is a complementary group of papers that address different dimensions of the environ- mental debate. david n. pellow leads off this collection by introducing the critical environmental justice studies framework that shows how corporate and state interests produce ecological forces and agents that have deleterious consequences for black residents. his paper draws insights from the black lives matter movement and deftly links them to environmental issues. the next four papers use large-scale datasets to comprehensively address how race is associated with environmental pollutants and risks. nicole kravitz-wirtz and colleagues use a national dataset linked to air pollution data to investigate whether there are racial disparities in pollution exposure in neighborhoods from - . robert j. sampson and alix s. winter center on chicago to demonstrate that lead exposure is a major pathway between racial segregation and black disadvantage in the united states. they measure the presence of lead in children’s blood from the period to and assess whether changes are attributed to individual, household, or environmental factors. amy j. schultz and colleagues focus on the detroit metropoli- tan area and examine the environmental contaminants that place some neighborhoods at risk. the fourth paper takes a different approach to studying the environment; stephen p. gasteyer and colleagues ask, “what is taken-for-granted but not uniformly available to all residents in the u.s?” the authors use u.s. census data to test whether race is associated with water and sanitation infrastructure. the next three papers take unique paths to show how people are not passive actors resigned to their environmental circumstances. karida l. brown and colleagues use a phenomenological perspective to shed light on how the environment shapes identity and belonging among black coal miners and their families. as the authors note, their intent is to counter the dominant narrative that “appalachian people are hopeless, helpless, and homeless; and white.” emily walton and mae hardeback ask critical questions about the promise and problems of neighborhoods that consist of diverse racial and ethnic groups. they do extensive analyses of multiethnic neighborhoods and assess the social factors associated with a sense of community. leconté j. dill and colleagues bring forth youth perspectives with a special emphasis on how they under- stand and respond to housing foreclosures in their neighborhoods. the final set of papers conducts empirical research on two proposed solutions for environmental risks and exposure: school gardens and parks. rashawn ray and colleagues review the promise of school gardens for urban children in shaping educational outcomes. they conduct a series of analyses that assesses whether washington d.c. schools, with gardens that children tend, produce better achievement outcomes than schools without gardens. parks have also been suggested as a means to reduce envi- ronmental risks and to facilitate better health among residents. jennifer j. garcia and colleagues creatively test whether latino neighborhoods are less likely to have parks than other areas in los angeles county. advancing the study of race and environmental equity each paper in this issue suggests a few ways that future research can answer the ques- tions raised by the individual studies. in this section, we place these recommendations within the context of a larger research agenda that address the complexities of race and environmental equity. at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core race and environmental equity du bois review: social science research on race : , the intersection of environmentalism with urban social and economic issues in , delegates from the first national people of color environmental leadership summit convened to forge an alternative direction for the environmental movement. they envisioned an environmentalism that was inclusive of social, racial, and economic justice and defined the environment broadly as “where we live, work, and play” (alston ). now, more than ever, where we live, work, and play occurs in the cities. about % of the u.s. population resides in urban places and that number is projected to rise (cohen et al., ). the population growth in urban areas is also following new patterns. after a history of decline in the white population in cities, nearly half of the fifty largest cities in the united states saw gains in their white population from to (badger ). these changes bring unique challenges for the environmental justice movement. urban environmental justice advocates were known for bringing attention to the disproportionate placement of societal ‘bads,’ including environmental hazards like polluting industries and waste sites, in communities of color. in the past, dense urban areas tended to be populated by lower-income racial and ethnic minorities while those with wealth fled to suburban and rural areas. now, as upper middle-class whites and millennials flock to cities, they are bringing with them a booming interest in sustainability and all things “green.” the environmental justice movement now has to contend with protecting neighborhoods of color from undesirable land uses but also with protecting their now desirable urban neighborhoods from displacement. many see the shift as moving from a reactive approach aimed at preventing ‘bads’ to a proac- tive approach of attracting and maintaining environmental ‘goods’ without displacing people of color. the next generation of the urban environmental justice movement is beginning to take shape in response to these threats. environmentalism is viewed through a wider lens that includes housing and the built environment, as well as new areas of focus including healthy food access and food justice, equitable transit access, bicycle and pedestrian safety, access to green space, and anti-gentrification/anti-displacement movements (martinez-alier et al., ). this current approach to urban environ- mental justice defines environment widely and looks to promote equity across multiple domains. the environmental protection and conservation movements, often criticized for their elitist and white perspective, have not traditionally focused on urban environ- mental issues. william a. shutkin ( ) aptly noted most americans care more about protecting secluded distant areas than places where the reside. novel critical frameworks are addressing this issue and offer promising directions for research on environmental equity, particularly in urban areas. for example, the just sustainabilities framework (agyeman ) provides a justice and equity focused understanding of the term sustainability, and urges a move beyond a simplified “green” discourse to one that recognizes the role of social and economic inequality in environmental disparities. david n. pellow, in this issue, introduces critical environmental justice studies, which, among other goals, presses scholars to acknowledge intersectionality and atten- tion to the ways intersectional oppression is intertwined with the experience of envi- ronmental injustice. these types of theoretical frameworks place value on protecting the urban environment while recognizing that marginalization is multi-faceted and may include oppressions related to race, place, and a variety of social characteristics. environmental issues in cities are simultaneously environmental, urban, and social issues. as a means to effectively address the pressing environmental issues of our time, at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core david t. takeuchi et al. du bois review: social science research on race : , from population displacement to climate change, our responses will need to cut across disciplines including the natural and social sciences, law, policy, and the lay-people who bear the brunt of environmental and social inequality. racial inequality and environ- mental degradation are closely linked and new iterations of urban environmentalism will need a multi-faceted response that is attentive to these linkages. race, migration, and climate injustice on a grander scale, john holdren ( ) argued that “global climate disruption” is more accurate than “global warming” or “climate change” to more fully capture the harm being done to the planet. the terms “global warming” and “climate change” can be misconstrued as moving at a steady, uniform, even, gradual, and benign pace. support for holdren’s argument is that climate disruptions occur in regions of the world in dissimilar ways. people of color, indigenous communities, and global south nations bear the brunt of climate disruption in the forms of ecological, eco- nomic, and health burdens. climate change may suggest a naturally occurring pro- cess, but a disruption refers to conditions created by specific human activities. the concept of climate justice encompasses racial and economic justice as inseparable from any effort to combat climate change. climate justice recognizes that climate disruption cannot be reversed unless race and economic justice are systematically addressed. climate justice is a contentious issue because it requires wealthy popu- lations and nations that have contributed the most to the problem take greater responsibilities for solutions. the mass migration of people, whose lives are uprooted by climate disruptions such as floods, hurricanes, and droughts, is expected to increase over the next two decades (warner et al., ). as mass migration increases, the effects of global inequalities in the distribution of environmental harms will become ever more evident especially for those who will bear the brunt of climate disruptions. environmental effects will likely affect people and groups seen as different and inferior defined by nation, race, gender, sexuality, and disability. critical transnational studies on climate migrations are needed to develop a vision for a future characterized by climate justice for all. environmental privilege while past empirical studies reveal the hardships and violence associated with envi- ronmental inequality, fewer studies consider the flipside of that reality: environmental privilege. environmental privilege results from the exercise of economic, social, politi- cal, and cultural power that some groups enjoy, which enables them near-exclusive access to coveted environmental amenities such as forests, parks, mountains, rivers, coastal property, open lands, and elite neighborhoods. environmental privilege is based on the premise that some groups can access spaces and resources that are pro- tected from ecological harm; other groups must contend with these harms on a regular basis. examples of these privileges include organic and pesticide-free foods, neighbor- hoods with healthier air quality, and energy and other products siphoned from the living environments of other peoples. lisa sun-hee park and david pellow ( ) show how environmental privileges accrue to the few while environmental burdens confront the many, including lack of access to quality air, water, and open spaces. if environmental racism and injustice can be easily observed around the world, the same is possible for environmental privilege. since they are opposite sides of the same coin, one cannot exist without the other. at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core race and environmental equity du bois review: social science research on race : , environmental privilege is not simply exclusive access to ecological amenities; it also refers to the maintenance of access and belonging to prized social places, where ecological and non-ecological amenities are a part. environmental privilege, in the end, is the exertion of power that demarcates where particular people belong. this border-making will come under greater pressure as the effects of climate change increases and the volume of resources—both human and non-human—required to maintain exclusive spaces like resorts intensify. if environmentalism is to become transformative, more basic and applied research must confront the privileges that pro- duce social inequality. acknowledgment special thanks to larry bobo for his unyielding support of this special issue. sara bruya did her usual amazing magic in managing the entire process and production. we recognize the anonymous reviewers who provided helpful commentary and critiques of each paper. we also acknowledge support from r hd and the research in social, economic, and envi- ronmental equity collaborative at the boston college school of social work. references agyeman , julian ( ). introducing just sustainabilities: policy, planning, and practice . new york : zed books . alston , dana ( ). transforming a movement . race, poverty & the environment , ( / ): – . badger , emily ( ). the white population is growing in many u.s. cities for the first time in years. washington post . wonkblog. < https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/ wp/ / / /the-white-population-is-growing-in-many-u-s-cities-for-the-first-time-in- years/ > (accessed september , ). cohen , darryl. t. , geoffrey w. hatchard , and steven g. wilson ( ). population trends in incorporated places to . washington, dc : u.s. census . du bois , w. e. b . ( ). the philadelphia negro: a social study . philadelphia, pa : the univer- sity of pennsylvania . holdren , john ( ). global climate disruption: what do we know? what should we do? a paper presented at the forum, john f. kennedy school of government, harvard university, november . martinez-alier , joan , leah temper , daniela del bene , and arnim scheidel ( ). is there a global environmental justice movement? the journal of peasant studies , ( ): – . park , lisa sun-hee , and david pellow ( ). the slums of aspen: immigrants versus the environment in america’s eden . new york : new york university press . shutkin , william a . ( ). the land that could be: environmentalism and democracy in the twenty-first century . cambridge, ma : mit press . warner , koko , charles ehrhart , alex de sherbinin , susana adamo , and tricia chai-onn ( ). in search of shelter: mapping the effects of climate change on human migration and displacement . geneva, switzerland : care international . at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core ps • april business ©american political science association, meet the – apsa minority fellows the minority fellows program (mfp) is a fellowship competition for individuals from underrepre- sented backgrounds applying to doctoral programs in political science. the mfp was established in (originally as the black graduate fellowship) to increase the number of minority scholars in the discipline. the following students were named as – apsa minority fel- lowship program recipients during the fall application cycle (the spring cycle sup- ports current phd students). these fellows are currently applying to phd programs in political science. feyaad allie feyaad allie graduated summa cum laude from dartmouth college with a ba in gov- ernment in . at dartmouth, he was a mellon mays associate fellow and a war and peace fel- low. he was awarded the rockefeller prize in comparative poli- tics and the runner- up chase peace prize for his thesis. after g ra d u a t i n g , al l i e received dartmouth’s lombard public ser- vice fellowship to work for usaid and president obama’s young african leaders initiative (yali) regional leadership center in nairobi, kenya. he is inter- ested in researching counterterrorism, political violence, and muslim-government relations. kimberly cÁrdenas kimberly cárdenas, a senior at cornell university studying government, latina/o, and latin american studies, is a gates millennium scholar, a mcnair scholar, and a mellon collaborative stud- ies fellow to havana, c u b a . f l u e n t i n spanish and french, cárdenas has con- ducted research with a women’s rights organization in chi- apas, mexico, and was a visiting student at sciences po, paris. she is currently investigating the racial identities and civic engagement of latinx immigrant students in southern arizona and has pre- sented preliminary research findings at cor- nell university, the university of arizona, and florida international university. she is interested in studying race and ethnicity, latinx politics, and political theory. stephanie chan stephanie chan is a senior at the univer- sity of massachusetts amherst. her current research project, “creative citizenship: immigrant political participation,” focuses on immigrant con- ceptions of politi- cal participation and enactments of citizen- ship. she is also coau- thor with meredith rolfe of the oxford handbook of politi- cal networks chapter “voting and partici- pation.” her research interests also include concept measurement, survey methods, and electoral redistricting. she has presented her work at the american political science association and the midwest political science association and is a university of massachusetts amherst rising researcher. additionally, as a junior fellow in the joint program on survey methodology, chan interned at the bureau of labor statistics during the summer of . she serves on the chancellor’s undergraduate advisory council and as a student alumna mem- ber on the umass women into leadership board of directors. kennia coronado kennia coronado (rbsi ) is a senior at the university of wisconsin-milwaukee majoring in political science and latin american, caribbean, and us latino studies. she is a recipient of the for- eign language area s t u d i e s fe l l o w- ship for brazilian portuguese and has studied at the pon- tifícia universidade católica do rio de janeiro in order to better understand brazilian politics and culture. in addition, she is a mcnair scholar and participated in the apsa ralph bunche summer institute. coming from a community where many are undocumented, coronado has spent the past several years as a community organizer advocating for immigrant rights. her research interests include latino politics, collective action/ social protest, immigration policy, latin american politics, and race and ethnic politics. coronado aspires to be a univer- sity professor in which she hopes to con- tribute to the diversification of the field by encouraging other latina women to pursue political science. she also hopes her work will someday contribute to policies that are undocumented-friendly. jose gomez jose gomez, (rbsi ) a senior at bing- hamton university, is a mcnair scholar and has participated in several indepen- dent studies across various disciplines. gomez is also a apsa ralph bunche scholar and has pre- sented research proj- ects at multiple con- ferences including the american politi- cal science associa- tion annual meeting and the university of michigan’s emerging scholars con- ference. he is interested in studying issues of representation, public opinion, money in politics, and voter disenfranchisement. nicauris heredia nicauris heredia (rbsi ) is a senior at rhode island college double-majoring in political science and public admin- istration, with a minor in international n o n g o ve r n m e n t al organizations studies (ingos). she served as the president of pi sigma alpha at rhode island col- lege. additionally, she worked in wash- ington, dc as an intern for congress- man jim langevin (ri- ). heredia has worked as a research assistant for several professors at her undergraduate institution and has conducted independent research at ps • april business ©american political science association, apsa’s ralph bunche summer insti- tute (rbsi). her research interests include how racialized power persists over time and the relationship between race, interna- tional law, and new forms of imperialism. jasmine c. jackson jasmine c. jackson (rbsi ) is a senior political science major at jackson state uni- versity where she is a dean’s list scholar. her research interests focus on how politi- cal issues impact minority communi- ties and the effect these issues have on societal placement. in , jackson had the privilege of working with geoff ward at the univer- sity of california at irvine on research that examined histori- cal racial violence. additionally, she attend- ed the apsa ralph bunche summer institute at duke university. jackson has presented at various conferences including the american political science associ- ation annual meeting, the pi sigma alpha student conference, the southern political science association conference, and the university of michigan’s emerging scholars conference. stefan samuel martinez-ruiz stefan samuel martinez-ruiz is a dual degree ba/ma student at georgia state universi- ty. having earned a ba in political science, cum laude, this past august , martinez- ruiz will complete his ma in political science in may . his research focus is comparative and international politi- cal economy. marti- nez-ruiz’s academic interests lie within the political economy of development, but more specifically meth- odologies and research around globalization and trade agreements, domestic institutions and trade, global north-south relations, and economic development strategies. having collaborated with government and nonprofit entities interested in nurturing inclusive and sustainable development, martinez-ruiz’s future goals include researching, teaching, and advocating for ways governments and markets can better co-exist to produce more optimal outcomes for society. alex munoz alex munoz graduated summa cum laude from southern methodist university in with a ba in political science with distinction, honors in liberal arts, and a minor in manage- ment science. he is a member of phi beta kappa and phi sigma alpha. his research interests include m u l t i c u l t u r a l i s m , especially in the unit- ed states and west- ern europe, and the politics of right wing populist move- ments. munoz is interested in pursuing political science research on the oppor- tunities and challenges posed by social diversity. adrienne scott adrienne scott received a ba in political science with a minor in american history from brooklyn college (cuny). she is interested in american politics, public policy, and racial and ethnic politics. while an undergrad- uate, scott worked on several research projects, including one where she ana- lyzed views on wel- fare public policy before and after the great recession. scott is currently a program associate for new york cares’ children’s edu- cation programs. she is a participant in the institute for the recruitment of teachers associate fellowship program and a for- mer participant in the leadership alliance program at princeton university. scott is interested in researching redistributive social programs at the federal, state, and local levels, and examining the inconsisten- cies and inefficiencies that may arise. naomi tolbert naomi tolbert (rbsi ) is a senior at southern illinois university of carbondale ( s i u c ) , d o u b l e - majoring in politi- cal science with a specialization in international affairs and international studies with a focus area in the middle east and northern africa. she currently serves as the student trustee on the southern illinois university board of trustees. she is the cochair for the university diversity council and works as the diversity specialist under the system’s president and the chief diversity officer. she serves as the cochair of the student advisory board and is the vice president of intercultural experiences and diversity within the honors program. tolbert is a siuc four year excellence scholar and a horatio alger in-state scholar. she is also a political science ambassador and has been recognized for high honors on the liberal arts dean’s list. as a first gener- ation, minority student, tolbert received the opportunity to participate in the apsa ralph bunche summer institute and the mcnair scholar’s summer research program at siuc, where she received sec- ond place at the summer end symposium. currently completing her third undergrad- uate research assistantship, tolbert is con- ducting research on the variation of racial attitudes and perceptions between racial groups. priscilla torres priscilla torres (rbsi ) is a senior at loyola marymount university. she par- ticipated in the apsa ralph bunche summer institute and presented her research at apsa’s annual meet- ing and at the inter- n a t i o n al s t u d i e s association-west. her research focuses on united nations security council r e s o l u t i o n on women, peace, and security. torres is interested in inter- national relations and plans on utilizing mixed methods to study the impact of the actions of international organizations on human rights and international security, particularly the women, peace, and security agenda. donovan a. watts donovan a. watts is a senior political sci- ence major at central michigan university. watts’ undergraduate career is highlighted by a number of accomplishments. he has received numerous scholarships and is the current president of the pi sigma alpha chapter at central michigan university. as a mcnair scholar, his research focused on the knowledge and attitudes of central ps • april business ©american political science association, with the us depart- ment of state gain- ing experience in public diplomacy a n d g o v e r n m e n t contracting. zim- m e r m a n i n t e n d s to concentrate his research on amer- ican politics and political theory, with a focus on black politi- cal behavior, black leadership with regards to the implementation of machiavellian principles, and the failure of federalism in the black community. ■ michigan’s african american students based on the recent conflict between law enforcement officers and african ameri- cans. watts’ research i n te re s t s i n c l u d e american politics with a concentration on race and ethnic politics and political par- ticipation. watts plans on exploring voter turnout of african american millennials and emerging social movements such as the black lives matter movement. watts has a passion for research and teaching and he hopes to use his doctoral degree to influence policy decisions that will have an impact within the african american community. justin zimmerman justin zimmerman graduated from the university of alabama with a ba in polit- ical science and philosophy, as well as an mpa with a concentration in public orga- nizational management. he is currently supporting the us department of trea- sury enterprise business solutions (ebs) team. previously zimmerman worked jold (print) issn – jold (online) issn – jold vol . – © , equinox publishing doi: https://doi.org/ . /jld. journal of language and discrimination editorial editorial isabelle van der bom, sara mills and laura l. paterson we are pleased to present you with this very first issue of the new journal of language and discrimination. the topic of discrimination is important across a large number of diverse but related fields, and much research con- cerning discrimination involves language as a core component. this mul- tidisciplinary journal has been established to encourage researchers from different backgrounds to consider the range of work being undertaken within and outside their specialisms. it has a wide scope and we encourage submissions from scholars at all levels whose work focuses in some way on the relationship between language and discrimination. currently, theorists and practitioners publish discrimination-focused work across a wide variety of different platforms. these studies advance research in their specific fields and topic areas, but there is much to gain from bringing these strands of research together to forge a new and dynamic forum that will stimulate intellectual crossover and the growth of multidis- ciplinary work on this topic. the journal of language and discrimination aims to do exactly this, and will appeal to those who are working on lan- guage and discrimination across a wide range of fields including linguistics, education, law and criminal justice, anthropology, sociology, psychology, feminism, queer theory, disability studies, race studies, and many more. as an illustration of the types of research we wish to host, this first issue covers a range of topics from borba and milani’s investigation into affiliations isabelle van der bom: sheffield hallam university, uk. email: i.v.bom@shu.ac.uk sara mills: sheffield hallam university, uk. email: s.l.mills@shu.ac.uk laura l. paterson: open university, uk. email: laura.paterson@open.ac.uk https://doi.org/ . /jld. mailto:i.v.bom% shu.ac.uk?subject= mailto:s.l.mills% shu.ac.uk?subject= mailto:laura.paterson% open.ac.uk?subject= isabelle van der bom, sara mills and laura l. paterson gender clinics in brazil, hermeston’s call for a field of disability stylistics, sloan rainbow’s take on the disconnection between the term ‘hate’ and linguistic violence against women, and zimman’s article on transgender language reform. we have also included reviews of books concerned with topics including palestinian political discourse (jones), indigenous african languages and the mass media (graham), representations of religion (al-anbar), and the psychology of prejudice (scott). future issues could include studies on linguistic profiling, language atti- tudes, activist research challenging the pathologisation of non-standard languages, applied linguistics work on the experiences of (non-)native speakers as teachers in the language classroom, a discursive psychology approach to narrated experiences of discrimination in the workplace, legal studies on brexit debates and legislation, and ethnographic studies of police run-ins. of course, this list is not exhaustive. we also invite proposals for special issues, the themes of which might include freedom of speech; language and ageism, disability, gender, iden- tity, class; same-sex marriage and civil partnerships; racist language; reli- gious language discrimination; islamophobia; anti-semitism; language and the equality act; trolling; shaming; offence and political correctness; language policies; language and social justice; challenging linguistic stereo- types; standardisation, education and second language learners; accent and dialect discrimination; minority languages; hate speech; and the language of animal rights campaigns. if you are interested in producing a special issue, please contact one of the editors for more information. why language and discrimination? it is a fact that for many, discrimination forms part of everyday life, and incidences of discrimination come to light with shocking regular- ity. discrimination, a negative experience in itself, typically comes with an additional burden of negative consequences for those exposed to it. language plays a key role in both discriminatory acts and wider discus- sions of (what constitutes) discriminatory practices. discriminatory lan- guage, for example, can signal to an individual that they are being regarded as a member of a stigmatised group and, even when they do not agree, it is difficult to outmanoeuvre labelling or address of this type. discriminatory language can act as a form of verbal violence, as butler ( ) has shown, often working alongside physical violence and affirming and holding in place wider social exclusion. however, language is also the means by which discriminatory language can be challenged, and, if not silenced, it can at editorial least be made apparent – its discriminatory presupposition made explicit and exposed. discrimination is manifest (and can be traced and challenged) dis- cursively; ideological stances and beliefs are produced, reproduced and legitimised through discourse, meaning that language is intertwined with people’s beliefs and ideologies, and subsequently with institutional prac- tices. this includes not just people’s beliefs about language and language users, but relates to social phenomena more broadly. the relationship between discrimination and language is therefore a crucial one, and is perhaps particularly relevant to study in light of recent discussions in the media about terrorism, migrants, sexism, ageism, disability discrimination and racism. as an example, in april khairuldeen makhzoomi was ejected from a southwest flight from los angeles to oakland, california because he spoke arabic to his uncle on the phone, which another passenger reported to crew. he was detained, searched and questioned by the fbi for nearly three hours, and released without further charge. although southwest refunded his flight costs, they did not apologise for their actions. in this case, makhzoomi was discriminated against because of a mistaken ideol- ogy that links speakers of arabic with terrorism. another, perhaps more general example includes instances where people who are offended by the language used towards them are labelled as ‘snowflakes’. their claims of being discriminated against are represented (in certain media) as due to the fact that they are over-sensitive and must learn to be more resilient. the question of whether and how much it is possible to take offence at discriminatory remarks fails to acknowledge the damaging reality of such remarks, instead transferring ‘blame’ from the perpetrator to the ‘victim’. in this way, discrimination is seen not as some- thing which can be associated with particular linguistic features, but as simply a matter of interpretation. this changes the view of language and its relation to discrimination. where in the past it was clear that there were certain language items that could be labelled as racist, for example, that certainty has shifted. changes in legislation, such as the public order act , the criminal justice and public order act , the racial and religious hatred act and the criminal justice and immigration act in the uk, as well as changes to wider social views, tend to prevent/discourage individuals from using overt hate speech, but discriminatory language which does not meet the legal threshold for hate speech may facilitate discrimination implicitly or display harmful ideologies or beliefs. zoe williams ( ) debates just this issue in discussing the feel free to insult me campaign, which aims isabelle van der bom, sara mills and laura l. paterson to get section of the uk public order act repealed. campaigners such as peter tatchell and the national secular society have argued that people should be free to express themselves, even if their beliefs are discrimina- tory. williams notes, for example, that a teenager was arrested outside the church of scientology in london for holding a placard stating that the church was a dangerous cult. another person was arrested for saying publicly that homosexuality was a sin (williams ). however, although individuals have been arrested under this law and charges may be brought if someone’s words are categorised as incitements to violence, language deemed merely offensive does not lead to prosecution. such issues clearly warrant further research. as these examples dem- onstrate, a journal that aims to show the ways in which the social phe- nomenon of discrimination functions to support and perpetuate social structures and unequal power relations, and to shape policies and practice to combat this, needs no further justification. journal of language and discrimination and activism as well as encouraging scholarly engagement with issues of discrimina- tion, the journal also has an outward-looking focus. there are many activ- ist groups and individuals who campaign around issues of language and discrimination. the everyday sexism project (bates ) was set up to establish an online space where people could post their experiences of mundane sexism not normally considered newsworthy. it also received reports of rape and sexual assault. bates ( ) noted her surprise at just how many women contributed their experiences to the project, many of which involved a linguistic element, such as experiencing street harass- ment or being referred to sexually. disability groups have long been active in challenging discriminatory language practices and there have been changes in the vocabulary which some charities use. in the uk, the cerebral palsy charity scope changed its name from the spastics society in , after pejoration had reduced the word to an abusive term (scope ). to change such negative naming practices reinforces the fact that the language we use to refer to ourselves and others is important. but it also highlights the fact that opposition to these pejorations is possible and that changing language can be a first step towards addressing underlying discriminatory practices. members of religious groups have also been mindful of the harm done by the media focus on terrorist attacks by muslims. this consistent yoking of the term ‘muslim’ with the term ‘terrorist’ has led to calls for the term ‘islamist’ or political terms, such as ‘isis’, to be used instead. refugees and editorial support groups have tried to challenge the use of some of the vocabulary used to describe refugees in the media, such as ‘swarm’ and ‘flood’ (see baker et al. for an investigation of such metaphors). once terms like these are used, there is a tendency for the groups of refugees to be viewed not as individuals with whom one can identify and empathise but as a face- less, dehumanised group. finally, the campaign group black lives matter, among many others, has been instrumental in drawing attention to discriminatory language and the impact that language has. there have, for example, been campaigns in the united kingdom and the united states to rename monuments and buildings that were built by those who profited from slavery or colonial- ism. in bristol (united kingdom), the ‘countering colston’ campaign aims to rename the music venue colston hall, which was named after edward colston, a seventeenth century philanthropist who donated funds for the establishment of schools (saner ). this philanthropy was funded by the slave trade and it is estimated that , africans were enslaved when colston ran the royal african company. this move to rename the venue has led to claims that people are trying to ‘airbrush history’ and that, in fact, maintaining the name draws attention to the history of bristol’s rela- tionship to the slave trade. simply changing the names of buildings, streets and public landmarks is not a solution; however, as john oldfield, director of the wilberforce institute for the study of slavery and emancipation at hull university, remarks: an alternative strategy might be to use these names as a way of drawing attention to the complexities and to discuss the past, because that informs how we understand the present. (cited in saner : ) such debates about discriminatory language ensure that the history of slavery is not simply consigned to the past. the journal of language and discrimination aims to support such activ- ism by providing research on activist work done and by publishing inter- views with prominent activists and academics. publishing research and resisting discrimination is obviously not the same as political activism, but we hope the journal contributes to bringing about changes in perception and ideologies about particular groups in the long run. we encourage our readers to contact us if they know of any groups who campaign on issues of discrimination who may be interested in being interviewed. references baker, p., gabrielatos, c., khosravinik, m., krzyżanowski, m., mcenery, t. and wodak, r. ( ) a useful methodological synergy? combining critical discourse analysis and isabelle van der bom, sara mills and laura l. paterson corpus linguistics to examine discourses of refugees and asylum seekers in the uk press. discourse & society ( ): – . https://doi.org/ . / bates, l. ( ) everyday sexism. london: simon and schuster. bates, l. ( ) what i have learned from five years of everyday sexism. the guardian. retrieved on july from https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/ / apr/ /what-i-have-learned-from-five-years-of-everyday-sexism. butler, j. ( ) excitable speech: a politics of the performative. london: routledge. saner, e. ( ) renamed and shamed. the guardian. retrieved on july from https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /apr/ /renamed-and-shamed-taking-on- britains-slave-trade-past-from-colston-hall-to-penny-lane. scope ( ) twenty years on: why i campaigned for the spastics society to change its name. scope’s blog. retrieved on june from https://blog.scope.org. uk/ / / /why-i-campaigned-for-the-spastics-society-to-change-its-name. williams, z. ( ) why insults are a political issue. the guardian. retrieved on july from https://www.theguardian.com/law/ /may/ /why-insults-are- political-issue. https://doi.org/ . / https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/ /apr/ /what-i-have-learned-from-five-years-of-everyday-sexism https://www.theguardian.com/lifeandstyle/ /apr/ /what-i-have-learned-from-five-years-of-everyday-sexism https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /apr/ /renamed-and-shamed-taking-on- britains-slave-trade-past-from-colston-hall-to-penny-lane https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /apr/ /renamed-and-shamed-taking-on- britains-slave-trade-past-from-colston-hall-to-penny-lane https://blog.scope.org.uk/ / / /why-i-campaigned-for-the-spastics-society-to-change-its-name https://blog.scope.org.uk/ / / /why-i-campaigned-for-the-spastics-society-to-change-its-name https://www.theguardian.com/law/ /may/ /why-insults-are- political-issue https://www.theguardian.com/law/ /may/ /why-insults-are- political-issue / / leviathan and the airway: black lives matter and hobbes with the history put back | by acmrs arizona | the sundial (acmrs) | medium https://medium.com/the-sundial-acmrs/leviathan-and-the-airway-black-lives-matter-and-hobbes-with-the-history-put-back- d f c / leviathan and the airway: black lives matter and hobbes with the history put back acmrs arizona follow jun · min read by christopher n. warren abraham bosse, detail of frontispiece to thomas hobbes’ leviathan ( ), courtesy of the british museum racism, ta-nehisi coates insisted in his award-winning book between the world and me, “is a visceral experience…it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth.” two years earlier, writing for the atlantic, coates had embarked on a public reading of thomas hobbes’ leviathan ( ) and found himself “amazed by the hardness — the relentless physicality — of hobbes’ https://medium.com/@acmrs?source=post_page----- d f c ---------------------- https://medium.com/@acmrs?source=post_page----- d f c ---------------------- https://medium.com/the-sundial-acmrs/leviathan-and-the-airway-black-lives-matter-and-hobbes-with-the-history-put-back- d f c ?source=post_page----- d f c ---------------------- https://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/ / /western-thought-for-avid-atheists-and-sucker-mcs/ / / / leviathan and the airway: black lives matter and hobbes with the history put back | by acmrs arizona | the sundial (acmrs) | medium https://medium.com/the-sundial-acmrs/leviathan-and-the-airway-black-lives-matter-and-hobbes-with-the-history-put-back- d f c / world.” calling hobbes’ description of war and the body “deeply poetic,” coates observed of hobbes’ method: for hobbes…reason comes from naming — as precisely as possible — that which we sense, and then using a valid method to connect the names. step one: sense. next, connect the names. kadir nelson, ‘say their names’ ( ) | abraham bosse, frontispiece to thomas hobbes’ leviathan ( ), courtesy of the british museum black leviathan: kadir nelson’s “say their names” “say their names,” kadir nelson’s haunting cover painting for last week’s the new yorker, is but one of a torrent of unsettling images from the past month that have helped https://www.theatlantic.com/personal/archive/ / /a-war-of-all-against-them/ / https://www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/ / /western-thought-for-footmen-and-aspiring-legionnaires/ / https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cover-story/cover-story- - - / / leviathan and the airway: black lives matter and hobbes with the history put back | by acmrs arizona | the sundial (acmrs) | medium https://medium.com/the-sundial-acmrs/leviathan-and-the-airway-black-lives-matter-and-hobbes-with-the-history-put-back- d f c / america better sense its legacy of white supremacy. and yet nelson’s painting is also an archive. it’s an omnibus image, what elizabeth alexander might call an “agglomerating spectacle” of black lives cut short by white violence that incorporates not only the recent murders of george floyd, ahmaud arbery, breonna taylor, philando castile, michael brown and others but also assassinated th-century civil rights leaders medgar evers and martin luther king, jr. and before them, millions of unnamed enslaved people whose graves are marked, if at all, by periwinkle alone. the bodily refrain “i can’t breathe” was already a cri de coeur of black lives matter long before derek chaivin’s knee came anywhere near george floyd’s neck, but in incorporating hundreds of years of racism’s visceral history, nelson turns george floyd’s body into a corporate body, a body whose blocked airway represents the suffering bodies of literally millions of other black americans. in what nelson calls his “weighted portrait of george floyd,” a multitude of black bodies become one. while “say their names” hardly needs th-century political theory to make its point, no scholar of the history of political thought can miss nelson’s fraught visual allusion. along with everything else, “say their names” suggests nelson’s own powerful reckoning with the philosophy of thomas hobbes ( – ). reimagining hobbes’ famous leviathan frontispiece for contemporary politics, nelson asks viewers to reject the hobbesian fiction of raceless, faceless, anonymous political subjects and to insert in its place the specificity of black history, black lives, and black vulnerability. with coates’ reading of hobbes in mind, it’s possible to see in nelson’s “say their names” a hobbesian impulse to “connect the names.” simultaneously, it suggests how little sense hobbes’ social contract makes for black americans regularly subject to police brutality. http://newyorker.com/magazine/ / / /the-trayvon-generation https://www.washingtonpost.com/arts-entertainment/ / / /new-yorker-cover-george-floyd/ / / leviathan and the airway: black lives matter and hobbes with the history put back | by acmrs arizona | the sundial (acmrs) | medium https://medium.com/the-sundial-acmrs/leviathan-and-the-airway-black-lives-matter-and-hobbes-with-the-history-put-back- d f c / detail of leviathan frontispiece, courtesy of the british museum | detail of nelson’s ‘say their names’ for hobbes, a onetime stockholder in the virginia company, state-sanctioned violence is held over from the violent state of nature. without some police-like authority, according to hobbes, “every man has a right to every thing; even to one another’s body.” this is why, for hobbes, individuals trade their natural rights for peace. nelson’s “say their names” evokes what charles mills calls “the racial contract,” reminding viewers why black american citizens who are unequally vulnerable to state violence might never make this deal. with hobbes’ political iconography in the background, nelson’s george floyd rises out of the landscape of black history much like hobbes’ sovereign, but floyd — in stark contrast to hobbes’ sword-bearing “person of the state” — is, quite literally, an unarmed man. just as no th-century viewer of the leviathan frontispiece could forget that charles i had recently been beheaded, neither does nelson permit viewers to see floyd’s portrait without sensing, viscerally, the grisly manner and duration of his murder. since nothing is more important than bodily safety, it only makes sense to drop one’s guard if one feels secure without it. some americans feel secure: that’s called white privilege. nevertheless, a state whose citizens fear for their bodies has forfeited its reason for being. while hobbes in the popular imagination is usually known as an authoritarian, he himself was fully alert to the chasms police violence introduced into the social landscape, and coates and nelson are too. as hobbes wrote in chapter , “no man can transfer, or lay down his right to save himself from death, wounds, and imprisonment”: it cannot be intended, that he gave any right to another to lay violent hands upon his person. / / leviathan and the airway: black lives matter and hobbes with the history put back | by acmrs arizona | the sundial (acmrs) | medium https://medium.com/the-sundial-acmrs/leviathan-and-the-airway-black-lives-matter-and-hobbes-with-the-history-put-back- d f c / a state that terrorizes its own unarmed citizens is no better than an armed gang and, in effect, returns those citizens to the terrifying state of nature. detail of leviathan frontispiece, courtesy of the british museum “the law did not protect us” coates’ between the world and me arises from just this fear — “a great fear, wide as all our american generations,” as he puts it — that coates feels both for his own body and for his teenage son’s. “in america,” coates writes, “it is tradition to destroy the black body — it is heritage.” popular notions of “whiteness” and “blackness” arise from this heritage. coates speaks poignantly of his fear of the white “syndicate arrayed to protect its exclusive power to dominate and control our bodies” and also of his childhood when / / leviathan and the airway: black lives matter and hobbes with the history put back | by acmrs arizona | the sundial (acmrs) | medium https://medium.com/the-sundial-acmrs/leviathan-and-the-airway-black-lives-matter-and-hobbes-with-the-history-put-back- d f c / to be black in the baltimore of my youth was to be naked before the elements of the world, before all the guns, fists, knives, crack, rape, and disease. “the law did not protect us,” coates insists. rightfully wary of the easily-weaponized distinction between “nature” and “culture,” coates nevertheless reflects on how fully one third of my brain was concerned with who i was walking to school with, our precise number, the manner of our walk, the number of times i smiled, who or what i smiled at, who offered a pound and who did not — all of which is to say that i practiced the culture of the streets, a culture concerned chiefly with securing the body. if coates’ probing analysis of racism grows from the lived sense of bodily vulnerability, as scholar james b. haile iii has pointed out, “coates, like hobbes, is attempting to understand the social ‘state’ through an interrogation of the material body.” insofar as police violence terrorizes some — but not all — american citizens, the layered orders that result from america’s racial contract might be called the “united states of nature.” say their names, see their faces whereas the leviathan subjects face inward in uniform, anonymous adoration, the black faces that make up floyd’s corporate body look outward, demanding accountability and acknowledgment as individuals. say their names, nelson tells us, but also see their faces. the names and faces of nelson’s black leviathan — george floyd, ahmaud arbery, tony mcdade, trayvon martin, laquan mcdonald, freddie gray, eric garner, aiyana stanley- jones, botham jean, michael brown, sandra bland, yvette smith, alton sterling, david mcatee, walter scott, breonna taylor, tamir rice, philando castile, stephon clark, martin luther king, jr., medgar evers, malcolm x, rosa parks, emmett till, rodney king, and gordon (he with the stripe marks) — will neither be subsumed nor annihilated by the united states of nature. http://muse.jhu.edu/article/ / / leviathan and the airway: black lives matter and hobbes with the history put back | by acmrs arizona | the sundial (acmrs) | medium https://medium.com/the-sundial-acmrs/leviathan-and-the-airway-black-lives-matter-and-hobbes-with-the-history-put-back- d f c / detail from nelson’s ‘say their names’ and rather than persist in quiet reverence, nelson’s citizens bear signs of protest and dissent. iconic signs from the long civil rights struggle — the naacp’s “a man was lynched yesterday” and “i am a man” from the memphis sanitation strike — bear witness to legacies of activism and voice. when coates’ wrote that racism dislodges brains and blocks airways, the very next sentence was an address to his son: “you must never look away from this.” and indeed, we must never look away. but what may be just as significant about “say their names” is that george floyd and the generations of black americans depicted in his black leviathan will never stop speaking — to us. there are unresolved tensions here; there always are. most significantly, hobbes insisted that states are people only in the way corporations are people: through an elaborate fiction. states are scary artworks that natural bodies create to extinguish their bodily fears. george floyd’s personhood, by contrast, was as obvious, material, and elemental as a breath of air. but what of george floyd’s corporate personhood? entirely separate from the george floyd with a momma and an airway, george floyd as spectacle, as story, as data point, as inspiration, is someone who forges bonds and mobilizes communities, who weaves generations and histories together. this george floyd incorporates publics and changes the dynamics of american politics. / / leviathan and the airway: black lives matter and hobbes with the history put back | by acmrs arizona | the sundial (acmrs) | medium https://medium.com/the-sundial-acmrs/leviathan-and-the-airway-black-lives-matter-and-hobbes-with-the-history-put-back- d f c / elizabeth alexander has written of the trayvon generation. they always knew these stories. these stories formed their world view. these stories helped instruct young african-americans about their embodiment and their vulnerability. the stories were primers in fear and futility. the stories were the ground soil of their rage. these stories instructed them that anti-black hatred and violence were never far. in alexander’s telling, diverse, heterogeneous black americans are joined together in the fear that they or their loved ones will become another trayvon martin or george floyd. fear helps make american blackness one. ultimately, this tension between body and spirit, materiality and artifice, suggests one of the main reasons hobbes has been such a reliable interlocutor for black lives matter. hobbes makes it possible to see how embodied fears give rise to constructs like “whiteness” and “blackness” and also the ineluctable, even terrifying potency available when we connect the names in order to create something new. . . . christopher n. warren (@chrisvvarren) is an associate professor of english and history at carnegie mellon university, where he teaches th-century literature and culture, digital humanities, and the history of political thought. his book literature and the law of nations, – , which was awarded the roland bainton prize for literature, is now available in paperback. june blacklivesmatter race early modern about help legal get the medium app https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/ / / /the-trayvon-generation https://urldefense.proofpoint.com/v /url?u=https- a__twitter.com_chrisvvarren&d=dwmgaq&c=l axh-kuv srqusp vyr n gycn _ jinuky zbqq&r=cy-dpdrxb yosdfmno cqbxtsuzanujukppwthjrfqg&m=fcoj -sb xn sy ivu f y dnuni_sy l_l 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https://itunes.apple.com/app/medium-everyones-stories/id ?pt= &mt= &ct=post_page&source=post_page----- d f c ---------------------- https://play.google.com/store/apps/details?id=com.medium.reader&source=post_page----- d f c ---------------------- / / leviathan and the airway: black lives matter and hobbes with the history put back | by acmrs arizona | the sundial (acmrs) | medium https://medium.com/the-sundial-acmrs/leviathan-and-the-airway-black-lives-matter-and-hobbes-with-the-history-put-back- d f c / socially just and inclusive education hodge, nick <http://orcid.org/ - - - > available from sheffield hallam university research archive (shura) at: http://shura.shu.ac.uk/ / this document is the author deposited version. you are advised to consult the publisher's version if you wish to cite from it. published version hodge, nick ( ). socially just and inclusive education. community, work & family, ( ), - . copyright and re-use policy see http://shura.shu.ac.uk/information.html sheffield hallam university research archive http://shura.shu.ac.uk http://shura.shu.ac.uk/ http://shura.shu.ac.uk/information.html socially just and inclusive education this is the final version of the article that was accepted for publication by community, work & family on november th . nick hodge is professor of inclusive practice, sheffield institute of education, sheffield hallam university, uk. sheffield hallam university arundel building room charles street sheffield s ne t: + ( ) n.s.hodge@shu.ac.uk @goodchap disclosure statement i have no potential conflict of interest in the writing or publication of this article. abstract this article presents a personal account of what socially just and inclusive education means to me, an academic in a uk university. i identify the critical elements as being the recognition of the right to claim and the duty to protect the humanity and value of all members of society. inclusion and social justice are about belonging in the world unfettered by the disablements of poverty, illness and prejudice. they are dependent upon interdependence, community and collaborative enterprise. here i call upon all students in education to take a stand; to work together to end the marginalisation and exclusion of the poor and the abandoned and to disavow control through privilege. only together by and for each other can we be free. article recently the sheffield institute of education, sheffield, uk, held an event to launch its new home, the charles street building . this building has enabled education colleagues and students who were scattered across the city campus to come information about and images of the charles street building can be found at https://www.shu.ac.uk/about-us/our-services/facilities-directorate/estates-development-and- sustainability/charles-street-building. mailto:n.s.hodge@shu.ac.uk https://www.shu.ac.uk/about-us/our-services/facilities-directorate/estates-development-and-sustainability/charles-street-building https://www.shu.ac.uk/about-us/our-services/facilities-directorate/estates-development-and-sustainability/charles-street-building together in a single space that has been described by the vice chancellor as a palace of learning. when i first entered it the building took my breath away. it is state of the art in its design, all round tables, cosy booths for group working, electrical sockets in settees to power your laptop and lecture rooms with chairs that swivel to enable collaboration with peers. the home of the institute is a community space. through the centre of the building runs brown lane, a street that is open to the public. the route was kept for its historical importance to the cultural industries quarter in which the charles street building is located: sheffield is proud of its artisans. the building was officially launched by baroness doreen lawrence who, since the racist murder of her son stephen, has been pivotal in the uk for exposing institutional racism. one family's tragedy led to fundamental changes in the practices of a nation's organisations. at the iaunch i was invited to deliver a short presentation that addressed two of the key drivers for the work of the institute: social justice and inclusive practice. i was asked to define and explicate what these terms mean to me. this is what i had to say. achieving consensus on what is socially just and inclusive education depends in part on first reaching agreement as to what these terms might mean for they are nebulous in nature and slippery. but they are sometimes trapped and dressed up in whatever form suits the particular political goals of the user. so for some social justice is all about economic redistribution - a robin hood taking of assets from the haves to give to the have nots. and inclusion becomes about lowering the drawbridge to permit into spaces, or at least into some of the space for some of the time, those who we know do not really belong but whom we are obliged by law to accommodate anyway. but for me neither social justice nor inclusion are about money or access to space - rather they are more profound axiological global issues in the sense that they compel us to reflect upon human worth. social justice and inclusion are all about personhood: being acknowledged and valued as a human being. social justice and inclusion are about being enabled to claim your place in the world unfettered by the malefic impediments of poverty, illness and prejudice. education is not a practice that stands outside of the world. free schools , for example, cannot become, to quote nicky morgan ( ), 'the modern engines of social justice', unless the children in those schools feel safe, warm, nourished and believe in a future. social justice and inclusion are as dependent on quality housing, health, social care and access to work or other forms of occupation as they are on education. in in the uk, the th richest country in the world, more than a million people are so poor that they cannot afford 'to eat properly, keep clean or stay warm and dry' (butler, , n.p.). this includes more than , children. rising housing costs and the annihilation of industrial communities in the northern counties it is the vice-chancellor who effectively leads a british university and has responsibility for its administrative functions. robin hood is an english folklore hero who robbed the rich to give to the poor. free schools in the uk are those funded by national rather than local government. nicky morgan was at that time education minister within the uk conservative government. of the uk are delivering devastating consequences for families (butler, ). one in children arrives at school hungry each day (tes, ). i do not imagine that they anticipate their aspirations coming to fruition anytime soon or even if life is permitting them any aspirations at all. the american political activist van jones ( ) has said that alicia garza in using the hashtag black lives matter changed a nation's conversation. just as years ago on april nd the savage murder of a young man, stephen lawrence, did in the uk. stephen was just waiting for a bus. today over disabled people in the uk die needlessly each year: death by indifference (barleon, ). once again it has taken the death of a young man, connor sparrowhawk, or lb as he is known to many, and the heart ripped out of yet another family to start this conversation: #disabledlivesmattertoo. political theorist hannah arendt ( ) conceptualised our personal failure to acknowledge, critique and decry such atrocities as a banality of evil. the evil that brings suffering and death to those who are stripped of their humanity, remade as burdens , as drains on our society and tossed aside, is not out there, situated in others but is embedded within us constrained by the gimp masks of uncritical consciousness that smother our righteous screams. and so we stay silenced as our once beautiful mediterranean sea becomes the graveyard that shames us all. over , deaths since and still counting (africa news, ). for the dispossessed, the thrown away and the forgotten, those whom zygmunt bauman ( ) has termed human waste, social justice and inclusion are not about being educated but about desperately seeking to remain human and to stay alive. social justice and inclusion for me must therefore include the bhaskarian ( ) notion of co-presence - they are not about autonomy and independence but about community: interdependence, connectedness, unity and working collectively. they are about protection - enabling people to live their lives in the ways that are right for them whatever their gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, class, economic status, age or physicality. social justice and inclusion are about focusing on the shared elements of being human and recognition of and respect for those characteristics that distinguish us. i want graduates from the sheffield institute of education to be able to recognise themselves in the other and to be inspired to new possibilities for their own being. i want our students to approach the world in what titchkosky ( ) calls a politics of wonder, unsettling what we think is known; making the familiar unfamiliar as we rethink and reshape our habitual ways of being. i want our students to revel in debate and discussion, to welcome the challenge of ideas that conflict with their own and to develop a set of skills that enable them to negotiate and accommodate different world views. i want our students to be ethical and informed citizens of the world, critical thinkers who can recognise what is wrong, cry out in condemnation and transform society through their creativity and their commitment to achieving positive change. ef schumacher ( ), the great economist, in response to the challenge of 'but i am only one person what can i do to change the world?' would reply 'everything starts very very small and usually in a very dark place'. in the sheffield institute of education one voice can become a choir whose song of justice will be so beautiful and compelling that it will be impossible to ignore. as critical thinkers we must ask of any philosophy who stands to benefit from this and who might lose. educating our young people and learners of all ages and being educated ourselves by them so that in a single project of learning we all become respectful and enlightened citizens of the world who have a belief in a future and the passion to make a difference will be of benefit to everybody without doubt. so in the long term can anyone lose - no. but paulo freire ( ) the famed brazilian educationalist argued that those in power, the ones who benefit from the current system, the oppressors who are thriving on the labour and sacrifice of the oppressed will not recognise their own oppression and so will not realise that in the socially just and inclusive world they too would be free. that a life of value is found within human connection, community and creativity and not in the amassment of things. and so it falls upon the oppressed to lead the oppressor to enlightenment. for those of you who are restless and feel change is a long time coming then i urge you to be still for a moment and listen hard. for to cite tracy chapman ( ) revolution sounds like a whisper. a feint melody that vibrates along the unemployment lines, through the cardboard boxes of the homeless, the food banks of the poor, the wards of the assessment and treatment units and the cells of the jails, the makeshift rafts of the sea and the wires of the camps, the classrooms of our schools and the lecture halls of academia. a melody that begets a verse and then a chorus and then a choir. and so that melody becomes a song of love, hope, possibility, unity and joy. references africa news ( ) over , migrants dead so far on the mediterranean sea. retrieved from: http://www.africanews.com/ / / /over- -migrants-dead- so-far-on-the-mediterranean-sea/. arendt, h. ( ) eichmann in jerusalem: a report on the banality of evil. london: faber. barleon, b. ( ) more than , people with a learning disability die of avoidable causes. the guardian, april . retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/healthcare-network/ /apr/ /learning-disability- healthcare-avoidable-deaths-mencap. bauman, z. ( ) wasted lives: modernity and its outcasts. cambridge: polity press. bhaskar, r. ( ) reflections on meta-reality: transcendence, emancipation, and everyday life. london: sage. http://www.africanews.com/ / / /over- -migrants-dead-so-far-on-the-mediterranean-sea/ http://www.africanews.com/ / / /over- -migrants-dead-so-far-on-the-mediterranean-sea/ https://www.theguardian.com/healthcare-network/ /apr/ /learning-disability-healthcare-avoidable-deaths-mencap https://www.theguardian.com/healthcare-network/ /apr/ /learning-disability-healthcare-avoidable-deaths-mencap butler, p. ( ) more than a million people in uk living in destitution, study shows. the guardian, april . retrieved from: https://www.theguardian.com/society/ /apr/ /million-people-uk-living-destitution- joseph-rowntree-foundation. chapman, t. ( ) talkin' 'bout a revolution. tracy chapman. cd for elektra records. freire, p. ( ) pedagogy of the oppressed. new york : herder and herder. jones, v. ( ) interviewed in e.f. schumacher: is small the next big? radio . may . morgan, n. ( ) free schools drive social justice: nicky morgan. press release. department for education and the rt hon nicky morgan mp may . retrieved from: https://www.gov.uk/government/news/free-schools-drive-social-justice-nicky- morgan. schumacher, e.f. ( ) recorded speech in e.f. schumacher: is small the next big? radio . may . tes (times educational supplement) ( ) some schools see one in five pupils arrive hungry, mps warn. april . retrieved from: https://www.tes.com/news/school- news/breaking-news/some-schools-see-one-five-pupils-arrive-hungry-mps-warn. titchkosky, t. ( ) the question of access: disability, space, meaning. toronto: university of toronto press. https://www.theguardian.com/society/ /apr/ /million-people-uk-living-destitution-joseph-rowntree-foundation https://www.theguardian.com/society/ /apr/ /million-people-uk-living-destitution-joseph-rowntree-foundation https://www.gov.uk/government/news/free-schools-drive-social-justice-nicky-morgan https://www.gov.uk/government/news/free-schools-drive-social-justice-nicky-morgan https://www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-news/some-schools-see-one-five-pupils-arrive-hungry-mps-warn https://www.tes.com/news/school-news/breaking-news/some-schools-see-one-five-pupils-arrive-hungry-mps-warn how we coped with covid- —and silver linings christmas : m*a*s*h how we coped with covid- —and silver linings doctors and patients tell kathy oxtoby what has got them through the year, and the positives they have taken from kathy oxtoby journalist zoom meetings and audio books, camaraderie with colleagues and royal college work, running and long walks. these are just some of the ways doctors have been dealing with this difficult year. to describe the year as challenging is, of course, a massive understatement. but along with the challenges presented by the pandemic have come positives, clinicians say, from a greater awareness of mental health and the importance of equality, to cleaner air and the closeness of family. appreciationofthenhsbroughtmetotears lade smith, consultant psychiatrist, visiting senior lecturer, and clinical director, forensic services, maudsley hospital, london, and clinical director, national collaborating centre, royal college of psychiatrists what’s saved me has been audio books—after being at a computer reading all day i feel i can’t pick up another book—and late evening walks. i’m having more meetings with colleagues, where we pass on information but also check in with each other to ask how we’re feeling. it turned into superheroes, putting over staff to remote access in five days. and colleagues are covering for others who are unable to come to work because they are shielding or in a potentially high risk group. i’ve been really impressed with how readily they’ve been doing this. and it’s been heartening that people, some of whom i haven’t heard from for a long time, are remembering me, remembering i’m a health worker, and asking, “are you ok, are you safe?” the first time that people clapped for the nhs i was a bit cynical. by the third time, when things had got so overwhelming, hearing everyone clapping i found myself in tears to hear that ring of appreciation for the nhs. i have re-evaluated what’s important in my life ian higginson, consultant in emergency medicine, university hospitals plymouth nhs trust, and vice president, royal college of emergency medicine having the family together during lockdown was reassuring—it felt like we were “hunkering down” for whatever was to come. i also have a friendship network composed of people with a strong sense of community and a good sense of humour. being part of an incredible emergency department team has helped. we stayed positive, and it felt good to continue to provide care for patients during this time of great need. and my royal college work has enabled me to feel i’ve made a contribution both to disseminating information relating to covid and emergency medicine’s response to it. the pandemic has prompted me to re-evaluate what’s important in life and get my work-life balance sorted. i’m a drummer, and playing live is hard to do during a pandemic, but i’ve learnt more about mixing and music production. video conferencing has enabled those of us working in emergency medicine to connect with each other across national and international borders, sharing our concerns and successes. i hope we’ll continue to share our incredible experiences across the world. i’ve been out exploring in the fresh air david turner, gp partner, chorley wood health centre, hertfordshire our team really pulled together and knuckled down to convert the practice mostly to phone appointments, then later, to start ramping up face-to-face appointments. as well as maintaining the surgery routine to keep things as normal as possible, i’ve been cycling, walking, and exploring local areas i didn’t know existed. there’s been less traffic on the roads so it’s been nice to be out in the fresh air, which is cleaner. with less traffic my journey to work has gone down from an hour and a half to minutes, which has made a huge difference to my day. during the first few weeks [of the pandemic] things were quieter, and i had time to catch up on routine stuff like updating records and qof [quality and outcomes framework]. and we were only dealing with patients with serious problems—so for a while there were no “worried well.” clinical researchers are more collaborative now sarah markham, visiting researcher, institute of psychiatry, psychology and neuroscience, king’s the bmj | bmj ; :m | doi: . /bmj.m feature london, uk kathyoxtoby @gmail.com cite this as: bmj ; :m http://dx.doi.org/ . /bmj.m published: december o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b m j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j.m o n d e ce m b e r . d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /bmj.m &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - about:blank http://dx.doi.org/ . /bmj.m http://www.bmj.com/ college london, and member of the bmj patient panel ironically, what’s helped me is that i’m a mental health patient. this has given me so many opportunities through life to build up resilience, to learn to take things in my stride, as well as experience of facing uncertainty, negative outcomes, and risk. i’ve been detained under the mental health act so have had previous experience of a kind of lockdown—so nothing that has been implemented has bothered me. as i’m an academic researcher, covid has brought me lots of interesting work. i’m currently working on a systematic review of mental health research that’s been initiated in response to the pandemic. historically, clinical research teams can be competitive with each other, whereas now it’s in everyone’s best interest to collaborate to better understand the virus, which is a positive change. “pizza fridays” have kept me going richard fieldhouse, chair of national association of sessional gps (nasgp) and locum gp in chichester, west sussex at the beginning of the pandemic across the country most locum work was cancelled, so doing [fewer] sessions helped me focus on my work with the national association of sessional gps (nasgp). what’s been getting me through is being able to make a difference to the lives of gp locums. my wife—also a locum—and i both help run nasgp, and we’ve been spending time making the organisation’s locum it software locumdeck more powerful and much simpler to use. we’ve also launched a network of gp locum chambers, which are managed local collectives of self-employed locums supporting local practices. my pizza oven has kept me going. i bought a portable pizza oven a few years back, and i’ve been having pizza fridays. as much as i miss my sons visiting, i’m no longer exposed to their cats’ allergens. so now i can go running for miles without any puff of an inhaler for the first time in decades. running is a form of meditation and relaxation ceinwen giles, director of partnerships and evaluation, shine cancer support, a cancer support charity for young people awful as things have been this year, what has got me through is the team i work with. a small team of five, we have all had a cancer diagnosis, are all in the same situation, and stay in touch with each other personally as well as professionally. running has helped a lot. i have an immune deficiency, and in the darkest days of lockdown, when i was having to shield, i went running every day by myself. for me it’s a form of meditation and relaxation. it’s been nice to spend more time with my husband and daughter, even though there were times when we drove each other crazy. we used to run three-day retreats on coping with a cancer diagnosis but have had to redesign these programmes to be delivered online. even if things go back to normal we’ll keep some of our online programmes because we can reach people in different parts of the country more easily. there’s been a lot of camaraderie within our online patient community, and it’s helped to make sure people don’t feel alone and isolated. my nhs family gave me a sense of purpose farah bhatti, consultant cardiothoracic surgeon and council member of royal college of surgeons of england while so many people were furloughed, shielding, and feeling isolated, being able to continue working with my nhs family gave me a sense of purpose through the crisis. it’s also been great to share guidance and help to define best practice and with issues concerning healthcare staff such as ppe availability and testing. i also have an extremely supportive husband, who is with me through thick and thin. this year has shone a light on the terrible things happening in the world, such as the increased risk of covid in ethnic minority communities and the killing of george floyd, renewing interest in black lives matter. we mustn’t stop trying to create a more equitable society. i’m very involved in equality, diversity, and inclusion—it’s what drives me. i feel honoured to have been invited onto an independent panel to look at diversity in the leadership of the royal college of surgeons of england. that’s a good thing to come out of this difficult year. “online connections are like having an extended family liz bragg, associate specialist paediatrician, cardiff and vale university health board zoom meetings with colleagues stopped me quietly going mad with my own company. i worked from home for six weeks—i was shielded because of health problems—so seeing people by zoom made a massive difference. group chats on facebook with like-minded people is like having an extended family. we take it in turns to support each other, share how awful things feel, and get group reassurance. i was impressed with the way our it department organised laptops for staff to work from home. i’ve been asking for years if i can access emails from home—during the pandemic this happened within days. it’s good that lots of people are suddenly thinking about mental health. there’s a greater awareness that everybody needs to watch everybody’s backs to make sure they’re coping. i liked the lack of emissions—that we were letting the planet breathe again. and having connections with people will continue to get me through. staying connected is what makes us human. the bmj | bmj ; :m | doi: . /bmj.m feature o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b m j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j.m o n d e ce m b e r . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.bmj.com/ uc santa barbara journal of transnational american studies title excerpt from internment during the second world war permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ jv n wf journal journal of transnational american studies, ( ) author pistol, rachel publication date license https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / . escholarship.org powered by the california digital library university of california https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ jv n wf https://creativecommons.org/licenses/https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . // . https://escholarship.org http://www.cdlib.org/ i internment during the second world war _pi- .indd i _pi- .indd i / / : : pm / / : : pm journal of transnational american studies . ( ) ii _pi- .indd ii _pi- .indd ii / / : : pm / / : : pm journal of transnational american studies . ( ) l o n d o n • ox f o r d • n e w yo r k • n e w d e l h i • s y d n e y iii internment during the second world war a comparative study of great britain and the usa rachel pistol bloomsbury academic an imprint of bloomsbury publishing plc _pi- .indd iii _pi- .indd iii / / : : pm / / : : pm journal of transnational american studies . ( ) iv bloomsbury academic an imprint of bloomsbury publishing plc bedford square broadway london new york wc b dp ny  uk usa www.bloomsbury.com bloomsbury and the diana logo are trademarks of bloomsbury publishing plc first published  © rachel pistol,  rachel pistol has asserted her right under the copyright, designs and patents act, , to be identifi ed as author of this work. all rights reserved. no part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. no responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by bloomsbury or the author. british library cataloguing- in- publication data a catalogue record for this book is available from the british library. isbn: hb:  - - - - epdf:  - - - - ebook:  - - - - library of congress cataloging- in- publication data names: pistol, rachel, author. title: internment during the second world war : a comparative study of great britain and the usa / rachel pistol. description: london ; new york : bloomsbury academic, . | includes bibliographical references. identifi ers: lccn | isbn (hb) | isbn (epub) subjects: lcsh: germans–great britain–evacuation and relocation, – . | italians–great britain–evacuation and relocation, – . | world war, – –prisoners and prisons, british. | world war, – –concentration camps–great britain. | japanese americans–evacuation and relocation, – . | world war, – –prisoners and prisons, american. | world war, – –concentration camps–united states. classifi cation: lcc d .g p | ddc . / –dc lc record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/ cover image © marshall/ fox photos/ getty images typeset by newgen knowledge works pvt ltd., chennai, india printed and bound in great britain to fi nd out more about our authors and books visit www.bloomsbury.com . here you will fi nd extracts, author interviews, details of forthcoming events and the option to sign up for our newsletters. _pi- .indd iv _pi- .indd iv / / : : pm / / : : pm journal of transnational american studies . ( ) v in memory of david cesarani _pi- .indd v _pi- .indd v / / : : pm / / : : pm journal of transnational american studies . ( ) vi _pi- .indd vi _pi- .indd vi / / : : pm / / : : pm journal of transnational american studies . ( ) vii contents list of illustrations viii acknowledgements ix introduction . th e origins of internment . life in the camps . endings and aft ermath . memory conclusion notes bibliography index _pi- .indd vii _pi- .indd vii / / : : pm / / : : pm journal of transnational american studies . ( ) viii illustrations . location of internment camps on the isle of man . camps and holding facilities for those of japanese ancestry in western united states . th e recreated guard tower stands alone in the wilderness that is manzanar . excavated water garden foundations at manzanar . th e tule lake visitor center . inside the tule lake stockade as it stands today . outside the tule lake stockade as it stands today . th e memorial in the cemetery at manzanar . th e memorial in the cemetery at camp amache, granada . a section of memorial highway outside manzanar . ‘go for broke’ memorial in los angeles _pi- .indd viii _pi- .indd viii / / : : pm / / : : pm journal of transnational american studies . ( ) xii _pi- .indd xii _pi- .indd xii / / : : pm / / : : pm journal of transnational american studies . ( ) introduction th e topic of this book could not be timelier. in both great britain and the united states of america, much is being made in the political sphere of the issues of race, immigration, and the rights of foreigners residing in each nation. it is impossible to consider the treatment of enemy aliens during the second world war without exploring the treatment of foreigners in preceding centuries. as the fi rst chapter of this book discusses, protests over immigration and calls for restriction are invariably heightened during times of economic discontent. th roughout history, immigration is perceived negatively whenever a country is experiencing eco- nomic problems. th e fi nancial crisis of – and the subsequent recession and austerity measures hark back to the economic crises of the late s, and the wall street crash of . both countries have been in this position before, but arguably little has been learned. current events are therefore not surprising, but are disappointing for the lack of attention paid to the history of the preced- ing centuries. it is, therefore, of even greater importance to be aware of the way foreigners have been treated in great britain and the united states of america, both in peace and war, in order to avoid repeating the mistakes of the past. evidence of the turmoil both britain and america are experiencing is found in recent political events, not dissimilar to those experienced during the s and s. great britain unexpectedly voted to leave the european union, and the leave campaign triumphed using a campaign of fear, which included mas- sive distortion of facts surrounding foreigners and immigration. nigel farage, former leader of the uk independence party (ukip), unveiled a billboard dur- ing the campaign that showed a picture of syrian refugees fl eeing their home- land, for which he was reported to the police for inciting racial hatred – not only was the image in incredibly poor taste, but it harked back to nazi propaganda footage of migrants. while ukip tried to distance itself from the comparisons made between their rhetoric and that of the nazis, there can be no mistak- ing the message ukip was trying to portray  – that immigrants are parasites, _pi- .indd _pi- .indd / / : : pm / / : : pm journal of transnational american studies . ( ) internment during the second world war not refugees, and that many of them are trying to take advantage of western countries. such sentiments have been oft repeated in britain, such as when east- ern europeans arrived in britain because of russian persecution in the late nine- teenth century, and when jewish refugees sought asylum in britain during the s. th e ‘brexiters’ consistently campaigned for the idea of ‘taking the coun- try back’. gisela stuart, labour member of parliament and spokesperson for the leave campaign, claimed that the only way to ‘take back control’ on immigration was to leave the european union, because of concern that ‘no matter how great the pressure on schools, hospitals and housing becomes or how much wages in our poorest communities are pushed down’, the needs of ordinary british peo- ple would not be met. th e problem with such arguments is that they encour- age a ‘them and us’ mentality, which feed xenophobic and racist attitudes. proof that this attitude engenders violence was tragically given when jo cox, member of parliament for batley and spen in west yorkshire, was gunned down by a man who gave his name in court as ‘death to traitors, freedom for britain’. in the days following the vote to leave, thousands of stories were posted on social media that showed how those who were not white, or who spoke with an accent, were harassed, threatened, and told to ‘go home’. in the fi rst few days following the eu referendum, hate crimes increased in britain by as much as per cent. regardless of nationality, no one should suff er insult or injury as a result of their nationality or skin colour. as the grieving family of jo cox said during this tragic and turbulent time, it is necessary for the british public ‘to focus on that which unites us and not which divides us’. th is is a message needed not just in britain, but across the globe, as men, women, and children are imprisoned and killed for the sake of their race or religion. both great britain and the united states of america are currently nations divided, and in america, immigration and the presence of foreigners is also being used as an explanation for social and economic problems. refugees from the middle east have been brought up in debates about the threat of terrorism. since the tragedy of september , , there has been a fear of anyone of middle eastern appearance, or more specifi cally, anyone who appears muslim. much in the same way that japanese and japanese americans were targeted because of the way they looked, those who appear muslim are subject to increased scrutiny and discrimination. th is follows a long history in america of discrimination based on skin colour, particularly experienced by the african american community. th ere have been many atrocities committed in the name of islam, and since / , many have been charged and found guilty of ‘jihadi terrorism’. th e problem america faces is that the attacks that have taken place in the past fi ft een years have been _pi- .indd _pi- .indd / / : : pm / / : : pm journal of transnational american studies . ( ) introduction perpetrated by american citizens. in the orlando massacre  – the largest mass killing on american soil since /  – the gunman was an american citizen. th e growth of technology and accessibility via the world wide web of terrorist lit- erature and chatrooms where vulnerable children and teenagers are groomed for violence is perhaps the most serious threat to american national security that exists today. however, the issue is not as simple as america being targeted by these individuals. th ose most vulnerable to such grooming are those who live on the edge of society. as the divide between the rich and the poor continues to grow, and the divide between diff erent ethnicities fails to diminish, the number of marginalized individuals in society is increasing. one only has to look at the case of flint, michigan, where the residents have been poisoned by the water sup- ply since , and even today lead- fi lled water continues to enter their homes. over half the population of flint are black and per cent live in poverty, forced to exchange food stamps for bottled water. th e residents feel that their concerns are not adequately addressed because of the colour of their skin, and because they are poor. racial inequality is still prevalent in american society, and until this is eradicated, it is highly likely that the rise of extremism will continue. th ere is also the issue of what constitutes terrorism. since / there have been a number of mass shootings in america, but these are not classed as acts of terrorism in the same way as jihadi terrorist attacks. oft en when a white extrem- ist opens fi re on schoolchildren, work colleagues, cinemagoers, shoppers, or those against whom he holds a grudge, the debate turns to gun control. th e total number of individuals killed due to gun crimes in america far outweighs the numbers of those killed through acts of terrorism. th at is not to say terror- ism is not a threat, but it shows the distortion of the terrorism debates, which inevitably revolve around race, much as arguments about national security did during the second world war. president donald trump, to take the highest pro- fi le example, made immigration and terrorism the foundation of his presidential campaign. aft er the orlando massacre, trump said, ‘th e bottom line is that the only reason the killer was in america in the fi rst place was because we allowed his family to come here’, and that ‘with the terrorists, you have to take out their families. when you get these terrorists, you have to take out their families’. such comments are redolent of the campaign waged against the families of japanese immigrants during the second world war. trump supporters have even gone so far as to link present- day america with japanese american internment by inap- propriately claiming that second world war internment forms a legal precedent for the creation of a muslim registry. th e need for a true understanding of the history of japanese american internment has never been greater. _pi- .indd _pi- .indd / / : : pm / / : : pm journal of transnational american studies . ( ) internment during the second world war trump’s campaign slogan is ‘make america great again’  – the implication being that the alleged ‘weakness’ of america is due to the number of legal and illegal migrants resident, and not any other social or economic issues. trump’s website proclaims the need for immigration ‘reform’, the main plank of his pol- icy being the insistence that mexico pay to build a wall to strengthen american borders. according to trump, ‘the mexican government has taken the united states to the cleaners. th ey are responsible for this problem, and they must help pay to clean it up’. trump has labelled mexicans as ‘dirty’, ‘criminals’, and ‘rap- ists’, racial slurs that his supporters are quick to endorse, in the same way that the terms ‘japs’ and ‘yellow peril’ were readily used by americans in the nine- teenth and early twentieth centuries. th ere have been hundreds of thousands of deportations of illegal immigrants from american soil during the twentieth century, but as michael chertoff , the former secretary of homeland security under president george w.  bush, said regarding trump’s ambitious deporta- tion plans: ‘i can’t even begin to picture how we would deport  million people in a few years where we don’t have a police state, where the police can’t break down your door at will and take you away without a warrant.’ once again, this harks back to the treatment of jews in europe during the s and s, and the treatment of enemy aliens during the second world war. th ere is a diff er- ence between illegal and legal immigration, but the problem of giving power for blanket arrests is that this power can so easily be abused. during the second world war, german, austrian, and italian enemy aliens were considered on a case- by- case basis, while the wholesale internment of all japanese along with their families, who were mostly american citizens, was a blatant contradiction of constitutional privilege. th e concept of internment is not controversial in the sense of being a recognized solution to dealing with enemy aliens in a time of war, but when that becomes an excuse to lock away american children, it shows how power can be abused. th is is a period of isolationism, where both britain and america are call- ing for tougher border control. right- wing politicians in both nations believe that the only way to protect a country is to keep out foreigners. th ere are many diff erent issues involved in the immigration debate, such as illegal versus legal immigration; however, there is very little distinction made between these cat- egories when talking about immigration, leaving all foreigners victim to nega- tive connotations. not since the s and s has there been such hatred directed at foreigners living in britain, with calls for foreigners and non- whites to ‘go home’. in america, there have been various times during the twentieth century when immigrant or refugee groups have been targeted by racists, and _pi- .indd _pi- .indd / / : : pm / / : : pm journal of transnational american studies . ( ) introduction the civil rights movement and the black lives matter movement demonstrate how unequal american society continues to be in the present day. th e fact that individuals are still targeted and stereotyped as a threat to be feared because of the colour of their skin shows how little progress has been made in the past cen- tury. th e issues of racial inequality and the inherent fear of the ‘other’ are just as prevalent in modern- day society as they were in the early twentieth century. th e first world war was a confl ict between nation- states, whereas the second world war was a confl ict based more on ideology than nationality. th e lack of greater understanding of this issue caused the detention of tens of thousands of individ- uals who would have gladly fought for the allied powers from the beginning of the confl ict. ultimately, as shown in chapter  , many internees in both countries were admitted or draft ed into the armed forces, and the heroic eff orts of these former internees is impressive. as the chapter also discusses, many of the former internees have contributed incredibly positively to their adoptive nations post- war, or in the case of those of japanese ancestry, they have gone on to achieve greatness in spite of their treatment by their country of birth. th ere is much to be learned from the actions and reactions of the internees to their incarceration, and the sacrifi ces they and their families have made cannot be overlooked. th is monograph is the fi rst transatlantic comparison of second world war internment. greg robinson has written an excellent comparative history of north american internment, and roger daniels has also considered the treat- ment of enemy aliens in both the united states and canada. th is work aims to build on their work, among others, to further demonstrate how allied countries treated enemy aliens. th e united states has a written constitution and bill of rights, whereas great britain governs by an unwritten code, which makes the comparison of internment in the two nations signifi cant from both a legal and social standpoint. th e benefi ts of comparative history are immense. as marc bloch believed, ‘history cannot be intelligible unless it can “ succeed in estab- lishing explanatory relationships between phenomena ” ’. comparative history is ‘a way to determine what needs to be known, and social analysis not at least implicitly comparative is hard to imagine. th ere is really no other way to identify historical eras or recognize historical change’. it is also a means of ‘isolating the critical factors or independent variables that account for national history’. th is book is written primarily from a social and cultural standpoint, and the experiences and memories of the internees themselves form a key part of the internment discussion. th ere are as many diff erent experiences of internment as there were internees, but by telling the internees’ stories readers will hopefully understand the human sacrifi ces behind the history. _pi- .indd _pi- .indd / / : : pm / / : : pm journal of transnational american studies . ( ) notes introduction . heather stewart and rowena mason, ‘nigel farage’s anti- migrant poster reported to police’, th e guardian , june . available online:  http:// www.theguardian.com/ politics/ / jun/ / nigel- farage- defends- ukip- breaking- point- poster- queue- of- migrants . ‘eu referendum: immigration target “ impossible ” in eu, vote leave says’, bbc news , june . available online:  http:// www.bbc.co.uk/ news/ uk- politics- eu- referendum- . patrick sawer, laura hughes, robert mendick, and luke heighton, ‘jo cox’s sister calls her “ perfect ” and “ utterly amazing ” as accused murderer tells court his name is “ death to traitors, freedom for britain ” ’, th e telegraph , june . available online http:// www.telegraph.co.uk/ news/ / / / jo- cox- mp- shot- thomas- mair- arrives- at- court- following- murder- cha/ . for examples, see harriet sherwood, vikram dodd, nadia khomami, and steven morris, ‘cameron condemns post- brexit xenophobic and racist abuse’, th e guardian , june . available online:  https:// www.theguardian.com/ uk- news/ / jun/ / sadiq- khan- muslim- council- britain- warning- of- post- brexit- racism ; and jamie bullen, ‘brexit: facebook page highlights racism aft er eu referendum vote triggers spike in hate crimes’, evening standard , june . available online:  http:// www.standard.co.uk/ news/ politics/ brexit- facebook- page- highlights- racism- aft er- eu- referendum- vote- triggers- spike- in- hate- crimes- a .html . peter yeung, ‘eu referendum: reports of hate crime increase % following brexit vote’, th e independent , june . available online:  http:// www. independent.co.uk/ news/ uk/ home- news/ brexit- hate- crime- racism- reports- eu- referendum- latest- a .html . rajeev syal, ‘mp jo cox wrote passionate defence of immigration days before her death’, th e guardian , june . available online:  https:// www.theguardian.com/ uk- news/ / jun/ / jo- cox- passionate- defence- immigration- death- article- eu . for a list of attacks that have taken place since / , see nadia khomami, ‘terrorist attacks by violent jihadis in the us since / ’, th e guardian , december . available online:  https:// www.theguardian.com/ us- news/ / dec/ / terrorist- attacks- by- islamists- in- the- us- since- _pi- .indd _pi- .indd / / : : pm / / : : pm journal of transnational american studies . ( ) notes . see oliver laughland and ryan felton, ‘ “ it’s all just poison now ” : flint reels as families struggle through water crisis’, th e guardian , january . available online:  https:// www.theguardian.com/ us- news/ / jan/ / fl int- michigan- water- crisis- lead- poisoning- families- children . see ‘gun violence archive’. available online:  http:// www.gunviolencearchive.org/ ; ‘guns in the us: th e statistics behind the violence’, bbc news , january . available online:  http:// www.bbc.co.uk/ news/ world- us- canada- . ‘donald j. trump addresses terrorism, immigration, and national security’, june . available online:  https:// www.donaldjtrump.com/ press- releases/ donald- j.- trump- addresses- terrorism- immigration- and- national- security ; ‘donald trump on the issues’, th e politics and elections portal . available online:  http:// . presidential- candidates.org/ trump/ ?on=terrorism . rachel pistol, ‘why shinzo abe’s pearl harbor visit comes as th reat of internment returns’, newsweek , december . available online:  http:// europe.newsweek.com/ why- shinzo- abes- pearl- harbor- visit- comes- threat- internment- returns- ; rachel pistol, ‘ years aft er pearl harbor, the th reat of internment returns’, th e huffi ngton post , january . available online:  http:// www.huffi ngtonpost.co.uk/ rachel- pistol/ - years- aft er- pearl- harb_ b_ .html . ‘immigration reform th at will make america great again’, available online:  https:// www.donaldjtrump.com/ positions/ immigration- reform . julia preston, alan rappeport, and matt richtel, ‘what would it take for donald trump to deport million and build a wall?’, th e new york times , may . available online:  http:// www.nytimes.com/ / / / us/ politics/ donald- trump- immigration.html?_ r= . greg robinson , a tragedy of democracy: japanese confi nement in north america ( new york :  columbia university press , ) ; roger daniels , concentration camps, north america: japanese in the united states and canada during world war ii ( malabar, fl :  krieger ,  ) . . william h. sewell jr., ‘ marc bloch and the logic of comparative history ’, history and th eory ( ),  . . raymond grew , ‘ on reading six books in search of another ’, comparative studies in society and history ( ),  . . george m. frederickson , ‘ from exceptionalism to variability: recent developments in cross- national comparative history ’, journal of american history ( ),  . . see a. w. b. simpson , in the highest degree odious: detention without trial in wartime britain ( oxford :  clarendon press , ) ; aaron l. goldman , ‘ defence regulation b: emergency internment of aliens and political dissenters in great britain during world war ii ’, th e journal of british studies , no. ( ), – . _pi- .indd _pi- .indd / / : : pm / / : : pm journal of transnational american studies . ( ) wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, 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of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ s jxx .. pandora’s box are your children having screen time or green time? the widespread availability of screen-basedtechnology has increasingly engaged young people, to the extent that screen-based activity has significantly overtaken green time, that is, interaction with nature. it is highly likely that this may have adverse effects on children’s well- being and mental health. the covid pandemic and the associated lockdown have made matters worse. the authors of a systematic scoping review col- lated evidence from databases (pubmed, psycinfo, scopus, embase) and found suitable quantita- tive studies on the subject. they aimed to assess associations among screen time, green time and psychological outcomes, which included mental health, cognitive function and academic achieve- ment in children < years of age, school children ( – years), early adolescents ( – years) and later adolescents ( – years). they comment on the limitations of the studies due to hetero- geneity and the fact that they were mostly cross- sectional, and noted other factors. the general finding, as one would expect, was that high levels of screen time were associated with unfavourable psychological outcomes. they also considered that children from lower socio- economic backgrounds may be disproportion- ately affected by high screen time and low green time, and noted that future research needs to be longitudinal and able to distinguish between passive and interactive screen activities, as well as incidental and purposive exposure to nature. they did think, however, that there, is at least preliminary evidence that green time can buffer consequences of high screen time, and concluded that nature may be an un- der-utilised public health resource for the psychological well-being of the young, in an increasingly high-tech world. oswald tk, rumbold ar, kedzior sge, moore vm. psychological impacts of “screen time” and “green time” for children and adolescents: a systematic scoping review. plos one ; ( ): e . is bilingualism good for children? a substantial number of families around theworld are of mixed ethnicity and may speak two different languages. this can be the source of a dilemma for parents wondering whether they should choose one language for their chil- dren, in the hope they may be interested in learn- ing the other one later on, or encourage them to learn both languages from the start. will learning two languages confuse their children or affect their ability to speak any language, or even cause them to speak in a mixture of languages in an esperanto fashion? well, for those of you facing such worries, a recent study will reassure you that learning two languages is not bad for your child. it is known that in adults bilingualism does affect brain structure, with experience-dependent grey and white matter changes in those brain structures that are involved in language learning, processing and control. in a cross-sectional study comparing monolingual and bilingual young- sters, the researchers examined the developmen- tal patterns of grey matter (thickness, volume and surface area) and white matter (fractional anisotropy and mean diffusivity) structures, across cortical and subcortical brain structures and tracts. they found that compared with monolin- gual youngsters, bilinguals had more grey matter (that is, less developmental loss) starting during late childhood and adolescence in the frontal and parietal regions of the brain, and higher white matter integrity (that is, a greater develop- mental increase) starting in mid-late adolescence, specifically in the striatal-inferior frontal fibres. these findings indicate that the bilingual brain does indeed differ from the monolingual brain, and that this difference begins to be apparent even during development. so, whether your child is bilingual in childhood or adulthood, he or she will still have a different brain from mono- linguals, and this is not a bad thing. they are essentially more ‘brainy’ as far as language func- tion is concerned! pliatsikas c, meteyard l, veríssimo j, vincent deluca, shattuck k, ullman mt. the effect of bilingualism on brain development from early childhood to young adulthood. brain struct funct ; : – . whether you are emotional or cool is all down to your brain if you find yourself bursting in tears whenwatching a sad film, you are considered a per- son with high emotional (affective) empathy, whereas if you keep cool but remain empathetic, you are classed as high in cognitive empathy. a meta-analysis of functional magnetic res- onance imaging (mri) studies showed that affective empathy is associated with increased activity in the insula, whereas cognitive empathy is associated with activity in the mid-cingulate cortex and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. however, it is not clear whether brain morph- ology actually determines the disposition to affective or cognitive empathy. in order to assess this, the researchers recruited individuals, who were asked to complete a questionnaire on cognitive and affective empathy (qcae); all par- ticipants underwent an mri study in which high-resolution three-dimensional t weighted structural scans were acquired. those with high scores on affective empathy, as per the qcae, had greater grey matter density in the insular cortex, and those with high cogni- tive empathy scores had greater grey matter dens- ity in the mid-cingulate cortex and dorsomedial prefrontal cortex. given our brains’ capacity for neuroplasticity, can people be trained to be doi: . /bji. . © the author(s) . published by cambridge university press on behalf of the royal college of psychiatrists.. this is an open access article, distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/ licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. bjpsych international volume number november downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog?doi= . /bji. . &domain=pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core more empathetic? further studies planned by the authors may answer this question. eres r, decety j, louis wr, molenberghs p ( ) individual differences in local gray matter density are associated with differences in affective and cognitive empathy. neuroimage ; : – . is doing good, good for you? being kind or charitable (prosocial) is ahuman quality that can help others in society at times of need; it has indeed been invaluable during the covid pandemic and the resulting lockdown and other restrictions. but is it good for you? the evidence suggests that, yes, it is good for one’s well-being and associated with bet- ter mental and physical health; however, it is not known how strong the relationship is between doing good and feeling good and what influences this. in a recent meta-analysis, the authors examine the strength of the link between prosociality and well-being, and also how theoretical, demo- graphic and methodological variables may mod- erate this link. analysing data from studies with a total of participants, they found a modest but meaningful effect size between pro- sociality and well-being. examining the data in more detail, they noted that there was a stronger link between kindness and ‘eudaimonic’ well- being (focusing on self-actualisation) compared with ‘hedonic’ well-being (feeling happy). they also observed that informal helping of others, such as random or spontaneous acts of kindness, is more likely to be associated with well-being than formal help such as organised volunteering for a charity. hui bph, ng jck, berzaghi e, cunningham-amos la, kogan a. rewards of kindness? a meta-analysis of the link between prosociality and well-being. psychol bull . available from: https://doi.org/ . /bul . mental health and suicide prevention – are we making progress? every year on september, the day desig-nated by the world health organization (who) as world suicide day, we are reminded that this major cause of death remains a global challenge. close to people die by suicide every year. every °s, someone, somewhere in the world, takes his or her own life, and for each one of these suicides, there are more than suicide attempts. in , the who launched its ambitious -year mental health action plan, which was adopted by the th world health assembly. this was described by the who director general, dr margaret chan, as a landmark achievement. mental health, the cinderella of medicine, was finally getting to go to the ball, and the action plan was received with hope and enthusiasm across the world. it made great promises, includ- ing the reduction of suicide globally by % by the year (global target . of the mental health action plan). have this and the other targets of the action plan been reached? time will tell, when the evalu- ation of this programme, hopefully starting next year, is published. however, so much has hap- pened in the past few years that may have made these ambitious targets even less likely to be achieved. conflicts in various parts of the world, increasing number of refugees and people dis- placed within and outside their countries, oppres- sion of ethnic and religious minorities, and major ecological disasters have made the task even more difficult. the covid pandemic is the final straw. the very existence of the who is threatened, particularly since the pandemic. the us, which had been the major financial contributor to the who, has withdrawn its support. it is a paradox that despite enormous scientific and technological progress, human behaviour seems to have taken a turn backwards, close to medieval ways of think- ing in that power is valued more than social con- science and human rights. a new world order seems to be emerging, and it won’t be in the inter- ests of mental health or humanity in general. world health organization. mental health action plan – . who, . available from: https://www.who.int/mental_health/ publications/action_plan/en/. what might happen after the covid pandemic? it is being recognised that there may be manychanges in the way we go about our personal and work lives post-covid, but could there be more dramatic changes and events? epidemics don’t just have health implications; they have the potential to bring about major sociopolitical changes. this issue is examined by two italian experts using a historical analysis. the main con- clusions are that although during the epidemic there is relative peace, dissatisfaction is growing, and this may finally explode after the epidemic. the covid- pandemic has overshadowed major protests such as ‘black lives matter’, the ‘gilets jaunes’, environmental activism and many others. a freedom house annual report states that of the protest movements that were active worldwide in december , only two or three remain active. yet, a lot of discontent is brewing, with ongoing serious ill-health and substantial numbers of deaths, the imposed ‘lock- downs’ and distancing restrictions with their asso- ciated psychological and social consequences and economic hardship; at the same time, an attitude of denial is shown by followers of the ‘virus con- spiracy’ theory promoted by some, including powerful politicians. the authors quote past situations of epidemics or pandemics that led to major sociopolitical unrest and argue that these can provide reliable information on similar possible effects of the current pandemic. a good example, going far back to the th century, is the uprising in england, france and italy that followed the black death ( – ). the authors identified bjpsych international volume number november downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://doi.org/ . /bul https://doi.org/ . /bul https://doi.org/ . /bul https://www.who.int/mental_health/publications/action_plan/en/ https://www.who.int/mental_health/publications/action_plan/en/ https://www.who.int/mental_health/publications/action_plan/en/ https://www.cambridge.org/core the most significant epidemics over the period between the black death and the spanish flu ( – ) and found that in all but four cases, revolts that took place during the period of the epidemic were mainly connected to the dis- ease. any pre-epidemic grievances were ‘crowded out’. however, they point out that the epidemic period may be actually acting as a ‘social incuba- tor’ for more serious disorders and, based on his- torical evidence, they claim that the epidemics display a ‘potential disarranging effect on civil society’. this, they note, occurs along three dimensions: (a) the policy measures tend to con- flict with people’s interests and facilitate attrition between society and institutions; (b) the differen- tial effects of the epidemic on society in terms of mortality and economic status exacerbates inequality; and (c) there may be irrational narra- tives on the causes and the spread of the disease, which may lead to social and racial discrimination and xenophobia. these phenomena may be mod- erated or exacerbated by the degree of social cohesion and political stability, the duration and extent of morbidity and mortality, and how the socioeconomic costs are distributed in the society. in their attempt to check the potential of social incubation during an epidemic leading to post- epidemic unrest, the authors examined five chol- era epidemics in different parts of the world. computing the episodes of revolt in the years before and the years after an epidemic, they identified revolts before and almost twice as many ( revolts) after an epidemic. another issue they considered important is the post-epidemic repercussions of the necessary restrictions of freedom during an epidemic. these may be exploited by governments to reinforce their power, and there may be dramatic divisions along ethnic or political and economic lines, with the likelihood of repression increasing. those in power can justify interventions to stop protest gatherings with the possibility of conta- gion. protesting per se is less likely to occur owing to personal fear of contagion and greater tolerance of personal privacy with the need for tracking and tracing. all of these weaken any pro- tests and opposition, and serve to consolidate power and the status quo. censolo r, morelli m. covid- and the potential consequences for social instability. peace econ peace sci public policy . available from: https://doi.org/ . /peps- - . bjpsych international volume number november downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://doi.org/ . /peps- - https://doi.org/ . /peps- - https://www.cambridge.org/core 	outline placeholder 	outline placeholder 	are your children having screen time or green time? 	is bilingualism good for children? 	whether you are emotional or cool is all down to your brain 	is doing good, good for you? 	mental health and suicide prevention -- are we making progress? 	what might happen after the covid pandemic? wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ v. , n. – issn - revista sobre acesso À justiÇa e direitos nas amÉricas abya yala e d it o ri a l v. , n. – issn - revista sobre acesso À justiÇa e direitos nas amÉricas abya yala e d it o ri a l este quarto número de abya- yala, o primeiro do ano de , confirma seu compromisso com o pensamento crítico latino-americano e apresenta, em seu conteúdo, um rico conjunto de reflexões sobre os processos de resistência nas américas face o avanço do neoliberalismo. confirmando sua estrutura interna, inaugurada quando da publicação de seu primeiro número, abya-yala apresenta às leitoras e leitores cinco seções: a primeira delas é dedicada a homenagear pensadoras e pensadores latino-americanos cuja produção seja significativa tanto sob o ponto de vista teórico, como sob o ponto de vista da reflexão crítica e engajada; a segunda seção veicula dossiê temático organizado por pesquisadoras e pesquisadores de referência no campo das ciências sociais nas américas, e qualificado pelo sistema de dupla avaliação cega; a terceira dá vazão aos trabalhos recebidos pelo fluxo contínuo de submissão de artigos, igualmente submetido a rigorosa dupla avaliação cega; a quarta seção divulga obras de referência através da publicação de resenhas críticas; a quinta e última seção consiste na transcrição de entrevistas realizadas com pensadoras e pensadores latino-americanos. nesta edição, a homenagem é feita ao etnólogo darcy ribeiro, grande pensador brasileiro que dedicou sua vida a refletir-para-transformar não só o brasil como, também, a américa latina. sua trajetória, formação e atuação são apresentados no texto de autoria de talita rampin, professora da universidade federal de goiás. seu percurso teórico é destacado de forma a caracterizá-lo como expressão do pensamento latinoamericano que, como tal, parte das especificidades da região para, então, construir estratégias para superação das situações concretas de desigualdades, violências e opressões. essa mesma preocupação e engajamento para superação de situações concretas de violações permeia o dossiê temático organizado por victoria chenaut, annapurna devi pandey e laura r. valladares. as organizadoras assinam o texto de abertura do dossiê, intitulado “procesos de resistencia, derechos colectivos y despojo de los bienes comunes en el neoliberalismo”, no qual problematizam o papel desempenhado pela academia, pelo ativismo social e jurídico, destacando-os como estratégias que podem contribuir para a construção de alternativas à discriminação, à radicalização e à violência que são v. , n. – issn - revista sobre acesso À justiÇa e direitos nas amÉricas abya yala e d it o ri a l continuamente praticadas contra aquelas e aqueles que resistem ao avanço do neoliberalismo, nas mais diversas partes do mundo. nesse sentido, destacam os processos de resistência que tem sido protagonizado por mobilizações inter setoriais que envolvem movimentos sociais, a sociedade civil organizada, a comunidade acadêmica, dentre outros atores implicados com a defesa de direitos e justiças. maria rocio bedoya bedoya, da universidade de antioquia, em “los impactos de las multinacionales mineras, el papel del estado colombiano y los procesos de resistencia en marmato”, fornece a estrutura analítica necessária para que possamos compreender a dinâmica do sistema capitalista em sua fase atual, financeira. a partir do estudo dos processos de resistência no município de marmato, na colômbia, a autora configura a estratégia de atuação de empresas multinacionais na américa latina frente a um modelo de desenvolvimento econômico – que é, também, político, social e cultural – que viabiliza o avanço de projetos extrativistas minero-energéticos devastadores sob o ponto de vista ambiental, territorial, social, político e econômico. fica evidenciada, em sua análise, que a incidência das multinacionais tem reconfigurado as estruturas e relações locais, modificando a atuação do estado de modo a reorientar sua ação para a viabilização de empreendimentos que tem, como fundo, a exploração dos recursos naturais em regiões periféricas. e é desde a periferia do sistema mundial, para além da espacialidade geossocial da américa latina, que binay kumar pattnaik e sanghamitra patra dão continuidade às reflexões iniciadas por bedoya bedoya. localizando seu olhar desde e para a Índia, os autores de “intercine between the indian state and the adivasis (indigenous people) under neo- liberalism: a case of lanjigarh resistance movement”, analisam outro processo de resistência, o movimento anti vedanta em lanjigarh, no distrito de kalahandi, no interior do estado indiano de odisha. o caso retratado envolveu uma situação em que famílias adivasis foram desabrigadas e seu território devastado pelo avanço das estruturas neoliberais materializadas em projetos de modernização. nele, problematiza a imposição de um modelo de desenvolvimento e os seus reflexos para a população local, enfatizando as formas de resistência que foram adotadas pelas famílias e a v. , n. – issn - revista sobre acesso À justiÇa e direitos nas amÉricas abya yala e d it o ri a l complexa relação que é estabelecida entre estado, sociedade civil e população local. faye v. harrison, por sua vez, em “from standing rock to flint and beyond:resisting neoliberal assaults on indigenous, maroon, and other sites of racially subjected community sustainability in the americas”, analisa outra situação de resistência ocorrida em reação ao avanço neoliberal em busca de recursos, desta vez, hídricos. a partir dos processos de mobilização realizados pela tribo standing rock sioux, na dakota do norte, estados unidos da américa, em coalizão formada com ativistas de outras nações indígenas, incluindo representantes da bacia amazônica, de movimentos não indígenas e de organizações políticas como o partido verde e o black lives matter, as situações de violações dos direitos humanos experimentadas alcançaram projeção nacional e ganharam destaque no debate político nos eua, assim como, a reflexão sobre as reivindicações a direitos coletivos que historicamente tem sido empreendidas pelos povos e movimentos afrodescendentes e indígenas, para além dos direitos à terra, ao desenvolvimento e aos recursos culturais. apesar das diferenças evidentes que emergem da localização geográfica desses dois casos analisados, persistem elementos em ambos que permitem identificarmos um mesmo padrão se repetindo na forma com a qual o capitalismo modula os padrões de desenvolvimento em nível mundial e, com eles, também os padrões de violações que são sistematicamente perpetradas contra os povos e os ambientes geossociais situados em regiões estratégicas, principalmente quando o são sob o ponto de vista dos recursos naturais. essa constatação nos leva a um imperativo que talvez represente um dos maiores desafios colocados para as gerações atuais: identificar esses padrões para que possamos construir alternativas viáveis para superá-los. outro desafio, como bem aponta anahy gajardo em “between support and marginalization: the process of the diaguita’s re-emergence in the age of neoliberal multiculturalism (chile)”, é dimensionar os efeitos sociais e identitários do multiculturalismo neoliberal, em um contexto em que se mundializam não só as relações financeiras mas, também, se complexificam as relações jurídicas e de poder, inclusive na dimensão que v. , n. – issn - revista sobre acesso À justiÇa e direitos nas amÉricas abya yala e d it o ri a l envolve os estados, as empresas multinacionais e os atores não estatais implicados na realização de ações que, embora possam ser desempenhadas pelos estados nacionais, acabam sendo relegadas a um plano que passa a ser ocupada por este novo ator. É nesse sentido que o sexto artigo do dossiê, “the role of non state actors in ensuring indigenous right to education in an era of neo liberalism: an experiential account from india”, de navaneeta rath e annapurna pandey, é desenvolvido. por fim, encerrando o dossiê, “the privatization of environmental discourse: clean development and indigenous territoriality in western panama”, de osvaldo jordan. nele, o autor analisa o caso da hidroelétrica barro blanco, no panamá, problematizando os discursos e usos do desenvolvimento sustentável, provocando-nos a refletir sobre os paradoxos de sua contraposição aos direitos humanos e das populações locais. afinal, quanto valem os direitos? a mesma tônica de olhar crítico e apurado sobre a realidade neoliberal e as práticas que são assumidas neste contexto, permeia os artigos recebidos em fluxo contínuo pela revista. em “cortes superiores y políticas de acción afirmativa: aspectos de las decisiones en brasil y contribuciones para investigaciones futuras”, ana claudia farranha enfoca as práticas judiciais, em especial, aquelas que são praticadas por cortes superiores em sede de apreciação jurisdicional de políticas de ações afirmativas. edgar belmont cortés e eduardo aristóteles ramírez, por sua vez, em “reeducar y trabajar por resultados: polémicas alrededor de la profesionalización del trabajo del policía en querétaro, méxico”, privilegiam a análise das mudanças notadas nas polícias desde os processos de modificações na forma pela qual é gerida e administrada a justiça no contexto mexicano. a edição segue com duas resenhas críticas, sendo a primeira de meztli yoalli rodríguez aguilera, referente ao curta-metragem “semillas de guamúchil”, e a segunda referente à obra „de la “vieja” a la “nueva” justicia indígena. transformaciones y continuidades en las justicias indígenas de michoacán”, publicada por orlando aragón andrade no ano de e resenhado por erika bárcena arévalo. através dessas resenhas, a publicação cumpre outro importante papel no campo das ciências sociais: o da difusão de conhecimento já produzido, tornando acessíveis análises v. , n. – issn - revista sobre acesso À justiÇa e direitos nas amÉricas abya yala e d it o ri a l promovidas por pesquisadoras e pesquisadores sobre a produção de outros pensadores e pensadoras latino- americanos. o número é encerrado com uma intrigante entrevista com mercedes olivera, realizada por marisa ruiz trejo sobre os aportes da antropologia feminista em chiapas, méxico, e as ausências de referências às mulheres no campo da produção do conhecimento. engajada, provocativa e crítica: esta é a quarta edição que compartilhamentos com o público leitor. desejamos a todas e a todos uma excelente leitura! rebecca lemos igreja, maria teresa sierra camacho, fernando dantas e talita rampin editors’ introduction to the special issue on the sociology of digital technology editors’ introduction to the special issue on the sociology of digital technology sharon zukin & john torpey accepted: july # springer nature b.v. abstract an increasing number of sociologists today are examining the social production of digital technology. although younger researchers may be digital natives and write from “within the algorithm,” and older sociologists may begin by trying to define terms and concepts that have become commonplace in the tech “space,” all share the goal of unpacking the “black box” of computer software by analyzing how, where, and by whom it is developed and asking who benefits most by its use. some of the articles in this special issue of theory and society focus on questions of connectivity, privacy, and equity in light of classical sociology’s concern with the state, the self, knowledge, and power; others look critically at forms of inequality in the operations of specific platforms, algorithms, urban tech ecosystems, and coworking spaces. keywords algorithms . digital sociology . digital technology . economic sociology . social studies of science and technology . technology and power with this special issue on digital technology, theory and society enters a new and enormously important area of sociological inquiry, one that demands not only intellec- tual rigor but also social engagement and self-examination. although this is not an easy set of tasks, it speaks to both the journal’s origins and its mission. the harder part is grasping the subject’s complexity. writing about digital technology is like catching water in your hand: the form is fluid, the situation changes quickly, and, aside from certain basic elements, the existence of the thing that you are trying to explain reflects processes and interactions that go far beyond the immediate human actor. https://doi.org/ . /s - - - * sharon zukin szukin@gc.cuny.edu john torpey jtorpey@gc.cuny.edu phd program in sociology, cuny graduate center, fifth avenue, new york, ny , usa /published online: september theory and society ( ) : – / http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf mailto:szukin@gc.cuny.edu for some sociologists, especially if they are older, digital technology remains a black box of mathematical formulas (algorithms) and mysterious languages and logics (computer codes) that are somehow combined to create software (programs, apps) that allows us to do things as users, workers, and consumers. we navigate on google maps, share photos on facebook and instagram, stream films on netflix, and arrange for car rides on uber. the technology that has made these activities so convenient—by reducing the “friction” of direct human involvement—has become as much a part of daily life as our cell phones. corporate names like google and zoom have been transformed into generic nouns and verbs, becoming the kleenex and band-aids of today. yet, trying to capture digital technology in a single analytic frame challenges existing concepts, methods, and fields. the field called social studies of science and technology that emerged in the mid- twentieth century offers some direction. identified, in the united states, with the work of the sociologist robert k. merton and the philosopher of science thomas kuhn, the field began by exploring the social and cultural conditions in which new ideas emerge and become paradigms, displacing hegemonic knowledge regimes. other researchers have directed their attention to elite networks of the knowledge professions, legal frameworks of contracts and intellectual property rights, and the financial and political capacity of states and capital to support technological innovation. more recently, sociologists, anthropologists, and historians have looked at the social construction of technological systems through constantly changing interactions between human and nonhuman actors, including people, computers, organizations, and ideologies, which are not necessarily ranked in any order of importance. this approach differs from both classical sociological frameworks of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, with their focus on states, social classes, and bureaucracies, and a postmodern emphasis on more diffuse though no less institutionalized systems of power, knowledge, and control. since the early s, when the software engineer and venture capitalist marc andreessen ( ) famously declared that “software is eating the world,” technological innovation has become more centralized in the hands of larger and richer corporations while control of technology is increasingly contested by private citizens and states. who has the right to own the data generated by private users of digital platforms? what happens when software is used to monitor people’s movements, persuade them to buy things, or evaluate their potential to commit crimes? during the past few years, and with sudden drama during the covid- pandemic, we all became aware that the buildup of digital surveillance transcends local and even national scale. the technolo- gy, and the companies that make, deploy, and profit from it, are everywhere. the toolbox of digital technology contains more than mechanisms of control. digital tools shape strategies of representation. facial recognition software often misidentifies people of color. some software languages perpetuate racist and gender stereotypes. commercial algorithms used by hospitals to decide which patients should get more intensive care are biased against black patients (obermeyer et al. ). yet, the same digital platform can be used to represent different interests and mobilize diametrically opposed constituencies. twitter serves both #realdonald trump and #black lives matter. we confront, then, as both scholars and users, multiple forms, uses, and meanings of digital technology. any attempt to explain its social production must inevitably focus theory and society ( ) : – on a limited range of examples, conditions, and sites. for some writers in the socio- logical tradition, tech is a new kind of knowledge; for others, it is a new means of social control. although the promise of democratic access to the world wide web has been overshadowed by its uses for commercial profit, it is important to examine how and why resistance to big tech companies emerges from forces as disparate as the european union and the us senate; social movements in new york, toronto, and berlin; and, increasingly, the companies’ own employees, from engineering teams at google to amazon warehouse workers. with a deep appreciation of both the complexity of digital technology and our moral responsibility to struggle with its social effects, this issue of theory and society presents ten articles by sociologists who are devising new approaches to explore different aspects of digital technology on different research sites. loosely speaking, the articles fall into three broad categories: concepts, mechanisms, and places. the first three articles, on concepts, connect current issues such as connectivity and privacy to sociology’s classical core concerns, beginning with the self, the state, power, and inequality. the next four articles, on mechanisms, look closely at core products of digital technology–platforms and algorithms—to document their effects on different groups of users and workers, in different organizational milieux, and with different kinds of cultural biases. the final three articles, on places, focus on the city as simultaneously a platform, a market, and a regulator of digital technology, as well as a material space of tech work. although all three articles take new york city as their research site, they focus on different parts of the city’s tech ecosystem, showing that the socio-spatial structures of a digital economy are interwoven with state institutions, cultural forms, and changing expectations of workers and work. the authors of the articles in this issue represent diverse generations, have slightly different educational backgrounds, and use varied methods. some of them are digital natives and write from “within the algorithm”; others clearly stand outside it. they do not yet define a coherent field, but they do not fit neatly into existing disciplinary silos or subfields of sociology. nonetheless, individually and together, they create a nuanced though still tentative understanding of what digital technology does, who profits from it, and what that suggests about social change. although these authors cast a wide net, there are many more topics and regions of the world that should and must be considered if we are to understand the tech transformation of the planet. with these articles, theory and society issues both a provocation and an invitation. we open the journal’s doors to social research that engages with digital technology in a multitude of ways that change both theory and society. and we reaffirm the journal’s interest since its founding in sociological studies of economic organization, culture, and power. references andreessen, m. ( ). why software is eating the world. https:/ /www.wsj. com/articles/sb , august. accessed july . obermeyer, z., powers, b., vogeli, c., & mullainathan, s. ( ). dissecting racial bias in an algorithm used to manage the health of populations. https://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / , october. accessed june . theory and society ( ) : – https://www.wsj.com/articles/sb https://www.wsj.com/articles/sb https://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. sharon zukin is professor emerita of sociology at brooklyn college and the graduate center, city university of new york; her work connects urban culture and economic change. john torpey is presidential professor of sociology and history and director of the ralph bunche institute for international studies at the graduate center, city university of new york; he specializes in comparative historical sociology and research on the contemporary state, religion, and politics. theory and society ( ) : – 	editors’ introduction to the special issue on the sociology of digital technology 	abstract 	references https://johepal.com cite article as: unangst, l. ( ). international alumni engagement: operations, leadership, and policy at u.s research universities. journal of higher education policy and leadership studies, ( ), - . doi: https://dx.doi.org/ . /johepal. . . journal of higher education policy and leadership studies jhepals (e-issn: - ) international alumni engagement: operations, leadership, and policy at u.s research universities lisa unangst postdoctoral researcher, centre for higher education governance ghent (chegg), belgium email: unangstl@bc.edu https://orcid.org/ - - - article received article accepted published online / / / / / / https://johepal.com/ https://dx.doi.org/ . /johepal. . . mailto:unangstl@bc.edu https://orcid.org/ - - - unangst, l. e-issn: - volume: issue: doi: . /johepal. . . international alumni engagement: operations, leadership, and policy at u.s research universities journal of higher education policy and leadership studies (jhepals) e-issn: - volume: issue: pp. - doi: . /johepal. . . abstract maintaining and leveraging relationships with alumni has long been a function of higher education institutions worldwide, both for the purposes of ‘alumni engagement’ but also, and particularly obviously in the u.s. context, to achieve philanthropic goals (holmes, ). this article reviews the scope of international alumni affairs activity among research intensive, doctoral granting institutions in the united states as identified by the carnegie classification of institutions of higher education. divergent paradigms and emergent themes are identified, including: definitional inconsistencies across the landscape; inconsistent staff support; variable programmatic functions; lack of data on the diversity of alumni leadership; and the increasingly important roles of digital media and intercultural competence. findings are discussed in light of new forms of engagement necessitated by the covid- crisis and with a view towards implications for university leadership globally. lisa unangst * keywords: international alumni affairs; development; alumni; philanthropy; advancement introduction it has been widely agreed that as higher education institutions (heis) operate in increasingly resource constrained environments, engaging alumni and bolstering their role in resource development is ever more important to long term institutional success (glass & lee, ; mcdearmon, ; pedro, pereira, & carrasqueira, ; pottick, giordano, & chirico, ). as the university of roehampton (united kingdom) puts it, ‘our alumni are important to the continued success of the university and we value your involvement, your support and the real difference this will make to the experience of *corresponding author’s email: unangstl@bc.edu mailto:unangstl@bc.edu international alumni engagement journal of higher education policy and leadership studies (jhepals) our students today – and in the future’ ( ). it is not only as a source of financial support that alumni contribute to hei well-being. rather, alumni as permanent constituents of an institution are uniquely well positioned to support student learning, the development of student and peer career trajectories, public service, local community relations, and other hei functions. given sustained levels of international student enrolment worldwide for several decades (oecd, , p. ), and in light of unprecedented economic mobility facilitating the dispersion of university graduates, international alumni affairs represents an important and emerging subfield of higher education research (unangst, ). this paper offers a synthesis of survey responses and interview data from international alumni affairs administrators at united states (u.s.)-based, carnegie classified doctoral granting institutions with highest research activity (the carnegie classification of institutions of higher education, ). while there are somewhat varied definitions of what a contemporary research university does and ought to do in any given national setting, crow and dabars’ ( ) definition of ‘a complex and adaptive comprehensive knowledge enterprise committed to discovery, creativity, and innovation’ (p. ) is a useful frame. the pre-pandemic data gathered from this single national case is explored in a discussion of implications for all-online alumni relations at heis worldwide. six key themes are identified: definitional inconsistencies; inconsistent staff support; variable programmatic functions; a lack of data on diversity of alumni leadership; and the increasingly important roles of digital media and intercultural competence. the paper concludes with indications for future research. conceptual framework previous scholarship on international alumni affairs is quite limited. most work completed in this area has been conducted by consultants or by professional associations such as the council for advancement and support of higher education (case) and the european association for international education (eaie). this type of literature tends to focus on improving the operations of alumni affairs practitioners and the work of university development (or ‘advancement’ as it is frequently referred to in the u.s. context) writ large. it does not emphasize relevant implications for heis as individual units or the tertiary sector more broadly. it also rarely attends to issues of equity, access, or internationalization—although dobson ( ) is an exception with respect to a focus on matters of internationalization. the area of crossover between student outcomes and alumni engagement – mentorship – has received somewhat more attention in the literature (dollinger et al., ; unangst, ). further, a recent publication by haupt and castiello-gutiérrez ( ) considers education abroad (ea) – or student mobility – and larger hei goals, gesturing towards a pipeline for the development of international alumni. this paper employs the conceptual framework indicated by pedro, pereira, and carrasqueira ( ), in which universities are seen as the primary constructor of relationship-building activities with institutional alumni. in short, ‘heis develop relationship programs with the alumni, especially directing resources to motivate their involvement in the activities of the institution’ (pedro et al., , p. ). this framework does not presuppose particular institutional priorities, allowing for a range of strategic objectives. further, it allows for the collection of data from a variety of institutional actors – in this case, alumni affairs officers with some engagement in the international sphere, whether in a full-time or part-time capacity. unangst, l. e-issn: - volume: issue: doi: . /johepal. . . finally, this inquiry allows for a close look at how universities extend the identity paradigms increasingly common in the student sphere to the realm of alumni activity (o’mochain, ). for instance, while it is mandatory for u.s. universities to provide publicly available data on the diversity of their student bodies (u.s. department of education, ) – and indeed they frequently highlight this information in prominent virtual and print ‘fact books’ – similar demographics around short and long term alumni engagement are not made available in any cohesive way. in the interest of extending transparency of data to the alumni sphere, this paper probes who among the larger alumni population is engaged by the home university and why, acknowledging that ‘diversity’ is itself a construct that leans on essentialist identity markers. moving forward, identity as self-reported, fluid, and intersectional may be seen as a participatory alternative to the static ‘diversity’ currently captured by most alumni records. methodology as noted previously, it is american doctoral-granting universities with highest research activity that are in focus here. this grouping was selected given that these institutions tend to be among the most well-resourced and largest in terms of student enrolment in the u.s. landscape. these universities, then, might be seen as most likely to display robust international alumni affairs staff units. i acknowledge that staffing itself is not the sole indicator of international alumni affairs activity, which may also be volunteer-driven. the emphasis in the first phase of this project – given the relative paucity of data centring the experience and perspectives of international alumni affairs practitioners – was on constructing an online survey that would garner descriptive data and allow for in-depth, text entry responses. the survey included questions, among them ‘roughly how many living alumni of your institution do you classify as international, and how have you arrived at that number’ as well as ‘please describe the process of selecting new international alumni leaders’. survey participants were identified at target institutions based on the titles assigned to alumni affairs staff; individuals responsible for international alumni clubs (or networks, associations, or similar groups) were included. if an ‘international’ point person was not immediately obvious, the ‘regional’ alumni affairs staffer was included in outreach. thus the job titles of targeted survey respondents varied from ‘program manager for alumni clubs, awards and international programs’ to ‘vice president of international outreach and engagement’ and reflected senior, mid-, and junior level administrative positions. the online survey was launched on may , and invitations extended to selected alumni affairs administrators at the doctoral granting institutions identified by the carnegie classification as having highest research activity. again, as this project sought to provide a census of international alumni affairs activities, one staff member was contacted at each target university. the survey received valid responses, representing a response rate of approximately %, lower than the average online survey response rate of % observed by nulty ( ). in recognition of the fact that the survey response rate was lower than hoped, and cognizant that the summer months in the u.s. are generally a difficult period to generate responses among university affiliates, in a second phase of the project survey data was augmented with semi-structured interviews of selected survey respondents. interviews probed survey responses, addressed changes at the given institution over time, and allowed for participants to share their thoughts in more depth on strategic goals and obstacles. six interviews were conducted by telephone or an online meeting platform. these interviews lasted approximately minutes on average, and all interview participants as well as international alumni engagement journal of higher education policy and leadership studies (jhepals) survey respondents were guaranteed confidentiality throughout the process. institutional review board approval was obtained for both the survey and subsequent interviews. findings six emergent themes definitional inconsistencies inconsistent and overlapping definitions abound in the area of international alumni affairs. how universities define ‘international alumni’ and how self-identified characteristics of an alumnus/a are reflected in alumni records represent areas where existing definitions and rapidly evolving record- keeping systems may struggle to meet new, tangible realities of internationalized higher education. among survey respondents, a plurality identified international alumni as ‘an alumnus/a holding citizenship of any country, but residing outside of the u.s.’, while three university representatives provided other definitions, and six declined to answer. further, ‘alumni’ was differently construed: seven respondents indicate that their institution recognized ‘degree holders only’, while others included program participants, or those who had completed at least one semester or one year of study at the institution. these varying definitions seem to contribute to the wide range of international alumni reported by the institutions surveyed here. indeed, these figures varied between - % of the total alumni base, notable given that the universities surveyed are of similar type. further, interview data indicated that as institutions experience progressively higher international student enrolment, they reconsider their definitions. one participant reflected that “the definition of international alumni has been loosened over time at [our university]; it used to be ‘you’re from a country other than the u.s. and you’re going back to that country when you graduate’, but now it also includes expats … you didn’t used to hear much about international aside from the student recruitment side. but now we’ve had our [european] campus for almost years, we have other established outposts, and we’re also building [an asian] campus. now we wonder, if you’re an american on the campus in [asia], are you international? is it about where you are or where you’re from?” though not the primary focus of this study, survey respondents were asked to indicate how alumni could self-identify in terms of gender – this question related to an interest in considering diversity (or lack thereof) among international alumni leadership, to be discussed further along in this article. one of the responding administrators indicated that alumni could select from among the categories ‘male’, ‘female’, ‘non-binary’, ‘transgender’ or ‘prefer not to state’. however, seven universities indicated that male and female were the only two options provided in this category, and eight respondents did not reply to this question, with one noting that they were not certain of the options available. while it may be that the databases in use at responding institutions pose some technological challenges in updating the ‘gender’ field, failing to track the self-reported gender identity of international alumni – or all alumni, for that matter – limits the degree to which relevant outreach may be conducted or programming created, particularly in a context of expanding sensitivity to this identity indicator in the united states. as garvey has noted, “identity-based philanthropy in higher education is gaining prominence in both practice and scholarship, recognizing that social identities are strong influences on alumni engagement and giving” (garvey, , p. ). some interviewees also indicated difficulty in tracking, for example, shifting professional affiliations unangst, l. e-issn: - volume: issue: doi: . /johepal. . . over time, or linguistic preferences or skills. these are clear areas for improvement in the iteration of alumni platforms. inconsistent staff support staffing levels for international alumni affairs activities vary widely among the institutions included in this analysis. three survey respondents reported that no staff member at their institution was tasked with managing this area; another reported that ‘five different full-time staff have a slice of international engagement’, and still another that the given university assigned twenty positions in this area. whether these roles were centralized or spread across schools or units also varied; the potential complexity of these arrangements was exemplified by the response ‘the staff member in the central alumni relations office works with three full time employees in global development [alumni focused] and four full time employees in the center for international affairs’. there was also uncertainty about staffing in the future, and how this might impact programming; one interview participant imagined two paths forward for the institution, asking ‘do we work to engage a broad set of alumni first and see ourselves as driven by alumni relations, or instead is engagement driven by development officers, identifying lead donors who would also be lead volunteers, and then broaden to wider engagement model’? predictably, administrators also indicated an awareness of the limitations indicated by low or inconsistent staffing levels. one interview participant noted that “i’ve been advocating that it [international alumni engagement] needs to be its own full time position if we want to be strategic and move in a more robust manner, especially given that our enrolment continues to increase internationally and our ma and phd students are going out in the world as well.” another staffer referred to the historical lack of staffing as an explanation for current, limited activities in the alumni sphere, saying ‘we’ve only been in existence about two years, and are the new kids on the block while the schools have been doing this [engaging international alumni] for many years”’. lastly, one interview participant noted a certain level of staff innovation in response to fewer resources: they outlined that the administrator responsible for the university alumni travel program would frequently organize events for international alumni to come together with members of an alumni tour for social events in any number of locations worldwide. variable programmatic functions while a few ‘core’ functions of international alumni affairs practitioners were identified in the course of this analysis, the overall impression was of a wide menu of programmatic foci. this reflects not only distinct staffing levels and institutional contexts, but also the degree to which alumni club or shared interest group activity is centrally managed. for example, reporting institutions formalized alumni clubs, networks or chapters, though indeed the number of those clubs ranged from to per institution. further, there was substantial variation among this subset of institutions with respect to whether and how club leaders were selected, ranging from ‘any eager volunteer’ to formal elections, and including ‘we don’t have a process at this time’. as observed by one interview participant “engagement of alumni living internationally is very different than for those alumni living in the u.s. with factors like budgetary constraints, geographic distance and limited staff resources, international engagement thus far has been simply the annual gatherings of the self-developed groups and a few dinners and receptions when the international alumni engagement journal of higher education policy and leadership studies (jhepals) chancellor is traveling internationally. each culture is so unique that a general model applied to all won't work.” across institutions with and without recognized international alumni clubs, a majority of survey respondents indicated that the university provided a newsletter or other communications vehicle for international alumni groups. given that the primary resource an alumni office can provide is contact information of university graduates, taking this common role of information distributor makes a certain amount of sense. as gallo has written, ‘alumni–university interaction is based on two passive interactions: the institution to alumni base through communications, and, the individual reading and reacting to the communications materials’ (gallo, , p. ). other activities mentioned in the context of the survey included: social events (thirteen universities), networking activities (eight universities), student-related activities including either admissions interviewing or student send-offs for those newly admitted (nine universities), lectures (two universities), and an annual meeting or community service event(s) (one each). further, one senior-level alumni administrator shared during an interview that they personally engaged in career development activities, based largely on their close familiarity with the alumni population. they reported, ‘i might connect people around job opportunities, for example someone who’s looking for consulting opportunities in brussels with an alum who works in the industry there’. lacking data on diversity of alumni leadership and leadership development initiatives broadly, data on international alumni leader profiles are unavailable. i refer here not only to demographic information on leadership—age, ethnicity, sexual orientation, etc.—but also course of study, length of service, and other factors. for instance, are most alumni leaders remaining in their positions for five or more years? ten or more years? or is there succession planning in place that allows for a diversity of leadership perspectives? in addition, relevant data ought to be considered in conjunction with the student body profile of the home institutions. if, for instance, percent of the alma mater’s student base identify as women, but percent of international alumni affairs leaders do so, what does this tell us about international alumni dynamics? in this mode, survey participants were prompted to provide any relevant data on the diversity of international alumni leadership, but none of the respondents chose or were able to do so. as a result, interview sessions probed this topic, and gleaned interesting, region-specific insights regarding leadership and gender. three participants characterized ‘asia’ as having various, particularly hierarchical systems, one observing that instead of ‘worker bees’ taking on the role of president of the alumni club it tended to be ‘well-heeled individuals serving as chair of their volunteer board… they’ve given themselves those titles. the role comes with prestige, and leaders have business cards printed’. further, two university representatives asserted that alumni clubs in korea were not welcoming to women as leaders. one noted that ‘there have also been conflicts or friction: in our korean club, we had a fantastic alumna decline to be president, because she said “korea is a male dominated model”’. the increasingly important role of digital media utilizing digital media to communicate with and drive new, innovative forms of cooperation with institutional alumni is a fundamentally international practice (domanski & sedkowski, ; ribelles, ). the role of social media in promoting diverse participation in alumni activities has also been explored in the literature (makrez, ), and in the context of covid- is more relevant than ever. unangst, l. e-issn: - volume: issue: doi: . /johepal. . . in fact, the results of this interview series and survey also reflect deep commitment to – and concern with – technology and social media. a majority of survey respondents indicated that their institutions maintained websites for international alumni groups, and also that event registration platforms were operated on their behalf. two interview participants mentioned the relevance of the chinese social media platform we chat, a medium that they were trying to master as quickly as possible, for more effective engagement with alumni in china. one survey respondent noted a sense of urgency around continued connection with a ‘large number of non-traditional alumni who live internationally and want to be engaged with the alumni association and university’; this refers to alumni of the institution’s massive open online courses (moocs). these international alumni of moocs represent a potentially new type of university-alumni relationship based on engaging individuals who have likely never visited the home institution’s brick and mortar campus in person. finally, one administrator created physical signs in eight different languages to be held up as props during photos at graduation and reunion that indicated the alumnus/a in question was a ‘proud graduate’ of the home university – these photos were meant to be posted to social media and thereby engage both alumni and student populations, in the u.s. and internationally. a vital need for intercultural competence the intercultural competence (also described as intercultural sensibility or skills) of individual university stakeholders is associated with the internationalization of higher education, and has been evaluated with respect to faculty and staff proficiency (hunter, ; jones, ; leask, ). however, given the sparse literature on the practice of international alumni affairs, the intercultural skills of this specific practitioner group are under-researched. the need for improved intercultural skills were highlighted by several interview responses, and largely fell into two categories: fear of engagement in a particular world region, and conflation of the terms ‘multicultural’ and ‘international’. in the first category, we place the response of one administrator who, in describing the international engagement of her colleagues throughout university advancement operations, said ‘asia still scares people…. they’re afraid to go…. we have this huge cohort and we’re trying to wrap our heads around it… [we have] a lot of cultural learning to do’. there may be several factors at play here, including language barriers (real or perceived) as well as distinct business and cultural norms. in any case, the need for heis and very likely professional associations to support the ongoing development of intercultural skills among alumni affairs staff is in evidence. another administrator noted in their interview that at their hei, ‘we use both the terms “multicultural” and “international” and that was confusing when i first came here… what’s the difference?’ the administrator continued that in the context of international alumni affairs, “this philanthropy mindset is not beneficial. it’s the same as in the multicultural space… it reflects differently. i’m a part of a black sorority, and when i get a call [from my own alma mater] to donate, they’ll say “ooh what was that like”? it’s not my job to educate you about the experience, it’s your job to know it and do your research.” this latter point reflects earlier scholarship from holmes ( ), which pointed to experiences of exclusion among affinity group members. further, it is consonant with the indication that ‘alumni associations should adopt more segmentation and targeting in their approaches to alumni’ (koenig- lewis, asaad, palmer, & petersone, , p. ), acknowledging that marginalized communities may have differently experienced student life and very likely seen systemic oppressors including racism international alumni engagement journal of higher education policy and leadership studies (jhepals) play out on their given campus. these individuals may therefore seek to be engaged as an alumna/us with the affinity groups with which they most closely identify. as primary constructor of the hei- alumnus/a relationship, colleges and universities are called to examine and deconstruct divides between ‘diversity’ or ‘multicultural’ initiatives and ‘international’ initiatives that play out in the alumni affairs realm as elsewhere at heis (moon, ). discussion databases: the alumni affairs lifeline the role of international alumni record keeping – indeed a longstanding alumni relations challenge that is now in the domain of database products – is clearly a key issue for the international alumni relations community. the indication for new criteria to be included in alumni databases, as suggested by several of the participants in this study, echoes earlier research in this area, which had primarily focused on criteria relevant for fundraising activity (drezner, ; newman & petrosko, ). of particular interest, based on survey results related to alumni diversity and gender identity, is how self-described, fluid identities can be reflected in (near) real time by alumni database records, which might provide a basis for intersectional alumni programming. here, i refer to intersectionality as proposed by crenshaw ( ): as the ongoing, complex interactions and dialectics of gender, race, and class in particular, which offer a lens through which to view the experiences of, for example, women of color (as distinct from white women). further, there are ongoing challenges associated with translating personal networks established by senior administrators or faculty into effective database information and, perhaps more importantly, dynamic communities that can continue beyond an individual’s tenure at the institution. similarly, participants discussed the parallel structures of social media platforms such as facebook and linkedin, which may host vibrant international alumni groups and databases that reflect up-to-date personal information not present in an official university database. institutional leadership responses to the online survey as well as data collected from the semi-structured interviews reflect a concern regarding lack of engagement of university leadership with strategic planning in the area of international alumni engagement. this is notable given that the survey and interview series did include the perspectives of some senior level administrators, who seemed to look to the presidential or senior vice presidential level for guidance. one participant indicated, when responding to a query regarding future unit goals, that ‘that is not clear and perhaps that is why we haven't made much progress in this area yet. we are looking for direction and resources from our university leadership’. turnover at the senior leadership level was also discussed as being detrimental to the effective function of these institutional units: as observed by birnbaum, ‘social trust’ held by leadership is essential to organizational efficacy (birnbaum, ). another interview participant synthesized a lack of ‘clarity of purpose’ regarding international alumni affairs strategy, and expanded on this idea to note that international alumni affairs ‘is so pervasive and involves so many people… but there’s no single leader. the vice provost for international outreach doesn’t even know everything that’s going on, and there’s no way he could. we’re evolving as it evolves’. this seems to refer to the diffusion of ‘official’ alumni affairs support staff through the institution, as well as the tendency for staff and faculty in various units to maintain relationships with alumni of their respective department or office, but failing to formalise these unangst, l. e-issn: - volume: issue: doi: . /johepal. . . relationships from an institutional perspective. this begs the question: how can a centralized feedback loop for alumni affairs be normalized when alumni affairs itself is diffused? focus on china it was evident across several interviews that many research institutions were particularly focused on their presence in china. this is not surprising, given william kirby’s assertion earlier in the decade that ‘nearly every leading american university believes that it needs to have a “china strategy”’( ). staff members reported uncertainty regarding ‘new fundraising rules in place’ in that country, making it ‘harder to export funds from alumni to our university’, as well as sustained, close attention to parents as affinity group in china. in two cases, parents were the core audience of large scale china-based conferences partially sponsored by the university, with the presumption that they would continue to be involved in some capacity following the student’s graduation. indeed, these conferences had been initiated by the parents rather than the university, and the university was, at least in one case, struggling to catch up with relevant needs, including the use of the appropriate institutional logo on advertisements and collateral. there has been much commentary in recent years of the danger in u.s. higher education institutions – as well as those in australia, new zealand, the united kingdom and elsewhere – developing a financial over-dependence on a continued inflow of chinese students (“china’s college- aged population to decline through ,” ; ziguras & mcburnie, ). in contrast, it appears that despite several decades of substantial chinese student enrolment, the international alumni affairs operations at research institutions surveyed are still struggling to catch up with that growth. considerations for universities worldwide in situating a case study of stockholm university, ebert et al. ( ) observe that ‘alumni constitute an important, large, but often underused resource for universities in countries that do not have a long tradition of developing and maintaining alumni relations’ (ebert, axelsson, & harbor, , p. ). higher education institutions and systems in such settings may find useful insights in the reflections offered here by international alumni affairs staff in the u.s., at least in terms of categories of activity to consider in relation to this field of work—ranging from the structuring of staff support for alumni outreach, to ensuring the intercultural competency of those staff members, streamlining data collection and the leveraging of critical demographic information, and considering how alumni identity might be best reflected in relevant institutional initiatives. as drezner has written, ‘questions remain as to how identity might matter in alumni engagement with their alma mater’ (drezner, , p. ), and of course the nationally-specific ecosystems of privilege related to class, race/ethnicity, migrant status, gender, sexual orientation and other factors will play a critical role in determining any institutional response. ultimately, universities around the world are called upon to respond to a generalized decrease in public support for higher education in many, if not most, national contexts (johnson, ; klemenčič, ; oecd, , p. ); increased degrees of global competition in the higher education sector; new opportunities to leverage far-reaching international networks in order to enhance university efforts to teach, research, and serve stakeholders; and a general call to operate more strategically in a ‘globally networked’ society. leveraging international alumni is therefore something that may be of interest to universities in a wide range of national contexts, which means that mutual learning among universities in different countries, with respect to international alumni relations, may be quite valuable. international alumni engagement journal of higher education policy and leadership studies (jhepals) implications in the nascent, all-online environment covid- has, since winter , dramatically shifted alumni relations at the u.s. universities studied in . alumni associations have surveyed their constituents to ask what types of online events they might be interested in (at one religiously affiliated institution, probing: athletics, class/learning, current event topics, networking & career development, social, spirituality, service, or other). others have, in response to the urgent black lives matter movement, initiated discussions of various manifestations of systemic oppression. new mentorship programs and virtual, international public service activities have also been widely publicized. it seems clear that the plethora of activities in online alumni affairs offer opportunities for heis: detailed participation data that is not always available at in person events, and which can be synched with alumni databases. further, the number and type of activities may increase and become more varied with little to no additional cost using existing hei platforms for online activity. this expanded menu of offerings has the potential to better engage the full diversity of institutional alumni and their lived experiences. clear consideration must be paid to how community building can best be achieved in an online environment. breakout rooms and creative ‘icebreakers’ are some of the recommendations made, as well as invitations to explore existing on-campus resources through, for example, virtual art museum tours. long-term leadership development may pose more of a challenge, and creative thought needs to be given to how alumni leaders can be identified and scaffolded in the coming covid years. limitations as noted, a major limitation of this exploratory study is its relatively narrow scope. though universities were targeted, our survey garnered valid responses, and so survey findings cannot be seen as representative of the field of doctoral universities with highest research activity as a whole. rather, survey responses in combination with interview data are best seen as an indication for research trajectories moving forward. additionally, the elite grouping of universities reflected here does not represent international alumni affairs activity that is taking place at teaching colleges and open access institutions. indeed, many american community colleges enrol a high proportion of international students from varying world regions (campus internationalization leadership team (cilt) shoreline community college, ); while staffing of alumni affairs units may be limited in this context, other faculty, staff or alumni are taking on leadership roles in convening groups and managing communications. finally, this paper’s focus on the u.s. setting clearly constrains discussion of international alumni affairs operations and institutional aims in germany, canada, and other countries with strong activity in this area. how, for instance, do questions about data privacy in light of the european general data protection regulation translate into alumni records and engagement? what does ‘minimal data’ mean in that sphere? these and other regionally and nationally specific questions merit further inquiry. unangst, l. e-issn: - volume: issue: doi: . /johepal. . . future research in addition to the areas outlined previously, several subjects for future study are indicated by findings elucidated here. first, who are international alumni affairs administrators themselves? are they alumni of the institutions in question ( % of survey respondents confirmed their alumni status)? have they received training on intercultural skills and do they draw from that knowledge to share best practices with colleagues at their own university as well as across institutions? while advancement as a whole has quite a strong tradition of professional development in the u.s., scant international alumni-focused resources exist. a lack of training and associated information-sharing would explain in part the broad range of strategic objectives outlined by our study participants; when asked about institutional goals in the next decade, they focused variously on acquiring better contact information, putting more international alumni on boards of trustees, ‘making [international alumni] feel like connected stakeholders’, and expanding the number of formal alumni clubs in the top ten international markets. second, institutional case studies on international alumni leadership seem urgently called for. neither survey, interview, nor publicly available data make clear how international alumni leadership reflect the diversity of a home university’s student body or its equity or diversity statements. a diverse alumni leadership might support the creation of a heterogeneous range of programs serving alumni, students, and their institutions as a whole; however it is difficult to ascertain if and to what extent this is happening at present. third, the role of digital media and associated platforms represent a pressing area for inquiry. as many international alumni will find it impossible to return to the home campus with any regularity in the near and medium term, online interaction sponsored by the university (and contracted private providers) may offer, for example, career networking and mentorship opportunities for alumni (perhaps in conjunction with students). are these providers establishing measures for ‘successful engagement’ that universities are then adopting? are they collecting data on informal alumni interactions around affinity that might inform the work of student support staff? all of these points echo pedro et al.’s ( ) emphasis on university-driven alumni engagement, but pose questions for the institutions themselves to answer. in short, the findings presented here begin to answer the who, what, when, where, and how of international alumni affairs. who is conducting alumni engagement activity on the university’s behalf, and how are they prepared to do so, iterating as strategic objectives and demographic realities shift? who and where are the key partners – international alumni leaders – and what activity are they asked and able to foster? what university services offer -hour engagement, and do those online channels serve (for example) mooc, undergraduate, and graduate alumni equally well? conclusion this paper presents a collation of online survey and interview data collected in an effort to examine the current international alumni affairs landscape at u.s. universities with highest research activity. this study was meant to be exploratory, given the scarce literature on the topic. perhaps the main contribution of this effort is to highlight areas for future research, which include mechanisms for supporting diverse international alumni leadership; the structure of staff and faculty support for international alumni engagement; the role of digital media, databases, and other technologies; and the intercultural competence of university constituents engaged in this work. international alumni engagement journal of higher education policy and leadership studies (jhepals) however, several themes anticipated to emerge from this inquiry did not present themselves. one of these was the volatility of the current political climate, imbued with xenophobia and racism. in response to the trump travel ban ( ), which in its several forms has sought to prohibit entry to the u.s. by citizens of primarily muslim-majority countries, ‘many u.s. university presidents quickly issued official statements to position themselves not necessarily in direct opposition to the ban, but in public support of their international students, faculty, and staff’ (stein, , p. ). surely, international alumni work is impacted by these developments and other administration initiatives. however, respondents did not raise this issue. even still, this topic merits a future line of research. this paper’s findings indicate a spectrum of international alumni models across the american research universities surveyed. these dynamic and differentiated models seem very likely to impact international alumni ‘engagement’ or, in the language of pedro et al, the relationship programs connecting institutions with alumni (pedro et al., ). that same diversity of models seems to indicate that the ‘why’ of international alumni activity is answered in distinct ways on each campus. by extension, it seems possible that significant resources expended by some universities in the international alumni sphere may support the internationalization of the institution as a whole, as engaged alumni, per weerts and ronca ( ), participate in what may be considered mutually beneficial activities such as international student recruitment, hosting summer interns from the home university, and so forth (weerts & ronca, ). notably, i also highlight how siloed these institutions appear: survey and interview data collected does not reference the work of other universities or best practices in the field. additionally, many interviewees were openly enthusiastic to learn that this research was being undertaken and looked forward to learning more about what their peers are doing in this area. clark kerr, among others, has referred to alumni as one of the key constituencies of any modern university (kerr, ), and indeed in many cases they represent an increasingly international pool. given pre-covid projections for increased student mobility worldwide (bhandari & robles, ), and the current expansion of online learning opportunities that may well result in more ‘all online’ international alumni, close consideration of what engagement with this base looks like is urgently called for. references bhandari, r., & robles, c. 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( ). executive order protecting the nation from foreign terrorist entry into the united states. retrieved february , , from https://www.whitehouse.gov/presidential- actions/executive-order-protecting-nation-foreign-terrorist-entry-united-states/ unangst, l. e-issn: - volume: issue: doi: . /johepal. . . u.s. department of education. ( ). letter from bill evers, assistant secretary for planning, evaluation and policy development. retrieved december , , from https://www .ed.gov/print/policy/rschstat/guid/raceethnicity/letter.html unangst, l. ( ). international alumni affairs: an emerging trans-national public service landscape. journal of higher education policy and management, ( ), - . https://doi.org/ . / x. . unangst, l. ( ). international alumni affairs and student mentorship: surveying the u.s. public research university landscape. nafsa research symposium series, vol. iii. nafsa. university of roehampton. ( ). alumni. retrieved october , , from https://www.roehampton.ac.uk/alumni/ weerts, d. j., & ronca, j. m. ( ). characteristics of alumni donors who volunteer at their alma mater. research in higher education, ( ), – . https://doi.org/ . /s - - - ziguras, c., & mcburnie, g. ( ). governing cross-border higher education. internationalization in higher education series. routledge. dr. lisa unangst is a postdoctoral researcher at the centre for higher education governance ghent (chegg). her research interests include how displaced groups access and experience higher education; international alumni affairs; cross-national constructions of “diversity”; and quantitative textual analysis. she earned her ph.d. from boston college’s higher education program and has published in comparative education review, policy reviews in higher education, and the journal of higher education policy and management, among other outlets. a co-edited volume titled refugees and higher education: trans-national perspectives on access, equity, and internationalization has recently been published by brill-sense. lisa worked previously at cal state east bay, caltech, and harvard university. wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ diversity workshop bárbara bordalejo (she/her/hers) university of saskatchewan @textualscholar daniel paul o’donnell (he/his), university of lethbridge @danielpaulod doi (this version): . /zenodo. part diversity, inclusion, and bias questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn diversity   we talk about diversity when we are in the presence of a group of individuals of different race, ethnicity, gender identity, sexual orientation, socio-economic status, age, physical abilities, religious beliefs, political beliefs, or other ideologies. questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn   questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn the diversity paradox   …what you aim to bring to an end some do not recognize as existing… so much feminist and antiracist work is the work of trying to convince others that sexism and racism have not ended; that sexism and racism are fundamental to the injustices of late capitalism; that they matter. just to talk about sexism and racism here and now is to refuse displacement; it is to refuse to wrap your speech around postfeminism or postrace, which would require you to use the past tense (back then) or an elsewhere (over there). (ahmed, living a feminist life, - ) questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn the diversity paradox   ...institutions might name things or say yes to something in order not to bring some things into effect. we too as diversity workers might labor for something (a new policy, a new document), and these things can provide yet more techniques whereby institutions appear to do something without doing anything. this is difficult: our own efforts to transform institutions can be used by institutions as evidence that they have been transformed. (ahmed, living a feminist life, ) questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn the diversity paradox   ...diversity can be used by organizations as a form of public relations. ...over the period of a decade, most of the work of diversity workers was about writing documents. at various points, the equality challenge unit, which oversees equality in the higher education sector, measured or ranked these documents, as i have discussed, moments of measuring that can be used by institutions that did well as a sign they are doing well. (ahmed, living a feminist life, ) questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn the diversity paradox   dhsi statement on ethics and inclusion http://www.dhsi.org/events.php adho code of conduct http://adho.org/administration/conference-coordinating- program-committee/adho-conference-code-conduct eadh diversity and inclusivity http://eadh.org/about/diversity-and-inclusivity ach statement after the election https://ach.org/activities/advocacy/ach-statement-in-the -aftermath-of-the- -election/ csdh/schn inclusivity and diversity statement https://csdh-schn.org/inclusivity-and-diversity-statement / questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn http://www.dhsi.org/events.php http://adho.org/administration/conference-coordinating-program-committee/adho-conference-code-conduct http://adho.org/administration/conference-coordinating-program-committee/adho-conference-code-conduct http://eadh.org/about/diversity-and-inclusivity https://ach.org/activities/advocacy/ach-statement-in-the-aftermath-of-the- -election/ https://ach.org/activities/advocacy/ach-statement-in-the-aftermath-of-the- -election/ https://csdh-schn.org/inclusivity-and-diversity-statement/ https://csdh-schn.org/inclusivity-and-diversity-statement/ inclusion   in an inclusive environment, everyone feels welcomed and valued, not only for their abilities but for their unique qualities and perspectives as well. (diversity & inclusion, society of women engineers, iiib) questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn   also known as implicit social cognition, implicit bias refers to the attitudes or stereotypes that affect our understanding, actions, and decisions in an unconscious manner. these biases, which encompass both favorable and unfavorable assessments, are activated involuntarily and without an individual’s awareness or intentional control. residing deep in the subconscious, these biases are different from known biases that individuals may choose to conceal for the purposes of social and/or political correctness. rather, implicit biases are not accessible through introspection. (kirwan institute, “understanding implicit bias.”) implicit bias http://bit.ly/iitg-ib implicit bias questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn https://implicit.harvard.edu/implicit/selectatest.html in an earlier article, i used the concept of intersectionality to denote the various ways in which race and gender interact to shape the multiple dimensions of black women's employment experiences. my objective there was to illustrate that many of the experiences black women face are not subsumed within the traditional boundaries of race or gender discrimination as these boundaries are currently understood, and that the intersection of racism and sexism factors into black women's lives in ways that cannot be captured wholly by looking at the race or gender dimensions of those experiences separately. i build on those observations here by exploring the various ways in which race and gender intersect in shaping structural, political, and representational aspects of violence against women of colour. (crenshaw, “mapping the margins” ) intersectionality black women are burdened not only because they often have to take on responsibilities that are not traditionally feminine but, moreover, their assumption of these roles is sometimes interpreted within the black community as either black women’s failure to live up so such norms or as another manifestation of racism’s scourge upon the black community. this is one of the many aspects of intersectionality that cannot be understood through an analysis of patriarchy rooted in white experience. (crenshaw, “demarginalizing the intersection of race and sex,” - ) intersectionality kyriarchy is best theorized as a complex pyramidal system of intersecting multiplicative social structures of superordination and subordination, of ruling and oppression. kyriarchal relations of domination are built on elite male property rights as well as on the exploitation, dependency, inferiority, and obedience of wo/men. kyriarchy as a socio-cultural and religious system of domination is constituted by intersecting multiplicative structures of oppression. (schüssler fiorenza, wisdom ways ) kyriarchy questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn diversity asks, “who’s in the room?” equity responds: “who is trying to get in the room but can’t? whose presence in the room is under constant threat of erasure?” inclusion asks, “has everyone’s ideas been heard?” justice responds, “whose ideas won’t be taken as seriously because they aren’t in the majority?” diversity asks, “how many more of [pick any minoritized identity] group do we have this year than last?” equity responds, “what conditions have we created that maintain certain groups as the perpetual majority here?” inclusion asks, “is this environment safe for everyone to feel like they belong?” justice challenges, “whose safety is being sacrificed and minimized to allow others to be comfortable maintaining dehumanizing views?” diversity asks, “isn’t it separatist to provide funding for safe spaces and separate student centers?” equity answers, “what are people experiencing on campus that they don’t feel safe when isolated and separated from others like themselves?” inclusion asks, “wouldn’t it be a great program to have a panel debate black lives matter? we had a black lives matter activist here last semester, so this semester we should invite someone from the alt-right.” justice answers, “why would we allow the humanity and dignity of people or our students to be the subject of debate or the target of harassment and hate speech?” diversity celebrates increases in numbers that still reflect minoritized status on campus and incremental growth. equity celebrates reductions in harm, revisions to abusive systems and increases in supports for people’s life chances as reported by those who have been targeted. inclusion celebrates awards for initiatives and credits itself for having a diverse candidate pool. justice celebrates getting rid of practices and policies that were having disparate impacts on minoritized groups. (dafina-lazarus stewart, “the language of appeasement”) part privilege questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn i have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that i can count on cashing in each day, but about which i was "meant" to remain oblivious. white privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools , and blank checks. (peggy mcintosh, “white privilege: unpacking the invisible knapsack”) questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn privilege i have come to see white privilege as an invisible package of unearned assets that i can count on cashing in each day, but about which i was "meant" to remain oblivious. white privilege is like an invisible weightless knapsack of special provisions, maps, passports, codebooks, visas, clothes, tools , and blank checks. (peggy mcintosh, “white privilege: unpacking the invisible knapsack”) privilege questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn http://bit.ly/iitg-pgq the privilege game questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn https://docs.google.com/presentation/d/ jqh rvkinxzboq mzv qkbcb n_kqipnrd lj jiskc/edit?usp=sharing https://privilege.huc.knaw.nl/ the privilege game https://privilege.huc.knaw.nl/ part diversity as digital humanities questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn “there's a solid consensus that the conference is there in order to hear from diverse groups, but whenever one opts for diversity, it usually means opting for less quality (otherwise there would be no issue), so the danger is that one loses sight of this, very central goal of the conference.” “we are the alliance of digital humanities organisations, not the alliance of diversity organisations.” questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn is diversity a core value of the digital humanities? does it (compete with|intersect with|oppose) quality? is it “just” a moral good or good manners? is it intellectually important? questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn in some sense an odd question to ask... in some sense an odd question to ask... questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn in some sense an odd question to ask... questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn the digital humanities is a paradiscipline that intersects with humanities domains it is an approach and set of techniques that grows in response to problems questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn dh vs. other disciplines ● medieval studies − a period to which techniques are applied − in-scope is defined by the temporal and geographic origins of the objects under analysis: ● belongs to period - ✔ ● comes from europe ✔ ● part of human culture ✔ ● you are in! ○ philosophical, literary, computational, archaeological approaches all welcome questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn dh vs. other disciplines ● digital humanities − techniques that are applied to (historical and other) disciplinary problems − in-scope defined by the use of computational techniques or interest in intersection of computation with discipline ● the problem involves computation/digital culture ✔ ● it is more broadly applicable ✔ ● you are in! ○ don’t care if it is text, or medieval, or architecture, or video questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn in historical domains “length” is more important than “breadth” questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn series celebrate repetition of method across lots of examples questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn goal is long line of examples not (necessarily)wide variety of methods questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn in dh breadth of method is more important than long line of examples ● the important thing is not “what can we edit next?” ● rather − “can we edit that?” − “can we do something other than ‘edit’?” − “what can we apply computation to next?” − “how does this affect our computation?” questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn series celebrate diversity of problem rather than comprehensiveness questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn it is the variety of new problems, not the number of successful examples that moves the field forward questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn variety of new problems ● mccarty and short’s image has boxes and bubbles, not columns and silos ● it is the way that the domains intersect through computing methods that is “the field” questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn ✔ this is digital humanities questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn ✔ this is (still) digital humanities questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn x this is a special interest group for latin concordance builders questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn a dh where everyone agrees with me is dead. a dh where everyone’s like me is dying. questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn three implications . it is possible to do digital work in the humanities without doing “digital humanities”: ● use computation to advance historical work rather than use historical examples to advance our understanding of how to solve humanities problems computationally ● e.g. a structurally marked-up transcription and edition of a straightforward medieval manuscript is (today) medieval studies, not digital humanities questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn three implications . diversity (of problem) is more important than “quality” (of work) if you are doing digital humanities ● dh began as text-focussed discipline: ● databases, stylistics, and text-representation ● it is exciting because it isn’t that any more ● new subjects (text, images, d) ● new techniques (xml, gis, crowd sourcing, wikis, visualisation, etc) ● new arenas (academy, glam, popular, etc.) ● new people (scholars, crowd, journalists, citizen scientists, etc.) questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn three implications . it’s not (just) a diversity of problem − the flaw in mccarty and short’s diagram is that it assumes there is a single methodological commons: “communications & hypermedia” questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn not just... diversity (of problem) ● great disciplinary realisation of the last - years is that diversity of people, region, language, context is as important as diversity of application ● there should be as many ovals in the diagram as there are clouds and (disciplinary) boxes questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn not just... diversity (of problem) ● why are some groups able to control attention and others not? ● how do (groups of) people differ in their relationship to technology? ● how do you do digital humanities differently in high- vs. low-bandwidth environments? questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn not just... diversity (of problem) ● how does digital scholarship differ when it is done by the colonised and the coloniser? ● how is what we discuss and research influenced by factors such as class, gender, race, age, social capital? ● etc. !!! questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn conclusion ● dh depends on a supply of problems to continue its development ● because it exists at the intersection of fields and involves the study of this intersection, its growth needs to be measured by its width rather than its bulk ● a dh that never got beyond a traditional interest in text, concordances and editing would be a dh that had died ● the same is true for a dh that cannot get beyond a narrow group of practitioners bringing a relatively limited set of problems questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn ... no matter how well “they” do it. questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn http://www.globaloutlookdh.org/ http://www.globaloutlookdh.org/ thank you for your participation! questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn funding • sshrc • adho • huc humanities cluster knaw • university of saskatchewan questions and notes: http://bit.ly/iitg-dn diversity workshop bárbara bordalejo (she/her/hers) university of saskatchewan @textualscholar barbara.bordalejo@usask.ca daniel paul o’donnell, university of lethbridge @danielpaulod daniel.odonnell@uleth.ca an official publication of the society of hospital medicine journal of hospital medicine® published online december e online first december , —perspectives in hospital medicine racial health disparities, covid- , and a way forward for us health systems max jordan nguemeni tiako, ms , , *, howard p forman, md, mba , , marcella nuñez-smith, md, mhs , , yale school of medicine, new haven, connecticut; center for emergency care and policy research, perelman school of medicine at the university of pennsylvania, philadelphia, pennsylvania; equity research and innovation center, yale school of medicine, new haven, connecticut; yale school of management, new haven, connecticut. t he coronavirus disease (covid- ) pandemic highlights long-standing inequities in health along ra- cial/ethnic lines in the united states. black, hispanic, and indigenous people have been disproportionately affected during the pandemic. for example, the age-adjusted mortality rate among black people with covid- is . times as high as that of white people. structural racism shapes social forces, institutions, and ide- ologies that generate and reinforce racial inequities across dif- ferent aspects of life. in this perspective, we discuss how, in the covid- context, structural racism shapes access to and quality of care, as well as socioeconomic and health status. we offer guidance to health systems and healthcare providers on addressing health inequities. healthcare quality and access disparities in access to and quality of care contribute to racial health disparities. at the onset of the covid- pandemic in the united states, guidelines for covid- testing were restric- tive, only investigating those who had symptoms and had re- cently traveled to wuhan, china, or had contact with someone who may have had the virus. news reports show disparities in access to testing, with testing sites favoring wealthier, whiter communities, a feature of racial residential segregation. res- idential segregation has also contributed to a concentration of closures among urban public hospitals, affecting access to care. in new york city (nyc) and boston, early hotspots of the pandemic, black and hispanic patients and underinsured/ uninsured patients were significantly less likely to access care from academic medical centers (amcs) compared with white, privately insured patients. amcs boast greater resources, and inequalities produced by this segregated system of care are of- ten exacerbated by governmental allocation of resources. for instance, nyc’s public hospitals care for the city’s low-income residents (who are disproportionately insured by medicaid), yet received far less federal aid from the provider relief fund covid- high impact payments, which favored larger, private hospitals in manhattan. these public hospitals, however, face looming medicaid cuts. similarly, the federal government de- layed the release of funds to health centers located on native american reservations, adversely affecting the indian health service’s preparedness to face the pandemic. in tandem with the effects of residential segregation, these data highlight the tiered nature of the us healthcare system, a structure that significantly impacts the quality of care patients receive along racial and socioeconomic lines. furthermore, studies have documented racial disparities in the provision of advanced therapies: in the case of predicting algorithms that identify pa- tients with complex illnesses, reliance on cost (thus, previous utilization data) rather than actual illness means that only . % of black patients receive additional help. socioeconomic status, occupational and residential risk healthcare alone does not explain the observed disparities. the disproportionately high risk of contracting the sars- cov- virus among black, hispanic and indigenous people can be explained by factors that render physical distancing a luxu- ry. first, in terms of occupational hazards, only in black and in hispanic workers can work remotely compared with in white workers. additionally, black and hispanic workers are more likely to have jobs classified as critical in industries such as food retail, hospitality, and public transit. in nyc, metropol- itan transportation authority (mta) employees reported using their own masks and home disinfectant at work, only to be rep- rimanded. by april , , at least mta workers had died of covid- , and more than , were ill or self-quarantining, resulting in a transit crisis with increasingly long wait times and crowded subway platforms. jason hargrove, a black bus driv- er in detroit, shared a video underscoring the dangers of his work in which he says, “we’re out here as public workers, doing our job…but for you to get on the bus and stand on the bus, and cough several times without covering up your mouth . . . in the middle of a pandemic…some folks don’t care.” he died of covid- complications days after sharing his video. such conditions likely also increased riders’ risk of contract- ing covid- . and while in aggregate, essential workers in healthcare receive more personal protective equipment (ppe) than those in other occupations, within nyc hospitals, the ra- tioning of ppe was such that low-wage, nonmedical workers ( % of whom are black or hispanic) were given less ppe or none at all compared with nurses and physicians. beyond occupational hazards, black and hispanic people are more likely to live in multigenerational homes, an identified *corresponding author: max jordan nguemeni tiako, ms; email: max.tiako@ yale.edu; twitter: @maxjordan_n. received: june , ; revised: september , ; accepted: october , © society of hospital medicine doi . /jhm. nguemeni tiako et al | racial health disparities and covid- e journal of hospital medicine® published online december an official publication of the society of hospital medicine risk factor of covid- infection. furthermore, black and his- panic people are overrepresented among homeless people as well as among those incarcerated. these social conditions, all products of structural racism, substantially and adversely affect the health status of black, hispanic, and indigenous people, especially as it relates to comorbidities associated with higher covid- mortality. disparities in health status black people are disproportionately represented among covid- patients requiring hospitalization, consistent with more severe disease or delayed presentation. for instance, among a cohort of , patients in a health system in loui- siana, . % of covid- patients hospitalized and . % of those who died were black, even though black people com- prise only % of this health system’s patient population. conditions associated with covid- mortality include heart failure, obesity, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. black, hispanic, and indigenous people have higher rates of these chronic illnesses, increasing covid- mortality risk. the increased prevalence of these illnesses is attributable to the aforementioned social conditions and environmental fac- tors and to the additional stress associated with repeated ex- posure to discrimination. recommendations although the disparities highlighted during the pandemic are staggering, this moment can serve as a portal to reimagine a more equitable healthcare system. health systems and provid- ers should ( ) remain vigilant in addressing bias and its effects on patient care; ( ) implement strategies to mitigate structural bias and use data to rapidly mitigate disparities in quality of care and transitions in care; and ( ) address inequities, diversi- ty, and inclusion across the entire healthcare workforce. addressing provider bias at the patient care level, healthcare providers have a role in ensuring patients have positive experiences with the healthcare system; this is an opportunity to address medical distrust. pro- viders should recognize the burden of psychosocial stress and place-based risk that contributes to patients’ presentations and clinical courses. in patient encounters, this awareness should translate to action, acknowledging patients’ experiences and individuality and upholding their dignity. under conditions of burnout, physicians’ biases are more likely to manifest in patient encounters, and although stress and burnout among providers are likely at an all-time high during the covid- pandemic, pa- tients of color must not suffer disproportionately. addressing structural bias in care provision health systems should establish checklist-based protocols in order to mitigate the impact of bias on patient care, such as on referrals for advanced therapies. algorithms used to au- tomate certain aspects of care should not be biased against black, hispanic, and indigenous patients, as has been the case with algorithms that lead to black patients receiving low- er levels of care compared with white patients with similar clinical presentations. health systems should therefore sys- tematically collect racial and sociodemographic data and im- plement rapid-cycle evaluation of processes and outcomes to root out biases. in tracking their own performance in pro- viding equitable care, health systems should create feedback systems that inform individual providers of their practices for improvement, and individual departments should hold frequent “morbidity and mortality” style reviews of practic- es and outcomes to continuously improve. additionally, col- laborations with and financial support of community-based organizations to ensure safe transitions of care and to con- tribute to addressing patients’ unmet social needs should be- come the norm. this is particularly relevant for covid- sur- vivors who may face long-term chronic physical and mental sequelae such as post–intensive care syndrome and require multidisciplinary care. workforce equity, diversity, and inclusion health systems should also examine and address the ways in which they contribute to racial health inequities beyond healthcare provision. among healthcare organizations, hos- pitals employ the majority of low-wage healthcare work- ers, most of them black or hispanic women. nearly half of black and hispanic female healthcare workers earn less than $ hourly (cited as a living wage, which could help prevent a significant number of premature deaths), and a quarter are uninsured or on medicaid. raising the hourly minimum wage to at least $ would reduce poverty among fe- male healthcare workers by . %. mortality decreases as income increases, and the lowest-income healthcare work- ers have a nearly six-fold higher risk of death relative to their highest-earning counterparts, a gradient steeper compared with other fields. health systems should guarantee occupa- tional safety and adequate wages and benefits and provide employees with career-advancing opportunities that would facilitate upward mobility. in addition to the aforementioned structural inequities embedded within the healthcare infrastructure, low-wage black healthcare workers report experiencing interpersonal discrimination at work, such as being assigned more tasks compared with their white peers and having others higher up the hierarchy, such as supervisors, nurses, and physicians, assume they are incompetent. workplace discrimination spans across the organizational hierarchy. black nurses and physicians report both interpersonal and organizational dis- crimination from patients and other healthcare workers and in terms of barriers to opportunities through hiring and cre- dentialing processes. black physicians are at greater risk of burnout and attrition, which is partly attributable to experi- encing discrimination. , to address these experiences, health systems should in- vest in creating a work climate that is inclusive and explicitly stands against racism and other forms of discrimination. the rise of the black lives matter movement has contributed to improving people’s attitudes toward black people over the racial health disparities and covid- | nguemeni tiako et al an official publication of the society of hospital medicine journal of hospital medicine® published online december e past years, whereas implicit bias trainings, commonly em- ployed to improve diversity and inclusion, may unwittingly further entrench the denial of the impact of racism (by attrib- uting it to implicit rather than explicit attitudes) or heighten intergroup racial anxiety and reduce individuals’ intentions to engage in intergroup contact. moreover, evidence shows interracial contact in medical school yields more positive ex- plicit and implicit attitudes toward black people among non– black medical trainees, whereas bias trainings do not, and a positive racial climate in medical school yields a greater inter- est in serving underserved and minority populations among non–black medical trainees. in other words, fostering a cul- ture and structure that champions racial justice and diversi- fying the healthcare workforce would synergistically improve non–black healthcare workers’ attitudes toward black people while also improving the working conditions of black health- care workers and the experiences of black patients. health- care is the fastest growing industry in the united states, and such initiatives would likely have a tremendous impact on moving the needle toward health equity. conclusion the covid- disparities were predictable. this pandemic may not end any time soon and certainly will not be the last we experience. therefore, healthcare workers and health systems should recognize the societal barriers patients and workers face and implement strategies to eliminate biased practices in the provision of healthcare as well as through the compen- sation structure and workplace protection of healthcare work- ers, especially when the healthcare system experiences undue stress. disclosures: the authors have nothing to disclose. references . the color of coronavirus: covid- deaths by race and ethnicity in the u.s. apm research lab. october , . accessed october , . https:// www.apmresearchlab.org/covid/deaths-by-race . wang j, huth l, umlauf t. how the cdc’s restrictive testing guidelines hid the coronavirus epidemic. wall street journal. march , . accessed june , . https://www.wsj.com/articles/how-the-cdcs-restrictive-test- ing-guidelines-hid-the-coronavirus-epidemic- . mcminn s, carlsen a, jaspers b, talbot r, adeline s. in large texas cities, access to coronavirus testing may depend on where you live. npr. may , . accessed june , . https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/ / / / /across-texas-black-and-hispanic-neighbor- hoods-have-fewer-coronavirus-testing-sit . ko m, needleman j, derose kp, laugesen mj, ponce na. residential seg- regation and the survival of u.s. urban public hospitals. med care res rev. ; ( ): - . 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t.gift@ucl.ac.uk) university college london andrew miner harvard university from the roman colosseum to wimbledon stadium, the olympics to the super bowl, sports have always played a central role in societies. with so much at stake—money, pride, power (and occasionally even fun)—sports are undeniably political. yet despite this recognition, political scientists and policy scholars devote little attention to the study of sports, especially compared to other disciplines like business, law, and economics. we offer reasons for this void and suggest how political scientists can begin to fill it. in our view, the nexus between sports and politics is not only a vital topic of study on its own, but it can also provide a lens through which to examine—and test—broader questions in the discipline. we propose how scholars can think more systematically about the interaction of politics and sports and leverage the distinctive qualities of sports to improve causal identification across a range of issue areas and subfields in political science and policy studies. keywords: sport and politics, sports and policy, political science research, political studies subfields, review article, sport and media, sport and international affairs. desde el coliseo romano hasta el estadio de wimbledon, los juegos olímpicos y el super bowl, los deportes siempre han jugado un papel central en las sociedades. con tanto en juego—dinero, el orgullo, el poder (y ocasionalmente incluso algo de diversión)—los deportes son innegablemente políticos. sin embargo, a pesar de este reconocimiento, los científicos políticos y los académicos de política dedican poca atención al estudio de los deportes, especialmente en comparación con otras disciplinas como los negocios, el derecho y la economía. ofrecemos razones para este vacío y sugerimos cómo los científicos políticos pueden comenzar a llenarlo. en the authors thank jeanne burke, olivia cristaldi, daniel finucane, paul peterson, and michael plouffe for helpful comments and suggestions. they especially thank neil sheaffer for supplying inspiration and enthusiastically supporting the writing of this piece when it was just an initial idea. gift also expresses his gratitude to the taubman center for state and local government at the harvard kennedy school for providing institutional support during the writing of this article. an earlier version of this paper was presented at university college london in november . mailto:t.gift@ucl.ac.uk the understudied nexus of sports and politics nuestra opinión, el nexo entre el deporte y la política no es sólo un tema vital de estudio por sí solo, sino que también puede proporcionar una lente a través de la cual examinar y ensayar preguntas más amplias en la disciplina. proponemos cómo los académicos pueden pensar de manera más sistemática sobre la interacción de la política y los deportes y aprovechar las cualidades distintivas del deporte para mejorar la identificación causal en una serie de áreas temáticas y subcampos de la ciencia política y el estudio de las políticas. palabras clave: deporte y política, deportes y política pública, investigación en ciencias políticas, subcampos de la ciencia política, revisión de literatura, artículo de revisión, deporte y medios de comunicación, deportes y asuntos internacionales. 体育、政治和政策：关于现有学术研究的批判性评价 不论是从罗马斗兽场 到温布尔顿体育场，还是从奥运会到超级碗，体育一直都在社会中充当着中 心角色。既然金钱、骄傲和权力（偶尔甚至还有娱乐）这些利害关系都与体育有关，后者一定是 具有政治性的。然而，尽管这一点已被认可，政治科学家和政策学者却很少将注意力放在体育 上，这与其对商业、法律和经济的关注相比尤为明显。本文解释了为何体育不受关注这一空缺， 并暗示了政治科学家如何能开始填补此空缺。本文观点认为，体育和政治之间的联系并不仅仅是 一个重要的研究话题，它还能提供工具用于检验和检查该学科范围内更广的问题。本文提议学者 如何能更系统地考虑体育和政治之间的相互影响，同时充分利用体育的鲜明特性，以更好地识别 政治科学和政治研究中一系列问题领域和分支领域之间的因果关系。 关键词：体育和政治，体育与政策，政治科学研究，政治研究分支领域，文献评论，评论文章， 体育与媒体，体育与国际事务 today more than ever, sports are in the zeitgeist. millions of people watch and play sports. sports are a sprawling industry globally, with fans and participants at every level: from youth teams, to amateur leagues, to university squads, to professional associations. whether one lives in london or new delhi, follows golf or cricket, loves lebron james or lionel messi, it is hard not to be inundated by sports. in a world where . million people outside the united states watched the super bowl in (price ) and the fifa world cup garnered . billion viewers (fifa ), sports are every bit as globalized as food, culture, or finance. the understudied nexus of sports and politics given the huge imprint of sports across the world, it should come as no surprise that sports are an intrinsically political business. in north america alone, revenues on professional sports were expected to exceed $ billion in (berr )—nearly ten times more than total campaign spending on all u.s. federal offices last year (pwc ). lobbyists advocating greater access for women in sports, controversies over funding stadiums, corruption afflicting global sports federations, sports scandals rocking major universities, and countries competing for prime- time tournaments are but a few examples of how politics and sports interact. for many societies, sports are the closest thing that exists is to a civic religion. today, sports venues reflect our political values, priorities, sensibilities, and even neuroses. in the shadows of their walls, we worship athletes like heroes from a virgil epic, sing anthems that affirm our national supremacies, memorize player facts and statistics like our lives depend on it, and demand federal investigations when our sports idols disappoint us. all the while, the centrality of sports to our political cultures raises captivating questions about why this nexus exists and what its effects are on citizens and governments. yet, despite the pervasive role in world affairs that sports play in money, power, and public policy—both domestically and internationally—political scientists study the topic remarkably little. not one of the discipline’s flagship outlets (american political science review, journal of politics, or the american journal of political science) has ever published a research article with the word “sports” in the title. to say that there is no veritable subfield covering sports in political science is an understatement. in those rare instances where political scientists and policy scholars do pay attention to sports, it is usually treated as a quaint diversion from serious scholarship. this lack of attention to sports in political science is striking given that other disciplines have developed impressive research infrastructures devoted to sports. several top-rated the understudied nexus of sports and politics universities have launched centers and institutes with sports themes. moreover, economists like the university of chicago’s steven levitt have gained mass popularity for their studies on sports; statisticians such as david spiegelhalter of the university of cambridge have made headlines for applying analytics to predict sports matches; and legal experts like harvard’s peter carfagna run entire clinics dedicated to sports. in political science, however, sports are barely discussed. this void is unfortunate. it is unfortunate in part because of the outsized impact that sports have on everyday life. sports inspire zeal in fans, drum up kitchen-table conversations, and beget cultural icons. famous sports events involving politics are embedded in our collective consciousness, as countless as they are unforgettable: from jackie robinson breaking the major league baseball color barrier against the backdrop of jim crow; to nelson mandela rooting for the south african rugby team in the world cup; to former basketball star dennis rodman trying to repair western-north korean relations during a rendezvous with dictator kim jong un. sometimes, politics implicates sports even to the point of discomfort. the munich massacre—in which the palestinean terrorist group black september assassinated eleven israeli olympians—proved that the injection of politics into sports can yield horrific (even deadly) consequences. more recently, in , riots rocked baltimore following the death of freddie gray, an african-american male who died tragically in police custody. in response to security concerns, the orioles baseball team bolted its gates and played the chicago white sox with no fans, resulting in one of the most eerie backdrops to a sports event in recent memory. even fidel castro’s death, one of the biggest political stories of , contained an important sports element. pundits had no dearth of stories by which to remember the former cuban dictator, from the bay of pigs to the thawing of washington-havana hostilities. yet news outlets from the new york times to espn could not help but highlight his enduring legacy relative to the understudied nexus of sports and politics sports (jeré ; espn ). whether it was pitching a game for a cuban revolutionary team, welcoming a major league baseball team to his country in the s, or leveraging sports to craft nationalistic pride, castro—for better or for worse—understood the power and politics of sports and its place in international affairs. sports and politics intersect visibly in society. yet that is not the only reason why political scientists should study sports. sports also provide a quintessential window through which to analyze many conventional topics in these disciplines. issues like social capital, political empowerment, and corruption all emerge centrally in sports—and offer an ideal backdrop in which to probe these phenomena. sports are flush with actors, institutions, and groups that mimic those found in familiar political spheres. consequently, analyzing how these entities interact and respond to incentives can shed useful insight on politics writ large. apart from the substantive reasons for studying the politics of sports, there is also a compelling methodological one. sports possess an inherently unpredictable quality, both on and off the field. who wins and who loses, and how political interests benefit from sports by chance, present unique opportunities for applying causal identification strategies. whether it is how an olympic bid affects a country’s foreign policy or how a cinderella team shapes the electoral odds of a hometown politician, political scientists can exploit natural randomization to answer questions more convincingly than with standard observational techniques. put simply, the politics of sports is important, and there is every reason to think that taking a more systematic look at the topic can yield fruitful scholarship. this article reviews the existing literature on politics and sports, highlights what we perceive to be serious gaps in this research, and erects a framework for addressing some of the major issues that arise with respect to politics and sports. our objective is not to identify the precise questions that political scientists should the understudied nexus of sports and politics answer, but to initiate a broad call for analyzing sports in greater depth. we argue that the subject is timely, interesting, and worthy of careful investigation. broadly speaking, we are agnostic about how political science research on sports should eventually evolve vis-à-vis the rest of the discipline. in the long term, sports could inspire its own thematic field of study, akin to environmental politics, health politics, or business politics. another possibility is for studies on sports to simply get subsumed into the larger political science discipline, yet with a greater recognition of the value in such research. given the existing state of the literature, it seems sufficient now to simply highlight the neglect of sports in political science and to create a springboard for future conversation on the topic. a central objective of this study is to reveal the diverse, and often unexpected, ways that politics and sports interface: across disciplinary subfields, time periods, locations, and topics. politics is everywhere in sports—in places both seen and unseen—and derives from the role of athletes, fans, teams, citizens, governments, markets, and institutions. sports may affect political alliances, governmental decision-making, voting, interest group mobilization, and even social order and stability. they may shape individuals, families, societies, countries, and international bodies. both domestically and globally, sports implicate the biggest debates in political science. the remainder of our article unfolds as follows. first, we document the paucity of political science studies bearing on sports. next, we propose why political scientists have traditionally been reluctant to study sports—and push back against these excuses. subsequently, we discuss some big, current-events stories involving sports that we think should interest political scientists. we then explain the relevance of leveraging sports to understand broader questions about politics and world affairs. after that, we turn to how political scientists can use the distinctive qualities of the understudied nexus of sports and politics sports to improve causal identification. finally, we conclude and suggest additional avenues for research. “sports and politics don’t mix”—or do they? “sports and politics don’t mix” (quoted in schwartz n.d.). these words, famously uttered by former u.s. olympian eric heiden in opposition to the united states boycotting the moscow games in , ironically only serve to highlight how much sports and politics are intertwined. sports and politics might not always mix well, as heiden was perhaps trying to imply. but as the very action of the united states boycotting the olympics—and heiden’s quote itself—suggest, politics and sports certainly mix. yet it is political scientists who seem to have taken heiden’s admonition literally. the discipline, with few notable exceptions, has always kept sports at a generous arm’s length. this separation should strike us as peculiar. ancient greek and roman thinkers routinely discussed sports in the context of politics. according to pulitzer-prize winning journalist george f. will ( , ), for instance, “greek philosophers considered sport a religious and civic—in a word, moral—undertaking. sport, they said, is morally serious because mankind’s noblest aim is the loving contemplation of worthy things.” among classic western civilizations, such ideals intersected iconically in the roman colosseum, where gladiatorial bouts inspired harrowing spectacles of herculean strength. “the colosseum was very much more than a sports venue,” says one study. “it was a political theatre” (brichford , ). throughout generations, the link between sports and politics has been a constant and prevailing theme. dating back to the middle ages, for example, “sports had a military character as the political formation of nation-states conferred valor and great prestige” (brichford , ). similarly, during the renaissance, “authors used sporting imagery, metaphor, and allegory the understudied nexus of sports and politics to defend or critique the social order that sport was originally believed to uphold” (colón semenza , ). in colonial america, “ideas about tempering sport and leisure pursuits revealed the serious nature of the impending political, social, economic, and military challenges in the young nation” (gems, borish, and pfister , ). in contemporary society, it is no coincidence that public figures—and especially politicians—frequently invoke sports as a metaphor for politics. former-u.s. president barack obama, for example, lamented that “when you’re in washington, folks respond to every issue, every decision, every debate, no matter how important it is, with the same question: what does this mean for the next election?...they’re obsessed with the sport of politics” (obama quoted in in wolffe , ). late american president john f. kennedy declared that “[p]olitics is like football. if you see daylight, go through the hole” (quoted in dent , ) most succinct was welsh politician aneurin bevan: “politics is a blood sport” (bevan quoted in jarski , ). in many countries, sports occupy a special status in society. “by becoming fans, spectators engage in certain kinds of pleasures, fulfilling their own desires through fetishism, voyeurism, and narcissism” (brummett , ) writes one expert. not coincidentally, teams often enjoy sizable tax breaks, reap big profits, and make out handsomely from public subsidies that finance their glittering new stadiums and other pet projects. in the united states, for example, sports are even exempt from certain anti-trust laws. as journalist sally jenkins ( ) explains, “[t]o quote the godfather, part , ‘it’s the business we chose.’ it’s a decision we’ve made as a culture and as a country and as a government.” perhaps the most convincing evidence that politics and sports are inextricably linked comes from politicians who explicitly try to capitalize on sports to improve their own election odds. for instance, in , then-republican presidential hopeful carly fiorina, embroiled in the iowa the understudied nexus of sports and politics caucuses, committed the ultimate act of apostasy by declaring her support for the iowa hawkeyes football team over her own alma mater, stanford, in the rose bowl. the attempt, which reeked of pandering (and ultimately backfired), led fiorina to be justly lambasted for opportunism. yet for all the backlash she received, fiorina was right about one thing: sports matter in politics. political science literature, however, focuses remarkably little on sports. today, political investigations into sports are largely the domain of the press and popular media. local and national newspapers are rife with articles recounting the latest stories involving politics and sports. sports- specific outlets like sky sports or sports illustrated, as well as blogs such as sb nation, also write about the politics of sports. these sources provide fast-response analysis of the day’s top news. yet they obviously differ from systematic research in which scholars derive concrete inferences about major political trends involving sports. many academic studies on sports politics more neatly qualify as historical accounts. for example, zirin ( ) chronicles how sports shape political conflicts, looking especially at the role of dissenter athletes and how sports can inspire a more inclusive society. additionally, gorn and goldstein ( ) offer an expansive history of how sports have mirrored american values since independence. lowe ( ) outlines the role of the u.s. congress in sports concurrent with their rise in american life. senn ( ) takes a more international tack, focusing on the modern olympics. other studies analyze sports history through the lens of women (o’reilly ), african americans (rhoden ; wiggins and miller ), or the disabled (depauw and gavron ). a separate strand of literature on sports politics fits more comfortably in sociology. gruneau and whitson ( ), for instance, consider the role of hockey in canadian life. see the twitter feed at https://twitter.com/carlyfiorina/status/ https://twitter.com/carlyfiorina/status/ the understudied nexus of sports and politics hargreaves ( ) pinpoints intersections of sports with class, culture, disability status, race, religion, and sexual orientation. festle ( ) concentrates on how women balance their dual identities as athletes and females. hoberman ( ), meanwhile, examines ideological attributes of sports and the affinity of the political right for athleticism. in another study, watterson ( ) explores how americans draw equivalencies between sports, manliness, and the competence of political leaders. mitchell, somerville, and hargie ( ) analyze the impact of socio-political divides on sports. conventional political science research on sports is limited—and focuses largely on governing institutions and global competitions. for instance, markovits and rensmann ( ) inspect how sports permeate local, regional, and global culture while influencing international politics. some years earlier, allison ( ) probed topics such as global sports bodies, the commercialization of sports, and their social value. foer ( ), by comparison, considers how global soccer reflects sectarian conflicts, corporate power, and nationalism. levermore and budd ( ) investigate how sports influence political economy, nation building, and diplomacy. other scholarship explores sports governance through a single-country context (see e.g., houlihan ; demause and cagan ). overall, despite its depth and breadth, the literature on sports and politics is largely historical and sociological, with little quantitative analysis. it does not significantly examine the overlaps of sports and electoral politics, the policy-making process, or a battery of other factors that figure centrally in political science more broadly. moreover, orthodox political science studies are largely limited to those institutions that govern and reflect domestic and international sports competitions, whereas research on sports and its prominent actors in relation to other political domains remains limited. the understudied nexus of sports and politics to the extent such concerns have been raised previously, most come from scholars outside political science departments. for example, jonathan grix ( , ) of birmingham’s school of sport, exercise, and rehabilitation sciences points to “the lack of academic research…by the very people one would assume would be at the forefront of sports politics analyses: political scientists and ir scholars.” alan bairner ( , ) of loughborough’s school of sport, exercise, and health sciences laments that, “not all political theorists or political scientists are ignorant about sport. indeed for many it is an important aspect of their lives—but often only of their lives as lived away from the lecture theatre, the seminar room, and the computer screen.” a particularly revealing recent anecdote of how rarely political scientists study sports comes from the university of chicago’s institute of politics, which hosted a seminar series in entitled the power and politics of sports. organizers convened leading writers, athletes, practitioners, and academics to discuss how sports and politics intersect in society. session titles included “the power of the athlete,” “fantasy football feud,” “life as a sports reporter,” and “concussion crisis.” yet the sessions were notable for who was missing: in talks designed explicitly to highlight intriguing overlaps between sports and politics, no political scientists were listed as speakers. in other social science disciplines, sports are much less marginalized. in law and business, for example, vibrant research agendas exist that not only take sports seriously, but also identify distinctive attributes of the topic that make it worthy of study. many universities have launched a notable exception is the university of wisconsin’s michael schatzberg, who observes that “political scientists have, for the most part, not envisaged the world of sports as falling within either the political sphere or their professional purview.” for the source of this quotation and more, see http://dept.polisci.wisc.edu/syllabi/ / .pdf see also bairner ( ) for one of the few comprehensive analytical treatments of sports and politics. see http://politics.uchicago.edu/pages/juliet-macur-seminar-series http://dept.polisci.wisc.edu/syllabi/ / .pdf http://politics.uchicago.edu/pages/juliet-macur-seminar-series the understudied nexus of sports and politics institutes, journals, and events dedicated to sports in these disciplines. cases in point include: marquette’s national sports law institute, harvard law school’s journal of sports & entertainment law, the london businesses school’s annual “sports business conference,” and the university of southern california’s sports business institute. in economics, scholarship on sports is arguably even more well established. many top schools—including vanderbilt, georgetown, and the university of chicago —offer classes on the economics of sports. the federal reserve bank of st. louis has released materials for how to teach the economics of sports. leading economists such duke’s charles clotfelter ( ) and smith college’s andrew s. zimbalist ( ) are renowned for their scholarship on sports, and popular books such as moneyball (lewis ) have spawned a virtual cottage industry on the economics of building winning sports franchises. by comparison, political science research on sports teeters between the hyper-niche and the nonexistent. to our knowledge, only one scholarly journal—the international journal of sports policy and politics—is specifically devoted to the study of sports, politics, and policy. yet its scope is limited. many of the journal’s articles come from scholars outside political science. furthermore, as evidenced by recent article titles such as “do light sport facilities foster sports see http://www.law.marquette.edu/national-sports-law-institute/welcome see http://harvardjsel.com/ see http://sportsbusinessconferencelbs.com/ see https://www.marshall.usc.edu/faculty/centers/sbi see https://my.vanderbilt.edu/vrooman/files/ / /econ- -f a.pdf see http://faculty.georgetown.edu/galei/econ% % provisional% syllabus% spring% .pdf see http://home.uchicago.edu/~arsx/syllabus/econ% % syllabus% spr% .doc see https://www.stlouisfed.org/events/ / /ee-lvl-econsports http://www.law.marquette.edu/national-sports-law-institute/welcome http://harvardjsel.com/ http://sportsbusinessconferencelbs.com/ https://www.marshall.usc.edu/faculty/centers/sbi https://my.vanderbilt.edu/vrooman/files/ / /econ- -f a.pdf http://faculty.georgetown.edu/galei/econ% % provisional% syllabus% spring% .pdf http://home.uchicago.edu/~arsx/syllabus/econ% % syllabus% spr% .doc https://www.stlouisfed.org/events/ / /ee-lvl-econsports the understudied nexus of sports and politics participation? a case study on the use of bark running tracks” (borgers et al. ) it is also reasonable to ask how much the journal emphasizes the “politics” in its name. why are sports understudied in political science? regrettably, sports command little attention in political science. why the void? one big reason, we believe, is the perceived “unseriousness” of the topic relative to issues such as war, voting, regime change, and so forth that typically rank at the top of the discipline’s research agenda. observers deem sports a form of entertainment that falls outside the bounds of what political scientists analyze. on its face, it is hard to blame a discipline preoccupied with the “big” questions—for example, “waves” of democratization or the roots of international conflict—for not caring about last night’s game. a problem with this logic, however, is that politics implicate sports on many fronts. not all aspects of sports seriously affect our daily lives, but many undoubtedly can. moreover, economists, sociologists, legal scholars, and other social scientists also study weighty topics. yet many nonetheless devote significant time to sports. finally, it is by no means a criticism of political science to say that not all studies in the field grapple with momentous, life-or-death issues. this casts doubt on the idea that sports are too unserious to merit significant attention from the field. to our minds, another reason for the dearth of political science research on sports is a lack of good data. to the extent that data availability dictates what political scientists can investigate, sports get short shrift. major surveys both in the united states and globally—such as the american national election survey (anes) or the world values survey (wvs)—do not include significant questions pertaining to sports. compared, for instance, to policies such as social insurance, environmental protection, or taxation, this makes it difficult to analyze political attitudes toward sports. this justification is also tenuous. many news outlets conduct scientific surveys on political the understudied nexus of sports and politics controversies in sports. political scientists may also view the lack of data on sports as an opportunity. in fields like psychology, scholars exploit quasi-experiments and randomized controlled trials to study topics ranging from the anxiolytic influence of exercise to the impact of injuries sustained by elite athletes on depression, anxiety, and self-esteem (leddy, lambert, and ogles ; strickland and smith ). with the rise of analytics in many sports, interest—and capacity—for carrying out data collection is likely higher than ever before. in our view, an additional cause of the understudy of sports in political science is the perception of an americanist bias. notwithstanding major global events like the world cup and olympics, the american sports market is so big (and flush with money) that it rightly elicits the lion’s share of attention in the united states, where many leading political science departments are based. with u.s. sports dominating the news, one could forgive political scientists for not realizing how much sports implicate other subfields, including comparative politics, international relations, methods, and even theory. yet move beyond american headlines, and it quickly becomes clear that the politics of sports spans the globe. indeed, it may well be universal. going forward, the perception of sports politics as an americanist pursuit should also dissipate as other regions develop robust sports infrastructures. latin america, for example, now has increasingly outstanding baseball leagues of its own. basketball has grown exponentially in china and japan, with inroads even being made in sub-saharan africa. similar expansions are underway in other sports, fueled by burgeoning middle classes in the brics and elsewhere. another reason why we sense that political scientists do not concentrate on sports is because they are fraught with supposedly irrational behavior. anecdotal evidence suggests that people often instinctively root for their hometown teams or support teams simply because their the understudied nexus of sports and politics parents like them. the pull of family and hometown connections is indeed strong. in an era of professional free agency, some observers even liken rooting for a team to rooting for a jersey. as comedian jerry seinfeld quipped, “you’re actually rooting for the clothes when you get right down to it” (seinfeld quoted in hahmann ). with so much irrationality in sports, making sense of the frenzy might seem like an exercise in futility. a flaw in this reasoning, however, is that one of the largest topics of study in political science—partisan identification—is a function of the same factors predicting sports fandom. parents are a prime determinant of whether one leans conservative or liberal, and the “red-blue” electoral map indicates that partisan preferences are tied to geography. yet this does not stop political scientists from studying party id. moreover, rationalism is hardly a prerequisite for investigating a topic, as evidenced by generations of political scientists who have examined topics like nationalism. a final reason, to our minds, why political scientists largely ignore sports is because the subject matter is thematic. it is characterized by the topic under investigation instead of a unified set of questions or insights. thematic fields are useful, however, because specific issue areas may possess their own distinctive qualities. one could argue, for example, that environmental, health, or business politics are just “special cases” of the politics of public policy. yet this would ignore all the ways in which these policy areas implicate unique issues, actors, and problems. thematic areas are also valuable if one simply believes that certain issues “matter.” environmental politics, for example, wrestles with existential threats like climate change. healthcare politics grapples with a fundamental tenet of human well being. business politics deals with the underpinnings of national and international economies. sports, likewise, are foundational for many societies. “sport,” as a secretary-general of the united nations once declared, “is a the understudied nexus of sports and politics universal language” (united nations ). because of its centrality, it is hard to argue that sports are undeserving of scholarly attention. in short, none of the above justifications for why political scientists rarely study sports seems especially compelling. so it can be done, but how? to our minds, invigorating the study of politics and sports first requires identifying the kinds of questions the field should address. here, we see two promising approaches. one is to ascertain some of the most relevant questions in sports today and to carve out a sports-specific research agenda. the other is to apply a sports frame to broader questions in political science that scholars are already trying to answer. in the following sections, we take each in turn. timely questions in sports politics below, we highlight several timely topics in sports that we believe could serve as the basis of systematic studies in political science. these “ripped-from-the-headlines” issues are intended to show how the discipline can engage an array of questions that are relevant, that involve topics the public cares about, and that can help deepen our understanding of politics. “so, how much is enough?”: sports salaries and the “ percent” today, much of the world is disillusioned over large—and growing—wealth gaps. as the perceived slights of the middle class have given rise to class warfare, a bevy of populist politicians, particularly in north american and western europe, have exploited this angst to champion “soak- the-rich” mandates and to enact broader regulations of business and the financial industry. fat paychecks, “golden parachutes,” and the perceived indifference of wall street to the plight of main street have fueled consternation over how economic resources are divvied up in free-enterprise systems. the understudied nexus of sports and politics at the same time, many sports fans harbor little resentment toward athletes who make more in a season than they do in a lifetime. babe ruth, in his most profitable year, would have “only” made $ . million in inflation-adjusted dollars (calcaterra ). at the time of writing, the highest-paid athlete in the world, real madrid’s cristiano ronaldo, earns $ million a year, including salary and endorsements (forbes ). baltimore orioles manager buck showalter said that he once asked his slugger chris davis, “[w]hen you walk into a target store, can you buy anything you want. [sic] so, how much is enough?” (brown ). why fans overlook perceived greed among athletes, but not ceos and hedge fund managers, is unclear. one answer is that fans see athletic achievements more as a function of earned success. yet “rags-to-riches” stories are not always the case in sports. many successful athletes are themselves the children of athletes, and parental wealth today buys access to sports camps, personal trainers, psychologists, and a wealth of other resources that bode well for athletic prowess. why do fans support players who hold out for hefty paychecks, yet resent the rest of the “ percent”? this, and related, questions seem as pertinent to political science scholarship as they are to sociology, psychology, or behavioral economics. “i wouldn’t lock a person up for doing it”: teams and freedom of speech san francisco ers quarterback colin kaepernick’s fall protests prior to nfl games have inspired virulent debate about the relationship between freedom of speech, team values, and public displays of patriotism. ironically, kaepernick’s motive for protesting—the maltreatment of african americans, especially by law enforcement—has been muddled, with the broader controversy riveted on his method: sitting or kneeling during the national anthem. both kaepernick’s defenders and critics have, in part, framed the debate in constitutional terms. the understudied nexus of sports and politics kaepernick’s defenders—backed by u.s. supreme court decisions including the case that allowed jehovah’s witnesses to sit during the pledge of allegiance in public schools and the case that struck down a federal law banning american flag burning—argue that his speech is protected. kaepernick’s detractors, meanwhile, maintain that the st amendment actually entitles his employers to penalize him. according to justice ruth bader ginsburg, “i think [kaepernick’s protest is] a terrible thing to do, but i wouldn’t lock a person up for doing it” (liptak ). just as relevant as the civil liberties questions raised by athlete protests is how interested parties react. for example, former baltimore ravens coach brian billick has accused kaepernick of not “liv[ing] up to his responsibility as a team member” (cbs sports radio ). but it is the san francisco ers that have found themselves in the thorniest position: needing to acknowledge legitimate criticism of kaepernick, without alienating his fans. what political incentives shape how players, coaches, and organizations strike the balance between preserving team values and respecting free speech? “not a dime back”: sports in an era of austerity public spending on sports has attracted heightened scrutiny amid recent global economic downturns. in , a journalist criticized jim calhoun, then-coach of the university of connecticut men’s basketball team, for being the state’s highest-paid public employee. “not a dime back,” was calhoun’s rejoinder (associated press ). to critics, public expenditures on sports symbolize waste and misplaced priorities—now more than ever with debt crises raging in greece, ireland, and portugal and now-empty olympic stadiums in many nations standing as painful reminders of unfulfilled government promises. the understudied nexus of sports and politics deficit spending has its keynesian defenders, who emphasize the specter of hysteresis, or the long-run damage done by contractionary policy, especially during recessions. still, the merits of public sports outlays in stimulating economies has come into question after a flurry of spending in the s, with one recent study finding that public investments in sports—such as subsidies for franchises—does little to boost economic growth (baade and matheson ). in many contexts, state spending on sports—including youth programs—has secured a central place on fiscal chopping blocks. the effect of spending on sports, of course, cannot be distilled to simple economics. in communities across the world, cuts to athletic programs inspire deep anxiety and frustration while posing salient political questions about local identity. furthermore, even after a global economic crisis, spending slashes have not been uniform. for example, despite its own flirtations with austerity, the united kingdom experienced a percent surge of nationwide investment in sports by the government in (roan ). under what conditions do voters support (or oppose) tax dollars being devoted to sports? “never—you can use caps”: cultural appropriation in sports in the united states, debates about cultural appropriation have proliferated both on and off the field. in , a yale faculty member criticized a university email encouraging students not to wear “culturally unaware and insensitive” halloween costumes as an affront to free expression (stack ). while the email met broad condemnation, the response inspired backlash of its own. concurrent with the protests, black football players at the university of missouri threatened to boycott games if the university’s president did not resign following alleged inaction after a string of racially charged incidents. the understudied nexus of sports and politics controversies over cultural appropriation have become ubiquitous in sports. critics, for example, denounce the washington redskins for their name and merchandise, which they say infantilizes and disrespects american indians. other teams—such as the kansas city chiefs, chicago blackhawks, atlanta braves, and cleveland indians—are also excoriated for their names, caricatured mascots, and choreographed fan celebrations. the offense taken has even garnered the attention of the u.s. congress. in , senators signed a letter to the redskins, urging the team to change its name (brady ). for his part, redskins owner daniel snyder views the term as one of “honor and respect” and has pledged to “never change the name. it’s that simple. never—you can use caps” (brady ). the ncaa banned american indian mascots in (it allows some schools to keep using mascot names that maintain ties with the tribes they represent, such as the florida state seminoles). yet the inflexibility of pro sports teams may be entrenched by the rise of “anti-politically-correct” rhetoric. why do some teams double down on their culturally contentious names, while others bow to pressure? “we’re blessed to get a free education”: amateurism and the (semi-pro?) student-athlete particularly in the “mega-money” sports of american football and basketball, scandals around college players receiving illicit kickbacks—from university of southern california standout reggie bush to the ouster of ohio state football coach jim tressel—have sparked political controversy. while sought-after coaches such as michigan football’s jim harbaugh and duke basketball’s mike krzyzewski make annual salaries of $ m and $ m, respectively, ncaa see http://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/salaries/ and http://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/salaries/mens- basketball/coach/ http://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/salaries/ http://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/salaries/mens-basketball/coach/ http://sports.usatoday.com/ncaa/salaries/mens-basketball/coach/ the understudied nexus of sports and politics athletes cannot earn money selling memorabilia and do not receive royalties from video-game companies that use their likenesses. prescriptions range from a stipend-system to an open-bidding process modeled after free agency, but most include payment for athletes—which was similarly sought by football players at northwestern university who tried (and failed) to unionize. still, compensation has met criticism by those who say it would eliminate “amateurism”; those who say it would be logistically impossible outside certain sports; and those, including former florida state heisman trophy winner jameis winston, who say, “we’re blessed to get a free education…. and that’s enough for me” (sherman ). this claim rests, of course, on the dubious assumption that most division i athletes receive an adequate education. for example, the university of north carolina’s recent basketball titles have been marred by revelations of academic fraud—a hardly surprising event when many athletes see their time in college as a necessary, but disagreeable, middle-step to pro stardom. these sagas raise questions about the politics of attaching de facto semi-pro sports teams to campuses. what initially led to this curious symbiosis, and what political variables will ultimately sustain (or unravel) it? sports as a window into broader questions in politics probing the nexus of politics and sports is worthwhile in and of itself. yet it is also useful for another reason: to gain insights into broader topics in the discipline. below, we look at several of the most prominent subjects in political science that connect closely to sports. these topics are at the heart of extensive attention in the discipline, and—collectively—span a range of subfields. we spotlight them to illustrate how political scientists can analyze classic questions of interest within the context of sports. the understudied nexus of sports and politics social capital since robert putnam’s ( ) landmark book bowling alone triggered an avalanche of studies on the topic, political scientists have debated both the origins and consequences of social capital (baron, field, and schuller ; dasgupta and serageldin ; lin ). even in ultra- polarized electorates, sports often display an uncanny ability to unite people together. as washington post columnist e.j. dionne has remarked, “[s]ports, like so many other voluntary activities, creates connections across political lines. all americans who are rooting for the red sox in the playoffs are my friends this month, no matter what their ideology” (quoted in ulaby ). as with partisanship, sports can also connect citizens of disparate economic backgrounds, occupations, races, and religions. because fan bases cluster geographically, sports may promote goodwill within communities, not unlike schools, churches, and volunteer clubs. as tony pulis, head coach of west bromwich albion (an english football team) has noted, “[a] football club is part of the community…..i think the bond between the football team and the community is everything….we win together, we lose together, and...there’s no other way of doing it.” this flipside, of course, is that sports can also divide opposing fans by perpetuating “in- group” / “out-group” distinctions (greene ; haidt ). these differences reflect both the positives and negatives of social capital. “bridging” social capital confers advantages when trust and reciprocity orient people across groups toward a common goal. “bonding” social capital, however, can yield disadvantages when these factors are confined exclusively to members within from the transcription of “part one | tony pulis’ first interview as head coach of west bromwich albion.” accessed at https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyht frk_v https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=qyht frk_v the understudied nexus of sports and politics groups (levitte ; woolcock and narayan ). when do sports unite people versus tear them apart? what lessons does this portend for healing (or exacerbating) larger political divisions? political empowerment just as karl marx called religion the “opiate of the masses,” some social theorists refer to sports in the same way (bain-selbo ). sports consume energy, leaving people with less time and inclination to scrutinize politicians. a less charitable interpretation is that rulers deliberately harness sports to manipulate the masses. mit’s noam chomsky, for example, insists that sports foster “jingoist and chauvinist attitudes” (quoted in chomsky and barsamian , ). in this vein, critics of american sports culture often argue that sports events constitute propaganda machines through the promotion of “hyper-nationalistic” displays (doolittle ; barron-lopez and waldron ). according to some experts, this culture can draw people toward unthinking nationalism, instilling a shared belief of their society’s superiority. as one scholar writes, “[w]hen ardent nationalists convince themselves that a highly arbitrary conglomeration of tens of millions of human beings is somehow biologically or socially ‘real’ and deeply consequential enough to give up their lives and shed the blood of those associated with other nations—you can bet that something deep in the human psyche is being touched. sports fans may simply be the comic sidekicks of nationalists” (barash ). such issues speak crucially to the political empowerment (or lack thereof) of the masses. an extensive literature in comparative politics examines how regimes take advantage of their citizenries to retain power. some rely on physical oppression (davenport ; pierskalla ), whereas others engage in clientelism, vote-buying, or propaganda (brusco, nazareno, and stokes ; kitschelt ). whether and how politicians exploit sports to bolster their power is unclear. the understudied nexus of sports and politics to the extent that governments wield sports to drum up nationalism or to reinforce their influence, how do citizens respond? when are leaders successful in their ambitions? corruption few areas of society are immune to corruption (rose-ackerman ), and sports are no exception. pete rose, for example, earned a lifetime ban from major league baseball after betting on games in the s. during the s and s, doping allegations disgraced numerous top cyclists, including seven-time tour de france winner lance armstrong. the world cup scandal—punctuated by the indictment of several top fifa officials—was a global embarrassment. as a recent new york times editorial declared, “revelations of corruption in international sports have become dismally common” (new york times ). corruption manifests in countless ways across sports. some examples involve athletes striving for a performance edge, whereas others involve office-holders using their influence for self-aggrandizement. some implicate “lone wolf” actors, whereas others comprise vast networks of criminality. like in other political domains, obtaining good data on corruption in sports is difficult precisely because so many activities go undetected. yet prominent transgressions that have been uncovered suggest that sports are a ripe setting in which to explore corruption’s causes and consequences. a crucial area of research on this front is how social norms affect whether corruption occurs, and if so, how authorities confront it. in a transnational context, some scholarship asserts that people who work in multilateral institutions absorb the norms of these places (lewis ). in the same way, global sports bodies like the international olympic committee may transmit their own norms surrounding corruption in terms of rule making and enforcement. when does the understudied nexus of sports and politics corruption thrive in sports? what safeguards exist against graft, and do they mirror those found outside of sports? regime transitions from post-colonial india to the cold war, “nation-building” in iraq to the arab spring, democratization has long been one of the most salient—and hotly contested—topics in international politics (geddes ). factors thought to shape regime change include (among others) economic development, colonial heritage, demography, inequality, natural resource endowments, supranational institutions, and even the backgrounds of leaders. compared to these variables, the idea of sports fostering regime transitions might seem far-fetched. but this does not appear to be the case. hosting global sports events may be one mechanism for regime change. on one hand, autocrats can use these events to line their pockets and to fortify their reputations. on the other hand, the global spotlight shone on nondemocracies may delegitimize tyrants and limit their ability to repress. some experts, for instance, contend that the seoul olympics destabilized chun doo hwan’s dictatorship by supplying political cover for pro-democracy reformers. citizens protested without fear of reprisal, knowing that the state would not respond with the world watching (johnson ). which sports people play may also shape regime types. for instance, “horizontal” sports like soccer—marked by egalitarian participation—may strengthen a nation’s “civic culture,” making democracy more likely (christesen ). an analogy can be drawn to “horizontal” and “vertical” religions. scholarship, for example, shows that protestantism promotes democracy more than catholicism because the former is more horizontal (i.e., democratic) in its decision making, the understudied nexus of sports and politics whereas the latter is more vertical (i.e., authoritarian) in its papal hierarchy (woodberry and shah ). when do sports reinforce democracy? when do they undermine it? social movements social movements are on the rise across much of the world. in the united states, for example, the black lives matter, anti-wall street, and tea party protests rank among the nation’s most important recent developments. sports have a long history of contributing to such campaigns. for example, the so-called “black power salute” by athletes john carlos and tommie smith at the olympics remains one of the most emblematic images in sports history. more recently, basketball stars like lebron james have been spotted with “i can’t breathe” t-shirts, a symbol of solidarity with black lives matter. against this backdrop, a major question is how athletes help to solve collective action problems within the context of social movements. considerable research explores how some groups successfully organize and lobby for political change (see e.g., olson ). one method is through the presence of “political entrepreneurs” who galvanize action among sympathizers (kosack ; noll ). sports figures, by dint of their celebrity, may be uniquely positioned to fulfill this role. athletes can leverage money, clout, and popularity to advocate for issues, regardless of whether they possess expertise on a topic. at the same time, other athletes either refuse to talk politics or endure criticism for doing so. basketball legend michael jordan, for instance, reputedly concealed his political views because “republicans buy sneakers, too” (vasilogambros ). athletes who speak their minds often raise the ire of the political class and upset fans. as one commentator notes, “so many times, athletes...are told to ‘stick to sports’ or ‘stay out of politics’” (mccalmont ). why do some the understudied nexus of sports and politics athletes seek leadership roles in social movements while others do not? what does this mean for understanding the motivations of political entrepreneurs? global governance global governance—as exemplified by international institutions, treaties, pacts, and other agreements—is of mounting interest in political science (finkelstein ; hughes and wilkinson ). amid a rapidly globalizing world, multilateral organizations tackle critical challenges, spanning climate change to nuclear proliferation, terrorism to monetary policy. yet as exemplified by brexit and the recent retreat toward isolationist platforms by several u.s. presidential candidates, many nations are backpedaling from supranational commitments, desiring more autonomy in policy areas like immigration and trade. in striving to ensure their legitimacy, multilateral organizations often face a battery of internal political dilemmas. these include procedural questions about who controls the policymaking process (e.g., setting the agenda and voting), mechanisms for resource allocations (e.g., collecting membership fees or subsidizing member states), and how to solve conflict between countries (e.g., mediating sovereignty disagreements or adjudicating allegations of unfair practices). all of these issues may influence the willingness of countries to join—and defer to— supranational institutions. like the united nations or the european union, many sports possess their own global or regional governing bodies. the international tennis federation (itf), the fédération internationale de football association (fifa), and the royal & ancient golf club of st. andrews (r&a) are but a few well-known examples. these organizations face many of the same political challenges as standard supranational institutions, making them prime laboratories for study. how the understudied nexus of sports and politics do global sports federations compare to traditional global governance institutions? are they gaining or declining in prominence, and why? peace and conflict even amid factors such as ethnic hatred, natural resource conflict, and inequality, sports may still play a vital role in triggering (or quelling) violence. on one hand, anecdotes exist of sports provoking conflict. for instance, the “football wars” between honduras and el salvador began after qualifying matches for the world cup brought inter-state tensions to a fever pitch (dart and bandini ). additionally, in the s, a soccer match between serbia and croatia was never played because of fighting that ensued between opposing fans. today, it is still remembered as a harbinger of the balkan wars (drezner ). on the other hand, anecdotes exist of sports mitigating violence. after helping his country qualify for the world cup in , star striker didier drogba was widely credited for ending the five-year ivorian civil war in when he implored his nation to lay down its arms (hayes ). on christmas , in the midst of world war i, british and german troops in flanders halted fighting to play an impromptu soccer match (kuper ). furthermore, so that fans could watch brazilian soccer legend pele, opposing sides in nigeria’s biafran war reached a truce in a conflict that eventually raged from to (greenwell ). one question for political scientists is whether certain chains of events are examples of causation or correlation. another question, as some anthropology work hypothesizes, is whether sports serve as an alternative outlet for bellicose tendencies or whether they actually whet the appetites of citizens for violence (sipes ). for scholars of both intra- and inter-state conflict, how sports shape violence is unclear. what are the causal pathways through which sports can spark the understudied nexus of sports and politics or check political violence? do certain sports have more conflict- or peace-inducing effects, and why? gender and women’s issues with scholars paying increased attention to the benefits of diversity and inclusion in an array of environments, questions of women’s rights have assumed a pivotal position in political science (carroll ; goren ; krook and childs ). trends in feminism, how women perceive their roles in society, and how their preferences translate into social change have become significant debates in the field. although many nations have made large strides in expanding opportunities for females, the “glass ceiling” still looms large in many contexts—even more so after hillary clinton’s surprise loss in the u.s. presidential election. one area that reflects this mix of both progress and room for improvement is sports. in the united states, title ix, signed into law by president richard nixon more than years ago, has played a tremendous role in closing gender gaps in athletic participation. the statute originally constituted a broad mandate designed to erase discrimination based on sex: “no person in the united states shall, on the basis of sex, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any education program or activity receiving federal financial assistance” (education amendments of ). advocates of title ix herald the surge in popularity among women’s sports. indeed, female participation in american collegiate athletics has risen more than twelvefold since (greenwell ). skeptics, however, point to unanticipated consequences—for example, the cutting of men’s sports programs to achieve gender parity and the financial stresses placed on schools to support undersubscribed women’s sports. what are the political consequences of equal- the understudied nexus of sports and politics opportunity laws, both in sports and other areas? what benefits (and unpredictabilities) do they present, and how do political interests respond? human rights when the u.n. general assembly approved the universal declaration of human rights nearly a half century ago, it was a watershed moment. former u.s. president bill clinton ( ), for example, once called it “one of the most important documents of the th century, indeed of human history.” yet even today, gross abuses of human rights—from human trafficking in india to the use of chemical weapons in syria—remain far too common. in response, much ink has been spilled in political science trying to determine why some countries protect human rights more than others (moravcsik ; risse, ropp, and sikkink ). global sports bodies possess tremendous leverage to advance human rights. major sporting events can be a huge boon for national economies, whereas boycotts by international federations can leave countries empty-handed. unfortunately, even as many sports officials pay lip service to human rights, their actions can fall short. as journalist ken shulman ( ) pointed out, “[i]t’s really a checkered record. for every positive step that something like the international olympic committee and fifa take, they do something really despicable and underhanded.” for example, in a defiant stance against apartheid, the ioc banned south africa from the olympic games in tokyo in . yet years later, it allowed russia to host the olympics, which according to human rights watch ( ), engages in a litany of human rights violations, including “[f]orced evictions,” “[m]igrant worker abuses,” “[p]ress and civil society crackdown,” and “[a]nti-lgbt discrimination.” why do global sports federations award major events to some human rights violators but not others? are they purely profit-motivated, or are other calculations at play? the understudied nexus of sports and politics public policy making governments—at the local, provincial, and national levels—are often intimately involved in sports policy making. most visibly, such policies involve major investments in sports stadiums and infrastructure. yet state purview can also extend into other realms, such as regulation, taxation, court battles, television contracts, collective bargaining, and engaging in public-private partnerships with sports organizations. not unlike other policy areas—such as education, the environment, or healthcare—politics plays a key role in who wins (and loses) from policies surrounding sports. one approach to understanding policy formation in sports is to adapt the classic “iron triangle” model from american politics. here, policy formulation is a function of executive bureaucracies, congressional committees, and interest groups, which collectively work to each other’s benefit (but not necessarily the general public’s) (adams ; briody ; heclo ). similarly, one could imagine an “iron sports triangle” comprised of prominent actors—namely, fans, owners, and politicians—who pursue their self-interests. fans want winning teams, owners want profits, and politicians want re-election. an alternative, perhaps more nuanced, strategy could be to model sports policy making through well-known “issue networks” comprised of multiple actors, including those discussed above, but also the media, business coalitions, consultants, and the like (heclo ). sports policy making is clearly “the product of many hands.” the challenge is to decipher how actors maneuver and how political structures filter their preferences. what mix of interests and institutions yields different policy outcomes in sports? when do these outcomes align with the public good versus that of special interests? causal identification in sports the understudied nexus of sports and politics asking the right questions is essential to energizing the study of sports politics. yet equally crucial are research designs that advance causal identification. in recent decades, methodologists have underscored the importance of randomization as a fundamental tool for interpreting cause- and-effect relationships. although some research critiques randomized studies on the grounds that they are not an empirical “gold standard” (deaton ), their popularity is a testament to their benefits. fortunately, in the case of sports, randomization is built into the very dna of many questions of interest. on the field, the adage that “games aren’t played on paper” suggests the difficulty of forecasting which teams will actually win. in most sports, it is not unheard of for underdogs to beat their heavyweight rivals, and rare is a season in which the last team standing is exactly the one that most analysts predicted. off the field, many aspects of sports—such as which city will secure a new expansion team or which country will host the olympics—are also not foregone conclusions. because of their inherent unpredictability, sports present unique opportunities to gain empirical traction over political questions. other disciplines offer useful instruction on this count. when it comes to leveraging randomization on the field, for example, a recent economics study parsed the connection between a country’s wins in the world cup and its success in international trade (bayar and schaur ). the premise was that countries with heightened global visibility trade more, and winning in the world cup increases a nation’s profile. because world cup matches are not easily predicted— and outcomes should not be endogenous to trade—the games could be used to test whether countries with greater presence on the world stage indeed trade more. it is not hard to think of expressly political dynamics that one could study using similar approaches. for example, a country’s record in earning gold medals at the olympics could the understudied nexus of sports and politics exogenously improve its reputation, making it a better candidate for joining treaties or international organizations. if a public university’s football team wins the sugar bowl, perhaps its state legislature rewards the school with more public dollars because it holds greater public credibility. armed with a clean identification strategy, in which sports outcomes are plausibly exogenous, political scientists can examine countless topics. there are many ways to get creative with this approach. suppose, for example, one wants to see if sports affect partisan leanings. for example, one well-known journalist claimed that supporting a losing baseball team as a youth turned him conservative: “my friends, happily rooting for stan musial, red schoendienst and other redbirds, grew up cheerfully convinced that the world is a benign place, so...they became liberals. rooting for the cubs in the late s and early s, i became gloomy, pessimistic, morose, dyspeptic and conservative. it helped...that the cubs last won the world series in ” (associated press ). self-selection could impair a simple test of whether fans of winning teams are more likely to be liberal. supporting a losing team might turn one conservative, but conservatives might also be more likely to stick with losing teams. one solution is to exploit diachronic changes in team success: identify if fans of a team who grew up in a city before that team had success are more conservative than younger fans who grew up in the same city after that team had success. ideally, success would be due to some random shock like a new owner. the virtue of this design is that it holds most contextual factors constant. using the on-the-field randomness of sports to explore political questions does have some precedent. one recent article, for example, investigated the link between winning college football teams and the outcomes of senate, gubernatorial, and presidential elections over the period - (healy, malhotra, and mo ). the authors discovered that—even if politicians had little the understudied nexus of sports and politics or nothing to do with sports outcomes—people still rewarded incumbents for victories by voting for them at higher rates. this raises questions about what priorities are most important to voters and the issues they consider at the ballot box. political scientists can also exploit randomness off the field to gain empirical leverage into questions of interest. suppose one wants to know whether certain outside events, such as spikes in petroleum prices affecting oil-rich nations, make governments more aggressive (the economist ). this is difficult to test because foreign policy actions may be endogenous. one way to tackle this problem, however, could be to analyze how countries behave when they are unexpectedly awarded a prize such as hosting the olympics, which is frequently the result of a highly idiosyncratic selection process. anecdotal evidence indeed indicates that this may embolden countries to become more assertive in their foreign policies. for instance, as russia hosted the winter olympics in sochi in , president vladimir putin proceeded to flex his nationalistic muscles. according to some reports, his actions in crimea suggested a country looking to extend its hard power and to regain the former glory of the u.s.s.r. a large-n empirical strategy—analyzing both countries chosen to host major sports tournaments and those left out—could shed light on whether this is a common phenomenon. again, some precedent exists for using the randomness of sports off the field to test political theories. for example, a recent article hypothesized that an exogenous shock such as hosting the olympics could help to overcome public policy stalemates. using interpretive analysis, the study examined the case of the london olympics and paralympics. it showed that the uk’s department for culture media and sport and visit britain developed beneficial alliances so as to the understudied nexus of sports and politics demonstrate positive impacts on tourism deriving from the nearly £ . billion in state investments devoted to the games (weed, stephens, and bull ). even if one is skeptical that country selection for global sports events is truly random, there may still be ways to improve causal identification. for instance, in the world cup study mentioned earlier, the authors actually argue that whether a country is chosen to host a mega-sports event may be endogenous to trade (bayer and schaur ). the study, however, proposes a workaround. capitalizing on fifa’s rotation policy of not hosting back-to-back world cups on the same continent, the authors use how far geographically an exporter is from the previous world cup’s host as an instrumental variable to preempt selection challenges. the empirical strategies discussed above are all quasi-experimental. of course, political scientists can also devise their own randomized experiments bearing on sports. this can be particularly useful when “unobservables” would otherwise confound causation. want to know if a candidate wearing a blue jays hat is more likely to get elected in toronto? this can be simulated. want to know if citizens view a prime minister who plays golf as out-of-touch and elitist? this can be tested. the array of questions that political scientists can pose with randomized experiments is seemingly infinite in sports. in a recent book entitled the numbers game: why everything you know about soccer is wrong, the author concludes that upwards of percent of every soccer match is determined by randomness (anderson ). certainly, better and worse teams exist in any league, and the more games team play, the more talent prevails. yet perhaps more than we recognize, sports outcomes are decidedly random, not just on the field, but off it, as well. to the extent that political scientists can capitalize on this fact, not only will studies of sports be more common, but their findings more convincing. the understudied nexus of sports and politics conclusion in contemplating the clear bond between politics and sports, journalist david zirin ( , xii) arguably said it best: the problem with...everyone who tries to segregate these two worlds [of politics and sports] is that they are trafficking in myth. they want us to believe that sports and politics together are as painful a mash-up as mitt romney getting cornrows or hillary clinton cutting a salsa album. it is certainly easy to understand why this is so readily accepted. many of us watch espn to forget at all costs what they are doing on c-span. sports are indeed an escape. they offer a welcome, if brief, respite from everyday life. terrorist plots may be afloat, natural disasters may be brewing, and poverty may be ravaging whole nations. yet even in these somber times, people still take comfort in sports. “just play. have fun. enjoy the game,” implored michael jordan (quoted in thomas , ). yet if “sports is human life in microcosm,” as famed journalist howard cossell observed (quoted in bloom , ), then sports are much more than an escape; they are part and parcel of who we are. sports, deeply human as they are, cannot elude the unmistakable pull of politics. it is unfortunate, therefore, that political science has neglected sports. like a slowly meandering changeup in baseball, sports have barely registered on the discipline’s radar gun. unlike other fields—economics, business, and the law—political scientists have not made sports a centerpiece of investigation. whether because sports are considered too unserious, the lack of data on sports politics, the perceived americanist bias of sports, or the notion that sports are impossible to study systematically, sports have been largely excluded from political science. sports, of course, are not the only form of entertainment that play a major role in our society, but which political scientists oddly neglect. movies, television, music, art, and the like are all inherently political—and understudied. consider paul mccartney speaking out for environmentalism, bono lecturing on debt relief in africa, or george clooney complaining about the understudied nexus of sports and politics the corrupting influence of money in politics. “hollywood-types” supposedly pull the purse strings of presidential candidates, while multimedia conglomerates lobby aggressively for their own interests. sports, however, are often uniquely positioned to bring out the best and worst of our political tendencies. one need look no further than the olympics in rio to see why. there, on the world’s greatest sports stage, a judo athlete from egypt refused to shake hands with his israeli competitor, a disturbing reminder of the divisiveness plaguing the middle east. meanwhile, the first-ever olympic “refugee team” constituted a hopeful symbol of global collaboration. it is hard to see how scholars could not be drawn to such topics that cut to our most primal political instincts. ultimately, no shortage of stories exist interlacing politics and sports. making sense of these anecdotes—and deriving generalizable trends from them—should be a priority for political science. vince lombardi, the legendary green bay packers football coach, insisted that “he never lost a game—it’s just that he sometimes ran out of time” (kindall and winkin , ). there is no game clock for tackling new and important topics in political science. yet this does not mean that we should not keep score. studying sports politics does not require a hail mary pass—just a good game plan, and a bit of effort. about the authors thomas gift is a lecturer (assistant professor) of political science at university college london. previously, he was a postdoctoral research fellow at the harvard kennedy school. his writings have been published in political behavior, journal of conflict resolution, annual review of political science, education next, and world economy. gift received his ba from washington and lee university and his ma and phd in political science from duke university. the understudied nexus of sports and politics andrew miner is a rising senior at harvard university studying government and economics. he is writing his senior thesis on the role of state capitalism in the steel and coal industries in china- u.s. and india-u.s. relations. miner has conducted policy research at the center for american progress and the american enterprise institute. he was the men’s wendy’s high school heisman national winner. references adams, gordon. . the politics of defense contracting: the iron triangle. piscataway, nj: transaction publishers. allison, lincoln. . the global politics of sport: the role of global institutions in sport. london: routledge. anderson, chris. . the numbers game: why everything you know 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/social-capital-implications-for-development-theory-research-and-policy http://documents.worldbank.org/curated/en/ /social-capital-implications-for-development-theory-research-and-policy / / the #othellosyllabus: twitter as play | hybrid pedagogy https://hybridpedagogy.org/othellosyllabus-twitter-as-play/ / · · · two guerrilla movements have disrupted digital humanities pedagogy in the past decade: the event syllabus, and the appropriation of twitter as a composition genre. the event syllabus typically presents as a web-based archive of articles that help the public both instruct themselves about racialized violence and provides resources to teach a kind of cultural competency in the classroom from a speci�c case. typically these begin with a call for public education through twitter with hashtags such as #fergusonsyllabus, #orlandosyllabus or #pulsesyllabus, and #charlestonsyllabus, the latter of which is now an edited collection from the university of georgia press. in our course, “#othellosyllabus: cyprus, ferguson, forest grove,” freshmen employed the rhetoric of hashtag activism to engage with critical race theory across a spectrum of texts, including a documentary on the black lives matter (blm) movement, william shakespeare’s othello, and jordan peele’s get out. in weekly twessays, posting responses during community lectures, and in devising a twitter play, the platform’s paradoxical mix of anonymity and very public writing worked to develop in students a cultural competency. the �rst-year seminar (or fys) curriculum offers an ideal platform to engage public debates through digital tools. at paci�c university each section is provided an upper-class student to mentor and lead classes themselves. our version of the course, supported by student mentor sienna ballou (a senior majoring in english literature with minors in spanish and dance), was inspired by several events the previous academic year including the presidential election which hit undocumented peers hard, followed shortly by local police reports of a pick-up truck trolling campus with a sign reading “black lives don’t matter.” then the trimet attack on two young women of color happened in portland. as a shakespearean, there is an added moral obligation to consistently engage with the politics of identity from which one might otherwise easily hide intellectually behind the deadest, whitest guy on the block. from this self-conscious positionality, combined with imperative social events, #othellosyllabus was born. the #othellosyllabus: twitter as play elizabeth tavares sienna ballou september twitter essay https://hybridpedagogy.org/ https://sociologistsforjustice.org/ferguson-syllabus/ https://docs.google.com/document/d/ f -gismgvkq xokbmcep h f jeafcbqcjhxshhdlem/edit# https://ugapress.org/book/ /charleston-syllabus/ https://sc.edu/about/offices_and_divisions/national_resource_center/index.php https://www.kgw.com/article/news/local/portland-max-attack-what-we-know/ - https://hybridpedagogy.org/author/elizabeth-tavares/ https://hybridpedagogy.org/author/sienna-ballou/ https://hybridpedagogy.org/tag/twitter-essay/ / / the #othellosyllabus: twitter as play | hybrid pedagogy https://hybridpedagogy.org/othellosyllabus-twitter-as-play/ / through an articulation and re�ection of the activities that used twitter speci�cally to engage with issues of race in the course, this medium did, in fact, productively engage the complexity of a range of issues regarding race and digital activism. in the fall of , we opened our �rst-year seminar course with this sketch, “othello tis my shite,” from a episode of the popular comedy show key and peele. the sketch is more historically accurate than perhaps the show writers realized: of the nearly �ve hundred identi�able people of color living in tudor england, black people were present in almost every area of london and its suburbs at some point between and . theatre historian imtiaz habib has shown that the black presence can be “documented in ninety percent of the neighborhoods dominated by the theatre industry” which critics now most closely associate with shakespeare ( ). not only did the play-makers of renaissance theatre live alongside people of color, but those neighbors very likely attended �rst performances of othello as well as the two dozen other documented plays featuring characters of color—�gures from all over the mediterranean world. aside from offering a gateway for cultural context, the sketch establishes for students that it is okay to playfully embrace the complexities of shakespeare’s language. at the same time, the sketch makes clear that in order to develop social equality, as paul gorski and katy swalwell argue, it is necessary to stage stories that feature people of color, not just talk about their inequity initial tweets composed while watching a documentary on the black lives matter movement in order to practice critical listening skills. hashtags in the room our course experimented with the use of twitter both in and out of the classroom, primarily of�oading the practice of critical reading and evidence selection onto that platform. enabling a wider range of participation amongst the students, in one-on-one conferences students routinely mentioned feeling safer participating in this way due to a perceived sense of anonymity in which to deal with an ideologically and emotionally dif�cult topic. their words could be carefully chosen in a small extract rather than formulated in the huff and speed of verbal discussion. for example, the initial unit of the course was shaped around the questions of how forms of dichotomous rhetoric and argumentation undermine a community’s ability to communicate and collectivize. to set up this question as well as get students comfortable with using twitter in the classroom, we watched the vpro backlight series documentary on the blm movement, which has its origins in the seattle theatre scene. rather than take notes, students pulled out their phones to post at least three tweets with the course hashtag #othellosy during and in response to questions posed by the documentary. it took about twenty minutes before an outgoing music major posted an informational question about treyvon martin. more questions began to be posted, which evolved into incisive quotations from the �lm carefully composed for clarity and brevity. by the end of the session, students were actively sharing their own arguments in response to the �lm, and so extending the discussion beyond its initial conditions. elizabeth e. tavares @elizetavares how do bodies get used—for something? against someone?—in the play? use an emoji + short quotation. make every character count. #othellosy � am · sep , https://vimeo.com/channels/keypeele/ https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/b f-svzd kc?hl=en https://topdocumentaryfilms.com/black-lives-matter-vpro/ https://twitter.com/hashtag/othellosy ?src=hash https://twitter.com/elizetavares?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/elizetavares?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/elizetavares/status/ ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/hashtag/othellosy ?src=hashtag_click https://twitter.com/elizetavares/status/ ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://help.twitter.com/en/twitter-for-websites-ads-info-and-privacy / / the #othellosyllabus: twitter as play | hybrid pedagogy https://hybridpedagogy.org/othellosyllabus-twitter-as-play/ / an example twessay prompt that invited the use of emojis as employed by handles like @emojidickinson. twessay responses that practice both careful selection of evidence as well as manipulating formal constraints to create new meaning with emojis. after engaging one another through twitter in the classroom, the students evolved these skills in their homework. following the excellent work by jesse stommel and donna alexander, students created “twessays” to both strengthen concisions and develop arguable claims (as opposed to passive summary). digital humanist david crystal has demonstrated that “all the popular beliefs about [short-form digital writing] are wrong, or at least debatable. its graphic distinctiveness is not a totally new phenomenon. nor is its use restricted to the young generation. there is increasing evidence that it helps rather than hinders literacy” ( ). the twessay prompt was particularly successful in encouraging the production of a concrete idea with speci�c evidence because it asked for a very particular kind of observation. sienna used one-on-one mentoring to encourage students to form questions about and from all available writing (including the tweets) so they could identify how textual evidence in�uenced these ideas. in one end-of-week discussion, we both wondered what kind of essays might be produced from students stringing together twitter prompts as topic sentences. this is not to say that they did not also write formal essays, but in some ways the effectiveness of twitter to deal with the kinds of exigencies that racialized public activism asks makes sense: these are new and newly dif�cult questions, so perhaps they require new and newly organized mediums. the peer-mentor helped set the tone with a carefully crafted twessay. kylie ✌ ('ω'✌ ) @aalohilanii for 'twas that that gave away my . a liberal ! the of old gave . #othellosy � am · sep , see kylie ✌ ('ω'✌ ) s̓ other tweets dustin @fysd_gapusan "but i will wear my upon my sleeve for daws to peck at: am not what i am." #othellosy � pm · sep , from forest grove, or cal mccarthy @caldmccarthy #othellosy iago's comments, such as "barbary horse", show othello as an aminal, something less than human. it can bias others' perceptions � pm · sep , ethan @doan iago's use of "anthropophagi" when he is https://twitter.com/emojidickinson?lang=en http://techstyle.lmc.gatech.edu/feed-texting-twitter-and-the-student- - / http://www.digitalpedagogylab.com/hybridped/twessays-and-composition-in-the-digital-age/ https://global.oup.com/academic/product/txtng- https://docs.google.com/document/d/e/ pacx- vrj odkhcldtfnnhld _usl wrzmlg bvqjb msrajkao qlyafyr-yo x h yw wlf x ahk mt/pub https://help.twitter.com/en/twitter-for-websites-ads-info-and-privacy https://twitter.com/intent/like?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f&tweet_id= https://twitter.com/elizetavares?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% 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ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f&tweet_id= https://twitter.com/aalohilanii?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/fysd_gapusan?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/fysd_gapusan?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/fysd_gapusan/status/ ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/hashtag/othellosy ?src=hashtag_click https://twitter.com/fysd_gapusan/status/ ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/places/beedf d e b ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://help.twitter.com/en/twitter-for-websites-ads-info-and-privacy https://twitter.com/intent/like?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f&tweet_id= https://twitter.com/fysd_gapusan?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/caldmccarthy?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/caldmccarthy?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/caldmccarthy/status/ ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/hashtag/othellosy ?src=hashtag_click https://twitter.com/caldmccarthy/status/ ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://help.twitter.com/en/twitter-for-websites-ads-info-and-privacy https://twitter.com/intent/like?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f&tweet_id= https://twitter.com/caldmccarthy?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/doan ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/doan ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/doan /status/ ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f / / the #othellosyllabus: twitter as play | hybrid pedagogy https://hybridpedagogy.org/othellosyllabus-twitter-as-play/ / students follow the lead of their mentor with their own responses to a weekly twessay. the strawberry hydro�ask getting students to take ownership over rather than reject out of hand very old words is dif�cult. in this forum, twitter offered a useful avenue through which to apply devising techniques from the theatre industry in the classroom. generally, devising activities ask participants to test all the available ways of performing a particular scene as licensed by the text with their bodies. in literary studies, it is known as polysemy: the simultaneous presence of multiple, equally viable readings of a literary text. we experimented with this in othello and several professional adaptations of the story, including red velvet, a new play about the life of ira aldridge, the �rst person of color to play that eponymous role in . (the question of blackface performance and othello in particular is still very live as evidenced by blogger michelle villemaire’s photo-essay campaign, “my adventures correcting yellowface.”) these devising exercises were crucial in order for students to fully consider the stakes of the cinema and alternate endings of the �nal text of the course, the academy award-winning get out. (watch the original and alternate here.) discussion of the two endings, how they engage the performance history of othello and the ways in which they make audiences aware of their own biases surrounding police brutality, enabled students to articulate the extent to which performance choices matter — particularly when the stakes of the adaptation have purchase on issues of inclusion. with the royal shakespeare company twitter play productions such tweet sorrow ( ) and a midsummer night’s dreaming ( ) as examples, for their �nal collaborative project the students developed #othelloscrane, a modern retelling inspired by the town of othello, washington, a little less than �ve hours from their forest grove campus. located in the heart of the columbia basin, othello is home to the largest migration of sandhill cranes in the western hemisphere; thirty-�ve thousand of the birds, white and black with red face markings, return to othello from alaska every march. unsettled by the thought that there was a town named othello is a state founded on premises of exclusion of peoples of color and that remained segregated until late into the s, the birds served as a poetic conceit and coordinating metaphor for their production. dramaturgy and devising activities in class facilitated students determining the major “beats” or plot elements that could not be left out in order for the basic story to hold together. students used their own handles to perform different roles in each act over a �ve class-day period, or two weeks; most of the actual activity of performance took place over the course of the day outside of class time. the play famously opens with two men shouting racial epithets to desdemona’s father in the wee hours of the night; the students started their play at roughly one in the morning to mimic that temporality which a traditional play could never do. they also had to make choices about props and how to translate early modern materials into modern ones. particularly memorable was the strawberry stitched handkerchief that travels between characters, charting desdemona’s chastity or presumed lack thereof. instead, emulating the cultural speci�city of the paci�c northwest, students reimagined it as a hydro-�ask decked with strawberry stickers. students modi�ed their twitter pro�les, from images to the text of their pro�le description, to emulate characters. left: iago; right: othello. the students were especially innovative in three areas, employing all of their knowledge about the intersectional complexities of the play. informed by critical race theory frameworks learned in class earlier in the semester, they �rst manipulated their twitter pro�les to emulate the emotional place of a speci�c character in a speci�c act in the play, including changing their display name, pro�le, and background images. having developed g p p g discussing othello's future children makes the reader think that they will be inhuman #othellosy � pm · sep , https://youtu.be/oy fabfm_w https://www.homemademimi.com/get-picture-adventures-correcting-yellowface/ https://www.imdb.com/title/tt / https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sshckbit bo https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jumgziowst http://www.bleysmaynard.net/suchtweet/ https://youtu.be/m ixh_icbek https://wakelet.com/wake/c c cc- e - - eac- d ffca https://www.othellosandhillcranefestival.org/ https://www.google.com/books/edition/_/evmuhs o tec?hl=en https://twitter.com/hashtag/othellosy ?src=hashtag_click https://twitter.com/doan /status/ ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://help.twitter.com/en/twitter-for-websites-ads-info-and-privacy https://twitter.com/intent/like?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f&tweet_id= https://twitter.com/doan ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f / / the #othellosyllabus: twitter as play | hybrid pedagogy https://hybridpedagogy.org/othellosyllabus-twitter-as-play/ / skills in composing short statements where form and function reinforce a uni�ed idea, these visual elements evolved over the course of the day a student was performing a role to take on more nuance and topicality. using kim f. hall’s scholarship on the intersection of race and beauty in literature and visual culture of the renaissance, students could then articulate how they used the palette of the pro�le to negotiate their own “fear of losing privilege” ( ). we then discussed strategies they chose to indicate a speci�c character’s racial or gendered privileges and what evidence from the playtext justi�ed their choice. dms were used to represent the effects of the aside, a renaissance staging tactic. a unique problem to adapting shakespeare to twitter as opposed to, say, frankenstein or the picture of dorian gray was the need to replicate asides. the technique has a number of bene�ts, including cultivating a sense of privilege in audiences — that they have access to special knowledge — as well as interrogating power dynamics inherent to public and private speech. much of the power behind iago’s choices is negotiated through asides, but how to replicate them in the ostensibly one-dimensional linearity of twitter? in a second stroke of inspiration, students used twitter’s dm feature. initially they had been messaging one another to strategize actions before posting the of�cial tweets. this gave them the idea to orchestrate a private conversation between characters in the dm window, taking a screenshot of this private conversation between characters, and posting the images to the public twitter thread to replicate the aside. in doing so, they maintained the visual cues that would mark this conversation as private, and yet make it public to the audience following along with the live twitter thread. rather than literally depict desdemona being struck, students decided to imply the action with a well-timed placement of the #metoo hashtag that was trending on social media in the wake of several celebrities being accused of sexual harassment. staged violence relies on physicality, which twitter lacks. no student wanted an image of themselves aping violence on the internet regardless of whether it was a performance. professional productions have historically struggled with this ethical crux; as erin sullivan has argued, “the more life- like the production became, the more it moved away from the suspended ethics of �ctional art and towards the codes of conduct expected, if not always realised, in the shared public sphere” ( ). at one point in the play, othello in his frustration and on the verge of another epileptic �t, not only slaps desdemona but does so in a very public way that undermines his political authority as general of the venetian army. after much deliberation, a brilliant solution emerged in discussion: students employed the #metoo hashtag, only just then blossoming online in late fall of , to suggest the violence without visualizing the action. jackie marchioro @marchiorojackie iago: shits about to go down #othelloscrane � pm · nov , see jackie marchioro s̓ other tweets hannah thornburg @han_thornburg des: #metoo #othelloscrane � pm · nov , see hannah thornburg s̓ other tweets https://www.jstor.org/stable/ https://shelleysfrankenstein.wordpress.com/frankenstein-a-public-literary-twitter-role-play-on-twitter/ https://litilluminations.wordpress.com/ / / /a-public-literary-twitter-role-play-oscar-wildes-the-picture-of-dorian-gray/ https://doi.org/ . / . . https://twitter.com/hashtag/metoo?src=hash https://twitter.com/marchiorojackie?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/marchiorojackie?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/marchiorojackie/status/ ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/hashtag/othelloscrane?src=hashtag_click https://twitter.com/marchiorojackie/status/ /photo/ ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/marchiorojackie/status/ /photo/ ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/marchiorojackie/status/ ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://help.twitter.com/en/twitter-for-websites-ads-info-and-privacy https://twitter.com/intent/like?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f&tweet_id= https://twitter.com/marchiorojackie?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/han_thornburg?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/han_thornburg?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/han_thornburg/status/ ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://twitter.com/hashtag/metoo?src=hashtag_click https://twitter.com/hashtag/othelloscrane?src=hashtag_click https://twitter.com/han_thornburg/status/ ?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f https://help.twitter.com/en/twitter-for-websites-ads-info-and-privacy https://twitter.com/intent/like?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f&tweet_id= https://twitter.com/han_thornburg?ref_src=twsrc% etfw% ctwcamp% etweetembed% ctwterm% e % ctwgr% e&ref_url=https% a% f% fhybridpedagogy.org% fothellosyllabus-twitter-as-play% f / / the #othellosyllabus: twitter as play | hybrid pedagogy https://hybridpedagogy.org/othellosyllabus-twitter-as-play/ / students used a color-�ltering app to represent the multiple deaths at the end of the play symbolically. the �nal mass death scene at the end of the play, where �ve characters die, four in the same room, posed similar problems. sienna worked with the students to devise a series of gestures and postures that would emulate the events, and then students used colorized photo apps on their phones to select only one color to present. in trying to �gure out how to resolve the play, the students came up with an ingenious choice that employed the event syllabus genre, intervened in the ongoing #metoo movement, and made clear the intersectionality of race and gender that was and has always been at stake in the resolution to the play. the cast analyzed and employed the rhetoric of hashtag activism to compose their own as an act of �nality to the play, making clear the intersectionality between violence against women and violence against people of color. the other side of the handle in order to fully merge the classroom and twitter spheres—and by extension, the concepts learned in the course with life outside the course— #othelloscrane needed an audience. as a �nal act of dissemination, the students participated in an end-of-term showcase wherein all the fys course sections shared some kind of project. in the spirit of their play, rather than be tethered to a table or trifold, they made signs that read “ask me about #othelloscrane.” moving between the other stationary presentations, they used pre-arranged, abbreviated scripts to share the play with / / the #othellosyllabus: twitter as play | hybrid pedagogy https://hybridpedagogy.org/othellosyllabus-twitter-as-play/ / their peers, discuss the experience of performing in it, and process what they learned about the intersection between gendered and racialized internal dominance. because they could direct their peers to the hashtag, the play immediately traveled onto other phones and computers. the dissemination verbally and digitally was immediate and the click-rate hit more than six hundred individual users that day. families, scholars, and other students around the country were checking in as well. the play has now been archived online, and you can read it with wakelet. students kylie wong and dana mccarthy share their twitter play with a showcase attendee. in , the context of oregon’s overt whiteness as a state, recent racially-charged violence in the area, and its particular history of settler colonialism and racial expulsion merited, for us, the necessity of engaging with a seminal text of cultural difference. engaging with any other topic within the sphere of identity politics seemed ideologically, pedagogically, and personally beside the point. while the performance of the play made clear the intersectional stakes pitting race against gender in othello, its dissemination likewise made clear intersectional stakes pitting race against class. we could not have anticipated that such questions seem newly urgent in the wake of the summer of , marked by a dramatic re- engagement with racialized police brutality and the “digital divide” driven, in part, by the novel coronavirus pandemic. as teachers and institutions at all levels race to �nd ways to meet students where they are in terms academic and technologic, instruments such as the twessay and twitter play offer new and newly organized mediums by which students can formulate and particularize questions only newly dif�cult but certainly not new. · · · ·   published in twitter essay photo credit: jan baborák on unsplash reviewer: rebecca halpern reviewer: maha bali / ���� ��� reviewer: chris friend share https://wke.lt/w/s/lannl https://ulpdx.org/advocacy-and-public-policy/publication_archive/state-of-black-oregon- /view-state-of-black-oregon-document/ https://www.pewsocialtrends.org/ / / /amid-protests-majorities-across-racial-and-ethnic-groups-express-support-for-the-black-lives-matter-movement/ https://cs.stanford.edu/people/eroberts/cs /projects/digital-divide/start.html https://hybridpedagogy.org/double-open-peer-review/ https://hybridpedagogy.org/bitmoji-classroom/ https://hybridpedagogy.org/tag/twitter-essay/ https://hybridpedagogy.org/tag/photo-credit-jan-baborak-on-unsplash/ https://hybridpedagogy.org/tag/reviewer-rebecca-halpern/ https://hybridpedagogy.org/tag/reviewer-maha-bali-mh-bly/ https://hybridpedagogy.org/tag/reviewer-chris-friend/ https://twitter.com/share?text=the% % othellosyllabus% a% twitter% as% play&url=https://hybridpedagogy.org/othellosyllabus-twitter-as-play/ https://www.facebook.com/sharer/sharer.php?u=https://hybridpedagogy.org/othellosyllabus-twitter-as-play/ / / the #othellosyllabus: twitter as play | hybrid pedagogy https://hybridpedagogy.org/othellosyllabus-twitter-as-play/ / get the latest posts delivered right to your inbox. type your email... double-open peer review: shaping the teaching community hybrid pedagogy uses double-open peer review, strategically crafting teaching communities by pairing authors and reviewers with intention. the menagerie, myths and merits of the bitmoji classroom educators don’t have to forfeit fun for quality online learning, but they do need to build authentic learning when using digital simulation tools. © – hybrid pedagogy · · issn - https://hybridpedagogy.org/double-open-peer-review/ https://hybridpedagogy.org/bitmoji-classroom/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / http://lccn.loc.gov/ https://twitter.com/hybridped https://feedly.com/i/subscription/feed/https://hybridpedagogy.org/othellosyllabus-twitter-as-play/rss/ / / the #othellosyllabus: twitter as play | hybrid pedagogy https://hybridpedagogy.org/othellosyllabus-twitter-as-play/ / emerald_edi_edi .. culturally sustaining pedagogy in higher education: teaching so that black lives matter courtney e. cole communication program, school of business and communication, regis college, weston, massachusetts, usa abstract purpose – the purpose of this paper is to show how the principles of black lives matter can be used to enact a culturally sustaining pedagogy (csp) in higher education settings, particularly in small colleges that serve significant populations of students who are underrepresented in higher education. design/methodology/approach – drawing on examples from college courses in media and society, organizational communication, and interpersonal communication, the case study shows application of the principles of black lives matter in the college classroom at two different institutions in the urban northeast usa, where the majority of the students are young people of color and/or first-generation college students. findings – the paper shows how founding principles of black lives matter, particularly diversity, intersectionality, loving engagement, and empathy, can be used to guide concrete pedagogical practices. it provides examples of how to use black lives matter as a framework to enhance and improve college teaching to make it more diverse and inclusive. research limitations/implications – this case study is based on the author’s experiences teaching at two majority-minority colleges in greater boston, massachusetts, usa. this paper is not the result of a systematic research study. practical implications – this paper has significant implications for how to enact csp in higher education settings. this paper is valuable to those looking for specific strategies to include more diverse and inclusive teaching strategies. this research also shows both the utility and impact of black lives matter when applied to higher education. social implications – this paper improves public understanding of black lives matter as a social movement. originality/value – since the black lives matter movement is fairly new, there is limited academic research on it. further, there has not been attention to how black lives matter provides insight into pedagogy, particularly in higher education. keywords teaching, higher education, organizations, diversity, black lives matter paper type case study introduction i had barely walked through the classroom door when my students shouted, “did you see halftime last night?” “did you see bae? she was amazing!” “why was coldplay even there? the night belonged to beyoncé!” it was the tuesday after the super bowl, and their staccato questions and comments focused intently on beyoncé’s halftime show. viewing the show at home, through the lens of the students i teach at a small college serving majority-minority undergraduate students in a large city in the northeast usa, i was ready for these questions and comments. beyoncé is a hero to many of my students. given the interest, i led a discussion of her performance briefly that day. we discussed the significance of the outfits worn by beyoncé’s dancers, which echoed the black panthers. many students were unfamiliar with the group’s commitments and activism, so i shared clips from a documentary about the group (nelson, ). the students made connections between black panthers and earlier class discussions of the black lives matter movement. the topic for that media & society class was the impact of politics on media, so we discussed racialized and gendered aspects of justin timberlake and janet jackson’s performance in relation to political regulation of media (eko, ; billitteri, ). equality, diversity and inclusion: an international journal vol. no. , pp. - © emerald publishing limited - doi . /edi- - - received january revised may july accepted august the current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on emerald insight at: www.emeraldinsight.com/ - .htm edi , this anecdote from my teaching is an example of how i have attempted to enact culturally sustaining pedagogy (csp) through the application of the guiding principles of black lives matter (ladson-billings, ; gay, ). this pedagogy is founded upon affirming the dignity, relevance, and importance of students’ cultures to the process of learning. i have used the principles of black lives matter as a way to apply this pedagogy to my teaching in media and communication courses. black lives matter was founded by patrisse cullors, opal tometi, and alicia garza in . the movement resists the endemic racism in our society, highlights the continuing oppression of black people, and affirms the dignity and resilience of black people (black lives matter, ). because of its genesis in response to the murder of trayvon martin, as well as police killings of michael brown, philando castile, and eric garner, blm is often viewed as a resistance movement to police brutality. further, because the movement began with the hashtag #blacklivesmatter, many assume that it is an online activist group. while both of these are important aspects of its roots and ongoing work, black lives matter is now a black liberation movement with chapters in communities across the usa that work on a range of issues that affect black people (taylor, a, b). a particular focus of black lives matter is “to center those that have been marginalized within black liberation movements” (black lives matter, ). beginning in , student-led activism inspired by black lives matter became an increasing presence on college campuses (hartocollis and bidgood, ; somashekhar, ) and even spread to public school systems (anderson, ). in contrast to this uptick, i was curious that on my own campuses, in which students of color make up a significant percentage of the overall student population, there was little engagement with black lives matter beyond programming for black history month. the students did not bring it into their everyday conversations, on-campus activism, or classroom discussions. from a faculty perspective, marcia chatelain and frank leon roberts led the way in a small but growing number of black lives matter college courses around the usa. the movement is also a burgeoning area of academic research (bailey and leonard, ; ransby, ; rickford, ; taylor, a, b). given the dearth of discussion around black lives matter on my campus, i began the process of engaging the movement as part of my pedagogical orientation to teaching at a majority-minority college. although i was not sure that it was the proper role for me as a white faculty member, it seemed increasingly imperative that i incorporate black lives matter – the contemporary struggle for equality and dignity amongst black people in the usa – into my pedagogical practice. doing this was a small but significant way to support underrepresented students in my classroom teaching. as an educator, i have always valued learning that is engaged and relevant to my student’s lives. this means that the classroom should be a place where all people’s backgrounds are seen as valid to the course subject matter. when i began teaching at more diverse institutions, i had to consider how to do this more effectively. this led me to culturally responsive pedagogy, which spoke to the student populations i taught at these institutions (gay, ). however, i was less clear about what this theory might look like in practice and how to enact these values. the application of black lives matter guiding principles has transformed my commitment to culturally responsive pedagogy into teaching that better reflects equality, diversity, and inclusion and, perhaps more importantly, prepares students for their future careers and communities. in this paper, i discuss my experience teaching at two different diverse colleges in which a majority of students are underrepresented amongst college students more generally. these two institutions have percentages of black students that are double to triple the national average of black students, who currently comprise . percent of all college students in the usa (national center for education statistics, ). culturally sustaining pedagogy goals and motivation in this essay, i reflect on the development of my teaching over the last three years, as a white professor at majority-minority colleges who has sought to make my teaching relevant to my students’ lives. in reflecting on these experiences, i show the utility of black lives matter guiding principles in enacting a csp in the college setting. this reflection is also fueled by conversations about the importance of white people standing up for racial justice. as susana morris of crunk feminist collective wrote after the us presidential election, “white people – so-called liberal, progressive, radical, dare i say “woke” white people – it’s time for you to do your motherfucking work. organize, mobilize, and strategize with and for your people. work on uprooting white supremacy at your job, place of worship, and at the thanksgiving table” (morris, a, b). i am a member of several online academic discussion groups where people of color forthrightly pointed out the needs for white people to educate themselves and take responsibility for racism so that the burden of the emotional labor of fighting racism does not also fall on those who are most harmed by racism. as a college professor, one of the most important places i can do this is in my classroom and on my campus. further, this is an attempt to enact allyship for racial justice. allies are people who fight oppression by advocating with and for those who are oppressed (washington and evans, ). being an ally requires that members of dominant groups give up their privilege to ignore race and work to challenge oppressive practices and assumptions (wildman, ). interestingly, many campuses that i have worked on have extensive ally training programs to support and affirm lgbtq students. however, in my experience, there are no similar college-wide programs to support students of color. higher education remains a space of white privilege, which black lives matter aims to disrupt (bender, ). thus, allyship in this context requires, as morris exhorts, that i do the work to figure out how to be an ally to the black lives matter movement in my role as a professor. one of the most impactful ways that i can do this is, first, to create courses that are founded upon and demonstrate racial equality and inclusion. second, i can also write about how movements articulated and built people of color (including culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy and black lives matter) can provide guidance. this is not to co-opt the meaning of these movements, but rather it is my attempt to put them to use through one of my primary daily contexts – teaching. the idea that people, particularly white people, might learn from the organizing and leadership of black people, is unfortunately uncommon. my adoption of black lives matter’s principles as csp attempts to make this more common. this essay is about what i have learned from black lives matter and the generative foundation it has provided to re-construct my pedagogy. the principles of black lives matter, particularly diversity, intersectionality, loving engagement, and empathy, provide concrete strategies for more inclusive, effective college teaching. in short, black lives matter offers a way to constitute a csp, particularly for and about those historically marginalized within us institutions of higher education and communication and media industries. to begin, i survey research on culturally responsive pedagogy, as well as csp. in doing so, i consider the way that my location in higher education settings builds upon and extends theorizing about csp. i then discuss how guiding principles of black lives matter offer a way to enact csp. next, i explain how i apply this pedagogy in higher education. i provide examples from different courses to show both obvious and less apparent ways to shift one’s teaching so that black lives matter. finally, i close by offering more general insights about how to enact a csp based in black lives matter, no matter the institution in which one works or the disciplines in which one teaches. literature review culturally relevant pedagogy (crp), theorized by ladson-billings ( ), includes three components: academic success, cultural competence, and sociopolitical consciousness. edi , the theory has focused mostly on settings in which all or most of the students were underrepresented minorities (hefflin, ). the vast majority of research in crp is focused on application in primary and secondary schools, particularly in urban and minority neighborhoods (gay, ; hefflin, ; milner, ; young, ). crp does not separate academic success from success in social contexts (ladson-billings, ). thus, teachers themselves work to identify and include educational content relevant to students (hastie et al., ). the focus of crp is often about lesson planning and making decisions for students (young, ; milner, ). another concern is how to bring in culturally responsive teaching materials within the stringent mandates of required curriculum and assessment (hefflin, ; sleeter, ). as a pedagogical framework, crp aims to preserve students’ cultures and counter negative effects of mainstream messages about those cultures (ladson-billings, ). the goal is to empower students “with knowledge and practices to operate successfully in mainstream society” (osborne, , p. ). in order to sustain students who come from backgrounds very different than a teacher’s own, engaging students’ cultural capital is central (goldenberg, ). crp is an invitation to re-vision teaching practices to better align with students (lopez, ). in critically assessing crp, there is a danger that teachers may inadvertently use “stereotyped ideas about how and what […] [students] should learn” (dutro et al., , p. ). even with preparation and knowledge, teachers cannot predict how and whether students will relate to the material. therefore, developing teachers’ cultural competence is important rather than solely focusing on students’ cultural competence (milner, ). the practice of crp requires critical reflection by the educator to examine assumptions and biases. a perhaps less prominent part of this theory is to challenge racism and other issues of social injustice (young, ). ladson-billings ( ) expressed dismay that this critical, activist aspect of crp has not been as widely adopted. this means engaging students to examine issues that affect their lives and communities. using the pedagogy to create sociopolitical consciousness “allows them to critique the cultural norms, values, mores, and institutions that produce and maintain social inequities” (ladson-billings, , p. ). students engage the relationship between dominant cultures and the cultural groups of which they are a part (hyland, ), which can help them to identify and respond to inequities in their local communities and the larger culture (milner, ). building on this, paris ( ) calls for a csp. this shift emphasizes cultural pluralism and equality as specific pedagogical goals, resisting political and educational practices that emphasize uniformity and homogenization. thus, teaching should not just relate to students’ diversity but “support young people in sustaining the cultural and linguistic competence of their communities while simultaneously offering access to dominant cultural competence” (paris, , p. ). as recognized by the scholars of crp, this sustenance supports both traditional, evolving, and hybrid forms of cultural expression, whether mainstream or marginal, which should be the foundation upon which effective teaching is built (au, ; paris and alim, ). this relates to concern, discussed earlier, about not relying on stereotypes in an effort to acknowledge culture in the classroom. the original motivation of crp was to improve student learning and achievement in schools. since minority students continue to be underrepresented and underperform than their white counterparts in college contexts, this goal is equally relevant to higher education. overall, black students earn only percent of college degrees in the usa (naylor et al., ). hurtado and ruiz ( ) demonstrated that the underrepresentation of students of color creates a negative campus climate for them. their research shows that underrepresented minorities report higher rates of both overt and subtle bias and discrimination, even at institutions that are not predominantly white (hurtado and ruiz, ). this translates into negative learning environment and retention. the authors argue, “race still matters, and students need culturally sustaining pedagogy opportunities to learn about and experience diversity in college if higher education is to advance the social progress of diverse communities and produce diverse leaders for the nation” (p. ). further, black undergraduates face structural issues of endemic racism, which often translates into a curriculum that does not relate to them and does not support their success on campus (harper et al., ). this undermines their persistence to graduation and overall academic achievement on college campuses. given this racial inequality in terms of retention, graduate rates, and academic achievement, it is imperative that professors do more to support the success of black students. further, while academic achievement is important in college, my goal as a professor is to prepare students for their workplaces and communities. therefore, it is important to help students understand their future careers and communities, while also preparing them to both contribute to and change them to be more diverse and inclusive. a csp is perfectly suited to this. another important difference in applying csp at the college level is control over curriculum. i have greater latitude to choose the materials i include in my courses, as well as the ability to change them in response to current events or student interest. a csp in college understands learning as a co-constructed process between students and professor as co-learners. one way of enacting csp is “centering culture and difference in the teaching process” (gay, , pp. - ). in my teaching, this means that i address the complex contexts in which media and communication are created, including political and economic influences, as well as the implications for people’s identities. in addition, i highlight the extent to which communication, including media, is a part of dominant culture, reflecting white, upper middle class, masculine, heterosexual identities and values. further, csp offers the opportunity to have students identify how they respond to a particular text. thus, i work to have students (and myself) articulate how their backgrounds and experiences – which often differ from those who created and/or are represented in the texts we are discussing – relate to their interpretations of these texts and their approach to creating media and crafting communication themselves. one criticism of culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy is the difficulty in applying it (young, ). although the theoretical commitments of the pedagogy are clear, it is less clear what they actually look like in terms of concrete teaching practices. for the answer, i looked to the burgeoning movement for black dignity and autonomy, black lives matter. in translating the theoretical commitments of csp into the concrete context of college classes in media and communication, i have adopted the principles of black lives matter, as articulated on the group’s website (black lives matter, ), as a way to enact csp. these principles, formulated by the movement in , are diversity, globalism, restorative justice, unapologetically black, collective value, transgender affirms, black women, black villages, empathy, black families, living engagement, queer affirming, and intergenerational. culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy began as a movement to center the backgrounds of minority students in a school system that generally treats their identities as irrelevant, if not inimical, to formal education. in expanding this pedagogy to higher education, we must reconfigure understanding of csp as not just adding on to existing curriculum but requiring a radical commitment to pedagogy that is culturally sustaining, no matter the identities of students in our classrooms. positioning black lives matter as a tangible way to enact csp has transformed my teaching. in using black lives matter to inform my curriculum and classroom teaching, the movement’s principles of diversity, loving engagement, empathy, and commitment to intersectionality help guide how i construct my courses and work with my students in the classroom. in essence, these are concrete principles through which i strive to enact a culturally relevant, sustaining pedagogy as a college professor. in the next section, i discuss what this looks like with specific examples from my teaching. edi , black lives matter as csp in college teaching diversity according to black lives matter, the principle of diversity is stated as “we are committed to acknowledging, respecting and celebrating difference(s) and commonalities” (black lives matter, ). in translating this principle into a csp, i have diversified perspectives and ideas that i engage with on a daily basis. this reflects the importance, within culturally relevant and sustaining pedagogy, of teachers working to develop their own cultural competence. black lives matter’s focus on diversity has affected my teaching through a broadening and deepening of media i consume regularly. i have worked to seek out media written by and about black people, other people of color, as well as people with different religions, ethnicities, social classes, sexualities, and gender identities. my intent is not only to improve my understanding of experiences and perspectives different from my own but also as an important way of preparing courses that are culturally relevant. i regularly read and interact with writers from the root, crunk feminist collective, and africa is a country, as well as people of color in mainstream publications. by diversifying who i follow on twitter to reflect diverse races and ethnicities, i aim to enact the black lives matter’s principle of diversity, which is evident in my curriculum choices. blm’s guiding principle of diversity was a clarion call to radically transform standard course content and existing curriculum templates. i no longer looked to what colleagues were doing or materials shared with me in graduate school. i moved beyond prepared textbooks and instructional materials. rather, i looked to my students as the starting point for course development. i considered their situations as fully and completely as i could, and i developed my courses from there. as i widened my consumption of diverse perspectives and consciously included the work of women and scholars of color, i also built in student engagement and participation as fundamental to my courses. i did a lot of work before the semester to find and organize content that reflected diversity in terms of race, ethnicity, nationality, geographic location, sexuality, gender identity, and class. this effort paid off as students came to see themselves – and people like them – represented in their college curriculum. my -level media and society is a standard course that addresses industries, audiences, and effects. nonetheless, the exemplars we engage in that class reflect a broad, deep commitment to diversity as articulated in the black lives matter platform. we begin the course with an article that examines the role of social media in #blacklivesmatter’s creation and ongoing work (stephen, ). rather than a standard overview of course content and the first textbook chapter, this article serves as an interruption rather than introduction to mainstream curriculum. in my upper-division organizational communication course, black lives matter also serves as a case study for organizing for social change. while black lives matter is a well-known hashtag, students are often unfamiliar with its organizational culture and strategy. thus, for homework, i assign my students to read and listen to interviews with the movement’s founders (garza, ; shapiro, ), talks by leaders of the movement (taylor, a, b), as well as the website of the movement itself (black lives matter, ). in a short writing assignment, and then class discussion, i ask students to connect the movement to important concepts in organizational communication such as identification, culture, and leadership. in my experience, students are particularly engaged to see how these issues manifest in a less typical organization that is focused on social change rather than corporate profits. further, this focus also allows students to make connections between the values of black lives matter and the way that these are enacted in the organizing of the movement itself. making black lives matter an object of study does two important things in the classroom. first, it de-centers organizational communication as a managerial discourse that is racist, sexist, xenophobic, and heterosexist. second, it centers black lives matter as an important exemplar of organizing for social change. as a result, for black and non-black culturally sustaining pedagogy students alike, this case study takes the experiences, and resulting organizing, of black people seriously as something from which we can learn and which is applicable to movement building in other contexts. this, again, demonstrates a culturally sustaining way of teaching organizational communication through the principles of black lives matter. the blm principle of diversity enacts csp in college courses in three distinctive ways. first, it ensures that non-white and other non-dominant media texts and mediamakers are at the heart of our study of media and communication. this means that students will discuss work about, and made by, as wide a variety of different kinds of people as possible, some of whom look like them. also, this approach is committed to the representation of issues and experiences beyond those of importance or interest to white, male-dominated, upper class, heterosexual, cisgender media institutions and leaders. in other words, the experiences of my students matter, and i work hard to find media that engages and addresses their experiences. finally, a true commitment to diversity, as articulated in the black lives matter platform, requires not simply more balance and representation in terms of what is included on the syllabus, but also the syllabus must work to help the students understand and articulate the contributions of those considered marginal as important and valuable for all people. issues of importance to so-called minority people and communities have insights and information important to all communities, and therefore deserve a place in mainstream media and communication courses. another easy, and perhaps obvious, way to enact a csp is to make students’ diverse experiences and identities central to learning in the course. in my media and society and interpersonal communication classes, i do this by having students contribute to the media texts we use in my courses. for both of these classes, students select media texts through which to apply their burgeoning knowledge in the course. for ease of analysis, students usually choose an advertisement, music video, episode of a television show, or scene from a feature film. this allows students to select a media text that they relate to and to provide serious analysis of its themes and apply relevant theorizing about media or interpersonal communication. this also flips the normal relationship between student and teacher regarding course content. when i share this assignment with students, i tell them that those who make the best case for their text – both its value as a media text or in illuminating interpersonal communication and their ability to connect their chosen text substantively through application of course concepts – will likely have their texts included in future iterations of the course. i discuss this further below. in the last year, some examples of student work included music videos such as “if i were a boy” by beyoncé and lupe fiasco’s “bad bitch.” in terms of television shows, students analyzed episodes of power, orange is the new black, master of none, and basketball wives. students have also analyzed scenes from furious , straight outta compton, zootopia, and years a slave. these media texts reflect black lives matter’s commitment to the centrality of black lives and experiences. in presenting these texts to the class, many students discussed both the importance of seeing people like themselves, their family members, and their friends as central to their selection of the text, as well as how these texts reflected and resonated with their own experiences of growing up black and/or in diverse neighborhoods. in some cases, students did not connect or agree with the representations in the media text. in either case, this provided the opportunity for class discussion about whose experiences are included in mainstream media, how, and why. in order to show the importance of representing the complex diversity of lives and experiences – especially black lives – i push students to reflect on how their identities are shaped by the media available to and about them. although these were not media texts i would have selected for analysis, they provide as good or better illumination of course themes. in addition to empowering students’ critical consumption of media texts and application skills, this assignment also provides a diverse edi , selection of texts to use in future teaching. from a csp perspective, this values my students’ insights about media and communication and application of course concepts. the texts they choose then become part of the mainstream curriculum we discuss in subsequent courses. this assignment, and the discussions that stem from it, intervenes in a media landscape that often serves to diminish or distort the value of black lives through representations that marginalize or oppress. this provides the opportunity for students and teacher to disrupt this tendency somewhat, affirm the contributions of black lives to the media landscape, and underscore the importance of diverse representations. enacting diversity also means seeking out and sharing media texts with which they may not be familiar. most of my students are from in or around boston. thus, media representations of boston are a point of discussion. movies like mystic river, the town, and black mass focus on irish-american communities in boston, mostly in relation to mob activity. these representations ignore the large and vibrant communities of color around boston. in order to remedy this, i introduced my students to a web series, pineapple diaries, that focuses on a young dominican-american woman living in the jamaica plain neighborhood of boston and how she negotiates family, friends, and daily life. this was not a show that any of my students had heard of, but for many of them it resonated with their sense of self and place. in addition, i included clips from the television shows fresh off the boat, blackish, transparent, and the movie moonlight to introduce them to perspectives and characters to which they may relate and to provide diverse representations to contemplate. intersectionality while diversity is important, it also requires attention to how issues of difference intersect. a second way that black lives matter’s principles can be used to enact csp is through its commitment to intersectionality. originally articulated by crenshaw ( ), intersectionality acknowledges that systems of domination and subjugation by race, ethnicity, nationality, gender, sexuality, and religion are connected. although not a specific guiding principle of black lives matter, taken together, many of the movement’s guiding principles – unapologetically black, queer affirming, black families, black women, transgender affirming, intergenerational – reflect an understanding of racial justice and uplift as intimately connected with other aspects of identity and the political movements for black liberation (taylor, a, b). the movement’s founders articulate an approach to understanding the struggle for the dignity of black lives as interconnected with gender, sexuality, religion, class, and other identity markers (chatelain and asoka, ). i use this intersectional approach in crafting csp for the college classroom. because the blm platform is inherently intersectional – highlighting gender, sexuality, dis/ability, age, and class – it thus offers the opportunity to talk about issues in complex, interconnected ways. in the case of “formation,” we used an intersectional approach to examine how identities overlap in beyoncé and her media. students worked in small groups to identify how issues of race and ethnicity, gender, national identity, economics and class, and marriage and family were represented within the video and performance of “formation.” they then brought their insights to the whole class. their discussion focused not only on her critical messages about black nationalism, policing, and brutality against people of color, the students were also able to articulate that the reasons for beyoncé’s success were likely not, or not only, because of her black womanist message. her relationship with jay z and her body both conform to social norms associated with able-bodied femininity. so, even as her message in “formation” supports a black nationalism, it does so in a form of conventional heterosexuality and gender identity. the relationship between beyoncé’s music and capitalist commerce was another important aspect of our unpacking of the formation video and performance. the super bowl performance, in particular, was part of the pepsi halftime show, a company with which culturally sustaining pedagogy beyoncé has a $ -million contract. further, formation was a surprise release available for download exclusively on tidal, an online music platform founded by jay z and co-owned by beyoncé. beyond monthly subscriptions in order to listen to the artist-owned platform, the platform offers access to tickets and merchandise. beyoncé’s tours are a worldwide phenomenon, the most recent of which was shows that grossed more than a million dollars per show. the case of beyoncé is a compelling one for my students. she is unabashedly a huge role model and economic force. she is successful, and her success is due in part to her cisgender, heterosexual identity. at the same time, she is – in the terms of black lives matter – unapologetically black. thus, “in affirming that black lives matter, we need not qualify our position. to love and desire freedom and justice for ourselves is a necessary prerequisite for wanting the same for others” (black lives matter, ). in the case of beyoncé, we discussed how her transgressive and progressive message – particularly in the face of white supremacism – is possible in part because of her self- representation as straight and feminine. because of her mainstream sexuality and gender identities, she is able to push the envelope in terms of race and representation. loving engagement and empathy the principles of diversity and the intersectionality of black lives matter’s platform provide important focus for my preparation for classes. in terms of the daily work of teaching, csp and the principles of black lives matter have also made me committed to spontaneous and critical engagement with the world outside of the classroom. two principles from black lives matter are essential here – loving engagement and empathy. black lives matter ( ) defines loving engagement saying, “we are committed to embodying and practicing justice, liberation, and peace in our engagements with one another.” in terms of empathy, the guiding principle of black lives matter ( ) states, “we are committed to practicing empathy; we engage comrades with the intent to learn about and connect with their contexts.” this approach to teaching treats the classroom as a “beloved community” that aims to enable and empower all members. the students’ presentation and analysis of media texts, discussed in the previous section, provides opportunity to build this beloved community through loving engagement and empathy. because of the critical nature of the course content, as well as its place in the curriculum as an introductory course, the media and society course is one where students tend to develop critical approaches to the consumption of media texts for the first time. because of this, they are often both quite critical of and disheartened by the lack of representation of diverse experiences and identities in the media. in their analysis of media texts, as well as class discussion of them, i aim to help them identify the ways in which media texts such as power, basketball wives, and straight outta compton provide both important representations of black lives as well as stereotypical and problematic representations of black experiences. this also includes discussion of why these texts are popular amongst black people and in us society more generally. we discuss how no media text represents people and their experiences perfectly, and that being able to identify what is powerful and problematic about these texts is an important media literacy skill. earlier in the course, we also discuss the barriers people of color face in participating in and controlling the creation of media, which i then bring to discussion of how this impacts the representations we see in the student-selected media texts. thus, i try to temper students’ critical impulse with compassion for those attempting to represent black lives and experiences in an industry that is often hostile or ambivalent to such diversity. in order to develop my classroom as a beloved community, i design assignments that encourage students to see one another as valuable collaborators who can help each other improve their work. for example, i have media and society students present initial analyses of their media texts before the final paper is due. thus, the presentations are of their work in progress. this makes the presentations valuable to the presenter, who gets ideas and edi , feedback for the analysis. it also makes the audience an integral part of the presentation, as they are called upon to provide constructive, specific input to help students develop their analyses. in preparing students for this assignment, we spend time talking about how texts have many meanings and readings, and that we can create better work by incorporating diverse perspectives into our analyses. this reflects black lives matters’ commitment to diversity. drawing on blm principles of loving engagement and empathy, we discuss both the vulnerability and importance of sharing ideas orally, as well as the difficulty of hearing ideas with which we may disagree. we also discuss the importance of offering feedback in a way that affirms and humanizes. this frames the presentations as important moments of professional growth, both in terms of doing something that may be difficult and also providing useful, effective feedback. i have also become more comfortable with letting the class help to dictate what we spend time on and how we proceed in the course. an example of loving engagement as pedagogical flexibility, as i discussed in the opening paragraph, was responding to intense student interest in beyoncé’s formation. because of this and the cultural controversy it created, i integrated study of it later in the course. students were assigned to view formation, the halftime show, and read articles about its impact on black storytelling (mcfadden, ; king, ). one student watching on a computer in the college’s learning commons was told to turn it off since it was not related to school. it was with no small amount of self-righteousness and indignation that she said, “this is my homework. i am watching this for class.” when the student recounted the story to us at our next class meeting, i could see and hear the pride she felt at being able to devote serious time and attention to the study of beyoncé and the messages she created about black womanhood. this pride was the direct result of treating student interest, experiences, and context with loving engagement. in the aftermath of donald trump’s presidential victory, my commitment to csp and its application through the blm guiding principles of empathy became even more urgent. in the semester following trump’s election, and the week of his inauguration, i began teaching an interpersonal communication course. interpersonal communication is often taught in an apolitical manner and emphasizes romantic and family communication. yet, it was impossible for me to ignore the larger political environment in which i was teaching. the guiding principle of empathy requires attention to others and their contexts (black lives matter, ). thus, approaching this course through the lens of csp, it was important and even imperative to enact this empathy. i realized that my teaching has been ineluctably changed through my commitment to csp and application of blm principles. it was no longer an add-on to enhance my teaching, but rather an integrated commitment (of course imperfect and always ongoing) to centering experiences other than my own within my teaching, in order to reflect and enhance diversity in my courses. from a pedagogical perspective, this means always pursuing justice, liberation, and peace as goals of my teaching. as i worked to craft an assignment to synthesize the first unit of the interpersonal communication course, including foundational concepts such as self-concept and self-esteem, perception of others, and diversity, i knew that i had to address the difficulty of post-election interpersonal conversations. i wondered, what does it mean to have caring, thoughtful interpersonal conversations with one another after this divisive election? how can we use the skills provided by an interpersonal communication to engage this personally difficult political context in which we find ourselves? i realized that this is an important way to make interpersonal communication – a course that can become myopic and self-absorbed if one is not pedagogically careful – align with csp, particularly black lives matter’s principles of loving engagement and empathy. although not necessarily the most obvious fit, i viewed this course as another opportunity to enact a csp through the application of black lives matter founding principles. these two culturally sustaining pedagogy principle of loving engagement and empathy led me to create an assignment that contextualizes interpersonal communication foundations, and thus the course itself, as relevant to the political moment. conclusion in the previous section, i provide examples of using black lives matter to enact csp in my college teaching. i critically engage in teaching so that students with marginalized identities see themselves, their experiences, and their futures as central to the study and practice of media and communication. i make an explicit effort to engage issues of identity in courses that, in their titles and descriptions, do not focus on diversity, equality, and inclusion. i applaud courses focused solely on black lives matter, as well as area and ethnic studies courses, women’s, gender, and sexuality studies, and disability studies courses, which provide focused spaces to learn about diversity and identity. however, attention to diversity and identity must not be relegated only to these specialty courses, which students may inadvertently or purposefully think are not relevant to them. thus, a csp approach is important in general education and major courses in primary, secondary, and post-secondary contexts that do not, on their face, necessarily require such attention. a foundation of many media and communication classes is that forms of shared meaning (whether mediated, interpersonal, or organizational communication) do not necessarily reflect reality. from the perspective of black lives matter, in my classes, they learn how media tend to distort our perceptions through mistaken and mendacious representations of black people (brooks and hébert, ; taylor, a, b). as such, it is important for students, no matter their background, to consider ways to make media and communication reflect the realities of, and be responsive to, people and experiences outside of dominant groups. while the examples i include here are focused on media and communication, the articulation of csp through application of the principles of black lives matter has great relevance beyond these disciplines. nearly all college courses, whether in the liberal arts or in professional programs, can be approached through the lens of csp. the examples that i have provided here are not expensive or difficult and do not require specialized training. faculty members have the opportunity to cultivate csp to prepare students to work and live in communities that are diverse and to flourish and help others flourish in such settings. for example, a class in biology, from the perspective of csp and the principles of black lives matter, could engage the way that medical care routinely marginalizes black people, through not attending to their pain, not addressing diseases that disproportionately affect black people, and other issues of racism in medicine. in a philosophy class, classes in ethics or epistemology offer the opportunity to consider how canonical thinkers ignore and/or subjugate the dignity of black people and their experiences. whether in biology or philosophy, just as in communication, it is both essential and easy to give students the opportunity to consider how universal perspectives often reflect the point of view of white, cisgender, upper middle class, straight men. further, as with communication, classes in biology and philosophy can also integrate more diverse perspectives through the inclusion of black authors in course readings. i hope that future work will articulate how a csp, through the principles of black lives matter, can be enacted in other disciplines. csp is obviously important in higher education institutions where a majority of students belong to groups that are underrepresented on college campuses. however, this approach is also important in predominantly white institutions (pwis). the fact that an institution is predominantly white does not change the fact that the world, and the usa, is increasingly diverse and therefore students need to engage with and be prepared to understand this diversity. the problem that professors using csp in predominantly white institutions may face is the mistaken perception that such content is not relevant to white people and also that it represents a political and ideological pedagogy. (of course, all pedagogy is political and ideological, but pedagogy that aligns with existing power structures is more likely, and edi , mistakenly, to be viewed as apolitical and neutral.) in such institutions, it will be more difficult to work with students to reflect and create the diversity that csp entails. though not the focus of my work here, future scholarship should consider how best to apply csp in such settings. nonetheless, it is critical that faculty members and students at pwis reckon with the contributions of non-dominant groups and they challenges they face. in addition, it is important to consider how the lessons of csp and black lives matter’s principles might also be relevant beyond the classroom, whether college or k- . the insights that i have shared here also provide the opportunity to consider how we might create organizations that better reflect and respond to the realities of black people and their experiences. a culturally sustaining approach, through the application of black lives matter’s principles, offers a new way to consider possibilities for radical revisioning of work, government, community, and other contexts through application of diversity, intersectionality, empathy, and loving engagement, as discussed in this manuscript in the context of the college classroom. finally, although inspired and guided by the principles of black lives matter, the examples and insights i share here are not only about black lives. the principles respond to how those with identities that fall outside dominant groups are devalued and erased from institutions of cultural and political power. although not the focus of this paper, the application of csp through the application of black lives matter’s principles has also allowed me to teach non-black students, whose identities are marginal within higher education, more effectively. the principles discussed here speak to those who do not speak english as a first language, who have a disability, who are the first in their family to go to college, who are immigrants, and those who are gay, lesbian, and transgender. further, because many of my students fit into more than one of these categories, the principles of diversity and intersectionality are particularly important in terms of practicing a pedagogy that acknowledges and celebrates their identities. a recent interview with the award-winning director of the music video formation and the television show insecure, two important texts representing women of color in , asked melina matsoukas, about her goals in her work. she responded, “to change the world, you know? to really make the voices that we don’t get to hear heard, and the images and the stories that we don’t get to see seen. i would like to normalize that” (morris, a, b). the statement was startling to me because it so closely resonates with why i choose to teach and, especially, why i am committed to enacting csp through the application of black lives matter’s principles. the teaching that i do attempts to change the world by normalizing those considered marginal to the study and practice of communication and media. in the last three years, black lives matter has become an increasingly powerful force in my teaching, as i have attempted to enact in csp in a higher education setting with large numbers of students who identify as marginal in terms of class, gender identity, ethnicity, sexuality, and/or race. black lives matter’s principles serve as important inspiration for the texts i choose, the discussions i facilitate, the assignments i give to my students, and the media and scholarship that i consume. this led me to create courses that are more diverse and inclusive and that help students to live and work in diverse contexts. while my journey to teach so that black lives matter is ongoing and imperfect, the principles of the movement provide trenchant guidance to enact csp. references anderson, m.d. ( ), “the other students activists”, the atlantic, november , available at: www. theatlantic.com/education/archive/ / /student-activism-history-injustice/ / (accessed may , ). au, k.h. ( ), literacy achievement and diversity: keys to success for students, teachers, and schools, multicultural education series, teachers college press, new york, ny. culturally sustaining pedagogy www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/ / /student-activism-history-injustice/ / www.theatlantic.com/education/archive/ / /student-activism-history-injustice/ / bailey, j. and leonard, d.j. ( ), “black lives matter: post-nihilistic freedom dreams”, journal of contemporary rhetoric, vol. nos / , pp. - . bender, m. ( ), “black lives matter”, critical education, vol. no. , pp. - . billitteri, t.j. ( ), “indecency on television”, cq researcher, vol. no. , pp. - . black lives matter ( ), “guiding principles”, available at: blacklivesmatter.com/guiding-principles (accessed may , ). brooks, d.e. and hébert, l.p. ( ), “gender, race, and media representation”, in dow, b.j. and wood, j.t. (eds), handbook of gender and communication, sage, thousand oaks, ca, pp. - . chatelain, m. and asoka, k. ( ), “women and black lives matter”, dissent, vol. no. , pp. - . crenshaw, k. ( ), “mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color”, stanford law review, vol. no. , pp. - . dutro, e., kazemi, e., balf, r. and lin, y.s. ( ), “ ‘what are you and where are you from?’ race, identity, and the vicissitudes of cultural relevance”, urban education, vol. no. , pp. - . eko, l. ( ), the regulation of sex-themed visual imagery, palgrave macmillan, new york, ny. garza, a. ( ), “a herstory of the #blacklivesmatter movement”, the feminist wire, october , available at: www.thefeministwire.com/ / /blacklivesmatter- / (accessed march , ). gay, g. ( ), culturally responsive teaching: theory, research, and practice, teachers college press, new york, ny. gay, g. ( ), “teaching to and through cultural diversity”, curriculum inquiry, vol. no. , pp. - . goldenberg, b.m. ( ), “white teachers in urban classrooms: embracing non-white students’ cultural capital for better teaching and learning”, urban education, vol. no. , pp. - . harper, s.r., smith, e.j. and davis, c.h. iii ( ), “a critical race case analysis of black undergraduate student success at an urban university”, urban education, pp. - . hartocollis, a. and bidgood, j. ( ), “racial discrimination protests ignite at colleges across the us”, the new york times, november , available at: www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/racial- discrimination-protests-ignite-at-colleges-across-the-us.html (accessed may , ). hastie, p.a., martin, e. and buchanan, a.m. ( ), “stepping out of the norm: an examination of praxis for a culturally-relevant pedagogy for african-american children”, journal of curriculum studies, vol. no. , pp. - . hefflin, b.r. ( ), “learning to develop culturally relevant pedagogy: a lesson about cornrowed lives”, the urban review, vol. no. , pp. - . hurtado, s. and ruiz, a. ( ), the climate for underrepresented groups and diversity on campus, higher education research institute, los angeles, ca. hurtado, s. and ruiz, a.a. ( ), discrimination and bias, underrepresentation, and sense of belonging on campus, higher education research institute, los angeles, ca. hyland, n.e. ( ), “one white teacher’s struggle for culturally relevant pedagogy: the problem of the community”, the new educator, vol. no. , pp. - . king, j. ( ), “with two performances, beyonce and kendrick lamar change black storytelling forever”, february , available at: https://mic.com/articles/ /with-two-performances-beyonc-and- kendrick-lamar-changed-black-storytelling-forever#.fix xiivo (accessed february , ). ladson-billings, g. ( ), “reading between the lines and beyond the pages: a culturally relevant approach to literacy teaching”, theory into practice, vol. no. , pp. - . ladson-billings, g. ( ), “toward a theory of culturally relevant pedagogy”, american educational research journal, vol. no. , pp. - . ladson-billings, g. ( ), “culturally relevant pedagogy . : a/k/a the remix”, harvard educational review, vol. no. , pp. - . edi , www.thefeministwire.com/ / /blacklivesmatter- / www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/racial-discrimination-protests-ignite-at-colleges-across-the-us.html www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/racial-discrimination-protests-ignite-at-colleges-across-the-us.html https://mic.com/articles/ /with-two-performances-beyonc-and-kendrick-lamar-changed-black-storytelling-forever#.fix xiivo https://mic.com/articles/ /with-two-performances-beyonc-and-kendrick-lamar-changed-black-storytelling-forever#.fix xiivo lopez, a.e. ( ), “culturally relevant pedagogy and critical literacy in diverse english classrooms: a case study of a secondary english teacher’s activism and agency”, english teaching, vol. no. , pp. - . mcfadden, s. ( ), “beyonce’s formation reclaims america’s narrative from the margins”, february , available at: www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /feb/ /beyonce-formation-black-american- narrative-the-margins (accessed february , ). milner, h.r. iv ( ), “culturally relevant pedagogy in a diverse urban classroom”, the urban review, vol. no. , pp. - . morris, m. ( a), “get your people”, november , available at: www.crunkfeministcollective.com/ / / /get-your-people/ (accessed november , ). morris, w. 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( ), “culturally sustaining pedagogy: a needed change in stance, terminology, and practice”, educational researcher, vol. no. , pp. - . paris, d. and alim, h.s. ( ), “what are we seeking to sustain through culturally sustaining pedagogy? a loving critique forward”, harvard educational review, vol. no. , pp. - . ransby, b. ( ), “the class politics of black lives matter”, dissent, vol. no. , pp. - . rickford, r. ( ), “black lives matter toward a modern practice of mass struggle”, new labor forum, vol. no. , pp. - . shapiro, a. ( ), “black lives matter founders describe ‘paradigm shift’ in the movement”, july , available at: www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/ / / / /black-lives-matter- founders-describe-paradigm-shift-in-the-movement (accessed august , ). sleeter, c.e. ( ), “confronting the marginalization of culturally responsive pedagogy”, urban education, vol. no. , pp. - . somashekhar, s. ( ), “how black lives matter, born on the streets, is rising to power on campus”, washington post, november , available at: www.washingtonpost.com/national/how-black- lives-matter-born-on-the-streets-is-rising-to-power-on-campus/ / / / c e - - e - be b- ae e f f _story.html?utm_term=. a b b ae (accessed may , ). stephen, b. ( ), “get up, stand up: how black lives matter uses social media to fight the power”, november, available at: www.wired.com/ / /how-black-lives-matter-uses-social-media-to- fight-the-power/ (accessed january , ). taylor, k.-y. ( a), “from #blacklivesmatter to black liberation”, february , available at: www. youtube.com/watch?v=nye ni nrji (accessed on august , ). taylor, k.-y. ( b), from #blacklivesmatter to black liberation, haymarket books, chicago, il. washington, j. and evans, n.j. ( ), “becoming an ally”, in evans, n. and wall, v.a. (eds), beyond tolerance: gays, lesbians, and bisexuals on campus, american college personnel association, pp. - . culturally sustaining pedagogy www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /feb/ /beyonce-formation-black-american-narrative-the-margins www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /feb/ /beyonce-formation-black-american-narrative-the-margins www.crunkfeministcollective.com/ / / /get-your-people/ www.crunkfeministcollective.com/ / / /get-your-people/ www.nytimes.com/ / / /arts/music/melina-matsoukas-beyonce-formation-interview.html www.nytimes.com/ / / /arts/music/melina-matsoukas-beyonce-formation-interview.html https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d /tables/dt _ . .asp https://nces.ed.gov/programs/digest/d /tables/dt _ . .asp www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/ / / / /black-lives-matter-founders-describe-paradigm-shift-in-the-movement www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/ / / / /black-lives-matter-founders-describe-paradigm-shift-in-the-movement www.washingtonpost.com/national/how-black-lives-matter-born-on-the-streets-is-rising-to-power-on-campus/ / / / c e - - e -be b- ae e f f _story.html?utm_term=. a b b ae www.washingtonpost.com/national/how-black-lives-matter-born-on-the-streets-is-rising-to-power-on-campus/ / / / c e - - e -be b- ae e f f _story.html?utm_term=. a b b ae www.washingtonpost.com/national/how-black-lives-matter-born-on-the-streets-is-rising-to-power-on-campus/ / / / c e - - e -be b- ae e f f _story.html?utm_term=. a b b ae www.wired.com/ / /how-black-lives-matter-uses-social-media-to-fight-the-power/ www.wired.com/ / /how-black-lives-matter-uses-social-media-to-fight-the-power/ www.youtube.com/watch?v=nye ni nrji www.youtube.com/watch?v=nye ni nrji wildman, s.m. ( ), “revisiting privilege revealed and reflecting on teaching and learning together”, washington university journal of law & policy, vol. no. , pp. - . young, e. ( ), “challenges to conceptualizing and actualizing culturally relevant pedagogy: how viable is the theory in classroom practice?”, journal of teacher education, vol. no. , pp. - . further reading marfelt, m.m. ( ), “grounded intersectionality”, equality, diversity and inclusion: an international journal, vol. no. , pp. - . wortham, s. and contreras, m. ( ), “struggling toward culturally relevant pedagogy in the latino diaspora”, journal of latinos and education, vol. no. , pp. - . corresponding author courtney e. cole can be contacted at: courtney.cole@regiscollege.edu for instructions on how to order reprints of this article, please visit our website: www.emeraldgrouppublishing.com/licensing/reprints.htm or contact us for further details: permissions@emeraldinsight.com edi , the sound of culture: diaspora and black technopoetics by louis chude-sokei (review) the sound of culture: diaspora and black technopoetics by louis chude-sokei (review) paul youngquist african american review, volume , number , spring , pp. - (review) published by johns hopkins university press doi: for additional information about this article [ access provided at apr : gmt from carnegie mellon university ] https://doi.org/ . /afa. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ https://doi.org/ . /afa. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ faulkner and the black americas from so many different angles, and this book gathers the very best of them into a collection that challenges and changes the way we think about faulkner’s work in conversation with the work of writers from the black americas. louis chude-sokei. the sound of culture: diaspora and black technopoetics. middletown: wesleyan up, . pp. $ . . reviewed by paul youngquist, university of colorado boulder say you’ve been sent to planet earth, emissary of a wise and beneficent post-human people. your mission: to solve the old race problem that causes earth- lings so much misery. your base of operations: the heart of the imperium, twenty- first-century america. your weapon: black technopoetics, a disruptor set to “stun.” you’d be following the secret agenda louis chude-sokei advances in the sound of culture: diaspora and black technopoetics. i say secret because this agenda doesn’t appear with complete clarity until near the book’s end. but chude-sokei wants to change the way race works both to differentiate black people from the norm of the (white) human and justify their subjection to it. he pursues this mission, unexpectedly and with flashes of brilliance, by using the science fiction to challenge cultural stereo- types by way of the future they presume. “to combine race,” he writes, “with a futurism is to subject blackness to the vagaries of temporal transformation” ( ). chude-sokei wants a blackness open to continuing transformation: “necessarily mutable, contingent, and therefore subject to going beyond itself ” ( ). a fantasy? only fantasy can tell. science fiction (generically allied to fantasy, as the shelves of brick-and-mortar bookstores attest) builds futures out of the detritus of contemporary dreams. chude-sokei shows how deeply such dreams come stained by histories of racial subjection and colonialism in the west. it’s a gorgeous, sobering insight: science fiction, the escapist pabulum of white geeks, has been about race all along. chude-sokei can make it because he approaches science fiction in broadly cultural rather than textual terms as a displaced allegory of social relations that provides an armature for dreaming the future. for him the fundamental feature of the genre, the one that places race front and center, is its obsession with technology, or more colloquially, machines. this emphasis allies science fiction with italian futurism, a contemporaneous modernism whose celebration of machine aesthetics served an obvious ethnic chauvinism. here’s the “tell” chude-sokei observes and interprets: machines in science fiction mediate social relations between whites and blacks. to sustain this claim, he works back about a century to document an abiding cultural association between blacks and machines. it isn’t simply that as enslaved labor, transported africans resembled the machines that would eventually replace them. chude-sokei establishes that, culturally speaking, blacks could pass for machines—and vice versa. minstrelsy opens up this possibility by staging blackface performance as the liminal and empty other to the human in a way that mimes the otherness of machines. a black automaton would clinch the point. chude-sokei finds one in the strange history of joice heth, the allegedly -year-old “mammy” of george washington whom p. t. barnum purchased in for public display, launching his spectacular career. heth’s extreme age, her rigidity and blindness, made it hard to distinguish her from an automaton—source of her initial public renown. barnum later heightened heth’s uncanny appeal by billing her as an african american review . (spring ): - © johns hopkins university press and saint louis university bookreviews_bookreviews / / : am page automaton passing for human: a black machine. it would be hard to invent a more powerful instance of the assimilation of machines and blacks, a cultural fantasy that finds fulfillment in with the westinghouse electric corporation’s design and manufacture of mr. rastus robot, the mechanical negro. these material instances of mechanical blackness give heft to the claim that the conflation of blacks and machines becomes a pervasive motif in science fiction. chude-sokei shows how the nineteenth-century writing he calls “victorian proto- science fiction” advances this association to the point of inevitability. he treats familiar authors in unfamiliar ways to reveal their displaced preoccupation with race and slavery. herman melville’s story “the bell tower” ( ) assimilates a critique of slavery to an account of a machine slaying its human master. edward bulwer- lytton’s the coming race ( ), in chude-sokei’s words, “features the discovery of a superior and technologically advanced subterranean lost race in england who pose a threat to an ‘inferior’ britain” ( ). the racial implications—and fears—are obvious and helped drive the vogue for “lost race” narratives that becomes a staple of pulp fantasy. put the coming race together with samuel butler’s erewhon ( ), that extended meditation on the life and destiny of technology, and the cultural interchangeability of blacks and machines becomes obvious: “simply substitute ‘blacks’ or ‘the negro’ or even ‘the colonized’ for machines [in butler] and a dimen- sion of meaning opens up that simply cannot be accidental, given his commitment to darwinian views of race, culture, and historical transformation” ( ). this victorian legacy of machines figuring for blacks lives on in subterranean fashion in the bona-fide science fiction that emerges in the early twentieth century, a point chude-sokei makes by examining karel Čapek’s famous play r.u.r. ( ). Čapek not only popularized the word “robot” (from “robota,” czech for “forced labor,” “slave”), but wrote his play with an eye trained on american race relations. chude- sokei’s lesson: when you see “machine” in science fiction, read “black.” it won’t make you happy. the cultural diagnosis is clear: blacks, like machines, remain both soulless and menacing, and the notion of race reinforces their differ- ence from the (white) norm of the human. something must be done, but in a way that disrupts that difference. that’s where chude-sokei’s weapon comes in, black technopoetics. he doesn’t describe it in much detail beyond a user-friendly gesture: self-consciously black “engagements with technology” in “literary, philosophical, [or] musical” realms ( ). you’d be forgiven for thinking the gesture associates his work with afro-futurism. but no. chude-sokei rebukes the whole motley movement for remaining too invested in a first world—and essentialist—notion of blackness. he prefers pluralities, and he liberates them with his disruptor of choice: creolization, which creates new mixes out of old cultures. late chapters provide a useful history of this practice: its inception with aimé césaire and the surrealists, its adaptation by Édouard glissant of martinique and wilson harris of guyana. most illuminating, however, is the extended discussion of sylvia wynter’s work and the solution it offers to the problem of permanently subjugated blacks. on wynter’s disruptive reading they inhabit “demonic ground,” cultural space of new becoming where alone new genres of the human can emerge. as chude-sokei puts it, “yesterday’s monsters are today’s subjects; today’s machines are tomorrow’s human beings” ( ). so there’s hope. only not for “us,” taking “us” to mean blacks today (and not me). i can’t second his claim that cyberpunk advances a vision of the future creolized. the sun has set on cyberpunk dystopias and risen elsewhere: the bio-fictions of octavia butler and the creolized sci-fi/fantasy of nalo hopkinson, nnedi okorafor, or n. k. jemisin—all black women writers, a crew chude-sokei shows no interest in taking seriously. if, as he repeatedly argues, creolization (however “universal” a practice) emerges as a caribbean response to the oppressive force of colonialism, i suspect its greatest creations turn out to be cultural and collective, not personal and aesthetic—rastafari, for instance. but chude-sokei reviews bookreviews_bookreviews / / : am page proves himself no friend of rastas either, preferring the “inauthenticity” of dance- hall and dub to the benighted “authenticity” of reggae, roots, and reparations. if there’s a bigotry of the postmodern, it shows itself in the blithe dismissal of lived spirituality—“livity”—as delusion, or more familiarly, “essentialism.” space won’t allow me to address chude-sokei’s interest in sound, especially its digital avatars, as a panacea for black purity. it’s a side of the sound of culture that, while interesting, deserves a more detailed treatment than it receives, especially given the extent of recent developments in sound studies. the book is most convincing in its historical assessment of blacks as machines, least so in its dated claims about the pertinence of cyberpunk to black futures. it ends in good postmodern fashion, however (reminiscent of the crying of lot ), “listening for a growing minority, servile and oppressed, waiting for the moment when we realize that it is we who now echo them” ( ). in the era of black lives matter and a mounting black body count, that’s enough to give even a white guy the hesitation blues. african american review bookreviews_bookreviews / / : am page wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( 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given both its nationalistic ending and its recuperation of iconic styles and images. this paper argues, however, that the film’s pastiche interrogates past cinematic tropes for race and space; in this sense, it proves counterhistorical, a term indicating not a lack of accuracy but a commitment to illuminating the role of visual media in shaping contemporary understandings of history and to encouraging fresh perspectives on the past. examining the many forms of constraint produced by iconic images of black and gendered per- sonhood, the film also takes on the spatial icon with which many of these figures are associated – the southern plantation. both exposing and challenging the ways in which spectacular accounts of southern racism occlude the geographic and political reach of african american movements against oppression, the film inconsistently insists on the importance of thinking across conven- tional demarcations of space and time. at these moments, it suggests possibilities for how even commercial cinema might contribute to new conceptions of black political history and possibility. we were right on the border: ten miles from memphis and a million miles from the rest of the world. fbi agent rupert anderson (played by gene hackman) on his previous career as a small-town sheriff in mississippi burning () while mississippi burning, alan parker’s action-packed account of an fbi investigation into the disappearance of three civil rights workers, was widely lauded for its technical achievements, it became notorious almost immediately upon release for “whitewashing” the fight for african american rights. as critics have demonstrated, the film depicts a struggle between violent racist department of english, university of mississippi. email: lduck@olemiss.edu.  mississippi burning, dir. alan parker, orion (), mgm home entertainment (), dvd.  inspired by the actual search for the killers of james chaney, andrew goodman, and michael schwerner, the film was well represented at a variety of awards ceremonies, includ- ing the american academy of motion pictures association. journal of american studies,  (), , – © cambridge university press and british association for american studies  doi:./s terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core mailto:lduck@olemiss.edu http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s &domain=pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core whites and a federal government eager to discipline them, occluding both the fbi’s often oppositional stance toward the civil rights movement and, most disturbingly, the leadership and labor of african americans themselves. but as agent anderson’s comment demonstrates, the film also depends on what amy lynn corbin calls “a fundamentally place-based otherness”: situating mississippi simultaneously on a recognizable road map and in interplanetary space, it “safely insulate[s]” viewers elsewhere from the particular “intersection of race, gender, class, and history” associated with the jim crow south. in these approaches to both race and space, the film proved typical of hollywood’s “civil rights genre,” which, as allison graham explains, did not take clear form until the late twentieth-century. though sharon monteith has noted more varied representations of the civil rights movement in international, independent, and exploitation cinema, major film releases have predominantly supported what historian jacquelyn dowd hall calls the “dominant narrative” concerning this period, in which struggle is restricted “to the south” and also “to a single halcyon decade.” in this way, cinema’s civil rights genre not only creates images of race and space but also specifies the connections between them, such that the challenges and aims of the civil rights movement are linked insistently and solely to the chronotope of the jim crow south, with no apparent connections to struggles in other spaces and periods. these narratives function to very different effect  donald bogle, toms, coons, mulattoes, mammies, and bucks: an interpretive history of blacks in american films, th edn (new york: continuum, ), –; allison graham, framing the south: hollywood, television, and race during the civil rights struggle (baltimore: johns hopkins university press, ), –; sharon monteith, “civil rights movement film,” in julie armstrong, ed., the cambridge companion to american civil rights literature, google e-book (new york: cambridge university press, ), –, –.  amy lynn corbin, cinematic geographies and multicultural spectatorship in america, proquest e-book (new york: palgrave macmillan, ), .  allison graham, “‘we ain’t doin’ civil rights’: the life and times of a genre, as told in the help,” southern cultures, ,  (), –, , , doi:./scu... ellen c. scott, cinema civil rights: regulation, repression, and race in the classical hollywood era (new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press, ), describes the many forms of institutional regulation – including self-censorship – that prevented hollywood films in previous decades from explicitly acknowledging african americans’ struggle for full citizenship. the few exceptions to this rule, in graham’s words (“we ain’t doin’ civil rights,” ), “sketched the outlines of a new sub-genre of social conscience film”.  monteith, –, –.  jacquelyn dowd hall, “the long civil rights movement and the political uses of the past,” journal of american history, ,  (), –, , doi:./.  ibid.; roopali mukherjee, the racial order of things: cultural imaginaries of the post-soul era (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, ), –. the concept of the chronotope, used to explain how interpretation of a narrative is affected by the spatial and temporal qualities of its setting, is developed in m. m. bakhtin’s “forms of time commercial counterhistory  terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core than the media and performances examined elsewhere in this issue; that is, the newspapers, journals, photographs, performance tours, political actions, and other interfaces through which african americans imagined, forged, and con- tested relationships with people in other global spaces. but such images and interactions, like hollywood cinema, demonstrate the role of media in con- structing relationships between race and space: as wendy hui kyong chun has argued, race and media are “used to construct connections between – and indeed construct the very concepts of – public and private, outside and inside.” by defining both racial segregation and resistance to it as social forms relevant solely to the us south, hollywood’s civil rights genre further illustrates how, in katherine mckittrick’s words, “existing cartographic rules … unjustly organize human hierarchies in place and reify uneven geograph- ies in familiar, seemingly natural ways”; such films occlude not only the geo- graphic and chronological expanses of us racial oppression and struggle but also the extent of african american geographic inquiry and organizing. but as mckittrick and chun link these mediated productions of race and space, they also suggest that such constructions, like genres, can be changed. where other authors here explore the period of jim crow, i examine a con- temporary film whose importance lies chiefly in how this period of us history is remembered. lee daniels’ the butler () might seem an unlikely candi- date for intervening in hollywood’s civil rights genre, given that its conclusion goes farther than any previous such film in promoting, in valerie smith’s words, “the fantasy that the united states has triumphed over and transcended its racial past.” but on its path to this finale, this broadly popular film and of the chronotope in the novel,” trans. caryl emerson and michael holquist, in michael holquist, ed., the dialogic imagination: four essays (austin: university of texas press, ), –.  wendy hui kyong chun, “introduction: race and/as technology; or, how to do things to race,” camera obscura, ,  (jan. ), –, , doi:./--.  as historian carl nightingale, segregation: a global history of divided cities, kindle e-book (chicago: university of chicago press, ), loc. , , , argues, jim crow consti- tuted one instantiation of a global “mania” for dividing populations “into separate, unequal, and compulsory residential zones for different races” with similarly differentiated levels of citizenship, effectively delimiting rights, privileges, and vulnerability to violence.  katherine mckittrick, demonic grounds: black women and the cartographies of struggle, proquest e-book (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, ), x, original emphasis. the links between media – particularly cinema – and space are well established, involving not only production, distribution, and exhibition, but also content and iconic construction: “a film,” tom conley argues, “can be understood in a broad sense to be a ‘map’ that … encourages its public to think of the world in concert with its own articula- tion of space.” tom conley, cartographic cinema (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, ), .  mckittrick, x–xii; chun, –.  valerie smith, “black women’s memories and the help,” southern cultures, ,  (), –, , doi:./scu... for scholarly critiques or dismissals of lee daniels’  leigh anne duck terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core significantly revises the genre’s map, placing plantation oppression at the core of the nation’s history and attributing change not least to african americans’ engagement with global political struggles. as i argue below, this remapping constitutes part of the film’s visual method, which could be dismissed as pas- tiche, a nostalgic revisitation of historical images, updated for a purportedly “postracial” era. here, however, investigation of past visual styles functions to interrogate past cinematic tropes for race and space. in this film, as in his- torical relations discussed throughout this issue, while blackness is mobilized by governments as a technology for dividing a population and disenfranchising a labor force, it also serves to assemble people with experiences and memories that attune them to local and global injustice. “inspired by films like gone with the wind”: the paradox of black epic cinema for most of hollywood’s history, it has been notoriously difficult to accrue funding for films made by or even concerning african americans, but the final quarter of  seemed to mark a kind of watershed. while some argued that election of the nation’s first black president had reassured execu- tives concerning the marketability of such films, scholars warned against overstating the purported cinematic “age of obama.” but in the case of lee daniels’ the butler, this historic first was formative. the project was the butler see monteith, –, ; scott, ; nicole r. fleetwood, on racial icons: blackness and the public imagination, ebsco e-book (new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press, ), ; bruce baum, the post-liberal imagination: political scenes from the american cultural landscape (new york: palgrave macmillan, ), ; and andrew grossman, “between the butler and black dynamite: servility, militancy, and the meaning of blaxploitation,” in david garrett izzo, ed., movies in the age of obama: the era of post racial and neo-racist cinema (lanham, md: roman & littlefield, ), –, –.  the butler held the top position in us box office ratings for its first two weeks in circula- tion; it went on to earn over $ million. “lee daniels’ the butler (),” box office mojo, at www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=butler.htm, accessed  oct. .  michael cieply, “coming soon: a breakout year for black films,” new york times,  june , at www.nytimes.com////movies/coming-soon-a-breakout-for-black- filmmakers.html?_r=.  see, for example, the comments of steve mcqueen, director of  years a slave (), in henry louis gates jr. and steve mcqueen, “steve mcqueen and henry louis gates jr. talk  years a slave, part ,” the root,  dec. , at www.theroot.com/articles/ culture///__years_a_slave_director_steve_mcqueen_interviewed_by_henry_louis_ gates_.  anna everett, “black film, new media industries, and bamms (black american media moguls) in the digital media ecology,” cinema journal, ,  (), –, –, doi:./cj..; monica ndounou, stephanie larrieux, and karen bowdre, “what’s happening now? black film and genre in the age of obama,” workshop, commercial counterhistory  terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core http://www.boxofficemojo.com/movies/?id=butler.htm http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /movies/coming-soon-a-breakout-for-black-filmmakers.html?_r= http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /movies/coming-soon-a-breakout-for-black-filmmakers.html?_r= http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/ / /_ _years_a_slave_director_steve_mcqueen_interviewed_by_henry_louis_gates_ http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/ / /_ _years_a_slave_director_steve_mcqueen_interviewed_by_henry_louis_gates_ http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/ / /_ _years_a_slave_director_steve_mcqueen_interviewed_by_henry_louis_gates_ https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core inspired by wil haygood’s washington post profile of eugene allen, an african american servant in the white house through eight different presi- dential administrations; appearing three days after obama’s victory, the article offers, in its own words, “a story from the back pages of history.” sadly, allen’s wife helene, also depicted in the profile, died the day before the election, and this combination of timely journalism and poignant circum- stance yielded the perfect premise for melodrama – an enormously popular genre that, as linda williams argues, has long constituted “the fundamental mode by which american mass culture,” especially cinema, “has ‘talked to itself’ about the enduring moral dilemma of race.” fittingly, amy pascal, then co-chair of sony pictures entertainment, immediately set about option- ing the story for laura ziskin, producer of the spider-man franchise and other popular films. the story of the resulting film’s development, like the film itself, illuminates a moment in which unyielding cultural and institutional patterns intermingle with signs of and efforts toward change. the figure of the black servant was, after all, foundational in cinematic representations of african americans, yet such a long-suffering female protagonist also featured in one of the best- selling novels of  – kathryn stockett’s controversial the help – as well as tate taylor’s  film adaptation. for collaborators on the allen project, this new entry in the long tradition of representing african americans as relatively passive in the social movement that led to their enfran- chisement constituted a kind of warning. describing development of the film based on his article, african american journalist haygood notes that ziskin, a white producer, originally saw the story as an opportunity to increase the society for cinema and media studies annual conference, seattle, washington,  march .  wil haygood, “a butler well served by this election,” washington post,  nov. , at www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-butler-well-served-by-this-election//// dd--e--eaafeaf_story.html.  linda williams, playing the race card: melodramas of black and white from uncle tom to o.j. simpson (princeton, nj: princeton university press, ), xiv.  john hazelton, “in service of the butler,” screen international,  jan. , proquest performing arts periodicals database.  bogle, toms, coons, mulattoes, mammies, and bucks, .  “books: best sellers/hardcover fiction,” new york times,  march , at www. nytimes.com/books/best-sellers////hardcover-fiction; “books: best sellers/ paperback trade fiction,” new york times,  may , at www.nytimes.com/books/ best-sellers////trade-fiction-paperback.  as valerie smith, “black women’s memories and the help,” , argues, both versions of the help seek to avoid naturalizing jim crow hierarchies, but the maids are still rigidly con- strained: their narratives, though shared in protest, can only be circulated via a white inter- mediary and are ultimately treated as gossip – restricted to the status of entertainment, as opposed to political speech. graham, “we ain’t doin’ civil rights,’” –.  leigh anne duck terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-butler-well-served-by-this-election/ / / / d d - - e - -e aafe a f _story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/a-butler-well-served-by-this-election/ / / / d d - - e - -e aafe a f _story.html http://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/ / / /hardcover-fiction http://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/ / / /hardcover-fiction http://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/ / / /trade-fiction-paperback http://www.nytimes.com/books/best-sellers/ / / /trade-fiction-paperback https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core limited racial diversity in hollywood films. to address the quality of these representations, however, white screenwriter danny strong and black director lee daniels determined to incorporate an “epic” narrative about african american activism by featuring the butler’s son. but when confronted with the cost of such a project – $ million over the $ million originally planned – sony backed out, leaving the white producers to seek funding from wealthy african americans with ties to media industries. in sum, the developers of this film consistently pursued strategies associated with popular cinema, the term “epic” calling to mind the sweeping historical spectacles of a previous hollywood era; in contrast, a combination of eco- nomic necessity and aesthetic vision (daniels’s enthusiasm for the project) aligned the project with the scholarly category of black film. that classification is complex, involving not only the races of persons funding and working on a particular movie, but also the films’ style and social impact. commercial cinema has earned particular skepticism in the latter regard: as terri francis explains, debates over black film involve “a complicated love-it-and-loathe-it relationship to popular culture,” which has often propagated insidious stereo- types, yet which also, as stuart hall argued in , constitutes an important venue in “the struggle over cultural hegemony.” this ambivalence is perhaps  wil haygood, the butler: a witness to history, google e-book (new york: simon and schuster, ), –. for a journalistic overview concerning the historic and ongoing lack of diversity in hollywood films see manohla dargis and a. o. scott, “hollywood, separate and unequal,” new york times,  sept. , at www.nytimes.com/// /movies/hollywood-separate-and-unequal.html.  rsebecca theodore-vachon, “if you’ve been comparing ‘the butler’ to ‘the help’ … stop!,” urban daily,  aug. , interactive one, at http://theurbandaily.com/// /the-butler-vs-the-help-interview. strong and daniels each independently use the word “epic” (haygood, the butler, –; hazelton). according to hazelton (–), strong had finished the first draft of the screenplay when talks with daniels began, but daniels, in his foreword to haygood’s the butler, makes clear he was particularly taken with the possibil- ities of using the father–son relationship as the guiding framework of the film.  haygood, the butler, –; hazelton; pamela mcclintock, “why ‘lee daniels’ the butler’ has  producers,” hollywood reporter, at www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/ why-lee-daniels-butler-has-, accessed  april .  vivian sobchack, “‘surge and splendor’: a phenomenology of the hollywood historical epic,” representations,  (), –, –, doi:./. in looking at the film’s relations to popular and to black cinema, it is worth noting that the producers (ziskin and her associate pam williams) also explored the possibility of working with steven spielberg as director (haygood, the butler, ; hazelton). but daniels’s version was no less “epic”: a variety reviewer described the film as “at its root the kind of starry, old-fashioned prestige pic the studios used to make.” scott foundas, “whitaker serves ‘butler’ well,” variety,  aug. , international index to the performing arts, .  terri francis, “whose ‘black film’ is this? the pragmatics and pathos of black film scholarship,” cinema journal, ,  (), –, , doi:./cj..; stuart hall, “what is this ‘black’ in black popular culture?”, social justice, , – (), –, . commercial counterhistory  terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /movies/hollywood-separate-and-unequal.html http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /movies/hollywood-separate-and-unequal.html http://theurbandaily.com/ / / /the-butler-vs-the-help-interview http://theurbandaily.com/ / / /the-butler-vs-the-help-interview http://theurbandaily.com/ / / /the-butler-vs-the-help-interview http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/why-lee-daniels-butler-has- http://www.hollywoodreporter.com/news/why-lee-daniels-butler-has- https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core particularly acute as african american filmmakers have made increasing inroads into hollywood production and distribution. where anna everett sees the successes of “bamms (black american media moguls)” as offering the potential for broad debate and exchange, jared sexton cautions that the “black directorial signature,” when applied to commercial media, may indicate creative constraint or complicity as black cultural workers are required to “orchestrate … scenes of [their] own subjection.” such concerns could be amplified when dealing with the work of daniels, whose previous films as a director – including shadowboxer (), precious (), and the paperboy () – are stylistically and thematically daring but yield no sense of political consistency. further, his publicity efforts for the butler suggested that, in his desire for an audience, he was willing to down- play political implications where helpful. he acknowledged, for example, that his racial identification could be useful for reassuring african american viewers skeptical of the film’s focus on a servant: he generally expressed dis- pleasure over the official title lee daniels’ the butler (the result of a copyright dispute with warner bros.), but in interviews with african american media he jokingly attributed the revised title to “god.” in other venues, however, he resisted the label “black filmmaker” and described the film’s premise as “universal,” a strategy that could, as mark cunningham observes, fuel fantasies of american “postracialism.” in fairness, these statements may also reflect frustration with how, as kobena mercer argued over a quarter of a century  everett, “black film,” –; anna everett, “the ‘new’ new black film: black media praxis in the millennium,” society for cinema and media studies annual conference,  march , montreal, canada; jared sexton, “the ruse of engagement: black masculinity and the cinema of policing,” american quarterly, ,  (), –, – , doi:./aq... because lee daniels lacked “transmedia platforms” as of , everett described him in “black film” as an “emerging bamm”; oprah winfrey, who plays the titular butler’s wife gloria, is (probably still) “the most successful bamm” (). daniels has since broken into television with empire (fox, – present) and star (fox, –present).  for a journalistic overview of the vigorous debate concerning precious’s cultural politics see felicia r. lee, “‘precious’ ignites a debate on the black narrative,” new york times,  nov. , at www.nytimes.com////movies/precious.html.  rachel dodes, “‘the butler’: a white house ‘forrest gump’; the african-american man who served presidents for  years,” wall street journal,  aug. , proquest performing arts periodicals database; theodore-vachon, “if you’ve been comparing.” from this point in this article, i will refer to daniels’ film with the shortened title of the butler.  dave itzkoff, “lee daniels: ‘i am not here to just tell black stories,’” new york times,  aug. , at www.nytimes.com////magazine/lee-daniels-i-am-not-here-to- just-tell-black-stories.html; hazelton; mark cunningham, “no getting around the black,” cinema journal, ,  (summer ), –, –, doi:./ cj... grossman discusses a similar moment in daniels’ publicity in “between the butler and black dynamite,” .  leigh anne duck terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /movies/ precious.html http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /magazine/lee-daniels-i-am-not-here-to-just-tell-black-stories.html http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /magazine/lee-daniels-i-am-not-here-to-just-tell-black-stories.html https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core ago, black artists are “positioned in the margins of the institutional space of cultural production [and] burdened with the impossible role of speaking as ‘representatives,’” a problem daniels experienced directly in responses to precious (). still, in expressing enthusiasm for popular genres, he articu- lated no concern with how they might propagate racist stereotypes: in his fore- word to haygood’s book the butler, he remarks that, upon reading strong’s screenplay, he felt “inspired by films like gone with the wind” and hoped to “capture even half of what that film accomplished … something magical.” in suggesting that he might emulate an epic devoted to celebrating and mourning the antebellum south’s plantation culture, daniels surely implies his intention to apply equally potent cinematic magic to african americans’ quest for citizenship: gone with the wind, released in , is well known as the “most grand and excessive” of american “racial melodra- mas” and remains the highest-grossing film of all time when prices are adjusted for inflation. but his statement also foregrounds, with disquieting frankness, the paradox of seeking greater diversity in popular historical film. for while subject matter can be changed, the very style of gone with the wind perfectly exemplifies, in frank b. wilderson iii’s words, “how black images can be degraded and white images can be monumentalized and made mythic.” any effort to generate that intensity of spectacle for the purposes of honoring african american achievements would require aesthetic transformation of the kind commercial cinema inherently resists. as kara keeling argues, films receive broad distribution only by “affirming aspects of common sense,” by which she means a preestablished way of perceiving and responding, shaped by an audiovisual environment suffused with corporate media; such pro- ductions generate, in keeling’s argument, not only clichéd images but also, less directly, clichéd ways of responding to images. both funding networks and audiences expect films, however much they differentiate themselves in certain respects, to adhere to these patterns.  kobena mercer, “black art and the burden of representation,” third text, ,  (), –, , doi:./. stephanie li, signifying without specifying: racial discourse in the age of obama (new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press, ), –, demonstrates how daniels’s complex representational strategies in precious were often received as documentary-style realism.  lee daniels, foreword to wil haygood, the butler, xi–xii, xi.  williams, playing the race card, ; “all time box office adjusted for ticket price inflation,” box office mojo, accessed  oct. , at www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/ adjusted.htm.  frank b. wilderson iii, red, white & black: cinema and the structure of u.s. antagonisms (durham, nc: duke university press, ), .  kara keeling, the witch’s flight: the cinematic, the black femme, and the image of common sense (durham, nc: duke university press, ), , –, . commercial counterhistory  terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm http://www.boxofficemojo.com/alltime/adjusted.htm https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core this paradox – between the desire for more broadly distributed black his- torical films and the concern that commercial aesthetics resist projects that challenge racial hierarchies – is arguably inescapable, given both the great imbalance in the histories currently represented in commercial cinema and the aesthetic constraints such projects face in production. diversity in such images matters, because they can influence understandings of the nation’s development: popular cinematic narratives make spectators “feel as if we are learning about the past by vicariously living through its moments,” in historian robert rosenstone’s words, or, in film scholar allison landsberg’s model, produce “prosthetic memories” of events in which viewers did not participate. and while such films are unlikely to challenge capitalist precepts, even critics of commercial cinema note its occasional sur- prises. keeling, for example, focusses on distinct images within films, arguing that, if cinema so influences how bodies interpret and respond to their world, it might at least momentarily “explode” that cycle, stimulating new ways to think about how political change occurs or how uses and understand- ings of race vary (or not) across time.  monica white ndounou, shaping the future of african american film: color-coded economics and the story behind the numbers (new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press, ), –.  robert a. rosenstone, history on film/film on history, nd edn (new york: pearson, ), –; alison landsberg, prosthetic memory: the transformation of american remembrance in the age of mass culture, proquest e-book (new york: columbia university press, ),  and passim. see also robert burgoyne, film nation: hollywood looks at u.s. history (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, ), –; mia mask, “introduction,” in mask, ed., contemporary black american cinema: race, gender and sexuality at the movies, proquest e-book (new york: routledge, ), –, –.  keeling, , , –, –. i am mindful here of adolph reed jr.’s critiques of demands for more opportunities for black filmmakers and actors, which holds not that the medium is without ideological influence, but rather that it is inevitably hegemonic, “embedded in cap- italist … imperatives.” adolph reed jr., “the real problem with selma,” nonsite.org,  jan. , at http://nonsite.org/editorial/the-real-problem-with-selma#foot_-; reed, “django unchained, or, the help: how ‘cultural politics’ is worse than no politics at all, and why,” nonsite.org, ,  feb. , at http://nonsite.org/feature/django- unchained-or-the-help-how-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why. while this point is essential, it may not encompass all the meanings conveyed by an indi- vidual film. notably, reed objects to films that appear to elide historical differences between previous eras and our own, on the principal that doing so acknowledges “no think- able alternative to the ideological order under which we live.” typical criticisms of civil rights films, in contrast, complain that they overstate historical difference, presenting the problem of racial injustice (as opposed to specifically de jure jim crow) as now, effectively, solved. to me, this very debate indicates what david scott, omens of adversity: tragedy, time, memory, justice (durham, nc: duke university press, ), , calls the “sense of a stalled present,” in which simply positioning the past in a generative relationship to the present becomes arduous.  leigh anne duck terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core http://nonsite.org/editorial/the-real-problem-with-selma% foot_ - http://nonsite.org/editorial/the-real-problem-with-selma% foot_ - http://nonsite.org/feature/django-unchained-or-the-help-how-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why http://nonsite.org/feature/django-unchained-or-the-help-how-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why http://nonsite.org/feature/django-unchained-or-the-help-how-cultural-politics-is-worse-than-no-politics-at-all-and-why https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core still, hollywood films are poorly suited to acknowledgment of how past conflicts are linked to continuing struggles, in part because they tend to present the past as beyond the scope of ordinary individuals, and also because their plots have long favored clear and thorough resolutions. such a critique perfectly fits the butler’s conclusion, where, as the now elderly retired protagonist (played by forrest whitaker) walks slowly down the white house’s elegant hallway on his way to meet the new african american president, viewers hear vocal clips attesting to the nation’s slowly expanding recognition of black citizenship, from john f. kennedy, to lyndon b. johnson, to obama himself, all accompanied by grand orchestral chords that suggest the transcendence of both the long-laboring black body and the once white-supremacist nation – ostensibly a now perfect union. but as i argue below, there are counterhegemonic approaches to history embedded within this film as well, a vacillation between contestation of and incorporation into dominant ideologies that exemplifies stuart hall’s account of black popular culture. approaching the butler in this way acknowledges the diversity of forms and goals that emerge as african american directors begin to gather substantial budgets for historical film. representing stories not only marginalized from but, in some ways, aesthetically unassimilable to the commercial cinema of pre- ceding decades, such films may seek, at some level, to pursue “counter-history,” marcia landy’s term for films that challenge “received views about historiciz- ing.” far from being “antihistorical,” counterhistory promotes “an active and irreverent position … in relation to the disciplines of history and popular culture,” stimulating audiences to contemplate the ways in which the past is visualized or understood more broadly. this project aligns with  sobchack, “‘surge and splendor,’” –; david bordwell, “classical hollywood cinema: narrational principles and procedures,” in philip rosen, ed., narrative, apparatus, ideology: a film theory reader (new york: columbia university press, ), –, –; robert a. rosenstone, visions of the past: the challenge of film to our idea of history (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, ), .  lee daniels’ the butler, dir. lee daniels, weinstein (), anchor bay (), dvd.  hall, “what is this ‘black,’” . everett, “black film,” –, argues that such approaches are particularly important in dealing with the work of contemporary “bamms.”  marcia landy, cinema and counter-history, kindle e-book (bloomington: indiana university press, ), loc. . see also miriam hansen, “alexander kluge, cinema and the publich sphere: the construction site of counter-history,” discourse,  (), –.  landy, loc. . for example, d. w. griffith’s birth of a nation (), though an outra- geously biased account of abolitionism and especially reconstruction, was not counterhis- torical: on the contrary, it worked very hard, through captioned “facsimiles,” to persuade viewers of its fidelity to the historical accounts of the white-supremacist “dunning school,” which dominated the discipline at that time (birth of a nation, griffith corp., kino, , dvd). commercial counterhistory  terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core an aesthetic challenge that michael boyce gillespie finds in “black film, and black art more broadly,” as this oeuvre necessarily “navigates the idea of race as constitutive, cultural fiction,” not simply to describe but to disrupt. such challenges to conventional representation are particularly important in dealing with the story of the civil rights movement, which has been reproduced in media from cinema to “heritage tours, museums, public rituals, textbooks, and various artifacts of mass culture” in ways that, as jacquelyn dowd hall argues, mold understandings of race, history, and space into a nationalist frame – ”a natural progression of american values … a satisfying morality tale.” iconic images: seeing past and seeing through the butler’s approach to the relationship between history and counterhistory can be usefully contrasted to that of ava duvernay’s selma (). where strong transformed the historical figure of eugene allen into the fictional character of “cecil gaines,” enabling the filmmakers to design his personal life as they chose, selma focusses on the interactions among actual activists, politicians, and police, as supporters of the civil rights movement gather in alabama for a confrontation that would lead to the passage of the  voting rights act. critics promptly questioned selma’s accuracy, but duvernay, while defending the factual basis of her film, emphasized her desire to change how viewers visualize the past. like those involved in  michael boyce gillespie, film blackness: american cinema and the idea of black film (durham, nc: duke university press, ), –.  hall, “the long civil rights movement,” , .  complaints that the film overstated johnson’s resistance to placing the vra on his legis- lative agenda and his support for fbi surveillance of martin luther king jr. erupted even before the film was widely released. jennifer schuessler, “depiction of lyndon b. johnson in ‘selma’ raises hackles,” new york times,  dec. , at www.nytimes.com//// movies/depiction-of-lyndon-b-johnson-in-selma-raises-hackles.html. while some accused the film of reckless disregard for history (see, for example, maureen dowd, “not just a movie,” new york times, jan. , , at www.nytimes.com////opinion/ sunday/not-just-a-movie.html), the more serious debate focussed on emphasis, tone, and/or implicit suggestion. for example, while most historians acknowledge that the film’s assessment of johnson’s approach to the vra’s timing is not incorrect, several wish that johnson had been portrayed as more generally supportive (schuessler); student non-violent coordinating committee (sncc) activists’ objections to southern christian leadership conference methods are given little screen time and are portrayed as callow (adolph reed jr., “the real problem with selma”); and while the film is circumspect regarding what fbi actions johnson actually supported, it “somewhat clumsily … crams a decade’s worth of murkiness” regarding j. edgar hoover’s notorious disregard for both legality and executive order into a brief time period (amy davidson, “why ‘selma’ is more than fair to l.b.j.,” new yorker,  jan. , at www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/selma-fair-l-b-j).  leigh anne duck terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /movies/depiction-of-lyndon-b-johnson-in-selma-raises-hackles.html http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /movies/depiction-of-lyndon-b-johnson-in-selma-raises-hackles.html http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/sunday/not-just-a-movie.html http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/sunday/not-just-a-movie.html http://www.newyorker.com/news/amy-davidson/selma-fair-l-b-j https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core developing the butler, she explicitly sought to counter previous hollywood representations, saying, “i wasn’t interested in making a white-savior movie.” but beyond that, she spoke of understanding the audience’s desire to see history “through their own lens” and explained, “this is how i see it”; early in the debate, she tweeted that “folks should interrogate history … let it come alive for yourself.” representing a vigorously encoded past, duvernay encourages more active engagement with mediated history more broadly. one aspect of her method is to incorporate an array of characters and moments not regularly seen in representations of the selma conflict. widely reproduced images tend, in leigh raiford’s account, to “tame memory”; as nicole r. fleetwood explains, their meanings have, for most viewers, long been cemented. duvernay does not avoid such moments altogether, which could risk alienating an audience accustomed to mainstream conven- tions, and she retains a central and iconic protagonist in the figure of martin luther king jr. but duvernay’s non-iconic sequences produce a sense of contingency, of uncertainty, and, in fleetwood’s words, a “need for narrative unfolding” in order for viewers to understand their significance. scenes of annie lee cooper (oprah winfrey) attempting to register to vote, for example, or of the lee-jackson family fleeing police violence in a diner demonstrate how enforcers of jim crow could render mundane public space cruel and even lethal, while scenes of movement leadership lunch- ing and arguing point toward the everyday forms of cooperation and conflict intrinsic to political organizing. where duvernay contests hollywood’s civil rights genre through creating non-iconic images, the butler, as its name suggests, interrogates a central cine- matic icon of blackness, thematizing how the black butler has typically been relegated to the cinematic background. in cecil’s training, which begins  gavin edwards, “we shall overcome: ava duvernay on making ‘selma,’” rolling stone,  jan. , at www.rollingstone.com/movies/features/ava-duvernay-on- making-selma-; haygood, the butler, –.  gwen ifill, “director ava duvernay on sharing the story of ‘selma,’” pbs newshour,  jan. , at www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/director-ava-duvernay-sharing-story-selma- deconstructing-american-heroes; ava duvernay, “bottom line is folks should interrogate history …,” twitter,  dec. , at https://twitter.com/avaetc/status/ .  leigh raiford, imprisoned in a luminous glare: photography and the african american freedom struggle (chapel hill: university of north carolina press, ), ; nicole r. fleetwood, troubling vision: performance, visuality, and blackness (chicago: the university of chicago press, ), .  fleetwood, troubling vision, .  fleetwood, on racial icons, , , defines such figures as affectively “pulled between the intertwined forces of denigration and veneration,” conveying “the weight of history and the power of the present moment,” which is situated historically through an icon’s presence. commercial counterhistory  terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/features/ava-duvernay-on-making-selma- http://www.rollingstone.com/movies/features/ava-duvernay-on-making-selma- http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/director-ava-duvernay-sharing-story-selma-deconstructing-american-heroes http://www.pbs.org/newshour/bb/director-ava-duvernay-sharing-story-selma-deconstructing-american-heroes https://twitter.com/avaetc/status/ https://twitter.com/avaetc/status/ https://twitter.com/avaetc/status/ https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core in his youth, he is repeatedly told, “the room should feel empty when you’re in it,” a demand to reassure white elites of a categorical difference between them- selves and their servants. but cecil’s mentor recognizes the performance of such difference as a professional challenge: “we got two faces – ours, and the ones that we gotta show the white folks.” much of the film highlights cecil’s aesthetically rigorous performance, ensuring that, when his role is to remain in the background, the labor of occupying that space will be visible. for example, in one early shot, young cecil (aml ameen) stands at the rear of a poolside scene, fully uniformed and holding a tray of refreshments in one hand, and the camera follows a white teenager as he approaches to take a soda. but as the boy turns and walks away, the camera continues to track toward cecil, whose gaze and stance have not flinched. in spotlighting how this figure remains immobile on the edges of the frame, the film illuminates the visual style of the plantation romance – a combination of spatial arrange- ments and aesthetics that, in nicholas mirzoeff’s words, “separates and segre- gates,” determining and delimiting social roles. this attention to iconicity, however, yields a potentially problematic emphasis on spectacle in sections of the film devoted to the activism of cecil’s son louis. he appears at many of the most famous events in the civil rights movement, enabling the film to speed through archival citations and reproductions of the kind that, as monteith and graham each point out, are featured consistently in hollywood’s civil rights genre. both i argue that, on the whole, the butler explores this process, though fleetwood, ibid., , describes the film as “caricature.” in signifying without specifying, –, li argues that precious includes a similar exploration of how icons are constructed and the experience of being viewed as such.  while this reference to duality is reminiscent of w. e. b. du bois’s famous description of “double-consciousness” from the souls of black folk (), this formulation, as it first appears in the film, is focussed clearly on performance, a form of role-playing that e. patrick johnson theorizes through the work of franz fanon, michel de certeau, and patricia williams, as well as the west african trickster figure of esu. e. patrick johnson, appropriating blackness: performance and the politics of authenticity (durham, nc: duke university press, ), –.  nicholas mirzoeff, the right to look: a counterhistory of visuality (durham, nc: duke university press, ), . mirzoeff focusses on the plantation complex as a social form in which the overseer/owner’s arrangement of spaces and exercise of surveillance – techni- ques that can each, at some level, be understood as visual – established and sustained both racial hierarchy and more general understandings of how authority functions. ibid., –. cinematic plantation romances, including gone with the wind, appeared after slavery’s abo- lition (albeit alongside sharecropping) and acknowledged the us south’s antebellum culture as archaic, but continued to celebrate the essential “right[ness],” in mirzoeff’s terms, of plantation visuality.  graham, “we ain’t doin’ civil rights,” –; monteith, “civil rights movement film,” –. one particularly displeased reviewer described the film as “a pedagogical march through the virtual african-american trials and tribulations memorial museum.”  leigh anne duck terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core strong and daniels note that these familiar scenes align the butler with forrest gump, robert zemeckis’s  blockbuster, which also constitutes an extended flashback shaped by voice-over narration, mixing archival and created footage; more fundamentally, each of these films is epic in sweep, melo- dramatic in plot, and resolutely popular. for many scholars and critics, however, such depictions of history as a series of set pieces with richly detailed production design suggest postmodern pastiche, which fredric jameson describes as “incompatib[le]” with “genuine historicity.” the danger of such an approach is that it compresses complex historical dynamics into neatly commodifiable images, and critics have noted this potential especially in the butler’s representation of the black panthers. while attentive to the party’s diverse programs of community building and self-defense, the melodramatic plot enfolds this historical movement in ways that highlight surface over substance. when louis and his friend carol (yaya alafia) dine with the gaines family, conversation breaks down into a conflict over mores that cannot be separated from personal style and manner- isms: head-coverings (beret and afro), the degree to which clothes hide the body, and whether it is acceptable to “belch at the table.” in this way, the scene threatens to “reduce … a politics of liberation to a politics of fashion,” a tendency that, as angela davis argues, has been particularly egre- gious in depictions of african american radicalism. michael atkinson, “the butler” (review), sight and sound, jan. , , international index to the performing arts.  dodes, “the butler”; foundas, “whitaker serves ‘butler’ well,” ; “the unique perspective of lee daniels’ the butler,” american cinematographer: the international journal of film & digital production techniques, sept. , international index to the performing arts, a.  fredric jameson, postmodernism, or, the cultural logic of late capitalism (durham, nc: duke university press, ), , –.  monteith, , expresses such a critique in calling louis “the forrest gump of the contem- porary civil rights fiction film.”  see, for example, cedric johnson, “panther nostalgia as history,” review of black against empire: the history and politics of the black panther party, new labor forum, ,  (may ), , doi:./; peniel e. joseph, “a civil rights professor reviews ‘lee daniels’ the butler,’” indiewire,  sept. , at www.indie- wire.com///a-civil-rights-professor-reviews-lee-daniels-the-butler-.  ryan j. kirkby notes that, until recently, even scholarship on the panthers tended to empha- size either their “survival programs” or their stance on violence, rather than exploring the coexistence of the two. “‘the revolution will not be televised’: community activism and the black panther party, –,” canadian review of american studies, ,  (), –, –, doi:./crv...  angela y. davis, “afro images: politics, fashion, and nostalgia,” in deborah willis, ed., picturing us: african american identity in photography (new york: new press, ), –, . commercial counterhistory  terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core http://www.indiewire.com/ / /a-civil-rights-professor-reviews-lee-daniels-the-butler- http://www.indiewire.com/ / /a-civil-rights-professor-reviews-lee-daniels-the-butler- https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core some scholars suggest, however, that pastiche can encourage contemplation of how history has been mediated. vera dika and stefan serada argue that many such works address viewers highly attuned to cinematic history, aware of conflicts in how contemporary understandings of the past are constructed, and thus able to recognize the subversion of conventional semiotic systems; in this regard, vivian sobchack sees even forrest gump as appealing to “historic- ally (self-)conscious viewers who have been immersed in questions about the boundaries, meanings, and place of history in their daily lives, as well as about their own possible place in history.” this logic is central to the butler’s continuing focus on the construction, enactment, attractions, and cri- tiques of iconic racial images, reaching a climax at that very dinner table scene. as the generations clash over apparel and manners, they also debate one of the period’s few black lead performances in hollywood – sidney poitier as virgil tibbs in norman jewison’s in the heat of the night (). where cecil lauds the actor’s accomplishments, which he believes to support civil rights, louis dismisses poitier as “nothing but a rich uncle tom,” and their ensuing fight crystalizes long-standing tensions in a relationship perpetually refracted through icons of blackness. exploring this problem, the film follows a pattern that alessandro raengo finds in daniels’s earlier precious, which “seeks to locate blackness not in bodies but in between them”; the butler, rendering this representational logic more explicit, also stages the ways in which such iconic versions of black- ness are debated and contested. years before the dinner scene, carol attributes louis’s criticism of malcolm x to shame over cecil, who in the former’s terms would be a “house negro.” though louis may not understand his father solely in such reductive terms, neither he nor cecil can evade the influence of this cliché, which sets the parameters for cecil’s professional performance and for the ways in which others interpret him. (notably, cecil’s vivid social life includes chiefly his white house colleagues and their wives, a group in which the butlers enjoy performing as different icons: for example, carter [cuba gooding jr.] dons a wig and imitates james brown.) later, as louis waits in martin luther king jr.’s memphis motel room, the civil rights  vera dika, recycled culture in contemporary art and film: the uses of nostalgia (cambridge: cambridge university press, ), , –; stefan sereda, “the cinema of simulation: hyper-histories and (un)popular memory in the good german () and inglourious basterds (),” in russell j. a. kilbourn and eleanor ty, eds., the memory effect: the remediation of memory in literature and film (waterloo: wilfrid laurier university press, ), –, –; vivian sobchack, “introduction: history happens,” in sobchack, ed., the persistence of history: cinema, television and the modern event (new york: routledge, ), –, .  alessandra raengo, “shadowboxing: lee daniels’ nonrepresentational cinema,” in mask, contemporary black american cinema, –, , original emphasis.  leigh anne duck terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core leader (nelsan ellis) assures him that, while domestic servants may appear “subservient,” they quietly “defy racial stereotypes by being hardworking and trustworthy.” as he finishes speaking, however, we see cecil openly request higher wages and greater opportunities for the black staff, only to be told not to “let that martin luther king shit fill [his] britches out.” the film displays such disjunctions between concepts and experiences also in relation to other icons, as characters confront restrictive interpretations while seeking to define themselves. this process is most overt in relation to the black panthers: after the gaines family dinner, viewers see party members insisting, against media reports, that they are not “terrorists” but “terrorized” by systemic racism and police violence; meanwhile, in parallel editing, we see nixon plotting to claim the mantra of “black power” for his administration through promoting “black entrepreneurs” even as he plans to “gut” the bpp. but the way in which iconic performance can express aspiration even while subjecting one to painful discipline is most poignantly demonstrated in cecil’s wife gloria, who met him while working as a hotel maid and, upon her marriage, becomes a homemaker, taking on the normative status and associated constrictions visualized in mid-century hollywood melo- dramas. situating this character in relation to an iconic film history, the butler does not foreground the significance of race, but neither does it diminish race’s importance by simply inserting a black woman into a cinematic role previously occupied by white women. rather, by positioning gloria in a distinctive ecology of icons, it explores how she is constrained by ideologies of both race and gender. for example, the film’s images of other black maids highlight the spatial restrictions that have long governed representations of this figure: though cecil’s colleagues at the white house, they are granted so much less prestige that his supervisor (played by colman domingo) insists he not speak to them. further, gloria’s portrayal by oprah winfrey may remind viewers that this media mogul built her transracial audience in part by reassuring viewers of her domestic expertise, and was often, in mia mask’s words,  for a historical account of how the panthers, the media, and various agencies struggled over the meaning of their image see jane rhodes, framing the black panthers: the spectacular rise of a black power icon (new york: new press, ).  for this tendency in hollywood film see robyn wiegman, “black bodies/american commodities: gender, race, and the bourgeois ideal in contemporary film,” in lester d. friedman, ed., unspeakable images: ethnicity and the american cinema (urbana: university of illinois press, ), –, –.  elizabeth patton notes that such figures are far more constrained spatially on television than even on radio programs. elizabeth patton, “we all have our jobs to do! maintaining labor relations in the private sphere on postwar television,” society for cinema and media studies annual conference, atlanta, georgia,  march . commercial counterhistory  terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core “interpreted as a metaphorical mammy.” recognized, as mask continues, for her extraordinary and yet iconically american “narrative of success … someone who has transcended abjection through self-realization and entrepre- neurial spirit,” winfrey’s extradiegetic persona, combined with her perform- ance, underscores the pathos of gloria’s quest to gratify her creativity. an avid consumer of television, print sewing patterns, woman’s day, and jet (which the film singles out as contributing to her insights on racial politics), this character exemplifies bourgeois gender norms but lacks the consuming public such an icon implicitly should have. for example, as she imparts the secret to her potato salad (a dish featured more than once in winfrey’s media outlets), her friend (played by adriane lenox) responds with a long pause, con- veying mystification at gloria’s enthusiasm. this gap between gloria’s efforts and impact may fuel her resentment of jacqueline bouvier kennedy, who, after retir- ing from her journalistic career to marry a promising male professional, became an icon of fashionable domesticity. frustrated that cecil devotes so much energy toward his job, gloria angrily badgers him to reveal details of “jackie’s” closet. fittingly, in exploring cinematic icons of blackness, the film also takes on the spatial icon with which many of them are associated – the southern plan- tation. long configured in cinematic plantation romances as extraordinary space, these expansive landscapes and ornate “big houses” were once, in edward baptist’s words, “soaked into the way america publicly depicted slavery,” and while their associated white-supremacist convictions have been subjected to vig- orous critique (though obviously not defeated), the belief that these labor camps functioned “separate from” the rest of the nation’s economy has remained obdurate. in these representations, as in hollywood’s civil rights genre, the very chronotope through which the us south is depicted impedes understanding of how past regional racial oppression relates to broader spatial histories or ongoing struggle. the butler both highlights how such understandings are pro- duced cinematically and challenges that process through portraying an african american community that persistently, albeit unevenly, explores experiential and conceptual links with diverse spaces. the palimpsestic plantation and global spaces of struggle the butler opens grandly: the opening chords of robert schumann’s piano concerto in a minor (op. ) accompany a black screen that fades to a  mia mask, divas on screen: black women in american film, proquest e-book (urbana: university of illinois press, ), .  ibid., .  edward e. baptist, the half has never been told, google e-book (new york: basic books, ), –.  leigh anne duck terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core white hall with columns, chandeliers, and red trimmings. amid this elegance, the film evokes both spatial and temporal boundaries. a black man stands as if guarding a door while another sits, and as the scene dissolves to a medium shot, we see that this man is disturbed. as his face turns upward, a second dissolve reveals the bodies of two lynched black men hung closely together, with a us flag waving behind them. this image echoes o. n. pruitt’s  photograph of the lynching of bert moore and dooley morton, later reproduced in a  sncc poster labeled “mississippi,” where it indexed the violence of jim crow and testified to the urgency of activism. in the butler, as it indexes both racial violence and the movement against it, this image emerges from the dissolving curtains as if from a red mist, disrupting the space of what viewers soon understand to be the white house. thus, from its opening shot, the film raises questions about space, time, and racial oppression – high- lighting the relationship between the opulent, restricted space of the foyer and the violent racism enacted elsewhere in the nation, as well as the pressures raised by this memory in the diegetic present. these slow dissolves create cinematic palimpsests, a term denoting reused recording surfaces where the traces of earlier writing or marking remain; in this case, the image of a public venue literally shares the frame with that of a personal memory. the trope of the palimpsest has proven particularly gen- erative among writers and artists seeking to challenge triumphalist accounts of national or global modernity, in which advances would simply and utterly dis- place past oppression. in the butler, such dissolves work both temporally and spatially, insisting that contemporary spaces of governance can neither dis- regard the impact of past racist violence nor pretend isolation from locales where such acts occur. this spatial argument is developed further in the next dissolve, as the protagonist recalls his youth on a georgia plantation in ; the connection between personal and national past is again emphasized by the curtains, which – dissolving into a white field of cotton – evoke a red stripe on the flag just shown. alluding, through the image of black workers in cotton fields, to the oppressive source of the nation’s early wealth and even the labor that built the white house, the film overlays these two  raiford, imprisoned in a luminous glare, –. where moore and morton were posi- tioned adjacent to each other – shoulder to shoulder – the butler’s two bodies are face to face, almost as if embracing. thus although this film is much more heteronormative than daniels’ previous work, this image conveys a continuum between racist and homopho- bic hate crime.  see, for example, ashraf h. a. rushdy, remembering generations: race and family in contemporary african american fiction (chapel hill: university of north carolina press, ); and boaventura de sousa santos, epistemologies of the south: justice against epistemicide (boulder, co: paradigm, ), , . commercial counterhistory  terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core spaces in a way that contests the long cinematic tradition of representing the south in a chronotope categorically different from that of the nation. while this sequence’s editing incorporates the plantation into national space, its sound and images function differently, presenting this site as spec- tacularly idyllic and horrific. schumann’s concerto shifts into a succession of percussive chords, wistful winds and piano, and precipitous strings, suggest- ing the workings of fate or an unworldly setting. as cecil begins the voice-over narration that sustains the film’s extended flashback, he speaks of the pleas- ure – despite the hard work – of being with his family in the fields all day, but this nostalgia is quickly interrupted by brutality, as young cecil hears his mother scream while being raped and sees his father shot for merely addres- sing the rapist. this shocking sequence echoes how cinema has typically either elided or contained representations of racial violence on the plantation, which is depicted as either too pastoral or too pathological to be readily mapped in relation to a functioning polity. what such linkage would entail is perhaps best illustrated through exceptions, such as the early birth of a nation, which complains that the us failed to value plantation structures, and steve mcqueen’s  years a slave (), which insists, via the protagonist’s abduc- tion in the nation’s capital and continued efforts to free himself via letters and the courts, that the nation is complicit in his suffering. while these films differ diametrically in their assessment of the plantation form, each considers it a structure embedded in the nation, whereas films from gone with the wind to richard fleischer’s mandingo () have suggested that either its beauty or its perversity could render it barely comprehensible by those not intimate with its cultures. in contrast, the butler approaches the question of the plantation’s chron- otope through young cecil, newly traumatized and unfamiliar with any other social space: rather than treating this zone as ontologically distinctive, the film explores the kinds of awareness necessary to understand it properly. cecil is initially resistant to such conceptual work, his insularity emerging from the loss he is not even permitted to mourn: immediately after his father is killed, the murderer’s mother tells him to “stop crying,” as she is “gonna teach [him] how to be a house nigga,” and he focusses on succeeding in this new role. while he recognizes this domestic sphere as dangerous, as he   years a slave, dir. steve mcqueen, fox searchlight (), twentieth century fox home entertainment (), dvd.  i have reproduced this word phonetically, albeit anachronistically. the film does distinguish this pronunciation by the elderly plantation matriarch (played by vanessa redgrave) from that of epithets later hurled at louis and his fellow activists. shortly after this scene, a black mentor (maynard, played by clarence williams iii) slaps the teen-aged cecil for using the matriarch’s phrase, calling it “the white man’s word … filled with hate.”  leigh anne duck terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core must serve his parents’ murderer/rapist at mealtimes, he explicitly considers the outside world even more frightening – and, indeed, he encounters both hunger and those lynched bodies upon his departure. perfecting his professional demeanor and carefully delimiting his psychological and cartographic interroga- tions – enacting, in other words, the cinematic ideal of “the butler” – he is recruited for a position at the white house after a manager, having a drink off-duty at a nearby inn, hears him answer a customer’s question about civil rights activism by saying he gives little thought to “american or european pol- itics,” simultaneously disavowing political and global geographic awareness. but cecil clashes regularly with friends and family members concerning spatial connections, and his singularity is important: otherwise, the film would risk supporting what mckittrick describes as “discourses that erase and despatialize [black] sense[s] of place,” geographies shaped through a history of “contestation.” instead, the butler foregrounds both dissent and investigation in african american spatial thought. cecil is disturbed, for example, that gloria and louis are so interested in mamie till, a chicagoan whose activism, following the murder of her son emmett in mississippi, demonstrated her conviction “that what happens to any of us, any- where in the world, had better be the business of us all.” conflict intensifies as louis determines to attend fisk university in nashville, leading cecil, fearful for his son, to attempt to persuade his family to ignore the south. other characters, however, insist on the inviability of stark regional boundaries while pointing instead to transnational connections. louis’s training as an activist at fisk is explicitly based on techniques honed in india and south africa, and this challenge to us exceptionalism ultimately proves persuasive even in cecil’s workplace, as john f. kennedy (james marsden), watching the abuse of civil rights activists on television, admits he cannot “tell what country [he’s] looking at.” the film makes clear that any serious consideration of african american life must attend also to transnational events, cutting dir- ectly from cecil and gloria’s faces as they watch johnson deliver the voting rights act to congress on television (images re-created for the film) to arch- ival news footage of bombings in vietnam and protests in washington. this convergence, usually represented in separate film genres, proves devastating to the family, as the younger son charlie dies in combat, and louis, long opposed to the us presence in vietnam, fulfills his promise not to attend the funeral, intensifying his conflict with his father.  mckittrick, demonic grounds, xiii, xix.  quoted in jacqueline goldsby, “the high and low tech of it: the meaning of lynching and the death of emmett till,” yale journal of criticism, ,  (), –, , doi:./yale... commercial counterhistory  terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core though these synchronic transnational connections are familiar to students of african american history, they are rarely seen on cinematic screens: even black independent films such as julie dash’s daughters of the dust () and haile gerima’s sankofa () focus chiefly on heritage ties between diasporic subjects and african ancestors. the butler, in contrast, promotes understanding of new or renewed connections based in the common need to oppose oppression; while that can yield pan-african or diasporic perspectives, it also highlights struggle against injustice more broadly. though the butlers talk frequently concerning national events, for example, one briefly criticizes his peers for “ignorance” of problems elsewhere: praising the refusal of pablo casals, who is performing for the kennedys, to perform in any country that recognizes franco’s regime, james (lenny kravitz) is appalled that carter doesn’t know who franco is. a moment of banter inserted in a section mainly devoted to louis’s experiences of brutality in the us south, this theme of geographic connection will nonethe- less prove crucial to the film’s resolution. the decades-long feud between cecil and louis only ends after cecil contemplates his spatial relationships with that georgia plantation, with the white house, and indirectly with south africa. the film suggests that cecil is only able to recognize these connections once he has considered his professional performances in a political context – not as the experience of being a butler, which for him involves familiar forms of labor and friendship with colleagues, but as the projection of an icon. this sequence begins when cecil and gloria are invited as guests to a reagan administration state dinner, during which cecil considers, in voice-over, the “two faces” worn by the butlers. offered this invitation for persuading white house administrators to provide african american staff equal pay, he cannot escape the impression that his primary purpose, in the eyes of others, is “for show.” though in many ways constructed as a realistic character, cecil suddenly becomes aware of himself as an icon of blackness whose “lived experience” cannot be recognized by the global governing class, whose  the film’s emphasis on social and political struggle as opposed to solely cultural or racial commonality suggests a sensibility influenced by what is now called the “global south,” as defined by levander and mignolo: “the place of struggles between, on the one hand, the rhetoric of modernity and modernization together with the logic of coloniality and domination, and, on the other, the struggle for independent thought and decolonial freedom.” caroline levander and walter mignolo, “introduction: the global south and world dis/order,” global south, ,  (), –, , doi:./globalsouth....  in red, white & black, , wilderson asks, concerning black or, in his terms, “slave cinema …: can film tell the story of a sentient being whose story can be neither recognized nor incor- porated into human civil society?”. in this sequence, the film seems to explore this question.  fred moten, “the case of blackness,” criticism, ,  (), –, , doi:./ crt... moten, here, is exploring how one can understand the substance of black lives in a world unequipped, ontologically, even to recognize them.  leigh anne duck terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core concepts of race have both dictated and been sustained by his performances. following this allegorical moment, cecil has his first embedded flashback. from the margins of a meeting between ronald reagan (alan rickman) and some republican senators, he hears the president insist, despite their warnings that apartheid constitutes a “human rights disaster,” the brutality of which makes it a “united states racial issue,” that he will veto any sanctions against it. suddenly, cecil sees his loving father, and then the snide cruelty of his father’s murderer. in the next shot, he wakes in the middle of the night and walks to his sons’ unoccupied room, where he finds manning marable’s race, reform, and rebellion, a volume that consistently situates conflicts over race in the us in a global context. proclaiming, in voice-over, that he feels “lost,” cecil then takes gloria to see his childhood home and to contemplate the space and time that so influenced his later life. comparing the brutality of us racial injustice to that of the holocaust, cecil’s voice-over, at this moment, aligns with rare anti-exceptionalist moments found in popular civil rights narrative; this scene stands out most, however, for its contrast with the film’s initial images of the plantation. in early shots, bodies of both sharecroppers and elites are effectively embedded in cotton, which reaches to their torsos. camera angles are either very low or situated amid such extensive growth that greenery dominates the frame; in many shots, plant life is also out of focus, simultaneously suffusing the image and evading scrutiny. though this later scene is no less lush, it no longer comprises cotton production, and the extreme long shots of grass and forest also include swaths of open sky. while its initial presentation evoked both previous hollywood epics and notorious brutality, rendering it difficult to connect to more mundane spaces, the land now appears merely rural – lacking the generic attributes, such as sound or conventional framing, that might determine its interpretation. arriving by car, dressed in tracksuits that underscore the difference in era, cecil and gloria survey this aesthetically unexceptional landscape from the road. in combining such non-iconic images with cecil’s voice-over discussing how contemporary citi- zens understand historical brutality, this commercial melodrama surprisingly echoes the opening of alain resnais’s avant-garde documentary nuit et bruil- lard/night and fog (): “even a peaceful landscape … even a meadow in harvest, with crows circling overhead and grass fires … even a road where cars  manning marable, race, reform, and rebellion (jackson: university press of mississippi, ).  this comparison is implicit in harper lee’s to kill a mockingbird (new york: warner, ; first published ), –.  production designers relied heavily on eye-catching costumes created by ruth e. carter to convey chronological differences. “the unique perspective of lee daniels’ the butler,” a. commercial counterhistory  terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core and peasants and couples pass … can lead to a concentration camp.” this generic transposition, like the butler’s early dissolves, suggests the films’ shared goal of disrupting viewers’ desire, as argued by the screenwriter of night and fog, to believe that a brutal past can be contained in “a given time and place,” a conviction that might blind us to “the arrival of our new executioners.” rather as night and fog questions how and to what effect societies can con- tinue after committing and being ravaged by violence, the protagonists of the butler, at this moment, contemplate the relationships between their child- hoods and their subsequent lives. for gloria, this process is verbalized, as she notes that her “mama woulda been right proud” of her for “being with a man” who has taken “such good care” of her, a paradoxical form of praise from a character whose frustration in her containment led to alcoholism and an affair. her delivery in this setting, however, suggests her conclusion that their partnership was pursued lovingly, even as it was inevitably shaped by destructive gender norms and limited career choices for african americans. the results of cecil’s thinking appear after his return, as he informs reagan of his retirement before joining louis in a protest at the south african embassy. remarkably, the president expresses concern that his stance on “this whole civil rights issue” might be “just wrong,” and cecil responds indirectly, “sometimes i think i’m just scared of what it really means. i’m trying not to be so scared anymore.” though the film depicts reagan as kind in personal interactions, cecil’s empathy can only shock those familiar with this president’s racial policies – knowledge that the film immediately conveys, as louis argues seconds later that reagan “has attacked or dismantled every civil rights program that has ever been put in place.” and yet cecil’s statement echoes gloria’s in its commitment to rec- ognizing how past circumstances might distort one’s understanding of the  nuit et bruillard/night and fog, dir. alain resnais, argos (), criterion (), dvd.  in this, the film nods to a prominent hagiographic tradition, which describes specific anti- racist acts in narrow contexts in order to argue that reagan’s national policies and rhetoric were meant to promote racial equality. steven f. hayward et al., “what ‘the butler’ gets wrong about ronald reagan and race,” washington post,  aug. , at www.washing- tonpost.com/opinions/what-the-butler-gets-wrong-about-ronald-reagan-and-race// //faae-e-e-cdd-bcdc_story.html). in contrast, the butler distin- guishes reagan’s personal style from his political goals and impact.  even the first edition of marable’s race, reform, and rebellion, published in , articu- lated such concerns; more recent editions describe this process in detail. marable, –; manning marable, race, reform, and rebellion: the second reconstruction and beyond in black america, –, rd edn, kindle e-book (jackson: university press of mississippi, ), loc. –.  leigh anne duck terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-the-butler-gets-wrong-about-ronald-reagan-and-race/ / / / f aa e- e - e - cdd-bcdc _story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-the-butler-gets-wrong-about-ronald-reagan-and-race/ / / / f aa e- e - e - cdd-bcdc _story.html http://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/what-the-butler-gets-wrong-about-ronald-reagan-and-race/ / / / f aa e- e - e - cdd-bcdc _story.html https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core present. thus he renounces his previous insularity immediately before he is shown being jailed for his activism against apartheid. by incorporating the reagan era into a civil rights narrative, the butler highlights a dangerous fulcrum between the iconic movement and our contem- porary era, a period that mobilized changes through which, as ellen c. scott argues, “an ultra neoliberalist state has transformed discourses of rights into the lexicon of the marketplace.” the full citizenship that civil rights activists pursued has in effect been weakened as a political category: spearheaded by reagan in the us and margaret thatcher in the united kingdom, the pursuit of global policies undermining both state social services and regulations on capitalist enterprise is now recognized as working to “remake the world around us in a totally different image,” such that “maximizing … market transactions” is understood as the central principle in pursuit of “the social good.” this upheaval proved devastating to radical movements across the globe, many of which sought to gain and mobilize state power for transforma- tive ends only to find it increasingly constrained in relation to global capital; such was the fate, in fact, of the struggle against apartheid. more than an attack on revolutionary movements, neoliberalism has battered the very prin- ciples through which they once imagined progressive futures, and the resulting “rupture,” in david scott’s words, has led to a “sense of a stalled present,” one in which it is difficult to comprehend connections to either future or past. in us cinema, this challenge has been prominent in representations of southern racial history, in which the past is recognized less as a period of oppressions we have been and are working to overcome on the path to a different future than as a period of triumph or pain that determines contem- porary meaning and experience. the celebratory endings of civil rights films, for example, present history, in scott’s terms, as “a source of radiant wisdom and truth,” whereas post-s representations of plantation slavery position that past as a haunting trauma, a “wound that will not heal.” the point here is not, of course, to deny that the civil rights movement bequeathed crucial ideals to the contemporary era or that slavery forged con- tinuing structures of injustice and immiseration; the point, rather, is that cinema has rarely imagined a way that persons in its present could alter the  scott, cinema civil rights, ; see also marable, race, reform, and rebellion, rd edn, loc. -.  david harvey, a brief history of neoliberalism (oxford: oxford university press, ), – . harvey also notes the centrality of deng xaioping in transmuting the economic directives of the people’s republic of china; reagan and thatcher were more immediately influential in the postcolonial contexts discussed below.  scott, omens of adversity, –, original emphasis; patrick bond, elite transition: from apartheid to neoliberalism in south africa, rev. edn (london: pluto press, ).  scott, omens of adversity, , .  ibid., . commercial counterhistory  terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core contemporary import of those pasts, by building on civil rights ideals or finding a new way to fight old injustice. (this problem is central, for example, to both sankofa and  years a slave, in which free protagonists with strong memories of slavery stare into space with expressions of unmitigated pain; though daughters of the dust uses representations of haunting to convey a process of healing, that transformation is contained in the early twentieth century and distanced from the mainland us.) in contrast, while diegetically placed within the very maelstrom leading to the moment in which the butler circulates, cecil revisits the past – both his and that of the plantation more broadly – as a period of meaningful but not absolute difference, a time that must be put in conversation with the present in order for him to partici- pate in ongoing racial struggle; further, this approach to time enables him to look beyond his home, his city, and his nation, gaining insight into local and global politics simultaneously. but if this sense of chronological connectedness contests the many represen- tations of the civil rights movement that keep it “from speaking effectively to the challenges of our time,” its manifestation proves evanescent. even as cecil, louis, and other protestors wait in jail, a sound bridge – cecil’s voice-over narration and the o’jays’ “family reunion” – leads the narrative forward twenty years to a neighborhood rally for barack obama. for cecil, these two events sharply punctuate the flow of time, with the second eclipsing the first: “after going to jail, i thought i’d seen it all, but i’d never imagined i’d see a black man be a real contender for the president of the united states.” but much as the o’jays’ distinctly easy-going tune obscures the complexity of their lyrics, cecil’s narration belies clear continuities between past and present: as the song emphasizes the family’s heteropatriarchal transcendence of time while implying a process of dispersal, cecil introduces obama’s campaign from the very space of the prison, a system that began expanding during the reagan administration and has since developed into mass incarceration and is often described as the nation’s most acute contemporary civil rights crisis. and if the film’s exploration of us racial conflicts is cut starkly short by its turn to the obama campaign, its geographical imagination  sankofa, dir. haile gerima, mypheduh (), dvd (); daughters of the dust, dir. julie dash, geechee girls (), kino international, dvd (). post-s cinematic representations of slavery are few, but scott’s argument could readily be applied to jonathan demme’s beloved (), kevin willmott’s c.s.a.: the confederate states of america (), and lars von trier’s manderlay (), all of which challenge linear time in efforts to comprehend slavery’s impact.  hall, “the long civil rights movement,” , added emphasis.  michelle alexander, the new jim crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness (new york: new press, ); marable, race, reform, and rebellion, rd edn, loc. – . i thank nicholas grant for pointing to this connection.  leigh anne duck terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core narrows even more sharply – back to cecil’s neighborhood (with his local polling place), to his home (where gloria, sadly, dies just before the election), to the hallway outside the oval office, where cecil appears to be finally enfolded into the nation with a thoroughness that resolves what lauren berlant calls “the tension between utopia and history.” conclusion: race, space, and cinematic relations describing us racial politics of the early twenty-first century in his third edition of race, reform, and rebellion (), marable continues to feature an interplay of global and local dynamics, including african americans’ con- tinued transnational organizing and concerns over rising us xenophobia, as well as a focus on african americans in new orleans, who experienced par- ticularly catastrophic effects from governmental failures to prepare for and respond to hurricane katrina. he concludes, “justice arrives slowly, for oppressed people.” but commercial cinema notoriously resists such timelines, seeking instead a plot that builds with palpable momentum and concludes with a sense of accomplishment. thus the butler, filmed chiefly in new orleans, celebrates obama’s victory as if it constituted a conclusion to racial injustice, rather than a “gratifying” event alongside long-standing pro- blems. ironically, however, while this most clichéd element of the film’s approach to politics responds to concerns readily associated with marketing, one could say the same of the butler’s far more innovative approach to space.  lauren berlant, the queen of america goes to washington city: essays on sex and citizenship (durham, nc: duke university press, ), . berlant here is describing the trope of the “infantile citizen,” whose “naïveté” and “faith in the nation-state’s capacity to provide the wisdom and justice it promises” promises to “transcend … the fractures and hierarchies of national life.” ibid., , . an elderly citizen who has shown skepticism toward his nation, cecil’s consistent respect for his presidential employers and now dimin- ished physical capacity nonetheless align him with this figure to a degree.  marable, race, reform, and rebellion, rd edn, loc. .  bordwell, “classical hollywood cinema,” –.  i take the term “gratifying” from waldo e. martin jr., who wrote after the election – much as cecil says in the film – “given my personal history, as both a citizen and a historian, i could not possibly have imagined that in my lifetime our nation would elect an african american president.” waldo e. martin jr., “precious african american memories, post- racial dreams and the american nation,” daedalus, ,  (), –, , doi:./daed_a_). martin goes on to distinguish, however, the affective qual- ities of this moment from its impact on “material and structural inequalities.” ibid., , . daniels has described obama’s election as having extraordinary impact on his own perfor- mances and sense of identity, which may have influenced his potent mobilization of affect in the film’s conclusion. see lynn hirschberg, “the audacity of ‘precious’,” new york times magazine,  oct. , at www.nytimes.com////magazine/precious-t.html. commercial counterhistory  terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /magazine/ precious-t.html https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core today, one of the greatest impediments to funding for major releases with largely african american casts is the long-standing and effectively untested preconception that they cannot draw global audiences. in this respect, the film’s productive and insistent dismantling of hollywood’s previous maps of racial oppression and struggle could also be read, at least in part, as an effort to position itself as a suitable commodity for the global film marketplace. certainly, this widely cited challenge was on filmmakers’ minds: producer pam williams noted her particular pleasure that, in earning approximately one- third of its revenues from foreign ticket sales, the film debunked “the myth that african-american and american political stories aren’t of interest over- seas.” the global circulation of us commercial cinema is, of course, rarely described as a means of conveying progressive narratives and ideas: rather, it is rightly recognized as a form of cultural imperialism and, more recently, neo- liberalism – an economic system in which cultural production is conducted by corporations with global aspirations and operations. nor is the butler a film to which one would generally turn for geographic contemplation, given that it was shot largely on soundstages in new orleans and uses even its “loca- tion” shots on louisiana plantations to suggest a setting labeled “macon, georgia.” the film participates in a system described as “dispersed” or even “runaway” production, in which high-cost us releases, previously centered in hollywood studios, are shot in locales whose governments provide substan- tial financial incentives, and such films are notorious for effacing local cul- tures and scenes, sometimes altering their image in postproduction to ensure they can be mistaken for other places. but even critics of such filmmaking  ndounou, shaping the future of african american film, –, –, –; michael cieply, “hollywood works to maintain its world dominance,” new york times,  nov. , at www.nytimes.com////business/media/hollywood-works-to-maintain-its-world- dominance.html.  hazelton, “in service of the butler.”  for a substantial overview of this argument see toby miller et al., global hollywood  (london: bfi pub., ).  in , louisiana offered film productions transferable tax credits equal to  percent of in- state expenditures, plus further credits for employment of louisiana residents. loren c. scott & associates, inc., “the economic impact of louisiana’s entertainment tax credit programs” (louisiana department of economic development, april ), at http://louisianaentertainment.gov/assets/ent/docs/ _oeid_program_impact_report%_final.pdf); georgia offered a  percent transferable credit without additional credits for local employees. oronde small and laura wheeler, “policy brief: a description of the film taxcredit and film industry in georgia” (fiscal research center,  feb. ), at http://frc.gsu.edu/files/// georgia-film-tax-credit-february-.pdf). in these arrangements, tax credits typically exceed tax liabilities and should be recognized as subsidies.  greg elmer and mike gasher, “introduction: catching up to runaway productions,” in elmer and gasher, eds., contracting out hollywood: runaway productions and foreign location shooting (lanham, md: rowman & littlefield, ), –.  leigh anne duck terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /business/media/hollywood-works-to-maintain-its-world-dominance.html http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /business/media/hollywood-works-to-maintain-its-world-dominance.html http://louisianaentertainment.gov/assets/ent/docs/ _oeid_program_impact_report% _final.pdf http://louisianaentertainment.gov/assets/ent/docs/ _oeid_program_impact_report% _final.pdf http://louisianaentertainment.gov/assets/ent/docs/ _oeid_program_impact_report% _final.pdf http://frc.gsu.edu/files/ / /georgia-film-tax-credit-february- .pdf http://frc.gsu.edu/files/ / /georgia-film-tax-credit-february- .pdf http://frc.gsu.edu/files/ / /georgia-film-tax-credit-february- .pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core strategies acknowledge that the “wander[ing]” induced by the extraordinary mobility of contemporary cinematic capital can, in some instances, yield complex “cosmopolitan” thought. if, as fredric jameson theorizes, representations of the local amid global transformation necessarily serve as allegorical figures through which to concep- tualize spatial relations, filmmakers engaged in dispersed production have expanded incentive (which many forgo, at least at the narrative level) to con- template relationships among geographies, polities, and narrative production. for the developers of the butler, economic motivations to consider global connections aligned productively with the history they sought to narrate. in circulating images of this history of transnational racial politics, the film argu- ably offers one example in support of herman gray’s argument that the inter- actions of us media with global markets and cultures might offer “as many possibilities as … pitfalls” for “black cultural politics in the u.s.” its insist- ence on the value of transnational political thought may be particularly useful for a moment when the traditions of leftist internationalism have been some- what eclipsed by alarm over global capital: while challenges to this system have certainly involved transnational cooperation and exchange, local and national politics in the us – when not directly supportive of neoliberal pol- icies – often emphasize protectionist or anti-immigrant stances. meanwhile, as studios relentlessly pursue blockbusters developed for con- sumption anywhere and with little consideration of particular locales, critical independent films often value vigorously “locative” aesthetics, which seek to incorporate or explore specific local histories, communities, and spatial rela- tions. such is the strategy, for example, of tanya hamilton’s night catches us () and ryan coogler’s fruitvale station (), which ellen c. scott rightly describes as distinctly powerful civil-rights-themed  stephanie hemelryk donald, “the ice storm: ang lee, cosmopolitanism, and the global audience,” in elmer and gasher, contracting out hollywood, –, .  fredric jameson, the geopolitical aesthetic: cinema and space in the world system (bloomington: indiana university press, ; first published ), –.  herman s. gray, cultural moves: african americans and the politics of representation, (berkeley: university of california press, ), .  michael kazin cites several additional factors for diminishing internationalism among us leftists in “let’s not change the world after all: the decline of left internationalism,” dissent, ,  (spring ), –, doi:./dss...  for a discussion of “locative” cinema see r. barton palmer, shot on location: postwar american cinema and the exploration of real place (new brunswick, nj: rutgers university press, ), x, –. sherry ortner, not hollywood: independent film at the twilight of the american dream (durham, nc: duke university press, ), –, –, without focussing on space per se, notes the extent to which us independent filmmakers tend to define their work against hollywood aesthetics and in favor of “real” circumstances. commercial counterhistory  terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core directorial debuts. seeking to capture memories and experiences of police violence and political organizing in changing urban neighborhoods (philadelphia and the oakland/san francisco area respectively), these films do not advertise their global relevance, which is nonetheless evident from broad geographic echoes and support for the black lives matter movement in the us. but such contexts are also implied, cinematically, by the butler – an unabashedly commercial film that nonetheless deconstructs famil- iar racial images, associating blackness with a history of broad geopolitical thought and action. in these ways, though the film is in many respects anything but revolutionary, it contributes to the contemporary possibilities of “film blackness,” gillespie’s term for emphasizing “the radical capacity of black visual and expressive culture” as opposed to a more narrowly defined and restricted “black film.” the butler suggests that such “resistances, capacities, and variables” currently operate, albeit inconsistently, across industry sectors and shooting practices, in a way that could ultimately enable a rich and broad cinematic mapping of black and progressive political geographies. author biography leigh anne duck is associate professor of english at the university of mississippi, where she edits the journal the global south. she is the author of the nation’s region: southern modernism, segregation, and u. s. nationalism (), as well as several essays on literary and visual representations of the us south, often involving transnational approaches. her current book project is tentatively titled on location in hollywood south: an aspirational state in uncertain times. for their very helpful feedback, she would like to thank the co- editors of this issue, nicholas grant and elisabeth engel, as well as participants in the german historical institute workshop where she first presented this essay.  scott, cinema civil rights, –.  ishaan tharoor, “black lives matter is a global cause,” washington post, july , , at www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp////black-lives-matter-is-a- global-cause. night catches us visually acknowledges the bpp’s transnational thought through images members have preserved, including a photograph of fidel castro (simonsays, , amazon streaming).  gillespie, film blackness, , –.  ibid., .  leigh anne duck terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/ / / /black-lives-matter-is-a-global-cause http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/worldviews/wp/ / / /black-lives-matter-is-a-global-cause https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core 	commercial counterhistory: remapping the movement in lee daniels the butler 	“inspired by films like gone with the wind”: the paradox of black epic cinema 	iconic images: seeing past and seeing through 	the palimpsestic plantation and global spaces of struggle 	conclusion: race, space, and cinematic relations                city, university of london institutional repository citation: hermes, j., kooijman, j., littler, j. & wood, h. ( ). on the move: twentieth anniversary editorial of the european journal of cultural studies. european journal of cultural studies, ( ), pp. - . doi: . / this is the accepted version of the paper. this version of the publication may differ from the final published version. permanent repository link: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/ / link to published version: http://dx.doi.org/ . / copyright and reuse: city research online aims to make research outputs of city, university of london available to a wider audience. copyright and moral rights remain with the author(s) and/or copyright holders. urls from city research online may be freely distributed and linked to. city research online: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/ publications@city.ac.uk city research online http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/ mailto:publications@city.ac.uk on the move twentieth anniversary editorial of the european journal of cultural studies joke hermes, jaap kooijman, jo littler, helen wood abstract twenty years of european journal of cultural studies is a cause for celebration. we do so with a festive issue that comes together with our first free open access top articles in three areas that readers have sought us out for: post-feminism; television beyond textual analysis; and cultural labour in the creative industries. the issue opens with freshly commissioned introductory essays to these three thematic areas by key authors in those fields. in addition, the issue offers new articles showcasing the range of the broad field of cultural studies today, including pieces on the politics of co-working, punk in china, black british women on youtube, trans pedagogy, and fantasy sports gameplay; featuring work by emerging as well as established scholars. our editorial introduction to this celebration of cultural studies offers reflections on how both the journal and the field of cultural studies have developed, and on our thoughts and ambitions for the future within the current conjuncture as we ‘move on’ as the new editorial team. keywords: cultural studies, europe, postfeminism, television, creative industries, dossier, introduction: celebrating years of european journal of cultural studies twenty years of the european journal of cultural studies is a cause for celebration. we do so with this festive issue which offers an exciting range of critical ideas and empirical research that reflects the current moment of cultural studies and the range of international scholars attending to its core themes. this issue comes with three online dossier collections to be found on www.journals.sagepub.com/home/ecs/.... which contain a selection of our most popular articles in areas that readers have sought us out for: post-feminism; television beyond textual analysis; and work and the creative industries. as an anniversary gift to our readers, the articles in the three dossiers are http://www.journals.sagepub.com/home/ecs/ and will remain open-access. more dossiers are to follow in future. the current dossiers on post-feminism, television and cultural studies and work and the creative industries are headlined by specially commissioned opening essays by key thinkers we are proud to welcome back. below we will briefly introduce ross gill’s reflection on postfeminism over the last decade; christine geraghty reading of how ‘television’ is one of the thematic ‘magnets’ of this journal and mark banks and justin o’connor’s overview of cultural studies work on labour and the creative industries. before we introduce the opening essays and the range of exciting contributions by established and emerging scholars that follow the three opening essays, we want to go back in time to situate both the current issue and our new editorial grouping. after reflecting on the very different context in which the journal was started, we move on to the challenges, both exhilarating and intimidating, that we face today. we will end by introducing the rest of the work chosen for this special issue that has been entitled ‘on the move’ to give a sense of the restless energy of cultural studies and of the kind of work we are privileged to edit. now twenty years old, european journal of cultural studies continues to reinvent ways to engage with how the world is made meaningful across media texts and the cultural, social and political practices of everyday life, whilst always taking into account and challenging the nature and reproduction of relations of power. looking backwards, looking forwards ‘on the move’ and its three open access dossiers mark two decades of european journal of cultural studies and a new group of editors. at the time of writing donald trump has recently been inaugurated as the us president and brexit appears unstoppable. it is a different conjuncture from the late s when right-wing populism appeared to be a uniquely french phenomenon, and multiculturalism elsewhere in europe was still regularly regarded as an achievement (if often reductively positioned as a potential ‘problem’). fake news referred to american satirical television programmes that offered their own form of political commentary. the aggressive resurgence of nationalist sentiments, euroscepticism, the ascendency of putin in russia were all yet to come, as were facebook and youtube. editing and reviewing the journal in the mid- s involved sending round paper copies of articles. access to academic work was the prerogative of those working in academic institutions and altavista was the search engine of choice and yahoo and aol were major players. the founding of the european journal of cultural studies was closely connected to the first crossroads in cultural studies conference organized by pertti alasuutari and his team at tampere university, finland, in july . not only did the journal founding editors—alasuutari, ann gray and joke hermes—first meet at the conference, but the journal’s first issue, published in january , contained several articles based on crossroads conference presentations, including those by ien ang, handel k. wright, maureen mcneil, lawrence grossberg, and jostein gripsrud. remarkable, in hindsight, is how cultural studies needed defining and querying in the mid- s. while institutionalized in and via teaching, the only specialised journal at that moment in time was cultural studies, edited by larry grossberg. when alasuutari, gray, and hermes founded the european journal of cultural studies, they shared a strong sense that cultural studies as an interdisciplinary field needed more well-theorized empirical work. they immediately connected via their own work on audiences and everyday practices of meaning-making, which in turn linked back to the audience studies of the s by morley ( , ), radway ( ) and ang ( ) in britain, the united states and the netherlands rather than to a more delineated tradition or school. unbeknownst to each other, at the same time, the international journal of cultural studies was launched with the same publisher, conceived of and edited by john hartley, which was to offer a more critically textual approach and sought an explicitly global reach. all three journals flourished while academic publishing was transforming: to be a ranked journal became an inevitable goal, as national governments made funding conditional and passed the pressure of selection and quality by accountability onto universities. while academic labour is more and more casualised, it becomes imperative for individuals to publish in the ‘right’, ranked, journals. to be part of these new disciplinary politics is deeply unsettling, politically, as our american co-editor jon cruz, who joined the journal as editor in , discussed in a special issue dedicated to the american ‘link’ made by the journal (cruz ). a glimpse of more positive - if still undoubtedly politically ambivalent - change can be found in our ongoing discussion about open access publishing (trottier, ). we now know that open access publishing may come in highly coercive forms that may shift control over who gets to publish to grant authorities and university administrators who decide budget allocation for the handling fees that will eventually replace the currently dominant subscription system. such changes are carried and facilitated by these seemingly mundane shifts. the journal is now produced on an internet-based platform that allows for easy implementation of the conditions set for ranking (such as double-blind peer review). journals are strange creatures, dependent as they are on those who perceive them as their ‘natural’ home for their work. in the first decade, with metrics and citation indexes becoming increasingly important as the online use of journal articles took off, we found that titles that included sex, reality television and the music industry did far better than any others. we may well have disappointed a sizable number of porn researchers whilst reality television researchers, on the other hand, have been very well-served. some subjects have moved into significance and importance within the journal over the past two decades: cultural labour studies was barely on the radar twenty years ago but is now a pronounced disciplinary strand that we are proud to have played a part in fostering (e.g. ross, , marshall, , striphas ; hope and richards ) cultural studies as a field has changed in a number of ways. over the last twenty years, identity and representation had become far less prominent entry points for cultural studies work but are returning now that transgender politics has finally been put on the agenda, black lives matter has found widespread recognition (and fierce populist resistance), feminist activism has returned with a vengeance via activity like slutwalk and the everyday sexism project; and class is firmly ‘back’ as a central area of study as the global landscape has resulted in increasingly obvious widening inequalities in the western world as well as the world at large. new issues are presenting themselves in the wake of global social and political change. to better understand fundamentalist identity politics in all its complexity, not simply in reference to religion, for instance, is certainly an issue that needs our critical attention; as do the urgent issues of climate change and extractivism, the resurgence of right wing populism and demotic racisms, the roles of the elites and financialisation, and online worlds of bullying and hate as well as self-representation and pleasure. cultural studies is ideally placed for this: it is the zone where an understanding of how discourses and social forces interconnect with each other to create meaning – an understanding of ‘articulation’ - was developed (slack ; grossberg and hall ). more recently, the related intersectional querying of identity and subjectivity has gained much popular ground. while intersectional feminism developed in the late s (crenshaw, ) to denote how the experience of one’s gender is impacted by race, sexual orientation, education, the term has gained an unprecedentedly large popular usage. in a recent article, for instance, the american newspaper usa today explained it at length in relation to the women’s protest marches against president trump (dastagir ). the last twenty years has seen a period in which the rise of neoliberalism – involving the attempt to marketise all areas of social life and to reduce us to simply competitive individuals – has expanded and become more painfully apparent. corporations and politicians have encouraged us to focus on honing our individualised market value, on intensifying and self-regulating the worth of ‘brand me’ in order to maximise our potential as flexible workers. we have been increasingly addressed as ‘responsibilised’ subjects: as people who need to deal with issues like retirement provision and health on an individual basis without relying on the state, and who can solve social problems through savvy consumer purchasing. cultures of accountability make clear that while neoliberalism may present itself as being about freedom, it is a deeply disciplinary project, one that draws heavily on conservative thought and tends to ‘outsource’ the burden of keeping up moral standards to women, thus making them doubly responsible as individuals and as moral subjects (e.g. gill and scharff, ; elias and gill ). the expansion of post-fordist capitalism, with its fêting of the flexible consumer- worker, and its proliferation of consumer products, has segued since the s with platform capitalism: that online cultural economy that has brought us instagram, airbnb and uber (murray , huws ; srnicek ; van dijck & poell ). the boundaries between work and personal life have changed, with so many people checking the smartphone at the beach or in the playground, being ‘always on’ - even whilst france legislates against it (gregg ). we have new ways to be social through media, to produce shareable content, to represent ourselves and to be, in that ubiquitous term, ‘curators’ of culture; and we also have new ways to be monitored through big data, to be targeted by affective brand analysts and exploited by those with the power to pay for its marketing (crawford et al , striphas ). class never went away, but the dream that we were ‘post-class’ was embraced by many in the s as consumer capitalism promised to break down boundaries and splinter us into more complex tribes based on transient identities. the banking crisis of has been felt as a fundamental failure of global financial institutions and yet the brunt of the damage has been rested on public services and welfare through harsh austerity measures, particularly in the uk. impoverishment has become harder to ignore in recent years, as the yawning chasm between rich and poor continues to expand at alarming rates and where poverty has been made spectacle through developments in reality television (tyler and bennett ; wood ). after world-war ii, western european societies witnessed the emancipation of working-class children through access to higher education. today, they witness the perverse result of that emancipation in a new divide produced by the competitive ‘meritocratic’ educational agenda. this produces a profound wedge between what are sometimes called a ‘cosmopolitan’ elite with higher education and a larger nationalist group with less opportunities and less education, whose trust in representative democracy has waned fast. levels of debt have rocketed amongst students alongside that of wider populations, changing our relationship to what is possible and to what the future can hold (adkins ; ross ). all of these developments -and they are only a small number of examples – present cultural studies with a new range of challenges. when starting the journal, the european journal of cultural studies was intended to promote an empirical strand of cultural studies with a strong theoretical dimension, taking everyday meaning-making and their imbrication with relations of power as defining the cultural studies’ field of interest. while the founding editors shared a strong interest in media, media audiences, media texts, and media organisations, they felt it was important to understand media studies alongside sociology, and its insights into organisations and policy as disciplines that could help strengthen cultural studies, always mining at disciplinary seams. ‘well- theorized empirical work’ was what they were looking for, rather than purely essayistic or theoretical pieces, which they felt were well covered by literary and critical theory journals. although less than in the s when the defence of popular culture had been felt to be a much-needed enterprise, derogatory attitudes to mass culture were clearly waning, allowing the scope for the journal to expand its critique of ‘everyday meaning- making’. to maintain a focus on everyday meaning-making and attend to unequal power relations is of course as much needed today as it was twenty years ago. returning to questions of identity and representation with the barrage of new critical tools that have emerged is important now that new variants of inequality, prejudice and hatred are expressed in no uncertain terms. both experiences of ‘subjectivity’ and ‘identity construction’ and the political ramifications of changing power relations need to be interpreted by powerful and rigorous research, including research into popular culture, defined as widely as possible. today’s ‘popular culture’, after all, encompasses the news (be it in satirical forms on television, as facebook lists of trending topics, as ‘fake’ macedonian-made stories, or good old-fashioned newspapers), an enormous array of entertainment forms (including the arts, live performances, the mass media as well as social network sites), wholly new types of politics (post-fact and even post-truth), as well as new ways of working (as capitalism’s short-termism has produced new groups of independent workers and a new precariat). an interest in any of these topics will take a researcher across domains, demanding a broad set of research tools which may range from textual approaches to discourse analysis to political economy and organisational sociology. combining methods, grounding them, explaining and justifying choices made has been key to the type of work this journal has sought to publish since its inception. opening up space: the journal as we indicated above, a key point of the journal from the beginning was to open up space for cultural studies work. alongside cultural studies and the international journal of cultural studies, the european journal of cultural studies, as gil rodman put it, ‘tripled the page space’ for cultural studies (rodman p and see finola jilly kay’s review in this issue). on november , , the times literary supplement published a review of four cultural studies journals, including the then newly-founded international journal of cultural studies and the european journal of cultural studies. the review opened rather negatively by questioning their relevance, claiming that such journals have ‘lost their hegemony over writing about culture’ and are too ‘vague’ and ‘fuzzy’ in their aims of promoting an ‘interdisciplinary’ approach. when specifically discussing the european journal of cultural studies, the review takes a more positive turn: a far clearer sense of purpose, and a far greater sense of urgency, is evident in the european journal of cultural studies—which, although susceptible to the same fashionable brand of woozy rhetoric as the rest […], at least appears to be driven by a group of editors and contributors who are broadly in agreement as to what kind of issues and ideas they are meant to be exploring. (mccann ) although receiving compliments is pleasant - and quoting them may seem rather vain - the praise does not diminish the review’s primary criticism of all these journals for their interdisciplinarity, an approach that the european journal of cultural studies both defends and has encouraged from the start. a key intellectual and political aim of cultural studies has always been to be inclusive and transdisciplinary — to question and challenge, rather than prescribe and reinforce, disciplinary boundaries. as the journal’s very first editorial reads: ‘[o]f course cultural studies has a somewhat unclear identity, but this openness is its greatest quality [….] our guiding principle will be that the traditions and future of cultural studies are best served by keeping an open mind’ (alasuutari, gray and hermes : , ). instead of being dismissed as ‘vague’ and ‘fuzzy’, european journal of cultural studies argued from its beginning that such disciplinary openness can help to give intellectual work its radical edge in generating new ways of seeing. at a time when disciplinary boundaries are often increasingly tightly policed under the imperatives of neoliberal audit culture, this is just as true as it was twenty years ago. another aim of the journal was and is still to be inclusive to scholars from different countries and regions. the ‘european’ of the title seemed appropriate to underscore that cultural studies work was not only done by british and american scholars. as the founding editors explicitly pointed out, the ‘european’ in the title recognized ‘that location matters’ in cultural studies, and sought to expand the involvement of european scholarly work beyond britain; but did not exclude scholarly work from elsewhere. on the contrary: ‘australian, canadian, asian, african and american papers will be as welcome as those produced in europe’ (alasuutari, gray and hermes : - ). however, we have to admit that inclusion has not always come easily. in , roman horak did a survey of our journal, as well as of cultural studies and the international journal of cultural studies, and found a clear uk english dominance, both in nationality of authors and in their instructional locations (horak ). we have tried to break this pattern, such as through the special issue on how asian cultural studies challenges the dominance of europe ( : , ) and the more recent issue on memory, post- socialism and the media ( : , ). we want to do more work in this direction in the years ahead, alongside work that considers culture in relation to a europe in flux and crisis, to migration, and citizenship under conditions of closing borders. future space as a new editorial team take on the direction of the journal, a team including both new and longstanding editors, we (joke hermes, jaap kooijman, jo littler and helen wood) are acutely aware of the new intensities that shape the cultural studies field in which we want to encourage good intellectual work. cultural studies has settled into the academy but its space there in any institutionalised form has not remained firm in the new arena of the neo-liberal university. whilst birmingham university has since put up blue plaques to commemorate the site where richard hoggart and stuart hall gave us british cultural studies, in it closed cultural studies as a department, quite unceremoniously and received much outrage (gray, ). none of us edit from within the space of a cultural studies department - rather media and communication, media, and sociology – and this makes cultural studies for us, especially in this political landscape, a more urgent and future-oriented project. since cultural studies is recognised as brushing along the borders of so many disciplines and so regularly exists without concrete institutional space, we feel the need for the journal to pursue, and help generate, the intellectual space for the next phase of its growth. defining that space is still difficult, since our journal title means that we receive numerous article submissions which might more regularly be considered area studies, or which touch upon ‘culture’ in the loosest sense. in this landscape it is important for us to insist on cultural studies, not as a discipline - since it is even in some ways undisciplined - but as an important practice. this remains a consistent commitment that we take from stuart hall, ‘a practice which always thinks about its intervention in the world in which it would make some difference, in which it would have some effect’ (hall, , p ). it is with that sense of critical intervention that we publish this anniversary issue. in gray’s ( ) discussion of cultural studies at birmingham, one of the reasons that cultural studies didn’t fit within the institutional strategy of the university was because of its commitment to a critical pedagogy. the three newly commissioned articles in this special issue head up the first of our online dossiers framing some of the areas of analysis for which the journal has been most appreciated: post-feminism, sexuality, television, and the cultural and creative industries. the intention is that these open access dossiers will provide valuable (and free) intellectual as well as teaching resources which enable critical pedagogy and increase the reach of cultural studies to encourage others to want to take up this practice. ros gill opens this issue. she revisits her article ‘postfeminist media culture: elements of a sensibility’ and reflects on ‘postfeminism’ ten years on. we are proud to say as we write this that the article is the most read and quoted article in the history of the journal. in the new piece gill refers to the ‘affective, cultural and psychic life of postfeminism.’ the journeys of postfeminism indicate how the world has changed irrefutably over the past tenyears. feminism, like multiculturalism has been redefined, individualised and challenged in a variety of ways during the turn from social democracy to neoliberalism. asked to reflect on the long list of articles that the journal has published on television, christine geraghty discusses how television surfaced as a ‘thematic magnet’ in the european journal of cultural studies, giving the journal a signature all of its own. it also makes her ponder what the journal aims for and what the ‘european’ in the title stands for, exactly? (we return to these important and timely questions below). mark banks and justin o’connor foreground the dossier on creative industries and cultural work, reflecting on two decades of research in the ‘cultural industries’ policy paradigm. they discuss the excitement of the creative city’s transformative potential but how ultimately the economistic policy discourses took hold at the expense of the promise of the progressive project. together these three articles signal a new project for cultural studies in a world that over two decades has changed irrevocably. engaging with practices of everyday meaning making and the power relations that shape these practices seems even more needed today. after these three reflective articles follow an eclectic range of new articles from established and emerging scholars. these include christian fuchs on the continued importance of raymond williams’ theories of communication and how williams’ ‘communicative materialism’ can advance our understanding of digital media. anita brady discusses the phenomenon of caitlynn jenner whose contribution to greater trans-visibility plays out alongside political conservatism and gender normative citizenship on reality television. andrew ploeg’s discussion of fantasy sports gameplay discusses new distinctions in fan identities on a world stage and jian xiao explores the importance of the biographical approach to understanding the (post) punk music scene in china. francesca sobande analyses how watching youtube videos has become a means, for some black women in britain, to counteract a lack of diverse national broadcasting. greig de peuter, nicole cohen and francesca saraco discuss the ambivalence of co-working as part of a wider emerging tendency that discusses ‘the new precariat’ in the creative industries. we suggest that these articles offer innovative analyses identifying new cultural trends which exemplify the kind of work we feel european journal of cultural studies has to offer the field. european journal of cultural studies is therefore far more than a collection of individual publications for the generation of citation metrics. we want to continue to use the journal in interesting ways to help the journal work as more than a repository to generate the citation data authors are obliged to use for their careers. in hall’s sense then there is a new challenge for political intellectual work in the competitive neoliberal world of academic publishing which is not to substitute publicity and metrics for good intellectual political work which makes an intervention. we invite you as readers and writers to join us in this venture and to continue to use this journal as a platform for critical work, for critical pedagogy and ultimately for the critical growth of the politically-engaged practice of cultural studies. we want to thank ann gray, pertti alasuutari as the original founding editors with joke hermes, for the opportunity to continue this important work as well as jon cruz for providing what was an always inspiring cross-atlantic perspective in the second decade of the journal’s existence. the work of motti regev and the associate editors, of our book review editors (handel k. wright, joost de bruin, tanja dreher and now ruth mcelroy) and our assistant editors (pekka rantanen, erin bell and jilly kay) over the years has been invaluable, not least in making this journal a truly international venture. works cited adkins, l. ( ) ‘speculative futures in the time of debt’. sociological review doi: / - x. alasuutari, p., gray, a., and hermes j. ( ), ‘editorial’, european journal of cultural studies ( ): - . crenshaw, k ( ) ‘mapping the margins: intersectionality, identity politics, and violence against women of color’ in stanford law review vol. , no. . pp. - crawford, k., lingel, j. and t. karppi ( ) ‘our metrics, ourselves: years of self- tracking from the weight scale to the wrist wearable device’ european journal of cultural studies ( - ): - . dastagir, a.e. ( ) ‘what is intersectional feminism? a look at the term you may be hearing a lot’, usa today ( january ): https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/ / / /feminism-intersectionality- racism-sexism-class/ / gill, r and scharff, c eds. ( ) new femininities: post-feminism, neoliberalism and subjectivity palgrave: macmillan. gray, a. ( ) ‘cultural studies at birmingham: the impossibility of critical pedagogy’ cultural studies ( ): - . gregg, m. ( ) work’s intimacy. cambridge: polity. grossberg, l. and s. hall ( ) ‘on postmodernism and articulation: an interview with stuart hall’ in d. morley and k.s. chen (eds) ( ) stuart hall: critical dialogues in cultural studies. london: routledge. - . hall, s ( ) ‘cultural studies and its theoretical legacies’ in grossberg, l, c. nelson and p. treichler, cultural studies routledge, london and new york. huws, u. ( ) labour in the global digital economy: the cyberteriat comes of age. mr press. horak, r ( ) ‘translation, cultural translation and the hegemonic english’ culture unbound . - . mccann, g. ( ) ‘cultural studies’, the times literary supplement ( november ), np. murray, r. ( ) ‘post-post-fordism in the era of platforms’, new formations ( )pp. - rodman, g. ( ) why cultural studies? new jersey: wiley. ross, a. ( ) creditocracy and the case for debt refusal. new york: or books. slack, j.d. ( ) ‘the theory and method of articulation in cultural studies’ in d. morley and k.s. chen (eds) stuart hall: critical dialogues in cultural studies. london: routledge. - srnicek, n. ( ) platform capitalism. cambridge: polity. striphas, ted ( ) ‘algorithmic culture’. european journal of cultural studies. ( - ) - . trottier, d ( ) ‘open source intelligence, social media and law enforcement: visions, constraints and critiques’ european journal of cultural studies ( - ): - . tyler, i. and b. bennett ( ) ‘celebrity chav: fame, femininity and social class’. european journal of cultural studies ( ) - . van dijck, j., & poell, t. ( ). understanding social media logic. media and communication, ( ), - . wood, h. ( ). ‘the politics of hyperbole on geordie shore: class, gender, youth and excess.’ european journal of cultural studies. ( ) - s x jed .. frontispiece . multibeam image of the inverted hull of the german battleship, sms grosser kurfürst in the english channel. the warship was one of the first ironclad vessels built for the german imperial navy. during manoeuvres off the coast of kent in may , the ship collided with the sms könig wilhelm and sank with the loss of lives. remote-sensing and diver surveys in found the wreck to be well preserved, including its bow ram and iron cladding. in may , the wreck was scheduled (legally protected) as an example of a revolutionary period in naval technology. image by wessex archaeology, reproduced courtesy of historic england from data provided by the uk hydrographic office. frontispiece . a longhouse under excavation at stöð, near stöðvarfjörður in eastern iceland in . the structure dates to the late ninth century ad, around the time at which the later saga literature suggests the island was first settled. the large size of the structure ( . m in length) and the wealth of material culture recovered, including beads, coins and hacksilver, suggest that this may have been a chieftain’s house. directly beneath the structure, excavation has revealed the presence of an earlier longhouse, dated to the start of the ninth century, which may have been a seasonal hunting camp. such early sites may have formed the stepping stones for the more permanent settlement of iceland towards the end of the century. photograph: bjarni einarsson. fornleifafræðistofan (the archaeological office) . editorial fallen heroes the statues of classical antiquity do not come down to the present standing on their ori- ginal plinths, unaltered for two millennia. over the centuries, their identities were often changed with judicious chisel work, or they might be redisplayed as parts of new monuments. eventually, they were toppled—by earthquakes, insurrection or irrelevance: repurposed as building materials, packed into lime kilns and burnt, or abandoned along with the cities over which they once presided. all too often, the later lives of these statues are obscured by a tendency—in the western imagination at least—to assume a direct connection between the classical and the contemporary. in the process, not only are culturally specific practices normalised, but we also focus on only one episode of longer histories, such as the putting up rather than the pulling down of these statues. it is also easy to forget that memorialising individuals for their ‘heroic’ deeds is neither inevitable, nor even typical, in past societies. in the newly founded usa, for example, there was great suspicion of commemorative statues and structures. aside from memorials to the god-like washington, the new nation was to be built on the enlightened values sustained by literacy and education; john quincy adams observed in his diary in december that “democracy has no monuments […] its very essence is iconoclastic”. yet, in the decades after the civil war, the young nation set about monumentalising its past, fixing its competing visions in stone and bronze, reshap- ing historical narratives and seeking to make its values eternal. over the subsequent century and a half, the fascination with such statues and monuments in the usa has grown to such an extent that erika doss has described a culture of ‘memorial mania’, freighted with emotions of grief, fear, gratitude, shame and anger. the events of june well illustrate her analysis. over recent years, campaigns around the world have sought the removal of statues and other forms of commemoration to imperialists, slave traders, eugenicists and racists. some of these campaigns have been successful: the removal of the statue of the imperialist cecil rhodes at the university of cape town in and that of the catalan slave trader, antonio lópez, marquis of comillas, in barcelona in . other campaigns, however, had stalled: the removal of the equestrian statue to the confederate robert e. lee in charlottesville, vir- ginia, had become entangled in legal proceedings; and in bristol, uk, wrangling over the wording of a plaque to be affixed to a statue of the slave-trader edward colston had reached a stalemate. within two weeks in june, the fates of both statues—and many more around the world—were sealed. in birmingham, alabama, and washington d.c., confederate statues were pulled down by protestors; in boston, massachusetts, and saint paul, minnesota, columbus was toppled; in london, a statue of the slave-owner robert milligan was removed; in edinburgh, graffiti © antiquity publications ltd, doss, e. . memorial mania: public feeling in america. chicago (il) & london: university of chicago press. antiquity vol. ( ): – https://doi.org/ . /aqy. . https://doi.org/ . /aqy. . daubed on a statue of robert dundas, nd viscount melville, declared him: “son of slaver. colonialist profiteer”; in rome, red paint was thrown over the marble bust of antonio bal- dissera, the italian governor of colonial eritrea; the examples, and the protests, go on (figure ). in the uk, attention focused on the figure of edward colston. the name of colston, a late seventeenth-/early eighteenth-century merchant, politician, philanthropist—and slave- trader—is woven into bristol’s cityscape through buildings, memorials and street names. recently, several institutions have voted to remove colston’s name to distance themselves from his legacy. in the latest protests, attention focused on a prominent statue in the city cen- tre. significantly, this memorial was not put up by grateful citizens in the immediate after- math of colston’s death, or even during the five generations that followed; in fact, it was erected some years later in , when city, country and empire, all grown rich on the back of slavery, were at their zeniths. on june, protesters toppled the bronze statue, rolled it across the city and dumped it into the harbour. similar stories played out around the world: lists of statues and monuments were circulated online, and opposing groups formed themselves to either protest or protect these memorials. back in bristol, colston’s statue has been fished out of the harbour and is destined to be redisplayed, and recontextualised, in a museum. that context connects bristol to places such as bunce island, in the sierra leone river, a base of the royal african company of which colston was a shareholder and eventually deputy governor, and which facilitated the com- pany’s monopoly on english slave-trading. it also includes the plantations of the caribbean and the southern usa to where many thousands of africans were transported to produce cotton, rice, sugar and tobacco. but such context is not all about the flows of anonymous individuals, commodities and capital across the wide ocean. in a cemetery in the suburbs of bristol is a modest memorial—a headstone and a footstone—marking the grave of scipio africanus, the servant of charles howard, th earl of suffolk. little is known about the life of africanus and how exactly he came into the howard household, but we do know that he died less than a year before colston; the latter died aged , africanus was just . it is unlikely that the two men ever met, but their stories have intertwined. in the days after the toppling of colston’s statue, africanus’s headstone was smashed and a chalked message was left at the scene demanding the restoration of the slave-trader’s statue. such actions suggest that recon- textualising colston’s statue in a museum will be an important start, but, clearly, there is urgent need for additional wider and more profound steps to address such racism. meanwhile, several existing campaigns for the removal of colonial monuments have regained momentum and seen their causes advanced. oriel college, oxford, for example, voted in june to remove a statue of its former student and benefactor cecil rhodes and to set up an inquiry into the wider issues of decolonisation and the societal and institutional barriers experienced by ethnic minority students and staff. the latter is a reminder, if one were needed, that removing statues is rarely the principal objective of campaigns such as rhodes must fall. they are about colonial legacies and the economic, institutional and ideo- logical structures ingrained in society that privilege some and discriminate against others. in the light of recent events, institutions as varied as universities, banks and brewing businesses are beginning to investigate and acknowledge how they may have benefited from slavery and how they might make reparations. © antiquity publications ltd, editorial at antiquity, like many other journals, scholarly societies and research institutions, we have also begun a process of reflecting on how we can become more inclusive of the full diversity of archaeological researchers and more representative of the variety of archaeological pasts that they are researching. in recent years, we have sought to attract and support a wider range of figure . the robert e. lee monument in richmond, virginia, june (photograph by mobilus in mobili, cc by-sa . licence). editorial © antiquity publications ltd, contributors, for example, through participation in mentoring initiatives such as the workshop ‘bringing the past to print: archaeology for and by west african scholars’, and we also look forward to delivering a writing workshop at the (covid- -delayed) society of africanist archaeologists meeting in oxford. nevertheless, we recognise that much more work is required in order to identify the barriers within the discipline and within our own publication processes that may prevent or dissuade authors of different backgrounds from submitting their research. more importantly, we must also develop tangible actions to encourage and support these scholars. some changes might be relatively straightforward—such as commissioning arti- cles or ensuring that a more diverse range of authors and reviewers is included in our book reviews section. other actions will require slower and longer-term strategies to reduce barriers and dismantle systems of oppression within our discipline, working alongside scholars of diverse backgrounds to build capacity and confidence. we do not pretend to have all the answers, and we will be looking to educate and inform ourselves, to reflect and to formulate plans. events such as the ‘archaeology in the time of black lives matter’ webinar organised by the society of black archaeologists on june have provided an invaluable starting point, and, of course, we welcome the suggestions and support of the whole antiquity com- munity in this important endeavour. from minneapolis to tulsa the june protests that swept the streets of north america, europe, australia and beyond were sparked by the police killing in minneapolis on may of yet another unarmed black man: george floyd. within days, black lives matter demonstrations had spread to hundreds of cities across the usa and dozens of countries around the world, protesting against police brutality and systemic racism. most gatherings started as peaceful protests, but a few were incited to violence after confrontations between protestors and police were escalated by the latter’s use of tear gas and rubber bullets. in some u.s. states and cities, curfews were declared and the national guard called in to quell the civil unrest. the white house response was less than conciliatory, denouncing protesters as vandals and anarchists, threatening to deploy the military, and also in its choice of the location and timing of a rally to restart the presi- dential election campaign. in the turbulent atmosphere of an ongoing pandemic with (at that time) u.s. citizens dead, impending economic recession and racial tensions at rock bottom came the announcement that the president’s first post-lockdown rally would take place in tulsa, oklahoma, on june. the date is significant because it marks juneteenth, the annual holiday observed in most u.s. states to celebrate the emancipation of enslaved persons on june after planta- tion owners in texas were forced to free those that they still illegally held in bondage. coming within two weeks of floyd’s death, news of the rally’s proposed date provoked an outcry and the event was postponed to the following day. the choice of location, however, was no less controversial. in , tulsa was the scene of one of the worst episodes of racial violence in editorial. antiquity : – . https/doi.org/ . /aqy. . a recording of the panel discussion is available via the society for black archaeologists website, along with lists of resources. available at: www.societyofblackarchaeologists.com (accessed july ). editorial © antiquity publications ltd, https/doi.org/ . /aqy. . https://www.societyofblackarchaeologists.com u.s. history. in the early twentieth-century context of jim crow laws, racial segregation and regular lynchings, what began with the arrest of a black man for the suspected assault of a white woman rapidly spiralled out of control. amid newspaper headlines in the tulsa trib- une calling for the suspect to be lynched, an armed white mob gathered outside the tulsa courthouse demanding the man be handed over. shots were fired and an explosion of vio- lence was directed against the population and property of the affluent black district of green- wood: despite resistance from greenwood’s community, residents were shot, shops looted, and houses, churches and schools burned; eyewitnesses even reported small aircraft dropping turpentine bombs. by the time order was restored the following day, some city blocks had been razed to the ground and of greenwood’s residents had been left homeless; to add insult to injury, several thousand black tulsans were temporarily detained under martial law. hundreds were hospitalised with injuries, many were missing or dead, others had fled the city in search of safety elsewhere. in the years that followed, the residents of greenwood rebuilt their community and neighbourhood, but no one was ever held accountable, nor any compensation paid, and a public silence grew up around the events. by the s, as the number of survivors with direct memories decreased, a commission was formed to collate testimonies, establish the facts and to make recommendations. one important question, among many, concerned the number of those killed. official records listed dead ( black and white), but multiple oral accounts from survivors detailed the mass burial of black victims at a number of locations around the city. as part of its inquiry, the commission organised non-invasive archaeological investigations at three poten- tial mass burial sites, but the data were inconclusive and the initiative was closed down before further investigations could be conducted. the final report provided estimates of the number killed, ranging as high as , along with a series of recommendations for financial repara- tions for survivors and descendants as well as economic support for the wider greenwood community. the resulting act, however, did not authorise any reparations, focusing instead on the recommendations for the provision for scholarships and the creation of a new public space, the john hope franklin reconciliation park. questions inevitably remained about both the past, including the true numbers of those killed, and the future of tulsa’s black community. the impending th anniversary of the massacre has provided the context for the formation of a new group to coordinate institu- tional and community efforts to find answers. the objectives of the tulsa race mas- sacre centennial commission are wide-ranging, both continuing investigations into the past but also looking forward with a programme of projects and events to commemorate and edu- cate, as well as plans for the economic regeneration of the greenwood district through sup- port for black businesses and the promotion of tourism. alongside the commission’s work, the city of tulsa has renewed archaeological investigations to identify the location of possible mass graves associated with the massacre and solicited the help of the oklahoma archaeo- logical survey as well as forensic anthropologists and archaeologists from across the state of oklahoma. investigations commenced last year, surveying a number of possible mass burial oklahoma commission. . tulsa race riot. a report by the oklahoma commission to study the tulsa race riot of . available at: www.okhistory.org/research/forms/freport.pdf (accessed june ). editorial © antiquity publications ltd, https://www.okhistory.org/research/forms/freport.pdf sites using ground-penetrating radar, magnetometer survey and other non-invasive methods. one of these locations has produced potential signs of a large pit, a signature consistent with a mass grave, but further testing is required to confirm its contents and whether or not it is connected with the events of . earlier this year, the presentation of these results to the public oversight committee, which is comprised of descendants, educators and local lea- ders in the black community, led to agreement for limited excavations to investigate further. that work was due to start in april, but has been pushed back into late summer because of covid- . tulsa’s search for mass graves is one of many restorative justice and reconciliation projects investigating missing persons in countries around the world, including bosnia, chile, cyprus, iraq and spain. such forensic enquiries require slow and detailed work, and sus- tained engagement with the affected communities. these investigations are not well suited to high-pressure situations such as that in which tulsa found itself during june. yet, in the end, after all the hype, the presidential rally was underwhelming and, distress and upset notwithstanding, the global spotlight cast on the city may well have helped to bring greater national and international awareness of the events of . now that the political band- wagon has moved on, tulsa can return to the detailed and careful work of dealing with its past in preparation for next year’s centenary and the longer-term revival of greenwood. my thanks to dr alicia odewale of the university of tulsa for invaluable comments and advice on this section. juukan gorge rockshelters on april , captain cook landed at kamay botany bay on the south-east coast of australia. plans to mark the th anniversary had already stimulated much public debate over the colonial legacy of european settlement; covid- and black lives matter have added to the mix. long-planned events have been scaled back, and instead of restoring monu- ments to cook, the authorities have felt compelled to protect them from demonstrators. indeed, from sydney via anchorage, alaska, to whitby near his childhood yorkshire home, statues of cook have been a focus of protest over the structural legacies of empire and racism. as if to exemplify the wider issues raised, in late may came news of the destruc- tion of two rockshelters in the pilbara region of western australia in advance of the extension of the brockman iron ore mine. the aboriginal heritage act aims to protect sacred aboriginal and cultural heritage sites, but under section , landowners can apply for per- mission to disturb or destroy these sites. in , the mining giant rio tinto sought and received consent from the federal aboriginal cultural heritage committee to destroy sites in the juukan gorge. subsequent archaeological investigations, however, indicated that one rockshelter had a long and, unusually, continuous history of activity stretching back years. what followed earlier this year was, at best, a series of miscommunications between rio tinto, the state and federal authorities and the traditional landowners, the puutu kunti kurrama and pinikura peoples; on may, the rockshelters were dynamited. for a detailed list of sources, curated by alicia odewale and karla slocum, see #tulsasyllabus: the rise, destruction, and rebuilding of tulsa’s greenwood district. available at: tulsasyllabus.web.unc.edu (accessed june ). editorial © antiquity publications ltd, https://tulsasyllabus.web.unc.edu even with covid- and black lives matter protests dominating the news, the outcry over the destruction seems to have taken rio tinto, and other mining companies, by surprise. under the global spotlight and under pressure from shareholders, rio tinto apologised for the distress caused and launched an internal review. meanwhile, the australian senate agreed to an urgent federal inquiry into the destruction and the bhp mining group suspended its own plans to move ahead with the destruction of dozens of sites at the nearby south flank mine. the aboriginal heritage act, under which consent to destroy the sites was granted, is the subject of an ongoing consultation with an intention to reform. events at juukan gorge have illustrated many of the inadequacies to be addressed. there is limited requirement for con- sultation with traditional landowners, and consent is rarely withheld; of the dozens of appli- cations under section submitted each year, almost none have been rejected over the past decade. once permission to destroy a site has been granted, there is no right of appeal, except on procedural grounds, and then only to delay. nor is there any provision for reassessing a decision in the light of new information, such as the results of archaeological assessment. fundamentally, the act makes no allowance for the imbalance of power and money between mining companies and traditional landowners. hence, although the former invest large sums into local economies and support programmes, and despite the fact that aboriginal groups have become more effective at negotiating with these companies, the multinationals inevitably have greater leverage and agency. similar stories play out around the world; in new mexico, for example, the u.s. bureau of land management is looking to lease land near chaco canyon for fracking, pitting energy companies against indigenous, environmental and archaeological groups. the juukan gorge fiasco has put the mining companies on the back foot, but the real nature of the relationship between government, traditional landowners and the multina- tionals will be revealed by the outcome of the review of the heritage act and by the trade- offs reached between rights and revenues as the global economy heads into recession. already, the first signs of the loosening of regulations to boost economic growth and the slashing of budgets are apparent. in the usa, for example, the president has signed executive orders directing federal agencies to use emergency powers to hasten the completion of infrastructure projects by poten- tially suspending various regulations, such as the national historic preservation act. over the border in mexico, deep budgetary cuts are proposed, including a per cent reduction in fund- ing for the national institute of anthropology and history, which oversees research and the pro- tection and promotion of the country’s cultural heritage. in the new world of covid- , there will be hard choices to make. contagious ideas each year, the antiquity trust recognises the two best articles published in the previous volume through the award of the antiquity prize and, for the runner-up, the ben cullen prize. the latter is named in memory of ben cullen ( – ), a young australian scholar whose life was cut tragically short. a quarter of a century after his death, ben’s research has assumed new resonance. influenced by neo-darwinism, he sought comparisons between cullen, b. . contagious ideas: on evolution, culture, archaeology and the cultural virus theory. edited by j. steele, r. cullen & c. chippindale. oxford: oxbow. editorial © antiquity publications ltd, genetic and cultural transmission, advancing cultural virus theory to explain the spread of ideas and practices such as megalithic monument building in prehistoric europe. twenty-five years later, in our hyper-networked, globalised world, the metaphor of contagion has grown from strength to strength: tweets go viral, influencers change the behaviour of people on the other side of the world and financial contagion brings down global markets. the metaphor of contagion is itself contagious. but with covid- , the metaphorical has become reality, so much so that we are forced to seek metaphors to conceptualise it: a silent killer, an invisible enemy, a battle to be fought, a victory to be won. alongside renewed interest in previous pan- demics, as archaeologists reformulate their research questions in response to the coronavirus, might we also expect a shift in thinking about cultural transmission? whether lithic industries or the capitalist mode of production carried by european colonialism around the world, ques- tions about the spread, adoption and modification of material culture and ideas lie at the heart of our discipline. to identify this year’s two winners, our editorial advisory board drew up a shortlist of arti- cles published in and then a panel of antiquity trustees and directors cast their votes. the antiquity prize goes to mark knight, rachel ballantyne, iona robinson zeki and david gibson for their article on ‘the must farm pile-dwelling settlement’. the authors describe the environmental context of a late bronze age site in the cambridgeshire fens and the evidence for its construction, brief occupation and destruction by fire. the excep- tional preservation conditions and tight chronological controls provide a unique insight into the quantity and variability of material culture from a domestic context from bronze age britain. also on the theme of prehistoric britain, the ben cullen prize goes to alan williams and cécile le carlier de veslud for their article: ‘boom and bust in bronze age britain: major copper production from the great orme mine and european trade, c. – bc’. located on the coast of north wales, the great orme copper mine was one of the largest in bronze age europe, but the extensive workings have generally been considered to be the result of small-scale exploitation over many centuries. based on the geochemical charac- terisation of ores, objects and production waste, the authors argue for a briefer, more intensive and larger-scale use of the mine in the mid second millennium bc, indicating full-time, spe- cialist mining and greater integration into the exchange networks of bronze age europe. congratulations to the authors of both articles, and our thanks to all of the contributors whose research featured in the many other articles published in the journal last year. all of the current and previous prize-winning articles are free to access via our website: http:// antiquity.ac.uk/open/prizes. before signing off, a quick update on the antiquity editorial team. for the past two and a half years, rebecca gowland has been working hard as our associate editor, dealing in mitchell, p. . contagious metaphor. london: bloomsbury. knight, m., r. ballantyne, i. robinson zeki & d. gibson. . the must farm pile-dwelling settlement. antiquity : – . https:/doi.orgi/ . /aqy. . williams, r.a. & c. le carlier de veslud. . boom and bust in bronze age britain: major copper production from the great orme mine and european trade, c. – bc. antiquity : – . https:/doi.org/ . / aqy. . editorial © antiquity publications ltd, http://antiquity.ac.uk/open/prizes http://antiquity.ac.uk/open/prizes http://antiquity.ac.uk/open/prizes https:&sol;doi.orgi&sol; . &sol;aqy. . https:&sol;doi.org&sol; . &sol;aqy. . https:&sol;doi.org&sol; . &sol;aqy. . particular with peer reviews and looking to attract more archaeological science. recently, rebecca has taken on additional university responsibilities and now needs to focus more fully on her new role. in her place, we are pleased to introduce our new associate editor, robin skeates. many readers will be familiar with robin and his research, which focuses on central mediterranean prehistory using a range of approaches to material and visual cul- ture. our thanks to rebecca, and a warm welcome to robin. in this issue, you will find our usual mix of research and reviews, including a new inca ritual deposit from lake titicaca and a fresh look at healing sanctuaries in ancient greece from the perspective of disability studies. we also consider the prospect of archaeology ‘with- out antiquity’—but not archaeology without antiquity!—as part of a reorientation of the dis- cipline to focus on the present and future, as much as on the past. the global events of the last few months amply illustrate the timeliness and importance of such a change of perspective. robert witcher durham, august editorial © antiquity publications ltd, 	editorial 	fallen heroes 	from minneapolis to tulsa 	juukan gorge rockshelters 	contagious ideas social accountability at the macro level vol : october • octobre | canadian family physician • le médecin de famille canadien commentary social accountability at the macro level framing the big picture ryan meili md ccfp sandy buchman md ccfp fcfp ritika goel md mph ccfp robert woollard md ccfp fcfp t his is the final of articles on social accountability in family medicine and the role of family doctors in advocating for health equity. previously, we described the scope of social accountability, actions that can be taken at the micro level to address the needs of individual patients or families, and work that can be done at the meso level to advocate for better health at the level of a specific practice population or geographic community. these articles described how taking the social deter- minants of health into account can lead to actions at micro and meso levels that make a difference in the lives of our patients. however, many of the circum- stances that have the biggest influence on health out- comes—income, education, employment, housing, food security, and the wider environment—are themselves influenced by policies set at the provincial, federal, or international levels. consequently, if our primary goal is the best health for our patients, we need to think about the health of society and use the power of the physician voice to create positive political and systemic change. the physician role in achieving greater health equity has been the subject of much discussion in recent years. in , the canadian medical association (cma) inter- viewed doctors across canada and released the report physicians and health equity: opportunities for practice, describing some of the factors that serve as barriers and facilitators to physician involvement in advocacy on the social determinants of health. the cma also held town hall meetings that led to the report health care in canada: what makes us sick? that includes various rec- ommendations relating to the social determinants of health, such as income, housing, food security, aborigi- nal health, and early childhood development. in , following the presidency of sir michael marmot, the british medical association produced the report social determinants of health—what doctors can do to give guidance on how physicians could respond to health inequities in the united kingdom. the best advice guide: social determinants of health by the college of family physicians of canada (cfpc) sought to translate these higher-level concepts into a practical approach for family doctors to take action for health equity. these efforts might, at first glance, seem a difficult fit with the traditional role of physicians. our primary responsibility is to serve individuals and families and to identify and address their immediate health needs. however, if our real goal is optimal health for our patients, our duty of care extends to advocacy for the social well-being that determines their health concerns. what can physicians do to have an effect at a higher level? how can we take what we witness in clinic and use it to advocate for social change? taking action our position as family physicians affords us a number of advantages in advocacy. we are trained to understand evi- dence, giving us a background to recognize and develop cogent arguments for effective policy. more important, we are connected with people. we are exposed to the strug- gles of patients who experience the downstream effects of unhealthy public policy, and we can bear witness to their stories. our professional role, and the privileged status that accompanies it, provides us with a voice that will be heard. physicians’ collective voice is consistently one of those most trusted by the canadian public, and more so when that voice is used to advocate on behalf of patients rather than for our own interests. the following is a menu of actions that family doctors can take to have more influence on health policy, as described in the cfpc best advice guide. join or create an organization to advocate both with and on behalf of communities. there are many recent examples of successful macro-level advocacy by physi- cian organizations. canadian doctors for refugee care is a striking example, as its varied efforts, from street activism to court challenges, led to the reversal of cuts to the interim federal health program, which provides health care coverage for refugees and refugee claim- ants in canada. canadian doctors for medicare has established itself as a leading voice in championing a high-quality universal health care system and has been instrumental in bringing the idea of pharmacare to a national stage. the voice of physicians can also be influential on issues less obviously related to health care; for exam- ple, the canadian association of physicians for the environment lent credible expertise on health effects to the successful effort to see coal phased out of power production in ontario and alberta. la traduction en français de cet article se trouve à www.cfp.ca dans la table des matières du numéro d’octobre à la page e . canadian family physician • le médecin de famille canadien | vol : october • octobre commentary | social accountability at the macro level for individual physicians, supporting organizations such as these is an excellent way to contribute to, as well as to learn skills from those experienced in, macro- level advocacy. engage with medical, health care, and social service organizations to provide organizational advocacy for improved social determinants of health. our profes- sional organizations are influential among policy mak- ers and among physicians. subgroups like the poverty and health committee of the ontario college of family physicians or the social accountability working group (of which the authors for this series are members) of the cfpc can help to organize these representative bodies to put greater emphasis on the role of the profession in macro advocacy. the aforementioned campaign on refugee health was aided considerably by the support of professional organizations, including the cma, the royal college of physicians and surgeons of canada, and the cfpc. individual members can also make their concerns known to the leadership of such organizations, which exist to represent our concerns. advocate for remuneration arrangements and fund- ing that incentivizes addressing social determinants of health care. there is some danger in this recommenda- tion, as it brings the issue back to what could appear to be a self-serving advocacy role. however, recognizing that certain models of payment and practice allow for more time and support for advocacy is essential to creating that space. such advocacy must be tied to the desire to design remuneration in ways that incentivize the best practice for patients. in that context, it can be an important place for physicians to speak up for a better system as a means to facilitate care for underserved populations and patients with complex needs. collaborate with other organizations to establish broad intersectoral support for healthy public policies that address upstream determinants of health. the voice of physicians can also support the work of part- ner campaigns and organizations. one example is upstream, a national organization dedicated to refram- ing political discourse around the social determinants of health (www.thinkupstream.net). while not an organization of physicians, it uses the voice of health care providers and the stories of patients to make the case for policy changes that will improve health out- comes, and the voice and experience of physicians is key to that message. the voice of physicians has been influential in sup- port of campaigns on specific issues such as paid sick days or raising the minimum wage. one example is the recent decision by the ontario government to pilot a guaranteed basic income; this has largely been led by the basic income canada network but has been greatly assisted by support from the cma and by con- certed outreach from ontario doctors to the minister of health and long-term care, eric hoskins. physicians can also lend their voices to support community groups fighting for justice, such as black lives matter or idle no more, recognizing that discrimination is a considerable determinant of health. advocate for increased focus on and exposure to social determinants of health in undergraduate and post- graduate medical education. the movement for social accountability in medical education has brought a greater understanding of the need for medical learners to be exposed to the social determinants of health. this is reflected in the future of medical education in canada projects (undergraduate and postgraduate) led by the association of faculties of medicine of canada, in which social accountability plays a prominent role. advocacy has also been included as a canmeds and canmeds– family medicine competency for medical learners. however, the concepts surrounding health advocacy remain challenging to teach and are often labeled as the “soft stuff,” both in curricula and in the minds of students and residents. increasing classroom content and, more important, giving greater opportunities for service learn- ing that incorporates a meaningful understanding of and actions on the determinants of health is necessary. an example of this approach can be found in the making the links certificate in global health at the university of saskatchewan in saskatoon and other global health concentration programs that offer advanced learning opportunities for students interested in global health and advocacy. rudolf virchow famously said that politics is medi- cine on a large scale. advocacy at the macro level is an opportunity for physicians to use their knowledge and influence to make that true—to create a politics actu- ally in service of the health of the public. when macro efforts are seen as complementary to efforts at the meso and micro levels, we see that the inverse of virchow’s dictum is true: medicine is politics on a smaller scale. our practice and its outcomes are bound up in the polit- ical realities that manifest in the social determinants of health. using our skills and voices to make change at the macro level is a natural extension of the call to service of the profession. our -year-old patient, diana, who has multiple medi- cal conditions and was recently diagnosed with cervical cancer, has been connected with local resources and has inspired you to engage in making healthy changes in your community. - building on these successes, you wonder how you can help patients like diana on a broader scale. vol : october • octobre | canadian family physician • le médecin de famille canadien social accountability at the macro level | commentary helping diana physicians can advocate as individuals or in groups, with everything from letter-writing campaigns to public activism, from single-issue efforts to the development of lasting organizations. here are some examples of where to direct that activity in the case of diana and patients like her. • diana frequently skips diabetes and blood pressure medications. a national pharmacare program would eliminate the competition between the cost medica- tions and other necessities. • increased wages or the existence of a basic income guarantee would ensure that diana is able to afford the nutritious food and stable housing necessary for a healthy life, especially when living with a chronic illness. • perhaps if more primary care services were available in her neighbourhood, diana’s cancer would have been caught earlier via an ongoing clinical relation- ship. more equitable distribution of full-service pri- mary care, with patient’s medical home models of care located in underserved areas, would result in greater opportunities for screening and early treat- ment of cancer and other conditions. • social media and other public education campaigns that are informed by a health equity approach, and designed in a way that diana and others like her will access and understand, can help connect people with care and supports. conclusion as family physicians we are uniquely positioned to influ- ence various factors at the micro, meso, and macro levels that can profoundly improve the health of our patients. this allows us to not only help individual patients like diana, but also to influence health far beyond the clinic. we hope that the reflections on the best advice guide on the social determinants of health in this series of articles - will help point to the actions and collaborations that will help family physicians raise our collective voice in service of our individual patients, our communities, and our health care system more broadly to ensure optimal health for all canadians. dr meili is a family physician in saskatoon, sask, head of the division of social accountability at the university of saskatchewan, and founder of upstream: institute for a healthy society. dr buchman is chair of the social accountability working group of the college of family physicians of canada, past president of the college, a family physician providing home-base palliative care in toronto, canadian family physician • le médecin de famille canadien | vol : october • octobre commentary | social accountability at the macro level ont, education lead at the temmy latner centre for palliative care at mount sinai hospital, and associate professor in the department of family and community medicine at the university of toronto. dr goel is a family physician with inner city health associates in toronto, co-chair of the ontario college of family physicians’ poverty and health committee, and lecturer at the university of toronto. dr woollard is associate director of the rural coordination centre of bc, a practising family physician, and professor in the department of family practice at the university of british columbia in vancouver. all are members of the social accountability working group of the college of family physicians of canada. competing interests none declared correspondence dr ryan meili; e-mail ryan.meili@usask.ca the opinions expressed in commentaries are those of the authors. publication does not imply endorse- ment by the college of family physicians of canada. references . buchman s, woollard r, meili r, goel r. practising social accountability. from theory to action. can fam physician ; : - (eng), - (fr). . goel r, buchman s, meili r, woollard r. social accountability at the micro level. one patient at a time. can fam physician ; : - (eng), - (fr). . woollard r, buchman s, meili r, strasser r, alexander i, goel r. social accountability at the meso level. into the community. can fam physician ; : - (eng), - (fr). . canadian medical association. physicians and health equity: opportunities in practice. ottawa, on: canadian medical association; . available from: www.cma.ca/assets/assets-library/document/ en/advocacy/health-equity-opportunities-in-practice-final-e.pdf. accessed jul . . canadian medical association. health care in canada. what makes us sick? ottawa, on: canadian medical association; . available from: www.cma.ca/assets/assets-library/document/fr/ advocacy/what-makes-us-sick_en.pdf. accessed jul . . british medical association. social determinants of health—what doctors can do. london, uk: british medical association; . available from: www.bma.org.uk/-/media/files/pdfs/working% for% change/improving% health/socialdeterminantshealth.pdf. accessed jul . . college of family physicians of canada. best advice. social determinants of health. mississauga, on: college of family physicians of canada; . available from: http://patientsmedicalhome.ca/ resources/best-advice-guides/best-advice-guide-social-determinants-health/. accessed jul . . tencer d. canada’s most and least trusted professions: sorry, ceos and politicians. the huffington post jan . available from: www.huffingtonpost.ca/ / / /most-least-trusted-professions- canada_n_ .html. accessed jul . . canadian doctors for refugee care [website]. in the news. toronto, on: canadian doctors for refugee care; . available from: www.doctorsforrefugeecare.ca/in-the-news.html. accessed aug . . canadian doctors for medicare [website]. support for pharmacare escalates in canada. toronto, on: canadian doctors for medicare; . available from: www.canadiandoctorsformedicare.ca/press- releases/support-for-pharmacare-escalates-in-canada.html. accessed aug . . canadian association of physicians for the environment [website]. what we do. toronto, on: canadian association of physicians for the environment; . available from: https://cape.ca/what-we-do/. accessed aug . . ontario college of family physicians [website]. poverty and health committee. toronto, on: ontario college of family physicians; . available from: ocfp.on.ca/who-we-are/ - -board-members- and-committees/poverty-and-health-committee. accessed jul . . upstream [website]. about upstream. toronto, on: upstream: institute for a healthy society. available from: www.thinkupstream.net/about_upstream. accessed aug . . mojtehedzadeh s. lack of paid sick days in ontario a public health risk, doctors say. toronto star nov . available from: www.thestar.com/news/gta/ / / /lack-of-paid-sick-days-in-ontario- a-public-health-risk-doctors-say.html. accessed jul . . bloch g. as a doctor, i know too well why the minimum wage needs to rise. the globe and mail jan . available from: www.theglobeandmail.com/opinion/as-a-doctor-i-know-too-well-why-the- minimum-wage-needs-to-rise/article /. accessed jul . . basic income canada network [home page]. ottawa, on: basic income canada network. available from: www.basicincomecanada.org. accessed jul . . martin d, meili r. basic income is just what the doctor ordered [blog]. the huffington post sep . available from: www.huffingtonpost.ca/danielle-martin/basic-income-canada_b_ .html. accessed jul . . association of faculties of medicine of canada. the future of medical education in canada. ottawa, on: association of faculties of medicine of canada; . available from: www.afmc.ca/medical-education/ future-medical-education-canada-fmec. accessed jul . . royal college of physicians and surgeons of canada [website]. canmeds: better standards, better physi- cians, better care. ottawa, on: royal college of physicians and surgeons of canada; . available from: www.royalcollege.ca/rcsite/canmeds/canmeds-framework-e. accessed jul . . working group on curriculum review. canmeds–family medicine. mississauga, on: college of family physicians of canada; . available from: www.cfpc.ca/uploadedfiles/education/canmeds% fm% eng.pdf. accessed jul . . watterson r, matthews d, bach p, kherani i, halpine m, meili r. building a framework for global health learning: an analysis of global health concentrations in canadian medical schools. acad med ; ( ): - . . virchow r. collected essays on public health and epidemiology. cambridge, uk: science history publications; . . meili r, hewett n. turning virchow upside down: medicine is politics on a smaller scale. j r soc med ; ( ): - . hodgkinson et al. crime sci ( ) : https://doi.org/ . /s - - -x t h e o r e t i c a l a r t i c l e beyond crime rates and community surveys: a new approach to police accountability and performance measurement tarah hodgkinson * , tullio caputo and michael l. mcintyre abstract in this conceptual piece, we argue that the current approach to police performance measurement typically based on the use of traditional police metrics has failed to achieve the desired results and that a different strategy is required. traditional police metrics have a narrow focus on crime and the police response to it. they provide little information on how well police organizations are performing. importantly, traditional police metrics do not incorporate input from police stakeholders in goal identification, nor do they use specifically designed indicators to assess progress towards achieving these goals. following an analysis of the criticisms levelled at the use of traditional police metrics, and subsequent attempts to address these issues, we argue that a networked governance approach represents a more promising foundation for undertaking police organizational performance assessment. such an approach would engage stakeholders more directly in goal identification and performance assessment, and potentially lead to more successful, responsive and accountable policing. keywords: performance measurement, policing, accountability, governance, canada © the author(s) . this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (http://creat iveco mmons .org/licen ses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons license, and indicate if changes were made. the creative commons public domain dedication waiver (http://creativecommons.org/ publicdomain/zero/ . /) applies to the data made available in this article, unless otherwise stated. introduction in the early s, a ‘businesslike’ approach to pub- lic administration known as new public management (npm), began to take root in the united kingdom, the united states, and many other western nations (hartley ; hough ; micheli and neely ). the impe- tus for npm came, in part, from growing concerns over mounting budget deficits and the desire by governments to gain greater control over public sector organizations like the police (den heyer ). the impact of these pol- icies and the changes they created in police organizations cannot be overstated. as reiner ( : ) notes, the reforms aimed at policing in the united kingdom, includ- ing the use of performance measurement, have been the most substantial in the past  years “and, arguably in the nearly two centuries since the establishment of the mod- ern british police”. and, despite a shift in performance metrics to alternative such as public confidence through procedural justice, many police organizations continue to experience pressures to demonstrate accountability. in this conceptual paper, we consider the growing emphasis on performance measurement in policing with a particular focus on the canadian context. we explore the criticisms levelled at the use of traditional police met- rics for performance assessment, then consider some of the alternatives that have been proposed for overcom- ing these criticisms including a shift to examining police legitimacy through procedural justice. finally, we outline what we believe to be a more fruitful and meaningful approach to police organizational performance measure- ment—one that builds on well-established governance principles that offer a promising way of addressing police organizational performance concerns, while prioritizing police legitimacy and accountability. in this way, we out- line a path forward for policing, that shifts organizational innovation from ‘episodic’ efforts to ‘systematic’ change (goldstein , ). open access crime science *correspondence: t.hodgkinson@griffith.edu.au school of criminology and criminal justice, griffith university, messines dr., mt. gravatt, qld , usa full list of author information is available at the end of the article http://orcid.org/ - - - http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - -x&domain=pdf page of hodgkinson et al. crime sci ( ) : history and background police organizations were originally exempted from the types of budget cuts, austerity measures and other changes imposed on public sector organizations as a result of npm-inspired reforms because they were con- sidered an ‘essential service’ (butterfield et al. ). this situation began to change, however, in the mid- s as the global recession put increasing pressure on govern- mental budgets (edwards and skidmore ). for exam- ple, in canada, the per capita cost of policing has risen steadily since the s. accounting for inflation, cana- dian policing budgets have grown more than % since reaching $ . billion in (approximately $ per capita and % higher than in ) (conor ). concerns over policing costs prompted the canadian federal government to launch an “economics of polic- ing” initiative in . this initiative focused on finding ways of delivering more ‘efficient and effective’ policing services while reducing policing costs (drummond ; leuprecht ; di matteo ; public safety canada ). considerations of the costs of policing are clearly important since they represent a significant expenditure for municipal, provincial and federal levels of govern- ment in canada. however, a more nuanced discussion about these costs is required given public expectations of the police, the increasing complexity of police work, and the greater time required to adequately perform policing tasks considering the legal requirements under which the police currently operate (e.g. regulations regarding the handling of domestic conflict calls). as well, there has been growing public demand for greater police account- ability and legitimacy in canada, as a result of a series of high-profile incidents involving the police, and the devel- opment of the national inquiry into missing and mur- dered indigenous women and children, and the black lives matter movement (lucchesi and echo-hawk ; reiti ). these developments have put policing high on the public policy agenda in canada in recent years as has been the case in many liberal democracies. police performance assessment and the use of traditional police metrics the current context of policing in canada includes a growing emphasis on police performance measurement frameworks by police organizations (icurs ). his- torically, policy makers and police leaders have typically used existing police metrics, such as crime rates and clearance rates, to assess police performance. indeed, the uniform crime reports (ucr) were developed in the early s specifically for this purpose. however, tradi- tional police metrics such as the ucr have a very narrow focus on crime and the police response to it (which the ucr also measures poorly) while providing little infor- mation on how well police organizations are run (magu- ire and uchida ). nor does the ucr provide any detail on the unique context of similar criminal incidents (e.g. one assault can be very different from another and require different police response). furthermore, clear- ance rates do not provide any indication about the type of service provided by the police beyond whether an arrest was made, or the case was solved. the four main types of information reported in exist- ing police metrics include: crime rates, clearance rates, response times and productivity or workload statistics (e.g. number of arrests, citations, stops and checks, etc.) (collier ; fielding and innes ; maguire ; sparrow ). these metrics do not alone address police goals, nor do they include specific indicators designed to track progress towards goal achievement. implicitly, police organizations are understood to be, “doing a good job” in relation to how well they perform on the above- mentioned traditional police metrics, rather than what some might consider legitimate police goals. while the police have some ability to impact the rise and fall of offi- cial crime statistics, most of these changes are a result of indirect police behaviour. for example, different attend- ing officers may record an incident as more or less severe depending on a number of factors. if this is done over time it could impact crime rates. however, traditional police metrics continue to be used despite ongoing criti- cisms including questions about what is being measured, what is being missed, how the data are collected, and how other data sources (like victim surveys) compare with these metrics (maguire and uchida ; wells et  al. ). four general critiques of traditional police metrics are outlined below. the first critique is that they are methodologically unsound. critics claim that traditional police metrics like crime rates are ill defined, poorly specified, and often do not capture the actual amount of crime that occurs in a given area (rein and winship ). reporting practices have received particular attention with respect to the methodological criticisms levelled at traditional police metrics. the research on reporting practices suggests that high reporting rates are often linked to a variety of factors (fielding and innes ). for example, increas- ing the number of police officers on the street could lead to higher crime rates because there are more police avail- able to witness and report crime, rather than having to rely on the public to make these reports (rein and win- ship ). additionally, crime rates can decrease if citi- zens fail to report crimes because they do not trust their police (reiner ). even crimes that have relatively high reporting rates, such as auto-theft and homicide, have been shown to be more correlated with an increase page of hodgkinson et al. crime sci ( ) : in security and a reduction in criminal opportunities, than the performance of the local police organization (hodgkinson et al. ; farrell et al. ). a second critique notes that traditional police metrics are too narrow. they tend to focus on particular kinds of crime (e.g. public order, interpersonal violence, property crime) while failing to adequately address arguably more serious crime categories (e.g. white-collar crime, corpo- rate crime, fraud, or cybercrime) that are often difficult or expensive to investigate, go undetected by victims, or are not reported to avoid damage to the affected organi- zation’s reputation (mailley et al. ; sommer ). traditional police metrics are also too narrow because they fail to address important aspects of police work (maguire ). for example, up to % of police calls for service are not crime related (mcfee and taylor ; di matteo ), with many being in response to men- tal health issues (coleman and cotton ) or other non-criminal social problems like addictions, poverty, and homelessness (goldstein ). these non-criminal social problems go unrecorded by traditional police met- rics, but account for a large proportion of what the police actually do in the course of carrying out their normal duties. as well, traditional police metrics fail to account for the time devoted to administrative and operational tasks such as report writing, attending court, attending hospitals, and directing traffic (leuprecht ; murphy ). traditional police metrics also place relatively little emphasis on crime prevention and other practices that can enhance community safety and improve police-stake- holder relationships (wells et al. ). ironically, exclud- ing these activities from the metrics used to assess police organizational performance penalizes police organiza- tions that are working proactively to prevent crime and enhance community safety (collier ; feltham and xie ). a third critique of traditional police metrics focuses specifically on the way they are used to influence public perception. some observers note that in order to dem- onstrate significant declines, crime rates need to be high in the first place. these critics claim that it is difficult to reduce crime rates below a certain level (i.e. a statistical floor effect), and while attempting to do so may be politi- cally expedient, it wastes valuable police resources on a pursuit that cannot succeed (sparrow ). additionally, crime rates have been declining interna- tionally for more than two decades and these declines cannot be explained by individual police service strate- gies (farrell ). in fact, the police actually have lim- ited ability to influence the crime rate with some critics arguing that they play a largely symbolic role that pri- marily serves to reassure the public (see manning ). this does not mean that reducing crime is not a valuable policing goal but needs to be considered as one of the several contributions made by modern policing that is worth measuring. the fourth critique focuses on the negative conse- quences associated with the use of performance met- rics themselves. for example, some observers argue that an excessive emphasis on crime control metrics such as arrest rates, can lead to violations of civil liberties or ignoring community satisfaction with the police (moore and poethig ). this is problematic, since, according to procedural justice researchers, public confidence in the police has been found to be an important predictor of overall feelings of community safety as well as com- pliance with the law (shilston ; tyler and murphy ). others have suggested that overemphasizing perfor- mance measurement can lead some officers to ‘game the system’. this can take various forms, including fail- ing to report negative incidents and manipulating the data to make it look like performance is good even if it is not (courty and marschke ; espeland and sauder ). some have suggested that gaming the system can become institutionalized to the point that the main goal of reporting and recording practices becomes production of the expected results rather than accuracy (loveday ). as patrick ( ) points out, statistics can and will be manipulated when the stakes are high. importantly, traditional police metrics fail to tell pol- icy makers and stakeholders very much about what the police are actually doing or how well a police organiza- tion is operating. critics have argued that traditional police metrics more accurately reflect the activities of offenders than those of the police (hoogenboezem and hoogenboezem ). in response to the wide-ranging criticisms levelled at traditional police metrics, numerous authors have sug- gested a variety of alternatives including developing and using better indicators, qualitative measures, or conduct- ing public/staff satisfaction surveys (shilston ; wells et al. ; rosenbaum et al. ). the policing literature is replete with new models and other alternatives to cur- rent police performance measurement schemes as many police services move away from traditional performance metrics or have discarded these metrics altogether. bar- lage et al. ( ) suggest that performance measurement should focus on objective versus subjective measures by using a multi-trait/multi-method (testing response bias across different response groups while testing the valid- ity of the measures) approach. in england and wales, the peel (police effectiveness, efficiency and legitimacy) program brings together numerous measures of police activity to provide the public with a standard to evaluate page of hodgkinson et al. crime sci ( ) : police performance (hmic ). barton and beynon ( ) introduced the promethee ranking technique that uses secondary data on sanction detection levels to improve police performance in a specific area. and oth- ers are attempting to identify better measures and indi- cators (guilfoyle ), measure additional factors such as city-level attributes (sharp and johnson ), and use citizen surveys to evaluate police-citizen encounters and public satisfaction (shilston ; rosenbaum et  al. ). while the proposed alternatives to traditional police metrics may provide better indicators or ways of meas- uring, they do not resolve the fundamental challenges inherent in the use of traditional police metrics for assessing police organizational performance (maguire and uchida ). an important consideration for those concerned about this issue is that existing police metrics were not specifically designed to address the questions inherent in determining how well a police organiza- tion operates and fulfils its role in community safety. for example, in the current context there are few measures of what might indicate that progress has been made towards achieving stated policing goals. this is remarkable because what the police are doing about crime may actu- ally be antithetical to what governments and the public desire. rethinking performance metrics according to organizational goals we believe that a different approach to police organiza- tional performance measurement is required: one that is more attuned to the expectations of local stakeholders, including governance and oversight bodies, as well as community members. an important starting point would require acknowledging the need for greater input and involvement by local stakeholders in discussions regard- ing the role of the police in a democratic society, realis- tic expectations for those undertaking these roles, and a consideration of the expectations of the people being served (goldstein ; sparrow ; moore and braga ). appropriate organizational performance assess- ment frameworks, specific to the police service, could then be developed based on well-established evaluation principles (goal identification, logic models, tailored indicators, regular data collection/analysis, ameliorative action based on evidence, etc.). a growing body of literature provides important insights into what an alternative approach might look like. newman ( ), for example, discusses a model that shifts governance away from current practices towards a more networked form, in which stakeholders are directly involved in the identification of organizational goals and how these are to be pursued (expectations about police behaviour). in this way, networked governance can pro- vide stakeholders with the voice they require to help shape police service policies and practices, so their needs and expectations can be more adequately addressed (fung ; bryson et al. ). networked governance has been gaining traction in community safety and public service management. for example, in vancouver, canada, a collaborative model of decision making was used to transform homelessness policy and allot funding to mutually agreed upon services (doberstein ). this model demonstrated that net- worked governance is far more advantageous than cur- rent governance approaches, highlighting in particular, the importance of the ‘process’ of networked governance. the policing literature includes other examples of a networked approach to police governance and how this might work at the organizational level. moore and braga ( ), for example, assert that stakeholders should be involved in measuring how the actions of the police contribute to the safety of their communities. an exam- ple of this is demonstrated in the nexus project in aus- tralia where participating police organizations work with communities to determine what they want their police organizations to achieve in relation to community safety, and what their vision of policing is for the st century (shearing and marks ). similarly, “measuring what matters”, a federally sponsored project in the us, includes stakeholder engagement as a means of identifying public expectations of the police regarding community safety (moore ; moore and braga ; sparrow ). if such an approach were to be used more broadly in policing, police leaders would have to work more closely with stakeholders, be more responsive to their input and guidance, and be more flexible and facilitative in their leadership roles (moore ; hartley ). at the same time, such an approach would require stake- holders to be more engaged and willing to participate in co-producing the outcomes they desire. in addition to community members, we argue it is important to engage institutional stakeholders who are informed about the issues at hand (simmons ). these institutional stakeholders should be drawn from the partners who comprise the community safety constellation and have a stake in working towards safe and healthy communities (see caputo and mcintyre ). these include health care providers, educators, social service providers, and even private security firms (shearing and marks ). finally, to address issues of conflict and consensus, unbi- ased and experienced facilitators would contribute to the police goals are rarely specified or clearly stated. rather, performance met- rics are chosen somewhat arbitrarily, and seldomly with the intention of measuring what the police organization wants to achieve. page of hodgkinson et al. crime sci ( ) : governance process (morley and trist ; hodgkinson ). a networked governance approach would address the issue of performance measurement in a way that is appropriate for police organizations in the st century (see council of canadian academies ). it would lead to goal setting for the police that is: a. deliberate and intentional because it reflects the results of a collaborative process and negotiated agreements; b. aligned with what a police organization can actually do; c. aligned with stakeholder expectations; and, d. linked to a suitable reference point for after-the-fact evaluation; this type of approach would place the interaction between the police and their stakeholders at the centre of the oversight and accountability process. the police would be required to keep their stakeholders informed of the progress they are making toward jointly determined goals through the use of indicators that were also jointly identified. based on an assessment of these performance measures, changes could be made as necessary to help a police organization become more successful going forward. we acknowledge that this proposal is a complex task. police organizations have several stakeholders (outlined above) who often differ in their expectations of police. we do not believe that consensus around these goals is a possibility or even a worthwhile pursuit. in fact, some argue that conflict is necessary to the networked govern- ance process (o’leary and vij ). rather, we argue that the process of networked governance is meant to create context specific metrics, that measure the ability of police to address locally identified needs and problems while acknowledging that these issues are subjective to local needs and experiences. while the proposed approach calls for the collabora- tive setting of strategic goals, we recognize that opera- tional decisions about how to achieve these goals should be left to police professionals. the distinction between strategic goals and operational decisions is an impor- tant one because it helps to clarify the role of the vari- ous participants in the community safety enterprise. for example, while police will continue to respond to calls for service (violence-related calls would continue to take pri- ority), how they frame these issues, and strategize their response will be co-determined and in line with mutually agreed upon priorities, such as those created by organi- zations like the american bar association’s standards for the urban police function (aba ). a networked governance approach goes further than requiring the police to seek information or input from the community about its concerns or priorities as is done in the existing community consultation process used by most police organizations. rather, the goals that emerge in networked governance should be co-determined by police leadership and their stakeholders such as govern- ance or oversight bodies, institutional partners, and other community representatives (mcknight and kretzmann ; hodgkinson and saville ). in doing so, police response becomes imperative rather than an elective that can be easily ignored by police leaders or to which they can merely pay lip service (klockars ). additionally, these goals are implemented at the organizational level, contributing to ‘systematic’ rather than episodic changes in policing and community safety (goldstein ). these goals then become the standard that stakeholders can use to assess the performance of their police organizations and this process will contribute to greater transparency as well as police accountability and legitimacy. conclusions the introduction of police reforms based on npm- inspired policies has had a dramatic impact on police organizations. this has been most evident in the increas- ing emphasis placed on police organizational perfor- mance measurement including the narrowly conceived performance imperatives exemplified by the rubric of efficiency and effectiveness and “value for money”. we submit that police performance measurement conceived of in this way fails to achieve its objectives while miss- ing much of the public’s concerns related to police legiti- macy and accountability. further, the reliance on existing traditional police metrics has privileged crime control over other policing functions even though this accounts for between a quarter and a third of all calls for service received by the police. clearly a much broader focus is required for police performance assessment if the myriad concerns related to community safety are to be addressed. our view is that a more fulsome approach to assessing the performance of police organizations is required—one this is more “bottom-up” and organic in nature. that is, it should be based on the collaborative identification of policing goals arrived at by a closer working relation- ship between the police and their primary stakeholders. moreover, once such goals are identified, appropriate indicators should be created for assessing whether pro- gress is being made towards achieving them. questions for examples on how to engage in this process with community stakehold- ers see: morley and trist ( ) or saville ( ). page of hodgkinson et al. crime sci ( ) : about police organizational performance would then revolve around the collection and sharing of the req- uisite information on an ongoing basis among police leaders and their stakeholders. assessments of the per- formance of a police organization could then be made based on whether and to what extent it is achieving its stated goals. in this way, the assessment of police organi- zational performance would be based on evidence that specifically addresses this issue rather than on the expe- dient use of narrow crime-based and organizational met- rics (work load statistics) that are readily at hand. in the proposed approach, police organizational performance would be assessed against the backdrop of broader com- munity safety goals while increasing the potential for more democratic, responsive and accountable policing organizations. abbreviations npm: new public management; ucr : uniform crime reports. acknowledgements no acknowledgements. authors’ contributions th was responsible for conceptualization and majority of research. tc and mlm assisted in conceptualization and research support. all authors read and approved the final manuscript. funding there is no funding associated with this piece. availability of data and materials there are no data used for this conceptual piece. competing interests the authors declare that they have no competing interests. author details school of criminology and criminal justice, griffith university, messines dr., mt. gravatt, qld , usa. department of sociology and anthropology, carleton university, colonel by drive, ottawa, on k s b , usa. sprott school of business, carleton university, colonel by drive, ottawa, on k s b , usa. received: august accepted: october references aba. 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( ). procedural justice, police legitimacy and coop- eration with the police: a new paradigm for policing. australian research council centre of excellence in policing and security briefing paper. brisbane: griffith university. wells, w., horney, j., & maguire, e. r. ( ). patrol officer responses to citizen feedback: an experimental analysis. police quarterly, ( ), – . publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in pub- lished maps and institutional affiliations. http://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/cntrng-crm/plcng/cnmcs-plcng/index-eng.aspx http://www.publicsafety.gc.ca/cnt/cntrng-crm/plcng/cnmcs-plcng/index-eng.aspx http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/van-jones-toronto- . http://www.cbc.ca/news/canada/toronto/van-jones-toronto- . 	beyond crime rates and community surveys: a new approach to police accountability and performance measurement 	abstract 	introduction 	history and background 	police performance assessment and the use of traditional police metrics 	rethinking performance metrics according to organizational goals 	conclusions 	acknowledgements 	references the rise of trump and the death of civility syracuse university from the selectedworks of keith j. bybee the rise of trump and the death of civility keith j. bybee, syracuse university available at: https://works.bepress.com/keith_bybee/ / http://www.syracuse.edu/ https://works.bepress.com/keith_bybee/ https://works.bepress.com/keith_bybee/ / **forthcoming in law, culture and the humanities** the rise of trump and the death of civility keith j. bybee, syracuse university abstract according to supporters and opponents alike, donald trump has been an unconventional candidate and president. in this article, i evaluate the relationship between trump’s unconventional behavior and the requirements of civility. i provide a definition of civility, and i explain why it makes sense to relate trump’s actions to civil norms. i then discuss how civility is enacted, i examine criticisms of civility’s triviality, and i explore the ways in which civility may repress dissent and maintain hierarchy. although i consider the degree to which trump’s actions are strategic, i ultimately argue that trump’s incivilities should be understood as an effort to initiate a revolution in manners. in this regard, trump’s behavior is not unprecedented. he is participating in a longstanding american tradition of determining standards of appropriate conduct through political conflict. keywords donald trump, civility, norms, manners, american politics, dissent, hierarchy, democracy contact information keith j. bybee, dineen hall, college of law, syracuse university, syracuse, new york email: kjbybee@syr.edu tel: - - mailto:kjbybee@syr.edu i. introduction the ordinary behavioral standards of american public life constrain political action while allowing space for criticism and confrontation. from the very beginning of his presidential run, donald trump flouted the conventional constraints. trump announced his candidacy in june by calling many mexican immigrants rapists. in his first month of campaigning, he pointedly questioned the intelligence of one of his opponents (rick perry “put on glasses so people will think he's smart. and it just doesn't work!”), condemned the esteemed veteran john mccain for having been a prisoner of war (“i like people who weren’t captured.”), and insulted a wide range of individuals, news organizations, and businesses. outraged observers called on trump to apologize for his broad slander and personal attacks. the wall street journal editorial board declared that trump had arrived at his “inevitable self-immolation.” rather than retreat, trump doubled down. he dismissed the wall street journal (“who cares!”) and continued to insult and offend at will. by the time the republican primary season was in full swing, trump’s consistently uncouth behavior had become a kind of vortex that sucked in other politicians. for a week in the spring of , for for an effort to catalogue the constraints in electioneering, see stephen hess, the little book of campaign etiquette (washington, d.c.: brookings, ). “donald trump’s presidential announcement speech,” time, june , , http://time.com/ /donald-trump-announcement-speech/. hannah krueger, et. al., “trump’s most notable insults,” the hill, july , , http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/ -trumps-most-notable-insults; jonathan martin and alan rappeport, “donald trump says john mccain is no war hero, setting off another storm,” new york times, july , , https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/trump-belittles-mccains-war- record.html. “trump and his apologists,” wall street journal, july , , https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump- and-his-apologists- . donald j. trump, twitter post, july , , : a.m., https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/ . http://time.com/ /donald-trump-announcement-speech/ http://thehill.com/blogs/ballot-box/ -trumps-most-notable-insults https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/trump-belittles-mccains-war-record.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/trump-belittles-mccains-war-record.html https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-and-his-apologists- https://www.wsj.com/articles/trump-and-his-apologists- https://twitter.com/realdonaldtrump/status/ example, the campaign trail was consumed by schoolyard taunts between trump and marco rubio, including a public debate over whether the smallness of trump’s hands might indicate that his other appendages were similarly under-sized. although some commentators hoped that trump would eventually adopt a more conventional style, trump’s antics persisted after he won the election and have continued, more or less unabated, throughout his term of office. how should trump’s behavior be understood? scholars have already begun to frame trump’s actions as violations of political norms and as contraventions of constitutional conventions. i, too, am interested in understanding trump’s actions in relationship to rules of behavior. but rather than focusing on the norms and conventions of official conduct, my interest is in understanding trump in terms of civility, the baseline understanding of the respect owed to everyone in public life. political norms and constitutional conventions are clearly eliza collins, “rubio suggests that trump wet his pants on debate stage,” politico, february , , https://www.politico.com/blogs/ -gop-primary-live-updates-and-results/ / /marco-rubio- donald-trump-con-artist- ; gregory krieg, “trump defends the size of his penis,” cnn, march , , https://www.cnn.com/ / / /politics/donald-trump-small-hands-marco-rubio/index.html. for a recent argument that trump should act like a more conventional president, see peggy noonan, “over trump, we’re as divided as ever,” wall street journal, march , , https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-screwball-tragedy-of-donald-trump- . and for overviews of trump’s continued disdain for convention, see jasmine c. lee and kevin quealy, “the people, places, and things donald trump has insulted on twitter: a complete list,” new york times, january , , https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/ / / /upshot/donald-trump-twitter-insults.html; peter baker, “for trump, a year of reinventing the presidency,” new york times, december , ,https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/trump-reinventing-presidency.html; and artin afkhami, “norms watch: democracy, the trump administration, and reactions to it (february ),” just security, march , , https://www.justsecurity.org/ /norms-watch-democracy-trump- administration-reactions-feb- /. neil s. siegel, “political norms, constitutional conventions, and president donald trump,” indiana l. j. (forthcoming ), https://papers.ssrn.com/sol /papers.cfm?abstract_id= . siegel defines political norms as “principles of right action that bind elected official and serve to guide and control their conduct in office” and constitutional conventions as obligatory rules that “advance a purpose of the constitution, such as limiting presidential power in order to prevent dictatorship.” see also steven levitsky and daniel ziblatt, how democracies die (new york: crown, ). in making my argument here, i draw upon and extend previous work, how civility works (stanford: stanford university press, ). https://www.politico.com/blogs/ -gop-primary-live-updates-and-results/ / /marco-rubio-donald-trump-con-artist- https://www.politico.com/blogs/ -gop-primary-live-updates-and-results/ / /marco-rubio-donald-trump-con-artist- https://www.cnn.com/ / / /politics/donald-trump-small-hands-marco-rubio/index.html https://www.wsj.com/articles/the-screwball-tragedy-of-donald-trump- https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/ / / /upshot/donald-trump-twitter-insults.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/trump-reinventing-presidency.html https://www.justsecurity.org/ /norms-watch-democracy-trump-administration-reactions-feb- / https://www.justsecurity.org/ /norms-watch-democracy-trump-administration-reactions-feb- / https://papers.ssrn.com/sol /papers.cfm?abstract_id= important, but they are also specialized and tend to limit attention to the activity of those in government. civility applies to all public interactions. by relating trump’s actions to the requisites of civil behavior, we can widen our analytical lens and situate trump within the broader history and development of standards of appropriate conduct. in this article, i begin with a definition of civility and i detail the ways in which civility differs from politeness and common courtesy. i then discuss how civility is enacted and i evaluate criticisms of civility’s triviality. i also explore how civility may repress dissent and maintain hierarchy. although i consider the degree to which trump’s actions are strategic, i ultimately argue that trump’s incivilities should be understood as an effort to initiate a revolution in manners. in this regard, trump is not without precedent. he is participating in a longstanding american tradition of determining standards of appropriate behavior through political conflict. ii. what is civility? in the most general sense, civility is a code of public conduct. it is not the only such code. politeness and courtesy are codes of public conduct too, as are chivalry and gallantry. all of these modes of behavioral management, including civility, are forms of good manners. the different forms of manners cluster and blend in several ways, yet each retains its own meaning. today we think of chivalry and gallantry as antique forms of manners principally for the leading source on the origins, meaning, and history of civility and good manners, see the two volume series by norbert elias: “the history of manners,” vol. of the civilizing process, translated by edmund jephcott (new york: urizen books, , originally published ) and “power and civility,” vol. of the civilizing process, translated by edmund jephcott (new york: pantheon, , originally published ). concerned with the treatment of women. unlike chivalry and gallantry, politeness is not narrowly preoccupied with female protection. on the contrary, polite society has rules that are meant to govern the behavior of everyone within it. this breadth of application is paired with an element of elevation: politeness is a refined set of good manners aligned with the interests and pursuits of high culture. although people may sometimes refer to ordinary politeness, polite behavior generally carries an air of polish and urbane sophistication. like politeness, courtesy also has a link to elite affairs. courtesy initially drew its name from princely courts and referred to the gracious behavior of courtly gentlemen. unlike politeness, courtesy did not retain its patrician patina. over time courtesy became less associated with courtiers and ultimately took on a more democratic cast. this more plebian descendant is now known as common courtesy and it signifies an everyday form of correct conduct. civility is a close cousin of both politeness and courtesy. civility originally emerged out of courtesy during the middle ages. compared to its medieval predecessor, civility called for a more self-conscious molding of personal behavior to conform to norms of appropriateness and to facilitate coordination in increasingly complex urban communities. after being adopted by the upper classes (and connected with politeness), civility gradually spread throughout society, developing into a standard of conduct for all citizens in the polity. by the mid- s an understanding of civility as “behavior proper to the intercourse of civilized people” had been established in the english-speaking world. oxford english dictionary, nd ed. (oxford: oxford university press, ). the intersecting histories of civility, courtesy, and politeness—as well as the fact that all three codes now apply to broad swaths of society—lead many people to treat these schemes of manners as largely interchangeable. and it is certainly true that it can sometimes be useful to emphasize a family resemblance between the types of good manners. for example, to underscore that being civil is a kind of cultural achievement, one can render civility as a species of politeness. to highlight the everyday utility of being civil, one can relate the requirements of civility in the language of courtesy. the differences between civility, courtesy, and politeness are nonetheless real. just as we can distinguish the polish of politeness from the daily devotions of common courtesy, we can find a distinctive significance in civility’s foundational role. as the standard for all citizens, civility is the baseline of decent behavior and its requirements outline the most basic kinds of respect that we owe one another in public life. we might frame civility’s baseline function negatively as the bare minimum of good manners steering people away from only the most blatant rudeness. alternatively, and more positively, we might view civility as a threshold condition that precedes and permits the kinds of interaction required by the other codes of conduct. either way, a sense of fundamentality is civility’s central defining feature. whether one is at the dining table, in the workplace, about town, or engaged in political discussion, civility is the base level guideline for conduct. iii. is civility trivial? in order to actually be civil—just as in order to be polite or courteous—one must follow the appropriate rules and requirements. these rules and requirements are generally known as etiquette or decorum, and their number and specificity vary substantially depending on the source consulted. as a teenager in colonial america, george washington wrote out precepts for his rules of civility & decent behavior in company & conversation, listing equal respect as the first commandment of civility (“every action done in company, ought to be with some sign of respect, to those that are present”) and ending with a directive to maintain moral sensibilities (“labor to keep alive in your breast that little spark of celestial fire called conscience”). more recently, p. m. forni, director of the civility initiative and author of choosing civility, has settled on twenty-five rules of civil etiquette, including “speak kindly,” “refrain from idle complaints,” and “respect the environment and be gentle.” lynne truss, an author who decries the decline of civility in her book talk to the hand, boils down all manners to a single rule: “remember you are with other people; show some consideration.” emily post’s etiquette, now in its nineteenth edition, not only lists a number of everyday manners, common courtesies, and guidelines for living but also details specific rules of behavior for dozens of different situations, ranging from dining and traveling, to work, weddings, funerals, and social life. whatever the rules of etiquette happen to be at a given time (and i will have more to say about the varieties of civility later on), appropriate behavior typically requires only relatively george washington. rules of civility & decent behavior in company & conversation, http://www.foundationsmag.com/civility.html. p.m. forni, choosing civility: the twenty-five rules of considerate conduct (new york: st. martin’s press, ). lynne truss, talk to the hand: thee utter bloody rudeness of the world today, or six good reasons to stay home and bolt the door (new york: gotham books, ). lizzie post and daniel post senning, emily post’s etiquette: manners for today, th ed. (new york: william morrow, ). http://www.foundationsmag.com/civility.html minor modifications of speech and action. critics of civility have sometimes argued that the small-scale restrictions must mean that civility itself is a trivial concern. thomas hobbes, for example, swept aside all manners as inconsequential requirements focused on “how one man should salute another, or how a man should wash his mouth, or pick his teeth before company.” when it comes time to consider “those qualities of man-kind that concern their living together in peace, and unity,” there is simply no place for trifling questions about appropriate actions and “other points of the small moralls.” in spite of such dismissive criticism, generations of americans have recognized that the small demands of decorum have great importance. in the nineteenth century, there was a huge commercial market for literature on civility. in the twentieth century, emily post wrote etiquette with the belief that millions of people wanted to know the details of appropriate behavior. post proved to be quite correct and her book attracted an enormous audience. from the first publication in until post’s death in , etiquette would go through ten editions (after post died, the emily post institute would continue to crank out revised and expanded editions along with a variety of spin-off works). during world war ii, etiquette was the book most often requested by gis; and for decades post’s manual on manners would consistently rank second on the list of books most commonly stolen from public libraries (the number one spot was held by the bible). post’s success spurred others to produce their own guides to good manners—many of which proved to be bestsellers in their own right. amy thomas hobbes, leviathan (new york: penguin english library, ), . john f. kasson, rudeness and civility: manners in nineteenth-century urban america (new york: hill and wang, ). laura claridge, emily post: daughter of the gilded age, mistress of american manners (new york: random house, ). vanderbilt’s complete book of etiquette, first published in , would sell nearly one million copies in its first six months. and the market was not limited to blockbuster books: when deborah robertson hodges attempted to catalogue all the writing on etiquette published in the united states from to , she produced a bibliographic volume nearly two hundred pages in length that documented a vast outpouring of books, pamphlets, and articles. the torrent of writing on manners has continued right through to the present day. just as commercial authors and the buying public have consistently re-affirmed civility’s significance, so too have scholars demonstrated the importance of civility in a variety of venues, ranging from city streets to the news media. it is true, as hobbes noted, that civility is a matter of minor restrictions and small behavioral modifications. nonetheless, it is also true, as erving goffman observed, that out of small gestures and minor restrictions “the gossamer reality of social occasions is built.” deborah robertson hodges, etiquette: an annotated bibliography of literature published in the english in the united states, through (jefferson, nc: mcfarland and company, inc., ). a quick search of amazon.com yields thousands of titles on “good manners”: https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_ ?url=search-alias% dstripbooks&field- keywords=good+manners&rh=n% a % ck% agood+manners. see, for example, jennifer lee, civility in the city: blacks, jews, and koreans in urban america (cambridge: harvard university press, ); and diana c. mutz, in-your-face politics: the consequences of uncivil media (princeton: princeton university press, ). erving goffman, behavior in public places: notes on the social organization of gatherings (new york: the free press, ), . see also erving goffman, the presentation of self in everyday life (new york: anchor, ). https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_ ?url=search-alias% dstripbooks&field-keywords=good+manners&rh=n% a % ck% agood+manners https://www.amazon.com/s/ref=nb_sb_noss_ ?url=search-alias% dstripbooks&field-keywords=good+manners&rh=n% a % ck% agood+manners iv. strategic incivility civility is fundamental to public life. it is this sense of fundamentality that explains why perceived declines in civility are often greeted by choruses of alarm. if civility is the zero point for appropriate behavior, then incivility undermines the rudiments of order and all is lost. alarm and fears of existential threat are exactly what trump’s norm-bashing behavior has produced. trump has shown that he can define “deviancy downward at the speed of sound,” jonathan rauch warned. if trump manages to destroy accepted standards of appropriate public conduct, then there is nothing to stop the existing system from collapse. is trump really at risk of destroying civility, as critics suggest? it is worth recalling that trump is a notorious showman and self-promoter. rather than seeing him as a mortal danger to good manners, one could argue that his brazen rudeness is a stunt designed to enhance his own celebrity and feed his desire for importance. as susan herbst argues in her book rude democracy, etiquette violation can be a tactic that political actors use to achieve their objectives. it could be that trump is counting on the existence of some consensus beliefs about the appropriate limits of polite politicking. he then intentionally provokes a defense of the consensus in hopes of triggering an avalanche of publicity. the self-serving moves of the strategic offender are infuriating, but these moves do not obliterate norms of appropriate public behavior. the strategic offender challenges reigning jonathan rauch, “containing trump,” the atlantic, march , https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/ / /containing-trump/ /. see also thomas b. edsall, “the self-destruction of american democracy,” new york times, november , , https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/trump-putin-destruction-democracy.html. susan herbst, rude democracy: civility and incivility in american politics (philadelphia: temple university press, ). https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/ / /containing-trump/ / https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/trump-putin-destruction-democracy.html civilities with spectacular breaches of decorum. on a deeper level, however, the strategic offender actually affirms prevailing forms of good manners by relying on their acceptance. strategic incivility performs a kind of jujitsu, seizing the indignation generated to protect civility and redirecting it to serve personal purposes. the breach of good manners is real; even so, the impact on the larger practice of civility is usually localized, and the strategic offender attempts to use the existing order, not to displace it. there are some indicators that trump’s incivility has been of strategic value. trump has a well-documented interest in ratings and his exploits have garnered an extraordinary amount of the media attention he craves. during the presidential primary season, trump spent a small fraction of what his competitors spent on media advertising (jeb bush’s media budget, for example, was more than eight times greater than trump’s). yet trump’s so-called “earned media coverage”—that is, all the free news and commentary about his campaign on television, in newspapers and magazines, and on social media—far outpaced that of any other candidate. indeed, as the end of the presidential primaries neared, trump had nearly as much earned media coverage as all the other candidates, republican and democratic, combined. as president, trump continues to attract an unusual degree of publicity. his frequent and wide-ranging attacks on individuals and organizations regularly drive news cycles and flood social media. by one count, trump received about one-third of all twitter mentions in , and there were only days in the entire year when he was not the leading topic of josef adalian, “a history of donald trump’s obsession with tv ratings,” vulture.com, august , , http://www.vulture.com/ / /donald-trumps-tv-rating-obsession-a-history.html. nicholas confessore and karen yourish, “$ billion worth of free media for donald trump,” new york times, march , , https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /upshot/measuring-donald-trumps- mammoth-advantage-in-free-media.html. http://www.vulture.com/ / /donald-trumps-tv-rating-obsession-a-history.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /upshot/measuring-donald-trumps-mammoth-advantage-in-free-media.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /upshot/measuring-donald-trumps-mammoth-advantage-in-free-media.html conversation on the platform. and trump’s twitter dominance comes at a time when the total volume of “political twitter conversation is up six-fold since —from million tweets then to . billion today.” the incivilities that win trump all forms of media coverage are a central feature of the raucous rallies he has held throughout his campaign and presidency. at his rallies, unlike those held by other recent presidents, trump does not focus attention on a specific issue with the aim of growing support for a favored policy. instead, trump focuses on himself and entertains by recounting his untoward behavior. he repeats his past accusations and broadsides to the delight of his capacity crowds. to shouts and laughter, he rehearses the disparaging nicknames he has given foreign leaders, democrats, celebrities, and members his own political party. he attacks the “fake news” press and foments roaring chants of “lock her up!” at the mention of hillary clinton. the rallies allow trump to share the mischievous joy of scoffing at established manners. his strategic violations of civility not only generate useful outrage, but also serve as sources of excitement and pleasure. trump revels in the tsunami of attention that his rule breaking brings and his supporters get a subversive thrill from seeing proprieties flouted. the fun is in knowing that many americans continue to accept the norms of behavior that trump has contravened. dawn c. chmielewski, “twitter’s no. topic of ? you guessed it: donald trump in a landslide,” deadline.com, december , , http://deadline.com/ / / -was-the-year-of-trump- /. see, for example, emily cochrane and maggie haberman, “trump hosts fiery rally on the heels of a whirlwind week,” new york times, march, , , https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/trump-rally-pittsburgh.html. theodore kupfer, “welcome to the permanent campaign,” national review, august , , https://www.nationalreview.com/ / /trump-rallies-permanent-campaign-tactics/. http://deadline.com/ / / -was-the-year-of-trump- / http://deadline.com/ / / -was-the-year-of-trump- / https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/trump-rally-pittsburgh.html https://www.nationalreview.com/ / /trump-rallies-permanent-campaign-tactics/ to have a good time at a trump rally, one could argue, it is not necessary to believe that civility should be killed off. it is enough to be shown that the right people are getting poked in the eye. v. civility in crisis the benefits of tactical rudeness and provocation may very well account for some of trump’s personal motivations and success. but strategic incivility does not seem to fully explain what we observe. one would expect the strategic offender to select specific occasions when incivility is most likely to advance the offender’s goals. for example, during the republican primaries, when marco rubio taunted trump for being short-fingered and lacking the “stature” to lead, rubio reverted to conventional behavior once his provocation was complete. by contrast, trump’s incivilities are continuous and unrelenting. when taken as a whole, his pattern of behavior does not resemble a series of discrete calculations designed to deflect and re-orient attention. there appears to be no higher-level set of objectives; his improprieties seem to be an assault on civility itself. in trump’s case, as michael grunwald has put it, “the side show is the real show.” if trump’s actions undermine civility, how should his efforts be understood? in posing this question, i do not mean to suggest that trump would himself explain his behavior as an assault on civility. to the extent that trump might connect his actions to a particular code of conduct he would most likely say that he is attacking political correctness (i will have more to michael grunwald, “donald trump is a consequential president,” politico magazine, december , , https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ / / /rating-donald-trump-year-one- - . https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ / / /rating-donald-trump-year-one- - https://www.politico.com/magazine/story/ / / /rating-donald-trump-year-one- - say about political correctness later on). i also do not mean to suggest that all of trump’s actions can be linked to fully articulated intentions or to a conscious plan. whether or not trump intends any given comment to be uncivil, the fact is that he consistently contravenes standards of appropriate conduct. what can be made of his behavior? to begin, it is important to note that worries about the state of civility are not limited to trump’s presidency or to the most recent presidential election. before trump began his campaign, we regularly experienced episodes of turbulent protest. and beyond any particular instance of turmoil, we inhabited and sustained a contentious public culture. our politics were preoccupied with the demonization of opponents. our news media was saturated with aggressive bluster and vitriol. our workplaces were rife with boorish behavior. our digital platforms teemed with expressions of disrespect and invective. reflecting these conditions, many americans believed we were living in an age of unusual anger and discord. in those pre-trump days, a host of authors and observers called for a return to civility as a remedy to our malaise. americans once treated one another with far greater respect and consideration, the argument went. if we can recover the traditionally courteous modes of relating to one another, we will find that our public life can be more restrained and peaceful. political disagreements will remain, but new compromises will become possible as adversaries turn their attention away from maligning one another’s character and focus instead on for an influential pre-trump warning about, and response to, the civility crisis, see stephen l. carter, civility: manners, morals, and the etiquette of democracy (new york: basic books, ). see also os guinness, thee case for civility: and why our future depends on it (new york: harpercollins, ); daniel m. shea and morris p. fiorina, eds., can we talk? the rise of rude, nasty, stubborn politics (new york: pearson, ); forni, choosing civility; and truss, talk to the hand. scrutinizing competing policies. the news media will model civil engagement in its coverage, emphasizing fact-based analysis rather than sensationalizing conflict and relentlessly stoking animosities. everyday exchanges between individuals—including those on social media, in website comment sections, and at work—will become more sociable, with substantially less tolerance for harassment and insult. one could argue that that trump’s rise makes the restoration of civility more difficult today than it used to be a few years ago. yet, as historians of civility have noted, generations of americans have felt that civility was in a precarious position and they had no trouble finding causes in their own time. at different points during the twentieth century, americans chalked up the deterioration of public conduct to jazz music, world war i, the great depression, world war ii, the vietnam war, the civil rights movement, rock and roll, and the large-scale entry of women into the workforce. nineteenth-century americans blamed the civil war, new immigrants, urban life, the vulgar rich, and the insolent poor. talk of social crisis and fear of coarsening relations were also easy to find in the eighteenth century. james madison along with many of our founders complained about the truculence and crass materialism produced by the grasping, interest-ridden politics in the states. viewed in this broader context, trump is the merely latest chapter in our long history of rudeness. to understand the significance of what trump is doing today, we must understand why people have continued to value civility when it has never been fully established and secure kasson, rudeness and civility; mark caldwell, a short history of rudeness (new york: picador usa, ); and gordon s. wood, “interests and disinterestedness in the making of the constitution,” in the idea of america: reflections on the birth of the united states (new york: penguin press, ), – . from challenge in the past. if we have always had problems getting along, what makes us think that there can or should be agreement on the requirements of appropriate behavior now? vi. civility’s repressive power we can best appreciate the case for civility by first considering the case against it. the obdurate unruliness of american society is not an obvious problem if one is skeptical of civility in the first place. rather than seeking consensus on the rules of appropriate public conduct, many have argued that people should be allowed to present themselves more or less as they like. the themes of uninhibited expression and unfettered self-definition run throughout the modern supreme court’s interpretation of the first amendment. and the roots of this argument run even deeper than current legal doctrine. in the middle of the s, more than a half century before the supreme court began actively championing first amendment rights, the classic case for broad personal freedom was powerfully developed in john stuart mill’s essay on liberty. according to mill, it is very often the case that conflicting opinions each possess some grain of truth. in such situations progress toward the whole truth can be made only through the free competition of ideas, a competition that mill called “the rough process of a struggle between combatants fighting under hostile banners.” the ardent advocates participating in the competition of ideas are themselves unlikely to gain a better or more accurate see, for example, new york times v. sullivan, u.s. ( ). john stuart mill, on liberty, ed. david spitz (new york: norton, ). mill, liberty, . understanding of issues. if anything, advocates tend to become more sectarian, inflexible, and extreme during heated disputes with their opponents. it is the audience, “the calmer and more disinterested bystander,” that benefits from no-holds-barred argument. by attending to the freewheeling opinions of fervent dissenters and impassioned partisans, the audience identifies error, learns new truths, and gains a more vital grasp of the truths it already knows to be sound. the “truth has no chance,” mill wrote, “but in proportion as every side of it, every opinion which embodies any fraction of the truth, not only finds advocates, but is so advocated as to be listened to.” free expression not only allows whole truths to rise and flourish but also permits individuals to follow the widest range of life plans. liberty of action and freedom to fashion one’s own identity are essential goods, and necessary for human excellence. “human nature is not a machine to be built after a model, and set to do exactly the work prescribed for it,” mill argued. human nature is instead “a tree, which requires itself to grow and develop itself on all sides, according to the tendency of the inward forces which make it a living thing.” great personal freedom not only yields important benefits without requiring agreement on a code of civil conduct; insistence on a shared code may actually preclude the progressive discovery of truth and the ongoing development of human faculties that personal freedom promises. systems of manners can be used to shore up hierarchies in the community, drawing distinctions between courteous and rude behavior in ways that entrench a pecking order across classes. when deployed in this fashion, civility becomes an impediment to change, insulating mill, liberty, . mill, liberty, . mill, liberty, . dominant groups from challenge and suppressing free competition of ideas along with experiments in living. mill recognized that civility could be employed to silence expression and he denounced the enforcement of polite conventions that “stigmatize those who hold the contrary opinion as bad and immoral men.” and there are many examples of political actors complaining that the powerful use preferred versions of civility to exert control. consider the contemporary criticism of “tone policing.” feminists who angrily object to sexism, black lives matter protesters who raise loud voices against institutionalized racism, antiwar demonstrators who passionately inveigh against military engagement—all report instances of being told that they should calm down and try being more polite. the demand to moderate demeanor is experienced as a means of deflecting attention from injustice and relocating the problem in the style of complaint. in this way, a broad constellation of activists and dissenters now feel they cannot express themselves without being called uncivil. if civility is opposed to free speech—and if civility is at best superfluous in a vibrant democratic society, and at worst a strong-arm tactic used by repressive elites—then who needs it? as it turns out, those in need of civility are often the critics of civility themselves. people who decry civility’s coercive use are usually not opposed to the general idea of civil conduct. although mill severely criticized the wielding of civility against those holding minority views, he also welcomed rules of temperate speech and fair discussion that applied mill, liberty, . “tone policing,” wikipedia, last modified february , , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/tone_policing. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/tone_policing equally to all, “giving merited honor to everyone, whatever opinion he may hold.” we see the same openness to civility among political actors. beginning in , black lives matter activists and their sympathetic allies convulsed college campuses around the country with obstreperous demonstrations, but their ultimate goal was not to destroy civility. the protestors’ most common demands were to increase the diversity of faculty and to extend existing campus programs to include diversity training. these are demands for inclusion and recognition. the protestors did not altogether dispense with codes of appropriate behavior so much as they sought to alter prevailing practices in order to foster equal treatment and a sense of belonging for people of color. free speech advocates and dissenters of all stripes have an affinity for civility because rules of appropriate conduct (once revised) offer something they desire. as aristotle observed centuries ago, persuasive rhetoric entails sound logical reasoning, targeted emotional appeals, and effective representation of the speaker’s integrity and credibility. yet in a society committed to free expression, people are at liberty to ignore the elements of persuasiveness that aristotle identified. it is perfectly permissible for speakers to spout illogical arguments, to anger the very audiences they wish to please, and to present a poor image of their own character. failed rhetorical sallies are, as we have seen, the means by which the free trade in ideas moves toward truth—but that does not mean such failures are easy to endure when they are one’s own. it is particularly painful when we project character defects through our free mill, liberty, . leah libresco, “here are the demands from students protesting racism at colleges,” fivethirtyeight.com, december , , https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/here-are-the-demands- from-students-protesting-racism-at- -colleges/. aristotle, rhetoric, trans. w. rhys roberts, http://classics.mit.edu//aristotle/rhetoric.html. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/here-are-the-demands-from-students-protesting-racism-at- -colleges/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/here-are-the-demands-from-students-protesting-racism-at- -colleges/ http://classics.mit.edu/aristotle/rhetoric.html expression. after all, each of us wants to think of ourselves as being a good person and we all want others to regard us in the same way. the chance to come across as disreputable and morally deficient is not a chance people are generally eager to take. (or at least the great majority of us are reluctant to take this chance—as the philosopher aaron james details in assholes: a theory, there is a type of person who cares very little about what others think.) the problem with free speech is that it constantly exposes us to the risk of being seen in a negative light. it is here that civility can be of service. civility plays an incredibly important communicative role: it is a simple, easily employed means of conveying integrity and moral standing, a way of behaving that guarantees we are portraying ourselves positively. with appropriate words and actions, the civil person grants basic respect and consideration to others. at the same time, the use of appropriate words and actions also signals that the civil person is worthy of receiving basic respect and consideration herself. in short, good manners communicate our goodness. opponents of civility seek what those invested in a prevailing code of conduct already have: a shared means of interaction that allows participants to show that they are good and decent people, even as they may argue and disagree. aaron james, assholes: a theory (new york: anchor, ). this understanding of civility spans centuries. see desiderius erasmus, de civilitate morum puerilium ( ), trans. brian mcgregor, in literary and educational writings , – . vol. of collected works of erasmus, ed. j. k. sowards (toronto: university of toronto press, ); and cheshire calhoun, “the virtue of civility,” philosophy and public affairs ( ): – . vii. revolutions in manners the possibility that civility can be revised to give new groups a fresh means of communicating their standing is essential to keep in mind. some commentators have envisioned civility as a fixed standard that always requires recognition of others as equals and that provides an independent means of defining what counts as a good democratic society. yet, in actual practice, civility is constituted by—not external to or independent of—the politics of the day. when we look back across the history of civility in the united states, it is important to see not only that good manners are often under threat of falling apart, but also that good manners are often in the process of being re-fashioned to serve new needs. the rules of civility were not forged once in a golden age of virtue and then left to slowly decay. instead, the rules undergo revolutions as they are forged repeatedly over time. codes of appropriate public conduct do not, in other words, exist outside of politics as an independent force that restrains and pacifies our disputes. the codes themselves are the subject of political struggle and debate. civility is a mode of behavior and means of communication that is developed and perpetually re-worked through conflict. contestation over the shape and meaning of civility has taken many forms. during the late s, for example, the federalist supporters of the new constitution practiced a patrician- led politics organized around disinterestedness, the requirement that public officials unselfishly rise above all pecuniary interests in their lawmaking. against this established approach to the richard boyd, “michael oakeshott on civility, civil society, and civil association,” political studies ( ): – . for an extended elaboration of this point, see caldwell, short history of rudeness. i draw my account of the federalist/anti-federalist debate from wood, “interests and disinterestedness”. conduct of public life, the anti-federalists claimed that all of politics was a competition among interests and they refused to conform either their arguments or their actions to the etiquette of disinterestedness. the federalists reacted to this rejection of the traditional leadership ideal with disbelief and fury. surely the anti-federalists could not seriously maintain that no one, no matter how educated or virtuous, was capable of seeing beyond his own narrow concerns. to see self- interested action everywhere was to deny that any class of individuals was capable of pursuing the public good, and to push the american people, as benjamin rush put it, to the verge of “degenerating into savages or devouring each other like beasts of prey.” yet what the federalists understood as a social crisis and a return to barbarism, the anti-federalists presented as the requisites of good order. anti-federalists like william findley felt no sting from the federalist rebukes. findley argued that the cardinal rule of appropriate behavior was not to pretend some aristocratic class was entirely above parochial concerns, but rather to make sure that all claims of self-interest were treated with equal regard. in america, findley insisted, “no man has a greater claim of special privilege for his £ , than i have for my £ .” although we retain something of the original federalist sensibility today in our disdain for special interests, it is clear that the anti-federalists were ultimately able to shift the norms of american public life in their favor. female political activists were embroiled in a different set of disputes over civility during the s. conventions of good behavior at the time required women to remain dependent on men as their guardians in public spaces. a woman appearing in the streets of town without a kasson, rudeness and civility. male escort invited opprobrium, and a woman standing alone, arguing against slavery or for the right to vote, was considered to be nothing short of indecent. “contending for your rights stirs up the selfish feelings of others,” one etiquette manual for women advised, “but a readiness to yield them awakes generous sentiments.” given these conditions, the political work of women could not be limited to giving speeches, lobbying policymakers, or proposing model legislation. it was also necessary to advocate a different conception of appropriate conduct that allowed women to participate in the public sphere as independent actors. the fact that independent participation by women is an accepted part of public life today demonstrates that the nineteenth-century movement for more egalitarian manners was successful. yet, even though civility was recast in terms that permitted women to signal their equal worth and standing, there is no guarantee that future movement will not be in the opposite direction, with groups advocating new pecking-order rules that assign women to a subordinate rank. as manners rise, fall, and reform, they do not inevitably progress toward inclusion and equal treatment, for there is no necessary incompatibility between good manners and inequality. it is entirely possible to fashion codes of appropriate behavior suited to a rigidly rank-ordered society. in such a hierarchical society, the civil norms through which individuals communicate their good character simply feed into an order where each class has its particular place. the modern-day men’s rights movement, for example, claims that women are given too much power and standing in american public life. see warren farrell, “the myth of male power: why men are the disposable sex, part i,” new male studies ( ): – ; and “the myth of male power: why men are the disposable sex, part ii.” new male studies ( ): – . conflict between different views of appropriate public behavior was also at the heart of the civil rights movement in the twentieth century. following the end of reconstruction, a network of jim crow laws established formal racial segregation throughout the former confederacy. these laws were surrounded and sustained by rules of racial etiquette that, when complied with, relegated african americans to a subordinate position. martin luther king jr. described what “proper” treatment of blacks looked like under these rules: “your first name becomes ‘nigger,’ your middle name becomes ‘boy’ (however old you are) and your last name becomes ‘john,’ and your wife and mother are never given the respected title of ‘mrs.’” king rejected this code of conduct and demanded that african americans be shown the same signs of respect as whites. from the perspective of those steeped in the old racial etiquette, king’s egalitarian demands were gross violations of good manners that were to be sharply criticized and quickly suppressed. king and other “outside agitators” were castigated for being ill- mannered and for refusing to keep to their appropriate station in the racial order. the civil rights movement prevailed and substantially changed understandings of the respect due to racial minorities and other marginalized groups in public life. as with the case of women, however, success in achieving more egalitarian manners carries no guarantee of permanence. consider the current controversy over political correctness as described by the preeminent authority on contemporary civility, miss manners. broadly speaking, the civil rights movement ultimately gave rise to political correctness in the sense that miss manners martin luther king, jr. “letter from a birmingham jail,” april , , https://www.africa.upenn.edu/articles_gen/letter_birmingham.html. miss manners is the pen name of judith martin. https://www.africa.upenn.edu/articles_gen/letter_birmingham.html defines the term: to be “politically correct” is to refrain “from delivering wholesale insults to groups of people.” miss manners celebrates the public intolerance for “hate talk,” and she uses political correctness as her “favorite counter-example to those who believe that etiquette has steadily deteriorated since the days of king arthur.” yet, as miss manners recognizes, forward progress is subject to revision and reversal. on one hand, some proponents of political correctness possess an “arrogance disguised as sensitivity” that leads them to attack “people for perceived slights when clearly none were intended.” such proponents of political correctness label as “bigotry” anything they do not like, an aggressive tactic that subverts political correctness by transforming it into a reason for, rather than a bulwark against, delivering wholesale insults to groups of people. on the other hand, some opponents of political correctness undermine it more directly: they wish to engage in the very nastiness and insults that political correctness forbids. these opponents claim that we can only have productive public interactions if people are allowed to say what they honestly think. but as miss manners argues, “name-calling is not conducive to debate” because productive discussion requires “treating opponents with respect.” “those who seize their right to be offensive,” miss manners observes, “should not be shocked that others take offense.” and thus, we arrive at trump, the latest in a long line of figures contesting the meaning of good manners. it might seem like a stretch to put trump’s attacks and accusations in the same league as historic disagreements over civility. nonetheless, trump—like eighteenth- judith martin, et.al., “name-calling is not the same thing as debate,” washington post, feb , , https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/miss-manners-name-calling-is-not-the- same-thing-as-debate/ / / /c aadbce-c f- e -bcda- a b _story.html?utm_term=.e c . https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/miss-manners-name-calling-is-not-the-same-thing-as-debate/ / / /c aadbce-c f- e -bcda- a b _story.html?utm_term=.e c https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/miss-manners-name-calling-is-not-the-same-thing-as-debate/ / / /c aadbce-c f- e -bcda- a b _story.html?utm_term=.e c https://www.washingtonpost.com/lifestyle/style/miss-manners-name-calling-is-not-the-same-thing-as-debate/ / / /c aadbce-c f- e -bcda- a b _story.html?utm_term=.e c century anti-federalists, nineteenth-century female abolitionists and suffragettes, and twentieth-century civil rights activists—is part of a movement advocating a new code of public conduct. trump, along with his many supporters who praise him for “telling it like it is,” is a vociferous opponent of political correctness. trump opposes political correctness on the grounds that it prevents him from frankly stating his views. as trump sees it, neither he nor the country can afford the luxury of pulling punches. as he succinctly summarizes his position, “i am so tired of this politically correct crap.” some commentators have worried that by breaking the limits of acceptable discourse trump has pitted himself against the entire idea of appropriate conduct, pushing us all to the point where there will be little more left than the shouting of unfiltered opinions. but like all erstwhile critics of civility, trump is not pursuing a program that obliterates all rules of appropriate behavior. his actions work to transform the rules so that civility can be used to communicate standing and character in a new way. trump speaks for those who dislike and distrust the conventional pieties of appropriate behavior. he advances a new version of civil norms that will recalibrate the baseline of respect that we owe one another in public life. the recalibration is accompanied by a great deal of although trump personally receives an enormous amount of public attention, it is important to emphasize that he is not acting alone. alterations in manners require the work of many hands. it is not only trump, but also trump supporters and trumpism, that are contesting the basic ways in which respect is conveyed and conferred in american public life. see, for example, “donald trump debate – political correctness,” youtube, august , , https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= odgvxnrg- . nick gass, “trump: i’m so tired of this politically correct crap,” politico, september , , https://www.politico.com/story/ / /donald-trump-politically-correct-crap- . jason willick, “how trump affected political correctness,” the american interest, may , , https://www.the-american-interest.com/ / / /how-trump-affected-political-correctness/. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v= odgvxnrg- https://www.politico.com/story/ / /donald-trump-politically-correct-crap- https://www.the-american-interest.com/ / / /how-trump-affected-political-correctness/ name-calling and plenty of inflammatory insults, but it is not a matter of name-calling and insults for all. trump has no tolerance for invective directed against himself or his supporters. trump also offers praise and the due regard for people who believe they have been undeservingly lumped together with the unworthy. at the announcement of his candidacy, for example, when trump made headlines by labeling many mexican immigrants as “rapists,” he paired his derogatory description of immigrants with plaudits for his supporters. “when mexico sends its people, they’re not sending their best,” trump told the crowd. “they’re not sending you.” there are, to be sure, some decent mexican immigrants—as trump himself acknowledged, “some, i assume, are good people.” from trump’s perspective, however, the mistake is to stipulate that all immigrants should automatically be given the same degree of consideration. to say that we are “a nation of immigrants” (a phrase that the trump administration has scrubbed from the u.s. citizenship and immigration services mission statement) is to treat all immigrants, regardless of country of origin, as having the same standing in public life. yet, in a world with so-called “shithole” countries, immigrant status should not be associated with decency and good character across-the-board. in differentiating daisy murray, “donald trump has just responded to michelle wolf’s white house correspondent's dinner roast,” elle, may , , https://www.elle.com/uk/life-and-culture/a /donald-trump- responded-michelle-wolf/. “trump’s presidential announcement speech.” “trump’s presidential announcement speech.” ryan devereaux, “u.s. citizenship and immigration services will remove ‘nation of immigrants’ from its mission statement,” the intercept, february , , https://theintercept.com/ / / /u-s- citizenship-and-immigration-services-will-remove-nation-of-immigrants-from-mission-statement/. josh dawsey, “trump derides protections for immigrants from ‘shithole’ countries,” washington post, january , , https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-attacks-protections-for-immigrants- from-shithole-countries-in-oval-office-meeting/ / / /bfc c-f - e - af- ac add _story.html?utm_term=. fa ae a . https://www.elle.com/uk/life-and-culture/a /donald-trump-responded-michelle-wolf/ https://www.elle.com/uk/life-and-culture/a /donald-trump-responded-michelle-wolf/ https://theintercept.com/ / / /u-s-citizenship-and-immigration-services-will-remove-nation-of-immigrants-from-mission-statement/ https://theintercept.com/ / / /u-s-citizenship-and-immigration-services-will-remove-nation-of-immigrants-from-mission-statement/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-attacks-protections-for-immigrants-from-shithole-countries-in-oval-office-meeting/ / / /bfc c-f - e - af- ac add _story.html?utm_term=. fa ae a https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-attacks-protections-for-immigrants-from-shithole-countries-in-oval-office-meeting/ / / /bfc c-f - e - af- ac add _story.html?utm_term=. fa ae a https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/trump-attacks-protections-for-immigrants-from-shithole-countries-in-oval-office-meeting/ / / /bfc c-f - e - af- ac add _story.html?utm_term=. fa ae a between immigrants, trump gives voice to a kind of speech common among many americans yet castigated by arbiters of polite society. his is a new brand of civility that promises to pick out the wheat from the chaff. “the forgotten men and women of our country will be forgotten no longer,” trump announced in his inaugural address. “everyone is listening to you now.” viii. conclusion the unconventionality of donald trump as a candidate and president has been widely noted. in this article, i have assessed trump’s unconventional behavior from the perspective of civility, the most basic form of manners that governs public life. i have explained what civility is, its strategic use, and its development over time. i have also explored the ways in which civility can be said to be trivial and unimportant, and as well as the ways in which it can be said to be powerful and repressive. ultimately, i have argued that trump and his supporters should be seen as the latest in a line of movements that have sought to alter civil norms in order to communicate the character and decency of new groups of people. the sense of crisis that surrounds civility today is not because trump is undermining the very idea of appropriate behavior and ushering in an age of universal insults. instead, the sense of crisis stems from the john bowden, “fox host on trump ‘s---hole’ remark: this is how ‘the forgotten men and women’ talk,” the hill, january , , http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/ -fox-host- on-trump-s-hole-remark-this-is-how-the-forgotten-men. andrew prokop, “trump backers hate ‘political correctness.’ that's why gaffes don't hurt him,” vox, february , , https://www.vox.com/ / / / /donald-trump-political-correctness. donald j. trump, “inaugural address,” whitehouse.gov, january , , https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/the-inaugural-address/. many commentators have argued that trump’s attack on political correctness and his talk about “forgotten” americans are veiled appeals to racism and white nationalism. the question of what a speaker “really means” by their speech and actions is a question that has long bedeviled debates over the standards of appropriate behavior. for an extended analysis of the relationship between civility and authenticity, see bybee, how civility works. http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/ -fox-host-on-trump-s-hole-remark-this-is-how-the-forgotten-men http://thehill.com/blogs/blog-briefing-room/news/ -fox-host-on-trump-s-hole-remark-this-is-how-the-forgotten-men https://www.vox.com/ / / / /donald-trump-political-correctness https://www.whitehouse.gov/briefings-statements/the-inaugural-address/ way in which trump’s actions work to re-define what appropriate behavior means and the status such behavior will confer. the examples i have drawn from the framing of the constitution, conflict over the propriety of women in politics, and the struggle over civil rights all show that rules of everyday interaction are subject to substantial change. although there were prominent leaders in each of these periods of change, the revolutions in manners that occurred were the labor of many hands. and, indeed, the success of any campaign for a new code of conduct necessarily depends on multitudes. this is so because the enforcement of civility, like the enforcement of all forms of good manners, is personal. individuals are obliged to police etiquette by watching for rudeness and chastising offenders. the first party to be monitored is oneself: the civil individual should be on the lookout to ensure she is conforming to the rules. public shaming then serves as backstop whenever self-supervision lapses. to inaugurate a new form of civility, many people must agree to demand new kinds of appropriate behavior from themselves and from others. the ultimate effect of trump’s efforts thus depends on the larger community. trump’s supporters delight in seeing proprieties flouted and get a subversive thrill from hearing trump say what other public figures will not. to change civility, his supporters must adopt a deeper defiance of convention and seek to advance new manners as the preferred means of communicating good character and respect. in their everyday speech and action, they will have to model their understanding of appropriate behavior and to admonish anyone who fails to conform. trump has opened up symbolic space for the re-valuing of new groups and provided these groups with a template for negotiating the interactions that make up ordinary life. looking forward, one question is the degree to which the template will be translated into everyday encounters and exchanges. a second question is the degree to which the push for new manners will spawn pushback. as mill observed, spirited contestation is the hallmark of a free society. we argue over many things, including the threshold definition of decent public behavior. it is true that civility was, at its medieval origins, derived from the relatively fixed model of conduct employed in royal courts. yet, as we have seen, there is no longer a central model of appropriate conduct, and manners are fashioned and re-fashioned from the assortment of different beliefs and practices found in modern society. without an established rule of behavior handed down from an aristocracy, we employ many different methods to establish rules for ourselves and we frequently disagree about the results. this process of shaping civility through political conflict will not stop with the rise of trump. his breaches of decorum have won enthusiastic praise from supporters and drawn blistering criticism from opponents. to the extent trump’s example extends to the daily interactions of ordinary life, we can expect those interactions to become increasingly contested and controversial. such disputes over the meaning of good manners can be difficult, and proponents of more egalitarian manners may find the fight against trumpism to be particularly trying. after witnessing the spread of more equitable and inclusive forms of acceptable behavior in recent decades, it can be aggravating to be confronted with a movement advocating a new pecking- order. unfortunately, progress toward equal treatment in one period is no guarantee of enduring success. the effort to advance egalitarian manners is nonetheless worthwhile in order to prevent inegalitarian alternatives from gaining ground. if we recall that civility forms the baseline of decent behavior, and that its rules communicate the terms of social belonging and identify the basic forms of consideration we owe one another in public life, then we will see that the work of improving civility is of great importance, even if this work is challenging and never completely finished. acknowledgements i presented an early version of this article at the law and politics under stress workshop at university of oregon law school. i thank stuart chinn and dan tichenor for organizing the workshop, and i thank the workshop participants for their constructive criticism. the anonymous reviewers and jesse allen helped to improve and strengthen my argument in a number of places. maryann spencer and laura jenkins provided excellent research assistance. word count: , 	syracuse university 	from the selectedworks of keith j. bybee 	 	the rise of trump and the death of civility 	tmpoqdmk .pdf s jra .. do all black lives matter equally to black people? respectability politics and the limitations of linked fate tehama lopez bunyasi george mason university candis watts smith university of north carolina–chapel hill abstract: cathy cohen’s ( ) theory of secondary marginalization helps to explain why the needs of some members of black communities are not priori- tized on “the” black political agenda; indeed, some groups are ignored altogether as mainstream black public opinion shifts to the right (tate ). however, the contemporary movement for black lives calls for an intersectional approach to black politics. its platform requires participants to take seriously the notion that since black communities are diverse, so are the needs of its members. to what extent are blacks likely to believe that those who face secondary margin- alization should be prioritized on the black political agenda? what is the role of linked fate in galvanizing support around these marginalized blacks? to what extent does respectability politics serve to hinder a broader embrace of blacks who face different sets of interlocking systems of oppression, such as black women, formerly incarcerated blacks, undocumented black people, and black members of lbgtq communities in an era marked by black social move- ments? we analyze data from the collaborative multi-racial post- election survey (cmps) to assess whether all black lives matter to black americans. keywords: black lives matter, respectability politics, linked fate, secondary marginalization, group consciousness, lgbt, intersectionality address correspondence and reprint requests to: candis watts smith, university of north carolina–chapel hill, abernethy hall, s. columbia st., cb# , chapel hill, nc . e-mail: cwsmith@unc.edu journal of race, ethnicity and politics, ( ), – . © the race, ethnicity, and politics section of the american political science association doi: . /rep. . - / terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core mailto:cwsmith@unc.edu https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core scholars of american political behavior have long recognized and made efforts to explain black political homogeneity, illustrated by this group’s rela- tively unified support of democratic political candidates despite increasing socioeconomic heterogeneity (dawson ; haynie and watts ). racial solidarity and racial group consciousness have provided helpful explanations to this empirical quandary (allen, dawson and brown ; olsen ; shingles ; verba and nie ). relatedly, dawson’s ( ) black utility heuristic theory predicts that as long as blacks perceive that their individual life chances are inextricably linked to other group members, they are likely to incorporate their racial group’s well-being into their political decision making calculus (dawson ). however, scholars have also noted the political divisions and ideological diversity that exists among this group (dawson ). while there are a number of prominent examples of political divisiveness over the course of black american history, the recent rise and development of the black lives matter (blm) movement and the movement for black lives (m bl) have served to highlight several important, persistent points of division in mainstream st century black politics. blm and m bl, like previous black social movements, hinge on a “determination to pre- serve black life in the face of white supremacist violence,” which “has always been a radical principle” (rickford ). martin luther king jr. noted that the black social movement forces “america to face all its interrelated flaws—racism, poverty, militarism, and materialism. it is expos- ing the evils that are rooted deeply in the whole structure of our society. it reveals systemic rather than superficial flaws and suggests that radical reconstruction of society itself is the real issue to be faced” (king ). today’s black social movement falls into that tradition. this contemporary social movement also exposes fissures that are deeply embedded in traditional, mainstream black politics. scholars have noted that as the politics of respectability has evolved to accommo- date neoliberalism, racial inequality has been “reproduced within, and not simply on black communities,” thus exacerbating the effects of secondary marginalization (harris ; spence ). cathy cohen’s ( ) theory of secondary marginalization highlights the notion that the needs of some members of black communities are not prioritized on “the” black political agenda; indeed, some groups are ignored altogether as mainstream black public opinion shifts to the right (tate ). however, the contemporary m bl, which was started by queer, black, millennial women, is unapologetically black, intersectional, and rejects respectability politics. do all black lives matter equally to black people? terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core two years after blm came to prominence, researchers found that while four-in- americans supported the movement, nearly % of black americans threw their support behind the movement (horowitz and livingston ). given the attention of the movement in the media as well as the high levels of support among black people, we should like to know whether intersectional politics is being reflected in the contem- porary political attitudes and opinions of average black citizens. that is, to what extent are blacks likely to believe that those who have traditionally faced secondary marginalization be prioritized on the black political agenda? what is the role of linked fate in galvanizing support around the most marginalized blacks? to what extent do respectability politics serve to hinder a broader embrace of blacks who face different sets of inter- locking systems of oppression, such as black women, justice-involved blacks, undocumented black immigrants, and black lbgtq community members in an era marked by black social movements? does a tendency to explain racial disparities in terms of either individual failings or struc- tural biases differently shape the prioritization of black sub-groups? we analyze data from the collaborative multi-racial post-election survey (cmps), which includes a sample of over , blacks to answer these questions. we assess whether the contemporary black social movement’s call for careful consideration of queer, transgender, justice-involved, female, and undocumented immigrant blacks has been mainstreamed. a mainstreamed intersectional politics would be marked by an overwhelming affirmation to support the particular challenges posed to groups that have traditionally been excluded from the black political “consensus” agenda. this is an important line of inquiry given the ongoing debate concern- ing a social movement that calls attention to the fact that black lives are devalued in the united states. while most blacks tend to agree on the premise of the movement, there is a great deal of contention around how to attend to these challenges. this study adds to the literature by sim- ultaneously and quantitatively accounting for the factors that bring blacks together as well as those that are likely to cause fissures among them. we begin by outlining the major concepts that must be put into conversation with one another to better understand contemporary black politics: linked fate, respectability politics, and secondary marginalization, and then briefly comment on what makes this moment in black politics susceptible to developing a more inclusive, intersectional black political agenda. thereafter, we explain how we operationalize these central concepts, prior to presenting the results of our analysis. lopez bunyasi and smith terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core to summarize, we find that though linked fate enhances the likelihood that blacks embrace marginalized group members, there are limits. though linked fate provides broad-brush support to uplift the racial group, it does not necessarily seep in to cover the most vulnerable black americans. our results reveal that respectability politics leads black people to disengage from supporting blacks who have been marginalized. specifically, we find that relying on individualist rather than structural explanations of racial inequality, believing that blacks ought to place a high value on a “traditional” black family structure, and acquiescence to practices of racial profiling in the name of lawand order serve as countervail- ing forces to linked fate. taken together, we find that even in the blm era, those who are already doubly or triply subjected in american society may still have difficulty in experiencing relief in their own communities. a politicized racial identity while one’s group identity denotes the extent to which one is aware of and attached to a particular racial group, group consciousness is best under- stood as “representing a more developed stage of identification, a deepen- ing of group attachments to include a belief that one’s life chances are inextricably tied to the group” (gay, hochschild and white ). individuals belong to many different kinds of groups, but we tend to see that those identities that have political relevance (e.g. race, ethnicity, gender) are more likely to trigger a sense of group consciousness. gay, hochschild and white explain, “feeling bound by membership and not simply ‘close’ to members, in sum, is an important antecedent to cooper- ation and giving priority to group objectives” (gay, hochschild and white ). paula mcclain et al. explain that racial group consciousness is “in-group identification politicized by a set of ideological beliefs about one’s group’s social standing as well as a view that collective action is the best means by which the group can improve its status and realize its interests”; they suggest that linked fate is a parsimonious and accurate measure of group consciousness (mcclain et al. ). additionally, sanchez and vargas ( ) find that few methodological issues arise when employing the measure of linked fate to assess a politicized group identity among black americans. there is a great deal of evidence that reveals the influence of linked fate on blacks in the u.s. scholars like michael dawson have shown that unlike whites who are more likely to become republicans as they do all black lives matter equally to black people? terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core ascend the socioeconomic ladder, blacks, on average, tend to maintain support of the political party that is most likely to help (or least likely to do irreparable damage to) members of their racial group, even as their own individual socioeconomic status improves (allen, dawson and brown ; dawson , ). while there has been a recent uptick in conservatism among affluent blacks, the influence of linked fate has led to blacks being more liberal than whites on issues such as social welfare, affirmative action, and government spending. a theory of linked fate also helps us to understand that blacks have historically been inclined to “support an activist welfare state as a form of racial redress” (tate ). while linked fate conceptually helps us to understand the relative homogeneity in prominent areas of political discourse (e.g. voting, parti- san loyalties), there still exists a great deal of heterogeneity within the group. the theory and paradigm of intersectionality helps to illuminate not only the diversity of identities that black people may hold—due to sexuality, gender, class, and immigration status—but also that the struc- tural constraints and advantages linked to each identity overlap to influ- ence individuals’ life chances in different ways (crenshaw ; jordan-zachery ). linked fate helps us to understand blacks’ political behavior with a broad brush, but research shows that racial linked fate is a separate construct from other kinds of group consciousness, such as black feminist consciousness, or a recognition of the special challenges that black women face due to the paternalism and racism (simien and clawson ; simien ). though extant research shows that racial and race-gendered group consciousness tend to increase together, it behooves us to recognize that racial linked fate does not necessarily capture the sentiments that blacks feel toward specific, marginalized groups. or in other words, though linked fate is often viewed as a liberal- izing force, it does not provide indiscriminate support for all types of black people, perhaps especially those who are deemed as undeserving, deviant, or “bad” representatives of the group. needless to say, black politics is complicated by conservative practices of respectability politics and, conse- quently, secondary marginalization. secondary marginalization and the evolution of respectability politics evelyn brooks higginbotham ( ) coined the term “politics of respect- ability.” she explains that late th century, black, middle-class, baptist lopez bunyasi and smith terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core women imbibed an ideology of respectability politics in effort to resist and even dissolve white americans’ negative stereotypes about black women. this resistance manifested through a specific standard of personal com- portment and practicing of particular behaviors, including proper dress, thrift, cleanliness of property, temperance, polite manners and language, and sexual purity (higginbotham ). the assumption behind the phil- osophy of respectability politics is that if blacks assimilate and behave more like whites, equal treatment will follow. higginbotham explains, “black leaders argued that ‘proper’ and ‘respectable’ behavior proved blacks worthy of equal civil and political rights. conversely, nonconformity was equated with deviance and pathology and was often cited as a cause of racial inequality and injustice” (higginbotham ). the politics of respectability has long been an important and debated aspect of black politics. some argue that respectability politics has been a useful tactic in successful black social movements (kennedy ; reynolds ). proponents view respectability politics as a way to per- suade whites that blacks are deserving of the rights promised to them by the u.s. constitution. randall kennedy ( ) adds to this defense of respectability politics noting that this way of thinking is necessary to “improve our [blacks’] chances of surviving and thriving” in a society marked by racism. kennedy recognizes that there have been “misapplica- tions of respectability,” such as evaluating the character or the allegedly troubled background of those individuals who are targeted by the police and either subjected to excessive force and/or extrajudicial violence; but he argues that these misapplications “should not obscure an essential fact: any marginalized group should be attentive to how it is perceived” (kennedy ). political scientist fredrick harris reiterates that respectability politics started as a philosophy rooted in linked fate by black elites to “uplift the race,” but asserts that the ideology “has now evolved into one of the hallmarks of black politics,” and is currently a governing philosophy that “centers on managing the behavior of black people left behind in a society touted as being full of opportunity”; the philosophy has morphed from “lift as we climb” (a collective endeavor) to “lift up thyself” (centering the behavior and attitudes of the individual) (harris ). though there are threads of the original version of respectability politics that run through today’s incarnation, the modern form is inextric- ably linked to neoliberalism, or a “governing agenda that includes the pri- vatization of government programs and institutions,” and “involves an intensifying rhetoric that is grounded in the belief that markets, in and do all black lives matter equally to black people? terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core of themselves, are better able than governments to produce, in particular, economic outcomes that are fair, sensible, and good for all” (cohen ; spence ; taylor ). legal scholar osagie obasogie and zachary newman succinctly describe the contemporary version of black respect- ability politics this way (obasogie and newman , ): [t]he notion that minorities can best respond to structural racism by indi- vidually behaving in a “respectable” manner that elicits the esteem of whites as a way to insulate the self from attack while also promoting a posi- tive group image that can “uplift” the reputation of the group. this contemporary version of respectability politics relies on policing indi- vidual behavior and attitudes rather than directly addressing structural forces that perpetuate racial inequalities (aziz ; harris ). this accommodates neoliberalism because “the virtues of self-care and self- correction are framed as strategies to lift the poor people out of their con- dition by preparing them for the market economy” (harris ). cohen ( ; ) reveals that black political elites as well as middle- class blacks are especially likely to rely on notions of individuality and good behavior when dealing with young and poor black people rather than focus on dismantling the systemic inequalities they face, such as unequal access to quality education or gainful employment. the effects of a governing philosophy dictated by neoliberalism are exacerbated by respectability politics. both respectability and neoliberalism serve to dismiss the particular challenges faced by those who do not mimic dominant depictions of deservingness. while perhaps a survival mechanism in the past, the logic of respect- ability politics, as it has evolved and plays out today, is one that some view as limiting efforts toward a more egalitarian, democratic society because it constrains blacks to “hegemonic articulations of gender, class, and sexuality” (higginbotham ). from this vantage point, “mis- applications of respectability” have become a commonsense feature of america’s racialized social system, and is now upheld by two pillars of the “normative moral super structure” that control access to resources and belonging in the united states (cohen ), namely ( ) assump- tions of the nuclear family structure and ( ) the license to surveil and search people whose location appears “out of place” and behavior appears “out of step” to the white, middle-class, heterosexist gaze. for at least half a century, dominant political rhetoric has echoed the moynihan report’s ( ) prescriptions for “the cycle of poverty and lopez bunyasi and smith terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core disadvantage” that beset african americans relative to whites: a stable, two-parent household. by overlooking present-day discrimination and the structural apparatuses that privilege white over black americans, this neo-conservative agenda pathologized female-led households for “operating on one principle, while the great majority of the population, and the one with the most advantages to begin with, is operating on another” (moynihan , ). since mid- s, black americans of various ideological stripes have publicly endorsed heteronormative mar- riage as a goal to uplift the community, with either tacit or intentional aims of projecting black people as wholesome, chaste, and fiscally prudent as whites (cohen ; dawson ). by striving for and celebrating heterosexual marriage as a goal for the racial community, a significant proportion of african americans become cast as undesirable and deprioritized members of the racial group: single parents ( particularly, single mothers, who either are or are not recipients of welfare), queer people (who may not aspire to heterosexual coupling), and justice-involved parents (who are not present in the home to raise their children). through the politics of respectability, these members of black communities are held in a state of exception when certain black acti- vists present their “best face” to gatekeepers of power and resources. relatedly, some blacks endorse hegemonic goals of social order through their support for state surveillance of some people of color in order to maintain law and order. black public discourse is in a state of con- flict over the presentation of black bodies in public space with some members in agreement that one’s attire, the location of one’s waistband, hairstyle, and general behavior can “reasonably” and “understandably” invite more intense scrutiny (harris ). when people of color endorse racial profiling in exchange for victories in a war against drugs, ter- rorism, or undocumented immigration, they tacitly work to maintain the exclusion of many people of color (waddington ). cathy cohen ( ) describes the outcome of these exclusionary proc- esses as secondary marginalization. cohen explains that there are some issues that are framed as “consensus issues,” or issues that are understood as “advancing the interests of the entire black community” and are “more likely to be ‘owned’ as community issues meriting group political mobiliza- tion” (cohen ). these issues often are made highly visible and are pri- oritized on any black political agenda. however, there are also issues that have an acute (negative) effect on smaller segments of the racial group, which she calls “cross-cutting” issues. if the smaller segment is one that is socially constructed as deviant, undeserving, immoral, or unworthy, it do all black lives matter equally to black people? terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core is likely that the challenges faced by that group will not receive the attention of black political leaders, especially if those leaders have attained a modicum of respect from dominant society (schneider and ingram ). consequently, blacks “must weigh concern over the respectability and legitimization of black communities in the eyes of dominant groups against concern over the well-being of those most vulnerable in our commu- nities, as they struggle against very public, stigmatizing issues” (cohen , ). the further relegation and ostracism of stigmatized segments of an already oppressed group is the process of secondary marginalization. the most damning implication of respectability politics is that it implies that not all lives matter, or at least suggests some lives matter more than others. the narratives of slain black people are often accompanied by details of their past. those who do not follow traditional, white-middle class, heterosexual patriarchal norms are ( perhaps unintentionally) deemed as deviants, and thus, not as “grieveable” (obasogie and newman , ). therefore, those who endorse a politics of respectabil- ity are disposed to focus on individuals who make more “compelling victims,” not only so that (white) conservatives can be persuaded that state violence is real but also to persuade white and black moderates of the same idea. the contemporary m bl not only rejects respectability as a tool of resistance in contrast to some previous iterations of black social move- ments, but it also elucidates the ways in which respectability politics is often employed to maintain inequality, especially for those who face sec- ondary marginalization. from this perspective, respectability politics is an idea whose time has passed. black politics in the new millennium cohen ( ) wrote that we ought to expect black politics to evolve and should “take seriously the possibility that in the space created by deviant discourse and practice, especially in black communities, a new radical pol- itics of deviance could emerge”; this evolution is likely to happen when a greater number of people recognize that acquiescing to the politics of respectability will not uproot the foundations of a racialized social system. this prediction is prescient. scholar-activist keeanga-yamahtta taylor explains, “the killing of mike brown, along with an ever-growing list of other unarmed black people, drove holes in the logic that black people simply doing the ‘right things’. . .could overcome the perennial lopez bunyasi and smith terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core crises within black america” (taylor ). in the wake of this realization, the blm movement and the m bl turned a moment into a movement. this movement, like the civil rights movement, works toward dismantling white supremacy, but is simultaneously in direct conflict with the “old guard” of black politics because both center on an intersectional approach to black politics and reject the requirement for respectability politics. as a point of reference, ordained minister and author barbara reynolds ( ) illustrates the logic and rhetoric of respectability politics in a washington post article, where she asserts that most people who were acti- vists in the s “admire the cause and courage of these young activists but fundamentally disagree with their [black lives matter’s] approach”; she explains: trained in the tradition of martin luther king jr., we were nonviolent acti- vists who won hearts by conveying respectability and changed laws by deliv- ering a message of love and unity. . . in the s, activists confronted white mobs and police with dignity and decorum, sometimes dressing in church clothes and kneeling in prayer during protests to make a clear distinction between who was evil and who was good. reynolds focuses on particular behavior and personal comportment, including proper dress, as tools of resistance. what’s more, she highlights the necessity of proving to white audiences that blacks are good and deserving of respect, rights, and dignity. in striking contrast, members of leaderful organizations like the blm find this kind of sentiment troub- ling, as there is an implicit message that you must prove yourself to be good in order to gain rights that are already promised to you as citizens and human beings (houston ; pugh ; taylor ). bgd blog writer aleo pugh ( ) explains, within the organization, there is a clear rejection of respectability politics, particularly the false relationships forged between speech, ways of dress and police harassment. there is also a rejection of conservative “keep the peace” theologies that are eagerly projected onto the blm movement. respectability politics are also renounced in the organization’s guiding principles, just some of them being: centralizing black women; and affirm- ing queer and trans folk. this is an outright refusal to adhere to the queer- phobic, patriarchal and classist ethos of the civil rights movement, both in leadership and values. do all black lives matter equally to black people? terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core this movement was founded by queer, black, millennial women, and its platform not only rejects the politics of respectability but it requires its par- ticipants to take seriously the notion that since black communities are diverse (e.g. family structure, gender, sexuality, immigration status), so are the needs of its members; it centers an intersectional approach to black politics. the platform of the unified m bl declares: we believe in elevating the experiences and leadership of the most margi- nalized black people, including but not limited to those who are women, queer, trans, femmes, gender nonconforming, muslim, formerly and cur- rently incarcerated, cash poor and working class, disabled, undocumented, and immigrant. . .there can be no liberation for all black people if we do not center and fight for those who have been marginalized (m bl). nonetheless, it should also be noted that “old guard,” revered black organ- izations are also slowly embracing an intersectional politics and even seeing through “the critical lenses provided by the #blacklivesmatter movement” (naacp ) on issues such as environmental racism and mass incarceration. this adds to the naacp’s and urban league’s rela- tively recent move to view and support lgbt rights as civil rights. leaders within these organizations have come around to the notion that “the african-american community and the gay and lesbian community are not and have never been separate communities” (hutson ). furthermore, rev. william barber has relaunched a poor people’s cam- paign (mcclain ). this new movement represents a shift from black political elites who over the past several decades focused on improv- ing the well-being of poor black people, but not without also chastising them for not buying their children “hooked on phonics,” or for stealing “pound cake”; indeed, president obama, himself, was a proponent for neoliberal governance strategies to uplift the lives of working class and low-income black citizens (dawson and francis ; price ). americans across the country learned more about blm not only as a social movement and political intervention but also as an ideological approach that can be characterized as intersectional. while “old guard” organizations appear to be open to some these influences, it should be made clear that there are still internal divisions among black political elites and the masses about the extent to which this new “radical,” inter- sectional agenda should be embraced (hutson ). keeping in mind both the potential shift in black politics as well as resistance to change, lopez bunyasi and smith terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core it remains to be evaluated whether the ideas of the new movement are rep- resented in the sentiments of average black citizens. theoretical expectations when most people think about blm and m bl, they are likely to think first and foremost about policing and police brutality. however, the move- ment is actually concerned with broader conceptions of the way that black people face state violence—from the police as well as in other domains of american life, such as housing, education, and the criminal justice system. while the blm seeks to affirm the notion that “black lives are sys- tematically and intentionally targeted for demise,” it is also cognizant of the fact that different kinds of black people face varied permutations and combinations of systems of oppression (black lives matter network). it has been noted that the contemporary m bl “ain’t your grandfather’s civil rights movement,” in large part because blm and m bl rely on intersectional black feminist ideology. given that most people have a broad, loose understanding of the motives of the contemporary black movement, we expect there to be a large variation in the extent to which blacks are likely to believe that the challenges of certain groups of blacks should be addressed head on; or in other words, we do not expect an intersectional black politics to be reflected among black respondents. consequently, we hypothesize the following: h : black americans will vary in their belief that it is very important to address the challenges of black women, formerly incarcerated black people, undocumented black immigrants, black people who identify as lesbian or gay, and transgender blacks. to be clear, we predict that there will be a hierarchy of perceived deserv- ingness among black respondents. it is likely that blacks will prioritize black women first followed by those who have been formerly incarcerated because both of these groups make up a fairly large proportion of the population. while black women have borne the brunt of respectability politics (harris-perry ; higginbotham ; ), generally speak- ing, one might expect that they are not explicitly deemed as deviants among most black people. rather, their marginalization is a result of being both black and female in a racist and patriarchal society. do all black lives matter equally to black people? terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core relatedly, although those who have been previously incarcerated have traditionally been marginalized, scholars (e.g. alexander ; lerman and weaver ; pager ), filmmakers (e.g. duvernay ; mcquirter ), and social activists have made an effort to illuminate the vast inequalities of the prison industrial complex and the resulting mass incarceration of black and latinx people in the united states. with increased attention around the inequities born out of america’s crim- inal justice system, blacks may feel particularly sympathetic to this group. undocumented black immigrants are likely to fall next. approximately, % of blacks in the united states are foreign born (anderson ). though greer ( ) notes that black immigrants are at times viewed as (and aimed to be viewed) model minorities, and relatedly, rogers ( ) reveals that many black immigrants feel that they have an exit option in the face of persistent racism, smith ( ) notes that we ought to expect a sense of diasporic consciousness to arise between native- and foreign-born blacks. she defines this as “the (mental) tightrope that people of african descent who live in the united states walk as they try to balance their superordinate racial identity (and the political interests associated with it) with their subgroup or ethnic identity and its closely associated political interest” (smith ). taken together, we see how complex of a relationship native- and foreign-born blacks have with one another, but typically in the face of anti-black racism, we ought to expect a modicum of coalescence (kim ). native-born black americans tend to have fairly conservative attitudes about immigration— largely due to a sense of economic threat (capers and smith ; diamond )—but seem to have open attitudes about immigrants themselves (carter and pérez ); generally speaking, black americans do not wish to participate in white supremacist notions of american belonging or identity (carter and pérez ; diamond ; masuoka and junn ). it is likely that lesbian and gay as well as transgender blacks will fall at the bottom of the deservingness hierarchy, given historical attitudes about those who do not follow heterosexual and cisgender norms among blacks (cohen ). a plethora of scholars have noted that, generally speaking, the politics of black lgbt matters are predominately treated with silence, as if black gay and lesbian people do not exist (griffin ), or through the lens of homophobia, which scholars suggest is rooted in both/either black nationalism and/or so-called theologically driven homophobia (ward ). black nationalism is one of the most well-received black ideologies among african americans (price ), and black americans lopez bunyasi and smith terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core are the most religious racial group in the country (pew research center ). though the united states has seen increasing openness to lgbt communities, the backlash against a left-leaning, liberal shift in some national black organizations’ orientation stances toward lesbian and gay people and their civil rights (e.g. gay marriage) was swift, negative, and public (cohen ; hutson ; stanford ). what are the major mechanisms leading to support or lack thereof for these groups? we believe there are several inter-related factors to consider. first, we consider linked fate. linked fate remains a highly supported notion among black americans. blacks are likely to believe that what happens to other black people will have something to do with what happens to them. as such, those with higher levels of linked fate should be more likely to support various sub-groups of blacks than those who report lower levels of linked fate. however, linked fate has its limits, and thus we view respectability politics, especially in its current iteration, as linked fate’s primary countervailing force. consequently, we predict that those who subscribe to respectability politics will be less likely to focus on the needs of groups that are not seen as respectable. put simply, h : linked fate will increase the extent to which blacks believe it very import- ant to address the challenges of black women, formerly incarcerated black people, undocumented black immigrants, black people who identify as lesbian or gay, and transgender blacks. h : those who subscribe to respectability politics will be more likely to believe that it is not very important to address the challenges of black women, for- merly incarcerated black people, undocumented black immigrants, black people who identify as lesbian or gay, and transgender blacks. data, methods, and measures we rely on the collaborative multiracial post-election survey (cmps) (barreto et al. ) to test our hypotheses. the responses were col- lected online in a respondent self-administered format between december , and february , . the full sample includes a total of , individuals from major pan-ethnic and racial groups, including whites, blacks, latinos, and asians. the survey and invitation were available to respondents in english, spanish, simplified and traditional chinese, korean, and vietnamese. the data include registered and non-registered voters as well as non-citizens. the full data are weighted within the four do all black lives matter equally to black people? terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core ethno-racial groups to match the adult population in the acs -year data file for age, gender, education, nativity, ancestry, and voter registration status; all models presented here are weighted to reflect the demographics of blacks in the united states, but descriptive statistics are presented in their raw form. we restrict our analysis to the , respondents who iden- tified as black or african american. the primary outcome variables of interest measure the extent to which blacks are willing to support the challenges posed to groups that have trad- itionally faced secondary marginalization in black politics. we analyze the responses of blacks to the following question: “how important is it for blacks to address the challenges of the following groups”: black women; formerly incarcerated black people; black undocumented immigrants; black gays and lesbians; and black transgender people. respondents were asked to select “not important at all,” “somewhat important,” or “very important” in response to each group. given the structure of the provided responses, the multivariate analyses rely on ordinal logistic regressions. we focus on two explanatory variables: linked fate and respectability politics. we rely on the two standard linked fate questions. first respond- ents are asked, “do you think what happens generally to black people in this country will have something to do with what happens in your life?” then, for those who answer “yes,” they are asked, “will it affect you a lot, some, or not very much?”; linked fate is, therefore, operationalized as an ordinal variable. though there has yet to be a broader conversation about the affective components of linked fate (price ), we created a new question to assess this: “some people feel positively about the link they have with their racial or ethnic group members, while others feel negatively about the idea that their lives may be influenced by how well the larger groups is doing. which comes closer to your feelings?” response options included a positive, negative, or neutral answer; we use a dichotomous variable measuring those who answered “positively” versus those who did not. the variables that comprise our construct of respectability evoke the two aforementioned pillars of the “normative moral superstructure”: adherence to a “traditional” family structure and legitimacy of racial surveillance. our measure of respectability politics concerning family structure is based on the question, “of the following statements, which do you agree with more? ‘blacks should focus on making sure families have two parents’ or ‘blacks should focus on making sure all families are supported no matter their make-up’.” the variable is binary with ‘two parents’ set as equal to ‘ ’. to measure acquiescence for greater police surveillance and lopez bunyasi and smith terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core social control, respondents were asked to rate their level of agreement with the following statement in a four-item likert scale from ‘strongly agree’ to ‘strongly disagree’: “racial profiling is sometimes necessary as a law enforcement tool. (‘racial profiling’ refers to targeting individuals from certain groups in the belief that they are more likely to commit crimes.)” in the models, this variable retained its ordinal character. in addition to these central variables, we also take into consideration several control variables. considering that contemporary respectability pol- itics are informed by the notion that “minorities can best respond to struc- tural racism by individually behaving” in a way that elicits respect from whites (obasogie and newman , ), we leveraged questions pro- vided by the cmps to account for racial premises of neoliberal logic. respondents were prompted, “of the following factors please indicate whether or not each one is important or unimportant in explaining black- white disparities.” they were then provided with several explanations, which they could provide their level of support, ranging from “very import- ant” ( ) to “not important at all” ( ). the respondents were asked the extent to which they believed the following four factors influence black–white disparities: “racial discrimination against blacks”; “lower quality of schools in black communities”; “lack of effort by blacks”; and “family instability in the black community.” following scholars like kluegel ( ), we combined responses to “dis- crimination” and “lower quality of schools” to produce a measure of struc- tural explanations of racial inequality, and combined “lack of effort” and “family instability” to create a measure of individualist explanations of inequality. finally, we subtracted the responses for structural views from individualist views to create a scale that allows us to ascertain the extent to which respondents rely on structural or individualist attributions of racial disparities (with higher values representing individualist attribu- tions). we employ responses to these four questions in this way because they mimic the broad underlying assumptions of a respectability politics that has evolved to accommodate a neoliberal governance, which are “based on a fundamentally american sense of capitalism, individuality, and work ethic—that if you work hard, play by the rules and are a good law-abiding citizens of any race, nothing will obstruct you in your pursuit of a ‘better life’ and integration into social and economic prosperity” (obasogie and newman , ; spence ). additionally, it has been noted, “most frequently, preaching respectabil- ity reflects a class and generational fear, by black people who feel they have do all black lives matter equally to black people? terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core escaped the face of poor disenfranchised blacks, and entered respectable society” (ioffe ). as such, we control for a number of demographics such as gender, income, education, and age. household income and edu- cation are ordinal variables. gender is coded so that female is the baseline group of comparison, and age is continuous. we also capture variables that often influence blacks’ decision-making calculus—partisanship and ideology—as well as demographic variables such as gender, household income, and education. given that the major- ity of black americans identify as democrats, we created a model that would show the predictive value of being republican or, separately, being a declared independent or member of a third party, relative to those who identify as democrat. a dichotomous variable for being liberal is utilized to measure the effect of ideology, following hajnal and lee ( ). moreover, we are cognizant that one’s membership in various groups likely determines how one feels about that group (tajfel and turner ). relatedly, research shows that having sustained interactions with lesbian and gay individuals liberalize individuals’ attitudes toward members of this group (sevecke et al. ). consequently, we control for respondents’ group membership or close relationship to members of marginalized groups. for example, in the model that assesses whether blacks believe the challenges of formerly incarcerated black people are important, we control for whether the respondent has been to jail or prison and/or knows a formerly incarcerated person. we control for whether one or more of the respondent’s parents were born in the united states for the model relating black undocumented immigrants; and we include a measure of whether the respondent identifies as lesbian, gay, or transgender and a separate measure for whether the respondent knows someone from the lgbtq community for correspond- ing models. the question wording of independent variables and distribu- tion of responses among black respondents is provided in the appendix. results descriptive results first, we assess the extent to which blacks are willing to address the chal- lenges posed by several marginalized black groups. figure depicts the distribution of black respondents’ reported attitudes. this preliminary lopez bunyasi and smith terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core data provide support for our first hypothesis. first, it should be noted that there is a great deal of support for black women, as hypothesized; % of respondents believe that it is very important to take consideration of black women. following black women, blacks throw their support behind for- merly incarcerated blacks ( % believe it is “very important” to consider this group’s challenges) and black undocumented immigrants ( % of blacks believe this group should be fully supported). as predicted, the levels of full support for addressing the challenges of gay and lesbian blacks as well as for transgender blacks lags significantly behind other groups ( % and %, respectively, think it is very important to address their challenges). there are multiple ways to interpret these initial findings. one way is to focus on those who suggest that it is “not important at all” to address these groups. from this perspective, there is evidence that intersectional politics has the potential to thrive among black americans. relatedly, close to % of black respondents believe that all five of these groups’ issues are “very important.” on the other hand, it should be noted that nearly one in four blacks believe that the needs of black lesbian, gay, and trans- gender individuals are not important at all. members of these groups have historically been marginalized and still continue to be, according to our analysis. overall, there is a great deal of variation across and within the groups. our next set of analyses test our hypotheses that aim to explain these differences in levels of support. figure . level of support for addressing challenges of marginalized groups. do all black lives matter equally to black people? terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core table . determinants of support of marginalized groups black women formerly incarcerated black people black undocumented immigrants gay and lesbian blacks black transgender people coef. se coef. se coef. se coef. se coef. se group consciousness linked fate . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) positive linked fate . ( . ) . ** ( . ) . *** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) respectability politics two-parent families − . *** ( . ) − . *** ( . ) − . *** ( . ) − . *** ( . ) − . *** ( . ) law and order − . *** ( . ) − . *** ( . ) − . * ( . ) − . *** ( . ) − . *** ( . ) individualist explanation of inequality − . * ( . ) − . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) demographic characteristics female . * ( . ) − . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . * ( . ) income − . * ( . ) . ( . ) − . ( . ) − . ( . ) − . ( . ) education . ( . ) . ( . ) − . ( . ) . ( . ) − . ( . ) age . *** ( . ) . ( . ) − . ** ( . ) − . *** ( . ) − . * ( . ) political predisposition republican − . ( . ) − . ( . ) − . * ( . ) − . ( . ) − . ( . ) independent/other − . *** ( . ) − . ( . ) − . ( . ) − . *** ( . ) − . *** ( . ) liberal . *** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . ** ( . ) . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) specific group connection has been or knows person who’s been incarcerated . *** ( . ) l opez b u n yasi an d s m ith term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s. h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /rep . . d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re. c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity, o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core immigrant or second generation . ( . ) identifies as straight − . *** ( . ) − . *** ( . ) knows lgbtq* person . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) n , , , , , pseudo r . . . . . notes: coefficients and standard errors (in parentheses) of ordinal logistic regressions reported. data are weighted. ***p < . ; **p < . ; *p < . . d o a ll b lack l ives m atter e qu ally to b lack people? term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s. h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /rep . . d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re. c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity, o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core multivariate analyses the remainder of our hypotheses is tested with a series of ordinal logistic regressions, reported in table . considering the fact that it is difficult to figure . predicted probability of high support for marginalized groups given linked fate. figure . predicted probability of high support for marginalized groups given family prioritization. lopez bunyasi and smith terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core interpret ordinal logistic regression coefficients, we provide illustrations of the predicted probabilities of believing that blacks of various groups’ chal- lenges should be central to black politics in figures – . overall, we find support for remaining hypotheses; each of the inde- pendent variables of concern are statistically significant even after figure . predicted probability of high support for marginalized groups given adherence to norms of law and order. figure . predicted probability of high support for marginalized groups. given endorsement of respectability politics (i.e. combined support of two parents families and law & order). do all black lives matter equally to black people? terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core controlling for explanations for black–white disparities and traditionally important demographic and political orientation variables. we begin our detailed discussion with the first set of columns in table , which out- lines the determinants of levels of support for black women. as a sense of linked fate increases, we find that the likelihood that blacks who believe that black women’s challenges are very important to consider on a black political agenda increases by percentage points from % for those whose report no sense of linked fate to % for those who believe that what happens to other blacks will affect their own lives a lot (figure ). the affective component of linked fate, however, makes no stat- istically significant difference in the way that blacks prioritize addressing the challenges of black women. additionally, as predicted, endorsement of two-parent households (figure ) and of racial profiling (figure ) is related to a de-prioritization of issues affecting black women. black respondents who believe blacks should focus on supporting families with two parents and endorse racial profiling as a necessary tool of law enforcement has a % chance of sup- porting black women, whereas blacks who dispel these racist–heterosexist norms have an % likelihood of supporting black women (figure ). the combination of measures of respectability serve to severely dampen the extent to which some blacks are willing to take on the ravages of pater- nalism and sexism. what’s more, we find that orientations that prioritize individualist attributions of inequality more so than structural attributions serves to diminish support for black women; indeed, this is the only model in which individualist attributions predict support for a marginalized group. those who primarily rely on structural attributions of inequality are % likely to suggest that black women’s issues are very important; this decreases to % among those who primarily rely on individual attributions. our results also reveal that younger blacks are less likely to provide higher levels of support for black women than their predecessors. although we do not test this thesis here it is possible that older black american women—including those in the black boomer and genx— find their gender identity to be a more salient component of their everyday experiences having lived through the women’s movement and the combahee river collective, or in the immediate wake of them, and may see the advancement of equal rights more prominently through a lens of gender. this finding also underscores a study of black women at the women’s march, which revealed that black boomers were over- represented among black women at the country’s largest day of demonstra- tion lopez bunyasi and smith ( ). lopez bunyasi and smith terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core we find that many of the predictors of blacks’ attitudes toward black women are mirrored in the analysis for formerly incarcerated individuals. linked fate increases support for this group by percentage points ( – %), and feeling positive about one’s connection to other blacks increases support for this marginalized group by five percentage points. components of respectability politics provides a great deal of explanatory power. those who value a two-parent family structure are eight points less likely to support justice-involved blacks (see figure ), while the jump across the range of sentiments toward “law and order” is percentage points (see figure ). additionally, blacks who simultaneously take con- servative postures around family structure and racial profiling have a % likelihood of emphasizing the issues of their justice-involved racial peers, while disavowing these norms increases the probability of centering the lives of this group by percentage points (figure ). our hypotheses are again supported in column of table , which shows that linked fate influences black respondents’ sentiments toward undocumented black immigrants in the expected direction; the chances of suggesting that undocumented black immigrants’ issues are very import- ant jumps from % among those who report low levels (or those who responded that they have no sense linked fate) of linked fate to % of those with high levels of linked fate. a positive feeling about this link results in a six-percentage point difference from those who feel either nega- tively or neutrally about their connection to other blacks. meanwhile, endorsement of the nuclear family and racial profiling are related to a de-prioritization of black undocumented immigrants; together, they reduce the support of black undocumented immigrants to %, per- centage points below those blacks who reject these racist and heterosexist norms (figure ). while youth was associated with lower levels of support for black women than older blacks, the opposite is true here. younger black americans may be taking a cue from the blm. for instance, after the supreme court made a decision on president obama’s deferred action for childhood arrivals (daca), the bml network immediately asserted that they would join the fight against deportations, thus making the issue salient among young people (rivas ). unfortunately, we are unable to compare blacks’ sentiments about undocumented and authorized black immigrants—two groups that may be looked upon differ- ently due to their legal status in the united states. finally, we turn to blacks’ attitudes toward lgbt community members. previously, we noted that levels of support were lowest for gay do all black lives matter equally to black people? terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core and lesbian blacks as well as for transgender black people, but we find that these levels of support are bolstered by a sense of linked fate. figure shows an – percentage-point increase between those who have no linked fate and those who have high levels of linked fate in the probability of believing that blacks should prioritize the needs of these groups. blacks who feel positive about their connection to other black people increase their support by – percentage points. when blacks believe that it is more important to support two-parent households and when they are willing to support racial profiling, blacks’ likelihood of secondarily marginalizing gay, lesbian, and trans members of their own racial group increases by about percentage points in com- parison to their peers who take a stand against the privileging of nuclear families and oppose race-targeted policing (figure ). in addition to the independent variables, there are a number of control variables that are worth discussing. first, younger blacks provide slightly higher levels of support than older blacks for members of lgbt commu- nities than older blacks. also, identifying as politically liberal consistently influences blacks to be more open to supporting groups that have histor- ically faced secondary marginalization. democrats are more likely than republicans or blacks who do not identify with either of the two major political parties to support marginalized blacks, but our results show that partisanship has a less consistent effect than political ideological on these matters. recently, scholars have begun to highlight the fact that blacks’ partisanship does not neatly map onto the traditional conserva- tive–liberal spectrum (hajnal and lee ; philpot ). as such, con- servatism is likely to be associated with social and cultural matters rather than economic ones, which is why we see that blacks’ ideological leaning as liberal has such consistent predictive powers. finally, our results generally reveal that having a personal connection with or being a member of a marginalized segment of the black popula- tion influences one’s attitudes about the group. being a formerly incarcer- ated person and/or knowing someone who is increases the chances of supporting the notion that it is very important to address the special chal- lenges of this group. it should be noted that % of respondents either identified themselves as formerly incarcerated or said that they knew someone who served time in jail or prison, which is to be expected given the trends of mass incarceration in the united states. meanwhile, the analysis shows that those who identify as heterosexual are less support- ive of lgbtq community members; however, this effect is countered when one knows someone who identifies as lesbian, gay, or transgender. lopez bunyasi and smith terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core in general, our control variables are in line with the existing literature, thereby providing greater confidence in the results. the effects of being woke while we have examined these attitudes—linked fate and respectability politics—separately, it would be remiss of us to not consider the additive effects of the sentiments we have analyzed thus far. figure illustrates the relationship between linked fate and respectability politics on blacks’ atti- tudes toward prioritizing traditionally marginalized groups. because high levels of linked fate are common among black americans, we manipulate the extent to which people adhere to respectability politics. in each instance, we find that those who report both (a) feeling that what happens to black people in this country will have “a lot” to do with what happens in their life, and (b) weak support for respectability politics (those who agree that all families should be supported and do not endorse racial profiling) range between (undocumented black immigrants) to ( formerly incarcerated black) percentage points higher in their support for marginalized sub-groups than those with both high levels of linked fate and high levels of respectability. however, even among those who might be considered the “wokest” black respondents—those with high group consciousness and low levels figure . predicted probability of high support for marginalized groups given. high linked fate and varying endorsement of respectability politics. do all black lives matter equally to black people? terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core of respectability—there is a wide range of support for blacks across these groups. lgbt blacks still do not have the full support of half of the most open members of their group. “woke” blacks have a % probability of believing it is very important to support the challenges black lesbian and gay people face, and they have only a % likelihood of fully support- ing transgender blacks in contrast to black women and justice-involved blacks, who maintain overwhelming support from this group. people who seem most critical of a matrix of domination and who might be seen as most inclusive of all black people still prioritize sub-groups of black people in a hierarchical fashion. conversely, we might think of those with high levels of linked fate and an orientation toward respectability politics as mimicking the sentiments of the “old guard” of black politics. this group of black respondents voice their overwhelming support for black women (with a % prob- ability of agreeing that black women’s issues should be prioritized), but leave nearly all the other groups behind. the likelihood of giving strong support to justice-involved blacks is just over half ( %) for high linked fate-high respectability blacks, and their prioritization other groups garner even less. overall, these results more clearly illuminate that linked fate is not a stopgap mechanism against secondary marginalization. discussion and conclusion there have long existed intersectional, feminist political ideologies among blacks in the united states (crenshaw ; dawson ; jordan-zachery ; smooth ; taylor ), but historically, the most prominent social movements have been ones that were hierarchical, privileging men as the face of activist leadership and foot soldierdom, and relegating women to the background or worse. respectability politics were also a key ingredient of the civil rights movement (carbado and weise ; kennedy ; reynolds ). in comparison to some social movements of the recent past, the contemporary m bl challenges the assumptions underlying the politics of respectability; it perceives this philosophy as repressive to the secondarily marginalized segments of the black community (black women, undocumented blacks, lbgt blacks, formerly incarcerated blacks, and the like), and inadvertently contributive to the white racial dominance that disadvantages blacks relative to their similarly situated white counterparts. lopez bunyasi and smith terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core despite ostensible indications that the contemporary m bl enjoys a great deal of support from the average black person, a deeper dive reveals that not all black lives matter equally to black people. to be specific, we find that while there is a great deal of support around black women and formerly incarcerated black people, upwards of two-thirds of blacks are only willing to give lukewarm support, if any, to tackling the particular chal- lenges posed to black undocumented immigrants and black lgbt people. this is an important line of research given that the life chances of undocumented immigrants as well as black lesbian, gay, and trans- gender people are particularly precarious. undocumented black immi- grants are over-represented among immigrants who are justice-involved (in large part due to their race), and are, thus, more likely to be deported on account of their status as unauthorized immigrants (black alliance for just immigration and nyu school of law immigrant rights clinic ; smith ). the challenges that gender non-conforming blacks face are well illustrated by the fact that the homicide rate for black transgender people is one in , , compared with one in , for americans between the ages of and (astor ). our results highlight that inequities can also be produced within, and not just on, communities of color. we aimed to delineate the mechanisms that push black americans toward or pull them away from participating in full-throated resistance against sexism, social and economic exclusion, xenophobia, and homo- phobia. black respondents who believe that their life chances are inex- tricably linked to other blacks are much more likely to want the status of marginalized groups to be improved, but this sentiment is not a panacea for black solidarity. our results consistently show that an orien- tation toward respectability politics dissuades black americans from believing that the challenges of blacks who face double or triple forms of oppression ought to be seriously addressed. more specifically, we find that the notions outlined by the moynihan report still have effects on blacks’ prescriptions and proscriptions for black uplift. what’s more, we find that many black americans are not immune to hearing the call of the “law and order” dog whistle; those who are willing to allow police to practice racial profiling are also likely to police those they see as deviant and undeserving of their positive attention. the uptick in attention and support of blm and m bl’s organization represents potential for st century black politics to take a hard turn toward its radical roots (dawson ). organizations like the naacp do all black lives matter equally to black people? terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core are even shifting their stance toward some traditionally marginalized groups, and still several dozen have provided public support and solidarity with blm by joining under the umbrella of m bl. but, these changes do not seem to have reached the average black citizen, quite yet. needless to say, “the success of other movements has been hampered by the inability of those movements to bring together the diverse opinions and differently situated individuals within that movement,” and it appears that this new social movement is facing similar difficulties. this move- ment actually has little tolerance for those unwilling to support all black lives, but it appears that intersectionality is not clearly expressed in the sentiments of average black citizens. a mainstreamed intersectional politics would be marked by normal- ized and deliberate attention to uplifting those who experience multiple axes of oppression. our results do not provide evidence for that. instead, they show the negative impact of respectability politics on the likelihood of broadly embracing those groups that find themselves struggling against a tone-deaf republican majority on capitol hill and president whose blunt characterization of the black community depicts african americans (literally) in a war against themselves. though our results suggest that there is a potential for social change as younger generational cohorts replace the “old guard” generation, this generational shift does not appear to be large enough to sustain major changes to black politics’ business as usual. notes . alicia garza, patrisse cullors, and opal tometi founded the black lives matter (blm) movement in . there is a network of local blm chapters—across the united states and inter- nationally—and an online platform. the movement for black lives (m bl) can be likened to an umbrella organization, which consists of about four dozen local and national organizations such as the black youth project , mothers against police brutality, the national conference of black lawyers, and the blm network as well as various supporting individuals. all supporters of the m bl share a set of guiding principles and political, social, and economic demands in an effort toward an anti-racist society. . to our knowledge, the racial and ethnic politics literature has yet to provide a validated, quanti- tative measure of respectability politics. our goal here is to leverage the theoretical apparatus provided to us by the extant literature as well as employ the questions that mimic components of the theory in the cmps. ultimately, we hope to spark a conversation about how to measure respectability politics, but do so from a position of intellectual humility. . hajnal and lee ( ) like tasha philpot ( ) show that the traditional “liberal-to- conservative” scale cannot be neatly superimposed on blacks’ political attitudes, as “conservativism” means something quite different for blacks in comparison to white americans. . the predicted probabilities in figure are produced by simultaneously holding support for racial profiling and support for two parent families at their respective maximums while holding the remain- ing variables at their mean, and then comparing them to their respective minimums, while continu- ing to hold other variables at their mean. lopez bunyasi and smith terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core . we also examined models that tested for the effects of “religiosity” (measured by the frequency of attendance to religious or spiritual services) on attitudes toward lesbian and gay as well as transgender blacks. this variable was statistically significant and was in the negative direction, as one might expect, but these models were not otherwise different from the models we report in table . . that is, the predicted probabilities in figure are produced by holding linked fate at its highest value, and then adjusting the two respectability politics measures from their lowest to highest values, while holding the remaining variables at their mean. . when reflecting upon the place of women in the student nonviolent coordinating committee, stokely carmichael is documented as having jested, “the position of women in sncc is prone.” . we thank one of the anonymous reviewers for this insight. . on 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https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core appendix question wording of independent variables and distribution of responses among black respondents linked fate . do you think what happens generally to black people in this country will have some- thing to do with what happens in your life? ◦ if yes, will it affect you: a lot, some, or not very much? a lot of linked fate . % some linked fate . % not very much linked fate . % no linked fate . % . some people feel positively about the link they have with their racial or ethnic group members, while others feel negatively about the idea that their lives may be influenced by how well the larger group is doing. which comes closer to your feelings? ◦ i feel positively about this link with my racial or ethnic group; i feel negatively about this link with my racial or ethnic group; neither positive or negative. feels positive about connection to other blacks . % does not feel positive about connection to other blacks . % respectability politics . of the following statements, which do you agree with more? blacks should focus on making sure families have two parents; blacks should focus on making sure all families are supported no matter their make-up. support all families . % support two parents . % . please indicate if you agree or disagree with each statement: racial profiling is some- times necessary as a law enforcement tool (“racial profiling” refers to targeting individ- uals from certain groups in the belief that they are more likely to commit crimes.): strongly agree; somewhat agree; somewhat disagree; strongly disagree. disagree with racial profiling . agree with racial profiling . do all black lives matter equally to black people? terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core individualist explanation of inequality . according to census statistics, white americans have higher income, education attain- ment and homeownership rates than black americans. of the following factors, please indicate whether or not each one is important or unimportant in explaining black– white disparities?: racial discrimination against blacks; lower quality of schools in black communities; lack of effort by blacks; family instability in the black community. ◦ responses: very important; somewhat important; not very important; not important at all ◦ scale reliability coefficient: . . negative scores correspond to greater reliance on “structural” explanations of inequality (e.g. racial discrimination, lower quality of schools). positive scores correspond to greater reliance on “individual” attributions of inequality (e.g. lack of effort, family instability) lopez bunyasi and smith terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core linked fate (%) positive linked fate (%) family structure (%) racial profiling (%) a lot/some/ not very much no linked fate positive not positive support all families support two parents disagree agree gender black women . . . . . . . . black men . . . . . . . . educational attainment college degree and higher . . . . . . . . less than college degree . . . . . . . . partisanship democrat . . . . . . independent . . . . . . . . republican . . . . . . political ideology liberal . . . . . . moderate . . . . . . . . conservative . . . . . . . . distribution of black americans’ responses d o a ll b lack l ives m atter e qu ally to b lack people? term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s. h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /rep . . d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re. c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity, o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core picturing ethnic studies: photovoice and youth literacies of social action uc riverside uc riverside previously published works title picturing ethnic studies: photovoice and youth literacies of social action permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ zz m journal journal of adolescent and adult literacy, ( ) issn - author de los ríos, cv publication date - - doi . /jaal. peer reviewed escholarship.org powered by the california digital library university of california https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ zz m https://escholarship.org http://www.cdlib.org/ feature article picturing ethnic studies: photovoice and youth literacies of social action cati v. de los ríos chicanx students use photovoice to articulate the importance of their high school ethnic studies course. i n , r epubl ica n legislators f rom a r izona cre- ated house bill specif ically to outlaw mexican a mer ic a n stud ie s i n t h at s t at e’s publ ic s cho ol s (cabrera, milem, jaquette, & marx, ). banning the mex ica n a mer ica n stud ies prog ra m i n t he t ucson unified school district, which had a reputable academic curriculum that improved student learning outcomes (cabrera et  a l., ), (re)inv igorated the movement for mexican american studies and other ethnic stud- ies courses throughout the united states, especially c a l i for n i a ( buen av i s t a , ). a s t h i s momentu m builds, more u.s. public school districts are enthusias- tically offering ethnic studies courses. in the last three years, nearly a dozen of the largest and most racially di- verse california school districts have created historical resolutions to mandate ethnic studies as a high school graduation requirement. as educators bear witness to growing social and ra- cial inequalities and the significant increase of students of color in our classrooms, a critical pedagogy of ethnic studies is necessary to increase race- conscious inquiry in literacy classrooms (de los ríos, lópez, & morrell, ). although the intellectual and pedagogical merits of ethnic studies are eminent, ongoing ideological bat- tles over curriculum and the representation of mexican americans and other communities of color in textbooks remain a contentious issue nationwide, particularly in the southwest (weissert, ). based on a - month ethnographic study, this ar- ticle demonstrates how photovoice (wang & burris, ), a participator y photo- elicitation methodology, was used to understand youths’ nuanced perspectives about an ethnic studies curriculum. inspired by zenkov and harmon ( ), photovoice here is used as a mu- tua lly informing research and pedagogica l method. photovoice seeks to embolden participants to take pow- er and control over the research process through their documentation of the social and political dimensions of their lives via photographs and accompanying writ- ten narratives for the purpose of social transformation (delgado, ). this study is situated in a secondar y chicanx/latinx studies (cls) course; the x signif ies a gender-inclusive alternative to the masculine- centric chicano and latino and the gender binary in chicana/o and latina/o. the overarching question that guides this inquiry is, how do students articulate the importance of ethnic studies courses in their lives? in this article, i f irst situate the rationale for this study and then the purpose of ethnic and cls. second, i describe the secondary classroom and context. third, i delineate the conceptual framework that i engaged and the methods through which i collected and ana- lyzed data. fourth, i examine excerpts of chicanx (of mexican descent) students’ photovoice compositions, which sought to document students’ voices through photographs and accompanying ref lections. a discus- sion of the research follows, as well as implications for educators who turn to ethnic studies to encourage so- cial transformation and change in their literacy class- rooms, regardless of whether one has the opportunity to create and teach ethnic studies courses. rationale on sept ember , , ca l i for n ia g over nor jer r y br ow n s i g ne d i nt o l aw a s s embly m a n lu i s a lejo’s journal of adolescent & adult literacy vol. no. pp. – doi: . /jaal. © international literacy association cati v. de los rÍos is an assistant professor in the graduate school of education at the university of california, riverside, usa; e-mail catidlr@ucr.edu. mailto:catidlr@ucr.edu journal of adolescent & adult literacy vol. no. july/august literacyworldwide.org feature article (d –salinas) landmark assembly bill , which will develop a model for standards- based ethnic studies curricula for public secondary schools by . with the first legislation of its kind, california now leads the united states in sanctioning ethnic studies courses and making them accessible statewide. california’s recent v ictor y d i rectly counters the xenophobic trends in arizona, where state policies banned such curricula in . despite california’s momentous strides, how- ever, a paucity of empirical research has provided few windows into the impact of these academically rigorous courses, especially from students’ perspectives. a lthough secondar y ethnic studies courses have existed since the late s, students’ access to these c l a s s e s h a s b e en l i m it e d (de lo s r ío s et  a l ., ). scholars have identified ethnic studies courses as a con- duit for robust literacy skills (morrell, dueñas, garcía, & lópez, ), academic achievement (cabrera et al., ), young peoples’ transformative praxis (san pedro, ), increased student attendance (dee & penner, ), and fecund soil for critical thinking (de los ríos, ). according to a recent position statement by the national council of teachers of english ( ), ethnic studies “has always been invested in providing equal access to literacy, encouraging democratic principles, and promoting different ways of knowing—of produc- ing and disseminating knowledge” (para. ). given the racial inequity present in k– curricula and standards (sleeter, ; vasquez heilig, brown, & brown, ) and the enduring racialized misreading of students of color (sealey- ruiz & greene, ), educators must look toward ethnic studies to enhance humanizing literacy experiences for all students, or what freire ( ) con- sidered literacy experiences that honor students’ full humanity. ethnic studies and cls scholars of ethnic studies have long argued that race a nd r ac i s m a r e de eply woven i nt o t he t ap e s t r y of colonia l ism a nd expa nsionism in the united states (hu- dehart, ; takaki, ). the “one- sided histo- ricity” (trouillot, , p. ) that dominates western s c h o l a r s h i p , c u r r i c u l a , a n d s c h o o l i n g t o o o f t e n priv ileges social, political, and economic systems of power (apple, ). okihiro ( ) posited that ethnic studies is not sim- ply about the inclusion or celebration that communities of color “too had heroes and ‘great’ civilizations” (p. ), nor is it the mere addition of writers of color. rather, according to okihiro, ethnic studies foregrounds an alternative vision of u.s. history and culture that was broadly inclusive, humanizing, and replete w ith the fervor of social activism: [ethnic studies] noted a global dimension to the american experience, both in the imperial expansion of european peoples and in the incorporation of america’s ethnic minor- ities. but beyond recapturing historical and contemporary realities and extending the community’s reach, ethnic stud- ies fundamentally sought to move the pivot, by fracturing the universalism of white men and by repositioning gender, class, race, and sexuality from the periphery to the core, de- centering and recentering the colors and patterns of the old fabric. (p. ) in the late s, university and k– students, par- ents, educators, and community members in the san francisco bay area embodied this vision of education as they advocated for the inclusion of histories, cur- ricula, and pedagogies of the oppressed (freire, ) in educational institutions beyond a multiculturalist approach (umemoto, ). this social movement, the third world liberation front, centered the decolonial texts of frantz fanon and albert memmi and advanced an antiracist educational agenda to overturn previous centuries of colonial education for “third world” com- munities living in the united states (okihiro, ). given the shifting demographics and the surge of mex ica n- a nd latin x- or ig in students in ca l i for n ia, ma ny school d istr icts have implemented a ra nge of ethnic studies courses, including mexican american studies. mexican american studies courses, often syn- ony mous w ith chicano studies and chicano/latino studies, restore and mobilize the decolonial histories, literatures, epistemologies, and resistance practices of mexican- origin and other latinx people (muñoz, ) to the center of u.s. classrooms. ethnic studies and its subdisciplines, such as cls, examine socially con- structed racialization processes in the united states and the ways that these processes are concretized by social, economic, and political powers (omi & winant, ) to elicit actions and literacies of social change. photographs and literacies new literacy studies (nls) has stretched the concept of literacy beyond its traditional understanding of print literacy to forge more nuanced, multimodal, and mul- tilingual comprehensions of reading and writing for an increasingly globalized world (new london group, ; street, ). in a theoretical shift in perspective around literacy, nls moved from a cognitive model, which focuses on a person’s literacy acquisition, to em- phasizing the social and cultural interactions around journal of adolescent & adult literacy vol. no. july/august literacyworldwide.org feature article literacy practices (gee, ; street, ). grounded in an understanding that multiple literacies exist and are situated within social and cultural practices (new london group, ), nls focuses on the central role of power; simply put, certain forms of literacy in soci- ety are more sanctioned than others (street, ). a persistent shortcoming of nls, however, is the insuffi- cient attention to the literate lives of racially, culturally, and linguistically diverse young people (fisher, ; skerrett, ). with this concern in mind, this study centralizes chicanx students’ photographs and writing. photovoice as both literacy pedagogy and research method can generate pathways for educators who seek to bridge the social and political realities of students i nt o t hei r w r it i n g i n st r uc t ion (zen kov & ha r mon , ). marquez- zenkov and harmon ( ) delineated the ways in which youths’ knowledge of visual texts, such as photographs, can provide both a window into adolescents’ dis/engagement with school and a multi- faceted channel for teaching an appreciation for lit- eracy. van horn ( ) argued that student- produced visual texts can motivate adolescents to engage more deeply in literacy assignments, and johansen and le ( ) outlined the ways in which photographs can be used to explore cultura l d i f ferences a mong d iverse adolescents. with deep roots in the dialogical ethics of freire ( ), photovoice emerged as an approach to partici- patory research that cultivates humanization and an awareness of social conditions (wang & burris, ). researchers in literacy have detailed the different forms of youth empowerment that can arise from photovoice projects, especially for students who have felt marginal- ized in school settings (zenkov et al., ). when cou- pled with an ethnic studies course, photovoice can be a vibrant pedagogical practice and research methodol- ogy, as both seek to amplify critical dialogue and social change (wang & burris, ). moreover, a participatory arts- based method, such as photovoice, can be more representative of the a f- fordances of ethnic studies courses than other modes of data col lection because it centers the lens of the student—a lens that has a racialized gaze of the world, par ticularly for students of color. in (re)positioning marginalized students “from the periphery to the core” (okihiro, , p. ), photovoice asks young people to respond to photographs that they have taken and elicits multiple openings for their description and explana- tion. in this context, students’ photovoice compositions about ethnic studies offer opportunities to expand our understandings of student literacy in more critical and diverse ways, as elucidated by nls. methods context this research is based on an ethnographic study of an th- and th- grade elective cls course offered at a working- class high school in southern california. the school ref lected the surrounding neighborhood, a pre- dominantly working- class latinx immigrant communi- ty adjacent to a historical african american community on the north side. according to california department of education data, at the time of the study, the school demographics were % latinx, % african american, and % undisclosed, and % of the student body re- ceived free or reduced- price lunch. approximately % of the student body was classified as english learners, with spanish as the primary language. because the cls course was an elective, many of the students enrolled in the class based on the reputation of both the class and the teacher, whereas others were enrolled by their counselors due to a lack of credits. the cls course com- prised f irst- and second- generation chicanx students from immigrant households. curriculum the yearlong cls class examined notions of colonialism, hegemony, and racism in the united states and how they impact communities of color, particularly chicanxs and latinxs. a veteran ethnic studies teacher, mr. miranda (all names are pseudony ms), dev ised and taught the course, which met daily for minutes. figure  is an outline of the curricular topics. upon learning about the dismantling of the tucson unif ied school district’s mexican a merican studies program in and california’s statewide efforts ad- vocating for ethnic studies, students sought to raise awareness and take action. mr. miranda facilitated a dialogue by asking students to articulate their under- standings of the course and the perceived impacts that derived from their participation in it. because of limit- ed school resources, mr. miranda felt that a photovoice project was feasible, as it did not require specific soft- ware, and all of the participating students had personal smartphones available to them that were used to take photographs. o ver t he c ou r s e of fou r mont h s , s tudent s u s e d google docs to upload images and their accompany- ing two- pa ragraph na r ratives to their teacher each mont h. student s were i nv ited to t a ke photog raphs that ref lected their understa nd ings of ethn ic stud- ies, t hemselves, a nd t hei r com mu n it ies i n relat ion to colonialism, hegemony, and racism. each student journal of adolescent & adult literacy vol. no. july/august literacyworldwide.org feature article selected si x pictures, below which they added their w r itten na r ratives descr ibing the photographs a nd their purpose. students captured photographs of their communities, textbooks, cultural artifacts, clothing, families, friends, and self ies (e.g., youth- curated self- portraits made w ith a smartphone). throughout the project, students answered the question, “what does ethnic studies mean to you?” w ith photographs and accompanying narratives. a single def inition for eth- nic studies was never demarcated for the students, as it is an academic f ield frequently in f lux and respon- sive to colon ized com mun ities in the un ited st ates (okihiro, ). the goal of the assignment was to raise awareness to stakeholders about the social exigencies of these literacy courses. up on s ubm it t i n g t he i r phot o g r aph s , s t ud e nt s worked in small groups using school laptops to discuss their photographs. with their teacher, students revised their writing for clarity and syntax in one- on- one con- ferences during class. data collection and analysis as a chicana who was raised in the same community a nd for ma l ly t aug ht at the school where th is study took place, trustworthiness was established through prolonged knowledge and engagement with the school community. data collection included semistructured inter v iews, pa r ticipant obser vations, and students’ photovoice compositions. for this ar ticle, i selected three focal students at the end of the photovoice project to provide information- rich depth into students’ experi- ences with ethnic studies. the students were selected through criterion- based purposive sampling (corbin & strauss, ) to include a range of linguistic prof i- ciencies, immigration status, grade levels, and length of time in the united states. the perspectives of the three focal students ref lect many of the sentiments of the par- ticipating students at large, including those who did not self- select themselves into the course. nvivo, a qualitative data analysis program, facili- tated the organization of data. inductive coding began upon my reading of all of the interview transcripts and students’ writings and photographs. analytic categories emerged from systematic analysis of all forms of data: questioning relationships of power, challenging domi- nant ideologies, and civic engagement. like woodgate and kreklewetz ( ), i used a multilayered- level ana- ly tic coding procedure. the f irst level of analysis in- volved identifying and isolating patterns and content denoted as three domains: individual, community, and structural. in the second level of analysis, i organized these domains through constant comparing and con- trasting and then grouped data together by associa- tions that emphasized social change on all three levels. finally, the third level of analysis required identifying traits in each domain and then discerning relations across the domains to identify yielding themes of (so- cial) action. i used morrell’s ( ) description of social action as endeavors that seek to empower oneself and/ or improve one’s community with a social justice orien- tation. the themes that emerged during these coding sessions were woven together to communicate a larger coherent stor y of literacies of social action (delgado, ). findings the three findings outlined in this section dimensional- ize what ethnic studies meant to the three focal youths and elucidate an overarching narrative of social action: the notion of self- determining one’s future, ethnic studies figure curriculum topics journal of adolescent & adult literacy vol. no. july/august literacyworldwide.org feature article as a practice of community change, and the development of racial literacies that contest structural racism. self- determining one’s trajectory schools ra rely prov ide ma rg ina l ized students w ith storytelling platforms to assert practices of autonomy and resistance, especia lly w ithin standa rdized a nd euro- american- centric teaching frameworks (sleeter, ). for u ndocu ment e d student s, more over, t he inv isibility and educationa l ha rdships that many of them face have been well examined (gonzales, ). as an undocumented th- grade student, beatriz had battled racist notions of worthiness and deservingness throughout her k– schooling. part of her photovoice composition illuminated the ways in which the cls course had helped her articulate her path in a digni- f ied and humanizing way. as seen in figure  , beatriz shows the statement on a t- shirt that she had attained while enrolled in the course. in response to the photograph, beatriz wrote, ethnic studies is captured in the words of this picture. the message of my t- shirt is clear. we are students of color who will not bow down to the conventions that tie us down. we are people who have exceeded despite not having white or class privilege. we have been empowered by the knowledge gained in and from our communities and in our formal and informal education. despite what we’ve been told, we de- serve to be here. we have worked hard for our place at the universities we’ve been accepted to. i’ve learned that if we ever question ourselves, we know that it is our success that has brought us this far and our ancestors who had to endure overwhelming hardships for us to be here. t he c a ref u l ly pr o duce d phot og raph , a close- up of her t- sh i r t , i s a s t at ement of beat r i z’s ident it y. like her photograph, her words echo a sense of self- determination that counters dominant perspectives of what she, a s a ch ica na, ha s been told she wou ld become. her constant use of we is grounded in a sense of communal understanding of self: her struggle for self- determination is intricately tied to those in her community. in beatriz’s interview, she shared that she has long battled the “racist voices from media about who undocumented people are…what we can and can’t achieve” (personal communication, april, , ). for beatriz, the course fostered literacies that encouraged her to critically make choices based on her values and passions, one of which was f lipping some of the dehu- manizing narratives regarding college- bound undocu- mented students. as seen in figure  , beatriz’s classmate miriam wrote in response to her own photograph, titled “non- selfie,” figure "caution: educated student of color" note. the color figure can be viewed in the online version of this article at http://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com. figure "non-selfie" note. the color figure can be viewed in the online version of this article at http://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com. http://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com http://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com journal of adolescent & adult literacy vol. no. july/august literacyworldwide.org feature article one of the f irst things we learned in cls was the concept of hegemony and how it hurts ever yone. it creates unfair privileges and also degrades people through discrimina- tion and false stereotypes. not a lot of people understand its inf luence over them, but it is our job [as youths] to dis- pel these forces, and change people’s point of view through the knowledge and skillsets that we gain through ethnic studies courses. it is our job to act, educate and take charge of our future. miriam recognizes that the work of hegemony is pre- cisely to def ine young people in a way that is harmful. her photograph features a red balloon with drawn- in features that purposefully covers her face. although the color red signifies a sense of vigilance, this image cap- tures a dominant sentiment among youths of an overall lack of control. however, miriam’s narrative speaks back to this representation of hegemony through the power- ful act of agency and self- determination. concurrently, nls scholars have highlighted the power of studying literacy practices in the context of the social and ma- terial realities of which they are a part. thus, beatriz’s and miriam’s descriptions underline the significance of taking control over their narratives and exhibit what zenkov and harmon ( ) argued, that engaging pho- tovoice as literacy pedagogy often allows youths to write more readily and critically about the issues that matter to them. community change students regularly def ined ethnic studies as promot- i ng a sense of accou nt abi l ity to t hei r com mu n it ies by responding to issues of social and racial injustice. beatriz expressed that the cls course led her and her classmates to “develop a sense of urgency to take action” (persona l communication, april , ). students’ a c c o u nt a bi l it y t o t h e i r c o m mu n it ie s m a n i fe s t e d th roug h d ivergent approaches; whereas some were pressed to address issues of injustice in their own every- day actions, others addressed systemic injustices, such as raising awareness around state- sanctioned police violence. humberto discussed the intersectionality of race, class, and gender centralized in the cls course and how it had changed his perception of the ways that women a re treated in his home and community. his photo- graph, titled “mujer” (woman), is a close- up picture of a young woman’s side profile. humberto exaplained it in his accompanying paragraph: this is a woman surrounded by “compliments.” i had never acknowledged how downgrading “catcalling” is for women. through [cls], i’ve come to see how real male privilege and sex ism are. in many situations, women wa lk the streets feeling unsafe because of the acts and comments imposed by disrespectful men. as a heterosexual male, i’m priv i- leged and i don’t have to regularly go through this but i am not proud of this privilege since “catcalling” is unaccept- able and no one should have to experience that. this critical awareness is what these courses are all about. in his interview, humberto discussed that learning about the oppression of women, specif ically chicanas and latinas, helped him see the ways in which women’s harassment is multilayered. he continued, “chicanas have a double oppression or sometimes a triple one. learning about intersectionality helped me see how i speak [to] and treat women, and how i don’t want to be part of systems that silence or harass them” (interview, april , ). humberto articulated a meta- awareness of how he viewed himself as accountable to the wrong- ful subjugation of women. the notion of critical aware- ness and consciousness (freire, ) is central to ethnic studies, as it is the first step toward humanizing litera- cies and social action. miriam regarded notions of accountability as re- sponding to the numerous unjust killings of unarmed men of color. upon analyzing the killing of black teenager michael brown in ferguson, missouri, in class, students in the cls class began to see their lives as in- extricably tied with brown’s and were inspired to raise awareness and take action. at her first black lives matter march with other classmates, miriam took a picture of the protest sign that she had made (see figure  ). miriam elaborated: ethnic studies raises our awareness about problems plagu- ing our community, like police brutality. we discussed and learned about the michael brown case and other local cases. there was a peace march for the victims of police brutality that i participated in. it was a memorable experience because it was the f irst time i ever did something like this and was empowering because it was among friends. we were there voicing our displeasures and peacefully demanding change in our society. at the end of the peace march we held a vigil for the families of those lost to police violence in our commu- nity. this was an emotional moment for everyone because we were united and bonding over a struggle that our com- munity has been facing for some time. seeing how my class- mates were involved and actually interested in the things we learned in cls and taking action (on our own) around those things outside of class, made me believe that even young peo- ple like us can be encouraged to do something that matters and that can care about injustice in the community. her phot og r aph , a n i nt ent ion a l clos e - up of her poster f rom the ma rch, poignantly notes that she’l l “ p r o b a b l y n e e d t h i s [a g a i n] n e x t ye a r! ” i n h e r journal of adolescent & adult literacy vol. no. july/august literacyworldwide.org feature article inter v iew, miriam a f f irmed that she w ill likely con- t i nue to t a ke act ion a rou nd pol ice br ut a l ity i n her community. she stated, “it’s sad that i’ll likely have to recycle this poster, but we can’t help but march” (in- ter v iew, april , ). fur thermore, miriam’s and humberto’s emerging practices of accountability to- wa rd oppressed members of their community reso- nate with the awareness of power dynamics that nls emphasizes. racial literacies within the f ield of literacy, sealey- ruiz ( ) argued that racial literacy is a vital skill that centers conversa- tions and writing around both the social construction of race and the perilous material realities of racism and moves individuals toward everyday acts of antiracism (sealey- ruiz & greene, ). through mr. miranda’s unit, he sought to support students’ racial literacy de- velopment by providing them with tools to not only ar- ticulate structural racial oppression but also ascertain what ethnic studies is and is not. given the numerous attacks on ethnic studies and the ways that it has falsely been deemed as promoting racial separatism and hate, students aimed to demystify these assertions through their narratives. beatriz took a picture of a puzzle (see figure  ). her accompanying paragraph stated, i had to wait a long time to feel this way—an impact that took nearly years of school to feel this way. it should not be this way. students of color should have racially empower- ing experiences and be “seen” well before our twelfth grade of school. this is what ethnic studies courses have to offer; it gives us the tools and terms to articulate where we stand. we learn to name and understand ourselves in the mix of it all. life is a puzzle, and having an ethnic studies course helps us put the pieces together. beatriz's photograph, the simple puzzle piece that reads “eye,” isolates the visual metaphor that empha- sizes what ethnic studies means to her. another meta- phor that she uses through her language is the notion of life as a puzzle. to her, life feels as daunting as a puz- zle; however, according to beatriz, her ethnic studies course provided her with the critical eye and tools to assemble important pieces. similarly, miriam’s writing figure "protest sign" note. the color figure can be viewed in the online version of this article at http://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com. figure "life is a puzzle" note. the color figure can be viewed in the online version of this article at http://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com. http://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com http://ila.onlinelibrary.wiley.com journal of adolescent & adult literacy vol. no. july/august literacyworldwide.org feature article reverberated through beatriz’s sentiments about the importance of being seen and heard in school. in re- sponse to a photograph of herself named “self ie,” she clarified: what we learn is not hatred toward others who have more pr iv i lege tha n us, but rather to have pr ide in our back- grounds, to respect it and to grow from it. with that, we are taught to appreciate other people’s heritages and struggles because just like theirs, we all deserve to be heard and seen. through ethnic studies, we are able to discuss power, race and racism in a productive way for everyone. in beatriz’s interview, she expanded on her writing and shared, “it’s not about hatred. it’s also not just about learning our histories or reading authors that look like us. it’s about learning the terms to name and challenge systems of power that cause oppression” (inter v iew, april , ). comparably, humberto’s narrative ac- companying his close- up photograph of himself titled “selfie” highlighted that ethnic studies isn’t just learning about people of color’s cul- tures or histories. for a lot of us, we already know about our cultures. it’s about naming our communities’ lived experi- ences as forms of systemic racism and then working to end all forms of oppression. no w m o r e t h a n e v e r, b e at r i z ’s , m i r i a m’s , a n d humberto’s racial literacies are necessary as vile racism and hate crimes ascend after the u.s. presidential election (okeowo, ). moreover, the long- standing school practices of color blindness and race- neutral curricula continue to dehumanize all young people in our school systems. discussion inqu i r y t hat hu ma n izes a nd engages ma rg i na l ized students’ historical, cultural, and literacy resources (mor rel l, ) is cr itica l at a time when a ntiblack, anti- immigrant, and other xenophobic sentiments pro- liferate. new literacies work for chicanx youths central- izes their literacies as social practice, particularly their literacies of racism, sexism, classism, and migrator y status as central to a humanizing literacy education. curricular and pedagogical projects aligned with this work accentuate the importance of the incorporation of young people’s lived experiences and decision mak- ing while simultaneously engaging in practices aimed toward academic empowerment. as delgado ( ) noted, “the subject of racial and ethnic relations is endemic to any serious discuss[ion] of urban youth photovoice” (p. ). literacy scholars zenkov et al. ( ) argued that photovoice as a storytell- ing platform can foster critical thinking skills, empower literate identities, and diversify the process of creating and sharing narratives of (in)justice. thus, this project invited students’ creativity to read and write their racial- ized social worlds, signifying the urgency for ethnic stud- ies curricula and other forms of race- conscious inquiry in literacy classrooms. implications e t h n ic s tud ie s c ou r s e s hold s t e ad f a s t pr om i s e i n building more decolonial, equitable, and humanizing visions of schooling, curricula, and literacy develop- ment in the st century (de los ríos, ). a hallmark of et h n ic stud ies is t he not ion t hat ever y i nd iv idu- a l i s c apable of sel f- det er m i n i n g a nd sel f- def i n i n g (umemoto, ). thus, although the creations of mod- el ethnic studies curricula in california are notewor- thy efforts, it is imperative to be cautious of models, as concepts such as self- determination cannot be stan- da rd ized across com mun ities a nd school contex ts. consequently, educators, regardless of whether one is able to create and implement an ethnic studies course, must continue to shape context- specif ic literacy cur- ricula and pedagogy that are responsive to students’ histories, desires, and divergent relations w ith colo- nialism and racism. take action! . consider the multiple literacies (visual, digital, media, and more) that students already engage in and how they can be leveraged into classroom literacy activities. . to incorporate elements of photovoice, provide students with disposable cameras (or encourage the use of students’ smartphones, if available) and ask them to photograph things of significance from their course, school, and/or personal life. . ask students to then select the four to six most significant photographs and write accompanying reflections prompted by their images, whether open- ended or explicitly engaging a prompt question. the goal is for students to engage their personal and academic identities or sociopolitical issues that are most important to them. . the aim is to better understand the social and political dimensions of students’ lives. (delgado, ). journal of adolescent & adult literacy vol. no. july/august literacyworldwide.org feature article for teachers and researchers, photovoice as both a pedagogica l and data collection method can ser ve as complementar y sources for transporting the lives a nd concer ns of students to the center of the class- r o o m c u r r i c u lu m ( z e n k o v & h a r m o n , ) a n d honor i ng student s’ reser voi rs of k nowledge to fos- ter mea ning f ul w r iting (zenkov, taylor, & ha r mon, ). as a profession, we must continue to env isage curricular transformations for a racially diversifying world, especia l ly a s pol it ica l d iscou rses t hat sa nc- tion ever yday forms of gender, ethnic, racial, and re- ligious harassment and violence become increasingly commonplace. in both photovoice and ethnic studies, educators have analytical tools and dialogical frame- works to cultivate modalities of resistance to injustice and oppression. references apple, m.w. 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( ). “on strike!” san francisco state college strike, – : the role of asian american students. amerasia journal, ( ), – . doi: . / amer. . . j rx https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . /s - - - https://doi.org/ . /s - - - https://doi.org/ . / x http://www.ncte.org/positions/statements/ethnic-studies-k -curr http://www.ncte.org/positions/statements/ethnic-studies-k -curr https://doi.org/ . /haer. . . n v j u http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/hate-on-the-rise-after-trumps-election http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/hate-on-the-rise-after-trumps-election http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/hate-on-the-rise-after-trumps-election https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . /amer. . . j rx https://doi.org/ . /amer. . . j rx journal of adolescent & adult literacy vol. no. july/august literacyworldwide.org feature article van horn, l. ( ). reading photographs to write with mean- ing and purpose, grades – . newark, de: international reading association. vasquez heilig, j., brown, k.d., & brown, a.l. ( ). illusion of inclusion: a critical race theory textual analysis of race and standards. harvard educational review, ( ), – . doi: . /haer. . . p j wang, c., & burris, m.a. ( ). photovoice: concept, methodology, and use for participatory needs assess- ment. health education & behavior, ( ), – . doi: . / weissert, w. ( , july ). textbook reignites mexican american studies f lap in texas. associated press. retr ieved from http://abcnews.go.com/us/wirestory/textbook- reignites- mexican-american-studies-f lap-texas- woodgate, r.l., & kreklewetz, c.m. ( ). youth’s nar- ratives about family members smoking: parenting the parent—it’s not fair!. bmc public health, , . doi: . / - - - zenkov, k., bell, a., lynch, m., ewaida, m., harmon, j., & pellegrino, a. ( ). youth as sources of educational equity: using photographs to help adolescents make sense of school, injustice, and their lives. education in a democracy, , – . zenkov, k., & harmon, j. ( ). picturing a writing process: photovoice and teaching writing to urban youth. journal of adolescent & adult literacy, ( ), – . doi: . / jaal. . . zenkov, k., taylor, l., & harmon, j. ( ). boundary- and border- spanning collaborations of educators and youth: challenging our literacy pedagogies and content. journal of adolescent & adult literacy, ( ), – . doi: . / jaal. more to explore ■ hipolito, e., & zavala, m. (eds.). ( ). ethnic studies k– [special issue]. xchange. retrieved from https://centerx.gseis.ucla.edu/xchange/ ethnic-studies-k- ■ sleeter, c.e. ( ). the academic and social value of ethnic studies: a research review. washington, dc: national education association. ■ tintiangco-cubales, a., kohli, r., sacramento, j., henning, n., agarwal-rangnath, r., & sleeter, c. ( ). toward an ethnic studies pedagogy: implications for k– schools from the research. the urban review, ( ), – . ■ zenkov, k., & harmon, k. ( ). through students’ eyes: writing and photography for success in school. lanham, md: rowman & littlefield. consider children’s choices, teachers’ choices, and young adults’ choices for curriculum planning and summer reading. ila gives you choices! looking for a good book? check out the choices reading lists—vetted by students and teachers themselves. see all the lists at literacyworldwide.org/choices https://doi.org/ . /haer. . . p j https://doi.org/ . / http://abcnews.go.com/us/wirestory/textbook-reignites-mexican-american-studies-flap-texas- http://abcnews.go.com/us/wirestory/textbook-reignites-mexican-american-studies-flap-texas- https://doi.org/ . / - - - https://doi.org/ . /jaal. . . https://doi.org/ . /jaal. . . https://doi.org/ . /jaal. https://doi.org/ . /jaal. https://centerx.gseis.ucla.edu/xchange/ethnic-studies-k- https://centerx.gseis.ucla.edu/xchange/ethnic-studies-k- tyr_v _n copy.pdf issn: - (print) - (online) journal homepage: http://www.theyoungresearcher.com all articles appearing in the young researcher are licensed under cc by-nc-nd . canada license. volume | issue the young researcher recommended citation fridy, e. ( ). rural and urban dialect perceptions of kentucky high schoolers. the young researcher, ( ), - . retrieved from http://www.theyoungresearcher.com/papers/fridy.pdf rural and urban dialect perceptions of kentucky high schoolers emma fridy introduction the purpose of this research is to identify links be- tween high schooler’s perception of rural kentucky dialect and how that affects their overall perception of students living in rural kentucky. the research took place in louisville, using high schoolers as par- ticipants, for which there is no previous research. in fact, cramer has recently called for further analysis of border communities (where communities meet) as well as a need for a broader understanding of regional identity associated with language (cramer, «contest- ed southerness,» ). louisville fits that niche, as it is located on the border between the south and the midwest. a combination of focus groups and question- naires was implemented, for which there is little to no precedent in the field of sociolinguistics or pd. the question explored was whether dialect affects per- sonal perceptions, especially among kentucky high schoolers. the significance of this research is that it will provide the academic community with a greater understanding of regional identity, linguistic varia- tion, and prejudices, as well as show how a younger generation views language and identity. no research rural and urban dialect perceptions of kentucky high schoolers emma fridy this research focuses on the previously unstudied dialect perceptions of kentucky urban high schoolers as it relates to their rural peers. focus groups and questionnaires were used to collect data with a grounded theory method being employed to analyze data. students were asked their percep- tions of topics relating to regional identity, linguistic variation, and prejudices, as well as how they, as a younger generation, view language and identity. the purpose of this research was to identify trends in urban high schoolers’ perceptions of their rural peers. the research found many students held prejudices against rural students, and although they recognized the prejudices, they believed them to be true. the research further concluded that louisville high schoolers perceive louisville is a separate cultural and dialectal entity from rural kentucky, and that rural kentuckians are more likely than louisvillians to be uneducated, ignorant, and impoverished. furthermore, urban stu- dents think that rural kentuckians have an overall negative view of louisvillians, especially african americans, stemming from a lack of communication and a difference in political and social values. these findings clearly point to the fact that urban students have negative views of rural citizens, and that kentucky needs to address systematic social division within the state between urban and rural citizens, especially students. keywords: perceptual dialectology, kentucky students, rural dialect perception, urban dialect per- ception, rural stereotypes rural and urban dialect perceptions of kentucky high schoolers has been done comparing these factors, much less with this sample, partly because the field of pd is so new. that makes this research foundational in nature. this research shows that prejudices are prevalent within kentucky’s urban high schoolers, and that most urban students believe rural students to be ig- norant, uneducated, poor, and conservative. analysis also led to the conclusion that most of these prejudices were the effects of a serious lack of communication between urban and rural students. this research is in- tegral to kentucky’s current very tense political situa- tion between urban and rural areas. literature review dialectology and sociolinguistics the idea of variation within languages is not new, nor is the intersection between variation in culture and language. however, over the past hundred years, great strides have been made in research regarding how geography, socioeconomic status, and ethnicity affect perceptions of linguistic variation. for example, in the s and s, dialectology was found to be extremely useful in cohort with other linguistic tradi- tions to further the study of language as a “socially sit- uated vehicle of communication” (sankoff, ). the s also brought great change to the field as dialec- tologists began branching out from simply document- ing dialects and began researching linguistic variation “as a correlate or indicator of social variation and as a source of language change” (nelson, ). this change opened up new areas of research previously ignored such as inner-city dialects and the language of young- er speakers, as experts wanted to document language change over time (nelson, ), as well as new fields of study such as historical sociolinguistics, mainly fo- cused on western europe (agar & macdonald, ). about a decade after that revelation, a new wave of thought swept through the dialectology community: the idea that dialects are not inferior to standardized language nor are they any less structurally complex or effective for communicating. the new idea concluded that every form of speech is a dialect; it just so hap- pens that one dialect was named standard (chambers & trudgill, ). it was at this point that dialectology and sociolinguistics started to look nearly indistinguish- able from one another, and where modern sociolin- guistic research began. this concept is fundamental to this research as the students were evaluating another group of students that were ultimately deemed infe- rior along with their dialects. geography became an important factor in socio- linguistic research and the concept of a chain of mu- tual intelligibility was formed. mutual intelligibility is when people speaking similar dialects (or even lan- guage) can understand one another. essentially, ... dialects on the outer edges of the geographical area may not be mutually intelligible, but they will be linked with a chain of mutual intelligibility. at no point is there such a break that geographically ad- jacent dialects are not mutually intelligible, but the cumulative effect of the linguistic differences will be such that the greater the geographical separation, the greater the difficulty of comprehension. (chambers & trudgill, ) in modern society, with phone lines and the inter- net, regional dialects are moving closer to standard dialects (wieling, ) which can make this chain of mutual intelligibility irrelevant. however, this concept is still applicable on a dialect continuum. this con- tinuum can also be social, and within kentucky, the dialect change between urban and rural is very abrupt and sharp, which leads to a break in this continuum and a breakdown of communication. this was also illustrated in jamaica, where the low- er class spoke creole while the upper class spoke eng- lish, creating social tension (chambers & trudgill, ). in the poorer neighborhoods, creole was spoken and speaking either english or creole identified closely with a socioeconomic status. even in the u.s.a. to- day, this social factor is evident as the descendants of immigrants use their heritage language less and less in favor of english (pégram ). a continuum also exists among speakers of different ages, with more homogeneity among members of a family in older generations (hamilton & hazen, ). eva-maría suárez büdenbender argues that this is also the case with dialect in puerto rico, where a sizeable portion of the population speaks dominican spanish. major- ity speakers often cite dialect as the principal method of identifying dominican immigrants, and büden- bender’s study found that negative stereotypes such as poverty and illiteracy were associated with a dialect, rural and urban dialect perceptions of kentucky high schoolers with more weight being placed on heavier accents (büdenbender, ). accents are only a part of dialect, but for many people, it is the most visible and easi- est identifying trait of different dialects. another clear connection between perceived socioeconomic status and language is the fresa phenomenon on the us/ mexico border. the fresa phenomenon is made up of young people living in mexico but near the us border who are incorporating aspects of both american and mexican culture into their everyday lives in order to be perceived as upper class. this is opposed to their peers, who primarily identify with mexican culture. in this sense, speaking english is seen as a luxury for the upper class (holguín, ). on top of that, it has been found that in pre-revolutionary cuba, english anglicisms had a direct correlation to the upper-class population—in other words, the rich people of cuba were mixing english into their spanish more than lower-class people (sánchez & antonio, ). altogether, dialectology and sociolinguistics are far-reaching fields that deal with a number of complex variables, but the research in this paper will primarily focus on geographic distribution and socioeconomic status in relation to linguistic variation. within ken- tucky, there is a broken social continuum as well as se- verely different lifestyles between urban and rural stu- dents that stems from a difference in socioeconomic class and social views. this research explores how all of these factors work together to influence the dialect perception of kentucky high schoolers. perceptual dialectology (pd) penelope eckert argues that there have been three major waves so far in terms of sociolinguistic research. these waves helped provide different levels of mean- ing to sociolinguistic variables (eckert, ). however, all three waves occurred before the field of pd had taken off. for the purposes of this research, pd is de- fined as “a branch of folk linguistics that attempts to redress the balance somewhat focusing on what non- linguists think, say, and understand about language and linguistic variation” (cramer & montgomery, ). even today, pd is a relatively new and emerging field. it is clear that extensive research has been done to show that geography and socioeconomic status play an important role in language variation, and that lan- guage variation is linked to culture and society. how- ever, because of the delayed interest in pd, a large gap in knowledge exists when it comes to how geography and cultural aspects affect people’s perceptions of lin- guistic variation. another key factor in this discussion is identity, be- cause how people perceive the language of others and of themselves often has to do with individual iden- tity and group identity (büdenbender, ; cramer, “perceptions of appalachian english,” - ). at one point, coupland wrote an article in direct opposition to trudgill’s statement “that identity is ‘irrelevant’ as a factor in his area of interest”, arguing that “to rule out all issues of identity, particularly in circumstances of demographic movement and cultural mixing, seems unnecessarily restrictive” ( ). identity can even come into play in situations like interviews, where men were found to respond differently (more politely) to women interviewers than other women partici- pants were, and the phenomenon was so widespread in the south that is was named the rutledge effect (bailey & tillery, ). one study went even so far as to assert its findings as “compelling evidence of such indissoluble bonds that link language and identity” (brown, ). haller & müller concluded that identity is directly related to attitudes, and therefore presum- ably to actions. they suggested further research on identity ( ), which this paper will indirectly be deal- ing with as associated with the identities of the groups of people being sampled. an expert in the field, jennifer cramer, has done extensive research specifically on the perception of speech within kentucky, mainly focusing on lou- isvillians’ perspective of appalachian and southern speech. she has found that louisvillians routinely identity with the perceived “best parts” of appalachian speech only (cramer, “perceptions of appalachian english,” ). louisvillians also consider appalachian speakers different from themselves, with an unedu- cated and incorrect dialect, although the appalachian dialect is considered to be relatively pleasant. louis- villians were also extremely accurate when denoting where appalachia was, specifically within kentucky. louisvillians are aware of the negative image america has of appalachia and seek to separate from that im- age (cramer, “perceptions of appalachian english,” ). it has also been found that mental dialect maps are extremely important for people to determine where their community lies, and where “other” starts rural and urban dialect perceptions of kentucky high schoolers (iannàccaro & dell’aquila, ). these sources are significant to this research because dialect maps have already been created and analyzed, and clearly there is a divide between rural kentucky and urban kentucky. methods this research builds off of previous research in the perceptual dialectology field. it does so by looking at a new category of participants: high schoolers. it also does so by moving past dialect maps and onto focus group analysis. a grounded theory phenomenologi- cal approach was used to collect primarily qualitative, and some demographic, data from focus groups. data were analyzed using the grounded theory technique and the software maxqda in order to discern the overall perceptions of kentucky high schoolers. because the topic of perceptual dialectology (pd) is not one generally discussed by high schoolers, focus groups were used to facilitate meaningful conversa- tion (agar and macdonald ). focus groups were also chosen because the topic discussed related to ex- periences and attitudes, which are well suited to focus groups (kitzinger ). two focus groups were conducted at an urban school in kentucky. a phenomenological method re- volves around deep analysis of a small sample size—in this case, ten students. a phenomenological approach also meant that questions could entirely be formulated beforehand because no assumptions about the results could be made. the focus groups were a loose format, allowing the students to talk about whatever came up, with the researcher simply guiding the discussion to- ward the research question. for full focus group tran- scriptions, see appendix b and appendix c. focus groups were audio-recorded, each student was assigned a number before transcription for pur- poses of anonymity, and consent forms were obtained. see appendix a for the consent form model. the sample was convenient, with a random sample being infeasible for high school participants, as they had to volunteer for the focus group during their study hall. the school was chosen because it was neither privileged or underprivileged and demographically diverse, with males and females being almost equally represented, and minority students representing % of the student population. questionnaires were also used because self-reporting has been found to be extremely accurate when talking about lack of bias, which is called for by a grounded theory phenom- enological method (bailey & tillery, ). question- naires were used to obtain personal and demographic information, as well as level of linguistic education, which was expected to be zero. this was one of the only assumptions made because grounded theory calls for unbiased data. however, it was necessary. in the field of pd, participants usually have no linguistic education. because the topic of pd is extremely nu- anced and complex, a phenomenological approach was necessary in order to reduce bias and to paint a full picture of students’ attitudes and perceptions. de- spite some literature fundamentally disagreeing with grounded theory (gt) methods (thomas & james, ), mainstream consensus holds that gt is a re- spectable method if conducted properly, and due to the foundational structure of this research—no other research on this topic has been conducted surround- ing high schoolers—finding a theory was especially relevant. in order to find a theory, the focus groups were analyzed using the gt method of coding line by line before a process of memoing began that was recursive and cyclical in nature. through this process, codes were organized into concepts and later categories in order to form a final theory. the purpose of this re- search was to assess perception and attitudes based on social factors. the open format of focus groups helped stimulate an environment for sharing attitudes and perceptions, and the demographically diverse stu- dents addressed social factors. as shown by the table below, the convenient sample was % white and % female, while kentucky is % female and % white. these differences are a limitation of a convenient sam- ple and should be taken into account. however, both sexes and multiple races were represented. see table i for a full breakdown of demographics. table i focus group demographics male female black white focus group focus group total rural and urban dialect perceptions of kentucky high schoolers questionnaires helped to collect data students may not have wanted to share with the group and/or did not make sense to discuss (demographics, family history, etc.). students had previously been assigned numbers and those were connected to questionnaires, which enabled the coding process to be anonymous while still knowing which student was which in the focus group and questionnaire. the questions on the questionnaire were piloted as focus group questions but were found to be awkward in a group and were moved to the questionnaire before the actual research was conducted. by using a qualitative phenomeno- logical grounded theory method, the most substan- tive information was gathered as efficiently as pos- sible, and the analysis of data was as significant as it could have been. results & discussion perception of rural dialect students agreed across the board that the dialect of rural kentucky was extremely different from that of louisville. the perception of rural dialect centered around the fact that rural kentuckians have a distinc- tive accent, with one student stating that, “if you go outside of louisville, the language that you hear, it gets more countryish.” rural dialect was described as being less proper, less formal, and associated with christianity and conservative political doctrine. one student summed it up by saying, “i think of confeder- ate flags, republican, conservative.” this finding sup- ports cramer’s research findings that louisville iden- tifies as separate from the rest of the state of kentucky (cramer, “perceptions of appalachian english,” ). one recurring theme within focus groups was that students acknowledged their prejudices were not founded in anything besides stereotypes and came to the conclusion that dialect doesn’t define a person. one student related that “it has a prejudice to it, and it’s hard to hear that, it’s hard to hear someone and not have prejudice,” while students across the board could not agree whether a person’s accent defined them. the two general themes were that “your accent or anything shouldn’t define who you are … it’s an im- pression of who you are, and it doesn’t define you, but it’s part of who you are,” juxtaposed with “it shouldn’t define you, but i think it does define you.” this ex- pands with brown’s theory that language and identity are inseparable, inextricably linked (brown, ). however, students felt that many of the prejudices were true. for example, the overwhelming consensus was that rural people are less educated and that their accent identifies them as such. however, students did admit that after they thought about it, rural people still seemed less educated, but students were unsure if they actually were less educated. furthermore, stu- dents said that partially due to lack of education and also from lack of opportunity, rural people are more likely to live in poverty. students also expressed that on top of lack of education, “people with more strong country accents, they are more ignorant,” as they have not traveled or experienced the outside world. this revelation specifically helped to answer the research question as it was made clear that stereotypes of peo- ple are directly linked to their respective dialects. another large theme that came up repeatedly in fo- cus groups was that louisville’s dialect is completely separate from that of rural kentucky. students re- ferred to this dialect as “city,” and almost all students identified with the city dialect rather than with the rural. however, some students did identify with some parts of the rural dialects. a large part of this, accord- ing to students, is that everyone gets their dialect from their family, or the people they grew up around. one student, echoing the entire focus group said, “family. i feel like all my stuff i be saying, see … i be, come from my family. i pick up stuff, when you’re young, when you’re little, that’s how you learn how to talk, that’s how you learn how to walk.” this particular student picked up the phrase “i be” from her family. for the students with parents or family from a more rural or southern area, having more rural colloquialisms was not uncommon, as some students reported “slipping into accents,” while the students with families from louisville almost all completely identified with the city accent. in fact, across all focus groups, students brought up the idea that some people in louisville exaggerated or even faked country accents, exempli- fying how out of place country accents are in louis- ville. however, most students were quick to point out that while country accents are rare in louisville, you do encounter them when traveling around kentucky and other parts of the south, and as such, students rural and urban dialect perceptions of kentucky high schoolers expressed familiarity with the rural dialects. this sup- ports general findings of kentucky dialects, and the fact that kentucky is situated on a border between the midwest and the south plays a large role in the unique situation of the high schoolers. one subset of students that had radically different views of rural peoples were the african american stu- dents, who expressed fear surrounding the attitudes of rural people towards different races and ethnicities. the african american students stereotyped those ru- ral people as conservative and often racist. one of the first students to speak brought up that “nobody’s blind to what’s really going on in the world, let’s be real. ev- erybody knows what’s going on with the whole black lives matter, all lives matter, on and on.” later during the discussion of this topic, students were asked if they felt more unsafe around people with deeper country accents, and every african american student said yes. students perceived rural kentuckians as more likely to target a black person with hate as opposed to an urban person, with one student speculating this was “because they’re not surrounded as much by as many black people.” another common sentiment among african american students, although it was also present in white students, was the need to adapt their language, a phenomenon known as codeswitching. african american students cited using less slang, slurring few- er words, and trying to sound more formal, just to be safe around people with country accents. in contrast, white students reported doing the same things to their dialect, but for the purpose of improving prospects at job interviews or during the college application pro- cesses. it has been previously established that stan- dard english is required for most job opportunities and college interviews (godley & escher, )(whit- ney, ), and that “...many african american children are not proficient enough in standard english to fa- cilitate academic success and career mobility” (taylor, ). so the fact that african american students did not address codeswitching in that context, and instead exclusively in the context of avoiding hatred certainly speaks to how dire their perceived need to codeswitch is around rural people. this finding expanded on the relationship between dialect and personal perception. clearly, african american students have prejudices against white rural people, and they simply use dialect to identify those people. black students also expressed resentment at be- ing labeled “ghetto, ”ratchet,” or ”thuggish.” these students felt like people with country accents were more likely to harm them, physically or verbally. not surprisingly, the students who felt that rural people often label them negatively based on their accent con- sistently argued within their focus group that dialect should not define a person, particularly the intelli- gence level of a person. as one student put it, “you could still be smart, you could still be anything.” how- ever, the students that expressed resentment at being labeled negatively based on their accent agreed that people with country accents are less educated, poorer, and more ignorant. overall, students expressed negative perceptions of rural students, including that rural students are less educated, poorer, and more likely to be racist. stu- dents identified rural kentuckians based on their ac- cent, and students separated louisville from the rest of kentucky in terms of cultural aspects. this affirms büdenbender’s theory that groups of people have neg- ative stereotypes and are identified by their dialect as opposed to people simply disliking dialects because of the way that it sounds ( ). essentially, the students affirmed that they had negative views of rural dialects and rural people. perception of rural students’ attitudes the last section of each discussion was dedicated to how students thought rural students perceived them. unsurprisingly, all students across all focus groups agreed that rural people do not like louisvillians, and that general rural attitudes towards urban centers are negative. one student even went as far as to say “i know people in other parts of kentucky hate louis- ville”. the reasons range from the fact that louisvil- lians don’t like the outdoors, to the fact that louisville is significantly more democratic/liberal than the rest of the state. technology was also brought up, with some students arguing that rural kentuckians do not like louisville because we use new technology. how- ever, all of these factors were combined into a concept dealing with a lack of understanding and communica- tion. students cited rural kentuckians as thinking “that since we’re from the city, we don’t understand them,” and that rural kentuckians are not likely to visit cities rural and urban dialect perceptions of kentucky high schoolers often, being more confined to their towns than urban students. coupled alongside these conclusions was the concept that urban students perceive rural peoples as generally ignorant, in the same vein as the percep- tion of lack of education previously discussed. one student stated, “i feel that people that don’t want to educate themselves or maybe are a bit more ignorant” in reference to rural people, and another student af- firmed that “people with more strong country accents, they are more ignorant.” the idea that rural people looked down upon af- rican americans was again brought up during this section of the focus groups. the fact that louisville is significantly more democratic than the rest of ken- tucky was mentioned, along with the fact that african americans overwhelmingly vote democratic. howev- er, it was concluded that the largest factor influencing this perception was ignorance, as urban students be- lieved rural people to be ignorant of social problems such as racism, resulting in the perception that rural people are more likely to be hateful towards african americans. overall, students perceived rural kentuckians as having a negative perception of urban kentuckians, primarily due to social and political values, as well as the perceived difference in lifestyles. theory as perceived by high schoolers in louisville, ken- tucky, louisville is a separate cultural and dialectal entity from rural kentucky and rural kentuckians are more likely than louisvillians to be uneducated, igno- rant, and impoverished. furthermore, urban students think that rural kentuckians have an overall negative view of louisvillians, especially african americans, stemming from a lack of communication and a differ- ence in political and social values. limitations and implications while this research presents new information, it is important to note that with only ten participants across two focus groups, these results can not be gen- eralized to the whole population, or even that of the south. this research pertains only to kentucky, spe- cifically to the regional perspective of louisville high schoolers. while this research is unique and therefore draws significant conclusions, more focus groups would need to be conducted in order to generalize the theory presented. however, this does not discount the conclusions drawn, as there was enough data to reach a point of saturation. a convenient sample was not ideal, as this may have biased the data in favor of those who are more comfortable with or care more about dialect percep- tion and language. however, the themes represented in this sample are likely to be present in populations without said bias, as even though the general public is not aware of the study of dialect perception, every person has biases, however explicit or implicit, that would allow them to participate in focus groups simi- lar to the ones in this project. the sample was taken entirely from louisville, and kentucky does have two major cities: louisville and lexington. while these cities are culturally and politi- cally similar, it is important to note that the findings of this research will by nature be more applicable to louisville than lexington. furthermore, as the re- searcher was also from louisville, it is possible that only louisville-specific topics were discussed un- knowingly. conducting further research in lexington would be extremely useful to support the findings of this research. though this study had some limitations, the data generated is still valuable in understanding the unique factors that influence dialect perception among ken- tucky high schoolers. the data represented a founda- tional study in kentucky student perceptual dialectol- ogy—no previous research has evaluated high school students’ perceptions of the issue. understanding these perspectives is critically important as the ten- sions between rural and urban america become more prevalent, and in light of the fact that today’s students, will eventually be directing and voting for policy. if effective policies regarding state and local government in kentucky are to be developed, students’ perspec- tives must be understood. this research provides a base upon which to further explore students’ dialect perception through additional focus groups and tar- geted questionnaires. rural and urban dialect perceptions of kentucky high schoolers future directions to allow for generalization of this theory to all ken- tucky students, a future study will involve additional focus groups across more urban schools, especially in lexington, and branch out into more rural parts of the state to gather the perceptions of rural students. tar- geting future focus group questions to major themes that arose from this research and that will arise in fur- ther studies will allow the researcher to focus on the more important concepts and categories. eventually, a theory will be generalized to all kentucky students, and the state government, local governments, schools, and businesses, will be able to use this information to better accommodate dialects, as well as work to dispel some of the untrue prejudices against rural or urban students. hopefully, this will help address the under- lying problems surrounding the stigma of a rural or urban dialect. conclusions the importance of this theory is seen in its applica- tion to current policy as well as to the previous per- ceptual dialectology research. the cultural divide is mainstream knowledge in kentucky, with local news station wfpl writing a story entitled “‘louisville, not kentucky: dissecting the state’s urban-rural divide.” the article addresses the political split between rural and urban kentucky, but concludes with the state- ment that louisville/lexington and the rest of ken- tucky have a “shared future,” evident by the fact that louisville/lexington rely on rural areas for fresh food and energy, while rural kentucky depends on urban centers for economic activity. this “shared future” is the exact reason why the legislature of kentucky, and of course, the citizens should come together to make policies that are in everyone’s best interest. as evidenced by the recent teacher sick-outs within public school districts, this has not happened of late. in as well as , kentucky teachers, particu- larly urban teachers, have staged sick-outs, in which a large number of teachers call in as sick, and school is forced to cancel for lack of substitute teachers. from jan , to march , , teachers had six sick- outs, and the courier-journal, a local news source, reports that the reason for these sick-outs was to pro- test anti-education legislation in the republican-con- trolled kentucky legislature. usa today also reported that the state requested all the names of the teachers that participated in the sick-outs, escalating the al- ready tense situation. the governor of ky, who has the support of rural ky, has rallied against the teacher sick-outs, angering many urban teachers. it is clear that the research presented here is part of a larger social trend that sees louisville and lex- ington as separate from the rest of kentucky, and that political and social tensions are high in the state right now. seeing as the students of kentucky are the most affected by kentucky’s education system, along with the fact that kentucky’s youth will one day be making decisions as legislative representatives or even teach- ers, it is clear that kentucky as a whole would benefit from the knowledge of its cultural and social divides. hence, the findings of this research can be directly ap- plied to the current situation within the state in order to direct policy and encourage the redressment of un- true or unfounded prejudices or assumptions regard- ing the rural and urban populations of kentucky. works cited agar, michael, and james macdonald. “focus groups and ethnography.” human organization, vol. , no. , , pp. – . jstor, jstor, www.jstor.org/ stable/ . bailey, guy, and jan tillery. “the rutledge effect: the impact of interviewers on survey results in linguistics.” american speech, vol. , no. , , pp. – . jstor, jstor, www.jstor.org/stable/ . brown, tony. “key indicators of language impact on identity formation in belarus.” russian language journal / Русский Язык, vol. , , pp. – . jstor, jstor, www.jstor.org/stable/ . büdenbender, eva-maría suárez. “‘te conozco, bacalao’: investigating the influence of social stereotypes on linguistic attitudes.” hispania, vol. , no. , , pp. – . jstor, jstor, www.jstor.org/stable/ . chambers, j. k, and peter trudgill. dialectology. nd ed., cambridge university press, . cramer, jennifer, and chris montgomery. “cityscapes and perceptual dialectology: global perspectives on non-linguists’ knowledge of the dialect landscape.” . mouton de gruyter. rural and urban dialect perceptions of kentucky high schoolers cramer, jennifer. contested southerness : the linguistic production and perception of identities in the borderlands. duke university press, . cramer, jennifer. “perceptions of appalachian english in kentucky.” journal of appalachian studies, vol. , no. , spring , pp. – . ebscohost, search.ebscohost. com/login.aspx?direct=trueanddb=a handan= andsite=ehost-live. eckert, penelope. “three waves of variation study: the emergence of meaning in the study of sociolinguistic variation.” annual review of anthropology, vol. , , pp. – ., www.jstor.org/stable/ . francis, w. nelson. dialectology: an introduction. longman, . godley, amanda, and allison escher. “bidialectal african american adolescents’ beliefs about spoken language expectations in english classrooms.” journal of adolescent & adult literacy, vol. , no. , , pp. – . jstor, jstor, www.jstor.org/stable/ . haller, max, and bernadette müller. “characteristics of personality and identity in population surveys: approaches for operationalizing and localizing variables to explain life satisfaction.” bms: bulletin of sociological methodology / bulletin de méthodologie sociologique, no. , , pp. – . jstor, jstor, www.jstor.org/stable/ . hamilton, sarah, and kirk hazen. “dialect research in appalachia: a family case study.” west virginia history, vol. , no. , , pp. – . jstor, jstor, www.jstor. org/stable/ . holguín mendoza, claudia. “sociolinguistic capital and fresa identity formations on the u.s.-mexico border.” frontera norte, vol. , no. , july , pp. – . ebscohost, doi: . /rfn.v i . . iannàccaro, gabriele, and vittorio dell’aquila. “mapping languages from inside: notes on perceptual dialectology.” social and cultural geography, vol. , no. , sept. , pp. – . ebscohost, doi: . / . kitzinger, jenny. “introducing focus groups.” bmj: british medical journal, vol. , no. , , pp. – . jstor, jstor, www.jstor.org/stable/ . mclaren, mandy. “teachers fear retribution after kentucky education chief seeks names of those staging ‘sickouts’.” usa today, gannett satellite information network, mar. , www.usatoday.com/story/news/ education/ / / /teacher-strike-sickout-kentucky- jcps-wayne-lewis-names-list/ /. pégram, scooter. “navigating behind the shadows of steel: the convergence and divergence of identity and language among latino youth in northwest indiana.” journal of the indiana academy of the social sciences, vol. , no. , sept. , pp. – . ebscohost, search. ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=trueandauthtype =ip,uid,cpid,urlandcustid=s anddb=a hand an= . ryan, jacob. “‘louisville, not kentucky:’ dissecting the state’s urban-rural divide.” . wfpl news louisville, july , wfpl.org/louisville-not-kentucky-dissecting- commonwealths-urban-rural-divide/. sánchez, fajardo, and josé antonio. “anglicisms and calques in upper social class in pre-revolutionary cuba ( - ): a sociolinguistic analysis.” international journal of english studies, vol. , no. , jan. , pp. – . ebscohost, search.ebscohost.com/ login.aspx?direct=trueandauthtype=ip,uid,cpid,urlandc ustid=s anddb=a handan= . sankoff, gillian. “dialectology.” annual review of anthropology, vol. , , pp. – . jstor, jstor, www.jstor.org/stable/ . taylor, orlando l. “ebonics and educational policy: some issues for the next millennium.” the journal of negro education, vol. , no. , , pp. – . jstor, jstor, www.jstor.org/stable/ . thomas, gary, and david james. “reinventing grounded theory: some questions about theory, ground and discovery.” british educational research journal, vol. , no. , , pp. – . jstor, jstor, www.jstor.org/ stable/ . whitney, jessica. “five easy pieces: steps toward integrating aave into the classroom.” the english journal, vol. , no. , , pp. – . jstor, jstor, www.jstor.org/ stable/ . wieling, martijn, et al. “quantitative social dialectology: explaining linguistic variation geographically and socially.” plos one, vol. , no. , sept. , pp. – . ebscohost, doi: . /journal.pone. . rural and urban dialect perceptions of kentucky high schoolers appendix a dialect perception consent form you are being asked to take part in a research study of how high school students perceive language. you are being asked to take part because you are a high schooler at one of the schools participating in this study. please read this form carefully and ask any questions you may have before agreeing to take part in the study. what the study is about: the purpose of this study is to learn about the relationship between geographic distribution factors and dialect perception. you must be a student from a chosen school to participate. what we will ask you to do: if you agree to be in this study, we will ask you to take part in a focus group. the focus group will include questions about your dialect (speech), your upbringing (cultural con- text), your perceptions of how other groups of people speak, where you live (rural v urban), language stereo- types you my have, and how much formal education you’ve had dealing with language. the focus group will take about one hour to complete. the focus group session will be recorded. i will also ask you to com- plete a questionnaire after the focus group which will take approximately minutes. the questionnaire will cover demographics as well as final questions regard- ing your education and family. risks and benefits: there is the risk that you may find some of the questions about your personal life and beliefs to be sensitive. there are no benefits to you. this study simply wishes to learn more about the speech perceptions and patterns of high school students. compensation: none your answers will be confidential. the records of this study will be kept private. in any sort of report we make public we will not include any information that will make it possible to identify you. research re- cords will be kept in a locked file; only the researchers will have access to the records. if the focus group is tape-recorded, it will destroyed after it has been tran- scribed, which is anticipate to be within two months of its taping. taking part is voluntary: taking part in this study is completely voluntary. you may skip any questions that you do not want to answer. if you decide not to take part or to skip some of the questions, it will have no effect. if you decide to take part, you are free to withdraw at any time. if you have questions: the researcher conduct- ing this study is emma fridy, and she is a student at dupont manual hs. please ask any questions you at egfridy@gmail.com or at - - - . statement of consent: i have read the above infor- mation, and have received answers to any questions i asked. i consent to take part in the study. your guardian’s signature ___________________ ________________ date ________________________ your guardian’s name (printed) _____________ __________________________________________ _____ in addition to agreeing to participate, i also consent to having the focus group tape-recorded. your guardian’s signature ___________________ ________________ date _________________________ signature of person obtaining consent ______________________________ date _____________________ printed name of person obtaining con- sent ______________________________ date _____________________ this consent form will be kept by the researcher for at least three years beyond the end of the study. rural and urban dialect perceptions of kentucky high schoolers the contagion effects of repeated activation in social networks t p s a b c d a a a k i t c t c d c a c p o t t p o w t i h a d h a d s h social networks ( ) – contents lists available at sciencedirect social networks j o u r n a l h o m e p a g e : w w w . e l s e v i e r . c o m / l o c a t e / s o c n e t he contagion effects of repeated activation in social networks ablo piedrahita a,∗, javier borge-holthoefer b, yamir moreno a,c, andra gonzález-bailón d,∗ institute for biocomputation and physics of complex systems and department of theoretical physics, university of zaragoza, spain internet interdisciplinary institute (in ), open university of catalonia, spain institute for scientific interchange, isi foundation, turin, italy annenberg school for communication, university of pennsylvania, usa r t i c l e i n f o rticle history: vailable online december eywords: nterdependence a b s t r a c t demonstrations, protests, riots, and shifts in public opinion respond to the coordinating potential of communication networks. digital technologies have turned interpersonal networks into massive, perva- sive structures that constantly pulsate with information. here, we propose a model that aims to analyze the contagion dynamics that emerge in networks when repeated activation is allowed, that is, when actors can engage recurrently in a collective effort. we analyze how the structure of communication net- emporal dynamics oordination hresholds ritical mass iffusion ollective action gent-based simulation works impacts on the ability to coordinate actors, and we identify the conditions under which large-scale coordination is more likely to emerge. © the authors. published by elsevier b.v. this is an open access article under the cc by-nc-nd license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . /). . introduction recent years have seen the emergence of massive events oordinated through large, decentralized networks. these include olitical protests and mobilizations like the occupy movement f (conover et al., ; gonzález-bailón and wang, ), he gezi park demonstrations of (barberá et al., ), or he growth of the #blacklivesmatter campaign during the rotests in ferguson (freelon et al., ). these collective events ffer examples of the coordinating potential of communication net- orks − which, increasingly, emerge through the use of online echnologies. this paper pays attention to the coordination dynam- cs that allow a small movement, a new campaign, or an unknown ashtag to rise to prominence. we present a formal model that llows us to answer the following question: how do coordination ynamics unfold to make individual actions (e.g. using an emerging ashtag, endorsing a mobilization) converge over time? our model ims to disentangle the mechanisms that drive the emergence of ecentralized, large-scale coordination. the goal is to identify the ∗ corresponding authors. e-mail addresses: ppiedrahita@gmail.com (p. piedrahita), gonzalezbailon@asc.upenn.edu (s. gonzález-bailón). ttps://doi.org/ . /j.socnet. . . - /© the authors. published by elsevier b.v. this is an open access article /). conditions under which coordination is more likely to arise from networks that are constantly pulsating with information. threshold models have become the standard for how we think about interdependence and the collective effects of social influence (granovetter, ; granovetter and soong, ; schelling, ). as originally formulated, the activation of individual thresholds responds to global information: the group of reference is assumed to be the same for all actors. in later developments of the basic model, networks were introduced to add local variance to social influence: the group of reference was now determined by connec- tivity in the network, which changed from actor to actor (valente, ; watts, ). these different variations of the threshold model share two important elements: first, activation is modelled as a step function that goes from to when thresholds are reached; and second, thresholds can only be reached once, that is, activation is assumed to be a one-off event. our model aims to relax these assumptions and allow actors to repeatedly activate as a function of the dynamics unfolding in the rest of the network. we argue that this modification aligns our model of contagion more closely with what is observed in many empirical networks − in particular, with the communication dynamics observed in online networks and the temporal autocorrelation that results from those dynamics. online campaigns are an important manifestation of this type of repeated activation, and they offer a good example of what we under the cc by-nc-nd license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . https://doi.org/ . /j.socnet. . . http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/ http://www.elsevier.com/locate/socnet http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /j.socnet. . . &domain=pdf http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / mailto:ppiedrahita@gmail.com mailto:sgonzalezbailon@asc.upenn.edu https://doi.org/ . /j.socnet. . . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / l netw m p b t w m t i m h a w h m t i w o a i h v a a e i c p c m l n e t c m w w a g a r t a w t o t d i m t d e g h w d i p. piedrahita et al. / socia ean by “coordination”: a form of organizational effort to attract ublic attention or direct mobilization logistics on the ground. the lack lives matter movement, for instance, gained traction when he hashtag was first adopted in social media in , which fueled hat has been labeled as “an internet-driven civil rights move- ent” (eligon, , see also day, ). there is agreement that he movement consolidated with its first peaceful demonstrations n ferguson in (bosman and fitzsimmons, ); but this ove “from hashtag to the streets” stands as a new model for ow “liberations groups in the twenty-first century can organize n effective freedom rights campaign” (ruffin, ). online net- orks were central to the coordination efforts of this campaign; ere, we aim to illuminate the mechanisms that explain why. in the context of empirical examples like the black lives matter ovement, activation involves repeatedly using a specific hashtag o build momentum up to the point when large-scale coordination s achieved − i.e., the hashtag starts receiving global recognition, hich can then be used to shape the public agenda or to help rganize further mobilization efforts. the goal of our model is to bstract this element of repeated activation and build an analyt- cal framework around it to answer three interrelated questions: ow does the structure of interdependence, the variance in indi- idual propensities to activate, and the strength of social influence ffect contagion and the emergence of large-scale coordination? s with many analytical models, ours is a simplification of what is ssentially a very complex reality. but it offers, we think, important nsights into the counter-intuitive effects of networks in allowing oordination to emerge. the rest of the paper proceeds as follows. first, we consider rior work analyzing coordination in networks, and the analytical hoices made when modelling social influence. we introduce our odel as a continuation of threshold models, well suited to ana- yze dynamics of adoption (e.g. joining a political movement) but ot well equipped to analyze the dynamics of coordination that merge amongst actors that are already part of a movement. we hen describe our model in detail, highlighting the main differences ompared to previous approaches and unpacking our assumed echanisms. in sections five and six we present our findings, which e organize around two main questions: how do changes in net- ork topology affect the emergence of coordination under different ssumptions of social influence? and how does individual hetero- eneity impact coordination dynamics? we close the paper with discussion of our findings, especially as they relate to previous esearch on contagion in networks. . coordination as a two-step selection process we can think of coordination dynamics as a two-step selec- ion process: in the first stage, actors decide if they want to join movement; in the second stage, they coordinate their actions ith those who also opted in. most threshold models refer to he first stage, and they focus on the cascading effects of one- ff activations − the decision, that is, to join a collective effort. hese models belong to the more general theoretical tradition of iffusion research, which looks at how ideas or behavior spread n social systems (rogers, ; valente, ). diversity in the otivation to adopt a behavior is modelled as a distribution of hresholds; what prior research shows is that the shape of this istribution is one of the key elements explaining the cascading ffects of individual activations (watts and dodds, ). conta- ion dynamics, however, also depend on the structure of ties and ow that structure encourages or hinders spreading dynamics. net- orks shape coordination dynamics by creating different centrality istributions, which allow specific individuals to be more or less nfluential (freeman, ); and by opening more or less structural orks ( ) – holes (burt, ; also girvan and newman, ), which constrain opportunities for chain reactions to the extent that they delimit the routes that cascades can follow (watts, ). networks also delimit the size and the composition of the groups of reference sur- rounding a given actor and, therefore, the number of social signals each actor receives (centola and macy, ; valente, ). most threshold models assume that activation happens only once and that, once activated, the change of state (from inactive to active) is permanent. this is the reason why threshold models are appropriate to capture the first stage of coordination dynam- ics − for instance, the decision to join a movement or start using a particular hashtag. the model we propose here, on the other hand, aims to capture dynamics of activation within adoption, that is, coordination amongst actors who already opted in and therefore have an interest in facilitating organizational efforts. we have theoretical and empirical reasons to allow repeated activation to be the driving force of contagion dynamics. the empir- ical reason is that most instances of diffusion do not involve a single activation but many activations building up momentum in time. before a hashtag becomes a trending topic, a period of buzz is first required; prior to a protest day, calls announcing the mobiliza- tion are distributed in waves. actors decide whether they want to engage in an online conversation or take part in a protest. this is what threshold models can capture. what threshold models are not devised to capture is the period of information exchange that fol- lows the act of joining a collective effort. during this period, social influence trickles intermittently as a function of the context that actors inhabit − that is, as a function of activity in the local net- works to which they are exposed; and this context is not stationary: it changes, sometimes drastically, over time. our model aims to capture this temporal dimension. we also have a theoretical reason to relax the assumption of sin- gle activation. the intermittent dripping of information that social networks facilitate often leads to bursts of activity (vazquez et al., ), as when news suddenly become trending topics (lehmann et al., ; wu and huberman, ). coordination dynamics underlie these bursts of activity: sudden peaks in communication require the adjustment of individual actions, that is, the align- ment of many individual decisions so that everybody uses the same trending hashtag or talks about the same news at the same time. these dynamics of coordination, and how they lead to collec- tive outcomes like swift information cascades, trending topics, or viral hashtags, are overseen if activation is modelled as a perma- nent change of state − that is, if we only focus on the first stage of what is, in fact, a two-step process. our model presumes that, once in the second stage, individual propensities to activate will be influenced by the network and the signals it transmits, which in turn results from how other actors are influenced and react to that influence over time. these dynamics aim to resemble more closely the dynamics observed in the context of large-scale mobilizations, where actors repeatedly engage in activities like spreading calls for action or increasing the salience of political hashtags (barberá et al., ; borge-holthoefer et al., ; budak and watts, ; conover et al., ; jackson and foucault welles, ). individual decisions to contribute to the flow of information, and the deci- sions of those connected to a focal actor, co-evolve over time; our analytical approach models that co-evolution explicitly. as previous models, our model assumes that exposure to infor- mation is the driving force underlying contagion. what makes our model different from previous models is that failure to trigger a chain reaction depends not only on the distribution of thresholds or the impact of network structure on activation dynamics; it also depends on whether the network facilitates coordination, that is, an alignment of actions in time − which is an important organiza- tional goal for social movements that want to gain public visibility in social media or use online networks to manage mobilization p. piedrahita et al. / social networks ( ) – fig. . schematic representation of the social influence model with recurrent acti- vation. the model, adapted from (mirollo and strogatz, ) assumes that actors (i.e. the nodes in the network) reach their activation threshold at different speeds. the speed of activation is a function of two parameters: ω, which determines how quickly the actor reaches the threshold zone (i.e. it defines the concavity of the curve that maps progression towards activation); and ε, or the strength of the signal received from the neighbors in the network when they activate, a pulse that shifts the state of the focal actor closer towards the threshold (the timing of which varies over time). the l a ε l m l d d i m o t t o a a t c e t i b t p m w a b c u f m o a t i o t e i fig. . the impact of the parameter ω on the activation buildup. when the parameter ω is , the progression of actors towards their activation thresh- old (x = ) grows linearly with time; as the parameter ω increases, actors reach their ower panels in the figure illustrate how actor i advances towards activation. when node activates, as node i does in t , she shifts the state of her neighbors with the signal and resets her state back to the beginning of her phase. ogistics in real time. by focusing on coordination dynamics, our odel is in a better position to explain why, more often than not, arge-scale contagion fails to take off. if the network is not con- ucive to coordination (i.e. if the timing of individual activations o not align over time), contagion ends up trapped in local activ- ty clusters and, therefore, fails to synchronize the actions of the ajority. . model and mechanisms our model of contagion relaxes the assumption that actors can nly transition from an inactive to an active state. we also allow he effects of each activation to vary over time to the extent that hey coevolve with the contagion dynamics taking place in the rest f the network. these modelling choices make sense if we think bout how online networks facilitate contagion dynamics: users re constantly exposed to signals that might shift their inclination o act − for instance, send messages directing attention to spe- ific issues (e.g. #occupy, #gezi, #ferguson, etc). only when a large nough number of users converge in their attention to these issues, heir actions become globally visible − i.e. mass media starts pay- ng attention. this type of coordination not only affects trending uzz; it actually has the potential to shape the public agenda in he same way than more traditional social movements would (e.g., etersen-smith, ). the difference is that coordination in social edia happens spontaneously, from the bottom-up. to bring these empirical intuitions into a tractable framework, e follow classic models of synchronized coordination (mirollo nd strogatz, ; piedrahita et al., ). these models have een used extensively to study coordination dynamics in biologi- al and physical settings (strogatz, ), but they have never been sed, to the best of our knowledge, to illuminate dynamics relevant or the study of social mobilization, or to extend classic threshold odels and their application to sociological questions. like thresh- ld models, our model assumes that the motivational structure of ctors can be defined by a limit that, when reached, triggers activa- ion; unlike threshold models, we split the motivation to activate nto two components: a social component, which depends on what ther actors are doing; and an individual component, which defines he intrinsic propensity of actors to activate regardless of what oth- rs are doing. we model this intrinsic component as a function that ncreases monotonically over time within the range [ , ] until the activation zone faster, i.e. a signal received from their neighbors will tip their sate over the threshold, which means they will send a signal as well (thus helping other actors to also get closer to their activation zones). upper bound – which acts as the threshold or activation limit – is reached. fig. illustrates the logic of this approach. our main assumption is that actors reach their activation zone at different speeds. the speed of activation is a function of two parameters: ω, which determines how quickly the actor reaches the threshold zone (i.e. it defines the concavity of the curve that maps progression towards activation); and ε, or the strength of the signal received from other actors − which, in our case, is restricted to actors one step removed in the network. every time a neighbor activates, they send a pulse that shifts the state of the focal actor closer towards the threshold zone; the parameter ε, in other words, is the building block we use to introduce social influence in the model. the lower panels in fig. illustrate how actor i advances towards activation, both as a function of her intrinsic propensity ω and as a response to the activation of the neighbors. when a node activates, as node i does in t , she shifts the state of her neighbors with the ε signal and resets her state back to the beginning of her phase. the mathematical expression of these intuitions follows this functional form: x = f (t) = ω ln ( + [ eω − ] t ) ( ) the parameter ω determines the shape of this function. it is always ω > to make the function concave down. we assume a mono- tonic increase because it is the most natural choice when modelling progression towards activation and it follows the same intuition as threshold models − only that instead of proposing a stepwise change, it models actors’ propensity to activate as a continuous pro- gression. as fig. shows, a larger ω produces a more pronounced shape, making the function rise very rapidly to then level off. in addition to this individual component, the model also takes into account the activation of other actors in the network, in par- ticular, those one step removed. if actors i and j are connected, j’s activation increases i’s propensity to activate by an amount ε or pushes i directly into activation, whichever is less. this rule of interdependence is expressed as: xi = min ( , xi + ε) ( ) p. piedrahita et al. / social networks ( ) – fig. . the impact of network topology on coordination dynamics. t alues t (via ε t coord s t t n m ( g a c b s t c his figure summarizes contagion dynamics in toy networks with size n = , and v heir progression towards activation. as time passes, the impact of social influence he network has activated at least once). the tree structure is the least conducive to ince the parameter ε captures social influence, our model assumes hat the activation signals sent by neighbors are more consequen- ial if they are concurrent (as in panel t of fig. ) than if they are ot (panel t ). in other words: our model assumes that exposure to ultiple signals matters not just because it reinforces affirmation a process that we capture with the sudden increases in the pro- ression towards the threshold zone specified by eq. ( )); but also, nd mostly, because it allows local activity to grow increasingly orrelated over time. introducing this temporal correlation is, we elieve, a necessary ingredient to build realistic models of large- cale coordination, especially given the available evidence on the emporal dynamics and bursts of activity characteristic of human ommunication (vazquez et al., ). ω = and ε = . . the initial state randomly allocates actors to different points in ) starts aligning nodes to the same timing (a tcycle is complete when every actor in ination. our analytical choice acknowledges the important difference between having multiple friends participating in, say, #black- livesmatter discussions or encouraging #occupycentral actions at different, uncoordinated times than having them all converge to the same timing. convergence in the timing of activations is more conducive to further activations, which, in turn, reinforces the feedback mechanism that makes an obscured issue suddenly jump to the spotlight of media attention. this is what happened in ferguson during the first hours of the demonstrations. journal- ists learned about the events through their twitter feeds (where hashtags created a channel for relevant information to flow in a coordinated fashion), not from their own news organizations (carr, ). large-scale coordination becomes visible only when the tim- ings of individual activations become highly correlated; and this is p. piedrahita et al. / social networks ( ) – fig. . network topologies used in the simulation experiments. we use four topologies to determine how actors influence each other via the ε signal. all networks were generated using the configuration model (newman, ), with the exception of the small world network, for which we used the watts-strogatz model regular network (we also run some simulations with p = . , with qualitatively similar re the erdős–rényi and the scale free networks) and degree (for the regular and small-worl fig. . maximum number of coordinated actors as a function of time across ω val- ues. the curves track the fraction of actors in the network that activate simultane- ously. simulations here run on a small world network with rewiring probability p = . and a fixed ε = . . as expected, high ω values (which here are distributed homogeneously) lead to faster large-scale coordination. as ω decreases, the time to f u n a e d r m ε r o m i e m a c l t l p i b n t p ull coordination increases, down to values for which system-level coordination is nattainable (i.e. ω = , a condition under which only small clusters of coordinated odes emerge). n aspect that cannot be captured by models that disregard the ffects of time on activation dynamics. to sum up, the motivational structure of actors in our model is etermined by the parameter ω, which defines how quickly they each the activation zone; and by the parameter ε, which deter- ines the strength of social influence. in a world of isolated actors, would equal ; in a world where social influence overrides the hythms of intrinsic activation, ε would equal . likewise, in a world f identical actors, ω would be distributed homogeneously; the ore heterogeneous the distribution, the more unequal actors are n their propensity to activate. these two parameters open the basic xperimental space of our model. one additional assumption our odel makes is that every activation is followed by a reset mech- nism that brings actors back to the beginning of their activation ycles. in other words, our model does not incorporate memory or earning, which we could hypothesize to accelerate activation as ime goes by − and could be modelled by allowing ω to increase as earning happens. the results that follow do not allow the intrinsic ropensity of actors to change; the only thing that changes is the nformation environment in which they operate, which is defined y their networks and the activations that take place in those etworks. future research, however, should consider the impact hat allowing actors to change their attitudes (as modelled by the arameter ω) would have on coordination dynamics. (watts and strogatz, ). the small world network rewires % of the ties of the sults). all networks have the same size (n = ) and the same average degree (for d networks). . the dynamics of repeated activation the combination of values for the two parameters ω and ε (when ε > ) determines the speed at which coordination emerges − that is, how long it takes for all nodes to start pulsating, or activating, concurrently (e.g. as when many people simultaneously use a new hashtag). however, the underlying network determining the path- ways for influence is also a crucial component of how we think about contagion dynamics. the core of our analyses aim, in fact, to determine the impact that different network structures have on those dynamics, holding ω and ε constant. to illustrate why networks matter in the context of our model, fig. summarizes contagion dynamics in toy networks with size n = , and values ω = and ε = . . the initial state randomly allocates actors to different points in their progression towards activation, which means that they pulsate at different times, as matrices tcycle = show (a tcycle is complete when every actor in the network has activated at least once). as time progresses, however, the impact of social influence (via ε) starts aligning nodes to the same timing. this is particularly clear in the case of the directed cycle. the undirected version of the cycle requires more time for actors to coordinate their activations; in fact, there is still an actor that activates with its own timing at tcycle = . the tree structure, also undirected, is the least conducive to coordination: the pres- ence of hubs, and their greater influence over the peripheral nodes that are only connected through them, hampers the spontaneous emergence of coordination. . social context as communication networks the topology on which interactions take place is, therefore, a crucial element in the dynamics we want to model. we run exper- iments on four network topologies, summarized in fig. . these networks determine how actors influence each other via the ε signal, and they capture different hypothetical scenarios where interactions might unfold empirically. in the erdős–rényi network, for instance, ties connecting the actors are formed at random. although we know that social net- works are never formed at random, this topology could account for a scenario where actors are connected through their online search patterns, i.e. by looking at what others are posting on websites or blogs beyond social media platforms. this network also offers a standard benchmark with which to assess the performance of the other three topologies. the regular network offers a way of mapping interdependence when it is highly structured by logistical or space constraints. dur- p. piedrahita et al. / social networks ( ) – fig. . the impact of social influence on large-scale coordination across � values. the panels summarize coordination dynamics for different values of ω (the intrinsic motivation parameter) and � (social influence strength) across the four network topologies. every dot in the plots corresponds to a combination of parameters ε and ω; the distribution of ω and ε is homogenous across nodes and edges, respectively. the color scheme indicates how long it takes, for each combination, to reach large-scale coordination (which here we define as at least % of the nodes activating simultaneously); time is averaged over realizations of the simulation. lighter colors indicate earlier coordination, darker colors indicate later coordination; black signals that no large-scale c s are m b nation r lobal i m c t a p o t f r f a u d t f a t b c z o b s o e s oordination was possible. the findings suggest that random, homogenous network y the presence of hubs (i.e. scale free networks) do not allow large-scale coordi estrictive in the emergence of coordination than regular networks, in spite of the g ng the umbrella revolution in hong kong, for instance, social edia and other internet-based modes of communication were ensored by the chinese government, so protesters used the blue- ooth technologies in their cell phones to create mesh networks nd coordinate their actions while on the streets (knibbs, ; arker, ; rutkin and aron, ). these networks do not rely n online servers (and are, therefore, more difficult to monitor by hird parties); but they require physical proximity: they are only easible when there is a large number of people concentrated in estricted spaces (like concert halls, stadiums or, as in this case, a ew streets within the same city district). regular networks offer n approximation to that sort of empirical scenario. the small world and scale free networks are the topologies we se to approximate most observed networks. there is ample evi- ence that social networks exhibit the small world property (watts, ) and they also tend to have a very skewed degree distribu- ion, especially those that emerge online (barabási, ). twitter, or instance, has a long tail in the allocation of connections, with minority of accounts being disproportionately better connected han the vast majority (kwak et al., ). similar properties have een found in other social media platforms like facebook or the hinese sina weibo (backstrom et al., ; ugander et al., ; hengbiao et al., ). we reproduce these structural features in ur simulation experiments because social media networks have een shown to play an important part in the emergence of large- cale coordination, from agreeing on which hashtags to use to rganizing massive demonstrations (barberá et al., ; conover t al., ; gonzález-bailón et al., ; romero et al., ; teinert-threlkeld et al., ; gonzález-bailón and wang, ). ore conducive to large-scale coordination. heterogeneous networks characterized when the social influence signal weakens. small world networks are also more shortcuts created by random rewiring (or because of them). to recover the example introduced above, the growth of the #black- livesmatter movement relied heavily on the coordinating potential of social media. . the effects of network topology our analyses aim to identify the conditions that need to be in place for large-scale coordination to emerge. given that the time to full coordination depends on the specific combination of ω and ε, but also on the underlying network, we measure time in terms of tcycles, which were illustrated in fig. . this definition allows us to normalize time across conditions and directly compare coordi- nation dynamics across networks and parametric settings. from an empirical point of view, every step in the evolution of our model (every tcycle) can be interpreted as a different time window, e.g. hourly, daily, weekly, or monthly activity. finding the appropriate temporal resolution to empirically analyze evolving dynamics in networks is not a trivial issue (holme and saramäki, ; moody, ). our model does not make any specific assumptions about the right resolution to aggregate observed activation data; the time it takes for a cycle to complete can correspond to different empirical windows − and, in fact, the appropriate width for that window is likely to change as periods of bursts in activity unfold in chrono- logical time (borge-holthoefer et al., ). at the end of every tcycle, i.e., once every node has activated at least once, we count the number of nodes that activated simultane- ously − i.e. the size of the clusters in the matrices of fig. . our model allows large-scale coordination to arise when small local islands of coordinated nodes start merging together through the cascading l networks ( ) – e c l a o ( l t i o i n q ( s o b t v p a t m t t a c t b c ( l o n n r d p s a c i l s t l o s s b w t f b t a v ( t p o fig. . heterogeneous distribution of the speed-to-activation parameter ω. p. piedrahita et al. / socia ffects of social influence, as captured by the parameter ε and as hanneled by the network. fig. shows what happens with the evels of coordination as the system evolves with a fixed ε = . on small world graph with size n = . the curves track the fraction f actors that activate simultaneously. as expected, high ω values which, in this example, is the same for all actors) lead to faster arge-scale coordination. as ω decreases, the time to full coordina- ion increases. at low values (i.e. ω = ), system-level coordination s unattainable: this is a condition under which only small clusters f coordinated nodes emerge. the question we are interested in is: how do contagion dynam- cs differ when ω and ε are held constant but the underlying etworks change? fig. shows a first set of results to answer this uestion. every dot in the heatmaps corresponds to a combination ε, ω). on the left of the horizontal axis we have systems where ocial influence is very strong; as we move to the right, the impact f neighbor activations on the focal actor starts diminishing. at the ottom of the vertical axis, we have actors that progress slowly owards the activation zone; at the top, we have those that get ery quickly into a tipping-point state. in this set of simulations, the ropensity to activate (the ω value) is distributed homogeneously cross all actors in the network; what changes is the structure of he underlying network. the color scheme indicates the time it takes under each para- etric combination to reach large-scale coordination, measured as cycles. we define large-scale coordination as having at least % of he nodes activating simultaneously. for each point, time is aver- ged over realizations of the simulation, with different initial onditions. in this scheme, lighter colors indicate earlier coordina- ion; as the colors get darker, coordination takes longer to emerge. lack signals that no coordination was possible within the limit of tcycles, when the simulations stopped. these results suggest that all networks are capable of generating oordination in scenarios with strong to moderate social influence . < � < ), regardless of the actors’ propensity to activate (regard- ess of the ω value). as ε starts getting smaller (i.e. as the strength f social influence diminishes), actors need to have steeper incli- ations to reach the tipping point for coordination to emerge. a etwork where ties channel little impact takes more time, and equires more motivated actors, to generate the same level of coor- ination than a network with stronger ties. after some critical oint, no amount of actor predisposition can overcome the lack of ubstantive social influence. this critical point, however, changes cross networks: in the random, erdős–rényi network, large-scale oordination emerges for most social influence conditions when ω s high, even when the impact of each neighbor activation is really ow. this is not the case for the regular, the small world, and the cale free networks, which are way more restrictive in their support o spontaneous coordination. the scale-free network is particularly imiting: it either allows coordination to emerge fast (white region) r it prevents it very abruptly (black region). the existence of hubs, o characteristic in the structure of these networks, explains why uch an abrupt transition takes place: because hubs are so much etter connected than the other nodes, they have a wide impact hen they activate; but hubs, which are surrounded by many struc- ural holes (burt ), also restrict the pathways for contagion, and or the alignment of local dynamics. given that most social media networks are well represented y the scale free structure, our simulations suggest two possibili- ies: either online ties channel stronger influence than traditionally cknowledged (e.g., gladwell, ); or users are so ready to acti- ate that coordination is possible even with weak social influence but not too weak). this is indeed what seems to happen during he emergence of campaign hashtags. social media users tend to be roactive in their behavior to facilitate coordination; in fact, the use f hashtags in twitter emerged itself as a user-driven convention in a second set of experiments we introduced actor heterogeneity by drawing the parameter ω from different normal distributions, centered around mean ω = and with a standard deviation in the range � = [ , ]. (parker, ). this high predisposition, especially amongst those who opted into a movement or mobilization (as our model pre- sumes), compensates for the constraints imposed by the network to spreading dynamics. . the effects of actor heterogeneity the findings above are interesting because they cast light on the importance that network topology has to delimit the possibility space for large-scale coordination. however, it is a big simplifica- tion to assume that all actors have the same propensity to reach their activation zone. in a second set of simulations, we introduced heterogeneity in the distribution of the ω parameter, as illustrated in fig. . we randomly drew n = values from a normal dis- tribution centered around ω = and a standard deviation in the interval � = [ , ], with . increases. a condition where actors differ slightly in their predispositions to act corresponds to sce- narios where exogenous events instill a sense of urgency in the need to act, as it happened in ferguson. a condition where actors are very heterogeneous, on the other hand, corresponds to situ- ations where the level of commitment to a cause varies amongst those willing to participate. for instance, in the hong kong protests students triggered a movement that soon escalated to involve a larger group of participants, partly thanks to the aid of social media (parker, ). students had the ability to camp on the streets and the time to generate the messages, photos, and videos that others (including mainstream media) picked up soon after. other demo- graphic groups (e.g., parents, middle class professionals) might have wanted to join the protests but they were unable to do so with similar dedication because of their job schedules or other time constraints. sociological factors like these could be a source of het- erogeneity in the ability to activate for actors that are, otherwise, equally interested in a political cause. the results of this second set of simulations are shown in fig. . in general, the simulations reveal that heterogeneity reduces opportunities for large-scale coordination across all networks. this supports the intuition that, for a cause to grow large, actors need to share predispositions, that is, they need to be as similar as possi- ble in their willingness to act. the scale-free network is, again, the most restrictive structure − but as long as ties channel some influ- ence, coordination arises fast, which is important for time-sensitive mobilizations (for instance, during the first hours of the gezi park protests, when mainstream media were censorig news of the events on the ground, barberá et al., ). given that large-scale coordination emerges repeatedly (and swiftly) in social media sites, our simulation results provide further evidence that online ties weave relevant interdependence, that is, they act as a significant source of social influence. this is consistent with experimental evi- dence on the mobilizing potential of online networks (bond et al., p. piedrahita et al. / social networks ( ) – fig. . the impact of actor heterogeneity on large-scale coordination across ε values. the panels summarize coordination dynamics for different distributions of ω and ε values (social influence strength). the distribution of ω depends on the standard deviation (vertical axis); ε is homogenous across edges. the color scheme indicates, again, the time it takes to reach large-scale coordination (i.e. at least % of the nodes activating s more, b ity inc i m t r t a e g i t a e t d ( i n s f w imultaneously); time is averaged over realizations. the results show that, once enchmark provided by the erdős–rényi topology. overall, low to mild heterogene t. ), which shows that exposure to information through social edia has a positive and significant impact on political behavior. his positive impact is what we capture with the ε parameter. our esults show that as long as the impact of social influence is not oo low, it can drive the network towards coordination even when ctor heterogeneity is high. . discussion our results show that network topology has counter-intuitive ffects on coordination when repeated activation is allowed. homo- eneous networks, that is, networks where the degree distribution s not significantly skewed, are more conducive to coordina- ion: the parametric combinations (ω, ε) leading to coordination re wider for more egalitarian networks, following this order: rdős–rényi > small world > regular networks. this ranking applies o conditions where ω is fixed but also where it is distributed ran- omly. networks characterized by a skewed degree distribution that is, by the presence of a small group of nodes exerting more nfluence over other nodes) are clearly less favorable to coordi- ation: they require stronger influence and actors that are more imilar in their propensity to activate. we refer to this as the “scale- ree paradox”: on the one hand, scale-free networks clearly create orse conditions for contagion dynamics to spread under repeated all networks are less efficient in allowing large-scale coordination than the random reases the probability of global coordination, whereas high heterogeneity hinders activation; on the other hand, an increasing body of observational evidence shows that these networks are also very good at help- ing coordinate the actions of many (barberá et al., ; conover et al., ; gonzález-bailón et al., ; romero et al., ; steinert-threlkeld et al., ). this empirical evidence suggests that heterogeneous networks are indeed behind many observed episodes of mass mobilization, regardless of the topological restric- tions uncovered by our simulation results. related to this, our findings also suggest that online networks must channel enough social influence to allow individual actions to align over time. our results show that there is a critical ε for all topologies, that is, for a given network and ω there is always a value for the social influence parameter below which actors do not achieve coordination. this critical value changes across topolo- gies, and it is particularly stringent for the scale-free networks. since most online networks are skewed in their degree distribu- tion, we contend that those networks must channel moderate to strong social influence – otherwise, it is unlikely that large-scale coordination would emerge so often though online channels. time-varying dynamics in networks have so far been largely disregarded by analytical approaches to collective action – and yet these dynamics are crucial, as our model suggests, to under- stand the feedback mechanisms that activate cascading reactions and the consolidation of a critical mass. prior research has shown l netw t i a h p c s s o e c g a d e o p a m l c t e c t v f s ( w n a a a o t a d f t n d c o f b g s h g s c ω c r t e d l s g t d p. piedrahita et al. / socia hat attaining this critical mass depends on the network topology, n particular the density and the centralization of ties (marwell nd prahl, ). that work suggests that centralization always as a positive effect on collective action because it increases the robability that involved actors will be tied to a large number of ontributors, allowing for more efficient coordination. our model uggests that highly centralized networks (in the form of scale-free tructures) can indeed be very efficient in coordinating efforts but nly when certain conditions are met. the strength of social influ- nce and the distribution of propensities to activate need both to be onducive to the critical mass. compared to other network topolo- ies, however, centralized structures perform significantly worse, ll else equal. by allowing activation to re-occur, we shift attention from the iffusion of activations (the focus of traditional threshold mod- ls) to their coordination (which happens during the second stage f activity within adoption). what we find is that for a range of arametric combinations (ω, ε), the four network topologies we nalyze are equally successful at generating coordination. what akes them differ is the impact that social influence has on col- ective dynamics. as networks grow more heterogeneous in their onnectivity, and as they open more structural holes, the space for he emergence of large-scale coordination diminishes. this differ- nce across networks results from how the underlying structure of ommunication activates feedback mechanisms of reinforcement hat align, with more or less success, individual decisions to acti- ate. there are two aspects of our modelling approach that deserve uture consideration: the distribution of ε (which we keep con- tant across ties) and the way in which ω values are distributed randomly, when heterogeneous). there are a number of reasons hy these two choices could be modified. we know that in social etworks ties vary in their strength: the actions of relatives, friends nd acquaintances, for instance, do not have the same effect on an ctor’s behavior. our model assumes that all ties channel the same mount of influence. although some ties activate more often than thers (and are de facto more influential), their impact on activa- ion responds to changing local events in the network, not to an ttribute of the tie itself. future work should consider coordination ynamics under different distributional assumptions of ε. likewise, uture research should also analyze scenarios where the propensity o activate (ω) is not distributed randomly but as a function of the etwork topology itself. for instance, there is ample empirical evi- ence to suggest that the values of ω might be more similar within lusters in a network – if we assume that this is another dimension n which homophily operates (mcpherson et al., ). students, or example, are more likely to share the same predispositions and e better connected to each other compared to other demographic roups. at the same time, observational and analytical evidence uggests that the importance of social influence can be overrated if omophily is not properly taken into account by studies of conta- ion (aral et al. , ; aral and walker, ). future research hould consider whether critical mass dynamics and the timing of oordination differ substantially if we constrain the distribution of to the position of nodes in the network and, in particular, to their lustering. another important question for future research is how much the esults would vary if actors were equipped with memory, that is, if hey did not reset their progression towards activation to at the nd of every tcycle. equipping actors with memory would open the oor to more explicit theorization on the impact that mechanisms ike social learning have on activation dynamics. as it currently tands, our model is aseptic about the specific mechanisms that ive shape to the function expressed in eq. ( ). our main explana- ory variables are the networks assumed to underlie coordination ynamics; we treat ω as a black box that determines the timing orks ( ) – of individual activations. when we allow ω to differ from actor to actor, the assumed heterogeneity can relate to different empirical possibilities: more or less interest in a political cause, more or less time to devote to the cause, etc. in any case, adding memory to how our actors behave would require a solid empirical justification of how memory operates in the context of coordination through decentralized networks. finally, another important question that we do not consider directly relates to finding a temporal scale that is the most appro- priate to empirically analyze coordination dynamics. as with most analytical models, ours is developed on a level of abstraction that allows generalizing across possible scenarios but does not give precise guidelines as to how to aggregate empirical data. digital technologies are providing richer sources of data that could help test empirically models like ours (golder and macy, ; lazer et al., ; watts, ). our model, in particular, requires a sys- tematic approach to the analysis of time-evolving networks and time-dependent activations (holme and saramäki, ; moody, ). in data tracking social media activity, the temporal scale can be expressed in terms of days, hours, or minutes – and the most informative temporal scale might not even remain constant during the observation window (borge-holthoefer et al., ). bringing closer the results of simulation models with the patterns observed in empirical data requires solving first the temporal res- olution problem. more research is necessary in this area, which would help calibrate our model with the most likely parameters, as inferred from observational data. . conclusion the model presented here casts light on how contagion dynam- ics emerge when actors are allowed to activate repeatedly and contribute intermittently to activity around a collective cause. theories of a critical mass and threshold models emphasize the importance of interdependence, and highlight that collective action is not about obtaining unanimous participation but about mobiliz- ing enough people to make the effort self-sustaining. our model contributes to this broad line of research by focusing on the second stage of coordination within adoption, that is, on the exchange of information among actors who are already part of a political cause. we emphasize the importance of temporal correlations in network activity, so far largely disregarded in previous modelling efforts but characteristic of many recent examples of observed large-scale coordination. our model shows that many contagion conditions are not conducive to coordination. in particular, networks that are more homogenous in their degree distribution facilitate coordina- tion under a wider range of actor predisposition and social influence conditions; as inequality in the degree distribution increases, how- ever, so does the time required to achieve coordination – time that, from an empirical point of view, might not always be available. our model also shows that when social influence has a moderate to strong impact, large-scale coordination emerges regardless of the underlying structure of communication, and regardless of actor’s predisposition to act. to the extent that digital technologies are inserting networks in every aspect of social life, our results sug- gest that we should expect to see more instances of large-scale coordination cascading from the bottom-up. acknowledgements p.p. acknowledges partial support from mineco through grant fis - ; y. m. acknowledges partial support from the gov- ernment of aragón, spain through a grant to the group fenol and by mineco and feder funds (grant fis - -p). l netw r a a a b b b b b b b b b c c c d e f f g g g g g g g h j wu, fang, huberman, bernardo a., . novelty and collective attention. proc. natl. acad. sci. 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( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - ( ) - /sbref 	the contagion effects of repeated activation in social networks 	 introduction 	 coordination as a two-step selection process 	 model and mechanisms 	 the dynamics of repeated activation 	 social context as communication networks 	 the effects of network topology 	 the effects of actor heterogeneity 	 discussion 	 conclusion 	acknowledgements 	references how economic inequality fuels the rise and persistence of the yellow vest movement at the time of writing, the french yellow vest (‘gilet jaunes’) movement continues to make headlines and the end of the movement is not yet in sight. although the movement has received attention in the news and social media, a theoretical analysis of the factors explaining the emergence and continued persistence of the movement is only slowly emerging. nevertheless, despite a scarcity of empirical research (for exceptions, see bennani, gandré & monnery, ; boyer at al., ), it is clear that the yellow vest movement deserves attention from social scientists. as an initially spontaneous and grassroots rural uprising without apparent organizational structures or leaders, the yellow vests has led to substantial policy change and concessions on the part of the french gov- ernment, changing the political landscape in france. that is, the yellow vest movement has effectively ‘rattled the french establishment’ (guilluy, ). even though there are many material and ideational factors that contribute to the rise of the yellow vest move- ment, here we focus on just one of those: growing levels of economic inequality. importantly, regardless of whether economic inequality is actually on the rise, we argue that the mere perception that inequality is increasing is asso- ciated with collective discontent and subsequently, the social mobilisation of the yellow vest movement. one of the first questions to ask, then, is which factors and events gave rise to the perception that economic inequality was growing in france? we focus on two such dynamics that have brought the issue of economic inequality into sharper focus in france—factors that may have enhanced the perceptions that there are two opposing groups of people in french society: the upper-class elite versus the lower-class victims of inequality. first, narratives about victims of inequality, originally crafted by populist far-right leaders like front national leader marine lepen, have been fanned by president macron’s austerity measures and policy decisions (such as the tax on petrol, repeal of the wealth tax) that dis- proportionally affect the poorer segments of society and favour the wealthy. this has given rise to suspicions that macron aligns himself with the elites and is disconnected from ordinary french people. second, even though grow- ing perceptions of inequality are collectively perceived as a cause of concern in many western countries, because historically france has defined itself as a country that embraces social equality and defines itself by egalitarian- ism, rising levels of income inequality are seen as a direct threat to the french national identity and the collective continuity of french values. as we will outline in greater detail below, the yellow vest protestors have positioned themselves as attempting to reclaim that legacy of col- lectively valuing equality and as restoring the continuity jetten, j., et al. ( ). how economic inequality fuels the rise and persistence of the yellow vest movement. international review of social psychology, ( ): , – . doi: https://doi.org/ . /irsp. the university of queensland, au corresponding author: jolanda jetten (j.jetten@psy.uq.edu.au) research article how economic inequality fuels the rise and persistence of the yellow vest movement jolanda jetten, frank mols and hema preya selvanathan our analysis explores the rise of the yellow vest movement as a collective response to perceptions of growing levels of economic inequality in france whereby collective action is triggered by the perceived illegitimacy of the growing gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’. we highlight different psychological processes that might explain why concerns about economic inequality have become more salient. we focus on two dynamics in particular: (a) president macron’s perceived alignment with the elites and disconnec- tion from ordinary french people, and (b) historically dominant collective narratives that frame growing inequality as breaking with long-standing values and norms of equality. both processes enhance ‘us’ (the victims) versus ‘them’ (the elite and those that are not true to national values of equality) categoriza- tions along wealth lines whereby, ‘us’ becomes a broad category. to explain why the movement continues to go strong, we focus on ongoing intergroup processes (i.e., the police response, lack of support from intellectuals and the middle class) and intragroup processes (i.e., the movement brings together all those who self-categorise as victims of inequality, uniting those that may at other times be seen as ‘strange bedfellows’). we conclude that a proper understanding of the way in which economic inequality might divide society creating new intergroup dynamics is essential to understand the yellow vest movement. keywords: economic inequality; yellow vest movement; collective action; political identity https://doi.org/ . /irsp. mailto:j.jetten@psy.uq.edu.au jetten et al: inequality and the yellow vest movement to past values and norms (jetten & wohl, ; mols & jetten, ; sani, bowe & herrera, ). before further developing our conceptual analysis, it is important to consider in greater detail the french context with respect to economic inequality. after this, we provide a social psychological explanation for the ways in which economic inequality can fuel social unrest and trigger col- lective action. in particular, we outline how the percep- tion of growing levels of economic inequality may have increased the salience of the gap between the ‘haves’ and ‘have-nots’, enhancing ‘us’ versus ‘them’ categorizations along wealth lines. in turn, we address the question of why the movement continues to go strong and focus in particular on the group dynamics (intergroup and intra- group) that are likely at play. we end this article with suggestions for how some of the processes described here might form the basis of future research. economic inequality in france objectively speaking, how unequal is france? the french economist piketty ( ) has drawn attention to the growing gap between the wealthy and poor in france. as piketty shows in his work, while the average income for the richest percent of people in france doubled between and , the bottom percent saw income rise by only one-fourth. other indicators also need to be consid- ered when answering the inequality question. reflecting on changes in the gini coefficient in france since , it is clear that income inequality did indeed surge between and (from . to . ). however, since then income inequality has slowed down and even fallen, albeit marginally (to . in —the most recent measure- ment year). perhaps more interestingly, levels of income inequality were as high in as they currently are, sug- gesting that inequality levels in france are currently not spiralling out of control as they are in other countries (e.g., the u.s.). indeed, according to the world bank, france has far less inequality than many other western countries, and there are only a handful of countries that spend a greater proportion of their income on social welfare programs (denmark, sweden and belgium; goodman, ). nev- ertheless, access to social security has become more dif- ficult because more and more french employees are on short-term contracts and/or are employed in the so-called gig-economy. for example, the number of contracts that lasted less than one month exploded from . million to . million over the last years and only half of those on these short-term contracts are eligible for unemployment benefits (goodman, ). importantly too, compared to other western european countries, france’s taxes continue to increase—from percent of the gross domestic product in to over percent in . on top of this, in the first year of macron’s presidency, eight additional taxes were introduced and the increase in taxation has been proportionally more than the wealth produced in france (paye, ). the increase in taxes was not equally divided across poorer and wealthier segments of society: the new taxes dispro- portionally affected the ‘have-nots’ of society (such as the tax on petrol, which affects working-class communities in rural areas, where people rely almost exclusively on cars to travel) while those in the highest income brackets saw a tax cut (the abolishment of the solidary tax on wealth or the ‘flat tax’, which reduced taxation on capital income from dividends and capital gains; paye, ). in addition to the objective growth in the gap between income of the poor and wealthy, partly as a result of such growing inequality, france has also seen an increase in unequal opportunities for those at different ends of the wealth spectrum (on the way social mobility affects acceptance of high levels of economic inequality; see day & fiske, ). increasingly, there is talk of a ‘broken social elevator’ in france whereby redistribution through taxes has not been sufficient to allow for equal opportunities for all, for example, in the educational system. data from the organization for economic cooperation and development (oecd, ) show that it takes more than six generations for a person at the bottom end of the income distribution to reach the mean income level in france. out of all the oecd countries, only hungary has a more broken social elevator with seven generations to reach a mean income level. likewise, out of all oecd countries, france stands out as the country where academic achievement is most dependent on students’ social class (see croizet et al., ). in sum then, answering the question whether income inequality has increased over the last decades in france is not that straightforward and the answer depends largely on which factors are being studied (e.g., labor versus capi- tal income, tax policy, intergenerational wealth, social security access, see for instance garbinti, goupille-lebret & piketty, ; goodman, ). what is clear though that the perception has emerged in france that its leaders have abandoned systems that promote greater economic equality and social security for all and have introduced systems that have pushed france on the path of greater economic inequality (greeman, ). importantly, the perception that inequality is growing creates fears for the future and it is perhaps the anxiety and pessimism around growing levels of inequality (and not so much present lev- els of inequality) that should be taken into account when studying people’s assessment of economic inequality (see also duvoux & papuchon, ). next, we turn to the importance of such perceptions. objective versus subjective perceptions of growing inequality despite the importance of objective indicators of economic inequality and the structural barriers for social mobility, there is an equally important reason why we need to examine the consequences of inequality through a social psychological lens: growing evidence suggests that objective inequality indicators and the collectively shared perception of inequality (i.e., subjective perceptions) are not necessarily aligned. for example, studies show that people can both dramatically underestimate (norton & ariely, ) and overestimate the actual level of inequal- ity (chambers, swan & heesacker, ). further, it is the subjective perceptions of inequality rather than objective inequality which predict important outcomes such as jetten et al: inequality and the yellow vest movement happiness (buttrick & oishi, ) and health (adler et al., ). moreover, even when objective and subjective percep- tions of economic inequality are aligned, for inequality to lead to dissatisfaction (and thereby affecting collective and individual behaviour), there needs to be collectively shared belief that inequality has reached a breaking point in the political community (i.e. ‘polity’). that being said, there is evidence that higher levels of actual inequality are associated with greater perceptions that the system is unfair. in particular, newman, johnston, and lown ( ) found that higher levels of income inequality were associ- ated with heightened rejection of meritocracy ideals. these dynamics may have been at play in the aftermath of the global financial crisis when, on a large scale in the western world, people started to question the legiti- macy of the gap between the wealthy and the poor, and recognize that those at the poorer end of the spectrum suffered most from the financial crisis. in this instance, it was a steady stream of revelations about excessive banker bonuses and about malpractices in the financial services sector that rendered the issue ‘inequality’ salient, and trig- gered public outcry over what became widely viewed by citizens as a society divided into ‘us’, the downtrodden ‘ percent’, and ‘them’, the exploitative ‘ percent’. similar dynamics may be at play when explaining the social unrest in chile, bolivia, iraq, iran, and jordan in (see walker, ). for example, in chile, while objective levels of economic inequality in chile hardly changed over the last decade, a range of government initiatives that appeared to target citizens from lower socioeco- nomic backgrounds, combined with the perceived lack of empathy of political leaders for the hardship suffered by ordinary chileans, were important triggers of large-scale political protests (walker, ). in sum, once ‘inequality’ has become/ been rendered salient, the issue can become politicized at the collective level, and if those perceptions subsequently become coupled with the perception that such high levels of inequality are unfair, then it is more likely that those who perceive themselves as the victims of economic inequality will rise up to challenge the status quo (see jetten & peters, ; Østby, ; walker & smith, ). when it comes to understanding the effects of ine- quality, most research attention to date focuses on its harmful consequences for health (e.g., oishi, kesibir & diener, ). important as this work is, it is unable to speak to concerns that inequality also undermines the social fabric of society and negatively affects citizens’ trust in government (kettl, ). there is now grow- ing evidence that inequality affects the relationship between those at the bottom and those at the top of the hierarchy (jetten et al., ; jetten & peters, ). the social identity approach—sia, comprised of social identity theory (sit; tajfel & turner, ) and self-categorization theory (sct; turner et al., ) forms a particularly use- ful theoretical framework to understand the dynamics between the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’. the sia provides explicit theorizing on how individual level psychological processes are both affected and informed by the broader socio-structural context (e.g., economic and political fac- tors affecting status relations between groups). there is evidence that the greater salience of economic inequality and the perception of being disadvantaged or victims of inequality are psychologically related. for example, osborne, sibley, and sengupta ( ) ana- lysed longitudinal panel data collected in new zealand and found that inequality heightens people’s percep- tions that they are deprived (either as individuals or as a group). interestingly too, they found that perceptions of relative deprivation were linked to neighbourhood-level inequality (as determined by data from the new zealand census), and that higher perceived inequality was associ- ated with higher ethnic identification. it is important to understand these processes, because heightened ethnic identification may motivate tensions between groups, heighten ‘us’ versus ‘them’ perceptions and, at times, this will lead to collective action and social unrest. in social identity terms (tajfel & turner, ), when bounda- ries between different wealth groups are impermeable (because of higher levels of inequality), this limited social mobility is likely to motivate lower classes to perceive the status quo as illegitimate. impermeability of boundaries and illegitimacy of inequality provide the combination of socio-structural factors that have the greatest likelihood of motivating lower status groups to challenge the sta- tus quo by engaging in collective action to improve their disadvantaged position. perceived economic inequality: its salience and perceived fairness while there appears growing consensus among scholars that inequality can erode social cohesion and perceptions of shared fate (buttrick & oishi, ; uslaner & brown, ), we suggest that, at a more basic level, inequality increases people’s tendencies to see the world through a ‘wealth lens’ (jetten et al., ). we therefore propose that we need to understand when wealth becomes a relevant categorization to make sense of the social world, and how this then triggers intra- and intergroup dynamics and determines the content of wealth group’s identities. unpacking this, we propose first that growing inequal- ity enhances the likelihood that income and wealth dif- ferences become more easily noticed. as wilkinson and pickett ( ) argue: ‘if inequalities are bigger, … where each one of us is placed becomes more important. greater inequality is likely to be accompanied by increased sta- tus competition and increased status anxiety. it is not simply that where the stakes are higher each of us worries more about where he or she comes. it is also that we are likely to pay more attention to social status in how we assess each other’ (p. ; see also loughnan et al., ). when there are increasing levels of inequality, wealth becomes a fitting basis for categorizing oneself and others in society (to use self-categorization theory terminology, inequality enhances the comparative fit of ‘wealth’ as a basis for categorization, turner et al., ). as a result, ‘us’ versus ‘them’ perceptions become more salient and, over time, this will lead to deteriorating relations between different socio-economic groups (as will be evident from jetten et al: inequality and the yellow vest movement greater intergroup competition), so called ‘classism’ (i.e., enhanced stereotyping of other wealth groups, horwitz & dovidio, ) and ingroup bias. ultimately, this can lead to a splintering of society into subgroups and the with- drawal of individuals from society at large, lower social cohesion and reduced identification with society (jetten et al., ). in line with this reasoning, in france there is a per- ception of a growing schism between different groups (greeman, ). as goodman ( ) observes in a recent article in the new york times: ‘france is cleaved by pro- found forms of inequality: between urban and rural com- munities; full-time employees and temporary workers; graduates of prestigious universities and the plebeian masses. and not least, between retirees, who maintain the divine right of pensions, and younger people excluded from social welfare programs.’ also evident from news reports is the notion that french people feel that their standard of living has declined over the years. in the words of anonymous yellow vest protestors: ‘we are a rich coun- try and yet there are people who work hard and have to sleep on the streets,’ and ‘i want better spending power for everyone, particularly for the vulnerable – single women, the old, widows’ (burrows-taylor, ). perceptions of subjective poverty, whereby people feel poor and iden- tify as poor, is highly prevalent among the french work- ing class even if they do not qualify as being below the poverty line according to existing indicators (duvoux & papuchon, ). despite the fact that objective inequality measures do not show that inequality has increased all that much over the last decades, it appears that the yellow vest move- ment has picked up on the collectively shared perception that france is increasingly divided into the ‘haves’ and the ‘have-nots’. their grievances have revolved around two narratives in particular. first, the movement has focused on the unfairness of growing levels of inequality whereby those who are at the bottom of the hierarchy must regain control. for example, philosopher alain de benoist sees the movement as a clear example of ‘populism of the people’ motivated by people who no longer want to be ‘excluded, exploited, overtaxed, humiliated and ignored in every way imaginable, who want to make it clear that they exist’ (united world international, ). second, the movement appeals to french national identity, including its historical ideals. by highlighting government policies that have led to growing levels of inequality, the current government is seen as breaking with france’s history of championing social and economic equality (bristow, ). the current french government, led by president emmanuel macron, is represented as undermining histor- ical continuity and as not acting in the interests of ordi- nary french people. we will unpack these two arguments in greater detail below. macron as fuelling the salience of economic inequality the yellow vest movement started in october response to macron’s fuel tax, but now its aims and moti- vations are much broader and target a number of initia- tives that are seen to enhance economic inequality. one of the most fiercely criticised initiatives is macron’s repeal of the wealth tax. when it comes to the leadership style of macron and what he stands for as an individual, he is increasingly seen as a ‘president of the rich’. this image is strengthened by the fact that macron himself is a wealthy man, a graduate from france’s prestigious École nation- ale d’administration (ena), which many former presidents attended, and, as a former investment banker, is seen as a member of the parisian elite. his decision to increase fuel tax was motivated by an environmental agenda to reduce car use. however, this motivation was also seen as being insensitive and blind to the needs of in particular ordinary people in more rural regions in france where public trans- port is not a viable alternative to car use. as one yellow vest protestor put it: ‘macron is concerned with the end of the world; we are concerned with the end of the month’ (goodman, ). president macron’s initial response to the yellow vest movement may have been well-intended, but they seemed to backfire and only strengthen the perception of ‘us’ versus ‘them’. in particular, he organised a ‘great debate’ which lasted for two months. however, this debate was dismissed as tokenistic, and lacking genuine dialogue and engagement with representatives of the yellow vest movement (royall, ). in fact, the debate was described by critics as ‘a long monologue’ whereby ‘the president chose the topics, posed the questions, and provided the answers himself’ (paye, : ). macron’s response therefore fed the resentment from the poorer parts of society who already felt exploited and believed the elites do not care about their suffering. although macron’s government has made concessions to some demands of the yellow vest movement (e.g., dropping plans for a fuel tax, and an increase in the pension age), the movement has continued, and macron’s attempts to appease the protestors’ demands only seemed to fuel the movement. the narrative of macron as the ‘president of the rich’ has underscored the salience of inequality, and, once it was noticed, it became persistent (greeman, ). one yellow vest protestor, ghislain coutard (who came up with the idea to use the yellow warning vests as a uni- form for the movement) stated: ‘we should have woken up years ago. we took too long to wake up and now we have to make up for the years that we have missed. there have really been too many abuses over the years’ (dw news, ). thus, while working classes (i.e., low-status groups) are often remarkably accepting of inequality and do not seem to routinely challenge it, in france greater attention for economic inequality has clearly enhanced ‘class consciousness’. this reasoning is consistent with recent work which has shown that class consciousness was lower in countries that were rich and more equal, compared to countries that were either poor or rich but unequal (carvacho & Álvarez, ). supporting this view, the few studies that have examined the demographic profiles of yellow vest protesters show that the protes- tors tend to have high levels of concern over downward social mobility and low confidence in political elites (royall, ). jetten et al: inequality and the yellow vest movement growing inequality as violating national identity a key cultural value in france is to look out for those who are less well-off and that is perhaps why the welfare sys- tem has traditionally been very generous. having strong national welfare programs is a historical french aspiration and it lies at the heart of french national identity. indeed, the slogan ‘freedom, equality and brotherhood’, coined during the french revolution in , is prominently dis- played in many public buildings and schools, forming a daily reminder for many french people that the national identity of france is intrinsically linked to social equality. in particular, the french revolution is an important his- torical narrative that encapsulates the idea of ‘the people versus the elites’ (bristow, ). as scholars have shown, historical memories help construct a group’s identity, its norms, and therefore provides the group with a frame- work for how to respond to current challenges (e.g., liu & hilton, ). research has provided some evidence for the idea that the longer specific social arrangements have been in place in a particular society (i.e. institutionalized), the more fairness and legitimacy these institutions are afforded (blanchard & eidelman, ). for example, in a study in india, participants were led to believe that the indian caste system (an inherently unequal social system, at least from a contemporary western perspective, in which people’s social status is determined by birth ranging from untouchables to brahmin) was either a system with a long history tracing the origins of the system back thousands of years or a relatively short history—that it originated only a few hundred years ago. when the indian caste system was described as having a long history, indian participants judged it to be more legitimate and justifiable (blanchard & eidelman, , experiment ). in france, the situation seems reversed—it is social equality (rather than social inequality) that is seen as at the core of what it means to be french. precisely because ‘equality’ embodies french national identity (anderson, ; bristow, ), growing inequality in french society is perceived as troubling because it instils in people the sense that the french revolutions may have been in vain, and, hence, economic inequality does not fit with their understanding of what it means to be french. this has led to a strong response for at least two reasons. first, the sus- picion that the french government is not doing enough to promote equality evokes strong emotions and accusa- tions that the french government and elites are threats to national identity and traitors who do not have french interests at heart. second, the perception that france is abandoning its core values also triggers a fear for identity discontinuity and identity loss (jetten & hutchison, ; sani et al., ). yellow vest protestors make frequent reference to the french revolution and the idea that all those ideals that ordinary french people had fought for were now at risk (anderson, ). as bristow ( : ) observes: ‘more or less the sole historical reference point for the yellow vests is the french revolution of . this common denomi- nator has been a symbolic presence on demonstrations from the start: french flags worn as capes or waved on sticks, rousing choruses of la marseillaise sung by groups of protestors, red phrygian caps, and even the odd mock guillotine’. the yellow vests have positioned themselves as holding the moral high ground by protecting the french people from the elites who are breaking with the past (mols & jetten, ). combined with a strong national history of collective action and protest, it may therefore not be surprising that violations of national norms around equality form a strong motivation for mobilization against the current french government. continued success of the yellow vest movement the yellow vest movement continues to go strong. depending on the week and depending on who does the counting, numbers of demonstrators are said to vary from , to . million (according to the police union) to , to , (estimates by the ministry of interior; paye, ). regardless of the actual number, it is clear that the yellow vest movement is not going away anytime soon. there are a number of intergroup and intragroup processes that help explain the continued appeal of the yellow vests: (a) police actions enhance the perceived legitimacy of the yellow vest protests (intergroup process), (b) sharply drawn boundaries between victims of inequal- ity and elites (intergroup process), and, at the intragroup level, (b) greater solidarity forged among strange bedfel- lows. together, these dynamics have further fuelled the cohesion within the group of yellow vest protestors, thereby consolidating a politicized identity as the ‘yellow vests’, directing mobilization against groups that are per- ceived as perpetuating social inequality. police response enhance the perceived legitimacy of protests from a social identity perspective, in particular the elaborated social identity model (esim; stott et al., ; stott & drury, ), protestors’ interaction with the police produces the social conditions that lead protestors to perceive violent protest tactics as legitimate. excessive use of police force enhances the perception that police actions are illegitimate, leads to a conflict with the police, and further strengthens ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dynamics between protestors and the state. supporting this ‘action and reaction’ analysis, it is clear that the response to the protests by the french police has been strong and at times brutal. protestors have complained about the ‘over-use of force’ and that protestors had been denied basic rights after imprisonment. journalist david dufresne reported that police retaliation against demonstrators has been out of proportion with cases of serious police violence over the period november to march , with head wounds, eyes put out and hands torn off (paye, ). police brutality increases the sense that protestors’ actions are legitimate, protestors’ violent actions such as property damage, looting, and rioting (royall, ). this is because repression can become an additional grievance that motivates further protests against authorities (earl, ). those who were initially unwilling or unlikely to use violence may engage in violence to defend themselves jetten et al: inequality and the yellow vest movement against perceived injustice at the hands of the police force—who are viewed as an extension of the unjust macron government (stott et al., ). in line with crowd behaviour research (reicher, ), violent yellow vest protestors are not vandalizing property at random but seem to choose their targets carefully. for example, many violent actions strategically targeted the type of property that lies at the heart of the class conflict in france: expen- sive and luxury brand shops that line the champs elysees in paris. beyond the micro-level categorization processes that occur between protestors and the police, the broader political system may also serve to legitimize the actions of the protestors. france is one of the few european countries to continue using rubber bullet guns to control crowds and disperse riots with the goal of enforcing public order. prominent french and international human rights non-government organizations have called for a ban on rubber bullet weapons, which have been fired over , times since the yellow vest protestors emerged (the local, ). for example, the united nations and the council of europe have condemned the use of excessive police force against the yellow vest protestors (news wires, ; the connexion, ). however, the french courts have upheld the use of rubber bullets and have shown no signs of curbing excessive police measures. instead, there appears to be an escalation and a growing tendency to resort to more violent means to curtail the yellow vest protests. as an example, the macron government has pro- posed a controversial ‘anti-vandalism’ law, which would bring in protest laws that sanction aggressive legal actions to be taken against violent protests. for example, this law would ban specific individuals (who are suspected to be violent) from protesting, give law enforcement agencies the power to search protestors for possessing weapons without a court order, and make it illegal for protestors to cover their face with masks (france , ). macron signed the ‘anti-riot’ bill into law in april , arguing it protects civil liberties (ndtv, ). however, it may inadvertently give the yellow vest protestors greater legiti- macy for their cause. these dynamics are well captured in the following statement by a yellow vest protestor: ‘we won’t give up. if nothing else, we will fight for those who have been injured, for people who lost their eyes and oth- ers who have been beaten up and assaulted. their injuries will not be in vain’ (voice of europe, ). research has shown that repression of free speech and protests can mobilize people (aytac, schiumerini & stokes, ; chen, zachary & farris, ; lawrence, ). in the context of the arab spring in morroco, lawrence ( ) found that people who had family members who faced violent victimization by the regime (e.g., imprisonment, beatings) were more likely to participate in anti-regime protests. in an experimental study, lawrence ( ) fur- ther found that reminders of the moroccan government repression against protestors (compared to tolerance or receiving concession from the government) led to greater support for future pro-reform protests. using geolocation and twitter data, chen et al. ( ) found that instances of policing increased the likelihood of black lives matter protests in baltimore, usa. through survey-based experi- ments, aytac et al., ( ) found that reminders of police violence during the gezi park protests in turkey promoted more anger, which subsequently led to greater intentions to protest in turkey. taken together, findings across dif- ferent social and political contexts suggest that political repression of protests can mobilize even further support for such protests, calling into question the effectiveness of government actions that aim to curb civil disobedience and activism (such as macron’s ‘anti-riot’ law). boundaries between ‘victims of inequality’ and ‘elites’ are drawn more sharply police actions are not the only group dynamic that fuels intergroup ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dynamics. rather, distinc- tions along wealth lines have been further enhanced by the alleged lack of support from more mainstream french intellectuals and the middle class. for instance, in an interview with geographer christopher guilluy ( ), who studies the experiences of working-class people in france, guilluy explains how the yellow vests have received little cultural validation from elites: ‘one illustra- tion of this cultural divide is that most modern, progres- sive social movements and protests are quickly endorsed by celebrities, actors, the media and the intellectuals. but none of them approve of the gilets jaunes.’ to explain this apparent lack of backing, we consider the possibility that the lack of support from elites and intellectuals may result from enhanced income inequality in france. in particular, there is evidence that enhanced wealth categorization are likely to give rise to the devel- opment of richer and more elaborate narratives and self-stereotypes of one’s own wealth group (stephens, markus & phillips, ) and the wealth groups that oth- ers belong to (in self-categorization terms, a stronger com- parative fit triggers a search for normative fit, turner et al., ). moreover, the yellow vests were denounced by many as xenophobes as anti-environmentalists (because of their demand for a lower fuel tax), anti-semites and homophobes, thereby strengthening class lines. indeed, this perception was/is reinforced by the protestors them- selves, many of whom are open about their support for marine le pen’s populist radical right party, national rally. this perhaps explains why, despite considerable support for the yellow vest movement from within some left-wing circles, intellectuals more generally have not supported and endorsed the movement to the same extent as sup- port that was given to some other protest groups (e.g. the occupy wall street movement in the usa; the chilean protests in ). regardless of whether intellectuals are reaching out to the yellow vest protestors or not (and when they do, what motivates them), it is clear that the yellow vest protestors are distrusting of intellectuals and refuse to include them as part of the struggle. it has been noted that the yellow vests movement avoids alliances that could split them. as a le monde journalist noted, [the yellow vests dem- onstrate an] ‘absolute defiance towards — almost disgust at — the usual channels of representation: the movement has no leaders or spokespeople, rejects political parties, jetten et al: inequality and the yellow vest movement keeps its distance from unions, ignores intellectuals and hates the media’ (halimi, ). in that way, strong ‘us’ versus ‘them’ distinctions are reinforced and boundaries between ‘victims of inequality’ and elites are drawn more sharply. moreover, cross-categorisations that may lead to schisms within the movement are less likely to occur and the unifying bond (i.e., fighting economic and social inequality) remains strong, enhancing identification with others who define themselves as ‘victims of inequality’ (andersen & curtis, ; jetten et al., ; newman et al., ) further fuelling protestors’ motivation to con- tinue the fight, challenging all those who are not ‘victims of inequality’. we will explore the latter dynamic in greater detail in the next section. fighting inequality enhances solidarity among strange bedfellows these two intergroup dynamics (i.e., police actions and sharper boundaries between ‘victims of inequality’ and elites) not only enhanced ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dynamics, but (and in line with class self-categorization theorising, turner et al., ), it also led to greater solidarity among all those who identify as ‘victims of inequality’ (see so- called social cure research; haslam et al., ). relevant for our current purposes, research on the outcomes of economic inequality has shown evidence of two dynam- ics that are of particular important to understanding the solidarity among protestors in the yellow vest movement. first, in more unequal societies, there is less physical contact between people who belong to different classes (rothstein & uslaner, ). this is particularly the case in france where there is considerable physical exclusion of the ‘have-nots’ from the big cities and therefore the perception of ‘us at the periphery’ versus ‘the elite in the cities’. that is, the working class tends to be largely con- centrated in the countryside or smaller cities whereas the elite and intellectuals tend to live in the city or metropo- lis areas, creating a strong centre-periphery (capital city versus the rest) dynamic. the reasons for such physical separation are largely historic: france engaged in exces- sive centralization of administrative power in the capital in the th and th century. even though, in the s, reforms were introduced to create new administrative ‘régions’ and to decentralize administrative functions to regional centres (e.g. lyon, bordeaux, marseille, lille) this development has not ended the widespread belief that paris remains by far the most dominant administra- tive centre. such physical segregation is likely to be con- sequential for how people perceive economic inequality (see dawtry, sutton & sibley, ). in this case, it is likely that it further fed the ‘us’ versus ‘them’ narrative, leading to greater solidarity among those who feel at the periph- ery to collectively mobilize against the elites. second, there is evidence that greater economic ine- quality is associated with stronger class identification whereby the poor are more likely to self-identify as lower class (andersen & curtis, ; newman et al., ). for instance, andersen and curtis ( ) analysed data from the world value survey and found in their analy- sis of countries that greater economic inequality (as assessed by the gini coefficient) was associated with an identification polarization effect whereby people with lower incomes were more likely to identify with the low- est social class category in more unequal compared to more equal countries. consistent with our reasoning, in the words of andersen and curtis ( : ): ‘our expla- nation for this finding is simple: if inequality between classes is high, people are more likely to see class dif- ferences and thus more likely to distinguish themselves along class lines’ (see also jetten et al., ; kraus, tan & tannenbaum, ). in sum, both processes lead to greater intergroup dynamics with enhanced salience of the own class (and its disadvantaged status) as well as polarization away from the elite who are increasingly seen as the enemy (‘them’), who are not acting in the interest of the victims of inequality. the yellow vest movement has been successful in draw- ing attention to its cause because it was able to harness and articulate collective grievances of multiple groups in french society that perceive a growing gap between the elite and ordinary people. ‘us’ is defined inclusively around shared victimhood—as anyone that is ‘not them’. this sentiment is also captured in one of the slogans of the yellow vest movement: ‘we are the people’ (paye, ) and the humble yellow vests that protestors wear, which have become a symbol of a shared identity around common grievances. in social identity terms, the shared outcry over rising inequality created a stronger superor- dinate identity, whereby differences between subgroups become (temporarily at least) unimportant and the focus is on the shared collective cause. as a yellow vest protes- tor interviewed in a euronews ( ) documentary on the movement explained, ‘our strength lies precisely in our diversity’. interestingly, as laclau ( ) has noted, pop- ulism lends itself well to unite strange bedfellows because it is based on a ‘thin’ ideology that may appeal to many different groups in society from different backgrounds and with diverse grievances. the notion that the yellow vest movement effectively represents a strong superordinate umbrella identity that embraces and includes many subgroups may explain why the movement includes a wide variety of political and social groups. the category becomes inclusive because it is defined in opposition to the wealthy and elite segments of society and united by a common goal—in this case, frus- tration with economic inequality. similar dynamics were at work for protestors coming together in turkey to pre- vent an urban development project of the popular gezi park (acar & uluğ, ). in turkey, what started out as a protest against the destruction of a park quickly escalated into protests against police violence, repression, and gov- ernment corruption, which mobilized over three million people in cities across turkey. groups that typically find themselves on the opposite end of the political spectrum rapidly came together united in their opposition to the government (acar & uluğ, ). in sum, by developing a narrative of bringing together all those who see themselves as victims of inequality, the yellow vest movement was able to unite groups that may at other times be seen as ‘strange bedfellows’. both the jetten et al: inequality and the yellow vest movement political left and the political right were attracted to the movement and it was not only working class but also middle-class workers who joined the demonstrations (anderson, ; royall, ). furthermore, it is histori- cally disadvantaged groups who are joined by the ‘newly disadvantaged’; those who, before the austerity measures, led more comfortable lives (e.g., nurses, teachers, truck drivers) but who feel that their living conditions have declined over the last couple of years. the yellow vest pro- testors have attracted people who have traditional mark- ers of wealth such as houses, jobs, and cars—but these are not considered luxuries because they are not sufficient to live comfortably anymore. as noted by the plateforme d’enquêtes militantes, a militant anti-racist research group in paris: “certainly, the familiar strata of public and civil servants, service workers, wage earners from the industrial basins and students are present. but a whole host of other social segments struggling to make ends meet seems to be at the forefront of the dynamic: employees of small and medium enterprises, shopkeepers, artisans and the grow- ing plethora of new forms of independent and precarious labour” (as cited in anderson, ). all three processes enhance ‘us’ versus ‘them’ dynam- ics whereby boundaries between ‘victims of inequality’ and ‘elites’ are drawn more sharply strengthening the shared identity among the protestors. first, in intergroup terms, police action and state legislation to curb protest enhances the perceived legitimacy of the movement and the perceived illegitimacy of anyone who aims to stop them (e.g., the police, the government, intellectuals, the middle class). second, the perception that ‘the elite’ are not on their side strengthens the ‘elite’ versus ‘common people’ distinction, making the movement a people-pow- ered response to a class conflict. third, and in terms of intragroup processes, the sense of shared identification that developed as a result of interacting with other sub- groups in society that identify as ‘victims of inequality’ strengthens the solidarity with the movement and the strength in numbers enhances perceptions of collec- tive efficacy and the motivation to fight for the cause. by banding together as those who share disadvantage, exclusion and marginalisation, a strong shared identity emerges and this is associated with a strong sense of anger and belief that by working together and continu- ing the protests, social change can be achieved (dixon et al., ). a research agenda the challenges facing ordinary french people (e.g., grow- ing job precariousness, rising cost of living due to austerity) are real, not imagined. furthermore, there are many spe- cific idiosyncrasies such as the unique local and historical context that need to be taken into account when explain- ing the rise and persistence of the yellow vest movement. however, we can nonetheless recognize that a proper understanding of the way in which economic inequality might psychologically divide society and create new inter- group dynamics is essential to understand the yellow vest movement. while we focused here on mapping out the way the yellow vest movement may be understood through the lens of economic inequality, our reasoning is in urgent need of empirical support. in particular, we suggest that future research may focus on examining the following processes. first, it would be important to test our hypothesis that the movement has profoundly shaped group dynamics around social class. the experience of participating in protests should help empower people facing economic hardships and politi- cize their identities around a clear power struggle – in this case, a class struggle among the ‘have nots’ and the ‘haves’. a second research agenda may focus on exploring the intragroup dynamics within the movement. specifically, we proposed here that even if the movement’s specific political demands are yet to be realized, the success of the movement lies in the act of protesting together (see drury & reicher, ). third, future research should explore social cure predictions (haslam et al., ) related to the relationship between engagement in the yellow vest movement and well-being. the yellow vest movement has provided people from radically different backgrounds— many of whom may not only feel economically but also culturally ‘left behind’—with a platform to come together and help one another. people who previously struggled in separation from one another now have new (and some unexpected) social networks from which they can draw resilience and strength. future research on yellow vest supporters may reveal a sense of solidarity within the group, as they are no longer suffering in silence (france , ). finally, another important aspect to explore is the way that the yellow vest movement has inspired the forma- tion of other movements. it is clear that the yellow vest movement has opened up opportunities for mobilizing around related grievances around inequality. for example, inspired by the yellow vests, a new protest group branded as the black vests (‘gilets noirs’) has emerged in france and is focused on advocating for the rights of undocu- mented migrants. a black vest protestor, kanoute, who is credited for naming the movement said: ‘we took the same name – the gilets – but we are blackened by anger – and that’s where the name gilets noirs came about’ (butterly, ). further, the yellow vests in neighbour- ing countries have also organised themselves by setting up schemes to support those who are unemployed and poor. for example, yellow vests in the netherlands have started a support program called ‘yellow and nothing to spend’ (‘geel en niets te makken’; heijmans, ). these off-shoots of the yellow vest movement are worthy of study in their own right. in sum, the yellow vest movement has made evident that there is a growing group of (lower) middle class, work- ing class, and poor who are experiencing economic depri- vation and resentment of the ruling class (i.e., politicians and elites), with this political class being perceived as ‘out of touch’ with the realities of everyday folk. whether the spirit of the movement will go on to enact revolutionary change to the present class system remains to be seen. in the words of one anonymous yellow vest supporter: “if the politicians don’t work for us, we should be able to get rid of them. the battle will be hard, it’s we the people against jetten et al: inequality and the yellow vest movement the elites, and they hold on to what they have, they don’t want to let go of their power. but we will fight until they fall” (voice of europe, ). notes macron announced plans to shut down the ena, in an attempt to make france a fairer society https://www. reuters.com/article/us-france-macron-ena/frances- macron-to-shut-elite-ena-school-in-drive-for-fairness- iduskcn s gz. what makes the yellow vest movement a particularly fascinating case study is the fact that it emerged in french-speaking european countries, where dis- course theorists have gone to great lengths to defend ‘progressive populism’ (mouffe, ; stavrakakis, ; thomassen, ). however, apart from this relatively small circle of scholars, few intellectuals appear to have taken up the plight of the yellow vest movement. even though the yellow vest movement has been sup- ported by some left-wing intellectuals, those who have supported the yellow vest movement have been criti- cised for doing so purely for their own personal gain without caring much about the lot of ordinary citizens. this is elaborated by guilluy ( ) when he notes: ‘it is really difficult to oppose the hipsters when they say they care about the poor and about minorities. but actually, they are very much complicit in relegating the working classes to the sidelines. not only do they benefit enormously from the globalised economy, but they have also produced a dominant cultural discourse which ostracises working-class people. think of the “deplorables” evoked by hillary clinton.’ interestingly, the yellow vest protest attracts both far-right front national supporters and far-left trade union supporters (cgt and others). in interviews with cgt representatives, it becomes clear that some of them are uneasy about the presence of front national supporters in the yellow vest movement, but accepting that the importance of the cause require them to temporarily set aside differences and fight a common enemy (see https://www.france .com/ fr/ -france-cgt-gilets-jaunes-greve-manifesta- tion-unisson-paris). there may be important boundary conditions to the ‘heterogeneity as a strength’ rationale. as shown by wouters ( ) in the context of an asylum seeker demonstration in belgium and the black lives mat- ter movement in the us, diversity of protestors only become persuasive and attractive in the eyes of the public when diverse groups act in unison and are con- sistent in 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( ). how economic inequality fuels the rise and persistence of the yellow vest movement. international review of social psychology, ( ): , – . doi: https://doi.org/ . /irsp. submitted: september accepted: december published: january copyright: © the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (cc-by . ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. open access international review of social psychology is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by ubiquity press. https://doi.org/ . /irsp. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / 	economic inequality in france 	objective versus subjective perceptions of growing inequality 	perceived economic inequality: its salience and perceived fairness 	macron as fuelling the salience of economic inequality 	growing inequality as violating national identity 	continued success of the yellow vest movement 	police response enhance the perceived legitimacy of protests 	boundaries between ‘victims of inequality’ and ‘elites’ are drawn more sharply 	fighting inequality enhances solidarity among strange bedfellows 	a research agenda 	notes 	funding information 	competing interests 	references racial projections: cyberspace, public space, and the digital divide ucla ucla previously published works title racial projections: cyberspace, public space, and the digital divide permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ journal information communication & society, ( ) issn - x author carpio, genevieve g publication date doi . / x. . peer reviewed escholarship.org powered by the california digital library university of california https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ https://escholarship.org http://www.cdlib.org/ full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rics download by: [ucla library] date: january , at: : information, communication & society issn: - x (print) - (online) journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rics racial projections: cyberspace, public space, and the digital divide genevieve g. carpio to cite this article: genevieve g. carpio ( ): racial projections: cyberspace, public space, and the digital divide, information, communication & society, doi: . / x. . to link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/ . / x. . published online: jan . submit your article to this journal view related articles view crossmark data http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rics http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rics http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showcitformats?doi= . / x. . http://dx.doi.org/ . / x. . http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rics &show=instructions http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rics &show=instructions http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / x. . http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / x. . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / x. . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / x. . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - racial projections: cyberspace, public space, and the digital divide genevieve g. carpio césar e. chávez department of chicana and chicano studies, university of california los angeles, los angeles, ca, usa abstract scholars of critical race studies, urban history, and information and communications technologies (icts) share an interest in the relationship between spatial and racial disparities, including the quality of basic infrastructure, degrees of connectivity, and participatory culture. however, contemporary research on the digital divide struggles to link historical legacies of uneven development, as well as social justice strategies, with digital participation in urban spaces. by examining contemporary digital art that critiques the spatial inequalities encountered by u.s. racial minorities, this article illustrates how public intellectuals use icts in ways that draw upon past strategies to territorialize space for political ends. it focuses on digital pop-ups, open-air installations that cast images onto public space using projectors. historicizing these new efforts illustrates a continuity of tactics engaged by communities of color in response to socio-spatial inequalities in the urban united states, such as the s mural movement’s efforts to re-politicize spaces of exclusion. while existing literature finds that digital inequality results in differential digital human capital, this research indicates that place-based claims, such as digital pop-ups, are important sites for combatting racial injustice and creating more inclusionary spaces, especially among youth adults. article history received may accepted december keywords digital divide; digital arts; race; urban studies; young people on a fall day in , bulldozers appeared in the barrio logan neighborhood of san diego, california. residents of this largely chicana/o community joined together to form a human chain around the imposing machinery that threatened to replace a parcel reserved for a neighborhood park with a california highway station. planning practices dismissive of chicano/a residents, unfulfilled promises by government officials, and years of advo- cacy by neighbors came to a standstill upon this contentious plot of land located beneath the san diego-coronado bridge. without waiting for municipal or state approval, residents occupied the parcel, where they boxed out bulldozers with their bodies and transformed the dry dirt into parkland with plants and seeds. in the following years, chi- cana/o artists from throughout california painted the bridge’s monotone walls with the vivid iconography of the chicano/a movement and mexican american history in a © informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group contact genevieve g. carpio gcarpio@chavez.ucla.edu césar e. chávez department of chicana and chicano studies, university of california los angeles, bunche hall, los angeles, ca , usa information, communication & society, http://dx.doi.org/ . / x. . mailto:gcarpio@chavez.ucla.edu http://www.tandfonline.com reconstruction of place-based identity that highlighted shared forms of spatial struggle across the barrios of california (avila, ; villa, ). the intervention of barrio logan residents is both an example of staunch inequalities and a model of the ways spatial interventions can undermine oppressive landscapes. the story above is well known among urban studies and ethnic studies scholars as a critical point within the chicano/a rights movement for the ways it transformed unwanted infrastructure into a cultural asset. within media studies, scholars concerned with the digital divide ‒ or uneven access to information and communication technologies ‒ have similarly underscored the active role of space in the perpetuation of disparities based on race, as well as displays of resistance to digital marginalization (gilbert, ; gonzales, ; robinson et al., ). it stands to reason that historical legacies of racism manifested in the built environment, likewise, hinder internet access and prevent equal engagement with web-based content. yet, the history of spatial struggle and resistive prac- tices by marginalized communities typically stand apart from contemporary concerns over the digital divide in academic discourse. uniting scholarship from information and com- munications technology studies, critical race and ethnic studies, and urban history, this essay attempts to bridge this gap by examining digital place-based claims that challenge historical spatial legacies encountered by communities of color (mcpherson, ). my contribution to this conversation is two-fold. i contend that although the mediums have changed, historicizing these efforts suggests a continuity of tactics ‒ or everyday prac- tices that recast the orderings of the powerful in acts of contestation ‒ engaged by commu- nities of color in response to socio-spatial inequalities in the urban united states (de certeau, ). here, i gleam insight from media scholars who have contended that the ‘digital turn’ represents a continuation of communication technologies rather than a stark departure (baron, ; jenkins, ; nakamura, ). likewise, here, i assert that responses to the inequities that accompany new technologies represent the persistence rather than abandonment of earlier meaning-making actions. related to this first point, i further argue that where digital inequality results in differential digital human capital ‒ or the ability to participate in the internet and harness it towards attaining beneficial social, economic, and political outcomes ‒ place-based claims emerge as an important site for combatting racial injustice. although compelling scholarship has concerned itself with social media organizing, the concern with #hashtag activism can obscure the continuing significance of place for participatory culture if it does not also concern itself with the ways communities of color have resisted marginalization through cultural production in everyday spaces (costanza-chock, ). focusing on the built environment, in this analysis, public plazas and universities will unfold as particularly fruitful places for digital spatial interventions. in order to flesh out these arguments, this essay examines digital pop-ups ‒ digital installations using projectors to cast images onto hard surfaces in order to communicate a public message ‒ as a method of spatial intervention growing out of earlier efforts used by communities of color to re-politicize spaces from which they have been excluded. along- side a brief account of the contemporary racial digital divide, it examines two place-based pop-up installations that were held in spaces whose self-proclaimed mission is the diffu- sion of knowledge, art intersections by the smithsonian asian pacific museum center in and latin@ mobility in twentieth century california curated by students enrolled in a course i taught at yale university in . that is, this essay foregrounds digital pop-ups g. g. carpio as a method for questioning the racial digital divide through uniting technology, histories of marginalized communities, and public spatial interventions. in doing so, it points towards a digital adaptation of earlier methods used for combatting spatial inequality, such as those enacted by the muralists of barrio logan, who rewrote the meaning of oppressive infrastructures with forms of cultural expression. this is not to collapse the real differences between the producers of these media and the grassroots actors in barrio logan, the latter whose stakes and perspectives are heightened by intersecting forms of marginalization experienced in their home environment, but to underscore the significant parallels in their traditions and goals. although the technology of digital projection has undergone significant changes over the last century, its purpose as a tool for civic communication has remained relatively steady. in its earlier iterations, during the s, projection media was composed of lamps, lenses, and mirrors. creating spectacular displays across the night sky, ‘environ- mental projections’ danced upon clouds and skyscrapers in a manner reminiscent of science fiction. as described by art historian abigail susik, these early forms of display gave way to advertising and political radicalism by the s. the juxtaposition of light and shadow has served to transform our cityscapes, as urban surfaces ‘become either will- ing or unwilling screens of fields for imposition’ (susik, ). today, digital pop-ups use computers and high-powered projectors to create live art installations on walls, buildings, and streets. for instance, the uk-based company urban projections provides a range of production services, including street projection, digital graffiti, and projection mappings that fit directly onto individual buildings (figure ). their clients have ranged from large organizations to independent arts organizations, such as the bbc, dr marten, and the royal festival hall in london (urban projections, ). because installation does not necessarily require permission, projection bombing has also been adopted for activist projects. temporarily transforming landscapes into spaces for public art and commentary, figure . courtesy of urban projections. information, communication & society digital projection by artists, activists, and non-profit organizations decenter for-profit marketing in favor of political commentary. likewise, digital pop-ups have the potential to add to the contours of public discourse and can be leveraged to expand the cultural citi- zenship of those normally excluded from galleries, central business districts, universities, and other elite spaces. urban history and critical race studies provide a foundation for scholars interested in the ways marginalized groups engage recent media developments, including digital projec- tion, in response to socio-spatial inequalities. past and present forms of discrimination in planning policy, property acquisition, and the distribution of undesirable land uses are intimately tied to the racialization of space. where social structures of ‘white privilege’ have not wholly excluded people of color from asset accumulation, policies and practices of racial apartheid devalue such investments and concentrate non-white populations in segregated neighborhoods with higher pollutants, dilapidated infrastructure, and fewer public resources (diaz, ; lipsitz, ; pulido, ). americanist george lipsitz refers to the ways white americans and african americans experience differential relationships to wealth, and its subsequent manifestation in the form of racial exclusion, as ‘the white spatial imaginary’ ( ). idealizing homogeneity and spatial control, the impulse of the white spatial imaginary is to obscure the unequal effects of geographic opportunity and the experiences of marginalized populations. persistent patterns of racia- lized wealth and poverty ‒ from federal housing authority subsidies to the siting of unde- sirable land uses ‒ have generated a spatialized politics of race with evolving consequences in the twenty-first century. digital pop-ups represent a form of digital projection that can be used to engage communities that have historically been excluded from full participation in a variety of place-specific contexts. a notable example exists within museum exhibitions that target audiences with minimal digital access, such as recent work designed by the smithsonian asian pacific american center and smithsonian latino center. in , the centers launched gourmet intersections, a digital exhibition examining ‘fusion foods’ as a means to explore the shared histories, commonalities, and culinary traditions of asian and latino/a descent communities in the united states. although often viewed separately from one another, the exhibition curators foreground the relational experiences of asian and latino people, who have intersecting experiences of immigration, labor segmentation, and neighborhood formation. presented collaboratively by the two centers, gourmet inter- section represents a multi-nodal approach to the museum experience. web visitors are presented the options of navigating the exhibit through a website, engaging the twitter hashtag #asianlatino, or sharing their own story to the museum instagram, twitter, or facebook accounts (smithsonian asian pacific american center, a). at the center of this work is creating multiple access points to the exhibit in order to generate a public conversation through art. a principal component of the gourmet intersections digital exhibit was an accompany- ing art intersections pop-up featuring digital-born artwork by latino/a and asian amer- ican artists in the spring of . drawn primarily from tumblr and twitter, participating artists included steve alfaro, audrey chan, the culturestrike network, and lalo alcaraz, among others. curators adriel luis, eric nakamura, and shizu saldamando designed the art intersections pop-up as a two-day event in silver spring, maryland with the purpose of breaking down museum walls and promoting an interactive experience that would draw g. g. carpio attendance from a wide-array of participants, particularly those with low rates of museum patronage. according to adriel luis, the event targeted immigrant communities without access to high bandwidth internet ‒ who would have limited access to an online exhibit ‒ by meeting people where they already live in a fusion of music, art, and gathering in the veterans plaza (figure ). using high-powered projectors, artists’ images were magnified and cast onto the walls and streets of the plaza, virtually turning the space into a living exhibit. an archive of this event continues to live at a flickr site and digital lookbook devoted to the exhibit, as well as a youtube video of children dancing to techno beats atop projected images in the public square (ajax , ; smithsonian asian pacific american center, b, c, d). when considering the art intersections pop-up alongside the legacy of spatial interven- tions waged by people of color, it appears to share a consonant effect of politicizing public space through media and art. located in downtown silver spring, maryland, minutes away from washington d.c., the veterans plaza occupies the symbolic heart of the city. as a site marked for public events and festivals, a pop-up that speaks to the hybridity figure . courtesy of the smithsonian asian pacific american center. information, communication & society of the american experience takes on a special significance here. as described by geogra- pher eugene mccann, public space often ignores racialized geographies and denies racial differences, particularly in u.s. urban contexts. where symbolic spaces such as central business districts are rendered devoid of social struggle in order to facilitate the assump- tion of public consensus, murals serve as a powerful form of communication that utilize everyday spaces in order to foster community expression and, in some cases, calls to col- lective action. in the tradition of grassroots actors, but yielding uniquely high access to technical capital and institutional resources, designers of digital pop-ups like art intersec- tions can rupture the perceived homogeneity of the downtown. through a recasting of public space with oppositional elements, digital installations can create a ‘counter-space’ that underscores difference (mccann, ). the methodology of art intersections aligns with interventions waged by people of color who have used cultural production as a means to ‘humanize an inhuman environ- ment’ when faced with mass displacement, real estate speculation, and planning policies that fail to account for working-class voices. the exhibit content underscores the depoli- ticization of urban space, while also pointing towards the artistic convergence of digital and spatial interventions that magnify difference in public space. consider an exhibit image of an elder woman sweeping and municipal workers whitewashing a wall impressed with a spray-painted portrait of trayvon martin in the embrace of the virgin of guada- lupe (figure ). the image is aptly titled eraces # . in this erasure, artist pablo cristi seems to conjure mexican muralist david siquieros’ américa tropical. the s mural was infamously whitewashed by the city of los angeles soon after completion in order to cen- sor its’ controversial content; the depiction of an indigenous man hanging from a double cross with an american eagle perched on top. conversant with the legacy of los angeles mural culture, eraces # underscores the politics of cultural erasure in urban space through the image of municipal workers and an abuelita solemnly sweeping away this poignant reminder of violence against black youth (cristi, ). in doing so, the image evokes the historical, spatial, and ideological legacies of expressive culture embodied in twentieth-century muralism. where communities without authoritative representation have lacked access to brick and mortar, they have adapted song, paint, and their own bodies to invoke claims to place. as a counterpoint to the ahistoricity of the white spatial imaginary, lipsitz has described cultural expression and attempts to imbue space with public meaning by people who are regularly excluded from physical space as the black spatial imaginary. for instance, examining the significance of street parades for african american musicians in mid-twentieth-century new orleans, he writes, ‘taking to the streets was a quintessen- tially political act that deployed performance as a means of calling a community into being and voiced its values and beliefs’ (lipsitz, , p. ). permeating space with expressive culture provided african americans access to sites in which they were otherwise unwel- comed. in the context of a racialized geography, in which people of color were systema- tically excluded from particular spaces, musical improvization was a political act that called into question the meaning of place. cultural historians have, likewise, drawn atten- tion to the ways african american and chicano/a communities have used street perform- ance and mural art to combat the cold surfaces of freeway development in a reappropriation of form and function that promotes pride in the histories of communities adversely affected by their construction (avila, ). these acts represent a visual taking g. g. carpio of one’s environment that question the logic of profit-driven development that occurs at the expense of people of color and, instead, replaces it with value measured by its usage. digital projection can be viewed as an extension of historical tactics waged by the dis- possessed as they demanded different ‘ways of seeing’ (berger, ). where patterns of (dis)investment obstruct the participation of people of color from the web, and planning decisions cast them apart from their built environment, digital projection serves as a tool to render these erasures visible. however, they are unique from most forms of spatial pic- torial expression in that they do not require official permissions and are accompanied by less risk than permanent changes to hard surfaces, such as freehand graffiti. the social the- ories of henri lefebvre, who argues abstract space becomes dominant when capitalism defines the appropriate meanings and activities that can occur in space, are also informa- tive here ( ). unlike exhibits that move art generated in public mediums to official spaces of high-culture, as in the s movement of street graffiti from public walls to can- vas in galleries for purchase, projection represents an ephemeral taking of the built environment removed from profit (cresswell, ). drawing from traditions of guerilla figure . courtesy of pablo cristi, eraces # , . information, communication & society projection, by casting images generated by and about people of color onto courtyards and administration buildings, the neutrality of public space is challenged and the needs of the public sphere materialize (irazábal, ; low & smith, ; mitchell, ; susik, ). where the democratizing potential of the web is undermined by digital inaccess, pop- ups offer a means to bridge the racial digital divide by uniting space and digital media in ways that question persistent government disinvestment in communities of color. in the twenty-first century, patterns of racialized inequity have generated a spatialized politics of race with evolving consequences, particularly as it relates to developing communications technologies. as detailed in survey reports of the us census, us department of com- merce, and pew research center, from the s and into the present african americans and latino/as have been significantly less likely have internet access in their households than those who identify as asian american and white (nakamura, ; u.s. census bureau, ). recent research underscores that ‘digital inaccess’ is a manifestation of place-based racism akin to other forms of discrimination that disproportionately affect non-white people, such as environmental inequalities and disinvestment in building stock (gilbert, ; hong, ). complicating other prerequisites to internet entry, such as access to a computer and the skills to maximize its use, a physical topology of ‘on-ramps,’ such as fiber optic cables, is far more likely to be found in white majority com- munities (sandvig, ; sterne, ). responding to barriers surrounding internet-use, people of color in working-class com- munities have developed innovative strategies that speak to both alternative access and variable-use of internet resources. for instance, in lieu of personal computers, low-income african american and latino/a residents have turned to public resources, such as library terminals, to complete pertinent tasks requiring the internet, including accessing health information, researching government services, applying for jobs, and completing home- work. more so, as an affordable alternative to personal computers, a significant portion of working-class people of color have adopted smart phones as their primary means for accessing the internet (zickuhr & smith, ). but inequalities remain. even where the gap seems to narrow, users with standard dial-up or lower speed internet service are at a distinct disadvantage to those with high-speed internet. working-class populations’ dis- proportionate means for maintaining and repairing wi-fi capable devices, due to unaf- fordability and the lack of temporary means for access within their immediate spatial networks, pose another barrier to equalization. ongoing economic and social costs are dis- proportionately burdensome for working-class users, resulting in ‘dependable instability,’ but they are also human agents who navigate these challenges to access in a myriad of ways (gonzales, ). where mural art and performance generated by communities scarred by urban devel- opment could transform infrastructural inequalities into a tableau of minoritized histories, spatial interventions using digital projection, likewise, represent a remaking of place with the potential to highlight social struggle and foster community belonging. in these cases, working-class communities of color are the intended audience and subject of projections, but persistent digital divides serve as a formidable barrier to production. whereas spatial interventions through occupation, performance, and mural art can manifest by employing everyday tools and resources in communities of color, designing digital pop-ups requires not only first-level digital access to information and communications technologies (icts), g. g. carpio but also second-level accessibility in terms of training and engagement (robinson et al., ). this is a significant obstacle, but not insurmountable. as places with unique access to technology and digital literacy training, spaces of higher education offer a promising site to engage media production for spatial change (bach, shaffer, & wolfson, ; carpio, luk, & bush, ; dixon et al., ; hale, ). colleges and universities generally provide students access to computers and wireless internet while on-campus. yet, a recurrent theme among college educators of media and technology studies are the uneven levels of access and familiarity with media resources among the college population, some remaining dependent on -hour loan periods of lap- tops from university libraries and reliant on their smartphones to write term papers. this concern suggests that the spatial inequalities hindering equal access to new technologies in working-class communities of color have lingering effects on college-aged youth. alar- mingly, educators’ concern points towards the continuation of digital inequality even when students’ move within spaces of high digital access (hargittai & walejko, ; jones, ; jones, johnson-yale, millermaier, & seoane perez, ). considering the links between skill-based computer usage and income, this trend has alarming conse- quences for the perpetuation of economic segmentation (paino & renzulli, ; robin- son, et al., ). as long as race and locational inequalities persist, schools will offer a critical space for either combating or maintaining spatial inequalities that reproduce unequal access to new technologies in communities of color (sterne, ). although limitations remain, universities are well positioned to challenge digital inequality by providing youth of color and their allies opportunities to investigate mani- festations of spatial injustice and to design digital humanities projects with the capacity for place-based interventions. inspired by arts intersections, this was the goal of an on-cam- pus digital installation i co-designed with students at yale university in december , digital pop-up! latina and latino mobility in twentieth century california. through projectors, an interactive computer station, and a led screen, students transformed the built environment of yale’s campus into an interactive web exhibition. at the center of the project were sharing latino/a histories and demonstrating the potential for emergent technologies to expand how research is done, by whom it is produced, and for whom it is intended. student projects built upon writing assignments examining the varied roles of mobility in latino/a california. these included migrant theater produced by el teatro campesino, transnational movements within the sister cities of tijuana and san diego, the movement of mural iconography between san diego and los angeles, multimedia photography of latinas in urban space, activism among los angeles street vendors, the chicano/a student walkouts in east los angeles, and the circulation of images per- taining to filipina/o and mexican american collaboration within the united farm workers movement. while foregrounding latino/a histories, students organized the exhi- bit geographically, moving north from the u.s./mexico border. in doing so, they provided an analysis of california foregrounding spatial relationships. throughout the exhibit, themes such as the built environment, visual culture, political-economy, and activism further linked the projects to one another (carpio et al., ). place was a key part of project design. more than a neutral backdrop, the setting was an important factor in framing the digital pop-up. nestled in the center of campus, adjacent to the center for engineering innovation and design, students selected the becton plaza for projection as a symbolic space where technology, art, and the humanities meet at the information, communication & society corner of a major public intersection. new haven is the largest urban community in con- necticut, with a majority–minority population and concentration of % african ameri- can and % latino/a residents (u.s. census, ). where gates and key card requirements close off much of yale’s campus from a surrounding majority–minority population, physical and visual access to the becton plaza is maximized by its street view. likewise, the stakes of digital pop-ups are magnified by their institutional context. for instance, yale university is an elite academic institution whose social capital is tied to nar- ratives of selectivity and exclusion. in , the year in which the exhibit was held, yale held a % acceptance rate with an enrollment ratio of % african american and % his- panic students, compared to a u.s. population of % and %, respectively (u.s. census, ; yale university, ). drawing national attention in the winter of , yale stu- dents held a ‘march of resilience’ that highlighted racial tensions ignited by a campus fra- ternity who denied a young woman of color entry, a faculty email defending students who chose to wear halloween costumes of racial caricatures, and a lack of administrative sup- port for tenure lines in ethnic studies, among others. these incidents, and those simul- taneously responded to by student activists at the university of missouri, ithaca college, university of kansas, and claremont mckenna college in the winter of , underscore the exclusionary environments and hostile resistance encountered by students of color within the institutional context of higher education (kingkade, workneh, & gre- noble, ; stanley-becker, ; swarns, ). they also point towards the specific place-context in which our digital pop-up operated. as a history course cross-listed in ethnicity, race, and migration, a university program with an explicit commitment to unpacking how communities of color have resisted their own marginalization, the course drew students allied with and coming from a student demographic more diverse than that typically associated with the university as a whole (laguna, ). given this dissonance, students had a unique opportunity to leverage campus resources to create a public-facing project intent on recasting who yale is for, while also engaging new media to draw attention to legacies of spatial inequality. using digital projection, the stone gray of the dean’s office ‒ a prominent example of the neo-gothic architecture found throughout yale’s campus ‒ was painted in light to display murals, video, and photography of latino/a expressive culture (figure ). even if only temporarily, through emerging technologies the student curators recast the terms of meaningful histories and made claims to a campus that has historically excluded sur- rounding residents and students of minority backgrounds. through digital projection, student-curators centered latino/a histories and claims to space that resonate with the legacies of place-based claims engaged by communities of color in california. histories of the chicano/a mural movement poignantly transported the expressive culture of barrio urbanism from the walls of southern california to the edi- fices of new haven. the nested spatial interventions of this transformation in the built environment ‒ one erected on the foundation of earlier chicano/a muralists ‒ was high- lighted by one student, noting, ‘these murals have now been introduced to yale’s campus … they have been featured in the walls that were once impenetrable by minorities in this country, and that is a radical movement within itself.’ another student created an inter- active map and curated images of the east los angeles walkouts, in which a multi- racial student coalition of chicano/a students and their allies advocated for courses that incorporated the mexican american experience in school curricula. underscoring the g. g. carpio ways that the mobility of collective bodies could transfer spatial meaning, even when con- fronted with police resistance, this exhibit pointed towards the power of coordinated action by youth, a historic link with particular significance in the wake of on-campus sup- port of the black lives matter movement. other exhibits engaged social media to examine how latino/a artists and activists seek to invoke changes in public policy and imbue place with social meaning. for instance, one student-curator choreographed a series of photo- graphs posted to tumblr and instagram alongside sound clips from interviews she con- ducted with their artists/subjects in order to present a chicana feminist perspective of urban mobility. illustrating the ways digital projection can be used to change the meaning of a neo-gothic architecture previously viewed as domineering, she reflected, ‘i was thrilled to see the images i curated being projected on the side of yale’s gothic sss building. these were mostly images of chicana women who come from my background, and it felt amazing to see two of my worlds clash in such a visually impactful way’ highlighted by the exclusionary context of yale university, student-curators created a counter-narra- tive placing the legacies of spatial intervention at the administrative center of campus (carpio et al., ). if the digital pop-up allowed students to experiment with a format that could, poten- tially, open up new media projects to communities underserved by digital infrastructure and draw attention to spatial manifestations of inequality and intervention, it was still lim- ited to those who could attend the event. connecting physical and virtual publics, the stu- dent-curators created the twitter hashtag #calatino (figure ). in her american studies association presidential address, ruth wilson gilmore notes, ‘while social media might produce interactions not available in the pen, paper, and print-media milieu, the face time required of group projects can powerfully ground the virtual social’ (gilmore, figure . projection design by fonzy toro, photograph courtesy of stephen pitti. information, communication & society ). likewise, here, the combination of public exhibition and social media generated multiple grounds from which students could socialize, both beyond and within the digital world. this methodology is particularly relevant for projects targeting u.s. latino/as who, according to a pew research center survey of white, black and hispanic internet- users, exhibit the highest rates of participation on social networking sites at % of all latino/a users (duggan & brenner, ). tweets from those in attendance allowed an exhibit access point for those who could not attend the pop-up. bridging public space and web space, twitter ‘favorites’ and ‘comments’ posted by those in virtual attendance, as well as in person, were read aloud throughout the evening. an advantageous outcome resulting from the #hashtag was a crowd-sourced digital archive of, an otherwise, ephem- eral event (carpio, ). a survey distributed within a week of the pop-up provides additional insight into the potential impact of digital projection for generating conversations about spatial and digital inequalities, particularly among college-aged youth. several respondents emphasized the value of multimodal work. as described in one survey response, ‘projecting the images on buildings, using multiple formats for presenting ideas and material, inviting people in through twitter, was marvelous. i learned so much.’ others highlighted the ways diverse primary sources including text, visual, and oral sources could garner new historical figure . original image courtesy of andrew quesada, projection designed by ivonne gonzalez, photo courtesy of tyler rogers. g. g. carpio insights when brought together in a digital medium. as described by one respondent, ‘[the project] used different kinds of data very effectively.’ another emphasized the importance of bringing these projects to ‘spaces that were once very exclusive.’ likewise, students were overwhelmingly positive about the results of the exhibit, excited by the affirmative feedback they received, open to addressing audience questions in their final papers, and interested in continuing work in the digital humanities. several have continued to take digital humanities coursework and have incorporated new media in their research agendas. at the same time, student analysis underscores some of the continuing questions these types of projects pose, including how to balance analyses with ‘show and tell,’ how to communicate the significance of the digital medium, and addressing the self-selectivity of those in attendance (carpio et al., ). where ict scholars have found low-rates of user-content generated by youth of color on the web, increasing their secondary digital access can foster student projects geared towards public interactivity. student-curators recognized themselves as producers of new media, rather than purely technology consumers, who could leverage university resources to draw attention to latino/a spatial histories (salhotra, ; schmidt camacho, ; wade- witz, ). their engagement in the digital pop-up reflects studies in education research arguing that civic engagement is a particularly effective learning practice for first generation college students (kuh, ). consider also the social and public art resource center (sparc) in southern california, which was founded by ucla professor judy baca to pro- mote the examination, preservation, and innovation of collaborative art. key to sparc’s efforts is a digital/mural lab (dml), where local youth are trained in digital imaging tech- niques, artists are enabled to combine mural painting with computer-generated imagery, murals are preserved through digital printing, and new techniques for presentation of public art through d and virtual presentations are being developed. by bridging secondary digi- tal divides in training and engagement with new technologies, digital humanities coursework can draw on the legacy of spatial intervention waged by people of color in response to uneven development and expand college-aged youth’s critical engagement with new media in ways that undermine exclusion from the built environment. this intervention is especially urgent in urban universities, where the communities surrounding campuses are most likely to be those at the other side of this gap. addressing accessibility requires not only increasing primary access to icts, but also incorporating the creative power of those traditionally excluded from its realm. conclusion through the tactic of bridging cyberspace and public space, digital pop-ups offer one tactic for mitigating the racial digital divide. it is not meant to be a solution, but rather a response to a white spatial imaginary that would render people of color, the poor, the homeless, or other marginalized people invisible. pop-ups have the potential to meet people where they are, providing an entry point to digital projects that is denied to those without internet access or experiencing dependable instability. it incorporates the tactics of justice struggles throughout the americas, which have claimed public space through demonstrations and art to make political, cultural, and citizenship claims (irazábal, ). where architecture privatizes space and masks difference through a fortress effect, color and light can paint alternative narratives onto elitist spaces (davis, ). in a similar vein, by claiming information, communication & society authorship in cyberspace, young people of color and their allies can recast their assumed place within the built environment, as well as the web, from that of passive consumers to active producers. as sites where technological and text resources are uniquely available, museums and schools have been particularly powerful sites from which to launch agendas that advance digital accessibility and media literacy. notes . in doing so, i seek to help bridge a gap in digital studies and american studies underscored by mcpherson ( ). . for a compelling analysis of transmedia organizing and its expression in physical space, see costanza-chock ( ). . the digital exhibit can be viewed online at http://gourmetintersections.com/about/. . my analysis of the event is shaped by a telephone conversation held with adriel luis, march, . . native american, native hawaiian, alaskan natives, and pacific islanders have been omitted from these reports. thom file, ‘computer and internet use in the united states,’ u.s. census bureau (may ); lisa nakamura notes that surveys failing to account for non-english- speaking asian immigrant populations, such as those taken by the pew research center, exclude a segment of the asian american population which is far less likely to have internet access than the aggregate. . author was a participant in the summer workshop. for more on femtechnet, see femtech- net collective, ‘femtechnet: a collective statement on teaching and learning race, fem- inism, and technology,’ frontiers: a journal of women’s studies. in press. . research suggests that despite the increase in opportunities for sharing user-produced materials on on-line platforms, the likelihood that young people will distribute content is negatively compounded with marginal race, gender, and socioeconomic status. . the ‘white alone’ population in new haven is . %, significantly higher than connecticut as a whole at . %. . these figures do not include international enrollment, which would bring the percentage of enrollment for african american and latino students down further. . an archive of social media engaging the hashtag #calatino can be viewed at https://storify. com/genevievecarpio/digital-pop-up-latin-mobility-in-california-histor. . participants were sent an anonymous online survey, authored using survey monkey. survey- monkey inc, palo alto, ca, www.surveymonkey.com. . these actions are akin to the efforts of wikipedians, foremost adrianne wadewitz efforts to address the gender gap in wikipedia. conversations with students show that reflective and com- munity-based project options in the introductory courses for er&m, as well as latino/a new haven, taught by alicia schmidt-camacho, were particularly formative in this regard. . site visit by author to ‘social and public art resource center-sparc,’ april . for more on the dml’s activities see http://sparcinla.org. . in los angeles, for example, ‘bland architecture’ combines with ‘carceral’ elements to create a ‘fortress effect.’ mike davis argues that the goal of the fortress effect is ‘to obliterate all con- nection with downtown’s past and to prevent any dynamic association with the non-anglo urbanism of its future’ (davis, , p. ). acknowledgements i am grateful to the artwork and curatorial expertise of the cultural producers highlighted in this article, especial my students javier cienfuegos, ivonne gonzalez, karen lazcano, katherine lee berry, joshua mandell, christofer rodelo, and alfonso toro. i wish also to thank sara fingal, jes- sica kim, priscilla leiva, and courtney long for feedback on early drafts of this article and maria nava gutierrez for help preparing the manuscript. g. g. carpio http://gourmetintersections.com/about/ https://storify.com/genevievecarpio/digital-pop-up-latin-mobility-in-california-histor https://storify.com/genevievecarpio/digital-pop-up-latin-mobility-in-california-histor www.surveymonkey.com http://sparcinla.org disclosure statement no potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. notes on contributor genevieve g. carpio is assistant professor of chicana and chicano studies at the university of california los angeles. she received her ph.d. in american studies and ethnicity at the university of southern california, where she was a ford foundation predoctoral and dissertation fellowship recipient. she spent – as cassius marcellus clay fellow in the department 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the three described within this article define and reinscribe their lessons through techniques that are essential to their existence. in these cases, the social witness that is borne by pedagogical communities is experiential and takes place through sound as well as sight. these pedagogical communities unite through music and use music to address their most central concerns. through the pedagogical use of music, each community featured here transforms sound into social movement, and participates in an everyday radicalism. although the communities featured in this article otis moss, iii is the pastor of trinity united church of christ, a congregation central to the geographical site matrix examined throughout this article. readers may find the social justice focus of the church pertinent, and it should also be noted for the sake of the final case study that moss is a member of the morehouse college class of . i have developed this concept of pedagogical community to describe networks and spaces of learning that are not necessarily confined to the physical classroom. as bell hooks writes in teaching community: a pedagogy of hope (new york: routledge, ), education can function as a practice of freedom. it is with the goal of freedom in mind that i consider the vignettes in this article. music and politics summer appear very different, they hold in common student-teacher relationships that use music as the means of inspiring social thought. these social movements are essentially pedagogical. at the center of the mis-education of the negro, carter godwin woodson asserted, “the mere imparting of information is not education.” originally published in , woodson’s text was a scathing indictment of the woeful standards of schooling to which racial minorities were subjected. re-read today, woodson’s claims resonate through a landscape buffeted by the violence of inequality. the chicago public library branch named after him, couched in the city’s south side, is surrounded by the evidence of failed integration. city of chicago blue light cameras, boxes affixed to light poles in high-crime areas, police nearly every corner, including the corner of halsted avenue and ninety-fifth street at the library’s entrance. from a high perch, the city tracks the movements of those entering to learn, casting a menacing blue light that typically deadens intersections in its presence. a long, not necessarily misguided distrust of the actions and motives of police forces in neighborhoods like these steers people away from the blue light, and from the doors of a library whose denizens, given a choice, might choose to trade that resource in security for supplements to its vivian g. harsh research collection of afro-american literature and history. but as the residents of washington heights and its surrounding communities have come to learn, the mere imparting of resources is not equality. participants in three separate ethnographic fields in which i have also participated not only hold this belief in common, but also actively seek to correct the imbalances that position young families within food deserts and libraries under surveillance. within this article, i consider the kitchenspeak at the musical arts institute, an occupy the dream rally held in the chicago financial district, and a morehouse college glee club concert as parallel event spaces. these three spaces feature participants striving to educate the young about music, centering their pedagogy on the legacy of a carefully constructed “black music.” in this way, youth are encouraged to hear beauty in themselves, and to hold the contributions of their race as an audible aesthetic ideal. community is taught through music. these spaces are only connected by my presence; this article is a meditation on some means by which black people have used music pedagogies in politically aware ways. in , as tensions continued to mount around the case of trayvon martin in particular and the fate of black youth in general, my perception of these spaces as ideologically distinct began to collapse upon one another. education emerged as the ultimate concern when discussing inequality with interlocutors across these spaces. the practice of positing education as solution has a concern with deep roots in a politics of respectability. idealized as a heal-all salve that is never properly and thoroughly applied to the wounds of discrimination, education has been presented as a solution since reconstruction. the past failure of this technique, the way in which it can only advance the fortunes of a select few while leaving entire communities to languish under the burdens of discrimination, has not stopped the redoubling of efforts. in walking around woodson regional, i present a tour of three pedagogical communities utilizing music in their struggle for educational, economic, and socio-cultural parity and the power of these interactions to transform, temporarily, a space of disenfranchisement into black sacred space. the presence of these cameras is reminiscent of jeremy bentham’s panopticon, a prison blueprint in which those jailed were always aware of the possibility of surveillance. this model, though rarely used, was highlighted in michel foucault, discipline and punish (new york: vintage books, ). pedagogical community: music education as social movement figure : pedagogical community google map link: http://dx.doi.org/ . /mp. . . a focus on education has, at times, been conflated with an engagement with the politics of respectability. for example, a sampling of contemporary progressive headlines profiling the black lives matter movement read as follows: “the politics of respectability is not revolutionary;” “ ways ‘respectability politics’ blame black women for their own oppression;” and “the definition, danger and disease of respectability politics, explained.” it has even been extrapolated to fit a diasporic context, in this is africa’s “why respectability politics is failing african women and girls.” however, the concept of respectability as constructed by evelyn brooks higginbotham is often misinterpreted. higginbotham herself pushed back at the scapegoating of this phrase in an interview with the founder and editor-in-chief of for harriet, titled “wrestling with respectability in the age of #blacklivesmatter: a dialogue.” she states that the objective of the subjects of righteous discontent: the women’s movement in the black baptist church, – was not to quell protest, but rather to conduct themselves in a way that functioned as protest. the churchwomen at the center of that social movement were not always wealthy; actually, the majority were working-class. they behaved in dignified ways to demonstrate their humanity and pushed at the boundaries that their gender and racial positions proscribed. education easily fits into this protest paradigm. its essence—the acquisition of demonstrable knowledge—makes it attractive to a broad spectrum of social agents and opens it to critique because of its subtlety. music education as demonstrated in the following examples allows for the expression of an everyday radicalism by individuals as they live: parents taking their children to piano lessons, citizens assembling for a demonstration, and young men performing old repertoire. more information on the movement for black lives, which includes the black lives matter network, can be found in keeanga-yamahtta taylor, from #blacklivesmatter to black liberation (chicago: haymarket books, ); christopher lebron, the making of black lives matter: a brief history of an idea (oxford: oxford university press, ); patrisse khan- cullors and asha bandele, when they call you a terrorist: a black lives matter memoir (new york: st. martin’s press, ); and marc lamont hill, nobody: casualties of america’s war on the vulnerable, from ferguson to flint and beyond (new york: atria books, ). these texts provide alternate viewpoints of a historian, a philosopher, a founder, and a public intellectual and cultural critic. music and politics summer i assess the following events on an individual basis as social movements because black sacred space can exist outside of the walls of a church, and education beyond a standardized curriculum. in doing so, i conceptualize social movement as a verb, not a noun, pushing it beyond particular times and spaces. although social movements undoubtedly arise from a set of circumstances which people hope to change, ron eyerson and andrew jamison state that social movements temporarily transcend the specific situations from which they emerge; they create new contexts, new public spaces for addressing the particular problems of the time. they are not to be reduced to the organizations or institutions that they eventually become; what is central is their transience, their momentariness, their looseness. if the phrase “social movement” is taken literally, as movement that is social, we may arrive at a means of conjoining past and present. this understanding of the social movement as motion adds coherence to the actions of contemporary individuals who model themselves after the “race men” and women of the pre-civil rights era. linking past and present might aid in the analysis of public action and reaction in the wake of racialized violence, such as the shooting of mike brown in ferguson, missouri, in . in the wake of #blacklivesmatter activism, the united states media has witnessed the transformation of social movements from historicized gloss of activity to a living, breathing realm of possibility. in addition to the situation of past within present, this article attempts to ethnographically profile disparate sites. the three spaces profiled in the following pages are of very different time spans. the first is the result of years of ethnography, the second, an afternoon, the third, a two-hour performance. as such, the length of each site visit is successively shorter. through pedagogical community, the voices in the three following ethnographic vignettes claim, “i, too, sing america.” the musical arts institute now let’s begin our tour. from the woodson regional library, i can walk a few blocks to the little schoolhouse where the musical arts institute (mai) is housed. for three years, i gave piano lessons on saturday mornings here. mai is a nonprofit music school founded by a husband and wife team. the school is located in a house next door to another location of the couple’s employment, st. james african methodist episcopal church. st. james amec is ensconced within the south side of chicago, in the predominantly black lilydale neighborhood. mai is a site of potential re-education, so i will consider the concept of community in this particular context. the bonds of understanding that draw together parents, friends, and acquaintances concerned about education constitute social movement. robert f. egan, author of music and the arts in the community: the community music school in america ( ), defines the community music school as “an institution that offers music instruction of the highest quality for those who desire it, regardless of ability to pay.” grant applications and policy briefs indicate a ron eyerman and andrew jamison, “social movements and cultural transformation: popular music in the s,” media, culture, & society , no. ( ): , https://doi.org/ . / . st. clair drake and horace cayton provided a typology of various black persons in relation to their tactical approaches to race matters in black metropolis, set in an abstracted chicago termed bronzeville (new york: harper & row, ). the authors list race leaders, race heroes, race men, and race women. although the events profiled in this article do not take place in the actual bronzeville neighborhood as presently bounded, “a walk around woodson” is in many ways a descendant of this text. the poem by langston hughes, “i, too,” begins by stating, “i, too, sing america.” this word choice is significant, given the poem’s context in mid-twentieth-century united states, a time before black music was widely accepted as representative of the nation. pedagogical community: music education as social movement general consensus around the existence of the community school, even if there is no agreement regarding operation, purpose, or any other aspect of it. community music schools are inherently local, but nonetheless serve as important construction sites of musical being and opinion that point to and participate within larger discourses that transcend physical boundaries. mai is an ideal site of inquiry regarding the performance of class, race, and culture. the quotidian interactions of faculty, parents, and students cumulatively represent the desires of a pedagogical community with religious and class-based aspirations. they also reflect wider trends in music education in america and globally, particularly in the african diaspora. figure : st. james african methodist episcopal church there are other chicago area music programs that use the designation of community music school, including the chicago children’s choir, the merit school of music, midwest young artists, suzuki-orff, and the old town school of folk music. as a part of my research, i routinely helped the mai directors prepare grant applications. in order to do so effectively, i inquired about any points that would distinguish this program. directors repeatedly claimed that the aforementioned community music programs are based either downtown, on the north shore, or in the north and northwest suburbs, where the majority of their constituents reside. mai is positioned uniquely because it is located on the city’s historically black south side. the directors also asserted that, whereas other programs are profit driven, the mission of mai prioritizes serving the local community. another article investigates the ways in which afro-diasporans negotiate the boundaries around and the benefits of classical music education. for haitian case studies, see lauren eldridge, “(re)membering haiti through mizik klasik,” journal of haitian studies , no. ( ): – , https://doi.org/ . /jhs. . . music and politics summer every saturday morning, i taught a piano group class and several private lessons at mai. after parking along lafayette street, i gathered my teaching materials and walked up the side steps of the single- family residence in which the school currently operates, often greeting parents in the midst of dropping off their kids and finding their own parking spaces. the school blends into the city block, a sentence of post- war bungalows punctuated by the church on the corner. the door opens into the kitchen, where a pot of coffee is ready for teachers and parents. there are two entrances into the living room, which has been repurposed as a reception area. a television is usually playing a dvd of darin atwater’s soulful symphony, a fifty-three-piece orchestra and twenty-four voice chorus composed of visibly black musicians in a typical attempt to model a particular sort of black musical success to students (and waiting, paying parents), but on another day, it could be charles mingus: live at montreaux or quincy jones: the th birthday celebration. maybe the tv is off, and cds by esperanza spalding or ledisi serve as background for the strained scales of soloists struggling through a lesson. these decisions are made by the receptionist, a young vocalist who maintains a lively conversation with the parents, grandparents and musicians who enter the school. this genre selection is indicative of a broader statement at mai, articulated by the founders: western european art music is presented as a means more than an end. black music is considered a viable aesthetic goal, and the definition of success in its genres is appropriately broad. the receptionist is held up as a model, and some parents enthusiastically attend her local neo-soul concerts and late-night jam sessions. each teacher represents a sort of success, a sort of career made possible by the knowledge of music. playing in a church, composing film music, and teaching high school band are among the several revenue streams demonstrated by teachers. although job descriptions are diverse, they all hold in common a gig-juggling act perfected by many musicians. often, this juggling act causes absences, and some teachers have intimated to me that they prefer teaching at mai to managing their own private studios because of the opportunity to request a substitute instructor should other engagements arise. younger siblings color and scribble in books or play with electronic toys, while parents and guardians read books, create small talk, or gaze out the wide front window onto the dan ryan expressway. a music theory station set up on an apple computer is often used by all for purposes other than learning music theory, and a gently worn baby grand piano attracts small, pudgy hands unable to take formal lessons yet. armchairs rim the room. upstairs, the three bedrooms have been converted to lesson studios, containing eighty-eight key electronic keyboards, electronic workstations, and multiple music stands and theory teaching aid posters. downstairs from the kitchen is the office of the directors and the converted den or family room where i taught class piano on seven keyboards. at any point, the unacquainted visitor may be startled by the sound of the percussion studio, housed in the basement, thundering through the floorboards. this flurry of activity may seem social, but not quite political in the manner of the more static conception of a social movement. however, behind the scenes activity proves otherwise. pedagogical community: music education as social movement figure : the chicago-style raised ranch home that houses the musical arts institute the directors of mai profess a desire to perform a sort of outreach to the geographic community, but arts education is a tough sell. in order to effectively service the geographic community, mai registered with the chicago public schools (cps) office of arts education as a “partner,” a type of approved vendorship through which mai can service schools. successive cps reforms have resulted in a school system that allocates a predetermined and limited amount of funds to arts education. the most recent round of budgeting cuts encouraged local principals to spend these funds on programs offered by vendors such as the chicago children’s choir, merit school of music, and now, mai, instead of hiring individual subject teachers who would require full-time employment and benefits. the partner sends a predetermined number of instructors in for – -week modules, during which the school’s children rotate through the guest program in addition to their regular classes. ideally, mai would be able to service the geographic community from its residence in the geographic community, but the directors have identified at least two hindrances to the success of this implementation, hindrances that are to some degree relatable across every ethnic and socioeconomic group, and thus have much to teach us about the function of contemporary music education in the united states. first, parents must be convinced that music education is necessary and beneficial. research observing the value of arts education is currently a trend, no doubt because current american cultural music and politics summer tenets demand it. however, the arts often play second fiddle to “core” subjects, such as mathematics and science. this subject hierarchy becomes a problem when a shortage in funding dictates the cutting of resources, such as the number of hours in a school day or the teachers at a learning center. the problem is compounded by the nagging belief that arts education is only for some people, namely, the elite. mai families map onto a broad socio-economic spectrum, but very few hail from a class position that would encourage music for music’s sake at the expense of future earning potential. the school directors constantly practice and refine their “principal” and “parent” sales pitches to address these impediments. they encourage principals to consider the social benefits of music education, education as a means to healthier community. meanwhile, they demonstrate to both parents and principals the broader educational value of music, tying music education to achievement in stem fields. a second issue is that of parental participation, a particular sensitive sticking point due to the aforementioned politics of respectability. as popularized by the suzuki method of music education, many teachers both inside and outside that pedagogical brand encourage parental supervision of individual practice time. this assumes, however, that a parent, usually a mother, has the disposable time to enforce this—perhaps she has a nine-to-five position, or works from home. although these narratives are well worn in mainstream american media discourse (see the “can women have it all?” debates, alternately titled the ongoing mommy wars), they require a particular class position that many mai parents cannot enter. this disconnect becomes a self-inflicted racial branding, for example, faculty berating parents for the lackluster performance of students in lessons by gesturing towards the back of the hand and saying “you know how we do.” sometimes this point is elaborated upon in a comparison with north side and north suburban music programs. the pedagogical community at the musical arts institute presents a prototype for a black community music school, a “race school,” to riff off drake and cayton. although racial advancement may not be the explicit mission of those who enter the building on the banks of the dan ryan, that goal is as present as the sounding of the tonic during hanon keyboard exercises; it is an ethical cornerstone, and a point of constant and consistent return. this pedagogical community demonstrates the negotiation of ideals and objectives through curriculum and parent-teacher communication. for its participants, believing in students, pushing them towards the unfamiliar, towards the excellent, in short, re-educating is a political act. occupy the dream i continue my consideration of education’s impact with an ethnographic sketch of a protest, the traditional site of a social movement and a commonly understood political act. after i exit the school and merge onto the expressway, i will arrive downtown in a few minutes. on january , , i circled the downtown chicago financial district, looking for a metered parking space. as i approached the intersection of west jackson boulevard and south lasalle street, i passed sporadic clusters of two and three people moving in the same directions. some carried crutches, others carried signs. they strolled easily on an unusually warm winter day, past banking institutions and the retailers that clothe their employees—allen for example, see the recent publication of the report reinvesting in arts education: winning america’s future through creative schools by the president’s committee on the arts and the humanities. while it is easy to agree that programming should focus on “reinvigorating the creativity and innovation that has made this country great,” (v) methods for attaining creativity are not quite as simple to agree upon. pedagogical community: music education as social movement edmonds, brooks brothers, ann taylor. when i cleared the intersection, the federal reserve bank on my right, i finally witnessed the result of several planning meetings and patient, weekly prodding from the pulpit—occupy the dream. several prominent black ministers and politicians organized occupy the dream, a series of simultaneous demonstrations on the national holiday commemorating the birth of civil rights icon dr. martin luther king, jr. borne of the contemporary sociopolitical climate in urban america, the name is a direct derivative of the occupy wall street (ows) movement, though their consonances were ultimately superficial. occupy wall street has been criticized in the popular press as a monochromatic movement, lacking the minority participation necessary in order to be able to represent their stated %. the rhetoric and reputation of the ows movement repelled many church-going african americans, particularly those who identify as socially conservative. ows is socially liberal, in keeping with its primary millennial demographic. this issue of differing values is in part exemplified by the crucial, yet divisive use of language. anti-racist activist tim wise has spoken about the difficulty of the occupy language for minority participants, noting that the very word “occupy” may offend descendents of groups that have been historically disenfranchised. even this monday, on a day conscientiously set aside for the careful engagement of black people, i saw a few older occupy the dream protestors cringe when the popular chant—“the banks were bailed out, and we were sold out”—was raised. based on the concerns of their congregants, a coterie of african american church leaders formed a separate movement that not only looked different, but that operated differently and articulated different central concerns. occupy the dream added a racial dimension to the class concerns of ows. actions included the occasional physical, in-person protest, but also included virtual protest, for example, moving money from so-called “wall street banks” into minority-owned banks and credit unions. leaders focused on mortgage and student lending reform, respectable issues for a broad black religious community with middle-class aspirations. middle-aged men wearing fraternity letters and union jackets mingled, representing both trade school and college educations in the same milieu. although not all attendees were educated in the same manner, education served as an ideal rallying point for this spontaneous community and unusual combination of diverse congregations. they were aware of the access that education provides, and actively engaged a politics of respectability in their offensive toward these goals. nostalgia reigned supreme on that crisp afternoon and transformed the protest into a pedagogical community. visiting ows protestors were excited to take advantage of the dream protestors’ knowledge a series of articles at the huffington post profile the leadership and stated intentions of occupy the dream. leaders named include benjamin chavis, jamal bryant, and russell simmons. see michael carmichael, “occupy the dream,” the huffington post, december , , http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-carmichael/occupy-the-dream_b_ .html. sarah van gelder describes the occupy wall street movement as being inspired by the spanish indignado movement. more information about the impetus and operation of ows can be found her reader this changes everything: occupy wall street and the % movement (san francisco: berrett-koehler publishers, ). also helpful is the compilation dreaming in public: the building of the occupy movement, edited by amy schrager lang and daniel lang/levitsky (oxford: new internationalist publications, ltd., ). this collection of “texts and images” devotes a section to the analysis of race in ows. see tim wise and melissa harris-perry, “tim wise on rachel maddow, / / –discussing race in the #occupy movement,” the rachel maddow show video ( : ), october , , http://www.timwise.org/ / /tim-wise-on-rachel- maddow- -discussing-race-in-the-occupy-movement/. occupy the dream rallies were held nationwide the february after ows began. at this point, ows protestors were still active, and some attended the occupy the dream rally. i want to note that the class politics of occupy the dream were not subsumed in the racial politics, at least not at a grassroots level. although these demonstrations were engineered from the top down, multiple “conversations” were being held simultaneously at an official level and among the crowd at the actual demonstrations. the dream organizers may have been governed by a politics of respectability, but i do not consider it a mono-class pedagogical community. music and politics summer of the civil rights catalogue of marching songs. dream protestors themselves were enthusiastic about pulling them out and participating in a legacy of social activism that many claim has been forgotten. others claim that the style of protest has simply changed, from linked-arm marches to online petitions. monday’s protest was held on the martin luther king, jr. commemorative holiday. attended by elders stooped over walking sticks and young adults furiously chronicling the event on their smart phones, it was reminiscent of old civil rights photographs that some of the young teenagers present might have studied in their history textbooks. this crowd was not so homogenous as those older historicized images, this multitude not nearly as dapper as civil rights was at midcentury. these protesters no longer follow, nor are held back by a single sign. the manner in which current media culture, powered by social media platforms such as facebook, twitter, and instagram, has usurped the ability to construct and maintain a narrative has been a public-relations nightmare for those who might wish to mobilize a politics of respectability in order to coerce acknowledgment of their complaints. these tensions have come to the fore in the aftermath of the recent rash of fatal black youth clashes with older white men. occupy the dream shows how models of protest have evolved from the mid-twentieth century yet are still impacted by nostalgia and memory. occupy the dream echoes in sound, sight, and purpose the chicago schools boycott, recently documented by kartemquin films. in this way, the first site (mai) appears closer to the second site (occupy the dream), with a shared focus on liberation. note below the consonances between and , the first drawn from the ‘ boycott archive, the second from my footage of occupy the dream. both use communal song as an anchor as they march around the same blocks of the downtown financial district with the articulated aim of “freedom.” occupy the dream may feel easier than a small local music school to associate with traditional static conceptions of a social movement. in keeping with my introductory thought experiment, i challenge the reader to imagine the physical mobilization of this set of ideals. hundreds of people gathered that mlk holiday to embody a pedagogical community that used music in protest. occupy the dream was a community formed in an instant. an amalgamation of several churches, it was held together by an event. when the event ended, the crowd dispersed and became individual family units and peer units. the coffee table at mai, on the other hand, is a recurring community. every saturday, the same parents mingle and learn about issues in adjacent school districts. both the single event and the recurring community serve as examples of the manner by which pedagogical communities may enact social movement. my third site is a concert that demonstrates the potential ambiguity of community. tanisha ford writes about the heavy representational mediation of these images in liberated threads: black women, style, and the global politics of soul (chapel hill: the university of north carolina press, ), https://doi.org/ . /northcarolina/ . . . the coverage of the killings of trayvon martin, jordan davis, renisha mcbride, and mike brown were preoccupied with race, but certainly had overtones of class analysis, i.e., focus on occupation at time of shooting. for more information on this documentary, visit boycott.kartemquin.com. the site draws clear connections between the chicago school boycott protesting school segregation and the contemporary under-resourcing and disproportionate closure of black and latinx schools. this resource was brought to my attention by elizabeth todd-breland, whose forthcoming monograph cites cultural elements such as the bud billiken back to school parade as indicative of a robust culture around education in the black chicago community. pedagogical community: music education as social movement figure : “' boycott -today is freedom day” see video: http://dx.doi.org/ . /mp. . . figure : “don't you let nobody turn you around -occupy the dream rally, - - ” see video: http://dx.doi.org/ . /mp. . . music and politics summer morehouse college glee club a few blocks away from the federal reserve, out of the economic district, are the institutions of “capital-c” culture, such as symphony center and the joffrey ballet. on march , , i went to the harris theater in order to see what some might term “the dream occupied.” the morehouse college glee club was on tour, and here in chicago, in conjunction with the school of the art institute of chicago, they celebrated their centennial. morehouse college is a historically black men’s institution founded in . it has been canonized as a cornerstone of african-american history through its esteemed alumni, which include theologian howard thurman, actor samuel jackson, and dr. martin luther king, jr. mcgc concert tours are an annual opportunity for alumni scattered nationwide to express pride in their affiliation with this institution and gather to support it financially. subsequently, concert attendees are an eclectic mix of alumni of morehouse college and their families, as well as other hbcu (historically black college and university) alumni familiar with the touring spectacle. pre-college youth are a consistent presence at these types of events, and touring ensembles often serve as a recruiting tool. with roots in the jubilee singer movement post-emancipation, the repertoire performed during these tours responds to woodson’s assertion that blacks have been mis-educated to the point of believing in their own inferiority by centering composers in the art music genre of african descent. like the students at mai, the mcgc is taught to uphold the cultural production of afro-descendents. as terrance mcknight, a mcgc alum writes, “in glee club, we were taught that being on time meant being a few minutes early and that our singing was a gift to the community. we were constantly reminded that some people in our audience may never have seen a group of black men in tuxedos, and so it was our duty to represent the highest standards of the college and of ourselves.” these tours are flashpoints of contrasting versions of black male respectability. the community that the young men themselves formed was diverse, consisting of several different factions that group members articulate. from a picture on the glossy concert booklet, or the distance between stage and audience seat, the men appear homogeneous. neat blazers and slacks, elegant posture, and a dramatic, yet efficient entrance ritual all contribute to this initial perception. however, as the concert continues, individuals emerge from the mass. tall and short, thin, sturdy, and stocky, the men become easily identifiable. under a close, persistent gaze, some further articulate their personal identities. a ponytail here, straightened hair there, and occasional long fingernails raise some eyebrows among older alumni. queering themselves in capacities that frustrate simple description, they contribute all the more to this complex portrait of black masculinity. yet that is merely the visual. the sound emerges, confident and tremulous, in sweet tenors, rumbling bass-baritones, and startling falsettos. on this occasion, there is a certain comfort in uniformity. however, my observations indicate that it is the sense of pedagogical a morehouse alumnus and past president of the college, dr. walter massey, was the current president of saic, thus establishing an institutional connection. the fisk jubilee singers toured america, and subsequently the world in order to raise funds for fisk university. their self- presentation was a cautious negotiation of the comportment and repertoire expected from former slaves. for more information, see toni anderson, “tell them we are singing for jesus”: the original fisk jubilee singers and christian reconstruction, – , (macon, ga: mercer university press, ) and tsitsi ella jaji, africa in stereo: modernism, music, and pan-african solidarity (oxford: oxford university press, ), https://doi.org/ . /acprof:oso/ . . . see the npr article “the morehouse college glee club is ” for more of mcknight’s contextualization of the glee club and performance clips. for further explanation of gendered and racialized sound, see alisha lola jones, “singing high: black countertenors and treble timbres of transcendence.” pedagogical community: music education as social movement community that comforts. uniformity engenders a silence regarding difference, and it is this uniformity that makes community possible in this space. the last half of the concert was titled “african-american heritage.” i include below the lyrics from that evening’s performance of “who’ll join the union?” arranged by the choir’s director, dr. david morrow, a past president of the national association of negro musicians. this particular civil war-era freedom song has lived, and continues to live, several lives. it is a freedom song in work song format, gesturing for each voice and each ear to fall into the rhythmic grooves. it is a song indicative of several moments, of union armies, labor unions , and present unity. the question bounces between each line, “who’ll join the union?” my lovely brethren, how ye do? oh, does your love continue true? ever since i have been newly born; i love to see-a god’s work go on; if you want to catch that heavenly breeze, go down in the valley upon your knees, go bend your knees right smooth with the ground and pray to the lord to turn you around say, if you belong to the union band, then here’s my heart, and here’s my hand, i love you all both bond and free, i love you if you don’t love me. now if you want to know of me, just who i am, and a-who i be, i’m a child of god with my soul set free for christ has bought my liberty. who will join the union? if social movement is read as a verb, this pedagogical community moves socially by singing racial pride through diverse voices. as the final destination on our walk around woodson, the mcgc shows us both the negotiation of ideals that mai represented and the evolution of models that occupy the dream presents. taken as a collective, these three sites of pedagogical community reconfigure the possibilities of social movements. in summary, each of the sites featured on this tour, on this walk around woodson regional library deals with a legacy of disenfranchisement by generating pedagogical community. respectable sound may take the form of piano etudes, freedom songs, or glee club choruses. it is a disciplined configuration of self that colors within certain lines so that other lines may be obliterated. the three black spaces described here are multivalent in their descriptions of education, social movement, and musical meaning. if the mere imparting of information is not education, actors within these theaters (social witnesses) intervene in order to create pedagogical community that actually does teach. in concert, the spaces and their inhabitants collectively assert that education has the potential to thomas turino explains the connection of many civil rights era songs with earlier labor movements in a discussion of the politics of participation (music as social life: the politics of participation [chicago: university of chicago press, ]). music and politics summer liberate, that it should be considered a human right. human rights discourse involves seeking affirmation outside of federal judicial structures in order to meet popular needs or demands. in this case, the communities that i have observed are not necessarily looking abroad for these ideals, or utilizing human rights language; rather, they self-determine through private collective actions, drawing together to complete tasks that government and the broader society have not yet finished. bibliography anderson, toni. “tell them we are singing for jesus”: the original fisk jubilee singers and christian reconstruction, – . macon, ga: mercer university press, . carmichael, michael. “occupy the dream,” the huffington post, december , . http://www.huffingtonpost.com/michael-carmichael/occupy-the-dream_b_ .html. drake, st. clair, horace r. cayton, richard wright, and everett c. hughes. black metropolis: a study of negro life in a northern city. new york: harper & row, . dwyer, m. christine. reinvesting in arts education: winning america’s future through creative schools. washington, dc: president’s committee on the arts and the humanities, . accessed november , . http://www.pcah.gov. egan, robert. music and the arts in the community: the community music school in america. new york: scarecrow press, . eldridge, lauren. “(re)membering haiti through mizik klasik.” journal of haitian studies , no. ( ): – . https://doi.org/ . /jhs. . . eyerman, ron and andrew jamison. “social movements and cultural transformation: popular music in the s.” media, culture, & society , no. ( ): – . https://doi.org/ . / . ford, tanisha c. liberated threads: black women, style, and the global politics of soul. chapel hill: the university of north carolina press, . https://doi.org/ . /northcarolina/ . . . foster, kimberly. “wrestling with respectability in the age of #blacklivesmatter: a dialogue.” for harriet. accessed january , . http://www.forharriet.com/ / /wrestling-with respectability-in-age-of.html#axzz vbnp zq. van gelder, sarah. this changes everything: occupy wall street and the % movement. san francisco: berrett-koehler publishers, . hill, marc lamont. nobody: casualties of america’s war on the vulnerable, from ferguson to flint and beyond. new york: atria books, . hooks, bell. teaching community: a pedagogy of hope. new york: routledge, . jaji, tsitsi ella. africa in stereo: modernism, music, and pan-african solidarity. oxford: oxford university press, . https://doi.org/ . /acprof:oso/ . . . johnson, maisha z. “ ways ‘respectability politics’ blame black women for their own oppression.” everyday feminism. accessed january , . http://everydayfeminism.com/ / /respectability- politics-black-women/. jones, alisha lola. “singing high: black countertenors and treble timbres of transcendence.” forthcoming. pedagogical community: music education as social movement khan-cullors, patrisse and asha bandele. when they call you a terrorist: a black lives matter memoir. new york: st. martin’s press, . lang, amy schrager and daniel lang/levitsky. dreaming in public: the building of the occupy movement. oxford: new internationalist publications, ltd., . lebron, christopher. the making of black lives matter: a brief history of an idea. oxford: oxford university press, . mcknight, terrance. “the morehouse college glee club is .” national public radio. september , . accessed june , . https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/ / / / /the morehouse-college-glee-club-is- . nketiah, rita. “why respectability politics is failing african women and girls.” this is africa. accessed january , . http://thisisafrica.me/respectability-politics-failing-african-women-girls/. reagon, bernice johnson. “songs that moved the movement.” perspectives , no. ( ): – . schechner, richard. the future of ritual: writings on culture and performance. new york: routledge, . ttps://doi.org/ . / . “the politics of respectability is not revolutionary.” hood feminism. accessed january , . https://hoodfeminism.com/ / / /the-politics-of-respectability-is-not-revolutionary/. taylor, keeanga-yamahtta. from #blacklivesmatter to black liberation. chicago: haymarket books, . todd-breland, elizabeth. a political education: black politics and education reform in chicago since the s. chapel hill: university of north carolina press, . turino, thomas. music as social life: the politics of participation. chicago: university of chicago press, . wise, tim and melissa harris-perry. “tim wise on rachel maddow, / / –discussing race in the #occupy movement.” the rachel maddow show video, : . october , . http://www.timwise.org/ / /tim-wise-on-rachel-maddow- -discussing-race-in-the occupy-movement/. woodson, carter godwin. the mis-education of the negro. washington, dc: the associated publishers, inc., . young, damon. “the definition, danger and disease of respectability politics, explained.” the root. accessed january , . http://www.theroot.com/articles/culture/ / /the_definition_danger_and_disease_of_respectab ility_politics_explained/ /. durham research online deposited in dro: september version of attached �le: accepted version peer-review status of attached �le: peer-reviewed citation for published item: tolia-kelly, divya p. ( ) 'a day in the life of a geographer : `lone', black, female.', area., ( ). pp. - . further information on publisher's website: https://doi.org/ . /area. publisher's copyright statement: this is the peer reviewed version of the following article: tolia-kelly, d. p. ( ), a day in the life of a geographer: `lone', black, female. area, ( ): - , which has been published in �nal form at https://doi.org/ . /area. . this article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with wiley terms and conditions for self-archiving. additional information: use policy the full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro�t purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in dro • the full-text is not changed in any way the full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. please consult the full dro policy for further details. durham university library, stockton road, durham dh ly, united kingdom tel : + ( ) | fax : + ( ) https://dro.dur.ac.uk https://www.dur.ac.uk https://doi.org/ . /area. http://dro.dur.ac.uk/ / https://dro.dur.ac.uk/policies/usepolicy.pdf https://dro.dur.ac.uk a day in the life of a geographer: ‘lone’i, black, female. divya p. tolia-kelly, durham university biographical note: divya p. tolia-kelly is a reader in geography at durham university, and is an ilm qualified he coach and mentor. her research focus is the geographies of race, representation, affect and postcolonial approaches to identities and cultural heritage. she is currently writing a monograph entitled ‘an archaeology of race at the museum’ with routledge. abstract: this piece is a narrative representation of the experience of being black and female in the discipline of geography in the uk and beyond. the aim is to share an ethnographic research on race in geography, based on day-to-day experience in the academy. the piece expresses some of the morphologies of black geographical life in everyday academia. the material has originally been shared in coaching and mentoring relationships with me. the quotes included have been sanctioned for use in this particular piece and have been sent to me in individual emails in january . keywords: race, decolonising geography, everyday life, institutional racism. introduction overall, this piece is borne out of reflections on discussions across the student body and with colleagues in academia for a need to engage with the race equality charter (ecu, ) and the ‘decolonising the academy’ (el magd, ) agenda. this call for engagement with a critique of university’s commitment to imperial, european frameworks of knowledge, philosophy and its oeuvre, occurs alongside the exponentially growing dissatisfaction with institutional and social racisms. these racisms are both experienced and accepted as being ironically, ‘beyond the pale’ amongst staff and students within the walls of the academy. however they continue to be present, and part of the fabric of everyday life in h.e. concurrently, the black lives matter iiand why isn’t my professor black?iii movements, have become sites where these debates and antagonisms are aired and coalesce. as peake & kobayashi, ( ) have made clear, a revitalisation of attention towards race this millennium is essential. it has to however, include strategies beyond having race on the teaching curriculum. this is not an adequate response. black bodies and black intellectual thought need to be part of the current re-evaluation (bhopal, ). actually feeling and having empathy (not pity) is also a critical starting point (ahmed, ). the felt violences that are part of the fabric of everyday life for our students, researchers and academic colleagues within institutions, are not simply a recent phenomenon, that have occurred as a result of the ‘brexit’ vote in the uk or indeed the election of donald trump in the us, in . these events have simply revealed the degree to which inequality is felt, how it is distributed and how institutional racism is in need of attention. the voice used in this piece is an amalgam of voices of black female academicsiv in uk and us geography departments. it is not a voicing of my experiences. simply put, i have written in a singular voice, to protect identities, but also as a mechanism to represent the layers and thickness of the repeated textures of experience, echoed by colleagues, whilst being in a variety of institutions. this piece is based on five years of mentoring and coaching with a score of black (those racialized as being not white british) female academics across the discipline in the uk and us. in the face of athena swan successes the piece underlines the importance of calls for race equality do effect change in the everyday experience of racisms within academia, beyond paper policies. ultimately what these collaged extracts show is that the experience of the flawed ‘meritocracy’ in which we work, and how it feels for racialized colleagues. in the face of racisms that are expressed here, an empathetic approach to the treatment of black colleagues is necessary. our practices could be reversed from seeing a white landscape as the norm, and could perhaps enable the discipline to become an academic home for all of us, and not more of a home for those who benefit from class privilege, an inherited sense of entitlement and a culture of male patronage. the piece does not engage with the structural inequalities and economies of casualization, zero hour contracts, scarcity of permanent posts, and the white, male dominated management structure of universities. at present the university college union is the one body that has a commitment and has been actively approached to assist black academics, albeit problematically (see morgan, ). scene i: coffee before campus am: background noise: radio , intermittent ‘talking head’ segments of the today programme: “brexit because immigration must be controlled. we have floods of migrants. . .” “protests in ferguson followed michael brown's death and a grand jury declining to charge the officer with murder. . .” “i don’t think we have ever had a president so publicly condescending to what black politics means”. each day the world seems to get more oppressive, worse, it’s giving permission to all to put into practice racist ideas and actions. these remind me of getting hit by a fascist skin-head in the s, my mum being threatened at work by racists because of her ethnic clothes, it was terrible for us then. we smell. our food smells. we take their jobs. we don’t speak english properly. everyone is scared of immigrants whilst they are hurting, and dying in their thousands; a silent, cruel holocaust. my sadness is heavy; a life of paper-cuts, layer upon layer, that accumulate ‘like death by a thousand cuts’ (hunt, ). ok i’m now taking my medication to try to stop feeling this way. need to feel ok. need to stop the nausea. ok ginger tisane, good for nausea. check in the mirror, must get it right, the best look possible; there is extra scrutiny, must make sure there are no glitches, i must look ‘in-place’, fitting-in, modern. scene ii: arrival invisibility cloaks am: arrival in the department. walk past professor white, and dr smith, no eye contact, no acknowledgement, my invisibility cloak must be on again. i have to keep narrating to myself “mustn’t let these micro-aggressive acts undermine, rise above these childish taunts; must be resilient, twice as resilient. it’s the institution, not them, not me.” “accumulatively, i think each day ‘i’m not sure this job is for me. am i invisible? or is it that i just don’t belong? i am constantly reminded that perhaps i am out of place.” over time these inner reconciliations have an impact on writing, research and mental health (green, ). often when aired the response is ‘oh don’t be so sensitive, you are reading far too much into things, perhaps they just had a bad day’. one colleague coined this in a phrase ‘they call it being oversensitive, we call it racism’. it has stuck with me, helpfully, through the years. also, the repetitive nature and thus accumulation of these violent experiences tells me that they are real and substantially represent a system of habits embedded into the very infrastructure of a university, a department, a research group. they hurt. “being silenced; trying yet failing to make your-self heard in the context of meetings because you are ‘talked over’ and rendered silent. subconsciously you begin to wonder whether what you have to say has currency - is it valid? almost as if being given the opportunity to speak validates you in some way. your experience, seniority counts for nothing; these things are overlooked as often (white) junior colleagues are given the chance to have their say; their chance to shine.” nothing has changed. for decades (b.b.c. ). scene iii: university office being seen in particular am: just spoke with a member of the panel for my interview feedback. one of them (a feminist professor) said ‘well your lipstick was very good!’ this reminds me of franz fanon, you’re constant awareness of the mask you must wear to conceal, to constantly regulate, and reconcile with what is expected. the facile condescension of commenting on my make- up rather than the serious focus on appointment processes is also an evasion often experienced by black women in academia. it’s easier for the senior women to communicate through superficial advice on dress, lipstick, spelling errors and grammar, than actually engage with patronage towards career development, or indeed recognising you as a significant scholar with skills to shape the discipline, or even the department. “during my time spent at a russell group university, the feeling of invisibility could be striking- while walking into the corridors or sitting in meetings and not being acknowledged by senior white male academic peers. on applying and being short-listed for a permanent academic post in the department. i was not offered the post and subsequently asked for feedback. i was told that i was appointable by one panel member. by another, i was told that i needed ‘to learn to have more of a presence with men’. certainly, constructions of gender and femininity are present, but so is the racialisation of gender and privilege. i have wondered if this would have been said to a white woman in the same position.” ‘presence with men’ sounds like a call to be a different kind of body. presence and absence are expected simultaneously; but only in an acceptable template, no room for manoeuvre / me. do i need to be more ‘decorative’ or ‘available’? or ‘be like a man?’ ‘trying to ‘blend in’ also makes me invisible. i lose my skin, my culture, my accent, my heart. i want to be myself. but my body is not what they want. i endeavoured for assimilation; however, being one- with-them means that i become invisible, i lose my identity, integrity. i risk being broken away from my anchors. everything is at stake. when experienced by racialized communities, the ‘imposter syndrome’ is enhanced and we/i am called to think ‘can i really do this? ‘am i good enough? these accumulate as continuous doubts of not being good enough for a long time. and then i’m told women do not put themselves forward. they don’t take leaps of faith, and risks like their younger counterparts. if i speak, you do not hear. when you hear, you do not expect me to be speaking in the same language. when i ask for my rightful place at the table, i am told that i’ll have to change, get a chair or that i do not quite understand. there are no others, no black professors (adams, ). i am ‘out-of-place’. scene iv: going for a morning coffee b r e a k out-of-placeness am: one of the most frequently mentioned experiences of black academics include repeated episodes of being shown and reminded that your body is out-of-place; ‘you are a fish out of water’. these include in meetings where people do not acknowledge your belonging in the discussion, or indeed ‘making space’ even as simple as having a chair ready for you as they would for other equivalent colleagues, or indeed a conscious disregard for your legitimate portfolio expressed through a lack of listening or cognition of your role and experience. an uneven recognition of rank, position or indeed expertise exists in the everyday environment of academia, including our ‘social’ spaces of taking a break or a meal outside of the working day. many black colleagues recount how they feel that an invisible wall between ‘others’ and those in the ‘inner circle (white and male)’ is palpably felt and worked around. “ there are certain practices that accentuate the process of ‘othering’ in academic life –a disregard for my personhood by colleagues, one look at the surreptitious delineation of the staff room during the coffee break (a visible apartheid of a sort) has made me ask the question repeatedly: ‘where the brown folks at in an ‘international’ department such as this?’ i know that i am not alone in experiencing these frustrations. it is a source of grievance for us (labelled) ‘foreigners’ in the department” “on my first ever entrance to the staff common room, i was met with the blank stares and averted eyes of supposed “colleagues”, in whose presence i felt like a servant, the temp, the hired help rather than a scholar of international standing.” there are costs to feeling this sort of negation on a daily basis, without a strong sense of self-identity, black staff are vulnerable to anxiety, stress and undermining that accumulates over a series or repeated experiences, each reinforcing others gone before. “the feeling of discrimination was reinforced by a total lack of support and mentorship. others held full patronage, grooming even to be part of the long term fabric of the university. whereas i, was given a series of promises of meetings with my allocated mentor, which never happened. this affirmed my sensation that my post was irrelevant in the economy of the department.” it is clear from hearing colleagues, that the language of diversity doesn’t have any impact in terms of the reconciliation needed (ahmed, ). in fact the bodies, committees and training elements of diversity at university level seem to operate as temporary salves that take the place of effective strategy and actions. “there’s also a tendency to infantilise; you are forever ‘young’ and inexperienced no matter how many years of experience you have. i’ve been told by a white (feminist) professor that i’m a brilliant researcher; you know, my field research was second to none but my writing needed a lot of work. these words stay with you, so much so that you hear them whenever you have to write a paper. they are words that cut deep and which sap your confidence; they also give truth to the lie that you are not worthy of being an academic – a seed that is planted long before you become one…” scene v: who do you think you are? race is a mythology pm: for many academics teaching becomes the space for job satisfaction and pride, where feedback is instantaneous. however for some, it is just another site where race and racisms play out. the motto ‘you have to be twice as good’ to be black and get successful at teaching chimes with many black academic colleague’s experiences. as a black academic (as with gender), the teaching on race becomes somehow automatically part of our role. and often when teaching you are not in the lecture hall with the equal authority as other colleagues. teaching can become difficult. you may feel vulnerable, as your authority is not always recognised and can be /is indeed challenged. recently, a black academic was teaching about the myth of race based on stuart hall ( ) and recent debates in popular culture (see adiseoye, ). the discussion was focussed on the discrediting of racial science. in response, the students dismissed her argument. their responses included ‘it’s proven scientifically, race does exist.’ ‘it is biological. look at our skins.’ also to prove their point, students started ‘googling’ for evidence whilst in the lecture theatre. ‘look here’s the evidence!” said a throng, whilst looking at a sports piece arguing for recognition of biological differences between white and black runners, in capacities for running (e.g. isaksen, ). in that space, her authority, expertise where placed on an equal or lesser platform to the students. one experience that is rarer for other colleagues. in another non-russell group university, one colleague on receiving critical feedback on her teaching stating that she ‘was confusing’, ‘not clear’, ‘could not be understood’, or that ‘she was not a good lecturer’. she was asked by her head of department to do a university language training course in english. this was posited as a supportive act, to prevent future injury. the lecturer held both a degree and phd. from cambridge geography and it was clear that the ‘ethnicity’ of accent was being criticised and not the content of the lectures. thus in the university’s ‘supportive’ act of ‘training’, there was an unconscious compounding of the effect of the student’s claims of inferiority and incompetence, thus strengthening the bias against ethnic accents. (note however, white irish, american, australian, canadian and indeed scottish accents are not necessarily received in this way). this colleague was understandably disheartened by this event. she has left academia. in an era where student feedback is sovereign, there are unrecognised biases in student feedback. the expectation of ‘brilliance’ from lecturers often tallies with axes of colour and gender. "male professors were described more often as 'brilliant' and 'genius' than female professors in every single field we studied - about two to three times more often." (staufenburg, ). another study showed that students who thought ‘genius’ was a precursor to success most often belonged to subjects where african-americans and women were underrepresented. "both of these groups are stereotyped in a similar way about their intellectual abilities and therefore are potentially affected in a similar way by the amount of emphasis that's put on brilliance." (cimpian, , cited in staufenberg, ). these in turn add to the layers of other experiences that are compounding the message that universities themselves produce racisms (williams, ), including in the intellectual realm (bonnett, ) and that: “universities are white spaces, in which whiteness – and white privilege – dominates. our research shows, for example, that black and minority ethnic staff are very scared to make complaints about racism. and when they do, it’s either dismissed as a ‘clash of personalities’, or it’s seen as taking something out of context. so what happens is the victim becomes the villain and white identity is protected at all costs.” (bhopal, ). home time pm : living for work is a habit for me. i get such exhilaration sometimes. but body feels heavy. no energy to write and think creatively. i need to contact friends and family. need them a little closer to get perspective. have to find an intellectual home; a safe, workplace, with dignity and respect. and to feel in-place. end references adams ( ) ‘british universities employ no black academics in top roles, figures show’ the guardian (jan th ). ahmed, s. ( ). the language of diversity. ethnic and racial studies, ( ), - . ahmed, s. ( ) on being included: racism and diversity in institutional life. duke university press. anonymous ( ) ‘why black people are so good at sports’ in popular social science: bridging the gap (http://www.popularsocialscience.com/ / / /why-blacks-are-good- at-sports/) (last accessed jan th ) bhopal, k., ( ) “the experiences of black and minority ethnic academics: multiple identities and career progression.” aiming higher: race, inequality and diversity in the academy, runnymede trust: london. pp. - . bonnett, a., . ‘geography,‘race’and whiteness: invisible traditions and current challenges’ area, ( ), pp. - . b.b.c. ( ) ‘education: black lecturers victims of racism’ (friday june th ) http://news.bbc.co.uk/ /hi/education/ .stm last accessed june th . equality charter unit ( ), http://www.ecu.ac.uk/equality-charters/race-equality- charter/about-race-equality-charter/ (accessed jan th ) green, a. ( . . ) the atlantic: the cost of balancing academia and racism. hall, s., ( ) representation: cultural representations and signifying practices (vol. ). sage: london peake, l. and kobayashi, a., . policies and practices for an antiracist geography at the millennium. the professional geographer, ( ), pp. - . mirza, h.s., . black women in higher education: defining a space/finding a place. in (eds) val walsh and louise morley feminist academics: creative agents for change, pp. - . el magd, n a, ( ) nus blog: why is my curriculum white? - decolonising the academy tuesday - - (last accessed jan th ) hunt, s. ( ) ‘racism in universities: there is a sense that your face doesn’t fit’ the guardian (thursday th february ) isaksen j. v. ( ) ‘why black people are so good at sports’ in popular social science: bridging the gap (http://www.popularsocialscience.com/ / / /why-blacks-are-good- at-sports/) (last accessed jan th ) http://www.popularsocialscience.com/ / / /why-blacks-are-good-at-sports/ http://www.popularsocialscience.com/ / / /why-blacks-are-good-at-sports/ http://news.bbc.co.uk/ /hi/education/ .stm http://www.ecu.ac.uk/equality-charters/race-equality-charter/about-race-equality-charter/ http://www.ecu.ac.uk/equality-charters/race-equality-charter/about-race-equality-charter/ http://www.popularsocialscience.com/ / / /why-blacks-are-good-at-sports/ http://www.popularsocialscience.com/ / / /why-blacks-are-good-at-sports/ morgan, j. ( ) ‘walkout’ by black members at ucu event’ times higher education (nov th ) reay, d. ( ) ‘time to change: bringing oxbridge into the st century’ in (eds) clare alexander and jason arday aiming higher: race, inequality and diversity in the academy london: runnymede trust. staufenberg, j. ( ) ‘black and female professors not seen as 'geniuses' as often as white male professors’ in the independent online (last accessed jan th ) williams, m. ( ) ‘does your university produce racism?’ the guardian online october st (https://www.theguardian.com/education/ /oct/ /does-your-university- produce-racism) last accessed jan th . i ‘lone’ is used here as a narrative device to reflect the fact that despite the experiences outlined are collectively experienced, often we feel that we are alone, isolated and an anomaly. this is a reflection of several women’s experiences, in different geography departments in the uk and beyond. ii http://blacklivesmatter.com/ iii http://blackbritishacademics.co.uk/ / / /why-isnt-my-professor-black/ iv quotes in italics are quotes from black female academic mentees received in written correspondence. https://www.theguardian.com/education/ /oct/ /does-your-university-produce-racism https://www.theguardian.com/education/ /oct/ /does-your-university-produce-racism ethnicity and covid- ethnicity and covid- public health england's review of disparities in covid- is a serious missed opportunity parth patel, lucinda hiam, annabel sowemimo, delan devakumar, martin mckee as deaths from covid- rose in the uk, it became clear that people with different backgrounds, but united by the label black, asian, and minority ethnic (bame), were being affected in numbers far beyond their share of the population. public health england (phe) has undertaken a review documenting the scale of the problem. death rates in people known to have covid- , after taking into account age, sex, deprivation, and region, were twice as high among those of a bangladeshi background and - % higher among other ethnic groups compared with white british people. all-cause mortality was almost four times higher in black men and almost three times higher in asian men than expected for this period based on deaths rates in - ; the figure for white men was . times higher. mortality was almost three times higher than expected among black women, . times higher in asian women, and . times in white women. why? on that, the phe report is conspicuously lacking. while the cause of these disparities is probably multifactorial, the silence concerning how structural inequalities may be fuelling this pandemic, and more importantly how these inequalities take root, is notable. some have suggested possible underlying genetic factors even though data show that all minority ethnic groups are disproportionately affected, many of which have distinctly different genetic ancestry. some have focused on the role of pre-existing conditions such as diabetes, obesity, and hypertension. yet the report fails to ask why these conditions are more common in many minority ethnic populations or to explore factors such as material deprivation that might explain them. others have explored socioeconomic position, occupation, and housing conditions, but most have remained silent on the structural and institutional racism that determines these social factors and also leads to exclusionary health policies that reinforce existing inequalities. all these factors are likely to be contributing to the disparate health outcomes, and it is important to remember their interdependence. unanswered questions phe’s report brought together a large amount of information but adds little to what was already known. one of the few new contributions was a series of multivariate analyses seeking to explain the risk of death in those aged - , ≥ , and all ages. however, this raised more questions than answers. for example, in univariate analyses of all ages, the risk of death in the main minority ethnic groups was actually lower than for white british, contrary to other analyses. a single multivariate analysis adjusted for age, sex, region, and deprivation, making it impossible to disentangle the roles played by each factor. several commentators, including the leader of the uk labour party, keir starmer, have criticised the report for failing to investigate the reasons behind the disparities it documents or make recommendations on how to address them. given the urgent need for action, this report is a serious missed opportunity. the government’s announcements that “professor kevin fenton, public health director for london will lead the review” and that the “disproportionate impact of covid- on black and minority ethnic groups highlights an important focus” were widely welcomed. fenton has been a longstanding champion of diversity and anti-racism, and he views community and stakeholder engagement as a critical component of public health. his name is absent from the published report, however, and ethnicity features only as a small subsection of a much broader report. phe said it received evidence from over organisations and individuals but failed to include their evidence in the final report. the health service journal reports that these organisations and their evidence were included in a previously circulated version but “did not survive contact with matt hancock’s office.” the department of health and social care has denied they were removed from the report. following widespread criticism, the government committed to a further review that will make recommendations. other insights will come from organisations planning to make their own inquiries. the equality and human rights commission, for example, has announced that it will investigate the “long-standing, structural race inequality” brought into focus by the covid- pandemic. the death of george floyd in the us has been described as a “symptom of systemic racism.” the black lives matter protests sweeping across cities in the us, the uk, and elsewhere point to an anguish not just about police brutality but about the persistent and broad subjugation of marginalised communities by racist societal structures. all who value equity and justice are pushing for both immediate action and long term change. yet kemi badenoch, the uk’s equalities minister, told parliament last week, “we are not taking action which is not warranted by the evidence,” ignoring that the evidence of ethnic inequality and its lethal effects is already plentiful. specific policy levers, such as suspending measures that constitute the hostile environment, could be pulled to reduce the disparities now. the bmj | bmj ; :m | doi: . /bmj.m editorials institute for public policy research, london, uk london school of hygiene and tropical medicine, london, uk midlands partnership foundation trust, leicester, uk university college london, london, uk correspondence to: p patel parth.patel@ucl.ac.uk cite this as: bmj ; :m http://dx.doi.org/ . /bmj.m published: june o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b m j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j.m o n ju n e . d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /bmj.m &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - mailto:parth.patel@ucl.ac.uk http://dx.doi.org/ . /bmj.m http://www.bmj.com/ the inequity described but not explained in phe’s report must not be allowed to persist. the government must act to protect minority ethnic groups before we are hit by this pandemic’s imminent second wave. competing interests: we have read and understood bmj policy on declaration of interests and declare the following interests: dd has an honorary position in phe. as is a trustee of medact charity. mm is a member of independent sage. provenance and peer review: commissioned; not externally peer reviewed. public health england. disparities in the risk and outcomes of covid- . phe, . aldridge r, lewer d, katikireddi sv, et al. black, asian and minority ethnic groups in england are at increased risk of death from covid- : indirect standardisation of nhs mortality data may . https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/ - . office for national statistics. coronavirus-related deaths by ethnic group, england and wales methodology .https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsand- marriages/deaths/methodologies/coronavirusrelateddeathsbyethnicgroupenglandandwalesmethod- ology. siddique h, halliday j. lack of response to bame covid- toll risks fuelling tensions, say mps .guardian jun .https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ /jun/ /lack-of-response- to-bame-covid- -toll-risks-fuelling-tensions-say-mps. public health england. review into factors impacting health outcomes from covid- . . https://www.gov.uk/government/news/review-into-factors-impacting-health-outcomes-from- covid- . croxford r. black health expert did not lead bame covid report. bbc news jun . https://www.bbc.com/news/uk- . moore a. government censored bame covid-risk review. health serv j .https://www.hsj.co.uk/coronavirus/exclusive-government-censored-bame-covid-risk-re- view/ .article topping a. uk equality watchdog to launch inquiry into entrenched racism . https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /jun/ /uk-equality-watchdog-to-launch-inquiry-into- entrenched-racism. olusoga d. britain is not america. but we too are disfigured by deep and pervasive racism . https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /jun/ /britain-is-not-america-but-we-too- are-disfigured-by-deep-and-pervasive-racism mohdin a. too little data for recommendations in covid- bame report, says minister. guardian jun .https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ /jun/ /too-little-data-for-recommenda- tions-in-covid- -bame-report-says-minister. marmotm,allen j,boycet,goldblattp.morrison jhealthequity inengland:themarmotreview yearson. .https://www.health.org.uk/publications/reports/the-marmot-review- -years- on hiam l, patel p, orcutt m, miller a, rae m. the move to end the immigration surcharge for nhs workers is welcome, but it does not go far enough. bmj opinion. may . https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/ / / /the-move-to-end-the-immigration-surcharge-for-nhs- workers-is-welcome-but-it-does-not-go-far-enough/ this article is made freely available for use in accordance with bmj's website terms and conditions for the duration of the covid- pandemic or until otherwise determined by bmj. you may use, download and print the article for any lawful, non-commercial purpose (including text and data mining) provided that all copyright notices and trade marks are retained. the bmj | bmj ; :m | doi: . /bmj.m editorials o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b m j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j.m o n ju n e . d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://wellcomeopenresearch.org/articles/ - https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/methodologies/coronavirusrelateddeathsbyethnicgroupenglandandwalesmethodology https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/methodologies/coronavirusrelateddeathsbyethnicgroupenglandandwalesmethodology https://www.ons.gov.uk/peoplepopulationandcommunity/birthsdeathsandmarriages/deaths/methodologies/coronavirusrelateddeathsbyethnicgroupenglandandwalesmethodology https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ /jun/ /lack-of-response-to-bame-covid- -toll-risks-fuelling-tensions-say-mps https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ /jun/ /lack-of-response-to-bame-covid- -toll-risks-fuelling-tensions-say-mps https://www.gov.uk/government/news/review-into-factors-impacting-health-outcomes-from-covid- https://www.gov.uk/government/news/review-into-factors-impacting-health-outcomes-from-covid- https://www.bbc.com/news/uk- https://www.hsj.co.uk/coronavirus/exclusive-government-censored-bame-covid-risk-review/ https://www.hsj.co.uk/coronavirus/exclusive-government-censored-bame-covid-risk-review/ http://.article https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /jun/ /uk-equality-watchdog-to-launch-inquiry-into-entrenched-racism https://www.theguardian.com/world/ /jun/ /uk-equality-watchdog-to-launch-inquiry-into-entrenched-racism https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /jun/ /britain-is-not-america-but-we-too-are-disfigured-by-deep-and-pervasive-racism https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /jun/ /britain-is-not-america-but-we-too-are-disfigured-by-deep-and-pervasive-racism https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ /jun/ /too-little-data-for-recommendations-in-covid- -bame-report-says-minister https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ /jun/ /too-little-data-for-recommendations-in-covid- -bame-report-says-minister https://www.health.org.uk/publications/reports/the-marmot-review- -years-on https://www.health.org.uk/publications/reports/the-marmot-review- -years-on https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/ / / /the-move-to-end-the-immigration-surcharge-for-nhs-workers-is-welcome-but-it-does-not-go-far-enough/ https://blogs.bmj.com/bmj/ / / /the-move-to-end-the-immigration-surcharge-for-nhs-workers-is-welcome-but-it-does-not-go-far-enough/ http://www.bmj.com/ science magazine april • vol issue sciencemag.org s c i e n c e il l u s t r a t io n : r o b e r t n e u b e c k e r editor’s note in her working life piece “instagram won’t solve inequality” ( march, p. ), meghan wright examined why she feels conflicted reading #scicomm instagram posts by fellow women scientists. she explained that she recognizes the good they can do, yet it seems unfair that such scientists must devote time to social media outreach to combat systemic inequities. so, she has decided that she prefers to separate her social media use from her scientific activities. wright named a social media role model at her university—the science sam instagram account run by samantha yammine—before detailing why she did not want to participate in this kind of outreach. although she intended to use science sam as an example of social media success, wright’s critical comments about such outreach were interpreted by some as a sexist and mean-spirited personal attack on samantha yammine in particular and women science communicators in general. in this section, samantha yammine and colleagues describe the power of social media, the women scientists organization responds to the working life article, and two scientists recognized by aaas (the publisher of science) for public engagement discuss how outreach and institutional reform can go hand in hand. in the online buzz box, we provide several excerpts from the online eletters we received. jeremy berg editor-in-chief . /science. aat other marginalized scientists must overcome as minorities in science, tech- nology, engineering, and mathematics (stem) ( ), they should not be expected to bear the full responsibility for out- reach—nor should they be penalized for choosing to do this work. diversity among communicators should be encouraged because multiple styles and approaches of science communication can make science more accessible and relatable to more people, including those who may not otherwise seek stem edu- cation. selfies on instagram are optional, but they receive % more engagement than pictures without a face ( ), enabling open dialogue with broad audiences in an effectively personal manner. further research can determine whether shar- ing selfies from a research setting helps confer more trust without sacrificing credibility, and these data will inform strategies for improving the public’s lack of trust in scientists ( , ). social media serve an important role in the movement toward increased equity, diversity, and inclusion within stem because it provides a widely available, readily accessible platform for many to use easily. social media allow high- throughput networking and exploration of careers, which benefits trainees who may otherwise lack access to professional development ( ). although not free from the bias and prejudice inherent in society, social media can connect diverse groups, enable rapid information exchange, and mobilize like-minded communities. this connectivity can allow those same groups to challenge tradi- tional structures, identify and call out systemic barriers, and question hierarchies of power. instagram, for example, allows for visible represen- tation of individuals who are often unseen, and can amplify voices that may go unheard in traditional settings. furthermore, increased representa- tion of those who break stereotypes and are underrepresented creates a more inviting percep- tion of stem careers, and these efforts can improve diversity and inclusion in academia ( – ). for a diverse academic com- munity to thrive, inclusion and acceptance of every scientist, regardless of edited by jennifer sills component of publicly funded research grants, and public engagement activities should have weight in merit, tenure, and promotion assessments. whether scien- tists do outreach themselves or work with communication and media experts, public engagement with science is a responsibil- ity requiring important skills that should be valued accordingly. given the other barriers women and letters insights social media for social change in science although we agree with m. wright (“insta- gram won’t solve inequality,” working life, march, p. ) that there are many systemic structures perpetuating the marginalization of women in science, we view social media as a powerful tool in a larger strategy to dismantle such structures. in addition, scientists have been using social media productively to address several other concerns in aca- demia, including engaging with the public about science, increasing science literacy, promoting trust, exploring career options, networking internationally, and influenc- ing policy. strong public trust in science con- tributes to a democratic, civil society. scientists have a responsibility to engage effectively with society, especially when trust is lacking ( , ) and scientific knowledge is not equitably accessible ( ). within academic science, much of this outreach is done by women ( ) and underrepresented groups ( ). thus, not surprisingly, outreach has been grossly undervalued and sometimes demeaned. instead of urging academia to stop celebrating this essential service, we should ensure sufficient compensation and recognition for public engagement. evidence of outreach is increasingly a da_ letters.indd / / : am published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ april • vol issue s c i e n c e sciencemag.org online buzz scicomm speaks the working life “instagram won’t solve inequality” (m. wright, march, p. ) sparked a wide-ranging discus- sion about the value and purpose of social media in science. excerpts from readers’ reactions to the article are below. read the full eletters and add your own at http://science.sciencemag. org/content/ / / / tab-e-letters. a selection of your thoughts: not every tweet, post, or youtube video that happens to feature a woman sci- ence communicator is uploaded with the express intent of challenging the status quo or systemic and institutionalized bias…. to assume this…fails to under- stand the many reasons why women choose to communicate science to the public. there are indeed activists who constantly challenge the institutional- ized bias favoring men, people who sporadically participate in collective events such as women in science day, and also science communicators who just hap- pen to be women. we should applaud all of their efforts…. victoria j. forster …like the author, i strongly believe that women and other underrepresented minori- ties in science should feel no obligation to take on additional emotional labor for the sake of educating others. i also agree that systemic issues of inequality will likely require systemic solutions to enact lasting change.… it is evident that the author views #scicomm on instagram as a chore, but for some of us it is a labor of love. if build- ing model satellites out of cake…or posing my dog in front of apollo moon trees… weren’t incredibly fun, i wouldn’t be doing it.… instagram has significant and largely untapped potential as a vehicle for science communication. the visual nature of the platform, in conjunction with the large and diverse userbase,…provides tremendous opportunity to reach nontraditional audi- ences. i agree with the author that science communication must be performed in a manner authentic to each individual, but my hope is that we can continue to encour- age each other to promote science in a variety of ways. right now, we need #scicomm more than ever. beth r. gordon …as an early-career researcher, the first in my family to go to university, social media has provided me with both community and opportunities that would have been unimaginable without it. having a window into the lives other academics and scientists from a range of backgrounds has helped me feel i belong and reassured me that there is a place in the academy for people like me…. at the same time, i was recently invited to publish a comment piece… after an editor noticed my tweets. i have also found coauthors on twitter and used it to keep up with recent publica- tions and research…. i have nonetheless begun to limit time spent on social media, realizing that it…distracts me from important work. but the benefits far outweigh the limitations…. glen wright . /science.aat indianapolis, in , usa. louisiana state university, college of science, baton rouge, la , usa. department of chemistry and biology, ryerson university, toronto, on m b k , canada. *corresponding author. email: samantha.yammine@mail.utoronto.ca r e f e r e n c e s . m, “state of science index global report” ( ); https://multimedia. m.com/mws/media/ o/ presentation- m-state-of-science-index- -global- report-pdf.pdf. . s. t. fiske, c. dupree, proc. natl. acad. sci. , ( ). . m. anderson, “the race gap in science knowl- edge,” pew research centre ( ); www. pewresearch.org/fact-tank/ / / / the-race-gap-in-science-knowledge/. . e. h. ecklund, s. a. james, a. e. lincoln, plos one , e ( ). . m. ong, “the mini-symposium on women of color in sci- ence, technology, engineering, and mathematics (stem): a summary of events, findings, and suggestions” (terc, cambridge, ma, ). . n. gupta, c. kemelgor, s. fuchs, h. etzkowitz, curr. sci. , ( ). . s. bakhshi, d. shamma, e. gilbert, “proceedings of the nd annual acm conference on human factors in computing systems” ( ), pp. – ; http://comp. social.gatech.edu/papers/chi .faces.bakhshi.pdf. . a. l. gonzales, commun. res. , ( ). . b. j. drury, j. o. siy, s. cheryan, psychol. inquiry , ( ). . s. d. hermann et al., basic appl. soc. psychol. , ( ). . s. cheryan, j. o. siy, m. vichayapai, b. j. drury, s. kim, soc. psychol. person. sci. , ( ). . /science.aat appearance (whether conventional or not) is necessary. no single post or person on social media should be expected to change the world, but social media have been instrumental in mobilizing grassroots political move- ments, including those related to safety in education, research, and equity, such as the march for our lives, the march for science, black lives matter, #metoo, and the women’s march. thus, we challenge the false dichotomy that use of social media for public engagement with science and working to change policy and remove systemic barriers to inclusion are mutu- ally exclusive. rather, they are intrinsically linked, and we need to harness the poten- tial power of social media to create social change. as scientists, we must look to data and evidence to inform our understanding of the benefits and pitfalls of the use of social media for public outreach and policy change, and uphold the same rigor and analysis in determining what has value and what should be celebrated. samantha z. yammine, * christine liu, paige b. jarreau, , imogen r. coe department of molecular genetics, university of toronto, toronto, on m s e , canada. helen wills neuroscience institute, university of california, berkeley, berkeley, ca , usa. lifeomic, journal editors should not divide scientists we’re writing to express our disappoint- ment at the poor judgment that led to the publication of “instagram won’t solve inequality” (m. wright, working life, march, p. ), which singled out and criticized a successful woman science communicator for her instagram presence promoting and celebrating science. the editor of this piece should have ensured that the message focused on the issues: women and underrepresented minorities take on a great deal of science com- munication, mentorship, and outreach work without recognition or professional reward from their institutions. despite increasing institutional pressure to com- municate about science — whether to increase a university’s public profile or meet the national science foundation’s broader impact requirements — many institutions expect the work to be done on personal time without compensation or additional resources. although the piece hinted at these systemic issues, those arguments were undermined when the editors allowed the author to criticize the work of another woman with an da_ letters.indd / / : am published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ unabashed tone of condescension and did not give the target of the comments an opportunity to respond. rather than address the roadblocks facing women and underrepresented groups in science, technology, engi- neering, and mathematics (stem) or grapple with the author’s personal misgivings around science communica- tion, the piece was framed as an attack. the tone implied that anything beyond basic research is a frivolous waste of time, belittling meaningful approaches to science communication and public engagement. it offered a false choice between an authentic and relatable social media presence and effective advocacy for institutional change. the choice to run this inflammatory article demonstrates a lack of thoughtfulness on the editors’ part. pitting one woman scientist against another is destructive and irresponsible, and it perpetuates unreasonable standards for women and underrepresented groups in stem. it is antithetical to the open, accessible, and inclusive future that we at women scientists envision for science. maryam zaringhalam,* rukmani vijayaraghavan, juniper simonis, kelly ramirez, and jane zelikova, on behalf of women scientists women scientists, boulder, co , usa. *corresponding author. email: info@ womenscientists.org . /science.aat efforts large and small speed science reform the working life article “instagram won’t solve inequality” (m. wright, march, p. ) asserts that science outreach efforts by individual women cannot counteract struc- tural inequities and that women are doing outreach at a cost to their own careers. we concur that collective action and structural change are needed to diversify science and improve meaningful science engagement with the public. however, when such reform is absent or too slow, individual efforts fill the vacuum and should not be condemned. along with hundreds of other scientists, we devote time and energy to individual public engagement initiatives, while pushing for institutional reforms to support more scientists who wish to engage effectively. these reforms would provide support and incentives through professional recognition, financial and logistical resources, networks of support, and an inclusive culture and capac- ity for public engagement. with support, more scientists could develop collabora- tive and innovative engagement practices to broaden participation in science. while changing the culture of public engagement, we must similarly push to dismantle other structural barriers to women and minorities in the sciences. to accelerate these changes, data collection and learning networks would enable us to improve the effectiveness of our efforts to create a diverse workforce and tackle science-societal challenges. individual action versus structural change is not an “either/or” question; it is a “yes, and.” anne j. jefferson * and melissa a. kenney department of geology, kent state university, kent, oh , usa. cmns-earth system science interdisciplinary center, university of maryland, college park, md , usa. *corresponding author. email: ajeffer @kent.edu . /science.aat “...when [structural change] is absent or too slow, individual efforts fill the vacuum...” insights | l e t t e r s da_ letters.indd / / : am published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ scicomm speaks doi: . /science.aat ( ), . science article tools http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / . content related http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions terms of serviceuse of this article is subject to the is a registered trademark of aaas.sciencescience, new york avenue nw, washington, dc . the title (print issn - ; online issn - ) is published by the american association for the advancement ofscience science. no claim to original u.s. government works copyright © the authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee american association for the advancement of o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / . http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / . .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://science.sciencemag.org/content/sci/ / / .full http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/about/terms-service http://science.sciencemag.org/ . .j.ijdsa. . international journal of data science and analysis ; ( ): - http://www.sciencepublishinggroup.com/j/ijdsa doi: . /j.ijdsa. . issn: - (print); issn: - (online) a comparative analysis on police related deaths and prediction of presidential election bon-a koo , jana choe , yeseo kim northfield mount hermon school, gill, united states the governor’s academy, newburyport, united states lakefield college school, ontario, canada email address: to cite this article: bon-a koo, jana choe, yeseo kim. a comparative analysis on police related deaths and prediction of presidential election. international journal of data science and analysis. vol. , no. , , pp. - . doi: . /j.ijdsa. . received: august , ; accepted: september , ; published: september , abstract: the recent death of george floyd once again reminded the americans of the chronic racial bias when it comes to police using force during an encounter with an alleged criminal or, in some cases, innocent civilians, and promulgated black lives matter (blm) movements in the united states. in order to verify such police use of excessive force against a particular racial group, we examined datasets regarding cases of police killings, which were collected from states (and washington, d. c. separately) across the country. to find out the possible factors that might cause frequent police killings against a particular racial group, we analyzed relevant datasets, observing each state’s demographics, political ideology, education level, and the frequency of police deaths in respect to each state’s frequency of police killings. although we found numerous factors that might lead such trends in police violence, we discovered a correlation between a state’s political ideology and the frequency of police killings of a particular racial group in the corresponding state. in response to such trends, we evaluated the correlation between each state’s prevalence of police killings and its presidential election outcome in . using two machine learning methods, random forest and logistic regression, we further predicted each state’s prospective preference toward a particular candidate (republican or democrat) and the election outcome of the presidential election. keywords: blm, police, violence, data analysis, machine learning . introduction in response to the recent death of george floyd and the overall perpetuation of police brutality against african- americans, black lives matter (blm) movements are extensively propagating in the united states. blm is seemingly the largest movement in us history, as about million to million people have participated in demonstrations by the week of july , [ ]. the term "black lives matter" has been used since july , when a black community organizer expressed her rage on facebook about the acquittal of george zimmerman, a white police officer, in the shooting of trayvon martin, a black teenager. the phrase gained prominence once again in august when michael brown was shot by a white police officer in ferguson, missouri. in november , the use of the hashtag accelerated dramatically when the police officer in question was released, free of charges. ever since, through social media posts and protests, blm marks a continuous presence in the states, frequently sparked by racial bias and police killings, underlining the severity of police brutality against the black population [ ]. undeniably, police violence has long been a major issue in the united states, being one of the leading causes of deaths for young men. analysts have estimated a mortality rate of . per , for young men of ages - ; although the number seems insignificant, it is only a few steps behind other causes of deaths such as heart disease ( . per , ) or cancer ( . per , ). researchers have also estimated that the black men are sua greater risk, being . times more vulnerable to police violence compared to white men [ ]. considering that the police officers are government employees paid for the protection of the citizens, the exceptionally high rate of police-related fatality, especially among the people of color, seems preposterous. bon-a koo et al.: a comparative analysis on police related deaths and prediction of presidential election according to recent research, the black lives matter movement, along with protests against police brutality, had a noticeable correlation with the election. people who felt "coldly" towards the blm movement were % more likely to vote for trump than were those who felt "warmly" towards the campaign [ ]. the current president of the united states, then a republican candidate, had expressed support for police and accused the blm campaign of "dividing america." [ ] on the other hand, the democratic candidate hillary clinton publicly announced her support for the movement. seemingly, in the election, one’s sentiment towards the blm movement had a clear link with one’s vote for a particular candidate, each of whom had a distinct stance towards the issue. in the us today, the progression of statewide blm movements is similar to that of , only with a greater magnitude. moreover, prospective candidates of the election, joe biden and donald trump, are maintaining identical stances on the issue to those of candidates, clinton and trump respectively. due to these commonalities, kevin drakulich, an associate professor of criminology and criminal justice at northeastern university, anticipates blm movements of and their primary cause, police brutality, will be "important factors in this election - as they were in ." [ ] the study aims to identify possible stimuli for police killings and discuss how they might be used for justifications; verify the frequency of police killings against the black people and the general population in different states; and explore the connection between the prevalence of police killings in a state and the region’s unique characteristics such as the education level, demographics, political preference, and frequency of police deaths. the study also strives to anticipate the impact of current blm movements on the upcoming election of based on the observation made on each state's characteristics and the results of previous elections. we acquired relevant data sets from the us census bureau, fivethirtyeight, and the washington post for data concerning traits of each state, cases of police death, and cases of police killings respectively [ , ]. we analyzed the datasets using pandas software library, matplotlib plotting library, and scikit-learn machine learning library. . methodology . . exploratory data analysis (eda) exploratory data analysis (eda) refers to an approach to analyze data sets to find out all main parts of context, often using visual methods. the outcome is usually statistically calculated or visualized to tell the prospect of certain events [ ]. in the following sections, we analyze the rate of police killings in respect to race, state, political affiliation, and the number of police deaths. . . . justifications of police killings in some or many cases, police killings could be justified by the threat level of the victim, who is also likely an alleged criminal. thus, we identified three critical factors that might have contributed to the killing: criminal charges of the victim, the victim’s attempts to escape, and the presence of weapons with the victim. figure . percentage of victims who had criminal charges. as shown in figure , only . % of the victims were charged with a crime while the rest was free of charges. however, it is hard to determine whether the police were aware of the victim’s criminal charges during the encounter; moreover, a criminal charge cannot account for the immediate threat level of the victim. whether the victim was armed during an encounter could define the threat level of one. as shown in figure , . % of the victims were “allegedly armed,” possessing a weapon of any type, while . % had a vehicle. . % of the victims were unarmed which questions the necessity of the police to use violence during the encounter, which oftentimes leads to death. figure . percentage of victims armed. though not a direct indicator of threat level, whether the victim attempted to flee could evince the necessity of police to use physical force during an encounter. as shown in figure , . % of the victims were fleeing during the encounter either by car, foot, or other means of international journal of data science and analysis ; ( ): - transportations. nonetheless, . % of the victims were not fleeing during an encounter. figure . percentage of victims who fled during the encounter with the police. . . . police killings by race we first investigated the total police killings in the united states by race. figure below shows the percentage of police killings that happened to each race group. figure . police killings by race. according to the figure above, the most number of killings happened to white ( . %), followed by black ( . %) and hispanic ( . %). however, as there are significant differences among the population of each race group, we also aimed to investigate the percentage of people killed by the police out of the total number of population by dividing the number of police brutality by population for each racial group. in the total rate of police killings, the percentage of the black population outnumbered other racial groups by recording . %, when other racial groups recorded . % (white), . % (hispanic), and . % (asian). the rate of police brutality also depended on the victim's gender and age. the number of police’s extreme usage of force over men was . times greater than over women. the police brutality seems to have marked the highest in the age group of ~ with cases, followed by ~ ( cases), ~ ( cases), and ~ ( cases). thus, the number of cases depended on various kinds of factors, including but not limited to, the victim’s race, gender, and age. we further investigated the trend of victim’s races in relation to states’ political ideologies. in order to select two representative states from each party (democrat and republican), we examined the approval rating from voter turnout. based on the data, california and new york had the highest electoral votes cast of and among the democratic leaning states, while tennessee and indiana had the highest electoral votes among the republican leaning states with the cast of [ ]. as a result, we selected california and new york for the democratic leaning states, and tennessee and indiana for the conservative leaning states. figures and represent police killings by race in two liberal states, california and new york. figure . police killings by race (ca). figure . police killings by race (ny). bon-a koo et al.: a comparative analysis on police related deaths and prediction of presidential election the data set of california conveys that the most killings happened to hispanic group ( . %), followed by white ( . %), and black ( . %), and the data set of new york conveys that the most killings happened to black group ( . %), followed by white ( . %), and hispanic ( . %). the figures and represent police killings by race in two conservative states, tennessee and indiana. figure . police killings by race (tn). the data set of tennessee conveys that the most killings happened to whites ( . %), followed by blacks ( . %); the data set of indiana conveys that the most killings happened to whites ( . %), followed by blacks ( . %). . . . the rates of police killings by population as shown in the figures in . . , the number of police killings happened most to the white population in the two conservative states. however, given the fact that white people are the most populated group throughout the four states, the population of four races has to be taken under consideration in order to determine the actual police killings by races. for example, in the states such as california and indiana, the police killing rates in black groups were approximately times larger than in white groups, showing that the rates are in fact relatively higher in black groups than in other racial groups. figure . police killings by race (in). . . . police killings by frequency of police death as we analyzed where and to whom police killings occur most frequently in the states, we have to explore why. as mentioned in . . , we understand that the threat level of the victim may account for police killing. expanding this idea further, we inquired whether the frequency of police deaths (number of police officers killed during an encounter) could influence that of police killings. figure . cases of police deaths and killings ~ . international journal of data science and analysis ; ( ): - as shown below in figure , there is a high positive correlation between the frequency of police death and that of killings. there are anomalies like arizona and california where more victims were killed compared to other states with similar numbers of police deaths. on the other hand, states like georgia, louisiana, mississippi, new york, and texas had more police killed compared to other states with similar numbers of victims killed by police. . . . police killings by state and political preference in order to clarify the connection between public awareness of police killing and election results, we tallied the total number of police killings from to by state, which was then labeled by its general preference for trump or clinton in the election (this information was determined based on the final result of the election, not exclusively on the popular vote) [ ]. as shown in figure , california had the most cases of , which is almost twice as many as those of texas with cases. florida had the third most cases of . overall, each state had cases on average. the median value was while the modes were , , and . the range was as rhode island had the least cases of . when taking california out of consideration as an anomaly, the relatively democratic states majority of whom voted for clinton had cases on average. on the other hand, the apparently conservative states majority of whom voted for trump had cases on average. figure . cases of police killings ~ . to further inquire about the trend of a state’s political preference in relation to the frequency of police killings against black population, we examined the results of the and presidential elections. we identified states that underwent a change in their prevailing political stance over the course of the two elections. accordingly, there were no states, whose political inclinations were changed from republicans to democrats from to , whereas there were five states (florida, minnesota, ohio, pennsylvania, west virginia) that changed their political preferences from democrats to republicans [ ]. in order to identify the patterns of police killings that target the black population in these five states, we calculated the ratio of police killings of black group to white group for all states. while the average ratio was . across all states, that of florida was . , minnesota . , ohio . , pennsylvania . , and west virginia . , all of which are higher than the average ratio. figure . people without bachelor’s degree (average). bon-a koo et al.: a comparative analysis on police related deaths and prediction of presidential election . . . states characteristics for a further analysis, we examined the level of educational attainment to see the possible correlation of the educational rate and the rate of police killings in the individual states. we determined the education level based on the percentage of people who have not attained a bachelor’s degree from ages to in each state. the average rate regardless of gender or race ranged from . % (ma) to . % (tn), marking a difference of . % (see figure ). in massachusetts, an estimated . per , black men were killed, in comparison to . per , white population. in tennessee, an estimated . per , black population were killed, compared to . per , white men. figure . people without bachelor's degree (race). we also obtained an analysis on the educational rate of the same group classified into different races. the average rate ranged from . % (wy) to . % (nv) for the black population, and from . % (hi) to . % (tn) for the white population. an average of . per , black men and . per , white men were estimated to be killed by police in nevada. minnesota marked the greatest difference in the educational rate between the two races (rate of black population being . % higher). utah, on the other hand, presented the smallest difference of . % (rate of white population being higher) between the educational rate. . . machine learning machine learning, a well-known subset of artificial intelligence, refers to the automatic learning of a computer through experience. during this process, a computer studies numerous patterns within a data set and creates its own algorithms to classify or predict the value of a new piece of data [ ]. figure . flowchart of decision tree algorithm. . . . background in the second part of our study, we used machine; earning as a means to determine the most likely election result of a state, based on each region’s unique characteristics - including the frequency of police killing - and previous election results. in order to obtain the most accurate result, we used a voting classifier, a type of machine learning. a voting classifier is an example of so-called ensemble learning, international journal of data science and analysis ; ( ): - using multiple algorithms to derive the final output. we used soft voting in particular, in which the probability vectors for each predicted class are summed up and averaged. the class with the highest value wins, becoming the final output [ ]. out of many algorithms used in a voting classifier, we specifically used two models: random forest and logistic regression. the random forest algorithm consists of multiple “decision making trees” which splits the input data into subgroups based on its features. for example, in figure , the tree is trying to classify the different numbers given. the system only uses questions to derive final subgroups: red & odd numbers, black & even numbers, and red & even numbers. in order for the tree to have the most effective design, each subgroup needs to be as distinct as possible, while the components of each have to be as similar as possible [ ]. an ensemble of these “trees” create a random forest. each individual tree comes up with a class prediction and the most voted one becomes the model’s final prediction. [ ] contrary to the random forest, logistic regression first applies linear regression and then applies logistic function to investigate the probability of an event occurring. the prediction is based on the higher probability of either class [ ]. though more complex, we used the same mechanism to classify each state into prospective preference towards a particular party (republican or democrat) in the upcoming election, by taking education level, demographics, and most importantly, frequency of police killings into account. . . . results and predictions according to the machine learning data that we obtained, democrats will most likely win the presidential election in , gaining support from states, while states for republicans. compared to the election results in , states– indiana, kansas, michigan, mississippi, montana, north carolina, and north dakota– changed from republicans to democrats, while minnesota changed from democrats to republicans. taking each state’s number of pledged electors into account, democrats earned pledged electors while republicans earned pledged electors. still, the results leaned to democrats. in addition, we identified the chances of the states’ political preference for all states (washington and d. c. separately). as a result, we found out that states– connecticut, georgia, kansas, montana, new jersey, north carolina, north dakota, pennsylvania, south carolina, south dakota– each won its political preference only by a small difference, indicating higher chances of incorrect predictions in the actual presidential election. . discussion analyzing the rate of the police’s use of excessive force regardless of the victim’s race, we delved into possible causes of this occurrence and how it correlates with the environment of each state. initially, we found that the black citizens were more likely to get killed by a police officer than were those of other racial groups. then we recognized a correlation between a state’s political preference and its frequency of police killings. we also identified a high correlation between a state’s frequency of police killings and police deaths. the more were police officers killed, the more they killed civilians. though the education level of a state had a negligible correlation with the prevalence of police killings in a state, former observations provided us a clue that the public sentiment, whether political preference or the tension between police and civilians, acted as important factors to the outbreak of police violence in a state. . conclusion using machine learning to comprehensively analyze the datasets, we proposed a prediction on the result of the upcoming presidential election: the democrats will win by votes of pledged electors ahead of republicans. the calculated accuracy of this machine learning mechanism was %, which could have been improved if we had used more sets of data from the past apart from those of the - which we used so that it forms “training data” along with the result from the election. moreover, for a comprehensive yet concise analysis, we could have used data sets concerning individual cities rather than states. by the same token, considering the current public outcry against police violence in the us, we could have included the frequency of protests in a region as an indicator of its holistic sentiment towards police brutality, thereby further developing the analysis of a state’s political preference. references [ ] buchanan, larry, et al. “black lives matter may be the largest movement in u. s. history.” the new york times, july , nyti.ms/ d phqy. [ ] anderson, monica. “social media conversations about race.” pew research center: internet, science & tech, pew research center, may , www.pewresearch.org/internet/ / / /social-media- conversations-about-race/. [ ] williams, joseph p. “study: police violence a leading cause of death for young men.” u. s. news & world report, u. s. news & world report, aug. , www.usnews.com/news/healthiest-communities/articles/ - - /police-violence-a-leading-cause-of-death-for-young- men. [ ] callahan, molly. “many people who voted in were motivated by the black lives matter protests. will the same hold true this year?” news northeastern, june , news.northeastern.edu/ / / /the-black-lives-matter- protests-motivated-voters-in- -will-they-do-the-same-in- /. [ ] siddiqui, sabrina. “donald trump strikes muddled note on 'divisive' black lives matter.” the guardian, guardian news and media, july , www.theguardian.com/us- news/ /jul/ /donald-trump-strikes-muddled-note-on- divisive-black-lives-matter. bon-a koo et al.: a comparative analysis on police related deaths and prediction of presidential election [ ] “census bureau.” five thirty eight, july , fivethirtyeight.com/tag/census-bureau/. [ ] the washington post, wp company, www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/metro/data/datapost.html. [ ] patil, prasad. “what is exploratory data analysis?” medium, towards data science, may , towardsdatascience.com/exploratory-data-analysis- fc cb fd . [ ] daniel diorio, ben williams. “the electoral college.” national conference of state legislatures, july , www.ncsl.org/research/elections-and-campaigns/the-electoral- college.aspx. [ ] “presidential election results: donald j. trump wins.” the new york times, the new york times, aug. , www.nytimes.com/elections/ /results/president. [ ] “president - live election results.” the new york times, the new york times, nov. , www.nytimes.com/elections/ /results/president.html. [ ] “machine learning: what it is and why it matters.” sas, www.sas.com/en_us/insights/analytics/machine-learning.html. [ ] mangale, sanchita. “voting classifier.” medium, medium, may , medium.com/@sanchitamangale /voting- classifier- be db d a . [ ] yiu, tony. “understanding random forest.” medium, towards data science, aug. , towardsdatascience.com/understanding-random-forest- e d . [ ] shetty, badreesh. “an in-depth guide to supervised machine learning classification.” built in, july , builtin.com/data-science/supervised-machine-learning- classification. editor’s introduction the buzz of africanist energies renewed the annual meeting of our beloved african studies association is one of my favorite events on the academic calendar. i look forward to seeing old friends, learning about new research in dynamic panels, workshops, round- tables, africa now! and plenary sessions, and strategizing with brilliant colleagues about ideas, initiatives, and shared goals. the recent meeting in atlanta met all of my expectations, and in abundance. not only did i witness one of the best organized and best attended gatherings in the association’s history, but the renewed energy was palpable. people cele- brated new scholarship, some with cakes in the shape of books [see figure ]. they toasted collaborations at the bar. others channeled their energies into diversifying the organization, democratizing its remit, and conceiving of innovative ways to ensure greater participation in the association, its committees, and its publications by our colleagues based on the african continent. the editorial collective salutes the leadership of the program co-chairs, nana akua anyidoho and mark auslander, and the local arrangements committee co-chairs, jennie burnet, pamela scully, and harcourt fuller. the african studies review is deeply involved in annual meeting activ- ities, and was a banner year for collaborations with our asa member- ship and the africanist scholarly community at large. thanks largely to the valiant efforts of our managing editor, kathryn salucka, and our executive director, suzanne moyer baazet, the asr in collaboration with the carnegie fellows program successfully hosted our fourth pipeline for emerging african studies scholars (peass) workshop [https://africanstudies.org/ peass-workshops], with generous support from the university of arizona’s africana studies program [https://africana.arizona.edu/]. the workshop featured ten emerging scholars from ghana, kenya, nigeria, south africa, togo, uganda, the usa, and zimbabwe. mentors representing universities from the greater atlanta area, from across the country, and from beyond provided rigorous and engaged feedback on pre-circulated work, with the goal of seeing it appear in print in peer-reviewed venues. the asr’s editors eagerly await the submission of this promising work. african studies review, volume , number (march ), pp. – © african studies association, doi: . /asr. . https://africanstudies.org/peass-workshops https://africanstudies.org/peass-workshops https://africana.arizona.edu/ african studies review the annual meeting is also the opportunity for the annual general meeting of the journal’s editorial collective, comprising the executive editorial team (those who perform the bulk of the day-to-day work of the journal), the editorial review board, emeritus editors, and our publisher, cambridge university press. this year’s meeting marked several important milestones, not the least of which was the completion of the editorial tran- sition, with the retirement of editor richard waller. the agm is the occa- sion for the discussion and adoption of the annual report. it also witnessed the passage of our strategic plan and a new statement about interdiscipli- narity [https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/african-studies-review/ information/statement-of-interdisciplinarity] and its intrinsic role in african studies. we formally adopted a proposal for the journal to become officially bilingual from mid- . this new policy will enable francophone authors to submit via the scholarone portal entirely in french. we also created new ad hoc sub-committees, one to investigate enhancing digitiza- tion and digital access, and a second to consider the creation of new prizes and awards. we welcome the involvement of our membership and readership in these deliberative processes. the asr’s annual meeting activities are expansive because we play a leadership role, connecting the asa membership to activities and publishing venues and creating new ventures with new collaborators. figure . nathan r. carpenter and benjamin n. lawrance launch their new book “africans in exile” and website with a book-shaped cake in the atlanta marquis marriott, december , . photo credit: author https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/african-studies-review/information/statement-of-interdisciplinarity https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/african-studies-review/information/statement-of-interdisciplinarity https://africansinexile.com/ editor’s introduction in atlanta, a number of scholars met to plan a fifth peass workshop, in dakar, in july . this will be the first peass workshop entirely in french. beyond the innovative peass workshop, also witnessed the relaunch- ing of “meet-the-editors” activities with a new, interactive, and more per- sonable format. participants at the meeting had an opportunity to engage directly with editors of a dozen africanist journals. in the publish that article! plenary session, editors were interviewed about best pub- lishing practices and fielded questions from the audience. in the new pitch that article! follow up session, prospective authors had an opportunity to talk one-on-one about their nascent projects with individual editors. we look forward to making this a regular fixture on the annual meeting schedule. the annual meeting is also an ideal opportunity for the asr’s eight editors, five book review editors, and its more than three dozen editorial review board members [https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/african- studies-review/information/editorial-board] to hear new and persuasive work and engage with authors. many conference attendees will ultimately find a publishing home for their research via the personal interactions and solicitations that took place at atlanta. the sociable and engaged atmo- sphere of the annual meeting is an ideal occasion to make the connections that bring embryonic thoughts to fruition. for five years now, the asr has sponsored an annual distinguished lecture, and anthropologist professor peter little of emory university delivered a trenchant critique of environ- mental experimentation in kenya based on his almost four decades of observations. the asr also sponsored two panels: one featured mohamedou ould slahi, live from his house arrest in nouakchott, in dialogue with ann mcdougall, erin pettigrew, and abbass braham, discussing guantanamo diary, slahi’s riveting memoir of his almost fourteen years in illegal deten- tion by the u.s. military in cuba [see figure ]. a second panel explored new research on african refugee mobilities, past and present, featuring christian williams, bonny ibhawoh, joanna tague, and others. we look forward to publishing iterations of each of these exciting endeavors, but you can find a teaser in the form of an africa past & present podcast [http://afripod.aodl.org/ / /afripod- /] conducted by one of our editors, peter alegi. we hope our efforts to broaden the reach and impact of the journal, to reconnect with the asa membership and draw in new readership, contrib- ute to the generation of new energy in africanists circles. with your contin- ued support and engagement, we will ensure the continuity and growth of our foundational journal and further cement the role of the african studies association in provoking, debating, and publishing the most compelling new research and scholarship in african studies. with the above considerations in mind, it should come as no surprise that this issue, the first of and our new four-issue format, features scholarship from two past annual meetings in chicago and washington dc alongside other work. we are pleased to publish the asr distinguished https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/african-studies-review/information/editorial-board https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/african-studies-review/information/editorial-board http://afripod.aodl.org/ / /afripod- / http://afripod.aodl.org/ / /afripod- / african studies review lecture, delivered at our chicago meeting by alcinda honwana. we also have a fascinating collection of articles on power and performance that were first delivered at the washington dc meeting in . this issue offers a compelling selection of disciplinary research, ranging from sociocultural anthropology and international development to history and film studies. our contributors explore case studies in burkina faso, côte d’ivoire, cameroon, kenya, and senegal, as well as the african continent and inter- disciplinary african studies and film writ large. our issue opens with alcinda honwana’s distinguished lecture “youth struggles: from the arab spring to black lives matter & beyond” [https:// doi.org/ . /asr. . ]. honwana contends that “waithood” is a profoundly useful category for understanding the “prolonged, difficult and dynamic transition” of african youths into adults [see figure ]. drawing on comparisons with the developed north and arabic north africa, she finds that the faith of africa’s younger generation in the capacity of its leaders to meet needs and expectations is in freefall. from senegal and spain to new york city and ferguson, missouri, young people are marshal- ling their energies to provoke political change. we next move to kenya, where corinne kratz examines marriage among the okiek. in “kinship in action, kinship in flux: uncertainties and figure . author meets critics panel, featuring abbass braham, erin pettigrew, and ann mcdougall discussing mohamedou ould slahi’s guantanamo diary, with author live from his house arrest in nouakchott, mauritania, november , , atlanta marriott marquis. photo credit: author https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . editor’s introduction transformations in okiek marriage arrangement” [https://doi.org/ . /asr. . ], kratz finds that marriage arrangements operate as a nexus for transformations in personhood, social relations, land tenure, and state engagements. she outlines okiek marital patterns and reflects on the centrality of interlineage discussions. our third article considers the cinematographic oeuvre of cameroonian director jean-pierre bekolo. hot on the heels of our celebration of the late idrissa ouedraogo in the september issue [https://doi.org/ . / asr. . ], we are pleased to offer vlad dima’s “waiting for (african) cinema: jean-pierre bekolo’s quest” [https://doi.org/ . /asr. . ], a highly original exploration of the pursuit of an aesthetically african cinema. dima reflects on bekolo’s corpus and its relationship to african and third cinemas, and critically reviews “naked reality,” bekolo’s somewhat absurdist and unfinished work. the remainder of our issue is devoted to a forum on the power of performance and the performance of power, edited by till förster and aïdas sanogo. in their introduction to the forum [https://doi.org/ . /asr. . ], förster and sanogo explain that the west african savannah is today the site of a rich history and powerful present energy pertaining to non-state-based institutions, notably secret societies and hunter fraternities. among these groups, spanning burkina faso and côte d’ivoire, as well as parts of guinea, sierra leone [https://doi.org/ . /asr. . ], liberia, mali, and senegal, are those that claim deep figure . former asr editor, sean redding, presenting asr distinguished lecturer, alcinda honwana, with a plaque commemorating her lecture in chicago, illinois, november . photo credit: african studies association https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . african studies review historical connections to pre-modern empires, as well as others that have formed in a dialectical tension with regional conflicts and civil wars. this forum is a multi-faceted collection of performance in action, and we are pleased to be able to offer vibrant color photography as well as digital music files to complement its display and representation. the authors in this collection provide a rich and diverse documentation and critique of ethics, aesthetics, and relationships between communities and states. in lorenzo ferrarini’s article, the author highlights the materiality of donso associations in a rich analysis of the smocks worn by individual hunters. in “the shirts of the donso hunters: materiality and power between concealment and visual display” [https://doi.org/ . /asr. . ], ferrarini departs from existing depictions of hunting attire embodiments of power, by instead revealing the aesthetics of concealment embraced by burkinabé hunters. till förster, himself a senufo poro initiate, explores secrecy and per- formance in “the invisible social body: experience and poro ritual in northern côte d’ivoire” [https://doi.org/ . /asr. . ]. förster contends that the privileging of the performative in the study of secret soci- eties overlooks the way poro lodges, as institutions, foster and sustain what he calls a “bodily experience” and “all-embracing sensory regime.” nocturnal funerals and other gatherings render the social body invisible and help account for the revitalization of poro associations in post-war ivorian society. in “songs from the hunters’ qur’an in côte d’ivoire: dozo music, textuality, and apostasy in the repertoire of dramane coulibaly,” joseph hellweg highlights the complexity of hunting songs among the majority-muslim odienné region of northwestern côte d’ivoire. the songs of dramane coulibaly, which our readers can listen to courtesy of digital files hosted on our web platform [https://doi.org/ . /asr. . ], “conjoin and distinguish” muslim goals and ostensibly non- muslim hunting practices. dramane’s lyrical performances at funerals bring dozos closer to god. and informed by the fact that gifts of game calm the spirits of deceased hunters, hellweg offers a new analysis of multivalent hunting modalities. kathrin heitz-tokpa’s analysis of state/non-state tensions in postwar côte d’ivoire zeroes in on the prefecture of ouangolodougou and the legacy of the security operations of dozos during the violent decade-long conflict. in “mande hunters and the state: cooperation and contestation in post-conflict côte d’ivoire” [https://doi.org/ . /asr. . ], she reveals how dozos today draw on a performative repertoire to entrench their power and profitable activities, notably via public processions. and in the final forum article, sten hagberg directs our attention to the interplay of political pragmatics and cultural representation in public debate in burkina faso. in “performing tradition while doing politics: a comparative study of the dozos and koglweogos self-defense movements in burkina faso” [https://doi.org/ . /asr. . ], https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . https://doi.org/ . /asr. . editor’s introduction hagberg compares two self-defense movements—dozos and koglweogos— and highlights political rivalries and social antagonisms. while the burkinabé state once tried to restrict self-defense movements, dozos and koglweogos have asserted a new public authority in the wake of blaise compaoré’s ouster. our issue concludes with an excellent selection of film and book reviews. from , all film and book reviews will be online only, and entirely free to access. we hope our readers will share these widely. all the original scholarly articles appearing in this issue originated under the previous editorial lead- ership of sean redding and elliot fratkin, and we thank them for continued engagement with the journal’s activities. -mata dandino .indd nº  , . páginas - diálogo andino “dos ojos o mÁs”. liderazgos colectivos en el marco de la acciÓn de una ciudadanÍa transformadora “two or more eyes”. collective leaderships in the framework of a transformative citizenship’s performance patricia mata benito* a partir de los resultados de una investigación en torno al aprendizaje y la práctica de una ciudadanía transformadora desde un enfoque intercultural, este artículo analiza las nuevas formas relacionales y organizativas que se están construyendo en el interior de los actuales movimientos sociales. de forma específica, explora la emergencia de una nueva forma de pensar sobre el liderazgo, caracterizada por el reconocimiento de la capacidad colectiva para orientar la acción y el cambio social, que conduce a la identi- ficación de liderazgos colectivos que desafían la concepción individualista del liderazgo personal. palabras claves: liderazgo colectivo, ciudadanía, movimientos sociales, transformación social. based on the results of a study on transformative citizenship learning and practice from an intercultural approach, this paper analyses the development of a new kind of relationships and organizational forms within the current social movements. specifically, it explores the emergence of a new way of thinking about leadership, characterized by the recognition of the collective capacity to guide action and social change that leads to the identification of collective leaderships that challenge the individualistic con- ception of personal leadership. key words: collective leadership, citizenship, social movements, social transformation. * universidad nacional de educación a distancia (uned), españa. correo electrónico: pmata@edu.uned.es recibido: de enero de . aceptado: de abril de . introducción una nueva tendencia político-pedagógica, que muestra una de sus caras más visibles en los gran- des movimientos populares de los últimos años, se extiende y contagia de un extremo a otro del globo. del m español a ayotzinapa en méxico, de la primavera árabe al black lives matter norteame- ricano, millones de ciudadanas y ciudadanos, la mayoría sin un perfil previo de militancia política activa, se organizan para luchar contra diferentes formas de opresión, explotación y dominación con el objetivo de mejorar las condiciones económicas, políticas y sociales en las que se desenvuelven sus vidas. aunque las luchas sociales no constituyen en sí una novedad histórica, algunos indicios nos permiten aventurar que se está gestando algo nuevo en el interior de estos movimientos. dixon ( ) destaca, entre sus características distintivas, la articulación de las protestas con la propuesta de alternativas, una organización de abajo a arriba, sin líderes visibles, y el desarrollo de nuevas formas de relación en el curso del proceso: formas que incorporan un importante contenido pedagógico relacionado con la construcción de confianza y competencias en las personas implicadas. muchas de estas cuestiones afloraron de forma recurrente en el trabajo de campo que llevé a cabo entre y , en el marco de mi in- vestigación en torno al aprendizaje y la práctica de una ciudadanía ética, crítica, participativa y transformadora desde un enfoque intercultural. entrevistas en profundidad con personas con una trayectoria de activismo o militancia activa en diversos ámbitos y tipos de organizaciones (en educación, organizaciones políticas, movimientos sociales, medios de comunicación, académicos), en españa, portugal y méxico, que compartieron sus experiencias y aprendizajes al tiempo que sus incertidumbres y dificultades, así como los retos a los que se enfrentan los colectivos en los que se implican. en este trabajo me referiré a algunas percep- ciones sobre las nuevas formas de organización y relación que se construyen en el interior de los movimientos sociales y discutiré específicamente sus argumentos sobre la emergencia de liderazgos patricia mata benito relacionales, colectivos, que desafían las formas habituales de entender y explicar las transforma- ciones sociales. caracterización de los movimientos sociales: alternativas y tensiones relacionales y organizativas la emergencia de movimientos sociales se interpreta por revilla ( ) como un proceso de ensayo de nuevas formas de acción y configuración de identidades colectivas que surge en las sociedades cuyos proyectos sociales y políticos no tienden a la inclusión de todas las personas y grupos. estos movimientos se articulan como redes de relacio- nes que, siguiendo una lógica de identificación y participación, producen un sentido alternativo de la acción colectiva. se sitúan así, de algún modo, en los márgenes del sistema, generando espacios no institucionales de aprendizaje y ejercicio de una ciudadanía crítica, participativa y transformadora. muchas de las personas con las que conversé narraban su propia experiencia de tránsito desde la vinculación con grupos organizados “tradicio- nales”, como asociaciones, ong o sindicatos, a la participación en movimientos sociales y redes no organizadas. cuestionaban la identificación de la ciudadanía con la participación en grupos organizados que pretenden arrogarse la categoría de representantes de la sociedad: “hay cierto mito de que la ciudadanía son los grupos organizados; y a veces hay ciertas ong que buscan presentarse como representantes de la sociedad civil y pues no son representantes de nadie” (e ). hay una clara tendencia a huir de la afiliación y la formalización, valorando la apertura y flexibilidad que ofrecen estas redes. también se valora el hecho de que los intereses y objetivos no estén definidos de antemano, así como el cuestionamiento permanente del porqué y para qué de la acción colectiva, y la renegociación constante de las identidades. los movimientos que describen se caracterizan por una actitud instituyente que se opone a la generación de inercias: “implican una renegociación constante de las identidades, lo opuesto a las instituciones inerciales. me interesan los premovimientos, hechos de solidaridad colectiva” (e ). estos movimientos y redes se construyen como espacios plurales y heterogéneos en los que se com- parte una crítica general al sistema, se intercambian información y saberes, y se pretende desarrollar un pensamiento complejo y socialmente creativo: “el grupo es muy diverso en cuanto a opiniones, ideologías, confesiones religiosas, y eso es lo que permite que el grupo desarrolle un pensamiento complejo, basado en la heterogeneidad, el debate y la creación” (e ). se pone de manifiesto un cambio de sentido evidente en los sucesos ligados a la transformación social; las metanarrativas, entendidas como grandes utopías e ideologías totalizadoras que en un pasado no lejano impulsaban y orientaban la movilización, están siendo sustituidas por procesos de construcción de abajo hacia arriba de nuevos proyectos que se formulan desde lo cotidiano, lo cercano, lo local. este cambio de orientación incide en la diversificación de razones sociales y la emergencia de distintas lógicas (medioambientales, económicas, de consumo, etc.) que no responden a una única explicación global de la realidad, sino a la combinación de múltiples perspectivas: es una visión muy gramsciana, una trans- formación del contexto y no una visión leninista que prima la conquista del estado para después transformar las condiciones de vida desde el propio estado. aquí no, aquí en el fondo es cómo desde lo coti- diano, desde los movimientos sociales, desde las autoridades locales, se pueden ir construyendo nuevas razones sociales portadoras en el fondo de proyectos de transformación […] no tienen detrás de una forma explícita, pueden tenerla de una forma implícita, modelos globales de sociedad, esto es tal vez lo distinto (e ). la apertura de los procesos es otra característica emergente en los actuales movimientos sociales. son procesos fundamentados no en modelos sociales o discursos cerrados, sino en unas orientaciones éticas que inciden en el constructivismo social y en la participación de todas las personas, sin exclusiones. este principio no excluyente se extiende también a las ideas, perspectivas, criterios divergentes, respecto de los cuales se trata de adoptar una visión capaz de integrar y nunca descartar opciones. se trata de multiplicar y simultanear alternativas, en línea con la complejidad, evitando los planteamientos dicotómicos y teniendo siempre en cuenta las posibilidades que en el consenso no han llegado a priorizarse: “tengo siempre una visión que intenta contemplar varios “dos ojos o más”. liderazgos colectivos en el marco de la acción de una ciudadanía transformadora puntos de vista sobre el mismo tema” (e ); “creo que tiene que haber un equilibrio entre cuál es mi criterio, cuál el de los demás, si luego llegamos a un acuerdo bien, y si aun así no llegamos a un acuerdo, yo voy a emplear mi criterio teniendo en cuenta que esa es la otra posibilidad que a lo mejor no tengo que descartar” (e ). la diversidad humana y la pluralidad de ideas, perspectivas y propuestas se conciben así como condición de posibilidad de un cambio social sustantivo. se pone de manifiesto el carácter permanen- temente instituyente de los nuevos procesos de construcción ciudadana, basados en una actitud de reflexión, cuestionamiento y revisión constante, muy alejada de comportamientos inerciales y fo- silizados. de ahí que buena parte de los discursos de las personas con las que conversé, lejos de la autocomplacencia, incidan en las dificultades, limi- taciones y tensiones que subyacen a estos procesos. una tensión básica es que se desarrolla entre el individuo y el colectivo, sobre la que se articulan tensiones diversas que implican interrelaciones no binarias, sino múltiples y complejas entre cuestio- nes que conciernen a las condiciones de igualdad, diversidad, reconocimiento, autonomía, solidaridad, poder y liderazgo. en sus discursos a menudo identifican el modelo sociopolítico hegemónico como un obstáculo para el aprendizaje y la construcción de una ciudadanía transformadora. describen una serie de lógicas y racionalidades que han penetrado de tal forma en el imaginario colectivo que han pasado a formar parte natural de la propia estructura social e institucional. se trata de lógicas de control, cuyo carácter regula- dor nos permite englobarlas bajo el calificativo de “burocráticas”. la racionalidad autoritaria, que se manifiesta en la asunción normalizada de la vertica- lidad y la jerarquía, es una de ellas: “normalmente se hacen las cosas de arriba a abajo y no de abajo a arriba” (e ). en mi institución actual, la universidad, o cuando voy con una organización no gu- bernamental, una asociación civil, no están planteadas de entrada, de tal forma que el ejercicio del poder y la toma de decisiones sea de por sí horizontal […] cuando llegas ya hay un director, ya hay un presidente, un coordinador (e ). un líder, la figura de un líder, la figura de un patrón […] el culto a la palabra del líder, el silencio para escuchar un líder, el respeto debido, no sabemos por qué, pero no importa, al padre, al patrón, al jefe, al director, todas estas figuras que implican una cierta mentalidad de racionalidad auto- ritaria, tú no discutes, tú no te enfrentas, no sé… yo veo eso muy común y fuertemente constriñendo la participación (e ). la combinación de estas lógicas autoritarias, jerárquicas, burocráticas e inerciales se encuentra en la base de un déficit educativo en la construcción de ciudadanía. las personas inciden en la falta de experiencias ciudadanas, y por tanto de espacios de aprendizaje, en sus contextos. esta carencia está en parte condicionada por una herencia política no democrática en sus países y en parte por la propia configuración del sistema, dotado de mecanismos que intencionalmente debilitan, neutralizan o anulan cualquier iniciativa participativa o transformadora: “he crecido en una sociedad diferente ¿no? era una sociedad franquista, y,… y la… lo que he aprendido de mi madre es: no levantes la voz, si piensas diferente no se te ocurra decirlo” (e ); “si no tienen a lo mejor la capacidad o la oportunidad de expresarlas, por lo que te decía, yo estoy, eeeh… estoy muy convencido de que la gente no está pre- parada para expresar sus necesidades” (e ); “los espacios mismos de participación ciudadana…, no tenemos experiencias al respecto; tal vez ni desde el nivel familiar, desde el nivel escolar, ni desde el nivel más inmediato, pues carecemos de esas, de esas experiencias muchas veces” (e ); “no hemos tenido un proceso de hábitos de participación, de hábitos democráticos, tenemos el discurso demo- crático pero sin hábitos” (e ). las tensiones entre lo individual y lo colectivo se manifiestan, en algunos casos, por medio de la percepción del riesgo de anulación del individuo en el interior del colectivo, bien porque este quede oculto dentro de la estructura grupal o bien porque se olvide de sí mismo al dar prioridad a la comuni- dad. se ponen de relieve formas muy distintas de posicionarse en esta tensión entre el individuo y el grupo, desde los intentos de personalización del colectivo, imprimiendo en este la huella individual, hasta la búsqueda del equilibrio entre el cuidado de sí y el cuidado de los otros, desde una perspectiva ecofeminista. se discute la articulación de los intereses parti- culares y el interés general. subyacen a esta algunas patricia mata benito cuestiones, entre otras: ¿es la suma de los intereses particulares equivalente al interés general? ¿de qué modo pueden coincidir o converger el interés general y el particular? ¿puede el interés general mover a determinados individuos a ejercer más poder que el resto? ¿es legítima la definición individual de lo que constituye el interés general? ¿es legítima en este caso esta apropiación del ejercicio del poder? y así, la transformación social, ¿puede lograrse desde la suma de acciones individuales? no es solamente de las estructuras ad- ministrativas sino que también de las concepciones personales de la gente que participa en esto ¿no? es un poco se lo toma como si fuera su propio proyecto personal, proyecto político, acción individualizada para realizarse como individuo. y entonces claro eso es complicado. ahí se junta una serie de intereses que olvidan continuamente que si estás ahí es para hacer algo por los demás ¿no? o porque los demás hagan algo por sí mismos, que es de lo que se trataría por no decir la transformación social […] mira yo soy concejal y voy a hacer lo que yo quiera. yo soy técnico y yo hago lo que yo pienso. o sea, todo el mundo hace lo que él cree, piensa y tal. volvemos a lo del interés general (e ). como articular el reconocimiento es un inte- rrogante fuerte, que remite a otras cuestiones no menos complejas: ¿es posible valorar a algunas personas como “mejores” o “más capaces” que otras? ¿desde qué instancia o posición se realizaría esa valoración? en caso de establecerse esa mayor capacidad, ¿legitimaría esta la delegación de un mayor poder en la toma de decisiones para las personas “más capaces”? por último, destacamos como parte de la tensión entre igualdad y diferencia la experiencia de algu- nas mujeres en relación con el género y la peculiar relación que encuentran entre diferencias de género y ciudadanía. estas están marcadas por la lógica patriarcal dominante y la profunda desigualdad de recursos y poder entre hombres y mujeres, que ha implicado históricamente la exclusión de estas de la ciudadanía, reconocida, aún hoy en día, solo local y parcialmente. pero se incide también en las aporta- ciones específicas que las mujeres como colectivo (“forzadamente constituido”, en palabras de una de las entrevistadas) hacen en la reconstrucción de la ciudadanía; la no jerarquización, la cooperación, la empatía, el cuidado, son principios que forman parte del imaginario femenino tanto como de una manera de sentir que se encuentra en la base de la ciudadanía transformadora: “el ecofeminismo en el desarrollo es tener otros valores distintos, cuando yo hablo de desarrollo, yo debería de hablar de una no jerarquización” (e ); “siento que por tradición y por historia las mujeres tenemos más facilidad para cooperar que competir, para sentirnos parte de una comunidad” (e ). creo que aportamos muchísimo más, in- cluso que los hombres, y que tenemos otra visión del mundo, tenemos otras cualidades, tenemos otra forma de hacer las cosas, tenemos una parte también interesante de saber empatizar con otras personas […] todo el tema del cuidado, todo el tema de la escucha […] su visión de la ciudadanía es mucho más de poder, mucho más de otra manera, y la nuestra es mucho más de construcción desde pequeños ¿no? y de escuchar a los vecinos (e ). una manera de sentir relacionada con la capa- cidad de ver el mundo desde varias ópticas y no con “un ojo solo”, como pone de manifiesto esta cita que parafrasea la perspectiva de una mujer timorense: ella decía que los hombres tenían un ojo solo, porque solo conseguían ver de una manera el mundo, ella decía que lo im- portante era un ser que tuviera dos o más ojos, y ella te explicaba, es fundamental, estamos en una edad en que hay que tener dos o más, esta frase es perfecta, perfecta para hablar de esto…(e ) del liderazgo personal a los liderazgos colectivos la discusión en torno al liderazgo parte de los distintos enfoques que compartieron las personas con las que me entrevisté, y que reflejan perspectivas diversas del juego de tensiones entre poder y auto- ridad, igualdad y reconocimiento. se reconoce que en cualquier colectivo es posible identificar personas y grupos con capacidad de influencia suficiente como para condicionar las decisiones colectivas: “dos ojos o más”. liderazgos colectivos en el marco de la acción de una ciudadanía transformadora el rol que juega cada uno dentro de ese grupo, el prestigio que tiene adquirido dentro de él, la… tendencia a veces también un poco a… no sé cómo decirlo, a que haya ciertos grupos de presión dentro de ese tipo de cosas, yo creo que eso son cuestiones de influencia […] entran factores como la experiencia de cada uno, cosas por el estilo, y al final acaba determinando o empujando mucho el peso de esa decisión (e ). el análisis de los discursos en torno al liderazgo muestra tres posiciones distintas, que podemos caracterizar como liderazgo personal, liderazgo delegado y liderazgos colectivos. los defensores del liderazgo personal argu- mentan la necesidad de la figura de un líder que ha de poseer ciertas características extraordinarias, y sobre todo la capacidad para concentrar y orientar las fuerzas de un colectivo en una dirección determinada: hace falta un líder, porque un grupo es potente cuando un líder es capaz de aunar todas esas fuerzas porque esas fuerzas están pero necesitan ser conducidas y yo creo en eso porque si no la fuerza se dispersa y al final se cae en el error de mucho ruido y pocas nueces (…) necesitamos personas que aporten modelos diferentes tanto económico, cultural, educativo… gente que sea capaz de salirse del tren este que va sin frenos y sin fin, que se tire y que se tire con todas las consecuencias, y creo que en eso consiste el cambio, en que gente valiente tire y esa gente existe, como ha existido toda la historia, gente revolu- cionaria, gente grandiosa mentalmente y grandiosa sentimentalmente, porque creo que la unión de una poderosa mente con un poderoso corazón son las personas que hacen grandes cosas (e ). el liderazgo, según esta posición, surgiría de una tendencia natural de algunas personas, una preocupación por lo social y una disposición a la participación que habría que potenciar educativa- mente con el desarrollo de competencias específicas: yo antes no creía en el tema de los liderazgos, y no héroes, no me gustan los héroes, pero sí que pienso que hay gente que es líder, que tiene más tendencia a participar […] que está preocupada por el bien común o por lo social, si tú le facilitas técnicas que existen para participar…sería lo de siempre las competencias, eso de los conocimientos, las habilidades, las actitudes… (e ). huaylupo ( ) critica este enfoque tra- dicional del liderazgo entendido como atributo de una persona con capacidades extraordinarias para impulsar el cambio social. esta forma de concebirlo resulta una simplificación que niega el protagonismo de la colectividad como creadora e impulsora de los cambios sociales, ignorando la condición situada de los individuos, que nacen en un contexto condicionado por la historia y la cultura colectiva. la figura de un líder capaz de orientar con sus capacidades y decisiones perso- nales el sentido de los cambios sociales es un mito enraizado en la visión individualista del mundo. contribuye además a legitimar una postura ideo- lógica conservadora que defiende la concentración del poder en manos de los supuestamente mejores y más capaces. “mientras tales mitos prevalecen, ellos refuerzan un enfoque en eventos de corto plazo y en héroes carismáticos en vez de fuerzas sistemáticas y aprendizaje colectivo” (senge, citado en huaylupo ). la propuesta del liderazgo delegado cuestio- na esta figura y aboga por la horizontalidad y la visibilización de todas y cada una de las personas involucradas en un proyecto ético democrático. desafía igualmente la idea del “experto”, argu- mentando que no hay personas comparativamente más capaces que otras en los procesos de transfor- mación social: yo tengo que romper la idea de experto, romper la idea de liderazgo, por supuesto tenerlos en cuenta, absolutamente, no, no, no se puede perder ningún efectivo, pero cuando hablo del proyecto ético democrático, es un proyecto de visibilizar a cada una de las personas que conforman una realidad (e ). cualquier función delegada se entiende como una “misión” que entraña sobre todo una obligación hacia la comunidad, como muestra el ejemplo del funcionamiento del liderazgo en el movimiento zapatista, sintetizado en el lema “mandar obedeciendo”: patricia mata benito la reflexión sobre lo que significa el poder, desde lo que sería una organización ciuda- dana ya tendría que cuestionar que haya un líder, a menos que fuera designado y, prácticamente, obligado por los demás. y esto es lo que yo creo que deberíamos aspirar […] un ejemplo que conocí de poblaciones indígenas oaxaqueñas en donde ahí, la comunidad elige quién se va a encargar de hacer las cosas en bien de la comunidad y no le queda otra […] es la mejor manera ¿no? cuando en un grupo surge un liderazgo o se designa un liderazgo para llevar a cabo tal actividad o tal misión (e ). una tercera posición incide en la importancia de la idea de liderazgo, pero señalando que este no debe entenderse como una tendencia o capacidad propia de los individuos, sino como una suma de potencialidades y capacidades colectivas que se encuentran dinámicamente distribuidas en los grupos humanos. se habla por tanto de liderazgos en plural; estos no tienen un carácter permanente, sino que en cada contexto, en cada situación, pueden encontrarse localizados en diferentes personas o grupos, aquellos cuya posición concreta en un momento determinado les permite captar más adecuadamente el sentido de la acción y formular las propuestas más adecuadas a la especificidad de esta: el liderazgo es muy importante en los procesos participativos, porque el lideraz- go es parte de los hechos movilizadores, catalizadores de los conflictos, de la res- ponsabilidad de pacificar los conflictos, y al mismo tiempo un liderazgo visionario también puede captar esas diversidades y ser capaz de dar sentido y hacer propuestas para avanzar, pero los liderazgos no pueden ser de una persona, los liderazgos están en una comunidad, son liderazgos políticos en sentido formal, liderazgos conectados […] tenemos que aprender a separar el lideraz- go del líder, el liderazgo no tiene que ser identificado con un líder, no tiene que ser una persona, ni tiene que ser autoritario, el liderazgo lo componen en cada situación, según mi entendimiento, las personas que están mejor capacitadas para interpretar la situación y hacer propuestas, no siempre son las mismas personas […] saber quién en cada momento está mejor, con más ins- trumentos para dar un paso al frente, y… y aceptar que pueden ser personas diferentes en circunstancias diferentes las que asumen el liderazgo, el conjunto de personas que son en aquel momento más capaces, y eso también produce una… unas relaciones, tanto en la educación como en la sociedad, unas relaciones mucho más en red […] hay que pensar es en el tejido social, buscar los liderazgos donde habitualmente no lo hacemos, no los vemos… quiénes son los que hacen más, quiénes son los que en un barrio donde hay problemas solucionan los problemas (e ). para construirse y manifestarse, estos lideraz- gos precisan de un entorno comunicativo en el que la información, los saberes y las experiencias se compartan y circulen fluidamente en toda la red: “una apuesta para fortalecer a las redes ciudadanas en cuestiones del manejo de la información y del saber, cómo circula o no circula el saber, cómo se construyen los liderazgos a partir de la administración del saber y de la información” (e ). conclusión combatir el individualismo, reconstruir y con- solidar los vínculos sociales, recuperar y reinventar la participación y lo comunitario, forman parte del proyecto de construcción de una ciudadanía crítica, participativa y transformadora que emerge en los discursos de las personas entrevistadas, la mayoría de ellas activamente implicadas en procesos de cambio y mejora en sus respectivos contextos. al calor del desarrollo de nuevas formas de articula- ción social en el seno de las redes y movimientos sociales, emerge una interesante concepción plural y colectiva del liderazgo con indudable interés político y pedagógico. un liderazgo que reconoce la diversidad, la heterogeneidad y la complejidad como base necesaria de la creatividad y la trans- formación social. repensar el liderazgo resulta una tarea po- lítica y pedagógica urgente en un contexto de efervescencia social como el que vivimos. la búsqueda de alternativas al liderazgo personal se está produciendo también, si bien de manera “dos ojos o más”. liderazgos colectivos en el marco de la acción de una ciudadanía transformadora testimonial, en ámbitos institucionales como la escuela. maureira et al. ( ) ponen de mani- fiesto cómo se va extendiendo la comprensión del liderazgo en las organizaciones como un “fenómeno coral” y no una obra solista. ya se denomine liderazgo distribuido, compartido, co- laborativo, democrático, colectivo o coliderazgo, se desarrolle en colectivos con mayor o menor nivel de organización, o en ámbitos más o menos formales o institucionales, implica una nueva forma de pensar sobre el liderazgo con algunas características distintivas, muy cercanas a las propuestas por el enfoque intercultural: •	 reconoce la necesidad y el valor de las distintas capacidades existentes en una organización o colectivo específico en relación con la orien- tación de la acción y el cambio. •	 reconoce, por tanto, el poder que todas las personas tenemos para crear, decidir y actuar. •	 desafía el autoritarismo y el individualismo construyendo un yo colectivo, un “nosotros” que se elabora en forma progresiva y se reorganiza y modifica permanentemente (guerra, ). •	 recupera el espacio político al reconocer la intencionalidad colectiva vinculada a deseos y creencias compartidos (lucena, ). referencias citadas dixon, c. another politics: talking across today’s transformative movements. university of california press, oakland. guerra velásquez, j. medios, poder e identidad. el yo colectivo frente a un proceso comunicacional transformador. revista estudios culturales : - . huaylupo alcázar, j. el liderazgo: un poder relativo. revista de ciencias sociales : - . lucena cid, i. v. la acción colectiva. todo poder viene de abajo. cuadernos electrónicos de filosofía del derecho : - . maureira, o.; moforte, c.; gonzález, g. más liderazgo distribuido y menos liderazgo directivo. nuevas perspectivas para caracterizar procesos de influencia en los centros escolares. perfiles educativos : - . revilla, m. gobernabilidad y movimientos sociales, una relación difícil. américa latina hoy : - . wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ issue- -editorial british art studies june british art studies issue , published june cover image: bill brandt, family supper (recto), , printed ca. , photographic print.. digital image courtesy of bill brandt and the bill brandt archive ltd. photography by richard caspole and robert hixon. pdf generated on february note: british art studies is a digital publication and intended to be experienced online and referenced digitally. pdfs are provided for ease of reading offline. please do not reference the pdf in academic citations: we recommend the use of dois (digital object identifiers) provided within the online article. these unique alphanumeric strings identify content and provide a persistent link to a location on the internet. a doi is guaranteed never to change, so you can use it to link permanently to electronic documents with confidence. published by: paul mellon centre bedford square london, wc b ja https://www.paul-mellon-centre.ac.uk in partnership with: yale center for 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editorial group 	authors 	cite as 	licensing aesthetic justice cr 	 	 design	for	next	 th	ead	conference		 sapienza	university	of	rome	 - 	april	 	 	 copyright	©	 .	the	copyright	of	each	paper	in	this	conference	proceedings	is	the	property	of	the	author(s).	permission	 is	granted	to	reproduce	copies	of	these	works	for	purposes	relevant	to	the	above	conference,	provided	that	the	author(s),	 source	and	copyright	notice	are	included	on	each	copy.	for	other	uses	please	contact	the	author(s).	 aesthetic	justice.	design	for	a	blind-spot	 culture	 	 peter	buwert		 edinburgh	napier	university	 corresponding	author	e-mail:	p.buwert@napier.ac.uk	 abstract:	 this	 paper	 presents	 a	 conception	 of	 aesthetic	 justice	 which	 builds	 on	 thoughts	 of	 theodor	 adorno	 and	 wolfgang	 welsch	 and	 attempts	 to	 reconcile	 design’s	relationships	with	both	aesthetics	and	ethics.	where	legal	justice	operates	 on	 a	 principle	 of	 homogenising	 equality,	 aesthetic	 justice	 recognises	 the	 full	 heterogeneity	of	experience	and	as	such	cannot	tolerate	the	injustice	of	treating	 things	which	are	not	alike	as	if	they	were.	building	on	this	theoretical	conception	a	 project	of	design	for	a	blind-spot	culture	is	outlined.	design,	rather	than	contributing	 to	societal	anaestheticisation	of	the	ethical	can	instead	utilise	its	aesthetic	influence	 to	shine	light	on	dark	places,	nurturing	an	atmosphere	of	sensitivity	to	differences,	 exclusions,	oppressions	and	intolerances.	design’s	potential	to	act,	and	fail	to	act,	in	 such	ways	is	discussed	through	examples	of	aesthetic	artefacts	relating	to	the	 	 british	 eu	 referendum,	 u.s.	 presidential	 election,	 and	 the	 black	 lives	 matter	 movement.	 keywords:	tolerance,	sensitivity,	ethics,	black	lives	matter,	anaesthesia		 .	why	aesthetic	justice?	 in	 	the	philosopher	monroe	beardsley	advanced	a	notion	of	aesthetic	justice.	beardsley’s	 conception	mirrors	an	economic	principle	of	distributive	justice,	proposing	that	each	society	 possesses	aesthetic	wealth	embodied	in	the	artefacts	assigned	aesthetic	value	by	members	of	that	 society.	some	segments	of	society	may	be	aesthetically	affluent,	while	others	could	be	said	to	be	 aesthetically	deprived.	aesthetic	welfare	could	be	sought	through	a	fairer	redistribution	of	aesthetic	 goods	out	of	the	standing	reserve	of	aesthetic	wealth.	this	fairer	distribution	would	amount	to	 aesthetic	justice(beardsley, ).		 though	there	is	some	value	in	beardsley’s	perspective,	read	through	contemporary	eyes	his	delivery	 and	immediate	application	can	appear	rather	crude.	underlying	assumptions	of	what	can	rationally	 be	assigned	aesthetic	value	pervade	and	constrain	his	conception	of	aesthetic	justice(beardsley,	 ).	for	beardsley	aesthetic	justice	is	subservient	to	the	primary	serious	business	of	ethical	 justice(beardsley, ,p. ).	 peter	buwert	 	 this	paper	approaches	the	idea	of	aesthetic	justice	from	a	different	angle.	rather	than	looking	for	an	 ethics	of	justice	within	the	marginal	special-interest	sub-domain	of	aesthetics,	the	case	is	presented	 here	that	all	of	our	conceptions	of	ethics	and	politics	are	in	fact	aesthetic	in	nature.	the	aesthetic	 realm	is	not	an	economy	of	objects	to	be	distributed.	rather,	it	is	the	realm	of	sensitivity	through	 which	all	our	experience	of	existence	is	encountered.	therefore,	matters	of	aesthetics	are	not	just	a	 side-show	add-on	to	the	main	event	of	ethics.	ethics,	politics,	justice,	in	fact	all	of	our	objects	of	 perception	and	cognition,	are	aesthetically	encountered	and	mediated.	aesthetic	welfare	is	not	 merely	a	first-world-problem	to	be	addressed	through	the	fair	distribution	of	opportunities	for	art	 appreciation.		 it	matters	greatly	how	we	produce,	deal	with	and	relate	to	our	aesthetic	artefacts,	because	this	 aesthetic	experience	has	a	profound	influence	on	the	ways	that	we	live	our	lives,	relate	to	others,	 and	organise	our	societies.	the	inherently	personal	nature	of	aesthetic	experience	can	mask	the	 social	significance	of	the	aesthetic	dimension.	aesthetic	experience	is	not	passive.	it	is	not	simply	 something	which	happens	to	us.	it	is	less	a	one-way	torrent	washing	over	us,	and	more	a	complex	 social	system	of	feedback	loops.	we	actively	shape	our	aesthetic	sensitivities	as	we	filter	and	refine	 our	experience	of	the	world.	this	in	turn	alters	our	responses	to	future	aesthetic	encounters.	 aesthetic	experience	is,	in	this	sense,	a	process	of	design.	as	anne-marie	willis	cogently	puts	it	in	 her	summary	of	the	idea	of	ontological	designing:	“we	design	our	world,	while	our	world	acts	back	 on	us	and	designs	us”( ,p. ).	in	a	world	in	which	artificiality	has,	in	clive	dilnot’s	words,	become	 the	“horizon	and	medium	of	our	existence”(dilnot, )	our	experiential	ways	of	perceiving	and	 understanding	this	designed	world	must	be	seen	as	an	integral	part	of	the	world-creating	system.	 how	are	we	designing	our	aesthetic	experience	of	the	world?	and	how	is	this	world	re-designing	our	 aesthetic	experience	of	itself	back	on	us?	are	we	nurturing	a	culture	in	which	we	are	aesthetically	 sensitive	to	the	realities	surrounding	us?	or	are	we	designing	our	own	numbness	and	blindness,	our	 own	lacks	of	aesthetic	awareness?(buwert, )	this	paper	proposes	a	conception	of	aesthetic	 justice	as	a	way	of	connecting	these	issues	of	aesthetics,	politics	and	ethics	in	the	context	of	design,	 arguing	that	design	has	the	potential	both	to	encourage	and/or	discourage	aesthetic	justice.	 .	aesthetics	and	ethics	 . 	aesthetic	sensitivity	as	an	ethical	imperative	 in	the	complete	blindness	of	the	absolute	lack	of	sensitivity,	ethics	cannot	be	experienced.	in	a	sense	 this	is	what	giorgio	agamben( ,p. )	refers	to	when	suggesting	that	the	only	ethical	evil	is	to	 exist	in	a	state	of	denial	of	one’s	own	potentiality.	german	philosopher	of	aesthetics	wolfgang	 welsch	describes	how	a	person	existing	in	a	state	characterised	by	such	a	deficit	of	sensitivity	would	 most	likely	assume	at	all	times	that	they	are	being	and	acting	well,	when	in	actuality	they	could	be	 acting	in	ways	which	would	horrify	themselves,	were	they	only	in	possession	of	the	capacity	to	be	 able	to	perceive	it(welsch, ,p. ).	welsch’s	example	of	intolerant	tolerance	demonstrates	the	 inadequacy	of	an	exclusively	insular	personal	conception	of	the	ethical.	while	an	individual	or	group	 might	be	able	to	deceive	themselves	that	their	actions	are	acceptable	in	line	with	their	internal	 standards,	in	genuine	encounter	with	the	other	these	internal	sufficiencies	come	to	be	 questioned(buber, / ;løgstrup, / ).	 it	is	here	that	aesthetic	sensitivity	becomes	a	necessity	for	the	ethical.	without	the	capability	to	 sense	differences,	adherence	to	the	principle	of	tolerance	becomes	a	meaningless	gesture.	so	in	all	 aesthetic	justice.	design	for	a	blind-spot	culture	 	 ethical	matters,	without	sensitivity	to	the	potentialities	inherent	within	the	situation,	the	ethical	 itself	becomes	nothing	but	an	empty	shadow	of	what	it	proclaims	to	be.	 the	specifically	aesthetic	character	of	this	sensitivity	towards	the	ethical	realm	is	significant.	in	 undoing	aesthetics( )	wolfgang	welsch	attempts	to	uncover	and	lay	bare	some	aspects	of	the	 operation	of	the	aesthetic	in	society,	and	in	doing	so	begins	to	tease	out	some	of	the	subtle	but	deep	 links	and	connections	between	the	aesthetic	and	the	ethical.	 welsch( ,pp. - )	identifies	two	fundamentally	aesthetic	ethical	imperatives	through	which	it	 is	possible	to	begin	to	identify	elements	of	the	ethical	actually	emerging	from	within	the	aesthetic	 itself.	the	first	of	these	emergences	of	the	ethical	from	within	the	aesthetic	he	refers	to	as	the	vital	 imperative;	in	which	aesthetic	sensibility	serves	the	primary	ethical	goal	of	the	preservation	of	life.		 the	second	aesthetic	imperative	which	welsch	advances	is	the	elevatory	imperative:	that	which	 requires	us	to	rise	above	raw	aisthesis	sensation	to	a	higher	level	of	perception	in	which	aesthetic	 sensibility	serves	not	only	the	vital	functions	of	survival	but	of	judgement,	reflection,	communication	 and	pleasure	perceived	autonomously	from	vital	concerns	and	often	prioritised	and	privileged	over	 them.	this	is	elevatory	in	two	senses,	firstly	that	such	perceiving	must	take	place	in	a	state	of	 reflection	“raised	above”	the	immediate	pleasure/pain	concerns	of	survival,	but	secondly,	because	it	 is	this	ability	to	rise	above	purely	physical	vital	concerns	in	which,	welsch	suggests	(after	aristotle),	is	 found	the	“anthropological	difference”( ,p. ):	that	which	sets	humans	apart	from	those	other	 living	creatures	and	inanimate	objects	who	lack	this	capacity	for	higher	level	reflection.		 it	is	in	this	sense	that	welsch	posits	aesthetic	sensitivity	as	the	ultimate	human	categorical	 imperative:	if	there	is	something	which	humans	“must”	do	–	because	to	not	do	this	means	to	lose	 something	of	what	it	means	to	be	human	–	it	is	to	maintain	our	grasp	on	the	capability	to	rise	above	 the	physical.	it	is	through	this	elevatory	aesthet/hic	imperative	to	seek	to	rise	above	the	raw	physical	 sensuous,	that	we	can	begin	to	recognise	connections	and	linkages	between	the	aesthetic	realm	and	 phenomena	which	we	may	more	easily	recognise	as	ethical.	 . 	adorno	and	welsch:	aesthetic	justice	 in	negative	dialectics	german	philosopher	and	sociologist	theodor	adorno	speaks	out	against	the	 uncritical	assumption	that	equality	and	justice	naturally	go	hand	in	hand,	positing	a	distinction	 between	legalistic	and	aesthetic	justice.	 “in	large	measure,	the	law	is	the	medium	in	which	evil	wins	out	on	account	of	its	 objectivity	and	acquires	the	appearance	of	good.	[…]	in	law	the	formal	principle	of	 equivalence	becomes	the	norm;	everyone	is	treated	alike.	an	equality	in	which	 differences	perish	secretly	serves	to	promote	inequality.”(adorno, ,p. )	 formal	equality	of	all	before	the	eyes	of	the	law	would	appear	to	be	a	rationally	desirable	condition.	 what	adorno	points	out	is	that	where	such	equality	is	manufactured	among	people	through	the	 crushing	of	genuinely	existing	differences,	this	cannot	properly	be	called	just.	reinforcing	this	point	 elsewhere,	he	writes	that	politics	ought	not	to	 “propound	the	abstract	equality	of	men	even	as	an	idea.	instead	they	should	point	 to	the	bad	equality	today,	[…]	and	conceive	the	better	state	as	one	in	which	people	 could	be	different	without	fear.	to	assure	the	black	that	he	is	exactly	like	the	white	 man,	while	he	obviously	is	not,	is	secretly	to	wrong	him	still	further.”(adorno,	 / ,p. )	 peter	buwert	 	 a	principle	of	radical	equality	such	as	that	demanded	by	modern	legal	systems	can	in	fact	become	 indiscriminate	blanket	homogenisation.	under	such	a	system	justice	belongs	to	the	imagined	 homogenised	average	figure	but	never	to	the	unique,	different,	heterogeneous	individual.	the	truth	 is,	that	while	it	is	absolutely	necessary	to	seek	common	grounds	and	patterns	in	society,	in	reality	 there	is	no	universal	homogeneity,	only	heterogeneity,	difference	and	uniquely	singular	moments,	 individuals,	experiences	and	artefacts.		 generalising	systems	of	legalistic	justice	seek,	out	of	good	intentions,	to	avoid	unfairly	excluding	 anyone	by	ensuring	that	all	are	treated	equally.	however,	in	a	fundamental	sense	by	doing	so	all	are	 treated	unjustly	as	none	are	recognised	fully	in	their	unique	singularity	and	difference.	it	is	only	 through	openness	to	the	recognition	of	differences	that	justice	can	properly	emerge.	this	 recognition	can	only	occur	aesthetically.	 counterintuitively,	precisely	because	it	operates	on	a	fundamental	principle	of	exclusion,	the	 aesthetic	is	inherently	open	to	what	welsch	calls	“justice	to	the	heterogeneous”(welsch, ,p. ).	 the	sensation	and	perception	of	something	always	occurs	with	reference	to	that	which	it	is	not,	the	 void	from	which	the	object	is	abstracted(saussure, ).	the	aesthetic	always	relies	on	the	 anaesthetic.	it	never	assumes	or	demands	equality	but	rather	relies	on	difference	and	exclusion	for	 its	foundations.	the	aesthetic	is	comfortable	with	diversity	and	plurality	and	conversely	cannot	stand	 the	injustice	of	equality,	at	least	in	the	sense	that	where	equality	reigns	aesthetic	recognition	of	 difference	has	already	been	minimised.		 this	dynamic	of	aesthetics	and	anaesthetics	goes	both	ways.	proper	aesthetic	sensitivity	requires	a	 balance	and	coexistence	of	the	aesthetic	and	the	anaesthetic.	each	requires	the	other.	an- aestheticisation	can	come	about	through	hyper	aestheticisation;	an	overloading	and	overwhelming	 of	aesthetic	sensitivity	leading	to	a	distinctly	homogeneous	numbness.	as	welsch	points	out:		 “a	basic	aesthetic	law	states	that	our	perception	needs	not	only	invigoration	and	 stimulation,	but	delays,	quiet	areas	and	interruptions	too.	[…]	where	everything	 becomes	beautiful,	nothing	is	beautiful	anymore;	continued	excitement	leads	to	 indifference;	aestheticization	breaks	into	anaestheticization.”(welsch, ,p. )	 proper	aesthetic	sensitivity,	is	by	its	nature	attentive	towards	that	which	is	different	and	excluded.	 while	legalistic	justice	is	interested	in	generalisable	blanket	principles	which	can	apply	to	a	range	of	 situations,	aesthetic	justice	embraces	the	plurality	of	the	singular	in	which	each	unique	situation	or	 individual	is	dealt	with	according	to	their	uniqueness	and	difference.	aesthetic	justice	is	more	 interested	in	the	exceptions	to	the	rule	than	the	greatest	good	for	the	greatest	number.	welsch	 writes:	 “in	that	reflected	aesthetic	consciousness	is	sensitized	for	fundamental	differences	 as	a	matter	of	principle	it	is	able	to	recognize	and	to	respect	the	peculiarity	and	 irreducibility	of	forms	of	life	more	easily	than	widespread	social	consciousness,	 which	denies	alterities	rather	than	acknowledging	them.	hence	an	aesthetically	 sensitized	awareness	can	also	become	effective	within	the	life-world	by	 illuminating,	clarifying	and	helping	out.	the	readiness	is	constitutively	built	in	to	be	 critically	attentive	of	borders	and	exclusions,	to	see	through	imperialisms	and	–	 being,	as	a	matter	of	principle	allergic	to	injustice	–	to	intervene	wherever	 excessive	domination	is	found	and	wherever	the	rights	of	the	oppressed	must	be	 espoused.”(welsch, ,p. )	 aesthetic	justice.	design	for	a	blind-spot	culture	 	 the	aesthetic's	predisposition	towards	justice	to	the	heterogeneous	allows	us	to	see	how	it	is	in	fact	 specifically	aesthetic	sensitivity	which	best	allows	us	to	engage	with	the	ethical.	aesthetic	justice	is	 the	necessary	foundation	for	authentically	ethical	justice.	 .	towards	a	blind-spot	culture	 . 	designing	anaesthesia	 	 figure	 .			“i	wanna	be	inside	eu”	poster.	 .	harry	 o’brien/eu-uk.info	 figure	 .			“don’t	be	a	sucker”	poster.	 .	 sagmeisterwalsh/pinswontsavetheworld.com	 what	are	the	implications	of	an	ethical	principle	of	aesthetic	justice	for	design?	aesthetic	experience	 can	divert	and	numb.	but	equally	it	can	draw	attention	and	return	sensation	to	those	areas	which	 have	become	our	blind-spots.	design’s	interventions	in	mediating	our	aesthetic	experience	can	act	in	 both	these	ways,	casting	both	shadows	and	light.	 from	propaganda	to	protest,	graphic	design	has	a	long	history	of	political	entanglement	which	 continues	to	the	present	day(mcquiston, ;pater, ;poynor, ).	the	major	political	events	 of	 	have	proved	to	be	no	exception,	as	designers	have	produced	posters,	infographics,	 merchandise	etc.	for	both	the	u.s.	presidential	election	and	the	uk’s	referendum	on	leafing	the	eu.	 however,	what	has	been	unusual	about	these	particular	events,	has	been	the	particularly	stark	way	 in	which	the	outcomes	of	both	votes	have	so	harshly	illustrated	fundamental	weaknesses	in	this	 contemporary	graphic	design	for	politics.	it	appears	that	a	majority	of	designers	(one	poll	of	uk	 creatives(kampfner, )	found	that	 %	of	those	asked	were	supporting	the	remain	campaign)	 found	themselves	on	the	losing	sides	of	these	debates.	for	significant	numbers	of	the	(generally	 liberal,	typically	left-leaning)	population	of	politically	engaged	designers	who	had	involved	 peter	buwert	 	 themselves	in	these	causes,	the	outcomes	of	both	votes	represented	genuinely	shocking	illustrations	 of	their	own	impotence.	 writing	for	the	eye	magazine	blog	marina	willer,	partner	at	pentagram	london,	described	her	 emotional	state	in	the	aftermath	of	the	brexit	vote:	“i	felt	ashamed	and	i	felt	guilty,	because	i	knew	 that	as	designers	we	could	have	done	so	much	more”(willer, ).	perhaps,	however	the	question	 designers	should	be	asking	is	not	“how	much	more”	we	could	be	doing,	but	“are	we	doing	the	right	 kind	of	things?”		 design’s	like	harry	o’brien’s	“i	wanna	be	inside	eu”	poster(figure	 )	and	sagmeister&walsh’s	pins	 won’t	save	the	world	project(figure	 )	are	examples	of	a	certain	typically	insular,	playful,	and	often	 heavily	ironic	strand	of	contemporary	“political”	graphic	design	which	communicates	clearly	and	 directly	to	only	the	select	few	who	get	the	joke,	have	the	visual	literacy	to	appreciate	the	symbolic	 nuances	of	the	design,	and	almost	certainly	are	already	support	the	same	position	as	the	designer.	 the	impact	of	such	aesthetic	interventions	is	only	the	deepening	of	collective	short- sightedness(becker, )	and	the	strengthening	of	filter	bubbles(pariser, )	as	we	speak	the	 language	of	those	like	us,	and	communicate	less	and	less	effectively	with	everyone	else.	willer,	in	 her	eye	article	stumbles	on	a	cutting	insight:	“almost	everyone	i	know	voted	to	stay	in	europe.	but,	 then	again,	almost	everyone	i	know	lives	in	london”(willer, )	by	failing	to	engage	with	those	 who	are	not	like	us,	operating	exclusively	within	our	own	circular	self-affirming	little	worlds,	are	we	 busily	designing	our	own	anaesthesia	instead	of	designing	for	sensitivity?	 by	creating	alluring	aesthetic	spectacles,	design	can	distract	and	divert	our	attention	away	from	 certain	ethical	issues,	leaving	us	with	blind-spots.	or	it	can	more	generally	overwhelm	and	numb	our	 aesthetic	sensitivity	through	the	non-specific	onslaught	of	hyper-aestheticisation	encountered	 through	the	sustained	sensory	overload	of	everyday	life.		 however,	design	can	also	return	sensation	by	specifically	re-directing	and	re-focussing	our	attention	 onto	neglected	issues.	it	can	create	spaces	for	reflection	in	which	attention	and	awareness	in	 relation	to	the	exclusions	and	blind	spots	we	have	created	for	ourselves	can	be	recovered.	 welsch	calls	this	shift	in	the	gear	of	aesthetic	production,	away	from	targeted	attention	grabbing	 and	towards	a	more	reflective	mode,	a	“blind-spot	culture”( ,p. ).	the	idea	of	a	blind-spot	 culture	represents	the	hope	that	design	is	not	fated	to	anaesthetise	but,	as	a	mediator	of	aesthetic	 experience,	holds	within	itself	the	potential	to	actively	promote	aesthetic	justice	by	systematically	 drawing	attention	to	that	which	we	do	not	notice.	to	be	clear,	a	blind-spot	culture	would	not	be	a	 culture	which	celebrated	or	treasured	its	blind-spots.	rather,	it	would	be	a	culture	which	seeks	to	 expose	and	illuminate	these	blind-spots	wherever	they	can	be	found	in	order	to	eliminate	them	by	 returning	them	to	consciousness.	elimination	by	illumination.	as	ethical	blind-spots	decrease	 through	the	nurturing	of	aesthetic	sensitivity	to	differences,	exclusions,	oppressions	and	 intolerances,	aesthetic	justice	increases.	 the	vital	question	for	design	in	response	to	this	abstract	theoretical	promise	is:	how	might	design	 nurture	a	blind-spot	culture	in	order	to	promote	aesthetic	justice	in	society?		 the	remainder	of	this	paper	discusses	three	examples	of	visual	communication	design	(in	the	 broadest	sense:	a	photograph,	a	billboard	and	an	art	installation)	connected	to	issues	of	racial	 injustice	in	america.	these	examples	demonstrate	how	aesthetic	interventions	can	be	used	to	draw	 attention	to	a	blind-spot	of	the	highest	socio-political	significance.		 aesthetic	justice.	design	for	a	blind-spot	culture	 	 . 	designing	sensitivity:	black	lives	matter	 	 figure	 .			protestor	ieshia	evans	is	detained	by	law	enforcement	near	the	headquarters	of	the	baton	rouge	police	 department	in	baton	rouge,	louisiana,	u.s.	july	 ,	 .	jonathan	bachman/reuters	 the	core	foundation	of	the	black	lives	matter	protest	movement,	is	the	failure	of	constitutionally	 enshrined	principles	of	legal	equality	to	bring	about	an	experienced	reality	of	authentic	justice	for	all	 within	american	society.	as	a	piece	of	photojournalism	jonathan	bachman’s	photograph	of	the	 arrest	of	ieshia	evans	at	a	black	lives	matter	protest	in	baton	rouge,	louisiana	(figure	 )	simply	 documents	an	event	which	happened	on	the	 th	of	july	 .	however,	the	operation	of	the	image	 as	an	aesthetically	encountered	‘designed’	visual	artefact	goes	much	further	than	this.	the	 composition	and	framing	of	this	image,	capturing	and	presenting	this	moment,	in	this	specific	way,	 becomes	more	than	a	presentation	of	reality.	as	clive	dilnot	has	written	of	such	images	“the	work	is	 not	objective.	it	is	not	a	‘slice	of	life’	but	an	active	mediation	vis-à-vis	the	‘real’	which	it	comments	 upon”(dilnot,	 ,p. ).	dilnot	maintains	that	such	an	image	is	not	merely	a	figural	representation,	 but	an	active	proposition.	the	photographer	may	not	have	consciously	aspired	to	anything	other	 than	realist	documentary.	the	image,	however,	takes	on	an	actively	critical	nature,	telling	a	story	 and	presenting	both	argument	and	critique	in	relation	to	the	represented	reality.		 the	‘proposition’	of	this	image	is	a	simultaneous	presentation	and	questioning	of	imbalance.	 injustice	is	an	abstract	concept,	experienced	by	the	oppressed,	but	not	‘seen’	by	those	who	do	not	 directly	feel	its	impact	on	their	lives.	in	its	visual	staging	of	the	conflict	between	the	faceless	army	of	 militarised	riot	police	and	ieshia	evans	in	her	summer	dress,	standing	alone,	supported	by	no	one,	 the	image	presents	a	tangible	sensory	encounter	with	a	symbolic	abstract	invisible	notion.		 this	image	does	not	merely	offer	information	about	a	social	phenomenon.	an	aesthetic	encounter	is	 an	experiential	encounter.	while	an	image	could	never	provide	the	full	experience	of	what	it	feels	 like	to	live	under	injustice,	the	aesthetic	encounter	with	an	image	can	provoke	the	sensitivity	to	 recognise	something	of	the	nature	of	the	lived	experience	of	others.	in	this	way,	the	encounter	with	 peter	buwert	 	 this	image	as	an	aesthetic	artefact	can	function	to	induce	sensitivity	to	an	issue	which	for	many	is	a	 blind-spot	in	their	understanding	of	social	normality.	 . 	stepping	on	raw	nerves:	for	freedoms	 	 figure	 .			“make	america	great	again”	billboard	in	pearl	mississippi	november	 .	hank	williams/for	freedoms		 for	freedoms	are	“the	first	artist-run	super	pac”(for	freedoms, )	formed	in	the	run	up	to	the	 	american	presidential	election.	aiming	to	use	art	to	encourage	new	forms	of	political	 discourse,	their	core	activities	surrounding	the	election	involved	an	exhibition	in	two	locations,	and	a	 series	of	billboard	advertisements	across	the	nation.	one	billboard	erected	in	pearl,	mississippi	 placed	the	words	of	donald	trump’s	election	campaign	slogan	“make	america	great	again”	over	a	 photograph	of	the	confrontation	between	state	troopers	and	civil	rights	activists	at	the	edmund	 pettus	bridge	during	the	selma	to	montgomery	marches	of	 	(figure	 ).	this	juxtaposition	of	text	 and	image	can	be	read	in	various	ways	as	either	a	question	or	a	statement:	make	america	great	 again	by	enforcing	racial	segregation.	make	america	great	again	by	standing	up	for	civil	rights.	when	 exactly	was	america	great	in	the	first	place?		 as	a	visual	communication,	the	image	is	open-ended.	it	is	not	clear	exactly	what	the	message	of	the	 billboard	is,	and	so	the	image	generates	a	space	of	constructive	ambiguity	which	invites	reflection	 and	response.	for	freedoms	co-founder	eric	gottesman	explained	the	group’s	intentions	in	an	 interview:	 “our	hope	was	to	spark	dialogue	about	our	collective	civic	responsibility	to	push	 for	freedom	and	justice	today,	as	those	before	us	pushed	for	freedom	and	justice	 in	their	time	through	peaceful	protest	and	political	participation.	[…]	we	hope	all	 who	see	our	billboards	think	about	them,	talk	about	them,	protest	them,	and	let	us	 and	each	other	know	their	feelings.	only	this	will	lead	to	a	greater	 america.”(vartanian, )	 aesthetic	justice.	design	for	a	blind-spot	culture	 	 the	billboard	received	a	largely	hostile	reception	on	local	and	social	media,	as	some	vocally	objected	 to	the	advert	based	on	their	interpretations	of	the	image	either	as	racist,	or	as	unfairly	implying	 racism	within	the	trump	campaign	and/or	supporters.	within	a	matter	of	days	the	billboard	was	 removed,	apparently	at	the	request	of	local	mayor	brad	rogers(houston, ).	 the	strong	emotional	responses	to	this	aesthetic	encounter	are	not	surprising.	the	two	elements	 which	make	up	the	image	are	highly	symbolically	charged.	one	group	reads	the	selma	image	literally	 as	a	representation	of	racism.	to	another	group,	it	is	a	key	historical	moment	which	stands	as	a	 symbol	of	the	achievements	of	a	long	and	hard	fought	journey	towards	racial	equality.	this	second	 group	fears	that	donald	trump’s	presidency	represents	a	step	backwards	on	this	journey	and	so	 interprets	his	slogan	with	scepticism	and	fear.	to	others,	however,	the	trump	slogan	is	a	banner	of	 hope	promising	the	righting	of	years	of	economic	injustice.	taken	as	a	whole	then,	in	bringing	these	 two	elements	into	relationship	with	each	other,	the	image	dances	on	the	raw	nerves	of	the	nation.	 increasing	sensitivity	is	not	always	a	pain-free	experience.	 the	billboard	was	not	the	first	of	for	freedoms	aesthetic	interventions	to	be	censored	due	to	 perceived	controversy.	between	 	and	 	a	black	banner	with	bold	white	lettering	stating	“a	 man	was	lynched	yesterday”	was	hung	outside	the	window	of	the	naacp’s	headquarters	in	new	 york	in	response	to	reported	incidences	of	crimes	across	the	country.	artist	dread	scott’s	 contribution	to	the	for	freedoms	exhibition	replicates	this	banner,	only	responding	to	the	recent	 protests	over	police	shootings	of	black	men	by	simply	adding	the	words	“by	police”(figure	 ).	the	 naacp	were	forced	to	stop	hanging	their	banner	in	 	under	threat	of	losing	their	lease.	in	 ,	 the	jack	shainman	gallery,	outside	of	which	scott’s	banner	was	flying	as	part	of	the	for	freedoms	 exhibition,	was	threatened	with	the	same	ultimatum	and	the	banner	was	moved	inside.	 	 figure	 .			“a	man	was	lynched	by	police	yesterday”	banner	by	dread	scott	hanging	outside	the	jack	shainman	gallery	in	 manhattan.	santiago	meija/the	new	york	times	 peter	buwert	 	 scott’s	banner,	like	the	billboard,	touches	exposed	nerves	throughout	contemporary	american	 society.	both	these	artefacts	confront	the	viewer	with	an	aesthetic	encounter	which	disrupts	the	 normality	of	expected	visual	experience.	they	do	not	fall	into	the	more-or-less	neat	and	predictable	 visual	narratives	of	social	life	offered	by	entertainment	and	news	media.	the	viewer	must	respond	 to	their	symbolic	complexity	and	lack	of	resolution.	in	a	sense,	these	aesthetic	artefacts	rudely	 demand	the	viewer	to	reflect	and	respond,	and	as	a	side	effect	of	this	bring	about	an	increase	in	 awareness	of	differing	viewpoints	and	experiences.	 visual	aesthetic	production	generally	maintains	acceptance	of	the	status	quo	by	re-producing	images	 which	legitimate	‘the	way	things	are’.	each	of	the	three	examples	discussed	above	demonstrate	the	 potential	of	aesthetic	production	to	increase	aesthetic	justice	by	drawing	attention	to	overlooked	 differences	embodied	in	systematically	neglected	areas	of	social	existence.	such	increases	in	 aesthetic	justice	can	be	produced	by	various	means:	by	aesthetically	staging	conflicts;	by	presenting	 ideas	in	unusual	and	unexpected	permutations;	by	disrupting	normalised	modes	of	representation;	 by	the	creation	of	unresolved	cognitive	spaces	which	require	resolving	through	active	critical	 engagement	with	the	issues	at	hand.	design	can	do	these	things.	however,	our	aesthetic	production	 can	also	suppress	aesthetic	justice,	creating	and	maintaining	blind-spots	by	failing	to	increase	 sensitivity	towards	difference.	the	success	of	a	project	of	design	for	a	blind-spot	culture	will	rely	 upon	finding	ways	to	consciously	ensure	wherever	possible	that	our	aesthetic	interventions	increase	 and	do	not	suppress	sensitivity	to	the	fully	heterogeneous	diversity	of	the	social	world	around	us.	 	 references	 adorno,	t.	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( ).	ontological	designing.	design	philosophy	papers,	 ( ),	 - .		 	 	 about	the	author:	 peter	buwert	is	a	graphic	design	educator	and	researcher	focused	on	the	ethical	 dimensions	and	implications	of	visual	communication	design,	and	more	broadly	on	the	 connections	between	design,	aesthetics,	ethics	and	politics	in	society.	 	 	 	 -text chapter what’s in a name? archives for black lives in philadelphia and the impact of names and name authorities in archival description alexis a. antracoli and katy rawdon introduction archivists, working within a profession that is . % white, have his- torically been focused on the description and naming of mostly white, male records creators and subjects. � klv�lv�odujho\�d�uhÁhfwlrq�ri�fro- lecting practices that privilege the history of those who wield power in society. describing and naming black people and other marginalized groups, whether as creators or subjects of records, has often been an afterthought and sometimes has been undertaken without the appro- priate respect and consideration for the communities who created or are described in the records. practically speaking, the sheer volume of ohjdf\�Àqglqj�dlgv�ghvfulelqj�sulpdu\�vrxufh�froohfwlrqv�zulwwhq�ryhu� the course of many decades, and held in nearly every paper-based and hohfwurqlf�irup�lpdjlqdeoh��ohdgv�wr�gliÀfxow�wr�dffhvv�ghvfulswlyh�odq- guage. for this reason, remediating outdated language or pulling names for further analysis or authority work are rarely undertaken. meanwhile, . a*census, society of american archivists, , https://www .archivists.org/ initiatives/acensus-archival-census-education-needs-survey-in-the-united-states. e t h i c a l q u e s t i o n s i n n a m e a u t h o r i t y c o n t r o l practices in archival collecting, processing, and description continue to generate oppressive language. shflÀfdoo\��wkh�delolw\�wr�shuirup�qdph�dxwkrulw\�frqwuro�zlwklq�dufkl- ydo�ghvfulswlrq�lv�kdpshuhg�e\�rqh�ru�pruh�idfwruv��lqvxiÀflhqw�qdph� information in archival collections; lack of established names in national authority databases for those found within a collection; lack of train- ing or ability among archivists to establish name authority records; and the privileging of certain creators and subjects by processing archivists because of archival practice or their own personal biases. the lack of name description and name authority work for black people represented in archival collections hampers research access, creates false silences by obscuring the names—and by extension, the existences—of black people, and ultimately leads to the ongoing erasure and dehumanization of black lives in our society’s cultural memory and conscience. archives for black lives in philadelphia (a blip) is a loose asso- fldwlrq�ri�derxw�Àiw\�dufklylvwv��sulpdulo\�zklwh�dqg�ihpdoh��iurp�wkh� philadelphia area, united by a concern for issues raised by the black lives matter movement and a desire to contribute to professional conversations and actions related to combating racism in archives. in particular, a blip approaches this work from the standpoint that it is zklwh�shrsoh·v�uhvsrqvlelolw\�wr�À[�wkh�sureohpv�wkdw�wkh\�kdyh�fuhdwhg�� and white archivists’ responsibility to create an inclusive, equitable, and non-oppressive approach to archival work. the group has recently undertaken a racism audit project to provide guidance to white archi- vists on remediating harmful legacy description and creating inclusive, respectful, and equitable description moving forward. the authors of this article are two white women, both from the united states, who are members of a blip. we attempt here to suggest an approach to name description that other archivists could use in making naming practices more equitable and inclusive. this chapter begins with a literature review that explores the rela- tionship between the archives and library professions’ centering of whiteness and their implementation of description practices, including vxemhfw�dffhvv��fodvvlÀfdwlrq��dqg�qdph�dxwkrulwlhv��,w�wkhq�lqwurgxfhv� w h a t ’ s i n a n a m e ? a r c h i v e s f o r b l a c k l i v e s i n p h i l a d e l p h i a the a blip group and its past and current projects, and describes the major challenges to implementing inclusive and ethical name descrip- tion and name authority work in archival description. it concludes with preliminary proposals for implementing an anti-racist approach to name authorities and name access, taken from a blip’s draft recommenda- tions for anti-racist archival description. literature review recent scholarship in both archival and library science has addressed the concept of whiteness and how it has shaped the profession in ways that are relevant to the issue of names in archival description. however, the bulk of the literature on library work focuses on issues of subject khdglqjv�dqg�fodvvlÀfdwlrq��zlwk�ihzhu�dgguhvvlqj�lvvxhv�ri�qdplqj�� while literature on archival work has all but ignored names and name authorities altogether. �$sulo�+dwkfrfn�ghÀqhv�zklwhqhvv�dv�´wkh�vrflr�fxowxudo�gliihuhqwldo� of power and privilege that results from categories of race and ethnic- ity; it also stands as a marker for the privilege and power that acts to reinforce itself through hegemonic cultural practice that excludes all who are different.” � fkroduv�dqg�surihvvlrqdov�lq�wkh�Àhog�kdyh�h[dplqhg�wkh� role of whiteness in shaping all aspects of the profession from how and why we acquire collections to the way we describe and provide access to them. their critiques focus on the overwhelmingly white demograph- ics of the archival and library professions, the lack of empathy for patrons who are people of color, the invisibility of people of color in our collections, and the traditional focus on ownership and acquisition by primarily white institutions over collaboration and partnership with communities of color. the most salient point of these critiques is that libraries and archives are far from being neutral spaces; instead they ��$sulo�+dwkfrfn��´:klwh�/leuduldqvkls�lq�%odfnidfh��'lyhuvlw\�,qlwldwlyhv�lq�/, �µ�in the library with the lead pipe, october , http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe. org/ /lis-diversity. e t h i c a l q u e s t i o n s i n n a m e a u t h o r i t y c o n t r o l usually support and center whiteness as the default identity, thereby marginalizing all other communities. the largest body of literature on the effect of whiteness on meta- gdwd�dqg�ghvfulswlyh�odqjxdjh�irfxvhv�rq�wkh�uroh�ri�fodvvlÀfdwlrq�dqg� subject analysis in library cataloging, and to a lesser extent in archival description. this exploration goes back at least to sanford berman’s early criticism of library of congress subject headings in . more uhfhqw�hiiruwv�wr�dpholrudwh�wkh�kdupixo�ohjdf\�ri�sudfwlfhv�lqÁxhqfhg� by colonialism and whiteness are the product of the years of ensuing research and practice to uncover structural racism in description and cataloging. subject headings, in particular, continue to be problematic, not only because changes in outdated language are slow to appear, ��&kulv�%rxuj��´'hedwlqj�\�rxu�kxpdqlw\��ru�$uh�/leudulhv� hxwudo"µ�feral librar- ian (blog), february , , https://chrisbourg.wordpress.com/ / / / ghedwlqj�\�rxu�kxpdqlw\�ru�duh�oleudulhv�qhxwudo��� lfkhooh� &dvzhoo�� ´ hdfklqj� wr� dismantle white supremacy in archives,” library quarterly , no. (july ): ���������grl������������������qlqd�gh�mhvxv��´/rfdwlqj�wkh�/leudu\�lq�,qvwlwxwlrqdo� oppression,” in the library with the lead pipe, september, , http://www.inthelibrary- withtheleadpipe.org/ /locating-the-library-in-institutional-oppression/; anthony :��'xqedu��´,qwurgxflqj�&ulwlfdo� dfh� khru\�wr�$ufklydo�'lvfrxuvh��*hwwlqj�wkh� conversation started,” archival science , no. (march ): – ; livia iacovino, ´ hwklqnlqj�$ufklydo��(wklfdo�dqg�/hjdo�)udphzrunv�iru�uhfrugv�ri�,qgljhqrxv�$xv- tralian communities: a participant relationship model of rights and responsibilities,” archival science , no. (december ): – , doi: . /s - - - ���$qqd�%��/rhzhqwkdo��´&rpsdulqj� hsuhvhqwdwlrqv�ri� dfh�lq�)lqglqj�$lgv� yhu� lphµ��pdvwhu·v�wkhvlv�� qlyhuvlw\�ri� ruwk�&durolqd�dw�&kdsho�+loo�������� dÀ\d� prmd� reoh��´*rrjoh� hdufk��+\shu�ylvlelolw\�dv�d� hdqv�ri� hqghulqj�%odfn�:rphq�dqg� *luov�,qylvleoh�µ�invisible culture ( ), http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/google-search- hyper-visibility-as-a-means-of-rendering-black-women-and-girls-invisible/; nicole djrzvn\� dqg� ldpk� :doodfh�� ´%odfn� /lyhv� dwwhu�� khgglqj� /leudu\� hxwudolw\� rhetoric for social justice,” college & research libraries news , no. ( ): – , http://crln.acrl.org/index.php/crlnews/article/view/ / ; mario h. ramirez, ´%hlqj�$vvxphg� rw�wr�%h��$�&ulwltxh�ri�:klwhqhvv�dv�dq�$ufklydo�,pshudwlyh�µ� american archivist , no. (fall/winter ): – . doi: . / - ���������������&duulh�:dgh��́ :klwhqhvv�dqg�wkh� \wk�ri� hxwudolw\�µ�library barbarian �eorj���)heuxdu\�����������.hoohh�(��:duuhq��´:h� hhg� khvh�%rglhv��%xw� rw� khlu� knowledge: black women in the archival science professions and their connection to the archives of enslaved black women in the french antilles,” library trends , no. ( ): – , doi: . /lib. . . . sanford berman, prejudices and antipathies: a tract on the lc subject heads concerning people (metuchen, n.j.: scarecrow press, ). w h a t ’ s i n a n a m e ? a r c h i v e s f o r b l a c k l i v e s i n p h i l a d e l p h i a but because the headings themselves appear to many as universal and unbiased. kh�olwhudwxuh�rq�eldv�lq�vxemhfw�fodvvlÀfdwlrq�jhqhudoo\�irfxvhv�rq� the experiences of a single group or demographic, exploring the ways lq�zklfk�ghvfulswlyh�sudfwlfhv�kdyh�́ rwkhuhgµ�shrsoh�ri�froru�dqg�rwkhu� marginalized groups, and pushing for librarians and archivists to be explicit in their framing to dispel the myth of neutrality in the profes- sion, make room for resources from outside the dominant culture, and create more inclusive description. ��+rsh�$�� ovrq��´ kh� rzhu�wr� dph�� hsuhvhqwdwlrq�lq�/leudu\�&dwdorjv�µ signs , no. (spring ): – . �� holvvd�$gohu��´&dvh�iru� d[rqrplf� hsdudwlrqv�µ�knowledge organization , no. �������������²����� holvvd�$gohu��´&odvvlÀfdwlrq�$orqj�wkh�&roru�/lqh��([fdydwlqj� racism in the stacks,” journal of critical library and information studies , no. ( ): �²����grl�����������mfolv�y�l������(oyld�$uur\r� dptuh]��´,qylvleoh�'hidxowv�dqg� hu- fhlyhg�/lplwdwlrqv�� urfhvvlqj�wkh�-xdq�*hopdq�)lohv�µ on archivy, october , , , https://medium.com/on-archivy/invisible-defaults-and-perceived-limitations- surfhvvlqj�wkh�mxdq�jhopdq�Àohv�����igg�������'rurwk\�%huu\��́ /rvw�lq�$jjuhjdwlrq�� towards inclusive metadata and descriptive practices in digital collections” (work- ing session at dpla fest, chicago, ill., april , ); marisa duarte and miranda %hodugh�/hzlv��´,pdjlqlqj��&uhdwlqj� sdfhv�iru�,qgljhqrxv� qwrorjlhv�µ�cataloging and &odvvlÀfdwlrq� xduwhuo\ , no. - ( ): – , doi: . / . . ; sharon farnel, sheila laroque, ian bigelow, denise koufogiannakis, anne carr-wig- jlq��'heelh�)hlvvw��dqg�.d\od�/du� rq��́ 'hfrorql]lqj�'hvfulswlrq��&kdqjlqj� hwdgdwd� in response to the truth and reconciliation commission” (presentation at netspeed library technologies conference, edmonton, alberta, canada, october , ), doi: . /r ms kf ; sharon farnel, sheila laroque, ian bigelow, denise kou- irjldqqdnlv�� $qqh� &duu�:ljjlq�� 'heelh� )hlvvw�� dqg� .d\od� /du� rq�� ´ qvhwwolqj� our practices: decolonizing description at the university of alberta libraries” (poster at diversity by design symposium in toronto, ontario, canada, sep- whpehu� ���� ������� grl�� �������� ������� �� ,dfrylqr�� ´ hwklqnlqj� $ufklydo�� ethical and legal frameworks for records of indigenous australian communi- wlhvµ�� dqgud�/lwwohwuhh�dqg�&khu\o�$�� hwr\hu��´.qrzohgjh� ujdql]dwlrq�iurp�dq� indigenous perspective: the mashantucket pequot thesaurus of american indian terminology project,” &dwdorjlqj� 	� &odvvlÀfdwlrq� xduwhuo\ ( ): – ; .dud� /rqj�� dqwl� krpsvrq�� dudk� rwylq�� dqg� rqlfd� lyhur�� ´ kh� ´:lfnhg� problem” of neutral description: toward a documentation approach to meta- data standards,”�&dwdorjlqj�	�&odvvlÀfdwlrq� xduwhuo\ , no. ( ): – , doi: ������������������������������� [�$�� dwlhq]r��´ r�+hoo�:lwk�*rrg�,qwhqwlrqv�� linked data, community and the power to name,” mark a. matienzo (website), february , , http://matienzo.org/ /to-hell-with-good-intentions/; k. -�� dzvrq�� $́ffhvvlqj� udqvjhqghu����'hvlulqj� xhhu�hu"��$ufklydo�/rjlfv�µ�archi- varia (fall ): – , https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/ ylhz�������������� .�� �� rehuwr�� ´,qÁh[leoh� %rglhv�� hwdgdwd� iru� udqvjhqghu� e t h i c a l q u e s t i o n s i n n a m e a u t h o r i t y c o n t r o l the past decade has seen increasingly active attempts to approach descriptive metadata in a non-oppressive fashion and to remediate legacy description. anthony dunbar was one of the earliest professionals to introduce critical race theory to the literature and to advocate for institutional policies that center trust and transparency and remedy past abuses. many efforts to introduce critical race theory to library practice since then have followed a collaborative model. jon newman describes d�surmhfw�lq�wkh� qlwhg�.lqjgrp�irfxvhg�rq�wkh�srvvlelolw\�wkdw�´wkh� single, neutral, authoritative and unattributed voice of the archive cata- orjxh�pljkw�eh�h[sdqghg��dpsolÀhg�dqg�lqwhushqhwudwhg�zlwk�d�udqjh�ri� other, attributed voices.” the collaborative and participatory approach has found success as a way to produce more inclusive description of indigenous communities. another approach is to create alternative taxonomies for classifying materials created by and about people of color, while the use of an intersectional approach has proved successful at the university of texas at austin. identities,” journal of information ethics , no. ( ): – ; catelynne sahadath, ´&odvvli\lqj� wkh� dujlqv�� vlqj� $owhuqdwlyh� &odvvlÀfdwlrq� fkhphv� wr� (psrzhu� diverse and marginalized users,” feliciter , no. ( ): . ��$qwkrq\�'xqedu��´,qwurgxflqj�&ulwlfdo� dfh� khru\�wr�$ufklydo�'lvfrxuvh��*hw- ting the conversation started,” archival science , no. ( ): – . ��-rq� hzpdq��´ hylvlwlqj�$ufklyh�&roohfwlrqv��'hyhorslqj� rghov�iru� duwlflsd- tory cataloguing,” journal of the society of archivists , no. ( ): . ��,dfrylqr��´ hwklqnlqj�$ufklydo��(wklfdo�dqg�/hjdo�)udphzrunv�iru� hfrugv�ri� ,qgljhqrxv�$xvwudoldq�&rppxqlwlhv�µ�/lwwohwuhh�dqg� hwr\hu��´.qrzohgjh� ujdql]d- wlrq�iurp�dq�,qgljhqrxv� huvshfwlyh�µ�'xduwh�dqg�%hodugh�/hzlv��́ ,pdjlqlqj��&uhdwlqj� sdfhv�iru�,qgljhqrxv� qwrorjlhv��´'hfrorql]lqj�'hvfulswlrqv��)lqglqj�� dplqj�dqg� changing the relationship between indigenous people, libraries and archives,” oclc zhelqdu�� ryhpehu����������kwwsv���zzz�\rxwxeh�frp�zdwfk"y z�+*g:[�:<��� )duqho��/durtxh��%ljhorz��.rxirjldqqdnlv��&duu�:ljjlq��)hlvvw��dqg�/du� rq��´'hfro- onizing description”; farnel, laroque, bigelow, koufogiannakis, carr-wiggin, feisst, dqg�/du� rq��´ qvhwwolqj� xu� udfwlfhv�µ�� dhjdq� zdqvrq�� $́gdswlqj�wkh�%uldq�'hhu� &odvvlÀfdwlrq� \vwhp�iru�$dqlvfkddxndplnz�&uhh�&xowxudo� ,qvwlwxwh�µ� cataloging & &odvvlÀfdwlrq� xduwhuo\ , no. – : indigenous knowledge organization ( ): – , doi: . / . . �� roo\� ·+djdq�+dug\��́ kh� udfwlfh�ri�(yhu\gd\�&dwdorjlqj��¶%odfnv�dv�$xwkruv·� and the early american bibliographic record,” past is present (american antiquar- ian society blog), june , , http://pastispresent.org/ /good-sources/ the-practice-of-everyday-cataloging-black-bibliography-and-the-early-american-bibli- w h a t ’ s i n a n a m e ? a r c h i v e s f o r b l a c k l i v e s i n p h i l a d e l p h i a :kloh�wkh�lvvxhv�ri�fodvvlÀfdwlrq�v\vwhpv�dqg�vxemhfw�dqdo\vlv�grpl- nate most of the literature on how whiteness has shaped descriptive metadata in archives and libraries, the problem of naming in particular has also been explored. this body of literature, while smaller and more recent, has prompted lis professionals to begin examining how name dxwkrulwlhv�fdq�dovr�fhqwhu�zklwhqhvv�dqg�´rwkhul]hµ�ydulrxv�pdujlqdo- ized communities. heather lea moulaison describes a study examining a group of authority records to see which records contain the expanded attributes allowed and/or required under resource description & access (rda) rules—additional information such as gender, occupation, asso- ciated place, and language. she found that in fact few records made use of the rda attributes, and those that did include expanded identity ghvfulswlrq�whqghg�wr�eh�uhfrugv�iru�́ (qjolvk�vshdnhuv��pdohv��dqg�wkrvh� associated with universities in some way.” frank exner, little bear examines north american indian names, which often follow multiple naming conventions and often do not follow the western naming format conventions most used in the library of congress name authority file (lcnaf); he notes that ´ ruwk�$phulfdq�,qgldq�shuvrqdo�qdphv� require special attention in authority control and cataloging because they do not necessarily follow rules developed for european names.” as in general librarianship, archival work has traditionally viewed itself as ideally neutral and unbiased. recent professional discussion has, however, thoroughly questioned the neutrality of archives and rjudsklf�uhfrug���$/& � hwdgdwd�,qwhuhvw�*urxs��´'lyhuvh�dqg�,qfoxvlyh� hwdgdwd�� developing cultural competencies in descriptive practices” (presentation at the american library association annual conference, orlando, florida, june ), .ulvwhq�+rjdq��´·%uhdnlqj� hfuhwv·�lq�wkh�&dwdorj�� ursrvlqj�wkh�%odfn� xhhu� wxglhv� collection at the university of texas at austin,” progressive librarian (fall ): ��²����kwws���zzz�surjuhvvlyholeuduldqvjxlog�ruj� /� /��b���sgi�$gohu��´&dvh�iru� d[rqrplf� hsdudwlrqv�µ������+rjdq��´·%uhdnlqj� hfuhwv·�lq�wkh�&dwdorj�µ ��+hdwkhu�/hd� rxodlvrq�� $́xwkruv�dqg�$xwkrulwlhv�lq� rvw� '$�/leudu\� \vwhpv�� a case study,” (paper presented at ifla wlic , lyon, france, august – , ), http://codabox.org/ / / -moulaison-en.pdf. ��)udqn�([qhu��/lwwoh�%hdu��´ ruwk�$phulfdq�,qgldq� huvrqdo� dphv�lq� dwlrqdo� bibliographies,” in radical cataloging: essays at the front, ed. k. r. roberto (jefferson, n.c.: mcfarland, april ), - . e t h i c a l q u e s t i o n s i n n a m e a u t h o r i t y c o n t r o l archivists. the works of terry cook, wendy duff and verne harris, bergis jules, stacie williams, sam winn, and jennifer douglas, among many others, have explored the ways in which records creation, acqui- sition, appraisal, and description are anything but neutral. tradition is gliÀfxow�wr�ryhufrph��krzhyhu��dqg�wkh�lghdov�ri�wkh�xqfkdqjhg�dufklydo� froohfwlrq�ohiw�lq�lwv�ruljlqdo�rughu��remhfwlyho\�uhÁhfwlqj�wkh�uhfrugnhhslqj� practices of the creator, as well as the myth of the objective archivist whose work simply exposes records without impacting them, pervade much of archival work. sam winn asserts the impossibility of neutrality in archival work, as archivists are unable—as all people are—to escape the societal biases in which they are steeped. the danger, she says, is when we leave these biases unexamined, and unquestioningly accept the hegemonic default. sharon larade and johanne pelletier raised the issue of the conscious use of language in archival description, exploring archivists’ reluctance to change their practices, including linguistic practices—again, leaning heavily on the specter of neutrality—while recognizing the importance of non-exclusionary language. bergis jules explicitly links the whiteness of archival work to physi- fdo�ylrohqfh�djdlqvw�%odfn�shrsoh��´ kh�zrun�zh�gr�dv�dufklylvwv��dv� librarians, as digital preservationists, have [sic] real consequences for marginalized people because who is remembered and how they’re remembered dictates who gets violence perpetrated against them. black bodies are either erased from the historical record or distorted in the historical record before we’re shot in the street like rekia boyd and trayvon martin. that’s partly what makes it ok to a large segment of the american public. that erasure from records, cultural spaces, and pdvv�phgld�duh�sduwo\�zkdw�doorz�shrsoh�wr�dffhsw�devxug�mxvwlÀfdwlrqv� �� dp�:lqq��´ kh�+xeulv�ri� hxwudolw\�lq�$ufklyhv�µ�on archivy, april , , https://medium.com/on-archivy/the-hubris-of-neutrality-in-archives- df b fe f. �� kdurq� ��/dudgh�dqg�-rkdqqh� �� hoohwlhu��´ hgldwlqj�lq�d� hxwudo�(qylurq- phqw��*hqghu�,qfoxvlyh�ru� hxwudo�/dqjxdjh� lq�$ufklydo�'hvfulswlrqv�µ archivaria (spring ): – , https://archivaria.ca/index.php/archivaria/article/view / / . w h a t ’ s i n a n a m e ? a r c h i v e s f o r b l a c k l i v e s i n p h i l a d e l p h i a for killing us.” erasing or distorting the histories of black people from the archival record, whether through collecting practices or descrip- tive practices, reinforces the dehumanization that leads to widespread anti-black violence such as police killings, mass incarceration, and gen- wulÀfdwlrq³hdfk�ri�zklfk��lq�wxuq��kdyh�ehhq�wkh�vxemhfw�ri�dqdo\vlv� of their effects on black people and the preservation of their histories. (plo\�'udelqvnl��zkloh�zulwlqj�iurp�d�oleuduldq·v�shuvshfwlyh��lghqwlÀhv� an issue closely related to archival practice. she notes the problematic qdwxuh�ri�klhudufklfdo�fodvvlÀfdwlrq��vwdwlqj�wkdw�klhudufklhv�sulylohjh�d� single aspect of a subject, while making that privilege appear logical and neutral. the same critique applies to archival description, as it is very intentionally hierarchical in nature, privileging the exposure of creators and collectors—those at the top of the hierarchical provenancial heap— over creators and subjects who fall for various reasons further down on the hierarchy. this is directly related to a core principle of archival work, wkdw�ri�suryhqdqfh��ghvfulehg�lq�wkh� $$�*orvvdu\�dv�´d�ixqgdphqwdo� principle of archives, referring to the individual, family, or organiza- tion that created or received the items in a collection. the principle of provenance or the respect des fonds dictates that records of different ��%hujlv�-xohv��́ &rqiurqwlqj� xu�)dloxuh�ri�&duh�$urxqg�wkh�/hjdflhv�ri� dujlqdo- ized people in the archives,” on archivy, november , , https://medium.com/ on-archivy/confronting-our-failure-of-care-around-the-legacies-of-marginalized-peo- ple-in-the-archives-dc . ��:dolgdk� ,pdulvkd�� ´.h\qrwh�$gguhvv�µ�/lehudwhg�$ufklyh�)ruxp�� rflhw\�ri� american archivists annual meeting, portland, or, august , , http://www. walidah.com/blog/ / / /transcript-of-walidahs-liberated-archives-keynote; huhvvd� dlirug��´�$ufklyhviru%odfn/lyhv��$ufklylvwv� hvsrqg�wr�%odfn�/lyhv� dwwhuµ� panel, liberated archive forum, society of american archivists annual meeting, ruwodqg�� ��$xjxvw����������� rflhw\�ri�$phulfdq�$ufklylvwv��´,vvxh�%ulhi�� rolfh� mobile camera footage as a public record, november , https://www .archi- vists.org/statements/issue-brief-police-mobile-camera-footage-as-a-public-record; -duuhww�'udnh�dqg� wdflh�:looldpv��´ rzhu�wr�wkh� hrsoh��'rfxphqwlqj� rolfh� lr- lence in cleveland,” journal of critical library and information studies , no. ( ): ������-duuhww� ��'udnh��´,qvxujhqw�&lwl]hqv�� kh� dqxidfwxuh�ri� rolfh� hfrugv�lq� post-katrina new orleans and its implications for human rights,” archival science , no. - (october ): - . ��(plo\�'udelqvnl��´ hdfklqj�wkh� dglfdo�&dwdorj�µ�lq�radical cataloging: essays at the front, ed. k. r. roberto (jefferson, n.c.: mcfarland, april ), – , http:// www.emilydrabinski.com/wp-content/uploads/ / /drabinski_radcat.pdf. e t h i c a l q u e s t i o n s i n n a m e a u t h o r i t y c o n t r o l origins (provenance) be kept separate to preserve their context.” the provenance and context of records supplies much of their meaning, however, the concept of records-source-as-creator—who gets to be a collection creator/collector/main entry—determines whose names are deemed most important. jarrett m. drake questions the principle of provenance as a relic of colonialism and as a principle, asserting that wkh�´sdwuldufkdo�ruljlqv�ri�suryhqdqfhµ�hpehg�wkhpvhoyhv�lqhylwdeo\� in archival description through the emphasis on the collection creator. because of the legacy of colonialism inherent in the issues of who is able to generate, control, and transfer archival collections to archival reposi- wrulhv��wkh�fuhdwruv�duh�pruh�olnho\�wr�eh�́ zhdowk\��zklwh��flvjhqghuhg�dqg� heterosexual men.” the resulting provenance-based description serves ´wr�ydorul]h�dqg�yhqhudwh�zklwh�zhvwhuq�pdvfxolqlw\�µ the archives community is beginning to think beyond the traditional concept of provenance. the international council on archives’ new records in contexts conceptual model (ric-cm), may eventually prove useful in bridging the divide between traditional provenance-based meth- ods of understanding context and new, more expansive ideas. ric-cm is designed to take advantage of the semantic web and allow archivists to move from multilevel to multidimensional description. the model notes ´:kloh�doprvw�doo�dufklylvwv�dffhsw�wkh�wkhruhwlfdo�ydolglw\�ri� uryhqdqfh�� many have become increasingly self-conscious and self-critical about the role that archivists and the application of archival principles play in what is remembered and how it is remembered.” ric-cm provides a way to honor both the traditional application of provenance, while also using new communication technologies to accommodate new understandings ��´ uryhqdqfh�µ� $$�*orvvdu\��kwwsv���zzz��dufklylvwv�ruj�jorvvdu\�whupv�s� provenance. �� -duuhww� �� 'udnh�� ´ dg hfk� hhwv� dg$ufk�� rzdugv� d� hz� ulqflsoh� iru� archives and archival description,” on archivy, april , , https://medium.com/ on-archivy/radtech-meets-radarch-towards-a-new-principle-for-archives-and-archi- ydo�ghvfulswlrq����i���h�������z�d��hjl� . international council on archives, records in contexts, september , p. . w h a t ’ s i n a n a m e ? a r c h i v e s f o r b l a c k l i v e s i n p h i l a d e l p h i a of archival context that represent the many contexts in which records are created and exist. little has been written about names in archival description, and even less on name authorities and archives. describing archives: a content stan- dard (dacs), the primary descriptive standard used by archivists in the united states, contains a section on archival authority records. here the lpsruwdqfh�ri�qdphv�wr�dufklydo�ghvfulswlrq�lv�fohduo\�vwdwhg��́ kh�vwuxf- ture and content of archival materials cannot be completely understood without some knowledge of the context in which they were created.” without knowing who created or otherwise contributed to a collection of archival materials, the records lose meaning. $gglwlrqdoo\��d�vlpsoh�dxwkrul]hg�irup�ri�qdph�lv�qrw�vxiÀflhqw�iru� archival description. dacs requires not only a name, but biographical or historical information to provide context to the persons, individu- als, or families themselves. dacs also emphasizes the usefulness of authority records systems as co-equal with collection descriptions. the standard notes that the model provided by the international council rq�$ufklyhv·�*hqhudo�,qwhuqdwlrqdo� wdqgdug�iru�$ufklydo�'hvfulswlrq� �, $'�*���lv�wkh�fuhdwlrq�ri�vwdqgdugl]hg�dxwkrulw\�uhfrugv�pdlqwdlqhg� separately and embedded within archival description, rather than simply incorporating names as text strings into description. dacs declares that elements common to bibliographic authority records and archival authority records include a standardized access point, related or variant names, and information about the establishment and maintenance of the record. but dacs states that archival authority records must also include additional context and relationship information. of course, with the implementation of rda for the lcnaf and the increasing inclusion of name authorities from archival materials within the lcnaf, archival and bibliographic authorities are perhaps not so far apart. qh�vshflÀf�duhd�ri�qdplqj�lq�dufklydo�ghvfulswlrq�wkdw�kdv�uhfhlyhg� attention is the issue of documenting names of enslaved people. in , . describing archives: a content standard (dacs), nd ed. (chicago: society of american archivists, ), . e t h i c a l q u e s t i o n s i n n a m e a u t h o r i t y c o n t r o l &duroh� huulww�lqwhuurjdwhg�wkh�gdpdjlqj�lghd�wkdw�´wkh�%odfn�sdvw�lv� unknowable.” in her discussion of researching the history of enslaved people, she describes the types of records—census records, property and estate records, tax and court records—through which the lives of enslaved persons can be studied. she notes the issue of surnames of enslaved people, in that they often changed over time, and frequently (although not always) were the name of a current or former slave owner. 'dylg�(�� dwhuvrq�sursrvhv�d�v\vwhp�wr�lqfoxgh�vodyhv·�qdphv�lq�Àqg- lqj�dlgv�lq�wkh�irupdw��´>vodyhkroghu�odvw�qdph��vodyhkroghu�Àuvw�qdph@� vodyh·v�Àuvw�qdph�odvw�qdphµ��l�h��´>:dowhu��$oohq� �@�*lqq\� wdpshu�µ� regardless of whether the enslaved person used the slaveholder’s name lq�olih��$q�h[fhswlrq�zrxog�eh�doorzhg�iru�´zhoo�nqrzqµ�vodyhv�zkrvh� full names are well-documented. this proposed solution dramatically dqg�xqiruwxqdwho\�uhÁhfwv�wkh�whqvlrq�ehwzhhq�wkh�dufklylvw·v�ghvluh�wr� provide access to under-documented people within historical records zlwk�wkh�ylrohqfh�ri�lqÁlfwlqj�wkh�zklwh�vodyhkroghu·v�lghqwlw\�rqwr�dq� hqvodyhg�shuvrq��,w�lv�wklv�w\sh�ri �́ vroxwlrqµ�wkh�dxwkruv�ri�wklv�fkdswhu� wish to avoid, instead seeking respectful and non-racist alternatives. archives for black lives in philadelphia (a blip) archives for black lives in philadelphia (a blip) was organized in august . the group drew inspiration from the social justice work ri�pdq\�lqglylgxdov�lq�wkh�Àhog��lqfoxglqj�exw�qrw�olplwhg�wr� lfkhooh� caswell, stacie williams, bergis jules, april hathcock, mario ramirez, samantha winn, and eira tansey, but the main call to action came from jarrett drake’s talk at the june ala annual conference. he called on archivists to confront their own complicity in upholding structural inequalities and to build trust with communities being documented based �� &duroh� huulww�� ´ odyh� )dplo\� hfrugv�� $q� $exqgdqfh� ri� dwhuldo�µ� geor- gia archive , no. (spring ): – , https://digitalcommons.kennesaw.edu/ georgia_archive/vol /iss / . ��'dylg�(�� dwhuvrq��́ $� huvshfwlyh�rq�,qgh[lqj� odyhv·� dphv�µ�american archivist (spring/summer ): – , doi: . /aarc. . .th g t h . w h a t ’ s i n a n a m e ? a r c h i v e s f o r b l a c k l i v e s i n p h i l a d e l p h i a on principles of allyship. a blip’s name was derived from one of the kdvkwdjv�'udnh�kdg�fuhdwhg�hduolhu�lq�wkh�\hdu���$ufklyhv)ru%odfn/lyhv� more than a dozen archivists attended the initial a blip meeting. as ri�)heuxdu\�������wkhuh�duh�Àiw\�Àyh�phpehuv�� hpehuv�duh�sulpdulo\� zklwh�zrphq��zklfk�uhÁhfwv�wkh�ghprjudsklfv�ri�wkh�dufklydo�surihv- sion, as well as a blip’s belief that white archivists should actively do the work to create a more inclusive profession. most members are employed at academic institutions rather than smaller cultural institutions or community archives. the group began work by collaboratively creat- lqj�d�gudiw�ri�dq�riÀfldo�srvlwlrq�vwdwhphqw��yld�hglwlqj�dqg�frpphqwv� zlwklq�d�*rrjoh�'rf�dqg�ihhgedfn�surylghg�yld�hpdlo�� q�-dqxdu\����������wkh�Àqdol]hg�vwdwhphqw�zdv�uhohdvhg�rq�*lw+xe� a blip contacted formal and informal archivist groups to announce this initial document. the concerned archivists alliance promoted the statement via social media, and in may, a blip presented to philadelphia area consortium of special collections libraries (pacscl). a blip requested that one local philadelphia area organization, the delaware dooh\�$ufklylvwv�*urxs��' $*���irupdoo\�hqgruvh�wkh�vwdwhphqw��exw� they declined to do so. they did link to the statement from their web- vlwh��zlwk�d�suhidfh�h[sodlqlqj�� $́�%/l �lv�qrw�diÀoldwhg�zlwk�' $*�� although we do encourage our members to read their statement and frqvlghu�wkh�lvvxhv�lw�udlvhv�µ�/dwhu��erwk�' $*�dqg� $& &/�djuhhg�wr� fund refreshments for a blip processing events. although the overall reaction to the statement and to a blip in general was positive, some �� -duuhww� ��'udnh�� ´([sdqglqj��$ufklyhv)ru%odfn/lyhv� wr� udglwlrqdo�$ufkl- val repositories,” on archivy, june , , https://medium.com/on-archivy/ expanding-archivesforblacklives-to-traditional-archival-repositories-b e daf . . rather than being a structured professional organization, a blip is intention- doo\�d�orrvh�diÀoldwlrq�ri�lqglylgxdov�zkr�gr�prvw�ri�wkhlu�zrun�uhprwho\��'hshqglqj� on inclination and availability, an archivist’s involvement at any given time may wax or wane. the group’s email list serves as a way to discuss issues of interest, including the race for philadelphia district attorney; conference and interest group announce- ments; discussions and formal talks about police body cameras, algorithm bias, and suhglfwlyh�srolflqj��dqg�d�phpehu·v�dqqrxqfhphqw�ri�khu�dgglwlrq�ri�wkh�´%odfn�olyhv� matter movement” heading to the subject authority cooperative program (saco). �� dssho����$�%/l �uhsrvlwru\��*lw+xe��kwwsv���jlwkxe�frp�udssho����$�%/l � e t h i c a l q u e s t i o n s i n n a m e a u t h o r i t y c o n t r o l archivists were unsympathetic, disparaging the group’s aims or objecting to archivists involving themselves in politics as archivists. an early draft of the statement allowed for anonymous commenting, and reactions included rejection of white archivists’ role in enforcing white supremacy �dqg�qhjdwlyh�frpphqwv�rq�wkh�xvh�ri�wkh�whup�´zklwh�vxsuhpdf\µ� in general), expressions of negativity toward the black lives matter movement, and concern that the statement weakened archivists’ role dv�´remhfwlyhµ�dfwruv�rq�dufklydo�froohfwlrqv� a session about a blip was part of the programming for the liber- ated archives forum at the july society of american archivists frqihuhqfh�lq� ruwodqg�� kh�´�$ufklyhv)ru%odfn/lyhv��$ufklylvwv� respond to black lives matter” session provided an opportunity to discuss not just the statement but also the process by which it was cre- ated. in keeping with the theme of the forum, terry baxter facilitated the pairing of three a blip archivists with a community member: ter- hvvd� dlirug��d�surplqhqw�yrlfh�iru��%odfn/lyhv dwwhu�dqg�irxqghu�ri� don’t shoot portland, who spoke after the a blip co-presenters. later in the day, she delivered a powerful closing statement on the importance of community memory, access, and control of archives. in august , a blip began discussing future goals. a poll of members indicated interest in two projects: partnering with commu- nity archives and conducting racism audits in repository catalogs and Àqglqj�dlgv��$�%/l �fuhdwhg�wzr�zrunlqj�jurxsv�wr�irfxv�rq�wkhvh� duhdv�� kh�frppxqlw\�dufklyhv�jurxs·v�Àuvw�surmhfw�lqyroyhg�pdwhuldo� collected by rasheeda phillips, an attorney, activist, and co-founder of wkh�pxowlglvflsolqdu\�%odfn� xdqwxp�)xwxulvp�&roohfwlyh��+hu�froohfwhg� material includes records of the brewerytown sharswood community civic association (bscca), a one-month community futures lab residency, and a zine library. phillips planned to donate the material to . an audio recording of the presentation, closing remarks, and the majority of con- ference sessions are available from saa. https://www.pathlms.com/saa/events/ . ��´&rppxqlw\�)xwxulvpv�� lph�	� hpru\�lq� ruwk� kloo\³&rppxqlw\�)xwxuhv� lab,” black quantum futurism (website), https://www.blackquantumfuturism.com/ community-futurisms. w h a t ’ s i n a n a m e ? a r c h i v e s f o r b l a c k l i v e s i n p h i l a d e l p h i a the bscca in the hopes that it would serve as the kernel for an acces- sible community archives. in mid-december, four a blip members visited the home of rasheedah phillips to survey the collection. they established that the collection could be collectively processed in a short dprxqw�ri�wlph��$�́ urfhvvlqj�)odvk� reµ�zdv�vfkhgxohg�iru� dufk����� ������dw�wkh�:looldp�:d\�/*% �&rppxqlw\�&hqwhu��zkhuh�yroxqwhhuv� ehjdq�surfhvvlqj�dqg�wkh�fuhdwlrq�ri�d�Àqglqj�dlg��,q�wkh�idoo�ri������� the racism audit group began work, which is described further below. names, name authorities, and names of black people in archival description working with names is a challenging aspect of archival description. the sheer number of names appearing in any given collection means that not every name can be included in higher-level description such as a biographical note, nor can they be made more prominent as a con- trolled access heading. even knowing the names of those documented lq�dufklydo�froohfwlrqv�lv�iuhtxhqwo\�gliÀfxow��dv�qdph�irupv�duh�riwhq� partial, or undifferentiated, or must be transcribed as written. in addition wr�wkh�sudfwlfdo�gliÀfxowlhv�ri�lghqwli\lqj�qdphv�lq�dufklydo�froohfwlrqv�� name authority work is hampered by a number of factors: the history of privileging published authors and subjects in name authority systems such as the lcnaf; barriers to archivists contributing to those systems; dqg�lvvxhv�ri�zkr�lv�dqg�zkr�lv�qrw�frqvlghuhg�´lpsruwdqwµ�wr�qdph� zlwklq�froohfwlrq�ghvfulswlrq��d�idfwru�riwhq�lqÁxhqfhg�e\�wkh�dufklydo� principle of provenance. the absence from name authority systems of the names of black people represented in archival collections is a barrier to important research about the historical lives of black people. more diverse and . for one example, see april armstrong’s blog post on princeton university’s afri- fdq�$phulfdq�doxpql�lq�wkh���wk�fhqwxu\��$sulo�&��$upvwurqj��´:kdw�$ufklydo� lohqfh� conceals—and reveals. recovering princeton university’s th-century african $phulfdq�*udgxdwh�$oxpql�µ�mudd manuscript library blog, february , , https:// blogs.princeton.edu/mudd/ / /what-archival-silence-conceals-and-reveals- recovering-princeton-universitys- th-century-african-american-graduate-alumni. e t h i c a l q u e s t i o n s i n n a m e a u t h o r i t y c o n t r o l appropriate subject headings will do much to increase research access to a more accurate historical narrative, but individually naming people of color is also necessary to provide adequate access to records of mar- ginalized communities. those who are individually named are deemed important, and those whose names are established and controlled in authority systems such as snac and the lcnaf are exponentially more visible and more easily researched than those who are not. par- ticularly in a discovery environment transitioning toward linked data, where an established name heading will connect to resources, entities, and relationships, those established headings vastly amplify the voices and stories of those whose names have been selected for inclusion. the lack of representation of black people in name description and name authority systems skews the historical record toward white culture and people, effectively creating false silences. this silence and the privileging of certain names over others serves to reinforce the ongoing cultural erasure of black lives, which in turn, as bergis jules states, enables the ongoing dehumanization of and violence against black people. armstrong explores how archives and archival description hid the existence of african american graduate students at princeton during the late th and early th centuries. she describes how, even though these students were listed in some university publica- wlrqv�dv�zhoo�dv�wkh�%rdug�ri� uxvwhhv�plqxwhv��wkh\�zhuh�gliÀfxow�wr�Àqg�� dyljdwlqj� the university’s records required laborious searches of outside sources which fre- quently did not mention individuals’ names. thus, while many of these men are not completely lost to time, the archival record and the way it is described means that uhfryhulqj�wkhlu�klvwrulhv�lv�gliÀfxow�dqg�uhtxluhv�h[whqvlyh�uhvhdufk� . the archival community has begun to explore the creation of name authority records via the encoded archival context-corporate bodies, persons, and families (eac-cpf) standard and the social networks and archival contexts (snac) project. eac-cpf is an international standard for encoding information about the creators of records. the snac project is a joint effort by the united states national archives and records administration, the university of virginia, and the california digital library to develop a cooperative program for maintaining information about the people, orga- nizations, and families documented by records. similar to the library of congress’s naco program, it is designed as a cooperative cataloging program that archivists at various institutions can contribute to after receiving training. once records are added to the snac web portal, collections related to the individual, family, or organization are connected through the eac-cpf records on the site. ��%hujlv�-xohv��́ &rqiurqwlqj� xu�)dloxuh�ri�&duh�$urxqg�wkh�/hjdflhv�ri� dujlqdo- ized people in the archives.” w h a t ’ s i n a n a m e ? a r c h i v e s f o r b l a c k l i v e s i n p h i l a d e l p h i a as described in the literature review above, librarians and archivists have been grappling with the issues of whiteness and neutrality (or lack thereof) in the profession. whiteness—the socially constructed normalization and privileging of white culture—not only permeates all efforts to catalog and describe archival and library materials, but by lwv�qdwxuh�pdnhv�eldvhv�lq�wkdw�ghvfulswlrq�gliÀfxow�wr�vhh�� kh�lqylv- ible imposition of whiteness on our work represents all identities not ghvfulehg�deryh�dv�́ rwkhu�µ�vhwwlqj�wkhp�dsduw�dqg��iuhtxhqwo\��uhqghulqj� them invisible. archivists have long claimed the ability to be neutral, as d�phdqv�wr�remhfwlyho\�surylgh�dffhvv�wr�froohfwlrqv�zlwkrxw�lqÁxhqflqj� them or skewing their interpretation. however, the very foundations of libraries and archives are based on a society steeped in whiteness, as are the librarians and archivists employed within. while much of the examination of whiteness and the biases in library and archives work within the professional literature has focused on collecting biases, clas- vlÀfdwlrq��dqg�vxemhfw�dqdo\vlv��wkhuh�lv�urrp�wr�h[dplqh�vshflÀfdoo\�wkh� role of name description and name authorities within archival work. names are important. those who are named are empowered, and those who remain nameless are at best marginalized, and at worst erased. the exclusion of people’s names from descriptions of historical records is not merely a barrier to scholarly research. rather, it is both a symptom and cause of the violence of whiteness in our society. there are several issues at work within archival description and name authority work that serve to privilege the naming of the white creators, collectors, and subjects over the naming of black people represented in archival collections. one is the privileging of published authors and subjects of published works in the lcnaf. the history of who is published—as author or as subject—is, unsurprisingly, largely white and male. the historical emphasis on published works and their associ- ated names privileges the types of people who have tended to publish works or have works published about them—white, male, wealthy and/ or educated. people less likely to appear in published works, even if they frequently appear in unpublished primary source materials such as archival collections, are less likely to be included in the lcnaf. while e t h i c a l q u e s t i o n s i n n a m e a u t h o r i t y c o n t r o l many people of color and members of other marginalized groups often appear as creators or subjects within archival collections, the unpub- lished nature of those materials means that their names have not been as readily contributed to the naf. this is beginning to change as the naf broadens its range of included names; however, as moulaison’s study demonstrates, the focus still remains white and male. archival collections provide a diverse pool of names for inclusion in the lcnaf. in fact, moulaison notes that most current authority records contributed by naco-trained librarians are created during the process of original cataloging, that is, cataloging of materials not already cataloged e\�dqrwkhu�lqvwlwxwlrq��́ wkh�pdwhuldov�wkh\�duh�fdwdorjlqj�duh�xqltxh��rwk- erwise there would be cataloging copy available.” for many libraries, the bulk of this material is likely to be special collection materials, including archival collections. however, few archivists are trained to contribute records to the naf, and the differences between cataloging and archi- val processing—not to mention the many and increasing demands for archivists to do more with less—raises barriers for archivists who may wish to do so. many archivists have little to no training in marc or rda, making the participation in naco training a daunting proposition. coordinating with naco-trained cataloging staff to contribute names from archival collections can be one solution; however, this assumes d�fhuwdlq�ohyho�ri�lqvwlwxwlrqdo�vwdiÀqj�dqg�zloolqjqhvv�dprqj�vwdii�wr� undertake this work, and most likely an academic setting. the efforts of archivists to implement archives-centric name author- ity systems face similar problems. the initial contributors to the snac portal as well as the initial member institutions are mostly large research universities, national archives, and well-resourced museums and research institutes in europe and north america. with the exception of howard �� rxodlvrq�� $́xwkruv�dqg�$xwkrulwlhv�lq� rvw� '$�/leudu\� \vwhpv�µ �� rxodlvrq�� $́xwkruv�dqg�$xwkrulwlhv�lq� rvw� '$�/leudu\� \vwhpv�µ��� ��´'dwd�&rqwulexwruv�µ� rfldo� hwzrunv�dqg�$ufklydo�&rqwh[w�zhevlwh��kwws��� vqdffrrshudwlyh�ruj�vwdwlf�derxw�gdwdfrqwule�kwpo�� ´���������� hpehu� ,qvwlwx- tions,” social networks and archival context (website), http://snaccooperative.org/ static/about/members_cooperative.html. w h a t ’ s i n a n a m e ? a r c h i v e s f o r b l a c k l i v e s i n p h i l a d e l p h i a university, all of the initial contributors are institutions likely to center whiteness and white people in their collecting and description. another way in which newer projects such as snac carry forward the biases within the structure of our profession is in the use of lc subject head- ings—as established above, often problematic—in many snac records, such as those that refer to indigenous people in north america as indi- ans. this practice serves only to reinforce the racism and colonialism ri�qdph�dxwkrulwlhv��$gglwlrqdoo\��wkh�wlph��wudlqlqj��dqg�vwdiÀqj�ohyhov� qhhghg�wr�frqwulexwh�wr� $&�pdnh�lw�gliÀfxow�iru�vpdoohu�uhsrvlwrulhv� with fewer staff and less funding to be active contributors. this can h[foxgh�frppxqlw\�dufklyhv�ru�vpdoohu�uhsrvlwrulhv�zklfk�vshflÀfdoo\� collect records of marginalized groups, just as surely as it creates a focus on name authorities only for published authors and subjects. at this point in the development of the project, it’s unclear whether snac’s approach to cooperative archival name authorities will address the problems with racism in archival naming practices. as mentioned in the literature review, archival practice itself creates barriers to increasing representation of people of color, particularly though the principle and practice of provenance. in archival work, the context of records is as important as the informational content of the records. through maintaining provenance, archivists hope to allow the original context of records to be understood by patrons, which is crucial in archival research. for example, information about enslaved persons is often found in plantation records, but those records are described with a focus on the slaveholder, who was the creator. while this provides important context for understanding the records and information that appears within them, the archival emphasis on context can also obscure and erase the human beings described as subjects in those records. the narrative of the slaveholder is preserved by archival description, but the lived experience of the enslaved person may be hidden or erased. . of course, provenance is not always straightforward. records may have changed hands multiple times prior to arriving at an archival repository. records may have been lost, or intentionally disposed of. former owners may not have thought certain docu- ments to be worth preserving--particularly those documenting marginalized people. in e t h i c a l q u e s t i o n s i n n a m e a u t h o r i t y c o n t r o l the practical application of provenance in archival work results in an emphasis on the name of the originating source in both the collection title and as author/main entry. (one moderate exception to this is a group of records by one individual collected by another, which results in both names in the title: the arthur langley searles collection of h. p. lovecraft research files, for example). it is important, however, to think about who has traditionally been empowered to collect archival materials, or create them, as well as whose materials have been collected. just as published authors and those who have works published about them have traditionally been white and male, so too has it traditionally been white men whose papers have been collected, who have been at the head of organizations whose records have been preserved, and who have had the means and the sense of self-importance to create records ri�wkhlu�dfwlylwlhv�lq�wkh�Àuvw�sodfh� the hierarchical nature of archival description places the name of the records originator or collector at the top of the descriptive pyramid, with all other names falling in layers underneath, with those who are least well-represented by the records in a collection at the bottom. since the records are ideally maintained as the originator/creator left them, it is that person’s or organization’s biases and preferences that determine who has been documented and in what order. description can do much to lift up the names of those who may not have originally been deemed important; however, this requires archivists to think closely about which names those might be, and how best to provide name access to those who according to traditional archival description would not have war- ranted naming. a blip racism audit project the racism audit group drew together members of a blip interested in exploring racism against black people inherent in archival description these ways, provenance can sometimes be less illuminating that archivists might wish, while at the same time continuing to erase the history of marginalized people. w h a t ’ s i n a n a m e ? a r c h i v e s f o r b l a c k l i v e s i n p h i l a d e l p h i a and the ways in which white archivists could develop anti-racist, inclusive description practices. the group began meeting regularly in the fall of via conference calls. kh�jurxs�Àuvw�fuhdwhg�d�eleolrjudsk\�ri�dssur[lpdwho\�hljkw\�wzr� potentially relevant journal articles, blog posts, conference presenta- tions, webinars, and bibliographies. they then focused on dividing up the resources to determine whether each resource was relevant, and, if it was, to create a brief abstract. this resulted in twelve resources being declared irrelevant or only somewhat relevant, leaving the group with seventy resources to draw on in developing best practices. the initial bibliography was quite broad, addressing more than just description-related concerns. while many of the resources focused rq�qdph�dxwkrulwlhv��vxemhfw�fodvvlÀfdwlrq��dqg�wkh�surfhvv�ri�dufklydo� description, others addressed the role of whiteness, white supremacy, and structural inequality in shaping the archival profession, as well as gender and sexuality issues. these wide-ranging readings helped provide a broad context for the work. by contextualizing the project in this way, the group is able to show how the work on anti-racist descriptive practices informs the project of creating a more ethical, inclusive, and anti-oppressive approach to archival description as a whole. after completing the review of resources, the larger group divided into two smaller groups to work on best practices. one group focused on concerns related to archival theory about description, such as orga- nizing collections by provenance. the other group focused on creating a recommended practices document for anti-racist archival description, dgguhvvlqj�wkh�vshflÀf�odqjxdjh�dssolhg�wr�%odfn�shrsoh�lq�Àqglqj�dlgv�� subject headings traditionally used to describe black people and commu- nities, and the use of name authorities as applied to black people. while wklv�grfxphqw�hqfrpsdvvhv�vxemhfw�fodvvlÀfdwlrq��odqjxdjh�xvh��yrlfh� and style, titles, and collaboration with black communities, several points irfxv�vshflÀfdoo\�rq�qdphv��lqfoxglqj�wkh�iroorzlqj�uhfrpphqgdwlrqv� • consider the extent to which describing a person by name is an dfw�ri�diÀuplqj�kxpdqlw\� e t h i c a l q u e s t i o n s i n n a m e a u t h o r i t y c o n t r o l • at the same time, when describing living creators or subjects, consider that description has the potential to put people from groups already subject to inordinate amounts of surveillance at greater risk. • revisit legacy description to provide better name access for black people where possible, including names of subjects as well as creators of records. • acknowledge the limits of provenance-based description, and describe the subjects of collections documenting oppressed or marginalized peoples at least to the extent that you describe the creators or collectors of those collections. • recognize that the naming of enslaved persons within archival description has traditionally been ignored in favor of the naming of slave owners. if, for example, you have item-level description for a deed of purchase for an enslaved person and the seller and purchaser’s names are included, include the name of the person being sold. humanize these documents from all sides—not just from the side of the creator. • use terminology that black people use to describe themselves, while recognizing that the black community is not a monolith, dqg�gliihuhqw�shrsoh�zloo�kdyh�gliihuhqw�dqg�vrphwlphv�frqÁlfw- ing preferences. • if you ask people from marginalized communities to help with description, be respectful of their time/labor and provide com- shqvdwlrq��'r�\rxu�krphzrun�Àuvw��dqg�gr�qrw�dvn�rwkhuv�wr� surylgh�lqirupdwlrq�\rx�fdq�hdvlo\�Àqg�\rxuvhoi�� d\�wkhp�iru� their work. • wrs�zulwlqj�Árzhu\��ydorul]lqj�elrjudsklfdo�qrwhv�iru�suhgrpl- nantly white male collection creators. remove and refrain from lqfoxglqj�hydoxdwlyh�whupv�olnh�´suhhplqhqw�µ�´uhqrzqhg�µ�ru� ´jhqlxvµ�wkdw�vhuyh�wr�sudlvh�froohfwlrq�fuhdwruv��$vn�\rxuvhoi�� does including this piece of information help users better xqghuvwdqg�wkh�uhfrugv"�(ydoxdwh�h[lvwlqj�elrjudsklfdo�qrwhv� for aggrandizing language and remove it. w h a t ’ s i n a n a m e ? a r c h i v e s f o r b l a c k l i v e s i n p h i l a d e l p h i a :kloh�$�%/l ·v�udflvp�dxglw�surmhfw�lv�irfxvhg�vshflÀfdoo\�rq�dufklyhv�� many of the best practices could apply in other settings. libraries and pxvhxpv�frxog�ehqhÀw�iurp�vrph�ri�wkh�pruh�jhqhudo�vxjjhvwlrqv�� vxfk�dv�frqvlghulqj�uhihuulqj�wr�d�shuvrq�e\�qdph�dv�diÀuplqj�ri�klv�khu� humanity and respecting the time and efforts of marginalized communi- wlhv�� rph�ri�wkh�pruh�vshflÀf�vxjjhvwlrqv�uhjduglqj�krz�elrjudsklfdo� notes are constructed may also prove helpful in other settings with prglÀfdwlrq�wr�phhw�wkh�qhhgv�ri�rwkhu�w\shv�ri�rujdql]dwlrqv� qfh�wkh�udflvp�dxglw�jurxs�kdv�Àqdol]hg�lwv�uhfrpphqgdwlrqv�iru� anti-racist archival description, the group plans to circulate the best practices to black communities and black archivists for feedback. our goal with this practice is to ensure that any best practices we circulate to the wider community will truly advance the goal of anti-racist archival description, rather than reinforce the structural power of white archivists to determine standards for what anti-racist archival description should look like. we recognize that as white archivists, we have a responsibility wr�gr�wklv�zrun��exw�dovr�wr�dyrlg�lpsrvlqj�rxu�ylhz�ri�zkdw�txdolÀhv� as anti-racist description of affected communities without dialogue and collaboration. additionally, a blip is also planning to raise funds to compensate reviewers for their work, in compliance with the best practices. the group is currently discussing not only how we will raise the funds, but also how we will structure compensation and provide transparency about what we pay for and how much we pay for that work. conclusion while name authorities, name access, and archival description have too often ignored and erased black people from the archival record, the problem is not irreparable. the work of scholars and practitioners over the past two decades has helped illuminate the scope and contours of the problem. naming practices and name authority work in archival description have traditionally been employed in an oppressive fashion that centers white people and their history; however, more recent work has begun to show how archival professionals can begin to overcome e t h i c a l q u e s t i o n s i n n a m e a u t h o r i t y c o n t r o l this tradition. these strategies include remediation of racist legacy description and proactively working to make new description inclusive and anti-racist; cooperative description; and a rethinking and critical dqdo\vlv�ri�wkh�frqfhsw�ri�wkh�lqÁxhqfh�ri�suryhqdqfh�rq�ghvfuls- tive practices. most importantly, perhaps, archivists should develop an hpsdwkhwlf�dssurdfk�wr�ghvfulswlrq�wkdw�frqvlghuv�wkh�kdupv�lqÁlfwhg� on black people in our use of naming practices. we should strive for a future in which the concerns, identities, and cultures of all communi- ties are represented in our application of name authorities and name access with the same attention, respect, and care historically reserved for white people. acknowledgements the authors would like to acknowledge the readers of draft versions of this chapter, who generously volunteered their time and provided insightful and essential feedback and criticisms: anastasia chiu, jarrett m. drake, fobazi m. ettarh, violet b. fox, margery sly, ruth kitchin tillman, and others who chose not to be named—as is their right. bibliography a*census, society of american archivists, . https://www .archi- vists.org/initiatives/acensus-archival-census-education-needs-sur- vey-in-the-united-states. $gohu�� holvvd��´&dvh�iru� d[rqrplf� hsdudwlrqv�µ�knowledge organization , no. 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( ): – . doi: . / . . . dwlhq]r�� [�$��´ r�+hoo�zlwk�*rrg�,qwhqwlrqv��/lqnhg�'dwd��&rppxqlw\� and the power to name.” mark a. matienzo (website). february , . http://matienzo.org/ /to-hell-with-good-inten- tions/. huulww��&duroh��´ odyh�)dplo\� hfrugv��$q�$exqgdqfh�ri� dwhuldo�µ�georgia archive , no. (spring ): – . https://digitalcommons.ken- nesaw.edu/georgia_archive/vol /iss / . rxodlvrq��+hdwkhu�/hd�� $́xwkruv�dqg�$xwkrulwlhv�lq� rvw� '$�/leudu\� \v- tems: a case study.” paper presented at ifla wlic , lyon, france, august – , . http://codabox.org/ / / - moulaison-en.pdf. hzpdq��-rq��´ hylvlwlqj�$ufklyh�&roohfwlrqv��'hyhorslqj� rghov�iru� participatory cataloguing.” journal of the society of archivists , no. ( ): – . reoh�� dÀ\d� prmd��´*rrjoh� hdufk��+\shu�ylvlelolw\�dv�d� hdqv�ri� hqghulqj�%odfn�:rphq�dqg�*luov�,qylvleoh�µ�invisible culture ( ). http://ivc.lib.rochester.edu/google-search-hyper-visibility- as-a-means-of-rendering-black-women-and-girls-invisible/. ·+djdq�+dug\�� roo\��´ kh� udfwlfh�ri�(yhu\gd\�&dwdorjlqj��¶%odfnv�dv� authors’ and the early american bibliographic record.” past is present (american antiquarian society blog). june , . http:// pastispresent.org/ /good-sources/the-practice-of-everyday- w h a t ’ s i n a n a m e ? a r c h i v e s f o r b l a c k l i v e s i n p h i l a d e l p h i a cataloging-black-bibliography-and-the-early-american-bibliograph- ic-record/. ovrq��+rsh�$��´ kh� rzhu�wr� dph�� hsuhvhqwdwlrq�lq�/leudu\�&dwdorjv�µ� signs , no. (spring ): – . djrzvn\�� lfroh�dqg� ldpk�:doodfh��´%odfn�/lyhv� dwwhu�� khgglqj� library neutrality rhetoric for social justice.” college & research libraries news , no. 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( ): - . social networks and archival context website. http://snaccooperative.org/. e t h i c a l q u e s t i o n s i n n a m e a u t h o r i t y c o n t r o l rflhw\�ri�$phulfdq�$ufklylvwv��´,vvxh�%ulhi�� rolfh� reloh�&dphud�)rrwdjh� as a public record, november , https://www .archivists.org/ statements/issue-brief-police-mobile-camera-footage-as-a-public- record. rflhw\�ri�$phulfdq�$ufklylvwv��´ uryhqdqfh�µ� $$�*orvvdu\��kwwsv��� www .archivists.org/glossary/terms/p/provenance. zdqvrq�� dhjdq�� $́gdswlqj�wkh�%uldq�'hhu�&odvvlÀfdwlrq� \vwhp�iru�$dq- ischaaukamikw cree cultural institute.” &dwdorjlqj�	�&odvvlÀfdwlrq� quarterly , no. – : indigenous knowledge organization ( ): - . doi: . / . . . :dgh��&duulh��´:klwhqhvv�dqg�wkh� \wk�ri� hxwudolw\�µ�library barbarian (blog). february , . :duuhq��.hoohh�(��´:h� hhg� khvh�%rglhv��%xw� rw�wkhlu�.qrzohgjh��%odfn� women in the archival science professions and their connection to the archives of enslaved black women in the french antilles.” library trends , no. ( ): – . doi: . /lib. . . :lqq�� dp��´ kh�+xeulv�ri� hxwudolw\�lq�$ufklyhv�µ�on archivy. april , . https://medium.com/on-archivy/the-hubris-of-neutrality- in-archives- df b fe f. aggregate plots introduction: black lives matter authors jonathan massey meredith tenhoor sben korsh protest at police station in ferguson, missouri. october , . photo by sarah ji. / black lives matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. it is an affirmation of black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression. —alicia garza, “a herstory of the #blacklivesmatter movement” addressing the black lives matter movement through architectural and urban research, the essays in this collection diagnose sources of violence, identify forms of view full image + jonathan massey, meredith tenhoor with sben korsh, "introduction: black lives matter," aggregate, volume , march, . http://we-aggregate.org/umbrella/plots http://we-aggregate.org/media/files/ db fb cdf bb ea c aa .jpg http://we-aggregate.org/umbrella/discipline http://we-aggregate.org/umbrella/systems http://we-aggregate.org/people/sben-korsh http://we-aggregate.org/ http://we-aggregate.org/people/jonathan-massey http://we-aggregate.org/umbrella/matter http://we-aggregate.org/people/meredith-tenhoor http://thefeministwire.com/ / /blacklivesmatter- / https://www.flickr.com/photos/sierraromeo/ what does it mean to put black lives at the center of our thinking about architecture and its history? how do architecture and urban design contribute to violence against black people? how can the tools and knowledge of our disciplines prompt change? inspired by the scholars, activists, and everyday citizens who have spoken out, marched, and protested against police killings of african- americans, we present this collection of short essays that directs architectural research to the black lives matter movement. racism fundamentally shapes architectural and urban spaces. ta- nehisi coates’ devastating case for reparations outlines the ways in which black americans have been dispossessed of land, excluded from homeownership, and impoverished by redlining and predatory lending from the jim crow era to the recent great recession. as darnell moore has argued, in cities ravaged by both predatory lending and gentrification, “black people will continue to be treated as something other than human as whiteness continues to function as a sign for possession and asset.” one hundred and fifty years after the end of the civil war, houses and subdivisions remain architectural instruments in racialized practices of investment, financing, ownership, maintenance, monitoring, and tenancy. in these and other ways, architecture and urban design in the united states today too often support white supremacy, which we understand, following george lipsitz, to include “a system for protecting the privileges of whites by denying communities of color opportunities for asset accumulation and upward mobility.” these links between race and space have long been visible in lived experience, and they have been addressed in architectural scholarship. but as architect mitch mcewen has argued, the necessity of an architectural critique of new forms of segregation became undeniably urgent after george zimmerman killed trayvon martin in the retreat at twin lakes, a gated community in sanford, florida. because they privatize formerly public functions and spaces, gated communities exemplify neoliberal approaches to housing, and some commentators were quick to identify their role in martin’s death. yet as mcewen and others have made clear, martin’s death can not be pinned on form; rather, it must be understood as the result of intersecting spatial, legal, and social operations. such violence against people of color requires architectural analysis, but architecture cannot account for it alone. after the killings of michael brown, eric garner, kimani gray, tamir rice, and too many others, the vulnerability long experienced by black people in public spaces challenged the legitimacy of the state, even for those protected by white privilege. streets, sidewalks and playgrounds such as those where brown, garner, gray, and rice died are sites where racially-biased policing governs access to liberty and life itself. over the past year, they have been reclaimed through demonstrations, die-ins, teach- ins, boycotts, black brunches, and “blackout fridays.” these spaces have also become sites for design interventions that make resistance, and reimagine black aesthetics. project black lives matter tags black lives matter jonathan massey, meredith tenhoor with sben korsh, "introduction: black lives matter," aggregate, volume , march, . http://we-aggregate.org/project/black-lives-matter http://www.temple.edu/tempress/titles/ _reg.html http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/ / /the-case-for-reparations/ / http://we-aggregate.org/piece/farming-the-revolution http://we-aggregate.org/tag/black-lives-matter http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mitch-mcewen/what-does-sanford-florida_b_ .html sites of violence safe for people of all colors. while responses to this crisis of space and state can untangle, critique, and resist the conditions that have made black life too precarious in the united states, recent protests and design projects make clear that architectural responses to the black lives matter movement must also activate the aesthetic dimension of architecture, a dimension that offers resources to sustain alternative visions of black life. this collection of brief essays thus comprise a mixture of aesthetic, critical, historical and theoretical analyses which we have grouped into three categories. the first essay group, diagnosis: policing and incarceration, describes the architectural origins and human effects of racially- biased policing, the “school-to-prison pipeline,” and mass incarceration, identifying ways in which design has helped to create the present crisis. in resistance: rights to the city and suburb, contributors outline forms of resistance developed by black people and their allies through activism, protest, research, and analysis. the third set of essays, aesthetics: from cities to curricula, illuminates architectural practices that figure and reimagine blackness through a variety of aesthetic, educational, and formal practices. when we put out our call for contributions, we aimed to highlight work underway on this topic, as well as to spur further scholarship and reflection on the biopolitical and architectural questions raised by the black lives matter movement. time was of the essence: we hoped that this writing might nourish political conversations, and that it could be used in seminars and teach-ins this spring semester. we are very grateful to all our contributors for putting this project on the front burner, and for writing and editing so quickly and diligently. as a result of their efforts, the work gathered here directs a wide range of scholarly and activist insights toward the present crisis. but it raises as many questions as it answers, and only begins to encompass the possible responses to the black lives matter movement. we invite you to deepen the discussion by commenting on the work presented here using the links at the end of each essay. we also welcome further proposals for work in a variety of lengths and formats ranging from short photo, video, sound, or text essays to long-form scholarly articles for peer review. diagnosis: policing and incarceration is “justice architecture” just? • raphael sperry schools and prisons • amber wiley fair policing for the fair city? • researchers for fair policing defensible space and the open society •joy knoblauch designing the great migration • james d. graham and michael abrahamson our first five contributions diagnose how theories and practices of architecture and urban design participate in racialized sorting, controlling, and conditioning of black life, situating aggressive jonathan massey, meredith tenhoor with sben korsh, "introduction: black lives matter," aggregate, volume , march, . http://we-aggregate.org/page/submission-guidelines http://we-aggregate.org/piece/designing-the-great-migration mailto:plots@we-aggregate.org http://we-aggregate.org/piece/schools-and-prisons http://we-aggregate.org/project/blmcall http://we-aggregate.org/piece/fair-policing-for-the-fair-city http://we-aggregate.org/piece/is-justice-architecture-just http://we-aggregate.org/piece/defensible-space-and-the-open-society police tactics within a complex of ideas, environments, and practices through which the state and other institutions exercise biopolitical control over black people. mass incarceration of young african-americans is at the heart of this complex of control. the united states imprisons its population at the world’s highest rate, as michelle alexander has described in the new jim crow. present-day practices of exclusion and segregation through incarceration, alexander argues, are updated versions of the segregation laws, racial exclusions, and lynchings that maintained white supremacy in the american south from the civil war to the civil rights movement. architects not only have participated in and profited from the incarceration complex, but also have fueled it intellectually and materially, as contributors to this section make clear. and yet architectural analysis has also been turned against incarceration. as laura kurgan and eric cadora so notably showed in million dollar blocks, redirecting state expenditures for incarceration to the neighborhoods from which prisoners originate would support extensive physical improvements and social services, reducing both crime and the violence that incarceration inflicts on individuals, families, and communities. their proof that mass incarceration is fiscally wasteful exposes the racism and classism inherent in the contemporary prison system. architecture intersects mass incarceration most directly through the design of police stations, courthouses, jails, and prisons. the opening essay in this section, “is ‘justice architecture’ just?,” by raphael sperry, president of architects, designers, and planners for social responsibility, considers the design and designers of the ferguson, missouri police station. noting the difference between how the project is received in the architectural community and in the world at large, sperry argues for architects to follow standards of justice articulated in international human rights charters, and calls on us to refuse commissions to design execution chambers and spaces for prolonged solitary confinement. mass incarceration extends beyond prisons and courthouses to shape the design and use of another architectural type central to contemporary biopolitics: the school. in her essay “schools and prisons,” amber wiley traces the successive renovations of the dunbar high school in washington, d.c., as it shifted from a brutalist building that promoted autonomy and self-control via open plans to a contemporary facility that emphasizes surveillance and security screening. wiley develops a historical framework for understanding how architects build what has come to be called the “school-to-prison pipeline”: the disciplinary practices in education that set the stage for mass incarceration. intrusive screening and intervention are too often daily realities for young people of color. in “fair policing for the fair city?,” researchers for fair policing, an intergenerational organization that links youth and academic researchers, present four video testimonials in which young people of color in new york city describe their experience of policing and its impact on their lives. these narratives offer perspectives on two approaches to policing jonathan massey, meredith tenhoor with sben korsh, "introduction: black lives matter," aggregate, volume , march, . http://newjimcrow.com/ http://we-aggregate.org/piece/schools-and-prisons http://we-aggregate.org/piece/fair-policing-for-the-fair-city http://www.adpsr.org/ http://spatialinformationdesignlab.org/projects/million-dollar-blocks http://we-aggregate.org/piece/is-justice-architecture-just that have marked the past decades in new york and elsewhere: “stop-and-frisk,” in which officers routinely interrupt daily life to question and frisk people on the streets and in school hallways, particularly in majority-minority neighborhoods, and “broken windows” policing—the tactic used in eric garner’s arrest—in which officers pursue and punish minor infractions, such as vandalism or subway fare evasion, on the theory that maintaining order at the small scale reduces more serious forms of lawlessness. these approaches, the videos suggest, have extended the incarceration complex well beyond prisons into other public spaces, creating a world in which self-surveillance and fear dissolve distinctions between public and private life. police tactics such as broken windows policing may seem to be outside of the realm of design, but their intellectual origins lie at least partially in architectural discourse. joy knoblauch’s essay “defensible space and the open society” focuses on the theory of “defensible space” put forward by architect oscar newman in the late s. newman imagined that well-designed public spaces and resident self-surveillance could solve social problems by creating a self-policing open society. his belief that maintaining physical order is crucial to maintaining social order was highly influential to the original theorists of broken windows policing strategies. and yet the liberal ambitions of newman’s theories–to create a society that required less outside policing–were jettisoned as defensible space theory was operationalized in order maintenance policing. recuperating newman’s ambitions while pointing to the paradoxes of the exercise of power in liberal societies, knoblauch reminds us that the outcome of architectural ideas depends less on their intentions than on their implementation in a matrix of policies and practices. valuing black lives pushes us to take the lived reality of architecture as seriously as we do the field’s discourse: for instance, to assess modernist cruciform towers as they were implemented by housing agencies and inhabited by working- and middle-class families, rather than as they were projected by le corbusier in the ville radieuse. in their essay “designing the great migration,” on the master plan and buildings that architect gunnar birkerts completed for tougaloo college in mississippi in the s, james d. graham and michael abrahamson explore the intentions and outcomes of the architect’s campus design principles. birkerts hoped to prepare rural black students for their anticipated integration into the cosmopolitan society of industrial northern cities as part of the great migration, and calibrated the design of his dormitories to generate a form of integrated urbanity on the historically black tougaloo campus. drawing on the work of isabel wilkerson and the testimony of tougaloo alumna gwendolyn hayes, graham and abrahamson suggest that this strategy belied the pervasive segregation that graduates found in the north. taken together, these essays describe a society in which soft power and police tactics intertwine in increasingly virulent ways; where discipline doesn’t replace punishment but rather jonathan massey, meredith tenhoor with sben korsh, "introduction: black lives matter," aggregate, volume , march, . http://we-aggregate.org/piece/defensible-space-and-the-open-society http://we-aggregate.org/piece/designing-the-great-migration supplements it; and where the biopolitics of race pervades streets and schools, houses and prisons, leaving almost no space exempt from policing. the work in this section also reminds us—as members of aggregate argued in our book governing by design— that architecture operates alongside and through fields such as economics and finance, urban studies and management, politics and bureaucracy. nowhere is this clearer or more pressing than in the system of mass incarceration. resistance: rights to the city and suburb the invisible brother with a brick • brian goldstein race, planning, and the american city • joseph heathcott the rights to the suburb • dianne harris air and the politics of resistance • derek r. ford architects and architectural discourse have helped to build systems of segregation and control such as the prison, the school, and contemporary policing, but they can also help to take apart such complexes of control. the essays in this section read space through the lens of race in order to write new accounts of resistance. the first two contributions examine structural racism in the history and theory of cities and suburbs. over the past few decades, historians of planning and urbanism have put race at the center of their research on cities. outlining the development and summarizing the insights of this scholarship in his essay “race, planning, and the american city,” joseph heathcott provides context and models for the discipline of architectural history, which has been slower to recognize the constitutive role of race in american architecture. drawing from this literature in urban history, as well as from archival and architectural research, brian goldstein’s essay “the invisible brother with a brick” examines urban redevelopment, riots, and resistance in newark during the late s. while the newark riots brought much destruction to the city, they also generated powerful forms of opposition to top-down redevelopment schemes that disproportionally targeted black neighborhoods. in goldstein’s analysis, the brick—the raw material of newark’s urban renewal schemes—is both a symbol and a generator of community empowerment. as goldstein and heathcott make clear, urban uprisings have emblemized black resistance to expropriation, exclusion, and displacement since the civil rights era. but suburban rebellions like those we have witnessed in ferguson pose representational problems to both scholars and a public accustomed to situating riots in urban space. in “the rights to the suburb,” dianne harris suggests we develop a lefebvrian theoretical lens for examining north american suburban uprisings. henri lefebvre’s work, which derives from his understanding of french suburbs as sites of exclusion, might help us better account for the racial and economic geographies of inner ring suburbs and the spatial jonathan massey, meredith tenhoor with sben korsh, "introduction: black lives matter," aggregate, volume , march, . http://we-aggregate.org/project/governing-by-design http://we-aggregate.org/piece/the-invisble-brother-with-a-brick http://we-aggregate.org/piece/the-invisible-brother-with-a-brick http://we-aggregate.org/piece/race-planning-and-the-american-city http://we-aggregate.org/piece/race-planning-and-the-american-city http://we-aggregate.org/piece/the-rights-to-the-suburb http://we-aggregate.org/piece/air-and-the-politics-of-resistance http://we-aggregate.org/piece/the-rights-to-suburb dimensions of suburban protest. as protesters across the united states echo eric garner’s dying words, “i can’t breathe,” they foreground questions about life and access to resources that are at the heart of the black lives matter movement. derek r. ford’s essay “air and the politics of resistance,” which closes this section, closely reads garner’s words and the slogans that have spun off from them to show how activists mobilize air as a resource through which a form of a public can assert embodied rights to the very conditions of life. in the protest cultures of may , pneumatic and inflatable structures were signs of youthful contestation, and air was a symbol of flexibility and freedom. today, air retains that optimism but also takes on a more ominous cast. ford argues that the biopolitical dimensions of air constitute a “pneumatic common” that defines the ground for contemporary struggle. yet, he and other contributors to this section make clear that not only the air–but also the insights and creativity of activists breathing it–are invaluable resources for architectural history and theory. aesthetics: from cities to curricula black spaces matter • charles davis ii toward a black formalism • darell w. fields farming the revolution • mike carriere, antoine carter, and fidel verdin valuing black lives means changing curricula • héctor tarrido- picart making black lives matter means looking at architecture and its history from perspectives that are often at the margins of professional and academic thinking, as when we approach monticello and mount airy from cellars, kitchens, and dependencies rather than making straight for the front door. we do black architects and creators an injustice, however, if we frame our discipline’s relevance to black lives solely in the terms of social history. valuing black lives also encompasses black aesthetics, such as the early th century classical revival as it was practiced by vertner woodson tandy on behalf of madam c. j. walker or the buildings designed by robert m. taylor at tuskegee institute. it means visiting sites of african american memory with craig evan barton and detouring from the main exhibition halls at a world’s fair to visit the negro building with mabel wilson. it means understanding the profession through the experience of pioneers such as norma sklarek and recognizing the forms of architectural agency exercised by others outside professional practice, from philosopher w.e.b. dubois to poet june jordan. jordan is a particularly potent reminder of the power of creative re-appropriation. she engaged architecture through writing by projecting forms and spaces of black self-realization. in “black spaces matter,” charles davis ii describes the alternative architectural modernism that jordan constructed from her jonathan massey, meredith tenhoor with sben korsh, "introduction: black lives matter," aggregate, volume , march, . http://we-aggregate.org/piece/toward-a-black-formalism http://we-aggregate.org/piece/air-and-the-politics-of-resistance http://we-aggregate.org/piece/black-spaces-matter http://we-aggregate.org/piece/black-spaces-matter http://we-aggregate.org/piece/farming-the-revolution http://we-aggregate.org/piece/valuing-black-lives-means-changing-the-curricula experience in harlem as well as from the work of adolf loos, mies van der rohe, and buckminster fuller. similarly, in “toward a black formalism,” an excerpt from the forthcoming second edition of his book architecture in black, darell w. fields projects an alternative modernism of his own. fields, who founded appendx, a key journal of african-american architectural theory, locates an aesthetic ground for race-based subjugation in immanuel kant’s aesthetic disparagement of blackness. yet he also makes kant’s aesthetics a resource for architectural theory, calling on a black “racial/spatial subject” to create a black formalism and a black architectonic by claiming the space created by its own negation. the world-making projects described by davis and projected by fields find a counterpart in the community gardening initiatives discussed by mike carriere, antoine carter, and fidel verdin in “farming the revolution.” in carter and verdin’s two urban gardening projects in milwaukee, developed in part as memorials to young people who died as a result of urban violence, growing food is simultaneously a means of claiming space, a technique of psychological and nutritional healing, and a means of aesthetic expression. the essay that closes this collection, héctor tarrido-picart’s “valuing black lives means changing curricula” challenges educators to deepen our engagement with black aesthetics. writing in response to discussions at harvard’s graduate school of design, where he leads the african american student union, tarrido-picart argues that architecture schools and educators can best intervene in the current crisis by teaching, writing about, researching and taking pleasure in these aesthetics. along with david p. brown, sekou cooke, and others, tarrido-picart sees in jazz and hip-hop the models for a distinctly african-american aesthetic and formal practice, one that offers a necessary corrective to seeing black life only through the lens of crisis or social justice. “#blacklivesmatter,” tarrido-picart writes, “but so does black culture.” black futures as tarrido-picart suggests, educators can put black lives at the center of our work on architecture by approaching teaching and learning in new ways. we need to write syllabi that address the issues outlined in the preceding essays, so that our courses engage more deeply with african-american histories, theories, cultures, and designs. much current design pedagogy privileges the cultural knowledge and habitus of privileged students in its selection of building types and programs. from an institutional and structural perspective, we must also address the composition of our field; it has long been clear that the requirements of architectural education–its high cost, time to degree and licensure, and time commitment relative to remuneration and cultural capital–skew the demographics of our student population. historians and theorists can put black lives at the center of our jonathan massey, meredith tenhoor with sben korsh, "introduction: black lives matter," aggregate, volume , march, . http://www.appendx.org/ http://we-aggregate.org/piece/valuing-black-lives-means-changing-curricula http://we-aggregate.org/piece/farming-the-revolution http://we-aggregate.org/piece/toward-a-black-formalism http://gsdaasu.com/ work in a number of ways, as the essays in this collection make clear. most obviously, we need to find archives and write texts that include the voices and experiences of people historically excluded from the narratives of our field. we can also deepen interdisciplinary collaborations, for no single realm of study can account for the present crisis. we should revise our accounts of how power operates in buildings and cities to reflect the conditions of present-day policing and imprisonment. the biopoliticization of policing and the introduction of profit and data-driven analytics into police tactics have produced forms of regulation less visible but no less insidious than that of their precursors. architectural theory should untangle and resist these operations of power, and we look forward to more work that takes on this task. in galvanizing people to action, the black lives matter movement has been a framework for manifesting “black excellence,” as patrisse cullors puts it: for drawing out the sustained clarity, passion, and leadership of african-american activists, intellectuals, and citizens. as we launch this project, we hope that aggregate can expand the range of venues for manifesting black excellence and cultivating essential conversations about race. cite this piece as jonathan massey and meredith tenhoor with sben korsh, “black lives matter,” the aggregate website (not peer reviewed), volume , march, . accessed march , , http://we-aggregate.org/piece/black-lives-matter.   alicia garza, “a herstory of the #blacklivesmatter movement,” blacklivesmatter.com, december , . ↑ black lives matter is one of many recent movements that have emerged in response to non-indictment of police officers responsible for the deaths of michael brown and eric garner, and to outrage over the deaths and incarceration of too many others. we’ve chosen to align ourselves with this particular movement and slogan because its emphasis on life, biopolitics, and race resonates with our own research commitments. ↑ ta-nehisi coates, “the case for reparations,” the atlantic, june . see also ta-nehisi coates, “the racist housing policies that built ferguson,” the atlantic, october , ; and beryl satter, family properties: how the struggle over race and real estate transformed chicago and urban america (new york: picador, ). ↑ darnell l. moore, “the price of blackness: from ferguson to bed-stuy,” truthout, september , . ↑ george lipsitz, the possessive investment in whiteness: how white people profit from identity politics, rev. and expanded ed. (philadelphia: temple university press, ), viii. ↑ see in particular the following: mabel o. wilson, negro building: black americans in the world of fairs and museums (berkeley: university of california, ); dianne harris, little white houses: how the postwar home constructed race in america (university of minnesota, ); (see also also john harwood, “review of little white houses,” traditional dwelling and settlements review , no. (spring ): ); craig l. wilkins, jonathan massey, meredith tenhoor with sben korsh, "introduction: black lives matter," aggregate, volume , march, . http://blacklivesmatter.com/a-herstory-of-the-blacklivesmatter-movement/ http://www.theatlantic.com/ta-nehisi-coates/ http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/ / /the-case-for-reparations/ / http://connection.ebscohost.com/c/book-reviews/ /little-white-houses-how-postwar-home-constructed-race-america http://truth-out.org/op-ed/item/ -the-price-of-blackness-from-ferguson-to-bed-stuy http://www.theatlantic.com/business/archive/ / /the-racist-housing-policies-that-built-ferguson/ / http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/little-white-houses http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn= the aesthetics of equity: notes on race, space, architecture, and music (minneapolis: university of minnesota press, ); darell wayne fields, architecture in black: theory, space and experience (london; new brunswick, nj: athlone press, ); cornel west, “race and architecture,” in the cornel west reader, (basic books, ) [and also charles davis, “looking for inspiration: (re)reading cornel west’s essay ‘race and architecture’” (race and architecture blog, )]. our own work has attempted to make race a central part of architectural and urban analysis. see jonathan massey, “five ways to change the world,” in where are the utopian visionaries? architecture of social exchange, ed. hansy better barraza (pittsburgh: periscope press, ); and rosten woo and meredith tenhoor with damon rich, street value: shopping, planning and politics at fulton mall (new york: princeton architectural press, ). ↑ mitch mcewen, “what does trayvon’s shooting mean for architects and urbanists,” the huffington post, march , . see also dianne harris, “race, space, and trayvon martin,” sah blog, july , ; and mimi zeiger, “koolhaas may think we’re past the time of manifestos, but that’s no reason to play dumb,” dezeen, december , . ↑ for two of the most popular critiques of the gated community, see edward j. blakely and mary gail snyder, fortress america: gated communities in the united states (washington, dc: brookings institution press, ) and mike davis, city of quartz (london: verso, ). writers have recently levied these critiques toward martin’s case. see anna kats, “guilty as charged? urban planning and the death of trayvon martin,” blouinartinfo, september , ; and kelly chan, “trayvon martin: victim of poor urban planning?,” architizer, april , . reinhold martin offers a more nuanced assessment in “fundamental # : real estate as infrastructure as architecture,” places, may . see also richard rothstein’s “the making of ferguson: public policies at the root of its troubles,” economic policy institute, . ↑ a number of dynamic coalitions have emerged since november . in new york, we’ve been particularly inspired by the group poc solvency, who have transformed the city’s public spaces with frequent die-ins, and who invoke human rights law to demand solvency for people of color. ↑ darnell moore also highlights the racial dimensions of gentrification, observing that we must look at police brutality in the larger context of “the precarious structural conditions restricting black life from ferguson to flatbush, brooklyn.” see moore, “the price of blackness.” ↑ see michelle alexander, the new jim crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness (new york: new press, ). see also alice goffman, on the run: fugitive life in an american city (chicago; london: university of chicago press, ); bernard e. harcourt, against prediction: profiling, punishing and policing in an actuarial age (chicago: university of chicago press, ), language of the gun: youth, crime, and public policy (chicago: university of chicago press, ), and illusion of order: the false promise of broken windows policing (cambridge: harvard university press, ); and loïc wacquant, punishing the poor: the neoliberal government of social insecurity (durham: duke university press, ). ↑ jonathan massey, meredith tenhoor with sben korsh, "introduction: black lives matter," aggregate, volume , march, . http://raceandarchitecture.wordpress.com/ / / /looking-for-inspiration-reading-cornel-wests-race-and-architecture/ http://architizer.com/blog/trayvon-martin-victim-of-poor-urban-planning/ http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/a/bo .html http://newjimcrow.com/ http://www.papress.com/html/book.details.page.tpl?isbn= http://press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/l/bo .html http://www.blouinartinfo.com/news/story/ /guilty-as-charged-urban-planning-and-the-death-of-trayvon http://www.basicbooks.com/full-details?isbn= http://truth-out.org/op-ed/item/ -the-price-of-blackness-from-ferguson-to-bed-stuy http://www.huffingtonpost.com/mitch-mcewen/what-does-sanford-florida_b_ .html http://www.bloomsbury.com/us/architecture-in-black- / http://wherearetheutopianvisionaries.com/ http://www.press.uchicago.edu/ucp/books/book/chicago/o/bo .html http://www.upress.umn.edu/book-division/books/the-aesthetics-of-equity http://www.dezeen.com/ / / /mimi-zeiger-opinion-urban-unrest-police-violence-race-architecture-urbanism-ferguson/ http://www.epi.org/publication/making-ferguson/ http://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn= http://www.sah.org/publications-and-research/sah-blog/sah-blog/ / / /dianne-harris-race-space-and-trayvon-martin http://placesjournal.org/article/fundamental- / see isabelle wilkerson, the warmth of other suns: the epic story of america’s great migration (new york: random house, ). ↑ marc dessauce, the inflatable moment: pneumatics and protest in ‘ (new york: princeton architectural press, ). ↑ achille mbembe has argued that this forms a new kind of “necropolitics,” a variety of biopolitics that emphasizes the control of death, not only life. see achille mbembe, “necropolitics,” public culture , no. ( ): - . ↑ see dell upton, architecture in the united states (oxford: oxford university press, ); john michael vlach, back of the big house: the architecture of plantation slavery (raleigh-durham: university of north carolina press, ); michael henry adams, harlem: lost and found (new york: monacelli press, ); ellen weiss, robert r. taylor and tuskegee: an african american architect designs for booker t. washington (montgomery: newsouth books, ); craig evan barton, ed., sites of memory: perspectives on architecture and race (new york: princeton architectural press, ); dell upton, “commemorating the civil rights movement,” design book review (fall ): - ; and wilson, negro building. ↑ fields, architecture in black. ↑ see also lesley naa norle lokko, ed., white papers, black marks: architecture, race, culture (london: athlone press, ); and irene cheng, “race and architectural geometry: thomas jefferson’s octagons,” forthcoming in j : the journal of th-century americanists. ↑ see david p. brown, noise orders; héctor tarrido-picart, “phonotropolis: designing a sound city,” harvard journal of african american public policy ( ): – ; sekou cooke, “the fifth pillar: a case for hip-hop architecture, harvard journal of african american public policy ( ): – ; and the upcoming symposium towards a hip-hop architecture. ↑ see garry stevens, “struggle in the studio: a bourdivian look at architectural pedagogy,” journal of architectural education , no. (november ): – ; and felicia davis, yolande daniels and mabel wilson, “inside and out: three black women’s perspectives on architectural education in the ivory tower,” in space unveiled: invisible cultures in the design studio, ed. carla bell (london; new york: routledge press, ). ↑ monica j. casper, “black lives matter / black life matters: a conversation with patrisse cullors and darnell l. moore,” truthout, december , . ↑ jonathan massey, meredith tenhoor with sben korsh, "introduction: black lives matter," aggregate, volume , march, . http://harvardjaap.files.wordpress.com/ / /hjaapp_ issue.pdf http://www.arthistory.ucla.edu/people/faculty/dupton/crm-dbr.pdf http://harvardjaap.files.wordpress.com/ / /hjaapp_ issue.pdf http://truth-out.org/opinion/item/ -black-lives-matter-black-life-matters-a-conversation-with-patrisse-cullors-and-darnell-l-moore http://www.ucpress.edu/book.php?isbn= http://soa.syr.edu/live/events/ -day- -towards-a-hip-hop-architecture religious education beyond congregational settings religions essay religious education beyond congregational settings katherine turpin iliff school of theology, denver, co , usa; kturpin@iliff.edu received: october ; accepted: november ; published: november ���������� ������� abstract: religious educational literature in the united states often presumes the congregation as the primary context for the work of faith formation. given the reduction of institutional affiliation and participation in christian congregations, this assumption makes approaches to religious education requiring an identity-bearing community of affiliation less relevant. several emerging models of religious education eschew the community provided by formal religious institutions for more provisional, radically contextualized communal approaches to religious education. these approaches spark a different and important imagination for religious education beyond congregations, embedded in provisional communities of solidarity and engagement. keywords: congregational formation; religious education; institutional affiliation . introduction for a period of about five years, i did not teach an introductory class in religious education. teaching the introductory class introduced a basic clash of realities that i could not resolve well in a ten-week term. namely, the majority of the us literature about religious education presumes participation in a congregational setting that has some relevance to the formation of identity and commitments. the majority of european literature about religious education presumes a schooling setting with required religious education classes, even though a shared community of religious belief is not assumed. neither situation was relevant to well over half of the students in any given introductory class in my teaching context in a school of theology. many of the students in my classes were planning to work as chaplains in hospital or hospice settings, where they would not be a part of a formative religious community, since they would be working short-term with more crisis-oriented populations. others were planning to work in religiously based nonprofits with a highly mobile client base and small professional staffs who engage the work for a variety of reasons, not all of them religious. even those who were working in parishes knew that they would only see the bulk of their parishioners once a month for two hours or less, given church attendance statistics in this part of the united states. for example, in colorado, according to the pew religious landscapes data from , the religiously unaffiliated is a larger group ( %) than catholics ( %), evangelicals ( %), or mainline protestants ( %). among adults in the state, % never attend religious services and only % attend religious educational or prayer groups on a weekly or monthly basis (pew ). although the pew data do not go into this much detail, given the affiliation numbers and patterns of piety in denominational identity, most of those attendees are more likely to be in roman catholic and evangelical congregations than in the congregations of mainline protestants that make up the majority of our student body. i should also note that the second highest religious affiliation group in my seminary is “none”. while i can help these students to make connections between their vocational contexts and the academic literature of christian religious education in the united states, this massive translation project ends up being a different topic entirely. this literature often imagines religious education as a critically formative task in the christian faith, where a vital congregation serves as a significant religions , , ; doi: . /rel www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= http://dx.doi.org/ . /rel http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions religions , , of community of shared identity and practice for participants. although there is a great deal of religious educational literature from places like the netherlands, australia, the united kingdom, and germany that considers the task of religious education from the context of civic or academic school-based classroom learning, in the united states, the history of separation of church and state and the deep concerns about what kind of religion would be taught in schools if introduced as an academic topic means that such a religious educational project has almost no leverage in the imagination of students in my classes. thus, i avoided trying to introduce the topic of religious education as an academic subject until i could figure out how to approach it in a way that made sense to my students in the current context. this experience in finding my field largely irrelevant to my students raised the major question: what does religious education look like in the united states without the presumption of belonging to an established community of faith? i am not a secularization theory proponent, given the continued importance of religious and spiritual discourse and practice in the united states. institutions are built to endure, and some forms of institutionalized christian community will endure in the united states for a long while. however, i do not believe that they will have the same central location of social and formative importance that they had in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the united states. some may rightfully argue that they never had this kind of importance, and that harkening back to a time when churches had more cultural influence is nostalgia, plain and simple. but the stack of basketball trophies from the mid-twentieth century in the basement of my denver mainline protestant congregation indicates something different. for social interaction, athletics, life cycle and significant ritual occasions, and community gatherings, the church was the only game in town in many communities for a long time. this is no longer the case, and the strategy of voluntary religious schooling or socialization into institutional christian communities similarly no longer holds as a strongly viable approach to religious education. the diminished location of christian institutions in the social structures of us white middle-class christianity is often expressed in concerns about the failure to protect sunday mornings for congregational participation. given the rush of schedules created by households in which there are no nonworking adults, other family activities and household tasks end up crammed into weekend hours on both days. some years back, as a volunteer sunday school teacher, i had a family who declared that this year, they had made a commitment to “do sunday school” for their four- and six-year-old daughters. it was clear that this was a choice among many enrichment activities for their children and, after one academic year commitment, they chose something different to do on sunday mornings the next year. it was hard to wrap my head around the idea that someone would treat the faith community as the same as any other enrichment opportunity for their child, important enough in some ways to make a one-year commitment, but largely interchangeable among many other important commitments to their growth and development. when we talked with the parents about the life of the whole community being essential to their own growth in faith through worship, service, and community relationships, they seemed puzzled by this, as if we had asked them to commit themselves fully to the personal development offered by the soccer boosters organization. the church just was not that important to them, even though they sought some cultural familiarity with the christian tradition and perhaps moral formation for their children through their participation in religious education classes for the year. when i speak to committed christians of the grandparent generation about their adult children, they often express sadness that their children are not involved in a community of faith. they took their children to church regularly and they tried to emulate christian values in their home, and yet their children have no interest in belonging to the institutional church. they often feel ashamed that they have failed to pass on the christian faith to the next generation. however, if you ask these same parents about their adult children: do you believe they are good people living lives indicative of the values in which you raised them? they will provide a litany of how proud they are of their children, how their work reflects concern for those who have experienced injustice, and how their children have taught religions , , of their grandchildren to be compassionate and wise in ways that they never felt they managed with their own children at that age. when i think of the dozens of conversations i have had like this over the past decade, i ask two questions. first, have these parents truly failed to pass on their faith when they admire the deepest values that their children have taken from their upbringing? if they admire the way that their children are living their lives and have a sense of integrity about their practices and commitments, should there be concern about whether or not they are members of a congregation? second, why is membership in a formal christian community the most obvious marker for whether or not they have successfully taught the next generation the christian faith? in some cases, the next generation has also jettisoned any notion of god, christian belief, or other markers of christian identity. in other cases, many of these identity-bearing beliefs are present, just not a felt need to participate in a formal christian community. it feels like a professional betrayal to the church to even ask the question of whether christian religious education can happen without participation in a formal christian community. many scholars in my academic fields of religious education and practical theology count the support and upbuilding of the church as one of the reasons for their existence. therefore, to ask the question of how important a community of faith is to the task of religious education is almost unthinkable. the religious education texts that i used to teach as basic to the field, such as maria harris’ fashion me a people, anne wimberly’s soul stories, charles foster’s educating congregations, and thomas groome’s christian religious education, all presume the existence of a community of faith that has identity bearing weight and some level of moral authority for its participants (or at least a catholic schooling setting where the church tradition is authoritative) (harris ; wimberly ; foster ; groome ). if communities of faith did not engage in religious education in the united states, who would? does the notion of “religious education” make any sense at all without formal congregations? . the prominence of the congregation in us religious educational literature participation in a christian community offers some things that are hard to imagine being a christian without, such as access to communal worship and sacramental life. for example, john wesley, one of the founders of the movement that led to the development of my own denomination, grew worried when the class meetings he had invented were taking off in popularity and people ceased to attend daily or weekly eucharist in anglican parishes. he feared for the health of the souls of parishioners who did not experience these means of grace on a regular basis. for many expressions of christian discipleship, gathering together with the faithful for worship is an essential element of formation, and congregations are the presumed context for that experience. additionally, developmental theory claims that the way a community lives and believes is one of the major factors in how people within that community will also believe and live. as an example, fowler’s work on faith development identified that many adults remain in what he terms the “synthetic–conventional” stage throughout their lifetime, persons who experience faith as an amalgamation of the centers of value and power offered by important others in their social environment, a stage that begins in adolescence (fowler ). as creatures who have evolved through social cooperation, who communicate through shared language and categories of meaning, the people around us are still essential to how we think about the world and what is good within it. the constitution of these communities has evolved and perhaps become distorted in an age of social media and diminished institutional belonging, but the influence of those around us matters in the formation of our commitments and worldviews. communities remain essential to human identity formation, even though communities are less stable, more networked, and more episodic than in prior generations. additionally, in the educational theories of john dewey and paulo freire, which have undergirded a great deal of theoretical work in christian religious education in the past half century, the role of the community is essential to the construction of knowledge (dewey ; freire ). through communal processes of shared exploration, discovery, and work, participants reconstruct knowledge religions , , of suitable to contemporary contexts, which is the occasion for true learning, as opposed to indoctrination or forced assimilation into social norms. these theoretical underpinnings reinforce a sense of the need for cooperative community for adequate learning to occur. however, in many non-christian contexts outside the united states, voluntary congregations are not considered necessary for the formation of religious belief. studies of immigrant groups have noted that coming into the us forced other religious groups into a voluntary congregational structure even when this is atypical in the country of origin. for example, building local mosques became a necessity for muslim immigrants: “lay involvement in mosque activities becomes important for preserving both religious and ethnic identities, a challenge not found in their muslim countries” (ebaugh and chafetz , pp. – ). a key element of establishing a congregation was providing religious education for members in forms recognizable in us culture: “immigrant congregations are also incorporating christian ways of imparting religious education by offering sunday school classes for children and adults. for example, some buddhists hold sutra study classes for the youth as well as adults; the zoroastrians have gatha classes, modeled on protestant bible study groups” (yang and ebaugh , p. ). the congregational setting and the schooling model of religious education were seen by incoming groups as essential to form and preserve both ethnic and religious identity in a us setting by new immigrant groups. despite the normativity of congregations as an expression of religious life in the united states, participation in congregational life has become less of a normative behavior. in her work on religious belief in britain, sociologist of religion grace davie originally offered the descriptor “believing without belonging” to explain the disparity in survey data between the numbers of people who claim christian identity or belief in god and the numbers of people who actually participate regularly in worship or education in local parishes (davie ). davie reflects on how powerful this phrase chosen for the subtitle of her book had become in global academic and ministry circles in her more recent work, noting that it clearly captured the imagination and experience of the lingering power of christian historical identity within societies where religious affiliation and participation has declined tremendously (davie ). she also gives witness to the more episodic nature of community in “new style” religion, where participation in organized religion is taking place, either through large festivals or smaller cell groups, drawing on the categorization of linda woodhead: “in ‘new style’ religion, moreover, authority is dispersed and communication takes place through a wide variety of media; the agency of the individual believer is considerably enhanced. the stress lies in finding yourself rather than in a definitive form of salvation” (davie , p. ). this more individualized religiosity is often described in us contexts as “spiritual but not religious,” again based on sociological surveys where participants claimed that they considered themselves spiritual people even though they were not affiliated with a religious community or tradition, and marked by an emphasis on choice rather than obligation, and diffuse rather than centralized authority in defining religious belief and practice. a recent study by sociologist of religion nancy ammerman and colleagues set out to document the kind of individualized religiosity identified in the “believing without belonging” demographic (ammerman ). however, her work also indicated the continued importance of communities of faith in religious formation in the us context. having set out to document everyday spiritual practices in a time of declining institutional affiliation, she notes a surprising finding: “one of the most striking results of this research has been the degree to which participation in organized religion matters” (ammerman , p. ). the researchers found in many arenas that they examined that attending services frequently made a difference in the participants’ practice and that participation in a site of interaction where religious or spiritual language was the common language led to adoption of increased spiritual elements into their lives. she notes, “so when we ask about the sites in which spiritual discourse is produced, congregations and other organized spiritual groups are both obvious places to look and surprisingly downplayed in a culture and a discipline that have glorified the life of the individual spiritual seeker” (ammerman , p. ). religions , , of given this deep assumption about the importance of the congregation to the formation of religious belief, the primary response by many denominations to the decline in membership and regular attendance in their congregations is to attempt to reverse the trend by reviving congregations as communities of vital practice. imagining that religious education or transmission of the tradition to the next generation is impossible without membership in a local community, denominations such as my own, the united methodist church, have poured energy and resources into church growth, into improving clergy efficacy and leadership skills, and into evangelism and marketing efforts to attempt to reverse the decline of its congregations. in the literature of christian religious education, recent works by boyung lee and charles foster have continued to emphasize the importance of community in congregational education. in the work of foster, the loss of a “catechetical culture of formation in congregations” has been a major factor in the collapse of faith formation (foster ). the loss of intergenerational mentoring and a compelling narrative of god in the congregational space leads to the need to rebuild the catechetical community as an adaptive change necessary for the transmission of faith from generation to generation. he believes this challenge “requires a lively and ecclesially grounded educational imagination” that challenges and reframes the technological orientation and marketing strategies that are dominating conversations about educational work in congregations (foster , p. ). the primary context for that educational work remains established christian congregations. religious educator boyung lee’s concerns about the importance of congregations also stem from her sense that vibrant community is sparse in the individualistic context of the united states. although she understands the congregation as an important base for educational work, she joins foster in not assuming that congregations already have the kind of community that is necessary for religious education: “thus helping congregation members to be connected to one another will be an important role for a leader to play: creating safe leaning environments and sound relationships among members is integral to both personal and communal transformation” (lee , p. ). she also speaks of the need for the church to “ . . . not wait for people to come to educational programs, but bring your religious education to where people are and where community is and can be created” (lee , p. ). this admonition shares this sensibility of the community that educates as somewhat distinct from the institutional church. her approach of the traveling bible study, an effort that met over lunch and in relationship to the workplaces of the adult participants, where they could wrestle with how notions of evil and temptation played out in their daily lives, is an interesting compromise between a desire for communal interaction and educational events presented in a time and place related to the ongoing lives of participants. her attention to how improved administrative structures in congregations can support good educational work belies her belief that congregations are still an essential community for this work, but her proposals indicate deep listening to the context where institutional life can be burdensome to maintain and may interrupt the formation of community. mai-anh le tran asks a harder question, namely, whether we are deceiving ourselves in thinking about preserving something “pure and precious” at the core of congregational life, and whether, instead, congregations might themselves be part of the problem. she notes the inefficacy of response to changing cultural conditions: “put differently, responses to tectonic structural shifts in mainline protestant churches seem to range somewhere between fearful paralysis and entrepreneurial fits. at either end of the spectrum, the obsession is still centripetal—inwardly focused, myopically spiraling” (tran , p. ). she ponders the erasure of memory, habitus of disimagination, fractured sanctuary, use of the bible as a weapon of mass destruction, and banking curricula of mainstream congregations and asks seriously about the violent nature of religious education in these congregational settings (tran , p. ). however, she speaks hopefully about “faithful individuals and congregations engaged in valiant action against the public pedagogies of disimagination” (tran , p. ). but her vision of the church is a community in transit, organically improvisational, an “enabling community of practice” that is able to be “responsive to specific situations, contexts, and needs” (tran , p. ), rather than a settled and powerful institution. this community is imagined by tran primarily in religions , , of moments of protest and witness and resistance, a “kind of protested faith for christian communities—a faith that is tested and testing, protested and protesting in the midst of contemporary social dis-ease” (tran , p. ). . the future of religious education beyond congregations in my own work as a religious educator, i often collapse the idea of an educational community with the idea of an institutional structure or an established congregation. this may be a particularly dominant culture understanding of community as most commonly embedded in institutional forms. the assumed control over formative environments expressed in the congregation as center of the social life of human communities, serving as the dominant religious environment that will shape the next generation, is an expression of mainstream white christian privilege. communities without this privilege often generated much more robust versions of religious education because they assumed that, as a minority population, they would have to work hard to pass on the wisdom of the tradition to the next generation. this has been true for, say, the highly committed religious educational efforts of the church of latter day saints. their invention of before-school seminary and school release time religious education came from the concern that their nondominant tradition would not survive without careful attention to education. historically, the work of catholic and jewish parochial schools in the era of protestant-dominated public education in the united states has also been an example of this phenomenon. in fact, the decline of the cultural prominence of mainline protestant denominations might be a boon to their practices of religious education through other communal means. letting go of the presumed congregational context also raises significant concerns for the practice of religious education. stable institutional life has allowed for paid full-time, educated clergy to be supported in their work in many white mainline congregations. if education is to happen in more provisional communities that are not institutionally-based, the question of where teachers and mentors will come from with the time to craft educational experiences arises. of course, a problem already exists in recruiting and training volunteer teachers and mentors in many congregations, as well as having voluntary learning participants. but this experience is shared with nondominant communities, where clergy and religious leaders have often been bivocational, unpaid, and in some cases, without the benefit of theological education or other professional preparation for their work. if we take seriously that formal religious institutions or congregational contexts do not seem a relevant context for even those pursuing theological education, we have to begin thinking differently about the future of religious education in the united states. what allowed me to resume teaching an introductory religious education class was the recent work of many colleagues in the field of religious education who do not presume the context of the congregation as a primary context for religious education. these authors have struggled to articulate the importance of religious education in response to violence in particular, and almost none of them rely on an institutionally–based community of faith as a reliable socializing or educating community. nevertheless, they simultaneously witness to the importance of a gathered community for the role of support of vocation, experiences of revelation, and resisting the violence and injustice of us culture in the name of christian commitment. these are scholars for whom community is essential, but the congregation is negotiable or even undesirable as a context for religious education. as mai-anh le tran expresses her doubts about congregations: “in what ways are christian faith communities plagued by enduring violence, perpetuated explicitly and implicitly through forms of religious educational malpractice?” (tran , p. ). these colleagues are paying attention to conditions on the ground, and they have heard, particularly from younger generations, concerns about the viability of formal religious institutions in addressing the deepest hurts and needs for education experienced by their communities. one example of this is the work of leah gunning francis describing religious education in the wake of the death of michael brown in ferguson, missouri (francis ). in her interviews with a number of religious leaders and activists who were part of the ongoing response to this extrajudicial killing, francis describes disconnects between younger and older generations, particularly the distance religions , , of between the faith leaders in established religious communities and the young activists organizing the nightly protests. this work gives witness to the need for leaders of established religious communities to put their bodies on the line and learn to follow in solidarity the lead of a new generation that is leading a different kind of religious transformation. she notes, “often the clergy would follow the lead of the young people by listening to them, offering advice when warranted, and giving them space to find their own voices. they supported, affirmed, and prayed for the young activists” (francis , p. ). francis and tran shared the experience of watching and participating in the dramatic public liturgies and protests that served as a provisional and powerful context for religious education within the black lives matter movement. not coincidentally, these new explorations come primarily from scholars of color, who recognize that the primary formative environments of their community do not always seek their flourishing. as patrick reyes puts it, bluntly, “how am i going to live when the world wants me dead?” (reyes , p. ). in his work on vocational discernment, he points to the importance of “elders, ancestors and communities” (reyes , p. ). the communities that reyes speaks of, where the work of education will happen, are not necessarily established institutions with budgets. he speaks of the exhausting work of “showing up for each other,” (reyes , p. ) and “building a space where we hold each other authentically, from heart to heart” (reyes , p. ). because, as he notes, “even when we follow god’s call, people of color still operate in a rigged game,” (reyes , p. ), he imagines formative communities as the struggle to “hold space” for a community to bring together their knowledge for survival and being called to life and share it. “what my education gave me was a set of skills, an ability to navigate multiple worlds so i could hold the space for new knowledge to emerge, and the responsibility to make an impact with what i was learning in the classroom in my own community” (reyes , p. ). at times, this means resisting, saying basta to the people and institutions that do not call you to life, and saying that prophetically and with force. but as reyes and francis imagine the community of formative environment, they point not to established congregations, but to communities of solidarity and engagement that require a struggle to create in the midst of less-than-ideal conditions. this notion of faith community as existing short term, of faith community not as a well-resourced and established institution, and of faith community as something that has to be fought for threads throughout these works. they spark a different and important imagination for religious education beyond congregations, embedded in provisional communities of solidarity and engagement. my white mainline protestant students are in the midst of what practical theologian tom beaudoin calls “witnessing to dispossession” (beaudoin ). their formal religious institutions that once held cultural dominance no longer hold anything close to the formative influence they once held, perhaps rightly so, given the histories of colonizing practice and white supremacy that informed their beginnings and the trajectories of their ministries. continuing to imagine religious educational practice as primarily a formative or even transformative task located in congregations severely limits the practice of religious education, given this shift. letting go of the assumption of a stable community of identity that forms members through embodied practice allows movement toward imagining religious education in the midst of provisional and episodic engagement and imagining the actual work necessary to build communities of solidarity and engagement across difference. funding: this research received no external funding. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflicts of interest. references ammerman, nancy tatom. . sacred stories, spiritual tribes finding religion in everyday life. new york: oxford university press. beaudoin, tom. . witness to dispossession: the vocation of a postmodern theologian. maryknoll: orbis books. davie, grace. . religion in britain since : believing without belonging. oxford: blackwell. religions , , of davie, grace. . religion in britain: a persistent paradox. chichester: john wiley & sons, incorporated. dewey, john. . experience and education, repr. ed. new york: free press. ebaugh, helen rose, and janet saltzman chafetz. . structural adaptations in immigrant congregations. sociology of religion : – . [crossref] foster, charles r. . educating congregations: the future of christian education. nashville: abingdon press. foster, charles r. . from generation to generation: the adaptive challenge of mainline protestant education in forming faith. eugene: wipf & stock pub. fowler, james w. . becoming adult, becoming christian: adult development and christian faith, rev. ed. san francisco: jossey-bass. francis, leah gunning. . ferguson and faith: sparking leadership and awakening community, st ed. st. louis: chalice press. freire, paulo. . pedagogy of the oppressed, th anniversary ed. new york: continuum. groome, thomas h. . christian religious education: sharing our story and vision. san francisco: harper & row. harris, maria. . fashion me a people: curriculum in the church. louisville: westminster/jknox press. lee, boyung. . transforming congregations through community: faith formation from the seminary to the church. louisville: westminster john knox press. pew research center. . america’s changing religious landscape. available online: http://www.pewforum. org/ / / /americas-changing-religious-landscape/ (accessed on november ). reyes, patrick b. . nobody cries when we die: god, community, and surviving to adulthood. st. louis: chalice press. tran, mai-anh le. . reset the heart unlearning: violence, relearning hope. nashville: abingdon press. wimberly, anne streaty. . soul stories: african american christian education, rev. ed. nashville: abingdon press. yang, fenggang, and helen rose ebaugh. . transformations in new immigrant religions and their global implications. american sociological review : – . [crossref] © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://www.pewforum.org/ / / /americas-changing-religious-landscape/ http://www.pewforum.org/ / / /americas-changing-religious-landscape/ http://dx.doi.org/ . / http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	the prominence of the congregation in us religious educational literature 	the future of religious education beyond congregations 	references 	 	 annu. rev. law soc. sci. . : – https://doi.org/ . /annurev-lawsocsci- - copyright © by annual reviews. all rights reserved murakawa www.annualreviews.org • racial innocence racial innocence: law, social science, and the unknowing of racism in the us carceral state naomi murakawa department of african american studies, princeton university, princeton, new jersey , usa; email: murakawa@princeton.edu keywords racism, antidiscrimination law, colorblindness, criminal justice reform, racial liberalism, abolition abstract racial innocence is the practice of securing blamelessness for the death-dealing realities of racial capitalism. this article reviews the legal, social scientific, and reformist mechanisms that maintain the racial innocence of one particular site—the us carceral state. with its routine dehumanization, violence, and stunning levels of racial disparity, the carceral state should be a hard test case for the willful unknowing of obvious devastation. nonetheless, the law presumes “no racism,” condones racial profiling, and interprets racial disparity in policing and imprisonment as evidence of true racial difference in criminality, not discrimination. prominent social science research too often mimics these practices, producing research that aids in the collective erasure of racism. introduction “it is not permissible that the authors of devastation should also be innocent. it is the innocence which constitutes the crime.” so wrote james baldwin in , as the black freedom struggle forced a national reckoning with racial innocence [baldwin ( ), p. ]. racial innocence, practiced blamelessness for the death-dealing realities of racial capitalism, is maintained through willful ignorance, blame displacement, and liberal reforms. ignorance here is no passive lack of information but an active discipline of denial armored in the “american creed” and the triumphal insistence that we have overcome (balfour , golub , hosang , mills , taylor ). this article reviews the legal, social scientific, and reformist mechanisms that maintain the racial innocence of one particular site: the us carceral state. racism is best understood as “the state-sanctioned and/or extralegal production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death” (gilmore , p. ). by this definition, there is abundant evidence of racism in the carceral state. police kill roughly , people a year, with blacks more likely to be killed even though they are less likely to be armed with a gun (zimring , correia 	 	 and wall ). the black lives matter movement confronted the spectacular violence of police killings as but one manifestation of the carceral structures of slow death—police stops, arrests, fees and fines, imprisonment—all of which produce and exploit group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death (movement for black lives , ransby ). each year the police make million traffic stops; approximately % of all drivers are stopped, but fully % of all black drivers are stopped by police each year (epp et al. ). even without an “incident” of police brutality, normal police arrests are harmful. even a low-level misdemeanor arrest record decreases the callback rate for entry-level jobs, and hence disproportionately high black arrest rates ultimately compound racialized wealth inequality (uggen et al. , natapoff , kohler-hausmann ). approximately . million people are held behind bars or on probation or parole; of these, roughly % are black. despite the black lives matter national wake-up call in the summer of , however, public support for police has since rebounded to preprotest highs (butler ), and a modest majority of white voters supported trump’s antiblack, anti-immigrant, anti-muslim law-and-order presidential campaign (brown , strolovitch et al. ). this article attempts to identify the overarching mechanisms that redefine, minimize, and legitimate the carceral state’s production and exploitation of group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death. the next section introduces racial innocence and what i see as its three core mechanisms: willful ignorance, the invention of “the negro problem,” and liberal reformism. each mechanism enables our collective unwitnessing of carceral devastation, as i explore in each of the three following sections. first, willful ignorance, enshrined in the law and replicated in prominent social science research, is an epistemology that begins with the presumption of no racism, searches for racism in narrow terms, and predictably concludes that there is meager support for “the discrimination hypothesis.” second, the invention of “the negro problem,” specifically the conflation of blackness with criminality, is an intellectual architecture that makes criminalization and caging seem necessary and even inevitable. third, liberal reformism absorbs protest and affirms the false hope that well-intentioned carceral humanism can end the devastation. racial innocence: an overview racial innocence is the dominant us epistemology, a way of knowing fueled by the desire for unknowing. “this is the crime of which i accuse my country and my countrymen, and for which neither i nor time nor history will ever forgive them, that they have destroyed and are destroying hundreds of thousands of lives and do not know it and do not want to know it” [baldwin ( ), p. , emphasis added]. baldwin faults something beyond ignorance and prejudice, racial liberalism’s preferred and misleading synonyms for racism. these terms distort twice over, once by reducing oppressive systems to personal educational deficits and once again by redirecting responsibility from the ruling class to the “uneducated” white poor (guinier taylor , taylor , haltom & mccann ). ignorance is no absence of knowledge; it is, rather, the cultivation of institutions, ideologies, and rhetorical mazes that unwitness racism, sometimes fully inverting evidence of racial inequality into national stories of equality, individualism, and progress (bonilla-silva , p. ; golub , p. ; taylor , p. ). willful ignorance baldwin’s idea of innocence entails “willful ignorance” (balfour , p. ), and contemporary 	 	 scholarship develops this form of unknowing under the moniker of “colorblind racism.” colorblind racism explains contemporary racial inequality as the by-product of ostensibly nonracist forces—market dynamics, naturally occurring tastes and preferences, and “cultural limitations” imputed to african americans (bonilla-silva , p. ; bonilla-silva ). colorblind racism’s affective register is not necessarily boiling animus and frothing hatred but, as williams ( , p. ) puts it, “a profoundly invested disingenuousness, an innocence that amounts to the transgressive refusal to know.” consider the “profoundly invested disingenuousness” of chief justice roberts in striking down public school integration measures in seattle and louisville: “the way to stop discrimination on the basis of race is to stop discriminating on the basis of race” [parents involved in community schools v. seattle ( )]. in the legal infrastructure and practiced fantasies of racial innocence, to ignore race is to end racism. inventing “the negro problem” twinned with the fastidious unknowing of racism is the facile knowing—or rather, invention— of “the negro.” the invention of “the negro” and “the negro problem,” as baldwin explains, projects onto blacks the un-american vices of laziness, criminality, and sexual aggression, thereby “safeguard[ing] the purity” of the us political and economic order [baldwin ( ), p. ; walker , p. ]. the invention serves racial capitalism by rewriting capitalism’s formal attributes of expropriation, exploitation, and ceaseless accumulation into narratives of racial “difference” (gilmore , taylor ). liberal reformism liberal reforms secure illusions of racial progress without paying the price of the ticket. baldwin deemed liberal reformism “the white fantasy of getting racial justice cheap,” in turner’s ( , p. ) apt words. to the extent that liberal reformism absorbs radical protest, it secures redemptive narratives of “mission accomplished” for leveling the playing field, thereby fortifying messages that black people have only themselves to blame (perry , taylor ). reformism reposes on anemic definitions of racism, constrained to produce “meaning in the service of power” (bonilla-silva , p. ). with racism reduced to a psychological problem, framed as prejudice, irrationality, hatred, or even personal sickness, its remedy requires no redistribution of resources (frymer , guinier , singh ). willful ignorance this section sketches three ways of maintaining willful ignorance toward carceral devastation. first, antidiscrimination law refuses to witness racial disparity statistics as proof of discrimination. instead, antidiscrimination law formalizes the presumption of racial innocence, tasking plaintiffs with the burden of identifying a perpetrator guilty of intentional discrimination (freeman , crenshaw , selmi , haney-lópez , spade , lovell et al. ). second, many law enforcement agencies have indeed banned racial profiling, but in name only. the official condemnation of prejudice imparts plausible deniability; in fact, the law condones racial profiling. third, prominent social science research replicates antidiscrimination law’s null hypothesis of no racism, searching for discrimination by the law’s constrained standards of intentional, directly caused racial harm. 	 	 knowing and unknowing racial disparity the carceral state produces and exploits group-differentiated vulnerability to premature death. this racism is often demonstrated through racial disparity statistics, especially in the incarceration rate. measured as the proportion of the population held in state and federal prisons plus local jails, the us incarceration rate nearly quintupled from ( per , ) to its peak in ( per , ). despite declines since , the incarceration rate of per , in leaves the united states the world’s lead per-capita incarcerator, topping russia ( per , ), south africa ( per , ), and brazil ( per , ) (beckett , kaeble & cowhig , schoenfeld ). blacks comprise % of the us population but roughly % of the imprisoned population, % of death row prisoners, and % of those sentenced to life without possibility of parole (platt ; kim et al. ). the injuries of criminalization both precede and extend beyond “mass incarceration,” which represents only “the tail end of the criminal process” (beckett , beckett & murakawa ). many have therefore adopted a more capacious if clunky term: the carceral state, which refers to the networks of laws, institutions, and administrators that enable and enforce punishment, including but not limited to criminal law and procedure, police, criminal courts, criminal records databases, legal financial obligations, probation and parole, brick-and-mortar incarceration and e-carceration with electronic shackles (beckett , gottschalk , hernandez et al. , lerman & weaver , schoenfeld ). approximately million people are estimated to have a felony conviction, one-third of whom are black (miller & stuart , shannon et al. ). eight percent of all us adults have a felony conviction, and a full % of adult african american men have a felony conviction (shannon et al. ). black-to-white male disparities receive significant attention, in part because historically black men’s struggles are framed as “representative” of black progress (cohen , strolovitch ). studies that disaggregate police stops by gender and race, however, find that women’s black-to-white disparities are comparable to men’s (crenshaw & ritchie , epp et al. , lundman & kaufman ). highlighting the surveillance and criminalization of black women and girls illuminates the structural relationship between the carceral state and black communities; by contrast, excluding them facilitates faulty analysis that lends itself to particularized tropes that black men and boys need “fixing” through programs such as my brother’s keeper (crenshaw & ritchie , butler , crenshaw ). carceral state violence against women and girls of color and trans and gender-nonconforming people is often unseen, unreported, or “privatized” through sexual violence that exploits and silences. for example, a survey by the los angeles organization bienestar found that fully one-quarter of latinx immigrant trans women, the majority of whom were undocumented, reported sexual assault by law enforcement officers (ritchie ). women of color also incur carceral injuries and costs through “proximal contact” with the carceral state (walker & garcía-castañon , gilmore , richie , ritchie ). in short, racial disparity statistics can be telling, but the numbers do not speak for themselves (muhammad , p. ). in terms of compelling legal redress and support for punitive de- escalation, why do these numbers sum to zero? legal defanging of racial disparity. antidiscrimination law holds that disparity is not proof of discrimination. as enunciated in mccleskey v. kemp ( ), statistics are insufficient to meet the burden of proving, first, intent (“the existence of purposeful discrimination”) and, second, causation (“that the purposeful 	 	 discrimination ‘had a discriminatory effect’ on him”) (p. ). in enunciating intent and causation, the mccleskey court required evidence that georgia “enacted or maintained the death penalty statute because of an anticipated racially discriminatory effect.” the court drew on washington v. davis ( ), which held that discriminatory impact alone is insufficient to establish an equal protection violation, and personnel administrator of massachusetts v. feeney ( ), which established a “because of, not in spite of” intent standard that essentially requires evidence of racist malice (lachance , lovell et al. , spade ). when confronted with statistical evidence of racially disparate policing and criminal sentencing, lower courts echo mccleskey’s reluctance to interpret statistics alone as evidence of discrimination [alexander , goel et al. , johnson , lynch ; see for example, united states v. armstrong ( ). given these legal standards, racial disparity statistics must be coupled with nonstatistical evidence of intentional racial animus. nonstatistical evidence that would meet mccleskey’s requirements—proof of discriminatory intent and direct harm in a particular case or set of cases—is essentially a moment when “officers admit to racial animus” (goel et al. ), a “stroke of luck” when plaintiffs fall upon the “miraculous happenstance of testimonial or documentary evidence of bias” (huq , p. ). plaintiffs in floyd v. city of new york ( , p. ; fagan ) achieved the rarest of victories—a successful equal protection challenge to police stop-and-frisk practices—by combining statistics with “smoking gun” evidence that high-ranking new york police department officers named “young black and hispanic youths [aged] to ” as the target population. without evidence of intent, antidiscrimination law witnesses racial disparity as a benign manifestation of two forces: criminal justice discretionary power and true differences between groups. through the s, conservatives challenged the validity of statistical evidence of discrimination in many arenas, including employment sex discrimination [eeoc v. sears, roebuck & co. ( )], minority workers’ rights [wards cove v. atonio ( )], and affirmative action for minority-owned businesses [city of richmond v. j.a. croson co. ( )]. in its attack on race- and gender-conscious affirmative action, for example, reagan’s office of legal policy ( , p. i) contended that “naturally occurring statistical disparities between groups are inevitable in a heterogeneous society such as the united states.” mccleskey’s indifference to high rates of black execution reflects the suspicion that black criminality is another “naturally occurring” disparity that warrants harsh punishment (seigel , donnelly ). whites’ adverse reaction to racial disparity statistics. critics of the carceral state marshal racial disparity statistics as a persuasive tactic, but research from social psychologists suggests that the invocation of extreme racial disparity might diminish white support for reform. stanford psychologists experimented in telling white californians and new yorkers different levels of prison racial disparity—one “realistic” black-to-white disparity and another “extreme” disparity with even higher percentages of black prisoners. when prison populations were represented as more black, whites were less likely to oppose three-strikes laws and stop-and-frisk practices (hetey & eberhardt ). hetey & eberhardt ( ) identified fear of crime as a mediating factor, with higher institutional blackness triggering crime concern. in short, knowledge of extreme racial disparity may perpetuate support for the very policies that produce disparities. additional social psychological studies connect perceptions of more blackness to greater punitiveness, whether the degree of blackness is within institutions or individuals. blacks who 	 	 are perceived as more stereotypically black in appearance (e.g., broad nose, thick lips, dark skin) are more likely to be perceived as criminal (eberhardt et al. ) and more likely to be deemed deathworthy in capital cases involving a white victim (eberhardt et al. ). one study found that, after controlling for differences in criminal history, defendants with stereotypically black facial features served up to eight months longer in prison than defendants who had the least stereotypically black features (blair et al. ). indeed, blackness signals criminal threat so deeply that psychological studies show that white subjects, when shown photos of black faces for less than one second, experience a lighting up in the “fear center” of the brain (phelps et al. ). racial profiling: legally prohibited, legally condoned racial innocence is, in shulman’s ( , p. ) words, the “denial of the reality of others and a disclaiming of this refusal.” observe this disclaimed denial in the legal lattice around racial profiling. many law enforcement agencies do indeed prohibit racial profiling, and a recent survey of large and mid-sized police departments found that all prohibited profiling (ritchie & jones-brown ). in a federalist patchwork without a single policy, however, some agencies merely define the problem away, requiring proof that an officer used race as the sole factor of suspicion (ritchie & jones-brown , glaser ). the same survey found that only one- quarter of law enforcement agencies ( out of ) prohibited profiling based on sexual orientation and gender, and only a handful ( out of ) prohibited profiling based on gender identity and expression (ritchie & jones-brown ). such racial profiling bans therefore allow loopholes for police suspicion toward women and lgbtq (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer/questioning) people of color, who are routinely profiled for carrying illegal drugs, prostitution-related offenses, and offenses related to child welfare (kunzel , mogul et al. , ritchie , ritchie & jones-brown ). although racial profiling is banned in name, and although fourth amendment search standards ostensibly require “individualized suspicion,” in effect courts sanction group-based suspicion and police actuarialism (fagan & geller , harcourt & meares , feeley & simon ), leading many scholars to conclude that courts affirmatively condone racial profiling (butler , ; glaser ; johnson ). the supreme court has licensed police investigatory stops as permissible under the fourth amendment, upholding pedestrian stop-and-frisks in terry v. ohio ( ) and vehicle investigatory stops in whren v. united states ( ). after terry lowered stop standards from “probable cause” to “reasonable suspicion,” courts validated police proxies for race with “location plus evasion” standards; that is, “reasonable suspicion” was satisfied by the conditions of policing in a “high crime area” and observing someone move away from police [see illinois v. wardlow ( ); harris ; lerman & weaver ]. whren upheld police practices of using minor traffic violations as pretext to investigate more serious violations, acknowledging the likelihood that pretextual stops risked racial profiling. whren rearticulated the perpetrator model of antidiscrimination law—i.e., the burden of proof is on the suspect to show that an officer intentionally used race as the primary reason for the stop—but the whren court simultaneously stated that an officer’s subjective intent is irrelevant. no officer motivation could invalidate a legal stop. with this, whren immunized police investigatory stops against equal protection claims (butler , epp et al. , johnson ). the investigatory stop is a legal, institutionalized practice that routinizes racial profiling. the international association of chiefs of police advertised whren as a post hoc legal validation of 	 	 already widespread practices of using traffic stops as pretext to uncover criminality. although police departments are locally controlled, federal organizations and police professional networks institutionalized investigatory stops as a nationwide crime-fighting tactic. for example, a drug enforcement agency initiative called operation pipeline trained state and local police in pretextual traffic stops; over the s and s, the dea trained , officers, many of whom went on to train others (epp et al. , seigel ). policing training manuals, hot-spot policing, and the national highway traffic safety administration’s programs further institutionalized the practice. with the investigatory stop as a normal institutional practice, individual officers and department leadership choose where to deploy these stops on the basis of (unstated) suspicions of black criminality (epp et al. , ; beckett et al. ; lynch et al. ; fagan & geller ; seigel ). the penology of racial innocence “what we know” through social science sometimes contributes to unknowing racism. van cleve & mayes ( ) fault dominant research approaches for adopting “colorblind lenses,” consequently minimizing or dismissing carceral racism. in a similar vein, murakawa & beckett ( ) fault criminal justice research for adopting the narrow standards of antidiscrimination law. in this “penology of racial innocence,” researchers obscure racism by searching for invidious racial intent in discrete moments of racial causation. just as antidiscrimination law puts the burden of proof on the plaintiff to prove discrimination, so too does social science set the null hypothesis as no racism (murakawa & beckett ). widely cited research from quantitative criminologists finds that racial disparity is largely attributable to legitimate legal factors, not racial discrimination. consider two influential schools of research. the so-called blumstein method compares changes in racial composition across different stages of criminal processing, from arrest to incarceration, per type of crime (blumstein ). various applications of this method attribute most of prisons’ racial disproportion to black criminality. blacks’ “differential involvement” in crime accounted for % of prisons’ racial differences in (blumstein ), % in (blumstein ), and between to % from to (beck & blumstein ). other studies produced lower estimates of “warranted” racial disparity—e.g., % in (tonry & melewski )—but beck & blumstein ( ) challenge low estimates as an artefact of mis-categorizing hispanics. without categorically denying the possibility of discrimination, blumstein ( , p. ) concludes that “the bulk” of prison racial disproportionality “is attributable to differential involvement in arrest, and probably in crime, in those most serious offenses that tend to lead to imprisonment.” another school of research examines sentencing outcomes and puts forward the “no discrimination thesis,” contending that unwarranted racial disparities all but disappear when models properly account for legally relevant factors (wilbanks ). direct “race effects” tend to decline with the inclusion of precise measures for criminal history, offense severity, pretrial release status, pleading guilty, hiring an attorney, and providing evidence or testimony; notably, these legally relevant factors are interpreted as nonracial. even with this strict dichotomy between racial and nonracial factors, many sentencing studies find “some discrimination, some of the time, in some places” (sampson & lauritsen , p. , emphasis in original; kramer & steffensmeier ). sentencing studies tend to find the strongest race effect when race, sex, and age are measured not independently but interactively, as judges exact a high cost for being a young black man (steffensmeier et al. , spohn & holleran , wooldredge et al. ). many challenges to the “no discrimination thesis” suggest that race may operate indirectly, 	 	 interactively, and cumulatively (mitchell , spohn b). if controversies over “apparent race effects” seem like inconsequential academic disagreements, consider the upscaling of these logics in the applied form of risk-assessment tools. risk-assessment tools magnify the penology of racial innocence. their development and defense depend on faith in the possibility of separating racial from nonracial factors. as social protest and budgetary constraints have created the perfect storm of reform pressures, many have elevated evidence-based risk assessments as new race-free solutions, sometimes repackaging old actuarial sentencing as new algorithmic justice (benjamin , browne , eaglin , eubanks , ferguson , gottschalk , mcleod , muñoz et al. ). by , when the american law institute endorsed the incorporation of actuarial risk tools into state sentencing structures, at least states required risk assessment in sentencing and at least states did so without statutory requirement (eaglin , starr ). many promote risk- assessments as tools to reduce racial bias and the expense of mass incarceration (e.g., flores et al. , skeem & lowenkamp , muñoz et al. ). with racism conceived of as flawed individual judgment, it follows that less discretion promises more fairness. yet risk-assessment tools are created from data sets of the already criminalized population, raising concerns that discrimination is woven into predictions (eaglin , ferguson , goddard & myers , hannah-moffat , harcourt , schwalbe et al. ). proprietary data means there are few studies testing this claim, but one recent study found substantial racial disparity in use of northpointe inc.’s popular tool known as compas (correctional offender management profiling for alternative sanctions) (angwin et al. , larson et al. ). as used in florida’s pretrial sentencing, compas assigned a higher mean risk score for black defendants. two years after risk score assignment, the false-positive rate— meaning the proportion of defendants labeled high risk but not rearrested—was % for black defendants and % for white defendants. by contrast, the false-negative rate—meaning the proportion of defendants labeled low risk but subsequently rearrested—was % for black defendants and % for white defendants (angwin et al. , larson et al. ). in a remarkable reassertion of racial innocence, risk-assessment defenders cited mccleskey, black recidivism rates, and standardized testing norms that “subgroup differences do not in and of themselves indicate lack of fairness.” instead, racial-group score differences reflected “true differences” in recidivism risk (skeem & lowenkamp , p. ). flores et al. ( ) maintain that, with rearrest rates of % for white defendants and % for black defendants, the test is accurately calibrated and satisfies standards for predictive parity. in short, risk assessments materially disadvantage black defendants—an uncontested finding—but legal standards and proper statistical accounting of black criminality make racial injury illegible. the penology of racial innocence has not gone unchallenged, however. critiques—here limited to critiques delivered within a positivist perspective—highlight the following. race-laden benchmarks and controls. because researchers reject general population racial proportions as a valid benchmark against which to evaluate disparity, studies depend on baseline measures of group-differentiated criminality (differential involvement) and controls for individual-level criminality (legally relevant factors). these benchmarks and controls reflect racially differentiated policing and prosecution, all reflected in arrest records, offense history, and offense seriousness (beckett et al. , lynch et al. , lynch & omori , van cleve & mayes ). like many sentencing studies, risk assessments essentially “launder” racial inequalities by declaring 	 	 criminal history a nonracial and legally relevant predictive factor (goddard and myers ). with criminal history a proxy for race, risk-assessment tools are likely to exacerbate but sanitize existing racial inequality (harcourt , ). cumulative racial disadvantage. many studies test for racism in a discrete moment, examining a snapshot of contact with the carceral state. this method washes out the cumulative effect of racism (murakawa & beckett , omori , van cleve & mayes ). modeling “cumulative disadvantage” in case processing, recent sentencing studies find that black felony defendants face a greater likelihood of prison sentences owing to accrued discrimination across criminal justice decision points (sutton ; wooldredge et al. ). including racial disadvantage accumulated through bail, pretrial detention, and adjudication as a felony, stolzenberg et al. ( ) find that the odds of receiving a severe sentence are roughly % higher for black defendants even after controlling for so-called legally relevant factors. kutateladze et al. ( ) find that black and latinx defendants in new york city receive the most disadvantageous combination of outcomes— detainment, case retention, and finally incarceration (see spohn a,b). still, this approach identifies “cumulative discrimination” only within individual case processing. organizational discrimination. sentencing studies that search for individual-level prejudice often overlook organizational and structural contexts that teach, normalize, and reinforce discrimination (lynch , lynch et al. , haney-lópez ). lynch & omori ( ) found that us attorney’s offices that aggressively charge crack cocaine (relative to other drugs) demonstrate higher black–white inequality in conviction rates across their entire caseload. at the level of the organization, general black criminalization followed from specific prosecution of notoriously harsh antiblack crack penalties and politics (alexander , beckett , provine , tonry ). the race effect versus the racism effect. regression analyses measure discrimination through the independent variable of defendants’ race; this specification, however, measures the race effect, not the racism effect. this is a conceptual elision that effectively sets one’s racial identity as a stand-alone self-triggering cause, forgetting that racism is enacted through institutional mechanisms, social relations, and political processes. in addition, estimating the race effect along with covariates like income, education, and criminal history means that these allegedly nonracial independent variables will absorb explanatory weight, reducing the race effect (bonilla-silva & zuberi , fields & fields , holland , lynch & omori , stewart , zuberi ). finally, testing the race effect forecloses an understanding of the recursive dynamics between race and the carceral state. that is, crime policy and carceral institutions change with changing racial populations, which in turn may alter racial categories (van cleve & mayes ). this section illuminated the legal, psychological, and social scientific practices of dismissing racial disparity, eliding racial profiling, and affirming the no-discrimination thesis. but these deconstructions of racism are twinned with something more—constructions of black criminality, black dysfunction, and black blameworthiness. inventing “the negro problem” 	 	 this section sketches the invention of “the negro problem” as another mechanism for maintaining racial innocence. the fabrication of western civilization, the european race, and whiteness—all constructed as internally unified and intrinsically virtuous—required the corollary inventions of the orient, indigenous peoples of the americas, and africa and the negro (robinson , kelley , crenshaw ). black feminist intellectual traditions have long recognized criminalization as integral to these inventions, as notions of innocence and guilt were affixed to racialized gender binaries. analyses from ida b. wells, for example, examined lynching and rape together to expose the interdependent construction of pristine white womanhood and the sexually primitive black slave. in a gendered racial triangle, white women’s purity was exceptionalized vis-à-vis black women’s impurity and imperiled vis-à-vis black men’s voraciousness (haley , ritchie ). haley’s ( ) study of georgia’s convict leasing and prison system identifies carceral development as integral to stabilizing gender identity for white women while enforcing the radical otherness of the black female subject. in short, criminalization does more than disproportionately harm people of color; it stabilizes categories of gendered racial identity, defining whiteness through hierarchical opposition to deviant racial others (crenshaw ). racial criminalization, as historian muhammad ( ) explains in his magisterial the condemnation of blackness, is the conflation of blackness with criminality and the simultaneous minimizing of white criminality as the transgression of white individuals, not a reflection on the white race. this intellectual architecture—the criminalization of blackness and decriminalization of whiteness—is maintained by diverse and recursive forces: positivist social science and criminology (hawkins , ward , van cleve & mayes , brown & schept , correia & wall ); messaging from mass media and political elites (beckett , weaver , murakawa , hinton ); policing and the carceral state (alexander , muhammad , lynch , mccorkel , butler , forman ); and surveillance beyond the criminal legal system (browne , pager , rios , shedd ). mainstreaming statistical rhetoric of “negro criminality” progressive-era actuaries like frederick hoffman pioneered positivist validation of black criminality, securing “the statistical rhetoric of the ‘negro criminal’” as a respectable “proxy for a national discourse on black inferiority” (muhammad , p. ). through the twentieth century, prominent social scientists explained racially disparate crime rates through notions of black subculture, family structure, and social disorganization, perhaps with “sympathy” toward black disadvantage, but nonetheless stressing the pathological features of black life (hawkins ). popularized theories of black criminality, laden with statistical measures and social scientific terminology, structured a mainstream discourse that ensconced “the crime problem” as a subset of “the negro problem” (murakawa , p. ; beckett , muhammad , weaver ). punitive crime policy is littered with references to moynihan’s pathological black family, dysfunctional ghetto subculture, crack babies, super predators, and a nihilistic underclass (kelley , hinton , camp , forman ). “culturally, blackness signifies the realm of the always known, as well as the not worth knowing,” writes williams ( , p. ). references to at-risk youth, thugs, gangs, broken homes, welfare, and ex-felons, even when not explicitly marked, represent narratives that weave blackness with criminogenic upbringing, poverty, and family dysfunction (perry ). these shorthand references to “negro criminality” are already known and not worth knowing. 	 	 white exemptions by contrast, theories of white criminality have been left in the dustbin of history. ward ( ) reminds us of one such discarded theory. having observed white youths attacking black people and their property through the s, psychologist clark ( ) hypothesized that white juvenile delinquency is an underdetected by-product of the white youth’s confused cynicism about proclaimed democratic egalitarianism alongside obvious white supremacy. historically, there are classes of missing perpetrators whose whiteness reduces their likelihood of being reported, policed, or punished (ward ). in the early–twentieth century urban north, whites were extended the benefits of rehabilitation and decriminalization that were withheld from african americans, as “the black male criminal” supplanted white hoodlums and ethnic gangsters as the dominant signifier of urban criminality (muhammad ). official measures of crime also largely exclude white “resistance” to desegregation from the s through the s; such “resistance” might have been measured in uniform crime report index crimes like aggravated assault, arson, and murder. such omissions exaggerate racial gaps in measures of the crime rate (ward ). present-day white exemptions include, to name just a few, not having school discipline farmed out to police, not being stopped or frisked, and being permitted to engage in unpoliced disorderly conduct (lassiter , ward ). with “real criminality” fastened to blackness, prosecutors and judges are more likely to “divert” whites into drug courts, pretrial diversion, or other programming (eaglin , schlesinger ). contemporary practices are consistent with longer histories of creating and reserving rehabilitation programs, and social insurance and welfare in general, for whites (alexander , muhammad ). by contrast, present-day returns to so-called therapeutic programming have reconfigured rehabilitation as responsibilization. working with large proportions of black, latinx, and native american people, contemporary programs “rehabilitate” by counseling people to lower their expectations, control their anger, correct their defective selves and assume individual responsibility (cox , mccorkel , miller & alexander , miller & stuart ). routine, cumulative, compounding racial inequality racial criminalization is routine and ubiquitous, not a single “event” performed by a carceral administrator (rios , shedd ). given the pervasiveness of being watched with suspicion, young people of color experience “hypercriminalization,” the process by which “everyday behaviors and styles become ubiquitously treated as deviant, risky, threatening, or criminal, across social contexts” (rios , p. xiv). brame et al. ( ) estimated that % of black boys have been arrested by age (versus % for white boys). this figure increases to % by age ; i.e., half of all black men hit young adulthood having been arrested at least once (versus % for white men). disadvantages of carceral contact accrue over the life course, although racial criminalization means that blacks are marked even without an official criminal record. sociologist pager’s ( ) groundbreaking racial audit studies, which assess callback rates for entry-level jobs, found that any kind of criminal record, even a low-level felony conviction without evidence of incarceration, reduces callback rates for white and black applicants. however, white applicants with a criminal record were three times as likely to receive a callback as equally qualified blacks with a criminal record ( % versus % called back). further still, white applicants with a criminal record were just as likely to receive a callback as black applicants without any criminal history ( % versus % called back; the difference is not statistically significant) (pager , 	 	 pp. – ; shedd ). internet search results are perhaps a more mundane example of reinforcing presumptions of black criminality. compared with google searches of white- sounding names (e.g., geoffrey or emma), searches of black-identifying names (e.g., deshawn or jermaine) are more likely to deliver results suggestive of an arrest record (sweeney ). results from a potential employer’s google search may in effect compound racialized wealth inequality, even if based on misinformation. beyond the legally marked individual, the costs of racial criminalization ripple across families, neighborhoods, and generations. the cumulative risk of experiencing paternal imprisonment for black children ( . %) and white children ( . %) exacerbates racial inequality in children’s well-being, especially with regard to child homelessness and foster care placement, poverty, and food insecurity (sykes & pettit , wakefield & wildeman ). of all black children born in to fathers without a high school diploma, . % would see their father imprisoned, up % from . the risk of paternal imprisonment for black children of college-educated fathers ( . %) is nearly twice the risk of paternal imprisonment for white children of fathers without a high school diploma ( . %) (wakefield & wildeman ). the collateral consequences of punishment further entrench racial inequality in wealth, health, and well-being. statistical illusions of progress recall that “the negro problem” safeguards fantasies of a just national order. this dynamic is well demonstrated in research finding that high black incarceration rates have the perverse effect of creating statistical illusions of racial progress. commonly used surveys sample only individuals living in households, not those living behind bars. these surveys include the current population survey, the national health interview survey, the national survey on drug use and health, and the survey of income and program participation. studies that rely on these data actually underestimate the magnitude of racial inequality, creating what pettit ( ) calls “illusions of progress” through “siphoning effects.” for example, current population survey data suggest that men’s black–white gap in high school completion narrowed from . to . percentage points between and . when pettit ( ) counted the imprisoned, however, this narrowing of racial disparity all but disappeared. the racial gap in high school completion remained mostly stable, hovering at roughly percentage points from to (pettit , ewert et al. ). similarly, conventional estimates of men’s black–white employment and wage gaps exaggerate narratives of racial progress because the most marginalized black people are siphoned off from the count (western & beckett , western & pettit ). liberal reformism this section considers liberal reformism as another mechanism for neutralizing radical protest and reaffirming the racial innocence of the carceral state. “racial innocence is the alchemy by which americans turn enduring and otherwise visible inequality into redemptive stories of rights, equal protection, individualism, and progress,” as taylor ( , p. ) explains. this alchemy— of spinning virtue from hoarding and domination—relies on a narrative of progress and liberal reformism. racial innocence is adaptive, and the “american creed” that celebrates procedural equality enables and constrains political reform (crenshaw , hosang , taylor ). liberal reform reflects the recognition that movement demands are powerful and threatening, and therefore preservation of power relations is best served by adopting some movement 	 	 demands after reducing them to a suitably moderate form (omi & winant , schept ). decarcerating the relatively innocent recent reforms have focused on relatively sympathetic figures like the “non, non, nons”: the nonserious, nonrepeat, and nonviolent offenders (beckett , gilmore , gottschalk ). this strategy, however, sidesteps the two most consequential macroshifts in sentencing policy since the s: the increased likelihood that a felony arrest would result in prison admission and increased time served in prison (beckett , tonry , travis et al. ). confronting these equilibrium shifts would require massive sentencing reform, including but not limited to repealing mandatory minimums and three-strikes provisions, abolishing life sentences and virtual life sentences of greater than years, replacing sentencing’s high floors with low ceilings, reinstating good-time early-release credits, and reducing parole length and terms of revocation (beckett ; gottschalk ; kim et al. ; tonry , ; mauer & nellis ). in short, advocating for the relatively innocent is inadequate. note, for example, that incarceration rates still would have quadrupled over the past years even if all drug convictions were eliminated (beckett , forman , gottschalk ). advocating for the relatively innocent legitimizes the idea that the relatively guilty deserve what they get. based on content analysis of legislative reforms and media language from to , beckett et al. ( ) found that reforms pertaining to nonviolent offenses were often justified as freeing resources to incarcerate violent offenders for even longer sentences. that is, reformers demand less prison in the name of more prison (beckett et al. ; gilmore , ). this reform tactic also hardens status divides between nonviolent and violent criminals, categories that are neither natural nor self-evident. rather, police and district attorneys actively produce “serious” or “violent” felony charges, and “their use is part of a racial apparatus for determining ‘dangerousness’” (gilmore ). carceral feminism “carceral feminism” critically names efforts to criminalize away the routine violence of rape, domestic violence, and heteropatriarchy (burnstein , davis , thuma ). as a major “lever of legitimacy for expanding the carceral state,” the violence against women act (vawa) delivered unprecedented federal funding for sexual and domestic violence prosecution. vawa was nested in the omnibus violent crime control and law enforcement act of , which allocated nearly $ billion for state prison construction and subsidized local hiring of more police officers (thuma ). other manifestations of carceral-feminist expansion include mandatory arrest policies and pro-prosecution protocols. women who do not “fit the traditional image of the innocent victim”—that is, black women, women of color, poor women, sex workers, lesbians, and trans women—are likely to be criminalized rather than protected through such policies (richie , p. ; gottschalk , gruber , ritchie ). much like “hate crime” legislation, carceral feminism builds punitive capacity while enabling lawmakers to stand in disavowal of state-sanctioned racial heteropatriarchy (reddy , schept , spade ). in short, critics of carceral feminism highlight the mutually reinforcing dynamics of carceral expansion, coopted resistance, and falsely affirmed state legitimacy. training and “police humanitarianism” like the black lives matter movement, liberation movements and uprisings throughout the s identified police as frontline enforcers of racial hierarchy (taylor , platt ). 	 	 reformers in both moments turned to police training, promoting what some critically call “police humanitarianism” and “carceral humanism” (gilmore , gilmore & gilmore , kilgore , schept ). in classic terms, the iron fist and the velvet glove identified the rise of “community policing” as complementary to the rise of aggressive paramilitary policing (center for research on criminal justice ). indeed, funding for community policing rose with swat teams and paramilitary units (camp , demichele & kraska , hinton ). procedural justice and implicit bias dominate the current landscape of police training. against the chorus of support, some scholars fear that procedural-justice training, as a stand- alone remedy, risks sustaining saturated police presence in communities of color, essentially teaching police to continue the same patterns but with superficial niceties (bell , butler , epp et al. , vitale ). some similar concerns apply to implicit-bias training, as companies like fair & impartial policing® instruct police to cultivate the skill of acknowledging their cognitive bias. framed as a pervasive yet individual-level phenomenon, implicit bias is presented as mitigatable through education (petersen , lynch et al. ). this vision of training calls to mind hosang’s ( , p. ) very definition of racial innocence: it is the notion that “the self-possessed individual” can decide “to free himself or herself from the narrow trappings of prejudice” and “no longer be ‘guilty’ of racism.” experimental tests of debiasing interventions demonstrate some success in very short-term reductions of implicit biases, but there is limited and conflicting evidence of whether reductions endure past two or three months (smith ). observations of implicit-bias police training paint a disturbing picture of racial criminalization reaffirmed, not deconstructed; one popular training module assures officers that implicit associations between blackness and criminality are partially justified by reality (petersen ). critical race theorists have long relied on implicit bias research to combat legal definitions of discrimination as intentional harm, but recent pushback against the implicit-bias preoccupation is illuminating in the context of police training. marshalling long citation chains of experimentally confirmed implicit bias research is a satisfying “hard evidence” refutation of the intent standard, but not all racial harm can or should be attributed to cognitive bias in the unwitting racist’s interior (seigel , selmi ). the habit of blaming implicit bias—a subset of the overarching habit of equating racism with psychological error—risks exonerating institutional arrangements that incentivize and legitimize racist harm (butler , frymer , lynch et al. , vitale , obasogie & newman ). conclusion: rejecting innocence law and social science are implicated in constructing the carceral state, of course, but this article illuminated the legal and social scientific tools used to obscure the carceral state, to blunt our perception of its intrinsic dehumanization and its routine racism. criminal law condones racial profiling, caging, and killing, while antidiscrimination law formalizes the presumption of racial innocence by tasking plaintiffs with the burden of proving intentional discrimination. positivist social scientists practice the same willful ignorance by setting a null hypothesis of no racism, fastidiously separating racial from presumably nonracial factors, and then measuring “the race effect” instead of racism’s effects. social science has furnished a respectable statistical rhetoric of black criminality since the progressive era, and this articulation of “the negro problem” justifies carceral development and its racial disparity. in short, willful ignorance, invention of “the negro problem,” and liberal reformism secure the racial innocence of the us carceral state. 	 	 witnessing carceral devastation requires rejecting innocence. for scholars of the carceral state, this entails rejecting professional investments in race-free crime statistics and nonracial legal variables; measures and methods are freighted to an unfolding history in which race matters (muhammad , thompson , ward , zuberi ). more broadly, witnessing carceral devastation requires rejecting the fantasy that social scientists can or should be innocent of normative commitments. the dehumanization of the carceral state exceeds what can be seen through racial disparity analysis, which is too often the stand-in for moral analysis. when baldwin [ ( ), p. ] challenged “urban renewal,” he staked an historically-informed moral claim about race, place, and abolition, writing: “the people in harlem know they are living there because white people do not think they are good enough to live anywhere else. no amount of ‘improvement’ can sweeten this fact… a ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence.” the same should be said of prisons. prisons normalize the practice of creating separate and subordinate spatial, legal, and political universes for whole categories of people (gottschalk , simon , lerman & weaver , miller & stuart ). further still, the carceral state reaffirms the foundational fictions of racial capitalism—fictions of freedom through the sanctification of property, fictions of earned opulence and deserved deprivation (gilmore , ; 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crossmark data citing articles: view citing articles http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=hppc http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/hppc http://www.tandfonline.com/action/showcitformats?doi= . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=hppc &show=instructions http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=hppc &show=instructions http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/ . / . . #tabmodule http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/ . / . . #tabmodule connected migrants: encapsulation and cosmopolitanization koen leurs and sandra ponzanesi utrecht university abstract taking a cue from dana diminescu’s seminal manifesto on “the connected migrant,” this special issue introduces the notions of encapsulation and cosmopolitanism to understand digital migration studies. the pieces here present a nonbinary, integrated notion of an increasingly digitally mediated cosmopolitanism that accommodates differences within but also recognizes europe’s colonial legacy and the fraught postcolonial present. of special interest is an essay by the late zygmunt bauman, who argues that the messy boundaries of europe require a renewed vision of cosmopolitan europe, based on dialogue and aspirations, rather than on eurocentrism and universal values. in this article, we focus on three overarching discussions informing this special issue: (a) an appreciation of the so-called “refugee crisis” and the articulation of conflicting europeanisms, (b) an understanding of the relationships between the concepts of cos- mopolitanization and encapsulation, and (c) a recognition of the emergence of the interdisciplinary field of digital migration studies. introduction “the migrant” is often a placeholder, marking memories of empire, or fears of globalization, or a sense of impending catastrophe. this has consequences for academic research (anderson, , p. ). the figure of the migrant has become central in popular communication, mobilizing imaginaries about digital media practices and the place they have in the construction of the haves and the have-nots. this creates hierarchical cultural, social, and political order- ing mechanisms between the west and the rest, magnifying broader patterns of inequality between the global north and the global south. focusing on the geopolitically charged situation of europe, the scholarship included in this special issue contests and intervenes in the narrow and exclusionary cultural representations of connected migrants. europe functions as a hinge between the legacies of past colonial expansions and the current multicultural settings, further complicated by the recent refugee crisis, which heightens the disjunctions between the local and the global. this special issue features digital migration research as first presented during the connected migrants academy colloquium and masterclasses that took place december – , , at the royal netherlands academy of arts and sciences (knaw) in amsterdam, the netherlands. as noted in the colloquium’s call for papers, the event aimed to further develop the notion contact koen leurs k.h.a.leurs@uu.nl graduate gender programme, department of media and culture studies, utrecht university, muntstraat a, ev, the netherlands. popular communication , vol. , no. , – https://doi.org/ . / . . © taylor & francis this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncommercial-noderivatives license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . /), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. http://orcid.org/ - - - https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - of the “connected migrant” (diminescu, , ) as a distinctly located geopolitical figuration (royal netherlands academy of arts and sciences, ). europe as an ideal (let us call it ‘europeanism’) defies monopolistic ownership. it cannot be denied to the ‘other’ since it incorporates the phenomenon of ‘otherness’: in the practice of europeanism, the perpetual effort to separate, expel and externalize is constantly thwarted by the drawing in, admission, accommodation and assimilation of the ‘external.’ (bauman, , pp. – ) this special issue is dedicated to the late zygmunt bauman, and we seek to be attentive to the workings of conflicting ideological europeanisms. we had hoped to end our collo- quium with bauman’s scheduled public keynote lecture. upon our invitation sent in december , bauman wrote to us: “on condition i survive that long, i’d be glad to partake in the amsterdam conference.” unfortunately, shortly before the colloquium he developed a serious health condition. we only realized fully how serious it was when he passed away shortly after the event, on january , , aged . despite his deteriorating condition, we are extremely grateful bauman shared with us his keynote lecture blueprint, which we managed to discuss with the participants at the event. his spirit and tireless intellectual endeavor characterized by hope and a far-reaching vision was present with us during this conference. it is an honor to publish these notes as the preface to this special issue, and we appreciate the fact that the rights holders have granted us permission to do so. the seminal manifesto on “connected migrants” by dana diminescu guides this project. it signals a clear shift from the notion of migrants being uprooted and separated from their home toward a connective presence ( , ) in their diasporic settings. this turn in digital media studies is significant because until recently, media and migra- tion scholarship had mostly focused on the underrepresentation and misrepresentation of migrants in news and popular culture, or else on their isolation (madianou, , p. ). therefore, there is a tendency to focus on digital migrants as either strengthening ethnic ties—by bonding with co-nationals and creating forms of ethnic “encapsulation,” which means “to nurture pre-existing social networks and communities” (jansson, ; p. ; see also christensen & jansson, a; erikson, )—or on digital migrants providing connecting and bridging communications leading to cosmopolitanization (vermeulen & keskiner, ). the articles included in this special issue demonstrate how—in the context of digital migrant connectivity—these two constructs, namely, “the cosmopolitan self” and the “encapsulated self,” are not mutually exclusive but can operate simulta- neously (christensen & jansson, a). the authors address social, cultural, and political implications of everyday practices of mediation among migrants. in line with popular communication’s current interest in “geopolitics and the popular” (burkart & christensen, , p. ), we question how connected migrants across the world are located in intersecting grids of power relations and how they may use and challenge “grammars of everyday life” (burkart & christensen, , p. ). the so-called “european refugee crisis” is the first of its kind, in terms of scale, in a fully digital age. at the height of the crisis in , syrian forced migrants emerged in public media carrying smartphones and taking selfies upon safely reaching dry land. their images were mobilized in a new form of geopolitical “symbolic bordering” (chouliaraki, ), triggering fear of undesired others. for example, in a headline, the german popular communication newspaper zeit asked “refugees: why do you need a mobile phone?” (habekuß & schmitt, ), while on its front page the dutch daily algemeen dagblad ran a story entitled “why are those refugees taking selfies all the time” (rosman & mersbergen, ). social media circles were replete with right-wing anti-immigrant posters criticizing selfie- stick carrying refugees with the meme “you know you’ve been had … when the ‘refugees’ pull out a selfie stick” (literat, , p. ). the appearance of digitally connected refugees was perceived as incongruent with eurocentric ideas of sad and poor refugees fleeing from war and atrocities. as ticktin writes, “[i]n other words, humanitarianism requires inno- cent sufferers to be represented in the passivity of their suffering, not in the action they take to confront and escape” ( , p. ). the promise of connectivity that is guaranteed even under duress becomes fraught with the profound disconnection brought about by the disciplining gaze of western media and publics (risam, , in this special issue). in addition to our introductory essay, this special issue consists of six articles. in the opening essay of the volume, zygmunt bauman sets out the geopolitical stakes of contemporary europeanism in “between separation and integration: strategies of cohabi- tation in the era of diasporization and internet” (bauman, , in this special issue). subsequently, the articles move from bottom-up experiences and user practices toward top-down framing, control, and surveillance. first, in her article entitled “the digital force in forced migration: imagined affordances and gendered practices,” saskia witteborn ( ) documents how two women seeking asylum in germany make use of digital technologies to negotiate institutionalized patriarchical living associated with the asylum bureaucracy. alexander dhoest ( ) addresses the cosmopolitanizing and encapsulating intersections between sexuality and ethnicity among lbgtqs with a migra- tion background in belgium. myria georgiou’s ( ) article explores how digital initia- tives aimed at letting migrant voices speak with/to europe operate in relation to the representational space of mainstream media. roopika risam ( ) expands on the politics of representation by comparing images of refugees taking selfies included in print media with selfies taking by syrian refugees themselves. finally, sanjay sharma and jasbinder nijjar ( ) draw upon the prevent program in britain to critique para- noid and racialized algorithmic counterterrorism machineries of control. these articles contribute to three interrelated overarching debates: (a) the “refugee crisis” and the articulation of conflicting europeanisms, (b) a relational understanding of cosmopolitanization and encapsulation, and (c) the emergence of the interdisciplinary field of digital migration studies. the “refugee crisis” and conflicting europeanisms in europe: an unfinished adventure, bauman in reflected on the state of europe as a non-geographically bounded site of ideological battles, which is mutually shaped by the interplay between exclusionary ideologies of containment and boundary making and border transgressions. fourteen years after its publication, what remains of the unfulfilled hope and promises that were expressed in that book? in his book strangers at our door, bauman surmised that despite “migration panic,” or the polarization of political parties and resurgent nationalism in its darkest clothes, we can still believe in this idea of a “transgressive civilization,” which, as bauman puts it, is a condition that has already internalized its difference. “this civilization or this culture was and remains a civilization k. leurs and s. ponzanesi which is allergic to borders, indeed to all fixity and finitude” ( , p. , emphasis in original). however, as he notes in the preface published for the first time in this special issue of popular communication, the “european refugee crisis” is in fact a manifestation of europe’s outdated consciousness. in this “state of interregnum,” established habitual procedures have lost their function but “new ways” have not yet been developed. rather, they “are still at best stuck at the drawing-board stage” (bauman, , in this special issue). currently, europe’s consciousness seems to end at its physical borders: for the last years europe has maintained its macabre status as the deadliest migration destination in the world. the deal reached between the european union (eu) and ankara, turkey, in march —which in exchange for an estimated billion euros resulted in the closure of the turkish border and the aegean route into europe—is celebrated by politicians as an agreement that solved the crisis. however, publicly available data demonstrate that the proportional death rates and massive loss of life in the mediterranean sea have been rising. in , alongside , , arrivals by sea or land, a registered , people died or went missing that year (united nations high commissioner for refugees [unhcr], ). the next year, , people died or went missing, while , people arrived, and as of december , , , people were registered as having arrived in europe by land and sea while an estimated , people have died or gone missing (international organization for migration [iom], ). according to sigona, the crisis trope and the framing of forced migrants as irregular migrants have “helped eu leaders to shift public attention from the causes that force people to flee their homes” ( , p. ). in recurrent news images, refugees waving eu flags walk along the motorways of hungary and austria. the images declare, “we share your respect for justice, freedom and human rights and here we are! we belong!” (anderson, , p. ), but are nonetheless met with silence, or worse. the lack of public outcry over the massive loss of life in the mediterranean sea, as ticktin notes, reveals migrant deaths to be “seemingly outside politics” and to leave “no space for the experiences of life” ( , p. ). the reality of the images is not a crisis belonging to europe, but a crisis experienced by individual human beings of all ages and walks of life who are forced to flee their homes. the traumatic experiences of refugees is further exacerbated because they meet with hostility, criticism, and rejection upon arriving in europe. in western media, the mass movement of forced migrants was only narrated as a crisis when refugees began traveling to europe, while larger numbers of forced migrants, including syrian refugees, had already been living in countries including lebanon, turkey, and egypt, sometimes for years. in europe, politicians and journalists all agreed that million newcomers in was “too many” for europe to handle. seen in context, this threshold was indicative of an ideolo- gical position premised upon exclusionary renderings of europeanism. the number could very well have been perceived as perfectly manageable if one thinks of it as being under “ . per cent of the eu population” (anderson, , p. ). europe’s looming demo- graphic decline and dropping birth-rate figures are other factors to be noted here. as georgiou and zabarowski ( ) note in their comparative study of cross-european news media, the news narratives about refugees arriving in europe changed from early onward, shifting from an initial tolerance and humanitarianism to militarization and securitization. the authors observe that particularly after the november attacks in popular communication paris, the “emotional, humane narrative surrounding the refugees and national citizens” shifted to a “relatively distant, emotionless framing” ( , p. ) across europe. following the terror attacks, migrants were increasingly framed as geopolitical dangers, without further contextualization, historical information, or the migrants’ own words and voices. weather metaphors like “flood,” “surge,” and “spillover” detached refugees from their individual or collective humanity (abid, abdul manan, & adul rahman, ), while metaphors such as opening “barn doors” framed refugees as animalized subjects (vaughan-williams, ). the uk independence party (ukip) pro-brexit campaign poster featured an image of a row of refugee men supposedly en route to germany. this poster included the heading “breaking point. the eu has failed us all.” as castles notes, the party leader nigel farage often made campaign appearances in front of the poster: “the image of the ‘strong, white leader’ standing in the way of a flood of desperate people—many of ‘middle eastern appearance’—threatening ‘our way of life’ helped shape public opinion in the uk” ( , p. ). akin to the campaign of the anti-immigrant politician geert wilders in the netherlands and donald trump’s racist lobbying in the united states, these practices are aimed at convincing voters that migrants and refugees are to blame for the decline of the welfare state and the lack of job opportunities. this development may be understood in the geopolitical context of the dehumanizing othering of refugees as a mass of non-white noncitizens, non-judeo-christian, nonsecular muslims and arabs, an influx of a brown mass of bodies consisting possibly of terrorists, radicalized, extremist others. contemporary mainstream europeanism displays the institutionalization of a “european apartheid” (balibar, , pp. – ). the “refugee crisis” is thus princi- pally also a racialized crisis: the migration and border regime draws on the colonial ethos of hierarchical sorting, ranking, and subordinating. this process is brutally organized to maintain the color line, and this is a racialized configuration that is “hardly acknowledged,” argues de genova, who compares how similar europeanism is to the lack of recognition of “black lives matter” in the united states (de genova, , p. ). the prolonged and renovated “european apartheid” stems from europe’s unwilling- ness to deal not only with its irreversible multicultural present but also with its colonial past. as hansen and jonsson have rightly pointed out, the history of europe has always excluded the colonies, even when they were officially still part of europe after : algeria as part of france until , the protectorate of somaliland under italian admin- istration (afis) until , angola and mozambique belonging to portugal until , suriname and the caribbean islands belonging to the netherlands until , and the western sahara as part of spain until . their wars of independence were seen as taking place not in europe, but displaced elsewhere, and therefore not damaging to the european project of peace and freedom (hansen & jonsson, ). the rewriting of european history is essential to the understanding of contemporary geopolitical shifts (ponzanesi, ). as balibar has recently written, the question of borders is not the only one that affects european identity, european destiny, or european projects. but, as he states, it is hardly separable from any of these ( ). the intellectual dimension of the latent conflicts in europe (syria; lampedusa in italy; libya; ukraine), show that history and geography are tightly intertwined in their political regimes: k. leurs and s. ponzanesi in each of the cases to which we can refer, it appears that borders have escaped the figure of linear demarcations more or less steadily inscribed in the territory by juridical and administrative means. they have become essentially mobile, and—as complex institutions themselves, which are contested from different sides—they extend their effects widely into the spaces that a conventional representation of europe identified as ‘internal’ and ‘external’. (balibar, , p. ) europe’s messy boundaries are becoming even messier, as the more distant eu territories still do not constitute any part of typical news media representations of the european union. the invisibility of these borders further points to the european union’s history and legacy of colonialism, of which these borders are active remains (hansen, ). bhambra suggests that the acknowledgment, or lack of acknowledgment, of europe’s colonial past continues to have implications for the inclusion and exclusion of countries and people in the european union today ( ) in terms of who belongs and who does not. the implications bear clear consequences for the implementation of militarized frontiers and increased securitization and surveillance beyond the clear con- fines of europe. gillespie, osseiran, and cheesman explore the “digital passage” to europe (forth- forthcoming)—the digitally mediated journeys of forced migrants across the mediterranean, which have become paradoxical trajectories, dialectically shaped top- down by such digital “infrastructures of movement of control” (latonero & kift, forth- coming), as well as bottom-up through refugees’ use of devices to manage rights, aspirations, liminality, and connectivity (leurs, ). the european “migration machine” (dijstelbloem, meijer, & besters, ) increasingly draws on intensified data collection and analysis for border control and migration management. this includes frontex, the european border and coast-guard agency, and the european border surveillance system (eurosur) that combines drones, reconnaissance aircrafts, offshore sensors, and satellite remote sensing to prevent “irregular migration” (european commission, ). asylum seekers are processed as machine-readable bodies through the collection of individual biometric data for storage in the european dactyloscopy (eurodac) database. social media trace data provide predictive analytics and are used to verify individual asylum claims and stories of flight. digital data sets are processed according to the big data ideology of algorithmic, enhanced, efficient, neutral, and objective decision making. the process of datafication masks human intervention and decisions that have configured the parameters of datafied decision making and discri- mination (leurs & shepherd, ). gillespie et al. (forthcoming) add further complex- ity to the notion of digital passages by placing it in dialogue with postcolonial critiques of the “middle passage” taken by slaves on transatlantic voyages. the “black atlantic” was shaped by those forcibly moved across the atlantic, constructing a space of hybrid, transnational black experience, within the constraints of unequal power hierarchies (gilroy, ). the digital passage then “concerns specially the power wielded by politicians, police and military personnel over refugees in determining their everyday existence, and their fate and future” (gillespie et al., forthcoming). thus, the “black mediterranean” (di maio, ) has become a sea of death (ponzanesi, ), which the ideological formation of european “white innocence” (danewid, ) renders invisible. popular communication it is not just a space of crossings and contaminations that rewrites european modernities from the location of the peripheries (chambers, ). sharma and nijjar scrutinize how the “racialized surveillance assemblage” severely impacts on the lives of muslim migrants in the united kingdom (forthcoming in this special issue). importantly, they signal that the push toward massive data mining has actually stifled efforts to identify terrorist threats. the uk prevent counterterrorism control machine and wider migration management and external border control mechan- isms are haunted by the “fear of unknowability.” mass surveillance has been normalized, resulting in a data deluge; however, terrorist prediction and detection rates are extremely low and the rate of false positives is enormous, wrongly accusing and breaching the human rights of many innocent civilians. this fear is further compounded by european orientalist perceptions of muslims as potentially dangerous abject, unknowable “others.” this paranoid racial surveillant assemblage (see also christensen, ) targeting the inscrutable other is also evident in the political rhetoric and news media attention paid to individuals assisting refugees during their journeys, but even more importantly to those returning europeans, particularly muslims, who have traveled to syria. for example, gavin williamson, the uk secretary of state for defense, noted that “british isis fighters should be hunted down and killed” (elgot, ). similarly, the united states, france, and australia have been noted as working with kill lists and collaborating on detecting and eliminating europeans and westerners in syria and iraq using special forces on the ground and coordinated drone strikes (dyer, ). the scholarship discussed in this section focused on top-down processes of social sorting, while in the next section we discuss studies that are oriented toward describing and explaining bottom-up meaning-making. they consider the ways in which connected migrants’ digital practices may offer an entry point to understand their everyday, situated negotiations across time and space. cosmopolitanism and encapsulation dana diminescu’s -year-old manifesto on the emergence of a new migrant figure, “the connected migrant” ( , ), remains a key source of inspiration for us, as is apparent from the title of our colloquium. rather than defining migrants solely on the basis of life experiences of disruption and uprooting, she innovatively made a plea to consider migrants’ mobility, media use, and space-making on a relational continuum: rather than in “twofold absence” (diminescu, , p. ) from one’s “home” country and “host” country, the use of digital technologies is indicative of the “portability of the networks of belonging” (diminescu, , p. ). connected migrants can maintain a sense of co-presence, of being “neither here nor there but here and there at the same time” (diminescu, , p. ). the urgency of the manifesto has not waned, particularly now as we are witnessing a proliferation of research on connected migrants, which commonly focuses either on encapsulating transnational or cosmopolitanizing local practices. on the level of transnational communication, researchers study the impact of digital technologies on maintaining diaspora communities, as well as family relations and friend- ships across distance. for example, scholars have researched the ways in which migrants resort to digital technologies for “transnational parenting” (madianou & miller, ), to maintain a sense of “digital togetherness” (marino, ), “ict-based co-presence” k. leurs and s. ponzanesi (baldassar, nedelcu, merla, & wilding, ), “virtual intimacies” (wilding, ), and “digital diasporas” (brinkerhoff, ; candidatu, leurs, & ponzanesi, forthcoming; everett, ; gajjala, ). the level of local intercultural practices remains somewhat understudied, but in this paradigm, researchers are studying the roles of social media and smartphone usage in processes of integration. the focus remains on digital technologies and practices of “intercultural adaptation” (chen, ) and “social inclusion” (andrade & doolin, ). alencar ( ) recently demonstrated the importance of social media use as one of the means to initiate intercultural contact between inhabitants of the netherlands and refugee newcomers, as well fostering improvements in language skills and the attainment of cultural competencies. however, we argue that either isolating transnational communication or focusing on local connections runs the risk of presenting those practices as dichotomous, incom- patible, or somehow mutually exclusive. furthermore, “homophily,” the assumption that “birds of a feather flock together” (boyd, , pp. – ), is popular among those who argue that transnational communication among non-elite migrants hinders integration and leads to segregation and radicalization (conversi, ). however, more attention is needed on highly mobile expatriates, who in particular have been found to draw on digital technologies in order to live a “geo-socially encapsulated” life (jansson, , pp. – ). we contend that encapsulating boundary-making and cosmopolitan boundary crossings happen simultaneously. digitally, migrants connect with members of the diaspora to maintain bonding capital, and they simultaneously develop bridging, cosmopolitan capital by networking with the host society (codagnone & kluzer, ). we theorize further how migrant connectivity revolves around the relational continuum of “encapsulation” and “cosmopolitanization” (christensen & jansson, a). rethinking the notion of encapsulation and cosmopolitanization is particularly relevant for rethinking cosmopolitan europe and the role migrants play in the re-articulation of its ethos (baban, ; beck & grande, ; bhambra, ; habermas, a). as bhambra argues, most normative accounts of european studies ignore the colonial and imperial histories that constitute the broader context of european integration. this means that “taking this history seriously would, at the very least, highlight the parochial nature of the cosmopolitan commitment presently at the heart of the european project and, perhaps more radically, provide the opportunity to develop a more inclusive and just postcolonial cosmopolitan project in europe” ( , pp. – ). this implies a revision not only of the notion of europe but also of cosmopolitanism and the position that migrants occupy in it. instead of a binary between encapsulation and cosmopolitanization, we would suggest a different connection to media and migration by foregrounding the notion of the “cosmopolitanism from below” that is the vernacular cosmopolitanism defined by homi bhabha in the contexts of british migrants and minorities ( ). bhabha develops his thesis of the vernacular cosmopolitanism moving onto those “who occupy marginal or minority positions within cultures and societies” (bhabha, , p. ). if there is a world community that is transnational and across boundaries, it is that of migrants, who have to adapt to new cultures and worlds, and translate the specifics of their original culture into the new generalities of assimilation and integration, to embrace a shared sense of civic virtues while preserving “language, food, festivals and religious customs.” bhabha ( , p. ) writes that popular communication it is this double life of british minorities that makes them vernacular cosmopolitans, translat- ing between cultures, renegotiating traditions from a position where ‘locality’ insists on its own terms, while entering into larger national and societal conversations. (p. ) this view is corroborated by schiller, tsypylma, and gruner-domic ( ), who argue: if cosmopolitanism is viewed as arising from social relationships that do not negate cultural, religious or gendered differences but see people as capable of relationships of experiential commonalities despite differences, then we have another lens through which to view and theorize social experiences. this perspective moves researchers beyond the binaries of inclu- sion vs. exclusion, sameness vs. difference. (p. ) hence, a cosmopolitan approach acknowledges that individuals are able to hold multiple ethnic, national, or religious belongings simultaneously (amelina & faist, ), drawing from different diasporic traditions without renouncing individual trajectories and collec- tive identifications. therefore, we could argue that the new cosmopolitans are actually the migrants, or the uprooted refugees and asylum seekers who move en masse and adapt to new cultures, languages, and systems of rights. hall has dedicated considerable attention to the diasporic roots of europe, and accounted for the outcome of this process as producing “cultures of hybridity,” since cultural identities are emerging that are in transition, drawing on different traditions while resisting wholesale assimilation (hall, ). these understandings of cosmopolitanisms have incorporated diversity within and allow for new visions of digitally connected migrants whose networks and relations co- construct multiple layered worlds between the local and the global. for example, in their work with karen refugee youth from burma in melbourne, australia, gifford and wilding note that they carve out “digital escapes” that are oriented toward both their homelands and their country of arrival, as well in between toward a global deterritorialized youth culture (gifford & wilding, ). in this special issue in his article on migrant gay men in belgium, dhoest problematizes the singular ethnic/racial axis interpretation that seems to underpin the continuum of connected migrants’ encapsulation and cosmopolitaniza- tion. his participants, a group of gay migrants distinctly located at the intersection of categories of difference, were “culturally cosmopolitan, but sexually rather encapsulated” (dhoest, ). as legal migrants to belgium with economic and symbolic capital, they were culturally cosmopolitan in line with their relatively privileged class positions, while simultaneously being encapsulated, not within ethnic diasporic communities, but within their families of choice, namely, as members of the lgbtq (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer) community. myria georgiou examines how migrants’ and refu- gees’ voices feature in the broader communicative structure of digital europe ( , in this special issue). the grass-roots and institutionalized platforms under study play a role in border power and contemporary boundary formation. on these platforms, refugees share their narratives, possibly in an attempt to invite europeans to see the world from their perspectives. georgiou assesses whether these discourses demarcate once again the new- comer as the encapsulated other or constitute a space where subalterns can not only voice themselves but also get heard. alongside rethinking migrant digital encapsulation and cosmopolitanization as a relational process, this special collection also seeks to provide an introduction to digital migration studies in europe more broadly. k. leurs and s. ponzanesi digital migration studies in this final section we elaborate the emerging field of digital migration studies. with the term digital migration, we refer to the expanding and intensifying roles digital technolo- gies play in migration processes, ranging from top-down governmentality and bottom-up practices of everyday meaning-making, discussed in the preceding sections. these phe- nomena cannot be confined within the borders of specialized academic disciplines. as a result, a multidisciplinary research focus is emerging that spans disciplines including media and communications, anthropology (zijlstra & van liempt, ), information studies (maitland & xu, ), psychology (chen, ), human rights (leurs, ), sociology (damian & van ingen, ), migration and refugee studies (harney, ), and postcolonialism (ponzanesi & leurs, ), among others. the emergence of the field of digital migration studies is marked by the increased circulation of academic buzzwords including “e-diasporas” (diminescu, ), “mediating migration” (hegde, ), and “migrant polymedia” (madianou & miller, ), alongside other concepts noted in the previous section. more recently, digital migration studies seek to capture the situation of refugees and asylum seekers, (unhcr, ) and, in this area, the following concepts are gaining currency: the difficulties refugees have in negotiating bureaucracies and situations of “information precarity” (wall, campbell, & janbek, ), refugees’ desire for “becom- ing (im)perceptible (witteborn, ), risks of “networked authoritarianism” (moss, ) experienced within, for example, the syrian diaspora, and the workings of algorithmic governmentality through “digital deportability” (trimikliniotis, parsanoglou, & tsianos, ). the three words—digital migration studies—that we use to identify an emerging field demand critical interrogation. first, there are new opportunities to study migration by means of the internet and digital tools, but the digital should not be fetishized. rather, digital technologies can serve a broader purpose an entry point to a critical human- centered and social justice-oriented research endeavor. we draw inspiration from the work of pink et al., who offer a valuable critique of “digital-media-centric-ness” (pink et al., , pp. – ). rather than foregrounding specific information and communica- tion technology (ict) systems, platforms, devices, tools, or data sets, digital technologies cannot be understood in isolation from offline, material, social, cultural, political, eco- nomic, and emotional factors. second, on the topic of migration, critical migration scholars have aptly demonstrated that categories such as “forced migrant,” “asylum seeker,” “refugee,” “economic migrant,” “expat,” and so on are not neutral, empty vessels, but performative social categorizations that have serious material consequences (sigona, ; anderson, ). digital migration researchers too play an important role in challenging in the era of big data what, how, where, and why boundaries between categories are drawn, and we should make serious efforts to avoid perpetuating power- ridden categorization logics. rather than offering generalizations and making universal claims about groups of people, we should work toward relational understandings, for example, of economic and forced migration motives that are not mutually exclusive but exist in a continuum, and scholarly renderings of individuals and communities should acknowledge diversity, dynamism, and complexity. third, on the level of knowledge production, there is an important genealogy to what is now called digital migration studies that needs to be acknowledged. popular communication three paradigms with diverging theoretical and methodological approaches can be recognized in the scholarship on migrants, diasporas, and transnationalism from the s onward: (a) “migrants in cyberspace”; (b) “everyday digitally mediated migrant life”; and (c) “migrants as data” (candidatu et al., forthcoming). the first paradigm emerged from the initial utopian celebrations of cyberspace and virtuality among internet studies scholars in the s as a distinctive, libertarian space. scholars explored whether digital networks could offer migrants alternative means to assert their voice, stake out their identity, and engage in community formation. over time, the technological- determinist celebration of new possibilities subsided. for example, bernal in her work on eritrean online activities works toward “grounding cyberspace” by understanding that the “internet is not primarily a product of science and technology but rather a cultural medium where social texts and cultural artifacts are produced and circulated” ( , p. ). the second paradigm focuses on “everyday digitally mediated migrant life,” and scholars operating within this space argue against “self-enclosed cyberian apartness,” and champion instead an understanding of the internet as “continuous with and embedded in other social space” (miller & slater, , p. ). illustratively, hirata studied inequalities experienced among migrants in south-east asia by conducting multisited ethnographies at internet cafés in singapore, thailand, the philippines, and taiwan ( ). the third paradigm, “migrants as data,” has emerged in the broader context of the recent boom in data gathering, aggregation, and computational analysis. however, before big data was big, diminescu blazed a trail with the large scale e-diasporas atlas project, which consists of a longitudinal mapping of e-diaspora communities and more than , migrant websites (diminescu, ). since the outset, digital studies on migration have tended to avoid the “digital positivism” of big data (fuchs, ), which is particularly important given the risk of data-driven generalizations and oversimplifications that reproduce violent categorizations of communities and individuals. illustrating the impact of the “everyday digitally mediated migrant life” paradigm, saskia witteborn’s contribution in this special issue draws from extensive in-depth inter- views and participant observation conducted in germany between and (witteborn, ). focusing on the situated experiences of two key female informants, witteborn combines interviews with observations of their routines negotiating urban settings, accommodations, and rooms, as well as their engagement with technologies, social media, and mobile phones. revisiting this contextually rich historical data (predat- ing the so-called “european refugee crisis”), the author untangles how gender and technology norms mutually constitute experiences and imaginaries of living in an asylum bureaucracy system. roopika risam, in her article, presents an affirmative critique of the “migrants as data” paradigm from the perspective of postcolonial digital humanities (risam, ). her quantitative textual analysis concerns news media articles on refugees talking selfies from the united states and united kingdom. articles typically feature photos of refugees taking selfies, rather than including the selfies taken by refugees themselves in their narratives. she combines sentiment analysis with a theorization of the refugee selfie to explore to what extent the refugees’ selfie-taking practice presents alternative possibilities for representation needed to reclaim subjectivity, gaze, and agency. sharma and nijjar further problematize the logics of knowability that shapes the “migrants as data” paradigm. they emphasize that algorithms can and do exacerbate inequalities and injustices experienced by migrant groups. unpacking the example of the k. leurs and s. ponzanesi paranoid racialized surveillant assemblage in the united kingdom, they show algorithm- driven approaches to measurable islamic-terrorist-suspect types as “discernable objects of knowledge” that affirm biopolitical dichotomies based on fixed racialized phenotypical features (sharma & nijjar, ). this article can thus also be read as an open invitation to digital migration scholars to address more widely the discriminatory workings of algo- rithmic social sorting. in order to remain aware of the ways in which categorizations and data-driven decision making impact upon populations, reverse-engineering algorithms will increasingly have to be a part of our critical toolkit. the three paradigms briefly outlined here coexist simultaneously, and researchers increasingly combine these multiple paradigms. for example, alinejad et al. (forthcoming) combine in-depth fieldwork with digital-data driven approaches to research romanian, somali, and turkish women in amsterdam, london, and rome, as well as connections with their homelands. they have taken the distinctly situated case of the turkish–dutch girl bade Çakır, who was diagnosed with childhood acute lymphocytic leukemia and around whom an online campaign was mobilized to find matching stem cells on time. they use this case to develop the method of producing “mattering maps.” these combine a critical awareness of digital media practices in migrants’ lived experiences and attention to the circulation of digital traces of these practices across social media platforms. incorporating elements from the three paradigms already mentioned may allow digital connections and social meanings to be valued as relationally constructed and the dyna- mism of political mobilization and diasporic formation to be captured in its complexity. finally, embracing their distinct pros and cons as well as opportunities and limitations will allow digital migration studies scholars to theorize the specific findings and situatedness of their own research exercises. conclusions: beyond connected refugees in this special issue, we seek to move beyond the fetishization of the smartphone- carrying, selfie-taking, connected refugee by deconstructing this categorization and acknowledging that individuals and communities are complex and multilayered, and function in a broader context of historical, cultural, and geopolitical causes, patterns, and aspirations. notions of encapsulation and cosmopolitanism are not unidirectional. by stating that plurality coexists within a renewed notion of cosmopolitanism from below, we have proposed an intervention in “cosmopolitan europe” from the perspec- tive of deep time. the histories of colonialism have multiple refractions in our current multicultural present (ponzanesi, forthcoming). in contrast with contemporary europeanism, this is a cosmopolitanism that accommodates differences without doing away with the notion of equality, justice, and common humanity. it is based on the predicament that bruce robbins has so cogently expressed as “if we agree that there is ‘no easy generalization,’ don’t we want to retain the right to difficult generalization?” (robbins, , p. , emphasis in original). the “connected migrant” inaugurated by dana diminescu ( , ) has very much redirected the field of digital migration studies toward rethinking cosmopolitanism as an everyday practice that helps in a “banal” way to overcome the unsustainable divide between online and offline, local and global, encapsulation and cosmopolitanization. these banal ways are understood differently from beck’s notion of “banal popular communication cosmopolitanism” ( ). for ulrick beck, the distinction between cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitanization emerges due to the fact that the latter affects modern society at large typically in “banal” ways (beck, ), in neo-liberal manifestations of economic cosmo- politanism that nobody can escape. this is particularly the case for those more vulnerable subjects (robbins, ). therefore, we have to take into account how, in this increasingly interconnected world, mediation and mediatization bring with them new forms of cos- mopolitanism and cosmopolitization (christensen & jansson, b; georgiou, ) that need to be accounted for and articulated from subaltern positions as well. these subaltern positions are central in notions of digital diasporas that allow for difference within sameness, creating a cosmopolitanism that is both part of this digital turn in migration studies and a revision of the cosmopolitanism from below as argued above. as christensen and jansson write, “the media are tools for sharing knowledge, making connections and stitching together our everyday lives in time and space … they are tools for communication and co-constitute ecologies of communication” ( b, p. ). this idea of cosmopolitanism is aspirational and has still not fulfilled its potential. as noted by bauman, cosmopolitanism is not just a theory, a normative ideal, but a practice, a way of life. the current refugee crisis has put to dire test europe’s self- proclaimed identity premised upon shared cosmopolitan values. this is a cosmopolitan- ism under erasure, but one that we “cannot not want.” to close with his words: in other words, just as the proof of the pudding is in the eating, the proof of the conversation as the royal road to mutual understanding, reciprocated regard and even- tually agreement (even if only an agreement reduced to ‘agreeing to disagree’) is in entering it and conducting it with a view to jointly negotiating the obstacles bound to arise in the course. whatever the obstacles, and however immense they might seem, conversation will remain the royal road to agreement and so to peaceful and mutually beneficial, cooperative and solidary coexistence simply because it has no competitors and so no viable alternative. (bauman, , p. , emphasis in original) acknowledgments this special issue presents findings first presented during the “connected migrants” academy colloquium and masterclasses that took place december – , at the royal netherlands academy of arts and science (knaw) in amsterdam, the netherlands (https://www.knaw.nl/en/ news/calendar/academy-colloquium-connected-migrants). we are grateful for the financial and administrative support provided by the knaw, and in particular we thank martine wagenaar for her unwavering assistance. we valued the collaboration with imre kleinlugtenbelt and her colleagues from the imagine ic museum. thank you, madhuri prabhakar and ena omerović, for your support, and for documenting the event by interviewing our invited speakers. video portraits are available at http://connectingeuropeproject.eu. funding the authors disclose receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article and editing of the special issue: the netherlands organisation for scientific research (nwo) veni grant “young connected migrants. comparing digital practices of young asylum seekers and expatriates in the netherlands,” project reference - - ( – ), and the erc (european research council) consolidator grant “digital crossings in europe: gender, diaspora and belonging” (connectingeurope), grant . k. leurs and s. ponzanesi https://www.knaw.nl/en/news/calendar/academy-colloquium-connected-migrants https://www.knaw.nl/en/news/calendar/academy-colloquium-connected-migrants http://connectingeuropeproject.eu references abid, r. z., abdul manan, s., & adul rahman, z. 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( ). smart(phone) travelling: understanding the use and impact of mobile technology on irregular migration journeys. international journal of migration and border studies, ( – ), – . k. leurs and s. ponzanesi https://www.ad.nl/buitenland/waarom-nemen-die-vluchtelingen-steeds-selfies% ea caf e / https://www.ad.nl/buitenland/waarom-nemen-die-vluchtelingen-steeds-selfies% ea caf e / https://www.knaw.nl/en/news/calendar/academy-colloquium-connected-migrants https://www.knaw.nl/en/news/calendar/academy-colloquium-connected-migrants http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://www.unhcr.org/afr/news/latest/ / / d b /million-sea-arrivals-reach-europe- .html http://www.unhcr.org/afr/news/latest/ / / d b /million-sea-arrivals-reach-europe- .html http://www.unhcr.org/connectivity-for-refugees.html 	abstract 	introduction 	the “refugee crisis” and conflicting europeanisms 	cosmopolitanism and encapsulation 	digital migration studies 	conclusions: beyond connected refugees 	acknowledgments 	funding 	references raced markets: an introductioni lisa tilley and robbie shilliam, queen mary university of london abstract the central consensus among the scholars, artists, and activists who came together for the first raced markets workshop in december is that ‘race’ may have begun as fiction, an invention of europeans in the service of colonisation, however, the fiction of race became material over time, producing, and in turn being produced by, the manifold raced markets of the global political economy. since that original workshop, and against a consolidated neoliberal capitalist context, the political rise of fascistic movements has intensified across the globe. our collective provocation here is that this current conjuncture cannot be explained with reference to the exceptional intrusion of racism, nor with reference to the epiphenomenal status of race in relation to political economy more broadly nor neoliberalism more specifically. instead we urge for the examination of how race functions in structural and agential ways, integrally reproducing raced markets and social conditions. our introduction opens this conversation for new political economy readers, positioning neoliberalism and the current conjuncture as the present political economic moment to be understood through a raced market frame of analysis, and surveying the original research articles emerging from the collaborative project. our hope is that this new political economy special issue will be read as a timely intervention referencing a long tradition of – often marginalised – thought attending to race as productive and material, rather than confined to the ideological realm. “[t]he economic substructure is also a superstructure. the cause is the consequence; you are rich because you are white, you are white because you are rich.” (fanon : ) in june of , an immense fire in grenfell tower, a predominantly social-housing high-rise block in north kensington, west london, claimed the lives of seventy-one victims, according to the official register (guardian a). those who lost their lives in the grenfell block were mainly black and minority ethnic members of the most impoverished section of london’s metropolitan population (guardian b; el-enany ). the grenfell disaster itself owes much to neoliberal urbanism: a lacklustre attention to regulations; a deficit of accountability from arms-length tenant management organisations whose practices include outsourcing renovations to the lowest bidder; and a wider context of gentrification and the steady diminution of social-housing stock in one of london’s richest (and most unequal) boroughs (prescod and renwick ). more specifically, however, the grenfell disaster also starkly demonstrates the extent of the racialisation of uk housing policy. from the late s onwards, black and minority ethnic residents in britain have been relatively more likely than their white counterparts to live in ill- suited, poor-quality accommodation owing to the increasingly raced nature of housing markets (henderson and karn ; institute of race relations n.d.). yet this picture is not entirely peculiar to the british context, and in many respects the residential conditions of grenfell tower are broadly representative of a global reality in which the racialised ‘others of europe’ remain largely impoverished, spatially marginalised, and excluded from dignified housing in cities across the world (el-enany ; see also chakravartty & silva ). a year prior to the grenfell fire, following a ‘leave’ campaign structured around racial imaginaries of reclaimed sovereignty voiced as “taking our country back,” a majority of participating british voters opted to withdraw the united kingdom from its membership of the european union. the defining moments of the leave campaign included the daylight murder of member of parliament and anti-racism campaigner jo cox by white supremacist thomas mair (guardian a), and the unveiling of a uk independence party (ukip) campaign poster featuring a vast crowd of mainly syrian asylum seekers, overlaid with the text “breaking point, the eu has failed us all. we must break free of the eu and take back control of our borders” (guardian b). in the immediate aftermath of the vote, anti-immigration sentiment intensified and translated into violent racist and xenophobic abuse, not only against people of colour, and especially muslim women, who consistently suffer racism under ‘normal’ conditions, but also against white polish and any foreign-accented individual presumed to be non-british (independent ). in the aftermath, and despite neoliberalism being implemented most vigorously by her own political party, the new prime minister theresa may made the claim that neoliberalism itself was not working for all citizens. by way of response she shifted the discourse of her post-brexit government towards claims to serve the “ordinary working class” (may ). in line with this way of thinking, it has become conventional wisdom that the ‘white working class’ who are ‘left behind’ by neoliberalism should be the central political focus if right-populism is to be countered. as much as brexit appeared to be driven by an inward-looking, nation-focused movement, some of the key conservative architects and supporters of brexit were in fact old thatcherites and atlanticists (see worth ). indeed, much of the brexit panorama was then reflected across the atlantic in images of trump’s presidential campaign. his promises to “make america great again” formed a similar appeal to fictional histories; his surprise electoral college win left analysts in collective shock and emboldened far-right elements in society to unleash a wave of racist violence; and his immediate fascistic executive orders have negated any expressed hopes that office would somehow moderate him. hillary clinton’s seemingly unlikely loss against trump has also been attributed to the retaliation of ‘politics’ against the false promise that neoliberal economic rationality would deliver for all. critics have taken this further to blame the democratic party’s embrace of neoliberalism and the failures of this doctrine to distribute resources specifically to the ‘white working class’ of rustbelt america. in the contexts of both brexit and trump, then, race and class both returned crudely to the central focus of academic and media analysis, with the plight of an ill-defined ‘white working class’ deployed as the economic rationale for (elite-led) populist political projects (see bhambra ). race and neoliberalism in political economy the cascade of events outlined above warrants a sustained response from scholars of critical political economy. but is any response to the current crises of neoliberalism adequate if it does not engage seriously with race? in reality, the student of political economy might easily pass through undergraduate, postgraduate, and doctoral study without ever being asked to reflect on the political economy of race. even as extensive critical work has closely treated the ways in which gender and class ‘work’ in our economies, race and its productions and functions in, through and alongside political economy has been accorded relatively less critical attention in teaching and scholarship. this is despite the existence of a wealth of literature by racialised and colonised intellectuals from w. e. b. du bois to frantz fanon, and from sylvia wynter to angela davis to cedric robinson, and despite the many sustained engagements with the political economy of race within fields such as sociology, history, education, gender studies and black studies. in contrast, neoliberalism itself has been thoroughly examined by critical political economists through a multitude of positions. some scholars have focused upon material understandings of the systemic organisation of the global political economy supported by defined and measurable economic policies. others have developed more amorphous and discursive understandings of neoliberalism as a particular form of rationality which has gradually come to inflect relations at almost every social scale. indeed, it is not an exaggeration to say that what currently defines critical political economy is the critique of neoliberalism. genealogies of neoliberalism in more materialist readings (for example, van der pijl & yurchenko ; gill ; harvey ) often trace how such ideas gained ground against corporate liberalism in the s and s. the latter involved capital’s compromise with organised labour, along with the development of a nominally redistributive welfare state, and ultimately formed a broader system of liberalism made up of smaller units – states, unions, etc – which were still organised internally along non-market lines. in this narrative, neoliberalism began as little more than an abstract doctrine emphasising the production of prosperity through free markets and free trade underpinned by secured property rights. the very first experiments in putting this neoliberal doctrine into practice were instigated in pinochet’s chile – under violent force rather than democratic consensus – by theodore schultz and other members of the “chicago boys,” a group of economists trained at the university of chicago under milton friedman (fischer ). it was through the dynamic agency of the chicago boys, and under the brutal dictatorship of pinochet, that chile became the principle global south site of experimentation, a laboratory for what had previously been imagined in economists’ lecture theatres, put into practice by means of a drastic reorganisation of the relationship between capital, labour, and the state. in the north atlantic, a concert of figures in high offices had a hand in replicating elements of this chilean experiment: volcker as the head of the us federal reserve led changes to monetary policy from ; while margaret thatcher’s prime ministership of britain from the same year and ronald reagan’s presidency of the us from both oversaw liberalisation, financialisation, and deregulation across a range of industries. the state’s role was transformed to that of securer and defender of property rights, as well as prime market-maker, but otherwise it was claimed to be largely non-interventionist in the functioning of markets themselves. reaching beyond this story, and beyond the analysis of policy and the formal role of the state in scholarship on neoliberalism, has become a core concern of a growing body of academic literature. scholars working along one prominent critical edge of political economy (for example, de goede ; aitken ; larner ) have been very much informed by post-structural understandings of the genealogy and character of neoliberalism, perhaps elaborated in most comprehensive detail by wendy brown ( ). in brown’s understanding, neoliberalism describes a particular mode of reason which resonates well beyond the scope of neoliberal policy itself (brown ). within this mode of reason, which radiates continually to an ever-wider sphere of social life, all actions come to be understood as market conduct, and all political domains come to be understood as marketplaces. the neoliberal economisation of conduct makes measurable any aspect of life which can be reinterpreted through metrics and quantified in economic terms. central to brown’s critique is her concern for the anti-democratic nature of this broad economisation of life in all of its aspects. even the retraction of neoliberal policies, she argues, effected through, say, the redistribution of wealth, significant investment in health and education, regulation of banks, and the rejuvenation of industrial policy, would not in themselves signify an end to the kind of neoliberal reason which brown believes is corrosive to liberal democracy. in the final analysis, brown understands neoliberalism to be a pervasive rationality which is fundamentally in contradiction with, and corrosive of, liberal democracy, rather than necessarily emerging from it. importantly, and to take this further, brown also conveys a sense that neoliberalism is essentially held in an inverse relationship to fascism, and was birthed specifically as a reaction to fascism in the s and s, even as she concedes that elements of the latter are often mirrored in neoliberal regimes. the political economist william davies ( : xiii) engages the present on these terms, understanding the trump and brexit movements to be: popular movements diametrically opposed to the economic common sense that has held sway in the uk and us since the s. these movements are fervently anti- neoliberal, not in the sense that they rest on a coherent critique of monetarism, say, or a specific ambition to regulate markets differently. but inasmuch as neoliberalism embeds particular forms of economic rationality (overseen by economic experts) as the governing principles of nearly all public policy, the very fact that this rationality (and those experts) are being defied or ignored is evidence that something has come unstuck. it is, in part, this kind of “revenge of politics on economics” (ibid: xiv) understanding of the present moment and the presentation of neoliberalism as being in an inverse relation with fascistic politics that this special issue asks us to confront on a deeper level of analysis. overall, there may be very little in common across all of the accounts surveyed above with respect to the character and scope of neoliberalism; whether it emerges fluidly out of liberal democracy or can be understood as exterior to it, eroding it from the outside; and whether the current brexit/trump movements represent a ‘politics against economics’ counter-revolution or, by contrast, represent the fusion of populist politics with neoliberal economics. however, as discordant as these scholarly understandings of neoliberalism may be, they do all bear a clear common characteristic which can be expressed in terms of an absence: none affords analytical importance to ‘race’ in its analysis of the neoliberal episteme. within neither the brown nor davies texts does ‘race’ even appear prominently enough to be an indexed term, and the same can be said for david harvey’s substantial works on neoliberalism. we would suggest that this reticence to attribute a constitutive character to race in critical political economy arises, in part, from the legacies of scientific racism. in effect, to claim a “materiality” on behalf of race risks falling into a eugenicist position. in his influential explanation of thatcherism – and nascently, neoliberalism - stuart hall ( ) consigned race to the ideological dimension of capitalist crisis. this positioning worked, perhaps against his intentions, to entrench a divide between class as materiality and race as ideology. yet we would argue that race cannot be reduced to an ideology of racism. rather, race must be apprehended as a mode of classifying, ordering, creating and destroying people, labour power, land, environment and capital; race precedes scientific racism by some centuries. in hermeneutical terms, race even precedes class in assembling all the elements that marx would come to call the “world market” (see especially robinson ). as such, we broadly make the case that unless we understand the racial ordering system which has been continuous, yet morphing in form, from colonialism, through fascism, liberalism, neoliberalism and into the present moment of fascist resurgence, then our analyses of each of these movements will only ever be partial. the word ‘race’ or its equivalent in various european languages was originally used to refer to types of plants or animals classified according to common traits. however, in the iberian context in which the expulsion of the moors and jews from the peninsula overlapped with violent colonial incursions in the americas, the word ‘raza’ was ambiguated from another use in medieval castilian denoting a ‘defect’, for example as in a stain or erroneous thread in woven cloth. christians were in possession of limpieza de sangre or ‘clean blood’ and raza came to refer to the negative stain or defect which marked the blood of jews especially, but also moors and ‘heathens’ (see for example twinam ). from this association with religion, itself biologically described, race has since gradually shifted in meaning in relation to religion, culture, blood, epidermis and gene across the centuries of colonialism, scientific racism, and the formal dismantling of such systems. fundamentally, race has been vital to european constructions of the proper political and economic subject, developed in relation to european colonial endeavours. sylvia wynter ( ) traces the secularisation of the european figure of ‘man’ in relation to race through homo politicus – the state’s political subject – to homo oeconomicus – the ‘rational’ investor and consumer figure who is, she argues, “ethnoclassed” as a wealthy western approximation in the present. race as hierarchised difference was thus invented for, and globalised through, european colonial domination and in direct relation to this secularising figure of man. most crucially, race has firmly defined the ‘extrahuman’, those excluded from the frames of the human and therefore excluded from norms of ethical treatment. still today, argues wynter, the ethnoclassed homo oeconomicus is represented as the human itself, and the material struggle is between man and those defined as outside of man as the proper economic subject. when the historical evidence is surveyed, it becomes clear that race has been integral to centuries of colonisation in the service of dispossession, extraction, and enslavement, and continues to play a role in the ordering of accumulation and impoverishment in the present. three scholarly foci on race and neoliberalism in light of a confrontation of colonial histories and their bearing on the present, it becomes conceivable that race has the same kind of materiality as class does in constituting the hierarchies and eviscerations of the “social” (see, usefully, chakravartty and silva ; mccarthy ; gilmore ). perhaps, even, race and class are historically conjoined, as the guide quote above from fanon proposes. accepting such a possibility thereby prompts us to consider neoliberalism as a raced market. in fact, within political economy, but especially outside of the field proper, there exists a significant body of work which enquires into the co-constitutive relationship between race, racism, and neoliberalism. for our present purposes we can identify three prominent foci in this scholarship. the first addresses the way in which neoliberal ideologies and policy designs have sought to erase the imbrication of power in the production and regulation of public spaces at the same time as personalising agency into an individual calculus of rational behaviouralism evidenced by “choice” making. by erasing the obvious presence of power and individualising agency, neoliberalism has been complicit in the creation of “colourblindness”. in fine, race has been reduced to individual prejudice – i.e. racism – at the same time as public space and public goods are no longer organized and provided along viscerally and explicitly racialised lines. instead, structural racialized inequalities in life chances are explained by behavioural deficits, a reductive strategy that itself draws upon historical racist stereotypes of the deserving and undeserving poor. in other words, neoliberalism can be said to have radically increased the obfuscation of race from the economy, that is, the racialized division of labour, wealth accumulation, property ownership, environmental degradation, and global debt (see bonilla-silva ; giroux ; goldberg ; spence ). a second focus examines shifting migration and population patterns both within neoliberal states and across the global neoliberal economy. since the s, migration flows have not only reproduced old colonial routes between “peripheries” and “metropoles”; capital accumulation as well as unskilled and skilled labour demands have carved out new routes drawing in to the global north peoples from the once soviet-controlled eastern europe, and the asia pacific. additionally, the destabilizations resulting from over years of the global war on terror have propelled the exodus of millions of peoples from their homelands across the middle east, afghanistan, the sahel and north-east africa. some actors have used the “refugee crisis” to politicize migration per se as a threat to social stability. further, from a quotidian and grass-roots practice of conviviality, the idea of ‘multiculturalism’ has been co-opted by neoliberal states as an instrument to discipline and manage population groups along racialized lines, all the while depressing labour conditions in general (melamed ; lentin and titley ; gomberg-muñoz ). in short, neoliberalism articulates immigration strategies of community cohesion with neo-imperial strategies of national exclusion (kapoor ). a third focus explores recent ideological reactions to neoliberalism on the part of the racial majorities of the global north. neoliberal policies were heavily implicated in the destruction of racialized compacts that mediated the struggles between state, labour and business, thereby structurally positioning a “white working class” in relatively more secure and well-paid skilled- manual jobs than non-white labourers. the nineteenth century notion of the “residuum” – the “left behind” – has over the past ten years been resurrected in order to capture the resentment felt by those who believe themselves to be displaced by newcomers. ideologues of the “left behind” have pointed to a positive record of anti-discrimination legislation in contrast to the deepening of inequalities and life-chances amongst “indigenous” working classes (haylett ; sveinsson ; roediger ; griffith and glennie ). some critical political economists have implicitly ascribed to this critique by positing “race” as identity politics in opposition to “class” as structural inequality. yet other scholars have drawn attention to the historical racism imputed into pre-neoliberal welfare systems, and thus employ the “left behind” sentiment in terms of a relative decline of white labour’s positionality (neubeck and cazenave ; davis ; soss, fording, and schram ; virdee ). a critical evaluation of the moral weight and analytical purchase of the “white working class” as a constituency is obviously extremely salient. overview of raced markets contributions the contributors to this special issue variously address the three foci outlined above; but they also go further to introduce new questions and problematise existing issue areas concerning race and political economy. opening this curated collection of research articles, matthew watson’s contribution on crusoe, friday and the raced market frame of orthodox economics textbooks, considers the import and translation of the white, colonising crusoe character into the central homo oeconomicus figure of standard economics textbooks. watson traces how a colonial novelist’s imperial fantasy centred on the exploitative, hierarchical relation between crusoe and friday – the first with his white colonist’s absolute claim on property and the second as the character commodified into property by means of enslavement – came to be de-raced and abstracted from its original racialised and extractive power relation within the pedagogical device of the textbook crusoe economy. the article sheds light on how the early marginalists – whose innovations continue to shape the form of mainstream economic thinking today – came to be so captivated by the crusoe figure. for these economists, crusoe’s desert island setting, seemingly without metropole or hinterland, was convenient for the way early marginalist economists committed to understanding economic relations in isolation from a wider imperial setting, whereas the commodified figure of friday, on whose labour crusoe’s accumulation is dependent, was decidedly inconvenient. within marginalist thought, watson details, constrained maximisation problems became understood to be solved by individuals removed from social relations of power; solo characters engaged in a straightforward “game against nature”. out of this mode of thought, the model of market exchange remains to this day based implicitly on a fictitious coloniser, imagined to be socially islanded as well as geographically marooned with the racialised and commodified enslaved human on which his accumulation is dependent entirely disavowed. ultimately, watson’s article cautions us to look again at the raced market frame of today’s economic thought and urges that the theory of market exchange itself should be dismantled by means of the “decolonising spirit.” although attending to a much longer genealogy of economic thought, watson’s article speaks to the ways in which race is obfuscated from the economy as in the first body of scholarship we identify above. ros williams and sibille merz address the complexities of ‘race’ and ‘science’ as they meet in the present context of the raced markets of genes and cells in an article entitled ‘we all have a responsibility to each other’: valuing racialised bodies in the neoliberal bioeconomy. despite the fact that many decades have passed since ‘race’ was proven not to correspond to any real biological correlate, williams and merz appeal for us to shift analytical scale down to the level of genes and cells in order to demonstrate how ‘race’ has returned as ‘science’ in the context of bioscientific economies. this co-authored article takes clinical trials for pharmaceuticals in the us context in comparative perspective with stem cell transplantation in the uk in order to reveal how racial taxonomies have returned in the economic ordering of genetic matter in scientific markets. against a broader social context in which black life is undervalued to the extent that “black lives matter” has become one of the central social justice calls of our time, the article analyses how not only racialised bodies, but also racialised tissue and cells ‘matter’ and are valorised in the lab in a different way to ‘white’ genes and cells. within these neoliberal biomarkets, however, the individuated, and presumed transparent, figure of homo oeconomicus, whom we know to be characteristic of neoliberalism, is not straightforwardly identifiable. these markets ultimately function, not through the centring of the individual, but rather through an appeal to a racialised collective, the members of which are presented as bearing a debt of responsibility to one another. in this sense, the functioning of biomarkets very much complicates the analysis within the body of literature which seeks to demonstrate the obfuscation of race in neoliberal markets. ultimately, the authors show how an ethical appeal to a raced community, understood as morally indebted to one another, has become central to raced biomarkets which produce value out of difference. in their article, colonialism, postcolonialism and the liberal welfare state, bhambra and holmwood set up their analysis against standard accounts of the welfare politics of the present in which a contemporary “failure of solidarity” in the context of a perceived increase in immigration is understood to have diminished the social pact necessary for a welfare state to properly function. in contrast with such presentist accounts, bhambra and holmwood argue that such a failure of solidarity is written into the logic of the welfare state on account of its colonial origins which structured systems of racialised and hierarchical ordering. such ordering systems continue to determine who has access to social and political benefits and who is excluded from such access. focusing on liberal welfare regimes in the us and uk in particular, bhambra and holmwood build what they refer to as a “deeper historical sociology of coloniality” which accounts for the formative events and contexts which still inform the character of welfare today. the authors focus in particular on the claim, traced back to the work of polanyi and esping- anderson, that non-market welfare provision represents the decommodification of claims to income beyond standard claims derived from capital or labour. instead, bhambra and holmwood argue, commodification is already racialised, as the long centuries of enslavement are testament to. as such, labour power sold as a commodity should be understood as already partially decommodified away from the form in which the enslaved labourer herself is the commodity. this article makes a significant contribution to the third body of literature we outline above which performs a re-reading of the history of political economy in relation to the urgency of the political present. in his article entitled racism and far-right imaginaries within neoliberal political economy, richard saull examines the complex racialised effects of neoliberalism prior to, within, and beyond, the contexts of brexit and trump. contra the presentation of neoliberalism by some of its advocates as ‘post-racial’ or ‘colour blind’ – centred on the presumed transparent, individuated figure of economic man – or even as a system which works to erase racism altogether, saull’s paper draws attention to forms of racialisation produced within neoliberal contexts. the neoliberal racialisation of welfare and incarceration, for example, are identifiable alongside the white anxiety generated in relation to the constant production of insecurities under a neoliberal system, selectively figured by the far-right as those socioeconomically “left behind” as economic justification for their political project. saull’s historical method allows him to trace the development of far-right politics in the context of liberalism from the nineteenth century onwards, with close attention paid to the changing racialised exclusions produced over time within liberal democracy. he follows this with an examination of the contemporary reproduction of racism within the context of neoliberalism, combined with the somewhat counterintuitive reproduction of the hegemony of neoliberalism by means of racialised political imaginaries. in the final analysis, saull demonstrates the ways in which racism is central to neoliberal political economy, not only in the reproduction of exclusions long produced by colonialism and liberalism, but also in the ways racist politics become particularly pronounced in moments of structural crisis. overall, saull sympathetically complicates conversations within the first group of debates we outline above on neoliberalism and the obfuscation of race; while also adding to the archive on the politics of migration flows and pressing debates around the ‘white working class’. in her article detroit’s municipal bankruptcy: racialized geographies of austerity sarah phinney makes a compelling argument for understanding the subprime crisis and subsequent municipal bankruptcy in detroit as raced events. correcting the de-raced understandings of austerity urbanism by critical urban geographers, phinney demonstrates how expenditure cuts and restructuring at the urban scale have been enacted at the expense of the racialised urban poor. as such, the article makes a substantial contribution to the first body of literature we identify on the neoliberal obfuscation of race. further, phinney’s analysis demonstrates that race is implicated in urban austerity on at least three levels. in terms of the causes of the crisis, the credit-redlining and subsequent super- inclusion into credit markets of spatially divided racialised communities cannot be overlooked in any serious analysis of the subprime event. in terms of the blame apportioned, detroit’s bankruptcy was discursively attached to city pensioners and the racialised poor by means of the ‘delinquent taxpayer’ narrative. finally, analysis of the effects of municipal bankruptcy, demonstrates that the racialised urban poor were disproportionate victims of subsequent water shut-offs in the city. ultimately, phinney’s attention to how race figures across the cause, blame, and effects of urban bankruptcy in detroit demonstrates the need for increased analytical attention to articulations of neoliberalism and race at the urban scale. finally, in the article refugees as surplus population: race, migration and capitalist value regimes, prem kumar rajaram makes a case for understanding refugees and migrants collectively as surplus populations, in the marxian sense, within regimes of value. despite the fact that the often-deadly exclusion of migrants is hyper-visible, understanding racialised populations as simply excluded from the nation-state disavows their condition as necessarily included as a source of informal and undervalued labour. there are, rajaram argues, many routes of inclusion for informal labour into european economies. however, this is not an emancipatory inclusion, but instead one which reinforces their exclusion from the more dignified tiers within a racially hierarchised labour regime. looking particularly at the context of hungary, rajaram considers how migrants and refugees come to be subject to discourses of exclusion even while becoming incorporated into informal labour markets which are central to the production of surplus value and to a broader system which relies on the differential valuing of raced bodies. rajaram makes a clear intervention in the second body of work on race and neoliberalism outlined above, that which takes migration as its central focus. he does this, however, from the perspective of a geographical location, eastern europe, which complicates clear notions of centre and periphery. hungary is both a point of origin of cheap labour for the rest of europe, a site of old internal exclusions, and a site of new patterns of migration and racialised inclusion/exclusion. geographically, the collection of articles in this special issue gravitates towards north america and europe. we acknowledge that a consolidated research project on raced markets would have to go beyond this provincialism and work through the premise that neoliberalism was always already global in its causes and consequences. put pithily, the brexit/trump era is an erdogan/ modi/brexit/trump era in the sense that movements in the north atlantic were prefigured in the global south. further, and speaking intersectionally, this collection engages with race in relation to class but has not integrated analyses of gender and sexuality to the same extent. we recognise this as a shortcoming reproduced in spite of clear and consistent intersectional analyses of capitalism which stretch back across many decades; but we see these as among the areas in which the raced markets project as a whole should be deepened and expanded in future incarnations. with these limitations admitted, we nonetheless believe that this special issue speaks instructively to the analysis of current global politics. while critical reactions to the twists and turns of the last few years have been multiple, we think that two positions are especially identifiable. on the one hand, there has been a palpable shock that racism in the form of populist and economic nationalism and the alt-right could have laid claim to the centres of western power seemingly above and beyond neoliberal dispositions. on the other hand, there has also been an analytical dismissal of racism as epiphenomenal or, at least, as a distraction to the “really-real” workings of neoliberalism. this special issue is oriented through another departure point: race has been and remains integral not just to the raced markets of capitalism but to neoliberalism more specifically. our provocation is that the current conjuncture cannot be defined by an exceptional intrusion of racism, nor can its racism be dismissed as epiphenomenal. if we want to adequately account for the twists and turns of global neoliberalism we must examine how race functions in structural and agential ways, integrally producing and being reproduced by our global political economy. aitken, rob. . performing capital: toward a cultural economy of popular and global finance. springer. bonilla-silva, eduardo. . racism without racists: color-blind racism and the persistence of racial inequality in the united states. lanham: rowman & littlefield. chakravartty, paula, and denise ferreira da silva. . “accumulation, dispossession, and debt: the racial logic of global capitalism—an introduction.” american quarterly ( ): – . davis, dana-ain. . “narrating the mute: racializing and racism in a neoliberal moment.” souls ( ): – . gilmore, ruth wilson. . golden gulag: prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing california. berkeley: university of california press. 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"far-right terrorist thomas mair jailed for life for jo cox murder." the guardian, november , . https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/ /nov/ /thomas-mair-found- guilty-of-jo-cox-murder guardian. b. "nigel farage's anti-migrant poster reported to police." the guardian, june , . https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ /jun/ /nigel-farage-defends-ukip-breaking-point- poster-queue-of-migrantshall, stuart. . “the great moving right show.” marxism today, no. january: – . guardian. a. "grenfell tower final death toll: police say lives lost as result of fire" the guardian november , . https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/ /nov/ /grenfell-tower-final- death-toll-police-say- -people-died-in-fire guardian ( b). "grenfell residents' groups compile lists of victims and survivors." the guardian june , . https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/ /jun/ /grenfell-residents-groups- compile-lists-of-victims-and-survivors hall, stuart. . “the great moving right show.” marxism today, no. january: – . haylett, chris. . “illegitimate subjects?: abject whites, neoliberal modernisation, and middle-class multiculturalism.” environment and planning d: society and space ( ): – . henderson, jeff, and valerie a karn. . race, class and state housing: inequality and the allocation of public housing in britain. aldershot: gower. institute of race relations. n.d. “inequality, housing and employment statistics.” accessed may , . http://www.irr.org.uk/research/statistics/poverty/. kapoor, nisha. . “the advancement of racial neoliberalism in britain.” ethnic and racial studies ( ): – . lentin, alana, and gavan titley. . the crises of multiculturalism: racism in a neoliberal age. london; new york: zed books. may, theresa. . “the shared society.” gov.uk. january , . https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/the-shared-society-article-by-theresa-may. mccarthy, michael. . “silent compulsions: capitalist markets and race.” studies in political economy ( ): – . melamed, jodi. . “the spirit of neoliberalism: from racial liberalism to neoliberal multiculturalism.” social text ( ): – . neubeck, kenneth j, and noel a cazenave. . welfare racism: playing the race card against america’s poor. new york: routledge. prescod, colin, and daniel renwick. . “fighting fire.” institute of race relations. http://www.irr.org.uk/news/fighting-fire/. robinson, cedric. . black marxism: the making of the black radical tradition. london: university of north carolina press. roediger, david. . “who’s afraid of the white working class?: on joan c. williams’s ‘white working class: overcoming class cluelessness in america.’” los angeles review of books. may , . https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/whos-afraid-of-the-white-working-class-on-joan- c-williamss-white-working-class-overcoming-class-cluelessness-in-america/. soss, joe, richard c fording, and sanford schram. . disciplining the poor: neoliberal paternalism and the persistent power of race. chicago: university of chicago press. spence, lester k. . “the neoliberal turn in black politics.” souls ( – ): – . sveinsson, kjartan páll. . “the white working class and multiculturalism: is there space for a progressive agenda?” in who cares about the white working class?, edited by kjartan páll sveinsson, – . runneymede perspectives. https://www.runnymedetrust.org/uploads/publications/pdfs/whocaresaboutthewhiteworkin gclass- .pdf. twinam, ann, . purchasing whiteness: pardos, mulattos, and the quest for social mobility in the spanish indies. stanford university press. virdee, satnam. . “a marxist critique of black radical theories of trade-union racism.” sociology ( ): – . worth, owen. . “reviving hayek’s dream.” globalizations ( ): – . wynter, s. ( ). unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation—an argument. the new centennial review, ( ), — . i warm thanks go to all of those who attended the first raced markets workshop in december at the university of warwick, as well as to the department of politics and international studies at warwick and the school of politics and international relations at queen mary university of london for co-sponsoring that event. we are deeply grateful to the anonymous referees of this special issue for their intellectual engagement with each of the research articles included. gratitude is also extended to the editor of new political economy for working with us to bring this to publication. science magazine p h o t o : r o b b c o h e n p h o t o g r a p h y & v id e o june • vol issue sciencemag.org s c i e n c e on january, when i first walked through the doors of our beauti- ful living monument to science on new york avenue in downtown washington as the american association for the advancement of science’s new chief executive officer and executive publisher of the science family of journals, i had plenty of ideas for how my first days, months, and year on the job would go. i articulated this vision on the editorial page of the january issue of science in the context of “envisioning tomorrow’s earth,” the theme of our annual meeting. i noted the extraordinary advances of our era, including treating and curing disease and deep- ening our understanding of the universe. i also identified some of the critical topics of our time in prioritizing the need to safeguard the scientific ecosystem for diverse voices and inclusivity and leverage the power of all great minds. at the time that editorial went to press, the united states had fewer than confirmed cases of covid- and george floyd, ahmaud arbery, and breonna taylor were alive. when we gathered in seattle in february to envision tomorrow’s earth, most of us had no idea how the tomorrows we were about to experience would change our earth forever. covid- is now a global pandemic that has infected more than million people, killed more than , , and fundamentally changed the way the world operates. the tragic and needless deaths of george floyd, ahmaud arbery, and breonna taylor have brought to the fore the need for decisive and lasting action to declare the importance of black lives, voices, and contributions to all aspects of our society—and, central to our work at aaas, to the stem ecosystem. almost every generation has arrived at similar moments of opportunity born of tragedy. aaas is uniquely positioned as an organization to be at the forefront of these generation-defining issues, and we are tak- ing action to make sure these moments do not slip away. science, engineering, and medicine are not immune to the discrimination, subjugation, and silencing of minority people and voices. we are too often unwitting perpetuators of the status quo, and the reasons are deeply ingrained in the systems that govern the con- duct of these fields. when we hold up a mirror to the scientific enterprise, we see that it is not only politicians and law enforcement that need to be reminded that black lives matter. on june, aaas participated in a grass- roots movement called #shutdownstem with the goal to get our community to stop business as usual and consider the facts— and, with those facts in hand, to act. despite so many in our community being learned and well-read, outside of the social science circles that have studied this issue for years, few of us know very much about the systemic rac- ism that has kept generations of black ameri- cans from realizing success in the stem workforce. #shutdownstem encouraged us to take responsibility in our own lives and circles of influence to be actively anti-racist and to recognize the time and space required for our black colleagues to heal. #shutdownstem is just one step toward following through on fulfilling the hope for positive change in our community and across society. other steps are already under way within aaas, and many more have yet to be conceived. for decades, under the leadership of shirley malcom, aaas has been at the forefront of the discussion about making the stem enter- prise more diverse, equitable, and inclusive. as an african american growing up in birmingham, alabama, in the s and s, malcom went through segregated schools that were underresourced because of the assumption that no scientists or engineers would ever be pro- duced from within their walls. she defied those odds, eventually com- pleting her doctoral work in ecology at penn state, dedicating her life’s work to achieving equality in stem education and the workforce, and going on to serve as a member of the national science board, a trustee of two of our nation’s most prestigious research universities, and a world-renowned leader in the conversation that we’ve been having for quite some time—but to which too few have paid sufficient attention. progress to increase the participation and advancement of un- derrepresented groups in stem has been incremental. for the past years, aaas, with the support of the u.s. national science foun- dation (nsf), has convened the emerging researchers national (ern) conference in stem. each year, more than a thousand un- dergraduate and graduate students from underrepresented com- munities come together to share their research and develop their careers—with the goal of broadening participation in stem fields. in describing the kind of experience that ern attendees have, malcom has said, “for some students it’s their first time on a plane, a view from my basement aaas ceo reflects on his first months on the job parikh calls for decisive and lasting action to declare the importance of black lives, voices, and contributions to all aspects of our society. a a a s n e ws & n o t e s by sudip s. parikh published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ stations and local radio stations across the country. in doing so, she reached nearly . million people in states with timely, accurate, and authoritative scientific and public health information. aaas’s science and technology policy fellowships program has adopted virtual platforms to connect with current policy fellows and to open doors for the incoming cohort of scientists and engineers. the program, which places some scientists and engineers in federal agencies and congressional offices each year, places a high value on in-person professional development and networking, switching to virtual convenings at a time when the need for fellows to provide scientific and technical advice is greater than ever. the team recently conducted thousands of interviews virtually for the incom- ing class and is preparing to host a virtual orientation in the fall. for the team that produces the aaas annual meeting, moving from in-person to virtual convenings has been top of mind. after announc- ing that the february meeting would be a virtual event, the team has not looked back, rolling out an entirely new format for scientific symposia that serves as a model for other organizations. the science for seminaries program, part of our dialogue on science, ethics, and religion, which assists theologically diverse seminar- ies to integrate science into their re- quired courses of study, also adjusted the focus of one of its recent discussions, shifting it to an examina- tion of the science behind the spread of covid- when audiences sing or speak in loud voices, such as at worship services. these initiatives display the amazing number of influential audi- ences we reach as a scientific society. researchers, policy-makers, journalists, science communicators, students, seminarians—all of these groups play critical roles in our mission to advance science and serve society. i have not stepped foot in aaas headquarters in downtown wash- ington since march—which means i have now spent more time lead- ing aaas from my basement or my kids’ playroom than i have from my office. even so, i am more confident than ever in the vitality of our mission and in those working daily to execute that mission. we will be a force for science, a force for good, and a support for one another. our programs, publications, and advocacy are critical to a better and more just world, and what we do during this time will define a generation. my january science editorial called on us all to rise to the chal- lenges of our time to ensure that the next generation has the opportu- nity to rise to theirs. on so many levels, those words ring truer today. s c i e n c e sciencemag.org never mind their first time presenting at a scientific meeting.” for the past years aaas has convened, also with nsf support, the hbcu making and innovation showcase. the event brings together more than students and faculty from historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) for days of workshops and training on inven- tion and entrepreneurship. the students are divided into teams that create an innovative solution to a community problem that relates to one of the united nations sustainable development goals. this year’s winning team, comprised of students from clark atlanta university and morehouse college, conceived a network of communication devices for use during natural disasters and other emergency situations. convenings like ern and the hbcu making and innovation showcase have surely helped. bit by bit, person by person, they have encouraged many students and professionals who might have otherwise abandoned stem careers to stay the course, knowing that their voices and contributions are valued and essential to the long-term success of the stem enterprise. as malcom posited in her may testimony before the u.s. house committee on science, space, and technology: “how do we ensure a steady flow of talent for stem while also responding to the larger need for a workforce and citizenry with knowledge and skills to address emerging challenges and opportunities? we can only do this by expanding that pool of talent, tapping into the vast well of women, minorities, and persons with disabilities currently underrepresented in stem.” we must acknowledge that our efforts thus far have fallen short of what is truly necessary: systemic change that transforms institu- tions—not just individuals. we must tackle the issue where it is most oppressive: deeply ingrained institutional systems. through aaas’s sea (stem equity achievement) change program, institutions of higher education commit to a self-reflection process with the aim of disentangling themselves from practices of the past that made inequities possible—indeed, almost inevitable. the program incentiv- izes institutions’ alignment with sea change principles by publicly recognizing them for their commitment to and creation of sustain- able systemic change through self-assessment. “it’s a transformative national vision,” said paula rayman, a sociologist at the university of massachusetts, lowell, who chairs the sea change advisory board. now more than ever, we must embrace transformative national vi- sions over piecemeal, individual-focused interventions. the rapid response of aaas and science to the covid- pan- demic also has been notable. science and its family of journals provide credible, evidence-based information, share the latest research, and disseminate up-to- the-minute, science-informed news coverage. our editorial team continues to deliver seminal papers showing how the structure of the coronavirus informs vaccine development and how the virus bonds to human cells, exploring the beginning of new therapies, and examining how the public health system and social distancing can mitigate the spread of covid- . journalists at science are covering the science and responses to the pandemic around the world, often highlighting aspects that are picked up by mainstream news outlets. among aaas programs focusing on covid- is sciline, which connects journalists with vetted scientific experts. sciline began , its second full year of operation, with plans that included two “boot camps”—one to help journalists understand the science be- hind key electoral issues and another for reporters covering adoles- cent health. in the space of about weeks, the sciline team quickly pivoted to organizing a series of online media briefings for journalists on covid- and developed a resources webpage to provide ready- to-use quotes from scientists. sciline also enlisted margaret hamburg, past president of aaas, former commissioner of the u.s. food and drug administration, and former health commissioner of new york city. on one day in april, from her home office, hamburg conducted interviews with local tv “#shutdownstem is just one step toward following through on fulfilling the hope for positive change in our community and across society.” sudip s. parikh, aaas ceo screeners needed for journalism awards scientists from the united states and abroad are needed to review the scientif c accuracy of entries in the prestigious aaas kavli science journalism awards competition. the screening sessions in late august and september will be online this year, opening them to participation by scientists beyond the washington, d.c., area. we need additional screeners with expertise in virology, epidemiol- ogy, and public health. if you can volunteer, please contact emily hughes at ehughes@aaas.org. june • vol issue published by aaas o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/ a view from my basement sudip s. parikh doi: . /science. . . ( ), - . science article tools http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions terms of serviceuse of this article is subject to the is a registered trademark of aaas.sciencescience, new york avenue nw, washington, dc . the title (print issn - ; online issn - ) is published by the american association for the advancement ofscience science. no claim to original u.s. government works copyright © the authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee american association for the advancement of o n a p ril , h ttp ://scie n ce .scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://science.sciencemag.org/content/ / / http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/about/terms-service http://science.sciencemag.org/ weil trans*versal animacies and the mattering of black trans* political life abraham weil #blacktranslivesmatter on the night of february , , trayvon martin, seventeen at the time, was fatally shot in sanford, florida. in the course of the investigation it was quickly discovered that martin was unarmed when he was killed by george zimmerman, a police-sanctioned neighborhood watch volunteer. zimmerman’s trial would eventually call into question the complexities of florida’s stand-your-ground laws as well as the broader racial climate of the united states. outrage sparked by martin’s premature death conjured the intimacies of racism—the moment in which we learn we are black, the moment we understand that being black is wicked, and the constant reminders of precarious life. unsurprisingly, the discursive thrust attending to racialized violence was met with oppositional support for zimmerman who received an outpouring of compassion. the role of social and mainstream media after martin’s death exposed (for those not already aware) the underbelly of race relations in the united states in arguably, unprecedented ways. it allowed, on one hand, a viral community to erupt, arguing that the injustice of martin’s death was not new (rather, history was repeating itself), and on the other hand, the relegation of martin to an animal in attempts to devalue his life. supporters of zimmerman argued that the shooting was not motivated by race, as zimmerman himself is not white. the assumption within these sentiments illuminated the particulars of anti-black racism that is often ignored under the larger rubric of race and racism, and are underscored by the mobilization of the animal that freshen the wounds of slavery, segregation, and animacy hierarchies. in july , zimmerman was acquitted of the second-degree murder charge. the initial protests that emerged after the failure to arrest zimmerman in were reignited. the following week, hundreds of protests across the us were held demanding “justice for trayvon weil martin.” protestors wore hooded sweatshirts, and held skittles and iced tea (in honor of martin), perhaps in part suggesting, that in some way, we are all made vulnerable by these forms of injustice. thus, the black lives matter movement(s) emerged from all corners of the united states, refreshing discourses of violent capitalism, transnational militarism, targeted incarceration, and legacies of colonialism. this eruption was particularly felt within the united states, however, viral contact picked up across the globe through internet support. following zimmerman’s controversial acquittal, a number of high-profile cases were ushered into media attention. martin’s murder became a touchstone in strategic forms of political mobilization, but the subsequent premature deaths of freddie gray, walter scott, tamir rice, akai gurley, michael brown, eric garner, eric harris, anthony hill, tony terrell robinson, ezell ford, and the murders at emanuel african methodist episcopal church, to name a few, were protested by the black lives matter movement. simultaneously, the virility of blm, both through internet and street protests began to focus on broader discourses of racial inequality and violence in the united states. the founders of blm asserted that “#blacklivesmatter is working for a world where black lives are no longer systematically and intentionally targeted for demise.” blm aimed to challenge not only anti-black racism within society, but also targeted “progressive” movements which considered themselves aligned with anti-racist politics through soft multicultural inclusion. simultaneously, it was faced with the task of accounting for the legacies of the civil rights movement and the critique that black death is not unique to black, heterosexual, men and boys, but that blackness itself has always been the target. the historical backdrop of the civil rights movement is important in this moment, for, unlike the lag time of the early black liberation, the necessary task of attending to the murders of black women (which specifically included queer and trans* women) was mobilized through #sayhername. in , an weil african american policy forum report was released insisting that it is crucial to attend to the deaths of women of color, historically, and in the contemporary moment of political outrage. a principal importance of #sayhername was to inspire an inclusive mobilization, holding blm accountable to their mission of all black lives. until fairly recently, the octothorpe (#) designated a commonplace abbreviation for “number,” familiar to its users on telephones, computer keys, or by shorthand. social media platforms have capitalized on the octothorpe’s metadata coding properties to provide quick connections between language, casual interest, and in this particular examples, social movements. its gridded visual speaks to its functions. like a grid, it scours the internet in search of identical matches, but in doing so, it discovers any number of landing points. for instance, in october of , social media was flooded with images of halloween costumes depicting martin on the night of his death. people dawned blackface and blood stains, wore hooded sweatshirt, held skittles and iced tea. these images were spread through #trayvonmartin, immediately intertwining them with memorial images of the black teenager. while many news outlets related trayvon martin’s murder to previous cases, particular attention was paid to the murder of -year-old emmet till, animating martin’s death in unprecedented ways through viral use of social media. zimmerman’s own racism, well documented through social media outlets and his public indictment of martin in his own death, played a key component in drudging up sympathy as well as inciting rage. the use of matter in #blaklivesmatter summons the immediacy and materiality of death, but also animates the long histories of anti-blackness in the united states, and indeed globally. for many activists, there has been an excitement in blm—principally, it did not rely on a singular influence as was the case in previous movements. the historic leadership of the civil weil rights movement, often attributed to influential men such as booker t. washington or w.e.b. du bois, and the guidance of malcolm x or martin luther king jr., suddenly became more capacious and accessible. blm has followed the notion that the people, in all their power, will be more influential in a mass movement than in one that looks to a single leader. thus, without casting assumptions regarding the advantages or challenges of the blm’s “leaderful” movement, we can say: while racialized violence is not new, nor is resistance to it, blm demonstrates a different form of insurgence. thus, it is not my intention to diminish the effectiveness or successes of the blm movement. rather, my concern lies in the ways in which these politics share a weedy history with prior movements and the ways in which they often leak from the inside. this is exemplified in the ways that blm almost immediately brought into question the mattering of other lives (the molar questioning of brown-lives, women’s-lives, queer-lives, trans- lives, and the more controversial all-lives, white-lives, blue-lives) displaying the modes of capture that power wishes to flow through. blm resisted these anti-black sentiments, suggesting “when we say black lives matter, we are talking about the ways in which black people are deprived of our basic human rights and dignity…and the fact is that the lives of black people— not all people—exist within these conditions is consequence of state violence.” indeed, the proposed connections between ‘all lives’ and ‘matter’—an argument that can be traced through the entirety of political debate, including debates leveraged through animals—ignores the historical misuse of the hashtag’s intention. the proposition of all-lives, at its most surface level, mobilizes anti-blackness, but also troubles the notion of collective signs, or the expression of identity through an individual or group. the correspondence of black-lives retains a specificity, or newly constituted regime, with which whiteness frequently attempts to coopt and weil capture. this, of course, becomes exacerbated when considering the trans*sectional impacts of gender, sexuality, and class, but what blm has been able to achieve thus far is an attention to the precise ways in which blackness functions, highlighting racism more broadly, as an extraction from whiteness, as a terror of the flesh. specifically, the challenges to mattering have not gained as much traction, with the exception of black trans* lives which have negotiated a clear alliance, particularly in attending to the murders of black trans* women. the disproportionate murders of black trans* women demanded a specification of “which black lives matter?” blm has addressed this by stating that “there is a fundamental belief that when we say black lives matter, we mean all black lives matter.” here we have the question of materiality. the referent of black and trans* materialities is a paradoxical point of connection and departure in the political case of #blacktranslivesmatter but, we do not need to deconstruct these identities into oblivion, rather we can attend to them and also, following judith butler’s provocation: “we may seek recourse to matter in order to ground or to verify a set of inquiries or violations only to find that matter itself is founded through a set of violations, ones which are unwittingly repeated in the contemporary invocation” (butler , emphasis in original). in cases of black lives, black trans lives, and in their coalition, attention to the premature death of black and trans* bodies has been faced with negative rhetorical justifications of animal- like behavior. the influential role of the internet in connecting the blm movement is also saturated with a plethora of descriptions of murder victims as “niggers,” “slaves,” “apes,” and “porch monkeys” in attempts to withdraw humanness, while mainstream media depicts protestors of the murders as “thugs,” “animals,” and “criminals.” thus, protests held under banners of black and trans* embodiment, were promptly met with rhetorical deployment of weil animality in hopes of rendering these subjects to subhuman behavior. this familiar slight-of- hand, or what nicole shukin calls the “double entendre of rendering,” calls attention to the significant biopolitical practices of capitalism in relation to the animal, conjuring both a sense of mimicry and boiling down, both which play key roles in modes of capitalist (re)production and the distilling of life categories (shukin). claire jean kim argues that “impassioned disputes over the animal practices of racialized others open a window onto the synergistic workings of the taxonomies of race and species in the contemporary united states. historically conjoined, the two logics continue to sustain and energize one another in the joint project of producing the human and the subhuman, not-human, less than human—with all of the entailments of moral considerability, physical vulnerability, and grievability that follow” (kim ). kim offers an important reminder, arguing that the false choice implemented by capitalism and biopower is often presented as an obligatory allegiance between the interests of humans and animals. this article explores questions of transversality and molecular revolution alongside questions of black and trans*. specifically, i am concerned with the ways in which inanimacy in invoked—on the proverbial back of the animal—in order to justify violence. i am not suggesting that by taking the animal more “seriously” we will see why certain bodies are mistreated. rather, as kim does, i am suggesting that we must understand where political projects place themselves in relation to other political projects. in doing so, we can excite transversal connections between them and imagine a politics that works across scales, across intensities, and indeed, across species rather than hierarchical relations. thus, as two political movements emerging in the u.s. have been yoked together under the slogans of lives mattering, attention to the use of “black lives matter,” “trans lives matter,” and the combination of the two “#blacktranslivesmatter,” has reignited attachments between weil blackness, animals, and deviance, demonstrating a biopolitical break in the population—where good and bad subjects emerge—which state power aims to direct itself through. i argue that it is critical to intervene in discourses that associate blackness with animality in ways that devalue black lives by forcefully withdrawing their humanness precisely because such a move both makes the human exceptional (placing the human above the animal and all else) and because it reinvests in animacy hierarchies that place both the human and animal in the fungible state of exception. the analytic of trans*, which in some spaces has taken up animality as a point of disruption in these very devaluing and delegitimizing politics, must also recognize these moves as risky and be attendant to the ways in which blackness and the animal are choreographed. thus, linking trans* to animailty is always already associated with blackness. black and trans* are not disparate categories when invoking animacy, but rather are inextricably linked. it is easy to see that it is not, nor has it ever been, sufficient to simply say racism and transphobia are wrong. to do so facilitates a political imaginary, undergirded by progress narratives in which certain lives are brought into the grid of intelligibility under the rubric of the human, with its attendant democratic inclusion, rights, and essentialist visibility, and simultaneously renders others as disposable, often discursively relegated to the indeterminate category “it.” race, gender, sex, or sexuality become cyclical practices of production and regulation in the classification and control of bodies. such an imaginary of inclusion also necessarily eclipses micropolitical, revolutionary happenings, or identity as it is molecular rather than molar and further suppresses possibilities found in a more capacious understanding of the vitality of matter and the possibilities of dismantling animacy hierarchies. as the politically sympathetic heterosexual becomes ‘queer,’ as whiteness reaches through the cultural and becomes ‘transracial,’ and as the queer ideologically becomes ‘trans*,’ we must wonder how weil these slippery identities matter politically. just as cartesian philosophy has not resolved the dualisms of mind and body, the impulses of identity have not allowed us to move beyond our own experiences. violence (affective, structural, physical) maintains particular biopolitical inactions of these identities, ensuring that we always resolve our own identity crises through language, community, compromise, and temporal notions of progress. the extension of community allows the state apparatus to inclusively shift, relying on our own sentiments drawn from the horrific experiences of the other; the other’s death weighs heavily on our mind. instead, when approaching the interwoven relations between blackness, trans*ness, and animality, we must look transversally in order to shift the analytical focus from the bifurcated species, rhetorical justifications of violence, and forced inanimacy in order to seek new, perhaps liberating angles for approaching difference. we must make this shift while understanding that these contemporary conditions of violence should not be marked by coincidence, accident, or ignorance. this violence makes up, constitutes, and subtends the united states, a nation built on the enslavement of black bodies, the fungibility of black labor, where black bodies continue to be lynched every day for america to be. a nation built by and upon slavery needs the afterlife of slavery to sure up its foundations, its logics, and its very meaning. capitalism, the police, and power are always tethered to one another, always with the same banal, everyday goals. while this article examines these modes of power along the lines of black and trans*, these are not the only constructed categories in need of attention. indeed, the struggles of bodies targeted for modern servitude have been forced to turn to themselves for strategic alliance, but should those bodies relegated to the state of exception become too much for power to contend with they are easily exterminated. there is a need to shift away from this capitalism-police-power triad, and toward a political response that does not rely weil on visibility (for instance, legal protections, media coverage, public discourse) and exposure to it. with a politics directed toward revolution, the present study assumes that while there is nothing “natural” about our current condition—it is nothing if not horrifyingly ordinary—the only viable option is to extinguish systems that rely on necropolitically charged complacency, decency, and respectability. proposing trans*versality despite recent media tracking of the murders of black and trans* people in the united states, we are not undergoing a crisis in its infancy but rather restructured violence organized by the mutation of new market demands which enact animacy hierarchies to justify supremacy, normativity, and necropolitical regimes of power. as long as we have conceptualized such normative categories there has been an enforcement to adhere to normative protocols and a consequence for failing to fulfill to such constructions. the practice of minimizing communication—between humans, animals, matter, institutions, and politics—is key in allowing state sanctioned violence to proliferate, multiply, leech, and repress. such a practice leads us to believe that power is much more than it is; our fear births its legitimacy, recalibrates it, and allows it to disappear from the surface of things. all the while it becomes encrypted, drowning beneath the surface of demands for fairness, squirming in chaos. the struggles of minorities know this chaos. productive critiques of liberation efforts (civil rights struggles, feminist waves, lgbtq efforts, revolutionary politics) often take place from within—questioning bias and exclusion as a central tenet of political mobilization—but these critiques rarely lead to the mass murders of those who have strategic disagreements. thus, in instances of targeted execution, we know that power names itself as the authority, the unwavering, yet “impartial” arbiter and animator of what is just, and relies on cooperation between subjects even if that cooperation is done under the rubric of dissatisfaction. weil from this initial commitment, the second task at hand is to move away from the human as the object that passes through the world, in order to understand that the world passes through the human in ways that are always in symbiosis with the animal. such a perspective offers a route for conceptualizing the breakdown of human relations, and taking it seriously can provide warnings and inspirations for revolution. this means taking into account our milieus in a more expansive way, in a way that maximizes communication between entities, and in a way that recognizes that human behavior is not monolithic, predictive, or logical, even if there is a deep imperative to repeat behaviors, politics, and ideologies previously available to the social body. to begin such a task, i look to trans*ness and blackness as two analytics that have been continually excluded from the body politic, while simultaneously making the body politic, in ways that have at once left them vulnerable to extraordinary violence, but also have positioned them with the radical possibility of transversality. cultural theorist félix guattari posits that the global scale of political intervention has become inseparable from molecular level, arguing that “we don’t need to build ‘ecological niches’ or ‘islands of fresh air’ alongside large social collectivities, but, rather, to aim these molecular revolutions…towards the construction of new social war machines, which will themselves forge their own support creating a new kind of social praxis” (soft subversions ). for guattari, earlier forms of revolution were reliant on particular ideological programs and easily captured forms of protest, but are disrupted by the spasmodic mutation of molecular revolution. ultimately these transversal mutations will not about purity, but instead work against the co-optation of marginalized experiences and by engaging these long-term molecular revolutions, attempts to co-opt or violate begin to slide past one another without the ability to bind to social reality (molecular revolution ). in his terms: “we should permit nothing to weil distract us from discovering the ways and means for irreversible social transformation, without which we will enter into an escalations of fear and despair on a whole new scale” (soft subversions ). putting transversality to the task of molecular revolution has been a crucial task for guattari. following this, the functioning of guattari’s understanding of transversality invites an investigation to the work of prefix of trans* in relation to the molecular. the prefixal “trans-”, in the sense of “across, through, over, to or on the other side of, beyond, outside of, from one place, person, thing, or state to another” (oxford english dictionary) provides some insight guattari’s fashioning of ‘versality.’ in most narrow sense, trans* (as it has become associated with the body) allows for an understanding that there is more than either/or. a broader understanding of trans* as a pollination, or mummer, provides a useful addition particularly in the framework of animality. implementing the asterisk (trans*versality) offers a way of thinking about the molecular possibilities, in politics and across species, not mediated strictly through normative protocols, capitalism, or the corpus. the rejection of revolution often operates through a refusal of its existence, or its impossibility. attending to revolution has put particular marginal strains on the potentials of thinking trans* and black trans*versally. in both cases, we could certainly dismiss these occurrences as exceptions to the rule, or, we can hypothesize the molecular revolutions already taking place. the central purpose of transversality is to create linkages between previously unexplored singularities in a field, and then to create connections in other conceptual topographies at different levels of discursivity. this varied from the deleuzoguattarian formulation of assemblages (agencements) that operate as an example of a singularity that can function transversally, brining intensities into contact at different levels (psychoanalysis and transversality - ). in my extension of guattari’s theorization of transversality, i ask how weil the work of the prefix “trans*” can itself become a methodology. while insights certainly draw on embodied psycho-social experience of people minoritized as trans*, the critical potential of trans* theorizing exceeds the milieu in which is often articulated. we see this in other arenas, such as feminist or critical race theory, animals or disability studies, where the minoritized embodiment becomes a key analytic, at times leaving behind the potential to think about different biopolitical power relations. within trans* studies, this discussion has come to revolve around the use of the asterisk to visually indicate the potential for prefixing trans to any number of suffixes, including but not limited to gender, and to signal the possibility of expansive capacities harbored within existing assemblages of terms and concepts. the theories of assemblage, becoming, plateaus and flight often attributed to the collective work of guattari and gilles deleuze elucidate this in a number of useful ways, but guattari’s transversality in particular lends itself to a political imputation that makes revolutionary work already possible, so that revolution might be drawn closer to the arsenal. for guattari, along with many french intellectuals, the events of may ’ were of principle importance in the formation of political concepts. it is in the residue of may ’ that guattari considered the possibilities for intervention through the functioning of transversality in new ways. he questioned the role of teachers, mental health professionals, and social workers upon the landscape of emergent discourses of general theory, but also “minor” theory, which began to chart affects operating at the level of everyday interactions and the relationships between politics and space. from this vantage, the central focus of transversal functions is rearticulated, and for guattari, the concern with how to force communication at different levels of discourse and life became critical (soft subversions - ). guattari’s purpose in questioning the “foundation of things” parallels deleuze’s critique of representation and rejection of objet des hauteurs. weil instead, transversality relies on a principle of continuity-discontinuity that resists taking historical record as the ultimate roadmap for forward-thinking politics. just as may ‘ spawns certain kinds of new social movements, and just as the ethnic nationalist, black liberation, and feminist gay movements of the s and s engaged with the biopolitics of identity, so too does the contemporary #blacktranslivesmatter both enact and inspire new potentials for revolutionary transformation—through trans*versal and trans*molecular practices. it is a new kind of decentralized social entity/body, but its movement borrows from previous social movement strategies, including identity politics, environmental justice, liberation movements, even occupy—but shifts them away from the molar scale (which remains important) toward molecular potentials. documenting how the new practices work, and how they are transversally connected to previous practices calls into sharp relief our schemas for understanding life itself and the politics of hierarchizing life according to animacy hierarchies. mel chen examines these animacy hierarchies in the slippery linkage between the perceived binary of human and animal, arguing that we are situated within animacy hierarchies that inform our political actions. chen argues that biopolitics offers a language for analyzing the terrain of animate hierarchies, and argues that attention to interstitial affective dimensions make salient the ways in which affect carries us in new directions, rhizomatically and virally, and further, how alternate mappings of race and sexuality might offer flexible zones of analysis when extended beyond embodiment. thinking alongside chen, we might first say that materiality is vital and worthy of political consideration and then, given this, it is possible to show how the ontologically false imputation of inanimacy serves as a powerful technique for construction hierarchies of bodily difference in ways that are not productive for the animal, nor the human. dinesh wadiwel has argued that the biopolitical violence between humans and between humans weil and animals share intertwined histories, but despite the ways in which they converge, they also display independent regimes of violence in their organization. principally, the enactment of particular modes of governmentality and control place the human and animal in complex fields of control in which the war against animals is distinctly biopolitical and shuttles the thin line between life and death (wadiwel ). wadiwel approaches the relationship between humans and animals from through the vantage point of war, pointing to the ways in which we continuously and systematically enforce the suffering of the animal, categorized as bare life, to the benefit of the human consumption. through these biopolitical techniques and technologies, the animal becomes inanimate. the same process can be seen between humans, lending itself to the ways that politics is constructed along lines of hierarchy and instituted through capitalism, industry, law, and social behavior. thus, it is not the rhetorical use of the animal, per se, that justifies analogous placement of the black or trans* human and animal on the auction block, but rather (in both cases) it is their forced inanimacy that renders them available for sale and slaughter. we might, with caution, even go as far as to say that black and trans* have much more in common with the animal than the human. following this, we must also question the role of black and trans* (and indeed all others) as political points of departure. connections between blackness and animality are curiously ushered in through recent theories utilized through trans* analytics. negative gestures between blackness and animals have been reordered through (though still indexed by) the emerging interest in discursively linking nonhuman species, trans*embodiment, and trans*theory. racist ideologies that have linked animals and blackness did so under the understanding that both can occupy a place of inanimacy (through violence, technology, biopolitical surveillance, etc.). thus, weil in an almost mirrored move, trans* theory has emerged from another direction, finding affinity with the animal in attempts to undo the common understanding of a human-centered world. year zero: molecularization deleuze and guattari remind us that masks do not make the head a face, rather they ensure that the head belongs to the body (deleuze and guattari ). thinking politically, and considering sentiments that the revolution always seems to be dissolved at the stage of the riot, we must consider our closed understanding of possession. if the desire for social transformation takes difference beyond the human seriously, it cannot be reducible to it, nor possess it. while the viewpoint of revolution opens possibilities for other strategic politics to emerge, it must do so in an overwhelming molecular fashion, or it risks humanist repetition and capture. the presupposition here is that molar and molecular segmentarities are enacted simultaneously, which leads us to a mutually informed and dependently unfolding macropolitics (molar) and micropolitics (molecular). molar and molecular politics operate simultaneously, often imperceptibly, as a kind of photosynthetic feedback loop. how then, might they answer to disparities between race, class, gender, sexuality and the power that shuttles between majoritarian and minoritartian embodiment? how can this be done in connection to the animal, rather than through shared inanimacy? if we consider these categories are already emergent in a molecular assemblages it is not the binary totality (human/animal; man/woman; black/white; cis/trans*) that binds them, rather, infinite multiplicities. as alphonso lingis says: let us liberate ourselves from the notion that our body is constituted by the form that makes it an objective for the observation and manipulation of an outside observer. let us dissolve the conceptual crust that takes hold of it as a subsistent substance. let us turn away from the anatomical and physiological mirrors that project it before us as a set of organs and a set of biological or pragmatic functions (lingis ). weil to turn away from the narrow-minded notion that our form is what makes us individual, that our identity is the principle form of this individuation, and that our individuality taken as a substance is an inherent exclusion of other substances, gestures us toward a much more open formulation of expressive possibilities amidst our milieus. lingis contends that any species is always already in symbiosis with others; they are symphony composed by and through “wheat, and corn fields, with berry thickets and vegetable patches, and also with the nitrogen-fixing bacteria in the soil that their rootlets enter into symbiosis with in order to grow and feed the stalk, leaves, and seeds or fruit…in symbiosis with other mammals, birds, reptiles, and fish” (lingis ). these entities cannot be flippantly relegated to an inanimate, subaltern or trivial status; rather it is their vital intensity brings about their material force, a force that would if directed, overwhelm normative power. their intensities cannot be hastily fastened to tactical capitalist suppositions, nor is there a traceable point of origin in which movement is cast. this is a particularly enticing standpoint from which to graft the work of black trans* and animacy together. for lingis, pulses, rhythms, intensities, passions, stimulate movements, and “the differentials of speed and slowness liberated from our bodies do not block or hold those movements…our movements compose their differentials, directions, and speeds with those movements in the environment” (lingis ). these molecular connections do not only extend out, they swell virally with forceful intensity. in this way, movements have no prior programmed goal to abide by, and no fantasy of achieving a finalized state affixed to the human. rather, they are transversal, and open up routes in which capitalist power tactics might otherwise subsume. when trans* prefixes animacy, it does so by highlighting the false assumption that the category of animal falls lower on the tree of life (as categorized by charles darwin), and further troubles the very notion of ontology that reduces élan vital through its required structuring and enabling of identity. thus, it is the sorcery of weil animals—the ebbs, flows, and lascivious prying of movement—that finds characterization in the sex, sexuality, and lust of bestial relations, is precisely the seduction found in trans*, for it presents a moment of crisis in the false understanding that logics of embodiment are given and unchanging. understanding the inextricable link between trans*, black, and animality allows for a theorizing that does not devalue identity, but rather puts it in concert with the possibility of transversality. tracing black, trans*, and the animal in the current political landscape is a clear, yet complex, route. to approach these questions transversally encourages a disruption of boundaries and an unauthorized puncture of corporeal and ideological false positives. if it is to hold any weight through the prefixal relationship to animality, it must be attendant to the historical abuse of the term. thus, tempering trans*animality does not work in a linear fashion, rather it opens new ways of thinking the animal transversally, showing as lingis did, that species shift, and are stirred by agitations in composition with an infinite number of possibilities. we can see the ways in which trans* theorizing may find inspiration in the animal, and that a responsible theorizing will necessarily discuss the impacts of theorizations of race. thus emerges the question of insurrection in the #blacktranslivesmatter movement. the reordering of blackness, trans*ness, and the animal will be faced with capture and we must decide if this is the point in which it fizzles out. trans*ness and blackness can render humanness perilous, directed toward inanimate death, or place the body in precarious relation to the nonhuman, subhuman, or inhuman. it may also offer new routes might be taken through the linking of trans*, black, and animacy, that if fully explored beyond the body, might serve to rearrange the human. the role of speciation provokes a theorization of the processes by which animal hierarchies become enmeshed with particular bodies in more salient ways than others, and in turn allows for a kind of transversal weil relation, or alternate politics, to work in the refrain of silence previously thought to be a space of death. tranimacies offer a transversal link between the affective dimensions of the animal and the provocation of the pollenating of trans*. if we accept this understanding of the human and the animal, where is the end? revolutionarily speaking, there must not be one. the use of “black trans lives matter” is not a conscious attempt to quell the revolution, and we must resist the impulse to label the movement as passing or momentary, but the capturable nature of identity stresses the importance of continually reinventing practices that otherwise risk infinite and dismal repetition and dangerous sedimentation. reconditioning identities, without performative reinvention, subdues creativity and anchors subjectivity to the static past, rather than the possibility of new futures. these new possibilities will necessarily come to understand the animal and human in new ways. the conceptual work of trans* can bring about new articulations of animacy, but doing so requires a great responsibility to the legacies of inanimacy that forcibly strip mattering. mainstream anxiety provoked by the insistence black and trans* lives matter is often articulated through attributions of animalistic, not-quite human, behavior. rethinking the question of matter itself offers a rethinking of the political impulse of inclusion. trans*ing animality displaces the notion that one must “count” to “matter,” instead it highlights how our matter endlessly animates our worlds. this disruption deterritorializes, at times imperceptibly so, in ways that open transversal routes for species to lean, shift, and agitate together. weil notes the founding of #blacklivesmatter as an organization is attributed to alicia garza, opal tometi, and patrisse cullors, however the influence can be traced in a number of directions and is disputed in its origins. most poignantly, because of the diffusion of blm, it is in many ways impossible to say it began in any one place, or was “founded” by any group of people. in july , alicia garza posted a public facebook in which she stated “black people. i love you. i love us. our lives matter”, which began, in part, the questions of mattering. in , blm, (which had already been organizing) gained wider public attention after the fatal shooting of mike brown by ferguson, missouri police officer darren wilson. quote taken from the website (black lives matter). blm has seen success in online networking, national conference planning, the establishment of registered chapters, and a constant presence in the mainstream us media. as of official chapters have locations in amherst, ma, boston, ma, cambridge, ma, springfield, ma, worcester, ma, rutgers, nj, new york, ny, rochester, ny, philadelphia, pa, washington, dc, bay area, ca, inland empire, ca, long beach, ca, los angeles, ca, pasadena, ca, sacramento, ca, portland, or, seattle, wa, denver, co, champaign-urbana, il, chicago, il, gary, in, detroit, mi, grand rapids, mi, kalamazoo, mi, lansing, mi, minneapolis, mn, cleveland, oh, birmingham, al, tampa bay, fl, atlanta, ga, durham, nc, columbia/orangeburg, sc, knoxville, tn, memphis, tn, nashville, tn, austin, tx, and toronto, canada (black lives matter). from the outset, it is important to note that while guattari and deleuze maintain metaphors throughout their work, it is not without salient political commitments that indeed have practical ethical and political implications. they say: “of course, we realize the dangers of citing scientific propositions outside their own sphere. it is the danger of arbitrary metaphor or of forced application. but perhaps these dangers are averted if we restrict ourselves to taking from scientific operators a particular conceptualizable character which itself refers to non-scientific areas, and converges with science without applying it or making it a metaphor” (deleuze ). in this article, i argue that the relationship between human an animal works in a similar fashion. hayward and weinstien’s provocation that the asterisk, when attached to trans signals a series of philosophical points. they say: “if the asterisk starfishes trans, literally making trans a radiated reach—a reach through yet another reach; a fold within a fold—it also speaks to how trans* is animated, vestibulated, speciated, and profligated. the asterisk makes many philosophical points; it is a sensuous node, a composite of affects and percepts that reminds us that speciation is always a cultivated response” (hayward and weinstien ). further, they recognize the asterisk as a pollen that follows trans* and attaches it to something else. the asterisk, then, offers a vegetal philosophy capable of approaching political questions in exciting new ways. despite the difference in character assignment, a similar argument is made by stryker, currah, and moore for the use of the hyphen when extending trans out. they say: “a little hyphen is perhaps too flimsy a thing to carry as much conceptual freight as we intend for it bear, but we think the hyphen matters a great deal, precisely because it marks the difference between the implied nominalism of ‘trans’ and the explicit relationality of ‘trans-,’ which remains open-ended and resists premature foreclosure by attachment to any single suffix” (stryker, currah and moore ). the events of may ‘ in france are largely categorized by tensions between university authorities and outraged students as well as workers and state authorities that came to breaking point and ideological differences moved to camp occupations, barricaded streets, and violent protest. as barricades were erected in the heart of the city, riots that began in early may gained momentum in subsequent outbreaks as activist protests grew in numbers and violence. limited financial resources and difficult living conditions framed student/worker occupations in france and elsewhere compounded with the growing viral radio coverage and events took a sensational turn on may th of , with violent riots raging until the dawn. incomplete visual and written accounts have long since carried on and the near half of century of distance has produced a myriad of theories, metaphors, manifestos, questions and politics. translated as “lofty objects.” chen notes that this idea of animacy, while fundamental, is constantly pushed forward for its relevance across languages and modes of signifying. its relevance to the posthuman project, and perhaps in general, is that it encapsulates a slippage between the material realities of alive and dead. chen is concerned with the ways that this conceptual geography (between things alive and dead) is persistently being worked out and forms the basis of many of today’s pressing political questions and the troubling of the flexing category of “human”. zakiyyah jackson argues posthumanist theory has “demonstrated the constructed and often spurious conceptual foundation of enlightenment humanism. however, its critics maintained that the acuity of posthumanism’s intervention was undercut when its scholars effectively sidestepped the analytical challenges posed by the categories of race, weil colonialism, and slavery” (jackson ). jackson, in part, critiques chen’s centering of a queer analytics precisely because while feminist and queer critique has begun to take animal studies and emergent new materialisms seriously in search of different routes for challenging biopolitical practices and the divide between the human and the animal, in some spaces, it has done so by sidestepping the impacts of race and colonialism embedded within the human project. deleuze and guattari’s notion of “molecular” appears repeatedly in their collaborations, often in tension with (and tethered to) the molar: “every society, and every individual, are…plied by both segmentarities simultaneously: one molar, the other molecular. if they are distinct, it is because they do not have the same terms or the same relations…if they are inseparable, it is because they coexist and cross over into each other” (deleuze and guattari ). weil works cited black lives matter. about the black lives matter network. http://blacklivesmatter.com/about/. accessed jan. . butler, judith. bodies that matter: on the discursive limits of sex. routledge, . chen, mel y. animacies: biopolitics, racial mattering, and queer affect. duke university press, . deleuze, gilles. cinema ii: the time-image. athlone, . deleuze, gilles, and félix guattari. a thousand plateaus: capitalism and schizophrenia. university of minnesota press, . guattari, felix. molecular revolution: psychiatry and politics. penguin, . ---. soft subversions: texts and interviews — . semiotext(e), . ---. psychoanalysis and transversality: texts and interviews - . semiotext(e), . hayward, eva and jami weinstein. “introduction: tranimalities in the age of trans* life.” tsq: transgender studies quarterly, vol. , no. , , pp. - . jackson, zakiyyah iman. “animal: new directions in the theorization of race and posthumanism.” feminist studies vol. , no. , , pp. - . kim, claire jean. dangerous crossings: race, species, and nature in a multicultural age. cambridge university press, . lingis, alphonso. “bestiality.” symploke, vol. , no. , , pp. - . shukin, nicole. animal capital: rendering life in biopolitical times. university of minnesota press, . stryker, susan, paisley currah, and lisa jean moore. "introduction: trans-, trans, or transgender?." wsq: women's studies quarterly, vol. , no. , , pp. - . wadiwel, dinesh joseph. the war against animals. brill publishers, . implicit bias in healthcare: clinical practice, research and decision making authors: dipesh p gopal,a ula chetty,b patrick o’ donnell,c camille gajriad and jodie blackadder-weinsteine a b s t r a c t bias is the evaluation of something or someone that can be positive or negative, and implicit or unconscious bias is when the person is unaware of their evaluation. this is particularly relevant to policymaking during the coronavirus pandemic and racial inequality highlighted during the support for the black lives matter movement. a literature review was performed to define bias, identify the impact of bias on clinical practice and research as well as clinical decision making (cognitive bias). bias training could bridge the gap from the lack of awareness of bias to the ability to recognise bias in others and within ourselves. however, there are no effective debiasing strategies. awareness of implicit bias must not deflect from wider socio- economic, political and structural barriers as well ignore explicit bias such as prejudice. keywords: implicit bias, unconscious bias, diagnostic error, cognitive bias doi: . /fhj. - introduction bias is the evaluation of something or someone that can be positive or negative, and implicit or unconscious bias is when the person is unaware of their evaluation. , it is negative implicit bias that is of particular concern within healthcare. explicit bias, on the other hand, implies that there is awareness that an evaluation is taking place. bias can have a major impact on the way that clinicians conduct consultations and make decisions for patients but is not covered in the medical field outside clinical reasoning. conversely, it is commonly highlighted in the world of business. , the lack of awareness of implicit bias may perpetuate systemic inequalities, authors: ageneral practitioner and in-practice fellow, barts and the london school of medicine and dentistry, london, uk; bgeneral practitioner and university tutor, university of glasgow, glasgow, uk; cgeneral practitioner and clinical fellow in social inclusion, university of limerick, limerick, ireland; dgeneral practitioner and clinical teaching fellow, imperial college london, london, uk; eroyal air force general practitioner and researcher, royal centre of defence medicine, edgbaston, uk education and training implicit bias in healthcare: clinical practice, research and decision making resulting in lower pay for clinicians from ethnic minorities and lack of female surgeons in senior positions, for example. , cognitive bias may explain political decisions in the coronavirus pandemic framing ventilators as ‘lifesaving’ and subsequent investment over public health non-pharmaceutical measures: framing bias. clinicians during the pandemic may have been tempted to prescribe medication despite lack of clear evidence due to fear of lack of action: action bias. action bias may have been exhibited by stressed members of the public when panic buying groceries despite reassurance of stable supply. cognitive bias may affect the way clinicians make decisions about healthcare given the novelty of the disease and evolving evidence base. politicians may prioritise resources to goals that will provide short- term benefit over long-term benefit; this might include increases critical care capacity over public health investment: present bias. given the amount of poorly reported and implemented non-peer reviewed pre-print research during the pandemic, many clinicians may implement easily available research amplified by media rather than taking a critical look at the data: availability bias. , this may be compounded by physical and emotional stress. media reporting of the coronavirus in the usa as the ‘chinese virus’ was linked with increasing anti-american bias towards east asians. this article aims to identify the potential impact of bias on clinical practice and research as well as clinical decision making (cognitive bias) and how biases may be mitigated overall. methods a non-systematic literature review approach was used given the heterogeneous and mixed-method study of bias in healthcare; such a topic would be unamenable to systematic review methodology. inclusion criteria included english language articles which were identified by searching pubmed and the cochrane database from january to december using the following search terms: ‘implicit bias’, ‘unconscious bias’, ‘cognitive bias’, and ‘diagnostic error and bias’. the highest level of evidence was prioritised for inclusion (such as recent systematic reviews, meta-analyses and literature reviews). opinion articles were included to set context in the introduction and the discussion sections to identify possible future direction. articles mentioning bias modification in clinical psychiatry were excluded as these focused on specific examples of clinical care rather than contributing to a broad overview of the potential impact of bias in medicine. inequality and prevention future healthcare journal vol , no : – © royal college of physicians . all rights reserved. how does bias work and where does it come from? decision making can be understood to involve type and type processes (see fig ). , type processes are fast, unconscious, ‘intuitive’ and require limited cognitive resources. , they are often known as mental shortcuts or heuristics, which allow rapid decision making. in contrast, type processes are slower, conscious, ‘analytic’ and require more cognitive resources. the above is known as dual process theory (dpt). it is type processing that makes up the majority of decision making and is vulnerable to error. if this occurs in consecutive decisions, it can lead to systematic errors, such as when a car crash that occurs after errors in some of hundreds of tiny decisions that are made when driving a car. despite the critique of implicit bias, such automatic decisions are necessary for human function and such pattern recognition may have developed in early humans to identify threats (such as predators) to secure survival. it is thought that our biases are formed in early life from reinforcement of social stereotypes, from our own learned experience and experience of those around us. the implicit association test (iat) is the commonest measure of bias within research literature. it was developed from review work which identified that much of social behaviour was unconscious or implicit and may contribute to unintended discrimination. , the test involves users sorting words into groups as quickly and accurately as possible and comes in different categories from disability to age, and even presidential popularity. for the gender- career iat, one vignette might include sorting gender, or names fig . decision-making processes. a) the interaction between type and type processes allows diagnoses to be made from patient presentations. t = ‘toggle function’; the ability to switch between type and type processes. b) the type processes that control calibration of decision making to make a diagnosis. adapted with permission from croskerry p, singhal g, mamede s. cognitive debiasing : origins of bias and theory of debiasing. bmj qual saf ; (suppl ):ii – . pattern recognition repetition type processes type processesrecognised not recognised patient presentation calibration diagnosis pattern processor executive override dysrationalia override t a b type processes emotional processes over-learned processes implicitly learned processes hard-wired processes calibration diagnosis (eg ben or julia), into the family or career categories. this has been well summarised in meta-analyses comparing the ability of the iat to predict social behaviour. , furthermore, oswald and colleagues found that the iat was not a predictor of markers of discrimination when looking at race and ethnicity. while the iat is used widely in research literature, opponents of the iat highlight that it is unclear what the test actually measures, and comment that the test cannot differentiate between association and automatically activated responses. furthermore, it is difficult to identify associations, bringing further confusion to the question of how to measure the activity of the unconscious mind. given these conflicting views, while iat testing is commonly used, it cannot be universally recommended. there are ethical concerns that the iat could be used as a ‘predictive’ tool for crimes that have not yet occurred, or a ‘diagnostic’ tool for prejudice such as racism. the iat should be used as a tool for self-reflection and learning, rather than a punitive measure of one’s biases or stereotypes. the test highlights individual deficiencies rather than looking at system faults. a systematic review focusing on the medical profession showed that most studies found healthcare professionals have negative bias towards non-white people, graded by the iat, which was significantly associated with treatment adherence and decisions, and poorer patient outcomes (n= , ; studies). a further systematic review showed that healthcare professionals have negative bias in multiple categories from race to disability as graded by the iat (n= , ; studies) but it did not link this to outcomes. the reviews bring into © royal college of physicians . all rights reserved. implicit bias in healthcare question healthcare provider impartiality which may conflict with their ethical and moral obligations. , bias in clinical medicine using the iat, us medical students (n= , ) and doctors (n= , ) were demonstrated to have weight bias (ie prejudice against those who are overweight or obese) which may stem from a lack of undergraduate education in the causes of obesity and how to consult sensitively. – many healthcare professionals believe that obesity is due to a lack of willpower and personal responsibility, but it may be due to other factors such as poverty and worsening generational insomnia. – similarly the obesity iat evaluated across countries (n= , ) between and identified that overweight individuals had lower bias towards to overweight people, while countries with high levels of obesity had greater bias towards obese people. there is evidence to corroborate anecdotal reports of female doctors being mistaken for nurses while at work, and male members of staff and male students being mistaken for doctors despite the presence of a clear female leader. , boge and colleagues found that patients (n= ) were . % significantly less likely to recognise female consultants as leaders compared with their male counterparts, and % significantly more likely to recognise female nurses as nurses compared with male nurses. in addition, female residents (registrars) have significantly negative evaluations by nursing staff compared with their male colleagues despite similar objective clinical evaluations between male and female colleagues. , one alarming disparity that deserves mention is gender-specific differences in myocardial infarction presentation and survival. while members of both genders present with chest pain, women often present with what is known as ‘atypical’ symptoms such as nausea, vomiting and palpitations. , the mention of ‘atypical’ in the literature is misleading given that women make up half of an average population. large cohort studies (n= , ; n= , ) have found increased in-hospital mortality by – % (adjusted odds ratios) for female patients compared with male patients, which contrasts with smaller cohorts (n= , ; n= , ), which have found no differences. – interviews with patients under the age of (n= , ) who had suffered myocardial infarctions revealed that women were . % (absolute risk) more likely to seek medical attention, and were . % less likely to be told their symptoms were cardiac in origin. this data indicates a need for education of the public and healthcare professionals alike about the symptoms of a myocardial infarction in women. in , the mbrrace-uk report revealed that maternal and perinatal mortality in pregnancy was five times higher in black women compared with white women, and this data has also been replicated in us data with a similar order of magnitude of three to four times. , while official reports have not offered clear explanations as to the causes of such differences, it has been suggested that a combination of stigma, systemic racism and socio-economic inequality are relevant causative factors rather than biological factors alone. , lokugamage calls for healthcare professionals to challenge their own biases and assumptions when providing care using a ‘cultural safety’ model. , such a model could help identify areas for power imbalances in the healthcare provider–patient relationship and resultant inequalities. cultural competence training has been evaluated in a cochrane systematic review, and a number of randomised controlled trials (rcts) included did show that training courses (of varying lengths) did provide some improvement in cultural competency and perceived care quality at – months’ follow-up (five studies; professionals; , patients). however, there was limited effect on improving objective clinical markers such as decreasing blood pressure in ethnic minorities for example. bias in research, evidence synthesis and policy while scientific and medical research is thought to be free from outside influence, ‘science is always shaped by the time and the place in which it is carried out’. the research questions that are developed and answered depend on the culture and institutions in our societies, including public–private industry partnerships. during research conduct, minimisation of bias (specifically selection and measurement bias) within research is an important factor when attempting to produce generalisable and robust data. canadian life science researchers note a consistent trend of small research institutions having a % lower chance of research grant application being successful compared with large research institutions. , in contrast, gender bias within the wider realm of research may discriminate against women in the selection of grant funding as well as in terms of the hierarchical structure of promotion in academic institutions. , at academic conferences and grand rounds, men were – % more likely to introduced by their professional titles by women compared with when women were introduced by men. – women were – % more likely to introduce a fellow woman by her title compared with men introducing men. however, these differences were not always observed. taking an international perspective, when an iat was used to assess healthcare professionals’ and researchers’ (n= ) views on the quality of research emanating from ‘rich’ and ‘poor’ countries (assessed by gross domestic product), the majority associated ‘good’ (eg trustworthy and valuable) research with ‘rich’ countries. this alone does not mean much, but by using a randomised blinded crossover experiment (n= ), swapping the source of a research abstract from a low- to high-income country, improved the assessment of the research in english healthcare professionals. a systematic review (three randomised control trials; n= , ) found geographic bias for research from high-income countries or more prestigious journals over low- income countries or less prestigious journals. this highlights how publication bias for research from high-income countries could neglect a wealth of data from low-income countries that is valid, even if it is not published, or only published in lower impact journals. these data highlight a greater need for more objective assessments of research, including multiple layers of blinding with a journal review board and peer reviewers from low-income countries. however, blinding may be beneficial when recruiting people to jobs from job applications given that application photos may influence the selection process at resident or registrar level. it may be difficult to anonymise citations or publication data during academic selection processes. bias comes into play during evidence generation and application of evidence-based policy (ebp) where scientific-based, single- faceted solutions can be seldom applied to multi-faceted or ‘wicked’ problems. these problems are poorly defined, complex, dynamic issues where solutions may have unpredictable consequences (such as climate change or obesity). parkhurst identifies two forms of evidentiary bias in policymaking that can occur in the creation, selection and interpretation of evidence: technical bias dipesh p gopal, ula chetty, patrick o’ donnell et al © royal college of physicians . all rights reserved. and issue bias. technical bias is where use of the evidence does not follow scientific best practice, such as ‘cherry-picking’ rather than systematically reviewing the evidence to support a certain position. in contrast, issue bias occurs when the use of the evidence shifts political debate in a certain direction, such as presenting a policy with evidence reflecting one side of the debate. cognitive biases and diagnostic errors errors are inevitable in all forms of healthcare. the prevalence of diagnostic errors varies between different healthcare settings and may be partly due to cognitive factors as well as system related factors. , systematic reviews ( studies; , autopsies) looking at studies where autopsies detected clinically important or ‘major’ errors involving principal underlying disease or primary cause of death found an error rate of . – % in adult and child inpatient settings. , a systematic review conducted in primary care identified a median error rate of . per consultations or records reviewed ( studies (nine systematic reviews and primary studies); . million consultations/records). existing research on human factors using checklists to decrease hospital- associated infections and perioperative mortality supports emerging research that links bias to diagnostic errors. – a systematic review assessing associations between cognitive biases and medical decisions found cognitive biases were associated with diagnostic inaccuracies in . %– % of case scenarios ( studies; n= ) from mostly clinician survey-based data. there was an association found between cognitive bias and management errors in five studies (n= , ). there was insufficient data to link physician biases and patient outcomes. the review was limited by a lack of definitions of the different types of cognitive biases in % of all studies (n= ) and a lack of systematic assessment of cognitive bias. cognitive biases are one of several individual-related interweaving factors linked to errors, including inadequate communication, inadequate knowledge–experience skill set and not seeking help. there are many different types of cognitive bias which can be illustrated in the healthcare diagnostic context (see table ). evidence-based bias training making diagnoses is thought to depend on the previously mentioned type and type processes which make up dpt. despite this, there has been a growing body of evidence suggestive that type processing or ‘thinking slow’ is not necessarily better than type processing ‘thinking fast’ in clinicians. , – furthermore, there has been suggestion that proposed solutions (such as reflection and cognitive forcing; strategies that force reconsideration of diagnoses) to identify and minimise biases and debiasing checklists has limited effect in bias and error reduction. – small-scale survey-based data (n= ) suggested the presence of hindsight bias where clinicians disagree on the exact cognitive biases depending on the outcome of a diagnostic error (see table ). a systematic review ( studies; n= , ) on cognitive interventions targeting dpt for medical students and qualified doctors found several interventions had mixed or no significant results in decreasing diagnostic error rate. the vast majority of studies included small samples (n< ) and effects often did not extend beyond weeks. interventions included integration into educational curricula, checklists when making diagnoses, cognitive forcing, reflection and direct instructions. these interventions often come under the umbrella term of ‘meta- cognition’. a more recent systematic review and meta-analysis determined that diagnostic reflection improved diagnostic accuracy by % in medical students and doctors (n= , ; studies) with short-term follow-up. this implies that decreasing bias can only occur after a diagnostic error has taken place. the limited evidence base for decreasing bias may be due to methodological differences or intrinsic differences in study subjects in the clinical studies and reviews. some clinicians may find a practical checklist when providing healthcare in order to minimise their own biases when making decisions (box ). – the nature of decreasing bias through a single- faceted intervention may be very difficult as bias is a ‘wicked’ or multi-faceted problem. unconventional methods of teaching bias may include a teaching bias to medical students in a non-clinical setting (such as a museum, a weekly series of case conferences examining health equity and implicit bias, and transformative learning theory). – transformative learning theory resembles what many consider to be key components of balint groups and combines multiple single interventions (such as experience, reflection, discussion and simulation). , hagiwara and colleagues outlined three translational gaps from social psychology to medical training which may hinder the effectiveness of bias training to improve health outcomes. the first is a lack of evaluation of a person’s motivation to make change along with bias awareness. the second is that bias training does not come with clear strategies to mitigate bias and may result in avoidance or overfriendliness which may come across as contrived in specific situations (such as clinics with marginalised groups). the third is lack of verbal and non-verbal communication training with bias training, given that communication is the mediator between bias and patient outcomes. verbal communication training may involve micro-aggressions. discussion there are limited data to suggest reflective practice as a clear evidence-based strategy to decrease our biases on a clinician–patient level but options such as cultural safety checklists and previously outlined strategies (box ) could provide support to coalface clinicians. – better appreciation of biases in clinical reasoning could help clinicians reduce clinical errors and improve patient safety and provide better care for marginalised communities who have the worst healthcare outcomes. , it is hoped that the training would help bridge the gap from the unawareness of bias to the ability to recognise bias in others and within ourselves to mitigate personal biases and identify how discrimination may occur. awareness of implicit bias allows individuals to examine their own reasoning in the workplace and wider environment. it asks for personal accountability and a single question: ‘if this person were different in terms of race, age, gender, etc, would we treat them the same?’ however, there is a conflict between those suggesting bias training which may increase awareness of bias and the limited evidence to identify any effective debiasing strategy following the identification of biases. advocates of bias training suggest that it should not be taught as an isolated topic but integrated into clinical specialty training. others deduce that bias training would be more effective with measures of personal motivation and communication training along with evidence-based strategies to decrease implicit bias. similarly, iat testing should be administered with a caveat. to our knowledge at the time of writing, only the royal college of surgeons of england has identified the importance of © royal college of physicians . all rights reserved. implicit bias in healthcare table . selected cognitive biases in a healthcare context with definitions illustrated with an example of a patient presenting with chest pain – type of bias definition practical example affective or visceral bias countertransference or a professional’s feeling towards the patient results in misdiagnosis. the patient presenting with chest pain reminds you of a relative that you know well, so you do not perform a full history or examination anchoring bias focusing on initial information in a patient’s presentation results in an early diagnosis made despite pertinent information available later during information gathering. you perceive the patient presenting with central chest pain to have gastro-oesophageal reflux and do not change your provisional diagnosis despite history- taking revealing chest pain radiating to the back. premature closure making a diagnosis before a full assessment is performed. you make a diagnosis of pneumonia for a patient presenting with right-sided chest pain and breathlessness with marked hypoxia but do not consider a pulmonary embolus as an additional contributory cause. availability bias recent encounters with a specific disease keep that disease in mind (more available) and increases the chance of making that diagnosis. alternatively, less frequent encounters with a disease (less available) decrease the chance of making that diagnosis. you perceive patients with pleuritic chest pain to have a pulmonary embolism despite low overall risk and send them for a computed tomography pulmonary angiography as a result of recently missed pulmonary embolism. confirmation bias seeking and accepting only information that confirms a diagnosis rather than information that refutes a diagnosis. you perceive the patient with left sided chest pain and raised troponin to have a myocardial infarction but do not consider other causes of raised troponin. commission (action) bias action rather than inaction prevents patient harm driven by beneficence; ie, believing that more is better. you prescribed two antibiotics, against local guidance, to the patient who presented with right-sided chest pain diagnosed with pneumonia ‘just in case’. you perceive the patient recovery as a result of your action rather than a less virulent disease. omission (inaction) bias inaction rather than action prevents patient harm driven by non-maleficence; ie, believing that less is better. omission bias is thought to be more prevalent than commission bias. you prescribed no antibiotics for the patient who presented with pleuritic chest pain diagnosed with a lower respiratory tract infection. the patient does not recover which you attribute to virulent disease progression rather than inaction. diagnostic momentum reinforcing a diagnosis that was once a possibility suggested by different stakeholders related to the patient including professionals that now becomes a certainty despite evidence to the contrary. this may involve continuing with a previous clinician’s management plan despite new information suggesting that this is unnecessary. you and your fellow team members agree with your consultant / attending physician who makes a provisional diagnosis of pneumothorax for a patient presenting with pleuritic chest pain but is contradicted by fevers and cough as symptoms. gambler’s fallacy believing that a condition cannot be the diagnosis having made the diagnosis repeatedly on several occasions; ie, the pre-test probability is affected by previous independent events. reference to a gambler’s false belief that flipping a coin five times resulting with heads increases the chance of tails on the sixth occasion. you diagnose all of the five preceding patients presenting with chest pain as having a myocardial infarction and believe there is less chance that the next patient will have the same diagnosis. overconfidence bias overestimation in one’s own ability to know more than they actually do, also known as the dunning–kruger effect, placing more emphasis on judgement rather than objective markers. you diagnose a patient presenting with left sided pleuritic chest pain after blunt trauma as having soft tissue injury as they have a normal respiratory examination rather than making a provisional diagnosis of pneumothorax and sending the patient for chest x-ray. dipesh p gopal, ula chetty, patrick o’ donnell et al © royal college of physicians . all rights reserved. table . selected cognitive biases in a healthcare context with definitions illustrated with an example of a patient presenting with chest pain – type of bias definition practical example sutton’s slip or law making the most obvious diagnosis without considering other possibilities; named after bank robber willie sutton. you diagnose a young patient presenting with breathlessness and chest pain on exertion as late- onset asthma without considering less likely but possible diagnoses such as stable angina. hindsight bias believing a diagnosis is more likely after it becomes known compared with before it was known. there are three types known as memory distortion, inevitability and foreseeability. you are criticised for missing a diagnosis of pulmonary embolism in a middle-aged man who presented with chest pain and collapse when the computed tomography pulmonary angiography was initially reported as normal when the patient self- discharged home. the scan was amended the next day to show a pulmonary embolism, but the patient unfortunately died. (continued) box . suggested checklist for making good clinical decisions – consider whether data are truly relevant, rather than just salient. did i consider causes besides the obvious ones? how did i reach my diagnosis? did a patient or colleague suggest the diagnosis? did i ask questions that would disprove, rather than confirm, my current hypothesis? have i been interrupted or distracted while caring for this patient? is this a patient i do not like or like too much for any reason? am i stereotyping the patient or presentation? remember that you are wrong more often than you think! unconscious bias through an information booklet. the booklet entitled avoiding unconscious bias seems unlikely because type processing is integral to human thinking. there is a need for better- powered research into the effectiveness of strategies that can decrease implicit and cognitive bias, especially in the long term. furthermore, organisations should consider whether bias training should be integrated into undergraduate and postgraduate curriculum as there are no effective debiasing strategies. as we move into data-driven societies, the impact of bias becomes every important. a simple example is a step counting mobile application that undercounted steps, it is probably due to the application being likely constructed to count steps in an ‘average person’ ignoring differences in gender, body mass index and ethnic origin. within artificial intelligence, testing of data algorithms in different groups of people can help make algorithms more applicable to diverse populations and, ideally, diversely created algorithms should limit bias and increase applicability. , since the black lives matter movement, many institutions may consider implementing bias training to mitigate racism. however, awareness of implicit bias or tokenistic bias training must not deflect from wider socio-economic, political and structural barriers that individuals face. , similarly, implicit bias should not be used to absolve responsibility, nor ignore explicit bias that may perpetuating prejudice and stereotypes. action to correct the lack of non-white skin in research literature and medical textbooks is welcome. – furthermore, there has been much work to challenge the role of biological race in clinical algorithms and guidance (such as estimated glomerular filtration rate and blood pressure). , most pertinent to the pandemic, sjoding and colleagues compared almost , pairs of oxygen saturations with pulse oximetry and arterial blood gas among black and white patients. black patients were – % (relative risk three times) more likely to have lower arterial saturations when compared with pulse oximetry for white patients. this has implications for the coronavirus pandemic, respiratory conditions and is a call to tackle racial bias in medical devices. with regards to the structure of our healthcare systems, the understanding of personal bias can help identify judgements made during recruitment processes and help build representative leadership and workforce in the healthcare system of the population they serve. this is likely to help deliver better patient outcomes. other strategies to decrease the impact of bias include using objective criteria to recruit, blind evaluations and salary disclosures. additional measures include providing a system of reporting discrimination and measuring outcomes such as employee pay and hiring, and routinely measuring employee perceptions of inclusion and fairness. such measures are fundamental to help mitigate inequality and associated adversity. ■ acknowledgements we thank prof damien ridge for his suggestions on this manuscript. conflicts of interest dipesh gopal is an in-practice fellow supported by the department of health and social care and the national institute for health research. disclaimer the views expressed are those of the author(s) and not necessarily those of the nhs, the nihr or the department of health. no 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reserved. http://www.mededportal.org/publication/ http://www.equalityhumanrights.com/en/publication-download/unconscious-bias-training-assessment-evidence-effectiveness http://www.rcseng.ac.uk/library-and-publications/rcs-publications/docs/avoiding-unconscious-bias https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/episode- -internet-is-repository-evil-ft-alex-fefegha/id ?i= http://www.nature.com/articles/d - - - https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/episode- -internet-is-repository-evil-ft-alex-fefegha/id ?i= http://www.blackandbrownskin.co.uk http://www.kingsfund.org.uk/audio-video/podcast/race-equality-nhs-workforce mailto:d.gopal@qmul.ac.uk ama journal of ethics, september ama journal of ethics® september , volume , number : e - art of medicine what the activism and art of felix gonzalez-torres and gregg bordowitz teach us about health and human rights giannella ysasi tavano, ma abstract living through a pandemic and social upheaval suggests the importance of revisiting the intersections of the art and activism of felix gonzalez- torres and gregg bordowitz. these artists’ works express their experiences of living through a pandemic and subsequent social change and draw out key human rights themes. the works’ materials, poetics, and invitations to interact offer opportunities for audiences to reflect on complex and ethically relevant social and cultural dynamics that surface during global crises, such as negotiating personal and collective interests, the politics of touch and coexistence, and cultivating resilience and strength. pandemics through art today, when thinking about pandemics, we consider global health crises caused by covid- and the subsequent social upheaval that has elevated voices of black people across the united states and the globe. memory and history remind us of other national and international pandemics and social crises. covid- recalls the spanish flu pandemic of , and activism still draws on the energy of the civil rights movements of the s and s. historical moments from the s and early s hiv/aids crisis combine fights against disease and fights for health care and human rights. when threats of ill health and social injustice collide, the right to live demands that we ask fundamental ethics questions. gregg bordowitz and felix gonzalez-torres’ work and histories give us space in which we can recognize the activism and poetry with which artists responded (and are still responding) to health and social crises that create moments of collective urgency, uncertainty, and resilience. bordowitz shares his experience of the hiv/aids crisis: “so total was the burden of illness—mine and others’—that the only viable response, other than to cease making art entirely, was to adjust to the gravity of the predicament by using the crisis as a lens.” today, again, we might consider these words and think about ways in which the covid- pandemic crisis offers a lens through which we can learn from these artists and how their work can help orient us to our individual and collective pasts, presents, and futures. https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/stigmatization-complicates-infectious-disease-management/ - https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/representing-aids-comics/ - www.journalofethics.org representing incongruence and inequality the work of gonzalez-torres and bordowitz, both activists in the hiv/aids crisis and both hiv positive, embodies complex ethical implications of pandemics that uncover political incongruencies, amplify social inequalities, and reveal sources of personal and community suffering. figure . drive, - , by gregg bordowitz. installation view: gregg bordowitz: i wanna be well. art institute of chicago, april to july , , chicago, illinois. image courtesy of the art institute of chicago. used with permission of the artist. media vintage wheeled derby car with vinyl stickers on artist-designed plinth, vinyl banner, clocks, and framed exhibition posters. gonzalez-torres’ work carries conceptual significance in its intent for the work to hold multiple meanings. for instance, “untitled” (portrait of ross in la), can be interpreted through the politics of touch during the hiv/aids crisis. the pile of candy can be interpreted as representing the artist’s partner, ross laycock, who passed away in from health complications related to aids. visitors in the museum gallery are given the choice to grab a candy, take it with them, maybe eat it if they decide to do so. they can also decide to enjoy the artwork simply by looking at it. having the opportunity to interact with the work is an essential part of the experience. the candy pile (ideally weighting pounds, the average weight of a healthy individual) thus can “lose weight,” just as the artist’s partner (and many other victims of aids) lost weight due to the illness and its treatment. nonetheless, it is important to note that during any given manifestation of any candy work by gonzalez-torres, the owner or authorized borrower can make decisions regarding the work’s form and weight, so while the work can “lose weight,” it also has the potential to be replenished throughout the course of the https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/article/salvation-time-plague/ - https://www.felixgonzalez-torresfoundation.org/works/c/candy-works ama journal of ethics, september exhibition depending on the borrower’s decisions. the flexible nature of the dimensions of the work is an essential part of it. the piece uncovers tensions in the museum space in which people are welcomed to touch (and take) the artwork, although visitors in a museum space are more typically surveilled and prohibited from touching at all. the covid- pandemic and antiracism protests expose and elevate similar tensions: the threat of touching what can be infectious coexists with our urgent need to come together. figure . “untitled” (portrait of ross in la), , by felix gonzalez-torres. installation view: objects of wonder: from pedestal to interaction. aros aarhus kunstmuseum, aarhus, denmark, october , to march , . curator: pernille taagard dinesen. photographer: lise balsby. image courtesy of aros aarhus kunstmuseum. © felix gonzalez-torres. courtesy of the felix gonzalez-torres foundation. media candies in variously colored wrappers, endless supply. overall dimensions vary with installation. ideal weight: lb. the pile of candy, slowly dissipating or growing back again, also suggests a visual image of our public health need to “flatten the curve” (a graphic representation of day-to-day statistics) during the early part of the covid- pandemic in the united states. sheila jasanoff, a professor of science and technology studies at harvard university, argues that the animation and visualization with which pandemic data can now be represented is something that was indeed not possible during the hiv/aids crisis. abstract graphic public health data contrasts with the concrete materiality of the gonzalez-torres installation and suggests key ethical questions arising from the relationships between individual life and collective existence during a global breakdown: when is a life worth saving? when do we declare further measures not worth doing? www.journalofethics.org artistic activism hiv/aids activists set a historical precedent in successfully demanding that policymakers address the crisis. the aids pandemic was ignored for years, unnamed by politicians and neglected by mainstream society. from to , gonzalez-torres belonged to group material, a collective in new york’s east village whose members were on a mission during the s and early s “to call attention to the unethical and despicable behavior of mainstream society, in response to the aids crisis.” but it wasn’t until the mid- s, when the demographics of aids patients diversified to include users of intravenous drugs and blood products, that governments decided to take action. aids activism brought about extraordinary gains, such as drug approvals, increased research budgets, and more targeted science, until when the us government approved powerful new antiretroviral drugs. today, again, authorities are called upon to revisit access to health care and to create policies that challenge structural racism at multiple levels of our realities. we have a long road ahead. ongoing struggle for health and human rights was the topic of a virtual lecture that bordowitz gave at the school of the art institute of chicago just as the covid- pandemic started to unfold in the united states in . while discussing his artistic and activist work, he said: “i was doing it, i am still doing it, and my work is an example of how catastrophes get represented, normalized and not really resolved, how the spotlight moves on.” in his recent retrospective show, i wanna be well, bordowitz included a giant banner: “the aids crisis is still beginning.” and, like the motto “black lives matter,” this motto compels us to listen, pay attention, look back into history, learn from it, and, more importantly, take action. figure . the aids crisis is still beginning, , by gregg bordowitz. installation view: gregg bordowitz: i wanna be well. art institute of chicago, april to july , , chicago, illinois. image courtesy of the art institute of chicago. used with permission of the artist. media vinyl banner. ama journal of ethics, september in contrast to gonzalez-torres’ metaphorical and conceptual approach, bordowitz’s work and poetics are explicitly activist in tone. self-portraits that bordowitz drew as he lost weight when he was first treated for hiv (see figure ) might, on one interpretation of “untitled” (portrait of ross in la), evoke the similar experience of gonzalez-torres’ partner. figure . detail from self-portraits in mirror, , by gregg bordowitz. installation view: gregg bordowitz: i wanna be well. art institute of chicago, april to july , , chicago, illinois. image courtesy of the art institute of chicago. used with permission of the artist. media graphite on paper. among many other works that represented his lifelong investigations of identity and illness is bordowitz’s other self-portrait in the form of an installation view of his personal library (see figure ). a library is both intimate and public, an apt contrast, perhaps, for his personal struggle with illness, which can also inform broader community www.journalofethics.org efforts to cultivate resilience and strength. in his lecture, bordowitz stated that the “personal part is about plurality. it shouldn’t evolve into the singular. it should resonate and vibrate with shared experiences…. art constitutes a great vitality of our lives.” figure . installation view of debris fields, , and selections from gregg bordowitz’s library, – , by gregg bordowitz. installation view: gregg bordowitz: i wanna be well. art institute of chicago, april to july , , chicago, illinois. image courtesy of the art institute of chicago. used with permission of the artist. the works of gonzalez-torres and bordowitz reveal complex tensions between a personal struggle and a global crisis and pose ethical questions about touch, life and death, privilege, and marginalization. yet, they also elicit a sense of gratitude and hope for the possibility of building a better future, either by restoring a pile of candy or by sharing one’s library with others—or by restoring a pile of paper. ama journal of ethics, september figure . “untitled” (passport), , by felix gonzalez-torres. installation view: box of angels. capp street foundation, san francisco, california, may to june , . curator: bob linder. photographer: johnna arnold. image courtesy of capp street foundation. © felix gonzalez-torres. courtesy of the felix gonzalez-torres foundation. media paper, endless supply. cm at ideal height x cm x cm (original paper size) [ inches at ideal height x / x / inches (original paper size)]. gonzalez-torres wrote a letter to art dealer andrea rosen in in which he described one of his “stack works.” gonzalez-torres designed stacks of paper comprised of printed sheets that bear photographic images or oblique texts; individual sheets could be removed by viewers as well as replenished by presenters, respectively. specifically, with reference to “untitled” (passport), he suggested that we might be able to go back to art as “a chance to alter one’s life and future, an empty passport for life… a simple white object against a white wall, waiting.” references . bordowitz g. the aids crisis is ridiculous and other writings: - . cambridge, ma: mit press; . . arjini n. science will not come on a white horse with a solution. nation. april , . https://www.thenation.com/article/society/sheila-jasanoff-interview- coronavirus/. accessed june , . . wojton ma. love and loss: the works of felix gonzalez-torres, the aids epidemic, and postmodern art [master’s thesis]. kent, oh: kent state university; . https://www.felixgonzalez-torresfoundation.org/works/c/paper-stacks https://www.thenation.com/article/society/sheila-jasanoff-interview-coronavirus/ https://www.thenation.com/article/society/sheila-jasanoff-interview-coronavirus/ www.journalofethics.org https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=kent &dispositio n=inline. accessed june , . . national institute of allergy and infectious diseases, national institutes of health. antiretroviral drug discovery and development. https://www.niaid.nih.gov/diseases-conditions/antiretroviral-drug-development. reviewed november , . accessed july , . . bordowitz g. i wanna be well [lecture]. school of the art institute of chicago. https://www.saic.edu/events/gregg-bordowitz. published april , . accessed june , . . douglas f. cooley memorial art gallery, reed college. gregg bordowitz: i wanna be well, art institute of chicago, april -july , . https://rdc.reed.edu/c/cooley/s?s= b a e b e f de a daac &p= &pp= . accessed july , . . gregg bordowitz: i wanna be well [press release]. chicago, il: art institute of chicago; march , . https://www.artic.edu/press/press- releases/ /gregg-bordowitz-i-wanna-be-well. accessed june , . . miller mh. a colossal new show revisits a conceptual art icon. new york times. may , . https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /t-magazine/art/felix- gonzalez-torres-zwirner-new-york-show.html. accessed june , . giannella ysasi tavano, ma is a fellow at the learning and public engagement department at the art institute of chicago in chicago, illinois. https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=kent &disposition=inline https://etd.ohiolink.edu/!etd.send_file?accession=kent &disposition=inline https://www.niaid.nih.gov/diseases-conditions/antiretroviral-drug-development https://www.saic.edu/events/gregg-bordowitz https://rdc.reed.edu/c/cooley/s?s= b a e b e f de a daac &p= &pp= https://rdc.reed.edu/c/cooley/s?s= b a e b e f de a daac &p= &pp= https://www.artic.edu/press/press-releases/ /gregg-bordowitz-i-wanna-be-wellp https://www.artic.edu/press/press-releases/ /gregg-bordowitz-i-wanna-be-wellp https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /t-magazine/art/felix-gonzalez-torres-zwirner-new-york-show.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /t-magazine/art/felix-gonzalez-torres-zwirner-new-york-show.html ama journal of ethics, september editor's note visit the art institute of chicago website or contact sam anderson-ramos at sramos@artic.edu to learn more about the museum’s medicine and art programming. browse the ama journal of ethics art gallery for more art of medicine content and for more about the journal’s partnership with the art institute of chicago. citation ama j ethics. ; ( ):e - . doi . /amajethics. . . acknowledgements thanks to gregg bordowitz and the felix gonzalez-torres foundation. conflict of interest disclosure the author(s) had no conflicts of interest to disclose. the viewpoints expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the ama. copyright american medical association. all rights reserved. issn - https://www.artic.edu/ mailto:sramos@artic.edu https://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/articles?field_article_type_target_id% b % d= &month=all&year=all seeing black lives matter and the alt-right through an existential lens: from responses to death to rebellion and revolution a dissertation submitted to the temple university graduate board in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree doctor of philosophy by matthew stein december examining committee members: heath fogg davis, advisory chair, political science barbara ferman, political science chloé bakalar, political science rosalind p. petchesky, external member, city university of new york ii abstract this dissertation examines the potential existential roots of contemporary american social movements. i extract an existential social movement theory from albert camus’s philosophy that can elucidate surprising similarities and tactical differences across ongoing movements. i then apply the theory to black lives matter and the alt- right which helps demonstrate that both movements express existential anxiety related to collective, racialized death. the social movement theory also clarifies the movements’ divergent political tactics as black lives matter responds to existential anxiety by collectively acting to relieve immediate black suffering and death which i argue is a camusian rebellion. the alt-right conversely responds to existential anxiety by directing their energies towards achieving a teleological goal of racial homogeneity which i argue is a camusian revolution. i use a variety of first-person sources including memoirs, interviews, and undercover exposés to support my thesis that black lives matter and the alt-right are both responding to feelings of racialized existential anxiety, although they traverse disparate pathways. while the dissertation is primarily focused on racially motivated social movements, i argue that american environmental activists can learn from, and emulate black lives matter’s tactics. environmental activists argue that climate change is an existential crisis, and the anxiety of the death and devastation of climate catastrophe underlies much of today’s climate activism. black lives matter has successfully transformed existential anxiety over state sanctioned black death into meaningful and immediate reforms, without sacrificing its radical critiques of racial capitalism, mass incarceration, and white iii supremacy. i argue that environmental activists can likewise energize their existential anxieties into reforms that slow climate change, while continuing to challenge systemic degradation of the global environment. i conclude the dissertation by examining the black lives matter activism in response to the deaths of ahmaud arbery, breonna taylor, and george floyd. ongoing and recent black lives matter protests are rooted in the same collectively anxious response to black death and have achieved even greater sociopolitical and cultural changes than the protests of years prior, providing further evidence for my thesis. iv dedicated to the family i lost along this journey from starting college through obtaining a doctorate. “absurdity is king, but love saves us from it.” – albert camus. max must ( - ) benjamin geigerman ( - ) june must ( - ) annette stein ( - ) arnold stein ( - ) v acknowledgments i have received a great deal of support, assistance, and encouragement throughout the writing of this dissertation. i want to first thank my supervisor, professor heath fogg-davis, who has read countless drafts of this work. heath, your help and advice were paramount to getting me from a starting point so distant to this final product. maybe more than anything, i want to thank you for the times we spoke about my work in your office with a sense of dark humor; yes the work is serious and yes it is on death, but looking at such a daunting work with a smile was refreshing and helpful beyond words. i want to thank professor barbara ferman and professor chloé bakalar for agreeing to be on my committee, for providing consistent, thoughtful feedback, and for pushing and challenging me to produce the best work possible. finally, professor rosalind petchesky who shaped my thinking as a political theorist, who oversaw my first project on albert camus when i was an undergraduate at hunter college, and who – all these years later – graciously agreed to be my external reader. professor petchesky, if you never suggested that i should get a ph.d., i don’t think it would have crossed my mind. i want to thank professor hillel soifer and professor robin kolodny for being my other ears, for looking at my work from different lenses, for helping me navigate the dissertation process, the job market, and graduate school at temple. thank you joseph schwartz for being my mentor and my advisor through the early portion of my time at temple. i also want to thank two professors who were instrumental in my academic growth and achievement: professor frank le veness who, years after i graduated from st. john’s university with my master of arts, continues to have my back and look out for vi me, and professor william byrne who has always been kind, understanding, and willing to help and chat about politics, political theory, and higher education. to my longtime friends, and my temple confidantes who have stuck with me through this journey and who have listened to me drone on about things in which they have no serious interest, i really appreciate it. there is no way i can really make it up to you all because your friendship and encouragement have gotten me through some incredibly difficult times. my family, perhaps obviously, without whom i literally would not be here. my parents have always been supportive of me, even when this goal was seemingly out of reach. you let me follow my own calling and encouraged me to forge my own path in life. maybe i took the least conventional means to get here, but without your help, i would never have made it to the finish line. finally, to nikki. when we met during college, neither of us could have ever imagined this. back in , getting a doctorate was not even slightly a thought in my mind. you always believed in me. you picked up and moved to philadelphia. you started and finished your master’s program. you accomplished some incredible goals and you should be so proud of yourself and all that you achieved. we have a dog! now katie will forever be a part of this journey. at the same time that you were working as hard as i know you did, you stood beside me every step of the way, down my long and winding road. there are no words that can adequately capture my gratitude; thank you is not even close. vii table of contents page abstract ........................................................................................................................ ii dedication ................................................................................................................... iv acknowledgments ...................................................................................................v chapter . introduction ......................................................................................................... defining the bounds of existentialism .................................................................... political theoretical treatments of social movements ........................................... theoretical analyses of social movements: situating the context ............ theoretical analyses of black lives matter ............................................. theoretical analyses of the alt-right ....................................................... conclusion ............................................................................................................. . extracting the camusian theory ............................................................ phase one: death and existential anxiety as the primary existential concern ............................................................................................................ phase two: existential anxiety and the revolt against the absurdity of human existence ............................................................................................. camus’s rejection of suicide .................................................................... camus’s rejection of religion .................................................................. camus’s revolt against the absurd .......................................................... viii phase three: camus’s conqueror – turning outwards towards the political ............................................................................................................ phase four: camus’s support of rebellion and retort of revolution .................. conclusion ............................................................................................................. . on the two cases: why black lives matter and the alt- right are fit for comparison ..................................................................... black lives matter and the alt-right as anti-hierarchical movements .............. black lives matter, the alt-right and the rejection of formal politics ............... the role of identity in black lives matter and the alt-right .............................. how black lives matter and the alt-right conceive of race ................. the role of gender in black lives matter and the alt-right ................... conclusion ............................................................................................................. . black lives matter: from necropolitics to camusian rebellion ............................................................................................................... black lives matter’s response to necropolitical death ....................................... black lives matter’s revolt against the absurdity of human existence .......... black lives matter’s rejection of suicide .............................................. black lives matter’s rejection of religion as a framing device .......... black lives matter’s life affirming revolt ........................................... black lives matter’s turn outwards towards political action ......................... black lives matter as a camusian rebellion ...................................................... conclusion ........................................................................................................... ix . the alt-right: from fear of white genocide to camusian revolution .......................................................................................................... the alt-right’s response to social death .......................................................... the alt-right as revolting against the absurdity of human existence ............ the alt-right’s rejection of suicide ...................................................... the alt-right’s rejection of religion as a framing device ................... the alt-right’s (white) life affirming revolt ...................................... the alt-right’s turn outwards towards political action.................................. the alt-right as camusian revolution ............................................................... conclusion ........................................................................................................... . environmental activism: lessons from black lives matter and the alt-right .......................................................................... a brief history of american environmental activism ....................................... environmental activism and environmental existential anxiety today ........... learning from black lives matter ...................................................................... black lives matter’s rebelliousness: immediate reforms and long-term approaches ..................................................................... environmental activism and radical realism .................................................... radical realism and the end of teleology: avoiding the pitfalls of the alt-right ........................................................................................................ conclusion ........................................................................................................... . postscript: and beyond ....................................................................... black lives matter in .................................................................................. x the alt-right in .......................................................................................... albert camus in .......................................................................................... conclusion: beyond .................................................................................... references cited .................................................................................................... chapter # introduction in this dissertation, i extract a political theory from the works of albert camus and argue that camus’s works help us to better understand some contemporary social movements in the united states as rooted in a response to death and existential anxiety. i then apply the camusian social movement theory i extract to two ongoing movements: black lives matter and the alt-right. i utilize the camusian theory to both highlight the role of death and existential anxiety in the respective movements, and to show how the movements proceed along divergent pathways to political change. social movements have been studied by many political theorists, but few if any have highlighted the important roles that death and existential anxiety can play in the inspiration of social movement formation and their ensuing growth. before proceeding, i want to first define existentialism and existential anxiety. historian george cotkin begins his book existential america by stating that “nearly everyone, it seemed, coming of age in s and s america danced to the song of french existentialism” ( , p. ). cotkin explains that “the meaning, excitement, and fashion of existentialism transformed the lives of many people” (ibid). while jean-paul sartre was dismissive of the united states as a locus of existential discourse, “no less than europeans, americans participated in the conversation of existentialism. in fact, existential modes of thinking had long before sunk deep roots in american thought and culture. the very notion of america as bereft of anguish is absurd” (cotkin , p. ). yet cotkin, who is quite sympathetic to the intellectual history of existentialism, locates existentialism’s heyday in the mid- th century. existentialism, as a publicly prominent concept, has reclaimed its glory in the early- st century due partly to ongoing political concerns. leanne italie ( ) of the associated press reports, “climate change, gun violence, the very nature of democracy and an angsty little movie star called forky helped propel ‘existential’ to dictionary.com’s [ ] word of the year.” the word “existential” and the related concept “existentialism” have returned from a half-century public slumber and are now front-and-center in america’s political discourse.i “existential” was a term used to refer to australian wildfires, hurricane dorian, mass shootings around the world from new zealand to texas, and united states president donald trump (ibid). dictionary.com – although an unscientific source – analyzes data for what words have defined a year based on spikes in user interest. it is clear that existentialism and contemporary politics share a connection. however, while many people were turning to dictionary.com to help define “existential” in light of its usage by presidential hopefuls bernie sanders and joe biden, defining the term is not a simple matter. i i do not mean to insinuate that people who use the term “existential” do so in a way that is entirely informed by existential philosophy. however, both the mainstream (or colloquial) use of “existential” and the philosophy of “existentialism” relate to similar themes of the underlying nature or purpose of human existence, especially given the reality of human finitude. defining the bounds of existentialism walter kaufmann, one of the preeminent scholars of twentieth century existentialism, opens his well-known anthology existentialism from dostoevsky to sartreii by refusing to define the term. in his introduction, kaufmann explains his understanding of existentialism. existentialism is not a philosophy but a label for several widely different revolts against traditional philosophy. most of the living ‘existentialists’ have repudiated this label, and a bewildered outsider might well conclude that the only thing they have in common is a marked aversion for each other. to add to the confusion, many writers of the past have frequently been hailed as members of this movement, and it is extremely doubtful whether they would have appreciated the company to which they are consigned. in view of this, it might be argued that the label ‘existentialism’ ought to be abandoned altogether. certainly, existentialism is not a school of thought nor reducible to any set of tenets. the three writers who appear inevitably on every list of ‘existentialists’ jaspers, heidegger, and sartre are not in agreement on essentials. such alleged precursors as pascal and kierkegaard differed from all three men by being dedicated christians; and pascal was a catholic of sorts while kierkegaard was a protestant's protestant. if, as is often done, nietzsche and dostoevsky are included in the fold, we must make room for an impassioned anti-christian and an even more fanatical greek-orthodox russian imperialist. by the time we consider adding rilke, kafka, and camus, it becomes plain that one essential feature shared by all these men is their perfervid individualism. (kaufmann , p. ) despite kaufmann’s insistence that defining existentialism is nearly impossible, he collects works by most of the aforementioned authors (all except pascal) for his anthology of existentialism. yet this vague approach to defining existentialism can leave the field open to an overly broad interpretation. ii cotkin states, “hardly a college student in the s could be found without a dog- eared copy of walter kaufmann’s collection” ( , p. ). cotkin uses this example to highlight just how prevalent existential thinking was in mid- th century america. while kaufmann’s effort to be inclusive is admirable, his refusal to define existentialism leaves one unable to discern what ought to be included or excluded in an examination of existentialism. it is not clear in kauffman’s account why edmund husserl (who influenced heidegger) or arthur schopenhauer (who was influenced by nietzsche) were not included in the anthology. conversely, if we are to assume that any tangential thinker ought to be included as an existentialist, we may find it difficult to exclude thinkers who wrote works that are not essentially existential; we could, by kaufmann’s account, consider john stuart mill, isaiah berlin, and murray rothbard existentialists since they addressed human freedom in their respective works.iii if this all- inclusive non-definition of existentialism may be too vague to be useful, there is also the potential to define existentialism too narrowly. jean paul sartre, simone de beauvoir and for some time, maurice merleau-ponty accepted the moniker of “existentialist” with sartre most explicitly endorsing the label. others such as camus, eugène ionesco ( ) and martin heidegger ( ) rejected the claim that their work should be considered in the existentialist cannon. camus, in a interview stated “no, i am not an existentialist. sartre and i are always surprised to see our names linked. we have even thought of publishing a short statement in which the iii i am not suggesting that liberalism overlooks death as there are questions about death that liberals consider such as the question of one’s right to suicide, and the right of self- defense and how it varies from murder. liberalism often considers questions of life and death within the realms of freedom or liberty, and rights. existentialism conversely contains a normative aspect (sometimes implicitly) and questions the normative value of life. existentialists also address issues surrounding freedom (see sartre and fanon), but not necessarily within the same liberal confines. undersigned declare that they have nothing in common with each other and refuse to be held responsible for the debts that they might respectively incur” ( b, p. ). for camus, ionesco, and heidegger, rejecting existentialism was tantamount to distancing their own philosophies from those of sartre. yet if we accept only sartre’s philosophy to be “existentialism,” then we would not only dismiss camus, ionesco and heidegger on their own terms, but we could not logically include those who wrote prior to sartre, including søren kierkegaard and friedrich nietzsche who wrote seminal existentialist works prior to sartre’s birth.iv instead of using either kaufmann’s vague understanding of existentialism which renders it entirely open, or a narrow definition that excludes thinkers who are commonly considered within the existentialist canon, i propose thinking about existentialism as a philosophical worldview that emphasizes the meaning and purpose of human existence, especially when considering the inevitability of death. by thinking about existentialism from this perspective, i need not dismiss camus, ionesco and heidegger on their own terms, nor those who wrote prior to sartre, including kierkegaard and nietzsche.v my approach, which includes these thinkers, aligns with studies of existentialism by scholars iv fyodor dostoyevsky, edmund husserl, and herman melville fall into this category as well. v this approach may include statements or even works by thinkers not often considered within existential discussions. for example socrates, in plato’s apology, famously claims that “the unexamined life is not worth living” (ca. b.c.e./ ). i comfortably accept that this claim is existential and that there may be other elements within the text that are likewise existential in nature if they consider the value of life, and the normative question of whether one ought to live. this does not mean that socrates nor plato are existentialists, but only that this statement is an existential statement. including kaufmann, cotkin, and sarah blakewell ( ). it is logical to include camus in this group of intellectuals since his work focuses on how the inevitability of death impacts the meaning and purpose of human life.vi existential thinking – considerations about the purpose of human life and death – can lead to feel a sense of angst or anxiety which can motivate political action.vii linguistic scholar alex ostmann defines existentialism as necessarily containing angst or anxiety related to one’s recognition of human mortality. he defines “existentialist thinking as a school of thought that is concerned with the problem of ‘angst’ (anxiety), ‘existenzangst’ (the fear of the threat to one’s existence) to be precise, and the way the individual copes with it. it centres around the total loneliness of the ‘anxiety-ridden’ individual who is faced with an inherently hostile world and, above all, with death” ( , p. ). my aforementioned definition of existentialism does not include anxiety as a necessary condition. instead, i slightly detach the two notions as existential thinking or considerations can often lead to a feeling of anxiety, but there may be cases where existential thinking does not necessarily cause anxious feelings.viii vi in the next chapter, i will address the related question of why i am specially using camus’s works by contrasting his existential approach with some of his existential peers and contemporaries. vii i will refer to this as “existential anxiety” throughout this dissertation. this term is synonymous with “existential angst” and even “existential dread.” different existentialists have deployed different terms, all related to primarily the same concerns. viii stoic philosopher epictetus is an example of a thinker engaged with existential questions about the meaning and purpose of human life and death. yet epictetus does not find anxiety to be a necessary part of the human existential experience as he asks rhetorically, “i must die. but must i die bawling?” (ca c.e./ , p. ). he states despite this slight protest, anxiety is prevalent in much existential discourse, ranging from philosophical doctrines, to literary works, to individual experiences. ostmann’s article is focused on heidegger’s philosophical usage of “existenzangst.” kierkegaard, however, published the concept of anxiety ( ) in ; years before heidegger’s birth. anxiety is a persistent theme in many of kierkegaard’s works, and in works by existentialists whom heidegger preceded.ix feelings of existential anxiety are found in many works of existential fiction such as jean-paul sartre’s nausea ( ) wherein the protagonist, antoine roquentin, becomes progressively sicker as he increasingly doubts his existence. likewise, romanian playwright eugène ionescox explains that existential anxiety did not just permeate his writing, but also preoccupied his life. his incessant asking the question “why?” leads to his ultimate questioning as he states that “it’s to death, above all, that i say ‘why?’ with such terror” ( , p. ). ionesco struggled to confront his existential anxiety, or the “universal anguish” ( , p. ) he individually experienced. existentialism and existential anxiety are prominent themes in philosophy, literature, and experiential similarly “no, i cannot escape death, but at least i can escape the fear of it” (epictetus ca c.e/ , p. ). stoic philosophy teaches one to live “in accordance with nature” (ca c.e./ , p. ) and since death is the natural conclusion of human life, epictetus argues that death is not something to fear, but it is merely the surrendering of the body. while existential, this argument is not tied directly to any feeling of anxiety and epictetus rejects such feelings as unnatural. ix see, for example, either/or, and fear and trembling for more of kierkegaard’s discussions on anxiety. x ionesco is one of the playwrights dubbed as part of the “theatre of the absurd” (esslin ) based on camus’s definition of the concept which will be discussed in the next chapter. journalistic writing. despite their prevalence in a wide array of relevant work, these themes are rarely considered within political theory generally, and specifically within theoretical studies of social movements. philosophical considerations of the meaning and purpose of human life, given the inevitability of death, can lead to feelings of anxiety. in turn these feelings, i will argue, can motivate participation in social movements.xi political theoretical treatments of social movements social movements have an extensive and important history in the united states, and in some regards, “social movements have made the world we live in” (cox , p. ). since the turn of the th century, social movements in the united states have fought against racism, sexism and misogyny, homophobia and transphobia, and have contributed to obtaining voting rights protections, the legalization of no-fault divorce, guarantees of same-sex marriage, and protections against discrimination against people with disabilities. laws that are now standard practice such as the americans with disabilities act (ada) and clean air act may not have materialized without the efforts of social movements.xii social movement scholars sidney tarrow and charles tilly define a social movement as “a sustained challenge to power holders in the name of a population living xi not all social movements are responses to existential anxiety, but the feeling of existential anxiety can spur a collective, social action. xii see a new york times op-ed by philosopher kwame anthony appiah ( ) for one alternative take on the successes (or for appiah, the overstatement thereof) of social movements. under the jurisdiction of those power holders by means of public displays of that population’s worthiness, unity, numbers, and commitment” ( , p. ). similarly, sociologists hadi khoshneviss and robert benford define social movements as “organized and sustained collective attempts to promote or resist social change. typically they seek to affect the course of change by employing extra-institutional means” and challenge “extant authority” ( , p. ). social movements may fight for solely cultural, social or symbolic change, yet “the status of the modern state as the institutional embodiment of elite interests often puts state authorities in the position of having to defend those interests against competing claims of challenging groups. this, coupled with the state’s historic monopoly on the legitimate use of violence, often makes it the key actor” (mcadam et al. , p. ). to modify a phrase used to describe war, a social movement is a form of politics by another means. social movements may actually be the only means, or minimally the most effective means of political engagement by those who have limited power in formal institutions. theoretical analyses of social movements: situating the context political and social theorists and philosophers from a wide array of intellectual and ideological backgrounds have studied social movements as political phenomena, and this dissertation exists in conversation with the scholars who have taken up similar tasks.xiii the following examples highlight that social movements have been studied by xiiixiii of course there are also many empirical studies of social movements. this theoretical contribution does not seek to displace any empirical work, but rather an array of political theorists and philosophers who vary in intellectual approaches and traditions, and who have analyzed many different social movements since the beginning of the th century. political philosopher and critical theorist jürgen habermas ( ) analyzed the german student protest movement of the late- s as a unique case since it had previously been believed that students did not play a vital political role in industrialized societies. habermas ( ) later coined the term “new social movements” to differentiate older, materialistically driven movements from the immaterial goals of social movements (such as environmental movements, anti-war movements, and human rights movements) that have arisen since the mid- s. political and social theorists frances fox piven and richard cloward study the structures and institutions that often limit social movement formation and activity to exceptional circumstances. the thesis of poor people’s movements is stated simply, “the occasions when protest is possible among the poor, the forms that it must take, and the impact it can have are all delimited by the social structure in ways which usually diminish its extent and diminish its force” (piven and cloward , p. ). piven and cloward apply their institutional approach to understanding social movements to two movements of the s (the unemployed workers’ and industrial workers’ movements), and two movements of the s (the civil rights movement, and welfare rights movement). the authors argue that on occasion, massive social or economic changes can upset daily life to a large extent. in these cases, some people protest against the extant contribute to a humanistic understanding of social movements and their relation to existential concerns. system which does not otherwise address their concerns through traditional, electoral means. in these moments, mass disruption through riots or similar forms of resistance may lead to vulnerable elites granting concessions in order to maintain stability. piven and cloward acknowledge that these concessions may be revocable, but without greater organization resources, poor people will not be able to otherwise achieve desired gains. political theorist iris marion young dedicates a chapter of justice and the politics of difference ( ) to social movements and focuses on movement efforts of women, latinos, and american indians. young argues that social movements often demand a positive recognition of social group differences.xiv this appreciation for group difference young contrasts with enlightenment-era thinking about equality and inclusion which mutes the uniqueness of group identities by demanding undesirable assimilation. some social movements, young argues, “have seen self-organization and the assertion of a positive group cultural identity as a better strategy [than assimilation] for achieving power and participation in dominant institutions” ( , p. ). it is this “politics of difference” that the movements young studied prefer to assimilationist alternatives.xv in the s, two classic collected volumes, this bridge called my back: writings by radical women of color and all the women are white, all the blacks are xiv women, for example, have sought maternity leave as a positive policy embracing the socially necessary labor of childbearing. xv philosopher charles taylor echoes some of young’s argument in stating that indigenous populations of canada ought to be entitled “certain rights and powers not enjoyed by other canadians, if the demands for native self-government are finally agreed on” ( , p. ). this would be a recognition of social group difference that is demanded by indigenous movements. men, but some of us are brave, featured theoretical critiques of ongoing (and earlier) iterations of the feminist movement in the united states and calls for movement activism that benefits marginalized women. in both collections, the movement is critiqued for ignoring the grievances of women of color, of working-class women, and of lesbians. audre lorde, for instance, in “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house” explains that this speech was being presented at a conference on feminist theory that lacked the input of “black feminists and lesbians” and of “third world women” ( , p. ). gloria anzaldúa likewise stated “my dear hermanas, the dangers we face as women writers of color are not the same as those of white women though we have many in common” ( , p. ). similar critiques by kimberlé crenshaw ( ) would follow and led her to develop of the framework of intersectionality; the idea that black women suffer unique forms of discrimination that cannot be explained solely by reference to either race or gender. more recently bell hooks, in her book feminism is for everybody, explains her concerns with prior waves of feminism. early in the work, she states that “even though individual black women were active in contemporary feminist movement [sic] from its inception, they were not the individuals who became the ‘stars’ of the movement, who attracted the attention of mass media. … even before race became a talked about issue in feminist circles it was clear to black women (and to their revolutionary allies in struggle) that they were never going to have equality within the existing white supremacist capitalist patriarchy” (hooks , pp. - ). the feminist movement unfortunately frequently overlooked the needs and demands of many women, and in doing so, reproduced extant oppression faced by women of color, working class women, and women identifying on the lgbtq+ spectrum. the spontaneous emergence of occupy wall street in led to a flurry of publications from political theorists and philosophers. occupy wall street began in new york’s zuccotti park in september , and the physical occupation of the park lasted for approximately two months. political and social theorists and philosophers analyzed the movement’s horizontal power structure (lowndes and warren ; aronowitz ; dean ; prentoulis and thomassen ), its relationship with and challenges to institutional politics (hardt and negri ; brown ; bronner ; walzer ; prentoulis and thomassen ), and its economic populist messaging and demands (barber ; Žižek ; dean ). in most cases, occupy’s rejection of hierarchical organization was tied to the movement’s skepticism of representative politics which itself was born from frustrations with socioeconomic conditions and perceived political inaction during the “great recession.” detailing the extensive theoretical and philosophical contributions to the literature on occupy wall street lies beyond the scope of this dissertation, but the sheer mass of relevant scholarship highlights the recent efforts of theorists to engage with an ongoing social movement. social movements at least as far back as the s have been analyzed by political and social theorists and philosophers. the above literature review highlighted that theoretical scholars from a wide array of intellectual backgrounds focused on then- ongoing social movements. the next two sections address two of today’s important social movements. first, i will analyze some of the theoretical contributions to understandings of black lives matter. then, i will analyze the few theoretical works that analyze the alt-right. this dissertation argues that both movements can be understood as rooted in a response to death and existential anxiety. in the following analyses, i will note both the lack of existential concern of most theoretical works on the respective movements, and the few instances in which this existential content is hinted at, but either not explored in detail, or from a widely varied perspective. theoretical analyses of black lives matter many political theorists have addressed black lives matter and while their contributions are important, they do not necessarily address the existential elements of the movement that my dissertation highlights. juliet hooker analyzes extant hostilities towards black lives matter protesters and their actions. she focuses “particularly [on] the demonization of those who have taken to the streets to protest the routine killing of black persons with impunity across the united states for minor, if not imagined, offenses by representatives of the state” (hooker , p. ). hooker argues for an understanding of black activism – including so-called “riots” – as a form of justified defiance wherein black americans publicize their political concerns which have otherwise been overlooked by their fellow americans and ignored by politicians. hooker focuses primarily on black lives matter’s protest tactics and the negative responses they have received from some political detractors. i will discuss black lives matter’s tactics as essentially nonviolent, which contributes to my understanding of the movement; black lives matter can be understood as a response to death and existential anxiety, and since the movement opposes death and suffering, it does not contribute to, or perpetuate violent acts.xvi while black lives matter’s tactics are hooker’s primary concern, they are only one focus within my larger argument concerning the existential anxiety that spurred the movement. courtenay daum ( ) argues that rights-based approaches to rectifying injustice fail to end the subjugation of marginalized and intersectionally-subjected populations within contemporary nationalist and neoliberal regimes. daum utilizes nancy fraser’s and michael warner’s concept of “counterpublics” and focuses on black lives matter as an example of a counterpublic arena wherein subjugated people can promote counterdiscourses, and oppositional interpretations of their identities, interests, and needs, while cultivating their collective power. black lives matter, daum argues, has rejected rights-based approaches as “marginalized populations are not going to be liberated from hegemony by seeking the recognition and protections of rights from the very institutions used to oppress them” ( , p. ). instead, black lives matter embraces their outsider status, rejects dominant discoursesxvii and established norms and procedures, in order to fight for an end to black american oppression. daum argues that black lives matter rejects reformist approaches to rectifying injustice because they are insufficient. she argues that the movement has created a xvi see the section on black lives matter as a camusian rebellion in chapter four for more detail. xvii for example, highlighting the state as having an institutional role in black death, rather than focusing on individual police officers, or the typical slogan of “a few bad apples.” this will be addressed in more detail in chapters three and four. counterpublic that exists outside of traditional institutions which serves to both articulate concerns and develop movement power. i agree with daum’s latter point as black lives matter has intentionally existed outside of formalized, institutional politics.xviii in chapter two, i compare black lives matter and the alt-right on three dimensions including both movements’ respective rejections of extant institutional politics as the primary pathway to political change. in that sense, i agree with daum’s argument. however, i argue in chapter four and again in chapter six that black lives matter has not rejected political reforms, but rather has embraced both immediate reforms and larger systemic changes. the movement has not rejected reformist politics wholesale, and instead embraces immediate reforms that can help alleviate immediate suffering while still acknowledging that these reforms are ultimately insufficient in addressing the causes of black suffering and death. deva woodly ( a) considers black lives matter (and the larger movement for black lives) as a response to the current american “politics of despair” which involves unbridled economic inequality, declining interpersonal and institutional trust, a lack of civic knowledge and political participation, and decreasing political efficacy. woodly ( ) also argues that black lives matter has, through its praxis, created a political philosophy, organizational practice and mobilization strategy aimed towards a form of “healing justice” that arises from lived experiences and which confronts the xviii black lives matter activist cori bush is currently the democratic representative- elect for missouri’s st congressional district. this one example does not, however, conflict with my argument that black lives matter, as a movement, exists outside of institutional politics. political institutions and practices that dominate and oppress marginalized peoples; in this case, black women. woodly’s interpretation of black lives matter as a response to the “politics of despair” does not include any mention of death.xix in chapter four, on black lives matter, i will show that the founders of the movement have framed it, from its inception, as a response to death and existential anxiety. i am not arguing that black lives matter has ignored (intentionally or otherwise) the issues woodly highlights; the movement has addressed some of these concerns by endorsing platforms that speak to socioeconomic and political injustices. however, i will present an alternative approach to interpreting black lives matter’s catalyst as rooted in concerns with death and the existential anxiety death can produce. one cannot fight political battles such as reducing economic inequality or opposing a lack of political efficacy and a lack of civic knowledge if one is dead. for this reason black lives matter’s founders and key contributors were inspired by feelings of existential anxiety to fight against state sanctioned death of black americans, and it remains at the root of its movement. xix woodly uses sociologist deborah gould’s definition of political despair which is a “feeling of inefficacy and hopelessness, the sense that nothing will ever change, no matter what some imagined collective ‘we’ does to try to bring change.” woodly adds that in the united states, six intensifying trends are evidence of an american politics of despair: “(a) rising inequality, (b) declining political trust, (c) declining interpersonal trust, (d) declining civic knowledge, (e) declining and stratified political participation, and (f) declining political efficacy.” while woodly references the deaths of trayvon martin, rekia boyd, eric garner, tamir rice, sandra bland, and mike brown, her definition of the politics of despair does not necessarily include death (woodly a, pp. - ). what woodly is addressing is the cynicism of people who believe that their government is unresponsive and that their communities are neglected by political elites. this may include the realm of unjust death, but it is not a necessary variable. political philosopher christopher lebron ( ) uncovers a multitude of intellectual predecessors and philosophical influences on black lives matter including preeminent thinkers such as frederick douglass, anna julia cooper, martin luther king jr., ida b. wells, and audre lorde, among others. i do not utilize lebron’s approach as i am not arguing that albert camus’s works were influential for black lives matter; there is no reason to believe camus directly influenced the movement.xx instead, i am extracting a political theory from camus’s works that helps us to explain the movement’s response to death and the trajectory it has taken. lebron, while he focuses on black lives matter’s intellectual influences, does hint at the existential anxieties that may motivate movement activities. he proclaims that african americans had been “a class of persons whose humanity was constantly questioned, threatened, and denied” (lebron , p. ). lebron is correct, as cotkin likewise rhetorically asks readers, “how could anyone ignore the existential anguish at the heart of the african-american experience?” ( , p. ). yet lebron does not place significant emphasis upon this existential component of life throughout african american history. while lebron may accurately highlight some of the crucial intellectual influences on black lives matter, i am presenting a more thorough examination of the existential anxiety present within the movement. my argument and lebron’s do not exist in tension, but my existential focus can complement lebron’s more historical understanding of black lives matter, and elucidate the role of death which he acknowledges, but which is not central in his work. xx cotkin ( ) argues that camus was influential to many who participated in the s generation of american social movements. unlike the previous examples, some works on black lives matter address existential concerns within the movement. shatema threadcraft ( ) notes that black lives matter focuses on the dead black body, which can overshadow other elements of racial justice and gender-specific forms of (often racialized) violence, such as femicide. threadcraft fears that prioritizing the dead black body prioritizes “how cis men die, how young men die, how able-bodied blacks die, over all other black dead” ( , p. ). black lives matter, by focusing on the dead, black body as the site of its movement, may be overlooking contributions to black death such as racial and economic segregation, non-lethal interactions between the police and black americans, and environmental racism’s contribution to a degradation in black health. while threadcraft champions black lives matter for changing the conversation about the “proper” interaction between police and citizens, she is skeptical that the movement’s focus is best serving the black community. i largely agree with threadcraft’s analysis of black lives matter as focusing on the dead, black body. in chapter four i, like threadcraft, address the “necropolitics” of the movement or black lives matter’s focus on the political distribution of death among black americans. where threadcraft and i diverge is while she expresses concerns with this focus, i analyze the role of death as the key motivator from a more normatively neutral perspective. my existential interpretation challenges threadcraft’s skepticism of the movement’s focus on death. i am sympathetic to threadcraft’s concerns that other forms of black suffering and death are important, and that the movement must not overlook forms of oppression that may be uniquely faced by black women. yet her skepticism may be unnecessarily strong. in the next chapter, i will show that black lives matter has highlighted the deaths of black women and has not focused solely on the lives and deaths of cis men, specifically through the movement’s connection to the #sayhername campaign. furthermore, i will highlight the movement’s intersectionality which is part of its founding principles and includes black women, black people with disabilities, and black people with criminal records. threadcraft may be correct in noting that there are many additional means by which black lives are harmed or taken beyond state violence. however, other crucial political issues such as environmental racism, continued neighborhood and school segregation, health disparities across races, and intrusive policing on racial lines cannot be addressed by the deceased. unfortunately, ensuring the mere continuation of black life must be at the forefront of black lives matter’s political agenda so that other socioeconomic and political concerns can likewise be addressed. shayla nunnally’s work is in american political development but is informed by political theory and is itself theoretically rich. nunnally traces the development of the idea of the “black body” and argues that black lives matter is fighting to “reinscribe the value of the ‘black body’ as equal to that of the ‘white body’” but in an historically unique way that refuses to denigrate black people “who were felt to be detrimental to the positive portrayal of blackness” ( , p. ). nunnally is referring to the inclusivity of black lives matter; a movement which has proudly fought for and included all black lives, and not just those who are considered “respectable” in mainstream society.xxi black lives matter is certainly highlighting the inherent value of the black body – of all black bodies – regardless of gender, sexuality, nationality, disability, age, or incarceration status. i argue that black lives matter can be understood as a response to death and existential anxiety and, in line with nunnally’s argument, the movement fights to preserve and improve the lives of all black people. nunnally does not forge her argument using existential terminology, but our arguments are compatible. as i will show in chapter four, black death and existential anxiety may lead to black lives matter’s fierce defense of black lives and the movement’s struggle against black suffering and death. black lives matter is not fighting to protect some black bodies, but instead as nunnally highlights, the movement is working for the betterment of all black lives. theoretical analyses of the alt-right there is far less theoretical scholarship aimed at interpreting the alt-right than black lives matter. political theorist ronald beiner’s ( ) book, dangerous minds, is the preeminent theoretical work which looks at the alt-right and far-right politics around the world. beiner’s objective is similar to lebron’s in that beiner seeks to uncover the intellectual influences on the alt-right, and he argues that the contemporary, global far- xxi a longer discussion of black lives matter’s rejection of respectability politics is found in chapter four. right has been influenced by two existentialists, namely friedrich nietzsche and martin heidegger. both philosophers traffic in an existential response to a situation akin to what Émile durkheim ( ) calls anomie; modernity’s rejection or destruction of once cherished socioethical standards and objectives. for nietzsche, the aimlessness, or “horizonlessness” of modernity caused life to become purposeless. in turn, nietzsche rejected the emptiness of modernity and embraced a pre-modern culture, including a hierarchical sociopolitics rooted in “rank order, slavery and oppression” (beiner , p. ). rejecting christian egalitarianism and returning to a caste-based aristocracy was, for nietzsche, the solution to the banality of modern life. heidegger is similarly responding to the existential homelessness, or the “limitless alienation” of modernity (beiner , p. ). he presents a standard for judging human civilizations which amounts to determining “to what extent those cultures or civilizations measure up to the question of being, the question of what it means to be– not ‘what does it mean for you or me to be?’ but ‘what does it mean for beings or entities in general to be?’” (beiner , p. ). heidegger preferences the culture and civilization that he believes was closest to recapturing the pre-modern fascination with being, which was nazi germany. for heidegger, modernity’s vapid egalitarianism could only be replaced by a non-nationalistic form of the volk that could serve as an adequate replacement for dasein.xxii in all, beiner argues that “nietzsche, no less than heidegger, hates modernity and wants to see it disappear” ( , p. ). beiner’s work on the alt-right, unlike lebron’s on black lives matter, focuses explicitly on the existential influences on the movement. beiner’s argument reinforces a central point i will highlight in chapter five on the alt-right as i argue that the movement’s concerns are explicitly rooted in existential anxieties. my focus is not, however, on the philosophers who influenced the alt-right. as with black lives matter, i am not arguing that albert camus influenced the alt-right.xxiii instead, the camusian theory i extract in chapter two will provide a means to better understanding both the existential anxiety of the alt-right, and the movement’s political trajectory and tactics. political theorist phillip gray presents an analysis of the alt-right as a movement which is engaged with american identity politics; a point with which the movement agrees. gray uses his concept “category-based epistemology” to highlight similarities in how the alt-right and “intersectional left” understand and embrace identity. within “category-based epistemology” a privileged category (an identity group) claims unique access to knowledge of the “actual dynamics that influence, shape, and (in a manner) determine the direction of history and human development” (p gray , pp. - ). xxii non-nationalistic because beiner interprets heidegger’s volk as being “more heroic” if it expands beyond the bounds of germany, or of any singular nation for that matter ( , p. ). xxiii in the rebel ( ) camus is actually very critical of nietzsche in a manner that resembles beiner’s argument. nietzsche, however, was an influence on camus’s thinking (illing ). the alt-right’s privileged category is primarily white people (and white males secondarily) who need to have their consciousness raised to become aware of the “real” historical and current events threatening the racial population. gray argues that the philosophical underpinnings of the alt-right and “intersectional left” are similar in privileging a particular group and treating that group’s experience as a form of knowledge that outgroup members cannot fully understand, participate in, or question. the privileged group crafts the relevant notion of oppression and identifies an “enemy population/structure” responsible for said oppression (p gray , p. ). gray argues that based on his description, intersectional thinking has no necessary progressive content. the difference, gray argues, is between the “intersectional left’s” understanding of marginalization and the alt-right’s understanding of racial science and demographic displacement, or between “biologism vs social constructivism” ( , p. ).xxiv gray turns intersectional theorists against themselves to argue that intersectionality – a typically “left” frame of understanding – can be utilized by the alt- right or can serve to explain the movement’s ideology and grievances.xxv i agree with xxiv the role of both race science and demographic displacement will be addressed in depth in chapter six. xxv gray uses the words of ange-marie hancock as he states that alt-right’s key thinkers “share the logic that multiple marginalizations of race, class, gender, or sexual orientation at the individual and institutional levels create social and political stratification, requiring policy solutions that are attuned to the interactions of these categories” ( , p. ). hancock is not speaking about white nationalist movements, but gray argues that hancock’s logic applies to the alt-right as well as it does to actually marginalized identity groups. gray that the alt-right is an identity-based movement that is primarily focused on race (whiteness), and secondarily on gender (male). many of gray’s factual notes about the alt-right are important and will be addressed in detail in chapters three and six.xxvi gray focuses on highlighting what he sees as the inherent flaws and dangers in identitarianism within american politics and political theory. his explanation of intersectionality is, however, little more than a strawman and briefly deconstructing his argument renders it less convincing. gray’s argument that a certain group is given the “privilege” to determine the definitional content of truth, and to define the enemy groups or structures is unsound. kimberlé crenshaw, in conceiving of the notion of intersectionality, did not place black women in a privileged epistemological position. crenshaw speaks about intersectionality as a framework for interpreting discriminatory phenomena. in crenshaw’s initial article, intersectionality is a conceptual framework that allows for a better understanding of the unique form of discrimination that black women faced in three court cases where neither sole reference to race, nor to gender could explain the discrimination (crenshaw ). emma degraffenreid’s discrimination as a black woman could not be explained as racial discrimination since black men were hired by general motors, nor could it be explained as gender discrimination as white women were also hired. an intersectional framework helps readers understand that the five black women serving as plaintiffs in the court case xxvi for example, gray notes the alt-right’s solution to racial discord is the promulgation of “homogeneous ethno-nations – with a unity of identity within a state while accepting a plurality of racially/ethnically different states” ( , p. ). faced a unique form of discrimination. nowhere, however, does this explanatory framework rely upon privileged, experiential epistemologies. it is, since crenshaw is a legal scholar, a legal argument that a private corporation utilized discriminatory hiring and firing practices (crenshaw ). it also is not the case that there is a clearly defined “enemy” in the court cases as an enemy could logically be the respective defendants, judges, or even the legal scholars who have not seen black women’s discrimination as discrimination. likewise, ange-marie hancock, who gray references, similarly argues that trayvon martin was killed by george zimmerman because of a tripartite intersectional identity as martin was a young, black, male. hancock’s ( ) argument shows a trend of young, black, men (between their late-teens and mid- s) being treated in violent and deadly manners by police officers and vigilantes. hancock mirrors crenshaw by arguing that these examples are best understood as a form of intersectional discrimination since comparable violence was not being directed towards individuals who did not fit the tripartite identity of young and black and male. hancock is clear that intersectionality serves as “an analytical framework for questions of social justice” ( ) which does not fit gray’s epistemological interpretation of the concept. gray is right to note that black lives matter is rooted in an intersectional framework. however, gray’s understanding of intersectionality is a misinterpretation of what this might mean for the movement. black lives matter, i will argue in the chapter three, prioritizes intersectionality partly because black women have often been ignored or overlooked in civil rights efforts. gray is correct to note that intersectionality does not necessarily imply a progressive politics. yet without gray’s epistemological preferencing, someone within or outside of the alt-right’s core constituency – white men – can critique their basic foundations and claims of oppression. one need not be a white man to argue that white men are not oppressed in the united states. nor would one need to be a black woman to analyze whether crenshaw’s example of emma degraffenreid’s case was one of discrimination by general motors against black women. the alt-right may be utilizing an intersectional framework to argue that white men are suffering in the united states. this argument is, however, open to interpretation and critique based on empirical realities that contradict said argument. in chapter five, i will argue that the alt-right’s existential anxieties are not based in empirical realities, but rather are based on a feeling of fear. the alt-right may portray white men as in existential danger, but this intersectional frame does not portray a clear or accurate depiction of life and death for white men in the united states. challenging the alt- right’s claims need not require dismissing intersectionality as a concept since, in the alt- right’s case, it is simply being inappropriately applied. the alt-right’s feeling of existential anxiety, and not any actual oppression towards white men, i will argue, can help explain the movement’s formation and can contribute to an understanding of its violent political actions, and revolutionary political goals. conclusion this introduction served to situate the rest of the dissertation. first, i defined existentialism as a philosophical worldview that emphasizes the meaning and purpose of human existence, especially when considering the inevitability of death. this definition is important to keep in mind, since i will be arguing that contemporary american social movements – specifically black lives matter and the alt-right – can be understood in an existential context. i then situated this dissertation widely within the context of extant theoretical understandings of social movements. while social movements and other forms of collective action are often studied empirically, there is a history of theoretical interpretations of social movements that includes many theorists from an assortment of intellectual traditions who studied a variety of movements across the th century. i then analyzed some of the extant theoretical contributions to the literature on the two main social movements of interest, black lives matter and the alt-right. in both cases, existential concerns are infrequently addressed, and when they are noted, existentialism is not at the forefront of the theoretical analysis. only ronald beiner’s analysis of the alt- right overtly addresses existentialism, but his work is targeting the intellectual influences on the movement, while this dissertation seeks an existential analysis of the alt-right. in the next chapter, i will extract my camusian social movement theory from an array of his fictional and non-fiction works. i argue that camus is uniquely situated among his peers and contemporaries, and by parsing out a theory from his fictional and non-fictional works, we can have a better understanding of the existential content of both black lives matter and the alt-right. in chapter three, before i apply the theory, i will argue that the two movements are fit for comparison. i analyze two institutional components of black lives matter and the alt-right, and one ideational component of the movement. only after explaining why the two movements, which appear dichotomous, are appropriately comparable will i then apply the camusian existential theory to black lives matter in chapter four, and the alt-right in chapter five. before concluding, i turn to american environmental activism and argue that there are ways to learn from the approaches taken by black lives matter and the alt-right. i conclude the dissertation with some considerations for and beyond as black lives matter, and existentialism have both taken center stage once again. chapter # extracting the camusian theory in this chapter i will uncover a political theory from some of albert camus’s works which can help elucidate humanisticxxvii elements of social movements. while camus’s works lack a cohesive political project, they present an approach to understanding contemporary american social movements as being rooted in a response to the existential anxiety associated with death. camus argues that individuals or collectives can follow divergent paths in response to feelings of existential anxiety. i will show that camus’s understanding of how collectives respond to feelings of existential anxiety can help us understand the specific actions undertaken by social movements including black lives matter and the alt-right; the former can be considered through his notion of rebellion and the latter through his notion of revolution. in brief, the camusian theory i am extracting from his works contextualizes the existential motivation of the seemingly disparate social movements (both responding to feelings of existential anxiety related to death) and helps us to better understand the movements’ respective trajectories (towards either rebellion or revolution). before explicating the camusian theory, i will situate camus within his intellectual context by considering his work in light of some of his existential contemporaries. a potential detractor may correctly note that while camus directly influenced social movements of the s including anti-vietnam war activists and the new left generally (cotkin ), there is no evidence that members of black lives matter or the alt-right have been influenced by his philosophy (or even read camus’s works). one question that reasonably may arise is, given his relative lack of direct influence on xxvii as opposed to strictly social scientific. contemporary american social movements, “why camus?” while christopher lebron ( ) and ronald beiner ( ) respectively trace the intellectual and philosophical influences of black lives matter and the alt-right, i am not suggesting that camus was influential to either movement. instead, over the course of this dissertation i will show that a camusian analysis of these movements can help us appreciate them as both responding to feelings of existential anxiety and as traversing similar and yet importantly divergent trajectories respectively towards rebellion and revolution. camus is a thinker on the periphery of political theory and philosophy. political theorist fred willhoite jr. begins his work on camus by stating “albert camus is not generally thought of as a political theorist. he was not a professional or academic political philosopher, and his worldwide literary reputation was achieved mainly on the strength of his novels” ( , p. vii). while this may be true, camus is often studied by political theorists and jeffrey isaac sees camus as a theorist following “in a long tradition of political inquiry” ( , p. ). isaac asks and answers a rhetorical question that summarizes political theorists’ interest in camus: why should political theorists be interested in camus as a dramatist? first, because camus was clearly a political writer, who as a journalist and essayist took up some of the most pressing problems of mid-twentieth century politics – the demands and limits of political engagement, the role of violence in politics, the need cautiously to equilibrate means and ends in radical politics, the dangers of a faith in historical progress, and the provisional and partial character of human judgment. ( , p. ) camus may not have been a political theorist by trait, but his works which span nearly all written genres – novels, short stories, plays, essays, journalistic contributions, and personal diaries – had political content and approached contentious theoretical questions. his works were theoretically and philosophically rich enough to be addressed by political theorists including stephen bronner ( , , ), joshua foa dienstag ( ), patrick hayden ( , ), jeffrey isaac ( , , , , ), john randolph leblanc ( ), michael walzer ( ) and postcolonial theorist edward said ( ). invoking camus’s works helps us to approach some of the difficult questions that both he and social movements consider including the acceptable limits of violence, and the appropriate response to a collective sense of existential anxiety. one may note that there are many existential philosophers; from this assortment of well-known philosophers, the question of “why camus?” arises for a second time. or, to expand upon the question, why camus and why not sartre, kierkegaard, nietzsche, or arendt? this question of why i am specifically using camus’s works and not works by other existentialists will be addressed over the course of this chapter. in extracting a theory from camus’s works which elucidates the responses to death and the deviating paths of rebellion and revolution, i will contrast elements of camus’s works with approaches taken by some of his intellectual peers.xxviii this method serves to more concretely draw out a theory from camus’s corpus, and to answer the “why camus?” challenge; alternative existential theories may be possible but the camusian theory allows for a cohesive understanding of contemporary american social movements as responding to the existential anxiety associated with death, and the divergent pathways that movements can forge. analyzing camus’s philosophy in light of xxviii the scope of this dissertation allows for some, comparison between camus and others, but it is admittedly beyond the scope of this work to delve deeply into such efforts. camus has been frequently discussed in comparison to other existentialists including hannah arendt (isaac ), simone weil (leblanc ), friedrich nietzsche and fyodor dostoevsky (illing ), miguel de unamuno and emil cioran (dienstag ), franz kafka, samuel beckett, and harold pinter (sutherland ). there are also countless works on camus and his one-time friend and eventual intellectual enemy jean paul sartre. alternative existential arguments will ensure that the theory, which will later be applied to black lives matter and the alt-right, is as robust as possible. over the course of this chapter, i will draw out the following theme that runs through camus’s works: (a) humans are primarily existentially concerned with death and the meaning of life in a meaningless universe; (b) people respond to the feelings of anxiety that this existential crises causes by revolting against their inevitable finitude and passionately promoting the value of their lives; (c) this revolt requires an outward turn towards the political world through; (d) rebellious social movements. at each step in the development of the theory, alternatives are offered that camus ultimately rejects. although elements of various existential philosophies might be found in black lives matter and the alt-right, camus allows for one clear way to appreciate the movements as rooted in responses to existential anxiety produced by death, and as respectively a rebellion and revolution. in the two chapters that follow, i will interpret black lives matter and the alt- right by utilizing the camusian theory to show that black lives matter follows camus’s theoretical pathway and that the alt-right ultimately fails to reach camus’s rebellious conclusion and thus becomes a revolution. before turning to the two contemporary cases, the camusian theory must be extracted, and the “why camus?” question must be more clearly answered. phase one: death and existential anxiety as the primary existential concern while one may assume that existentialism – the philosophy that is concerned with the meaning and purpose of life – is focused on death, there are some existential thinkers who prioritize other, related concerns. hannah arendt,xxix in the human condition explicates her existential focus on natality (birth), as opposed to mortality (death). arendt’s existentialism is concerned with the potential that life, from birth, imparts upon all people. natality is arendt’s focus because “the new beginning inherent in birth can make itself felt in the world only because the newcomer possesses the capacity of beginning something anew, that is, of acting” which is crucial “since action is the political activity par excellence” ( , p. ). thomas nagel ( ) similarly argues that the absurdity of human existence is not related to death. but in contrast to arendt, nagel states that the absurdity of human life is an internal contradiction “between the seriousness with which we take our lives and the perpetual possibility of regarding everything about which we are serious as arbitrary, or open to doubt” ( , p. ). more recently, philosophers including irving singer ( ), susan wolf ( ) and thaddeus metz ( ) focus not on the meaning of human life given the certainty of death, but on the human capacity to create meaning within life. singer, for example, argues that while the human fear of death may be rational, the search for meaning in life – rather than the meaning of life – is the central existential concern ( , p. xii). while arendt, nagel and singer are among those who do not focus on death, human mortality is a chief concern of albert camus. the central question found in camus’s writings – fiction and non-fiction – is given that all humans die, what is the meaning and purpose of living in a seemingly meaningless and purposeless universe? this question is predicated on the notion that humans are inherently meaning-seeking beings. the distance between human beings xxix arendt was interested in existentialism even if her work is only occasionally associated with existentialism. see, for example, arendt’s essay ( ) “french existentialism” originally published in the nation in in which she addresses early works by sartre and camus, as well as franz kafka. who seek meaning, and an existence that lacks any permanent meaning is understood as the “absurd” condition of human life (camus b).xxx colloquially we use the word “absurd” to describe a condition that is wildly preposterous or ludicrous. camus utilizes the term to similarly describe the condition of human life; what is preposterous for camus is that human beings live contradictory lives since human minds desire reason and clarity while living in a universe that lacks meaning, purpose and order. the absurd condition is a uniquely human, paradoxical experience. neither a meaningless universe, nor a human mind seeking meaning are, in and of themselves, absurd; “but what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational [world] and the wild longing for clarity whose call echoes in the human heart. the absurd depends as much on man as on the world. for the moment it is all that links them together” (camus b, p. ). it is the meeting of these two facets of existence which leads to the absurd conundrum as the reason-seeking being would not live absurdly if the world contained meaning, and the purposeless universe is not itself absurd should there be no beings seeking meaning. the conflict arises between the human mind seeking transcendence, and a finite and purposeless existence. it is from the realization of the absurdity of human existence that camus’s works proceed. the absurd condition is dependent upon human finitude. if an afterlife were guaranteed, the absurd condition would not exist since we would transcend the basic human experience; some otherworldly or spiritual meaning of human life might be attainable. camus is skeptical of anything beyond our material existence. death, as the permanent and foregone conclusion of human life, is therefore central to understanding camus’s views on the absurd. philip thody does not acknowledge human finitude in xxx nagel ( ), as mentioned, has a very different take on the absurd and disputes camus’s argument. camus’s notion of the absurd in his stating that “[t]he absurd can occur only when two elements are present – the desire of the human mind that the world should be explicable in human terms, and the fact that the world is not thus explicable” ( , p. ). rachel bespaloff conversely explains that camus’s central concern can be reduced to the question “[w]hat value abides in the eyes of the man condemned to death who refused the consolation of the supernatural?” ( , p. ). bespaloff’s understanding of the absurd highlights camus’s concern with human finitude – the fact that all humans die.xxxi camus’s fictional works present the inevitability of human death as a central focus. in the play “caligula,” the titular character states that he has discovered “a childishly simply, obvious, almost silly truth, but one that’s hard to come by and heavy to endure” which is that “men die; and they are not happy” (camus a, p. ). in the novel the strangerxxxii the protagonist, meursault, is sentenced to death after committing a murder. faced with his imminent demise, meursault is approached by a chaplain who asks, “and do you really live with the thought that when you die, you die, and nothing remains?” to which he defiantly replies, “yes” (camus , p. ). death is omnipresent in the plague which is centered upon the random distribution of death – and the responses to death by the living – as the citizens of oran succumb to the bubonic plague. one patient philosophizes about the condition as he asks rhetorically, “what does that mean – ‘plague?’ just life, no more than that” (camus c, p. ). without xxxi the question of how to deal with this fact will be addressed in the next section. in brief, camus argues for a passionate revolt against death which involves living despite our mortality. he contrasts this with committing suicide, religious leaps of faith, and attachments to hope (that something else might be possible). xxxii l'Étranger in french. both the stranger and the outsider have been used as english titles for the work. i use the stranger as it is the more common translation and it is utilized by matthew ward who translated my copy of the work. exaggeration, it is impossible to find a work of fiction by camus that lacks at least some discussion about death. camus’s non-fiction also focuses on death such that one cannot ignore death as a central component to camus’s understanding of the absurd condition of humanity. camus’s essays, philosophical pieces, notebooks, and journalism all include musings on death. the myth of sisyphus begins with the profound statement, “there is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide” ( b, p. ). in the rebelxxxiii ( ), camus asks whether murder – even for seemingly just causes – can ever be defensible. his concern in the rebel follows earlier discussions on violence and killing as a form of self-defense or resistance in the “letters to a german friend” ( a). in the “letters,” camus argues for the legitimacy of the violent french resistance to nazi occupation. camus conversely discusses the illegitimacy of state- sponsored killings (i.e. capital punishment) in his “reflections on the guillotine” ( d). as in his fiction, camus’s non-fictional works are ripe with discussions about death, what it means for human beings, and how we ought to respond to death. over the next two chapters, i will argue that both black lives matter and the alt- right exist, in part, as responses to their respective concerns about human mortality. neither movement is primarily driven by arendt’s prioritization of natality, nagel’s views concerning the irrational seriousness with which we take our lives, or singer’s desire to find meaning within human life. camus, unlike arendt, nagel, and singer, focuses on the human experience of facing one’s inevitable death within the confines of a meaningless universe. xxxiii l'homme révolté in french. it translates to “the revolted man” which is an intentional play on words. camus’s discussions of death, both in his fiction and non-fiction, are central to his thinking about the absurd condition of human life. patrick hayden ( ) notes that the absurd informs camus’s politics as his political arguments are responses to the existential anxiety produced when one considers the absurdity of human life and death. from this initial understanding of human mortality, camus turns to answer the question of how one can and ultimately should respond to one’s mortal fate. phase two: existential anxiety and the revolt against the absurdity of human existence upon recognizing the absurdity of human existence, camus states that there are threexxxiv primary recourses: taking one’s own life (suicide), taking a leap of faith (religion) or revolting against the absurd. in his play, “caligula,” and in his novel, the stranger, camus details different experiences of individuals recognizing the absurd. however, the two early works of fiction do not provide any useful approaches for how humans ought to act in the face of the absurdity of human experience. as lópez- santiago notes in his work on camus, “caligula and the stranger are works primarily concentrating on putting forth existential and epistemological questions, not clear answers” ( , p. ). the question that proceeds from camus’s notion of the absurd is how one ought to respond to the anxiety induced by death? in the myth of sisyphus camus begins to explain how one should respond to the feeling of existential anxiety produced by the absurd, and this response is revolt. xxxiv there are three primary responses, but camus does insinuate that one can also “hope.” it is not perfectly clear that “hope” and the religious leap of faith are entirely separate options, and it is of no great consequence to conflate the two. camus’s rejection of suicide philosophical discourse on suicide frequently centers on whether individuals have the right to take their own lives, and not whether suicide is or is not an acceptable response to existential anxiety.xxxv one philosopher who did view suicide as an appropriate ethical response to the human condition is philipp mainlӓnder. while mainlӓnder was influenced by german philosopher and noted pessimist arthur schopenhauer (who denied suicide as an appropriate response to existential anxiety) mainlӓnder would deviate from schopenhauer. american philosopher frederick beiser explains that mainlӓnder advocated suicide as a solution to one’s suffering. beiser states that for mainlӓnder “whoever cannot bear the burden of life … should ‘throw it off’” ( ). mainlӓnder, however, is an exception to the rule; most existentialists do not advocate for suicide as a solution to existential anguish. romanian-born existentialist emil cioran may be the philosopher who is most sympathetic to pro-suicide arguments without endorsing suicide as an appropriate response to existential anxiety. cioran romanticized suicide and those who successfully took their own lives, yet he maintained that the human desire to live was instinctual. while cioran did not commit suicide, he was personally and professionally obsessed with the prospect of killing himself. cioran, however, does not advocate suicide and states that “it’s not worth the bother of killing yourself, since you always kill yourself too late” ( , p. ). camus rejects suicide as an appropriate response to the existential xxxv hume ( ) and schopenhauer ( ) both argue that one has the right to take his or her own life but neither promote suicide as a solution to human suffering. kant conversely argues that suicide is inherently unethical and a “violation of one’s duty to other human beings” ( , p. ). additionally, sociologist Émile durkheim ( ) conducted the first significant academic case study of suicide in but his work classified four typologies of suicidal reasoning, rather than considering suicide in a normative sense. anxieties one encounters due to the presence of death – opposing mainlӓnder – and his rejection extends beyond cioran’s mild dismissal. in the myth of sisyphus, camus exclaims that suicide is a confession that “life is too much for you” or simply that life “is not worth the trouble” ( b, p. ). camus determines that suicide is not a solution to the absurd conundrum. the world itself is not absurd, but it is unreasonable. what is absurd is the confrontation of this irrational world and the human desire for reason, purpose, and clarity. the absurd therefore depends upon the existence of both the purposeless world, and the meaning-seeking human beings inhabiting this world. suicide is not a solution to the absurd conundrum, but instead it upsets the absurd’s equilibrium like weighing down one side of the scales. suicide destroys the delicate balance of the human condition by destroying one of the two necessary conditions that produce the absurd; the human being. suicide evades answering the challenge of how to live in an ultimately meaningless universe. camus explains: to destroy one of its [the absurd’s] terms is to destroy the whole. there can be no absurd outside the human mind. thus, like everything else, the absurd ends with death. but there can be no absurd outside this world either. and it is by this elementary criterion that i judge the notion of the absurd to be essential and consider that it can stand as the first of my truths. the rule of method alluded to above appears here. if i judge that a thing is true, i must preserve it. if i attempt to solve a problem, at least i must not by that very solution conjure away one of the terms of the problem. (camus b, p. ) suicide negates the human aspect of the absurd dilemma and negating one of the two elements of the absurd is not a solution to the conundrum. rather than succumb to suicidal intuitions due to existential anxiety, camus determines that revolt, as stated, is how to answer the challenge of the absurd. for camus, revolt – living well despite a mandatory death sentence – is a more appropriate response to the absurd than suicide. in the chapters that follow, i will briefly highlight how neither black lives matter nor the alt-right advocate for suicide as an appropriate response to the existential anxiety associated with death. while self-immolation has been used as a form of political protest, neither social movement utilizes suicide as a political tactic. even though some individuals who supported the movements have taken their own lives, suicide has not been supported as a tactic by either social movement. finding suicide to be an insufficient response to the absurd, camus considers but also rejects the religious leap of faith. camus’s rejection of religion danish philosopher søren kierkegaard is likely the best-known existentialist who argued for an embrace of religion as a response to the existential anxiety associated with human mortality. while kierkegaard was, not unlike camus, focused on the human concern with death, kierkegaard’s christianity led to his rejection of human finitude and he instead embraced a religious notion of transcendence. as kierkegaard states in the sickness unto death, “christianly understood death is by no means the last thing of all” ( , p. ). this christian denial of death as the end of human life is not based on logic or reason but is based on faith and belief as kierkegaard says, “to believe is precisely to lose one’s understanding in order to win god” ( , p. ). for kierkegaard, the response to living in a world that appears purposeless is to take the now famous leap of faith; to abandon logic and reason and faithfully embrace the divine. kierkegaard is not alone in espousing religion and god as a solution to the existential anxiety humans experience due to their mortality. lutheran theologian and philosopher paul tillichxxxvi wrote in the courage to be that humans have an anxiety which “is the existential awareness of nonbeing … anxiety is finitude, experienced as one’s own finitude” ( , p. ). tillich later states that “the anxiety of death overshadows all concrete anxieties and gives them their ultimate seriousness” ( , p. ). tillich’s solution to addressing the anxieties produced by human mortality is to embrace a notion of “the god above god” which is an explication of god as beyond human interpretation. the concept of the god above god, tillich argues, provides the source of courage for humans to live and to find meaning and purpose in their lives despite existential anxiety. tillich, like kierkegaard before him, embraces some notion of god as the means of curtailing the existential anxieties produced by death. camus ultimately rejects religion and the leap of faith taken by kierkegaard and tillich as a solution to the absurdity of life for a similar reason as he rejects suicide; religious leaps of faith upset the balance of the absurd as people deny the meaninglessness of human life and death and posit meaning onto a meaninglessness universe. in sisyphus, camus refutes physical suicide as a solution to the absurd before refuting “philosophical suicide” – religion– on similar grounds. like suicide, religious adherence is an attempt to circumvent the absurd by destroying the one of its two conditions. if suicide destroys the human who is seeking meaning, religion posits meaning upon a meaningless existence without justification. religion falsely credits the xxxvi while tillich may be a seemingly unusual choice for analysis, his work was highly influential to martin luther king jr. who wrote his dissertation on tillich ( ), wrote an article on existentialism and specifically addressed tillich ( ) and referenced tillich in his famous “letter from birmingham jail” ( ). king and tillich met while king was obtaining his dissertation and it is clear that tillich’s theological existentialism motivated king’s work during another famous american social movement, the civil rights movement. meaningless and purposeless universe with being purposive. this, camus argues, is largely due to an illogical leap of faith based on a lack of empirical evidence. in a passage from the myth of sisyphus, camus exclaims, i don’t know whether this world has a meaning that transcends it. but i know that i do not know that meaning and that it is impossible for me just now to know it. what can a meaning outside my condition mean to me? i can understand only in human terms. what i touch, what resists me – that is what i understand. and these two certainties – my appetite for the absolute and for unity and the impossibility of reducing this world to a rational and reasonable principle – i also know that i cannot reconcile them. what other truth can i admit without lying, without bringing in a hope i lack and which means nothing within the limits of my condition? (camus b, pp. - ) religious solutions to the absurd cannot satisfy camus because they are without justification. camus refuses to take a leap of faith and argues that we ought to live solely with the existential truths we can confirm – our human desire for meaning and a universe that lacks purpose. only by living honestly within the bounds of the absurdity of life can one truly resist the potentially overwhelming anxieties of human mortality. suicide eliminates the human aspect of the absurd and religion denies the meaninglessness of the universe. camus, after dismissing suicide and religion as potential solutions to the absurd conundrum, argues that revolt is the best response to the absurd. camus’s revolt against the absurd camus argues that one must passionately and freely revolt against the human condition because of (rather than despite) the hopelessness of our existential circumstance: finitude and meaninglessness. revolt is an action of living freely and passionately in the present moment rather than hoping that one’s existential future might be anything but absurd. this form of hopelessness, in that it encourages revolt can be a motivation for action generally and in the context of social movements, revolt can motivate collective action. in sisyphus, camus explains that upon recognizing the absurdity of existence, “one of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt” which he defines as “the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it” ( b, p. ). one revolts by insisting on living even though all humans are condemned to death. it is a confrontation with the absurd as one revolts against the conclusion that one will die and one’s life will ultimately lack eternal meaning. camus finds two additional philosophical conclusions that arise from confrontation with the absurd – freedom and passion – both of which can be understood in light of revolt. for camus, freedom is one’s acceptance of one’s limited time on earth; a perspective that camus shares with many of his existentially concerned peers. it is a recognition that one need not adhere to preconceived roles or titles but instead, one can live in the moment without titular attachments. it is a freedom that entails an acceptance of the finitude and a refusal to hope for eternity. one is free to live a life without illusory consolation that the absurdity of the human experience can be otherwise; death is inevitable, but life may be lived well and without artificial restraints. passion is explained by camus as an enthralled consciousness. what matters for camus is not the “best living” but the “most living.” by most living, camus means the highest quantity of conscious experiences. he explains that two people who live the same number of years will have the same number of experiences. the one of them who is most conscious of his or her revolt and freedom has lived to the maximum extent and has done the most living. recognition of the absurd may appear daunting, but camus explains that one’s revolt – a life lived freely and passionately despite the anxiety produced by one’s impeding death – is the most appropriate response to the absurd. revolt, for camus, is personified by sisyphus. in greek mythology, sisyphus defies the gods and enchains death so that humans would cease to die but death is eventually freed from bondage. in lieu of death, sisyphus is punished for attempting to eradicate mortality and is sentenced to push a rock up a mountain for all eternity. upon reaching the summit, the rock rolls down the mountain and sisyphus is required to repeat this task of ascending the mountain with the rock. for camus, sisyphus embodies the absurd hero since he despises the idea of death, passionately embraces life and yet his life is consumed by a pointless and repetitive task. sisyphus does not fall victim to one of the insufficient responses to the absurdity of his condition: he cannot turn to the gods who have punished him (religious leap of faith) nor can he or would he take his own life. instead, camus envisions sisyphus as acknowledging his reality (“he too concludes that all is well”) and smiling in the face of his endless task as “one must imagine sisyphus happy” ( b, p. ). smiling in the face of his fate, and yet continuing to push the rock, sisyphus is the embodiment of camus’s revolt against death; he recognizes his fate but he is not emotionally crushed under its daunting weight. it is this sisyphean task that divides camus from some of his existential peers who embrace either suicide or the religious leap of faith. while camus details some examples of how one may pursue revolt, it is his turn to “conquest” or towards political revolt which helps shed further light on american social movements. phase three: camus’s conqueror – turning outwards towards the political while camus did not write an explicit work of political theory until the rebel, he begins to sow the seeds of political theorizing in the myth of sisyphus. one may recognize the absurdity of life given the imminence of death and may passionately and freely revolt by living despite one’s initial feelings of existential anxiety. in sisyphus, camus sketches out three archetypes for how one might accomplish an existential revolt: don juanism, the artist, and the conqueror. camus’s third example, the conqueror, is his first call for a turn towards political action as a form of revolt. camus does not refer to conquest or the conqueror in the manner that one might expect as it is not a forceful subjugation of some place and its inhabitants. instead, camus uses the idea of conquest to explain that one may revolt against the absurdity of life through participation in collective, political action. one’s outward turn towards the political – as a revolt against death – again places camus in opposition to some other existentialists who instead argue in favor of an individualistic response to existential anxiety produced by death. german philosopher arthur schopenhauer may be the best example of an existential thinker who supported an internal, rather than outward, response to existential anxiety. schopenhauer viewed the human condition as one of incessant suffering; he expressed that having not been born would have been preferable to existence and he stated that “the much-lamented brevity of life might be the best thing about it” ( , p. ). while schopenhauer was perhaps the dreariest of pessimists, he did not advocate suicide, but instead he argued for an internal retreat from the cause of life’s suffering which he identified as desire or will. in the world as will and representation, schopenhauer argues that humans are driven by an insatiable will. it is the will’s desirous nature which causes endless human suffering and obtaining what the will desires is not a release from suffering as fulfilment leads instead to boredom (schopenhauer ). whether one lacks or obtains what the will desires, schopenhauer sees the individual as existentially burdened. in turn, schopenhauer proposes ascetic denial of the will. he explains that the denial of the will to live – the grandest denial of the will – “does not in any way imply the annihilation of a substance; it means merely the act of non-volition: that which previously willed, wills no more” (schopenhauer , p. ). this denial is a solitary act as opposed to a collective or a political act. while schopenhauer sees the denial of will as the denial of illusory individuality (or of the “self”), the act of denying is itself not a collective or political action.xxxvii instead, the denial of the will to live is an individual revolt against death as it is a denial of the human instinct which desires life. schopenhauer does not desire death but instead refuses desire altogether and in doing so revolts against the human will that causes suffering. while schopenhauer’s individualistic revolt involves a rejection of the world – a pessimistic “no” – nietzsche’s revolt is an enthusiastic “yes.” while nietzsche was greatly interested and influenced by schopenhauer, nietzsche’s existential revolt involves an individual’s embrace of the world rather than a shedding of the will. nietzsche’s existentialism is a response to his classic phrase “god is dead” which is an acknowledgement of the historical moment wherein religious justifications for existence and action had been intellectually eroded ( ). nietzsche considers how one ought to respond to “the repudiation of worth, purpose, desirability” (nietzsche , p. ) and the loss of value in european society. in short, nietzsche raises the question that camus will later address of how one ought to act in a world lacking transcendent meaning or purpose and wherein all people are inevitably sentenced to death. nietzsche’s revolt is individualistic as he praises and encourages superior individuals to achieve self-affirmation or self-determination; nietzsche’s notion of the xxxvii that is not to suggest that schopenhauer did not have a political theory in his works. see schopenhauer’s short piece “on law and politics” in his essays and aphorisms ( ) and matthew slaboch’s ( ) chapter on schopenhauer’s political theory in a road to nowhere. Übermensch ( ). rather than turn towards false transcendence and outdated religious values, nietzsche (through his character zarathustra) praises the Übermensch – the “overman” or “superman” – as the creator of new, earthly values. the Übermensch is considered a goal for humanityxxxviii and presents us with a manner of how to respond to the absurdity of life, through individual creation and fulfilment and not through any notions of collectivity. nietzsche bemoans collectives as encouraging “herd” mentality. a focus on the herd of humanity, nietzsche argues, may be instinctual but the herd animal is profoundly mediocre, timid, and bored ( ). for nietzsche, thinking and acting collectively is counterproductive to the Übermensch who could achieve greatness as an individual acting against the limitations posed by the mediocrity of the herd. contrarily, the herd helps to create what nietzsche terms the “last man” who is risk averse, comfort-seeking and focused on security. the last man is the antithesis of the Übermensch and while the Übermensch has the potential for self-affirmative greatness, the last man is focused on egalitarianism and modest aspirations. nietzsche states that the race of last men “is as ineradicable as the flea- beetle” which affirms his claim that last men may gain safety, comfort, and security and generally avoid risk taking and other difficult tasks ( , p. ) while he uses an animalistic metaphor to highlight the limited thinking and low levels of desirability associated with the herd. nietzsche’s rejection of collectivity does not imply a rejection of politics.xxxix however, his response to the challenge of a lack of transcendence in a human life that is promised death remains focused on the individual level. camus, while enamored with nietzsche (illing ), offers a collective and political, rather than a xxxviii men could become the Übermensch, while women could, at best, hope to birth one who becomes an Übermensch. xxxix i largely agree with beiner’s ( ) interpretation of nietzsche’s aristocratic politics. solely individual response to the existential anxieties associated with human death in a meaningless universe. camus’s works do not begin with a strong call for collective action as caligula, meursault and sisyphus are all individuals who are faced with the existential anxiety upon recognizing the absurdity of the human condition. yet in the myth of sisyphus, camus begins formulating what would become his political, rather than his individual, response to the absurd through his articulation of conquest and his example of the conqueror. if caligula, meursault, and sisyphus fail to provide enlightening approaches to revolting against the existential anxiety one has because of death, the conqueror provides a more concrete and political approach. camus explains that “conquerors know that action is in itself useless” in that all actions will eventually be lost unto the infinite void of the universe, but he continues by stating that “there is but one useful action, that of remaking man and the earth” ( b, p. ). the task of “remaking man and the earth” remains out of the reach for the conqueror since success would require world and human control. yet the conqueror – the political actor – fights for political progress. camus explains that the conqueror is free of any delusions of eternal victory, but this awareness of contingency does not lead to a political quietism as he states, “if i choose action, don’t think that contemplation is like an unknown country to me. but it cannot give me everything, and, deprived of the eternal, i want to ally myself with time” (camus b, p. ). the conqueror’s focus on political struggle is an authentic concern with humanity’s needs. political conquerors acknowledge the limitations of human life and yet resist the nihilistic temptation to give up because political victories are, at most, temporary. conquest is an act of revolt as camus explains the idea in sisyphus; it is a revolt literally against some form of political oppression, and it is also an existential revolt as one acts despite the reality that eternal victory is impossible. however, camus does not consider all political acts to be equally justifiable. in the rebel, camus differentiates rebellion and revolution and argues in favor of the former as the appropriate collective political tactic. phase four: camus’s support of rebellion and retort of revolution the myth of sisyphus presents readers with the absurdity of the human condition – the fact that humans seek meaning in a meaningless world that promises only death – and begins to offer responses to the absurd. in camus’s subsequent “letters to a german friend” ( a) (written during the nazi occupation of france) he defines injustice as human contributions to suffering and death. for camus, the human condition is itself unjust, as martin crowley explains, camus is “motivated by his sense of the fundamental injustice of the human condition (put simply: that we suffer and die in the midst of a meaningless universe)” ( , p. ). if the absurd is the unjust condition of human existence, human injustice is the intensification of the absurd by contributing to human suffering and death. camus, in the “letters,” begins to articulate his argument that what is crucial in political action is to remain faithful to rectifying or minimizing political injustices; to struggle against politically imposed suffering and death. in the context of an absurd existence, where transcendent meaning is lacking and only death is promised, camus questions whether all political actions against injustice are equal, or whether there are limitations of acceptability. camus’s goal in the rebel is to reject the nihilism that the absurdity of life and death might imply by articulating the bounds of acceptable human actions. although it may appear that a lack of transcendent meaning to life implies that all courses of action are permitted, camus articulates that there are limits to acceptable political actions through his distinction between rebellion and revolution. sociologist vincenzo ruggiero referred to “new” social movements – those that jürgen habermas ( ) identified as defined by immaterial motives – as movements which “do not rely on a precisely identifiable set of ideologies” ( p. ). ruggiero differentiates these new movements from older, teleological movements which “are inspired by the pursuit of a final stage in society, characterized by definitive harmony” (ibid). camus argues in favor of rebellions which definitionally fight for systemic socioeconomic and political overhauls without sacrificing immediate reforms and improvements that will help actual, suffering people. camus’s rebellions are juxtaposed with his rejection of revolutions which are teleologically motivated and aim towards a conclusive, and permanent social change. a rebel, camus explains, is responding to some injustice and in doing so, is articulating the limitation of acceptability. camus states that a rebel simultaneously says “no” and “yes.” the “no” is a renunciation of injustice; it is an individual statement that i, as a human being, do not deserve the injustices that i am facing. it is a “no” to further injustice or a statement “against the suffering of life and death” (camus , p. ). the implication of such a rebellion is that no human beings deserve the injustices that the rebel is opposing.xl the “yes,” is therefore an affirmation of the common value of humanity. since one rebels or revolts in the name of something, the positive affirmation is the rebel’s support for humanity as the individual conqueror now expresses collective xl the notion is not only do i, as an individual, not deserve to suffer from injustice, but it extends this individual proposition to a collective understanding that human beings in general do not deserve to suffer from injustice. political concerns.xli the “yes” is the assertion of the value of human life and the implication that the rebel will likewise not exceed the bounds of acceptable behavior. rebellion must, if it is to remain true, not exceed the limits of acceptability; it must remain committed to fighting (and must avoid contributing to) injustice, defined as human suffering and death in a meaningless universe. rebellion is limited as it begins from the experience of suffering from injustice and seeks to remedy whatever injustices are beyond the limits of acceptability. beginning from a politics of experience implies a rejection of transcendent moral principles – including those to which one may contemporarily subscribe such as universal human nature or dignity – as a preconceived justification for political action. rebellion instead refuses “the tendency to subordinate the embodied presence of others to a tool in a war of abstractions, it always strives to see them as concretely situated, living individuals” (mrovlje , p. ). the theoretical content of camus’s rebellions is “not based on psychological identification, community of interest or definite cause that presses others into agreement and instructs on the course of rebellious action. it is grounded in revealing the individual experiences of the absurd, suffering, injustice, or exile as (human) situations common to all” (mrovlje , p. ). as rebellions are inspired by an amelioration of human suffering, they are endowed with limits; a rebellion must address suffering and not contribute to or further suffering. the primary limitation that a rebel accepts is the limit on killing another person. stephen bronner explains that in the rebel, camus makes it clear that “the killing of xli camus’s reformulation of descartes’s cogito, “i rebel – therefore we exist” ( , p. ). while camus sees this move as one that acknowledges the collective of humanity, it can, i will argue, be understood as a smaller collective or subgroup. for both black lives matter and the alt-right, the movements understand the collective through their respective racial prisms. another person is always wrong unless the murderer is himself or herself prepared to die as well. the murder of the other must be considered from the standpoint of one’s own death” ( , p. ). xliii xlii killing another person must remain a tactic of absolutely last resort, as it can never be entirely justified. camus explains in the “letters to a german friend” ( a) that the french had to weigh the philosophical implications of resisting nazi occupation since it would inevitably involve violence and death. camus’s “letters” consider “the moral cost to the victim of using violence to counter violence” (bronner , p. ) even in the most drastic case of anti-fascism. unfortunately, camus argues, political rebels can forget the initial impulse against injustice that motivated the rebellion’s existence. revolutions, while they originate in rebellion against injustice, do not continuously fight against injustice, but instead become teleological movements which pursue an “end of history” or (in ruggiero’s previously quoted words) a “final stage in society.” conversely, fred willhoite jr. explains that in a camusian rebellion “all abstract and futurized ideals must be subordinated to a concern for concrete and immediate human needs, to the struggle against present injustice and oppression” ( , p. ). revolutions abandon the concern for immediate justice – for alleviating ongoing suffering and death facing a population – and focus instead on a teleological project of remaking the world. xlii camus’s limit on violence may appear to excuse or justify, for example, suicide bombers. however, camus’s general commitment to nonviolence, and especially his requirement that violence must be used only as a tactic of absolute last resort likely overrides the requirement that one who kills must also be prepared to die. other considerations, such as a suicide bomber’s indiscriminate killing of civilian non- combatants would render the tactic unacceptable. xliii camus considers the same concern in his play “the just assassins” ( b) (le justes in french, literally translated as “the just.”). the play tells the story of russian revolutionaries who ponder the ethics of assassinating the grand duke. in forgetting their initial desire to oppose injustice, revolutions have the potential to become unjust. camus details the difference in approach between rebellion and revolution: rebellion is, by nature, limited in scope. it is no more than an incoherent pronouncement. revolution, on the contrary, originates in the realm of ideas. specifically, it is the injection of ideas into historical experience, while rebellion is only the movement that leads from individual experience into the realm of ideas. while even the collective history of a movement of rebellion is always that of a fruitless struggle with facts, of an obscure protest which involves neither methods nor reasons, a revolution is an attempt to shape actions to ideas, to fit the world into a theoretic frame. that is why rebellion kills men while revolution destroys both men and principles. ( , p. ) here camus overstates the potentially deadly nature of rebellions and one need not interpret camus’s rebels as inherently or necessarily murderous or violent. rebellions can kill or may be violent, but “violence can be justified, if at all, only as an unwelcome necessity, to be adopted in full awareness of its unacceptability, and not excused by an external, supposedly infallible, historical law” (crowley , pp. - ). when a rebellion kills, it recognizes that its violence can never be fully philosophically justified or condoned. camus, however, is not a pacifist as he recognizes violence and murder as potentially necessary within liberatory rebellions. a rebel does not begin with violent intentions, and the decision to use violence as a tool or tactic must be deeply debated and considered only as a last resort (bronner , ). killing a human being “must remain the greatest exception to the ordinary human experience” (foley b).xliv to xliv foley ( b) details elements of the scholarly article debating exactly the limit that camus sets on violence. while i will not restate the debate here, there is at least consensus that camus does set significant limitations on what is considered to be acceptable political violence. absolutely reject murder as a rebellious tactic is akin to silently accepting the murders of the rebel’s opposition, or as george kateb states, camus rejects pacifism “because it is acquiescent in the various injustices and inhumanities that men inflect on one another” ( , p. ). since absolute pacifism could negate rebellion, camus ( ) neither condones murder, nor denies it as a plausibly necessity. murder for camus is, as isaac states, “both right and wrong, just and unjust” ( , p. ). revolutions, while they may have once been rebellions, no longer concern themselves with those suffering from actual injustices, and extended beyond the previously mentioned limits of acceptable action. revolutions are teleological movements which desire a final, end goal – a conclusive stage of history that could theoretically end all injustice – and act violently to achieve this goal. for teleological revolutions, the idealized ends justify the means. this implies, however, that the limits of acceptable political acts are no longer respected; any means are deemed acceptable in the name of the end.xlv for camus, revolutions, in order to achieve some end goal, may act unjustly by contributing to suffering and death. in doing so, revolutions not only may kill human beings but they also abandon the very principle – the fight against injustice – that initially sparked the movement. while rebellion implies limitations, revolution discards these limits for the idealized future as camus explains “the golden age, postponed until the end of history and coincident … justifies everything” ( , pp. - ). xlv camus speaks of this as “an absolute end, as in nihilistic ideologies (anything goes, success is the only thing worth talking about) or in those philosophies which make history an absolute end (hegel, followed by marx: the end being a classless society, everything is good that leads to it)” ( , p. ). these “absolute ends” are why i argue camus is specifically opposing teleological pursuits. camus argued that soviet oppression of the proletariat was a form of state terror that postponed justice and morality until the achievement of full communism. friedrich engels, in anti-dühring ( ), argues that morality is contingent upon social relations and there are no universal moral principles or standards. for engels, debating the morality of marxism was to suggest that bourgeois morality should dictate the actions of a communist revolution and transition. engels aimed towards proletarian morality in a hypothetical communist future. camus understood engels’s approach as sacrificing both theoretical morality and justice in the present, and as destroying, in practice, the very proletariat who engels supported. revolutions aim towards a telos, and in doing so, neglect or may contribute to injustice defined as the actual suffering and death of actual people. political theorist matthew bowker explains, “the rebel begins by seeking to defy the forces that excuse injustice, but if he ends badly, it is because in so doing he abandons the difficult integration of tensions that motivated his revolt, yielding to the temptation to idealize his own force and his own excuses in their place” ( , p. ). the revolutionary seeks to remake the world and force it towards a final, historical goal. the once debased rebel is no longer concerned with alleviating the injustice of suffering and death but is focused instead on domination; “the slave begins by demanding justice and ends by wanting to wear a crown” (camus , p. ). while camus is arguing against teleological revolution in theory, he found an intellectual and political enemy in his once friend, jean-paul sartre. when the rebel was published, sartre was the director of the editorial board of les temps modernes. sartre selected francis jeanson to review the rebel and jeanson’s review was scathing. camus believed that jeanson’s review was the work of sartre and camus responded to jeanson’s review by addressing sartre (as editor, not by name), rather than by addressing jeanson. while camus lacked evidence to his claim, there was nothing in sartre’s response to camus that suggests that he disagreed with jeanson’s review (foley a). camus, in critiquing teleologically motivated revolutions, indirectly critiqued sartre, who persisted in his attachment to marx’s dialectical materialism. marxism, camus argued in the rebel, supports a telos – communism as the historical end of all class conflict – that could endorse injustices committed against even the proletariat. camus therefore rejected marxism for its telos which, in practice, he argues legitimated the stalinist regime and its actions.xlvi at the time, sartre retained support for the soviet union.xlvii camus saw sartre as a rebel who lost sight of the suffering proletariat and endorsed state terror through his support of the soviet union. much of sartre’s work deals with the existential concerns for human freedom and sartre would attempt to negotiate a philosophical paradox between the free individual and the historical determinism implied by marx’s dialectical materialism. sartre would eventually turn from soviet support, but his work continued to focus on reconciling marxism and existentialism. sartre’s search for a method ( ), for example, argues that marxism was corrupted by soviets and was abused for soviet political gains. while sartre becomes less enamored with orthodox marxism and the soviet union, he does not abandon the marxist pursuit of communism and his expansive xlvi camus states in his response to jeanson, addressed to sartre, that “everything proceeds in your article as if you are defending marxism as an implicit dogma without being able to affirm it as an explicit policy” ( a, p. ). camus accuses jeanson and sartre of excusing the policies of stalin’s soviet union in the name of one day achieving an idealized marxist and communist telos. this excusing of injustice in the name of one day achieving justice is one of camus’s chief concerns with revolution in the rebel. xlvii although sartre was not blind to, for example, soviet work camps which he denounced in an editorial co-authored with another of sartre’s friends turned intellectual enemies, maurice merleau-ponty (forsdick ). critique of dialectical reason ( ) is an expanded defense of marxism as the pathway to achieving existential freedom. camus’s position in the rebel is that teleological movements can abandon the pursuit of alleviating human suffering and instead pursue a theoretical end to all human suffering in some hypothesized future. these theoretical ends can, at their worst, justify and contribute to the injustice of sorrow and death and may treat “the individual as a means rather than an end” (bronner , p. ). sartre’s continued focus on marxism and on achieving communism, despite his mounting critiques of the soviet union’s domestic (work camps) and international (imperialism) policies, underlies camus’s concerns. for camus, sartre’s endorsement of communism led to his quietism on soviet atrocities.xlviii while sartre may have been personally and politically concerned with human suffering, his commitment to communism embodies camusian revolution since human suffering in practice was overlooked in the name of theoretically eliminating all suffering in the hypothesized future. camus presents an analogy of his view on the acceptable limitations of violence and death in speaking about his home of algeria, and the tactics undertaken by national liberation front (fln) revolutionaries. in the preface to his algerian reports, camus states “if anyone … still thinks heroically that one’s brother must die rather than one’s principles, i shall go no farther than to admire him from a distance. i am not of his stamp” ( b, p. ). the fln’s violent tactics were aimed at achieving liberation from colonization, and the fln’s approach was deadly. michael walzer explains that camus could never side with the fln because of its revolutionary approach: “camus was committed to a particular people, the fln intellectuals to a cause” ( , p. ). xlviii bronner ( ) attributes this to sartre’s nostalgia for the “heroic years” of the soviet union ( - ). the death of human beings must be the last resort and camus supported the efforts of the french resistance to the nazis during world war ii for said reason. conversely, camus saw sartre as embracing revolutionary political approaches that abandoned and harmed actual people in the name of achieving a hypothetical end to all suffering for humanity in the future. the present moment, and the people inhabiting it could be sacrificed for the telos, and camus would never endorse this revolutionary proposition. camus published a series of essays in the newspaper combat entitled “neither victims nor executioners” and this statement exemplifies his “anti-absolutist” rebellion (walzer , p. ). the rebel is not a victim, for in saying “no,” the rebel fights against the injustice of suffering and death. the rebel is not an executioner as the rebel, in saying “yes” that humanity has value, refuses to act unjustly by harming or killing in the name of an ideal. a rebel cannot excuse today’s injustices in the name of theoretically ending injustice in the future. rebellion persists as a refusal to accept injustice and as a persistent struggle against injustices committed upon the suffering. as neither victim nor executioner, the rebel engages with politics in a sisyphean manner, and fights for an end to human suffering and death, while acknowledging that no victory is eternally guaranteed. while sisyphus persisted in solitude, rebellion is a corporate effort that affirms human value. conclusion in this chapter, i have extracted a political theory from several of camus’s works. camus argues that human life and death is inherently absurd since humans desire meaning but ultimately will die in a meaningless universe. recognizing the absurdity of human existence can cause an individual to succumb to existential anxiety. instead, camus argues that one can participate in collective, political rebellion to contest human contributions to suffering and death. in the next chapter, i analyze institutional and ideational components of both black lives matter and the alt-right. the chapter does not apply the camusian theory to the cases, but instead situates the two movements in some historical context and provides a justification for why these two movements are appropriate for a theoretical comparison. in short, the movements have structural similarities, and are both ideationally focused on collective identity. only after detailing why these two movements are appropriate for a comparison will i then apply the camusian theory to the respective movements. in chapter four, i argue that black lives matter collectively responds to the anxieties produced by state sanctioned death through a political revolt that is not teleologically motivated but is continually concerned with improving the lives of suffering (or potentially suffering) black americans. black lives matter can therefore be understood as an example of a camusian rebellion. in chapter five, i turn to the alt- right to elucidate a key difference from black lives matter. the alt-right is similarly responding to the anxieties produced by fears of death – albeit social rather than physical death – and the alt-right turns towards a passionate revolt. however, the alt-right abandons its own principles in its pursuit of a telos and in doing so commits injustices by committing acts of violence and murder against the white americans the movement claims to support. the alt-right, because it abandons suffering white people in the name of an ideal political telos, can be viewed as a camusian revolution. chapter # on the two cases: why black lives matter and the alt-right are fit for comparison in the previous chapter, i extracted a theoretical approach to understanding social movements from the works and philosophy of albert camus. over the next two chapters, i will apply the camusian social movement theory to highlight the movements’ respective pathways from responding to the existential anxiety associated with death, to the divergent forms of collective action that the movements have pursued; black lives matter as a camusian rebellion, and the alt-right as a camusian revolution. however, before proceeding to apply the camusian theory to the cases, i will explain why these two cases are fit for comparison and contrast. although black lives matter and the alt-right appear to be dichotomous movements with very little in common, the two movements have surprising similarities. in this chapter, i will analyze three aspects of the movements – two institutional components and one ideational – in order to show that the movements are fit for comparison. first, both black lives matter and the alt-right are decentralized and non- hierarchical. the movements’ rejections of hierarchy offer a structural locus of comparation between the two movements while they exist in stark contrast to some of their respective intellectual predecessors. second, both black lives matter and the alt- right operate outside of the formal political sphere, and challenge institutional norms and procedures, unlike some of their important predecessors. finally, i will focus on the ideational importance of race that underlies both movements, and the divergence of the movements’ respective views on group identity. i additionally will address gender and sexuality which are collective identities that the movements consider in divergent manners. black lives matter and the alt-right are most dissonant with respect to their views on race (and on collective identity generally), and their understandings of collective identity are ideational components that allow for both comparison and contrast. for the three aforementioned reasons – decentralized organizational structures, outsider approaches to political action, and focuses on group identity – black lives matter and the alt-right will be shown to be appropriate for the comparative case study that follows this chapter. black lives matter and the alt-right as anti-hierarchical movements both black lives matter and the alt-right reject hierarchical leadership models. black lives matter intentionally has avoided the hierarchical tradition of the civil rights movement which relied upon charismatic and well-known individual leaders who “tended to be male, straight, and christian” (spence ). the founders of black lives matter – alicia garza, patrisse cullors and opal tometi – do not refer to themselves as the movement’s sole leaders and use the term “leaderful” to positively describe localized leadership of the movement’s affiliate organizations. the alt-right’s lack of hierarchical leadership is perhaps less intentional and more circumstantial due to the grassroots development of the movement and its inherently decentralized, online presence. the alt- right does have highly influential and well-known public faces such as its founder, richard spencer. however, spencer and other public figures within the alt-right are not the movement’s leaders in the traditional notion. while i will argue that black lives matter and the alt-right are different in many regards, the two movements’ lack of respective hierarchical structures render them more similar to one another than to their intellectual and political predecessors. black lives matter operates without hierarchical leadership (hoffman et al. ; hooker ). while garza, cullors and tometi are credited with beginning the movement (updegrove et al. ) some mistakenly refer to the three founders of black lives matter as the movement’s leaders (eidelson, ; rickford ; jones-eversley et al. ). black lives matter is a decentralized global network and is comprised of over chapters in the united states and in other countries (black lives matter, herstory). black politics in the united states during the latter twentieth century was dominated by the “charismatic leadership model” personified by martin luther king jr., jesse jackson, and al sharpton (harris ). the leadership roles were hierarchically structured and disproportionately dominated by men. conversely, black lives matter has prioritized a “bottom-up insurgency led by ordinary people” rather than the “top- down approach of old guard civil rights organizations” (ibid). despite the clear shift from the older leadership model, black lives matter rejects the claim that the movement is “leaderless.” in an interview with kaavya asoka for dissent, historian marcia chatelain states “i hate it when i hear people call black lives matter leaderless” before asking rhetorically, “if there are no leaders, then who is getting the word out? who is getting the young people on buses and cars to appear before state houses and to lie down in train stations? who is sending out the calls for protests? who is managing the social media presence?” ( , pp. - ). chatelain’s concern stems from the historical trend of rendering black women, and their contributions to activism invisible. chatelain is not alone in expressing this concern as alicia garza ( ) has explicitly addressed “the theft of black queer women’s work” and has focused on the important contributions of black lives matter’s co-founders, supporters, and globalized network. alicia garza states, “#blm, both as a network and as a movement, does not see itself as without leaders, but as a leaderful network and a leaderful movement” ( a, pp. - ). garza does, however, note that there is a structural difference between black lives matter’s “leaderful” approach which has a decentralized network of local leaders, and the traditional “great leader” hierarchy. garza’s co-founder, patrisse cullors, in an interview with kandia johnson ( ) of black enterprise, likewise echoes chatelain in stating “we believe blm is leaderful and all movements have many leaders, our movement doesn’t believe in a single charismatic leader.” the more equitable arrangement of power and authority which is dispersed throughout black lives matter’s global network does not reflect the centralized and hierarchical leadership of prior movements such as the civil rights movement. black lives matter has intentionally avoided the tendencies of hierarchy and patriarchy by focusing on the contributions and concerns of the multitude of its local organizers, and by prioritizing the empowerment of all, rather than by focusing on singular figures. the alt-right mirrors the lack of hierarchical leadership of black lives matter, albeit for quite different reasons. while black lives matter has dedicated local chapters and many local voices in organizational roles, the alt-right is a movement that is largely – although not entirely – contained on the internet. both movements, however, have been misrepresented in the media as having hierarchical leadership. while richard spencer originally invented the term “alternative right,” the movement is formally leaderless, although some of its supporters such as spencer, jared taylor, greg johnson and andrew anglin are rather well-known and prevalent.xlix books (main ; wendling ), periodicals (carroll ; weigel ), mainstream cable news networks (bradner ) and scholarly journal articles (atkinson ) have all mistakenly stated that the alt-right has “leaders.”l the alt-right, like black lives matter, functions without hierarchical leadership although both movements pay homage to their founders (spencer for the alt- right; garza, cullors and tometi for black lives matter) and their intellectual contributors (hawley ). prominent members of the alt-right have confirmed that the movement does not utilize hierarchical leadership. andrew anglin, editor of the daily stormer, one of the most prominent american neo-nazi websites and message boards, explains in “a xlix jared taylor is the founder and editor of american renaissance (an online white supremacist publication), greg johnson is the co-founder, and editor-in-chief of counter- currents publishing (a white nationalist imprint), and andrew anglin is the founder and editor of the neo-nazi website and forum daily stormer. l huffpost (sweet ) not only mistakenly stated that the alt-right has leaders within its ranks, but also named milo yiannopoulos – a target of the alt-right’s andrew anglin ( b) – as one of the leaders. normie’s guide to the alt-right”li that the alt-right “is, at this point, entirely leaderless” and notes that “the mob is the movement” ( a). a well-known alt-right poster who goes by “vincent law” explains that the movement “cannot rely on pyramid structures of authority” before citing a passage written by aryan nations member louis beam titled “leaderless resistance” ( b). even richard spencer, who initially coined the term “alt-right,” acknowledges that he has not been the leader of the movement as he states “the alt-right is what it is today not because of me; it is what it is today because i let it go. i didn’t possess it, and it was taken up by all these people” (as cited in hawley , p. ). political scientist george hawley explains the lack of formal leadership within the alt-right: although journalists understandably seek out, again and again, a small number of prominent figures on the alt-right when writing stories about the movement, the truth is that the alt-right is without leaders in the usual sense. it is a disorganized mob that broadly shares a number of goals and beliefs. pepe did not become the unofficial mascot of the alt-right because there was a central figure telling his supporters to make pepe their twitter avatars but because someone decided pepe was funny and others eventually agreed. (hawley , p. ) while the alt-right has prominent intellectual influencers and publicly known spokesmen, its lack of formal institutions and leadership structure differentiates the alt- right from white nationalist movements and organizations such as the ku klux klan as the alt-right lacks anything comparable to the klan’s hierarchical structure; there is no alt-right equivalent to the klan’s grand wizard or imperial wizard. li normies are defined as those who are not alt-right members and who are “programmed” to not accept the supposed truth claims of white nationalism. the alt-right is an authentically grassroots movement and, in this respect, is more similar to black lives matter than the most recent example of a successful right- wing social movement in the united states, the tea party. while many supporters of the tea party were genuinely energized by the movement and its message, much of the movement was “astroturfed.” sectors of the tea party did not “naturally” spring about as grassroots efforts, but there existed an artifice of support thanks in part to the funding the movement received from organizations such as freedomworks (which was financed by the billionaire koch brothers) (fetner and king ). the alt-right and black lives matter are grassroots efforts which parallel one another in their committed opposition to hierarchical leadership despite staunch ideological disagreements (which will be addressed). the term “alt-right” was created by richard spencer much as the term “black lives matter” was created by alicia garza and spread by patrisse cullors yet neither movement acknowledges their respective founders as the sole leaders of their movements. this rejection of hierarchy by the alt-right and black lives matter stands in contrast with each movement’s intellectual or ideological ancestors such as the ku klux klan (the alt-right) and the civil rights movement (black lives matter). while black lives matter has a more sophisticated network of local organizations (and belongs to the larger umbrella group movement for black lives), the alt-right remains primarily an online phenomenon and is largely relegated to internet chatrooms, forums, blogs and social media networks (hawley ).lii as i will discuss in more depth in chapter four, black lives matter has organized thousands of rallies and protests which required the presence of its members and supporters. the alt-right has been active in organizing some in-person events and the most famous of these events – the unite the right rally – will be addressed in chapter five. the alt-right shares a lack of hierarchical leadership with black lives matter, and both movements are driven by grassroots support. while the movements vary in the reasons and specific functions of these institutional features, the general similarity is important to note since a rejection of hierarchy leads black lives matter and the alt- right to be more similar to one another than to some of their predecessors. decentralization is not the only institutional similarity between black lives matter and the alt-right as both movements have functioned as political outsiders and have not attempted to directly enter government. black lives matter, the alt-right and the rejection of formal politics black lives matter and the alt-right have functioned outside of formal political spheres and have challenged individual politicians and political institutions. neither movement has prioritized an individual candidate (or candidates) who have run for office, lii journalist mike wendling does cite some “proto-institutions” that feed into the alt- right such as “the /pol/ section of chan, numerous accounts on twitter, popular reddit forums and youtube accounts, and niche websites and message boards devoted to conservative news topics such as men’s rights” ( , pp. - ). these outlets allow for anonymous posting and commenting which may help spread the alt-right’s messages but limits the movement to primarily – but not exclusively – a digital platform. nor has either movement spent significant energy attempting to alter the existing platforms of the democratic or republican parties.liii while the two movements vary as to their respective reasons for rejecting formal political pathway, the similarity in rejecting institutional politics lends further credence to comparing black lives matter and the alt-right. although black lives matter has functioned outside of institutional american politics, the movement has engaged with elected officials and candidates for office. in july , black lives matter members including patrisse cullors interrupted a town hall featuring presidential hopefuls former maryland governor marin o’malley and vermont senator bernie sanders (resnikoff ). members of the seattle chapter of black lives matter later interrupted a rally for senator sanders (bruner ). fellow democratic presidential hopeful and eventual nominee, former secretary of state hillary clinton, was likewise interrupted by black lives matter members during a rally in atlanta (merica ) and later during a fundraising event in charleston, south carolina (bixby ). democratic candidates and the democratic national committee (dnc) have largely been supportive of black lives matter. sanders and o’malley both utilized the movement’s terminology and uttered “black lives matter” during the democratic primary debates. sanders – who has been actively involved in civil rights work since his liii black lives matter has engaged in voter registration efforts in , but the movement has not – as a movement – endorsed candidates. see the movement’s statement on the election for their voter registration efforts (black lives matter, what matters ). college days in the s (frizell ) – released a racial justice platform which was followed by o’malley’s own platform (ollstein ). clinton likewise released a racial justice platform which was (along with sanders’s platform) praised by black lives matter activist and baltimore mayoral hopeful deray mckesson (mckesson ). the dnc also passed a resolution in support of black lives matter in (seitz-wald ). although significant plans have been proposed by presidential hopefuls, and the dnc has publicly supported the movement, there has been little accomplished at the national level. in chapter four and again in chapter six, i will discuss some of the successes of black lives matter at the local and state levels. despite the public support by o’malley, sanders, clinton and the dnc, little progress has been made to support black lives matter at the federal level and these endorsements have unfortunately been little more than lip service.liv republican politicians have, on aggregate, not supported black lives matter. ben carson, republican presidential hopeful, called the movement “silly” (lerner ). former new jersey governor and fellow republican presidential hopeful chris christie falsely accused black lives matter of calling for the murder of police officers (miller ). former new york city mayor rudy giuliani called black lives matter “inherently racist” and “anti-american” (twohey ). then-presidential liv that is not to suggest that the individuals or the dnc does not want to do more to support black lives matter. it is entirely possible that, given a more politically favorable climate, democrats would have proposed and passed legislation endorsed by black lives matter. congressional gridlock is not the only cause of legislative impotence, but i do not want to misspeak or suggest that o’malley, sanders, clinton, and the dnc were being inauthentic in their public support of the movement. candidate donald trump also had a rally cancelled in chicago after black lives matter organized a protest (linthicum and lee ). the protest came about four months after a black lives matter protester was physically assaulted by a trump supporter at a rally in birmingham, alabama (diamond ). trump openly supported the violence against the supporter and had previously threatened to fight black lives matter supporters should they interrupt his events (legum ). while black lives matter has protested elected officials and has refused to formally endorse any candidates or politicians, there are questions about the ties between the movement and government. on the one hand, black lives matter repudiated the previously mentioned endorsement dnc endorsement (rickford ). concurrently, mass action for black liberation, formerly black lives matter: cincinnati, has distanced itself from the black lives matter global network because the chapter fears that the movement has become too embedded in institutional politics. in the former chapter’s ( ) statement, “why black lives matter: cincinnati is changing its name,” they state that black lives matter has shifted “towards electoral and liberal democratic party politics and away from revolutionary ideas.” mass action for black liberation argues that black lives matter has been moving towards a reformist agenda with their sights set on electoral support and provide evidence such as black lives matter’s efforts to register voters. alicia garza, when pressed for her thoughts on the chapter’s defection stated, “i think the beautiful thing about a movement is that there are many different paths identified to accomplish a common goal” (garza ). garza’s reply leaves questions about the existing and future relationships between black lives matter and formal, political institutions unclear. although she was not speaking about the issues raised by mass action for black liberation, patrisse cullors presents a more explicit repudiation of institutional politics in her memoir when they call you a terrorist. cullors states that “we actually don’t give a fuck about shiny, polished candidates. we care about justice” (kahn-cullors & bandele , pp. - ). this approach is echoed in historian barbara ransby’s making all black lives matter wherein she states that the movement has “rejected representative politics as a stand-in for substantive change in the condition of black people’s lives” ( , p. ). ransby is not suggesting that electoral politics are being entirely dismissed by the movement. instead, black lives matter sees institutional politics as ultimately insufficient in accomplishing the movement’s goals, and the movement persists unaffiliated with formal politics and politicians. political scientist deva woodly explains that the movement for black lives – a coalition of organizations which includes black lives matter – is fighting “not only to raise awareness or change policies, but more fundamentally, to change politics” ( b, p. ). to accomplish these goals, woodly states that there are efforts underway to organize black voters, recruit progressive black candidates, and to raise funds independent of any extant political party. even these efforts, though they accept some institutional norms, occur outside of the democratic party which has largely captured the black vote in the united states. thus even when black lives matter participates in the most institutional manners of fighting for political change, the movement does so beyond the bounds of longstanding political party institutions. black lives matter’s relationship to institutional politics may be too tightly knit for some supporters, but the movement remains sufficiently autonomous for others. i will further address black lives matter’s approach to both reforms, and radical systemic changes in chapters four (when discussing the movement as a camusian rebellion) and six (when considering the implications of this approach for other movements). in short, the black lives matter movement has supported immediate reforms while still pursuing more radical and systemic social, economic, and political changes. black lives matter has rejected venerable elements of institutional politics and has worked to forge alternative pathways to political change. the alt-right, like black lives matter, has primarily existed outside of formal political institutions, and while the alt-right has purportedly had ties to american federal politics, the movement is fundamentally countercultural. the alt-right gained mainstream notoriety thanks to media coverage of the movement during the united states presidential campaigns of hillary clinton and donald trump. clinton brought attention to the alt-right during a speech in reno, nevada where she connected donald trump, his campaign ceo steve bannonlv, and the alt-right (ohlheiser and dewey ). while trump’s unbridled braggadocio, bannon’s (and breitbart’s) racismlvi, and the alt-right are all intertwined, the connections between the three are more complicated than clinton suggested. lv former executive chairman of right-wing outlet breitbart news. lvi daniel hosang and joseph lowndes ( ) provide examples of bannon’s speeches which emphasize the struggles of people of color. however, they note that bannon used the alt-right did not endorse donald trump and trump has not, in turn, publicly stated support for the alt-right. however, prominent alt-right members have been clear about their support for trump and his political agenda and scholars have noted that the alt-right’s support contributed to trump’s victory (love ). for example, richard spencer, at the national policy institute (npi) conference following trump’s electoral victory boisterously asserted, “hail trump, hail our people, hail victory!” (lombroso and appelbaum ). spencer’s speech garnered publicity and trump, following intense public pressure upon the video’s circulation, formally denounced the alt-right (goldstein ; hawley ). furthermore, some members (and former members) of trump’s administration have been tied to the alt-right including stephen miller, julia hahn, michael flynn, sebastian gorka, and steve bannon. again, however, these connections are not always clear and direct, and the relationship between the trump administration and the alt-right movement is complicated. while members of the alt-right placed their hopes in trump and saw his victory as a success, trump’s victory was viewed as a stepping stone to greater movement organizing; richard spencer and greg johnson have both championed trump as being an “icebreaker” who can lead plausibly sympathetic supporters to the movement (hawley ).lvii the alt-right also is supportive of some of trump’s policy positions racially inclusive language and examples to promote civic nationalism which is a cover for racist ethnonationalism. lvii some supporters in london have cited trump’s election and the mainstream acceptance of far-right ideas as a motivating factor for their newfound activism. trump’s such as his proposed immigration ban from primarily “muslim” countries.lviii trump’s racist dog whistles, such as his twitter post of hillary clinton with a large pile of money, and a six-pointed star of david, are also ties that bind the alt-right to trump as the meme was created and promoted by a white nationalist twitter account (wendling ). trump has also retweeted several far-right twitter accounts including “@whitegenocidetm.” the term “white genocide” is a prominent one for alt-right supporters and will be discussed in more depth in chapter five. while it is important to again state that the alt-right did not endorse trump, and trump eventually denounced the movement, there are linkages between the two. steve bannon served as the executive chairman of breitbart news, before serving as white house chief strategist for trump. breitbart, while a far-right website, has had a tenuous relationship with the alt-right. a group that was claiming to speak for daily stormer handed out flyers to those in line waiting to see controversial, far-right blogger and former breitbart editor milo yiannopoulos speak at the university of alabama. while yiannopoulos is on the far-right of the political spectrum, daily stormer protested yiannopoulos for not sufficiently supporting the alt-right’s racio-political cause. despite these tensions, bannon had referred to breitbart as “the platform of the alt- victory inspired alt-right activism in the united states, the united kingdom, and in continental europe (holland, lucas, sveriges television, & silverfish media , : ). lviii the alt-right’s support for the “muslim” ban was not championed for necessarily banning muslims, but rather because it was limiting entry to the united states to people of color (hawley ). the alt-right is not concerned with religion, per se; for more on the alt-right’s relationship with religion, see chapter five. right” (posner ) and alt-right corporation co-founder jason jorjani claimed to have direct connections to the trump administration through steve bannon (holland et al. ). when clinton attempted to triangulate trump, the alt-right, and breitbart news, these connections between trump, bannon and jorjani were the strongest evidence in her favor. however, these connections between the alt-right and formal political institutions have since been severed; bannon is no longer with the trump administration nor with breitbart news and jorjani has distanced himself from the alt-right, and supported tulsi gabbard in the united states presidential election (jorjani ).lix journalist mike wendling explains that the alt-right understands itself as a countercultural movement that exists outside of the mainstream. he notes activists have compared their movement to punk rock or the hippies of the s. the comparison stems not from shared political values but from the alt-right’s claim to ‘outsider’ status. like the hippies and the punks, alt-righters rail against what they see as an oppressive establishment. the difference is that their establishment is made up of academia, the washington ‘swamp,’ and influential leftists in the media, rather than the corporate world and free-market politicians. (wendling , pp. - ) wendling’s claim – that the alt-right views itself as countercultural – is supported by jason jorjani. swedish graduate student patrik hermansson infiltrated the alt-right (and other white supremacist, white nationalist, and neo-nazi groups) on behalf of hope not hate, and recorded an undercover interview with jorjani, who stated that the “movement has mass appeal, because it is the counter-culture now. it is the underdog” (holland et al. lix this despite continued islamophobic statements and sentiments (schaeffer ). , : ). the outsider approach to politics leads to a contrast between the alt-right and previous right-wing social movements. george hawley ( ) identifies the paleoconservative movement of the s and s as one which has influenced the alt-right.lx unlike the alt-right, paleoconservatives attempted to gain formal political power through institutional norms. in both and , patrick j. buchanan ran in the republican presidential primaries on platforms that supported economic protectionism, rigid immigration restrictions, international nonintervention, and cultural traditionalism. while paleoconservatives were frustrated with the growing neoconservatism of the republican party, “they sought to change conservatism, not destroy it” (hawley , p. ). the paleoconservative desire for reform is why the movement worked within institutional norms and sought power through accepted, formal means. like paleoconservatism, the tea party sought political power through established political pathways. unlike paleoconservatism, the tea party is not often considered an intellectual influence on the alt-right (hawley ) and some members of the alt- right have openly distanced themselves from the tea party because of the movements’ divergent views (p gray ). although the tea party movement utilized the internet lx paleoconservatism is a political philosophy, and a branch of american conservatism that gained supporters in the united states during the mid-to-late th century. the philosophy and movement posed itself as traditionalist and rejected the more interventionist approach of the growing neoconservative sector of the american political right. the movement prioritized staunch immigration restrictions, political decentralization, and economic nationalism and protectionism. while some paleoconservative principles have been adopted by recent and current conservatives, paleoconservatism lost most of its prior momentum (hawley ). to organize and mobilize its support base, the movement gained political power through mainstream political support, and electoral successes. like the alt-right, tea party supporters often challenged and undercut “establishment” republicans (skocpol and williamson ). yet self-proclaimed tea party candidates ran as republicans, were backed by the republican party, and worked within established congressional procedures to pass favorable policies and thwart democratic preferences. at the state level, tea party-aligned governors followed suit and cut taxes, reduced, or eliminated business regulations, and reduced benefits for public employees such as teachers (ibid). while some existing institutional norms and procedures were challengedlxi by tea party aligned republicans, the movement functioned within most of the confines of the american electoral system, supported candidates for office at the state and federal level, and garnered power through these victories and the establishment of the house congressional tea party caucus. the tea party represents the most recent successful right-wing social movement in the united states. the alt-right diverges strongly from the tea party because of its ideological and intellectual commitments, and even more strongly due to the variation in their respective tactics. unlike the paleoconservatives of the late th century and the tea party of the early st century, the alt-right has fought against established institutional norms and has functioned as a movement outside of formal government. lxi skocpol and williamson identify budget legislation as one area where the tea party challenged norms; “budgets have been occasions for legislators to compromise, but tea party republicans do not look at them in this light” ( , p. ). the alt-right lacks formal political power and lacks direct connections to institutional politics.lxii the alt-right has not run its own candidates nor has the movement expressed enthusiasm for other candidates the way it did in for donald trump. the movement has not fought to reform the republican party through electoral means as was the tactic of the paleoconservatives and tea party. instead, the alt-right exists as a force to challenge and oppose both mainstream conservatism and liberalism. in this respect, the alt-right and black lives matter are institutionally similar. the rejection of hierarchical leadership, and the outsider status of black lives matter and the alt-right are two institutional similarities that make the movements fit for comparison. an ideational component – the movements’ respective focuses on race and collective identity – is a third reason that the two movements are appropriate for the case study that follows. the role of identity in black lives matter and the alt-right black lives matter and the alt-right are both social movements that primarily frame their respective causes in terms of race and additionally consider the role of gender. both movements agree that race is the identity which defines people and through which people perceive the world. despite this parallel, the two movements agree on little else; black lives matter has created an inclusive and intersectional approach to social lxii i will briefly discuss other far-right movements, including the boogaloo boys and qanon which have supplanted the alt-right in mainstream discourse, in the final chapter. qanon does, unlike the alt-right, work within existing political institutions. change which opposes the oppression that occurs on (primarily) racial lines while the alt- right’s belief in race science and biological determinism has led to their fight for racially homogeneous ethnostates. both movements’ respective views on race are central to their understandings of death and existential anxiety. the two movements’ focuses on identity are a third means for comparison. while the anti-hierarchical structures, and outsider statuses of the movements are institutional similarities, the movements’ focuses on race and gender are ideational similarities. both the similarities and staunch differences between black lives matter and the alt-right with respect to race and gender are crucial to understanding the movements. how black lives matter and the alt-right conceive of race the primary concern for the alt-right is preservation of white people.lxiii while contemporary biological and physiological scientists have denounced race as a folk concept, the alt-right is opposed to scientific consensus (smedley & smedley ; omi & winant ; hawley ). instead, the alt-right maintains an arcane belief that race is rooted in evolutionary biology and alt-right supporters of racial science often refer to it with the euphemistic term “human biodiversity” (hbd) (hawley ; wendling ). hbd is the pseudoscientific belief that different groups of people have different traits, and these traits are attached to genes which sort people into well-defined lxiii i will focus more on the issue of preserving white people in the chapter on the alt- right. what is important at this stage is that if white people need protection, then the category of “white,” and who is fit for inclusion in that category is going to be defined by the alt-right. racial and ethnic groups. hbd proponents argue that these traits include, for example, one’s intellectual capabilities as the biological capability for intelligence is genetically attached to one’s racial makeup. because the alt-right argues that race is a biological reality, the movement views different races as distinct and mutually exclusive; one cannot simultaneously be both white and black.lxiv members of the movement conclude that because different races evolved to be unique, they must not live amongst one another and should instead maintain rigid borders of separation. politics, from this perspective, is a battle over racial group interests and the alt-right has argued against heterogeneity so that different races of people would not come into conflict (singal ). the alt-right’s beliefs in deterministic racial differences have led to the movement prioritizing race its primary political concern. race is also a central concern for black lives matter, although the movement does not conceive of race in a manner that mirrors the alt-right. black lives matter does not attempt to define race, or to police the bounds of blackness. political scientist shayla nunnally explains, “while different black activists introduced their contributions lxiv sociologists aaron panofsky and joan donovan ( ) found that members of the white nationalist forum stormfront, when presented with genetic ancestry tests that indicated that they had genetic markers from “non-white” areas of the world either rationalize the results, offering a pseudoscientific explanation for the variation, or would reject the genetic tests’ results based on family history or outward appearance. while stormfront and the alt-right are not synonymous, this work hints at how white nationalists such as alt-right supporters cope with, and attempt to overcome the cognitive dissonance between a lack of their own racial purity, and their white nationalist ideologies. to expand the definition of blackness and those protected by an agenda of racial justice, the contemporary black lives matter movement emphasizes acknowledging all aggrieved blacks at the outset, no matter their sociodemographic backgrounds” ( , p. ). however, while nunnally states that black lives matter works to be inclusive of all black lives, it is not clear from her explanation who is considered black. although black lives matter does not explicitly define race or blackness – setting the movement apart from the alt-right which has focused on defining and policing whiteness – there is an implicit understanding of blackness as lived experience with a sense of linked fate. black lives matter seems to recognize that racial definitions are socially constructed and vary across time and space but the movement does not deny the social importance of race. being black in the united states is rooted in a collective understanding of “lived experience” which can be explained as a combination of three factors: skin color, ascribed race, and discrimination experiences (garcia et al. ). based on these individual lived experiences, black americans can envisage themselves as a collective racial group due to “linked fate” which is the notion that one’s individual or self-interest is inherently tied to the interests of the group as a whole (frasure-yokley et al. ). when one’s racialized lived experiences aligns with the racialized lived experiences of other individuals, a collective sense of linked fate can bond the racial group. for black lives matter, the lived experience of black american oppression by police, and possibly the experience of having lost someone to police or vigilante violence can bond the group. however, even if an individual has not had one of these experiences, the notion of linked fate may attach an individual to the racial group, since one may see racial subjugation as plausibly impacting them in the future. this combination of lived experience of racial subjugation and linked fate of black americans differs widely from the alt-right’s biological conception of race. the “jewish question” (often shortened to “jq”) is a point of contention within the movement that highlights both the alt-right’s attempt at policing the boundaries of whiteness, and the difficulty in doing so due to the dynamic nature of racial categories. political scientist phillip gray notes this internal disagreement in his study of the alt- right by stating that the movement is unclear on if “jews are viewed as an intentional, collective racial enemy” ( , p. ). as such, the alt-right is divided on whether jews can assimilate into white societies or whether jews ought to face expulsion or even execution. jared taylor is less overtly anti-semitic than many of his alt-right peers, and he believes that european jews can possibly assimilate into white, american society (p gray ). conversely, greg johnson has expressed blatantly anti-semitic views. patrick hermansson, in an undercover meeting with greg johnson, filmed johnson explaining his belief that jews ought to be expelled from the united states and sent to israel (holland et al. , : ). richard spencerlxv voiced similar views to greg johnson in declaring his support for israel as a jewish ethnostate (sommer ). andrew anglin’s “a normie’s guide to the alt-right” defines jews as “a separate race, with biological drives and behavior patterns which come into direct conflict with the goals and values of lxv while johnson and spencer largely detest one another, they agree on the “jq.” the white race” (anglin a). for anglin, jews “must be confronted and ultimately removed from white societies completely” by physical means (ibid). as the three aforementioned perspectives on the jewish question highlights, the alt-right is internally divided on exactly where the boundaries of whiteness ought to be drawn. despite internal disagreements, the movement is united in the goal of defining the bounds of whiteness, and in enforcing white, racial purity. sociologists michael omi and howard winant identify race as a master category which they define as “a fundamental concept that has profoundly shaped, and continues to shape, the history, polity, economic structure, and culture of the united states” ( , p. ). richard spencer ironically echoes omi and winant in stating that “race isn’t just some issue. it isn’t just some little thing that we might want to pursue here and there. it’s this core idea that really informs everything” (as cited in main , p. ). omi and winant, call race a way of “making people up” because the notion of race lacks any scientific basis. the alt-right, while it sees race as a master category, denies the biological and physiological sciences that repudiate race realism. the alt-right sees race as a biologically determined master category and thus, where heterogeneity exists, politics is understood as racial competition. spencer, in a speech to reporters in washington, d.c. publicized this position by stating “race is real, race matters, and race is the foundation of identity” (as cited in harkinson ). for the alt-right, interracial conflict must be avoided, which requires racial separation. the alt-right’s solution to the problem of tenuous racial cohabitation is the creation of racially pure ethnostates wherein each state’s polity is comprised entirely of members of a single race (hawley , main , wendling , hosang and lowndes ). for prominent alt-right members, this implies that the united states of america ought to be a country wherein the entirety of the populace is racially codified as purely white. this desire for racial homogeneity is why the alt-right is best understood as a white nationalist movementlxvi and why it has dedicated significant effort to defining and policing the bounds of whiteness. while black lives matter may have members who support black nationalism, the movement is not explicitly or exclusively about black nationalism nor black separatism. for the alt-right, racial heterogeneity is to be avoided if political harmony is to be achieved. the role of gender in black lives matter and the alt-right black lives matter was founded by alicia garza, patrisse cullors and opal tometi following the death of trayvon martin and the acquittal of his killer, george zimmerman. the three founders of the movement have prioritized inclusivity, both in the movement’s membership and in the movement’s strategies and goals. while women were crucial to the civil rights movement some women, not limited to ella baker, fannie lou hammer, dorothy height, diane nash and rosa parks, were “relegated to lxvi it is not necessarily appropriate to classify all alt-right supporters (nor the movement) as white supremacist although the two terms may be conflated. while white nationalism is clear within the movement, the idea of “supremacy” is contested (hawley ). jared taylor even argues that the east asian “race” is superior to the white “race” (sussman ). there are certainly white supremacists within the movement including unapologetic neo-nazis, but the movement’s goals are more clearly white nationalist than white supremacist. i agree with phillip gray who states that “this current form of nationalist identity is separatist rather than imperial” ( , p. ). secondary roles at the march on washington in , and were not allowed to speak or march with the male leaders” (clayton , p. ). black lives matter has fought this tradition of male-domination as can be seen in the movement’s official website entry, “herstory” which notes, black liberation movements in this country have created room, space, and leadership mostly for black heterosexual, cisgender men—leaving women, queer and transgender people, and others either out of the movement or in the background to move the work forward with little or no recognition. as a network, we have always recognized the need to center the leadership of women and queer and trans people. to maximize our movement muscle, and to be intentional about not replicating harmful practices that excluded so many in past movements for liberation, we made a commitment to placing those at the margins closer to the center. (black lives matter, herstory) to reverse the tradition of male domination in black politics, black lives matter focuses on inclusivity. the movement affirms “the lives of black queer and trans folks, disabled folks, undocumented folks, folks with records, women, and all black lives along the gender spectrum” (black lives matter, about). black lives matter creates space for, and fights on behalf of all black lives. kimberlé crenshaw’s ( ) explanation of intersectionality highlights the multidimensionality of black women’s experience and articulates that discrimination against black women is not simply a summation of racial discrimination plus gender discrimination. instead, crenshaw shows that black women face unique discrimination as black women in manners that cannot be explained by single-axis analyses of identity- based discrimination; either race or gender. similarly, black lives matter has focused on highlighting the multidimensionality of lived experiences of black americans and has emphasized the unique lived experiences of black women, black queer and trans people, “and all black lives” (black lives matter, about). this inclusion of “all” black lives in the movement is an intentional focus on the multiplicity of black experiences which “does not preclude studying and acknowledging the particular historical and lived experiences of black men and boys … it offers an expansive lens that renders visible black women and girls and trans*, genderqueer, gender nonconforming, and queer people as victims and survivors of anti-black racial terror” (lindsey , p. ). the movement has made explicit attempts to focus on intersectional discrimination though its association with the #sayhername campaign which highlights the often-overlooked black women who have been victims of police violence. crenshaw, unsurprisingly, has been instrumental in highlighting the lack of public awareness of the black women such as sandra bland, tanisha anderson, megan hockaday, and michelle cusseaux. crenshaw, in her ted talk, “the urgency of intersectionality” tells her audience the stories of many women who have died as a result of their encounters with the police. she states, police violence against black women is very real. the level of violence that black women face is such that it’s not surprising that some of them do not survive their encounters with police. black girls as young as seven, great grandmothers as old as , have been killed by the police. they’ve been killed in their living rooms, in their bedrooms, they’ve been killed in their cars, they’ve been killed on the street, they’ve been killed in front of their parents, and they’ve been killed in front of their children. they have been shot to death, they have been stomped to death, they have been suffocated to death, they have been manhandled to death, they have been tasered to death. they’ve been killed when they’ve called for help, they’ve been killed when they were alone and they’ve been killed when they were with others. they have been killed shopping while black, driving while black, having a mental disability while black, having a domestic disturbance while black, they’ve even been killed being homeless while black. they’ve been killed talking on a cell phone, laughing with friends, sitting in a car reported as stolen, and making a u-turn in front of the white house with an infant strapped in the backseat of the car. (crenshaw , : ) black men and boys are frequently the public face of racist police brutality.lxvii while the fight against state-sanctioned violence against black males is central to black lives matter, the movement is committed to publicizing the numerous black women who have faced the same, yet less frequently discussed fates. in , breonna taylor was killed by three members of the louisville metro police department (lmpd) while she was asleep in her home.lxviii the officers fired over twenty shots in taylor’s apartment; she was hit by eight bullets and died. taylor, a -year-old emergency medical technician, would be one of the names front-and-center when black lives matter protests were prevalent across the united states during early- to-mid . none of the officers would be indicted by a grand jury in taylor’s death, and only one of the three was indicted for recklessly firing his gun, as bullets entered taylor’s neighbor’s apartment. the new york times reported that since , black women have been killed by police, but only two charges have been filed (gupta ). crenshaw, in response to the grand jury’s decision not to indict the officers in taylor’s death stated, “you can attach that hope to some of the factual distinctions of this case: the police can’t even claim she was doing anything. but realism tells you that the likelihood of something different was pretty slim” (ibid). breonna taylor’s death highlights the continuous violence and potential death that black women face, and the lxvii political scientist and gender studies scholar ange-marie hancock ( ) notes an intersectional trifecta of age (young), race (black) and gender (male). while age may not be a factor in all cases of black death at the hands of police, hancock reminds us to think about the specific racial demonization of black youth. lxviii breonna taylor’s case will be discussed in more depth in the final chapter. similarly continuous lack of justice that these victims receive. yet concurrently, black lives matter’s push to bring breonna taylor’s name to the forefront of their activism shows the movement’s commitment not just to the (frequently more publicly known) male victims of police brutality, but also to the black women whose lives have been taken by police. while black lives matter highlights the unique intersections of race, gender and sexuality, challenges have arisen. historian russell rickford ( ) argues that some supporters of the movement have framed the struggle in stereotypically masculine terms such as the need for self-defense. additionally, transgender and gender nonconforming activists from within black lives matter critiqued the movement during a major convention in cleveland due to the transphobia and heterosexism of fellow activists (rickford ; garza a). despite some internal fissures, black lives matter maintains committed to intersectionality and the movement works to rectify its past indiscretions. black lives matter’s gender inclusivity is at odds with the alt-right which “is defined in party by its misogyny and its anti-feminist, anti-woman language” (kelly ). the alt-right is a movement of white men, with few white women (holland et al. ). george hawley, in an interview with max ehrenfreund of the washington post, explained that “the modal alt-right person is a male, white millennial; probably has a college degree or is in college; is secular and perhaps atheist” and he described women as “hugely underrepresented in terms of the people who are really driving the movement forward” (ehrenfreund ). phillip gray ( ) and hawley ( ) note that gender is, at most, a secondary concern for the alt-right. misogyny is, however, rampant in the movement (atkinson , holland et al. ); richard spencer said that women should be denied the right to vote (m hayden a) and former, female alt-right member, katie mchugh detailed examples of women’s subordinate status within the movement (r gray ). alt-right misogyny is likely due to the movement’s traditional notions of masculinity which supplement their views on race (kelly ).lxix undercover exposés on the alt-right also note the disproportionate male presence within the alt-right and the misogyny within the movement. journalist donna minkowitz went undercover at a rally sponsored by jared taylor’s american renaissance organization and detailed that around percent of the rally’s attendees were male (bader ). at the event, sam dickson – a lawyer who has represented ku klux klan members and who participates in the neo nazi forum, stormfront – gave a speech detailing how, in the proposed all-white ethnostate, only men would be able to vote and hold office. dickson also argued for a “handmaid’s tale-ish” plan for white women which involved financial incentives for white procreation, and a limitation on women’s clothing styles (ibid). patrick hermansson’s undercover interview with greg johnson produced similarly misogynistic revelations as johnson argued against voluntary birth control as he lxix political scientists daniel martinez hosang and joseph lowndes likewise state that “gender and sexuality are always fundamental to the production of far-right politics, working as a fulcrum for these racially trans-positive politics. performed as patriarchal traditionalism, online ultra-misogyny, or street-brawling bravado, masculinity bridges racial difference for populist, fascist, and even white-nationalist politics” ( , p. ). claimed that it is “dysgenic.” johnson stated his normative desire for white women to procreate and argued that only after raising children should they obtain college degrees (singal ).lxx reporter david lewis snuck into the northwest forum in seattle, which is sponsored by johnson and features numerous, well-known alt-right supporters.lxxi after catching jared taylor using the women’s restroom, lewis states in his report “to be fair, having a ladies’ room at an event like this is superfluous anyway” ( ) which humorously denotes the lack of women in attendance. lewis more plainly states, “of the to people in the lodge, only about four were female. by far the one who creeped me out the most was a five-year-old girl in white dress clomping around in pink boots with her blond hair in a pink ribbon who played beethoven on the piano” (ibid). the unique undercover work from minkowitz, hermansson and lewis all point towards women lacking a significant presence within the alt-right and misogyny being commonplace. lxx hermansson also recorded scottish alt-right personality colin robertson, better known by millennial woes, who is famed for his misogyny and supports an end to equal rights for women (holland et al. , : ). hermansson pressed robertson and asked where most of his viewers are located and he said that “it’s about - % americans” (holland et al. , : ). it is worth addressing non-american alt-right influencers since their reach includes the united states. robertson was one of the key speakers at the london forum. lxxi the northwest forum in seattle is one of three “forums” with others in new york and london. the london forum precedes the two, and greg johnson copied the concept and spread it to the united states. the forums are held in singular locations but serve as international networking opportunities for far-right sympathizers generally (holland et al. ). while black lives matter was created by three black women and focuses on intersectionality and inclusivity, the alt-right has worked towards exclusivity and rigidly defined and policed borders. the alt-right is primarily concerned with racial purity and homogeneity, but the movement also envisions women’s subjugation as part of its larger political project. both black lives matter and the alt-right are concerned with identity politics and specifically with the importance of race, and to a lesser extent, gender, which again lends credibility to a comparison of the two seemingly disparate movements. conclusion in this chapter, i explained why two social movements, black lives matter and the alt-right, are fit for comparison. i provided three justifications for the comparative analysis that will follow as i included two institutional similarities, and one ideational similarity. both movements reject hierarchical forms of leadership and in that regard the movements are closer in institutional structure to one another, than to their respective predecessors. similarly, both movements exist outside of formal political institutions, and have not embedded themselves in any extant political party. a recent politico article on black lives matter notes the ties between the two institutional aspects of the movement as “there is no chairperson or candidate calling the shots in private or serving as a public rallying point” (barrón-lópez ) and the same statement applies to the alt-right. finally, both movements focus on the importance of race and gender, although in this ideational aspect, the movements have staunch divergence; black lives matter is an intersectional movement that seeks racial justice, while the alt-right is a white nationalist movement that is rooted in a desire for racial purity and traditionalist notions of masculinity. over the next two chapters, i will apply the camusian social movement theory to the cases of black lives matter and the alt-right. i will trace the movements’ respective trajectories as the camusian theory helps us understand their origins in existential anxiety and the courses that they have pursued. at each stage in the applied camusian theory, i will highlight that each movement has rejected the alternatives that camus likewise rejects. however, where the movements diverge is in regards to their respective conclusions; black lives matter forges a rebellious pathway that focuses on alleviating suffering and reversing trends of state-sanctioned death of black americans, while the alt-right is focused on an end-goal – a telos – of rearranging the world into racially homogenous ethnostates. chapter # black lives matter: from necropolitics to camusian rebellion black lives matter began as a hashtag on july th, . community organizer alicia garza was “disappointed” and “enraged” when a jury acquitted george zimmerman in the murder of trayvon martin; an unarmed, -year-old, african american male. garza penned a message on facebook which ended with the now famous words, “black lives matter.” garza’s friend and fellow community organizer, patrisse cullors, was inspired by the message and spread it with the hashtag, #blacklivesmatter. opal tometi, who was friends with garza, voiced her support for the hashtag and the message therein. the hashtag has since become more than an internet slogan and sparked a movement (guynn ). in this chapter i will use my camusian social movement theory to help elucidate important elements of the black lives matter movement. i will argue that black lives matter is responding to the existential anxiety supporters have experienced due to state- sanctioned black death. specifically, the form of death that black lives matter is responding to is necropolitics; the political power to determine who may live, who must die, and who should be exposed to death and dying. when i am referring to “state- sanctioned” death i do not just mean formally state-sanctioned capital punishment (e.g. troy davis’s death in ). i am also referring to cases in which the state has chosen not to charge police officers in the killing of a black civilian (e.g. freddie gray’s death in ), when a grand jury has chosen not to indict a police officer in a similar circumstance (e.g. the respective deaths of eric garner and michael brown in ), and cases in which a police officer was found not guilty of the murder a black civilian (e.g. anthony hill’s death in ). i am also considering instances in which a non-black civilian was either not charged for killing a black civilian or found not guilty in the murder of an unarmed black civilian (e.g. trayvon martin’s death in ). i will then argue that black lives matter rejects the responses to the imminence of death that camus warns against; the movement does not advocate for suicide or self- immolation as a form of protest nor does the movement utilize religion to purport transcendent meaning onto their movement or lives. instead, black lives matter revolts against the necropolitical realities that black americans experience. rather than succumbing to the persistence of black death at the hands of the state or vigilantism, black lives matter passionately fights to reduce black deaths and promotes the vivaciousness of black lives. next, i will argue that black lives matter’s revolt occurs through an outward turn towards political change. i will contrast this approach with the turn inwards which would focus on demanding individual change through forms of respectability politics. black lives matter has focused on the political world and seeks to rectify the conditions that have given rise to existential anxiety. finally, i will argue that black lives matter is focused on improving the dire conditions of actual black people in the united states which makes the movement a camusian rebellion. black lives matter’s response to necropolitical death in july , alicia garza was at a bar when she heard the news that george zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of -year-old trayvon martin. in response to the acquittal, she posted a facebook message that became the inspiration for black lives matter. garza was outraged and saddened by the trial’s result and the lack of safety and justice it represented for the black community. additionally, she expressed a personal attachment to trayvon martin as she stated in an interview, “my brother is six feet tall and has a huge afro” and her brother could have been in trayvon’s shoes; “that could have been my family” (meyerson a). as for why garza penned her message, she explains “i wrote a post saying that we deserve to live … i ended that post by saying that our lives matter” (as cited in fessler ). trayvon martin’s death sparked alicia garza’s recognition of the imminence of death that could befall her loved ones. patrisse cullors was in a motel room in california when she received the disheartening updates that trayvon martin’s killer was found not guilty of all charges. in her memoir, cullors explains her initial reaction to hearing about trayvon’s death as she states, “i have loved so many young men who look just like this boy” (kahn-cullors & bandele , p. ). she connects trayvon’s death to the lives of young, black males who she has known over the course of her life. zimmerman’s acquittal forces cullors, like garza, to consider potential parallel cases that could hypothetically occur to her own family. cullors describes her reaction to zimmerman’s acquittal, “i think of emmett till and his family and also my nephew, chase, monte’s son, who is the year trayvon is killed. will he be shot down and killed for walking while black, and will his murder matter so little it doesn’t even make the news, and no one will be held accountable?” (kahn-cullors & bandele , p. ). patrisse cullors cries in a motel room and then sees the facebook post by her friend alicia garza as cullors responds, “#blacklivesmatter.” albert camus argues, in the myth of sisyphus, that all people die. reminders of the absurdity of human existence – the guarantee of death in a seemingly meaningless universe – can occur at any given moment. camus explains that one’s realization of human mortality can occur amid an otherwise routine and benign work week; rising, streetcar, four hours in the office or the factory, meal, streetcar, four hours of work, meal, sleep, and monday tuesday wednesday thursday friday and saturday according to the same rhythm – this path is easily followed most of the time. but one day the ‘why’ arises and everything begins in that weariness tinged with amazement. ( b, pp. - ) there may also be catalysts that can remind someone of the absurdity of human existence as a finite person. camus notes that there are “absurd marriages, challenges, rancours, silences, wars, and even peace treaties” ( b, p. ). for garza and cullors, trayvon martin’s death and george zimmerman’s acquittal on all charges was this catalyst. for black lives matter, race is the prism through which reminders of existential anxieties are experienced. two of the founders of black lives matter expressed themselves existentially in response to trayvon martin’s murder and george zimmerman’s acquittal. while camus states that there can be catalysts that spark existential awareness or anxiety, these catalysts may not be evenly distributed. although camus sees these moments as being potentially random, naomi zack expands this logic and highlights how reminders of death can be unevenly distributed along racial lines. zack argues that “the catastrophe of death occurs more frequently for racialized people because demographically their lives are shorter, and they are more likely to be murdered than nonracialized people. so race is relevant to death. yes. but everyone dies” (zack , p. ). camus would agree with the final declaration that everyone dies as this is an unquestionable fact as zack repeats later that “[d]eath comes to us all, regardless of race” ( , p. ). what zack argues is that some people experience different degrees of “catastrophic” death, and she notes that different degrees of oppression can impact how much freedom different people can express while alive. this supports camus’s notion that people can experience reminders of death but also expands upon it to highlight that race is one category through which reminders of human mortality are unevenly distributed; black americans are faced with more frequent and more gruesome reminders of death than white americans. african-american studies scholar keeanga-yamahtta taylor states, “every movement needs a catalyst, an event that captures people’s experiences and draws them out from their isolation into a collective force with the power to transform social conditions” (k taylor , p. ). the activism of alicia garza, patrisse cullors, and opal tometi was catalyzed by trayvon martin’s death and the subsequent acquittal of his killer. many others black lives matter supporters had their activism awakened by the death of mike brown in ferguson, missouri. taylor states that it may be impossible to explain why any specific instance is the catalyst for action, “just as it’s impossible ever to accurately calculate when ‘enough is enough’” ( , p. ). movement catalysts – moments which spark existential anxiety that can inspire activism – are commonplace within black american communities. philosopher george yancy writes on black lives matter and retells a story of his childhood which highlights both camus’s argument that existential anxiety can occur at any given moment and zack’s notion that these moments are unevenly distributed on racial lines. as a child, yancy lived in public housing in north philadelphia, was fascinated with astronomy, and was walking in his building’s stairwell while carrying his telescope. he ran into a white police officer who stated that he almost shot the young boy since the officer mistook the telescope for a weapon. yancy recalls that the officer’s words “made [him] tremble and pause. in retrospect, this was something more than an existential death shudder that is due to our finitude; this was an experience of potential (and in so many cases, actual) existential limitation punctuated by being black within an anti-black world” ( , p. ). yancy’s story is one of existential anxiety in the midst of a seemingly routine evening of stargazing, and this existential anxiety arose due to a conflict with police, sparked by yancy’s race. while yancy’s story occurred in the s, the existential anxiety plaguing black americans persists. empirical scholarship on black lives matter also points towards an existential element in the movement’s actions. in a study of the locations and purpose of black lives matter protests, williamson, trump, and einstein find that “black lives matter protests were more common in localities where police had more frequently killed black people” ( , p. ). black lives matter protests occurred at the location where a police officer killed a black person, and parallel protests occurred in solidarity with the on-site protests in cities with prior instances of police killings of black people. the authors conclude, in line with my argument, that death plays an important role in black lives matter’s activism as they note that their findings are “consistent with the interpretation that while individuals may respond to direct carceral contact by withdrawing from public life, those proximate to police violence can and do respond with coordinated political action” (williamson et al. , p. ). black lives matter acts collectively when existential anxiety may be at its highest; when black people are extrajudicially killed by police officers. there is, as williamson et al. discover, an “association between the deaths of black people at the hands of police officers and protest action about that grievance” (williamson et al. , p. ). it is, as naomi zack highlights, a reminder of the human mortality that we all possess, but a reminder that occurs in greater frequency and that takes on increased political significance for black americans. combining camus’s general sentiment about death with zack’s focus death’s racially uneven distribution helps clarify one reason that black lives matter mobilizes; unjust, state-sanctioned mortality is present in black communities in greater frequency. responding to black death makes black lives matter a type of necropolitical social movement. necropolitics is a term coined by achille mbembe who locates “the ultimate expression of sovereignty … in the power and the capacity to dictate who may live and who must die” ( , p. ). necropolitics expands beyond foucauldian biopolitics to include a sovereign’s right to choose who ought to be exposed to death, and the sovereign’s right to impose social death (denying full humanity of some people such as through slavery and apartheid) or civil death (the loss of civil rights such as the collateral consequences faced by former felons in the united states). while black lives matter is infrequently discussed as a movement responding to necropolitical stimuli, the previously noted empirical evidence and quotes from the movement’s founders (explaining their motivations) highlight that the movement’s response to state-sanctioned black death is a central tenet. shatema threadcraft ( ) is correct; for black lives matter, the death of black people and the exposure of black communities to these state-sanctioned deaths is the necropolitics that helps us to understand the existential anxiety expressed by garza and cullors after zimmerman’s not guilty verdict. it is this existential anxiety that led to the formation of black lives matter. the persistent reminder of state-sanctioned black death – such as the deaths of eric garner, michael brown, tamir rice, meagan hockaday, sandra bland, alton sterling and philando castle –williamson et al. cite as motivating black lives matter protests. while threadcraft importantly highlights the roles that social, economic, and political discrimination play on diminishing the quality and length of black lives, the impact of a dead black body and the experience of seeing that slain body in one’s community may be more immediately impactful experiences. an analysis of the contemporary politics and economics of segregation and the ways that it leads to poor quality of life simply may not affect people’s emotional and political responses the same way as seeing michael brown’s dead body which was left in the canfield drive for over four hours after he was killed by officer darren wilson (bosman and goldstein ). housing politics and policies have not been a central part of a global social movement in recent memory whereas state-sanctioned killing of black people has, maybe due to its grotesque presence, become the major focus of black lives matter. black lives matter does not overlook other, important issues that plague black american communities. opal tometi states “when we started black lives matter, it wasn’t solely about police brutality and extrajudicial killing” (chotiner ). yet while tometi discusses housing, education, health care, and utilities, black death at the hands of the state, and the existential anxiety this causes remain the impetus for the movement’s activism as she notes “we have been fighting and advocating to stop a war on black lives. and that is how we see it–this is a war on black life” (ibid).lxxii from a camusian perspective, black lives matter’s focus on state-sanctioned black death is not surprising. camus opens the myth of sisyphus by proclaiming that the most important philosophical question relates to suicide and whether life is worth living. all other philosophical questions, “whether or not the world has three dimensions, whether the mind has nine or twelve categories – comes afterwards” ( b, p. ). camus’s statement finds a parallel in black lives matter’s prioritization of maintaining black life by fighting against state-sanctioned killing of black americans. all other political questions, including those which threadcraft correctly denotes as being important to flourishing black life and wellbeing, come after ensuring the mere continuation of black life. dead black americans cannot fight the political battles that lxxii i mention some of the movement’s immediate and long-term desires in the final section of this chapter, including some which are not directly tied to death. threadcraft highlights as important. if black lives matter is responding to the death and existential anxiety that are disproportionately present in black communities because of state-sanctioned killing of black americans, other important elements of contemporary black politics are understandably playing a secondary role. black lives matter’s response to death is particularly challenging to more contemporary existential thinkers who argue that the crucial existential matter is not the meaning of human life despite the promise of death but is the search for meaning within life. irving singer, for example, argues that there is a distinction between the meaning of life and the creation of meaning within one’s life. his aim is “to show how the latter enables us to have a life worth living” (singer , p. xii). it seems impossible to apply singer’s approach to black lives matter as the movement is focused on preserving black life in the united states. the movement is not solely focused on working with black people to create a meaningful existence when black people are being killed at the hands of the state. to echo my prior concerns with threadcraft’s argument, dead black americans cannot create meaningful lives in the way that singer advocates. since black lives matter is responding to the existential anxiety that is disproportionately present in the black community because of state-sanctioned killing of black americans, focusing on how to create meaningful lives for the living is not the highest priority for the movement. poet claudia rankine summarizes the role that death and existential anxiety plays for black lives matter in new york times magazine. the black lives matter movement can be read as an attempt to keep mourning an open dynamic in our culture because black lives exist in a state of precariousness. mourning then bears both the vulnerability inherent in black lives and the instability regarding a future for those lives … black lives matter aligns with the dead, continues the mourning and refuses the forgetting in front of all of us. (rankine ) black lives matter responds to the existential anxieties that their founders express by revolting against the prevalence of state-sanctioned death of black people. black lives matter’s revolt against the absurdity of human existence since black lives matter is responding to the feeling of existential anxiety produced by the deaths of black people, what is important is how black lives matter responds to these existential realities. as i previously detailed, camus argues that when one recognizes the absurdity of human existence, there are three primary approaches that one can take: taking one’s own life (suicide), taking a leap of faith (religion) or revolting against the absurd. i will argue that black lives matter has revolted against the realities of the absurdity of the human condition. i will explain this in contrast with the other responses that camus rejects by arguing that black lives matter has not endorsed suicide, nor has the movement adhered to what camus calls “philosophical suicide” by rejecting religion. revolt – not to be confused with camusian revolution – is how black lives matter has responded to existential anxiety. first, i will address the rejected responses to existential anxiety before detailing black lives matter’s life affirming revolt. black lives matter’s rejection of suicide while camus carefully argues against suicide as a logical response to existential anxiety, it is less of a concern to social movements. although self-immolation has been used as a form of political protest by other individuals and movementslxxiii black lives matter has not endorsed such drastic measures and doing so would counter the movement’s focus on promoting the value of black lives. black lives matter passionately affirms the value of life despite the guarantee of death and the apparent lack of transcendent meaning of human life. black lives matter co-founder alicia garza explains that the first assumption agreed to by the founders of black lives matter was that “black people deserved to live with dignity. that we were (and still are) sick and tired of being gunned down in the streets by police and vigilantes” (garza a, p. ). black lives matter has focused on inclusivity and has attempted to highlight the value of all black lives regardless of age, class, gender, sexuality, or imprisonment. since the movement is life affirming, it is not surprising that black lives matter does not support suicide as a way to protest state-sponsored killings of black people. lxxiii two famous cases of self-immolation come to mind. first, thích quảng Đức who in set himself a blaze in saigon to protest the persecution of buddhists by the south vietnamese government. second and more recently, mohamed bouazizi set himself on fire in in tunisia. bouazizi’s act was the catalyst for the tunisian revolution and the arab spring in . sadly, there have been cases of black lives matter activists taking their own lives. edward crawfordlxxiv lxxvi – who gained notoriety for a picture of his firing a tear gas canister back at police officers in ferguson – took his life with a self-inflicted gunshot and fellow ferguson protester marshawn mccarrellxxv took his life via gunshot on the door to the ohio statehouse (salter ). while crawford and mccarrel should be remembered as dedicated supporters of black lives matter, their suicides do not represent the movement’s response to existential anxiety. i will highlight some of the policy and procedural reforms black lives matter endorsed in the final section of this chapter, none of which support suicide. black lives matter is a social movement that promotes the value and continuation of black lives, and it would be logically incoherent for a life affirming and life preserving movement to endorse suicide. like camus, black lives matter does not endorse self-harm or suicide as a response to addressing state-sponsored existential anxieties. camus and black lives matter reject suicide and they also both reject religious leaps of faith. lxxiv crawford shot himself in the backseat of a car which was being driven at the time. the two witnesses in the front seat said crawford had been expressing some distress over his personal life before pulling out a gun and shooting himself in the head (o’hara ). lxxv mccarrel posted on social media, on the day of his death, “my demons won today, i’m sorry” (as cited in helsel ). lxxvi the death of danye jones was also ruled a suicide. his mother, melissa mckinnies was active in the ferguson protests and does not believe that the determination of suicide was correct. mckinnies believes that her son – who was found hanging from a tree in the family’s yard – was lynched (salter ). black lives matter’s rejection of religion as a framing device given the seeming purposelessness of human life due to the guarantee of death, many people adopt religion as a source of comfort or as a means of purporting purpose onto human life. while theological variations of existentialism have influenced other social movements, black lives matter remains irreligious. this does not imply that individual members of black lives matter chapters are themselves without religious attachmentslxxvii lxxviii nor does it imply that individual clergy members cannot participate (or have refused to participate) in movement efforts. furthermore, this does not mean that some have not attempted to explain the actions and claims of black lives matter in religious terms. for example, do all lives matter? by wayne gordon and john m. perkins ( ) puts forth arguments from biblical scripture in support of, and responding to black lives matter. yet as a movement, black lives matter has not attached itself to religion in the manner of other similar liberatory movements such as the civil rights movement. black lives matter’s refusal to utilize religion as a movement frame is in line with the previously noted desire for inclusivity as the movement’s agnosticism can help to open the tent of the movement to people of all religious faiths and to those who are atheists or religious skeptics. lxxvii black lives matter co-founder patrisse cullors has, for example, earned a degree in religion from ucla (kahn-cullors & bandele ). lxxviii in fact, there are examples of clergy members being invited to black lives matter events and participating in prayer. see, for example, pastor mark whitlock’s story of his attendance at a black lives matter protest in los angeles (whitlock ). in ferguson, protesters prioritized movement efforts over religious leaders and interests. alicia garza explains that when reverend jesse jackson came to ferguson, he spoke with community members and activists. although jackson came to allegedly work with community members and demonstrators, “jackson made the grave mistake of asking for donations for ‘the church,’ and was promptly booed” (garza b, p. ). clergy in st. louis likewise were repudiated for only half-heartedly supporting protesters based on their tactics. rather than kowtow to clergy, who were integral in the civil rights movement, members of the clergy in st. louis had to change their approach and reevaluate their stance in order for their participation to be accepted. these examples in missouri highlight the lack of attachment black lives matter has to organized religion as the movement has prioritized its efforts over specific religious attachments. i will argue later in this chapter that black lives matter’s goals, motivations, and demands have been explicated and they have been detailed in secular terminology. black lives matter, as a movement, does not have its genesis in religion or theological existentialism. instead, the guiding principles of black lives matter are secular, intentionally inclusive and challenge patriarchy and heteronormativity (kahn-cullors & bandele , pp. - ). similarly, “vision for black lives,” a list of policy demands crafted by the movement for black lives and endorsed by black lives matter makes socioeconomic and political demands which are not framed in religious language (movement for black lives, vision for black lives). the secular nature of black lives matter is in line with camus’s refusal to endorse a turn towards religion as a solution to existential anxiety. it is not religion that calls black lives matter to act, and yet the movement is active. camus, having rejected both suicide and religion as solutions to the anxiety produced by human mortality, advocates for a revolt that is likewise found in black lives matter. black lives matter’s life affirming revolt black lives matter is acting against the state-sponsored death of black americans and is motivated by the resulting racialized existential anxiety. in response to the problem of existential anxiety, black lives matter is a life-affirming social movement. alicia garza explains that one of the foundational assumptions of black lives matter is that “all black people deserve dignity, not just some” (garza a, p. ). the claim “black lives matter” is both affirmational – that the lives of black people do, in fact, matter – and aspirational – that the lives of black people ought to, in practice, matter. it is a claim that denotes the gap between the universal and theoretical position that all human lives are equal and have value, and the particular reality of the black american experience in which black lives are denigrated and destroyed by the state (or in a manner accepted or sanctioned by state authority) (burgos ).lxxix camus argues against suicide and religion as solutions to the existential anxiety that can affect humanity. what camus argues for instead is a passionate revolt against the lxxix as rankine ( ) states, “if black men and women, black boys and girls, mattered, if we were seen as living, we would not be dying simply because whites don’t like us.” or, as mumia abu-jamal states, “the black lives matter movement was called into existence, and has so much work to do, because, well, black lives still don’t matter” ( , p. ). imminence of human death. the passionate affirmation of the value of black lives despite the inevitably, and oftentimes injustice surrounding black death, can be interpreted through the lens of camus’s call for revolt. when one recognizes the absurdity of the human condition, camus explains that revolt is “one of the only coherent philosophical positions.” as previously noted, camus defines revolt as “the certainty of a crushing fate, without the resignation that ought to accompany it” ( b, p. ). black lives matter is not resigned to passively accepting the inevitability of death, but rather passionately asserts the value of black life despite this inevitability. while black lives matter could have accepted death, the founders, and eventual supporters of the movement revolt in accordance with sisyphus and live passionate lives dedicated to securing black survival. black lives matter has persisted as a movement despite its lack of significant achievements. in one of the first quantitative studies of black lives matter protests, vanessa williamson, kris-stella trump, and katherine levine einstein ( ) found that there were at least black lives matter protests in states and localities between august and august . in spite of the movement’s consistent activity, there have been few victories that are of note. although the movement lacks many achievements, political scientist dewey clayton positively assesses the movement in stating that black lives matter “has placed the topic of police brutality and criminal justice reform at the top of the national agenda” ( , p. ). while scholars, think tanks and government officials debate these pressing issues, police violence in general, and towards african- americans specifically has not decreased.lxxx rickford, writing prior to clayton, remains correct in stating that black lives matter activism “has by no means stopped or even slowed the crescendo of violence” ( , p. ). alicia garza noted in an interview with bloomberg businessweek that there had been approximately laws passed which dealt with criminal justice reform within a one-year span. however, garza also notes that while some of the laws were positive, “some of them were actually pretty crappy” (eidelson ). additionally, the national debate that clayton celebrates has shifted away from issues of police violence due, in part, to the chaos of the trump regime (lowery ). the news media’s focus has turned towards white house scandals, official turnover, staffing uncertainty and continual executive branch disarray. patrisse cullors, in response to the police killing of pamela turner in baytown, texas, noted on instagram that “although @blklivesmatter is no longer national headlines we keep dying at the hands of the police” (cullors-brignac ). these difficulties and setbacks have not led to political renunciation from black lives matter as alicia garza notes in , despite a lxxx washington post’s police shootings database lists the number of fatal police shootings of citizens at for , which is in line with the for , for and for (washington post, police shootings database). the website and organization mapping police violence lists , people killed by the police in , which is in line with their total of , for . mapping police violence includes shootings which account for % of deaths, as well as police use of tasers, physical force and police vehicles. lack of press coverage, “there is all kinds of organizing that is still happening” around police accountability and reform (hayes ).lxxxi like the mythological sisyphus, black lives matter passionately revolts against the human, existential condition despite a lack of significant change. alicia garza ( ) states “black lives matter is an ideological and political intervention in a world where black lives are systematically and intentionally targeted for demise. it is an affirmation of black folks’ contributions to this society, our humanity, and our resilience in the face of deadly oppression.” garza’s statement highlights the movement’s response to existential anxieties through its positive affirmation of black people. the revolt inherent in black lives matter is an acknowledgement of the inevitability of black death and the refusal to accept anything less than full and flourishing lives for black people in the united states (lopez bunyasi and watts smith ). deva woodly calls this flourishing “black joy” and defines it as “the defiant affirmation of blackness in spite of the material and psychic deprivation that often marks members of the group. importantly, this kind of joy is experienced by both the individual and those participating in the group” ( , p. ). there is no resignation or qualification in this passionate revolt against death; black lives matter explicitly rejects notions of relativity with regard to some black lives having value over others. for the movement, the lives of black inmates, black queer folks and black youth all have the same inherent value as those who lxxxilxxxi much would change in and black lives matter would be thrust back into mainstream discussions. see chapter seven for more discussion on black lives matter’s activism in . are black and not incarcerated, black and cisgender, black and gainfully employed, or black and aged. black lives matter affirms the value of all black lives. as a life-affirming social movement, black lives matter rejects the same alternative approaches to life that camus rejects: suicide and religion. for black people to flourish, however, there must be substantial political changes. while camus details some examples of how one may revolt against death, it is his turn to “conquest” or towards explicitly political revolt which helps shed further light on black lives matter’s collective action. black lives matter’s turn outwards towards political action it may be obvious that black lives matter has not focused on individual level revolt since it is a social movement that requires collective action. what is unique about black lives matter is the movement’s rejection of respectability politics which can be defined as a group’s policing of an individual’s stereotypically deviant behaviors as a means to improvement. with regards to the african american community, respectability politics can be more specifically defined as “the idea that blacks can minimize or evade the injustices associated with discriminatory attitudes by behaving in a so-called respectable manner, i.e., dressing, acting, speaking, and even protesting in certain acceptable ways” (obasogie and newman , p. ). black lives matter has refused to focus on individual actions or responses to existential anxiety – the approach favored by schopenhauer and nietzsche – as can be seen through the movement’s rejection of respectability politics. alicia garza ( a) explains that black lives matter has rejected a respectability politics that demands a focus on “black-on-black crime” as a prerequisite to claims against state-sanctioned violence. respectability politics focuses on altering an individual’s actions, and garza argues that this approach distracts from efforts to fight systems of oppression such as white supremacy, patriarchy, and capitalism. black lives matter’s rejection of respectability politics is aligned with its acceptance and inclusion of all black lives regardless of one’s “respectability.” furthermore, while one may bemoan mike brown for breaking the law by selling loose cigarettes, seven-year-old aiyana jones was killed by detroit police officers when they accidently raided the wrong apartment and no form of “respectability politics” could explain why the young girl was murdered in her home.lxxxii shayla nunnally traces the development of the idea of the “black body” and argues that black lives matter is fighting to “reinscribe the value of the ‘black body’ as equal to that of the ‘white body’” but in an historically unique way that refuses to denigrate black people “who were felt to be detrimental to the positive portrayal of blackness” ( , p. ). the movement’s rejection of respectability politics puts black lives matter at odds with an older generation of black organizations and social movements and at odds with some notable contemporaries. the woman's club movement and some famously involved advocates such as mary church terrell, anna julia cooper and ida b. wells (threadcraft ), the national association for the advancement of colored people (naacp), and the southern christian leadership conference (sclc) which boasts martin luther king jr. as its first president (clayton ) all advocated for forms of respectability politics. nunnally highlights the inclusivity of black lives matter as a movement which has proudly fought for and included all black lives, and not just those who are deemed “respectable” by mainstream society. lxxxii unfortunately, and perhaps obviously, aiyana jones is not the only example to whom this applies. there are many examples of the civil rights movement utilizing tactics of respectability politics. political scientist dewey clayton states “for example, when college students sat at lunch counters throughout the south during the sit-ins, they were dressed in their sunday best. they sat quietly with their school textbooks and did their homework. they were courteous at all times, they sat up straight, always facing the counter, and they did not strike back or curse when abused” ( , p. ). clayton continues that the freedom riders, who traveled from washington d.c. to new orleans, were again well dressed, well behaved, and spent their time reading and sitting quietly. proponents of respectability politics view a lack of respect as the root of anti-black racism in the united states. from the respectability politics position, the movement approach would be to dress, and behave in manners that white americans found respectable, so that white attitudes towards black people would change, and subsequently this could lead to sociopolitical changes (rasaki ). the underlying premise behind respectability politics is that white respect for black people must be earned before policy changes could occur. unlike in the civil rights era, respectability politics is not supported by black lives matter, nor by the generation comprising the movement. for example, one recent study on respectability politics found that younger black americans see respect and autonomy as rights that must be protected, rather than as privileges that must be earned (kerrison et al. ). black lives matter refuses to police individual african american lives or behaviors, and the movement also applies this logic to the state. black lives matter has held protests and demonstrations which have demanded accountability for the actions of individual police officers who have undertaken violent and murderous actions against black people. however, the movement also recognizes the need to address sociohistorical conditions that make these killings possible (davis ).lxxxiii this historical shift from the civil rights era – where encouraging individuals to act “respectfully” was prevalent – to black lives matter’s inclusivity is paralleled by camus’s shift from individual revolt to a collective response to existential anxiety. a social movement that collectively responds to the existential anxiety associated with state-sponsored killing of black americans by responding to political, economic, and sociohistorical conditions is acting in the vision of camus’s rebel. an individual or group must continue to live in the material world after refusing to endorse suicide, or religion as a solution to existential anxiety. camus’s early works, including the myth of sisyphus, do not provide a detailed approach to dealing with existential realities. however, camus does hint at one approach to dealing with the world in sisyphus that he explicates in detail in his latter works: turning outwards towards improving political conditions. this approach – which is first hinted at in the section in sisyphus on the “conqueror” – is expanded upon most thoroughly in the rebel. turning outward towards the political world can be contrasted with notions of turning inwards either towards improvement of the self or of the group (through means such as respectability politics), which are endorsed by some existential thinkers such as arthur schopenhauer and emil cioran, but are rejected by camus and black lives matter. in the final section of the chapter, i will argue that black lives matter fits camus’s understanding of rebellion thanks, in part, to black lives matter’s reflexive political demands and goals. while black lives matter has refused respectability politics as an inward response to existential anxiety, the outward turn towards political solutions will be detailed in the following section. lxxxiii some of these efforts will be seen in the concluding section which interprets black lives matter as a camusian rebellion. black lives matter as a camusian rebellion the death of trayvon martin, and the subsequent acquittal of his killer were turning points for alicia garza, patrisse cullors and opal tometi. of course, there have been black people in the united states who have faced tremendous violence or death at the hands of the police prior to black lives matter’s formation in . growing up in new york city, i remember news coverage of the brutal beating suffered by abner louima by members of the new york city police department (nypd) in , the death of amadou diallo who was killed by four nypd officers in the bronx in , and the death of sean bell at the hands of nypd officers in my home borough of queens in . trayvon martin was not the first black person killed by the state and his killer was not the first to be acquitted of charges. for garza, cullors and tometi, trayvon martin’s death signaled a turning point in their own politics and black lives matter signaled a change in black politics in the united states. the camusian theory provides a tool for understanding of the existential anxiety which motivated the founders of black lives matter to transform political quietism to political rebellion. camus opens the rebel by asserting that a rebel is one who sets limits of acceptability. he asks rhetorically, “what is a rebel?” to which he immediately responds, “a man who says no, but whose refusal does not imply a renunciation. he is also a man who says yes, from the moment he makes his first gesture of rebellion” (camus , p. ). the negation implies an intolerance of further transgressions or a sense of “i do not deserve this.” camus describes this rebellion as one’s refusal to be a pawn in the course of history. the positive aspect of rebellion is an assertion of one’s value and it is the positive capacity to alter the course of history to some, limited extent. rebellion begins from a negative which is supported by an affirmative. the beginning of a camusian rebellion occurred in july with the formation of black lives matter. when alicia garza posted her facebook comment following the acquittal of george zimmerman in the murder of trayvon martin, garza became a rebel. she said “no” to further state-sanctioned killing of black americans and “yes” to the value of black lives. as jeffrey isaac explains, “to rebel is to assert something in oneself that is of value, and to refuse that about the world which denies this value” ( , p. ). the statement “black lives matter” is an assertion of the value of black lives, and a refusal of the state-sanctioned killing of black people in the united states. judith butler, in a new york times interview with george yancy explains the purpose of the phrase “black lives matter” perhaps we can think about the phrase “black lives matter.” what is implied by this statement, a statement that should be obviously true, but apparently is not? if black lives do not matter, then they are not really regarded as lives, since a life is supposed to matter. so what we see is that some lives matter more than others, that some lives matter so much that they need to be protected at all costs, and that other lives matter less, or not at all. and when that becomes the situation, then the lives that do not matter so much, or do not matter at all, can be killed or lost, can be exposed to conditions of destitution, and there is no concern, or even worse, that is regarded as the way it is supposed to be. the callous killing of tamir rice and the abandonment of his body on the street is an astonishing example of the police murdering someone considered disposable and fundamentally ungrievable. (yancy and butler ) butler’s explanation of black lives matter complements isaac’s description of what it means to rebel in a camusian sense since the movement asserts the value of black life that is being denied through state-sanctioned extrajudicial killings of black people and resists this dehumanizing condition. while garza’s suffering (following zimmerman’s acquittal) may have been an individual experience, camus understands rebellion as a communal experience. garza’s moment of rebellion attracted cullors and tometi and this would not surprise camus as he explains that “from the moment when a movement of rebellion begins, suffering is seen as a collective experience” ( , p. ). although camus’s earliest works supported the individual’s capacity to revolt, he admitted that his thinking shifted “from an attitude of solitary revolt to the recognition of a community whose struggles must be shared … in the direction of solidarity and participation” ( a, p. ). while camus argues that not all collective experiences are rebellions, i argue that black lives matter can be rightfully understood as a camusian rebellion. black lives matter began with individual experiences of political suffering and injustice such as garza’s and cullors’s feelings and the experiences of state-sanctioned death in the black community. revolutions, which (as rebellions) once desired to alleviate suffering, cease being concerned with the experiences of struggling peoples. instead, revolutions are focused on some political telos – some final political goal – the achievement of which may come at the expense of those who are suffering. as patrick hayden explains, camus opposes revolutions in the name of “abstract ideals posited as determinate ends” since a focus on ideals can “justify the subordination of people to those ends as a matter of ‘necessity’” ( , p. ). black lives matter has focused on the lives and livelihoods of black americans who have been or who may be victims of state- sanctioned violence. the movement has opposed the actual conditions that black americans have faced by protesting the police killings black people, and through their lists of goals and demands. this focus on the actual suffering of black people in the united states has prevented black lives matter from becoming a camusian revolution as the movement steadily remembers its purpose. camus sees the absurdity of the human condition – that humans desire meaning for their lives and yet will live and die without transcendent meaning – as inherently unjust. what a rebellion must fight against is human injustice which camus defines as the human contribution to purposeless suffering and death. in his “letters to a german friend,” camus ( a) explains that the absurdity of the human condition is unjust, but the nazis, by killing innocent people, are increasing the injustice of the world. like the french, who had to rebel against nazi occupation and the injustice they inflicted upon the world, black lives matter became a rebellion against the human injustice of state- sanctioned killing of black people in the united states. fred willhoite jr. explains that camus sees rebellion as necessarily fighting against such political oppression “for such oppression is on the side of death and misery in negating men’s freedom and happiness” ( , p. ). similarly, martin crowley explains that, from a camusian perspective, “the drive for social justice may be motivated by the desire to institute at least the justice that is humanly possible, against a fundamentally unjust existential condition” ( , pp. ). black lives matter arose from experiences of suffering – of existential anxiety – and the movement has fought against human injustice which multiplies the injustice of the human condition. black lives matter has supported principles and goals based on the experiences of existential suffering, rather than arguing for some political ideology and in doing so has forged intelligible limits and political expectations on their desired instantiation of justice. there are three sources of political goals or demands endorsed by black lives matter which can help us to understand it as a camusian rebellion: ( ) the guiding principles affirmed by black lives matter; ( ) campaign zero, which is a police reform campaign proposed by prominent activists within black lives matter and; ( ) the movement for black lives’ organizational platform “vision for black lives” which was endorsed by black lives matter. all three of these platforms list goals or demands which are practical and reflexive, and none of the three adhere to a political telos or a specific political ideology or platform. black lives matter’s guiding principles are open-ended and include terms and ideas such as “diversity,” “restorative justice,” “empathy,” “intergenerational” and “black villages” (black lives matter, what we believe). while the guiding principles can appear vague, details of the principles are laid out on black lives matter’s official website. for example, while “transgender affirming” is listed as a general principle, the webpage explains the principle by stating “we make space for transgender brothers and sisters to participate and lead. we are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift black trans folk, especially black trans women who continue to be disproportionately impacted by trans-antagonistic violence” (ibid). the statement does not detail a platform of transinclusivity. instead, the principle is reflexive and exemplifies the rebellious aspect of black lives matter; the movement has created space for trans men and trans women to participate in the movement, to become leaders within the movement, and to seek immediate restitution to sociopolitical issues specifically affecting the black trans community. campaign zero similarly offers ten open-ended goals including “end broken windows policing,” “community representation,” and “demilitarization.” like black lives matter’s guiding principles, campaign zero offers details of their approaches to limiting police intervention, improving community interaction, and ensuring accountability. for example, “training” is listed as one form of improving community interactions and includes detailed policy solutions for investing in “rigorous and sustained training” and for requiring police officers to undergo implicit racial bias testing (campaign zero, we can end police violence). these approaches, goals, and policy positions are limited in scope and generalizable. campaign zero does not provide a political telos towards which the campaign is directed. while campaign zero’s positions may imply certain approaches to policing, they originate from the negative experiences that black people have had with police officers and are attempts to improve upon the suffering and death that result from such experiences. finally, the movement for black lives, which encompasses black lives matter and other similarly focused organizations, compiled a list of six demands including “end the war on black people,” “economic justice,” and “community control.” like the guiding principles and campaign zero, the movement for black lives’ organizational platform, “vision for black lives” includes details on all six demands. for example, the demand for “political power” is not a demand for a change in political structure from the american system of federalism, but includes details such as putting an “end to the criminalization of black political activity” and “termination of super pacs and the implementation of ‘public financing of elections’” (movement for black lives, vision for black lives). in all three examples, black lives matter has avoided teleological thinking and has prioritized the needs of actual human beings. black lives matter has, concurrently, thought about larger notions of “political power” which require more radical changes and long-term social, economic, and political shifts. camus offers an important example in the rebel of the potential for success when political movements focus on limited – rather than teleological – goals. he explains that “revolutionary trade-unionism,” while it has never accomplished anything as lofty as the goals of dialectical marxism, successfully achieved improvements in working conditions for laborers. camus states that “it is this movement alone that, in one century, is responsible for the enormously improved condition of the workers from the sixteen-hour day to the forty-hour week” ( , p. ). similarly, while black lives matter does not make teleological demands as lofty as fred hampton’s demand for socialism, nor garveyism, black lives matter’s goals remain large and yet also remain achievable. black lives matter is not focused on some teleological ends – regardless of whether they are liberal, marxist or black nationalist – but rather is focused on programs, policies, reforms and other approaches that would improve the lives of suffering, and existentially anxious, black people in the united states. as isaac explains of camusian political movements, they are, like black lives matter, “present-oriented, intended not to realize a grand historical objective but to afford proximate forms of mutual solidarity and empowerment” (isaac , p. ). yet black lives matter does not desire only a singular policy outcome and the movement has distinguished itself from more narrowly focused elements of the civil rights movement which prioritized securing the voting rights act of . for a rebellion to remain true to its cause of alleviating human suffering, “abstract and futurized ideals must be subordinated to a concern for concrete and immediate human needs, to the struggle against present injustice and oppression” (willhoite jr. , p. ) and it is fair to suggest that black lives matter has embodied this requirement. a camusian rebellion can become a revolution if it is left unchecked. that is, a rebellion must remain faithful to alleviating immediate suffering rather than to some teleological idea or ideal which can theoretically eliminate all suffering in the future. black lives matter has no stated telos; no stated final political goal. the movement works in a sisyphean manner; sisyphus was condemned for all eternity to push a boulder up a mountain which would inevitably roll down to the mountain’s base. for sisyphus, there could be no hope, no release of death and no denying his condition. black lives matter persists politically without the certainty that they will achieve any successes, and without conceding to death or denying the necessity of their political actions. instead, black lives matter revolts passionately against the injustice of state-sanctioned killing of black people in the united states with the goal of alleviating some of these worldly injustices. conclusion in , at the broadway for black lives matter event, scholar-activist frank roberts – who gained fame for teaching one of the first courses on the movement at new york university – was given the opportunity to speak on the movement. roberts stated that black lives matter was not a civil rights movement but rather a movement for human rights. civil rights movements, he explained, are often centered around the struggle for legislative gains such as the right to marry, or the right to vote. conversely, roberts explains that “human rights movements cut to a deeper, existential question, which is the question of who gets to be counted as human” (listing, , : ).lxxxiv roberts presents one way to think about the movement, in existential terms, and this helps us to analyze black lives matter as a response to dehumanization and death at the hands of the state or as keeanga-yamahtta taylor, african american studies scholar states simply, “the brilliance of the slogan ‘black lives matter’ is its ability to articulate the dehumanizing aspects of anti-black racism in the united states” ( , p. ). black lives matter is a social movement that has followed along the camusian pathway. the movement’s founders have expressed their motives in existential terminology and their efforts have been a response to the necropolitical situation of black people in the united states. rather than succumbing to existential anxiety, black lives matter has turned outwards towards addressing systemic injustice. in order to rectify the injustices brought upon black americans, black lives matter acts as a camusian rebellion which has been motivated by alleviating the actual suffering of black people in the united states. the movement, while it is fighting against injustice, is not focused on a telos – a previously conceived end goal – but is politically reflexive and focused on lxxxiv italics added for emphasis. both immediately workable solutions and longer term socioeconomic and political changes. chapter # the alt-right: from fear of white genocide to camusian revolution the alt-right was first conceptualized in by richard spencer when he founded a website titled “alternative right.” the website featured “highbrow white- nationalist content” and attempted to “maintain an intellectually serious tone” while promoting racial anti-egalitarianism (hawley , p. ). the alt-right gained mainstream notoriety in thanks to media coverage of the movement and criticisms by democratic presidential candidate hilary clinton (hawley ). while spencer’s alt-right website, and the movement that has borne its namesake, has waned, and waxed in popularity (spencer even abandoned the project at one point) the alt-right has maintained its core goal of achieving racially homogenous ethnostates. in this chapter, i will interpret the case of the alt-right using the camusian social movement theory. applying the camusian theory to both the alt-right and black lives matter will allow for greater comparison across the two seemingly disparate movements. importantly, both movements are responding to the existential anxieties that have been aroused by death, albeit death in different forms.lxxxv while the camusian theory helps us envisage the two movements as following similar trajectories, it also help to explain the lxxxv the alt-right’s response to “social death” will be addressed in the following section of the chapter. divergence between black lives matter as a camusian rebellion and the alt-right as a violent and deadly camusian revolution. the alt-right’s response to social death i argued in the previous chapter that black lives matter’s existential anxiety is related to the deaths of black americans whose lives have been taken by members of the police, or by vigilantes who have been exonerated by the courts. this anxiety, i argued, is experienced through the prism of race and the aggregate experience of being black in the united states. while the alt-right similarly expresses existential anxieties in racialized terms, the movement is not existentially anxious over actual deaths of white americans. instead, the alt-right is also responding to the existential anxiety produced by social death. the alt-right understands social death through a white racial context and the movement discusses social death using the term “white genocide.”lxxxvi understanding the alt-right’s use of “social death” and “white genocide” is paramount to understanding the existential anxiety that underlies the movement’s purpose. the alt-right is not responding to the deaths of white americans, but instead focuses primarily on social death which, in its contemporary usage, includes “loss of social identity, loss of social connectedness and losses associated with the disintegration of the body” (králová , p. ). social death – the manner in which a person (or people) is treated as dead or nonexistent – has been the bane of the alt-right’s existential lxxxvi and synonymous existential terms such as “white replacement” and “white erasure.” anxiety. the feeling of existential anxiety, rather than empirical observations, can motivate human actions including participation in the alt-right. in this chapter i will focus on white americans’ expressions of the feeling of existential anxiety – which is real – rather than the empirical realities often ignored or denied by the alt-right (and by many white americans in general) that counter their claims.lxxxvii the camusian theory helps us understand how the alt-right’s feeling of existential anxiety can motivate the movement’s actions. in the myth of sisyphus, camus states that one may not be awoken to existential anxiety through rational considerations, but rather through an irksome feeling. matthew bowker, in his work on camus’s understanding of the absurd, explains that for camus, the absurd “is more akin to a conflicted or ambivalent experience” and “not a single ‘fact’ that can be deduced from proposition or postulate” ( , p. ). since one may feel or experience – rather than logically reason – the absurdity of human existence, the feeling of the alt-right’s existential anxiety can help us to appreciate the movement’s response to shifting racial demographics in the united states. this feeling is expressed by some white americans and manifests as the existential anxiety that motivates the alt-right. the alt-right’s fear that white lives are in danger of facing social death is not unique as similar feelings have existed for some white americans as far back as the reconstruction era. historian carol anderson’s concept of “white rage” explains a similar feeling of some white americans who have fought against black advancement. lxxxvii notably, that demographic displacement and social death are either not occurring, or that white americans have no empirically based reasons to be concerned in either regard. anderson explains that “white rage is not about visible violence, but rather it works its way through the courts, the legislatures, and a range of government bureaucracies … the trigger for white rage, inevitably, is black advancement” ( , p. ). anderson finds white rage as a force employed to annul black social, political, and economic achievements from reconstruction through the obama administration. juliet hooker similarly explains that “victories in the struggle for racial equality have been followed by eras of deep and sustained backlash in which blacks and other minorities have borne the brunt of racial terror, violence, and xenophobia” ( , p. ). the fear of social death has been explicated by some white americans, although the specific terminology “social death” was not directly utilized. scholars matthew fowler, vladimir medenica, and cathy cohen ( ) argue that “white vulnerability, the perception that whites, through no fault of their own, are losing ground to other groups” drove millennial trump voters to the polls in .lxxxviii lxxxix white vulnerability is a fair approximator for white fear of social death and young, white americans (the primary demographic of the alt-right) expressed this feeling which is not supported by empirical realities. education scholar nolan cabrera similarly found that while anti-white, or “reverse” racism has become popular in rhetoric, it remains “primarily a myth as opposed to a tangible reality … it is predicated on a feeling by many white people that racism against black people is largely over but racism against lxxxviii trump’s relationship with the alt-right is complicated and i do not mean to insinuate that there is more of a connection between the two than actually exists. lxxxix italics added for emphasis. white people is on the rise” ( , p. ).xc the racial victimization expressed by white students in cabrera’s study again highlights that some white people are feeling anxious about white social death although the empirical realities do not match these feelings. members and supporters of the alt-right have even more clearly expressed a fear of white social death than the previously noted examples of the white general public in the united states. patrik hermansson, following his undercover exposé on the alt-right, conducted an “ask me anything” question and answer session on the popular news aggregator and discussion platform reddit. hermansson was asked by participants what thought was driving people towards far-right political groups and he responded, the real question is what makes white men, many of whom are middle class and/or relatively well educated, decide that they - not ethnic minorities - are in fact the real victims in society. the whole movement is consumed with a sense of victimhood. they genuinely believe that white men are the most oppressed people in society. ( ) hermansson uses the word “believe” to express the same argument as i have made above regarding “feelings.” what matters to alt-right supporters is not empirical reality but rather the feeling that white people have become targeted victims of a plot to eliminate the white race either literally or through social means. political theorist corey robin articulates white fears of social death without using the term to describe the feeling: xc for example, one student that cabrera interviewed, “jonathan,” was not initially accepted into western university (wu) and blamed affirmative action policies, “despite the fact that wu had not practiced race-conscious admissions for nearly a decade” (cabrera , p. ). a combination of stagnating wages, rising personal and household debt, and increasing precarity–coupled with the tormenting symbolism of a black president and the greater visibility of black and brown faces in the culture industries–has made the traditional conservative offering seem scant to its white constituents. the future of the united states as a minority-majority nation exacerbates this anxiety. racial dog whistles no longer suffice; a more brazen sound is required. ( , p. ) while robin attributes this new “more brazen sound” to donald trump, the same can be said of the alt-right.xci in fact, the alt-right’s white nationalism is more openly pronounced, and it often unapologetically embraces racism while trump’s brand of racism – as clear as it is – often lacks the candor of the alt-right. the previous evidence suggests that some white americans certainly do fear social death, whether or not they use the term to describe this feeling. scholar thomas main correctly notes that the alt-right “is under the delusion that whites have been entirely disposed of power” ( , p. ). despite these claims to the contrary, there is no reason to believe that white americans are in danger of suffering a social death. sociologist orlando patterson ( ) explains that social death involves, minimally, the absence or revocation of basic civil rights which is a problem that white americans are not facing.xcii however, the feeling of fear expressed by some white xci robin argues that conservatism’s reactionary tendencies are present in american conservatism throughout its history. what is new is the base’s aching for (and receiving) a bolder expression of reaction that is explicitly racially focused. xcii patterson, in slavery and social death, explores the relationship between the two titular concepts. he finds the roots of social death in enslavement which involves an unqualified lack of basic human and civil rights. social death was a disempowering and alienating condition in which a slave was stripped of his or her former identity, subsumed under the control of a master and “ceased to belong independently to any formally americans is very real. the alt-right has, within the scope of contemporary american politics, uniquely captured this feeling of fear of social death in their use of the existential term “white genocide.” white genocide is “the belief that whites are in imminent danger of cultural, political, economic, and even physical annihilation by some combination of jews, immigrants, muslims, african americans, white liberals, feminists and communists” (atkinson , p. - ). it is “the notion that the ‘white race’ is directly endangered by the increasing diversity of society” (j.m. berger as cited in greene , p. ).xciii white genocide is an explicitly existential fear about the value of white lives, their imminent mortality, and the disempowerment – the social death – of white people. the notion of white genocide has profoundly influenced the alt-right as noted by some of its most prominent members. greg johnson has stated that “white extinction is the intended result of the policies we oppose” (as cited in p gray , p. ). johnson has framed white genocide as a policy or set of policies responsible for the racial demographic shifts in the united states since the s.xciv johnson’s quote expresses the alt-right’s anxiety that has arisen from this new american reality as the movement’s “ultimate goal” is to reverse recognized community” (patterson , p. ). this does not describe the current scenario for white americans. xciii to be clear, white genocide is the idea that whites are facing a genocide, not that whites ought to conduct genocide. xciv which have increased people of color as a proportion of the population in the united states. the demographic shift and secure an all-white ethnostate. johnson does not believe that white genocide is inevitable, but he insists that it is already occurring and has been occurring since desegregation as he states, “when tens of thousands of whites fled american cities and lost tens of millions in property because of desegregation, that was ethnic cleansing” (johnson ). johnson has likewise stated “whenever we talk about diversity, increasing diversity. that is always a euphemism for having fewer white people” (holland et al. , : ). johnson’s followers have expressed similar fears of white genocide. “quintilian” ( ) who posts to greg johnson’s counter currents website explains in his review of the film interstellar that “it is the white race that is the indispensable race.” quintilian’s review is similarly titled “the future is white” and the author argues that interstellar’s use of a white male as the earth-saving protagonist is consistent with the alt-right’s understanding of race realism. one commenter on quintilian’s review who uses the pseudonym “collition” ( ), juxtaposes this notion of white indispensability and heroism with a strawman argument wherein the poster notes that “the leftists will always say that the white race is the cancer of humanity and that the world would be better off w/o us.” greg johnson has directly referenced fears of white genocide and this idea is present in posts by some followers who contribute to his website. johnson is not the only prominent member of the alt-right who expresses fears of white genocide and who promotes these ideas to sympathetic followers. richard spencer expressed similar existential fears of white genocide during his during his speech at the national policy institute (npi) conference following the election.xcv in his speech, spencer states “as europeans … no one mourns the great crimes committed against us. for us, it is conquer or die. this is a unique burden for the white man” (spencer ).xcvi similarly, andrew anglin expresses fears of white genocide in “a normie’s guide to the alt-right.” among the terms that anglin defines or explains are “white genocide” and the related notion of “white countries for white people.” anglin explains that white genocide involves “flooding white nations with non- whites” and this process “amounts to a form of calculated genocide against a racial group” (anglin a). anglin, like johnson and spencer, expresses a concern that “non-white immigration into white countries will lead to a destruction of white culture, the white social order and ultimately an extermination of the white race” (ibid). spencer, johnson, and anglin all express existential fears of racialized social death and all believe that the best means to avoid this seeming inevitability is to secure racial purity within defined state borders. stead steadman, a highly influential alt-right supporter in the united kingdom and organizer of the london forum was filmed by hermansson for his undercover exposé stating that the alt-right was facing “an unparalleled existential threat” (holland et al. , : ). steadman’s statement echoes prominent american alt-right members and these key influences are among the many alt-right supporters publicly xcv npi, despite its innocuous name, is a white nationalist organization that made spencer its president in . xcvi this dichotomy of “conquer or die” also hints towards the alt-right as a camusian revolution. expressing fears of white genocide. this instantiation of existential anxiety is central to understanding the alt-right’s motives and actions.xcvii the alt-right as revolting against the absurdity of human existence the alt-right has framed its actions as a response to the existential anxiety caused by white genocide. the movement has revolted against their alleged racialized social death by championing the lives of white people through a celebration of “white culture.” for alt-right, “the preservation of the white race is a prerequisite for preserving western culture and western societies” (esposito , p. ). the response to feelings of existential anxiety has thus been a form of “white advocacy” (esposito ) which promotes and celebrates the alt-right’s vision of a vibrant and exuberant white population which is not only alive but contributing to cultural creation. white advocacy attempts to revolt against the supposed social death of white people by passionately championing white people and white culture. the alt-right’s revolt can be explained using the camusian theory since the movement, like camus, rejects suicide and xcvii there are many examples of less prominent alt-right supporters or even anonymous posts that express similar feelings. george hawley interviewed members of a group claiming to speak for daily stormer who explained that “the core concept of the [alt- right], upon which all else is based, is that whites are undergoing an extermination, via mass immigration into white countries” ( , p. ). vox day ( ) similarly wrote that “the alt-right believes we must secure the existence of the white people and a future for white children.” vox day is quoting the “ words” which are popular white supremacist and white nationalist slogan. another counter currents poster, spencer j. quinn ( ) supported trump’s presidency but remained fearful of white “demographic demise” leading to “white irrelevance” which is similar to, if not synonymous with, white genocide. religion as alternative responses to the existential anxiety associated with death. i will first address the rejected approaches before explaining the alt-right’s life affirming stance towards white people and white culture which is a revolt against the purported inevitability of white genocide. the alt-right’s rejection of suicide the alt-right has focused on promoting the value of white lives, and its members have promoted a desire for a generational continuation of white families. like black lives matter, the alt-right has not argued for suicide as an appropriate means of responding to social death and existential anxiety. the alt-right’s political goal of a racially pure, all white ethnostate requires the continuity of white lives and the movement’s fight for the continuation of white bloodlines would be logically inconsistent with a hypothetical support for suicide since the dead cannot reproduce and create racially pure children. while in the prior chapter i noted a few cases of black lives matter supporters taking their own lives, my research has not led to any examples of alt-right supporters doing the same. while the alt-right is a white nationalist movement that is majority male, there is no evidence suggesting that its supporters are subject to the high suicide rates of white men in the united states. xcviii it is also worth reiterating the previous xcviii i do not mean to insinuate that the alt-right has done anything to fight against white people taking their own lives, and more will be said about the alt-right’s general silence on confronting white suicide, and white male suicide in the next chapter. in short, white people and specifically white males account for a disproportionately high rate of suicides example of the poster collition ( ) who claims that “the leftists will always say that the white race is the cancer of humanity and that the world would be better off w/o us.” while one could succumb to this feeling of racially understood existential threat, collition, the previously mentioned quintilian (who claimed that the white race is “indispensable”), and the mass of alt-right supporters have not turned to suicide. instead, as i previously stated, the alt-right has often promoted white lives as possessing value that ought to be celebrated while, in the alt-right narrative, these very lives are under assault. the alt-right’s rejection of religion as a framing device the alt-right is a unique right-wing, american social movement in its aggregate rejection of and even hostility towards religion. existential anxiety about death can lead some people to seek religious sources of meaning; an approach which camus rejects. black lives matter was shown to be unique in the recent history of african american social movements and the alt-right similarly is unique among right-wing social movements in the united states as both movements have rejected religiosity as a framing device. the alt-right is ideologically secular with many atheists, anti-theists, and religious skeptics among its ranks (hawley ; wendling ) and this irreligiosity places the movement in opposition to previous (and concurrent) right-wing movements in the united states. in the united states and yet the alt-right is not focused on addressing this seemingly significant social concern. while it is easy to conflate right-wing movements in the united states with the “religious right,” the alt-right opposes and often ridicules the religious right. richard spencer has, for example, cited nietzsche’s critique of christianity as being particularly important in developing his belief system (hawley ). for spencer, nietzsche’s critique of christian slave morality and christianity’s universalism (if not egalitarianism) exist in contrast to the alt-right’s racially exclusionary beliefs. spencer explained that his understanding of racial identity is opposed to both liberalism and “abrahamic monotheism” for its egalitarian portrayal of all people as “all one” (gee ).xcix spencer’s reading of nietzsche led to hawley ( ) explaining that members of the alt- right will more likely mock than defend evangelical christians. ronald beiner, in his analysis of the philosophical influences on the contemporary radical right, argues that nietzsche is the most important thinker “associated with the tradition of resolute repudiation of liberal modernity in all its moral, political, and cultural dimensions” ( , p. ). it is not surprising that spencer and others in the alt-right have latched on to a pseudo-nietzschean, anti-religious position that stands in contrast to christianity and to the moorings of liberal democracy (e.g. xcix jared taylor likewise stated that “no phrase in history has done more harm than ‘all men are created equal’” and vox day stated that “[t]here is no such thing as equality, the grand rhetorical flights of thomas jefferson notwithstanding…. the assertation is not a self-evident truth, it is nothing more than a logical and empirical falsehood, and easily proven to be so by every possible standard” (as cited in kelman ). egalitarianism, basic human equality, etc.).c the alt-right’s explicit anti-religiosity places it in a unique position in contrast with other influential and recent right-wing american social and political movements. hawley cites paleoconservatismci as being an influence on the early founding of the alt-right, but the anti-religious leanings of the alt-right have led to a noted distance between the movement and what remains of the paleoconservatives (hawley ). unlike paleoconservatism, the tea party was not a major influence on the alt-right. the tea party is, however, a recent and relatively successful right-wing social movement in the united states. like the paleoconservatives of prior decades, the tea party was a far more religiously inclined movement than the alt-right (arceneaux & nicholson ). while the alt-right is unique among recent american right-wing movements as it is not religiously inclined, individual alt-right members and supporters may not be as anti- religious as the previously noted intellectual contributors. despite the general anti-christian sentiments of the alt-right, there are some less religiously hostile segments of the movement. there is, for example, an alt-right christian podcast called “the godcast” and hawley ( ) notes that there are several bloggers who identify as both alt-right and christian. one element defining alt-right christianity is its rejection of the left-leaning politics of leaders such as pope francis, and c greg johnson ( ), in a decidedly positive review of beiner’s work on the far right, states that beiner’s book is valuable to anyone who “wants to understand why nietzsche and heidegger are so useful to the new right.” ci see chapter three for a longer discussion of paleoconservatism’s political philosophy, and some differences between the earlier paleoconservative movement and the alt-right. other christians who have endorsed social justice causes. still others in the alt-right embrace a secular or cultural christianity as they “prefer cathedrals and incense to church communities and prayer” (wendling , p. ). the presence, however, of religiously minded members of the alt-right should not distract from the overall irreligiosity of the movement; the alt-right remains in staunch opposition to recent right-wing movements as, unlike prior right-wing social movements, it has neither appealed to religion for justification of its politics, nor has it framed its cause in religious terms. the alt-right’s goals, motivations and demands are all centered around racialized existential anxiety and exist in opposition to what supporters see as false universalism promoted by christianity. like black lives matter, the alt-right has acknowledged feelings of existential anxiety produced by death and has, by and large, refused to turn towards religion as a potential solution to these feelings. of course, the differences between black lives matter and the alt-right are stark, yet the secular nature of both movements places them in a degree of opposition not to each other, but to their respective intellectual and chronological predecessors. the alt-right’s (white) life affirming revolt the alt-right has revolted against white genocide by promoting white lives and white culture. while these terms are somewhat ill-defined within the alt-right, members of the movement have attempted to revolt against (their perception) of the seeming certainty of white genocide by affirming the value of white people and white cultural contributions.cii richard spencer seemingly agrees with karl marx in stating that the globalized free market flattens the world and devalues culture. spencer wants to counter the market because he feels that it does not sufficiently promote and value white contributions to culture (esposito ). many existing, contemporary cultural artifacts are, for example, portrayed by members of the alt-right as antithetical to their cause as the alt-right charges that its racial enemies (mostly jews) influence these forms of culture (kelly ). rather than reforming existing forms of culture, members of the alt-right, such as spencer and jared taylor, promote a form of cultural/racial self-preservation that champions the notion of white culture as distinct from other cultures. as philp grey explains, for the alt-right, “race and culture are not separate but connected” which means that the alt-right’s attempts to oppose perceived white genocide are also an attempt to preserve and promote white culture and reverse the perceived trend of white social death (p gray , p. ). alt-right supporters have, for example, defended the place of white people in popular culture. a well-known alt-right essayist who writes under the pseudonym cii to be clear, the alt-right does not see race and culture as synonymous, but rather intertwined. only white people can produce white culture, but not all white people will contribute to white culture, and some may even reject white culture (or support other races’ cultures, etc.). “henry olson” explained that what motivated his or herciii contributions to the alt-right was the idea of white culture being “under attack” (hawley , p. ). another alt- right supporter and twitter user @genophilia called for a boycott of the movie the force awakens, a recent sequel in the star wars saga, due to the trailer featuring black actor john boyega. the post stated, “#boycottstarwarsvii because it is anti-white propaganda promoting #whitegenocide” (as cited in greene , p. ). by highlighting the value of white lives as contributing to culture, and by noting cultural creations that they feel are contributing to white social death, the alt-right is revolting against its existential fear of white genocide. in this manner, it is a life affirming movement although one that affirms only the value of the lives of white people. alt-right sympathizer roosh v – a self-proclaimed pick-up artist who turned to writing about politics – juxtaposes the two positions of existential anxiety and white affirmation in a post entitled “the white european culture is dead” ( ). roosh v first exhibits a fear of muslims invading the west, adopting technology and customs, and eventually reproducing at higher rates than westerners (before africans eventually do the same to muslims). yet roosh v turns to promote a “re-focus on family and tradition” in order to avoid this form of racial or ethnic replacement. by focusing not just on the existential anxiety of white replacement (by muslims and africans), but by also proposing a semi- solution that champions white virility, roosh v highlights the positive promotion of ciii it is overwhelmingly likely that the anonymous posters identify as male since, as discussed earlier, the alt-right is disproportionately comprised of men. i use both male and female pronouns for anonymous posters, but i expect that the posters are men. i spoke in more depth about the alt-right and gender in chapter three. whiteness that the alt-right has used as its form of revolt. some alt-right supporters extend their revolt beyond cultural considerations as they focus on white progeny and express a desire to carry on white bloodlines. there are examples of women within the alt-right who prioritize their role as traditional wives (“tradwives”) and mothers and see their role as carrying on a white lineage. one such advocate, known as a “wife with a purpose” put forth a video titled “the white baby challenge” in which she encouraged white women to procreate to reverse the trend of declining white birthrates in the global west (kelly ). the alt-right’s core constituency, men, have also been explicit about the need to continue white bloodlines. donna minkowitz, in her previously noted exposé, states that sam dickson spoke about the “need to get white women to have more babies” and dickson “suggested incentives to make this happen.” minkowitz continues, for example, he mentioned financial incentives for men to get them to each father ‘legitimate’ white babies. for women, he suggested that they be allowed to wear certain clothing styles—my guess is that he was referring to stylish, pretty items although he was not explicit—only after they have given birth to several legitimate white children. (as cited in bader ) like dickson, greg johnson also discussed the need for white women to have children and prioritize motherhood over education (singal ). the alt-right’s focus on continuing white bloodlines, alongside its emphasis on white culture are evidence of the movement’s (white) life affirming tendencies. in promoting the value of white lives through a positive portrayal of both the lives of white people and of so-called white culture, the alt-right is revolting against the existential anxiety associated with white genocide.civ the alt-right’s revolt is one that, as camus explains, is not resigned to accept the inevitability of the perceived fate of white genocide. the alt-right affirms the value of white lives and rejects calls for open borders and multiculturalism as being existentially threatening and debasing to white culture. both black lives matter and the alt-right have rejected the same alternative approaches to existential anxiety that camus rejects: neither movement supports suicide, nor religion as sufficient responses to the anxiety produced by death. like black lives matter, the alt-right feels a sense of existential anxiety and reaffirms the value of the racial group before turning to camusian conquest; political action. the alt-right’s turn outwards towards political action while black lives matter turned outward and away from the history of african american respectability politics, the alt-right refused an inward reevaluation in a different manner. politicians and other elites have long asked black americans to consider how the black community can improve itself and black lives matter has rejected such naïve considerations. historically, white americans have not faced similar demands as white people have not been asked to turn inwards and consider why white civ the alt-right does not, however, define what actually comprises “white culture” in any meaningful depth. later, i will note that white culture includes, at most, a vague understanding of “good manners” and “creativity.” a more thorough definition appears impossible for two reasons: the inability to define the bounds of whiteness as discussed earlier, and the question of which white cultural productions ought to be included as appropriately “white culture.” people may be suffering in the united states.cv white americans have not faced pressure to police white communities, and have been able to turn to camusian political conquest through political action and critique. while the proper role of government and views of market economics differentiate the alt-right from mainstream conservatives, it is the role of race that primarily places the republican party in opposition to the alt-right. matthew flisfeder ( ) explains that it is “culture, rather than the political economy of capitalism” that is the principal concern for the alt-right. the alt-right may disagree with mainstream republicans on economic or national security matters, but the alt-right’s most contentious difference lies in the movement’s view of “racialism” which understands race as a fundamental biological category that necessarily implies that unlike peoples can and ought to be identified and forcibly separated due to immutable scientific differences among the races (main ). without racial purity, the alt-right feels that white culture is being dispossessed, denigrated, and destroyed and that white lives are being socially – if not physically – eradicated. the alt-right’s solution is a political turn as it attacks opponents who the movement believes have contributed to white genocide in the united states. the alt-right thus views the republican party as its opposition because the party cv terence mccoy ( ) of the washington post conducted interviews with alt-right supporters who turned their blame outward towards the state, liberals, anti-racists, corporations and most clearly, people of color. one interviewee, for example, blamed his unemployment on mcdonalds and walmart because both corporations hired black employees instead of him. has ceded to non-whites and has not taken a strong enough political stance against the mere existence people of color in the united states. although the democrats and their liberal and progressive supporters are the most obvious opponents of the alt-right’s anti-egalitarianism, the alt-right has expressed strong opposition to mainstream members of the republican party such as jeb bush, john mccain, mitch mcconnell, and paul ryan. previous right-wing movements such as the tea party (condon ) and paleoconservatism (hawley ) have stood outside of the republican party but have worked to infiltrate and alter the course of the republican party. the alt-right, however, exists outside of the republican party and has not sought to reform the party through electoral politics.cvi the alt-right appreciates donald trump’s brand of politics because he, like members of the movement, does not wish to reform the republican party. instead, trump and the alt-right both offer a new and alternative message and approach to politics in the united states that seeks to displace classic liberalism and conservatism with a politics that is rooted in their understanding of race. as previously noted, trump has been called an “icebreaker” by johnson and spencer for creating a fissure in american politics that challenges egalitarianism which the alt-right hopes to exploit (hawley ). cvi i am not aware of any elected official at the federal level having declared outward support of the alt-right. while there are over , local governments in the united states, and an elected official may support the movement, there are no well-known examples. it is chiefly the conciliating of racial egalitarianism that has divided the alt-right from mainstream political parties in the united states. the most explicit divide between the alt-right and mainstream conservatism can be found in the movement’s use of the term “cuckservative” which is a portmanteau of the words cuckoldcvii and conservative. cuckservatives are, for the alt-right, white conservatives who are not advancing the interests of themselves as a racial group but are instead advancing the interests of other racial groups, likely at the expense of their own group interest (hawley ). “cuckservative” is infused with racist connotations and is closely related to the idea of someone being a “race traitor.” jeb bush and john mccain were both labeled cuckservatives for supporting looser immigration restrictions, and bush specifically, for being married to a woman of color (heer ). republicans who have staunchly supported their party such as mitch mcconnell and paul ryan have been labeled cuckservatives for not being more closely aligned with the alt-right’s political goals of racial purity (m hayden b). as the alt-right can be understood as responding to the perceived existential threat of white genocide, therefore political actors who oppose the alt-right are best understood (from their perspective) as either complicit in or actively contributing to white genocide. the alt-right’s perception of racial abandonment by the political establishment has led to the movement turning outward and seeking political redress through protests cvii a man who has been cheated on by his spouse and knowingly raises the offspring of his wife and another man. cuckoldry, as an insult, often has racial connotations whereby the father of the child is black, while the husband and his adulterous wife are white. and rallies. racially motivated feelings of existential anxiety have not led the alt-right to a critical reevaluation of whiteness in american society, nor to actively policing individual white americans. instead, the alt-right has turned towards the public sphere to broadcast their concerns and to seek political redress. while some mainstream republicans have offered dog-whistle racism and others have gone further towards more open racist imagery and statements, many in the alt-right preferred the bombastic, and unapologetically politically incorrect style of donald trump as political outsider during his presidential campaign. despite this appreciation for trump, the alt-right’s ethnocratic politics remain at odds with the administration’s publicly stated goals.cviii rather than waiting for trump and the republican party to move towards the alt-right’s racio-political position, the alt-right moved from the internet into the streets and has acted as a violent camusian revolution. the alt-right as camusian revolution a camusian revolutionary begins from the same starting point as a camusian rebel and in this way, we can see the alt-right and black lives matter as similar. both cviii as noted in the chapter three, alt-right corporation co-founder jason jorjani claimed to have a direct connection to steven bannon while bannon was in the trump administration (singal ) and bannon described breitbart news as “the platform of the alt-right” (posner ). while breitbart news and the alt-right have had, as previously noted, a very tenuous relationship, bannon’s presence as the white house chief strategist and senior counselor to the president represented at least some potential pathway to influencing national politics. bannon, however, only served in his governmental roles until august and he has fallen out of favor with trump (graham ), breitbart (gonzales ), and the alt-right (owen a). jorjani has also since distanced himself from the alt-right and from richard spencer (jorjani ). movements began due to some individual (or individuals) rejecting pain and anguish and refusing to accept further degradation. what differentiates rebellion from revolution is, most fundamentally, the limits (or the lack of limits) that the actors accept. the rebel accepts the world as it is but acts politically to change some fundamentally problematic aspects of existence which cause pain and suffering. the rebel acts in a sisyphean manner and consistently pursues immediate political goals to help alleviate suffering and death. the sisyphean rebel wants to improve the lives of the suffering and this may take a (seemingly) endless effort. the revolutionary, rather than accepting the world as it is and fighting for some meaningful change, begins with an end goal in mind and acts to pursue this goal. a revolution is therefore teleological; it has predefined end goals and prioritizes these goals over alleviating the actual suffering of real people. this approach may lead not only to abandoning suffering people, but for camus, revolutions may harm actual, suffering people in the name of achieving some later teleological goal. the alt-right’s teleological goal is to obtain racially pure ethnostates wherein racial homogeneity would exist within defined state borders. the alt-right opposes those who do not agree with its ethnocratic telos and while this approach has led to the alt-right’s opposition towards mainstream republicans, it has also led to violent and even deadly results for its white opposition. camus feared revolutions because they were willing to kill those who opposed their teleological ends; even those who the revolutionaries claimed to want to help. in the alt-right, camus’s fears have come to fruition as movement supporters have committed violence against and even killed white people who have resisted the alt-right’s teleological goal of obtaining a white ethnostate. heather heyer – a white woman – was killed by an alt-right supporter in charlottesville, virginia during the infamous unite the right rally. i will return to heather heyer’s murder at this chapter’s conclusion as i argue that the alt-right can be understood in camusian terms as a violent revolutionary movement which is willing to sacrifice actual white lives in the name of attaining some idealized, future, white ethnostate. for camus, a revolutionary attempts to reshape the world. he differentiates it from rebellion by explaining that “a revolution is an attempt to shape actions to ideas, to fit the world into a theoretic frame. that is why rebellion kills men while revolution destroys both men and principles” (camus , p. ). rebellions can be deadly; black lives matter has been peaceful, but camus does not deny that even a genuine rebellion may need to act violently to pursue political and social change. rebellious violence is limited to what is absolutely necessary as a last resort to achieve political change and for camus, this violence can never be entirely philosophically justified. revolutionaries, however, may be willing to kill not for the purpose of helping the suffering, but in the name of an ideal.cix in committing violence against their fellow human beings, revolutionaries destroy both human beings and the very idea that they initially put forth (e.g. freedom, justice, labor, etc.). for the alt-right, this has meant killing the very white people that the movement supposedly wishes to help. the cix the alt-right genuinely believes that their teleological goal of racially homogeneous ethnostates will end white suffering. the movement, however, has done little or nothing to help purportedly suffering white people in the intermediate time period. revolutionary, in order to reshape the world, is willing to destroy anything that is opposed to such reconstruction as camus explains, “total revolution ends by demanding – we shall see why – the control of the world” (camus , p. ). total control of the world, for the alt-right, would be a world of racially pure ethnostates. those who stand in the way of this global reshaping are, for the revolutionary, expendable. the unite the right rally occurred in charlottesville, virginia on august th and th, . the stated purpose of the rally was to protest the removal of a statue of robert e. lee from what was then known as lee park in charlottesville. on august th, james alex fields jr. weaponized his dodge challenger by driving through a crowd of counter-protesters, injuring people, and killing -year-old heather heyer. while the unite the right rally was depicted as a fight to preserve southern heritage by protecting a confederate monument, it was, in reality, the alt-right’s most public display of its revolutionary intentions and its desire to eliminate its ideological opposition. unite the right was primarily organized by jason kessler who has spent time writing on vdare, an anti-immigration website which often publishes articles by white nationalists and white supremacists. the rally was attended by numerous individuals and organizations associated with the alt-right including but not limited to richard spencer and mike enoch (both of whom were scheduled as speakers), and members of the daily stormer.cx although the rally extended beyond the alt-right, prominent and associated alt-right supporters were involved and invested in the rally (sunshine ). cx other speakers included alt-right supporters augustus invictus and christopher cantwell. attendees included (but were not limited to) alt-right supporter brad griffin vincent law’s post on the alt-right’s website clarified that the intention of the unite the right rally was to guard against white genocide. before the rally, law asked readers, “will you stand up for your history, your race and your way of life?” (law a). law wanted alt-right supporters to assemble in charlottesville to “defend white heritage” as the movement left the internet and took to the streets (ibid). the unite the right rally was supported and attended by the alt-right and was portrayed as defending against white genocide and promoting white people and white culture. unite the right, far from being a protest about a statue, personified the alt-right’s fears of white genocide, promotion of whiteness, and eventually, its revolutionary tendencies. the pre-rally feelings of existential anxiety, and the need to protect white people and white culture manifested in charlottesville. joe phillips and joseph yi explain that what united the right in charlottesville was an overarching narrative that i have argued is attached to ideas of social death and white genocide. supporters were connected by the belief that “‘non-privileged’ whites are victims of unfair governmental policies such as affirmative action, sanctuary for illegal migrants, and the cultural cleansing of ‘white history’ (e.g., columbus to confederacy)” (phillips & yi , p. ). this fear, that “whites are in imminent danger of cultural, political, economic, and even physical annihilation” (atkinson , p. ) was explicated by those at the rally who chanted “you will not replace us” and similarly “jews will not replace us” (shaohua ). of occidental dissent, a coalition of neo-nazi, neo-fascist, neo-confederate and white nationalist organizations known as nationalist front, neo-nazi organization vanguard america which sprung from the alt-right and supporters from many affiliated and unaffiliated groups. these slogans express the very fears of social death that i articulated earlier in the chapter and that were stated by vincent law in his pre-rally post on the alt-right’s website. this existential anxiety is juxtaposed with the alt-right’s revolt; its defense of white people and white culture. rather than question the justification for the feelings of existential anxiety expressed in charlottesville, supporters argued that they were “dedicated to the preservation of white heritage and identity” and highlighted that the “best of the white race” includes “good manners, being polite, creative and having the qualities of leadership” (as cited in phillips & yi , p. ). these sentiments were expressed by one poster on the alt-right’s website as “white pride.” the alt-right’s revolt against existential anxiety can be seen in its appropriation of black lives matter’s namesake as protesters in charlottesville chanted “white lives matter” (shaohua ). like black lives matter, the alt-right’s use of the idea “white lives matter” is a public assertion that the lives of white people have value and should be treated appropriately. these two ideas – racially understood existential anxiety over death and a passionate assertion of the value of white lives – could lead the alt-right towards camusian rebellion. the alt- right is not a revolution solely because it expresses fears of social death and revolts against them through a reaffirmation of “white values” and “white culture.” the alt- right’s violence, and particularly the violence that occurred against white people, the supposed beneficiaries of the alt-right’s ethnopolitics, transforms the movement from rebellion to revolution. unite the right marked the moment that the alt-right transformed form a possible rebellion to a camusian revolution. the murder of heather heyer contributes to an understanding of the alt-right as a camusian revolution for two interacting reasons: first, heather heyer was a white woman; and secondly, some significant alt-right supporters justified (or at least refused to condemn) her murder. the alt-right claims to be a movement for the protection and promotion of white lives and white culture and yet members of the movement found the death of a white person to be acceptable because she was ideologically opposed to the alt-right. heyer was described as standing up against racial discrimination, being moved to tears by maltreatment of her fellow human beings, and actively supporting black lives matter (silverman & laris ). she attended unite the right as a counter- protester and was dedicated to opposing the hatred that occurred. in the wake of heather heyer’s murder, richard spencer classified the alt-right as non-violent but refused to condemn james alex fields jr. in heyer’s murder (r gray ).cxi unite the right, spencer said was “really beautiful” and he blamed charlottesville’s mayor, and the governor of virginia for not appropriately policing the rally (ibid). greg johnson was similarly dismissive and said, “i think what’s happened at charlottesville is more of an opportunity than a crisis” (holland et al. , : ). even more harshly, posts on the daily stormer championed the death of heyer as one poster stated that “most people … are glad she is dead, as she is the definition of uselessness. a cxi greg johnson is, at a minimum, aware of the violent desires of the alt-right’s followers as patrik hermansson noted his presence at a barbecue the night before the northwest forum where supporters were heavily armed, preparing for a violent conflict, and fantasizing about hanging “anti-fascists from the lamp posts” (holland et al. , : ). there was no concern expressed for whether those “hanging” were white or not. -year-old woman without children is a burden on society and has no value” (as cited in duff , p. ). jason kessler, unite the right’s primary organizer, posted on twitter that “heather heyer was a fat, disgusting communist. communists have killed million. looks like it was payback time” (as cited in pearce ).cxii while some within the alt-right have since condemned the attack, there were clearly alt-right supporters who felt that the death of the opposition – even when the opposition was white – was acceptable for the advancement of their political telos. the fact that the alt-right was willing to ignore or even support the killing of a white woman is a unique juncture in the history of the movement. at one point, the alt- right was described as primarily a non-violent movement (hawley ). the alt-right has, however, insinuated that violence might be necessary dating back to before unite the right. jason jorjani, for example, was filmed by patrick hermansson suggesting that for the alt-right to fulfill its goals of creating an all-white ethnostate, forcible expulsion and plausibly concentration camps would be necessary (singal ). greg johnson has suggested that deportation would be one way to encourage nonwhites to leave the united states, but “more draconian measures” would plausibly be necessary (hawley ). johnson has even used the language of “cleansing” america and has suggested a “bounty” be placed on non-whites who attempted to remain in the united states. as cxii kessler has since deleted said tweet. the tweet (and kessler) was publicly denounced by many on the right, including spencer. based on some comments that followed, denouncing kessler and the tweet likely occurred because they gave the rally bad press coverage rather than due to some genuine disagreement with kessler or his sentiment. johnson states, “‘but there would be violence! there would be a race war!’ the defeatists will bleat. of course there would be” (johnson ). while johnson (ibid) admits that “there would be white casualties” in a violent effort to achieve an all-white united states, the violence is framed as “us” versus “them” (white versus nonwhite). heather heyer’s death is unique because it does not fit this existing narrative wherein the violence which might occur would be due to racial clash between whites and nonwhites. heyer’s death was the death of a white woman, at the hands of a white, alt- right supporter, and it was excused by the alt-right because she was opposed to the alt- right’s telos. camus notes that if a rebellion justifies murdering the very people they claim to be helping, the rebellion has become a revolution. if a member of an oppressed group (white people in this case) opposes the movement (the alt-right) or its goals (racially pure ethnostates) a revolutionary group may be willing to kill the person in the name of the end goal. as stephen bronner explains, “the revolutionary is willing to murder all who stand in the way of constructing a just world. the end is seen as justifying the means, and therein, for camus, lies the ‘pathology’ of modern totalitarianism” ( , p. ). an alt-right supporter may explain heather heyer’s death as necessary because she opposed the alt-right, or more pejoratively, she could be described as a “race traitor.” this explanation does not, however, combat my argument that the alt-right is a camusian revolution. from a camusian perspective, heather heyer’s murder remains a revolutionary murder of a white woman, in the name of purportedly improving white lives. the telos of an all-white ethnostate in which white suffering could be theoretically permanently eliminated was prioritized by both her killer, and by prominent alt-right supporters. the actual life of an actual white person was deemed less important than the pursuit of a teleological goal.cxiii for camus, revolutions fail to exhibit genuine concern for the suffering members of the group that they claim to represent. in the rebel, camus was chiefly reproaching the soviet union’s revolutionary oppression (“state terror”) of dissenting proletariats in the name of achieving full communism. the logic of his argument can easily be extended to the alt-right; revolutions destroy their ideals (the alt-right’s claim to support white people) by destroying human beings who are members of the suffering group (heather heyer, a white woman). the alt-right claims to be acting to benefit white lives which are existentially threatened. the murder of heather heyer, and the alt- right’s acceptance of the action, indicates that the movement is not actually concerned with real white lives. the alt-right’s acceptance of heyer’s murder means that the movement, because of its willingness to kill white people, has sacrificed its supposed principles which were to alleviate white suffering and death. in the place of these principles, the alt-right has sought power and control so that they may reshape the world into racially homogenous ethnostates that they argue will end all white suffering in the future. cxiii the alt-right also does not frequently target white people who do not support their causes. instead, the movement prioritizes converting white outsiders to alt-right supporters. bringing potentially sympathetic white people on board is the idea behind the phrase “redpilling normies.” killing white people is a tactic that is counterproductive to the alt-right which wishes to expand its movement. conclusion the telos has replaced the façade of genuine concern for white people and the mask of the alt-right has been removed. the alt-right could have been a force that fought against high suicide rates, or against the opioid crisis which both disproportionately plague white americans.cxiv instead, the alt-right’s supposed concern for white people has morphed into a camusian revolution which wishes to manipulate the world to achieve its telos. those who stand in the way of the telos, even those who are white, are expendable members of the political opposition. the alt-right is a political revolution that has nihilistically dismissed even its own principles – alleviating the suffering white race – for the more expedient purpose of acquiring absolute political control. cxiv both issues will be discussed in more detail in the following chapter. chapter # environmental activism: lessons from black lives matter and the alt-right in chapter three, i argued that black lives matter and the alt-right are appropriately comparable based on a tripartite analysis of their respective horizontal or anti-hierarchical organizational structures, their outsider relationships with formal political institutions, and their ideational prioritizations of identity with a specific focus on race. i then applied my camusian theory to black lives matter and the alt-right and analyzed the movements from their inceptions as responses to necropolitics and social death respectively, through their divergence as a camusian rebellion (black lives matter) and revolution (alt-right). in this chapter, i will address how the camusian theory can help to inform environmental activists whose efforts are substantively different than either aforementioned movement. i will first explain the purpose of extending the camusian theory to this dissimilar movement before considering today’s environmental activism in some historical context, and addressing some ways in which environmental activists can learn from both the successes of black lives matter, and the shortcomings of the alt-right. black lives matter and the alt-right interpret the world through racial lenses. american environmental activism, however, has often overlooked the importance of race as environmental organizations and activists are disproportionately white. in , dorceta taylor authored the report, “the state of diversity in environmental organizations” for green . , an advocacy campaign working to increase racial diversity among environmental organizations. taylor found that despite improvements over time, “the current state of racial diversity in environmental organizations is troubling” ( , p. ). taylor notes that while ethnic minority populations have proportionately increased in the united states, the percentage of minorities on the boards or general staff of environmental organizations does not exceed %. … ethnic minorities occupy less than % of leadership positions … they rarely occupy the most powerful positions (such as president or chair of the board) in environmental organizations. the diversity manager’s position is the only position that minorities are more likely to hold than whites in environmental organizations. however, relatively few of the organizations had such a position. … very few minorities are members or volunteers of the organizations studied. … few of the organizations studied collaborate with ethnic minority or low-income institutions or groups. ( , pp. - ) historically, environmental organizations were both founded and populated by wealthy, white men, and the organizations frequently excluded anyone beyond white elites. people of color have been essential in contributing to the creation and maintenance of national parks and forests, yet “people of color were excluded from the membership and workforce of most environmental organizations throughout the nineteenth century and for most of the twentieth century” (taylor et al. , pp. ). these trends have, based on taylor’s data, not been adequately reversed, despite the many ways in which environmental decay negatively affects communities of color in the united states. scholar danielle purifoy ( ). explains that “environmentalism is white not because it is irrelevant to nonwhites. it is white because its primary considerations reflect the interests of mostly white and wealthier people – to the literal exclusion of nonwhites.” due to the overwhelming whiteness of environmental organizations, environmental racism, the forms of environmental injustice that occur to racialized populations, may be unaddressed or under addressed. communities of color face unique examples of environmental injustices that harms local populations. perhaps the most well-known ongoing example is the water crisis in flint, michigan – a majority black city with around , residents and one of the highest poverty rates in the state – wherein the city has been sourcing its water from the flint river which is so polluted that it eroded the city’s plumbing infrastructure and caused lead to leak into the city’s drinking water. the lead levels were so high in flint’s drinking water that they exceeded the epa’s standard of toxic waste, as lead was found to be times higher than the maximum acceptable federal level (benz ). there are many additional examples one could note such as the devastation of hurricane katrina which disproportionately affected working class black americans in louisiana and mississippi (adeola and steven ), and the geography of toxic pollution and waste treatment facilities in communities of color (johnson, raine, and johnson ). these cases serve to underscore the previously noted point that environmental activism may be disproportionately white, but both environmental catastrophes, and everyday environmental racism affect communities of color in the united states. i will apply my camusian theory to environmental activism despite the disconnect between the whiteness of environmental activism generally, and the realities of environmental racism. it is certainly important to note environmental activism’s historic and continuing racial blind spots. applying the camusian theory and encouraging cross- movement learning serves to illustrate that the theory can travel beyond the two racially- motivated movements analyzed in the prior chapters, and can even apply to a movement that while often progressive, has historically been racially blind, racially insensitive, and racist. a brief history of american environmental activism despite environmental activism’s aforementioned racial blindness, environmental advocacy in the united states has a long and rich history, and environmental destruction has frequently been framed as an existential threat to humanity. the following is not a comprehensive study of green activism as a more complete analysis of existentially depicted environmental activism is beyond the scope of this work. before considering today’s environmental activism, i trace a thread of existentially described environmentalism running from henry david thoreau in the early-to-mid nineteenth century, to teddy roosevelt in the early twentieth century, to rachel carson in the mid- twentieth century, and finally to al gore in the late twentieth, and early twenty-first centuries. this section serves to situate ongoing green activism in the united states in some of its historical context as it is the current manifestation of a long history of existentially motivated activism. in a journal entry from september , henry david thoreau states, “perhaps i may say that i have never had a deeper and more memorable experience of life–its great serenity, than when listening to the trill of a tree-sparrow among the huckleberry bushes after a shower” ( , p. ). thoreau often described his experiences in the wilderness, and he attached great importance to the connection between the human being and the natural world. near the end of walden, thoreau depicts his seemingly innate attachment to nature, stating “we need the tonic of wildness … we can never have enough of nature” ( , pp. - ). this connection between human beings and nature occurs out of existential necessity; part of what it is to be a human being, for thoreau, is to be immersed in nature. thoreau was a transcendentalist and the movement precedes sartre’s existentialism by a century. yet his desire for a simple life in nature, free of social obligations and full of leisure time exemplifies one philosophy of the purpose of human existence. for thoreau, a natural existence could bring humans the utmost happiness, and modern conveniences were unnecessary if not burdensome. thoreau’s existential naturalism would inspire his environmental politics. while secluded in concord, massachusetts (when he wrote his famous work, walden), thoreau already expressed sorrow at the destruction of nature as trains were becoming prevalent. thoreau is additionally critical of over farming and capitalist consumption as he states “all the indian huckleberry hills are stripped, all the cranberry meadows are raked into the city. up comes the cotton, down goes the woven cloth; up comes the silk, down goes the woolen; up come the books, but down goes the wit that writes them” ( , p. ). in the previously mentioned journal entry, thoreau described his attachment to the huckleberry bushes, which now had been plucked bare. as thoreau saw consumer culture expanding, he viewed it as an existential threat to the natural world he wished to inhabit. in response to the growing existential threat to nature, thoreau proposed a public common space. he states, in a journal entry from each town should have a park, or rather a primitive forest, of five hundred or a thousand acres, where a stick should never be cut for fuel, a common possession forever, for instruction and recreation. we hear of cow-commons and ministerial lots, but we want men-commons and lay lots, inalienable forever. let us keep the new world new, preserve all the advantages of living in the country. ( , p. ) what thoreau proposes is a political solution (a public common space) to what he saw as an existential concern (the growing degradation of nature). thoreau’s approach – framing environmental activism as a response to an existential concern – would be repeated by activists over the next century. president theodore roosevelt was a keen conservationist who framed environmentalism in existential terminology. roosevelt, the th president of the united states, was a leader in the burgeoning american conservation movement even prior to his presidency. as president, roosevelt’s efforts to preserve the natural wonders of the united states – such as the grand canyon and mount olympus – were rooted in his concern with the nation’s growing exploitation of natural resources due to excessive logging, hunting, and mining. roosevelt’s love of game hunting was not borne out of a desire to eradicate animal species, but conversely was intertwined in his understanding of the “fundamental existential relationship” that humans have with natural elements (redekop , p. ). roosevelt attached environmental conservation to the survival of the american people. in his speech “conservation as a national duty,” roosevelt called the issue of conservation “the weightiest problem” facing the united states (sheffield , p. ). economic growth and increased consumption, he feared, had led to a forgetfulness of human “dependence upon nature” (sheffield , p. ). two years later roosevelt, in his well-known “new nationalism” speech, stated that “the health and vitality of our people are at least as well worth conserving as their forests, waters, lands, and minerals” (slack ). roosevelt continuously attached environmental preservation to the survival of the human being, and to the survival of the american people. during his presidency, roosevelt established “ national forests, federal bird reserves, four national game preserves, five national parks and monuments on over million acres of public land” (u.s. department of the interior ). conservation efforts were prioritized due to roosevelt’s perception that human survival was innately connected with the survival of nature. roosevelt’s existential fear – that abuse of natural resources would lead to irrevocable harm for humanity – informed conservationist policies. despite roosevelt’s efforts, environmental degradation continued throughout the th century, leading other key american environmentalists to likewise frame the cause using similar existential terminology. rachel carson begins her classic work, silent spring, with a fable of the destruction of nature. where plant-life once thrived, and animals once flourished, silence had crept in and destroyed this natural harmony. in her work, carson identifies numerous manners in which human beings have irreparably damaged the air, soil and waters of the planet which could turn her fable into a reality. she notes that the history of life on earth was, until relatively recently, a history of interaction and adaptation. however a seismic shift occurred from benign interactions between life, to the human domination of the rest of the natural world. carson states, “given time – time not in years but in millennia – life adjusts, and a balance has been reached. for time is the essential ingredient; but in the modern world there is no time” ( , p. ). the human domination of the planet led to carson’s existential concern; as people utilize chemicals to control the planet’s plant and animal populations, she fears not only for their survival, but for human survival. speaking on the development and usage of hundreds of pesticides that were developed over the span of the twenty years prior to her work, carson asks rhetorically, “can anyone believe it is possible to lay down such a barrage of poisons on the surface of the earth without making it unfit for all life? they should not be called ‘insecticides,’ but ‘biocides’” ( , pp. - ). in silent spring, carson addresses humanity’s frail existential condition. while writing during the cold war, carson notes that environmental destruction – second only to nuclear annihilation – was the biggest threat to the human species. beyond humanity, carson considers how pesticides were existentially jeopardizing the entirety of the planet’s life. traces of synthetic chemicals which had only recently begun being used at the time of carson’s writing had already been found across the animal kingdom; they have entered and lodged in the bodies of fish, birds, reptiles, and domestic and wild animals so universally that scientists carrying on animal experiments find it almost impossible to locate subjects free from such contamination. they have been found in fish in remote mountain lakes, in earthworms burrowing in soil, in the eggs of birds – and in man himself. for these chemicals are now stored in the bodies of the vast majority of human beings, regardless of age. they occur in the mother’s milk, and probably in the tissues of the unborn child. (carson , pp. - ) these “elixirs of death” were able to alter the very function of cells in “sinister and often deadly ways” (carson , p. ).cxv arsenic, a highly toxic poison, can kill many speciescxvi and has carcinogenic effects in humans. yet at the time of carson’s writing, arsenic was employed as a chemical pesticide. other chemical compounds such as dichlorodiphenyltrichloroethane (ddt) can affect human reproductive capacity and may negatively affect embryos or fetuses exposed to the compound. compounds similar to ddt such as dieldrin, aldrin, and endrin build up in food chains, are all toxic, and can have potentially deadly impacts such as degenerative changes to vital organs including the liver and kidneys. endrin specifically was “ times as poisonous as ddt to mammals, times as poisonous to fish, and about times as poisonous to some birds” (carson , p. ). carson tells an anecdote of a child and dog playing on a surface recently sprayed with endrin. as a result of seemingly innocuous play, the dog convulsed and died only an hour or so later, and the child slipped into a permanently vegetative state. carson’s work is full of stories and statistics like the aforementioned examples which serve to support her existential fear of human domination of the environment. silent spring warns readers of the powerful and destructive effects that humans can have on nature. in turn, human destruction of the environment through the use of cxv the term “elixirs of death” would be supplemented later in the work with carson’s depiction of “rivers of death.” carson was not shy in highlighting the presence of death and the existential emergency that chemical compounds had on all living beings. cxvi carson notes extant sickness and death among exposed cows, goats, pigs, deer, fish, and bees ( , p. ). chemical pesticides served as an existential threat to the species itself. while corporations such as the chemical company dupont, and the agricultural company monsanto contested carson’s environmental efforts, carson’s public appearances and testimonies helped usher in the first significant era of environmental activism and environmental regulation in the united states. chemically induced existential threats served as a warning to some legislators in the united states and led to the creation of the environmental protection agency (epa), and the passage of the federal insecticide, fungicide, and rodenticide act which created pesticide regulations and protections. while silent spring was immediately impactful to some elected officials, it also had long-lasting impacts on future elected official al gore. at least as far back as , when al gore was a united states senator, he told the new york times that reading carson’s silent spring during his early teens at his mother’s behest was a foundational moment in his environmental awakening (dionne ).cxvii that same year, gore published an editorial in the washington post in which he framed environmental destruction in existential terms. gore states that “humankind has suddenly entered into a brand new relationship with the planet earth. the world's forests are being destroyed; an enormous hole is opening in the ozone layer. living species are dying at an unprecedented rate” ( ). gore’s editorial echoed carson’s concerns as he described global environmental decay as an existential issue since it could cxvii gore repeats this story about his mother’s insistence that he read silent spring in his book earth in the balance ( ), his introduction to silent spring ( ), and again in his later work an inconvenient truth ( ) where he mentions it twice. “perhaps even supplant, our concern with preventing nuclear war” (ibid). with the cold war concluding, gore noted that u spy planes were being repurposed as they no longer monitored soviet missile silos but helped to track ozone depletion which indicates that the latter had become a more immediate existential threat than the former. caron’s silent spring encouraged change in american environmental policy, but gore highlights how over years later, the environmental crisis was continuing. in his final year as a senator, gore published his first book on environmentalism, earth in the balance: ecology and the human spirit ( ). the book was incredibly popular and successful, as it reached the new york times bestseller list and received the robert f. kennedy center for justice and human rights book award. in the introduction, gore begins by noting the severed attachment between human beings and nature which he, like carson, finds deeply troubling. he worries that human domination over nature threatens world’s progeny as gore states that “many people have lost faith in the future, because in virtually every facet of our civilization we are beginning to act as if our future is now so much more in doubt” ( , p. ). human actions, gore warns, have put the planet’s life, including humanity, in great jeopardy. like carson, gore focuses on the existential devastation that humanity has had on various species across the globe. he states that “living species of animals and plants are now vanishing around the world one hundred times faster than at any time in the past million years” (gore , p. ). gore supplements his fears of ongoing and recent existential destruction with warnings about a future in peril as, for example, increases in atmospheric chlorine can lead to radiation increases that threaten “all animal and plant life” ( , p. ). earth in the balance serves as a warning that there is a feedback loop wherein human being and our actions are a threat to the global environment and in turn the environment alters and has become a threat to human civilization. as vice president, gore would lead attempts to intervene in altering the human side of the feedback loop that threatened all life on earth. unfortunately, major efforts such as signing onto the kyoto protocol were opposed by the senate. while gore signed the kyoto protocol, it was never ratified by congress. the clinton-gore administration did allow the vice president to launch the global learning and observations to benefit the environment (globe) program in which utilized the fledgling internet to educate students on environmental issues. unfortunately, despite gore’s environmental efforts as a senator and as vice president, the existentially destructive potential of climate change strengthened. gore’s latter work, an inconvenient truth: the planetary emergency of global warming and what we can do about it ( ), was an even larger phenomenon than earth in the balance. the book was published alongside the film of the same name and presents many images used in gore’s environmental lectures. the film version of an inconvenient truth won two academy awards including for best documentary, and it became the eleventh highest grossing documentary film in the united states, earning $ million domestically, and an additional $ million internationally (box office mojo, an inconvenient truth). gore, in the film and book, continued to warn audiences of climate change’s increasing existential threat to humanity and presented powerful imagery to support his concerns. gore calls climate change a “planetary emergency” and acknowledges that despite his decades of advocacy, “the pace of destruction has worsened and the urgent need for a response has grown more acute” ( , p. ). the efforts of the clinton-gore administration would immediately be reversed by the incoming bush-cheney administration which rolled back or eliminated existing environmental regulations and bush reneged on his campaign promise to address carbon dioxide emissions. gore refers to continuing climate change as a “a true planetary emergency” which, if left unaddressed, will lead to a “string of terrible catastrophes” ( , p. ). among the devastation is existential destruction as gore notes that climate change has caused “the loss of living species at a level comparable to the extinction event that wiped out the dinosaurs million years ago” (ibid). the existential threat is not just aimed at the world’s various animal species, but gore recognizes that climate change presents “the worst potential catastrophe in the history of human civilization” (ibid). significant environmental existential threats were realized in the years between gore serving as a senator from tennessee and the release of an inconvenient truth. gore presents readers (and viewers of his film) with a cacophony of imagery showing the devastating effects of climate change: the massive reduction in snow and ice on mount kilimanjaro; melted glaciers in argentina, switzerland, italy, and tibet; charts highlighting the increase in ocean temperatures over years; and the massive hurricanes and typhoons that hit disparate parts of the world in the early twentieth century. punctuating gore’s points are images from hurricane katrina which landed in the southeastern united states in , killed between one-and-two thousand people, and caused $ billion in damages.cxviii katrina was but one of the hurricanes and tropical storms that occurred in .cxix yet conversely, gore notes that climate change has also caused some of the most intense droughts in recorded history and has led massive reductions of reliable water sources such as lake chad. a lack of soil moisture in places such as the american southwest leads to less arable land, less productive agriculture, and an increased potential for wildfires. hurricanes, droughts, wildfires, and underproduction of crops are all potential threats to animal life including human beings. gore makes it clear, “what we do to nature we do to ourselves. the magnitude of environmental destruction is now on a scale few ever foresaw; the wounds no longer simply heal themselves. we have to act affirmatively to stop the harm” ( , p. ). while an inconvenient truth made public waves, climate destruction has not ceased and gore released a sequel to both the book and film of an inconvenient truth in . environmental degradation has been portrayed as an existential concern in the united states at least since thoreau’s writings in the th century. framing cxviii in usd amounts. approximately $ billion in usd. cxix as previously noted, hurricane katrina is also a key example of how climate change has a racial component as the population that was impacted was disproportionately black. further discussion of environmental racism lies largely beyond the scope of this project, but examples ranging from money diverted from improving louisiana’s levy system, to waste treatment plants in areas with high percentages of black residents such as chester, pennsylvania, to the ongoing water crisis in flint, michigan are all issues that must be addressed. environmental racism is also a global problem as much of the existential burden of climate change lies on non-white populations across the global south. again, these issues should not be decoupled from environmental activism but are much too large to address in depth in this chapter. environmental concerns in existential terminology is not just a useful political tactic, but a staunch reality; “the intergovernmental panel on climate change tells us that we need to roughly halve global carbon emissions by to have a decent chance at keeping warming below . ° celsius–the limit that scientists agree we should aim for to prevent catastrophe” (aronoff et al. , p. ). existential anxiety due to environmental destruction has inspired conservationist and environmental action among some of the most well-known advocates such as roosevelt, carson, and gore. unfortunately, these efforts have not been sufficient and the earth’s environment continues to suffer from human made destruction. climate change is one of the most substantial concerns facing humanity today. if left unchecked, the potentially deadly results of climate change will affect the global population and these deadly consequences have been highlighted by today’s environmental activists. environmental activism and environmental existential anxiety today as i have shown in the prior section american environmental activists have framed their causes in existential terms in a manner that is similar to black lives matter and the alt-right. what may differentiate today’s existentially motivated environmental activism from centuries prior is the imminence of the existential concern. while thoreau was concerned with the manufacturing and shipping of mid-nineteenth-century goods and resources, the degree of environmental collapse today is far greater and impacts the global community in existentially devastating manners. thoreau, roosevelt, carson, and gore all were concerned about both the immediate and long-term impacts of environmental degradation. in the twenty-first century, the once long-term concerns of earlier generations are actualized in ongoing global environmental devastation. a large- scale social movement which responds to the immediacy of environmental collapse may be the best hope for pushing for environmentally friendly socioeconomic and political change. as previously noted, tarrow and tilly ( ) define social movements as collective and sustained challenges to power holding elites which utilize public displays. in the united states, it is not clear that today’s environmental activism could be considered a social movement. i do not mean to undermine environmental activists or activism, nor am i suggesting that organizations and advocacy groups are not working towards environmental transformation. groups including, but extending far beyond the sierra club, people’s climate movement, and the national audubon society have all worked to address environmental destruction. however, while the respective and people’s climate marches were widely attended across the united states (organized by people’s climate movement), individual instances of protest are not the same as a social movement. while the sunrise movement, for example, has the potential to grow into a sustained social movement, i am skeptical about including it as a social movement as this moment. again, this does not mean that the sunrise movement has not invested in environmental activism as it has already worked to elect sympathetic officials and has protested speaker of the house nancy pelosi for climate inaction (roberts a). until the sunrise movement (or another organization) proves to be a sustained and public effort, it is difficult to consider them a social movement and for the purposes of this work, i will address both international organizations and activists. one young environmental activist, greta thunberg, a swedish teenager whose name has become synonymous with youth-led environmental activism has highlighted and fought against insufficient political responses to climate change. while greta thunberg may not be nearly as well-known as former presidents and vice presidents, world leaders including australian prime minister scott morrison, german chancellor angela merkel, russian president vladimir putin, french president emmanuel macron, italian prime minister giuseppe conte, and united states president donald trump have all acknowledged thunberg and her efforts.cxx thunberg has faced criticism from across the world, and yet she continues to be a global spokesperson in the ongoing fight against climate change. following nearly years of precedent, in her public statements and speeches, greta thunberg has addressed climate change as an existential concern. on september rd, , thunberg spoke at the united nations’ climate action summit and publicly proclaimed climate change an existential crisis. she stated, “people are dying. entire ecosystems are collapsing. we are in the beginning of a mass extinction, and all you can talk about is money and fairy tales of eternal economic growth” (npr staff ). while thunberg focused on death and extinction at the u.n. climate action summit, it is not the first time that she has described the crisis in existential terms. in april , thunberg spoke with politico and stated plainly, "we cxx not all in positive manners as some, like trump, have mocked thunberg. have not treated this crisis as a crisis; we see it as another problem that needs to be fixed. but it is so much more than that. it’s an existential crisis, more important than anything else” (oroschakoff ). she similarly stated in an interview with bbc “this is an emergency. this is an existential crisis and we must do everything we can to stop it” (bbc news a). in , at a tedx event in stockholm, thunberg stated “everyone keeps saying that climate change is an existential threat and the most important issue of all and yet they just carry on like before” ( ). while thunberg is one of the most well-known climate change activists portraying the crisis in existential terms today, she is not alone as some environmental organizations have undertaken similar existentially motivated approaches. extinction rebellion is a global environmental movement which was established in the united kingdomcxxi in . the name “extinction rebellion” is itself an existential term; it is a movement portraying itself as resisting global death. protests in london have included several symbols and statements associated with death which highlight the existential anxiety produced by climate change. for example, one protester locked himself in a hearse which contained a coffin with a plaque that stated, “our future.” a nine-year-old, accompanied by her sister and mother stated, “we’re here because we want the world to still be alive when we die” (bbc news b). cxxi extinction rebellion is global and has acted in american cities such as new york, denver, and portland, as well as internationally in calgary, paris, vienna, amsterdam, and across australia. the organization, however, is disproportionately active in the united kingdom where it receives the bulk of its media coverage (townsend ). birthstrike is an environmental group which is both unique and affiliated with extinction rebellion. birthstrike, as its name suggests, is a group that has united in an anti-natalist campaign that promotes an inclusive, childfree approach to resisting climate change. the group’s tumblr page description refers to life as being in immediate danger and movement supporters protested in london with a flag that stated, “article : right to life” which references the u.k.’s human rights act and protesters placed oil drums in strollers having spray-painted the containers with phrases including “where’s our future?” (@_birthstrike ). birthstrike is just one group within the larger environmental activism universe that exemplifies a response to the anxiety produced by climate change induced death. the environmental existentialism of activist organizations such as extinction rebellion and birthstrike are also found in mainstream political circles as existential language has been used by current elected officials to describe ongoing environmental decay. jonathan bartley, co-leader of the green party of england, and wales, in an interview with gq (which coincided with the release of the green party’s manifesto), twice referred to climate change as an “existential crisis” (chesterton ). similarly, united states senator and two-time presidential candidate, bernie sanders, took to twitter following hurricane dorian’s devastation of the bahamas as he stated, “let us be clear: hurricane dorian has everything to do with climate change, which is the existential crisis of our time” (sanders ). washington governor jay inslee likewise referred to climate change as an “existential crisis” as he urged the democratic national committee and its chair, tom perez, to hold democratic primary debates specifically on the topic (democracy now ). minnesota representative ilhan omar stated on twitter that “our next president should declare a #nationalemergency on day to address the existential threat to all life on the planet posed by climate change” (omar ). left- leaning politicians have, like the previously noted activists and organizations, recently utilized existential language to draw attention to the imminence of death that will occur if climate change inaction continues. framing environmental activism in existential terms has been a tactic used by protesters, activists, and elected officials for nearly two centuries. the notion that global climate change will, if not immediately addressed, lead to death and mass extinction cannot be ignored in studying climate change politics. should a sustained environmental social movement develop, the movement should emulate the rebellious approach of black lives matter so that both immediate reforms, and long-term systemic changes can be simultaneously addressed. learning from black lives matter black lives matter’s activism has not stopped police killings of black americans; atatiana jefferson’s death at the hands of the fort worth police department, breonna taylor’s death at the hands of the louisville metro police department, and george floyd’s death at the hands of the minneapolis police department are evidence of this ongoing trend. neither has the movement stopped racist, anti-black vigilantism as ahmaud arbery’s murder in georgia illustrates. despite continued violence and death perpetrated against black americans, black lives matter has been informative for how future social movements ought to operate. specifically, movements that are rooted in existential anxieties about death should follow the rebellious path of black lives matter rather than the revolutionary violence of the alt- right. while it is not clear that today’s environmental activism will blossom into a sustained social movement, environmental activists – who likely would be involved in forging a green social movement – already frame the cause in existential terms. should a sustained environmental social movement develop based on responses to existential anxieties, then black lives matter is the social movement to emulate. black lives matter’s rebelliousness: immediate reforms and long-term approaches black lives matter pursues immediate and relative goals but does not sacrifice more radical and systemic challenges and solutions. yet the movement also does not contemplate grand, teleological pursuits that aim towards a “final stage of society.” rather than a teleological approach, black lives matter represents “the end of teleology” (ruggiero , p. - ) as it works in a sisyphean manner without a clearly defined final solution to systemic racism in america. black lives matter is a rebellion which pursues both immediate and long-term goals without sacrificing either; it is a push not for a telos, but for both realist and radical political changes. this approach – a radical realist rebellion – is what a burgeoning environmental social movement ought to pursue. while camus is critical of teleological efforts aimed towards achieving pre- defined political ends, what he supports is a rebellious politics that aims towards, what i am calling, “radical realism.” the radical realist approach to political action refuses to sacrifice immediacy or long-term systemic change. the language of radical realism helps us to understand how black lives matter can reject teleology without forgoing the fight for significant social, economic, and political changes. concurrently, radical realism helps us understand that black lives matter has also refused to focus solely on systemic overhauls and has embraced immediate political reforms as improvements over the existing status quo. while black lives matter may find many reforms to be largely insufficient, they are still celebrated as advancing the movement’s cause, even if only in smaller increments. the term radical realism helps to bridge the gap between a realist approach to political change that focuses on immediate contexts and achievable goals, and more radical demands for systemic overhauls. in the rebel, camus explains that a rebellion which is focused on alleviating actual suffering and death “only aspires to the relative and can only promise an assured dignity coupled with relative justice” ( , p. ). he is comfortable with accepting qualified successes as he warns “absolute freedom mocks at justice. absolute justice denies freedom. to be fruitful, the two ideas must find their limits in each other. no man considers that his condition is free if it is not at the same time just, nor just unless it is free” ( , p. ). those who pursue absolute and unfettered freedom, for camus, cannot logically condemn murder. those who pursue absolute justice (which camus argues was the goal of the soviet union) may logically suspend liberty in justice’s name. avoiding temptations towards either absolutism requires a persistent memory of the initial source of rebellion; a “no” and a “yes” which recognize limits to injustice and freedom and includes a promise not to exceed such limits. black lives matter has refused to go beyond acceptable limits while also endorsing relative aims, and this approach has led to some immediate and impactful changes. while black lives are still being lost to police and vigilante violence, black lives matter and its supporters have achieved some notable and immediate successes.cxxii jonathan butler, who participated in black lives matter activism in ferguson, fought alongside activists at the university of missouri to pressure the missouri university system president tim wolfe to resign. wolfe, protesters argued, did not take racism on campus seriously as the missouri students association president faced racial discrimination, and a swastika was drawn on the gateway residential hall in feces (ford ). additionally, following alton sterling’s death at the hands of police officers in baton rouge, louisiana, black lives matter protesters filed a lawsuit against the city alleging that the police used unconstitutional tactics to quell protests. baton rouge settled with the plaintiffs for $ , (meyerson b). while a victorious lawsuit may appear to be a small triumph, it is an accomplishment for the movement’s efforts (especially given their protest tactics) and it is vital to the movement’s sustainability. black lives matter’s push for an increase in the use of body cameras on police officers – spurred by the death of michael brown in ferguson – indirectly led to a major increase in camera purchases by various law enforcement agencies (reilly ). body cxxii these sections were written prior to many of the social and political changes that occurred in response to the protests surrounding the murder of george floyd. please see the final chapter for some thoughts on further achievements of black lives matter. camera footage was an important piece of evidence in the death of walter scott, as former officer michael slager pleaded guilty to using excessive force in scott’s death (ross and lowery ). similarly, -year-old jordan edwards was shot in the back of the head while in a passenger seat of a car in . police officer roy oliver was fired from the department and arrested about a week after the shooting. oliver was found guilty of murdering edwards and was sentenced to years in prison. oliver’s body camera footage was crucial evidence which led to his conviction (ibid). without black lives matter’s efforts, and subsequent public pressure the respective police departments may never have voluntarily purchased and mandated body cameras on their officers. political theorist courtenay daum argues that transformation (dismantling of an entire system) – as opposed to reformation – is the means to redistribute power and end the police state that continues to take black lives. yet black lives matter activists, including alicia garza and patrisse cullors have not taken as staunch of a stance as daum. as previously noted, garza acknowledged in a interview that, “in one year, there were laws passed around criminal justice reform around the country” (eidelson ). these reforms are pragmatic achievements that garza celebrated as meaningful accomplishments by or inspired by black lives matter’s activism. garza also continues to fight for increased turnout by black voters as she states “i'm hoping that what we're able to accomplish is a more nuanced way of engaging black communities for the sake of cementing turnout and increasing turnout in black communities” (hayes ). cullors, in an interview with american studies scholar christina heatherton, echoes elements of garza’s realism. cullors states that she believes in police reform and supports efforts to “reclaim the idea of public safety as access to jobs, healthy food, and shelter – in other words, having a framework that is about the community’s response to social ills instead of a police response to social ills” (heatherton , p. ). realist reforms, however, may insufficiently change the political landscape as daum highlights, and more radical pursuits may be necessary. if camus can accept a realist approach to relative success, his philosophy retains a radical critique; there remains a systematic challenge to political and economic norms that aspires to great change rather than exclusively to reform. in “neither victims nor executioners” ( ) and in more depth in the rebel ( ), camus critiques both dialectical communism and western capitalism for being utopian and absolutist. his rejection of both ruling ideologies implies that reforming either system would be insufficient, as he sees both marxism and capitalism as inherently, or systematically flawed.cxxiii thus, camus’s rejection of both capitalism and marxism is a radical rejection. patrisse cullors stresses her commitment to radical, systemic changes. although i noted that cullors supports movement efforts for police reform, her long-term goal is abolition. in the same interview with christina heatherton, cullors states “i believe we should abolish the police. i think they are extremely dangerous and will continue to be. that doesn’t mean i don’t believe in police reform” (heatherton , p. ). later in the interview, cullors offers more radical statements focused on systemic economic and cxxiii the notion of the inevitability of progress, camus argues, is present in both economic and governing theories and this utopianism is noted as each theory’s fatal flaw. political changes; “an abolitionist society is not based on capital. … it’s a society that has no borders, literally” (heatherton , p. ). cullors supports meaningful reforms while recognizing that they are insufficient. while black lives matter has enjoyed some reformist successes, the movement has signed on to statements which support cullors’s vision of radical, systemic changes. radical, systemic concerns are found in the movement for black lives’ organizational platform, “vision for black lives.” the platform includes calls for “divestment from exploitative forces including prisons, fossil fuels, police, surveillance and exploitative corporations” and “a reconstruction of the economy to ensure black communities have collective ownership, not merely access.” the platform does not solely demand reforms but includes both reforms and these aforementioned calls for radical changes to the extant criminal justice and economic systems in the united states. historian michael kazin notes that black lives matter “has its radical aspects and its more reformist aspects” (illing a). while successful implementation of relative reforms has been (and should be) celebrated, black lives matter has refused to abandon its commitment to radical critiques of systematic injustice. environmental activism and radical realism environmental activists should be cognizant that embracing political reforms – even ones that are insufficient in entirely reversing climate change – can still be productive and may be immediately necessary. for example, activists ought to celebrate the over mayors from across the united states who agreed to adopt and honor the commitments enshrined in the paris climate agreement despite president trump’s withdrawal from the pact (climate mayors ). these mayors represent over million americans and include the mayors of the ten largest cities by population. at the state level, new york is one example of a state which is pursuing an aspirational set of environmental targets that strive for carbon-free electricity by and a net-zero carbon economy by . as reporter david roberts of vox explains, “advocates didn’t get everything they wanted, but in the big picture, the clcpa [climate leadership and community protection act] is a huge, huge win. the country’s third-biggest economy has passed its most ambitious economy-wide climate targets — some of the most ambitious climate targets in the world” (roberts b). state and local government should be applauded when attempting to fill the gaps that federal and international political agreements have created. while these laws and agreements are immediate measures that are likely to have positive impacts, they exist within a context of federal legislative impotence. alicia garza celebrated the previously noted pieces of state and local level criminal justice legislation, even when she still stated the laws were ultimately insufficient. likewise, state, and local efforts to curb climate change will likely remain inadequate in staving off climate induced death and radical, systemic critiques are necessary. environmental non-profit the cdpcxxiv published its carbon majors report which compiled data from publicly available emissions figures. the report concludes cxxiv formerly known as carbon disclosure project, the organization is now “the cdp.” that more than half of global industrial emissions since can be traced back to corporate and state-owned entities. furthermore, the report found that since , companies are responsible for over % of the world’s greenhouse gas emissions (riley ). environmental transformation will require a substantial shift in the means by which energy is generated and consumed, and plausibly a systemic change in the global economic system. state and local level reforms in the united states are unlikely to offset the greenhouse gas contributions of large state-controlled entities and multinational corporations. countries and state-owned businesses from locations including, but not limited to china, iran, india, mexico, russia, united arab emirates, poland, kuwait, nigeria, iraq, qatar, kazakhstan, libya, and turkmenistan all feature prominently on the list of the top greenhouse gas emitters. publicly traded, multinational corporations including exxonmobil, bp, chevron, shell, total s.a., conocophillips, lukoil, and canadian natural resources also appear on the list. environmental change will require a shift in the way that energy is produced and consumed as the aforementioned nations and corporations all actively participate in the gas and coal industries. extinction rebellion has promoted systematic changes as necessary to curbing environmental catastrophe. the united kingdom’s extinction rebellion chapter presents three demands, the second of which is a reduction of “greenhouse gas emissions to net zero by ” (extinction rebellion, our demands). this is a radical demand that would require an immediate response and restructuring of the economy of the united kingdom including its participation in international trade with high-polluting nations and corporations. the third demand is that “government must create and be led by the decisions of a citizens’ assembly on climate and ecological justice” (ibid). cxxvi cxxv again, this is a radical demand that would require systematic changes in the structure and behavior of government. radical, systemic critiques may be necessary to adequately fight the impending death and destruction of unfettered climate change. canadian social scientist kevin mackay ( ) finds that oligarchic interests in developed nations including canada, australia, eurozone members, and the united states have contributed to climate degradation. like extinction rebellion, mackay argues for radical economic and political shifts from oligarchic industrial capitalism to “a democratic, eco-socialist society” (ibid). this, mackay argues, will require greater economic justice, a commitment to human rights, and dedication to ecological sustainability. mackay presents a systemic critique which challenges capitalistic interests and government acquiescence to demands from the wealthy. his solution is likewise one which would require vast systemic change in governance and economics. black lives matter has endorsed radical challenges to capitalist economics and statist systems of mass incarceration, and some environmental activists have similarly supported systemic critiques of capitalism and oligarchic pseudo-democracy. while cxxv the first demand is titled “tell the truth” and states “government must tell the truth by declaring a climate and ecological emergency, working with other institutions to communicate the urgency for change.” while this is not a systemic demand per se, it does reinforce the notion that climate change is an immediate and existential emergency. cxxvi ireland recently experimented with a citizens assembly which was vital in its recent policy shifts on same-sex marriage and abortion rights. goals such as ending mass incarceration and reaching carbon neutrality are long-term and radical solutions, they remain important pursuits. black lives matter’s radical politics do not prohibit the movement from supporting immediate changes that benefit suffering black americans. a sustained environmental social movement, if one develops in the united states, should likewise celebrate, and support immediate changes while – like sisyphus endlessly pushing his boulder up his hill – ceaselessly pursuing more radical and systemic demands. radical realism and the end of teleology: avoiding the pitfalls of the alt-right i have intentionally avoided critiquing the politics of the alt-right; analyzing and criticizing the white nationalist movement (as white nationalist) is best saved for another work. instead, i argued that the alt-right fails on its own terms because it is a teleological social movement with supporters who have committed harm against white people, and with prominent members of the movement who have excused the murder of white opposition by appealing to the notion of being a race traitor – a claim which does not, by the movement’s own apparent standards, excuse the murder. the alt-right is not a movement that is serious about alleviating the suffering of white americans. the movement does not pursue any immediate changes such as expanding medicaid or raising the federal minimum wage that could ease economic burdens of white americans, many of whom are financially suffering. nor does the alt- right fight against social plagues which disproportionately affect white americans such as the ongoing opioid epidemic and high levels of mental illness and suicide rates. the opioid epidemic, for example, has contributed to a decrease in the life expectancy of white americans, leading some scholars to refer to the ongoing crisis as a uniquely “white problem” (hansen and netherland ). while there has been a surge in the number of opioid overdose deaths among suburban and rural whites, there are similar increases in more urban settings such as in staten island, which has the largest percentage of white residents among new york city’s five boroughs (mendoza et al. ). similarly, suicide has been noted to be particularly high among white american males. as noted in the previous chapter, the american foundation for suicide prevention found that in the united states, white people are the racial subgroup which is most susceptible to suicide and white males – the primary intersectional group within the alt-right – accounted for . % of suicide deaths in .cxxvii when considering age, the rate of suicide is highest in middle age white men (american foundation for suicide prevention, suicide statistics). despite harsh social realities, the alt-right has not fought for policies or reforms that could alleviate the actual death and suffering of white americans. the alt-right does not pursue realist changes and instead solely pursues a telos – a “new jerusalem” (ruggiero ) –wherein all the problems of white people will be theoretically solved when racially homogeneous ethnostates are achieved. until then, the alt-right fails to show concern for the ongoing suffering of actual white people and even contributes to this suffering through violence and murder. the alt-right, even on its own terms, is a camusian revolution that sacrifices actual white lives in the name of cxxvii this statistic is particularly noteworthy as white men make up approximately % of the population of the united states. pursuing a pro-white telos. while it seems unlikely that an environmental movement would pursue such a self-destructive path, a final warning is necessary to restate why a revolutionary approach would be devastating. there is no doubt that existing state and local efforts to fight climate change are, at best, relative successes that are ultimately insufficient at solving grandiose problems. however, potential movements fighting climate change should support, and not oppose, these and other future interventions. it is not unfathomable to imagine critiques from environmental activists which would challenge the value of local energy policies when there are nationally controlled oil and coal industries around the world. a refusal to support sympathetic and impactful, yet ultimately insufficient legislation, will not further environmental causes. yes, environmental activists should acknowledge the limitations of policies that exist or that may exist in the future. at the same time, movements should be supportive of policies that will save lives and reverse or stall climate trends. in greta thunberg’s aforementioned tedx event, she stated “if the emissions have to stop then we must stop the emissions. to me, that is black or white” (thunberg ). unfortunately, the “black or white” approach to climate change may ignore the many “gray” reforms that are immediately beneficial, yet ultimately inadequate. “gray” reforms – those which can help thwart climate change without completely reversing carbon emission trends – may delay or prevent global catastrophe. yes, thunberg is correct that systemic overhauls remain necessary to truly alleviating the existential anxiety associated with climate induced death. however, even inadequate reforms are certainly better than inaction.cxxviii the most significant environmental reform proposed in the united states is the green new deal, championed by representative alexandria ocasio-cortez and senator ed markey (aronoff et al. ). the green new deal aims for the united states economy to reach net zero carbon in the s and connects the fight against climate change to economic reforms as it calls for a federal jobs guarantee. furthermore, it prioritizes clean energy investments in working class communities and communities of color, while also expanding access to social services such as free college tuition and a “medicare for all” style system of socialized medicine. the green new deal is a realist set of reforms rooted in “the world’s best climate science” which is responding to “an existential threat to human civilization” (aronoff et al. , p. ). yet even the scholar-authors of a planet to win: why we need a green new deal note that the reforms, while immediate and impactful, will not replace the more radical need to replace capitalism in order to stave off environmental destruction. refusing to acknowledge the benefit of reforms, and working only towards radical change, can lead to a sacrifice of actual lives in the name of a telos. an environmental social movement, should one develop and sustain, can certainly be critical of insufficient legislation and can fight for radical, systematic changes. in the end, cxxviii unfortunately, responses can be used by government as a means to shut down a movement or stifle discourse. a government can pass inadequate reforms, ignore larger systemic changes, and use these reforms as “evidence” that they have achieved the necessary goals to stymie climate change, and to force the movement to retreat. movements must never lose sight of their initial call to action; to reduce the actual suffering and death that is brought upon actual human beings. or, in camus’s terms, fight against injustice. conclusion an environmental social movement can situate its cause as rooted in existential anxiety as activists ranging from thoreau to thunberg have already embraced existential language in highlighting the need for humanity to alter its domination of the environment; failing to do so will ultimately lead to humanity’s demise. however, an all- or-nothing, teleological approach that repudiates immediate, albeit insufficient, reforms will do nothing to alleviate the burden of environmental catastrophe. radical realism requires that movements think both towards the immediately achievable and towards long-term systemic changes without sacrificing either. abandoning the former could lead to a teleological approach that does not address the concerns of the suffering, while abandoning the latter will be inadequate in bringing about the environmental changes that are necessary. camus’s words could easily apply to a theoretical environmental social movement in the st century as he states, “they would be preparing the future and at the same time knocking down a few of the walls which imprison us today. if realism is to be the art of taking into account both the present and the future, of gaining the most while sacrificing the least, then who could fail to see the positively dazzling realism of such behavior?” ( , p. ). aronoff et al. make this point clear in a planet to win: why we need a green new deal. the authors conclude the age of climate gradualism is over. if we act too slowly, it will just be a matter of years before concatenating crises turn into an unimaginable nightmare. to stop that from happening, we need to go all out. but that’s not the same as believing that every single fight, every single policy contest, every single election is ‘all or nothing.’ (aronoff et al. , pp. - ) to stop environmental destruction, a green social movement in the united states can, as the previous scholars state, embrace reforms such as the green new deal while pushing for greater systemic changes to the global, capitalist mode of production. climate change and the catastrophe that follows are not inevitable. environmental destruction and the existential havoc it wreaks upon humans and other animals alike can be halted. chapter # postscript: and beyond ahmaud arbery, a -year-old black man, was jogging near his home in glynn county, georgia on february rd, . arbery was pursued from behind by two armed, white men and a third who recorded the pursuit on his cellphone. ahmaud arbery’s death that day was ruled a homicide and the cause of his death was determined to be three shotgun wounds he sustained: two shots hit his chest and one in his wrist (stelloh ). it took days, the release of the video of arbery’s murder, and massive public outcry for the perpetrators to be arrested and charged with arbery’s murder. breonna taylor, a -year-old black woman, was asleep in the home she shared with her boyfriend kenneth walker on the night of march th, . three plainclothes officers of the louisville metro police department (lmpd) executed a no-knock search warrant, and forcibly entered taylor’s apartment in louisville, kentucky with a battering ram. walker believed that three men had just broken into his apartment, retrieved his gun, and fired upon the officers. the three police officers fired over twenty shots and breonna taylor was shot eight times and died that night. the lmpd officers were looking for two men suspected of selling drugs more than miles away. although taylor knew one of the men, the suspect was already in police custody at the time of taylor’s death (bogel-burroughs ). the three officers involved were placed on administrative reassignment while investigations occurred and eventually officer brett hanikson was fired from the lmpd. the grand jury declined to charge any of the officers with murder in taylor’s death.cxxix on may th, george floyd, a -year-old black man was killed by police officers in minneapolis, minnesota. floyd allegedly used a counterfeit $ bill to buy cigarettes from a local grocery store. both police body camera footage and cellphone videos from witnesses captured floyd’s death at the hands of officer derek chauvin. floyd, already in handcuffs, was forced in the backseat of a police car, where he stated that he was struggling to breathe due to claustrophobia. chauvin pulled floyd out of the car where he fell to the ground, chest first. chauvin then forced his knee into floyd’s neck while officer james kueng applied pressure to floyd’s torso, officer thomas lane applied pressure to floyd’s legs, and officer tou thao stood to the side and watched the situation unfold (bennett, lee, and cahlan ). witness video shows floyd repeatedly saying “i can’t breathe” at least times while pleading with officers to get off of his neck and saying that he was about to die. floyd said, “my stomach hurts, my neck hurts, everything hurts” and begged the officers, “don’t kill me.” floyd, who was visibly bleeding, continued to cry for help before appearing unconscious. officers checked for a pulse, found that floyd did not have a pulse, but provided no medical assistance (hill et al ). videos of george floyd’s death circulated quickly on the internet and chauvin cxxix as of this writing, the case is becoming more complicated as an anonymous grand juror in the case has spoken out, and has publicly stated that the attorney general, daniel cameron, refused to pursue homicide charges against the officers. the grand jury, therefore, could not deliberate on, or consider homicide charges against the officers (allen ). was arrested on may th and charged with third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. following mass protests and public outcry the three other officers involved in floyd’s death were eventually arrested on june rd and were charged with aiding and abetting chauvin, who’s charge was elevated to second-degree murder. the deaths of ahmaud arbery, breonna taylor, and george floyd all occurred in the midst of the covid- global pandemic; an existential crisis that paralyzed the world. while anyone can contract covid- , suffer from the virus and die as a result of infection, black americans (and people of color in the united states generally) have contracted the virus at higher rates than white americans (centers for disease control and prevention ) in both urban and rural areas (barrón-lópez et al. ). covid- is particularly deadly to people with underlying health conditions and chronic diseases such as cardiovascular disease, diabetes, lung disease, asthma, and diabetes; all conditions which disproportionately affect african americans (millett et al, ; poteat et al. ; kendi ). black americans are also less likely to have access to health insurance and quality health care, are disproportionately employed in “essential” jobs that require in-person work, utilize public transportation which can be a site of viral transmission, and live in areas with higher rates of air pollution and human congestion (millett et al, ; poteat et al. ; goody and wood, ).cxxx despite the cxxx specifically, scholars note high rates of black employment in “low-wage health care sectors such as home health aides, nursing home staff, and hospital janitorial, food service, laundry, and other sectors. many of these low-wage jobs do not provide adequate, if any, health insurance, sick leave, childcare, or other benefits which protect higher wage workers from covid- exposures. moreover, the surrounding environment magnifies risk. black americans are more likely to live in crowded settings unprecedented spread of covid- , george floyd’s death inspired mass protests around the united states and across the globe. black lives matter in in response to the aforementioned deaths, although primarily the death of george floyd, and after a few years of being largely dormant from mainstream public discourse, black lives matter reemerged as central to american politics. protests responding to floyd’s murder began in minneapolis on may th, and continued into july. initially, protests were localized in the minneapolis-saint paul metropolitan area of minnesota, but quickly became a nationwide movement, before spreading globally. there were protests in solidarity in over , cities in the united states, and in over countries. while the protests generally remained peaceful, at least american cities imposed curfews, over states and washington d.c. activated the national guard (sternlicht ), and over , people were arrested (olson ). opal tometi describes the protests in a manner that is quite similar to garza’s and cullors’s explanations of their activism following trayvon martin’s death and his killer’s acquittal. as previously noted, garza and cullors each connected trayvon martin to their families and loved ones. similarly, tometi explains that “people are absolutely lifting up names like breonna taylor and ahmaud arbery and george floyd, but i think they are very clearly in the streets for themselves and their family such as public housing where the ability to practice social distancing is quite limited, if not impossible” (poteat et al. , p. ). members because they don’t know who is next” (chotiner ). tometi theorizes that the deaths of taylor, arbery, and floyd resonated with people, and sparked an existential awareness that state-sanctioned death was possible for themselves, and their families. tometi identifies this individual feeling of existential anxiety as a motive for the largest collective action in the history of the nation, much in the way that camus sees one’s recognition of absurdity as an opportunity for participation in collective rebellion; his previously note restatement of descartes’s cogito, “i rebel – therefore we exist” ( , p. ). initial estimates state that between million and million people participated in the protests in the united states alone which makes the protests the largest in united states history (buchanan et al. ). various police forces involved in patrolling the protests have come under intense scrutiny as many officers have been filmed instigating and elevating violence at the protests. nypd officers used their suv as a weapon and rammed a barricade of people, philadelphia police tear gassed peaceful marchers, and police in buffalo shoved an elderly man to the ground who was standing on a street corner and left him bleeding from his ear (way ). on reddit, a user going by “avenattiforpresident” compiled and archived video footage from the protests which documents police brutality unleashed on protesters. in total, footage exists from states, washington d.c., and several clips from unknown locations ( pb ). professor melina abdullah, who co-founded black lives matter’s los angeles chapter, states in a recent interview on the movement’s efforts in response to george floyd’s death, “it’s good that so many white mainstream people and even businesses are making sympathetic statements about black lives mattering, about the reality of white supremacy. the real question is, what will they do?” (as cited in e a kaplan ). abdullah’s question is being answered with changes that extend beyond those which garza had once criticized as “pretty crappy” (eidelson ). most clearly, the protests in response to floyd’s death have brought the conversation about existing racial injustice and the efforts of black lives matter back into the national spotlight, “including in washington, where lawmakers have been unsure how to react or liaise with the groundswell” (barrón-lópez ). chris hayes, in a june interview with alicia garza for nbc news noted the dearth of black lives matter activity during the first years of the trump presidency. he states, the movement itself feels way less present in the everyday of trump’s america than it did five years ago. the amount of cable news stories about a black man dead at the hands of police is much lower. the amount of demonstrations you see in the wake of that, right? there was a period of time in which that was so dominant in the news and in consciousness and the dominance of that in the news and the consciousness has gone away. (hayes ) one year later, hayes’ statement no longer rings true as black lives matter and conversations surrounding race, racism, and racial justice in the united states have returned to the headlines as news coverage of the protests exploded. political scientist michael heaney ( ) writes in the washington post that the “media focused on protest in june more than during any other month in two decades - percent more than at any point in the past two decades. not since the kent state killings, in which national guard troops shot and killed four student protesters in may , has there been so much media attention to protest.” beyond the national conversation, the state, schools and universities, private corporations, and elite individuals have instituted immediate and meaningful changes. police reforms have been instituted around the country at both the city and state levels. cities such as minneapolis, washington d.c., chicago, and denver have banned the use of neck restraints or neck holds (commonly referred to generally as chokeholds) (andrew and asmelash ) as have several states including california, florida and new york (kaur and mack ). the louisville, kentucky metro council unanimously voted to ban no-knock search warrants after the police killing of breonna taylor (gupta and hauser ). several mayors and police chiefs from across the united states organized the police reform and racial justice working group to address needed changes (andrew and asmelash ). in new jersey, the attorney general updated its use-of-force rules for the first time in nearly years, while the dallas police department adopted a “duty to intervene” rule which requires an officer to intervene if a fellow officer is using excessive force (ibid). new york also repealed a law which kept police disciplinary records secret (buchanan et al. ). concurrently, schools from around the country have cut ties with local police forces including in minneapolis, denver, portland, and seattle (andrew and asmelash ). police have also faced budget cuts in several locales. los angeles mayor eric garcetti announced that the city’s budget would not contain new funds for police and instead the city would find budget cuts and reinvest $ million into jobs, health, education, and “in healing” (matthew ), and new york city mayor bill de blasio likewise reached a deal with the city council to reallocate $ billion from the nypd to youth and community services and which moved school safety agents out of the nypd (durkin ). most drastically, the minneapolis city council unanimously voted to disband its existing police department (forliti and karnowski ). statues and monuments of confederate leaders and military members, as well as perpetrators of slavery and genocide have been removed as a response to the protests. cities including birmingham and mobile, alabama, little rock, arkansas, jacksonville, florida, decatur, georgia, indianapolis, indiana, louisville, kentucky, clarksville, tennessee, dallas, fort worth, and houston, texas, norfolk, richmond, and roanoke, virginia, and charleston, west virginia, have seen confederate statues removed by their respective governments (a taylor , ortiz and o’boyle ). monuments to perpetrators of genocide have been removed by officials in albuquerque and santa fe, new mexico, santa fe and ventura, california, and denver, colorado. statues of christopher columbus have been removed by officials in hartford, middletown, new haven, and norwalk connecticut, wilmington, delaware, boston, massachusetts, detroit, michigan, st. louis, missouri, camden and newark, new jersey, columbus, ohio, columbia, south carolina, and houston and san antonio, texas. statues and dedications to racially contentious political figures have likewise been removed including a statue of former philadelphia mayor frank rizzo, a statue of former detroit mayor orville hubbard, and a monument dedicated to vice president john c. calhoun in charleston, south carolina. other statues and monuments have been removed by private entities including the sons of confederate veterans, united daughters of the confederacy, private preparatory schools, the university of nevada, las vegas, university of portland, columbus state community college, the catholic church, the carolina panthers of the national football league, and the minnesota twins of major league baseball. still other statues and monuments were defaced, beheaded, toppled or removed by protesters in cities including birmingham and montgomery, alabama, san francisco and los angeles, california, denver, colorado, new orleans, louisiana, frederick and silver spring, maryland, saint paul, minnesota, eugene and portland oregon, nashville, tennessee, portsmouth and richmond, virginia, and madison, wisconsin. many other statues are currently scheduled for removal by local and state officials, but the respective removals and relocations have not yet occurred (andrew and asmelash , a taylor , ortiz and o’boyle ). while the removal of statues may appear small, it is a significant step in addressing the history of american racism and white supremacy. historian julian hayter told business insider that the removal of confederate statues is an historical correction. hayter states that “[the statues] were designed to rewrite history, to essentially justify the rise of racial apartheid and segregation, and the racial apartheid and segregation of the th century” (as cited in abadi et al. ). fellow historian karen cox notes that the removal of a robert e. lee monument will not lead to the country forgetting who robert e. lee was as “the history is always going to be there” (ibid). however, the removal of the statues is one way of ending the publicly funded celebration of slaveowners and perpetrators of genocide. schools, colleges, and universities have renamed buildings that were previously named after members of the confederacy, white supremacists, segregationists. for example, robert e. lee high school in baton rouge, louisiana was renamed the lee magnet high school, nicholls state university changed the names of two buildings that had previously been named after confederates who had no affiliation with the school, and the university of southern california (usc) removed rufus b. von kleinsmid’s name from its public affairs building for his support of eugenics and forced sterilization. similarly, public sites – including entire neighborhoods –have been renamed. livingston park in albany, new york has become black lives matter park as the livingston family had been an importer of slaves, and the stapleton neighborhood in denver, colorado is undergoing a renaming as its namesake was a member of the ku klux klan. formerly innocuously named locations were positively renamed to honor and acknowledge individuals as the nasa headquarters in washington, d.c. would be renamed the mary w. jackson nasa headquarters to honor the agency’s first black, female engineer, and subway stations in brooklyn, new york are being renamed to honor civil rights leader, medgar evers. in addition to confederate (and related) monuments, another contentious issue has been the use of the confederate battle flag. in response to the protests, the mississippi legislature has commissioned a redesign of the state’s flag which would omit the confederate battle flag that has been a fixture in the state flag’s upper left-hand side. gulfport, mississippi removed the state flag from city-owned buildings while bay st. louis, mississippi stopped flying the state flag city-wide (palumbo ). similarly, confederate battle flags were removed from public sites in florida and georgia. the united states marine corps banned the confederate battle flag from its military bases in all formats (including on bumper stickers, clothing, and coffee mugs) and the united states navy has been working on a similar order (gross ). nascar has also banned any and all use of confederate flag imagery by both its drivers and fans (levenson ). as previously noted, alicia garza referred to many of the previously instituted policy responses to black lives matter as “pretty crappy.” however, both private and public entities responded to protests for racial justice in .cxxxi changes have been made in the majority of states within the united states, as well as in the united kingdom, belgium, australia, new zealand, india, and south africa. additionally, many private entities including religious institutions, professional sports teams and organizations, colleges and universities, publicly traded corporations, and the entertainment industry have committed to changes that aim towards increased racial justice. private companies and businesses which have utilized racially stereotypical imagery and naming in their branding have committed to rebranding efforts. among the food and beverage products in question are aunt jemima’s syrup and pancake mixes, uncle ben’s rice, mrs. butterworth’s breakfast foods, cream of wheat, eskimo pie ice cream, and land o’lakes butter (tyko ). the walt disney company announced that splash mountain – a log flume ride in both disneyland and disneyworld – would cxxxi the responses were so numerous that there is even a wikipedia article compiling a “list of changes made due to the george floyd protests.” rebrand as the ride had included depictions from the racist film song of the south. the forthcoming change would incorporate disney’s the princess and the frog, which introduced the company’s first black disney princess, tiana (pallotta ). country music artists previously known as lady antebellum, and the dixie chicks have respectively rebranded to lady a, and the chicks (melas ). perhaps most drastically, the washington redskins have committed to a rebranding which would eliminate both the team name and logo which have long been criticized for being racist (tyko ).cxxxii in addition to the aforementioned country artists, visual media has responded to the protests. cops, the long-running television show that depicted real interactions between law enforcement officials and civilians was canceled after seasons, as was the similar show live pd (blake ). cast changes were made by television shows such as big mouth, central park, family guy, and the simpsons as white actors (and voiceover actors) will cease playing characters of color (itzkoff ). entire shows were pulled from streaming services for having instances of racism including white actors in blackface, while some shows had specific episodes removed for similar racist depictions and jokes (alter ). ongoing television series brooklyn nine-nine – a cxxxii the cleveland indians, atlanta braves, kansas city chiefs, and others using stereotypically native american imagery have not committed to rebranding. the cleveland indians did retire former mascot chief wahoo prior to the major league baseball season and now wear jerseys that say “cleveland” as opposed to “indians.” the washington redskins changing their imagery is significant considering team owner dan snyder said in that “we will never change the name of the team” (tyko ). police comedy show – has decided to re-write and film upcoming seasons in light of the protests (katz ). while the list of responses to the protests against the murders of ahmaud arbery, breonna taylor and george floyd are continuing to grow, many are just as “crappy” as the prior generation of responses. several cities have had the words “black lives matter” painted on streets but have not followed this performative support by addressing any of the changes the movement seeks (king ). despite the lack of federal response, and the sitting united states president donald trump calling black lives matter “a symbol of hate” (wilkie ), it is undeniable that cities, states, and private entities have instituted immediate reforms in response to the movement’s protests. these reforms are undoubtedly insufficient, and do not approach the movement’s larger calls for police abolition, but they are worthy of praise and recognition. the alt-right in while black lives matter has grown in support and achieved some significant gains, the status of the alt-right in is far less certain. over the course of the last few years, the alt-right’s internet presence has suffered some setbacks. the alt-right relies on the internet as its primary platform for organizing, recruitment and spreading its message (hawley ; wendling ). yet the alt-right’s access to these online platforms has become limited: reddit banned two large alt-right subreddits (r/altright and r/alternativeright) (hern ), facebook banned two pages associated with richard spencer (the national policy institute and altright.com pages) (owen b) and his twitter account was suspended for a time (selyukh ), and the daily stormer has faced numerous issues in attempting to find a permanent registrar for its site after it was removed by its host, godaddy, and was subsequently removed by google (which also deleted its youtube account) (mcgoogan ). the alt-right has, despite these efforts, persisted in its online activities. the daily stormer may have been revoked by godaddy and google, but has attempted to find hosts from across the world as it relocated to a .ru (russian) domain (bbc news ), a .hk (hong kong) domain and a .name domain (from chinese-based company eranet international limited) (m hayden a). the alt-right has also found alternative platforms such as gab (feshami ) and the daily stormer has found a home on the dark web’s tor project (murdock ). the alt-right largely relies on the internet, and rather than succumb to pressures from mainstream websites, the movement has seemed to work ceaselessly to find alternative, albeit less publicly visible, forms for online propagandizing. while the movement has become somewhat nomadic on the internet, its presence had remained relatively strong over time.cxxxiii however, it is not clear how active the alt-right is in . about a year of publishing his first book on the alt-right, george hawley argued cxxxiii thomas main explains that “the alt-right web magazines have a considerable audience, one comparable in size … to those of established organs of left, right, and centrist opinion” (main , p. ). main found growth in total and unique visits to alt- right sites between october and february which exceeded some mainstream left-and-right sites. daily stormer, despite hosting issues, had more monthly visits than commentary, harper’s dissent, the progressive, the american prospect, and washington monthly. if the alt-right is merely retaining its support, it may have a significant base of support. that the movement appeared to be in a hopeless state of decline. hawley presented a talk on march th, at u.c. berkeley’s institute for the study of societal issues entitled “is the alt-right collapsing?” in his speech, hawley articulates his answer of “a qualified yes” that while the alt-right is not going to imminently disappear, the movement is no longer growing and is instead fracturing and suffering from internal divisions (hawley ). hawley cites internet censorship and public embarrassment as reasons for speculating that the alt-right is in decay. while the alt-right has functioned both online and offline, hawley has observed that there has been growing disunity within the alt-right and an increase in discord among members which has led to a growth of internal factionalism. hawley even cites some anecdotal examples of alt-right members that he once interviewed who have deleted their social media accounts and who are no longer openly contributing to the alt-right. while extremist activities have not ceased in the united states in , they are not the product of the alt-right as the boogaloo movement and qanon have respectively gained notoriety. the boogaloo movement (or the boogaloo boys), a violent, far-right, anti- government movement has taken over extremist headlines in . there are important differences between the movement and the alt-right. first, the boogaloo movement often presents itself as libertarian while the alt-right favors a strong, central government (dickson , owen ). while both movements oppose the extant governmental structures and institutions of the united states, the boogaloos are often accelerationists who want to increase civil disorder, so as to spark a civil war and the downfall of the state and society (coaston , pemberton ). the alt-right’s supporters are a disproportionately -and-under crowd of white males who work in the tech industry and who have swooping “macklemore” style haircuts (lewis ) while boogaloo boys are often seen in either full tactical body armor, or in their hawaiian shirts, having embraced an entirely different set of memes than the alt-right (pemberton ). most significantly, the boogaloo movement is less clearly white nationalist than the alt-right. reporter jane coaston ( ) of vox explains that “not all boogalooers are white supremacists … and while frequently using racist images and tropes online, many members of the boogaloo movement have no specific ties to white nationalism or the white power movement.” while the alt-right is rooted in racial concerns, and pursues a white nationalist telos, the boogaloo movement is not dedicated to white nationalism. yes, the boogaloo movement has openly racist elements, but it is more clearly dedicated to anti-government activities than to white nationalism. the boogaloo movement supports a range of anti-government activities including violent uprisings against both liberal political opponents and police officers (zadrozny ) and resisting mandatory lockdowns and masks during the covid- pandemic (al jazeera ). while some boogaloo supporters actually supported the black lives matter protests since the protesters opposed police killing and violence (owen ), others used the protests as a distraction to commit anti-governmental attacks (price and sonner ). several boogaloo supporters have been arrested on charges ranging from murder, to arson, to possession of unregistered firearms, to making a terroristic threat, to inciting a riot to drug charges. in one instance which grabbed headlines, active duty united states air force sergeant steven carrillo and robert justus, two boogaloos, were charged in the murder of a santa cruz county deputy in june , and an earlier murder of a federal protective service officer in oakland in may (mendoza and dazio, , macfarquhar and gibbons-neff ). in october , at least people were charged for their roles in a terroristic plot to kidnap michigan governor gretchen whitmer. several of those arrested have been tied to the boogaloo movement (jones and waldrop ; starr et al. ). the boogaloo movement is not alone in garnering attention with far-right supporters in as the qanon conspiracy has likewise berthed a movement. qanon is a far-right conspiracy theory began with an anonymous post on the imageboard chan by “q.” the anonymous individual purported to be a government official who had classified information regarding the trump administration and its political opponents. in short, q has accused countless liberal politicians, celebrities, and other high-ranking officials of being members of a global cabal that worships satan, operates an international child sex-trafficking ring, and plots against donald trump. supporters have backed trump who, according to the conspiracy, is supposedly quietly battling these efforts and related efforts of a liberal coup by barack obama, hillary clinton, george soros, and other sympathizers. q followers believe that there will be a forthcoming event known as “the storm” in which mass arrests of high-ranking people will occur, followed by “the great awakening” in which the non-believers will realize that qanon’s claims were accurate (roose ; wsj staff ). qanon traffics in additional conspiracies such as believing that john f. kennedy jr. faked his death, has been living as a trump supporter named vincent fusca, is exposing high-level, deep state conspiracies, and would reveal himself to the world as trump’s reelection, vice presidential running mate. some also believe in a longstanding conspiracy theory that the united states federal government is run by reptilians, while others believe that hillary clinton was arrested and imprisoned and the “hillary clinton” who is free today is actually a clone, while still others believe that kim jong un was installed in north korea as a cia puppet (milbank ). qanon may not be a social movement, but it is a far-right group that has garnered significant mainstream attention. qanon, clearly, is distinct from the alt-right and the boogaloo boys, as qanon is rooted in a far different set of beliefs and conspiracy theories than either movement. the only significant connection between qanon and the alt-right is that both traffic in anti-semitism. qanon supporters often use classic anti-semitic tropes such as targeting influential jewish figures (george soros and the rothschild family) and claiming that they are secretly enacting a political agenda, and promoting the fabricated anti-semitic text, the protocols of the elders of zion which falsely describes a plan for jewish world domination (choi ). while qanon and the alt-right may share some anti-semitic sentiments, qanon is far more invested in formal american political institutions than the alt-right. in and , several republicans running for congressional office expressed sympathies with qanon. matthew lusk ran in the republican primary in florida’s th congressional district, openly supported qanon and listed “q” as one of the issues he wished to address in congress on his campaign website. danielle stella ran in minnesota’s th congressional district and her campaign frequently retweeted qanon messages and used qanon’s calling-card statement, “where we go one we go all” or shortened, “wwg wga.” similarly, rich helms ran as a republican primary candidate in texas’ rd congressional district and retweeted qanon posts. lusk withdrew prior to florida’s republican primary, stella lost in minnesota’s republican primary, and helms withdrew prior to texas’s republican primary. erin cruz ran in california’s th congressional district and while her campaign materials did not mention q, she acknowledged that her supporters included qanon supporters and was careful to not denounce their movement (franco and radford ). cruz lost in the general election to incumbent democrat raul ruiz. jo rae perkins was the republican nominee for the united states senate election in oregon and was among the most vocal supporters of qanon of any candidate in the country (mapes ). perkins lost in the general election to incumbent democrat jeff merkley. in total, at least twenty-seven candidates who endorse or minimally have promoted qanon material online are on ballots in the november general election (a kaplan ). while the alt-right has not run candidates, and the boogaloo boys generally oppose the government’s existence, qanon supporters proudly stand behind sympathetic candidates for office, and support the presidency of donald trump. trump – who is the centrally supported figure in the q movement – has stated that he does not know much of the qanon movement but claims that q supporters are “people that love our country” (ibid). at a news conference, trump stated, “i understand they like me very much” and he has retweeted many accounts promoting qanon (associated press ). trump rallies have had q supporters prominently displayed in the crowd (stanley-becker ), and trump has proudly supported and endorsed some of the qanon-supporting republicans running for office such as marjorie taylor greene (maclean ) who is now the representative-elect in georgia’s th congressional district, and angela stanton-king (laughland and silverstone ) who ran in georgia’s th congressional district but was defeated in the general election by democrat nikema williams.cxxxiv qanon, unlike the alt-right, is highly invested in trump’s presidency, and makes its presence visible at trump rallies and campaigns. while the alt-right has not run candidates for office, and candidates have not, in turn, publicly supported the alt-right, the same cannot be said for qanon as many qanon supporters are on ballots for office in . although the alt-right may not be dead, it is not the far-right movement that is most prevalent in the united states in . one should not conflate far-right movements as the alt-right, boogaloo boys, and qanon vary in their ideological origins, have different relationships with governmental institutions, and have vastly divergent sociopolitical goals. the alt-right may have taken a backseat to the violence of the boogaloo boys, and the mainstream candidacies of qanon supporters, but the movement had been largely quiet before charlottesville, and can certainly reemerge from the internet, to the streets. cxxxiv georgia’s th congressional district had been represented by john lewis who passed away between the democratic primary and general election. albert camus in when covid- began to infect americans, many mayors and governors mandated quarantines and other stay-at-home orders to minimize the spread of the virus. i instantly thought of camus’s novel the plague in which the city of oran is quarantined due to an outbreak of the titular bubonic plague. dr. rieux, the story’s narrator states that it is not a story of heroism as fighting the plague is a communal effort and a duty of the town’s citizens. those who volunteer to join the sanitary squad organize to ensure sanitary conditions in congested areas, while others accompany doctors on house visits, evacuate the infected, and transport the sick and deceased. yet the plague is also a story of isolation, loneliness, and a longing for loved ones while collectively struggling against death. many people will die due to a plague – nearly , americans have died due to covid- cxxxv – and every death is a “defeat.” yet even the removal of the plague, or a vaccine to end covid- is not a defeat of mortality as there can be no eternal victory as all people will eventually die. thus, rieux and the others in the plague, like the doctors working during the covid- outbreak, are fighting an absurd battle of assured defeat. yet, like sisyphus, rieux in the plague, and the real medical professionals today persist in a sisyphean manner to treat patients and attempt to halt the widespread suffering and death. albert camus has perhaps not been this relevant in mainstream american circles since his death. historian robert zaretsky, who published a book on camus’s life in cxxxv this number sadly continues to rise and is accurate as of november , . similarly, over . million people have died across the world. , penned an op-ed in the houston chronicle tying the plague to the covid- outbreak. he concludes, “were camus alive today, he would not be surprised how the spread of covid- has, in part, been enabled by authoritarian regimes like china and iran that fear the transmission of truths more than they do the transmission of viruses. nor would he be shocked to learn that this fear courses through our own administration” (zaretsky ). philosopher alain de botton, in a new york times op-ed likewise conflated the plague and the covid- outbreak. despite the fictious outbreak affecting one-quarter of oran, de botton ( ) states that he people “keep imagining reasons it won’t happen to them. they are modern people with phones, airplanes and newspapers. they are surely not going to die like the wretches of th-century london or th-century canton.” de botton is talking about the novel’s characters, but it runs parallel to a disturbing portion of people in the united states who question the validity of epidemiology, and refuse to isolate or even take precautions as simple as wearing a mask to prevent covid- ’s spread. sean illing, a political theorist turned vox journalist, associates the collective suffering of the plague to america’s covid- outbreak. illing explains, “each character in the story is defined by what they do when the scourge comes. no one escapes it, but those who revolt against it, who reduce the suffering of others, are the most fulfilled. the only villains in the plague are those who cannot see beyond themselves” ( b). suffering, whether from a pandemic, or political injustice, may never cease, and therefore the struggle against suffering – the fight to minimize its impact – is likewise a sisyphean task. illing concludes a pandemic, terrible though it is, highlights our mutual interdependence in a way that only tragedy can. the beauty of the plague is that it asks the reader to map the lessons of the pandemic onto everyday life. the principles that drive the hero, rieux, are the same principles that make every society worthwhile — empathy, love, and solidarity. if we learn these lessons now, in a moment of crisis, we’ll all be better off on the other side of it. (illing b) with plague, as with covid- “the essential thing was to save the greatest possible number of persons from dying and being doomed to unending separation. and to do this there was only one resource: to fight the plague. there was nothing admirable about this attitude; it was merely logical” (camus c, p. ). everyone is condemned to death, but in times of the greatest existential anxiety such as during pandemics, the sisyphean battle to save and improve lives continues. dr. rieux summarizes the ongoing covid- outbreak in the united states as much as the fictious plague in oran, “i have no idea what’s awaiting me, or what will happen when all this ends. for the moment i know this: there are sick people and they need curing” (camus c, p. ). conclusion: beyond when i began conducting research for this dissertation, only percent of white americans had a favorable view of black lives matter (easley ). by the middle of , perceptions have changed and black lives matter now has increased white support and boasts a multi-racial and multi-ethnic coalition of protesters. pew research center found that percent of white, percent of hispanic and percent of asian respondents support black lives matter (in addition to percent of black americans) (parker et al. ). a similar wall street journal/nbc news poll of registered voters found that percent of voters support the protests in response to floyd’s death and percent are more concerned with racial inequality in the united states as a result of the protests (siddiqui ). in june , black lives matter was respectively more popular than both the sitting united states president, republican donald trump, and his general election opponent, democrat joe biden. in a staunch reversal from the movement’s earlier years, black lives matter became the most favorably viewed national political organization or politician in the united states (wilkinson ). yet increased white support for the movement and its actions raises the question, do white supporters of black lives matter also support the movement’s prerogatives? most americans in a poll produced for abc news by langer research associates oppose key segments of black lives matter’s political aims. while the majority of white respondents believe that black people are treated in racially discriminatory manners, only percent support reducing police funding. additionally only percent of whites support removing confederate statues, and percent support removing statues of slave- owning united states presidents (although percent of white democrats support removing statues of slave-owning presidents) (langer ). a similar gallup poll found that while most americans feel that changes are necessary in terms of policing, there is a vast racial divide between the percent of black americans, and the percent of white americans who feel that major changes are needed. even more divisive is the question of police funding; percent of black americans support reducing police department budgets, but only percent of white americans concur (crabtree ). while these polls do not separate white supporters of black lives matter from white americans in general, they do hint that white support for black lives matter has grown while white support for some of what the movement desires, has not necessarily increased at the same rate. the disparity between support for black lives matter and support for the movement’s priorities is concerning. it is not clear what would happen if white supporters read the vision for black lives or learned that the movement’s founders are police abolitionists and anti-capitalists.cxxxvi would white support for black lives matter decrease? would white support for these policies and positions increase? will black lives matter become more conservative to retain white support? moving forward in the midst of a global pandemic during the end of donald trump’s tenure as united states president may leave us with more questions than answers. what is clear is that my initial argument remains consistent; black lives matter is a rebellious social movement that has responded to the existential anxiety associated with state-sanctioned black death, and has taken a radical realist stance which achieved meaningful reforms while acting in a sisyphean manner and pushing endlessly for more radical changes. george floyd’s murder was another existential catalyst in black lives matter’s political push much in the way that trayvon martin’s murder was the catalyst for the movement’s formation, and mike brown’s murder was the catalyst for the movement’s public arrival. much has changed since and much remains to be seen. cxxxvi anecdotally, a friend of mine who works for an elected official in new york city posted on social media that black lives matter’s calls for defunding the nypd did not mean eliminating the police, but only reducing their budget by $ billion (about % of their budget). how would he respond to the movement’s generally abolitionist stance? 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( ). the year of dreaming dangerously. verso. 	front matter.pdf 	abstract 	acknowledgments 	matt dissertation ( . . ).pdf 	introduction 	extracting the camusian theory 	on the two cases: why black lives matter and the alt-right are fit for comparison 	black lives matter: from necropolitics to camusian rebellion 	environmental activism: lessons from black lives matter and the alt-right 	postscript: and beyond face coverings for covid- : from medical intervention to social practice face coverings for covid- : from medical intervention to social practice helene-mari van der westhuizen and colleagues argue that face coverings should be considered not as medical equipment but as a social practice informed by norms and expectations helene-mari van der westhuizen, , koot kotze, , sarah tonkin-crine, nina gobat, trisha greenhalgh key messages • face coverings used by the public are now widely recommended as source control during the covid- pandemic • the dominant narrative driving policy has viewed face coverings as a medical intervention and evaluated their effectiveness from an infection control perspective • face coverings are also a social practice and carry a range of meanings in different settings • policies to encourage uptake should reflect the complex and contested sociocultural meanings of covering the face and draw on these to promote their use covering the mouth and nose is a public health measure designed to capture respiratory droplets from the wearer (who may not have symptoms) to reduce transmission of respiratory infections. debates about whether face coverings should be used have framed them largely as a medical intervention with benefits and harms. although the majority of countries and public health agencies now recommend or mandate face coverings against covid- , viewing face coverings through a medical narrative still dominates. - many public facing infographics on face coverings describe the initial steps as follows: “clean your hands before touching the mask, inspect the mask for damage or if dirty, adjust the mask to your face without leaving gaps on the side.” given that social practices are deeply held and passionately defended, we hypothesise that uptake of face coverings is likely to be advanced by downplaying the medical narrative about “standards,” “donning and doffing,” “decontamination,” and “risk.” for successful uptake, face coverings need to be grounded in the social and cultural realities of affected communities. we use the term “medical mask” to refer to a device that meets particular standards and is intended primarily for healthcare workers (but may also be recommended for the public). the term “face covering” refers to anything that covers the face, including homemade or commercially sold coverings (typically made of cloth, but sometimes from paper or other materials) intended primarily for the public. different countries opted for different approaches as covid- spread. china and south korea, for example, rapidly increased production of medical masks for use by the public, whereas the czech republic and thailand were early adopters of cloth face coverings to conserve supplies of medical masks for health workers. an infection control tool framed medically, a face covering is either personal protective equipment (to protect the wearer) or a means of source control (to prevent the spread of illness). manufacturing of infection control equipment is subject to stringent quality standards with distribution and procurement typically organised on a national level. almost all randomised controlled trials of face coverings have been done in healthcare facilities and addressed their efficacy in protecting the wearer from infection, not as source control. but drawing on the same evidence base for healthcare facilities and community settings has limitations. medical narratives favour interventions with fixed characteristics and an effect size that can be determined through controlled experiments. public health measures aimed at whole populations seldom have randomised controlled trial evidence available, and such trials may not be ethical or practical. - for example, a challenge of assessing face coverings as source control is that the people in the trial are not those in whom the effect would need to be measured. this medical narrative includes concerns about the public not being able to use face coverings safely. standardisation in making, using, and cleaning face coverings at population level is challenging when people have access to vastly different resources. in such circumstances, making the task of putting on and taking off a face covering feel complicated and hazardous risks making it more difficult to implement. social practice framed socioculturally, face coverings are clothing or accessories. wearing one is a social practice—a behaviour that has a particular meaning in a particular society. a social practice involves human agency based on the person’s (perhaps imperfect) knowledge—for example, their assessment of whether a face covering is effective—and what they view as its symbolic meaning. the latter will be influenced by social expectations (eg, what we expect a shop assistant, bus driver, or nurse to be wearing), norms (what is viewed as morally correct and as right and proper behaviour), and laws and regulations (is wearing a face covering mandatory?). uptake of the policy will be influenced by practical matters such as availability of resources (is it easy, and a priority, to make or obtain one?). the bmj | bmj ; :m | doi: . /bmj.m analysis nuffield department of primary care healthsciences,universityofoxford, uk tb proof, south africa correspondence to: h van der westhuizen helene.vanderwest huizen@gtc.ox.ac.uk cite this as: bmj ; :m http://dx.doi.org/ . /bmj.m published: august o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b m j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j.m o n a u g u st . d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /bmj.m &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - mailto:helene.vanderwesthuizen@gtc.ox.ac.uk mailto:helene.vanderwesthuizen@gtc.ox.ac.uk http://dx.doi.org/ . /bmj.m http://www.bmj.com/ in the current global pandemic, there are examples of face coverings adapting to cultural traditions. in india, a loose end of a piece of clothing, from a saree, or a loose piece of cloth, a “dupatta,” has become more commonly used to cover the face during covid- . face coverings have been associated with assuming a different identity (worn by a superhero), avoiding recognition and persecution (worn by a criminal), to exhibit modesty (expected of women in some cultures), having an infectious disease (worn by a patient), and for cultural ceremonies and processions (worn by those who are celebrating). covering the face may also be viewed in practical terms as protection against pollution, dust, pollen, or wildfires. in some countries, predominantly in asia, face coverings have been widely used in public before this pandemic, possibly owing to past experience with respiratory virus epidemics and, perhaps, a strong cultural emphasis on interdependence instead of independence. it might also be linked to cultural meaning systems that emphasise the boundary between a clean and pure inner self and a potentially polluted outside (similar to the removal of shoes on entering the home, for example). cloth face coverings are usually characterised by personalisation and a bottom-up approach to manufacturing and distribution. they can be homemade, from an existing piece of clothing or purchased from a store for convenience, to display a brand or to match an outfit (fig ). there are examples of face coverings with animal noses, creating a sense of playfulness that may make them more acceptable to children. activists have placed slogans (such as black lives matter) on their face coverings that emphasise their role in displaying identity. designer labels have produced expensive, high fashion face coverings. the bmj | bmj ; :m | doi: . /bmj.m analysis o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b m j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j.m o n a u g u st . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.bmj.com/ fig | london jazz singer kitty laroar wearing a matching face covering with her vintage outfit. photo credit: nicholas shankland. the wide variation in materials and style raises questions about the efficacy and reliability of face coverings. public health policy must consider the trade-off between efficacy and compliance (a face covering that is % effective at preventing transmission but only worn by % of the population will have less impact that one that is % effective but worn by % of the population). the bmj | bmj ; :m | doi: . /bmj.m analysis o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b m j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j.m o n a u g u st . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.bmj.com/ shifting the narrative during the covid- pandemic, wearing face coverings is being rapidly introduced as a public health intervention in countries with no cultural tradition of doing so. for successful uptake, such interventions need to be grounded in the social and cultural practices and realities of affected communities, and campaigns should not only inform, but also work to shape new sociocultural norms (table ). table | shifting public health messaging about face coverings from being seen as a medical intervention to a social practice social practicemedical interventiontopic community: protect others and they will also protect youindividual wearer: protect yourself and in doing so, you may also protect others focus and message population benefit: reducing the overall level of transmission on population level risk reduction: reducing or eliminating risk of infection to the wearer goal acceptability: choose a face covering that is easy to make or buy and has a design that you would like to wear. aim to use one with three layers, but a face covering with fewer layers is better than wearing no face covering function:ensurethat thefacecoveringmeetsparticular filtration and performance standards selecting comfort and cleanliness: make sure it covers your mouth and nose and is comfortable to wear without repeatedly adjusting it. change your face covering if it becomes dirty. wear a clean face covering each day infection control: follow strict donning and doffing procedures (use straps; do not touch front of face covering). test for fit. avoid self-contamination by touching your face covering. removethecoveringafteraspecifiedtimeperiodorwhenthere is visible soiling or damage putting on, taking off, and wearing laundering: remove your face covering when you get home and put it in the laundry. wash it with your other clothes storageanddecontamination:storesoiledcoveringsaccording to strict procedures. wash the face covering at a specified temperature cleaning promotebenefit:makesureyour friends, family,andvulnerable members of society have face coverings too—eg,through community making and distribution schemes avoid risk: do not share your face covering with othersrelating to others sustainability: have two or three reusable face coverings that can be washed and used again, which could reduce costs to the user and avoid waste careful disposal: discarded disposable face coverings are an environmental hazard; they must be properly destroyed in accordance with regulations environmental concerns public messages around face coverings help conceptualise who typically wears a face covering and the moral valence of this action. at the start of the covid- pandemic, people of asian ethnicity were stigmatised in the united kingdom for wearing face coverings, as if they were carriers of disease who threatened the safety of others. in the us, mandating of face coverings has been interpreted as an infringement of civil liberties and autonomy, with critics using the term “muzzle” to depict dehumanisation of the individual by the state. some public figures, including the president of the united states, initially refused to wear a face covering, depicting wearing a mask as a sign of weakness and refusing to wear a mask as an assertion of authority. for a policy of public masking to succeed, negative depictions of the social meaning and moral worth of face coverings need to be actively reframed. given that the main purpose of face coverings by the public is source control, wearers could be depicted as altruistic or even as protectors. this could create new symbolism around wearing, making, and distributing face coverings that is based on social responsibility and solidarity against a common threat (fig ). the czech republic and south africa have taken a social practice approach to promoting the domestic production and use of face coverings (box ). the bmj | bmj ; :m | doi: . /bmj.m analysis o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b m j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j.m o n a u g u st . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.bmj.com/ fig | a seamstress participating in a local #masks all campaign in south africa. source: george hospital trust. box : examples of social practice approaches to promoting face coverings in the czech republic, a community led #masks all advocacy campaign rapidly reshaped societal norms around the acceptability of wearing a face covering in public. “mask trees” were used to distribute face coverings, and communities coordinated creating face coverings for each other. social media were used to share messaging about making them at home, to show celebrity support for the campaign, to distribute songs to encourage their use, and to add humour through photos of public statues wearing face coverings. this created a movement, which prompted others to imitate this behaviour and follow the example. #masks all slogans such as “keep your droplets to yourself” and “my mask protects you, your mask protects me” appealed to a shared set of social values. this sparked similar movements in other countries, including #masks all campaigns in the us, south africa, and shelagh’s sewing circle in the uk. in south africa it has been mandatory to wear a face covering when leaving your home since may . a key consideration has been managing access to face coverings, especially in rural areas with higher rates of poverty and unemployment. one of several locally focused, rural #masks all campaigns in south africa was led by george hospital trust in collaboration with non-profit organisation azaria and members of the community who own sewing machines. through this ongoing campaign they have fundraised, made, and distributed over face coverings to people who would otherwise have struggled to obtain them. this also creates job opportunities for women in need through the purchase of face coverings from azaria and engages members of the public in making them as volunteers. embracing sociocultural narratives could enable the public to select a face covering that is meaningful to them and that they will be more likely to wear. yet, a balance must be struck between encouraging customisation for comfort and acceptability and ensuring that the covering is sufficiently effective to block most viral transmission. cultural narratives are changing, though not universally. in some settings, a person who is not wearing a face covering is seen as a threat to the safety of others. this is generating new meanings of socially constructed deviance. as a community adopts face coverings, the first members wearing a face covering will be seen as deviant, but later those without coverings become deviants from the new norm. two harm reduction researchers travelling from the uk to thailand to attend a conference during the sars outbreak described the persuasive influence of peer pressure in enhancing the use of face coverings as they transitioned between environments with contrasting norms around their use. social norms around how deviance is tolerated are likely to vary between a society’s the bmj | bmj ; :m | doi: . /bmj.m analysis o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b m j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j.m o n a u g u st . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://www.bmj.com/ tightness (for example, singapore) and looseness (for example, brazil) and can contribute to learning through the behaviour of others. drawing on existing social and behavioural science research of previous respiratory epidemics and the experiences of countries where the use of face coverings have been widespread before this pandemic is key. conclusion protracted debates about face coverings as a medical intervention have delayed implementation of a valuable preventive tool. now that most countries have shifted to support face coverings to prevent transmission of covid- , we must also shift the focus to implementation. instead of continuing to debate technical specifications and efficacy, sociocultural framings should be explored to encourage their use. this can be done by emphasising underlying values such as solidarity and communal safety. such measures are likely to enhance the uptake of face coverings and help curb the devasting impact of the pandemic. contributors and sources: hvdw is a medical doctor doing qualitative research about tuberculosis infection control measures. kk is a medical doctor and health systems researcher. st-c is a health psychologist whose work focuses on infections and health related behaviours. ng is a social scientist whose work aims to advance epidemic relevant clinical and social research. tg is trained in global public health, health systems research, and social science; she has an academic interest in narrative review. she sits on the scientific and technical advisory committee of the world health organization alliance for health policy and systems research. hvdw conceptualised the paper and wrote the first draft; she is the guarantor. other authors provided additional ideas and contributed to a series of redrafts. patient involvement: this article was reviewed by ingrid schoeman, a member of tb proof, who developed drug resistant tuberculosis and was asked to wear a mask during her treatment. she also used a mask to protect herself while she worked as dietitian in a public hospital. tb proof is a tuberculosisadvocacyorganisationbased insouthafrica. it formspartnershipsbetweenpatientswith tuberculosisandresearchers to improvetbpreventionandcare.collaborationaimstocombinestories and science and include public awareness campaigns, policy reviews, and training on tb infection control and advocacy. competing interests: we have read and understood bmj policy on declaration of interests and have the following interests to declare: hvdw is chairperson of the board and does unpaid advocacy for the non-governmental organisation tb proof, which includes work on tuberculosis stigma and infection control. stc and ng receive funding for research related to covid- from the european commission h ( ) and the uk research and innovation covid- emergency fund. they do not receive direct funds for work on this topic. ng is co-chair of the who covid- research roadmap social science working group. the views expressed in this paper are those of the authors and do not necessarily reflect those of the working group. tg has written several articles promoting the wearing of face coverings by the lay public as source control in covid- ; she has received no direct funding for herworkonthis topicbut isprincipal investigatorongrants fromnational institute forhealthresearch (brc- - ), uk research and innovation (covid- emergency fund), and wellcome trust (wt ma). provenance and peer review: not commissioned; externally peer reviewed. we acknowledge the contributions of the who covid- research roadmap social science working group who 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made accessible via the edinburgh research explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. take down policy the university of edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that edinburgh research explorer content complies with uk legislation. if you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please contact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. download date: . jun. https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/peace-as-a-minor-grounded-utopia(bcc d - - abc- fb -facdfb a c).html peace as a minor, grounded utopia on prefigurative and testimonial pacifism *** this is the pre-print, pre-proofread version of a paper published (online first) in perspectives on politics. to cite, please consult the final version on the publisher’s website: thaler, mathias. “peace as a minor, grounded utopia: on prefigurative and testimonial pacifism.” perspectives on politics, (online first). https://doi.org/ . /s . if your university does not provide access to this journal, please send me an email so that i can share the published paper with you. *** author: mathias thaler, university of edinburgh contact: mathias.thaler@ed.ac.uk abstract a common complaint about pacifism says that it is utopian, in a pejorative sense. the worry can take various forms and directions, but when it is couched in terms of just war theory it usually includes accusations of pacifism’s immorality, inconsistency and impracticality. contemporary defenders of pacifism have responded to this complaint by delineating a highly sophisticated, empirically informed account of pacifism that foregrounds its real-world effectiveness. this paper takes a different route towards vindicating pacifism: via a more nuanced picture of what is specifically utopian about it. i propose that peace, in at least some of its guises, can be described as a minor, grounded utopia; a desire for an alternative future without war and violence, whose pursuit blurs the boundaries between thought and action. reconstructing both prefiguration and testimony as practical modes of this kind of pacifism, the paper maintains that minor, grounded utopias are sites rife with conflict and contestation. . is pacifism utopian? a common and long-standing complaint about pacifism holds that it is utopian, in a pejorative sense. pacifists are frequently derided as lofty dreamers, oblivious to the harsh realities of an evil, brutal world. worse still, they are accused of muddled ethical reasoning, guilty of self-contradictory claims that quickly crumble when subjected to serious scrutiny. just war theorists, amongst others, charge pacifists with revering ideals of nonviolence that are both unworkable and in violation of principles of rights protection. adhering to nonviolence might at first sight seem like a virtuous stance, but a complete renunciation of violence is ultimately irresponsible. in recent years, a powerful response to this charge has emerged. against the suspicion that pacifism is utopian, authors such as dustin howes ( , ), karuna mantena ( ) or todd may ( ) have insisted on another kind of pacifism; one that is credible, practical and eminently realistic. interestingly, these political theorists have based their defenses of pacifism on the findings of social scientists who have investigated the effectiveness of nonviolence in a number of empirical contexts. this paper contributes to the debate between detractors and advocates of pacifism by developing a primer for defending pacifism on explicitly utopian grounds. the main target of this paper is a particular way of critiquing pacifism, embodied most vividly by just war theory. a connected objective is to ask how the revitalization of pacifism along the lines of howes, mantena and may could be complemented by a reflection on pacifism’s utopian impulse. envisaging pacifism as utopian is helpful, i argue, so long as this process is staged in a minor, rather than a major key. in opposition to the mainstream picture of utopia, which unduly stresses the stifling perfection of a static end state, this minor type of utopia is uniquely suited for the vindication of pacifism because it foregrounds the real-world obstacles that any utopian project has to tackle. before i proceed, an important clarification on the paper’s theoretical apparatus is required. since i propose a conceptual innovation that allows us to positively valorize pacifism as a utopian project, i take some liberty in interpreting the term “utopian” widely and invite the reader to follow me in this hermeneutical exercise. when i maintain that critics have frequently labelled pacifism as utopian, in a pejorative sense, i consequently aim to reconstruct a general tendency shared across many, often divergent positions. some authors explicitly refer to the term “utopia” to deplore pacifist initiatives (orend , ); others, however, employ notions such as “otherworldly” (primoratz , ) or “unrealistic” (sonderling , ) to condemn nonviolence. faced with this shifting terminology, the essay hopes to introduce some analytical clarity. my claim is that the concept of “utopia” describes a basic disposition that all the critiques (and even some defenses) of pacifism have in common, namely an objection to the notion that war and violence can be overcome in the real world, simply by imagining a future in which peace would reign supreme. as we shall observe in the next section, this objection can be teased out in different ways and with the help of unique vocabularies; but underneath the variegated formulations lies a deep and recurring discontent with the utopian dimension of pacifism. accordingly, i will subsume authors who do not overtly use the term “utopia” under this grouping so long as they express a functionally equivalent concern with pacifism as a form of wishful thinking. my positive proposal entails that these critics misconstrue what is utopian about appeals to nonviolence. peace should be viewed as a utopia, of sorts. its pursuit presupposes envisioning a future that is very different from the world we currently inhabit. but anticipating that future does not necessarily imply we succumb to the dangerous illusion of wishful thinking. rather, nonviolence is utopian insofar as it strives to excavate emancipatory potentials that are latent in the status quo. against the negative reading of utopianism, the idea is hence to pay close attention to the ways in which pacifism is enacted through concrete practices that draw on the utopian imagination. the plan for the paper is as follows: in section , i outline the standard case against pacifism and point towards various replies that have recently been contemplated. the next step (section ) detects a juncture in the midst of the utopian tradition, between two competing strands: a major, afloat as well as a minor, grounded one. it is a mistake, or so i shall maintain, to collapse the latter into the former. section explores the minor, grounded version of utopianism through two illustrative examples, relating to what i term prefigurative and testimonial pacifism respectively. my particular interest lies with american radical pacifist movements in the wake of the second world war and with amnesty international during its inception phase. finally, section fleshes out some of the paper’s implications, casts a side look at anarchist politics and probes the benefits of a utopian perspective for analyzing counterhegemonic movements. . pacifism and just war theory: a family constellation pacifism is a multi-faceted set of ideas and practices, spanning conversations over at least two millennia, that can be approached from two different angles. (cady ; fiala ) the first would be to focus on the morality of using violence in general. correspondingly, pacifism may denote an attitude of opposing all, or at least most, forms of violence, in interpersonal, domestic as well as international affairs. to put it inelegantly, but accurately, on this account pacifism amounts to “nonviolentism” (holmes ), the systematic renunciation of violence in all its guises. whether pacifists reject violence in an absolute fashion, or whether they allow for exceptional situations in which violence can be justified (such as individual self-defense or defense of innocent others), is a question internal to this debate. while only few authors subscribe to an unconditional form of pacifism qua nonviolentism, this is not an impossible position to hold. (fox ) the second way to characterize pacifists would be by concentrating on their narrower, yet still categorical, hostility to war instead of violence. this interpretation homes in on campaigns for a less violent world that endorse peace activism and nonviolent mobilization, for example. duane cady describes the position, which this type of pacifism rejects, as “warism” (cady , – ), or what we would normally call “militarism”. on this perspective, pacifists are not necessarily dedicated to renouncing violence in the broader sense, but they do contest both the institution of war and the wider political, cultural, social and economic system that entrenches war-making. (cochran ) crucially, this second interpretation originates in an aversion to war as an activity with far-ranging consequences for the entire society; it is not only directed at specific wars with their particular justifications and rationales. (fiala b; l. may ; parkin ) that is to say, the reason why pacifists qua “anti-warists” dispute a particular reason for going to war is not do with a peculiar feature of that war. rather, their view of war is so comprehensively determined by a recognition of war’s devastating effects that any specific war will have to be opposed. this gives rise to a political rendition of pacifism. (alexandra ; holmes , ; ryan ) the bifurcation has led some to further separate pacifism from nonviolence. (see for example: howes ; nepstad a) whereas the former is frequently associated with an ideological, spiritual or philosophical stance, the latter is usually defined as a flexible tactic that groups deploy to attain certain goals. following this line of reasoning, pacifism is perceived as an abstract worldview centered around a few unwavering convictions (“nonviolentism” or “anti-militarism”), while nonviolence comprises a diverse set of practices designed to sustain political action. (bharadwaj ) in contexts where pacifism underwrites nonviolent action, commentators speak of principled nonviolence. parsing pacifism from nonviolence moreover implies that one can be a pacifist without resorting to nonviolence as a means of public protest – religious communities, such as the amish, decide to remove themselves from wider society so as not having to battle with a social order that violates their sacrosanct ethics; conversely, a group might be committed to nonviolent practices without accepting the ideological, spiritual or philosophical underpinnings of pacifism at all. in this case, we speak of strategic nonviolence. (sharp , , ) the conclusion revisits this distinction, contending that the shift in perspective encouraged in this paper also affects the way the relationship between pacifism and nonviolence is conceived. but at this point, i want to continue by asking why the label “utopian” has so often been attached to pacifists of all sorts. while i will in the following primarily zoom in on just war theory, it is important to emphasize that pacifism has been attacked from multiple directions. amongst the most influential ones are different types of realism and justifications of revolutionary violence . authors as diverse as reinhold niebuhr, hans morgenthau or frantz fanon have all expressed serious reservations about nonviolence’s capacity to attain political ends. in light of these manifold objections, my rationale for exclusively focusing on just war theory is straightforward: as a diverse tradition rooted within various cultural settings, just war thinking has been consistently geared towards refining a complex set of criteria to ascertain whether and under what conditions conflict would be permissible. (sorabji and rodin ) its rebuttal of pacifism appears to be so compelling because it is anchored in a sophisticated ethics of violence: today, just war thinking encompasses both historically oriented approaches, which couch the ethical reflection on war in terms of an ongoing dialogue between past and present ideas (o’driscoll ; reed and ryall ; rengger ) and analytical philosophical accounts, which seek to establish the veracity of their claims mainly through thought experiments. (frowe ; mcmahan ) while it might be an overstatement to proclaim that just war theory currently exerts a monopoly over the moral debate around war (coates , ), it has certainly, due to its longue durée and its rich internal variety, mounted the most formidable challenge to pacifism. within just war theory, we can discern three key objections that feed into the indictment of utopianism. following fiala’s taxonomy ( a), i shall highlight pacifism’s immorality, inconsistency and impracticality. elizabeth anscombe ( ) famously surmised that pacifism is a problematic doctrine because of its failure to distinguish between innocent victims and guilty perpetrators of violence. in its absolute, rather than qualified, rejection of violence, pacifism qua “nonviolentism” indirectly licenses the slaughter of the innocent. the argument here entails that pacifists are supposedly committed to protecting innocent life, but they fail to take the moral and political imperative inherent in that commitment seriously; it would be more appropriate, proponents of the just war doctrine such as anscombe opine, to actively protect the rights of the innocent by violent means. what is more, she identifies pacifism with a general attitude of escapist withdrawal from the world, which infringes on the christian duty of maturely engaging with evil. trying to keep one’s hands clean in an unjust world is a dishonest and futile posture. jan narveson ( , ) constructs a closely related argument when he subjects pacifism to critical scrutiny. he claims that pacifism is theoretically incoherent because it fails to appropriately act towards the objective of holding human life sacred. on this view, pacifists are simply incapable of drawing the correct conclusions from their own premises: if the ultimate goal is to honor human life and to resist its destruction wherever it occurs, then pacifists must be prepared to take all the necessary steps for pursuing that goal. pacifism is thus charged with being logically self-defeating. the accusation of inconsistency leads directly to the final objection to pacifism, which is often voiced by advocates of radical politics, but has recently also been picked up in just war theory (fabre ): that it is simply unfit for the harsh realities bedeviling our contemporary condition. this view typically includes the proposition that nonviolence is an ideological standpoint that only the privileged can meaningfully defend. polemically put, pacifism is a pathology (churchill ) or a myth (losurdo ), depriving oppressed people from the only resources by which they could actively resist their aggressors. on this account, pacifism serves the insidious purpose of sheltering those in power from oppositional force. (gelderloos ) a stubborn pledge of nonviolence undermines solidarity across counter-hegemonic groups, which need to deploy a diversity of tactics. (on this issue see: frazer ) all these critiques riff on the theme that pacifism is insufficiently attuned to a world rampant with evil and injustice: either by abdicating the imperative of engaging with wrongdoing, or by declining to acknowledge the necessary implications of a pledge to safeguard the innocent, or by turning a blind eye to the fact of brutal oppression. even though authors do not always explicitly refer to the term “utopia” when buttressing their preference for just war thinking, they base their ideas on arguments about pacifism’s shortcomings that are functionally equivalent to the charge of utopianism. in order to induce some order to this debate, we should therefore try to translate the three main objections to pacifism – its immorality, inconsistency and impracticality – into the language of utopianism. accordingly, pacifism is denounced as utopian insofar as it imagines a world in which all suffering is equal (the immorality charge); it is utopian insofar as it imagines a world in which the pursuit of justice is self- fulfilling (the inconsistency charge); and, finally, it is utopian insofar as it imagines a world in which nonviolent resistance to oppression will always be successful (the impracticality charge). behind the various objections lies a discontent with pacifism’s aloofness and naivety: the vision of peace as a blueprint for a world without war and violence is simply unfit to guide real-world action. while it is true that just war theory, especially in its revisionist formulation (mcmahan ; rodin ), continues to thrive, we can presently also detect a reinvigoration of pacifist outlooks. the push-back has happened along two tracks: positively, by rehabilitating pacifism and nonviolence as genuine options for political action; and negatively, by condemning just war theory’s proclivity to degenerate into an exculpatory or legitimating discourse in the service of hegemonic actors. as we have observed in the introduction, commentators have sought to render pacifism more credible, practical and realistic by analyzing the panoply of feasible options that nonviolent actors have at their disposal when resisting oppressive regimes. this vindication attempts to present nonviolence as a worldly set of ideas and practices that is entirely compatible with a commitment to fighting evil and injustice. (cortright , – ) this view is perhaps best conveyed in a passage from dustin howes: against the conventional wisdom, pragmatic pacifism maintains that the advocates of violence are prone to unrealistic ideological commitments that are often doomed to failure, whereas nonviolence offers a self-limiting, pragmatic, and realistic approach that accounts for the manifold difficulties of politics. in contrast to traditional pacifism, which rejects violence on moral grounds, this brand of pacifism relies upon political as opposed to moral principles to make the case against violence. violence may be immoral, but recent empirical and theoretical work pushes us toward the perhaps more important insight that violence is counterproductive to politics. (howes , ) in terms of negative critique, observers have highlighted that just war theory can have unpalatable effects: making imperial efforts more tolerable to increasingly war-weary audiences. despite its ambition to subject all wars to normative scrutiny, just war theory has hence been attacked for its tendency to proffer all-too facile excuses for war-mongers. proponents of just war theory are insufficiently sensitive to the true horror of war; all they do is deliver handy rationalizations for a domestic audience that needs to be charmed into acceptance by the veneer of morality. (butler ; fiala ; neu ) maja zehfuss has pushed this argument to its logical conclusion by claiming that “just war thinking […] plays a crucial role in setting up key ways of conceptualizing the problem which make it possible to believe that we are doing the right thing because we follow our best intentions.” (zehfuss , ) her critique suggests that the ideal of an “ethical war”, which is pivotal to today’s politics in a liberal vein, is founded on a reprehensible delusion that can only be upheld through the ideological scaffolding of just war theory. according to this account, pacifism has been deliberately discredited, not least by just war theory’s success in dictating the terms of the debate about war and violence. the hope of these critics is that, once the notion of an “ethical war” is dismantled, new ways of reflecting about the global order will reveal themselves. these two rejoinders erect safeguards against an uncritical embrace of just war theory. they remind us that just war theory, in spite of its ostensibly skeptical attitude, is always at risk of reproducing the systemic conditions in which violence is exercised. although i do not wish to diminish their accomplishments, the recent recuperation of pacifism still strikes me as misguided in its presumption that, if just war theory’s accusation of utopianism were indeed correct, then pacifism would turn out a problematic doctrine. (howes , ; king ) after all, the strategy of authors such as howes, mantena and may is precisely to establish, with the help of social science, that a commitment to nonviolence is not utopian at all: it does have positive real-world effects that war cannot engender. however, this invective against utopianism cedes too much ground to just war thinking. my worry is that, by rendering pacifism more credible, practical and realistic, these authors inadvertently reproduce and entrench the anti-utopian animus that defenders of just war theory have been nurturing for a long time. by contrast, i will now demonstrate that pacifism’s utopian impulse is much more complex than either the detractors or the advocates of pacifism believe. . utopia, split in the middle let us begin with an ecumenical framing of the utopian tradition. ever since thomas more coined the term in his eponymous novel in , utopia signified at the same time a no-place (ou-topos) and an arcadian place (eu-topos). the word play, oscillating between a simple absence and an alluring alternative, tells us something important about the functional structure of all kinds of utopia. as paul ricœur perceptively notes with regard to the evocative image of a nowhere: [a] place which exists in no real place, a ghost city; a river with no water; a prince with no people, and so on. what must be emphasized is the benefit of this special extraterritoriality. from this “no place” an exterior glance is cast on our reality. the field of the possible is now open beyond that of the actual; it is a field, therefore, for alternative ways of living. (ricœur , ) what this passage brings out is the procedural, rather than the substantive aspect of utopian thinking. by opening up a field for “alternative ways of living”, often through satire and hyperbole, utopias enable us to take a critical stance vis-à-vis the status quo. varied forms of social organization shed new light on the situation in which the reader finds herself. utopia’s critical purchase is, of course, fully recognized in the literature, but it has often been interpreted as either a flight from reality or as a totalitarian plot for forcefully creating another world: the view from nowhere as the launch pad for radical upheaval. utopias can become vehicles of domination insofar as the world, here and now, is shown to be utterly corrupt and in need of urgent repair. numerous critics, including so-called cold war liberals (see: müller ), have surmised that utopias are not only idle fantasies that might have distracting effects on their audience, but may become dangerous schemes for legitimizing social engineering on a large scale. philosophers such as karl popper ( ), isaiah berlin ( ) or judith shklar ( , ) saw utopias in a decidedly fatalistic way: their primary objective is to prop up totalitarian programs for transforming society in its entirety. on this perspective, the imaginary anticipation of a different world is itself perilous insofar as it seduces us to disregard the material sacrifices that would have to be made to attain a prosperous future. the suspicion that utopias represent a turning away from worldly affairs is a commonplace in the wider discussion in social and political theory. against these perspectives, it is important to insist, however, that interpreting utopia as otherworldly and deluded hinges on an intellectual shortcut. utopias entail ways of imagining “alternative ways of living”, which do not necessarily coalesce into rigid templates for an arcadian future. this point has recently been made in utopian studies. several commentators, including miguel abensour ( , ) and russell jacoby ( ), have identified a rupture within the utopian tradition itself: between a highly visible strand that seeks to conjure static visions of a world to come, devoid of change and contestation; and a more covert, yet equally noteworthy strand that endeavors to draw on utopian thinking and acting so as to gain distance to the status quo. the (cold war) liberal critique of utopianism is prone to collapsing the second strand into the first one, such that all types of utopianism appear as harbingers of totalitarianism. this is a mistake that a subtler interpretation manages to avoid, by referring to what ruth levitas calls “utopia as a method” (levitas ). levitas is skeptical of endeavors to define utopia narrowly, for instance by fixating on a particular literary genre or by placing utopianism primarily within the canon of political theory. influenced by ernst bloch’s magisterial the principle of hope ( ), levitas prefers a conceptualization of utopia as the “expression of a desire for a better way of being” (levitas , ). she argues that a holistic reading of utopianism must cut across the divide between cognition and action. this implies that utopias engage the imagination by making up different worlds, but they also shape actual practices, here and now. utopias, then, are as much about the way we think as they affect the way we act. as a consequence, the monolithic interpretation of utopianism is too restrictive, highlighting only one aspect of a rich kaleidoscope of ideas and practices that all qualify as utopian. using the split of the utopian tradition as a starting point, let us now outline minor, grounded utopias. minor utopias – a term coined by jay winter ( ) in his historical sketch of peace initiatives during the th century – embody cultural and social projects whose aim is the partial renewal of the world. in contrast with major utopias, which winter associates with despotic reveries of social engineering, their telos is to become incubators of change on a local, rather than global, scale. since they necessarily react to particular constellations of power, minor utopias reflect the material and ideological conditions from which they emerge. winter probes this dialectical movement by tracing a fundamental tension within utopianism: first, it [utopianism] is a narrative about discontinuity. it is a story through which men and women imagine a radical act of disjunction, enabling people, acting freely and in concert with others, to realize the creative potential imprisoned by the way we live now. but secondly, since the narrative is written by men and women rooted in contemporary conditions and language, it inevitably shows where they are, even as it describes where they want to be. utopias force us to face the fact that we do not live there; we live here, and we cannot but use the language of the here and now in all our imaginings. (winter , ) one way in which these minor utopias are constitutionally grounded is therefore with regard to the contexts from which they try to escape – the “language of the here and now”, in winter’s words, cannot be simply left behind like an old coat. although utopias may appear unattached – consider how many early modern utopias are set on islands – they in fact remain tethered, often in surreptitious ways, to the material and symbolic universe that they reject. whereas major utopias obfuscate this tethering by attempting to altogether transcend the strictures of the present condition, minor utopias openly acknowledge the dialectics at play when experimenting with alternative ways of living. but utopias are grounded in another respect as well: via the everyday experiences of the people enacting utopian visions through practices of resistance and dissidence. (davis ) instead of merely scrutinizing the abstract ideas behind political action, grounded utopianism describes how particular social milieux can be turned into spaces for emancipatory practices. accordingly, davina cooper has recently examined utopias through the lens of quotidian encounters in settings designed to foster communal promise and hope. cooper defines these sites as everyday utopias, networks and spaces that […] perform regular daily life in a radically different fashion. everyday utopias don’t focus on campaigning or advocacy. they don’t place their energy on pressuring mainstream institutions to change, on winning votes, or on taking over dominant social structures. rather they work by creating the change they wish to encounter, building and forging new ways of experiencing social and political life. (cooper , ) far from being figments of the imagination, grounded utopias thus strive to actualize the utopian desire for change, here and now. this drives them beyond the realm of cognitive processes into the sphere of contentious politics, albeit on a small scale. while social transformation might be an ulterior ambition of minor, grounded utopias, their chief objective is to salvage, through “alternative ways of living”, emancipatory potentials from within existing power structures. viewed from this vantage point, it becomes clear why both detractors and advocates of nonviolence are too quick to dismiss pacifism’s utopian impulse. if utopianism pertains to both imagination and action, then we can interpret at least some nonviolent movements and initiatives as utopian in a non-pejorative sense. accordingly, a few authors have contended that pacifism and utopianism are bound up with one another. tom moylan, for example, proposes that levitas’s conception of utopia as a method can helpfully illuminate social movements. on this account, both principled pacifists and campaigners for strategic nonviolence resist oppression by embodying the change they want to see in the wider world: “in challenging oppositional violence and exemplifying alternative nonviolent manoeuvres, they function as a strategic or at least a tactical vanguard, as a utopian sensei or even a utopian ‘commissar’ whose methods are dialogical and not centralist.” (moylan , ) stellan vinthagen surveys related terrain with his concept of “utopian enactment” (vinthagen , – ). his suggestion, inspired by both gandhi himself and the gandhian philosopher richard gregg, is to scrutinize the efforts of the activist in terms of dramatic performances that anticipate a peaceful future. when the activist refuses to use violence in her practice of resistance and refusal, she elects to suffer the painful consequences of violent repression. yet, pace just war theory, this suffering is not a private decision to keep one’s hands clean, but fulfils a demonstrative function by “[t]rying through […] ‘as if’ actions to apply the nonviolent future in the present, precisely where this is most difficult, near violence and oppression.” (vinthagen , ) in sum, the notion of minor, grounded utopia deviates along two axes from the standard picture of utopia as a blueprint: minor utopias are, firstly, distinct from major utopias owing to their acknowledgment of the limitations that the here and now imposes on the aspirations to build a better future. secondly, grounded utopias differ from afloat utopias in that they link imaginative strivings to everyday practices. taken together, these two features help us retrieve a meaning of utopianism that both the critics and the defenders of pacifism have thus far missed: an empowering vision for creating another world that works through the contradictions of the status quo, without succumbing to the dangerous illusion of wishful thinking. . two modes of pacifist utopianism: prefiguration and testimony we can further sketch the contours of peace as a minor, grounded utopia by concentrating on two of its enactive modes: prefiguration and testimony. while they are related to each other, prefiguration and testimony are situated at the extreme ends of a spectrum of activities that characterize pacifist utopianism. they set into motion different ways of performing, rather than merely speculating on, pacifism, moving back and forth between cognition and action, between contemplating and doing, and between the future and the present. in the most general terms, we may describe prefiguration and testimony as follows: prefigurative pacifism strives to promote nonviolence “as if” a world were already in existence where violence was utterly discredited as a means to attain political ends. several authors have noted, with respect to recent social movements, that prefiguration serves various interconnected goals: by employing horizontal decision- making procedures, activists endeavor to “build the new society in the shell of the old”. such anticipatory action is supposed to transmit a strong signal to society at large that its hegemonic order, in which democracy has been hollowed out, is utterly fraudulent. (boggs ; kinna ; leach ; sande ; yates ) this communicative function is also central to testimonial pacifism. (martin and varney ) testimony can be located at the other end of the spectrum: through the public witnessing of violence, a system of oppression is laid bare to wider society so as to provoke a shock that will move the audience into a peaceful future. providing testimony is not the same as standing by in passivity. peace witnesses hold up to society a mirror that is designed to reflect reality back on those who engage in violence and on bystanders who avert their eyes to remain unaffected by their surroundings. (hess and martin ; martin ) crucially, even though “acting as if” and “bearing witness” appear like polar opposites, they share a vital feature: their orientation towards a world of nonviolence supplies a critical tool for uncovering problems concealed within the status quo. let us now refine this abstract model by unpacking two examples. my goal here is to study in some detail whether the framework of minor, grounded utopianism, with its emphasis on working through the contradictions of the status quo, can be conducive for better understanding both “acting as if” and “bearing witness” as pacifist strategies. before proceeding, a word on case selection and discussion. the two examples have been chosen because they operate through practices of prefiguration and testimony that exhibit the tenets i identified with minor, grounded utopianism. the purpose of this section is not to paint a fully comprehensive picture of prefigurative and testimonial enactments of pacifism; nor is it to glorify particular social movements and issue a stern judgment on others. rather, i hope to demonstrate that the framework of minor, grounded utopianism can shed light on nonviolent activism, illuminating both its successes and its failures. that the inherent complexity of each case will have to be reduced for presentational reasons strikes me as inescapable. to commence with our first example, in the late s and early s, a number of radical pacifist movements, such as the committee for non-violent revolution, the committee for non-violent action and the peacemakers, sprung up in the us. (cortright , – ) any form of violent behavior during their protests was prohibited from the get-go; resistance was to be marshalled on strictly nonviolent grounds. facing fierce opposition from the state and opprobrium from society, these groups sought to turn themselves into catalysts of transformation. given the widespread patriotism in the immediate aftermath of the second world war and the concomitant attrition of pacifist sentiments, their strategy involved the creation of small-scale cells that internally adhered to the kind of peace and democracy they wished to spread across society. (danielson ) like gandhi, the radical pacifists maintained that nonviolence was ultimately more efficacious in prompting social transformation than violent resistance. associating the pacifist calling with the underground activities of early christians, a. j. muste, a dutch-born leader of the peacemakers and vehement critic of the emerging doctrine of cold war realpolitik (danielson ), assessed the situation in rather bleak terms: it seems altogether likely that building a radical pacifist movement of any size will be a tougher and slower job in the u.s. than anywhere else […] [w]ill reaction prove so strong in the u.s. that we have to keep a small remnant alive […] a church in the catacombs pattern? (cited in: polletta and hoban , ) it is essential to remark that these groups openly espoused the terminology of utopianism to explain and justify their politics. as francesca polletta observes, the radical pacifists believed that “[a]n honest utopianism […] had to be a part of a radical politics worthy of the name – but a utopianism that refused to withdraw from the political world” (polletta , ). their worldly engagement hence corresponds with the minor, grounded utopianism theorized above. so how did the radical pacifists concretize their utopian project? the internal structure of these movements was based on egalitarian principles that were supposed to anticipate the non-oppressive order they were aiming to institute within society at large. the plan was precisely to prefigure in their actions the world they planned to bring about through canvassing and lobbying, hoping that the old shell would wither away once the new world was born within. however, their deep commitment to a non-hierarchical organization frequently came into conflict with the public mission of mobilizing for peace. the dilemma was clear: since these groups were politically and socially marginalized, they were compelled to turn inwards for keeping the momentum going and for bolstering the members’ morale. at the same time, those who were affected by the message of nonviolence needed to be addressed in such a way that they immediately grasped the attractiveness of the alternative world imagined and enacted by pacifists. this friction points to a dilemma pervading the collective identity of social movements. (della porta and diani , chap. ) the difficulty for activists facing an intensely adverse environment is how to persuasively speak to the people in the wider public, without compromising the group’s internal integrity and without weakening the grip of the collective’s foundational values. although the radical pacifists in the late s and early s were not trying to become mass movements, they still struggled to negotiate the tension between an inward-looking consolidation of egalitarian ideals and an outward-looking strategy for advocacy. this tension became most palpable when their commitment to collaborative relationships negatively influenced external constituency-building. as a consequence, their peculiar brand of pacifism made them vulnerable to strong leadership claims, which ran counter to self-professed benchmarks of non-hierarchical organization. (polletta , – ) in many respects, these groups’ activities and initiatives were admirable. they bravely stood up against a political establishment and a societal mainstream that identified peace with cowardly appeasement; they experimented with ways of cooperating that intended to maximize inclusion and horizontality; they were fearless in their employment of nonviolent forms of protest. through their anticipation of a peaceful future, these groups performed a critical function in the postwar era. (danielson ) later, they would have substantial impact on the civil rights agenda and especially on martin luther king jr. yet, the radical pacifists were also working through precisely those contradictions that permeated the wider public in the us after the second world war (and even today, one might add). the main fault-lines in their activism ran along largely predictable divisions: gender and race. while they endeavored to abolish hierarchies within their ranks, the protagonists of these groups assumed, often unreflectively, a cultural homogeneity within their organizations. as polletta remarks, “[w]hen pacifists talked about democracy within their organizations, they meant among people with similar ideological commitments, formal education, and political expertise.” (polletta , ) while inclusion and horizontality were thus objectives of their prefigurative politics, the basis for who would get recognized was still shaped by the gendered and racialized matrices that structured the societal mainstream of that period. women occupied especially uncertain positions within this utopian setting: they were openly valued as equal members in the struggle for peace, playing important roles in the above- mentioned groups; but their very presence also stretched the notion of universal “brotherhood” to its breaking point. in the words of another commentator: [t]he activism promoted by the radical pacifist movement was a highly gendered phenomenon that shaped the experience of women and men in different and unequal ways. male activists actively promoted a definition of pacifist action that equated political militancy with a rough and rugged style of heroic manhood. in their hands, political protest became a way to defend and define their masculinity – a type of direct action identity politics disturbingly similar to that promoted by the culture of militarism, which identified self- sacrifice and courage as the primary markers of manly citizenship. (mollin , , see also: ) the unsure standing of african-americans resembled in some respects that of women. although eradicating racial segregation was one of the key targets of groups such as the congress for racial equality (core) – orchestrating, for example, the so-called journey of reconciliation in , a two-week bus ride through southern states governed by jim crow laws (catsam ) – the actual results of these campaigns must be deemed mixed at best. albeit an interracial group from the start, core’s leadership was mostly white (and exclusively male), “committed to a race-blind ‘brotherhood of man’, but not yet sure of how to make concrete contributions to the black freedom struggle.” (mollin , ) even though we must not overlook the contributions of alternative peace initiatives run by black women (mcduffie ), the most influential groups in the wake of the second world war clearly failed to relinquish the racial divide they were attempting to abolish in society at large. the political language of universalism underpinning their pacifist agenda, apparent in the color-blind invocation of an all-encompassing “brotherhood”, made a genuine alliance with those resisting the oppression directed at african-americans almost impossible. it would take the civil rights movement, more than a decade later, to rearticulate universalism in such a way that the struggle for black freedom could finally gain traction. (hall ) my second example concerns one of the most prominent ngos today: amnesty international. in the following, i concentrate on amnesty’s early years during the beginning of the cold war. the focus here is specifically on amnesty’s foundational principle of bearing witness to human suffering, which is also central to other human rights ngos, such as médecins sans frontières, for example. (redfield ) while amnesty is usually not considered a pacifist organization, the unconditional pledge to nonviolence featured prominently in its historical development. this becomes especially apparent when we look at a public figure who amnesty initially did not recognize as a prisoner of conscience: nelson mandela. although he was eventually offered the “ambassador of conscience” award in , in , when he was sentenced to life in prison, mandela’s name had not been included in amnesty’s list of prisoners of conscience. the justification for this decision was amnesty’s erstwhile dismissal of any form of activism or policy that propagated violence, even when targeted at oppressive regimes. (clark , ; bbc news ) this is the sole reason why mandela was denied the status of “prisoner of conscience”: as somebody who had openly encouraged violent resistance against the apartheid state, his suffering – while authentic and undeniable – was simply not deemed “unjust”. mandela’s story thus speaks to the centrality of nonviolence within amnesty’s ethico- political universe. in order to grasp the importance of this point, we require some historical background. amnesty was founded in , by the british lawyer peter benenson, a converted catholic of russian-jewish descent. (buchanan , ) benenson’s energy had been channeled at prisoners of conscience – those subjected to state violence merely on the basis of their beliefs and convictions. the means amnesty employed in its activism, at least during its initial phase, was detached objectivity in research and reporting. during the early s, benenson, and those supporting his mission, was adamant about the need to keep equidistance to the great powers embroiled in the cold war. in that vein, amnesty was supposed to operate on an “extra-political” platform, standing in solidarity with prisoners of conscience around the world, without having to endorse any particular creed or worldview. this constituted the normative basis for amnesty’s reliance on unbiased research into infringements on civil and political rights, which would further consolidate its “moral position, that of the apolitical, neutral, impartial observer” (hopgood , ). to comprehend the purpose of testimony in backing detainees, further historical context is needed. bearing witness has always played an important role for pacifists, perhaps most famously in the quaker movement. (ceadel ; dandelion ; smith ) the quaker view holds that it is a christian duty to oppose war in the broadest possible sense. testimony is part of its strategy for resisting the advocacy for, and contribution to, war. amnesty’s founders were heavily influenced by this religious coloring of pacifist activism. the pervasiveness of spiritual symbols also manifests itself in amnesty’s official logo, a burning candle surrounded by barbed wire. (lahusen , ) fashioning itself as a beacon of apolitical, neutral and impartial objectivity in a turbulent sea of conflicting creeds and worldviews augmented amnesty’s reputation over time, culminating in a sort of secular religion – a quasi-spiritual organization whose doctrinal core is held together by a deep faith in the sanctity of human rights. stephen hopgood, who introduced the phrase secular religion to portray amnesty’s institutional culture, grasps the basic dynamic succinctly: amnesty’s lack of building blocks – its social and geographical separation from any specific national social class or group – created an initial detachment. its growing symbolic role as a universal flame-bearer then edged it toward rules, procedures, and finally doctrine that maintained moral authority by elevating the idea of impartiality to an organizational imperative. it sought to construct in practical terms the kind of space – above, beyond, outside the world – in which the idea of objective morality of a kind of universal truth, could be anchored. (hopgood , ) the emphasis on carving out a space “above, beyond, outside the world” foregrounds the utopian aspirations of amnesty’s testimonial pacifism. observing politics from such a transcendent position is premised on imagining an alternative world that looks radically different from the present moment. when the peace witness faithfully records what is happening here and now, her evidence, preserved for future generations, performs a commemorative function. for testimony to call attention to structural wrongdoing, distance must be maintained between the observer and the observed, the activist and the sufferer. the epistemological status of truth-telling thus depends on the researcher-activist protecting her vantage point from undue distortions and biases. amnesty’s reports therefore resemble investigative journalism, or indeed academic inquiry, in that the singular norm governing them is the falsifiable truth of what is being conveyed. its “interpretive capacity” (clark , – ) relies on giving an accurate and perspicuous account of frequently inchoate patterns of human rights violations. the celebration of detachment and objectivity has repercussions for how the suffering subject is represented. if testimony is to generate the desired effect of garnering public support, human suffering needs to be depicted in a clear-cut way that leaves little room for doubt about perpetrators and bystanders. the victim’s absolute innocence is key to the smooth operation of “humanitarian reason” (fassin ). innocent life is thereby elevated to a sacralized status, for instance through the many images of children and women in amnesty’s reports; reports that are meant to elicit visceral responses from the audience. call this the totemic dimension embedded within the human rights imaginary. (hopgood , – ) a difficulty for this model of impartiality arises from the way amnesty’s core mission is simultaneously facilitated and constrained by the guiding principle of truth-telling. the predicament appears to be this: for testimony to lead to positive results, detachment must not feel like cold-hearted indifference; dispassionate distance to the suffering subject must not evoke a sense of isolationism; the observational stance must not eclipse the activist’s moral outrage. later on, especially during the genocide in rwanda, the tension stemming from the very idea of testimony would cause a severe crisis in amnesty’s “ethos-in-action” (hopgood , ); a crisis, which has arguably been exacerbated during recent wars in the middle east. these two cases tell us something about the peculiar appeal of prefiguration and testimony as modes of pacifist utopianism. both “acting as if” a peaceful order was already in place and the method of “objectively” documenting human suffering spring from the desire for a different world. they unfold a space beyond the here and now within which prefigurative and testimonial practices can become effective. but this space, albeit utopian in essence, is not the product of wishful thinking. prefigurative and testimonial actions are deeply embedded in the world as we know it; they occupy ambiguous sites, rife with conflict and contestation. what is distinctive about both kinds of utopian pacifism is that they deliberately confound, albeit in different ways, the trajectory leading from the present moment’s violence to an uncertain future. the feminist activist and scholar elise boulding has dealt with this issue through her pioneering work on the human capacity to produce images of concrete alternatives to war. such future-oriented visions can galvanize struggles in the here and now, by debunking the potent myth that making war is simply humanity’s destiny. other feminist thinkers have pursued similar lines of reasoning, stressing that pacifism aims to “construct an alternative to war by addressing the conditions that make it seem that war is the default mechanism for securing justice” (hutchings , ) . importantly, this utopian mode of thinking about alternatives should not be mistaken for a predictive method: its main purpose is to inspire change in the face of massive obstacles, not to forecast what the future will eventually bring. what makes both the radical pacifists in the aftermath of the second world war and amnesty international minor, grounded utopias, is their inability to escape the predicaments they attempt to resolve. they envisage nonviolence as a viable and indispensable alternative to the status quo; nonetheless, in their quotidian encounters, they also remain mired in the “very contradictions they seek to supersede” (winter , ). their worldly orientation goes hand in hand with a rejection of what i have called major and afloat utopianism above – the search for a static blueprint that knows no dispute or transformation. for the radical pacifist groups in the late s and early s, the continued prevalence of male, white leadership threw into sharp relief the limitations that the language of universal “brotherhood” imposed on their institutional culture and decision-making procedures. while inclusion and horizontality were officially celebrated, the boundaries of equality were drawn along culturally dominant coordinates, with the effect that minorities could not occupy leadership positions. consequently, outsiders within the organization, especially women and african- americans, remained largely disempowered. the case of testimonial pacifism relates a different story. although human rights have been called the “last utopia” (moyn ) – a morally pure counterpoint to a world ravaged by dangerously divisive ideals – an investigation of amnesty’s pledge of impartiality opens up another perspective. bearing witness involves an ethos that is predicated on “extra-political” truth-telling. this is the essence of its “self-imposed limited mandate” (baehr ). yet, in reality the imperative of enunciating in public nothing but the truth runs the risk of appearing overly anemic, menacing the core mission of an activist ngo that strives to make the world a better place. traversing the gulf between the epistemic demands of truth-as-testimony and the duty to positively intervene to alleviate human suffering marks out amnesty as a minor, grounded utopia. amnesty intends to speak from a place beyond politics, but the reality of human suffering, “unjust” or otherwise, necessarily forces them back to the ground of compromise and concession. . fail again, fail better what wider lessons can we learn from these examples of prefiguration and testimony? my proposal in the concluding section is that envisaging pacifism as a utopian project helps us to appreciate why social movements and ngos engaged in nonviolent struggles often seem to falter, or at least to fall short of the aspirations they set themselves. one consequence of what i have claimed so far is that, when debating nonviolent initiatives, we should refrain from tracing their shortcomings back to pacifism’s intrinsic immorality, inconsistency and impracticality. just war theorists of different stripes have pursued this denunciatory scheme, without seriously considering whether a more differentiated account of utopianism would weaken the critical thrust of their objections. insofar as utopian pacifism remains bound by the conventions it aims to transcend, what we perceive as failure should be more appropriately comprehended as an upshot of the complex negotiations between the strictures of the contemporary condition and the promise of an anticipated future. (jameson ) to paraphrase samuel beckett, failing again, but next time better, might hence be a suitable motto for this kind of pacifism. here, a side look at anarchist politics can illuminate the advantages of the framework delineated in this essay. in david graeber’s apologia of the occupy movement, we discover an instructive account of why the actual accomplishments of anarchist politics are often met with silence in the public sphere. (graeber ) against the predominant view that the pacifist protests of , for example, were a complete disaster in terms of tangible policy impact, graeber insists that many of the demands put forth by the anti-war movement had delayed ramifications that can still be felt today. graeber condenses this view in the following words: clearly, an antiwar movement in the s that is still tying the hands of u.s. military planners in can hardly be considered a failure. but it raises an intriguing question: what happens when the creation of that sense of failure, of the complete ineffectiveness of political action against the system, becomes the chief objective of those in power? (graeber , ) this last sentence reveals a tantalizing prospect: that the depiction of pacifism as pejoratively utopian serves specific interests, most notably the pre-emptive condemnation of nonviolence as immoral, inconsistent and impractical. viewed from this vantage point, a different set of responses to just war theory takes shape. recall how just war theorists present their normative assessment of warfare as a more responsible reaction to a global constellation where evil and injustice cannot simply be wished away. once we foreground the minor, grounded utopianism within pacifist movements and initiatives, just war theory loses at least some of its compelling character. for we can now grant that utopian thinking and acting is not always capable of comprehensively resolving all the contradictions of the status quo. indeed, following winter’s and cooper’s reflections, we might conclude that minor, grounded utopias are by default contentious and imperfect; they are bound to be assembled within the force-field of extant power structures. this admittance has repercussions for how we conceive of counterhegemonic campaigns more broadly. naturally, the fact that women and african-americans could not obtain leadership posts within radical pacifist groups such as core or peacemakers should make us skeptical of their progressive agenda; equally, the fact that peace testimony can, and often does, lead to a complacent retreat from the world must be a cause for concern to all those who want human rights to become tools of emancipation. nonetheless, viewed through the framework of minor, grounded utopias, both issues are symptomatic of the ways in which prefiguration and testimony function as incubators of real-world change. the creators and inhabitants of minor, grounded utopias seek to distance themselves from the status quo, through complex ways of anticipating alternative futures; but they inevitably remain entangled in the contradictions that they aspire to resolve. espousing the maxim of “failing better” thus entails that we perceive both the successes and the failures of pacifist projects as temporary stations on a continuous, yet rocky journey. trying to imagine and occupy utopian spaces is an experimental endeavor, full of promises and disappointments. while it would be inaccurate to depict this journey as a linear, steady learning process, prefigurative and testimonial practices do possess an iterative dimension that enables nonviolent actors to gain awareness of the pitfalls of inaugurating real-world change. the perspective of minor, grounded utopianism then allows us to judge their performance in a nuanced manner, which is not only sensitive to their shortcomings, but also appreciative of their accomplishments. this observation casts light on the distinction between pacifism and nonviolence, which we have encountered in section . against the current tendency to pit them against one another, my analysis indicates that the contrast between principle and strategy is less stark than often assumed. although it is, of course, correct that “[t]hose who engage in nonviolent action hold a variety of different beliefs, one of which may be pacifism” (schock , ), it seems also apposite to point out how ideas and practices affect each other in minor, grounded utopias. as we have seen, prefiguration and testimony inexorably alter the relationship between the means and the ends of political action. rather than merely seeking to determine the most appropriate means for achieving their chosen ends, proponents of minor, grounded utopias contest the very notion that we can neatly separate means from ends. as a consequence, it will in concrete moments perhaps be possible to hold apart pacifism as an ideological, spiritual or philosophical stance and nonviolence as a means-oriented tactic; but the benefits of differentiating between pacifism and nonviolence are not always clear in cases such as the ones discussed in this paper. without denying the potential value of the distinction in other contexts, i would therefore suggest that, within minor, grounded utopias, pacifist principles and nonviolent strategies are inextricably bound up with one another, to an extent that trying to unravel them can seem like a pointless exercise. the significance of adopting this perspective for contemporary politics, beyond the two cases discussed above, is considerable. in underscoring the utopian impulses in social movements and initiatives, we are able to overcome a simplistic framework whereby the tensions resulting from minor, grounded utopias are taken to be intractable. to explain this further, i will gesture towards just one example that discloses the broader potential of my proposal. while the essay’s conclusion cannot be the place to unpack this multifaceted project in any kind of detail, consider for a moment black lives matter. (lebron ) one fruitful approach for making sense of its anti-racist resistance is, in melvin rogers’s words, to view it as a “utopian […] exercise of our moral imagination, struggling to be realized in practice” (rogers ). its commitment to a “pragmatic utopianism” (dawson , – ), which inventively combines bearing witness to state violence and the anticipation of a less oppressive future, exposes one of the many parallels between black lives matter and the wider tradition of black radicalism. (kelley ; bailey and leonard ) looking at black lives matter through the prism of a minor, grounded utopia lets us appreciate its freedom struggle, in spite of its many set-backs and uncertain future, as a dynamic form of social dreaming. (k.-y. taylor ) finally, we can also ponder how my case for bolstering pacifism relates to the above- mentioned attempts of rendering pacifism more credible, practical and realistic. as should be evident, i do not believe that conceiving of pacifism as utopian is at odds with these proposals. in the critique of just war theory, my essay thus joins up with the ambitions of dustin howes, karuna mantena and todd may to re-orient the ethical reflection on violence. like these authors, i, too, have sought to steer attention towards enactments of pacifism that try to exert a positive impact on the world as we know it. but this paper has also claimed that a vital aspect of nonviolence gets lost if we conceive it primarily as a means-oriented technique in the arsenal of contentious politics. there is something positively utopian about pacifism, which even its defenders habitually ignore. grasping this aspect, in all its complexity, is a precondition for analytically understanding, normatively vindicating and actively encouraging struggles for a nonviolent future. references abensour, miguel. . “william morris: the politics of romance.” in revolutionary romanticism: a drunken boat anthology, edited by max blechman, – . san francisco: city lights books. ———. . “persistent utopia.” constellations ( ): – . https://doi.org/ . /j. - 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(print) - (online) journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjce economics, economic anthropology, and debt drucilla k. barker to cite this article: drucilla k. barker ( ) economics, economic anthropology, and debt, journal of cultural economy, : , - , doi: . / . . to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / . . published online: apr . submit your article to this journal article views: view related articles view crossmark data citing articles: view citing articles https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rjce https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rjce https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showcitformats?doi= . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rjce &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rjce &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - 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(paperback), isbn - - - - , $ . (cloth) isbn - - - - debt is a social and ideological construct, not a simple economic fact. noam chomsky miranda joseph’s monograph, debt to society: accounting for life under capitalism, contributes to an emerging body of scholarship that locates debt in its wider social context. joseph’s work, rooted in cultural studies, explores debt and its meanings in the contexts of criminal justice, time, gender, and interdisciplinarity in the academy. two major and interrelated concepts organize the book: first, the dialectics of abstraction and particularization through which capitalism becomes legible, and second, the moral/ethical question of accountability. regarding the first, drawing on marx, joseph under- stands particularities as the results of abstract social processes and relations, a dialectical processes in which the contradictions created by class antagonisms and tensions produce differences in the meanings of abstractions. thus she navigates a course between the scylla and charybdis of privile- ging particular formations of social difference, on the one hand, and trivializing them in favor of abstract categories, on the other. understanding abstraction in terms of generative, historical, real social forces allows joseph to develop an appreciation of the dialectical and complementary relation between the particular and concrete. regarding the second concept, accountability, the key questions are: who has to pay their debts, and who does not? from whom is accountability required? generally not the class at the top, the famous %. accounting and statistics are disciplinary practices used to separate neoliberal subjects into those who are worthy of social inclusion and those who are excluded. how do the abstractions produced by accounting and statistics create dynamic social processes that enable accountability for the many and carte blanche for the few? as joseph ( ) argues in an earlier piece, ‘financial accounting in its managerial mode (cost accounting) and the “metrics” (statistical measurements) meant to track the efficacy of practices and programs are the technologies by which most public insti- tutions are managed and held “accountable”’ (n.p.). they are also the technologies through which individuals and groups of individuals are represented, managed, and held accountable (or not). my interest in this topic stems from my work in feminist political economy and interest in econ- omic anthropology. in the remainder of this essay i offer a reading of three aspects of joseph’s work – methodology, criminal justice, and gender – concentrating mainly on the questions of methodology and accountability. i conclude with a brief discussion of future directions for this type of work. methodology joseph articulates the notion that debt may be understood as a generative metaphor describing not only financial debt, but also criminal justice, entrepreneurial subjects, gendered subjects, and aca- demic institutions. to investigate, she suggests a ‘methodology of critical abstraction’, that begins by setting up her work in contradistinction to graeber’s ( ) debt: the first years. graeber’s theorization of debt is, according to her, an example of the ‘repressive hypothesis’, that relies on the demonization and reification of abstraction in order to cast debt as destructive of ‘natural communal energy’ ( ). she offers, instead, a presentation of debt and credit as generative of social formations. journal of cultural economy, vol. , no. , – http://www.tandfonline.com i differ in my own reading of graeber and offer a more sympathetic one that will support rather than weaken joseph’s position. joseph’s analysis of graeber begins with a refutation of the romantic discourse of community that positions community as the antidote to capitalism and modernity. debt and credit are at the heart of capitalism and ‘the development and expansion of credit is explicitly seen to have participated in or at least to be symptomatic of the destruction of community, and community is often posited as bul- wark against the evils of indebtedness’ ( ). i agree with joseph here, but where we part company is in the implication that this is also at the root of graeber’s ( ) theorization of debt. for anthropol- ogists debt is the bond that holds communities together and is thoroughly embedded in all social relations and in all economies. graeber is not arguing against capitalism per se, rather he is unra- veling what he sees as the moral confusion around debt. this moral confusion lies in neglecting the difference between people and things, and, in graeber’s reading, this neglect can be laid squarely at the feet of neoclassical economics. neoclassical economics, often referred to as mainstream econ- omics, is considered by many to be an objective, value-free science, and its scientific status depends crucially on its methodology: rational choice theory and mathematical modeling. this methodology requires treating the human being as a commodity, just like any other commodity. this is the source of the moral confusion around debt, the violation of the principle that human life is an absolute value; its value cannot be expressed in terms of money. the distinction between people and com- modities is the ethical principle at the center of graeber’s work. graeber is not arguing for a return to a romantic notion of community. as an anthropologist, he is well aware that many premarket societies were neither egalitarian nor peaceful. he does, however, want to question the pernicious morality of debt that follows the reduction of people to commodities. it is in the reduction of people to commodities that joseph locates graeber’s aversion to abstraction. but graeber’s aversion is to a particular instance of abstraction: the reduction of human beings to a rational economic agent. resisting the commodification of persons does not necessarily imply resist- ing abstraction; nor does it imply ignoring the dialectics of abstraction and particularities. it does imply, however, rejecting the notion of people as commodities, of a world ruled by equivalences, of a world ruled by number. it implies rejecting the fantasy world of neoclassical economics where individuals exist in radical isolation and the market is the arbiter of morality. the ethics of neoclassical economics can be found in social contract theory: the thesis that the body politic comprises separate and equal beings who, being rational, form a union based on consent and contract. social contract theory has its beginnings in what graeber calls ‘the strange fantasies of liberal philosophers’ who explain the origins of society as the result of the decisions of a ‘collection of thirty- or forty-year-old males who seem to have sprung from the earth fully formed, who then must decide whether to kill each other or swap beaver pelts’ ( ). this tumultuous epoch, during which the divine right of kings and power of priests to legitimate that right was being questioned, was also a time when the fortunes of elite europeans were being built on colonial appropriation. when the brit- ish colonists looked at the americas they saw vast untouched stretches of forests, rivers, and fertile soil. liberal political theory allowed them to rationalize the taking of this land because it was not private property; it had not been transformed by labor. thus liberal political theory justified theft by the elite and obscured the roles of power and violence in the acquisition of wealth and prop- erty. my question is about accountability. why, in this theoretically ideal and just society, was the taking of property and persons lauded when it was done in the name of the sovereign, the nobility, or the state, but severely punished when it was done by starving displaced peasants to feed them- selves? this is akin to the question of accountability that joseph raises: what are the processes through which the neoliberal concept of personal responsibility justifies upward redistributions of wealth while those responsible for the financial crisis largely escape censure? what are the social processes that overdetermine accountability? as i have argued above, for people to be abstracted into commodities, they must be in some sense be equal. this principle, along with the principle of private property, is enshrined in liberal and neo- liberal philosophical thought. but of course, this abstract principle is belied by people’s actual review symposium positions in particular social formations. although in principle all theft should be punished equally, in practice those responsible for the financial meltdown have escaped punishment and retained the rewards of their chicanery. the contradiction between the abstract principle of equality and the particular workings of power and privilege as manifest in accounting practices and financial insti- tutions, resulting in amnesty for the wealthy and impoverishment for the poor whose lives and bodies are marked as ‘other’ has generated social movements such as occupy, strike debt, and black lives matter, as well as personal resistance manifested in a variety of quotidian practices. debts to society it has become a truism that criminals owe a debt to society. however, accounting for the time a pris- oner ‘owes’ to society involves complex and seemingly objective calculations. in joseph’s telling, these accounting practices can be thought of as a socially performative force that articulates particu- lar individuals to seemingly fair and objective abstract rules. whereas previously the property crimes of the poor were subject to one set of rules and practices while those of the wealthy were subject to another, liberal notions of equality and the rule of law created a legal regime that was symbolically marked by an impartial and uniform adherence to the law. deprivation of liberty was the appropriate punishment for crimes of property and in principle the time served should be equal for everyone, regardless of class. this new juridical regime was accompanied by a transformation in debtor-credi- tor relations. debtors’ prisons and indentured servitude were displaced by other mechanisms, such as ‘promissory notes that could be enforced or discounted when they were exchanged’ and that ‘gave creditors alternatives in dealing with overdue debts’ ( ). debtors prisons have returned, partly as a consequence of the privatization of the prison industry and probations systems in the usa. this is a new type debtors’ prison for debts that are occurred after the penalty for the initial offense (stillman , human rights watch ). these offenses range from minor misdemeanors like shop-lifting, public drunkenness, and traffic citations to trivial violations of municipal ordinances mandating, for instance, lawn care. generally they do not warrant jail time. however, if people cannot pay their tickets or fines they are put on ‘probation’, and ordered to sign up for a payment plan with a company contracted to collect unpaid fines and fees for the court. if the person falls behind on her payments, they can end up with wage garnishments or even jail time, which can result in the loss of employment and even more fees. the end result is that poor people are further impoverished and trapped in webs of debt. like payday lenders, these for-profit companies seek contracts in cities and counties strapped for cash due to job losses and declining property values. local governments and debt collectors profit while poor people are demonized as wastrels. thus a system of racialized for-profit policing has resulted in the creation of new class of indebted subjects. ferguson, missouri provides a stark example of this practice. the situation there is so dire that one could argue that entire city has become a debtors’ prison (cobb , hendrix ). people are afraid to leave their homes for fear of arrest. ferguson is a predominately black and desperately poor city that earns a substantial amount of its annual income from court fines. its residents are trapped in a cycle of debt that imprisons them both physically and psychologically. but the city has no other source of revenue. there is an important gender dimension here. in the case of criminal justice, poor women suffer disproportionately because they earn less than men and often have the sole responsibility for children. moreover, when men are incarcerated it is their mothers, wives, and girlfriends who bear the financial burden by paying exorbitant rates for telephone calls and transportation to and from the prisons for visits. they also provide the money needed by the men for basic necessities like soap and shampoo, thus shifting the costs of social reproduction from the state to individuals and families. as joseph notes, the division of people into two classes – the responsible and respectable, on the one hand, and the disreputable and irresponsible, on the other – is part of the larger project of per- sonal financialization, the imperative to manage personal lives through financial accounting journal of cultural economy practices. people who run afoul of the criminal or civil justice system, even in minor ways, are easily thrust into the latter category. people on the margins for other reasons may suffer a similar fate. take the healthcare and insurance industries in the us as an example. anyone, with even minimal insur- ance, who suffers from a serious illness or has a spouse or child who has, becomes enmeshed in a complex network. this network is composed by a bewildering variety of bills from hospitals, doctors, and laboratories and confusing insurance policies, co-pays, and benefits explanations. deciphering them takes inordinate amounts of time, patience, and knowledge. that serious illnesses result in mortgage defaults, miserable credit scores, and bankruptcy is not just due to the high costs of medical care, but to the workings of a complex and increasingly opaque for-profit healthcare system. com- plex and opaque bureaucracies are part of the problem, but the deeper issue is the shifting of costs to those who are least able afford it, while at the same time creating a new class of persons, indebted subjects who are also physically ill. in neoliberal discourse illness, like poverty, is not a matter of bad luck or even bad genes, but bad choices. rational subjects choose wellness and act in ways to ensure that outcome. those afflicted clearly did not make appropriate choices according to the neo- liberal vision of the social. representations of gender and debt able-bodied, unencumbered, and economically rational white men are today’s paradigm entrepre- neurial subjects. they take risks, of course, because in today’s financialized world realizing profits requires taking risks. risk-taking is in fact extolled in the social imaginary. countless examples may be found in popular culture, but my favorite representation of this type is the character of henry selfridge in the eponymous television series selfridge. selfridge, an american-born real estate magnate founded selfridges in , a luxury department store in london. from the first time the character appears on screen, you know this is a man who does not have to worry about the downside of risk. relatively young, fit, and supremely confident, his moral compass rests on achieving wealth by taking risks, fulfilling his appropriate gender role as the head of his family and guardian of his employees, and extolling the virtues of shopping for pleasure rather than necessity. in this world, men provide for their dependents by taking risks; women, on the other hand, shop. they are, however, both consumers and financial mediators. the interactions between selfridge and the major women characters flesh out joseph’s assertion that the boundaries of acceptable risk are set by portrayals of ‘women as impulsive shopaholics on the one hand and paralyzed noninvestors on the other’ ( ). while excess, both financial and sexual, is lauded in men, it is problematic for women. the lives of the excessive women – lady mae loxley, a powerful socialite, and ellen love, a beautiful dance hall performer – are vigorously policed by social norms, institutions, and cul- tural conventions in ways that men’s lives are not. the risk-averse women – rose, harry’s wife, and agnes, the shop girl who makes good – have their subjectivities tied up with notions of respectability and obedience to a patriarchal and hierarchical society. as joseph argues, excessive women must be brought under the control of men, who in turn are called on to become risk-taking entrepreneurial subjects. it is the task of obedient, respectable women to mediate the excesses of men. the respect- able women are the ones who are accountable, and they are generally the ones with the least power in the face of financial institutions that are far beyond their control. joseph’s statement that ‘negative, pathologized portrayals of women as impulsive shopaholics on one hand and paralyzed noninvestors on the other indicate the boundaries of responsible entrepre- neurial subjectivity’ ( ) yields an important insight about the reasons why none of those truly responsible for the crisis were held accountable. they had nothing to be accountable for: they were simply fulfilling their necessary entrepreneurial role. accountability lay not with them but with racialized and feminized subjects who allowed themselves to be duped into taking on risky mortgages and were too ignorant to understand the contracts they were signing. just like people facing bankruptcy from illness or those imprisoned in their homes or cities, the unruly ones, the poor and disreputable ones, are the ones to suffer the consequences of financial collapse. review symposium conclusion let me return to my original claim that an anthropological theorization of debt is complementary to joseph’s. anthropologists are deeply critical of mainstream economics and its utopian vision of self-regulating market economies, which understands social relations as embedded in economic relations. not only is this morally wrong, it is also bad social science. anthropologists understand economies as embedded in social systems or, to use joseph’s term, social formations and are thus able to examine the ways that cultural inscriptions and economic processes circulate in tandem and engender unjust social and racial formations. this examination is necessary to understand the moral confusion around debt without resorting to calls for accountability and responsibility, which are ultimately futile and which reinforce rather than resist the imposition of norms of respectability and responsibility on the powerless, while leaving the powerful immune. to better articulate my claim about the complementarity let me quote joseph at length. [b]ankers [ … ] deploy the credit that allows free – liquid – movement through time and space, enabling them to live in whatever present they might prefer. they are shielded by a red herring in the form of the apparently particular, but in fact statistically created, present-oriented, irresponsible childbearing young woman of color. meanwhile ‘responsible’ workers and savers (consumers and borrowers) bear the debt, the obligations and responsibilities [ … ] intricately intertwined, neither responsibility nor irresponsibility provides the leverage against the social processes that generate the scenario: insisting on responsibility turns out to be ressentiment, a self-defeating expression of moral superiority by the losers; and irresponsibility [ … ] must be understood as a normal privilege of the powerful and creditworthy, those in command of the technologies of accounting and thus the attribution of credit and debt. rather than join in the effort to extend and reinforce the norm of respon- sibility, i will persist in the effort to pick at its cracks and fissures. ( – ) anthropology is well suited to pick at these cracks and fissures. what is it about the culture of neo- liberal capitalism that constructs these classes, and what are the forces that animate them? how is it that the ability to navigate the intricacies of compound interest, double-entry bookkeeping, and neo- classical economics has become a path toward power and privilege? once on it, what are the cultural practices that maintain status? who, at the top, is held accountable and under what conditions? what are some of the micro-interventions by national governments and transnational institutions that mitigate the excess of markets? what strategies can we craft to create an economically just society? these are the questions we need to be asking in order to escape the impasse between futile calls for accountability and nihilism. debt to society has opened the door for asking such questions, and i look forward to the conversations that will ensue as we move forward. notes . joseph’s critique of ‘community’ emerges from (and is more fleshed out in) her previous book against the romance of community. . see mauss ([ ] ) and polyani ([ ] ) for foundational accounts of this reading of the economy of debt. . *a world ruled by number* is the title of margaret shabas’ ( ) book about william stanley jevons and the rise of mathematical economics. . there were, of course, other rationalizations used, most famously perhaps the notion that the colonists had a civilizing mission. it was their duty to lead the dark, indigenous heathens into the light of christianity. . although joseph is careful to point out that ‘some caution is warranted before we pile on demands for account- ability that ultimately affirm the juridical regime of accounting “debts to society” that has been so central the reproduction of racial hierarchy in the united states’ (xiv). . men’s excess may be manifested in terms of money and finance, but also in terms of appetites for adventure and sensation. acknowledgements i would like to extend a special thanks to taylor nelms for his valuable assistance in crafting this essay. any remaining shortcomings are my own. journal of cultural economy notes on contributor drucilla k. barker (ph.d., university of illinois, ) is professor in the department of anthropology and the women’s & gender studies program. she is a radical, feminist economist whose research interests are globalization, feminist political economy, and economic anthropology. her work is interdisciplinary and from ranges from exam- inations of the roles of gender, race, and class in social valuations of labor, especially affective labor, to accounts of the financial crises that characterize late global capitalism. she is a founding member of the international association for feminist economics. references cobb, jelani. ( ) ‘what i saw in ferguson – the new yorker’, the new yorker, august . http://www.newyorker. com/news/news-desk/saw-ferguson. graeber, david. ( ) debt: the first , years, melville house, brooklyn, ny. hendrix, michael. ( ) ‘for-profit policing means ferguson is basically a debtor’s prison’, values capitalism. http:// www.valuesandcapitalism.com/profit-policing-means-ferguson-basically-debtors-prison/ (accessed february ). human rights watch. ( ) ‘profiting from probation america’s ‘offender-funded’ probation industry’, https://www. hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/us _forupload_ .pdf (accessed february). joseph, miranda. ( ) ‘accounting, accountability and abstraction’, scholar & feminist online. taylor and francis. http://sfonline.barnard.edu/gender-justice-and-neoliberal-transformations/accounting-accountability-and- abstraction/. mauss, marcel. ( ) the gift: forms and functions of exchange in archaic societies, routledge, london. first pub- lished in french in . polanyi, karl. ( ) the great transformation, beacon press, boston. shabas, margarert. ( ) a world ruled by number: william stanley jevons and the rise of mathematical economics, princeton university press, princeton. stillman, sarah. ( ) ‘get out of jail, inc’, the new yorker, june . http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/ / / /get-out-of-jail-inc. drucilla k. barker university of south carolina barkerdk@sc.edu © drucilla k. barker http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . review symposium http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/saw-ferguson http://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/saw-ferguson http://www.valuesandcapitalism.com/profit-policing-means-ferguson-basically-debtors-prison/ http://www.valuesandcapitalism.com/profit-policing-means-ferguson-basically-debtors-prison/ http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/us _forupload_ .pdf http://www.hrw.org/sites/default/files/reports/us _forupload_ .pdf http://sfonline.barnard.edu/gender-justice-and-neoliberal-transformations/accounting-accountability-and-abstraction/ http://sfonline.barnard.edu/gender-justice-and-neoliberal-transformations/accounting-accountability-and-abstraction/ http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/ / / /get-out-of-jail-inc http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/ / / /get-out-of-jail-inc mailto:barkerdk@sc.edu 	methodology 	debts to society 	representations of gender and debt 	conclusion 	notes 	acknowledgements 	notes on contributor 	references << /ascii encodepages false /allowtransparency false /autopositionepsfiles false /autorotatepages /pagebypage /binding /left /calgrayprofile () /calrgbprofile (adobe rgb \ \ ) /calcmykprofile (u.s. web coated \ swop\ v ) /srgbprofile (srgb iec - . ) /cannotembedfontpolicy /error /compatibilitylevel . /compressobjects /off /compresspages true /convertimagestoindexed true /passthroughjpegimages false /createjobticket false /defaultrenderingintent /default /detectblends true /detectcurves . /colorconversionstrategy /srgb /dothumbnails true /embedallfonts true /embedopentype false /parseiccprofilesincomments true /embedjoboptions true /dscreportinglevel /emitdscwarnings false /endpage - /imagememory /lockdistillerparams true /maxsubsetpct /optimize true /opm /parsedsccomments false /parsedsccommentsfordocinfo 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acheck false /pdfx check false /pdfxcompliantpdfonly false /pdfxnotrimboxerror true /pdfxtrimboxtomediaboxoffset [ . . . . ] /pdfxsetbleedboxtomediabox true /pdfxbleedboxtotrimboxoffset [ . . . . ] /pdfxoutputintentprofile (none) /pdfxoutputconditionidentifier () /pdfxoutputcondition () /pdfxregistryname () /pdfxtrapped /false /description << /enu () >> >> setdistillerparams << /hwresolution [ ] /pagesize [ . . ] >> setpagedevice status threat, material interests, and the presidential vote * stephen l. morgan johns hopkins university forthcoming in socius: sociological research for a dynamic world this draft: june , (first draft: may , ) _______ * direct correspondence to stephen l. morgan (stephen.morgan@jhu.edu), department of sociology, n. charles st., johns hopkins university, baltimore, md . i thank diana mutz for answering my questions on her analysis in a professional and collegial manner and for posting more complete data in response to my request. i thank andrew cherlin, morris fiorina, erika franklin fowler, andrew gelman, spencer piston, sydney van morgan, chris winship, and ezra zuckerman for their comments, as well as the editors and three reviewers for the same. the first version of this article was posted to socarxiv on may , . mailto:stephen.morgan@jhu.edu status threat, material interests, and the presidential vote abstract the april article of diana mutz, “status threat, not economic hardship, explains the presidential vote,” was published in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences and contradicts prior sociological research on the election. mutz’s article received widespread media coverage because of the strength of its primary conclusion, declaimed in its title. the current article is a critical reanalysis of the models offered by mutz, using the data files released along with her article. contrary to her conclusions, this article demonstrates that ( ) the relative importance of economic interests and status threat cannot be estimated effectively with her cross-sectional data and ( ) her panel data are consistent with the claim that economic interests are at least as important as status threat. the preexisting sociological literature has offered interpretations that incorporate economic interests, and, as a result, provides a more credible explanation of the election. introduction a first wave of sociological research on the presidential election has now been published, and a prominent theme of this research is the appeal of trump’s campaign to white, working- class voters. analyses of obama-to-trump voters, along with the spatial distribution of votes cast, are both consistent with the claim that white, working-class voters represented the crucial block of supporters who delivered the electoral college victory to trump (mcquarrie ; morgan and lee , ). to attract their support, trump appealed directly to the economic interests of working-class voters, praising the dignity of their work and arguing that their past labor had given the country its mid-twentieth century prosperity (lamont, park, and ayala- hurtado ). he relied on folk beliefs about how the us economy can be managed in order to argue that renegotiated trade agreements and restrictions on immigration would improve working-class economic standing (swedberg ). these appeals echoed populist arguments of past insurgent republican candidates, most notably pat buchanan, who also challenged the expansion of free trade agreements that were promoted by mainstream republicans, the business community, and centrist democrats (mccall and orloff ). none of this sociological scholarship has argued that trump did not also increase his support among white, working-class voters because of his willingness to stoke xenophobia and white nativism, in particular through false and disparaging characterizations of immigrants from mexico and muslims of all types. trump also offered veiled appeals to long-held prejudice against black americans, which is more prevalent among white, working-class voters (morgan and lee ), such as when he criticized the black lives matter movement. yet, it is also clear that trump is an entirely different sort of politician than any recent presidential candidate, with a willingness to lie for effect, and to provoke as necessary to achieve his ends (hahl, kim, and zuckerman sivan ). it is, therefore, unclear how much of trump’s nativism was appealing to white, working-class voters because of its core content. for some voters, it may have been received as an effective demonstration of working-man’s bravado, intended as a critique of the excessive “political correctness” of highly educated elites and the politicians that they support. the overall conclusion of this first wave of sociological research would appear to be that we have more work to do in order to understand why so many white voters supported trump. and, although we may never be able to definitively decompose the sources of their support, four primary motives deserve further scrutiny: economic interests, racial prejudice, white nativism, and the appeal of the trump persona. at the same time, it remains to be determined how much of the animus toward his competitor – hillary clinton – was crucial to his success, and whether that contrary sentiment is based on gendered evaluations of leadership competence or, instead, particular features of clinton’s biography and how they were used against her. status threat as the key motivation for trump’s support in an april article published in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences, entitled “status threat, not economic hardship, explains the presidential vote,” the political scientist diana mutz ( ) concludes evidence points overwhelmingly to perceived status threat among high-status groups as the key motivation underlying trump support. white americans’ declining numerical dominance in the united states together with the rising status of african americans and american insecurity about whether the united states is still the dominant global economic superpower combined to prompt a classic defensive reaction among members of dominant groups. (mutz : ) in support of this conclusion, mutz claims that she is able to explain away the education gradient in support for trump that has led prior analysts to focus incorrectly on the economic interests of white, working-class voters: lack of a college education was persistently noted as the strongest predictor of trump support. this pattern led journalists with limited data toward economic explanations. however, education is also the strongest predictor of support for international trade, a relationship that is not tied to income or occupation so much as ethnocentrism. negative attitudes toward racial and ethnic diversity are also correlated with low levels of education. in this election, education represented group status threat rather than being left behind economically. (mutz : ) these claims are far stronger than those of most other scholars who have analyzed similar measures, including the sociologists cited above. media attention to the status-threat explanation mutz’s article offered bold claims that deliver clarity on an election outcome still regarded as a puzzle by many. the article was promoted via a press release from her university that noted its publication in the journal sponsored by the national academy of sciences, a journal with a title that implies that its contents are first presented in front of a body of the country’s leading scientists. the press release, like the original article, reduced the economic interests of white, working-class voters to current and recent “pocketbook” concerns. the university of pennsylvania’s press release, entitled, “fear of losing status, not economic hardship, drove voters in presidential election,” was publicly released the same day the article was published but, presumably, was distributed in advance to journalists (see university of pennsylvania, april , , link here). the press release https://www.asc.upenn.edu/news-events/news/fear-losing-status-not-economic-hardship-drove-voters- -presidential-election because of the press release, as well as the prestige of the article’s publisher, mutz’s article received widespread media attention. the new york times published “trump voters driven by fear of losing status,” summarizing mutz’s article as ever since donald j. trump began his improbable political rise, many pundits have credited his appeal among white, christian and male voters to “economic anxiety.” hobbled by unemployment and locked out of the recovery, those voters turned out in force to send mr. trump, and a message, to washington. or so that narrative goes. a study published on monday in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences questions that explanation, the latest to suggest that trump voters weren’t driven by anger over the past, but rather fear of what may come. white, christian and male voters, the study suggests, turned to mr. trump because they felt their status was at risk. “it’s much more of a symbolic threat that people feel,’’ said diana c. mutz, the author of the study and a political science and communications professor at the university of pennsylvania, where she directs the institute for the study of citizens and politics. “it’s not a threat to their own economic well-being; it’s a threat to their group’s dominance in our country over all.” (chokshi, april , , link here) for cnn, the summary was similar but with the introduction embracing a bold truth claim, “the media largely stuck to the conventional wisdom that economic anxiety helped drive support for president donald trump during the election. the only problem? it isn’t true” (see waldow, april , , link here). some pundits used mutz’s article as a provocative way to begin a column, such as the washington post’s michael gerson in his “how do we tame trumpism’s virulent nostalgia for an old status quo?” (see gerson april , , link here). others accepted the article’s conclusions without qualification. in his piece “democrats need to stop believing this myth about begins with “it has been a well-worn postmortem of the presidential election: the white working class, having faced job losses and stagnant wages under president obama, voted with their pocketbooks when they chose donald trump. strong new evidence published today in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences …” https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/trump-economic-anxiety.html http://money.cnn.com/ / / /media/status-threat-diana-mutz-reliable-sources/index.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-do-we-tame-trumpisms-virulent-nostalgia-for-an-old-status-quo/ / / /f e de- - e - -f d bc f _story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=. b ca b a trump’s base,” princeton university’s public-facing historian and cnn political analyst julian zelizer wrote the big myth about the presidential election was that economic suffering drove most of donald trump's “base” directly into his hands in states such as wisconsin, pennsylvania, and michigan. the story goes that while democrats were tied in knots about identity politics, trump’s attacks on china, free trade and open-ended immigration appealed to struggling workers who believed he could bring back their jobs. the problem with the narrative is that we keep learning it is not true. some democrats have responded to the widely circulated misconception about why clinton lost by insisting that the party needs to move away from identity politics – issues revolving around gender equality and racial justice – and focus in on economic issues. instead, democrats should be basing their election strategy on what is actually true. a just-published study in the proceedings of the national academy of sciences by the political scientist diana mutz found that white, christian, male voters were attracted to trump out of fear that their social status keeps dwindling. (zelizer, april , , link here). similar, but shorter, write-ups of mutz’s article were offered by both the economist on its blog (link here) and the atlantic (link here). the only critical journalistic piece in a major outlet in the days following the press release, an interview with mutz published for slate (link here), has revelatory content, such as slate journalist: how do you disaggregate opinions on trade? is it an economic issue or about status anxiety? because trump plays on both: he says our economy is hurting because of trade deals, and other countries are taking advantage of us. mutz: it could be either, but this study shows that the degree to which you have been personally affected had absolutely no change between and . it’s a very small percentage of people who feel they have been personally affected negatively. it’s not that people aren’t being hurt, but it wasn’t those people who were drawn to support trump. when you look at trade attitudes, they aren’t what you’d expect: it’s not whether they were in an industry where you were likely to be helped or hurt by trade. it’s also driven by racial attitudes and nationalistic attitudes—to what extent do you want to be an isolationist country? https://www.cnn.com/ / / /opinions/trump-base-economy-myth-opinion-zelizer/index.html https://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/ / /left-behind https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/ / /existential-anxiety-not-poverty-motivates-trump-support/ / https://slate.com/news-and-politics/ / /a-new-theory-for-why-obama-voters-went-trump.html trade is not an economic issue in terms of how the public thinks about it. it definitely is when elites think about it. mutz’s position that “trade is not an economic issue in terms of how the public thinks about it” is a bold claim. it is also a pivotal assumption of her analysis that drives her conclusions, as i will show below. motivation and plan for a reanalysis mutz’s claim that status threat alone provides a powerful explanation for the election outcome is at odds with the sociological literature that places similar identity responses within a constellation of motivations that can become mutually reinforcing. my primary goal in this article is to provide an analysis of the data files released with mutz’s article in order to demonstrate that her conclusions about status threat are far too strong. my secondary goal is to provide a more complete perspective on voting motivations in the election, drawing on the sociological literature cited above that has analyzed white, working-class voters. accordingly, i argue in the course of the empirical analysis that mutz’s concept of “economic hardship” is too narrow, relative to the existing literature on material interests and the election, in part because her concept of “status threat” is too broad. thus, in addition to assessing mutz’s conclusions using her own models and measures, i offer additional analysis from this broader material-interests perspective. a bit more formally and with loss in precision, my argument will be that the sociological literature provides convincing evidence that the causal explanation of the election is at least as elaborate as an interactive function, f(a, b, c, d). i contend that mutz argues for an alternative function, f(s), where s is the union of the sociologists’ a and b, and where the distinction between a and b can be deemphasized because status threat is a unifying narrative. for readers who recognize the marxist overtones of the concept of “material interests,” i should be clear that the phrase “economic interests” can be and will be used interchangeably throughout this article based on context. i use after providing a brief orientation to my methodological approach, i offer results in response to three specific research questions. the subsequent analysis demonstrates that measures of economic hardship, material interests, and status threat are all sufficiently intertwined in mutz’s cross-sectional data that one cannot deliver credible estimates of their relative importance in order to construct a compelling causal explanation. in addition, the panel-data models offered by mutz do not provide additional clarity, while more straightforward versions of those models contradict her interpretations. i conclude with additional discussion of the election, questioning whether, in light of the foregoing results, the proposed status-threat mechanism has scope to improve upon explanations that rely more narrowly on traditional measures of racial prejudice. finally, i argue that public-facing social science research can be counterproductive when the evidentiary basis of claims is too weak to merit widespread media coverage. methodological approach i adopt the approach of a “fair critic,” writing from a sociological perspective and seeking to assess ( ) whether the models that mutz presents are the models that she estimated, ( ) how she interprets the models that she estimated, and ( ) whether her overall conclusions are robust to alternative reasonable choices about what models could be estimated with the data that mutz shared with pnas readers. material interests for fidelity with (my reading of) the literature on class politics, not to assert that class conflict is essential to their relevance for political support. i do not evaluate any of the initial steps in her analysis, including how the data were collected and initially coded. i also do not consider whether other measures available in her data that she chose not to incorporate into her analysis could have better supported or further undermined her conclusions. this approach, which i label a critical reanalysis, is a reasonable and productive way to evaluate published results, insofar as the reanalysis holds constant many of an author’s analysis decisions in order to enable a clean assessment of the consequences of a few important decisions that determine the conclusions. to facilitate further reanalysis of mutz’s results, as well as to enable a critical reanalysis of the models i present in this article, the stata code i have written is publicly available on github (in a repository to be posted when this article is published). three questions for reanalysis i organize my critical reanalysis in three sections. in each, i pose a question and offer an answer. thereafter, i explain what i take to be mutz’s position on each question and then offer analysis that justifies my answer. only for the first question are mutz’s conclusions in line with mine. and here, as i show next, a simple extension of her analysis provides valuable additional insight. in this case, it is also the only choice. the data and code that mutz released do not permit a “soup to nuts” replication, followed by a full reconstruction of an alternative set of models alongside hers. the two data sources mutz analyzed are privately held by her research group, and only the final analysis data files were released to pnas readers. with a few exceptions, the files include only the variables that are specified in the models. in addition, three measures of local economic context were deleted from the files for data-privacy reasons, under the rationale that the zip codes of respondents could possibly be determined by a third party. question : did voters change their positions on trade and immigration between and , and were they informed enough to recognize that trump’s positions were much different than romney’s, in comparison to clinton’s and obama’s? answer: voters did change their positions on trade and immigration, but only by a small amount. they were also informed enough to recognize that the positions of trump and clinton were very different from each other on these issues, and also in comparison to the positions of romney and obama four years prior. on this question, mutz’s results are well supported under reanalysis, and they are a unique and valuable addition to the literature. with panel data collected online by gfk a few weeks before the elections in both and , mutz shows that the positions taken by voters on both trade and immigration changed, on average, only very modestly between the two elections. in , respondents had slightly less favorable attitudes toward international trade and slightly more favorable attitudes toward inclusive immigration policy. since these issue positions were reported by the same respondents, such panel-based results that show considerable stability are a valuable addition to findings from surveys that also suggest stability but are based on independent cross-sectional samples. in contrast to the stability in their own issue positions, voters perceived strong differences between and in the issue positions of the presidential candidates. for obama and romney, voters saw little or no difference between their support of additional free trade agreements, and only a small difference on whether china is a threat to jobs and security. for trump and clinton, wide differences emerged, with trump seen as much more opposed to free trade agreements and much more likely to regard china as a threat to jobs and security. on in particular, the result is inconsistent with the speculation that “shy trump voters” declined to participate in polls and surveys during the election cycle (assuming no selective panel attrition). immigration, voters perceived a substantial difference on inclusive immigration policy between obama and romney, but they saw the difference increasing markedly for the comparison of clinton to trump. these results, which are presented in full at the end of this article in appendix table a , imply that voters were informed enough to recognize differences between trump and clinton on at least a few headlining policy priorities of the campaign. more important, because these results are based on repeated measures from the same respondents, they demonstrate that the same voters recognized that trump’s positions were much different than those of romney. mutz does not report in her article whether these changes differed by respondents’ levels of education. in supplementary results for this reanalysis (again, see appendix table a ), i show that education level is not a substantial predictor of these changes, implying that these policy issues were salient enough in that voters of widely different education levels were sufficiently aware of candidate differences between and . i will return to mutz’s panel data below, but it is more natural to shift now to mutz’s second data source, a cross-sectional dataset, collected by norc through its omnibus, mixed-mode amerispeak poll, in the weeks just before the election. mutz uses this data source to address the following question. question : can the relative appeal of trump to white voters with lower levels of education be attributed to status threat rather than their material or economic interests? answer: no. on this question, mutz’s article implies that she would answer affirmatively; in fact, she makes the case in her article that education “represented” status threat (see quotation above). here is the crucial interpretation from her results section: the meaning of education. the cross-sectional survey replicates the strong relationship with education shown throughout the election. more importantly, it provides a better understanding of what precisely education represents. in table s , model , i replicate the strong relationship between lack of college education and trump support using only demographics as predictors. in model , i examine what happens to education’s predictive power when measures of personal economic wellbeing are also included in the model. finally, in model , i drop the economic variables and instead, include indicators corresponding to status threat toward dominant groups. as summarized in fig. , regardless of which outcome measures i examined, including indicators of economic status did not eliminate the impact of education. it reduced education’s impact somewhat for the feeling thermometer measure, but for trump/clinton vote, the impact of education remained constant. however, after the relationship between trump support and perceived status threat is taken into account, even lack of a college education no longer predicts trump support for any of the measures. these findings strongly suggest that group-based status threat was the main reason that those without college educations were more supportive of trump. (mutz : ) table presents the results that mutz interprets in this paragraph, as well as a reanalysis using the cross-sectional data that she released. the outcome in the first panel is a relative thermometer rating – with poles of warm/approve and cold/disapprove – scaled such that higher numbers favor trump relative to clinton. the outcome for the second panel is intended vote choice: trump rather clinton among those who intended to vote for one or the other. mutz’s interpretation is based on the coefficients in rows and , which i have copied from her article. as noted above, three measures of local economic context were not provided in the data files that she released, and so, for reanalysis, they cannot be included. in rows and , i show for the reanalysis that their omission has only minor consequences. table . mutz’s analysis of the effect of “not having a college degree” on support for trump in the weeks before the election specification of adjustment variables: outcome and specification baseline variables baseline plus economic indicator variables baseline plus status threat variables trump relative thermometer rating ols regression coefficients (from mutz) . . . ols regression coefficients (reanalysis) . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) trump rather than clinton logit coefficients (from mutz) . . . logit coefficients (reanalysis) . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) average marginal effect (in percent) . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) notes: standard errors are in parentheses for the results from the reanalysis. mutz does not provide standard errors. mutz’s article includes a third outcome: trump as the favored candidate versus all others, including third-party candidates. the results are sufficiently similar to the head-to-head analysis of trump and clinton that, for brevity, i omit results for this third outcome. the results are, nonetheless, produced by the code that generates the reanalysis and so can be accessed by an interested reader. these variables have very little predictive power in mutz’s results throughout her article and are one basis for why she argues that “economic hardship” is not an important factor for understanding the election. without access to these variables, i cannot assess whether they are valid measures. at face value, it does seem a strong assumption to maintain, for example, that a static measure of percent manufacturing employment averaged over recent years in a respondent’s five-digit zip code is a sufficient measure of the extent to which voters believe that deindustrialization since has altered the economic standing of different types of workers in their own regional labor market. the goal of mutz’s analysis, consistent with her language of providing an “understanding of what precisely education represents” is to show that the “effect” of low education, as a measure of being in the working class, is a spurious causal effect that can be attributed instead to status threat, not material or economic interests. all rows of table show the same basic pattern, but the final row gives the most interpretable metric: the average marginal effect of not having a bachelor’s degree on the likelihood of voting for trump. the coefficient of . (with a standard error of . ) suggests that trump’s vote share was higher by . percent among those without a bachelor’s degree, after adjusting for other demographic characteristics. when economic indicators are included as additional adjustment variables, trump’s excess vote share falls to only . percent, suggesting that material interests measured by economic indicators, cannot explain away much of any of the net association between education and voting. but, when adjusting for measures of status threat, the vote share falls to less than percent, which leads mutz to the conclusions above. what are the specific adjustment variables utilized? table lists the three groups of variables selected by mutz, along with an alternative categorization that the sociological literature suggests a fair critic would prefer. table . conditioning sets for modeling the education gradient in support for trump variable mutz ( ) a fair critic’s alternative female (indicator variable) baseline background baseline background age ( -category ordinal variable) baseline background baseline background religiosity ( -category ordinal variable) baseline background baseline background household income ( -category ordinal variable) baseline background baseline background party identification ( -category ordinal variable) baseline background endogenous outcome or baseline background white-only, non-hispanic (indicator variable) baseline background stratum identifier or baseline background looking for work: unemployed or laid off (indicator variable) economic indicator material interests worried about expenses: health care affordability, money for retirement, and cost of education for self or family ( -item scale) economic indicator material interests safety net: spend more taxes on safety net, cut taxes to eliminate government programs and services ( -item scale) economic indicator material interests current personal finances: better or worse than last year economic indicator material interests nation’s economy: better or worse than last year material interests social dominance orientation: consider all groups when setting priorities, group equality should be our ideal, should not push for group equality, superior groups should dominate inferior ones ( - item scale) status threat status threat outgroup prejudice: other groups are hardworking/peaceful or lazy/violent (multiple-item scale; number not provided by mutz) status threat status threat reverse discrimination: discrimination against high status groups greater than against low status groups ( -item scale) status threat status threat worried about america: worried that the american way of life is under threat status threat status threat support for free trade: support federal government negotiating more free trade agreements, past increases in free trade have helped or hurt the us economy ( -item scale) status threat material interests china is a threat to jobs: china provides new markets and is an investment opportunity or is a threat to our jobs and security status threat material interests support for inclusive immigration policy: support path to citizenship, border fence with mexico, return of illegal immigrants to native countries ( -item scale) status threat material interests and foreign policy support for isolationism: active role in solving conflicts around the world, take care of the well-being of americans and not get involved with other nations, essential to work with other nations to solve problems, best for the future of the country if we stay out of world affairs, have a responsibility to fight violations of international law and aggression wherever they occur ( -item scale) status threat material interests and foreign policy terrorist threat: worried about terrorists committing violence against americans material interests and foreign policy national superiority: our culture is superior to others, would rather be a citizen of america than of any other country, world would be a better place if people from other countries were more like americans ( -item scale) status threat notes: the description of each variable reflects the question wording and is not always equivalent to the labels that mutz used. for the critic’s categorization, discrimination against high status groups is represented by three -item subscales provided by mutz: more discrimination against men than women, christians than muslims, and whites than blacks. four of mutz’s six baseline background variables are also in the critic’s baseline set, but two are categorized differently. although political scientists have devoted tremendous attention to the relationship between party identification and voting, many researchers view party identification as an endogenous outcome, especially when collected only a few weeks before the collection. in the modern language on causal inference (see morgan and winship ), party identification can be considered a descendant of the education variable that lies on a directed path that reaches the outcome variable of intended vote. in the analysis below, i will therefore estimate models with and without party identification in the baseline conditioning set. in addition, i will use the indicator variable for non-hispanic whites in two ways, either as the basis for analyzing only the sample of whites and as an adjustment variable when analyzing all respondents. in addition to the four variables that mutz considers “economic indicators,” i consider views of the nation’s economy to be a relevant member of the alternative “material interests” category. the rationale for including it among the critic’s measures of material interests is that it is a lay judgment rendered from the vantage point of the respondent, reflecting to some extent one’s own experience with the economy, not that of a depersonalized economic planner who renders a professional judgment after considering all the facts. as noted below, mutz’s panel data demonstrate that such endogeneity is a feature of the election. obama-to- trump voters indicated that they became more republican between and on mutz’s three-point scale (see appendix table a , row ). mutz includes this variable in other analyses of support for trump (see her table s ), but she excludes this predictor from her models of the effects of education on trump’s support. the major difference shown in table , however, is the category of “status threat,” which includes many more variables for mutz’s analysis. two of these variables – support for negotiating more free trade agreements and the opinion that china is a threat to jobs and security – are considered measures of status threat for mutz but measures of material interests for the critic. as noted in the introduction, mutz does have an arguable rationale for her decision: such responses reflect ethno-nationalism more than anything else. a critic, however, would note that these questions are typically asked in a survey context in batteries on respondents’ own economic standing (and this is the case for mutz’s data, according to her questionnaire map). in addition, the standard position in the literature is that respondents make cognitive connections between globalization, trade, and their own economic standing (see mccall and orloff ). and, perhaps most importantly, trump, as a presidential aspirant, tied both issues directly to working-class economic security, as shown in lamont, park, and ayala-hurtado ( ) as well as swedberg ( ). trump’s own statements are an undeniably important part of the context for how these questions would be interpreted by respondents only a few weeks before the election. recall also that, for question above, mutz demonstrated how these same respondents demonstrated that they were aware of how much trump’s positions on trade differed from those of romney, clinton, and obama. it seems unlikely that they would recognize this difference, but entirely ignore trump’s economic rationale for it. the critic then includes a separate category for three variables – support for inclusive immigration policy, support for isolationism, and terrorism as a threat – which i label “material interests and foreign policy” – because they are an entwined set of attitudes that, for some respondents, may be strongly shaped by their economic interests, while for others they may only reflect cultural values and their judgments about the nation’s relationship with other countries. for this reason, the critic treats attitudes toward inclusive immigration policy and support for isolationism as sufficiently distinct from both status threat and clear measures of material interest that it is sensible to place them in their own intermediate category. finally, the terrorist threat variable is included in this category because mutz uses it in the immediately prior table s , but then drops it for her analysis of the education gradient. for a fair critic, it is a sensible measure of foreign policy and immigrant threat, especially given trump’s linkage of terrorism to his proposed “muslim ban.” the final row of table then categorizes the national superiority variable as a status threat variable, which is where it is placed for mutz’s more general analysis in her table s . it is excluded from her analysis of the education gradient in table s , and for consistency i reintroduce it into the critic’s categorization. table presents alternative conditioning results, enacting the strategy suggested by the final column of table , in four separate configurations: for the full sample and for whites only cross-classified with whether or not party identification is included in the baseline variables. a fair critic would likely favor the models that do not adjust for party identification and that are estimated for whites only, given that the white working-class narrative is what inspired mutz’s analysis (and that narrative suggests that white, working-class voters, not all working-class voters, were the ones to push trump across the threshold of victory). these are the models in the first and fifth rows of table , which show the same basic pattern. table . a fair critic’s alternative conditioning analysis for what education represents average marginal effect of having less than a bachelor’s degree when conditioning on: dependent variable, whether conditioning on party identification, and sample baseline variables baseline plus material interest variables baseline plus material interest and foreign policy variables baseline plus status threat variables trump relative thermometer rating party identification in baseline: no white respondents only . . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) all respondents . . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) party identification in baseline: yes white respondents only . . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) all respondents . . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) trump rather than clinton party identification in baseline: no white respondents only . . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) all respondents . . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) party identification in baseline: yes white respondents only . . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) all respondents . . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) notes: standard errors are in parentheses. the marginal effects for the relative thermometer ratings are simply the relevant linear regression coefficients, given the linearity of the model. for vote choice, the underlying model is a logit, just as for table . to understand the point estimates, consider the models for vote choice in the fifth row. trump’s vote share was . percent higher among whites without a bachelor’s degree after adjusting for baseline variables. further adjusting for material interests, the share decreases to . percent of white voters. finally, the share falls to percent of white voters when the immigration and foreign policy variables are included. this adjusted share is similar to the share in the final column, which is produced only by adjusting for the baseline background variables and status threat measures. overall, three patterns are clear in the table. first, material interests explain away far more of the education gradient than mutz’s “economic indicators” above in table . when the variables for “material interests and foreign policy” are then included as conditioning variables, the adjusted effect of education mostly vanishes, without needing to use any of the measures of status threat. second, the explanatory power of these variables increases slightly when party identification is considered endogenous and therefore excluded from the baseline background variables (because the baseline-adjusted education effect is larger). third, the explanatory power also increases when the sample is limited to whites only. what would an analyst attuned to the modern literature on causal inference conclude based on these results? first, mutz’s “horse-race” conditioning strategy is a reasonable beginning point. however, explicit assumptions, ideally encoded in equations with exclusion restrictions or in a causal graph, are needed to warrant causal conclusions. the categorizations of conditioning variables in table are too far from explicit assumptions to support disciplined causal inquiry. as such, the models in tables and are stylized descriptive models that seek to determine which variables can account for observed patterns of association in the data set analyzed. second, given what the analysis can accomplish, the horse race is probably a tie. material interests can account for a lot of the education association with trump’s support, and status threat variables somewhat more. when immigration and foreign policy variables are used alongside the material interest variables, the difference is narrowed so much that it is untenable to conclude, as mutz does in her article, that education “represented” status threat in this election rather than concern for material interests or other sorts of policy evaluations. question : do repeated measures of voters’ attitudes and policy priorities, collected in october of and , demonstrate that status threat is a sufficiently complete explanation of trump’s victory? answer: no. mutz claims to offer panel-data models that allow her to confidently assert that status threat, rather than material interests, explains the outcome of the election. unlike the results for the prior section, mutz’s conclusions are not based on the comparison of multiple models, with varying sets of adjustment variables in a comparative conditioning analysis. instead, for her table , she offers an overall characterization of coefficients for the same specification of predictor variables, deployed for the analysis of two outcome variables measured in both and – thermometer advantage for the republican candidate and voting for the republican candidate rather than the democratic candidate. in this portion of her analysis, the models are represented as “all-cause” specifications where simultaneously estimated coefficients are interpreted as warranted net direct causal effects. before examining mutz’s panel data, it is important to show the rationale that she offers for her embrace of a panel-data approach. she reasons in the opening to her article: because elections are not amenable to experimentation, it is difficult for scholars to make strong causal claims. as a result, most interpretations of election outcomes either rely on cross-sectional associations in survey data or are inferred from aggregate data on voting patterns by geographic areas. neither approach is the best that can be done. in observational settings, panel data are widely acknowledged as the ideal basis for causal conclusions. when analyzed appropriately, they have the ability to eliminate most potentially spurious associations. (mutz : ) when introducing her specific models several pages later, she expresses strong confidence in their power to reveal causal effects, as well as the interpretive criteria she will use: fixed effects panel analyses provide the most rigorous test of causality possible with observational data. because the goal is understanding what changed from to to facilitate greater support for trump in than mitt romney in , i estimate the effects of time-varying independent variables to determine whether changes in the independent variables produce changes in candidate choice without needing to fully specify a model including all possible influences on candidate preference. significant coefficients thus represent evidence that change in an independent variable corresponds to change in the dependent variable at the individual level. in addition, the net change over time in these independent variables must be in the direction helping to explain increased support for trump. (mutz : ) mutz does not discuss a major assumption of this type of model: extrapolation from within-person variation to all variation, which is sometimes referred to as a “constant coefficient” assumption. consider the association between income and vote choice. the assumption is that an estimated change in vote choice from the democrat candidate to the republican candidate, and vice versa, that is predicted by shifts in income between and is equal to the effect of income on changes in vote choices between individuals whose income is stable. for mutz’s data, the income variable appears to be household income from all sources, including at least wages and salaries from all adults in the household, social security and pension payments, other government transfers, and investment income. the variable in her released dataset is binned into categories for and categories for . the model uses variation only from individuals whose income changed to a higher or lower bin, and it pays no attention whatsoever to whether the changes are produced by exogenous economic shocks, like an unforeseen layoff, or instead annual raises, a voluntary job change, retirement, or a household-changing life-event like marriage or divorce that alters income pooling. then, whatever association is calculated from such within-household, binned-income change between and is implicitly extrapolated to those who have stable income across both time periods. for a concrete example from mutz’s data, individuals who voted in both and had incomes in the “$ , to $ , ” bin in . four years later, of these individuals remained in the same bin, fell to a lower bin, and moved to a higher bin. for a fixed-effect model, the individuals who remained in the same bin are ignored. these stable- income individuals represent percent of this income stratum, each of whom could be described as having persistently low income in and . if these are the individuals who were obama-to-trump voters, and if they were obama-to-trump voters in part because they were frustrated by their stable and relatively low income, a fixed-effect model assumes that their stable-income-induced support for trump can be estimated effectively by comparisons of vote-choice changes across individuals whose income fluctuated across bins between and . the constant coefficient assumption that equates all sources of variation is, therefore, very constraining for interpretations. it does not mean that fixed-effect models are not worth estimating. table presents twelve fixed-effect models of this sort, where the outcome is the same thermometer advantage for the republican candidate analyzed earlier, but now for a pooled sample with two observations for each individual, one for each election. for this outcome, the thermometer advantage takes on values, and only about percent of respondents favor the republican candidate more than the democratic candidate by the same amount in both years. this represents a sufficient amount of within-person variation for a fixed-effect model to be successfully estimated with a sample of this size (unlike vote choices, as i will discuss below). table . fixed-effect linear regression models of relative thermometer ratings of the republican candidate in and bivariate models: all-cause multiple regression models: variable bivariate coefficient r-squared current personal finances better - . ( . ) . - . ( . ) - . ( . ) nation’s economy better - . ( . ) . - . ( . ) - . ( . ) household income - . ( . ) . - . ( . ) - . ( . ) looking for work -. ( . ) . -. ( . ) -. ( . ) trade helped you - . ( . ) . - . ( . ) - . ( . ) support for free trade - . ( . ) . - . ( . ) - . ( . ) china is an opportunity not a threat to jobs and security - . ( . ) . . ( . ) . ( . ) support for inclusive immigration policy - . ( . ) . - . ( . ) - . ( . ) social dominance orientation . (. ) . . (. ) . (. ) r-squared na na . . . n na na , , , notes: standard errors are in parentheses. the n’s for the bivariate models are between , and , . the first two columns summarize nine separate bivariate fixed-effect regression models, one each where the variable in the row label is specified as the sole predictor variable. the first- coefficient, - . (with a standard error of . ), suggests that individuals who indicated that their current personal finances were better this year than last year (by one point on a five-point scale) rated the republican candidate lower by . units on the -point thermometer- advantage scale. this is a meaningful association, but not a large one. it corresponds to . percent of the variance of within-person change in thermometer advantage, which is a typical result for a fixed-effect model because of the unreliability of these sorts of scales. the other eight bivariate models have a similar pattern, with some variation in strength. the strongest, accounting for . percent of the variance of the outcome, is in the second row for the rating of the nation’s economy. overall, the first eight models have negative coefficients, and all are in line with the relevance of economic factors, suggesting that material interests played a role in changes in relative thermometer ratings between and (although, again, immigration could reflect status threat as well). the last coefficient is positive and summarizes the effect of changes in social dominance orientation on changes in relative thermometer ratings. its effect is also small, and it accounts for less than percent of the variance. for the remaining columns, i present three fixed-effect multiple regression models. for model , seven variables that a fair critic would argue represent material interests account for . percent of the variation in relative thermometer ratings and, altogether, are consistent with a material-interest narrative. i do not regard the point estimates for the seven variables as warranted net causal effects, but collectively they do capture how well these variables predict changes in relative thermometer ratings between and . for model , which is the panel data equivalent of the status threat model, i give the immigration variable over to it. (a fair critic might not be so generous, but this seems reasonable given that the additional status threat variables collected for mutz’s cross-sectional data were apparently not collected for her and panel data; see table in this reanalysis for these additional variables.) even when given the immigration variable, the status threat model accounts for only . percent of the variance in relative thermometer ratings, or less than half of what is explained by the material-interest-only specification for model . finally, model is a kitchen-sink model, and it shows that the variation that generates the coefficients for models and is largely unrelated. this may seem surprising based on the cross-sectional analysis reported above. it is not. the cross-sectional results were driven by stable differences, not changes expressed as variance in time, in how these predictor variables are related to relative thermometer ratings, which is one reason that the fixed-effect models are not as conclusive as mutz claims. regardless, model shows that changes in status threat do not explain away changes in material interests as predictors of changes in relative thermometer ratings. overall, table does not support mutz’s conclusion that there is “overwhelming” evidence that status threat is the sole or even the primary explanation of the election (mutz : ). mutz does not present these simple models, which have straightforward interpretations. instead, she offers a variant on model that specifies many more variables. first, she includes party identification, even though the model suggests that it is endogenous, with an estimated negative coefficient that implies that individuals who shifted from obama to trump moved away from the democratic pole and toward the republican pole on her three-point scale (and vice versa for romney to clinton voters). the inclusion of party identification in the model robs some of the predictive power of the other variables. mutz also includes six additional predictors for the absolute differences between individuals’ own positions on trade, immigration, and china and their perceptions of each candidate’s positions on the same issues. for two reasons, the absolute-value distance variables do not improve the models. first, positive and negative differences from perceptions of candidates’ positions are not distinguished, and the measures have floor and ceiling bounds because of the -point scales that are differenced. second, ratings of closeness to a candidate are themselves endogenous to thermometer ratings (and vote choice; see below) because individuals support candidates who share their own issue positions. as a result, like party identification, including these variables in the model also robs some of the predictive power of the other variables in the model. finally, mutz includes wave interaction terms for most predictors (i.e, a dummy variable for the wave multiplied by the value of each predictor, after copying that value into each person-record so that the interaction is not zero in all cases). these variables are meant to offer simultaneous tests of the differential salience of each relevant predictor, under the rationale that a substantial estimated coefficient for an interaction term indicates greater predictive power in . an interaction with wave could provide additional insight if it were the case that a crucial singular causal effect was at the center of analysis, and models without wave by factor interactions were offered as a baseline for comparison. in this case, because no baseline is offered, and interactions are present for many variables, i do not see how the additional coefficients clarify mutz’s interpretations of net direct causal effects in either or . regardless, these wave interactions are not required to evaluate what mutz aims to evaluate. a fair critic would argue, instead, that the only models that need to be estimated, in the absence of a defendable set of assumptions in a well-articulated causal graph, are those presented already in table . and those estimates do not support mutz’s conclusions. what about vote choice? mutz claims to offer fixed-effect logit models for vote choice that are analogous to those for relative thermometer ratings, and she uses the same specification of predictor variables in the models that she reports. however, the code she released shows that instead she estimated a generic logit regression model, and in reanalysis it is clear why this was necessary. a fixed-effect logit model for her validated voter sample cannot be estimated because of a lack of variation for the modest sample size at her disposal. only respondents flipped their votes in the sample: from obama-to-trump and for romney-to-clinton. in contrast, for the thermometer-advantage models nearly , respondents reported differences in relative thermometer ratings between and . for this reanalysis, i verified that one cannot get a fixed-effect logit model to converge for a specification even simpler than mutz’s. what is wrong with an ordinary logit? in some respects, such a model has advantages, insofar as it does not rely only on within-person variation, which is then extrapolated for interpretation to all between-person variation. but, in this case, as judged by her own rationale one might prefer a slight alternative to those presented in table : two-way fixed-effect models that include a single dummy for wave and no interactions. such models yield nearly the same coefficients as in table , with minor oscillations that differ by coefficient. the american national election studies suggest that obama-to-trump voters were at least twice as common as romney-to-clinton voters (see morgan and lee ), contrary to mutz’s distribution of validated voters that suggests that they are roughly of the same proportion. while this difference across studies may reflect variation reasonably attributed to her smaller sample size, it is possible that the difference has systematic sources worthy of further investigation. for using fixed-effect models (recall her statement quoted above: “fixed effects panel analyses provide the most rigorous test of causality possible with observational data”), her generic logit model falls short of the rigorous test she aims for. in particular, because no person-level effect is implicitly fit in these models, additional predictors are needed to protect against confounding. two very obvious ones are missing from mutz’s models of vote choices: respondent’s race and respondent’s education. without these variables, and probably others, the only reasonable interpretation of her pooled logit model on vote choice in her table is that it is misspecified, for the very reasons mutz argues make genuine fixed-effect models so valuable to estimate. the omission of race and education imparts the sort of bias that is likely to operate in the opposite direction of the “over-control” bias that results from the inclusion of endogenous variables – in her case, respondents’ closeness to the issue positions of each candidate (and, for a sociologist, party identification as well). it is technically possible that these biases cancel, but this result seems unlikely. nonetheless, the vote-choice data can be inspected in more basic fashion in order to assess whether they align with her conclusions. in appendix table a , i offer eight subgroup means of each of the predictors from table as well as party identification: for and and across four types of voters (romney-trump voters, obama-clinton voters, obama-trump voters, and romney-clinton voters). in general, movement in these mean values across years for different types of voters is consistent with the pattern shown above in table for relative thermometer ratings. for this reason, the thermometer-advantage models, i would argue, are sufficient to reveal the extent to which the panel-data models are informative. overall, what does the panel data reveal? for question , i noted already that the panel data showed that respondents were informed enough to appreciate how the positions of trump and clinton did and did not differ from the prior positions maintained by romney and obama. the panel-data models presented in table (and which are consistent with the results in appendix table a ) show that respondents who voted for and supported trump, rather than clinton, had positions that matched his positions more closely, both for material interests and, as well, for mutz’s measures of inclusive immigration policy and social dominance orientation. these relationships could possibly be part of an explanation for why trump’s voters lined up behind him as their preferred candidate. however, as mutz discusses as well, these responses, offered only a few weeks before the elections, could simply reveal the extent to which voters had aligned their sentiments and positions with their preferred candidate. consider the evaluation of the nation’s economy. trump voters saw the economy as weaker than clinton voters did. a materialist explanation would suggest that this evaluation reflects particularities of their own economic circumstances. but, a “reflection” interpretation would suggest that respondents are simply parroting trump’s criticism of obama’s legacy, and attaching it to the record of clinton. if this is the case, then the value of panel data collected only a few weeks before the election is considerably lower than mutz claims that it is. and, if that is the case, then it also applies to status threat as well, such that individuals preparing to vote for a candidate like trump may well have been preparing to do so while rationalizing their intended choice in the just the sort of way that the social dominance orientation measures are designed to pick up. conclusions many analysts have argued that trump’s agenda to “make america great again” was appealing to white voters, especially strongly identified republicans who find “political correctness” distasteful and who are less comfortable with recent social change. some scholars have seen this attraction as a type of racial resentment, or group-based status threat, driven by a felt loss of relative status. what mutz ( ) appears to argue is that economic interests – and especially the appeal of trump’s vigorous campaigning for renegotiated trade deals in order to boost growth and provide economic security to the working class – no longer need to be included in explanations of the election outcome. a crucial piece of her argument is that ( ) attitudes toward trade and immigration are unrelated to economic interests, which are based on current pocketbook concerns, but ( ) attitudes toward trade and immigration are valid measures of group-based status threat, which has both national and international dimensions because of the nature of ethno-nationalism. in this article, i have offered a reanalysis from the perspective of a fair critic, attuned to the recent sociological literature, and conclude that mutz’s data do not support her overly strong conclusions. material interests and her measures of status threat are sufficiently entangled among white voters, especially those in the working class, that it is impossible with her data to estimate their relative importance with any clarity. in addition, the panel-data models that she offers are misspecified and do not reveal the causal effects of interest. instead, alternative panel-data models and basic mean differences suggest the alternative conclusion that material interests are at least as important as group-based status threat. discussion the core of the analysis i have offered is centered on measurement and modeling assumptions, as well as the range of interpretations that can be given to estimated statistical models. broader matters of conceptualization should also be discussed in conclusion, insofar as they structure the components of effective explanations. what role did economic interests play in the election outcome? mutz takes a position that is at odds with the literature on material interests and how it has been invoked to analyze trump’s victory. for mutz, economic interests can be narrowly defined – current and recent economic hardship, or lack thereof – while for the material-interests literature a broader conception of economic interests is appropriate. for this more encompassing alternative, economic hardship is not irrelevant, but it is only a subset of concerns that can be the basis of political support. the prospects of policy to shift economic distribution in the future, as well as to assign blame for economic distribution in the past, are critical to political support for alterative parties and candidates, especially at the end of a two-term presidency when the electorate considers the advisability of a disruptive change in course. even though i maintain this position, and thus argue that mutz gives short shrift to the economic interests of many of trump’s voters, i agree with mutz’s conclusion that non- economic interests are vitally important to consider. indeed, in prior work with my colleague jiwon lee, i have argued that … many working-class voters mobilized by the trump campaign are unlikely to be able to apportion their enthusiasm between policies and rhetoric that promote working-class economic interests and those that supposedly facilitate a return to a past when a less multicultural united states had a more prominent and secure position in the world economy (morgan and lee : ). after analyzing mutz’s data, i am further convinced of this position. i do not argue in the current article that trump’s appeals to white nativism and ethno-nationalism did not matter, only that they did not matter so much that little else did. other scholars may see more promise in the capacity of statistical models to apportion the motivations of white, working-class voters, but the standard we set for strong conclusions based on such models should be a high one in public-facing research, as i discuss below. turning from what can be excluded from an explanation based on economic interests, what should be included within an explanation based on status threat? i cannot determine from mutz’s article what the full answer to this question is, but it should be clear from the preceding analysis that i believe her operational definition is too expansive. the challenge i see for the prospects of status-threat explanations is how to differentiate them, with empirical evidence, from explanations that rely on prejudice and racial animus instead. a baseline prejudice-incorporating explanation of the election outcome, which also gives appropriate scope to economic interests, would have these nine components: . white voters who are prejudiced against non-whites have been much more likely to vote republican in presidential elections since at least the s, and this pattern was also true in . . white voters who are prejudiced against non-whites are more prevalent in the working class, and this remained true in . . white, working-class voters swung toward obama in and because mccain and romney did not prioritize working-class economic interests, and the swing was likely strongest among those who were the least prejudiced. . some of the same voters who swung toward obama in and swung back toward trump in because, unlike mccain and romney, trump argued for policies that he claimed would foster working-class economic security. . the most prejudiced white, working-class voters were excited by trump’s white nativism because it aligned with their pre-existing prejudice, and many other less prejudiced white voters were willing to tolerate it. . most non-white, working-class voters found trump’s white nativism offensive, and so his appeal to their working-class interests was ineffective. . some centrist white voters with college degrees were offended by trump’s white nativism and/or wanted to elect the nation’s first female president, and thus some of these voters swung away from romney toward clinton. . the swing of centrist white voters with college degrees toward clinton was much smaller than the swing of white, working-class voters toward trump, in part because clinton was framed in the primary campaign as less interested in working-class economic security than sanders, and in part because she defended global trade in the general election against trump. . because of these swings in support, the education gradient increased among white voters, and the white working class was the crucial group of voters that put trump over the top in the electoral college. this skeletal narrative is not meant to be a full explanation for the election, but it has the features of an explanation that incorporates both prejudice and economic interests in order to demonstrate how they can interact to shape an electoral outcome. it is also consistent with two pieces of evidence that i find compelling: ( ) white, working-class voters in the general social survey were, on average, no more prejudiced in than during the past few presidential election years (see morgan and lee ), and ( ) approximately percent of the white, working-class respondents to the american national election studies claimed to have voted for obama in and trump in , in comparison to only percent of all other white voters (see morgan and lee ). it is unclear from mutz’s article which components of a prejudice-incorporating explanation are inconsistent with her status-threat explanation. she does note at the end of her article that “status threat is not the usual form of prejudice or stereotyping that involves looking down on out-groups who are perceived to be inferior” (mutz : ). instead, for mutz’s argument, white voters resent the racial progress that has eliminated some historical disadvantage because whites perceive that progress as a zero-sum loss in their own relative status. according to this reasoning, support for trump, following eight years of a multiracial presidency, can be interpreted as a predictable psychological response – “a classic defensive reaction among members of dominant groups” (mutz : ). if a zero-sum threat dynamic was an emergent force during the election cycle, then it would be helpful to be able to differentiate it empirically from a baseline prejudice- incorporating explanation. derogatory statements about mexicans, muslims, baltimore gangs, and activists in the black lives matter movement were probably sufficient to secure the support of whites whose votes are predetermined by their own pre-existing prejudice. the matters worthy of further debate are ( ) whether a zero-sum status narrative has value for explaining the electoral swing in because it can account for the votes of less prejudiced whites and ( ) whether, by implying that whites simply crave reassurance of their status dominance, the acceptance of such a supplemental explanation undermines (a) the need for more balanced economic growth that will benefit all members of the working class and (b) the need for more effective racial integration to reduce the prejudice and racial animus of whites that contributes to persistent racial inequality. looking forward, if status threat is to become worthy of being placed at the center of causal explanations for future electoral outcomes – subsuming racial prejudice, economic interests, and foreign policy views – then better measures need to be developed that can explain what existing measures cannot. the obligation of care in public-facing research bold interpretations of evidence have their place in social science scholarship, but we also have an obligation of care when drawing conclusions about topics that are a matter of intense public concern. after reading mutz’s article, and this reanalysis, surely some readers will reach the position that mutz’s article pushes the interpretative envelope in a way that is exciting and hence has potential to inspire new scientific breakthroughs. from this perspective, her results may not fully support her conclusions, but there is a good chance that future evidence based on new measurement techniques will validate them, demonstrating why it is courageous and vital for scholars to always be just a bit beyond what the evidence suggests. in an age when social science is often decried as insufficiently scientific – and, in the case of political science, left-leaning and partisan enough that it should be defunded by the national science foundation – social scientists must be careful when conducting and popularizing our public-facing research. mutz’s article characterized many millions of us residents as feckless voters driven by a reactive psychologism – a claim that, in widespread media coverage, was accepted as a myth-busting explanation of the election. it is insufficiently cautious to deny the possibility that many voters recognized their own stagnant economic fortunes, borne of an age of gross inequality not seen in decades, and welcomed by a highly educated elite no longer shy of its own conspicuous consumption. it may be puzzling to see a billionaire as a savior for the fortunes of such voters, but it is far less puzzling if, as a bombastic outsider candidate claiming to fund his own campaign, he was a beneficiary of their desire for a transgressive moment of protest. this possibility also suggests that reconciliation may be more attainable than feared, and that centrist voters, many of whom are white and working class, are not beyond the limits of reasoned persuasion, especially if working-class economic security is not enhanced by the promised upending of global trade relations and migration patterns. . references cited chokshi, niraj. , april . “trump voters driven by fear of losing status.” in new york times. https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/trump-economic-anxiety.html. chotiner, isaac. , april . “status whoa: a new study finds that obama voters who went trump were motivated 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https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/ / /existential- anxiety-not-poverty-motivates-trump-support/ /. lamont, michèle, bo yun park and elena ayala-hurtado. . “trump’s electoral speeches and his appeal to the american white working class.” the british journal of sociology :s -s . doi: . / - . . mccall, leslie and ann shola orloff. . “the multidimensional politics of inequality: taking stock of identity politics in the u.s. presidential election of .” the british journal of sociology :s -s . doi: . / - . . mcquarrie, michael. . “the revolt of the rust belt: place and politics in the age of anger.” the british journal of sociology :s -s . doi: . / - . . morgan, stephen l. and jiwon lee. . “the white working class and voter turnout in u.s. presidential elections, to .” sociological science : - . doi: . /v .a . morgan, stephen l. and jiwon lee. . “trump voters and the white working class.” sociological science : - . doi: . /v .a . morgan, stephen l. and christopher winship. . counterfactuals and causal inference: methods and principles for social research. new york: cambridge university press. mutz, diana c. . “status threat, not economic hardship, explains the presidential vote.” proceedings of the national academy of sciences. doi: . /pnas. . https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/trump-economic-anxiety.html. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/ / /a-new-theory-for-why-obama-voters-went-trump.html. https://slate.com/news-and-politics/ / /a-new-theory-for-why-obama-voters-went-trump.html. https://www.economist.com/blogs/democracyinamerica/ / /left-behind. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-do-we-tame-trumpisms-virulent-nostalgia-for-an-old-status-quo/ / / /f e de- - e - -f d bc f _story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=. b ca b a. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-do-we-tame-trumpisms-virulent-nostalgia-for-an-old-status-quo/ / / /f e de- - e - -f d bc f _story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=. b ca b a. https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/how-do-we-tame-trumpisms-virulent-nostalgia-for-an-old-status-quo/ / / /f e de- - e - -f d bc f _story.html?noredirect=on&utm_term=. b ca b a. https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/ / /existential-anxiety-not-poverty-motivates-trump-support/ / https://www.theatlantic.com/science/archive/ / /existential-anxiety-not-poverty-motivates-trump-support/ / swedberg, richard. . “folk economics and its role in trump’s presidential campaign: an exploratory study.” theory and society : - . doi: . /s - - - . waldow, julia. , april . “what journalists got wrong about voters in the election.” in cnn. http://money.cnn.com/ / / /media/status-threat-diana-mutz-reliable- sources/index.html. zelizer, julian. , april . “democrats need to stop believing this myth about trump’s base.” in cnn. https://www.cnn.com/ / / /opinions/trump-base-economy-myth- opinion-zelizer/index.html. http://money.cnn.com/ / / /media/status-threat-diana-mutz-reliable-sources/index.html. http://money.cnn.com/ / / /media/status-threat-diana-mutz-reliable-sources/index.html. https://www.cnn.com/ / / /opinions/trump-base-economy-myth-opinion-zelizer/index.html. https://www.cnn.com/ / / /opinions/trump-base-economy-myth-opinion-zelizer/index.html. table a . issue positions and perceptions of candidates by respondent’s level of education respondent’s position perceptions of candidates’ positions outcome and level of education romney trump obama clinton panel a. all respondents more free trade agreements high school or less . . . . . . some college . . . . . . bachelor’s or more . . . . . . more inclusive immigration high school or less . . . . . . some college . . . . . . bachelor’s or more . . . . . . china is an opportunity not a threat to jobs and security high school or less . . . . . . some college . . . . . . bachelor’s or more . . . . . . panel b. validated voters only more free trade agreements high school or less . . . . . . some college . . . . . . bachelor’s or more . . . . . . more inclusive immigration high school or less . . . . . . some college . . . . . . bachelor’s or more . . . . . . china is an opportunity not a threat to jobs and security high school or less . . . . . . some college . . . . . . bachelor’s or more . . . . . . notes: the outcomes are all seven-point scales. the standard errors of the means in each cell are between . and . . the results are based on all valid panel responses, and so the n’s vary slightly by outcome and year. as an example of sample size, the n’s for own position on trade are , , and for and , , and in , from high school or less to bachelor’s or more. when narrowed to voters only, the n’s fall to , , and in and , , and in . table a . means of panel variables, calculated separately for the and data, by a joint classification of vote choices mean of variable by vote choice patterns variable romney and trump obama and trump romney and clinton obama and clinton party identification (repub = , ind = , dem = ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) current personal finances better ( -point scale) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) nation’s economy better ( -point scale) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) household income (ordinal variable with / categories) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) looking for work . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) trade helped you ( -point scale) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) (table continued on next page) support for free trade ( -point scale) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) china is a threat to jobs ( -point scale) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) support for inclusive immigration policy ( -point scale) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) social dominance orientation ( -point scale) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) notes: standard errors are in parentheses, and the n for each mean is below the standard error. 	status threat, material interests, and the presidential vote *
 	abstract 	introduction 	methodological approach 	conclusions 	discussion 	the core of the analysis i have offered is centered on measurement and modeling assumptions, as well as the range of interpretations that can be given to estimated statistical models. broader matters of conceptualization should also be discussed in c... 	what role did economic interests play in the election outcome? mutz takes a position that is at odds with the literature on material interests and how it has been invoked to analyze trump’s victory. for mutz, economic interests can be narrowly ... 	even though i maintain this position, and thus argue that mutz gives short shrift to the economic interests of many of trump’s voters, i agree with mutz’s conclusion that non-economic interests are vitally important to consider. indeed, in prior work... 	… many working-class voters mobilized by the trump campaign are unlikely to be able to apportion their enthusiasm between policies and rhetoric that promote working-class economic interests and those that supposedly facilitate a return to a past when ... 	after analyzing mutz’s data, i am further convinced of this position. i do not argue in the current article that trump’s appeals to white nativism and ethno-nationalism did not matter, only that they did not matter so much that little else did. othe... 	turning from what can be excluded from an explanation based on economic interests, what should be included within an explanation based on status threat? i cannot determine from mutz’s article what the full answer to this question is, but it should b... 	the challenge i see for the prospects of status-threat explanations is how to differentiate them, with empirical evidence, from explanations that rely on prejudice and racial animus instead. a baseline prejudice-incorporating explanation of the ... 	 . white voters who are prejudiced against non-whites have been much more likely to vote republican in presidential elections since at least the s, and this pattern was also true in . 	 . white voters who are prejudiced against non-whites are more prevalent in the working class, and this remained true in . 	 . white, working-class voters swung toward obama in and because mccain and romney did not prioritize working-class economic interests, and the swing was likely strongest among those who were the least prejudiced. 	 . some of the same voters who swung toward obama in and swung back toward trump in because, unlike mccain and romney, trump argued for policies that he claimed would foster working-class economic security. 	 . the most prejudiced white, working-class voters were excited by trump’s white nativism because it aligned with their pre-existing prejudice, and many other less prejudiced white voters were willing to tolerate it. 	 . most non-white, working-class voters found trump’s white nativism offensive, and so his appeal to their working-class interests was ineffective. 	 . some centrist white voters with college degrees were offended by trump’s white nativism and/or wanted to elect the nation’s first female president, and thus some of these voters swung away from romney toward clinton. 	 . the swing of centrist white voters with college degrees toward clinton was much smaller than the swing of white, working-class voters toward trump, in part because clinton was framed in the primary campaign as less interested in working-class econ... 	 . because of these swings in support, the education gradient increased among white voters, and the white working class was the crucial group of voters that put trump over the top in the electoral college. 	this skeletal narrative is not meant to be a full explanation for the election, but it has the features of an explanation that incorporates both prejudice and economic interests in order to demonstrate how they can interact to shape an electoral ... 	it is unclear from mutz’s article which components of a prejudice-incorporating explanation are inconsistent with her status-threat explanation. she does note at the end of her article that “status threat is not the usual form of prejudice or stereo... 	if a zero-sum threat dynamic was an emergent force during the election cycle, then it would be helpful to be able to differentiate it empirically from a baseline prejudice-incorporating explanation. derogatory statements about mexicans, muslims,... 	the obligation of care in public-facing research 	bold interpretations of evidence have their place in social science scholarship, but we also have an obligation of care when drawing conclusions about topics that are a matter of intense public concern. after reading mutz’s article, and this reanalys... 	references cited exceptional injustice: facebook as a reflection of race- and gender-based narratives following the death of george floyd $ € £ ¥ social sciences article exceptional injustice: facebook as a reflection of race- and gender-based narratives following the death of george floyd patricia j dixon and lauren dundes * department of sociology, mcdaniel college, college hill, westminster, md , usa; pjdixon @gmail.com * correspondence: ldundes@mcdaniel.edu received: november ; accepted: december ; published: december ����������������� abstract: following the death of george floyd, facebook posts about the black lives matter movement (blm) surged, creating the opportunity to examine reactions by race and sex. this study employed a two-part mixed methods approach beginning with an analysis of posts from a single college student’s facebook newsfeed over a -week period, commencing on the date of george floyd’s death ( may ). a triangulation protocol enhanced exploratory observational–archival facebook posts with qualitative data from black and white college students queried about their views of blm and policing. the facebook data revealed that white males, who were the least active in posting about blm, were most likely to criticize blm protests. they also believed incidents of police brutality were exceptions that tainted an otherwise commendable profession. in contrast, black individuals commonly saw the case of george floyd as consistent with a longstanding pattern of injustice that takes an emotional toll, and as an egregious exemplification of racism that calls for indictment of the status quo. the exploratory data in this article also illustrate how even for a cause célèbre, attention on facebook ebbs over time. this phenomenon obscures the urgency of effecting change, especially for persons whose understanding of racism is influenced by its coverage on social media. the need to recognize the divergence of views—how they vary by sex and race and their connection to social media—remains critical for progress in determining the best steps forward in race relations and police reform. keywords: black lives matter; blm; george floyd; social justice; facebook; social networking sites; racial justice; unity; protests; race; gender; police brutality; excessive force; bad actors; social media . introduction with the growing role of social media as a source of news (anspach ; boczkowski et al. ; fletcher and nielsen ; hopp et al. ), videos of violence by police posted on social media have become an increasingly prominent source of hashtags and an impetus for mobilizing social justice movements (anderson ; bowman ; clark et al. ; lake et al. ). social media sites such as facebook are one means to rally the public (miethe et al. ), allowing users to discuss police brutality in online settings, independent of an incident’s coverage in traditional media (bordonaro and willits ; umamaheswar ). a bystander video posted on facebook brought public attention to the killing of george perry floyd, jr., in the twilight hours of memorial day, may . floyd’s death quickly became “an inflection point in the modern civil rights movement”, not unlike the galvanizing force of the death of emmett till in (levitz et al., para. ). in fact, the image of till’s mutilation that appeared in jet magazine added unprecedented urgency to a social justice movement that showcased the power of social media (whitfield ). although till died at a much younger age ( ) than floyd ( ), the widespread distribution of video plainly showing nearly eight minutes of police brutality soc. sci. , , ; doi: . /socsci www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci http://www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci http://www.mdpi.com http://dx.doi.org/ . /socsci http://www.mdpi.com/journal/socsci https://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= soc. sci. , , of against floyd resulted in widespread consternation. social media became a key outlet for outrage and horror as memorials to floyd sprang up nationwide (cappelli ; mchunu ). the emergence of video footage, especially viral black death, is a form of “visible evidence”, a growing field of study (watson ). while the repeated exposure to violence portrayed on social media platforms such as facebook can trigger sadness, anger, and fear (motley et al. ), citizen-posted “visible evidence” of police brutality can also become viral spectacles that undermine the humanity of those victimized. “reiterating the ubiquity of black death outside of its context” can result in short-term dismay about black death that undermines the need for structural change (mohrman and fischer , para. ). these viral videos of black death may have “deadening effects of over-exposure to images that were perhaps once meant to move us” (juhasz , para. ), a concern consistent with how interest in a news event tends to wane (as conveyed by the “ min of fame” expression). on the other hand, social media provides a means to catalyze a movement, without the costs and infrastructure previously required: “the internet allows...movements to grow dramatically and rapidly, but without prior building of formal or informal organizational and other collective capacities...[with] no need to spend six months putting together a single rally when a hashtag could be used to summon protesters into the streets” (tufekci a, pp. xii–xiii), or to test out messages on large audiences, enhanced by the ease with which users can validate members of their social network (tufekci b; vaidhyanathan ). following george floyd’s death, there were unprecedented calls for increased scrutiny and cessation of police brutality, specifically the killing of black men by white police officers (pannett et al. ). these reactions, captured in part by posts on social media, are timely and often unvarnished data that provide a unique window into how race and gender predict reactions to a major social movement. this mixed methods exploratory study examines reactions to floyd’s death on facebook, with methodological triangulation through supplemental queries posed to a black–white race stratified convenience sample of male and female college students. . the death of george floyd, jr. on may , four minneapolis police officers were dispatched to a business complaining about a counterfeit $ bill. after floyd, who “fit the description” of the suspect, was located in a nearby parked car, he complied with a request to exit his vehicle, while repeatedly asking officers not to shoot him. once police handcuffed floyd, they tried to place him in their squad car, at which point he resisted, citing his claustrophobia and anxiety. at the same time, he reassured them that he would not harm anyone. once in the police car, floyd complained of difficulty breathing, resulting in officers pulling him out of the police car and placing him on the ground. floyd continued to tell officers that he was struggling to breathe, a health concern that was exacerbated when the senior officer at the scene, derek chauvin, pressed his knee on floyd’s neck for nearly min. during this time, floyd was lying on the pavement in agony, expressing that he could not breathe, saying among other things, “everything hurts”. his distress was palpable as he begged for water and twice cried out “mama” in reference to his mother who had died two years earlier. chauvin finally removed his knee after floyd had fallen unconscious, and only at the behest of a paramedic called to the scene. the medical examiner later cited the cause of death as cardiopulmonary arrest related to how law enforcement subdued, restrained, and compressed floyd’s neck (bailey ). images of floyd pleading for relief from the excessive force were captured on video by a bystander and shared widely on social media. social networking sites such as facebook filled with commentary about floyd’s death, as it was widely deemed to constitute clear evidence of oppression, in accordance with longstanding claims promulgated by such groups as the black lives matter movement (blm). politicians echoed this national (and international) trend of facebook and twitter posts following floyd’s death, with specific mentions of “george floyd” appearing on the congressional facebook and twitter social media accounts of % of democrats and % of republicans (shaw and widjaya ), soc. sci. , , of an outgrowth of the ability of social media to galvanize the national discourse about racism (carney ; wilkins et al. ). . the social justice movement the outpouring of reactions to floyd’s death revealed that frustration with the treatment of black people by police had reached a tipping point, eliciting calls for radical reform of the police (e.g., defunding them, giving firing power to civilian review boards) (acevedo ; russonello ), outrage likely exacerbated by the impact of racial capitalism on the covid- -caused morbidity and mortality that occurred simultaneously (pirtle ). despite widespread anger at police, the reactions to floyd’s death also included the view that the reprehensible actions of an isolated individual, a so-called “bad apple”, did not truly reflect law enforcement as a whole. those focusing on rogue police, whose actions are seen as anomalous, reflect a philosophy of psychological individualism, in which culpability rests with an autonomous individual. in the case of police brutality, justice entails punishment of a responsible individual rather than dismantling or significantly changing the system. in other words, according to this way of thinking, floyd’s death resulted from the inhumanity of a corrupt individual rather than because of a flawed, unjust system that advantages some groups over others. these differences in opinion about the need to reform police vary widely by race: % of black respondents in a gallup poll believed major reform is warranted compared to % of white respondents (crabtree ). understanding these differences, including reactions to police shootings of unarmed black men, is linked not just to race, but also to racial identity. a strong sense of being white, as well as negative stereotypes about black individuals, predicts low empathy for black people subject to excessive force by police (johnson and lecci ), a finding consistent with a racial disparity in worries about police brutality and the effects of structural racism (graham et al. ; hehman et al. ; horowitz and livingston ). likewise, adherence to “masculine honor beliefs”, such as allegiance to one’s country, is inversely related to seeing police violence against racial minorities as problematic (stratmoen et al. ). moreover, fragile masculinity is linked to a higher probability of justifying social inequality (dimuccio and knowles ; weaver and vescio ). . facebook posts as a social justice barometer one means of gaining insight into responses to police killings of black citizens is to analyze social networking sites, in particular facebook, the site with the largest number of users worldwide (despite the ebb and flow in the number of users as other sites such as instagram have grown in popularity) (clement ). although young people report learning about blm from social media sites such as facebook (cox ), studies in which facebook is a source of data are a relatively new addition to research studies. it is possible that the dearth of studies that examine facebook data is due to unresolved issues surrounding informed consent, a topic that is important to consider in order to protect research subjects whose posts on social networking sites are the subject of studies. below we address concerns about informed consent relevant to the analysis of facebook data. . informed consent in the analysis of facebook posts although analysis of facebook posts is widely considered to be a gray area in terms of requiring informed consent, certain criteria have emerged about whether a given project can be classified as exempt observational research that obviates the need for informed consent. first, because information is on a newsfeed (versus facebook private messages, for example), the expectation is that this form of social media is in fact designed for a person to have an audience. in fact, arguably data from an online space, such as newsfeed data, are consistent with institutional review board (irb) norms if the subjects perceive the space as largely public, in line with the site’s public “glasshouse structure” (willis , p. ). soc. sci. , , of in addition, the ability to ask someone to revert to private messaging (pm) implies an understanding that communication can transition from a public to a private forum, where expectations of privacy exist (moreno et al. ). moreover, regardless of facebook users’ awareness of facebook policies, their information is not in fact private. furthermore, there seems to be general awareness of how information is sold to advertisers, including how targeted ads appear based on the content of posts. thus, the data can arguably be classified as “public” behavior (moreno et al. ). second, in the case of this study, views about the blm movement studied here are opinions of those years and older and do not reveal anything about physical or mental health, nor behaviors. in other words, disclosures of subjects’ responses could not reasonably put them at risk of criminal or civil liability. nor is the research intrusive, but rather involves “passive” analysis of internet postings versus active involvement in the community, defined by actively participating in communication (eysenbach and till ). third, the qualitative information in this analysis is presented in a manner that protects the anonymity of those making comments; the content of comments presented in this paper are either re-posts, and thus untraceable, or have been reduced to key phrases and general views that could not be traced nor attributed to any one individual, with posts as the unit of analysis rather than individual users. hence, the comments cannot be linked to subjects, but rather are part of an untraceable collection of observations of public posts. federal and state courts have ruled that there is no reasonable expectation of privacy in information individuals post on their facebook pages, for example in accordance with the court’s decision in romano v. steelcase. in this case, the court referenced facebook privacy policies that unambiguously state that users’ posts can be shared, and that sharing in social networking sites is their raison d’être, which otherwise would not exist in the first place (moreno et al. ). finally, facebook terms of service are clear about a lack of expectation of privacy. for example, the following statement appears in facebook’s terms of service page, under the section entitled: partners who use our analytics services: we provide aggregated statistics and insights that help people and businesses understand how people are engaging with their posts, listings, pages, videos, and other content on and off the facebook products. for example, page admins and instagram business profiles receive information about the number of people or accounts who viewed, reacted to, or commented on their posts, as well as aggregate demographic and other information that helps them understand interactions with their page or account (facebook ). . background on study design and timing this study was originally intended to assess facebook reactions to publicized cases in which black people were profiled and killed, such as the february murder of -year-old ahmaud arbery. arbery was a black jogger in georgia chased and killed by two white men who mistakenly thought he had burglarized homes in their neighborhood (spawning the viral hashtag “i #runwithmaud”). by chance, data collection began on monday, may , the date that george floyd jr. was killed by police (and pronounced dead at a hospital at : pm). by the following day, may , there was an “outpouring of anger” following the release of a bystander video that showed the (white) senior police officer, chauvin, kneeling on floyd’s neck. by the evening of may and into may , protests became violent. nationwide and international outrage about the death of floyd emerged by june (zurcher ), triggering a major social movement that generated an explosion of social media posts. soc. sci. , , of . methods . . facebook feed data data in this irb-approved study were collected from the facebook newsfeed of a white female associate of the first author. this associate is a daily facebook user. she cites facebook as the optimal platform to connect to a wide web of family, friends, and professionals, whereas on snapchat and instagram, she is connected only to friends. on facebook, she has connections to a broad array of persons of different ages, races, and backgrounds. she uses facebook to view and share written information in addition to media, while her other social networking sites are primarily media-oriented (posting photos and videos). the associate’s facebook (fb) friend group is above average in size at friends (versus the mean number of fb friends: (omnicore )). however, for this study, fb friends were excluded, as they did not identify as or appear to be either black or white (that is, were primarily latino and asian). the remaining group of friends catalogued for analysis was comprised of fb friends: white females ( %); white males ( %); black females ( %); black males ( %). the percentage of the subject’s fb friends in college or college educated was %, with % falling in the – age group. beginning on may, the first author began checking the designated facebook newsfeed every few days in order to log all quantitative and qualitative posts about the black lives matter (blm) movement by those who could be identified as either black or white, specifically those surrounding police shootings of black individuals. for purposes of anonymity and logistical recordkeeping, the number of posts per person was not logged, but rather the total number of posts was used, as well as information on whether they were by black or white persons and their sex (male or female). assessments of racial groups were based on the first author’s presumptions based on photos (while gender was presumed or commonly designated in a person’s public personal information). all blm-related content was assessed for its support for preserving the current system (the status quo). these posts fall into three broad categories that either directly or indirectly convey that change is not the top priority in response to george floyd’s death. instead, these posts reflect the notion that reform is at best secondary to the need to work within the current system, overlooking experiences and fears of those disadvantaged by a white hegemonic framework: ( ) police brutality reflects bad actors and not systemic flaws; ( ) unity and commonalities should be prioritized over differences; ( ) protests should be strictly non-violent (operationalized below in table ). table . facebook (fb) friend comments about black lives matter (blm), categorized by race and gender ( total comments by black and white friends over weeks: may– august). white males n = blm fb comments black males n = blm fb comments white females n = blm fb comments black females n = blm fb comments percent of comments supporting status quo out of all of subgroup comments % % % % percent of subject’s fb friends % % % % percent of all blm comments % % % % number of total blm comments vs. expected (relative to proportion of all fb friends) % of expected # of comments % of expected # of comments % of expected # of comments % of expected # of comments soc. sci. , , of . . follow-up query data for mixed-methods design methodological triangulation involved collecting additional data from traditionally-aged college students at the small, private mid-atlantic liberal arts institution attended by the student whose facebook account was analyzed. during the week of – november , with the assistance of a white male student volunteer who queried white males, the authors and the student volunteer used convenience sampling to collect query data about views of the blm movement from six members of each of the following demographic groups: white males, white females, black males, and black females. there was an % response rate, with busy schedules cited as the reason for declining participation. after obtaining informed consent, the authors conducted the queries in person, via zoom, or over email (in part due to the covid- pandemic and students’ limited time on-campus). these data served as a means to complement the data from fb trends, rather than to provide a representative sample of each group. these data also offered protections of anonymous reporting in contrast to public, non-anonymous posts that characterize fb data. the two queries were as follows: . what are your thoughts about the black lives matter movement? . how much do you think that george floyd’s death reflects the need to revamp policing in the us versus the need to screen out individuals who abuse their power? because of the open-ended nature of the first question, there was a wide range of responses, a consequence of allowing each respondent to choose the direction they would take with the general, open-ended prompt. . results from facebook newsfeed white males were least supportive of blm ( % made comments critical of blm, coded as pro-status quo). this percentage was much higher than for white females ( %). while black males were only a small proportion of all of the subject’s fb friends ( %), they accounted for a far greater proportion of all of the comments on the subject’s fb feed ( %) (see table ). this finding is also depicted in chart form to show the adjusted number of fb posts over a -week period by black males, as well as the other three demographic groups (see figure ). soc. sci. , , x for peer review of and black females. there was an % response rate, with busy schedules cited as the reason for declining participation. after obtaining informed consent, the authors conducted the queries in person, via zoom, or over email (in part due to the covid- pandemic and students’ limited time on-campus). these data served as a means to complement the data from fb trends, rather than to provide a representative sample of each group. these data also offered protections of anonymous reporting in contrast to public, non-anonymous posts that characterize fb data. the two queries were as follows: . what are your thoughts about the black lives matter movement? . how much do you think that george floyd’s death reflects the need to revamp policing in the us versus the need to screen out individuals who abuse their power? because of the open-ended nature of the first question, there was a wide range of responses, a consequence of allowing each respondent to choose the direction they would take with the general, open-ended prompt. . results from facebook newsfeed white males were least supportive of blm ( % made comments critical of blm, coded as pro- status quo). this percentage was much higher than for white females ( %). while black males were only a small proportion of all of the subject’s fb friends ( %), they accounted for a far greater proportion of all of the comments on the subject’s fb feed ( %) (see table ). this finding is also depicted in chart form to show the adjusted number of fb posts over a -week period by black males, as well as the other three demographic groups (see figure ). figure . total (adjusted) number weekly fb posts over weeks. to make the number of posts comparable across demographic groups, the number of white female posts was left intact, with the other groups adjusted to take into account their smaller proportions. white males were adjusted by . , black females were adjusted by . , and black males were adjusted by . , so that the numbers of posts listed in the chart (below) were derived by taking the recorded numbers of posts and multiplying them by the aforementioned number corresponding to each demographic group. in week , both black males and females had a resurgence of posts, a pattern that differed from that of white males and females. this week (week ) covered june– july and may have been in response to the ironies of celebrating the country on the th of july (independence day) when the promise of justice and equality seemed so elusive in the wake of national attention on police killing week begins may & week ends august total (adjusted) number weekly fb posts over weeks black males black females white females white males figure . total (adjusted) number weekly fb posts over weeks. soc. sci. , , of to make the number of posts comparable across demographic groups, the number of white female posts was left intact, with the other groups adjusted to take into account their smaller proportions. white males were adjusted by . , black females were adjusted by . , and black males were adjusted by . , so that the numbers of posts listed in the chart (below) were derived by taking the recorded numbers of posts and multiplying them by the aforementioned number corresponding to each demographic group. in week , both black males and females had a resurgence of posts, a pattern that differed from that of white males and females. this week (week ) covered june– july and may have been in response to the ironies of celebrating the country on the th of july (independence day) when the promise of justice and equality seemed so elusive in the wake of national attention on police killing black citizens, especially given the way in which george floyd suffered before his demise. figure also reveals a substantial drop in online posts in all demographic groups subsequent to week . these data reflect the expected finding that more reactions appeared in the first few days after the facebook release of the video of floyd’s interaction with chauvin by a year-old african-american bystander, darnella frazier. . qualitative data: comments supportive of the status quo comments, including re-posts, about the blm movement were analyzed and coded into several broad categories of views supportive of the status quo, some of which are paraphrased to protect posters’ anonymity: ( ) bad actors. in this category of comments, posters expressed the belief that the killing of black people by police reflected the inevitable “bad apples” or corrupt individuals in an otherwise laudable and necessary social institution. examples include the following: ( ) not all cops are bad. ( ) do not let the officer who murdered george floyd define what you think about law enforcement officers in general. there are so many phenomenal officers out there who put their lives on the line for us every day and they do not deserve the hate. ( ) a few bad officers do not mean all officers are evil. ( ) unfortunately cops like this slip through the cracks. ( ) #dontjudgeallbecauseofone. ( ) unity should supersede racial differences. posts in this category included the following: ( ) “people are people” (suggesting that the george floyd incident had nothing to do with race—with content revealing the view that the claim that the incident was about race was itself racist). ( ) photo of a black man hugging a white police officer captioned, “more love, less hate”. ( ) “we are one race, the human race”. ( ) “we should all stand together rather than putting each other down”. ( ) “#togetherstrong”. ( ) various hashtags: #allvoicesheard #alllivesmatter #standtogether #commonenemy #racismistheenemy.” all of these examples reflect the belief that the death of george floyd should unify all those that oppose police brutality (i.e., virtually everyone). the case then becomes a human rights issue, separate from race or historical patterns of racism. ( ) focusing on acceptable forms of protest. posts that exemplified this perspective included the following: ( ) “i’m okay with protesting but there’s a way to go about it to get your word heard” (including disapproval of the manner in which colin kaepernick protested in when he took a knee during the national anthem at football games). ( ) a picture of martin luther king, jr., walking with a group of people with the caption “this is a protest” paired with a picture of looting in minnesota captioned “this is a crime”. ( ) condemning police brutality alongside this message: “looting and burning businesses is [also] immoral and counterproductive, and people who do this should go to jail”. ( ) the sentiment that the more violent forms of protest were a setback to the movement, encapsulated by the words, “you are your own worst enemy.” soc. sci. , , of . qualitative query data query data collected subsequent to cataloging the facebook data provided convenience sample data from student respondents who shared their thoughts, data that respondents knew would be reported anonymously and remain confidential (unlike fb data). there were only two prompts: . what are your thoughts about the black lives matter movement? . how much do you think that george floyd’s death reflects on the need to revamp policing in the us versus the need to screen out individuals who abuse their power? (complete responses for all respondents are available in appendix a.) . . white males three major themes emerged from white males queried, all in line with the fb data: ( ) non-peaceful blm protests, specifically looting and rioting, hurt the movement; ( ) the media creates a false narrative that overstates racism; ( ) police are wrongly discredited by a few bad apples and instead engage in noble work that deserves to be appreciated. see table below for a synopsis of respondent query data. table . synopsis of six white males’ (wm) responses to queries about blm. wm : black lives matter is a great movement for the black community to express their feelings. we do need police reform, like requiring more hours of job training, but looting and rioting are not a good solution to the problem of injustice. wm : police do a good job keeping everyone safe—and some situations that aren’t racist get construed that way in the media. wm : this country truly is divided, and it is because of the media trying to push a narrative to benefit only them. we as americans have failed the very people who protect us on a daily basis, and if we do not fix the divide, we may not have many more police officers willing to protect and serve in this country. wm : the movement promotes the physical destruction of businesses and property in order to send a so-called “message” that is both threatening to our law enforcement officers and other races. wm : i believe that the whole acab (all cops are bastards) and defund the police talk is nonsense. what we need to do is invest in our police force and focus on better training for them. wm : i have only seen them protest. i think there are much better ways to solve the issues at hand, revolving around black businesses, education, and fixing communities. there are truly just a few bad apples...[police] should truly be getting our thanks for putting their lives on the line every day. . . white females as summarized in table below, three salient themes emerged among white females: ( ) the blm movement is needed to combat police brutality and racism; ( ) the movement has inadvertently created racial divisions that are uncomfortable; ( ) it is difficult to know how best to support the movement but learning about it and discussing it are an important step. soc. sci. , , of table . synopsis of six white females’ (wf) responses to queries about blm. wf : a lot of white people can feel helpless as to what to do and how to be an ally. we do need to have police but people of color need to feel safe, even though i don’t know what that looks like for them. wf : the blm movement is entirely necessary for the advancement of equality in policing. we hear “all lives matter”, but that can’t be possible until systemic racism and implicit biases are removed from all workplaces, and we address the treatment of minorities while interacting with police officers and in the court system. wf : with every movement comes backlash like saying, “all lives matter”. that is true but that is not what the movement is trying to say. they weren’t bashing other ethnic groups but saying, “hey, black people matter too and we are not treated correctly.” people need to stop viewing things as blaming them personally. wf : i feel like some followers of the movement have begun to lose their way by criticizing people they think don’t support the movement. so while i completely understand blm and fully support it, it is creating a divide in the nation, rather than the unity that was originally intended. wf : maybe white people are quiet because we are watching and learning and trying to recognize our “white privilege” we were taught to ignore by society and our families so we can make a change. wf : the movement is doing really good things by addressing people’s differences and how everyone should be treated the same no matter what they look like. but too often we hear about all of the negative things that police officers do since the media doesn’t show enough of the good things they do daily. however, there is still a need to fix what the police do because they are far from perfect. people should talk more and be better educated about this instead of treating it as taboo and argument-provoking. . . black males the query data from black males stood out in terms of respondents’ frustration with the status quo and especially with corrupt officers that compel black people to stay ever-vigilant against police brutality. their responses (table ) also provide a glimpse of its emotional toll. table . synopsis of six black males’ (bm) responses to queries about blm. bm : we have to combat racism, especially police brutality, which otherwise lets corruption get pushed under the rug. i know people that have been pulled over by police and beaten up so corrupt policing is something on my mind. but we [men] don’t talk enough about how this affects us because we aren’t in touch with our emotions. my father wouldn’t let me watch spongebob once he saw that the character cries a lot. bm : we have to act a certain way to be presentable when we go out in public. i have been pulled over for no apparent reason where the cop was going the extra mile just to see if we were doing what we’re supposed to be doing. he “thought there was suspicious activity” and checked all of our ids. there are not a few bad apples—they are everywhere. bm : inside of the police force, we know that the police protect their own, pretty similar to how gang members don’t believe in snitching. but it was good to see that people genuinely cared about what happened. it made me feel positive about the future, seeing that police reform is starting to come to the forefront of people’s minds and people aren’t defending police as much anymore. bm : the police have always known that they have back up from other officers and feel empowered to abuse their power. defunding them takes back control for black neighborhoods where residents are used to fighting for their rights in a system that works against them but always stands behind police. defunding them puts community residents on more equal footing with police in a system that doesn’t have our back. bm : the blm movement is inspirational, but unfortunately i see a majority of it as a trend when it needs to be an everyday thing. black lives certainly do matter, yet we continue to have to say, “oh look! there goes another black person murdered, missing, or lynched,” and it’s exhausting. i truly hope that one day society will just be able to recognize african americans as equal. because it is draining, it is very draining. bm : blm is a necessary movement black people have been fighting for a really long time, pointing out the injustices that they face on a day-to-day basis, and how they are endangered every single day. people get really impassioned about being a part of protests, to feel like they belong. i saw white girls dressed with helmets and bats at a protest, like it was a block party. people don’t really know why they are there. to make people in positions of power uncomfortable, we have to continuously educate and have these conversations. we have to pound the pavement to make sure that people don’t forget about it because that interest dies off. soc. sci. , , of . . black females the three most prominent themes black females expressed (table ) were: ( ) frustration that black people’s lives have not been valued, historically or currently; ( ) the need for mainstream acknowledgement that fighting racism must be prioritized; ( ) white people need help understanding that the true meaning of the movement is equality and not black superiority. table . synopsis of six black females’ (bf) responses to queries about blm. bf : some people don’t realize the long-standing tension that has gotten pushed to the background as normal, so it’s hard for them to see it, like when black people get labeled as thugs. history is repeating itself. bf : people need to understand that blm isn’t saying that black people’s lives matter more than others; it’s saying that they should be valued as much as anyone else.... because we feel that we’re not advocated for in society. blm isn’t about dividing the country, but about uniting it. it’s a shame that it took floyd’s death for people to realize that things have been happening like this for a long time. bf : our lives should matter all the time, regardless of the involvement of an authority figure like a police officer or the race of the killer. we should be as upset by black on black deaths, even when it gets less media attention. bf : blm allows racial issues that were once taboo to transform into mainstream topics for the masses. george floyd’s death represented the systemic abuse of black people, which leads to our militarized police taking extreme and unneeded action. george floyd’s death is one of the countless deaths of an innocent african american in alone. bf : the black lives matter movement is simply a movement to increase awareness of the growth in killings of black men and women when compared to any other race, whether it’s due to police brutality or murders of black men and women by civilians...[a] problem that a lot of people want to ignore. bf : as black people, we also get questioned because we don’t get a basic level of respect or credibility, but we mostly need the movement because of how white police officers treat black people. i have to think extra hard when i encounter police because i go in with the idea that they could harm me rather than protect me. . discussion analysis of weeks of fb posts and query data uncovered two patterns that will be the focus of the discussion: ( ) how white males were least likely to post about blm and most likely to cite the role of bad apples in explaining floyd’s death and ( ) the relatively high number of posts by black males. . . white men and support for the status quo fb comments by white males were less apt to be unilaterally supportive of the blm movement, although it is important to point out that nearly three-quarters of fb posts by white men were supportive of blm and that the comments favoring the status quo often revealed conditional support for the movement. while the data could reflect that white males feel defensive because publicized police shootings often involve black male victims shot by white male officers, the data suggest additional reasons that white males were less likely to both see and speak out against racism. . . . police brutality and bad apples white males were more likely than other demographic groups to blame the media for overstating police brutality and distorting the honorable nature of police. wm commented, “i have met many police officers in my life and all of them are fantastic people” (emphasis added). this is in sync with research by levan and stevenson ( ), who examined both social media news sources (most prominently facebook) and data on college student views of police comportment. they found that white males justified law enforcement’s behaviors in part by faulting victims’ lack of compliance and how the media conveys the narrative, findings consistent with the query data from white males in this study. for example, levan and stevenson found that students largely questioned the accuracy of media soc. sci. , , of portrayals, e.g., a white male in their study commented that the few “bad apples” are disproportionately featured, wherein a single incident “gets blown up” (levan and stevenson , p. ). . . . riots and looting one of the most striking facets of the query data from white men was their greater likelihood of seeing black protestors as vandals (e.g., citing looting and rioting in accordance with the thug stereotype (see smiley and fakunle )) (see table and white males in appendix a). while other demographic groups saw the riots and looting as exceptions to meaningful protests, the white males were more prone to seeing police brutality as exceptional. prioritizing law and order and seeing police officers as heroes maintain the status quo in which white males have traditionally been in power. white males, then, are more inclined to view the blm movement as threatening, attracting people willing to flout the rules because they do not trust the police. thus, protestors are perceived as disrespecting law and order—a cornerstone of a system that has helped white people maintain hegemony. white males may be more apt to think that they should be masters of their reality and experiences due to an internal locus of control. by downplaying social forces and emphasizing the power of the individual, they could be more likely to attribute problems with the police as primarily driven by the individual’s actions rather than by racism that results in differential treatment of people of color. attributing police brutality to bad apples or bad actors is in line with the fundamental attribution error, that is, thinking that the actions of a corrupt or sadistic individual do not reflect an institution or broader social forces that shape an individual. furthermore, with less socialization of males to be empathetic, it may be more difficult for white males to imagine what it would feel like to experience the dangers of living as black men, who according to racial stereotypes, are more likely to pose a threat than be a victim. in other words, white men have a vested interest in conceiving of the video of a white police officer killing a black man as one autonomous man killing another man, neither of whom represent a demographic group. instead, they may view the video as depicting a flawed police officer whose actions occur outside a racialized context. ignoring a pattern helps them avoid seeing themselves in the video; they do not want to recognize themselves as the oppressor or part of a racial group that exerts hegemony. the incident is not seen as a microcosm of racism but rather as a manifestation of the failings of a corrupt individual whose race and gender are irrelevant and hence do not reflect broader societal issues based in social structural inequality (watson et al. ). the flip side of social structural inequality is undeserved white privilege. the bad actor paradigm frees white individuals from implications about unfairly benefiting from race and gender because of an unjust system. the system and the status quo can then be preserved. the emphasis on the individual allows white men to blame autonomous bad actors that make the pattern irrelevant to them as unique individuals. seeing abusive police as deviants reflects the belief in people acting as free-minded persons (fowler and geers ). at the same time, this mindset preserves a system that condones inequality that benefits them. thus, white men have a vested interest in blindness to patterns and systemic social forces that show white males acting as oppressors and black individuals suffering the consequences. while the video of floyd’s treatment removes any justification of police action as self-defense, white men seeing the corrupt officer as an anomaly obviates the need for introspection about the role of a biased system in which white men hold a position of advantage. this bad actor mentality is also encouraged by a culture of toxic masculinity that is so prevalent that it is hard to see (vandello and bosson ). men are valorized for having agency and dominance, and sometimes for blindness to social inequality also emerged in the weeks following / / , when white americans put up flags in a show of patriotism, while many black people failed to see how an act of terrorism erased social structural inequality and merited an abrupt show of unity in the absence of societal reform (harlow and dundes ). soc. sci. , , of being a maverick or a lone wolf, in contrast to women being praised for ensuring their actions meet with the approval of others, reflecting women’s socialization to be interdependent (cross and madson ). if white men perceive themselves as independent of a system because they ostensibly operate outside of it, then it follows that they would lack a direct role in or the responsibility for fixing social structural inequality. nor would they feel compelled to take ownership of the anomalous bad actors that must be separated from an otherwise admirable police force. . . white females in contrast, white women expressed more empathy for those victimized by police brutality, yet they also prioritized unity. by seeking to minimize divisions, regardless of persistent and entrenched racial inequality, they arguably validated concerns that white participation is driven in part by social justice as an in-vogue activity (stewart ), as expressed by bm # : “i saw white girls dressed with helmets and bats at a protest, like it was a block party. people don’t really know why they are there” (table ). these concerns are an echo of suspicions that for white women who attended the women’s march in january , promoting social justice can be performative (brewer and dundes ). two other black males also queried expressed wariness about white people’s long-term commitment to change: “you see white support when the issue is trending, but not after the moment has passed” (bm , table ), and “the blm movement is inspirational, but unfortunately i see a majority of it as a trend when it needs to be an everyday thing” (bm , table ). . . black males black males’ concerns about the transitory nature of white support for blm are consistent with their strong support for the movement, which is reflected in the fb data. black men spoke up disproportionately more than their share of the subject’s fb friends ( % of fb friends and % of all blm posts, contrasting with white men who spoke up less than might be expected, comprising % of fb friends but only % of all blm posts). the data presented as weekly posts (see figure ) show that black males were significantly more likely to post than all of the other groups. this gave them an opportunity to change the narrative from identifying with a victim of police brutality to that of a social reformer taking control and demanding change. this general phenomenon of empowerment has been noted with twitter data, where tweeting is used to call for social change through political participation (more than disruptive protesting) (tillery ) (while hashtags are associated with partisan views (rho and mazmanian )). the data, however, do not answer the question of why the death of george floyd galvanized people—black men in particular, according to facebook data presented in this paper. floyd’s death, as described by black writer jemar tisby, triggered a “shared sense of danger that made us [black men] feel like more than friends—we were brothers” (tisby , para. ), solidarity that tisby notes also emerged when former president barack obama reacted to the death of trayvon martin saying, “this could have been my son”. obama’s statement about trayvon martin that helped spawn the black lives matter movement in reveals that such deaths united black individuals despite differences in social class, promoting solidarity through hardship “forced on us by the oppression we endure in a white-supremacist society” (tisby , para. ), and in a society in which “african americans are not granted the same privileges as their white peers in terms of emotional display” (jackson , p. ). beyond a feeling of kinship with victims of police brutality, some black men may see themselves when contemplating the fate of george floyd, given the high proportion of black men who have experienced racism, and therefore distrust police (calvert et al. ), a sentiment reflected in the query data (see table ). however, speaking up and complaining are generally not socially sanctioned for black men, who must consider the costs of alienating white people (mincey et al. ) and avoid an appearance of vulnerability. some black male respondents mentioned the emotional weight they carry, including pressure to hide signs of vulnerability. for example, bm shared that he was socialized to contain his emotions: “my father wouldn’t let me watch spongebob once he saw that the character soc. sci. , , of cries a lot”. similarly, bm was very aware of his front stage persona: “we have to act a certain way to be presentable when we go out in public” (see table ). furthermore, previously published data from the same institution where query data were collected reveal that black men may be reluctant to admit feeling vulnerable, even though they are the most likely to be victims of police brutality. these previous findings show that black female college students were much more likely than black male college students to feel very vulnerable when thinking about police shootings of unarmed black people ( % versus %) (robertson and dundes , p. ). nonchalant performativity exists within what erving goffman labels a “front stage” public performance that co-exists with “backstage” anger (goffman ; jackson and wingfield ). however, in this particular case of police brutality with floyd, vocalizing and going public with such sentiment seems to have been socially sanctioned, possibly providing a reprieve in the intense pressure to engage in impression management. for example, although not all posts showed empathy for floyd, there was no blatant evidence that anyone in the sample studied (including white males) directly or indirectly disparaged floyd’s patent display of suffering. in fact, floyd expressed fear and pain—and did so in front of police officers, in an exhibition of vulnerability that men are socialized to hide, especially when in the presence of adversarial agents of social control (fowler and geers ). floyd revealed his anxiety and apprehensions about his fate, showing no macho aggression, but rather only agony, including a memorable and haunting cry invoking his departed mother. when floyd called out for his mother, some perceived his cries to be a type of sacred invocation (o’neal ), an interpretation bolstered by floyd’s belly tattoo of his mother’s name (fernandez and burch ; levitz et al.). instead of condemning these behaviors as a failure to demonstrate masculinity publicly (vandello and bosson ) or in an aggressive manner (o’dea et al. ), floyd’s suffering garnered support for causes advanced by blm, in an unprecedented way, at least as measured by reactions on social media. in other words, floyd’s vulnerability was touted as a strength, as brave, because instead of disguising his pain, his voice was heard and was audible around the world. he was recognized, indeed canonized, for his suffering in the absence of aggression; murals and other depictions of his likeness included halos and angel wings. as a result, the circumstances and narrative surrounding his death became a symbol of the oppression of black men, giving other black men license to show pain and vulnerability through social media posts. all of these factors may have coalesced to increase social acceptance of black male fb posters expressing vicarious pain and outrage about floyd’s death (small ). . . black females the black women queried were conscious of how white people perceived the blm movement, revealed in part by the hope that white individuals see blm as a movement to advance equality rather than to promote black superiority. some query data reflected dubois’ double consciousness in black female respondents seeing themselves as supporters of the movement through the eyes of white people that misunderstand the movement. the black women queried largely wanted to convey that the movement is one promoting unity (appendix a). thus, they carried the double burden of worrying about their vulnerability to police brutality as well as concerns that white people could misunderstand the movement as divisive or threatening. . . broader context for study findings these racially disparate sentiments are not unexpected. robertson and dundes ( ) found that white college students were less likely than black college students to feel very distrustful of police ( % of white males and % of white females compared to % of black males and % of black females). likewise, according to research by pew, most black respondents (just over %) considered race to be a major factor in the grand jury decisions not to indict the officers responsible for the shooting deaths of michael brown and eric garner compared to % of white respondents ( ). this phenomenon is related to greater white indifference to police killings, wherein white people studied focus on the “if soc. sci. , , of only” aspects of the incidents: “if only michael brown hadn’t stolen the cigarillos, trayvon martin hadn’t been walking with his hood up in that neighborhood, or tamir rice hadn’t been playing with a toy gun” (reinka and leach , para. ), narratives in which sympathy is subject to media bias (torres ). . . the lens of race and promoting action these finding raise the question of what to do about these varying perspectives about blm and police brutality. some insight lies in how police brutality is publicized and how it affects individuals based on their race. “when we have the choice to look, we are bound ethically and politically to what we witness and what we do with all we have seen” (juhasz , para. ). however, white people may process police brutality against black people differently because of disaggregation, a “narrative technique that narrows the perception of the range of illegitimate racial power by divorcing particular episodes from their larger social context”, as occurred in the rodney king case, where king was portrayed as a menace when defense attorneys employed freeze-framed and blurred images, with officers’ narration of their point of view that diminished the officers’ accountability (watson , p. ). when such portrayals feed into negative stereotypes about black males, there are implications for audience empathy for victims and perpetrators (dukes and gaither ). as a result of ignoring the broader socio-historical pattern of racist policing, and in conjunction with negative stereotypes about black males as criminals (owusu-bempah ), we can expect white people to minimize the urgency of ethical action by citing the need for training, in which good, trustworthy protectors who deserve appreciation require even more resources to help deal with an allegedly self-sabotaging community (evidenced by any looting and rioting by protestors). nowhere in the query data from white males was there a sense of the enduring history of police brutality, nor the broader context of structural racism. the mention of rioting and looting, only brought up by white males queried, shows the prioritization of stability (the status quo) over equality. this makes sense within the context of being part of a group that stability benefits and their identification with those that enforce social order. . limitations the data is drawn from a single facebook user ’s account, and is, thus, subject to bias based on the demographic profile of the subject (young, white, and educated) (see barroso for a discussion of how these factors influence the likelihood of discussing issues surrounding race). in addition, the total number of comments tallied did not reflect the number of participants actively involved in the posts, but rather the overall number of posts within each of the four demographic groups, with presumptions made about how individuals identify racially. other studies should use a larger pool of fb users, including users with fb friends from racially diverse demographic groups. in addition, facebook is only one source of commentary about social justice with limited generalizability. while fb data are not posted anonymously, the follow-up two-question query was reported anonymously. as a consequence, the query data have the potential to be more honest, but are also subject to social desirability bias, based on the rapport of the person collecting the data and the respondent. this bias, however, is hard to escape when researchers take on politically sensitive topics. in addition, the queries supported the trends noted in the facebook feed, as well as previously published data on a similar topic from the same college (robertson and dundes ). conducting research during the covid- pandemic also affected generalizability, as the resulting restrictions on interpersonal interactions and fears about the coronavirus created an unusual environment in which protests about george floyd’s death occurred. . conclusions while white males supported police “reform” (that involves more resources for police—not defunding them), they also stipulated what constitutes a proper protest (i.e., one that is non-violent). soc. sci. , , of they also tended to attribute brutal police tactics to a few bad actors rather than systemic racism. these views largely support the status quo. as such, white people can feel virtuous about conditionally endorsing an ostensibly cross-racial, unified effort to address police brutality, but one that ultimately will not interfere with the current power structure. however, understanding different perspectives is a way to stop different groups from talking past each other and to increase empathy, even if it causes white people to be uncomfortable. bernice king, daughter of martin luther king, jr., tweeted on august : “we shouldn’t have to see one more video of a black human being brutalized and/or gunned down by police in a clear case of excessive or unwarranted force. anybody who doesn’t believe we are beyond a state of emergency is choosing to lack empathy and awareness” (king ). king’s use of the word empathy is consistent with the data in this paper showing that white men are least empathetic about social justice challenges. however, it is important to emphasize that the bad actor paradigm does not apply to all white males, but rather provides some confirmatory evidence of which demographic group is most resistant to social reform. darnella frazier, who posted the video of derek chauvin’s assault on george floyd on facebook, posted a meme of boondock’s character huey freeman on november that reflects the frustration black individuals feel towards white people’s criticism of the movement: “i have no patience for white people trying to lecture us on how to respond to oppression in the comfort of their own privilege.” the data in this study elucidate the context for this statement. greater awareness of demographic patterns in reactions to injustice could help increase momentum for achieving racial justice. author contributions: both authors contributed equally to each stage of the research with the exception of the collection of the facebook data by p.jd. all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. funding: this research received no external funding. apc charges were covered in part by a charles a. boehlke, jr. engaged faculty fellow grant. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. appendix a answers to queries: what are your thoughts about the black lives matter movement? how much do you think that george floyd’s death reflects on the need to revamp policing in the us versus the need to screen out individuals who abuse their power? white male data wm # black lives matter is a great movement for the black community to express their feelings. white people should try to understand what black people have gone through. we do need police reform, like requiring more hours of job training, but looting and rioting are not a good solution to the problem of injustice. wm # i support the purpose of the movement, but i do not support the way that some people are going about their protesting. i think that the peaceful protests are great to bring awareness, but i do not support the rioting and looting. we need more funding for the police department so that they can be better trained on everything that they will encounter, but generally police do a good job keeping everyone safe—and some situations that aren’t racist get construed that way in the media. https://www.facebook.com/darnellareallprettymarie. https://www.facebook.com/darnellareallprettymarie soc. sci. , , of wm # i believe that the black lives matter movement is hurting this country more than anything. i believe that black lives in fact do matter, but the movement is not something i can support. since the movement has started, it has caused millions of dollars in property damage around the united states and countless deaths of police officers and civilians. there have been riots in major cities that have affected the lives of more black people than any others. i believe that there have been some good protests but when they turn into riots, they immediately are counterproductive. i just do not get it because black lives matter is supposed to support racial equality and bring an end to systematic racism but they only care about their own agenda. during the riots after george floyd’s death, a black -year-old retired police officer was shot for protecting a small business. do black police officers’ lives not matter? or only the black lives that fit the narrative? people are so blinded and taken over by the media that they do not see how much pain the riots are causing. you can have a protest without it turning violent. i have seen videos of white liberals harassing black police officers for being a police officer. if you actually watch interviews in the inner city where the riots take place, the residents love the police and do not want them defunded because they know they need the police to protect their neighborhood. this country truly is divided, and it is because of the media trying to push a narrative to benefit only them. we as americans have failed the very people who protect us on a daily basis, and if we do not fix the divide, we may not have many more police officers willing to protect and serve in this country. it was a shame that george floyd died the way he did and the police officer who killed him should be put away for it. but floyd was resisting arrest as seen in the bodycam footage where he was in the police car and then pushed himself out of it, claiming he was claustrophobic. there have also been reports that there was fentanyl in his system. if that was the case, he had a very high percent chance of dying. i do not think there is any need to revamp law enforcement, but i do believe we must hold police officers accountable more. we are now moving out of the old generation of police officers adding more and more new young police officers. the older generation grew up where racism was more pronounced, but the younger generation is people like us. as we grow older, everyone will become more accepting and the racial divide will close. what we need in the united states is to form a stronger bond between law enforcement and the newer generations. this will make them more trusting and lower crime. wm # the black lives matter movement is a discriminatory and politically inaccurate movement that promotes the superiority of one ethnic group rather than equality. while it is not a “terrorist group”, the movement promotes the physical destruction of businesses and property in order to send a so-called “message” that is both threatening to our law enforcement officers and other races. george floyd’s death simply gave the gang members and criminals that live in the ghettos of minnesota a reason to riot and loot small businesses and the use of strong force should be heavily imposed. they are destroying their own neighborhoods and black businesses, and then are the first to complain after they have rioted. there are other ways to solve this concern, specifically enforcing stricter and longer police training to become a cop. i support everyone being treated equally. if people took the time to do their research, they’d be surprised to find out that more white americans are killed by the police each year than black americans. what would happen if you did defund the police? then who are you going to rely on? it is simply the most racist and dumbest group that i have ever seen organized over recent years—to treat all cops as “pigs” and anyone who doesn’t support the movement as “racist”. with people such as breonna taylor dying, she was at the wrong place at the wrong time. it isn’t the police’s fault. if her boyfriend had never shot at the police, there wouldn’t have been police gunfire. i guarantee you that the police validated themselves before entering the residence, as part of their civic duty. soc. sci. , , of wm # in the case of george floyd, my understanding is that he had a previous history with the police officer, he was on some kind of drug, and he had previous arrests. now my main question is why does everyone portray floyd as a hero? i am in no way agreeing with the actions of the police officer or the officers who stood around and let that happen, but i think there is something to be said about floyd’s past and maybe the police officers’ knowledge of him. i believe that the whole acab and defund the police talk is nonsense as well. change is necessary but what we need to do is invest in our police force with better training and collaboration with social workers for situations where mental illness is an issue. wm # the blm organization likes to pick and choose when lives matter. they are silent when black police officers are murdered like david dorn. they are silent about the millions of black babies that have been killed through abortion. they are silent when it comes to promoting successful black conservatives like candace owens. they are silent when it comes to the rampant crime in black communities. they receive millions of dollars in support from shadow donors like george soros and seem to only participate in movements when there is politics involved. i cannot personally point to a situation that they have made better. i have never heard about that organization trying to help their communities. i have only seen them protest. i think there are much better ways to solve the issues at hand, revolving around black businesses, education, and fixing communities. there are truly just a few bad apples. i have met many police officers in my life and all of them are fantastic people. the entire group is being judged on the basis of derek chauvin and men like him when they should truly be getting our thanks for putting their lives on the line every day. if we provided more training and services like therapy to these officers, it would be more beneficial than to get rid of the system. black males bm # blm is a very influential, essential movement. it is a continuation of past efforts—a modern version for a newer generation where more people are coming together as a whole. we have to combat racism, especially police brutality, which otherwise lets corruption get pushed under the rug. we need to completely re-do the system and stop prosecuting black people for minor, petty offenses, especially drug offenses that lead to unnecessary incarceration. i know people that have been pulled over by police and beaten up so corrupt policing is something on my mind. but we [men] don’t talk enough about how this affects us because we aren’t in touch with our emotions. my father wouldn’t let me watch spongebob once he saw that the character cries a lot, telling me, “you’re not going to be a crybaby” because, “crying isn’t going to help you get through a problem”. bm # at around or years old, i went to a friend’s house and his dad (black) explained to me the double standard where we have to act a certain way to be presentable when we go out in public. i have been pulled over for no apparent reason where the cop was going the extra mile just to see if we were doing what we’re supposed to be doing. he “thought there was suspicious activity” and checked all of our ids. the biggest thing about blm movement is that it’s unified. it’s joining people from different areas together. looking at the george floyd situation was frustrating—there were other cops around, seeing him get choked out. there are not a few bad apples—they are everywhere. i can’t forget the san francisco ers’ “blackout tuesday challenge” posting a black square, but they never apologized to colin kaepernick. apologize to him first and then we will take you seriously. soc. sci. , , of bm # i understand why some people have a problem with the name black lives matter because it is too focused on black people even though it is about everybody, and is an inclusive organization. the blm movement is all about emphasizing that everybody is human, and that you can’t forget about somebody because of their skin color. inside of the police force, we know that the police protect their own, pretty similar to how gang members don’t believe in snitching. but it was good to see that people genuinely cared about what happened. it made me feel positive about the future, seeing that police reform is starting to come to the forefront of people’s minds and people aren’t defending police as much anymore. bm # it’s important to speak not just about blm but about “blue lives matter” so that all opinions can be heard. but i do feel like racist incidents fall on deaf ears in “blue lives matter” supporters because they feel blm isn’t about them, so they don’t care about the movement. you see white support when the issue is trending, but not after the moment has passed. we need to defund police and instead put resources into community programs and putting black officers in black neighborhoods so we feel safe. the police have always known that they have back up from other officers and feel empowered to abuse their power. defunding them takes back control for black neighborhoods where residents are used to fighting for their rights in a system that works against them but always stands behind police. defunding them puts community residents on more equal footing with police in a system that doesn’t have our back. bm # the blm movement is inspirational, but unfortunately i see a majority of it as a trend when it needs to be an everyday thing. if someone calls the police because of forged money, weapons don’t need to be drawn. if someone is trying to steal using fake money, just get him out of there. if he is resisting, of course some force may need to be applied, but derek chauvin was forcibly trying to hurt george floyd. black lives certainly do matter, yet we continue to have to say, “oh look! there goes another black person murdered, missing, or lynched”, and it’s exhausting. i truly hope that one day society will just be able to recognize african americans as equal. because it is draining, it is very draining. bm # blm is a necessary movement black people have been fighting for a really long time, pointing out the injustices that they face on a day-to-day basis, and how they are endangered every single day. it’s based on both dr. martin luther king and malcolm x. mlk, jr., was all about peaceful protests and pounding the pavement but in a peaceful manner, countering hate with love. malcolm x was on the other end of the spectrum, “by any means necessary”, so without malcolm x with his extremism, passion, and drive, we wouldn’t make white people feel uncomfortable and challenged—the only way that change will happen. but blm is not counter-white people, but asking white people to value the lives of black people just like we do for the majority. defunding is not abolishing the police, just taking money and allocating it to other communities. then there is the opposite of defunding the police—reforming the police by pouring more money into the police force for better and longer training. people get really impassioned about being a part of protests, to feel like they belong. i saw white girls dressed with helmets and bats at a protest, like it was a block party. people don’t really know why they are there. to make people in positions of power uncomfortable, we have to continuously educate and have these conversations. we have to pound the pavement to make sure that people don’t forget about it because that interest dies off. it’s sad that there is so much systemic racism with a hierarchy where people cannot act on their morals without having to risk their job. if one of those officers had spoken up to prevent floyd’s death, they would have lost their job. people will not be willing to hold each other accountable until the entire system is corrected. soc. sci. , , of white females wf # blm street protests call attention to the issue but does not tell people what to do. where do we go from here? now what? a lot of white people can feel helpless as to what to do and how to be an ally. how do we deal with reliance on people in power that make it hard to enact change? defunding the police is knee-jerk in one direction and is more saying what we don’t want rather than what we do want. we do need to have police but poc need to feel safe, even though i don’t know what that looks like for them. wf # the blm movement is entirely necessary for the advancement of equality in policing. we hear “all lives matter”, but that can’t be possible until systemic racism and implicit biases are removed from all workplaces, and we address the treatment of minorities while interacting with police officers and in the court system. the death of george floyd reflects the need to revamp the entirety of the police system. there was an officer involved in the murder of george floyd who was hesitant to be involved but still participated in guilty acts. there is no way to screen out individuals who would abuse their power and no way to know or predict how a person would react in different circumstances. wf # the black lives matter movement started off really well, helping other communities like the white community see racism in america and the unfair treatment of black people. however, with every movement comes backlash, like saying “all lives matter”. that is true but that is not what the movement is trying to say. they weren’t bashing other ethnic groups but saying, “hey, black people matter too and we are not treated correctly”. people need to stop viewing things as blaming them personally. wf # overall, i understand and agree with the reasoning for creating the black lives matter movement. however, i feel like some followers of the movement have begun to lose their way by criticizing people they think don’t support the movement. so while i completely understand blm and fully support it, it is creating a divide in the nation rather than the unity that was originally intended. also, while it’s truly sickening and terrifying that officers like [chauvin] are out there, the popular acab [all cops are bastards] movement and its push to “defund the police” is just like putting a band-aid on the issue. wf # i think the intentions of the black lives matter are good, but i also saw a lot negativity coming from it. unfortunately that’s what fuels the news and social media as well. i don’t think rioting supports blm. i saw a lot of white people and business owners bashed for not saying anything because it’s as if they don’t care and aren’t supportive if they are quiet. i saw a lot of posts about how the silence is “deafening and discouraging”, but at the same time, if someone did speak on something, they got bashed and called racist because they didn’t say it correctly and that our “white privilege” was showing. maybe white people are quiet because we are watching and learning and trying to recognize our “white privilege” we were taught to ignore by society and our families so we can make a change. police need to be held to higher standards and be held accountable for their actions. there is no reason for a police officer with a history of complaints to still be employed as a police officer. not only do police need to change when it comes accountability and culture, but they also should receive extra training such as about racial bias, problem-solving skills, conflict mediation, and de-escalation tactics. i think george floyd’s death is a catalyst that will help revamp policing and police abuse of power. soc. sci. , , of wf # the movement is doing really good things by addressing people’s differences and how everyone should be treated the same no matter what they look like. but too often we hear about all of the negative things that police officers do, since the media doesn’t show enough of the good things they do daily because people want to hear about all of the bad things going on in the world. however, there is still a need to fix what the police do because they are far from perfect. people should talk more and be better educated about this instead of treating it as taboo and argument provoking. although i will never fully be able to see something like this from their point of view, i like to educate myself on different points of view so i can make an educated judgment. black females bf # people wonder, “how can this happen?”, but police brutality has always been there, even if people just haven’t been aware of it or older people have turned a blind eye. some people don’t realize the long-standing tension that has gotten pushed to the background as normal, so it’s hard for them to see it, like when black people get labeled as thugs. history is repeating itself. my grandmother (in her mid- s) compared it to when nwa came out with their “f*** the police” song [ ]. but with this new, more progressive generation, there is now a chance for change. black people will be more able to just live their lives. bf # the movement and the protections for black people are needed. people need to understand that blm isn’t saying that black people’s lives matter more than others; it’s saying that they should be valued as much as anyone else. i also don’t appreciate people claiming that blm is a cult. it’s a group that advocates for black people because we feel that we’re not advocated for in society. blm isn’t about dividing the country, but about uniting it. it’s a shame that it took floyd’s death for people to realize that things have been happening like this for a long time. why is it that black people being continuously killed seems to be necessary for non-poc to realize what we’ve been fighting for? bf # : blm is a good movement, but it’d be better if we focused more on poc—not just black people. also, there’s a lot of black-on-black crime. do black lives matter if y’all killing each other? why does it seem like blm matters only when a white police officer is involved in killing a black person? our lives should matter all the time, regardless of the involvement of an authority figure like a police officer or the race of the killer. we should be as upset by black-on-black deaths, even when it gets less media attention, like when it happens because of a beef between two people. we should be preventing black deaths and not limiting our outrage to when it’s caused by racist police officers who seem to be able to get away with it or only get charged with a minor offense. bf # the blm movement is necessary for a country built from such a bloody background. it allows racial issues that were once taboo to transform into mainstream topics for the masses. george floyd’s death represented the systemic abuse of black people, which leads to our militarized police taking extreme and unneeded action. george floyd’s death is one of the countless deaths of an innocent african american in alone. we need to reform our police due to this happening so regularly. bf # the black lives matter movement is simply a movement to increase awareness of the growth in killings of black men and women when compared to any other race, whether it’s due to police brutality or murders of black men and women by civilians. blm is not a terrorist movement when its mission is to bring awareness to 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[crossref] zurcher, anthony. . bbc: george floyd death: violence erupts on sixth day of protests. june . available online: https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada- (accessed on november ). publisher’s note: mdpi stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-race-ethnicity-and-politics/article/what-kind-of-movement-is-black-lives-matter-the-view-from-twitter/ bca efbe c f e https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-race-ethnicity-and-politics/article/what-kind-of-movement-is-black-lives-matter-the-view-from-twitter/ bca efbe c f e https://www.cambridge.org/core/journals/journal-of-race-ethnicity-and-politics/article/what-kind-of-movement-is-black-lives-matter-the-view-from-twitter/ bca efbe c f e http://dx.doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/ / /familial-language-black-grief/ / https://www.theatlantic.com/family/archive/ / /familial-language-black-grief/ / https://rws .pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/ /tufecki% social% media% from% tahrir% square.pdf https://rws .pbworks.com/w/file/fetch/ /tufecki% social% media% from% tahrir% square.pdf http://dx.doi.org/ . / c. http://dx.doi.org/ . /a http://dx.doi.org/ . /famp http://dx.doi.org/ . /vlt http://dx.doi.org/ . /s - - -y http://dx.doi.org/ . /bjso. http://dx.doi.org/ . / https://www.bbc.com/news/world-us-canada- http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	introduction 	the death of george floyd, jr. 	the social justice movement 	facebook posts as a social justice barometer 	informed consent in the analysis of facebook posts 	background on study design and timing 	methods 	facebook feed data 	follow-up query data for mixed-methods design 	results from facebook newsfeed 	qualitative data: comments supportive of the status quo 	qualitative query data 	white males 	white females 	black males 	black females 	discussion 	white men and support for the status quo 	police brutality and bad apples 	riots and looting 	white females 	black males 	black females 	broader context for study findings 	the lens of race and promoting action 	limitations 	conclusions 	 	references s jra .. essay a crowdsourcing approach to revitalizing scholarship on black women suffragists thomas dublin* state university of new york at binghamton *corresponding author. e-mail: tdublin@binghamton.edu abstract this article draws on a collection of crowdsourced biographical sketches of black women suffragists to explore the contributions of these activists to the expansion of voting rights that accompanied the passage of the nineteenth amendment. it explores the motivations and strategies adopted by black women suffragists and interracial alliances that emerged in the course of the suffrage struggle, comparing and contrasting the experiences of suffrag- ists across racial lines. keywords: black suffragists; collective biography; crowdsourcing; local history; women’s suffrage the historiography of the women’s suffrage movement in the united states has long emphasized the whiteness of the dominant organizations that promoted women’s vot- ing rights—the national american woman suffrage association (nawsa) and the national woman’s party (nwp). this emphasis was a function of the conscious exclu- sion of african americans from the movement. after , nawsa accommodated white southern concerns by adopting a states’ rights approach that enabled southern affiliates to set membership requirements and policy within the states. as momentum for women’s suffrage built, nawsa and nwp made concessions to white southern suf- fragists, noting that the nineteenth amendment would leave state racial barriers intact. notable incidents support this emphasis on racial discrimination in the suffrage movement. in march , as african american women mobilized to join a suffrage march in washington, dc, nawsa organizers attempted to relegate them to a separate grouping at the procession’s rear. howard university student nellie quander had heard that african americans might be singled out for special treatment by march organizers, and she wanted no part of it. quander wrote to march co-organizer alice paul two weeks before the march, her second letter on behalf of her sorority, alpha kappa alpha, expressing the group’s desire “to participate in the woman suffrage procession,” but adding, “we do not wish to enter if we must meet with discrimination on account of race affiliation.” in a separate but parallel incident, on the day of the march, ida b. wells-barnett defied the organizers’ instructions and at the last minute slipped into the line of march with her white illinois colleagues (fig. ). discrimination continued in the less visible, daily activities of nawsa. in , the northeastern federation of women’s clubs, a federation of black women’s clubs in new england and the mid-atlantic states, applied for nawsa affiliation. nawsa © the author(s), . published by cambridge university press on behalf of the society for historians of the gilded age and progressive era (shgape) the journal of the gilded age and progressive era ( ), , – doi: . /s h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . mailto:tdublin@binghamton.edu https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms officers denied the request, noting “that if nawsa admitted ‘an organization of , colored women … the defeat of the amendment will be assured.’” in , nwp planned to commemorate the movement with the unveiling of a statue of lucretia mott, elizabeth cady stanton, and susan b. anthony, followed by a national confer- ence. efforts to include as a speaker mary b. talbert, noted african american activist and former president of the national association of colored women (nacw), failed; paul also resisted a delegation of sixty black activists who lobbied that black concerns should have a place on the convention’s agenda. yet during the century since the adoption of the nineteenth amendment to the u.s. constitution, we have learned that there is more to the story of black women’s suffrage activism than their exclusion from the ranks of white suffragists. the historian rosalyn terborg-penn laid the foundation for a new generation of scholars and the emergence of new questions about black women suffragists. terborg-penn identified seventy lead- ers of the black women’s suffrage movement and analyzed their activism between and . the theme that emerged in her account is how the broader racial struggle of african americans intersected with and shaped the black women’s suffrage movement and differentiated the efforts of black and white women. my own research builds on terborg-penn’s work. beginning in , i proposed to collect and publish online the writings of black women suffragists whom terborg-penn had identified. we worked together in selecting the group and commissioning scholarly essays to accompany the collection. subsequent work assembled more than two thou- sand writings by and about black women suffragists. after we published the first writ- ings, recent scholarship and the digitization of black newspapers led to the discovery of figure . ida b. wells marching in the illinois contingent at the march suffrage parade in washington, dc. chicago tribune, mar. , . thomas dublin h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms more and more black suffragists, leading me to expand the project and take it in a bio- graphical direction. most of the seventy suffragists of terborg-penn’s study were national leaders whose biographies were included in leading reference works. most of the women i was discovering were grassroots or local leaders about whom little or nothing was known. by , i had identified about two hundred such suffragists; that number now approaches four hundred. beginning in , i reached out to schol- ars, librarians, archivists, teachers, and students and commissioned brief biographies for this growing group of black women suffragists. the project expanded as i added nwp and nawsa suffragists to the crowdsourcing project. the database now includes some thirty-six hundred grassroots suffrage activ- ists, including black and white suffragists, and militant and mainstream suffragists. the resources of the internet make this research and accompanying database construc- tion possible. i am working with more than forty state coordinators to help with out- reach and the work of copyediting and fact-checking the resulting sketches. by the end of the process, i expect to have worked with more than fifteen hundred volunteers. alexander street, our online publisher, is taking on the technical challenges of con- structing a freely accessible website. the database is public, is expanding steadily, and should be complete by mid- . my focus here is on the suffrage and reform activism of the almost four hundred black women suffragists that we’ve identified thus far. i rely on four distinct sets of sources. the first consists of about three hundred biographical sketches that have been completed to date, including those of the prominent activists identified by terborg-penn. eventually these brief biographies will allow us to consider new ques- tions about black women and the suffrage movement: was there a black women’s suf- frage movement? what was its character? what issues did it address? and what part did black women suffragists play in the long freedom movement? but right now, i am mainly working on the level of detail in the individual biographical sketches to address the question: what can we learn about the black women’s suffrage movement from the details of these women’s lives? second, i have created a small database with about thirty variables coded from each suffragist sketch completed thus far. i’ve compiled a preliminary statistical overview of the group. in addition, i have assembled more than two thousand works written by or about these activists. lastly, at least ninety-five of these women corresponded with w. e. b. du bois, the founder of the national association for the advancement of colored people (naacp) and leader of the black freedom movement after the death of booker t. washington in . this correspondence— , items in all—has been digitized, providing a valuable source for analyzing connections between du bois and black women suffragists. taken together, these resources permit new explo- rations of black women suffragists’ activism before and after the passage of the nineteenth amendment. this progress report comes while we still await about one hundred more biographical sketches that are out on assignment. the findings are pre- liminary, but still useful. what can we learn from these biographical sketches? some of these suffragists are relatively unknown; others are quite famous. their demographic data and personal experiences reveal their geographic distribution, age, religious affiliation, education, eco- nomic standing, and social justice commitments. using the sketches, we can construct a collective portrait of black women suffragists that will help us to understand their importance in the context of broader social movements. for example, their stories reveal the significance of migration from the south to the emergence of an organized the journal of the gilded age and progressive era h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms black movement for women’s suffrage. importantly, their stories also show that the black women’s suffrage movement was the composite creation of dozens of local wom- en’s groups addressing their own individual circumstances. a national picture emerges from myriad local ones, revealing the importance of paying close attention to local actors and events. let’s begin with two obscure women who were part of a group of washington, dc, african americans who supported women’s suffrage during the reconstruction decade. they were signers of a petition submitted to congress in january that called for a constitutional amendment “to prohibit the several states from disfranchising united states citizens on account of sex” (fig. ). the petition seems to have been organized by a son and daughter of the noted abolitionist, frederick douglass, who circulated it among friends and acquaintances, including a group of african american settlers on the former barry farm—a planned settlement organized by the bureau of refugees, freedmen and abandoned lands, or freedmen’s bureau, with small lots sold to freed- men and freedwomen at low monthly installments. more than a third of the petition signers lived in this neighborhood, less than a mile from the homestead, cedar hill, that frederick douglass purchased in . the three douglass sons—lewis, charles, and frederick, jr.—all purchased lots at barry farm, and lewis submitted a second women’s suffrage petition in . among the signers of frederick douglass, jr.’s petition were caroline chase and her adult daughter elizabeth. in , the chases lived together in ward in northwest dc and worked as washerwomen. elizabeth was listed in freedmen’s bureau records as receiving $ in cash relief twice just after the civil war. caroline was recorded in the census as owning real property valued at $ . these resources enabled mother and daughter to purchase nearby lots on elvans avenue in uniontown before . by , elizabeth chase was living in her new neighborhood and was operating an eating saloon, a decided step up from domestic labor. in april , augustus straker, a black lawyer employed by the treasury department, gave a lecture at the nearby pioneer lyceum, titled “citizenship, its rights and duties—woman suffrage.” whether either elizabeth or caroline chase attended that lecture is unknown, but the petition confirms their support for women’s suffrage. washington, dc, was home to percent of black women suffragists in this study. along with new york city, the district was a leading center for black women’s suffrage activism, and an example of the power of migration and local communities in this history. brooklyn was a second locale that played a significant role in the emergence of a black women’s suffrage movement in the early twentieth century. one suffragist whose story this project has uncovered was alice wiley seay. born a slave in in south-central virginia, in she married a tobacco farmer from her hometown of giles. by the mid- s, she and her husband had moved to brooklyn; he was recorded at different times as a coachman, blacksmith, and janitor; she, as a dressmaker. without children, alice could devote her energy to social activism. a devout churchgoer, she was president of the dorcas home missionary society of the concord baptist church and was active in the black women’s club movement in brooklyn. seay was elected president of the northeastern federation of women’s clubs in , and three years later founded the empire state federation of women’s clubs (esfwc), which joined in campaigns for women’s suffrage. after the death of her first husband, seay remarried in , to another virginia tobacco farmer, though she continued to live in brooklyn. in december , the dorcas home missionary society gave her a testimonial dinner as she moved thomas dublin h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms permanently to her husband’s farm. though she lived in virginia thereafter, she made lengthy visits to her old brooklyn neighborhood and had a sister still living there. virginia death records noted alice wiley seay as a social worker, an appropriate occu- pation for an active black clubwoman. although seay resided in virginia for the last two decades of her life, more than three hundred of her former friends and neighbors attended a memorial service held in brooklyn. figure . petition for woman suffrage from frederick douglass, jr., and other residents of the district of columbia, . petitions and memorials, resolutions of state legislatures, and related documents which were referred to the committee on the judiciary during the th congress (hr a-h . ), records of the u.s. house of representatives, – , record group , no. , national archives, washington, dc, www.docsteach.org/documents/document/douglass-petition-woman-suffrage (accessed june , ). the journal of the gilded age and progressive era h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/douglass-petition-woman-suffrage https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms these individual life stories speak to larger social processes at work among black women suffragists as they struggled for citizenship rights. analyzing the quantitative information contained in their biographical sketches and in other secondary sources fills out the picture that emerges from individual stories. those suffragists who lived to see the ratification of the nineteenth amendment, and who may have voted in that year’s presidential election, had a mean age in of forty-eight, and they had been active suffrage supporters for eleven years on average. black suffragists were well distributed across the country: percent lived primarily in new england and the mid- dle atlantic states, percent came from the south, and the remainder lived in the midwest and west. these activists were part of the first wave of the great black migration that reshaped the lives of african americans between and . of black suffragists with known places of birth and death, were born in the upper or lower south. only percent of these black southerners died in the states of their birth—almost percent migrated and died elsewhere, a testament to the importance of the great black migration in the emergence of the black women’s suf- frage movement in these decades. among the additional characteristics that stand out are the activists’ high level of education and their strong participation in the black women’s club movement. fully percent of the activists for whom level of education is known attended college or uni- versity. overall, percent had a ba degree or higher. in a time period when black americans often had to struggle just to support public education in their communities, the higher educational achievements of black women suffragists are striking. equally significant in this emerging picture of active citizenship was the fact that fully per- cent were members of a club associated with the nacw. this number is no doubt an underestimate; many more were probably engaged in club work than is apparent from these sketches. in researching black women suffragists, one finds numerous references to women’s engagement in efforts on behalf of their race, but far fewer indications of their commitment to women’s suffrage. the suffrage activism was folded into the larger racial project in this period when jim crow and black disfranchisement were gaining strength. suffrage was a means to achieve broader ends—particularly the defense of black men and women against lynching and racial subjugation. religion was as significant as the black women’s club movement for these suffrage activists. the biographical sketches reveal denominational affiliations for about half of the women. except for a lone catholic and one baha’i convert, all were protestants; baptist ( ) and african methodist episcopal ( ) were the two leading denominations. churches encouraged and facilitated aid to the poor that was strongly compatible with the concern for racial uplift central to the black club movement’s activ- ities. denominational groups also offered additional venues for both advocating for the race and advancing the status of women within church and society. the woman’s convention, an auxiliary to the national baptist convention was a particularly impor- tant site for women’s activism as the black women’s suffrage movement was taking shape. in terms of goals, programs, and leaders, the woman’s convention and the nacw were closely intertwined. this new trove of biographical sketches enables us to place suffrage activism within the context of the broader black freedom struggle that emerged in the early twentieth century. almost a third of the women—ninety in all—were active in the naacp. another sixty-one were active in the young women’s christian association (ywca), forty-five in fraternal organizations, and thirty-four in the woman’s thomas dublin h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms christian temperance union. the sketches reveal that activists engaged in the gamut of social justice campaigns within the black community. this conclusion is consistent with the perspective offered by scholars of black wom- en’s political engagement in the years between the passage of the thirteenth and nineteenth amendments. elsa barkley brown’s research on women in richmond, virginia, emphasizes the community dimension of black women’s political engage- ment, focusing on racial group concerns rather than gender. terborg-penn captured a similar point in quoting josephine st. pierre ruffin: “we are justified in believing that the success of this movement for equality of the sexes means more progress towards equality of the races.” founded in , the national association of colored women was committed from the beginning to collective racial uplift, with suffrage as a central issue. from its found- ing, the nacw had a suffrage department, headed by the brooklyn activist sarah j. garnet. the suffrage issue, though, had a different meaning for african american women during this era than it had for white women suffragists. addie hunton, a founder of the nacw, captured that distinction, writing in about the nacw’s suffrage department: “they are making no fight for the ballot for women, but they are earnestly working for the rights of our men.” in a period of growing disfranchisement, black clubwomen initially made defending the voting rights of black men their first suffrage priority. taking a long view, black women’s clubs moved from an emphasis on temperance and wholesome family life for blacks to a call for a change in attitudes and behavior on the part of whites. this perspective evolved from a call first to protect or restore black men’s voting rights in order to better protect the race, and after to extend the ballot to black women as well. the picture of black women suffragists that emerges here becomes clearer when we realize that percent were teachers or educators; another percent were writers or journalists, and percent were professionals. only percent of the black suffragists were in working-class occupations; in that group, only ten were domestic servants, six did sewing, and one worked in agriculture—major occupations for african american women at this time. nwp supporters actually displayed a more diverse occu- pational profile: writers and journalists comprised almost percent of those with recorded occupations, a figure similar to that for black suffragists. teachers and educa- tors, though, comprised only percent of nwpers, less than a third of the figure for black activists. the group that stands out in the nwp, though, consisted of working- class occupations, comprising almost a quarter of nwpers with known occupations. at the other end of the occupational spectrum, almost percent of nwp supporters were recorded as business women. so, while black suffragists were concentrated in middle-class occupations, the militant white suffragists were well represented at both the lower and upper ends of the class spectrum. one other aspect of the networks of black women suffragists needs mention. fully of the women activists had correspondence with w. e. b. du bois, with more than , letters in all. du bois stood out among black male rights advocates for his early and consistent support for women’s suffrage. he edited two special issues of the naacp’s official magazine, the crisis, devoted to women’s suffrage, and he gave cov- erage to black participation in the march suffrage parade in washington, dc (fig. ). we see among du bois’s most active correspondents a long-time commitment to women’s suffrage: those correspondents who exchanged ten or more letters with du bois averaged sixteen years of suffrage activism, compared with less than eight years for those with no correspondence with du bois. the journal of the gilded age and progressive era h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms black suffragists looked to du bois for advice and leadership and they also wrote words of support and encouragement. four leaders of the brooklyn-based equal suffrage league wrote in august as the niagara movement was getting launched: “be assured that we are with you in the spirit of the work to co-operate in any practical figure . cover, special suffrage issue of the crisis, aug. . thomas dublin h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms way.” six months later, they shared with du bois a copy of a petition they had sent to congress calling for enforcement of the fourteenth and fifteenth amendments to pro- tect black citizenship rights “[t]hroughout all its section[s],” a pointed reference to the denial of black voting rights in the south. nacw co-founder addie hunton, who was also a leader in the early naacp, was one of the most prolific correspondents: she and du bois exchanged more than hun- dred letters between and . in one of her earliest letters, when hunton had just moved to brooklyn, she wrote of meeting “with some women who want to inaugu- rate a movement among colored women but who seem too afraid of the southern white women to do right.” these might well have been the same women who had recently written to du bois in support of the nascent niagara movement. hunton did not feel at liberty to discuss their plans, but suggested that she might consult him later: “you could perhaps help me in deciding what can be done.” while white and black women created largely separate organizations to work for women’s suffrage, the existence of distinct groups did not preclude alliances. one such effort took shape in tennessee, which eventually became the thirty-sixth and final state needed to approve the nineteenth amendment in august . the previous year, the tennessee state legislature had approved a bill providing women municipal and state suffrage. in the runup to local elections in nashville, white and black women’s suffrage leaders joined forces. as the historian carole stanford bucy has written, white suffrage leader “[catherine] kenny forged a political relationship with frankie j. pierce and dr. mattie coleman, two african american activists, to support reform candidates in the local nashville elections. in return, kenny promised support for pierce’s legislative agenda, a state vocational school for african american girls.” both of these black suffrage leaders addressed mixed suffrage audiences. dr. coleman spoke at the annual convention of the tennessee equal suffrage association in early june . as the nashville tennessean recorded her speech: “the negro woman stands for purity and uplift. … we ask merely to be treated right. this war work we have been doing has done more to bring us into close touch with you women than any other thing.” after quoting further from coleman’s speech, the article noted that “dr. coleman was made chairman of the tennessee negro wom- en’s suffrage organization,” and assured the paper’s (white) readers that she would be working “under the supervision” of white suffragists. another account from the tennessean in july named that organization as the negro women’s reconstruction league and noted that it had already registered some sixteen hundred voters. in the spring of , kenny “invited frankie pierce to address the meeting” of the tennessee league of women voters. “pierce told the [lwv] convention that her sisters would use the vote to ‘uplift our people’ and asked only for a ‘square deal.’” dr. coleman, for her part, launched a campaign that registered some twenty-five hundred black women for the election. in , the state legislature provided for the estab- lishment of the tennessee vocational school for colored girls, which opened in october . in this way, black women gained resources for the black community by exercising their newfound voting rights. the historian anita shafer goldstein, who has offered the fullest account of this interracial alliance in tennessee, concluded that “the alliance produced concrete gains and demonstrated the importance of organization within the african american community. … the decision to support reformers against machine candidates in the city was a bid for access to the growing agencies of state government via the the journal of the gilded age and progressive era h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms democratic party organization.” goldstein emphasized the agency of black women suf- fragists, noting, “it was not ‘apathy, accommodation, and caste’ that characterized them, but vigorous action, the offer of cooperation in return for concrete benefits, and an eagerness to make use of any breach in the walls of separate sisterhoods.” wilmington, delaware, offers a second example demonstrating the possibilities of white and black suffragists working together, even as they worked through segregated organizations. like nashville, wilmington was situated in a civil war border state that had a sizable black population and a lengthy post-slavery history of segregation. events there emphasize how important local initiatives were as black women suffragists emerged as political players in women’s suffrage campaigns. this story suggests, in fact, that the practice of jim crow could actually contribute to the emergence of a strong black women’s suffrage movement. the story begins with the howard school, an all-black high school in wilmington—in fact, the only four-year free high school that black students in delaware could attend. because of residential segregation, the teachers were largely confined to a few square blocks centered on east th and th streets, the city’s black middle-class enclave. the density of teachers living there gave east th street the informal name “teachers’ row.” the black faculty included half a dozen teachers who joined with other women in march and founded the equal suffrage study club (essc), aimed at “arousing interest in the suffrage movement among colored women.” many of these women had earlier worked together on black self-help undertakings, exemplified in their sup- port for two black institutions, the home for the aged and the settlement house. the new group held twice-monthly meetings focused on “questions of municipal, state, national, and international interest.” in may , members joined the city’s white suf- fragists and “marched, in a separate contingent, in wilmington’s first [woman] suffrage parade,” with blanche stubbs serving as marshal of the “‘colored’ section.” the two groups continued to work to secure women’s suffrage in a effort to amend the state constitution and a – campaign to convince the state legislature to ratify the nineteenth amendment. in the latter campaign, schoolteacher and essc member alice baldwin joined a group of nwp members who “lobbied the governor to convene a special session of the legislature to consider ratification.” according to her biography, “two days later, she was the only african american speaker at an nwp ‘suf- frage mass meeting’ held at the (segregated) majestic theater in wilmington. … alice baldwin’s address was entitled, ‘the colored teacher’s tale.’” the state legislature did not ratify the nineteenth amendment, but delaware women won the vote with the amendment’s final ratification in august . immediately, essc members turned their club into the colored women’s republican committee, “blocked out the city into workable districts,” and worked to register the newly enfran- chised black women voters. their efforts came off smoothly and alice baldwin reported in a letter to the naacp that “things passed off here very nicely and peaceably. many women voting … intelligently and honestly.” while black women voted in wilmington, that was not the case for blacks in the south more generally. mary woodlen, another essc member, “took part in a protest over the disfranchisement of african american women in states of the former confederacy.” woodlen joined a delaware group in february to observe the unveiling in the capital of a statue of suffrage leaders stanton, anthony, and mott. there she joined a delegation of sixty black suffragists, including fellow wilmington residents alice dunbar-nelson and blanche stubbs, that met with alice paul and pro- tested the nwp’s failure “to go on record as disapproving the disregard of the thomas dublin h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms nineteenth amendment” throughout the south.” whether marching in a suffrage parade, lobbying delaware state legislators to ratify the nineteenth amendment, or pro- testing the racism of the nwp’s accommodation of white supremacy, black women in wilmington were engaged suffragists determined to secure their citizenship rights. this discussion leads us logically to our final focus—what black women suffragists did after the passage of the nineteenth amendment. one can sum it up in one word— politics—though there was more than one way to proceed in post-suffrage politics. now that black women were voters, at least outside the south, they increasingly came to pres- sure their representatives. at the federal level, the leading issue was a demand for anti- lynching legislation. of course, ida b. wells-barnett had been working to make lynching a very visible issue for almost three decades before the adoption of the nineteenth amendment, but after , the anti-lynching campaign gained the naacp’s institutional support. congress got much more serious about the cause after , with the dyer anti-lynching bill providing the vehicle for the movement. still, the cause could not overcome the threat of a southern filibuster in the senate. notable suffragists who joined the naacp’s campaigns included charlotta bass, nannie helen burroughs, alice dunbar-nelson, bertha higgins, lugenia burns hope, and mary b. talbert. the other avenue for suffragists’ fuller entry into politics came through work within the republican party. an early indication of the power of the vote came in chicago, well before the nineteenth amendment was ratified. in , the illinois state legislature approved women’s municipal and presidential suffrage. wells-barnett had anticipated the development by founding the alpha suffrage club earlier that year, and black women suffragists played a major role in succeeding aldermanic elections, registering new black women voters, sponsoring candidate forums, and getting out the vote in both primary and main elections. their race efforts met success in with the elec- tion of oscar depriest as the first black alderman in chicago. black women suffragists joined the republican party before and after . in wilmington, the essc rapidly reorganized as the colored women’s republican committee. in new york, shortly after the november referendum that approved women’s suffrage, black women in harlem organized the women’s non-partisan political league. two new york city black suffragists, gertrude curtis and laura fisher, served as delegates to the state republican convention in . in kentucky two years later, annie simms banks was appointed a delegate to that state’s republican convention. suffragists got on the ballot themselves in numerous states: mary byron clarke and ida b. wells-barnett in illinois; grace campbell in new york; charlotta bass in california; and alice presto in washington. they were not successful in these early runs for office, but they energized black voters. viewing the database of black women suffragists as a whole, we find ninety-two women active within the republican party, seven among the democrats, and five active in the socialist, communist, or progressive parties (though a migration to the democratic party began to be evident with fdr’s election in ). both major parties played roles in cementing black loyalty to the republican party for several generations —the republican party in passing the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth amend- ments, which enfranchised freedmen after the civil war, and the democratic party in the south in overthrowing reconstruction and then disenfranchising black men in the – period. this political alignment was fixed in place well before the pas- sage of the nineteenth amendment, and black women suffragists did not hold back when they had the opportunity. moreover, they did not just follow the lead of black men in politics. they had, in fact, developed a critique of the ineffectiveness of black the journal of the gilded age and progressive era h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms men in the years when only men could vote, and they built on their decades of orga- nizing in the black women’s club movement and carved out a place for themselves in city, state, and national politics. black suffragists’ post- activism reinforced alliances that had been established in the struggle for the vote. recall that wilmington black activists spoke at a mass meeting of the nwp in the joint effort to get the delaware state legislature to ratify the nineteenth amendment. three years later, the leading delaware black suffragist alice dunbar-nelson convinced the delaware federation of colored women’s clubs to endorse the newly proposed equal rights amendment promoted by the nwp. even at a time when black suffragists were pressing the nwp to lobby for the nineteenth amendment’s enforcement in the south, they could find other grounds on which to join with the nwp in pressing for broadened rights for women. the evidence presented here leads to a number of conclusions. black women made a serious commitment to the women’s suffrage cause, embedding it in the broader african american campaign for citizenship rights. given the mounting attacks on black americans in a period described as “the nadir” in race relations, race trumped gender in the thinking and efforts of black women suffragists. the national activist mary church terrell expressed a perspective that was widely shared: “nowhere in the united states have my feelings been so lacerated, my spirit so crushed, my heart so wounded, nowhere have i been so humiliated and handicapped on account of my sex as i have been on account of my race.” this was a central fact in the lives of black women suffragists that white suffragists did not face. given the growing racial division in the nation in the early twentieth century, black women organized suffrage activities on their own; white and black priorities were not the same. still, at numerous points in the women’s suffrage struggle, black and white activists coordinated their efforts. moreover, the suffrage activism of black clubwomen contributed to a growing women’s presence in early civil rights struggles. it is no coin- cidence that so many of the black women suffragists noted here were among the foun- ders and activists in the early naacp. and the legacy of their activism is visible still today. they launched traditions of civic engagement that showed the way for ella baker, fannie lou hamer, shirley chisholm, and stacy abrams, who have brought these citizenship struggles into our time. whether it is the black lives matter move- ment or today’s fight against voter suppression, the struggles launched by black women suffragists are still being fought fully a century later. notes aileen s. kraditor, the ideas of the woman suffrage movement, – (new york: columbia university press, ), esp. – ; louise michele newman, white women’s rights: the racial origins of feminism in the united states (new york: oxford university press, ); marjorie julian spruill, “race, reform, and reaction at the turn of the century: southern suffragists, the nawsa, and the ‘southern strategy’ in context” in votes for women: the struggle for suffrage revisited, ed. jean h. baker (new york: oxford university press, ), – . spruill, “race, reform, and reaction at the turn of the century,” ; kraditor, ideas of the woman suffrage movement, – . for the nwp’s stance on black voting and the nineteenth amendment, see kathryn kish sklar and jill dias, how did the national woman’s party address the issue of the enfranchisement of black women, – ?, vol. (binghamton: state university of new york at binghamton, ), women and social movements in the united states, – , https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/c/ (accessed june , ). for nawsa’s stance, see carrie chapman catt to edwin webb, jan. , , thomas dublin h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/c/ https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/c/ https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms petitions and memorials, resolutions of state legislatures, and related documents which were referred to the committee on the judiciary during the th congress, hr a-h . , records of the u.s. house of representatives, record group , national archives, washington, dc, www.docsteach.org/documents/ document/webb-carrie-catt (accessed june , ). “suffrage paraders,” the crisis (new york), apr. , ; rosalyn terborg-penn, african american women in the struggle for the vote, – (bloomington: university of indiana press, ), ; lisa g. materson, for the freedom of her race: black women and electoral politics in illinois, – (chapel hill: university of north carolina press, ), ; nellie m. quander to alice paul, feb. , , national woman’s party papers, library of congress, washington, dc, https://www.loc. gov/exhibitions/women-fight-for-the-vote/about-this-exhibition/new-tactics-for-a-new-generation- - /new-tactics-and-renewed-confrontation/howard-university-sorority-seeks-assurances-of-nondiscrim- ination (accessed july , ). spruill, “race, reform, and reaction at the turn of the century,” . see documents a– in sklar and dias, how did the national woman’s party address the issue of the enfranchisement of black women?; see also nancy f. cott, the grounding of modern feminism (new haven, ct: yale university press, ), – . terborg-penn, african american women in the struggle for the vote. for the initial lists of black suffragists that i drew on, see rosalyn m. terborg-penn, “afro-americans in the struggle for woman suffrage” (unpub. phd diss., howard university, ), appendices – . notable examples include darlene clark hine et al., eds., black women in america: an historical encyclopedia (brooklyn, ny: carlson publishing, ), subsequently accessible online. see also jessie carney smith, ed., notable black american women, book i (detroit, mi: gale research, ); rayford w. logan and michael r. winston, eds., dictionary of american negro biography (new york: w. w. norton, ). thomas dublin and kathryn kish sklar, online biographical dictionary of the woman suffrage movement in the united states (henceforth cited as online biographical dictionary), in women and social movements in the united states, – , https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/votesforwomen (accessed june , ); also available via the subscription database, women and social movements in the united states (wasm). the two versions of the database are identical, but there are some differences in the ease of searchability. also, in wasm users can access the substantial writings of black women suffragists, which are not part of the freely accessible online biographical dictionary. i did not limit information recorded in this datafile to that found in the crowdsourced or notable american women bio sketches, but i coded information found in other published or online biographical sketches, and scholarly articles and monographs touching on this history. completeness seemed more important than consistency of sources across the database entries. edward t. james et al., eds., notable american women, – , vols. (cambridge, ma: belknap press of harvard university press, ); barbara sicherman and carol hurd green, eds., notable american women: the modern period; a biographical dictionary (cambridge, ma: belknap press of harvard university press, ); susan ware and stacy braukman, eds., notable american women: a biographical dictionary: completing the twentieth century (cambridge, ma: belknap press, ). “w. e. b. du bois papers, – ,” collection ms , special collections and university archives, university of massachusetts at amherst libraries, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/collection/mums (accessed june , ; henceforth cited as du bois papers). petition for woman suffrage from frederick douglass, jr., and other residents of the district of columbia, , petitions and memorials, resolutions of state legislatures, and related documents which were referred to the committee on the judiciary during the th congress (hr a-h . ), records of the u.s. house of representatives, – , record group , no. , national archives, washington, dc, www.docsteach.org/documents/document/douglass-petition-woman-suffrage (accessed june , ). my thanks to chelsea lundquist-wentz and blair forlaw for tracking down and sharing these petitions and related documents. see also terborg-penn, african american women in the struggle for the vote, – . for a list of the purchasers of lots from the barry farm, see louise daniel hutchinson, list of first settlers of barry farm/hillsdale, – , , history of place research files, box , folder , anacostia community museum, washington, dc. for frederick douglass’s nearby home, see “cedar the journal of the gilded age and progressive era h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/webb-carrie-catt https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/webb-carrie-catt https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/women-fight-for-the-vote/about-this-exhibition/new-tactics-for-a-new-generation- - /new-tactics-and-renewed-confrontation/howard-university-sorority-seeks-assurances-of-nondiscrimination https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/women-fight-for-the-vote/about-this-exhibition/new-tactics-for-a-new-generation- - /new-tactics-and-renewed-confrontation/howard-university-sorority-seeks-assurances-of-nondiscrimination https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/women-fight-for-the-vote/about-this-exhibition/new-tactics-for-a-new-generation- - /new-tactics-and-renewed-confrontation/howard-university-sorority-seeks-assurances-of-nondiscrimination https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/women-fight-for-the-vote/about-this-exhibition/new-tactics-for-a-new-generation- - /new-tactics-and-renewed-confrontation/howard-university-sorority-seeks-assurances-of-nondiscrimination https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/women-fight-for-the-vote/about-this-exhibition/new-tactics-for-a-new-generation- - /new-tactics-and-renewed-confrontation/howard-university-sorority-seeks-assurances-of-nondiscrimination https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/votesforwomen https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/votesforwomen http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/collection/mums http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/collection/mums https://www.docsteach.org/documents/document/douglass-petition-woman-suffrage https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms hill: frederick douglass’s home in anacostia,” national park service, washington, dc, https://www.nps. gov/frdo/learn/historyculture/places.htm (accessed june , ). petition of louis [sic] h. douglass, r. j. meigs, m. albert clancey, harriet cowperthwaite, and other citizens of washington, dc, asking for an amendment to the constitution prohibiting the several states from disfranchising united states citizens on account of sex, petitions and memorials, resolutions of state legislatures, and related documents which were referred to the committee on the judiciary during the th congress (hr a-h . ), records of the u.s. house of representatives, – , record group , folder of , national archives, washington dc. biographical information here is drawn from the remarkable biographical sketches of caroline and elizabeth chases prepared by chelsea lundquist-wentz for inclusion in the online biographical dictionary, https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity% cbibliographic_details % c and https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity% cbibliographic_ details% c (accessed july , ). for a biographical sketch of d. augustus straker, see wikipedia, “d. augustus straker,” last modified mar. , , https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/d._augustus_straker. straker’s speech was published in pam- phlet form. see “citizenship, its rights and duties—woman suffrage; a lecture delivered by d. augustus straker, esq., at the israel a. m. e. church, and before the pioneer lyceum, at hillsdale, washington, dc, apr. – , ,” library of congress, washington, dc, www.loc.gov/item/ (accessed june , ). matt saddlemire, thomas dublin, and anne slatin, “biography of alice wiley seay” in online biographical dictionary, https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity% cbibliographic_ details% c (accessed july , ). see also new york age, july , , . i am grateful to the genealogist anne pratt slatin for tracking down the vital records related to seay. new york age, dec. , , . see also the entries for alice wiley seay and her husband in the and federal manuscript censuses for giles, virginia. new york age, nov. , , ; new york age, aug. , , . saddlemire, dublin, and slatin, “biography of alice wiley seay.” quotation appeared originally in “alice wiley seay’s memory honored,” brooklyn daily eagle, feb. , , . evelyn brooks higginbotham, righteous discontent: the women’s movement in the black baptist church, – (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, ), – , – ; bettye collier-thomas, jesus, jobs, and justice: african american women and religion (new york: alfred a. knopf, ), esp. xvi–xxxiv. elsa barkley brown, “to catch the vision of freedom: reconstructing southern black woman’s political history, – ” in african american women and the vote, – , ed. ann d. gordon et al. (amherst: university of massachusetts press, ), – . josephine st. pierre ruffin, “trust the women!” the crisis, aug. , , as quoted in rosalyn terborg-penn, “josephine st. pierre ruffin: civil rights and women’s rights trailblazer,” women and social movements in the united states, – (mar. ). adrienne lash jones, “addie waits hunton: social justice and human rights activist,” women and social movements in the united states, – (sept. ): ; addie waits hunton, “sarah j. garnett,” the crisis, oct. , ; floris barnett cash, “victoria matthews: nineteenth-century activist and women’s advocate,” women and social movements in the united states, – (sept. ): . addie waits hunton, “the national association of colored women: its real significance,” the colored american magazine (new york), july , . dorothy salem, to better our world: black women in organized reform, – (brooklyn, ny: carlson publishing, ), – . salem notes that this formal action occurred two years before the sim- ilar action of the white general federation of women’s clubs. terborg-penn sets as the date for the nacw’s formal adoption of women’s suffrage. terborg-penn, african american women in the struggle for the vote, . i sense that salem’s date is more likely, but i have not found references to primary doc- uments to confirm this dating. see “suffering suffragettes,” the crisis, june , – ; “suffrage paraders, the crisis, apr. , ; w. e. b. du bois, “votes for women,” and accompanying articles in aug. special issue of the crisis; w. e. b. du bois, “votes for women,” the crisis, nov. , ; “votes for all: a symposium,” the crisis, nov. , – . thomas dublin h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://www.nps.gov/frdo/learn/historyculture/places.htm https://www.nps.gov/frdo/learn/historyculture/places.htm https://www.nps.gov/frdo/learn/historyculture/places.htm https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/d._augustus_straker https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/d._augustus_straker https://www.loc.gov/item/ https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms this discussion is based on linking black women suffragists in the online biographical dictionary to w. e. b. du bois’s correspondence, du bois papers, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/collection/ mums (accessed june , ). letter from the national association of colored women’s clubs to the niagara movement, aug. , , du bois papers, http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums -b -i (accessed june , ). the niagara movement was an early civil rights organization that first met on the canadian side of niagara falls in , led by w. e. b. du bois and william monroe trotter. the group proposed an alternative, more militant approach to race relations than the conciliatory, accommodationist stance of booker t. washington. the organization never gained a strong foothold, but laid the foundation for the emergence of the naacp in . petition from the equal suffrage league, mar. , , du bois papers, http://credo.library.umass.edu/ view/full/mums -b -i (accessed june , ). letter from addie w. hunton to w. e. b. du bois, apr. , , du bois papers, http://credo.library. umass.edu/view/full/mums -b -i (accessed june , ). carole stanford bucy, “catherine kenny: fighting for the perfect thirty-sixth” in the human tradition: ordinary women, extraordinary lives; women in american history, ed. kriste lindenmeyer (lanham, md: sr books, ), . “mrs. milton heads woman suffrage body,” nashville tennessean, june , , ; “negro women’s league indorses church’s stand,” the tennessean, july , , . bucy, “catherine kenny,” . see also carole bucy’s biographical sketch of kenny in the online biographical dictionary, https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/d/ (accessed july , ). kobe walker et al., “biography of mattie e. coleman, – ” in online biographical dictionary, https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity% cbibliographic_details% c (accessed july , ); “dr. mattie e. coleman wreath laying ceremony,” aahgs nashville (blog), https://aahgsnashville.org/ / / /dr-mattie-e-coleman-wreath-laying (accessed june , ); jessie carney smith, notable black american women, book ii (detroit, mi: gale research, ), – . anita shafer goldstein, “a rare alliance: african american and white women in the tennessee elections of and ,” journal of southern history (may ): – . see two bios in the online biographical dictionary: stephanie clampitt, “biography of caroline b. williams,” https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity% cbibliographic_details % c (accessed july , ); and anne m. boylan, “biography of fannie hopkins hamilton,” https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity% cbibliographic_details% c (accessed july , ). there are biographical sketches of each of these suffrage activists in the online biographical dictionary. my thanks to anne m. boylan, who wrote or edited all of these biographies and whose research uncovered this dense network of black activists and their stories. see especially carol a. scott, “biography of blanche williams stubbs,” https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity% cbibliographic_ details% c (accessed july , ). anne m. boylan, “biography of helen w. anderson (webb)” in online biographical dictionary, https:// search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity% cbibliographic_details% c (accessed july , ). scott, “biography of blanche williams stubbs”; ann m. boylan, “biography of mary e. taylor” in online biographical dictionary, https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity% cbibliographic_details% c (accessed july , ). alison lewis, “biography of alice gertrude baldwin” in online biographical dictionary, https://search. alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity% cbibliographic_details% c (accessed july , ). for this letter to the naacp, see alice g. baldwin to portia m. wiley, november , in naacp papers, microfilm edition, part , selected branch files, – , part b: the northeast, reel no. . there are, though, signs of white opposition to black voter registration in delaware. for her expe- riences in dover, see mary church terrell to morefield [sic] story, oct. , , mary church terrell papers, manuscript division, library of congress, washington, dc, www.loc.gov/exhibitions/women- fight-for-the-vote/about-this-exhibition/hear-us-roar-victory- -and-beyond/ratification-and-beyond/ colored-women-of-the-south-will-be-shamefully-treated (accessed june , ). the journal of the gilded age and progressive era h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/collection/mums http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/collection/mums http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/collection/mums http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums -b -i http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums -b -i http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums -b -i http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums -b -i http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums -b -i http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums -b -i http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums -b -i http://credo.library.umass.edu/view/full/mums -b -i https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/d/ https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/d/ https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://aahgsnashville.org/ / / /dr-mattie-e-coleman-wreath-laying https://aahgsnashville.org/ / / /dr-mattie-e-coleman-wreath-laying https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/women-fight-for-the-vote/about-this-exhibition/hear-us-roar-victory- -and-beyond/ratification-and-beyond/colored-women-of-the-south-will-be-shamefully-treated https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/women-fight-for-the-vote/about-this-exhibition/hear-us-roar-victory- -and-beyond/ratification-and-beyond/colored-women-of-the-south-will-be-shamefully-treated https://www.loc.gov/exhibitions/women-fight-for-the-vote/about-this-exhibition/hear-us-roar-victory- -and-beyond/ratification-and-beyond/colored-women-of-the-south-will-be-shamefully-treated https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms addie w. hunton, “phoebus and hampton” in naacp papers, box c , folder “discrimination, voting, oct. – , , general,” manuscript division, library of congress, washington, dc. for the broader story, see liette gidlow, “resistance after ratification: the nineteenth amendment, african american women, and the problem of female disfranchisement after ,” women and social movements in the united states, – (mar. ). anne m. boylan, “biography of mary j. johnson woodlen” in online biographical dictionary, https:// search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity% cbibliographic_details% c (accessed july , ). see angelica mungarro and karen anderson, how did black women in the naacp promote the dyer anti-lynching bill, – ?, ed. marian horan (binghamton: state university of new york at binghamton, ), women and social movements in the united states, – , https://documents.alex- anderstreet.com/c/ (accessed june , ). paula j. giddings, “wells-barnett, ida bell” in women building chicago, – : a biographical dictionary, ed. rima lunin schultz and adele hast (bloomington: university of indiana press, ), – ; materson, for the freedom of her race, – ; maureen a. flanagan, “suffrage,” essay in encyclopedia of chicago, http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/ .html (accessed july , ). boylan, “biography of fannie hopkins hamilton”; terborg-penn, african american women in the struggle for the vote, , ; susan goodier and karen pastorello, women will vote: winning suffrage in new york state (ithaca, ny: cornell university press, ), – . terborg-penn, african american women in the struggle for the vote, – . deborah gray white, too heavy a load: black women in defense of themselves, – (new york: w. w. norton, ), – , – . “negro women appeal against ku klux klan,” wilmington news journal, oct. , , . rayford w. logan, the betrayal of the negro, from rutherford b. hayes to woodrow wilson (new york: collier books, ; originally published in ). mary church terrell, “the woman suffrage movement and frederick douglass: speech delivered at the th anniversary of the seneca falls meeting,” mary church terrell papers, manuscript division, library of congress, washington, dc. also quoted in alison m. parker, “mary church terrell: woman suffrage and civil rights pioneer,” women and social movements in the united states, – (mar. ): . in this speech, terrell echoed the sentiments expressed by frederick douglass forty years earlier during the debate over black suffrage and woman suffrage occasioned by consideration of the fifteenth amendment. there, douglass stated, “when women, because they are women, are hunted down through the streets of new york and new orleans; their children torn from their arms and their brains dashed out on the pavement; when they are objects of insult and outrage at every turn; when they are in danger of having their houses burnt down over their heads; when their children are not allowed to enter school, then they will have an urgency to obtain the ballot equal to our own.” somebody in the audience inquired, “is that not also true about black women?” to which douglass replied “yes, yes, yes, but not because they are women, but because they are black.” see also philip s. foner, frederick douglass on women’s rights (new york: da capo press, ), – . thomas dublin is a distinguished professor emeritus at the state university of new york at binghamton. his research and teaching focus on u.s. labor and women’s history. he is the author of women at work: the transformation of work and community in lowell, massachusetts, – (columbia university press, , ), cowinner of the bancroft prize. between and , he coedited the online journal and database, women and social movements in the united states. he is currently editing the online biographical dictionary of the woman suffrage movement in the united states, a crowdsourced online resource; this article draws on that work. cite this article: dublin t ( ) a crowdsourcing approach to revitalizing scholarship on black women suffragists. the journal of the gilded age and progressive era , – . https://doi.org/ . / s thomas dublin h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://search.alexanderstreet.com/view/work/bibliographic_entity&percnt; cbibliographic_details&percnt; c https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/c/ https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/c/ https://documents.alexanderstreet.com/c/ http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/ .html http://www.encyclopedia.chicagohistory.org/pages/ .html https://doi.org/ . /s https://doi.org/ . /s https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms 	a crowdsourcing approach to revitalizing scholarship on black women suffragists 	notes neufeld, starzyk, & gaucher ( ) online supplemental materials appendix a: participant demographics for all studies study n % n % n % n % n % gender identity male . . . . . female . . . . . gender fluid . -- -- -- -- -- -- two-spirit -- -- -- -- . -- -- other, not specified . . -- -- -- -- ethnicity arab (e.g., egyptian, kuwaiti, libyan) . . . . . black (e.g., african, nigerian, somali) . . . . . chinese . . . . . filipino . . . . . indigenous (first nations, métis, inuit, non-status aboriginal) . . . . japanese . . korean . . . . . latin american (e.g., chilean, costa rican, mexican) . . . . . south asian (e.g., bangladeshi, punjabi, sri lankan) . . . . . southeast asian (e.g., vietnamese, cambodian, malaysian, laotian) . . . . . west asian (e.g., afghan, assyrian, iranian) . . . . . white . . . . . visible minority (e.g., pacific islander, guyanese) . . -- -- -- -- neufeld, starzyk, & gaucher ( ) multiple visible minorities . . . -- -- -- -- other . . . . . country of birth canada . -- -- . . -- -- another country . -- -- . . -- -- note. participants in studies , , and could select multiple ethnic groups. neufeld, starzyk, & gaucher ( ) appendix b: study —initial political solidarity measure instructions, item pool, and issue descriptions note: participants did not read any of the bolded text below. text within brackets were replaced with the appropriate information, depending on the randomly assigned outgroup issue. instructions and item pool in this section, you will answer a series of questions about your feelings toward another group and a current issue related to the group, that is, their “cause.” it is ok if you do not agree with the group or the cause. the group you will reflect on is [outgroup]. the cause you will reflect on is [issue]. [outgroup issue description; see “issue descriptions” below] using the scale below, please answer the following questions. remember to answer the questions while thinking about [outgroup] and their cause, [issue]. strongly disagree disagree slightly disagree neutral slightly agree agree strongly agree i feel a sense of “brotherhood” or “sisterhood” with _____. _____can count on me to be their ally. _____ and i are “all in this together”. i stand in solidarity with _____. i feel a sense of solidarity with _____ . (adapted from leach et al., ) it’s important for me to stick together with _______. i stand united with _____. in some ways, i have a sense of responsibility toward _____. i would say i am loyal to _____. i feel committed to _____. (adapted from doosje et al., ) in some ways, i view _____’s cause as my cause, too. _____’s cause is important to me. i identify with _____’s cause. i think _____’s cause is worthy. i share _____’s goal. i feel partly responsible to ensure that _____’s interests are met. working together to achieve ______’s goal is important to me. i have a role to play in _____’s cause. i am committed to supporting _____’s cause. i feel connected to _____’s cause. policies negatively affecting ______ should be changed. all citizens should be better informed about how ______are disadvantaged by policies. more people should know about how _______ are negatively affected by this issue. it’s important to challenge the power structures that disadvantage ______. neufeld, starzyk, & gaucher ( ) power structures that disadvantage ______are unfair. policies and laws that are unfair to ______must be changed. the way that the authorities treat ______is unjust. we need policies that will grant equal rights to ______. i believe social systems should change so they guarantee equality for ______. fighting for social justice for ______means fighting for the social good. issue descriptions indigenous people: inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women indigenous women and girls in canada are disproportionately affected by all forms of violence. even though they only make up % of canada’s female population, % of all women murdered in canada between and were indigenous. many indigenous people for more action on the issue of missing and murdered indigenous women. indigenous people: reconciliation for over years, indigenous children were removed from their families and sent to institutions called residential schools. students often experienced trauma, which has been passed down from generation to generation and affected the relationship between indigenous peoples and other canadians. many indigenous peoples are calling for reconciliation to revitalize the relationship between indigenous people and other canadians. syrian refugees: immigration to canada the ongoing conflict in syria has triggered the worst humanitarian crisis in the world today. half the country’s pre-war population—more than million people— have been killed or forced to flee their homes. many of these syrian refugees wish to immigrate to canada. transgendered people: transgender rights transgendered people in canada are disproportionately affected by violence and discrimination. for example, whereas % of straight children feel safe at school, % of transgendered students feel unsafe at school. many transgendered people are calling for federal laws to provide transgendered individuals with the same legal protections as other vulnerable groups in canada. black people: black lives matter canada black people in canada are disproportionately affected by violence and discrimination. for example, even though they only represent . % of the population, black people were victims of % of reported hate crimes in canada. many black canadians have joined black lives matter canada, a movement that aims to end violence and discrimination against black canadians. women: income equality women in canada earn less money than men. in fact, canadian women earn % less than men even when they do the same job. many women are calling for policy changes to guarantee income equality for women. neufeld, starzyk, & gaucher ( ) appendix c: distribution of participants across psm issues study gendered income equality black lives matter inquiry into missing and murdered indigenous women reconciliation with indigenous peoples in canada transgender rights admitting syrian refugees to canada -- -- -- -- -- -- -- neufeld, starzyk, & gaucher ( ) appendix d: study —covariance matrixes (legend of items follows) psma psma psma psma psma psma psma psma psma psma psma . . . . . . . . . . psma . . . . . . . . . . psma . . . . . . . . . . psma . . . . . . . . . . psma . . . . . . . . . . psma . . . . . . . . . . psma . . . . . . . . . . psma . . . . . . . . . . psma . . . . . . . . . . psma . . . . . . . . . . psmb . . . . . . . . . . psmb . . . . . . . . . . psmb . . . . . . . . . . psmb . . . . . . . . . . psmb . . . . . . . . . . psmb . . . . . . . . . . psmb . . . . . . . . . . psmb . . . . . . . . . . psmb . . . . . . . . . . psmb . . . . . . . . . . psmc . . . . . . . . . . psmc . . . . . . . . . . psmc . . . . . . . . . . psmc . . . . . . . . . . psmc . . . . . . . . . . psmc . . . . . . . . . . psmc . . . . . . . . . . psmc . . . . . . . . . . psmc . . . . . . . . . . psmc . . . . . . . . . . neufeld, starzyk, & gaucher ( ) psmb psmb psmb psmb psmb psmb psmb psmb psmb psmb psma . . . . . . . . . . psma . . . . . . . . . . psma . . . . . . . . . . psma . . . . . . . . . . psma . . . . . . . . . . psma . . . . . . . . . . psma . . . . . . . . . . psma . . . . . . . . . . psma . . . . . . . . . . psma . . . . . . . . . . psmb . . . . . . . . . . psmb . . . . . . . . . . psmb . . . . . . . . . . psmb . . . . . . . . . . psmb . . . . . . . . . . psmb . . . . . . . . . . psmb . . . . . . . . . . psmb . . . . . . . . . . psmb . . . . . . . . . . psmb . . . . . . . . . . psmc . . . . . . . . . . psmc . . . . . . . . . . psmc . . . . . . . . . . psmc . . . . . . . . . . psmc . . . . . . . . . . psmc . . . . . . . . . . psmc . . . . . . . . . . psmc . . . . . . . . . . psmc . . . . . . . . . . psmc . . . . . . . . . . neufeld, starzyk, & gaucher ( ) psmc psmc psmc psmc psmc psmc psmc psmc psmc psmc psma . . . . . . . . . . psma . . . . . . . . . . psma . . . . . . . . . . psma . . . . . . . . . . psma . . . . . . . . . . psma . . . . . . . . . . psma . . . . . . . . . . psma . . . . . . . . . . psma . . . . . . . . . . psma . . . . . . . . . . psmb . . . . . . . . . . psmb . . . . . . . . . . psmb . . . . . . . . . . psmb . . . . . . . . . . psmb . . . . . . . . . . psmb . . . . . . . . . . psmb . . . . . . . . . . psmb . . . . . . . . . . psmb . . . . . . . . . . psmb . . . . . . . . . . psmc . . . . . . . . . . psmc . . . . . . . . . . psmc . . . . . . . . . . psmc . . . . . . . . . . psmc . . . . . . . . . . psmc . . . . . . . . . . psmc . . . . . . . . . . psmc . . . . . . . . . . psmc . . . . . . . . . . psmc . . . . . . . . . . neufeld, starzyk, & gaucher ( ) legend of items reported in above covariance matrixes psma : i feel a sense of “brotherhood” or “sisterhood” with x psma : x can count on me to be their ally psma : x and i are “all in this together” psma : i stand in solidarity with x psma : i feel a sense of solidarity with x psma : its important for me to stick together with x psma : i stand united with x psma : in some ways, i have a sense of responsibility towards x psma : i would say i am loyal to x psma : i feel committed to x psmb : in some ways, i view x’s cause as my cause, too. psmb : xs cause is important to me psmb : i identify with x’s cause psmb : i think x’s cause is worthy psmb : i share x’s goal psmb : i feel partly responsible to ensure that xs interests are met psmb : working together to achieve x’s goal is important to me psmb : i have a role to play in x’s cause psmb : i am committed to supporting x’s cause psmb : i feel connected to x’s cause psmc : policies negatively affecting x should be changed psmc : all citizens should be better informed on how x are disadvantaged by policies psmc : more people should know about how x are negatively affected by this issue psmc : its important to challenge the power structures that disadvantage x psmc : power structures that disadvantage x are unfair psmc : policies and laws that are unfair to x must be changed psmc : the way that the authorities treat x is unjust psmc : we need policies that will grant equal rights to x psmc : i believe social systems should change so they guarantee equality for x psmc : fighting for social justice for x means fighting for the common good neufeld, starzyk, & gaucher ( ) appendix e: study —covariance matrix for psm items : i feel a sense of “brotherhood “or “sisterhood” with x . . . . . . . . . : i feel a sense of solidarity with x . . . . . . . . . : i stand united with x . . . . . . . . . : in some ways, i view x’s cause as my cause, too . . . . . . . . . : i have a role to play in x’s cause . . . . . . . . . : i feel connected to x’s cause . . . . . . . . . : policies negatively affecting x should be changed . . . . . . . . . : more people should know about how x are negatively affected by this issue . . . . . . . . . : it’s important to challenge the power structures that disadvantage x . . . . . . . . . neufeld, starzyk, & gaucher ( ) appendix f: study —comparison of original and modified psm cause connection items original item wording revised item wording in some ways, i view x’s cause as my cause, too in some ways, i view the issue of y for x as my cause, too i have a role to play in x’s cause i have a role to play in the issue of y for x i feel connected to x’s cause i feel connected to the issue of y for x note. “x” denotes the outgroup name; “y” denotes the outgroup’s cause. neufeld, starzyk, & gaucher ( ) appendix g: study —passage and message of support instructions passage the instructions for the passage read, “on the next page, you will read a short description of a social issue. please read this carefully; you will be asked questions about it later.” the following passage, which was created for this project, appeared on the next page: for over years, indigenous children were removed from their families and sent to institutions called residential schools. until the mid- s, government-funded, church- run schools were located across canada to eliminate parental involvement in the spiritual, cultural, and intellectual development of indigenous children. more than , first nations, métis, and inuit children were forced to attend these schools, some of which were hundreds of miles from their home. separated from their families, the experience was often marked by abuse and other traumatic experiences. through the transmission of intergenerational trauma, survivors’ experiences continue also negatively affect their descendants, such as children and grandchildren. to address the legacy of residential schools and the damaged relationship between indigenous peoples and others in canada, many are calling for reconciliation. reconciliation can only occur, though, if all peoples work together. message of support instructions participants read the following preamble. as part of their efforts towards reconciliation, the university of xxxxx’s indigenous student council (isc) is creating a multimedia campaign. the isc is looking for non- indigenous u of xxxxx students to provide messages of support for reconciliation with indigenous peoples in canada. there are two types of messages they’re interested in that you can complete now, if you so choose. next, participants read the following descriptions of the two types of messages, a written message or a video message, which were crafted to make the tasks sound relatively easy to complete (e.g., quick, supplies were provided). video messages the isc will compile video messages into a video that will be unveiled on campus during the winter term orientation week. the video may also be played on the campus television screens and its social media accounts. if you would like to create a video message, the research assistant will provide you with a script or you can create your own message. each video is seconds in duration maximum. you will be able to record the video in private (the experimenter will not be in the room), and you can retake the video as many times as you would like. neufeld, starzyk, & gaucher ( ) written messages the isc is also looking for written messages. they will compile these messages into a mosaic that will be on display in university centre during the winter term orientation week. if you would like to create a written message, the research assistant will provide the supplies, such as markers and paper. you do not need to sign your name on the message if you don’t want to. by nidhi subbaraman a s marchers in the united states and around the world filled the streets over the past week to protest against police brutality and racial injustice, black scientists grieved openly on social media, calling for action on racism in society and in science. many stated ways in which institutions and colleagues, from collaborators to meeting organizers, could support black scientists. some pushed universities and scientific societies to release statements against racism. and several tweeted that the weight of the cur- rent events made it even harder for them to do their jobs in a profession that already margin- alizes women and people of colour — and black scientists in particular. “i’m not there yet,” wrote desmond upton patton, a professor of social work at columbia university in new york city. “i’m struggling with kindness, forgiveness, empathy. i feel pushed to make decisions, go to meetings, and to ‘show up.’ i’m just not ready.” george floyd’s death after being restrained and knelt on by police in minneapolis, minnesota, on may, coupled with the killing of ahmaud arbery, breonna taylor and other black americans, sparked largely peaceful demonstrations across the country. the police response to some gatherings, which has included the use of chemical irritants and projectiles, made headlines and drew condemnation from civil-rights groups. scientists are organizing, as well. as nature went to press, hundreds were planning to stop their research on june, as part of an academic strike in support of the larger protesters have gathered across the united states and around the world to denounce racism and police brutality. an academic strike ran alongside marches and demonstrations worldwide. grieving and frustrated: black scientists call out racism in the wake of police killings d r e w a n g e r e r /g e t t y nature | vol | june | the world this week news in focus © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. movement. the goal was “to hit pause, to give black academics a break and to give others an opportunity to reflect on their own complicity in anti-black racism in academia and their local and global communities”, said one of the groups organizing this event. time-sensitive research on covid- was able to continue. many are exhausted by the stream of gut-wrenching news. cassandra extavour, an evolutionary and developmental biologist at harvard university in cambridge, massachu- setts, said that reports of police brutality and killings alongside the systemic racism in her field test her will to stay in science. “every time one of us is rejected, beat down, dismissed, ridiculed or murdered, i question why i am still in academia,” she wrote in a series of tweets. “i answer my question by asking myself if today will be the day that another black scientist leaves the field, is pushed out by the toxicity that we have to wade through every day so we can ‘be productive’ and ‘just think about science.’ i answer, ‘not today.’” critical messaging over the past week, scores of universities and scientific societies joined organizations of every stripe in issuing statements about the civil unrest in the united states. some faced criticism that they had missed the mark. for example, several chemists pointed out that the american chemical society (acs) in wash- ington dc left out key words, such as “black”, “police brutality” and “racism”, in a statement released on june, and took issue with the way that the statement criticized the use of vio- lence during the protests themselves. in doing so, they argued, the society missed the core drivers of the current movement and failed to acknowledge the pain its black members were experiencing. according to some analyses, black americans are killed by police at more than twice the rate of white americans. glenn ruskin, vice-president for external affairs and communications at the acs, says that the society followed that “initial response” with a video message from acs president luis echegoyen. “in this message, we condemn racism, stand in solidarity with our black and brown members and commit ourselves to using our resources to addressing issues of racism in all its manifestations,” ruskin says. many scientists challenged organizations to back up their statements with actions that support or elevate black scientists, includ- ing sharing their figures on diversity and ensuring that they hire staff members from diverse backgrounds. some spelt out steps that institutions could take. “although it’s great that universities have made public statements condemning racism, it is important for those statements to include a specific list of anti-racist actions they’re planning to take to support their black stu- dents, faculty and staff, such as increasing recruitment and retention efforts, supporting african american studies programmes and anti-racism education, and providing more funding to support black faculty and stu- dents,” says jioni lewis, a psychologist who studies discrimination and mental health at the university of tennessee, knoxville. advice to allies lesley weaver, a cell biologist who is about to take up a post at indiana university in bloomington, suggested that scientific insti- tutions and societies should ensure that they include people from minority ethnic groups as editors, reviewers and authors of peer-reviewed papers; that they give students, staff and faculty members regular diversity and inclusion train- ing; and that they make diversity sessions at major conferences main events, rather than side acts that must compete for attention with concurrent sessions. “if academia wants to support black scientists, they’ll train and support them instead of using black bodies for a number quota,” weaver wrote. “if academia wants to support black scientists, it won’t take another senseless death and uprising for it to be clear that black lives matter.” addressing her own field of cell biology, she suggested ending the use in research of hela cells, the extraordinary cell line that doctors at johns hopkins hospital in baltimore, maryland, took and cultured without permission from henrietta lacks, a poor black woman, in . jasmine abrams, a behavioural scientist at boston university school of public health in massachusetts and yale school of public health in new haven, connecticut, similarly tweeted ways scientists could be allies to black colleagues: “drop our names for special opportunities or hires. post about our work on your social media. cite us in your papers. vote in favor of our contract renewals, tenure, and promotion.” abrams continued: “say some- thing (instead of secretly coming by our office later) in the faculty meeting, hallway, or class- room when a colleague or student says/does something implicitly or explicitly racist.” the challenges that black scientists face — and that white colleagues are now seeing — aren’t new, she added. “keep in mind that the plantation has been on fire for us and that for most, it is a legit daily struggle to do our work. we appre- ciate you reaching out, but we’d appreciate it more if you helped us put the fire out.” amid the maelstrom, bianca jones marlin, a neuroscientist at columbia university, posted a video message addressed to other black scientists. she spoke out loud something she wished she’d heard at difficult times in her past: “that your presence in science is important, that your purpose in science is seen,” she said. “i’m here to hear your stories. because i get it.” additional reporting by giuliana viglione “we appreciate you reaching out, but we’d appreciate it more if you helped us put the fire out.” cryo-electron microscopy feat will allow the workings of proteins to be probed in unprecedented detail. revolutionary microscopy technique sees individual atoms by ewen callaway a game-changing technique for imaging molecules, known as cryo-electron m i c ro sc o py, h a s p ro d u c e d i t s sharpest pictures yet — and, for the first time, discerned individual atoms in a protein. by achieving atomic resolution using c r yo - e l e c t ro n m i c ro sc o py (c r yo - e m ) , researchers will be able to understand, in unprecedented detail, the workings of proteins that cannot easily be examined by other imag- ing techniques, such as x-ray crystallography. the breakthrough, repor ted by t wo laboratories late last month, cements cryo-em’s position as the dominant tool for mapping the d shapes of proteins, say scientists. ultimately, these structures will help researchers to understand how proteins work in health and disease, and lead to better drugs with fewer side effects. “ there’s really nothing to break any more. this was the last resolution bar- rier,” says holger stark, a biochemist and electron microscopist at the max planck institute for biophysical chemistry in göt- tingen, germany, who led one of the studies | nature | vol | june news in focus © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. © springer nature limited. all rights reserved. athanasiou, a., kolocotroni, v. and papanikolaou, d. ( ) on the politics of queer resistance and survival: athena athanasiou in conversation with vassiliki kolocotroni and dimitris papanikolaou. journal of greek media and culture, ( ), pp. - . (doi: . /jgmc. . . _ ) there may be differences between this version and the published version. you are advised to consult the publisher’s version if you wish to cite from it. http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/ / deposited on: march enlighten – research publications by members of the university of glasgow http://eprints.gla.ac.uk http://dx.doi.org/ . /jgmc. . . _ http://dx.doi.org/ . /jgmc. . . _ http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/ / http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/ / http://eprints.gla.ac.uk/ interview vassiliki kolocotroni | dimitris papanikolaou | athena athanasiou on the politics of queer resistance and survival on the politics of queer resistance and survival: athena athanasiou in conversation with vassiliki kolocotroni and dimitris papanikolaou vassiliki kolocotroni and dimitris papanikolaou athena athanasiou panteion university of social and political sciences athena athanasiou is professor of social anthropology and gender theory at panteion university of social and political sciences, athens. she is the author of agonistic mourning: political dissidence and the women in black (edinburgh up, ); Ζωή στο Όριο: Δοκίμια για το Σώμα, το Φύλο και τη Βιοπολιτική (life at the limit: essays on gender, body and biopolitics) (ekkremes, ); Η kρίση ως kατάσταση ‘Έκτακτης aνάγκης’ (crisis as a ‘state of exception’) (savvalas, ); and (with judith butler) dispossession: the performative in the political (polity press, ). she has also edited the collections Φεμινιστική Θεωρία και Πολιτισμική Κριτική (feminist theory and cultural critique) (nisos, ); (with elena tzelepis), rewriting difference: luce irigaray and ‘the greeks’ (suny press, ); Βιοκοινωνικότητες: Θεωρήσεις στην Ανθρωπολογία της Υγείας (biosocialities: reflections on the anthropology of health) (nisos, ); and (with mina karavanta et al.), Αποδομώντας την Αυτοκρατορία: Θεωρία και Πολιτική της Μετααποικιακής Κριτικής (deconstructing the empire: theory and politics of postcolonial studies) (nisos, ). she has been a fellow at the center for the study of social difference at columbia university. she is a member of the editorial advisory board of the journals critical times and feminist formations. contact: syngrou avenue, athens , greece. e-mail: athenaathanasiou @gmail.com dimitris papanikolaou https://orcid.org/ - - - st. cross college, university of oxford dimitris papanikolaou is an associate professor of modern greek studies at the university of oxford. he has written the monographs: singing poets: literature and popular music in france and greece (legenda, ), “those people made like me”: c.p.cavafy and the poetics of sexuality (patakis, , in greek) and there is something about the family: nation, desire and kinship in a time of crisis (patakis, , in greek). his editorial work includes the new editions of the work of costas taktsis in greek and the special issue of the journal of greek media and culture on cavafy pop ( ; co-edited with eleni papargyriou). he is currently completing the book greek weird wave: a cinema of biopolitics, for edinburgh university press. contact: , wellington square, oxford, ox jf e-mail: dimitris.papanikolaou@stx.ox.ac.uk vassiliki kolocotroni https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - university of glasgow vassiliki kolocotroni is a senior lecturer in english literature at the university of glasgow. she is a co-editor of modernism: an anthology of sources and documents and the edinburgh dictionary of modernism (edinburgh up, ; ); women writing greece: hellenism, orientalism and travel (brill ); in the country of the moon: british women travelers to greece – (hestia, ), a special issue on muriel spark for textual practice ( ) and two books on the surrealist poet and theorist nicolas calas (ypsilon, , ). she has published journal articles and book chapters on various modernist and twentieth-century writers and theorists, such as woolf, joyce, rhys, conrad, spark, quin, freud, benjamin, derrida and kristeva and is currently at work on a study of modernism and hellenism. vassiliki kolocotroni (vk) and dimitris papanikolaou (dp): thank you for agreeing to contribute to our special issue by answering our questions and perhaps posing more of your own. much of the critical thinking and writing represented by the essays published in this volume is indebted to your vision and vigilance as a theorist, teacher and activist. may we start by a simple question? is there a new queer greece? if yes, where? in what tactics, movements, collectivities, cultural work, demands can it be found? athena athanasiou (aa): thank you, vassiliki and dimitri, for this conversation, and this question which is posed in a highly charged moment of political grief, in the immediate aftermath of zak kostopoulos’s death after a brutal public beating in the centre of athens. this horrific occurrence has elicited outrage and collective antiracist protest, lgbtqi rallies have taken place demanding justice for zak, and the three of us have signed the petition ‘the responsibility of our grief’, endorsed by more than academics from universities in and outside greece. a queer activist and drag performer committed to raising awareness about hiv through the organization ‘positive voice’, zak was kicked to death by a shop owner allegedly ‘protecting his property’ and a mob of male onlookers and policemen, as he was lying wounded on the ground, unarmed, utterly degraded and dislocated, radically exposed to homophobic and police brutality, designated as a dangerous and disposable body. when the policemen who arrived at the scene, instead of stopping the assault, handcuffed zak, who lay bleeding on the ground, rather than his assailants, it became outrageously clear whose vulnerability mattered and whose didn’t. to compound the dehumanizing ‘justice’ meted out to zak, his body was transported to the hospital to be certified dead on arrival with the handcuffs still on. survival emerges as a politically saturated struggle. the queer body, radically exposed to brutality, is construed by the lynching mob as inherently threatening and dangerous, and thus police violence is justified not only as self-defence but also as protection of public (heteronormative, white, national, bourgeois) safety. so we might consider: what claims of social justice and political freedom are we making, then, when we come together to share our grief for zak’s unjust death but also to affirm his life and practices of freedom despite and against the legitimation of police violence? and by what means do we draw inspiration on zak’s practices of freedom when we resist and oppose the normativity of racist hate crimes? the next scheduled demonstration is fittingly named after a phrase used by zak in an interview: ‘violence isn’t my thing’. i think we can discern here a possibility for an ethics of nonviolence as a mode of political embodiment, whereby vulnerability as a differentiating effect of power is not disavowed and grief is collectively and relationally mobilized. for me, this possibility does not denote a moral pacifist position but rather stands as a political articulation of bodies on the line, avowing their vulnerability, opposing police force and refusing to be violated. can we imagine a world through this possibility of political subjectivity? vk and dp: thank you for this opening frame, which gives your answer to our questions an added poignancy and prescience. it is worth noting that video footage of the events that led to zak’s death, which were circulated widely online, played a crucial role in this case, perhaps becoming a determining factor for the way the public reacted. given your own past philosophical interventions on the subject, perhaps a question about public appearance would be in place? aa: indeed, how do we think about the appearance of bodies in the public sphere? what happens when tv screens and social media are saturated with images of police brutality? what kind of visual and sensual familiarity is enacted in watching the video footage showing zak’s lynching? one hopes that this video footage can be used as visual proof of police violence in the fight for justice. however, the repeatedly aired images become part of a visual field already entrenched in and infused with racist and homophobic structural violence that determines who counts as a recognizable subject and whose vulnerability matters. surely, the repeated tv images seemed to manufacture a securitarian consent and initially worked to further anaesthetize those who ‘empathized’ with the assailants and were too quick to state that ‘he got what he deserved’. but, at the same time, many people were mobilized to political action, despite and against the established order – and ordinariness – of heteronormative bourgeois apathy. however, in and of itself, even the most explicit visual evidence cannot be guaranteed to be taken as indisputable ‘proof’ of police brutality. and so our political struggle for accountability cannot rely on the ‘objectivity’ of available images. it has to make space for ensuring accountability and justice. what may be most important right now is to not let this go. and so the question becomes what kinds of reflective commitment bind us to one another in this struggle against prevailing schemes of normative violence, including, significantly, neo-nazi and far-right violence still on the rise in greece. it always takes enormous amounts of collective persistence and courage, critique and creativity. it seems to me to be worth remembering the ways in which visual evidence – namely, the video footage of eric garner, an unarmed black man, showing him surrounded by police and placed in a chokehold – played a significant role in galvanizing the black lives matter movement and demonstrations that oppose police brutality against black people in the united states. thousands of marchers took to the streets in anger and protested chanting garner’s last words: ‘i can’t breathe’. eric garner, as we know, died from a chokehold applied by police officers while he pleaded for a breath of air eleven times. despite the clear use of excessive force, however, a grand jury failed to indict the police officer, which also resonates with the failure to indict the white officers responsible for the racist beating of rodney king. in sharing my grief and sense of despair about zak’s death with a friend earlier today, i used a phrase which in greek implies something like how do we go on living or surviving, or, perhaps more accurately, on what conditions do we live on. my friend replied: ‘together’. indeed, this performativity of embodied relational agency offers the possibility of politicizing the conditions of survival and what counts as life amidst ongoing loss through figuring a break with the present order(ing) of things and giving a sense of what a ‘different life’ might consist of. at least so i hope. vk and dp: from the way you described this last encounter, but also taking into account the initial question that provoked your chain of thoughts, it seems that you propose these new forms of ‘togetherness’ as deeply queer engagements: intersectional, non-normative, constantly in flux but also demanding, constantly orientated by the relationality of embodied desire and the shattering of loss. to return to that initial question, could we define ‘new queer greece’ on that basis? how problematic (or enabling) do you find this term? aa: it seems to me that every ‘new’ risks promoting a normalizing, sequential and teleological view of temporality. so, yes, i find the term problematic but also perplexing and thus enabling. i wonder: does ‘new queer’ imply a decisive break from previous or ‘older’ enactments of queer analytics? and what about the concept ‘greece’? how is ‘greece’ performed in this ambivalent conceptual framework of new queerness or queer newness? is there such a thing as ‘new queer greece’? what logics of location and identification does this rubric mark out? what non-normative formations and subjugated knowledges of being-in-the-world does it shift our attention to? can there ever be such a thing as ‘queer time’ and ‘queer space’ – to recall j. jack halberstam? along with many other people, i am interested, then, in the term’s potential to open up possibilities of queering time and space. for me, ‘new queer greece’ registers a critical desire to displace or denaturalize ‘straight temporality’ and reproductive time lines – their hierarchies and power dynamics – from the standpoint of greece and beyond. as the concept of ‘queer’ travels and gets translated across transnational and transcolonial relations and non-relations, the question is what normative claims are made and unmade in its name, in different contexts. queer is always in need of queering, and in this case, each of the terms in the title is in need of queering. i think this kind of provocation is performed in the project of this special issue. queering ‘greece’, in this sense, cannot be centred on greece, but rather positions us, ex-centrically, both within and beyond the (temporal and spatial normativity of the) nation-state, and decidedly against greek nationalism. so ‘new queer greece’, or – perhaps more accurately for our purposes here – ‘new greek queer’, is either antinationalist and non-homonationalist or does not exist. the critical perspectives of queer transnationalism, queer of colour critique and queer diaspora studies have mobilized interesting analytics regarding the interstices between queerness and the politics of location and positionality. it seems to me that queerness is a critical framework through which we might productively problematize both the erasure of local/translocal/glocal specificity in eurocentric universalist modalities of scholarship and the invocation of reified localization as an authenticated critique of colonial capitalist modernity. queer critique is inextricably bound up with particular contexts, flows, turns, returns, relocations and dispersals across space and time. and so i would like to situate ‘new queer greece’ in such disparate and alternate topographies and temporalities, in such affective and political economies, which include queer locations and translocations, diasporas and immigrant imaginaries. it was through the perspective of such translocal and citational performativity that i tried, in my work on ‘women in black’ agonistic mourning in former yugoslavia, to grapple with a modality of political activism that critically addresses the uneven conditions of grievability, in judith butler’s terms, in the face of political loss, despite and against ethno-nationalist and heteronormative formations. i was interested in understanding the ways in which these political subjects, acting in the context of a multilayered queered, antinationalist and antifascist feminism, troubled the established intelligibility of memorability by embodying the eventualities involved in their own and other’s dissident un/belonging. i was interested in this queering going on in the very complexities and complicities of belonging. to return to your question on new queer greece: as you both know, various queer collectivities in greece seek to situate their critical interventions beyond (and despite) the boundaries between academic and political engagement. what fascinates me about such critical situatedness that traverses genres and eschews binaries, is that it enables us to trace the nuanced ways in which theory is ‘already at work in the exercise of political discourse’, as butler puts it. in a way, this resonates with the resourceful archive of radical feminism and the autonomous feminist movement in greece. this is the archive where my own formative moments of feminist positionality are also to be traced. one only hopes that it will be by virtue of such political collective historicities that feminist discourses emerging from ex-centrically situated, non-eurocentric, non-us contexts, will be able to effectively counteract the #metoo neoconservative privatization of feminism. this is, of course, one more symptom of the rightward move of organized feminist and gay politics in the united states during the past decade. but the varied historicities of feminist and queer encounters in different contexts pose different challenges to a critical queer feminist decolonial politics. they raise the question of feminist-queer differences and coalitions, but also the divisions and embattlements among feminists and among queer subjects, a question that emerges – although not really addressed and productively dealt with – whenever difficult and charged issues come up, such as the question of adjudicating sexual harassment complaints: what does it take to ask how to problematize the heteronormative logic that often underlies institutionalized antiharassment discourse? in my opinion, we need a space – theoretical and activist at once – where such questions can be formulated. these issues pertain to the fraught intersections of feminism, queer and knowledge. if we take ‘queer’ as a verb, as i believe we should, we find ourselves engaging in the immanent politics of troubling inscriptions of normative intelligibility by forging creative, sustainable and transversal interconnections for the purpose of engendering transformative and transfigured presents and futures. how to enact queer as a designation of political alliance, then, including queer-feminist, but also queer- anticolonial, queer-left/marxist, queer-disabled/crip and so on? queerness thus emerges as a performative gesture of decentring, dis-orienting and re-orienting bodies and worlds, locations, categories, identities, affiliations, affectivities, desires and imaginaries. it is also, for me, a way of becoming in touch with the moment through which intersectional oppressions and exclusions can be effectively challenged and emancipatory resignifications can happen. rather than instantiate a queer ‘identity’ then, what difference might it make to spectralize the historicity of subjectivation by means of thinking further about/through the temporal and spatial normativity of gender, sexuality, race, class and able-bodiedness? at issue, thus, is a political and affective force of disidentification from fixed and polarizing categories of ‘here’ and ‘there’ as well as ‘now’ and ‘then’. for me, queerness becomes a provisional and tenuous occasion for multidirectional repositioning and reimagining as a way out of the heteronormative, racialized, nationalist, capitalist organization of time. it seems to me that the point of engaging in queer scholarship is to work through and with the sense of not being at one with our actualized and actualisable present and its geopolitical histories of racialization and racialized sexuality, white nationalism, economic injustice and (neo-)colonial dispossession. vk and dp: ‘we are spoken, we are open to linguistic harm, we are exposed to the psycholinguistic and social affect of identitarian names and yet we are not those names.’ in your work you have consistently addressed the stronghold of identitarian reflexes, both in a context of active, contingent social resistance, but also in terms of the affect of recognition and the contradictions that must be faced at both the personal and political level. are these theoretical and embodied, political challenges particularly knotted around the name ‘queer’? are they to be thought differently? aa: yes, in the text you mentioned, i tried to think through the possibilities of disidentification and misrecognition in gender and queer resistance. we do not own the signifiers and categorical names to which we are subjected and through which we are interpellated as subjects (i.e. ‘woman’); but they do not own us either, as they are constitutively incomplete, and as we are, always already, outside ourselves. i try to think of the political possibilities of such uneasy and ambivalent belonging. what are the political possibilities of the dispossession upon which our affective being/becoming is premised? perhaps such questions put us in a position where we can effectively think through both the struggles for recognition but also the failures of the politics of recognition. and we may have to think more about how a rights-based approach often fails to account for struggles of social justice. thus, our critique of a politics of recognition might involve also the question whether there can be a queer politics and affectivity of recognition. i think it is important to reconceive and work through the rubric of queer recognition as a mode of queering recognition, its injuries and innovations. perhaps the historical present requires ways of perceiving political temporality beyond ‘cruel optimism’, but also beyond cruel nihilism – namely, the idea that just because all transformations oriented towards social inclusion (including liberal legal reforms in the realm of the politics of recognition) are susceptible to being turned into sites of cooptation, they are merely weapons of the state and the status quo, and thus irrelevant, unnecessary and even dangerous. the question is how to develop and enact alternative ways, affects and genres of living in the present without letting normative fantasies and attachments become the horizon of our political desires. perhaps what we need to work through right now is alternative political, ethical and affective structures of temporality and ‘im/possibility’, beyond the inherited orthodoxies of both presentism and futurism. incidentally, this is something i’m currently struggling with: utopia, affect, inappropriate/d humanities and the critical methodology of the not-yet. and perhaps this would interestingly speak to what you, dimitri, have so aptly called ‘archive trouble’. vk and dp: to bring to the table another designation of the term ‘humanities’, could you say more about how you deploy the term ‘queer’ in your pedagogical practice? aa: i would like to think, along with students and colleagues, both within and beyond the institutional machine of the university, and definitely beyond and despite the university’s narcissistic monopoly on the production of knowledge, about how we might reimagine and recraft, again and again, queer scholarship that could account at once for subjugated knowledges of economic precarity, migrant and refugee displacement, nationalist violence, transgender embodiment, racialized dispossession, and those modes of dispensability and inappropriate/d subjectivation that remain unaccountable and uncapturable by our available appellations and identificatory apparatuses. and so we might do well to consider questions such as: how does queerness matter in our critical pedagogical practices? how does it matter in our allied work? how is it mobilized as an embodied, affective, imaginative performative instance of teaching and (un)learning against the grain of white bourgeois heteronormative power-knowledge? what is most interesting is to figure out how to deploy queer as a way to trouble normalizing and oppressive universalities within the university and beyond. and how to do so in the midst of far-right anti-intellectualism and neoliberal attacks on public education, critical theory and the university. in the era of the corporate university, i think it has its own significance that universities are still public in greece and don’t rely on tuition and private funding. such questions resonate with patricia hill collins’s work on critical public pedagogy in reference with black feminism as a project of social justice. the matter of queer pedagogies and, more specifically, the question of what might be queer in pedagogical practices point, for me, to the ongoing need to expand and multiply the sites in which queer studies takes place. this is something that halberstam has also discussed in terms of unsettling the boundaries between theory, activism, the campus and the communities. and this is partly why i’m moved that some of the scholars who contribute to this special issue are my students and colleagues from/with whom i’ve been learning and unlearning so much and in so many remarkable ways all along, and specifically on the conditions of critical possibility beyond and despite the cruel imperatives of the global marketplace and the precarization of jobs. my sense is that attending to the affectivity and performativity of intellectual solidarity and friendship plays an important role in the ways in which we are moved towards and by our critical epistemologies. in this sense, despite its limits and problematic aspects, queer remains an important epistemological and political concern for me as a transdisciplinary and transversal critique of the conditions of time and space that render certain livelihoods impossible, and, at the same time, as a performative exploration of (im)possibilities of world-making. but although queer carries with it a potentially subversive promise, i don’t believe there is anything inherently radical or subversive about ‘queer studies’. we should ask, again and again, following eng, halberstam and muñoz : ‘what’s queer about queer studies now’? the queer/ing that i find enabling is a post-foundational political concept and embodied pedagogy that refuses assimilation and offers the possibility of figuring an immanent critique of the present. judith butler’s idea of ‘critically queer’ offers such a way to trouble the liberal subjective formation of ‘sexual identities’. vk and dp: as you do now, you have often made reference in your work to a ‘(post)- queer framework’, while stressing the ‘very undefinability and productive indeterminacy signalled by the term “queer” […] [that] lends itself not only to a critique of heteronormative presumptions but also to opening the stage for theorising unfinished, unfinishable and reanimated temporal proprieties as well as their future possibilities’. yet one feels the temptations to ask: where do you stand on the matter of definition? are there specific moments and/or spaces of contestation and resistance that require strategic definition, or is that a trap of interpellation per se? aa: well, i think that we will be asking this question for some time to come. the dialectical suspension between contestation and interpellation in the realm of defining, naming, and labelling cannot and should not be assumed in advance or answered away by means of programmatic ‘definitions’. how could anyone be sure? in any case, what interests me about the term queer is precisely the indefinability and indeterminacy that marks its critical genealogies – their incalculable potentialities and misfires. i would suggest that we learn from the queer performativity of putting histories of violence and derogatory interpellation to non-normative use. i think it is important to invoke, again and again, what has enabled derogatory significations of oddness, strangeness, and dehumanized out-of-placeness to be used to violate and abject non- heteronormative desires and lives, but also what motivates on occasions these abjected people, collectively, to question and take back these injurious terms and re-appropriate them against regimes of violation and dehumanization. so how to remain open to what it means for (our) bodies to be situated in – and moved by – such performative acts in (and over) space and time? how to acknowledge and theorize these moments of despair as they become events of radical possibility? it is important to use the term precisely to acknowledge the political performativity of making the effects and affects of despair work in another form. in disrupting and disorientating the normative powers of naming and defining, queerness becomes a springboard for reanimating unfinished and unfinishable temporalities and for opening up new interrelations and ‘orientations’ – sexual or otherwise. so, for me the point can be made quite simply, albeit very schematically: there are by all means moments and spaces of contestation that require ‘definitions’ and we must undertake this task and take on this responsibility, even though – or precisely because – such definition might end up working as a trap of interpellation. i think we should always take into account, in our (re-)theorizing and (re-)politicizing, that definitions allow power to work through discursive formations, and, as such, they lay claim on us. at the same time, however, definitions are subject to reiteration, redirection and change. they are not simply given but rather are actively produced, expropriated, deconstructed, performatively reclaimed, enacted and mobilized. instead of producing fixed and familiar meanings, then, thinking with concepts and definitions might be a way to rethink such concepts and definitions and thus counter, even provisionally, the authority of discourse and the pervasive powers of interpellation. this is why it is always important, i think, to work with what exceeds available definitions. to take this point a little further: if taken as a deconstructive project, queerness is not about evading the pressing needs of actuality (as is the habitual accusation of political impracticality) including those of offering what you call ‘strategic definitions’ even as necessary errors. and it is definitely not about evading or disparaging the need and the duty of taking a stance. taking a stance takes place as a performative way of inhabiting and acting in the world. it may involve making turns, wandering off, going astray in unwieldy directions, and deviating from assigned lines of demarcation, even, hopefully, taking apart the apparatuses that generate injurious and exclusionary lines. in many respects, taking a stance and engaging with the present may (or should i say must?) involve a poetics of the aporetic. thus, any sense of critical (and self-critical) agency against regulatory designations and exclusionary identity categories involves a struggle against being totalized by proper names saturated with differential operations of power, and against being complicit in the interpellations they harbour. in short, to queer definitions is also to offer definitions as well as to open up how definitions come to matter. to queer definitions is also to relate to the indefinability yet to come. vk and dp: recent queer criticism has focused on two issues that seem to stand on opposite sides of the queer political spectrum. on the one hand, an insurgence of homophobia and racist legislation in many parts of the world (a new ‘global homophobia’ often connected to geopolitical changes and neo-nationalist rhetoric and agendas); and on the other, the exploitation of glbtqi demands in order to strengthen neoliberal and/or neo-colonial agendas through a politics of what jasbir puar and others have termed ‘homonationalism’ and ‘pinkwashing’. how intertwined are these two tendencies, the neohomophobic and the homonationalist? can we see similar traits in greece? aa: your wonderful question makes me think of how to bring work on queer theory, the liberal state, discourses of sexuality, and biopolitics to bear on our understanding of neoliberal and neo-colonial agendas. a challenge inherent in this task is how to not assimilate queer into normative kinship structures, the nation, property ownership, racialized capital and settler colonialism. jasbir puar has convincingly argued that pinkwashing is a normative mechanism that does not only regulate queerness, but also works to rehabilitate the biopolitical matrices that define able-bodied, masculine, reproductive, virile, homonational citizenship. i would add that the accusation that criticism of israel and its politics of occupation and dispossession entails anti-semitism is a crucial component of the very mechanisms of pinkwashing and homonationalism. homonationalism denotes the biopolitical management of queerness through the tenuous incorporation of certain queer subjects into the agendas and ideologies of imperialism, militarism and the reproductive nation state. for me, it offers a conceptual frame for grasping the complexities of complicity. but again, we need, i think, to move beyond a clear-cut and reified opposition between ‘complicity’ and ‘resistance’. instead of the structural registers of interiority/exteriority vis-à-vis the exigencies of power relations, i would like to think my way through modalities of movement and engagement that cross through the established paradigms of the political and their universal claims to truth. besides her influential work on israeli homonationalism, puar’s analysis in her recent book the right to maim is equally insightful : she interrogates israel’s policies towards palestine by outlining how israel brings palestinians into a biopolitical state by rendering them available for injury and by enabling the mass debilitation of palestinian racialized bodies. puar argues that the production of debilitation and disability is a biopolitical process not reducible to either the pair of ‘make die/let live’ under the sovereign or the pair of ‘let die/make live’ under biopolitics. as a biopolitical register, ‘the right to maim’ denotes the production of precarious populations. i think this valuable modification of the foucauldian schema through an examination of how global racialization works to debilitate can be productively deployed, in the context of critical intersectionality and assemblage theory, and in the service of articulations of present and future resistance to the effects of political dispossession and humanitarian militarism. homonationalism was first coined by puar in order to address the us ‘war against terrorism’ and israel’s self-proclaimed representation as a gay-friendly state. for me, it is both a field of power and a conceptual frame that implies the complicity of queerness in certain geopolitical and transnational paradigms of human rights, bourgeois consumerism and regimes of racial politics. but what happens when this frame is transposed onto other locations? i think an analytics of such transposition and of various homonationalisms requires taking into account not only differing geopolitical formations but also differing epistemic configurations. your question about greek homonationalism makes us think of the affective linkages between sexuality and nationalism. this brings to mind the slogan ‘we are queer. we are proudly the shame of the nation’ put forward by the athenian queer group qv (queericulum vitae), in response to neo-nazi golden dawn demonstrations against the staging of terence mcnally’s play corpus christi at the chytyrion theatre in athens, in october , amidst austerity policies and various responses to them, including nationalist ones. this and other queer collectivities (such as amoqa, kiouries, greek transgender support association, rainbow families and others) engage in a struggle against racialized gendered violence and have addressed neoliberal politics as a national and sexual project by mobilizing antinationalism, antifascism and a critique of homonormalization. the discursive and activist tactics of these collectivities differ from those deployed by the identity-oriented lgbt discourses, with their focus on liberal gay rights and the same-sex marriage agenda. for my part, this is by no means to disregard the right to homosexual marriage (at least insofar as the institution of marriage still exists as a form of legal recognition and protection), but rather to critically question how the abolition of a discrimination may slip into an act of normalization. in order to understand how queerness and racialization are intertwined, we need to take into account the role of the production, regulation and normativisation of desire in the operations of nation building. national citizenship, in its racial–sexual historicity, is ‘bodied’ as a condition of idealized and exclusive intimacy sustained by biopolitical practices of population regulation and assimilability. the control of women’s bodies becomes the vehicle through which the reproduction of the gendered and racialized nation is made possible. consider how neoliberal governance through debt and austerity interlocks with racializing securitization and militarism in processes of white nation making in present- day europe. consider also the dynamics of the normativisation of gender and sexuality in relation to national bordering. multi-sited and translocal accounts of queer migration politics and lgbti refugees have offered important insights with respect to the ways in which national processes of belonging and subjectivation emerge not only as bordered spaces but also as spaces of dissensus. for my part, the coalitional politics emerging across queer, migrant, refugee and racial justice movements offers unique possibilities for remaking the world in our historical present. in my opinion, an important self-reflexive question for critical queer theorizing is how to address and counteract the epistemological occlusion of the differential positionalities of queers of colour, trans people of colour, migrant women and migrant queers. so it is through this critical and reflexive figure of positionality and self- positionality vis-à-vis the dynamic complexity of power that i understand and engage the term ‘homonationalism’. i wouldn’t take the invocation of this critical term as a call to occult the persistent ways in which the nation is heteronormative but rather as a discursive register through which to reflect how ‘gay-friendliness’ can become an instrumental component in the articulation of ‘proper’ national citizenship. i think the task here is to reflect on what it is that constitutes the very impulse to mainstream queer and how to mobilize the critical capacity of queer politics in multivalent ways that enable the restless re-theorizing and re-politicizing of the cross-cutting registers of race, class, gender, sexuality, nationalism and imperialism. this requires attending to what slips between the lines in queer constellations of other places, subjects, objects and times. and it is about the passionate possibility of lived experiences, lines of allegiance and critical epistemologies to rework the very conditions by which our historical present is marked in contexts of duress, grief, but also relationality and desire. i take this possibility to be interminably complicated, but also politically exhilarating. references athanasiou, athena ( ), ‘“who” is that name? subjects of gender and queer resistance, or the desire to contest’, european journal of english studies, : , pp. – , p. . ——— ( ), agonistic mourning: political dissidence and the women in black, edinburgh: edinburgh university press. butler, judith ( ), ‘critically queer’, glq, : , pp. – . ——— ( ), excitable speech: a politics of the performative, new york, london: routledge. ——— ( ), precarious life: the power of mourning and violence, london, new york: verso. ——— ( ), frames of war: when is life grievable?, london, new york: verso. berlant, lauren ( ), cruel optimism, durham, nc, london: duke university press. collins, patricia hill ( ), on intellectual activism, philadelphia, pa: temple university press. eng, david l., halberstam, judith and muñoz, josé esteban e. (eds) ( ), what’s queer about queer studies now?, social text (special issue) : - (fall- winter), pp. – . halberstam, judith ( ), ‘reflections on queer studies and queer pedagogy’, journal of homosexuality, : – , pp. – . ——— ( ), in a queer time and place: transgender bodies, subcultural lives, new york: new york university press. papanikolaou, dimitris ( ), ‘archive trouble, ’, in kateryna botanova, christos chryssopoulos and jurriaan cooiman (eds), culturescapes: archaeology of the future, basel: cristoph merian verlag, pp. – . puar, jasbir k. ( ), terrorist assemblages: homonationalism in queer times, durham, nc, london: duke university press. ——— ( ), the right to maim: debility, capacity, disability, durham, nc, london: duke university press. rancière, jacques ( ), dissensus: on politics and aesthetics (ed. trans. stephen corcoran), london, new york: continuum. schulman, sarah ( ), ‘israel and “pinkwashing”’, the new york times, november. notes . on this incident, see also the editors’ introduction, this issue. . ‘for zak: the responsibility for our grief’, https://nomadicuniversality.com/ / / /for-zak-the-responsibility-for-our-grief/. accessed october . . see halberstam ( ). . see athanasiou ( ). . see butler ( , ). . see butler ( : ). . see athanasiou ( ). . see berlant ( ). . see papanikolaou ( ). . see, for instance, collins ( ). . halberstam ( ). . see eng et al. ( ). . see butler ( ). . athanasiou, ‘“who” is that name?’, p. . . see, for instance, puar ( ) and schulman ( ). . see puar ( ). . on this concept as an underpinning and shared space of radical reorientation and redistribution of the ‘normal’ and the ‘sensible’, or politically legible, see also rancière ( ). vassiliki kolocotroni, dimitris papanikolaou and athena athanasiou have asserted their right under the copyright, designs and patents act, , to be identified as the authors of this work in the format that was submitted to intellect ltd. sociocultural influences on the sociopolitical development of african american youth sociocultural influences on the sociopolitical development of african american youth nkemka anyiwo, josefina ba~nales, stephanie j. rowley, daphne c. watkins, and katie richards-schuster university of michigan abstract—sociopolitical development (spd) is the pro- cess by which individuals become aware of social inequal- ity, recognize the status of their social identities, and engage in activism. for racially marginalized youth, race is an important aspect of their spd. yet few studies have considered the connections between racial factors and youth’s spd. in this article, we introduce an integrative model situating racial sociocultural processes (i.e., racial identity, racial socialization, and experiences of racial discrimination) within current spd theory. in particular, we look at african american youth as a case study to dis- cuss how sociocultural factors can contribute to youth’s awareness of structures of social inequality (i.e., critical social analysis) and engagement in action against social inequality (i.e., sociopolitical action). we conclude with suggestions for research. keywords—social justice; black youth; sociocultural fac- tors globally, black people (i.e., people of african ancestry) experi- ence racial bias rooted in systems of racial oppression (e.g., slavery, apartheid, colonization; ). black youth in nations with racial stratification have resisted oppression by engaging in political movements (e.g., south african students’ movement, black lives matter; , ). however, few studies have examined the factors that promote youth’s understanding of oppression and engagement in activism. sociopolitical development (spd) the- ory describes the process by which individuals develop an awareness of and act against sociopolitical factors (i.e., culture, politics, economics) that contribute to inequitable social systems ( , ). scholars identify racism as influential in the spd of racially oppressed groups ( , ), yet few studies identify the underlying racial processes that shape youth’s spd. in this arti- cle, we propose a framework for contextualizing sociocultural factors in the spd of black youth. although the sociocultural factors we consider (e.g., racial socialization, racial identity, racial discrimination) are likely relevant to the spd of youth from other backgrounds (e.g., latinx, asian, native american), much of the literature on the sociocultural influences on devel- opment is rooted in the experiences of african americans. thus, we focus on african american youth as a case study that may apply to other marginalized groups. we begin with an overview of spd theory and sociocultural factors that influence african american youth’s development. then we describe connections between these sociocultural fac- tors and aspects of african american youth’s spd, and propose a conceptual model. we conclude with suggestions for research. sociopolitical development paulo freire’s conceptualization of conscientizacao (portuguese for conscientization) includes the process by which the oppressed and the oppressors develop a critical awareness of social inequity and methods for liberation ( ). spd theory shares theoretical roots with critical consciousness ( ), empowerment nkemka anyiwo, josefina ba~nales, stephanie j. rowley, daphne c. watkins, katie richards-schuster, university of michigan. the authors thank matthew diemer for providing insightful feed- back on this article. the research reported is based on work sup- ported by the national science foundation graduate research fellowship program under grant dge . any opinions, find- ings, and conclusions or recommendations expressed in this material are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views of the national science foundation. this research was also supported by a ford foundation predoctoral fellowship. correspondence concerning this article should be addressed to nkemka anyiwo, school of social work, s. university ave- nue, ann arbor, mi ; e-mail: nanyiwo@umich.edu. © the authors child development perspectives © the society for research in child development doi: . /cdep. volume , number , , pages – child development perspectives ( ), and social justice youth development ( ), which incorporate aspects of freire’s notion of conscientizacao. each of these theo- ries describes how and why individuals develop an awareness of structural oppression and disrupt marginalization. because spd theorists often focused on the experiences of african americans ( , ), we build on this literature to identify the process by which sociocultural factors shape spd for african american youth. spd includes critical social analysis—the ability to analyze the systems that produce inequality—as well as sociopolitical action—behaviors to overturn structural and individual oppres- sion ( ). social analysis is theorized to precede youth’s engage- ment in change, meaning that youth must be conscious about social inequity to engage in sociopolitical action. however, rela- tions between action and analysis might be bidirectional: engagement in action may also contribute to social analysis. spd has implications for psychological development. although experiences of discrimination can harm development, sociopolitical action can alleviate the impact of racism, increase satisfaction with life, and raise educational attainment among african american youth and young adults ( , ). youth’s sociopolitical action also has a collective benefit because it can result in community and social change ( ). hence, understand- ing the factors that facilitate african american youth’s spd is important for facilitating their well-being and addressing the social structures that disrupt their development. our model of the sociocultural influences on youth’s spd reflects the notion that spd is rooted in adolescents’ environ- ments (i.e., home, school, community; ) and is transactional, with interplay between adolescents’ characteristics (e.g., fea- tures, ideologies) and their sociopolitical engagement. in this way, african american youth’s racialized experiences and beliefs contribute to their understanding of social inequality and engagement in action. sociocultural factors we argue that african american youth’s sociocultural factors (e.g., experiences with racial discrimination, racial socialization, and racial identity) are integral to their spd. issues of race, cul- ture, racial identity, and racial discrimination are likely to be particularly salient during adolescence because youth are actively building identities ( ). adolescents’ gains in metacog- nition, abstract thinking, and social cognition inform their explo- ration of racial identity and strengthen their ability to identify discrimination on an individual and structural level ( – ). indeed, african american youth have reported experiencing more types of racial discrimination as they grow older ( ). these increases are likely a result of their cognitive gains as well as gains in independence that can raise their susceptibility to racial bias ( ). during adolescence, parents more often dis- cuss racial discrimination with their children as well as how to cope with it ( ). thus, adolescents’ perceptions of and responses to racial discrimination can be facilitated by their par- ents’ racial socialization messages ( ). taken together, internal and external changes during adolescence can influence the type of racialized experiences african american youth have and how they process them ( ). racial discrimination a key attribute of spd is awareness of social inequality (i.e., social analysis; ). youth might develop this awareness through direct and vicarious experiences with racial discrimination. in one study of african american, asian, and latinx youth ( ), adolescents’ perceptions of racial discrimination were associated with their consciousness about how racial groups are treated in society. furthermore, african american college youth’s experi- ences of racial discrimination are related to their beliefs about sociopolitical action (e.g., black people should fight against injustice and racism) and their engagement in action ( ). beyond direct experiences with racial discrimination, african american youth are also likely to develop skills in social analy- sis as they witness discrimination experienced by others ( ). for example, trayvon martin, an african american teenager shot and killed by a neighborhood watchman, became the cata- lyst for the black lives matter movement, which has increased discussions around race and police brutality ( ). public dis- course on the killing of unarmed african americans has pro- moted awareness of and activism against racism ( ). experiencing discrimination does not automatically lead youth to reflect on racial inequality or become engaged in action. youth might experience discrimination but be unaware of it, or they may interpret discrimination as an individual slight and not a larger systemic issue. however, racial socialization and racial identity may influence youth’s understanding of and action against discrimination. scholars ( ) argue that racial identity, racial socialization, and discrimination “are interdependent, co- occurring and, indeed, mutually defining elements of a system of racial knowledge that youth configure, reconfigure, and act upon” (p. ). hence, we argue that the interplay among socio- cultural factors (i.e., racial discrimination, identity, and social- ization) shapes african american youth’s ability to analyze inequality (social analysis) and engage in social justice behaviors (sociopolitical action). racial socialization racial socialization is a mechanism by which youth shape their beliefs about their racial group and understand the history and values of that group ( ). the two most common forms of racial socialization reported by parents and children are cultural socialization (emphasizing racial/ethnic pride, cultural history, and traditions) and preparation for bias (educating about the reality of racial inequality and preparing youth to respond to dis- crimination; see for a review). racial socialization can directly promote youth’s positive development and affect the impact of racial discrimination on their developmental outcomes child development perspectives, volume , number , , pages – nkemka anyiwo et al. ( ). accordingly, we argue that the impact of racial discrimina- tion on african american youth’s spd is likely informed by the messages about race they receive from people they know (e.g., parents) as well as from people distant from them (e.g., public figures). cultural socialization that focuses on history and pride may lead to social analysis and sociopolitical action. parents and schools that convey messages about african american culture can stimulate youth’s social analysis ( ). culturally relevant pedagogy, a form of cultural socialization that highlights african americans’ experiences with social inequality, is theorized to facilitate students’ spd ( ). common cultural socialization practices include parents discussing black history with their children and accompanying their children to black cultural events. these practices might sensitize black youth to race or raise their awareness of social movements. indeed, in a recent study, african american youth who were culturally socialized more than their peers had greater social analysis and, in turn, were more engaged in their communities (i.e., through sociopolitical action; ). messages that prepare youth for bias can make them aware of systemic and individual racial discrimination and guide them on how to respond. these messages may include discus- sions about youth experiencing racial discrimination or society devaluing black people. african american youth may use these messages to develop a social analysis that includes an awareness of the structural determinants cause social inequality. furthermore, youth may receive messages that encourage them to cope with racism through sociopolitical action. for example, african american activists describe how adult caregivers’ mod- eling of community activism when the activists were children promoted their spd ( ). parents may also communicate the importance of voting or being knowledgeable about current events (i.e., traditional political attitudes and behaviors) to change inequitable social systems ( ). racial identity racial identity might also inform african american youth’s social analysis and sociopolitical action. early scholars on black racial identity conceptualized it as rooted in unique attributes of african american culture and experiences of racial oppression (see ). the ways that african american adolescents interpret cultural and institutional factors (e.g., racial oppression) can shape their identity development as well as their psychological and behavioral responses ( ). although having a strong cultural connection to one’s racial group is a vital component of african americans’ spd ( ), the process by which racial identity con- tributes to aspects of spd has neither been identified clearly nor included in models of spd. one possibility is that african american youth who believe race is central to their self-defini- tion (i.e., have high racial centrality) might be more likely to interpret their experiences through a racial lens. for instance, in one study ( ), african american college students with greater racial centrality were more likely to report experiencing racial discrimination. racial discrimination and racial socialization can serve as en- counters or racial awakenings that trigger african american youth to explore the historical legacy of their racial group, as well as the meaning and significance of their racial identity ( ). for example, in a longitudinal study of african american ado- lescents ( ), youth who had experienced discrimination believed more strongly a year later that african americans are perceived negatively by society. black adults’ experiences of direct or vicarious experiences of racial discrimination, as well as formal and informal education about black history, have been identified as racial awakenings ( ). these racial awakenings may serve as the foundation of social analysis and action. racial identity can also influence how youth understand and are affected by discrimination. for example, african american youth who believed that others viewed african americans nega- tively reported experiencing more racial discrimination, but were also affected less negatively by those experiences ( ). these studies suggest that becoming aware of society’s views of african americans might allow youth to identify and cope with experiences of racial discrimination more effectively. aspects of racial identity may predict individuals’ sociopoliti- cal attitudes ( ) and behaviors ( ). for instance, african american undergraduates who considered race central to their self-concept and believed african americans should remain a distinct cultural/political group were less likely to believe that the united states was fair and just ( ). in another study ( ), dimensions of african american college youth’s racial identity predicted their sociopolitical beliefs: participants for whom race was central to their self-concept and who felt positively about being african american were more likely to engage in sociopo- litical action and believe that other african american people should do so. in summary, we argue that in the context of systematic racism, an interplay among experiences of racial discrimination, racial socialization, and racial identity shapes african american youth’s spd. experiences of racial discrimination can prompt african american youth to critically analyze social inequality and engage in sociopolitical action. however, their racial iden- tity and exposure to racial socialization messages may influence how they understand racial discrimination and respond to it. african american youth may draw on their racial identity and their experiences of racial socialization to develop a critical social analysis of oppression and engage in sociopolitical action that addresses individual and structural inequality. considerations for black youth globally we have contextualized our findings in african american youth’s experiences, but sociocultural experiences are likely to influence marginalized youth of other backgrounds and from other nations where racial stratification persists. black adults in child development perspectives, volume , number , , pages – sociocultural influences nations such as australia, bermuda, and south africa describe racial awakenings similar to black adults in the united states ( ). these awakenings prompted identity development, social analysis, and engagement in activism. in addition, many factors might influence the types of racialized experiences black youth have and how they understand these experiences. next, we discuss several examples. social identities and cultural variation while we have focused on race, it is but one social identity that youth often acquire with other social identities such as gender and sexual orientation ( ). spd is developed when “the individ- ual is able to integrate experience in different power relation- ships into a multileveled understanding of oppression” ( , p. ). the extent to which black youth are privileged and oppressed in dimensions of their identity (e.g., gender, sexual orientation) can shape how they understand racial experiences and other systems of oppression (e.g., sexism, homophobia; , ). cultural context might also introduce variation in youth’s spd. in the united states, the sociocultural experiences of black immigrant youth from the caribbean and african nations differ from those of african americans with a generational legacy in the united states ( ). for black immigrant youth, developing a connection to a collective black identity and becoming acculturated to black american culture may be important to their spd. in other nations, black youth with differ- ent sociocultural backgrounds (e.g., ethnicity, country of origin) may differ in spd. cross-racial camaraderie and globalization black youth’s ability to recognize similarities in the oppression of other racially marginalized groups may enhance their under- standing of systematic racism ( ). this awareness might allow them to engage in more sociopolitical action that disrupts racial oppression for all racially marginalized groups ( ). similarly, globalization can contribute to international sociocultural experi- ences. for example, black lives matter protests have emerged in african and european nations ( ). black youth may be able to examine the sociopolitical forces that affect racially marginal- ized youth domestically and internationally, and develop cama- raderie with other youth. looking ahead investigations of spd and similar processes (e.g., critical con- sciousness) explicate the nature of consciousness building and its implications for youth’s broader development (e.g., ). but for racially marginalized youth, scholars should consider the signifi- cance of race to their spd. our conceptual model starts to iden- tify sociocultural influences (e.g., racial discrimination, racial identity, racial socialization) on african american youth’s spd. however, previous work has found differences in the sociocul- tural experiences (e.g., racial socialization) of other racially marginalized youth ( ). thus, researchers should examine the unique attributes of the spd of different racially marginalized youth (e.g., latinx, asian, native american). we discussed sociocultural factors as predictors of social analysis and sociopolitical action. however, developing a criti- cal awareness about race ( ) and engaging in activism can inform the development of racial identity ( ). given that spd is a transactional process, social analysis and action may inform how youth interpret their experiences of racism and racial socialization. researchers should examine the interconnections between sociocultural factors and spd. scholars can investigate how youth use their racial identity, as well as their experiences of discrimination and racial socialization, to inform their analy- sis of racial inequality and engagement in activism. scholars should also examine the relations between the proposed model cross-sectionally and longitudinally to elucidate the directionality between factors. our article has implications for scholars and practitioners who investigate the resiliency and healthy psychological development of marginalized youth. a well-established literature has addressed the sociocultural processes that shape marginalized youth’s development (see , ), but this work has not contextu- alized these processes in spd. racial identity and racial social- ization have been identified as protective factors that allow youth to be resilient amid racial discrimination ( ). examining marginalized youth’s spd gives scholars an opportunity to con- sider not only how youth are resilient in the presence of structural inequality, but also how they are empowered to actively resist and dismantle systems of oppression that impede their development. references . neville, h. a., & cross, w. e. j. 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( ). talking about race, learning about racism: the application of racial identity development theory in the classroom. harvard educational review, , – . https://doi.org/ . /hae r. . . k v r child development perspectives, volume , number , , pages – nkemka anyiwo et al. http://www.abcnews.go.com/international/black-lives-matter-protests-global-ireland-south-africa/story?id= http://www.abcnews.go.com/international/black-lives-matter-protests-global-ireland-south-africa/story?id= https://doi.org/ . /haer. . . k v r https://doi.org/ . /haer. . . k v r living in a multi-risk chaotic condition: pandemic, natural hazards and complex emergencies international journal of environmental research and public health article living in a multi-risk chaotic condition: pandemic, natural hazards and complex emergencies mohammad amin hariri-ardebili , college of engineering and applied science, university of colorado, boulder, co , usa; mohammad.haririardebili@colorado.edu; tel.: + - - - college of computer, mathematical and natural sciences, university of maryland, college park, md , usa received: june ; accepted: august ; published: august ���������� ������� abstract: humans are living in an uncertain world, with daily risks confronting them from various low to high hazard events, and the covid- pandemic has created its own set of unique risks. not only has it caused a significant number of fatalities, but in combination with other hazard sources, it may pose a considerably higher multi-risk. in this paper, three hazardous events are studied through the lens of a concurring pandemic. several low-probability high-risk scenarios are developed by the combination of a pandemic situation with a natural hazard (e.g., earthquakes or floods) or a complex emergency situation (e.g., mass protests or military movements). the hybrid impacts of these multi-hazard situations are then qualitatively studied on the healthcare systems, and their functionality loss. the paper also discusses the impact of pandemic’s (long-term) temporal effects on the type and recovery duration from these adverse events. finally, the concept of escape from a hazard, evacuation, sheltering and their potential conflict during a pandemic and a natural hazard is briefly reviewed. the findings show the cascading effects of these multi-hazard scenarios, which are unseen nearly in all risk legislation. this paper is an attempt to urge funding agencies to provide additional grants for multi-hazard risk research. keywords: multi-risk; covid- ; pandemic; natural hazard; protest; healthcare system . background human existence involves exposure to many hazards [ ], and various low to high risk scenarios. while understanding a hazard and its associated risks may help prevent or reduce adverse consequences, in many instances, people are unaware of the risks involved, making it difficult to fight against an invisible enemy. risk aversion is a robust characteristic of human decision making, meaning people are less likely to gamble on something when they are unsure if they will obtain the desired outcome. however, planning for risks becomes even more challenging when considering that we live in a multi-risk world with infinite natural and man-made hazards, many of which we cannot control and can occur at any time. the year will be remembered in the u.s. for several reasons: ( ) the coronavirus began to spread throughout the nation starting in february, with the first confirmed case reported on january, according to cdc (https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/ /wr/mm e .htm). ( ) there were multiple natural hazards (nh) around the country, including two devastating dam failures in michigan and over earthquakes in western nevada (https://www.sfgate.com/earthquakes/ article/nevada-tonopah-earthquakes- - -aftershocks- .php), and an above-normal atlantic hurricane season expected (https://www.cnn.com/ / / /us/ -atlantic-hurricane-season- fast-facts/index.html). ( ) complex emergency (ce) situations arose at both national (e.g., black lives matter protests) and international (e.g., u.s.–china and u.s.–who tensions) levels. other int. j. environ. res. public health , , ; doi: . /ijerph www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph http://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - http://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= https://www.cdc.gov/mmwr/volumes/ /wr/mm e .htm https://www.sfgate.com/earthquakes/article/nevada-tonopah-earthquakes- - -aftershocks- .php https://www.sfgate.com/earthquakes/article/nevada-tonopah-earthquakes- - -aftershocks- .php https://www.cnn.com/ / / /us/ -atlantic-hurricane-season-fast-facts/index.html https://www.cnn.com/ / / /us/ -atlantic-hurricane-season-fast-facts/index.html http://dx.doi.org/ . /ijerph http://www.mdpi.com/journal/ijerph int. j. environ. res. public health , , of notable conditions included the ongoing climate crisis and economic contractions due to nation-wide stay-at-home orders. for example, gdp fell . % in q , and unemployment increased by more than % between april and may. figure illustrates the combination of multi-hazard factors that many citizens are facing. natural hazards climate change epidemic/ pandemic complex emergencies protests political conflicts economic losses fatality healthcare infrastructure network unemployment figure . a multi-risk condition. this paper tries to briefly review three distinct risk sources that the u.s. is facing, section ; followed by the concept of multi-risk analysis in section . a perspective on low- to high-probability risk scenarios for healthcare system impacts, functionality loss, and recovery duration is provided in section . finally, the concept of nh-induced evacuation and sheltering during pandemic conditions is revisited in section . . single-hazard risk . . covid- pandemic in december , the novel coronavirus pandemic, known as covid- , emerged from wuhan, china [ ]. it is the most recent biological hazard and has resulted in a global outbreak. covid- is a potential zoonotic disease with a low to moderate mortality rate. person-to-person transmission may occur through droplets or direct contact [ ], and therefore isolation of cases and contact tracing are essential to controlling covid- outbreaks, though the probability of successfully controlling an outbreak decreases as the number of initial cases increases [ ]. as of august , there are about . million confirmed cases, . million recovered patients, and about , deaths related to covid- in the u.s. alone [ ]. multiple researchers have studied the risks associated with a covid- outbreak [ , ]. although most of these studies are in preliminary stages, different types of forecasting models have been proposed to predict the temporal and spatial distributions of the virus when subjected to various constraints [ – ]. these projection models account for factors such as the behaviors of citizens, impacts of social distancing, effectiveness of face coverings, consequences of reopening, capacity of the healthcare system, pre-existing health conditions and age groups [ , ]. it is noteworthy that there is an epistemic uncertainty (lack of current knowledge) [ ] in the exact number of infections and their spatial distribution. therefore, making any decision about the reopening of the states/cities is very difficult and challenging. this already caused extra political problems and legal challenges. according to cnn (https://www.cnn.com/ / / /politics/ georgia-kemp-mask-mandate/index.html), georgia governor, brian kemp, announced that he is suing atlanta mayor, keisha lance bottoms, over the city’s mask mandate, claiming the measure violates his emergency orders. https://www.cnn.com/ / / /politics/georgia-kemp-mask-mandate/index.html https://www.cnn.com/ / / /politics/georgia-kemp-mask-mandate/index.html int. j. environ. res. public health , , of the risk of exposure to covid- is an important factor in subsequent life loss (ll) estimations. among other factors, it is highly dependent on location, human concentration, and safety protocols. an approximate covid- risk map is shown in figure a (as of july ). the map is based on incidence rate (i.e., the number of confirmed cases per , people), and since it accounts for population density, it offers a more reliable metric for exposure risk. the map is subjected to temporal changes. (a) confirmed covid- cases; adopted from big local news (b) natural hazards distribution; adopted from reddit (c) protests locations; adopted from usa today (d) healthcare system distribution; adopted from khn figure . spatial distribution of risk of exposure (pandemic), potential natural hazard, and mass gathering (of protests) across the u.s.; all maps are approximate and for illustration purposes only. . . natural hazards natural hazards are the result of a series of natural processes that have operated throughout earth’s history [ ]. hazard analysis refers to a process of recognizing hazards that may arise from a system or its environment, documenting their unwanted consequences, and analyzing their potential causes [ ]. natural hazards are classified as geophysical (e.g., earthquake, volcanic activity), meteorological (e.g., tornado), hydrological (e.g., flood), climatological (e.g., drought), biological (e.g., epidemic), and extraterrestrial (e.g., impact). since the start of the covid- pandemic in january , several natural disasters have been reported, including: ( ) dozens of tornados in southern states in the u.s. between and april ( fatalities); ( ) a . magnitude earthquake struck the western area of nevada on may, damaging the main highway; ( ) two dam breaks on may in michigan, u.s. (with , evacuees); ( ) tropical storm cristobal made landfall on june, near the mouth of the mississippi river and the island of grand isle in louisiana, brought winds of up to km/h, and spawned a tornado in florida; ( ) seven inches of rain caused flash floods in wisconsin, washed out roads, and declared a state of emergency on june; and ( ) as of late july, hurricane hanna has roared ashore onto the texas gulf coast as a category storm. https://covid .biglocalnews.org/ https://www.reddit.com/r/mapporn/comments/ qyisj/us_natural_disaster_map_ _x_ / https://www.usatoday.com/in-depth/graphics/ / / /map-protests-wake-george-floyds-death/ / https://khn.org/news/as-coronavirus-spreads-widely-millions-of-older-americans-live-in-counties-with-no-icu-beds/ int. j. environ. res. public health , , of in the u.s., fema provides the major disaster declarations every year [https://www.fema.gov/ disasters/year/ ?field_dv _declaration_type_value=all]. figure b is one of many maps showing the approximate locations of various natural hazards across the country. the majority of risk maps for natural disasters are developed based on their economic impact to properties (e.g., loss). . . complex emergencies while multiple complex emergencies have developed since the start of the pandemic (e.g., u.s.-china tensions, u.s. military movements in the middle east), only those directly affected by the spreading of covid- inside u.s. borders are discussed in this paper. these can be categorized into two main groups: ( ) normal condition actions and ( ) emergency condition responses. both categories are somewhat related to mass gatherings, which pose significant public health challenges to health care professionals and governments [ ]. historically, sporting, religious, music, and other mass gatherings have enabled the global spread of infectious diseases [ ]; the situation can become worse when face coverings, social distancing, and other preventative actions are not fully observed by attendees. authorities in each community must try to flatten the transmission curve to give scientists more time to find a cure; however, mass gatherings move the needle in the opposite direction. multiple researchers have shown that the perceived risk of covid- is affected by politically-motivated interpretations of the risk. these patterns persist even in the face of state-level mandates to close schools and non-essential businesses [ ]. studies show that political partisanship may play a role in determining perceived risk during a pandemic, with potentially significant changes in public health outcomes. according to painter and qiu [ ], residents in republican counties are less likely to comply with stay-at-home orders than those in democratic counties. similarly, democratic-leaning counties responded more to recommendations from republican governors than from democratic ones [ ]. according to adolph et al. [ ], the results of the state-level database analysis for five social distancing policies across all fifty states revealed that: all else equal, republican governors and governors from states with more president trump supporters were slower to adopt social distancing policies. furthermore, it is reported that u.s. counties with lower per capita income were associated with significantly reduced social distancing mandates [ ]. thus, the geographical location of a pandemic is an important factor in its spread. according to dincer and gillanders [ ], in communities where corruption is endemic, observing social distancing during sheltering and implementation of mitigation strategies is difficult. we should also highlight the mutual trust between individuals and their communities [ ], which yields a successful emergency mission during a pandemic outbreak. the u.s. presidential election rallies are also a hot topic amongst voters. while many believe the rallies should stop, president trump did not cancel his june campaign in tulsa, oklahoma. according to cnn (https://www.cnn.com/ / / /politics/trump-tulsa-rally-coronavirus/ index.html), following this rally ( june), at least eight staffers who were part of the rally preparation tested positive, and the rest who attended the rally were quarantined. one may note that the incubation period for covid- is about days, but the cdc (https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/ -ncov/hcp/clinical-guidance-management-patients.html) announced the median time of – days (other resources reported similar data [ ]). to date, there is no scientific research showing the direct correlation between rallies and transmission of covid- . however, according to fox news (https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-campaign-says-two-more-staffers-who-attended- tulsa-rally-tested-positive-for-coronavirus), at the same time as the rally, tulsa county was experiencing its own spike in infections, which drew concerns that trump’s indoor rally could be a “super spreader” event for the virus. one form of mass gathering during the pandemic has been protesting or marching by different civil rights groups, and the u.s. has seen several such protests over the past three months. on april, nearly people gathered at the wisconsin state capitol in madison to protest. two weeks later, https://www.fema.gov/disasters/year/ ?field_dv _declaration_type_value=all https://www.fema.gov/disasters/year/ ?field_dv _declaration_type_value=all https://www.cnn.com/ / / /politics/trump-tulsa-rally-coronavirus/index.html https://www.cnn.com/ / / /politics/trump-tulsa-rally-coronavirus/index.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/ -ncov/hcp/clinical-guidance-management-patients.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/ -ncov/hcp/clinical-guidance-management-patients.html https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-campaign-says-two-more-staffers-who-attended-tulsa-rally-tested-positive-for-coronavirus https://www.foxnews.com/politics/trump-campaign-says-two-more-staffers-who-attended-tulsa-rally-tested-positive-for-coronavirus int. j. environ. res. public health , , of the wisconsin department of health services confirmed cases of covid- . of those, people reported having attended a large gathering, though patients were not asked specifically if they had attended the protest [ ]. it was observed that many protesters did not maintain a six-foot distance from others or wear masks. on april, there was a protest in lansing, michigan against the state’s governor, gretchen whitmer, and her covid- lockdown, figure a. again, there was no sign that people were taking the covid- related public health advice seriously. (a) anti whitmer adopted from nbc news (b) black lives matter; adopted from npr (c) police-protests interaction; adopted from the advocate figure . complex emergencies and protesting during covid- . following george floyd’s death on june by a white police officer in minnesota, a new wave of black lives matter protests began in the u.s. while many worried about catching covid- during these marches [ ], they decided to take the risk anyway, figure b. while some of the protesters tried to follow public health advice (i.e., wearing masks, distancing, using hand sanitizer, and getting tested for covid- ), but there is no perfectly safe way to demonstrate in large groups during a pandemic. concerns about racism and discrimination have also arisen during the covid- outbreak [ ]. covid- policy responses have disproportionately affected people of color and immigrants-people who are over-represented in lower socioeconomic groups, have limited access to healthcare, and work in precarious jobs [ ]. the question for many was: “which is worse: protesting with an increased short-term risk of fatalities due to covid- or staying at home and enduring sustained systematic racism?” for many black people and their allies, the risks associated with protesting did not outweigh the risks of doing nothing, which some equated with “one in every black men dying at the hands of police”. according to the guardian (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ /jun/ /protests- police-covid- -coronavirus-spread), it is impossible to know how many people at these marches were asymptomatic carriers, and that is really scary. protests, like those mentioned above, are now taking place nation-wide; figure c maps the locations of protests in the u.s. related to george floyd’s death and the larger black lives matter movement. finally, the scenario was worsened by police tactics used to subdue protesters, figure c. according to wired (https://www.wired.com/story/police-tactics-could-turn-protests-into-covid- -hot-spots/), some police tactics could turn protests into covid- hot spots. while large crowds already carry a risk of transmission, the situation is exacerbated when police deploy tear gas against protesters, causing them to cough on each other (spraying virus-laden droplets into the environment), or bus them to jails in groups. tear gas and pepper spray make it nearly impossible to breathe while wearing a mask, and mass arrests or detainments are very risky, not just for the people arrested but also for the jail staff, the court staff, and their families. in any case, the police have to respond to vandalism and theft (in any form) in which people try to damage public properties, steal from stores, and alter the peaceful protest. also, the police should confront anarchist agitators, and criminal opportunism amid the chaos. it is important to note, therefore, that both protesters and police face significant risks. according to the military (https://www.military.com/daily-news/ / / /national-guard- covid- -diagnoses-after-protests-are-disturbing-sign-fauci-says.html), an undisclosed number of the roughly d.c. guard members sent to respond to the protests now have covid- . two members of the nebraska national guard also tested positive. https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/politics-news/lock-her-anti-whitmer-coronavirus-lockdown-protestors-swarm-michigan-capitol-n https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/ / / / /combing-through- -million-tweets-to-show-how-blacklivesmatter-exploded https://www.theadvocate.com/baton_rouge/news/crime_police/article_ d ec - c- e - ae-dbcc e .html https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ /jun/ /protests-police-covid- -coronavirus-spread https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ /jun/ /protests-police-covid- -coronavirus-spread https://www.wired.com/story/police-tactics-could-turn-protests-into-covid- -hot-spots/ https://www.wired.com/story/police-tactics-could-turn-protests-into-covid- -hot-spots/ https://www.military.com/daily-news/ / / /national-guard-covid- -diagnoses-after-protests-are-disturbing-sign-fauci-says.html https://www.military.com/daily-news/ / / /national-guard-covid- -diagnoses-after-protests-are-disturbing-sign-fauci-says.html int. j. environ. res. public health , , of the readers should note that all the statements (especially the political ones) throughout this paper do not reflect the personal political view point of the author in any way. all the statements are carefully selected from peer-reviewed documents and those reported by the news. none of the statements aim to defend a political party and/or opinion, but to bring to the attention of readers, the complex situation we are living. . . healthcare availability finally, all the above-mentioned hazard sources (and their combined effects) should be studied in the context of the healthcare system performance, see section . a better healthcare system may reduce the devastating consequences of large-scale fatalities. according to khn (https://khn.org/news/as- coronavirus-spreads-widely-millions-of-older-americans-live-in-counties-with-no-icu-beds/), more than half of counties in the u.s. have no hospital icu beds, which poses a particular danger for more than seven million + years old people facing the spread of covid- . they released a map (based on and reported data), showing the counties with and without hospitals, and counties that do have icu beds, figure d. as can be seen, there is considerable heterogeneity in the distribution of the icu beds (with some having just one bed available for thousands of senior residents). one may normalize the above-discussed multi-hazard sources with respect to the available healthcare system in each county. in this way, the impact of the healthcare system (as a secondary hazard source, in case it is not sufficient) is incorporated in overall risk calculation. . multi-hazard risk each of the individual risk factors explained in section can be catastrophic and devastating if the individuals and/or society/community are not prepared already [ ]. however, the critical question is “are we ready for combination of these risks?”. therefore, we need to talk about the framework of multi-risk analysis, keeping in mind the fundamental differences between hazard and risk: risk ∼ hazard × impact on asset × consequences of impact; ref.[ ] ( ) risk ∼ hazard × value at risk × vulnerability; ref.[ ] ( ) the concept of multi-risk analysis is well established in natural hazards [ , ]. european commission [ ] defines the multi-hazard assessment as: “to determine the probability of occurrence of different hazards either occurring at the same time or shortly following each other, because they are dependent from one another or because they are caused by the same triggering event or hazard, or merely threatening the same elements at risk without chronological coincidence.” therefore, a multi-hazard assessment can be studied from two perspectives [ ]: • independent hazards threatening a given area: the main concern in this effort is harmonization of the hazard assessment, meaning that all should have a similar basis [ ]. • hazard interactions, triggering or cascade effects: in this effort, the occurrence of one event could affect the probability of occurrence in others (usually accelerates them). once this concept is propagated into a chain of events, the bayesian networks framework can be used [ ]. for two events with occurrence of e and e , the probability of e occurrence, p[e ], is: p[e ] = p[e |e ].p[e ] + p[e |ē ].p[ē ] ( ) where the bar sign presents the non-occurrence condition. this equation can be generalized for n events. liu et al. [ ] proposed a simple matrix approach to identifying the interactions between various hazards. according to figure a (upper part), the interaction of any two hazards ei and ej can https://khn.org/news/as-coronavirus-spreads-widely-millions-of-older-americans-live-in-counties-with-no-icu-beds/ https://khn.org/news/as-coronavirus-spreads-widely-millions-of-older-americans-live-in-counties-with-no-icu-beds/ int. j. environ. res. public health , , of be determined by understanding their impacts on one another. for three hazard sources in this paper, such interactions are assessed in figure a (lower part). while the single-hazard sources take the diagonal cells, their clockwise influence/interaction fill out the off-diagonal cells. for example, this matrix shows that occurrence of a natural hazard may spread the pandemic, while an ongoing pandemic does not change the probability of occurrence of a natural hazard. each of these major hazard sources also has various sub-categories. for example, natural disasters include earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes, while pandemics and epidemics include outbreaks of covid- or an intensified seasonal influenza. ei influence of ei on ej influence of ej on ei ej nh none spreads none ce spreads shortage of healthcare none pandemic (a) multi-hazard interaction (top: generic relation; bottom: interactions in this paper) likelihood im p a c t low risk high risk nh nh + pandemic (b) risk matrix (with hypothetical pandemic and natural hazards lines) figure . matrix presentation of multi-hazard and multi-risk. a combination of all single-hazard sub-categories and multi-hazard scenarios can be illustrated on a risk matrix, figure b. a risk matrix is a simple way to present the severity and probability of various events [ ], increasing the visibility of risks to assist with decision making. assuming the evaluation metric is the number of fatalities, a path can be developed connecting all the single natural hazards [ ]. the same approach can be followed to add in the effects of a pandemic. presumably, both the likelihood of fatalities and their impacts are increased (or may stay constant in some instances) when a natural hazard occurs during a pandemic. this can be expanded for any combination of two or three hazard sources (not shown in this figure). since this paper focuses on life loss (i.e., human fatalities) as a main metric for risk analysis, it is important to distinguish the differences between individual and societal risk measures. the individual risk, ri , is defined as the probability that an average unprotected person, permanently present at a certain location, is killed due to a hazardous event [ ]: ri = p[ei].p[ll|ei] ( ) where p[ei] is the probability of hazardous event i, and p[ll|ei] is the probability of life loss due to ith hazardous event. on the other hand, the societal risk (the expected loss), rs, can be approximated as: rs = ∫∫ a ri(x, y).m(x, y)dxdy ( ) where m(x, y) is the population density at location (x, y), and a is the area. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . multi-hazard on healthcare system arguably one of the most important tasks in any community is keeping the healthcare system as resilient as possible. resilience refers to the capacity of a system, community, or society to adapt to potential hazards by resisting or changing in order to reach and maintain an acceptable level of functionality and structure [ , ]. the concept of resilience was first introduced in the field of psychology [ ] and has been rapidly adopted by environmental [ ] and social sciences [ ]. individual researchers have addressed the resilience of communities against natural hazards (e.g., climate-resilient [ ], earthquake-resilient [ ], flood-resilient [ ], pandemic-resilient [ ], and politically-resilient [ ]). the concept of resilience has risen in popularity during the covid- pandemic, prompting many researchers from various fields to re-evaluate their protocols, systems, and communities to understand how they could recover from adverse effects of covid- . among hundreds of publications, the most notable have focused on medical resilience [ , ], mental resilience [ – ], tourist resilience [ ], food system resilience [ ], supply chain resilience [ ], educational system resilience [ ], and socioeconomic resilience [ , ]. furthermore, several researchers have considered the relationships and interactions between risk, hazard, uncertainty, and resilience in the era of covid- [ – ]. figure qualitatively illustrates a few potential scenarios (some with rare probability) that could happen within a healthcare system. again, our primary metric is loss of life, which should be controlled (i.e., reduced) during a pandemic. similar scenarios can be designed for social and economic aspects, which are ignored in this paper. one may note that combining these three hazard sources with different nature is a challenging task because their spatio-temporal domains are different. while most crises or disasters are constrained within a relatively limited space and time, pandemics persist and reverberate for months or even years [ ]. establishing our three main hazard sources as a nh, pandemic, and ces, the following five scenarios can be discussed, see figure : . pandemic only: this is a single-hazard scenario and assumes no other concurrent hazard threatens the healthcare system. based on this figure, the healthcare system is assumed to be initially in either full functionality (i.e., %), in a degraded mode (> %), or in an upgraded mode (< %). degraded functionality could be caused by aging facilities or personnel and medical equipment shortages. alternatively, upgraded functionality could be due to the preparedness of a system with prior knowledge about the possible occurrence and dimensions of such a pandemic [ ]. the performance, or functionality, of a system is reduced with increasing numbers of positive covid- cases. the system has minimum functionality (more or less) when the pandemic is peaking. by reducing the number of infections and designating additional monetary and logistical recourses to the issue, the system recovers from this adverse effect. the transitioning from response to recovery, including consideration of assessment, management, and communication of risk and uncertainty over time was discussed by menoni and schwarze [ ]. . pandemic + natural hazard: this is a double-hazard situation that assumes a natural hazard (e.g., earthquake, flood) hits the community during a pandemic. examples are provided in section . . the nh-induced functionality loss in this scenario is fairly rapid, compared to the slow reduction of functionality in the pandemic-only case. a natural disaster may impose extra pressure on the healthcare system by occupying a considerable amount of overall hospital capacity. it can also cause a large evacuation, which in turn increases the risk of viral infections among displaced people. following the sudden functionality loss due to nh, the final compound loss of functionality in this scenario is more than in the pandemic-only one, assuming that the natural hazard can turn into a disaster. recovery in this scenario is also longer because the natural disaster may cause some physical damage to the healthcare system, which would not occur in the pandemic-only scenario. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . pandemic + ce: this is also a double-hazard situation in which multiple ces (e.g., political conflict, protests) occur during a pandemic. each of these events, depending on their severity, may or may not reduce the functionality of the healthcare system, including reductions in financial resources, global collaborations, and/or data sharing. compared to the pandemic-only scenario, the recovery time is higher. on the other hand, the occurrence of such ces may impact the original pandemic transmission curve by intensifying its peak and elongating its endurance time, see figure (transition from light gray to darker one). . pandemic + nh + ce: this is a very low-probability, high-consequence situation in which all three hazard sources occur in a relatively short timeframe, though not necessarily at the same time. such a scenario might cause the largest functionality loss and longest recovery time. one may recognize some states within the u.s. exposed to such multi-risk by overlapping the three maps in figure . . the final scenario is an intense version of any of the previous four scenarios. the healthcare system in each county has a limited capacity (e.g., icu rooms, ventilator machines), and may fail if the imposed demand becomes higher than the “ultimate capacity” of the system [ ]. a potential solution is to flatten the transmission curve by imposing stronger stay-at-home orders. non-degrading system functionality aged system outbreak % time (not to scale) preparedness complex emergency original pandemic natural hazard failure duration (different) recovery duration(s) pandemic + nh pandemic only ultimate capacity zone nh-induced functionality loss pandemic-induced functionality loss ce-induced functionality loss pandemic + ce pandemic + nh + ce total failure altered pandemic with ce outbreak nh incident ec occurrence start/end minimum/peak figure . response and recovery of healthcare system under multi-hazard scenarios during pandemic; five color lines present the response/recovery of the healthcare system; color (red, blue and yellow) circles show the occurrence of three hazard sources; the black circle shows the start and end point of the resilience curves; the white circle presents the minimum resiliency (or peak pandemic); the light and dark gray bell shapes are the pandemic progress over time in the original form and altered by ce, respectively; and finally, the colored transparent rectangle on the top left side of the figure presents the individual/cumulative functionality loss. . multi-hazard evacuation models while each of the above-mentioned single hazards may lead to direct fatalities (the main metric discussed in this paper), they may also cause some indirect effects. more specifically, the combination of a pandemic with either nhs or ces will cause higher infection rates and potentially more fatalities. while mass gatherings due to ces can be controlled or prevented to some extent, see section . , evacuations forced by nhs are usually inevitable. int. j. environ. res. public health , , of evacuating a large number of people during a pandemic is challenging, given the public health advice to slow the spread of new infections. as mentioned in section . , during the michigan dam failures, a total of , people were evacuated. the concept of crowd simulation was already studied in different forms [ – ]. while there are multiple models to simulate the evacuation of people during hazards, such as wildfires [ , ], earthquakes [ ], and tsunamis [ ], very little research can be found that directly addresses this issue during a pandemic or epidemic [ ]. therefore, developing such multi-hazard evacuation models is a missing link towards overall community resilience. figure qualitatively presents a general framework to simulate the evacuations during a concurring pandemic and natural hazard. any new model should include microscopic and macroscopic crowd models. while the microscopic models take into account spatial-temporal information at the individual-level, city-level evacuations, sheltering, and effective social distancing are governed by macroscopic models. a natural hazard usually hits the entire city (like during an earthquake) or just part of it (like in a flood), forcing people to evacuate with little time. having an emergency action plan (eap) is a key factor in responding quickly to hazards, as these plans guide people to the nearest, safest shelters. one may isolate only a small portion of the city (as shown in figure ; top right) and develop the model in three parts: residential commercial service shelterevacuation path city level regional level microscopic analysis microscopic analysismacroscopic analysis ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) contagious with symptom contagious with no symptom not infected recovered free mask healthy evacuation touching [common objects] blocking crossing direction agenti ri vi t outbreak natural hazard t t t ventilation figure . evacuation and sheltering in pandemic era after a natural hazard; in city level figure (top left), the circles and squares present different types of buildings; the timeline axis presents the pandemic era before natural hazard occurrence, t , during staying inside a confined place, t , during evacuation, t , and during sheltering, t . • confined space crowd models investigate the occupants’ (or agents’) exposure inside a building during a pandemic and right before or after a natural hazard. in this model, various factors, such as the distance between individuals, the type of transmission contact (e.g., airborne, droplets), and time of exposure, should be considered. the uncertainty associated with the spread of disease can be addressed as one of four potential cases shown in figure : int. j. environ. res. public health , , of . direct physical contact (e.g., touching). . within the social distance: the exposure might happen if the agentj falls within the social distance (about . m) of agenti. . being face-to-face within the social distance: the transmission of covid- is higher when the individuals are facing each other or their faces are at a certain angle of each other. this is an important factor especially in commercial or service centers. . being in the same confined area. one may add the following further details to each of four above-mentioned cases: – all cases are time-dependent and should be analyzed in the transient mode. – all the interactions should be modeled between any two combination of agenti and agentj. – various constraints should be applied to the simulations including but not limited to: using face covering, contagious with or without symptoms, etc. • evacuation models are divided into two parts: evacuating a building and heading towards a shelter. for the latter, factors such as duration, length of travel, difficulty of paths, speed of each individual, potential touching of common surfaces/objects, blocked paths by a group of individuals, and violations of social distancing should be considered. • lastly, sheltering is another major concern during a pandemic, and the capacity of shelters should be recalculated to account for safe distancing between individuals, as well as the length of time evacuees will remain there. among other factors, the functionality of ventilation systems should be managed to avoid potential damage by a natural hazard. during all three models, a portion of evacuees might become injured, which should be accounted for in evacuation models and added to the resiliency of the healthcare system, figure . . conclusions this paper highlights the importance and impacts of natural hazards and various complex emergencies in a pandemic era and explains the concept of multi-hazard risk in three hazard scenarios. two major ideas are qualitatively proposed for future detailed research: ( ) the need for resilience models that explore the healthcare system under multi-hazard risk, potential forms of functionality loss, and the recovery duration; and ( ) the need for pandemic-specific evacuation and sheltering models that also cover the risks posed by nhs. while the skeleton of the paper was formed based on the data, hazards, and events that have been reported in the u.s., the idea can be expanded to any other country without loss of generality. while all countries in the world are fighting covid- outbreak, natural hazards (from different types) are also inevitable. for example, since january , several major natural disasters have been reported worldwide, including: ( ) . magnitude earthquake on march in zagreb, croatia [ ] (one fatality, injured); ( ) . magnitude earthquake on may in tehran, iran (two fatalities, injured); ( ) earth-fill dam break on may in uzbekistan (four fatalities, injured, and , evacuees) [ ]; ( ) tropical storm amanda, formed on may, along the coast of guatemala (at least fatalities); ( ) cyclone harold [ ] in the solomon islands, vanuatu, fiji, and tonga between and april, which destroyed many homes; ( ) wildfire outbreaks in the west, southwest, and south of iran that burned more than hectares of forest between may and june; ( ) multiple floods impacted large tracts of southern china in june and july due to heavy rains, which affected more than million people, and left about death/missing. also, add the ongoing (or new) international complex emergencies to this multi-hazard scenario. the examples of ongoing challenges are: hong kong protests, the war/conflicts in the middle east (such as syria, yemen, afghanistan), etc. some other types of complex emergencies are predictable; however, blocking them temporarily may even cause extra future consequences. for example, the authorities in iran have to face the int. j. environ. res. public health , , of dilemma of canceling (due to covid- ) nation-wide university entrance exam early august with about . million participants (which practically cripple the entire educational system for the upcoming academic year), or risking their lives by a half-a-day exam in the indoor classrooms/environments. one major conclusion out of this paper is that a multi-hazard situation combining any three hazard sources of pandemic, natural hazard, and complex emergency might have a cascading effect. since various dimensions of this problem is still unknown (i.e., we do not have a quantitative metric to evaluate the risk, and we clearly are not prepared to face it), the authors implore governments to allocate additional financial resources to multi-hazard risk research, paving the way for a safer, less uncertain future. while the covid- pandemic and all its consequences were unfortunate for the society, some researchers note that it might yield positive impacts for future resilience design, plans, and politics within built environments [ , ]. last but not least, the author believes that anyone in any position should contribute (to the extent possible) to improve the knowledge related to the covid- outbreak, and as haas [ ] truly said: “risk analysts and risk analysis researchers should not be shy about contributing our skills to important policy developments during this crisis.” this paper proposed a multi-risk assessment framework in the following general form, g, in which the risk increases in the presence of a pandemic, natural hazard, complex emergencies, and in the lack of a sufficient healthcare system: multi risk ∼ g ( pandemic, natural hazard, complex emergency healthcare system ) ( ) while this paper proposed a general framework, we did not present a quantitative example (case study). at the time of publication of this paper, the world was in the middle of a covid- pandemic, with no definite database on full interaction of different hazard sources. as a future work, the idea presented in this paper can be applied to the database collected at the national or international levels. funding: this research received no external funding. acknowledgments: the author would like to pay his tribute and appreciation to all front-line workers who are fighting the covid- pandemic. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. references . jonkman, s.; van gelder, p.; vrijling, j. an overview of quantitative risk measures for loss of life and economic damage. j. hazard. mater. , , – . 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[crossref] [pubmed] c© by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . /risa. http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/ http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	background 	single-hazard risk 	covid- pandemic 	natural hazards 	complex emergencies 	healthcare availability 	multi-hazard risk 	multi-hazard on healthcare system 	multi-hazard evacuation models 	conclusions 	references ps • january john gaus award lecture © american political science association, introduction and acknowledgements i am humbled and honored to be standing before you as the recipient of the john gaus award from the prestigious ameri- can political science association. i’d like to first thank my nominators, rosemary o’leary and tony bertelli; thank you for your continued colleagueship and friend- ship. i’d also like to thank the selection committee, kelly leroux, chair, jill nich- olson-crotty, and andy whitford. in addi- tion, there are a number of people here who have been colleagues, mentors, friends, and even deans, who have been instrumental in my career and i’d like to thank them: david rosenbloom, frank thompson, carolyn ban, my current dean charles menifield, and my former dean marc holzer. i’d also like to thank beryl radin, a senior woman in the field, who has been very gracious and generous with her time and advice. in the beginning it is a somewhat circuitous path that leads me here today, in that the people i was living with when i was in high school didn’t intend for me to go to college, despite my protestations to the contrary. by the time i finished high school and i left there and connecticut, college was not even on my radar screen. long story short, i ended up in miami, florida after graduating high school, and started working as a book- keeper for the dobbs house at the miami international airport. dobbs ran airport restaurants and was a us airline food caterer at the time and i was very good with numbers. in the first year that i was at dobbs, i trained two persons, both men who were white, to be my supervisor. and shortly thereafter, a young mba grad was hired to run the operations in our unit at the airport. and one of the first things he did was fire anyone over years of age, and anyone who was black or brown, notwith- standing their age. i knew we had a civil rights law, but i just knew instinctively that this was wrong. these were the values instilled in me by my beloved parents. they taught me right from wrong and that treat- ing people differently because of their race, color, or religion was just plain wrong. [we didn’t talk about gender as much, because my maternal and paternal grandmothers were the matriarchs of our roost.] so, i confronted him about his actions, and i was promptly fired (it is the first and only time i was fired from any job), and it was at this moment i decided it was time for me to go to college. i mention this experi- ence because it touched upon one issue that would draw me to the field of public admin- istration. i always believed that govern- ment had a responsibility to address social problems and bring about positive change. and this certainly fits the tradition of john gaus, who in his book, reflections on public administration ( ), recounts how crises as well as changes in people, place, tech- nology, and philosophy in the first half of the th century led citizens in the us to repeatedly to look to government for relief. i started out taking liberal education courses at miami dade community college before i transferred to florida international university. and it was there that a political science professor introduced me to public administration. i asked him, “what exactly is public administration,” and his response was the typical one we rely on when we respond to family and friends who ask us the same question: “it’s similar to a busi- ness administration degree but only in government.” it wasn’t until years later that i attempted to pull together how i defined public administration, which resulted in my logic of inquiry book, public administra- tion: traditions of inquiry and philosophies of knowledge ( ). i earned a bachelor’s of public admin- istration and it was in this program that i first read about something called the “new public administration.” it was only text- on our journey to achieving social equity: the hits and misses norma m. riccucci, rutgers university norma m. riccucci, board of governors distinguished professor in the school of public affairs and administration at rutgers university, delivers her john gaus award lecture titled “on our journey to achieving social equity: the hits and misses” at the apsa annual meeting. ps • january j o h n g a u s a w a r d l e c t u r e © american political science association, book coverage, however, so it was very cursory. it was in the first edition of nick henry’s public administration and public affairs ( ), which i still have on my bookshelf. and, it doesn’t even refer to social equity, which would become a central focus of my research. rather, henry ( , ) writes that: the focus is disinclined to examine such traditional phenomena as efficiency, effectiveness, budgeting, and administrative techniques. conversely, the new public administration is very much aware of normative theory, philosophy, and activism. the questions it raises deal with values, ethics… and the broad problems of urbanism, technology, and violence. if there is an overriding tone to the new public administration, it is a moral tone. i wanted to learn more about the new public administration, so i went to the card catalogue at the fiu library and looked for the book referenced by henry: frank marini’s ( ) toward a new public admin- istration: the minnowbrook perspective. not there, but i would later return to the issues addressed by new public administration. i instinctively knew as an undergrad student in public administration that i wanted to go on for a phd in the field and focus on issues of social change. i was particularly interested in race and gender relations. my professors at fiu were grad- uates mostly of the maxwell school (e.g., ann-marie rizzo) and usc, and encour- aged me to choose one for my mpa and the other for my phd. working on my mpa at usc, i had the privilege of working with folks such as wes bjur and bob biller. i also wondered if there were any women in public administration, and was so happy to learn of beryl radin at usc. but, i discovered that she was at the dc campus, so it would be another years before i would have the pleasure of work- ing with her. in my phd program at the maxwell school, i studied under david rosen- bloom, whose intellectual history of public administration course solidified by commitment to public administration. in the phd program, i learned of the signifi- cant contributions that george frederick- son made to the field, when he wrote his chapter in marini’s toward a new public administration. here frederickson ( , , emphasis in original) wrote that: the rationale for public administration is almost always better (more efficient or economical) management. new public administration adds social equity to the classic objectives and rationale. conventional or classic public administration seeks to answer either of these questions: ( ) how can we offer more or better services with available resources (efficiency)? or ( ) how can we maintain our level of services while spending less money (economy)? new public administration adds this question: does this service enhance social equity? defining social equity, frederickson ( : ) then went on to say that the procedures of representative democracy presently operate in a way that either fails or only very gradually attempts to reverse systematic discrimination against disadvantaged minorities. social equity, then, includes activities designed to enhance the political power and economic well being of these minorities. frederickson thus advanced the seminal theoretical justifications for social equity as a critical value in public administration (also see frederickson ; ), indeed referring to it as the “third” pillar of the field. the concept of social equity has since assumed a host of different meanings, but it continues to center on the tenets set forth by frederickson—fair and just treat- ment and the equal and equitable distri- bution of benefits to the society at large. as susan gooden ( ) and gooden and shannon portillo ( ) point out, social equity is fundamental to the fulfillment of democratic principles. david rosen- bloom’s federal equal employment oppor- tunity ( ) was one of the earliest, most comprehensive books that reported on the federal government’s experiences with equal employment opportunity, which also shapes the contours of the concept of social equity. viewed collectively, social equity can thus be construed as the democratic consti- tutional values of fairness, justice, equal opportunity, equity, and equality (see, for example, rosenbloom, ; jennings ). it embodies a host of concepts, legal tools, and public policies includ- ing, from the perspective of employment, equal employment opportunity, affirma- tive action, and diversity initiatives. the value, worth, and effectiveness of modern democratic governance particularly in a pluralistic society is inextricably linked to a diverse corps of civil servants gener- ally, but in particular in the upper reaches of government bureaucracy. in this sense, two of the key pillars of public adminis- tration—efficiency and effectiveness—are contingent upon the strength of the third— social equity. some of my early work focused on the use of affirmative action, which continues to be one of the most polemical and polar- izing issues over the past several decades. some of my work here was intentionally normative, in the tradition of the new public administration. scholars, practitio- ners, and policymakers have debated the appropriateness and potential effective- ness of affirmative action since its incep- tion. after decades of legal wrangling and uncertainties, the us supreme court issued a ruling, in , grutter v. bollinger that paved the way for not only universities but also government employers to rely on affir- mative action policies in order to redress past discrimination as well as to promote or enhance diversity in the classroom and the workplace. but, the bar has been set rela- tively high by the court—at least a major- ity of its members—and so we continue to grapple with such issues as the use of scores on tests, such as sats, gres, merit exams, and the weight they should be accorded in making admissions, hiring, or promotion decisions (i’ll turn to the more recent affir- mative action case, fisher v. university of texas, later). the first us supreme court decision on affirmative action, the regents of the university of california v. bakke case, essen- tially asked the question, can we set aside test scores and rely solely on race to admit students to a university or college? at that time, the question of why the test scores of certain groups such as african ameri- cans were systematically lower than that of whites was not considered. alan bakke claimed that his mcat scores among other measures were higher than the persons of color admitted to the medical program; hence, bakke concluded, less qualified persons of color were being admitted over him. in the bakke case, the high court, in a marvel of indecision, supported the general principle of affirmative action in admissions but struck down its use by the university of california under the four- teenth amendment of the us constitu- tion and title vi of the civil rights act of ps • january j o h n g a u s a w a r d l e c t u r e © american political science association, because of its overwhelming reliance on race. today, it seems widely accepted that test scores are not perfect measures of abil- ity, competence, or merit. but, early on, it may be recalled, tensions between merit and equity ran high. the value of merit has been particularly significant to our field in that government employers historically relied on “merit” exams to select or promote employees. whether designed to depoliti- cize government service or identify “quali- fied” civil servants, the importance and value of merit have been clear both histor- ically and politically. but, as the value of social equity became increasingly impor- tant, the general populace began to ques- tion the compatibility of merit and equity specifically asking, if we pursue equity, do we sacrifice merit? many public administra- tionists believed that a socially diverse work force could only improve the legitimacy of government. indeed, they saw greater qual- ity in the delivery of government services. lloyd nigro ( , ), for example, in the first affirmative action symposium appear- ing in public administration review argued that “to be truly effective, our public organi- zations must be representative in the most positive and meaningful sense of the word.” he went on to say that “representativeness is counted on to act as a sort of internal ‘thermostat’ on administrative behavior, keeping it within the boundaries set by soci- etal values and attitudes” (nigro – ). even frederick mosher ( , ), in his classic democracy and the public service, which greatly influenced my career, stated in the first edition, published in : the ideals which gave support to merit principles were of course never fully realized. in fact, given the gross imperfection in american society and its toleration of discrimination and of a more or less permanently underprivileged minority, some of those ideals were, in part at least, mutually incompatible. the concept of equal treatment hardly squares with competitive excellence in employment when a substantial part of the population is effectively denied the opportunity and/or the motivation to compete on an equal basis through cultural and educational impoverishment. in the second edition of his book, published in , mosher ( , ) returned to this issue and argued that the merit system must continually evolve in conjunction with, and ultimately to accommodate, changes in societal values. he stated that “the principles of merit and the practices whereby they were given substance are changing and must change a good deal more to remain viable in our society” (mosher , ). the real issue behind the debate, to be sure, could not be reduced to how equity was defined. rather, the critical issue which galvanized the debate was the underlying assumptions about how equity would be achieved. that is to say, those who viewed equity as a challenge to merit simply assumed that less qualified women and people of color would be hired over better qualified white males (see, e.g., stahl ). importantly, though, there was very little empirical proof to substantiate this claim. this issue of merit versus equity may be playing out in an interesting, politically- motivated manner today, as seen in the lawsuit filed by asian americans against harvard university (students for fair admis- sions v. harvard ; ). test scores or more broadly scoring systems continue to be relied upon and can be manipulated to control the desired outcome. most univer- sities today rely not on a single test score but rather on a battery of tests when they make admissions decisions. in its admis- sions’ process, harvard scores applicants on five categories: academic, extracurricu- lar, athletic, personal, and “overall,” which is not an average of the other criteria; it is here that an applicant’s race or ethnicity, for example, could be included. applicants are ranked from to , with being the best. the lawsuit, which was brought by the anti- affirmative action group, students for fair admissions (sffa), alleges that while asian american applicants have strong academic records, harvard discriminates against them by scoring them lower on personality traits. the lawsuit claims that harvard caps the number of asian amer- ican students by placing more weight on subjective, non-merit-based criteria in admissions. parenthetically, edward blum is the founder of sffa; blum was the driv- ing force behind the fisher v. university of texas case that i will address shortly. under the obama administration, the justice department and the department of education in may of decided to take no action on a similar complaint against harvard’s admissions. under the trump administration, the department of justice led by attorney general jeff sessions decided to launch the investigation into harvard’s admissions practices to explore that same claim. [the trump administra- tion also abandoned president obama’s policy calling on universities to consider race in order to diversify their student bodies.] many are persuasively arguing that blum is pursuing the case to force the high court to issue a negative ruling on affir- mative action. there are also concerns that the justice department will use the case to argue that all race-conscious admissions are a violation of the us constitution and title vi civil rights act. the harvard suit alleges that the university uses race as a dominant factor in admissions and engages in “racial balancing.” the lawsuit also claims that harvard overlooks race-neutral alterna- tives when making admissions decisions and that in its efforts to promote diver- sity, it harms asian americans. the sffa claims that harvard relies on the same type of stereotyping and discrimination against asians that it used to justify quotas to bar jewish applicants in the s and s (students for fair admissions v. harvard ; hartocollis ; lane ). interestingly, dana takagi ( ) in her book, the retreat from race: asian ameri- can admissions and racial politics, makes the case that universities have deliberately manipulated entrance criteria to disad- vantage asian american applicants. she points to, for example, an over reliance in some cases on athletic ability as a pivotal criterion, which early on had a negative impact on asian american applicants. a number of universities, including harvard, brown, cornell, and princeton faced such complaints in the s (the harvard plan ). in this sense, elite universities want it both ways: rely on test scores and other “specific measures” of performance when it suits their interests, but eschew them when they don’t (also see warikoo ). the us district court will determine whether harvard has discriminated against asian americans in admissions under title vi of the civil rights act and it is possible that the case will make its way to the high court, where blum and the sffa hopes to see fisher v. university of texas over- turned. let me briefly address that case as it provides the current legal standing on a critical social equity tool, affirmative action. fisher v. university of texas most perceive the high court as being neutral, with each justice issuing an opin- ion or decision in a vacuum; that they ps • january j o h n g a u s a w a r d l e c t u r e © american political science association, operate in silos. well, this is not the case. the high court’s rulings are rendered through negotiations and compromises between and among the justices. this was certainly the case in with fisher, where the high court was expected to strike down the race-conscious program, despite the – ruling in the grutter v. bollinger case, mentioned earlier. certainly the compo- sition of the court had changed since then, but the issue goes beyond this. in fisher ( ) the court did not make a substan- tive ruling on the use of race in admissions, but instead remanded the case to the us court of appeals for the fifth circuit, which had upheld the use of race. the supreme court in its – ruling instructed the fifth circuit to closely examine the issue of “criti- cal mass,” which universities rely on when justifying their use of race in admissions. although universities do not seek to admit a specific percentage of students of color, they do seek to enroll a critical mass of underrep- resented students to ensure the creation of diverse learning environments, which bene- fit all students by producing “cross-racial understanding and the breaking down of racial stereotypes” (see grutter , ). surprisingly, justices sotomayor and breyer signed on with conservative block of the court—chief justice roberts and justices scalia, alito, and thomas, as well as the swing vote, kennedy, even though they did not agree with the conservative justices view that critical mass was really a façade or pretense for racial balancing, or worse “quotas.” the notorious rbg ( justice ginsburg) not surprisingly wrote the sole dissent in fisher opining that the affirma- tive action programs should be upheld, period; justice kagan recused herself from the case as she was solicitor general when the department of justice filed an amicus curiae or friend-of-the-court brief in fisher when the case was before the fifth circuit. so why was there no substantive ruling in the case, and why did the liberal justices breyer and sotomayor, who in her poignant autobiography, my beloved world ( ), clearly stated that she was a beneficiary of affirmative action in higher education, agree to sign on with the conser- vative majority opinion? joan biskupic ( ), a legal scholar and journalist and who has covered the supreme court since in her book breaking in: the rise of sonia sotomayor and the politics of justice, provides behind-the-scenes interviews with supreme court justices on the fisher case. she discovered that justice sotomayor had actually written a passionate dissent in fisher, which served to dissuade the conser- vative members of the court from striking down the university’s affirmative action program altogether. her dissent was never made public. biskupic ( , – ) writes about the process: in the university of texas case, it initially looked like a – lineup. the five conservatives, including justice kennedy, wanted to rule against the texas policy and limit the ability of other universities to use the kinds of admissions programs upheld in grutter v. bollinger. the three liberals were ready to dissent. yet that division would not hold . . . the deliberations among the eight . . . took place over a series of draft opinions, transmitted from computer to computer but also delivered in hard copies by messengers from chamber to chamber as was the long-standing practice. biskupic found that several justices were concerned about the public’s reaction if justice sotomayor wrote a dissenting opinion. she writes: as sotomayor drafted and began sending her opinion to colleagues’ chambers, they witnessed this intensity. to some, it seemed a dissenting opinion that only sotomayor, with her puerto rican bronx background, could write. they saw it as the rare instance when she was giving voice to her latina identity in a legal opinion at the court . . . certainly the justices were accustomed to individual differences in cases revolving around race and ethnicity, but in this dispute some were anxious about how sotomayor’s personal defense of affirmative action and indictment of the majority would ultimately play to the public. (biskupic , – ). biskupic ( , ) goes on to say, “if the heated opinion that sotomayor was drafting in the university of texas case had the well-attended lecture took place on friday, august , from : p.m. to : p.m. in the boston marriott copley place in boston, massachusetts. ps • january j o h n g a u s a w a r d l e c t u r e © american political science association, made it into the public eye, more fervent conflict would have captured america’s attention.” another explanation could be that the agreement to mute the fisher decision was “a tactical concession by both wings of the court in a volatile term with …victo- ries and defeats for both progressives and conservatives in landmark marriage equal- ity and voting rights cases” [us v. windsor and shelby county v. holder, respectively] (powell and menendian , – ). so, the fisher case was sent back to the fifth circuit for further review. now, normally or traditionally, once a case has been remanded and the circuit court makes a decision, the case ends there. however, in a highly unusual, unprecedented move, the supreme court agreed to take the case on again, after the fifth circuit once again upheld the use of race in admissions. the circuit court agreed with its original ruling and stated, with respect to critical mass that “attaining a critical mass of under- represented minority students… does not transform [the university’s program] into a quota’” (fisher , , quoting grut- ter at – ). the court reasoned that the concept of critical mass could not be placed in numerical terms. the goal of diversity is not about “quotas or targets;” rather its focus is on individuals. the fifth circuit questioned why the high court continues to misconstrue and twist the meaning of critical mass by analogizing it to “a numeri- cal game and little more than a cover for quotas” (fisher , ). now, back in the high court, a – ruling was surprisingly issued in june of in fisher upholding the use of race- based admissions practices. recall at the time of the ruling, there were only eight justices sitting on the court. justice scalia passed away in in february of ; and justice kagan continued to recuse herself. the majority opinion, written by justice kennedy now argued that deference should be paid to universities in such matters as “student body diversity, that are central to its identity and educational mission” (fisher, , online). moreover, the fisher court now seemed to accept the fact that critical mass defies numerical classifica- tion. kennedy wrote for the majority that “a university is in large part defined by those intangible ‘qualities which are inca- pable of objective measurement but which make for greatness’” (fisher, , online, quoting sweatt v. painter, : ). the court went even further to stress this point. despite the fact that kennedy continued to rail against the concept of critical mass in his opinion in fisher, he writes in his majority opinion, that: as this court’s cases have made clear . . . the compelling interest that justifies consideration of race in college admissions is not an interest in enrolling a certain number of minority students. rather, a university may institute a race-conscious admissions program as a means of obtaining ‘the educational benefits that flow from student body diversity’ . . . as this court has said, enrolling a diverse student body ‘promotes cross-racial understanding, helps to break down racial stereotypes, and enables students to better understand persons of different races’ . . . equally important, ‘student body diversity promotes learning outcomes, and better prepares students for an increasingly diverse workforce and society’ (fisher, , online, quoting fisher and grutter ). the court then went on to conclude that the university of texas at austin “cannot be faulted for failing to specify the particular level of minority enrollment at which it believes the educational benefits of diversity will be obtained” (fisher, , online). this is certainly a landmark case and indicative of progress, but if blum is successful in pushing the harvard case to the high court, we may be in for another battle, especially since justice kennedy has stepped down from the court. i would like to turn more broadly to the question of whether progress has been made in terms of social equity, in particular race and gender relations. have we made progress in achieving social equity? i ask this question to my students every semester, and generally get a mixed response, with some saying absolutely, and others saying that it is equivocal. this latter response captures the sentiment of mary guy’s article in public administration review: “three steps forward, two steps backward.” we have made some progress, but the black lives matter, time’s up and #metoo movements as well as “taking a knee,” the continued use of arbitration clauses and the push for inclusion riders tell us we have a long way to go. even sheryl sandberg ( ), the chief operat- ing officer of facebook, who has continu- ally instructed women to “lean in,” recently stated that women who plan on becoming pregnant should not lean in. let me first turn to employment progress. employment progress in terms of public sector employment, which i study in terms of race, gender, and ethnicity, we have seen a good deal of progress in terms of entry into govern- ment jobs at every level—local, state, and federal. but progress in terms of gaining entry into the higher, policy-making ranks of government has been relatively slow as many have pointed out (see gooden and portillo ; gooden ; riccucci ; see appendix a). another area that deserves attention in terms of employment is family respon- sibilities discrimination (frd); family responsibilities include caring for a spouse, child, or aging parent, being pregnant, or even the possibility of becoming preg- nant and caring for a disabled sibling or child. in short, frd is the legal concept that describes discrimination against an employee on the basis of her or his respon- sibilities as a caregiver (mullins ). this concept has been called the newest form of workplace discrimination and particu- larly the new sex discrimination because it disproportionately affects women. that is, while the literature shows that frd extends beyond women to all caregivers, frd legal claims are most often filed by working mothers. litigation of frd is on the rise in the public and private sectors in the us. from – , frd claims increased by over % in comparison to the previous decade, with verdicts and settlements aver- aging over $ , ; %of the plaintiffs in these cases are women (calvert, ). while there is no federal law that expressly prohibits discrimination based on family responsibilities, claims can be brought under title vii of the civil rights act as amended—which includes the preg- nancy discrimination act of —the family medical leave act (fmla) of , the equal pay act of , employee retire- ment income security act of , or state or local laws. insofar as discrimination occurs as a result of caring for disabled children or relatives, the americans with disabilities act of also protects work- ers from frd (williams and bornstein, ; ; williams and segal, ). our conception of social equity in ps • january j o h n g a u s a w a r d l e c t u r e © american political science association, political science and public administra- tion has broadened in the last decade or so to include lgbtq employment. such scholars as greg lewis ( ; ), rod colvin ( ) and donald haider-markel ( ; ) have made significant inroads in their research on the employment and voting patterns of lgbt persons as well as the implementation of public policies addressing lgbt individuals. in , the high court in its – obergefell v. hodges ruling upheld the constitutionality of same-sex marriages. same-sex couples can now marry in all states. yet, lgbt persons still do not have federal employ- ment protection in all states. efforts date back to when the first version of the employment non-discrimination act (enda) was introduced in congress. but, it failed to gain enough support for passage into law. it has been introduced in virtually every congress since , but has failed to muster enough support. the issue of pay equity or equality continues to be a topic of great interest in this nation, and despite legislation and lawsuits, pay inequity based on gender persists. data from the us census bureau show that women earn % of what their male counterparts earn (us census bureau ). in , the pay gap stood at % (us council of economic advisers ). while the gap has obviously lessened, it took close to years for it to shrink by only %. in the public sector, the picture is a bit differ- ent. at the federal level, the us office of personnel management reported that the average female salary is . % of the average male salary (us opm ). there is also a gender pay gap for state and local govern- ment workers, but it varies depending upon the location. there are wide variations by state, but nonetheless, the gender pay gap persists even here. in addition, the gender wage gap is even larger for african ameri- can and hispanic women: african ameri- can women earn about %, and hispanic women earn not even % of median annual earnings for white men (institute for women’s policy research ). if the bbc can boost the salaries of its women journalists, why can’t us companies? it is also important to point out that we are beginning to see an increasing amount of research with a focus intersectionality, which addresses the unique experiences of individuals who occupy multiple margin- alized social categories (see for example, breslin, pandey, and riccucci ). it refers to the ways in which the various forms of oppression (e.g., racism, sexism, homopho- bia, xenophobia, classism, etc.) are intercon- nected and cannot be examined separately from one another. representative bureaucracy the research on representative bureaucracy also indicates progress in social equity, in that it points to the benefits of diverse work- forces. and, importantly, as a number of studies have shown, representative bureau- cracies promote democracy and increase government accountability (see, e.g., meier and stewart ; theobald and haider- markel ). it was kingsley ( ) who first theorized that the social composition of bureaucracies should reflect the people they serve as a function of democratic rule; it was a normative theory. levitan ( ) was the first to propose that representa- tive bureaucracy theory be applied to the american civil service (also see long ; van riper ). mosher ( ) went even further to argue that bureaucrats should push for the needs and interests of their social counterparts in the general popula- tion; this manifesto squarely falls within the tradition of the new public adminis- tration. a number of empirical studies have tested the theory of representative bureau- cracy in its various forms, including passive, active, and symbolic. passive representa- tion refers to the degree to which the demo- graphics of public organizations reflect the demographics of the general population (meier a; meier b; selden ; kellough ). studies on passive repre- sentation have consistently found that, although women and people of color may be well represented in bureaucracies in the aggregate at various levels, they are gener- ally underrepresented in the higher, policy- making positions (smith and monaghan ; aikaterini, sabharwal, connelly, and cayer ). ken meier, an avatar of representative bureaucracy, greatly advanced the theory of representative bureaucracy. he was one of the first scholars to empirically examine the link between passive and active repre- sentation, finding that minority bureau- crats will pursue policies or actions that benefit minorities in the citizenry (see, meier and stewart ; meier, wrinkle, and polinard ). and important work by sally selden along with jess sowa among others followed (selden a; b; sowa and selden ). for exam- ple, a study by keiser, wilkins, meier, and holland ( ) was the first to find a link- age between passive and active represen- tation for women. their study found that women math teachers improved the math scores of not only girls, but of boys as well, although the impact was not as large for boys’ scores. a third strand of representative bureau- cracy examines the symbolic effects of passive representation in that the social origins of bureaucrats can induce certain attitudes or behaviors on the part of citizens or clients without the bureaucrat taking any action (theobald and haider-markel ; riccucci, van ryzin, and lavena ). research by gade and wilkins ( ), for example, found that veterans who know or believe that their counselors in the department of veterans affairs are veter- ans report greater satisfaction with services. as they point out, “passive representation can . . . translate into symbolic represen- tation, where representation may change the attitudes and behaviors of the repre- sented client without any action taken by the bureaucrat” (gade and wilkins , ). theobald and haider-markel’s ( ) study found that a predominately african american police force can create greater legitimacy among african americans in the community, notwithstanding the actions or behaviors of the police officers. they also found that whites are more likely to perceive police actions as legitimate if the actions were taken by white officers. a number political science and public administration scholars have greatly advanced the representative bureaucracy literature in a host of policy domains; they include lael keiser, sally selden, vicky wilkins, jill and sean nicholson-crotty, brian williams, jess sowa, donald haider- markel, rhys andrews, karen johnston, amy smith, k. jurée capers, andrea head- ley, and meghna sabharwal. in particular, jill and sean nicholson-crotty along with jason grissom and sergio fernandez have examined such critical issues as distribu- tional equity, gifted educational services, and most recently, the importance of race representation in police departments, given the violence we are seeing against blacks in our society. in the us in the past several years, police violence against blacks has once again esca- lated, resulting in the deaths of a number of young black men, including michael brown, eric garner, tamir rice, walter scott, alton sterling, philando castile, and terence crutcher. the shooting death of michael brown, for example, a young ps • january j o h n g a u s a w a r d l e c t u r e © american political science association, -year-old black man by a city of fergu- son police officer in august of , sparked civil unrest in that city’s black community and strong protests across the country around the brutality of police against black citizens. these events signaled renewed national interest in the violence against blacks in our society by law enforcement officers, and led to nationwide demonstra- tions. the black lives matter movement has focused almost exclusively on police brutality against blacks. in response to the unrest, president obama created a task force to recommend reforms to the problem of police violence (president’s task force on st century policing ). in addition, the high-profile cases of fatal police shootings prompted a number of reports by the us justice department under the direction of former attorney generals eric holder and loretta lynch on police violence against blacks in cities across the country. the justice department has been empowered to investigate systematic constitutional violations in local police departments since , when section was included in a crime bill signed by president clinton. the attorney general was authorized to sue or enter into consent decrees to address the biases. local govern- ments tend to enter into consent decrees to avoid federal lawsuits. there has been a surge of consent decrees recently with the spike of police violence against blacks. however, since mr. trump took office in , the justice department under his attorney general, jeff sessions, has been unwilling to interfere with local police matters. in his confirmation hearing, sessions stated “these lawsuits under- mine the respect for police officers” (stol- berg ). a number of studies consistently show patterns of racial profiling, in that blacks and latinx are more likely to be targeted by police than whites (harris ; gelman, andrew, fagan, and kiss ; brunson ). for example, in their study of police stops in their phenomenal book pulled over: how police stops define race and citizenship, epp, maynard-moody and haider-markel ( , ) point out that . . . it is well established that racial minorities are more likely than whites to be stopped by the police. but, disparities in who is stopped are only the most obvious indicator of how police stops both reflect and define racial division in the united states. in stops, racial minorities are questioned, handcuffed, and searched at dramatically higher rates than whites are; they are much more likely than whites to perceive the stop as unfair; and they distrust the police in general at much higher rates than do whites. in a more recent study, epp, maynard- moody, and haider-markel ( ), find racial profiling by police in investigatory vehicle stops, where officers disproportion- ately stop blacks who are driving or walk- ing to question and search them. not only are they innocent, but the experience of such investigatory stops erodes their trust in police and it also leads to psychological harm. their research found that blacks’ “common experience of investigatory stops contributes to their perception that they are not regarded by the police as full and equal members of society . . . investigatory stops . . . are significantly more likely to foster the perception that the police are “out to get people like me” (epp, maynard-moody and haider-markel , ). they also point out that many of the high-profile shootings of blacks in recent years occurred during these stops. such stops include what are known as “stop-and-frisk” practices. here police detain and question pedestrians and search them if they believe a crime is being or about to be committed. often, these encounters can escalate into aggressive actions by police officers, including deadly violence by police. as noted earlier, police often become violent particularly when citizens are engaging in constitutionally- protected free speech, as the us justice department has found in their reports examining police violence against blacks. the stop-and-frisk practices of new york city gained national attention because of their pervasive use and propensity to target blacks and latinx. eric garner was a victim of such practices because he was suspected of selling “loosies” (i.e., individual ciga- rettes) on a new york city street corner. when he stated that he was tired of being harassed by the police, officers attempted to restrain him by putting him in an illegal choke hold. despite pleas from garner that “i can’t breathe,” additional officers moved in to restrain him. he died in part as a result of the chokehold. an article in the journal of public admin- istration research and theory (jpart) examines experimentally the symbolic representation effects of race in policing (riccucci, van ryzin, and jackson ). the study varies the representation of black officers in a hypothetical police department and also varies the agency’s complaints of police misconduct, including stop-and- frisk practices to determine how citizens view the police. it finds support for the exis- tence of a symbolic representation effect: the racial composition of the police force does seem to causally influence how citi- zens view and judge a law enforcement agency. specifically, the study found that blacks respond more favorably toward the police when there are more black officers on the force, regardless of whether complaints increase or decrease. this would suggest that, given a predominately black police force, black citizens may be more tolerant of aggressive police practices such as stop- and-frisk. thus, although the presence of black police officers may lead to an increase in racial profiling, as wilkins and williams ( ) found in their study, the results of this forthcoming study suggest that this may be offset to some extent by enhanced trust and legitimacy on the part of black citizens. if police departments across the coun- try are genuinely interested in improving police-community relations and in restor- ing trust of the police among black citizens, diversifying police forces so that they are more representative of the communities they serve will produce more trust and legit- imacy in the eyes of citizens. nicholson- crotty, nicholson-crotty, and fernandez ( , ) in their exceptional study found that “more black officers are obviously seen, in part, as a way to directly reduce unnecessary violence between police and citizens.” they go on to say that “increased diversity or representation of minorities is also proposed as a way to indirectly reduce violence by enhancing the legitimacy of the police force within communities.” certainly, we will see additional research on this important topic in the future. social equity in academe the faculty profile at institutions of higher education in the us continues to be mostly white and largely men (warikoo ; mcmurtrie ; brown ). this somewhat holds true for such fields such as public administration and politi- cal science depending upon faculty rank. in public administration, for example, we have made progress in terms of increases of white women in the field, but the higher ranks continue to be dominated by white ps • january j o h n g a u s a w a r d l e c t u r e © american political science association, men. leisha dehart-davis ( ), who with mary feeney spearheaded the creation of academic women in public administra- tion (awpa), invited comments through an anonymous qualtrics survey posted on twitter, the awpa email list, and the public management research associa- tion’s (pmra’s) listserv on the following questions: “based on your experiences, is public administration a diverse and inclu- sive academic field? why or why not? if not, what can be done? all thoughts, ideas, comments, suggestions, critiques welcome.” while only people posted comments, the responses were varied and provocative, and were summarized by professor dehart- davis. responses included: • public administration is (not) a diverse academic field; • international students, particularly those from china and korea, bring diversity to pa; • while asian students do indeed bring diversity, it cannot be used as an excuse for ignoring the call for us public administration to be more inclusive of women and faculty of color; • public administration is a white field that excludes minority voices; • white men are overrepresented in power positions; • the creation of academic women in public administration was viewed by some as positive, but others suspect self-serving motives and white feminism at play. other public administration faculty members across the us were invited to comment on this issue (dehart-davis , – ). they echoed some of the comments made by the anonymous respondents to the qualtrics survey. this is certainly an issue that deserves greater attention and asks the question, have the aims and objectives of new public administration been real- ized? but we also need to ask: how does the field define diversity? what exactly does it mean? and what is the unit of analysis? are we looking at students, faculty, deans, chairs, directors, and/or journal editors-in- chief? parenthetically, the minnowbrook i conference had no persons of color nor women present. dehart davis’ survey was a response to a washington post op-ed piece writ- ten by professor marybeth gasman of the university of pennsylvania (gasman ). gasman wrote that there is little diversity among faculties at elite univer- sities because they do not want faculty of color. she argued that universities exclude them because they may not have graduate degrees from elite universities, there is a perception of low-quality scholarship and there is an absence of people of color in the faculty pipeline. all of these pretexts, of course, can be explained away, and this is why gasman concludes that university faculties simply do not value diversity. can this be the case for us in public administra- tion and political science? conclusion in closing, let me return to the writing of john gaus ( , ), whose words are particularly relevant and prevailing today: “the inclusion of greater numbers of persons in political activity and the increased dependence of populations on the results of this activity make our indi- vidual and group ideas of ends and means of public housekeeping more important. such ideas influence our decisions and acts . . . the decisions and acts have long led to policies that affect our standard of living and for many, life itself . . . new forms of war, embodying doctrines of race or class . . . have increased the urgency and importance of decisions and policies.” ■ n o t e s . see, and compare, for example svara and brunet ( ) and rosenbloom ( ); and nalbandian ( ) and rosenbloom ( ). . also see krislov ( ) and krislov and rosenbloom ( ). . the us supreme court attempted to address affirmative action in an earlier case, defunis v. odegaard ( ), but dismissed it on procedural grounds. . the us justice department submitted a “statement of interest” in the harvard case on august , , in support of the students suing harvard over affirmative action policies. see https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice- department-files-statement-interest-harvard- discrimination-case-defending-claim- . . the sffa is also suing the university of north carolina at chapel hill. . the complaint was dismissed because it is similar to an ongoing and separate federal lawsuit filed against harvard (see, students for fair admissions v. harvard ). . that is, that harvard uses race in a positive way for blacks and latinos, but in a negative way for asian americans. . interestingly, harvard relies on what it calls a “z-list,” which is a back door to admissions. here, harvard admits mostly whites who are legacies or individuals with connections to deans or directors. . the grutter court issued a – decision: o’connor, wrote the majority opinion and was joined by justices stevens, souter, ginsburg, and breyer; dissenting were chief justice rehnquist and justices scalia, kennedy, and thomas. in , the court’s liberal block was composed of justices ginsburg, breyer, kagan, and sotomayor; the conservative block consisted of chief justice roberts and justices scalia, thomas, alito, and kennedy, actually a swing vote on many cases. . the three-judge panel on the fisher appeals court ruled unanimously in favor the university’s race- based admissions program. see fisher v. university of texas at austin, f. d ( th cir. ). . the appeals court applied the us supreme court’s strict-scrutiny test—or means-to-ends analysis—to determine the constitutionality of the university’s affirmative action programs. the first prong of this test asks whether there is a compelling state interest in the program (i.e., is diversity a compelling interest); the second prong asks whether the program is sufficiently narrowly tailored to meet its goal (i.e., are there alternative means to reach the goal without taking race into account). the courts, since bakke have found that diversity serves as a compelling government interest. writing for the court’s – majority, justice sandra day o’connor ( , ) stated that “classroom discussion is livelier, more spirited, and simply more enlightening and interesting when the students have the greatest possible variety of backgrounds . . . student body diversity promotes learning outcomes.” the second prong of the strict-scrutiny test asks if race is but one factor among others in the universities admission process, and if students are considered individually. . in grutter, the court majority ruled that “there is no number, percentage, or range of numbers or percentages that constitute critical mass” (grutter, , p. ). . the conservative block will most likely rule against race-based admissions program (chief justice john roberts and justices alito, gorsuch, and thomas). the liberal block will support affirmative action ( justices ginsburg, breyer, kagan, and sotomayor). a conservative appointee to the court will be pivotal in affirmative action as well as other cases (e.g., abortion, death penalty; lgbtq rights). and despite the fact that judge brett kavanaugh has endorsed stare decisis, the practice of following precedent, it is unlikely that this will hold true if he is confirmed to serve on the court. . four states—alaska, connecticut, new jersey, and oregon—and the district of columbia enacted laws expressly prohibiting frd. in addition, at least localities in different states have local laws that prohibit frd (see, calvert, et. al., ). . it was not introduced in the th congress— january , to january , —the fifth and sixth years of george w. bush’s presidency; both houses were controlled by republicans. . see, for example, nicholson-crotty, grissom, and nicholson-crotty ( ); nicholson-crotty, grissom, nicholson-crotty, and redding ( ); nicholson-crotty, nicholson-crotty, and fernandez ( ); meier and nicholson-crotty ( ). . there were white police officers when michael brown was killed, and only three black police officers. . the study also found that whites rate the police somewhat less favorably in terms of job performance, trustworthiness, and fairness when the force includes mostly black officers, whether complaints increase or decrease against the agency. but the decline was relatively small. . paul light ( ) writes about these issues almost years ago. also see radin ( ). https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-files-statement-interest-harvard-discrimination-case-defending-claim- https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-files-statement-interest-harvard-discrimination-case-defending-claim- https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-files-statement-interest-harvard-discrimination-case-defending-claim- ps • january j o h n g a u s a w a r d l e c t u r e © american political science association, r e f e r e n c e s biskupic, joan. . breaking in: the rise of sonia sotomayor and the politics of justice. ny: sarah crichton books. breslin, rachel a., sheela pandey, and norma m. riccucci. . “intersectionality in public lead- ership research: a review and future research agenda.” review of public personnel administration ( ): – . brown, launcelot i. . “diversity: the challenge for higher education.” race ethnicity and educa- tion ( ): – . brunson, rod k. . “‘police don’t like black people:’ african-american young men’s accumu- lated police experiences.” criminology & public policy ( ): – . calvert, cynthia thomas. . family responsibili- ties discrimination: litigation update . san francisco: center for worklife law. http://www. worklifelaw.org/pubs/frdupdate.pdf. calvert, cynthia thomas, joan c. williams, and gary phelan. . family responsibilities discrimina- tion. edison, nj: bloomberg bna books. colvin, rodderick a. . gay and lesbian cops: diversity and effective policing. boulder, co: lynne rienner publishers. defunis v. odegaard, u.s. 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%) native hawaiian/ pacific islander ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) white ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) latinx and more than one race ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) more than one race ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) unspecified ( . %) ( . %) ( . %) total sesers source: us office of personnel management. . – senior executive service report. https://www.opm.gov/policy-data-oversight/data-analysis-documentation/ federal-employment-reports/reports-publications/ses-summary- .pdf note: the report does not break data down by gender, race, and ethnicity. totals vary due to missing data. https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/first-consent-decree-police-abuse-pittsburgh.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/first-consent-decree-police-abuse-pittsburgh.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/first-consent-decree-police-abuse-pittsburgh.html https://clinton .nara.gov/wh/eop/cea/html/gendergap.html https://clinton .nara.gov/wh/eop/cea/html/gendergap.html https://clinton .nara.gov/wh/eop/cea/html/gendergap.html 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crawley_differentangle marie­louise crawley* «this a different angle»: dancing at the louvre dicembre , pp. ­ doi: https://doi.org/ . /issn. ­ / section: dossier [peer reviewed] articles are published under a creative commons attribution non­commercial . unported licence (authors retain copyright in their articles, permission to reuse third party copyrighted content is not included). email: danzaericerca@unibo.it www: https://danzaericerca.unibo.it/ abstract sulla scia delle proteste globali che hanno segnato l’e­ state del , come quelle di black lives matter e dell’abbattimento delle statue negli stati uniti, questo contributo ripropone l’idea della danza nei musei co­ me forma di “archeologia radicale”. essa è presentata come una storiografia radicale per quei corpi di colore che, in precedenza, sono stati resi invisibili, o solo par­ zialmente visibili, da una pratica oppressiva della sto­ ria. l’articolo esamina un caso centrale dal punto di vi­ sta degli studi accademici sulla danza, il video musica­ le apeshit ( ) di beyoncé e jay­z carter, girato al louvre, e ne offre un’attenta analisi coreografica tra movimento e immobilità, al fine di sostenere la danza nei musei come forma metaforica di “abbattimento di statue”, una forma che può sfidare con forza lo status quo della storia dell’arte. in the wake of the global black lives matter protests and the statue­toppling that marked the summer of , this article reappraises the idea of dance in the museum as a form of “radical archaeology”. it presents dance in the museum as a radical historiography for those bodies of colour previously rendered invisible, or only partially visible, by an oppressive curating of history. from a dance scholarship perspective, the ar­ ticle examines a central case study, beyoncé and jay­ z carter’s music video apeshit ( ), filmed in the musée du louvre (france), offering a close analysis of its complex choreographies of movement and still­ ness to argue for dance in the museum as a metaphor­ ical form of statue­toppling, one that can powerfully challenge the art historical status quo. * centre for dance research (c­dare), coventry university, uk. https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / mailto:danzaericerca@unibo.it https://danzaericerca.unibo.it/ marie-louise crawley «this a different angle»: dancing at the louvre introduction: a story of falling statues it is june : i am writing this article in the same week that a group of protestors in bristol (uk) pulled a statue of slave-trader edward colston from its pedestal and rolled it into the harbour waters; the same week that the streets of oxford (uk) resounded with renewed calls that “rhodes must fall” and the statue of british colonialist cecil rhodes be removed from the façade of one of its colleges; the same week that the statue of the west indian merchant and enslaver robert milligan was removed from the west india docks in london (uk); and the same week that, across the channel, a statue of léopold ii was toppled in antwerp, belgium. these calls and actions for colonial statues to fall have come in the wake of global black lives matter protests sparked by the killing of an unarmed black man, george floyd, by a police officer in minneapolis (usa) on th may . in the uk, much of the public and, particularly, the right-wing media discourse on this statue toppling, monument removing and renaming of buildings has focussed on what this might mean in terms of erasing, re-writing or even – and here, the irony is astounding – “white-washing” history . yet the historiographical argument is clear: while the toppling of statues does not erase but rather highlights history, it is statues themselves that have contributed to the erasure of specific stories of people and cultures for centuries. as historian tanja bueltmann reminds us, statues are often far less historical than they are ahistorical, as they are . edward colston ( - ) was a bristol-born merchant, philanthropist and tory member of parliament who was heavily involved in the transatlantic slave trade, eventually becoming deputy governor of the royal african com- pany ( - ). his legacy in bristol has long been debated with repeated calls for his statue to be removed. cf. olivette otele, slavery and visual memory: what britain can learn from france, in «open democracy», august th , online: https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/slavery-and-visual-memory-what-britain- can-learn-from-france/ (accessed / / ). on th june , colston’s statue was finally toppled by black lives matter protestors and thrown into the harbour. the statue has subsequently been removed and will now be placed in a museum, along with the ropes that were used to topple it, and placards from the protest. . see, for example, the british prime minister boris johnson’s statements on twitter following the toppling of colston, where he wrote that «to tear [statues] down would be to lie about our history, and impoverish the education of generations to come», as cited in peter walker – alexandra topping – steven morris, boris johnson says removing statues is to lie about our history, in «the guardian», june th , online: https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ /jun/ /boris-johnson- says-removing-statues-is-to-lie-about-our-history-george-floyd (accessed / / ). «danza e ricerca. laboratorio di studi, scritture, visioni», anno xii, numero , danzaericerca.unibo.it doi: . /issn. ­ / https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/slavery-and-visual-memory-what-britain-can-learn-from-france/ https://www.opendemocracy.net/en/beyond-trafficking-and-slavery/slavery-and-visual-memory-what-britain-can-learn-from-france/ https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ /jun/ /boris-johnson-says-removing-statues-is-to-lie-about-our-history-george-floyd https://www.theguardian.com/politics/ /jun/ /boris-johnson-says-removing-statues-is-to-lie-about-our-history-george-floyd https://danzaericerca.unibo.it https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / marie­louise crawley selective in their historicising . statues are about who has the power to select what, and whom, we remember, and whom, and what, we forget. this is a matter of who is held up on a pedestal and who has the power to put him there. the actions of those protestors on a summer’s sunday afternoon in bristol should not cause us, as historian charlotte riley puts it, «to worry about “re-writing” history [because] it’s literally what historians do» . as riley points out, historians are constantly engaged in the process of re-evaluating and reinterpreting the past: she reminds us that while «the past may be dead […] history is alive, and it is constructed in the present» . as such, the black lives matters protestors in bristol, oxford, london and antwerp are not only history-makers themselves; they can, in fact, be seen as historiographers, and their actions as publicly debating, questioning and re-writing history. through such actions, at least in britain, the lines of public debate about heritage and racism are now being decisively re-evaluated and redrawn. the context of the black lives matter protests have enabled citizens to powerfully use statues and museums as public spaces to re-frame how we think and feel about difficult and uncomfortable histories of colonialism, slavery, oppression, and about anti-blackness and social justice in the twenty- first century. in britain, they are becoming places where the public can assemble to acknowledge the on-going nature of the country’s colonial past and together work for collective, transformative action. sometimes, bringing a statue down with ropes and rolling it into the harbour is part of that action. in statues and in museums, historically, we see a tidy, if subjective, curating of the past. both are sites of public memory, of common remembering; they are where we come together to remember (or to forget) and where what we remember (and what we forget) is very often decided for us, where the past is neatly boxed into a glass display case, curated and framed for us in a very specific way. however, the past cannot always be so tidily enclosed, framed and mummified. sometimes the glass of the vitrine must be smashed and the statue must fall as we confront those difficult and uncomfortable histories. however, it is important to note that due to the institutional developments brought about by the movement of the “new museology” , museums have gradually become – and are still becoming – much more fluid, transient spaces where the historicized past meets the present moment. even if we believe that colston’s statue should remain lying at the bottom of the atlantic, its removal and the plan to eventually place it in a museum along with the ropes that toppled it and black lives matter placards . cf. tanya bueltmann, twitter thread, june th , online: https://twitter.com/cliodiaspora?ref_src=twsrc% egoogle- % ctwcamp% eserp% ctwgr% eauthor (accessed / / ). . charlotte riley, don’t worry about “rewriting” history, in «the guardian», june th , online: https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /jun/ /rewriting-history-historians-statue-past (accessed / / ). . ibidem. . since the s, museums have undergone significant and radical changes, with political and economic pressures leading to a shift away from collections and towards a more viewer-centred ethos. this self-reflexivity that attempts to ensure greater accessibility to these public spaces and to put an end to the traditional elitism of the museum has become known as a “new museology”. https://twitter.com/cliodiaspora?ref_src=twsrc% egoogle% ctwcamp% eserp% ctwgr% eauthor https://twitter.com/cliodiaspora?ref_src=twsrc% egoogle% ctwcamp% eserp% ctwgr% eauthor https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/ /jun/ /rewriting-history-historians-statue-past «this a different angle»: dancing at the louvre becomes an important action too. significantly for my argument here, it is within such a framework of the historicised past meeting the present moment that performance has entered the museum. as museology scholar helen rees leahy suggests, it is «the inherent transience and fluidity of performance that confronts the apparent solidity and stasis of the museum» . performance in the museum can be part of a confrontation with the past: not only smashing through the glass of the vitrine, but also finding ways for that fragmented and fragmentary past to be reassembled in different ways. through performance, history can be re-membered differently and previously erased or deliberately forgotten histories can resurface . in witnessing the collective protests and statue toppling that have been occurring, i have been prompted to think again about dance in the museum and what i have elsewhere termed dance’s poten- tial in the museum to be a means of «radical archaeology» . following archaeologists michael shanks and christopher tilley’s groundbreaking argument, i have previously argued that the dancer in the mu- seum is navigating past and present. like the bristol protestors, in her own way, she is statue toppling; she is “doing” history, remembering, story-telling. for choreography, like archaeology, continually inscribes «the polyvalent qualities of the past» in its present-ness. however, whereas archaeologists aim to survey, excavate and produce texts, and there is rarely recourse to an empathetic (or bodily) understanding of the past, in my own museum practice, the dance aims to communicate the emotions and sensations of [female] bodies from the past to its viewers and to encourage in them an empathetic, visceral connection to the past . this “radical archaeology” that takes place in the bodies of both the dancer and the viewer, is an essential principle behind my own dance practice in the museum where the choreographic reassembly of fragments of bodies, stories and perspectives (akin to an archaeological re-piecing together of broken shards) points to a mode of dismembering and remembering history . as a white feminist scholar, i . helen rees-leahy, watching me, watching you: performance and performativity in the museum, in tony jackson – jenny kidd (edited by), performing heritage: research, practice and innovation in museum theatre and live interpretation, manchester university press, manchester , pp. - : p. . . on notions on the dismembering and remembering of history through performance in the archaeological museum, see further marie-louise crawley, likely terpsichore? dancing in the museum of ancient history and archaeology, in «performance paradigm», n. , , pp. - ; marie-louise crawley, «the crafted body»: thoughts on dancing, viewing and remem- bering, in simon ellis – hetty blades – charlotte waelde (edited by), a world of muscle, bone and organs: research and scholarship in dance, c-dare, coventry , pp. - ; marie-louise crawley, dance as radical archaeology, in «dance research journal», vol. lii, n. , , pp. - . . marie-louise crawley, dance as radical archaeology, cit., p. . . michael shanks – christopher tilley, re-constructing archaeology: theory and practice, routledge, london , p. . . marie-louise crawley, dance as radical archaeology, cit., p. . it is worth noting that there is some overlap with my own propositions in the field of sensory classical archaeology (e.g. eleanor betts, senses of the empire: multisensory approaches to roman culture, routledge, abingdon ) but sensory classical roman archaeology has, to date, mainly focused on the sonic and haptic rather than the kinaesthetic. . my idea of dance as radical archaeology also chimes with work being proposed in the fields of both phenomenology and sensory studies in archaeology. i am indebted to the sensory studies in antiquity network marie­louise crawley have always thought of dance’s radical potential in the museum for doing historiography in terms of revealing previous unrealized female histories in a traditionally patrilineal space. in the wake of the black lives matter protests, my attention has turned once again to the “whiteness” of the marble statues in the archaeological museum – and indeed my own white body and the white mask that i wear in my museum dances – and i have begun to think about the potential for dance as radical historiography for bodies of colour rendered invisible (or only partially visible) by a tidy and oppressive curating of history. in this week of statue toppling, i have thought repeatedly of one very striking museum dance that deserves another look in the light of black lives mattering: apeshit, a music video by hip-hop artists the carters (otherwise known as beyoncé and jay-z). apeshit ( ): the carters’ louvre takeover directed by ricky saiz and choreographed by flemish-moroccan choreographer sidi larbi cherka- oui, apeshit was the first music video to be released from the carters’ album everything is love ( ). filmed inside france’s musée du louvre over two nights in may , the video was released on june th . as concerns how radical dance can be in an art history and archaeology museum, apeshit is quite the statement. with their chorus of dancers, all men and women of colour, bey- oncé and jay-z stage a take-over of the museum and, in doing so, powerfully dance, rap and sing, underscoring themes of cultural ownership, protest and the resistance of black bodies and histories in whitewashed spaces and, by extrapolation, throughout history. as art historian james smalls has writ- ten, this video is «all about bodies […] about establishing a new order in which black bodies seize and command cultural and physical spaces from which they have traditionally been excluded and are typ- ically marginalized» . indeed, as jay-z raps in a lyric that repeats throughout the track, the perspective on how this performance work presents black history and the representation of bodies of colour is clear: «this a different angle». this is a work about reimagining history, and about reassembling “collections” so that they include, and focus on, black bodies . above all, it is important to note the high and complicated stakes of the video’s location given the louvre’s status as one of europe’s most famous art and history museums. on one level, in a track that (www.sensorystudiesinantiquity.com) for pointing me towards the current promotion of the study of senses in the ancient world among archaeologists and ancient historians. . see my performance in likely terpsichore? (fragments), ashmolean museum of art and archaeology, oxford (uk), , online: http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work (accessed / / ). . james smalls, crazy in louvre how beyoncé and jay-z exploit western art history to ask who controls black bodies, in «frieze», th june , online: https://frieze.com/article/crazy-louvre-how-beyonce-and-jay-z-exploit-western-art-history- ask-who-controls-black-bodies (accessed / / ). . throughout this essay, following definitions outlined by reni eddo-lodge, i use bodies of colour to describe bodies that are not white; and the word black «to describe people of african and caribbean heritage, including mixed-race people», cf. reni eddo-lodge, why i’m no longer talking to white people about race, bloomsbury, london , p. xvi. https://sensorystudiesinantiquity.com/ http://podcasts.ox.ac.uk/likely-terpsichore-fragments-solo-durational-dance-work https://frieze.com/article/crazy-louvre-how-beyonce-and-jay-z-exploit-western-art-history-ask-who-controls-black-bodies https://frieze.com/article/crazy-louvre-how-beyonce-and-jay-z-exploit-western-art-history-ask-who-controls-black-bodies «this a different angle»: dancing at the louvre speaks of beyoncé and jay-z’s fame, wealth and having “made it” despite the odds – «i can’t believe we made it», as they rap throughout – that the carters can afford to hire out the louvre for two nights to make a music video in which the first and last shots of them show them in a private audience with leonardo da vinci’s la gioconda (c. - ) is a clear demonstration of their wealth. yet the choice of location for this particular video goes deeper. indeed, it is about status in all senses of the word. as i have outlined above, museums are where we come to remember our past, and our art and our cultural history. furthermore, they are complicated spaces where not only is culture and history displayed but where it is curated. they are public archives in the ancient greek sense of the home of the ἄρχων, the tyrant who holds the power – and it is those in power who choose what is displayed in, and excluded from, museum collections. as classicist helen morales is quick to point out, the louvre museum houses about six thousand paintings, «but only twenty-one women artists have works in the collection, and none are identified as women of colour» . in addition, there are few works in the collection that feature people of colour who are not slaves . originally a royal palace and a private art collection, the louvre was turned into a national, public and free space in . its layout – and the layout of the galleries that are principally featured in apeshit – was originally designed to show france as the rightful heir to the traditions of ancient egypt, greece, rome and the italian renaissance. however, like many other archaeological and art history museums that face accusations of theft, unethical acquisition and cultural appropriation, the louvre’s is a murky history with many “masterpieces” stolen by napoléon bonaparte, emperor of france. stories of plunder and of cultural appropriation lie at the very heart of the louvre’s transition from private palace to public museum. as morales outlines, further complicating matters is the vision of napoleonic france as the “new” rome. the louvre’s foundational narrative is that of classical antiquity as the basis for western european civilisation, «a by-word that is once more becoming code for white euro-american superiority» . the napoleonic galleries of the louvre are whitewashed spaces. what is significant in beyoncé and jay-z carter’s “takeover” of the louvre is exactly that: theirs is a takeover of a traditionally white space with bodies of colour. however, not only does apeshit «criticise the exclusion of black people and culture from the louvre […] it also goes beyond that, by reimagining the space and its collections in ways that create new icons, perspectives, and priorities. it acts as a kind of restorative myth-making» . . helen morales, antigone rising: the subversive power of the ancient myths, wildfire, london , pp. - : p. . . most of the art from africa, asia, oceania and the americas is housed in another of paris’ museums, the musée du quai branly; and only a very small collection is displayed in the denon wing of the louvre. . ivi, p. . recent classical scholarship (donna zuckerberg, not all dead white men: classics and misogyny in the digital age, harvard university press, cambridge ; helen morales, antigone rising, cit.) has pointed out that this may be partly due to the current rise of online “red pill” communities who appropriate ideas from classical antiquity to justify misogynist and racist narratives. . helen morales, antigone rising, cit., p. . marie­louise crawley as such, apeshit is quite clearly dance performance as radical historiography. the title of the work itself is indicative of this: “apeshit” is a north american slang term for “expressing wild excitement and anger” . when the carters sing here about the «crowd going apeshit», they mean it in a double sense: not only in terms of excited audiences enjoying their performances, but in terms of a crowd of angry protestors. while protest and social consciousness are not new themes in hip-hop culture , a hip-hop protest in such a space as the louvre is a new development . beyoncé, jay-z and their dancers are indeed raving in the louvre, in both senses of the word, and they have every cause to do so . re-framing history apeshit opens reflectively, in relative silence, which might be likened to the ambient silence of the museum, bar the noises of passing traffic, a church bell tolling and the wail of a police siren denoting the sign of things to come. it is night and outside the museum a black male dancer with angel wings (reminiscent of a figure from director wim wenders’ wings of desire, ) crouches on the stone steps of the louvre’s parvis, clasping his hands in a gesture of prayer or even, perhaps, wringing them in anguish. the video then cuts to a shot of the ceiling of the louvre’s galerie d’apollon, bathed in pink, blue, green and yellow light. there is a series of fragmented close-ups of a painting of the virgin mary, perhaps holding the body of christ, once taken down from the cross in some sort of pietà, a motif that will later be repeated in the video with a woman holding a male body close to her. we hear the sound of footsteps on the museum’s marble floors drawing closer and as soon as the beat begins, an establishing . nor can we ignore the title’s allusion to the racist trope of comparing black people to apes, an idea that is also clear in jay-z’s final solo verse («i’m a gorilla in the fuckin’ coupe/finna pull up in the zoo/i’m like chief keef meet rafiki, who been lyin’ “king” to you?»). furthermore, at various points underneath the beat, there is a sample of the sound of apes screaming. in the eighteenth century galleries of the louvre, these lyrics and sound effects resound loudly: we cannot help but be reminded of racist eighteenth century anthropological studies of racial difference. . since its origins in the bronx, new york city (usa), in the early s, protest has been a motif running through hip-hop culture and hip-hop has spoken loud to racial inequity. early examples include grandmaster flash and the furious five’s the message ( ) and public enemy’s fight the power ( ). . however, as alicia caticha has pointed out, rap has been performed at the louvre before: in , writer toni morrison invited slam poets from paris’ suburbs to perform in front of géricault’s raft of the medusa, the same paint- ing we see jay-z rapping in front of in apeshit ; cfr. alicia caticha, madame récamier as tableau vivant: marble and the classical ideal in beyoncé and jay-z’s apesh*t, in «journal : a journal of eighteenth century art and culture», th january , online: http://www.journal .org/nq/madame-recamier-as-tableau-vivant-marble-and-the-classical-ideal-in- beyonce-and-jay-zs-apesht-by-alicia-caticha/ (accessed / / ). on the performances, see further alan rid- ing, rap and film at the louvre? what’s up with that?, in «new york times», th november , online: ht- tps://www.nytimes.com/ / / /books/ morr.html (accessed / / ). . while the analysis that i offer here is predominantly from a dance perspective and a musical analysis is beyond my intention, it is worth noting apeshit ’s connection to trap music, a sub-genre of hip-hop that emerged in atlanta (usa) in the s. apeshit adheres to common trap conventions, alternating between sung and shouted moments, the rapid triplet flow of the rapping punctuated by vocal adlibs and noise elements. as such, the song itself is «a sonic palimpsest» (gabriel ellis, on apeshit’s trapness, in «journal of popular music studies», vol. xxx, n. , december , pp. - : p. ), a complex layering of musical and verbal fragments, marked by striking antiphony that serves to both express individuality and affirm collective identity (cf. paul gilroy, the black atlantic: modernity and double consciousness, harvard university press, boston , p. ). http://www.journal .org/nq/madame-recamier-as-tableau-vivant-marble-and-the-classical-ideal-in-beyonce-and-jay-zs-apesht-by-alicia-caticha/ http://www.journal .org/nq/madame-recamier-as-tableau-vivant-marble-and-the-classical-ideal-in-beyonce-and-jay-zs-apesht-by-alicia-caticha/ https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /books/ morr.html https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /books/ morr.html «this a different angle»: dancing at the louvre shot shows beyoncé and jay-z in his and hers pastel suits standing in front of la gioconda and looking directly to camera. a tracking shot pulls focus away from the famous painting to the figures standing in front of it: the famous white face fades away, as the famous black faces come into view. more than the white face figure fixed in pigment on the canvas, the carters’ are living, breathing faces and bodies. the shot that follows sees the carters standing at the top of the museum’s famous daru staircase, standing underneath the winged nike of samothrace, a chorus of female dancers wearing flesh-coloured bodysuits in a variety of skin tones lying on the staircase. as the first lyrics begin, the dancers rise up in unison in a series of graham-style “pleadings” (a series of repetitive contraction and release movements lying prone). with this movement, and the still, sculptural bodies suddenly stirring into dance action, a collection of statues come to life, so begins the carters’ fast-paced museum tour which throughout combines striking juxtapositions of movement and stillness, interspersing cherkaoui’s choreography with still images from the museum collection. as such, this is a (art) history tour being re-written in the moment of performance by the bodies of colour occupying the traditionally “white” space . as several commentators (helen morales, antigone rising, ; james smalls, crazy in louvre, ) have pointed out, throughout the video, there is a vibrant juxtaposition between the sculptural or painted white bodies in the museum and the dancing black bodies, between the stillness of the white marble sculptures and the mobility of the black dancers: «there is a sheer joy in the contrasts here: between the white bodies on the walls and the black bodies in front of them, between the powerful movement of the dancers and the stillness of the artwork, between the reverent silence of the museum and the exuberant sound of the music» . however, from a dance analysis point of view, i would argue that the relationship between stillness and movement here is yet further meaningful and complex. it is more than a simple juxtaposition of “white” fixity and “black” mobility. at several points, as i will argue further below, it is the shifting of the dancers themselves between stillness and movement that is perhaps more significant. throughout, the louvre’s collection becomes the backdrop for the dance and the music; the viewer’s focus is consistently drawn to the dancing, singing bodies in the foreground. this shift in focus points to the carters, and not the louvre collection, as the real artwork . in another shot that occurs later in the video, a chorus of dancers positioned on plinths supplant the museum’s white classical sculptures. here, i am reminded of the bristol protest where, once colston had been toppled, black . interestingly, following the video’s release, in july the louvre began to offer ninety-minute guided tours based on the works featured: https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/louvre-beyonce-jay-z-apeshit-video- / (accessed / / ). . helen morales, antigone rising, cit., p. . . this is not a new approach for jay-z, who used a similar technique in the video of his single picasso baby ( ), which was filmed at new york’s pace gallery (usa) and inspired by the work of performance artist marina abramović (in particular, the artist is present, ). in the video, jay-z is positioned on a stage as the “artwork”, and gallery visitors queue to have the opportunity of him performing the song directly to them as a one-to-one experience. https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-news/louvre-beyonce-jay-z-apeshit-video- / marie­louise crawley activist bodies took up the empty space on the plinth to further protest. by their action of taking up colston’s place on the plinth, they could be seen to be “re-writing” history, their bodies supplanting his. in apeshit, the carters and their dancers quite literally step into the museum collection, and through such an action, they ask the viewer to reflect upon how the art collection – and history – is being re-framed. choreographically, the apotheosis of this re-framing comes with beyoncé’s powerful dancing as she agitates swathes of white material in front of the winged nike of samothrace. the headless body of the sculpture is here eclipsed by the vibrancy of the live dancer: the classical “white” nike (the ancient greek goddess of victory) is eclipsed by a victorious and famous black woman, re-making herself into a living mythological heroine, framing herself as no less than a living goddess . at another moment in the video, beyoncé stands in front of the famous venus de milo sculpture – the first time she is in stillness, at two later- points she is dancing – and both her still pose and then her movements echo the statue’s form and point out its fragmentation. beyoncé’s arms “complete” the fragmented statue and, as such, the dance does the work of the restoration and the reworking of history. for me, both these examples of beyoncé’s dance in the louvre work as examples of what i call the “fragmentary monumental”, an action that – by “completing” the fragmentary presentation of monuments in the museum, through the dance, present a different angle of the collection and might thus be able to resituate oppressed bodies on the inside of power but on their own terms, and, eventually, to enable an alternative means of viewing history. furthermore, as she dances in front of both of these classical sculptures, the juxtaposition of bey- oncé’s «black body with the white marble challenges long-held assumptions about whiteness, antiquity and beauty» . it reminds the viewer to question the power of the “whiteness” that is at stake in the museum. indeed, as recent classical scholarship has reminded us, not all ancient statues were white. they were polychromatic: they were brightly coloured, and they did not always portray white people. the striking way in which the statues in apeshit are lit – particularly the blue light cast on the white venus de milo and on hermes tying his sandal – points out this forgotten polychromy. the lighting of the statues and the dancing bodies in front of them remind us that history is not always what it seems; it is not always what those in power have told us it is. the juxtapositions at work here again . it is important to note that beyoncé has a history of reworking mythical heroines and goddesses into her imagery and her performances: she has previously cast herself as venus (in a series of photographs on instagram in to announce her pregnancy), nefertiti (coachella performance, ), and as the yoruba goddess oshun, venus and the virgin mary (grammy awards ceremony, ). on this, see further, helen morales, antigone rising, cit., pp. - . as helen morales points out, in this, beyoncé is part of a wider tradition of black activist feminist art – see kara walker’s installations a subtlety, or the marvelous sugar baby ( ) and safety curtain at the vienna state opera house ( - ); hip-hop artist monae smith’s work as medusa, “the lyrical seducer”, dorothea smartt’s poetry collection connecting medium ( ) and robin coste hughes’ poetry collection voyage of the sable venus ( ). . helen morales, antigone rising, cit., p. . . especially sarah bond, why we need to start seeing the classical world in color, in «hyperallergic», june th , online: https://hyperallergic.com/ /why-we-need-to-start-seeing-the-classical-world-in-color/ (accessed / / ). https://hyperallergic.com/ /why-we-need-to-start-seeing-the-classical-world-in-color/ «this a different angle»: dancing at the louvre point out how the traditionally curated vision of european history has, like its classical statuary, been whitewashed. throughout this video, it is the power and “liveness” of the dance that helps the viewer to see this. one of the video’s most powerful dance sequences sees beyoncé in the centre of a chorus-line of female dancers in their nude bodysuits, positioned directly in front of jacques-louis david’s sacre de l’empereur napoléon ier et couronnement de l’impératrice joséphine dans la cathédrale notre-dame de paris, le décembre ( ). in the way that the shot is framed both choreographically and cinemato- graphically, it appears that napoléon is crowning beyoncé rather than the joséphine. the black creole woman replaces the white creole woman, just as «beyoncé and jay-z become the new royalty of the louvre» . the choreographic crowning physicalizes the motif of the couple as twenty-first century royalty taking over the louvre “palace”, a space previously denied to bodies like theirs; a motif that echoes throughout the song in the recurring lyric, «i can’t believe we made it». this same lyric takes on greater significance when it occurs first with the couple’s sculptural stillness in front of the sculpture of the great sphinx of tanis, and then again with the group shot of the crowd of dancers moving furiously and “going apeshit” in the same location. for while the louvre displays ancient egyptian art along with the ancient greek and roman art, and can thus be seen to be appropriating and claiming african art as part of a eurocentric art history, this lyric sees the carters claiming this heritage back: the line «i can’t believe we made it» here speaks to african artists and their descendants. there is something significant in the stillness within the dance at these moments, in the ways in which beyoncé, jay-z and the dancers shift from sculptural stillness into sudden, vibrant motion. for me, this speaks back to performance theorist andré lepecki’s reading of anthropologist nadia serematakis’ concept of «still-acts» as the moment of the refusal of «the sedimentation of history into neat layers» . it is that moment of stillness before the eruption into movement where the layers of history come crashing away, that «moment of exit from historical dust» . in such moments, the stillness in the dance allows for a different temporality, a new relationship with the time and space of history, one that is no longer chronological, but unstable, contractile and fragmentary, one that is no longer diachronic but synchronic, allowing different angles, different stories, different bodies and different histories to emerge. as such, apeshit consistently reframes european art history and thus also reframes perspectives on race, bodies and power. not only is background is swapped for foreground, but tiny details in paintings are focussed on and positioned in sharp juxtaposition with the dancing, moving bodies, so . beyoncé makes claim to her creole ancestry in her song formation ( ). joséphine de beauharnais was born in les trois-Îlets, on the caribbean island of martinique. . helen morales, antigone rising, cit., p. . . andré lepecki, exhausting dance: performance and the politics of movement, routledge, abingdon , p. . . ibidem. . nadia serematakis, the senses still: perception and memory as material culture in modernity, university of chicago press, chicago , p. (my emphasis). marie­louise crawley that bodies that have previously been hidden or rendered invisible in the art-works themselves are revealed. while several art historical studies have already to date examined this in detail and the close focus of this article is on the choreographic, i do want to cite one example here and that is paolo veronese’s le nozze di cana ( ). in this canvas, the black bodies of servants are present in the painting, but they are hidden in corners and easily overlooked; juxtaposed with the vibrancy of the dancers’ bodies, they are suddenly thrown into sharp relief. the viewer is called to do the work to see the bodies that have historically been overlooked: it is the dancers’ dancing bodies that offer the lens through which we might re-view these painted bodies, and begin to reassemble bodily histories previously rendered invisible. this re-viewing becomes yet more pressing as, throughout the video, there are significant allusions to artworks by artists of colour that have, until now, been “invisible” in such a canonical space as the louvre. for example, the hair-styling scene in front of la gioconda echoes a painting from carrie mae weems’ kitchen table series ( ) and the hand-holding dance of beyoncé and her chorus in front of david’s coronation is reminiscent of faith ringold’s story quilt, itself significantly entitled dancing at the louvre and from which i have borrowed the title for this essay. through such rich visual allusions, akin to the culture of inter-textual and musical sampling in hip-hop, the carters can be seen to be reclaiming a space for artists of colour in the “white” space of the louvre: and it is both the positioning and movement of the dancers’ bodies that enable this powerful re-visioning. apeshit ’s visual and choreographic call to review received historical narratives gains in urgency throughout its six minutes: however, it is particularly potent at the moments where the choreography becomes explicitly one of protest. broken bodies, protesting bodies it is undeniable that protest is a central theme of apeshit. at times, the crowd «going apeshit» is an angry, dancing crowd. this anger is no less eloquent, but arguably more so, for the shifts between the fluidity and vibrancy of the choreography and the stillness at work within it. as i have pointed out above, sometimes this is a shift between the still images of the artwork and the moving, dancing bodies; sometimes, it is the stillness within the choreography that does the work of protest. in the following section, i want to offer a close examination of three striking examples of where in the video this can . see especially constance grady, the meaning behind the classical paintings in beyoncé and jay-z’s apeshit, in «vox», th june , online: https://www.vox.com/culture/ / / / /apeshit-video-beyonce-jay-z-carters-portrait- negresse-benoist (accessed / / ); ariel lebeau, an art history expert breaks down beyoncé and jay-z’s apeshit video, in «fader», june th , online: https://www.thefader.com/ / / /beyonce-jay-z-apeshit-art-history-expert- louvre-mona-lisa (accessed / / ); carol vernallis, tracing the carters through the galleries, in «journal of popular music studies», vol. xxx, n. , december , pp. - . . see dan cameron (edited by), dancing at the louvre: faith ringgold’s french collection and other story quilts, uni- versity of california press, berkeley . https://www.vox.com/culture/ / / / /apeshit-video-beyonce-jay-z-carters-portrait-negresse-benoist https://www.vox.com/culture/ / / / /apeshit-video-beyonce-jay-z-carters-portrait-negresse-benoist https://www.thefader.com/ / / /beyonce-jay-z-apeshit-art-history-expert-louvre-mona-lisa https://www.thefader.com/ / / /beyonce-jay-z-apeshit-art-history-expert-louvre-mona-lisa «this a different angle»: dancing at the louvre be seen to be happening. the first is the inverted still image of the still bodies of the dancers on the daru staircase mentioned above. following the shot of their bodies moving in bursts of contraction and release, in convulsive graham-style pleadings that, traditionally in graham-based technique, can express moments of extreme emotional power, the dancers’ bodies become quiet and motionless. here, the shot is inverted and we see the still bodies of colour seemingly suspended or hanging upside down. there is a clear visual and spatial allusion to historical drawings of enslaved bodies in the hold of a slave ship. it is perhaps the first indication in apeshit of the oppressed black body . furthermore, commenting on the daru staircase sequence, cherkouai states how he felt that this moment was «my way of paying homage to the contraction of martha graham. i made it my own, so it had this kind of crunch effect, yes. you pull inside and then back, like you’re broken and then returned to stillness» . cherkouai’s image of the contraction and release movement here being a moment of the body breaking, fragmenting, and then returning to sculptural stillness, in addition to the stillness of the freeze-frame on the suspended “broken” bodies on the staircase, can be seen as another moment of the “fragmentary monumental”: it is a moment of not so quiet protest. similarly, another striking moment of stillness is the lingering shot of two dancers seated in front of david’s portrait de madame récamier ( ). the dancers are connected by their heads to the same length of white cloth turban, which prefigures the white wrapped head-cloth in marie-guillemine benoist’s portrait d’une femme noire ( ), formerly known as portrait d’une négresse, which appears towards the end of the video. the dancers’ connected bodies echo the composition of the painting: there is no dancing, singing or rapping at this point, just a moment of quiet stillness between the dancers’ bodies and the painted body on the canvas. however, in its choreographic composition, this is a moment of choreographic quietness that speaks volumes. as art historian alicia caticha has argued, the image can be seen to be reworking the tableau vivant tradition of the eighteenth century, with the carters appropriating «this self-referential parlor game as a visual analogy for their own success in a culture of systemic racism» . while art historian and curator georgina downey has noted how . the suspended, “hanging” image is perhaps also reminiscent of the «strange fruit hanging from poplar trees» that billie holliday sings of strange fruit ( ), a song protesting about the lynching of black americans in the american south. . cherkaouai cited in michelle kim, the choreographer for the carters’ apeshit video on being inspired by mythology and martha graham, june st , online: https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/choreographer-beyonce-jayz-apeshit-video- interview-inspired-by-mythology-martha-graham/ (accessed / / ), my emphasis. . alicia caticha, madame récamier as tableau vivant, cit. this is not the first time that performance in the museum has used the idea of reworking the tableau vivant to make a political statement – see further manuel pelmus and alexandra pirici’s public collection ( ) where, through what the artists term «continuous actions», performers in the museum use their bodies to re-enact artworks on display, and physical, bodily enactment becomes a strategy to attempt to (re)-claim history. another example might be the museum dance works of choreographer alexis blake such as allegory of the painted woman ( - ) and conditions of an ideal ( ). . georgina downey, beautiful no-bodies? the dancers in beyoncé and jay-z’s apeshit, august th , online: http://www.georginadowney.com/writing-and-art-a-blog/ / / /beautiful-no-bodies-the-dancers-in-beyonc-and-jay-zs- apeshit (accessed / / ). https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/choreographer-beyonce-jayz-apeshit-video-interview-inspired-by-mythology-martha-graham/ https://pitchfork.com/thepitch/choreographer-beyonce-jayz-apeshit-video-interview-inspired-by-mythology-martha-graham/ http://www.georginadowney.com/writing-and-art-a-blog/ / / /beautiful-no-bodies-the-dancers-in-beyonc-and-jay-zs-apeshit http://www.georginadowney.com/writing-and-art-a-blog/ / / /beautiful-no-bodies-the-dancers-in-beyonc-and-jay-zs-apeshit marie­louise crawley this scene may also have echoes of ulay and marina abramović’s performance relation in time ( ) where the two artists knotted their hair together for seventeen hours, caticha points out how the long white headscarf more significantly makes reference to photographer john edmond’s series, du- rags. the du-rag itself has its origins in headscarves of enslaved women and so the dancers in front of the récamier portrait through their «bodies […] make present what is absent: the slave labor that was responsible for the consumerist luxuries in david’s portrait de madame récamier and eighteenth- century french culture writ large» . furthermore, the du-rag is a motif that is positioned in opposition to the white ideal of the neo- classical dress of madame récamier and in its sculptural folds, it also stands in opposition with the marble statuary that we see throughout the video. beyoncé too embraces this artefact as an object of resistance and re-appropriates it: at another point in the video, we see her reclining in the gallery, in a pose not too dissimilar from madame récamier’s, wearing a silk headscarf. in fact, perhaps the most striking still image is the video’s final cut to benoist’s portrait d’une femme noire, the sitter recently renamed through research by anne lafont ( ) and, in some way, rescued from the erasure that comes with anonymity. as art historian james stalls argues, of all the art-works re-appropriated in the video, this highly complex painting with many things happening in it across the realm of politics, race, gender, class and strategies of looking and being looked at […] is the […] one that most significant to beyoncé’s strategic manipulation of the bodily presence and absence of black women [in the museum collection] . significantly, the portrait is never directly visually paired with beyoncé. the painting is cropped so that we only see the sitter from the neck up and the camera lingers on her facial expression. this has two effects: first, we are forced to confront her gaze; second, her exposed breast (which is in the full portrait) is strategically removed so any opportunity for the “traditional” objectification of a woman of colour in western art tradition is also removed. in such a way, the black woman is given back her body; and that black body is one that is not longer objectified, subjugated or oppressed, but that is celebrated by the bodies of beyoncé and her female dancers moving powerfully through the museum, dancing a dance of resistance. however, perhaps the most explicit choreographic reference to resistance and protest comes later in the video where there is a shot of young black men outside the louvre “taking the knee”. this pose is a direct allusion to the physical gesture of kneeling during the national anthem that marked the national football league (nfl) player protests against police brutality and the killing of unarmed black men, first started in by player colin kaepernick. it is a pose that has also marked the most . alicia caticha, madame récamier as tableau vivant, cit. . james smalls, crazy in louvre, cit. «this a different angle»: dancing at the louvre recent black lives matter protests; and it is a gesture that can now be read as horrifyingly similar to the police officer’s pose as he knelt on the neck of george floyd. in apeshit, the shot of the kneeling protestors directly follows a shot of a classical statue, a roman version of a greek statue by lysippus of hermes tying his sandal, which is in a similar pose. it occurs on a lyric where jay-z is critical of the nfl («i said no to the superbowl / you need me, i don’t need you / every night we in the end-zone / tell the nfl, we in stadiums too»). this is the concluding criticism of a verse that may also allude to donald trump (as the th president of the usa). as jay-z warns, change is coming: « - , i got change for you». as morales has noted, the juxtaposition between the kneeling statue and the kneeling protests is striking: the juxtaposition of the image of hermes with his knee bent inside the louvre with that of the kneeling protestors outside the louvre co-opts the statue, bringing the ancient god on board as part of the modern protest. hermes becomes an advocate for black lives mattering; he is given a better purpose than fiddling with his footwear. the modern ennobles the classical (a reversal of the expected dynamic) . what morales does not further unpick here is the relationship between exterior and interior. while “white” hermes is inside the museum, the black male protesting bodies remain, at least mo- mentarily, on the outside. however, the exterior shot is followed by an interior shot of jay-z, having «made it» and rapping in front of théodore géricault’s le radeau de la méduse ( - ). as art historian james smalls has commented: this painting contains three black men among the human debris who are used emblematically by the artist to relay the story of a human tragedy. the most visible black figure is located at the apex of the composition. he is energetic and heroic in his display of a muscular back […] at one brief moment, jay-z is caught gazing up at the black hercules who constitutes the focal point of the drama and symbolizes black people as both survivors and saviours . this theme of survival, despite oppression and restriction, continues choreographically through- out the video. it is visible in a powerful montage that includes shots of bone-breaker and hip-hop dancer nicholas “slick” stewart contorting his arms in front of la gioconda, his limbs seemingly breaking; in the recurring motifs of the coiling, twisting arms of the female dancers juxtaposed with still shots where the camera zooms in on close-up, detailed images of the coiled ropes of le radeau de la méduse, and of dancers’ hands apparently bound in rope, and the liberating, invigorating «cross-cut breaking free of ropes; a black female dancer vigorously dancing; the same dancer in full flexion with her hair thrown back» . this is a danced and sung story about the survival of oppressed and broken bodies; about how we might re-assemble them those broken bodies through revisions of history, and about . helen morales, antigone rising, cit., p. . . james smalls, crazy in louvre, cit. . carol vernallis, tracing the carters through the galleries, cit. marie­louise crawley how that necessitates a deep work of protest. what apeshit reveals is that through such protest, spaces and history can be re-appropriated, and previously invisible or partially visible bodies be made more visible. such “statue toppling” can be a cause for celebration: at such a time, the dancing crowd can indeed «go apeshit». conclusion: «this a different angle» re-viewing this video in the context of the black lives matter protests and the calls for colonial statues to fall, i am struck by how vital apeshit is for thinking about how dance in the museum can be a mechanism to give a space for previously invisible or erased bodies to resurface and tell their stories. perhaps the dance is, in fact, more than “metaphorical” statue toppling; for it also does the work of protest, reassembling broken bodies into an alternative fullness. it does the work of re-constructing history; it is historiography in artful action. in apeshit, the protest seeps through most powerfully in the choreographic juxtapositions of movement and stillness, where the layers of history fall away and the statues crumble, until life and movement emerges anew from the historical dust. here, we can read dance as the “fragmentary monumental”, an action for re-assembling the fragments of bodies that history has broken, that does the vital work of remembering the deliberately forgotten, lost and erased . piecing together the fragments and recognising who and what has been made to slip through the cracks is where we, the viewer, have to do the work: it is not just the content of apeshit (the lyrics and the things featured in the video) that is a form of protest, but also the process in which it engages the viewer and the listener. the insistence that the viewer makes connections, the refusal to simplify, and the sheer richness of historical, artistic and ideological textures created: all this is a form of cultural resistance . in re-examining the particular ways in which the stillness and movement of both the choreography and the cinematography are woven together in apeshit, as well as how bodies of colour surge into a public space that has historically been denied them in a dance that is simultaneously protesting and celebratory, we can make a claim for dancing in the museum as a radical means of powerfully challenging and resisting the art historical status quo. through dance in the museum, we can begin to call history to account and look at it from a “different angle”. in the public spaces where we come to remember uncomfortable and difficult histories, the ground is shaking. in paris, the crowd is going apeshit; in bristol, a colonial statue comes crashing down. from the dust, previously invisible bodies rise up, and as they do, they dance. . the way in which apeshit ’s complex sonic layering re-assembles fragments of song, shouts, noise elements and vocal adlibs (see above, footnote ) reinforces this idea of the “fragmentary monumental” musically as well as choreographically. . helen morales, antigone rising, cit., p. . basecoverletter_ext september , dapper stats juniper l simonis dear juniper l simonis: re: order no.: fax tel: ( ) - ne th ave portland, or specialty analytical se jannsen rd clackamas, oregon website: www.specialtyanalytical.com tel: - - fax: - - specialty analytical received sample(s) on / / for the analyses presented in the following report. marty french revised report: please see case narrative for information on revision. there were no problems with the analysis and all data for associated qc met epa or laboratory specifications, except where noted in the case narrative, or as qualified with flags. results apply only to the samples analyzed. without approval of the laboratory, the reproduction of this report is only permitted in its entirety. if you have any questions regarding these tests, please feel free to call. sincerely, lab director http://www.specialtyanalytical.com project: client: dapper stats / / case narrative date: wo#: specialty analytical revision : report revised to reflect correct client sample ids. revision : full name for svoc tics which names are not fully displayed are as follows: sample : benzo[c]thiophen- ( h)-one, -( -o: cas # - - : benzo[c]thiophen- ( h)-one, -( -oxobenzo[c]thien- ( h)-ylidene)-, €- isoindole- , ( h, h)-dione, -benz: cas # - - : -benzoyl- -( -methylphenyl)- h-isoindole- , ( h)-dione sample : h-indene- , ( h)-dione, -( -quin: cas # - - : -( -quinolyl)- h-indene- , ( h)-dione -hydroxy- -(p-toluidine)anthraqui: cas # - - : -hydroxy- -(p-toluidino)anthraquinone sample : h-indene- , ( h)-dione, -( -quin: cas # - - : -( -quinolyl)- h-indene- , ( h)-dione -benzoylamino- -benzyl-butyric ac: cas # - - : -benzoylamino- -oxo- -phenyl-butyric acid methyl ester benzenamine, , -dibromo- -nitro-: cas # - - : , -dibromo- -nitroaniline sample : benzene, , - -methyl- -phenylt: cas # - - : , '-[ -methyl- -(phenylthio)cyclopropylidene]bisbenzene project: client: dapper stats / / case narrative date: wo#: specialty analytical sample : , -di-tert-butyl- -(dimethylamino: cas # - - : , -di-tert-butyl- -(dimethylaminomethyl)phenol sample : hexanedioic acid, bis( -ethylhexyl: cas # - - : bis( -ethylhexyl) adipate sample : propanedinitrile, (phenylmethylene: cas # - - : benzylidenemalononitrile project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: client sample id: truck medic / - / lab id: - collection date: matrix: analyses result qual units date analyzeddfrl icp/ms metals-total recoverable sw b analyst: aw chromium / / : : pm µg/kg nd lead / / : : pm µg/kg nd zinc / / : : pm µg/kg tic - semivolatile e e analyst: ck tic's / / : : am see below tic: benzo[c]thiophen- ( h)-one, -( -o / / : : amµg/kg . tic: isoindole- , ( h, h)-dione, - benz / / : : amµg/kg tic: phthalic anhydride / / : : amµg/kg volatile organics by gc/ms sw d analyst: ck , , , -tetrachloroethane q / / : : am µg/kg nd , , -trichloroethane q / / : : am µg/kg nd , , , -tetrachloroethane q / / : : am µg/kg nd , , -trichloroethane q / / : : am µg/kg nd , -dichloroethane q / / : : am µg/kg nd , -dichloroethene q / / : : am µg/kg nd , -dichloropropene q / / : : am µg/kg nd , , -trichlorobenzene q / / : : am µg/kg nd , , -trichloropropane q / / : : am µg/kg nd , , -trichlorobenzene q / / : : am µg/kg nd , , -trimethylbenzene q / / : : 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µg/kg nd styrene q / / : : am µg/kg nd tert-butylbenzene q / / : : am µg/kg nd tetrachloroethene q / / : : am µg/kg nd toluene q / / : : am µg/kg nd trans- , -dichloroethene q / / : : am µg/kg nd trans- , -dichloropropene q / / : : am µg/kg nd trichloroethene q / / : : am µg/kg nd trichlorofluoromethane q / / : : am µg/kg nd vinyl chloride q / / : : am µg/kg nd surr: , -dichloroethane-d / / : : am . - %rec page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: volatile organics by gc/ms sw d analyst: ck surr: -bromofluorobenzene / / : : am . - %rec . surr: dibromofluoromethane / / : : am . - %rec . surr: toluene-d / / : : am . - %rec . tic - volatiles e d analyst: ck tic's / / : : am see below tic: p-xylene / / : : amµg/kg tic: toluene / / : : amµg/kg page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: client sample id: hc smoke can lab id: - collection date: matrix: analyses result qual units date analyzeddfrl icp/ms metals-total recoverable sw b analyst: aw chromium / / : : pm µg/kg lead / / : : pm µg/kg zinc / / : : pm µg/kg e+ tic - semivolatile e e analyst: ck tic's / / : : am see below tic: h-indene- , ( h)-dione, - ( -quin e / / : : amµg/kg tic: -hydroxy- -(p- toluidine)anthraqui / / : : amµg/kg tic: -o-demethylsalutaridine / / : : amµg/kg tic: phthalic anhydride / / : : amµg/kg . volatile organics by gc/ms sw d analyst: ck , , , -tetrachloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , , -tetrachloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trimethylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dibromo- -chloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dibromoethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trimethylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -butanone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -chloroethyl vinyl ether q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -chlorotoluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -hexanone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: volatile organics by gc/ms sw d analyst: ck -chlorotoluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -isopropyltoluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -methyl- -pentanone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd acetone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd acetonitrile q / / : : pm µg/kg nd acrolein q / / : : pm µg/kg nd benzene / / : : pm µg/kg bromobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromochloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromodichloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromoform q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromomethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd carbon disulfide q / / : : pm µg/kg nd carbon tetrachloride q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chloroform q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd cis- , -dichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd cis- , -dichloropropene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd dibromochloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd dibromomethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd dichlorodifluoromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd ethylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd hexachlorobutadiene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd isopropylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd m,p-xylene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd methyl tert-butyl ether q / / : : pm µg/kg nd methylene chloride q / / : : pm µg/kg nd naphthalene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd n-butylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd n-propylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd o-xylene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd sec-butylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd styrene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd tert-butylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd tetrachloroethene / / : : pm µg/kg toluene / / : : pm µg/kg trans- , -dichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trans- , -dichloropropene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trichlorofluoromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd vinyl chloride q / / : : pm µg/kg nd page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: volatile organics by gc/ms sw d analyst: ck surr: , -dichloroethane-d / / : : pm . - %rec surr: -bromofluorobenzene / / : : pm . - %rec . surr: dibromofluoromethane / / : : pm . - %rec . surr: toluene-d / / : : pm . - %rec . tic - volatiles e d analyst: ck tic's / / : : pm see below tic: decyl pentyl ester sulfurous acid / / : : pmµg/kg tic: dimethylundecane / / : : pmµg/kg tic: hexachloroethane / / : : pmµg/kg tic: pentamethylheptane / / : : pmµg/kg tic: tetramethyldodecane / / : : pmµg/kg tic: tetramethylheptane / / : : pmµg/kg tic: tetramethyloctane / / : : pmµg/kg tic: trimethyldecane / / : : pmµg/kg tic: trimethylhexane / / : : pmµg/kg page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: client sample id: a's backpack lab id: - collection date: matrix: analyses result qual units date analyzeddfrl icp/ms metals-total recoverable sw b analyst: aw chromium / / : : pm µg/kg nd lead / / : : pm µg/kg nd zinc / / : : pm µg/kg tic - semivolatile e e analyst: ck tic's / / : : am see below tic: .alpha. naphtholphthalein / / : : amµg/kg . tic: h-indene- , ( h)-dione, - ( -quin / / : : amµg/kg . tic: -benzoylamino- -benzyl- butyric ac / / : : amµg/kg . tic: -hydroxy- -nitrobipheny / / : : amµg/kg . tic: benzenamine, , -dibromo- - nitro- / / : : amµg/kg . tic: benzenamine, -chloro- , - dinitro- / / : : amµg/kg . tic: benzene / / : : amµg/kg volatile organics by gc/ms sw d analyst: ck , , , -tetrachloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , , -tetrachloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trimethylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dibromo- -chloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dibromoethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trimethylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: volatile organics by gc/ms sw d analyst: ck -butanone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -chloroethyl vinyl ether q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -chlorotoluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -hexanone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -chlorotoluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -isopropyltoluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -methyl- -pentanone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd acetone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd acetonitrile q / / : : pm µg/kg nd acrolein q / / : : pm µg/kg nd benzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromochloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromodichloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromoform q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromomethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd carbon disulfide q / / : : pm µg/kg nd carbon tetrachloride q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chloroform q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd cis- , -dichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd cis- , -dichloropropene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd dibromochloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd dibromomethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd dichlorodifluoromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd ethylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd hexachlorobutadiene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd isopropylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd m,p-xylene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd methyl tert-butyl ether q / / : : pm µg/kg nd methylene chloride q / / : : pm µg/kg nd naphthalene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd n-butylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd n-propylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd o-xylene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd sec-butylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd styrene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd tert-butylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd tetrachloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd toluene / / : : pm µg/kg trans- , -dichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: volatile organics by gc/ms sw d analyst: ck trans- , -dichloropropene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trichlorofluoromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd vinyl chloride q / / : : pm µg/kg nd surr: , -dichloroethane-d / / : : pm . - %rec surr: -bromofluorobenzene / / : : pm . - %rec . surr: dibromofluoromethane / / : : pm . - %rec . surr: toluene-d / / : : pm . - %rec . tic - volatiles e d analyst: ck tic's / / : : pm see below tic: hexanal / / : : pmµg/kg tic: nonanal / / : : pmµg/kg page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: client sample id: plants rd & salmon lab id: - collection date: matrix: analyses result qual units date analyzeddfrl icp/ms metals-total recoverable sw b analyst: aw chromium / / : : pm µg/kg lead / / : : pm µg/kg zinc / / : : pm µg/kg tic - semivolatile e e analyst: ck tic's / / : : am see below tic: h-purine- , -dione, , - dihydro- / / : : amµg/kg . tic: ( h)naphthalenone, , , , , , a-h / / : : amµg/kg . tic: , -phenanthrenediol, , , , , a, / / : : amµg/kg . tic: eicosane / / : : amµg/kg . tic: heptadecane / / : : amµg/kg . tic: tridecanoic acid / / : : amµg/kg . volatile organics by gc/ms sw d analyst: ck , , , -tetrachloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , , -tetrachloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trimethylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dibromo- -chloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dibromoethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trimethylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -butanone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: volatile organics by gc/ms sw d analyst: ck -chloroethyl vinyl ether q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -chlorotoluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -hexanone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -chlorotoluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -isopropyltoluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -methyl- -pentanone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd acetone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd acetonitrile q / / : : pm µg/kg nd acrolein q / / : : pm µg/kg nd benzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromochloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromodichloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromoform q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromomethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd carbon disulfide q / / : : pm µg/kg nd carbon tetrachloride q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chloroform q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd cis- , -dichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd cis- , -dichloropropene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd dibromochloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd dibromomethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd dichlorodifluoromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd ethylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd hexachlorobutadiene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd isopropylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd m,p-xylene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd methyl tert-butyl ether q / / : : pm µg/kg nd methylene chloride q / / : : pm µg/kg nd naphthalene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd n-butylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd n-propylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd o-xylene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd sec-butylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd styrene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd tert-butylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd tetrachloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd toluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trans- , -dichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trans- , -dichloropropene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: volatile organics by gc/ms sw d analyst: ck trichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trichlorofluoromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd vinyl chloride q / / : : pm µg/kg nd surr: , -dichloroethane-d / / : : pm . - %rec surr: -bromofluorobenzene / / : : pm . - %rec surr: dibromofluoromethane / / : : pm . - %rec . surr: toluene-d / / : : pm . - %rec . tic - volatiles e d analyst: ck tic's / / : : pm see below tic: , ,- dimethylcyclopentane / / : : pmµg/kg tic: d-limonene / / : : pmµg/kg tic: hexanal / / : : pmµg/kg tic: methyl ester acetic acid / / : : pmµg/kg tic: nonanal / / : : pmµg/kg tic: pinene / / : : pmµg/kg page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: client sample id: surface soil lownsdale lab id: - collection date: matrix: analyses result qual units date analyzeddfrl icp/ms metals-total recoverable sw b analyst: aw chromium / / : : pm µg/kg lead / / : : pm µg/kg zinc / / : : pm µg/kg tic - semivolatile e e analyst: ck tic's / / : : pm see below tic: benzene, , - -methyl- - phenylt / / : : pmµg/kg tic: n-hexadecanoic acid / / : : pmµg/kg tic: nonivamide / / : : pmµg/kg tic: oleic acid / / : : pmµg/kg tic: pentadecanoic acid / / : : pmµg/kg . tic: stigmast- -en- -one / / : : pmµg/kg . tic: styrene / / : : pmµg/kg volatile organics by gc/ms sw d analyst: ck , , , -tetrachloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , , -tetrachloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trimethylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dibromo- -chloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dibromoethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trimethylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -butanone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -chloroethyl vinyl ether q / / : : pm µg/kg nd page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: volatile organics by gc/ms sw d analyst: ck -chlorotoluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -hexanone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -chlorotoluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -isopropyltoluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -methyl- -pentanone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd acetone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd acetonitrile q / / : : pm µg/kg nd acrolein q / / : : pm µg/kg nd benzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromochloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromodichloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromoform q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromomethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd carbon disulfide q / / : : pm µg/kg nd carbon tetrachloride q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chloroform q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd cis- , -dichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd cis- , -dichloropropene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd dibromochloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd dibromomethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd dichlorodifluoromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd ethylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd hexachlorobutadiene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd isopropylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd m,p-xylene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd methyl tert-butyl ether q / / : : pm µg/kg nd methylene chloride q / / : : pm µg/kg nd naphthalene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd n-butylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd n-propylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd o-xylene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd sec-butylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd styrene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd tert-butylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd tetrachloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd toluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trans- , -dichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trans- , -dichloropropene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: volatile organics by gc/ms sw d analyst: ck trichlorofluoromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd vinyl chloride q / / : : pm µg/kg nd surr: , -dichloroethane-d / / : : pm . - %rec . surr: -bromofluorobenzene / / : : pm . - %rec . surr: dibromofluoromethane / / : : pm . - %rec . surr: toluene-d / / : : pm . - %rec . tic - volatiles e d analyst: ck tic's / / : : pm see below tic: -methylbenzene / / : : pmµg/kg tic: -chlorobenzaldehyde / / : : pmµg/kg tic: bicyclohexan- -one / / : : pmµg/kg tic: butylated hydroxytoluene / / : : pmµg/kg tic: nonanal / / : : pmµg/kg tic: pinene / / : : pmµg/kg tic: toluene / / : : pmµg/kg page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: client sample id: rd street / lab id: - collection date: matrix: analyses result qual units date analyzeddfrl icp/ms metals-total recoverable sw b analyst: aw chromium / / : : pm µg/kg nd lead / / : : pm µg/kg nd zinc / / : : pm µg/kg tic - semivolatile e e analyst: ck tic's / / : : am see below tic: , -octanediol / / : : amµg/kg . tic: -hentriacontanone / / : : amµg/kg . tic: , -di-tert-butyl- - (dimethylamino / / : : amµg/kg . tic: diethyl phthalate / / : : amµg/kg tic: oleic acid / / : : amµg/kg . tic: phthalic acid, , - difluorophenyl / / : : amµg/kg . tic: squalene / / : : amµg/kg . tic: tridecanoic acid / / : : amµg/kg . volatile organics by gc/ms sw d analyst: ck , , , -tetrachloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , , -tetrachloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trimethylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dibromo- -chloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dibromoethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trimethylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: volatile organics by gc/ms sw d analyst: ck -butanone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -chloroethyl vinyl ether q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -chlorotoluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -hexanone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -chlorotoluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -isopropyltoluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -methyl- -pentanone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd acetone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd acetonitrile q / / : : pm µg/kg nd acrolein q / / : : pm µg/kg nd benzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromochloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromodichloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromoform q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromomethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd carbon disulfide q / / : : pm µg/kg nd carbon tetrachloride q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chloroform q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd cis- , -dichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd cis- , -dichloropropene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd dibromochloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd dibromomethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd dichlorodifluoromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd ethylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd hexachlorobutadiene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd isopropylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd m,p-xylene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd methyl tert-butyl ether q / / : : pm µg/kg nd methylene chloride q / / : : pm µg/kg nd naphthalene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd n-butylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd n-propylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd o-xylene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd sec-butylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd styrene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd tert-butylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd tetrachloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd toluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trans- , -dichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: volatile organics by gc/ms sw d analyst: ck trans- , -dichloropropene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trichlorofluoromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd vinyl chloride q / / : : pm µg/kg nd surr: , -dichloroethane-d / / : : pm . - %rec surr: -bromofluorobenzene / / : : pm . - %rec . surr: dibromofluoromethane / / : : pm . - %rec . surr: toluene-d / / : : pm . - %rec tic - volatiles e d analyst: ck tic's / / : : pm see below tic: -chlorobenzaldehyde / / : : pmµg/kg tic: -ethylacrolein / / : : pmµg/kg tic: cyclopentane / / : : pmµg/kg tic: decyl ester acetic acid / / : : pmµg/kg tic: ethylmethylpentanol / / : : pmµg/kg tic: methyl ester acetic acid / / : : pmµg/kg tic: methylheptanol / / : : pmµg/kg tic: nonanal / / : : pmµg/kg tic: trimethylcyclopentane / / : : pmµg/kg page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: client sample id: emily's shirt lab id: - collection date: matrix: analyses result qual units date analyzeddfrl icp/ms metals-total recoverable sw b analyst: aw chromium / / : : pm . µg/l . lead / / : : pm . µg/l . zinc / / : : pm . µg/l tic - semivolatile e e analyst: ck tic's / / : : am see below tic: , , , , , - tetracosahexaene / / : : amµg/kg . tic: pentaethylene glycol / / : : amµg/kg . tic: tetradecanoic acid / / : : amµg/kg . volatile organics by gc/ms sw d analyst: ck , , , -tetrachloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , , -tetrachloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trimethylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dibromo- -chloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dibromoethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trimethylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -butanone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -chloroethyl vinyl ether q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -chlorotoluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -hexanone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -chlorotoluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -isopropyltoluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: volatile organics by gc/ms sw d analyst: ck -methyl- -pentanone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd acetone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd acetonitrile q / / : : pm µg/kg nd acrolein q / / : : pm µg/kg nd benzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromochloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromodichloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromoform q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromomethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd carbon disulfide q / / : : pm µg/kg nd carbon tetrachloride q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chloroform q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd cis- , -dichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd cis- , -dichloropropene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd dibromochloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd dibromomethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd dichlorodifluoromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd ethylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd hexachlorobutadiene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd isopropylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd m,p-xylene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd methyl tert-butyl ether q / / : : pm µg/kg nd methylene chloride q / / : : pm µg/kg nd naphthalene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd n-butylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd n-propylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd o-xylene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd sec-butylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd styrene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd tert-butylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd tetrachloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd toluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trans- , -dichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trans- , -dichloropropene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trichlorofluoromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd vinyl chloride q / / : : pm µg/kg nd surr: , -dichloroethane-d / / : : pm . - %rec surr: -bromofluorobenzene / / : : pm . - %rec page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: volatile organics by gc/ms sw d analyst: ck surr: dibromofluoromethane / / : : pm . - %rec . surr: toluene-d / / : : pm . - %rec . tic - volatiles e d analyst: ck tic's / / : : pm nd page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: client sample id: green smoke can lab id: - collection date: matrix: analyses result qual units date analyzeddfrl icp/ms metals-total recoverable sw b analyst: aw chromium / / : : pm µg/kg lead / / : : pm µg/kg zinc / / : : pm µg/kg e+ tic - semivolatile e e analyst: ck tic's / / : : am see below volatile organics by gc/ms sw d analyst: ck , , , -tetrachloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , , -tetrachloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trimethylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dibromo- -chloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dibromoethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trimethylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -butanone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -chloroethyl vinyl ether q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -chlorotoluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -hexanone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -chlorotoluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -isopropyltoluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -methyl- -pentanone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd acetone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd acetonitrile q / / : : pm µg/kg nd acrolein q / / : : pm µg/kg nd page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: volatile organics by gc/ms sw d analyst: ck benzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromochloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromodichloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromoform q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromomethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd carbon disulfide q / / : : pm µg/kg nd carbon tetrachloride q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chloroform q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd cis- , -dichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd cis- , -dichloropropene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd dibromochloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd dibromomethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd dichlorodifluoromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd ethylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd hexachlorobutadiene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd isopropylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd m,p-xylene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd methyl tert-butyl ether q / / : : pm µg/kg nd methylene chloride q / / : : pm µg/kg nd naphthalene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd n-butylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd n-propylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd o-xylene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd sec-butylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd styrene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd tert-butylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd tetrachloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd toluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trans- , -dichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trans- , -dichloropropene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trichlorofluoromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd vinyl chloride q / / : : pm µg/kg nd surr: , -dichloroethane-d / / : : pm . - %rec surr: -bromofluorobenzene / / : : pm . - %rec . surr: dibromofluoromethane / / : : pm . - %rec . surr: toluene-d / / : : pm . - %rec tic - volatiles e d analyst: ck page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: tic - volatiles e d analyst: ck tic's / / : : pm see below tic: -methyl- -propylnonane / / : : pmµg/kg tic: substitutued heptane / / : : pmµg/kg tic: tetramethyldodecane / / : : pmµg/kg tic: tetramethylhexane / / : : pmµg/kg . page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: client sample id: sarah's leggings lab id: - collection date: matrix: analyses result qual units date analyzeddfrl icp/ms metals-total recoverable sw b analyst: aw chromium / / : : pm . µg/l . lead / / : : pm . µg/l . zinc / / : : pm . µg/l tic - semivolatile e e analyst: ck tic's / / : : pm see below tic: furan, , -dihydro- , , - trimethyl / / : : pmµg/kg . volatile organics by gc/ms sw d analyst: ck , , , -tetrachloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , , -tetrachloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trimethylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dibromo- -chloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dibromoethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trimethylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -butanone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -chloroethyl vinyl ether q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -chlorotoluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -hexanone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -chlorotoluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -isopropyltoluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -methyl- -pentanone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd acetone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: volatile organics by gc/ms sw d analyst: ck acetonitrile q / / : : pm µg/kg nd acrolein q / / : : pm µg/kg nd benzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromochloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromodichloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromoform q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromomethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd carbon disulfide q / / : : pm µg/kg nd carbon tetrachloride q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chloroform q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd cis- , -dichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd cis- , -dichloropropene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd dibromochloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd dibromomethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd dichlorodifluoromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd ethylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd hexachlorobutadiene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd isopropylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd m,p-xylene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd methyl tert-butyl ether q / / : : pm µg/kg nd methylene chloride q / / : : pm µg/kg nd naphthalene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd n-butylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd n-propylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd o-xylene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd sec-butylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd styrene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd tert-butylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd tetrachloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd toluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trans- , -dichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trans- , -dichloropropene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trichlorofluoromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd vinyl chloride q / / : : pm µg/kg nd surr: , -dichloroethane-d / / : : pm . - %rec surr: -bromofluorobenzene / / : : pm . - %rec surr: dibromofluoromethane / / : : pm . - %rec . surr: toluene-d / / : : pm . - %rec . page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: tic - volatiles e d analyst: ck tic's / / : : pm nd page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: client sample id: witches tent lab id: - collection date: matrix: analyses result qual units date analyzeddfrl icp/ms metals-total recoverable sw b analyst: aw chromium / / : : pm µg/kg nd lead / / : : pm µg/kg zinc / / : : pm µg/kg tic - semivolatile e e analyst: ck tic's / / : : pm see below tic: -octadecenamide, (z)- / / : : pmµg/kg . tic: hexanedioic acid, bis( - ethylhexyl / / : : pmµg/kg . tic: oleic acid / / : : pmµg/kg . tic: pentadecanoic acid / / : : pmµg/kg . tic: tetradecanoic acid / / : : pmµg/kg . tic: tridecanoic acid / / : : pmµg/kg . volatile organics by gc/ms sw d analyst: ck , , , -tetrachloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , , -tetrachloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trimethylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dibromo- -chloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dibromoethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trimethylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -butanone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -chloroethyl vinyl ether q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -chlorotoluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: volatile organics by gc/ms sw d analyst: ck -hexanone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -chlorotoluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -isopropyltoluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -methyl- -pentanone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd acetone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd acetonitrile q / / : : pm µg/kg nd acrolein q / / : : pm µg/kg nd benzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromochloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromodichloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromoform q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromomethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd carbon disulfide q / / : : pm µg/kg nd carbon tetrachloride q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chloroform q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd cis- , -dichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd cis- , -dichloropropene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd dibromochloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd dibromomethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd dichlorodifluoromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd ethylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd hexachlorobutadiene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd isopropylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd m,p-xylene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd methyl tert-butyl ether q / / : : pm µg/kg nd methylene chloride q / / : : pm µg/kg nd naphthalene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd n-butylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd n-propylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd o-xylene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd sec-butylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd styrene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd tert-butylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd tetrachloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd toluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trans- , -dichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trans- , -dichloropropene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trichlorofluoromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: volatile organics by gc/ms sw d analyst: ck vinyl chloride q / / : : pm µg/kg nd surr: , -dichloroethane-d / / : : pm . - %rec surr: -bromofluorobenzene / / : : pm . - %rec . surr: dibromofluoromethane / / : : pm . - %rec . surr: toluene-d / / : : pm . - %rec tic - volatiles e d analyst: ck tic's / / : : pm see below tic: -chlorobenzaldehyde / / : : pmµg/kg tic: benzaldehyde / / : : pmµg/kg tic: dimethylether / / : : pmµg/kg tic: methyl ester acetic acid / / : : pmµg/kg tic: nonanal / / : : pmµg/kg page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: client sample id: spicy bucket scrape lab id: - collection date: matrix: analyses result qual units date analyzeddfrl icp/ms metals-total recoverable sw b analyst: aw chromium / / : : pm µg/kg nd lead / / : : pm µg/kg zinc / / : : pm µg/kg tic - semivolatile e e analyst: ck tic's / / : : pm see below tic: -isoquinolinecarbonitrile / / : : pmµg/kg tic: -chlorobenzalmalononitrile / / : : pmµg/kg tic: -chlorobiphenyl / / : : pmµg/kg tic: -quinolinecarbonitrile / / : : pmµg/kg tic: benzenamine, , -dichloro- / / : : pmµg/kg tic: propanedinitrile, (phenylmethylene / / : : pmµg/kg volatile organics by gc/ms sw d analyst: ck , , , -tetrachloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , , -tetrachloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trimethylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dibromo- -chloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dibromoethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , , -trimethylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichlorobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd , -dichloropropane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -butanone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -chloroethyl vinyl ether q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -chlorotoluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: volatile organics by gc/ms sw d analyst: ck -hexanone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -chlorotoluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -isopropyltoluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd -methyl- -pentanone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd acetone q / / : : pm µg/kg nd acetonitrile q / / : : pm µg/kg nd acrolein q / / : : pm µg/kg nd benzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromobenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromochloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromodichloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromoform q / / : : pm µg/kg nd bromomethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd carbon disulfide q / / : : pm µg/kg nd carbon tetrachloride q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chlorobenzene / / : : pm µg/kg chloroethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chloroform q / / : : pm µg/kg nd chloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd cis- , -dichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd cis- , -dichloropropene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd dibromochloromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd dibromomethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd dichlorodifluoromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd ethylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd hexachlorobutadiene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd isopropylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd m,p-xylene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd methyl tert-butyl ether q / / : : pm µg/kg nd methylene chloride q / / : : pm µg/kg nd naphthalene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd n-butylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd n-propylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd o-xylene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd sec-butylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd styrene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd tert-butylbenzene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd tetrachloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd toluene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trans- , -dichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trans- , -dichloropropene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trichloroethene q / / : : pm µg/kg nd trichlorofluoromethane q / / : : pm µg/kg nd page of project: client: dapper stats lab order: -sep- specialty analytical date reported: volatile organics by gc/ms sw d analyst: ck vinyl chloride q / / : : pm µg/kg nd surr: , -dichloroethane-d / / : : pm . - %rec . surr: -bromofluorobenzene / / : : pm . - %rec . surr: dibromofluoromethane / / : : pm . - %rec . surr: toluene-d / / : : pm . - %rec . tic - volatiles e d analyst: ck tic's / / : : pm nd page of project: client: dapper stats testcode: _s -sep- qc summary report wo#: specialty analytical sample id icv batch id: testno: sw b analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: icv runno: seqno: icvsamptype: testcode: _s sw b chromium lead . . zinc sample id ccv batch id: testno: sw b analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: ccv runno: seqno: ccvsamptype: testcode: _s sw b chromium lead . . zinc sample id mb- batch id: testno: sw b analysis date: / / prep date: / / analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: pbs runno: seqno: mblksamptype: testcode: _s sw b chromium nd lead . nd zinc nd qualifiers: page of b analyte detected in the associated method blank h holding times for preparation or analysis exceeded nd not detected at the reporting limit o rsd is greater than rsdlimit r rpd outside accepted recovery limits s spike recovery outside accepted recovery limits project: client: dapper stats testcode: _s -sep- qc summary report wo#: specialty analytical sample id lcs- batch id: testno: sw b analysis date: / / prep date: / / analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: lcss runno: seqno: lcssamptype: testcode: _s sw b chromium lead zinc . sample id - adup batch id: testno: sw b analysis date: / / prep date: / / analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: zzzzzz runno: seqno: dupsamptype: testcode: _s sw b chromium . lead . sample id - ams batch id: testno: sw b analysis date: / / prep date: / / analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: zzzzzz runno: seqno: mssamptype: testcode: _s sw b chromium smc lead srp sample id - amsd batch id: testno: sw b analysis date: / / prep date: / / analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: zzzzzz runno: seqno: msdsamptype: testcode: _s sw b qualifiers: page of b analyte detected in the associated method blank h holding times for preparation or analysis exceeded nd not detected at the reporting limit o rsd is greater than rsdlimit r rpd outside accepted recovery limits s spike recovery outside accepted recovery limits project: client: dapper stats testcode: _s -sep- qc summary report wo#: specialty analytical sample id - amsd batch id: testno: sw b analysis date: / / prep date: / / analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: zzzzzz runno: seqno: msdsamptype: testcode: _s sw b chromium . lead . sample id ccv batch id: testno: sw b analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: ccv runno: seqno: ccvsamptype: testcode: _s sw b chromium . lead . . zinc sample id - adup batch id: testno: sw b analysis date: / / prep date: / / analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: zzzzzz runno: seqno: dupsamptype: testcode: _s sw b zinc . sample id - ams batch id: testno: sw b analysis date: / / prep date: / / analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: zzzzzz runno: seqno: mssamptype: testcode: _s sw b zinc - smc qualifiers: page of b analyte detected in the associated method blank h holding times for preparation or analysis exceeded nd not detected at the reporting limit o rsd is greater than rsdlimit r rpd outside accepted recovery limits s spike recovery outside accepted recovery limits project: client: dapper stats testcode: _s -sep- qc summary report wo#: specialty analytical sample id - ams batch id: testno: sw b analysis date: / / prep date: / / analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: zzzzzz runno: seqno: mssamptype: testcode: _s sw b sample id - amsd batch id: testno: sw b analysis date: / / prep date: / / analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: zzzzzz runno: seqno: msdsamptype: testcode: _s sw b zinc - smc . sample id ccv batch id: testno: sw b analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: ccv runno: seqno: ccvsamptype: testcode: _s sw b chromium lead . . zinc sample id icv batch id: testno: sw b analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: icv runno: seqno: icvsamptype: testcode: _s sw b chromium . lead . . zinc . qualifiers: page of b analyte detected in the associated method blank h holding times for preparation or analysis exceeded nd not detected at the reporting limit o rsd is greater than rsdlimit r rpd outside accepted recovery limits s spike recovery outside accepted recovery limits project: client: dapper stats testcode: _s -sep- qc summary report wo#: specialty analytical sample id icv batch id: testno: sw b analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: icv runno: seqno: icvsamptype: testcode: _s sw b sample id ccv batch id: testno: sw b analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: ccv runno: seqno: ccvsamptype: testcode: _s sw b chromium lead . . zinc sample id ccv batch id: testno: sw b analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: ccv runno: seqno: ccvsamptype: testcode: _s sw b chromium lead . . zinc sample id ccv batch id: testno: sw b analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: ccv runno: seqno: ccvsamptype: testcode: _s sw b chromium qualifiers: page of b analyte detected in the associated method blank h holding times for preparation or analysis exceeded nd not detected at the reporting limit o rsd is greater than rsdlimit r rpd outside accepted recovery limits s spike recovery outside accepted recovery limits project: client: dapper stats testcode: _s -sep- qc summary report wo#: specialty analytical sample id ccv batch id: testno: sw b analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: ccv runno: seqno: ccvsamptype: testcode: _s sw b lead . . zinc sample id ccv batch id: testno: sw b analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: ccv runno: seqno: ccvsamptype: testcode: _s sw b zinc qualifiers: page of b analyte detected in the associated method blank h holding times for preparation or analysis exceeded nd not detected at the reporting limit o rsd is greater than rsdlimit r rpd outside accepted recovery limits s spike recovery outside accepted recovery limits project: client: dapper stats testcode: _w -sep- qc summary report wo#: specialty analytical sample id icv batch id: testno: sw b analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/l pql client id: icv runno: seqno: icvsamptype: testcode: _w sw a chromium . . . . lead . . . . zinc . . . . sample id ccv batch id: testno: sw b analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/l pql client id: ccv runno: seqno: ccvsamptype: testcode: _w sw a chromium . . . . lead . . . . zinc . . . . sample id mb- batch id: testno: sw b analysis date: / / prep date: / / analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/l pql client id: pbw runno: seqno: mblksamptype: testcode: _w sw a chromium . nd lead . nd zinc . nd qualifiers: page of b analyte detected in the associated method blank h holding times for preparation or analysis exceeded nd not detected at the reporting limit o rsd is greater than rsdlimit r rpd outside accepted recovery limits s spike recovery outside accepted recovery limits project: client: dapper stats testcode: _w -sep- qc summary report wo#: specialty analytical sample id lcs- batch id: testno: sw b analysis date: / / prep date: / / analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/l pql client id: lcsw runno: seqno: lcssamptype: testcode: _w sw a chromium . . . . lead . . . zinc . . . sample id a - adup batch id: testno: sw b analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/l pql client id: zzzzzz runno: seqno: dupsamptype: testcode: _w sw a chromium . . . . lead . . . zinc . sample id a - ams batch id: testno: sw b analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/l pql client id: zzzzzz runno: seqno: mssamptype: testcode: _w sw a chromium . . . . lead . . . . zinc . - . smc qualifiers: page of b analyte detected in the associated method blank h holding times for preparation or analysis exceeded nd not detected at the reporting limit o rsd is greater than rsdlimit r rpd outside accepted recovery limits s spike recovery outside accepted recovery limits project: client: dapper stats testcode: _w -sep- qc summary report wo#: specialty analytical sample id a - amsd batch id: testno: sw b analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/l pql client id: zzzzzz runno: seqno: msdsamptype: testcode: _w sw a chromium . . . . . . lead . . . . . . zinc . . smc . sample id ccv batch id: testno: sw b analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/l pql client id: ccv runno: seqno: ccvsamptype: testcode: _w sw a chromium . . . . lead . . . . zinc . . . sample id ccv batch id: testno: sw b analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/l pql client id: ccv runno: seqno: ccvsamptype: testcode: _w sw a chromium . . . . lead . . . . zinc . . . qualifiers: page of b analyte detected in the associated method blank h holding times for preparation or analysis exceeded nd not detected at the reporting limit o rsd is greater than rsdlimit r rpd outside accepted recovery limits s spike recovery outside accepted recovery limits project: client: dapper stats testcode: _o -sep- qc summary report wo#: specialty analytical sample id ccv msvws- batch id: testno: sw d analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: ccv runno: seqno: ccvsamptype: testcode: _o sw b , , , -tetrachloroethane . . . . , , -trichloroethane . . . . , , , -tetrachloroethane . . . . , , -trichloroethane . . . . , -dichloroethane . . . . , -dichloroethene . . . . , -dichloropropene . . . . , , -trichlorobenzene . . . . , , -trichloropropane . . . . , , -trichlorobenzene . . . . , , -trimethylbenzene . . . . , -dibromo- -chloropropane . . . . , -dibromoethane . . . . , -dichlorobenzene . . . . , -dichloroethane . . . . , -dichloropropane . . . . , , -trimethylbenzene . . . . , -dichlorobenzene . . . . , -dichloropropane . . . , -dichlorobenzene . . . . , -dichloropropane . . . . -butanone . . -chloroethyl vinyl ether . . -chlorotoluene . . . . -hexanone . . -chlorotoluene . . . . qualifiers: page of b analyte detected in the associated method blank h holding times for preparation or analysis exceeded nd not detected at the reporting limit o rsd is greater than rsdlimit r rpd outside accepted recovery limits s spike recovery outside accepted recovery limits project: client: dapper stats testcode: _o -sep- qc summary report wo#: specialty analytical sample id ccv msvws- batch id: testno: sw d analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: ccv runno: seqno: ccvsamptype: testcode: _o sw b -isopropyltoluene . . . . -methyl- -pentanone . . acetone . . . acetonitrile . nd acrolein . . benzene . . . . bromobenzene . . . . bromochloromethane . . . bromodichloromethane . . . . bromoform . . . bromomethane . . . . carbon disulfide . . . . carbon tetrachloride . . . . chlorobenzene . . . . chloroethane . . . . chloroform . . . . chloromethane . . . . cis- , -dichloroethene . . . . cis- , -dichloropropene . . . . dibromochloromethane . . . dibromomethane . . . . dichlorodifluoromethane . . . . ethylbenzene . . . . hexachlorobutadiene . . . . isopropylbenzene . . . . m,p-xylene . . . qualifiers: page of b analyte detected in the associated method blank h holding times for preparation or analysis exceeded nd not detected at the reporting limit o rsd is greater than rsdlimit r rpd outside accepted recovery limits s spike recovery outside accepted recovery limits project: client: dapper stats testcode: _o -sep- qc summary report wo#: specialty analytical sample id ccv msvws- batch id: testno: sw d analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: ccv runno: seqno: ccvsamptype: testcode: _o sw b methyl tert-butyl ether . . . methylene chloride . . . . naphthalene . . . . n-butylbenzene . . . . n-propylbenzene . . . . o-xylene . . . . sec-butylbenzene . . . . styrene . . . . tert-butylbenzene . . . . tetrachloroethene . . . . toluene . . . . trans- , -dichloroethene . . . . trans- , -dichloropropene . . . . trichloroethene . . . . trichlorofluoromethane . . . vinyl chloride . . . . sample id mb batch id: testno: sw d analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: pbs runno: seqno: mblksamptype: testcode: _o sw b , , , -tetrachloroethane . nd , , -trichloroethane . nd , , , -tetrachloroethane . nd qualifiers: page of b analyte detected in the associated method blank h holding times for preparation or analysis exceeded nd not detected at the reporting limit o rsd is greater than rsdlimit r rpd outside accepted recovery limits s spike recovery outside accepted recovery limits project: client: dapper stats testcode: _o -sep- qc summary report wo#: specialty analytical sample id mb batch id: testno: sw d analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: pbs runno: seqno: mblksamptype: testcode: _o sw b , , -trichloroethane . nd , -dichloroethane . nd , -dichloroethene . nd , -dichloropropene . nd , , -trichlorobenzene . nd , , -trichloropropane . nd , , -trichlorobenzene . nd , , -trimethylbenzene . nd , -dibromo- -chloropropane . nd , -dibromoethane . nd , -dichlorobenzene . nd , -dichloroethane . nd , -dichloropropane . nd , , -trimethylbenzene . nd , -dichlorobenzene . nd , -dichloropropane . nd , -dichlorobenzene . nd , -dichloropropane . nd -butanone . nd -chloroethyl vinyl ether . nd -chlorotoluene . nd -hexanone . nd -chlorotoluene . nd -isopropyltoluene . nd -methyl- -pentanone . nd acetone . nd qualifiers: page of b analyte detected in the associated method blank h holding times for preparation or analysis exceeded nd not detected at the reporting limit o rsd is greater than rsdlimit r rpd outside accepted recovery limits s spike recovery outside accepted recovery limits project: client: dapper stats testcode: _o -sep- qc summary report wo#: specialty analytical sample id mb batch id: testno: sw d analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: pbs runno: seqno: mblksamptype: testcode: _o sw b acetonitrile . nd acrolein . nd benzene . nd bromobenzene . nd bromochloromethane . nd bromodichloromethane . nd bromoform . nd bromomethane . nd carbon disulfide . nd carbon tetrachloride . nd chlorobenzene . nd chloroethane . nd chloroform . nd chloromethane . nd cis- , -dichloroethene . nd cis- , -dichloropropene . nd dibromochloromethane . nd dibromomethane . nd dichlorodifluoromethane . nd ethylbenzene . nd hexachlorobutadiene . nd isopropylbenzene . nd m,p-xylene . nd methyl tert-butyl ether . nd methylene chloride . nd naphthalene . nd qualifiers: page of b analyte detected in the associated method blank h holding times for preparation or analysis exceeded nd not detected at the reporting limit o rsd is greater than rsdlimit r rpd outside accepted recovery limits s spike recovery outside accepted recovery limits project: client: dapper stats testcode: _o -sep- qc summary report wo#: specialty analytical sample id mb batch id: testno: sw d analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: pbs runno: seqno: mblksamptype: testcode: _o sw b n-butylbenzene . nd n-propylbenzene . nd o-xylene . nd sec-butylbenzene . nd styrene . nd tert-butylbenzene . nd tetrachloroethene . nd toluene . nd trans- , -dichloroethene . nd trans- , -dichloropropene . nd trichloroethene . nd trichlorofluoromethane . nd vinyl chloride . nd surr: , -dichloroethane-d . . . . surr: -bromofluorobenzene . . . . surr: dibromofluoromethane . . surr: toluene-d . . sample id ppb ical batch id: testno: sw d analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: lcss runno: seqno: lcsdsamptype: testcode: _o sw b , , , -tetrachloroethane . . . . . , , -trichloroethane . . . . . qualifiers: page of b analyte detected in the associated method blank h holding times for preparation or analysis exceeded nd not detected at the reporting limit o rsd is greater than rsdlimit r rpd outside accepted recovery limits s spike recovery outside accepted recovery limits project: client: dapper stats testcode: _o -sep- qc summary report wo#: specialty analytical sample id ppb ical batch id: testno: sw d analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: lcss runno: seqno: lcsdsamptype: testcode: _o sw b , , , -tetrachloroethane . . . . . , , -trichloroethane . . . . . , -dichloroethane . . . . . , -dichloroethene . . . . . . , -dichloropropene . . . . . , , -trichlorobenzene . . . . . , , -trichloropropane . . . . . , , -trichlorobenzene . . . . . , , -trimethylbenzene . . . . . , -dibromo- -chloropropane . . . . . , -dibromoethane . . . . . , -dichlorobenzene . . . . . , -dichloroethane . . . . . , -dichloropropane . . . . . , , -trimethylbenzene . . . . . , -dichlorobenzene . . . . . , -dichloropropane . . . . . , -dichlorobenzene . . . . . , -dichloropropane . . . . . -butanone . . . . . -chlorotoluene . . . . . . -hexanone . . . . . -chlorotoluene . . . . . -isopropyltoluene . . . . . -methyl- -pentanone . . . . . acetone . . . . qualifiers: page of b analyte detected in the associated method blank h holding times for preparation or analysis exceeded nd not detected at the reporting limit o rsd is greater than rsdlimit r rpd outside accepted recovery limits s spike recovery outside accepted recovery limits project: client: dapper stats testcode: _o -sep- qc summary report wo#: specialty analytical sample id ppb ical batch id: testno: sw d analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: lcss runno: seqno: lcsdsamptype: testcode: _o sw b benzene . . . . . . bromobenzene . . . . . bromochloromethane . . . . . . bromodichloromethane . . . . . bromoform . . . . . bromomethane . . . . . carbon disulfide . . . . . carbon tetrachloride . . . . . chlorobenzene . . . . . . chloroethane . . . . . . chloroform . . . . . chloromethane . . . . . cis- , -dichloroethene . . . . . cis- , -dichloropropene . . . . . dibromochloromethane . . . . . dibromomethane . . . . . dichlorodifluoromethane . . . . . . ethylbenzene . . . . . hexachlorobutadiene . . . . . isopropylbenzene . . . . . m,p-xylene . . . . methyl tert-butyl ether . . . . . methylene chloride . . . . . . naphthalene . . . . . n-butylbenzene . . . . . n-propylbenzene . . . . . qualifiers: page of b analyte detected in the associated method blank h holding times for preparation or analysis exceeded nd not detected at the reporting limit o rsd is greater than rsdlimit r rpd outside accepted recovery limits s spike recovery outside accepted recovery limits project: client: dapper stats testcode: _o -sep- qc summary report wo#: specialty analytical sample id ppb ical batch id: testno: sw d analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: lcss runno: seqno: lcsdsamptype: testcode: _o sw b o-xylene . . . . . sec-butylbenzene . . . . . styrene . . . . . tert-butylbenzene . . . . . tetrachloroethene . . . . . toluene . . . . . . trans- , -dichloroethene . . . . . trans- , -dichloropropene . . . . . trichloroethene . . . . . . trichlorofluoromethane . . . . . . vinyl chloride . . . . . sample id lcs msvws- batch id: testno: sw d analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: lcss runno: seqno: lcssamptype: testcode: _o sw b , , , -tetrachloroethane . . . . , , -trichloroethane . . . . , , , -tetrachloroethane . . . . , , -trichloroethane . . . . , -dichloroethane . . . . , -dichloroethene . . . . . , -dichloropropene . . . . , , -trichlorobenzene . . . . qualifiers: page of b analyte detected in the associated method blank h holding times for preparation or analysis exceeded nd not detected at the reporting limit o rsd is greater than rsdlimit r rpd outside accepted recovery limits s spike recovery outside accepted recovery limits project: client: dapper stats testcode: _o -sep- qc summary report wo#: specialty analytical sample id lcs msvws- batch id: testno: sw d analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: lcss runno: seqno: lcssamptype: testcode: _o sw b , , -trichloropropane . . . . , , -trichlorobenzene . . . . , , -trimethylbenzene . . . . , -dibromo- -chloropropane . . . . , -dibromoethane . . . . , -dichlorobenzene . . . . , -dichloroethane . . . . , -dichloropropane . . . . , , -trimethylbenzene . . . . , -dichlorobenzene . . . . , -dichloropropane . . . , -dichlorobenzene . . . . , -dichloropropane . . . . -butanone . . -chlorotoluene . . . . -hexanone . . -chlorotoluene . . . . -isopropyltoluene . . . . -methyl- -pentanone . . acetone . . . benzene . . . . . bromobenzene . . . . bromochloromethane . . . bromodichloromethane . . . . bromoform . . . bromomethane . . . . qualifiers: page of b analyte detected in the associated method blank h holding times for preparation or analysis exceeded nd not detected at the reporting limit o rsd is greater than rsdlimit r rpd outside accepted recovery limits s spike recovery outside accepted recovery limits project: client: dapper stats testcode: _o -sep- qc summary report wo#: specialty analytical sample id lcs msvws- batch id: testno: sw d analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: lcss runno: seqno: lcssamptype: testcode: _o sw b carbon disulfide . . . . carbon tetrachloride . . . . chlorobenzene . . . . . chloroethane . . . . chloroform . . . . chloromethane . . . . cis- , -dichloroethene . . . . cis- , -dichloropropene . . . . dibromochloromethane . . . dibromomethane . . . . dichlorodifluoromethane . . . . ethylbenzene . . . . hexachlorobutadiene . . . . isopropylbenzene . . . . m,p-xylene . . . methyl tert-butyl ether . . . methylene chloride . . . . naphthalene . . . . n-butylbenzene . . . . n-propylbenzene . . . . o-xylene . . . . sec-butylbenzene . . . . styrene . . . . tert-butylbenzene . . . . tetrachloroethene . . . . toluene . . . . . qualifiers: page of b analyte detected in the associated method blank h holding times for preparation or analysis exceeded nd not detected at the reporting limit o rsd is greater than rsdlimit r rpd outside accepted recovery limits s spike recovery outside accepted recovery limits project: client: dapper stats testcode: _o -sep- qc summary report wo#: specialty analytical sample id lcs msvws- batch id: testno: sw d analysis date: / / prep date: analyte result spk value spk ref val %rec rpd ref val %rpdlowlimit highlimit rpdlimit qual units: µg/kg pql client id: lcss runno: seqno: lcssamptype: testcode: _o sw b trans- , -dichloroethene . . . . trans- , -dichloropropene . . . . trichloroethene . . . . . trichlorofluoromethane . . . vinyl chloride . . . . qualifiers: page of b analyte detected in the associated method blank h holding times for preparation or analysis exceeded nd not detected at the reporting limit o rsd is greater than rsdlimit r rpd outside accepted recovery limits s spike recovery outside accepted recovery limits key to flags rev. may , a this sample contains a gasoline range organic not identified as a specific hydrocarbon product. the result was quantified against gasoline calibration standards a this sample contains a diesel range organic not identified as a specific hydrocarbon product. the result was quantified against diesel calibration standards. a this sample contains a lube oil range organic not identified as a specific hydrocarbon product. the result was quantified against a lube oil calibration standard. a the result was determined to be non-detect based on hydrocarbon pattern recognition. the product was carry-over from another hydrocarbon type. a the product appears to be aged or degraded diesel. b the blank exhibited a positive result great than the reporting limit for this compound. cn see case narrative. d result is based from a dilution. e result exceeds the calibration range for this compound. the result should be considered as estimate. f the positive result for this hydrocarbon is due to single component contamination. the product does not match any hydrocarbon in the fuels library. g result may be biased high due to biogenic interferences. clean up is recommended. h sample was analyzed outside recommended holding time. ht at clients request, samples was analyzed outside of recommended holding time. j the result for this analyte is between the mdl and the pql and should be considered as estimated concentration. k diesel result is biased high due to amount of oil contained in the sample. l diesel result is biased high due to amount of gasoline contained in the sample. m oil result is biased high due to amount of diesel contained in the sample. mc sample concentration is greater than x the spiked value, the spiked value is considered insignificant. mi result is outside control limits due to matrix interference. msa value determined by method of standard addition. o laboratory control standard (lcs) exceeded laboratory control limits, but meets ccv criteria. data meets epa requirements. q detection levels elevated due to sample matrix. r rpd control limits were exceeded. rf duplicate failed due to result being at or near the method-reporting limit. rp matrix spike values exceed established qc limits; post digestion spike is in control. s recovery is outside control limits. sc closing ccv or lcs exceeded high recovery control limits, but associated samples are non-detect. data meets epa requirements. * the result for this parameter was greater that the maximum contaminant level of the tclp regulatory limit. spotlights © american political science association introduction tanya b. schwarz, american political science association i n november , the american political science associa- tion introduced a new civic engagement initiative to highlight political science research, teaching practices, and campus engagement techniques related to student voting and po- litical participation. the raise the vote campaign, which stands for resources to amplify and increase student engage- ment, in accordance with apsa’s statement on civic engage- ment and voting, is a nonpartisan effort to provide political science faculty with the tools needed to effectively encourage student civic engagement. in particular, the campaign’s main goal is to increase college student registration, voting, and civic engagement through two key mechanisms: • providing concrete steps and best practices that faculty can use in the classroom and on-campus to encourage student engagement; • highlighting the research, teaching, and service of political scientists related to civic engagement and voting, and encourage faculty to use these resources in their classrooms. over political science faculty members and students have contributed blog posts and other resources to raise the vote. we feature four exemplary contributions here. in their respective posts, sekou franklin (middle tennessee state university) and melissa michelson (menlo college) discuss how they integrate civic engagement assignments, experiences, and principles into the political science classroom. in her piece, lilly goren (carroll university) provides an overview of the th amendment and shows how it has been represented in popular culture. finally, we round out our highlights with a piece from davin phoenix (university of california, irvine) and maneesh arora (welles- ley college), providing an overview of their research on the effectiveness of #blacklivesmatter protests on police reform. the posts featured here are representative of the excellence exhibited in the broader pieces featured in the raise the vote campaign. any political science faculty or students interested in contributing a blog post should reach out to dr. tanya schwarz, apsa director of teaching & learning, at tschwarz@apsanet. org ■ teaching the power of local political participation melissa michelson, menlo college my menlo college stu-dents are generally concerned with current events and politics at the federal level—including supreme court decisions and actions taken by congress or the president— and it can be challenging to convince them that their local participation matters on that larger stage. i have found that once students learn more about what local government does and how to get involved, local politics provide a great oppor- tunity for turning hackneyed phrases about the importance of participation and voting into real-world experiences that have longer-lasting impacts on their civic engagement. last spring, a local political issue offered an opportunity for my students to learn about the political process while also taking direct action. in march , a city very close to campus, redwood city, was threatened with a lawsuit if it did not revise its election pro- cedures to switch from an at-large system to a district system. the basis for the threat was that only one of the seven members of the council was latino, while latinos represent % of the population. this dilution of the latino vote was in violation of the california voting rights act. the council put together some map options and was preparing to vote. this was a key time to have our voices heard. first, i shared with my students what was happening, includ- ing background information on at-large vs. district elections, the demographics of redwood city ( % non-hispanic white), and the proposed maps. this was an academic lesson that included the history of the voting rights act, the california voting rights act, and the pros and cons of at-large vs. district systems. then i gave them an assignment: imagine you are speaking to the redwood city council (or writing an op-ed for the local paper). in your own words but being as persuasive as possible, why should the city approve [your preferred map]? raise the vote: political scientists reflect on civic engagement in r a is e t h e v o te mailto:tschwarz% apsanet.org?subject= mailto:tschwarz% apsanet.org?subject= february © american political science association students wrote their statements and then shared them with the class. it was a satisfying and successful class that engaged students’ creativity while maintaining academic integrity. things shifted to real-world politics soon afterwards, when it looked like the council was going to approve a map that created only one majority-latino district. local residents were outraged. groups representing the latino and asian american communities organized a rally to precede the march , council meeting.¹ several of my students met me there to partic- ipate in the rally and sit in on the council meeting. inspired by the rally to have their voices heard, two of my stu- dents—victor garcia and rasmia shuman—decided to fill out cards to speak, and they read their prepared statements from our class assignment. in the end, the council voted to change their decision and adopt a map creating two majority-minority latino districts. this was the outcome preferred by my students, and they were invigorated by their role in the process. it’s easy to spend our time talking about federal politics; it dominates the news cycle and can feel like where the important decisions are being made. but local politics are equally import- ant and often more accessible. the surge of interest in police re- form is a good reminder that local politics can catalyze change, whether through police reform, redistricting decisions, or plans for how to bring students back to campus safely. my students learned a powerful lesson about how to participate locally and have their voices heard. as my colleague emily farris says, “lo- cal politics are the best politics.” n o t e s . mark simon. march . “political climate with mark simon: council changes course on district map amid opposition.” climate online redwood city. available at: https://climaterwc.com/ / / /political- climate-with-mark-simon-council-changes-course-on-district-map-amid- opposition/ civic engagement as critical pedagogy at middle tennessee state university sekou franklin, middle tennessee state university the expansion of civic en-gagement initiatives in us colleges and universities has diversified the curricula of political science departments. civic engagement includes a broad array of activities, includ- ing: experiential learning activ- ities and externships; volunteer and community service projects that are integrated in course re- quirements; participant observation of legislative proceedings, city council meetings and hearings by government agencies; independent study and applied research projects; and partic- ipation in social movement campaigns. these activities can be developed as in-class or stand-alone activities coordinated by political science faculty and departments. in general, civic en- gagement can be institutionalized as broad-based programs by universities and political science departments, or they can be integrated into undergraduate courses to supplement class instruction. a decade ago, my university—middle tennessee state uni- versity—established the experiential learning scholars program (also referred to as an exl program). the program allows facul- ty to create exl courses (or reclassify traditional courses into exl ones). these courses must comply with learning outcomes that give students hands-on involvement in civic engagement activ- ities, which for the most part allows them to interact with public officials, politicians, and community advocates. exl faculty can even apply for small grants to supplement course projects. stu- dents who take six exl-designated courses can graduate with “distinction”—they are formally recognized by the university president as exl scholars at graduation ceremonies. several of my courses were designated under the exl pro- gram: sustainability and the cities; civil rights policy and poli- tics; and democratic participation and civic advocacy. for my sustainability course, i placed students with an environmental organization or government agency. they also had to develop an “action plan” that municipalities could use to reduce carbon emissions and create clean energy jobs. i converted my civil rights course to a voting rights immersion class in the summer of . with funds from the exl program, i took three academic years of students to birmingham, selma, and lowndes county, alabama. students then created photovoice projects visually documenting past and contemporary barriers to voting. on sev- eral occasions, students in the civic advocacy course conducted voter registration drives in low-income neighborhoods where incarceration, language barriers, and disabilities inhibit political and voter participation. i now include at least one civic engagement activity in most of my courses including those not classified under the exl pro- gram. for example, in spring , students in my african amer- ican politics course participated in an official hearing organized by the tennessee advisory committee to the us civil rights commission. the hearing focused on legal and financial obli- gations (lfos) that prohibit formerly incarcerated persons from voting and obtaining affordable housing. students even provid- ed written testimony that became part of the official record of the hearing. if leveraged correctly, civic engagement can be a tool for advancing what brazilian educator paulo freire called “critical pedagogy.”¹ this pedagogical framework reduces hierarchies between teachers and students as well as universities and com- munities, while allowing faculty to create curricula that promote participatory democracy and challenge institutional inequities. along these lines, students can be resourced to work on civil rights and advocacy campaigns. my political science depart- ment even has a “community-based practicum” course that al- lows students to conduct research projects supervised by advo- cacy groups and government agencies. for the course, students created a documentary on transit justice for a bus riders union and blogged for a community-labor coalition working on com- munity benefits agreements. political science departments have much to gain by expand- ing their curricula and course options to include civic engage- ment initiatives. first, they can teach students about the mach- https://climaterwc.com/ / / /political-climate-with-mark-simon-council-changes-course-on-district-map-amid-opposition/ https://climaterwc.com/ / / /political-climate-with-mark-simon-council-changes-course-on-district-map-amid-opposition/ https://climaterwc.com/ / / /political-climate-with-mark-simon-council-changes-course-on-district-map-amid-opposition/ spotlights © american political science association inations of political institutions. for example, in several of my courses, i require students to observe committee hearings at the tennessee general assembly or hearings at school boards and municipal commissions. i challenge students to document what goes on behind the scenes at these meetings such as interactions between lawmakers and whether the hearings are receptive to people from poor neighborhoods. civic engagement activities that center the experiences of under-resourced communities can also allow students to evalu- ate their own assumptions about the workings of political institu- tions. as part of course requirements, my students participated in an organizer training led by housing justice advocates fighting gentrification; attended a parole hearing of a person who spent years in prison for a wrongful conviction; and participated in a legislative redistricting training sponsored by the lawyers’ committee for civil rights under law. in these settings, students had a chance to evaluate the applicability of constitutional prin- ciples to marginalized communities. moreover, civic engagement creates reciprocal learning exchanges between university personnel (faculty and students) and community advocates. students and faculty mentors can assist community advocates, who in turn, may coproduce in- structional activities for political science courses. students in my african american politics course teamed up with an advoca- cy group led by formerly-incarcerated women that was work- ing on a class-action civil rights case at the time. the students canvassed a public housing development to enlist residents in the lawsuit, which provided monetary damages for people ad- versely affected by the county’s parole system. a year after the class-action suit, i asked the same advocacy group to help me develop a court watch activity for my “race and criminal justice” course. court watch is a participatory defense exercise that allows the families and friends of incar- cerated persons to serve as watchdogs, and in some cases, to assist criminal defense attorneys in disputes involving indigent defendants. i required students to observe court proceedings in tennessee’s sixteenth judicial district. the students then wrote letters to the tennessee administrative office of courts offering recommendations on how criminal courts can better respond to under-resourced communities. overall, civic engagement should be a critical component of the political science discipline. it should not be solely rele- above: dr. sekou franklin's students prepare to knock on doors in the mercury court public housing development in murfreesboro, tennessee. photo by sekou franklin. gated to internships or specialty courses that focus exclusively on racial politics and civic advocacy. rather, civic engagement should be integrated into undergraduate courses in us politics and international relations and seminars for graduating seniors. n o t e s . paulo freire. . pedagogy of the oppressed. new york: bloomsbury academic. th anniversary edition. the presidency and the th amendment in popular culture lilly j. goren, carroll university within the american popular culture landscape, the pres- ident and the presidency has long been a unique presence, in part because this office and the individual who holds it are often within the popular gaze of the citizenry. from the very early days of the republic, the populace was quite captivated by george washington—ini- tially as a general and then as president. literary writers of the th century like mark twain and walt whitman integrated the president and the presidency into their work. the th century has seen the rise of the imagined president and presidency in both film and television, as we also note the personalization of the presidency through the media, where presidents can speak directly to the entire country, through radio, television, and now through social media. one of the most notable characteristics of the presidency in popular culture today is the frequent ap- pearance of the th amendment. in the aftermath of donald trump’s covid- diagnosis and the storming of the capitol by his supporters on january th, , it is worth exploring february © american political science association why this amendment is such a staple of contemporary popular culture. i often refer to the th amendment in my classes as the “hollywood amendment” because americans are much more familiar with the workings of the th amendment, especially section , from television narratives and films than they are from the actual application of the th amendment in real life. there is a particular reason why this really is the hollywood amend- ment, and it has a great deal to do with hollywood’s use of it in narrative productions, but it is also the result of the amendment’s essential dormancy since it was created and the constitutional questions that remain in regard to how section , in particular, would be invoked and executed, without having it seem like a coup executed by the vice president and the cabinet. in octo- ber , the th amendment’s reach and implication were getting even more attention because of the concern about the vice president or other members within the line of succession also falling ill with covid- . the th amendment, along with the constitutionally outlined process for impeachment, are the mechanisms provided to re- move a president for some particular extant reason, outside of the four-year election cycle. sections of the th amendment have been delicately used on rare occasions and not necessar- ily when it might have been expected, most specifically when president ronald reagan was shot in . there was no im- plementation of section of the th amendment at that time, though it seemed like the situation called for it, given that the president was shot, and then disabled while in surgery and un- der anesthetic. this particular image, of a president shot and thus disabled, and the process for the implementation of section of the th amendment can be seen in a number of popu- lar culture artifacts, including the recently concluded cbs show scandal. this is why i refer to it in my classes as the hollywood amendment, in large measure, because hollywood has imple- mented it, and thus imagined how it might work, far more often than we, as citizens have seen it in actual action. political scien- tist jay wendland has argued that popular culture has indeed contributed to our understanding of the th amendment and presidential succession, far more from fiction than from fact.¹ constitutional law scholar david pozen has noted some of the plot points that have made use of the th amendment, ex- plaining that “on popular tv series such as and house of cards and in thrillers such as the enemy within, section has been at the center of elaborate plots to steal the presidency. if, as some scholars have argued, the more realistic risk is that vice presidents and cabinet officers will be too timid about call- ing out presidential inability when it exists, these associations of section with machiavellian maneuvering are unhelpful.”² and while it is true that these visions show us how the th amend- ment can be used deceitfully, to essentially steal the presidency, the television show madam secretary demonstrated the compli- cated moral and political dilemma faced by the fictional cab- inet members as they approached relieving president conrad dalton of his office in the episode “sound and fury” ( . ). the cabinet and vice president become quite alarmed at the presi- dent’s cognitive capacity and behavioral shifts—they had all no- ticed dramatic changes in his disposition and personality—but he showed no physical signs of any kind of disability. this again highlights the complicated aspects of the th amendment as a means to relieve the president of his or her office without a clear physical incapacitation (like woodrow wilson’s stroke) or emergency (like the concern that jfk would be permanently disabled by the assassination attempt). on the abc/netflix series designated survivor, we actually saw the challenge process of section unfold. in this multi-ep- isode arc, president tom kirkman’s cabinet follows the th amendment’s process to remove a sitting president whom they determined to be unable to execute the duties of the office be- cause of a number of factors, including the recent and sudden loss of his wife in an automobile accident. the president’s mental health, grief, and his family’s genetic predisposition towards de- pression are brought forward as the basis for what are deemed to be his inabilities to perform his job. president kirkman contests these conclusions and, as allowed by the th amendment, he makes a case for his continued capacity to execute the job. he is successful in his challenge and remains in the oval office. the point of contention is not being physically unable to carry out the job, but a character’s limitation due to mental or psychologi- cal disability. this challenge aspect, like the cabinet and the vice president’s capacity to remove the president from office, have never been implemented in real life, though it does come up in fictional narratives. these are just two recent examples of television series in- tegrating the th amendment into their narrative arcs. in the spring of , nbc’s the west wing explored the th amendment in the episode “twenty five” when president jed bartlet voluntarily steps aside because he realizes he cannot fully execute the duties of his office while his daughter, zoey, is kidnapped and missing. the episode also wrestles with the line of succession and the complicated nature of the us sys- tem of government, since the vice president had been forced to resign and there was no new vice president in place, thus the office of “interim president” fell to the republican speaker of the house, a political foe of the president. that same spring fox’s also explored the th amendment in another multi-episode arc that also interrogated the president’s capacities in the job, in this case, president david palmer, who was skeptical of the evidence provided as the basis for air strikes against potential terrorists. because of what was seen as a lack of commitment to exact punishment for attacks, president palmer’s cabinet moves to remove him from office because they deem him unfit—in part because members of his cabinet and senior staff disagree with his decisions. goes on to make use of the th amendment a few more times throughout its multi-season run on fox television. thus, the problem with the th amendment is that it remains henry e. chen spotlights © american political science association untested in the more crisis-oriented situations—situations that we often see on screens in our homes or in movie theaters but, thus far, never in fact. hollywood has had such free reign with this amendment because it can propel plots and shift allegiances, it can be used for nefarious ends, to steal the presidency from the duly elected character, and because of the complication sur- rounding how it is both implemented and how it is then to be reversed, screenwriters have a lot of latitude when they integrate it into a narrative. this is good for screenwriters since it provides an oft used means to move a narrative along, but it may be more problematic for citizens since we only know the way this amendment works from our fictional experiences. in considering how this amendment works in practice, we are often relying on historians, constitutional law scholars, political scientists, and the understandings we have from legislative history surrounding the passage of the th amendment as well as the constitutional convention’s discussion of succession and the role of the vice president. as we consider the presidency in our popular imaginations, we also find ourselves puzzling over aspects of the constitution- al system that may be confusing or obscure. in the case of the removal of the president via the th amendment, for many citi- zens, the only conceptualization that we have of this amendment and how it functions is from these imagined narratives, again demonstrating unanticipated ways that popular culture shapes our thinking and understanding of politics and government in the united states, especially as it has to do with the presidency. this is actually a way in which voters are connected to the office itself—through their imagined ideas of the office and the individ- uals either inhabiting it or running for the white house. n o t e s . jay wendland. . “a heartbeat away: popular culture’s role in teaching presidential succession.” dialogue: the interdisciplinary journal of popular culture and pedagogy ( ). . david pozen. "the deceptively clear twenty-fifth amendment." interactive constitution: national constitution center. https://constitutioncenter.org/ interactive-constitution/interpretation/amendment-xxv/interps/ #the- deceptively-clear-twenty-fifth-amendment-by-david-pozen. will the recent black lives matter protests lead to police reform? davin phoenix, university of california, irvine maneesh arora, wellesley college on may th, , a police officer killed george floyd by kneeling on his neck for minutes and seconds. since then, protests, marches, and demonstrations have taken place around the country, bringing renewed attention to police brutality and racial injustice. a major question among movement participants, supporters, and casual observers is: will these protests lead to meaningful police reform? more broadly, can the protests that have taken place since as part of the movement for black lives spark infrastructural change? our research, along with early signs from local, state, and federal governments, provide some indication that the protests will be effective in changing policing practices. states like connecticut, iowa, and new york, as well as cities including houston, louisville, and phoenix have taken steps to reduce police violence or race-based targeting in recent weeks. legislation is moving through legislative chambers in several other states.¹ early evidence suggests that legislators are, at least somewhat, responsive to the demands of protesters and movement leaders. these anecdotes also align with our own work² and other scholarship³, which shows a relationship be- tween movement activity and policy reform. blm protests are effective working with an outstanding team of undergraduate research assistants, we created two original data sets. the first data set includes every police reform bill introduced by every state leg- islature since . the second data set includes every article on policing and police-related protests written in the largest newspapers since . this starting point is significant because it predates the ferguson uprising of after the murder of michael brown, which sparked heightened focus on police bru- tality among media and political figures. building from prior scholarship, we theorized that media cov- erage of protests could be a mechanism through which protest- ers can transmit their preferences to legislators, which may then lead to policy changes.₄ our findings ( ) support this hy- pothesis. indeed, we find substantial correlation between media attention on policing-related protests and legislative activity on above: after the police killings of george floyd, breonna taylor, tony mcdade and others in spring , protests against racial injustice erupted across the nation. illustration by henry e. chen. https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/interpretation/amendment-xxv/interps/ #the-deceptively-clear-twenty-fifth-amendment-by-david-pozen. https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/interpretation/amendment-xxv/interps/ #the-deceptively-clear-twenty-fifth-amendment-by-david-pozen. https://constitutioncenter.org/interactive-constitution/interpretation/amendment-xxv/interps/ #the-deceptively-clear-twenty-fifth-amendment-by-david-pozen. february © american political science association policing. among a set of major newspapers, the total number of articles related to policing published in was a dramatic times greater than in . this heightened media attention was sustained in . we found similar spikes in legislative activity, with all state legislatures introducing some form of police reform legislation. overall, state legislatures passed three times as many police reform bills in as they did in the previous year, times as many in and five times as many in . these findings indicate that protests, and particularly media coverage of protests, can put pressure on political decision mak- ers to act on the protesters' demands. there are several indi- cators that the current protests may be even more effective in influencing policy. the current protests may even be more effective first, michael t. heaney’s work shows that the media focused on protests in june of last year % more than at any other point in the last years.₅ there was about four times as much atten- tion on protests in june than at any point during the history of the black lives matter movement. this matters because it signals to legislators the salience of police reform to constituents across the country, which can lead to greater policy responsiveness from elected officials (gause ). second, americans are becoming substantially more sup- portive of police reform policies and blm more generally. re- cent polling finds that a majority of americans now support blm and, for the first time ever, a plurality of white americans sup- port the movement. roughly % of americans support major changes to law enforcement or to redesign the system complete- ly. importantly, in an era of intense political polarization, there is common ground across the political spectrum on several police reform policies.₆ third, as lagina gause argues, the costs of participating in these protests are higher due to the covid- crisis, and the grievances expressed over rampant police brutality are com- pounded by concerns over burgeoning unemployment and a worsening economy. gause argues that elected officials may be more responsive to the interests of groups who have to over- come considerable barriers to express their interests. in sum, because of the particularly high stakes of participation in these protests amidst the backdrop of a global pandemic, they may bring about greater policy responsiveness than previous pro- tests against police brutality. of course, it’s important to note that many police reform policies passed in recent years are merely symbolic. indeed, many of the bills in our database involved token gestures such as increasing community service of officers. even the substan- tive reforms, such as body camera policies and building public databases, are often not congruent with the institutional transfor- mation advocated for by the movement for black lives.₇ nev- ertheless, participation in the current protests appears to be an effective method of shaping public opinion and bringing about policy changes that better hold police departments and police officers accountable for their use of force. ■ n o t e s . see, for example: https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/ which-states-are-taking-on-police-reform-after-george-floyd/ . maneesh arora, davin l. phoenix, and archie delshad. . “framing police and protesters: assessing volume and framing of news coverage post-ferguson, and corresponding impacts on legislative activity.” politics, groups, and identities ( ): - . available at: https://doi.org/ . / . . . . daniel q. gillion. . the political power of protest. new york: cambridge university press. . lagina gause. . the advantage of disadvantage: legislative responsiveness to collective action by the politically marginalized. dissertation, university of michigan. . michael t. heaney. . " the george floyd protests generated more media coverage than any protest in years." the monkey cage. available at: https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ / / / george-floyd-protests-generated-more-media-coverage-than-any-protest- -years/. . see: https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-poll/ public-agenda-hidden-common-ground-police-reform . see: https://m bl.org/policy-platforms melissa r. michelson is dean of the college of arts & sciences and professor of political science at menlo college. sekou franklin is associate professor of political science at middle tennes- see state university (mtsu). he is the author of after the rebellion: social movement activism and popular mobilization among the post-civil rights generation (nyu press, ) and coauthor of losing power: african ameri- cans and racial polarization in tennessee politics (university of georgia press, ). he is president of the national conference of black political scientists and is a member of the tennessee advisory committee to the us commission on civil rights. lilly j. goren is professor of political science at carroll university. she is au- thor and editor of a number of books that focus on politics and popular culture. she is one of the cohosts of the new books in political science podcast. davin phoenix is associate professor of political science at the university of california, irvine, researching how race interacts with various spheres of us politics to shape the attitudes, emotions and behavior of both everyday people and elites. his book the anger gap: how race shapes emotions in politics is the winner of the ralph j. bunche award by the american political science association. maneesh arora is assistant professor of political science at wellesley college and an affiliate of the taubman center for american politics and policy at brown university. his research focuses on race and ethnicity politics, public opinion, and political behavior. his articles have been published or are forthcoming in political research quarterly, politics groups and identities, and journal of education and social policy. the views expressed in the posts and articles featured in the raise the vote campaign are those of the authors and contributors alone and do not represent the views of apsa. https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/which-states-are-taking-on-police-reform-after-george-floyd/ https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/which-states-are-taking-on-police-reform-after-george-floyd/ https://doi.org/ . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ / / /george-floyd-protests-generated-more-media-coverage-than-any-protest- -years/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ / / /george-floyd-protests-generated-more-media-coverage-than-any-protest- -years/ https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/ / / /george-floyd-protests-generated-more-media-coverage-than-any-protest- -years/ https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-poll/public-agenda-hidden-common-ground-police-reform https://www.ipsos.com/en-us/news-poll/public-agenda-hidden-common-ground-police-reform https://m bl.org/policy-platforms introduction from populism to decolonisation: how we remember in the twenty-first century forsdick, c, mark, j and spišiaková, e introduction. from populism to decolonisation: how we remember in the twenty-first century. modern languages open, ( ): pp. – . doi: https://doi.org/ . /mlo.v i . global crisis in memory introduction from populism to decolonisation: how we remember in the twenty-first century charles forsdick , james mark and eva spišiaková , university of liverpool, gb university of exeter, gb university of vienna, at corresponding author: charles forsdick (craf@liverpool.ac.uk) this article introduces, and contextualises, the contributions to the collection the global crisis in memory. since the s, the idea of ‘coming to terms with the past’, shaped by the values of neoliberal economics and liberal politics, became part of a globally-powerful consensus over how societies should overcome violent and traumatic experiences. in the s, in the context of the global rise of populist nationalisms, political hostility linked to global migra tion, and increasingly vocal criticisms of a neoliberal order, this consensus was powerfully challenged. rather than rejecting memory politics, new political formations have in fact embraced them. the white resentment embodied in the ‘history wars’ controversy in australia; legislation such as the polish ‘holocaust bill’; the growing scepticism of african states towards the international criminal court; or the rewriting of the histories of indian independence by hindu nationalists all reveal the ways in which diverse movements critiqued and reworked previous memory tropes. at the same time, attempts to decolonise western memory have engaged actively with previous manifestations of memory around which apparent consensus had been constructed. moreover, these various new memory practices increasingly have their own alternative internationalisms too, reaching across or beyond regions in new transnational formations. . overview across the world, what many commentators have called a liberal and universal(ist) model of ‘coming to terms with the past’ has come under attack. while various attempts to reckon with traumatic history date from the end of the second world war, the present-day crisis in endeavours to ‘come to terms’ with difficult pasts is mostly associated with the momentous geopolitical changes of the last decades of the twentieth century. this paradigm crystallised in the so-called memory boom as the cold war came to a close: the fall of military regimes in latin america and the end of communist dictatorships in europe and africa, the post- yugoslav wars, the genocide against the tutsi in rwanda alongside various african civil wars were all followed by the emergence of fledgling democracies frequently built on the debris of traumatic memories. these new socio-political contexts inevitably brought a renewed need to https://doi.org/ . /mlo.v i . mailto:craf@liverpool.ac.uk forsdick et al: introduction. from populism to decolonisationart.  , page  of consider how to make sense of the atrocities and injustice stretching across the past century and how to ensure the continuation of peace into the new millennium. these processes had many national specificities, but as a powerful ideal they were also linked between countries and regions by a common idea that the defence of civic and human rights, and thus of liberal citizenship, required that we remember past atrocities and state violence. sometimes this was based around the transnational memory of the holocaust, sum- moned up regularly in remembrance to ensure nie wieder (‘never again’). the terminology that dominated during the memory boom – coming to terms in english, devoir de mémoire (‘duty of memory’) in french (see ledoux; rousso, face au passé) or vergangenheitsbewältigung (‘mas- tering the past’) in german – suggested that populations could overcome the legacies of violence through memory. recently, those who promote liberal memory work have become more critical of the idea of mastering the past; only by ensuring that memory retains its power to unsettle in the present might societies, they reckon, really ensure peace and democracy (frost and watanabe; grosescu, baby and neumayer – ). german state policy adopted the term aufarbeitung der vergangenheit (working through the past) to emphasise the open- ended and ongoing nature of the process, necessary lest populations become desensitised to threats from anti-democratic forces (finch). critics of this liberal paradigm have existed ever since it emerged and assumed a hegem- onic position in the s; yet, as many of the contributors document here, the s wit- nessed a significant expansion in this challenge, both geographically and ideologically. on one side, new populist authoritarians – from jair bolsonaro in brazil to rodrigo duterte in the philippines – attacked those who sought justice for past atrocities, and rejected a set of late twentieth-century judicial and social practices that aimed to tackle the experience of dictatorship, genocide and violence. on another, critics from eastern europe to africa framed such cosmopolitan memory cultures as fundamentally colonial impositions of a model of remembering that had never captured local experiences or was unsuited to addressing transnational structures of imperial violence whose legacies lasted into the present. on yet another, various forces on the left, from latin america to southern africa, criticised what they saw as a western-led depoliticisation of the past. they cast the memory boom as bour- geois ideological ballast for an unequal, neoliberal world, and as such incapable of sustain- ing a public historical culture that could keep the radical right at bay. the alternatives these groups proposed were various, from the simple erasure of the past and the re-establishment of cultures of impunity, to the discovery of new forms of justice that arose out of local tradi- tions and cultures, to calls for more radical histories, public cultures and trials to deal with structural and economic injustices that had been left untouched at the end of dictatorships and wars. in order to understand these contemporary challenges, first we historicise the growth of this liberal memory paradigm. it was shaped by the moment of its birth in the late s, when the global anticolonial project in its various manifestations, including tricontinental- ism – the transnational attempt to link the liberation movements of africa, asia and south america (mahler) – was losing its appeal, and western-led neoliberal globalisation began on its road to dominance. in adopting this broader perspective, we can more easily observe how this eventually hegemonic framework was shaped by a set of individualising and eurocentric by president theodor heuss was calling ‘die unbewältigte vergangenheit’ (the unresolved past) a ‘schlag- wort’ (buzzword); the verbal forms ‘die vergangenheit bewältigen’, ‘unbewältigte vergangenheit’ mutated into the compound noun vergangenheitsbewältiung by the mid- s (eitz and stötzl, – ). thanks to chloe paver for this information. for a recent work that seeks to explore the move away from individual notions of responsibility to address how societies are more deeply implicated, see rothberg, the implicated subject. forsdick et al: introduction. from populism to decolonisation art.  , page  of assumptions about what was significant in dealing with violent pasts. in the second part, we examine the rise of right-wing populist counter-memory. right-wing populists were both anti-elitist and anti-pluralist, and based their legitimacy on the claim that only they could genuinely represent the will of the people (müller). memory politics have been crucial for many such projects. in appropriating the right to speak for a popular unity, populists imagine themselves as the true founders of democracies or nations (bull); as the only ones able genu- inely to represent the nation’s suffering in war or under persecution; or position themselves in direct succession to former patriotic authoritarian strongmen. in so doing, they present their movements as the protectors of national community from what they identify as the emasculating effects of shame, guilt and repentance at the core of cosmopolitan liberal inter- nationalism and its memory practices. such populist movements have been adept at employ- ing both social media and popular culture, through cartoons, songs, festivals or religious ceremonies, to embed these new historical narratives (kockel et al.; wodak and forchtner). in the third part, we explore the critiques of cosmopolitan liberal memory and justice as neoco- lonial from the perspective of the global south, most notably in sub-saharan africa and south america. in addition, we assess the decolonial responses that challenged the propensity of western liberal memory practices to reproduce hierarchical civilisational orders. these critics often sought to show the interconnections in histories of suffering, in ways that might elicit empathy and undercut exclusivist ethno-populism and racism: such interventions came from historians, memory studies scholars and in public memory work. others questioned outright the usefulness of memory based upon suffering and victimhood. finally, we explore why there was resistance to this decolonial turn, mostly in the west, and the prospects for change. this collection brings together scholars working on these various manifestations of memory politics from all corners of the globe, deploying their expertise from most world regions: from brazil to japan, south africa to austria. the articles are drawn from a conference that took place in london in february , funded by the uk’s arts and humanities research council (ahrc) in the context of its ‘care for the future’ and ‘translating cultures’ strategic themes. as such, it highlights the need to historicise the present while adopting approaches to mem- ory that are comparative, transnational and linguistically sensitive. the event became a first stage for discussions about the possible links between these global shifts in memory politics, generating debates that illustrated the inevitable co-dependency of these movements across the globe. this initiative develops this discussion further through an extended collection of papers that cover a broad range of both geographical areas and arenas for memory politics: from museums and war memorials to comic books and street paintings. . emergence of a paradigm the contributions here from cercel and david explore how memory studies has too often tended to neglect its relationship to historical change – an important task in order to under- stand the ideology of the ‘memory boom’ that is currently under fire. outlining ideas central to her book the past can’t heal  us: the dangers of mandating memory in the name of human rights, david presents the irruption from the s onwards of a victim-centred memorial culture as a cumulative accretion of rights culture since the second world war – from the universal declaration of human rights to the international covenant on civil and political rights, which gradually ‘force[d] states to face, and be held accountable for, past human rights abuses’. yet this was not a smooth journey. the ‘coming to terms’ paradigm also had its roots in the late s, in a western european postwar generation’s sense of the failure to confront societies properly about their role in violence and the genocide against european jews. institutions such as the international military tribunals at nuremberg and tokyo – established not only to prosecute war criminals but also to help societies acknowledge forsdick et al: introduction. from populism to decolonisationart.  , page  of and remember the atrocities of the second world war – had been sidelined. this had partly occurred because of the onset of cold war confrontation, which undermined the possibility of a shared understanding of wartime violence. other venues such as the un war crimes commission ( – ) were shut down due to the reluctance of western powers to face justice for, or even acknowledge colonial crimes. moreover, these institutions were accused of being more concerned with judging and delegitimising wars of aggression than publicising or seeking justice for the holocaust. in both the liberal west and the communist east, albeit in very different ideological registers, the crimes of fascism were blamed on elites – often at the expense of confronting society as a whole. only a few intellectuals, such as hannah arendt, resisted this framing. it was the violence of the accelerating processes of decolonisation in the late s that led to the first postwar memory boom. certainly, an emerging western new left played a large role. they connected the violence of a now hastening end to european empire in the late s to the broader failures of western civilisation to work properly through the remnants of fascism and wartime violence (clifford, gildea and mark; kundnani; shepard). in france, young activists connected the brutality with which their elites suppressed the algerian inde- pendence movement to the unresolved legacies of the second world war, notably the failure to prosecute collaborators who would go on to torture and kill in north africa (rothberg, multidirectional memory). the sheer violence of algerian decolonisation was in that sense fundamental to the evolution and contestation of postcolonial memory; it became the test case through which a new generation established an equivalence between the unresolved legacies of the second world war and the ongoing, neocolonial violence of the west. for this reason, parts of the right in germany and france have ever since argued that it would be unbalanced to grant to algeria this representative status for the whole of the colonial expe- rience (“was weiß der postkolonialismus vom kolonialismus?”). the s and s was the period, too, when the holocaust was becoming more widely discussed, even if in main- stream culture it was not yet remembered, as it later would be, as an evil above all others. nevertheless, such framings had already been long apparent in the thought of non-european anticolonial intellectuals: in his discourse on colonialism, afro-caribbean poet and poli- tician aimé césaire, like many other advocates of decolonisation, encouraged europeans to see the holocaust as a result of their own colonial practices coming home – in other words, as a genocidal tragedy which could only be vested with greater meaning by connecting it to episodes of colonial violence. the russell tribunal, a private people’s tribunal established in by leftist intellectuals bertrand russell and jean-paul sartre to try us crimes in vietnam, tied its mission to its forebear at nuremberg. in their view, remembering the holocaust was crucial for the fight against the ongoing crimes of western imperialist capitalism (molden; on the importance of alternative anti-fascist holocaust internationalisms before liberal human rights, see rothberg, “the witness as ‘world’ traveler”). many rejected – or did not even consider – such connections. the s french debates over algeria aside, the postwar political cultures of present or former european colonial pow- ers – namely britain, germany, belgium, portugal and the netherlands – did not witness sig- nificant public debate about the association between imperial violence and the brutality of fascism in europe. the haunting memory of victimisation in the netherlands and france dur- ing the second world war had the effect of rendering the colonial violence that had forced the end of their empires in the war’s aftermath all but invisible (foray). even the french survivors of concentration camps were not able to conceive of the brutal violence meted out by their own state in internment camps in north africa in the s as in any way equivalent to their own experience (kuby). horrific episodes outside europe could still be understood by many as irrational aberrations (king and stone ). forsdick et al: introduction. from populism to decolonisation art.  , page  of the revival in the late s of the idea of totalitarianism – which equated the state vio- lence of fascism and communism as the outcomes of similar historical processes – also served to ensure that the debate over the origins of modern genocide became a very eurocentric one. in this view, it was necessary only to have to explain ‘eruptions of barbarity’ in the place that white europeans considered most civilised and thus least expect it to happen – that is, on their own continent (moses – ). it should be noted that hannah arendt, who published one of the most influential postwar works on this topic, the origins of totalitarianism ( ), did connect the european use of racialised violence, from population transfer to genocide, to underpin her account of the brutalisation of european politics back home. however, her ear- lier desire to write primarily about nazi racism and imperialism had been replaced by the late s, and the onset of the cold war, with a greater emphasis on the twin threats of fascism and soviet communism – ideologies that both aimed at ‘total domination’. her contempo- rary defence of western civilisation in the face of the contemporaneous soviet threat served in part to sideline her earlier stringent attacks on racist imperialism’s perversion of western civilisation. she thus later came to emphasise the british empire as having been the last bulwark against nazi barbarism, and rejected the critiques of its violence from anticolonial intellectuals such as frantz fanon and césaire himself (moses – ). indeed, the smaller part of origins that did address connections between imperial violence and europe’s destruction in the s and s was soon forgotten in the reception of her work. it was only after the collapse of the communist threat that this interpretation became prominent once again: her boomerang thesis came to the fore in the s in the work of postcolonial scholars such as paul gilroy. others questioned the seemingly excessive focus on victims of the second world war. in both the ‘second’ and ‘third worlds’, anti-imperialists made the connection between european fascism and empire primarily through the lens of resistance. it was a political imperative to connect the anti-fascist struggle of the second world war with the anticolonial struggle for liberation in the present – not the memory of suffering. when the north vietnamese military visited communist-led poland in the late s to gain support for their struggle against the united states, they wanted to see the inspiring sites of the polish national struggle from the warsaw uprising of . a supposed overemphasis on victims from a particular ethnic- religious group was dismissed in some quarters too, especially in those eastern european communist states where the holocaust had taken place but antisemitism persisted. one czech communist dismissed the heightened recognition of the holocaust in the west as merely an ‘epidemic of jewish literature on concentration camps’ (kolár). the so-called coming to terms paradigm that developed in the s and s – culmi- nating in the explosion of memory practices after the cold war – marginalised the connec- tion of violence between the european and colonial worlds, which had been one aspect of the first postwar memory boom. both cercel and david here explore how, as the global anticolo- nial project weakened in the s, the use of memory to bolster resistance and struggle was gradually replaced by a newly dominant paradigm that highlighted the suffering of victims of genocide and criminal dictatorships. cercel draws on a longer-term left critique of this new memory culture. the focus on individual victims and criminality bolstered a western system that reasserted individual rights and the market economy and, in doing so, depoliti- cised the past, defanging history as a resource to claim social justice or economic equality (traverso). remembering victims became a way to stabilise the ‘transitions’ to a politically liberal democratic and neoliberal economic order that took place across southern europe, latin america, eastern europe and then south africa between the mid- s and mid- s (miles). cercel argues that it was no coincidence that the rise of memory occurred at this juncture: it was closely linked to the ‘transnational stabilization of a neoliberal consensus […] forsdick et al: introduction. from populism to decolonisationart.  , page  of the abandonment of the politics of redistribution, the erosion of social and economic rights, deregulation and privatization’. here, he connects the rise of a new economics to newly tri- umphant conceptions of rights. dominant western powers successfully saw off the radical claims of the south for real self-determination, greater equality in the world economic system and socio-economic justice (richardson-little, dietz and mark). these were replaced by more individualistic conceptions that emphasised protecting the citizen from dictatorship, political repression and restrictions on mobility (eckel and moyn; iriye, goedde and hitchcock). a concern with redress for political or moral wrongs perpetrated on the individual agent displaced collective struggles for justice (copello; slaughter; whyte). the victim had replaced the resister. in this sense, this liberal paradigm aimed at erasing the opposition between colonialism and anticolonialism as a central guiding struggle of poli- tics, replacing it with the opposition between dictatorship (of whatever hue) on one side and liberal democracy on the other. post-dictatorial sites of memory in the late twentieth century were generally constructed at places of violence or imprisonment in europe, latin america, and east and southeast asia, where a compelling account of the transformation from suffer- ing to freedom could be narrated (druliolle, “remembering and its places”; hughes; mark; schumacher). the victim of dictatorship became central to the imaginations of these democ- ratising states. legal compensation, or declarations of regret, were offered to them after trials or research at secret police archives – processes that also often served as public performances designed to inculcate new civic values (apor, horváth and mark; osiel; traverso ). yet these definitions often excluded those who did not conform to a model of the individual victim of state brutality: victimhood built around the claims of structural violence, notably on the basis of gender, or economic exclusion and poverty, usually received scant attention (roht-arriaza). these memory practices were placed in national containers too. this was part of a wider ideological apparatus that removed a consciousness of structural interconnected violence from countries whose modernisation had been attempted by dictatorships (notably in eastern europe and latin america), replacing them with an account of strictly national trajectories from an iniquitous criminal past to a liberal democratic present. this is readily discernible in the first judicial mechanisms after third-wave democratisations: they focused on the over- bearing authoritarian nation-state as a source of criminality and usually ignored, or provided no mechanisms through which to scrutinise or prosecute, businesses or transnational corpo- rations that had committed human rights abuses (koposov – ; pietropaoli vii). at the heart of this emerging paradigm was a belief that memory could be used to achieve ‘social reconciliation’; in the context of the late cold war, this meant the deradicalisation of the marxist left, and a commitment from the authoritarian right to democracy. this notion of the ritualised reconciliation of enemies as ultimately a good had emerged in the inter- national sphere in the context of east–west détente from the late s; its values would soon find concrete national form in the ‘consenso’ transition after the fall of the franco dic- tatorship in spain from the mid- s. representatives of the authoritarian regime and its opposition sought ways to enable compromise in order to avoid violence, often in return for a collective amnesty and a degree of continuation in the institutions and personnel of the previous regime. in spain, amnesia reigned, in the name of achieving social peace and pre- venting a return to the social divisions that had led to civil war (aguilar). yet elsewhere, first in latin america and then south africa, the idea of the history commissions emerged, used to acknowledge suffering and violence, but also in the hope of crafting new shared historical narratives to ensure social cohesion through a sense of shared overcoming of past trauma (moon). the extent of the universality of this paradigm – and its capacity to travel – has long been an important question. this ‘cosmopolitan memory’, a term coined by levy and sznaider in forsdick et al: introduction. from populism to decolonisation art.  , page  of their key work on the subject, was supposed to ‘transcend […] ethnic and national bounda- ries’ through a globally shared consciousness of victimhood (levy and sznaider ), with the holocaust serving as global model from which all others might learn. traumatic pasts could be addressed in similar ways across the world – a transnational synchronised ‘poli- tics of regret’ commemorating the ‘innocent victim’ as the agent of remembrance par excel- lence across europe, latin america, and east and southeast asia (jager and mitter; lim; mark; olick) was seen as central to the processes of democratisation and social stability, and a guard against the return of the far right across the world (assmann and conrad; grosescu, baby and neumayer ; mudde ). accelerating further after the end of the cold war, the growth of an international human rights system, culminating in the establishment of the international criminal court in , was also of great significance in propagating this cosmopolitan mem- ory culture (biedendorf). at the centre of these remembrance frameworks stood the memory of the holocaust: it became such a powerful and lasting symbol of the ultimate failure of reason and justice that it was transformed into a frame of reference, a yardstick by which to measure all crimes against humanity. as the fundamental narrative of the victory of good against evil, holocaust memory was able to penetrate geographic, religious or linguistic boundaries, and became so generalised that it could be channelled regardless of personal relationships to the events (baer and sznaider; eder; rothberg, multidirectional memory). from the s, it was pro- moted for memorialisation by the european union as a key element of a common european identity based on facing the continent’s dark past. a recognition for the other victims of nazi genocide – notably roma and homosexuals – slowly developed under the pressure of activism. a transnational ‘duty to remember’ was challenging for southern and eastern europeans, whose memory cultures were initially resistant (bottici and challand; littoz- monnet). nevertheless, this particular idea of genocide helped create a ‘convergence in “lan- guages of commemoration”’ (de cesari and rigney ) and eventually became the framework in which human rights abuses under latin american dictatorships, franco’s violence in spain and communist crimes in eastern europe could be understood (baer; crenzel; mark; von lingen). japanese peace activists in the later stages of the cold war drew inspiration from the german model of reconciliation and deployed it against the militarism of their own political right. holocaust memory served to bolster the attempted globalisation of this paradigm, not only as it became viewed as a transnational duty, but also because it provided a template to narrate other atrocities through which those occupying less powerful positions on a global media stage could make their claims for justice to audiences across the world. it should be noted that recently some have questioned how global this paradigm really was, noting that in many places – from india to latin america – holocaust memory hardly featured (confino). some sceptics thus question the reach of the memory boom, deeming it to reflect the limita- tions of a eurocentric memory studies that paid excessive attention to the universalisation of its western forms, and which failed to address how globally powerful paradigms and vocab- ularies emerged from other regional and local traditions of memory (grosescu, baby and neumayer ). hence, emerging projects are attempting to ‘globalize national memories of the south as well as to provincialize the eurocentric memory regime’. the idea of the holocaust that underpinned these new memory cultures became detached from colonial violence and came to be considered as the evil that stood above all others (rothberg, the implicated subject – ). this was already apparent in the early s, as its exposure on television through the eichmann trial lent it a media visibility beyond other violence (levy and sznaider; novick; rothberg, the implicated subject). some jewish writers, see the palgrave macmillan book series ‘entangled memories in the global south’. forsdick et al: introduction. from populism to decolonisationart.  , page  of such as elie wiesel, emphatically placed the holocaust as part of a specific and separate two- thousand-year history of christian anti-jewish persecution: the stress on modern imperial violence as the key to understanding the holocaust threatened to undermine the crucial role that its memory as a unique genocide played as bulwark against the return of antisemitic forces (tollerton). the idea of the singularity of the holocaust accelerated still more in the late cold war, as it became the pre-eminent illustration of the necessity of society’s to commit to a liberal tolerant order in which such an atrocity could ‘never again’ take place. the exclu- sions concomitant with remembering it, particularly in europe, were further cemented by the collapse of the eastern bloc in – . remembering imperial violence was thereafter associated with a demonised socialist internationalism in the continent’s east, where new anti-communist elites claimed, in any case, that their countries were free of colonial guilt as their states had never held empires. meanwhile, eastern european conservatives’ successful advocacy for a recognition of the gulag alongside the holocaust as constitutive of the mem- ory of a post-cold war european culture further reinforced the importance of the suffering of europeans over those who had been the victims of european imperialism. since the very beginnings of a postwar liberal memory culture, its advocates have been anxious about its vulnerabilities. some agonised that remembrance might become routinised in ways that no longer inspired societies to defend their democracies. neuhäuser here dis- cusses german philosopher theodor adorno’s early fears in , in his essay “was bedeutet aufarbeitung der vergangenheit”, that memory might become just a defence mechanism to keep responsibility at a safe distance. such memory work would have to be deemed a failure if it did not elicit ‘inner unrest’ in either the individual or in society. in germany, some jewish survivors did not support vergangenheitsbewältigung, as it suggested the possible settlement of matters too forcibly and thus repressed rather than continued to keep open and raw the processes of reconciling with the past (finch). such a ‘settling of the past’ might be just as dangerous as silence, as analysts of the rise of the radical right argued (mudde ). thus, an ongoing, disquieting and ever vigilant aufarbeitung der vergangenheit (‘working through the past’) was preferable. a number of the contributors here note the contemporary challenges to sustaining politi- cally and socially meaningful cultures of memory, and are themselves involved in important institutional projects and political activism to address them. hansen and bull explore the non-antagonistic nature of many state-endorsed memory practices that focus solely on a par- ticular form of victimhood and leave the wider context of grievances unacknowledged. such forms of remembrance, they argue, sought superficial narratives of healing without confront- ing the conflicting memories that lie beneath, and thus failed to resist the rise of ‘antagonis- tic’ nationalist memory cultures. rather, they advocate a ‘radical multiperspectivism’ and a ‘conflictual consensus’ in which the multiple subject positions of victims and perpetrators can be argued over – rather than shown as simple illustrations of good and evil (bull and hansen). others address the fact that the idea of resolution embedded in ‘coming to terms’ can be too easily mobilised for impunity; they contend, rather, that memory practices should be designed to enable ongoing engagement with, and management of, social and politi- cal conflict (druliolle, “h.i.j.o.s. and the spectacular denunciation of impunity”; opotow). the role of artistic (and often ‘agonistic’) interventions in such processes of maintaining continually unsettling engagement is beginning to attract the attention it merits (bull and clarke). vaisman’s contribution posits that the abstract idea of unity after violence is often more attractive than the hard and ongoing work of reconciliation; rather, she contends, the voices of survivors who seek the truth about the past have for this reason frequently been obscured and censored. in her examination of the recurrence of disappearances in modern- day argentina, she raises questions about the extent to which a ‘facing the past’ paradigm can really alter society and state institutions sufficiently to prevent the recrudescence of violence. forsdick et al: introduction. from populism to decolonisation art.  , page  of . new right, new populisms: challenging the liberal paradigm one of the first challenges to this liberal paradigm emerged from the new right in the s. neuhäuser suggests here that such voices anticipated the arguments of populists critical of vergangenheitsbewältigung almost thirty years later. he notes the case of kurt waldheim, soon to be president of austria, who, in , against the background of revelations of his nazi past, became one of the first causes célèbres that the right defended. some in the con- servative austrian people’s party were already denigrating the media, employing cries of ‘fake news’, while promoting waldheim as the real victim and accusing jewish groups of coordinat- ing a global media conspiracy against him. and elsewhere in the s, the remembrance of victims was not invoked to support the construction of a cosmopolitan empathetic culture of ‘never again’, but rather to give form to nationalist victimhood. in germany, ernst nolte trig- gered the historikerstreit (‘historians’ dispute’) of and by using atrocities under stalin as a diversion from nazi violence. reformist chinese elites around deng xiaoping increasingly invoked wartime suffering during this decade, employing nationalist appeals to preserve legitimacy (hillenbrand). stories of the victimisation of china by japan in the second world war were used to bolster his reformist movement and divert attention away from the domestic violence of the great leap forward and the cultural revolution (frost, vickers and schumacher). a major national site emblematic of this approach – the memorial hall of the victims in nanjing massacre by japanese invaders – was opened in . it was in the s, however, that the challenges to these liberal hegemonic forms of remembering attained an even wider political and geographical reach. many of these con- testations thrived in a new global climate in which convergence with western liberal democ- racy no longer appeared inevitable or desired. the global financial crisis of inaugurated a decade of widespread unemployment, housing market crises, failure of businesses and decline in consumer wealth: this was used by populist elites to further fuel the need to blame ‘others’, and to promote an increased scepticism regarding liberal western political and social models. the collapse of consensus that followed created space for the expansion of an ethno-nationalist populism, built largely on anti-globalism, protectionism, nativism and often opposition to islam, immigration and gender politics (kaya; mudde; wodak). and as subotić argues here, history was the ‘handmaiden of populism’: legislation such as the polish ‘holocaust bill’ (ray and kapralski), commemorations of dictatorial pasts in latin america and the reignited ‘history wars’ controversy in australia (attwood; taylor), are but a few of the most visible examples. a number of contributions here explore how the very rise of such populism was connected to the failure to entrench a liberal culture of memory, whether in eastern europe, latin america or east asia. indeed, schneider, in her essay on the ascent of president bolsonaro, and mckay on that of his equivalent, duterte, explicitly link their rise to the failure to sustain a human rights paradigm in both brazil and the philippines respectively, demonstrating how it is possible to revive the memory of past dictatorships as the true protectors of nation. crenzel, in addressing the case of argentina under president macri ( – ), demonstrates that even in the latin american country most committed to a culture of human rights and anti-impunity, populists will attempt to undermine transnational rights systems and justice – and use deeply embedded domestic human rights law to consolidate immunity for previous abusers. while these movements appeared to be independent from one another in their particular- ist focus on national and local histories, they were invariably connected through a shared determination to overturn the previously established liberal and would-be universalist human rights approaches to coming to terms with the past, seeing them as a political bedrock for a global liberal order. they sought to protect the nation from the perceived threat posed by globalisation, of which such memory practices were seen as part, the culture of the nation forsdick et al: introduction. from populism to decolonisationart.  , page  of supposedly undermined by the constant requirement to embrace post-imperial self-flagel- lation or post-holocaust mourning. they desired to replace this with their own particular brand of victim-centred identity politics, which portrayed themselves as the true representa- tives of the nation’s history and – often – its suffering (bull; kochanski). in germany, where ‘pluralism in the content of public memory overall’ is matched by ‘a lack of pluralism when it comes to the regulatory framework of remembrance’ (wüstenberg, “pluralism, governance, and the new right” ), the right-wing populist alternative for germany (afd) party increas- ingly exploited disquiet at the perceived lack of representation of certain memories of vic- timisation. in particular, they highlighted the suffering of so-called ‘ordinary germans’ during the second world war, a history they now employed in defence of a nation now supposedly threatened by the rise of immigration. in a speech in , björn höcke, afd’s state leader in thuringia, alluded to the memorial to the murdered jews of europe by claiming: ‘germans are the only people in the world who plant a monument of shame in the heart of the capital’ (bochum). neuhäuser here highlights how the house of austrian history, opened in vienna in , was attacked by the far right, who regarded it, as they already did the memorials at mauthausen and auschwitz, as a ‘cult space’ for an education in liberal guilt. the cosmopolitan memory of the holocaust was a particular target for populists, who viewed its widespread dissemination as part of a global liberal conspiracy. in eastern europe, for instance, the stress on the uniqueness of the holocaust in the internationalist ‘never again’ pan-european culture of memory was, following accession to the european union, countered by transnational networks of conservative politicians, activists and institutions. having suffered under both communism and fascism, they argued against a marginalisation of their own nations’ demands to be recognised as victims (mälksoo; mark; neumayer, the criminalisation of communism; neumayer, “integrating the central european past”; radonić, the holocaust/genocide template; subotić). where holocaust memory threatened to stifle such claims, it was attacked: in , polish president andrzej duda vocally supported the country’s holocaust bill, exempting the ‘polish nation’ from any complicity in the holocaust and other nazi atrocities. in this collection, subotić explores how the displacement of the holocaust with the idea of ‘communist genocide’ in eastern european nationalist memory cultures was connected to a right-wing programme to weaken a liberal idea of a post-national europe of ‘unity in diversity’. at the same time, the memory of the holocaust has also pro- vided populists with a powerful template of suffering. indeed, they used this transnation- ally recognised paradigm to promote their own nationalist histories of victimization (david, against standardization of memory). in this sense, holocaust memory was appropriated by those with ethno-nationalist agendas to undermine the very cosmopolitanism it had been employed to build. the german sponsorship of memorials to sites of jewish and other atroci- ties in eastern europe was in some cases exploited by local anti-communist activists who align such sites with their local cultures of suffering and resentment (bekus). in china, com- munists instrumentalised the memory of the holocaust mainly to highlight atrocities com- mitted under japanese occupation (confino). the defence of nationhood was also gendered. cosmopolitan memory was sometimes blamed for instilling progressive support for feminism and lgbtq politics that these popu- list detractors saw as undermining the foundations of national cultures. populists often drew on historical narratives that cast the nation as a masculine, heterosexual, potent force able to project power on the international stage. sawkins here explores why russia’s first embrace of the memory of the holocaust in the s – after many decades of downplaying its dis- tinctiveness in an otherwise powerful culture of great patriotic war memory – occurred in the context of the country’s invasion of crimea and conflict with the west. an emergent holocaust memory enabled president putin, in the context of his own expansionist geopo- litical project, to project an assertive masculine russia as the saviour of jews, to claim the forsdick et al: introduction. from populism to decolonisation art.  , page  of passivity of feminised europeans in the face of genocide and to highlight the nazi collabora- tionism of the former soviet republics such as ukraine. steele likewise offers here a gendered reading of the importance of the maintenance of the memory of the lost southern struggle in the american civil war. he locates it in a culture of a right-wing southern masculinity in crisis, fuelled by sexual anxiety and a fear of violation by migrants. he sees in the defence of the lost cause and its monuments a reassertion of white masculinist supremacy, a project grounded in the fear that the united states was becoming feminised, so much so that it could no longer lead the defence of the west. in some countries, these new victim-centred memory cultures became tied to culturally and racially exclusive modes of belonging preoccupied with the protection of nation, especially in the context of the ‘threat’ of migration (bull; de cesari and kaya). following the european ‘migrant crisis’ (or, more accurately, the crisis of political will and hospitality) of , a wave of anti-immigration sentiment emerged across the continent. eastern european conserva- tives in particular made the argument that a liberal human rights-based, holocaust-centred memory culture had left vulnerable to ‘islamic infiltration’ a continent that was ‘overly tol- erant’ and too ready to open its borders (kalmar; mark, iacob, rupprecht and spaskovska; sayyid). such fears were apparent in india too, where attempts to exclude islamic migrants from pakistan, afghanistan and bangladesh from indian citizenship in the late s were accompanied by a memory politics that retold the story of indian independence as a violent struggle to build a hindu nation. in post-imperial european nations, populists looked to defend a national culture – often coded as white - based on an older nostalgic vision of european empire. this was enabled by, as paul gilroy puts it (referring to the uk), a ‘postcolonial melancholia’: in this view, the empire was a source of discomfort and many of the violent aspects of its ‘unsettling history’ silenced (gilroy). and according to david, the ‘coming to terms’ paradigm was also in part responsible for this quietening. it had attempted to create a ‘standardisation of memory’ which was fundamentally eurocentric, neo-imperialist and had paid too little heed to cultural variation. it also only sought to address those extraordinary circumstances that followed vio- lent dictatorship or war: hence, ongoing structural violence inherited from colonialism, such as the treatment of aboriginal peoples in australia or native americans in north america, despite much activism and memory work, did not become mainstream at the height of the memory boom (orford). forged in the western celebration of victory over dictatorship in the late cold war, it became a framework that allowed a liberal world to celebrate its achieve- ments less encumbered by the burdens of its colonial past. conjunctures did arise through which interconnections between these forms of violence could be made visible in western cultures; but often the opportunities for transformation they threw up were as swiftly closed down. in france, for instance, the trial of maurice papon in offered one such moment. papon was a french colonial official who had served in morocco and algeria, suppressing the sétif uprising of may , and who, subsequently, as chief of police in paris, oversaw the massacre of peaceful north african immigrant fami- lies protesting in the city on october . although he was charged with crimes against humanity as a result of his complicity in the deportation and murder of french jews as a sen- ior civil servant during world war two, the trial entangled this wartime atrocity with a height- ened awareness of the huge death toll of the algerian war of independence. momentary national consciousness of these interconnections rapidly subsided, however, as memories of vichy collaboration, historically untangled from questions of colonial complicity, again took centre stage. the country’s ‘vichy syndrome’ (rousso, the vichy syndrome) eclipsed what oth- ers have dubbed its ‘algeria syndrome’ (donadey). likewise, in britain, the public revelation of the use of detention camps, violence and torture by the authorities against the mau mau during kenya’s decolonisation, and the prominent court case on behalf of three of its victims forsdick et al: introduction. from populism to decolonisationart.  , page  of in british courts from , did not fundamentally unsettle a broad national consensus on the benevolence of the empire (brown; elkins). the incapacity of the ‘coming to terms’ paradigm to attribute a similar gravity to the crimes of colonialism as it did the holocaust or communist violence has had important conse- quences. gordon, morin and noussis all address how this relativising amnesia, disavowal or silencing have enabled positive memories of british empire or the so-called french presence overseas to come back into the mainstream in the s. indeed, french president nicolas sarkozy claimed that an excessive guilt and drive for repentance or reparation for colonial- ism were a malady that undermined french national identity (bruckner; lefeuvre). natalya vince’s work, which highlights the great divergence between algerian and french views of the conflict, is instructive here. in french debates, the devoir de mémoire was often criticised as a liberal identity project of self-flagellation in the domestic sphere, rather than an attempt to address seriously the long-term effects in north africa. in algeria, by contrast, memory was not about reconciliation or healing, but rather concerned the question of who could claim to be authentic fighters in the anticolonial struggle. only elite algerian memory actors in well- connected cities used the international idiom of genocide to promote their memorialisation or film projects on a world stage. algerian and french debates were kept within their national containers (vince). french memory could not readily be unsettled by algerian voices. yet slowly in the s, through social media, the activism of both caribbean french politicians and hard left figures such as jean-luc mélenchon, the issue of colonial crimes, slavery and vio- lence returned. this broader shift set the scene for president emmanuel macron, as noussis explores, to call the colonisation of algeria a crime against humanity and to recognise the barbarity of the french state during the former’s struggle for independence. as gordon argues in this collection, underlying sentimental attachments to british empire were never challenged either by a ‘coming to terms’ paradigm that focused on the holocaust, or a national story that repeatedly recalled having fought the ‘good war’ between and . a contemporary soft imperial nostalgia might incorporate an awareness of the empire’s dark underbelly; nevertheless, such memories were often relativized in ‘balance sheets’ of good and bad, in ways that allowed a comforting memory of british imperial power still to be deployed to great political effect (ward and rasch). gordon demonstrates how readily the brexit campaign was able cleverly to mix aspects of colonial and anticolonial histories, uncritically invoking the glories of the empire to highlight the potential of ‘global britain’ that would bestride the world economically after the country’s ‘liberation’ from its own sup- posed colonisation by the european union (o’toole). some populists mobilised an imperial longing in defence of a white anti-multicultural identity. the afd party, for example, attempted to build political capital through celebrat- ing the ‘positive’ sides of the country’s colonialism, as a counterbalance to what it consid- ered liberal self-flagellation. germany, in the afd account, was absolved of colonial guilt and was under no obligation to rename streets or pull down statues. the afd’s leaders in fact recognised episodes of violence such as the herero and nama genocide ( – ), but downplayed their significance as not structurally core to the german colonial project, and as outweighed by the large amount of development aid given to namibia since independence (melber). morin explores in this collection the french right and far right’s attempts to revive positive memories of algerian colonisation and its defence in order to inspire a new struggle against an imagined ‘grand remplacement’ or ‘reverse colonisation’ by muslim immigrants. similar examples can be seen in italy, where populists such as matteo salvini targeted positive memories of fascist empire in africa in the s and the abyssinian invasion, especially vis- à-vis the diaspora. such a defence of whiteness can also be discerned in the widespread ‘irish forsdick et al: introduction. from populism to decolonisation art.  , page  of slavery myth’. this misleading memory enables those of irish heritage across the world to draw on the memory of african slavery, building a community identity around an imagined white victimisation under a multiculturalism which, they imagine, threatens their privilege. it cites a one-sided history of irish suffering under british colonialism, while forgetting the role that irish people played as beneficiaries of colonialism in the caribbean and north america (hogan, mcatackney and reilly). in some places, where populists took power, governments have sought to reshape their country’s spaces of memory. museums were a particular target in central-eastern europe. pis and fidesz governments removed politically unsympathetic directors at the museum of the history of polish jews in warsaw and at the holocaust memorial centre in budapest respec- tively. they also established the processes to create new (as yet unopened) museums such as the house of fates in hungary (which, as sawkins shows here, will be used to articulate the politics of the christian nation as protector of its jewish community from a contemporary islamic threat) or the warsaw ghetto museum, which will privilege the role of the polish nation as rescuer over its complicity in antisemitic violence (segal; radonić ‘our’ vs. ‘inherited’ museums). structures once used to propagate a liberal memory culture can be taken over too: more and more, the transnational networks enabled by european union funding are used to connect those radical right groups across the continent who seek to create their own memory politics based on racially exclusive readings of national heritage (kaya; pasieka). in india, hindutva-inspired populist bjp (indian people’s party) state governments targeted statues. memorials to post-independence leaders such as gandhi or the dalit leader b.r. ambedkar, and other socio-religious reformers denounced as cultural traitors, were defaced or removed. many lenin statues had endured despite the country’s liberalisation; but after president modi’s party took power, they were widely attacked – most notably in west bengal and tripura. claims to be the only true founders of nation was often key to populist memory: this was particularly challenging for modi’s bjp as they had no major figures of the independ- ence era as part of their political tradition. so, they revived figures such as revolutionary hindu shyamji krishna varma, who founded the india home rule society in london and died in . modi brought his ashes back to india from geneva in when he was chief min- ister of gujarat – almost a decade before he became prime minister. since then, the hindutva populists have crafted his image as a ‘masculine and pugnacious anti-gandhi’, prepared to use violence to force change, and whose struggle anticipated their own project to transform india. his recrafted biography as a key mover for independence, and its invented connections to the present, provided a vital alternative independence myth for the populist right (fischer- tiné). as india marked the th anniversary of mahatma gandhi’s birth in , narendra modi’s hindutva movement worked to marginalise the legacies of his non-violence and even revived the memory of the anti-islamic struggles of the british empire. in other cases, the practitioners of right-wing memory politics were skilled at promoting anti-liberal memory in spaces where populist historical effusions were still frowned upon – or could not obtain an institutional hold. the contribution from takeda here explores the politics of translation in this regard, showing how speeches by the japanese prime minister shinzo abe concerning his country’s wartime atrocities committed in east asia were trans- formed into a ‘language of regret’ for an international audience. the original japanese, by contrast, avoided the appearance of apology so as to be acceptable to a nativist right at home. the scale of these populist, far right or neo-nationalist movements, and their similarities, similar recognition of complicity in transatlantic slavery is increasingly emerging regarding scotland (mullen) and wales (evans). forsdick et al: introduction. from populism to decolonisationart.  , page  of mean that it is vital to consider the intersections and borrowings that inform them and the media that connect them. many of these new memory practices increasingly have their own alternative internationalisms, reaching across or beyond nations and regions in new transna- tional formations, even as they have reversed the earlier ‘cosmopolitan’ functions of memori- alisation. several eastern european right-wing populist governments cooperate with both the us and israeli right in the creation of nationalist versions of holocaust memory – as sawkins explores here. a number of contributors also highlight the importance of social media – an area that has become one of the strongest and most recognisable channels for a politics that subverts the traditional cosmopolitan model of remembering (fielitz and thurston; guhl, ebner and rau). the lack of editorial control, relative cost-effectiveness and the rapidity with which con- cepts and information can spread across the virtual world, as well as the opportunity to host discussions and share posts in order to create whole new networks of readers, make social media one of the most popular arenas for these new memory groups (zucker and simon). the absence of official sanction also becomes an asset for campaigners who question the integrity of public authorities and see themselves as excluded from the institutions of official memory politics. the subversive nature of these challenges to memory practices appears always at the edge of seriousness, eternally playful and disruptive, thus appealing to those disillusioned by the status quo. the sheer scale of some social media platforms makes it nearly impossi- ble to prevent extremist ideas from spreading, and several recent elections won by populist candidates have demonstrated the full capacity for social media to sway voters’ preferences. schneider considers here how jair bolsonaro’s victory in brazil is widely accredited to an aggressive campaign via whatsapp messaging, while indonesia’s and the philippines’ presidential campaigns actively used facebook to fight political opponents with con- siderable success. perhaps nothing represents the power of social media to influence world politics at the highest level more strikingly than does the twitter account of the us president donald trump. furthermore, as the examples from this volume show, the unique outreach of social media now intersects with memory politics. mckay analyses in this collection how the filipino president rodrigo duterte recast the memory of the marcos dictatorship on facebook and similar platforms when targeting the vote of diaspora communities in multiple election campaigns. while the examples mentioned in this brief overview touch on only some of the most prom- inent and publicised instances of these new memory politics, they serve to illustrate both their truly global impact and the similarities in their methods and patterns of development. however, despite their widespread reach and the clear links discernible between them, an interconnected globally aware account of this shift in memory politics remains elusive. there is still a need for research that charts networks and circulations underpinning these new memory paradigms across a range of political, cultural and linguistic contexts, and to explore the methodological approaches with which these can be captured from a global perspective. we recognise that there is increasing scholarly attention paid to memory beyond the national frames to which it has been traditionally limited (bond, craps and vermeulen; buchinger, gantet and vogel; de cesari and rigney; erll and rigney), not least in its state-endorsed forms (much of this work has been concentrated around the journal memory studies, founded in ). the twenty-first century has witnessed a clear ‘tension between the production of remembrance through transnational processes and its grounding in concrete locations’ (wüstenberg, “locating transnational memory” ), and new paradigms – such as ‘trav- elling memory’ (erll) – allow us to understand better the reworking of stories as they are transmitted across borders into new cultural spaces. most of the articles in this collection remain national, however, although some do point to the new networks of authoritarians forsdick et al: introduction. from populism to decolonisation art.  , page  of and right-wing populists who share approaches to memory politics, or to forms of media. however, detailed studies that would trace the connections and networks behind these seemingly unconnected contemporary movements are still urgently required – to chart the ideological origins and growth of contemporary memory practices in transnational terms, to address the ways in which they draw on techniques and tropes from earlier paradigms, and to analyse their relationship to new ideological formations based on race, nationalism and gender. the current collection exposes the possible systemic structures that underpin these developments across the globe, while trying to answer the question of whether the liberal ‘coming to terms with the past’ paradigm is indeed undergoing a (worldwide) crisis. its intention is to encourage the formulation of further case studies, but more importantly the identification – as we suggest in the following section – of new memorial dynamics evident in theory and practice. . from the neocolonial to the decolonial: alternatives to the liberal memory paradigm the essentially colonial nature of the liberal memory paradigm has been central to many of its detractors’ and opponents’ objections; yet the arguments over the nature of that colonial- ity, and the alternative projects established to supersede it, have taken many different forms. as we saw above, new populists drew on what has been termed a right-wing postcolonialism, which sought to bolster the pride of the white or hindu nation. in the west, this was pitched against the perceived threat from globally powerful, colonising, multicultural and ‘shaming’ liberal discourses about the past. yet there also developed critiques of the neocolonialism of contemporary judicial practices from across the global south and calls for new decolonial approaches that might supersede what their proponents consider to be the provincialism of memory practices within the west. the argument that cosmopolitan forms of memory and justice were essentially neocolo- nial powerfully returned in the s. the international criminal court (icc), established in the netherlands in to prosecute individuals for genocide and crimes against humanity, increasingly became targeted as an instrument of the west and its justice as culturally inap- propriate (kaleck). south africa and the gambia threatened to leave, with burundi ( ) and the philippines ( ) actually taking that step. ugandan president yoweri museveni, his kenyan counterpart uhuru kenyatta and rwandan president paul kagame, all criticised the court – the latter claiming it was never about justice ‘but politics disguised as international justice’ (taulbee, ). many in the african union pointed to the west’s hypocrisy in failing to prosecute crimes committed during the iraq war of . here maingi’s contribution examines how the arguments that african elites employed about western neocolonialism were in fact critiqued and ridiculed in popular culture. he examines the visual culture of resistance to kenyan politicians’ recent attempts to obtain impunity from the icc. his close reading of a rich culture of political cartoons and paintings shows how the strategic use by national elites of neocolonial discourses to avoid a judicial reckoning for political violence became vivid material for local artists who viewed their leaders’ appeals as hypocritical and ripe for satire. liberal paradigms were also considered to be colonising in that they aimed to depoliti- cise memory, thus robbing progressive movements of the tools for constructing a histori- cal consciousness that could inspire resistance to neoliberal globalisation and its domestic supporters. its memory culture, in this view, was only fit for an age that aimed at social deradicalisation and no longer had ambitions for structural economic transformation. in this critique, the fight against global injustice had been displaced by the veneration of the histori- cal victims of authoritarian states whose suffering was instrumentalised to underpin a series forsdick et al: introduction. from populism to decolonisationart.  , page  of of national, liberal settlements based on limited claims to justice, equality and rights. as roberts explores here, recent critiques from a second post-apartheid generation of radicals from the african national congress contend that the collective struggle to transform the society and economy of south africa was sacrificed to the memory politics of the truth and reconciliation commission (trc), which valued national reconciliation and stability (so as to attract foreign investment) over economic justice (similarly on liberia, see glucksam). the trc, he argues, was part of a much longer genealogy of colonial population management in africa, and a ‘conceptually simplistic’ local accommodation to the global discourse of tran- sitional justice which mainly served the purpose of further integrating south africa into a neoliberal global economy. the promotion of the trc across the world as a model for over- coming difficult pasts should, in this view, be understood as a neocolonial reproduction of control at the global periphery. salt’s contribution also addresses such failures of our present memory politics, noting how their past effacement of colonialism partly explains the incapac- ity of dominant models of memory to critique a neoliberal system which is still in essence neocolonial; without this acknowledgement, she contends, it is not possible to open up polit- ical spaces for alternative postcolonial futures. thus, alternatives were developed. in the s, in both africa and latin america, anti- neoliberal legal networks fought what they view as the ‘soft justice’ that had followed late twentieth-century democratic transitions. they were critical of approaches that had restricted the definition of criminality to exclude economic suffering and began to fight for the recog- nition of those who had endured socio-economic violence under dictatorship (nagy ). judicial campaigns on behalf of victims moved away from an individualised framework to set the crimes of dictatorship in the context of collective struggle against not only their local dictatorial elites but also transnational corporations that had helped to sustain them. they were critical of nationalised memory paradigms that erased historical awareness of the struc- tural and connected nature of violence within the global system (grosescu; lai; pietropaoli; verbitsky and bohoslavsky). histories told at sites of memory began to change too. in latin america, leftist populist memory activists began to occupy those places of atrocity and former prisons which had been the preferred spaces for liberal human rights advocates to create their ‘never again’ memory. at sites such as londres in santiago, chile, they sought to politicise more explicitly their histories, placing a greater emphasis on stories of struggle alongside suffering (bădescu, beyond the bare walls). working to bolster a new struggle against an authoritarian populist right that was no longer clearly committed to preserving democratic values, they framed the history of the violence of the left in ways that were no longer aimed at deradicalisation and political accommodation (bădescu, transnational place-making). there were also calls to ‘decolonise’ both memory studies and public cultures of memory of western countries. such approaches usually critique both the eurocentric, provincialised forms of remembering they observe in the liberal paradigm, and the remembrance practices of new ethno-nationalist populisms which justify exclusivist nationalisms or white suprem- acy. very often, such works were written by, or sought to incorporate the views of, those from the global south or, in the west, from minority communities. these often attempted to give public visibility to those who lack it, and encourage an understanding of the importance of the west’s imperial violence – alongside the holocaust or gulag – in the making of the mod- ern world. in so doing, they have sometimes developed paradigms that refuse competition between different types of historical suffering and exclusion, and instead encourage cultures that recognise the interconnections and encourage empathy between them. in other cases, sometimes this is extended to a claim about the co-production of human rights and neoliberalism. see whyte. forsdick et al: introduction. from populism to decolonisation art.  , page  of practitioners have constructed approaches that question whether the memory of suffering actually serves any purpose. these innovations need to be situated in the context of a conservative turn within the acad- emy, particularly in response to active attempts to ‘decolonise’ memory. pierre nora, one of the most important founding figures of studies of contemporary memory, associated himself in with efforts to counteract the perceived threats of decoloniality in contemporary france on the grounds of their ‘détournement indigne des valeurs de liberté, d’égalité et de fraternité qui fondent notre démocratie’ (‘shameful hijacking of the values of liberty, equality and fraternity on which our democracy is built’) (‘le “décolonialisme”, une stratégie hégé- monique’). he opposed radical efforts, evident also in the work of memory studies in the english-speaking world (see rothberg, sanyal and silverman on noeuds de mémoire [knots of memory]), to ‘come to terms with the past’ that destabilise conveniently coherent and often introverted narratives of national memory. this was in fact nothing new: the rapid growth of the discipline of memory studies in the s – which he played a large role in shaping – had been nationalist, eurocentric and anti-anticolonial. this was very evident in a key term of the emerging discipline, lieux de mémoire: ‘sites’ or ‘realms of memory’ (nora). the field has often failed to carry out the rigorous contextualisation and historicisation that concepts of this sort require. the idea of the lieu de mémoire itself emerged from a specific ideological niche associated with the bicentenary of the french revolution and the fin-de-siècle crisis in french republican identity. methodologically nationalist in conception, the term ‘realms of memory’ has now been deployed in universal ways; these often omit to recognise how nora’s original collection failed to engage with the colonial past (achille, forsdick and moudileno), but may also be seen – as ‘neither an oversight nor blindness’ (stoler ) – as being rooted in wider efforts to avoid any association of official french memorial practices with that past. ann laura stoler has highlighted the importance of nora’s initial research in the s on the pied noir population of algeria, detecting in his first book, les français d’algérie, a barely veiled disdain for his subjects, not least because they are seen to diverge from a benchmark of authentic frenchness. it was this methodological nationalism and eurocentrism to which nora’s work contrib- uted that practitioners in memory studies have recently attempted to critique. huyssen has described the risks of such ‘cultural fortressing’, a phenomenon that many scholars and prac- titioners have sought to transcend. they have instead looked to interconnected paradigms as alternatives to hierarchical and competitive memory cultures. the work of michael rothberg on multidirectional memory, in particular, has foregrounded the need to situate memories of the holocaust in relation to that of other historical traumas, not least slavery and colonialism (rothberg, multidirectional memory), and a number of other scholars have entered into dia- logue with this approach (rothberg, sanyal and silverman; sanyal; silverman). problematics associated with multidirectional or interconnected memories are now increasingly visible in memory studies, with this work also underpinned by recent shifts in historiography. historians of germany have, for instance, shed light on the links between colonial violence and the holocaust (kim; madley; mazower; olusoga and erichsen; zimmerer). as is often the case, literature and the creative arts have had a vanguard function in the emergence of such work at historical intersections, providing a space for experimentation immune to the threats of intellectual censorship or legal intervention. the aesthetics and poetics of memory literature have played a key role in illustrating and generating such multi- directionality. rothberg drew on literature and film in developing his original concept, study- ing works such as didier daeninckx’s detective novel meurtres pour mémoire (death in memoriam) and michael hanneke’s film thriller caché (hidden) to reflect on the links between the holocaust and the algerian war of independence (rothberg, multidirectional forsdick et al: introduction. from populism to decolonisationart.  , page  of memory). the swedish author sven lindqvist explored in his utrota varenda jävel (exterminate all the brutes) the interconnections of colonial brutalities and the shoah. lindqvist reveals the ways in which the barrier between memories of the holocaust and of imperial genocides has been a site of great cultural tension. similar approaches were evident in the visual, plastic and performance arts, where important work revealed ‘artistic memory practices in which the european and the non-european are indissolubly folded into each other’ (huyssen ). however, applying new models – primarily the multidirectional and decolonial – in approaches to public memory was very difficult to achieve. the interconnections between different moments of extreme violence that were established in critical memory theory were not well represented in public praxis, especially when this was state-endorsed. holocaust memorial days were established in most european countries in the early s. these were were increasingly used to mark other genocides too, such as that against the tutsi, but this approach invariably focussed on questions of difference rather than any interconnective par- adigm. they could sometimes be connected to contemporary racisms against black, jewish and roma communities in europe in the name of ‘never again’ (kushner), but nevertheless seldom linked the phenomenon of the holocaust itself to the longer-term development of european racial violence linked to colonialism. in other cases, such days were in fact used to reassert national virtue and exceptionalism, as in turkey and hungary (karakaya and baer). so, despite substantial historical research, and some popular pressure, there has been con- siderable resistance to the incorporation of a consciousness of europe’s colonial violence alongside the story of the holocaust and gulag – either in national debates or within eu public memory projects (lawson; sierp). this is particularly the case in germany, where mis- readings of the work of achille mbembe led to the philosopher being accused of relativising memories of the holocaust and colonialism, whereas his work is much more about multi- directionality than competition (rothberg, “the specters of comparison”; khanna). indeed, mbembe’s writings may be seen as an indictment of how germany’s privileging of holocaust memory contributes to the ‘refusal to acknowledge the practice of german colonialism and countenance the consequences’ (melber and kössler). a major new museum in berlin, the humboldt forum, due to open in , also brought these issues of germany’s relation- ship to its colonial history to the fore. the housing of ethnographic collections in a rebuilt prussian palace; the physical separation of ‘primitive art’ from the histories of european cul- tural progress told on nearby museum island; accusations of relative incuriosity concerning the relationship between colonialism and the collections themselves; and opposition from minority groups who felt their perspective was excluded from an institution that first and foremost celebrated german enlightenment humanism, all rendered it a controversial pro- ject (el-tayeb; pelz; steckenbiller). nevertheless, to a limited degree, there had been signs of a shift to acknowledge the dark sides of colonialism within specific national debates. in belgium, as early as the s, the question of whether the colonial practices of the congo free state where, from to , an estimated – million africans had died, constituted genocide, was publicly debated. pressure started to be exerted on museums that addressed this colonial period, and demands to remove statues of léopold ii, sovereign of the congo free state, became audible (hasian and wood). in the netherlands too, the amsterdam tropenmuseum, one of a number of imperial foundations grappling actively with the legacies of this colonial past, started first tentative steps of decolonisation of the institution (van huis) with a temporary exhibition in , ‘oostwarts! kunst, cultuur en kolonialisme’ (eastwards! art, culture and colonialism). this is now integrated into the museum’s permanent collections and continues in recent dis- plays such as ‘heden van het slavernijverleden’ (afterlives of slavery). efforts elsewhere were less successful, with the long-awaited refurbishment of displays in the royal museum for forsdick et al: introduction. from populism to decolonisation art.  , page  of central africa at tervuren being met with widespread disappointment and major criticism at the perceived failure of an opportunity to address the institution’s complicity in the excesses of belgium’s colonial past (hassett). a number of contributors to the current collection – notably noussis on france, and arens on belgium – highlight how challenges to colonial memory are no longer contained within only national debates. the increasing transnational power of right-wing memory politics pro- duced a counter-reaction, a growing realisation among the liberal left that colonialism’s lega- cies need to be challenged in the realm of memory, leading to a much more assertive case for a decolonised public sphere across many western countries. such processes are evident in the museum and heritage sector, where groups such as museum detox in the uk have held heritage institutions to account regarding the attention they pay to deconstructing systems of inequality across their operations. some historians and memory activists, most notably on the left and within minority communities, are therefore trying to break down such barri- ers, and use an understanding of violence now widely socially embedded through holocaust memory to encourage their societies to face up to the brutality of their own imperial pasts. initiatives are both state endorsed and community led, and although there are inevitable ten- sions between these approaches, complementarities are evident too. this is very apparent vis-à-vis the memory of transatlantic slavery, which is relatively mar- ginalised in the wider field of memory studies. growing activism in this area is complemented by an emerging institutional activity that increasingly avoids the one-sided and often deeply insensitive emphases on abolitionism – evident at the commemorations of the th anni- versary of the abolition of the slave trade in france in , and the th anniversary in britain in . indeed, the very choices of these dates centred the role of european pow- ers as saviours, marginalising the experience of the enslaved as both oppressed and libera- tors. avoiding past controversies around competing understandings of victimhood and the uniqueness of historical traumas (burzlaff; zierler), more recent work has also sought con- structively to bring together study of the ways in which transatlantic slavery and the shoah have been commemorated (katz). in learning from the germans, susan neiman suggests, for instance, that any stress on ‘comparative evil’ should be replaced by attention to ‘compara- tive redemption’, allowing a focus on how communities have reacted to and processed their memories of difficult pasts. increasingly, germany’s postwar confrontation with nazism was publicly promoted as a model in the united states for its reckoning with slavery. recent public commemorations of transatlantic slavery have often been coordinated from the top down, although there is a pressing need to acknowledge the importance of the voices of the black activists and politicians who have, often for decades, fought for such histories to gain greater visibility within state institutions. the advocacy of french guianese politician christiane taubira and martiniquan writer Édouard glissant was crucial in the passing of the taubira law in , recognising historical slavery as a crime against humanity. the french state developed a major commemorative apparatus in this area, focused around annual events on may, the national day of remembrance of the slave trade, slavery and their abolition, and culminating in the establishment in of the fondation pour la mémoire de l’esclavage. arguably a means of forging a unified ‘duty of memory’ in an area where – unlike that of the algerian war of independence – relative consensus exists, this nevertheless rep- resents a state-endorsed process of ‘coming to the terms with the past’ that regularly attracts criticism from the far right. marine le pen, leader of the rassemblement national (national rally), formerly the front national (national front), has repeatedly called for a ‘rebalancing’ of school curricula in this area (sessions). elsewhere, responding to the international reparations see for example: the horizon cohere project, https://research.ncl.ac.uk/cohere/. https://research.ncl.ac.uk/cohere/ forsdick et al: introduction. from populism to decolonisationart.  , page  of movement, major initiatives such as universities studying slavery have seen higher education institutions in the united states and the united kingdom addressing the direct and indirect place of slavery and its legacies in their histories. a report and series of recommendations produced by the university of glasgow in (mullen and newman) has triggered parallel responses in other universities, suggesting various ways in which ‘coming to the terms with the past’ continues to benefit from a degree of institutional traction in relation to reparative memory practices in the twenty-first century. as such, they resonate with the ‘rhodes must fall’ movement, a campaign launched in march against a statue commemorating cecil rhodes on the campus of the university of cape town, which has become a global movement advocating the ‘decolonisation’ of education. that challenges to western memory of colonialism and slavery are now part of transna- tional movements, and no longer confined to national debates, was made clear in the global impact of black lives matter in the summer of . this movement started in the united states in response to the police murder of george floyd in minneapolis, and saw protests across the country that connected a populist president, contemporary state violence and the militarisation of the police with much longer histories of racial injustice. a striking aspect of the movement was its recourse to historical memory. its insistence on understand- ing the long-term history of white supremacy as key to the struggle against contemporary racial injustice rapidly led to the targeting of buildings and monuments that represented this ideology and the survival of which embodied its persistent power. waves of defacement, crowd-driven toppling and state-sanctioned removal of statues linked to the civil war-era southern slave-owning confederacy spread across the united states. steele’s contribution to this special collection shows how a recent white memory politics that grew out of a feeling of decline in the united states’ status as a great power – based on a sense that the afghan and iraqi conflicts were eventually lost – turned to memory politics. as the whiteness of a us populist right was rendered fragile, so its leaders revalorised the early twentieth-century ‘lost cause’ monuments – such as the robert e. lee statue in richmond, virginia – which evoked an earlier era of racial supremacy. it was partly the fact of this revival that made them such a focus for removal by protesters in . the black lives matter movement soon inspired other acts of iconoclasm, particularly in post-imperial western europe. it was the consciousness of shared political objectives across black communities in the united states and europe that was crucial in creating a transnational challenge to the way in which imperialism and slavery were remembered. in britain, attacks on monuments to those who had been complicit in the slave trade accelerated following the toppling of the late nineteenth-century statue to bristol slaver and philanthropist edward colston in june . in belgium, monuments to léopold ii were defaced and removed. the movement spread well beyond black communities on both sides of the atlantic; this may have been due in part to the fact that the historical consciousness it brought to light provided a compelling counter-agenda to the ethno-populist visions of nation, identity and memory that had intensified over the previous decade. yet entry into the mainstream of the idea that slavery and colonial violence were part of a system of racialised global supremacy that had potent legacies in the present quickly became a challenge to a eurocentric memory culture. it placed under question a european tradition of using concern over racial injustice in the united states as a displacement tactic to evade confrontation with the continent’s history of colonial violence (younge; wekker): questions of racisms past and present were now brought straight to europe’s shores. and so there was also resistance and ambivalence. in germany, an insistence on the singularity of holocaust memory had to be restated, although a process leading to an apology for the namibian genocide was accelerated (melber). british opponents of the sudden, unplanned removal of statues often connected attacks on monuments that forsdick et al: introduction. from populism to decolonisation art.  , page  of commemorated slavery with a mostly invented fear that war memorials were to be next – to enable more effectively an argument, through conflation, that such attacks constituted an assault on national identity and indeed history itself. as they attempted to contain this street-level reckoning, they also responded by invoking, by way of contrast, the measured, state-sanctioned nature of german memory culture. in eastern europe, all this inspired a small roma lives matter movement, and led to marches in solidarity with black lives matters in various capitals; nonetheless, rightist populists pointed to its lack of relevance, drawing on well-established (and contested) arguments that the region had not participated in european colonialism. such appropriation is also to be read in the light of an established critique of any con- temporary overemphasis on remembering history in terms of victims, trauma, melancholia and loss – a tendency mirrored in the approach to memory analysed by many of our con- tributors. it is the presence of such approaches in cultures of public memory that has, it is argued, fostered countervailing grievance cultures. similarly, the dominant focus of memory studies has often been – as this collection demonstrates – on past violence, trauma and processes of ‘working through’, reconciliation and transitional justice. thus, more recently, there have been sustained critiques of this paradigm, in an attempt to move memory beyond its exclusive focus on violence and victimisation (see arnold-de simine; kansteiner; lacapra; radstone; rigney). as stated at the outset, this collection sits at the intersection of two ahrc research themes: ‘care for the future’ and ‘translating cultures’. the first of these seeks to historicise the con- temporary; the second to foster comparative and transnational understandings, rooted in a sensitivity to linguistic and cultural variation, that challenge the universalisation of the partic- ular. responding to these agendas, the articles gathered here are an attempt to launch a wider debate regarding the perceived crisis in public memory practices in ‘coming to terms with the past’. as this introduction has demonstrated, they represent at the same time a critique of memory studies, an indication of the risks incurred by virtue of the field’s eurocentrism and the need for more active internationalisation and accompanying decolonisation. as such, the essays that follow call for attention to a wider range of contexts and paradigms that will per- mit us to grasp the re-politicisation of memory in the twenty-first century – and the urgent need for the elaboration of new paradigms to allow us to understand such shifts. . structure of the collection the contributions in this volume are organised around six main themes. the first centres on the tensions in contemporary forms of cosmopolitan memory, starting with cristian cercel’s piece which finds parallels between the recent boom in memory politics and the global rise of neoliberalism. cercel follows the origins of both phenomena as they developed through the s and s, describes their spread through their mutual entanglement and ultimately demonstrates how their interconnected paths led to the current crisis of both liberal democ- racy and cosmopolitan memory. these connections generate questions about how best to use such memories for the future, and whether it is the future, rather than the past, with which we need to come to terms. the paper by lea david adopts a critical approach to the global ‘coming to terms with the past’ agenda and questions the purported universality and superiority of this model of transnational remembering, synonymous as it is with the preservation of human rights. she exposes some of the inconsistencies and paradoxes of its design, including the incongruity of applying patterns of dealing with trauma drawn from human psychology to something as heterogeneous as a whole nation, and reveals how the victim-centric focus of these memory politics creates destructive forms of societal competition and hierarchies of victimhood. forsdick et al: introduction. from populism to decolonisationart.  , page  of the following two articles build on the lessons learnt from these tensions and imagine different pathways that could lead out of the crisis of memory. the study by anna cento bull and hans lauge hansen is based on their results from the unrest project, an eu-wide endeavour that explores the possibilities for a transnational remembering that is neither cos- mopolitan nor antagonistic. this so-called agonistic mode of memory, drawing on the work of chantal mouffe, embraces conflict instead of ‘coming to terms’ with it and deliberately avoids attaching labels such as ‘good’ and ‘evil’ to groups or movements. the empirical evidence from bull and hansen’s case studies, collected from various european museums and other heritage institutions, shows the real possibilities that flow from the effective application of these alternative memory pathways. adopting an approach inspired by postcolonial studies, karen salt reimagines derek walcott’s concept of twilight zone in the context of the present-day crisis in memory politics. her piece looks for different pathways to lead us out of this twilight of remembering and into a future that might leave the darkness of the past behind. salt also stresses, however, that the way out lies in a continual process of becoming, rather than in aiming to reach a horizon point where that history is wholly forgotten. the second theme revisits what became the fundamental ‘never again’ moment of european history, the memory of the holocaust. the papers in this section trace the varied local manifestations of this supposedly global, or pan-european, memory and expose the frequent appropriation of these narratives into local populist movements. jelena subotić explores how this universalist notion of the holocaust as the ultimate sym- bol of the failure of human rights is frequently compared with the crimes of the communist regimes in europe’s former eastern bloc. drawing on examples from various museums and commemorative practices, she follows the genesis of these developments, dating back to the acceptance of these countries into the shared memory space of the european union, and then details how this creation of apparently seamless parallels between nazi and communist victimhood feeds into nascent nationalist and populist narratives which consciously militate against the model of cosmopolitan memory. isabel sawkins’s article maps the development of russia’s memory of the holocaust under putin. previously, the specificity of jewish suffering was not emphasised over the wider national narrative of the second world war. yet as a holocaust memory has emerged there for the first time, it has served russian nationalist aims rather than become part of the liberal cosmopolitan version. using the example of a celebrated film centred around a soviet leader of a revolt in an extermination camp in poland, sawkins demonstrates how the putin gov- ernment uses stories of russian jewish heroism in order to emphasise the country’s central position on the eurasian stage, as its depiction intentionally shifts from ambivalence over the suffering of russian jews during the second world war towards the glorification of heroes of the resistance in more recent years. stephan neuhäuser illustrates austria’s complicated relationship with its involvement in the second world war through the arduous process of opening the country’s first national history museum. his contribution traces the complications and controversies surrounding the attempts to build the house of austrian history in central vienna, details the various methods through which its opponents tried to forestall its opening and discredit its aims, and finally links these movements with a nationwide reluctance to ‘come to terms with’ – or work through – the country’s past. the third theme leaves the european realm behind and traces the connections between new populist memory practices and the rise of right-wing authoritarianism across the globe. it starts with two south american examples. nina schneider scrutinises jair bolsonaro’s rise to power in brazil while asking whether the election of a president openly supporting forsdick et al: introduction. from populism to decolonisation art.  , page  of right-wing dictatorships and other human rights violations can be ascribed to a ‘failure’ of memory politics. her detailed overview of the brazilian attempts – or the lack thereof – to ‘come to terms with’ the country’s violent past on both ends of the political spectrum reveals ample scope for unintentional forgetting, and she indicates how these cases of seemingly nationwide amnesia are frequently exploited and deepened as part of bolsonaro’s politics. emilio crenzel’s article looks back at the three and a half decades since the fall of argentina’s dictatorial regime, contemplating how the transitional justice structures, and in particular, the country’s pronounced emphasis on incorporating human rights into the judicial system, has influenced memory narratives. through detailed analysis of four present-day judicial trials that took place under the current macri administration, crenzel demonstrates how a gradual ero- sion of the human rights paradigm has been justified through reinterpretations of the country’s own history of dictatorship, and how the inter-american system for the protection and defence of human rights was undermined in right-wing attempts to return justice to the national sphere. he also explores the strength of the backlash against these tendencies from those liberals and progressives who refuse to equate ‘coming to terms with the past’ with political impunity. across the pacific, deirdre mckay uses examples from recent filipino history to investigate one of the newest and as yet rarely explored agents of the present-day memory crisis: social media. through her study of rodrigo duterte’s presidential campaign and his depiction of the national memory of the martial law era of the s, mckay demonstrates how facebook and other platforms were deliberately used to create alternative interpretations of history, and how the global reach of these media allowed for their spread far beyond the country’s official borders. her study reveals just how important it is to include such material in any dis- cussions on memory politics, given an increasingly globalised world that uses social media as its primary means of communication, while also emphasising the new challenges associated with the archiving and evaluation of these sources. lastly, brent steele’s chapter addresses the united states under donald trump as the presi- dent seeks parallels between the military politics of his administration and the memory of the american civil war in the southern states. by juxtaposing the reinterpretation of civil war memory through the lost cause mythology and the erection of memorials in the south against the trauma of military defeats following the war on terror of the s, steele dis- covers how the concept of national loss may precipitate the rise of populist memory politics within a wider context of socio-political and economic crises. during the demonstrations in the united states in may and june that followed the killing of george floyd by police in minneapolis, those monuments to the confederacy that had been revalorised by a recrudes- cent white populism, such as the robert e. lee statue and the daughters of the confederacy building in richmond, were targeted by protesters. the fourth theme traces the pathways of right-wing populist memories in european coun- tries that were once colonisers. it starts with two french case studies. paul max morin’s chapter demonstrates how the unchallenged coexistence of conflicting memories, aiming to appease all sides while not asking any uneasy questions about the past, can easily feed into the rise of extremisms present in europe since the turn of the millennium. using examples from the discourses surrounding the algerian war of independence in france, morin shows how an allegedly peaceful method of remembrance devoid of critical reflections – as cur- rently pursued by the french president emmanuel macron – leaves scope for easy appro- priation of these national memories by groups on both sides of the political spectrum, and how the lack of a clear national narrative can result in a reversal of the victim–perpetrator dynamic, fuelled by nationwide insecurities and frustrations. giorgos noussis then explores how the different presidencies of the past two decades have addressed the topic of national memory. he focuses on the french activist maurice forsdick et al: introduction. from populism to decolonisationart.  , page  of audin, whose death in algeria under french military torture became a symbol of the antico- lonial struggle. by juxtaposing nicolas sarkozy’s anti-repentance approach with emmanuel macron’s ostentatiously public apology to audin’s widow, noussis positions each of these stances in their respective socio-political contexts, reveals the motives underpinning the dif- ferent approaches to national memories and links these with the difficult transformation of a living memory into a cultural one. britain’s memory politics vis-à-vis the country’s colonial past is recounted by michelle gordon, who demonstrates how the concept of british ‘exceptionalism’ helped crystallise a mythological image of a less violent colonial past within the context of recent brexit debates. these narratives continue resurfacing in political as well as in public discussions, and gordon demonstrates the dangerous potential of such partial depictions of the past when used as a tool in legitimising exclusionist practices. she suggests that both the core of the problem and its solution can be found in the communication channels between historians and the wider public, and calls for a greater contextualisation of britain’s colonial past within the broader discourse of national history. sarah arens considers the role of visual cultures in the complex web of memories tied to the colonial past in africa through an analysis centred around a comic book set during the first world war in belgian congo. behind the story of an unlikely friendship between a belgian colonial officer and a native soldier, arens traces patterns of preconceptions that resonate in belgian society to this day and demonstrates that the frequently underestimated medium of comic books or graphic novels can provide a nuanced depiction of competing national memories while remaining accessible to a wide range of audiences. the fifth theme addresses left-wing responses to these new memory politics, examining the recurring patterns of the violent past(s) and questioning the echoes and limitations of reconciliation practices. noa vaisman’s article, centred on the disappeared argentinian activist santiago maldonado, follows the ripples of the country’s dictatorial regime awak- ened through the actions and discourses surrounding this disappearance. she explores how the conflicting narratives of a violent history can help to recover these patterns despite the claims that the past has already been dealt with, and ultimately highlights the limits of such practices within the broader context of the transitional justice movements in latin america. ronald suresh roberts draws on his personal involvement with south africa’s truth and reconciliation commission in the s and reflects on how its approach has been con- sidered and reconsidered in the three decades following its conception. he reveals how the frameworks of ‘transitional justice’ came to eclipse the original aims of the african national congress government, and how the anticolonial and anti-apartheid aims that were at the core of the anc’s agenda developed under the influence of global philanthropists into a recycled version of an older colonial ideology. finally, the sixth theme goes beyond strictly local case studies and looks at ways in which populism and memory negotiate increasingly international spaces. donald maingi offers an insight into the work of kenyan artists who used art to process their country’s history in the aftermath of the violent kenyan post-election crisis of – , as well as their country’s shifting international position. through political satire that combines global populism with local memories of the failings in kenya’s transitional justice process, the artists create vivid connections between the errors of the past and the present-day neoliberal crisis in memory politics. maingi’s use of examples from various artistic media, including paintings, political cartoons and puppet show posters, highlights the potential for art to be a compelling unifier and powerful stage for scrutinising a community’s relationship with its past. forsdick et al: introduction. from populism to decolonisation art.  , page  of lastly, kayoko takeda’s research combines memory studies with translation studies in a pro- ject analysing the english versions of speeches from japan’s prime minister, shinzo abe, relat- ing to various points of the country’s contested war history. focusing on frequently debated keywords such as ‘comfort women’ and ‘forced labour’, her comparison demonstrates that the past can be strategically adapted and manipulated in the process of interpreting to suit the expectations of target audiences, showing the crucial role of translation in producing transnational memories. acknowledgements we offer our gratitude to david clarke, martin thomas, raluca grosescu and max silverman for providing incisive comments on earlier drafts of this introduction. we would also like to express our deep gratitude to the arts and humanities research council (ahrc) for funding this initiative; and to andrew thompson and henry french, who, as theme fel- lows, supported this collaboration between its care for the future and translating cultures programmes. we also wish to thank hannah dutton and susan leedham, who provided vital support and encouragement throughout this initiative; and proofreader martin thom, whose attention to detail and creativity greatly improved our texts. the contributions of charles forsdick and eva spišiaková to this special issue were part of their work on the ahrc translating cultures leadership fellowship (phase ii) (ah/n / ), the support of which they acknowledge with gratitude. james mark acknowledges the support of the ahrc-funded ‘the criminalisation of dictatorial pasts in europe and latin america in global perspective’ (ah/n / ) project, and a netherlands institute for advanced study in the humanities and social sciences (nias-knaw) fellowship, both of which funded time for research, writing and editing. references achille, etienne, charles forsdick, and lydie moudileno, eds. postcolonial realms of memory: sites and symbols in modern france. liverpool university press, . 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- - - how to cite this article: forsdick, c, mark, j and spišiaková, e introduction. from populism to decolonisation: how we remember in the twenty-first century. modern languages open, ( ): pp. – . doi: https://doi.org/ . /mlo.v i . published: august copyright: © the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (cc-by . ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. open access modern languages open is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by liverpool university press. https://doi.org/ . /hgs/dch https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / - - - - https://doi.org/ . / - - - - https://doi.org/ . /mlo.v i . http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / 	 . overview 	 . emergence of a paradigm 	 . new right, new populisms: challenging the liberal paradigm 	 . from the neocolonial to the decolonial: alternatives to the liberal memory paradigm 	 . structure of the collection 	acknowledgements 	references sebuah kajian pustaka: necmettin erbakan Üniversitesi hukuk fakültesi dergisi (neÜhfd) journal of necmettin erbakan university faculty of law doi: . /neÜhfd. . cilt: sayı: yıl: e-issn: - cilt/volume: sayı/issue: yıl/year: almanya’nın sosyal ağ yasasının nefret söylemi İçeriklerinin kaldırılması bakımından İncelenmesi: türkiye İçin Öneriler ahmet Çubukcu dr. Öğr. Üyesi, necmettin erbakan Üniversitesi, acubukcu@erbakan.edu.tr makale bilgileri Öz makale geçmişi geliş: . . kabul: . . yayın: . . anahtar kelimeler: sosyal ağ, sosyal ağ yasası, nefret söylemi, siber zorbalık, İçerik çıkarma. tüm dünyada olduğu gibi ülkemizde de sosyal ağlarda hukuka aykırı olan pek çok içeriğin bulunduğu ve bunların hızla yayılabildiği görülmektedir. nefret söylemi de bu içerik tarzlarından bir tanesini oluşturmaktadır. nefret söylemi, bu söyleme maruz kalan insanların aşağılanması, dışlanması, tehdit edilmesi, zaman zaman bu tehditlerin gerçeğe dönüşerek şiddet eylemlerinin gerçekleştirilmesi gibi sonuçları karşımıza çıkarabilmektedir. bu açıdan sosyal ağlarda kolaylıkla yayılabilen nefret söylemi içerikleri, derhal kaldırılması gereken içeriklerden biridir. bu çalışmada, nefret söylemi kavramından ne anlaşılması gerektiği incelenmekte, yaygın kullanılan sosyal ağların nefret söylemine karşı kullanım kuralları kapsamında aldıkları tedbirler tetkik edilmekte, ardından avrupa birliği’nde (ab) nefret söylemi ile mücadele için kabul edilen etik kurallara değinilmekte ve son olarak almanya’nın sosyal ağ uygulama yasası (network enforcement act- netzdg) sosyal ağlarda nefret söylemi ile mücadele konusunda incelenerek türkiye için önerilerde bulunulmaktadır. examining the germany's social media law in terms of removing hate speech content: suggestions for turkey article info abstract article history received: . . accepted: . . published: . . as in all over the world, it is seen that there are many illegal content in the social networks in turkey and these illegal content can spread rapidly. hate speech is one of these content styles. hate speech can cause the humiliation, exclusion and threat to the people who are exposed to this and can sometimes result in the realization of violent acts by turning these threats into reality. in this respect hate speech content, which can be easily spread across social networks, should be removed immediately. in this study, the concept of hate speech is examined, measures taken by common social networks under the “rules and policies” against hate speech are examined, then code of conduct adopted to fight hate speech in the european union is discussed and lastly, the social network enforcement act of germany (netzdg) is reviewed on the fight against hate speech and suggestions for turkey are made. keywords: social media, social media law, hate speech, cyberbullying, content removal. atıf/citation: Çubukçu, a. “almanya’nın sosyal ağ yasasının nefret söylemi İçeriklerinin kaldırılması bakımından İncelenmesi: türkiye İçin Öneriler”, necmettin erbakan Üniversitesi hukuk fakültesi dergisi, c. , s. , , - . “this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial . international license (cc by-nc . )” mailto:acubukcu@erbakan.edu.tr https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / https://orcid.org/ - - - almanya’nın sosyal ağ yasasının nefret söylemi İçeriklerinin kaldırılması bakımından İncelenmesi: türkiye İçin Öneriler gİrİŞ İnternetin gelişmesi ile karşımıza web . teknolojisi çıkmıştır. web . teknolojisi; sosyal bağlantılılığı, medya ve bilgi paylaşımını, kullanıcı kaynaklı içeriği ve bireyler ile organizasyonlar arasında işbirliğini destekleyen kullanıcı merkezli uygulamalar ve hizmetlerden oluşan . nesil web olarak tanımlanabilir . web . aynı zamanda insan merkezli (people-centric) web, katılımcı (participative) web, oku-yaz (read/write) web gibi isimlerle de anılmaktadır. sosyal ağlar ise; web . kavramının bloglar, mikrobloglar, anlık mesajlaşma uygulamaları, forumlar gibi alt kümelerinden biridir . sosyal ağlar, kişisel web siteleri oluşturmaya imkân sağlayan ve kişinin arkadaşları ile içerik paylaşmasını iletişim kurmasını sağlayan platformlar olarak tanımlanabilmektedir . İnternet kullanıcılarının sınırları kendileri tarafından belirlenmiş bir sistem içerisinde diğer kullanıcılara kısmen veya tamamen açık profil oluşturmasına izin veren ve bu kullanıcılar arasında etkileşimli içerik üretimini destekleyen web tabanlı hizmetler olarak da tanımlanabilmektedir. bu kapsamda değerlendirilecek olursa sosyal ağlar sosyal medyanın en önemli parçasını oluşturmaktadır. sosyal ağların daha geniş kapsamda kullanıcılar arasında iletişim, yorum ve haber amaçlı kullanımını destekleyen yapısı sosyal medya olarak adlandırılmaktadır. bu çalışmada ise sosyal medyanın en önemli parçasını oluşturan sosyal ağ kavramının kullanımı, incelenen literatüre bağlı olarak tercih edilmiştir. sosyal ağlar ile birlikte kullanıcılar içerik üretebilir, bu içeriği paylaşabilir, farklı içeriklerle ilişkilendirebilir ve bu içeriği farklı amaçlar için kullanabilirler. sosyal ağların bu özellikleri nedeniyle, kullanıcılar bu ortamda kolaylıkla nefret söylemi içerikleri üretebilmekte ve bu içerikleri paylaşabilmektedir. bunun sonucu olarak sosyal ağlarda önyargı, inanç ve mezhep temelli, yabancılara ve göçmenlere yönelik ayrımcılık içeren paylaşımlarda toplumsal nefretin boyutları da gözlemlenebilmektedir . bu çalışma kapsamında, öncelikle nefret söyleminin tanımı yapılmaya çalışılmakta, devamında ab’nin nefret söylemi ile mücadele edilmesine yönelik hazırladığı ve bazı teknoloji firmaları tarafından imzalanan etik kurallar incelenmektedir. ardından, almanya’da yürürlüğe giren sosyal ağ uygulama yasası (network enforcement act- netzdg), nefret söylemi ile mücadeleye yönelik araçlar içermesi bakımından bu çalışma kapsamında incelemeye tabi tutulmaktadır. sonuç kısmında ise almanya’daki netzdg düzenlemesinden yola çıkılarak türkiye için öneriler sunulmaya çalışılmaktadır. nefret söylemi kavrami ve sosyal ağlarda nefret söylemi nefret kelimesinin türk dil kurumu (tdk) çevrimiçi güncel türkçe sözlük’te yer alan anlamı “ . bir kimsenin kötülüğünü, mutsuzluğunu istemeye yönelik duygu, . tiksinme, tiksinti” şeklinde iken, söylem kelimesinin tanımı “ . söyleyiş, söyleniş, sesletim, telaffuz, . kalıplaşmış, klişeleşmiş söz, ifade, . bir veya birçok cümleden oluşan, başı ve sonu olan bildiri, tez” şeklindedir. nefret bir insana ya da nesneye karşı duyulabilen ve aslında her insanda bulunan bir duygu olsa da, bu çalışma kapsamında nefret wilson, david w. / lin, xaolin / longstreet, phil /sarker, saonee, “web . : a definition, literature review, and directions for future research”, in amcis, , s. . murugesan, san, “understanding web . ”, it professional, c. , s. , , s. . altunay, alper, “bir sosyalleşme aracı olarak yeni medya, selçuk İletişim, c. , s. , , s. . mayfield, anthony: what is social media?, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://www.icrossing.com/uk/sites/default/files_uk/insight_pdf_files/what% is% social % media_icrossing_ebook.pdf, s. . sezgİn, ayşe aslı, “Çevrimiçi gazetelerin okur yorumlarında nefret söylemi: reina saldırısı Örneği”, ajit-e: online academic journal of information technology, c. , , s. . https://www.icrossing.com/uk/sites/default/files_uk/insight_pdf_files/what% is% social% media_icrossing_ebook.pdf https://www.icrossing.com/uk/sites/default/files_uk/insight_pdf_files/what% is% social% media_icrossing_ebook.pdf almanya’nın sosyal ağ yasasının nefret söylemi İçeriklerinin kaldırılması bakımından İncelenmesi: türkiye İçin Öneriler söylemi kavramı bağlamında ele alınan nefret; insanların belirli değiştirilemez ırk, milliyet, etnik kimlik, dini inanç, cinsiyet, cinsel yönelim gibi özelliklerine dolayısıyla “varoluşlarına, varoluş biçimlerine duyulan” bir nefret olup, bir ideolojinin parçasını teşkil eder . nefret söylemi kavramının ise üzerinde uzlaşılan bir tanımı bulunmasa da, nefret söylemi genel anlamda insanları belirli bir gruba dâhil olmalarından ötürü aşağılayan iletişim biçimi olarak tanımlanabilmektedir . nefret söylemi, manipülasyona açık olarak çok geniş kapsamlı tanımlanabildiği gibi; söylemin zarara veya şiddet eylemlerine yol açacağına dair “korku söylemi”, “tehlikeli söylem” gibi ifadelerle daha dar kapsamlı olarak da tanımlanabilmektedir . ayrımcı, korkutucu ve onaylanmayan içeriğe sahip olan, kimi zaman tahrik unsurları da içeren nefret söylemi; önyargılarla motive olan bireyin nefret dolu söylemidir . nefret söylemine ilişkin avrupa konseyi bakanlar komitesi tarafından ekim tarihinde alınan r( ) sayılı tavsiye kararı kapsamında nefret söylemi kavramından; ırkçı nefret, yabancı düşmanlığı, yahudi düşmanlığı veya azınlıklara, göçmenlere ve göçmen kökenli insanlara yönelik saldırgan ulusalcılık ve etnik merkezcilik, ayrımcılık ve düşmanlık şeklinde ifade edilen, hoşgörüsüzlüğe dayalı başka nefret biçimlerini yayan, kışkırtan, teşvik eden veya meşrulaştıran her türlü ifade biçiminin anlaşılması gerektiği belirlenmiştir . avrupa konseyi’nin mezkûr tavsiye kararı bağlayıcı nitelikte olmayıp, sözleşmeci devletlere yol gösterici niteliktedir . diğer taraftan, ulusal ve bölgesel kuruluşlar nefret söyleminden ne anlamak gerektiğini yerel geleneklere göre belirlemeye çalışmaktadır. bu kavram üzerinde tüm dünyanın uzlaşacağı bir tanım bulmanın pek mümkün görünmediği ifade edilmektedir. facebook, twitter gibi çevrimiçi iletişime aracılık eden platformların ise nefret söyleminin ne olduğuna dair kendilerince tanımlar yaptığı ve belirli ifade türlerini kısıtlamak üzere kullanıcıları bu kurallarla bağlı kıldığı görülmektedir . türkiye büyük millet meclisi tarafından yılında hazırlanan bilgi toplumu olma yolunda bilişim sektöründeki gelişmeler ile İnternet kullanımının başta Çocuklar, gençler ve aile yapısı Üzerinde olmak Üzere sosyal etkilerinin araştırılması amacıyla kurulan meclis araştırması komisyonu raporu’na göre günlük yaşamda kullanımı giderek artan, yaşam alışkanlıklarını köklü biçimde değiştiren, bedenin bir parçası haline gelen bilgisayarlar, internet, cep telefonları, oyun konsolları gibi dijital teknolojilere yeni medya adını vermek mümkündür . diğer bir söyleyişle yeni medya; iletişim, sağlık, eğlence ticaret ve kariyer gibi hayatımızın pek çok alanında karşımıza çıkan dijital bir platformdur . bu gÜranlioĞlu, nurhayat, nefret söylemi ve nefret suçunun türkiye Üzerinden Örneklerle İncelenmesi, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://www.academia.edu/ /nefret_söylemi_ve_nefret_suçunun_türkiye_Üzerinden_Örneklerle_ İncelenmesi, s. . community empowerment for progress organisation: introductıon to hate speech on social media; erişim tarihi: . . ; https://defyhatenow.net/wp- content/uploads/ / /defyhatenow_whatishatespeech_jul .pdf, s. . unesco: countering online hate speech, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://unesdoc.unesco.org/ark:/ /pf , s. - sezgİn, s. . weber, anne, nefret söylemi el kitabı, erişim tarihi: . . ; http://panel.stgm.org.tr/vera/app/var/files/n/e/nefret-soylemi.pdf, s. . vardal, zeynep burcu, “nefret söylemi ve yeni medya”, maltepe Üniversitesi İletişim fakültesi dergisi, c. , s. , , s. . unesco, s. , . türkiye büyük millet meclisi: bilgi toplumu olma yolunda bilişim sektöründeki gelişmeler ile İnternet kullanımının başta Çocuklar, gençler ve aile yapısı Üzerinde olmak Üzere sosyal etkilerinin araştırılması amacıyla kurulan meclis araştırması komisyonu raporu, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://www.tbmm.gov.tr/sirasayi/donem /yil /ss .pdf, s. . dondurucu, zeynep benan / uluÇay, ayşe pınar, “yeni medya ortamlarında nefret söylemi: eşcinsellere yönelik nefret söylemi İçeren videoların youtube Üzerinden İncelenmesi”, international journal of social sciences and education research, c. , s. , , s. . https://www.academia.edu/ /nefret_söylemi_ve_nefret_suçunun_türkiye_Üzerinde https://www.academia.edu/ /nefret_söylemi_ve_nefret_suçunun_türkiye_Ãœzerinden_Örneklerle_Ä°ncelenmesi https://www.academia.edu/ /nefret_söylemi_ve_nefret_suçunun_türkiye_Ãœzerinden_Örneklerle_Ä°ncelenmesi https://defyhatenow.net/wp-content/uploads/ / /defyhatenow_whatishatespeech_jul .pdf https://defyhatenow.net/wp-content/uploads/ / /defyhatenow_whatishatespeech_jul .pdf https://defyhatenow.net/wp-content/uploads/ / /defyhatenow_whatishatespeech_jul .pdf http://panel.stgm.org.tr/vera/app/var/files/n/e/nefret-soylemi.pdf https://www.tbmm.gov.tr/sirasayi/donem /yil /ss .pdf almanya’nın sosyal ağ yasasının nefret söylemi İçeriklerinin kaldırılması bakımından İncelenmesi: türkiye İçin Öneriler kapsamda yeni medya sosyal medyadan da daha geniş bir kavramı ifade etmektedir. bilgi ve iletişim teknolojilerindeki ilerlemelerin medya sektörü üzerindeki yansımaları yeni medya akımını ortaya çıkarmıştır. geleneksel medya egemen ideolojiyi yansıtmasına rağmen, yeni medyanın toplumun farklı kesimlerini temsil eder nitelikte olduğu görülmektedir . yeni medyanın kendine has özelliklerinden dolayı, kullanıcıların kendi değerleri ve önyargılarını geleneksel medyaya oranla daha özgür ifade ettiklerini söylemek mümkündür . diğer taraftan geleneksel medya içerikleri çoğunlukla yüzlerce yıllık gazetecilik geleneği ile ortaya çıkmış etik kodlar doğrultusunda üretilmekteyse de yeni medya bu tür bir araçtan yoksun durumdadır . İçeriğin kullanıcı tarafından üretildiği yeni medya sayesinde nefret söylemlerinin yayıldığını söyleyebilmek mümkündür. bunun yanı sıra, içeriğin kullanıcılar tarafından üretilip yayıldığı bu ortamların nefret söyleminin oluşturulduğu ortamlar değil, toplumda var olan duygu ve düşüncelerin yansıtıldığı ortamlar olduğu ifade edilmektedir . yeni medyanın en işlevsel ortamlarından biri ise sosyal ağlardır. İnternet bağlantısına sahip olan kişiler, sosyal medya sayesinde kısa zaman içerisinde mesajlarını milyonlarca kullanıcıya ulaştırabilmektedir. bu durum içerik yayınlama konusunda demokratikleşmeyi sağlamış, bu demokratikleşme toplumda önemli değişikliklere yol açmıştır. sosyal medya, internet kullanıcılarına görüşlerini ifade etmek üzere uygun bir ortam sağlamaktadır. bu durum iletişim için muazzam fırsatlar yaratsa da önemli zorlukları beraberinde getirmektedir. bu zorlukların bir örneği; ifade özgürlüğü ile insan onurunun korunması arasındaki karmaşık dengeyi sağlamak olup, bu zorluk çeşitli şekillerde karşımıza çıkabilmektedir. nefret söylemi ise bu zorlukların tipik bir örneğidir . bunun yanı sıra, nefret söylemi içeriklerinin kin ve nefret dolu ifadeler barındırmadan da meydana getirilebilmeleri sebebiyle, tespit edilmeleri çok kolay olmayabilmektedir . we are social ve hootsuite isimli şirketlerce hazırlanan “digital ” isimli sunum incelendiğinde, yılında tüm dünyada aktif sosyal medya kullanıcıları sayısının . milyar olduğu, tüm dünyada sosyal medya platformlarında geçirilen sürenin günde saat dakika olduğu görülmektedir . bu verilerden açıkça görüleceği üzere tüm dünyada sosyal ağ kullanımı son derece yaygındır. sosyal ağların bu denli yaygın kullanımı ile sosyal ağlarda hukuka aykırı, özellikle nefret söylemi niteliğine sahip içerikle sıklıkla karşılaşılmakta olup, bu içerikle mücadele etmenin son derece önemli olduğu değerlendirilmektedir. nefret söylemleri sadece muhalif/karşıt görüşlerin yayılmasını sağlamamakta, aynı zamanda korku, gözdağı ve bireylere yönelik tacizin yaygınlaşmasına sebep olmaktadır. bu söylemlerin sonucunda insan onurunun ciddi manada zarar görebileceği, nefret söylemi mağdurlarının depresyona girebileceği veya intihara teşebbüs edebileceği, hatta bu söylemlerin hedef aldığı kişilerin öldürülmesi veya soykırımına sebep olabileceği ifade edilmektedir . sayılan sebeplerle çevrimiçi nefret söyleminin ifade özgürlüğü çatısı altında korunmaması ve suç sayılması gerekmektedir . devletler sosyal medya üzerinde ifade özgürlüğünü kısıtlamaya ve kontrol mekanizması kurmaya yönelik artan baskıları sebebi ile eleştirilmektedir. ancak vardal, s. . sezgİn, s. . vardal, s. . sezgİn, s. . silva, leandro / mondal, mainack / correa, denzil / benevenuto, fabricio / weber, ingmar, “analyzing the targets of hate in online social media”, in tenth international aaai conference on web and social media, , s. . sezgİn, s. . we are social / hootsuite: digital reports, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://wearesocial.com/blog/ / /digital- -global-internet-use-accelerates laanpere, liina: online hate speech:hate or crime?, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://files.elsa.org/aa/online_hate_speech_essay_competition_runner_up.pdf, s. . laanpere, s. . https://wearesocial.com/blog/ / /digital- -global-internet-use-accelerates https://files.elsa.org/aa/online_hate_speech_essay_competition_runner_up.pdf almanya’nın sosyal ağ yasasının nefret söylemi İçeriklerinin kaldırılması bakımından İncelenmesi: türkiye İçin Öneriler devletler, küresel organizasyonlar ve sosyal medya platformları arasındaki işbirliğinin sağlanması önemli olduğu gibi sosyal medyada nefret söyleminin kalıcı etkilerini önlemek için bu söylemlere hızlıca reaksiyon gösterilmesi de önemlidir . sosyal medyada üretilen ve paylaşılan nefret söylemi içeriklerinin, aşırı ve uç görüşlere sahip olmayan bireyler tarafından da içselleştirilebilecek olması, nefret söylemi içeriklerinin teşkil ettiği en ciddi tehlikelerden biridir. facebook ve twitter gibi platformlarda kullanıcılar, nefret söylemini doğal görmekte ve arkadaşlarının ürettiği nefret söylemine ortak olmaktadırlar . sosyal ağlarda sıkça karşımıza çıkabilen nefret söylemi aynı zamanda hedef aldığı gruplara karşı duyarsızlık veya gaddarlığı teşvik etmektedir . nefret söyleminin yaygınlaşması ile ortaya çıkabilecek diğer sonuçlar; sosyal problemlerin artması, toplumu bütünleştiren dinamiklerin zarar görmesi ve nefret suçlarının işlenmesidir . vardal’a göre, sosyal ağların bir parçasını teşkil ettiği yeni medya nefret söylemi içeriklerinin yayılması için etkin bir araç teşkil etmektedir. vardal, kullanıcıların eğitilmesi ve toplumun bilinçlendirilmesi ile bu söylemlerin önüne geçilebileceğini dile getirmektedir . Öztekin ise ekşi sözlük isimli sosyal medya platformundaki nefret söylemi örneklerini incelediği çalışmasında, nefret söyleminin günlük hayatta da yaygınlaştığını ve bu söylemlerin herkesçe kanıksandığını ifade ederek, yeni medya kullanıcıları dâhil herkese nefret söylemi hakkında farkındalık kazandırılması gerektiği sonucuna varmıştır . taş, nefret söylemlerinin günden güne arttığını dile getirerek siyaset kurumunun nefret söyleminin engellenmesi adına üstüne düşeni yapması gerektiğini belirtmektedir . Çomu ve binark, yeni medyadaki nefret söylemi ile mücadele için bireylerin eğitimi, farkındalığın artırılması yönünde çalışmalar yapılması, farklı paydaşların bir araya gelerek soruna çözüm üretmeleri ve nefret söylemi ile hep birlikte mücadele edilmesi yönünde önerilerde bulunmuştur . nefret söylemi bireysel olarak gerçekleştirildiğinde ulusal ceza hukukunun konusunu oluşturabileceği ancak çevrimiçi nefret söyleminin daha geniş bir perspektiften ele alınması gerektiği ifade edilmektedir . yasa koyucular, çevrimiçi nefret söylemi ile etkin biçimde mücadele etmenin yanı sıra, bu içerikler ve ifade özgürlüğü arasında denge kurmak zorunda kalmaktadırlar . bu hususta amerika birleşik devletleri (abd) ile avrupa ülkelerinin yaklaşımları genel olarak karşılaştırıldığında, abd’nin avrupa’dan daha geniş kapsamlı olarak ifade özgürlüğünü koruduğu söylenebilmektedir . abd’de nefret söyleminin tespiti konusundaki yaklaşım; düşünce özgürlüğünün ancak şiddeti teşvik söz konusu olduğunda kısıtlanabileceği şeklindedir . ab’de ise, bu çalışmanın devamında açıklandığı üzere nefret söylemi ile mücadele için teknoloji firmaları ile birlikte çaba gösterilmektedir. nefret söylemleri çeşitli sosyal ağların kullanım kuralları ile de yasaklanmıştır. Örneğin facebook gelashvili, teona, “hate speech on social media: implications of private regulation and governance gaps”, jamm master thesis, , s. . vardal, s. . alp, hakan, “Çingenelere yönelik nefret söyleminin ekşi sözlük’te yeniden Üretilmesi”, ankara Üniversitesi İlef dergisi, c. , s. , , s. . Çakar, bekir, “avrupa ve abd’de artan salgın: nefret suçu”, the global journal of policy and strategy, c. , s. , , s. . vardal, s. . Öztekİn, hülya, “yeni medyada nefret söylemi: ekşi sözlük Örneği”, journal of international social research, c. , s. , , s. . taŞ, eray, “yeni medyada nefret söylemi”, yeni medya elektronik dergi, c. , s. , , s. . Çomu, tuğrul / bİnark, mutlu, yeni medya ortamlarında nefret söylemi, hrant dink vakfı yaymları, ankara, s. . claussen, victor, “fighting hate speech and fake news. the network enforcement act (netzdg) in germany in the context of european legislation, rivista di diritto dei media, c. , s. . claussen, s. . unesco, s. . sezgİn, s. . almanya’nın sosyal ağ yasasının nefret söylemi İçeriklerinin kaldırılması bakımından İncelenmesi: türkiye İçin Öneriler topluluk standartları kapsamında nefret söyleminden neler anlaşıldığı tanımlanmış ve nefret söylemi içeren ifadelerin paylaşılması aşağıda bulunan ifadelerle yasaklanmıştır : “bir korku ve dışlama ortamı yarattığı, hatta bazı durumlarda gerçek hayatta şiddeti teşvik ettiği için facebook'ta nefret söylemine izin vermiyoruz. nefret söylemini insanlara koruma altındaki özellikler olarak adlandırdığımız ırk, etnik köken, milli köken, dini inanç, cinsel yönelim, sosyal sınıf, cinsiyet, cinsel kimlik, ciddi bir hastalık veya engellilik gibi özelliklerinden dolayı doğrudan saldırıda bulunulması olarak tanımlıyoruz. ayrıca, göçmenlik durumu için de bazı korumalar sağlıyoruz. saldırıyı şiddet veya itibarsızlaştırıcı söylem, aşağılama ifadeleri veya dışlama ya da ayrımcılık çağrıları olarak tanımlıyoruz.” yılında güncellenen facebook topluluk standartları’nın ihlal edilmesi sonucunda uyarı, paylaşımda bulunmasını kısıtlama veya profili kapatma gibi tedbirler alınacağı ifade edilmektedir. konu hakkında bir diğer örnek olarak, yaygın olarak kullanılan sosyal ağlardan bir diğeri olan twitter’ın kullanım kurallarına bakılacak olursa, bu kurallar arasında bulunan; “nefret söylemi: diğer kişilere karşı şiddeti destekleyemez veya ırk, etnik köken, ulusal köken, cinsel yönelim, cinsiyet, cinsel kimlik, dini inanç, yaş, engellilik durumu ya da ciddi hastalığa dayanarak tehditlerde bulunamaz veya taciz edemezsiniz.” ifadeleri ile nefret söylemi yasaklanmaktadır. ayrıca twitter tarafından, bu kurallara uyulmaması halinde hesabın kapatılmasına kadar giden çeşitli tedbirler uygulanacağı belirtilmektedir . sosyal medya platformları nefret söylemi içerikli paylaşımların tespiti ve ifade özgürlüğü ile denge kurma aşamalarında ciddi sorunlar yaşamaktadır . sosyal ağlarda neyin nefret söylemi teşkil ettiği konusunda, sosyal ağın kendi içinde dahi farklı görüşler ortaya çıkabileceğine örnek olarak “black lives matter” hareketine facebook tarafından verilen ilk tepkilerden söz edilebilir. afrikalı amerikalı bir genci öldüren george zimmerman’ın yılında beraat etmesi üzerine “black lives matter” (siyahilerin hayatı önemlidir) hareketi başlamış olup, buna tepki olarak bazı kesimlerce “all lives matter” (herkesin hayatı önemlidir) ifadeleri geliştirilmiştir . facebook binasında duvarlara yapıştırılmış olan “black lives matter” ifadeleri sökülüp, bunların yerine “all lives matter” ifadelerinin asılması üzerine facebook’un ceo’su mark zuckerberg açıklama yaparak “black lives matter” ifadelerinin yalnızca siyahilerin hayatının önemli olduğu ve diğer insanların hayatlarının önemsiz olduğu anlamına gelmediği, sadece siyahi topluluğun hak ettikleri adaleti elde etmelerini sağlamaya yönelik bir söylem olduğunu belirtse de, şirket içerisinde “black lives matter” ifadeleri değiştirilmeye devam etmiştir. bu olay her ne kadar sosyal ağın yayınladığı ifadeler üzerinde değil, şirket duvarlarına asılan ifadeler üzerinde gerçekleşmiş olsa da nefret söylemi içeriklerinin değerlendirilmesinde kişisel önyargıların ne kadar etkili olabileceğini ortaya koymaktadır . yukarıda yer verildiği üzere, nefret söylemi ahlaken kınanan bir davranış olmakla birlikte çeşitli sosyal medya platformlarının aldığı tedbirler ile bu söylemlerin önüne geçilmeye çalışılmakta ancak bu facebook: topluluk standartları, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/objectionable_content twitter yardım merkezi, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://help.twitter.com/tr/rules-and- policies/twitter- rules waseem, zeerak / hovy, dirk, “hateful symbols or hateful people? predictive features for hate speech detection on twitter”, proceedings of the naacl student research workshop, , s. . the guardian: mark zuckerberg tells facebook staff to stop defacing black lives matter slogans, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ /feb/ /mark-zuckerberg-facebook- defacing- black-lives-matter-signs waseem / hovy, s. . https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/objectionable_content https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/objectionable_content https://help.twitter.com/tr/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules https://help.twitter.com/tr/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules https://help.twitter.com/tr/rules-and-policies/twitter-rules https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/volumes/n - / https://www.aclweb.org/anthology/volumes/n - / https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ /feb/ /mark-zuckerberg-facebook-defacing-black-lives-matter-signs https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ /feb/ /mark-zuckerberg-facebook-defacing-black-lives-matter-signs https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ /feb/ /mark-zuckerberg-facebook-defacing-black-lives-matter-signs almanya’nın sosyal ağ yasasının nefret söylemi İçeriklerinin kaldırılması bakımından İncelenmesi: türkiye İçin Öneriler çabalar bireylerin önyargıları ile karşılaşabildiği gibi çeşitli sebeplerle yetersiz kalabilmektedir. Ülkemizde çeşitli sosyal medya platformlarında da sıklıkla nefret söylemleri ile karşılaşılmakta olup türk ceza kanunu’nda bulunan çeşitli düzenlemelerin (m. - inanç, düşünce ve kanaat hürriyetinin kullanılmasını engelleme, m. - nefret ve ayırımcılık, m. – hakaret ve m. - halkı kin ve düşmanlığa tahrik ve aşağılama) nefret söylemi ile mücadelede kullanılabileceği değerlendirilmektedir. avrupa birliği’nde nefret söylemi İle mücadele nefret söylemi ile mücadele için ab’deki gelişmelere bakılacak olursa; çevrimiçi nefret söylemi ile mücadele etmek üzere mayıs ’da avrupa komisyonu, facebook, twitter, microsoft ve youtube ile bir araya gelerek sosyal platformlarda kullanıcıların yasadışı nefret söylemini bildirebilmelerini sağlayan “Çevrimiçi nefret söylemi ile mücadele İçin etik kurallar”ı kabul etmiştir. ayrıca ve yıllarında instagram, google+, dailymotion, snapchat ve jeuxvideo.com, mezkûr etik kurallara katılma yönündeki iradelerini açıklamışlardır . mezkûr etik kurallar içerisinde; yasadışı nefret söylemi ile mücadele için açık ve etkili bir süreç işletme, yasadışı nefret söylemine dair bildirimlerin çoğunluğunu (yirmi dört) saat içerisinde inceleme ve gerekiyorsa bu içeriğe erişimi engelleme veya içeriği yayından kaldırma, kullanıcılarını kendi kuralları kapsamında uygun olmayan içeriğe dair bilinçlendirme gibi taahhütler bulunmaktadır . Çevrimiçi nefret söylemi ile mücadele İçin etik kurallar” daha detaylıca incelenirse bu kurallara katılım sağlayan şirketlerin; • yasadışı nefret söylemi içeriğine erişimi engellemek veya içeriği kaldırabilmek için, nefret söyleminin bulunduğuna dair bildirimlere ilişkin açık ve etkili bir inceleme süreci işletme, • yasadışı nefret söylemine dair bildirimlerin çoğunluğunu (yirmi dört) saat içerisinde inceleme ve gerekiyorsa bu içeriğe erişimi engelleme veya içeriği yayından kaldırma, • kullanıcılarını kendi kuralları kapsamında uygun olmayan içeriğe dair bilinçlendirme, - ab üyesi devletlerin otoriteleri ile diğer şirketler arasında iletişimin hızlı ve etkili olmasını temin etmek üzere bilgi sağlama, • yüksek doğrulukta bildirim sağlanması için, sivil toplum kuruluşları ve güvenilir raportörlere ab üyesi devletler ve avrupa komisyonu’nun desteği ile erişim sağlama ve güvenilir raportörlere ilişkin bilgileri web sitelerinde bulundurma, • Çalışanlarına güncel sosyal değişiklikler konusunda düzenli olarak eğitim verme ve gelişim sağlamak üzere görüş alışverişinde bulunma • en iyi uygulamaların paylaşımını gerçekleştirmek üzere kendileri ile diğer platformlar ve sosyal medya şirketleri ile iş birliğini geliştirme, • nefret içerikli önyargı ve söylemlere yönelik karşı argümanların tespit edilmesi ve yayılmasını sağlama ile eleştirel düşünceyi geliştirmek üzere eğitim programlarını destekleme, • nefret içerikli söylem ve önyargılar ile mücadele etmek üzere sivil toplum kuruluşları ile yapılan çalışmaları güçlendirme, sivil toplum kuruluşlarının karşıt söylem kampanyalarını güçlendirmek üzere european commission: countering illegal hate speech online #noplace hate, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/just/item-detail.cfm?item_id= code of conduct on countering illegal hate speech online: erişim tarihi: . . ; https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/just/item-detail.cfm?item_id= https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/just/item-detail.cfm?item_id= https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/just/item-detail.cfm?item_id= almanya’nın sosyal ağ yasasının nefret söylemi İçeriklerinin kaldırılması bakımından İncelenmesi: türkiye İçin Öneriler proaktif yaklaşımını artırma taahhütlerinde bulundukları görülmektedir. ayrıca bu taahhütlerin yerine getirilmesinin, sonuçları ile birlikte düzenli aralıklarla değerlendirilmesine karar verilmiştir. mezkûr etik kuralların uygulanmasına ilişkin ab tarafından yapılan . değerlendirme tetkik edildiğinde : • etik krallara katılım sağlayan platformlara toplamda adet bildirim geldiği, • toplamda adet olmak üzere en çok facebook’a, ardından adet ile twitter’a ve adet olmak üzere youtube’a bildirimde bulunulduğu, • bildirimlerin % . ’unun saatten kısa süre içerisinde incelendiği, • bildirilen içeriğin % . ’sinin kaldırıldığı görülmektedir. diğer taraftan kendini regüle eden bu yaklaşımın, içeriğin nefret söylemini haiz olup olmadığı kararını verme yetkisini sosyal ağ sağlayıcılara bırakma bakımından bir çeşit sansüre sebep olabileceği ifade edilmektedir . aşırı engelleme tehlikesi ile birlikte hangi tarz içeriklerin değerlendirilmeye alınacağı, ülkeler arasındaki kültürel ve politik farklılıkların engellenecek içerik türlerini belirleme hususlarını da zorlaştırmaktadır. genel olarak nefret söyleminin tanımı yapıldıktan ve ab’de nefret söylemi ile mücadele için kabul edilen etik kurallardan söz edildikten sonra almanya’da nefret söylemi ile mücadele için kullanılan netzdg’ye ilerleyen bölümde değinilmiştir. almanya’nın netzdg düzenlemesi almanya’nın yılından itibaren özellikle ortadoğu’dan bir milyona yakın mülteci kabul etmesi, göçmen karşıtı sağ kanadın tepkisini çekmiş; sosyal medyada mültecileri ve mültecilerin almanya’ya kabul edilmesinden sorumlu tutulan kamu görevlilerini hedef alan nefret söylemleri artmıştır . nefret söylemlerine karşı sosyal medya platformları ile ortak çalışmalar yürütülse de alman yetkililer tarafından bunun yeterli olmadığı değerlendirilmiştir. bunun üzerine almanya’da netzdg düzenlemesi kabul edilmiş ve ekim ’de yürürlüğe girmiştir. netzdg’nin tüm hükümleri ile yürürlüğe girdiği tarih ise ocak ’dir. netzdg’nin çevrimiçi nefret söylemine karşı en kapsamlı mevzuat düzenlemelerinden biri olduğu dile getirilmektedir . hatta, netzdg halk arasında “nefret söylemi kanunu” olarak da bilinmektedir. fransa gibi diğer ülkeler de neztdg’yi taslak düzenlemeleri için temel olarak kullanmaktadır . bu başlık altında öncelikle netzdg’nin hükümleri açıklanmakta, ardından netzdg’nin seçilen sosyal ağlar tarafından uygulanması incelenmekte, devamında netzdg’ye yönelik eleştiriler incelenmektedir. jourova, vera, code of conduct on countering illegal hate speech online, erişim tarihi; . . ; https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/code_of_conduct_factsheet_ _web.pdf, s. - . claussen, s. . echikson, william / knodt, olivia, germany’s netzdg: a key test for combatting online hate, erişim tarihi: . . ;https://www.counterextremism.com/sites/default/files/cep- ceps_germany% s% netzdg_ .pdf, s. . spencer-smith, charlotte: dealing with hate speech on social media, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://static .squarespace.com/static/ a d e c /t/ a fbb d fa db/ /hate+speech+on+social+media.pdf, s. . tworek, heidi /leerssen, paddy: an analysis of germany’s netzdg law, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://www.ivir.nl/publicaties/download/netzdg_tworek_leerssen_april_ .pdf, s. . https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/code_of_conduct_factsheet_ _web.pdf https://www.counterextremism.com/sites/default/files/cep-ceps_germany% s% netzdg_ .pdf https://www.counterextremism.com/sites/default/files/cep-ceps_germany% s% netzdg_ .pdf https://static .squarespace.com/static/ a d e c /t/ a fbb d fa https://static .squarespace.com/static/ a d e c /t/ a fbb d fa db/ /hate% bspeech% bon% bsocial% bmedia.pdf https://www.ivir.nl/publicaties/download/netzdg_tworek_leerssen_april_ .pdf almanya’nın sosyal ağ yasasının nefret söylemi İçeriklerinin kaldırılması bakımından İncelenmesi: türkiye İçin Öneriler netzdg hükümlerinin İncelenmesi netzdg’nin “kapsam” başlıklı ’inci maddesinde, mezkûr düzenlemenin uygulama alanı belirlenmiş olup, bu düzenlemenin sosyal ağlara uygulanacağı belirtilmiştir. netzdg’nin ’inci maddesinde sosyal ağların tanımı “kullanıcıların diğer kullanıcılarla içerik paylaşabildiği ve bu içeriği kamuya açık hale getirebildiği platformlar” şeklinde yapılmıştır. aynı maddede, bu kanunun gazetecilik amacıyla kullanılan platformlar ile bireysel haberleşme sağlayan ve spesifik içeriklerin dağıtılmasına yönelik platformlara uygulanmayacağı ifade edilmektedir. bu doğrultuda, spesifik konulara yönelen ağlar örneğin iş hayatına ilişkin ağlar, profesyonel ve teknik platformlar, çevrimiçi oyunlar ve ticari amaçlı web siteler netzdg’nin kapsamı dışındadır. yer verilen hükümde bulunan bu kısıtlama sebebiyle, almanya’da (yedi) adet sosyal ağdan daha fazlasının netzdg’den etkilenmediği, bu ağların da netzdg düzenlemelerine uymak için gerekli tedbirleri almış bulunduğu ifade edilmektedir . netzdg’nin ’inci maddesinin ikinci fıkrasında, almanya federal cumhuriyeti sınırları içerisinde iki milyondan az kayıtlı kullanıcıya sahip olan sosyal ağ platformlarının, bu kanunun ’nci ve ’üncü maddelerinde yer alan yükümlülüklerden bağışık tutulduğu düzenlenmiştir. bunun yanı sıra, sosyal ağların netzdg kapsamına girebilmesi için merkezleri veya şubelerinin almanya’da bulunması gerekmemektedir . netzdg’nin ’inci maddesinin üçüncü fıkrasında ise, bu kanun kapsamında yasadışı içerikten ne anlaşılacağı düzenlenmiştir. belirtmek gerekir ki, netzdg yeni bir yasadışı içerik kategorisi düzenlememektedir. netzdg, alman ceza kanunu’nda yer alan adet maddenin uygulanmasını hedeflemektedir . alman ceza kanunu’na atıf yapılarak belirlenen bu suçların işlenmesi için; hukuka uygunluk sebeplerinin gerçekleşmemiş olması ile birlikte bu suçların maddi ve manevi unsurlarının tamamlanması yani tipikliğin gerçekleşmesi aranacaktır . alman ceza kanunu’nda yer alan maddenin arasında; nefrete teşvik, şiddet tasvirinin yayılması/dağıtılması, terör örgütü kurma, anayasaya aykırı organizasyonların sembollerini kullanma, çocuk pornografisinin dağıtımı, hakaret, karalama, kamu barışını bozabilecek şekilde dinleri ya da dini veya ideolojik dernekleri karalama, fotoğraf yoluyla mahremiyeti ihlal etme gibi hükümler bulunmaktadır . bu çalışmanın konusu özelinde ele almak gerekirse; alman ceza kanunu’na atıf yapılarak belirlenen nefret söylemi örneklerinden bazıları suça teşvik, suç işleneceği tehdidi, nefrete teşvik, inanca veya insanlara hakaret edilmesidir . dülger ve oğlakcıoğlu, alman ceza hukuku’nun bir değer yargısının veya bir tutumun dile getirilmesine dayanan pek çok konuşma yasağı içerdiğini ve bir demecin “profil durumu”, “tweet”, “retweet” olarak paylaşılması, herhangi bir yorum yazılması veya dile getirilmesinin suçun meydana gelmesi için yeterli olacağını ifade etmektedir . bunun yanı sıra sosyal ağlarda yer alan bir ifadenin suç teşkil edip etmediği ve suç teşkil etmekteyse hangi suç tipini oluşturacağı, bu ifadenin içeriğine bağlıdır . bu çalışmanın konusu bakımından ele alınabilecek suçlardan olan halkı kin ve düşmanlığa tahrik suçu ile inançlara hakaret suçlarında, söylemin toplumsal barışı bozmaya elverişli olup olmadığının belirlenmesi gerekmektedir. bunun yanı sıra halkı kin ve düşmanlığa tahrik suçlarında hukuki sınırlar içerisinde kalan polemik yaratan ifadeler ile nefrete yönelik tahrik eden ifadeler arasındaki sınır belirsiz claussen, s. . dÜlger, murat volkan / otlakcioĞlu, mustafa temmuz, “alman sosyal ağlarda hukuk uygulamasının İyileştirilmesi hakkında kanuna İlişkin değerlendirme”, chd, c. , , s. . tworek / leerssen, s. . dÜlger / oĞlakcioĞlu, s. . tworek / leerssen s. . claussen, s. . dÜlger / oĞlakcioĞlu, s. . dÜlger / oĞlakcioĞlu, s. . almanya’nın sosyal ağ yasasının nefret söylemi İçeriklerinin kaldırılması bakımından İncelenmesi: türkiye İçin Öneriler olup, bu ifadelerin birbirinden ayrılması uygulamacıya bırakılmıştır . netzdg’nin “raporlama yükümlülüğü” başlıklı ’nci maddesine göre; bir yıl içerisinde ’den fazla yasadışı içerik konusunda şikâyet alan sosyal ağ sağlayıcıları, platformlarındaki yasadışı içeriğe ilişkin şikâyetleri ele alma konusunda almanca rapor oluşturmalıdır. bu raporlarda yer alması gereken hususlar ’nci maddenin ikinci fıkrasında yer almakta olup, bunlardan bazıları; yasadışı içeriğin bildirilmesine yönelik oluşturulan mekanizmanın tanımı, içeriğe erişimi engelleme veya içeriği silme konusunda karar verilirken dikkate alınan kriterler, raporlama döneminde alınan şikâyetlerin sayısı, şikâyetleri incelemeden sorumlu birimin organizasyonu, uzmanlığı, dil konusunda yetkinliği ve personel kaynakları hakkında bilgi, şikâyetleri ele almakla sorumlu personelin eğitim durumu, şikâyetin alındığı zaman ile yasadışı içeriğin silindiği veya bu içeriğe erişimin engellendiği zaman arasında geçen süre, şikâyeti gönderen kişiyi bilgilendirmek üzere alınan tedbirler şeklindedir. oluşturulan bu raporlar federal gazete’de ve sosyal ağ sağlayıcının kendi web sitesinde yayımlanacaktır. ayrıca yayımlanan bu raporlar kolaylıkla fark edilebilir ve devamlı olarak erişilebilir durumda olmalıdır. getirilen bu raporlama yükümlülüğünün, netzdg düzenlemesinin etkinliğinin geçmişe dönük olarak değerlendirilmesine de katkı sağlayacağı ifade edilmektedir . raporlama yükümlülüğünün ayrıca; şikâyette bulunan kullanıcıların şikâyetinin incelendiğini, sonuçlandırıldığını ve gerekli yaptırımların uygulandığını görerek hukuki güvenliğinin sağlandığını hissetmesi bakımından olumlu etki oluşturacağını söylemek mümkündür . netzdg’nin “yasadışı içeriklere ilişkin şikayetlerin ele alınması” başlıklı ’üncü maddesine göre; sosyal ağ sağlayıcı, yasadışı içeriğin ele alınmasına ilişkin olarak etkili ve şeffaf bir prosedür oluşturmalıdır. sosyal ağ sağlayıcı, yasadışı içerikler hakkında şikayetlerin bildirilmesine ilişkin kullanıcılara kolaylıkla fark edilen ve doğrudan ulaşılabilen, sürekli erişilebilir halde bulunan bir prosedür sağlamalıdır. netzdg’nin ’üncü maddesinin ikinci fıkrasına göre sosyal ağ sağlayıcı şikâyetleri ivedilikle dikkate alır ve şikâyet edilen içeriğin yasadışı olup olmadığını ve kaldırmaya veya erişimin engellenmesine konu olup olmadığını inceler. aynı zamanda sosyal ağ sağlayıcı açıkça yasadışı olan içeriği, şikâyeti alma anından itibaren yirmi dört saat içerisinde kaldırmalı veya içeriğe erişimi engellemelidir. ancak bu hüküm, sosyal ağın yetkili hukuku uygulama otoritesi ile açıkça yasadışı içeriği silme veya bu içeriğe erişimi engelleme hususunda daha uzun bir süre üzerinde anlaşma sağladığı hallerde uygulanmamaktadır. bunun yanı sıra sosyal ağ sağlayıcı derhal, en geç gün içerisinde, bütün yasadışı içeriğe erişimi engellemeli veya bu içeriği kaldırmalıdır. ancak bu yedi günlük süre de belirli hallerde uzayabilmektedir. İçeriği kaldırma halinde / /ec ve / /eu sayılı direktifler kapsamında söz konusu içerik haftalık bir süre boyunca saklanmaya devam edilmelidir. sosyal ağ sağlayıcı, verilen kararla ilgili şikâyette bulunan kişi ile kullanıcıyı kararın gerekçesini de açıklamak suretiyle derhal bilgilendirmelidir. aynı madde uyarınca prosedür, her bir şikâyet ile durumu düzeltmek için alınan tedbirin / /ec ve / /eu sayılı direktifler kapsamında belgelendirilmesini sağlamalıdır. Şikâyetlerin ele alınması süreci sosyal ağ yönetimi tarafından izlenmelidir. Şikâyetlerin ele alınması sürecindeki eksiklikler hızlıca giderilmelidir. İncelenen bu hükmün, sosyal ağlarda yer alan nefret söylemi içeriklerinin hızlıca bildirilmesi ve kaldırılması için gerekli işlemlerin yapılabilmesine yönelik etkili bir süreç oluşturulması bakımından faydalı olduğu değerlendirilmektedir. yine aynı hüküm kapsamında, şikâyetleri işleme sürecinde görevli personele sosyal ağ yönetimi tarafından eğitim ve destek programları almanca dilinde ve düzenli olarak sağlanmalıdır. ayrıca bu eğitimler en az ayda bir olmak üzere gerçekleştirilmelidir. bahsedilen bu hükmün; içeriğin yasadışı olup olmadığı, bu çalışma kapsamında ise nefret söylemi teşkil edip etmediği dÜlger / oĞlakcioĞlu, s. . claussen, s. . dÜlger / oĞlakcioĞlu, s. . almanya’nın sosyal ağ yasasının nefret söylemi İçeriklerinin kaldırılması bakımından İncelenmesi: türkiye İçin Öneriler yönünde inceleme yapan personelin eğitimli olmasını ve bilgilerinin sürekli olarak güncel halde tutulmasını sağlaması bakımından son derece önemli olduğu değerlendirilmektedir. netzdg’nin ’üncü maddesinde para cezaları düzenlenmektedir. bu hüküm kapsamında; ’nci maddede öngörülen raporlamanın yapılmaması, raporlamanın zamanında ve doğru biçimde yapılmaması, raporun zamanında veya hiç yayımlanmaması, belirlenen şekilde yayımlanmaması, ’üncü maddede öngörülen prosedürün tam veya düzgün olarak sağlanmaması, ’üncü maddenin dördüncü fıkrasına aykırı olarak şikâyetlerin ele alınmasının gözetlenmemesi, ’üncü maddenin dördüncü fıkrasına aykırı olarak organizasyonel eksikliklerin giderilmemesi veya zamanında giderilmemesi, ’üncü maddenin dördüncü fıkrasına aykırı olarak personele eğitim veya desteğin hiç veya zamanında verilmemesi hallerinde para cezası uygulanmaktadır. bu maddenin beşinci fıkrasına göre; netzdg’nin ’inci maddesinin üçüncü fıkrasında belirlenen yasadışı içeriğin kaldırılmadığı ve bu içeriğe erişimin engellenmediğinden bahisle uygulanacak para cezalarında, öncelikle içeriğin yasadışı olduğuna dair yargı kararı alınmalıdır. ayrıca belirtilmelidir ki, bu maddede öngörülen cezalar ancak sistematik ihlal halinde uygulanabilecektir . bu hüküm kapsamında; ihlal halinde para cezası tatbik edilmesi düzenlenerek, işbu çalışma konusu bakımından nefret söylemi içeriklerinin kaldırılmasına dair hükümlere ilgililerce uyulmasının amaçlandığı görülmektedir. netzdg’nin ’inci maddesinin birinci fıkrasına göre sosyal ağlar federal almanya cumhuriyeti’nde tebligatları almaya yetkili bir kişiyi belirmelidir. bu maddenin ikinci fıkrasına göre ise sosyal ağlar, alman hukuk uygulama otoritelerinin bilgi taleplerini karşılamak üzere bir kişiyi görevlendirmelidir. netzdg kapsamında hukuka aykırı içeriği silmekte sistematik olarak başarısız olan online platformlara milyon euro’ya kadar para cezası uygulanabilmektedir . bu kanun gereksiz şekilde yayından çıkarmalara sebep olacağı ve sansür niteliğine sahip olduğu gerekçeleri ile eleştiriye tabi tutulmaktadır. netzdg’ye yöneltilen eleştirilere ilerleyen başlıklarda detaylıca yer verilmektedir. netzdg’ye genel hatları ile bakacak olursak sosyal medya kuruluşlarının almanya'da en az bir adet temsilcilik kurma mecburiyeti, özellikle nefret söylemi çerçevesindeki suç türlerinin belirginliği, içeriğin sadece almanya’da değil internet ortamında genel olarak engellenmesi gerekliliği ve caydırıcı cezai yaptırımlar düzenlemeyi oldukça güçlü ve etkin hale getirmektedir. her ne kadar düzenlemenin oldukça katı olduğuna ve ülkede internet sansürünü artıracağına ilişkin endişeler yer almış olsa da düzenlemenin internet kullanıcılarının mağduriyetlerini giderebilecek ölçüde kullanımının önemi de ortaya atılmaktadır. netzdg’nin sosyal ağlar tarafından uygulanması netzdg’nin uygulanmasında sosyal ağlar; yasadışı içeriğin tespit edilmesini sağlayacak yeni enstrümanları kurmak ve geliştirmek için hayli yüksek maliyetlerle karşılaşmakta, kısa süre içerisinde yasadışı içeriği kaldırma ya da erişimi engelleme kararı verme yükümlülüğü altında bulunmakta ve kanun koyucu tarafından kullanılan “açıkça yasadışı” gibi belirsiz kavramları yorumlamak zorunda kalmaktadırlar . bu başlık altında netzdg’nin sosyal ağlar tarafından nasıl uygulandığı, sosyal ağlar tarafından kamuya açıklanan bilgiler üzerinden incelenmektedir. netzgd’nin nasıl uygulandığı yaygın kullanılan sosyal medya platformlarından biri olan instagram’ın yardım merkezi’nde bulunan açıklamalardan incelenirse, instagram yardım merkezi’nde; “instagram'da nelere izin verilip nelere verilmediğini belirleyen bir dizi topluluk kuralı geliştirdik. echikson / knodt, s. . echikson / knodt, s.i. stavinoha, vlastislav, “law regulation of social media in germany”, poder y medios en las sociedades del siglo xxi, , s. . almanya’nın sosyal ağ yasasının nefret söylemi İçeriklerinin kaldırılması bakımından İncelenmesi: türkiye İçin Öneriler topluluk kurallarımız dünyanın her yerindeki içerikler için geçerlidir ve instagram'da insanların kendini ifade etmesini ve kişisel güvenliği korumak için vazgeçilmezdir. Şiddet ve suç eylemlerini destekleyen içerikler, başkalarının güvenliğini tehdit eden içerikler, nefret söylemi, sansürlenmemiş şiddet içeriği, spam ve reşit olmayanlar için zararlı içerikler dahil olmak üzere birçok uygunsuz veya zararlı içerik, topluluk kuralları kapsamında yasaklanmıştır. ağ uygulama yasası ("netzdg"), sosyal ağların yasadışı içeriklerle ilgili şikayetleri ele alırken belirli bir prosedür uygulamasını zorunlu kılan bir alman yasasıdır. netzdg şikâyet formu aracılığıyla şikâyet edilen içerikleri değerlendirmek için iki adımlı bir yaklaşım izleriz. İlk olarak, şikâyet edilen içeriği topluluk kurallarımız kapsamında değerlendiririz. netzdg şikâyet formu aracılığıyla bize şikâyet edilen içeriğin topluluk kurallarımızı ihlal ettiği durumlarda içerik dünya genelinde instagram'dan kaldırılır ve değerlendirme süreci sonuçlanır. İkinci olarak, şikâyet edilen içerik topluluk kurallarımızı ihlal etmiyorsa, aldığımız şikâyet doğrultusunda içeriği yasalara uygunluğu açısından değerlendiririz. sürecin bu kısmında, şikâyet edilen içeriğin netzdg'de belirtilen alman ceza kanununun ilgili hükümlerini ihlal edip etmediğine dair bir değerlendirme yapılır. Şikâyet edilen içeriğin netzdg kapsamında yasadışı olduğuna karar verilirse, almanya'da bu içeriğe erişim kapatılır .” açıklamalarının bulunduğu ve bu açıklamalarda instagram topluluk kuralları’nın uygulanması ile netzdg’nin uygulanması arasındaki farkların ortaya konulduğu görülmektedir. bu açıklamalardan anlaşıldığı üzere gelen şikâyetler instagram tarafından öncelikle kendi topluluk kurallarına göre incelenmekte, bu içerik anılan kuralları ihlal etmiyor ise netzdg açısından değerlendirmeye tabi tutulmaktadır. ayrıca bu açıklamalar doğrultusunda, instagram topluluk kurallarını ihlal eden içeriğin tüm dünya genelinde kaldırıldığı ancak netzdg kapsamında işlem yapılan içeriğin almanya’dan bu içeriğe ulaşılamayacak şekilde kapatıldığı anlaşılmaktadır. aynı şekilde youtube’un konuya ilişkin açıklamaları incelendiğinde; “… İçeriğin netzdg uyarınca kaldırılabilmesi için, alman ceza kanununda yer alan ve netzdg'nin atıfta bulunduğu ceza tüzüğünden birinin kapsamında olması gerekir. bize netzdg uyarınca gönderilen içeriği de kendi küresel youtube topluluk kurallarımıza göre değerlendiririz. youtube topluluk kurallarımızı ihlal etmesi halinde içeriği küresel bazda kaldırırız. İçeriğin bu politikaların kapsamında olmamasına rağmen alman ceza kanunu'nda yer alan ve netzdg'nin atıfta bulunduğu ceza tüzüğüne (§ iii netzdg) ya da başka bir yerel yasaya göre yasa dışı olduğunu belirlersek içeriği yerel bazda kısıtlarız ” ifadelerinin bulunduğu ve youtube’un da şikayet edilen içerikleri öncelikle kendi topluluk kuralları uyarınca incelediği, kendi topluluk kuralları kapsamında kaldırılmayan ancak netzdg uyarınca kaldırılması gereken içerikleri almanya’da yerel bazda kısıtladığı görülmektedir. diğer taraftan, sosyal ağların netzdg’nin uygulanmasına yönelik oluşturdukları raporların kısaca incelenmesinin de faydalı olacağı değerlendirilmektedir. Öncelikle netzdg’ye ilk aylık raporlar incelendiğinde yaygın kullanılan sosyal ağların içerik kaldırma oranları aşağıdaki tablo ’de özetlenmektedir. tablo . sosyal ağların yılı ilk yarısında içerik kaldırma oranları (kaynak: gollatz vd., s. ) platform raporlanan çerik sayısı kaldırma oranı saat içerisinde kaldırma oranı facebook . (% . ) % . (raporlamaların tümüne oranla) instagram yardım merkezi, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://www.facebook.com/help/instagram/ youtube: Şeffaflık raporu, ağ İcra yasası kapsamındaki kaldırma işlemleri, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://transparencyreport.google.com/netzdg/youtube?hl=tr https://transparencyreport.google.com/netzdg/youtube?hl=tr almanya’nın sosyal ağ yasasının nefret söylemi İçeriklerinin kaldırılması bakımından İncelenmesi: türkiye İçin Öneriler youtube . . (% . ) % ( . ) google+ . . (% . ) % . ( . ) twitter . . (% . ) % . ( . ) söz konusu raporlamalarda nefret söylemi içeriklerine ilişkin verilerin incelenmesinde de fayda görülmektedir. ’in ikinci yarısındaki raporlara bakıldığında; google+’nın temmuz – aralık Şeffaflık raporuna göre, nefret söylemi veya politik aşırılık sebebiyle gelen şikâyetlerin tanesi topluluk kuralları kapsamında, tanesi netzdg kapsamında kaldırılmıştır . youtube’un temmuz- aralık Şeffaflık raporu’na göre ise, nefret söylemi ve politik aşırılık sebebi ile youtube’un topluluk kuralları kapsamında . içerik kaldırılmışken, netzdg kapsamında . içerik kaldırılmıştır . facebook’un temmuz-aralık Şeffaflık raporunda, alman ceza kanunu kapsamındaki suçlar bazında gelen şikâyet sayıları verilmiş ve devamında bunlardan kaç tanesinin kaldırıldığı açıklanmıştır. bu kapsamda facebook’a nefrete teşvik suçuna (§ ) yönelik ; dinlerin, dini ve ideolojik grupların karalanması suçuna (§ ) yönelik adet şikâyet gelmiştir. facebook’ta nefrete teşvik suçu (§ ) sebebiyle ; dinlerin, dini ve ideolojik grupların karalanması suçu (§ ) sebebiyle toplamda adet içerik silinmiş veya engellenmiştir . İlk raporlar yayımlandıktan sonra da almanya adalet bakanlığı görevlisi gerd billen, netzdg’nin hedeflenen amacı gerçekleştirdiğine dair tatmin duyduklarını ifade etse de yine de uygulamanın çok başında olduklarını belirtmiştir . bu ifadeden ve sosyal ağ kuruluşlarının açıklamalarından yola çıkarak söz konusu düzenlemenin öncelikli olarak sosyal ağ kuruluşlarının topluluk standartları çerçevesinde değerlendirileceği ve bu standartların dışında kanunda belirtilen maddelere ilişkin almanya’ya özel taleplerin karşılanabileceği ortaya çıkmaktadır. bu da düzenlemenin tam anlamıyla uygulanması konusundaki eksiklikleri ortaya koymaktadır. netzdg’ye yönelik eleştiriler teknoloji endüstrisi, aktivistler ve akademisyenler netzdg’yi desteklemekten ziyade eleştirmektedirler . google ve facebook gibi sosyal medya şirketleri tarafından finanse edilen global network initiative (küresel ağ girişimi) isimli platform, nisan ’de netzdg taslağına ilişkin açıklamasında, bu kanunun açık ve demokratik söylemlere karşı bir tehdit oluşturduğunu dile getirmiştir . yaygın eleştirilere rağmen netzdg’nin hızlıca kaleme alındığı ve sivil toplum kuruluşları ve uzmanlara danışmak için çok kısa süre verilerek kabul edildiği ifade edilmektedir . Öte yandan dalia research isimli araştırma şirketince yapılan araştırmaya göre almanya vatandaşlarının % ’si netzdg’yi google+: Şeffaflık raporu, ağ İcra yasası kapsamındaki kaldırma işlemleri, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://transparencyreport.google.com/netzdg/googleplus?hl=tr youtube Şeffaflık raporu facebook: netzdg transparency report, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://fbnewsroomus.files.wordpress.com/ / /facebook_netzdg_january_ _english .pdf?fbclid=iwar dixicvuiq humki ffdkdxt_h geowe rvnrmuqwl f hc pes l gozu, s. - gollatz, kirsten / riedl, martin j. / pohlmann, jens, removals of online hate speech in numbers, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://zenodo.org/record/ #.xpjsyogzbiv tworek / leerssen, s. global network initiative: proposed german legislation threatens free expression around the world, erişim tarihi: . . ; http://globalnetworkinitiative.org/proposed-german- legislation-threatens-free- expression-around-the-world/ tworek / leerssen, s. . https://transparencyreport.google.com/netzdg/googleplus?hl=tr https://fbnewsroomus.files.wordpress.com/ / /facebook_netzdg_january_ _english .pdf?fbclid=iwar dixicvuiq humki ffdkdxt_h geowe rvnrmuqwl f hc pes lgozu https://fbnewsroomus.files.wordpress.com/ / /facebook_netzdg_january_ _english .pdf?fbclid=iwar dixicvuiq humki ffdkdxt_h geowe rvnrmuqwl f hc pes lgozu https://fbnewsroomus.files.wordpress.com/ / /facebook_netzdg_january_ _english .pdf?fbclid=iwar dixicvuiq humki ffdkdxt_h geowe rvnrmuqwl f hc pes lgozu https://zenodo.org/record/ #.xpjsyogzbiv http://globalnetworkinitiative.org/proposed-german-legislation-threatens-free-expression-around-the-world/ http://globalnetworkinitiative.org/proposed-german-legislation-threatens-free-expression-around-the-world/ http://globalnetworkinitiative.org/proposed-german-legislation-threatens-free-expression-around-the-world/ almanya’nın sosyal ağ yasasının nefret söylemi İçeriklerinin kaldırılması bakımından İncelenmesi: türkiye İçin Öneriler desteklemektedir . Öncelikle belirtmek gerekir ki, sosyal medyada nefretle mücadelede en etkili yol içeriğin çıkarılmasıdır. aşırı engelleme (over-blocking), elle tutulur bir gerekçe olmaksızın içeriğin engellenmesi veya silinmesi ve bu durumun engelleme veya silinmeden sonra anlaşılması haline verilen genel bir isimdir . neztdg’ye ilişkin ilk endişe, bu düzenlemenin hukuka uygun içeriklerin kaldırılmasına (over- removal) sebep olabileceği yönündedir . İfade özgürlüğü taraftarları ile sektör temsilcileri, netzdg’nin teknoloji şirketlerini acele kararlar vererek hukuka uygun içeriği dahi çıkarma konusunda teşvik edebileceğini, almanya’da hukuka uygun içeriği silme halinde uygulanacak bir ceza olmadığı için bu platformların ağır para cezalarından kurtulmak için “sil” butonuna kolaylıkla basacağını ifade etmektedir . netzdg’nin özellikle modern sanatçıların güncel politik ve sosyal konuları eleştirdikleri içeriklerin sosyal ağlardan kaldırılmasına veya bu içeriklere erişimin engellenmesine sebep olması, mezkûr düzenlemenin olumsuz etkisi olarak yorumlanmaktadır . netzdg’de açıkça yasadışı olan içeriklerin yirmi dört saat içerisinde kaldırılacağı düzenlenmiştir. ancak alman yasa koyucu, neyin açıkça yasadışı içerik olduğunu net olarak belirlememiştir ve yasadışı içerik ile açıkça yasadışı olan içerik arasındaki sınır da belirsizdir . netzdg’ye ilişkin bir diğer eleştiri, neyin silinmesi gerektiği konusunda karar verme yetkisinin sosyal ağ yönetimine bırakılmış olmasıdır . bu eleştiri kapsamında sosyal ağların, kanunun korumak üzere çıkarıldığı değerleri değil ticari çıkarlarını koruma amacı ile hareket ettikleri ifade edilmektedir. bu konuda ayrıca, bir ifadenin hukuka uygun olup olmadığının tespit edilebilmesi için derin inceleme yapmanın gerekli olduğu durumlarla karşılaşılabildiği, bazen sosyal medya şirketlerinin bu tür bir incelemeyi sağlayamayabileceği yönünde eleştiriler de bulunmaktadır . Çevrimiçi platformların her bir şikâyeti tüm detaylarıyla inceleyebilecek uzmanlığa ve zamana sahip olmadıkları ifade edilmektedir. diğer yandan netzdg, çevrimiçi söylemleri kısıtlamak için otoriter rejimlere bir örnek teşkil edebileceği yönüyle de eleştiriye tabi tutulmaktadır . netzdg hükümlerine dayanarak sosyal ağlarca yapılan kaldırmalar dikkate alındığında netzdg’nin en önemli etkisinin, almanya’da bulunan platformların topluluk kuralları kapsamında içeriğin daha hızlı ve tutarlı biçimde kaldırılmasını sağlamak olduğu ifade edilmektedir . diğer yandan, sosyal ağlarca yayımlanan şeffaflık raporlarının formatlarının birbirinden farklı olduğu ve bu farklılığın raporlar arasında doğrudan karşılaştırma yapmayı engellediği görülmektedir. tworek ve leerssen raporlama konusunda iyileştirmeye ihtiyaç duyulduğunu ifade etmektedir . kuczerawy, neztdg’yi hukuka uygun içerikleri kaldırılan veya engellenen kullanıcılar açısından bir dalia research: % of germans approve of social media regulation law, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://daliaresearch.com/blog-germans-approve-of-social-media- regulation-law/ heldt, amélie p., “taking speech regulation slightly: the netzdg reports”, ssrn, , s. - . tworek / leerssen, s. . echikson / knodt, s. . stavinoha, s. . kuczerawy, aleksandra: phantom safeguards? analysis of the german law on hate speech netzdg, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://www.law.kuleuven.be/citip/blog/phantom- safeguards-analysis-of-the- german-law-on-hate-speech-netzdg/ haerting: netzdg as a source of censorship – a summary of recent effects, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://www.haerting.de/neuigkeit/netzdg-source-censorship-summary- recent-effects echikson / knodt, s. . tworek / leerssen, s. . tworek / leerssen, s. . tworek / leerssen, s. . https://daliaresearch.com/blog-germans-approve-of-social-media-regulation-law/ https://daliaresearch.com/blog-germans-approve-of-social-media-regulation-law/ https://www.law.kuleuven.be/citip/blog/phantom-safeguards-analysis-of-the-german-law-on-hate-speech-netzdg/ https://www.law.kuleuven.be/citip/blog/phantom-safeguards-analysis-of-the-german-law-on-hate-speech-netzdg/ https://www.law.kuleuven.be/citip/blog/phantom-safeguards-analysis-of-the-german-law-on-hate-speech-netzdg/ https://www.haerting.de/neuigkeit/netzdg-source-censorship-summary-recent-effects https://www.haerting.de/neuigkeit/netzdg-source-censorship-summary-recent-effects almanya’nın sosyal ağ yasasının nefret söylemi İçeriklerinin kaldırılması bakımından İncelenmesi: türkiye İçin Öneriler itiraz mekanizması içermemesi sebebiyle eleştirmektedir . diğer yandan, tworek ve leerssen netzdg’nin ifade özgürlüğüne zarar verebileceği endişelerinin hafifletilmesi açısından; sosyal ağların içeriği yükleyene, içerik hakkında şikâyet olduğunu bildirmelerinin ve içeriği kaldırmadan önce savunma hakkı tanınmasının faydalı olacağı görüşündedir . netzdg, büyük sosyal medya platformlarından hesap verebilirliği ve şeffaflığı teşvik ederken, ifade özgürlüğü hakkında kritik sorular da gündeme getirmektedir . netzdg’nin uygulanmasına dair araştırmalara bakıldığında; netzdg’nin kaldırma konusunda aşırı talebe sebep olmadığı gibi, sosyal ağları da “önce kaldır-daha sonra sor” şeklinde bir yaklaşıma itmediğinin görüldüğü ifade edilmektedir . aynı zamanda uygulama konusundaki ilk raporlara bakıldığında elde edilen verilerin, netzdg’nin aşırı engellemeye (over-blocking) sebep olduğu yönündeki düşünceyi desteklemediği belirtilmektedir . ancak netzdg’nin amacına tam olarak ulaşıp ulaşmadığının belirlenmesi için daha fazla veriye ulaşılmasına ihtiyaç bulunmaktadır . netzdg düzenlemesinin savunucularının ve karşısında duranlarının haklı ve haksız tespitlerini doğru bir şekilde ortaya koymak için verilerin kamu ile şeffaf bir şekilde paylaşılarak düzenlemenin hangi amaçla ne şekilde kullanıldığının iyi kavranabileceği düşünülmektedir. buna göre de düzenlemenin olumlu ve olumsuz yönleri iyi analiz edilerek gerekli değişikliklere gidilebileceği değerlendirilmektedir. sonuÇ ve Önerİler bir taraftan sosyal ağlarda ifade özgürlüğünün gözetilmesi gerekirken, diğer taraftan sosyal ağlarda bulunan nefret söylemi içerikleri ile etkili biçimde mücadele edilmesi gerekmektedir. kısıtlayıcı tedbirler içererek çevrimiçi nefret söylemi ile mücadele etmeye çalışan netzdg gibi ulusal kanunların faydasız ve işlevsiz olduğuna dair eleştiriler bulunsa da almanya’nın netzdg düzenlemesinin çevrimiçi nefret söylemi içeren ifadelerin süratle kaldırılmasını temin etmesi, bunun yanında getirdiği raporlama yükümlülüğü ile konuya ilişkin istatistiksel verilerin kamuya açık hale getirilmesi bakımından da faydalı bir düzenleme niteliğinde olduğu yönündedir. bu çalışmanın sonuçlanmasına yakın bir zaman içerisinde ülkemizde de kamuoyunda "sosyal medya yasası" olarak bilinen sosyal ağ sağlayıcılarına ilişkin düzenlemeler sayılı "İnternet ortamında yapılan yayınların düzenlenmesi ve bu yayınlar yoluyla İşlenen suçlarla mücadele edilmesi hakkında kanun"a getirilmiştir. böylelikle ülkemizde sosyal ağ sağlayıcılığı kavramı tanımlanmış ve türkiye’den günlük erişimi bir milyondan fazla olan yurt dışı kaynaklı sosyal ağ sağlayıcılarına ilişkin düzenlemeler getirilmiştir. söz konusu değişiklik ile netzdg’ye benzer düzenlemeler getirilmiştir. böylelikle temsilci bulundurma, belirli süre içerisinde cevap zorunluluğu, ağır idari yaptırımlar ve suça konu içeriğin yayından kaldırılmasına ilişkin benzer düzenlemeler yasallaşmıştır. suça konu içeriğin çerçevesi ise hukuka aykırılığı hâkim veya mahkeme kararı ile tespit edilen içerik olarak belirlenmiş ve nefret söylemine ilişkin özel bir husus tanımlanmamıştır. netzdg’den yola çıkarak türkiye için getirilebilecek önerilere bakıldığında; öncelikle yapılacak düzenlemeler veya yapılan düzenlemedeki değişiklikler ile çevrimiçi nefret söylemlerinin, sosyal ağlardan kuczerawy tworek / leerssen, s. . tworek / leerssen, s. . echikson / knodt, s.i. theil, stefan: freedom of expression on social media- conceptual and regulatory challenges in europe and the us, erişim tarihi: . . ; http://blogs.oii.ox.ac.uk/policy/wp- content/uploads/sites/ / / /ipp -theil.pdf tworek / leerssen, s. . http://blogs.oii.ox.ac.uk/policy/wp-content/uploads/sites/ / / /ipp -theil.pdf http://blogs.oii.ox.ac.uk/policy/wp-content/uploads/sites/ / / /ipp -theil.pdf almanya’nın sosyal ağ yasasının nefret söylemi İçeriklerinin kaldırılması bakımından İncelenmesi: türkiye İçin Öneriler kaldırılması gereken yasadışı içerik kapsamında detaylandırılması gerektiği değerlendirilmektedir. ancak, düzenlemenin birtakım içeriklerin internet ortamından kaldırılmasını gerektirmesi sebebi ile çevrimiçi nefret söyleminden ne anlaşılması gerektiği, yapılacak düzenlemede ifade özgürlüğünü de koruyacak biçimde mümkün olduğunca net olarak belirlenmelidir. yapılan düzenlemede sosyal ağ sağlayıcılarına kişilik hakları ve özel hayatın gizliliğine ilişkin kişiler tarafından yapılacak başvurularda olumlu ya da olumsuz cevap verilmesi şartı koşulmuş iken özellikle milli ve manevi değerlere ilişkin hem bireysel hem ülke bazında nefret söylemi içerik türleri tanımlanmalıdır. türkiye’de de çevrimiçi nefret söylemi içeriklerinin sosyal ağlara bildiriminden itibaren sosyal ağın belirli süre içerisinde bu içeriği incelemesi, netzdg’de olduğu gibi yasadışı içeriklerin belirli süreler içerisinde kaldırılması gerektiği yönünde düzenleme yapılabileceği değerlendirilmektedir. bunun yanı sıra sosyal ağların şeffaflık raporlarında, nefret söylemi içerikleri ile mücadele yöntemleri ve konuya ilişkin istatistiksel verilerin açıklanmasının faydalı olacağı değerlendirilmektedir. sayılı yasaya getirilen düzenlemelerde bu hususlar belirtilmiş olmakla birlikte nefret söylemi özelinde de belirtilebileceği değerlendirilmektedir. yukarıda sayılan hususlara ilaveten sosyal ağın, kendisine gelen şikâyetleri incelemekle sorumlu personeline belirli periyotlarda ve sürekli olarak eğitim vermesi gerektiğine dair düzenleme yapılmasının nefret söylemi içeriklerinin tespiti ve kaldırılmasında başarı sağlamak üzere faydalı olacağı değerlendirilmektedir. Çevrimiçi nefret söylemlerinin failinin tespitinde zorluklar yaşanabilmektedir. failin tespiti konusunda kolaylık sağlamak ve diğer bilgi taleplerinin kısa zaman içerisinde cevaplanmasını temin etmek üzere, netzdg’de bulunduğu gibi, sosyal ağ tarafından resmi makamların bilgi taleplerine belirli sürede cevap verme yükümlülüğü altında bulunan kişilerin görevlendirilmesine dair düzenleme yapılabileceği değerlendirilmektedir . yukarıda yer verilen tüm hususlar neticesinde; almanya’nın netzdg düzenlemesinin çevrimiçi nefret söylemi ile mücadelede etkin bir araç olduğu görülmektedir. bundan dolayı ülkemiz mevzuat düzenlemelerinde de örnek alınmasının faydalı olabileceği değerlendirilmektedir. kaynakÇa alp, hakan, “Çingenelere yönelik nefret söyleminin ekşi sözlük’te yeniden Üretilmesi”, ankara Üniversitesi İlef dergisi, c. , s. , , s. - . altunay, alper, “bir sosyalleşme aracı olarak yeni medya, selçuk İletişim, c. , s. , , s. - . arslan, sevcan, “sosyal medya platformları Üzerinden kişilik hakları İhlali, korunmasına yönelik düzenlemeler, Ülke uygulamaları, sorunlar ve Çözüm Önerileri”, bilgi teknolojileri ve İletişim kurumu, bilişim uzmanlığı tezi, ankara. claussen, victor, “fighting hate speech and fake news. the network enforcement act (netzdg) in germany in the context of european legislation, rivista di diritto dei media, c. , s. - . code of conduct on countering illegal hate speech online: erişim tarihi: . . ; https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/just/item-detail.cfm?item_id= community empowerment for progress organisation: introductıon to hate speech on social media; erişim tarihi: . . ; https://defyhatenow.net/wp- content/uploads/ / /defyhatenow_whatishatespeech_jul .pdf Çakar, bekir, “avrupa ve abd’de artan salgın: nefret suçu”, the global a journal of policy and strategy, c. , s. , , s. - . Çomu, tuğrul / bİnark, mutlu, yeni medya ortamlarında nefret söylemi, hrant dink vakfı yayınları, arslan, sevcan, “sosyal medya platformları Üzerinden kişilik hakları İhlali, korunmasına yönelik düzenlemeler, Ülke uygulamaları, sorunlar ve Çözüm Önerileri”, bilgi teknolojileri ve İletişim kurumu, bilişim uzmanlığı tezi, ankara. almanya’nın sosyal ağ yasasının nefret söylemi İçeriklerinin kaldırılması bakımından İncelenmesi: türkiye İçin Öneriler ankara. dalia research: % of germans approve of social media regulation law, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://daliaresearch.com/blog-germans-approve-of-social-media- regulation-law/ dondurucu, zeynep benan / uluÇay, ayşe pınar, “yeni medya ortamlarında nefret söylemi: eşcinsellere yönelik nefret söylemi İçeren videoların youtube Üzerinden İncelenmesi”, international journal of social sciences and education research, c. , s. , , s. - . dÜlger, murat volkan / otlakcioĞlu, mustafa temmuz, “alman sosyal ağlarda hukuk uygulamasının İyileştirilmesi hakkında kanuna İlişkin değerlendirme”, chd, c. , , s. - . echikson, william / knodt, olivia, germany’s netzdg: a key test for combatting online hate, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://www.counterextremism.com/sites/default/files/cep- ceps_germany% s% netzdg_ .pdf european commission: countering illegal hate speech online #noplace hate, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://ec.europa.eu/newsroom/just/item-detail.cfm?item_id= facebook: netzdg transparency report, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://fbnewsroomus.files.wordpress.com/ / /facebook_netzdg_january_ _english .pdf?fbclid=iwar dixicvuiq humki ffdkdxt_h geowe rvnrmuqwl f hc pes l gozu facebook: topluluk standartları, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://www.facebook.com/communitystandards/objectionable_content gelashvili, teona, “hate speech on social media: implications of private regulation and governance gaps”, jamm master thesis, . global network initiative: proposed german legislation threatens free expression around the world, erişim tarihi: . . ; http://globalnetworkinitiative.org/proposed-german- legislation-threatens-free-expression-around- the-world/ gollatz, kirsten / riedl, martin j. / pohlmann, jens, removals of online hate speech in numbers, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://zenodo.org/record/ #.xpjsyogzbiv google+: Şeffaflık raporu, ağ İcra yasası kapsamındaki kaldırma işlemleri, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://transparencyreport.google.com/netzdg/googleplus?hl=tr gÜranlioĞlu, nurhayat, nefret söylemi ve nefret suçunun türkiye Üzerinden Örneklerle İncelenmesi, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://www.academia.edu/ /nefret_söylemi_ve_nefret_suçunun_türkiye_Üzerinde n_Örneklerle_İncelenmesi haerting: netzdg as a source of censorship – a summary of recent effects, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://www.haerting.de/neuigkeit/netzdg-source-censorship-summary- recent-effects heldt, amélie p., “taking speech regulation slightly: the netzdg reports”, ssrn, . instagram yardım merkezi, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://www.facebook.com/help/instagram/ jourova, vera, code of conduct on countering illegal hate speech online, erişim tarihi; . . ; https://ec.europa.eu/info/sites/info/files/code_of_conduct_factsheet_ _web.pdf kuczerawy, aleksandra: phantom safeguards? analysis of the german law on hate speech netzdg, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://www.law.kuleuven.be/citip/blog/phantom- safeguards-analysis-of-the-german-law- on-hate-speech-netzdg/ laanpere, liina: online hate speech:hate or crime?, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://files.elsa.org/aa/online_hate_speech_essay_competition_runner_up.pdf mayfield, anthony: what is social media?, erişim tarihi: . . ;https://www.icrossing.com/uk/sites/default/files_uk/insight_pdf_files/what% is% social % media_icrossing_ebook.pdf murugesan, san, “understanding web . ”, it professional, c. , s. , , s. - . network enforcement act (netzdurchsetzunggesetz, netzdg), erişim tarihi: . . ; http://germanlawarchive.iuscomp.org/?p= Öztekİn, hülya, “yeni medyada nefret söylemi: ekşi sözlük Örneği”, journal of international social research, c. , s. , , s. - . sezgİn, ayşe aslı, “Çevrimiçi gazetelerin okur yorumlarında nefret söylemi: reina saldırısı Örneği”, almanya’nın sosyal ağ yasasının nefret söylemi İçeriklerinin kaldırılması bakımından İncelenmesi: türkiye İçin Öneriler ajit-e: online academic journal of information technology, c. , . silva, leandro / mondal, mainack / correa, denzil / benevenuto, fabricio / weber, ingmar, “analyzing the targets of hate in online social media”, in tenth international aaai conference on web and social media, . spencer-smith, charlotte: dealing with hate speech on social media, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://static .squarespace.com/static/ a d e c /t/ a fbb d fa db/ /hate+speech+on+social+media.pdf stavinoha, vlastislav, “law regulation of social media in germany”, poder y medios en las sociedades del siglo xxi, . taŞ, eray, “yeni medyada nefret söylemi”, yeni medya elektronik dergi, c. , s. , , s. - . the guardian: mark zuckerberg tells facebook staff to stop defacing black lives matter slogans, erişim tarihi: . . ; https://www.theguardian.com/technology/ /feb/ /mark-zuckerberg-facebook- defacing- black-lives-matter-signs theil, stefan: freedom of expression on social media- conceptual and regulatory challenges in europe and the us, erişim tarihi: . . ; http://blogs.oii.ox.ac.uk/policy/wp-content/uploads/sites/ / / /ipp - theil.pdf tÜrkİye bÜyÜk mİllet meclİsİ: bilgi toplumu olma yolunda bilişim sektöründeki gelişmeler ile İnternet kullanımının başta Çocuklar, gençler ve aile yapısı Üzerinde olmak Üzere sosyal etkilerinin araştırılması amacıyla kurulan meclis araştırması komisyonu raporu, erişim tarihi: . . ; 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https://transparencyreport.google.com/netzdg/youtube?hl=tr the political divide between lay and elite atheism a long-standing debate in atheist and secular humanist circles in the u.s. has been whether organized secular- ists should embrace a broader political agenda or steer clear of such commitments. this debate was brought front-and-center during the political ferment of the democratic primary campaigns, where we saw the emer- gence of an outspoken secular political candidate in the person of bernie sanders. yet atheist leaders and publica- tions showed minimal, if any, interest in the campaign. such leaders assumed that atheism does not include a set of socio-political markers that sets it off from other movements; it is mainly a science- and reason-based phi- losophy challenging belief in the supernatural that can be adapted to a wide range of political orientations. we find this view increasingly reflected among both atheist and secular humanist leaders and publications, especially in the new atheist movement, which drew a high proportion of atheists interested in science (cragun ). this view also squares with the finding that as a secular population grows, it increasingly reflects the demographics of the broader population (voas ). evidence of this may be seen in the recent finding that the “nones,” or those who do not identify with any religion, do not necessarily repre- sent a political bloc (kurtzleben ). in regard to social movements, it may be difficult to divorce atheism from social and political worldviews, or to argue that atheism is merely a lack of belief and does not carry values and beliefs of its own. recent studies suggest class/economic-based atheist critiques, which identify religion as a key factor in perpetuating a false conscious- ness that impedes social justice, are not getting attention in contemporary atheist discourse (cimino, smith, ). ledrew ( ), for example, finds a pattern of conserva- tive discourse on a whole range of issues, such as crime, war and peace, terrorism and broad support of the free market, among intellectuals and opinion leaders such as richard dawkins, sam harris, steven pinker, and michael shermer. as organized secularism becomes a viable—if not always realized—alternative for the growing population of non- religious americans, our study is one of the first to raise the important question of how this diffuse movement can maintain its identity in a sharply politically polar- ized society. while considerable attention has been paid to internal dynamics and issues dividing secularists, there has been a paucity of research on the role of external politics in the cohesion of this movement. in this arti- cle, we categorize secularist opinion leaders and authors as “elites,” although we acknowledge that in a generally intellectual and decentralized movement that places high value on individualism and free thought as atheism, the line between elite and “lay” activity and discourse can be blurry. there is also the fact that the core systematic ideo- logical features of the secularist movement developed by these highly educated group members, or new atheists, in intellectual dialogue with prior ideas and cultural val- ues, was arguably successful and internalized enough to be taken for granted by “lay” members. nonetheless, one feature of elite atheist discourse is its reliance on science, which has high valuation in the secularist community and within society in general. there is also prestige associated with being a public intellectual in the case of dawkins, harris, and others, as well as celebrity status in the case of bill maher, that allows them more weight in terms of cimino, r, et al. . religious socialization and millennial involvement in organized and digital nonbelief activities. secularism and nonreligion, : , pp.  – . doi: https://doi.org/ . /snr. * state university of new york, old westbury, us † independent scholar, us ‡ university of muenster, de corresponding author: richard cimino (relwatch @msn.com) research article the political divide between lay and elite atheism richard cimino*, christopher smith† and gerrit cziehso‡ a long-standing debate in atheist and secular humanist circles has been whether organized secularists should embrace a broader political agenda or steer clear of such commitments. the latter camp argues that atheism does not include a set of socio-political markers that sets it off from other movements; it is mainly a science- and reason-based philosophy challenging belief in the supernatural that can be adapted to a wide range of political orientations. we find this view increasingly reflected among both atheist and secular humanist leaders and publications, especially in the “new atheist” movement, which has drawn high proportions of atheists interested in science. in this paper, we will examine the political discourse and views of atheist leaders and opinion-makers and those of members of atheist-secular humanist organiza- tions during and after the elections. we conduct a textual analysis of secularist publications and web sites as well as use a survey we conducted among , members of a prominent atheist organiza- tion to understand the political divide in american secularism and the prospects for greater unity in this diffuse movement. https://doi.org/ . /snr. mailto:relwatch @msn.com cimino et al: the political divide between lay and elite atheismart.  , page  of disseminating ideas. and as “the public thinkers” of the group, laypeople are more receptive to their ideas, and often develop their own ideas and knowledge by way of response, irrespective of whether they actually view them as any sort of “leaders.” it is for these reasons that we view the new atheism as largely an elitist enterprise and refer to these intellectuals as “leaders.” we distinguish between secular humanists and atheists on the basis of the former’s emphasis on a positive set of ethics (such as democracy), as compared to atheists who emphasize debunking the belief in god and organized religion as a whole. it is obvious that strategically, secu- lar humanists and atheists join each other’s organizations and make common cause on such a key issue as calling for the strict separation of church and state. when we refer to both atheists and secular humanists, or talk of collective action across any ideological differences, we use the term “secularists” or “secularism.” significant work has been done on the emerging inter- nal politics of secularist organizations. meagher ( ) argues that secularists have long lacked the resources to effectively pursue their goals, but in recent decades they have adopted “repertoires of contention” from other political movements, such as lobbying efforts, often with the help of new technology. yet meagher concludes that the internal differences among secularist movements “will challenge their ability to press their political claims” (meagher : ). cimino and smith ( ) examined the role of media in allowing secularists to connect and mobilize in cyberspace. a confluence of media infrastruc- ture and atheist discourses disseminated and popularized by the vital forces of the marketplace and associational activities organize secularists into networks that extend beyond their immediate territorial and social affiliations. though the authors explored how such discourses pro- vided political vitality and an imagined unity, in benedict anderson’s ( ) sense of the term, the authors did not explicitly explore the role this discourse dissemination had on formal and institutional politics. in their recent study, fazzini and cragun ( ) challenge the portrayal of organized secularism as a competitive and conflict- ridden world where cooperation between the different groups has been difficult. instead, they argue that in recent years a new generation of secularist leaders have learned to cooperate and that the diversity in the move- ment shows its vitality rather than its disorganization and schismatic nature. but again, like cimino and smith ( ) before them, they do not extend this research on internal politics within the movement to institutional party politics outside it. just as political and social cleavages take place between and within specific religions in the u.s., we find that these conflicts can unfold among members and lead- ers of the same secularist organizations. however, irre- spective of the ideological differences between groups, leaders, and laypeople that we highlight, our research also finds that pragmatically and politically there is a statistically left-leaning consensus forming—a consen- sus that is emerging as a self-conscious entity or social movement. this article seeks to explore the politics of the secularist movement internally at the ideological, and cultural levels, but also as it applies to national party politics. referring to politics in the formal sense of relating to social change and government policy directed at both church and state issues and wider concerns (such as social justice) implies an understanding of atheism as a social movement. previous research considering atheism as a social move- ment has conceptualized it as linked loosely ideologically but decentralized organizationally (cimino and smith ; kettell ). in other instances, the research has focused more heavily on the ideas of prominent figures and how those figures’ ideas helped constitute and con- geal the movement in complex ways (ledrew ). in not linking such ideals to politics proper, however, such research implicitly perpetuates the view of social move- ments as a “potential rival to the political representation system” (jenkins and klandermans : ); “necessarily extra-institutional” (katzenstein : ); and as “out- siders” who succeed to the extent their challenges lead to being recognized institutionally without being co-opted (gamson ; tilly ). such a view of secularists as outsiders has been rein- forced by the fact that american secularism has taken on a “rejection identity” by the atheists themselves (smith ). this was furthered by the fact that much of the surge in research was conducted on the heels of the new atheism, which was portrayed in the media as a challenge to not only religious values but civility itself. to be sure, voting, lobbying efforts, and decisions of the supreme court are distinctly different than advocacy and aware- ness protest efforts off and online. nonetheless, for the purposes of this article, in addition to looking at dif- ferences in strategies between the opinion leaders and followers of the movement, we wanted to look at dif- ferences in normal institutionalized politics occurring through party-identification and voting, attempting to tease out the ways that the secularist social movement may end up participating in and contributing to party politics in varied forms (e.g., voting, advocacy, etc.) in the years to come. this latter goal is admittedly in its infancy in this article. nonetheless, we feel it is impor- tant to set the groundwork for future research in this regard, especially because the secularist movement has become part of the contemporary landscape that con- tributes to political parties and even gave rise to one, at least in name, in the form of the national atheist party, that “seeks to politically represent u.s. atheists and all who share the goal of a secular government by gath- ering the political strength of secularists nationwide while being guided by the values of secular humanism and evidenced-based reasoning” (national atheist party website ). in doing this, we refer to politics in the formal sense of the term relating to social change and government policy directed at both church-state issues and wider concerns. and in looking at formal, institutional politics in america, we accept the more traditional understanding of the democratic party as the more left-oriented and progres- sive party in comparison to the republican party. cimino et al: the political divide between lay and elite atheism art.  , page  of methods to understand the political differences among organ- ized secularists (those who are involved in atheist and secular humanist organizations), we use both rich data from nationwide surveys with over , movement par- ticipants and textual analysis of one of their pioneering publications. we conducted two surveys of participants in atheist and secular humanist organizations as well as textual analysis of secularist publications and websites, particularly the secular humanist magazine free inquiry from to ( issues), which included a total of articles. our first survey was a questionnaire sent to participants in secular humanist groups conducted in may . the respondents were drawn from a plural- ity of secular humanist and atheist organizations, such as local branches of the center for inquiry, american athe- ists, and the american humanist association. we sent the questionnaire to the leaders of secularist organizations in every region of the u.s. (the west, southwest, south, mid-atlantic, midwest, and new england) who then dis- tributed it to their members and participants. although the questionnaire was not meant to be representative of secularists in the u.s., we believe the responses illuminate the range of economic views and statuses of secularists. the second survey was conducted among members of the freedom from religion foundation (ffrf) in with a sample size of , . ffrf is one of the oldest and largest atheist groups that wields significant influence on secularist activism on strict church-state separation. the leadership of the organization agreed to publicize the survey to its membership base to support the data collec- tion. to parse the differences between organized secular- ists, we focused on support for democratic frontrunners hillary clinton and bernie sanders. because of the unprec- edented standoff between two controversial candidates in the presidential race, donald trump and hillary clinton, we believe that a more accurate study of political prefer- ences was to look at political preferences during the primary race. we used a mix of closed and open-ended questions because of the complexity of some topics (e.g., changes in political affiliation, self-identification terminology). afterwards, two independent researchers coded partici- pants’ responses to prepare for a quantitative data anal- ysis. we were able to use the detailed descriptions and comments of the survey participants for an additional qualitative analysis. this allowed us to cite the respond- ents’ reasons and motivations for their political senti- ments as well as how they self-identify politically and personally (e.g. atheist, secular-humanist, marxist, etc.). while this survey is not statistically representative of the membership, it does include one-quarter of the founda- tion’s members and probes the political beliefs and atti- tudes of participants in this highly influential secularist organization. judging from the organization’s website and related publications critical of religious beliefs (and the expression of religion in public), the freedom from religion foundation members would appear to be largely atheistic as opposed to humanistic in nature. however, we found over of their members self-identifying as secular humanist. on the other hand, while free inquiry magazine clearly embraces the secular humanist agenda, new atheists such as richard dawkins, sam harris, and christopher hitchens wrote for the publication before they became celebrated leaders of the movement. we used a mixed-method approach for data analysis including textual analysis of free inquiry and statistical methods for the quantitative survey data. for the empiri- cal analysis of the quantitative segment of our research we rely on a logistic regression model to be able to control for different covariates to reduce alternative explanations. findings while there are other secularist publications that we could have chosen for our analysis, such as the american atheist magazine, free inquiry magazine (from to ) clearly reflects the changes and history of secular human- ism and how this movement differentiated itself from earlier forms of humanism that tended to embrace social- ist economics and politics. early on, the magazine sought to open its pages to those dissenting from the alliance between socialism and humanism, such as philosopher sidney hook, the mentor of founding editor paul kurtz. in , an issue was devoted to the clash over libertarian- ism and socialism among secular humanists. (free inquiry ). the “open forum” approach on economic and polit- ical issues largely continues in the publication. of the articles we analyzed, were categorized as “conservative,” libertarian, or critical of liberal or progressive economics and politics, as liberal and critical of capitalism and conservative politics, and as neutral, with no discern- able political orientation. two regular columnists, the late tibor machan and ronald bailey, are among the promi- nent libertarian scholars and writers, while robert price reflects a distinct politically conservative position. other columnists, such as greta christina and shadia drury, come from the political and activist left. the magazine has revisited the libertarian-liberal (or socialist) debate several times, although it has reached little consensus on eco- nomic issues. current editor tom flynn published articles in a special section entitled “the left is not always right,” where he acknowledges that while “unbelievers often lean left, secular humanism clearly has no necessary link between it and any particular social, economic, or politi- cal policy prescription” (flynn , ). worth noting is how flynn traces the roots of postmodern philosophy, a school of thought strongly disavowed by secular human- ists and other atheists for its “anti-reason” stance, to the political left. drawing on the writings of sidney hook, he argues that marxist-leninism sought to limit science from its universal and objective standing to a form of knowl- edge subordinate to the ideologies characteristic of each nation and class (flynn , ). marxist ideas inspired noted postmodern philosophers, such as michel foucault and jacques lacan, and paved the way for postmodern- ism’s “cluster of ideologies that repudiated the enlighten- ment, rejected the possibility of universal knowledge not colored by ideological or class biases, advanced an idio- syncratic understanding of power relations among social groups, promoted a divisive model of identity politics, cimino et al: the political divide between lay and elite atheismart.  , page  of and lionized an approach to multiculturalism that would disempower any one group to form legitimate judgments about another’s traditions” (flynn , ). we found no articles in free inquiry that employed the marxist critique of religion that links religion, like all ide- ology, to maintaining an oppressive society and economic system and only a few that cast a critical eye on capital- ism. on the political level, during the election sea- son, only one article favorably focused on bernie sanders, even though sanders was the most secular candidate and highly favored by secularists (drury ), a point our sur- vey confirms. we did find new atheist polemicist p.z. myers calling for a “third wave” of atheism that would uphold progressive politics and social justice (myers ). myers’s joining of social justice concerns with atheism is part of a larger debate in secularist circles about the role of feminism and progressive politics within the movement. this is clearly on display in free inquiry, with special issues devoted to women and atheism. but most of the articles on feminism we analyzed tended to focus on fighting sexism and press- ing for greater inclusion and leadership within secular- ist organizations. the reform movement atheism + also includes “social justice” in its platform, including sexism, racism, political and criminal reform, and classism or the promotion of greater economic equality, even if in vague terms (christina ). but these movements have faced opposition, at least rhetorically, within the broader secu- larist movement. secularist diversity and its limits our online surveys including , participants ( . percent females, m age : . , sd: . , min: , max: ) in secular humanist groups as well as the more strictly atheist ffrf, finds a more consistently liberal or left-of- center stance among atheists. the statistical analysis shows that the political affiliation of these members is largely democratic with . percent, followed by . percent independent, . percent others and . per- cent unaffiliated (see figure ). a multinomial logistic regression model with participants gender and control variables (age and region) as independent variables, and political affiliation as a dependent variable, shows that the stated affiliation is significantly different across males (e.g., democrats male = . percent followed by independ- ents male = . percent) and females (e.g., democrats fe- male = . percent followed by independents female . percent) (χ ( ) = . , p < . ), see figure . another multinomial logistic regression with age and the control variables (gender and region) as an independent variable and political affiliation as the dependent variable indi- cates significantly higher rates of political unaffiliation for young people (unaffiliated age under = . percent) compared to older participants (vs. unaffiliated age – = . percent, unaffiliated age over = . percent, (χ ( ) = . , p < . ), yet still democratic affiliation is in the lead. furthermore, participants stated that they mainly supported bernie sanders in the primary campaign ( . percent) followed by hillary clinton ( . percent). using another multinomial logistic regression model with gen- der and controls (age and region) as an independent variable and the support for a specific candidate as the dependent variable shows significant divergence between secularist men and women (χ ( ) = . , p < . ). in particular, we further used a logistic regression model to focus on gender differences in the support of hilary clin- ton and bernie sanders. the analysis shows differences between males and females on the support for hilary clinton ( clinton male = . percent vs. clinton female = . percent, b = . , se = . , z( ) = . , p < . ), how- figure : what is your current political affiliation? . % . % . % . % . % . % democrat independent others unaff./none undecided n/a * * = others include . % repub., . % green party, . % libert. and different smaller par�es . % democrats independent others* unaff. undec. n/a cimino et al: the political divide between lay and elite atheism art.  , page  of ever, we found no gender differences in the support of bernie sanders (sanders male = . percent vs. sanders female = . percent, b = –. , se = . , z( ) = . , n.s.). the multinomial logistic regression with age and control vari- ables (gender and region) as independent variables and support of a specific candidate as dependent variable shows significant differences as well (χ ( ) = . , p < . ). again using logistic regressions for a more specific contrast, the results reveal significantly higher preference for bernie sanders among young people (sanders under = . percent) while older people show lower preferences for sanders (sanders age – = . percent or sanders age over = . percent) (b = –. , se = . , z( ) = . , p < . ). in addition, the analysis shows significant dif- ferences in the support of hilary clinton between age groups with only . percent of supporters in the group of young participants (< years) but . percent sup- porters in the age group between and years and even . percent in the age group over years (b = . , se = . , z( ) = . , p < . ). it should be noted that we had a minority of respond- ents ( in total, or . percent) identifying as republican as well as supporting and voting for trump. these same respondents reiterated many of the arguments of the elite secularists when it comes to political correctness regard- ing religion, especially around the defense of islam, as well as seeing identity politics as manifested in feminism and campaigns like black lives matter as a product of the “regressive left” in america. such hard distinctions ideo- logically give credence to the notion that the new atheists, in spite of none of them identifying as right-wing, con- tribute to the “clash of civilizations” narrative (huntington ) that ledrew ( , ) has captured in his work and we capture in ours as well. this is particularly observ- able with respect to discussions of islam and muslims as well as identity politics more broadly. we also were interested in the effect of participation in secularist activities and organizations. we found that . percent of the participants reported discussing politics in their meetings and secularist media and publications com- pared to . percent stating that politics were not dis- cussed. the data also shows that only a minority report that their secular organizational involvement is affecting their level of political involvement (agree: . % vs. disagree: . percent). however, the agreement rate is significantly higher for younger participants (agree under = . per- cent) compared to older ones (agree age – = . percent or agree age over = . percent) even when controlling for the covariates of gender, region and political affiliation in a logistic regression (b = –. , se = . , z( ) = . , p < . ). we found no differences for a change in politi- cal involvement between gender in the logistic regression analysis (agree male = . percent vs. agree female = . per- cent) (b = . , se = . , z( ) = . , n.s.). overall, the majority of participants reported that their political affiliation did not change after becoming involved in secularist groups (no change = . percent vs. change = . percent). however, a logistic regression shows that the under years old respondents (in comparison to older ones) reported more change in political affiliation since becoming an atheist (change age under = . percent vs. change age – = . percent, change age over = . per- cent) (b = –. , se = . , z( ) = . , p < . ) (see figure ). additionally, we found gender differences in the change of political affiliation with more males stat- ing a change (change male = . percent) compared to figure : what is your current political affiliation? (gender differences). . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % democrat independent unaff./none others undec. male female χ ( ) = . , p < . * = others for males include . % repub., . % green party, . % libert. and different smaller par�es . %. * ** ** = others for females include . % repub., . % green party, . % libert. and different smaller par�es . %. cimino et al: the political divide between lay and elite atheismart.  , page  of females (vs. change female = . percent) (b = –. , se = . , z( ) = . , p < . ). our findings on political-economic identification of sec- ularists are close to a reader poll conducted by free inquiry in . it found that socialists, liberals, “progressives,” and moderates (only percent) made up percent of the readership, with conservatives and libertarians repre- senting percent (free inquiry ). overall, however, the majority of our sample from the first survey— per- cent—fell firmly on the side of government intervention in the economy as well as allowing some capacity for the redistribution of resources, at least in terms of necessities such as healthcare, housing and regulating corporations, all hallmarks of the type of social democratic scandinavian countries that american progressives, atheists included, have long valorized but have yet to see develop in the u.s. (zuckerman ). as one michigan respondent stated: “i would consider myself center-left. government is not the solution, but it has to be part of the solution as cor- porations cannot be allowed to do as they want. the free market has shown itself to self-corrupt and needs regu- lation.” in the first questionnaire, we found significantly more agreement with the marxist critique of religion than is expressed in the pages of free inquiry, with slightly over fifty percent of those surveyed seeing religion as some- thing that will never end until the social, material need for it is eradicated. when moving from merely surveying political positions to asking about the influence of their personal unbelief on such political positions in our larger survey, which allowed respondents to write in responses, the views were more diverse. there were those, for example, for whom becoming an atheist was an important component of their becoming more liberal politically. as one -year- old man from michigan said: “since joining american atheists i have become more liberal. however, my move to the left started when i first decided that i was an athe- ist and no longer a catholic.” another -year-old female from virginia mentioned how they “used to affiliate with the republican party … [but that] the democratic party tends to support issues that have become very important to [them], especially separation of church and state.” with one -year-old male from new york going so far as to assert that “atheism is a gateway drug to anarchism. no gods; no masters.” on the other hand, there were those, such as jill from florida, for whom the causal arrow was reversed, with her politics informing her atheism. as she said, “i think that it’s the other way around--my involve- ment in politics and learning about republican and christian-right policies, caused me to become involved in secular groups. but then reading secular magazines [of] the freedom from religion foundation and americans united for separation of church and state made me more aware of how important involvement in politics is.” in a similar vein, some respondents were forthright in stating the connection between their secularism and their economic and political views. robert from illinois, for example, stated, “my belief in government policies that are rational, secular, and scientifically informed leads me to support a separation of church and state. my belief in figure : since becoming involved in secular humanist/atheist groups, has your political affiliation changed? (age differences). . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % . % < - - - - - > age groups b = -. , se = . , z( ) = . , p < . answer: yes cimino et al: the political divide between lay and elite atheism art.  , page  of the value of scientific discovery leads me to support envi- ronmental protection and research funding, and my sense of non-judgmental secular morality leads me to support social programs and oppose wars.” but others were more uncertain about making clear connections between their secularist positions and social issues. bill from alaska stated simply, “atheism does result in habitual rational thought, but i don’t think it’s specific to any one [politi- cal] point of view.” the most antagonistic response we received came from charles, the contact person for a small rural group that did not wish to participate in our research, writing, “if you really want my opinion here it is: surveys such as these are useless. atheism is simply lack of belief in god or gods. in my community … we have liber- tarians, conservatives, and liberals. in short, you’re trying to manufacture controversy where there doesn’t need to be any.” as the case with charles above, we have heard the refrain that “atheism simply means this and nothing more” since the inception of our research over a decade ago, but it should be noted that the same view is rarely, if ever, extended to believers—that religion only means a belief in god or gods. atheists and believers alike under- stand that belief in god or gods has the potential to influ- ence behavior and carries the potential for consequences in the world. as a case in point, many of the new atheists placed the cause of / squarely at the feet of religious belief and cited the event as a turning point, or impetus, for their social activism. the new atheists, along with cul- tural personalities such as bill maher, have made a point of highlighting the importance of the war of ideas. it is obvious to atheists that religious beliefs in the form of reli- gious movements have had and continue to have political ramifications. that atheism as a movement—constituted by individuals with values and beliefs about themselves, others, and society—could have the same impact seems beyond dispute. just as religion has been employed across the political spectrum, atheism can be called upon to jus- tify as well as oppose and challenge the status quo using scientific evidence to justify their politics in a way not unlike the way religionists use religious texts and theories to justify their politics (reed ). the issue of islam is something that we did not ask about explicitly in our larger, more recent survey, but it was nevertheless commented on by several respondents. “i believe in a much more inclusive society, so i don’t agree with the new atheists on islam being worse than any other religion,” asserted one respondent. in contrast, a -year-old white female from virginia said: “i used to be more tolerant of islam simply because the right seemed to be against them. being involved in secularism has opened my eyes to the realities of life in the muslim world, and now i fight against it. the ‘regressive left’ still supports islam--i do not.” overall, the responses were fairly evenly split when discussing islam, with some argu- ing that american society needs to be more inclusive and fight against islamophobia and others citing radical islam as one of the biggest threats to american society. what was noteworthy was seeing how both sides of the issue were arguing for a more inclusive and unified society, with those of the anti-islamic persuasion also often mention- ing identity politics as something that is working to divide americans. those who cited the “bigotry” of islam as an important social issue also often mentioned the rights of the lgbtq+ community as well as the inequality along class, gender, and racial lines in the u.s. as something important to fight against. as one example, when joann was asked about political involvement, she said: “i partici- pated in city council meetings when a nondiscrimination ordinance was being considered. i attend special events put on by the local democratic office, the local pride committee, black lives matter and drinking liberally…. i do not stand for the pledge of allegiance as i feel it should be returned to its original writing.” where joann sees acts of civil disobedience, e.g. not standing for pledge, and identity politics as a path for unity in the form of equality, other respondents see such activ- ism and politics as divisive. consider this response from william. “there’s black lives matter, etc. there’s no vegan lives matter movement. there’s no atheist lives matter movement. media’s sole interest is in promoting the idea that because i am an educated white male, the ills of the world are my fault. i’m judged not on my behavior but by my gender, etc.” a few respondents went so far as to refer to the black lives matter movement as a form of domestic terrorism and pointed towards the inconsistency of those on the left, which the media is assumed to be, who will bash christianity in one breath and defend islam in the next. “the media ignores the growing threat of domes- tic terror groups like black lives matter and downplays the threat islam is to secular values,” asserted a younger female named caitlin. or, to quote kenneth, a middle- aged man from the midwest: “often liberally leaning [media] sources pander and apologize for islamic ideology while holding nothing back when criticizing christianity. i feel that needs to change.” although many respondents praised the importance of social media for outreach, we found a segment of them complaining about bigotry and others criticizing tribalism on the left. consider this response from john: “i have noticed on websites (particu- larly facebook) that there are a number of atheists who hold particularly reactionary, particularly bigoted and misogynist views on muslims and women, and who use derisive terminology to discuss the left (e.g, sjw, libtard, loony liberal).” a similar sentiment is expressed by nora: “most of the secular humanist/atheist activity i have observed takes place on youtube, where the quality of the discourse regarding politics is generally exceptionally low. specifically, many high-profile youtube atheists seem to have taken up right-wing or otherwise retrograde banners, most notably anti-feminism, but also anti-sjw. i realize that this is not necessarily a fair or indicative representation of atheists in general, but it is a por- tion of our public face, like it or not (and i don’t).” several respondents mentioned a growing tendency to use social media to deride, shout down, vilify, and even har- ass any atheist that “doesn’t march lockstep with certain cimino et al: the political divide between lay and elite atheismart.  , page  of viewpoints (such as the social justice warrior opinions).” in contrast, however, there were those few, such as earl, an older gentleman residing in a rural area of the midwest, who spoke about being closeted as a conservative atheist: they are all very liberal/progressive, even socialist, and politically and socially i am conservative. i know i am an exception, and i do not “come out” to other humanists/atheists. they would rebuke me as strongly as religious fundamentalists rebuke humanists/atheists. these controversial discourses around islam and identity politics highlight the ways the discourse of atheist leader opinions is both incorporated and rejected by lay atheists, with a significant majority of our respondents speaking supportively of the sort of leftist multiculturalism and tol- erance that secularist spokesmen such as sam harris, bill maher, and the late christopher hitchens have publicly criticized as being supportive of islam and evidence of a “regressive left” informed more by the tribalism of identity politics than rational thought/reason. discussion our research conforms with past research on american secularists that shows they are politically left-of-center. a statistically significant portion of our respondents reported moving further left away from the republican party insofar as it is perceived as more likely to use religi- osity in an attempt to legitimize policy, asserting how they feel that the policies of the democrats are more fact- and evidence- based than those of the gop. the only responses that went against the grain of this left-leaning emphasis were those that complained about the divisiveness of identity politics, and how such politics care more about political correctness and collective tribalism than using reason and rational thought to inform political decisions. these responses suggest that identity politics has become a major source of division in organized secularism. these statistical patterns also suggest that, to quote a respondent, “there is a strong correlation between athe- ism and liberal political views….” while our early research, specifically on the use of social media (smith and cimino ), showed a high prevalence of an independent politi- cal orientation informed by enlightenment ideals and a strong reaction against any talk of being a collectivity that made easy political classification difficult, it is clear now that there is a positive relationship, or an elective affinity, between atheism and left-leaning politics in the u.s. (pew ) —a unity that is based not only on things they agree upon but also that which they oppose, namely a critique of a close relationship between religion and the republican establishment. in this, we can see how they mirror the general liberal, or “solid liberal,” population of the u.s. in many ways (pew ; pew ), being statistically highly educated, politically engaged, predominantly white, less likely to be religious than any other political type/group, and overwhelmingly disapproving of trump. this affinity is present, though in a weaker relationship, among non- affiliated populations (pew ) as well. a recent sur- vey of members of the american humanist association (brockway ) found not only a prevalence of left-ori- ented sentiment but also that its members occupy the far left and activist wing of the democratic party. they express more liberal values and beliefs than the democratic party membership and the non-affiliated population. these members are more likely to get involved in activism that aims to steer the party further leftward towards the type of social-democratic parties one might find in western european or scandinavian countries and that a political candidate like sanders would symbolize for an american audience. this is illustrated by the fact we had over respondents refer to themselves outright as socialists, ten refer to themselves as democratic socialists, two refer to themselves as marxists, and one respondent refer to themselves as “a european-style socialistic-capitalist [that would] nationalize our natural resources and banking (including credit cards).” as carmen, a female interviewee from the northeast put it: “liberal topics are embraced in these atheist com- munities (abortion, gay rights, science-based issues), but most atheist-affiliated c ’s are reluctant to be parti- san. the liberal slant is unescapable though.” this “lib- eral slant,” conflating atheism with progressive politics, has only increased among atheists in recent years, espe- cially as their influence has grown with the internet and stronger institutional networks at the turn of the millen- nium (cimino and smith ; cragun and fazzini ; meagher ). the self-confidence and social capital gained through online and offline activism solidified a previously weak social movement. the mimetic isomor- phism existing between institutional actors may be evi- dent in the way that lay atheist activists have borrowed the identity politics of progressive social movements (such as the gay rights and multicultural movements), as well as in the formation of a stronger feminist caucus, wherein one can find feminist atheists drawing on science-based arguments for atheism as well as feminist-left critiques of both established secularist institutions and wider soci- ety (dimaggio and powell ; christina ). in other words, the network ties and social movement involve- ment of secularists have moved them further to the left of center. leaders, followers, and party politics on these related issues of islam and identity politics, it is evident that our survey respondents line up to the left of the leadership and “knowledge class” of opinion-makers in organized secularism. unlike many liberal religious denominations, where the clergy and officials often stand to the left of their members in the pews, in organized sec- ularism we found the reverse pattern; the intellectual and organizational elite are more right-of-center than rank- and-file participants (wuthnow ). we argue that the reason for this distinction could be related to the higher-class status of secularist leaders and intellectuals than “laypeople.” only one-quarter of respondents to our questionnaire identified as upper-class or upper-middle class. the recent pew research center’s religious landscape study ( ), however, as well as past research (pasquale ), found that self-identified atheists and agnostics tend to be relatively wealthy, with cimino et al: the political divide between lay and elite atheism art.  , page  of about six-in-ten in each group making $ , or more per year. by contrast, those who describe their religion as “nothing in particular” and who say religion is unimpor- tant to them closely mirror the general population as a whole. the logic of secularism through much of american history was to distance itself from capitalism and the busi- ness class, partly because of their religious associations— a pattern that is still evident among many secularists, if not their opinion leaders. sociologists such as daniel bell and peter berger have argued that capitalism and business elites have embraced secular values and some aspects of progressive culture and distanced themselves from social conservatism. citing the example of the strong corporate support for gay marriage, berger ( ) writes that a “new configuration is coming into shape: the cultural elite and the business elite are in process of merging… combining [the business elite’s] old protestant work ethic with a very un-protestant liberality in all matters south of the navel…” although it may no longer be advantageous to disassoci- ate atheism and secular humanism from capitalism and the business class, it is not clear whether such a configura- tion can take root and find a place at the organizational level of secularism when so many of its participants are leaning left and the business class remains strongly loyal to the republican party—if for economic more than cul- tural reasons. in several ways, our research is similar to ledrew’s iden- tification of atheist ideological values that could be said to be (neo)conservative in orientation, contributing to a clash of civilizations narrative and critique of identity poli- tics ( : ). simmons’ ( ) more recent research of canadian atheists also shows a prominence of such con- servative views. yet, more recent treatments of the new atheism, which we consider as largely synonymous with the elite wing or knowledge class of the secularist move- ment, have suggested that its distance from the left has only grown in the trump era. hamberger writes that there may even be a division within atheist elites, with one side linking atheism to progressive politics, represented by media figures such as the young turks’ cenk uygur and kyle kulinski, and the other side, including prominent new atheist celebrities, “who felt that the emphasis on feminism, diversity and anti-imperialism distracted from the fight against religious extremism” (hamberger ). our earlier research found a strong emphasis on new atheism, with almost every respondent in our earlier survey mentioning the so-called new atheist texts as an integral component of their atheism. in our more recent study, however, although lay “followers” still respect the new atheists for their accomplishments, we find that they take only what they need, being more than willing to disagree among themselves on particular points. and irrespective of whether they agree ideologically or not, pragmatically they have started to view themselves as a collective identity with legitimate political clout. consider what dominic stated when asked about the political legiti- macy of atheism and whether or not he could envision an atheist presidential candidate: “i think i have seen the [public’s] opinion of atheists improve in recent years (thanks, i suspect, to the “new atheists”). i think we could have a president who happens to be an atheist…[bernie] sanders was pretty much an atheist, even if he didn’t use the term, and i think enough people might have voted for him.” further research is required in order to understand what this may mean for organized secularism going forward. social movements are dual-sided, having a universalist side interested in equal rights and inclusion within given institutions and an identity-based side interested in cre- ating new values and modifying societal institutions and associational forms. our study of the secularist movement shows that such influence has developed in both directions and on both sides. while there has been greater institu- tionalization, with atheists tempering more identity-based concerns in compromising to participate in party politics as atheists, (as one respondent said, “my politically liberal views are more important than my secular views in the current election.”), this has neither excluded or replaced more identity-oriented concerns, both in terms of indi- viduals as well as secular organizations. the trump era of politics has strengthened the progres- sive-identity politics thrust of organized secularism. as one might expect, there has been little to no public defense of trump and his administration in secularist media. at the same time, “the issue of political correctness has only become more pressing for many prominent new atheists. increasingly central to their arguments today is the idea that american liberalism has in fact become illiberal, obsessed with the primacy of group identities over the individual” (hamberger ). new alliances, such as the intellectual dark web (idw), have formed as many of those associated with new atheism have taken up the fight against political correctness. thus, the old debate about postmodernism and identity politics and the role of rationality and science in atheism from the s has been revived in recent years but this time it has become an in-house battle. the idw includes both believers and atheists, and thus it is telling that such secularist opinion- makers as harris and pinker find more in common with their traditional enemies than with many of their fellow non-believers whom they now view as tribalists in revolt against true science and rationality. that some prominent atheists, such as dawkins and harris, have recently argued that at least the cultural forms of christianity can have positive benefits for society may represent another emerg- ing cleavage in secularist ranks (van maren ). it may be the case that the turn to conservative pop- ulism may again even fortify the countercultural elements of atheism and secular humanism (as was the case during the height of the influence of the new religious right) and the drive for political influence may be put on hold. it could also be the case that coalition-building with reli- gious liberals may find a new hearing among secularists trying to challenge the populist right on a host of non- church-state related issues. but the divide between lay and elite secularists will likely persist into the future because they highlight the contending strategies of pragmatic political versus academic intellectual mobilization that has marked this movement from its early years. cimino et al: the political divide between lay and elite atheismart.  , page  of competing interests the authors have no competing interests to declare. references anderson, b. . imagined communities. london: verso. berger, pl. . virtue and vice in indiana. in the blog religion and other curiosities, may . 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/ /americas-religious-nones-are-growing-quickly-should-republicans-worry. doi: https://doi.org/ . /acprof:oso/ . . https://www.npr.org/sections/itsallpolitics/ / / / /americas-religious-nones-are-growing-quickly-should-republicans-worry. doi: https://doi.org/ . /acprof:oso/ . . https://doi.org/ . /acprof:oso/ . . https://doi.org/ . /acprof:oso/ . . http://religiondispatches.org/atheisms-dark-side-aiding-the-trump-agenda/ http://religiondispatches.org/atheisms-dark-side-aiding-the-trump-agenda/ https://www.usanap.org/ https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . / https://doi.org/ . /snr. https://doi.org/ . /snr.ab https://doi.org/ . /socrel/srq https://doi.org/ . /socrel/srq https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/atheists-sound-the-alarm-decline-of-christianity-is-seriously-hurting-society https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/atheists-sound-the-alarm-decline-of-christianity-is-seriously-hurting-society https://www.lifesitenews.com/blogs/atheists-sound-the-alarm-decline-of-christianity-is-seriously-hurting-society cimino et al: the political divide between lay and elite atheism art.  , page  of how to cite this article: cimino, r, smith, c and cziehso, g. . the political divide between lay and elite atheism. secularism and nonreligion, : , pp.  – . doi: https://doi.org/ . /snr. submitted: march accepted: february published: june copyright: © the author(s). this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (cc-by . ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. see http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. open access secularism and nonreligion is a peer-reviewed open access journal published by ubiquity press. https://doi.org/ . /snr. http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / 	methods 	findings 	secularist diversity and its 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archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ european journal of american studies, - | european journal of american studies  - | special issue: intimate frictions: history and literature in the united states from the  th to the st century “black matters”: race and literary history in mat johnson’s pym jennifer m. wilks electronic version url: http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/ doi: . /ejas. issn: - publisher european association for american studies electronic reference jennifer m. wilks, « “black matters”: race and literary history in mat johnson’s pym », european journal of american studies [online], - | , document , online since june , connection on december . url : http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/ ; doi : https://doi.org/ . / ejas. this text was automatically generated on december . creative commons license http://journals.openedition.org http://journals.openedition.org http://journals.openedition.org/ejas/ “black matters”: race and literary history in mat johnson’s pym jennifer m. wilks there is an eerie correspondence between “black matters,” the title of the first chapter of toni morrison’s essay playing in the dark: whiteness and the literary imagination ( ), and black lives matter, the movement created in after the exoneration of george zimmerman in the murder of unarmed black teenager trayvon martin (garza, n.p.). though separated by the span of twenty years, both chapter title and activist call raise the questions of how and why race continues to be important in american society, with morrison focusing on the literary canon and contemporary activists taking on the spate of highly publicized, extrajudicial killings of black women and men that have punctuated life in the s united states. both book and movement posit a long, critical view of history as a prerequisite for understanding the dynamics of u.s. conceptions of race and iterations of anti-black racism. whereas morrison argues that black(ness) matters because one cannot understand whiteness without appreciating the other against which it is constructed, today’s activists assert that black lives matter because they, too, warrant the “basic human rights and dignity” more readily accorded white lives (“about us”). to juxtapose morrison’s literary criticism with the political work of black lives matter is not to be flip but, rather, to consider the often inextricable relationship between literary text and social context. as scholar ashraf h. a. rushdy argues, the “cultural conversation [‘comprising literary and extraliterary issues’] occurs within the field of cultural production but is nonetheless a refraction of the struggles in the social order within which that field is situated” ( , ). the publication of playing in the dark came on the heels of a decade that brought the “black matters”: race and literary history in mat johnson’s pym european journal of american studies, vol , no | presidency of ronald reagan and saw the emergence of two figures, “the welfare queen” and the menacing criminal, who were ostensibly unraced but nonetheless became vehicles for positioning african americans as foreign rather than integral to american identity. the former rose to national prominence “during reagan’s failed bid for the republican presidential nomination” (kohler-hausmann ). in campaign speeches, reagan used the case of linda taylor, an illinois woman charged with defrauding the state’s social service programs, as an example of how such programs wasted taxpayer dollars. the latter figure emerged in the person of willie horton at the end of reagan’s second term as president. in conjunction with an advertisement released by an independent group, then vice president george h. w. bush cited horton, a convicted murderer who assaulted a couple while released on a furlough program, as a reason that the country would not be safe if massachusetts governor —and democratic nominee—michael dukakis were elected president. on the surface, the taylor and horton cases were matters of fiscal responsibility and public safety, respectively. as scholars have noted, however, race was pivotal in each as both taylor and horton were african american. historian julilly kohler-hausmann has argued that the reforms built around stereotypes such as that of the welfare queen “help[ed] solidify the public perception of a racialized, criminal ‘culture of poverty’” ( ). likewise, political scientist tali mendelberg has observed that, although horton’s story was but one talking point in bush’s discussion of crime, the “case […] was saturated with racial meaning” via its imagery, especially the circulation of the young black man’s mug shot by the media ( ). the taylor and horton stories indicate that the ever-present yet suppressed blackness that toni morrison deems “africanism” and discusses within american literary history is not, in fact, limited to “the field of cultural production.” on the contrary, “denotative and connotative blackness” has also served as a means of “talking about and a way of policing matters of class, sexual license, and repression, formations and exercises of power, and meditations on ethics and accountability” in the world beyond the page (morrison , ). deeply informed by morrison’s landmark work, matt johnson’s satirical novel pym ( ) likewise invites the reader to contemplate the relationship between literary text and social context. johnson revisits one of the examples featured in playing in the dark—edgar allan poe’s nautical adventure the narrative of arthur gordon pym of nantucket ( )—to explore how race and racism remain pervasive elements of twenty-first-century american society. his protagonist is chris jaynes, an urbane black philadelphian recently fired from his position as an english professor at a liberal arts college. intent on proving that dirk peters, a character from poe’s narrative, actually existed, chris enlists a motley crew to retrace the itinerary described in poe’s novel. johnson inverts his predecessor’s chromatic and geographic scheme by having his african american characters land in antarctica, where they stumble upon a settlement of massive white monsters and, among them, an ancient, “black matters”: race and literary history in mat johnson’s pym european journal of american studies, vol , no | pickled arthur gordon pym, whose life and nineteenth-century racism have been preserved in the frigid climate. where poe’s narrative concludes with a vision of perfect, all-encompassing whiteness, johnson’s pym closes with chris and his friend garth landing in a mysterious place where a vision of warm, reassuring brownness greets them. yet johnson’s task in resurrecting poe’s work is not to celebrate how multicultural the united states has become since the mid-nineteenth century. like morrison before him, johnson encourages his readers to take a long view of history; indeed, pym presents the antebellum united states of sometime baltimorean poe and the “colorblind” nation in which chris resides as points along a troubled, underexamined continuum rather than as discrete eras. johnson’s characters, black and white, alternately reject and embrace the fixed, racialized roles that early- twenty-first century society still expects them to play. consequently, although the explicit reason for chris’ quest is to verify a rare manuscript that has been attributed to peters, his implicit mission is to decode the meaning behind, and to escape from, the long life of race in the united states. that said, chris’ fascination with the peters manuscript serves as more than a plot device. johnson uses the artifact to cast his literary net even wider to include not only the seafaring tale but also the neo-slave narrative. dating the genre to the s and s, rushdy locates the neo-slave narrative’s “origins in the social, intellectual, and racial formations of the [ s]” and contends that its texts also “engage […] in dialogue with the social issues of [their] moment of origin” ( , ). with dirk peters’ account of his service at sea and chris’ report of his time in antarctica, johnson creates a multi-layered neo-slave narrative that speaks to the ways that the early s, like the s, have represented a period of both promise and peril for americans of african descent. as the passage of major civil rights legislation in and , respectively, was followed by the assassinations of black leaders such as malcolm x and the rev. dr. martin luther king, jr., so the election of barack obama as the first u.s. president of african descent has been succeeded by the repeal of significant portions of the voting rights act and the heightened awareness of anti-black violence (“the voting rights act: a resource page”). indeed, the april death of african american freddie gray in police custody, and the uprisings that followed, prompted many observers to compare present-day baltimore to the city in april , when the assassination of king provoked two weeks of unrest.i johnson also confronts the paradox of his historical moment by using humor, particularly satire, to explore how blackness and black lives mattered in the nineteenth-century united states and how their twenty- first-century manifestations resonate with their antecedents. corresponding to darryl dickson-carr’s characterization of “the african american satirical novel” as a text that features “unremitting iconoclasm, criticism of the current status of african american political and cultural trends, and indictment of specifically american forms of racism,” johnson “black matters”: race and literary history in mat johnson’s pym european journal of american studies, vol , no | reveals the degree to which the nation’s racist past reverberates in the lives of his madcap cast of characters ( ). as refracted through their improbable adventures, the history of race in the united states is a constitutive element of contemporary social dynamics. furthermore, blackness and whiteness are inextricably bound constructs not simply for pym the antiquated racist and chris the scholar of race but also for everyone around them, from the proud black nationalist to the staunch tea party conservative. finally, in a more frightening vein, one might also read pym as suggesting that, because race and racism seem to be inescapable in organized societies, the only way to end recurring patterns of alienation, exploitation, and inequality is to end the world itself. in other words, one might argue that, far from suggesting a postracial paradise, pym takes a key question of s civil rights movements—that of whether substantive, lasting change can best be effected through reform or revolution—and proposes a third, even more disruptive option: apocalypse. . “what’s past is prologue”: morrison, poe, and johnson appreciating the historical critique in pym requires revisiting the works that set the literary-critical stage for johnson’s raucous satire. as indicated above, morrison’s playing in the dark challenges assertions of american literature as the exclusive “preserve of white male views, genius, and power [that] are without relationship to and removed from the overwhelming presence of black people in the united states” ( ). counter to such visions, morrison diagnoses what she calls “american africanism” as “a disabling virus within literary discourse” that can be located in the work of such canonical mainstays as poe, willa cather, and ernest hemingway ( ). it is “inextricable from the definition of americanness,” and to fail to appreciate this relationship is to neglect the multilayered dimensions of american literature (morrison ). thus, playing in the dark presents the color “black” and the race(s) it evokes as integral elements of american culture, as subjects (“matters”) that warrant further examination and that carry great weight (“matter”). according to morrison, poe’s narrative of arthur gordon pym of nantucket is central to understanding the enduring presence of blackness in the american psyche. partially published as a serial in the southern literary messenger in and released as a novel by harper & brothers the following year, the narrative chronicles the travels of its title character, a white new england teenager who, with the help of his best friend augustus, stows away on the whaling ship grampus. after a mutiny and treacherous weather dispense with most of the ship and its crew, pym, augustus, and “hybrid” (european-native american) dirk peters resort to cannibalism before augustus succumbs to injuries sustained during the mutiny (poe ). rescued by the british schooner jane guy, pym and peters join their new ship’s voyage to the south seas “black matters”: race and literary history in mat johnson’s pym european journal of american studies, vol , no | and the tropical island of tsalal. inhabited by black “savages” who eventually ambush the jane guy’s crew, tsalal is pym and peters’ final stop before, accompanied by islander nu-nu, they sail into an unspecified, but overwhelmingly white, horizon (poe ). “romancing the shadow,” morrison’s second chapter, opens with an extended citation of poe’s vision of whiteness. adrift in the antarctic ocean, pym, peters, and nu-nu travel by canoe in a scene rich with contrasting images of dark and light. at one moment they are beneath “[a] sullen darkness”; at another they are overtaken by a “white ashy shower” (poe ). in the novel’s final paragraph, the darkness “materially increase[s]” only to give way to the other end of the color scale: “but there arose in our pathway a shrouded human figure, very far larger in its proportions than any dweller among men. and the hue of the skin of the figure was of the perfect whiteness of snow” (poe ). morrison reads the scene as evidence of the persistent coupling of whiteness and blackness in american literature, of the use of the latter to distinguish and buttress the former. like the nation whose identity it emerged to represent, early american literature had to negotiate the excitement and anxiety of freedom, and figurations of darkness, indicative of “the not-free” (the country’s enslaved population) and “the not-me” (the character of african rather than european descent), were central to that negotiation (morrison ). blackness, however, is not solely a matter of negation. morrison brings her reading to a close with the claim that johnson will take up in his novel’s narrative climax: blackness and whiteness are mutually constitutive, and “[w]hiteness, alone, is mute, meaningless, unfathomable, pointless, frozen, veiled, curtained, dreaded, senseless, implacable” (morrison ). morrison’s study and others interrogating the role of race in poe have prompted much debate among poe scholars. critic john c. havard describes the prevailing camps as those who deem the narrative of arthur gordon pym “a simple reflection of racist, proslavery thought” ( ) and those who, like havard and dana d. nelson, read the novel as a more sophisticated, more nuanced engagement with said thought. scholar david faflik likewise writes that poe infused his novel with racist imagery to cater to the tastes of antebellum readers, not to advance a particular political agenda, and that to label poe a racist southerner is to ignore his varied background along with the regional complexity of the united states ( ).ii however, it is important to note that, although morrison deems the “africanist presence” a predominant part of american literary discourse in poe and elsewhere, she refrains from labeling any of the authors she discusses “racist” (morrison ). indeed, she concludes playing in the dark by clarifying that her “deliberations are not about a particular author’s attitudes toward race” (morrison ). similarly, my primary purpose here is not to read mat johnson’s reimagining of pym as evidence that poe was racist. instead, my interest lies in how poe’s narrative reflects its author’s context, a society in which “the vast majority of white americans, from the most virulent proponent “black matters”: race and literary history in mat johnson’s pym european journal of american studies, vol , no | of slavery to the most radical abolitionist, held racist views of some sort” (havard ), and in the correspondences that johnson finds between that period and the one in which he sets chris’ story. in other words, it is not poe that matters as much as it is the historical and fictional lives of race in his work and beyond.iii in pym, whose opening pages signal johnson’s debt to morrison, the inquiry into the power and persistence of race begins in a setting often thought to be a bastion of progressive thought: a selective liberal arts college nestled in a picturesque northeastern town. it is this institution, however, that denies chris promotion with tenure for, among other things, his insistence on teaching the unpopular course “dancing with the darkies: whiteness in the literary mind” (johnson ). by riffing on morrison’s title, johnson situates chris as heir to her call to investigate the nation’s “racial pathology” through the study of early american literature ( ). through the usage of the epithet “darky,” johnson also casts his protagonist as a picaro whose glib, disruptive behavior will “lay bare the normative constructions of positive social values as false and illusory” (dickson-carr ). as a result, while failing to meet an institution’s pedagogical goals may read as valid grounds for dismissal, the circumstances leading up to and following chris’ firing prove to be far more troubling. for if morrison reads poe and his peers in order to consider the implications of nineteenth-century racial constructions for “the served” and their descendants, johnson chooses to foreground the ramifications of race and racism for the descendants of those charged with “serving” (morrison ). although the psychological and physical toll of nineteenth-century enslavement only exists in chris’ life as an object of study, and his academic position shields him from twenty-first-century iterations of physical labor, he discovers that “service” remains a fraught, racialized issue in his seemingly ideal professional environment. rather than being perceived as groundbreaking or important, chris’ introduction of the topic of race into the presumably neutral domain of “american” literature is deemed transgressive, as is his refusal to sit on the diversity committee. “‘everyone has a role to play,’” the college president intones to the newly fired chris, and by failing “to purvey the minority perspective,” he has rendered himself useless to his employer ( , ). in brief, his role at the institution was to diversify the predominantly white campus by embodying blackness, not by critiquing the category and its analogues. johnson complicates his exploration of racialized service via chris’ (re)turn to poe after his firing. for the character’s struggle with race is not only a question of escaping demands that he play the part of the “professional negro” but also of recognizing his own desire to categorize identity ( ). this longing informs chris’ interest in a tattered manuscript attributed to dirk peters, the tenacious mixed-race sailor from poe’s narrative; in his mind, it is peters who performs the role of “the serviceable and serving black figure”—a part that morrison attributes to “black matters”: race and literary history in mat johnson’s pym european journal of american studies, vol , no | poe’s tsalal native nu-nu—and whose life story, if verified, will unlock the mysteries of race in the u.s. (morrison ). although poe initially presents peters as “the son of an indian squaw [and] a fur trader,” shortly thereafter he describes the character as having “herculean” limbs and an “immense” head “with an indentation on the crown (like that on the head of most negroes)” (poe ). chris contends that this language, which recalls stereotypes of african americans as monstrous and inhuman, suggests that peters’ non-native american half is of african rather than european descent.iv consequently, as poe’s peters eventually ascends to whiteness toward the end of the narrative, when pym describes the two of them as “the only living white men upon the island” after the tsalalians attack the jane guy crew, so johnson’s version (of peters) gradually inhabits blackness over the course of chris’ analysis (poe ). the latter reading is apparently confirmed by chris’ acquisition of the aforementioned peters memoir, which includes an illustration of its author as “a pale man, mulatto by feature and skin tone: his hair hinting at the slightest of kink, thin lips betrayed by a wide nose and the high west african cheekbones” (johnson ).v the transformation is “apparent” rather than “certain” because if poe and his anglo american peers used blackness, as morrison argues, to consolidate whiteness, johnson and african american contemporaries such as percival everett and danzy senna juxtapose racial categories in order to complicate blackness.vi while the consolidation of identities still appears in these early twenty-first century texts, it tends to function as a target of critique rather than as a desired narrative end. this dynamic manifests itself in pym through the double-edged nature of chris’ interest in dirk peters, and through his satirical lens johnson directs the reader to ask how peters operates as a “serviceable and serving black figure,” to revisit morrison, for the beleaguered african american academic (chris) as much as he does for the antebellum white author (poe). if chris can authenticate the true and interesting narrative of dirk peters, he promises to revive his academic career, but if he can validate his reading of peters as black he is poised to do something that is perhaps far more difficult: stabilize an identity—his own—that is more precarious than he would like to admit. johnson extends this narrative thread via the character of mahalia mathis, a gary, indiana, resident and peters’ descendant to whom chris turns for information; their first conversation reveals a clear disconnect between their respective interpretations of her racial identity: “i am of greek, hopi, crow, blackfoot, chinese, and danish descent,” she interrupted me to declare immediately after i mentioned the genealogical page on her [web]site. hearing this, i poked my head back at the computer screen to look at the image of the negro there looking back at me. (johnson ) the immediate purpose of this incongruity is to present mrs. mathis and other members of her civic group, the “native american ancestry collective of gary (naacg),” as tragicomic figures ( ). their protestations to the contrary, the group looks to chris “like any gathering “black matters”: race and literary history in mat johnson’s pym european journal of american studies, vol , no | of black american folks, some tan and most brown,” and the genetic tests they order indicate that their resources might be better invested in the civil rights organization with a similar acronym but different purpose: the naacp, or national association for the advancement of colored people ( ). in brief, chris aligns mrs. mathis and friends with the tradition of black americans’ claiming native american heritage in order to downplay, if not deny, having african ancestry.vii while chris paints the naacg episode with a farcical brush, johnson invites a more careful consideration of the politics of identity. garth frierson, chris’ best friend, responds to a laughter-filled account of the gary expedition by charging chris with having a narrow, condescending view of blackness: “‘so that’s it, everybody has to play their roles, right? black people can’t be indians, don’t matter what’s in their blood or how they was raised or what the freedman did for red folk’” ( ). in garth’s eyes, chris is no better than the administrator who chided him for not performing the part of “professor of african american literature” to the college’s expectations. one might also read garth’s assessment as a charge that chris is playing another role all too well. in keeping with dickson-carr’s study of the african american satirical novel, johnson positions chris as a means of taking on “the current status of african american political and cultural trends,” in this case the figure of the conscientized black intellectual who is so invested in tackling white supremacy that he is unable to see how his critical approach might produce its own limited and limiting conceptions of identity and belonging ( ). instead of advancing his interrogation of race and racism, chris’ views blind him to the complexity of mrs. mathis’ subject position as well as his own. in the essay “why most black people aren’t ‘part indian,’” henry louis gates, jr. reflects that, even with significant statistical evidence to the contrary, “it was much easier for black people to invent a putative native american ancestor to explain mixed-race features and hair textures than to confront the terrible fact that we have so much european ancestry because of forced or cajoled sexuality during slavery” (n. pag.). this observation suggests that mrs. mathis’ reaction to her dna test, along with that of her fellow naacg members, may indeed be rooted in denial, but not denial of african ancestry tout court so much as of the “monstrous intimacies,” to borrow from christina sharpe, through which african and european americans coexisted in the antebellum era (sharpe ). in a discussion of the usage of visual imagery in anti- and pro- slavery arguments, sharpe asserts that photographs of “pure” africans served the latter position because of the presumption that “injury [caused by sexual violence] cannot be read on the unmiscegenated black body” ( ). the unstated inverse of sharpe’s claim is that injury can be read on the miscegenated black body, and it is perhaps this legacy of injury, violence, and subjection that mrs. mathis and her peers wish to eschew in favor of their adoption of native american heritage. however “black matters”: race and literary history in mat johnson’s pym european journal of american studies, vol , no | problematic, such an affiliation nonetheless provides access to an inheritance of sovereignty and nobility. the issue of the miscegenated black body is even more pertinent to chris’ construction of his own identity. when chris castigates mrs. mathis’ reluctant blackness, garth retorts, “‘you [sic] so scared someone’s going to kick you off team negro that you think everybody’s got to stick to some crazy one-drop rule’” ( ). hypodescent, the practice of using the identity of the “more socially subordinate parent” to “determin[e] the classification of a child of mixed-race ancestry” (riley), functions here not to protect whiteness but to reinforce chris’ otherwise tenuous claim to blackness. the import of dirk peters’ identity, then, both intersects with and extends beyond the literary historical mystery that chris hopes to solve. offered mid-way through pym, chris’ self-portrait exposes the more immediate reason he may be drawn to the “pale man” in the frontispiece of peters’ memoir. the passage bears citation at length: i am a mulatto in a long line of mulattoes, so visibly lacking in african heritage that i often appear to some uneducated eyes as a random, garden-variety white guy. but i’m not. […] mandatory ethnic signifiers in summary: my hair is fairly straight, the curl loose and lazy; my skin lacks melanin—there are some italians out there darker than me. my lips are full and my nose is broad, but it’s really just the complexion and hair that count. […] i am a black man who looks white. ( ) earlier in the novel chris speaks of the eternal american quest for “a romanticized ancestral home,” a geographic construct in which one can anchor one’s identity ( ). his confession of racial indeterminacy proposes reading “home” in an additional manner, as an affective construct that entails finding shelter and stability within oneself. in this vein, what matters is not how poe, mrs. mathis, or chris views dirk peters, or how others read chris’ racial identity, but how the characters define themselves. .racial revision and the specter of history rather than elide race, then, johnson revises notions of identity in order to depict the myriad ways that race is chosen, experienced, and, manifested in the lives of his characters. indeed, chris’ relationship to blackness is not the only one considered in pym. he and garth become best friends in middle school because neither of them conforms to expected notions of black boyhood in their “working-class neighborhood in […] ‘black is beautiful era’” philadelphia: the former is ostracized because he is a “symbol of whiteness and all the negative connotations it held,” the latter because he is a nerd who “[wears] his boy scout uniform every day” ( , ). the boys take refuge in the school library, where chris develops a love for african american literature and garth a passion for art history. johnson continues to complicate the character’s blackness into his adulthood, during which garth becomes a devoted fan of fictional “black matters”: race and literary history in mat johnson’s pym european journal of american studies, vol , no | artist thomas karvel. much like the work of thomas kinkade, his historical analogue, garth’s treasured karvel prints have little to do with african diasporic places or people; if anything, these bucolic landscapes suggest the mythic american homeland that chris contemplates when studying poe’s fiction and that, through concepts such as manifest destiny, was believed to be the exclusive province of white americans ( ).viii johnson further destabilizes the notion that blackness is in any way monolithic with his characterization of the other members of chris’ antarctic expedition. his cousin booker jaynes, “probably the world’s only civil rights activist turned deep-sea diver,” heads the group ( ), and two couples complete the roster: jeffree and carlton damon carter, water treatment specialists and creators of “an ‘afro-adventure blog,’” and angela and nathaniel latham, chris’ ex-girlfriend and her second husband ( ). as chris assembles a crew for the appropriately named creole mining company, so johnson collects a range of archetypes through which to parse contemporary african american identity. with his historically evocative name, flowing dreadlocks, and dog named “white folks,” booker embodies the figure of the black nationalist ( ); with their expensive gear and omnipresent camera, jeffree and carlton damon carter represent social media celebrities as well as gay urbanites; and, with their impressive academic credentials and social connections, angela and nathan epitomize upwardly mobile professionals. early in his book who’s afraid of post-blackness? what it means to be black now, social critic touré notes that “[i]f there are forty million black people in america then there are forty million ways to be black” ( ). johnson cannot cover as broad a spectrum within the confines of pym, but he nonetheless presents a diverse assortment of african americanness. one can trace his interest in part to morrison’s consideration of how people of african descent are not inherently uniform but have been reduced to uniformity by legal, social, and literary constructions. in playing in the dark, she identifies six “linguistic strategies” used to manage the africanist presence in american literature: “[e]conomy of stereotype,” “[m]etonymic displacement,” “[m]etaphysical condensation,” “[f]etishization,” “[d]ehistoricizing allegory,” and “[p]atterns of explosive, disjointed, repetitive language” ( - ). these strategies echo the dehumanizing methods deployed to justify and perpetuate the enslavement of africans and their descendants. for example, morrison explains that in metonymic displacement “[c]olor coding and other physical traits become metonyms that displace rather than signify the africanist character” ( ). while the previously mentioned practice of hypodescent can disrupt the power of skin color, that disruption depends on knowledge of the mixed-race person’s background. “black matters”: race and literary history in mat johnson’s pym european journal of american studies, vol , no | although johnson’s revision of racial scripts resists such displacement, his characters cannot escape the specter of history. chris and company travel to antarctica thinking of themselves as intrepid modern explorers, with chris intent on verifying dirk peters’ account and the others intent on making money from booker’s mining scheme. yet when they stumble across pym, miraculously alive in the twenty-first century, his language and outlook take them back in time: “‘so tell me, then,’” pym inquires of chris, “‘have you brought these slaves for trading?’” (johnson ). the question disregards the possibility that chris might identify as other than white and flattens the differences that the narrative has so carefully ascribed to his fellow travelers. in pym’s mind, phenotype connotes race, and race determines whether one is enslaved or free. the humorous component of johnson’s novel might tempt one to dismiss pym as a delusional relic from the past, as chris himself wishes to do, but the critical element of that humor prompts one to confront how, as sharpe asserts, “all modern subjects are post-slavery subjects fully constituted by the discursive codes of slavery and post- slavery” ( ). if not directly impacted by modern-day iterations of the dehumanization, violence, and submission that characterized the antebellum period (with such experiences being the impetus behind the black lives matter movement), the relative freedom lived by chris and his friends is still, sharpe would argue, haunted by this tragic legacy. in other words, johnson’s fictional manifestation of this inheritance may be fantastic, but the historical subtext of his narrative is all too credible. lest one reject this provocative collapse of historical time and social progress, johnson doubles down on his engagement with the neo-slave narrative by imagining the enslavement of his “post-slavery” characters. after a botched trade deal with the tekelians, the white snow monsters with whom pym resides, everyone except garth is indentured to the creatures for one hundred years.ix effectively enslaved, chris, booker, angela, nathaniel, and jeffree and carlton damon carter are joined in their shared bondage and utter lack of preparation for their predicament. as chris confesses, “turns out […] that my thorough and exhaustive scholarship into the slave narratives of the african diaspora in no way prepared me to actually become a fucking slave” (johnson ). the characters’ personalities re-emerge as they adapt to and cope with captivity; their reactions run the gamut from jeffree’s open resistance to nathan’s cultural entrepreneurship. others, like booker and chris, form affective bonds with their captors. regardless of their respective strategies, however, each character finds himself in a contemporary rendering of the hegelian dialectic: he must assert his identity in opposition to or in cooperation with that of his owner (hegel, - ). if blackness as lived and experienced beyond the confines of racist thought is always already diverse and multiple, then whiteness is also a “black matters”: race and literary history in mat johnson’s pym european journal of american studies, vol , no | construction that obscures the many ways in which that identity is lived. johnson first allows for the complexity of whiteness via his narrator’s musings about the landscape; during an excursion with garth, chris discovers that although the “antarctic gives the impression of being white, […] really it’s blue. almost entirely constructed of that pale, powder blue that at times can darken to a rich, cobalt haze, as it did now around me” ( - ). this passage recalls the original pym’s reaction to tsalal; the island’s darkness may seem constant, but it is not. the water, pym observes, “was not colourless, nor was it of any one uniform colour— presenting to the eye, as it flowed, every possible shade of purple, like the hues of a changeable silk” (poe ). where johnson departs from poe is in his extension of this depth and variety to his white characters, a consideration that poe does not allow the tsalalians, whom he depicts as uniformly ignorant and savage. as with all aspects of pym, johnson’s examination of whiteness requires that the reader appreciate the novel’s polyvocality. in his introductory images of the tekelians, from their embodiment of the “shrouded,” perfectly white figure at the end of the narrative of arthur gordon pym to their menacing homogeneity, johnson seems to channel his literary antecedent (poe ). of the first encounter between the tekelians and the creole crew, chris remembers, their size alone, their towering presence, would have been enough to provide a spectacle. given my own height of six four, i would have to say that their median height was at least seven four or higher. their bodies were mountainous and hidden, covered in hooded capes that hung broadly from the shoulders and concealed their bulk in folds. […] the only things that were clearly visible were their heads, and those were what froze us. what i at first glance had assumed to be horrific masks proved instead to be their actual faces. the color, or lack of it, was striking” (emphasis in original, - ). with their “hooded capes” and menacing stature, the tekelians evoke the similarly attired ku klux klan, the hate group known for perpetrating anti-black, anti-semitic violence in the united states. johnson underscores this connection by naming chris’ owner “krakeer,” a moniker that echoes the epithet “cracker,” which is commonly used as an insult for poor southern whites ( ). yet just as “cracker” identity, which scholars have traced to ethnicity (in this case, celtic origin) rather than social class, is more complex than regional stereotypes allow, so the tekelians have an array of temperaments and occupy different positions in their society’s hierarchy.x krakeer, whom chris renames “augustus…in honor of pym’s fallen shipmate,” lives in modest conditions and feels guilty when he is unable to feed chris properly ( ). he is “soft and harmless,” in stark contrast to barro, the powerful, wealthy tekelian who responds to jeffree’s defiance by stabbing him ( ). like american whiteness in morrison’s analysis, tekelian identity is consolidated only in opposition to external difference. “black matters”: race and literary history in mat johnson’s pym european journal of american studies, vol , no | consequently, although pym worships the tekelians as “perfection incarnate,” he, too, occupies a liminal position, albeit not an enslaved one, within tekeli-li ( ). unassailable in his nineteenth-century new england context, pym’s whiteness is diminished by his humanity in his adopted twenty-first century antarctic setting. because he is a different species than the tekelians, he is an outcast who is at odds with society biologically as well as temporally. chris discovers the precarity of pym’s position on a visit to a tekelian bar. well versed in the interplay of geography, race, and socioeconomic status in the nineteenth-century u.s., in which being the descendant of a prominent new england family usually entailed some degree of privilege, chris assumes that pym is the establishment’s owner. yet pym is neither the proprietor nor a customer; instead, he passes his time waiting to consume the scraps discarded by tekelian patrons. his ability to communicate with the creole crew may have temporarily improved his status, but it has not made his whiteness equal to that of the creatures that he celebrates as “the gods” ( ). a different, contemporary example of decontextualized whiteness emerges in the figure of garth’s beloved artist thomas karvel, whom garth tracks down while his friends are enslaved.xi in karvel’s case, decontextualization serves as a means of bolstering, not diluting, his identity. the dome of light, the high-tech refuge that the artist has built for his wife and himself, is a collage of different karvel paintings, with palm trees in one area and an authentic english cottage in another. in contrast to the exterior antarctic “snow with its frozen white death,” the dome’s interior is color-saturated, warm, and vibrant ( ). when explaining his relocation to garth and chris, who reunites with his friend after escaping tekeli-li, karvel never speaks of race, only of wanting to recreate “america without taxes, and big government, and terrorist bullshit” ( ). indeed, the african american newcomers are welcome to stay in the dome as long as they produce their own food. if the dome of light was an all-white space before chris and garth’s arrival, it would seem that its racial exclusivity was circumstantial, the result of mr. and mrs. karvel’s being its only residents, rather than intentional or discriminatory. karvel’s whiteness, however, is no more independent than that of his historical and literary predecessors. in presenting his “perfect world” to chris and garth, karvel marshals language that recalls morrison’s description of early european immigrants to the united states. if morrison imagines these travelers viewing early america as a place where “[o]ne could be released from a useless, binding, repulsive past into a kind of history-lessness, a blank page waiting to be inscribed” ( ), johnson has karvel celebrate the dome of light as “‘a place without history. a place without stain. no yesterday, only tomorrow’” ( ). karvel believes that he has created a postracial paradise unsullied by the “black matters”: race and literary history in mat johnson’s pym european journal of american studies, vol , no | legacies of slavery and inequality that haunt the united states. indeed, karvel’s words echo the conclusion chris reaches just before trading deathly cold for technicolor comfort: i saw it all become clear to me. that is how they stay so white: by refusing to accept blemish or history. whiteness isn’t about being something, it is about being no thing, nothing, an erasure. covering over the truth with layers of blank reality just as the snowstorm was now covering our tent, whipping away all traces of our existence from the pristine landscape. (johnson ) in this moment of crisis-induced clarity, chris fully grasps the articulation (in the sense of “linking or connecting”) of race and morality in the american psyche: to be white is to be superior and blameless, to fortify one’s identity through a necessary but, ultimately, expendable other (edwards ). it is this ideal whiteness that karvel attempts to create, and sustain, in the isolated, pastoral world reconstructed from his paintings. chris and garth’s presence in the dome of light not only reveals the correspondence between chris’ critique of whiteness and karvel’s vision but also exposes the cracks in the dome’s idyllic façade. while garth delights in their new home’s edenic wonders, chris finds troubling reminders of american history at every turn. the cottage in which he and garth are housed recalls the compromise through which delegates to the constitutional convention allotted legislative representation in the u.s. congress: “representatives and direct taxes shall be apportioned among the several states which may be included within this union, according to their respective numbers, which shall be determined by adding to the whole number of free persons, including those bound to service for a term of years, and excluding indians not taxed, three fifths of all other persons” (u.s. constitution, art. , sec. ).the phrase “all other persons” referred to enslaved people, the vast majority of whom were of african descent and, in this constitutional accounting, determined to be less than the “free persons” who were predominantly of european descent. in pym, chris and garth’s cottage in the dome of light appears to be “the adjective quaint made manifest” with its “thatched roof,” “handblown glass” windows and “candlelight flickering behind each one” ( ). upon closer inspection, however, the building is really “three-fifths of a house” with an unfinished interior ( ). contrary to chris’ initial concerns, black people can exist in karvel’s fantasy world, but their existence is circumscribed and their access to resources limited. johnson further explores the workings of karvel’s whiteness by addressing how race, gender, and nationality intersect in the construction and experience of identities. early in playing in the dark morrison identifies masculinity as a characteristic that is “championed” by the eurocentric american literary canon; she later notes that the figure heralded by that canon was neither gender- nor race-neutral but, rather, “a new white man” (morrison , ). similarly, johnson depicts thomas “black matters”: race and literary history in mat johnson’s pym european journal of american studies, vol , no | karvel as a character who constructs his world around his gender identity as well as his artistry. in addition to leaving the united states to avoid taxes and other government oversight, he has sought to flee “‘[a]ll that pc nonsense [that] made men soft’” (johnson ). when karvel discovers that his habitat’s palm trees do not bear coconuts, he demands that some be added because “‘[n]ature was created to serve man. and now this man wants some coconuts up there’” ( ). karvel’s interlocutor in the coconut exchange—and the other against which his gender is defined—is his wife. the character is known only as “mrs. karvel,” and, during chris’ first days in the dome, he notes that “[she] seemed perpetually stressed, rarely out of motion any time i saw her. standing still for a moment, without food or an emptied plate or a feather duster in her hand, seemed almost a painful act for her” ( ). when karvel insists on having coconuts, mrs. karvel rolls her eyes “like her corneas were going on a world tour,” but she also quietly and invisibly fulfills her husband’s wish ( ). yet despite appearing to revolve solely around the master of light, mrs. karvel’s womanhood, like the other identities investigated in pym, proves to be much more complicated. mrs. karvel is the engineer who realizes her husband’s artistic visions and, when necessary, recognizes their limitations; life in the dome of light would not be possible without her labor. as the aforementioned eye-roll suggests, mrs. karvel’s domestic efficiency is edgy, not cheery, and this sharpness becomes incontrovertible when the tekelians attack the dome. reaching back even further into the annals of american history, the mistress of light proposes an antarctic thanksgiving during which the karvels and tekelians can discuss their differences over “[g]ood home cooking” ( ). just as the first contact between european colonists and native americans resulted in the decimation of the latter group, so mrs. karvel’s generosity is a premise for a darker, genocidal plan: to serve the tekelians “a good, strong supper” that will be laced with rat poison and, consequently, “take care of all [their] troubles” ( ). the chilling stratagem exposes the true architecture of the karvel marriage, for it is mrs. karvel’s strength, not her submission, which enables and supports her husband’s masculinity in the face of external challenges. in addition to dispelling notions of mrs. karvel as a compliant helpmate, the deadly tekelian supper rounds out pym’s study of the dimensions of whiteness. although the tekelians and karvels share a skin color, they do not have a common cause. conceived of as a self-contained, self-sustaining habitat, the dome of light becomes a fossil-fuel dependent environmental hazard after thomas karvel alters the original design. once its supply chain is disrupted, mrs. karvel begins looking for a new home, and tekeli-li strikes her as a promising location. the antarctic natives, in contrast, descend on the dome because its “exhaust fan […] is blowing heat straight into tekeli-li” ( ). white or not, the karvels are “black matters”: race and literary history in mat johnson’s pym european journal of american studies, vol , no | causing the destruction of the very site they envision colonizing. this antagonism bespeaks the “isolation, the separateness” that morrison identifies as “always a part of any utopia” (morrison ). neither the karvels’ dome nor pym’s heaven (tekeli-li) is equipped to accommodate outsiders; their respective residents only do so when prompted by exigent circumstances, and their reluctance to accept change ultimately causes the collapse of their respective societies. . racial utopias and the end(s) of the world like poe’s narrative before it, johnson’s pym ends on an intriguing yet inconclusive note. the poisoning of the tekelians provokes a human- snow creature battle that results in the explosion of the dome of light and implosion of tekeli-li. after traveling by boat for days, chris, garth, and pym, the only survivors, reach land; chris describes the scene that greets them as follows: rising up in our pathway was a man. he was naked except for the cloth that covered his loins. he was of normal proportions, and he was shaking his hand in the air, waving it, and we, relieved, waved ours back at him. […] on the shore all i could discern was a collection of brown people, and this, of course, is a planet on which such are the majority. ( ) the academic-turned-adventurer confesses that he cannot confirm whether they have reached tsalal, and, given the skin color of its inhabitants, the land does not quite correspond to chris’ fantasy, entertained at the novel’s beginning, of a “great undiscovered african diasporan homeland […] uncorrupted by whiteness” ( ). by the novel’s end, however, perhaps chris has come to realize the fallacy of such a vision in the twenty-first century. the simultaneous fall of tekeli-li and the dome of light reveal that, even in the absence of racial difference, “great,” “uncorrupted” homelands are not immune to social conflict, ecological imperatives, or other challenges, be they anthropological or natural. in sending chris and garth to a place where blackness and whiteness have mingled to such a degree that they have ceased to be distinct categories, johnson suggests a need to engage with multiculturalism not as an empty ideal but as a lived reality. if the construct of race is as weighty and as contingent as chris’ experience implies, what are the consequences for the world that he and his fellow characters have left behind? how viable is a society whose structure and self-identity are, as morrison argues, so invested in something that is omnipresent and invisible, biologically inconsequential yet politically and socially significant? one of the fascinating aspects of pym is that the annihilations of the dome of light and tekeli-li are but two of multiple catastrophes, real and imagined, that appear in the novel. jeffree and carlton damon carter’s blog features their video coverage of the september attacks in new york city, and their search for “black matters”: race and literary history in mat johnson’s pym european journal of american studies, vol , no | excitement and heroism also prompts them to travel to ohio “during the [fictional] dayton dirty water disaster” ( ). in antarctica, the tekelians’ enslavement of the creole crew is precipitated by an unexplained global cataclysm that cuts off the americans’ contact with the outside world. just prior to their departure for tekeli-li, they all receive the same anonymous email message with no content save the “ominous […] subject line: armageddon” ( ). as noted toward the beginning of this essay, morrison portrays whiteness in isolation as “dreaded, senseless, implacable” ( ). i would argue that johnson expands upon this contention to propose that eurocentric perspectives disregard history, the humanity of others, and the far-reaching consequences of a community’s actions to the detriment of global society. more specifically, without serious, sustained attention to issues such as racialized violence, income inequality, and climate change, the wider world seems poised to follow tekeli-li and the dome of light on the path to destruction. shortly after his firing, chris meets the hip-hop scholar who has been hired to replace him. when chris tries to explain his scholarly turn to poe, the aptly named mosaic johnson snaps back, “‘poe. doesn’t. matter’” ( ). although his name evokes cultural diversity, the fictional johnson’s retort reveals his willingness to accept the superficial multiculturalism sought by the college administration in lieu of the substantive, often difficult engagement with difference that chris seeks. yet as morrison argues in playing in the dark and johnson elaborates in pym, poe and other white early american authors do matter if one wishes to understand the roots of race and racism in the united states. likewise, blackness matters not because it is a fixed, immutable identity, but because it is a flexible, ever-changing one in and of itself and in relation to other categories. whiteness also warrants examination and interrogation, johnson contends, because it is not invisible, independent, or stable; instead, it is inextricably bound to the identities through and against which it is normalized and subject to its own internal divisions. in the end, pym does not posit a postracial fantasy that enables its characters to escape the complications of race and history so much as it projects a multi-layered, multiracial world in which such complications might be acknowledged and worked through. bibliography “about us.” black lives matter: not a moment, a movement. n.d. web. may . “black matters”: race and literary history in mat johnson’s pym european journal of american studies, vol , no | “baltimore ’ : riots and rebirth.” university of baltimore. langsdale library special collections. n.d. web. may . dickson-carr, darryl. african american satire: the sacredly profane novel. columbia, mo: u of missouri p, . print. edwards, brent hayes. the practice of diaspora: literature, translation, and the rise of black internationalism. cambridge, ma: harvard up, . print. everett, percival. erasure. minneapolis: graywolf press, . print. faflik, david. “south of the ‘border,’ or poe’s pym: a case study in region, race, and american literary history.” mississippi quarterly . ( ): - . print. garza, alicia. “a herstory of the #blacklivesmatter movement,” the feminist wire, oct. . web. july . gates, henry louis, jr. “why most black people aren’t ‘part indian.’” december . the root. web. jan. . havard, john c. “‘trust to the shrewdness and common sense of the public’: the narrative of arthur gordon pym as a hoaxical satire of racist epistemologies.” in deciphering poe: subtexts, contexts, subversive meanings. bethlehem, pa: lehigh up, . - . print. hegel, g. w. f., “independence and dependence of self-consciousness: lordship and bondage,” the phenomenology of mind, trans. and introd. j. b. baille. new york: harper & row, . - . print. hurston, zora neale. “how it feels to be colored me.” . in i love myself when i am laughing… and then again when i am looking mean and impressive: a zora neale hurston reader. ed. alice walker. old westbury, ny: feminist press, . - . print. jacobs, deborah l. “in battle for thomas kinkade estate, girlfriend doesn’t have a prayer.” “personal finance.” forbes.com. aug. . web. may . jacquel, jessica. “the narrative of arthur gordon pym: une déconstruction des représentations de l’autre racial,” ma thesis, université de montpellier, . print. johnson, mat. pym. new york: spiegel & grau, . print. kohler-hausmann, julilly. “‘the crime of survival’: fraud prosecutions, community surveillance, and the original ‘welfare queen.’” journal of social history . ( ): - . print. laurent, olivier. “go behind time’s baltimore cover with aspiring photographer devin allen.” lightbox. apr. . web. may . mcwhiney, grady. cracker culture: celtic ways in the old south. university, al: u of alabama p, . print. mendelberg, tali. “executing hortons: racial crime in the presidential campaign.” public opinion quarterly ( ): - . print. morrison, toni. interview with elizabeth farnsworth. pbs newshour. march . broadcast. “black matters”: race and literary history in mat johnson’s pym european journal of american studies, vol , no | ---. playing in the dark: whiteness and the literary imagination. new york: vintage, . print. nelson, dana d. the word in black and white: reading “race” in american literature, - . new york: oxford up, . print. poe, edgar allan. the narrative of arthur gordon pym of nantucket. . ed. and introd. richard kopley. new york: penguin classics, . print. riley, steven f. “hypodescent.” “definitions.” mixed-race studies: scholarly perspectives on the mixed race experience. june . web. may . rushdy, ashraf h. a. neo-slave narratives: studies in the social logic of a literary form. new york: oxford up, . print. senna, danzy. you are free: stories. new york: riverhead, . print. sharpe, christina. monstrous intimacies: making post-slavery subjects. durham, nc: duke up, . print. “the voting rights act: a resource page,” brennan center for justice at new york university school of law, aug. . web. january . touré. who’s afraid of post-blackness? what it means to be black now. new york: free p, . print. verne, jules. le sphinx des glaces. . paris: le livre de poche, . print. notes i. the cover of the may issue of time magazine featured a black and white photograph of the april protests and the phrase “america, ” in white type. the “ ” has been crossed out and a red, apparently handwritten “ ” placed above it. see laurent n. p. see also “baltimore ’ : riots and rebirth.” ii. while faflik’s claims about present-day scholars misconstruing, if not altogether dismissing, the importance of regional identities in the th-century u.s. are convincing, his apparent attempt to disentangle questions of race from those of region is less so. the yankee-cavalier (southerner) split faflik outlines is incomplete without discussions of race ( - ), as is an analysis of relations among the u.s.-mexico border, the location toward which faflik turns his attention at the end of his essay ( - ). iii. for another reading of representations of race in poe’s novel, see jessica jacquel’s m.a. thesis. iv. havard argues that such representations were part of the “‘average’ [anti-black] racism” of the narrative’s time; he uses the term “average,” or typical, to reiterate his claim that the segregated nature of the antebellum united states led most anglo americans to hold anti-black views of some sort ( ). v. johnson also uses the fictional peters manuscript as an opportunity to reference jules verne’s novel le sphinx des glaces (an antarctic mystery), an earlier sequel to poe’s narrative. in peters’ manuscript he recounts traveling to france to confront verne about the use of his (peters’) story. vi. see, for example, everett’s erasure and senna’ you are free: stories. vii. zora neale hurston challenges this ethno-racial subterfuge at the beginning of her essay “how it feels to be colored me,” in which she writes that she is “the only negro in the united states whose grandfather on the mother’s side was not an indian chief” (hurston ). “black matters”: race and literary history in mat johnson’s pym european journal of american studies, vol , no | viii. karvel, whom garth describes as the “master of light” ( ), is a fictional double of thomas kinkade ( - ), the american artist known as the “painter of light” and famous for painting “bucolic scenes of cozy cottages, gardens, streams, villages and rural churches.” (jacobs). ix. in poe’s narrative, the tsalalians, the residents of the dusky tropical island, cry “tekeli-li! tekeli-li!” in terror whenever they see a white object or being ( ). in johnson’s pym, chris utters the same terrified cry upon seeing his first antarctic “humanoid” and subsequently learns from pym that the creatures’ subterranean world is named “tekeli-li” ( , ). x. grady mcwhiney writes, “some crackers were rich, others poor, and still others were neither; but they all more or less shared the same values. and that is the point: cracker does not signify an economic condition; rather, it defines a culture” (xiv). xi. garth finds the artist using the karvel print shackleton’s sorrow as his guide; the title further links pym to the history of antarctic exploration as ernest shackleton ( - ) was an anglo- irish explorer who led three expeditions to the region. abstracts after being denied tenure for expanding his teaching of race and literary history beyond exclusively african american texts, chris jaynes, the protagonist of mat johnson’s novel pym ( ), sets out to retrace the voyage from edgar allan poe’s novel the narrative of arthur gordon pym of nantucket. this essay examines how johnson uses jaynes’ own shipwreck—he and his crew are stranded in antarctica—to posit the history of race in the united states as a national disaster that overdetermines contemporary social dynamics. using intertextuality and satire, johnson follows toni morrison’s precedent in depicting blackness and whiteness as constructs that are inextricably bound and that cannot be understood one without the other. central to this claim are johnson’s mirroring of the progressive, st-century african american jaynes with his narrative foil: the pickled, ancient anglo american arthur gordon pym. i contend that johnson not only revisits morrison’s argument but also expands upon it; for, as jaynes and his fellow characters confront the thorny legacy of race and racism in the united states, they must also face a future in which the country’s changing demographics will render questions of identity more, rather than less, complicated. index keywords: th century, st century, edgar allan poe, literary history, mat johnson, playing in the dark, pym, race, the narrative of arthur gordon pym of nantucket, toni morrison, united states author jennifer m. wilks the university of texas at austin “black matters”: race and literary history in mat johnson’s pym european journal of american studies, vol , no | 	“black matters”: race and literary history in mat johnson’s pym 	 . “what’s past is prologue”: morrison, poe, and johnson 	 .racial revision and the specter of history 	 . racial utopias and the end(s) of the world mourning, melancholia, and race now review essay mourning, melancholia, and race now jermaine singleton hamline university, st. paul, mn , usa. hope draped in black: race, melancholy, and the agony of progress joseph r. winters durham, duke university press, , pp., isbn: - - - - mourning in america: race and the politics of loss david w. mcivor ithaca, cornell university press, , pp., isbn: contemporary political theory ( ) , s –s . https://doi.org/ . /s - - -x; published online august despite calls to build a more inclusive age of multiculturalism, the united states remains haunted by racial conservatism. we are in an age of unprecedented institutional diversity and equal protection under the law, yet our collective consciousness is rife with unresolved racial grievances. indeed, the uneven persistence of social injustice along racial lines disrupts contemporary racial grief- work and compounds racial grievances. as such, racial grievances of the past and present collide in ways that both challenge and necessitate the work of mourning. how do we account for the forces that continue to undermine the form and function of citizenship in a pluralist democracy? moreover, how might we do so in ways that register and address compounded historical and contemporary racial grievances? how does a nation go about healing psychic wounds, while some wear fighting gloves and others refuse to acknowledge that there is something for which to fight? past publications—jermaine singleton’s cultural melancholy: readings of impossible mourning, race, and african american ritual ( ), paul gilroy’s postcolonial melancholia ( ), anne cheng’s the melancholy of race: psychoanalysis, assimilation, and hidden grief ( ), and judith butler’s the psychic life of power: theories in subjection ( ) – consider the work of mourning inevitable and argue that melancholy is subject to racial formations, � springer nature limited. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s www.palgrave.com/journals gender formations, or ritualized reconstitution. two books in particular, both responses to the obama era and the racial backlash that gave birth to the black lives matter movement, have entered these conversations to explore the productive capacities of melancholy and mourning: hope draped in black: race, melancholy and the agony of progress ( ) by joseph r. winters; and mourning in america: race and the politics of loss ( ) by david w. mcivor. these books complement one another, opening fresh ways to understand and address the paradoxes surrounding the struggle for racial progress. as opposed to positioning melancholy and mourning as isolated processes that must be worked through individually and moved beyond, mcivor’s mourning in america and winters’s hope draped in black situate them as companion tools in the ongoing work of addressing racial grievances. the authors highlight the status of melancholy and mourning as analytics to be used in the promotion of awareness and discernment as we take on the collective work of forging the battle against social and racial injustice. the corollary is that the work of mourning – of coming to terms with and moving beyond the social loss wrought by social injustices – and melancholy – that is, the distilling and harnessing the social loss wrought by social injustices – must be paired in the work of transformative grieving. the question of why power and implicit bias misalign legality and justice along racial lines continues to perplex and polarize the u.s. citizens. this is partly because the ways whiteness and the quotidian engagements and habits of mind associated with white people are only obliquely linked to the unconscious and incessant weaponization of blackness and black bodies. nevertheless, mcivor’s notion of ‘democratic mourning’ and winters’ notion of ‘melancholic hope’ chart a path beyond this national impasse. these intellectually challenging and forward-thinking texts frame observations and directives that do not find their much-needed expression in our contemporary multiculture. first, a proper, democratic mourning of the individualized nature of the crimes committed against black life is an enterprise steeped in black feminist inquiry. moreover, an outlook filtered through a melancholic hope that both anticipates and neutralizes ongoing crimes against black humanity is a task steeped in intersectional praxis. indeed, the democratic work of mourning and melancholic hope hinge on our willingness to outstrip the pain of racialization through the development and sustained address of inquiry that emerges from sensitivity to the contexts of grieving and everyday injustice. an intersectional exploration of the continuation of the u.s. narratives of racial and social progress alongside neoliberal politics and rhetoric highlights the ways these discourses coalesce to obfuscate the propagation of a virulent necropolitics embedded within our contemporary society. although winters and mcivors do not acknowledge this directly, their books work in tandem to underscore the ways that black feminist theory and praxis can be drawn on to mitigate the disproportionate violence leveled against vulnerable communities. these texts encourage us to s � springer nature limited. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s review essay engage melancholic hope and democratic mourning in tandem, offering a paradigm for enacting a two-pronged queer theoretical praxis that mines intersectional inquiry to develop creative solutions to shared problems – problems that impact segments of vulnerable population uniquely and disproportionately. both books think through insights from sigmund freud’s ‘mourning and melancholia’ ( ) astutely. when freud outlined two ways of working through loss over a century ago, the complex landscape of social loss and racial grieving did not factor into his calculus. freud situates mourning at the limits of melancholia. according to freud, mourning is the successful integration of loss into conscious- ness. in melancholia, freud maintains, a loss that is unmourned and barred from recognition is displaced discreetly onto the subject’s ego, enacting an uncon- scionable loss of self. for freud, mourning is a healthy response to loss, and melancholia is an unhealthy one, because it can never be overcome after a lapse of time, and it perpetually haunts the subject’s ego. the central commitment of hope draped in black is to a more expansive consideration of the melancholic cast of mind that attends narratives of racial progress. winters’ notion of ‘melancholic hope’ renders the pervasive misrecog- nition directed toward the historical and ongoing offenses against people of color in the u.s. an unhealthy and irresponsible response. for winters, ‘melancholic hope’ is a push for racial and social justice progress that acknowledges the incomplete nature of past triumphs. ‘the notion of racial progress’, winters reminds us, ‘obscures the ways race operates to justify death and its various intimations – loss, exclusion, silencing, repression, hunger, and so forth’ (p. ). on the basis of close readings of toni morrison’s paradise and ralph ellison’s essays on jazz and the blues, winters invites a renegotiation of linear notions of progress, myopic notions of exceptionalism and coherence, and binary notions of racial difference that render lives and circumstances lived beyond these frames subject to silence, sanctioned violence, or death. melancholic hope shines a halogen light on the ontological and discursive circuitry that underpins the easy trafficking in american exceptionalism rhetoric that makes laudable and acceptable death threats against muslims, arabs, and latinos living in the united states. in his discussion of the dangers of exceptionalism narratives, he points to how john mccain’s concession speech reinforced america’s collective self-image as an exceptional nation, as a place unequivocally defined by opportunity, tolerance, and freedom. although the u.s. celebrated itself as an ideal democracy during the obama era, the discourse of national exceptionalism persisted and engendered a national pride that also reinvigorated race pride. winters writes: ‘after reassuring a gentleman at the meeting that obama is a decent man, mccain offered the microphone to an elderly woman who expressed her distrust of the future president. she confessed that her distrust was motivated by a suspicion that obama is an arab’ (p. ). he continues, ‘he rejoined in a civil manner, reassuring the woman and the audience that obama is a ‘‘decent family man and citizen’’ … mccain’s rejoinder attempts � springer nature limited. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s s review essay to defuse the woman’s suspicion by making a tacit distinction between ‘‘decent family man and citizen’’ and the threatening arab other’ (pp. – ). winters opens up space for understanding the way racial anxiety cloaks and mobilizes the intersectional nature of oppression across national, gender, and sexual lines. hope draped in black compels us to rethink notions of progress and pain beyond the black–white binary toward the address of the multilayered workings of hegemony. the book also renders visible ‘the limitations and dangers involved in projects that underscore the significance of race while downplaying the struggles, erasures, and losses attached to other identities and subject positions’ (p. ). if melancholic hope provides a conceptual lens for higlighting the paradoxical working of oppression under the auspices of racial progress and national cohesion, david w. mcivor’s notion of ‘democratic morning’ issues an invitation to pair this offensive strategy with more tactical and multivocal modes of grieving and working through. the democratization of mourning, mcivor posits, is an ongoing and dynamic preemptive strategy against the patterns of misrecognition accompanying rituals of grievance and reconciliation that fail to effect transformative, structural change. drawing on scholarly discourses of truth and reconciliation, greek tragedy, and psychoanalysis, mcivor highlights our capacity to mine moments of conflict and discord for structural and existential change. presupposing that racial grieving structures and processes designed to promote social change inadvertently preserve and perpetuate violent patterns of misrecognitions, mcivor makes a case for mining the tensions, dissonance, and disavowals characteristic of such spaces of racial grievance for more ‘inclusive, dialogic encounters across entrenched lines difference’ (p. ). for mcivor, public morning can be pathological, perpetuating racism discretely in and through the rhetoric of mourning, unless infused with the ‘generative natality’ of political life (p. ). in the trenches of racial discord, amid ongoing violence and subjugation, is where, mcivor suggests, we might employ our most tactical maneuvers beyond unresolved racial grievances. i have called this cast of mind the ‘melancholic haze’, one that keeps the dead alive yet disavowed and set for reconstitution in the face of ongoing racial offense and strife (singleton, , p. ). mcivor astutely highlights the capacity of public expressions of grief and rage to ‘shut down social reflexivity and make coalitional politics and civic labors less likely’ (p. ). the black lives matter movement, according to mcivor, sidesteps this pitfall. mcivor aptly draws a distinction between merely recognizing injustice, and ‘wrestling with the dominant norms of recognition and the anxieties and defenses that limn the circuitry of social interaction’ (p. ), as expressed in claudia rankine’s citizen. only in recognition of this distinction can we engage in the dialogic work that hinges on a keen sensitivity to context, so as to be didactic and effective. for rankine, mcivor notes, the black lives matter movement ‘can be read as an attempt to keep mourning as an open dynamic in our culture’ (p. ). dissolving the ideological borders of our circumscription – and the resulting s � springer nature limited. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s review essay misrecognitions – requires us to avow the claims of racial traumas, knowing the struggle is subject to change at every turn. attention to the ongoing and variable nature of this mourning is one of the most striking features of mourning in america. while not made explicit by mcivor, the democratic work of mourning – of exhuming and reshaping the social circuitry of recognition and misrecognition – is based in intersectional inquiry and praxis. mcivor warns against incorporating the notion of ‘authenticity’ into the politics and practice of mourning, citing the way it ‘ignores dimensions and fractures within black identity, dimensions inferred by class, gender, and sexual difference’ (p. ). the sexual underpinnings of the misalignment between the form and function of citizenship along racial lines is one of the most overlooked and pernicious misrecognitions with which the black lives matter movement must wrestle. the mutually reinforcing discourses of racial and sexual difference form a nexus of recognitions and misrecognitions that underwrite the necropolitics rendering black bodies subject to disproportionate violence and death. one of queer theory’s major contributions to critical race studies is the grammar it provides for reading the impact of the mutually reinforcing discourses of racial and sexual difference on black life and race relations. the status of the black body as the national locus of racial and sexual difference underpins the paradoxical terrain of both inclusion and despotism upon which black bodies stand in the contemporary u.s. society. on friday, june , , the same week the supreme court announced the legalization of gay marriage, president obama asked the nation to mourn the nine black lives lost in the charleston church massacre. a full reckoning with the underpinnings of this tragedy would require us to confront the way obama’s presidential inauguration set the pendulum of black progress and despair into rapid motion. more specifically, reading the presidency of obama through the lens of winters’ notion of ‘melancholic hope’ hinges on understanding the status of whiteness as an ideological proposition and, moreover, process. whiteness has expanded its boarders of inclusion to exceptional figurations of blackness and queerness in ways that rendered ‘less exceptional’ racial and sexual minorities of color subject to unprecedented sanctioned violence at the hands of the law. what david l. eng calls ‘queer liberalism’ pairs with the discourse of color blindness in ways that exacerbate the necropolitics waged against certain members of marginalized communities ( , pp. – ). president obama’s embodiment of the abstract property of whiteness, and the extension of this domain to the lgbt community through the national defense authorization act and the marriage equality act, undermined the racial and sexual exclusion upon which white heteropatriarchal authority stands. increasing levels of anxiety over the porous borders of whiteness and its changing face have given way to an ever-increasing private sphere governed by a racialized liberal security state. amidst all the self- congratulatory discourse and relative privilege afforded certain racial and sexual � springer nature limited. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s s review essay minorities, this racialized liberal security state waged war against those on the margins of marginalized communities. the dominant narrative of american exceptionalism rose alongside heightened competition for domestic advancement, global capitalism, and the diminished federal funding of state programs and initiatives to make space for a hyper security state to which those on the periphery of marginalized communities fall prey disproportionately. anxiety over an increasingly fragile white heteropatriarchal norm, policing-for-profit, and poor- choice-baiting triangulate to ensnare poor, black, and/or queer ‘persons of irresponsibility.’ the nation’s expansion of the abstract property of whiteness to include certain racial and sexual minorities in the face of its diminishing returns in a globalized economy begs a melancholic reading that does not gloss over the racial oppression and violence that narratives of progress instigate and secure. for winters, the danger of overlooking those ‘individuals, strivings, and memories that are not immediately relevant’ and that ‘present an obstacle to a unified, harmonious future’ looms large (pp. – ). in fact, the consequence of resisting arrest and/or being black amidst a concurrent militarization of both american policing and public life, the decline of federal funding for state initiatives and programs, and the egoistic backlash of a declining white heteropatriarchal authority and centrality can be lethal. violence and coercion thrive in social climates in which privilege is relative, fragile, and transferable. what is more, figurations of blackness and difference function as central arteries in these social and libidinal networks of loss and compensation. a striking feature of the deaths of oscar grant, sandra bland, and michael brown is the fact that they were all prefigured by ungendering name- calling, issued from victim to convicted or alleged perpetrator. eric garner was convicted to ‘death by excessive force,’ which points to the asymmetries of crime and punishment that shore up when black assailants and suspects are subject to arrest. in part, the deaths of the charleston nine are the result of attempts by state and local municipalities to balance budget shortfalls through the sale of handguns and licenses to an increasingly over-medicated populace struggling to cope with the simultaneous globalization-stimulated racial and class anxieties. jailed on false arrest charges, the acquittal and discharge of marcus jetter after the surfacing of lost dash cam footage registers a racialized police state and juridical system trafficking in the neoliberal narratives of black irresponsibility and poor choice. if winters reminds us that racism is embedded in memorials and rituals in observation of racial progress, mcivor pushes for the development of a grammar for decoding the underpinning norms, anxieties, and defenses that render modes of racial healing and reconciliation ineffectual. the libidinal currents that interlock categories of race, sexuality, and gender discreetly have always worked with the shifting demands and forces of nationalism to secure or undermine community across the racial divide. as such, racial truth and racial healing, according to mcivor, are challenging to align. neoliberal racial ideology makes this pairing ever s � springer nature limited. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s review essay more precarious. from its very inception, according to michael omi and howard winant, neoliberalism was as much a racial project as a class project ( , p. ). the neoliberal racial ideology of color blindness was designed to dismantle the welfare state and apply the same market-based rules across racial lines. indifference and insensitivity to the ways free market capitalism and the clamor for privatization render black, poor, and/or queer lives subject to exclusion, devaluation, and death disproportionately is a neoliberal norm. as the flows of capital work to obliterate the middle class, this indifference grows unchecked. what can queer theory’s focus on desire, nonlinear trajectories, and untidy lines of demarcation provide in aid of efforts to understand and circumvent neoliberal racial ideology and practice? the political project of woman-of-color feminism is a conscious departure from identity-based forms of reconciliation and collectivity. how do we challenge the norm of indifference? how do we create and entrench new norms and meanings in the face of neoliberal racial ideology? how do we secure safety and promise in the interstices of identity categories within marginalized communities? winters and mcivor invite more publications exploring the intersections of mourning, melancholia, and civic engagement. subsequent volumes could contribute to these powerful paradigms for exploring the democratic and generative possibilities of racial grieving in the face of ongoing racial and social injustices. situating identity and community as interstitial and dynamic libidinal forces, these two books also mark the fruitfulness of woman-of-color feminism and praxis on this pressing social justice front. taken together, we are reminded that power flows as an intricate and contradictory assemblage and thus strategies and tactics in the service of racial healing and democratic pluralism must flow accordingly. references eng, d. ( ). the feeling of kinship: queer liberalism and the racialization of intimacy. durham: duke university press. omi, m., & winant, h. ( ). racial formation in the united states. new york: routeledge. singleton, j. ( ). cultural melancholy: readings of impossible mourning, race, and african american ritual. urbana: university of illinois press. � springer nature limited. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s s review essay 	mourning, melancholia, and race now 	subtitle 	references online teaching in the humanities lee skallerup bessette available online at https://teachingresources.hcommons.org/a-guide-to-online-teaching-in-the-humanities/ this guide was conceived as a way to use the collection ​digital pedagogy in the humanities​ as a resource for conceiving and delivering online or hybrid humanities courses. the pandemic has forced us all to rethink our pedagogies and our teaching strategies, while also bringing the issues of inequity in higher education to the forefront. we could no longer ignore the unequal access our students’ have to stable housing, food, reliable internet connectivity and technology. and now we can no longer ignore the racial injustices and inequalities, either. not that we should have been, after fergeson, black lives matter, and other protests around police violence towards african-americans and indegenous peoples in particular. but as we are already shifting and rethinking our courses, our pedagogies in light of the uncertainty around how the upcoming fall semester will look, it is equally an opportunity to look at ​what​ we are teaching alongside ​how we are teaching it. this is not a primer on online courses in general. i would strongly recommend the book teaching online​ by clare howell major, as well as ​small teaching online​ by flower darby with james m. lang and ​high-impact practices in online education​ edited by kathryn e. linder and chrysanthemum mattison hayes. the center where i work has produced ​a number of resources to help prepare for fall ​, including ​guide books​ and ​tip sheets​. other excellent resources include ones created by ​vanderbilt​, ​plymouth state​, and ​online learning in a hurry​. university of texas at arlington at arlington has ​a self-paced open course​ on pivoting your course to an online format. this guide then, is about how to approach teaching the ​humanities​ online. first step, whether you are teaching online or not, is to take this opportunity to ​decolonize your course​ (read ​a moving story of why this is important​). if you are looking for digital resources to help you fill your syllabus instead, look at the entries for ​indigenous​, ​queer​, ​social justice​, race​, and ​intersectionality​. always design for ​accessibility​, and remember that online spaces heighten already-existing inequities. keep ​the digital divide​ at the forefront of your planning. issues of ​gender​, ​disability​, and ​interface​ can impact the learning experience of your students. think about how you will foster ​community​, engage in ​networked learning​, how ​open​ your course will be. start from a space where you are not lamenting what is lost, but begin to embrace the possibilities of ​what can be gained​. being online means we have to fundamentally rethink how https://teachingresources.hcommons.org/a-guide-to-online-teaching-in-the-humanities/ https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/ https://muse.jhu.edu/book/ https://www.amazon.com/small-teaching-online-applying-learning/dp/ https://styluspub.presswarehouse.com/browse/book/ /high-impact-practices-in-online-education https://instructionalcontinuity.georgetown.edu/fall- / https://instructionalcontinuity.georgetown.edu/fall- / https://instructionalcontinuity.georgetown.edu/guides/ https://instructionalcontinuity.georgetown.edu/quick-tips/ https://cft.vanderbilt.edu/teaching-guides/ https://colab.plymouthcreate.net/ace/ https://oliah.ca/ https://linkresearchlab.org/pivot/ https://ncte.org/blog/ / /decolonizing-the-classroom/ https://ncte.org/blog/ / /decolonizing-the-classroom/ https://www.latimes.com/books/la-et-jc-decolonize-syllabus- -story.html https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/indigenous/ https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/queer/ https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/social-justice/ https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/race/ https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/intersectionality/ https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/access https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/digital-divides https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/gender/ https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/disability/ https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/interface/ https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/community https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/network https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/open we engage with our students and how we engage with the materials and discipline, be it ​fiction​, poetry​, ​history​, ​rhetoric​, or ​language learning​. engagement doesn’t just have to be sitting in a room facing each other; we can engage with the materials and each other through ​blogging​, mapping​, ​annotating​, ​curation​, ​field work​, and ​storytelling​ (​among many, many others​). even how we ​read​ can be fundamentally shifted in online spaces, using ​text analysis​, ​video​, and visualizations​. assessment​ no longer has to be limited to papers and exams: we can rethink ​collaborations​, create ​public-facing projects​, value ​iteration​ and ​prototyping​, embrace ​play​ and ​multimodality​. this is an opportunity, an invitation to rethink your pedagogy, your course, your assignments, how you engage with your students, with the materials, with the world. talk about ​failure​, because it is inevitable but also essential to learning. the hardest part of moving online isn’t the planning and the building, but what amy collier describes in her contribution, ​online​, as “[being] willing...to step into the messiness and “not-yetness” that accompany emergent models of digital learning and that resist templated approaches.” templates are fine to get you started, with modules for each week or unit, built with an intro-reading-watching-doing-submitting-conclusion format, in the same way our class time was built on similar structures or templates, even if we didn’t call them that. our students need predictability, but they also need space and freedom to explore, to engage, to create, to connect. build something using the building blocks in ​digital pedagogy in the humanities​. they’re there to get you started, to inspire, to inform. ultimately, it is up to you to take these materials and make them into something meaningful with and for your students. https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/fiction/ https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/poetry https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/history https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/rhetoric https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/language-learning https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/blogging https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/mapping https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/annotation https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/curation https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/fieldwork https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/storytelling https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/ https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/reading https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/text-analysis https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/video https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/visualization https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/assessment https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/collaboration https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/public https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/iteration https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/prototype https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/play https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/multimodal https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/failure https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/keyword/online/ https://digitalpedagogy.hcommons.org/ wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ black lives matter in canada too!« black lives matter » : c’est vrai aussi au canada! editorial/Éditorial black lives matter in canada too! « black lives matter » : c’est vrai aussi au canada! louise potvin # the canadian public health association as pen is set to paper, a summer which on many levels will be recognized as unlike any in our collective memory is drawing to a close. it will certainly have been the summer of covid- , this pandemic of a virus that was completely unknown until a few months ago. the virus has spared no country and has re- vealed shortfalls in healthcare systems. it illuminated the cata- strophic deficiencies of western democracies that allowed noto- rious incompetents to govern according to their whims, in total ignorance of scientific knowledge and of the manner in which it is produced. it has certainly also been one of repeated heat waves. in north america as in europe, evidence of climate change has manifested on a daily basis, with records broken for heat on the north american east coast and for drought on the west coast (noaa ). it will also be remembered that for the first time in american history and following a spring and summer punc- tuated by demonstrations to affirm “black lives matter”, a black woman has joined the ticket for one of the two major parties for the presidential election. however, it will have been forgotten that statistics canada published a report on the evolution of the socio-economic status of canada’s black population since the start of the century (houle ). yet this report is of utmost importance since it shines a light on a significantly overshadowed sector of canadian society. in fact, over the course of the spring and summer, while american cities were burning, canadian institutions and leaders, taking steps in the solidarity movement represented by peaceful demonstrations in canada’s largest cities, had to admit to the existence of systemic racism in the country. the notable excep- tion was québec, where premier françois legault, while recog- nizing that inequalities exist between black individuals and the general population, refused to attribute them to institutional dis- criminatory practices (buzetti and crête ). from a public health point of view, the approach that consists of recognizing, flushing out and eradicating systemic racism where it exists saves lives. in a recent article, williams et al. ( ) analyze the literature and show how institutional racism, that which is registered and reproduced in the formal and informal practices of our institu- tions, affects the health of those who are its victims. for them, the lack of access to education and to quality jobs are two fundamen- tal factors by which institutional racism affects health. for black american minorities, institutional racism is associated from birth with an elevated risk of prematurity and of low birthweight. with regard to cancer, a systematic review reports an association be- tween systemic discrimination and a higher risk of mortality for breast and lung cancers. the statistics canada report (houle ) rightly points out the significant differences that exist in canada between the black population and the general population when it comes to educa- tion, employment and income. a major strength of the report is to distinguish the data coming from recent immigrants from those of individuals born in the country to immigrant parents (second-generation) or in place for several generations. these distinctions are critical, since, in , immigrants born outside the country made up % of canada’s black population which comprised a little more than million individuals. except with respect to immigrant men, the report showed an unfavourable evolution between and of the proportion of black women and black men having a postsecondary diploma in com- parison with the proportion of women and men of the general population who possessed such a diploma. more and more, black immigrant men are as well educated as men in the general population while black men and women who are born in the country increasingly lag in obtaining a postsecondary diploma in comparison with men and women of the general population. the report also shows that except for second-generation black wom- en, the employment rate of black men and black women is * louise potvin louise.potvin@umontreal.ca centre de recherche en santé publique, université de montréal et ciusss du centre-sud-de-l’Île-de-montréal, montreal, qc, canada https://doi.org/ . /s - - - published online: september canadian journal of public health ( ) : – http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf mailto:louise.potvin@umontreal.ca significantly lower than that of their counterparts in the general population, and the gaps are more or less the same for the entire period. with regard to annual median salary, the report indicates that the difference in revenue (about $ , more annually for men in the general population) between black men and men of the general population has remained more or less constant for the entire period and for all groups. for second-generation black women, the wage gap is less and tends to have shrunk since . the report concludes that “black people generally live in more difficult economic conditions than the rest of the canadian population” (houle , p. ). what this report shows is that black people born in canada have less access to education and to quality jobs than their counterparts in the general population. this puts them effec- tively in a situation of systemic discrimination. as a result of a collection of institutional mechanisms, formal and informal, our society does not offer black people the same opportunities as to other canadians. this situation must be recognized by the authorities and our fellow citizens if we really want to bring about solutions. in contrast to research in the united states, where numer- ous studies clearly demonstrate that the fact of belonging to the afro-american minority is associated with lesser access to healthcare and poorer health, research in canada shines very little light on the repercussions on health of this systemic discrimination. recently, nnorom and her colleagues ( ) highlighted that the healthcare systems in canada do not col- lect in a systematic way data concerning race and ethnic ori- gin. it is thus extremely difficult to estimate the inequalities of health associated with belonging to the black population in canada. it is easy for we canadians to compare ourselves with our neighbours in the south and to congratulate ourselves. our society is not as violent as theirs, the numbers of individuals from visible minorities not as large, and as a result, the inci- dences of institutional and systemic violence towards a por- tion of our citizenry are less flagrant. however, we should not fool ourselves, they do exist: the statistics canada report pro- vides an eloquent demonstration. it is time for canadian re- searchers to get to work on documenting and analyzing the impacts of systemic racism on the health of canada’s black populations. clearly, it is equally true for canada that “black lives matter”! louise potvin editor-in-chief Éditorial au moment d’écrire ces lignes se termine un été qui s’inscrira comme exceptionnel dans notre mémoire collective, et ce à plusieurs titres. Ç’aura été bien sûr l’été de la covid- . cette pandémie d’un virus totalement inconnu il y a quelques mois, qui n’a épargné aucun pays et qui a mis en évidence les lacunes des systèmes de soins et les déficiences catastrophiques des démocraties occidentales qui permettent notamment à des incompétents notoires, de gouverner au gré de leurs lubies en ignorance totale des connaissances scientifiques et de la manière dont elles sont produites. Ç’aura été aussi celui des canicules à répétition. autant en amérique du nord qu’en europe, les dérèglements climatiques se sont manifestés d’une manière quotidienne, fracassant des records de chaleur sur la côte est américaine et des records de sécheresse sur la côte ouest (noaa, ). on se souviendra aussi que pour la première fois dans l’histoire américaine, et suite à un printemps et à un été ponctués par des manifestations pour affirmer que « black lives matter », une femme noire a fait partie du ticket pour l’élection présidentielle d’un des deux grands partis. on oubliera cependant que statistique canada publiait un rapport sur l’évolution de la situation socioéconomique de la population noire canadienne depuis le début du siècle (houle ). pourtant ce rapport est des plus importants, car il met en lumière une importante zone d’ombre de la société canadienne. en effet, au cours de l’été et du printemps, alors que les villes américaines s’enflammaient, des institutions et dirigeants canadiens, prenant acte du mouvement de solidarité représenté par des manifestations pacifiques dans les grandes villes canadiennes, ont bien dû admettre l’existence d’un racisme systémique au pays. l’exception notoire étant le québec, où le premier ministre françois legault, bien que reconnaissant qu’il existe des inégalités entre les personnes noires et la population générale, a refusé de les attribuer à des pratiques institutionnelles discriminatoires (buzetti and crête ). d’un point de vue de santé publique, la démarche qui consiste à reconnaître, débusquer et éradiquer le racisme systémique lorsqu’il existe, sauve des vies. dans un article récent, williams et al. ( ) analysent la littérature et montrent comment le racisme institutionnel, celui qui s’inscrit et se reproduit à travers les pratiques formelles et informelles de nos institutions, affecte la santé de ceux qui en sont victimes. pour eux, le défaut d’accès à l’éducation et à des emplois de qualité sont deux facteurs fondamentaux par lesquels le racisme institutionnel façonne la santé. pour les minorités noires américaines, le racisme institutionnel est associé dès la naissance à un risque élevé de prématurité et de naissance de petit poids. pour ce qui est du cancer, une revue systématique rapport une association entre la discrimi- nation systémique et un risque de mortalité plus élevé pour les cancers du sein et du poumon. le rapport de statistique canada (houle ) fait état justement des écarts importants qui existent au canada entre la population noire et la population générale pour ce qui est de l’éducation, de l’emploi et du revenu. une des forces du rap- port est de distinguer les données provenant des immigrants récents des personnes nées au pays de parents immigrants ou can j public health ( ) : – installés depuis plusieurs générations. ces distinctions sont critiques, car, en , les immigrants nés à l’extérieur du canada formaient % de la population noire du pays qui comptait un peu plus d’un million de personnes. sauf en ce qui concerne les hommes immigrants, le rapport montre une évolution défavorable entre et de la proportion des femmes noires et des hommes noirs possédant un diplôme postsecondaire en comparaison à la proportion des femmes et des hommes de la population générale qui possèdent un tel diplôme. de plus en plus, les hommes noirs immigrants sont aussi scolarisés que les hommes de la population générale alors que les hommes et les femmes noires qui sont nés au pays accusent de plus en plus de retard dans l’obtention d’un diplôme postsecondaire comparativement aux hommes et aux femmes de la population générale. le rapport montre aussi que sauf pour les femmes noires de deuxième génération, le taux d’emploi des hommes noirs et des femmes noires est significativement plus faible que pour leur contrepartie de la population générale, et les écarts sont à peu près les mêmes pour toute la période. en ce qui concerne le salaire annuel médian, le rapport indique que l’écart de revenu (environ $ de plus annuellement pour les hommes de la population générale) entre les hommes noirs et les hommes de la population générale est demeuré à peu près constant pour toute la période et pour tous les groupes. pour les femmes noires de seconde génération, l’écart est moindre et tend à se rétrécir depuis . le rapport conclut que « les populations noires vivent généralement dans des con- ditions économiques plus difficiles que le reste de la population canadienne » (houle , p. ). ce que ce rapport montre c’est que les personnes noires nées au canada ont un accès moindre à l’éducation et aux emplois de qualité que leurs contreparties de la population générale, ce qui les place effectivement dans une situation de discrimination systémique. À travers un ensemble de mécanismes institutionnels formels et informels, notre société ne leur offre pas les mêmes opportunités qu’aux autres canadiens. cette situation doit être reconnue par les autorités et nos concitoyens si l’on veut y apporter des solutions. contrairement aux États-unis où de nombreuses études montrent bien que le fait d’appartenir à la minorité afro- américaine est associé à un moindre accès aux soins et à une moins bonne santé, la recherche au canada n’apporte que très peu d’éclairage sur les répercussions de cette discrimination systémique sur la santé. récemment, nnorom et ses collaborateurs ( ) soulignaient que les systèmes de santé au canada ne recueillent pas de manière systématique les données concernant la race et l’origine ethnique, ce qui rend extrêmement difficile d’estimer les inégalités de santé associées au fait d’appartenir à la population noire canadienne. il est facile pour nous canadiens, de se comparer à nos voisins du sud et de s’autocongratuler. notre société n’est pas aussi violente que la leur, les personnes issues des minorités visibles pas aussi nombreuses, et de ce fait, les vio- lences institutionnelles et systémiques envers une partie de nos concitoyens sont moins flagrantes. il ne faut cependant pas se leurrer, elles existent : le rapport de statistique canada en fait une démonstration éloquente. il est donc temps pour les chercheurs canadiens de se mettre à l’ouvrage et de documenter et analyser les impacts sur leur santé du racisme systémique envers les populations noires du canada. bien évidemment, c’est vrai aussi pour le canada que « black lives matter »! louise potvin, ph.d. rédactrice en chef references/références bibliographiques buzetti, h., & crête, m. ( ). le racisme condamné à québec et à ottawa. le devoir, juin . https://www.ledevoir.com/ politique/quebec/ /quebec-solidaire-demande-un-plan-de- lutte-contre-le-racisme. accessed aug . houle, r. ( ). changes in the socioeconomic situation of canada’s black population, to /Évolution de la situation socioéconomique de la population noire au canada, à . ottawa: statistics canada. https://www .statcan.gc.ca/n /pub/ - -x/ - -x -eng.htm (english version, page ) and https://www .statcan.gc.ca/n /fr/pub/ - -x/ - - x -fra.pdf?st=olxm dnq (french version, page ). accessed aug . nnorom, o., findlay, n., lee-foon, n. k., jain, a. a., ziegler, c. p., scott, f. e., rodney, p., & lofters, a. ( ). dying to learn: a scoping review of breast and cervical cancer studies focusing on black canadian women. journal of health care for the poor and underserved, , – . https://doi.org/ . /hpu. . . noaa (national oceanic and atmospheric administration) ( ). national climate report – july . https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/ sotc/national/ . accessed aug . williams, d. r., lawrence, j. a., & davis, b. a. ( ). racism and health: evidence and needed research. annual review of public health, , – . https://doi.org/ . /annurev-publhealth- - . publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdic- tional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. can j public health ( ) : – https://www.ledevoir.com/politique/quebec/ /quebec-olidaireemande-n-aneutteontree-acisme https://www.ledevoir.com/politique/quebec/ /quebec-olidaireemande-n-aneutteontree-acisme https://www.ledevoir.com/politique/quebec/ /quebec-olidaireemande-n-aneutteontree-acisme https://www .statcan.gc.ca/n /pub/ -x/ -x ng.htm https://www .statcan.gc.ca/n /pub/ -x/ -x ng.htm https://www .statcan.gc.ca/n /pub/ -x/ -x ng.htm https://www .statcan.gc.ca/n /pub/ -x/ -x ng.htm https://doi.org/ . /hpu. . https://doi.org/ . /hpu. . https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/ https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/sotc/national/ https://doi.org/ . /annurev-publhealth- - https://doi.org/ . /annurev-publhealth- - 	« black lives matter » : c’est vrai aussi au canada! 	references/références bibliographiques theological roundtable theology in the public sphere in the twenty-first century several decades ago david tracy wrote that theologians speak to three publics: the academy, the church, and society. since then many theologians have exhibited, in tracy’s words, “that drive to publicness which constitutes all good theological discourse[,] … a drive from and to those three publics.” our four roundtable authors discuss how and why theologians engage the public sphere in the twenty-first century. in arguing for the necessity of such engagement, they also draw attention to the promise and perils of doing public theology today. keywords: public theology, religious diversity, racism, liturgical theology, blogosphere, “nones,” neoliberalism doing public theology in june , then us senator barack obama delivered a major address on the role of religion in our political life. he observed, “frederick douglass, abraham lincoln, william jennings bryan, dorothy day, martin luther king—indeed, the majority of great reformers in american history— were not only motivated by faith, but repeatedly used religious language to argue for their cause.” this statement spurs my thinking about what “doing public theology” might mean, especially for catholic theologians working in the context of us society. i am not so much interested in defining “public theology” as a theological discipline or specialization. i am more concerned with how and why a bryan massingale, std, is professor of ethics in the theology department of fordham university. previously, he was at marquette university. he has served as president of the catholic theological society of america and earned his doctorate from the academia alphonsianum in rome.  david tracy, “defending the public character of theology,” the christian century, april , .  for the transcript of this speech, see “obama’s  speech on faith and politics,” new york times, june , , http://www.nytimes.com////us/politics/ obamaspeech.html?_r=. horizons, , pp. –. © college theology society,  doi: . /hor. .  terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /hor. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /hor. . &domain=pdf http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /hor. . &domain=pdf http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /hor. . &domain=pdf http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /hor. . &domain=pdf http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /hor. . &domain=pdf http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /hor. . &domain=pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /hor. . https://www.cambridge.org/core catholic theologian might conduct him/herself in addressing the audience that david tracy called “the public.” that is, i am more interested in the “doing” of public theology than in delineating its conceptual contours or boundaries. i offer, then, an operational understanding distilled upon reflect- ing on my own experiences with engaging the public square. by “doing public theology,” i mean () addressing issues of public concern, urgency, and import () to a religiously pluralistic and diverse audience of fellow members of a civic community () in a way that is accessible to people of any or no faith tradition or commitment ) while rooted in and inspired by one’s own faith perspective, commitments, and beliefs. addressing issues of public concern, urgency, and import. here i specify the subject matter of “doing public theology.” it entails treating issues that pertain to what catholic social teaching calls “the common good.” that is, when doing public theology, catholic theologians are speaking to issues that affect our common life, as opposed to issues of confessional concern (e.g., the inclusion of women in ordained ministry or the sacramental recognition of same-sex civil marriages). to put this another way, the issues at stake in doing public theology are what gaudium et spes calls “the signs of the time,” that is, issues of such col- lectiveimportthattheydemandaresponseorconsiderationinlightofthegospel. i realize that issues within catholicism may be of public interest. the church’s merger of urban parishes, or practices concerning the sexual abuse of minors, would be examples of intrachurch matters that impact com- munal well-being. but a theologian’s dealing with such issues in more public fora, such as newspapers and/or blogs, would not be an exercise of public the- ology. doing public theology is more than a more popularized presentation of intraecclesial debates or theological perspectives. such activities are a valu- able service; yet i do not believe that these do public theology—chiefly because of the remaining criteria. to a religiously pluralistic and diverse audience of fellow members of a civic community. this specifies the audience that the theologian is addressing when doing public theology. the theologian is speaking as a member of the public arena to others who also occupy or reside within it. that is, the theologian is speaking not from a distant perch about matters of public moment or urgency, but as one who is also impacted by the issue at hand—someone who also has “skin in the game,” so to speak. for example, when doing public theology about immigration or climate change, the theo- logian speaks as one who has a stake in the public discussion or resolution of these realities. in short, the theologian is a member of the community being addressed. moreover, when doing public theology, the theologian is very much aware that the audience includes those who do not share his or her faith commitments. this leads to the third consideration:  t h e o l o g i c a l r o u n d t a b l e terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /hor. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /hor. . https://www.cambridge.org/core in a way that is accessible to people of any or no faith tradition or com- mitment. here we encounter the “how” of doing public theology. i believe that this may be the constitutive mark of this theological endeavor. “doing public theology” is not simply speaking or writing in a way that is acces- sible to those lacking theological expertise; it is not just a popularization of catholic theological concepts or beliefs. rather, what is at issue are the warrants, rationale, and argumentation offered for one’s appeal or perspective. the religious diversity of the us population, and especially the growing number of those who are religiously unaffiliated (a.k.a., the “nones”), means that one cannot ground one’s position by appealing to truths that are self- evident within one’s religious tradition. indeed, in the us context, doing public theology is a fraught enterprise in large measure because of the lack of credibility—if not hostility—that many have toward the institutional carriers of one’s faith tradition. to be specific, many americans reject any appeal founded on catholic faith tenets because of an erosion of its leaders’ moral authority as a result of their failure to forthrightly address the sexual abuse of minors by church leaders, the church’s exclusion of women from ordained ministry, and/or the church’s opposition to measures that would signal the legal equality of lgbt persons (including, but not limited to, same-sex civil marriage). if one doubts this, simply peruse the online comments following any article dealing with catholicism in a daily newspaper. even without such hostility and suspicion, the religious diversity of one’s audience precludes appeals founded upon a shared religious perspective. so, how can one proceed? i think david tracy’s concept of “the classic” provides helpful insight. recall that he described classics as those “expressions of the human spirit [which] so disclose a compelling truth about our lives that we cannot deny them some kind of normative status”—in other words, “what we mean in naming certain texts, events, images, rituals, symbols and persons ‘classics’ is that here we recognize nothing less than the disclosure of a reality we cannot but name truth.” thus classics are texts, events, or persons that are rooted in a particular culture, yet also have the power to speak beyond their originating culture to something universal in the human experience. they have a transcultural significance, resonance, and even authority. thus they are accessible to and instructive, even normative, for those who do not belong to a specific cultural heritage. religious texts, symbols, and persons can be such transcultural classics. this allows them to “enter into the public realm and [become] available to  david tracy, the analogical imagination (new york: crossroad, ), . h o r i z o n s  terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /hor. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /hor. . https://www.cambridge.org/core all” regardless of their particular religious commitment or lack thereof. thus in doing public theology, one is not simply appealing to the least common denominator or the thinnest common values present in us society. public theology is not just a vague or superficial injunction to be civil to one another and treat each other with respect. as the figures invoked by obama demonstrate, doing public theology authoritatively summons the members of a community to engage with and realize their highest ideals and best aspi- rations in their common life as these are conveyed by the community’s classics. for catholic theologians, one does public theology by appealing to those catholic persons, texts, and symbols that possess a classic character. i suggest that among these would be people like francis of assisi, mother teresa, dorothy day, and thomas merton (the latter two effectively invoked by pope francis in his address to congress in the fall of ); the gospel para- bles of the good samaritan, the last judgment, and the rich man and lazarus; and the image of the kingdom (reign) of god. these are among the persons, texts, and symbols whose transcultural resonance could ground normative discourse on matters of public concern to those who do not share catholic faith convictions. while rooted in and inspired by one’s own faith perspective, commitments, and beliefs. as i hope is apparent by now, doing public theology by addressing a religiously diverse audience does not require that one bracket or surrender one’s own faith commitments. the theologian offers to his/her neighbors and fellows the fruits of his/her intellectual expertise and spiritual reflection. indeed, it is because of one’s faith commitments and theological expertise that one can feel obligated to speak. that is, the theologian can become com- pelled to speak to issues of public urgency out of the conviction that failing to do so would betray one’s obligation to love one’s neighbor. to say this more simply and directly, in doing public theology, the catholic theologian speaks to the public as who he/she is—an intellectual, a believer, a member of the american community, and, in the words of martin luther king, “a citizen of the world.” so much for what “doing public theology” entails. but to what end? what does such activity offer to our understanding of or pursuit of social justice? i think obama is instructive when in his speech he notes, “the problems of poverty and racism, the uninsured and the unemployed, are not simply tech- nical problems in search of the perfect ten-point plan. they are rooted in both societal indifference and individual callousness—in the imperfections of man.  t. howland sanks, “david tracy’s theological project: an overview and some implications,” theological studies  (): .  t h e o l o g i c a l r o u n d t a b l e terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /hor. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /hor. . https://www.cambridge.org/core solving these problems will require changes in government policy, but it will also require changes in hearts and a change in minds.” i believe that doing public theology offers to those who share our social world the motivation, in- spiration, and challenge to address pressing social issues by accessing the nonrational sources—the fears, anxieties, aspirations, and imagination— that fuel social callousness and social transformation. i will illustrate this through a personal example of an attempt to do public theology. the occasion was an acceptance speech i delivered when honored by the ywca in  with its “eliminating racism” award. specifically, i was asked to speak about why i do what i do to a civic gathering of people of diverse—and perhaps no—religious convictions. i spoke in the aftermath of the killings of eric garner, tamir rice, and so many other unarmed african americans, and in the midst of public agitation over the black lives matter movement: something catastrophic is happening in our country. and i don’t mean only the morbid, wrenching, almost incessant killings of black young men and boys. these deaths reveal a deep malady at the core of america. a coldness. a callousness. a soul-warping disease. for racism is a soul-sickness. the deepest reason i have chosen to be a catholic ethicist who focuses on racial issues stems from my understanding of racism. there are many ways to understand racism, namely, as a political issue, as a sociological phenomenon, as a cultural divide. but for me, at its deepest level, racism is a soul-sickness. it is a profound warping of the human spirit, one that enables human beings to create communities of cold, callous indifference to their darker sisters and brothers. stripped to its core, racism is that disturbing interior disease that enables people to not care for those who don’t look like them. to quote a fellow scholar, “the real meaning of race comes down largely to this: is this someone i should care about?” race in america has become a spiritual cataract that limits our vision and determines whom we do and do not notice, that is, who is beyond the reach of our concern or interest. racism today is revealed not only in verbal taunts and slurs; not only in continuing inadequate represen- tation in positions of power and overrepresentation in our prisons; not only in the scourge of the killings of unarmed black men, the milita- rized policing of communities of color, and the scandal of the under- education of our black and brown youth. racism today is revealed in a lack of empathy and profound indifference, that is, the pervasive lack of concern and the social callousness of the majority of society to the horrors and scandals that are unfolding in our midst.  paul l. wachtel, race in the mind of america: breaking the vicious circle between blacks and whites (new york: routledge, ). h o r i z o n s  terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /hor. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /hor. . https://www.cambridge.org/core america has become like the rich man in the biblical parable of lazarus: blind to and uncaring about the plight of its citizens of darker hue. a blindness rooted in a soul-sickness that allows it to rest easy, complacent and even hardened to the rampant suffering among us, … a suffering that is conveniently hidden from sight and largely absent from public discourse. i am convinced that as necessary as changed social practices such as better police training and body cameras may be, and as important as a vigorous enforcement of civil rights laws is, these will be limited and even ineffective without a deeper conversion, without a healing of the soul, without a profound revolution of values, that is, without at- tending to the deeper recesses of the human spirit that are the realm of religious faith and spirituality. that is why i became and remain a faith activist for racial justice. i offer this as one illustration of both the contribution and the necessity of “doing public theology,” that is, of addressing issues of public concern, urgency, and import to a religiously pluralistic and diverse audience of fellow members of a civic community in a way that is accessible to people of any or no faith tradition or commitment while rooted in and inspired by one’s own faith perspective, commitments, and beliefs. bryan n. massingale fordham university doing theology in the public sphere there is nothing more wonderful, or more satisfying, than writing about god and the things of god, and sharing that writing in a public space. public theological writing—whether it be for a journal of opinion, a cat- echetical resource, or a blog—responds to the gospel call to “proclaim on the housetops” what you hear whispered (matt :), and in its own way partic- ipates in the christian calling to “set on a lampstand” that light that gives glory to god (matt :). there can also be great satisfaction in shaping religious publications and designing and speaking at live events during which people interact around theological subjects. all this is very good. rita ferrone is an independent scholar and author of several books about liturgy, including liturgy: sacrosanctum concilium (new york: paulist press, ). she serves as general editor of the yale ism review, and is a contributing editor and columnist for commonweal magazine. she blogs at dotcommonweal and the pray tell blog.  t h e o l o g i c a l r o u n d t a b l e terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /hor. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /hor. . https://www.cambridge.org/core em-ijcm .. j_id: ijcma art no: . /ijcma- - - date: -august- page: total pages: /color figure(s) arttype="research id: akash.bhosle time: : i path: //mbnas .cadmus.com/home$/akash.bhosle$/em-ijcm crime and punishment a realistic group conflict approach to racial discrimination in hiring convicted felons barry goldman university of arizona, tucson, arizona, usa dylan cooper california state university channel islands, camarillo, california, usa, and tamar kugler management and organizations, university of arizona, tucson, arizona, usa abstract purpose – a surprisingly large proportion of the working population of the usa consists of individuals with felony convictions. moreover, the issue of employability of these individuals is compounded for minorities. this paper aims to present two experimental studies investigating whether minorities with felony backgrounds have a more difficult time being selected for employment than identically situated white applicants. the authors ground the paper in realistic group conflict theory. results indicate discrimination is more acute against minorities with felony backgrounds than whites with the same background and shed light on the mechanisms leading to this discrimination. theoretical and practical implications are discussed. design/methodology/approach – this paper involves two experimental studies involving working adults engaging with realistic survey situations using mturk. findings – results of both studies indicate discrimination is more acute against minorities with felony backgrounds than whites with the same background, and shed light on the mechanisms leading to this discrimination. research limitations/implications – one limitation of the methodology is that the authors used fictional candidates and jobs. this may have led to understating the effects of discrimination on minorities because it allowed applicants to answer in socially desirable ways (e.g. absent of racial bias) without suffering any of the anticipated negative consequences of actually hiring individuals about whom they hold negative stereotypes. practical implications – this research has several important implications for practice. first, organizations should be keenly aware of the potential for subtle and unconscious bias to affect the job application process even among well-intentioned hiring managers. second, as the bias is often triggered by threats, organizations should share with their employees the nature of the threat involved with former felons. social implications – organizations should deliberately address issues associated with the use of criminal background checks. for many organizations, a felony conviction in an applicant’s background automatically eliminates that person from employment. however, a substantial amount of the workforce now has a felony in their background. indeed, the equal employment opportunity commission ( ) has issued guidelines that detail important factors that organizations should consider on a case-by-case basis when considering employment for former felons. organizations may consider updating any blanket exclusions regarding the hiring of ex-felons – not only because it makes good policy but also because it may help the organization hire the best people. originality/value – this research studies an important – and growing – societal problem related to the hiring of convicted felons, and the related issue of racial discrimination that affects black convicted felons particularly hard. there has been very little work in the management area on this topic. moreover, there has received april revised june august accepted august http://www.emeraldinsight.com/ - .htm j_id: ijcma art no: . /ijcma- - - date: -august- page: total pages: /color figure(s) arttype="research id: akash.bhosle time: : i path: //mbnas .cadmus.com/home$/akash.bhosle$/em-ijcm been very little work in all areas that includes experimental methods. the use of such methods is particularly useful to eliminate confounds found in field data. keyword race paper type research paper federal and state anti-discrimination laws have done much to promote equality in the workplace. however, one significant and remaining area for permissible discrimination (sometimes referred to as “rational, discrimination” simonson, ) involves those with prior felony convictions. those convicted of felonious crimes, implying violation of important social rules, are marked by our legal system for society’s severe punitive treatment (prison, fines, etc.). moreover, there are reasons to believe that the consequences that felons experience beyond the immediate court-imposed punishment (“collaterial consequences”) may not be experienced equally. these collaterial consequences can include loss of voting rights, difficulty in acquiring loans and housing, as well as increased obstacles in securing employment. in the area of employment hiring, there are significant questions as to whether minorities with felony convictions are less likely to be hired compared with whites with identical felony convictions (pager, ). the particular question of racial disparities in the hiring of those with felony convictions, while virtually omitted from the management literature (for an exception, levashina and campion, ), has received attention from researchers in the areas of sociology and criminology (decker et al., ; pager, , ). this research has been valuable in mapping out factors, including race, that affect the hiring of those with felony convictions. however, it is often based on audit or archival data that may lack the controls of experimental methods. moreover, it has typically been presented without reliance on an established theoretical construct to support the findings. in this paper, we extend the previous research as it relates to the hiring of minorities (versus non-minorities) with felony convictions. in doing so, we strive to make several contributions: we use experimental methods to exert greater control over the studies; we rely on realistic group conflict theory (rgct), a theory that is well-suited to understanding competition between groups for scarce resources (e.g. a job); we extend rgct in two ways – by investigating whether its effects extend to situations when the resource at stake has only symbolic benefits to the respondent or a member of his/her group; and by investigating mechanisms through which discrimination occurs by whites against minority felons. background during that past few decades, the us prison population has dramatically increased. between and , this population increased per cent (from , to . million; pastore and maguire, ). the us department of justice estimates that approximately per cent of all men will serve some time in federal or state prison (bonzcar and beck, ; bjs, ). for certain subgroups, the proportion is even higher. nearly per cent of african american men and per cent of hispanic men will serve a prison sentence at some time during their lives (pastore and maguire, ). given that the median time served for prisoners released during the late s was just over two years, a large group of non-institutionalized men now have prison records and the felony[ ] records that typically go along with it (stoll, ). the number of americans with a felony conviction amount to approximately per cent of the unemployed (holzer et al., ; pager, ; schmitt and warner, ). the successful re-absorption of this growing ex-offender population has major policy implications because failure to do so is costly in j_id: ijcma art no: . /ijcma- - - date: -august- page: total pages: /color figure(s) arttype="research id: akash.bhosle time: : i path: //mbnas .cadmus.com/home$/akash.bhosle$/em-ijcm terms of increased crime and criminal victimization in society, increased stress on limited government resources, and lost productivity (holzer, ). there are several reasons to expect that ex-felons may have difficulty securing future employment other than for reasons of discrimination: felons’ (on average) lower education, poor cognitive skills and other personal factors are likely to restrict future employment regardless of their criminal records (stoll, ). felons may suffer still further disadvantages because they often do not accumulate significant work experience while incarcerated and may instead experience an erosion of skills. moreover, ties to legitimate employers are likely to be severed by an initial arrest and prison time. from employers’ viewpoint, a criminal record may signal that the individual is untrustworthy, likely to steal, be violent or otherwise problematic. they may avoid such workers due to a perceived propensity to break rules, steal or harm customers, or because they fear lawsuits based on negligent hiring (holzer et al., ). perhaps unsurprisingly, the unemployment rate among ex-prisoners is substantially higher than among those who were never incarcerated, with an estimated loss to gdp of . - . per cent resulting in a total cost to the us economy of $ bn to $ bn in (harris and keller, ; schmitt and warner, ). freeman ( ), for example, found that incarceration led to a to percentage-point decline in subsequent employment rates. grogger ( ) concluded that differences in incarceration rates between young white and young black men accounted for about one third of the black-white employment gap in the national longitudinal survey of youth data. approximately . per cent of all men born in the usa in are projected to serve time in federal or state prisons compared to . per cent born in (schmitt and warner, ). however, these projections differ by race and ethnicity – with estimates of per cent for black males, per cent for hispanic males and per cent for white males (bonzcar and beck, ). the criminal background check, via public or private records or providers, provides a tool for employers to make informed decisions before hiring convicted felons. the use of background checks has dramatically increased in the past years, probably because of increased availability and decreased costs associated with technological change (levashina and campion, ). due to the disproportionate percentage of minorities with criminal records, a number of civil rights groups have objected to the rampant use of criminal background checks. their call has been echoed by the federal equal employment opportunity commission (eeoc). recently, the eeoc has taken this policy position a step further by pursuing several lawsuits intended to reduce discrimination against felons, especially minority felons (e.g. eeoc v. freeman companies, federal district court of maryland, , in which it alleged that the company used criminal background checks to “unlawfully deprive a class of black, hispanic, and male job applicants of equal employment opportunities.”) in recent policy guidance, the eeoc ( ) stated that organizations should be mindful that the issue of arbitrary elimination of those with felony records is contrary to its recommendation. it was particularly sensitive to automatic bars to employment for felony convictions to minorities, as they are several times more likely than whites to have felony convictions. specifically, the eeoc observed that: arrest and incarceration rates are particularly high for african american and hispanic men. african americans and hispanics are arrested at a rate that is to times their proportion of the general population. assuming that current incarceration rates remain unchanged, about in white men are expected to serve time in prison during their lifetime; by contrast, this rate climbs to in for hispanic men; and to in for african american men.(eeoc, , introduction) j_id: ijcma art no: . /ijcma- - - date: -august- page: total pages: /color figure(s) arttype="research id: akash.bhosle time: : i path: //mbnas .cadmus.com/home$/akash.bhosle$/em-ijcm if blacks and other minorities have felonies in their background at rates much higher than whites, then a key question is whether white employers are less likely to hire these minorities than white applicants with similar records. prior research supports the conclusion that blacks (and other minorities) are more frequently denied jobs because of racial discrimination than white applicants (decker et al., ; goldman, ; pager, , ). however, it remains unclear whether illegal discrimination also occurs because felony convictions reduce black job applicants’ employment opportunities more than they reduce white applicants’ opportunities. the concern is not just that proportionately more minorities are denied jobs because of felony convictions than white applicants; this is potentially defensible because proportionately more minorities have felony convictions than whites. the potential concern is whether blacks with felony convictions are subject to further employment discrimination because of inappropriate and illegal racial (or outgroup) bias. existing research has been helpful in demonstrating the possible aggregate effects of felony convictions on labor market outcomes. however, it presents largely mixed results and fails to disentangle discrimination based on race from discrimination based on criminal conviction. for example, pager ( ) used an audit methodology (four male auditors; two blacks paired together and two whites paired together, one in each pair claimed a criminal record; both members of each pair applied for the same job) to compare the percentage of applications that elicited callbacks from actual employers. the effects of auditor race on the percentage of applications receiving callbacks were large (and statistically significant), both for those with criminal backgrounds and those without criminal backgrounds. only per cent of the applications by the black auditor without a criminal record received callbacks, relative to per cent of the applications by the white auditor with no criminal record. moreover, the white auditor with a criminal record received more favorable treatment ( per cent callbacks) than the black with a criminal record ( per cent). the white auditor with a criminal record received more favorable treatment ( per cent) that the black auditor without a criminal record ( per cent). however, the reduction in callbacks due to a criminal background was larger for the white auditors than for the black auditors ( and per cent reduction for whites and blacks, respectively, although this interaction was not statistically significant), indicating that blacks are not hurt by a criminal conviction more than whites. a similar methodology was presented by pager et al. ( ), for low paying jobs in nyc. although the effect size for the black vs white differential appear substantially smaller in this study, the authors documented that blacks are penalized slightly more for having a felony conviction compared to whites. decker et al. ( ) used an audit methodology similar to pager ( ; pager et al., ) as well as online correspondence to send resumes or job applications by email. with respect to the online correspondence portion of the study, decker et al. ( ) report no negative effects of race/ ethnicity or of having a prison record on employment chances. the audit portion of their study did find that whites were the preferred job applicants in the food service sector among those with a criminal record, but, similar to pager ( ), the reduction in favorable responses due to a criminal record was larger for whites than for blacks. therefore, the existing literature presents a pattern of mixed results regarding the question of racial discrimination against applicants with felony convictions. as interesting and provocative as these studies are, they are limited in at least four important ways that restrict their ability to support their conclusions: first, they are not designed in a way that rules out the possibility that its findings can be explained by “typical” racial discrimination as opposed to discrimination based on criminal convictions. to do this, a study would be required to have applicants with identical pertinent factors. j_id: ijcma art no: . /ijcma- - - date: -august- page: total pages: /color figure(s) arttype="research id: akash.bhosle time: : i path: //mbnas .cadmus.com/home$/akash.bhosle$/em-ijcm then, it would have to demonstrate that the reduction in desirability following a criminal conviction is larger for blacks than for whites (as shown above, this was true for only one out of the three studies). second, the audit field study methodology includes by nature many uncontrolled variables that can present alternative explanations to the findings. third, the studies do not control for the race of the employers who reviewed the applications. to the extent that the studies conclude differential treatment for applicants based on race, it would seem relevant that the race of the decision maker be controlled. finally, the studies do not provide a theoretical explanation to further support the results. a theory provides a deductive basis for hypothesis prediction and a foundation to understand and organize the data. to address these issues, we use experimental studies in which important information about the applicants (qualifications, type of crime, format of application, etc.), as well as the race of the decision maker, are controlled. we ground our hypotheses in rgct, a well- regarded social-psychological model of intergroup relations (sidanius and pratto, ) as a basis for understanding discrimination against minority felons (as compared to white felons) by white hiring managers. below, we describe two experiments to test whether minorities (here, blacks) with felony convictions in their backgrounds were penalized more in the hiring process for having such convictions, than whites with identical credentials. in the first study, we find that minorities (blacks) with a felony conviction are discriminated against when seeking a job. the second study tests the mechanisms that help to explain this discrimination. we propose a model (figure ) for understanding racial discrimination against minorities with felony convictions. realistic group conflict theory in this investigation, we rely upon the framework of rgct, which offers an explantion for intergroup hostility involving scarce resources (sidanius and pratto, ). we do not argue that rgct is necessarily the only framework to explain conflict over employment issues between group members. however, unlike psychological models of prejudice, racism and discrimination that focus strictly on internal and psychodynamic processes within the individual, rgct is a social-psychological model that emphasizes the individual’s absorption of cultural and ideological norms and the larger social context. as such, rgct proposes that relations between particular groups are based not only on reactions to the immediate conflict between group members but also by the history of interactions between the groups (jackson, ). rgct is a fairly straightforward theory asserting that intergroup discrimination and prejudice result from groups being locked in competition over either real or symbolic figure . theoretical model offense harm felony conviction applicant race moralism poor character desirability j_id: ijcma art no: . /ijcma- - - date: -august- page: total pages: /color figure(s) arttype="research id: akash.bhosle time: : i path: //mbnas .cadmus.com/home$/akash.bhosle$/em-ijcm resources that are in limited supply (jackson, ; sidanius and pratto, ). the theory states that intergroup hostility is produced by the existence of conflicting goals (i.e. competition). for example, potential immigration host participants are more reluctant to help immigrants when they believe their own economic and power gains might be jeopardized by potential economic and power gains by the immigrants (jackson and essess, ). in this sense, it assumes that groups view these conflicts as a zero-sum game; that is, one group’s gain is another group’s loss. this translates into perceptions of group threat which, in turn, cause prejudice and discrimination against the outgroup (campbell, ). rgct is supported by a large body of research, across many different fields, using both surveys as well as field and lab experiments (bobo, ; sherif et al., ; sidanius and pratto, ). it has been brought into the management literature (brief et al., ) to study racial diversity and work relationships but, as noted by brief et al. ( , p. ), rgct is still “underattended to by organizational scholars (at least in recent years)”. since its inception, there has been remarkably little extension to the theory. the basic theory explains the reaction of group members to real competition over scarce resources (bobo, ; fiske and ruscher, ; jackson, ; sidanius and pratto, ). one area where there is debate among rgct researchers is whether the ingroup (often, whites) attitudes toward outgroup members (often, blacks) are based primarily on prejudice, discrimination and racism or whether they are based primarily on self-interest (bobo, ; kinder and sears, ). in the present study, we intend to extend rgct by investigating discriminatory behavior by members of the ingroup when they do not personally benefit via significant tangible benefits. typically, studies of rgct examine situations where a valued tangible or symbolic resource to the respondent’s group is perceived to be threatened by the outgroup. the theory is based on two assumptions: that groups actually exist and have a history of shared identify and fate; and that these groups believe themselves to be in a zero-sum competition with other groups over valued resources (sidanius and pratto, ). we argue that once ingroups and outgroups are created through conflict and develop a shared identity, the intergroup conflict is generalized to settings where the rewards to the outgroup no longer directly deprives the ingroup. rgct studies often involve a white ingroup and a black outgroup and result in discrimination or prejudice against the outgroup. we therefore argue that the negative behavior toward the outgroup exists even when the resource is not tangible, the actor cannot personally benefit in the real world from the resource, and the resource does not rise to the level of important symbolic values represented in prior studies (school busing in the s, bobo, ; brief et al., , p. , for research on symbolic competition). that is, when what is at issue is not so much a scarce and valued resource but only a relatively minor outcome to the respondents (non-managers), but one where different groups are in competition over it (in this case, a hypothetical job). we believe this will provide a more conservative test of rgct by deemphasizing the importance of the scarcity of the resource at stake. social identity theory (tajfel and turner, , ) is prevalent in the literature as the main alternative framework to rgct. as noted by brief et al. ( ), social identity theory is complementary to rgct. it explains ingroup favoritism as based on a general desire for shared positive social identity. as tajfel and turner noted, “[.. .] the theoretical orientation to be outlined here is intended not to replace r.c.t. [rgct], but to supplement it” ( , p. ). in elaborating social identity theory, tajfel and turner ( ) speculated on the effects of hierarchical social structures on intergroup discrimination. for example, they proposed that group conflict is likely to be increased when either group does not accept the legitimacy j_id: ijcma art no: . /ijcma- - - date: -august- page: total pages: /color figure(s) arttype="research id: akash.bhosle time: : i path: //mbnas .cadmus.com/home$/akash.bhosle$/em-ijcm x of their status distinctions (and minimized when both the superior and inferior groups accept the legitimacy of their status distinctions). as noted by brief et al. ( , p. ): thus, it can be seen that realistic group conflict theory and social identity theory truly are complementary, with the latter providing a cognitive explanation of how intergroup conflict can arise (perceived or otherwise) and the former addressing the consequences of this conflict – the focus of attention here. as with brief et al. ( ), we rely primarily upon rgct because this study focuses on the consequences of discrimination against convicted felons based on race. study in study , we investigate whether a prior felony conviction negatively affected black job applicants more than white job applicants when respondents rated applicants’ desirability for a (fictional) job for which they are the hiring manager. based on rgct, we expected white respondents to prefer white applicants with felony convictions over black applicants with an identical resume and felony conviction. as noted earlier, rgct explains ingroup preference for the distribution of limited resources to other ingroup members (over outgroup members) based on preference for one’s ingroup (bobo, ; jackson and essess, ). this is more likely to be the case in situations involving a scarce resource (such as a single job) because the outgroup’s gain is likely to be viewed as the ingroup’s loss. we therefore hypothesize the following: h . a felony conviction decreases applicant desirability. h . when rated by whites, black applicants are less desirable than white applicants with identical qualifications. h . when rated by whites, the effect of a felony conviction is moderated by the applicant’s race such that the reduction in desirability for an applicant with a felony conviction compared to an identical applicant without a felony conviction is larger for black applicants than for white applicants. method participants in total, participants were recruited from amazon mechanical turk (mturk; mason and suri, ; paolacci et al., ) for an experiment in which they would “play the role of a hiring manager in a company and review a job application.” all participants were located in the usa and had a per cent or higher work acceptance rate on mturk. the experiment included three reading comprehension checks to eliminate participants who paid low levels of attention. in all, participants passed those tests[ ]. participants were paid $ . to complete the survey. to test our hypotheses, we retained the participants who self- identified as white as our final sample. in total, ( per cent) of these participants were female. participants’ age ranged from to years, with a mean age of . years (sd = . ). design the experiment employed a (applicant race: black, white) (criminal background check: clean, felony, no check) between-subjects design, resulting in six experimental conditions with approximately - observations per condition. j_id: ijcma art no: . /ijcma- - - date: -august- page: total pages: /color figure(s) arttype="research id: akash.bhosle time: : i path: //mbnas .cadmus.com/home$/akash.bhosle$/em-ijcm procedure participants completed the experiment online (see appendix a for all study materials.) they were asked to imagine that they were managers at a fictitious online university, had posted an advertisement for a market research analyst position and would be reviewing an application for the position. participants subsequently read a -word job description and answered two reading comprehension questions related to the job description. participants then viewed a list of job applicants, read that they would rate the application of one of them and completed the applicant race manipulation described below. next, they were presented with the job description again, a -word applicant resume, the criminal background check manipulation (described below), and a measure of applicant desirability (also described below). these elements were presented in a single web page so that participants could refer to the job description, resume and background check information when completing the measure of applicant desirability. no information about applicant race was available on this page and participants were not able to navigate back to previous pages. finally, participants provided a free-text explanation of their impression of the applicant, completed manipulation checks (applicant sex, race and years of experience) and completed a comprehension check. as aforementioned, those who failed to remember whether a criminal background check had been run and, if so, whether the results indicated a criminal conviction, were excused from the experiment. participants concluded by providing demographic information. applicant race manipulation the applicant’s race was manipulated by displaying a photo of the applicant. first, a list of three applicants with names and photos of their faces was displayed. participants were informed that they would review the job application of one person from the list. the first photo was of a white female. the second two photos were of a black male and a white male. note that this display creates competition between the white (ingroup) applicants and the black (outgroup) participant for a single job, which should trigger ingroup bias as described by rgct. the photos of the males were matched in attractiveness based upon the results of a previous pilot study conducted on mturk with participants. matching business attire was visible in both photos. the photos used in the study are available from the authors. in the black applicant condition, the photo of the black male was displayed at the bottom of the list and the photo of the white male was displayed in the middle position. in the white applicant condition, the order of the photos of the male applicants was reversed. the applicant name and job application information were identical in both conditions. on the next page of the experiment, participants were told that they would review the application of the displayed applicant and the photo of the black or white male was presented. if the participant viewed this page for more than . s, the experiment auto- advanced to the next page. we based our decision to limit participants to . s on ho et al. ( ) who reported that this limited time allowed automatic processing of decisions involving racial stereotypes. no racial cues were present in the remainder of the experiment and participants were not able to view previous pages. criminal background manipulation the criminal background check results were manipulated in the job application. in the clean check condition, participants were told that a criminal background check found no record of any criminal convictions. in the felony conviction condition, participants were told that a criminal background check found one felony conviction for possession of a controlled j_id: ijcma art no: . /ijcma- - - date: -august- page: total pages: /color figure(s) arttype="research id: akash.bhosle time: : i path: //mbnas .cadmus.com/home$/akash.bhosle$/em-ijcm x substance with intent to distribute. the applicant had been sentenced to months in federal prison, three years of probation and a $ , fine. the date of the conviction was such that the applicant would have been released from prison within the current year. in the no-check condition, no information regarding a criminal background check was presented. all other job application information was identical in all three conditions. the employment dates in the resume did not include months, so that they could remain the same in all three conditions. dependent measure four items measured job applicant desirability. the items were, “how likely would you be to interview this applicant for a job?”, “overall, do you agree with the statement, ‘this applicant is well suited for the job’?”, “does this applicant meet your criteria for someone who should get an offer for this job?”, and “overall, do you agree with the statement, ‘this applicant’s strengths outweigh his weaknesses’?”. responses were recorded on a seven- point scale of increasing desirability. the scale was uni-dimensional with good internal consistency (a = . ). results and discussion t table i shows the mean applicant desirability in each of the six experimental conditions. the results were analyzed using a between-subjects analysis of variance. the analysis shows no main effect of applicant race on applicant desirability (m = . and . for white and black applicants, respectively (f( , ) = . , p = . , h = . ), rejecting h . there was, however, a significant main effect of criminal background check condition (f( , ) = . , p < . , h = . ). orthogonal planned contrasts found that the applicant with a clean check (m = . , sd = . ) was more desirable than the applicant with no check (m = . , sd = . , p < . ) regardless of race and that these two applicants were more desirable than the applicant with a felony conviction (m = . , sd = . , p < . ). this result supports h . finally, the interaction between applicant race and criminal background check on applicant desirability was significant, f( , ) = . , p < . , h = . . consistent with h , the black applicant suffered a larger decrease in desirability than the white applicant when a background check showed a felony conviction. overall, we find that applicants with a prior felony conviction are rated as less desirable by white respondents. we report no main effect of race on rating of job applicants. this is likely due to socially desirable answering (supphellen et al., ). there is, however, a significant interaction of applicant race and criminal background check results. black applicants are penalized more (rated as significantly less desirable) for having a prior felony condition n desirability sd black, clean check . . black, no check . . black, felony conviction . . white, clean check . . white, no check . . white, felony conviction . . note: desirability was recorded on a seven-point scale with higher scores indicating higher desirability table i. study . mean applicant desirability in each condition id: akash.bhosle time: : i path: //mbnas .cadmus.com/home$/akash.bhosle$/em-ijcm j_id: ijcma art no: . /ijcma- - - date: -august- page: total pages: /color figure(s) arttype="researc conviction than are white applicants. this interaction is consistent with observations that direct and obvious effects (like the main effect of race) are more sensitive to social desirable answering than complex effects (such as interactions). study study did not measure mechanisms to better understand why respondents judge certain applicants as more desirable than others. study was designed to address this question, by considering the mechanisms that lead white hiring managers to rate job applications from an ingroup (white) candidate more favorably than applications from an outgroup (black) candidate when both have a felony conviction. there has been little research on ingroup bias that attempts to better understand the specific psychological mechanisms that allow ingroup members to justify differential treatment of outgroup members. one exception, bobo ( ), explored reasons whites opposed school busing. he reported that whites opposed to busing were not more likely to display prejudice or intolerance to blacks, per se, but instead perceived busing as threatening important values (kinder and sears, , for a counter argument). we believe that rgct would benefit from additional investigation of the mechanisms that create discriminatory behavior, particularly when these mechanisms involve subtle differences in the differential treatment between the races. to identify potential mechanisms, we began by focusing on justifications for treating minority applicants with felony convictions differently than white applicants with clean backgrounds. as rgct has little to say as to the mechanisms of how members of an ingroup differentially treat outgroup members, we relied on the work of legal scholar joel feinberg ( - ) who developed a typology of reasons that governments punish lawbreakers. broadly speaking, these can be viewed as moral (something is inherently immoral or offensive) or pecuniary (protection against harm). feinberg was a political and legal philosopher whose seminal work, the four-volume the moral limits of the criminal law ( - ), addressed the question of what criminal conduct the state should punish. feinberg famously expanded the justification for state- sanctioned criminal punishment beyond the accepted standard at the time that only punishment intended to address harm to others can be morally punished (mill, ). in a famous thought experiment, feinberg ( ) invites readers to an imaginary “ride on the bus” in which the observer experiences a series of harmless but increasingly offensive behaviors from others (e.g. scratching nails on slate, burning of the flag, public sex) to make the argument that some conduct is so offensive to reasonable people as to warrant state- sanctioned punishment. as part of his justification, feinberg rejected the assumption of psychological egoism that individuals only pursue self-interest, arguing that punishment should transcend just harm to self because humans are interested in more than narrow self- interest (feinberg, ). we adopt this perspective, widely viewed nowadays as “magisterial” (jamieson, , p. ), to extend rgct in part because it is consistent with our view that rgct triggers negative reactions of ingroup members to outgroup members for reasons beyond self-interest. moreover, we extend this perspective to the work environment. we argue that some organizational managers choose to compound the adverse treatment that former felons have already received by deciding to not hire them. such hiring managers may view the non- hiring of former felons as an extension of a complex network of societal punishment and, as evolutionary biologists argue, act on a cultural and genetic predisposition to punish cheaters because they represent a threat to social cohesion (barkow et al., ; cosmides and tooby, ; hoffman, ). managers may also see former felons as potentially dangerous to the success of their organization and view non-hiring as a way to protect against this harm. id: akash.bhosle time: : i path: //mbnas .cadmus.com/home$/akash.bhosle$/em-ijcm j_id: ijcma art no: . /ijcma- - - date: -august- page: total pages: /color figure(s) arttype="researc because feinberg’s typology has not been empirically tested previously, we surveyed us adults online, soliciting (free-text) reasons for why they would be hesitant to hire job applicants with a felony conviction. the goal for this survey was twofold. first, we wanted to verify that feinberg’s categories corresponded to self-reported reactions to job applicants with felony convictions. this was indeed the case. the majority of the reasons given to not hire former felons were pecuniary, but moral reasons, especially related to taking offense to working with a criminal, were identified as well. second, we hoped to discover whether people reported reasons beyond those proposed by feinberg. we found one such category: concerns about poor character (e.g. propensity to violence, theft and unreliable behavior) were raised by many of the survey respondents. overall, we identified four reasons why hiring managers may consider applications from former felons inferior to those from candidates with clean criminal backgrounds. harm is judgment that the applicant might harm the organization or the people in it. this could involve financial or reputation damage to the organization, as well as physical or psychological harm to other organizational members. this corresponds to feinberg’s ( ) category of “harm to others”. survey respondents indicated such concerns with comments like, “there could be financial risk to my company,” and “if people found out, it could tarnish the reputation of my company.” offense is the judgment that other organizational members may be offended by hiring the applicant or being forced to work with him or her. this corresponds to feinberg’s ( ) “offense principle” and was revealed on the survey with objections such as, “it could cause problems with other employees.” poor character includes concerns about the applicant’s character. although this does not directly correspond to any of feinberg’s ( ) categories, it was revealed with survey comments such as “they may be less trustworthy in general.” finally, moralism consists of moral concerns on the part of the hiring manager about hiring the applicants. this corresponds to feinberg’s ( ) “legal moralism” and was revealed on the survey with comments such as, “i might not like what they did.” note that offense is related to the concerns of other organizational members while moralism is related to personal concerns. rgct (and the results of study ) suggest that these reasons are used differentially – for whites and minorities – with white hiring managers more likely to find minorities with felony convictions offensive to others, likely to cause harm, low in character and immoral as compared with whites with identical felony convictions. study is therefore designed to test the following thypotheses: h . when rated by whites, applicant race moderates the effect of felony conviction on four reasons to not hire an applicant: (a) harm, (b) offense, (c) poor character and (d) moralism, so that the difference in the rating for black applicants with and without a felony conviction is larger than the difference in ratings for white applicants with and without a felony conviction. method participants in total, adult participants were recruited from mturk for a task in which they were told they would, “review a job application and answer questions about why you would or would not hire the candidate.” twenty-one participants withdrew before completing the survey. the experiment included the same three comprehension checks as study and two attention check questions to eliminate participants who read or answered carelessly. the participants who failed to answer all of these questions correctly were removed from the analysis. the experiment was successfully completed by participants of whom id: akash.bhosle time: : i path: //mbnas .cadmus.com/home$/akash.bhosle$/em-ijcm j_id: ijcma art no: . /ijcma- - - date: -august- page: total pages: /color figure(s) arttype="researc x ( per cent) were female. they were paid $ . to complete the experiment. their age ranged from to years with a mean of . (sd = . ). to test our hypotheses, we retained the participants who self-identified as white as our final sample. design the experiment employed a (applicant race: black, white) (criminal background check: clean, felony) between-subjects design, resulting in four experimental conditions with - observations per condition. procedure participants completed the experiment online. they read the scenario and job description used in study , answered simple comprehension check questions and then reviewed a job application including a resume and criminal background check. the resume was similar to that used in study . participants then completed measures of reasons why they would be willing or unwilling to hire the applicant (see measures section below). they concluded by completing a manipulation check and a short demographic survey. applicant race manipulation we manipulated applicant race through the photo and last name on the resume. the resume was described to participants as, “the applicant’s online resume from linkedin.com” and was formatted similarly to those on this well-known professional networking website. most importantly for this experiment, linkedin.com resumes prominently display a photo of the applicant. we used the same applicant photos as in study . in addition, in the black applicant condition, the candidate’s last name was washington. in the white applicant condition, the last name was walsh. these names were chosen because they were used predominantly by people self-identifying as black and white, respectively, in the us census (usa census bureau, ). to check that participants could recall the manipulation at the end of the experiment, they answered the item, “what was the applicant’s race?” the possible answers were african american/black, asian, hispanic, white and “i don’t remember”. in the black applicant condition, of ( per cent) of the participants recalled the race correctly. in the white applicant condition, of ( per cent) recalled it properly. criminal background manipulation the manipulations for the felony conviction and clean background check conditions were the same as in study . the no-check condition was not used. we removed from the analysis the six participants who did not recall whether the participant had been convicted of a felony (through one of the comprehension check questions discussed earlier) because this information was stated explicitly. measures we measured four variables reflecting reasons why hiring managers may consider applications from former felons inferior to those from candidates with clean criminal backgrounds: harm, offense, poor character and moralism. responses were recorded on a seven-point likert scale with higher scores indicating higher agreement. we developed three-item measures for each of these variable. see appendix b for the full scale. the variables, as well as the items that measure them, were extracted and developed from the two sources discussed above: feinberg ( ) and the qualitative study of id: akash.bhosle time: : i path: //mbnas .cadmus.com/home$/akash.bhosle$/em-ijcm j_id: ijcma art no: . /ijcma- - - date: -august- page: total pages: /color figure(s) arttype="researc x participants who were asked to list three to five reasons why they would not be willing to hire a job applicant of unspecified race with an unspecified felony conviction. the initial scale had three to seven items in each variable measure. we then ran a trial of these items (n = ). participants in the trial were asked to rate how much they agreed that each item was a reason to not hire an applicant with a felony conviction. a confirmatory factor analysis was used to identify items to either eliminate or reword. finally, we repeated the process (n = ) to test the revised version. although the chi-square test of fit of the final model is significant, the remaining fit statistics indicate acceptable fit for the participants of study (x = . , df = , p < . ; cfi = . , tli = . , rmsea = . , srmr = . ; hu and bentler, ; mathieu et al., ). we also created an overall reasons not to hire variable by averaging the four scales. this was justified because adding a higher-level factor to the cfa retained similar fit (x = . , df = , p < . ; cfi = . , tli = . , rmsea = . , srmr = . ). results and discussion table ii presents the mean values of all the reasons to not hire in each of the four experimental conditions. the results were analyzed using a between-subjects analysis of variance. recall from study that discrimination against a black applicant with a felony conviction resulted in a significant interaction between the background check and the race of the applicant. we found that black applicants were penalized more for a felony conviction than white applicants with the same conviction. we tested a similar interaction here. the test of the interaction between applicant race and criminal background check is reported in table ii. consistent with our prediction of discrimination, the black applicant suffered a larger increase in the rating of two of the four reasons to not hire (harm, poor character) when a background check showed a felony conviction compared to the white applicant. the two other reasons, moralism and offense, showed an effect in the predicted direction but fell short of significance. the overall reasons not to hire variable also exhibited the significant interaction. to the extent that these reasons contribute to reducing an applicant’s overall desirability, we can conclude that black applicants with a felony conviction are discriminated against in hiring, mainly because they are expected to cause more harm to the organization and to be of a poor character. condition n harm poor character offense moralism overall black, clean . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) black, felony conviction . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) white, clean . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) white, felony conviction . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) . ( . ) f . . . . . p . . . . . h . . . . . table ii. study . mean endorsement of notes: sd in parentheses. f statistic is for testing the interaction between applicant race and criminal background check condition, df = ( , ) for all comparisons. responses were recorded on a seven-point likert scale with higher scores indicating higher agreement reasons to not hire the applicant in each condition id: akash.bhosle time: : i path: //mbnas .cadmus.com/home$/akash.bhosle$/em-ijcm j_id: ijcma art no: . /ijcma- - - date: -august- page: total pages: /color figure(s) arttype="researc general discussion major findings in study , we report an interaction between applicant race and criminal record on rated applicant desirability. while we document a decrease in desirability for all applicants with a felony conviction, consistent with our prediction of discrimination, the black applicant suffered a larger decrease in desirability than the white applicant when a background check showed a felony conviction. thus, in this study, we confirmed that black job applicants with felony records do indeed have a more burdensome obstacle than comparable white applicants. study investigates the mechanisms by which a felony conviction affects the rating of reasons not to hire applicants with a felony conviction. it also investigated whether race moderates the effect of a felony conviction on ratings of reasons not to hire applicants. consistent with our prediction of discrimination, the black applicant (as compared to a white applicant) suffered a larger increase in two of the four reasons (harm and poor character) not to hire the applicant when a background check showed a felony conviction. figure presents the full model tested in both studies. theoretical implications rgct states that when members of an ingroup perceive a threat of loss to a scarce and valued resource, they increase their prejudice and adverse behavior directed toward an outgroup (esses et al., ). our study suggests that these differential effects of outgroup vices or ingroup virtues are evident even when the resource at stake is not a tangible resource that a group member can personally benefit from or an important group value, i.e. the preference for ingroup members exists even when what is at stake is a symbolic resource (in this case, a job which respondents knew did not really exist). moreover, this preference for ingroup members exists even when among a pool of job applicants with generally “undesirable” job qualifications (i.e. felony convictions). this speaks to the robustness of the preference for ingroup members even when the resource involved is not very substantial. future research may explore this further to determine the limits of this effect and to investigate whether the preference involves an exaggeration of outgroup vices or of ingroup virtues. campbell ( , p. ) also proposed that intergroup conflict increases as the conflicting groups have more in tangible gains at risk and that this in turn leads to a “magnification of outgroup vices” and also “exaggeration of ingroup virtues.” our study extends rgct by investigating the mechanisms by which white respondents rationalize their preference for ingroup members. it suggests that the reasons not to hire differ by the race of the applicant with white respondents reporting that black applicants with felony convictions are more likely to be discriminated against because they are expected to cause more harm to the organization and to be of poorer character. the other two reasons, moralism and offense to others, showed an effect in the right direction that fell short of significance. these results suggest that ingroup members do indeed emphasize the “magnification of outgroup vices.” future research may further explore this relative preference for exaggeration of outgroup vices or of ingroup virtues. a related question is whether the effects we found also exist with other minority groups (e.g. hispanics) or whether they are isolated to blacks. it is possible that recent social movements, like black lives matter, make whites both more publicly guarded in their expression of bias but more likely to activate them unconsciously. it is unclear whether the same effect will occur with hispanics, with a less visible social movement. a related question is whether the results of this study would also hold if the raters were something other than whites. as noted, rgct requires that the group members have a sense of shared id: akash.bhosle time: : i path: //mbnas .cadmus.com/home$/akash.bhosle$/em-ijcm j_id: ijcma art no: . /ijcma- - - date: -august- page: total pages: /color figure(s) arttype="researc identify and fate. prior research states that minorities (such as blacks) have, perhaps, even more of a sense of shared identify and fate. therefore, it would seem to follow that minority raters would have at least as strong a preference for other minority applicants over non- minority applicants. practical implications this research has several implications for practice. first, organizations should be keenly aware of the potential for subtle and unconscious bias to affect the job application process even among well-intentioned hiring managers. organizations should consider job training programs that extensively review the possibility of a double hurdle for minority job applicants with felony backgrounds, i.e. the criminal background as well any possible stereotypes that are triggered. second, as the bias is often triggered by threats, organizations should share with their employees the nature of the threat involved with former felons. as noted earlier in the paper, former felons constitute a much larger proportion of the working population than most people general assume. they are the great unseen in the workplace and general population. most are non-violent but the unaddressed stereotype of a convicted felon is powerful and, if left unaddressed, can result in overt or covert fear that, in turn, can help trigger a plethora of stereotypes. finally, organizations should deliberately address issues associated with the use of criminal background checks on all applicants. for many organizations, the existence of a felony conviction (or, indeed, of any criminal conviction) in an applicant’s background automatically eliminates that person from employment. however, as noted earlier, a substantial amount of the workforce now has a felony in their background. this serves as a modern-day scarlett letter ostracizing the former felon. as one former felon told the first author, “i committed a drug crime years ago and was released from prison years ago. when can i leave that behind?” indeed, the eeoc ( ) has issued guidelines that detail important factors that organizations should consider on a case-by-case basis when considering employment for former felons. these factors include the nature and gravity of the offense, how much time has passed since the offense or completion of the sentence, and the nature of the job sought. organizations may consider updating any blanket exclusions regarding the hiring of ex-felons – not just because it makes good policy, not only because it may be the moral thing to do but also because it may help the organization hire the best people. limitations and further research questions the main limitation of our methodology is that we used fictional candidates and jobs, and this was known to the study participants. we have traded off realism in return for tight control over the information the participants receive, and ability to manipulate only the race and record of the applicant, without confounding other factors that could affect desirability. this may have led to understating the effects of discrimination on minorities because it allowed applicants to answer in socially desirable ways (e.g. absent of racial bias) without suffering any of the anticipated negative consequences of actually hiring individuals about whom they hold negative stereotypes. in fact, study found no effect of racial discrimination among job candidates when no criminal background check information was presented, despite widely documented racial effects in hiring. this suggests that discrimination against minorities with felony convictions may be higher than reported here. we therefore suggest that our findings should be evaluated within the context of the other empirical audit studies reviewed in the introduction. further research should attempt to identify the interaction between a criminal background and race in a field experiment, with real jobs. id: akash.bhosle time: : i path: //mbnas .cadmus.com/home$/akash.bhosle$/em-ijcm j_id: ijcma art no: . /ijcma- - - date: -august- page: total pages: /color figure(s) arttype="researc our studies referenced only male job candidates who were either black or white. further research is required to test whether the same results hold for women candidates and minorities from other ethnic or racial groups. we selected black males as the focus minority group in our studies because they are the most incarcerated group in the usa and, hence, have the most to lose from the discrimination we describe. whether black women and members of other minority groups (e.g. hispanics) suffer similar discrimination is an open research question. it is possible that recent social movements, like black lives matter, make whites more publicly guarded in their expression of bias but more likely to activate unconscious bias. this may not occur with hispanic job applicants, with a less visible social movement. finally, in our two experiments, the candidates had been convicted of drug distribution. future research should examine variance in racial discrimination by type of crime. are certain crimes more associated by the public with whites versus blacks (e.g. perhaps tax evasion vs drug crimes) and is the reaction of hiring managers to applicants with stereotyping-triggering crimes affected by the type of crime? for example, would the reaction of a hiring manager to a black applicant convicted of tax evasion differ from that of a white applicant convicted of the same? or, would the reaction differ for a black applicant convicted of a drug crime as opposed to tax evasion? there are reasons to think that the reaction may be harsher for a black applicant convicted of a crime more associated with the stereotype of a black felon. that is, attribution theory might suggest that external attributions might cause managers to more likely excuse a person from a crime not typically associated with that group. conversely, the hiring manager is more likely to attribute internal attributions – and less likely to excuse – a person from a crime typically associated with that group (ababneh et al., ; ployhart and ryan, ). conclusion in this study, we investigated whether minorities (here, blacks) with felony convictions in their backgrounds were less likely to be hired for jobs than whites with identical credentials. in two studies, we established this to be the case. moreover, the conservative measures and experimental methods provide a high degree of confidence in the results. relying on rgct and legal theory of punishments (feinberg, ), we proposed and found that members of the white ingroup rationalize this discrimination by perceiving black felony applicants as having poorer character and being more likely to cause organizational harm. we also discussed the theoretical and practical implications of this study, as well as calling for further research in related areas. notes . a prison record is considered a “felony” when one is sentenced to a crime punishable by one or more years in prison. . we believe the relatively high failure rate is due to comprehension checks that required recalling the content of text read on the previous page. the checks, along with the number of participants who failed each, are presented in appendix a. . references ababneh, k.i., hackett, r.d. and schat, a.c. 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( ), “expected practices in background checking: review of the human resource management literature”, employee responsibilities and rights journal, vol. no. , pp. - . mason, w. and suri, s. ( ), “conducting behavioral research on amazon’s mechanical turk”, behavior research methods, vol. no. , pp. - . mathieu, j.e., gilson, l.l. and ruddy, t.m. ( ), “empowerment and team effectiveness: an empirical test of an integrated model”, the journal of applied psychology, vol. no. , pp. - . mill, j.s. ( ), on liberty, nd ed., john w. parker and son, london. pager, d. ( ), “the mark of a criminal record”, american journal of sociology, vol. no. , pp. - . pager, d. ( ), marked: race, crime, and finding work in an era of mass incarceration, university of chicago press, chicago, il. pager, d., western, b. and sugie, n. ( ), “sequencing disadvantage: barriers to employment facing young black and white men with criminal records”, annals of the american academy of political and social sciences, vol. no. , pp. - . paolacci, g., chandler, j. and ipeirotis, p.g. ( ), “running experiments on amazon mechanical turk”, judgment and decision making, vol. no. , pp. - . pastore, a.l. and maguire, k. (eds) ( ), “sourcebook of criminal justice statistics”, table . . and table . . , available at: www.albany.edu/sourcebook/pdf/t .pdf and www. albany.edu/sourcebook/pdf/t .pdf (accessed june ). ployhart, r.e. and ryan, a.m. ( ), “toward an explanation of applicant reactions: an examination of organizational justice and attribution frameworks”, organizational behavior and human decision processes, vol. no. , pp. - . http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/pdf/t .pdf http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/pdf/t .pdf http://www.albany.edu/sourcebook/pdf/t .pdf id: akash.bhosle time: : i path: //mbnas .cadmus.com/home$/akash.bhosle$/em-ijcm j_id: ijcma art no: . /ijcma- - - date: -august- page: total pages: /color figure(s) arttype="researc schmitt, j. and warner, k. ( ), ex-offenders and the labor market, center for economic research, washington, dc, available at: www.cepr.net/documents/publications/ex-offenders- - .pdf (accessed june ). sherif, m., harvey, o.j., white, b.j., hood, w.r. and sherif, c. ( ), intergroup conflict and cooperation: the robbers’ cave experiment, institute of group relations, university of ok, norman, ok. sidanius, j. and pratto, f. ( ), social dominance: an intergroup theory of social hierarchy and oppression, cambridge university press, cambridge. simonson, j. ( ), “rethinking ‘rational discrimination’ against ex-offenders”, georgetown journal on poverty law and policy, vol. no. , pp. - . stoll, m. ( ), “ex-offenders, criminal background checks, and racial consequences in the labor market”, the university of chicago legal forum, vol. no. , pp. - . supphellen, m., kvitastein, o. and johansen, s. ( ), “projective questioning and ethnic discrimination: a procedure for measuring employer bias”, public opinion quarterly, vol. no. , special issue on race, pp. - . tajfel, h. and turner, j.c. ( ), “the social identify theory of intergroup behavior”, in worchel s. and austin w.g. (eds), psychology of intergroup relations, nelson-hall, chicago, il, pp. - . tajfel, h., turner, j.c., ( ), “an integrative theory of intergroup conflict”, in austin w g. and worchel s. (eds), the social psychology of intergroup relations, brooks/cole, monterey, ca, reprinted in hogg, m.a. and abrams, d. ( ), intergroup relations, psychology press, new york, ny, pp. - . united states census bureau ( ), “frequently occurring surnames from the census , file a: top names”, data set available at: www.census.gov/topics/population/genealogy/data/ _surnames.html (accessed june ). further reading bjs ( ), “bureau of justice statistics, strategic plan fy - ”, available at: www.bjs.gov/ content/pub/pdf/bjssp .pdf (accessed june ). corresponding author barry goldman can be contacted at: bgoldman@eller.arizona.edu appendix a this appendix contains materials used in study . a. experiment scenario in this experiment, imagine that you are a hiring manager at lanover university, a large and growing private online university. as part of your work, you posted a job description for an open position. it is important to fill this position with a qualified candidate. until you do so, everyone on the team (including you) has more work than they can effectively handle in the work week. on the other hand, if you make a hiring mistake, things will get even worse for the team. in this experiment, you will review and rate an application for the position. a. job description market research analyst position summary. the primary focus of the market research analyst is to execute market research projects under the direction of the lead market research analyst. http://www.cepr.net/documents/publications/ex-offenders- - .pdf http://www.census.gov/topics/population/genealogy/data/ _surnames.html http://www.census.gov/topics/population/genealogy/data/ _surnames.html http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/bjssp .pdf http://www.bjs.gov/content/pub/pdf/bjssp .pdf mailto:bgoldman@eller.arizona.edu id: akash.bhosle time: : i path: //mbnas .cadmus.com/home$/akash.bhosle$/em-ijcm j_id: ijcma art no: . /ijcma- - - date: -august- page: total pages: /color figure(s) arttype="researc responsibilities. • identify market research solutions to business problems; • design, execute and present market research projects; and • be a knowledgeable resource and consultant for internal clients about market research. required qualifications. • þ years’ experience in designing, developing and executing market research projects; • knowledge and experience using statistical software; and • bachelor degree in related field. required competencies. • ability to think strategically and encourage strategic dialogue; • understand principles of marketing; • strong written and verbal communication skills; and • strong organizational, project management and interpersonal skills. a. applicant resume james smith market research professional. summary market research professional dedicated to providing outstanding results to internal and external clients. experience market research analyst. jb foods -present ( year). food industry market research analyst for gourmet brand. • contributor advertising impact study for a new product. – designed and executed market research, including data analysis with statistical software. – provided actionable recommendations to marketing team. • assisted in product market forecasting. – provided key insights/trends from secondary data reports. – measured impact of new competition in the smoked meats market. market research analyst university of alabama - ( years). research analyst for alumni office. • responsible for creating surveys to support development of new alumni services. • created research reports from survey results. • coded survey responses, conducted focus groups, and developed market data collection campaigns. id: akash.bhosle time: : i path: //mbnas .cadmus.com/home$/akash.bhosle$/em-ijcm j_id: ijcma art no: . /ijcma- - - date: -august- page: total pages: /color figure(s) arttype="researc education university of alabama. ba, communication. . a. comprehension checks two multiple-choice comprehension checks were displayed after participants read the description of their role and the job description. the choices are in parentheses following each question and the correct answer is in italics:. • you are playing the part of a hiring manager at which of the following? (an advertising agency, an online university, a pharmaceutical company, a trucking company, a restaurant chain) • what is the title of the job? (university instructor, chemist (senior), market research analyst, adverstising analyst, hr director) one or both of these checks were failed by participants. these participants were excused from the experiment. the final comprehension check was displayed after participants read the job application and rated the job applicant: • what were the results of the applicant’s criminal background check? (no information about a criminal background check was provided, the criminal background check found a felony conviction, the criminal background check did not find any convictions) this check was failed by participants who were excused from the experiment. appendix b this appendix includes the measures of mediators used in study . responses were recorded on a seven-point likert scale. the scale names (e.g. harm) were not displayed to participants. harm the sentences below state possible reasons why hiring this person might harm the organization or the people in it. please indicate how much you agree or disagree that each statement is a reason to not hire this person: • he may cause serious harm or injury to the interests of the organization or its employees. • he may commit a criminal offense at work. • he is likely to hurt the reputation of the organization. poor character the sentences below state possible concerns about this person’s character. please indicate how much you agree or disagree that each statement is a reason to not hire this person: • he is likely to be unreliable. • he is likely to be untrustworthy. • he is likely to be dishonest. id: akash.bhosle time: : i path: //mbnas .cadmus.com/home$/akash.bhosle$/em-ijcm j_id: ijcma art no: . /ijcma- - - date: -august- page: total pages: /color figure(s) arttype="researc offense the sentences below state possible reasons why other people in the organization might be offended by hiring this person. please indicate how much you agree or disagree that each statement is a reason to not hire this person: • he may seriously offend other employees, even if he does not actually harm them. • i think most people in the organization would be offended if we employed him. • it would bother my coworkers to know our organization would hire this kind of person. moralism the sentences below state possible moral concerns about hiring this person. please indicate how much you agree or disagree that each statement is a reason to not hire this person: • to me, he would be a morally inappropriate representative of the organization’s values. • i believe it is morally incorrect to hire this person. • i would be uncomfortable around him because his morals are low. 	crime and punishment 	ijcma 	crime and punishment 	ijcma 	crime and punishment 	ijcma 	crime and punishment 	crime and punishment 	ijcma 	crime and punishment 	crime and punishment 	ijcma 	crime and punishment 	crime and punishment 	crime and punishment 	ijcma autopoiesis | ethopoiesis: bioconvergent media in the age of neoliberal biopolitics mediatropes ejournal vol v, no ( ): – issn - www.mediatropes.com autopoiesis | ethopoiesis: bioconvergent media in the age of neoliberal biopolitics stuart j. murray & deborah lynn steinberg introduction we are delighted to present the second part of our double issue of mediatropes devoted to the theme of bioconvergence. together, the two issues gather eleven contributions that variously address bioconvergence in two interlinked respects: on the one hand, as a phenomenon that has progressively and pervasively infiltrated the social field across a multitude of arenas; and, at the same time, as a critical theoretical frame—that is, as a means to describe and to interpret the convergence of media, technologies, and bodies across such representative sites as biomedicine, genomics, contemporary warfare, securitization, economics, informatics, entertainment, law, gender, and race. the remit for contributions was to present a case study that might offer readers a salient instance of bioconvergence and provide an occasion to develop the concept itself as a critical-analytic tool for further research. we asked authors to treat bioconvergence as a generative problem, at once sociological, political, and technological. as editors, we suggested as a starting point that bioconvergence has become, at one and the same time, a pervasive set of social relations and a sedimented media trope and cultural referent. thus, we see in the mediatized imaginary that biology, the natural environment, and human life are subjects of—and inescapably subject to—a technological telos. we proposed, moreover, that media representations provide a key site of cultural seduction and projective phantasy for processes of bioconvergent life, where technologies and bodies are, in their own right, mediated and mediating. even dystopian visions tend to understand such convergence as inevitable, if not desirable. media representations are, then, more than mimetic re-presentations of reality; if this view is by now commonsense, exactly how real bodies vol. can be accessed: http://www.mediatropes.com/index.php/mediatropes/issue/view/ . mediatropes vol v, no ( ) s.j. murray & d.l. steinberg www.mediatropes.com converge across media and technologies in the narcotizing spectacles of neoliberalism is not a matter of common sense. each of the contributions that resulted engages in critical social descriptions of convergent media, technologies, and bodies as these are variously deployed and coalesce—in and as contemporary conceptions of bios, or life. they also demonstrate the interdisciplinary convergence of theories and methodologies, much as sandra harding describes the convergence of postcolonial and feminist philosophies of science and technology. in both postcolonial and feminist approaches, harding ( ) argues, “the perspectives and interests of their particular constituencies are not well served by modern western science and technology philosophies, policies, or practices” (p. ). and yet, despite a shared political program, the ways in which these fields might profitably converge “feel[s] scattered and undertheorized” (ibid.). the prevailing conceptual framework of each, she suggests, remains intact, while a convergence and transformation of these frameworks is “necessary to fully engage with the full range of issues and innovative insights of both” (p. ). the two special issues extend this principle beyond postcolonial and feminist science and technology studies to include media and communication studies, cultural studies, rhetoric, law and legal studies, sociology, security studies, health, and so on. these are or have become convergent disciplines in their own right, and a worthwhile dialogue is made possible when each brings situated knowledges, methodological strategies, and theories to bear on a common theme. in sum, the collection offers a novel critical purchase through the lens of convergence, when, for a moment, the conceptual frameworks of these respective disciplines are undisciplined, and we begin to see how they already convey the convergent—and oftentimes covert—“values” of a neoliberal ethic. in particular, this collection of essays extends the helpful critique of convergence developed by james hay and nick couldry ( ) in their special issue of cultural studies, “rethinking convergence/culture.” hay and couldry identify at least four ways that the expression ‘convergence’ has been deployed and its meaning solidified—as a description of new synergy (a ‘horizontal’ realignment) among media companies and industries, as the multiplication of ‘platforms’ for news and information, as a technological hybridity that has folded the uses of separate media into one another (e.g. watching a television broadcast on a cell phone), and as a new media aesthetic involving the mixing of documentary and non- documentary forms. (p. ) mediatropes vol v, no ( ) s.j. murray & d.l. steinberg www.mediatropes.com for our purposes, this approach too narrowly limits what henry jenkins ( ) has described as “convergence culture,” confining convergence to a particular understanding of media as information economy, operating across production, distribution, consumption, and increasingly, “prosumption.” while this work in media and cultural studies is important, and while many of the essays published here undoubtedly contribute to this field of research, the collection also offers a more capacious understanding of media as an aesthetic or mode of governmentality—a “conduct of conduct” in foucault’s terms—that extends beyond the simple mixing of extant media forms. in other words, convergence is more than the sum of its parts: it is a gestalt, a rationality, articulating a sociopolitical imaginary out of (and into) sociopolitical relations. as marshall mcluhan ( ) has remarked, “there is no ceteris paribus in the world of media and technology. every extension or acceleration effects new configurations in the over-all situation at once” (p. ). no ceteris paribus: all things are never equal. in other words, media technologies and innovations change the rules of the game and transform perception itself. in this respect, we sought to explore the convergence of (inter)disciplinary discourses, methodologies, semiotic practices, and theoretical perspectives—a ‘vertical’ as opposed to a ‘horizontal’ realignment, as it were. for these discourses, too, constitute media, which is to say, they too are normative forms that mediate (and remediate) informational “content,” navigate the power and politics of everyday life, and drive cultural production. the special issues cast their sights beyond the relation between media studies and cultural studies, then, to engage divergent disciplines whose traditional self-understanding has not immediately included the study of media and culture. to shift the “convergent” emphasis from a descriptive to a normative valence, seizing on bodies across divergent fields of research, is to refocus on the constitution of “life” through the problematic of bioconvergence. “convergence” is a strange term. it suggests movement, action, dislocation, and perhaps relocation. does it make sense to speak of discrete or static phenomena that are ‘horizontally’ aligned yet somehow converge to produce something new? no doubt we speak of media, technologies, and bodies as if they represented distinct and singular phenomena, as if they were independent epistemological categories, able to be described on their own terms, existing on the same ontological plane. they occupy, more or less comfortably, grammatical subject-positions in our speech, and so seem to possess a kind of linguistic agency and auto-determination. we might say that media elicit particular effects that can be studied; technologies can be put to use to bring about new ways of observing and new bodies of knowledge; and that these bodies can be measured, classified, and variously analyzed. and yet, this mediatropes vol v, no ( ) s.j. murray & d.l. steinberg www.mediatropes.com autonomy is fictive, tropic, a manner of speaking. it belies the ways that power operates in the interstices, below, above, between, and beyond its distinguishable, temporary iterations. for example, if we look to medicine, politics, law, ethics, war, work, education, and entertainment—and the manner in which these converge on and in life—we are dealing with social and cultural formations that are always already convergent across media, technologies, and bodies. certainly, our analyses remain partial: these media, these technologies, these bodies, and these lives are sites of particular discoveries, here or there, and yet they surface for us deeper ways that their convergence might offer a new analytic. analysis of convergent phenomena (as ‘horizontally’ aligned) calls for the resistant convergence of conceptual frameworks and methodologies (as ‘vertical’ or ‘transversal’ forces). bioconvergent thematics internet surveillance has evolved into a shockingly extensive, robust and profitable surveillance architecture. (schneier ) . bioconvergence as social praxis across the collection are a number of overarching themes. the first concerns the scale and reach of bioconvergence as a social praxis. thus we see transformations of economies that take myriad forms: high-frequency trading (nadeson); the biomarkets of stem cells, ova, organs, and blood (happe); and surveillance across end-user gps technologies (military dispositifs), from roboticized warfare (suchman) to digital activism (summerhayes) to crowd- sourced self-defence (beaton) to the cinematic conventions of political paranoia (epstein & steinberg). similarly, we note transformations of political life, of biopolitics itself, in the convergence of media, catastrophe, and medicine (diedrich); in genomic services (kramer); in emergent neurocultural practices (williams, katz, & martin); and in redefinitions of personhood in the modulations of obstetric law (burgess) and in securitization at guantánamo bay detention camp (federman & holmes). to paraphrase the quotation from schneier above, bioconvergent technology has evolved into a shockingly extensive, robust, and profitable social architecture, driven by, but also considerably exceeding, its surveillant dimensions. all of these contexts demonstrate distinctively bioconvergent confluences of digitally-driven technological capacities, (dis)embodied agencies, and neoliberal economies. indeed, even as all of the case studies mediatropes vol v, no ( ) s.j. murray & d.l. steinberg www.mediatropes.com demonstrate the pervasive character of bioconvergent social relations, they also point to the significance of digital capacities, in particular, as primary drivers. digitization has not only facilitated expansive (and expanding) modalities and instantiations of convergence, it has, in so doing, produced a distinctive social ethos, a particular culture of expectation and imaginative investment, and a transversal political economy in which value accrues to and through praxes of acceleration and amplification. emergent in this context are new, and paradoxical, forms of biosociality. for example, the distributed gaze of drone warfare also facilitates the crowd-sourced networks of apps against rape, google earth in darfur, and andme.com. in the state of emergency and the state of terror, both, bioconvergent mediatization produces ungrievable lives and biocitizens alike—the reconstituted muselmänner of guantánamo; the medical casualties of hurricane katrina, articulated along socioeconomic and racialized axes; the de-realized figuration of terri schiavo, neither fully living nor dead; and the hyper-investment of unborn “persons” in the state of kansas. . bioethos: against ethics a second and related thematic arising across the collection concerns what might be termed bioethos. the aristotelian understanding of ethos refers to habit and character. it is, in other words, a concept of culture and social conditions and of their inculcation through the iterative practices of individuals. ethos can be distinguished from ethics, not only for the former’s conventional emphasis on an underlying logic or rationality, but for the latter’s conventional evocation of normative moralities, of principles enforced through regulatory instruments—of law, medicine, or social customs (see: murray & holmes ). (bio)ethics implies systems, dispositifs, and acts that operate to convey and to normalize instantiations of rights or wrongs. taken as a whole, the papers in this collection suggest significant contiguities between ethics and ethos across bioconvergent instantiations. these are, for example, effected through a pervasive expectation of instantaneity—of trade, of communications, of geopositioning, and of bodies themselves as their discrete locations and biometrics become increasingly digitized and networked. a second expectation is characterized by ephemerality—of knowledge as a “cloud,” as the invisible workings of capillary power made manifest, even as end-users, or end-effects, are catapulted into unprecedented focus. a third expectation is ubiquitous visibility—of being measured and monitored, analyzed, and interpellated by the logarithms of big data as potential “prosumers,” where production and consumption become indistinguishable. as both kramer and beaton note, respectively, the seductions of andme.com—to be genomically revealed, diagnosed, and framed by a larger picture—and of apps that track us for fitness, for evidence of crimes against us, and as media that promise social justice and mediatropes vol v, no ( ) s.j. murray & d.l. steinberg www.mediatropes.com the rule of law—become consuming, become the productive economies of biocitizenship and social capital. the paradox of digital deprivatization is that the what’s of surveillance reflexively blur into the who’s. the vantage point of ‘smart’ screens delivers multitudes; it constitutes multiple trajectories, blurring multiple agencies. thus, as federman and holmes suggest, digital mediation means that the enemy-combatant inmates of guantánamo can be repeatedly, pervasively stripped—the eye-objects of multiple publics. bioconvergence does not solve the problem of attenuated function, it amplifies it in multiple, proliferative, ‘vertical’ convergences: in layers of nearly (but not quite) identical ‘smart’ technology, in layers of surveillance, in layers of political economy. it produces space-time triangulations that can stand-in for content, for the face, marking social existence and shepherding its extinction. if the expectations of bioconvergent technologies comprise a broadening frame of cultural value, its apparatus constitutes the means of its assimilation, infinitely iterative, instantaneously purveyed, globalized in reach. herein are two further orders of ethics. the first is what steinberg ( ; forthcoming) elsewhere has referred to as imperatives of action, affect, and will. the second is in the foucauldian sense, as care (see: murray ). there is an urgency to the bioconvergent frame. it is a technology of consent, underwriting conversation, commerce, and crisis alike. it is also a mode and medium of attachment—of grievability and of its obverse, the sphere of social democracy and of trolls. . a specular ecology: the convergent episteme a third overarching theme of the collection concerns the articulation of feeling and knowledge. this refers not only to the conditions of possibility that drive and derive from bioconvergent technologies, but to the conditions of their persuasion. on the one hand are addresses to the liberal human subject. apps, for example, are forged on the twin conceits of individual sovereignty and of ownership. and yet the convergent ecology presumes a distributed agency, a superordinate specular power—to write oneself as a public being, to source oneself in crowds, to aggregate powerfully, to strip from distances without consequence, to conjure capital, to kill in effigy. a second address is to crisis, what might be termed, as suggested by epstein and steinberg, the bourne seduction—vigilance as a heroic stance, as exculpatory, as escape, as a necessary violence. bios and neoliberalism the bios that emerges as a phenomenon of neoliberal bioconvergence, then, tends to take on a life of its own—as if it escaped discourse, existing in an mediatropes vol v, no ( ) s.j. murray & d.l. steinberg www.mediatropes.com ontological kingdom beyond the vagaries of power and politics. and yet this “extra-discursivity” is an effect of convergence, making genealogical critique very difficult, masking a new domain of biopolitical governance that immunizes itself, convergently, from critique. if “life” is produced and constituted through convergent discourses, it is difficult to trace the threads. bodies are scarcely distinguishable from the technologies that sustain them, impossible to represent in any unalloyed sense; media are by nature technological, embodied, and embodying; effects are interchangeably ideological and material, ideational and generative. if “life” seems to us the most immediate and self-evident good, so that we might speak of and in the name of “life itself,” this too is nevertheless a convergent phenomenon, a mode of production, a field of rhetorical address. bioconvergence is a way of hiding or obfuscating vital and lethal powers, making the exercise of political and moral agency all the more attenuated. there are no longer actor-agents but nodes in convergent networks, or actants. in linguistics, an actant is defined as a noun phrase that functions as the agent of a verb—and the metaphor offers a grammar of social worlds. in bruno latour’s ( ) sense, actants are nonhuman entities that act on us, that do something to us, with us, or through us. political and moral agency, the nostalgic domain of the liberal subject, yields to the assemblage. and yet one paradox of neoliberal biopolitics is that while individual agents are dispossessed of their subjectivity and their moral and political agency is dispersed across convergent networks, we nevertheless feel as though our moral and political agency, our subjectivity, our lives, are being respected and fostered. this is the affective-productive ruse of neoliberal biopolitics. we become tied to our identities, and mistake this imprisoning identification for agency as we exercise the illusory and false agency of prosumption, which is driven in part by immersive media, what mcluhan so presciently termed “narcissus narcosis.” the paradoxical effect of neoliberal biopolitics is a heightened sense of individual responsibility—but one that is thoroughly mediatized and regulated, producing the illusion of freedom and democracy, while circumscribing and policing these terms ruthlessly. michel foucault was among the first to note the discursive emergence of “life” as the convergence of sociopolitical discourses, called “biopolitics”: the endeavor, begun in the eighteenth century, to rationalize the problems presented to governmental practice by the phenomena characteristic of a group of living human beings constituted as a population: health, sanitation, birthrate, longevity, race. ( , p. ) mediatropes vol v, no ( ) s.j. murray & d.l. steinberg www.mediatropes.com here, foucault claims that in modernity the “life” of the population increasingly comes to inform the ways that individuals are governed—as collectivities whose very lives and vital well-being are increasingly subject to governmental control, surveillance, regulation, segregation, health and welfare, pro-life policies, and improvement programs, through forecasts, education, and statistical measures, among others. gradually, he claims, individuals are replaced by “biological processes” and individual lives are displaced by “species-life.” this ideology of “life” becomes a public morality, a moral orthopaedics that is soon internalized and perpetuated at the micro-level; as a form of biopower this ideology is invisibly taken up in the ways that individuals come to govern themselves, and live their lives. in recent years, research in the social and human sciences has extended foucualt’s insight and has turned toward the bios. biocapital, biovalue, biobanking, biosociality, biological citizenship, etc., all valuably build on foucault’s theorizing of biopolitics. from this perspective, we can read myriad critical analyses of media, political economy, agribusiness, healthcare, the pharmaceutical industry, the insurance industry, and many others. these discourses are often “convergent”; that is, while studies may be situated in particular domains, they do not presume discrete categories in any strict sense. a robust exploration of each involves the others in complex and interconnected ways. for example, an understanding of health must take into account the production of global identities through globalization, since pharmaceutical research and testing frequently take place in the global south and rely on technologies, networks, and informational and migrational flows that are enabled by global capital and transnational corporate structures. in turn, these relationships—through the inflection of political power, culture, and emergent identities—must themselves be assessed within the context of new digital media, the instantaneous exchange of information, advertising, and the communities that mobilize, often across great distances, to challenge or to exploit these conditions, from local grassroots organizations to the globalizing production of academic knowledge in the service of governmental and corporate knowledge-economy “stakeholders.” certainly, these discussions often contest the meaning of bios or life, whether life is conceived as a natural category, a social production, or whether its “naturalness” is not itself socially and discursively constituted and occluded as “life itself.” in a straightforward sense, then, it would be naïve to see in bioconvergence no more than a sum of tendencies in the ways that media, technologies, and bodies come together. here, we might describe a directionality, a process of incorporation, and intersectionality among and between social bodies, institutions, and technological artefacts conceived at first mediatropes vol v, no ( ) s.j. murray & d.l. steinberg www.mediatropes.com blush as discrete, independent, or even autonomous. one might offer limited genealogies of movements and minglings, or seek to account for emergent properties, where the whole somehow exceeds the sum of its parts. this might take place at the material level of social institutions and events. we might project ourselves into some past in order to track these movements and minglings, genealogically, or we might instead stand as a modest witness to processes currently underway. but the essays gathered in these two issues suggest it is too late for such a naïve analysis. if bioconvergence is a fait accompli, there could be no wholesale return to an understanding of its constitutive parts, even though we might be equipped to trace some of their trajectories. rather, bioconvergence now informs our worldview, and there is no turning back; there is no stable “place” of critique across our fugitive geopositionings. haraway’s cyborg has become quaint, not because it is impossible, but because it is quotidian; the cyborg, too, is a fait accompli, and along with this its revolutionary potential has dissolved. haraway writes: “the cyborg is not subject to foucault’s biopolitics; the cyborg simulates politics, a much more potent field of operations” ( , p. ). this is not quite true: cyborg politics are no longer simulacra—because all politics are cyborg politics, and all political forms simulacric. haraway’s cyborg is no longer the “illegitimate child”; it has become naturalized, adopted, incorporated, and co-opted by the neoliberal economies it once rubbed against. its revolutionary potential has been harnessed and deployed, unwittingly, against itself. the cyborg’s ambiguity is now thoroughly disambiguated; paradoxically, centralized forms of power have supplanted cyborg ambiguity. the cyborg is now a subject of foucault’s biopolitics. indeed, the cyborg—the non-individuated networked “subjectivity” or “dividual”—has become the subject of biopolitics, the realization of a convergent norm through a dispersed agency that is no agent at all. the ambiguity of the cyborg has become incorporated—with all of the inflections of corporate life, entrepreneurialism, and the fictive, compliant, individualism that it produces. we have moved from haraway’s quasi-utopian projection not directly to dystopian fantasies, but to an atopia, a no-place, in which it is now nearly impossible to gain a purchase on the historical present and its relations of power, or to imagine appropriate forms of critique. we do not have a sense of what to call our moment; there is no classification system. the cyborg was once a political category, one way to think about the politics of the body, of technology, of power, etc. but what haraway saw as emergent is today “residual” (see: williams ). mediatropes vol v, no ( ) s.j. murray & d.l. steinberg www.mediatropes.com in , haraway could write: “bodies, then, are not born; they are made. bodies have been as thoroughly denaturalized as sign, context, and time. late twentieth-century bodies do not grow from internal harmonic principles theorized within romanticism” ([ ] , p. ). twenty-five years later, living in the long shadows of neoliberalism, we might well wonder whether neoliberals are the new romantics. we must ask how sign, context, and time once again appear to us as natural—as we discover within ourselves, quite by surprise, the internal harmonic principles from which life itself seems to flow. under neoliberalism, then, we must ask how, and to what extent, bioconvergent media, bodies, and technologies offer up a new sign of life, a new life-sign. and how, and to what extent, these forms-of-life conform to neoliberal convergences. neoliberalism, autopoiesis, ethopoiesis what are the creative or poietic valences of neoliberal bioconvergence today? what happens when we begin to conceive of life in terms of the liveliness of bioconvergent networks, as if these networks constituted a living system—a self-organizing or autopoietic machine? as n. katherine hayles ( ) writes, describing the principles first-wave cybernetics: “life and autopoiesis are coextensive with one another” (p. ). we are drawn into and become inextricable parts of “self” replicating feedback loops. if the “self” is convergent with the anonymous forces that articulate across media, bodies, and technologies, these nevertheless produce the illusion of a life that is independent, free, and above all responsible. responsible selfhood is enterprising: labour converges with life in neoliberal economies and valuations. we are “free” to construct ourselves within the closed system’s autopoietic terms. autopoiesis becomes indistinguishable from ethopoiesis, which, to invoke aristotle once again, comprises the ongoing self-reflexive work of an individual’s character (ēthos) and social habitus (ethos). ethics and ethos become contiguous under neoliberalism. “ethical” life becomes defined by a neoliberal ethic, by moral imperatives or demands that are intimate. the intimate imperatives of neoliberal bioconvergence bear on an individual’s affect, action, and will. we are heroic; we aggressively submit to austerity measures; we define our citizenship through registers that appear as consensual, biocratic, even life-affirming. and yet these demands are ultimately material, embedded in and mediatized through the internet of things, conveying modes of value, phantasmatic forms of identification. we embrace “normotics” (bollas ), a pathological investment in normality, a desire to embody the norm almost as an article of faith, to believe in something, wilfully denying the mediatropes vol v, no ( ) s.j. murray & d.l. steinberg www.mediatropes.com ambiguities of reality and the precariousness of human life. spaces of ambiguity are collapsed and supplanted by the systemic “knowledge” of predictive rationality, risk-management, securitization, and then handed over to a cadre of “expert” service providers in the management of one’s own livingness. in this way one assures one’s public moral standing, assures one’s own salvation, as part of an emergent social contract informed at the nexus of capital and public morality. these material vectors are themselves convergent, modes of prosumption, technological processes, administration, institutionalization. if the revelations of edward snowdon and chelsea manning show us anything, it is how this process escalates the tensions of late capitalism. rather than expose the hidden workings of power, their revelations have been the occasion to reconsolidate the phantasy of sovereign power in its most repressive, yet familiar, forms. federman and holmes suggest that guantánamo represents the false-consciousness of sovereignty, the “interiority” or “consciousness” of the state itself. yet subtler technologies of control and securitization articulate with media and bodies in manners that are more palpably seductive, if not “salvific.” beaton’s contribution on apps against sex crimes suggests that security apps of this sort unintentionally responsibilize the end-user in ways that are not always empowering. citizens are co-opted into a technological system in which they are encouraged to harness surveillance technologies for their own pre- emptive protection, as if participation in one’s own panoptic protection were a moral duty, as if innovations in public safety were coextensive with technological innovations. the feeling of security promised by these apps might prove illusory, since they extol the virtues of a convergent, crowd-sourced self, registered in intimate proximity through systems that fuel their own excesses and modes of co-optation. the fantasy is that these apps are merely “tools” in the service of individual agents. and yet they are not simply tools: they contribute to a grammar of social worlds; they subjectivate us in particular ways; they constitute an ethos, a habitus, and ultimately an ethic of moral social and political action. individual agency and personal security are relocated across diffuse networks and technologies of biocitizenship, demonstrating how the traditional distinction between public and private life has been eroded by the circuits of prosumption and moral capital, in so-called real-time. in may , the american civil liberties union (aclu) of missouri released “mobile justice,” an app for android and iphone (http://www.aclu- mo.org/your-rights/mobile-justice/). the app’s website cites the michael brown murder in ferguson, missouri on august . it allows users to record mediatropes vol v, no ( ) s.j. murray & d.l. steinberg www.mediatropes.com interactions with police, and to have these audio or video recordings sent automatically to the aclu. it promises to give citizens a voice, to “witness” and to “report,” in the context of a citizen’s civil liberties. it is meant to save lives, and to hold the police accountable for their actions. and it is presented as an innovation in public safety. herein is a proffered mode of empowered biocitizenship. how lives matter, how black lives matter, requires documentary witness—handheld, ubiquitous, and focused on governmentality itself, its instantiated excesses, its flagrant abuses and crimes. thus the architecture of social action becomes seductively, autopoietically, and inextricably mediatized: part of the denuding–empowering apparatus of ‘smart’. the temporality of neoliberal convergence moves at the speed of light, not at the speed of life. nadesan’s essay considers the bioconvergent dimensions of high-frequency stock and commodity trading, which is redefining the technologies of neoliberal capitalism. the informatic, almost autopoietic, distribution of wealth relies on deregulation, but ushers in its own rigged regulatory framework—the binary logics of powerful computerized and automated transactions well beyond the reach of ordinary citizens. diedrich also suggests how time speeds up through the convergence of media and medicine in the temporality of catastrophe. she contrasts two seemingly divergent sites from (the case of terri schiavo and hurricane katrina), and analyzes the ways in which the mediatization of these two events serves to obfuscate the exercise of sovereign power. both nadesan’s and diedrich’s contributions emphasize the ways in which neoliberal power operates in the temporality of crisis, normalizing the state of emergency as the new order of things. summerhayes’s contribution also studies the state of emergency, turning to the humanitarian crisis in darfur as this is mediatized through the digital- embodied technos of google earth. this technology fosters digital “disaster tourism,” where the end-user’s hyperreal point-of-view is constituted at a safe distance from those lives and bodies in crisis. post-script convergence produces something new, a new form-of-life, a new understanding of life, much as benedict anderson ( ) explains in terms of a new community apropos of early print culture: “the convergence of capitalism and print technology on the fatal diversity of human language created the possibility of a new form of imagined community” (p. ). while capitalism and print technology existed separately, together they created the conditions in and through which a new understanding of community and subjectivity could arise, albeit at the cost of linguistic diversity, and arguably, at the cost of mediatropes vol v, no ( ) s.j. murray & d.l. steinberg www.mediatropes.com existing cultures themselves. in brief, the medium becomes the message. such an approach is paradigmatic of what we understand as critical media studies at least since the age of mcluhan: “media” is an interdisciplinary and convergent rubric that makes it possible to pursue comparative work to construct a composite picture of a culture by studying the ways information is organized and represented across many dimensions of cultural production—e.g., texts, images, architecture. critical media theory and methods afford new insights than can help contextualize the information presented in texts by reference to principles, conventions, customs, genres, and traditions that combine to create the overall style of a culture in a particular epoch. the eleven essays of this collection reflect a certain urgency. as we have suggested, they demonstrate how “life” (bios) is a convergent phenomenon, but they also complicate our understanding of convergence in the age of neoliberalism: ubiquitous mediatization, securitization, war, and speculative futures, increasingly lived out within a manmade ecological crisis. neoliberalism surely pays much lip-service to interdisciplinarity (witness nearly every university strategic research plan), but it refashions disciplines and selectively orchestrates their convergence according to rapacious “free” market economies, privatization, deregulation, and an evacuation of the commons that was once the matrix of serious social science and humanities scholarship (see: brown , chapter ). indeed, under the banner of academic efficiency and excellence (see: halffman & rader ), neoliberalism militates for the evacuation of the social sciences and humanities altogether, couched, of course, in the “fungible” logics of budgetary compressions, and the apotheosis of public–private “partnerships,” “innovation,” “commercializable outcomes,” knowledge economies and creative industries (see: brouillette , ). under neoliberalism, media, technologies, and bodies converge on life to produce a conception of bare life, mere life, or life itself (bloβes leben, to borrow a term from walter benjamin , p. ). the neoliberal interchangeability of “life” and “liberty” is captured by pierre dardot and christian laval: “to govern is not to govern against liberty, or despite it; it is to govern through liberty—that is, to actively exploit the freedom allowed individuals so that they end up conforming to certain norms of their own accord” ( , p. ). neoliberalism becomes a kind of living logic, an onto- logic, a hyperdriven rationality that embraces the spaces of everyday life, turning the raison d’état into a raison d’être. the essays here offer convergent meditations on the bioconvergent age, and a critique of its modus operandi, refusing to relinquish the value of the commons and community, and yet without capitulating to nostalgic paternalism, modern western science and technology philosophies, policies, or practices. mediatropes vol v, no ( ) s.j. murray & d.l. steinberg www.mediatropes.com works cited anderson, b. ( ). imagined communities: reflections on the origin and spread of nationalism. london: verso. benjamin, w. ( ). reflections: essays, aphorisms, autobiographical writings. new york: schocken books. bollas, c. ( ). the shadow of the object: psychoanalysis of the unthought known. london: free association books. brouillette, s. ( ). literature and the creative economy. stanford: stanford university press. —— ( ). on some recent worrying over world literature’s commodity status. maple tree literary supplement, . available at: http://www.mtls.ca/issue /impressions/. brown, w. ( ). undoing the demos: neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. new york: zone books. dardot, p., & laval, c. ( ). the new way of the world: on neo-liberal society. london: verso. foucault, m. ( ). the birth of biopolitics. in essential works of foucault – , ethics, vol. (pp. – ). ed. p. rabinow. london: penguin books. halffman, w., & radder, h. 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( ). convergence culture. new york: new york university press. latour, b. ( ). politics of nature: how to bring the sciences into democracy. trans. c. porter. cambridge, ma: harvard university press. mcluhan, m. ( ). understanding media: the extensions of man. cambridge, ma: mit press. murray, s.j. ( ). care and the self: biotechnology, reproduction, and the good life. philosophy, ethics, and humanities in medicine, ( ). available at: http://www.peh-med.com/content/ / / . murray, s.j., & holmes, d. (eds.) ( ). critical interventions in the ethics of healthcare: challenging the principle of autonomy in bioethics. farnham, uk: ashgate publishing. schneir, b. ( ). “how we sold our souls—and more—to the internet giants.” the guardian ( may). available at: http://www.theguardian.com/technology/ /may/ /sold-our-souls- and-more-to-internet-giants-privacy-surveillance-bruce-schneier. steinberg, d.l. ( ). genes and the bioimaginary: science, spectacle, culture. farnham, uk: ashgate publishing. —— (forthcoming). the bad patient: estranged subjects of the cancer culture. body and society. special issue: “estranged bodies: shifting paradigms and the biomedical imaginary.” eds. m. shildrick and d.l. steinberg. williams, r. ( ). marxism and literature. oxford: oxford university press. about the cover aaron palomides of buckminster. source: suburban knights: a return to the middle ages ( ). © e.f. kitchen. postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies ( ) , – . doi: . /pmed. . the cover image has the potential to unsettle its viewer in ways that the essays in this issue seek to address. the viewer finds that her position in modernity, usually protagonistic, assumed, and unassailed, becomes unstable. she asks: is this an evil knight because he is black? is this the kind of blackness that signals antagonism? assumptions about good and evil are superseded by even more pressing concerns about time: if this is not the kind of blackness that signals a knight’s evil, is it because in medieval literature, art and warfare, a knight’s blackness inheres in his armor, not his skin? are questions of blackness in response to the image so decidedly modern, so anachronistic, that they cease to be useful lines of inquiry? concerns about temporality quickly give way to questions about the status of race in the construction of time: weren’t the european middle ages homogenously white, or very close to it, anyway? is this image not that of a medieval black knight at all, but rather that of a modern notion of a medieval black knight – a notion that is ultimately erroneous? or is it that this is not a black knight but instead a knight who happens to be black? is this knight the result of late twentieth-century multi-culturalism and color-blind casting, in which a body of any color can appear in any role? the photograph is of aaron palomides of buckminster, a member of the society for creative anachronism, a group devoted to re-enacting medieval activities, including battle. by engaging these questions, the image disturbs the humdrum of racial time. it unsettles the notion that we know what © macmillan publishers ltd. - postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies vol. , , – www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /pmed. . http://www.palgrave-journals.com/pmed blackness means – that, in the context of historical racism, blacks are exclusively modern and cannot lay claim to a glorious and racially pure middle ages, and further, that in the context of the american and global justice systems, black skin denotes a violent and criminal character. it unsettles, too, opposing perspectives on what blackness means – that, in the context of the civil rights movement, it means the triumphant yet continual overcoming of blackness’s unfair devaluation, or that, in the context of today’s ‘black lives matter’ movement, it means the survivalist necessity of overcoming the injustices perpetrated by a violent and racist legal system. the image unsettles the notion that the answer to racism is color blindness. the image unsettles the notion that there is an answer. when aaron palomides confronts you with his sidelong gaze, he knows he is a black knight. and he knows that he confronts you with a whirl of significations. others in kitchen’s book state that they engage in re-enactments of medieval battle in order to get away from the stresses of their daily lives, to escape their pasts, to become someone different from their everyday selves yet truer to their real, innermost selves. perhaps when aaron palomides dons his medieval armor and stares into the lens of a modern camera, disturbing race and time, he does so in order to get away from the very kinds of questions his image engenders. or at least to get away from the constraining belief that these disturbing questions’ only value is in their answers. by confronting us with his image, he challenges us to join him and to rest in the whirl of the disturbance. cord j. whitaker department of english, wellesley college, wellesley, ma about the cover © macmillan publishers ltd. - postmedieval: a journal of medieval cultural studies vol. , , – 	about the cover s jed .. editors’ note boyd cothran and rosanne currarino this issue came together during a period of historic change and uncertainty. when we began developing this issue last year, we were absorbed by the upcoming centennial cel- ebration of the passage of the nineteenth amendment to the constitution of the united states. as the issue began coming together and entered into production this spring, we were abruptly confronted by the shifting realities of life in the age of covid- . and as we wrapped up production this summer, our hearts were broken by the news of george floyd’s murder at the hands of the minneapolis police even as our spirits were then lifted by the peaceful protests that are shaking the nation to its core. george floyd’s death was not an isolated incident. it is a tragic reminder to all americans of the deep- seeded inequalities in our nation and of the very real need for systemic change if we are ever to live in a truly just world where black lives matter. as historians and scholars of the gilded age and progressive era, we are deeply aware of the long history of anti-black racism and racial violence in america. countless essays in the pages of this journal have documented that history and traced its origins, debated its meanings, and mapped out its trajectories. in june, the officers of the society for historians of the gilded age and progressive era endorsed the american historical association’s statement on the history of racial violence in the united states. it is a cogent, compelling statement that situates the nation’s sordid tra- dition of anti-black racial violence within a historical context that stretches back centu- ries. it is a lengthy statement and we urge you all to read it in full. but we wanted to include the following excerpt as a particularly powerful call to action and acknowledg- ment of the role of historians in creating a more just society: as a nation, we’ve shown a reluctance not only to learn our own history but to learn from it, which helps to explain why we continue to witness—and set aside as excep- tional—egregious forms of human-rights abuses in case after case. throughout our history, those trusted to enforce the law have too often acted lawlessly, while too many civilians have acted with the tacit approval of law enforcement in targeting african americans just going about their daily lives. we are killing our own people. even as we mourn the death of george floyd, we must confront this nation’s past; history must inform our actions as we work to create a more just society. we must confront this nation’s past. in the next year, we have planned a number of special issues and fora designed to highlight the history of racial violence during the gilded age and progressive era. in our january issue, we will publish a lengthy ret- rospective on the historiography of lynching. we also have in the works a special forum revisiting c. vann woodward’s the strange career of jim crow. throughout the fall of , we will also publish a series of microsyllabi pulling together articles from jgape © the author(s), . published by cambridge university press on behalf of the society for historians of the gilded age and progressive era (shgape) the journal of the gilded age and progressive era ( ), , – doi: . /s h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms and other journals that can help us think about and teach the history of racial violence in the united states. these microsyllabi, each accompanied by a brief introduction, will first appear on the shgape website and then as a collection in the journal. we also invite you, the readers, to send us your ideas for how we might continue to produce historical scholarship that illuminates our past even as it informs our future. this important work will continue for the remainder of our terms as editors of the journal and beyond. but today, we are proud to introduce a wonderful collection of scholarship. this volume centers on the centennial of the ratification of the nineteenth amendment, affirming women’s right to vote. the scholars here present us with a broad picture of the fight for suffrage, moving far afield from white-clad (and white) women in vast parades. in their introduction to the special issue, cathleen d. cahill, crystal feimster, and kimberly hamlin remind us that the road to women’s suffrage was hewn by a wide range of women. lucretia del valle, the subject of our spotlight, and the chinese and chinese american women in our photo essay were as much a part of ensuring the amendment’s ratification as was the national women’s suffrage association. thomas dublin used crowdsourcing to find documents highlighting the wide range of african american women’s roles in the suffrage movement. those doc- uments are now digitally available. the issue also shows us that the fight for women’s formal equality took place in unexpected locations, such as the patent office; had unin- tended consequences, including the redefinition of citizens’ rights broadly; and could also serve to limit the parameters of citizenship and belonging, as happened in the birth control movement. finally, the issue also remembers women who did not want suffrage and fought against the amendment. in april, as covid- ground the world to a halt, we quickly gathered together six scholars of the gilded age and progressive era to talk about “our” influenza pandemic of – . the pandemic is often a mere aside in lectures and textbooks. this roundtable argues for the centrality of the pandemic to our understanding of the broader era. expertly assembled and guided by christopher mcknight nichols, this diverse panel of scholars discusses how they each study the pandemic, how they see the pandemic shaping the history of the progressive era and after, and how they have taught and will teach the pandemic in the age of covid- . their free-flowing exchange points to the many fruitful ways we can think about, write about, and teach the – pandemic. a final note: we are introducing a new feature: letters to the editor. we look forward to hearing from you. happy reading, but please, only in a socially distanced way. and wear your darn masks! notes aha statement on the history of racist violence in the united states (june ), https://www.histo- rians.org/news-and-advocacy/aha-advocacy/aha-statement-on-the-history-of-racist-violence-in-the-united- states-(june- ) (accessed july , ). aha statement on the history of racist violence in the united states (june ). cite this article: cothran b, currarino r ( ) editors’ note. the journal of the gilded age and progressive era , – . https://doi.org/ . /s editors’ note h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://www.historians.org/news-and-advocacy/aha-advocacy/aha-statement-on-the-history-of-racist-violence-in-the-united-states-(june- ) https://www.historians.org/news-and-advocacy/aha-advocacy/aha-statement-on-the-history-of-racist-violence-in-the-united-states-(june- ) https://www.historians.org/news-and-advocacy/aha-advocacy/aha-statement-on-the-history-of-racist-violence-in-the-united-states-(june- ) https://www.historians.org/news-and-advocacy/aha-advocacy/aha-statement-on-the-history-of-racist-violence-in-the-united-states-(june- ) https://doi.org/ . /s https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms 	editors&rsquo; note 	notes bringing student voices into the university archives:
 a student organization documentation initiative case study – in the library with the lead pipe 		 		 				 			 				 					 						skip to main content 						 					 				 				 					 						chat .webcam					 				 				 			 		 		 		 		 			 				 				 					 											 					open menu	home 	about 	awards & good words 	contact 	editorial board 		denisse solis 	ian beilin 	jaena rae cabrera 	kellee warren 	nicole cooke 	ryan randall 	emeritus 	announcements 	authors 	archives 	conduct 	submission guidelines 	lead pipe publication process 	style guide 	search 				 				 					home 	about 	awards & good words 	contact 	editorial board 		denisse solis 	ian beilin 	jaena rae cabrera 	kellee warren 	nicole cooke 	ryan randall 	emeritus 	announcements 	authors 	archives 	conduct 	submission guidelines 	lead pipe publication process 	style guide 	search 	 		 				 			 		 		 	 	 	 			 			 			 				 							 	 		 	 			 		 		 			 				 					 										 						 						 	 				 		 		 			 				 					 					dec 					 				 				 					jenifer becker					/ comment 				 											bringing student voices into the university archives:
 a student organization documentation initiative case study 								 					 				 				 			 			 		 			in brief the undergraduate student experience has long been poorly and selectively captured by university archives. though student narratives have always been essential for creating a complete history of the university, current nationwide student protests have made these voices all the more important to capture. as students engage in activism, regarding issues relevant to student life and wellbeing such as title ix violations, tuition hikes, and racism on and off campus, college and university archives must go to additional lengths to document these activities. a student organization documentation initiative, focused on actively seeking and informing student donors, can assist in filling these archival gaps. in the six-step iterative process, archivists would begin with a survey of their collections and their community. contacted through various means of outreach, student organizations would engage in discussions focused on introductory archival instruction and donation interests and concerns. then, following formal and informal evaluation, archivists would reflect on and rework the initiative. in its initial iteration, the documentation initiative has successfully solicited donations from % of the student organizations at washington state university vancouver. this article reflects on the project’s design, successes, and failures in its first year. additionally, it looks forward to the iterations to come. by jenifer becker introduction student narratives have long been an underrepresented voice within college and university archives. the last couple of decades have seen a rise in archival projects and scholarship geared towards bringing these voices in. despite the recent advocacy by archivists, the erasure of the student narrative continues to be an issue. the need for increased advocacy, outreach, and donor solicitation has become all the more apparent as students have come forward to demand change following tuition hikes, title ix violations regarding sexual assault and harassment mishandlings, and incidences of racism and racial microaggressions on and off campus. student activism has made way for a wave of new student organizations and new collaborations and coalitions between existing student organizations. created within a movement, these coalitions and organizations may be as enduring as the black student organizations which came to be in the late s. however, they may also exit the campus scene as quickly as they arrived. these records – already struggling from the ephemeral nature of a student’s brief tenure – have an added urgency and uncertainty. beyond creating an increased imperative to document student work, student activism has also created an increased need to do so ethically and with care. as a traditionally hidden department, university archives must work harder to show themselves as allies as students question administrative policy. a documentation initiative actively engaging student organizations presents the possibility to bring in these challenging student narratives. the six-step iterative student organization documentation initiative outlined in this case study includes surveying, initial contact, discussion, evaluation, reflection, and reworking. first, collections are surveyed for potential gaps. beyond the collections, the campus is also surveyed for present campus climate and possible allies in this work. then, various forms of outreach are employed to make initial contact. when contact is successfully made, students meet for a discussion which is part introduction to the archives and part donor conversation. in these meetings, students have the opportunity to discuss the work they are doing on campus, the materials they are creating, and the concerns they might have with donating. as appropriate, formal and informal evaluation is taken from students through surveys, continued communication, and donations. all this feedback is taken into consideration as the initiative is then reflected upon and reworked. this article reflects on the student organization documentation initiative’s first year of implementation at washington state university vancouver. of the student organizations on campus during the - academic year, nearly a third responded to contact and student organizations – or % – went on to donate materials. each step of the initiative is outlined and places for improvements are considered. literature review the effort to bring undergraduate students into the archives and special collections as either users or donors has gained stride since the turn of the century. the body of scholarship detailing outreach practices and theory on basic competencies and skills has grown significantly, slowly ushering archivists away from the image of being passive stewards of collections, reluctant to invite users in. this movement from passivity has also encouraged archivists to consider students not only as potential acquirers of knowledge within the archives, but also as sources of knowledge. this article borrows from literature which looks to the student as a user of and donor to the university archives. student as user archives are often new and intimidating to undergraduate students, who frequently lack confidence in their ability to use archives and primary sources. despite the difficulty in acquiring them, archival and primary source skills are important for any college student. however, to ethically allow students to donate, these skills are a necessity. students must understand what an archive is and how their records will be used. therefore, to see students as a donor they must first be seen as a user. in , elizabeth yakel presented composites of various users based on her years of interactions with these populations. the composite “brad” highlights the difficulties undergraduates have with being archives users. though he struggles to navigate the archives and special collections, brad is hesitant to ask for the extra help he needs and worries doing so might undermine his intelligence. yakel’s insights are important for considering the tone to create with students to encourage questions. to improve student confidence, archivists have considered the necessary skills and knowledge – or archival intelligence – needed for students to comfortably navigate the archives. in , yakel identified skills for learning to access and utilize the archives and special collections. key amongst these, yakel argues students must be able to define what an archive is and what findings aids are. additionally, students must know how to utilize finding aids and related access tools. in encouraging students to define terminology for themselves, yakel places agency on students to be active participants in acquiring these skills. the following year yakel and deborah torres identified arguably more advanced skills for archival intelligence. in addition to needing advanced critical thinking and problem-solving skills to maneuver around archival collections, yakel and torres argue users must have an understanding “of archival theory, practices, and procedures.” efforts to encourage students to gain this intelligence or understanding of the archives has taken many forms of outreach. in , wendy duff and joan cherry identified five types of archival instruction which might help students, including brief interactions at the reference desk, tours with introductions to policies, tutorials using archival resources, multiple hour sessions, and full-term course. the pair found, following a survey, that students marginally increased their confidence following an orientation to the archives. in “selling the college and university archives: current outreach perspectives,” tamar chute notes the lack of university archives access and/or interest in promoting access prior to the early s. in the face of this need to change a perception of exclusion, archivists have created a myriad of outreach projects. they have targeted audiences from various bodies on or related to a college campus, including students, faculty, administration, and alumni. programs have often gone beyond traditional outreach to much success, for example with the creation of holiday based events utilizing related collections. in the face of present day campus issues, archivists have also informed students through lectures and exhibits on past student activism. student as donor actively seeking student records has been an interest for some time in college and university archives. interest in student materials grew out of the late s broader interest in expanding historical narratives beyond the quintessential affluent white male narrative. interest in the student narrative began with a focus on the educational endeavors of students and the respective records those endeavors generated. perhaps spurred by an interest to avoid family educational rights and privacy act (ferpa) regulations or a desire to document students more holistically, recent decades have seen a growing interest in the examination of student life beyond the purely academic. while some have considered student oral histories as a means of collecting the whole through a few student experiences, others have continued to segment the population – particularly through student organizations – in the hopes of collecting a bit from the many. though targeting student materials through student organizations presents the possibility of excluding voices and segmenting the student experience, organizations often last longer on a college campus than the typical student. in “giving it more than the old college try: documenting diverse populations in college and university archives,” kathryn m. neal examines the diverse bodies – such as departments, offices, and student organizations – on a campus, the types of documents they may hold, and the potential ways to reach said populations. included in these options, neal provides a model for a diversity initiative, which involves collection surveys and network building, collecting, and various outreach methods. focused on the student government specifically, megan stark, et al. worked with the associated students of the university of montana to digitize their papers. while external users may find interest in these records, it is believed the collection will primarily be accessed for the continued use of the student government. beyond a model for bringing in student materials, stark, et al.’s work speaks to the importance of listening to student needs, even if those needs depart from the donor norm. despite more active and aggressive efforts to solicit collections, there continues be a struggle to bring these narratives in. in , swain identified three hurdles that must be overcome in order to promote donation. swain’s findings were informed by a survey of seven classes which had received an orientation to the archive. the survey sought to find suggestions for outreach and collection-development programs. swain argued that first, archivists must change student perception of the archives. second, archivists must discover how students are documenting their experience. third and finally, archivists must motivate students to donate their documents. similar to swain’s work, jessica l. wagner and debbi a. smith conducted a student survey, circulated via mass email, to learn about the archives’ use and perceptions and to attempt to solicit student materials. the survey found a lack of knowledge of the resources available to students. additionally, students were unaware that the university archives were interested in student life and related documents. following the survey, the archivists considered their next steps forward, including becoming involved in freshman orientation sessions and coordinating with student organizations. in the face of student opposition to or disinterest in donating, some have suggested methods to document student activities through website captures, eliminating the need to engage with students. in , prom and swain set out to capture websites for all student organizations rather than a select few. following the captures, students were contacted via email with the option to change the terms associated with the materials or to have them removed. written prior to the outgrowth of social media and present-day campus climate issues, the ethical ramification of what is being advised by prom and swain was likely not as clear in . however, in a time of student distrust, this method may not be best for instilling trust and building partnerships. limitations as with many outreach programs before this one, this documentation initiative segments the student population. it focuses on one aspect of their experience as students – their involvement in student organizations – and excludes other elements, including their coursework and their home life. additionally, each institution has its own culture, making it difficult for a case study to act as a representative model. washington state university vancouver has several quirks that differentiate it from other institutions. wsu vancouver is a non-residential, -year-old branch campus with an average student age of . furthermore, while there has been some student activism at wsu vancouver, students have yet to focus specifically on campus climate or politics. outreach methods used at wsu vancouver may not translate well on other campuses and archivists on campuses that have seen issues of inclusivity may need to use extra care. the six-step iterative project design the documentation initiative utilizes a six-step iterative project design: survey, initial contact, discussion, evaluation, reflection, and rework. while the task of bringing student narratives in through a project of this scale may be daunting, the methods present in this project are not dissimilar from those commonly employed by archivists. the survey and analysis below provide a description of how each phase was enacted at wsu vancouver in its first year. survey first, archivists must survey their collections to learn what student materials are already present in the university archives. beyond serving to show the gaps present, surveying the university archives can also highlight interesting organization materials to include later in donor discussions. where possible, archivists should view acquisition records or other documentation that might suggest how these materials came to be in the university archives. despite being a young campus, the wsu vancouver archives and special collections had already successfully captured several student-run media outlets, including the vancougar newspaper and the salmon creek journal. unfortunately, this was largely the extent of the student materials in the archives and special collections. this meant that there were not many exciting examples to show students to reassure them that the archives and special collections had already begun the work to preserve their history. it also meant looking beyond the archives to get an understanding of the campus culture. archivists must be informed about what is currently occurring on their campus. current issues will impact the types of outreach and contact possible and appropriate. additionally, beyond understanding what is happening with students, it helps to learn the various faculty and administrative bodies which may be of help in this project. this initiative was implemented shortly after i came to wsu vancouver. the lack of institutional knowledge, especially regarding the campus climate, made the surveying period essential. this project required an understanding of the campus climate and its relationship to student protests that had been taking place across the united states; of the players, including student groups, faculty advisors, and the administration; and of the structures and outreach currently in place. beyond the archives, the campus was far quieter than many around the united states. in fall , students held a black lives matter rally and march through campus. in the wake of the u.s. presidential election, there were also several events for students to voice their concerns. though there was student activism present, that activism was not directed towards the administration or other bodies on campus. instead the students have consistently looked beyond to the national landscape. this has provided for a certain level of liberty when considering outreach that might not have been possible elsewhere. the student community portal, cougsync, was invaluable in learning about the active student organizations and their respective leaders and faculty advisors. with attendance at student events and student-led rallies, trusted staff and faculty made themselves apparent. these faculty and staff were informed of the project and encouraged to talk to the students within their sphere about preserving their records. initial contact second, the archivist will seek to make initial contact with the student organizers. the ideas for how this might be accomplished are endless and include attending student events, emailing, engaging in a social media campaign, creating an exhibit, or using popular forms of student outreach, such as tabling on campus in which students gather in a designated spot on campus to inform passing students about their group. archivists should consider the various forms of contact students are using to get out their message and evaluate if reaching out via these methods would be feasible or appropriate for the university archives. students were contacted both in person – through an involvement fair, rallies, and events – and via email. near the end of the fall semester, this project received funds from the wsu vancouver diversity council allowing several of the first student organizations’ donated materials to be processed. this created another opportunity to reach out to students and encourage donation with the knowledge that trusted faculty and staff on the diversity council had vetted the project. towards the end of the academic years, select faculty advisors were also contacted via email to encourage student interest. of the organizations on campus, followed up in some form. for some students, initial contact and knowledge that the archives and special collections was interested in their work was all that was needed to encourage donation. four groups opted to never meet for a discussion and to instead email their items and the transfer agreement or add me to their organization’s google drive. though this made formal evaluation difficult, student ease should be the priority. discussion third, once students have expressed interest in learning more, the archivist will meet for a two-part discussion including an introduction to the archives and a donor conversation. these meetings should take whatever format students are comfortable with – be it with the entire organization, board members, or a chosen representative. additionally, these discussions should take place wherever students are comfortable, such as in the library or during their regularly scheduled meeting. seven of the groups contacted opted for a group-based discussion format. the discussions began and concluded with the distribution of questionnaires evaluating students’ archival knowledge. due to one group not being able to finish questionnaires at the end of the discussion, the meetings generated pre-discussion and post-discussion questionnaires. an additional two organizations opted for in-person discussions, however the one-on-one meetings with organization leadership hindered formal evaluation. while this project first and foremost sees students as donors to the college archives, students must also be considered potential users in order to provide an introduction to the archives. therefore, the first component of the discussion should offer a very basic introduction to what an archive is, what finding aids are, and how students would go about gaining access to their institution’s repository. this conversation seems to be most successful with plenty of examples of student organization materials to illustrate the items the archives might be interested in. additionally, it helps to have a finding aid present to demonstrate what will become of their items once donated. during the orientation period of the discussion, it is often difficult to identify what to include and what to exclude. unlike an instruction session or orientation to a class, students in an organization may come from departments across the campus and they may range from freshmen to seniors. this conversation then works best when students guide it – asking for clarification in places where they are confused and asking to bypass sections they are familiar with. to encourage students to make the most of this time, archivists should promote an environment where they feel safe to ask questions. the second component of the discussion is a donor conversation. students might be questioned about their organization’s history and mission, the materials they create, and the types of materials which best represent their work. they may also be questioned on whether or not they have continued ties to alumni in the hopes of generating material for donation further back than the last couple years. all students surveyed said their respective groups were creating emails, event sign-in/sign-up sheets, flyers/posters, photographs, and giveaways/swag. many members also stated their group was creating meeting minutes (n= ) and some form of printed updates, such as a newsletter (n= ). all groups also had some level of social media presence. when asked which materials best show the work their groups are doing, meeting minutes (n= ), flyers/posters (n= ), and photographs (n= ) received the most support. this emphasis on familiar mediums – though typically created digitally – is interesting in the face of growing interest in capturing social media. the donor segment of the conversation also gives students an opportunity to address any concerns they may have regarding donating. even after a brief introduction to the archives, students may not understand the full implications of donating. it is the archivist’s duty to inform students of potential concerns and tactics for easing those concerns. when asked about their concerns about donating in the post-discussion questionnaires, the majority (n= ) stated they had no concerns. those with concerns were worried about the identification of members (n= ) and the archives and special collections having access to their social media accounts (n= ). with these groups that mentioned concerns, the archives and special collections then discussed the possibility of redacting names, setting restriction periods, and/or donating only selected social media posts rather than documenting and capturing the whole. in the end, the students chose the latter option. finally, an in-person meeting is a great opportunity to conclude with the next steps to donating. in discussions to the entire organization, the archivists can take this time to remind students about the types of materials they have agreed to donate. in discussions to group leadership, archivists may also assign topics to take back to the whole of their organizations, specifically regarding concerns or additional contacts with alumni that other members may have. if students feel confident in donating at that point, they can simply be set up with a transfer agreement and a prospective donation date or timeline. evaluation fourth, archivists should attempt to gather formal and informal feedback on the successes and failures of the contact and discussion. this may look like allowing time before and after the discussion for the students to rate their current understanding of archives and of the need to preserve the materials they create. in individual one-on-one discussions and email correspondence, formal feedback may not be feasible or entirely comfortable. in such cases, informal feedback may be expressed in continued contact or continued interest in donating. prior to the discussion, nearly all (n= ) of the students were familiar with the term “archive(s),” though the majority (n= ) had never visited an archive before. despite this, no student stated they would be uncomfortable at the prospect of visiting one, though several (n= ) felt they would need additional instruction before utilizing their campus archives. following the discussion, all students surveyed stated they would be comfortable using archival resources without further instruction. reflection fifth, following evaluation the archivists would enter a period of reflection where they might consider the interactions and progress thus far. data from formal evaluations can easily be compiled to reflect student thoughts on the discussions. other less formal points to consider might be rate of student response, interest in utilizing collections, and continued interest in donating. methods of outreach employed in the first iteration led to nearly a third of the organizations making contact. while this was a mildly successful beginning effort, the fact that two thirds did not respond, signals more efforts need to be made. on a campus like wsu vancouver, this will likely translate to more aggressive forms of outreach, such as stopping by at the beginning or end of an organization’s meetings. additionally, from the organizations that expressed interest, five later indicated they might wish to donate later rather than in the current academic year. this lack of donation suggests there needs to be continued and possibly more aggressive follow-up measures taken, beyond email correspondence and checking in during happenstance in-person meetings. as the documentation initiative moves into its second year at wsu vancouver, new outreach and follow-up methods have begun to use structures already in place, such as library social media accounts and student organization orientations to create more chances for interactions. this closer consideration for locating potential points of contact with students is just one of the means of reworking the documentative initiative. rework sixth and finally, the project is reworked to incorporate the successes, failures, and other lessons learned during the previous iteration. the lead should consider ways to utilize connections – both with students and other departments on campus – made throughout the first iteration. they should also consider ways to tackle new goals and to fill gaps still present within the collection. this phase comes alongside, as do all the steps following the discussion, additional follow-up as necessary to ensure donations from student organizations which have already been reached. as those leading the initiative get more involved in campus life, they will likely become more informed about the various structures already in place. for example, in the initial iteration the archives and special collections learned that in order to get funds allotted by the student government at wsu vancouver, two students from every student organization must attend an orientation hosted by the office of student involvement annually. the archives and special collections has now begun the process of taking part in these orientations. in a very brief -minute introduction, the archives and special collections hands out an information sheet and transfer agreement form and explains that the work the students are doing throughout the year is important to university history and that the archives would like to preserve that work. it is hoped that reaching them early will keep donating in their mind throughout the school year. the archives and special collections is also hoping to develop permanent ties to the office of student involvement to streamline donations. in addition to participating in these orientations and in the involvement fair at the beginning of the fall semester, an exhibit was displayed in the library highlighting materials already collected and advocating for further donations. this exhibit gave new students an opportunity to learn about some the active organizations. it also gave returning students some encouragement to donate materials they still have from previous years. as wsu vancouver continues to grow its student organization collection, the archives and special collections will continue to explore the ways these materials might be used to encourage further donation, such as tabling with potential throwback thursday (#tbt) material. beyond outreach, the archives and special collections is also reconsidering the donor discussions. when asked about improving the discussions, several students (n= ) stated they wanted more structure in what to include in their donation – despite having examples of what they might consider including. this desire presents a difficult fine line for the archivist. too little structure seems to make students believe donating is far more difficult and time consuming than it is; too much structure may exclude creative projects students are engaged in. tentatively, students will be given a list of materials they might want to include and language which will hopefully make it clear that these are not the only options open to them. conclusion throughout the different phases of this first iteration from the - academic year, student organizations donated materials from at least the past years’ activities. materials collected in the first iteration at wsu vancouver have since been processed and finding aids can now be found on the archives & special collections’ online portal. at wsu vancouver, we hope with new outreach methods, the next iteration will bring more interest from other organizations and continued interest from the organizations which have previously been reached. as each organization’s leadership and membership turns over, outreach will likely have to continue year after year, though we hope in time the archives and special collections’ might become a seamless part of their spring leadership transition. at wsu vancouver and beyond, the student organization documentation initiative holds the promise to not only combat swain’s hurdles, but to go further to address present campus climate issues. as stated above, in , swain argued that archivists must ) change student perceptions of the archives, ) learn the materials students are creating, and ) encourage student donations. though often this project found students who lacked any perceptions or understanding of the university archives, with outreach and discussions students can begin to perceive the archives as a resource for them to succeed academically and to preserve their work on campus. additionally, the discussions, both in person and via email, provide an opportunity for archivists to learn about student life and how they are documenting it. finally, through contact and the iterative nature of the project, archivists can repeatedly encourage students to donate the materials they are creating. while swain’s three hurdles still provide an excellent starting point for designing outreach to potential student donors, written prior to the current prevalence of student activism, answering the three hurdles is no longer enough. archivists must also be able to create trust and transparency. reaching student donors and maintaining their interest with their hectic schedules pulling them in different directions is difficult. it is tempting then in an age when so much of their lives are digitally preserved to simply capture it without permission and without contact. while this practice is concerning from the standpoint of copyright and intellectual property laws, i implore university archivists to look beyond copyright and ferpa to the ethical ramifications of doing so. the university archives should not become yet another place for student distrust of campus authorities. students must be educated about the potential hazards that come with donation, especially when they come from vulnerable populations on campus or when they have been engaged in work which combats campus administration or policies. students, as with any donor, should have the right to decide how much and what of their life is preserved. this documentation initiative provides an opportunity for archivists to build a relationship of trust and transparency with students through continuous communication. acknowledgements thank you to the university of california, los angeles’s mlis program for allowing me to explore this project while i was a student. thank you to karen diller, robert schimelpfenig, and the wsu vancouver library for supporting this project and the representation of student voices in the university archives. thank you to the wsu vancouver diversity counsel for funds to process student 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[↩] 	“finding aids.” washington state university vancouver library. https://library.vancouver.wsu.edu/archive/finding-aids (accessed october , ). [↩] 			 						 							 					 	 						 												 						 							editorial: harassment in scholarship is unacceptable–and requires action 							vocational awe and librarianship: the lies we tell ourselves 							 						 						 												 						 	 		 response	 		 	pingback : academic library evolution - #infoshow 	 		 						 										 				 				 				 			 			 	 		 			 		 				 	 				 		 	 		 	 		 				 			 				 										 this work is licensed under a cc attribution . license. issn - 				 										about this journal | archives | submissions | conduct 				 			 		 				 	 	 jass forum journal of anthropological sciences the jass is published by the istituto italiano di antropologia www.isita-org.com vol. ( ), pp. - what is race today? scientific, legal, and social appraisals from around the globe reflections on “race” in science and society in the united states alan h. goodman school of natural science, hampshire college, amherst, ma , usa e-mail: agoodman@hampshire.edu this commentary on the discourses, use, and salience of “race” in the united states has two linked purposes. first, i would like to provide readers with a glimpse of the “state of race” in science in america, focusing on both the current relationship among studies of race, racism, and human variation and the relationship of these studies to “race” in society. i will reflect on how race is discussed, the underlying ideol- ogy of race, and how the word race is intended and used in science and society. second, the editors would like to initiate a thoughtful forum on the current state of race, racism, and human biological variation. the hope is to provide an opportunity to compare current discussions and debates that center on race, human biological variation, and racism in science, law, and other intersecting domains, such as in popular cul- ture (race in media and public forums, for example) in different countries within and beyond europe. this essay is the first in the forum. i begin by summarizing the state of race in the united states, the country in which i live, was trained, and work. subsequently, others will contribute their own analyses of the state of race in the country or countries they are most familiar with. among the guiding questions are the following. •	 how is race - both the concept and the word itself - used in science today? although sci- ence is international in scope, have there been notable changes in how race is con- ceptualized and used in your country or in the language of your country? •	 is there a decline in the salience of the term “race” as a proxy for human genetic varia- tion, and if so, in what ways is it evident? for example, have genomics and the prom- ise of personalized medicine had any impact on the use of race in medicine (bonham et al., )? •	 how is race used in legal documents and legal proceedings? have there been any de- bates about changing the definition or use of the word race and related terminology, especially as they might reference informa- tion about human genetic variation? •	 what are the current political and cultural points of tension, or “hot spots,” with re- gard to race and racism? do they intersect in any way with the scientific and legal sta- tus of race? •	 has progress been made in improving the study and understanding of human variation? what progress might be made to use a full range of humanistic and scientific expertise to eliminate (instead of perpetuate) racism? race in the united states i must start with a blunt disclaimer. in a brief commentary, it is impossible to systematically summarize the diverse ways in which race is dis- cussed - and the multiple ways in which the word race is used - in the united states. mine is a hugely complicated nation. it would be difficult to sum- marize the state of race on my college campus, more challenging to summarize the state of race in my town, and almost unimaginable to summa- rize race in a single discipline such as linguistics. it is impossible to systemically summarize “race” doi . /jass. jass forum: what is race today? scientific, legal, and social appraisals from around the globe in any larger social or institutional group because racial discourses and how race is used move in many directions at once. with that caveat, some general trends are clear. first, the inability to summarize the state of race is itself meaningful: it is the result of, in part, the size and heterogeneity of the united states. more important, though, is the fluidity of its meaning. the word race is a chameleon. while it harks back to old tropes of difference and hierarchy, it is also a constantly changing concept, and it veers from institution to institution, person to person, and from one moment to the next. race, as an actor, does not sit still. in the united states, as it was through- out europe, race was once accepted as a fixed, unchanging, natural way to characterize individu- als and groups. this idea of race supported euro- american empire building, taking of lands, and slavery. it naturalized differences and the status quo of a racial hierarchy. the science of the seventeenth century to the twentieth added insult to injury by elevating the folk idea to objective and natural truth. in linné’s first classification of humans into subspecies or races, in , race was used to explain unchal- lenged biological differences such as skin color, as well as temperament, mode of governance, and, by extension, socioeconomic conditions and accomplishments. that view of race as the expla- nation for biological and social differences lives on in the united states. a few, starting as far back as the middle of the nineteenth century, challenged this view, most notably the antislavery activist frederick douglass ( ), who argued that environment shapes human biology and that the idea of racial types is flawed. in the last half century, evidence has mounted at an exponential rate that race simply does not explain or account for human genetic variation (lewontin, ; yu et al., ). with increasing data on genomic diversity since the s, the usefulness of race as a biogenetic construct seems to be slowly losing acceptance among scientists in the united states (yudell et al., ). moreover, research is beginning to dem- onstrate that persistent racial differences in health are in fact due to subtle and overt forms of racism (goodman, ; olshansky et al., ). the “revolution” in how we think about race as distinct from human biological and genetic variation is still in its early stages. whereas social epidemiology is showing the deep and multiple pathways by which racism affects health (krieger, ), many doctors and medical researchers still believe that racial differences in health are innate and natural (satel, ), and many scientists still use race as a convenient shorthand for human variation (wade, ). race is used without much notice in medicine as a biological grouping (goodman, ). and race also appears in legal documents, again without much questioning of its meaning (haney lópez, ). despite a national obsession with race, my sense is that most individuals in the united states are confused about how biology, genetics, and race interrelate; how the categories of race, ethnicity, color, religion, and so on were formed; and how they intersect today (goodman, ). although some clearly see race as a socially constructed category with biological consequences, most still consider it a natural division of humans, just as linné did in . most european-americans are confused about what race is and is not. and they are also confused about the underlying causes of racial differences in wealth and health. that con- fusion, i believe, is problematic: it inhibits acting on racial differences in access to resources and on racism itself. what is true today in the united states is that one hears a cacophony of opinions about race. president obama has tried to promote a national dialogue on the subject, but we have not gotten very far in our understanding of what race is and what it is not. as many have commented with regard to discussions about race and racism, there is more talk than understanding, more smoke than fire. in short, although evidence suggests that the concept of race-as-genetics is losing credibility, change in this hegemonic worldview is painfully slow (mills, ). we in the united states are obsessed with race but we do little to address rac- ism. we collect information on racial inequalities www.isita-org.com jass forum: what is race today? scientific, legal, and social appraisals from around the globe but then do not alleviate them. race is the cor- nerstone of an unwritten social contract in which whites of european ancestry have greatest access to power and resources and everyone else has the least access (mills, ). why has the race-as-genetic worldview changed so slowly with fifty years of data to show it to be obsolete? i would say that the racial worldview has remained largely intact because the political- economic stakes are so high (goodman, ; goodman et al., ). what follows are further observations and some examples of the state of race in the united states. my comments are divided into three overlapping domains: sociopolitical and public discourse, law and institutional race, and race in science and among scientists. i end with a brief call to action by scholars, educators, and scientists to challenge out-of-date legal doctrines, sociopo- litical discourses, and uses of the word - and the concept of - race. race in socio-politics, popular culture, and discourses of all the domains in which race resides, it is most fluid and varied in the domains with the least structure: popular culture, everyday discourses, and socio-politics. as always in the united states, citizens of color see more than whites the salience of race and the realities of racism. reactions to the academy awards (the oscars) nominations for acting illustrates this point. for the second consecutive year, all of the nominees were white. most whites saw little wrong with that; it sort of just happened. on the other hand, individuals of color saw the nominations as a visible tip of the iceberg of systems of racial thinking in which act- ing roles are tailored for white actors (and white audiences). some political analysts point to obama’s elec- tion as a sign of the declining salience of race in political life. yet the answers to a question posed to voters after the presidential election showed that race played a role for many in their decision to vote against barak obama, our first african american president (https://www.ted.com/talks/ nate_silver_on_race_and_politics). among some groups, such as southern republications, the race of a candidate is shockingly relevant. on the positive side, one can point to a younger generation that seems to hold less firmly some of the divisive racial stereotypes. this change, how- ever, does not seem to be very deep. i recently gave a talk on race to a group of two hundred young teenagers at a school in my university town. even in this educated community, kids tend to eat lunch with individuals they see as within their own race or ethnicity. i asked them how they see or explain race. for most, race is real and biologically based. the reported rate of racial intermarriage is on the rise in the us, but this might be related, at least in part, to the implementation of a multiracial cat- egory on the and censuses. note that as recently as it was illegal to marry outside one’s race in the state of virginia. indeed, at one time or another, thirty-three of the then forty-eight states in the united states had laws that prohib- ited miscegenation - that is, marrying someone of a different race - for fear of degeneration and to protect the so-called white race. i want to be optimistic, but change is glacially slow and the glass seems still to be more empty than full. in the last few years, a frighteningly high number of acts of police brutality have come to public attention. this is probably nothing new; rather, it may be simply a result of the increased access to video footage. but the important point is that the victims are almost always black men. in almost every form of statistical evidence, one finds persistent inequalities among races. for exam- ple, in the united states, the chance of being incar- cerated is three times greater if you are hispanic than if you are white and six times greater if you are black (pettit & western, ). the average wealth of white families is about twelve times that of black and hispanic families and the difference seems to be rising (shapiro et al., ). the more open and visible signs of police brutality against black men have shed more light on systemic inequalities in the criminal justice system, including the rates of crime, convictions, and sentencing. repeated acts of violence against jass forum: what is race today? scientific, legal, and social appraisals from around the globe black men have led to the sustained black lives matter (blm) movement. there is an important aspect to blm: the focus specifically on african americans. indeed, most statistics show that african americans are the most impoverished and oppressed group in the united states. a case can be made for concentrating affirmative action and reparations on african americans. the old untruths of racial disparities in intelli- gence and violence are now less frequently articu- lated in open, public discourse. a few neo-nazi websites and commentators such as david duke, of the ku klux klan, continue to spew talk of white supremacy and to denigrate jews and indi- viduals of color. anti-muslim rhetoric post- / is still on the rise. donald trump, at the moment the presumptive presidential candidate of the republican party, ran on a rant against mexicans and muslims and the promise to build a wall between the us and mexico and to ban muslims from entering the united states. this openness of xenophobia and bigotry is a new turn, as it is generally seen in the united states as uncivil to comment publically on racial differences in a way that recalls the outmoded race-as-genetic destiny. for example, when sports commentators refer to the “natural ath- letic ability” of african americans and the “bril- liance” of white athletes, their unconscious biases are exposed - and people notice. that might sound positive, and in a way it is, but trump and his popularity suggest that the ideology of race-as-deep-and-natural has not disappeared; rather, it had simply gone underground. slavery was abolished more than one hundred fifty years ago and a range of civil rights laws and statutes have passed. the ideologies of biologi- cally based racial hierarchies and racism, however, are more difficult to change. in the united states, neighborhoods, schools, and workplaces are increas- ingly diverse. we are an increasingly diverse nation, yet, as is evident in the middle school i recently vis- ited, it is common for blacks, latinos, asians, and whites to gravitate to those who look like them and thus to self-segregate. and, in fact, white public space is rarely safe space for all. enacting laws does not change hegemonic worldviews. the proof of enduring ideological and institu- tional racism is in the data. in the united states, racial variations are huge in all matters of wealth, education, and law enforcement. i am particularly interested in how the stress of racism is embodied, or “gets under the skin.” living in a racist society (the us) has led to persistent racial differences in almost every measure of morbidity and mortality (kochanek et al., ). recent evidence suggests that the gap in life expectancy between blacks and whites has narrowed, from an average of eight years less for blacks in to “only” a little more than four years less in . some of this difference is explainable by socioeconomic status, but what are the other reasons that blacks live shorter lives? perhaps the one certainty is that one can find whatever one is looking for: either signs of a blur- ring of racial lines and a decline in racism or signs that racism is alive and well. the glass of racism is both half full and half empty. legal and institutionalized race the us constitution. throughout the history of the united states, race and color (race and color terms are employed somewhat interchangeably) have been used in legal documents. the fifteenth amendment to the us constitution famously “prohibits each government in the united states from denying a citizen the right to vote based on that citi- zen’s race, color, or previous condition of servitude.” both race and color are singled out in this voting- rights act, so one must assume that the authors differentiated between the two terms. in law, a definition or elaboration of the meaning of race and/or color has never been successfully upheld (haney lópez, ). there is a famous aphorism attributed to supreme court justice potter stewart (served - ) in reference to what constitutes por- nography. pornography is hard to define, he said, “[b]ut i know it when i see it.” the same notion has been made for race. such a casual definition is problematic for pornography, however, and it is even more problematic for race. race does not stand still. we should not base laws on something www.isita-org.com jass forum: what is race today? scientific, legal, and social appraisals from around the globe that is changing as we write, speak, read, and sleep. moreover, without a clear and defensible defini- tion of race (as well as of color, ethnicity, and related terms), the door is wide open to falling back on its outdated interpretation as a genetic grouping. the lack of a sound definition is bad science and bad politics and, inevitably, does harm. the census and the office of management and budget directive (omb ). slavery was the sin on which the wealth of the united states was founded. and even with the abolition of slavery, most americans know that we are a country with ideological and institutional racism at our core. we pledge equality but know it is a lie. despite the lack of a definition of race, my nation is obsessed with it. the us census has contained a question about color or race since its inception, in . the categories black and white have been retained from census to census, although the social definitions of black and white have changed. in addition, race/color options have been added or eliminated almost every dec- ade. for example, the census contained the categories chinese, mulatto, and indian (as in native american) and ten years later there were three more options: quadroon (one-fourth black), octoroon (one-eighth black), and japa- nese (nobles, ). since , the collection of information on race and ethnicity has been codified by the office of management and budget’s (omb) directive : “this directive provides standard classifica- tions for record keeping, collection, and presen- tation of data on race and ethnicity in federal program administrative reporting and statistical activities.” and: “[these classifications] have been developed in response to needs expressed by both the executive branch and the congress to provide for the collection and use of compatible, nondu- plicated, exchangeable racial and ethnic data by federal agencies”. (visit https://www.whitehouse. gov/omb/fedreg_directive_ .) indeed, federal collection of data by race has proved useful in tracking racial inequalities in health, education, employment, incarceration, and other aspects of life. unfortunately, little work seems to be done to eliminate these inequalities and little attention is paid toward rectifying the social, political, and ideological conditions that have led to inequalities. although the collection of data on “race” is necessary to track inequalities, the data suffer from shifts in how they are collected (for exam- ple, by census taker or head of household), social definitions of race, and changes in the categories themselves. a study of race and infant death gives a frightening glimpse of the lack of repeatabil- ity of race categories. hahn and his colleagues ( ) compared the birth and death certificates of infants who had died during their first year of life (infant deaths). they found that almost percent of infants who were native american on their birth certificate were another race, usu- ally white, on their death certificate. the authors suggest that most of these cases of a legal change in race came about because a newborn baby’s race is matched with that of its mother and a dying infant’s race is filled in by the attending physician. the underlying problem is that race does not have a clear meaning, and, by extension, there is no guide to providing useful and repeatable racial categories. in fact, a disclaimer is hidden in the text of omb : “these classifications should not be interpreted as being scientific or anthro- pological in nature”. in short, by the federal government had given up any hope of providing a logical basis for racial classification. as we approach our next decennial census, in , race and ethnicity categories are again undergoing scrutiny. currently, the category his- panic is an ethnicity. thus, one can be a black hispanic or a white hispanic. a court rul- ing, however, has determined that “hispanic” has the legal status of a race - whatever that is! given this and other confusions about what is race and what is ethnicity, there is some discus- sion within the census bureau about keeping the categories (white, black, hispanic, and so on) but not calling them anything: not race, color, reli- gion, language group, or ethnicity (http://www. pewresearch.org/fact-tank/ / / /census- considers-new-approach-to-asking-about-race-by- not-using-the-term-at-all/). doing so is important jass forum: what is race today? scientific, legal, and social appraisals from around the globe because the categories, though imperfect, are use- ful for tracking inequalities. interestingly, this is close to a point suggested by the american anthropological association almost two decades ago (http://www.understandingrace.org/about/ response.html). race, anthropology, and science the publication and responses to nicholas wade’s a troublesome inheritance ( ) is a use- ful barometer as to salience of use as a race as a genetic grouping variation. the uk-born and eton-educated wade was for decades a science writer for the new york times; he stepped down after his book was published. as a reporter, he covered many developments in human evolution and genetics, and clearly favored genetic and racial explanations. wade was an important gatekeeper for his own views: he highlighted for new york times readers what were in fact sketchy findings about the power of genes and the links between race and genetics and ignored evidence that sug- gested that race is not in the genes. his biases are for all to see in a troublesome inheritance. in the first half of the book, he tries to establish the validity of race as a category for studying recent human evolution. he attempts to discredit as politically motivated any scholarly research that argues that race is not a valid and useful biological category. in the second half of the book, he makes a number of speculative efforts to explain personality, culture, and economic achievements as the result of bio-racial differences. in my view, the book is astonishing in the weakness of its scholarship and the unembel- lished scientific racism. it is more akin to racial tracts published a century ago and the original formulation of linné than to more recent (and more subtle) race-science screeds such as the bell curve (herrnstein & murray, ). here is an increasingly rare public figure, this time a science journalist, writing what i can best describe as unvarnished scientific racism. it is startling that the book was published in summer . what would be the reactions? upon publication, the book shot into the top twenty of the most purchased books on amazon. com. prepublication copies had been sent to those who would most likely give it favorable media. indeed, charles murray, coauthor of the bell curve, was one of the first reviewers. he echoed wade in arguing that those who do not believe race is genetic are making a politically correct, rather than scientifically correct, argument and then went on to give it a solid recommendation in the wall street journal ( may, ). before it was even published, the book was discussed in a talk show hosted by david duke, the head of the ku klux klan, and was widely applauded on neo-nazi and anti-immigration websites. as of march , , the book had been rated more than three hundred times on amazon. com. most of the reviews are very positive: two of three reviewers give it four or five stars out of a possible five and more than half ( percent) give it a full five-star rating (highest ranking). a minority ( percent) award the book a single star (lowest ranking), suggesting a bifurcation of responses: most positive few in the middle and some strongly negative reviews. the most apparent pattern is that the positive reviews stress what they call wade’s daring ability to tell the truth. often the reviewer is unidentifi- able, hidden. the single stars (negative reviews) often point to his misunderstanding of the sci- ence on which he has been reporting. these peo- ple usually self-identify as scholars and scientists and speak specifically to the studies wade refer- ences. they demonstrate knowledge of evolution- ary theory and the facts of human variation. in addition, one hundred thirty-nine senior population geneticists state in a letter to the new york times: “as scientists dedicated to studying genetic variation, we thank david dobbs . . . for his description of wade’s misappropriation of research from our field. . . . wade juxtaposes an incomplete and inaccurate account of our research on human genetic differences with speculation that recent natural selection has led to worldwide differences in i.q. test results, www.isita-org.com jass forum: what is race today? scientific, legal, and social appraisals from around the globe political institutions and economic development. we reject wade’s implication that our findings substantiate his guesswork. they do not”. this letter suggests a possible sea change in how geneticists see race and human genetic vari- ation. indeed, an editorial in science just called for the elimination of race in genetic research (yudell et al., ). change in scientific work and theories is often slow, and changes in public perceptions are often slower. with regard to race, the response to wade’s book suggests that there may be a growing gap between scientific understandings of human vari- ation and public perceptions of those differences. in summary, race in science, like race in other realms of life in the united states, is both in flux and in a confused state. whereas it might be acceptable to be unsure of what “race” means in some domains, it is far less acceptable in legal terms and in the courts of science. after many cen- turies, however, that is the state of race in science. conclusions if the state of race in the united states is to provide any sort of guide, i imagine readers will be seriously disappointed. the meaning of race - the word or the concept - as i have tried to explain, is all over the cognitive map. its actions vary. yet race is still a very powerful actor in pub- lic life, law, and science. the optimist in me would like to think that we are making social and scientific progress: racial boundaries are now more permeable and less fixed. more and more scientists are starting to realize that race medicine is bad medicine and, in fact, that any- where race is used in science makes for bad science. but many signs indicate that change is not only slow; it is also superficial. most americans still think race is primordial and genetic and by exten- sion that disparities in attainment in employment, education, and wealth are due to inherent differ- ences. racism is supported by a racial worldview. what can we do? almost two decades ago, the american anthropological association (aaa) tried to engage public discussions about race by launching its largest-ever public education project, titled “race: are we so different?” (understand- ingrace.org). the project presented to the public “race” through the lenses of science, history, and lived experience. components of this project comprised a book (goodman et al., ), teach- ing materials, a highly trafficked website, and an award-winning museum exhibit. the original exhibit, which opened in , was so well received that both a duplicate version and a smaller version were manufactured. as of , the three traveling exhibits have been on display in fifty museums and viewed by millions. as indicated by the quantity and quality of the responses to it, the project is a great public-education success. but it is also a drop in the deep ideological seas of race and racism. if what we think about race, human variation, and racism is to change, i believe it is time for us - scholars of humanity, such as social scientists, anthropologists, and geneticists - to take the lead. it is useful to talk about the structure of human variation in a classroom or a journal, but that is not sufficient. we need more public-education projects, like the aaa’s, that elevate the discourse around race and bring it to open forums. another recommendation is to examine how the idea of race is used in legal documents. although documents are not enough to change how race and racism “lives,” they now speak a language that undermines science. instead, they should provide a legal grounding that supports the facts of human variation. science once helped to justify a racial hierar- chy by promoting the idea that races are separate and unequal. now i believe it is our obligation to repudiate those disproven ideas and to spearhead the movement to promote scientifically accurate knowledge about human diversity - in the interest of justice. references bonham v.l., shawneegua l., callier j.d. & royal c.d. . will precision medicine move us beyond race? n. engl. j. med., : – . jass forum: what is race today? scientific, legal, and social appraisals from around the globe goodman a.h. . bred in the bone? the sciences, : – goodman a. h. . why genes don’t count (for racial differences in health). am. j. public. health, : – . goodman a.h., moses y. & jones j. . race: are we so different? wiley–blackwell, boston. hahn r.a., mulinare j. & teutsch s.m. . inconsistencies in coding of race and ethnicity between birth and death in us infants: a new look at infant mortality, through . jama, : – . haney lópez i.f. . white by law: the legal construction of race. new york university press, new york. herrnstein r. & murray c. . the bell curve. simon and schuster, new york. krieger n., waterman p.d., , kosheleva a., chen j.t., carney d.r., smith k.w., bennett g.g., williams d.r., freeman e., russell b. et al. . exposing racial discrimination: implicit & explicit measures; the my body, my story study of us–born black and white community health center members. plos one, : e . lewontin r. . the apportionment of human diversity. evol. biol., : – . mill c. . the racial contract. cornell university press. murray c. . wall street journal. may . nobles m. . history counts: a comparative analysis of racial/color categorization in us and brazilian censuses. am. j. public. health, : – . pettit b. & western b. . mass imprisonment and the life course: race and class inequality in us incarceration. am. soc. rev., : – . satel s.l. . i am a racially profiling doctor. new york times. may . shapiro t., meschede t. & osoro s. . the roots of the widening racial wealth gap: explaining the black–white economic divide. institute on assets and social policy. wade n. . a troublesome inheritance: genes, race and human history. penguin, new york. yu n., chen f.–c., ota s., jorde l.b., pamilo p., patthy l., ramsay m., jenkins t., shyue s–k., li w–h. . greater genetic differences within africans than between africans and eurasians, genetics : – . yudell m., roberts d., desalle r. & tishkoff s. . taking race out of human genetics. science, : – . this work is distributed under the terms of a creative commons attribution-noncommercial . unported license http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . / addendum my reflection on “race” in the united states was written during the summer of . now, less than a year later, it is outdated by my reference to donald trump as the “presumptive candidate.” i wrote that the “openness of xenophobia and bigotry” that was a hallmark of trump’s campaign was a new turn in us public civility and discourse on race. the transition from an african american president to a bigot- in-chief is a sea change and a further sign that racist ideology is still dominant in the us. tweets have replaced reason. trump and his circle have attacked data and analysis. their anti-science stance is clearest with regards to climate science and it also spills into old-fashioned dogma about human variation and race. they draw support from white nationalists who believe in a white homeland and that caucasians are a superior race. and worst of all, this racist ideology fuels a politics of division, specifically of white poor and working class individuals from individuals that identify with other races, ethnicities and religions. now, more than ever, we scientists, anthropologists, and humanists need to stand up for facts, data, and scientific analyses and we need to stand up to those who want to manufacture false division among us. alan goodman, may , s jed .. editors’ note with this issue, we formally leave the journal of the gilded age and progressive era in the hands of the impressively thoughtful and conscientious new editors, boyd cothran and joe genetin-pilawa, along with continuing reviews editor elaine frantz—who herself has been a consistently valuable contributor in all realms of the journal. we have worked closely with cothran and genetin-pilawa in a transition year that has delighted us as we have witnessed their energy, creativity, and imagination—as well as their commitment to the highest professional standards. if the united states is suffering from a crisis in the humanities, you surely will not see that over the next several years at jgape. we are eager to see the new directions that cothran and genetin-pilawa will take a now middle-aged journal still powerfully grounded in the exemplary stewardship of its first editors, maureen flanagan and alan lessoff. we have had, over the last five years, a terrific time in service to the journal. we have tried our best to nurture a wide variety of scholarship, especially from graduate students and younger historians, in an increasingly fertile and boundary-breaking subfield. our goal has been to function, at the most elemental level, as a gentle and encouraging— as well as rigorous—gateway to publication in the field’s journal of record. we wish to thank the many authors who have worked so hard to continue the quality and distinc- tiveness of jgape. we have also sought to change the journal in a variety of other ways. it may be difficult to tell in an age where digital downloads reign, but we have worked, in partnership with the dedicated and hard-working staff at cambridge university press, to create a brighter and more fluid sense of aesthetics for the journal’s physical design. we have brought to our editorial board scholars from diverse backgrounds, perspectives, and interests. we have reoriented the journal to include more western and transnational topics. and in a move that we very much hope receives emulation in the rest of the world of historical journals, we have opened our pages to the serious study of pedagogical issues (especially involving k– teaching, and with real-life high school teachers even serving as authors). informing all these changes (well, perhaps not the fluid aesthetics) has been a robust sense of historiographical engagement—even adventure. part of this commitment to his- toriography was formal, especially in various reflections on classic books ranging from aileen kraditor’s the ideas of the woman suffrage movement to robert wiebe’s the search for order. (next up: an exploration of george chauncey’s gay new york on the th anniversary of its publication.) historiographical commitment also suffused the journal’s regular research articles. our authors graciously responded to our frequent requests to expand their engagement with different interpretations so that they could best clarify their original contributions to long-running and wide-ranging intellectual discussions. why such an embrace of historiography? after all, neither of us is a believer in jargon, and “historiography” is the ugliest word in the mainstream vocabulary of the discipline. the journal of the gilded age and progressive era ( ), – doi: . /s © society for historians of the gilded age and progressive era h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms perhaps foremost: we are firm believers in james loewen’s awesome dictum: “history is furious debate informed by evidence and reason.” the fullest intellectual engagement in our discipline comes not through a pedantic literature review, but rather through a ram- bunctiously contentious, and illuminating, conversation with scholarly colleagues and forebears. beyond that, historiographical discussions are not just about different perspec- tives on how to look at the facts, but even more are fruitful opportunities to blend our present-day moral and communal commitments with our custodial responsibilities to the past. in that way, the historiographic debates that loewen celebrates are the primary bridge between the politics of history and the politics of democracy. that devotion to connecting scholarly insights with the politics of the current moment is the final foundation that we have hoped to cultivate in these pages. in the so-called second gilded age in which many believe we now live (the subject of a forum in an upcoming issue), public contests over the themes of the late nineteenth and early twen- tieth centuries have once more become common. nativism and pluralism again contend as the percentage of the national population born abroad has reached its highest since the early twentieth century. proposals for net neutrality revisit many of the dynamics of the state sponsorship of gilded age railroads. the u.s.-mexico border is at the center of national politics in a way rarely seen since the mexican revolution in the s. digital giants like amazon, facebook, and google make progressive debates about monopoly seem newly relevant. the #metoo movement has pushed back against the norms and limits established by an entrenched and discriminatory male-dominated society in ways reminiscent of the women’s rights campaigns of a century ago. and black lives matters continues the work of ida b. wells, the naacp, and all those who crusaded against the scourge of lynchings and white supremacy. indeed, politicians and pundits from across the ideological spectrum battle not just over those same themes of a century ago, but over the very essence of the gilded age and (especially) the progressive era—and what we as citizens might make of these periods today. the most recent visceral example that we can think of: before his recent transformation into an advocate of civility and even black lives matter, glenn beck each year ecstatically danced on woodrow wilson’s grave in celebration of the anniversary of his death. wilson is, for beck, the dark prince of progressivism and thus the progenitor of all modern peril to the republic. in contrast, barack obama visited osawatomie, kansas, in to deliver the most important economic address of his reelection campaign. following in the footsteps of teddy roosevelt’s “new nationalism” speech there, obama hoped to birth a new progressive era by directly chan- neling the spirit of the old one. or take the debate, to which historians have contributed plenty, over who and what constitutes modern-day “populism” in our rancorous age of resurgent nationalism across the globe. does donald trump, with his angry mobilization of the embittered white masses against liberal elites, constitute the most accurate embodiment of that term and analytical category? or, in contrast, does the eugene debs-loving self- described socialist bernie sanders better deserve that label? so: our little corner of history continues to matter. in fact it matters quite a bit—even if there are unfortunately plenty of obstacles to the serious consideration of the past in our overheated civic moment. editors’ note h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms we know, and deeply appreciate, that our colleagues and successors cothran and genetin-pilawa share these understandings and commitments. we especially look forward to seeing how the collective endeavor of connecting history to our own day will continue to unfold in the pages of the journal, enlivening and enriching our under- standings of the past as well as helping in some small ways to forge a more just present. *** of course, in addition to saying farewell, we also have an issue to put out. we have been particularly proud of our various themed issues and forums, ranging from the history of capitalism to indigenous histories of the gilded age and progressive era. in the current issue, ably curated by guest editors manfred berg and axel jansen, we con- sider aspects of world war i: of course an enormously consequential conflict, but one also too frequently neglected by scholars and the public alike. the eight essays include analyses of topics such as preparedness, party politics, and diplomacy typically associated with the studies of war, as well as themes such as childhood, academic freedom, and “voluntarism.” our hope is that this special issue presents a view of the war’s historiography, including extensive discussion of scholarship in german; new methodological approaches; and suggestions for new lines of inquiry. with novem- ber , , marking the centennial of the end of world war i, we hope this special issue will be of use to specialists as well as those drawn by the centenary to discuss, in their courses and with a broader public, the conflict and its enduring legacy for the united states and the world. *** a final word of appreciation: in all our work these past five years, we have benefited mightily from the superb orga- nization, excellent editing, and cheerful collegiality of the journal’s wonderful graduate assistants: first, luke staszak; and, for the last four years, the exceptional left-handed shortstop, and historian, tim herbert. thank you. the next several beers at haymarket pub and brewery on randolph street are on us. robert d. johnston and benjamin h. johnson n o t e s james w. loewen, lies my teacher told me: everything your american history textbook got wrong (new york: the new press, [ ]), . and historiography is not just for the experts. elsewhere, loewen compellingly argues that “understanding historiography is one of the great gifts a history course can impart to its students.” see teaching what really happened: how to avoid the tyranny of the textbook and get students excited about doing history (new york: teachers college press, ), . on beck and obama, see robert d. johnston, “long live teddy/death to woodrow: the polarized pol- itics of the progressive era in the election,” journal of the gilded age and progressive era (july ): – . a good portion of obama’s interest in the reformers of a century ago likely came via his coun- selor, john podesta, who wrote a fairly learned book about the progressive era and its legacy for progressivism today. see podesta, the power of progress: how america’s progressives can (once again) save our economy, our climate, and our country (new york: crown, ). of course, as hillary clinton’s campaign manager, podesta was one of the chief targets of wikileaks; in the process, the journal of the gilded age and progressive era actually got swept up in julian assange’s muckraking net; john halpin to john editors’ note h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms podesta, “the power of progress rises again!,” email, feb. , , wikileaks, https://wikileaks.org/podesta- emails/emailid/ . for dueling perspectives, see charles postel, “if trump and sanders are both populist, then what does populist mean?,” the american historian, feb. ); and michael kazin, “how can donald trump and bernie sanders both be ‘populist’?,”. new york times, mar. , . see also postel’s illuminating “what we talk about when we talk about populism,” raritan (fall ): – . editors’ note h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/ https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/ https://wikileaks.org/podesta-emails/emailid/ https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms 	editors note microsoft word - dh -asian-american-dh-forum.docx dh ,	alliance	of	digital	humanities	organizations	 ottawa/virtual,	july	 - ,	 	 	 asian	american	dh:	building	radical	communities	through	justice-oriented	praxis	 	 facilitators:		 ● anne	cong-huyen	-	https://orcid.org/ - - - ,	university	of	michigan,	 annech@umich.edu	 ● dhanashree	thorat	-	https://orcid.org/ - - - ,	mississippi	state	 university,	dt @msstate.edu	 ● setsuko	yokoyama	-	https://orcid.org/ - - - ,	university	of	maryland,	 setsuko@umd.edu		 ● arun	jacob	-	https://orcid.org/ - - - x,	university	of	toronto,	 arun.jacob@mail.utoronto.ca	 ● amardeep	singh,	lehigh	university	 	 description:		 in	recent	years,	ethnic	studies	scholars	have	carved	an	increasingly	visible	space	for	digital	 scholarship	informed	by	and	attuned	to	ethnic	and	critical	race	studies.	perhaps	less	visible	 amongst	these	interventions	has	been	the	work	done	in	asian/asian	american	studies.	as	many	 would	contend,	however,	before	digital	humanities	emerged	as	the	field	we	recognize	today,	asian	 americanists	had	been	researching	and	publishing	on	issues	of	digital	labor,	online	communities,	 infrastructure,	and	networks.	we	situate	this	scholarship	from	asian	american	studies	in	the	 genealogy	of	digital	humanities.		 	 this	forum	brings	together	asian	americanist	faculty,	librarians,	and	students	to	unpack	and	frame	 research,	pedagogy,	and	praxis	in	both	digital	humanities	and	asian	american	studies:	what	does	 asian/am	dh	look	like?	what	form	might	a	community	of	practice	in	asian/am	dh	take?	how	best	 can	we	support	asian	americanists,	whose	field	is	historically	grounded	in	community	organizing	 and	activism,	in	applying	dh	methods	to	their	scholarship?	as	we	address	these	questions,	we	will	 foreground	how	asian/am	dh,	like	other	ethnic	studies	informed	dh	praxis,	centers	concerns	of	 race,	social	justice,	transnationalism,	and	community.		 	 this	forum	will	begin	with	facilitators	each	presenting	 -minute	introductory	talks	to	illuminate	 keywords	related	to	themes	and	approaches	to	asian/american	digital	humanities.	in	the	ethos	of	 public	digital	humanities,	one	of	the	conference	themes	for	dh ,	this	forum	emphasizes	 inclusion,	care,	community,	and	anti-racist	collaboration.	 	 opening	keywords:	 ● networks	-	how	do	asian	americans	on	social	networks	and	in	digital	media	use	rhetorics	 of	authenticity	to	develop	resistant	narratives	of	identity?	to	what	extent	should	asian	 american	digital	communities	be	seen	as	countercultural,	and	how	and	when	do	they	 become	legible	as	mainstream?				 ● activism	-	what	are	the	connections	between	the	radical	tradition	of	activism	in	asian	 american	studies	and	the	resurgent	interest	in	social	and	racial	justice	in	digital	humanities	 communities?	 ● collaboration	-	how	can	we	interrogate	collaboration	and	its	politics	in	dh?	how	can	we	 address	the	challenges	of	building	and	sustaining	long-term	and	equitable	partnerships?	 and	how	can	we	learn	from	historical	cross-racial	social	justice	alliances	as	we	practice	dh?		 ● accessibility	-	what	are	the	implications	of	using	the	sound	spectrograph	as	an	analytical	 research	methodology	or	assistive	pedagogical	tool	today?	given	its	historical	formation	as	 a	means	of	british	imperialism,	how	can	we	avoid	the	reproduction	of	violence	inflicted	 upon	indigenous	and	immigrant	communities	in	north	america?		 ● iteration	-	improvisation,	change,	and	adaptation	has	been	increasingly	integral	to	dh	 practice.	knowing	this,	how	can	we	best	acknowledge	the	creativity,	troubleshooting,	and	 failures	that	accompany	digital	diasporic	scholarship?	 		 a	substantial	amount	of	time	will	be	reserved	to	engage	with	audience	members,	who	will	be	asked	 directed	questions,	and	will	also	be	encouraged	to	contribute	to	a	collaborative	document	that	we	 hope	to	eventually	publish	in	an	open	format.	we	hope	that	this	panel	will	provide	space	to	build	a	 community	of	practice	and	start	conversations	about	a	special	interest	group	or	caucus	around	 asian/am	digital	humanities.	 	 	 in	lieu	of	the	virtual	forum,	 / / :	 a	lot	has	changed	since	october	 	when	we	put	together	the	asian	american	dh	forum	to	 discuss	building	radical	communities	through	justice-oriented	praxis.	as	covid- 	cases	started	to	 emerge	in	the	united	states	in	february	 ,	the	white	house	started	blaming	the	people's	 republic	of	china	for	the	global	pandemic,	and	such	false	accusations	led	to	the	surge	in	hate	crimes	 against	asians	and	asian	americans	in	the	u.s.	even	being	challenged	by	journalists	about	the	 consequences	of	such	racist	remarks,	the	president	continues	to	willfully	refer	to	the	virus	with	 various	xenophobic	terms	including	“kung	flu”	or	“chinese	virus”	to	divert	the	public	attention	 from	his	dire	mismanagement	of	this	public	health	crisis.	 	 just	as	the	current	administration’s	rhetorics	around	the	pandemic	has	incited	the	legacy	of	 racialization	that	has	long	marked	asian	americans	as	the	yellow	peril	and	perpetual	“foreigners,”	 covid- 	has	also	exacerbated	the	existing	inequities	bolstered	by	centuries-old	systemic	racism	in	 the	u.s.	to	date,	covid- 	has	disproportionately	impacted	the	lives	of	black,	brown,	and	 indigenous	communities,	as	many	work	as	frontline	workers,	rely	on	public	transportations,	suffer	 from	housing	insecurity,	and	lack	basic	social	infrastructural	needs	such	as	access	to	clean	running	 water	and	affordable	health	care.	meanwhile,	rightwing	militia	groups	brandished	assault	rifles	on	 as	they	gathered	to	protest	their	state’s	order	to	shelter	in	place,	a	policy	designed	to	collectively	 curve	the	infection	rates.	this	was	april	 th.	 	 while	ignoring	the	gun-bearing	protestors	refusing	to	quarantine	or	to	wear	masks	in	public,	the	 police	have	continued	to	inflict	violence	upon	black	lives.	on	may	 ,	 ,	a	white	police	officer	 named	derek	michael	chauvin	murdered	george	floyd	in	minneapolis,	mn,	by	keeling	on	floyd’s	 neck	for	nearly	nine	minutes.	the	killing	of	floyd	came	after	the	killing	of	ahmaud	arbery	and	 breonna	taylor	and	many	others	before	them	at	the	hand	of	police	and	other	state-sanctioned	 vigilantes.	such	a	heinous	act	of	floyd’s	killing	captured	on	video	and	widely	circulated	on	the	 internet	sparked	public	outrage.	for	asian	american	communities,	it	was	especially	appalling	to	 witness	tou	thao,	an	asian	american	police	officer,	standing	guard	while	floyd	suffocated	for	air.	 the	moment	woefully	encapsulated	how	white	supremacy	has	assured	itself	by	pitting	bipoc	 communities	against	one	another,	and	that	anti-blackness	within	asian	american	communities	 must	be	dismantled.	 	 the	black	lives	matter	movement	that	saw	a	myriad	of	street	protestors	demanding	immediate	 justice	for	black	communities	has	now	turned	into	an	abolitionist	movement:	to	end	excessive	 policing;	to	replace	the	police	with	community	social	services	equipped	to	respond	to	the	public	 health	crisis;	and	to	terminate	the	mass	incarceration	which	disenfranchises	black	americans	and	 sustains	capitalism	run	on	their	prison	labor.		 	 while	the	call	for	“care	not	cages”	has	mobilized	activists	and	allies	to	work	towards	abolition,	 however,	ice	announced	a	new	guideline	on	july	 th	with	its	plan	to	deport	international	college	 students	unless	students	attend	in-person	courses	in	fall	 .	like	the	police,	ice	shows	no	regard	 for	human	life,	as	it	has	terrorized	undocumented	students	on	university	campuses	as	they	actively	 keep	immigrants,	refugees,	and	asylum	seekers	in	crowded	cages,	even	in	times	of	covid- .	this	 latest	attempt	of	the	xenophobic	policy	was	meant	to	target	a	particular	group	of	chinese	students	 as	a	political	stunt,	but	it	echoes	the	exclusionary	anti-chinese	immigration	policies	of	the	 th	 century	and	which	take	on	new	life	in	the	age	of	coronavirus.	attacking	international	students	 allows	the	white	house	to	demonstrate	its	misguided	commitment	to	the	"america	first"	ideology	 that	blames	immigrants	for	historic	high	rates	of	unemployment--just	as	the	same	administration	 tried	to	justify	dismantling	of	the	daca	program	in	the	past--and	claim	covid- 	as	biological	 warfare	fabricated	by	a	foreign	nation.	these	actions	on	the	part	of	this	administration	all	act	as	 diversions,	drawing	attention	away	from	the	fact	that	the	current	administration's	mismanagement	 of	the	public	health	crisis	led	us	all	here	in	the	first	place.	 	 in	a	moment	of	heightened	anti-black	and	anti-asian	racism,	our	commitment	to	building	radical	 communities	through	justice-oriented	praxis	is	of	vital	importance.	it	could	not	have	been	more	 timely	for	us	to	engage	in	discussions	with	scholars,	teachers,	and	activists	in	the	field	of	digital	 humanities	to	forge	our	way	forward	by	reintroducing	asian	americanists	who	have	been	doing	the	 work	that	is	attuned	to	ethnic	and	critical	race	studies.	asian	american	studies	emerged	out	of	and	 remain	committed	to	afro-asian	solidarity,	and	continue	to	work	against	u.s.	imperialism	and	 white	supremacy	in	all	forms.		 	 at	the	same	time,	the	constant	assault	from	the	racist	white	house	coupled	with	the	new	normal	of	 working	and	homeschooling	in	quarantine	has	been	draining.	we	are	tired.	we	have	therefore	 decided	to	prioritize	our	wellbeing	and	community	care	over	academic	productivity,	which	has	long	 tasked	bipoc	communities	with	emotionally	taxing	labor	to	address	prolonged	injustice	in	the	u.s.	 and	in	our	institutions	without	the	necessary	support.	 	 although	we	cannot	engage	in	these	dialogues	with	you	in-person,	we	share	this	statement	with	our	 larger	dh	community	with	the	added	heartfelt	wish	that	you	all	remain	safe	and	well.	we	also	hope	 that	you	take	this	time	to	reflect	on	your	own	positionality,	your	own	actions,	your	own	complicity,	 and	consider	ways	that	you	can	work	towards	racial	justice.	 	 references:	 ● cong-huyen,	anne.	“asian/american	and	the	digital|technological	thus	far.”	verge:	studies	 in	global	asias.	spring	 .	 ● cong-huyen,	anne.	"toward	a	transnational	asian	american	digital	humanities."		 between	humanities	and	the	digital,	edited	by	david	theo	goldberg	and	patrik	 svensson.	mit	press,	 	 ● gajjala,	radhika.	cyber	selves:	feminist	ethnographies	of	south	asian	women.	walnut	creek:	 altamira	press.	 	 ● lee,	rachel	c.	asian	america.net:	ethnicity,	nationalism,	and	cyberspace	(routledge	 university	press,	 	 ● nakamura,	lisa.	race	in	cyberspace,	routledge,	co-edited	with	beth	kolko	and	gil	rodman,	 	 ● nakamura,	lisa.	cybertypes:	race,	ethnicity,	and	identity	on	the	internet.	routledge,	 .		 ● nguyen,	mimi.	"asiatic	geekgirl	agitprop	from	paper	to	pixels."	technicolor:	race,	 technology	and	everyday	life.		ed.	thuy	linh	tu	and	alondra	nelson.	new	york:	new	york	 university	press,	 .	 - .	 ● risam,	roopika.	“diasporizing	the	digital	humanities:	displacing	center	and	periphery.”	 international	journal	of	e-politics,	vol.	 ,	no.	 ,	 ,	pp.	 - .	 	 s jra .. (mis)calculations, psychological mechanisms, and the future politics of people of color efrén pérez university of california, los angeles race, ethnicity, politics & society (reps) lab abstract: this essay comments on three questions about race, ethnicity, and politics in the contemporary united states—how did we get here? who are we now? and, where are we going next? i grapple with these questions as a pol- itical psychologist steeped in the study of intergroup politics. in this capacity, i will argue that structural (mis)calculations have paved the road toward present intergroup relations, where identity politics reigns supreme. i then discuss america’s current racial landscape, arguing that reality is more complex than before, especially as it concerns political relations between whites and non- whites. in this regard, i will claim that political psychology holds special insights to generate new knowledge about how (non-)whites are navigating this changing racial landscape. finally, i will advocate, strongly, for a greater sense of wonder about the multiplicity of identities that people of color hold. in particular, i will claim that by relaxing our assumption that race is the main identity that matters to people of color, we stand to better appreciate just how adaptive non- whites are to their political surroundings, leading us toward new insights about the origins and nature of mass political engagement and involvement. keywords: interminority politics, people of color, hierarchy. “you can observe a lot by just watching.” —yogi berra, former new york yankees catcher for any political scientist with a pulse, has been a year replete with jaw-dropping observations. we have seen a raging global pandemic wreak address correspondence and reprint requests to: efrén pérez, departments of political science and psychology, university of california, los angeles, los angeles, california, usa. e-mail: perezeo@ ucla.edu the journal of race, ethnicity, and politics, ( ), – . © the author(s), . published by cambridge university press on behalf of the race, ethnicity, and politics section of the american political science association doi: . /rep. . - / terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:perezeo@ucla.edu mailto:perezeo@ucla.edu https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core havoc across black and latino communities (oppel et al. ). we have also witnessed numerous, high-profile murders of black, latino, and other civilians of color at the hands of police (bailey ; mejia ). moreover, we have witnessed a virulent rise in bald, unapologetic prejudiced behaviors and attitudes toward asian americans, native americans, and other communities of color (reny and barreto ; walker and cochrane ). and what are we learning from all this? certainly not anything new that we did not know before as race, ethnicity, and politics (rep) scholars. indeed, for all of the particulars of each and every one of these lamentable cases and others, the common spark behind them all, i would say, is the congeries of structures, beliefs, and attitudes that are designed to keep people of color “in their place” as minorities. while there was a time when such backlashes succeeded wildly, this time it feels different. and, as i will seek to persuade you in the rest of this essay, it is different (at least conceptually). all we have to do is follow yogi berra’s dictum by looking for the correct signs in the contin- ued unfolding of rep. what i am suggesting to rep scholars is a conceptual hypothesis of sorts. namely, that what is unfurling before us is qualitatively distinct from what we have observed in the past as far as the relations between non-hispanic whites and people of color are concerned. by this reason- ing, the “null” in play here is simply more of the same—a state of affairs where whites are the sole ascendant group in america’s racial hierarchy, with people of color below in a common well of devaluation and with few political paths to remedy this lowlier station. i will prosecute my case against this null hypothesis by answering three conceptual questions about rep in the context of american politics: ( ) how did we get to this precise moment? ( ) who are we, in the contemporary era? and ( ) where are we going next? i will answer each of these questions in the only way i know how: as a political psychologist who is steeped in the study of intergroup politics. this means that much of what i have to say—and the evidence that i adduce for my claims—will come from a very narrow slice of our shared knowledge base in the social sciences. this should make it plainly obvious that anything i say in the pages that follow is not any more valid than the perspectives of others in this collection of essays. alas, all science—including its political variety—is a cumulative, collect- ive effort. from this angle, then, my insights are a drop in that enormous bucket. nonetheless, i still want to suggest that a stronger focus on the psychology of intergroup relations can sensitize many of us further to pérez terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core what i would characterize as “victories” in the long struggle for the greater political inclusion of people of color, broadly construed. thus having cleared my throat a little, allow me now to at least try to persuade you about some of this. arriving to the current moment through sheer (mis)calculations in the wake of donald trump’s election to the u.s. presidency in , many mainstream political scientists have produced a torrent of scholar- ship that highlights the major role of intergroup dynamics in general (e.g., achen and bartels ; bartels ; kinder and kalmoe ), and the influence of racial identity politics in particular (e.g., sides, tesler, and vavreck a; sides et al. ; b). yet, the sense of novelty and urgency behind this largely non-rep scholarship is likely to strike many rep scholars (including this one) as a sign of “being asleep at the wheel” until now. long before the current era, the relevance of intergroup relations and identity politics to america’s electoral dynam- ics has been one of the core insights that rep scholars have been clamor- ing about, often with minimal recognition by those outside of this specific subfield (cf. hutchings and valentino ; mcclain and stewart ). yet, what both rep and non-rep scholars generally overlook in this scholarship are the structural roots of the identity politics we continue seeing playing out at the individual level. this effervescence in racial iden- tities is not just “in people’s heads.” it is a consequence of a changing field of race relations (cf. kim )—a long-run effect driven by both deliber- ate and accidental actions at the institutional level. let me illustrate with one crucial example. in , america’s congress passed the hart-celler act: a piece of legislation aimed at removing the remaining vestiges of what lawmakers saw as america’s racist past when it came to immigrant admissions (king ). more than half a century had passed since the time when the u.s. congress had thought differently about all this, having instituted—in and —formal quotas that expressly limited the entry of asian foreigners and immigrants from southern and eastern europe (ngai ), some of the main racial bogeymen of that era. but it was the early s now, and america was locked in a cold war with the soviet union—and racial discrimination at home was one bat that russian officials used regularly to beat the united states over the head in public settings and diplomatic circles (parker ; skrentny ; yuen ). thus, by removing any semblance of racial quotas future politics of people of color terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core in immigrant admissions, the hart-celler act aimed to tactically strike a symbolic victory against the russians and other u.s. critics. indeed, lawmakers who supported this act won over their skeptical colleagues by noting, sotto voce, that this policy change would be largely cosmetic, not really affecting the nature and content of immigra- tion to the united states. it was considered an astute political move at the time (tichenor ). time has revealed to us that this strategy was also pregnant with hubris. through simple strokes of a pen, the removal of these quotas set into motion a cascade of immigration flows from countries that had, in years prior, anemically contributed to america’s foreign-born population. through sheer miscalculation, asian and latin american nations drove the growth in immigration from onward. in fact, we’re still feeling those effects today. the panorama of non-white individuals in the united states now includes traditional groups, such as african americans and native americans, but also “newer” groups such as mexicans, koreans, salvadorans, filipinos, dominicans, chinese, puerto ricans, japanese, and cubans. this multiplicity of groups has led some political entrepreneurs to weave together a variety of new categor- ies with political purposes in mind. for example, political actors have threaded together mexicans, puerto ricans, cubans, dominicans, and others into what we now know as latinos. originally deemed artificial and incoherent (beltran ; mora ), this label has now become a fully-fledged identity with political effects under very specific circum- stances (e.g., barreto ; manzano and sanchez ; pérez a, b; pérez et al. ; valenzuela and michelson ). ditto with the transformation of chinese, korean, japanese and other groups into asian americans (e.g., kuo et al. ; lien et al. ; wong et al. ). and, as if this diversity of categories is not enough, many of these disparate, unique racial and ethnic groups have now coalesced— by design and through elite action—into a larger mega-group, with african americans, asian americans, latinos, and others identifying, many times, as people of color (more on this below) (pérez, forthcoming; pérez ). this imaginative spread of racial and ethnic groups that draws on the growing demographic diversity of our country underlines the power of political opportunity and its exploitation by elites in the study of intergroup politics. let me illustrate this further with the case of people of color versus whites. in objective terms, there are far and few points of immediately obvious commonalities between african americans, asian americans, pérez terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core and latinos and their constituent subgroups. in fact, one could reasonably argue that these are communities with distinct histories, aspirations, and trajectories (not to mention the differences in treatment at the hands of u.s. authorities) (skrentny ). but there is a basic reality about american politics that fails to escape the attention of many of its residents, including people of color. namely, political power is respon- sive to large numbers, particularly when these are organized coherently. for many members of these disparate “minority” groups, then, these stark realities have encouraged many, mostly black, leaders to highlight and thread together a unifying banner of identity on the basis of shared disadvantages and grievances as people of color (pérez, forthcoming; pérez ). white americans understand these broad developments, too, even if they cannot or will not admit to their particulars. how do we know this? i, for one, am confident in this assertion based on a simple empirical observation. beginning in the early s, many white americans have changed their tune and temperament as a group. many group members have gradually shifted from being a predominant majority that is securely privileged with more power, resources, and prestige, to a group that palp- ably senses its once sheltered foothold is loosening—and fast. in short, whites are now also engaged in the politics of grievance, claiming that the america they see now is not the american they once knew (danbold and huo ; jardina ; knowles and lowery ; lowery et al. ; pérez et al. ). the fact is, america is not the same and is unlikely to return to this bygone era. indeed, i would argue that the spasms we are witnessing at the top of the hierarchy are not reflections of a predominant group who is reasserting its position. rather, this agitation is an indica- tion of a group that has already lost its “usual” position and is now scram- bling—worried, fearful, pessimistic—about new changes in the configuration of relations between racial and ethnic groups in the united states. still not convinced? then think of the recent reactions of some whites to the high-profile murders of black individuals at the hands of police (e.g., bailey ; berman et al. ). unlike in previ- ous moments like these, some individuals within the white community are actively listening, reflecting, and readjusting their attitudes and behaviors toward blacks and other groups (del real, samuels, and craig ; knowles and lowery ), with some of these individuals openly expressing sympathy for (chudy , ), rather than antip- athy against, various communities of color (cf. kinder and kam ; future politics of people of color terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core kinder and sanders ; ramirez and peterson ). let that sink in for a minute: some white individuals are now genuinely expressing sym- pathy for outgroups, with these sentiments bearing on how white americans behave politically (chudy ). each of these developments indicates the need to break strongly with our existing mental models of u.s. intergroup relations. as many rep scholars have previously noted, we often treat our racial landscape in binary and reductionist ways (beltrán ; dawson ; kim ; masuoka and junn ). some of this arises from scientific pressures to be parsimonious in our conceptualization and theory-building efforts. yet, parsimony should not retard our collective efforts at “catching up” with current empirical reality. we need to develop stronger theories that can better anticipate our political future. to this end, i encourage rep scholars to further suspend their standing assumptions about u.s. racial politics in order to better engage with two points that follow from this discussion. the first is a need to reformulate our understanding about the racial order that governs the relations between (non-)white groups today. to me, this entails greater exploration of the circumstances under which america’s hierarchy can be appreciably transformed, such that the actual stations of non-white groups shift into new and lasting patterns. for example, the emergence of a broader person of color identity under- scores the adage of “strength in numbers.” if we subscribe to this view, then one task at hand for rep scholars is to clarify the circumstances under which the centripetal forces of broadly shared attachments like a person of color identity can overcome the centrifugal pressures of identify- ing with one’s unique racial or ethnic group—all in order to produce collective action that meaningfully alters the racial status quo. this will involve lengthy and difficult conversations about what counts as non-trivial changes in america’s racial hierarchy. yet from where i sit, simply clinging to previous notions about the nature of america’s racial hierarchy as durably unchanging seems to be no longer tenable in descriptive, concep- tual, and empirical terms (masuoka and junn ; tajfel and turner ; zou and cheryan ). the second implication in need of further attention concerns the bal- kanization of white opinion, especially about racial matters. it is my belief that we need to move beyond the broad narrative of white backlashes or similar efforts to reassert dominance or control within america’s hierarchy (sidanius et al. ; sidanius and petrocik ). at minimum, this involves grappling further with the possibility that whites have already pérez terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core lost their sense of dominance within the hierarchy and what this entails attitudinally and behaviorally among specific members of this group. for example, jennifer chudy’s ( , ) creative work on racial sympathy alerts us to the range of feelings that members of a majority group can feel toward an outgroup—a point that psychologists like marilynn brewer ( ) and other scholars (jackman ) have made before to other audiences. but how much of this sympathy is an adapta- tion to changing circumstances in the relations between whites and people of color? and when can sympathy from the ingroup produce tangible changes in the configuration of america’s racial order for the outgroup(s)? these are crucial questions that cut to the heart of a hierarchy’s functionality (katz ): the idea that people are motivated to endorse an arranged set of relations between groups for basic psycho- logical motives (e.g., need for certainty, clarity, etc.) (cf. federico and malka ; jost and liviatan ; reid and hogg ). rep scholars—particularly those with a political behavior focus—should be on the ready to better grasp these motivations for our subfield’s sake. this is a long slog of an endeavor, with the upshot being greater oppor- tunities for younger rep scholars to establish themselves and nurture pro- ductive careers. in a similar spirit, ashley jardina’s ( ) path-breaking work on white identity politics translates for rep scholars a point that many psychologists have long understood and made (ellemers et al. , ): namely, that (white) identity is a matter of degree, not a type. a fuller appreciation of this range of racial identification among whites can, in my view, yield additional and sharper predictions about the motivations driving white politics toward people of color. while much of the action consuming our collective attention has been driven by the exclusionary reactions of high-identifying whites ( for whom being white is central to their sense of self ) (leach et al. ; pérez a, b), low-identifying whites are incredibly ripe for closer scrutiny. these are individuals for whom being white reflects weakly on how they see themselves, which, in theory, leaves them more open to a range of calls and entreaties to remedy political problems their group may disagree with (on average), but which they personally find appealing (see ellemers et al. ). greater inspection of this range of “being white” can further solidify our understanding about why some white people do, and do not, engage in vigorous efforts to improve racial inequality—one of the main byproducts of america’s racial order (cf. knowles and lowery ; lowery et al. ). future politics of people of color terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core who are we? more than one thing–and perhaps several things at once if we want to answer the query who are we? by strictly availing ourselves of prior rep work, then the resounding answer is that who we are is, largely and regularly, defined by our racial or ethnic identities. by this metric, a person’s sense of being african american, asian american, latino, etc. colors one’s everyday existence, in general, while underwriting their polit- ical expressions and behaviors, in particular. nobody here is putting in doubt the crucial role that racial/ethnic identities play in the politics of non-white individuals. what is debatable, however, is the extent to which non-whites operate, unerringly, on the basis of their unique racial/ethnic identities alone, especially in politics. why? because unless we wish to make the more questionable claim that non-whites are some unique human sub-species, the conceptual reality is that “minor- ities,” too, possess a multiplicity of attachments that they enjoy access to—a full repertoire of identities (chandra ; ; garcía-ríos et al. ; pérez a, b; pérez et al. ; sen and wasow ). who we are, then, largely depends on who else is around us and what is at stake, with the latter encompassing both material and status-based con- siderations (cf. tajfel et al. ; tajfel and turner ; turner et al. ; ; see also sidanius et al. ; sidanius and petrocik ). that, at least, is what reams of psychological studies teach us. i think this hallowed insight matters because failure to wrestle more aggressively with the rich identity repertoires of non-whites exposes rep scholars to a few unforced errors. the most prominent one, to my mind, is that we risk attributing various political opinions and behaviors to racial and ethnic identity when these acts are really driven by other attachments— or some combination, thereof—that are stored in one’s repertoire. this omission matters qualitatively and quantitatively. to claim that racial/ ethnic identity is responsible for “minority” politics when it is not is to miss out on the very heterogeneity that we all recognize characterizes these communities (e.g., abrajano and alvarez ; beltran ; dawson ; ; garcia ; lien et al. ; white and laird ; white, laird, and allen ; wong et al. ). simply put, our conceptual scope is unnecessarily narrowed, leading us to collectively miss out on conceptual and theoretical innovations. this can influence the array of literatures that are amplified and ignored, with lasting conse- quences for the creation and circulation of fresh ideas from rep scholars, especially junior ones. pérez terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core but this omission also matters statistically. if racial identity is stored in one’s repertoire—a fancy word for a particular slice of one’s long-term memory (ltm)—then it means that racial identity keeps close company with other distinct attachments (cf. collins and loftus ). in fact, given the associative architecture of ltm, group identities that we consider distinct are actually robustly correlated with others, thus urging rep schol- ars to think about “omitted” identities in their statistical analyses (lodge and taber ; pérez ; see also tourangeau et al. ). let me illustrate some of these pitfalls and opportunities with two examples. the first case is the overwhelming democratic partisanship of african americans. scores of published studies have sensitized many an rep scholar to the chronic and powerful role of racial identity in black political behavior (e.g., allen et al. ; dawson ; ; hajnal and lee ; tate ; white ). but if the outcomes that fascinate us are political, then why isn’t a more political identity responsible for these effects, rather than a social identity, like being african american? indeed, the most obvious suspect here is partisan identity—an expressly political form of attachment, and one that also defines many african americans as strongly identified democrats (hajnal and lee ). so which one is it: racial or partisan identity? the most imaginative answer i have seen on this yet can be found in steadfast democrats: how social forces shape black political behavior by ismail white and chryl laird. this volume provides a compelling account about racial identity, partisan identity, and the interface between both (emphasis on the interface part). white and laird ( ) contend that the overwhelming democratic partisanship of black americans can be best understood as emanating from a variety of social pressures that cement the political unity, cohesion, and power of their racial group. by this account, african americans’ enduring experiences with racial discrimination have taught them that collective political action is one avenue to improve their social status. yet, such action requires unity in light of political heterogeneity among african americans, with some leaning ideologically to the left, some leaning ideologically to the right, and plenty of others in between. in order to speak with a more unified voice, black americans close ranks by policing the conservative members of their racial group, thus transforming them into a steadfast segment of the democrats’ electoral coalition. the empirics in support of this theoretical framework are firmly impres- sive, consisting of surgically precise experiments that trace the effects of future politics of people of color terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core social pressure on the political compliance of black partisans. but the real victory here, in my mind, is a conceptual one. think of it this way. before the fresh and imaginative insights of white and laird ( ), there were at least two prominent ways to interpret black politics in light of their stead- fast allegiance to the democratic party. one is to view the political cohe- siveness and electoral reliability of black democrats as a manifestation of political capture (e.g., carmines and stimson ; frymer ). by this view, the political potency of black democratic voters is taken for granted by elites and manipulated by them toward political ends that sometimes may not fully align with black preferences. another, more stat- istically inclined view is that democratic partisanship among blacks is empirically uninteresting because there is so little variation to exploit or explain (roughly out black adults are self-identified democrats). together, these interpretations construe black americans as lacking polit- ical will or nuance. yet by illuminating the interface between racial and partisan identity, white and laird ( ) erect a new framework high- lighting that black americans possess more agency, more complexity, and more identities than typically assumed. i count this as a firm victory in our collective efforts to deepen our conceptual understanding of intraminority politics. another example comes from my own work on non-whites’ identifica- tion as people of color. in a forthcoming book titled diversity’s child: people of color and the politics of identity, i argue that many non-white individuals in the united states have a new entry in their identity repertories—that is, many of them now identify as people of color. this new attachment is related to, but distinct from, their sense of identification with their own racial and ethnic groups. in fact, this rela- tionship is rooted in a particular configuration between people of color— a type of category that psychologists call a superordinate identity—and racial and ethnic identities—categories that psychologists dub as subor- dinate attachments (gaertner et al. ; transue ). once again, the interface between identities is important (cf. pérez, deichert, and engelhardt ). my basic proposition is that a person’s sense of being african american, asian american, or latino is nested under this broader category, people of color. this nesting occurs when, in indi- viduals’ environs, there is a clear frame of reference. for many african americans, asian americans, and latinos, this frame of reference is often whites—a group whose relatively stronger position in america’s racial order reminds many “minorities” about who is responsible for their shared devaluation. pérez terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core the key to this conceptual renovation is not that non-whites have for- gotten that they are black, asian, or latino, but rather, that under some circumstances, their perspective is shifted toward a wider panoramic view. when this occurs, any spirit of generosity, support, or benefit of the doubt that a black person would grant to other black individuals, or that asians would normally extend to other asians, or that latinos would offer to other latinos, is now held out to other people of color. that is, non-whites come to see themselves as interchangeable exemplars of the same shared group. hence, “your” political battle is “my” battle because we are all people of color (pérez ). indeed, across in-depth interviews with carefully selected people of color, as well as more than , black, asian, and latino participants in multiple polls, survey experiments, and lab experiments, i find that stronger identification as a person of color produces greater support for policies and measures that affect the general well-being of non-whites, even if these initiatives don’t have direct or immediate implications for members of one’s own racial or ethnic group. as but one example, i find that higher levels of poc id reliably and substantially boost support for the black lives matter movement, not only among african americans, but among asian americans and latinos—and by similar margins, to boot. this effect emerges from a sense that members of each racial community share a broader group in common. in fact, a loss in this perceived similarity reduces the winds behind poc id’s sails. the moment that a black, asian, or latino individual senses that the larger group ignores the unique experiences and challenges of their nar- rower group, this political unity behind black lives matters falls apart. again, the victories i see here are conceptual ones, for we arrive at a deeper understanding about what underpins, psychologically, both conflictual and cooperative relations between distinct minority groups— an understanding that is based on acknowledging the rich identity repertoires that non-whites possess. it also throws new light on some of the pathways behind possible transformations in the racial order. and by transformations, i mean objective changes in the stations of non-whites within the racial order (e.g., horowitz ; tajfel ). in the study of intergroup dynamics, transformations occur in the stable arrangements that govern relations between groups when the outgroup “takes the fight” to the ingroup, what is formally described as social competition (tajfel and turner ). accordingly, those groups on the outs become less restrained by a sense of impertinence and actively press for changes and improvements in how they are treated and how future politics of people of color terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core much power they actually enjoy. rather than being sudden and destruc- tive, these efforts are often slow, incremental, and largely non-violent (e.g., lee ; parker ). viewed from this angle, then, a person of color identity becomes one tactic for non-whites to feel better about themselves despite their continued stigmatization (pérez, forthcoming), while also facilitating greater collective action at opportune political moments (pérez ). this does not mean that poc id, alone, will topple america’s hierarchy. but it is to say that this broad-based attachment can help dislodge previous assumptions about how well-organized and credible the political entreaties of non-whites are, especially as people of color completely shed their “minority” status. where next? toward a firmer grasp of intergroup relations in every sense of the word in my graduate school years at duke university, i clearly remember paula mcclain, my ph.d. advisor, once remarking during a seminar that most articles and books aiming to study u.s. racial attitudes were, upon very close inspection, really studies of white attitudes toward race. that obser- vation has always stuck with me. indeed, i find it fantastically impressive that even today, so much scholarship examines racial attitudes or questions of race from the strict vantage point of whites, with scattered, limited, and uneven attention to the views of people of color (brader, valentino, and suhay ; gilens ; kinder and dale-riddle ; kinder and sanders ; sniderman and carmines ). there is nothing wrong with this perspective, of course. it is an essential piece of a larger story we are all partaking in. but my point here is that—salesmanship and profit-incentives notwithstanding—this type of focus is a ruse that sometimes helps to reify many of the inequalities that exist between main- stream political scientists and those from rep, most of whom are from underrepresented groups. i know this because, if i were to characterize my own research on, say, people of color, as a study of american opinion toward race relations, i highly doubt many readers would be convinced about the scope of this work. i highlight all this in order to call closer attention to a limitation in current work that needs immediate rectification going forward. if we want to truly understand intergroup politics in the united states (and beyond, actually), then we need to engage more seriously with the inter part of this word. this involves more aggressive conceptual, theoretical, pérez terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core and empirical efforts in our research. for instance, on the conceptual side of things, all groups should manifest and display the same “moving parts” as others, even if there is meaningful variance in how these “essentials” operate for different groups. otherwise, comparisons are futile (sartori ). let me highlight a concrete example here. when i teach my gradu- ate seminar on political psychology, i am regularly struck by our often bifur- cated understanding of (non-)whites’ political motivations in intergroup settings. by standard accounts, white politics are primarily motivated by their outgroup attitudes (e.g., kinder and sanders ; sears and henry ), yet the politics of non-whites are generally construed as being driven by their concerns about their ingroup (e.g., dawson ; kuo et al. ; pérez a, b). this makes for a conceptually awkward situ- ation where each type of group is missing some key aspect of human nature (cf. brewer ). alas, all racial groups, irrespective of their social status, possess ingroup and outgroup attitudes—with the degree of corres- pondence between the two being looser and more modest than rep schol- ars typically presume (e.g., kinder and kam ). indeed, as the social psychologist marilynn brewer ( , ) reminds us, “ingroup love can be compatible with a range of attitudes toward corresponding outgroups, including mild positivity, indifference, disdain, or hatred.” now, lest you think this is a no-brainer, consider the rapid shift in treat- ment of white people in the study of racial politics, from individuals who sometimes personally manifest pathological attitudes toward a variety of “others,” to a growing focus on whites as members of a group with a spe- cific station in society, just like other non-white groups. in (which is really yesterday), sears and savalei ( ) wrote in an influential piece that “whites’ whiteness is. . .no more noteworthy to them than breathing the air around them. white group consciousness is. . .not likely to be a major force in whites’ political attitudes today.” fast forward less than years later, and ashley jardina ( , ) now teaches us that “white racial solidarity does factor into whites’ political thinking, primarily with respect to polices that whites see as benefiting or harming their in-group.” the arc connecting these two perspectives is breathtaking and a welcome development in my notebook. for we cannot have concepts in intergroup politics that only some actors seem to understand or use. our theories, too, should be on this chopping block, not with the aim of eliminating them from the record, but by dissecting them and reconsti- tuting them into broader, more unified theories that capture the complex field of race relations that i alluded to earlier. there is much merit in developing and testing theories pertaining to specific groups (barreto future politics of people of color terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core ; dawson ; hajnal and lee ; kuo et al. ). but it is now increasingly untenable, scientifically speaking, to keep these frameworks in silos away from each other. what is needed, instead, are frameworks that, in explanation and scope, are more unified and more widely applic- able to multiple racial and ethnic groups. at a fundamental level, this entails a shift in frame of reference, from theories about the behavior of proper nouns (e.g., african americans, asian americans, latinos, muslim americans, native americans, etc.), to more generic theories about broader sociopolitical phenomenon (e.g., intergroup politics). this can be, and should be, a constructive endeavor. and there are signs already that it works, with a boon of insights for us all (and budding junior careers for some). as but one example of this, consider the racial position model (rpm) developed by zou and cheryan ( ) within social psychology. many an rep scholar is well-versed in the trailblazing insights of political scientist claire jean kim ( ; ), who developed a theory of racial triangulation to explain the structural subordination of asian americans in between whites and other people of color—a move that results from the systematic stereotyping of asian americans as a “higher status” but “forever foreign” group. building on this insight, zou and cheryan’s rpm stipulates that whites are still the most valorized group in america’s racial order. yet, major shifts have emerged in the rankings of communities of color. in particular, the rpm re-conceptualizes non-whites as falling along two major axes of subordination. the first of these is the familiar superior–inferior dimension that has shaped many political scientists’ thinking (e.g., carter and pérez ; masuoka and junn ; sidanius et al. ). here, whites are construed as the most superior group—that is, the group with the most cachet or social prestige. punching right below whites are asian americans: a racial group considered to be higher-status than blacks and latinos, but not as socially esteemed as whites. this liminal station is a resounding recognition of asian american’s complex status within the racial order (kim ; xu and lee ). the second axis of subordination, in turn, involves the ranking of groups in terms of how american or foreign they are considered to be. once again, whites occupy the most advantaged position along this corridor as the most american group, which is evidenced by their regular efforts to limit others’ entry into this highly valorized category (cf. danbold and huo ; knowles and lowery ; pérez et al. pérez terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core ). but what about people of color? here, the jockeying for position along this axis reflects the complex and unique ways in which different racial minority groups experience their subordination. for example, african americans are positioned here as a relatively more american group than asians and latinos, who contain substantial numbers of immi- grants in their ranks. that is, in comparison with asian americans and latinos—two groups who are regularly construed as “foreign intruders”—black individuals are considered relatively more american than this pair of communities (carter ). this revised hierarchy is visually represented in figure , which i reproduce from zou and cheryan ( ). the simple two-by-two reveals some interesting insights and, with additional brainstorming, can yield more precise predictions about intergroup politics. notice that each group’s position is relative to the other. in other words, it is very nearly impossible to understand, say, the position of asian americans without also appreciating where african americans, latinos, and whites are located on this plane. for what it is worth, i believe that this relational arrangement will prove essential in our further development and testing of hypotheses about interminority politics (cf. tajfel and turner ; turner et al. ). as but one example, in collaborative work with enya kuo (yale university, department of psychology), we demonstrate that the precise location of non-whites within america’s racial hierarchy motivates their political reactions to other people of color (pérez and kuo, n.d.). using the case of political attitudes toward latinos, we show, experimentally, that black adults are threatened by latinos’ demographic growth only when it is framed as having implications for blacks’ sense of what it means to be american. in contrast, asian american adults are only threatened by latinos demographic growth if it is framed as dragging down the quality of immigrants to the united states, which asian individuals draw a sense of superiority from (i.e., the dimension most relevant to them). this work shows how african and asian americans can express hostile political attitudes toward latinos (e.g., greater opposition to immigration), but for fundamentally different psychological motives that are rooted in their station within the very racial hierarchy they all share. finally, if we are to expand our conceptual and theoretical range, it stands to reason that our data-collections must also follow. there was once a time when collecting data for non-white groups was prohibitive in terms of finances, time, and effort. many of these barriers to entry future politics of people of color terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core have now been lowered, with the rise of online data collection and other creative approaches to data-collection (e.g., labs with poc-rich participant pools). moreover, new methodologies and techniques are emerging to further reduce these obstacles and allow more effective use of data on non-whites, such as the formal organization of multi-investigator studies and meta-analyses to analyze pooled samples of non-whites (goh et al. ; hopkins et al. ). let me illustrate what is possible here with some of the work being done in my lab at ucla. in , upon arriving to ucla, i launched the race, ethnicity, politics & society (reps) lab. one of the main goals of this space was to serve as a data-collection platform for social and political psychologists who study intergroup politics and relations through experiments. while many political scientists are consumed with questions about generalizabil- ity when it comes to experiments, one major lesson that often escapes critics is that with any experiment, the inferences are over the treatment, not the units themselves (druckman and kam ). thus, whether a finding replicates and extends across settings, participants, outcomes, and operationalizations of a treatment is a question of external validity— a question that requires multiple data-collections (campbell and stanley ). figure . two axes of subordination (zou and cheryan ). pérez terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core seizing on this insight, the reps lab coordinates a quarterly study that draws on the diversity of undergraduates at ucla and uc riverside, thus offering rep scholars (mainly doctoral students) the opportunity to run experiments with african american participants, asian american partici- pants, latino participants—or with participants from all three groups (and others). for example, in my book on identifying as a person of color (pérez forthcoming), i conducted a handful of lab experiments to bore down into the psychology behind this identity, generating insights that i was able to test further in studies outside of the lab. the point here is that the reps lab, and outfits similar to it (see cortland et al. ; kirby et al. ), aim to reduce barriers to data-collection so that rep scholars and others can continue to develop and test insights about the pol- itical attitudes and behaviors of (non-)whites in the united states, an area of research of utmost intellectual and practical significance, and one that should allow younger rep researchers to establish and distinguish them- selves going forward. a final thought in the end, none of what i have discussed in this essay is easy and i regret not being able to throw more “soft pitches” our way. taking these active steps is going to continue being a hard, time-intensive effort with high-risks. but i would also say that these efforts are suffused with potentially massive rewards, for they stand to clarify how a growing and substantial portion of our polity actually engages in politics. it is also, to draw on yogi berra’s insight one last time, a way for us to avoid being passive observers and becoming more active protagonists in how we understand ourselves and others in a political system that we all have to share in. this optimism on my part stems from taking comfort in the fact that, at a raw level, rep schol- ars have the deep expertise, the motivation, and the need to accomplish this feat for themselves and their field. our shared area of expertise began from a sense of exclusion and an equally deep sense that the perspectives of those we study mattered just as much as those from “mainstream” america (e.g., mcclain et al. ; mcclain and garcia ). those two sentiments were true in years past. and they are even more true today. we have in our hands, then, an opportunity and obligation to further thread these per- spectives, validate them empirically, and place them in flagship journals, if for the simple reason that people of color are a major segment under that broad canopy that we call american politics. future politics of people of color terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /rep. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /rep. . https://www.cambridge.org/core note indeed, by this metric, even a 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san diego uc san diego previously published works title the asm journals committee values the contributions of black microbiologists. permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ gj gj journal msphere, ( ) issn - authors schloss, patrick d junior, melissa alvania, rebecca et al. publication date - - doi . /msphere. - peer reviewed escholarship.org powered by the california digital library university of california https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ gj gj https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ gj gj#author https://escholarship.org http://www.cdlib.org/ the asm journals committee values the contributions of black microbiologists patrick d. schloss,a chair, asm journals committee, melissa junior,b director, asm journals, rebecca alvania,b assistant director, asm journals, cesar a. arias,c,d editor in chief, antimicrobial agents and chemotherapy, andreas baumler,e editor in chief, infection and immunity, arturo casadevall,f editor in chief, mbio, corrella detweiler,g editor in chief, microbiology and molecular biology reviews, harold drake,h editor in chief, applied and environmental microbiology, jack gilbert,i editor in chief, msystems, michael j. imperiale,a editor in chief, msphere, susan lovett,j editor in chief, ecosal plus, stanley maloy,k editor in chief, journal of microbiology and biology education (jmbe), alexander j. mcadam,l,m editor in chief, journal of clinical microbiology, irene l. g. newton,n editor in chief, microbiology resource announcements, michael j. sadowsky,o editor in chief, microbiology spectrum, rozanne m. sandri-goldin,p editor in chief, journal of virology, thomas j. silhavy,q editor in chief, journal of bacteriology, peter tontonoz,r editor in chief, molecular and cellular biology, jo-anne h. young,s editor in chief, clinical microbiology reviews, craig e. cameron,t isaac cann,u a. oveta fuller,a ariangela j. kozikv adepartment of microbiology and immunology, university of michigan, ann arbor, michigan, usa bamerican society for microbiology, washington, dc, usa ccenter for antimicrobial resistance and microbial genomics and division of infectious diseases, university of texas health science center, mcgovern medical school, houston, texas, usa ddepartment of microbiology and molecular genetics, university of texas health science center, mcgovern medical school, houston, texas, usa edepartment of medical microbiology and immunology, university of california, davis, california, usa fdepartment of molecular microbiology and immunology, johns hopkins bloomberg school of public health, baltimore, maryland, usa gdepartment of molecular, cellular & developmental biology, university of colorado, boulder, colorado, usa hdepartment of ecological microbiology, university of bayreuth, bayreuth, germany idepartment of pediatrics, university of california, san diego, california, usa jdepartment of biology, brandeis university, waltham, massachusetts, usa kdepartment of biology, san diego state university, san diego, california, usa lboston children’s hospital, boston, massachusetts, usa mharvard medical school, boston, massachusetts, usa ndepartment of biology, indiana university, bloomington, indiana, usa obiotechnology institute, university of minnesota, st. paul, minnesota, usa pdepartment of microbiology and molecular genetics, university of california, irvine, california, usa qdepartment of molecular biology, princeton university, princeton, new jersey, usa rdepartment of pathology and laboratory medicine, david geffen school of medicine, university of california, los angeles, california, usa sdepartment of medicine, university of minnesota, minneapolis, minnesota, usa tdepartment of microbiology & immunology, university of north carolina, chapel hill, north carolina, usa ucarl r. woese institute for genomic biology, university of illinois, urbana, illinois, usa vdepartment of internal medicine, university of michigan, ann arbor, michigan, usa black lives matter. the ongoing problem of police brutality and the resulting deathsof george floyd ( ), breonna taylor ( ), and many other black people in the united states ( ) has rightly shaken the country. acts of racism should cause us to question the level to which we have personally participated in the systems of racial inequity that facilitate such acts. we all have an obligation to identify the ways that systemic racism functions in our society and in science. as scientists, we prefer to believe that we are driven by data and are immune to such detrimental behaviors. yet, if we are honest, we know that this is not always true. citation schloss pd, junior m, alvania r, arias ca, baumler a, casadevall a, detweiler c, drake h, gilbert j, imperiale mj, lovett s, maloy s, mcadam aj, newton ilg, sadowsky mj, sandri- goldin rm, silhavy tj, tontonoz p, young j-ah, cameron ce, cann i, fuller ao, kozik aj. . the asm journals committee values the contributions of black microbiologists. msphere :e - . https://doi.org/ . / msphere. - . copyright © schloss et al. this is an open-access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license. ed. note: this editorial is being published by the following asm journals: antimicrobial agents and chemotherapy, applied and environmental microbiology, clinical microbiology reviews, ecosal plus, infection and immunity, journal of bacteriology, journal of clinical microbiology, journal of microbiology and biology education, journal of virology, microbiology and molecular biology reviews, microbiology resource announcements, microbiology spectrum, molecular and cellular biology, mbio, msphere, and msystems. address correspondence to patrick d. schloss, pschloss@umich.edu. published editorial crossm july/august volume issue e - msphere.asm.org july https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - x https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / mailto:pschloss@umich.edu https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /msphere. - &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - https://msphere.asm.org between and , the horrific tuskegee syphilis study was performed to observe the natural history of latent syphilis infection in black men ( ). the premise of the study was driven by the racist pseudoscience of social darwinism. the study directors hypothesized that black men were inferior to white men. the study directors lied to the men about their condition, leading the men to infect their partners and children. furthermore, when penicillin was shown in to treat syphilis, the doctors hid the treatment and refused to treat the men. leading peer-reviewed journals of the time published results from the study. this textbook example of racism in microbiology underscores the historic role of scientific publishers in disseminating racist ideologies and points to the potential for scientific publishers to prevent the spread of racism. as the journals committee of the american society for microbiology, we are committed to promoting the work of black microbiologists and the issues that impact the black community. to do this, we must improve the representation of black microbiologists across the peer review process, recruit black authors to publish their research in asm’s journals, and identify aspects of peer review where there is oppor- tunity for bias to affect our decisions to publish their research, something that we wish to avoid. we must also reassess the scopes of our journals to ensure that the micro- biological problems that are important to the black community are published within the journals of this society. issues that affect the black community matter. black people in the united states in are, and historically have been, disproportionately and negatively impacted by infectious diseases ( ). the flint, mi, water crisis brought significant suffering to the primarily black community, including outbreaks of legionnaires’ disease ( ). black women are more likely to have a preterm birth, of which half are associated with a microbial etiology ( ). black children are more likely to have asthma, a disease which is associated with increased bacterial burden in the lungs ( ). black people are more likely to have a severe case of and die from coronavirus disease (covid- ) ( ). in new york city and elsewhere, the death rate due to covid- for black people is twice that for white people ( ). black people are also far more likely to be affected by sexually transmitted infections, including hiv, and evidence suggests a role for underlying structural inequities, such as mass incarceration and unequal treatment when seeking medical care ( , ). these disparities in health are an outcome of differences in socio-economic factors and the corresponding disenfranchisement. these include less access to health care, food deserts where nutritious and affordable food is not available, and poorly funded public health infrastructure. a person’s race provides no biological basis for the observed health disparities, and to assert otherwise will slow the identi- fication of solutions to these disparities. unfortunately, research related to solving such problems is often discounted. a recent analysis of research project (r ) proposals reviewed by the national institutes of health found that the community- and population-level research topics of interest to black scientists placed them at a disad- vantage for a fundable outcome and accounts for much of the reduced success rate of black scientists ( ). as an academic publisher, we have a responsibility to help to promote the importance and legitimacy of work that is important to the black com- munity. black scientists have made significant contributions in spite of the systemic racism that they have faced throughout their lives. these scientists should be able to put their energy into their science rather than into overcoming the bias and prejudice that deters their efforts and devalues their humanity. as an example, george washington carver was born into slavery yet went on to become a preeminent plant biologist, chemist, and microbiologist despite many barriers to safely obtaining an education (https:// www.tuskegee.edu/support-tu/george-washington-carver). he improved the lives of farmers by developing alternative crops to cotton, harnessing the power of rhizobia to help improve soil health, and fighting fungal plant pathogens. he impacted the lives of many black and non-black people. numerous black microbiologists have had significant impacts on topics that are particularly relevant to black communities and beyond, including drs. william hinton, ruth moore, jane hinton, and many others. in an editorial july/august volume issue e - msphere.asm.org https://www.tuskegee.edu/support-tu/george-washington-carver https://www.tuskegee.edu/support-tu/george-washington-carver https://msphere.asm.org interview at the microbe meeting in new orleans, la, dr. marian johnson- thompson (university of the district of columbia) recounted the lives of many of these and other black microbiologists ( ). she told the story of dr. moore, a professor at howard university who attended a general meeting of the asm. because of segrega- tion, she was not able to stay at hotels within the city or eat at any of its restaurants. although we want to believe that such systemic racism no longer exists within our discipline, we must constantly question that assumption. the stories of these microbi- ologists emphasize that representation matters. they underscore the fact that unless the perspective and challenges of black communities are represented, then they will not be addressed. in a recent msphere of influence article, dr. michael johnson recounted his shock that although there was a % increase in the number of biomedical ph.d.’s awarded to black people and those from other underrepresented groups (urgs) between and , there has not been a meaningful change in the number of assistant professors from urgs over that time ( ). in his article, he asks how he wound up at a research-intensive university as a black professor. he asks two questions of himself: “by what miracle did i beat the odds to get here?” and “what can i do to get other urms [underrepresented minorities] in a similar position as myself?” yet, it is not dr. johnson’s responsibility alone to remove these barriers. as a publisher of microbiology research, we acknowledge the important role that we have in the career development of junior scientists and the role that we have in giving legitimacy to scientific questions. for too long, we have not promoted the work of junior black and other scientists from urgs as much as we could have. we have been too passive in recruiting these scientists to publish in our journals. scientists like dr. johnson should not think that their success is a “miracle.” we also must ask ourselves what we can do to get more scientists from urgs into faculty and leadership positions. although we should always strive to recruit more people from urgs into science, the data that he reports indicate that the problem also lies with retention of this talent. as leaders of the asm journals program, we need to take a greater role in mentorship. we can recruit more junior scientists from urgs to be peer reviewers, put them in leadership positions, and publicly recognize them. as the journals committee, we seek to improve the representation of black micro- biologists and therefore take on the responsibility to do the following. ● learn from the stories of black microbiologists, past and present. we will listen. black microbiologists should not have to shoulder the burden of dismantling systems of inequality on their own. ● ensure that diverse voices and viewpoints are represented among the editors in chief. we will conduct open searches that actively recruit black scientists and scientists from urgs. we will not constrain the candidate pool to current or past editors and editorial board members, which have traditionally been the source of candidates. ● appoint editors in chief who understand that the impact of their journal is dependent on the diversity of their authors, reviewers, and editors. we will ask candidates to state their experience fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion in their application. ● improve the representation of black scientists and those from other urgs across the peer review system. each journal will develop a plan that will be regularly evaluated and used as a criterion to determine whether an editor in chief should be reappointed. ● be alert to implicit and overt bias when handling manuscripts from black and other scientists from urgs. we will work with our editors and others to under- stand bias and study where it can manifest itself in peer review. ● more fully represent the scope of how microbiology impacts the black commu- nity. we will solicit input from black microbiologists for topics that are not being editorial july/august volume issue e - msphere.asm.org https://msphere.asm.org addressed adequately within asm’s journals and revise the scopes of the journals accordingly. ● promote black microbiologists. we will ensure that their representation is equi- table when selecting papers for editor spotlights, authors for commentaries, and subjects for biographical reports. ● help develop the next generation of microbiologists and more actively listen. we will participate in opportunities to serve and mentor black scientists and those from other urgs through the annual biomedical research conference for minor- ity students (abrcms) and the annual conference for the society for advance- ment of chicanos/hispanics & native americans in science (sacnas). ● identify appropriate methods for identifying and quantifying representation of black microbiologists. we will collaborate closely with the asm taskforce on diversity, equity, and inclusion. there is no place for anti-black or for any form of racism within microbiology. to solve the most important microbiological problems of today and prepare for those of the future, we must leverage the experiences, perspectives, and expertise of everyone. references . boone a. june . one week that shook the world: george floyd’s death ignited protests far beyond minneapolis. star tribune, minneap- olis, mn. https://www.startribune.com/george-floyd-death-ignited -protests-far-beyond-minneapolis-police-minnesota/ /. . gardner h. june . ‘this is for you, baby’: days of protests are about more than breonna taylor. courier-journal, louisville, ky. h t t p s : / / w w w . c o u r i e r - j o u r n a l . c o m / s t o r y / n e w s / l o c a l / / / / l o u i s v i l l e - p r o t e s t s - m o r e - t h a n - b r e o n n a - t a y l o r - l m p d - s h o o t i n g / /. . peeples l. . what the data say about police brutality and racial bias—and which reforms might work. nature : – . https://doi.org/ . /d - - -z. . brandt am. . racism and research: the case of the tuskegee syphilis study. hastings cent rep : – . https://doi.org/ . / . . cyrus e, clarke r, hadley d, bursac z, trepka mj, devieux jg, bagci u, furr-holden d, coudray ms, mariano y, kiplagat s, noel i, ravelo g, paley m, wagner ef. may . the impact of covid- on african amer- ican communities in the united states. medrxiv https://www.medrxiv .org/content/ . / . . . v . . byrne bg, mccolm s, mcelmurry sp, kilgore pe, sobeck j, sadler r, love ng, swanson ms. . prevalence of infection-competent serogroup legionella pneumophila within premise plumbing in southeast michigan. mbio :e - . https://doi.org/ . /mbio. - . . fettweis jm, serrano mg, brooks jp, edwards dj, girerd ph, parikh hi, huang b, arodz tj, edupuganti l, glascock al, xu j, jimenez nr, vivadelli sc, fong ss, sheth nu, jean s, lee v, bokhari ya, lara am, mistry sd, duckworth ra, iii, bradley sp, koparde vn, orenda xv, milton sh, rozycki sk, matveyev av, wright ml, huzurbazar sv, jackson em, smirnova e, korlach j, tsai yc, dickinson mr, brooks jl, drake ji, chaffin do, sexton al, gravett mg, rubens ce, wijesooriya nr, hendricks- muñoz kd, jefferson kk, strauss jf, iii, buck ga. . the vaginal microbiome and preterm birth. nat med : – . https://doi.org/ . /s - - - . . akinbami lj, moorman je, garbe pl, sondik ej. . status of childhood asthma in the united states, – . pediatrics :s –s . https://doi.org/ . /peds. - c. . tai dbg, shah a, doubeni ca, sia ig, wieland ml. june . the disproportionate impact of covid- on racial and ethnic minorities in the united states. clin infect dis https://doi.org/ . /cid/ciaa . . yancy cw. april . covid- and african americans. jama : . https://doi.org/ . /jama. . . . hallfors dd, iritani bj, miller wc, bauer dj. . sexual and drug behavior patterns and hiv and std racial disparities: the need for new directions. am j public health : – . https://doi.org/ . /ajph . . . . institute of medicine committee on understanding and eliminating racial and ethnic disparities in health care. . unequal treatment: confronting racial and ethnic disparities in health care. the national academies press, washington, dc. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/ nbk /. . hoppe ta, litovitz a, willis ka, meseroll ra, perkins mj, hutchins bi, davis af, lauer ms, valantine ha, anderson jm, santangelo gm. . topic choice contributes to the lower rate of nih awards to african- american/black scientists. sci adv :eaaw . https://doi.org/ . / sciadv.aaw . . asm microbe. june . early african american microbiologists: making contributions/overcoming barriers. youtube video posted by asm. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v�yqaozdcl gm. . johnson m. . msphere of influence: hiring of underrepresented minority assistant professors in medical school basic science depart- ments has a long way to go. msphere :e - . https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - . editorial july/august volume issue e - msphere.asm.org https://www.startribune.com/george-floyd-death-ignited-protests-far-beyond-minneapolis-police-minnesota/ / https://www.startribune.com/george-floyd-death-ignited-protests-far-beyond-minneapolis-police-minnesota/ / https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/local/ / / /louisville-protests-more-than-breonna-taylor-lmpd-shooting/ / https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/local/ / / /louisville-protests-more-than-breonna-taylor-lmpd-shooting/ / https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/local/ / / /louisville-protests-more-than-breonna-taylor-lmpd-shooting/ / https://doi.org/ . /d - - -z https://doi.org/ . /d - - -z https://doi.org/ . / https://www.medrxiv.org/content/ . / . . . v https://www.medrxiv.org/content/ . / . . . v https://doi.org/ . /mbio. - https://doi.org/ . /s - - - https://doi.org/ . /s - - - https://doi.org/ . /peds. - c https://doi.org/ . /cid/ciaa https://doi.org/ . /jama. . https://doi.org/ . /ajph. . https://doi.org/ . /ajph. . https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/nbk / https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/nbk / https://doi.org/ . /sciadv.aaw https://doi.org/ . /sciadv.aaw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqaozdcl gm https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - https://msphere.asm.org 	references ethics of research at the intersection of covid- and black lives matter: a call to action crooks n, et al. j med ethics ; : – . doi: . /medethics- - ethics of research at the intersection of covid- and black lives matter: a call to action natasha crooks , geri donenberg, alicia matthews current controversy to cite: crooks n, donenberg g, matthews a. j med ethics epub ahead of print: [please include day month year]. doi: . / medethics- - department of human development nursing science, college of nursing, university of illinois, chicago, illinois, usa department of medicine, university of illinois, chicago, illinois, usa department of population health nursing science, college of nursing, university of illinois, chicago, illinois, usa correspondence to dr natasha crooks, university of illinois at chicago, chicago, illinois, usa; ncrooks@ uic. edu received november revised december accepted january © author(s) (or their employer(s)) . no commercial re- use. see rights and permissions. published by bmj. abstract this paper describes how to ethically conduct research with black populations at the intersection of covid- and the black lives matter movement. we highlight the issues of historical mistrust in the usa and how this may impact black populations’ participation in covid- vaccination trials. we provide recommendations for researchers to ethically engage black populations in research considering the current context. our recommendations include understanding the impact of ongoing trauma, acknowledging historical context, ensuring diverse research teams and engaging in open and honest conversations with black populations to better address their needs. the core of our recommendation is recognising the impact of trauma in our research and health care practices. the usa has exceeded , covid- - related deaths, . % of which were among black ameri- cans. while vaccine trials are ongoing, blacks only account for % of enrolees, which may threaten the validity and generalisability of the vaccine trial results. although scientific research is one of the most important ways to advance public health, its success is contingent on the participation of key populations. vaccine trials with diverse participants are essential to find a medicine that works for all people. yet fewer than half of black americans say they would get a covid- vaccine, compared with % of hispanic people and % of white people, according to a december report from the pew research center. many black people say they do not trust the medical establishment because of glaring inequities in modern- day care and historical examples of mistreatment. the spread of misin- formation about the vaccine development process has not helped either. low participation of blacks in covid- vaccine trials and uptake may have dire consequences for their future health and well- being. blacks have been disproportionately and negatively impacted by the coronavirus with higher rates of infection, hospitalisation and death in black communities. in chicago alone, black people represent almost % of all covid- deaths—more than three times higher than any other racial/ethnic demographic. the factors driving covid- health disparities are complex and include increased vulnerabilities associated with the social determinants of health (ie, discrimi- nation, criminalisation, healthcare access, socioeco- nomic status, work and housing), delays in access to testing and treatment in black communities and structural racism, which has been increasingly linked to morbidity and mortality outcomes among blacks. these same factors may increase the likelihood that black communities will not participate in vaccine trials or agree to be vaccinated, thus, exacerbating existing covid- disparities. efforts to diversify participants in covid- vaccine trials and uptake will likely be difficult due to historical mistrust of research among commu- nities of colour, growing scepticism regarding the objectivity of scientific research and weakened trust in institutions of higher education, where most scientific research takes place in the usa. the black lives matter (blm) movement is demanding a societal reckoning with the racist foundations of this country and the ongoing structural violence that limits the life chances of people of colour. the mission of the blm global network founded in is to ‘eradicate white supremacy and build local power to intervene in violence inflicted on black communities by the state and vigilantes’. efforts based on the civil unrest and killings of unarmed black people (eg, george floyd, breonna taylor and ahmaud arbrey) are the foundation of the current worldwide uprising demanding an end to police brutality and equity for all. indeed, scien- tific research is being implicated along with other institutions and structures, such as the police, in failing in their role to ‘protect/serve/help’ all people. numerous accounts of historical mistrust under- score the urgency of work needed to encourage black people to feel confident in the medical establishment. – understandably so—unethical research practices over many years, combined with persistent health disparities and lack of access to effective treatments for black people, discourage the very groups most in need of new innovations from receiving them. a historical mistrust of research by black commu- nities stems from the heinous abuse of black bodies in clinical trials in the usa. furthermore, black communities have endured the burden of excess deaths from health disparities for generations. several examples underscore this reality. in the th century, the ‘father’ of modern gynaecology, james marion sims, developed surgical techniques to improve women’s reproductive health, but these were derived from research conducted on enslaved black women without their consent or the use of anaesthesia. the tuskegee syphilis study that began in lasted until after it was leaked to the press that impoverished black men enrolled in the clinical study were allowed to needlessly suffer and die long after a cure was found. it is now widely recognised that the tuskegee experiment was highly unethical. finally, in , henrietta lacks’ trust was betrayed by the medical system when her cervical cells were removed from her body and stored without her knowledge or permission and o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://jm e .b m j.co m / j m e d e th ics: first p u b lish e d a s . /m e d e th ics- - o n f e b ru a ry . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://jme.bmj.com http://www.instituteofmedicalethics.org http://orcid.org/ - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /medethics- - &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://jme.bmj.com/ crooks n, et al. j med ethics ; : – . doi: . /medethics- - current controversy used to develop the polio vaccine due to their ‘immortality’. the tuskegee study and the story of henrietta lacks reveal the depths of structural racism in this country and its foundation in the us healthcare system. institutional review boards were formed partially in response to the tuskegee study. while formal abuses in research have been significantly reduced, maltreatment in the healthcare setting persists. importantly, racist policies and modern- day medical practices continue to harm black communities. in , black mothers in the usa had the highest mortality rates postpartum, three times higher than white women. maternal mortality has been attributed to institutional racism in that healthcare professionals fail to listen or believe mothers when they report a problem during childbirth. similarly, grave disparities in how doctors treat pain in blacks exist, including black children. – racist and stereotypical beliefs by healthcare providers are implicated in these disparities and can be traced back to slavery, whereby violence against black people was justified by a false belief that blacks had a greater pain tolerance due to thicker skin. the persistence of these false beliefs was documented as recently as in a study of white medical students. ongoing structural racism and mistrust of the usa medical establishment, particularly in the face of covid- disparities and blm, continue to traumatise and retraumatise black indi- viduals. covid- has produced disproportionate rates of unemployment, mental health issues and death in black commu- nities, and while the blm movement has reignited a desire to fight for black human rights, it has also ‘reopened psychoso- cial wounds’ reminding people that black lives are devalued and expendable. the media’s constant bombardment of images of black people being killed reinforces a sense of vulnerability, lack of protection and safety, which triggers fears of the future. the blm movement has brought to light the blatant racism, discrim- ination and prejudice blacks face and the ways in which these circumstances create roadblocks to education, impede healthcare and economic opportunities and contribute to mental health problems. we must ask ourselves, why should black people trust that involvement in scientific research will benefit them? as scientists who are committed to bettering the lives of black people and reducing health disparities, our job is to conduct research that drives effective interventions and prevention programmes. yet, as academics, we must also acknowledge the tensions between the power of research to improve health inequalities and mistrust among black populations and ourselves in the ‘institution of science’. currently, the national institutes of health funding to study covid- , including community engagement, is being given to those who already have proven track records with funding, a predominately white contingent; reducing the likelihood of blacks receiving federal funding for their research. this means that researchers with the most experience and knowledge of disparities and sociocultural factors related to research participation will again be absent from the table. funding whites to conduct research with black popu- lations may further perpetuate misunderstanding of why blacks would not participate in research trials and take the vaccine. we have been asking ourselves whether it is ethical to engage vulner- able populations in research? is it ethical to recruit those who are disproportionately impacted by covid- and continuously devalued and victimised by science and other socially sanctioned institutions (ie, government, police, hospitals)? and yet, what are the public health costs of not pursuing research with black communities with whom we are deeply invested? clearly, it is important to continue research with black communities, but with new standards. fully understanding the intersection of blm, covid- and historical trauma, researchers must be explicit in strategies to avoid retraumatising or perpetuating violence of black lives as disposable at every point of the research process. furthermore, it will also require research institutions to change how we engage black popula- tions, commit resources to diversify our workforce and enact antiracist programmes/policies, to foster greater sensitivity to these issues. against this backdrop and in the context of a global health pandemic and civil unrest, academics of colour are also experiencing heighted levels of mistrust. the intersections of covid- and blm have triggered a critical self- examination among academics of colour who engage vulnerable popu- lations in research and begs the question: how do we imple- ment research with care and minimise retraumatisation of black people? we have three recommendations for researchers to ethically engage black populations in research. first, researchers must acknowledge and understand the ongoing impact of current and historical trauma, enacted by the medical establishment and research, on black lives. the tuskegee study was a clin- ical trial that enrolled vulnerable black men and led to many unwarranted deaths because a cure, penicillin, was withheld by ‘trusted’ medical professionals. by asking black communities to once again participate in clinical trials, we risk retraumatising individuals if we fail to address them properly. traumatic life events (ie, racism, discrimination, death) can be triggered by healthcare experiences as well as education, corrections, child welfare and government systems. trauma may limit participa- tion in research, but it may also be a point of connection for black people. as researchers, we must acknowledge sources of ongoing harm and excess deaths, and that trauma compounds the emotional pain, physical illness, economic hardship and injustice black communities continue to endure. using a trauma- informed lens (ie, recognising the impact and symptoms of trauma and understanding potential paths to recovery) and culturally safe, research methods that respect black peoples’ lived experiences can provide the confidence and trust needed to engage in research. in addition to understanding trauma, we must be explicit about addressing it in our research. for example, we must ensure that our research settings are both emotionally and physically safe (ie, by asking questions regarding safety, listening and centring participant experience). we must be trans- parent about our research by ensuring that the informed consent process is clear and understood by various literacy levels. mixed method approaches (ie, open- ended questions and interviews) can capture the voices and lived experiences of black people, providing much needed context of findings based on quantita- tive data. offering a safe space for participants to discuss their trauma can empower black people, as their narratives have often been silenced, ignored or delegitimised. in response to partic- ipants sharing their trauma, researchers should be prepared to provide mental health resources and to assist with linkages to care. researchers must collaborate with mental health profes- sionals to aid in providing trauma- informed care as needed. we must also be intentional about who is on our research teams by ensuring they are representative of the population and properly trained in antiracist thinking, cultural safety and/or implicit bias. if we truly aspire to create a physically safe environment, we need to have diverse teams of clinical researchers representing the patients they treat. second, research interventions should acknowledge the historical context of black participants’ experiences and address it directly where possible. researchers must understand that racism is embedded in our country’s structures and systems and o n a p ril , b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://jm e .b m j.co m / j m e d e th ics: first p u b lish e d a s . /m e d e th ics- - o n f e b ru a ry . d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://jme.bmj.com/ crooks n, et al. j med ethics ; : – . doi: . /medethics- - current controversy contributes to health disparities. a parallel between historical usa events (world war i, red summer and civil rights move- ment) and present- day circumstances (covid- , blm move- ment) is evident; in both, black people are disproportionately impacted and have been left traumatised. this historical perspec- tive should trigger explicit reflection of researchers regarding sampling. we must take intentional steps to avoid repeating historical atrocities, and instead, use our unique platform to help support, protect and empower black communities. research should challenge and counter stereotypical narratives that crim- inalise black communities and highlight strengths, contributions and voices of black people. finally, sharing research findings with communities will facilitate trust and encourage input and insight into interpreting the results. for example, now that covid- vaccines have been approved, it will be important to ensure equitable access and prioritise communities most at need. while healthcare providers were among the first to be vaccinated, more vulnerable populations of health workers (ie, home health aides), who do not have access to ppe, may not be considered to be ‘essential’. blacks are more likely to be concentrated in lower status positions, such as home health aides, in the healthcare work force and maybe systematically left out of the equation for the first round of vaccines. finally, researchers must engage in open and honest conversa- tions with black participants about how they feel participating in research during the covid- pandemic, including the risks, strengths and barriers. then, researchers must listen, adjust timelines, protocols and objectives based on the information provided. we must reconsider how to implement our research to minimise the risks and maximise the benefits. for example, concerns already exist regarding vaccine uptake among individ- uals from racial and ethnic minority groups. while it is critical to evaluate vaccine efficacy across populations, blacks will be understandably dubious to enrol. programmes that promote vaccines must build on pre- existing researcher/community- based partnerships, engage trusted community leaders to message their importance and employ black researchers and staff from the communities where people live and work. studies show that individuals are more likely to adopt behaviours promoted by people indigenous to their community. hence, vaccine success will depend on whether members of black communities deem them safe and effective, and if they believe the institution (ie, colleges, hospital and clinics) delivering the vaccines are trust- worthy and care about their needs. racial disparities and structural racism exist in the healthcare system, and academic researchers must take action now to avoid previous mistakes, ensure safety and change the future trajectory of scientific engagement by black populations. the core of our recommendations is the recognition of the impact of trauma in our research, care and practices. in order to protect black popu- lations engaging in research, we must acknowledge our history of maltreatment and racism, incorporate black voices, experi- ences and perspectives and be intentional about the purpose of our research. now is the time to regain black americans’ trust in research and the healthcare system. contributors all authors contributed to the conception, writing and editing of the manuscript. funding the authors have not declared a specific grant for this research from any funding agency in the public, commercial or not- for- profit sectors. competing interests none declared. patient consent for publication not required. provenance and peer review not commissioned; externally peer reviewed. data availability statement there are no data in this work. this article is made freely available for use in accordance with bmj’s website terms and conditions for the duration of the covid- pandemic or until otherwise determined by bmj. you may use, download and print the article for any lawful, non- commercial purpose (including text and data mining) provided that all copyright notices and trade marks are retained. orcid id natasha crooks http:// orcid. org/ - - - references apm research lab staff. the color of coronavirus: covid- deaths by race and ethnicity in the u.s. available: https://www. apmresearchlab. org/ covid/ deaths- by- race [accessed sep ]. new york times. u.s. coronavirus cases top million. available: https://www. nytimes. com/ / / / world/ coronavirus- covid. html [accessed sep ]. warren rc, forrow l, hodge da, et al. trustworthiness before trust - covid- vaccine trials 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https://www.ajmc.com/view/racial-disparities-persist-in-maternal-morbidity-mortality-and-infant-health https://www.ajmc.com/view/racial-disparities-persist-in-maternal-morbidity-mortality-and-infant-health https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/u-s-finally-has-better-maternal-mortality-data-black-mothers-n https://www.nbcnews.com/health/womens-health/u-s-finally-has-better-maternal-mortality-data-black-mothers-n http://dx.doi.org/ . /ajph. . . https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/racial-disparities-seen-in-how-doctors-treat-pain-even-among-children/ / / / e d -b - ea-aca -ebb d e ff_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/racial-disparities-seen-in-how-doctors-treat-pain-even-among-children/ / / / e d -b - ea-aca -ebb d e ff_story.html https://www.washingtonpost.com/health/racial-disparities-seen-in-how-doctors-treat-pain-even-among-children/ / / / e d -b - ea-aca -ebb d e ff_story.html http://dx.doi.org/ . /pnas. https://www.bbc.com/future/article/ 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https://khn.org/news/mostly-poor-minority-home-health-aides-lacking-ppe-share-plight-of-vulnerable-covid-patients/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /cts. http://dx.doi.org/ . /cts. http://jme.bmj.com/ 	ethics of research at the intersection of covid- and black lives matter: a call to action 	abstract 	references microsoft word - when one lacks will they denounce editorial introduction jume (proof ).docx journal of urban mathematics education july , vol. , no. b (special issue), pp. – ©jume. https://journals.tdl.org/jume robert m. capraro is professor of mathematics education and co-director of the aggie stem center at texas a&m university, department of teaching, learning and culture, tamu, college station, tx - ; email: rcapraro@tamu.edu. his research interests are centered on stem educational research initiatives, urban mathematics achievement and represen- tational models, and quantitative methods. jonas l. chang is editorial assistant at the aggie stem center at texas a&m university, department of teaching, learning and culture, tamu, college station, tx - ; email: jchang @tamu.edu. his research interests include communication strategies in stem education and the role of language and word choice in stem learning. editorial when one lacks will, they denounce… robert m. capraro texas a&m university aggie stem jonas l. chang texas a&m university aggie stem o much needs to change, and so many who have so much do so little that it makes us wonder why. recently, walmart; the american college of cardiology, the association of black cardiologists, and the american heart association (american college of cardiology, ; walter, ); the memphis interfaith coalition for action and hope; the president of the church of jesus christ of latter-day saints (mccombs, ); columbia sportswear and nike (bjorke, ); and sports leg- ends alike have pronounced their positionality to denounce racism and violence. we are not sure, but it is quite likely that those police officers who were involved in mr. george floyd’s death would denounce racism and violence. some police chiefs have made the news denouncing racism and violence, though each of those who did so was unarmed and among peaceful protestors. so many voices are being raised to call for change and address the need for systemic racism and violence to end. these an- nouncements are comforting, for sure, but we as american consumers understand that business is business and that nike and many other companies denouncing racism and violence make their money on the “dollar-acracy” of black super athletes; in this case, positionality is good for business and words are cheap. isn’t it time for action now? i want to push that further actually. perhaps it is time for a little less business positioning and a lot more action. the facts are facts concerning the events that spurned this national conversa- tion. well, the media and the public relations moguls seem to have a specific idea of what those facts are, and perhaps too many people believe those “facts.” there were news stories indicating that mr. floyd was a criminal, a spurious designation that was intentionally misleading and not supported by the events that transpired. yes, there have been many arguments centered on this “fact” and a multitude of oth- ers, but i think there are several facts we can all assess and agree upon: mr. floyd was suspected of a crime, mr. floyd remained on the scene long enough for police to respond, and mr. floyd cooperated with police by allowing himself to be arrested s capraro & chang editorial journal of urban mathematics education vol. , no. b (special issue) and handcuffed. furthermore, no charges had been filed, so mr. floyd was not yet accused, and, of course, he was not found guilty in a court of law by a jury of his peers. therefore, he was not a criminal. now he is denied the opportunity to face his accusers and was denied his right to a speedy trial. he was accused, tried, and sen- tenced on the street in public view while all too many people watched. it was a public execution. "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness." these are guaranteed to all americans, well, as long as you are not black. right? the united states declaration of independence contains these three "unalienable rights." within the declaration of independence, it says that these rights have been given to all humans by their cre- ator and that our governments (local, state, and national) were created to protect them. is the government protecting these rights for everyone? how can students learn, how can our society progress, how can families be secure when there is no law that demands that those in police custody remain safe and at least in the same life state as when they are arrested? when will police training be focused on preserving the life of those in their custody? well, custody is an interesting word. police use it as a term for when someone has been arrested. the technical definition of custody is the protective care or guard- ianship of someone or something. was mr. floyd in custody? nope! well, i have heard that mr. floyd was under arrest and had not yet moved to custody before his death; that’s another “fact” floating around. the definition of arrest, interestingly, is to seize (someone) by legal authority and take them into custody. yes, an arrest is the seizing of someone or something, and that act places the person or thing in the cus- tody of the duly authorized officers performing the arrest. mr. floyd was in the cus- tody of the arresting officers. so, how should someone treat someone or something once they are in their custody? this is a tough question, because what keeps coming up is the concept of ordi- nary care. ordinary care necessitates the preservation of the status of the person or object in police custody to all reasonable but not extraordinary measures. was there an effort on the officers’ part to exercise ordinary care? watch the video of mr. floyd’s arrest and his treatment while in police custody—see what you think. them ask yourself how would you feel if mr. floyd was your father, child, brother, cousin, or nephew? what is our responsibility though in the face of this horrific act? i think to an- swer this question, we first must recognize who we are and what power we have. we are teachers, researchers, friends, and colleagues. in short, we are influencers, ones who have privileged status and positions. but how are we going to use this privilege? do we simply submit our words of support with all the other people and organizations who have done so? that doesn’t seem enough. it has never seemed enough. we must use our individual and collective privilege to act and spur change. if you are not using it now, you don't deserve it. give it back. capraro & chang editorial journal of urban mathematics education vol. , no. b (special issue) we need to go beyond words and help educate those who are doing the most to better society in the present by peacefully demonstrating and thereby placing them- selves at risk of covid- infection. we must help them develop messaging that provokes change and not just dissention. this is one of those pivotal moments where one must act to avoid being the disruption and become a disruptor. productively using frustration and anger there have been many trying times in u.s. history, each punctuated by precip- itating events that stemmed from long-standing social ills, many of which are still unresolved. perhaps none are more pervasive and insidious than white privilege and systemic, pernicious, and well-entrenched racism. recently, that racism came to the forefront with mr. floyd’s execution. unfortunately, these current trying times seem to be playing out just as others have. while i applaud high-profile people and organ- izations taking on aspects of the big issue, i am concerned that the big issue is not at the forefront of the conversation. how will we as educators use these events to educate children, to reach out to our peers, colleagues, and friends, and, finally, how will mathematics education change as a result of these conversations? i think the current needs of society require us as mathematics educators to not only do what we can to support the current peace- ful protests and calls for reform, but to also reflect on our own practices and field and make necessary changes. a number of researchers have claimed that mathematics success is an equalizer and that those who are successful in mathematics are among a privileged class. when and how are we going to use mathematics to privilege young black and brown children? how will we educate new teachers to assume the mantle of leadership in the classroom and foster the mathematical success of black and brown children? as editor-in-chief, i challenge you to think deeply about these events, consider responses to the questions i raise, and use your time, talents, and research prowess to answer these questions in order to make a change today for the world of tomorrow that we must build together. our team has secured permission to reprint two amazing publications that were clearly ahead of their time and speak to our current situation. a special thank you to mr. george f. johnson, president & publisher of information age publishing inc., and dr. chance lewis, professor and founder of the international conference on urban education, for granting permission to reprint these two articles. i hope you find them timely and inspirational. capraro & chang editorial journal of urban mathematics education vol. , no. b (special issue) references american college of cardiology. ( , june ). abc, acc and aha denounce racism and vio- lence plaguing communities. https://www.acc.org/latest-in-cardiology/articles/ / / / / /abc-acc-and-aha-denounce-racism-and-violence-plaguing-communities bjorke, c. ( , june ). portland businesses and leaders add to calls denouncing racism and vio- lence. portland business journal. https://www.bizjournals.com/portland/news/ / / /so- cial-roundup.html mccombs, b. ( , june ). mormon president denounces racism, escalating violence. standard- examiner. https://www.standard.net/news/state/mormon-president-denounces-racism-escalat- ing-violence/article_e c - e - c -a c - d .html walter, m. ( , june ). in wake of george floyd’s death, cardiovascular groups denounce ‘inci- dents of racism and violence.’ cardiovascularbusiness. https://www.cardiovascular- business.com/topics/healthcare-economics/george-floyd-cardiovascular-denounce-racism-vio- lence copyright: © capraro & chang. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of a creative commons attribution-noncommercial-sharealike . international license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original au- thor and source are credited. coolabah, no. , , issn - , observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona living on the borders of belonging: an editorial note cornelis martin renes university of barcelona mrenes@ub.edu copyright© cornelis martin renes. this text may be archived and redistributed both in electronic form and in hard copy, provided that the author and journal are properly cited and no fee is charged, in accordance with our creative commons licence. this post-congress coolabah issue entitled “on the borders of belonging” offers seven papers developed from presentations at the go between in between congress, held at the university of barcelona - january . they offer different perspectives on identity formation but all deal with the potentialities and pitfalls, the enrichment and impoverishment, the empowerment and disempowerment that may flow from identitarian in-between positions, an area of inter and cross- culturality homi bhabha famously coined “the third space” in “the manifesto” (wasafiri , spring : – ). located between the known and the unknown, the homely and the unhomely, the national and the foreign, the self and the other, this culturally fluid, mixed, hybrid discursive space is the zone where more and more human beings, perhaps willy-nilly, find themselves in these times of globalisation. in western societies, most of us have turned into cosmopolitans, or weltbürger to stick to the kantian term: citizens of the world, free to use our resources to travel abroad and imbibe gratifying experiences, presumably open to cultural difference. yet, globalization and cosmopolitanism also appear to favour those that already have over those who have not. the global spread of capitalism and its increasingly free circulation of capital is not necessarily accompanied by an equally free flux of labour, curtailing access to vital resources to large populations. as nation–states fail to control multinational capital, they can and do often impose restrictions on processes of migration; this is especially the case with political and economic refugees, who cannot return to their countries of origin but depend for their present and mailto:mrenes@ub.edu coolabah, no. , , issn - , observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona future well-being on the world’s wealthier nations’ adherence to the universal declaration of human rights passed by the united nations in , precisely in the wake of the genocidal horrors of wwii. in the face of increasing economic insecurity at the western home front, immigrants and refugees are often perceived as unfairly feeding on jobs, resources, services and rights available to local citizens. weltbürgerschaft only reaches so far, and where the cultural other comes to close for comfort, where the comfort zone threatens to disappear between self and other, where the distant tourist view is confronted with itself, nationalism may raise its head again to defend local interests, perceived as inalienable. great britain of the s was a precursor of the xenophobe ghosts that have been haunting the old continent over the past two decades: pm maggie thatcher’s ultra- liberal economic policy delivered the country to the mercy of multinational capital. yet, this opening up to free trade was corresponded by a much tighter and stricter definition of national identity, which was felt to be endangered in the face of diminished economic control, and whose impact on migratory movement was serious. it is not difficult to see that britain’s current brexit zeal responds to similar spectres in the european continent at large; neither that the united states’ president elect donald trump is immersed in, and conditioned by a similar set of regressive racial politics, ordering a wall to be built on the mexican border and american territory to be closed off for muslims. and as scholars of australian studies, let us not forget the barely-hidden racism of the howard years in australia, which laid the ground for ex-pm tony abbott’s border policies based on offshore retention in nauru and christmas island, continued as part of the current pm malcolm turnbull’s conservative agenda. in one way or another, the seven essays presented in this coolabah issue have connections to the themes raised in the lines above and interconnect in various ways. yasue arimitsu’s essay elaborates on the postcolonial links between the australian writer richard flanagan’s awarded novel the narrow road to the deep north and its japanese namesake oku no hosomichi, the masterwork by the th c. japanese poet and travel writer of the edo period matsuo basho. flanagan’s investigation and reimagination of his father’s sufferings as a prisoner of war in japanese captivity on the burma/death railway develops into a critical assessment of the cruel behaviour of the japanese officials in charge of the western pows. arimitsu places flanagan’s text within a reversed postcolonial framework which puts the asian in the place of the colonizer, which at the same time allows her to profile the coloniser as a victim as well as victimiser within the self-same colonial logic. arimitsu argues that, as the japanese code of honour traditionally places service to the emperor at the centre of life, an understanding of the absolute obedience, sacrifice and hence suffering this cult requires paves the way for a process of mutual understanding and acceptance between the east and the west. if flanagan’s intentions are indeed of breaking open this taboo area of war crime and creating a space of communication and healing between both former enemies, then his novel may be seen to occupy an illuminating cultural in-between location. intercultural incomprehensibility also forms the backbone of linda brinkman and susie latham’s essay, which provides an overview of australian-muslim relations over the years, and the way these have evolved into islamophobia on the part of the australian mainstream ever since the twin coolabah, no. , , issn - , observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona tower attack in and the subsequent fear of local ‘terrorist’ acts by islamic perpetrators. brinkman and latham delve deep into the border patrol history of australia ever since its founding as a british convict colony, and lay out the conditions that inspired invigilation of the fearsome conceptual, emotional and geographical border zones on white australia’s inner and outer perimeters of identity, affected by the proximity and enduring dark presence of its indigenous nations and the asian continent as well as by its physical marginality to europe and north america. according to brinkman and latham, the current height of islamophobia in australia follows on to the older perceptions of black and yellow peril, and is nothing but the latest manifestation of a lobby as old as post/colonial australia itself: one that secures white privilege over other ethnic groups’ rights of access to common resources, and that fears to lose such advantage. brinkman and latham claim a productive space of intercultural acceptance and coexistence can only be created by laying bare the hidden interests of those media and lobbies that advocate islamophobia in the first place, which is a conclusion we should bear in mind in contemplating contemporary europe’s treatment of immigration as well. the ongoing discursive effects of the colonialist white australia policy are at stake in thor kerr and shaphan cox’s essay, which looks at australia’s indigenous underbelly analysing the media portrayal of aboriginal solidarity gatherings on an urban heritage site for which native title was claimed and granted. in uncovering the subtle changes in media discourse centring on the heirisson island aboriginal presence in perth and , kerr and cox show how the adverse mainstream reactions towards the aboriginal presence on this officially recognised indigenous site is steeped in fear of proximity and too close for comfort. yet, after initial rejection and calls for eviction and the imposition of the law, some media started to frame the aboriginal gatherings within a discourse of tolerance, foregrounding that people gathered round fires which offered a sense of home and safety, while a discourse on aboriginality as a non-urban phenomenon, at a safe distance from spaces perceived as white was maintained. kerr and shapan’s analysis reveals that, at bottom, the intercultural meaning of a gathering around fire as a temporary shelter for all to share could muster up a sense of mainstream solidarity only to reinstate the premise that once- tribal land now be considered urban and therefore white. julieta mallari’s essay on the ayta, a group of indigenous people displaced from their natural habitat in the philippino highlands to the urban lowlands by the eruption of mt pinatubo, takes another take on indigeneity and national belonging—not from the point of land recovery but highlighting university training to counter the disenfranchisement contemporary aytas are confronted with, and how this affects their identity. mallari’s essay is another case study that delves into the often vexed relationship between first nations and settlers, laying bare the depth to which colonial discourse perpetuates itself into postcolonial contemporaneity. as mallari’s set of interviews with selected and funded university candidates shows, positive training results often run up against engrained philippino mainstream racism and the aytas’ assimilation of mainstream values regarding behavior, aspirations and looks. mallari concludes that university education has certainly boosted the aytas’ self-esteem, improved their chances of employment and raised their standard of living; yet, her study also reveals that this process implies what homi bhabha has termed a “struggle of identification” sparked off by a strong, often traumatic loss of cultural identity, so that the critical issue remains where these well-trained aytas belong. coolabah, no. , , issn - , observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona cynthia lytle’s essay draws on judith butler and athena athanasiou’s conceptualisation of disenfranchisement and dispossession by showing how white sovereignty is maintained in western society through acts of “dehumanization, disposability and death” of targeted ethnic minorities. this enables her to draw a parallel between the events surrounding the recent ‘black lives matter’ movement in her homeland, the united states, and the refugee crisis in her host continent, europe. despite the vast differences in both focus groups, lytle discerns a common agenda in the underlying “necropolitics” and “necropower” exerted by the state apparatus which are given wider traction by active media support: both the oppression of the afro-american underclasses and the barring of poor, displaced, disenfranchised migrant and refugee flows from europe share the political objective of keeping american and european territory white. ultimately, lytle’s argument is we can only rehumanise the populations discarded by white sovereignty by recovering their silenced voices, incorporating their personal histories from the identitarian borderlands where they have been made to dwell as part of a diverse national history. paula horta’s essay on the practice of ubuntu also chimes in with the need for recovering subaltern voices. she takes her cue from the south-african truth and reconciliation commission, which was proposed by the country’s first black president in democracy, nelson mandela, and directed by the black religious leader bisshop desmond tutu after the apartheid regime had come to an end in . the commission, in which victimisers and victims of the apartheid regime were heard in public hearings without punitive intent, made an essential contribution to the peaceful cohabitation of formerly segregated classes and peoples beyond the racist violence, damage and trauma of apartheid. the ability to share individual stories, confessions and forgiveness so as to create a sense of community, collective and national identity and belonging took place in the spirit of ubuntu, defined as “a person’s self-realisation and manifestation as a human being” by delivering a personal narrative in which the tellers make themselves vulnerable and open to critique before an ethically responsive audience. ubuntu has subsequently been applied in other postcolonial settings as well, amongst which portugal. referring to some case studies, horta describes the importance of the implantation of the ubuntu philosophy in some educational community projects in disadvantaged areas in and north of lisbon, involving immigrant, refugee and other minority groups, and so highlights how solidarity, engagement and progress can be achieved despite disenfranchising social contexts. inez baranay’s contribution is a creative writer’s reflection and unique voice on the question of national, communal and individual belonging that firmly commits itself to a transcultural location and strongly argues for the benefits of our constant going and being in between identities. baranay’s multicultural biography is testimony to the identitarian fluidity and flexibility she proposes, in which a certain amount of outsiderness is often—and contradictorily—tantamount to the most inclusionary of attitudes. aware of the extent to which our lives have become intercultural and defined by crosscultural contact in these times of globalization, baranay argues for transcultural space as the very place “where the unbelonging can belong”. although my presentation of these essays suggests a certain order of reading, no bias of interpretation is intended, and they have therefore been uploaded alphabetically according to the author’s last name as is habitual in this journal. coolabah, no. , , issn - , observatori: centre d’estudis australians / australian studies centre, universitat de barcelona cornelis martin renes holds a phd in english literature from the university of barcelona and lectures for its department of english and german studies. his main area of interest is the study of film and literature from a postcolonial point of view within the larger framework of cultural and australian studies. he codirects the university of barcelona’s interdisciplinary observatory: australian studies centre, through which he co-edits the journal coolabah, and he is the current chair of the european association for studies of australia, easa. he has also co-convened congresses on australian studies in collaboration with similar centres at southern cross university nsw, curtin university wa, and the university of tasmania, all three in australia: see http://www.ub.edu/dpfilsa/. http://www.ub.edu/dpfilsa/ s .. thinking about the upcoming u.s. elections jeffrey c. isaac “why are you screaming? you have a microphone, it’s amplified and when you shriek that way, it’s such an unpleasant . . . ” —geraldo rivera “i think a lot of it with hillary clinton has to do with style and delivery, oddly enough. she shouts. there’s something unrelaxed about the way she is communicating and i think that just jumps off . . . ” —bob woodward “what is likable about that? what is angry, bitter, screaming? i’m going to stop there.” —sean hannity “she’s aging, out of ideas, often shrill, apparently according to oral reports angry and clearly not inspiring.” —sean hannity “hillary clinton’s hair-raising tone on the campaign trail has garnered a lot of criticism, many saying she needs to cut it out and tone it down. but did you know that criticism is sexist? that’s correct, sexist. that’s according to clinton surrogate howard dean . . . that’s rich, coming from the screamer.” —kimberly guilfoyle “as leon wieseltier, the literary editor of the new republic, once told me: ‘she’s never going to get out of our faces. . . . she’s like some hellish housewife who has seen something that she really, really wants and won’t stop nagging you about it until finally you say, fine, take it, be the damn president, just leave me alone.’ that’s why hillary is laughing a lot now, big belly laughs, in response to tough questions or comments, to soften her image as she confidently knocks her male opponents out of the way. from nag to wag.” —maureen dowd “i don’t want to sound like the old ball-and-chain guy, but hillary clinton cannot be elected president because—am i wrong in feeling, am i the only one in america that feels this way?—that there’s something about her vocal range. there’s something about her voice that just drives me—it’s not what she says, it’s how she says it. she is like the stereotypical— excuse the expression, but this is the way to—she’s the stereotypical bitch, you know what i mean? she’s that stereo- typical, nagging, [unintelligible], you know what i mean? and she doesn’t have to be saying—she could be saying happy things, but after four years, don’t you think every man in america will go insane?” —glenn beck “do you think hillary looks presidential? i don’t think so . . . i’m not going to say it. . .. i refuse to say that i cannot stand her screaming into the microphone all the time.. . . because we’re not allowed to say it, right?” —donald j. trump a fter months of vicious campaigning, donald trump eviscerated all sixteen of his original rivals for the republican nomination (“lyin’ ted,” “little marco,” “ugly carly,” “loser jeb” and the rest), and immediately went on the attack against the pre- sumptive democratic nominee, hillary clinton, who was herself locked in a sometimes bitter race with bernie sanders for the nomination. u.s. political science has much to contribute to the understanding of this electoral contest and its underlying dimensions, dynamics, and likely consequences. readers of monkey cage, vox, and numerous other blogs encounter illuminating versions of political science research on u.s. politics on a daily basis; commentaries by respected columnists such as e.j. dionne, jr. in the washington post and thomas b. edsall in the new york times regularly feature political science discussions; and sometimes political science research makes its way even further to the top of political discussion, as with our september piece by martin gilens and benjamin page on “testing theories of american politics,” which went viral, and has also been cited frequently in connection with the sanders campaign and its criticism of “oligarchy” (see especially robert reich, “the most pragmatic way to fix american democracy: elect bernie sanders”). this issue of perspectives contains a variety of articles, essays, and reviews of direct relevance to the election and to the broader dynamics of u.s. politics. it also contains two terrific “praxis” essays that reflect on the practical opportunities and challenges associated with direct involvement in political campaigns: donald p. green and alan s. gerber’s “voter mobilization, experimentation, and translational social science” and hahrie han and elizabeth mckenna’s “political science, field campaigns, and democratic praxis.” it seems appropriate to lead our issue with jennifer j. jones’s “talk like a man: the linguistic styles of hillary doi: . /s © american political science association september | vol. /no. from the editor https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core clinton.” jones draws on research in political psychology and political communication, and employs a quantitative textual analysis of almost interview transcripts and candidate debates to analyze the shifts in the linguistic style of clinton between —the year in which she first served as first lady—and —the year she began to make her move towards the democratic presidential nomination. jones finds that “clinton’s linguistic style grew increasingly masculine over time, as her involvement and power in the political world expanded.” and she draws from this research a more general conclusion: “women pursuing leadership positions are not simply halted by a glass ceiling, but by a labyrinth of obstacles they must navigate along the way. these obstacles, both implicit and overt, do not pose concrete barriers, but rather ‘circuitous routes’ toward attaining leadership positions. expectations of leadership and institutional arrangements have impli- cations for the types of individuals who run for public office as well as the self-presentational strategies that politically ambitious women use to advance through the labyrinth of leadership. to be successful, they must cultivate an appropriate and effective self-presentation— one that reconciles symbolic attitudes toward gender with masculine prototypes of political leaders.” jones helps us to understand why the rhetoric quoted at the very top of this introduction has figured so prominently in the current election cycle. at the same time, as she makes clear, the gendered dynamics in play can also work in subtler ways. janet elise johnson’s “fast-tracked or boxed in? informal politics, gender, and women’s representation in putin’s russia,” reminds us that these dynamics are rather universal, or at least in play in a range of places beyond the united states. johnson argues that the inclusion of women into electoral politics is an important gain for gender equality but also a double-edged sword: “women are being fast-tracked into politics informally, not just formally such as by party or legislative quotas. yet these women are then boxed in by informal rules and by parallel institutions and posts, with virtually no opportunities to advocate for women’s interests. putin’s regime has promoted women to be ‘stand-ins’ during times of crisis or change, ‘loyalists’ and ‘showgirls’ when the regime needs to showcase elections and representation, and ‘cleaners’ when the appearance of corruption threatens the regime. even demonstrations of ultimate loyalty have not protected those women who once advocated for feminist policies . . . these political processes, especially the loyalist box where there is the most evidence in this opaque political system, not only limit women-politicians’ willingness and ability to sub- stantively represent women, but incentivizes them to push for regressive policies. instead of expanding wom- en’s substantive representation, the increase in women’s descriptive representation has led to backlash, reinforcing male dominance and informal politics.” donald trump’s derisive comment about hillary clinton’s supposed playing of “the gender card” notwith- standing, this election—pitting a very visible and accom- plished professional woman who is a liberal feminist against a man who epitomizes belligerent masculinity and has a demonstrated propensity to demean professional women in public (think clinton, but also megyn kelly, heidi cruz, and carly fiorina)—vividly dramatizes the gendering of american politics. theda skocpol and alexander hertel-fernandez’s “the koch network and republican party extremism” centers on another theme vividly dramatized in this election, not in the opposition of trump and clinton but in the opposition of sanders and clinton: the role of private wealth, and of class and distributive conflict more generally, in politics. skocpol and hertel-fernandez develop an “organizational” approach that in some ways parallels work published in perspectives by kay lehman schlozman, sidney verba, and henry brady, and by jacob hacker and paul pierson. they proceed from the obser- vation that in recent years the republican party has moved unremittingly rightward in ways that seem to counter median voter models. “why has this happened?” they ask. “standard wisdom blames current gop extremism on unruly party base voters—on tea partiers, or christian conservatives, or working-class nativists. in safely conser- vative legislative districts and presidential primaries dom- inated by base voters, gop stances on social issues like abortion or immigration can be attributed to such pressures from below. but this explanation sheds little light on accelerating gop economic extremism.” in order to explain this development, they draw upon data and findings from a new research project on “the shifting u.s. political terrain” that focuses on organizations rather than simply on mass publics or aggregates of wealthy donors. while they do not deny the importance of wealthy donors such as the koch brothers themselves, their article maps the vast organizational network associated with koch industries and the koch brothers, which includes the freedom partners chamber of commerce, the koch seminars, the libre initiative, themis/i , aegis strate- gic, the cato institute, the mercatus center at george mason university, and the american legislative exchange council (see hertel-fernandez’s article on alec in our september issue). and it centers on a case study of americans for prosperity, a centrally-directed yet federated organization that promotes “a broad pro-free-market agenda with a highly disciplined focus on economic and political issues.” they claim that “in some ways, afp’s connection to the gop is similar to the ‘anchoring’ relationship that the labor movement used to enjoy with democrats . . . on webpages, in statements to the media, in lobbying efforts, and at public protests, messages from national and state afp operatives focus relentlessly on promoting tax cuts, blocking and eliminating business perspectives on politics from the editor | thinking about the upcoming u.s. elections https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core regulations, opposing the landmark health reform law passed in , pushing for reductions in funding of (and, where possible, the privatization) public education and social-welfare programs, and opposing state-level environ- mental initiatives and any from the u.s. environmental protection agency.” and they argue that “because of its massive scale, tight integration, ramified organizational reach, and close intertwining with the gop at all levels, the koch network exerts a strong gravitational pull on many republican candidates and officeholders, re-setting the range of economic issues and policy alternatives to which they are responsive.” (on the theme of ideological and partisan polarization, see also this issue’s critical dialogue between hans noel, author of political ideologies and political parties in america, and russell muirhead, author of the promise of party in a polarized age. and on the broader theme of political mobilization, see daniel carpenter’s article “recruitment by petition: american antislavery, french protestantism, english suppression.”) jacob hacker’s “america’s welfare parastate” nicely complements skocpol and fernandez’s article, reviewing a growing literature on the distinctive features of the american welfare state, which is comparatively stingy in its social spending but comparatively lavish in its provision of “social benefits delivered or subsidized through the tax code.” “the result,” he argues, “is a framework of social protection that is not just maddeningly complex but also unevenly perceived. big expenditure programs like social security and medicare are hard to miss. but the rest of the framework—the assortment of tax breaks and regulated private benefits and third-party providers—lies mostly beneath the surface of public consciousness. it is, as suzanne mettler puts it . . . a ‘submerged state.’” hacker notes that this framework has long contributed to a public myopia about social spending, but that “the rise of donald trump and the insurgent campaign of sanders in both suggest that public pressures for social protection are building. . .. perhaps more important, race and racism continue to greatly complicate the task of increasing support for public protections. among many downscale white voters, public programs are seen as the province of blacks, hispanics, and undocumented immigrants (even though virtually every social program is majority white, hispanics are generally underrepresented among program beneficiaries, and undocumented immigrants are often excluded altogether). donald trump’s presidency augers a nativist backlash at least as much as it suggests a latent coalition for robust measures to aid displaced workers.” our review section contains two other features dealing with distributional politics: a critical dialogue between james druckman and lawrence jacobs, authors of who governs? presidents, public opinion, and manipulation and daniel m. butler, author of representing the advantaged: how politicians reinforce inequality, and an undisciplined review essay by sanford schram on matthew desmond’s ethnography evicted: poverty and profit in the american city. and john boswell’s “deliberating downstream: countering democratic distortions in the policy process” discusses the resistance of policy processes to political change even in the instances when this change is legislated and seems to reflect the mobilization of rational opinion formation. on the topic of “nativist backlash,” our issue contains a very important piece of public opinion research, morris levy, matthew wright and jack citrin’s “mass opinion and immigration policy in the united states.” the piece proceeds from a situation that has become central to the current presidential contest: “hundreds of bills in the last twenty-five years have sought to augment, scale back, or rebalance an admissions regime that, at present, allocates roughly one million green cards each year to relatives of u.s. citizens and legal permanent residents (about two- thirds of visas), skilled workers ( percent), and refugees ( percent). acrimonious debates have repeatedly played out at all levels of government over the fate of an estimated million illegal immigrants, many of whom arrived in the united states as children, have family ties here, or are so integrated into american society that returning home is unthinkable to them. should they be deported as ‘law- breakers?’ legalized as aspirants to the american dream? tolerated in a policy of ‘salutary neglect?’” levy, wright, and citrin argue that the scholarly conventional wisdom is that this patchwork of policies is unpopular, and that it persists, rather than giving way to a more restrictive policy, because of the influence of “elites and organized lobbies” that support a liberal and relatively permissive regime— a view that parallels the arguments made by advocates of immigration restriction. they subject this perspective to empirical test, and report the results of a survey experiment that shows that “americans’ abstract desire to reduce immigration co-exists with broad-based support for the pillars of the expansionary status quo—family reunifica- tion, recruitment of skilled labor, and admitting refugees. this contradictory mix of opinions arises because the actual contours of visa preferences evoke humanitarian and sociotropic considerations that compete with the exclu- sionary impulses tapped by more abstract poll questions. the point here is not that the public is more ‘pro- immigrant’ than generally believed or that it will support large-scale immigration irrespective of the political con- text, but that failing to take stock of divergence between abstract policy aims and specific means of achieving them makes one ignore the permissive consensus supporting the status quo.” their piece contains implications for public policy analysis and for how we understand the ways that public opinion is currently being mobilized, and it warrants careful attention. in the current u.s. election cycle, immigration policy has become a hot-button issue in connection both with donald trump’s call for the building of “a wall” at the u.s.–mexican border and september | vol. /no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core with his call for a ban on the entry of muslims into the united states. but the issue is very live throughout the world, especially in the light of the massive waves of refugees and migrants who are crossing the mediterranean in flight from war in syria, libya, iraq, afghanistan, eritrea, nigeria, and elsewhere. this issue contains three critical dialogues dealing with the topic, between marisa abrajano and zoltan hajnal’s white backlash: immigra- tion, race, and american politics and sarah wallace goodman’s immigration and membership politics in western europe; leila kawar’s, contesting immigration policy in court: legal activism and its radiating effects in the united states and france and stuart chinn, recalibrating reform: the limits of political change; and ayten gundogdu, rightlessness in an age of rights: hannah arendt and the contemporary struggles of migrants, and ben herzog, revoking citizenship: expatriation in america from the colonial era to the war on terror. race also plays an obvious role in the current election cycle. the substantial weakness of the republican party in attracting support from african-americans and latinos has been widely noted in the press, and black lives matter activists have been very visible both in demon- strating against the trump campaign and in pressing the sanders and clinton campaigns to be more responsive to links between race, criminalization, and state-sanctioned violence. these themes feature prominently in our critical dialogue between michael javen fortner, author of black silent majority: the rockefeller drug laws and the politics of punishment and daniel kato, author of liber- alizing lynching: building a new radicalized state. they also are the focus of a symposium we have organized on recent controversies surrounding the racial legacies of woodrow wilson, at princeton and beyond. my sympo- sium charge sums up the issues: woodrow wilson is the only american political scientist to have served as president of the united states. in the time between his political science ph.d. (from johns hopkins, in ) and his tenure as u.s. president ( – ), he also served as president of princeton university ( – ) and president of the american political science association ( – ). wilson is one of the most revered figures in american political thought and in american political science. the woodrow wilson award is perhaps apsa’s most distinguished award, given annually for the best book on government, politics, or international affairs pub- lished in the previous year, and sponsored by the woodrow wilson foundation at princeton university. woodrow wilson has also recently become the subject of controversy, on the campus of princeton university, and in the political culture more generally, in connection with racist statements that he made and the segregationist practices of his administration. a group of princeton students associated with the “black lives matter” movement has demanded that wilson’s name be removed from two campus buildings, one of which is the famous woodrow wilson school of public and international affairs (see martha a. sandweiss, “woodrow wilson, princeton, and the complex landscape of race,” http://www.thenation.com/article/woodrow-wilson-princeton-and- the-complex-landscape-of-race/). many others have resisted this idea, noting that wilson is indeed an important figure in the history of twentieth-century liberalism and progressivism in the united states. a number of colleagues have contacted me suggesting that perspectives ought to organize a symposium on the wilson controversy. although we do not regularly organize symposia around current events, given the valence of the controversy and its connection to issues we have featured in our journal (see especially the september issue on “the american politics of policing and incarceration),” and given wilson’s importance in the history of our discipline, we have decided to make an exception in this case. we have thus invited a wide range of colleagues whose views on this issue will interest our readers to comment on this controversy. our symposium features current apsa president jennifer hochschild, apsa past president dianne pinderhughes, national conference of black political scientists (ncbps) president todd shaw, ncbps president-elect shayla nunnally, eldon eisenach, des- mond jagmohan, dara strolovitch and chaya crowder, and david wilson. the issue also includes a review essay by desmond king, “illiberalism unbound: rethinking america’s progressive legacy,” that addresses similar themes. (in our forthcoming december issue we will include a symposium on robert vitalis’s white world order, black power politics: the birth of american in- ternational relations, and also an undisciplined review essay by vitalis on aldon morris’s the scholar denied: w. e.b. dubois and the birth of modern sociology). the legal status accorded members of the glbt community is another lightening rod of partisan con- troversy in the current electoral cycle. while the supreme court’s decision in obergefell v. hodges declared that the right to marry is guaranteed to all individuals, including same-sex couples, according to the fourteenth amendment, republican resistance to the enforcement of this right has been practiced in many states on grounds of “state’s rights.” legal and political contests over the issue of glbt rights have also figured prominently in the news in connection with legislation passed in north carolina and in mississippi, and that have been debated in indiana, arkansas, and elsewhere, that allows discrimination against glbt individuals on grounds of “religious liberty.” these controversies have been further accentuated by the may , , directive issued by the obama administration’s department of education and department of justice, which construed title ix of the education amendments as prohib- iting “discrimination based on a student’s sexual identity, including discrimination based on a student’s trans- gender status,” and requiring that public schools re- ceiving title ix funding be in compliance with this “significant guidance.” our symposium on stephen macedo’s just married: same-sex couples, monogamy, perspectives on politics from the editor | thinking about the upcoming u.s. elections https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core and the future of marriage, featuring commentaries by scott barclay, joe fishel, and jyl josephson, speaks directly to these issues. perhaps the most surprising development in the presidential contest has been the extraordinary success of bernie sanders, an avowed “democratic socialist” and a septuagenarian who came of age in the ’s and who first entered politics as a new left student activist in chicago involved in civil rights and anti-vietnam war organizing. such involvements were also foundational for many of those who have shaped the current discipline of political science in the united states over the past three decades. the recent publication of a new edition of “the port huron statement,” the manifesto of students for a democratic society, seemed like an opportune moment to invite a wide range of important disciplinary figures who experienced the new left as graduate students or young professors to comment on how the statement, and its theme of “participatory democracy,” shaped their thinking as political scientists. while many of the original list of invitees were unable to participate, we are pleased that those who were able to contribute include a stellar cast of commentators: mark blitz, william connolly, peter gourevitch, phil green, frances fox piven, wilbur rich, sid tarrow, molly shanley and martha ackelsberg, and nick xenos. that generation of scholars was largely in rebellion against prophecies of an “end of ideology” that by the late sixties had proven horribly wrong. we live, and work, at a time in which another declaration of “the end to history” has proven wrong. the acrimony, and the corroding fault lines, of the current moment in u.s. electoral politics has its parallels in too many other places the world over. recent challenges to liberal democracy in hungary, poland, but also austria, france, and even great britain, currently in the midst of a bitter “brexit” controversy, further intensify a sense of abiding concern, if not crisis. at the same time, electoral processes carry on. the tension between the relative normalcy of electoral politics and the lingering anxiety, fear, and sense of grievance among large seg- ments of the populations of many of the most impor- tant nation-states in the world is palpable. in the coming years we will face many challenges, and be forced to answer many questions. we political scientists have our work cut out for us. september | vol. /no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core statement of mission and procedures perspectives on politics seeks to provide a space for broad and synthetic discussion within the political science pro- fession and between the profession and the broader schol- arly and reading publics. such discussion necessarily draws on and contributes to the scholarship published in the more specialized journals that dominate our discipline. at the same time, perspectives seeks to promote a complemen- tary form of broad public discussion and synergistic under- standing within the profession that is essential to advancing scholarship and promoting academic community. perspectives seeks to nurture a political science public sphere, publicizing important scholarly topics, ideas, and innovations, linking scholarly authors and readers, and pro- moting broad refl exive discussion among political scien- tists about the work that we do and why this work matters. perspectives publishes work in a number of formats that mirror the ways that political scientists actually write: research articles: as a top-tier journal of political sci- ence, perspectives accepts scholarly research article sub- missions and publishes the very best submissions that make it through our double-blind system of peer review and revision. the only thing that differentiates perspectives research articles from other peer-reviewed articles at top journals is that we focus our attention only on work that in some way bridges subfi eld and methodological divides, and tries to address a broad readership of political scien- tists about matters of consequence. this typically means that the excellent articles we publish have been extensively revised in sustained dialogue with the editor—me—to address not simply questions of scholarship but questions of intellectual breadth and readability. “refl ections” are more refl exive, provocative, or pro- grammatic essays that address important political science questions in interesting ways but are not necessarily as systematic and focused as research articles. these essays often originate as research article submissions, though sometimes they derive from proposals developed in con- sultation with the editor in chief. unlike research articles, these essays are not evaluated according to a strict, double- blind peer review process. but they are typically vetted informally with editorial board members or other col- leagues, and they are always subjected to critical assess- ment and careful line-editing by the editor and editorial staff. scholarly symposia, critical book dialogues, book review essays, and conventional book reviews are developed and commissioned by the editor in chief, based on authorial queries and ideas, editorial board suggestions, and staff conversations. everything published in perspectives is carefully vetted and edited. given our distinctive mission, we work hard to use our range of formats to organize interesting conver- sations about important issues and events, and to call atten- tion to certain broad themes beyond our profession’s normal subfi eld categories. for further details on writing formats and submission guidelines, see our website at http://www.apsanet.org/ perspectives/ https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core leigh patel doi: . / . . ways of knowing in times of destabilization kneller lecture leigh patel university of pittsburgh on march th, , i had the distinct honor of delivering the kneller lecture at the philosophy of education society’s annual conference. i titled the talk “ways of knowing” as a hat tip and acknowledgement of my colleague, mike gunzenhauser, who has extended nothing but generosity since i was first recruited to join the university of pittsburgh. ways of knowing is a course that mike had taught several times, but he displayed the opposite of territoriality, and asked me if i might like to teach this course that he had developed and adapted over many years. leading up to the conference, the conference president, cris mayo and i spoke several times, with cris offering detailed context about the association and its history. although i was an outsider to this particular pro- fessional organization, and, as i always am, an uninvited guest on indigenous lands, the flow and format felt familiar: work out tech issues, stay after the talk to interact with people who often tell me what meanings they made of the talk and how it relates to their work. true to so many other talks i have provided, one person asked me if i wouldn’t mind sending him the power point presen- tation that i had used to structure the talk, a request that i have heard before and one that echoes the erasure of women of color’s intellectual work. so far, not much was unusual to the ongoings of academic convenings: generosity of spirit, as well as tendrils and re-enactments of the individualized and sometimes opportunistic ways of being in the academy. i refresh these details to mark my experience of the philosophy of education conference as neither new nor surprising to me. there was gen- erosity, thoughtfulness in every step leading up to the talk, as well as retread conversations in which academics, so deeply expert in their areas, often engage in dialogues with other academics by first articulating their research interests. it has long been a cultural practice, a shared way of doing, knowing, and acting philosophy of education | heather greenhalgh-spencer, editor © philosophy of education society ways of knowing in times of destabilization volume issue for academics to listen to another academic and then start a sentence with a version of: “that’s interesting. what i’m interested in is…” i say this to name explicitly the ways of knowing and the forms of relationality, or rather the lack thereof, in the highly individualized and competitive culture of academe that is in no way exclusive to philosophers of education. eleven days after delivering the kneller talk, mine and other campuses across the nation and the planet closed their campuses, scrambling to mediate and contend with the impact of covid- . in a matter of days most faculty and administrators gradually found spaces in their homes where they would then pass hours staring at the green light of the computer cameras in online meetings. for students who had access to technology, including computer broadband internet, the adjustments to online courses were annoying and a poor match for the physical energy of bodies, objects, and tools in the shared same physical space. our ways of knowing have been altered, in some cases regrounded in foundational principles of learning as relational because we have missed being able to do so in shared physical spaces. in other cases, our ways of knowing have been made to reckon, again, with the long-standing patterns of societal inequity. black and white students who participated in university programming returned to their homes to discover and remember that they, in fact, came from drastically different socioeconomic and political social location. lastly, ways of knowing have been demanding attention about the global phenomenon of racism, with global uprisings against and responses to long-standing patterns of anti-black violence delivered through law enforcement officials and vigilantes. although the mortal consequences of systemic racism were predictable, the statistics and material loss, large-scale lack of wellness, and lack of access to healthcare has provided harrowing statistics of who has fallen ill, suffered from mental health burdens, and died from covid- : predominantly black, migrant, and indigenous peoples. in new orleans, a city with a large black population, and the site of many black freedom struggles, including the removal of confederate monuments built in the s to stave off leigh patel doi: . / . . the civil rights movement, more than % of covid deaths have been black americans. this city in particular highlights the fact that covid hooked into existing disparities between access to health care, reliable public transportation, and food deserts. who is safe and who is not? ways of knowing safety and wellness are both somatic and driven by durable yet always permeable culture and policy. culture is, at its most reduced definition, shared ways of being, doing, and acting. policies here defined as de jure laws and policies that, along with cultural practices create starkly different material realities of literal life and death. an obvious and glaring example of racialized proximity to popula- tion-level acceleration to illness and death has always been a fact in the united states. however with the pandemic and its increasingly glaring and cruel im- pacts on working class black, brown, and indigenous peoples, were reminders to mainstream, specifically white people who could physically distance and experience no interruption to their income or access to healthcare that the social structure daily manifested statistics in which racism, poverty, and health insecurity were headlines. frontline workers, a term often reserved for people in direct combat with people named as enemies, included grocery cashiers, people who stocked shelves in stores, truck drivers, and delivery agents, to name a few. unsurprisingly, as these workers could not financially opt out of work, such as driving a public transportation bus, were eulogized as essential but materially were treated as expendable. at the same time, people who could work remotely and did not face material effects that put them at risk of illness and death, hopefully had to con- tend with the fact that their safety was intimately connected to lack of safety of others. for example, pre-ordering food from a grocery and driving up to have it brought to one’s car is a stark example of the long-standing chasm between those of means and those whose safety is in constant question because they simply cannot choose not to show up to work. ways of knowing in times of destabilization volume issue ways of knowing interconnectedness once virtually every public and private space was shuttered, people began to know, deeply that our lives and actions are deeply intertwined. loneliness and isolation were foils to families being able to shelter in place and renew the depth of their bonds. at the same time, many people sheltered in place with a family or community member who had been abusing them for years. however people decided to defy or were forced to cross shelter in place orders, their actions impacted them and everyone they came into contact with. for example, in mid-march students enrolled at the university of texas, austin, chartered a plane to fly to mexico for their spring break. to date, of those young people have tested positive for the virus and returned to austin, in which % of the city is elderly, resulting in austin joining other cities experiencing a second surge of the virus in the summer that peaked higher than the first peak in april. for long-standing indigenous ways of knowing, the fact that all living beings are intertwined is neither new nor revelatory. kawagley’s a yupiak way of knowing concisely articulates that ways the yupiak peoples’ interconnected- ness with land, air, waterways have been impacted by contact with european and euro-descended settlers’ ways of being: snowmobiles, oil drilling, and the killing of animals for sport or mass profit rather than for more localized needs. relatedly, people who had never considered the planet as a lifeform unto itself were being told through various media outlets that large outbreaks of the virus in meat processing plants might, to put it mildly, require a reconsideration of how we know and are in relation with animals, the air, water, and the planet. as a person who attended secondary and university education in the midwest, i witnessed both the demise of family farms and the rise of large meat processing plants. i recall farmers receiving subsidy checks to not grow more of their crops, as international trade proved to be cheaper with the government acting as intermediary. with these moves came economic devastation to family-owned farms, myriad small towns becoming ghosts of thriving agricultural practices, leigh patel doi: . / . . and a lost ethos of raising healthy animals and then making use of as many of their offerings after being slaughtered. those are now a historical practice having given sway to large-scale companies whose interests are to use chemical hormones to bolster the animals’ growth so that they would that much more quickly be slaughtered, processed, and placed in styrofoam and plastic wrapped containers on grocery shelves. however, it’s important to note that even during the era of family-owned farms, this property ownership was reserved almost exclusively for white men. their epistemologies were in closer relation to the land, more attentive to rainfall and early frosts, but most still operated from the stance that land is property, and farm animals were valued for their potential profit after slaughter. the morrill acts that created land grant institutions from and on top of indigenous lands, is another iteration of these ways knowing through property and expectation of property rights. covid- and its outbreak in many areas, including meat processing plants raised questions that have long lingered about the safety of workers in these factories, most of whom are migrants, many without legal documentation to be in the united states. the seated president of the united states, a life-long racist, contended that the virus would be quickly solved and insisted on the re-opening of meat-packing plants before he urged governors to re-open their states’ businesses. at the time of this writing, the pandemic is in a second surge, much higher than the first surge in april of . from the perspective of many indigenous nations and tribes, land is not property: a capital to be owned. nor is it a resource to be tilled. it is a lifeforce. it is ancestor. it is future child. all of ways of knowing, or more accurately put, being in relation to the planet, are grounded in the inextricable relationship amongst all living beings, which demands being in right relationship to land, air, and waterways. this way of knowing holds respect for elders and ancestors, but unlike the academy, it does not seek to reproduce static forms of elder’s characteristics; neither does it insist upon highly individualized and competitive cultures. for many native peoples, individualism and competition is anathema to their ways of being for time immemorial. ways of knowing in times of destabilization volume issue ways of knowing interventions in colonialism as a constant dynamic at the same time that the covid- pandemic halted business and social activities across the globe, some practices persisted and intensified: the long-standing practice of racializing diseases to have an enemy, concentrated harm to indigenous peoples due to lack of social services and long-standing efforts to contain and erase them, and finally, the ongoing murder of black people by law enforcement or white vigilantes. in fact, anti-black racism has been a global phenomenon for centuries. in the united states, george floyd’s breath was literally squeezed out him by an officer who placed his knee on floyd’s neck, with his hands in his pockets for almost nine minutes. in february ahmaud arbery, a black man jogging on a narrow street in georgia, was cornered by two vehicles driven by white men and shot to death after struggling for his life. breonna taylor was in her home when four police officers with a no-knock order, meaning that they needed neither to identify themselves nor request entry, shot her partner in the leg, and shot her seven times. she died immediately. these and many other killings of black and brown people led to an uprising. about a week after floyd’s execution, protests were occurring in all states, and then spread across the globe. as it turns out our ways of knowing that black lives matter can, like all ways of knowing, change and expand over time. along with the protests about anti-black racism and the cries for cessation of racism towards chinese appearing people, came specific demands and adroit analyses. the student activists at the university of minnesota have articulated their demand clearly, holding a rally on campus with the message: get the police off our campus. the then president of the american studies asso- ciation issued a statement calling the global uprising a rebellion and making the important distinction that a rebellion is not a revolution but can be a revolution. ways of knowing regional leaderfull and sustaining figurations of connections as educators, the ways of knowing what constitutes being in right rela- leigh patel doi: . / . . tion with all living beings and knowing deeply the intertwined and shapeshifting patterns of white, heteropatriarchal capitalism is part of our moral duty. it is striking within the population of full professors in the united states, roughly . percent are black women. this is not accidental nor a reflection of a lack of grit, growth mindsets. it reflects how the united states rose to global prominence through stolen labor on stolen land. in fact, enslaved black women were valued highly as property precisely because they were able to produce more chattel slaves, babies. insurance companies were started to insure enslaved black lives for their white slave owners’ property ownership. learning from emergence during pandemics what are ways of knowing that should be foundational to a philosoph- ical organization dedicated to education? while different in form and, i would argue, purpose, there are many examples to learn from. in emergent strategy, adrienne marie brown proposes that there are emergent communities, practic- es, and knowledges coming into fruition constantly. the pointed question is if we engage in these or use the disciplines of the academy to tamp down these emergent and revolutionary knowledges and relations. i write this essay during a time of global health crisis and anti-racist rebellions. this is a leaderfull moment, with people being restricted from gath- ering together physically, they have found ways to gather, ways to teach, ways to imagine a new world into existence. roy reminds us that pandemics have always been portals, opportunities to imagine new worlds into existence. she poses that to do so would mean stepping lightly through the portal, with luggage and leaving behind individualism, hatred for racial and ethnic scapegoats. further, the movement generation, which offered a strong series of programming during the summer of states: it took + years of increasing domination of the land to bring on this pandemic. the decisions that caused it were made far from the places of impact. in fact, governance and decision-making are at the root of the crises of our ways of knowing in times of destabilization volume issue times-from speculative housing markets to global indus- trial food systems and toxic fossil fuel industries. how can we move towards local, loving, linked, participatory economies for life? what unjust rules do we need to break? what new practices do we need to codify to move from political borders to ecological boundaries? this is in fact, a radical analysis and a literal example of what it means to imagine a new world into existence. educators like septima clarke and anna julia cooper, sociologists such w.e.b. dubois and historians like barbara ransby and robin dg kelley are some of the public intellectuals whose actions were both word and deed, all undergirded by philosophical inquiry and reflection. it has always been the right time to unfurl our grip on epistemologies and tradi- tions that forward property and individualism. i hope that we learn from these traditions to reshape what it means to be a philosopher of education. nicholas casey, “colleges made them feel equal: the virus exposed how unequal their lives are,” new york times, may , , https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/politics/coronavi- rus-zoom-college-classes.html. gordon russell & sam karlin, “coronavirus disparity in louisiana: about % of the victims are black, but why?” the times-picayune, april , , https://www.nola.com/news/coronavirus/article_d d - - ea-ac d- ebb c .html. stuart hall, cultural studies : a theoretical history (duke university press, ). ruth w. gilmore, golden gulag: prisons, surplus, crisis, and opposition in globalizing california (university of california press, ). angayuqaq o. kawagley, a yupiaq worldview: a pathway to ecology and spirit (long grove, il: waveland press, ). leigh patel doi: . / . . eve. tuck & marcia mckenzie, place in research: theory, methodology, and meth- ods (london: routledge, ). manulani a. meyer, “indigenous and authentic: hawaiian epistemology and the triangulation of meaning,” handbook of critical and indigenous methodologies ( ), - . arundhait roy, “the pandemic is a portal,” financial times, april, , , https://www.ft.com/content/ d f e - eb- ea- fe-fcd e- ca. adrienne m. brown, emergent strategy: shaping change, changing worlds (chico, ca: ak press, ); movement generation ( ). accessed june , : https://movementgeneration.org/. this is the accepted version of an article accepted for publication in south atlantic quarterly published by duke university press: https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal accepted version downloaded from soas research online: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / lori allen, department of anthropology and sociology, soas university of london what’s in a link? transnational solidarities across palestine and their intersectional possibilities forthcoming. january abstract this essay analyzes some key moments of transnational palestinian solidarity politics as a basis for considering the possibilities for challenging the status quo ignited by the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (bds) movement. throughout modern palestinian history, political efforts have been built on nationalist identifications and the nation-state as a goal. alongside the nation as reference point, transnational and intersectional movements and objectives have also animated palestinian politics, including pan-arabism, pan-islamism and the human rights movement. the bds movement has re-ignited transnational palestinian solidarity, and drawn into the struggle for palestinian liberation black activists in the u.s., including members of the prison abolition movement. the black-palestinian solidarity movement is still in a nascent stage, and the constituent struggles remain based in nation-state imaginaries. the links that participants in the bds and black-palestinian solidarity movements are fostering are not based on shared identities, however. instead, they have developed out of shared recognition of the transnational dimensions of the experiential, rights-based, and systemic contiguities among their conditions. contributor’s note lori allen is senior lecturer in the department of anthropology at soas university of london. she is the author of the rise and fall of human rights: cynicism and politics in occupied palestine ( ), which won the association for political and legal anthropology book prize. she is currently working on a historical ethnography of international investigative commissions to palestine. introduction the history of transnational palestinian solidarity politics provides a way in to thinking about the possibilities for challenging the status quo ignited by the boycott, divestment, and sanctions (bds) movement, and the status of the nation within those efforts. the frameworks i discuss here include pan-arabism and pan-islamism as they came together in the islamic congress in jerusalem and the - arab revolt, human rights, bds, and the black-palestinian solidarity movement. solidarity generally refers to stances and actions that come from “a sense of unity between two political actors on the basis of shared interests, understandings, or aspirations, and sometimes on the basis of a common enemy” (khalili : ). the multiple parallels between the earlier and the contemporary moments are the focus of this essay. in each, transnational solidarity has been developed through claims to different universalizing ideologies, https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / this is the accepted version of an article accepted for publication in south atlantic quarterly published by duke university press: https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal accepted version downloaded from soas research online: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / and through sympathy generated by representations of palestinian suffering. in different moments, intersectional analysis of actors on the ground have also generated solidarity actions. in some of these cases, the people involved and their motivating ideologies have challenged nationalism and proffered other-than-nationalist imaginings of a liberated future for palestinians and others. however, where non-national or transnational imaginings have emerged, nation-state specific interests and nationalist actors have stood in tension with these more radical efforts. debate, and sometimes paralyzing dispute, over strategies, priorities, and how to balance ideological commitment to higher values with pragmatism and local contingencies is a constant throughout this history. such is the nature of politics, but the ramifications of these dynamics are perhaps more acute in self-consciously transnational political solidarity movements. another element common to these cases is the tendency of experiential dimensions and structural analyses to come in and out of focus to justify and motivate solidarity. at different moments, discursive and visual portrayals of the experience of palestinian suffering have activated sympathy for, or identification with, the palestinians as victims of british or israeli brutality. the torment of palestinians living under occupation has been regularly compared to the brutality that blacks in south africa or the united states experience under those discriminatory regimes. alongside these visceral appeals to sympathy are critiques that analyze the structural, material connections that propagate those brutalities through imperial alliances and the business of militarized policing. the ways in which activists have analyzed those links between palestinians and others, recognizing that the connections exist beyond the experiential and emerge from transnational systems of domination, has shaped the nature of the resulting solidarity. across some of these various moments and movements, “intersectionality” has been a framework for analysis and a prompt to action across identity and geographic boundaries. this essay engages with intersectionality as “a method and a disposition, a heuristic and analytic tool” (carbado et al. : ). it sheds light on the ways that people have recognized their common conditions of oppression and overlapping identities, and traces intersectionality in practice as it has generated forms of solidarity throughout this history. first coined in in an essay by kimberlé crenshaw, the term intersectionality refers to the ways that identity categories and dynamics such as “race, class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, ability, and age operate not as unitary, mutually exclusive entities, but as reciprocally constructing phenomena that in turn shape complex social inequalities” ( : ). the concept of intersectionality offers a way to think not just about the structures that oppress, but also about shared opportunities for addressing them. intersectionality is an activist disposition, a mode of solidarity building, and a means through which political actors come together in coalition. a range of identity frameworks and discursive frames have functioned across palestinian history. they have undergirded practices such as racism, colonialism, imperialism, incarceration, police and military violence, denied freedom of movement within and across borders, denied freedom of expression and political organizing, among other conditions (collins ). following robinson ( ), this essay considers the ways in which such imperial-colonial regimes are intersectionally constituted in order to capture both dynamics of power and resistant formations that work in ways not captured by the notion of identity (carbado et al. : ). intersectional theory developed to correct narrow (and specifically racist) analytical frames in https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / this is the accepted version of an article accepted for publication in south atlantic quarterly published by duke university press: https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal accepted version downloaded from soas research online: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / order to better capture specific configurations of overlapping stigmatizations of dominated groups, and in a western context in which identity politics had become predominant. but intersectionality does more than help us understand “wounded identities” (brown ). intersectionality sheds light on the actors and their conditions that have brought transversal coalitions together (whether transnational groups that emerge from nation-specific concerns, religious communities united by claims to supranational belief and belonging, or universal- ideological formations like human rights). as the history of the palestinian struggle shows, intersectionality as a mode of thought and practice has been shaping political action for a long time. in dean spade’s analysis of intersectional politics, he argues that the methodologies of intersectional scholars and activists have, and should, critique the nation-state form itself as the engine of population control that produces the abuses being opposed. these methodologies, he writes, “bring attention to the violences of legal and administrative systems that articulate themselves as race and gender neutral but are actually sites of the gendered racialization processes that produce the nation-state” ( : ). within palestinian solidarity politics at the grassroots and elite levels, in palestine and elsewhere, there has been limited debate that seeks to think outside the nation-state box. because palestine, from an early moment, came to stand as a symbol for ideals and aspirations other than itself, paradoxically, efforts on its behalf have remained tethered to the concrete nation-place of palestine. those who are called to its cause, either because it is the holy land that is home to the third holiest site in islam, or as the home to victims of israel, often seen as the last or most brazen bastion of settler-colonialism, keep the liberation of palestine, as a place for a nation-state, as a focus. the territory of the “homeland” is tethered within a nation-state ideology and political program. although people working in solidarity for palestine acted and identified with causes that transcended national borders, such as islam or pan-arabism, the nation-state has remained the consistent, overriding goal for most. however, the continued deferral of nation-state sovereignty for palestinians, and the growing visibility of transnational linkages that tie repressive forces together ideologically and economically, has the possibility to prompt novel transnational political imaginaries and actions. arab nationalism and pan-islamic thought people working from distinct but overlapping categories of identification have acted in common since arabs and others recognized the threat to palestine that zionism and the british mandate posed. one of the earliest modes of political coalition was pan-arabism in the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-centuries, in which people from across the arab region identified with a shared cultural and historical heritage, and argued for their independence from western domination based on those claims of shared (and noble) identity. intersectionality was at play in pan-arabism insofar as people built coalitions and political visions linked to their arab identity or common heritage in opposition to a sense of shared subjugation to imperial powers (although it was more than that, too). arabs claimed that their shared ethnicity, their shared linguistic heritage and sense of a common long history shaped who they were in the present (dawn ). those producing pan-arab political thought recognized that they were up against a system of power that defined them as undeserving of political sovereignty because of their position at the intersection of race and religion. not only were they https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / this is the accepted version of an article accepted for publication in south atlantic quarterly published by duke university press: https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal accepted version downloaded from soas research online: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / considered an inferior, backwards race – arab – but they were also perceived as belonging to a dangerous and fanatical religion – islam. pan-arab thinkers also identified the economic drivers of imperialism as injurious to arab peoples (dawn : ). they identified the operations of orientalism and challenged the regulatory regimes of race, imperialism, and islamo-phobic christianity that worked in tandem to deny arabs their collective rights. orientalism, understood in said’s sense as a set of converging narratives and political practices ( ), is a concept that captures the intersectionality of a repressive regime. it draws attention to the multiple and reinforcing categories that define people and underwrite practices of marginalization and disempowerment. partly in response to that intersectional regime of repression, pan-arabism asserted the nobility and historical depth of the arab race and civilization, and it brought people together in common action on that basis. pan-arabism might not be considered fully transnational, since “the national” was only just emerging as a relevant political framework in the region, the borders of distinct countries not yet fully erected in governmental administration or popular imagination. in the palestinian case, the ideas, places, and imagined communities that people identified with were overlapping, as arab cultural identity began to crystallize into an arab nationalist politics within and against the ottoman empire (khalidi ). in an early survey of “arab opinion” in a majority of the arabs who were consulted in palestine expressed their demand for an independent united arab nation under a constitutional monarchy in what was then considered “greater syria.” as historian awad halabi ( ) argues, loyalty to the ottoman dynasty, muslim identity, nationalism (of a generally arab as well as specifically palestinian kind), and shared opposition to european rule were motivations and identifications in play for arabs in what came to be considered palestine well into the s. a geographically defined palestine in many ways overtook (but did not eliminate) arab nationalism as a focus and identification for political mobilization in palestine, partially due to the specificity of the challenges facing arabs under british rule in palestine. when great britain took control of the territory, it did so with a commitment to facilitating the development of palestine into a national homeland for the jews. this promise, first made in by britain’s secretary of state for foreign affairs, arthur balfour, was incorporated into the text of the palestine mandate, converting that statement from one of “intention into a legally binding obligation” (kattan : xxxi). this brief declaration positioned the nascent zionist movement above the arabs of palestine, and became the bedrock justification for great britain’s favoritism of the jews in their administration of palestine. the threat that zionism posed to islam and the arab world became a mobilizing force that palestinian leaders put to political use for the sake of palestinian nationalism. for some, arab nationalism and islamic identity could function “as mutually reinforcing expressions of identity” (matthews : ). hajj amin al-husayni, sought to cultivate support for palestine throughout the muslim world with a pan-islamic message and networking activities. al-husayni had been appointed mufti and head of the government-established supreme muslim council by the british, and was a leader of the palestinians during the mandate. in developing support for independence against british control and the zionist danger it propelled, he convened a pan-islamic congress in jerusalem in . the expressed goal of the meeting was to investigate measures for the defense of muslim interests, while the real aim “was https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / this is the accepted version of an article accepted for publication in south atlantic quarterly published by duke university press: https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal accepted version downloaded from soas research online: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / to investigate the zionist danger to palestine and to its muslim holy places” (mattar : ). the palestinian leader’s goal was to increase support for arab palestine throughout the muslim world, but also enhance his own position in palestine as mufti, as go-between with the british, and as the palestinians’ best bet for achieving independence. invitations to muslim and arab countries yielded some delegates from twenty countries, a reflection of the popularity of the “pan-islamic notion of reuniting the umma (muslim community)” at the time (freas : - ). according to arnold toynbee, a contemporary observer, the fact that shi’ah muslims were also invited “was the first outward manifestation of a new spirit of co-operation (born in part of common adversity)” ( : - ). speakers at the congress all made an appeal for unity in the muslim world, and most emphasized that the palestinian cause was a muslim one, since zionism threatened the islamic integrity of jerusalem. the discussions and resolutions of the congress were pro-palestinian, but also spanned concerns of muslims living under regimes with anti-muslim policies and colonial activities elsewhere, from russia to morocco and libya (toynbee : ). the islamic congress of reveals much that is interesting for the present discussion of transnational politics, showing how different strategies took inspiration and borrowed from comparatives cases, how they were negotiated within and among competing national interests, how intersectional analyses shaped their vision and self-representation. a major position that united participants in the islamic congress was an opposition to “’every kind of colonization,’” as the executive council expressed in protests dispatched to the league of nations, foreign ministries, and other lofty addresses (toynbee : ). but the people involved were motivated by a mix of political values and goals: some were interests of national or transnational collectives, or pragmatic concerns about alliances, some were partisan interests, others were individual. among palestinians, for example, nationalists opposing the mufti believed that arab unity was the best means to fight the imperialists, a necessary condition for achieving independence for each arab country, itself a necessary condition for maintaining arab unity, a goal in its own right (matthews : ). arabs in palestine and beyond were also paying attention to anti-british politics in india, and vice-versa, from a supra-national perspective of “easternism” (kahn ). arab nationalists in palestine had learned from, and were teaching their students about, events in india and calling on gandhi’s tactics of noncooperation as a model for their own protests. gandhi “set the standard for activists in palestine” (matthews : ). at the same time, these activists recognized how british colonial tactics that exploited sectarianism were harming the indian independence movement and they opposed endeavors that played into this tactic in palestine (matthews : - , , - ; matthews : ). these palestinian nationalists saw hajj amin al-husayni, and his reliance on the british to support his institutional base, the supreme muslim council, as a sectarian and partisan obstruction diverting energies away from the real problem, which was imperialism (matthews : , , ). their goal, which was palestine-focused within a larger anti-imperialist, anti-colonialist intersectional frame, remained the removal of british control of palestine and blocking the zionists’ takeover of the country. for many palestinians involved in these debates and activities, they directed their intersectional analysis and transnational activism towards a nationalist goal. https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / this is the accepted version of an article accepted for publication in south atlantic quarterly published by duke university press: https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal accepted version downloaded from soas research online: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / the transnational coalitions remained riven with nation-specific projects. the congress posed a dilemma to the leadership in various arab lands. syria, negotiating for its independence from france, preferred a strategy of “’honourable co-operation’” to the anti-imperialist denunciations espoused by the arab nationalists in palestine who would become the istiqlal [independence] party. the national bloc, led by syrian moderates, insisted that their strategy be solely in support of the syrian national movement. but when this cooperative approach intended to appease the french failed, devotion to pan-arab activities and public commitment to palestine later became a means for the sullied moderates to “rehabilitate their reputations” using pan- arabism as the “ideological tool to do so” (khoury : - , - , ). fighting for palestine thus lent weight to the “symbolic capital” of some who were striving for syrian national independence. this is one of many instances in which the palestinian cause became a badge of prestige, and offered political credibility to those seen to be fighting for palestine (cf. khalili ). these lines of identification across national borders stemmed from a shared understanding that the exploitive economic gears of colonialism, although operating differently for arabs in syria and in palestine, represented a common threat to their distinct national projects. in the end, the gains of the congress for palestinians were more symbolic than practical. the substantial moral support for the palestinian cause was not matched by financial or political help, because the muslim community as it was represented at this pan-islamic congress was politically divided (mattar : - ; matthews : ; toynbee : ). the congress did achieve the mufti’s personal goal of strengthening his own political position in front of the british and his people (matthews : , , ). the - revolt a resurgence of pan-arab and pan-muslim sentiment was sparked by the - revolt, an insurrection against the british and zionists in palestine (khoury ; gershoni ). indian politicians and political groups across religious affiliations remained attentive to what was happening in palestine in this period. they expressed public sympathy for the palestinian arabs, and criticized the british government for its actions in their mandate (roland : - ). the revolt aroused the sympathies and passions of “the syrian masses” and others across the arab and muslim worlds, too. as with the islamic congress, commitment to a transnational cause pulled against “personal ambition” and national “provincialism” (khoury : - ). taking inspiration from a major strike in syria that happened the previous year, the revolt became a symbol of pan-arabism itself, attracting men from across the arab world to fight against the british for the idea of greater syria (parsons : ). fawzi al-qawuqji, a veteran of the syrian revolt against the french, became a rebel leader in palestine and was declared “commander in chief of the arab revolt in southern syria” (khoury : , parsons : ). al-qawuqji and others were drawn to defend palestine, which they considered to be “southern syria,” as an integral and indivisible part of a greater arab entity, and of which they, as syrians, were a central part (khoury : ; matthews : ; parsons : - ). they and other syrians knew that the strongest supporters for their own strike had come from palestine, which compelled them to contribute in return. they also understood that the zionist https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / this is the accepted version of an article accepted for publication in south atlantic quarterly published by duke university press: https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal accepted version downloaded from soas research online: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / movement that was most directly threatening palestine was likewise an “obstacle to arab unity,” that it would “jeopardize the future of neighbouring territories,” and that “zionist enterprises posed a potential danger to the syrian economy” (khoury : - ). although it was in solidarity with another people, the support they expressed – through media, demonstrations, fundraising, boycotting jewish products, arms smuggling, and providing political asylum to palestinian leaders and guerrillas escaped to syria (khoury : ) – was also a means of self protection. the revolt also attracted the sympathies and active support of the egyptian muslim brothers. pan-islamic, egyptianist, and pan-arab ideologies and commitments motivated their actions on behalf of palestine. the muslim brothers were an organization that considered all muslims to be part of a single community, the islamic umma, which “superseded national, geographical or racial divisions” (el-awaisi : ). the unity of people and belief entailed, for them, an obligation to act on behalf of other muslims. they likewise believed that all muslims should defend their own countries as well. within their universalist vision of the religion, palestine had a special significance because of its importance within the islamic tradition, and the history of this land that was populated by the holy figures who were born, died, or traveled through there. for the brothers, every muslim had a duty to defend palestine with their money and their lives (el-awaisi : - , - ). beyond expressions of support and educational activities about british repression in palestine in their media, the muslim brothers also raised money for palestinian victims of british violence and fighters. to assert pressure against zionism they sent letters of protest to the league of nations, they called for egyptian workers to refuse work for the british in palestine, and advocated a boycott of jewish merchants who they believed supported zionism (el-awaisi : - , , , - ), (despite the fact that most jews in egypt were not zionists) (beinin [ ] : - ). they mobilized material support by appealing to their fellow egyptians on behalf of the “sufferers” in palestine, organizing a “high committee for helping the sufferers of palestine,” its purpose to bring aid and relief to their muslim brethren. flyers proclaiming “palestine bleeds” were posted as far away as najaf in iraq and dubai, describing the tortures of people in palestine and calling on muslims to fight. in the view of the muslim brotherhood, the responsibility to palestine, and arguments for opposing zionism, were also tied to nation-specific worries, however. like the syrians, egyptians believed that a hostile jewish state in the region posed a threat to their independence and economy (el-awaisi : ). at the same time, they believed that britain was the driving force behind these threats and the common enemy. with zionism as its tool, britain was intent on dividing and conquering the arab-islamic world. this meant that threats to palestine were threats to them as egyptians, as arabs, and as muslims. “’the british are fighting us, but on the land of palestine,’” as one muslim brotherhood publication expressed it. their fates were interlocked because, in their analysis, zionism opposed arabs and muslims everywhere. in another essay, they equated support with palestine with being a true muslim (el-awaisi : , ). in contrast with the syrian representatives who were worried about currying favor with the british, the palestine cause was integral to the muslim brotherhood’s own agenda. the extension of their activism beyond religious preaching and into politics itself developed out of the palestine campaign (gershoni ). as the muslim brothers developed their ideology and practices, a sense of identification with palestine and palestinians at the national, pan-arab, and religious levels meant that egypt-specific concerns and transnational ideologies were in synergy. https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / this is the accepted version of an article accepted for publication in south atlantic quarterly published by duke university press: https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal accepted version downloaded from soas research online: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / human rights while syria, egypt, india, and other countries whose people had stood up for palestinian liberation gained their own independence, palestine’s arabs remained subject to foreign rule. india’s ongoing solidarity with the palestinian cause was apparent in its positions expressed within the un in its early days. india became a member of the special committee on palestine (unscop) set up by the un in to develop (yet another) plan for the resolution of the problem of palestine. along with iran and yugoslavia, india dissented from unscop’s majority plan of partition and voted instead for a federal plan for palestine that would give internal autonomy to the jews in palestine. although not in conformity with arab demands calling for full independence for the palestinian arabs, this plan did recognize that “the peoples of palestine are entitled to recognition of their right to independence,” and emphasized that individual and communal rights should be protected by the constitution of such a federal state. the authors of the plan described it as “the most democratic solution,” which would afford “an opportunity for full and effective participation in representative government to every citizen of the state. this solution would be most in harmony with the basic principles of the charter of the united nations” (unscop ). fighting between zionist and arab armies thwarted unscop’s majority and minority plans, and the state of israel was declared in , leaving some , palestinian arabs as refugees dispersed among neighboring arab countries. the un welcomed israel as a member state in may of , recognizing it as a “peace-loving state.” as countries in the third world were decolonized and gained independence throughout the s and s, the makeup of the un shifted, and the general assembly became a visible forum for the articulation of anti- imperialism and anti-racist positions, including advocacy for the palestinians. opposition to apartheid and an understanding of colonialism from the perspective of the colonized were bases for their shared perspective (allen , chakrabarty : , mazower : ). although anti-colonialism and anti-westernism characterized the discourse and attitudes of many key players in the non-aligned movement, there was also “significant positive engagement with human rights by a range of newly decolonized states” (burke : ). the principles of “natural rights,” the right to self-determination, and human rights also have been constant reference points throughout the history of palestinian political claim-making and solidarity building. from especially the s onwards, human rights became a hegemonic idiom through which palestinians and their international supporters called for palestinian individual and collective rights. the vast system of human rights norms and laws, and the diverse ngos that sought to activate them, have remained a predominant tool and forum within the palestinian struggle for independence (allen ). the universalist language of human rights, the un as a world body, and the global network of human rights ngos presented new opportunities and challenges to the cultivation of palestinian transnational solidarity. this channel of international support was complicated by the ideology of political neutrality that underwrote the human rights system, since the activation of that system for the political cause of palestinian liberation could be decried as violating that neutrality. this ideology of apoliticism that was inherent to the early formulation of the human rights system ran https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / this is the accepted version of an article accepted for publication in south atlantic quarterly published by duke university press: https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal accepted version downloaded from soas research online: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / counter to intersectional analysis. “the human” in human rights was a liberal individual who, in race-free and gender-neutral terms was figured as pre-political. it was just this claim to apolitical universality that a group of palestinians and their advocates sought to utilize for their own nationalist cause. the palestinians who launched the first human rights organization in the west bank in saw in international human rights law a tool for challenging israeli domination on the ground and in the western understandings of israel, which in the first years of its military occupation of the west bank, gaza strip, and east jerusalem had managed to cultivate an image of “benevolent occupation” (shehadeh : ). because human rights carried the claim of embodying universal values, they believed that they could cut across the various taboos that had shielded israel from criticism (bisharat ). raja shehadeh, one of these early human rights activists, took up rights work as a means to “bear witness” to the abuses wrought by israeli occupation, to prove the state’s noncompliance with international law, and to “reveal to the world the true nature of the occupation.” he saw human rights as a method for urging the international community to exert moral pressure on israel to change (shehadeh : - ). others involved at the time also believed that human rights work was a means to mobilizing international solidarity, and ngo activists continue to marshal human rights to cultivate international support for palestine and compel a change in israeli behavior (allen : , ). in the early days of his involvement in human rights activism, shehadeh believed that his work rightfully should be separate from politics, a position that others, including his father, opposed ( : , ). in the view of some still today, the efficacy of human rights work depends on its moral authority derived from neutral law that enshrines universal values and standards (hopgood ). jessica montell, former head of an important israeli human rights organization, b’tselem, has argued that the power of human rights can only be maintained if it is inoculated from politics, kept separate from diplomatic agreements and frameworks, political organizing, and the mobilization of constituencies (montell , ). the historiography of human rights, however, demonstrates the ideological claims and false premises that are embedded in that stance. the imbrication of human rights and politics was what ensured that the principles spelled out in the universal declaration of human rights could not be enforceable, and would not impinge on the sovereignty of the great powers (normand and zaidi : - , - ). boycott, divestment, sanctions appealing to human rights as a universal and politically neutral language, and drawing attention to the sufferings caused by israel’s abuse of palestinian rights through representations of rights violations, has produced much sympathy for palestinians and yielded expressions of solidarity coming from many quarters. the many human rights ngos working in the occupied palestinian territory are also a testament to some success of the human rights system, if professionalization is an indicator (hanafi and tabar ). they have, however, done little to shift the state structures that are the systemic cause of abuses (allen , ; sfard ). a quarter of a century after the first palestinian human rights organization was established, the israeli occupation is only more entrenched. countless human rights reports documenting israeli abuses, as well as repeated efforts at political negotiations and grassroots level “dialogue,” have done nothing to thwart https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / this is the accepted version of an article accepted for publication in south atlantic quarterly published by duke university press: https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal accepted version downloaded from soas research online: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / israeli settler-colonialism’s spread. the call by palestinian civil society to bring supporters together in a movement of boycott, divestment, sanctions (bds) against israeli institutions has re-ignited international palestinian solidarity in an effort to shift that status quo. there is no specific program within the bds movement that seeks to lead, step by step, to a one- or two-state solution. its goals are both broad and definite. the movement seeks to generate non- violent forms of pressure that will compel the israeli government to do three things: end its occupation and colonization of all arab lands occupied in june and dismantle the wall; recognize the fundamental rights of the arab-palestinian citizens of israel to full equality; and respect, protect and promote the rights of palestinian refugees to return to their homes and properties as stipulated in un resolution . bds itself is a human rights movement that demands justice for palestinians, and that is pursuing a human rights agenda “which is in conformity with international law and resolutions adopted by the united nations.” it is mobilizing people from very diverse backgrounds, from churches and student groups to jewish voice for peace, bringing politics and human rights into a productive mélange. inspired by the anti-apartheid movement, it is a disparate, loosely organized coalition of efforts aimed at chipping away at the benefits that the israeli government and related institutions gain from the current situation. rather than rely on the “expose and embarrass” methods of human rights advocacy, bds seeks to produce conditions in which those who enjoy the status quo and who are motivated – economically, politically, ideologically – to maintain the occupation benefit less. bds prods at this current stasis that is so comfortable for the occupiers, by de-normalizing the repression and inequality under which palestinians live in israel and the occupied palestinian territory. as it salutes “people of conscience” for expressing their “principled solidarity” (pacbi ), and brings people together around shared values of anti-racism and freedom, bds parallels earlier instances of transnational solidarity mobilization in palestine in its references to human rights and universal values. as in earlier moments of palestinian political claim-making, the right to national self-determination is articulated as a primary goal and principle (al-azza ). what may be distinct is that this principle is not enunciated from the standpoint of national identity (chalcraft ), but rather within the frames of international law, human rights, and with continual reference to south africa (morrison : ) as a positive example of the power of boycott to change political structures. the movement’s focus on three main forms of oppression affecting palestinians – the unfulfilled right of return, military occupation, and discrimination against palestinian citizens of israel (morrison : ) – is an intersectional approach. as such, it goes against what has become the palestinian authority’s narrower focus on the west bank and gaza strip, which had sidelined palestinian refugees and palestinians in israel and in the diaspora. in contrast to the pa’s approach, bds discourse brings this range of palestinian identity groups into a single framework of analysis and activism. bds also seeks to be a global and anti-racist movement (barghouti ). it draws attention to the symbolic and material similarities between israel and other settler-colonial and racist regimes such as the united states, and to the shared violation of indigenous rights that such regimes inflict. it likewise highlights the symbolic and material connections between israel and apartheid south africa. by activating this transnational intersectional perspective, the movement has drawn into its fold scholars and activists working on indigenous rights in north america and in https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / this is the accepted version of an article accepted for publication in south atlantic quarterly published by duke university press: https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal accepted version downloaded from soas research online: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / other fields. many make references to the “resonances” and “links” between palestine and the conditions of unfreedom elsewhere. but as more and increasingly diverse people have pledged to respect the bds call to boycott israeli institutions, analyses of what does and should bring them together have become more detailed, pointing to the concrete actors and interests that link the oppressors. activist writings and analyses are ever more attentive to not only experiential aspects that are shared across groups in different locales, but also structural dimensions that bind them. these movements are bringing transnational populations into action together, while increasing awareness of the global systems of militarized policing that afflict them in similar ways (blumenthal ), drawing attention to how the apparatuses of state violence lead national budgets away from citizen welfare. the global elite and its armed wing – state police and armies – are coming into view as a common enemy of palestinians and us citizens. black lives matter in addition to the many academic associations and church groups that have voted to endorse bds, black lives matter and various associated groups have also endorsed it, in recognition of the regimes of oppression and liberatory goals that their supporters share. as in earlier manifestations of international solidarity, discourse around bds and black liberation reveals what alex lubin refers to as “a geography of liberation.” with this term, lubin captures “dialectal spaces produced in the collision between nationalism and colonialism, on one hand, and subaltern decolonial and liberation politics, on the other,” which promote recognition of “communities of shared fate,” and which can lead to political imaginaries beyond nationalism and colonialism ( : , ). in distinction from much human rights reportage about palestine, however, the black-palestinian solidarity movement has become more visibly active in drawing out the intersectional connections between the struggles of people of color in palestine/israel and the us. disparate and dynamic, manifestations of the black-palestinian solidarity are numerous, and many take bds as a core commitment. the voicing of solidarity with palestinians by high- profile black intellectuals such as angela davis brought increasing attention to their intersecting struggles. it was publicized broadly through the “ black solidarity statement with palestine.” the interfaith peace-builders, established in , have brought numerous delegations of indigenous people and people of color, including african heritage communities, from the united states to palestine, aimed at fostering “a network of informed and active individuals who understand the israeli-palestinian conflict and the united states’ political, military, and economic role in it” (ifpb). as another example, the palestinian youth movement (pym), a transnational organization that has sought to politically mobilize the palestinian diaspora, has allied with black lives matter as well as indigenous groups (salih et al. ). and students at the foremost university in the west bank, birzeit, held a solidarity event around the similar struggles against racism in palestine and blacks in the us (shams ). the responses from palestinians tweeting tear gas advice to protesters in ferguson under the hashtag “#palestine ferguson” in brought wider visibility to the racist violence impacted within the us and israeli policing systems, and the training and tools shared between the two countries’ militarized policing systems (activestills ; schotten ). perhaps an indication of the critical power of black-palestinian solidarity of this sort, the transnational advice among activists https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / this is the accepted version of an article accepted for publication in south atlantic quarterly published by duke university press: https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal accepted version downloaded from soas research online: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / was widely covered in mainstream us and other western media, including the new york times and usa today (jackson , mackey , molloy ). the writings and representations of activists within these groups – by prominent journalists and scholar-activists, among others – consciously promote a dialectical engagement of experiential and systemic understandings of palestinian and black conditions of oppression, while also attending to the distinctions between the experiences of violence that characterize their different struggles. as an example, greg thomas curated a traveling exhibition about george jackson, a member of the black panther party, that highlights palestinian and black american experiences of captivity. he has analyzed themes of porous “segregation” and captivity writ large, “a condition that extends beyond incarceration in a specific kind of building with prison bars,” which characterize the condition of blacks in america and palestinians. marc lamont hill made a public call for solidarity with rasmea odeh, a palestinian social justice worker prosecuted in the us through what many believed to be a show trial. she was charged in federal court “with unlawful procurement of naturalization, an allegation based on answers she gave on a -year-old immigration application.” in hill’s ( ) description of her case, he highlights the similarities between the unjust and racists court systems in israel and the us that disadvantage palestinians and black americans, and that serve to thwart resistance movements in both places. he insists that odeh’s story “must also be understood as a black story. a story of global resistance to colonial power… a story of solidarity.” lest one think this movement exists only in the rarefied confines of academia, consider american football stars, michael bennett and colin kapaernik, among others, who made waves when they declined an israeli government-sponsored trip to israel for nfl players. bennett explained that his unwillingness to go to israel resulted from learning about palestine, and recognizing the similarities between the black lives and palestinian movements (democracy now ). in this discourse, common themes have emerged, highlighting shared experiences of life and suffering under militarized police, the racist ideology of zionism, the importance of recognizing common humanity across difference, and rejection the dehumanizing effects of racist regimes (baraka and jackson , bailey , barrows-friedman ). an historical consciousness also redounds, with analyst-activists making frequent references to important figures (malcolm x, stokely carmichael, muhammad ali) and organizations (sncc, black panther party) in the history of black liberation struggles. martin luther king’s statement that injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere (king ) is also often invoked. within these evocations of shared histories of suffering (and resistance) are clear analyses of the systemic, economic investments that us and israeli states and companies have in today’s systems of incarceration. many point to the role of israel in training and arming us police (bailey , kelley / , kelley ). the structural analyses in this constellation of ideas and actions are not totally unique in the history of transnational solidarity with palestine, as critiques of imperialism and capitalism fueled earlier periods of solidarity with palestine, too. however, the resurgence of discussion and research on black radical thought, and increasing work being done to analyze the prison- industrial complex and grow a prison abolition movement is shaping black-palestinian solidarity work in novel ways. conclusion https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / this is the accepted version of an article accepted for publication in south atlantic quarterly published by duke university press: https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal accepted version downloaded from soas research online: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / there are continuities and distinctions in the axes of the identifications that have undergirded solidarity movements across the history i have sketched here, as well as between the analyses and critiques that were part of those movements. in all cases, the groups that have expressed their solidarity have been multidimensional and dynamic. syrians who supported the - revolt comprised “the masses” and elite politicians, moderates and pan-arabist anti-imperialists, and then moderates who became anti-imperialists. those who shared pan-islamist beliefs placed different emphasis on the arabness of palestine, and had varying ideas about how central palestine should be to the islamic community. the human rights world has included ngo professionals who believe that politics must be kept separate from human rights advocacy, activists who politically deploy human rights work that is done without explicit partisan identification, and political activists who recognize in human rights an effective universal language for rousing political solidarity for a national cause. in some moments and among some who stood with the palestinians, sympathy for their suffering was predominant in their expressions of solidarity. sometimes it was sympathy that emerged out of a sense of outrage at the injustices to which palestinians were subject, under british or israeli occupation. in other instances, sympathy has been inspired by a recognition of a shared plight, a recognition that the experiences of harassment at the hands of the police in the us are similar to what palestinians live through in the west bank. the solidarity does not stop at sympathy, however, and the lines of congruence between systems of power that incarcerate and violate people across national contexts are clearly drawn. the prominence of black intellectuals involved in the prison abolition movement, such as angela davis, who are also active in palestinian solidarity work, may be part of what is influencing this discourse (davis : - ). it marks a significant break with the human rights framework, that has tended to obfuscate the political, systemic and economic structures that produce rights violations, and that has for several decades been a dominant framework channeling support for the palestinian liberation struggle. an indication of how far this analysis may reach, and the influence of these new kinds of intersectional understandings, can be found in the ways these transnational understandings are trickling into unlikely quarters. in his recent memoir, no country for jewish liberals, israeli journalist larry derfner proclaims: “the occupation is not just a flaw, but a morally fatal flaw. it is different from apartheid, different from jim crow, but the same in one overriding way: it is a species of tyranny, a system of government in which the strong trample the weak. the system israel runs on the three million people of the west bank is military dictatorship” ( : ). as john chalcraft has observed, the bds movement’s “de facto mode of identification is multitudinous” ( ). without requiring any shared and singular “identity,” people have found in bds a channel through which to come together through intersectional analysis and action around these broad human rights goals. it is prompting collective action within professional associations, sparking new considerations of what businesses to patronize, inspiring people to seek change within their local academic structures, to shape their artistic interactions, and to demand accountability from their entertainers (and be accountable entertainers) as much as their political leaders. because it is working to galvanize solidarity and organize action, it has gotten under the skin of the israeli government, which is investing considerable resources in trying to https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / this is the accepted version of an article accepted for publication in south atlantic quarterly published by duke university press: https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal accepted version downloaded from soas research online: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / stop it – an indication of real political efficacy. throughout the history i have sketched here, an independent palestinian nation-state has been a consistent political goal of people working across geographical and identity boundaries in and for palestine. but the more recent manifestations of intersectional solidarity activity and theorizing, 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.” in the routledge handbook of the history of the middle east mandates routledge, edited by cyrus schayegh and andrew arsan. abingdon, uk: routledge, - . perugini, nicola and neve gordon. . the human right to dominate. oxford: oxford university press. https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / http://www.power youth.eu/publications/the-palestinian-youth-movement-pym-transnational-politics-inter-national-frameworks-and-intersectional-alliances#sthash.m rhld b.dpbs http://www.power youth.eu/publications/the-palestinian-youth-movement-pym-transnational-politics-inter-national-frameworks-and-intersectional-alliances#sthash.m rhld b.dpbs http://www.power youth.eu/publications/the-palestinian-youth-movement-pym-transnational-politics-inter-national-frameworks-and-intersectional-alliances#sthash.m rhld b.dpbs this is the accepted version of an article accepted for publication in south atlantic quarterly published by duke university press: https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal accepted version downloaded from soas research online: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / purkayastha, prabir and ayesha kidwai. .“india’s freedom struggle and today’s bds movement.” in generation palestine: voices from the boycott, divestment and sanctions movement book, edited by rich wiles, - . london: pluto press. robinson, cedric. [ ] . black marxism: the making of the black radical tradition. chapel hill and london: north carolina press. robson, laura. . colonialism and christianity in mandate palestine. austin, tx: university of texas press. roland, joan g. . the jewish communities of india: identity in a colonial era. new brunswick, nj: transaction publishers. scotten, heike. “analysis: racism and rhetoric from ferguson to palestine.” ma’an news agency, january . https://www.maannews.com/content.aspx?id= . sfard, michael. . “the human rights lawyer’s existential dilemma.” israel law review , no. : - . shams, alex. . “birzeit students hold solidarity event with black struggle in us.” ma’an news agency, december . http://www.maannews.com/content.aspx?id= . shehadeh, raja. . strangers in the house: coming of age in occupied palestine. new york: penguin books. shlaim, avi. . “the balfour declaration and its consequences.” in yet more adventures with britannia: personalities, politics and culture in britain, edited by wm. roger louis, - . london, i. b. tauris. http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ssfc /the% balfour% declaration% and% its% consequence s.html. spade, dean. . “intersectional resistance and law reform.” signs: journal of women in culture and society , no. : - . toynbee, arnold j. . survey of international affairs . oxford: oxford university press and london: humphrey milford. unscop . unscop report to the general assembly, doc. a/ , september . https://unispal.un.org/dpa/dpr/unispal.nsf/ / de fa de d e f . https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ssfc /the% balfour% declaration% and% its% consequences.html http://users.ox.ac.uk/~ssfc /the% balfour% declaration% and% its% consequences.html https://unispal.un.org/dpa/dpr/unispal.nsf/ / de fa de d e f this is the accepted version of an article accepted for publication in south atlantic quarterly published by duke university press: https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal accepted version downloaded from soas research online: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / a fuller analysis would also include the numerous other configurations of transnational activism and the longer history of globalist ideologies that have coursed through the palestinian struggle, including bi- nationalism, boycotts, the khilafat movement, arab nationalism of the s and s and the islamist movements that overtook it, the arab league, bandung, the non-aligned movement and other third world movements as they overlapped with anti-colonial and anti-apartheid movements, plo-black panther party solidarity and plo military support of other leftist causes, communism, the palestinian diaspora, and arab-jewish alliances. scholarly works that have addressed some of these movements include chamberlin , feldman , hassan , khalili b, lockman , and lubin . the king-crane commission of toured arab lands at the end of the ottoman empire and the beginning of the league of nations. the commission recorded that the majority wanted independence in a multi-faith, united arab nation of greater syria (including palestine), under the constitutional rule of a monarch. for a summary of the king crane commission, see http://www.oberlin.edu/library/digital/king- crane/intro.html. so, too, were urban locales nodes for identity (doumani , khalidi ). for others, arabism was a means to an islamist end. rashid rida ( - ), recognized as a leading islamist thinker who sought to reform the islamic world, incorporated arabism in his writings as “a corollary force to be used solely for the rejuvenation of islam” and the “bringing together of global islamic solidarity” (dawisha : , ). many at the congress were also sensitive to the importance of christians in the palestinian cause (toynbee : ). one speaker addressed this directly, and al-husayni, recognizing the difference between european christian colonialism and local arab orthodox palestinians, “responded by publicly recognizing and congratulating the orthodox congress as well as passing a resolution acknowledging the arab orthodox cause as part of the broader arab nationalist movement” (robson : , - ). palestinian courting of indian support has a longer history. see khalidi / . for an account of more recent uses of palestine solidarity for the accrual of symbolic capital by the lebanese resistance party, hizbullah, see khalili . on the mufti’s goal of enhancing his political status, also see freas : , ; robson : . those who opposed this active support for the palestinian revolt were capitalists and politicians. they did so out of concern for their own financial prospects, because the strike disrupted trade, and out of fear for disrupting british support for the syrian cause against the french (khoury : ). memo from aden to ormsby gore, secretary of state for colonies, oct . india office, ior/r/ /a/ : . also see jankowski . from these british records, it is not clear who was responsible for the flyers. september , palestine india office, ior/r/ / / . https://bdsmovement.net/news/legal-briefing-bds-legitimate-human-rights-movement https://bdsmovement.net/news/legal-briefing-bds-legitimate-human-rights-movement the statement, “ black solidarity statement with palestine” is available in arabic and english at http://www.blackforpalestine.com/read-the-statement.html. it was circulated widely on leftwing media websites, as well as the official bds website, https://bdsmovement.net/tags/black-solidarity-palestine. the reciprocal advice about how to dress for an urban riot allegedly provided by a protestor from ferguson was likewise covered in the right-wing press. https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / http://www.oberlin.edu/library/digital/king-crane/intro.html http://www.oberlin.edu/library/digital/king-crane/intro.html http://www.blackforpalestine.com/read-the-statement.html this is the accepted version of an article accepted for publication in south atlantic quarterly published by duke university press: https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal accepted version downloaded from soas research online: https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / a two-part interview with thomas about this exhibition, “george jackson in the sun of palestine,” and the black radical tradition is available at the nakba files website: http://nakbafiles.org/ / / /palestine-in-the-sun-of-the-black-radical-tradition/. attesting to the intertwining networks of academics, activist, and entertainers, in another interview, bennett refers to noura erekat, a widely known legal scholar and palestinian activist. https://twitter.com/ajplus/status/ . see, as an indication, the re-issue of cedric j. robinson’s volume, black marxism: the making of the black radical tradition in , as well as many of the volumes listed on the black lives matter syllabus http://www.blacklivesmattersyllabus.com/fall /. see http://justice rasmea.org/about/. thomas’ article was published on samidoun: palestinian prisoner solidarity network, and http://samidoun.net/ / /the-black-panther-party-for-palestine-by-greg- thomas/. https://www.dukeupress.edu/south-atlantic-quarterly/?viewby=journal https://eprints.soas.ac.uk/ / http://justice rasmea.org/about/ microsoft word - introduction.fr_vignola.docx la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  revue	
  en	
  ligne	
  de	
  philosophie	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  et	
  le	
  miroir 	
   alice	
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   par	
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   quand	
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   je	
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  n’était.	
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   par	
   là	
   même,	
   elle	
   devient	
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   petite	
   qu’elle	
   n’est	
  maintenant.	
  bien	
  sûr,	
  ce	
  n’est	
  pas	
  en	
  même	
   temps	
   qu’elle	
   le	
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   en	
   même	
   temps,	
  du	
  même	
  coup	
  qu’on	
  devient	
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   qu’on	
  n’était,	
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   devient.	
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   dont	
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  présent.	
  en	
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  esquive	
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  présent	
  […]	
  alice	
  ne	
  grandit	
  pas	
   sans	
  rapetisser,	
  et	
  inversement.	
   gilles	
  deleuze,	
  logique	
  du	
  sens	
   	
   	
   le	
   devenir	
   d’alice,	
   son	
   devenir	
   plus	
   grand	
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   plus	
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   à	
   la	
   fois,	
   nous	
   offre	
   l’opportunité	
  d’opérer	
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  diagnostique	
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  présent,	
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  phénomène	
  de	
  plus	
   en	
  plus	
  actuel	
  –	
  la	
  «	
  jeune-­‐‑fille	
  »	
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  tiqqun	
  ( ),	
  désormais	
  amplifiée	
  par	
  les	
  réseaux	
   sociaux	
  –	
  et,	
  en	
  même	
  temps,	
   il	
   indique	
  une	
  stratégie	
  politique	
  rigoureusement	
   inac-­‐‑ tuelle	
  ou	
  intempestive,	
  qui	
  vise	
  la	
  recherche	
  des	
  virtualités	
  singulières	
  échappant	
  à	
  la	
   chronologie	
  du	
  temps	
  réifié	
  des	
  existences.	
  en	
  suivant	
  logique	
  du	
  sens	
  de	
  deleuze,	
  mais	
   aussi	
  en	
  le	
  projetant	
  dans	
  le	
  présent,	
  donc	
  en	
  l’inactualisant,	
  on	
  dira	
  que	
  la	
  marchandisa-­‐‑ tion	
  des	
  existences	
  se	
  donne	
  d’abord	
  dans	
  le	
  temps	
  chronologique,	
  celui	
  pour	
  lequel	
  on	
   dit	
  que	
  «	
  le	
   temps,	
  c’est	
  de	
   l’argent	
  ».	
   il	
   s’agit	
  du	
   temps	
  de	
   la	
  consommation,	
  c’est	
   le	
   temps	
  qui	
  se	
  consomme	
  littéralement,	
  mais	
  c’est	
  aussi	
  le	
  temps	
  où	
  l’on	
  consomme	
  et	
  où	
   l’on	
  se	
  consomme.	
  avec	
  un	
  style	
  incomparable,	
  deleuze	
  a	
  opposé	
  à	
  cette	
  sorte	
  de	
  sablier	
   métaphysique,	
  à	
  savoir	
  chronos,	
  le	
  clignotement	
  d’une	
  autre	
  temporalité,	
  celle	
  de	
  l’aiôn	
  :	
   	
   d’après	
  aiôn,	
  seuls	
  le	
  passé	
  et	
  le	
  futur	
  insistent	
  ou	
  subsistent	
  dans	
  le	
  temps.	
  au	
  lieu	
   d’un	
  présent	
  qui	
  résorbe	
   le	
  passé	
  et	
   le	
   futur,	
  un	
   futur	
  et	
  un	
  passé	
  qui	
  divisent	
  à	
   chaque	
  instant	
  le	
  présent,	
  qui	
  le	
  subdivisent	
  à	
  l’infini	
  en	
  passé	
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  futur,	
  dans	
  les	
  deux	
   sens	
  à	
  la	
  fois.	
  ou	
  plutôt,	
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  l’instant	
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  et	
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  extension	
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  subdivise	
   chaque	
  présent	
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  au	
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  de	
  présents	
  vastes	
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  épais	
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  compren-­‐‑ nent	
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  rapport	
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  et	
  le	
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  […]	
  alors	
  que	
  chronos	
  ex-­‐‑ primait	
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  création	
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  qualités	
  corporelles,	
  aiôn	
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  le	
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  des	
   événements	
  incorporels,	
  et	
  des	
  attributs	
  distincts	
  des	
  qualités.	
  alors	
  que	
  chronos	
   était	
  inséparable	
  des	
  corps	
  qui	
  le	
  remplissaient	
  comme	
  causes	
  et	
  matières,	
  aiôn	
  est	
   la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  revue	
  en	
  ligne	
  de	
  philosophie	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  et	
  le	
  miroir peuplé	
   d’effets	
   qui	
   le	
   hantent	
   sans	
   jamais	
   le	
   remplir.	
   […]	
   toujours	
   déjà	
   passé	
   et	
   éternellement	
  encore	
  à	
  venir,	
  aiôn	
  est	
  la	
  vérité	
  éternelle	
  du	
  temps	
  :	
  pure	
  forme	
  vide	
   du	
  temps,	
  qui	
  s’est	
  libérée	
  de	
  son	
  contenu	
  corporel	
  présent.	
  (deleuze	
   	
  :	
   -­‐‑ )	
   	
   les	
  devenirs	
  de	
  l’alice	
  de	
  lewis	
  carroll	
  doivent	
  en	
  effet	
  être	
  compris	
  à	
  la	
  lumière	
  de	
   l’aiôn,	
  modalité	
  extracorporelle	
  et	
  ineffectuelle	
  du	
  temps	
  qui	
  se	
  partage	
  en	
  passé	
  et	
  en	
   futur,	
  tout	
  en	
  échappant	
  au	
  piège	
  de	
  l’identité.	
  si,	
  avec	
  kronos,	
  on	
  était	
  en	
  mesure	
  de	
   narrer	
  l’histoire	
  de	
  la	
  succession	
  des	
  faits	
  et	
  de	
  nos	
  gestes,	
  c’est	
  avec	
  aiôn	
  que	
  l’on	
  peut	
   viser	
  les	
  événements	
  arrivants	
  sur	
  un	
  niveau	
  différent,	
  à	
  savoir	
  celui	
  de	
  la	
  pensée	
  qui	
   expérimente	
  et	
  contre-­‐‑effectue.	
  c’est	
  cette	
  dernière	
  qui	
  nous	
  permet	
  de	
  faire	
  la	
  décou-­‐‑ verte	
  et	
  le	
  dépistage	
  du	
  sens	
  de	
  nos	
  actions	
  et	
  de	
  nos	
  passions	
  à	
  l’intérieur	
  de	
  ce	
  qui	
   nous	
  arrive	
  :	
  «	
  l’événement	
  est	
  dans	
  ce	
  qui	
  arrive	
  ».	
  et	
  encore,	
  comme	
  nous	
  l’apprend	
   logique	
  du	
  sens,	
  cette	
  pensée	
  désigne	
  son	
  propre	
  parcours	
  en	
  se	
  laissant	
  former	
  par	
  des	
   paradoxes,	
  c’est	
  à	
  dire,	
  par	
  le	
  surpassement	
  des	
  opinions,	
  du	
  sens	
  commun	
  et	
  des	
  images	
   imposées	
  ou	
  suggérées	
  par	
   la	
  philosophie,	
   la	
  politique,	
   la	
   science,	
   le	
  pouvoir	
  –	
  de	
   la	
   religion	
  au	
  marché,	
  de	
  l’etat	
  à	
  la	
  culture	
  –	
  afin	
  de	
  penser	
  et	
  de	
  nous	
  voir	
  dans	
  le	
  miroir.	
   c’est	
  dans	
  ce	
  sens-­‐‑là	
  que	
  la	
  deleuziana	
  désire	
  penser	
  le	
  devenir	
  d’alice	
  comme	
  un	
   devenir-­‐‑femme,	
   à	
   la	
   fois	
   dans	
   son	
   paradoxe	
   a-­‐‑chronologique	
   et	
   théorique	
   et	
   dans	
   la	
   politique	
  exprimée	
  par	
  l’actualité.	
  très	
  consciente	
  et	
  enthousiaste	
  de	
  l’inséparabilité	
  des	
   deux	
  dimensions	
  susnommées	
  dans	
  la	
  pensée	
  et	
  dans	
  l’écriture	
  de	
  deleuze,	
  à	
  savoir	
  celle	
   de	
  la	
  théorie	
  et	
  celle	
  de	
  la	
  politique,	
  la	
  revue	
  suggère	
  un	
  parcours	
  de	
  sens.	
  il	
  s’agit	
  du	
   point	
   de	
   départ	
   à	
   partir	
   duquel	
   se	
   trouve	
   l’acte	
   récognitif	
   plus	
   général	
   du	
   devenir,	
   entendu	
  comme	
  mouvement	
  de	
   la	
  pensée	
  qui	
  se	
   tourne	
  et	
  se	
  détourne	
  à	
   travers	
  ses	
   personnages	
  conceptuels.	
  notre	
  revue	
  se	
  penche	
  sur	
  une	
  entrée	
  toute	
  particulière,	
  ou	
  un	
   paradoxe	
  précis,	
  car	
  elle	
  ouvre	
  d’emblée	
  sur	
   la	
   terre	
  mitoyenne	
  entre	
  philosophie	
  et	
   littérature,	
   lieu	
  de	
  naissance	
  de	
   l’alice	
  de	
  deleuze.	
  c’est	
  exactement	
  dans	
   l’interstice	
   demeurant	
   entre	
   le	
   concept	
   et	
   l’écriture,	
   d’où	
   «	
  on	
   en	
   revient	
   les	
   yeux	
   rouges	
  »,	
   qu’adviennent	
   les	
  devenirs	
   (devenir	
   femme,	
  enfant,	
  animal,	
   imperceptible,	
  etc..)	
  et	
   la	
   création	
  de	
  personnages	
  conceptuels.	
  la	
  porte	
  principale	
  du	
  devenir	
  nous	
  permet	
  ainsi	
   d’entrer	
  dans	
  le	
  dehors,	
  pour	
  respirer	
  «	
  un	
  peu	
  de	
  possible	
  »,	
  c’est-­‐‑à-­‐‑dire	
  pour	
  sentir	
  et	
   pour	
  regarder	
  les	
  lignes	
  de	
  fuite	
  mises	
  à	
  disposition	
  par	
  la	
  pensée	
  deleuzienne	
  face	
  à	
  un	
   présent	
  qu’il	
  faut	
  bien	
  esquiver	
  et	
  qu’il	
  faut	
  pourtant	
  survoler	
  afin	
  d’inventer	
  les	
  straté-­‐‑ gies	
  capables	
  de	
  le	
  critiquer.	
   pourquoi	
  alice	
  ?	
  parce	
  qu’elle	
  devient	
  fillette	
  (jeune-­‐‑fille)	
  et	
  femme	
  en	
  même	
  temps.	
   il	
  est	
  très	
  important	
  de	
  rappeler	
  ici,	
  que	
  parmi	
  les	
  devenirs,	
  le	
  devenir-­‐‑femme	
  est	
  pour	
   deleuze	
  et	
  guattari	
  la	
  précondition	
  et	
  le	
  point	
  de	
  départ	
  incontournable	
  du	
  processus	
  du	
   devenir-­‐‑minoritaire.	
  les	
  raisons	
  d’un	
  incipit	
  de	
  telle	
  sorte	
  ont	
  une	
  nature	
  essentielle-­‐‑ ment	
  politique	
  renvoyant	
  à	
  la	
  valeur	
  phallocentrique	
  inscrite	
  dans	
  la	
  constitution	
  de	
  la	
   subjectivité	
   occidentale.	
   l’homme	
   (mâle),	
   c’est	
   en	
   effet	
   «	
  le	
   référent	
   privilégié	
   de	
   la	
   subjectivité,	
  porte-­‐‑étendard	
  de	
  la	
  norme/loi/logos	
  [qui]	
  représente	
  la	
  majorité,	
  le	
  cœur	
   la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  revue	
  en	
  ligne	
  de	
  philosophie	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  et	
  le	
  miroir mort	
  du	
  système	
  »	
  (braidotti	
   	
  :	
   ).	
  par	
  conséquent,	
  le	
  masculin	
  ne	
  peut	
  qu’être	
  le	
   lieu	
  de	
  la	
  déconstruction	
  et	
  de	
  la	
  critique	
  –	
  il	
  n’y	
  a	
  pas	
  de	
  devenir	
  qui	
  ne	
  soit	
  pas	
  minori-­‐‑ taire	
  –	
  et	
  surtout	
  il	
   faut	
  entendre	
  le	
  devenir-­‐‑femme	
  comme	
  «	
  le	
  passage	
  fondamental	
   dans	
   le	
  processus	
  de	
  devenir,	
  pour	
  les	
  deux	
  sexes	
  ».	
  voici	
  pourquoi,	
  pour	
  deleuze	
  et	
   guattari,	
  «	
  même	
  les	
  femmes	
  ont	
  à	
  devenir	
  femmes	
  ».	
  cependant	
  aujourd’hui,	
  des	
  alpes	
   aux	
  pyramides,	
  du	
  manzanares	
  au	
  rhin,	
  il	
  semble	
  que	
  la	
  tendance	
  soit	
  plutôt	
  celle	
  de	
   devenir	
   fillettes	
  –	
  on	
  voit	
   les	
   symptômes	
  de	
  cet	
  enfantillage	
  avec	
   les	
  égoportraits	
  et	
   autres	
  autoexpositions	
  qui	
  tapissent	
  les	
  vitrines	
  digitales	
  subjectives	
  comme	
  celles	
  de	
   facebook.	
   pourtant	
  la	
  deleuziana,	
  comme	
  alice	
  (femme	
  et	
  fillette	
  dans	
  le	
  même	
  devenir),	
  n’a	
   aucune	
   intention	
   de	
   voler	
   dans	
   les	
   plumes	
   d’un	
   phénomène	
   de	
   masse	
   ni	
   dans	
   les	
   tendances	
  d’un	
  genre	
  dont	
  elle	
  fait,	
  elle	
  aussi,	
  partie	
  (au	
  moins	
  au	
  bureau	
  d’état	
  civil)	
  –	
   puis,	
   elle	
   aussi	
   est	
   sur	
   facebook…	
   le	
   moment	
   d’expliciter	
   le	
   sens	
   de	
   l’être	
   fillette	
   aujourd’hui	
  est	
  donc	
  arrivé,	
  en	
  reprenant	
  la	
  théorie	
  conçue	
  à	
  la	
  fin	
  du	
  siècle	
  dernier	
  par	
   tiqqun,	
   pour	
   lequel	
   la	
   jeune-­‐‑fille	
   n’est	
   qu’une	
   sorte	
   de	
   mise	
   à	
   jour	
   de	
   l’anthropomorphisme	
  du	
  capital	
  (cesarano	
   ),	
  le	
  résultat	
  de	
  la	
  description	
  phéno-­‐‑ ménologique	
  du	
  mouvement	
  anthropisant	
  et	
  anthropoiétique	
  du	
  capital.	
  ce	
  dernier	
  se	
   fait	
  homme,	
   s’y	
   incarne,	
  en	
   faisant	
  ainsi	
  de	
   tout	
  homme	
  une	
  partie	
  de	
  soi-­‐‑même,	
  en	
   bâtissant	
   ainsi	
   l’humain	
   à	
   partir	
   de	
   ses	
   propres	
   axiomes.	
   dans	
   cette	
   direction	
   nous	
   voulons	
  ajouter	
  aussi	
  qu’il	
  ne	
  faudrait	
  pas	
  manquer	
  d’interroger	
  conceptuellement,	
  et	
  à	
   juste	
  titre,	
   la	
  féminisation	
  paradoxale	
  du	
  travail	
  qui	
  colore	
  d’affectes	
  et	
  d’injustices	
  le	
   capitalisme	
  cognitif	
  au-­‐‑delà	
  de	
  toute	
  distinction	
  de	
  genre.	
  de	
  plus,	
  à	
  travers	
  la	
  jeune-­‐‑ fille,	
  et	
  sur	
  la	
  lignée	
  du	
  post-­‐‑scriptum	
  sur	
  les	
  sociétés	
  de	
  contrôle,	
  il	
  est	
  nous	
  permis	
  de	
   comprendre	
  au	
  mieux	
  la	
  valorisation	
  des	
  différences	
  individuelles	
  opérée	
  par	
  le	
  marke-­‐‑ ting	
  et	
  par	
  le	
  data	
  behaviourism	
  (rouvroy	
   ),	
  dans	
  les	
  termes	
  de	
  leur	
  valorisation	
  et	
   mise	
  en	
  valeur	
  économique,	
  typique	
  des	
  sociétés	
  post-­‐‑disciplinaires.	
   pourquoi	
   la	
   jeune-­‐‑fille	
  ?	
  d’abord	
  puisqu’	
  «	
  elle	
  »	
  n’est	
  pas	
  un	
  concept	
  sexué	
  ou	
  de	
   génération,	
  qui	
  serait	
  confinable	
  à	
  une	
  seule	
  figure	
  sociale,	
  la	
  fillette	
  en	
  particulier,	
  étant	
   donné	
  qu’elle	
  peut	
   identifier	
  n’importe	
  quel	
   sujet	
  –	
   le	
  mâle,	
   in	
  primis	
   –	
   incarnant	
   le	
   devenir	
  marchandise	
  de	
  l’humain.	
  puisque,	
  au	
  fond,	
  ce	
  «	
  n’est	
  que	
  le	
  citoyen	
  modèle	
  tel	
   que	
   la	
   société	
   marchande	
   le	
   redéfinit	
   à	
   partir	
   de	
   la	
   première	
   guerre	
   mondiale,	
   en	
   réponse	
  explicite	
  à	
  la	
  menace	
  révolutionnaire	
  »	
  (tiqqun	
   	
  :	
   ).	
  puisque,	
  enfin,	
  en	
   tant	
  que	
  produit	
  de	
  la	
  mise	
  en	
  valeur	
  de	
  la	
  différence,	
  la	
  jeune-­‐‑fille	
  devient	
  une	
  singula-­‐‑ rité	
  perpétuellement	
  en	
  miroir	
  et	
  «	
  sera	
  donc	
  cet	
  être	
  qui	
  n’aura	
  plus	
  d’intimité	
  à	
  soi	
   qu’en	
  tant	
  que	
  valeur	
  et	
  dont	
  toute	
  l’activité,	
  en	
  chacun	
  de	
  ses	
  détails,	
  sera	
  finalisée	
  à	
  son	
   autovalorisation	
  »	
  (ivi	
  :	
   ).	
  voici	
  alors	
  le	
  selfie,	
  comme	
  miroir	
  actuel	
  de	
  la	
  jeune-­‐‑fille,	
   l’écran	
  contemporain	
  que,	
  dans	
  l’auto-­‐‑valorisation	
  de	
  l’utilisateur,	
  donne	
  libre	
  cours	
  au	
   symptôme	
  de	
  la	
  névrose	
  de	
  la	
  présence	
  et	
  du	
  présent	
  ;	
  une	
  névrose	
  qui	
  se	
  marie	
  avec	
  la	
   misère	
   symbolique	
   générée	
   par	
   l’hypertrophie	
   de	
   la	
   communication	
   sur	
   les	
   social	
   networks	
  et	
  par	
  leurs	
  modèles	
  de	
  communication.	
  	
   la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  revue	
  en	
  ligne	
  de	
  philosophie	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  et	
  le	
  miroir À	
  la	
  différence	
  de	
  tiqqun,	
  cependant,	
  nous	
  ne	
  nous	
  pensons	
  pas	
  du	
  haut	
  d’une	
  com-­‐‑ munauté	
  théorique	
  et	
  politique,	
  comme	
  des	
  subjectivités	
  révolutionnaires	
  adamantines ,	
   puisque	
   nous	
   sommes	
   conscients	
   du	
   milieu	
   du	
   contrôle	
   capitaliste,	
   celui	
   des	
   écrans	
   numériques,	
  où	
  baignent	
  nos	
  inconscients.	
  il	
  faut	
  aussi	
  être	
  lucides,	
  comme	
  veronique	
   bergen	
  nous	
  l’indique,	
  de	
  la	
  captation	
  tendancielle	
  de	
  l’aiôn	
  –	
  c’est-­‐‑à-­‐‑dire	
  des	
  devenirs	
  –	
   par	
  le	
  marché	
  :	
  l’aiôn	
  est	
  de	
  plus	
  en	
  plus	
  reterritorialisé	
  et	
  donc	
  chronologisé.	
  cepen-­‐‑ dant,	
  ou	
  peut-­‐‑être	
  précisément	
  pour	
  cette	
  raison,	
  si	
  nous	
  n’étions	
  pas	
  déjà	
  dangereuse-­‐‑ ment	
  plongés	
  dans	
  ce	
  présent	
  chronologique	
  qui	
  ne	
  nous	
  offre	
  que	
  des	
  différences	
  et	
  des	
   nomadismes	
  stérilisés,	
  il	
  serait	
  probablement	
  impossible	
  de	
  désirer	
  l’aiôn,	
  tout	
  comme	
   impossible	
   serait	
   le	
   devenir,	
   in	
   primis,	
   à	
   savoir	
   le	
   devenir	
   révolutionnaire.	
   ce	
   serait	
   comme	
  vouloir	
  être	
  digne	
  de	
  ce	
  qui	
  arrive	
  aux	
  autres.	
  pour	
  la	
  même	
  raison,	
  ne	
  pleurni-­‐‑ chons	
  pas	
  sur	
  nous-­‐‑même,	
  n’espérons	
  pas	
  non	
  plus,	
  mais	
  essayons	
  de	
  nous	
  trouver	
  de	
   nouvelles	
  armes,	
  en	
  suivant	
  la	
  suggestion	
  parodique	
  d’un	
  art	
  du	
  contrôle	
  indiquée	
  par	
   gilles	
  deleuze	
  dans	
  sa	
  lettre	
  à	
  serge	
  daney:	
   	
   la	
  télévision	
  est	
  la	
  forme	
  sous	
  laquelle	
  les	
  nouveaux	
  pouvoirs	
  de	
  «	
  contrôle	
  »	
  de-­‐‑ viennent	
  immédiats	
  et	
  directs.	
  aller	
  au	
  coeur	
  de	
  la	
  confrontation	
  ce	
  serait	
  presque	
   se	
  demander	
  si	
  le	
  contrôle	
  ne	
  peut	
  pas	
  être	
  retourné,	
  mis	
  au	
  service	
  de	
  la	
  fonction	
   supplémentaire	
  qui	
   s’oppose	
  au	
  pouvoir	
   :	
   inventer	
  un	
  art	
  du	
  contrôle,	
  qui	
   serait	
   comme	
  la	
  nouvelle	
  résistance.	
  (deleuze	
   	
  :	
   )	
   	
   hier	
  la	
  télévision,	
  aujourd’hui	
   le	
  selfie	
  et	
   les	
  social	
  networks	
   :	
  mots	
  incompossibles	
   pour	
  un	
  martien	
  intéressé	
  par	
  l’apprentissage	
  de	
  l’anglais,	
  et	
  pourtant	
  fonctionnels	
  l’un	
   envers	
   l’autre	
   pour	
   l’exploitation	
   capitalistique	
   des	
   relations	
   (stiegler	
   )	
   et	
   des	
   jumelages	
  de	
  sa	
  sainteté	
  la	
  communication.	
  il	
  faut	
  réfléchir	
  sur	
  le	
  fait	
  que	
  l’égoportrait,	
   sorte	
  de	
  monadographie	
  du	
  xxième	
  siècle,	
  soit	
  devenue	
  la	
  pratique	
  emblématique	
  des	
   ainsi-­‐‑dits	
  réseaux-­‐‑sociaux.	
  ce	
  n’est	
  sans	
  doute	
  pas	
  qu’une	
  réaction	
  à	
  quelque	
  chose	
  qui	
   n’est	
  plus	
  là,	
  dont	
  la	
  présence	
  est	
  étalée	
  par	
  le	
  capitalisme	
  –	
  l’artiste	
  du	
  manque.	
  déjà	
   deleuze	
  disait,	
  avec	
  klee,	
  que	
  c’est	
  le	
  peuple	
  qui	
  manque	
  ;	
  aujourd’hui	
  on	
  dirait	
  que	
  c’est	
   le	
  social	
  qui	
  manque.	
  le	
  social	
  semblerait	
  avoir	
  remplacé	
  le	
  social,	
  en	
  vidant	
  la	
  significa-­‐‑ tion,	
  au	
  point	
  que	
  l’individuation	
  psychique	
  et	
  collective	
  (simondon	
   )	
  se	
  perd	
  dans	
   les	
  petites	
  rivières	
  de	
  l’individualisation	
  et	
  la	
  cure	
  de	
  soi	
  et	
  des	
  autres	
  (foucault	
   )	
  –	
   sans	
  laquelle	
  il	
  n’y	
  a	
  ni	
  de	
  complicité	
  ni	
  de	
  solidarité	
  –	
  dégradées	
  dans	
  la	
  cure	
  du	
  selfie	
  et	
   des	
  avatars	
  –	
  c’est-­‐‑à-­‐‑dire	
  le	
  degré	
  zéro	
  de	
  la	
  socialité.	
  ce	
  degré	
  est	
  celui	
  dans	
  lequel	
  on	
   n’est	
  lié	
  que	
  par	
  l’adhésion	
  pulsionnelle	
  à	
  ce	
  qui	
  nous	
  est	
  offert,	
  comme	
  des	
  monades	
   entrant	
  en	
  contact	
   l’une	
  avec	
   l’autre	
  seulement	
  au	
  travers	
  d’écrans	
  –	
  où	
  le	
  profile	
  ne	
   suffit	
  même	
  pas,	
  où	
  il	
  faut	
  plutôt	
  suivre	
  le	
  profiling.	
  et	
  si	
  l’écran,	
  semblable	
  à	
  celui	
  de	
   l’eau	
  dans	
  lequel	
  narcisse	
  est	
  tombé,	
  peut-­‐‑être	
  le	
  premier	
  écran,	
  dans	
  le	
  cas	
  du	
  mythe	
  il	
   ne	
  s’agit	
  pas	
  de	
  selfie,	
  ni	
  de	
  stupidité,	
  puisque	
  les	
  deux,	
  comme	
  nous	
  le	
  savons,	
  sont	
  des	
   	
   pour	
  une	
  critique	
  de	
  la	
  position	
  de	
  tiqqun,	
  cf.	
  consigliere,	
  paravagna	
   . la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  revue	
  en	
  ligne	
  de	
  philosophie	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  et	
  le	
  miroir produits	
  d’un	
  pouvoir	
  des	
  plus	
  soporifique,	
  celui	
  du	
  capital,	
  celui	
  qui	
  aujourd’hui	
  incite	
   les	
  pulsions	
  à	
  annihiler	
  le	
  désir.	
  la	
  jeune-­‐‑fille,	
  en	
  selfie	
  et	
  pour	
  le	
  selfie,	
  exprime	
  pour	
   cela	
  la	
  régression	
  au	
  niveau	
  de	
  la	
  marchandise	
  pulsionnelle	
  des	
  processus	
  de	
  subjectiva-­‐‑ tions	
   fonctionnant	
  comme	
  des	
  parcours	
  entourés	
  en	
  vue	
  d’une	
   jouissance	
  essentielle-­‐‑ ment	
  aveugle	
  et	
  entropique,	
  parce	
  qu’entièrement	
  plaquée	
  sur	
  le	
  modèle	
  de	
  la	
  consom-­‐‑ mation.	
   si	
  le	
  désir	
  est	
  pour	
  deleuze	
  et	
  guattari	
  une	
  force	
  sociale	
  productive,	
  neguentropique	
   et	
  vitale,	
  ce	
  n’est	
  surement	
  pas	
  un	
  hasard	
  que	
  tiqqun	
  décrive	
  la	
  jeune-­‐‑fille	
  comme	
  un	
   cadavre	
   parfaitement	
   maquillé,	
   produit	
   aujourd’hui	
   grâce	
   à	
   tous	
   les	
   filtres	
   et	
   les	
   re-­‐‑ touches	
  automatisées	
  d’instagram,	
  photoshop	
  ou	
  des	
  smartphones.	
  par	
  contre	
  alice,	
  face	
   au	
  miroir,	
  n’a	
  pas	
  besoin	
  de	
  maquillage,	
  ni	
  de	
  poses	
  sexy	
  ou	
  coquines,	
  ni	
  de	
  tag	
  ni	
  de	
   partage,	
  elle	
  n’a	
  ni	
  identité	
  ni	
  nickname	
  son	
  devenir	
  échappe	
  aux	
  cookies	
  et	
  au	
  profilage,	
   elle	
  n’a	
  même	
  pas	
  besoin	
  de	
  faire	
  un	
  login,	
  puisque	
  elle	
  a	
  déjà	
  sa	
  «	
  carte	
  d’intensité	
  ».	
  du	
   coup,	
  nous	
  aimons	
  à	
  imaginer	
  qu’alice,	
  parmi	
  ses	
  devenirs,	
  puisse	
  devenir	
  la	
  deleuziana	
   aussi,	
  et	
  vice	
  versa.	
   de	
  plus,	
  avec	
  ce	
  numéro	
  nous	
  voulons	
  essayer	
  de	
  concrétiser	
  ce	
  que	
  nous	
  avons	
  écrit	
   dans	
  notre	
  tout	
  premier	
  manifeste	
  :	
  	
   	
   en	
  tant	
  que	
  femme,	
  la	
  deleuziana	
  est	
  la	
  réponse	
  polémique	
  à	
  la	
  jeune-­‐‑fille	
  du	
  capi-­‐‑ talisme	
  (que	
  l’on	
  doit	
  à	
  la	
  très	
  suggestive	
  analyse	
  de	
  tiqqun),	
  c’est-­‐‑à-­‐‑dire	
  à	
  la	
  subjec-­‐‑ tivité	
  mercantilisée	
  dont	
   le	
  désir	
  est	
  systématiquement	
  détruit	
  par	
   le	
  calcul	
  algo-­‐‑ rithmique	
  des	
  pulsions.	
  s’il	
  faut	
  oser	
  au	
  moins	
  une	
  fois	
  dans	
  sa	
  vie,	
  nous	
  aimerions	
   que	
  la	
  deleuziana	
  soit	
  tout	
  comme	
  l’anti-­‐‑Œdipe	
  de	
  notre	
  époque	
  :	
  l’anti-­‐‑jeune-­‐‑fille	
   qui	
  trace	
  la	
  ligne	
  de	
  fuite	
  des	
  passions	
  tristes	
  où	
  la	
  pensée	
  souvent	
  s’abîme .	
  	
   	
   nous	
  osons	
  donc,	
  même	
  seulement	
  pour	
  une	
  fois,	
  et	
  avec	
  le	
  désire	
  de	
  décrocher	
  une	
   rafale	
  de	
  concepts	
  permettant	
  d’être	
  incisifs	
  envers	
  le	
  présent.	
  bref,	
  il	
  nous	
  semble	
  que	
   le	
   moment	
   soit	
   venu	
   pour	
   que	
   la	
   deleuziana,	
   comme	
   (la)	
   femme,	
   puisse	
   devenir	
   deleuziana.	
   enfin,	
  pourquoi	
  avons-­‐‑nous	
  choisi	
  la	
  femme	
  ?	
  parce	
  que	
  la	
  seule	
  arme	
  qui	
  nous	
  reste,	
   c’est	
  à	
  dire	
   le	
  sens	
  critique	
  comme	
  puissance	
  créatrice,	
  on	
  ne	
  peut	
   l’aiguiser	
  qu’avec	
   l’écriture	
  –	
  de	
  n’importe	
  quelle	
  forme	
  qu’elle	
  soit,	
  même	
  celle	
  digitale	
  –	
  et,	
  pour	
  deleuze,	
   l’écriture	
  est	
  un	
  devenir-­‐‑femme,	
  un	
  devenir-­‐‑femme	
  qui	
  peut	
  s’achever	
  seulement	
  avec	
  le	
   combat,	
  contre	
  les	
  forces	
  qui	
  tentent	
  de	
  nous	
  faire	
  régresser	
  vers	
  des	
  formes	
  toujours	
   actuelles	
  de	
  stupidité	
  et	
  de	
  micro-­‐‑fascisme.	
  et	
  la	
  femme,	
  elle	
  peut	
  être	
  n’importe	
  quoi,	
   sauf	
  fasciste.	
  plus	
  généralement,	
  le	
  geste	
  vital	
  et	
  d’émancipation	
  de	
  l’écriture	
  consiste	
  à	
   la	
  conjonction	
  des	
  flux	
  moléculaires	
  traversant	
  les	
  sujets	
  et	
  leur	
  segments	
  identitaires	
   (genre,	
   espèce,	
   ethnie,	
   âge,	
   classe,	
   etc..)	
   afin	
   de	
   les	
   amener	
   aux	
   seuils	
   de	
   la	
   dés-­‐‑ identification.	
  c’est	
  cette	
  dernière	
  qui,	
  toute	
  seule,	
  permet	
  des	
  alliances	
  révolutionnaires	
   	
   http://www.ladeleuziana.org/manifesto/ la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  revue	
  en	
  ligne	
  de	
  philosophie	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  et	
  le	
  miroir entre	
  les	
  minorités	
  –	
  et	
  il	
  faut	
  bien	
  être	
  surs	
  qu’en	
  politique	
  et	
  dans	
  le	
  social,	
  tant	
  qu’il	
  y	
   a	
  de	
  la	
  vie,	
  il	
  y	
  a	
  de	
  la	
  minorité.	
  enfin,	
  le	
  devenir-­‐‑femme	
  de	
  l’écriture,	
  l’être	
  minoritaire	
   face	
  à	
  sa	
  propre	
  identité,	
  comme	
  deleuze	
  le	
  voit	
  dans	
  plusieurs	
  écrivains	
  (kafka,	
  james,	
   lawrence,	
  miller,	
  et	
  même	
  virginia	
  woolf),	
  ne	
  consiste	
  pas	
  dans	
  «	
  l’écrire	
  comme	
  »	
  une	
   femme,	
   exactement	
   comme	
   le	
   devenir-­‐‑animal	
   ne	
   consiste	
   pas	
   dans	
   l’imitation	
   de	
   l’animal,	
  mais	
  plutôt	
  dans	
  l’alliance	
  avec	
  ce	
  qui	
  souffre	
  des	
  effets	
  d’une	
  majorité.	
   voici	
  donc	
  un	
  premier	
  pas	
  pour	
  la	
  reconstruction	
  du	
  social	
  qui	
  manque	
  :	
  écrire	
  afin	
  de	
   tracer	
  une	
  ligne	
  de	
  dés-­‐‑identification	
  afin	
  d’en	
  rencontrer	
  une	
  autre	
  qui	
  puisse	
  se	
  lier	
  à	
   la	
  nôtre.	
  c’est	
  aussi	
  pour	
  cette	
  dernière	
  raison	
  que	
  «	
  femme	
  »	
  nous	
  semble	
  être	
  le	
  nom	
  à	
   donner	
   aux	
   stratégies	
   de	
   transformation	
   et	
   de	
   contre-­‐‑effectuation	
   de	
   la	
   rivière	
   des	
   événements	
   qui	
   est	
   en	
   train	
   d’annihiler	
   la	
   pensée	
   critique.	
   femme	
   comme	
   la	
   grèce,	
   comme	
  lampedusa,	
  comme	
  la	
  lune	
  et	
  la	
  terre,	
  comme	
  la	
  (géo)philosophie.	
   	
   	
   contenus	
   	
   le	
  numéro	
   	
  de	
  la	
  revue	
  s’ouvre	
  avec	
  une	
  sorte	
  de	
  cadeau	
  que	
  véronique	
  bergen	
  a	
   envoyé	
  à	
  la	
  rédaction,	
  après	
  avoir	
  lu	
  l’appel	
  à	
  contributions.	
  il	
  s’agit	
  d’un	
  portrait	
  de	
  la	
   deleuziana,	
   dont	
   le	
   lecteur	
   peut	
   trouver	
   la	
   version	
   française	
   (originale),	
   anglaise	
   et	
   italienne.	
  ce	
  portrait,	
  à	
  la	
  fois	
  généreux	
  et	
  critique,	
  tout	
  aussi	
  bien	
  que	
  lucide	
  et	
  vision-­‐‑ naire,	
  représente	
  pour	
  nous	
  comme	
  un	
  deuxième	
  manifeste,	
  duquel	
  nous	
  essayerons	
  de	
   devenir	
  dignes.	
  	
   tout	
  comme	
  les	
  numéros	
  précédents,	
  la	
  deleuziana	
  propose	
  un	
  parcours	
  de	
  sens	
  à	
   travers	
  des	
  rubriques,	
  afin	
  de	
  présenter	
  les	
  éléments	
  principaux	
  indiqués	
  dans	
  l’appel	
  à	
   contributions.	
   on	
   commence	
   donc	
   avec	
   la	
   rubrique	
   «	
  nécessités/concepts	
  »,	
   où	
   on	
   trouve	
  trois	
  différents	
  aperçus	
  théoriques	
  concernant	
  ce	
  que	
  peut	
  signifier	
  le	
  point	
  de	
   vue	
  de	
  alice	
  dans	
  notre	
  présent.	
  le	
  texte	
  de	
  rosi	
  braidotti,	
  vitalismo	
  –	
  materia	
  –	
  affer-­‐‑ mazione	
  (transcription	
  d’une	
  leçon	
  donnée	
  à	
  bologna	
  le	
   	
  octobre	
   ),	
  se	
  concentre	
   sur	
  plusieurs	
  questions	
  proprement	
  contemporaines,	
  comme	
  la	
  «	
  deuxième	
  vie	
  numé-­‐‑ rique	
  »,	
   la	
  nourriture	
  génétiquement	
  modifiée,	
   les	
  prothèses	
  avancées,	
   la	
  robotique	
  et	
   les	
  technologies	
  de	
  reproduction.	
  grâce	
  à	
  son	
  fort	
  engagement	
  dans	
  les	
  women	
  studies,	
   braidotti	
   conduit	
   le	
   lecteur	
   vers	
   une	
   question	
   fondamentale	
   pour	
   ce	
   numéro	
   de	
   la	
   deleuziana,	
   à	
   savoir	
  :	
   «	
  la	
   femme	
   est-­‐‑il	
   anthropos	
  ?	
  ».	
   derrière	
   une	
   telle	
   question	
   se	
   cache	
  la	
  nécessité	
  d’une	
  enquête	
  relative	
  au	
  phallocentrisme	
  latent	
  dans	
  le	
  sens	
  et	
  dans	
   les	
   postures	
   de	
   la	
   civilisation	
   occidentale,	
   auquel	
   braidotti	
   a	
   toujours	
   consacré	
   son	
   travail.	
   l’article	
   de	
   eleonora	
   de	
   conciliis,	
   il	
   divenire	
   donna	
   dell’idea	
   e	
   la	
   verità	
   della	
   jeune-­‐‑fille,	
  prend	
  d’un	
  autre	
  angle	
  la	
  question	
  philosophique	
  de	
  la	
  femme,	
  du	
  gendre	
  et	
   du	
   capitalisme.	
   depuis	
   une	
   lecture	
   approfondie	
   de	
   la	
   déconstruction	
   derridienne	
   de	
   l’image	
  de	
  la	
  femme	
  dans	
  l’histoire	
  de	
  la	
  philosophie	
  et	
  dans	
  la	
  civilisation	
  occidentale,	
   de	
  conciliis	
  suggère	
  d’utiliser	
  cette	
  lecture	
  pour	
  enquêter	
  sur	
  la	
  validité	
  du	
  concept	
  de	
   la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  revue	
  en	
  ligne	
  de	
  philosophie	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  et	
  le	
  miroir jeune-­‐‑fille	
  élaboré	
  par	
  tiqqun	
  afin	
  de	
  décrire	
  l’anthropomorphisation	
  du	
  capital.	
  alors	
   que	
  la	
  femelle,	
  en	
  suivant	
  tiqqun,	
  semble	
  devenir	
  l’image	
  même	
  du	
  capitalisme	
  contem-­‐‑ porain,	
  l’autrice,	
  en	
  passant	
  par	
  lacan,	
  derrida	
  et	
  baudrillard	
  indique	
  la	
  femme	
  en	
  tant	
   que	
  sujet	
  capable	
  de	
  fuir	
  le	
  traditionnel	
  phallogocentrisme	
  de	
  la	
  philosophie	
  tout	
  aussi	
   bien	
  que	
  le	
  néolibéralisme.	
  c’est	
  précisément	
  pour	
  un	
  tel	
  parcours	
  émancipatoire	
  que	
   l’article	
  de	
  gianluca	
  de	
  fazio	
  etica	
  delle	
  composizioni.	
  sul	
  divenire-­‐‑donna	
  e	
  le	
  linee	
  di	
  fuga	
   della	
  corporeità	
  peut	
  représenter	
  un	
   instrument	
  utile	
  dans	
   la	
  description	
  du	
  concept	
   deleuzien	
  du	
  «	
  devenir-­‐‑femme	
  ».	
  comme	
  l’auteur	
  nous	
  le	
  montre,	
  si	
  un	
  tel	
  concept	
  peut	
   être	
  pensé	
  au	
  carrefour	
  de	
  deux	
  thématiques	
  deleuziennes	
  majeures,	
  à	
  savoir	
  le	
  corps	
  et	
   l’événement,	
   le	
  devenir	
  en	
   tant	
  que	
  mouvement	
  de	
   transformation	
  du	
  social	
   indique	
   aussi	
  son	
  actualité	
  éthique	
  et	
  politique,	
  dont	
  l’essai	
  souligne	
  la	
  nécessité.	
  	
   ensuite,	
  la	
  rubrique	
  «	
  symptomatologies	
  »	
  accueille	
  deux	
  articles	
  consacrés	
  au	
  «	
  de-­‐‑ venir-­‐‑femme	
  »	
   deleuzien,	
   bien	
   que	
   leurs	
   buts	
   portent	
   sur	
   «	
  ce	
   qui	
   nous	
   arrive	
  ».	
   en	
   particulier,	
   stefano	
   dughera,	
   dans	
   l’article	
   per	
   una	
   lettura	
   deleuziana	
   del	
   capitalismo	
   cognitivo.	
  sul	
  divenire-­‐‑donna	
  del	
  lavoro	
  contemporaneo	
  propose	
  l’utilisation	
  du	
  devenir-­‐‑ femme	
  en	
  tant	
  que	
  lentille	
  pour	
  enquêter	
  les	
  transformations	
  du	
  travail	
  contemporain	
   dans	
  le	
  capitalisme	
  cognitif.	
  le	
  grand	
  champ	
  d’auteurs	
  appelés	
  par	
  dughera	
  permet	
  une	
   profonde	
  reconnaissance	
  du	
  mouvement	
  contradictoire	
  qui	
  caractérise	
   le	
  capitalisme	
   contemporain,	
  mais	
  aussi	
  la	
  compréhension	
  des	
  rapports	
  entre	
  le	
  devenir	
  deleuzien	
  et	
  la	
   production	
   sociale	
   et	
   politique	
   du	
   common.	
   le	
   deuxième	
   article,	
   écrit	
   par	
   Öznur	
   karakaş,	
  (la	
  petite	
  fille	
  de	
  la	
  surface	
  comme	
  figure	
  de	
  la	
  dissolution	
  du	
  soi	
  )	
  recherche	
  les	
   traces	
  possibles	
  de	
  la	
  jeune-­‐‑fille	
  contenues	
  dans	
  logique	
  du	
  sens,	
  dont	
  les	
  symptômes	
   contemporains	
  ont	
  été	
  décrits	
  par	
  tiqqun.	
  après	
  une	
  recognition	
  des	
  concepts	
  princi-­‐‑ pales	
  employés	
  pour	
  décrire	
  le	
  féminine	
  dans	
  le	
  livre	
  de	
  deleuze,	
  karakaş,	
  avec	
  l’aide	
  de	
   luce	
   irigaray,	
   met	
   en	
   évidence	
   la	
   différence	
   fondamentale	
   entre	
   la	
   jeune-­‐‑fille	
   et	
   le	
   devenir-­‐‑femme	
  :	
  tandis	
  que	
  la	
  première	
  représente	
  le	
  résultat	
  de	
  l’apparat	
  de	
  capture	
   capitalistique,	
   le	
  deuxième	
   fait	
   signe	
  vers	
  une	
  conception	
  du	
   féminin	
  en	
   lutte	
  contre	
   n’importe	
  quel	
  système	
  patriarcal,	
  qu’il	
  soit	
  symbolique,	
  politique	
  ou	
  économique.	
  	
   par	
  ailleurs,	
   la	
  rubrique	
  «	
  régions	
  »	
  accueille	
   la	
  traduction	
  italienne	
  d’un	
  article	
  de	
   theresa	
  senft,	
  the	
  skin	
  of	
   the	
  selfie	
  (la	
  pelle	
  del	
   selfie),	
  qui	
  représente	
  une	
  réflexion	
   autour	
  de	
  l’enjeu	
  politique	
  de	
  l’aisthesis	
  à	
  l’âge	
  des	
  touch	
  screens	
  et	
  des	
  selfies.	
  au	
  cœur	
   de	
  l’article	
  il	
  y	
  a	
  la	
  dissémination	
  publique	
  des	
  selfies	
  contenants	
  le	
  visage	
  de	
  sandra	
   bland,	
  une	
  activiste	
  afro-­‐‑americaine	
  du	
  group	
  black	
  lives	
  matter,	
  emprisonnée	
  pour	
  un	
   contrôle	
  de	
  route.	
  sandra	
  bland	
  est	
  morte	
  en	
  prison,	
  en	
  nous	
  laissant	
  les	
  traces	
  de	
  sa	
  vie	
   sur	
  les	
  réseaux	
  sociaux.	
  c’est	
  à	
  partir	
  de	
  ce	
  fait	
  que	
  senft	
  développe	
  un	
  discours	
  sur	
  les	
   images	
  publiques	
  de	
  la	
  vie	
  privée	
  et	
  sur	
  la	
  mort	
  individuelle,	
  où	
  le	
  but	
  est	
  une	
  reconfigu-­‐‑ ration	
   du	
   rapport	
   entre	
   esthétique	
   et	
   politique.	
   pour	
   senft	
   ce	
   nouveau	
   rapport	
   du	
   politique	
  à	
  l’esthétique	
  devrait	
  se	
  focaliser	
  sur	
  la	
  surface	
  des	
  nos	
  existences,	
  c’est-­‐‑à-­‐‑dire	
   sur	
  leur	
  et	
  notre	
  peau.	
  	
   la	
  rubrique	
  «	
  yeux	
  rouges	
  »	
  présente	
  deux	
  essais	
  dédiés	
  au	
  rapport	
  entre	
  deleuze	
  et	
   la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  revue	
  en	
  ligne	
  de	
  philosophie	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  et	
  le	
  miroir la	
   littérature,	
  qui	
  est	
  aussi	
   le	
  point	
  de	
  départ	
  de	
  ce	
  numéro	
  de	
   la	
  revue.	
  l’article	
  de	
   valentina	
  maini,	
  «	
  io	
  sono	
  grande	
  e	
  piccola	
  insieme	
  »	
  divenire	
  amelia	
  rosselli,	
  suggère	
  un	
   parallélisme	
  entre	
  le	
  travail	
  de	
  la	
  poétesse	
  italienne	
  amelia	
  rosselli	
  et	
  alice	
  de	
  deleuze.	
   maini	
  retrouve	
  ce	
  parallélisme	
  dans	
  la	
  tension	
  commune	
  vers	
  cette	
  forme	
  paradoxale	
  du	
   devenir,	
  a	
  travers	
  de	
  laquelle	
  la	
  poétesse	
  tout	
  aussi	
  bien	
  que	
  le	
  personnage	
  conceptuel	
   de	
  deleuze	
  expriment	
  leurs	
  identités	
  instables	
  :	
  le	
  devenir	
  plus	
  grande	
  et	
  plus	
  petite	
  en	
   même	
  temps.	
  cette	
  sorte	
  de	
  paradoxe	
  concerne	
  tendanciellement	
  toutes	
  les	
  questions	
   politiques	
  présentées	
  par	
  ce	
  numéro	
  de	
  la	
  revue,	
  et	
  en	
  ce	
  sens	
  il	
  témoigne	
  la	
  relation	
   forte	
  entre	
   la	
  politique	
  et	
   la	
   littérature	
  qui	
   inspire	
   l’écriture	
  deleuzienne.	
  l’article	
  de	
   olga	
   lópez,	
   proust-­‐‑deleuze	
  :	
   les	
   signes	
   des	
   jeunes-­‐‑filles,	
   analyse	
   plus	
   que	
   le	
   devenir-­‐‑ femme,	
  le	
  devenir-­‐‑jeune-­‐‑fille	
  dans	
  l’œuvre	
  de	
  marcel	
  proust.	
  en	
  suivant	
  une	
  suggestion	
   deleuzienne,	
  lópez	
  montre	
  comment	
   l’esthétique	
  de	
  proust	
  ne	
  peut	
  pas	
  être	
  séparée	
   d’une	
  tension	
  vers	
  le	
  devenir-­‐‑femme	
  et	
  celui	
  à	
  son	
  tour	
  d’un	
  devenir-­‐‑jeune-­‐‑fille,	
  car	
  c’est	
   précisément	
   par	
   l’intermédiaire	
   de	
   ce	
   devenir	
   que	
   les	
   affects	
   sont	
   crées	
   dans	
   À	
   la	
   recherche	
  du	
  temps	
  perdu.	
  en	
  décrivant	
  cette	
  méthode	
  artistique,	
  lópez	
  développe	
  un	
   point	
   de	
   vue	
   singulier	
   ou,	
   plus	
   précisément,	
   sa	
   propre	
   méthodologie	
   singulière	
   par	
   rapport	
  au	
  numéro	
  de	
  la	
  revue.	
  si	
  la	
  plupart	
  des	
  articles	
  décrivent	
  les	
  devenir-­‐‑femme	
  en	
   général	
  ou	
  le	
  point	
  de	
  vue	
  de	
  la	
  femme,	
  même	
  quand	
  ils	
  sont	
  écrits	
  par	
  des	
  hommes,	
   lópez	
  essaye	
  de	
  fournir	
  une	
  alternative	
  paradoxale,	
  sur	
  la	
  vague	
  du	
  dernier	
  numéro	
  :	
  en	
   tant	
  que	
  femme,	
  décrire	
  le	
  devenir-­‐‑femme,	
  même	
  le	
  devenir-­‐‑jeune-­‐‑fille,	
  d’un	
  écrivain.	
  	
   dans	
  la	
  section	
  «	
  nouvelles	
  armes	
  »	
  on	
  trouve	
  l’article	
  de	
  angela	
  balzano,	
  tecno-­‐‑corpi	
   e	
  vie	
  di	
  fuga	
  postumane,	
  et	
  la	
  raison	
  de	
  cet	
  choix	
  est	
  tout	
  à	
  fait	
  évident.	
  en	
  retraçant	
  les	
   éléments	
   théorétiques	
  du	
  poststructuralisme	
  (deleuze	
  et	
  foucault	
  notamment)	
  et	
   les	
   contributions	
   du	
   néo-­‐‑matérialisme	
   féministe,	
   l’essai	
   décrit	
   la	
   métamorphose	
   des	
   subjectivités	
  à	
   l’âge	
  des	
  biotechnologies.	
  sur	
   la	
  base	
  des	
   travaux	
  de	
  rosi	
  braidotti	
  et	
   donna	
  haraway,	
  balzano	
  essaie	
  de	
  tracer	
  un	
  parcours	
  théorique	
  fondé	
  sur	
  la	
  dimension	
   politique-­‐‑transformatrice	
  du	
  cyborg	
  et	
  de	
  la	
  subjectivité	
  nomade.	
  le	
  but	
  devient	
  donc	
  de	
   signaler	
   les	
   conditions	
  de	
  possibilité	
  pour	
   l’invention	
  de	
  nouvelles	
  armes	
  critiques	
  à	
   l’usage	
   d’une	
   subjectivité	
   non-­‐‑anthropocentrique	
   et	
   non-­‐‑phallogocentrique	
   –	
   une	
   subjectivité	
  qui	
  reste	
  à	
  venir.	
  	
   l’article	
  de	
  daniel	
  ross,	
  touch/screen,	
  est	
  le	
  contenu	
  de	
  la	
  rubrique	
  «	
  anomalies	
  »,	
   avec	
  laquelle	
  la	
  deleuziana	
  cherche	
  à	
  aborder	
  d’un	
  point	
  de	
  vue	
  différent	
  les	
  questions	
   majeures	
   du	
   numéro.	
   tandis	
   que	
   les	
   écrans	
   sont	
   un	
   des	
   arguments	
   principaux	
   du	
   numéro	
   ,	
  la	
  question	
  du	
  cinéma	
  et	
  des	
  télé-­‐‑technologies	
  par	
  rapport	
  à	
  la	
  subjectivité,	
  au	
   désir	
  et	
  au	
  devenir	
  n’a	
  pas	
  été	
  mis	
  en	
  évidence	
  dans	
  l’appel	
  à	
  contribution.	
  cette	
  ques-­‐‑ tion	
  est	
  néanmoins	
  incontournable	
  afin	
  de	
  comprendre	
  la	
  plupart	
  des	
  causes	
  qui	
  nous	
   ont	
  conduits	
  face	
  à	
  la	
  jeune-­‐‑fille,	
  aux	
  selfies	
  et	
  aux	
  autres	
  troubles	
  de	
  la	
  subjectivité.	
  À	
  ce	
   propos,	
  ross	
  développe	
  une	
  critique	
  généalogique	
  de	
  ces	
  causes,	
  afin	
  de	
  montrer,	
  avec	
   l’aide	
  de	
  bernard	
  stiegler,	
  comment	
  le	
  cinéma,	
  la	
  télévision	
  et	
  les	
  écrans	
  contemporains	
   ne	
  décrivent	
  pas	
  seulement	
  notre	
  désir,	
  ni	
  même	
  simplement	
   le	
  pervertissent	
   ;	
  mais	
   la	
  deleuziana	
  –	
  revue	
  en	
  ligne	
  de	
  philosophie	
  –	
  issn	
   -­‐‑ 	
   n.	
   	
  /	
   	
  –	
  alice	
  et	
  le	
  miroir contribuent	
  essentiellement	
  à	
  sa	
  constitution	
  et	
  sa	
  possibilité.	
  comprendre	
  ce	
  fait	
  peut	
   permettre	
  de	
  développer	
  cet	
  art	
  du	
  contrôle	
  deleuzien	
  signalé	
  tout	
  à	
  l’heure,	
  un	
  art	
  qui	
   est	
  devenu	
  possible	
  précisément	
  à	
  partir	
  des	
  effets	
  invasifs	
  de	
  la	
  télévision.	
  	
   dans	
   la	
   section	
   «	
  précurseurs	
  »	
   le	
   lecteur	
   trouvera	
   un	
   texte	
   de	
   alexander	
   wilson,	
   comment	
  choisir	
  ce	
  qui	
  aura	
  été	
  ?	
  réflexions	
  sur	
  l’optimisme	
  prométhéen	
  contemporain.	
   cette	
  section	
  accueille	
  des	
  essais	
  hétérogènes	
  par	
  rapport	
  au	
  sujet	
  du	
  numéro,	
  mais	
  qui	
   font	
  signe	
  vers	
  le	
  numéro	
  suivant	
  ;	
  à	
  ce	
  propos,	
  l’article	
  de	
  wilson	
  représente	
  un	
  pont	
   entre	
  le	
  texte	
  «	
  anomalie	
  »	
  de	
  ross	
  et	
  le	
  numéro	
   	
  de	
  la	
  revue.	
  wilson	
  pose	
  en	
  effet	
  sur	
  le	
   fond	
  de	
  ses	
  réflexions	
  autour	
  du	
  pessimisme	
  et	
  de	
   l’optimisme	
  au	
  regard	
  du	
  climate	
   change	
  et	
  de	
  l’accélération	
  technologique	
  deux	
  films,	
  melancholia	
  de	
  lars	
  von	
  trier	
  et	
   interstellar	
   de	
   christopher	
   nolan.	
   c’est	
   l’occasion	
   de	
   réfléchir,	
   avec	
   des	
   philosophes	
   contemporains	
   comme	
   deleuze	
   et	
   stiegler,	
   mais	
   aussi	
   avec	
   leibniz,	
   sur	
   ce	
   qui	
   peut	
   signifier	
  vivre	
  dans	
  l’absence	
  d’un	
  future	
  compossible	
  avec	
  le	
  changement	
  climatique,	
  et	
   donc	
  avec	
   le	
  risque	
  d’une	
  mort	
  généralisée,	
  non	
  (seulement)	
  de	
   l’homme,	
  mais	
  de	
   la	
   terre	
  elle-­‐‑même.	
  le	
  but	
  devient	
  alors,	
  encore	
  une	
  fois,	
  de	
  ne	
  pas	
  craindre,	
  ni	
  d’espérer,	
   mais	
  de	
  trouver	
  de	
  nouvelles	
  armes.	
   	
   	
   	
   bibliographie	
  	
   	
   braidotti,	
  r.	
  ( )	
  “degli	
  insetti	
  e	
  delle	
  donne”.	
  in	
  vaccaro,	
  s.	
  (ed.).	
  il	
  secolo	
  deleuziano.	
   milano:	
  mimesis.	
  pp.	
   -­‐‑ .	
   cesarano,	
  g.	
  ( ).	
  manuale	
  di	
  sopravvivenza.	
  torino:	
  boringhieri.	
   consigliere,	
  s.,	
  paravagna,	
  s.	
  ( ).	
  “da	
  dentro:	
  relazioni	
  con	
  il	
  possibile”.	
  in	
  coppo,	
  p.,	
   consigliere,	
  s.,	
  paravagna,	
  s.	
  il	
  disagio	
  dell’inciviltà.	
  milano:	
  colibrì.	
  pp.	
   -­‐‑ .	
   deleuze,	
  g.	
  ( ).	
  logique	
  du	
  sens.	
  paris	
  :	
  les	
  éditions	
  de	
  minuit.	
   deleuze,	
  g.	
  ( ).	
  pourparlers,	
   -­‐‑ .	
  paris	
  :	
  les	
  éditions	
  de	
  minuit.	
  	
   deleuze,	
  g.	
  ( ).	
  critique	
  et	
  clinique.	
  paris:	
  les	
  éditions	
  de	
  minuit.	
   foucault,	
  m.	
  ( ).	
  le	
  souci	
  de	
  soi.	
  histoire	
  de	
  la	
  sexualité	
   .	
  paris:	
  gallimard.	
  	
   rouvroy,	
   a.	
   ( ).	
   “the	
   end(s)	
   of	
   critique:	
   data-­‐‑behaviourism	
   vs.	
   due-­‐‑process”,	
   in	
   hildebrandt,	
  m.	
  &	
  de	
  vries	
  e.,	
  (eds.).	
  privacy,	
  due	
  process	
  and	
  the	
  computational	
  turn.	
   philosophers	
  of	
  law	
  meet	
  philosophers	
  of	
  technology.	
  london:	
  routledge.	
   simondon,	
  g.	
  ( ).	
  l’individuation	
  psichique	
  et	
  collective.	
  paris:	
  aubier.	
   stiegler,	
  b.	
  ( ).	
  la	
  société	
  automatique	
  i.	
  l’avenir	
  du	
  travail.	
  paris:	
  fayard.	
   tiqqun,	
  ( ).	
  premiers	
  materiaux	
  pour	
  une	
  theorie	
  de	
  la	
  jeune-­‐‑fille.	
  paris:	
  les	
  éditions	
   de	
  minuit.	
   	
   © american political science association, ps • january people ps spotlights & updates books by our readers in memoriam u p d at e s rosemary banks, a senior adjunct fellow in the university of canterbury’s depart- ment of political science and inter- national relations, was named new zealand’s ambassador to the united states. stéphane corcuff, a professor of political science at france’s lyon university was honored with the french-taiwanese cul- tural foundation award. lara-zuzan golesorkhi, a visiting assistant political science professor at the univer- sity of portland, was invited to the united nation’s global people’s summit for her work with her nonprofit with or without. bernard grofman, jack w. peltason endowed chair at the university of california, irvine, has been appointed by a federal court to redraw virginia’s house of delegates’ district lines to address racial gerrymandering. david c. hendrickson, professor of political science at colorado college, has received the gresham riley award for outstanding service, commitment, and accomplish- ment from alumni. devesh kapur has been named the starr foundation professor of south asian studies and director of asia programs at johns hopkins university school of advanced international studies. rep. dave loebsack, emeritus professor of political science at cornell college, ran for a seventh term to represent iowa’s nd congressional district. taneisha means, assistant professor of politi- cal science at vassar college, was awarded the class of chair, given to vassar’s most promising assistant professors. keep ps informed share your news and announcements with ps and our readers. let us know about your new appointment, activity, event, or award by emailing ps editorial associate nick townsend at ntownsend@apsanet.org. ■ ps spotlights & updates james meernik, regents professor of political science at the university of north texas, recevied the faculty leadership award for his impact through leadership and service. karthick ramakrishnan has been recog- nized as part of the frederick douglass , celebrating those who embody the work and spirit of douglass. ali riaz, formerly a distinguished profes- sor of political science at illinois state university, was awarded the inaugural thomas e. eimermann professorship for the years – . glenn sanders has been named the new dean of the college of arts and sciences at king university after serving as chair of the department of anthropology, his- tory, and political science for years. vivien schmidt, professor of international relations and political science at the fred- erick s. pardee school of global studies at boston university, will receive the euro- pean union studies association (eusa) lifetime achievement award. mark scully, former assistant professor of political science at the university of the ozarks, joins lee university’s depart- ment of history, political science and humanities as an assistant professor of political science. a report by richard sobel, consultant and speaker for the houston institute at harvard university, “the high cost of a ‘free’ photo voter identification cards,” was used as a basis for questions in the judiciary committee supreme court nomination hearings for brett michael kavanaugh in september. daniel bennett smith, previously a politi- cal science professor at the us air force academy, has been named a career ambas- sador to the us state department by the us senate. andrew westmoreland, president of sam- ford university, is among nine alabama humanities fellows who were honored in the alabama colloquium at the bir- mingham museum of art. gary winslett joined the middlebury college faculty as assistant professor of political science in the department of political science. ■ mailto:ntownsend@apsanet.org © american political science association, ps • january people lawrence d. bobo appointed harvard dean of social sciences lawrence d. bobo, w.e.b. du bois professor of the social sciences, was appointed dean of social science at harvard university by claudine gay, edg- erley family dean of the faculty of arts and sciences. bobo, who chaired the department of african and african american studies, took the helm on october , . a scholar of sociology and african and african american studies (aaas), bobo has illuminated issues of inequality, politics, and race in his research. he was hired in to a joint position in sociology and the former afro-american studies department. in , bobo helped gay, then dean of social science, found the fas inequality in america ini- tiative, a multidisciplinary effort to elevate teaching and research in this critical area. upon learning of the appointment, bobo said he was thrilled “for the opportunity to deepen ties across the departments and to help colleagues continue to pursue and con- duct excellent research and engage in the innovative teaching that has characterized this faculty.” bobo’s most recent book, prejudice in poli- tics: group position, public opinion, and the wisconsin treaty rights dispute, was a final- ist for the c. wright mills award. he is coauthor of the award-winning racial atti- tudes in america: trends and interpretations, and founding editor of the du bois review: social science research on race, published by cambridge university press. bobo is a member of the national academy of science and a fellow of both the american academy of arts and scienc- es and the american association for the advancement of science. he has held ten- ured appointments in the sociology depart- ments at the university of california, los angeles, and stanford university, where he was director of the center for comparative studies in race and ethnicity. ■ adapted from the harvard university news release. spotlight tracy sulkin named as university of illinois dean of college of media tracy sulkin was appointed dean of the college of media at the university of illinois at urbana-champaign and assumed the position in september . before her appointment, sulkin, previously a professor of political science in the college of liberal arts and sciences (las), was serving as the college of media’s interim executive associate dean. a member of the illinois faculty since , sulkin is a romano professorial scholar in las and was previously an las centennial scholar. legislative style, the third and most recent of her books on american politics, was published in . sulkin brings extensive administrative experience to her new position. in the department of political science, she served as the director of graduate studies and associate head for undergraduate programs. she was elected to the las executive committee and served on the las curriculum committee. she also chaired the undergraduate education task force for the campus strategic planning process. ■ adapted from the university of illinois news release. yasmin dawood named a member of the royal society of canada yasmin dawood, the canada research chair in democracy, constitutionalism and, electoral law in the university of toronto’s faculty of law, was one of six emerg-ing scholars at the university of toronto named as members of the royal society of canada’s college of new scholars, artists, and scientists in . the college, which was established in , recognizes and fosters leadership and inter- disciplinary collaboration among canada’s new generation of scholars, artists, and scien- tists who received their phd within the last years. membership extends for seven years. dawood, whose pioneering research and public engagement have influenced policy for- mation and public debate in the areas of election law, electoral integrity, and the protection of democracy, says the position in the college “is a tremendous honor” that will give her the opportunity to collaborate with a cross-section of scholars in the field. she would also like to contribute to the college, mentoring young scholars and participating in networks that address themes such as diversity, inclusion, and belonging. “as a woman, visible minority and religious minority, i know firsthand how important it is to have mentors in order to do one’s best work.” dawood became interested in election law as a political science undergraduate at the university of toronto, studying constitutional law, political theory, and elections. she con- tinued to look at the issues while doing a law degree at columbia university in new york and a phd at the university of chicago’s department of political science. her dissertation was on the us supreme court’s election law decisions. she spent two years in the univer- sity of toronto’s centre for ethics as a social sciences and humanities research council postdoctoral researcher, and in joined the faculty of law. she is now an associate professor who is cross-appointed to the department of political science. dawood’s research focuses on innovative legal solutions for safeguarding electoral fairness, strengthening democratic governance, and counteracting systemic obstacles like partisan bias. her current research is a project that looks to see how courts adjudicate in conflicts that arise in election laws, comparing different countries to see how they have dealt with the issue. ■ adapted from the university of toronto news release. https://news.harvard.edu/gazette/story/ / /lawrence-bobo-named-dean-of-social-science-at-harvard/ https://news.illinois.edu/view/ / https://www.utoronto.ca/news/expert-election-law-one-six-u-t-named-royal-society-canada-s-college-emerging-scholars © american political science association, ps • january people dan slater speaks at the weiser center for emerging democracies the weiser center for emerging democracies (wced) at the university of michigan presented an inaugural lecture by dan slater, ronald and eileen weiser professor of emerging democracies and professor of political science on the topic “democra- cies emerging and submerging” in september . in the lecture, slater explored how research on authoritarianism and democratic dysfunctions might ironically shed light on enduring questions of democratic emergence—especially when it builds on concepts transcending disciplinary boundaries. the lecture served as a keynote for the “democra- cies emerging and submerging” conference hosted by wced on september – , . the conference, a meeting of the democratic change research initiative, brought leading scholars of authoritarianism and democratization to wced to present and discuss their ongoing research on why democracy and autocracy either emerge and endure or falter and fail. slater specializes in the politics and history of enduring dictatorships and emerging democracies, with a regional focus on southeast asia. he came to the university of michigan after years on the faculty at the university of chicago, where he served as director of the center for international social science research (cissr), associate pro- fessor in the department of political science, and associate member in the department of sociology. his book manuscript examining how divergent historical patterns of conten- tious politics have shaped variation in state power and authoritarian durability in seven southeast asian countries, entitled ordering power: contentious politics and authoritarian leviathans in southeast asia, was published in the cambridge studies in comparative politics series in . ■ adapted from the university of michigan news release. alvin tillery jr.’s speaks at kenyon college alvin b. tillery, jr., associate professor in the department of political science at northwestern university, presented a lecture titled “performance vs. power: is the black lives matter movement winning?” at kenyon college in september , sponsored by kenyon’s african diaspora studies program, the law and society program, the department of political science, the public policy program, and the faculty lectureships program. tillery’s academic interests include american politics and polit- ical theory, with particular focus on media and politics, racial, and ethnic politics, and critical race theory. he also presented “tocqueville, critical race theory, and the future of multiracial america,” a lecture on the th-century french political theorist alexis de tocqueville while visiting the college. tillery’s book between homeland and motherland: africa, us foreign policy and black leadership in america earned the w.e.b. du bois distinguished book award from the national conference of black political scientists. his papers have appeared in studies in american political development, journal of black studies, and political research quarterly. his forthcoming book will examine african american attitudes toward immigration between and . tillery earned his bachelor’s degree in political science from morehouse college and a doctorate in political science from harvard university. in addition to his appointment in northwestern’s political science department, tillery works as director of northwestern’s center for the study of diversity and democracy. ■ adapted from the kenyon college news release. laura olson elected president of sssr laura olson, j. strom thurmond pro-fessor of political science at clem-son university, has been elected president of the soci- ety for the scientific study of religion (sssr). the society is the leading schol- arly organization for social scientists who study religion. it sponsors an annual conference each fall and publishes the jour- nal for the scientific study of religion, which olson edited for five years. “the presidency of sssr is an elected office, so it is an especially meaningful honor to be recognized by my peers in this way,” olson said. “moreover, the roster of past presidents includes generations of the lead- ing scholars in my area of expertise. it is very humbling to have my name included along- side theirs.” olson’s research focuses on contempo- rary religion, civic engagement, and ameri- can politics. she is the author or editor of eight books. her work also has appeared in leading scholarly journals, including politi- cal research quarterly, social science quar- terly, and the journal for the scientific study of religion. she also has served on the board of directors of the public religion research institute in washington, dc, as well as on the american academy of religion’s committee for the public understanding of religion. her term as president will last from fall to fall . in her role, she will give a public address at the annual meeting in , as well as a few administrative duties, such as running the society’s committee that awards small research grants. ■ adapted from the clemson university news release. https://ii.umich.edu/wced/news-events/news/search-news/wced-inaugurates-new-director--professor-dan-slater.html https://www.kenyon.edu/middle-path/for-the-media/media-relations/press-release-archives/prominent-political-scientist-speaks-at-kenyon-on-race-and-american-politics/ http://newsstand.clemson.edu/mediarelations/clemson-political-science-professor-elected-president-of-society-for-the-scientific-study-of-religion/ journal of pedagogical research volume , issue , http://dx.doi.org/ . /jpr. research article is good teaching culturally responsive? madalina tanase university of north florida, united states demographic data show an increasingly diverse student population in all urban settings. this contrasts with the teacher force, which is predominately middle class, female, monolingual, and of european ancestry. this discrepancy adds complexity to an already complex profession. to bridge this cultural gap, researchers advocate for a change in the teaching paradigm, in which teachers understand the relationship between students’ culture and learning. this paradigm is called culturally responsive teaching. the participants of this study were twenty-two secondary mathematics and science teachers. the researcher analyzed whether some of the strategies used in mathematics and science urban classrooms were student- centered as well as culturally responsive. results show that teachers used a variety of student-centered strategies, such as discovery learning, centers and group work, and games. similarly, the teachers incorporated their students’ culture into their mathematics and science classrooms, by including their students’ interests in the lessons, exposing students to similar role models, and using real-life examples that students found relatable. keywords: urban settings; culturally responsive teaching; middle school; high school article history: submitted july ; revised september ; published online september . introduction the student population in urban settings is increasingly diverse. the report on racial diversity in the educator workforce revealed that in the - school year, % of all public-school students were caucasian, % were african american, and % were hispanic (us department of education, ). in comparison, % of public-school teachers were caucasian, % were african american, and % were hispanic. to gay ( ), this discrepancy adds a ―layer of complexity to implementing culturally responsive teaching and makes linking it explicitly to regular classroom functions even more important.‖ (p. ) to bridge the cultural mismatch, ullucci and howard ( ) urged teacher educators to offer new perspectives on educating students from impoverished backgrounds. similarly, gay ( ) advocated for educating teachers to incorporate their students’ culture into teaching. this approach to teaching, in which teachers understand the relationship between students’ culture and learning is known as culturally responsive teaching (hereafter crt) or culturally responsive pedagogy (hereafter crp). banks ( ) named this approach to teaching equity pedagogy. the need for crt is further stressed by the national education association (n.d.): address of corresponding author madalina tanase, phd, university of north florida, college of education and human services, jacksonville, fl, . madalina.tanase@unf.edu - - - how to cite: tanase, m. ( ). is good teaching culturally responsive?. journal of pedagogical research, ( ), - . http://dx.doi.org/ . /jpr. mailto:madalina.tanase@unf.edu orcid.org/ - - - orcid.org/ - - - http://www.orcid.org/ - - - m. tanase / journal of pedagogical research, ( ), - culturally competent teaching is increasingly necessary if educators are to connect with their students. and to connect, educators need to acquire new teaching strategies that match students’ way of understanding and interacting with the world. these approaches will help increase student performance as measured by grades and tests, enhance student access to a more rigorous curriculum, and advance student attainment to high school completion and beyond. similarly, howard ( ) and banks ( ) stressed the role that crt plays in closing the achievement gap between cultural groups. to howard ( ), crt is a response to ongoing achievement gaps between african americans, caucasians, certain asian americans, and latinos. banks ( ) believed that the academic achievement of african american students can be increased when teachers have cultural competency in the cultures of their students and design activities which build upon the cultural and linguistic strengths of students. in addition, rychly and graves ( ) stipulated that if diverse students were underachieving because of cultural differences in the ways they learned best and the ways they were taught, american students would continue to underachieve unless teachers change the ways they teach. banks ( ) talked about a transformation of education in the st century, because of the deepening racial, ethnic, cultural, and language diversity around the world: students should develop a balance of cultural, national, and global identifications. a nation-state that does alienate and does not structurally include all cultural groups into the national culture runs the risk of creating alienation and causing groups to focus on specific concerns and issues rather than on the overarching goals and policies of the nation-state. (p. ) it thus becomes necessary for teachers to develop a repertoire of strategies that tap into their students’ cultural and ethnic potential, in order to maximize learning and to close the achievement gap between cultural groups. this occurs if and when teachers are willing to learn about their students’ culture, and to use these funds of knowledge (velez-ibanez & greenberg, ) when they design and implement their lessons in their diverse classrooms. . . literature review . . . culturally responsive teaching: definitions, curriculum, and pedagogy what is crt? according to gay ( ), crt is the paradigm needed to embed culture within the teaching: a very different pedagogical paradigm is needed to improve the performance of underachieving students from various ethnic groups—one that teaches to and through their personal and cultural strengths, their intellectual capabilities, and their prior accomplishments. culturally responsive teaching is this kind of paradigm. (pp. - ) there are currently many definitions centered around crt. an earlier definition comes from ladson-billings ( ), who reflected: ―culturally relevant pedagogy urges collective action grounded in cultural understandings, experiences and ways of knowing of the world‖ (p. ). teel and obidah ( ) described crt as creating learning communities where cultural heritages are valued, by using cultural knowledge of the diverse communities to guide curriculum development and to challenge the status quo. for howard ( ), crp embodied: a professional, political, cultural, ethical, and ideological disposition that supersedes mundane teaching acts; it is centered in fundamental beliefs about teaching, learning, students, and their families, and their communities, and an unyielding commitment to see student success become less rhetoric and more of a reality (p. ). m. tanase / journal of pedagogical research, ( ), - moreover, rychly and graves ( ) reflected that crp responded to the cultures present in the classroom by connecting new information to students’ background knowledge and presenting in ways that respond to students’ natural ways of learning. furthermore, gay ( ) reflected: in culturally responsive teaching the ―knowledge‖ of interest is information about ethnically diverse groups; the ―strategic thinking‖ is how this cultural knowledge is used to redesign teaching and learning; and ―the bounds‖ are the reciprocity involved in students working with each other and with teachers as partners to improve their achievement (pp. - ). more recently, gay ( ) defined crt as ―using the cultural knowledge, prior experiences, frames of reference, and performance styles of ethnically diverse students to make learning encounters more relevant to and effective for them.‖ (p. ) in culturally rich environments students are held accountable for one another’s success; all students are winners and they all assume responsibility for helping one another to achieve to the best of their ability. similarly, researchers have reflected on the goals and value of crt. for ladson-billings ( ), the goal of crt is to prepare students to critically examine the society in which they live and to work for social change. au ( ) argued that teachers should build on the background knowledge and experiences gained in the home and community in order to ―close the achievement gap between students of diverse backgrounds and their mainstream peers‖ (p. ). in turn, howard ( ) reflected that crt sought to develop consciousness and commitment to social justice wherein students understand the social, historical, and political issues and identify and address inequities. in addition, rajgopal ( ) believed that crt was empowering, as it enabled students to be better human beings and more successful learners, while gay ( ) described crt as affirming, as ―it builds bridges of meaningfulness between home and school experiences‖ as well as ―it uses a wide variety of instructional strategies that are connected to different learning styles‖ (p. ). culturally responsive curriculum. gay ( ) believed that curriculum content can empower students if the knowledge students acquire is accessible to them and meaningful for their lives outside of school: ―content about the histories, heritages, contributions, perspectives and experiences of different ethnic groups and individuals, taught in diverse ways, is essential to culturally responsive teaching‖ (p. ). textbooks continue to be prominent teaching tools (crum, ; rosenwald, ), as most students consider textbooks incontestable sources of information (gullicks et al., ). when conducting a curriculum analysis, sleeter and grant ( ) found that textbooks were dominated by european-americans, as they conformed to their status, culture, and contributions. banks ( ) found that the west paradigm in american history and culture continued to permeate the school curriculum at all levels. banks thus argued that ―the west paradigm must be seriously examined and deconstructed in order for students to acquire a deep, complex, and compassionate understanding of u.s. history and culture‖ (banks, p. ). similarly, gay ( ) argued that textbooks were flawed in their treatment of cultural diversity, and they continued to be far from ideal. the upside, according to giarrizzo ( ), was that african americans received more coverage; the downside, however, was that the information tended to be stereotypical, negative, or superficial. given the influence of the curriculum on learning, how can teachers help their students understand the social, historical, and political issues and address inequities that exclude marginalized groups? gay ( ) believed that teachers should push their students to critique teaching resources and strategies, and conduct their own analyses of textbooks, mass media, internet, literary sources, and personal narratives. together, they can examine multiple ethnic descriptions of events and replace existing presentations of issues with their own acquired cultural knowledge and insights. banks ( ) further advised that students must be taught that since the concept of the west is a eurocentric idea, different groups conceptualized and viewed the west differently. when teachers help students view eurocentric concepts from different perspectives m. tanase / journal of pedagogical research, ( ), - (i.e. the west, the discovery of america), they can increase their students’ ability to determine the implicit perspectives embedded in curriculum materials and to become more reflective citizens. as gay ( ) concluded: ―much more cultural content is needed in all school curricula about all ethnic groups of color. the need is especially apparent in math and science and for ethnic groups other than african-american‖ (p. ). this cultural content, as gay ( ) argued, cannot be drawn from one source alone. teachers need to use various resources (textbooks, music, personal experiences, mass media, etc.) to provide students with more accurate cultural information about groups of color to fill knowledge voids or clear misconceptions. culturally responsive pedagogy. according to kroeger and bauer ( ), american traditional classrooms have developed from western european traditions: the classroom culture you are most likely to see and experience is based on white, anglo- saxon, protestant roots with core values of individualism and freedom. there is an assumption that anyone from outside the majority culture will somehow conform to or assimilate these values and ways of perceiving the world (p. ). similarly, gollnick and chin ( ) and spindler and spindler ( ) identified individualism and freedom as paramount values of the dominant group. but are these values imprinted in the dna of the diverse students who make up the majority of the us classrooms? the above researchers found mainstream values to differ radically from the values of ethnically diverse groups: while individualism, competition, personal achievement, and success were fundamental western values, diverse groups valued cooperation, the group’s well-being, and interdependence. when discussing the pedagogy of place, raymer ( ) believed that learning occurred when students connected subject matter to their own lives and surroundings and critically reflected upon the connection and the materials being studied. learning happened when students saw themselves as products and creators of interconnections among people and places. banks and banks ( ) talked about equity pedagogy, which they defined as strategies that ―help students from diverse racial, ethnic, and cultural groups to attain the knowledge, skills, and attitudes needed to function effectively within and to help create and perpetuate a just, humane, and democratic society.‖ (pp. - ) according to the researchers, equity pedagogy exists when teachers adapt their teaching to meet the needs of diverse students. is good teaching crt? yes, in the sense that there are some universal strategies (i.e. cooperative learning strategies) that enhance learning in general (au, ; slavin, ); in particular they enhance the learning of minority students (banks, ; gay, ; powell & caseau ). and no, because culture permeates all aspects of our lives, including how we teach and learn. according to gay ( ): many educators still believe that good teaching transcends place, people, time, and context. they contend it has nothing to do with the class, race, gender, ethnicity, or culture of students and teachers…individuals who subscribe to this belief fail to realize that their standards of ―goodness‖ in teaching and learning are culturally determined and are not the same for all ethnic groups. (p. ) in order to achieve educational equity and excellence (gay, ), teachers should employ a variety of resources and teaching techniques (i.e. cooperative learning strategies, discussions, etc). cooperative learning has been deemed an essential tool for crt because cooperation and collaboration are prominent in educating marginalized latinxs, native africans, and asian americans. according to gay ( ), this is due to the fact that connectedness and collaborative problem-solving are high priorities in the cultures of most groups of color. moreover, cooperation plays a central role in these groups’ learning styles. many researchers addressed the benefits of cooperative learning in relation with crt. for gay ( ), cooperative teaching and learning ―can create psycho-emotional ―safe spaces‖ and culturally responsive ―grace spaces‖ … and can m. tanase / journal of pedagogical research, ( ), - increase congruence among students’ preferred ways of personal being, intellectual engagement, and academic task performance.‖ (p. ) similarly, gillies ( ), morgan ( ), and slavin ( ) believed that cooperative learning forged more interethnic social interactions and friendships and it increased academic achievement, resulting in higher levels of confidence and efficacy for students of color, better engagement and learning tasks, and intrinsic motivation. kagan ( ) believed that cooperative learning lead to academic gains, improved race relations among students, and improved social and affective development among all students; the researcher thus urged teachers interested in crt to ―give serious attention to cooperative learning methods.‖ (p. ) however, banks ( ) urged teachers to pay attention to how they used cooperative learning, as implementing such strategies would not necessarily result in equity pedagogy. for this to happen, students need to be actively involved in the process of knowledge construction and production. the goal of equity pedagogy is to challenge the idea of instruction as transmission of facts and the image of the teacher as a citadel of knowledge and students as passive recipients. cooperative learning should enable students to construct knowledge as well as envision new possibilities for the use of that knowledge for societal change. another crt strategy is the group work and discussion. powell and caseau ( ) considered small group discussions effective instructional tools, as they moved students from passive to active modes of learning. moreover, small group work increased problem solving, creative and critical thinking, social skills development, and the students’ cultural sensitivity. these researchers deemed group work as ―preferred modes of learning for females, native americans, african americans, and latins.‖ (p. ) likewise, gay ( ) believed that the african american, asian, native american, and latino american communal cultural systems relied on peer teaching and group work in order to improve student learning. not all group work automatically becomes crt. for groups to function in a manner consistent with a diverse worldview, au ( ) believed that the teachers should guide students to develop ground rules that promote student collaboration. similarly, gay ( ) believed that groups may not work well when teachers assign students to groups to work on specific tasks; rather, teacher and students should develop together the criteria for selecting group members and assigning the tasks. and while banks ( ) believed that students learn from peers, he urged teachers to make provisions ―for dealing with the status differences among students based on race, gender, and social class‖ (p. ). incorporating group work without paying attention to the above factors could further marginalize students from low status groups, rather than enabling them to learn from their peers. as a conclusion to the above, culturally relevant teachers need to use strategies that facilitate learning for all students. banks ( ) argued students should be pushed to generate knowledge and solutions and to create new understandings. moreover, gay ( ) reflected that matching teaching strategies to the learning styles of different ethnic groups may be connected to providing students with a variety of options for demonstrating mastery of academic content (i.e. essays, letters, dialogues, photo collages). according to gay ( ), teachers should develop repertoires of culturally diverse examples which they should use fluidly in classroom instruction. and since music and movement benefit the performance of african american students, researchers (allen & butler, ; gay, ) advised teachers to incorporate music and movement into learning. lastly, au ( ) believed that crt should not duplicate home and community settings in the classroom, rather, it should be a hybrid, or a ―blending of elements from students’ home cultures with elements typical of the classroom and academic learning.‖ (p. ). . method . . participants and context thirteen mathematics and nine science novice teachers participated in this study. all participants graduated from an urban graduate teacher residency program from a mid-sized university in the m. tanase / journal of pedagogical research, ( ), - southeastern united states. the researcher had previously taught the participants as they were undergoing the program, and upon completion, the researcher asked all former students to participate in the study; only twenty-two agreed to participate. table . participants gender male: females: ethnicity caucasians: african-americans: latinx: asian: content area mathematics: science: cohorts cohort : started teaching fall cohort : started teaching fall cohort : started teaching fall there were thirteen female and nine male teachers of an age average of thirty. thirteen teachers were caucasians, seven african-american, one asian, and one latina. the teachers belonged to three different cohorts: cohort (who started teaching in the fall ), cohort (who started teaching in the fall ), and cohort (who started teaching in the fall ). the directors of the residency program, in collaboration with the school district, placed the teachers in eight urban middle and high schools in the city where they graduated. according to the center for technology in education ( ), urban schools generally have larger enrollments than suburban or rural schools, mostly serving low income students. behavior problems in the areas of absenteeism, classroom discipline, and weapons possession are more common in urban schools. moreover, % of urban students attend high poverty schools, where more than % receive free/reduced lunches. on average, students in urban schools have lower achievement scores than students in suburban schools. the directors of the residency programs chose the schools because they met the criteria of low-income, high-poverty schools, and they were situated in the poorest area of the city. table . context of the schools mean annual income national: $ , school neighborhood: $ , school population african-americans: % caucasians: - % latinx: - % school performance ( - ) graduation: % drop out: % the mean annual income of the neighborhoods in which the teachers taught was $ , , while the mean national income was $ , . all the schools were historically black, with over % african american students, - % latinx, and - % caucasian students. according to the florida department of education website, the graduation rate for these schools in the year - was %, while the dropout rate was %. moreover, % of the students were low income, and all the schools offered free/reduced lunches. the school district rated these schools with the grades of b (average) and c (below average) (florida department of education n. d.). . . research design and instrument the data in this manuscript were part of a longitudinal study, which started in and ended in . the researcher interviewed the cohort participants for the first time in . in , the researcher interviewed the participants in cohorts and , and in , the researcher interviewed the participants in all three cohorts. overall, the researcher collected more data from cohort , who were interviewed on three occasions (in , , and ). participants in cohort were interviewed on two occasions (in and ), while participants in cohort were only interviewed in one occasion, in . as the approval of the study ended in , the researcher could not obtain more data from participants in cohorts and . because there were more data from cohort , in the current study the researcher only used the data collected in the first year of m. tanase / journal of pedagogical research, ( ), - teaching for all participants for uniformity reasons. other studies will analyze all the longitudinal data obtained from the three cohorts, analyzing any changes in the participants’ use of strategies. the instrument used in this study was a teacher interview developed by the researcher. the participants answered six open-ended questions that were directed at instructional strategies. for example, the participants were asked to describe the strategies and activities they used to teach their students science and mathematics, as well as to reflect whether and how they integrated their students’ culture into their teaching. all the questions are included in appendix . this instrument, in addition to a demographic questionnaire, was administered at the beginning of the participants’ first year of teaching. . . data analysis the researcher conducted a content analysis of all interviews to identify the participants’ understanding of crt, and the strategies they used to teach mathematics and science. the researcher used content analysis to classify words that had similar meanings into categories (cavanagh, ) with the aim ―to attain a condensed and broad description of the phenomenon‖ (elo & kyngäs, , p. ). while interpreting the data, the researcher grouped the statements into categories, and further named these categories using content-characteristic words. the researcher used the n-vivo software ( th edition), a computer-assisted qualitative data analysis program. to discover connections among the nodes, the researcher analyzed the refined data sets from the teacher interviews. two main themes emerged from the data set: a) the teachers used student-centered strategies to teach mathematics and science, and b) the teachers incorporated students’ culture into their mathematics and science classrooms. when analyzing the data, the researcher focused on the research questions that guided this qualitative study: ) what strategies do culturally responsive teachers use in their mathematics and science classroom? ) how do these teachers incorporate their students’ cultures into teaching? the above data generated other categories, which could not all be captured in this paper, given the length limitations imposed on research papers in general. the researcher used the data in the two themes described above to make the case for this paper. other categories include, for example: making connections with real-life in mathematics and science classrooms, and enabling students to make choices in their learning. each of these two categories is further divided into sub-categories. these data make the subject of another paper. . results i divided the findings into two main categories: ) the teachers used student-centered strategies to teach mathematics and science, and ) the teachers incorporated students’ culture into their mathematics and science classrooms. each category was further divided in sub-categories. table . themes and sub-themes themes sub-themes sub-themes sub-themes teachers used student-centered strategies discovery learning centers and group work games teachers incorporated their students’ culture into their mathematics and science classrooms it’s all about the students it takes a community m. tanase / journal of pedagogical research, ( ), - . . the teachers used student-centered strategies to teach mathematics and science . . . discovery learning most teachers used a mix of strategies that enabled students to learn hands-on by working on real- world problems. discovery learning was dawn’s favorite, as her students worked in groups to create their dream bedroom: they researched different items on the internet and then they had to create their own scale drawing. i guess they didn’t realize how big stuff was in real life…i want this master bedroom with this master bath, but the room was only so big so maybe we should just do a master bedroom. this activity was hands on, directly involving the students in different types of measurements, and its outcome was great, as dawn stated that ―after they got through it, i had some really nice designs of room.‖ similarly, mitchell’s students learned about enzymes: the students were testing on chicken livers to see enzyme activity; basically, when you take hydrogen peroxide and the chicken liver, it produces oxygen bubbles. just the fact that they get to different stations and play around with different things that they would not normally get to play with, interests them alone. mary also believed in the significance of engaging her students in discovery learning: i let them go to the lab and start tinkering with stuff, and then i say, ok, what did you do? they respond, i don’t know, i was just putting stuff together. then we unpacked that as a class and say, ok when we did this and we didn’t follow instructions…this happened. and when this thing happens, it happens because of this, and we call it…then i start working on vocabulary. recognizing the benefit of students working hands-on to apply the concepts they learn, greg stated that this year he engaged his students in labs all the time: ―i’ve done four labs this year; i’m going to do a lab for everything i teach. they love the labs. during a test day, the class feels three hours long. during a lab day, it feels like its thirty minutes long.‖ in such a lab, for example, his students used candy to learn about water molecules: if i have two gummy bears and one marshmallow, the marshmallow is my oxygen and the gummy bears are my hydrogen. then they made their water molecule and they had to show me hydrogen bonding. that means someone’s marshmallow had to touch someone’s gummy bear because hydrogen bonds are oxygen and hydrogen. in another lab, alyssa’s students learned about the water cycle by placing a bag over a plant to show that plants transpire so that water comes out of leaves: ―we used one of these plants, and then they’ll see the condensation on the bag. they physically put a bag on top of it and tied it with a rubber band. that way they could actually see the process occurring.‖ . . . centers and group work teachers believed in the power of collaboration between students. ethan stated: ―i am big on collaboration, so i aim to have my students collaborate more.‖ when students collaborate, they rely on each other to arrive at the correct response, as mitchell reflected: the fact that their classmates are depending on them holds them accountable. investing creative energy into something that looks nice helps make it fun, because it is not just know these things and that is it, they actually get have fun with it. to foster collaboration, sally and greg set up their classrooms in centers. at one such center, sally’s students learned about cells: m. tanase / journal of pedagogical research, ( ), - at this station we used cell analogies: for example, officer jim was our cell membrane, mr. sims was our nucleus, batteries were mitochondria. in another center, the students have to use these analogies in a story. it allows everybody something a little different. in selecting their stations, greg’s students had a variety of choices: i told them: if you’re feeling crafty today, i’ve got cutting and pasting and working together. if you’re feeling artsy, this is the drawing station. if you’re feeling creative, join the writing station. if you want to do some hard-core thinking, join this station in which you really have to think. if you need a little more help, come to this station. while working in groups, mitchell’s students collaborated on macromolecules, and then did a gallery walk: ―each group focused on a particular type of macromolecule and then they walked around and looked at everyone’s poster to get the information.‖ anna engaged her students in social learning: ―i like to do pair/group share, i like to have them stand up, speak and share. i like to have a presence so that helps them with their public speaking and things of that nature.‖ . . . games to break down the routine and ensure their students had some fun, all the teachers incorporated games into their teaching. gregg reflected: ―if they’re laughing, they pay attention, and that helps them stay interested. and if they are interested, i can teach them things.‖ when teaching about ratios, tammy used a matching game ―where they find the person who shares the same ratio that’s equivalent,‖ while courtney’s students played a carousel game: ―i have some problems taped up around the room so students have to solve a problem, and the answer to that one will lead them to a problem over there.‖ although courtney felt the game was fun, she also felt that ―the goal of the activity to get the order right was lost and the kids were like, why can’t i just solve it?‖ to conclude, the teacher reflected on the need to discuss the goal of the game prior to playing it. other teachers used manipulatives. diane’s students played cards to learn about positive and negative numbers: ―the students dealt the cards out. i would say, what quantity of cards can you get to get zero? i can take and you can take…and we can make a zero out of it?‖ moreover, diane used dice to teach her students about fractions: ―i had ten packs of dice with fractions. i would tell them though, if we cannot behave ourselves while we are doing this, i’d take them away and work off the books instead.‖ luke’s students, on the other hand, enjoyed playing the game ―walking through the hood‖: students walk around to different stations. i don’t give them a time limit but they have to go to each station and work on problems at their own pace. they walk around and get as much work done with no restrictions. that is what they do in their neighborhood; they walk to play basketball, walk to a friend’s house…no restrictions until momma tells you to come home. furthermore, chris, sally, and mary’s students worked with puzzles. chris taught his students how to use puzzles in math, while sally used puzzles to teach about cells in her science class. similarly, mary used puzzles to discuss the nature of science: every person gets a piece of a puzzle. the piece of puzzle you have is your discovery, but it is not the entire picture. to get the whole picture, you need other people’s pieces. when we put all of the pieces together, then we get the whole truth…the whole picture. other teachers, like chris and courtney, developed review games centered around their students’ interests, such as basketball. chris shared: i developed a basketball game that i use for review. i have got three basketballs, three garbage cans set up, an a, b and a c and i will post the slide, it has an a b c answer, you work it out and then you shoot. i take tallies when they do it and i make it three points. m. tanase / journal of pedagogical research, ( ), - chris felt that his students ―really got into it. i saw some kids trying to do some stuff that they would have never tried. they would have never tried to work on a problem if i had not showed it to them in that way.‖ similarly, courtney called her review game trashket ball: they work in teams, and if their team gets it right, they shoot a piece of paper into the trashcan. they get really excited about it. i will play the music and we have a certain amount of time to answer the question. when the music stops, their time is up, and they hold their whiteboard to show the answer. online games were also an important part of the instructional sequence. cahoots was a favorite for chris, greg, cole, and tammy. chris liked cahoots because ―it is a cool online game that holds the kids accountable, because they have to put their names into it. it is almost like taking a quiz.‖ greg used regular cahoots ―for pre-exit tickets or practice,‖ and blind cahoots, ―where the next question involves information from the previous question. the first question might be ―what are macro molecules?‖ you have to know the answer to this one to get the next one right.‖ moreover, adam’s students played math excel online, anna used an online game ―for science so they are learning while they are playing and they gain points, they really like that,‖ and dawn used the ―cool math‖ site to engage her students in logic games, in which her students ―have to get things at a certain angle or add really quick.‖ . . the teachers incorporated students’ culture into their mathematics and science classrooms crt revolves around students’ culture. the teachers incorporated students’ culture by using students’ interests, their community, and by addressing current issues. . . . it’s all about the students to relate to their students, some teachers adopted their students’ language. for example, alyssa and irene used terminology their students related to. alyssa’s attempt to speak her students’ language consist in the use of hashtags: ―i talk in their language if that’s what they understand. i use vocabulary words that they can understand, and i’ll explain words they haven’t seen.‖ on the other hand, irene felt like her language was a barrier in the way she communicated with her students: ―the way i speak and the way i act is a barrier. i am not comfortable changing that much, but i find my language is changing a little bit.‖ anna and ethan incorporated their students’ names in word problems both intentionally: ―i try to put names into world problems,‖ (ethan), or unintentionally: ―a student recognized that it was her name, and then other people said, well can you start using my name? and i said, sure‖ (anna). on the other hand, mary used slang in her class: even though we are both african american from rough parts of town, our slang is different. for example, back in baltimore if i say, you are trying to base on me, that means you are being disrespectful…here, the word sounds like basel, which means junkie. my kids will say, ms. m., did you just call me a basel? mary turned this into a teaching moment: i am like, what are you saying to me because we are not speaking the same language? and they are like, it means this...i take a little break from teaching, i go to the board and i let them be the teacher. this shows i want to understand what you are talking about. teach me your language, so i know when you are saying things you shouldn’t say. while becoming the experts, mary’s students also learned about the culture within the culture: because i am a teacher, you don’t get my baltimore voice. my husband gets my baltimore voice. they understand that at different times i use different voices. this is called knowing m. tanase / journal of pedagogical research, ( ), - where you are and how to respond. and if you don’t learn that, you will be crippled later in your life. most teachers incorporated their students’ interests in the lessons. andrea and alyssa appealed to their students’ passion for sports. since alyssa’s students connected best to football, she used ―football terminology, as that’s what most of my students understand. it also helps that i am big on football.‖ similarly, andrea shared: in math, they like real world applications. you know how in basketball if you step on the line it is out of bounds, but in tennis, it is inbound so that is the difference between less than and equal to. if you remember the analogy, you remember the rule. both mitchell and adam used their students’ interest in dance and music. when teaching about evolution, mitchell used ―the evolution of dance‖ video, with will smith and jimmy fallon: i ask them, did you see the neh neh? no, because these are things from last year, and this video is kind of old. i had some kids who were like, that’s how my parents used to dance. we were able to see how dance changed over several generations. evolution is the same kind of thing. adam taught his students about translations, by using the cha-cha-slide: we talked about translations, which is shifting and moving, and we did the song/dance cha-cha-slide in class. it is all slide, up and down, left to right. the students understand that when you translate it, you stay the same, but you move your position. on the other hand, irene connected with her students by educating herself on their music preferences, but at times classroom management issues got in the way: i am trying to, when they reference music, have you heard that? no, can you write it down for me. i try to…but i feel like so much of my day is spent shutting down off topic conversation, and it is about things like that. this is not something i am doing well with. genetics presented itself as a highly interesting topic when discussing evolution. for example, carmen addressed the topic of skin color: genetics is a great place to integrate culture. when i teach evolution, they always make fun of each other for the darker skin; they’ll be talking about how black he/she is. i’ve been teaching them that the darker your skin, the better you’ve been adapted evolutionary. when i teach evolution, i can go back in history because some of them want to be called black and some of them want to be called african american. greg appealed to his students’ interest in the social media: kids are raised by the internet, so i incorporate things they are familiar with, like memes. i actually use these in my lesson. i take screen shots of it, so they’ll be like, oh, i’ve seen that before, that was on that website. i am using the internet culture for learning purposes. students’ interest in the media were also geared towards social justice issues. sally captured the significance about addressing modern issues related to social injustice beautifully when she said: ―when they ask me about stuff that is going on in the world, sometimes we have conversations about it. i get emotional and i don’t want them to see that.‖ diane’s students wanted to discuss the topic of the nfl players kneeling during the national anthem. asked if they could kneel during the pledge of allegiance, diane replied: if you feel the need to take a knee, go for it. but you cannot sit. it is a school policy that you stand. either stand up and pledge, stand up and do nothing, or take a knee if you want to. i have no problems with that. m. tanase / journal of pedagogical research, ( ), - similarly, carmen told her students it was ok to sit during the pledge ―if you have reasons to back it. however, no talking during it, respect others.‖ both chris and mitchell incorporated social justice issues in their classrooms. while teaching math, chris brought up black lives matter in word problems: i had a problem dealing with black lives matter. we talked about numbers, like how many people do i need to have at this rally, how long does it need to take, etc. this is important, i am not only teaching kids how to do math, i am teaching them how to be better people. similarly, when teaching environmental science, mitchell addresses social justice issues: ―it is relevant to them, because minorities tend to suffer the most because of environmental issues. i try to frame everything so it’s very applicable to their lives.‖ . . . it takes a community… the communities in which students live are a significant component of their culture. that is why teachers embedded community examples in their science and mathematics lessons. for example, sally used the church analogy to teach about cells: ―i try to make things relatable to them, like our cell analogies. make it your church, your pastor is your nucleus, right? ok, where is the cell wall? i don’t know if it’s necessarily cultural, but it’s something they see.‖ similarly, ethan engaged students in conversations about how they could improve their community: ―i am using their community as a world problem. either the kind of stores they have in their community, what they want to improve, things like that.‖ for a more hands-on experience, anna took her students on nature walks on campus, helping them to ―make connections with the types of organisms living within the ecosystem. a student made the connection between the nuclear plant that you see when you are driving over the dames’ point with fossil fuel emissions.‖ most significantly, students need to be able to relate to successful people. sally and carmen introduced their students to african american scientists. sally stated: i give them examples of people who look like them. neil degrasse tyson is one of my favorite scientists. everybody puts up albert einstein; he is an old man with white hair. when i use visuals, i try to use people they can relate to, like neil degrasse tyson. i shared a video with him. similarly, carmen stated: ―the scientist thing is killing me. i had them write down their favorite scientist. only one girl wrote down greg washington carver, a black scientist. they don’t know others. albert einstein is who everyone wrote down…they need to be more aware.‖ cole also made it his point to introduce new names when talking about oceanography: the history of marine science goes back to the polynesians going across the pacific so i try to show it across the entire history of oceanography. every human culture has been out to sea and has made these advances. i’m looking for more scientists and things i can bring in. once i get to optics, i know the father of modern optics was a north african. . discussion all teachers used a plethora of student-centered strategies to enhance their students’ mathematics and science learning, and they incorporated their students’ cultures into their mathematics and science classrooms. these strategies are briefly discussed below in light of the two research questions that guided this study. . . what strategies do culturally responsive teachers use in their mathematics and science classroom? for the most part, the teachers used strategies that focused on student collaboration. firstly, some teachers used discovery learning by engaging students in real-life problems. for example, some m. tanase / journal of pedagogical research, ( ), - students used chicken livers to test for enzyme activity, others constructed water molecules from candy, while others learned about the water cycle by covering plants with bags to observe condensation. all students were engaged in hands-on activities while conducting a scientific or mathematics investigation. according to ladson-billings ( ), culturally responsive teachers apprentice their students in a learning community rather than teach them in unrelated ways. in this way, the students’ real-life experiences can become part of the official curriculum. secondly, teachers engaged students in collaborative work to increase accountability. the centers allowed for student choice, as they had different levels of complexity, like in greg’s class. moreover, students engaged in different tasks, from creating things, to writing stories, like in sally’s case. by working together, students taught each other, and they expanded their learning. when students engage in group work, they develop their critical thinking, their social skills, their academic performance, and their cultural sensitivity (gay, ; kagan, ; powell & caseau, ). thirdly, teachers made learning fun. some teachers, like diane and sally used manipulatives such as cards, dice, or puzzles to make learning more active. other teachers, like chris and courtney, used basketball games to review content, as movement breaks monotony. chris and greg’s students competed in cahoots; adam’s students played math excell online games. similarly, dawn used the ―cool math‖ website to engage her students in logic games, and anna used a science online game in which students would points by playing. since movement benefits the academic performance of african american students, researchers urged teachers to incorporate music and games into learning (allen & butler, ; gay, ). researchers (banks ; gay ) cautioned against assuming that all strategies are crt techniques, as standards for teaching and learning are culturally determined and vary across ethnic groups (gay, ). while some strategies (i.e. cooperative learning strategies) enhance learning in general (au, ), using these strategies without engaging the students in the construction of knowledge and challenging them to use that knowledge for societal change will not result in equity pedagogy (banks, ). furthermore, gay ( ) believed that students need to have choices in the classroom (i.e. which groups they want to work in, what tasks they want to work on, etc.). . . how do these teachers incorporate their students’ cultures into teaching? while the teachers in this study used many strategies to motivate their students, they also made sure that these strategies related to students’ culture and their interests. firstly, some teachers eliminated the language barrier, by learning the slang used by their students or by adjusting their language to make themselves understood by their students. secondly, most teachers used their students’ interests to teach specific content. some used sports to connect with mathematics topics, like andrea and alyssa did. other teachers, like adam and mitchell used their students’ interests in music and dancing to explain mathematics concepts. similarly, carmen used her students’ interests in genetics to teach about evolution, when discussing the relation between skin color and environment adaptation. a few teachers used the media culture to appeal to their students’ social culture. greg, for example, used memes in his science class, to help students connect scientific concepts to everyday life. chris, sally, and diane discussed social justice issues with their students, such as the black lives matter movement, or kneeling for the national anthem. given the students’ interest, teachers extended the latter to talk about the appropriateness of sitting/standing for the pledge of allegiance. last but not least, some teachers discussed the urgency to use role models their students could relate to (african american scientists and mathematicians, or scientists of african descent), as they found that curriculum continued to exclude marginalized groups (gay, ; howard, ). ultimately, teachers need to help their students determine the implicit perspectives embedded in curriculum materials and to become more reflective citizens (banks, ), while ―teaching explicit m. tanase / journal of pedagogical research, ( ), - information about gender contributions, issues, experiences, and achievement effects within ethnic groups.‖ (gay, , p. ). . . on the way to becoming critically responsive teachers given the limited data set, it is presumptuous to assume that all the teachers in this study were culturally responsive, or that they were culturally responsive all the time. one teacher interview does not grant a large amount of data, but it grants enough to see instances of crt taking place. more data need be collected over a period of time to account for intentional crt. but for this study, the researcher feels comfortable to state that some teachers were making progress towards becoming more culturally responsive. these teachers made attempts to learn about their students’ culture and community, and they integrated this knowledge into their curriculum and pedagogy. some of the above stories are successful, others are not. one reason for the lack of success of these teachers could be that they did not intentionally used culturally responsive strategies; some stumbled across them and used them spur of the moment, like anna stated about her using one of her student’s names in a word problem. failure to be more culturally responsive could also be due to a weak classroom management. for example, irene stated that she spent more time shutting off conversations than focusing on incorporating her students’ culture into teaching. similarly, diane used pair work more as classroom management strategy than a culturally structured strategy when her students used the computers, in an attempt to eliminate distractions. in addition, courtney stated that her carousel activity was not successful due to poor instructions and expectations for group work. and since classroom management impacts both the classroom and the instruction (monroe, ; weinstein et al., ), a weaker command of classroom management, as in the above cases, lead to unsuccessful classroom activities. . conclusions and implications for future research teaching and learning are shaped by cultural influences (ladson-billings, ; spradlin & parsons, ). therefore, teachers need to develop a cultural understanding and minimize any tensions that might arise in their classroom in order to ensure their students are successful at school and at home (gay, ). they can do so by diversifying their techniques and resources (gay, ) and by establishing continuity between the modus operandi of ethnic groups and school cultures in teaching and learning (spindler, ). this implies a mindset in which teachers understand their students’ cultures and they use this knowledge to guide curriculum development and use crt (banks, ; rychly & graves, ; teel & obidah, ). secondly, this mindset starts with the teachers’ willingness to learn about their students’ culture. but intention without action is not enough (gay, ), so teachers need to educate themselves about their students’ cultures and to accompany this knowledge with the skills that help students dismantle the status quo (banks, ; gay, ; howard, ). it may be too early to call the teachers in this study culturally responsive, as crt is strengthened by time and teaching experience. but what these teachers lacked in experience, they compensated in their willingness to relate to their students. moreover, all teachers took steps to incorporate students’ cultures into the curriculum and pedagogy. this conclusion bears the following implication for research: to gather whether these teachers are indeed culturally responsive, the researcher needs to revisit them in their nd and rd years of teaching. at this time, the researcher can engage the teachers in conversations about what it means to be a culturally responsive teacher, allowing them to reflect on ways to be intentional about using their students’ cultures into their teaching and classroom management strategies. finally, given the increased diversity in the student population, crt should become the reality of today’s schools. gay’s ( ) statement bears a sense of urgency: ―finally, students and teachers should become scholars of ethnic and cultural diversity and generate their own curriculum content.‖ (p. ) ultimately, teachers, educators, parents, and students, are all responsible to m. tanase / journal of pedagogical research, ( ), - create equitable learning environments. all it takes is the willingness to do so, and the action to pursue this desire. references au, k. ( ). isn’t culturally responsive instruction just good teaching? social education, ( ), - . banks, j. a. ( ). educating citizens in a multicultural society. new york, ny: teachers college press. banks, j. a., & mcgee banks, c. a. ( ). equity pedagogy and multicultural education. in j. a. banks (ed.), educating citizens in a multicultural society (pp. - ). new york, ny: teachers college press. cavanagh, s. ( ). content analysis: concepts, methods and applications. nurse researcher, ( ), – . doi: . /nr. . . .s crum, m. ( ). sorry, ebooks. these studies show why print is better. huffington post. retrieved from http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ / / /print-ebooks-studies_n_ .html elo, s., & kyngäs, h. ( ). the qualitative content analysis process. journal of advanced nursing, ( ), – . doi: . /j. - . . .x florida department of education. n.d. ―school district data”. retrieved from http://www.fldoe.org/schools/k- -public-schools/school-dis-data.stml gay, g. ( ). culturally responsive teaching: theory, research, and practice. new york, ny: teachers college press. gay, g. ( ). preparing for culturally responsive teaching. journal of teacher education, ( ), - . doi: . / gay, g. ( ). culturally responsive teaching: theory, research, and practice. new york, ny: teachers college press. gay, g. ( ). teaching to and through cultural diversity. curriculum inquiry, ( ), - . doi: . /curi. gay, g. ( ). culturally responsive teaching. theory, research, and practice. new york, ny: teachers college press. giarrizzo, t. ( ). history losing its value: representation of minorities within high school history. master’s thesis. st. john fisher college, rochester. gillies, r. m. ( ). cooperative learning: developments in research.‖ international journal of educational psychology, ( ), - . gollnick, d. m., & chinn, p. c. ( ). multicultural education in a pluralistic society. upper saddle river, nj: merrill prentice-hall. gullicks, k. a., pearson, j. c., child, j. t., & schwab, c. r. ( ). diversity and power in public speaking textbooks. communication quarterly, ( ), - . doi: . / howard, t. c. ( ). why race and culture matter in schools? closing the gap in america’s classrooms. new york, ny: teachers’ college press. kagan, s. ( ). cooperative learning. san clemente, ca: kagan publishing. kroeger, s. d., & bauer, a. ( ). exploring diversity: a video case approach. upper saddle river, nj: pearson/merrill prentice hall. ladson-billings, g. ( ). the dreamkeepers: successful teachers of african american children. san francisco, ca: jossey-bass. monroe, c. r. ( ). why are ―bad boys‖ always black? causes of disproportionality in school discipline and recommendations for change. clearing house, ( ), - . doi: . /tchs. . . - morgan, b. m. ( ). teaching cooperative learning with children’s literature. national forum of teacher education journal, ( ), - . powell, r. g., & caseau, d. ( ). classroom communication and diversity: enhancing instructional practice. mahwah, nj: lawrence erlbaum associates. doi: . / rajgopal, k. ( ). create success: unlocking the potential of urban students. alexandria, va: association for supervision and curriculum development. raymer, a. ( ). pedagogy of place facilitation guide: cultivating and promoting place-based education. lexington, ky: the appalachian rural education network and the university of kentucky appalachian center. rosenwald, m. s. ( ). why digital natives prefer reading in print. yes, you read that right. the washington post. retrieved from washingtonpost.com/local/why-digital-natives-prefer-reading-in-print-yes-you- read-that right/ / / / ca -b - e - -f d a ec c_story.html?utm_term=.ef b fc . february . http://www.fldoe.org/schools/k- -public-schools/school-dis-data.stml m. tanase / journal of pedagogical research, ( ), - rychly, l., & graves, e. ( ). teacher characteristics for culturally responsive pedagogy. multicultural perspectives, ( ), - . doi: . / . . slavin, r. e. ( ). cooperative learning in elementary schools. international journal of primary, elementary, and early years education, ( ), - . doi: . / . . sleeter, c. e., & grant, c. a. ( ). race, class, gender, and disability in curriculum textbooks. in m. w. apple & l. christian-smith (eds.), the politics of textbooks (pp. - ), new york, ny: routlege. spindler, g. d. ( ). education and cultural process: anthropological approaches. waveland, il: prospect heights. spindler, g. d., & spindler, l a. ( ). the american cultural dialogue and its transmission. london, falmer press. spradlin, l. k., & parsons, r. d. ( ). diversity matters: understanding diversity in schools. belmont, ca: thomson wadsworth. teel, k. m., & obidah, j. e. ( ). building racial and cultural competence in the classroom. new york, ny: teachers college press. the center for technology in education. n.d. ―characteristics of urban education”. retrieved from http://cte.jhu.edu/urbaneducation/ses _act _pag .shtml ullucci, k., & howard t. ( ). pathologizing the poor: implications for preparing teachers to work in high- poverty schools. urban education, ( ), - . doi: . / us department of education. ( ). the state of racial diversity in the education force. retrieved from www .ed.gov/rschstat/eval/highered/racial-diversity/state-racial-diversity-workforce.pdf vélez-ibáñez, c. g., & greenberg, j. b. ( ). formation and transformation of funds of knowledge among us‐mexican households. anthropology & education quarterly, ( ), - . weinstein, c. s., tomlinson-clarke, s., & curran, m. ( ). toward a conception of culturally responsive classroom management. journal of teacher education, ( ), - . appendix . teacher pre and post interview this interview will last about one hour and i will audiotape the discussion to make sure that it is recorded accurately. pedagogy/classroom instruction . what teaching strategies do you use to assist students in learning content? . how are your learning activities promoting student engagement in mathematics/science? . how do you help students make connections with real-life? . what are some examples of choices students have in your classroom when it comes to instruction or assessment? . how do you assess student learning? do students have opportunities for self-assessment? . how do you integrate students’ cultures into your teaching? ending the interview thank you very much for your time and participation in this interview. i would like to remind you that to protect the privacy of this study’s participants, all transcripts will be coded with pseudonyms. http://cte.jhu.edu/urbaneducation/ses _act _pag .shtml book reviews by a ‘wider range of animals than any other hero’; there is the lion when he meets nausicaa, the octopus when he is clinging to a rock before he makes landfall at scherie and a bat when he is clinging to the fig tree in book ; of these the lion is a relatively common comparator, but the latter two are most inventive and typical of the homeric poet. under- standably the journey to the underworld (nekyia) is a chosen theme to explore and explain odysseus’ character and motivation to return home to ithaca and to cheat death in the process. overall, this is an excellent resource and accessible to students, though the sections on the epics themselves would be best read after the text has been studied. doi: . /s not all dead white men. classics and misogyny in the digital age. zuckerberg (d.). pp. . cambridge, ma: harvard university press, . cased, £ . , us$ . , € (paper, £ . , us$ . , € . ). isbn:  - - - - . jo lashly shrewsbury high school. i found this quite a difficult book to read; not because of its complexity, though in a way it was, but because of the sometimes difficult subject matter. it is an interesting book and very apt for its time, coming, as it does, in the age of trump, the handmaid’s tale and black lives matter, but there are so many acronyms to cope with and an overwhelming feeling of the desperate inadequacy felt by the major players in the ‘manosphere’. while i was reading it, the republican national conference was being reported from the states, ‘mrs america’ was being advertised on uk television and there were reports of women calling for one-vote households where the man of the house had the final say, ‘if it were a godly household’. the premise of the book is that the alt-right, the trp (the red pill, named for the choice between red and blue pills in the matrix) and sundry other groups that seem to be united by a resentment against women, people of colour and the liberal élite, have hijacked (and misrepresented in part) classical literature to give a gravitas to their ideas. the author, donna zuckerberg, younger sister of facebook founder, mark zuckerberg, is a classicist and well-read in the literature that she discusses. she is also not blind to the societal norms of the ancient world that kept women more closeted than is the case for western societies these days; but it is a usa-centric approach (that is not to say that there are not elements of it in other western societies but it seems to be less desperate). the alacrity with which these groups focus on classical texts, particularly stoic philosophy and greek tragedies such as hippolytus, is understandable in some respects; but it is also typical of a society which was heavily based on classical constructs – see their political architecture, the naming of the senate and the latifundia plantations of years ago that were tended by slaves (though other western societies were not blameless in this respect). zuckerberg explains how stoicism in particular reinforces the belief that men are guided by rationality and women by emotion which means that women should be ruled by men. she also explains how a reading that stops at this point is missing the point that women too could aspire to true virtue though with the gendered language of the ancient world (virilis, ἀνδρεῖα). whilst the chapter on stoicism was interesting, it would be the chapter on ovid that, i think, would draw in more people. this chapter focuses on the use by the ‘manosphere’ of ovid’s ars amatoria as a handbook not only on seduction but on how to treat women generally. whilst there are parts of this work which are not very savoury (and indeed there are elements of the amores (the behaviour of the narrator in iii. perhaps?) too with which we might take issue), zuckerberg does acknowledge that this is a work of literary fiction and probably not to be taken literally; and the resentment of the members of the ‘manosphere’ is apparent particularly in the section on danish women who, it seems are immune to ovidian seduction techniques as they have ‘no idea what it feels like to not have medical care or free access to university education. they have no fear of becoming homeless or permanently jobless. the government’s soothing hand will catch everyone as they fall’. so, it seems that women are only prey when they are likely to be vulnerable, which rather reinforces the idea that many of those in these groups are inadequate. sadly, the use and abuse of classics is not restricted to the alt-right and the the red pill group: there are numerous examples amongst some uk politicians of latin (and greek) tags and references being dropped into speeches or interviews, perhaps to advertise an élite education and to sound clever. this does classics no good and is unfair on those who work so hard to bring it to a wide range of people, especially those who are encouraged to exert their critical faculties on it, as should be done with all subjects. no civilisation can be perfect, but the faults and beauties should be seen for what they are and not highjacked for political or societally sinister motives. this is an interesting book, but one which i cannot see being widely read in schools. in times of financial probity, it might be a luxury. i am glad i read it, though there are some views that i would hope never to encounter. still, forewarned is forearmed, and a knowledge of how some of these groups work is a useful tool. doi: . /s x aristotle: poetics zerba (m.), gorman (d.) (edd., revised trans.). pp. xxxviii + . new york & london: w. w norton and company, . paper, £ . . isbn: - - - - . maria bergquist merchant taylors’ school, northwood aristotle’s poetics is perhaps the most influential work of literary theory. as such, it enjoys a wider audience than some of aristotle’s other works. this edition, with its introduction, glossary, notes on https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s x downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s x https://www.cambridge.org/core westminsterresearch http://www.westminster.ac.uk/westminsterresearch capitalism, patriarchy, slavery, and racism in the age of digital capitalism and digital labour fuchs, christian this is a copy of the accepted author manuscript of the following article: fuchs, christian . capitalism, patriarchy, slavery, and racism in the age of digital capitalism and digital labour, critical sociology, ( - ), pp. - . the final definitive version is available from the publisher sage at: https://dx.doi.org/ . / © the author(s) the westminsterresearch online digital archive at the university of westminster aims to make the research output of the university available to a wider audience. copyright and moral rights remain with the authors and/or copyright owners. whilst further distribution of specific materials from within this archive is forbidden, you may freely distribute the url of westminsterresearch: ((http://westminsterresearch.wmin.ac.uk/). in case of abuse or copyright appearing without permission e-mail repository@westminster.ac.uk https://dx.doi.org/ . / http://westminsterresearch.wmin.ac.uk/ repository@westminster.ac.uk capitalism, patriarchy, slavery, and racism in the age of digital capitalism and digital labour christian fuchs, university of westminster, united kingdom accepted manuscript abstract this paper asks: how can understanding the relationship of exploitation and oppression inform the study of digital labour and digital capitalism? it combines the analysis of capitalism, patriarchy, slavery, and racism in order to analyse digital labour. the approach taken also engages with a generalisation of david roediger’s wages of whiteness-approach, marxist feminism, angela davis’s marxist black feminism, rosa luxemburg, kylie jarrett’s concept of the digital housewife, jack qiu’s notion of islavery, eileen meehan’s concept of the gendered audience commodity, and carter wilson and audrey smedley’s historical analyses of racism and class. the article presents a typology of differences and commonalities between wage-labour, slave-labour, reproductive labour, and facebook labour. it shows that the digital data commodity is both gendered and racialised. the paper analyses how class, patriarchy, slavery, and racism overgrasp into each other in the realm of digital capitalism. it also introduces the notions of the organic composition of labour and the rate of reproductive labour and shows based on example data how to calculate these ratios that provide insights into the reality of unpaid labour in capitalism. keywords: digital media, digital labour, digital capitalism, patriarchy, racism, digital housewife, housework, organic composition of labour, rate of reproductive labour, marxist feminism, socialist feminism, angela davis, david roediger, kylie jarrett, jack qiu, eileen meehan, maria mies, veronika bennholdt-thomsen, claudia von werlhof, rosa luxemburg . introduction this paper asks: how can understanding the relationship of exploitation and oppression inform the study of digital capitalism? for answering this question, the paper re-visits and updates the discussion of how capitalism, patriarchy and racism are connected. one important question that arises in this context is how the economic and the non-economic are related to each other. this question is not just of theoretical relevance, but also matters politically. it focuses on how class politics that struggle for re-distribution of resources and identity politics that struggle for the recognition of oppressed identities are related (fraser and honneth, ). reductionist politics privilege either class or identity politics, whereas dualist politics say that both realms and demands are important without relating them (fuchs, : section . ). in marxist feminism, patriarchy has not just been seen as a form of sexist oppression, but as the exploitation of houseworkers in capitalism. given that in the world of digital capitalism, new unpaid forms of labour (fuchs, ; lambert, ), such as the use of facebook or crowdsourced labour, have emerged, the question arises: what can we learn from studies of the relationship of exploitation and oppression that helps us to better understand unpaid digital labour? the media’s commodity has a peculiar character because information is not used up in consumption and it is difficult to exclude others from its use and copying. the labour involved in producing media therefore also takes on peculiar forms. targeted advertising is a very important capital accumulation model in the realm of internet capitalism (fuchs, ). dallas smythe ( ) and sut jhally ( ) have argued that not media workers, but audiences produce the advertising-funded media’s commodity. the access to such media is provided as a gift to the users and the audience’s attention is sold as commodity to advertisers. smythe therefore speaks of audience labour and the audience commodity. in the context of targeted-advertising based capital accumulation on social media platforms such as facebook, youtube and google, we find user- labour that produces a data commodity and attention commodity (fuchs, , , ). based on constant surveillance and big data analytics, online advertising is personalised and interest-based (ibid.). such user labour is yet another form of unpaid labour in capitalism. therefore the question arises what the role of unpaid labour is in the capitalist mode of production, what types there are, and what their commonalities and differences are. section focuses on the relationship of housework and digital labour. section analyses the relationship of racism, slavery and digital labour. section generalises the discussion and provides a typology that outlines the commonalities and differences of wage-labour, slave labour, housework, and users’ digital labour. section draws some conclusions. . housework and digital labour the task of this section is to explore commonalities and differences between housework and users’ digital labour. this will be done in two steps: section . . re-visits the debate on reproductive labour and identifies two basic positions: the first holds that reproductive labour is productive labour, the second one that reproductive labour is excluded from productive labour. especially the first position is relevant in the digital age. based on this discussion, section . . updates debates about reproductive labour by engaging with the notion of digital housework that was introduced by the marxist-feminist scholar kylie jarrett ( ). . . the debate on housework and reproductive labour women have historically carried out the dominant part of reproductive labour, such as child-rearing, care, education, cooking, laundry, shopping, cleaning, etc. in contemporary capitalism, many more women are active in the paid labour force than or years ago, but housework is still predominantly women’s matter, which creates multiple responsibilities and less free time for them. angela davis shows that in the usa, women slaves’ labour was different than white women’s labour. domestic work was the only labour that was not under the slave-master’s control ( : ). there was relative equality in the slaves’ quarters, men and women worked together ( : ). black women’s lives were characterised by “hard work with their men, equality within the family, resistance, floggings and rape” ( : ). in , white us women’s labour force participation rate was . %, whereas it was . % for black women (bls : table ). in , the respective rates were . % and . % (bls : table ) black american women are to a higher degree both wage- and reproductive-workers than white women. the share of women who are doubly exploited by capital as both wage-workers and houseworkers is larger among blacks than among whites in the usa. there are two basic positions within socialist feminism on the question whether housework is a form of productive labour or not. the first position can for example be found in mariarosa dalla costa and selma james ( ) the power of women and the subversion of community. dalla costa and james ( : - ) criticise that “orthodox marxism” often assumes that women outside of wage-labour “are also outside of social productivity” and that “women in domestic labor are not productive”. such assumptions would deny “women’s potential social power” ( ). domestic labour “produces not merely use values, but is essential to the production of surplus value” ( ). it produces a commodity “unique to capitalism: the living human being – ‘the labourer himself’” ( ). the family would not be a superstructure, but a realm of production ( ), in which houseworkers perform “social services which capitalist organization transforms into privatized activity, putting them on the backs of housewives” ( ). leopoldina fortunati ( ) stresses that reproductive labour is productive labour; “it produces and reproduces the individual as a commodity” ( ) by “producing and reproducing labor-power” ( ) and “the use-value of labor-power” ( ). maria mies ( : ) points out that women face a threefold form of exploitation: “they are exploited […] by men and they are exploited as housewives by capital. if they are wage- workers they are also exploited as wage-workers”. the second position argues that domestic labour is excluded from productive labour and thereby ideologically rendered inferior. roswitha scholz ( , ) formulated this assumption in the value-dissociation hypothesis (wertabspaltungsthese). abstract labour would only be possible by dissociating the sphere of reproductive labour, emotions, and sensuality: “the value-dissociation hypothesis claims […] a ‘dissociation’ of the feminine, housework etc from value, abstract labour and the related forms of rationality that attributes specific qualities such as sensuality, emotionality etc that are connoted as female to women; the man in contrast stands for intellectual power, strength of character, courage, etc. the man was under modern development equated with culture, the woman with nature” (scholz, : , translation from german ). the endnotes collective’s ( ) argument is comparable to the one made by scholz: the “activity of turning the raw materials equivalent to the wage into labour-power takes place in a separate sphere from the production and circulation of values. these necessary non-labour activities do not produce value, not because of their concrete characteristics, but rather, because they take place in a sphere of the capitalist mode of production which is not directly mediated by the form of value. […] there must be an exterior to value in order for value to exist. similarly, for labour to exist and serve as the measure of value, there must be an exterior to labour (we will return to this in part two). while the autonomist feminists would conclude that every activity which reproduces labour-power produces value, we would say that, for labour-power to have a value, some of these activities have to be cut off or dissociated from the sphere of value production”. angela davis shares the second position. for her, housework is dissociated from wage-labour. “within capitalism, household labor, generating only the value of utility, is no longer related to the productive apparatus. […] women experience a double inferiority: they are first prohibited, by virtue of their family standing, from consistently and equally reaching the point of production. secondly, the labor they continue to monopolize does not measure up to the characteristic labor of capitalist society” (davis : ). davis speaks of the “labor of utility as opposed to that of exchange” ( ) and writes that housework is not abstract labour ( ). there is “a fundamental structural separation between the domestic home economy and the profit-oriented economy of capitalism. since housework does not generate profit, domestic labor was naturally defined as an inferior form of work as compared to capitalist wage labor” ( : ). there is a “structural separation of the public economy of capitalism and the private economy of the home” ( ). one argument against the second position can be found in marx’s works. he argues that the capitalist division of labour resulted in the emergence of the collective labourer (gesamtarbeiter). “in order to work productively, it is no longer necessary for the individual himself to put his hand to the object; it is sufficient for him to be an organ of the collective labourer, and to perform any of its subordinate functions” (marx : - ). this means that in a software company, not just the software engineers who german original: „die wert-abspaltungsthese behauptet nun [...] eine ‚abspaltung’ des weiblichen, der hausarbeit etc. vom wert, von der abstrakten arbeit und den damit zusammenhängenden rationalitätsformen, wobei bestimmte weiblich konnotierte eigenschaften wie sinnlichkeit, emotionalität usw. der frau zugeschrieben werden; der mann hingegen steht etwa für verstandeskraft, charakterliche stärke, mut usw. der mann wurde in der modernen entwicklung mit kultur, die frau mit natur gleichgesetzt“ (scholz, : ). produce the software commodity, are productive workers, but also the secretaries, cleaners, janitors, accountants, marketers, etc. productive labour produces surplus-value, “it must appear in surplus produce, i.e. an additional increment of a commodity on behalf of the monopolizer of the means of labour, the capitalist” ( ). the value of labour-power is the time that it takes to reproduce it. “the value of labour-power is determined, as in the case of every other commodity, by the labour-time necessary for the production, and consequently also the reproduction, of this specific article. […] the value of labour-power is the value of the means of subsistence necessary for the maintenance of its owner” ( ). angela davis is critical of the wages for housework-movement and its theoretical foundations. “the demand that housewives be paid is based on the assumption that they produce a commodity as important and as valuable as the commodities their husbands produce on the job” (davis, : - ). davis says it cannot be denied that houseworkers’ “procreative, child-rearing and housekeeping roles make it possible for their family members to work – to exchange their labor-power for wages” ( : ). but houseworkers would be structurally separated from the capitalist production process. so davis tends to share the value dissociation hypothesis. housework “cannot be defined as an integral component of capitalist production. it is, rather, related to production as a precondition. the employer is not concerned in the least about the way labor-power is produced and sustained, he is only concerned about its availability and its ability to generate profit. in other words, the capitalist production process presupposes the existence of a body of exploitable workers” ( : ). wages for housework would not aim at abolishing housework, but could rather reify and keep women tied to the home. the demand would also not question wage-labour as integral part of capitalism. “the wages for housework movement discourages women from seeking outside jobs” ( ). “in the united states, women of color – and especially black women – have been receiving wages for housework for untold decades. […] cleaning women, domestic workers, maids – these are the women who know better than anyone else what it means to receive wages for housework” ( ). davis demands the “abolition of housework” and says that “it may well be true that ‘slavery to an assembly line’ is not in itself ‘liberation from the kitchen sink’, but the assembly line is doubtlessly the most powerful incentive for women to press for the elimination of their age-old domestic slavery” ( ). davis is particularly critical of dalla costa and james’ ( : ) formulation that “[s]lavery to an assembly line is not a liberation from slavery to a kitchen sink” ( ). the two socialist feminists argue that wage-labour would not mean the liberation of houseworkers, but another form of slavery: “[w]omen are the slaves of wage slaves” ( ). dalla costa and james do not uncritically embrace the demand of wages for housework. they say on the one hand that such a demand risks “to entrench the condition of institutionalized slavery which is produced within the condition of housework” ( ), but argue on the other hand that practically speaking this demand also helped to radicalise and unify the socialist-feminist movement in italy ( - : footnote ). silvia federici’s ( ) wages against housework-manifesto argues that the “unwaged condition of housework has been the most powerful weapon in reinforcing the common assumption that housework is not work” ( ). “to say that we want money for housework is the first step towards refusing to do it, because the demand for a wage makes our work visible, which is the most indispensable condition to begin to struggle against it […] to say that we want wages for housework is to expose the fact that housework is already money for capital” ( ). the lack of a wage for housework has “also been the primary cause of our [houseworkers’] weakness in the wage labor market” (federici, : ). the invisibility of housework is also sustained by the fact that it is not included in the calculation of the gdp (federici, : ). the demand of wages for housework “exposed the enormous amount of unpaid labor that goes on unchallenged and unseen in this society” (federici, : ). federici’s goal is both the abolishment of wage-labour and housework, which is a perspective that davis shares. they differ on the question whether a wage for housework is a feasible political demand or not. the point is to avoid two extremes, namely to focus political demands and action either solely on the waged workplace or the household. given that both realms are interlinked, the struggle for the abolishment of wage- labour and housework should also be connected. demanding wages for housework does not automatically exclude demanding equal pay for equal work. the point is that higher wages in any case weaken capital’s power and to find ways of how to strengthen the autonomy and power of the working class, which includes the power of houseworkers. a guaranteed basic income funded by capital taxation that guarantees a living-wage can both empower wage-workers and houseworkers: wage- workers can refuse to take on jobs that are in any respect precarious, which empowers their position vis-à-vis capital. houseworkers are strengthened because a basic income that they receive individually makes them independent from wage-workers in the same household and allows them more social and financial autonomy. the total effect of such a version of the basic income guarantee on the labour-capital relationship would be redistribution from capital to labour that strengthens labour’s autonomy vis-à-vis capital. neither capital nor wage-labour nor housework would thereby automatically cease to exist, but resources, time and spaces that challenge and transcend capitalism could thereby be easier created. the main result of this discussion is that the position that reproductive labour is productive labour is feasible. section . builds on this discussion and connects it to the notion of users’ unpaid digital labour as one specific form of reproductive labour. . . digital housework and reproductive labour the crucial difference in the analysis of different forms of labour is the one between wage-labour and unwaged labour. slave-labour, reproductive labour and unpaid facebook labour have in common that they are unwaged, but by being integrated into capitalist society nonetheless create surplus-value. they are therefore productive labour. not all online activities are labour. so for example listening to music on spotify based on a monthly subscription is advertising-free. the consumers do not create, but consume a commodity. not all digital labour is unpaid. so for example gold farmers on world of warcraft or online freelancers tend to conduct their labour via the internet and to produce digital outputs, but are mostly paid. in this section, we focus on facebook usage when speaking of digital labour. kylie jarrett ( ) uses the notion of the digital housewife for pointing out parallels between unpaid online labour and houseworkers’ domestic, reproductive labour. she argues that the social worker has not emerged in contemporary capitalism, but has in the form of houseworkers always been an essential part of surplus-value production in capitalism. parallels between housework and facebook labour include that both are unwaged and produce two use-values, of which only one is a commodity (wage-labour in the case of the houseworker, data in the case of the facebook worker). affects and social relations form the second use- value. the “digital housewife can have real friends on facebook” ( ). jarrett argues that both the houseworker and the facebook worker both produce alienable and inalienable objects ( ). the first are “inalienable use-values such as pleasure, social solidarity and the general intellect” ( ). “consumer labour is akin to domestic labour not only because it is unpaid and occurs outside of formal factory walls in what is ostensibly free time. it is also akin to it because it is a site of social reproduction: a site for the making and re-making of the social, affective, ideological and psychological states of being that (may) accord with appropriate capitalist subjectivities” ( ). digital housewives “express themselves, their opinions and generate social solidarity with others in commercial digital media while, at the same time, adding economic value to those sites” ( ). nancy fraser ( : ) argues that childrearing is a dual aspect activity, at the same time an activity of material reproduction and symbolic reproduction, economic and cultural. one must caution in this respect that the symbolic and cultural realms are not immaterial because materiality in society that humans socially produce results. so it is better to speak of physical reproduction. fraser ( : ) says that all work, including industrial food production and software engineering, reproduce social identities and physical existence. the difference is that both in reproductive labour and facebook labour humans directly produce two use-values, whereas in software engineering and industrial food production conducted as paid jobs, there is one main use-value and sustained social relations between colleagues may or may not result as an indirect by-product of the labour process. humans have a family and use facebook for sustaining their social relations, whereas they have to have a paid job in order to earn money to be able to survive. one should stress that the two use-values (created by both reproductive labour and facebook labour) are not independent. social relations and affects are key resources for the reproduction of labour-power in the case of housework and the creation of personal relations data in the case of facebook. social relations are means of subsistence for houseworkers and facebook workers. both housework and facebook labour have a relation to commodity consumption: purchased consumer goods are part of the goods that housework transforms into means of subsistence that sustain life and labour-power. in consumer capitalism, consumers learn about the existence of particular commodities via advertisements by looking at shelves in a shop. audience labour and user labour generate attention and data that are used for presenting and targeting ads and selling commodities. audience labour and commercial digital labour are therefore that part of reproductive labour that generates commodities that help advertisers to make profits so that consumer goods are sold and consumed. housework transforms consumer goods into means of subsistence that enable survival and the saleability of labour-power. marx argues that capital has aspects of living and dead labour. he therefore introduces the distinction between variable and constant capital. both are key factors in the capitalist production process, but it is only living labour that creates value. the organic composition of capital is the relationship of constant to variable capital: “as value, it is determined by the proportion in which it is divided into constant capital, or the value of the means of production, and variable capital, or the value of labour- power, the sum total of wages” (marx, : ). marx describes a tendency of the organic composition of capital to rise that is an expression of the automation and technification of capitalism, by which the capitalist class tries to replace labour by technology. to offset increasing rises of costs for constant capital, capital tends to be forced to also increase the exploitation of unpaid labour. marx ( : chapter ) introduced for this purpose the rate of surplus-labour. it is the ratio of profit to wages. it is typically calculated at the level of monetary prices and not labour-time and thereby leaves out forms of unremunerated labour such as reproductive labour. it operates in respect to waged labour. the organic composition of labour is a new complementary variable that operates at the level of labour time. it calculates the relationship of the total of unpaid labour hours to paid labour hours. unpaid labour time includes both unwaged labour time and surplus-labour time in waged labour. table provides approximations for what can be termed the organic composition of labour that can be calculated as the ratio of unpaid labour- time (including both reproductive labour-time and wage labour’s surplus- labour-time) in an economy over the time period of one year. the data shows that in the usa, the organic composition of labour is around . . this means that per waged hour, there are . hours of unpaid labour. american capital only pays for one in seven labour hours. the rate of reproductive labour measures the share of both components of unpaid labour (see table ). it indicates that in the usa, reproductive labour accounts for around . *% of all unpaid labour time and wage-labour’s surplus-labour-time for about . %. the total production time includes the reproductive labour time that reproduces the labour-power as a commodity. reproductive labour is productive because it is surplus-labour time unremunerated by capital. capital not just exploits wage-labour, but also the reproductive labour required for the existence and reproduction of labour-power. based on marx’s analysis, we can say that the exploitation of labour entails not a dual separation, but a dialectic of reproductive labour and wage-labour. table presents further estimates. it indicates that on average, for each paid hour of labour, there are . hours of unpaid labour. i call the ratio of unpaid to paid labour time the organic composition of labour. unpaid labour includes both unpaid reproduction labour as well as wage-labour’s surplus-labour time. if reproductive labour were paid at the average wage, then profits would dwindle and capitalism would not be able to survive. this fact shows on the one hand the importance of reproductive labour in capitalism. on the other hand is also indicates capitalism’s inherent drive and need to create milieus of unpaid labour in order to survive. another measure is the rate of reproductive labour: it measures the ratio between unpaid reproductive labour-time and wage labour’s surplus-labour time. for the analysed data, the rate of reproductive labour is . , which means that reproductive labour time in the total economy is . times as large as wage-labour’s surplus-labour-time. table indicates that on average each person in the usa conducts . hours reproductive labour per week. commercial media use accounts for . % of this time, which shows that advertising dominates a very significant share of our lifetime. in , global advertising revenue accounted was £ bn (ofcom : figure . ). television advertising amounted to a total of £ bn ( . %), online advertising to a total of £ bn ( . %) (ibid.). so tv and the internet are the two most profitable realms of advertising. at the level of human activities, this circumstance is based on the fact that we spend large amounts of our free time watching television and using social media: on average, americans watch . hours television per week and spend . hours on social media (see table ). a significant share of reproductive labour is television audience labour and social media-digital labour. variable average number of hours per week us census bureau, american time use survey grooming . us census bureau, american time use survey health-related self care . us census bureau, american time use survey housework . us census bureau, american time use survey food preparation and cleanup . us census bureau, american time use survey lawn and garden care . us census bureau, american time use survey household management . us census bureau, american time use survey interior maintenance, repair, and decoration . us census bureau, american time use survey exterior maintenance, repair, and decoration . us census bureau, american time use survey vehicles . us census bureau, american time use survey appliances, tools, and toys . us census bureau, american time use survey travel related to household activities . us census bureau, american time use survey consumer goods purchases . us census bureau, american time use survey medical and care services . us census bureau, american time use survey personal care services . us census bureau, american time use survey travel related to purchasing goods and services . us census bureau, american time use survey caring for and helping household members . us census bureau, american time use survey caring for and helping nonhousehold members . use of commercial tv and commerical social media . us census bureau, american time use survey watching television . data, statista.com being online . http://time.com/ /tv-commercials-increasing/ watching ads ( % of watching time) . globalwebindex, http://www.globalwebindex.net/hubfs/reports/gwisoci alreport-q summary.pdf using commercial social media . average reproductive labour time per week per person . percentage share of commercial media use in reproductive labour time . % table : reproductive labour in the usa variable value data source average reproductive labour hours per year per person . us census bureau average total annual reproductive labour time in the usa , , , . billion unwaged hours per year us population aged or over ( ) , , oecd stats average annual hours worked ( ) , oecd stats full time equivalents of totally economically population ( ) , , total annual hours worked ( ) , , , oecd stats total wages and salaries in us$ ( ) , , , , oecd stats value added at current prices, us$ ( ) , , , , oecd stats gross fixed capital formation, us$ ( ) , , , , profits, us$ ( ) , , , , monetary rate of surplus-value . total annual hours of wage-workers’ surplus-labour , , , = . % of total annual hours worked by wage- labourer total annual hours of wage-workers’ necessary labour , , , = . % of total annual hours worked by wage- labourer melt in us$ ( ): monetary expression of labour time (=profit created per paid working hour) . average hourly wage/salary ( ), us$ . monetary value of unpaid reproductive labour-time (calculated at average hourly wage) , , , , organic composition of labour (relationship of unpaid/paid labour time) . ocl = (unpaid reproductive labour time + surplus wage-labour time) / paid labour-time = ( , , , + , , , ) / , , , rate of reproductive labour . rrl = unpaid reproductive labour-time / wage-labour’s surplus-labour-time = , , , / , , , table : reproductive labour in the usa a very important part of housework is made up by household activities such as housework, food preparation, cleaning, lawn and garden care, and household management. according to statistics , us women in spent on average minutes more time on such activities than men (men: . hours per day, women: . ). another important activity is caring and helping others. whereas us men spent . hours per day on caring and helping others, the amount was . hours for women. shopping took up . hours per day for men and . hours for women, taking the averages of these three types of activities allows us to estimate that us women tend to conduct on average % of reproductive labour and men %. reproductive labour is both gendered and racialised: it is predominantly a realm of women. and in the case of paid reproductive labour, low-paid migrant workers and workers of colour form a proportionally very large share of the workforce. capitalism is inherently connected to patriarchy and racism. the next section further explores this connection in the context of digital labour. . slavery and racism in the age of digital labour capitalism is not just connected to patriarchy, but also to racism. when analysing digital capitalism, it is therefore also important to have a look at what forms racism takes on in respect to digital media. this section explores this topic in two steps. section . . re-visits debates on the connection of capitalism and racism. section . . builds on this discussion and discusses aspects of racism in the context of digital labour. . . capitalism and racism in the usa, the enslavement of people of colour was the most important historical expression of racism. although slavery was abolished, racism continued to exist in ideological, political and economic forms of exclusion, discrimination and exploitation. audrey smedley ( ) argues that before the rise of capitalism, kinship, occupation, gender and social position were the crucial feature of society that shaped connectedness and identities. in the middle ages, religion emerged as another important marker of identity. “what was absent from these different forms of human identity is what we today would perceive as classifications into ‘racial’ groups, that is, the organization of all peoples into a limited number of unequal or ranked categories theoretically based on differences in their biophysical trait” ( ). slavery as class phenomenon was in ancient and feudal society hardly based on racism, which is why slavery is older than racism. according to smedley, racism emerged with european colonialism in america, english colonialism in ireland and african slave trade in the th century. “’race’ data source: http://www.bls.gov/news.release/atus.t .htm, accessed on october , . developed in the minds of some europeans as a way to rationalize the conquest and brutal treatment of native american populations, and especially the retention and perpetuation of slavery for imported africans” (smedely, : ). the implication of smedely’s analysis is that there are indications that racism and imperialism have been inherently linked. racism has provided not just the opportunity for ideological feelings of superiority, but also opportunities for justifying exploitation. modern slavery has to a significant degree been racist slavery. angelis davis acknowledges the importance of labour and capitalism in the analysis of oppression. her contribution to the black feminist reader (james and sharpley-whiting, ) is the only one of ten chapter that foregrounds the importance of both labour and capitalism for understanding racism and patriarchy and vice versa. davis is interested in the role of black women in american slavery and contemporary capitalism. black women slaves experienced racism by being turned into slaves because of their skin colour. slave-masters oppressed them as women by raping them. and they were exploited as unpaid workers. the unity of their oppression and exploitation is that they were treated as completely unfree beings, as beings without any rights, who were exploited, oppressed, raped, and killed by slave-masters as they pleased. davis ( : ) argues that black women worked both outside the home for the slave-master and inside the home, so that they were not, as many white women of the time, defined by the household alone. slaves were treated as “inorganic conditions of production” (davis, : ), as means of production, tools and things: “the slave system defined black people as chattel” (davis, : ). the majority of slave women were just like slave men field workers (davis, : ). “the slave-holding class expressed its drive for profit by seeking the maximum extraction of surplus labor in utter disregard to the age or sex of the slave” ( : ). female slaves had to work just like men and were in addition raped by white masters and seen as machines that produce new slaves. “[w]hen it as profitable to exploit them as if they were men, they were regarded, in effect, as genderless, but when they could be exploited, punished and repressed in ways suited only for women, they were locked into their exclusive female roles. […] they were ‘breeders’ – animals, whose monetary value could be precisely calculated in terms of their ability to multiply their numbers. […] rape, in act, was an uncamouflaged expression of the slaveholder’s economic mastery and the overseer’s control over black women as workers ” ( : - ). slavery is the ultimate form of alienation and fetishism: reification and alienation means for slaves that they just like a pure thing have no rights at all. they are robbed of their humanity, which makes them targets of limitless exploitation and domination. women slaves can also be subject to rape and theft of the children they give birth to, and can be forced to become slave-bearing machines. after the american civil war, the united states formally abolished slavery in . but this did by no way mean that equality was established. up until today, black americans face discriminatory forms of domination and expression. as the black lives matters-movement has shown, one the most extreme racist form is that blacks are much more likely to be killed by state power than whites, either in the form of police killings or the death penalty. carter wilson ( ) argues that racism has economic, political and cultural dimensions. “[r]acial oppression is sustained within an exploitative and oppressive economic structure. this structure shapes the formation of a racist culture that functions to reinforce patterns of racial oppression. the state, operating within this economic and cultural context, generally supports and legitimizes oppressive relations” ( ). “whereas racial oppression is grounded in oppressive and exploitative economic arrangements and maintained by the state, culture plays a role in sustaining racism. that is, culture structures the way people think about and behave toward race in ways that perpetuate racial oppression” ( ). wilson shows that in america, racism took in north america subsequently took on the forms of the slave mode of production and dominative racism ( - ), debt peonage and dominative aversive racism ( - ), and meta-racism (since ). forms of aversive racism continue to exist, especially racial discrimination in the labour market, urban racial segregation, and housing segregation. affirmative action programmes brought some improvements. advanced capitalism features the increasing importance of knowledge and service work, financial capital, capital export, monopolisation, and automation. capital mobility and global communications extended the international division of labour. wilson argues that in advanced capitalism high black poverty in urban centres is the most distinctive feature of racism in the usa. the black middle class was undermined. meta-racism has been accompanied by particular racist images: “today’s images include those of the black under- class: crazed, uncontrollable, powerful, violent, drug-addicted black men; promiscuous black women; and black welfare queens” ( ). angela davis ( : - ) cites data from the us census that shows that . % of black women employees worked in agriculture, . % in domestic households, . % in laundry work, and . % in manufacturing. black people had the lowest-paid, precarious jobs and a system of de-facto-peonage emerged. tables and show that racist discrimination continues to exist in the us economy today. median household income median household income unemployment rate august part-time for economic reasons source us census bureau us census bureau bls bls all , , . % . % white , , . % . % black , , . % . % white women . % . % black women . % . % white men . % . % black men . % . % - year olds, white . % - year olds, black . % men . % . % women . % . % table : income, unemployment and involuntary part-time work in the usa source bls bls bls bls bls bls bls all . % . % . % . % . % . % . % white . % . % . % . % . % . % . % black . % . % . % . % . % . % . % white women . % . % . % . % . % . % . % black women . % . % . % . % . % . % . % white men . % . % . % . % . % . % . % black men . % . % . % . % . % . % . % men . % . % . % . % . % . % . % women . % . % . % . % . % . % . % table : occupational structure in the usa =management and professional occupations , =service occupations , =sales occupations , =office and administrative occupations , =agricultural occupations , = manufacturing and transport occupations , =construction and extraction the two tables show the reality of economic discrimination in contemporary america. in the usa, the median income of a black household was in . % of a white household. in , the situation had not much improved: the figure was . %. black women and men have a much higher unemployment rate than white women and men. among young people, blacks have an unemployment rate that is almost twice as large as the one of whites. black men and women are also more affected by precarious labour than white men and women. whereas a larger share of black americans than white americans works in service labour, office labour, manufacturing and transport, white americans are more represented in management and professional occupations. given that management and professional jobs tend to be highly paid, racist wage and salary discrimination is built into the us occupational structure. one of the features of what wilson ( ) terms the era of meta-racism is that american blacks tend to be more affected by unemployment than whites. and their jobs are much more likely to be precarious, low-paid service jobs such as waiters, cleaners, fast food workers, or clerks. davis ( , , , ) is also is a critic of the prison-industrial complex. the privatisation of prisons turns these institutions into for-profit companies that make inmates labour to create profit. racism makes people of colour more likely to be imprisoned, which is why there is not just a racist practice of imprisonment, but also racist exploitation in the prison-industrial complex. “the institution of the prison tells us that the nightmare of slavery continues to haunt us” (davis, : ). “[b]lack bodies are considered dispensable within the ‘free world’ but as a major source of profit in the prison world” ( : ).through the prison- industrial complex, “racism generates enormous profits for private corporations” ( : ). davis speaks of the “imprisonment binge” ( : ): instead of tackling the causes of social problems, the homeless, illiterate, poor, black and unemployed are imprisoned. “according to this logic the prison becomes a way of disappearing people in the false hope of disappearing the underlying social problems they represent” ( : ). mass imprisonment “is supposed to make people feel better [and safer], but what it really does is divert their attention away from those threats to security that come from the military, police, profit- seeking corporations, and sometimes from one’s own intimate partners” (davis, : - ). the prison “functions ideologically as an abstract site into which undesirables are deposited, relieving us of the responsibility of thinking about the real issues afflicting those communities from which prisoners are drawn in such disproportionate numbers. this is the ideological work that the prison performs – it relieves us of the responsibility of seriously engaging with the problems of our society, especially those produced by racism and, increasingly, global capitalism” (davis, : ). angela davis analyses the unfreedom of blacks in america as it was instituted by slavery. women slaves not just faced exploitation like male slaves, but in addition were also sexually oppressed and exploited by being raped and forced to bear slaves in an industrial manner. in contemporary america, black people face multiple forms of discrimination and domination. in the prison-industrial complex, state-violence forces them to work for profit-generating corporations. “although black individuals have entered economic, social, and political hierarchies (the most dramatic example being the election of barack obama), the overwhelming number of black people are subject to economic, educational, and carceral racism to a far greater extent than during the pre-civil rights era. in many ways, the demands of the bpp’s ten-point program are just as relevant – or perhaps even more relevant – as during the s, when they were first formulated” (davis, : ). the black panther party’s programme demanded for example: “we want an end to the robbery by the capitalists of our black community. […] we want an immediate end to police brutality and murder of black people” (black panther party, ). by analysing the role of black women and men in american capitalism, davis shows that capitalism requires gender-based and racist forms of exploitation. sexism and racism are furthermore ideologies that reduce women to “sexual, childbearing, natural” beings (davis, : ) and people of colour to their skin in order to justify discriminatory and exclusionary practices and distract attention from the real causes of society’s problems. the analysis shows that racism continues to play an important ideological and economic role in capitalism and sustains exclusion and exploitation. based on this discussion, we can next have a look at the role of racism and slavery in the context of digital labour. . . racism, slavery and digital labour . . . slavery in the age of facebook one of the most important differences between wage-labour, slave- labour, reproductive labour and facebook labour concerns their legal status and what makes the workers conduct labour. slave-workers’ bodies and minds are a private property that the slave-master owns at all time. slavery is the most reified form of labour, which means that slaves have no rights so that the slave-master can treat them as he pleases and is legally allowed to kill them. so what makes the slave work is in the final instance the fear of being killed or experiencing physical violence. in slavery, “the worker is distinguishable only as instrumentum vocale [vocal instrument] from an animal, which is instrumentum semi-vocale [semi- vocal instrument], and from a lifeless implement, which is instrumentum mutum [silent instrument]” (marx, : , footnote ). whereas the slave constantly faces the threat of death, wage-labour only does so in particular cases, for example when workers are being asked to conduct life-threatening work, such as cleaning up nuclear waste. other than the slave, the wage-worker owns him-/herself. in capital volume ’s chapter , marx ( ) formulates the unfreedom of wage-labour as the double freedom of labour: modern labour is free because it is better off than slaves (although slavery has continued to exist in global capitalism), but it is also unfree because it is compelled to be exploited by capital and to having to enter class relations in order to be able to survive. proletarians’ minds and bodies are not the private property of the dominant class, as slaves are, they are rather compelled by the “silent compulsion of economic relations” ( ), the violence of the market that makes ordinary people die if they do not obtain money that allows them to buy commodities, which compels many to become wage-workers. a specific share of women experience domestic violence and economic dependence that forces them to conduct reproductive labour against their will and creates their fear to leave their partner. so direct violence can be a means of coercion in the case of housework. but also commitment, solidarity and love are important driving forces of reproductive labour. housework can frequently involve hybrids of love and hatred, pain and pleasure, play and toil, care and violence, feelings of self-fulfilment and alienation. facebook labour is in the regular case not coerced by physical violence and psychological violence, but by monopoly power, which is a specific form of structural violence. facebook’s and google’s absolute market dominance and their restrictive terms of use and privacy policies force users to use these platforms if they do not want to suffer from social and informational disadvantages. it would be a mistake to assume that the rise of capitalism and wage- labour has brought an end to slavery. although slavery is older than wage-labour, it continues to exist in specific forms in capitalism. jack qiu ( ) speaks in his book goodbye islave: a manifesto for digital abolition of islavery to indicate that slavery is still a reality in the st century, where the iphone has become one of the dominant tools for the organisation of life. qiu bases his understanding of slavery on the un slavery convention that foregrounds the ownership of a person by another one as the key feature of slavery. the bellagio-harvard guidelines on the legal parameters of slavery (qiu, : - ) specify that the ownership of a person can entail buying, transferring or selling her; exploiting her labour or sexually; managing such exploitative use; profiting from the use of a person; transferring the slave to another person (e.g. a heir or successor); or physically or psychologically mistreatment. these definitions are in line with marx’s understanding of slavery that foregrounds the unfree character of a slave so that s/he is not in possession of his/her own body and mind. according to estimates, there were . million slaves in the world in the year (walk free foundation, ), including high numbers in india, china, pakistan, bangladesh, uzbekistan, north korea, russia, nigeria, the democratic republic of congo, indonesia, egypt, and myanmar (walk free foundation, : ). the same report provides a concise definition of slavery as “situations of exploitation that a person cannot refuse or leave because of threats, violence, coercion, abuse of power or deception, with treatment akin to a farm animal” ( ). digital technologies are based on minerals such as cassiterite, coltan, gold, cobalt, or wolframite. large amounts of it are extracted in conflict- ridden regions in the congo. as a result, rebels and warlords that enslave villagers control some of the mines. parts of the minerals used in mobile phones, laptops, etc. are based on slave labour and child labour. this phenomenon has come to be known as conflict minerals (fuchs, : chapter ). cobalt is an important mineral for the production of batteries used in phones and laptops. more than half of the world’s supply comes from the democratic republic of the congo. amnesty international ( ) documented: amnesty international and afrewatch conducted research in artisanal mining areas in southern drc in april and may , visiting five mine sites. […] chronic exposure to dust containing cobalt can result in a potentially fatal lung disease, called “hard metal lung disease. […] many of the miners complained that they coughed a lot or had problems with their lungs. […] unicef estimated in that approximately , boys and girls work in all the mines across southern drc, many of them involved in cobalt mining. the children interviewed by researchers described the physically demanding nature of the work they did. they said that they worked for up to hours a day in the mines, carrying heavy loads, to earn between one and two dollars a day (amnesty international, : - ). one can be a slave for a limited time period (qiu, : ). qiu documents how foxconn workers, who manufacture iphones, ipads and other digital gadgets, faced “tremendous difficulty […] to quit” and how “student interns were used as inexpensive and involuntary labor on a massive scale” ( ). he shows how forced labour and the lack of freedom to quit employment, two types of slavery, exist within the manufacturing domain of the international division of digital labour (iddl) (see also fuchs , , for a detailed discussion of the iddl). qiu also documents foxconn’s refusal to pay out wages to workers, violent and abusive factory guards, and the control of foxconn workers’ leisure and sleeping time. the example also shows that wage-labour can be a form of slavery. qiu concludes that foxconn’s management system should be seen as “institutions and practices similar to slavery” ( ). the forms of control exercised include physical violence and structural, bureaucratic violence (forced internships, wage restraint, contracts that cannot be quit, etc.) so that any control of labour-time (its start and end) is forcefully removed from workers’ decision-power. jack qiu ( : chapter ) also identifies free consumer labour as a form of slavery that he calls manufactured islavery. the implication of his analysis is that users of advertising-funded online platforms are facebook slaves, google slaves, etc., who are coerced by advertising, monopolies, play and the addiction to commodity and media consumption into working without payment for advertising-based media. qiu writes that the manufactured islave show “voluntary servitude”, in which “[a]ddiction becomes enslavement” ( ). the manufactured islave is a mind-slave – her/his mind is enclosed by the dominant class’s logic. slavery can be used as a more restrictive or more expansive term. marx did both at once. he on the one hand saw the differences between slave- labour and wage-labour by stressing that slavery is the most unfree and life-threatening form of labour. he however also stressed certain parallels between pure slavery and other class relations. so he for example characterised patriarchy as a system, in which “the wife and children are the slaves of the husband” (marx and engels, : ) and spoke of capitalism’s “two poles of capital and wage-slavery” (marx, : ). every class relation at least bears traces and has certain features of slavery because it always entails some form of unfreedom and coercion. there are historical dialectics of slavery. but there are also reasons for not expanding the term slavery to every form of exploitation. there is a tendency for commonality in that slave labour, reproductive labour and facebook labour are highly exploited and are unpaid forms of labour, in which all labour-time tends to be surplus- labour-time. but there is also a difference in respect to the difficulty of refusing labour, i.e. in respect to the political dimension of political economy that governs human activity, labour-power and labour-time: regular wage-workers because of their double freedom can leave their employer’s factory or office at the end of the working day. they have to return in order to earn a wage, but can also choose to search for another job, which is a relative freedom within unfreedom. in contrast to the wage- worker, the congolese miner extracting coltan at gunpoint cannot leave the mine without being shot. he is a slave. some foxconn workers cannot leave the factory because they are locked into their contracts and into the factory walls all night and day. they too are slaves. and what about the facebook user? is s/he a slave, too? s/he may spend lots of time on the platform, but can also choose to log-off, to deliberately turn off the computer and phone in order to sleep, spend some time talking to friends and family, make love, enjoy an uninterrupted walk in nature, etc. the facebook-user’s refusal of labour in the social factory is much easier to achieve than the congolese miner’s refusal. they are both highly exploited, but only the latter is a slave. and nonetheless all labour and all class relations have certain dimensions of slavery because they are all coerced into labour in particular ways. the exploitation of the wage-worker, the slave, the houseworker and the facebook worker are in certain respects different as well as in certain other respects comparable. only the collective revolt of slaves and other workers exploited by transnational corporations, their collective refusal to labour and search for alternatives, can put an end to capitalism and slavery. slaves can be houseworkers and digital workers, but not all houseworkers and digital workers are slaves in the classical sense of the term. a houseworker is a slave if s/he experiences violence that makes her afraid of leaving an abusive relationship. a digital worker is a digital slave if s/he for example is by debt bondage forced to work as gold farmer for a game company and can therefore not choose to leave the job. slaves do not have political and social rights. wage-workers have specific social rights in respect to wages, social security, and trade union representation. houseworkers only have limited social rights in respect to for example child benefits. being a facebook worker does not give you particular social rights and mostly very limited legal rights in respect to privacy and data protection. whereas the wage-worker has a contractual and legally enforceable right to be paid a wage for the performed labour, slaves, houseworkers and facebook workers do not have such a right, which enables their exploitation as unpaid workers. but not all of digital labour and housework are unpaid. parts of it are conducted as contractual labour. paid carers and cleaners are an example. these are typically low-paid types of labour, often conducted by migrants and women. the intersection of reproductive labour and wage-labour tends to have a racialised and patriarchal character. . . . racist ideology and digital labour africans and asians conduct the most exploitative and precarious jobs in the international division of digital labour (iddl). in contrast, high paid software engineers – the digital labour aristocracy – in the western world tend to be predominantly male and white (fuchs, ). a structural form of racism operates in the iddl. racism and challenges to racism also operate in the world of social media. on the one hand, racism makes use of social media. here are two example tweets that were posted one day after donald trump won the presidential election: “#trump � the end of #whitegenocide in america. #nazi #siegheil”, “president trump wants to know if you have any last words mr soros? #revengewillbesweet #whitegenocide #rapejihad #rwds #trump #trump ” [+ image of a nazi shooting a jewish person]. on the other hand, also anti-racism is present on social media: in december , yhe twitter account of black lives matter (@blklivesmatter) had around , and its facebook group around , followers. commodity fetishism makes capitalism and wage-labour appear as natural properties of society, which tends to ideologically sustain both capitalism and class. racism is an ideology that often justifies slavery and discriminatory labour practices. sexism is an ideology that tries to chain women to the household and to create a gender pay gap. on facebook and in housework, there is inverse commodity fetishism (fuchs, : chapter ; fuchs, : chapter ): the workers’ immediate experience is not the production of commodities, but the creation of social relations. digital workers have, as jarrett ( : ) says, friends online. and houseworkers tend to care for those they love. the commodity form is hidden behind the social form so that commodity fetishism tends to take on an inverted form: for houseworkers and facebook workers, it is not directly experienceable that they produce a commodity for facebook. racism, nationalism, sexism and other ideologies can create economic, political and cultural advantages for specific groups in society, typically white men. how does this approach relate to the realm of digital labour? eileen meehan ( ) introduced the notion of the gendered audience commodity: the advertising industry tends to base advertising on sexism and to “discriminate against anyone outside the commodity audience of white, to- -year-old, heterosexual, english-speaking, upscale men” (meehan , ). according to the un human development report (undp ), norway and the usa are two of the world’s richest and most developed countries, whereas the central african republic, the democratic republic of congo and malawi are three of the poorest. in , the gross national income per capita was us$ , in the usa, us$ , in norway, us$ in the central african republic (car), us$ in the democratic republic of congo (drc), and us$ in malawi. measured based on this variable, car, drc and malawi were the world’s three poorest countries. table shows suggestions that facebook calculates and provides to users for the maximum cost-per-click bid they should offer when presenting ads to users of a specific gender in a specific country. country gender suggested bid for a cost-per-click, in us$ usa male . usa female . norway male . norway female . central african republic male . central african republic female . democratic republic of congo male . democratic republic of congo female . malawi male . malawi female . table : facebook’s suggested cost-per-click bid for users aged + based on location and gender (data source: facebook adverts manager, accessed on october , ) the data indicates that facebook’s algorithm works based on sexist and racist logic by assuming that users in poorer countries and poorer users are less valuable consumers, i.e. less likely to click on ads and to purchase advertised commodities, than male users and users in rich countries. the facebook data commodity is both gendered and racialised. the digital housewife is not just exploited, but this exploitation is combined with patriarchal and racist algorithmic discrimination that assumes that the poor and the female digital housewife are inferior to the male, rich digital housewife. therefore it assumes that the price for one click by the “inferior audience” should be less than the one of the “superior audience”. . capitalism, racism, and patriarchy sections and have shown that class, patriarchy and racism are important dimensions in the age of facebook and digital labour: digital housework is one particular form of audience labour and reproductive labour that constitutes significant everyday lifetime. it is just like housework unpaid, exploited and producing a peculiar commodity. slavery and racism also play an important role in digital capitalism. digital capitalism and phenomena such as social media, digital labour, mobile communication and big data that are associated with it, are part of the latest developments in advanced capitalism. meta-racism takes on a specific form in it. forced labour and child labour form an important dimension of the international division of digital labour. it especially concerns african and asians miners and assemblage workers. structural racism and sexism shape the international division of digital labour: whereas people of colour in developing countries conduct the most exploited, unfree and precarious types of labour in the iddl, the digital labour aristocracy of highly paid software engineers is predominantly white and male. whereas highly skilled and highly paid managerial and knowledge work tend to be primarily dominated by white people, low-paid precarious service jobs in the usa tend to be the domain of black people. algorithms tend to reproduce racist ideologies that discriminate against people of colour based on the assumption that they are poor and therefore less valuable consumers than white users. contemporary racism is both communicated and challenged on social media. given this analysis, the question arises how we can make sense of the relationship of capitalism, patriarchy and racism today. one argument underlying this paper is that we have to go beyond intersectionality theory. intersectionality theory is one of the most widely adopted approaches for understanding the relationship between forms of oppression. in the s, the black-feminist combahee river collective ( : ) argued that “the major systems of oppression are interlocking”. these forms of domination are “racial, sexual, heterosexual, and class oppression” ( ). based on such influences, intersectionality theory developed as an “analysis claiming that systems of race, social class, gender, sexuality, ethnicity, nation, and age form mutually constructing features of social organization” (hill collins, : ). inequality and power are “being shaped not by a single axis of social division, be it race or gender or class, but by many axes that work together and influence each other. […] intersectionality as an analytic tool examines how power relations are intertwined and mutually constructing. race, class, gender, sexuality, dis/ability, ethnicity, nation, religion, and age are categories of analysis, terms that reference important social divisions“ (hill collins and bilge, : + ) eve mitchell ( ) criticises intersectionality theory from a marxist- feminist perspective. she writes that the intersectionality approach’s identity politics is a form of individualistic, naturalising “bourgeois politics” ( ). intersectionality theory would neglect the material commonalities of the oppressed, namely the importance of labour and that all oppressed groups and individuals are human. “identity politics argues, ‘i am a black man,’ or “i am a woman,’ without filling out the other side of the contradiction ‘…and i am human.’” ( - ). mitchell points out that intersectionality theory provides an analysis of interlocking dimensions of oppression. it is incomplete because it does not reflect on how these dimensions are grounded. the result is a relativist theory of oppression. vivek chibber’s ( ) critique of subaltern studies is comparable to mitchell’s critique of intersectionality theory. chibber questions the assumption that the global south is so fundamentally different from the west that theories wanting to understand it have to be radically different from any theory originating in the west, including marxism. he argues that there is a universalising drive of capitalism that affects people worldwide in different ways, but also makes their oppression and struggles common. marxism’s critique of capitalism would allow a critique that is “cross-cultural, common to east as well as west” ( ). both the east and the west would see two forces of universalism – “the universal logic of capital […] and social agents’ universal interest in their well-being, which impels them to resist capital’s expansionary drive” ( ). one can say that chibber stresses just like mitchell that their quest for a humane society unites the world’s oppressed. the struggle for such a society can best be termed socialism. how can we think systematically about the relationship of capitalism, patriarchy and racism and avoid both reductionism (as in economic reductionism and identity politics-reductionism) and dualism (as in intersectionality theory)? how can one go beyond post-colonialism’s and intersectionality theory’s relativism? david r. roediger ( ) in his book wages of whiteness says that the racism practiced by a share of white workers is not a form of dopiness, but a form of strategic agency. based on w. e. b. du bois, roediger argues that “the pleasures of whiteness could function as a ‘wage’ for white workers. that is, status and privileges conferred by race could be used to make up for alienating and exploitative class relationships” ( ). wages of whiteness are for angela davis ( : ) “the privileges of those who benefit from the persistence of racism”. roediger does not give much attention to the circumstance that not all white people are part of the working class because there are also white (as well as non-white) capitalists. he also does not so much focus on white anti-racists, non- white racists and nationalists, and the “relationship between the struggle against male supremacism and white supremacism” (allen, ). but roediger’s wages of whiteness-approach is nonetheless an important approach of how to think about the relationship of class, gender and racism. it can be generalised: whiteness can be understood in a bourdieuian sense as a form of cultural or ideological capital that allows white workers to distinguish themselves from blacks. masculinity is a form of ideological capital that makes men distinguish themselves from women and lgbt people. whiteness and masculinity as ideologies help to accumulate reputation, status, and social distinction, i.e. cultural capital. as ideologies, they are produced in social relations, i.e. there is the labour of producing and reproducing whiteness and masculinity. masculinity and whiteness are as patriarchal and racist ideologies forms of bio-politics, as they are grounded in making the human body a terrain of politics that acts as a field of cultural capital accumulation. the motivation for masculinity, whiteness, racism, nationalism, etc. is often, as roediger shows, the feeling of having to make up for alienation and exploitation by producing and reproducing oppression. the effect is then a distraction of energy and struggles from the “real” enemies. the pleasure derived from oppression and exploitation can be seen as a cultural “wage”. political advantages derived from oppression and exploitation form a political “wage”. but there is a dimension beyond social distinction: another wage of whiteness, nationalism and masculinity can in racist, nationalist and sexist societies and organisation be that ideological capital is used for attaining economic capital and/or political capital, i.e. better economic positions, wages, salaries, income and more political influence. in these cases, whiteness, nationalism, masculinity and other ideologies also take on the role of economic and political wages. racism, nationalism, sexism and other ideologies can create economic, political and cultural surplus-“wages” or, better expressed, bourdieuian forms of economic, political and cultural capital. desan ( ) argues that bourdieu has a limited understanding of capital and does not enough theorise economic capital. the “notion of economic capital remains largely undertheorized” ( ). by capital, “bourdieu seems to mean simply any resource insofar as it yields power […] in the end, what bourdieu’s notion of capital lacks is not only an idea of capitalism as a particular historical formation but more fundamentally an idea of exploitation as a particular operation of power” ( ). although “bourdieu is sensitive to class conflict, he does not in fact have a theory of exploitation in the sense of appropriating surplus-labor” ( ). desan does not conclude that marx and bourdieu cannot be combined. he rather implies that such a combination must be guided by marxist theory. erik olin wright ( ) has attempted such a type of combination. he grounds the concept of class on the notion of exploitation and adds to it the concepts of skills and authority that are close to bourdieu’s concepts of cultural and political/social capital. both wright and bourdieu stress the importance of property, skill, and authority in class analysis. the difference is that there are two different rankings in these approaches: “property, skill, authority for marxist class analysis; skill, property, authority for bourdieu’s culturally grounded class analysis” (wright, : ). for wright, class exploitation remains the dominant aspect of capitalism, but he ascertains that skill and authority can result in “skill exploitation” ( ) and “loyalty rent” ( ). relating this argument back to roediger, we can say that within the capitalist economy, authority, culture and ideology can result in a monetary surplus-wage. and within the political and cultural system, exploitation and oppression can result in certain individuals and groups’ social advantages at the expense of others, or what could, in a metaphorical sense, be termed an ideological wage (a surplus of pleasure, enjoyment and status) and a political wage (a surplus of political influence). one aspect that bourdieu and marx’s analysis shares is the stress on how the logic of accumulation shapes capitalist society and brings about inequalities. wright and roediger extend this analysis in a marxist manner by arguing that a) ideology, culture and authority result in surplus-wages in the economy and b) ideology and politics in modern society are systems of accumulation, in which political and cultural surpluses are accumulated. the surplus that ideology can produce is not just surplus pleasure and enjoyment in the suffering of others, but can also be economic, political and cultural in character. w. e. b. du bois argued in this context: “it must be remembered that the white group of laborers, while they received a low wage, were compensated in part by a sort of public and psychological wage. they were given public deference and tides of courtesy because they were white. they were admitted freely with all classes of white people to public functions, public parks, and the best schools. the police were drawn from their ranks, and the courts, dependent upon their votes, treated them with such leniency as to encourage lawlessness. their vote selected public officials, and while this had small effect upon the economic situation, it had great effect upon their personal treatment and the deference shown them. white schoolhouses were the best in the community, and conspicuously placed, and they cost anywhere from twice to ten times as much per capita as the colored schools. the newspapers specialized on news that flattered the poor whites and almost utterly ignored the negro except in crime and ridicule” (du bois, : - ). in digital capitalism, we can find an intersection of different forms of labour in the international division of digital labour – paid labour, unpaid labour, reproductive labour, and users’ digital labour. the economic dimension of the interrelation of these forms of labour is that capitalism requires and creates milieus of exploitation in order to sustain profitability. it strives to maximise capital accumulation by minimising labour costs. the diversification of labour is a result of the profit imperative. non- standard forms of labour, such as slavery, precarious labour, freelancing, unpaid user labour, or housework, are an expression of this diversification. the result of it is that transnational digital media corporations are achieving high profits: in , apple made profits of us$ . bn and was the world’s ninth largest transnational corporations. at&t was the twelfth largest (profit: us$ . bn), verizon the th largest (us$ bn), microsoft the rd largest (us$ . bn), and google/alphabet the th largest (us$ bn) . capitalism is based on the capitalist class’ appropriation of surplus-labour and surplus-value. given that the working day consist of two parts, necessary labour and surplus-labour, i.e. paid labour and unpaid labour, all labour in capitalism contains unpaid labour. the capitalist class’s interests is to maximise unpaid labour time. Étienne balibar ( ) argues in this context that “what characterizes capitalism is a normalization of overexploitation. the reverse side of this is a class data source: forbes , list, http://www.forbes.com/global /list/, accessed on december , . struggle that tends to impose limits”. the sustenance and creation of forms of labour that are completely unpaid or have a high degree of unpaid labour time should therefore be understood as being part of this capitalist tendency to normalise over-exploitation. unpaid digital labour is one of the newest manifestations of this tendency. balibar concludes that “we should question the axiom” of “the distinction of productive and unproductive labor”. theories of digital labour just like theories of reproductive labour are a contribution to this endeavour. sandoval ( ) provides a typology with dimensions that are relevant for a systematic analysis of labour in capitalism. these dimensions can be grouped into the categories of means of production, workforce, relations of production, production process, results of production, and the role of the state. table builds on sandoval’s typology. it uses a compressed version of her typology and adds to it the dimension of ideology that focuses on how justifications for the exploitation of specific forms of labour appear and are presented in public. the typology used in table focuses on economic, political, and cultural/ideological dimensions of labour. it summarises the discussion of this paper. dimen- sion aspect wage-labour slave-labour reproductive labour users’ unpaid digital labour on facebook ) economy means of production brain, body, tools brain, body, uterus and genitals (women slaves), tools brain, body, uterus (women), genitals, tools brain, body, computers, online platforms product of labour use-values and commodities owned by capitalist use-values and commodities owned by the slave-master, slaves (women slaves), workforce/labour- power (house slaves) commodity/use -value for capital: workforce and labour-power; use-value: affects, social relations, means of subsistence commodity/u se-value for capital: data commodity, attention; use-value: social relations, affects spaces of labour factory, office, social factory plantation (including contemporary plantations such as for-profit prisons) household, social factory internet labour- time legal division between labour time and leisure time, necessary labour-time (paid) and surplus labour-time (unpaid) slave-master controls all time and can turn all life-time of slaves into labour-time, all labour-time is unpaid, slave- master has the legal power to end a slave’s life-time by killing her/him a) all labour- time is unpaid; wages of the household’s wage labourers are used for buying the household’s means of consumption as means of production; b) paid reproductive workers are freelancers or work for the state or for- profit companies online time as unpaid labour-time ) politics wages and benefits wages and salary, legally guaranteed social benefits (unemployment insurance, health insurance, pension system) no wages/salary, unpaid labour; no legally guaranteed social benefits a) no wages/salary, unpaid labour, limited legally guaranteed social benefits (child benefits) b) low-paid labour (paid cleaners, babysitters and carers); no wages/salary , unpaid labour; no legally guaranteed social benefits legal aspects of labour double free labour: labour- contract and labour legislation, freedom of the person, “wage- slave” double unfree labour: no labour- contract and legislation, no human rights, no freedom of the person: slave’s body is owned by the slave-master unfree labour: no labour- contract and no labour legislation, family law, full or partial or no freedom of the person, corporate self- regulation (terms of use and privacy policies as labour contracts that provide no rights to users), data protection legislation political representati on of labour trade unions, labour parties abolition movement, anti- racist movement, feminist movement privacy advocacy movements, consumer protection groups, digital labour unions (?) labour struggles and demands strikes, sabotage, occupations, worker co- operatives; wage-demands, shortening of the working day, better working conditions slave rebellions; political freedom, equality protests; equality, wages for housework, equal pay for equal work, abolishment and socialisation of housework protests, ad blocking, platform co- operatives; participatory media fee, online advertising tax, public service internet, wages for use of facebook, google, etc. coercion and control of labour dull compulsion and structural violence of the labour-market physical violence, death threats, rape physical and sexual violence, social commitment (social violence) monopoly power, social disadvantage s (social violence) ) culture and ideology ideology of labour repression commodity fetishism, wage- labour fetishism racism sexism, inverse commodity fetishism inverse commodity fetishism table : characteristics of four types of labour the control and coercion of labour works with both political-economic and ideological means: political-economic means include physical violence, sexual violence, monopoly power, social violence, and the labour market’s structural violence. the discussion has shown that in the international division of digital labour, we can find all of these forms of violence. ideological repression takes on specific forms in the international division of digital labour. classical commodity fetishism does not allow workers and consumers to immediately experience all the forms of exploitation that are underlying the international division of digital labour. in the usage of social media, there is just like in housework an inverse form of commodity fetishism that veils the role of the commodity by foregrounding sociality. social media use does not feel like labour, but is unpaid labour that creates profits. users’ digital labour creates a big data commodity that digital media corporations sell to advertisers. the big data commodity is both gendered and racialised: algorithms are based on the assumption that white, male users in the west are bona fide consumers potentially buying many commodities and spending lots of money, whereas others are considered to be inferior consumers. “the categorisations of targeted ad groups “based on gender (and also other stereotypical features of class, race, ethnicity, and age) function as a kind of discrimination by assigning differential value to these different target markets” (shepherd, : ). classical ideology and algorithmic ideology create a paradoxical situation: in paid digital labour, white men dominate the employment structure and can obtain gendered and racialised wages of whiteness. people of colour (child labour and slaves in the congo, predominantly female assemblage workers in china, etc.) in contrast have the most highly exploited and most precarious jobs in the international division of labour. at the same time, white men are also the privileged objects of exploitation in online advertising and unpaid digital labour based on racist and sexist ideologies designed into algorithms. new racism justifies the exploitation, exclusion, domination, or annihilation of an out-group. one can draw a “distinction between a racism of extermination or elimination (an ‘exclusive’ racism) and a racism of oppression or exploitation (an ‘inclusive’ racism)” (balibar and wallerstein, : ). in the international division of digital labour, one can both find the exclusive and the exploitative type of racism. . conclusion this paper studied the connection of capitalism, patriarchy and racism in the digital age. capitalism is inherently patriarchal and racist in character and uses ideology and discrimination for deepening exploitation and domination. unpaid labour is not unproductive, but rather constitutes a super-exploited form of productive labour that generates surplus-value without wage. based on david roediger, one can argue that racism, nationalism, sexism and other ideologies can create economic, political and cultural surplus-“wages” or, better expressed, bourdieuian forms of economic, political and cultural capital for dominant groups. i took up kylie jarrett’s notion of the digital houseworker in order to show commonalities and differences between three forms of unpaid labour, namely slave-labour, reproductive labour, and facebook labour. these three forms of labour were also compared to wage-labour. combining the notion of the digital houseworker with eileen meehan’s concept of the gendered audience commodity allows to understand that facebook’s data commodity is both gendered and racialised, which shows that digital capitalism instrumentalises both sexism and patriarchy by building their logic into algorithms that determine the data commodity’s price by assuming that the price for one hour of labour should be discriminated based on gender and country. capitalism requires what rosa luxemburg ( / ) termed milieus of primitive accumulation in order to survive. forms of unpaid labour constitute such territories. housework has traditionally been such a milieu of exploitation that has sustained capitalism and wage-labour. housework means “superexploitation of non-wage labourers [. . .] upon which wage labour exploitation then is possible” (mies, : ) because it involves the “externalization, or ex-territorialization of costs which otherwise would have to be covered by the capitalists” ( ). housewifisation means the extension of super-exploitation and unpaid labour to realms beyond housework so that work or labour is transformed in such ways that it shows some parallels with the conditions of housework (mies, bennholdt- thomsen and von werlhof, ; mies, ; fuchs. ). housewifised labour “bears the characteristics of housework” (mies, bennholdt-thomsen and von werlhof. : ). facebook labour is just like unpaid internships and the precariat’s labour a form of housewifised labour. unpaid forms of labour are differently exploited than wage-labour in that it forms super-exploited milieus of primitive accumulation. how can unpaid labour today best be made visible in order to resist and overcome it? all labour is based on a specific degree of surplus-labour. in unwaged labour, surplus-labour time is extended to a maximum. a universal basic income guarantee that is funded out of capital taxation is a progressive demand that builds on and extends the demand of wages for housework. that the organic composition of labour is around . in an advanced country like the usa shows the role that unpaid labour-time plays in capitalism. socialist universal basic income does not aim at reforming or improving capitalism, but to provide humans autonomous space and time beyond capitalism so that foundations for thinking, living, producing, consuming and usage beyond the logic of capital can be strengthened. references allen tw ( ) 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/gmh. . received: june accepted: july key words: colonialism; racism; violence author for correspondence: stevan weine, e-mail: smweine@uic.edu © the author(s), . published by cambridge university press. this is an open access article, distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. justice for george floyd and a reckoning for global mental health stevan weine , brandon a. kohrt , pamela y. collins , janice cooper , roberto lewis-fernandez , samuel okpaku and milton l. wainberg department of psychiatry, college of medicine, university of illinois at chicago, chicago, il, usa; division of global mental health, department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences, george washington university, washington dc, usa; department of psychiatry and behavioral sciences & department of global health, university of washington, seattle, wa, usa; the carter center mental health program in liberia, monrovia, liberia; department of psychiatry, new york state psychiatric institute, columbia university, new york, ny, usa and center for health, culture, and society, vanderbilt university, nashville, tn, usa abstract in the wake of george floyd’s killing by police in minneapolis and the global response inspired by black lives matter, it is time for the field of global mental health to reexamine how we have acknowledged and addressed racism in our institutions, our research, and our mental health services. in solidarity with street level responses, this is an important opportun- ity to understand and collaboratively respond to public demand for systemic change. to respond effectively, it is vital to ( ) be aware of the colonial history that influences today’s practices, and move forward with anti-colonial and anti-racist actions; ( ) identify where and why diversity and representation are lacking in the global mental health workforce, then follow steps to combat these disparities; and ( ) work with communities and institutions to end both police violence and structural violence. in his eulogy for george floyd, the reverend al sharpton, stated, ‘god took the rejected stone and made him the cornerstone of a movement that’s going to change the whole wide world’ (c-span, ). this movement is not constrained by boundaries or borders. protests inspired by the movement for black lives began in minneapolis and spread across all states and in over countries. brazilians filled the streets following the recent killing of a -year-old black teenager by brazilian police (biller, ) echoing both the candelaria massacre of homeless children in brazil and the loss of tamir rice in cleveland. protests in london and amsterdam expressed both solidarity with the u.s. black lives matter and called attention to the lasting effects of britain’s and europe’s colonial histories (dejong, ). in australia, protests erupted for aboriginal lives matter (pilling, ). the former president of liberia, ellen johnson sirleaf, said this moment ‘has forced a self- recognition of everyone’s collective past’ (pilling, ). people are not only calling for an end to injustice, police brutality, race-based violence, and institutional racism, they are also calling for a broader understanding that locates the root cause of these problems in socio-economic and political systems that entrench structural power and privilege in the hands of a few and then blame the victim for their own oppression. the call for change has been felt in all corners of life, including homes, business, factories, government, sports, entertainment, medicine, and higher education. when it comes to thinking about the nexus of racism and violence, global mental health practitioners have not shied away from these topics, but nor has the field led the necessary efforts to catalyze change. the critics of global mental health have previously pointed out how our field has kept a distance from radical and critical theory which analyzes and confronts power relation- ships (bemme and d’souza, ; jadhav et al., ). these power differentials are used to point fingers at injustices in low- and middle-income countries (lmics), but not our own. americans have spent decades telling other countries how to handle public health crises, yet the u.s. response to the covid- pandemic has disastorously fallen short, especially for black, indigenous, and latinx communities, and those with economic and health dispar- ities whose infection and mortality rates are disproportionately higher than among whites. this supports a view of global mental health which is more than a set of actions in lmics and emphasizes improving and achieving health and mental health equity within and between all countries. the present moment provides an overdue opportunity for a reckoning for global mental health regarding racism and violence. we, as global mental health practitioners and research- ers affiliated with u.s. institutions, feel a sense of urgency to act. to do this, we have many guides, particularly among black psychiatrists who have and con- tinue to lead the call for racial equity in the united states and abroad. the late psychiatrist dr https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /gmh. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/gmh https://doi.org/ . /gmh. . https://doi.org/ . /gmh. . mailto:smweine@uic.edu http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - x https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /gmh. . https://www.cambridge.org/core carl bell, led many crusades for his african american patients and community and against the racism that degraded their health, mental health and well-being. he focused on prevention and examined the root causes of mental health disparities by working directly with children and young people (bell, ). he would have wanted us to concentrate on this historic moment, drawing from it all possible facts and meanings, overt and hidden, in order to strengthen our capacities to combat racism and to prevent vio- lence and mental illness. nearly years ago, dr chester pierce, the late emeritus pro- fessor of psychiatry at harvard, and the originator of the concept of ‘microagressions,’ achieved a longstanding goal to convene people of african descent living across the world at a summit focused on the complex drivers of mental health for black people (pierce, ). dr pierce recognized the importance of under- standing shared and divergent experiences as a route to innovative solutions. his legacy and committment are continued by black psychiatrists and allied advocates today ( rd african diaspora global mental health conference, ). global mental health’s colonial history just as understanding the history of slavery, the jim crow era, and other political and structural exclusions of black america is vital to responding to the current moment, we in global mental health must know the legacy that has shaped what we are doing – and not doing – around the world. global health is rooted in tropical medicine, which was used to support the british empire and other western powers, and subsequent economic expansions and political control into the twenty-first century (packard, ). throughout five centuries of colonialism, there was no short- age in global health of disparaging commentaries on the beha- viors and customs of colonized populations – as pointed out by frederick hickling ( ), who championed anti-colonial psych- iatry in his native jamaica. throughout the colonial era, most non-western groups were considered insufficiently evolved to have the privilege of suffering from mental illness (littlewood and dein, ). anthropologists and psychiatrists extolled the idea of ‘cognitive primitivism’, which included a lack of mental development to allow the emotional suffering of mental illness (bock and leavitt, ). the british anthropologist charles seligman, at the end of the s, characterized communities in the south pacific as free from psychotic illness until the civilizing effects of colonialism (seligman, ). continuing for most of the twentieth century, western institu- tions supported research on populations in lmics, often at the nexus of psychiatry and anthropology, but there was a glaring void in support and investment in mental health care and services research (kohrt et al., b). it was acceptable to observe, but the moral imperative to engage, dialogue, and support health systems and social change was mostly absent, with notable exceptions (sartorius and harding, ) that laid the groundwork for initia- tives today that are working towards global access to mental health care (world health organization, ). global mental health research has progressed significantly from its colonial roots to a global partnership model. most global mental health researchers share an integrationist perspective, rec- ognizing both the universality in mental disorders across cultures as well as meaningful cross-cultural variability (sweetland et al., ). however, even though global mental health research is grounded in the social justice and human rights perspective that all individuals have the right to mental healthcare and the need to decrease mental health disparities, we are far from eradi- cating social injustices. despite significant progress, especially that of indigenous researchers, the global mental health movement itself is not immune from longstanding national and global his- tories of institutionalized racism, and this has not been suffi- ciently acknowledged. diversity in the global mental health workforce attempting to chart a new course, the past two decades have wit- nessed the development of a global mental health workforce that includes practitioners, policy makers, researchers, and people with lived experience of mental illness. it is not surprising that it took advocates originally from the global south, along with allies in high-income countries, to eloquently and definitively call for glo- bal mental health to be a field of action to bring equity in care and research (lancet global mental health group et al., ). as we enter the third decade of the twenty-first century, it is important to reflect upon how far the workforce has come and where we still need to go. foundations, multilateral organizations, and government pro- grams such as grand challenges canada, u.k.’s department for international development, the wellcome trust, and the world bank have shown commitment to promoting the careers and sup- porting research of people in and from lmics. in the united states, the first incarnation of a dedicated global mental health research portfolio at the national institute of mental health – the office for research on disparities & global mental health – highlighted research workforce development to address both national and global mental health disparities (collins and pringle, a). the first decade of nimh funding in global men- tal health focused on partnerships for research and research cap- acity building in lmics (collins and pringle, a). a flagship initiative was the development of collaborative research hubs in lmics (nimh, a) to grow the workforce and also engage policymakers, practitioners, and persons with lived experience (pringle et al., ). these were later expanded to research among indigenous communities in the united states (nimh, b). task-sharing and task-shifting initiatives have led to the peo- ple who deliver services being from the same communities they serve. however, this has leaned heavily upon the labor of volun- teer or low-paid community health workers, the vast majority of whom are women (singla et al., ) and many of whom are racial, ethnic, or religious minorities in their own countries. however, at the professional-health level, higher positions con- tinue to be dominated by men from elite groups – just as in the u.s. health and research fields. globally, ethnic and racial minor- ities and members of low-caste groups are often excluded from upper-level medical training and positions. at the global level, women are underrepresented in health research leadership positions, and they are less likely to receive capacity-building opportunities for career development (crawford et al., ; doyal, ). this leads to a bias with the majority of studies published by men from a male perspective (gayet-ageron et al., ). when women are equally involved in research, this leads to greater impact of research on health out- comes. equal involvement of female researchers in global health leadership has been associated with reduced neonatal deaths (bhalotra and clots-figueras, ), improved higher education among adolescent girls (beaman et al., ), and greater support stevan weine et al. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /gmh. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /gmh. . https://www.cambridge.org/core for the involvement of women in income-generating activities (beath et al., ). similar analyses are needed to examine the public mental health impacts when leadership is inclusive across ethnicity, nationality, persons with disabilities, persons with stigmatized health conditions, and other marginalized groups. almost no attention has been given in global health to the mental health of lbgtq+ individuals, despite the burden of social, economic, and political exclusion faced by these populations. police violence and structural violence george floyd’s killing by the minneapolis police, and many other named and unnamed victims, are evidence that policing in the united states is broken. unfortunately, some of the problems that we see in the united states are also seen in other countries, including lmics. these problems are: ( ) lack of mutual trust between local communities and the police; ( ) over-securitization of the relationship between the government and local communi- ties; ( ) over-militarization of police tactics and equipment; ( ) lack of adequate investments in local services, whether social, health, mental health, employment, youth, or education, that can help; and ( ) lack of involvement of civil society partners. by virtue of their lack of affiliation with government, community- based organizations can have the trust of and access to individuals and local communities affected by violence in ways that govern- ment officials do not. whereas there has been an expansion of psychosocial services and initiatives such as world health organization mental health gap action programme (mhgap) in over countries, engage- ment with police for mental health has received staggeringly scant attention. a low priority has also been placed on the provi- sion of mental health services in prisons in lmics despite the availability of promising models for how mental health profes- sionals can engage with police, who in lmics are often the first responders for mental health crises (jack et al., ). one model to address this is crisis intervention team (cit) training in which law enforcement, mental health workers, and service users are trained to work together (compton et al., ). proof-of-concept testing in liberia has shown that a -hour cit curriculum and ongoing collaboration between law enforcement and mental health is feasible and beneficial (kohrt et al., c; boazak et al., , ). not only do attitudes change, but suicide attempts in police custody and experiences of violence between police and persons with mental illness are decreased. crucial to this approach is local ownership of the cur- riculum and implementation through the national police program and a local service user organization. moreover, although training law enforcement and supporting collaboration is important, we should heed the call that law enforcement officers should not be first line response for mental health crises. instead, new cadres of workers should be established in community health systems that specialize in managing risk and facilitating access to care. this type of program has the potential to channel the energy in the streets by providing concrete training and systems changes that not only increase the safety and wellbeing of people with mental illness and other citizens, but also of law enforcement. more broadly, there are several important gaps in global men- tal health’s approach to violence. global mental health has not embraced violence prevention like the public health field, which has a growing body of violence prevention theory, evidence, and practice models that are framed as injury prevention. global mental health has not sufficiently focused on the historic and cur- rent role that racism has played in driving violence, nor embraced critical theory perspectives for challenging institutional racism. global mental health has not comprehensively integrated the con- cept of structural violence (kohrt and mendenhall, a), defined as the systematic exclusion of a group from the resources needed to develop their full human potential. far too often, mar- ginalized populations confront simultaneous forms of discrimin- ation – race, caste, religion, economic, and gender – necessitating approaches that will mitigate multiple social drivers of mental ill- nesses. lastly, global mental health has not sufficiently focused on ideologically motivated violence or targeted violence (violence where a known or knowable attacker selects a specific target prior to attack) and hate crimes. examples of whole-of-society wraparound approaches to violence in global mental health can be found in derrick silove’s adapt model ( ) for post- conflict societies as well as the work of mike wessells ( ) and theresa betancourt ( ) on rehabilitating child soldiers. recent efforts in preventing gender-based violence in the global context should also be a role model (torres-rueda et al., ). similarly, hiv researchers have increasingly focused on the impact of violence on hiv prevention and care, including especially gender-based violence hiv and intimate partner vio- lence (maman et al., ; meskele et al., ; rwafa et al., ). what should be done? to address these concerns, much work lies ahead. here are some starting points. identify and commit to decolonizing practices we in global mental health, especially those of us affiliated with u.s. institutions, need to reckon with the institutional and polit- ical history of our approaches and identify what we will do to sup- port systems change. education and training in global mental health need to start with a decolonizing approach (sweetland et al., ). we need to emphasize reciprocal exchanges where lmic collaborators have opportunities to train and advance careers, as exemplified in the nih fogarty international center initiatives and a recent nimh concept for supporting innovative new scientists in lmics (rausch, ), and to rethink brief glo- bal health site visit programs. also, global mental health training programs should seek out activists and practitioners who are tack- ling u.s. disparities and build bridges between disparities focused work in the united states and in lmics (collins and saxena, b). we need to also promote the integration of cultural com- petence and structural competence into global mental health, and promote cultural humility. promote a more diverse mental health workforce additional resources are needed to expand the foundation of pro- grams such as the nimh center for global mental health and for funding mechanisms to support collaborative global mental health research and research training. similar initiatives are needed from a practitioner perspective to explore how more of the mid-level and upper-level health practitioners can be more representative in terms of gender, ethnicity, caste, geography, and other characteristics. one key to this is acknowledging that for stigmatized and marginalized populations, entering psychiatry global mental health https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /gmh. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /gmh. . https://www.cambridge.org/core – probably the most stigmatized field of medicine – is not often a logical pathway. more open dialogue and solutions are needed to combat the intersectional stigma about being from a minority group in a marginalized field of medicine. oppose police violence and structural violence more initiatives are needed to support the engagement of mental health professionals, law enforcement, and communities on a var- iety of mental health and public safety issues, including people with serious mental illness, child protection, gender-based vio- lence, immigration status, and the mental health needs of law enforcement officers. they can collaborate on improving strat- egies including: ( ) engaging and listening to the communities whose involvement in and support for programs are critical to their success; ( ) developing community policing; and ( ) facili- tating multi-actor and multi-sector involvement, including by cre- ating and supporting community-level violence prevention and intervention teams. police practices must be monitored for human rights abuses to ensure the protection of persons with untreated mental illnesses--who are times more likely to be killed by law enforcement compared to other civilians (treatment advocacy center, ). for global mental health researchers and practitioners, this also means seeking out institu- tions and funders that directly address violence, such as the u.s. institute of peace and the national institute of justice. black lives matter and worldwide street protests have shown that regarding racism, colonialism, and police violence, silence and inaction are unacceptable. global mental health is founded on the principle of equity. nowadays, we see how important it is for global mental health’s commitment to equity to be manifest in anti-colonial, anti-racist, pro-inclusiveness, and anti-police vio- lence actions for all counties. references rd african diaspora global mental health conference ( ) boston university school of medicine: psychiatry, october. available at http://www.mghglobalpsychiatry.org/chesterpierce.php. beaman l, duflo e, pande r and topalova p ( ) female leadership raises aspirations and educational attainment for girls: a 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https://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/key-issues/criminalization-of-mental-illness/ -people-with-untreated-mental-illness- -times-more-likely-to-be-killed-by-law-enforcement- https://www.treatmentadvocacycenter.org/key-issues/criminalization-of-mental-illness/ -people-with-untreated-mental-illness- -times-more-likely-to-be-killed-by-law-enforcement- https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/ / https://apps.who.int/iris/handle/ / https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /gmh. . https://www.cambridge.org/core 	justice for george floyd and a reckoning for global mental health 	global mental health's colonial history 	diversity in the global mental health workforce 	police violence and structural violence 	what should be done? 	identify and commit to decolonizing practices 	promote a more diverse mental health workforce 	oppose police violence and structural violence 	references s .. black lives matter: evidence that police- caused deaths predict protest activity vanessa williamson, kris-stella trump, and katherine levine einstein since , protests opposing police violence against black people have occurred across a number of american cities under the banner of “black lives matter.” we develop a new dataset of black lives matter protests that took place in – and explore the contexts in which they emerged. we find that black lives matter protests are more likely to occur in localities where more black people have previously been killed by police. we discuss the implications of our findings in light of the literature on the development of social movements and recent scholarship on the carceral state’s impact on political engagement. w hile the movement is now closely associated with opposition to police brutality, the phrase “black lives matter” originated in response to the july acquittal of a civilian, george zimmerman, in the shooting death of the unarmed teenager, trayvon martin. over the following months and years, black lives matter activists played a central role in organizing protests that drew attention to deaths of black people at the hands of police, to the broader issue of police violence and over- policing, and to other persistent racial disparities in economic, social and political power. groups associated with black lives matter have advocated for a wide variety of policy changes—including body cameras, in- dependent special prosecutors, and greater transparency in policing —and have proven to be a salient political force, drawing enormous attention from all sides of the political spectrum at the local and national levels. by calling attention to police brutality against black people, this new wave of activism has spurred scholars to highlight a failure in political science to fully explore the consequences of state repression in the united states. while recent studies have begun to examine the political consequences of the american carceral state, we have relatively little evidence on when and why these conditions *data replication sets are available in harvard dataverse at: https://doi.org/ . /dvn/l gsk vanessa williamson is a fellow in governance studies at the brookings institution (vwilliamson@brookings.edu). she is the author of read my lips: why americans are proud to pay taxes (princeton university press, ) and, with theda skocpol, of the tea party and the remaking of republican conservatism. her research on the politics of redistribution and attitudes towards taxation has been published in perspectives on politics and presidential studies quarterly. kris-stella trump is program director at the social science research council (trump@ssrc.org). she leads the anxieties of democracy program, which encourages research on whether the institutions of established democracies can capably address large problems in the public interest. her research on reactions to income inequality and attitudes towards the welfare state has been published in journals including the british journal of political science and the journal of politics. katherine levine einstein is assistant professor of political science at boston university (kleinst@bu.edu). she is the author, with jennifer hochschild, of do facts matter? information and misinformation in democratic politics. her work on local politics, american public policy, and racial/ethnic politics has been published in the american journal of political science; the british journal of political science; political behavior; publius: the journal of federalism; presidential studies quarterly; and the urban affairs review. the authors thank ariel white for thoughtful feedback, and curtlyn kramer and benjamin thesing for their outstanding research assistance. a previous version of this manuscript was presented at the annual meeting of the midwest political science association. perspectives on politics doi: . /s © american political science association special section articles https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://doi.org/ . /dvn/l gsk mailto:vwilliamson@brookings.edu mailto:trump@ssrc.org mailto:kleinst@bu.edu http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s &domain=pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core generate protest activity such as that engaged in by black lives matter (blm) activists. moreover, though scholars have done crucial work to situate the movement histori- cally and philosophically, empirical research on the scope and impact of blm has focused primarily on the online networks within and around the movement. we extend the early empirical literature on blm by assessing the contexts in which physical-world protests occurred. we combine a novel dataset of blm protests in the united states with political and demographic data to assess where these protests emerged, with a particular focus on the extent to which police-caused deaths spatially predict protest activity. our goals for this study are twofold. first, we offer new descriptive evidence on the geographic spread of these politically significant protests. from august to august , at least blm protests occurred in states and localities; % of all u.s. cities with more than , inhabitants saw at least one blm protest in this time period. our blm protest dataset is available as part of the replication materials for this paper, available in the supplemental materials, and we hope it will be a useful tool for future research. second, we explore the pattern of blm protests. we focus especially on recent scholarly discussions of how the state security apparatus affects political activity in the united states, but also draw on classic theories regarding the emergence of political protest. we start by confirming that the frequency of blm protests is predicted by variables specified in well-established theories of protest emergence. in particular, both resource mobilization and political opportu- nity structure variables predict blm protest frequency. we also find, however, that blm protests are more common in locations where police have previously killed more black people per capita. this finding is consistent with predictions drawn from an older school of social movement analysis that suggested that the level of protest behavior observed in a community would respond to the level of grievance a community was facing. we consider this finding in the context of the ongoing scholarly debate about how carceral contact affects political participation. our results are in keeping with recent results suggesting that direct carceral contact reduces political engagement, but indirect, proximate carceral contact can spur mobilization. the carceral state, political participation, and the black lives matter movement in the united states, black people experience dispropor- tionate interactions with the criminal justice system and the carceral state. despite its formal adherence to the principle of colorblindness, the contemporary u.s. criminal justice system has been described as a “system of racial control.” this control is not merely legal, it is political. major expansions of the criminal justice system have their roots in campaigns to reverse the political gains made by black americans in the reconstruction and civil rights eras. criminal justice in america is an example of a policy arena in which “losers in a conflict”—in this case, opponents of civil rights for black americans—could “regain command of the agenda.” at the same time, state-sanctioned violence has been a major organizing issue for black americans for centuries. the development of policing and incarceration policies in the united states is not a simple story about the protection of lives and property; it is a policy arena that has served to reinforce racial hierarchy and resist movements towards racial equality. given this history, it is important to assess how the criminal justice system plays into the distribution and exercise of political power in contemporary america. the most obvious way in which the criminal justice system limits political engagement is felon disenfranchisement, which affects approximately . % of the u.s. voting age population, including . % of the black voting age population. but this is far from the only way in which contact with the criminal justice system might reduce political activity. weaver and lerman have found that even comparatively low-level interactions with the carceral state—such as questioning and arrest without conviction – reduce individuals’ political participation. if policies can “make citizens,” interactions with government can also provide deeply disempowering lessons about how and for whom democracy works. as weaver and lerman note, “carceral contact is not randomly distributed, but is spatially and racially concen- trated.” high rates of incarceration in a neighborhood reduce political participation by fraying social ties and reducing economic resources. in addition, entire com- munities subject to heavy policing may experience reduced trust in government. lerman and weaver find correlative evidence of a decline in calls in places experiencing high rates of invasive policing. other research, however, suggests that proximal contact with the criminal justice system—i.e., knowing individuals who have interacted with the carceral state but not having had such interactions oneself—might actually be mobilizing. in this paper, we contribute to the literature on the carceral state and political participation by examining the association between the deaths of black people at the hands of police officers and protest action about that grievance. our work represents an expansion of previous research, which has often relied on survey indices of individual political behaviors or attitudes, or on datasets of individual civic activities not directly related to policing. our dependent variable, protest frequency, provides a locality-level perspective on the political correlates of the carceral state. this observational data allows us to explore political expression where lethal police violence has occurred. analyzing protest activity at the level of locality has implications for our theoretical expectations. on the one june | vol. /no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core hand, the localities we look at are large enough that much of their population is relatively farther removed from the individual- and community-level social and economic consequences of overpolicing. this distance could make the collective action of protest easier, since it implies relatively less exposure to the demobilizing effects of direct carceral contact. on the other hand, being farther removed from the direct experience of grievance could also result in less motivation to participate. but there are good reasons to imagine that political responsiveness to police killings might extend beyond familial or neighbor- hood boundaries. first, the black community shares a historically strong sense of “linked fate,” and growing class divides have not weakened the cross-class commitment to racial justice. this strong sense of in-group identification can increase reputational and expressive benefits to potential protest participation. additionally, racial bias in polic- ing is an issue that appears to transcend class boundaries. among black americans, education correlates with an increased propensity to see police profiling as pervasive, and an increased likelihood of reporting having experi- enced police profiling personally. members of the black middle class are also especially skeptical of the notion that black people receive equal treatment in the justice system. to the extent that the killing of black people by police is perceived as one example of a broader array of biases in the criminal justice system—a point we return to in the discussion section—it would be reasonable to expect the black lives matter mobilization to cross class divisions among black people, and therefore to reach well beyond the lower-income neighborhoods most subject to overpolicing. in addition, mobile technology may have increased the efficacy of protest by helping marginalized groups to “circulate their own narratives without relying on main- stream news outlets,” and to “socialize” conflicts with police by providing clear empirical evidence of the violation. this capacity may be of critical value when protestors come from groups that tend to receive less sympathetic media coverage and whose testimony may be seen as suspect by the broader public. moreover, police killings are concrete and observable events carried out by a specific state actor. these factors may facilitate the process of blame attribution, setting police killings apart from more diffuse social problems (such as poverty, inequality, or lack of mobility). for instance, muller and schrage show that growth in state incarceration rates is linked with declining public trust in the courts. finally, it may be that while carceral contact might reduce individuals’ trust in political institutions and “insider” forms of political activity, it might also encourage forms of political expression, like street protest, that are seen as anti-establishment. the burgeoning literature on the impact of the carceral state on political participation has, to date, focused primarily on “insider” strategies, such as voting or running for office, rather than “out- sider” strategies, like public protest, that are the political strategies of the disempowered. this focus may over- look the most likely forms of political participation if heavily policed communities, discouraged from pursu- ing insider strategies, find other channels to voice their dissatisfaction. on the other hand, a pattern of over-policing might create the expectation among potential protestors that such protests would be met, not with accommodation of their demands, but with violent state repression. moreover, if police officers are perceived as able to violate local citizens’ rights with impunity, potential protestors might also doubt that state violence against protestors would draw public attention and sympathy, a key com- ponent of an effective protest strategy. if we find that localities with a history of frequent police-caused deaths of black people were more prone to protest under the banner black lives matter, the implications are significant. if carceral contact is always demobilizing, and if criminal justice policies serve to maintain existing power hierarchies, the result is a self- reinforcing cycle of disempowerment. if, on the other hand, localities can under certain conditions respond to overpolicing with political mobilization, that cycle can be interrupted. however, if those directly impacted by the carceral state come to be represented in the political arena by geographically proximate others—whose lived experi- ences and policy priorities may be quite different—the result remains a substantial and deeply problematic distortion in representation. in a time when the coercive powers of the state are expanding in the domestic arena, these questions are critical ones. resource mobilization and political opportunity structure political and social discontent only occasionally results in public protest, in part because mass protest faces a sub- stantial collective action problem. there is a rich tradi- tion of research in the social sciences that seeks to identify the contexts in which larger, more frequent, and more organized protests occur. in examining the potential relationship between police violence and blm protests, we must also account for the economic, social, and political materials and tools available to protestors and potential protestors. here we discuss this robust literature and how we apply it to our analysis. while those groups with the fewest resources are hampered in their ability to engage in public contesta- tion, those with the most resources may have less need to resort to such methods; for this reason, the impact of resource mobilization on protest is sometimes described as curvilinear. it is for those in the middle that protest activity perspectives on politics special section articles | black lives matter https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core is most likely. this scholarship leads us to expect a curvilinear relationship between the resources available to the black community and the intensity of protest. in addition to income, verba, schlozman, and brady show that education is a critical political resource. counter- intuitively, this insight appears to hold for some more extreme political expression also; in the context of the watts riots in los angeles, sears and mcconahay find that among the residents of the protesting areas, those with more education were more likely to participate in the riots. the scholarship on the importance of resources on the individual level thus leads us to expect that higher percentages of middle-class black people and college- educated populations will be associated with larger or more frequent protests. as political process theory would suggest, we need to take account of political opportunities and mobilizing structures as well as the material resources available to potential protestors. from this perspective, we would expect protests to be more frequent in cities where local politicians are more concerned about police brutality, or about the concerns of the black community more generally. in an ideal world, we would be able to glean the attitudes of local political elites and policing and police violence in american cities prior to the start of the black lives matter movement. unfortunately, to the best of our knowledge, this kind of elite survey does not exist. we are therefore left with imperfect proxies for attention to the concerns of black constituents. first, we include in our analysis an indicator of whether a city has a black mayor. in addition, we expect that local partisan conditions may predict the frequency of black lives matter protests. black ameri- cans strongly and increasingly identify with the demo- cratic party, so we include city partisanship as a control, expecting more protests in democratic cities (based on presidential election vote tallies) and in cities with democratic mayors. while local partisan divisions are often not as sharp as those at the national level, the left- right divide that partitions national politics persists locally, suggesting that local political elite party affili- ation should similarly correlate with political opportunity for blm protestors. moreover, there is some evidence that blm leaders deliberately targeted democratic presidential candidates for protests because of their perceived friendliness to the movement’s aims. in an appearance on the news program democracy now, danausia yancey, a prominent orga- nizer of black lives matter boston, offered this explana- tion for targeting democratic candidates: “it’s actually a practice called ‘power mapping’. . . where you actually map who’s closest to you on the issue and go to those folks first in order to force them to articulate their stance and then hold them accountable. so this movement is very strategic, and that’s what we’ve been doing.” to the extent yancey describes a broader strategy within the black lives matter movement, we would expect higher levels of protest in more strongly democratic localities. another relevant aspect of the local political opportu- nity structure is the historical strength of local black political institutions and community organizations. places where black americans have a history of political contestation may favor greater protest activity. these locations are more likely to have institutions and networks in place that can overcome collective action problems, as well as a local population more familiar with protest tactics and scripts. we consider the tricky question of how to operationalize such a variable later. in our analyses that follow, we include indicators for economic resources and political opportunity struc- tures, in part to confirm whether patterns of blm protests are successfully predicted by such variables, and in part to improve interpretation of any relation- ship that we find between police killings and protest activity. of course, no quantitative operationalization of ideas as complex and nuanced as political resources or social ties will be comprehensive. and since these data are observational, there are several limitations to our approach, even with these controls in place. we are unable to establish causality, and the locality-level nature of our measurements also rules out an explora- tion of detailed individual-level mechanisms that may explain patterns of behavior that we uncover. nonethe- less, we believe that this is a useful first step toward better understanding the relationship between police violence and protest activity. in the next section, we discuss our data and its promises and limitations in more detail. data to examine the contexts in which black lives matter protests occurred, we developed a novel dataset of protests, including their size and location. to perform the following analyses, we matched this dataset with demographic and political data. our dataset of black lives matter protests captures blm protests in the year after the death of michael brown, an unarmed man killed by a police officer in ferguson, missouri, on august , . our data was developed from a dataset built by alisa robinson, graduate of the political science department at the university of chicago, and made available by a creative commons license. we amended her data by adding additional protests, correcting some errors, and removing all protests that were not in-person public gatherings held in the united states. for each protest we have a date, geocoded location, and, wherever possible, an estimate of the number of protest participants. the dataset includes protests in states and localities. because protest size estimates are inherently june | vol. /no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core error prone, all of our analyses below rely on a dichotomous measure of whether or not a protest occurred. figure reviews the frequency of protests during the protest year. the largest peaks are associated with the death of michael brown in ferguson, mo (august ), the non-indictment of officer darren wilson in that case (november ), and the non-indictment of officer daniel pantaleo in the chokehold death of eric garner (december ). in the analysis that follows, we bring together our protest data with contextual data about the localities in which protests took place. because in-person protest activity by definition requires large groups of people to congregate, we focus our analysis on the , localities in the united states with a population over , . most research exploring the relationship between the carceral state and political participation has used individual- or neighborhood-level metrics as dependent variables. here we use a city-level metric of protest frequency. though we have more granular data regarding the location of protests and of police-caused deaths, we aggregate our data here to the level of fips locality. while some blm protests were held at the location of a police-caused death (such as at the site of michael brown’s death in ferguson, mo), we do not think that, within a locality, there would be a theoretical reason to expect a strong systematic relationship between the location of a police-caused death and the location of protest. the precise location of the protests in our dataset often reflect logistical or symbolic considerations—such as in front of city hall, or in a large park. by contrast, localities map relatively well onto towns and other similarly politically and socially meaningful geographic areas from which one might expect protestors to be drawn. it may be that events in some localities have spillover effects in neighboring localities, especially where several fips codes map on to one larger city with its surrounding suburbs. as a result, our estimates of the number of applicable police killings in a city, as well as our estimates of the available protest population may be underestimates in some cases. however, the fips locality remains the best spatial unit for which we can obtain control variables. in addition, insofar as the data cannot capture spillover effects that one death may cause in nearby localities, this would push against finding an effect, making our results more conservative. our locality-level measures of population, population density, percentage black, and black poverty levels are drawn from the american community survey’s -year estimates. summary statistics for our key variables can be found in table ; the replication materials also include a correlation matrix. in keeping with the resource mobiliza- tion literature that predicts a quadratic relationship between economic wellbeing and protest, we include both the black poverty rate and the square of the black poverty rate. we operationalize local education levels in two ways. first, we include a measure of the percentage of the population with at least a bachelor’s degree, based again on the american community survey’s -year estimate. second, because college students themselves often play an important role in protests, we include an estimate of the number of college students attending schools in each locality, drawing on the estimates produced in the integrated postsecondary education data system maintained by the national center for education statistics. we include several measures intended to assess the political opportunity structure of the localities. first, we include variables for mayoral race and mayoral party (expecting democratic and black mayors to preside over more blm protests). we also include a control for local democratic vote share, using presidential election results aggregated at the level of locality. in addition, we develop a measure intended to capture, as best as we can, the history of black political organizing in an area. we use a dataset of naacp chapters, – , developed by the university of washington’s mapping american social movements project. our measure is the number of years a locality had a local naacp branch during this early period of the organization’s activism. this variable is not intended to imply a leading role of the naacp in the development of the black lives matter, but rather to serve as an (imperfect) proxy for a tradition of black political activity that might be missed by measures of black population, mayoral race and the strength of the local democratic party. figure over-time frequency of black lives matter protests perspectives on politics special section articles | black lives matter https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core finally, we examine the key relationship of interest: the association between deaths caused by police and blm protests. there are no governmental databases of police- caused homicides; our data comes from the nonprofit databases, “killed by police” and “fatal encounters.” the two sites provide local news reports of each reported death. for further confirmation, we verified the two datasets against one another. these data are intended to capture one aspect of the state security apparatus; this is an aspect of the state that blm protests have explicitly targeted. we acknowledge that deaths caused by police may, but do not necessarily, correlate with other aspects of policing, such as arrest rates, stop-and-frisk rates, or excessive non-lethal violence. each of these aspects of the carceral state may well have an independent, and different, impact on political participation that we do not examine here. in addition, our data by definition and choice do not address the underlying determinants of police violence. we are interested in asking whether the constellation of social forces that manifest themselves in high rates of lethal police violence are associated with higher rates of protest against such violence. we limit our data on deaths caused by police to the dates between january , , the earliest date for which the data is available, and august , , the date of death of michael brown and the beginning of our protest observation period. during that time, at least people were killed by the police; we remove from this dataset deaths that were caused by vehicle collisions, leaving a total of , people killed by police, including black people. a total of victims were unarmed, including unarmed black people. protests and police-caused deaths table summarizes the data on police-caused deaths and black lives matter protests by locality. the table shows the total number of localities in our analysis, and breaks these localities down by the presence/absence of at least one documented black lives matter protest during the observation period. overall, from august to august , black lives matter protests occurred in % of u.s. cities with population over , . the rows in table subset the analysis to cities with various forms of experience of police-related deaths. black lives matter protests were significantly more common in cities that experienced at least one police-related death between january , and august , : protests occurred in % of cities without a death, but in % of cities with at least one death. the pattern is even more pronounced when we restrict our attention to black deaths ( % of cities with at least one black death experienced at least one protest) or unarmed black deaths ( % of cities with at least one unarmed black death experienced at least one protest). cities that experienced at least one unarmed death during the period of protest observation were also more likely to experience protests ( % of cities with at least one unarmed death during the period of observation experienced at least one protest). the pattern holds up when we restrict our attention to cities without any police-caused deaths of unarmed individuals during the protest observation period; these cities can be thought of as holding “solidarity” protests (a distinction we return to below). these results mirror the patterns in table ; detailed results are available in the online appendix. of course, cross-tabulations of raw data run the risk of spurious correlations; to give just one example, these data are not adjusted for population size or the percentage of residents who are black. in the following section, we examine the relationship between police-caused deaths and black lives matter protests more rigorously. correlates of protest frequency our main statistical results are presented in table , which looks at protest activity in the u.s. localities with a population over , . the outcome variable is the number of protests held over the year from august , to august , ; of these locations had at least one table summary statistics of key variables, localities with populations over , median mean maximum percent black % % % black poverty rate % % % percent ba % % % local college enrollment per capita % % % democratic vote share % % % police-caused deaths . police-caused deaths per , people . . black police-caused deaths . black police-caused deaths per , people . . blm protests . in two cases, the number of students registered at universities in a city exceeds the number of people registered as domiciled in the city. in those instances, local college enrollment per capita exceeds %. june | vol. /no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core black lives matter protest during this year. the outcome (number of blm protests) is modelled using a negative binomial distribution, as is appropriate for an event count. as a robustness check, we also test a logit model for whether any blm protests occurred and find similar results. all models in table include key background variables that we expect to correlate with protest activity. these variables are drawn primarily from the protest literature as described earlier. the first control variables are the size of the city, population density, and percentage black resi- dents. as described in the introduction, we anticipate that higher numbers and concentrations of residents, and in particular black residents, increase the pool of potential protestors from which the movement can recruit partic- ipants. we find that population size and percentage black are both positively linked to protest activity while pop- ulation density is negatively related to protest activity. all models in table also include variables that operation- alize the resource mobilization and opportunity structure theories of protest. as the resource mobilization theory would suggest, there is a quadratic relationship between protests and black poverty; protests are most frequent in the middle of the black poverty spectrum. protests are also more frequent in localities with a larger college-educated population and with a large population of current college students, consistent with the observation that individuals with more resources may be more likely to protest. turning to the opportunity structure approach to protests, we found that out of the four variables that we expected to be relevant (democratic vote share in presidential elections, mayoral partisanship, may- oral race, and early naacp activity), only one improves model fit and significantly predicts protest activity: democratic vote share. because we expected all four variables to be significant, we present model specifications with all four variables included (models – ) and with only democratic vote share included (models – ). with the benefit of hindsight, we present models – as the best fit with the data; the replication package has additional detail on model fit comparisons. in the replication package, we also test adding the three non-predictive variables one at a time and show that they still do not improve model fit. these null findings may suggest that more subtle political dynamics are swamped by partisanship, or they may simply be due to limitations of the variables with which we attempt to operationalize other aspects of the political opportunity structure. in the case of mayoral race, for example, there is a substantial underrepresenta- tion of black people in local politics; only cities in our sample have a black mayor. as discussed above, naacp history is also, at best, a coarse indicator of the history of black organizing in a locality. in models and in table , we add two measures of key interest to the model: police-caused deaths of black people, and police-caused deaths of people of any race. model shows that adding a measure of black police- caused deaths per capita to the regression does not change the point estimates or the significance of the other variables, and that black deaths per capita is itself a significant predictor of protest. in a city of , residents, holding all other variables at their means, going from no police-caused deaths of black people to one such death increased the likelihood of protest by about %. it is worth remembering however, that the likelihood of protest remained small—our model predicts that about one in ten cities of that size and demographic makeup would hold a protest at all. model expands the variable of police-caused deaths to deaths of victims of all races; here we find a smaller estimate and a positive but not significant relationship. this finding is consistent with the blm movement’s explicit focus on police brutality against black americans in particular. so far, our results show a correlation between police- caused deaths and blm protests that suggests that protest table cities tabulated by police-caused deaths (january , –august , ) and occurrence of blm protests (august , –august , ) share of cities with at least one protest total n of cities n of cities with no protests n of cities with at least one protest all cities with population . k . no deaths . at least one death . no black deaths . at least one black death . at least one unarmed black death . at least one unarmed death during observation year . note: based on all cities with population over , . perspectives on politics special section articles | black lives matter https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core table correlates of black lives matter protest frequency dependent variable: number of protests ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) ( ) population (log) . *** . *** . *** . *** . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) population density (log) – . ** – . ** – . ** – . * – . * – . * ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) percent black . *** . *** . *** . *** . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) black poverty rate . *** . *** . *** . *** . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) black poverty rate (squared) – . *** – . *** – . *** – . *** – . ** – . ** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) percent college-educated . *** . *** . *** . *** . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) college students (% of population) . *** . ** . ** . ** . ** . ** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) democratic vote share . *** . *** . *** . *** . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) black police-caused deaths (per , ) . *** . *** ( . ) ( . ) police-caused deaths (per , ) . . ( . ) ( . ) republican mayor . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) years of naacp activity . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) black mayor . . . ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) constant – . *** – . *** – . *** – . *** – . *** – . *** ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) ( . ) observations , , , , , , log likelihood – . – . – . – . – . – . theta . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) . *** ( . ) akaike inf. crit. , . , . , . , . , . , . notes: negative binomial regressions. observations: all u.s. localities with population over , *p;**p;***p, . j u n e | v o l. /n o . h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s. h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re. c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity, o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core activity is more common in places where the police kill more black people. this finding is in keeping with a grievance-based explanation of protest. however, as figure suggests, certain cities in this dataset are exceptional. for example, in baltimore and cleveland, massive protests responded to prominent local deaths of unarmed black individuals that occurred during the year of protests. it is theoretically possible that protests primarily emerged in response to prominent killings during the year in question. cities with overall higher rates of police killings are more likely to experience such a killing in any given year. this makes it possible that these results are driven by short-term responses to specific killings, rather than being more systematic responses to longer-term patterns of state repression. we therefore perform additional analyses in which we exclude cities where an unarmed person was killed by police during the year in question. by excluding these cities, we remove the possibility that our results are driven solely by protests that occurred in response to high-profile unarmed deaths during the protest year. protests that occurred in cities where no unarmed individuals were killed by police during the year in question, in contrast, can be thought of as “solidarity protests”; protests that occur to voice frustra- tion with a general pattern of events, rather than any one recent event in one’s immediate vicinity. we therefore ask whether such “solidarity protests” were more common in cities where, in the years leading up to the protest year, more people had been killed by police (refer to the online appendix for detailed results). we find that relationships that we saw in the full set of cities remain almost entirely unchanged. the coefficient measuring the relationship between black police-caused deaths per capita increases slightly in magnitude, and remains statistically significant. holding all other variables at their means, going from zero to one police-caused death of a black person in a city of , predicts a % increase in protest activity. the point estimate on all police-caused deaths per capita also increases, but this variable is not statistically significant. for more detailed results, refer to the table provided in the online appendix. we conclude that the correlation between deaths of black people at the hands of police and the frequency of black lives matter protests is not limited to the cities that experienced a surge of protest activity following a police-caused death of an unarmed person during the protest year. when grievances predict protest activity on july , , in front of his girlfriend and her four- year-old daughter, philando castile was shot and killed by a police officer during a traffic stop in falcon heights, minnesota. the incident rapidly became national news in large part because castile’s girlfriend, diamond reynolds, live-streamed the immediate aftermath of the shooting. asked later why she filmed the incident, ms. reynolds responded that she was afraid for herself and her daughter, and wanted to have independent evidence of the events; “i know that the people are not protected by the police,” she explained. nearly a year later, the officer who shot mr. castile was acquitted of all charges. the day after the verdict in minnesota, several hundred black lives matter activists held a rally in oakland, california. the “justice for philando castile” protest was nearly , miles from the st. paul suburb where mr. castile was killed. but for attendees, the incidents in minnesota felt close to home. one woman who spoke at the event had lost her son in an accident with the local highway patrol; another told of her son’s newfound decision to travel with his driver’s license on his dashboard, so that, if pulled over, he would not have to reach for his wallet. the rally was held in front of city hall, at what is informally known as “oscar grant plaza,” in memory of the young black man shot in by police in a nearby train station. it is the same site where the mother of alan blueford, killed by oakland police in , led a protest a few years earlier. in this paper, we demonstrate that the oakland protest—which occurred outside of the time frame we examine—is in keeping with the general trend of black lives matter protests; blm protests are more common in localities with a history of police killings of black people. we have examined the correlates of in-person black lives matter protests in u.s. cities with a population over , in the time period august , (the day of the shooting death of michael brown) and august , . our results broadly conform with resource mobilization, political opportunity structure, and grievance-based analyses of protest mobilization, and also contribute to a growing literature examining polit- ical engagement in conditions of high levels of policing and state violence. we find support for a resource mobilization theory of protest in the form of a curvilinear relationship between protest frequency and poverty among black americans. this result fits with previous research suggesting that protest is most common not among the most or least resourced, but among those in the middle. similarly, and also in line with resource mobilization theory, localities with a more educated population and a larger local college enrollment have more protests. we also find some support for a political opportunity structure approach to explaining protest activity: blm protests are more common in cities with a higher democratic vote share in presidential elections. we also tested other plausible measures of political opportunity structure, and found that a history of naacp organiza- tion, mayoral partisanship, and mayoral race do not predict blm protests once local partisanship is included in the model. perspectives on politics special section articles | black lives matter https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core finally, we find a relationship between local police- caused deaths of black people and the probability of protest. these findings echo a much older school of research into the origins of social movements that expected political grievances to predict protest activity. in its most modern forms, “grievance theory” suggests that, at least in some contexts and when resources and political opportunity are present, levels of deprivation or injustice can in fact predict levels of protest. that theorized relationship between grievance and protest is supported by our data. our results contribute to the developing literature on how the criminal justice system relates to political engagement. however, the interpretation of the correla- tions we identify here requires careful consideration. though a local history of police-caused deaths of black people predicts blm protest activity, we do not know that the variable we are measuring is precisely that which spurred protest. it is easy to imagine that police-caused deaths correlate with a broader array of police behaviors, including patterns of over-policing and police brutality, and that these other factors are the grievances that inspired protest. unfortunately, data on these more specific aspects of local policing are spotty at best. the highly localized nature of policing in the united states means that—like many facets of local politics and policy—there is enormous heterogeneity in the quality of data. while the obama administration made improving local police transparency an important part of its policy agenda, as of this writing, only law enforcement agencies had signed onto the administration’s police data initiative, which commits agencies to releasing at least three policing datasets to the public. in contrast, many localities take active steps to make it harder for the public (and researchers) to access data on their policing practices. these actions include mandating secrecy when settling civil suits for police misconduct and refusing to produce records. without equivalent data across the cities in our sample, we are unable to assess how specific policing practices may shape protest activity. in part because of the black lives matter move- ment, there is a resurgence of scholarly interest in patterns of policing coupled with greater propensity on the part of (at least some) police departments for transparency. these dual trends may, over time, allow for the testing of more specific hypotheses regarding the aspects of policing that provoke protest, among many other important topics about the nature of policing in the united states. with this data, we also cannot speak to the circum- stances in which police brutality may be more likely to occur. for example, police-caused deaths or police brutality likely correlate with other features of cities, such as residential segregation, poverty, or crime rates. in particular, there is good reason to believe that over-policing occurs in high-crime areas—that violence and punishment are related “forms of state failure, particularly with respect to african-americans.” when we include a variable for high local violent crime rates in our main model, we find a positive relationship between crime and blm protests; the addition of this variable does not change our primary results (details are available in the online appendix). the crime rate correlation—which we emphasize is tentative, given the poor quality of national crime data—is subject to multiple interpretations. first, it is possible that local violent crime increases frustration with the police for their failure to ensure local safety. following miller, it is also possible that violent crime rates are so closely related to police behaviors that this measure can in fact serve as a proxy for overpolicing. the institutional and structural origins of police brutality are a critical avenue for future research. directions for future research in this paper, we find that black lives matter protests were more common in localities where police had more frequently killed black people. this finding is consistent with the interpretation that while individuals may re- spond to direct carceral contact by withdrawing from public life, those proximate to police violence can and do respond with coordinated political action. we see several ways to build upon the contributions of our research. while our community-level data yield valuable insights, individual-level data and analyses of community organizations and political networks would help scholars better unpack the psychological and in- stitutional mechanisms at work. some ongoing research has attempted to harness social media geocoding to make such a connection. even more important, future research could take advantage of our systematic protest data to explore the consequences of this political mobilization, and to compare black lives matter protests to other protests against the carceral state. for instance, did blm protests spur local law enforcement agencies to move towards greater transparency or greater opacity? do police-caused deaths decline in areas with active blm mobilizations? an additional avenue for scholarly exploration is the extent to which the relationship presented here—between the state’s exercise of power and a popular mobilization in opposition—holds in other aspects of the state security and carceral system, such as federal immigration enforce- ment. we hope the data presented here serve as a resource for these and other continuing lines of research. there are important continuations of the data collec- tion we have begun. first, as with any observational data analysis, there are important limitations to our data and results. while we have attempted to be comprehensive in our search for black lives matter protests, there are undoubtedly protests we missed, including what could be june | vol. /no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core a substantial number of small protests that did not leave enough of a media footprint to appear in our dataset. additionally, though the federal government has recently moved to create an official database of police-caused deaths, we remain reliant on non-profit sources for the years of interest to our study, and those sources may also be incomplete. efforts are underway to create a comprehen- sive dataset of police-caused deaths over a longer time frame, which will have a much larger number of observations and would therefore allow for important sub-analyses, for instance of the relationship between blm protest and unarmed deaths of black people or protest in response to the prosecution or non-prosecution of the officers involved. our data collection and analysis provide a starting point for conducting future studies. while better understanding the emergence of the black lives matter movement is in and of itself an important exercise given the movement’s political and social salience, our results also help point towards a broader understanding of when protest activity might emerge in the context of state repression. in a presidential adminis- tration that many policy observers—including participants in the blm movement —have argued is characterized by increased state repression, we hope that our results will be useful not only to researchers but also to political actors who seek to contextualize and understand protest activity. the need for high quality scholarship on the political correlates and consequences of state repression in the united states remains great, and we hope to read other work that goes beyond our movement case study to help us fully understand how the state’s coercive power affects our democracy. notes throughout this work, we use the phrase “black lives matter” to refer to the entire movement, not just the online activism associated with the #blm hashtag or the specific organization, “black lives matter.” the terminology used to describe racial groups in the united states has long been contested (hochschild and powell ). a review of recent literature suggests that it is common to use “black”, “black,” and “african american” (e.g., weaver and lerman ; walker ). in this article we use black, and, following the u.s. census convention, we capitalize all racial groups; see also bobo and hutchings , , and tharps . see the platform of the movement for black lives, a document that frames their movement in the historical context of gender and class inequalities and provides a redistributive policy platform across issue areas; https://policy.m bl.org/platform/. see, for instance, the solutions proposed by campaign zero: http://www.joincampaignzero.org/solutions/ #solutionsoverview. soss and weaver . lebron and taylor . freelon, mcilwain, and clark ; jackson and welles ; bonilla and rosa ; olteanu, weber, and gatica-perez . western ; epp and maynard-moody . alexander , . wacquant . weaver , . giddings . the sentencing project . weaver and lerman , . see also white . but c.f. gerber et al. forthcoming. campbell . soss . lerman and weaver , . burch ; clear, rose, and ryder . lerman and weaver . walker . dawson . foster and matheson ; chong, rogers, and tillery ; gay hochschild and weaver . chong ; de weerd and klandermans . protest events themselves can also affect the mobili- zation and unity of the protestors’ larger community. latinos become more unified in their views on immigration, and were more likely to see immigration as an issue of primary importance, following the immigration protests; barreto et al. ; carey, branton, and martinez-ebers . interestingly, smaller protests have been shown to increase latinos’ sense of efficacy, while large protests had the opposite effect; see wallace, zepeda-millán, and jones-correa . weitzer and tuch . for a discussion of why middle-class black people may be more likely to be profiled, refer to – . brooks and jeon-slaughter kurgan et al. . freelon, mcilwain, and clark schattschneider . stanley et al. . simon and klandermans , . muller and schrage . maloney, jordan, and mclaughlin . there is historical evidence to suggest that protests attended by black people are more harshly policed. see davenport, soule, and armstrong . additionally, reynolds-stenson shows that police respond to protests making anti-police brutality claims more aggressively than other protests. chenoweth and stephan ; chong . andreas and price . piven and cloward . chong . perspectives on politics special section articles | black lives matter https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://policy.m bl.org/platform/ http://www.joincampaignzero.org/solutions/#solutionsoverview http://www.joincampaignzero.org/solutions/#solutionsoverview https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core dalton, van sickle, and weldon ; mccarthy and zald . meyer . verba, schlozman, and brady . sears and mcconahay . inferring the characteristics of protestors from the characteristics of locations where the protests occurred would constitute ecological inference with all its attendant problems. our argument here is not that we know who attends blm protests (unfortunately we have no data on individual characteristics of protesters). however, we do argue that in locations with larger numbers of educated and middle-class blacks, the protest movement has a larger pool of potential protestors who are available for mobilization. mcadam, doug. political process and the develop- ment of black insurgency, - . university of chicago press, . in , having greater representation by black aldermen increased the local propensity for protest; eisinger . for more on descriptive representation, see mansbridge ; gay . frymer . tausanovitch and warshaw ; einstein and kogan . democracynow . a wide array of social-scientific research suggests that these areas experience more political activity generally alongside protest activity. see for example tate and ; fitzgerald . among others, the dataset includes protests in response to the death of -year-old tamir rice, shot by police on a playground in cleveland, oh; walter scott, shot in the back after being pulled over for a broken tail light in north charleston, sc; and freddie gray, who died after suffering a spinal injury incurred while in the back of a police van in baltimore, md. it also includes protests that occurred when the police officers involved were not indicted in the death of eric garner, who died after being put in a choke hold by a police officer in new york city. in order to specifically focus on blm protests, as distinct from other forms of protest relating to black civil rights, we excluded protests that occurred in selma, al, relating to the anniversary of the selma to montgomery marches, and in charleston, nc, after june th, . we found additional protests via a systematic search of google news results during the protest year, as well as snowball searches where news articles referred to protests at other times or in other localities. though no dataset can be assured to be absolutely complete, we believe this to be a thorough and systematic assessment of protest activity during the period in question. the dataset in the replication materials (available in the supplemental materials) includes links to the original news articles used to verify each included protest. einstein and kogan . estrada and gregory . indeed, the division between the naacp and blm activists has been well documented and acknowledged by leaders of both groups/movements. one of the founders of the blm movement, patrisse cullors, said of the divide: “each generation has their own un- derstanding of what’s most important . . . . the hope is that groups like the naacp will see that we have to bridge the generational divide and the political divide”; vega . for instance, it may be that people are more likely to be killed by police in high-crime areas, but unless one posits a relationship between crime and protest independent of crime’s effect on policing, crime is not a control variable of interest in our analysis as we have defined it. additionally, the coefficient on a crime variable will have an ambiguous interpreta- tion due to the possibility that high-crime areas are subject to harsher policing practices that predict protest activity but are not captured in our measure of deaths at the hands of police. in the online appendix, we provide a regression in which we include this control variable for interested readers (the main results do not change). we also emphasize that in addition to these theoretical reasons for not using crime indicators in our main models, there are serious data concerns with national crime data. the fbi’s unified crime reports are the only nationally comparable dataset on crime. police departments provide these data to the fbi voluntarily and the fbi has taken minimal steps to ensure data quality, leading many scholars to question their value. see for example lynch and jarvis . forty-five deaths in the combined dataset could not be conclusively attributed to a census location, and are therefore omitted from analysis. in the main geographic analysis, we use localities with more than , residents. this reduces the number of police-caused deaths in our final dataset: , of , deaths occurred in these localities. the data violate the more restrictive assumptions of the poisson model. we also tested whether the data call for a zero-inflated negative binomial, due to the relatively high number of cities with zero protests. goodness-of-fit tests indicated that zero-inflated models did not improve model fit; by occam’s razor we choose the negative binomial model. refer to the replication package in the supplemental materials for more detail on model selection. for concision, these similar results are not presented here but these models are included in the replication package in the supplemental materials. june | vol. /no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core the data for unarmed black deaths (with localities), is too sparse for reliable analysis. when we tested this variable while anticipating that the results may be unreliable, the point estimate for this variable was about twice as large as the estimate for all 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( ). de/politisering van de waarheid: complottheorieën, alternatieve feiten en nepnieuws in het tijdperk van de postwaarheid. sociologie, ( ), - . https://doi.org/ . /soc . .hara general rights it is not permitted to download or to forward/distribute the text or part of it without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), other than for strictly personal, individual use, unless the work is under an open content license (like creative commons). disclaimer/complaints regulations if you believe that digital publication of certain material infringes any of your rights or (privacy) interests, please let the library know, stating your reasons. in case of a legitimate complaint, the library will make the material inaccessible and/or remove it from the website. please ask the library: https://uba.uva.nl/en/contact, or a letter to: library of the university of amsterdam, secretariat, singel , wp amsterdam, the netherlands. you will be contacted as soon as possible. download date: apr https://doi.org/ . /soc . .hara https://dare.uva.nl/personal/pure/en/publications/depolitisering-van-de-waarheid(eb d- - - c - a c df).html https://doi.org/ . /soc . .hara de/politisering van de waarheid complottheorieën, alternatieve feiten en nepnieuws in het tijdperk van de postwaarheid jaron harambam soc １３ (１): ７３–９２ doi: １０.５１１７/soc２０１７.１.hara abstract the truth dominates many public discussions today. conventional truths from established epistemic authorities about all sorts of issues, from climate change to terrorist attacks, are increasingly challenged by ordinary citizens and presidents alike. many have therefore proclaimed that we have entered a post-truth era: a world in which objective facts are no longer relevant. media and politics speak in alarmist discourse about how fake news, conspiracy theories and alternative facts threaten democratic societies by destabilizing the truth – a clear sign of a moral panic. in this essay, i firstly explore what sociological changes have led to (so much commotion about) the alleged demise of the truth. in contrast to the idea that we have moved beyond it, i argue that we are amidst public battles about the truth: at stake is who gets to decide over that and why. i then discuss and criticize the dominant counter reaction (re-establishing the idea of one objective and irrefutable truth), which i see as an unsuccessful de-politisation strategy. basing myself on research and experiments with epistemic democracy in the field of science studies, i end with a more effective and democratic alternative of how to deal with knowledge in the complex information landscape of today. het zal u niet ontgaan zijn. de waarheid is de afgelopen tijd volop onder- werp van discussie en strijd geworden. zo maken velen die de opwarming van de aarde met zorg bekijken zich druk over hen die tegen de breed aangenomen verklaring ingaan dat dit door menselijk handelen komt, ter- wijl anderen video’s op het internet zien van architecten en ingenieurs die betogen dat de wtc-torens in new york onmogelijk door ingevlogen vlieg- tuigen ingestort kunnen zijn en hierna de straat op gaan om te protesteren vol. , no. , tegen de hegemonie van het gangbare verhaal over de aanslagen van / . en wie was niet gechoqueerd (of jaloers?) over het gemak waarmee mace- donische jongeren een goed zakgeldje verdienden met het online versprei- den van sensationele berichten die als waarheid worden gepresenteerd? met de komst van donald trump als president van de verenigde staten is de discussie over de waarheid alleen nog maar prominenter geworden. want waar gaat het allemaal heen als de machtigste persoon van de wereld te pas en te onpas allerlei kritische geluiden en zelfs hele instituten zoals de gerespecteerde media als nep bestempelt? van verschillende kanten wordt geroepen dat wij nu in het postwaarheid-tijdperk zijn beland, een wereld waarin objectieve feiten een steeds kleinere rol zouden spelen en emotionele of persoonlijke overtuigingen in toenemende mate als feitelijke waarheden gepresenteerd en gezien worden.１ maar hoewel de media bol staan van berichten over hoe complottheo- rieën, alternatieve feiten en nepnieuws democratische samenlevingen in gevaar brengen door de waarheid te ontwrichten, is het sociologisch ge- zien allerminst duidelijk wat hier nu precies aan de hand is. ja, de waar- heid lijkt meer gepolitiseerd dan ooit nu verschillende groepen mensen hier met hun eigen kennis een beroep op doen, maar hebben we nu ook echt te maken met een serieuze verandering van ons kennislandschap en de manieren waarop wij ons hierin bewegen? of is de echte verandering vooral de opkomst van afschuw en paniek van de culturele, epistemische en politieke ‘gevestigden’ over het feit dat ‘buitenstaanders’ zich ineens zijn gaan bemoeien met de waarheid (vgl. elias en scotson )? de enorme publieke onrust over de alomtegenwoordigheid van allerlei onwaarheden in publieke debatten lijkt namelijk alle schijn te hebben van een morele paniek (cohen ), maar het lijkt eveneens moeilijk te ontkennen dat de komst van het internet en sociale media geen fundamentele veranderingen te weeg heeft gebracht in de manieren waarop wij met kennis en met elkaar omgaan. de kwestie die ik in dit essay centraal wil stellen is echter niet of er een morele paniek is, maar waar die paniek precies over gaat. daarvoor is het noodzakelijk eerst beter in kaart te krijgen welke sociologische verande- ringen ten grondslag liggen aan de opkomst van zo veel beroering over de zogenaamde teloorgang van de waarheid. in tegenstelling tot het idee dat we ons niet meer tot de waarheid zouden verhouden maar er voorbij zijn, beargumenteer ik dat we juist middenin een publieke strijd om de waar- heid zitten. de kwestie die hierin centraal staat is wie mag bepalen wat waar is en waarom. het dominante tegengeluid welke oplossingen zoekt in het in ere herstellen van de waarheid zie ik echter als een onsuccesvolle vol. , no. , sociologie depolitiseringstrategie. kennis is namelijk niet transcendentaal en onom- stotelijk, maar het product van bepaalde mensen in een bepaalde tijd en plaats. na mijn sociologische kritiek op deze depolitiseringstrategie uiteen- gezet te hebben, zal ik dit essay eindigen met democratischere alternatie- ven voor hoe om te gaan met kennis in het huidige complexe informatie- landschap. １ vage begrippen, krachtige retorische wapens voordat ik inga op de sociologische veranderingen die de maatschappe- lijke discussie over de waarheid hebben doen ontbranden, wil ik eerst nog aanstippen hoe de in deze discussie centraal staande termen complottheo- rie, nepnieuws en postwaarheid allesbehalve vanzelfsprekend en neutraal zijn. hoewel alle drie de termen op het eerste oog goed lijken te omschrij- ven waar ze naar moeten verwijzen, blijken ze empirisch gezien vooral ambigu, met normatieve assumpties verweven en een uitdrukking van macht te zijn. zo is het met een letterlijke definitie allerminst mogelijk om de empirisch gemaakte onderscheidingen tussen wel/geen complot- theorie of wel/geen nepnieuws te volgen. wat als complottheorie of nep- nieuws gezien wordt blijkt namelijk niet (enkel) uitdrukking te zijn van inhoudelijke eigenschappen, maar vooral van sociale situering: bepaalde vormen van kennis worden als onwaar bestempeld (harambam : ; vgl. bratich : ; coady : ). met dit klassieke labelingsperspectief komt de kwestie van macht centraal te staan (vgl. becker ; goffman ; spector and kitsuse ). want wie mag bepalen wat het officiële verhaal, oftewel de waarheid is? wie is er in de positie om bepaalde vor- men van kennis te diskwalificeren door het als complottheorie of nep- nieuws te bestempelen? het benoemen alleen al is dus een politisering. daarnaast zit in de deze termen de assumptie ingebakken dat het onder- scheid tussen nep en echt simpel en duidelijk te maken is. maar wanneer sommige complottheorieën waar blijken te zijn (zoals de afluisterpraktij- ken van de nsa) en ander echtnieuws juist gefabriceerd blijkt te zijn (zoals de massavernietigingswapens in irak), wat is dan eigenlijk echt en nep? hetzelfde geldt voor postwaarheid, want leefden we eerder dan in een wereld waar niet gelogen en de waarheid niet verdraaid werd? juist door de onbestemdheid van deze termen worden ze krachtige retorische wa- pens om allerlei ongewillige geluiden in maatschappelijke discussies sim- pel en snel te diskwalificeren (harambam ; vgl. bjerg en presskorn- thygesen ; husting en orr ). verschillende groepen mensen die harambam de/politisering van de waarheid tegen de heersende waarheden van media, wetenschap en politiek in gaan, zien hun argumenten in rook opgaan doordat het, al dan niet terecht, als complottheorie of nepnieuws bestempeld wordt. nu trump (en zijn aan- hang) juist dezelfde termen weer gebruikt om de heersende waarheden van de mainstream media, wetenschap en politiek te diskwalificeren is de cirkel rond. doordat deze termen lege, maar enorm krachtige retorische wapens zijn in publieke discussies rondom de waarheid zijn ze eveneens zwaar gepolitiseerd. ２ wat is hier nou aan de hand? omstreden instituties en kennis een eerste verklaring voor de opkomst van zo veel maatschappelijke beroe- ring over de zogenaamde teloorgang van de waarheid ligt, zoals veel com- mentatoren beargumenteren, in het dalende vertrouwen in instituties, ex- perts en hun kennis. verschillende grootschalige onderzoeken van onder andere gallup ( ) en edelman ( ) laten zien dat publieke instituties als de media, politiek, overheid, het rechtssysteem en zo meer, in toene- mende mate gewantrouwd worden.２ natuurlijk kan men zich afvragen wat dit soort cijfers nu precies betekenen, er valt immers een hoop af te dingen op de botheid van de gebruikte vraagstellingen. andere wetenschappers proberen dit daarom verder te onderzoeken en van meer betekenis en context te voorzien: wat betekent ‘vertrouwen hebben in’ eigenlijk, waar komt het tegenwoordige wantrouwen vandaan en wat zijn de gevolgen hiervan voor democratische samenlevingen (vgl. gauchat ; moy and pfau ; misztal )? ook in mijn promotieonderzoek naar de wereld van complotdenkers komt dit wantrouwen naar instituties, zoals de media, wetenschap en overheid sterk naar voren. deze mensen beargumenteren om verschillende redenen, en vaak met grote nauwkeurigheid, dat deze instituties niet lan- ger werken zoals ze bedoeld zijn omdat een elite deze beheerst en voor eigen gewin inzet (harambam ). naast dit ongenoegen over het func- tioneren van onze instituties, wantrouwen complotdenkers ook de kennis die zij produceren. deze zijn volgens hen helemaal niet zo objectief en onomstotelijk als beweerd wordt: feiten worden volgens (sommige) com- plotdenkers actief geconstrueerd en zijn altijd het product van bepaalde mensen in een bepaalde tijd en plaats (harambam en aupers ). dat deze experts die feiten mogen en kunnen produceren onderdeel zijn van een groep mensen met dezelfde afkomst en overtuigingen, een culturele vol. , no. , sociologie elite, welke in hun ogen innig verbonden is met andere machtige netwer- ken in onze samenlevingen maakt dat dit wantrouwen naar hun kennis zo groot is (vgl. achterberg et al. ; lukkassen ). de empirische manifestaties van dit wantrouwen naar gevestigde insti- tuten en hun kennis zijn duidelijk zichtbaar in verschillende publieke dis- cussies. een concreet voorbeeld was te zien in een onlangs uitgezonden aflevering van het npo-televisieprogramma de stelling, waarin ‘mensen uit alle lagen van de samenleving met elkaar in debat gaan over de heikele thema’s van vandaag’３ – een vurige wens van npo-bestuursvoorzitter shula rijxman die na de overwinning van trump vond dat onze media het volk beter moet horen. in deze uitzending kwamen de feiten van onaf- hankelijke kennisinstituten sterk onder vuur te liggen. verschillende men- sen hekelden de officiële cijfers van het cbs en scp omdat die ‘op de hand zouden zijn van de regering’ en niet zouden stroken met hun eigen bele- ving in het dagelijks leven, een argument dat eveneens sterk terugkwam in mijn eigen onderzoek (harambam en aupers ). deze publieke strijd om de feiten, om de waarheid, zien we natuurlijk net zo goed in de ver- enigde staten, waar trump en zijn entourage de liberale en culturele elites opschrikten met de introductie van de orwelliaans aandoende term alter- native facts. de (terechte) verontwaardiging en woede waren alomtegen- woordig, maar wat het vooral laat zien is dat de waarheid simpelweg niet meer vanzelfsprekend is en van alle kanten bestreden wordt. ３ wat is hier nou aan de hand? een veranderend informatielandschap een tweede grote verklaring die vaak aangevoerd wordt voor de alomte- genwoordigheid van allerlei ‘onwaarheden’ in huidige publieke debatten is het veranderende informatielandschap. waar de traditionele media vroe- ger een monopolie hadden op informatievoorziening, is dat met de komst van het internet drastisch veranderd. iedereen kan tegenwoordig namelijk (nieuws)websites beginnen, blogs onderhouden of via sociale media aan live journalism doen. doordat de traditionele media hun poortwachters- functie verliezen zou het internet onze informatievoorziening radicaal de- mocratiseren: de gewone mens is nu ‘in control’ (shapiro , vgl. jenkins ; weinberger ). alles wat vroeger door de traditionele media be- wust en onbewust werd tegengehouden, vindt nu zonder problemen zijn weg naar geïnteresseerde publieken. hierin schuilt natuurlijk een enorm democratisch potentieel: kritische, contrahegemonische en andere revolu- harambam de/politisering van de waarheid tionaire geluiden zijn ineens veel makkelijker te vinden en te verspreiden. het internet krijgt hierdoor vaak messianistische krachten toebedeeld: de gewone mens zou verlost worden van de informatieketenen die haar tot dan toe klein hielden. alle kennis is er ineens voor iedereen. deze mening wordt door veel complotdenkers gedeeld, zo merkte ik tijdens mijn onder- zoek. het internet is voor hen de vrijplaats waar machthebbers geen in- vloed hebben en zij ongestoord allerlei geheime en verborgen gehouden informatie kunnen verzamelen en delen (harambam ). maar voor veel mensen laat die de utopische democratiseringsbelofte van het internet zich nu van zijn andere kant zien. iedereen kan zich tegenwoordig als expert voordoen op het internet, en allerlei pseudowe- tenschappelijke kennis (of erger) kan op gelikte en professioneel uitziende sites als betrouwbaar en waarachtig worden gepresenteerd. daarnaast zou de informatie die er is ook nog eens minder van kwaliteit zijn geworden omdat nieuwsaanbieders moeten concurreren om aandacht en hierdoor meer sensationele berichten, oftewel clickbait, zouden produceren. boven- dien zouden wij door de overvloed aan informatie op het internet lijden aan een information overload: er is té veel informatie beschikbaar om door ons zinnig verwerkt te kunnen worden (shenk ). in plaats van kennis- verhogend, zou het internet hierdoor juist kennisverlagend zijn: we kunnen steeds slechter onderscheid maken tussen kwalitatief goede kennis en meer onzinnige informatie (kovach ). het gevolg van deze informatieovervloed is dat we vooral informatie zouden binnenkrijgen die onze bestaande ideeën en wereldbeelden beves- tigen, en tegenstrijdige kennis moedwillig en onbewust zouden negeren. deze psychologische eigenschap, ook wel confirmatiebias of cognitieve dissonantie genoemd, wordt nog eens versterkt door nieuwe technologi- sche ontwikkelingen. zoek- en selectiealgoritmes structureren onze infor- matievoorziening op basis van eerder vertoond gedrag (denk aan google en de gepersonaliseerde zoekresultaten die wij krijgen), of op basis van wat onze peers lezen en leuk vinden (denk aan facebook en hoe zij onze newsfeed opmaken) (van dijck et al. ). het effect hiervan zou zijn dat we te weten komen wat we eigenlijk al wisten, en geen andere meningen horen dan die we reeds al hoorden. oftewel, we zouden gevangen zitten in zogenoemde filter bubbles (pariser ) en zouden enkel zelfbevestigende verhalen aanhoren in zogenoemde echo chambers (jamieson en capella ). daarbij zijn deze algoritmes ook nog eens goed bewaarde bedrijfs- geheimen, waardoor we niet eens weten hoe ze precies werken en op basis van welke criteria onze informatiewinning gestructureerd is (van dijck et al. ; morozov ). het is fascinerend om te zien hoe psychologische vol. , no. , sociologie eigenschappen hier dus ogenschijnlijk onfortuinlijk samensmelten met de sociologische neiging om gelijkgestemden op te zoeken en met technolo- gische ontwikkelingen die de wereld die wij te zien krijgen vanuit bedrijfs- economische belangen sterk filteren op onze bestaande voorkeuren. daarbij komt dat internationale actoren zich, door het mondiale en open karakter van het huidige informatielandschap, in toenemende mate kunnen mengen in nationale publieke discussies, wat dit probleem een geopolitieke zaak maakt. zo schijnt rusland allerlei nationale publieke debatten te beïnvloeden (denk aan black lives matter, brexit, de mh - ramp, de europese migratiecrisis, de catalaanse onafhankelijkheidsstrijd etc.) door het online verspreiden van propaganda (voornamelijk) in de vorm van disinformatie (onder andere) verspreid door trollen en bots met het doel om maatschappelijke verdeeldheid te zaaien en democratische waarden en instituties te destabiliseren (vgl. aro ; goble ; kelly et al. ). deze nieuwe vorm van geopolitieke oorlogsvoering, een inverse (of perverse) maar uiterst effectieve vorm van soft power (nye ), is mogelijk geworden in dit nieuwe informatielandschap waarbij de publieke opinie op geraffineerde en deels geautomatiseerde wijze gestuurd en ge- manipuleerd kan worden. ogenschijnlijk onzichtbare actoren kunnen door het inzetten van bots (zelfsturende softwareapplicaties die zich voordoen als echte socialemedia- accounts en met hoge snelheid (nep)berichten versturen, retweeten, liken en verder verspreiden) bepaalde ideeën de wereld in helpen en bevorderen (een duidelijk voorbeeld van de agency van wat latour non-humans noemt ( )). die bots kunnen ook nog eens aan elkaar gekoppeld worden waar- door zogenoemde botnets ontstaan: enorm krachtige en zelf versterkende netwerken die hun eigen berichten promoten. deze botnets zijn perfect aangepast aan de mechanismes van socialemediaplatformen welke de acti- viteiten van botnets als trending topics zien en deze belangrijker in hun feeds laten worden. de algoritmes van deze platformen laten menselijke gebrui- kers hierdoor denken dat het belangrijke onderwerpen zijn waar veel men- sen over discussiëren of voor- of tegenstander van zijn – denk aan maat- schappelijke zorgen over instromende migranten. traditionele media pak- ken dit weer op, en zo wordt via technologische mechanismes een self-fulfil- ling information prophecy gecreëerd. als een onderwerp op een gegeven moment genoeg aandacht krijgt op de sociale media, ook al is dat een artificieel gecreëerde en valse voorstelling van zaken, dan kan dat momen- tum zich razendsnel uitbreiden tot een daadwerkelijke situatie waarbij dat onderwerp reëel is geworden en mensen hiernaar gaan handelen. de publie- harambam de/politisering van de waarheid ke beïnvloeding lijkt in dit nieuwe informatielandschap kinderspel gewor- den. paniek alom dus, want als goede informatie ongrijpbaar wordt, komt de democratie in gevaar. vanuit verschillende politiek-filosofische tradities wordt gesteld dat een autonome en transparante informatiewinning en de mogelijkheid om tegenstrijdige geluiden te kunnen aanhoren van cru- ciaal belang zijn voor een goed functionerende democratie (zie dewey ; habermas ; mouffe ; nussbaum ). hoewel denkers uit de verschillende tradities van mening verschillen over hoe onenigheid aan- gesproken en opgelost moet worden, staat het idee van waarheidsvinding door de uitwisseling of botsing van ideeën bij allen centraal. de hierboven beschreven situatie van het hedendaagse informatielandschap laat daar volgens deze denkers totaal geen ruimte toe omdat we ons dus niet goed kunnen informeren, we moeilijk met andersdenkenden in contact komen en we gemakkelijk voor de gek gehouden kunnen worden. dit ondermijnt volgens hen niet alleen het publieke debat, maar leidt ook tot sterke pola- risatie in de samenleving en parallelle leefwerelden (zie sunstein ) en maakt ons kwetsbaar voor manipulatie en propaganda (zie morozov ; pariser ; tufekci b). socialemediaplatformen als facebook, youtube en twitter worden daardoor steeds meer op het matje geroepen over hun rol in het faciliteren van propaganda en het bevorderen van maatschappelijke tegenstellingen. in tegenstelling tot hun claim dat zij slechts mensen en ideeën met elkaar in contact brengen op basis van hun eigen voorkeuren, vinden velen dat deze depolitiseringstrategie niet langer houdbaar is aangezien de platfor- men wel degelijk bepaalde verhalen prioriteren en hierdoor dus niet zo neutraal zijn als ze zeggen (zie van dijck et al. ; dojcinovic ; gane ; tufekci a). de eerdergenoemde complexe versmelting van psychologische, sociolo- gische en technologische eigenschappen wordt dus nog eens verder ge- compliceerd door de diverse bedrijfs-, geopolitieke en maatschappelijke belangen die hiermee verwikkeld zijn. de alomtegenwoordigheid van aller- lei (on)waarheden lijkt daardoor een zogenoemd wicked problem gewor- den: een probleem met een enorme complexiteit door de aanwezigheid van verschillende, op elkaar inspelende en continue veranderende factoren waarbij schijnbare oplossingen steeds weer tot andere problemen leiden (vgl. brown et al. ; kolko ; rittel en webber ). de weg uit dit moeras van (on)waarheden lijkt hierdoor moeilijk te vinden en de nood- zaak van betrouwbare en goede informatie groter dan ooit. vol. , no. , sociologie ４ ‘dit is een appel’. depolitisering van de waarheid als oplossing? nu is er nog wel wat af te dingen op de analyse dat wij door deze verande- ringen in het informatielandschap inderdaad enkel onze eigen wereldbeel- den te zien krijgen en hierdoor een makkelijk prooi voor massale propa- ganda zijn. auteurs als morozov ( ), pariser ( ) en sunstein ( ) maken, hoewel goed geïnformeerd, toch meer anekdotisch en theoretisch hun punt. meer systematische en empirische onderzoeken zijn nodig om deze ideeën daadwerkelijk te staven. gelukkig is een begin reeds gemaakt (zie voor een aardig overzicht: mortimer ). maar meer dan zulke ana- lyses bekritiseren wil ik vooral ingaan op het dominante discours van waaruit oplossingen gezocht worden voor deze informatiecrisis, namelijk een positivistisch ideaal waarin feiten objectief en vaststaand zijn, waar naar experts geluisterd moet worden, en waar de waarheid niet alleen heilig is, maar vooral ook gedepolitiseerd wordt. zo zijn grote mediabedrijven als cnn en the new york times groot- schalige mediacampagnes gestart tegen fake news en alternative facts, waarin het beeld geschetst wordt dat er slechts één uniforme waarheid kan zijn. cnn heeft een filmpje gemaakt waar ze een appel laten zien, en vervolgens zeggen: ‘this is an apple... some people might try to tell you that it’s a banana. they might scream banana, banana, banana over and over and over again. they put banana in all caps. you might even start to believe that this is a banana. but it’s not. this... is an apple.’ het filmpje eindigt met ‘facts first. cnn’.４ onze wereld is helemaal niet zo complex, stelt cnn, feiten spreken voor zich, en daar is eigenlijk geen discussie over nodig; een appel is immers een appel, toch? de nyt laat een complexer beeld zien, hun filmpje start met een opeenvolging van verschillende varianten van ‘the truth is... ’: ‘the truth is our nation is more divided than ever’, ‘the truth is alternative facts are lies’, ‘the truth is the media is dis- honest’. en na een versnelling en kakofonie van allerlei verschillende waar- heidsclaims over sociale, morele en politieke zaken, komt het tot een climax waar het beeld weer tot rust komt en gesteld wordt dat ‘the truth is hard... to find... to know... the truth is more important now than ever. the new york times’.５ ondanks de grotere nuance blijft het idee centraal staan van de waarheid als uniform en objectief ideaal, welke, met veel moeite weliswaar, toch gevonden kan worden. ook in nederland hoor je dit soort positivistische geluiden die een simplistisch idee van waarheid propageren. zo heeft het nrc handelsblad een code opgesteld waarin zij hun journalistiek uitleggen en hierin een hard onderscheid maken tussen harambam de/politisering van de waarheid nieuws en opinie, feiten en commentaar: ‘onze journalistiek draait om waarheidsvinding en, op basis daarvan, meningsvorming [...] wij hante- ren een scheiding tussen feiten en commentaar (facts are sacred, comment is free). in de berichtgeving staan feiten centraal (en de context daarvan in duiding en analyse), niet de mening of persoonlijke voorkeur van de au- teur. in opinies gaat het om persoonlijke standpunten’.６ het dominante antwoord is er dus één van harder roepen dat de waarheid in ere hersteld moet worden door feiten en meningen strikt van elkaar te scheiden. vaak wordt de schuld van de informatiecrisis gelegd bij het postmoder- nisme dat de intellectuele basis zou hebben gelegd voor het ontkennen van de waarheid zoals dat nu door trump en verwante figuren gebeurt. zo stelt wetenschapsfilosoof maarten boudry in een recent stuk in het nrc handelsblad dat hoewel ‘de ideologie van het postmodernisme mijlenver verwijderd [is] van die van trump, het intellectuele vandalisme van con- cepten als “waarheid” en “feit” gelijksoortig [is]. de wapens die we nodig hebben tegen de populistische feitenvrijheid heeft het postmodernisme ons afhandig gemaakt’.７ evengoed stelt filosoof en psycholoog kees kraaij- enveld in zijn ‘pleidooi voor de waarheid’ dat ‘er talloze ideologische stro- mingen [zijn] die aan de waarheid een broertje dood hebben. denk aan pragmatisme, het postmodernisme of het sociaal-constructivisme’. hij roept dan ook op om ‘de waarheid [te] verdedigen tegen relativisme [...] niet iedere mening telt. niet iedere zienswijze is even waar en daarmee even waardevol [...] we moeten waarheid weer als waarde omarmen [en] meer waarde hechten aan wat experts zeggen dan aan wat leken roepen’.８ de intellectuele oorsprong van het postwaarheidtijdperk moeten we vol- gens hem dus vinden in het postmodernisme, of het daarmee verbonden relativisme. zelfs bruno latour, vaak (verkeerd) aangehaald als archetypi- sche postmodernist, krabt zich achter de oren nu ‘the weapons of social critique [are] taken away from us by the worst possible fellows as an argument against the things we cherish’ ( : ). hij vraagt zich in dat interessante stuk bezorgd af of het constructivisme en het analytische ge- reedschap dat deze traditie ontwikkeld heeft nog wel voldoet nu ‘voldon- gen feiten’ zoals de klimaatverandering op eenzelfde manier gedeconstru- eerd en ontkracht worden? nu trump en consorten allerhande waarheden ontkrachten en als nep bestempelen, zijn meer wetenschappers binnen de science and technology studies (sts) zich gaan afvragen of zij inderdaad niet verantwoordelijk zijn voor dit postwaarheidtijdperk waar alle feiten zonder veel moeite in twijfel getrokken kunnen worden (collins et al. ; lynch ; fuller a, b, ; sismondo ). zo beargumenteren collins et al. dat ‘[sts’s] vol. , no. , sociologie logic of symmetry, and the democratizing of science it spawned, invites exactly the scepticism about experts and other elites that now dominates political debate’ ( : ) en dat ‘[t]he views sts was espousing were consistent with post-truth irrespective of their authors’ intentions or their causal impact’ (ibid.: ). fuller stelt langs dezelfde lijn dat de ‘post-truth world is the inevitable outcome of greater epistemic democracy’ ( a) en dat het daarom ‘most puzzling’ is dat ‘sts recoils from these tropes when- ever such politically undesirable elements as climate change deniers or creationists appropriate them effectively for their own purposes’ ( ). waar deze sts-wetenschappers latour en sismondo van beschuldigen is dat zij wetenschap (en dus feiten) weer proberen te depolitiseren, terwijl zij als sts’ers nu juist zo hardnekkig hebben aangetoond dat wetenschap- pelijke feiten, en dus de waarheid, nogal wat politiek werk omvat om het als zodanig de wereld in te krijgen en te houden (collins et al. ; lynch ; fuller b, ). de waarheid depolitiseren, zoals het eerder besproken dominante ant- woord op de huidige informatiecrisis, is naar mijn idee daarom slechts een schijnoplossing die zowel niet klopt als niet effectief is. het klopt niet omdat een grote traditie van wetenschapssociologen en antropologen met empirisch gedegen onderzoek heeft laten zien dat wetenschappelijke feiten geen simpele reflecties zijn van de wereld zoals die is, maar het product zijn van een breed netwerk van onderzoekspraktijken, validatie- structuren, professionele netwerken en politieke dynamieken die deze waarheden in het leven roepen en houden (zie gieryn ; latour ). dit maakt deze kennis niet minder waar, maar wel het product van men- selijk handelen (in interactie met objecten). de tegenstelling die door eer- dergenoemde positivistische waarheidsridders wordt gemaakt waarbij constructivistische kritieken op een vaststaande en objectieve waarheid worden weggezet als een postmodern relativisme waarin alle vormen van kennis aan elkaar gelijk zouden worden is een valse. het zou er bij de waardering van kennis niet om moeten gaan of iets waar is of niet, maar hoe deze is opgebouwd, uit welke kennisbronnen zij putten en welke socio- materiële netwerken en infrastructuren deze ondersteunen. waarheid laat zich naar mijn idee beter kennen als continuüm (meer-minder waar), of eigenlijk nog beter als multipel９ (mol ), dan als een dichotomie (waar/ onwaar). daarnaast is de waarheid depolitiseren niet effectief omdat veel men- sen simpelweg niet langer in een transcendente, objectieve en vaststaande waarheid geloven. zij benadrukken juist een politisering van de waarheid: ‘er zijn geen objectieve feiten, dit is jullie waarheid, niet de onze’ is het harambam de/politisering van de waarheid geluid dat je hoort uit de hoek van vele populisten (en hun aanhang). maar ook is het voor velen veel aannemelijker geworden dat er verschillende waarheden naast elkaar kunnen bestaan. zo laat ik in mijn proefschrift naar complotdenkers zien dat zij, bijvoorbeeld door het reizen en wonen in andere werelddelen, ontdekken dat hun waarheid over bepaalde wereld- gebeurtenissen helemaal niet de enige of echte waarheid hoeft te zijn (ha- rambam : - ). ten slotte heeft men ook steeds meer wetenschap- pelijke kennis over hoe de waarheid werkt. zo worden constructivistische argumenten over kennisproductie en de rol van experts en leken hierin nu gebruikt door verschillende groepen mensen (bijvoorbeeld zieken, religieu- zen, anti-vaccinatiebewegingen) die aanspraak proberen te maken op epi- stemische autoriteit (zie arksey ; epstein ; fuller ; martin , ) – een duidelijk voorbeeld van de democratisering van weten- schappelijke kennis. hoewel het begrijpelijk is dat gerespecteerde mediabedrijven zich ver- zetten tegen de geluiden die hun journalistiek weg zetten als nepnieuws en dat constructivistische wetenschappers zich zorgen maken over het ge- bruik van hun analytische gereedschap voor politieke doeleinden waar zij niet achter staan, is het depolitiseren van de waarheid dus geen doeltref- fend antwoord op de huidige postwaarheidsituatie omdat veel mensen simpelweg iets anders willen horen dan deze metafysische, want geblack- boxte, beroepen op de waarheid. de oproepen van eerdergenoemde waar- heidsridders beginnen daarom steeds meer te lijken op de wanhoopskre- ten van priesters in de jaren zestig die gods woord hoog probeerden te houden, terwijl de kerken massaal leegstroomden. maar in plaats van al dan niet terecht de schuld voor het postwaarheidtijdperk te leggen bij het constructivisme van sts, wil ik hier beargumenteren dat sts juist een oplossing voor deze culturele situatie van epistemische instabiliteit kan bieden (harambam ). ５ inzicht en inspraak. een constructivistisch en democratisch alternatief om een epistemologisch sterke en sociologisch effectieve manier te ont- wikkelen waarmee in een gedigitaliseerd postwaarheidtijdperk met kennis omgegaan kan worden, leun ik sterk op twee belangrijke principes van sts die ik hier bijeenraap en inzicht en inspraak noem (vgl. hackett et al. ; sismondo ). een belangrijke prestatie van deze wetenschappelijke traditie is dat die met empirisch gedegen onderzoek heeft laten zien hoe vol. , no. , sociologie wetenschappelijke feiten geproduceerd worden. sts heeft hiermee inzicht gegeven in de verschillende socio-materiele factoren die een rol spelen bij het in leven roepen en houden van wetenschappelijke kennis (vgl. hara- way ; m’charek et al. ; mol ; latour ; lynch ). het symmetrieprincipe waarbij zowel gevestigde (wat we nu voor waar aanne- men) als uitdagende (wat toen of nu tegen het gevestigde idee in ging) vormen van kennis op eenzelfde manier geanalyseerd zouden moeten worden hangt hier sterk mee samen (bloor ). daarnaast is het promo- ten van inclusie van gemarginaliseerde groepen en hun expertise in ken- nisproductie, ook wel epistemische democratie genoemd, een belangrijke pijler in het alternatief dat ik voorstel (vgl. collins en evans ; holst en molander ; maasen en weingart ). in tegenstelling tot het idee dat kritiek op het geloof in de waarheid zou leiden tot een relativistische wereld waarin alle vormen van kennis aan elkaar gelijk zouden zijn, bepleit ik juist dat het openbreken van de black box waarmee (wetenschappelijke) feiten gewoonlijk worden gepresen- teerd, het mogelijk maakt om onderscheid te kunnen maken tussen kwali- tatief goede en minder goede kennis. met behulp van empirisch navolg- bare verslagleggingen over hoe bepaalde feiten en waarheden tot stand zijn gekomen, kan er inhoudelijk gesproken worden over waarom deze vorm van kennis beter is dan een andere, en dat zonder te hoeven leunen op een blind vertrouwen in experts en op de heersende waarheid. trans- parantie over het productieproces en navolgbaarheid in plaats van objecti- viteit als ideaal nastreven is essentieel voor het openlijk kunnen waarderen van kennis. de vraag die nu opdoemt is natuurlijk door wie hierover ge- sproken mag worden, en volgens welke regels. tot nu toe was dit recht vooral voorbehouden aan wetenschappers zelf, die ondanks druk van bui- tenaf, intern bepalen wat goede kennis is en volgens welke procedures dat bepaald wordt (zie gieryn ; shapin ). dit principe kan echter makkelijk leiden tot dogmatiek en autoritarisme (‘wij hebben de waarheid in pacht’), hetgeen de kwaliteit van kennis niet ten goede komt, en tot meer maatschappelijke vervreemding (‘wetenschap is ook maar een me- ning/linkse hobby’), hetgeen de publieke status van de wetenschap niet ten goede komt. net zoals verschillende sts-studies hebben laten zien dat het goed mogelijk is om verschillende maatschappelijke groepen te betrekken bij kennisproductieprocessen (zie arksey ; epstein ; rabeharisoa et al. ), zo denk ik dat het net zo goed mogelijk moet zijn om verschil- lende groepen burgers te betrekken en inspraak te geven bij bepalingen van criteria en procedures voor goede kennis. ik denk dan aan een soort harambam de/politisering van de waarheid burgerplatform dat in samenwerking met wetenschappers gesprekken voert, ideeën ontwikkelt en deze praktisch vorm gaat geven in een soort wetenschapswaakhond. de confrontatie van verschillende ideeën over cri- teria en procedures voor goede kennis moet zo tot een – altijd voorlopige – uitkomst leiden waarbij verschillende maatschappelijke belangen gehoord en geactiveerd zijn. dit is geen betoog voor een wetenschappelijk popu- lisme waar de agenda door de massa bepaald wordt, maar wel een oproep om meer inzicht en inspraak te geven in de manieren waarop wij de kwaliteit van kennis evalueren en waarderen. hoe dit burgerplatform er precies uit moet komen te zien (universeel of specifiek op onderwerpen afgestemd), welke samenstelling het moet hebben (hoe en wie selecteer je) en hoe dit georganiseerd en gefinancierd moet worden, zijn allemaal zaken die in de publieke discussie hierover besproken moeten worden. terugkomend op het onderwerp van dit essay, nepnieuws en postwaar- heid, bepleit ik eenzelfde nadruk op meer inzicht en inspraak. een eerste aanzet hiervoor is eigenlijk al gegeven door de wereldwijde opkomst van vele min of meer onafhankelijke factcheckers die verschillende claims op de waarheid in publieke (on- en offline) debatten op juistheid controle- ren.１０ hoewel er discussie is over de mogelijkheid van het neutraal contro- leren van feiten, omdat die altijd ingebed zijn in grotere structuren van betekenisgeving (zie uscinksi en butler ), laten de empirische praktij- ken van factcheckers de genealogie van allerlei uitspraken in publieke debatten goed zien (graves ). hiermee wordt inzichtelijk gemaakt waar zulke uitspraken vandaan komen, hoe die in hun levensloop getrans- formeerd zijn en welke actoren hier een rol in hebben gehad. dit inzicht is, net als transparantie over hoe wetenschappelijke feiten de wereld in wor- den geholpen, van groot belang in het openlijk kunnen waarderen van de vele waarheidsclaims die wij gepresenteerd krijgen. inzicht alleen is echter geen panacee. de onafhankelijkheid van factcheckers wordt namelijk vaak in twijfel getrokken, bijvoorbeeld omdat ze te links zouden zijn.１１ hierdoor wordt al hun arbeid weer teniet gedaan, ze worden immers niet gelezen of geloofd. omdat factcheckers veelal vanuit dezelfde culturele klasse afkom- stig zijn, en veel ‘gewone’ mensen zich niet gezien en erkend voelen in publieke debatten en instituten (vgl. hochschild ; mepschen ; kemmers ) lijkt mij inspraak in de vorm van vertegenwoordiging een manier om dit tegen te gaan. ik stel daarom weer een burgerplatform voor, ditmaal van factcheckers, waarvan verschillende maatschappelijke groe- pen deel uit maken. hierdoor zal deze praktijk evenwichtiger zijn en meer legitimiteit genieten. evengoed denk ik dat er meer inzicht en inspraak moet komen in de vol. , no. , sociologie technologieën die onze informatievoorziening structureren. hoewel het onwaarschijnlijk lijkt dat de grote techbedrijven hun goed bewaarde be- drijfsgeheimen over hoe hun algoritmes precies werken zullen gaan bloot- geven (vgl. foer ), valt er nog wel veel te winnen in het kweken van bewustwording over hoe algoritmes meer algemeen werken. zo laten esla- mi et al. ( ) zien dat gebruikers van sociale platformen grotendeels onbekend zijn met algoritmische beïnvloeding van hun informatievoorzie- ning, maar dat meer bewustwording hierover wel leidt tot een actievere houding en een groter gevoel van agency ten opzichte van algoritmes, door deze bijvoorbeeld aan te passen aan meer persoonlijke wensen. hoewel deze bevindingen steeds breder ondersteund worden (vgl. bucher ; dietvorst et al. ; powers ), is het de vraag in hoeverre aanpassing van bedrijfsalgoritmes genoeg agency en privacy zullen geven om van een vrije en meer transparante informatiewinning te kunnen spreken. er zijn daarom steeds meer initiatieven gekomen die meer onafhankelijke algorit- mes willen ontwikkelen die in het belang van de gebruiker of van een bepaalde publieke waarde zoals diversiteit opereren (vgl. diakopoulos ; helberger et al. ). zo hebben onderzoekers van het mit media lab onder leiding van ethan zuckerman gewerkt aan gobo, een sociale- media-algoritme met filters waar wij zelf, en niet een van die techbedrij- ven, controle over hebben.１２ met gobo, zo stellen zij, kan je zelf bepalen wie of wat er in je nieuwsfeed komt, zelfs als dat nieuws of berichten zijn die juist van buiten je eigen leefwereld komen. daarnaast is gobo trans- parant over waarom elk item in je nieuwsfeed gekomen is, en wat je pre- cies gemist hebt door jouw eigen filterkeuzes. een geweldig idee, en hope- lijk krijgen dit soort projecten meer en meer momentum, waardoor ze, als zelflerende systemen, beter en beter worden. het moge duidelijk zijn dat dit essay slechts een aanzet is tot meer wetenschappelijke en publieke discussie over hoe we op een andere ma- nier om kunnen gaan met de complexe situatie van de alomtegenwoordig- heid van allerlei (on)waarheden in het huidige informatielandschap. meer inzicht en inspraak krijgen over wat wij als goede kennis zien en waarom lijken mij epistemologisch sterker en sociologisch effectiever dan een leeg beroep op de waarheid en een daarmee samenhangend blind vertrouwen in experts. ik kan hier nog geen volledig uitgewerkte plannen aanbieden over hoe we dit precies moeten vormgeven en welke actoren hierin mee zouden moeten beslissen, maar dat lijkt mij ook meer iets om samen te gaan bepalen. de uitdaging is om niet in technocratisme noch in weten- schappelijk populisme te vervallen. we kunnen daarbij goed gebruik maken van het werk van verschillende sts’ers die precies op dit snijvlak harambam de/politisering van de waarheid van wetenschap, technologie en politiek ideeën hebben ontwikkeld om dit soort complexe vraagstukken en de besluitvorming hierover te organiseren (zie callon et al. ; dijstelbloem ; latour ; latour en weibel ; marres ). als wij democratie hoog willen houden, en niet over- geleverd willen zijn aan de macht van grote (tech)bedrijven en natiestaten die ons met nieuwe technologieën en aloude manipulatietechnieken kun- nen laten dwalen in oerwouden van (mis)informatie, dan zullen wij deze discussies over hoe wij een vrij en sterk informatielandschap kunnen waar- borgen meer moeten gaan voeren. noten . https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/word-of-the-year/word-of-the-year- . . http://news.gallup.com/poll/ /americans-confidence-institutions-stays-low.aspx, https://www.edelman.com/trust /. . https://www.npo.nl/de-stelling-van-nederland/ - - /at_ . . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vckz ean y. . https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gy fdz ge. . https://www.nrc.nl/static/front/pdf/nrc% gedragscode% hr% ( ).pdf. . https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/ / / /linkse-feitenvrije-wetenschap-ging-aan-trump- vooraf-a . https://www.argumentenfabriek.nl/media/ /pleidooi-voor-de-waarheid-kees-kraai- jeveld- .pdf. . maar op een gegeven moment moeten er toch keuzes gemaakt worden over welke waarheid in welke situatie gekozen wordt, en dan is hiërarchisering van de verschil- lende waarheden toch onvermijdelijk. . zo heb je in de verenigde staten factcheck.org (verbonden aan annenberg school for communication van de university of pennsylvania), politifact (verbonden aan de tampa bay times en de ford foundation en het democracy fund) en the fact checker van de washington post. in europa beginnen dit soort initiatieven nu ook vorm te krijgen: zo kent het verenigd koninkrijk het onafhankelijke full fact en frankrijk heb je les décodeurs van le monde. in nederland hebben we nog niet dit soort onafhanke- lijke organisaties die dit actief doen, wel hebben de volkskrant en het nrc handelsblad gespecialiseerde factcheckrubrieken, en zijn studenten van bijvoorbeeld de universiteit leiden hiermee actief (nieuwscheckers.nl). zie voor een goed overzicht van al deze initiatieven en meer duiding het volgende artikel: http://nieuwejournalistiek.nl/fact- checken/ / / /strijd-om-het-feit-de-opkomst-van-factcheckers-binnen-en-buiten- de-journalistiek/. . deze discussie over de politieke kleur van factcheckers zie je eveneens over politieke voorkeuren in de wetenschap: https://www.nrc.nl/nieuws/ / / /duisenberg-wil- onderzoek-naar-de-politieke-kleur-van-universitaire-medewerkers- -a of inbar en lammers ( ). . https://medium.com/@ethanz/who-filters-your-news-why-we-built-gobo-social- bfa b . vol. , no. , sociologie literatuur achterberg, p., w. de koster en j. van der waal ( ) a science confidence gap: education, trust in scientific methods, and trust in scientific institutions in the united states, . public understanding of science, ( ): - , doi: . arksey, h. 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( ) everything is miscellaneous: the power of the new digital disorder. new york: henry holt. over de auteur jaron harambam is socioloog en als postdoc werkzaam bij het instituut voor informatierecht (ivir, universiteit van amsterdam), waar hij binnen het multidisciplinaire fair news project onderzoek doet naar algoritmes in nieuwsmedia. hij is onlangs aan de erasmus universiteit rotterdam cum laude gepromoveerd op een etnografisch proefschrift over de cultuur van complotdenken in nederland, getiteld the truth is out there. conspiracy culture in an age of epistemic instability. hij is vast redactielid van socio- logie, en heeft in deze rol in een themanummer over actor-netwerk theorie geredigeerd. in was hij als visiting fellow verbonden aan het science in human culture program van de northwestern university nabij chicago (vs). hij heeft gepubliceerd over complotdenken, digitale cultuur en online-spelwerelden in internationale peer-reviewed tijdschriften zoals cultural sociology, public understanding of science, information, communi- cation and society en het european journal of cultural studies. jaron is voornamelijk geïnteresseerd in sociologische fenomenen op het snijvlak van wetenschap, religie, populaire cultuur en media. e-mail: jaron.harambam@gmail.com vol. , no. , sociologie s jxx .. special issue a second gilded age? the promises and perils of an analogy: introduction daniel wortel-london* and boyd cothran** *corresponding author. new york university. e-mail: dhl @nyu.edu **corresponding author. york university. e-mail: cothran@yorku.ca are writers, poets, artists, thinking people still merely gnashing away at the problems of the early twentieth century? but this is not “mere.” these primal, unsilenced ques- tions pursue us, whenever we are trying to live conscientiously in the time we have. a new century, even a new technology, doesn’t of itself produce newness. it is live human beings, looking in all directions, who will do this. – adrienne rich no one sees farther into a generalization than his own knowledge of details extends. – william james between the more modern belief that all history is a projection of the present, and the more ancient understanding of the present as a cyclical repetition of the past, lies the shadow of analogy. as a heuristic device analogies are agnostic; radicals, liberals, and conservatives have all enlisted their fearsome and questionable power. you’ve probably used a few of them yourself. the roman empire, the weimar republic, the new deal, vietnam, the gilded age. which analogy should we draw? what are the differences and similarities between a previous period and our own? what are the implications? in this special issue, we have invited fourteen historians from diverse disciplinary backgrounds, but sharing a deep knowledge of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, to discuss what is gained and lost by conceiving of the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries as a “second gilded age.” readers of jgape have doubtlessly encountered a few thoughts on this point by now. for over a generation, many american journalists and commentators have noted with alarm certain perceived similarities between our current moment and that facing the united states in the decades after the civil war. as early as , thomas frank in the pages of the baffler described the united states as entering a “new gilded age,” and by the end of decade the new yorker deployed the same mon- iker to describe the era in its retrospective look at the american culture of affluence. as the heady days of the s gave way to the great recession, such analogies proliferated. from writers such as thomas piketty, robert reich, paul krugman, and steve fraser to the frontline activists known as occupy wall street and black lives matter, it seemed as if everywhere one looked, connections were being made between the current era and the gilded age. © society for historians of the gilded age and progressive era the journal of the gilded age and progressive era ( ), , – doi: . /s h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . mailto:dhl @nyu.edu mailto:cothran@yorku.ca https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms the commentariat shows no sign of abandoning the comparison. in a recent usa today think piece, rick hampson drew parallels between thomas edison and steve jobs, coxey’s army and the occupy movement, and the chinese exclusion act of and president donald j. trump’s so-called muslim ban. in the new republic, sarah jones bluntly declared, “we’ve reverted.” policy proscriptions flow easily from such comparisons. sociologist paul starr asserted in the american prospect that “as daunting as the political challenges were at the time, the gilded age came to an end with the reforms of the progressive era and the new deal. … the challenge now is to mobilize that kind of moral sentiment on behalf of a new age of reform.” even pres- idential candidate elizabeth warren dips her toe into historical revisionism, stating that the american response to inequality “wasn’t to abandon the technological innovations and improvements of the industrial revolution” but to “c(o)me together” and “through our government … chang(e) public policies to adapt to a changing economy” that helped build a “strong middle class.” the historians amongst you should be sharpening your knives by this point. even if two points in time share certain surface similarities (for instance, levels of income inequality), underlying differences in how those characteristics were generated and what they meant to contemporaries dissolves any easy analytical takeaways. to this point, some historians have recently emphasized dissimilarities between our period and the past in terms of shared social outcomes and the mechanisms that produced and mitigated them (if at all). for steve fraser, the rising general standard of living figure . income inequality in the united states, – . this graph, featured in thomas piketty’s capital in the twenty first century (cambridge, ma: harvard university press, ), has become a visual shorthand for a much broader and increasingly ubiquitous narrative concerning the depth and trajectory of american inequality over the past hundred years. america, we are told via op-eds and think tanks, is currently in a “second gilded age” with levels of economic disparity and political corruption not seen since before the first world war (or second world war, depending on the outlet). such analogies, however, often rest on simplistic historical accounts that overlook ongoing scholarly disagreements around the precise origin and nature of late nineteenth-century inequality, racism, xenophobia, or any number of other “gilded analogies.” by enriching and challenging our historical consciousness and “filling in” the tacit narrative embodied by the earlier graph, the contributors in this volume have laid a sturdier foundation for understanding and combating new manifestations of these old troubles. daniel wortel-london and boyd cothran h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms and productive industry that accompanied late nineteenth-century inequality has no parallel today. for heath w. carter, the widespread moral opprobrium and premarket values that helped working people organize social and labor movements that challenged industrial capitalism in the late nineteenth century are sadly missing from our current era. and for steve hahn and many other historians, the endemic racism and sexism that accompanied these “premarket values” cautions against adopting them too loosely as a “usable past” for our own resistance. authors in previous volumes of this journal—the very flagship journal of the (first) gilded age!—or in prominent syntheses of the era have taken contradictory stances on such analogies. scott reynolds nelson, speaking of the dangers of financial speculation in the late nineteenth century, notes that “the long-dead voices of the gilded age” have a “lesson for everyone.” conversely, leon fink notes dissimilarities; while “the work- ers of the extended new deal generation were in an important sense the children and grandchildren of the long gilded age,” he writes, “the same cannot be said for the con- nections between the postwar boom era and today’s second gilded age.” others have tried to balance the promise and perils of analogy. noam maggor states that future work on late nineteenth-century capitalism should “resist the temptation to draw facile anal- ogies to our own “new” gilded age” while calling for this work to bring to the fore “valuable historical perspective(s) to pressing contemporary concerns about global eco- nomic transitions, massive inequality, and strained relations between liberal markets and democratic politics.” this forum, reader be forewarned, holds no singular conclusion as to what lessons the gilded age might hold for us, no final word on whether and to what extent we have “reverted.” why? first, a true test of an analogy’s salience would need clearance from scholars focusing on the present as well as those well versed in the past, which this volume does not. second, and perhaps more germane to an audience of historians, it is difficult to achieve any consensus on what defines a period such as a “gilded age” to begin with, much less what lessons its study might offer. why is this? one reason is that we do not have a shared chronological sense of the elephant we are looking at. richard schneirov has periodized the gilded age as lasting from – while leon fink has pointed to the decades from to as a single “long gilded age.” moreover, each of us is using different instruments to mea- sure the elephant. recent decades have seen an explosion in different approaches toward defining and evaluating change over time, from critical race theory to the new history of capitalism to historical geography. while this journal has diligently publi- cized and even championed these approaches, this plethora has added to the difficulty of allowing historians from different subfields to come together to, in the words of schneirov, “generate questions and hypothesis of common interests” in search of a larger paradigm. partly as a result of this, the essays in this volume sing in uneasy harmony. our con- tributors disagree as to whether the dominant economic and political dynamics of the late nineteenth and early twenty-first centuries are comparable, or if there are funda- mental differences in their operation and trajectory. they disagree as to whether it is desirable, undesirable, or even possible to replicate the venerable social movements that challenged these dynamics at the turn of the last century. and yes, they disagree about chronology, even to the point of questioning whether the first gilded age ever really ended. even if historians were to arrive at some consensus on these points and settle on the place of the present vis-à-vis the past, it is unclear exactly how we could best convey the journal of the gilded age and progressive era h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms these insights in order to shape contemporary discussions and policies. many of the issues involved in this question touch on basic considerations of historical method and epistemology. should our narratives emphasize the determining causal structures or the malleable contingencies that make our era similar or different from the late nine- teenth century? should we make our case by presenting entirely new narratives in order to explain our time, or should we emphasize new theoretical perspectives on familiar stories and sources? while these are perennial questions for historians, we might revisit them with a somewhat more pragmatic eye if our intention is to weigh in on contem- porary debates. what are our goals in entering the public sphere? who will read our work? what kind of stories will help us reach that audience and accomplish our goals? of course, one of the somewhat self-serving goals of such forays into the public sphere is to encourage new converts to our subfield. this is accomplished not by pro- viding new historical narratives as mentioned, but by stressing the incompleteness of established narratives and the need for new research (and therefore students) in light of contemporary developments. the rise of the history of capitalism field after falls along this line, as does the growth of the postwar era as a site of historical research after the conservative resurgence of the s. it is not entirely certain, however, whether the “second gilded age” will have a similar bolstering effect on our subfield as a whole. it is worth bearing in mind that some of the largest paradigm shifts in our understanding of the gilded age occurred during what is considered by many to be its antithesis—the keynesian “les trente glorieuses” of the mid-twentieth century. regardless of their ideological or methodological differences, historians of the neo-consensus, new left, and organizational synthesis schools agreed that the post- war era was a direct product of developments in the late nineteenth century, or at least responses to those developments. things are more complicated today– it is the growth of conservatism and neo-liberalism (or, if you prefer, the failings of liberalism) in the postwar era that leap out as the immediate shapers of our time. these topics and decades therefore compete with the first gilded age as a site for historical scholarship and policy lessons. there is no automatic relationship between relevance and popularity —just ask your average newspaper editor. nonetheless, there are two less instrumental reasons for attempting comparative his- tory than providing policy directives or bolstering one’s field. the first is that it can improve our understanding of the past, and the second is that it is unavoidable. just as our vision of the past is shaped by the unconscious theoretical lenses we adopt, so it is influenced by the various developments and trends of our own era—as historians can well appreciate. engaging with analogies deliberately rather than unconsciously, rig- orously rather than reflexively, and with curiosity rather than close-mindedness can improve or call into question established historical narratives. if our final verdict on the salience of a given comparison remains ambivalent and complex, so much the bet- ter; it is ultimately the historian’s ability to appreciate the messiness of reality, which is perhaps our greatest virtue, and perhaps our greatest value in a time all too hungry for simple answers and convenient villains. to this point, less forgivable than this volume’s lack of a punchy takeaway is the lack of space it devotes to other domains of historical study, especially artistic, cultural, urban, and intellectual history. to make sense of our own era, much less the past, we need to discern the meaningful practices through which actors interpret and resist their world, analyze the role of the built environment in reproducing and transforming power relations, and study how ideas and ideologies have coordinated and reshaped social activity. while our contributors have incorporated these considerations into daniel wortel-london and boyd cothran h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms their essays with finesse, we regret that these lines of inquiry (and many more besides) have not received the singular focus enjoyed by environmental history, political history, the history of gender and sexuality, and other topics within these pages. nonetheless, we hope that the essays here will provide inspiration and material needed to conduct such comparative studies in time for the forthcoming “third gilded age” volume in . we hope that reading these submissions will shake your assumptions about gilded ages past and present, while simultaneously revealing cross-cutting themes that beg further inquiry. that the forum lacks any easy collective policy proscriptions is not an excuse for complacency, but the very opposite. it is a call to further involve ourselves in the deweyan task of building up “soft generalizations” that must be tested in the light of our peers’ and publics’ experiences. it is also a call to actively combat the stereotypes and generalizations that constrain effective analysis and transformative action in our own time. these directives—unspoken but conveyed in its very format and tone—are perhaps this volume’s real “lessons.” oh, and bring back the unions. notes adrienne rich, arts of the possible: essays and conversations (new york: w. w. norton & company, ), . william james, the letters of william james (new york: cosimo inc, ), . thomas frank, “opening salvo: the new gilded age” in commodify your dissent: salvos from the baffler, st ed., eds. thomas frank and matt weiland (new york: w.w. norton & company, ), – ; david remnick, ed., the new gilded age: the new yorker looks at the culture of affluence (new york: random house, ). thomas piketty and arthur goldhammer, capital in the twenty-first century (cambridge ma: the belknap press of harvard university press, ); robert reich, “we’re living in a new gilded age of wealth and power,” salon, apr. , , https://www.salon.com/ / / /robert_reich_were_living_ in_a_new_guilded_age_of_wealth_and_power_partner/ (accessed jan. , ); paul krugman, “why we’re in a new gilded age,” the new york review of books, may , , https://www.nybooks.com/ articles/ / / /thomas-piketty-new-gilded-age/ (accessed jan. , ); steve fraser, “what we can learn from the workers, activists and even politicians who tore down the first gilded age,” the nation, apr. , , https://www.thenation.com/article/what-we-can-learn-workers-activists-and- even-politicians-who-tore-down-first-gilded-a/ (accessed jan. , ). ). keeanga-yamahtta taylor, from #blacklivesmatter to black liberation (chicago: haymarket books, ). rick hampson, “america’s second gilded age: more class envy than class conflict,” usa today, may , , https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/ / / /americas-gilded-ages-then-and-now-and-how- they-differ/ / (accessed jan. , ). sarah jones, “lessons from the gilded age,” the new republic, june , , https://newrepublic.com/ article/ /lessons-gilded-age (accessed jan. , ). “how gilded ages end,” the american prospect, apr. , , https://prospect.org/article/how-gilded- ages-end (accessed jan. , ). james fallows, “elizabeth warren on the second gilded age,” the atlantic, may , , https://www. theatlantic.com/notes/ / /elizabeth-warren-on-the-second-gilded-age/ / (accessed jan. , ). jefferson crowie, the great exception: the new deal & the limits of american politics (princeton, nj: princeton university press, ); james livingston, “the myth of a ‘second gilded age,’” chronicle of higher education, jan. , , https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-myth-of-a-second-gilded/ (accessed jan. , ). steve fraser, the age of acquiescence: the life and death of american resistance to organized wealth and power (new york: basic books, ). heath w. carter, “why we’re not in a new gilded age,” religion and politics, feb. , (accessed jan. , ). the journal of the gilded age and progressive era h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://www.salon.com/ / / /robert_reich_were_living_in_a_new_guilded_age_of_wealth_and_power_partner/ https://www.salon.com/ / / /robert_reich_were_living_in_a_new_guilded_age_of_wealth_and_power_partner/ https://www.salon.com/ / / /robert_reich_were_living_in_a_new_guilded_age_of_wealth_and_power_partner/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/ / / /thomas-piketty-new-gilded-age/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/ / / /thomas-piketty-new-gilded-age/ https://www.nybooks.com/articles/ / / /thomas-piketty-new-gilded-age/ https://www.thenation.com/article/what-we-can-learn-workers-activists-and-even-politicians-who-tore-down-first-gilded-a/ https://www.thenation.com/article/what-we-can-learn-workers-activists-and-even-politicians-who-tore-down-first-gilded-a/ https://www.thenation.com/article/what-we-can-learn-workers-activists-and-even-politicians-who-tore-down-first-gilded-a/ https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/ / / /americas-gilded-ages-then-and-now-and-how-they-differ/ / https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/ / / /americas-gilded-ages-then-and-now-and-how-they-differ/ / https://www.usatoday.com/story/news/ / / /americas-gilded-ages-then-and-now-and-how-they-differ/ / https://newrepublic.com/article/ /lessons-gilded-age https://newrepublic.com/article/ /lessons-gilded-age https://newrepublic.com/article/ /lessons-gilded-age https://prospect.org/article/how-gilded-ages-end https://prospect.org/article/how-gilded-ages-end https://prospect.org/article/how-gilded-ages-end https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/ / /elizabeth-warren-on-the-second-gilded-age/ / https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/ / /elizabeth-warren-on-the-second-gilded-age/ / https://www.theatlantic.com/notes/ / /elizabeth-warren-on-the-second-gilded-age/ / https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-myth-of-a-second-gilded/ https://www.chronicle.com/article/the-myth-of-a-second-gilded/ https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms steve hahn, “the long gilded age,” the nation, july (accessed jan. , ). scott reynolds nelson, “introduction: reflecting on history when markets tumble,” the journal of the gilded age and progressive era : (oct. ): . leon fink, the long gilded age: american capitalism and the lessons of a new world order (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, ), . noam maggor, “the great inequalizer. american capitalism in the gilded age and progressive era,” the journal of the gilded age and progressive era, volume : ( ): . richard schneirov, “thoughts on periodizing the gilded age: capital accumulation, society, and politics, – ,” the journal of the gilded age and progressive era : ( ): . fink, the long gilded age. schneirov, “thoughts on periodizing the gilded age,” . for an insightful treatment of how historians can best intervene in public debates and policy, see alix r. green history, policy and public purpose: historians and historical thinking in government (london: palgrave macmillan, ). richard hofstadter. the age of reform: from bryan to f.d.r. (new york: vintage books, ); robert h. wiebe, the search for order, – (new york: hill and wang, ); martin j. sklar, woodrow wilson and the political economy of modern united states liberalism (indianapolis, in: bobbs-merrill, ). see judith stein, pivotal decade: how the united states traded factories for finance in the seventies (new haven, ct: yale university press, ); kim phillips-fein fear city: new york’s fiscal crisis and the rise of austerity politics (new york: metropolitan books, ). cite this article: wortel-london d, cothran b ( ) a second gilded age? the promises and perils of an analogy: introduction. the journal of the gilded age and progressive era , – . https://doi.org/ . /s daniel wortel-london and boyd cothran h ttp s://d o i.o rg / . /s d o w n lo ad ed fro m h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re . c arn eg ie m ello n u n iversity , o n a p r at : : , su b ject to th e c am b rid g e c o re term s o f u se, availab le at h ttp s://w w w .cam b rid g e.o rg /co re/term s . https://doi.org/ . /s https://doi.org/ . /s https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms 	a second gilded age? the promises and perils of an analogy: introduction 	notes heq- - -ver -perrin_ p .. editorial open access academic medicine’s responses to national race-related events and its role in civil rights paul b. perrin* these past few years have been difficult for our nation, as well for many of our patients and for those of us who treat, conduct research with, and teach about health is- sues affecting racial/ethnic minority populations. the national racial climate has channeled directly into our professional work, and indeed into many of our lives. to many, the list of names of black men killed has felt endless: keith lamont scott, terence crutcher, freddie gray, michael brown, alton sterling, among far too many others. people have taken to the streets protesting these killings, and a black lives matter movement has gained substantial momentum, contributing to what some have called the second civil rights movement. some of us in the medical community feel that race relations in the united states have reached the lowest point in our lifetimes, even some of us who remember segregation. many patients of color come into our clin- ics, offices, and research studies reeling from these na- tional race-related events, and the political rhetoric and related public policies that disproportionately harm immi- grants and communities of color seem only to make that pain worse. our trainees and colleagues of color, as well as white allies, struggle to make sense of this era of highly vis- ible racism. although many people believed that racism had gone undercover, there is no doubt now that it has reemerged: it is alive, pervasive, and blatant. this overt racism, now combining synergistically with more covert forms, has taken a profound mental and physical health toll on many of us and the popu- lations we serve. universities and training programs in the allied health professions across the nation have sent supportive emails over listservs, held anti- racism and cultural competence trainings, hosted ra- cial dialogues, and sponsored guest speakers. despite these efforts, the pain of racism is not fading. and why would it? to this very day, my trainees of color leave my office in richmond, virginia, for their rota- tions at our community clinic and in four blocks turn right from monument avenue under a statue of j.e.b. stuart. if they strolled another block, they would pass beneath a monument to robert e. lee atop his horse, adorning richmond’s largest roundabout. racism is far from over, and we are becoming increasingly aware of its role in medicine. exactly years ago in september , dr. martin luther king, jr. gave a speech to a large group of behav- ioral health researchers in washington, dc. the speech was published in march , the month be- fore his assassination. dr. king told us that health sci- entists have a unique role to play in the civil rights movement, and i find it both helpful and troubling that his words ring as true today as they did in . i look to his words, now years old, for perspective. he understood many of our feelings, telling us, ‘‘i must confess that these have been very difficult days for me personally. and these have been difficult days for every civil rights leader, for every lover of justice and peace. they have been days of frustration—days when we could not quite see where we were going, and when we often felt that our works were in vain, days when we were tempted to end up in the valley of despair’’ (p. ). like him, not only our patients but—i would argue—the medical community itself is often tempted to despair, and we want the race-related department of psychology, virginia commonwealth university, richmond, virginia. *address correspondence to: paul b. perrin, phd, department of psychology, virginia commonwealth university, box , richmond, va - , e-mail: pperrin@vcu.edu ª paul b. perrin ; published by mary ann liebert, inc. this open access article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . ), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. health equity volume . , doi: . /heq. . health equity pain that we and our patients feel to stop, particularly those of us of color. but dr. king cautioned us about our pain: ‘‘men and women should be as maladjusted as the prophet amos, who in the midst of the injustices of his day, could cry out in words that echo across the centuries, ‘let justice roll down like waters and righteousness like a mighty stream’’’ (p. ). he challenged us not to acclimate to racial injustice, as much as we might be tempted to self-soothe and withdraw or encourage our patients to. he reminded us that the medical field gave society the great word ‘‘maladjusted,’’ but he implored us to ‘‘never adjust ourselves to racial discrimination and ra- cial segregation’’ (p. ). he told us our pain was pur- poseful and necessary, and though we often grow weary, we should not allow it to be numbed or quieted. without it, we would lack the fuel and vigor we need to assume our unique role in the civil rights movement. never has the medical community been more capa- ble of our assuming the role he described; never has our scientific understanding of the health effects of racism been more nuanced and comprehensive. for our pa- tients of color, we must begin to shift our approach from solely remediating the physical and mental health effects of racism to preventing them. we cannot simply numb the symptoms of immigrant patients presenting in our offices with insomnia when the true source of their pathology is fear of deportation. we similarly can- not fully treat post-traumatic stress disorder stemming from racial trauma unless we leave our offices to per- form antiracism community work, engaging in preven- tion before we encounter patients of color in a medical capacity. we cannot stand by and solely treat hyperten- sion in patients of color without taking stances on civil rights legislation that our research shows would di- rectly influence their stress and health. there are several concrete steps that academic health centers can take to draw on our civil rights mission in the midst of national race-related events. at the indi- vidual level, health faculty and healthcare providers can directly ask both trainees and patients of color about their emotions related to these events, and then overtly validate those emotions, being respectful of the profound range of reactions people may have. doing so can build support into medical and training environments that otherwise tend to emphasize more objective and sometimes sterile approaches. it is also important that we challenge ourselves to reflect on and consider the various ways in which we may unwit- tingly reinforce racism in our profession through the unconscious biases that we all have. ultimately, it is on us to educate ourselves about the privileges we hold based on aspects of our identities or social status and how those privileges may blind us to the ways that racism can become embedded in our training en- vironments and clinics. at the macro level, we can join forces and advocate in local, state, and federal contexts for our patients of color and help provide the civil rights that will positively influence their health. the american medical association and many other allied health professional organizations have grassroots advo- cacy and patient action networks through which health professionals can get involved in legislative work to im- prove access to care for patients of color. if ever a time for the medicine to assume its role, it is now. this is not the time for medical professionals— no matter exhausted themselves—to go quietly into the night. we must bend our pain to action and as dr. king has said, ‘‘through such creative maladjustment, we may be able to emerge from the bleak and desolate midnight of man’s inhumanity to man, into the bright and glitter- ing daybreak of freedom and justice’’ (p. ). authors disclosure statement no competing financial interests exist. reference . king jr. ml. the role of the behavioral scientist in the civil rights move- ment. am psychol. ; : – . cite this article as: perrin pb ( ) academic medicine’s responses to national race-related events and its role in civil rights, health equity : , – , doi: . /heq. . . publish in health equity - immediate, unrestricted online access - rigorous peer review - compliance with open access mandates - authors retain copyright - highly indexed - targeted email marketing liebertpub.com/heq perrin; health equity , . http://online.liebertpub.com/doi/ . /heq. . http://www.liebertpub.com/heq ps • october news ©american political science association, fund for latino scholarship recipients the latino scholarship fund’s primary goal is to encourage and support the recruitment, reten- tion, and promotion of latina/o political scientists (especially students and tenure track junior faculty); the secondary goal is to support research on latino politics in the united states (especially students and tenure track junior faculty). grants for the cycle were awarded to those indi- viduals, institutions, and projects whose purposes most clearly match the goals of the fund, and whose proposals most persua- sively demonstrate capacity for successful completion. applications for the fund close annually each june. learn more about this year's fund recipients: rebeca j. agosto rosa is a political science graduate student at the university of illi- nois, urbana-champaign. she studies american politics with a focus on politi- cal psychology and identity. her disser- tation project examines under what conditions and why foreign language cues affect political atti- tudes in non-politi- cal contexts. support from the fund for latino scholarship will assist in her travel to the apsa annual meeting, where she will present her work on the political consequences of spanish language cues in non-political media. she will also attend the political psychology pre-conference and the latino politics workshop. she is a schroeder fellow at the cline center for advanced social research, a harry s. truman scholar, and a recipient of the rita and leonard ogren prize. she holds a master’s degree in political science from uiuc and a bachelor’s degree in political science and journalism from the university of puerto rico, río piedras. alejandro beltran aguirre is a phd candi- date at the school of government and public policy of the university of arizona. he received his ba from the universidad autónoma de sinaloa and has a book on local governance in spanish published through his alma mater. alejandro’s dissertation explores how corrupt politi- cians in mexico avoid accountability at the ballot box by buying off voters as well as exposing corruption in the auditing process of public finances at the state and local level. through the use of economet- ric methods, he demonstrates that mayors are systematically embezzling money during election years and through the use of network models he finds that audi- tors avoid investigat- ing corrupt mayors. as a first-generation college graduate and first-generation immi- grant, alejandro understands the barri- ers that many latino students face when choosing to enter grad school, which moti- vates his goal of recruiting more latino undergrads into phd programs. alejan- dro is excited to use the support of the fund for latino scholarship to travel to the apsa annual meeting to present his research and to interview for potential tenure track positions at minority serving institutions where he can fulfill his goal of mentoring students and recruiting them into political science and graduate school. tabitha bonilla is currently a research assistant professor at northwestern univer- sity’s institute for policy research. tabitha earned her phd from stanford university, and previously worked as a post-doctoral scholar and teaching fellow at the univer- sity of southern california. her research and teaching interests are at the intersection of political commu- nication, represen- tation, and identity. her work includes understanding how c o m m u n i c a t i o n matters for represen- tation as well as how various communica- tions alter support for public policies and social movements, including immigration, human trafficking, and black lives matter. in one current project, tabitha investigates how descriptive and substantive represen- tation inform each other. the award from the fund for latino scholarship will pay for gift card rewards for interview participants in summer . Álvaro josé corral received his ph.d. in government from the university of texas at austin. his research is in the areas of latinx politics and race and ethnicity in american politics, with a focus on the public opin- ion and voting behavior of latinxs as well as immigration policy. between and Álvaro was a consortium for faculty diversity postdoctoral fellow, and begin- ning in the fall of he will join the department of polit- ical science at the college of wooster at the rank of assistant professor. his book project, an extension of his dissertation, explores the relation- ship between gener- ational status and civic institutions as a new way to understand the political inte- gration process of latinx immigrants and their us-born family members. he is also a co-principal investigator for the immi- grant worker survey project, a collabora- tive project across four liberal arts colleges that collected over in-depth interviews with latinx migrants in ohio in partner- ship with a community-based organiza- tion. he plans to use funds from the latino scholarship award to conduct focus group interviews with latinx participants for his book project. angela gutierrez is a - marvin hoffenberg fellow and a senior policy fellow at the latino politics and policy initiative (lppi) at the university of california, los angeles. her research focuses on the role of political threat on latino identity and political participation. her co-authored paper “somos más: how racial threat and anger mobilized latino voters in the trump era” was recently published in prq. her dissertation explores how identity can be activated and subsequently influ- ence political behav- ior. she will use the f i n a n c i a l s u p p o r t provided by the fund for latino schol- arship help fund an experiment for her dissertation that aims to disentangle how different identity measures such as linked fate and group consciousness influence political attitudes and behaviors of lati- nos in the united states. ps • october news ©american political science association, michelangelo landgrave is a doctoral student at the university of califor- nia, riverside. his research focuses on representation and legislative studies. in addition to his academic research, he regularly publishes p o l i c y b r i e f s o n immigration policy. h i s re s e a rc h h a s been cited by such media as the wash‑ ington post and the h i l l . h e w i l l u s e his award from the f u n d f o r l a t i n o scholarship to fund research related to his dissertation. his dissertation devel- ops a new theory of legislative discrimi- nation using experiments with political elites. eddie lucero is a third-year graduate student at the university of california, merced’s phd program in political science. his interests lie in latino politics broadly, investigating both institutional and behav- ioral factors that influence latino participa- tion in american politics and the formation of a latino group conscious. he completed his ba in politi- cal science at uc merced in the fall of and worked for a california state legislator during and after his under- graduate studies. eddie is a recipient of the eugene cota robles fellowship and has recently presented work at the western political science conference. the award from the fund for latino scholar- ship will aid in the completion of his current study on how bilingualism among lati- nos effects their perceptions of american politics and opinion formation. his goal is to present this work at the next western political science conference in . this work will further the latino scholarship’s mission by investigating how bilingualism (english and spanish), among a growing bilingual latino electorate, effects latino participation and perception of american politics. eduardo salinas is currently a doctoral candidate studying political science at the university of illinois at chicago. his research links issues of race, racism, latino assimilation/immigration, public opinion, survey methodology, and policy prefer- ences. his peer-reviewed published work can be found in community development, the journal of politics in latin america, and the routledge companion to race and ethnic‑ ity ( nd ed., forthcoming ). eduardo is also currently a research methodologist at the national opinion research center (norc) at the university of chicago. while at norc, he has worked most extensively on the g e n e r a l s o c i a l survey (gss) in a variety of roles. the apsa fund for latino scholarship will contribute to eduardo’s ongoing research into minority-on-minority racism, and its effects on latino public policy pref- erences. eduardo received his ba in inter- national studies from the university of north texas before attending the univer- sity of illinois at chicago. inés valdez is an associate professor of political science at the ohio state univer- sity and the director of the latina/o studies program. her work focuses on the politi- cal theory of race, migration, empire, and cosmopolitanism. her first book, transna‑ tional cosmopolitanism: kant, du bois, and justice as a political craft, was published in june of with cambridge univer- s i t y p r e s s . t h e book theorizes the notion of transna- tional cosmopoli- t anis m t o m o ve the debate away from neo-kantian accounts of cosmo- politanism toward a grounded, rela- tional, and dialec- tical approach of transnational justice based on neglected portions of w. e. b. du bois’s work. her work has appeared in the american political science review, politi‑ cal research quarterly, and political stud‑ ies among other outlets. she has held or currently holds fellowships from the euro- pean university institute, the princeton university center for human values, and the humboldt stiftung. she is currently at work on a book manuscript on imperial mobility and the origins of popular sover- eignty. the apsa fund for latina/o scholarship will support—alongside an institutional match—a summer research stipend for an ohio state graduate student who is latina/o/x or whose research is on latina/o/x politics. daisy vazquez vera is a doctoral student in the political science department at ucla focusing on immigrant political repre- sentation and participation. she gradu- ated from uc irvine in with a ba in political science and chicano/latino stud- ies. her current work studies how immi- grant-serving organizations mediate the representation process for undocumented immigrant constituents across states and localities. daisy’s previous research has examined the impact of institutional prac- tices that support educational equity for undocumented immigrant college students and the legislative process and implemen- tation of state-level immigrant policies. she is currently a senior research fellow at the ucla latino policy and politics initiative conducting research on the topics of latino representa- tion and voting rights. daisy is a recipient of the ford predoctoral fellowship, apsa minority fellowship and the eugene v. cota-robles fellowship from ucla. the fund for latino scholarship will allow her to continue data collection efforts for her project on the role of immigrant-serving organizations’ advocacy efforts on legisla- tive behavior and policy outcomes. ■ ps • october news ©american political science association, apply this fall for the – fellowship year fellowship year fellows begin their fellowship year with a comprehensive four-week orientation with congressional experts and policy leaders. orientation begins in november . fellows then serve full-time assignments as legislative aides in the house of representa- tives or senate. office placements run until august , . candidates may apply for two optional programs—a research fellowship and a course on congress and foreign policy—that run from september to october . the fellowship year also features a winter and spring seminar series on congress, a visit to the district or state of a member of congress, and optional programs in annapolis, maryland, and ottawa, canada. qualifications applications are welcome from political scientists who have completed a phd in the last years or will have defended a dissertation in political science by november of the fellowship year. the program is open to scholars in all subfields within political science who can show a scholarly interest in congress and policy making. stipend $ , for the . -month fellowship period, plus a travel allowance. how to apply the application period opens in september . applications must be submitted online and include: • a -word personal statement • the names and contact information for three references • a writing sample. learn more at http://www.apsanet.org/cfp. congressional fellowship program advisory committee michelle chin* joan claybrook* richard cohen charles e. cook, jr. menna demessie* robert dole ronald d. elving* vic fazio michael franc david gergen lee h. hamilton gerald kovach paul light* richard lugar rep. david price cokie roberts catherine e. rudder* james thurber* *former apsa congressional fellow introducing the – apsa congressional fellows thanks to the – selection panel michelle chin (cfp – ), jessica gerrity (cfp – ), john haskell (cfp – ), tyson king-meadows (cfp – ), and marvin overby (cfp – ) political science fellows carlos algara, phd - university of california, davis christian fong, phd - assistant professor, university of michigan paul musgrave, phd - assistant professor, university of massachusetts, amherst ryan vander wielen, phd - associate professor, temple university catherine wineinger, phd - assistant professor, western washington university mci/communications fellows joel reed, phd candidate, university of missouri journalism fellow sofia resnick, rewire.news, washington, dc http://www.apsanet.org/cfp achieving diversity and inclusion in political science a m e r i c a n p o l i t i c a l s c i e n c e a s s o c i at i o n • n e w h a m p s h i r e av e . , n w, wa s h i n gto n , d c , - • w w w. a p s a n e t . o r g the american political science association has several major programs aimed at enhancing diversity within the discipline and identifying and aiding students and faculty from under- represented backgrounds in the political science field. these programs include: ralph bunche summer institute (rbsi) (undergraduate juniors) the s program is an annual five-week program designed to introduce to the world of doctoral study in political science to those undergraduate students from under-represented racial ethnic groups or those interested in broadening participation in political science and pursuing scholarship on issues affecting underrepresented groups or issues of tribal sovereignty and governance. application deadline: january of each year. or more information visit www.apsanet.org rbsi. apsa minority fellows program (mfp) (undergraduate seniors or ma and ph students) ( all ycle for seniors and ma students spring ycle for ph students) m p is a fellowship compe on for those applying to graduate school, designed to increase the number of individuals from under-represented backgrounds with ph s in political science. application deadline: ctober and march of each year. or more information, visit www.apsanet.org mfp. minority student recruitment program (msrp) (undergraduates and epartmental members) the ms p was created to iden fy undergraduate students from under-represented backgrounds who are interested in, or show poten al for, graduate study and, ul mately, to help further diversify the poli cal science profession. or more informa on, visit www.apsanet.org/msrp. apsa mentoring program the mentoring program connects undergraduate, graduate students, and junior faculty to experienced and senior members of the profession for professional development mentoring. apsa membership is re uired for mentors. to request a mentor or be a mentor, visit www.apsanet.org/mentor. apsa status committees apsa status committees develop and promote agendas and activities concerning the professional development and current status of under-represented communities within the political science discipline. for a listing of all apsa status committees, visit www.apsanet.org/status-committees. for more information on all iversity and nclusion programs, visit us online at www.apsanet.org/ diversityprograms. please contact imberly mealy, ph , senior irector of iversity and nclusion programs with any questions: kmealy@apsanet.org. to contribute to an apsa fund, such as the ralph bunche endowment fund or the hanes walton jr. fund, visit us at www.apsanet.org/donate. diversity and inclusion programs journal of critical thought and praxis issn: - . journal homepage: https://www.iastatedigitalpress.com/jctp/ volume , issue , , article , https://doi.org/ . /jctp. a review: unapologetic: a black, queer, and feminist mandate for radical movements stephanie gibb-clark, iowa state university abstract this is an overview and honest review of the page, paperback edition of unapologetic: a black, queer, and feminist mandate for radical movements, authored by charlene carruthers. recommended citation gibb-clark, s. ( ). a review: unapologetic: a black, queer, and feminist mandate for radical movements. journal of critical thought and praxis, ( ), - . https://doi.org/ . /jctp. copyright and open access © stephanie gibb-clark this article is licensed under a creative commons attribution-noncommercial (cc by-nc) . license, which permits any sharing and adaptation of the article, as long as the original author(s) and source are credited and the article is used for non-commercial purposes. the journal of critical thought and praxis is published by the iowa state university digital press (https://press.lib.iastate.edu) and the iowa state university school of education (https://www.education.iastate.edu) journal of critical thought and praxis , vol. , no. , - unapologetic: a black, queer, and feminist mandate for radical movements by: charlene carruthers, , paperback edition, pages, isbn stephanie gibb-clark iowa state university charlene carruthers, a prominent community organizer based primarily in chicago, presents a powerful field guide to the contemporary radical black liberation movement and the potential of a black, queer, feminist framework in organizing successful social justice movements in unapologetic: a black, queer, and feminist mandate for radical movements. organized around both personal and communal experience as a founding member of the black youth project , unapologetic offers a critique of anti-blackness, gender-based violence, and systemic racism, as well as, provides potential solutions in the reimagining of the radical black tradition and the practice of transformative justice. carruthers’ work epitomizes the conceptual underpinnings and practical actions of contemporary radical or “leftist” movements in the united states and clearly delineates a fourth wave of feminist scholarship; in other words, unapologetic embodies the feminist adage ‘the personal is political.’ according to carruthers, unapologetic “reflects insights gained on my journey thus far as an activist, community organizer, and leader,” (carruthers, , p. xi). to be sure, the account underscores lessons learned through over years of work by the author with organizations such as the center for community change, colorofchange.org, and national people’s action. as well as the ways in which those lessons have developed in response to the author’s discovery of, and education in, black feminisms, queer feminisms, anti-blackness, and the work of contemporary abolitionists, to form the foundational praxis of the black youth project . not only does unapologetic provide an overview of the ways that contemporary activist groups such as byp or black lives matter organize to combat racial, gender, and other social injustices, the work serves as a brief history of both national and international struggles against anti- blackness, homo/transphobia, and patriarchy that carruthers refers to as the black radical tradition. indeed, carruthers’ ( ) text emphasizes the production and consumption of black, queer, and feminist knowledges as inherent to the process of movement organization and the dismantling of oppressive systems, stating: “as activists and organizers, it is our duty to create and keep investigating new information to be transformed into knowledge,” (p. ). she further adds: what is common terminology and practice in social justice circles today was theorized, written about, organized around, and fought for by people whose names we may never know. what we include in the story of the black radical tradition must account for these forebears without apology. (p. ). furthermore, carruthers’ ( ) reinforces her focus on the importance of education in the black radical tradition with a discussion of what the author calls the black radical imagination. for carruthers ( ), the black radical tradition requires an ongoing and persistent cultivation of the black radical imagination. it is within the spaces of imagination, the dream spaces, that liberatory practices are born and grow, leading to the space to act and transform. (p. ). indeed, carruthers exposes the history of anti-blackness as a means to diminish and disrupt perceived paths toward freedom and liberation, and calls for the regeneration of the black radical gibb-clark, unapologetic: a black, queer, and feminist mandate for radical movements imagination as a way to infuse activist movements with new possible futures, organizations, and outcomes that do not reinforce capitalist, white supremacist, cisheteropatriarchal systems of oppression. it is through her analysis of the ways in which the black radical imagination is weakened that carruthers calls for organizational action in which the means used prefigure the end goal; in other words, liberation is a process that requires action that creates freedom in the present. carruthers further elaborates on ‘three commitments’ and ‘five questions’ which the author recommends using as a way to guide activist movements in sustainability and regeneration. according to carruthers ( ), “building many strong leaders, adopting healing justice as a core organizing value and principle, and combating liberalism with principled struggle” (p. ) are integral to avoiding atrophy within radical movements. moreover, carruthers finds critical personal and collective interrogation of five essential questions - who am i?, who are my people?, what do we want?, what are we building?, are we ready to win? - as the answer to constructing organizations that can create transformational change through social movements. underscoring the entirety of the work, however, is carruthers’ identification with, and reliance upon, a black, queer feminist theoretical framework for activism. for carruthers ( ), the black, queer feminist lens is an aspirational and “political praxis (practice and theory) based in black feminist and lgbtq traditions and knowledge, through which people and groups see to bring their full selves into the process of dismantling all systems of oppression,” (p. ). black queer feminism, in other words, recognizes the multiple oppressions faced by black folx around the world and the ways in which combatting the oppressions faced by black people embodies the struggle for collective liberation. despite a personal identification as both black and queer, carruthers makes clear that although the black queer feminist lens “is derived from and rooted in personal identity” (p. ), identification as black or queer is not mandatory, rather the black, queer feminist lens requires a politic that centers identity and lived experience. notwithstanding this recognition, however, carruthers fails to explore the ways in which those of non- marginalized identities can be incorporated into radical activist movements that subscribe to a black, queer feminist theoretical lens. to be sure, the voices of those of marginalized identities, including black and lgbtq+ folx, should be the most prominent in radical activist movements, but if building movements for collective liberation requires an interrogation and understanding of one’s self-interest and personal stakes, as carruthers ( ) claims (p. ), what strategies do the black youth project and carruthers suggest employing to engage those whose stakes may be obscured? carruthers similarly omits a coherent discussion of a few key points. for instance, the first of carruthers’ ‘three commitments’ calls for building strong leaders, however, leadership, and the qualities that leaders should possess, is not clearly defined. much of the discussion on leadership is centered around critical interrogation of self-interest in the movement for collective liberation and the importance of ‘showing up’ for the movement in daily life and during critical actions but the ways in which self-interest and ‘showing up’ relate to building leadership skills is not entirely obvious. carruthers’ ( ) suggestion that “all leaders must ask themselves: what work needs to be done, what am i being asked to do, and what am i best positioned to do?” (p. ) seems to suggest that leadership requires the ability to critically assess organizational and movement needs in conjunction with critical self-reflection, but this is implied rather than definite. gibb-clark, unapologetic: a black, queer, and feminist mandate for radical movements one of carruthers’ ( ) ‘five questions’ for radical movements - are we ready to win? - is equally vague. this section acts as a clarion call to rally enthusiasm but, ultimately, leaves more questions than answers. by focusing on calls for experimentation and implementation of new “practices that match the type of world we want to create” (p. ), carruthers ( ) ignores the integral question, what does winning mean? how do activist movements in struggle for collective liberation measure a ‘win’? does winning entail one successful action that produces a desired result - such as the reparations achieved by the anti-torture campaign against the chicago police department (pp. - ) - or does winning require a fully radical transformative change? a more complete conceptualization of what winning means could only bolster carruthers’ rallying call, as well as foster a rejection of the individualistic, ‘us versus them’ mentality that popular conceptions of competition create. these small quibbles aside, unapologetic successfully affords the reader the ability to see the importance of storytelling and narrative - of major importance to both critical race and women and gender studies - to the process of movement creation, the creation and centering of marginalized knowledges, and the development of successful organizing strategies. furthermore, carruthers’ ( ) work effectively highlights the importance of maintaining an intersectional analysis in all movements aimed at doing social justice work. while academics working in the field of race, gender or sexuality studies will find the work an accessible, yet thorough introduction to key ideas of the fourth-wave of feminism, the work may be better suited to those who come to the movement for collective liberation from an activist background due to a more conversational tone and lack of traditional citations throughout. however, the work would be well suited to classroom discussion in conjunction with key theoretical texts of the black feminist, radical feminist, and critical race traditions. overall, unapologetic is a particularly timely addition to the scholarship of activist academics seeking to create transformative change in our current culture of insecurity. author notes stephanie gibb-clark is currently pursuing a master’s degree in the interdisciplinary graduate studies program at iowa state university with a focus on revolutionary and liberation movements through the study of history, sociology and women and gender studies, in addition to the certificate in education for social justice program. her research interests include projects on anarcha-feminisms, anti-fascist activism, the convergences of radical critical social theories, and contemporary liberation movements, especially rojava in syria. previous works include “toward an anarcha-feminist understanding of revolutionary change,” presented at the april iowa state university transforming gender and society conference. ms. gibb-clark received her a bachelor of liberal studies from iowa state university in . references carruthers, c. a. ( ). unapologetic: a black, queer, and feminist mandate for our movement. boston, ma: beacon press. 	 _cover 	manu _final inclusive public space: rethinking practices of mitigation, adaptation and transformation vol.:( ) urban design international ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - - editorial inclusive public space: rethinking practices of mitigation, adaptation and transformation karina landman published online: august © springer nature limited recent decades have brought about an increased focus on public space as part of building more inclusive and sustain- able neighbourhoods and cities. not only are the develop- ment of public space highlighted as important in the sustain- able development goals and in the new urban agenda, but they have also become the focus of movements such as new, sustainable and tactical urbanism. however, recent events such as the outbreak of covid- and protests by black lives matter, have shaken our ideas and perceptions of public space. it forces us to pause for a moment and reconsider the meaning for and threats to inclusive public space. broadly, inclusive refers to something containing a spec- ified element of a whole or not excluding any section of society or any party (oxford dictionary , p. ). in this sense, inclusive public space would allow for different parts or groups of society to be accommodated in public space or in other words for social and physical inclusion. for example, making space for young people (crane ), skate-boarders (carmona ) and different race groups (edgell ) in public space or for informal livelihoods (chen and kihato ) and pop-up markets (madanipour ). however, the notion of inclusive public space has also been challenged by growing security concerns and debates related to whether inclusive or exclusive spaces would be safer. consequently, certain spaces become mono- culturally dominated, undermining the intention for public spaces to be democratic places for all (shaftoe , p. ). this has also recently been extended to question the valid- ity of certain actions, such as protests in the name of main- taining security. how can we consider the safety of people without excluding some? how can we make room for differ- ent groups of society in the public space? how can we allow for different groups to voice their concerns within public space without the fear of being arrested? how can we ensure that the nature of public space is culturally inclusive and do not evoke traumatic memories? these questions need to be considered if we strive towards more inclusive public spaces. this special issue of urban design international invited different scholars and practitioners to offer their insights through in-depth case studies and practical interventions. this issue seeks to not only question the notion of inclusive public space in its vari- ous manifestations but also to interrogate it within different contexts. consequently, perspectives from both the global south and north are represented, as well as from the east and west. this does not only highlight vast cultural differ- ences and political challenges but also show some similari- ties in terms of more common concerns and opportunities. reconsidering the nature and use of public space in  the recent global events have forced many observers across the world to rethink the nature and use of public space. as the outbreak of covid- spread across the world in the early months of and gripped many countries, governments responded with various forms of lockdown to contain the spread of the virus. in many places, for example in italy and spain, this resulted in eerie and haunted images of some of the world’s most well-known public spaces being deserted and empty. san marco plaza in venice lay silent with only the buildings witnessing the empty space. in other parts of the world, where the restrictions were not that severe, people were still allowed out into public space, but with strict meas- ures of social distancing in place. novel signs reminded visi- tors of the new rules, enforced by law enforcement agents or in extreme cases, by robots, for example in singapore. * karina landman karina.landman@up.ac.za https://www.up.ac.za department of town and regional planning, faculty of engineering, built environment and information technology, university of pretoria, room - , building , south campus, private bag x , hatfield  , south africa http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf k. landman freedom was restricted and measures of mitigation in public space became the new norm to reduce risk and ensure the safety of people against the spreading new virus. while people were still in shock and trying to come to grips with the new reality after covid- and the often dev- astating economic impacts, a second major event shook the world. towards the end of may, george floyd, a black man, was accosted by a white police agent and pinned down on the street with his knee on his neck for more than min. meanwhile, mr floyd was crying out that he cannot breathe. he died on his way to the hospital. this lead to a huge wave of protests in the united states and others parts of the world of people voicing their discontent over the brutal killing of a black man by a white police officer, opening old wounds and leading to boiling anger of continuous practices of discrimi- nation and existing inequality. all this played out in public space. overnight streets became battlegrounds of peaceful protests and not so peaceful confrontations between pro- testors and law enforcement agents. the eyes of the world turned to the places of protests, where the traditional role of the street was temporarily undermined. voices of thousands adapted once customary streets into channels of vibrant action, while artists changed the landscape through murals across the world, depicting the face of george floyd and often the words “i cannot breathe”. more recently, due to the passing of new security law, the voices of the people and the freedom to protest have become severally challenged in the streets of hong kong as practices of “succession, subver- sion or terrorism” can now lead to imprisonment. a number of protestors have been arrested in the city’s public spaces. practices of public space adaptation, including large num- bers of diverse people gathering in public space, forced the world to not only reconsider the nature of inclusive public space but also what can and should take place in such spaces. as more people started to speak out against the injustices in the world, the movement gained momentum under what has been called black lives matter. not only injustices of the present, but also of the past and into the future. protest action expanded to question the representations of oppres- sion in public space. soon the statues of prominent figures who gained wealth through slave trade or played leading roles during colonialism were targeted. one by one the old icons of the past were toppled or removed—from colum- bus in the usa and colston in the uk to leopold ii in belgium. in south africa, the controversial figure of pres paul kruger—fenced in from previous attempts to remove him  years ago during calls for decolonisation—was again defaced with spray paint along with four other statues of boer warriors surrounding him. these acts reopened up the debate related to the meaning of structures in the built envi- ronment. it questions the value of being aware of history versus the feelings or memory evoked by these statues. as explained by a historian, ana lucia araujo on cnn, if the trauma of brutal memory linked to the actions committed by these historical figures outweighs the historical facts, then it calls for the transformation of space or in other words, the removal of symbols of oppression (euronews ). the increasing debate around the world related to the removal of historical figures has opened up many questions related to practices of the transformation of public space to be more inclusive. is there still hope for inclusive public space? exploring narratives from five cities this special issue seeks to build on these discussions and events and broaden the ways in which we can reconsider inclusive public space. specifically, we are interested in whether users in public space experience these spaces as inclusive and if not, why not and how this can be changed to be more inclusive. through this endeavour, we hope to show that inclusive public space does not have to remain an elusive ideal but can become a reality through various types of interventions. the first narrative is about intercultural interactions and perceptions in public space in england, in the northern city of bradford. the paper shows how people experience other people from different ethnics groups and or genders in some of the inner city’s public spaces. ganji and rish- beth illustrate how the nature of physical space can enable more meaningful interactions and thus create opportunities for more inclusive public space. the potential for inclusive public space is therefore influenced by who uses the space, where and when and how this make other users feel. in the second story, roa, fois and velasco offer detail about a more practical process of regeneration towards more inclusive public space. the article focusses on how to adapt the existing public environment in the city of guayaquil in ecuador through urban design interventions and the improvement and reconnection of public space. the authors argue that reconnection should occur through both tangible connections such as green infrastructure, street furniture and cycle paths and intangible connections that create links between the city and its users, for example, imaginary paths, nodes of convergence and collective memories. thus, to be inclusive, does not only relate to the physical condition of the space but also relates to the meaning and opportunities it creates for the users. the meaning of space should, however, extend beyond the local inhabitants of a city. barreiro and gonzalez share a narrative about palermo in sicily which details the chal- lenges presented through an influx of migrants and what this means for the adaptation and transformation of exist- ing spaces in the old historic centre of the city. the article reconsiders how to enable and produce more inclusive public inclusive public space: rethinking practices of mitigation, adaptation and transformation space in a multicultural environment where the arrival of the migrants have raised many questions about inter-cultural place-making. the authors show how involving more people from various communities and reclaiming old spaces can create opportunities for the evolution of and the emergence of more inclusive public space. in hong kong, bruyns and nel tell a story of limited public space in hong kong and how people have adapted the existing public spaces, albeit often in temporary ways, to reclaim and appropriate existing space in more inclusive ways. this occurs within a climate of large scale privatiza- tion of space in the city, with restrictive use and privileges. this reclamation of space is referred to as lateral privatiza- tion, conjuring up notions of the right to the city and physi- cally taking temporary ownership or reclaiming a specific part of this space. the authors offer two examples of lateral privatization, namely the umbrella movement where activ- ists occupied and temporary adapted public spaces through sit-ins, creating study spaces and using spaces to address crowds, as well as the occupation and transformation of spaces by foreign domestic workers every sunday to gather and communicate. they argue that lateral privatization chal- lenges us to reconsider the notion of inclusive public space through people’s actions in micro territories to temporarily redefine the meaning and nature of these spaces. returning to the global south, makakavhule and land- man share the tale of the search for greater democracy in south africa’s changing public spaces. the article explores the challenges and opportunities for deliberative democracy and the creation of more inclusive public space in the capital city of south africa, the city of tshwane, as the municipal area is known. the authors show that while there is often resistance or an inability to facilitate spatial democracy in tshwane, there are also opportunities in this regard by giv- ing people a voice and enabling bottom-up dialogue. at the same time, they indicate that while democratic space may be hampered through the unequal distribution of space or confrontation within public space, efforts towards the devel- opment of public space in former marginalized or poorer areas of the city can create opportunities to address these challenges, paving the way for more inclusive public space. divergent stories and common threats the articles illustrate five divergent stories of attempts to understand the use of public space in multi-cultural soci- eties and different contexts. while some of these stories focus more on the findings of research projects or observa- tion of changes occurring in public space, others are geared more too specific urban design interventions related to the improvement or regeneration of public space. however, there are also a number of common threats present in these accounts. the first common threat refers to the clear relationship between designed space and the lived experience of the users of these spaces. for example, the study in bradford illustrates how the design of spaces can make people feel comfortable to only observe from a distance or to engage closer to playgrounds. in ecuador, the urban designers were cognizant of the intangible connections or urban signs that fill the city with codes that inhabitants interpret for their use and enjoyment. second, the value of mixed activity spaces was clearly articulated. in bradford, there was a positive relationship between mixed activity spaces and the poten- tial for inter-cultural activity. interviews indicated that they enjoyed these more inclusive spaces that seem to be able to accommodate people of different colour, culture and class. mixed development also featured strongly in south africa as a means to enable more inclusive and democratic pub- lic space. the discussion highlights two challenges for the achievement of deliberative democracy in space, namely homogenisation and exclusion. these challenges can be countered through diversity and mixed development, as was evident in many parks across the city of tshwane. third, the facilitation and creation of inclusive public space are hindered by ethnic and gender dis-association. in palermo, one of the key challenges was to articulate a meaningful inclusion of multiple cultural identities in the shaping of the public space. this was especially challenging in a con- text filled with multicultural groups that are often socially disconnected. similarly, users of the public spaces in brad- ford were often discouraged to use these spaces due to the presence of male groups or certain ethnic groups. however, interestingly in hong kong, foreign domestic workers coun- tered this lack of belonging or association by purposefully reclaiming space for a short period on a sunday to assert their right to the city and facilitate a form of inclusion in space. finally, inclusive space is threatened by the unequal distribution or limited amount of public space, often exac- erbated by the privatization of public space. it is pointed out that being one of the cities in the world with the highest densities, hong kong does not have an adequate amount of public space. in addition, some accessible spaces are in fact privatised and controlled and are thus not inclusive. lateral privatization, as illustrated by the discussion, offers a way to temporarily take back portions of the space for those who are often excluded from these spaces. likewise, south africa has also witnessed the privatization of public space through the creation of pseudo-public spaces in shopping centres or common open spaces in gated communities, creating exclu- sive space for selected groups. as indicated above, a focus on diversity and mixed development has the potential to enable more democratic and inclusive spaces. k. landman the way forward and the role of urban design inclusive public space does not have to remain as an idea on paper or in the minds of urban designers. there is enough evidence to show that, despite many challenges, it is possible to achieve it to some extent, either temporarily or in more permanent ways. however, it means that urban designers need to rethink practices of mitigation, adaptation and trans- formation of public space, both in terms of process and prod- uct. in some cases, it may translate in a temporary change of use, either in terms of activities or users. this can mitigate a range of safety concerns. second, the traditional nature and/or use of public space may need to be adapted through protest actions or urban design interventions to accommo- date different activities, either temporarily or on a more permanent basis. various forms of public space adaptation have the potential to counter practices of exclusion, either physically or symbolically. finally, in some cases, a com- plete re-imagination of public space is necessary to enable meaningful and inclusive public space. this may require a number of urban design interventions linked to regeneration or upgrading projects to create new opportunities for a much broader multicultural public and remove signs of oppression or discomfort, both physically and socially. references carmona, m. . contemporary public space: critique and clas- sification; part one: critique. journal of urban design ( ): – . chen, m., j. harvey, c. wanjiko kihato, & c. skinner. . inclusive public spaces for informal livelihoods: a discussion paper for urban planners and policy makers. prepared by wiego for cities alliance. https ://www.citie salli ance.org/sites /defau lt/files /publi c% spa ce% dis cussi on% pap er_ .pdf. crane. . young people and public space: developing inclusive policy and practice. presented at the international conference on young people and social exclusion, university of strathclyde, glasgow. https ://eprin ts.qut.edu.au/ / /crane _syij_artic le.pdf. accessed september edgell becker, p. . “making inclusive communities” congrega- tions and the “problem” of race. social problems ( ): – . euronews. , confronting colonisation, cnn. https ://www.youtu be.com/watch ?v=oh_csn s ne &featu re=youtu .be). madanipour, a. . cities in time: temporary urbanism and the future of the city. london: bloomsbury. oxford concise english dictionary. . oxford university press. shaftoe, h. . convivial urban spaces: creating effective public places. london: earthscan. publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. https://www.citiesalliance.org/sites/default/files/public% space% discussion% paper_ .pdf https://www.citiesalliance.org/sites/default/files/public% space% discussion% paper_ .pdf https://eprints.qut.edu.au/ / /crane_syij_article.pdf https://www.youtube.com/watch% fv% doh_csn sne % feature% dyoutu.be https://www.youtube.com/watch% fv% doh_csn sne % feature% dyoutu.be 	inclusive public space: rethinking practices of mitigation, adaptation and transformation 	reconsidering the nature and use of public space in  	is there still hope for inclusive public space? exploring narratives from five cities 	divergent stories and common threats 	the way forward and the role of urban design 	references intersections between tiktok and tv: channels and programmes thinking outside the box article intersections between tiktok and tv: channels and programmes thinking outside the box jorge vázquez-herrero * , maría-cruz negreira-rey and ana-isabel rodríguez-vázquez ���������� ������� citation: vázquez-herrero, jorge, maría-cruz negreira-rey, and ana-isabel rodríguez-vázquez. . intersections between tiktok and tv: channels and programmes thinking outside the box. journalism and media : – . https://doi.org/ . / journalmedia received: october accepted: january published: january publisher’s note: mdpi stays neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affil- iations. copyright: © by the authors. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (https:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). faculty of communication sciences, universidade de santiago de compostela, santiago de compostela, a coruña, spain; cruz.negreira@usc.es (m.-c.n.-r.); anaisabel.rodriguez.vazquez@usc.es (a.-i.r.-v.) * correspondence: jorge.vazquez@usc.es abstract: the rise of the tiktok social network has caused the media to confront the younger generation. the platform, which hosts dances, challenges, and funny short videos, has unique features that force a reinvention of social networking strategies. television has become social and has expanded to new platforms, while young people are abandoning the consumption of traditional television. in this study, we explore—for the first time—the presence of television channels and programmes on tiktok and an analysis of the main strategies shown in the found profiles. the results describe a first exploratory phase that lacks specific strategies in most cases, while examples adapted to the logic of the social network emerge: content with a fun and simple tone, with participation in challenges and trends of the moment, as well as a positioning of the brand to—gradually—approach its future potential audiences. keywords: television; social media; tiktok; social media logic . introduction the impact of new media on the traditional television model has transformed its con- tent, distribution channels, consumer experience, and the understanding of the audience. television has become social and has emerged out of the tv box to extend its content to a multi-screen scenario dominated by mobile devices, becoming increasingly interconnected to social networks (proulx and shepatin ). social media has become both an opportu- nity and a challenge at the corporate level for professional practice and the production of specific content (van dijck and poell ). one of the constant challenges is to connect with the social audience (quintas-froufe and gonzález-neira ) and maintain user engagement, a complex issue influenced by the culture of media consumption, perceptions of television and its programmes, and the characteristics of the various social networks or techno-commercial strategies of television producers and social media companies, etc. (guo and chan-olmsted ; moe et al. ). in the continuous process of adapting to the changing characteristics of major social networks, media outlets have recently encountered the unexpected rise of tiktok. in , the chinese platform became one of the most popular among young audiences worldwide and revalued the format of user-produced short videos (kaye et al. ). given the success of this social network, media organisations have been gradually incorporated (vázquez-herrero et al. ) to position their brands and content. however, tiktok’s own logic, characterised by the emotional dimension of its videos—humour, fun, music, dance, challenges, etc.—and new forms of interaction and editing possibilities (feng et al. ) forces media editors to redesign their social media strategies. in the intersection between television and tiktok, the characteristics of a traditional channel, which remains one of the main sources of information and entertainment for adult audiences, and those of a new and growing social network with a specific language and logic in which the younger generations find—in addition to fun content—a place for information (newman et al. ), are contrasted. to discover how television channels journal. media , , – . https://doi.org/ . /journalmedia https://www.mdpi.com/journal/journalmedia https://www.mdpi.com/journal/journalmedia https://www.mdpi.com https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://doi.org/ . /journalmedia https://doi.org/ . /journalmedia https://creativecommons.org/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / https://doi.org/ . /journalmedia https://www.mdpi.com/journal/journalmedia https://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= journal. media , and programmes adapt to this new social platform and its language, this work starts by formulating the following research questions: rq : which television channels and programmes are present on tiktok? rq : what strategies do television channels and programmes on tiktok employ? . . tv strategies, social media, and new audiences television is not dead, but the classic modalities of television consumption tend to occupy the attention of the audience only at very specific moments and around very determined phenomena. this is what is known as ‘event-tv’, which finds a powerful ally in social networks where the audience comments, shares, and co-creates content. the user experience is also strengthened with personalised offers that the audience can access from multiple devices, at any time, and from anywhere (tse ). internet connectivity, multiple devices, social networks, and new audience behaviours have transformed the television model (ross ). social audience measurement has become critical in the commercial development of the television industry (kosterich and napoli ) and has also affected the corporate and content strategies of television chan- nels and programs. the impact of social media has led broadcasters to formulate new policies to integrate social networks into their programming, promotion, and audience interaction strategies (evans ). television is evolving to capture a multiplatform audience which, in order to fight the boredom of watching only one programme, demands interaction with native content for mobile devices through transmedia storytelling and no more than six seconds to tell a story (vázquez ). watching television has become a transmedia experience that has transformed the temporalities of television’s narratives, moving from a linear temporal structure to one of the overlapping experiences in a single narrative moment across diverse platforms and screens (evans ). television broadcasters have taken on a multi-platform production that complements linear television (doyle ) and transforms the consumption and socialisation around television content (simons ). those changes have been significantly influenced by the proliferation of over-the-top (ott) platforms or the growth of internet video consumption. in a context where niche audiences—understood as clusters of users strategically gathered around communities—predominate, television media implement policies to reach them through social networks, involve them in their creative and content diffusion strategies, and try to control their contributions as fans to the building of the television brand (navar-gill ). in their performance on social networks, lin and peña ( ) point out that television actors tend to publish more task-oriented posts than socio-emotional ones, even though these are the types that generate the most impact on the audience— especially those with a positive tone. the authors also point out that the influence of the type of content also differs according to the genre of the programmes. social networks are also an opportunity to connect with new audiences. a report by the pew research center (perrin ) highlights the generational differences in tv consumption and renewed habits in young people. they prefer to watch tv via streaming: % prefer to watch ‘app/web on a smartphone’ and % prefer ‘live+dvr/time-shifted tv’ (nielsen ). designing strategies to adapt to new consumption models becomes a challenge for television that relies on social networks to improve its connections with what they already consider their audience of the immediate future—generation z, also known as igen, generation net, or centennials. these young people are a difficult demographic to pin down because they include late millennials, including their younger brothers and sisters in generation z and even shaking up kids who are still learning to read (twenge ). they are hyperconnected teenagers who share traits of generations y and z, inclined towards the virtual world; digital natives who met the internet at birth; they are pragmatic and relate to each other through online communities on instagram, twitter, flickr, tumblr, whatsapp, badoo, tinder, youtube, twitch, tiktok, telegram, etc. (rodríguez-vázquez journal. media , and garcía-ruíz ). generation z, despite having multiple technological devices to stay connected and consume content, maintains the smartphone as the main channel for access and connection to social networks, audiovisual content, music, video games, etc. (turner ). their television consumption behaviour is free—in terms of devices, choice of moment, and content—and occurs largely through the offer of otts, is multi-screen, and remains interconnected with social networks (patch ). . . media adaptation to social media (logic) the popularisation of social networks soon made them indispensable platforms for the media, causing changes in their business strategies, content production, and distribution, as well as in their relationship with audiences. social media logic, understood as ‘the processes, principles, and practices through which these platforms process information, news, and communication’ (van dijck and poell ), expands beyond the platforms that generate it to fully impact media dynamics. nieborg and poell ( ) call this process platformisation, whereby economic, governmental, and infrastructural extensions of digital platforms modify the production dynamics of the cultural industries. this redistribution of power is visible between the news media and platform companies, and the growing dependence of the former on the latter results in the dislocation of news journalism (ekström and westlund ). thus, outside media organisations, social media also affects journalistic practices and norms, adapting them to their own logic of operation and consumption (hermida and mellado ). in this scenario, mainstream media strive to adapt to social media (newman ), and news organisations assume a multichannel communication method, in whose dynamics each platform is employed in different phases of content production and distribution (neuberger et al. ). this involves experimenting with formats adapted for each social network, which often involves the production of specific or native content for each platform. on facebook, the algorithm adjustment made in forced media to publish more video content to maintain its visibility on the platform, a challenge that digital-native and broadcast publishers took up with less difficulty than print media (tandoc and maitra ). the tendency to distribute content in more visual forms also extended to twitter, a social network on which media companies experimented with different formats depending on the characteristics of the genre being broadcast (garcía-avilés and robles ). in a context in which communication and journalism are increasingly mobile and ubiquitous (westlund and quinn ; salaverría and de-lima-santos ), content pro- duction and distribution strategies are evolving from digital-first to mobile-first or even social-first or social-only (hill and bradshaw ), adapting to the formats and possibili- ties of native mobile social networks. the immediacy of content distribution has given rise to forms such as live-blogging (matheson and wahl-jorgensen ) and the live broadcast of events through facebook live, periscope, or snapchat, which achieve engagement of users thanks to immersion, immediacy, interaction, and sociality (haimson and tang ). the popularisation of instagram resulted in the publication of photographs, computer graphics, or videos, and in the production of ephemeral content through its stories for the dissemination of its news, coverage of events, the publication of specials, or the search for user interaction (vázquez-herrero et al. ). instant messaging networks such as what- sapp and telegram have also been adopted by the media for the personalised distribution of their information content (negreira-rey et al. ). in addition, the standardisation of some wearables, such as smartwatches, forces experimentation with new microformats that allow the consumption of content ‘at a glance’ (silva et al. ). regarding the adaptation of television to social media and innovation in visual for- mats, garcía-avilés ( ) points out that broadcasters must offer different content for digital platforms that exploit the potential of their images and present specific publica- tion guidelines for instagram, twitter, facebook, or youtube, networks on which content broadcast on television can be complemented to develop transmedia strategies. journal. media , to a large extent, the media depends on the distribution of content through social networks to attract traffic to the web and audiences to the main platform, engaging users and building participatory relationships with the audience (xia et al. ). this impact on users is, in turn, conditioned by the growing incidental consumption of news through social media, which is especially pronounced among young audiences who are associated, in this case, with intensive use of the smartphone and a constant connection to social networks (boczkowski et al. ). the dynamics of content consumption through social media are also based on the logic of virality (klinger ), which is defined by nahon et al. ( , p. ) as the ‘process which gives any information item (picture, video, text, or any other audiovisual textual artifact) the maximum exposure, relative to the potential audience, over a short dura- tion, distributed by many nodes’. in this sense, welbers and opgenhaffen ( ) explain that virality depends on news sharing, and pieces about softer news topics being more share-worthy (kalsnes and larsson ) or stories of emotional and personal character (wahl-jorgensen ). however, the scope of content on social networks is also highly con- ditioned by the recommendation algorithms of each platform (devito ), and through the options for interaction and sharing of each social network (larsson ). . . tiktok tiktok is the fastest-growing micro-video social network for mobile devices and the latest social platform to attract media attention. micro-videos, characterised as videos of a few seconds duration usually recorded with a smartphone (nie et al. ), are a booming media format that are not just exploited by the tiktok social network. instagram joined this trend with the launch of reels in august , facebook tried the same with the now-closed application lasso, and byte appeared as the short video application successor of the old vine. tiktok leads the field with more than million users, which places it in sixth place of the most popular social media mobile apps, with more than two billion downloads world- wide (we are social ). during , the application reached million downloads, while during the first quarter of , it surpassed the mark of the maximum downloads achieved by an app in that period (sensor tower a, b). the success of tiktok is associated with its popularity among users of so-called generation z, while boomers or millennials are less familiar with the app (pellicer ; schmidt ). tiktok is a version of the chinese application douyin, which was launched in septem- ber by bytedance (kaye et al. ), which has been adapted for the international market. douyin’s success in china led the company to create the tiktok brand for ex- pansion to other countries from september , eventually buying and merging with musical.ly in august . regarding its characteristics, tiktok is a short video app—with a duration of up to s or s—in which lip-sync type videos predominate (largely inherited from musical.ly) as well as challenges of various kinds (generally identified with hashtags), duets (employed for reactions or other types of responses to other videos), or live shows. feng et al. ( ) define the characteristics of tiktok around the emotional dimension of its content (attrac- tive, funny, etc.), its interactivity, and its usability. the content consumption experience in tiktok is highly influenced by the app’s recommendation algorithm. when the user opens it, they are shown a sequence of videos in the so-called for you page—associated with the #foryou or #fyp hashtags—similar to the explore pages of other apps. although the user has the option of changing this view to see the publications of the profiles that follow, the recommended videos are shown in order of priority. this is why the engagement options (larsson ), such as likes and shares in less-demanding forms or comments, duets, or lip-syncs in the more-demanding forms, are fundamental for the visibility of the content and its potential virality. besides the use of hashtags for video tagging associated with various challenges or trends, interaction on tiktok also occurs through the sounds that are used, which can be original, reused from journal. media , another video or app library, or from the stitch tool, which allows other users’ videos to be reused in other publications. the rapid popularisation of tiktok in the international arena is not, however, free of controversy and concerns about the app. several researchers have pointed out the existence of censorship policies, related to content opposed to the chinese government (hern ) or related to the discrimination of ugly or poor people’s profiles (biddle et al. ). during , tiktok has also been banned in india (abi-habib )—along with other chinese applications such as wechat—and prosecuted by the trump administration (paul ). however, media outlets have joined this platform to adapt to its logic, connect with the younger public, and reinforce the positioning of their brands on this new channel. during , tiktok has been one of the most used platforms to disseminate information about the coronavirus to young people, both from the media (sidorenko-bautista et al. ) and official accounts (ballesteros herencia ), as well as from social movements such as the black lives matter (richardson ). although some of the first media accounts on tiktok came from musical.ly, some of the first to join were bbc radio , teen vogue, nbc news’ stay tuned, the washington post, and clarín or pulzo (gonzález ; zaffarano ; schmidt ). in a previous approach, klug ( ) explored the presence and adaptation of us news providers—print legacy newspapers and digital natives—identifying a total of accounts. in a previous study, the first to specifically address the performance of media in tiktok with an international scope (vázquez-herrero et al. ), the authors mapped up to verified media profiles, the result of a progressive incorporation since . they pointed out that there is an effort to adapt media to the logic of tiktok because, in addition to pursuing an informative objective, they elaborate specific content for the platform with the publication of funny and silly videos or the participation in challenges, using the app’s own aesthetics and resources. . methodology to answer the research questions, we developed an exploratory research study (stebbins ). the object of study has barely been addressed so far due to the recent rise of tiktok, and this research focuses on the intersections between the social platform and television in a novel way. through this qualitative method, we aim ‘to maximize the discovery of generalisations leading to description and understanding of an area of social or psychological life’ (stebbins , p. ). we respond to rq (which television channels and programmes are present on tiktok?) by searching for verified profiles of television channels and programmes through the tiktok search engine using keywords and by reviewing the recommendations of each profile up to a level five of depth. in october , we updated the database previously elaborated in february for a published study (vázquez-herrero et al. ). we obtained a non-probabilistic exploratory sample of tv channels and programmes from around the world. in this phase, we collected the profile identification and engagement and publication data (username, fans, hearts, videos, date of first publication, channel/programme, and country) on october . the quantitative engagement data, such as fans and hearts, were taken from the source code. the accessibility of the data in october was more restricted than it was in february because tiktok is a social network without an application programming interface (api). we take as reference previous research on journalistic media on tiktok (vázquez- herrero et al. ) to analyse the unique aspects of social media logic in the field of television from an inductive process and by selecting illustrative case studies. this second phase will allow us to respond to rq (what strategies do the television channels and programmes on tiktok employ?) by identifying practices and focusing on the main genres and themes of the identified profiles. journal. media , . results . . exploring tv on tiktok the sample of tv channels and programmes has profiles in tiktok, non-probabilistic data that represents a starting point for future studies because it is still an emerging platform. looking at when they first started publishing videos, we found profiles created from onwards, prior to the launch of tiktok outside china in , and which would have originated from musical.ly, with whom tiktok merged in august . as shown in figure , the year of greatest growth so far has been , when the start of activity of profiles was identified, especially in the second half of the year, with new profiles of tv channels and programmes being created— . % of the sample was born, specifically, between october and december . however, the data for is partial and does not faithfully represent the trend, as the birth of these channels is very close to the data collection, and it is unlikely that they had obtained profile verification. journal. media , , for peer review . results . . exploring tv on tiktok the sample of tv channels and programmes has profiles in tiktok, non-proba- bilistic data that represents a starting point for future studies because it is still an emerging platform. looking at when they first started publishing videos, we found profiles created from onwards, prior to the launch of tiktok outside china in , and which would have originated from musical.ly, with whom tiktok merged in august . as shown in figure , the year of greatest growth so far has been , when the start of activity of profiles was identified, especially in the second half of the year, with new profiles of tv channels and programmes being created— . % of the sample was born, specifically, between october and december . however, the data for is partial and does not faithfully represent the trend, as the birth of these channels is very close to the data collection, and it is unlikely that they had obtained profile verification. when we analysed the country of origin of the television channel or programmes (table ), we observed a very marked presence from the united states ( . %), where important media such as espn, mtv, or nickelodeon were also present worldwide. the same is true of some brands and formats originating in the united states, such as america’s got talent, mtv’s wild’n out, america’s funniest home videos, the late late show with james corden, or the tonight show starring jimmy fallon. second, spain ( . %) is represented by national broadcasters such as public broadcaster rtve and antena , in addition to regional media such as À punt mèdia and canalsur and sports media such as gol and teledeporte. regarding programmes with a presence on tiktok, el hormiguero, got talent españa, and operación triunfo stand out. in third place, the united kingdom ( . %) has profiles of channels such as nickelodeon uk, mtv uk, and the bbc, as well as pro- grammes such as got talent global, x factor global (both of british origin), britain’s got talent, and love island. the united states, spain, and the united kingdom are followed by france ( . %) with tf and m ; germany ( . %) with sport and tagesschau; russia ( . %) with Телеканал ТНТ and ctc; and jordan ( . %) with roya’s channels and programmes. an- other countries on different continents appeared with fewer than five identified cases. figure . new profiles on tiktok of tv channels and programmes by quarter. q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q q figure . new profiles on tiktok of tv channels and programmes by quarter. when we analysed the country of origin of the television channel or programmes (table ), we observed a very marked presence from the united states ( . %), where important media such as espn, mtv, or nickelodeon were also present worldwide. the same is true of some brands and formats originating in the united states, such as america’s got talent, mtv’s wild’n out, america’s funniest home videos, the late late show with james corden, or the tonight show starring jimmy fallon. second, spain ( . %) is represented by national broadcasters such as public broadcaster rtve and antena , in addition to regional media such as À punt mèdia and canalsur and sports media such as gol and teledeporte. regarding programmes with a presence on tiktok, el hormiguero, got talent españa, and operación triunfo stand out. in third place, the united kingdom ( . %) has profiles of channels such as nickelodeon uk, mtv uk, and the bbc, as well as programmes such as got talent global, x factor global (both of british origin), britain’s got talent, and love island. the united states, spain, and the united kingdom are followed by france ( . %) with tf and m ; germany ( . %) with sport and tagesschau; russia ( . %) with Телекaнaл ТНТand ctc; and jordan ( . %) with roya’s channels and programmes. another countries on different continents appeared with fewer than five identified cases. regarding the classification of television content profiles on tiktok, . % are pro- grammes, . % are channels, and . % are digital products. analysing the channels and their themes (table ), we observed that almost half are general, as is the case with france télévisions, rtÉ one, rtp, and telemundo, etc. among the thematic channels, we identified nine news channels (msnbc, ytn news), nine sports channels (sky sports, tyc journal. media , sports, tsn), eight musical channels (vh , mtv, eskatv), five entertainment channels (ctc, show tv, zoom tv), and others aimed at children or devoted to comedy. table . tiktok profiles of television channels and programmes by country of origin. country profiles argentina australia brazil canada colombia dominican republic finland france germany hungary india ireland italy jordan malaysia netherlands poland portugal russia south korea spain sweden turkey united arab emirates united kingdom united states table . classification of television channels present on tiktok. tv channel profiles general news sports musical entertainment children comedy concerning television programmes (table ), the main focus is on talent shows, a category in which profiles were found, representing . % of the total sample of channels and programmes, only behind the general channels. among the talent shows are got talent, masterchef, the voice, and x factor, with these same brands being present across several countries. there are news programmes, including cbs this morning, e! news, tagesschau, stay tuned, and jornal da record. in the comedy category, eight programmes are included, such as america’s funniest home videos, wild’n out, and stand-up. six examples are registered for contests (fear factor, guerreros) and reality shows ( day fiancé, how far is tattoo far?). the variety of genres is completed with nine more categories, such as late shows, magazine shows, and talk shows. journal. media , table . classification of television programmes present on tiktok. tv programme profiles talent show news comedy contest reality late show educational lifestyle magazine news magazine talk show zapping sports as a separate case, we considered three digital products that were born as television initiatives originally for the internet and with a general scope in terms of subject. on the one hand, playz and mtmad are platforms of rtve and mediaset in spain, respectively, aimed at a young audience. on the other hand, yle areena is a platform of the finnish public broadcaster with content for radio and television together with digital-only content. an analysis of the engagement data allows for an understanding of the scale of the interaction between users and tiktok publications. in terms of fans (followers), the average in the sample is , per profile, with the highest figure being that of the espn channel with . million fans, followed by nickelodeon ( . m), wild’n out ( . m), america’s funniest home videos ( . m), america’s got talent ( . m), and mtv ( . m). table lists the most-followed channels and programmes for each category for illustration and reference purposes. table . most-followed tv channels and programmes on tiktok by category. profile country followers tv channel children nickelodeon united states . m comedy comedy central united states . m entertainment Телекaнaл ТНТ russia . m generalist telemundo united states . k musical mtv united states . m news mirror now india . k sports espn united states . m tv programme comedy wild’n out united states . m contest fear factor united states . m educational het klokhuis netherlands . k late show the late late show united states . m lifestyle follovers poland . k magazine the insider united arab emirates . k news e! news united states . m news magazine today show united states . k reality day fiancé united states . m sports nba on tnt united states . k talent show america’s got talent united states . m talk show el hormiguero spain k zapping zapeando spain . k digital general yle areena finland . k in terms of hearts (likes) in the publications accumulated by profile, the average is , , hearts and, once again, espn holds first place ( . m), followed by america’s journal. media , funniest home videos ( . m), nickelodeon ( . m), wild’n out ( . m), america’s got talent ( . m), and comedy central ( . m). regarding the volume of publications, the average number of videos per profile is , although this is influenced by the age of the account and the strategy employed on tiktok. the most prolific channels are espn ( videos), nickelodeon ( ), america’s funniest home videos ( ), mtv ( ), and zoom tv ( ). in both fans and hearts and the number of videos published, profiles originating in the united states present the greatest data. for this reason, the second phase of the analysis continued its exploration of the television channels and programmes on tiktok through illustrative cases, avoiding a selection by objective criteria which would reduce the study to the united states case study. . . tv strategies on tiktok most general channels do not have a clear strategy to link their activity on tiktok with their television offer. however, we can highlight tf and france télévisions as two profiles presenting promos of programmes, including data from the tv broadcast or the bbc channel which frequently mentions its iplayer streaming service. the most common practice is to broadcast fragments of programmes, with highlights or curious and funny moments, and participating in challenges on the platform. thematic channels are similar, although with slight differences in sports and news channels. the sports media bet on the broadcasting of curious, funny, and surprising videos about the practice of sport, including content from professional competitions and amateur videos that are even created by other users, as often happens on espn or sky sports. there are different strategies from news media outlets—adaptation of cuts from the television news on mirror now, behind-the-scenes on msnbc, and an informative and public service approach on profiles such as ytn news or br . on music channels, the general tendency is to broadcast fragments of programmes, highlighting the case of mtv uk which deals with current affairs with an informative character, such as black lives matter or mental health, or eskatv, which participates in challenges and questions to the audience on the occasion of the day of polish music. in terms of entertainment and children’s channels, they again use fragments of series and programmes, with some mention of the television programming, for example, on the russian channels tnt and ctc or on the american nickelodeon. in the analysis by genres, the results are similar: in most cases, outstanding fragments of the programmes are broadcast without being integrated into the logic of tiktok. this strategy fits well with talent shows—america’s got talent (peacock), got talent global, x factor global, and deutschland sucht den superstar (rtl)—where surprising skills, perfor- mances, and jury reactions are shown. it is also perceived as suitable content in comedy and educational programmes for humour and experiments, respectively, which are two types of content that do well on this social network. on the other hand, references to television broadcasting are infrequent, although they indicate the channel, the day and the time in some cases, such as the daily show (comedy central), guerreros (canal ), catfish (mtv), america’s got talent, the voice (nbc), got talent españa (telecinco), and the x factor (itv, stv). the connections between tiktok and linear television are scarce in this sense. however, tiktok also works as a news channel with promotional content, advances, and announcements such as the date of the new season or about open castings. the strategies of television programmes affect, in specific cases, the search for a new connection with the audience. it is especially appropriate for contests and talent shows, where users react to official publications through duets (split-screen and simultaneous reaction to the original video) and challenges (using a certain hashtag they respond to a challenge based on a dance or the demonstration of a skill, generally). we can highlight challenges from hot ones: the game show (trutv), a contest in which participants answer questions and eat spicy chicken wings, where users are shown eating spicy food, or from journal. media , operación triunfo (rtve), a musical talent show, based on dances proposed by the pro- gramme’s choreographer. in both cases, the challenges coincide exactly with the purposes of the programme, including protagonist elements such as the dynamics of the contest or one of the academy’s teachers, respectively. for some programmes, content is developed specifically for tiktok, oriented to trend- ing challenges and making use of the resources and tone of the platform. the late late show (cbs) used to develop content adapted to current web topics, as the tonight show (nbc) did with the announced tiktok ban in the united states. in this last example, and others like el hormiguero (antena ), the channels are frequently involved in the challenges of the moment and use popular songs that are trending on the platform. in news programmes, the variety of publications is greater and an effort to adapt is identified because a fragment of the television broadcast will hardly attract attention in this case. however, accounts such as stay tuned (nbc) and tagesschau (ard) combine news with interesting, entertaining, and curious content to attract younger generations, focusing on explaining current events with a discourse adapted to the platform (selection of transcendental themes, use of graphic and sound elements, brevity, presence of young journalists, etc.). finally, we must mention a strategy that cuts across the different genres and is present, in some cases, in a prominent way—showing what life is like behind the scenes of the programme or media company. this type of video always shows a humorous, friendly, and animated tone with music; they can be seen in the profiles of the late show the tonight show or the news programme jornal da record (recordtv). . conclusions the emergence of tiktok has not gone unnoticed by tv channels and programmes, which are facing a key challenge for their future—young people are not hooked to the traditional model of television, and alternative methods are being amplified through youtube, ott, and mobile devices. social networks are consolidating as extensions of a television experience that requires an approach that thinks outside the tv box. on tiktok, profiles of television channels and programmes were identified (rq ), with a significant growth noticed since the last quarter of . among the channels there are general and thematic ones—espn and nickelodeon stand out with around million followers each, although they are still far from the million who follow top ‘tiktoker’ charli d’amelio. among the television programmes with a presence on tiktok, there are various genres and formats, but the number of talent shows is striking— examples were found across different countries. in a third category, we identified three digital-only television initiatives made for a young audience, such as yle areena, playz, and mtmad. platformisation (nieborg and poell ) and social media logic (van dijck and poell ) have encouraged content producers to look for adapted and differentiated formats (garcía-avilés ) for each new scenario. however, the strategies of tv channels and programmes on tiktok (rq ) are still weak and are mostly based on the diffusion of fragments of the original television broadcast as highlights and funny moments. refer- ences to television programming are also scarce, so there is no clear objective of driving audiences to the main platform. however, we have described cases in which a singularity of the content and an adaptation to the logic of tiktok is being sought: getting involved in the challenges of the moment and promoting others related to the programme, receiving feedback from the audience through duets and lip-syncs, using editing resources and filters in their messages, or using the songs of the moment and employing a friendly and funny tone. one of the practices that serves as an extension of the media outlets shows what happens behind the scenes, providing a new and original perspective on the organisation or programme. october . journal. media , the search for new audiences on the networks to generate engagement and direct them towards the main platform (xia et al. ) has to be among the objectives of television entities on tiktok to deal with the near future of generations disconnected from the television set. virality (klinger ) and the influence of the recommendation algorithm on this platform are two drivers of content delivery over which the producer has no control, but which are closely related to the creation of tiktok-adjusted content—in tone, language, music, and tagging. the last two aspects are key points in the logic of the social network because it is possible to navigate the content through the sound and hashtags used. the songs of the moment and the challenges are connected and are the leitmotiv of much of the content of the platform. the study establishes a first framework in the analysis of the intersections of tiktok and tv, although it is in an initial phase of this relationship that limits the generalisation of results. it is necessary to advance in the research analysing content, i.e., to assess the use of tv broadcast fragments and the typology of contents on tiktok. future research must also address the identification of objectives and purposes when presenting a media brand to a new generation and analyse how to build their loyalty as an audience. so far, we can refer to the intersection of television and tiktok as an initial exploration that still needs to be further explored to find specific strategies. as has happened in news media such as the washington post or nbc’s stay tuned, it will be necessary to think outside the box to reinvent television for the social network of the moment. author contributions: conceptualization, j.v.-h., m.-c.n.-r. and a.-i.r.-v.; investigation and methodology, j.v.-h. and m.-c.n.-r.; supervision, a.-i.r.-v.; writing—original draft, j.v.-h., m.- c.n.-r. and a.-i.r.-v; writing—review & editing, j.v.-h. and m.-c.n.-r. all authors have read and agreed to the published version of the manuscript. funding: this research has been developed within the research project “digital native media in spain: storytelling formats and mobile strategy” (rti – -b-c ), funded by the ministry of science, innovation and universities (government of spain) and the erdf structural fund. data availability statement: data sharing not applicable. conflicts of interest: the authors declare no conflict of interest. references abi-habib, 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Érudit est un consortium interuniversitaire sans but lucratif composé de l’université de montréal, l’université laval et l’université du québec à montréal. il a pour mission la promotion et la valorisation de la recherche. https://www.erudit.org/fr/ document généré le avr. : ontario history showdown! making modern unions by rob kristofferson and simon orpana david tough volume , numéro , spring uri : https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar doi : https://doi.org/ . / ar aller au sommaire du numéro Éditeur(s) the ontario historical society issn - (imprimé) - (numérique) découvrir la revue citer ce compte rendu tough, d. ( ). compte rendu de [showdown! making modern unions by rob kristofferson and simon orpana]. ontario history, ( ), – . https://doi.org/ . / ar https://apropos.erudit.org/fr/usagers/politique-dutilisation/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/ https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/onhistory/ https://id.erudit.org/iderudit/ ar https://doi.org/ . / ar https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/onhistory/ -v -n -onhistory / https://www.erudit.org/fr/revues/onhistory/ ���book reviews hamilton has long enjoyed a starring role in canadian labour history. from bryan palmer’s a culture in conflict: skilled workers and industrial capitalism in ham- ilton, ontario, - ( ) to craig heron’s lunch bucket lives: remaking the workers’ city ( ), the city of steel has provided rich fodder for scholars looking to analyze the development of an industrial working class. now comes showdown: mak- ing modern unions, an effective graphic his- tory of one very important story, the struggle for recognition of the first industrial union at the stelco plant, the united steelworkers (usw) local , in . a lot of the effectiveness of the book is owed to simon orpana’s lively and loose il- lustration style which looks not unlike as if some classic noir comics (chester gould’s dick tracy panels, maybe) were being re- drawn in haste by a fan. figures look a bit shaky on their feet, their limbs a bit jelly- like, their faces a few mere squiggles, but they have an undeniable élan about them, even when they’re standing around talking, that suggests the kinetic, uncertain pace of political activism. (compare, for example, chester brown’s justly celebrated louis riel graphic novel, an important milestone in the historical comic book genre, but one which uses a style so static and repetitive that even dramatic confrontations read like awkward monologues.) the illustration style fits well with the story-telling, which is loosely episodic, cre- ating a verisimilitude of daily life during the strike by interjecting anecdotes and side stories around the main action. the central narrative is told through characters in panels speaking in speech balloons, but interview- ees pop up in the margins to tell their version of the story, which is offset by transcripts of radio broadcasts and press commentaries, giving a wonderful scrapbook quality to the book. the sources of the story, and the role of archives, photos, and even funders in the production of the book are all given a place in the story, a decision which is very effec- tive and entirely apt in a story about how things are made and by whom. at the end of the book, the historical struggle is connected to current political issues–not just labour issues, but idle no more and black lives matter. this is effec- tive, and i found it quite moving, but it felt a bit rushed, a bit perfunctory; the connec- tions could have been deeper. for example, the book touches briefly on the prejudice experienced by eastern and southern euro- pean immigrants in the mid- th century. could that have been developed further showdown! making modern unions by rob kristofferson and simon orpana toronto: between the lines, . pages. $ . paperback. isbn (www.btlbooks.com) spring inside pages.indd - - : : am �� ontario history in a coda that linked historical to current racism? in any case, discussing in detail the actual resonances between historical and contemporary iterations of one movement or problem would have been more effective and instructive than the quick and general gestures, however powerful they are as soli- darity gestures. if there’s a criticism that can be levelled at the book, it’s that its institutional focus, its attention to unions specifically as op- posed to the wider working class culture of hamilton in the period, feels a bit limited, a bit old-fashioned as labour history. there is some discussion of food, fun, and music, but it’s all pretty much connected to the success of the strike. labour history is about more than unions, and while the story of how unions were made is important, changes in working class culture are probably more im- portant to understanding the current politi- cal and social moment. and the institutional focus raises the further question of whether comic readers are being condescended to: like undergraduates presented with all-kill- er-no-filler course options, are they assumed to only hunger for action? will they only gain insight by stealth? it’s notable, in this respect, that the current issue the book draws attention to in connection with labour politics is the harper government’s attacks on unions, bills c- and c- . the harper agen- da was destructive without a doubt, but it does little to explain the decline in effec- tiveness and energ y on the part of unions over the last many decades. strikes like the one described in showdown are highly un- likely now because of changes in the cul- ture of class, to say nothing of the state and the economy, not because of laws that af- fect unions, most of which are unchanged. ignoring culture, in fact, drives a teleologi- cal current in the book (signalled in the subtitle making modern unions) that un- derlines what we have that the people in the story lacked, rather than what we lack and they had: strong and effective bonds of class solidarity. david tough trent university donald creighton never forgave “the giggling bow-tied bastard,” later con- fessing to a journalist, “i feel positive hatred towards that man.” according to creight- on’s historical calculus, lester pearson had abandoned great britain during the suez crisis and later severed canada’s symbolic connection to what used to be called its mother country when he insisted on the maple leaf over the red ensign. even mike: the memoirs of the rt. hon. lester b. pearson, vols. i-iii by lester b. pearson toronto: university of toronto press, . volume i, pages. $ . paper, isbn . $ . ebook (epub format) isbn . volume ii, pages. $ . paper, isbn . $ . ebook (epub format) isbn . volume iii, pages. $ . paper, isbn . $ . ebook (epub format) isbn . worse, canada’s fourteenth prime minister accepted the premise of bilingualism when he appointed the royal commission on bilingualism and biculturalism. it cut both ways because pearson didn’t think much of creighton. when frank underhill sent him an offprint, he thanked him “for reduc- ing some of donald creighton’s views to historical perspective and accuracy,” adding that he intended “to borrow from it shame- spring inside pages.indd - - : : am science journals — aaas warshaw et al., sci. adv. ; : eabd october s c i e n c e a d v a n c e s | r e s e a r c h a r t i c l e of c o r o n a v i r u s fatalities from covid- are reducing americans’ support for republicans at every level of federal office christopher warshaw *†, lynn vavreck †, ryan baxter-king † between early march and august , covid- took the lives of more than , americans. here, we ex- amine the political consequences of the covid- epidemic using granular data on covid- fatalities and the attitudes of the american public. we find that covid- has led to substantial damage for president trump and other republican candidates. states and local areas with higher levels of covid- fatalities are less likely to sup- port president trump and republican candidates for house and senate. our results show that president trump and other republican candidates would benefit electorally from a reduction in covid- fatalities. this implies that a greater emphasis on social distancing, masks, and other mitigation strategies would benefit the president and his allies. introduction covid- has killed about times as many americans as were killed in the korean war, over times as many as in vietnam, and times as many americans as were killed in the entire iraq war. americans broadly disapprove of the president’s handling of the pandemic ( ), but as of yet, there has been no clear causal evidence about whether the rise in covid- fatalities has led americans to turn away from president trump. a large academic literature has shown that the american public holds presidents accountable for their performance in office ( ,  ). among other things, the public penalizes a president and others in their party for casualties in war. areas with more local casualties, for example, were among the first to turn against the vietnam war be- tween and ( ), and during the iraq war, people who knew someone who died on / or in the iraq war were consistently more likely to disapprove of george w. bush ( ). as a result, states with greater losses were more likely to vote against president bush in the presidential election ( ). voters also punished republican can- didates at other levels of office: areas with higher casualties from the war in iraq were more likely to support democratic house and senate candidates in the midterm elections ( ,  ). last, areas with higher casualties in the war in afghanistan penalized barack obama’s democratic successor in , secretary of state hillary clinton, by supporting donald trump in greater numbers ( ). the u.s. president has likened his battle against covid- to that of a “war-time president” ( ). voters may also see him that way. on the basis of previous studies of the political costs of war-time casualties, we hypothesize that the american public will be less like- ly to support president trump and other republican candidates for federal offices in areas with higher levels of covid- fatalities. we examine whether americans are penalizing the president and other republicans for the fatalities due to covid- using several granular data sources (see materials and methods for more details). we leverage both temporal and geographic variation in the magni- tude of the covid- pandemic using local-level data on fatalities gathered by the new york times. we use the democracy fund + ucla nationscape project to measure the attitudes of the american pub- lic at a local level. this survey includes the responses of more than , people between the summers of and ( ). results figure  (below) examines the state-level association between cu- mulative covid- fatalities as of may and changes in americans’ attitudes between the first months of and june. it shows that states with more covid- fatalities were less likely to support republican candidates. for example, people in the states with the highest fatalities were about % less likely to approve of presi- dent trump’s performance in office than people in the states with the lowest level of fatalities (fig. a). the states with the highest level of fatalities were about % less likely to support president trump’s reelection in the presidential race against democrat joseph r. biden (fig. b). the hardest-hit states were nearly % less likely to sup- port republican senate candidates (fig. c) and about % less likely to support republican house candidates (fig. d). these associations, however, could be confounded by other state- level factors and may be affected by sampling variability at the state level (particularly for smaller states). thus, we move next to a more rigorous difference-in-differences regression design to assess the causal effect of covid- fatalities on political preferences. this approach examines the effect of covid- fatalities over the past days in each respondent’s state or county on their attitudes about president trump and other politicians. in addition to providing a more granular test, county-level results characterize the impact of the information environment surrounding the pandemic relative to the actual number of fatalities. we use fixed effects for geography and week of interview to account for area- and time-specific con- founders. we also control for a host of pre–covid- individual- level attributes of the survey respondents, including vote choice, making our results net of factors such as race, education, gender, and partisan preference in (see materials and methods). we find consistent results at every level of geography and for every office (fig.  ): the effect of fatalities is a drain on republican vote share (see materials and methods for a variety of robustness checks and the supplementary materials for a table with the regression re- sults). overall, areas with higher covid- fatalities are signifi- cantly less likely to support president trump and other republican department of political science, george washington university, washington, dc, usa. department of political science, ucla, los angeles, ca, usa. *corresponding author. email: warshaw@gwu.edu †these authors contributed equally to this work. copyright © the authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee american association for the advancement of science. no claim to original u.s. government works. distributed under a creative commons attribution noncommercial license . (cc by-nc). o n a p ril , h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://advances.sciencemag.org/ warshaw et al., sci. adv. ; : eabd october s c i e n c e a d v a n c e s | r e s e a r c h a r t i c l e of candidates. a doubling of covid- fatalities ( .  u on the natu- ral log scale) at the county level leads to a roughly . % reduction in president trump’s approval rating, and a doubling in fatalities at the state level leads to a . % reduction in the president’s approval. in the presidential election, a doubling of covid- fatalities at the county level makes americans about . % less likely to support president trump against joseph r. biden and a doubling in fatali- ties at the state level leads to a . % reduction in support for trump. in senate races, a doubling of covid- fatalities at the county level makes americans about . % less likely to support republi- can candidates and a doubling in fatalities at the state level leads to a . % reduction in support for republicans. last, in house races, a doubling of covid- fatalities at the county level makes americans about . % less likely to support republican candidates and a doubling in fatalities at the state level leads to a . % reduction in support for republicans. discussion our results show that the covid- pandemic has already substan- tially damaged the political standing of president trump. just as the public penalizes the president for casualties during wars, the public ak al ar azca co ctde fl ga hi ia id ilinks ky la mamd me mi mn mo ms mt nc nd ne nh nj nmnv nyoh okor pa ri sc sdtn tx ut va vt wa wi wv wy alaal flll aaaa aaaaaa ilininninsskks kykcacacacaffaaaaaaaa lalal mammamdmdililililmom mss mtmmt nn ndndssss kkkk njnjnnnnnnnhhohohhoooo ppaappppscsccccc tntn txtxkkkk vvaaoovvv − % − % − % − % % % % % % log(covid deaths per , ) c ha ng e in t ru m p ap pr ov al fr om j an ua ry /f eb ru ar y to j un e association between covid and trump approvala ak al ar az ca co ct de fl ga hi ia id il in ks ky la ma md me mi mn mo msmt nc nd ne nh nj nm nv ny oh ok or pa ri sc sdtn tx ut va vt wa wi wv wy alaalcaacaaaaaa ililky caca lal mamma mdmd illill mee mo ncnc cc njnj nv alal mm nnnnn okncnc papp txtx vvmvvmmmmaamomovvvmm waww − % − % % % % log(covid deaths per , ) c ha ng e in t ru m p vo te in te nt fr om j an ua ry /f eb ru ar y to j un e association between covid and trump vs. biden vote intent ak al ar az co de ga ia id ilks ky la mame mi mn ms mt nc ne nh nj nm ok or ri sc sd tn tx va wv wy ak lazaazalala gg ill y mee nenekyky n oror riri sckykynnkykykykyddssdmemeeemm vavv wvv − % − % % % % % % log(covid deaths per , ) c ha ng e in r ep ub lic an v ot e in te nt fr om j an ua ry /f eb ru ar y to j un e association between covid and senate vote intent ak al ar azca co ct de fl ga hi ia id ilinks ky la ma md me mi mnmo ms mt nc nd ne nh nj nm nv ny oh okor pa ri scsd tn tx ut vavt wa wi wv wy azaazcaaaaaa dede ilil kyy caca lal mam mdmdilililil eememee mtm ncn ccn cckykyyy ccncncnn cccckykykykykykykyky cc njnjnnnnn oro scscs txtxmm vav − % − % − % % % % % % log(covid deaths per , ) c ha ng e in r ep ub lic an v ot e in te nt fr om j an ua ry /f eb ru ar y to j un e association between covid and house vote intent c b d fig. . association between covid- deaths and changes in political preferences. house vote senate vote president vote trump approval − . % − % − . % − . % − . % % effect of doubling in covid deaths per , people county state fig. . effect of covid- deaths on political preferences for various offices. this graph shows the results of regression models of the effect of a doubling in covid- deaths per , people in the past days in each state and county on trump approval and whether respondents plan to vote for republican candidates for president, senate, and house. the dots show the point estimates, and the bars show % confidence intervals. o n a p ril , h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://advances.sciencemag.org/ warshaw et al., sci. adv. ; : eabd october s c i e n c e a d v a n c e s | r e s e a r c h a r t i c l e of is penalizing the president and other members of his party for local fatalities during the pandemic. the number of local fatalities due to covid- appears to be at least as important as the local economy in americans’ evaluations of their leaders ( ,  ). covid- could cost trump and other republicans several percentage points in the election. this could swing the presidential election and the u.s. senate toward democrats, with particularly high effects in swing states such as michigan, wisconsin, pennsylvania, new hampshire, arizona, and florida. all of these states had tight margins in the presidential election. michigan’s margin was particularly narrow ( . %), as was new hampshire’s ( . %), suggesting that covid- related fatalities may be consequential not only at the individual level in but also in terms of electoral college results. similarly, there were very close u.s. senate elections in . in florida, . % of the vote separated the republican winner from the democrat. these narrow margins in and , coupled with the reali- zation that fatalities from covid- are not unlike casualties of war in voters’ minds, suggest that a winning strategy for president trump and other republican candidates on the ballot in should be to adopt mitigation strategies to limit the spread and consequences of covid-   in the american population. increasing fatalities from the disease leads to losses for republicans. materials and methods this section describes the methods and data that we use in our paper. the first building block of our study is granular data on reported covid- fatalities across geography and time. for this, we use data that the new york times has collected on the basis of state web- sites and databases (see https://github.com/nytimes/covid- -data). we then aggregate the county-level data on covid- deaths at the state level. county-level population data are taken from the to american community survey (acs). the next building block is data on attitudes of the american public about president trump and vote intentions for the elections. for this, we use the democracy fund + ucla nationscape project to measure the attitudes of the american public at a local level ( ). this survey includes the responses of more than , people, about of whom were interviewed each week between the summers of and (through july ). the survey is fielded on- line and is representative of the nation as a whole ( ). the nation- scape staff generate sampling weights for the weekly datasets. the technique is based on processes used by the american national election studies. in table s , we show a detailed comparison of the weighted nationscape sample with population targets. overall, the weighted sample appears to be extremely representative of observable population targets. owing to its large size, nationscape can also be disaggregated to reflect opinions at the state and local levels. the survey asks about a variety of political attitudes and prefer- ences. we use four specific questions from the survey. first, we use data on whether respondents approve of president trump’s job per- formance. we collapse this four-point question to a dichotomous variable. second, we use data on whether people would vote for president trump or joseph r. biden in a head-to-head matchup in the presidential election. third, we use data on whether respondents plan to vote for the republican or democratic candidate in the house election in their district. last, we use data on whether re- spondents plan to vote for the republican or democratic candidate in the senate elections in their state (if they have one). for each, we are excluding individuals who answered “not sure.” (note that fig. s shows that the results are similar in models that include don’t know responses.) our main paper reports the results of two sets of analyses. the next two sections describe the details for these analyses. association between covid- deaths and changes in political preferences at the state level first, we look at the state-level association between covid- fa- talities and americans’ attitudes about president trump and their vote intentions in the election. for this analysis, the independent variable is the natural log of the number of covid- fatalities per , people in each state before june . the outcome vari- able is the change in the public’s attitudes before the covid- pandemic (defined as the first months of ) and their attitudes after the arrival of covid- , between june and july . we use the appropriate state-level sampling weights to calculate the public’s state-level attitudes in each time period. we then graph the relationship between covid- fatalities and the changes in political attitudes in each state. by focusing on changes in political attitudes, our analysis implicitly accounts for time-invariant confounders (omitted variables) in each state and common shocks that affect all states. however, there is large sampling variability at the state level, particularly in smaller states, which we will address in further analyses. causal effect of covid- deaths on political preferences for various offices next, we move to a more rigorous difference-in-differences regres- sion design. we use a linear probability model to examine the effect of covid- fatalities over the past days in each survey respon- dents’ state or county with their attitudes about president trump and other politicians. for this analysis, the independent variable is the natural log of the number of covid- fatalities per , people in the last days (relative to the date each respondent was interviewed) in each geographic area. a . -u increase on the nat- ural log scale can be interpreted as approximately a doubling of fa- talities ( ). here, we use fixed effects for geography and survey wave (week) to account for area- and time-specific confounders and identify the causal effects of covid- on political attitudes ( ). the geographic fixed effects account for the tendency of different areas to have varying levels of baseline support for president trump and other republican candidates. the temporal fixed effects ac- count for national-level changes in political attitudes due to the pandemic, the economy, and national events such as the black lives matter movement. we also control for a host of individual-level pretreatment attributes of the survey respondents. these are not crucial for our identification strategy, but they reduce the variance in our results ( ). specifically, we control for respondents’ gender, race/ethnicity, education, hispanic ancestry, and their vote choice in the presidential election. the ses in our regression results are clustered at the state-day or county-day level depending on the model ( ). we use national sampling weights in all our analysis. so, our results are representative of the american public at the national level. while our main analyses use a linear probability model, we find substantively similar results using logistic regression models. to validate our research design, we run a placebo check where we examine the effect of future covid deaths on an index of ap- proval, presidential voting, senate voting, and house voting at the state level. specifically, we look at future covid deaths over the next o n a p ril , h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://github.com/nytimes/covid- -data http://advances.sciencemag.org/ warshaw et al., sci. adv. ; : eabd october s c i e n c e a d v a n c e s | r e s e a r c h a r t i c l e of and days using survey data before the start of the covid- pandemic, from between july and march . figure s shows that there is no effect of future covid- deaths on political preferences. note that the state of the art in panel research designs is con- stantly moving forward. in recent years, a number of scholars have conducted innovative work ( – ). however, to our knowledge, all of this work currently requires dichotomous treatment variables. so, overall, we believe that our design is the best available research design for our data and that our placebo checks validate a causal interpretation of our results. we have also run a number of robustness checks for our main research design and results. for simplicity, each of these robustness checks focuses on our state-level model using an index of our four outcome variables to capture aggregate political preferences. ) first, we examine the results if we use several different num- bers of days as cutoffs rather than just days. specifically, we ex- amine cutoffs ranging from to days. in fig. s , we find that the results are quite similar across models, although the point estimates decrease a bit for longer cutoffs. overall, this suggests that our re- sults are not especially sensitive to the choice of cutoffs. they are also significant across all cutoffs. ) our next robustness check examines the results if we do not include any control variables in our analyses (fig. s ). we find that our results are slightly noisier without any control variables, but the results are still significant without controls. in our main analyses, we prefer to retain control variables because of the increase in effi- ciency that they provide. ) in our main analysis, we dropped don’t knows. however, it is reasonable to think that don’t knows could be an important middle category, and voters could move into this category because of concern about covid- . to assess this possibility, we coded alternative variables for all our outcomes with don’t know as a middle category ( . ). figure s shows the results at the state level. it indicates that the results are generally very similar with and without don’t knows, especially for the presidential race. the point estimates in senate and house races are a bit smaller when we include don’t knows, but the results are significant both with and without don’t knows at all levels of geography. likewise, our county level results are also simi- lar with and without don’t knows. ) last, we examine whether the results change if we drop each state one by one. figure s shows that our results are not sensitive to dropping individual states. the point estimates are generally quite similar across models. the highest p value is in a model that drops texas. even in this model, however, we still find a p value of . . overall, these robustness checks indicate that our results are not sensitive to alternative regression specifications or driven by outliers. supplementary materials supplementary material for this article is available at http://advances.sciencemag.org/cgi/ content/full/ / /eabd /dc references and notes . k. karson, approval of trump’s coronavirus response underwater, as he returns to campaign trail: poll. abc news ( ). . s. ashworth, electoral accountability: recent theoretical and empirical work. annu. rev. polit. sci. , – ( ). . a. healy, n. malhotra, retrospective voting reconsidered. annu. rev. polit. sci. , – ( ). . s. s. gartner, g. m. segura, m. wilkening, all politics are local. j. confl. resolut. , – ( ). . s. s. gartner, ties to the dead: connections to iraq war and / casualties and disapproval of the president. am. sociol. rev. , – ( ). . d. karol, e. miguel, the electoral cost of war: iraq casualties and the u.s. presidential election. j. polit. , – ( ). . c. r. grose, b. i. oppenheimer, the iraq war, partisanship, and candidate attributes: variation in partisan swing in the u.s. house elections. legis. stud. q. , – ( ). . d. l. kriner, f. x. shen, iraq casualties and the senate elections. legis. stud. q. , – ( ). . d. l. kriner, f. x. shen, battlefield casualties and ballot-box defeat: did the bush–obama wars cost clinton the white house? ps political sci. politics , – ( ). . c. oprysko, s. luthi, trump labels himself a wartime president combating coronavirus. politico ( ). . c. tausanovitch, l. vavreck, democracy fund+ ucla nationscape project, january –june , . ( ). . a. healy, g. s. lenz, presidential voting and the local economy: evidence from two population-based data sets. j. polit. , – ( ). . j. de benedictis-kessner, c. warshaw, accountability for the local economy at all levels of government in united states elections. am. polit. sci. rev. , – ( ). . c. tausanovitch, l. vavreck, t. reny, a. r. hayes, a. rudkin, democracy fund+ ucla nationscape methodology and representativeness assessment ( ). . a. gelman, j. hill, data analysis using regression and multilevel/hierarchical models (cambridge univ. press, ). . j. d. angrist, j.-s. pischke, mostly harmless econometrics: an empiricist’s companion (princeton univ. press, ). . d. j. hopkins, k. parish, the medicaid expansion and attitudes toward the affordable care act: testing for a policy feedback on mass opinion. public opin. q. , – ( ). . a. abadie, s. athey, g.w. imbens, j.wooldridge, “when should you adjust standard errors for clustering?” (technical report, national bureau of economic research, ). . a. goodman-bacon, “difference-in-differences with variation in treatment timing” (technical report, national bureau of economic research, ). . k. imai, i. s. kim, when should we use unit fixed effects regression models for causal inference with longitudinal data? am. j. polit. sci. , – ( ). . y. xu, generalized synthetic control method: causal inference with interactive fixed effects models. polit. anal. , – ( ). acknowledgments: we are grateful for feedback on this paper from d. caughey and a. cox. funding: we also appreciate funding support for the nationscape survey from the democracy fund, the klarman family foundation, and the ucla marvin hoffenberg chair in american politics and public policy. author contributions: l.v. secured funding and managed the fielding of the nationscape survey. c.w. and r.b.-k. executed the data analysis. all authors participated in writing and editing the manuscript. competing interests: the authors declare that they have no competing interests. data and materials availability: all data needed to evaluate the conclusions in the paper are present in the paper and/or the supplementary materials. replication data and code for this paper are available at the harvard dataverse at https://doi.org/ . /dvn/sn xam. additional data related to this paper may be requested from the authors. submitted july accepted september published october . /sciadv.abd citation: c. warshaw, l. vavreck, r. baxter-king, fatalities from covid- are reducing americans’ support for republicans at every level of federal office. sci. adv. , eabd ( ). o n a p ril , h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://advances.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/ / /eabd /dc http://advances.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/ / /eabd /dc https://doi.org/ . /dvn/sn xam http://advances.sciencemag.org/ federal office fatalities from covid- are reducing americans' support for republicans at every level of christopher warshaw, lynn vavreck and ryan baxter-king doi: . /sciadv.abd ( ), eabd . sci adv article tools http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/ / /eabd materials supplementary http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/ / / / . .eabd .dc references http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/ / /eabd #bibl this article cites articles, of which you can access for free permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions terms of serviceuse of this article is subject to the is a registered trademark of aaas.science advancesyork avenue nw, washington, dc . the title (issn - ) is published by the american association for the advancement of science, newscience advances license . (cc by-nc). science. no claim to original u.s. government works. distributed under a creative commons attribution noncommercial copyright © the authors, some rights reserved; exclusive licensee american association for the advancement of o n a p ril , h ttp ://a d va n ce s.scie n ce m a g .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/ / /eabd http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/suppl/ / / / . .eabd .dc http://advances.sciencemag.org/content/ / /eabd #bibl http://www.sciencemag.org/help/reprints-and-permissions http://www.sciencemag.org/about/terms-service http://advances.sciencemag.org/ © society for applied philosophy, . this is the author accepted version of the following book review: mcgregor, r. ( ), the war on cops: how the new attack on law and order makes everyone less safe heather mac donald, new york: encounter books pp., $ . (hb), journal of applied philosophy. published in final form at http://dx.doi.org/ . /japp. . this article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with wiley terms and conditions for self-archiving. the war on cops: how the new attack on law and order makes everyone less safe heather mac donald new york: encounter books pp the war on cops is a collection of previously-published essays by heather mac donald, a public intellectual in the united states who belongs to the ‘small faction’ of secular conservatives (mark oppenheimer, “a place on the right for a few godless conservatives”, new york times, february , ). the essays are journalistic rather than academic, having appeared in the city journal, national review, new york daily news, insidesources, wall street journal, and weekly standard, but the volume is nonetheless significant to contemporary philosophers due to both its form and content. first, mac donald presents a logical argument for her position and makes explicit use of philosophical devices such as thought experiments. second, this argument concerns the controversy surrounding the killing of african american males by police officers in the last three years and she provides the first sustained criticism of the rationale for the black lives matter movement. mac donald’s argument proceeds as follows: ( ) the activism of blm has changed policing strategy from proactive to reactive. ( ) the change in policing strategy from proactive to reactive has caused the current crime surge in the us. ( ) the negative impact of the crime surge on the quality of life in african american communities is higher than the negative impact of discriminatory policing practices. ( ) therefore blm has had a net negative impact on the quality of life in african american communities. ( ) and ( ) combine to create ‘the ferguson effect’ (p. ). in addition to her criticisms of blm, president obama, and liberal academics, mac donald offers a positive thesis, claiming that the breakdown of the african american family is the cause of the disproportionate crime rate in african american communities and that the solution to the crime problem is ‘to rebuild the family – above all, the black family’ (p. ). there are times when mac donald brings a refreshing rigour to issues that have become supercharged with opacity, hyperbole, and emotion. she argues, for example, that the statistics on stop-and-frisk are no more evidence of racism than they are sexism (p. ). african american men commit a disproportionate number of gun crimes and are therefore more likely to be stopped by police and also more likely to shoot at – and be shot by – police. mac donald is correct that statistics need to be both analysed and contextualised before they can be offered as evidence, but she employs the very same rhetorical devices that she criticises in her opponents in making her own case. the use to which she puts the proactive/reactive dichotomy and her selection of examples are paradigmatic. mac donald follows many contemporary criminologists in dividing policing strategy into two value-laden and mutually-exclusive categories, proactive and reactive. she regards the former as positive – tellingly referred to as ‘broken windows policing’ (p. ) rather than the more accurate and aggressive-sounding zero tolerance policing – and the latter as negative. reactive policing is an essential part of police work just as it is for the other two emergency services and proactive policing can be positive (in reducing crime) or negative (in straining police and community relations), depending upon the tactics used. second, mac donald exploits a technique that is used by both sides of the debate, the focus on examples at the expense of counter-examples. she concentrates on those cases where there may have been justification for the use of deadly force rather than the cases where police officers have shot unarmed african american suspects in circumstances where the force used was either avoidable (such as ezell ford and, subsequent to her writing, alton sterling) or inexplicable (walter scott and, subsequently, philando castile). each one of these regrettable incidents needs to be assessed in isolation on a case-by-case basis and mac donald’s attempts to gloss over unjustified homicides on the principle that some of the homicides have been justified is every bit as misleading as attempts to exaggerate police culpability by means such as using trayvon martin’s death as an example of police aggression. mac donald accuses both president obama and new york mayor bill de blasio of irresponsibility in speaking out against the police, but she is no less irresponsible in her blanket defence of the police. this irresponsibility is perhaps most flagrant in the lack of evidence offered by mac donald for her argument. there has been a recent surge in violent crime and although james comey, the director of the federal bureau of investigation, supports the idea of the ferguson effect, the cause of the crime wave remains highly disputed (eric lichtblau & monica davey, “homicide rates jump in many major u.s. cities, new data shows,” new york times, may , ). similarly, the efficacy of zero tolerance policing is the subject of much debate rather than the received wisdom that mac donald takes for granted. she assumes, for example, that stop-and-frisk is a successful police tactic without quoting the statistics. in the united kingdom, stop and search has drawn a great deal of criticism, not only because of the potential for racial profiling and the negative consequences for community policing, but because it is claimed to be, in the words of theresa may in an address to parliament on april , ‘an enormous waste of police time’. the stop to arrest ratio in the uk was extremely low – and the costs thus believed to outweigh the benefits – but mac donald makes no such analysis of the situation in the us. there is thus no convincing evidence for the ferguson effect, premises ( ) and ( ) above, nor is any offered for ( ) beyond reports of a handful of interviews with african americans who have the misfortune to live in high crime areas and have a preference for a large and active police presence in their neighbourhoods. in consequence, her conclusion – that blm has done more harm than good to african americans – is groundless. the same criticism applies to her positive thesis. family breakdown and concomitant problems like the absence of role models for adolescent males are indeed contributing factors to criminal behaviour, but mac donald offers no evidence for the prioritisation of this one cause above the many others that are advanced beyond a few examples of career criminals with dysfunctional family backgrounds. she betrays the full extent of her conservatism at times with the use of phrases such as the need for the police to ‘stop crime before it happens’ (p. ) and african americans being ‘born out of wedlock’ (p. ). the result is more rhetoric along the lines of blm versus alm (all lives matter) rather than a methodical scrutiny of policing and race in the us. rafe mcgregor bishop burton college on #blacklivesmatter and journalism symposium “value and values in the organizational production of news” https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / sociologica. v. n. ( ) issn - https://sociologica.unibo.it/ on #blacklivesmatter and journalism sarah j. jackson* submitted: july , – accepted: august , – published: september , abstract in this refined version of a talk given to journalism students at duke university, pro- fessor sarah jackson reflects on the newsroom controversies and tensions that have accom- panied the rise of #blacklivesmatter. she argues that normative news values have always been at least partially subservient to the larger values of society, which means that, in the united states at the very least they are unavoidably and structurally racist even as they si- multaneously represent real efforts on behalf of an occupational group to enact values that help democracy function properly. jackson’s goal in this powerful piece is for journalists to be more self-reflective about the manner by which their professional efforts can harm particular people and groups even while it purports to benefit society at large. keywords: #blacklivesmatter; political protest; civil rights movement; newsrooms; val- ues. * annenberg school for communication, university of pennsylvania (united states);  sarah.jackson@asc.upenn.edu copyright © sarah j. jackson the text in this work is licensed under the creative commons by license. https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / art. # p. https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://sociologica.unibo.it/ https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / on #blacklivesmatter and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) historical background like potentially many people in this room i had initially hoped to work as a professional jour- nalist, and in fact did a little of that at various points in my life. i ended up going the academic route because it turned out i was more interested in the question of interrogating the power of stories, and the power of journalism, and who gets to tell those stories and whose voices are included in terms of shaping culture and politics. and that’s part of what got me to where i am in terms of my academic career — really having a lot of these questions very early on about the cultural, and political, and social power of journalism and journalists telling some stories and not telling other stories — and telling some stories well and not telling other stories so well. with that, i’m going to jump into a little background. i wanted to make sure that we’re all on the same page in terms of some of the basic scholarship about the history of recent jour- nalism. and so i’m going to talk a little bit about that before jumping into this contemporary moment and talking about what things look like now and what the best journalistic practices might even look like for the current moment. in terms of history, we know that just like other institutionintheunitedstates, thatthefieldandinstitutionsofjournalismthatinitiallyexisted in this country were those engaged in the planned and organized exclusion and demonization of black voices. and when i say this to people, i think they often feel like, “oh, i can’t believe you’re saying this about my institution that i work in,” but we have gotten to a point where i think we can honestly accept that the united states was founded on ideologies that very specif- ically were white supremacist ideologies. and therefore, a byproduct of that is the simple fact that many of our institutions, from our universities to our journalistic institutions, to our po- litical institutions and many others, just assumed that it was normal and natural to exclude certain stories and/or to stereotype and demean certain groups. there has been a lot of scholarship about how that has and hasn’t shifted over time. but i think for me and in my work, one of the things that’s really important is that even though it’s important for us to acknowledge that history and acknowledge the exclusions and the harms that that history has caused in the field of journalism and in media in particular, we also need to uplift and know that there are examples in which, even at time periods when people tend to say, “well, that was just the culture. that’s just how it was done,” there were always people pushing back against this. and we can see that pushback in any historical time period. my first book was about the black press. you can see that african americans, even before the abolition of slavery, were pushing back about how they were being represented in the media. and so for example, the first black newspaper, freedom’s journal, which was founded in , was founded by two free african american citizens in new york city. and their opening editorial said, “too long has the public been deceived by misrepresentations of things which concern us dearly. from the press and the pulpit we have suffered much by being incorrectly represented.” and so, the goal of this paper was to correct some of the representations of black americans. similarly, just this year, , ida b. wells was awarded a posthumous pulitzer prize, but at the turn of the twentieth century, the journalism that ida b. wells was doggedly doing to tell stories about lynching, the violence of lynching and the heinous and prolific phenomenon that was lynching, was really significant in helping to set the stage for eventually passing anti- lynching legislation in the united states. wells shone light on these stories that the mainstream, . this is the transcript of a talk given by sarah j. jackson, presidential associate professor at the annenberg school for communication, university of pennsylvania, to journalism students affiliated with duke univer- sity’s dewitt wallace center for media & democracy on july , . this talk was given over zoom and the transcript has been lightly edited for clarity. https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / on #blacklivesmatter and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) whitepresswaseitherignoringoroftenjustifying. wecouldgothroughanymomentofhistory and see that there’s always been black folks who have said, “wait a second. there are these stories that are being left out. there are these representations that are problematic.” and what history shows us is that those people were right. the folks who were agitating from within a journalistic practice to say, “hey. what about this group? what about this idea? why aren’t we covering this story? why are we always framing it this way? why do we always depend on these sources?” as history then remembers them, it turns out that their pushes for more just and inclusive journalism are the ones we look back on as the heroic story. i think that’s something interesting for us to hold as we think about the current moment as well. i want to say something also before we get up to the present about the civil rights era as well. i know that when i was in journalism school, one of the things that i learned was this kind of heroic narrative of the role journalists played in the civil rights movement, which was that many americans where changed by journalism of the period, sort of the hearts and minds argument, when they saw the brutality that was happening on the streets in the south around desegregationprotests. theysawthegermanshepherdsbeingsiccedonchildrenandthewater hoses and all that. and there’s this argument that this journalistic coverage, and especially the photo journalism and the visual images that people saw on the nightly news, really helped to change and influence folks all the way up to president john f. kennedy about the real brutality that black civil rights protesters were experiencing in response to their organizing in the south in the s and s. that’s true, to an extent. but one thing that gets left out of that story that i think is re- ally important for journalists to be self-reflexive about is that while sometimes that was true, there was still an overwhelming and very problematic representation of black people and black activism at the core of u.s. journalism. it’s a myopic fairy tale to say that journalists were al- ways on the right side of these issues. in fact, if you go back and you look at the journalism at the time, many, many media outlets actually demonized the civil rights movement, demonized martin luther king, jr., argued that their demands were too radical, argued that they should go slower, represented them through conflict frames that really made it seem as if they were on equal footing with the armed police that they were facing during these protests. and that actually sounds similar to some of what we might see from media today. later on, in the post-civil rights era, we certainly saw great progress in terms of the inte- gration of newsrooms and of media and a greater diversity of voices. and that is something that is often celebrated. and i think it’s important to celebrate that because it’s real. but once again, we still need to hold space for the nuance that often that integration wasn’t enough, that it stagnated and didn’t necessarily change the whiteness of journalistic institutions, that it was often just tokenized voices without more holistic change. black journalists, post-civil rights era, still faced enormous challenges in doing their jobs in terms of being limited to covering only certain types of stories, covering crime stories, covering sports stories, for example, and not be- ing taken seriously as journalists that could cover things like politics. add that in that era, we saw several decades of backlash against the progress of the civil rights movement, for example during the reagan era in the s, where we saw the media and journalists really pick up and spread some of what has come to be understood as really harmful propaganda about black communities. that includes the stereotype of the welfare queen, that the majority of coverage of black communities was about crime and conflict, the exclusion of african american stories from public interest news and from mainstream political news unless it was about racial con- flict. this is an interesting conundrum because, of course, what we also see, very much so in the s and s, is the holding up by media-makers of supposedly “exceptional” african https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / on #blacklivesmatter and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) americans like michael jackson or michael jordan as evidence that we’d overcome racial preju- dice and didn’t need ongoing policy efforts to ameliorate racism. again, this probably sounds familiar. journalism today and black lives matter i offer all that background to say that these aren’t new issues. this issue of diversity and inclu- sion in journalism as a profession isn’t a new issue. and this question of how are african amer- ican communities represented isn’t a new issue. the question of how does black activism and protest around racial justice get represented in news is not a new issue. but i think it’s promis- ing we are talking about these questions more openly now than any other time i can recall in my life. in the next section of this talk i want to address where we are in this current moment in history. one of the things that i think is really fascinating about the current moment is that we have hit a moment in media culture, where what we saw was… do you remember when obama was running for president? it may be hard to believe today, but when obama was running for president and when obama was elected president, there was all this chatter in the media about how america was now “post-racial.” and this word post-racial came out of nowhere. and it was like, “now that enough of the american public will vote for a black man to be president, we’ve overcome race.” whatever that means. there was this really strong idealistic discourse in journalism that somehow the white supremacist impulses of much of the country had been erased by the fact that we had a black president. what we know, of course, is that that was really this exceptionalism framing — tokenism — that allowed the racial status quo in america to go unchallenged, that just like in the ’ s and ’ s one person’s success is not how to honestly measure inequality or people’s lived experiences. what has been really interesting for me to watch as an observer and somebody who studies media is to watch the same journalists who were, in the obama era, uncritically taking up this narrative about post-racialism, and about racial progress, and about how far we’ve come — well now, in the wake of the trump election, and the not just national but global rise of far right and racist political ideology, they seemed to be taken by surprise. part of that surprise was because of accepting the story that they themselves were telling about america being “post- race.” there has been a lot of hand-wringing about how political commentators, and opinion editors and all these media people got so wrong. everybody expected something different to happen. and i really think that part of that had to do with the fact of this sort of myopic racial exceptionalism narrative that people allowed themselves to believe about obama. clearly, we now know that that’s not true and we’re not post-race. it’s frankly laughable. i don’t think there’s any question at this point that that is any longer something that people can rationally think. and so what we’ve seen then, i would say in the last decade or so, is something really interesting has happened because progress, of course, has continued to happen in news- rooms, in national conversations about race and racism, in social justice spaces. we’ve seen an increasing power of members of underrepresented groups in newsrooms. we’ve seen more and more folks like nikole hannah-jones at the new york times, who has risen to a point in her career where she’s able to organize an entire issue of the new york times magazine about the centrality of slavery to american experience. we see people like yamiche alcindor, who is a white house correspondent doing really great political coverage, when historically we didn’t see many black women even being given the option to seriously cover politics or the white house in that way. so of course, we continue to see progress. and one of the results of this progress is that black media-makers and black journalists have been asking their outlets, and https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / on #blacklivesmatter and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) their colleagues, and the rest of the american public to really continue grappling with the ques- tion of race, and race inequality, and racism. they’ve actually been doing this for a very long time. and in some cases, we’ve found out, editors have silenced these journalists, asked them to change the force of their arguments or angles of their stories. recently, we saw a whole group of young new york times staffers on the news side come out publicly in response to the decision to run the tom cotton editorial and say, “hey. we were told we weren’t allowed to critique the editorial side, even when they ran things about race that were harmful to us, but, we’re not going to be silent anymore.” but the blowback they faced for speaking the truth was also real. and so that reflects how, as more black journalists rise to acclaim, these journalists are still facing some of the same limitations and assumptions. a lot of that has to do with the ongoing assumption in the news business that the target audience of u.s. news is a white, middle america, conservative kind of news consumer, which in and of itself flies in the face of what we know about the increasing diversity of u.s. news consumers. all that to say one of the things that we’re seeing then in this moment with the rise of visibility of black lives matter is that, this didn’t just happen in ; and in fact it didn’t just happenin whenmichaelbrownwaskilledinferguson, missouri. itstartedin when george zimmerman was acquitted for killing trayvon martin. that was the first time that the phrase “black lives matter” was used online, but of course black communities have been organizing against state violence long before that. one of the things i think is really crucial for journalists to understand and do is contextualize this movement, which is to say the black lives matter movement isn’t a standalone racial justice movement any more than say the me too movement is a standalone feminist movement. there were feminist campaigns and organized movements way before we ever heard of me too, just like there were racial justice movements and organizing way before we heard of black lives matter. and so, one of the things that’s really important is for journalists to be self-reflexive enough to look back and say, “okay, how didwecoverthecivilrightsmovement? whatmistakesdidwemake? andhowcanwedobetter in covering black lives matter? how did we cover the black panther party? what mistakes did we make? how did we cover black activism in the s, what can we do better?” let me tell you, there were a lot of mistakes. how can we do better in covering black lives matter? we have examples of this happening before. there might have been a different name to what was happening, but we have examples of the really important role that journalists can play in either helping the u.s. public make sense of the really complicated and nuanced issues atplayhere, orfallingbackontocertainassumptionsthatfranklyarebasedonracialstereotypes about black conflict, and about urban disorder and many other things. because i think this is so important i want to finish by sharing some best practices. i’m sure these aren’t the only best practices, but they’re the ones that came to mind most for me, given what i’ve studied for a long time. journalistic values and newsroom best practices start from a place of not just praising journalism, which we should because journalism is im- portant to democracy and we desperately need it to continue doing its job, but we also need for journalists and journalism institutions to acknowledge where harm has been done. there are some local papers that have started to do this. for example, in montgomery, alabama, the montgomery advertiser’s editorial board apologized publicly for what it called its “shameful” and “careless” coverage of white mob violence that justified and normalized lynching from the https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / on #blacklivesmatter and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) s through the s. that’s an -year period of being complicit in the extra-judicial murder of black alabama citizens! that might seem like an extreme example, though it’s more common than you might think, but papers all over the country outside of the south have been complicit in villainizing african americans in various ways and with harmful results. for jour- nalists, and editors and outlets to really come to an honest reckoning with their role, both the good and bad, that is a first step. next, it’s important for journalists to question how we understand and how we’ve been taught to understand the concept of objectivity. there was just a great piece in the new yorker recently by masha gessen about this — her argument is that in the contemporary media envi- ronmentmanypeoplehaveconfusedtheidealofobjectivitywithsortofaboth-siderism, which ultimately lacks what journalist wesley lowery calls “moral clarity.” objectivity is not giving equal time to both sides even if one side is violating truth, morals, and the social contract. in this“both-siderism,” ifweinterviewpeoplewhosaythatsystemicracismisacontinuedsocial is- sue, well then, the bad argument goes that we then need to have someone on that says, “there’s no more racism. and actually, black people are better off than white people now.” but that is not objectivity. objectivity as a concept has unfortunately been used to mask assumptions within the journalism industry that protect whiteness, but ideally objectivity is reporting the facts, the truth, with what the kerner commission called “compassion and depth.” there is no need to report misinformation and disinformation or every bad argument out there as if it should be weighed alongside the actual answers we have to questions about how inequality works. a good journalist offers context that helps the public understand that not all claims should be given the same weight. we have some really great examples of what that looks like. what’s valuable here is the kind of contextualization that the norms of truth and moral clarity call for: not just uncritically recording what members of the establishment or those in power say, but offering context, seeking out sources with less power as well, checking to see what the data says, etc. here we see a third best practice emerging, which is in how journalists think about sources. for instance, think about using police as sources. historically, journalists have worked really hard to maintain relationships with elite sources. there’s a certain set of sources that are con- sidered to be the sources you want to have in your pocket, you want to be able to call, and they include politicians, and corporate insiders, and police, because these are the people that, for ex- ample, if you have a crime beat at your newspaper, you want the police to be friendly with you and let you know when things are going on so you can report them. but one of the problems with that is that in many cases, these relationships have been too close. and these sources are treated as if their narrative and their version of the story is more reliable and more honest than the versions of the story that come from citizens. what we’ve seen over and over again in these police brutality cases is that often the first reporting, the first narrative that the police report to journalists and the public is just fundamentally untrue. the videos have shown us that. they said that so-and-so was resisting arrest when he wasn’t. they said that so-and-so had a gun when she didn’t. we know now that the police can be faulty sources and that they have a rea- son to protect themselves and each other. that doesn’t mean don’t use them as sources, that means use them as sources but also use witnesses as legitimate sources, community members as legitimate sources, activists and social workers as legitimate sources. i mentioned the kerner commission earlier. in when the country erupted in un- rest following the assassination of martin luther king, president lyndon johnson had put together the kerner commission, which was meant to investigate the reasons for civil unrest and try to prevent it in the future. the kerner commission came back with all these reasons https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / on #blacklivesmatter and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) for black uprisings that would sound very familiar today: disenfranchisement from voting, poverty, joblessness, homelessness, all these things that are still social issues today. but one of the striking things the kerner commission said was that, in fact, a lot of this unrest was the responsibility of journalists because black communities felt that they weren’t being heard and that their stories weren’t told unless they did something that fit into some kind of narrative about black criminality or conflict. and so the kerner commission said, “along with the country as a whole, the press has too long basked in a white world, looking out of it, if at all, with white men’s eyes and a white perspective. that is no longer good enough. the painful process of readjustment that is required of the american news media must begin now. they must make a reality of integration — in both their product and personnel. they must insist on the highest standards of accuracy — not only reporting single events with care and skepti- cism, but placing each event into meaningful perspective. they must report the travail of our cities with compassion and depth.” in this moment, we can heed the same call, this question of compassion and depth. you can report professionally and still treat people and their stories and their communities with compassion and depth, don’t just swoop in and swoop out with- out knowing anything about the community, don’t ignore community members, instead take into consideration their histories and pain, think about how media coverage might negatively affect folks as you’re reporting on them and their experiences and about how to do better. those are three best practices. another best practice is that white journalists should stand withtheirblackcolleagues. asimentionedearlier, it’sthecasethatblackjournalists, forgenera- tions, havebeenpushingtheseissuesandhavebeentryingtomakesomechangeaboutlanguage innewsrooms, aboutsensationalism, aboutframing, abouttheexclusionofcertainsourcesand the reliance on other sources. but at the same time, the folks who have been doing this have not always had the most welcoming or friendly environment and culture within these insti- tutions. but collectively, with solidarity, news staff can push to make sure that news orgs are practicing what they preach, that they have fair hiring and promotion practices, that they have an environment and culture that’s welcoming to everyone. continuing to stand with black journalists and other journalists of color will make a difference in terms of who gets to tell us these stories and under what conditions. fifth: especially in covering activism, reject individualistic narratives that ignore collective organizing. what i mean by this is that one of the critiques that is often justifiably made of journalists in their retrospective coverage of the civil rights era is that they spend a lot of time focusing on and telling stories of individuals, which is why we all know martin luther king and we all know rosa parks. but part of the problem with that sort of framing of these stories is that it ignores that it was thousands of ordinary people who were organizing for change and whose voices were being reflected in those demands. so many regular people risked their lives for the right to vole and for desegregation that it’s a real shame we don’t have a better collective understanding of how activism works. similarly, i would say in this moment, while it might be tempting and there might be compelling figures to tell stories about, it’s important to know how these figures fit into the larger space in which these events are occurring. these stories aren’t just about one case of police brutality, or one police officer, or one victim of police bru- tality, or one organizer, although those organizers i think their stories are important to tell and they make good sources, but it’s in fact about communities, and those communities have deep collective histories and members of those communities have been organizing and reacting for a long time. i was recently in conversation with alicia garza, who people often refer to as a “founder” of the black lives matter movement, and i myself made the mistake of referring to her that way. she immediately corrected me that she is a “co-creator” of the black lives matter https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / on #blacklivesmatter and journalism sociologica. v. n. ( ) global network, which is a specific organization, and an organizer in many capacities, but that she sees herself as part of a legacy and community of black activism that is much bigger than just this moment. it’s important to tell this history and holistic story. and last. is this part of my fifth point or a sixth one? you decide. so much of the way that journalists have been trained to cover activism and social movements is through the lens of crime. many of the conventions of covering crime or covering conflict migrate to the coverage of social movements: “disruption to the social order is bad. who is on this side? who is on that side? was it a scuffle? what sensational happened? ooooh look a photo of something on fire.” a lot of the sort of, “if it bleeds, it leads logic,” is applied to coverage of activism and protest. we know this approach isn’t even useful for covering a crime, but it’s certainly not useful for covering social movements, because what that approach does is it tends to erase and make invisible social issues and their solutions. it erases why people are collectively do- ing what they’re doing by focusing on sensational images or individual actors. it really fails to inform the american public about what is at root in social movements, which is in fact ques- tions of democracy and american progress. social movements are about progress, activism is about demanding change that theoretically will make us better, right? why do we cover it like crime? if we’re going to understand how change happens in a society, we have to understand the roots of why people are demanding change. if we’re so focused on a building burning or an individual story that we can’t tell the story that answers the questions, “why are there , people in the streets, and what have their experiences been? what is the history here? what are their demands? what is the social context?” we really fail to give people the information they need to make informed decisions about whether to support or not support a movement, about whether they think change needs to happen, about how progress works. i see this as crucially important in thinking about the ideal of democracy itself. journalists are crucial to democracy, but their crucialness lies in telling stories with nuance, with depth, holistically, and not falling into shortcuts, or stereotypes, or overly simplistic frames or sensa- tionalism. that’s the value of journalism to democracy. and with that, i’ll close. sarah j. jackson: annenberg school for communication, university of pennsylvania (united states)  sarah.jackson@asc.upenn.edu;  https://www.asc.upenn.edu/people/faculty/sarah-j-jackson-phd sarah j. jackson studies how media, journalism, and technology are used by and represent marginalized publics, with a focus on how communication arising from black, feminist, and activist communities contribute to us progress. her first book, black celebrity, racial politics, and the press (routledge, ), examines the relationship between black celebrity activism, journalism, and american politics. her co-authored second book, hashtag activism: networks of race and gender justice (mit press, ), focuses on the use of twitter in contemporary social movements. as a andrew carnegie fellow, she is working on a third book on the political power and industry innovation of african ameri- canmedia-makers. sheisanassociateeditorofcommunicationtheoryandservesontheadvisoryboards of the center for critical raceand digital studies and the social science research council’s mediawell initiative. https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / https://www.asc.upenn.edu/people/faculty/sarah-j-jackson-phd https://doi.org/ . /issn. - / 	historical background 	journalism today and black lives matter 	journalistic values and newsroom best practices untitled the cambridge journal of postcolonial literary inquiry, ( ), pp – april . © cambridge university press, doi: . /pli. . from post-global to post-truth: african literature beyond commonsense pius adesanmi this article discusses tejumola olaniyan’s submissions in his essay “african literature in the post-global age: provocations on field commonsense” by problematizing some of his submissions on the temporalities, especially the global and the post-global, that have inflected the field of african literary discourse since the second half of the twentieth century. in doing this, the essay queries the idea that the category of the nation-state has been exhausted or overwhelmed by the global and the post-global. the essay suggests instead that the nation-state has been retooled and rearmed by a nascent temporality, the post-truth, in ways that have significant consequences for african literatures. keywords: african literature, african imagination, post-global, post-truth, afropolitanism, afropeanism tejumola olaniyan published his seminal essay “african literature in the post-global age: provocations on field commonsense” in september , two months before donald trump was elected the forty-fifth president of the united states on november , . i want to suggest that olaniyan’s “provocations” have been complicated by certain discursive and epistemological consequences of that election in ways he could not possibly have foreseen. i contend that post-globality and its cultures and affects—the temporal frame of olaniyan’s submissions—have been supplanted by new and insurgent calibrations in global spheres of politics, culture, and meaning. this implies the advent of a new temporal order beyond post-globality, with significant implications not only for african literatures and cultures but for what abiola irele, in a more encompassing manner, calls “the african imagination.” pius adesanmi is a professor of english and director of the institute of african studies at carleton university, ottawa, canada. he has published widely as a comparatist of anglophone and francophone african and black atlantic literatures and cultures. his current research is at the intersection of social media and the production of new spaces of cultural conversation in africa. he is the inaugural winner of the penguin prize for african writing in the nonfiction category with his book, you’re not a country, africa. (email: piusadesanmi@gmail.com) i am using the term calibrations in the sense inaugurated by ato quayson in his seminal book of the same title. quayson proposes “a reading of literature with what lies beyond it as a way of understanding structures of transformation, process, and contradiction that inform both literature and society.” this hermeneutic methodology extends, in my view, to a reading of the temporal frames of culture and society. see abiola irele, the african imagination (oxford: oxford university press, ). at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /pli. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available mailto:piusadesanmi@gmail.com http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /pli. . &domain=pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /pli. . https://www.cambridge.org/core the new moment in question is the post-truth age and its corollaries of post- factuality or alternative factuality, consecrated in by oxford dictionaries, which elected post-truth as its international word of the year. oxford dictionaries was not just consecrating a word. they were flagging a temporal advent or, more precisely, a chronotope spelled out in terms of an ascendant ethno-nationalistic provincialism and a resultant assault on global cosmopolitanisms underwritten by the trumpian rise of the american far right, with consequences in europe: brexit and the increasing assertiveness of ethno-national provincialism in france, austria, italy, germany, and the netherlands. by foregrounding the post-truth age and its discursive consecration by no less a western institution of canonization than oxford dictionaries, i am by no means attempting a centering or normativization of a new western moment and time whose ramifications are still unfolding. after johannes fabian, after ngugi wa thiong’o, after dipesh chakrabarty, and the extensive body of work that emanated from postcolonial theorizing in the s, it would be odd to proceed from a perspective that makes the african imagination incidental or marginal to yet another western moment of ennui with her own logocentric self after postmodernism. on the contrary, what i propose to examine, as a way of interrogating olaniyan’s “provocations” and pushing them in other directions, are the ways in which post- truth, even within its own provincialist economies of meaning, is worlding a new imaginary of racialized alterities of the global south that requires vigilance and new modes of engagement on the cultural front, modes of engagement that are at once consonant with olaniyan’s provocations but also require that we urgently problematize and extend some of his submissions on what he calls “the field commonsense of belonging and identity.” it is gratifying that olaniyan takes as his point of departure an affirmative answer to kwaku korang’s oft-cited query of the tensions between originary questions of definition and boundary-cutting in african literary studies. against the backdrop of the nativist/language debate in makerere and its consequent inflections of the conceptualization of african literatures for much of the second half of the twentieth century, resulting in some of the nombrilistic textual strategies famously denounced by achille mbembe in his “african modes of self-writing,” korang asks: “are ‘post,’ ‘trans,’ and globalist/neo-universalist propositions now (more than ever) definitionally viable for african literature?” olaniyan’s affirmative answer to this question is premised on a number of temporal permutations he considers self-evident: the nativistic impulse, with its affects of language, geography, and race, coincided with a time when a sizeable number see bbc’s news entry, “post-truth declared word of the year by oxford dictionaries,” http:// www.bbc.com/news/uk- . i am thinking of johannes fabian’s time and the other, ngugi wa thiong’o’s moving the centre, and dipesh chakrabarty’s provincializing europe. tejumola olaniyan contributed significantly to the s’ wave of “moving the center” by exploring some of the fault lines of postcolonial discourse. see, notably, the special issue of callaloo he guest-edited: “on post-colonial discourse,” callaloo, special issue . (fall ). see r. radrakrishnan, “postmodernism and the rest of the world,” the pre-occupation of post- colonial studies, eds. fawzia afzal-khan and kalpana seshadri-crooks, (durham, nc: ), – . pius adesanmi at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /pli. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available http://www.bbc.�com/news/uk- http://www.bbc.�com/news/uk- https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /pli. . https://www.cambridge.org/core of practitioners of the african imagination were based on the continent. harry garuba has opined that this era produced textualities in which it was possible to map a mytho- ritualistic center in the works of most african writers of that era irrespective of their divergent sensibilities and ideological preferments. olaniyan, agreeing with korang, surmises correctly that the originary premise of the african imagination has been supplanted by a globalistic imaginary marked by such temporal and cultural-material signposts as globalization, transnationalism, deterritorialization, borderlands, and contact zones, in essence, the sort of global and cross-border reorganization of culture that has been theorized as privileging cosmopolitanism, diaspora, difference, and heterogeneity. these, among others, are the features of the global and post-global age, theorized as a given, a “field commonsense” by olaniyan. this is the age of the so-called african writers of the second and third generations, characterized by a thematic voyage out, an ideological unmooring from the interpellations of the mytho-ritualistic textual and ideological centers of the first generation. olaniyan posits that high theory’s attempts to grapple with these developments with an efflorescence of the “posts” have predictably resulted in a dilemma in which the posts have become exhausted clichés, unable to capture the cultural complexities of a moment whose contours have outstripped the conceptual powers of the global. just as a certain theoretical consensus was reached, especially in the circuits of african literary theorizing, that the “post” in postcolonial did not necessarily refer to a linear temporal time after colonialism, olaniyan submits that the “post” in post-global does not in any way imply that “we are ‘beyond’ the global age”. however, post-global “does propose that ‘global’ no longer adequately describes the world we live in now” ( ). how then may we describe this world that “we live in now,” and how does it inflect africa, african humanity, african society, and the vexed question of the african’s agency? how may we situate the african imagination in a world that has outstripped the global and rendered her inadequate? olaniyan, in my view, does not offer nearly a satisfactory response to these questions made necessary by his powerful reading of the african present. rather, he flags conceptual inadequacies and critiques epistemological simplisms in a way that perpetually underwrites his incredulity toward certainties that are now wholly circumscribed by concerns that are “larger than global” ( ). it is in theorizing the nation-state that olaniyan offers us the closest to an empirical account of the otherwise inchoate features of the post-global. while the nation-state and the global reinforced and nourished each other’s certainties, the post-global effected an “emptying out of the nation-state and territorial sovereignty of the african of the last thirty years or so. many of our writers and critics, harry garuba, “the unbarable lightness of being: re-figuring trends in recent nigerian poetry,” english in africa . ( ) : – . latin american theorists such as walter mignolo and annibal quijano resolved this dilemma somewhat with decolonial theorizing. tejumola olaniyan, “african literature in the post-global age: provocations on field common- sense,” cambridge journal of postcolonial literary inquiry . ( ): . ibid., . from post-global to post-truth at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /pli. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /pli. . https://www.cambridge.org/core both in their work and in their life trajectories, are eloquent testimonies to this sociohistorical condition. and i dare anyone disagree with me that even our parents and relatives in our far-from-cities african villages deeply feel this condition too.” i dare to disagree with olaniyan—not in the sense that the post-global condition has not deeply affected our “far-from-cities african villages.” i disagree with olaniyan because he is questioning the obvious. i believe he is questioning the obvious because, after a surfeit of warnings and caveats about the dangers of theoretical certainties, the emptying out of definitions and conceptual categories, the exhaustion of nativistic, linguistic, geographic, and other paradigms with which we once read and engaged african literatures, the dépassement of certain constitutive tools of producing and managing meaning, offering more than the broadest possible outlines of what the after global might or could be and mean would have undermined the cautionary dialect of his own reflection. yet, that after global can now be named—at least in my opinion—as the post-truth that emerged at almost the moment of consolidation of africa’s cultural post-globality. i see the rise of afropolitanism in anglophone african cultural production and afropeanism, its francophone african counterpart, as the highest points of african cultural post-globality. first, afropolitanism. i am more interested in the floating, cosmopolitan, post-globalist confessions of some of its spokespersons than i am in the expanding corpus that has fallen into the theoretical rubric of afropolitan fiction. whether they have embraced the term or not, a majority of the anglophone african writers of the millennial generation are now routinely discoursed as afro- politan writers. the term embraces the globalist-itinerant members of the generation (taiye selasie, teju cole, chris abani, chimamanda adichie, pettina gappah, etc.) just as it embraces writers based in lagos or nairobi. what explains this is the fact that more than a geographical location, afropolitanism is more about a culture, an imaginary rooted in a free-floating transnational imaginary organized around effects of taste, style, and self-definition that are african in feeling but wholly global (read western) in connotation. this explains constant disavowals of the label african writer by the most strident among the afropolitan writers. from petina gappah to taiye selasie via teju cole, “i am not an african writer; i am just a writer” became a popular rallying anthem of a certain influential fragment of afropolitanism, forcing kenyan author binyavanga wainaina to disown afropolitanism in favor of pan-africanism. writer and critic akin adesokan captures this disavowing inclination thus: there is something of a compulsion about the second attitude of african writers. a puzzling compulsion to disavow. this is the spectacular ritual rejection of the label of “african writer,” and the posture of two writers—pettina gappah, the author of an elegy ibid., . i have myself discussed the emptying out of african villages by post-globality in a plenary lecture delivered at the ala conference in dallas, texas. see pius adesanmi, “face me, i book you: writing africa’s agency in the age of the netizen,” https://xokigbo.com/ / / /guest-blog- professor-pius-adesanmi-face-me-i-book-you-writing-africas-agency-in-the-age-of-the-netizen/. pius adesanmi at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /pli. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://xokigbo.com/ �/� / /guest-blog-professor-pius-adesanmi-face-me-i-book-you-writing-africas-agency-in-the-age-of-the-netizen/ https://xokigbo.com/ �/� / /guest-blog-professor-pius-adesanmi-face-me-i-book-you-writing-africas-agency-in-the-age-of-the-netizen/ https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /pli. . https://www.cambridge.org/core for easterly, and olufemi terry, the winner of the caine prize—captures the spirit of this rejection. in france, afropeanism performs its own post-globalist disavowal of the african- ness of the african writer by other means. like afropolitanism, afropeanism is as much a critical-theoretical paradigm of engaging writers who, only a decade ago, used to be known as “migritude writers” or the “children of the postcolony.” some of the most accomplished novelists in this tradition are fatou diome, alain mabanckou, léonora miano, wilfried n’sondé, sami tchak, kossi effoui, bessora, and abdourahman waberi. as famously demonstrated in sami tchak’s novel place des fetes, afropeanism makes no concessions whatsoever to the identity category of diaspora, of the immi- grant, of the transnational subject. afropeanism stakes an unapologetic claim to an autochthonous european identity inflected by african origins. the afropean’s ancestors may not be gauls; it is no basis for him to concede the category of “autochthone” to those who trace their ancestry to the gauls. the afropean will not write the european tribe in the self-distancing flaneur style of a caryl phillips for s/he is the european tribe tout court. the afropean’s double consciousness does not speak of a division between being european and african at once but between the european and the tracery of africa. in screaming, “i am not an african writer!” and in the quest to find an autochthonous way of being french despite the stubborn persistence of africa, afropolitanism, and afropeanism, the unrooted african subject seeks to enact the ultimate moment of errantry and cosmopolitan rootedness in a western mythos masquerading as both globality and post-globality. it is precisely at this moment that post-truth emerges and the goalpost shifts—as it has shifted at every moment of africa’s becoming for much of the last five hundred years. the post-global that olaniyan either does not name or whose contours he describes in very broad and general terms actually now has very precise configurations and consequences for diaspora formations of africa-derived identities such as afro- politanism, afropeanism, on the one hand, and continental modes of articulating african agency in the twenty-first century (ethnicity, religion) on the other hand. post-truth is not just an extreme ideological articulation of white supremacy under- written by only its own claim to truth. post-truth also comes complete with its own geographical, ethnic, national, and nation-statist materialist enactments. the nation- state, which olaniyan warns us, has been emptied out by globalization and after- globalization has, in fact, rearmed and returned with a deleterious force and ferociousness that have left many a theoretical scribbler of her requiem scampering for cover. see his essay, “i’m not an african writer, damn you!” http://chimurengachronic.co.za/im-not-an- african-writer-damn-you/. for an introduction to afropeanism in contemporary francophone african fiction, see the excellent book edited by nicki hitchcott and dominic thomas, francophone afropean literatures (liverpool: liverpool university press, ). see also, pius adesanmi, “redefining paris: trans- modernity and francophone african migritude fiction,” mfs modern fiction studies . (winter ): – . from post-global to post-truth at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /pli. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available http://chimurengachronic.�co.za/im-not-an-african-writer-damn-you/ http://chimurengachronic.�co.za/im-not-an-african-writer-damn-you/ https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /pli. . https://www.cambridge.org/core only this nation-state says she wants a wall whose borders are determined by the cultural boundaries of western culture, history, and civilization. only this nation-state says migrancy, transnationalism, globalization, cosmopolitanism, hybridity, cultural heterogeneity, afropolitanism, and afropeanism are ruses of invasion by colored others and othered others. only this nation-state says that there is only one truth and that truth is white and christian and euro-american. only this nation-state says even those she enslaved and who have contended with her physical and epistemic brutality for more than three hundred years do not even have the right to utter, “black lives matter,” and she is ever ready to narrativize them as essential outsiders to her essential white and western self. where does this leave chris abani and dinaw mengestu? only this nation-state says that the afropean articulating a politics of autochthonous agency and belonging is “scum” that reminds him of “noise and odour.” where does this leave sami tchak and leonora miano? olaniyan’s critique is at its most powerful when he engages the nation-statist project in africa. i do not wish to rehash his well-argued points about the predilec- tions of the nation-statist project, the tensions and the contradictions that have ren- dered it ineffectual as a mode of ensuring the african’s agency in the twenty-first century. however, whereas olaniyan reads the nation-statist model in africa as an exhausted praxis incapable of responding to the orders, agendas, and schemes of late modernity—human rights, the environment, social justice, and so on—i am wondering if there isn’t more to be said for continuities between the rise (or is it the return?) of the post-truth, totalitarian, provincialist state in the global north and contemporary articulations of nation-statehood in africa? put differently, in the wake of trump and the steady rise of a far right agitating for a racial-puritanical and provincial nation-state in europe, is the global north in fact rediscovering what has always been true of african actuations of nation-statehood since independence? hardly any african state enjoyed more than a decade of post- independence euphoria before disillusionment and contestations of the state set in. however, contestations and delegitimation of the state in africa have hardly ever been about a will to surpass that particular political structure but about a desire to make her geographical boundaries, instruments of statehood, language, and culture coterminous with the provincialist affinities of specific ethnic groups. hence, biafra in nigeria was an agitation for a provincialist nation-state whose boundaries would be coterminous with igbo identity. it was not an agitation to surpass the nation-state per se as the political ambit within which igbo agency could be guaranteed in the modern world. in the nigerian context, biafra was soon to give birth to copycat agitations for ethnically bounded nation-states known as the oodua republic for the yoruba and the arewa republic for the hausa-fulani. as olaniyan correctly surmises, xenophobia in south africa is an expression of a desire for the puritanical state from which the demonized other must be excised. across africa, i refer to french resident nicholas sarkozy’s famous description of black and arab dwellers of french suburban ghettoes as “la racaille” (scum) in the wake of the violent uprisings. in a famous speech in , jacques chirac, then mayor of paris, complained about “the noise and odour” of african immigrants who crowd apartment buildings in paris as polygamists and live on welfare. the speech would become a famous rap song by zebda, a rap group comprising french youth of north african extraction. pius adesanmi at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /pli. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /pli. . https://www.cambridge.org/core modern statehood has always sought to be a puritanical expression of the self-defined on the basis of very strict, narrow, and provincialist parameters. led by the new american president, the post-truthers of the global north appear to be discovering what has always been true of the nation-state in africa. how might these permutations affect the field of african literary studies and, indeed, the african imagination? olaniyan submits that: the post-global is tearing to shreds the canons of provenance that have constituted what i call the “field commonsense of belonging and identity” of african literary studies since the s. i am referring here to those unanimous or contested, spoken or implied assumptions of what constitutes the africanness of african literature and literary studies.” i beg to differ slightly. the post-global is not tearing to shreds the canons of provenance. what the post-global really did was to create the possibility of easy assumptions on the part of the twenty-first-century african writer and critic. such easy assumptions as the idea that narratives of origins have been overcome and cosmopoli- tanism is the only basis through which the african must engage the rest of the world. the itinerant, well-heeled african writer and critic, circulating in the capitals of the global north, the rootless cultural mongrel of taiye selasie’s “bye-bye barbar,” became the iconic embodiment of the mobilizing power of diaspora, immigrant, global mobilities, hybridity, heterogeneity, and every other identity interpellation that is cast as antipodal to “the africa of the ixties” or “the africa of makerere and the language debate.” the afropolitan and the afropean, as i have argued, are cast as the apotheoses of the post-global african. yet, at the very moment of his transnational, diasporic coronation, the capitals of the west return to source, return to origins, return to a space in which the other can only figure as a cultural danger to a puritanical, ethno- national, and provincial idea of the nation-statist self. whatever signs of primordial identity backwardness he projected onto the “provenance africa” of the s while reveling in the cosmopolitan jouissance of his post-global present has caught up with him in postmodern london, paris, or new york of . discourses of the great cultural mosaics, melting pots, and multiculturalism are suddenly recast as endangering the body politic. it therefore seems pertinent to me that a field commonsense has to be a return to questions left unanswered since makerere in the s. i am not by any chance proposing a facile reboot of the retraditionalization of africa model. at any rate, retraditionalization has been extensively debated in african philosophy, sociology, and anthropology in the s. i am also proposing a field commonsense that moves beyond ngugi wa thiong’o’s linguistic nativism. i subscribe to his vision of linguistic empowerment and agree that europhonism has deleterious consequences see olaniyan, “african literature in the post-global age: provocations on field common- sense,” . for an in-depth discussion of retraditionalization in african discourse, see < fn > kasereka kav- wahirehi, “on the concepts of disorder, retraditionalization, and crisis in african studies,” journal of french and francophone philosophy—revue de la philosophie française et de langue française xxiv. ( ): – . from post-global to post-truth at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /pli. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /pli. . https://www.cambridge.org/core for the continent. we do, however, need a field commonsense that revisits an “africa” with the interpellative and conceptual powers of the africa of the nationalist and immediate post-nationalist moment. it is true that the said africa came with its own baggage of ideological rigidities and fanciful agendas that olaniyan rightfully critiques. that africa, however, created a transcendental, trans-continental space of meaning that enabled the nationalists to mobilize the masses on the basis of its power of appeal. what happened to that africa is not the fact that globality and post-globality exposed its weakness and emptied it of meaning. globality and post-globality only set upon it after it had been relinquished internally in favor of other modes of identity interpellation. in my view, globality and post-globality are preys of opportunity and are not a catalytic or cau- sative factor in what became of the africa taht kwame nkrumah, julius nyerere, nnamdi azikiwe, leopold sedar senghor, and nelson mandela mobilized with considerable suasive effects. internal relinquishing of the mobilizing power of that africa is what led to the delegitimation of its identity claims in favor of the global, the post-global, and the transnational, and inaugurated a discursive regime in which africa was cast as antithetical to progress. after hegel, after hugh trevor roper, we started doing it ourselves through effects and affects of discourse. this inaugurated what i call a scramble for cosmopolitanism in african literary discourse. the fractious debates over the “posts” in the context of african literary discourse in the s had at least one connecting strand: the africa of the s and s, with its claims to geographical and definitional rigidities, had become too “essentialist” to be a valuable conceptual tool for any critique of the african imagination worthy of the “post” tag. senghor and nyerere may have been able to map a conceptual africa that operated seamlessly from cape to cairo, any such deployment in the era of the theoretical “posts” was “essentialist.” to read achebe and mpahlele as “africans” was to dissolve their differences; it was not to pay attention to their particularities; it was to assume that there was any such a thing as a “transcendental category” called “the african.” this was a slippery slope of postcolonial surrender of africa to the essentialism police operating, ironically, in the global, post-global, and cosmopolitan academies of the global north. it was only a question of time before the afropolitan citizen of the world would arrive on the scene and declare that there is no such thing as an african writer while wearing a goatskin bag filled with western literary prizes. the africa we relinquished as a viable conceptual category because of the post-global needs to be returned to and re-engaged as an emergency field commonsense. see adam branch and zachariah mampilly, africa uprising: popular protest and political change in africa (london: zed books), . see pius adesanmi, “africa, india and the postcolonial: notes towards a praxis of infliction,” arena journal ( – ): – . see niyi osundare, african literature and the crisis of post-structuralist theorizing (ibadan: dialogue in african philosophy monograph series, options books, ). i discussed this issue in broader details in a previous essay. see pius adesanmi, “cats, catritude, and the limits of contingency: africa in north american critical theory,” the zeleza post, april , . the essay was later reworked as a chapter in my book, you’re not a country, africa (johannesburg: penguin books, ). pius adesanmi at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /pli. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /pli. . https://www.cambridge.org/core i am in full agreement with olaniyan’s submissions on what he calls “the ideo- logical test” of africanness in his conclusion. olaniyan contends that the ideological is the best equipped of all the field “tests” he critiqued to weather the storm of the post-global. this may be true. i am, however, interested in “the ideological test” for totally different reasons. i think it is the best equipped to deliver on the promise of a transcendental, actionable africa of the sort that the nationalists deployed against colonialism in the first half of the twentieth century. however, such an africa must be retooled and reimagined for our contemporary conditions, circumstances, and needs. an africa produced by a reimagined and remapped ideological terrain is the only weapon that the continent has against xenophobia. when, as recently as may , a black south african pens an op-ed in sowetan live in which he openly boasts of the superiority of black south africans to the rest of the junk in sub-saharan africa and said article is well-received by black south africa, only a collective ideological reimagining—in which african cultural producers and critics must play a pivotal role—of africa could revive what connected nelson mandela’s generation to nnamdi azikiwe’s generation. making it possible to embrace africa again from cape to cairo in a transcen- dental fashion is the first field commonsense obligation of contemporary african literary commonsense—if not the only obligation. see prince mashele, “sa finally africa, thanks to zuma,” sowetan live, may , . from post-global to post-truth at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /pli. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /pli. . https://www.cambridge.org/core 	from post-global to post-truth: african literature beyond commonsense wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ from study-abroad to study-at-home: teaching cross-cultural design thinking during covid- teaching tips - special issue (covid) from study-abroad to study-at-home: teaching cross-cultural design thinking during covid- mae m. lewis and mia k. markey department of biomedical engineering, the university of texas at austin, austin, tx, usa (received july ; accepted august ; published online september ) challenge statement undergraduate degrees at the university of texas at austin (ut austin) require ‘‘flags’’ in each of six areas: ( ) cultural diversity in the united states; ( ) ethics; ( ) global cultures; ( ) independent inquiry; ( ) quantitative reasoning; and ( ) writing. courses that carry the global cultures flag guide students in exploring the practices, beliefs, and histories of at least one non-us cultural group, and encourage reflection on one’s own cultural experiences. many engineering students are excited to learn about global cultures in the context of their discipline through faculty-led study-abroad. currently, there are engineering courses carrying a global cultures flag, of which are faculty-led study-abroad. unfortunately, the covid- pandemic has prevented almost of our engineering students from participating in faculty-led study-abroad. our challenge was to quickly transition a faculty-led study-abroad carrying a global cultures flag to an online format. novel initiative the course ‘‘international perspectives on biomed- ical engineering design’’ prepares students for cross- cultural design thinking. students learn human-cen- tered design methods to understand the people for whom they are designing and to identify actionable problem statements. the course theme is the potential of artificial intelligence (ai) to transform breast cancer care. as a short-term faculty-led study-abroad in portugal, it facilitates students’ exploration of the im- pact of culture on healthcare delivery and the design of healthcare technologies. reflective exercises are emphasized to help students develop intercultural competence. the primary course number is in biomedical engineering with cross-listings offered through chemical engineering and mechanical engi- neering. students plan, conduct, and interpret interviews with healthcare professionals who treat breast cancer patients at champalimaud clinical center (lisbon, portugal) and the university of texas md anderson cancer center (houston, us). in study-abroad, at least half of the interviews are conducted via video- conference since half the professionals are in us and half are in portugal. as an online course, all of the interviews are via videoconference. due to scheduling constraints for synchronous online delivery, the num- ber of healthcare professionals interviewed was re- duced from in the study-abroad offering to in the online offering, with a corresponding de- crease from to specialties. study-abroad students’ learning from the interviews is assessed in three ways: ( ) individual reflective writing; ( ) actionable problem statements written in the form of tweets by small groups (find us on twitter at @povpractice.); and ( ) nih-style abstracts written, reviewed, and revised by small groups. students are randomly assigned to dif- ferent groups for different activities. for the on- line offering, four groups of four students each were used. given the enrollment and distribution of majors, groups typically included a mix of bme and non-bme students. individual reflective writing required students to summarize the interview experience by discussing three main ideas, answering the prompt: ‘‘how is the culture of the country in which the subject of this interview practices reflected in their answers to the interview questions?’’ and proposing a future interview address correspondence to mia k. markey, department of biomedical engineering, the university of texas at austin, austin, tx, usa. electronic mail: mia.markey@utexas.edu biomedical engineering education, vol. , no. , january (� ) pp. – https://doi.org/ . /s - - - biomedical engineering society - / / - / � biomedical engineering society http://orcid.org/ - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &amp;domain=pdf question. actionable problem statements capture needs and insights identified from interviews of healthcare professionals using tweetable memes. after all interviews were completed, students proposed and critiqued solutions to actionable problem statements in the form of nih-style abstracts. for the transition to online, we maintained the first two assessments but dropped the third because the nih-abstract project typically requires students to work together in groups for many hours. we were concerned about students’ ability to coordinate extensive groupwork in the online format given the pandemic’s disruptions of ‘‘normal’’ life, e.g., some students were expected to have increased family responsibilities. it is noteworthy that the online students’ interview questions included the impact of the covid- pandemic on breast cancer care and health equity topics inspired by the black lives matter movement. study-abroad students visit the breast unit of two very different hospitals: hospital de são joão partici- pates in the national health service whereas cham- palimaud clinical center is a private institution. study-abroad students also visit research facilities: centro de investigação em tecnologias e serviços de saúde (cintesis), associação fraunhofer portugal research (fraunhofer aicos), and instituto de investigação e inovação em saúde (i s). the online format replaced these site visits with ‘‘virtual field trips’’ featuring youtube videos and readings and were assessed by discussion board posts relating them to other course activities. study-abroad students participate in structured cultural activities: short immersive portuguese lan- guage lesson; hands-on introduction to cooking tradi- tional portuguese food; and an interactive lesson in traditional portuguese dances. the portuguese lan- guage lesson was replaced with a short course through the online language learning platform memrise. in the online dancing lesson, students submit a video of themselves performing a traditional portuguese dance and discuss how it compares to other dance forms. for this and other video assignments, students used flip- grid, which integrates with canvas, our learning management system. flipgrid is a user-friendly plat- form for instructors to facilitate and moderate student video responses. the convenient privacy settings offer an advantage over self-recorded student videos by allowing instructors to limit influence from past assignments by hiding the responses. the settings can also be adjusted so that students can view and com- ment on each other’s submissions. these video assignments also give the instructor the opportunity to hear from all students, which is an important interac- tion often lost in online instruction. unlike written reflections, video reflections capture students’ feelings in the moment and are a memorable course experi- ence. in lieu of a hands-on cooking lesson, students read portuguese recipes and respond with a reflective flipgrid video submission about which ingredients they had at home and how the recipes compared to what they normally eat. study-abroad students also go on guided tours. we did not try to replace the tours in the online format, but instead picked a few topics to introduce through readings, videos, and interactive websites, and assess by flipgrid: geography of por- tugal and its connection to wine industry; role of portugal in black history; and religious freedom. changes to students’ thinking about culture, design, breast cancer, and ai in medicine were assessed by comparing start-of-course and end-of-course concept maps. , study-abroad students create concept maps in small groups, whereas the online students created maps individually. in the study aboard format, it was natural to have students do the concept maps in small groups because we had extensive class time together. for the online format, the amount of synchronous class time was very limited in comparison. moreover, we were reluctant to assign group projects because we were concerned about students’ ability to coordinate extensive groupwork in the online format given the pandemic’s disruptions of ‘‘normal’’ life. for this rea- son, in the transition to online, we chose to change the concept map exercises from group projects to indi- vidual assignments. students individually perform start-of-course and end-of-course self-assessments of their global learn- ing and their intercultural knowledge and compe- tence , and respond to free-response reflection prompts inspired by the set proposed by the university of michigan for international programs in engineer- ing, though substantial modifications were made for the transition to online learning. students write three end-of-course essays. they use rolfe’s reflection model to write about the impact of culture on healthcare delivery and the impact of cul- ture on the design of healthcare technologies, espe- cially those based on ai methods; this process was unchanged by the transition to online learning. how- ever, in the study-abroad format, the third essay is a photo essay based on photographs they take during the program, so the online students searched for photos online. reflection six biomedical engineering majors and students in other health-related disciplines enrolled (biochem- istry, biology, health & society, international rela- tions, neuroscience, and public health.) the total is biomedical engineering society m. m. lewis and m. k. markey similar to prior study-abroad offerings, though the percentage of non-engineering majors was higher (historically ~ – %.) about half of the students identified as male ( ) and the others as female ( ), which is typical for the course. as expected, they ranged from rising sophomores to graduating seniors. some key ideas typically noted from interviews conducted by study-abroad students were observed in the online format as demonstrated by the students’ written reflections and actionable problem statements, e.g., differences between the us and portuguese gov- ernments’ roles in healthcare. however, the online students’ questions emphasized more current events, e.g., how covid- is impacting breast cancer care and how ai may perpetuate health inequities. in contrast, study-abroad students’ questions emphasized the doctors’ daily experiences and their reflective writings stressed the emotional impact on the doctors. we believe that these differences are more likely due to the extraordinary world events that the students are living through rather than the course format. recording interviews was essential because con- nections were frequently ‘‘dropped’’ and students faced pandemic time demands (health concerns, family responsibilities, etc.) video recordings of course ses- sions can be shared on canvas via zoom or panopto. while either allows the instructor to disable download and restrict access by date, we decided to use panopto because the zoom configuration at our institution does not enable the instructor to restrict access to students enrolled in the course. in particular, students enrolled in a course can share links to course recordings dis- tributed via zoom to any member of our large uni- versity, whereas course recordings distributed via panopto cannot be simply shared to people not en- rolled in the course. considering the privacy of both our students and professional guests, we prefer greater access control. the study-abroad professional field trips were dif- ficult to mimic online. many portuguese organizations have youtube channels, but often with limited eng- lish-language content. youtube’s automatic transla- tions from spoken portuguese to english subtitles were not useable. unfortunately, our virtual field trips did not prompt as much critical reflection. for example, the visit to hospital de são joão is a major culture shock to many of our study-abroad students because it challenges their assumptions about what a ‘‘good’’ hospital looks like. in contrast, the students’ video reflections about the virtual field trip to hospital de são joão were not emotional. we believe that this is a substantial loss in the translation from study-abroad to online. online language learning was well-received, and some students exceeded the requirements. in future courses, online or study-abroad, memrise may be beneficial for students to pace their own language learning. students seemingly enjoyed flipgrid. their video reflections were longer and more engaging than their discussion posts. video assignments were also oppor- tunities to involve others in their learning. in the cooking flipgrid, many students reported discussing, sharing, or cooking a meal with family. family mem- bers or pets also served as dance partners—some more willingly than others! shared experiences with family can make it easier to reflect after a course is over, which is key to a successful study-abroad. however, these observations may not generalize to post-pan- demic online offerings. due to the societal impacts of the pandemic, students are currently spending more time with their families than with fellow students. while the online cultural activities related to geog- raphy, history, and governance are limited substitutes for the extensive educational tours of study-abroad, there were complementary learning benefits. for example, some students had not realized the relative size of portugal to its former colonies prior to the interactive map activity. we recommend using more multi-media tools in future offerings, including for study-abroad. a key cultural experience for study- abroad students is the são joão festival. in the end-of- course self-reflections, several online students regretted missing the são joão festival. online information about festival traditions is a far cry from participation. moreover, in the future we will explore online approximations of the informal interactions with portuguese people experienced in study-abroad. broadly, the learning gains qualitatively assessed using concept maps were similar for the online offering as compared to the prior study-abroad offerings. however, our online students emphasized the risk that ai poses to perpetuate or increase racial and socio- economic biases. we suspect that this is due to con- current world events rather than course format. some covid- specific themes were also evident, e.g., interest in clinicians’ descriptions of breast cancer patients’ isolation due to pandemic constraints on visitors. since online submission of concept maps was effective, we will adopt it for future offerings, including study-abroad. for global learning value rubric self-assess- ments, students’ end-of-course scores were significantly improved (wilcoxon signed rank test) relative to start-of-course for global self-awareness (p < . ) and perspective taking (p < . ), but not for cul- tural diversity (p = . ), understanding global systems (p = . ), applying knowledge to con- temporary global contexts (p = . ), or personal and social responsibility (p = . ). for global self- biomedical engineering society from study-abroad to study-at-home awareness, the most common response on the start-of- course self-assessment was ‘‘analyzes ways that human actions influence the natural and human world,’’ whereas the most common response on the end-of- course self-assessment was ‘‘effectively addresses sig- nificant issues in the natural and human world based on articulating one’s identity in a global context.’’ for perspective taking, the most common response on the start-of-course self-assessment was ‘‘identifies and ex- plains multiple perspectives (such as cultural, disci- plinary, and ethical) when exploring subjects within natural and human systems,’’ whereas the most com- mon response on the end-of-course self-assessment was ‘‘evaluates and applies diverse perspectives to complex subjects within natural and human systems in the face of multiple and even conflicting positions (i.e., cultural, disciplinary, and ethical.)’’ for intercultural knowledge and competence va- lue rubric self-assessments, students’ end-of-course scores were significantly improved (wilcoxon signed rank test) relative to start-of-course for empathy (p < . ), but not for cultural self-awareness (p = . ), knowledge of cultural worldview frameworks (p = . ), verbal and nonverbal communication (p = . ), curiosity (p = . ), and openness (p = . ). in contrast, the prior study- abroad cohort self-reported improvements in all areas except personal and social responsibility. for empathy, the most common response on the start-of- course self-assessment was ‘‘recognizes intellectual and emotional dimensions of more than one worldview and sometimes uses more than one worldview in interactions,’’ whereas the most common response on the end-of-course self-assessment was ‘‘interprets intercultural experience from the perspectives of own and more than one worldview and demonstrates ability to act in a supportive manner that recognizes the feelings of another cultural group.’’ the global learning value rubric and intercul- tural knowledge and competence value rubric self- assessments suggest global cultures topics that are more challenging to address online relative to study- abroad. however, in addition to the limitations of self- assessments, taking a course online during a pandemic is not the same as taking a course online in general, e.g., some students reported that the current situation at home made it harder to think about global issues whereas others said that the ongoing pandemic made global issues more salient. study-abroad students have extensive opportunities for informal feedback because they spend many hours with the instructors. while we endeavored to be readily available to online students via slack, interactions were still limited by comparison. hence, the online distri- bution of structured rubrics was essential. several online students lamented that they did not get to know their classmates. in contrast, study-abroad students form strong bonds. weaker connections among students are detrimental to learning because each person views the world through the lens of their own experiences, e.g., students’ responses to readings about religious freedom varied with their own religious background. in addition, we hypothesize that weaker connections among students decreased their efficiency in using remote collaboration tools for cooperative learning activities, e.g., generating actionable problem statements. in future online offerings, we will promote more student discussion towards the goal of increasing appreciation of the cultural diversity within the us and how one’s personal experiences influence one’s per- ceptions of portugal. we propose to build rapport among the students by having them interview each other, through which they would also be practicing skills they need to interview the healthcare profes- sionals. this approach could be easily repeated throughout the course as new interview techniques are introduced. the online version of the class retained some of the major learning objectives in ai, breast cancer, and the role of culture in healthcare delivery and design of healthcare technologies through interviews, discussion board posts, concept maps, and tweetable actionable problem statements. in addition, flipgrid video reflections helped us maintain some of the authenticity of portuguese cultural experiences such as cooking traditional food, dancing to folk music, and learning facts about portuguese culture. students who incor- porated members of their families into these assign- ments may benefit from creating lasting memories at home. however, study abroad experiences relying more heavily on students’ interactions with each other and with portuguese people were not captured in this online format. the global value learning rubric and intercultural knowledge and competence value rubric self-assessments show that global cultures to- pics were more challenging to address, although these findings may also be influenced by the current extraordinary world events rather than solely the shift to online learning. final course surveys also showed that students wished they had taken more initiative to meet their classmates. moving forward, study-abroad courses that must transition to an online format should incorporate more opportunities for student interaction to increase overall student experience and student appreciation for others’ diverse perspectives on course material. biomedical engineering society m. m. lewis and m. k. markey acknowledgments we thank the international engineering education office at the university of texas at austin for the opportunity to teach international perspectives on biomedical engineering design in the maymester format. we are particularly grateful for the guidance of our program coordinator, ellen aoki. we deeply appreciate the support of our colleagues at champal- imaud clinical centre in lisbon, especially maria joão cardoso and sofia bragança. we thank patricia pa- drão at universidade do porto for portuguese recipes. we are indebted to the healthcare professionals who graciously volunteered their time to be interviewed by our students. we also appreciate the technical support and guidance in transitioning to teaching online from our colleagues, especially kathy jackson, jim pollard, and dan puperi. author contributions both authors contributed to all aspects of the manuscript. references adesope oo, nesbit jc. a systematic review of research on collaborative learning with concept maps. in: hand- book of research on collaborative learning using concept mapping. hershey: igi global; . pp. – . davis k, knight db. impact of a global engineering course on student cultural intelligence and cross-cultural communication. j int eng educ. ; : . doorley s, holcomb s, klebahn p, segovia k, utley j. design thinking bootleg. palo alto: stanford d.school; . https://dschool.stanford.edu/resources/design-thin king-bootleg. accessed july . ferreira mf, savoy jn, markey mk. teaching cross- cultural design thinking for healthcare. breast. ; : – . global learning value rubric. in: association of american colleges & universities. https://www.aacu.org/ value/rubrics/global-learning. accessed july . intercultural knowledge and competence value rub- ric. in: association of american colleges & universities. h ttps://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/reflecting-on-reflections-u sing-video-in-learning-reflection-to-enhance-authenticity/. accessed july . kinchin im. concept mapping as a learning tool in higher education: a critical analysis of recent reviews. j contin high educ. ; : – . klein-gardner s. defining global competence for engi- neering students. in: asee annual conference & exposition; june – . vancouver, bc: american society for engineering education; . markey mk, monteiro jc, stewart j. using twitter to support students’ design thinking. in: asee gulf-south- west section annual meeting; april – . austin: american society for engineering education; . pp. – . reflection prompts—international programs in engineer- ing. in: michigan engineering international programs in engineering. https://ipe.engin.umich.edu/studyabroad/pre departureinfo/yourstory/reflection-prompts/. accessed july . rolfe g, freshwater d, jasper m. critical reflection for nursing and the helping professions a user’s guide. london: palgrave macmillan; . rose ej, sierschynski j, björling ea. reflecting on reflections: using video in learning reflection to enhance authenticity. j interact technol pedagogy. . vande berg m, michael paige r, hemming lou k, editors. student learning abroad: what our students are learning, what they’re not, and what we can do about it. sterling: stylus publishing, llc; . publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with re- gard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institu- tional affiliations. biomedical engineering society from study-abroad to study-at-home https://dschool.stanford.edu/resources/design-thinking-bootleg https://dschool.stanford.edu/resources/design-thinking-bootleg https://www.aacu.org/value/rubrics/global-learning https://www.aacu.org/value/rubrics/global-learning https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/reflecting-on-reflections-using-video-in-learning-reflection-to-enhance-authenticity/ https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/reflecting-on-reflections-using-video-in-learning-reflection-to-enhance-authenticity/ https://jitp.commons.gc.cuny.edu/reflecting-on-reflections-using-video-in-learning-reflection-to-enhance-authenticity/ https://ipe.engin.umich.edu/studyabroad/predepartureinfo/yourstory/reflection-prompts/ https://ipe.engin.umich.edu/studyabroad/predepartureinfo/yourstory/reflection-prompts/ 	from study-abroad to study-at-home: teaching cross-cultural design thinking during covid- 	challenge statement 	novel initiative 	reflection 	acknowledgements 	references edinburgh research explorer community development and the politics for social welfare citation for published version: emejulu, a & scanlon, e , 'community development and the politics for social welfare', community development journal, pp. - . https://doi.org/ . /cdj/bsv digital object identifier (doi): . /cdj/bsv link: link to publication record in edinburgh research explorer document version: peer reviewed version published in: community development journal general rights copyright for the publications made accessible via the edinburgh research explorer is retained by the author(s) and / or other copyright owners and it is a condition of accessing these publications that users recognise and abide by the legal requirements associated with these rights. take down policy the university of edinburgh has made every reasonable effort to ensure that edinburgh research explorer content complies with uk legislation. if you believe that the public display of this file breaches copyright please contact openaccess@ed.ac.uk providing details, and we will remove access to the work immediately and investigate your claim. download date: . apr. https://doi.org/ . /cdj/bsv https://doi.org/ . /cdj/bsv https://www.research.ed.ac.uk/portal/en/publications/community-development-and-the-politics-for-social-welfare(b f c a -f b- fc -a fe- d b c fd c).html community development and the politics for social welfare: rethinking redistribution and recognition struggles in the united states akwugo emejulu* edward scanlon abstract in this article, we explore the philosophical conflict between, on the one hand, a community development politics centered on forming race and gender neutral alliances to promote pragmatic economic advance, and on the other, one focused on recognising the perspectives and practices of people of colour, women and other groups who are often excluded from grassroots movements. using the united states as an example, we argue that a politics for social welfare is essential to create a movement in opposition to the devastating impacts of neoliberalism. defending and reconstructing the american welfare state requires a politics which articulates ) a theory of justice, ) an understanding of the nature of social reforms, ) a critical analysis of the state and ) an appreciation of the limits of the welfare state in the context of the political economy of advanced capitalism. we conclude with a set of questions which we believe practitioners, activists and scholars should address if are to win victories while fostering the inclusion, leadership and participation of those groups who have been systematically marginalised in community development politics. keywords: community development; social welfare; welfare state; social justice; citizenship; america *moray house school of education, university of edinburgh, edinburgh eh aq, uk, akwugo.emejulu@ed.ac.uk introduction for this th anniversary edition of the community development journal, we are revisiting a key dilemma that troubles the theory and practice of community development in the united states and beyond. understanding the most effective strategies and tactics to advance the social justice claims of different groups is hotly contested and disputes often focus on the efficacy of redistribution versus recognition struggles (young ; fraser ; hobson, ). in community development there is a communicative and practical disconnection between those activists advocating pragmatic politics focused on winning tangible redistributive victories linked to jobs, housing and education and those activists advancing recognition politics who seek to take action on the variety of ways in which respect, status and privilege are unequally available to different social groups (alinsky, ; boyte, ; defilippis, fisher, and shragge, ; emejulu, ). these debates do not have to be constructed as binary opposites since redistributive struggles are often predicated on the misrecognition and erasure of groups based on their race, class, gender and sexuality in public life. nevertheless, when we reflect on the contemporary failures of left-wing politics in the united states—in spite of some important but partial reforms under the obama administration after —we see progressive activists disunited because of the familiar disputes between redistribution and recognition struggles. this disunity is rooted in competing understandings of the goals, strategies and priorities of community development. for example, a central feature of american community development is the enduring appeal of populist politics. populism, in the us context, is a movement which emerged from late th century agrarian traditions which focuses on combating the power of elites and restoring direct rule and power to ordinary people (kazin, ). populism, as a political phenomenon, can be seen across the political spectrum in the u.s. and has been pulled to both the left and the right at different moments in american history. while left-wing populism focuses on reining in corporate excess and the extremes of power and money in the political system, right-wing populism has tended to be associated with anti- intellectual, anti-immigrant and anti-government traditions. both populist traditions have been reactivated in response to the economic crisis. examples of right-wing populism include the tea party in the us, the front national in france, the united kingdom independence party in britain and the swedish democrats in sweden. examples of left-wing populism can be seen in the presidential campaign of bernie sanders in the us, jeremy corbyn’s successful leadership bid for the labour party in britain and widespread support for podemos in spain and the election of syriza-led governments in greece. for some political actors in community development, left-wing populism is the rational and pragmatic choice for policymakers and grassroots activists wanting to advance equality and social justice (boyte ; scanlon ). given the entrenched everyday and institutionalised racism and sexism in american society some left-wing populists argue that actions derived from explicitly anti- racist and/or feminist politics are doomed to failure as these positions fracture rather than unite social movements for equality and justice (gitlin ; scanlon ). proponents of left-wing populism, who seek to unite different interest groups under the banner of economic justice for all, argue that it is the logical choice for those serious about advancing social justice. a focus on economic justice—which explicitly eschews the politics of race and gender—has the ability to sidestep the controversies surrounding identity politics and focus instead on a core issue that the vast majority of americans experience: economic inequality (stiglitz ). this argument is compelling particularly when assessing the success of progressive populist movements for increasing the minimum wage at the city, state and federal levels. these movements, such as the fight for $ campaign for a $ dollar minimum wage, have won widespread support precisely because they are presented as ‘race and gender free’ propositions to policymakers and the american public. advocates of left-wing populism strategically focus on ‘fairness in pay’ as a backdoor means of addressing racial and gender inequalities since increases in the minimum wage disproportionately benefit people of colour and women (and women of colour in particular) because these groups are typically over-concentrated in low-skilled, low waged employment. in these uncertain economic times, a populist message has captured the zeitgeist and helped to shape party politics and policymaking in ways that seem to perpetually elude anti-racist and feminist campaigners. however, when we look more closely at the politics of left-wing populism, deeply problematic practices are evident. both left-wing and right-wing populist politics actively exclude discussions of race and gender, making it extremely difficult for activists to make social justice claims that advance perspectives linked to race, class, gender, sexuality and disability (emejulu, , ; pride and morrison ). at the expense of people of colour and women (and women of colour in particular) populist politics secures legitimacy by silencing the voices and experiences of those in the most precarious social and economic positions. thus there is a serious question here about the ethics of adopting an exclusionary politics in the very name of those groups populist activists seek to support. surely it is better to focus on the political education of grassroots activists so that feminist, anti-racist and class politics can be interwoven into the very fabric of progressive political action. understanding and addressing interlocking experiences of oppression linked to race, class, gender, sexuality and disability is a central concern of an intersectional politics (combahee river collective ; crenshaw ; yuval davis, ; bilge ). for example, the #blacklivesmatters movement is an important riposte to the de-raced and de-gendered left-wing populist agenda. the movement was founded in by three black queer women—alicia garza, patrisse cullors and opal tometi—in the wake of the murder of trayvon martin by a neighborhood security guard, george zimmerman, who was subsequently acquitted of criminal charges at a closely watched trial. #blacklivesmatters seeks to dismantle anti- black racism that systematically terrorizes and marginalises black women and men (garza ). this movement takes an explicitly intersectional approach whereby ‘black lives’ are defined to highlight how the dynamics of race, class, gender and sexuality operate in america—and in so called ‘progressive movements’—to oppress black people. #blacklivesmatters embodies, rather than sets aside, an intersectional politics to help build a mass movement for black liberation and social justice. as the protests against the extra-judicial killings of michael brown, eric garner, aiyanna stanley-jones, freddie gray, rekia boyd and sandra bland demonstrate, marginalised groups continue to be organised and mobilized for action by explicitly and intentionally using the language of race and gender—and can win popular public support and concessions from state actors. interestingly, the #blacklivesmatters movement also operates as a direct challenge to white progressives (and populists) to join the movement for black liberation by taking seriously anti-black racism. thus #blacklivesmatters seeks to build interracial coalitions but on the terms that black activists prioritise—rather than those that will be ‘palatable’ to the american public. this is a very different and important alternative strategy and politics to coalition building for social justice. given these ongoing debates within contemporary politics, how might we move beyond these conflicts between redistribution and recognition? how might we begin to refocus efforts on addressing disparities in income, wealth and respect between different social groups? in this article, we argue that a ‘politics for social welfare’ can be constructed and advanced to unite different types of left-wing activists for both redistribution and recognition struggles. by ‘politics for social welfare’ we mean analyses and practices that defend and support the expansion of the universal redistributive features of the welfare state, whilst simultaneously engaging in struggles for the recognition, respect and equal participation of marginalized groups in the american polity. we argue that community development is an embodiment of social democratic ideals of egalitarianism, fairness and justice and activists and practitioners in america can renew their politics and perhaps overcome their internal disputes by arguing for, rather than running away from, the solidarity politics of social welfare. by ‘community development’ we mean a ‘political and social process of education and action to achieve self-determination and social justice for marginalised groups’ (emejulu : ). in a context where individualism and inequality are often portrayed as a ‘common sense’ part of american life, advancing a politics for social welfare is no small endeavor. indeed, that governing has virtually ground to a halt in congress and that the majority of the american public think government is broken is a major obstacle to a politics for social welfare. however, attempting to practice politics on the terms set by neoliberalism and anti-government partisans is not working for progressives and those in the most precarious economic circumstances. a renewed politics that seeks to reclaim the idea of social welfare and the recognition of marginalised groups is crucial at this moment of neoliberal hegemony and state violence. the article next provides a short overview of both the formation of the american welfare state in the early th century and its retrenchment in order to understand the on-going tensions between a redistribution and recognition politics. we will then move on to discuss the constitutive elements of a politics for social welfare and how it might be practiced in contemporary american community development. we conclude with a set of questions which we believe practitioners, activists and scholars should address if we are to win victories while fostering the inclusion, leadership and participation of those groups who have been systematically marginalised in community development politics. the american way of social welfare: piecemeal, incremental and inadequate social welfare advocates in the us have long lamented the inadequacy of their welfare state, particularly in comparison to those of western europe. social policies and programmes in the us generally lack both the depth of coverage (i.e., adequacy) needed to ensure the well-being of individuals and the breadth (i.e., universal eligibility) necessary to extend social protection to all residents (o’connor, ; katz, ). what is more, fewer mandates exist which require employers to provide benefits such as paid vacation, paid time off for illness and/or disability and parental leave. esping-andersen ( ) describes these differences as reflecting three competing traditions among welfare states, distinguishing liberal, social democratic, and corporatist models. the us, lacking the social democratic and social solidaristic traditions found in much of europe, esping-andersen argues, developed along liberal lines, favoring a minimalist approach which focuses more on means tested social welfare than upon universal programmes. however, we think esping-andersen unnecessarily downplays the role of institutionalised racism in the shaping of the american welfare state. as has been well documented, americans lack strong social solidarity in relation to social welfare because a toxic blend of individualism and white supremacy work to undermine the construction of a universal and comprehensive social protection system in order to avoid providing a social safety net for african americans and other minority groups (katz, ; o’connor, ; soss, ; katznelson, ). american welfare state formation and expansion occurred during three historical periods spanning about sixty years in response to destabilizing economic contractions in the mid- th century. by the early th century, these crises partly produced and were amplified by foundational changes to american society: growing income and wealth inequalities, widespread political corruption, high levels of immigration and urbanization and the development of an unregulated industrial workplace (katz, ). in response to the disruptions generated by these social and economic transformations, institutional actors conceived of and constructed a limited interventionist state that could regulate market fluctuations and reduce absolute poverty in order to stifle social unrest, popular protests and maintain political and economic order. the first important moment of american welfare state formation was during the progressive era ( - ). during this period, the administrations of both theodore roosevelt and woodrow wilson developed federal and state policies to reduce social inequalities and protect vulnerable populations (katz, ; skocpol, ; mcgerr, ). further welfare state expansion occurred with the passage and implementation of franklin roosevelt’s new deal programmes ( - ), which were in response to the great depression. using keynesian approaches of counter-cyclical state spending, the architects of the new deal spurred consumer demand, expanded federal powers to include the regulation of the banking industry, recognised collective bargaining rights for trade unions and created systems of retirement security, income maintenance, unemployment benefits and workers compensation. the new deal provided access to economic rights for a large number of white american workers and the unemployed, but systematically excluded a large percentage of african american citizens in order to placate racist white southern democrats and ensure the passage of the new deal reforms in congress (katz, ; quadagno, ). during the third period for american welfare state expansion, lyndon johnson’s administration implemented the great society programmes ( - ) which aimed to expand roosevelt’s new deal reforms. this era was distinguished by efforts to tackle persistent poverty during an era of sustained economic growth and implement reforms in response to the civil rights movement. key programmes include the creation of medicare and medicaid, head start, job corp and vista, community action programs and expanded food stamp eligibility as well as the passage of the voting and civil rights acts. johnson’s war on poverty focused on providing educational and social service benefits to the poor, but also attempted to include them, via community action agencies, in the process of developing and administering social services under the famous mantra of ‘maximum feasible participation’ (moynihan, ; marris and rein, ). eli zaretsky ( ) argues that while bureaucratic solutions could have been engineered solely by policy elites, the american welfare state was not simply a technocratic and managerial response to economic crises and social unrest. at each stage of its development, the welfare state was also the product of political protest by left-wing activists. the progressive era was shaped by a diverse group of social reformers that included feminists, birth control advocates, temperance activists, union leaders, social workers, public health advocates, populist farmers, and others. the new deal was influenced by the demands of socialists, early civil rights campaigners and trade unionists. the great society would not have occurred without the theoretical and pragmatic work undertaken by civil rights, new left, and black trade union activists who had laid the groundwork for racial justice claims since early in the th century. by the mid- s, america’s experiments with keynesianism and social welfare were starting to falter. first, the debilitating recession caused by the oil embargo in the persian gulf brought to an abrupt end the unprecedented economic growth america had experienced since . in a context of a shrinking economic pie, many americans balked at paying higher taxes on social welfare programmes (diamond, ; katz, ). second, the incipient new right movement, which was incubated in barry goldwater’s failed presidential campaign, was growing in strength and gave voice to the so-called ‘silent majority’ of white americans opposed to the social and cultural changes of the civil rights, new left and feminist movements and interventionist federal initiatives such as addressing de facto residential and school segregation (fisher, ; diamond, ; emejulu, ). finally, the ‘new deal coalition’ was starting to fracture. since the s an uneasy alliance of trade unionists, socialists, civil rights activists, social reformers and conservative democrats had comprised the voting bloc for the democratic party. by the late s, disagreements about the pace and direction of meaningful social change— particularly in relation to the state’s role in addressing institutionalised racism in american society—split the coalition. this was seen in debates about issues such as affirmative action, school desegregation, and the availability of welfare benefits, the last of which was being increasingly racialised (piven and cloward, ). these complex economic, social and political changes helped to usher ronald reagan into power in , who, in turn, put his administration to work to undermine popular public support for social welfare. for reagan and the broader new right movement, dismantling many of the new deal and great society reforms was justified in the name of individual freedom and personal responsibility. thus key apparatuses of the war on poverty were abolished. federal funding and support to community development projects were dramatically cut or withdrawn completely (block et al., ; o’connor, ). it is important to note that specific funding streams for radical social welfare work were deliberately targeted by the reagan administration for defunding. this was especially the case for feminist and anti-racist community organising projects (fisher, ). racially coded attacks were also used to disparage welfare recipients which further undermined popular support for the social welfare state. from , bill clinton, pursuing the neoliberal policy platform of the ‘new democrats’, continued the assault on social welfare through the privatisation of many of social programmes and went further than reagan by ‘ending welfare as we know it’ (weaver, ). the passage of the personal responsibility and work opportunity act ended welfare as an entitlement programme and placed a five-year lifetime limit on the receipt of federal welfare payments (soss, ; katz ). these harsh reforms under clinton represent a toxic mix of neoliberal restructuring of the social welfare state and the racist justifications for cutting entitlements. the economic crisis and the subsequent great recession have continued to erode the social security of low and moderate income americans, especially african americans and latinos, and particularly in states with liberal welfare models. the recession was fueled by the deregulation of the financial services industry, the banks’ wide-spread use of supposedly ‘risk free’ financial instruments such as ‘credit default swaps’ and the inevitable bursting of the subprime mortgage bubble (blinder, ; roubini, ). in addition to the impacts of the recession on employment, savings, and property values, conservative policymakers have used the crisis as an opportunity to advance austerity measures designed to further roll back the welfare state. for example, conservative politicians at the state and federal level argue that social welfare further contributes to the economic crisis by the federal state overspending on benefits. these politicians argue for cuts to unemployment insurance, the dramatic reductions of benefits in the temporary assistance for needy families (tanf) program and the abolition of compulsory health insurance, otherwise known as obamacare. european states, too, are engaged in these struggles over austerity programmes, which pose a direct threat to the european social model (busch, hermann, hinrichs, & schulten, ). the idea of social welfare has been partially relegitimised through the passage of barack obama’s landmark legislation, the affordable care act, which, among other provisions, extends basic healthcare coverage to million americans. this act, however, is still being challenged in the courts. in the most recent supreme court case, king v burwell, the justices upheld the funding mechanism for the federal subsidy that makes healthcare affordable for approximately million americans. that the expansion of basic healthcare is the subject of impassioned popular and policy debate demonstrates the on-going contestations about an activist welfare state and the idea of social welfare and social solidarity in america. since the s, progressive movements have been scattered and disorganised. important movements exist relating to a myriad of particular causes but a multi- issue, multi-constituent alliance similar to that of the new deal coalition continues to elude the american left. however, we do not ascribe the rolling back of the social welfare state to the disorganised left—that is the central project of neoliberalism. while the dismantling of the american welfare state can be traced to neoliberal politics, it is also important to note neoliberalism is not totalizing: progressives have been able to defend some social programmes, in particular social security (the state pension) and medicare (federally subsidised health care for adults over the age of ), which are extremely popular among the public. to provide effective opposition to the neoliberal agenda, and in order to address widening social and economic inequalities in american society, the left must renew its politics. we contend that the best way to unite the disparate groups of the left and re-engage the american public in meaningful debates about equality, fairness and the common good is to advance a politics for social welfare. we do not think we are overstating the case about the disunited left. for example, the recent skirmishes between supporters of the left-wing populist democratic presidential candidate, bernie sanders, and black lives matter activists—in which the black lives matters protestors disrupted a sanders event and criticized his platform for not addressing racial justice issues—demonstrate that we cannot take for granted that those advancing left-wing populist politics and those supporters of recognition struggles will naturally and unproblematically develop political solidarity for collective action (florido / / ). uniting the left to rebuild the welfare state will require a politics that transcends such divisions, and there are signs that by working through such disagreements, an intersectional left can emerge that has the potential to reshape debates in the united states. we will now turn to discuss the constituent elements of a politics for social welfare and the implications this kind of politics might have for community development. the politics for social welfare as activist-scholars, we are deeply concerned with trying to build a new coalition to disrupt neoliberal hegemony and advance the social citizenship rights of the most marginalised. this requires a politics that promotes universality in social welfare programmes, while also pursuing the expansion of human rights and protections for those who have been historically excluded from economic, political, and social institutions. we refer to this as a ‘politics for social welfare’— ideas and practices that defend and support the expansion of the universal redistributive features of the welfare state, whilst simultaneously engaging in struggles for the recognition and inclusion of marginalized groups. we argue that a politics that can encompass both redistribution and recognition struggles has the best chance of uniting, mobilizing and sustaining the unruly left. we contend that a politics for social welfare has four constituent elements: a theory of justice; an understanding of the history of social reforms; an analysis of the state; and an appreciation of its own limitations. we will discuss each of these in turn. a theory of justice the starting point for a politics for social welfare is conceiving of both liberty and equality. in contemporary american politics, the focus of public debates is typically concentrated on individual freedom and negative rights—the right not be interfered with by the state (through taxes, regulations and social programmes) or by other citizens (diamond ). indeed, much of the recent debate about the affordable care act centres on the legitimacy and authority of the state to compel private individuals to have healthcare insurance. american life is deeply unequal and this inequality is justified on the basis of preserving maximum individual liberty. as t.h. marshall ( ) and amartya sen ( ) argue, individual freedom is dependent on equality and social rights. in order for individuals to live lives they have reason to value and to participate fully in democratic public life, they must have access to social welfare in the form of affordable and high quality housing, education and healthcare. indeed as ben- ishai ( ) persuasively argues, social welfare ‘fosters autonomy’ by securing individuals’ social rights. it is through their experiences of social welfare service delivery that individuals and groups learn how to articulate redistribution and recognition claims and further advance their social citizenship. the ‘big lie’ of neoliberalism is that social welfare undermines individual liberty and fosters dependency (harvey ; hall, massey and rustin ). quite the opposite is true: social welfare that addresses institutionalised inequalities is what makes individual liberty possible and meaningful and it activates rather than undermines citizenship. freedom from the fear of economic marginalization provides the material basis that makes progressive political and social action possible. none of this should be new to left campaigners but this fundamental argument defending social welfare is not being made consistently and unapologetically. the triumph of neoliberalism is not just in its ruinous economic practices but the ways in which it has captured the discourse about justice. many on the us left appear to be embarrassed to talk about social welfare for fear of being labeled ‘enemies of liberty’ or aligning ourselves with mythical ‘welfare queens’, who are generally portrayed as poor black women (hancock ). evidence of this can be seen in the shift to the right of many social democratic parties on both sides of the atlantic in order to capture swing voters and the ‘centre ground’ in politics (emejulu ). by not defending social welfare, the left is robbing itself of the language of justice and the ability to form effective coalitions for progressive action. the left cannot speak to itself, of itself or to the wider public until it can (re)learn that social welfare—which embodies ideals of egalitarianism and solidarity—is at the heart of justice. interestingly, in the left-wing populist campaigns of podemos, syriza, bernie sanders and jeremy corbyn, we are starting to see a renewed commitment to social welfare. understanding the limited but necessary nature of social reforms as we have demonstrated above, organised pressure from social movements that disrupt the social and economic order is how change is made and how concessions in the form of institutional reforms are won. reforms are not bequeathed by technocrats but are conceded by institutional actors after defeats (tilly and tarrow, ; tarrow, ). the history of social reforms in the united states shows us that seeking voluntary concessions from the state typically does not work and operating on the terms that the state sets is oftentimes ineffective. returning to the example of the black lives matter movement, key activists, brittany packnett, johnetta elzie, deray mckesson and samuel singyangwe, have developed campaign zero, a twelve-point policy proposal to stop police brutality and extra-judicial police killings (http://www.joincampaignzero.org). through campaign zero, activists have been able to influence the policy positions of three democrat candidates seeking their party’s presidential nomination: hillary clinton, bernie sanders and martin o’malley. organised movements must seek to capture and harness state power and state institutions to win reforms for social justice. it remains to be seen whether the activists behind campaign zero can enact their ambitious and important policy agenda. an analysis of the state in the context of us capitalism in order to effectively win reforms, a politics for social welfare must have an analysis of the state and state action. left campaigners must hold two contradictory ideas about the state in mind simultaneously. from the rise of the carceral state—the institutionalised surveillance, over-policing, mass incarceration and state sanctioned violence—which controls the lives of many african americans and latinos, to the thicket of legislation at the state and local levels that regulates women’s bodies and reproductive decision-making, the local and national state is a coercive force for many marginalised groups and must be transformed (bumiller, ; alexander, ). further, the state in capitalist political economies must be understood as an institution that promotes the reproduction of capitalism and unequal social relations by delegitimising the demands of labour by holding down wages and benefits in order to allow for higher levels of capital accumulation (harvey, ). however, the state, at the local, state and federal levels must undertake various actions to maintain the legitimacy of the social order (o’connor, ). this leads us to the second of contradictory idea of the state: that the state can also, in a deeply flawed and piecemeal fashion, further the cause of social justice through the expansion of social reforms. thus space exists for activists to wrest important concessions from state actors, who must at times concede to these demands in order to maintain the legitimacy of the dominant social order. an example of engaging in such analysis of the state to inform a politics for social welfare can be seen in the work of the st. louis, missouri based organization missourians organizing for reform and empowerment (more). more grounds its political work in an analysis of the ways in which state and corporate power impact missouri’s citizens, with a simultaneous focus on taking collective action to combat racial injustice and economic inequality (for further details see: http://www.organizemo.org). more is currently running multiple social justice campaigns, including a demand that the city of st. louis allow non-monetized ways for defendants in local courts to pay court fines and costs. the organization refers to this work as their solidarity economy campaign. this organizing is particularly salient due to recent findings that missouri municipalities derive a significant amount of their fiscal stability on criminal fines and court costs extracted predominantly from residents of colour. in light of the recent rebellion in nearby ferguson (sparked by the killing of michael brown by darren wilson), more’s struggle is a concrete example of having a complex understanding of the state and developing a politics for social welfare that links redistribution and recognition. as we have argued above, the state is deeply problematic, but it is the job of left campaigners, using the politics for social welfare, to make it work better for the most marginalised. as emejulu ( : ) argues, ‘regardless of how the state in advanced capitalist countries is seen or experienced, it is important to bear in mind that it is not a monolith of either control or protection’. abandoning the state to the right will further shrink the social welfare state and expand the repressive apparatuses of the state. as the work of more shows us, a politics for social welfare seeks to reclaim the state and bring the state back into our conceptions about the nature of justice and how the state can preserve and expand social citizenship. an appreciation of the limitations of a politics for social welfare http://www.organizemo.org/ the very premise of a politics for social welfare will be unpalatable for those wanting more revolutionary changes. whilst we are sympathetic to this, we are concerned with how to deal with the actually existing politics as they stand in america today. a politics for social welfare is not an end point but a first step to opening up dialogue between groups about the good society and social solidarity. a politics for social welfare means we are forced to confront the realities of who is disproportionately poor and who is most likely to be subject to the coercive powers of the state. this politics also forces us to consider what kinds of meaningful reforms are necessary in order for people to live the kinds of lives they have reason to value. in so doing, we think a politics for social welfare places intersectional inequalities—disadvantages derived from the interactions of particular categories of difference and social positonality—as a central component of left politics. in this way, the left can undertake redistribution struggles whilst simultaneously addressing the misrecognition and invisibility that many groups experience in everyday life. community development as the politics for social welfare? given the above discussion, what is the relationship between community development and a politics for social welfare? we think community development is uniquely positioned (but not essentially constituted) to be an incubator of a politics for social welfare because of the space that community development creates, its potential practices in relation to participatory democracy and its ability to support the political education of local people. we will discuss each of these in turn. space: learning social citizenship what is most important about community development, we argue, is the ability for different types of people to come together and create a space to articulate and take action on the issues that are important to them. in the us, where individualism in an important part of social and political life, a community development process that fosters social solidarity and collective action is a critical and dissenting space whereby local people learn or reaffirm the politics and practices for social citizenship. community development can be a space where citizens learn how to make complex political claims and organise collectively to advance both redistribution and recognition social justice struggles. such community development spaces do not happen by accident. critical community development spaces must be intentionally designed to encourage debate, develop community leadership, strategise action and endure inevitable defeats (gaventa ; cornwall ; eversole, ). a community development process that creates this kind of space with and for citizens can help to advance a politics for social welfare practices: participatory democracy we think critical community development spaces are most likely to flourish when they are designed as incubators for participatory democracy. the ability to articulate needs, demands and problems, to learn how undertake deliberative dialogue and consensus-based decision-making and how to use collective power fosters the sort of environment in which individuals can experience themselves, sometimes for the first time, as being active agents exerting control over their lives (polletta ; ransby, ; emejulu ). the practices of participatory democracy in community development spaces can offer citizens a sense of agency and efficacy and can lead to them demanding similar recognition in workplaces, in encounters with the state and in other private and public spaces of life. purpose: political education community development is not a neutral activity. it can be deployed in a myriad of ways to advance the various agendas of the state, the market, the non-profit sector or different kinds of citizens. whilst we do not believe that there is one ‘true’ form of community development, we do think that some types of community development are better than others because they seek to treat community development as a pedagogical process of learning for democracy and dissenting citizenship (hooks ; shaw ; learning for democracy group ). for community development to effectively contribute to democratic public life, it must be designed as an educational endeavor in which people learn about themselves, the nature of power and the social world. this kind of political education, which is cultivated in democratic spaces and is geared to developing citizenship practices for social solidarity and collective action, is how community development might embody a politics for social welfare. however, we acknowledge that thinking about community development in this way is a challenging prospect. a politics for social welfare generates a range of dilemmas for community development. for instance, left-wing populists argue that a politics for social welfare must engage in a kind of majoritarian strategy whereby a given community development process attracts a broader base of participants beyond women and people of color to include white working class men and women (scanlon ; atlas ). given that most americans live highly segregated lives, trying to find a way to bring different kinds of groups together is a worthy goal for community development. in contrast, those concerned with recognition struggles are focused on how women and people of colour (and women of colour in particular), who are too often sidelined in grassroots politics, can articulate and take action on their complex social justice claims with and alongside other groups. again, redistribution and recognition are not binary opposites, but they are often practised as such in grassroots politics. the challenge for community development in operationalising a politics for social welfare is puzzling out where and how to begin and with whom, in struggles for social justice. this dispute should not be minimized as it cuts to the heart of our entire discussion about democracy, justice and citizenship. we cannot resolve this dispute in the abstract but what we can do is offer a few questions that we think activists, practitioners and scholars can consider for further action.  what is the process by which we identify and name particular social problems? whose interpretations of social problems get privileged and whose get silenced?  when we identify social problems, how are particular groups constructed as either agents of change or problems to be solved?  how might a community group build strategic alliances in order to understand an issue or problem from different perspectives? what is to be gained, and whose interests might be challenged, by undertaking such a process?  what role does self-interest play as a motivation for political participation and what is its relationship to solidarity across categories of difference? we think these questions represent the sort of inquiry and exploration that will be useful to activists, practitioners and scholars. a successful politics for social welfare is an educational process that increases participants’ understanding and appreciation of the common struggles they share and the distinct oppressions that particular groups experience. conclusions in this article we have attempted to explore some the challenges of community development theory and practice in the united states at this uncertain political and economic moment. we argued that community development constantly battles with an unresolved tension between redistribution and recognition struggles for social justice. by outlining a politics for social welfare, we sought to offer a strategy for progressive activists to confront these tensions and seek to resolve them through critical community development processes. by embracing a politics for social welfare, activists can stand up and work for egalitarianism, social solidarity and social citizenship. by practicing a politics for social welfare, it may be possible to address america’s rapidly rising levels of economic inequality whilst simultaneously confronting the injustices of misrecognition and disrespect that many groups must also negotiate. locating a politics for social welfare in community development offers the opportunity for activists and practitioners to work at the grassroots and engage with the contradictions of the state and the competing 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( ). why america needs a left: a historical argument. polity press: cambridge, uk. biographical details akwugo emejulu is senior lecturer and programme director of the msc social justice and community action at the university of edinburgh. edward scanlon is associate professor and msw program director at the university of kansas school of social welfare. untitled cultuur, sociologie en de verbeelding van bevolkingsgroepen rogier van reekum soc １２ (１): １２３–１３９ doi: １０.５１１７/soc２０１６.１.reek every form of identification that does not resolve into identity is also a form of disidentification: ‘yes, you can call me by that name, but i am not really captured by that name; whoever i am does not correspond to the norms conveyed by the name you call me; even if i answer to the call, something in me resists or exceeds the way you call me, and yet i am here, responding.’ – judith butler ( : ) het relletje rondom sywert van liendens uitspraken in het amusements- programma de wereld draait door van januari laat goed zien hoe moeilijk het is om iets over cultuur te zeggen in het nederlandse publieke debat. wat was er aan de hand? sywert van lienden besprak, in de context van tamelijk gespannen, deels racistische debatten over seksueel geweld tegen vrouwen, een artikel uit mens & maatschappij. anton van wijk en arjan blokland publiceerden in een exploratief onderzoek waarin ze ‘etniciteit’ met ‘seksuele delinquentie’ correleerden. van lienden wilde met dit onderzoek nu eens zonder gedraai een verband leggen tussen cultuur- verschil en seksueel geweld. dit liep slecht voor hem af, omdat hij een en ander verkeerd weergaf en het onderzoek sowieso van tendentieuze bete- kenis was voor het lopende debat. van lienden werd gecorrigeerd en het amusementsprogramma bekritiseerd: de feiten willen melden was mooi, maar moest wel goed gebeuren.１ de hele episode – van kwestie, naar onderzoek, naar tv-uitzending, naar correcties en kritiek – is tekenend voor het doolhof waarin publiekelijk spreken over cultuur gevangen zit. dat komt vooral omdat met het woordje ‘cultuur’ in feite niet cultuur bedoeld wordt. cultuur wordt be- vol. , no. , sociologie www.tijdschriftsociologie.nl amsterdam university press spreekbaar gemaakt door het over iets anders, namelijk ‘bevolkingsgroe- pen’, te hebben: bevolkingsgroepen kunnen en mogen verantwoordelijk gehouden worden voor problemen. zij hebben of zijn het probleem, want zij hebben of dragen een cultuur. deze groepslogica is diep gecementeerd in het publieke denken, spreken en ruziën over kwesties van in- en uitslui- ting, migratie en burgerschap (barker ; essed ; wekker en lutz ; schinkel ). heeft het zin om cultuur aan de hand van ‘bevolkingsgroepen’ te ana- lyseren en welke rol speelt het sociologisch onderzoek naar ‘bevolkings- groepen’ hierin? van lienden besloot het relletje door te beweren dat alle methodologische keuzes politiek zijn. het eerste zinnige dat hij te melden had. helaas bedoelde van lienden daarmee dat hem een methodologische voorkeur niet kwalijk genomen kon worden. zoals ik zal betogen is dat precies het omgekeerde van wat deze opmerking inhoudt. １ het cultuurprobleem we zouden nog verder terug kunnen gaan (zie jones ; gouda ; stoler ; weiner ), maar de meest recente uitwerking van een groepslogica ten aanzien van migratie en burgerschap is te vinden in de jaren zeventig van de vorige eeuw (tinnemans ; bonjour ; schol- ten ; uitermark ). het is in die jaren dat een publieke taal is ont- wikkeld voor het diagnosticeren van, wat in die jaren nog geregeld, ‘de multiraciale samenleving’ werd genoemd. ‘cultuur’ moest in dezen dia- gnostiek aangeven in hoeverre iedere ‘bevolkingsgroep’ – surinamers, an- tillianen, woonwagenbewoners, vluchtelingen etc. – was toegerust op het zelf oplossen van economische en sociale problemen, gezien de economi- sche herordening na de oliecrisis, de dekolonisering en een keuze voor een ‘activerende’ verzorgingsstaat (rath ; vink ; schrover ; lucas- sen en lucassen , ; van den berg ). deze taal werd dan ook onderdeel van een beleidsprogramma – het minderhedenbeleid – dat we- derzijdse bestendiging van etnisch-raciale en sociaaleconomische segrega- tie moest ontzenuwen (molleman ). het doel van dit beleid was de creatie van een ‘zelfredzame’ bevolking die de obstakels van armoede en traditie zou overwinnen (duyvendak et al. ). ‘cultuur’ en ‘etniciteit’ hadden dus altijd al hiërarchische betekenissen, analoog aan meer sociaal- economische groepskwalificaties (de regt ; derksen en verplanke ; vgl. verwey-jonker ). ‘cultuur’ betekent in de publieke taal van nederland storing, obstakel, achterlijkheid en probleem. wie wel toegerust vol. , no. , sociologie is op ‘de nieuwe tijd’ heeft geen ‘cultuur’, in elk geval geen ‘cultuur’ waar publiekelijk over gediscussieerd hoeft te worden (zie ook yanow en ter haar ). in het nederlandse debat wordt al decennia onophoudelijk over deze ‘cultuur’ gesproken en daarbij speelt voortdurend de suggestie dat dat eigenlijk niet mag (prins ; vgl. couwenberg ; vuijsje ). dit zo- genaamde gebod komt niet voort uit een antiracistische, cultuurrelativis- tische of postkoloniale zelfkastijding, alsof het publieke debat een psycho- analytisch gesprek met het volk is (essed ; tinnemans ; kennedy ; gabriels ; van der valk ; essed en nimako ; jones ; uitermark ; duyvendak et al. ; laarman ; van reekum ). het ‘eigenlijk niet mogen’ is een frase in een opkomend verhaal over ne- derlandschap dat vanaf de jaren zeventig het imaginair van een christelijk koninkrijkje met burgerlijke karaktereigenschappen gaat vervangen (mel- link ; van reekum ). in dat nieuwe verhaal is de nederlander bovenal het vrijgevochten in- dividu. dit individu begeeft zich voortdurend in wisselende en horizontale relaties, precies wat de nieuwe ‘economie’ en de ontzuilde ‘vrije tijd’ van hem verwacht. ‘cultuur’ is dan ook het gebrek om met een dergelijke ‘flexibiliteit’ om te gaan: ‘traditionele gezinsverhoudingen’, ‘vrouwenonder- drukking’ en ‘zelfsegregatie’. daar waar ‘cultuur’ wordt aangetroffen, mag en moet de vrijgevochten nederlander zich verheffen boven de nieuweling. maar daar waar de nieuweling nu juist de drager blijkt van nieuwe manie- ren en relaties, van mondaine flexibiliteit, moet de nederlander deze zon- der weerstand incorporeren. zie daar het dilemma van het nederlandse nationalisme zoals dat vanaf de jaren zeventig de publieke opinie is gaan tekenen (van reekum ). religie en seksualiteit, in onderlinge verstrengeling, zijn de belangrijkste kwesties geworden waarmee ‘achterlijkheid’ van ‘wereldsheid’ wordt on- derscheden (mepschen et al. ; verkaaik ). daartoe zijn lange tijd ras en racisme als kwesties aan de kant geschoven: antiracisme wordt in het nederlandse debat bekritiseerd als een manier om gelijken het zwijgen op te leggen, terwijl het ‘vrijuit spreken’ over zelf en anderen nu juist het nieuwe ideaalbeeld is geworden (van dijk ; bosma ; van reekum ). and yet, between the yes and the no, both conditioned by a firm sense of identification, is there not a critical alternative that focuses less on what you call me than on what calls when you call? – judith butler ( : ) van reekum cultuur, sociologie en de verbeelding van bevolkingsgroepen ２ methodologisch etatisme het is in dit probleemveld dat sociaalwetenschappelijke interesse voor ‘etnische cultuur’ vorm heeft gekregen. ze is vooral een zoektocht naar de te koesteren andersheid en te corrigeren rigiditeit van nieuwkomers, waar- bij het laatste de overhand heeft. dat uit zich in een veelheid van gevals- studies naar ‘gemeenschappen’ (bijvoorbeeld buiks ; vermeulen ; ferrier ; van den berg-eldering ; van der werf ) maar vooral vanaf de jaren negentig in grootschalig etno-statistisch onderzoek naar criminaliteit, gezondheid, opleiding, werkloosheid, contacten, opvattingen en extremisme. dit onderzoek naar ‘bevolkingsgroepen’ is publiekelijk toe- gankelijk, breed gefinancierd, bepalend geweest voor beleidsvorming, voortdurend aangehaald in de media en, bovenal, infrastructureel mogelijk gemaakt door de nederlandse overheid (groenendijk ). van enig taboe is geen enkele sprake. het cultuurprobleem wordt met dit onderzoek voorgesteld als een vor- derend proces met voor- en achterlopers, niet als een verandering van condities waarbinnen mensen met elkaar strijden over wat goed, waar en schoon is. onderzoekers die zich verzetten tegen deze depolitisering heb- ben ontegenzeggelijk tegenwerking ondervonden. dat is geen bewijs voor al dan niet ‘links’ taboe – alsof het bestaande onderzoek niet gedaan werd om de relatieve achterlijkheid van ‘bevolkingsgroepen’ te bepalen –, maar bewijs voor de innige relatie tussen sociaalwetenschappelijk onderzoek en een paternalistische bestuursmentaliteit (schinkel ; scholten ; ent- zinger en scholten ; van houdt ). het is de nederlandse overheid die in samenwerking met onderzoekers een nationale registratiestandaard heeft ontwikkeld – de gemeentelijke basis administratie (gba) –, waardoor ‘geboorteland’ statistisch gecorre- leerd kan worden met een veelheid van andere variabelen. deze poel aan data wordt nu al ruim twintig jaar gebruikt om van alles en nog wat door de etnische lens te belichten. over de zin en onzin van dergelijk onderzoek wordt onder academici wel gedebatteerd (zie bijvoorbeeld krebbekx et al. ), maar dit heeft niet of nauwelijks invloed op het publieke debat of de beleidsontwikkeling. daar geldt de groepslogica van het nederlandse cul- tuurbegrip: er zijn sowieso ‘bevolkingsgroepen’, statistisch herkenbaar aan hun ‘geboorteland’, en deze laten in vergelijking met de ‘autochtone’ nul- meting een bepaalde afwijking zien. die afwijking moet, zo gebiedt het vrijgevochten individu, ‘benoemd worden’. in dit licht doen ‘marokkanen het beter dan turken’, doen ‘antillianen het nog steeds even slecht als vijf vol. , no. , sociologie jaar geleden’ en lijken ‘polen hetzelfde niveau als autochtonen bereikt te hebben’. etno-statistiek is prestatiemeting. wat al deze statistische verbanden precies betekenen, weet eigenlijk niemand. dat komt vooral omdat er in dit etno-statistisch onderzoek geen gedegen conceptualisering van etniciteit bestaat en, vervolgens, ook niet voor de relatie tussen ‘etniciteit’ en ‘cultuur’. anders gezegd: er wordt nooit afdoende gearticuleerd welk theoretisch begrip met ‘geboorteland’ gemeten wordt. meestal wordt ‘geboorteland’ niet gebruikt als een metho- dologische benadering van een theoretisch concept, zoals inkomen dat is voor ‘klasse’ of het aantal boeken in een huishouden dat is voor ‘cultureel kapitaal’. nee, ‘geboorteland’ is – als vanzelf – etniciteit en etniciteit wordt, vooral in het publieke debat, voor ‘cultuur’ gehouden. ‘cultuur’ betekent immers ‘wat anderen hebben’ en kan dus enkelvoudig aan de migratiege- schiedenis van naasten gelijkgesteld worden. onderzoekers menen dikwijls dat de sluitende correspondentie tussen meting en concept een voordeel is (vgl. verweij ). dit is uiteraard een vergissing. wie denkt dat een thermometer een goed meetinstrument voor temperatuur zou zijn omdat het gedrag van de thermometer zou bepalen wat temperatuur is, mag zijn wetenschapsfilosofie-tentamen overdoen. dat temperatuur een theoretisch concept is buiten haar methodische en tech- nische operationalisering, is voor het bedrijven van normale wetenschap volstrekt noodzakelijk (de vries ). zo niet in het nederlandse etno- statistisch onderzoek: daar definieert men rustig het concept aan de hand van haar meetbaarheid.２ onderzoekers houden tegen deze aanmerkingen voet bij stuk door te stellen dat voor inkomensgroepen, gender of leeftijdscohorten toch ook mensen onder een geaggregeerd label gegroepeerd worden. er moet nu eenmaal een categorie gemaakt worden. maar de vraag is helemaal niet of er complexiteit gereduceerd wordt, maar hoe. er spelen hier twee zaken. ten eerste moet de wijze waarop een meetinstrument complexiteit reduceert in verhouding staan tot een theorie over het te meten concept. door respondenten te verdelen in mannen en vrouwen denken wij redelijk goed te weten wat we meten, omdat we de theorie aanhangen dat in de werkelijkheid mensen ook op die manier beoordeeld worden. precies daar en waar dat niet opgaat, is het categoriale genderonderzoek in gebreke. geregeld dus. door respondenten te verdelen in inkomensgroepen denken wij redelijk goed te weten wat we meten, omdat we de theorie aanhangen dat kapitaal uit te drukken is in geld. daar en waar dat niet zo is, wordt het maken van inkomenscategorieën zinloos. geregeld dus. voor etniciteit is het feitelijk niet anders: men veronderstelt redelijk goed te weten wat men van reekum cultuur, sociologie en de verbeelding van bevolkingsgroepen meet met ‘geboorteland’, omdat men – hoewel meestal stilzwijgend en ongekwalificeerd – de theorie aanhangt dat relatieve ongeschiktheid voor ‘het moderne leven’ is uit te drukken in ‘geboorteland’. deze onuitgewerkte theorie is overigens een afgeleide van de moderni- seringsthese. daarin wordt wat geldt als ‘moderniteit’ – burgerlijke gezins- verhoudingen, liberale instituties, kapitalisme, vrijhandel, de ideologische dominantie van de hogere middenklasse etc. – tot norm verheven en bui- ten het onderzoek geplaatst (zie ook somers a, b). juist daarom produceert dergelijk onderzoek enkel variaties op de conclusie dat ‘proble- men’ te wijten zijn aan de onvolkomen ‘modernisering van bevolkings- groepen’ (boersma en schinkel ). de mogelijkheid dat ‘modernisering’ of ‘autochtonie’ zelf problemen creëren, is methodologisch uitgesloten (als het al bevraagd wordt). verder is aan de hand van etno-statistisch onder- zoek niet te bepalen of het inderdaad zo is dat ‘geschiktheid’ afdoende of betekenisvol samenvalt met ‘etniciteit-qua-geboorteland’. daarvoor zou ‘geschiktheid’ een andere operationalisering moeten krijgen, maar dan ver- valt – in dezen – de noodzaak om naar ‘bevolkingsgroepen’ te aggregeren. ten tweede veronderstelt aggregatie naar ‘bevolkingsgroep’ dat etnici- teit op een bepaalde manier werkt. er bestaat een lijvige en gevarieerde onderzoeksliteratuur die aantoont dat ‘een etniciteit’ in het leven van mensen geenszins werkt zoals bijvoorbeeld ‘een inkomen’ dat doet (bij- voorbeeld brubaker ; baumann ; eriksen ; wimmer en glick schiller ; comaroff en comaroff ). de waarde van . euro hoeft – dankzij staatsmacht – niet onderhandeld te worden en is daarom vergelijkbaar met een andere . euro. haar gebruik is over de gehele geldeconomie inwisselbaar. de betekenis van een etniciteit is nu juist voortdurend in onderhandeling door mensen zelf. niet alleen ‘marokkanen’ bepalen wat ‘marokkaans’ is, maar ook vele anderen. deze anderen zijn op hun beurt anders omdat ze, alweer met anderen, uitvogelen wat het is om ‘niet-marokkaan’ te zijn (zie vooral hall ). bovendien is er onder men- sen die zich op enig moment ‘marokkaans’ weten, voortdurend gedoe over wat het ‘marokkaan zijn’ bepaalt. dat gedoe is het werk dat etniciteit doet in het leven van mensen. onderzoek naar de werking van etniciteit moet gericht zijn op vormen van grenswerk (lamont en molnar ; baumann en gingrich ). de complexiteit van dat werk wordt bijzonder slecht gereduceerd door te aggregeren naar ‘bevolkingsgroepen’, omdat deze methode zelf een vorm van grenswerk in werking zet en daarmee de rest overstemt (schinkel ; zie ook hacking ; ruppert ). de methode volgt namelijk één bepaalde ideologie en zienswijze ten aanzien van etniciteit, waardoor de vol. , no. , sociologie werking van etniciteit – het maken en trekken van grenzen – onzichtbaar wordt. de ideologie die hier gevolgd wordt, zegt dat een ieder primair één etniciteit heeft３ en dat deze etniciteit identiek moet zijn aan zichzelf. de idee van discrete mensengroepen is natuurlijk, laten we het netjes houden, weerlegd. maar dat betekent niet dat groepen niet voortdurend gemaakt worden (fields en fields ; m’charek ). dit groepen-maken is wat onderzocht moet worden. de zienswijze die hier gevolgd wordt, is de blik van de staat, of liever gezegd, staten, die zich het soevereine recht toebedelen mensen in etnici- teiten te ordenen. dat moeten die staten vooral doen, maar zij leveren daarmee slechts één lijn in het spel van grenzen maken. niemand dwingt de onderzoeker die lijn te volgen, behalve diezelfde staat natuurlijk. deze staatsvisie is hoogst subjectief. het is immers de zienswijze van één enkel subject – de soeverein –, maar dit subject is natuurlijk wel dat subject dat met enig succes pretendeert objectief te zijn (bourdieu ). juist aan mijn positivistische collega’s, wier wetenschapsvisie zo ver- bonden is met de zuivering van de taal, zou ik willen vragen waarom ze erop staan de categorieën van de staat te verheffen tot waarheid. ３ onderzoek voor beleid en debat de sociologische nalatigheid rondom ‘etniciteit’ leidt ertoe dat onderzoeks- resultaten niet te interpreteren zijn: ze bevestigen noch weerleggen een gedegen theorie over wat ‘geboorteland’ doet in de levens van mensen. waarom wordt dit onderzoek dan al meer dan twintig jaar gedaan? omdat het aansluit bij de publieke en beleidsmatige definitie van het cultuurprobleem: ‘bevolkingsgroepen’ mankeert het aan capaciteiten om, met zo min mogelijk beroep op (staats)steun, te overleven in een steeds ‘flexibelere’ wereld. daarom wordt, zelfs zonder methodologische basis, het rapporteren van prestatiescores per bevolkingsgroep publiek en be- leidsmatig interessant gevonden. ze demonstreert voornamelijk hoeveel ‘last’ de belastingbetaler van immigratie zou hebben. afgezien van het feit dat dit een nogal vernauwende kijk op migratie oplevert en bestendigt, is de vraag natuurlijk waarom die last etnisch gelabeld dient te worden en op welke wijze het verdisconteerd moet worden met de ‘baten’ van migratie. zonder een antwoord op die vragen is het lastenonderzoek niet veel meer dan een pr-machine voor, dan weer, anti-migratie en, dan weer, pro-mi- gratie spreekbuizen. van reekum cultuur, sociologie en de verbeelding van bevolkingsgroepen de etnische labelling van lasten wordt verdedigd door te wijzen op het welbegrepen eigenbelang van ‘bevolkingsgroepen’: nee, surinaams-neder- landse werkloosheid is niet anders dan autochtone werkloosheid, maar – zo gaat de redenering – het is in het belang van surinaamse nederlanders om de problemen in ‘hun’ bevolkingsgroep boven tafel te krijgen. is dat zo? het is ontegenzeggelijk van groot belang om systematische uitsluiting in kaart te brengen. nu is systematiek een van de grote voordelen van een statistische benadering, maar welke systematiek brengt etnische registratie precies aan en leidt deze tot bruikbare inzichten? hier wreekt zich de onvolkomen conceptualisering van hetgeen ‘geboorteland’ zou moeten meten. wanneer registratie als ‘roemeen’, gecontroleerd voor een trits aan variabelen, een effect blijkt te hebben op werkloosheid ... wat zegt dat dan? gegeven de theoretische vaagheid van ‘geboorteland’ is het hooguit indicatief voor een mechanisme dat, om verder onbekende redenen, vol- doende correleert met de registratie in het gba. dit onderzoek voert het beleidsproces allicht naar ‘de roemenen’, maar zonder enige verdere aan- leiding of oriëntatie. in plaats van deze onwetendheid komt dan al gauw het idee dat ‘roemenen’ iets met elkaar delen dat ze als groep vatbaar maakt voor werkloosheid. dit is een nogal wankele beleidstheorie – ze kan nog alle kanten op – die helpt bij het steeds maar weer opwaarderen van de ‘etnische factor’, terwijl het effect van ‘roemeen zijn’ ook nog aan allerlei andere zaken kan liggen die niet bij ‘de roemenen’ te vinden zijn. zelfs nu opeenvolgende kabinetten doelgroepenbeleid hebben afgezwo- ren, blijft het spreken in ‘bevolkingsgroepen’ en ‘hun’ problemen ongehin- derd door gaan. natuurlijk kunnen daadwerkelijke mechanismen achter schijnverbanden verder onderzocht worden. maar waarom pas nadat de significantie van een holle variabele was aangetoond? omdat we in zaken van ongelijkheid enkel nog in beweging komen wanneer een probleem tot kenmerk van een ‘bevolkingsgroep’ is gemaakt? etno-statistiek kan, juist vanwege haar luchtledige operationalisering, natuurlijk wel indicatief zijn voor systematische discriminatie en uitslui- ting. wanneer je kans op depressiviteit, longkanker of werkloosheid toene- emt enkel en alleen omdat we de gba-registratie in het verklaringsmodel opnemen dan roept dat terecht vragen op over het meritocratisch gehalte van nederland. die vragen zijn met etno-statistiek verder niet te beant- woorden – mensen lopen niet rond met een gba-formulier op hun voor- hoofd – en lang niet alle vormen van discriminatie of onrecht worden zichtbaar in etno-statistiek. bovendien gaat het hier om een hypothetische orde waarin alle verschillen tussen burgers zijn verdwenen behalve hun vol. , no. , sociologie merite. het is de meetlat van de hardwerkende nederlander. we kunnen de zeggingskracht van dergelijk onderzoek niet te ver doorvoeren: is er zoiets als ‘individueel gedrag’ zonder verdere bepaling en heeft het zin om mensen zo te ordenen? marc elchardus ( ) vraagt zich bijvoorbeeld af waarom de notie van ‘merite’ die van ‘ras’ lijkt te naderen: datgene wat overblijft wanneer sociale bepaling is weggezuiverd en waarop mensen boven- en ondergeschikt zouden mogen worden. ten slotte kan etno-statistiek precies daar bruikbaar zijn waar de state- lijke definitie van verschillen in het spel is. precies in zoverre de data bepaald worden door de zienswijze van de staat, kunnen die data licht werpen op de verschilwerking van beleid. het effect van grenzen trekken door de staat, middels migratie- en burgerschapsbeleid, kan zo – alweer gedeeltelijk – worden onderzocht aan de hand van de etnische registratie. zijn er significante verschillen in toelating, verblijfsstatus, naturalisatie, behandeling en deportatie tussen mensen die staten voor ‘marokkaan’, ‘amerikaan’ of ‘zweed’ houden? dergelijk onderzoek laat daarmee niet de prestatie van deze of gene ‘bevolkingsgroep’ zien, maar de verschilwerking die uitgaat van het statelijke grenzen trekken. de etno-statistiek zou op deze manier de staat een spiegel voor kunnen houden, in plaats van be- stuurlijke prestatiemetingen te helpen verkondigen (zie bijvoorbeeld pe- ters et al. ). in de nederlandse praktijk heeft de focus op etno-statistische kennis- vorming geleid tot de institutionalisering van een beleidsobject – ‘niet- westerse allochtonen’ – wiens collectieve prestaties nauwlettend in de gaten worden gehouden, maar voor wie op basis van dat toezicht verder weinig gedaan kan worden. er wordt in het felle licht van deze prestatie- metingen van alles gesuggereerd over ‘cultuur’, maar bar weinig aange- toond. zoals ik heb laten zien: dat kan aan de hand van onderzoek naar ‘bevolkingsgroepen’ helemaal niet. de commissie blok concludeerde reeds: nieuwkomers hebben zich een positie in nederland verworven ondanks het gevoerde beleid (commissie blok ). de factor ‘geboorteland’ kan immers niet met beleid worden beïnvloed anders dan proberen grenzen te sluiten voor bepaalde mensen of mensen anders te categoriseren. de landsgrenzen worden al geruime tijd omgebouwd tot zeef om mensen te weren die ‘ongeschikt’ worden geacht voor ‘het moderne leven’. leven en dood worden bepaald door ‘af- komst’. over het aanpassen van beleidscategorieën woedt zo af en toe een discussie, waarbij serieus gepleit wordt voor het registreren van ‘derde-’ of zelf ‘vierde-generatie allochtonen’. hier wordt de registratie van migratie- geschiedenissen, die toch al wortels had in koloniaal bestuur en essentia- van reekum cultuur, sociologie en de verbeelding van bevolkingsgroepen listische rassen- en cultuuropvattingen (stoler ; hondius ; vgl. ver- wey-jonker ), een vorm van raciale demografie. i am less interested in how repetition spawns variants as a matter of course than in the possibility of a counterdiscourse that emerges in the midst of break- down, animating the remnants of a broken ideological machine for critical purposes. – judith butler ( : ) ４ alsnog cultuur? wat valt er door sociologen dan wel over cultuur te zeggen? of misschien moeten we vragen: wat valt er nog voor cultuur te zeggen? cultuur wordt terecht verguisd in de sociale wetenschap (lemaire ). al dan niet ge- meten aan de hand van ‘geboorteland’, moet het staan voor een onhan- teerbare kluwen van ‘sociale invloeden’ (kuper ). het duidt even veel op ‘expressie’, ‘vrije tijd’, ‘de publieke sfeer’, ‘de private sfeer’, ‘overtuigin- gen’, ‘opvattingen’, ‘claims’, ‘discoursen’, ‘betekenis’, ‘taal’, ‘socialisatie’, ‘ide- alen’, ‘waarden’, ‘sublimatie’, ‘beleving’, ‘interpretatie’, ‘gezin’, ‘familie’, ‘groepsleven’, ‘gemeenschap’, ‘gebruiken’, ‘tradities’, ‘normen’, ‘uitdrukking’, ‘impressie’, ‘context’ of ‘omgeving’. weg ermee zou je zeggen. waar al deze connotaties op willen duiden, is niet totaal ongewis: ze worden bij elkaar gehouden door de idee dat ‘sociale uitkomsten’ niet enkel bepaald worden door de samenkomst van anonieme ‘factoren’ maar ook nog door manieren van doen. sociale situaties worden niet enkel beslist en besloten door hun discrete onderdelen – gemeten als ‘factoren’ – maar ook nog door de manier waarop geanticipeerd wordt op een zeker besluit van die situaties terwijl ze zich voordoen (zie vooral austin ). pas wanneer er geanticipeerd wordt op een vergadering aan de hand van gebaren – ‘hierbij open ik deze vergadering’ –, worden de stoelen, tafels, carrières, lijven, gebouwen, kennis, diploma’s etc. een serie ‘factoren’ bij die vergadering. dit anticiperen wordt ook wel performativiteit genoemd en vormt de conceptuele motor van de hedendaagse, vaak prag- matistische cultuurtheorie (zie butler ; alexander ; latour ; bell ; somers ). zelfs zouden we het onbruikbare concept ‘bevolkingsgroep’ achter ons laten, dan nog verhoudt het bestaande programma van verklarende socio- logie zich moeilijk tot performativiteit. het probeert anticipaties namelijk juist voor te zijn: hoe waarschijnlijker een bepaalde uitkomst gemaakt kan vol. , no. , sociologie worden – verklaarde variantie –, hoe beter. de vormende rol van perfor- mativiteit is enkel reststof. juist daarom zoekt dit programma de ‘culturele factor’ in die zaken waarvan verondersteld wordt dat ze in principe onbe- slist zijn: in de sfeer van de individuele autonomie of ‘keuzevrijheid’. cul- tuur is dan te vinden bij precies die zaken waarvan ‘moderne mensen’ veronderstellen dat het individu ze kan en mag veranderen: denkbeelden, gedrag in de publieke en private sfeer, seksualiteit, hoop, verlangen, religie, vriendschappen, inzet, relaties, vrije tijd etc. omdat ‘culturele verklaringen’ gaan over zaken die ‘het moderne indi- vidu’ geacht wordt te kunnen en mogen veranderen, sluiten ‘culturele ver- klaringen’ naadloos – en dus onfeilbaar – aan bij de problematisering van ‘cultuur’ zoals die vanaf de jaren zeventig vorm krijgt. ‘cultuur’ is dan al die zaken die vrij-geachte individuen wel kunnen en mogen, maar niet willen of durven veranderen. ‘cultuur’ is de tijdelijke inperking van onstuitbare ‘flexibiliteit’. de verantwoordelijkheid voor ‘culturele’ effecten wordt zo – klaarblijkelijk terecht – gelegd bij een verinnerlijkte weerstand tegen ver- andering. daarom krijgt ‘cultuur’ uiteindelijk een psycho-moralistische duiding. de oplossing is het breken of verleggen van weerstand: mensen dienen te laten zien dat zij zich voldoende identificeren met het vrijge- maakte individu dat in fel oranje aan ons voorgesteld wordt (mellink ; van reekum ). geen wonder dat nagenoeg ieder serieus beleidsvoor- stel over ‘integratie’ neerkomt op een vorm van klassikale instructie. cul- tuurverandering is morele dressage. wat kunnen we nu wel met een performatief cultuurbegrip? daar is al een hoop over gezegd (garfinkel ) en nog te zeggen, maar in het kader van de voorgaande discussie is de belangrijkste les de volgende. de rol van cultuur is niet te begrijpen zonder een gedegen beschrijving van geantici- peerde toekomsten. verbeeldingen van die toekomsten moeten op zichzelf beschouwd worden en niet als min of meer adequate reacties op of ge- volgen van ‘reële condities’ in de mentaliteit van ‘personen’. juist daarom zijn ‘attitudes’, ‘motieven’, ‘intenties’, ‘strategieën’ of ‘redenen’ geen goede vervanging voor hetgeen performativiteit aanduidt. ze maken van antici- patie toch weer een gesocialiseerde houding of gewoonte. performativiteit draait om manieren van anticiperen die in iedere situatie aan de hand zijn en valt dus noch samen met ‘habitus’, noch met ‘keuze’. de groepslogica van het gangbare cultuurbegrip werkt hoogst verwar- rend: cultuur wordt niet langer in het licht van verbeelde toekomsten ge- analyseerd maar als min of meer versteende gedragingen van populaties: ‘zo doen zij dat’. dergelijke verklaringen kunnen enkel terecht komen in tautologieën en just so stories, waarin ‘cultuur’ precies de vorm van de te van reekum cultuur, sociologie en de verbeelding van bevolkingsgroepen verklaren uitkomst aanneemt. wanneer performativiteit beschreven wordt in het licht van de toekomst, kan dit voorkomen worden. ter afsluiting een voorbeeld. uit onderzoek naar carrières van jongeren in de economie van verdo- vende middelen, wapens en vrouwen is op te maken dat een cruciale schakel gevormd wordt door de anticipatie op vernedering die voortdu- rend verbeeld wordt in de levens van deze gangmakers. dit imaginair van, voornamelijk mannelijke, vernedering blijkt van groot belang in het ver- klaren van bepaalde vormen van criminaliteit. natuurlijk is het pochen, steken en stelen ‘aangeleerd’ (vgl. van san ; siegel et al. ). het vergt oefening en instructie. dat aanleren is goed te vatten in situationele, belichaamde en terugkerende praktijken die leiden tot de bestendiging van bepaalde handelingswijzen (zie bijvoorbeeld de jong ; paulle ). er is echter ook nog een anticipatie op vernedering die de motor van onder- schikking en (uitgesteld) falen draaiende houdt. het is anticipatie die de bundel van ‘factoren’ – buurt, mannelijkheid, kennissen, school, gezin, geld, vriendschappen, identificaties, fysiek geweld, beleid, segregatie etc. – aan elkaar knoopt. deze verklaring geeft aanleiding tot een probleemana- lyse die vele malen scherper georiënteerd is dan de volkenkundige verdwa- ling waartoe ‘bevolkingsgroep’ leidt. natuurlijk: jongeren zullen redenen moeten hebben om niet te antici- peren op vernedering. waarom wordt ze deze rationaliteit ontzegd? maar meer nog: er zullen alternatieve verbeeldingen van de toekomst beschik- baar moeten zijn. bijvoorbeeld een waarin de liberale waanzin van ‘eigen verantwoordelijkheid’ en ‘invechten’ wordt ontmaskerd en bekritiseerd, waarin strijd tegen ongelijkheid een politieke of zelfs profetische lading kan krijgen. de black lives matter-beweging in de vs is een goed voor- beeld, zo ook het recente activisme tegen nederlands racisme. daar wor- den de ‘factoren’ van vernedering op een alternatieve manier aaneenge- schakeld. dat is cultuur. ten slotte roept deze benadering de vraag op waar het imaginair van mannelijke vernedering nog meer in het spel is en, onder andere condities, leidt tot gelijksoortige loyaliteiten aan een ‘eigen club’ en het veronachtzamen van de gewelddadige consequenties die gedrag – al dan niet aan het roer van een financiële instelling – voor anderen heeft. ik zou beginnen bij de inheemse studentencorpsen. vol. , no. , sociologie noten . zie voor kritieken: philipse ( ), van der meer ( a), van der meer ( b) en jennissen, dagevos en engbersen ( ). . het ideaal van nomothetisch-deductieve wetenschap is niet het mijne. maar mogen wij van haar beoefenaren vragen zich aan de eigen regels te houden? . in het geval van meer, dan alleen als de discrete optelling van één en nog één. literatuur alexander, j.c. 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( ) the demography of race and ethnicity in the netherlands: an ambiguous history of tolerance and conflict. in: r. sáenz, n. rodriguez en d.g. embrick (red.) the international handbook of the demography of race and ethnicity. new york: springer, - . wekker, g. en h. lutz ( ) een hoogvlakte met koude winden. de geschiedenis van het gender- en etniciteitsdenken in nederland. in: m. botman, n. jouwe en g. wekker (red.) caleidosco- pische visies. de zwarte, migranten en vluchtelingenvrouwenbeweging in nederland. amster- dam: kit. werf, s. van der ( ) allochtonen: een inleiding. bussum: coutinho. wijk, a. van en a. blokland ( ) zedendelinquentie en etniciteit. een exploratief onderzoek op basis van politiegegevens. mens & maatschappij, ( ): - . vol. , no. , sociologie wimmer, a. en n. glick schiller ( ) methodological nationalism and beyond: nation-state building, migration and the social sciences. global networks, ( ): - . yanow, d. en m. van der haar ( ) people out of place: allochthony and autochthony in net- herlands identity discourse – metaphors and categories in action. journal for international relations and development, ( ): - . over de auteur rogier van reekum is postdoctoraal onderzoeker aan de afdeling be- stuurskunde en sociologie van de erasmus universiteit rotterdam. hij is onderdeel van het monitoring modernity project (erc starting grant) onder leiding van prof. dr. willem schinkel. daar doet hij onderzoek naar de visualisering van irreguliere migratie in europa. rogier schreef een proef- schrift (cum laude) aan de aissr (universiteit van amsterdam) over pu- blieke en politieke debatten rondom nederlanderschap ( - ) en pu- bliceerde over nationalisme, plaats, burgerschapspolitiek, immigratiebe- leid en onderwijs. hij is redacteur bij sociologie en krisis, tijdschrift voor actuele filosofie. e-mail: vanreekum@fsw.eur.nl van reekum cultuur, sociologie en de verbeelding van bevolkingsgroepen “i do, i don’t”: the benefits and perils of legalizing same-sex marriage in the united states—one year later humanities article “i do, i don’t”: the benefits and perils of legalizing same-sex marriage in the united states—one year later kristina b. wolff , , master of health care delivery science at dartmouth, dewey field road, hanover, nh - , usa; kristina.b.wolff@dartmouth.edu the dartmouth institute for health policy and clinical research, medical center drive, lebanon, nh , usa department of public health, school of nursing and health professions, mckean , colby-sawyer college, new london, nh , usa academic editors: annabel martín and gail finney received: february ; accepted: march ; published: march abstract: in , a gay male couple applied for and was given a marriage license in minnesota. the license was eventually rescinded by court order. forty-five years later, the u.s. supreme court ruled that section of the defense of marriage act, limiting the federal definition of marriage to consist of one man and one woman, was unconstitutional. the result was the legalization of same-sex marriage in the united states. the purpose of this article is to discuss the importance of establishing the right for same-sex couples to legally marry. it outlines the benefits and costs to lgbt communities one year after the establishment of same-sex marriage in the u.s. this paper explores the limits of utilizing a rights-based approach when advocating social change. the recommendation is for lgbt individuals, communities and allies to shift tactics to adopt a capabilities approach to organizing and mobilizing people, groups, and organizations around issues of injustice. a capabilities framework addresses the complexities of individual and community needs while providing a foundation for coalition building and lasting positive social change. keywords: same-sex marriage; lgbt marriage; social movement; social change; gay marriage . introduction in , jack baker and michael mcconnell applied for a marriage license in minneapolis, mn. after being turned down by the county, they began their fight for their right to marry [ – ]. in , the minnesota supreme court ruled that it was constitutional to limit marriage to opposite sex couples. this decision was upheld via the u.s. supreme court’s dismissal of baker and mcconnell’s appeal in [ ]. in , the defense of marriage act (doma) was established by congress in response to the growing increase in the legal recognition of same-sex partnerships throughout the nation [ ]. doma limited federal marriage recognition to married opposite-sex couples [ ]. states could determine their own marriage laws but same-sex marriages were not federally recognized. in , united states v windsor was heard by the supreme court on the grounds that doma was discriminatory. the court ruled that section of doma, which defined marriage as a relationship between opposite sex couples, was “unconstitutional as a deprivation of the equal liberty of persons that is protected by the fifth amendment” ([ ], p. ). in their decision, the court described same-sex couples who were married by a state yet not federally recognized, as having a “second-tier marriage” when compared to opposite-sex marriages ([ ], p. ). the complexities of doma is an example of what nancy fraser calls “injustice of recognition” as same-sex married couples’ lack of federal recognition “prevents them from participating as a peer humanities , , ; doi: . /h www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities http://www.mdpi.com http://www.mdpi.com/journal/humanities humanities , , of in social life” ([ ], p. ). “misrecognition is a social relation, not a psychological one,” and is a “consequence of institutionalized patterns of interpretation and evaluation that constitute one as comparatively unworthy of respect or esteem” ([ ], pp. – ). the decision in windsor creates federal recognition of same-sex marriages and allows for states that sanction same sex-marriages to continue. it did not result in requiring all states to recognize and provide marriage licenses for same-sex marriages, which subtly reinforces prejudices and stigma, justifying discrimination toward lgbtq people. windsor paved the way for obergefell et al. v hodges, which challenged the constitutionality of limiting marriage to opposite-sex couples. the court agreed and found that lgb rights were violated under the fourteenth amendment [ ]. at a time when groups were fighting for equal rights for lgbtq people in areas of employment, immigration status, and safety, it is curious that national lgbtq organizations shifted focus onto legalizing same-sex marriage. at question is not the validity of the desire for couples to marry and gain the same rights and protections as opposite-sex couples. yet there are unanswered questions: why the shift in strategy? what is the potential impact on all lgbtq people? will this result in an increase in acceptance or an expectation of adopting the mainstream model of a nuclear family? what happens if a community is unwelcoming to same-sex couples? this essay explores some of the advantages and disadvantages of legalizing same-sex marriage and concludes with a recommendation to adopt a capabilities framework as part of an organizing strategy. this approach moves beyond recognizing basic rights to developing an ethos that also strives to achieve social justice and a dignified life for all. . discussion . . benefits of marriage forty-five years post-baker, after multiple legal challenges and changes throughout the country the u.s. supreme court overruled baker in obergefell et al. v. hodges, thus legalizing same sex marriage across the united states, except for native american tribes as they are sovereign nations ([ , – ]). when the supreme court decision was announced on june , president obama called it a “victory” proclaiming “when all americans are treated as equals we are all free” [ ]. images of rainbows and same-sex marriage ceremonies dominated mainstream media. president obama and vice-president biden were photographed running thorough the white house carrying a rainbow flag, and that night, the white house was illuminated in rainbow colors. the decisions in both windsor and obergefell were a significant step forward in advancing civil rights for lgbtq identified individuals in the united states. while same-sex couples have maintained long-term committed relationships for centuries, legal recognition of these relationships is a fairly new phenomenon [ – ]. at the time of the obergefell decision, twenty countries ( % of all nations) and ( %) u.s. states had legalized same-sex marriage. as it is difficult to determine how many people identify as lgbtq, it is also challenging to ascertain how many wish to or are already married to a same-sex partner. the best data existing on marriage rates are the number of marriage licenses and divorce decrees in the country. in fact, while legally recognized same-sex marriages have been happening since , it was not until that the u.s. census said it would begin to count same-sex marriages in [ ]. the national marriage rate for heterosexuals in the u.s. has decreased from . in to . (per ) in [ ]. there is some evidence that these marriages are lasting longer than in the early s as the divorce rate has also decreased from . in to . (per ) in [ ]. in , four months after obergefell was decided, approximately % of same-sex couples were legally married, however much of this data is based on self-reporting [ ]. the percentage of the u.s. population that identify as lgbtq range from lgbtq represents individuals who identify as lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender or queer. different variations of these abbreviations appear throughout the paper and vary by context. often, lgb will be used when only discussing same-sex partnerships or marriages. humanities , , of % to % of the population; it is known that the , same-sex couples who married in these same few months represent % of all new marriages in that time period [ , , , ]. marriage is an important rite of passage in many societies and cultural traditions [ , , ]. combined with family, it provides the early foundation for shaping morals and socializing children. in the united states, before the th century, many opposite-sex couples married for social and economic class status. some family members arranged marriages, indentured servants were sometimes forced into marriage, others married due to pregnancy, and some for love [ ]. in the s, cultural beliefs about marriage began to shift to focusing on love and companionship as the central reason for marriage [ ]. as women’s independence evolved, art, media, and advertisements popularized images and stories of the ‘perfect’ wedding and the ‘ideal’ marriage, which was largely based on judeo-christian beliefs and euro-american culture [ , , ]. the merger and growth of industrialization and capitalism after world war ii strengthened the foundation of today’s wedding industry and further solidified societal expectations of marriage and family structure in the country [ , ]. one place this is evident is in u.s. mainstream television shows ranging from father knows best ( ) to current hits such as the bachelor ( seasons since ) and the bachelorette ( seasons since ). thousands of television shows, movies, and social media sites depict marriages and engagements as desirable. these images dominate u.s. popular culture [ , ]. the marriage industry is estimated to generate between $ and $ billion annually [ ]. in , there were an estimated . million weddings in the u.s. at an average cost of $ , [ ]. early reports of same-sex marriages have mixed estimates regarding wedding cost. one study found that, on average, same-sex couples having a wedding out-of-state spent one-tenth of what residents paid for a wedding [ ]. a report estimated same-sex marriage would generate $ . billion in revenue in the first three years of marriage with an additional $ . million in state and local tax revenues [ ]. the foundation for legal marriage is an agreement that is primarily regulated by property law [ ]. the original basis of a marriage contract solidified a husband’s control over his wife and children with the expectation that he provide adequately for the family. the wife operated the household, raised the children, and was subservient to her husband [ , , , ]. while the country has progressed since this time, many believe in traditional marriage roles and the original laws and customs that form the foundation of marriage and family law [ , – ]. in addition to media and law reinforcing traditional marriage arrangements, policies and practices in areas of commerce, employment, housing, education, medicine, and healthcare continue to reinforce opposite-sex marriage as the ideal [ , , ]. for lgb couples seeking to marry, some believe that recognition on a federal level may reduce stigma and increase acceptance. in justice kennedy’s decision in obergefell, he affirmed the impact of stigma on lgb couples. kennedy wrote that “without the recognition, stability and predictability marriage offers, children suffer the stigma of knowing their families are somehow lesser” ([ ], p. ). whereas chief justice roberts’ dissent sought to maintain the status quo and challenge the role of the court in defining marriage despite previous court rulings related to marriage and intimate relations [ – ]. exhibiting a classic ‘if it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’ approach, roberts writes, “[t]he majority expressly disclaims judicial ‘caution’ and omits even a pretense of humility, openly relying on its desire to remake society according to its own “new insight” into the “nature of injustice” ([ ], p. ). by arguing that marriage is always only for opposite-sex couples, roberts is supporting a conservative argument that continues to be used as a means to discriminate against same-sex couples and by extension the lgbtq communities across the country. some advocate a wider definition of family and marriage. paula ettelbrook argues that “a better approach for our community would be to expand the definition of family, rather than confine ourselves to marriage . . . [it] would open up much broader possibilities for recognition of all” same-sex family relationships ([ , ]; [ ], p. ). in one feature by the new york times, couples married after the obergefell decision expressed how important it was to have marriage legalized on a federal level [ ]. similar to others’ experiences across the nation, some reflected on discrimination and hostility they had faced in their lives as well as family hesitation around having a public ceremony. one person said, humanities , , of “my husband’s parents were a bit hesitant and frightened by the idea of a big public wedding. they wanted us to keep the whole thing more private, discreet. it was very helpful to have the actual president of the united states on television saying this was a good thing. the tidal wave of news and social media posts about gay marriage gave us some legitimacy at the exact right moment.” ([ ], p. ) kennedy’s decision touched on the importance of recognizing stigma, discrimination and violence lgbtq people endure in u.s. society and how marriage can help mediate these things. in his decision, he quoted a passage from the massachusetts case that led to the legalization of same-sex marriage in that state (goodridge v dept of public health ). marriage holds an essential role in this nation as “it fulfills yearnings for security, safe haven, and connection that express our common humanity; civil marriage is an esteemed institution, and the decision whether and who to marry is among life’s momentous acts of self-definition” ([ ], p. ; [ , – ]). dean spade notes that when same-sex couples live together in monogamous relationships or get married, they can “move from being highly stigmatized to being considered acceptable” ([ ], p. ). . . perils of legalizing marriage many marriages are not as idyllic as portrayed in the promotion of legalizing same-sex marriage. often, they can be quite stressful, due to societal expectations of married couples. in addition to possible challenges related to intimate relationships, the inclusion of children, employment and financial stress can contribute to an increase in personal struggles. [ – ]. relationships can also be violent. for example, on average, over , phone calls are placed to domestic violence hotlines in the united states. more than million people are abused by an intimate partner each year [ ]. it is “estimated [that] in children are exposed to domestic violence each year and % witness” the violence ([ ], p. ). same-sex partnerships have the same stressors as opposite-sex couples and often anxieties are intensified due to lgbtq discrimination. some studies have found that “minority stress” and prejudice that lgbtq individuals face have a deleterious effect on their health and relationships [ , , – ]. the marketing campaign in favor of same-sex marriage rights depicted couples as happy, secure, loving, and carefree. in reality, many lgb married couples are adapting and doing their best to merge into mainstream married life designed for and by heterosexuals and reinforced by social institutions that are often the source of lgbtq oppression [ , , ]. angela davis reminds us that assimilation is not always possible nor does it solve many issues that lgbtq people face. she notes, “the structures of heteronormativity, and the various violences these structures and discourses entail, do not necessarily disappear when the sexuality of the participants is changed” ([ ], p. ). this is further complicated if one is a member of other oppressed populations as u.s. institutions and culture are designed to push people into a specific way of being that is “enforced through internal and external policing and discipline” ([ ], p. ). popular rhetoric may claim support of difference yet this masks the reality that there is little tolerance for those who do not conform to expected norms [ , , , ]. the decision to emphasize marriage as the main focus of efforts taken to improve the lives of lgbtq individuals and communities is a bit murky. the organization ‘freedom to marry, freedom to love’ is a sales pitch as much as a goal to attain access to legal marriage. lgbtq people as well as heterosexuals have successfully had romantic love relationships and partnerships for centuries, whether or not it was legal. the ‘freedom to marry, freedom to love’ organization founded by evan wolfson was one of the key groups working to advance the right for same-sex couples to marry [ , ]. by using a state-by-state approach to advance rights combined with lawsuits advancing their way through the courts; plus working in partnership with national organizations along with wealthy donors, they were successful at making same-sex marriage legal in the united states [ , , – ]. at question though, is why did marriage become the central focus of change for lgbtq communities? was there a definitive crisis involving marriage that wolfson and the national organizations such as the human rights campaign were responding to? determining a specific focus humanities , , of for advancing lgbtq equality is challenging as sexual orientation cuts across all races, ethnicities, genders, classes, ages, and other clearly defined populations. the common thread uniting lgbq people is sexual orientation. the ways in which a person’s romantic, intimate, sexual experiences, and relationships impact her or his life is deeply personal and often difficult to mobilize around. many lgbtq individuals are focused on the necessities of daily living, therefore marriage is often not a top priority [ – , , , , , , ]. as previously noted, legal marriage brings with it recognition and rights from various private and state apparatuses including health care benefits, social security benefits, tax benefits along with positive social status. “it is an economic institution. it is about property. it is not about human relations, or intimate relations” ([ ]; [ ], p. ; [ ]). it is also recognition of a specific intimate type of relationship that two people have with one another [ , , ]. for many in the lgbtq community, marriage represents transcending fraser’s “injustice of recognition” and for a select few this is possible. numerous lgb individuals in leadership positions, working for the campaign as well as providing significant financial backing, had surpassed daily struggles and injustices that other lgbtq individuals face due to racism, sexism, nationalism, ableism, classism, transphobia, and discrimination due to incarceration, religious affiliation and geographic location [ , , , , – ]. therefore, access to legal marriage was the last barrier that needed to be dismantled. the push for marriage is viewed by some as a classist goal [ , , , , , ]. for example, in the u.s., college graduates have a higher rate of marriage and better options for high earnings. a study by the pew institute found that % of college graduates married compared to % of high school graduates [ ]. one of the main reasons people do not marry is financial; this is particularly true for women [ ]. although the gender pay gap between women and men has narrowed, recent data show that women as a whole are paid % less than men who are in the same position [ ]. same-sex female couples compared to same-sex male couples are likely to earn significantly less income, especially if they do not have a college degree. tthere are more single women raising children compared to single men. women tend to earn less and have difficulties advancing in their careers due to the complex balance of job and children [ , – ]. similar to heterosexual couples, lower-income same-sex female couples with children who marry would likely benefit with an increase in income. however, for many lower-income couples, it may be just enough of an improvement to put government benefits for children into jeopardy [ ]. this may not be the same situation for same-sex male couples with children. same-sex couples may also face challenges within their communities and families due to lack of acceptance and understanding [ , , , , , , – ]. several choose to remain silent and hidden within and outside of their communities due to prevailing adverse cultural and family beliefs, religious traditions, racism and homophobia [ , , , , – ]. lgbtq people face “the sting of social disapproval and the persistence of discrimination in nearly every facet of everyday existence.” for “most of the th century and continuing even today, many gay people have lived their lives ‘in the closet’ so as not to risk losing a job, a home, or the love and support of family and friends.” ([ – ]; [ ], p. ) in places where non-discrimination policies for lgbt do not exist, married same-sex couples are at risk of being fired, denied housing, and other public accommodations without recourse if they revealed their sexual orientation. for many white lgb people, particularly those who are well-educated and have resources, the “freedom to marry” campaign provided an opportunity to work for social change that they would directly benefit from as this was likely the only place where they faced discrimination [ , , , , , , ]. unfortunately for those struggling financially or working in a state without lgbtq protection, marriage usually offers little increased benefit. coincidentally, the employment non-discrimination act (enda) was facing a crucial vote when the push for marriage intensified. all lgbt national organizations mobilized around marriage instead of enda. therefore, when enda failed to pass a vote in the house, it was finished. this bill could have been of great benefit to the vast majority of lgbtq individuals as well as heterosexual people. humanities , , of for non-whites, the complexities of living in the u.s. present many challenges beyond a single focus on race, gender, class, or sexual orientation. it is essential that an analysis of inequality utilize an intersectional framework of analysis when examining social issues and strategizing for change [ , , ]. while one issue may be more salient at a particular moment, this does not mean that the impact of other systems of oppression cease to matter. “our understanding of structural aspects is fundamentally connected to and mediated by conceptual constructs—the way we talk and think about any social group will influence the place we assign it within the social realm, and the way we treat people who fit in it.” ([ ], p. ). images of same-sex couples and marriages during the campaign as well as after obergefell are dominated by pictures of white couples [ , , ]. this is what most people in the u.s. saw when viewing mainstream media and discussing same-sex marriage [ , , , ]. wealthy whites were the primary spokespeople, leadership, and financiers of the push for same-sex marriage. this structure has been criticized since the lgbtq movement began. unless mainstream primarily white, national organizations, which are seen as the leadership of whatever lgbtq ‘movement’ there is, truly take a more inclusive approach, change will continue to be driven by whites. writing about the post-stonewall era, essex hemphill states, “it has not fully dawned on white gay men that racist conditioning has rendered many of them no different from their heterosexual brothers in the eyes of black gays and lesbians. coming out of the closet to confront sexual oppression has not necessarily given white males the motivation or insight to transcend their racist conditioning.” ([ ], p. ) certainly, this “conditioning” or socialization that all people are subjected to in some way when living in the u.s., has an impact on decisions to marry. the issue regarding the structure and history of marriage in the u.s. has a different level of concern for people of color. many are critical of the history and structure of the institution of marriage and power dynamics within marriage. research show that there is a hesitancy to marry due to mainstream expectations of marriage as well as how marriage, inequality, and slavery are intertwined [ ]. while often ‘invisible’ in mainstream america, communities of color are often subjected to inappropriate or ineffective programs, such as president bush’s “healthy marriage initiative”. this policy was aimed at poor communities of color in an effort to encourage marriage and perhaps save the government resources due to loss of benefits because of marriage status ([ ], p. ; [ ]). for lgbtq individuals and couples of color, many find they do not belong in their communities because of their sexual orientation. yet, they are also invisible within the lgbtq community because of their race/ethnicity [ , , , , , ]. from this vantage point, marriage may be a marker of assimilation, a means of survival, and/or a revolutionary act for lgbtq couples of color. the decisions in windsor and obergefell were not greeted with great joy by many conservatives across the country. religious leaders and politicians, particularly republican candidates running for the presidential nomination, quickly objected to the obergefell ruling. senator lindsay graham and governor john kasich noted that they would abide by the ruling even though they were disappointed and did not agree with it [ , ]. other candidates such as governors scott walker and bobbie jindahl turned the decision into an example of legalized religious prosecution of those opposed to the ruling due to religious beliefs [ , ]. they called for a constitutional amendment to keep marriage for opposite sex couples only [ , ]. while the amendment is unlikely, there is cause for concern as president trump is against same-sex marriage. of greater concern is vice-president mike pence of indiana who actively opposes anti-lgbtq rights and favors discrimination of lgbtq individuals [ ]. protection for lgbtq identity varies by state. hate crime laws recognizing crime directed specifically at someone due to their perceived sexual orientation or identity as transgender were primarily established in the s. laws focusing on humanities , , of after the obergefell decision, an alabama judge ruled that it was illegal to marry same-sex couples and would not allow licenses to be issued [ ]. this has changed, yet there are a few counties in alabama, texas and kentucky that will not issue licenses [ – ]. before and after the obergefell decision, numerous stories emerged around the u.s. of people refusing to provide goods or services for lgbt weddings. this spurred new types of legislation, such as ‘pastor protection’ acts which allow religious leaders to refuse to marry same-sex couples if they disagree with the wedding on religious grounds. other states have adopted laws that allow people to refuse services to lgbt individuals [ – ]. the extent of this conflict is significant and illustrates that “same-sex marriage has stirred so much resistance” that it has revealed “how widespread america’s attachment is to a narrow vision of marriage.” it also shows how “widespread the reluctance is to accept gay people within the social mainstream” ([ ], p. ). while much of the nation and the lgbtq community celebrate the legalization of marriage, the level of the nature of negative responses also illustrates the precarious nature of a rights-focused approach to creating lasting social change. coupled with the anti-lgbt marriage rhetoric are efforts to eliminate access to public spaces across the u.s. [ ]. many of these initiatives extend their focus to individuals who identify as transgender. stories pepper social media about children being sent home from school for not dressing to match their biological gender or by openly identifying as transgender [ , ]. for example, in g.g. v. gloucester county school board, gavin grimm, who is a transgender female to male student, sued the school board for denial of access to use the boys’ bathroom at his school [ ]. the school system created a policy that people must utilize the bathroom that matches their biological sex due to complaints of grimm using the boys’ bathroom [ ]. in august , the u.s. supreme court issued a temporary order, blocking grimm’s use of the bathroom and in october , it agreed to hear the case [ , ]. in may, , the us justice department and department of education issued a directive that all public schools must allow transgender students to use the bathroom of their choice [ ]. ten states filed a lawsuit against the government arguing that title ix protections do not apply and that the government was overreaching [ ]. north carolina made headlines in april for adopting a law that made it illegal for people to use public bathrooms and locker rooms that did not match their biological sex [ , , , ]. in the midst of protests and contentious debates, stories emerged of men monitoring women’s bathrooms looking for people violating the law [ – ]. while unnerving and despite the backlash against north carolina via boycotts [ ], the law still stands. at the heart of the law is the increased difficulty for individuals filing discrimination lawsuits in the state and the elimination of the minimum wage law, which was largely ignored in the press. in essence, transgender individuals are the scapegoats being used to advance laws that otherwise would not have been adopted [ , , , , ]. often incendiary language coupled with anti-lgbtq backlash can lead to violence. the national anti-violence project (avp) report on violence impacting lgbtq people highlights the complexities of lgbtq individuals’ lives, which were largely erased during the marriage campaign [ ]. it also calls attention to the brutality many face in immigrant detention centers and the positive impact of the black lives matter movement [ ]. the annual report is based on avp sites around the country. for , they documented survivors of violence; % of homicides were people of color and % of these homicides were transgender and gender non-conforming increasing access and eliminating discrimination for lgbtq individuals became more widespread in the s. currently, four states have hate crime statutes for both sexual orientation and gender identity. an additional states have hate crime laws for sexual orientation. laws protecting individuals from discrimination also vary. twelve states offer protection for gender identity and recognize sexual orientation. of these states, states offer both and four recognize sexual orientation. eighteen states also provide protection from discrimination for sexual orientation and gender identity in the areas of housing and employment. seventeen of these states also offer protection for accessing public accommodations. the states are alabama, arkansas, georgia, kentucky, louisiana, tennessee, and texas. the law is immaterial as they already can refuse to conduct any marriage that they do not want to conduct. the states are texas, wisconsin, arizona, alabama, west virginia, tennessee, maine, oklahoma, louisiana and georgia. humanities , , of people ([ ], p. ). the federal bureau of investigation reports that lgbtq identified people have experienced the highest reported rate of hate crimes in the u.s. since [ , ]. stories of couples being beaten and harassed after the windsor and obergefell et al. decision have appeared throughout social media including one where two women were arrested in honolulu for holding hands [ ]. in the wake of the legal push for marriage, it is easy to forget that people experience discrimination and violence for doing simple things that opposite-sex couples can do openly, including holding hands or showing affection in public [ ]. one extreme example of this is the violence that happened at the pulse nightclub in orlando, fl. on june , people were killed and an additional were injured when one assailant entered the club and started shooting [ ]. this massacre is certainly an incident that caused the nation to pause and reflect on anti-lgbtq violence, yet little has changed in the wake of the event. . conclusions strategizing for social change: an additional approach rights-based strategies are long proven mechanisms for creating social change in the u.s. however, they are limited as they often simply grant access to something rather than creating a cultural shift [ , , , , , ]. many note that despite the civil rights act of , violence and discrimination continue in communities of color. rates of incarceration for african and latino/a americans remain at proportionally higher rates than whites. the black lives matter movement's efforts have shown that, people of color are dying at the hands of the police at significantly higher rates than whites [ , , , , ]. additional legal actions need to occur to ensure that rights are being honored. continued efforts on many levels must take effect in order to create a lasting cultural shift. this is evident in the rapid anti-lgbtq backlash that has happened since the obergefell et al. decision. it is important to celebrate the significance of the right for same-sex couples to marry. it also remains necessary to continue to organize across a multiplicity of factors affecting lgbtq individuals’ lives including the impact of racism, classism, sexism, nationalism, ageism, issues related to varying abilities, religious intolerance and xenophobia. as this article is being written, there is a tremendous, often violent, backlash against lgbtq individuals. community gathering places are disappearing partially due to the impact of assimilation, and many politicians are using anti-lgbtq rhetoric and proposed legislation as a foundation for their personal success. for lgbtq individuals, the cost of marriage and increasing ‘acceptability’ encourage people to ‘pass’ or ‘cover,’ and to hide their lgbtq selves, thus eroding away lgbtq communities and culture. “there is no collective lesbian and gay past, there is only the straight-defined assimilationist future” ([ ], p. ). any protection from discrimination or mistreatment due to social status is based on state-by-state laws and in some cases, city or town ordinances. limited protection exists at the federal level. the new republican administration and legislature are promoting an anti-lgbt agenda that includes supporting conversation therapy for lgbt youth, a repeal of same-sex marriage rights and various protections from discrimination or violence. rights-based change is essential to achieve needed legal protections, yet they often fall short of addressing other needs. after obergefell, in an interview with evan wolfson, he was asked what his next steps were going to be. wolfson noted that “we’ve now achieved our goal. so we will, in a matter of months, shut down” [ ]. he discussed the need to continue to “harness the power of the marriage win” and to keep working on lgbtq issues, but failed to recognize the loss of the network that was created via the “freedom to marry” organization. without a means to keep those involved together, the coalition died. cornel west reminds us to take heed as “the fundamental forms of social misery in american society can be neither adequately addressed nor substantially transformed within the context of existing legal apparatuses” ([ ], p. ). why did ‘freedom to marry’ not restructure and become a coalition that works on numerous issues facing lgbtq individuals? certainly, wolfson is clear that marriage was the major barrier to cross. this reflects the limits of the marriage campaign, humanities , , of of a rights-based approach and a leadership focused on a goal that is most beneficial to them rather than what lgbtq people need. marriage only recognizes certain types of families and a specific kind of relationship. the campaign has “only been fighting for families that look exactly like the ideal of a straight family.” it ignores the “structural dimension of how these decisions give people access to certain cultural institutions,” which is limiting and often the source of discrimination ([ , , ]; [ ], p. ; [ , , ]). there is nothing that must change in these social systems except to grant access to a few more people. urvashi vaid notes that improved access does not transform into equality, “civil rights do not change the social order in dramatic ways; they change only the privileges of the group asserting those rights” ([ ], p. ). i suggest that the addition of a new framework for organizing, and a shift in the mindset and approach to creating change is essential. economist amartya sen has argued that people’s capabilities must be taken into account when addressing human rights issues [ ]. the basic premise is that the ‘one size fits all’ approach fails to adjust for differences in people’s lives. by paying attention to what “people are able to do and be”, it can bring us closer to “understanding the barriers societies have erected against full justice” ([ ], p. ). martha nussbaum states, “the language of capabilities gives important precision and supplementation to the language of rights” ([ ], p. ). under the context of human rights, which places emphasis on “people’s choice and autonomy”, capabilities focus on choice, therefore people can decide what is important to them rather than having the decision made for them ([ ], p. ). for example, if a capabilities approach were applied to the push for same-sex marriage, perhaps a parallel campaign working on getting enda approved would have occurred at the same time due to lgbtq people’s needs. or if organizers learned that a community needed improved afternoon childcare, part of the campaign could include this issue as well. in doing so, a rights campaign is more inclusive. by working for community issues as well as their own, it is also more representative. communities strengthen while rights are advanced and are ideally better able to respond to future needs. nussbaum argues that social justice can be achieved if the capabilities approach is expanded to include “ten central human capabilities as central requirements of a life with dignity” ([ ], p. ). the addition of these specific capabilities reflects a necessary shift in mindset; they include “being able to live to the end of human life of normal length,” . . . “being able to move freely from place to place; to be secure against violent assault” . . . and “to love those who love and care for us” ([ ], p. ). if these tenets were embraced already, perhaps transgender people would have the right to use the public facilities of their choice in north carolina. it would have been more difficult to access weapons used in the pulse shooting, and same-sex couples would not feel social pressure to marry or conform to specific narrow definitions of family. currently, most of these freedoms are not guaranteed and are often violated in numerous areas of people’s lives. for lgbtq individuals, there is added stress and uncertainty tied to living life in the open or quietly. the complexities of living in a society designed for others is definitely experienced by people of color, the young and elderly, individuals with disabilities, non-christians, immigrants, and many others who do not quite meet the cultural expectations of fitting into mainstream u.s. society. at issue are the types of strategies used for creating social change and who or what entity determines the place to focus efforts at addressing social injustice. angela davis states that “people have massively and collectively organized for change, and the world we live in today, however many problems remain, is the result of those movements” ([ ], p. ). now that the celebration of achieving rights for same-sex marriage has happened, it is time to get back to work, to not just organize but to also mobilize; to support social justice efforts across the u.s. and beyond due to the new crises in the nation, including the election of donald trump and the goal of republicans to eliminate much rights-based legislation [ , ]. coalition building is the key to successful social the “central human capabilities” are: . life, . bodily health, . bodily integrity, . senses, imagination and thought, . emotions, . practical reason, . affiliation, . other species, . play, . control over one’s environment ([ ], pp. – ). humanities , , of change; one cannot work solely on issues that benefit a select few and expect deep meaningful change to occur. denis goldberg reminds us to work from a personal place of “respect for others’ dignity” and to not tire in our efforts at achieving social justice. as nelson mandela stated, “to be free, it is not enough to throw off one’s chains. one must live one’s life so that one respects and advances the freedom of others.” ([ ], p. ). at this moment, it is imperative that we eliminate the silo approach to organizing, that we unite as communities, build coalitions, and work to improve all lives. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. references . erik eckholm. “the same-sex couple who got a marriage license in .” new york times. august . available online: http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/the-same-sex-couple-who-got-a-marriage- license-in- .html?_r= (accessed on june ). . david l. chambers. “couples: marriage, civil union, and domestic partnership.” in creating change: sexuality, public policy, and civil rights. edited by john d’emilio, william b. turner and urvashi vaid. new york: st. martin’s press, , pp. – . . eric marcus. making history: the 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an abridged version of this interview previously appeared in valeurs actuelles on july , , under the title “comment le ‘nouvel an- tiracisme’ a banalisé le racisme anti-blanc.” the interview was conducted by bastien lejeune and is published here by permission of pierre-andré taguieff. in the wake of what happened in the united states, some people in france are defacing statues and calling for the removal of statesmen who made our history—notably colbert. has anti-racism become a totalitarianism? the major phenomenon, whose development has been observed since the s, is the ideological corruption of anti-racism, which gave rise to what i have long called “pseudo anti-racism,” of which the so-called “new anti- racism,” also known as “political anti-racism,” is only the latest figure. * translated by pierre schwarzer. . pierre-andré taguieff, “comment le ‘nouvel antiracisme’ a banalisé le racisme anti-blanc,” valeurs actuelles, july , , https://www.valeursactuelles.com/clubvaleurs/ politique/comment-le-nouvel-antiracisme-banalise-le-racisme-anti-blanc- . pierre-andré taguieff behind the globalized “new anti-racism”: a trivialized anti-white racism this is an open access article under the terms of the creative commons attribution- noderivatives . international (cc by-nd . ) license. to view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nd/ . . english translation © the telos- paul piccone institute, http://www.telosinstitute.net. telos (winter ): – doi: . / www.telospress.com behind the globalized “new anti-racism” the “fight against racism” has been monopolized by minorities calling themselves “non-white,” only to be imperceptibly transformed into anti- white racism. by the fall of , i had coined the term “anti-jewish anti-racism,” which proved to be predictive. today, we are in the presence of “anti- white anti-racism,” in other words, a new form of politically and culturally acceptable political and cultural racism, which its promoters refuse, of course, to recognize as such. this denial is based on a sophistic argument, consisting in a dogmatic and simplistic definition of racism that makes the existence of anti-white racism theoretically impossible. this anti-racist definition of racism, fabricated by revolutionary afri- can american activists in the late s, is known under various names: “institutional racism,” “structural racism,” or “systemic racism.” it is not a conceptualization of racism but a symbolic weapon that reduces rac- ism to white racism that is supposed to be inherent in “white society” or “white domination,” which is the only form of domination recognized and denounced by neo-anti-racists. therefore, anti-white racism, “by defini- tion,” cannot exist. this is an article of faith included in a new anti-racist catechism. this is a caricature of the holistic vision of social phenomena: whites are “systemically” guilty of racism because they are white. and blacks are “systemically” innocent victims of racism (“white” by definition) because they are black. it follows that the attitudes and behaviors of individuals are entirely determined by the “system” and are thus dis-empowered. individ- ual responsibility is evacuated: it is “the system” that directs everything, the thoughts, feelings, and actions of individuals being mere puppets. this militant definition of racism, known as “structural” or “systemic,” further implies a dogmatic definition of anti-racism as the fight against white racism, and nothing else. and if said racism is “systemic,” then anti- racist action must aim at destroying the “system” that produces racism by its very functioning. definitional sleight of hand has thus removed the very possibility of anti-white racism and conferred a revolutionary final telos on the anti-racist struggle. this is why marxists of all persuasions welcome these anti-racist anti-white mobilizations, in which they see the revolution on the march. in its globalized form, this anti-racism has become an extraordinarily symbolic weapon used by ethno-religious groups presenting themselves as victims of “white hegemony.” anti-white anti-racism is racist anti-racism: pierre-andré taguieff such is the oxymoron that sums up the extreme theoretical and rhetorical confusion which we are facing. what is the objective pursued by these “pseudo anti-racists”? these organized active minorities have no other project than destroying a supposedly “white” society, thought to be inherently structured by an un- reformable “systemic racism.” “whiteness” is the name of the cursed new race, guilty of slavery, colonialism, imperialism, and racism. this neo-rac- ism of pseudo anti-racists postulates that every white person is a dominant and every dominant is white. we are indeed in the presence of a new rac- ist vision of the world, which has borrowed its language from anti-racism, not without distorting it to adapt it to the cultural war against the “white” world. a current made up of maniacs and vigilantes of difference finds its inner coherence in designating a single target: “whites” or “the white man.” its objectives can be summed up in three words: to intimidate, to make people feel guilty, and to purify [intimider, culpabiliser, épurer]. the frenetic desire to eliminate, the old revolutionary dream of the clean slate, a dream of purifying violence, has found its latest translation in a his- torical and cultural “ousting,” added to the political “ousting” by far-left populists, a symbolic form of a desire to put political leaders to death. in the behavior of contemporary pseudo anti-racist movements, there is a permanent oscillation between tribal or identity “pride,” a banal ex- pression of spontaneous ethnocentrism (“we are the best”), and the posture of the victim, translated by a discourse of misery (“we are innocent vic- tims of systemic discrimination” or “governmental anti-blackness”) fuel- ing resentment and a desire for revenge, most often dressed in calls for “revolution” or the destruction of the “system.” this is enough to seduce the survivors of the communist catastrophe, who are in the process of fab- ricating a new ideological product of synthesis: racialized marxism. what should we think of the duty of memory or remembrance? after the “right to be different,” it is now the turn of the “duty of remem- brance” to be subjected to an ideological and rhetorical corruption that transforms it into an instrument of cultural conquest and disqualification of opponents. by engorging the memory of victims of a certain group and staging a competition of ethnic victim memories, the pseudo anti-racists’ duty to remember takes on the meaning of a duty to destroy the collec- tive memory of the other, the dominant, the oppressor, and the exploiter, behind the globalized “new anti-racism” in short, the “racist,” “white” by nature (the color of skin) and culture (“whiteness” as a social construction). the memory of victims tends to be monopolized by “non-whites,” but even further, anti-white “memoricide” is an item on today’s agenda. collective identities are not treated in the same way. while black identity is celebrated in its victimized representation, french identity, for example, is denied or criminalized, reduced by postcolonial ideologues to a fantastical legacy of france’s colonialist past and its implication in slavery. the pseudo anti-racist cultural purification can be seen as the un- anticipated avatar of racist purification. the irony in this ideological tour de force is almost to be praised, given that it manages to pass off a move- ment based on the essentialization and criminalization of a “race,” the whites, and thus a racist movement, as an anti-racist movement. and this, to the applause of a large part of the media. can the import of racial issues from the united states succeed in france? a politico-cultural import, however mimetic it may seem, always takes place in the form of a translation, which does not come without an ad- justment to the new context, that is, an import never occurs without distortions or displacements. in the jargon in vogue since the s, we speak of “hybridization.” unlike the united states, france is not a multi-communitarian society, and its secular republican tradition, which aims to establish equal opportunities and continues to produce citizens with equal rights, prevents imported racial conflicts from taking on a national dimension. but the desire for racial cleansing is easily export- able. by burning the historical-cultural past of the other, criminalized as “racist,” pseudo anti-racists dream of a world without whites, except as minorities, marginalized, inferior. the dream of a great “de-whitening” of france reactivates the imaginary of the witch hunt, transformed into a hunt for white wizards and all the symbols of “whiteness.” through the cumulative effects of the black lives matter movement, a new ra- cial order is taking shape on the horizon, based on what could be called “non-white privilege,” which is already reflected in the affirmative ac- tion measures demanded by decolonial activists, which are supposed to reverse a systemic discrimination. whites are both under constant sus- picion of “racism” and condemned to penitential conduct. they must atone for their ontological fault: being white. this disturbing prospect can only fuel the fears of citizens and thus give rise to a counter-movement pierre-andré taguieff (anti-anti-racism), which would turn french society into a battlefield, on which a racialized civil war would take place. a dark horizon. one must be attentive to certain highly significant crossroads of pos- tures and claims that are part of anti-white racism and radical anti-zion- ism, denying the right of existence to israel, which is today’s dominant form of the hateful rejection of jews. during the month of june , in france and belgium, graffiti, slogans, and appeals launched during so-called “anti-racist” demonstrations testify to this: “death to whites,” “dirty jews! black is beautiful,” “black is beautiful,” bds posters (boy- cott, divest, and sanction), more or less clear calls for the destruction of israel (“from the river to the sea, palestine will be free”), the chanting of the sloganized anti-jewish song referring to the battle of khaybar ( to jews with their throats cut by the prophet) and often sung by islamists: “khaybar khaybar ya yahoud, jaysh muhammad sawfa ya’oud” (khar, khaybar oh jews, the army of muhammad is coming”), etc., etc. the “new anti-racism” is both anti-jewish and anti-white. but this new veiled racism is also covered by the soothing (and sometimes lenient) justifica- tions made by the “useful idiots” that are the intellectuals of the extreme left, always waiting for a victorious evening, wherever it comes from. if one wanted to transform the meager troops of white suprema- cism into large battalions fighting against “white genocide,” one would only have to favor the multiplication of violent pseudo anti-racist dem- onstrations with anti-white themes, which function as provocations, and therefore as incitements to violent reaction. what is likely to arise in the french population is, based on these spectacles of french subversion, the fear of black supremacism assaulting “white” societies. showing civic re- sponsibility means taking seriously the psychosocial phenomenon called a “self-fulfilling prophecy”: the so-called “new anti-racism,” by dint of provocations, could give birth to a true anti-black racism. how would you describe the french society torn by the traoré affair? in france, extremism is everywhere, multiplying and creating conflicts on top of existing divisions, even though everything should be done, in the aftermath of the health crisis, to make national unity possible and prepare for the country’s economic redeployment. while extremists are every- where because they are visible in the media, they remain ultra-minorities. for the “radicals” of anti-white anti-racism, the atrocious filmed death of george floyd was a providential event, capable of mobilizing mili- behind the globalized “new anti-racism” tant masses worldwide by emotion and not by ideas. the exploitation of the floyd affair took place in france to the benefit of the traoré affair, set up from scratch by the family and “radical” militants, notably from leftist islamic movements or “anti-anti-blackness” small groups hiding their leu- kophobia poorly. hence this racialized manichaeism takes the place of a new revolutionary ideology via the literal denunciation of “white power.” but these unprecedented mobilizations remind us above all of the exis- tence of something greatly forgotten: the force of passions. it is emotion that is the great fuel of the revolutionary struggle. the reaction of the dis- tinguished revolutionary angela davis, not hiding her divine surprise in the guardian, is highly significant in this respect: “we have never sus- tained demonstrations of such magnitude and diversity before. . . . this time may be the right one.” moving beyond the struggle against “police violence” and “sys- temic racism,” the british branch of the black lives matter movement (blmuk), which is very active on social networks, has defined an inter- sectional revolutionary project whose objective is “to dismantle imperi- alism, capitalism, white supremacy, patriarchy, and state structures that disproportionately harm blacks in britain and the world.” extravagant as it is, this racialized revolutionary utopia has attracted more than , donors who, in two weeks, deposited more than £ million via crowd- funding. consider the signs of the coming revolution. groups of violent censors are debunking or defiling statues, while militant intellectuals, sectarian minds converted into the professionally outraged, intervene in public to legitimize the violence, not without denouncing, condemning and intimi- dating those who resist them. they call for censorship and launch witch hunts dressed in noble sentiments. “the” enemy is “whiteness”! uncul- tured fanatics launch into the ideological market, shamelessly producing, in anachronism, major polemical amalgams between french historical fig- ures and anti-black racism: colbert, schoelcher, faidherbe, jules ferry, etc. the retrospective criminalization is a mode of intellectualizing the passions, particularly resentment and a desire for revenge. the objective is to inculcate and trivialize the shame of being “white.” intimidation by active minorities operates in the media space without encountering re- sistance. in france, the “new anti-racism,” a tool of intimidation and an instrument of media agendas (fabricating a muse in the figure of assa traoré), is also a matter of business and marketing. pierre-andré taguieff the privatization of the censorship of all things “white” by groups of activists and the big brands follows the movement. for it is indeed a fash- ion, therefore a passing but powerful conformism. “race,” skin color, and the “anti-racist” flag, waved at the top by tartuffes and at the bottom by violent sectarians, are fashionable. the big brands are on the march, start- ing with coca-cola or l’oréal, which has decided to remove the words “white,” “whitening,” and “clear” from the description of its cosmetic products designed to lighten the skin. as these actions of lexical cleansing show, the merchandising of anti-white anti-racism is on the march. it is a mixture of a grotesque, instinctual gregariousness and a mercantile spirit. what is striking is the alliance of fanaticism, hypermoralism, conformism, and advertising frenzy. those who shamelessly play on the—legitimate—indignation aroused by the murder of george floyd exploit the emotion stirred on a global scale. they built themselves an ideology seeking to be immune from all the criticism masterfully orchestrated by active minorities. it follows that to challenge their magical “new anti-racism” is to expose oneself to the accusation of racism. these “anti-racist” activists are always right: intimi- dation has the last word. the activists of the adama traoré committee can thus accuse the french police and justice system of being “racist” and behaving accordingly. an advisor to emmanuel macron revealed to me that the president had read your books to better understand the danger weighing on the french universalist model, and that your writings had “nourished” it. do you feel that the president is inspired by you in his management of this strange period? to put it another way, does he seem to have realized the extent of the danger? i believe that, in recent months, president macron has become aware of the danger represented by the progression and trivialization of decolonial ideology in france, which, under the guise of a ragingly vindictive pseudo anti-racism, has taken hold in a certain number of universities and in the world of culture before taking matters to the streets, on the occasion of the artificial twists and turns of the traoré affair, to aggravate the conflictual fragmentation of civil society and criminalize the republican institutions that guarantee national unity. what is of great concern is that this crim- inalization extends to the entire history of france, to its great political figures and its great authors, to its monuments as well as to its artistic and literary works. behind the globalized “new anti-racism” the obsession with skin color has become commonplace in extreme left-wing circles, as a result of decolonial indoctrination. in these circles, the racial decoding of political life is a reflex reaction. the lfi deputy danielle obono, close to the indigènes de la république, reacted to the nomination of jean castex to the post of prime minister on july , , with a tweet of inclusive writing beginning as follows: “profile: white, male, right-wing technocrat, and big moonlighter.” when he declared, according to comments reported by le monde on june , , that “the academic world . . . has encouraged the ethnici- zation of the social question,” president macron merely reacted with an observation that can hardly be criticized except for its globalizing char- acter. it is obviously not all academics who have favored the use of ethno-racialist approaches in the analysis of social phenomena. racial- ist indoctrination has only been carried out by teachers confusing their task with their political engagement in this or that indigenist, postcolonial, or decolonial movement. by allusively calling into question the respon- sibility of certain extreme left-wing academics, in particular a number of specialists in the social sciences—a sector that has professionalized the teaching of “radical ideas” of all kinds (notably in “gender theory”)—the president has only appropriated the critical analyses formulated for sev- eral years on the postcolonial and decolonial aberrations of the university system that were until now neglected by the political authorities. by in- tervening in this field, president macron has broken the silence and made a notable ideological-political turnaround. those who felt targeted re- sponded by raising their voices. but indignation, especially when feigned, is not an argument. in this respect, as the results of the ifop-fiducial poll conducted on june – , , for cnews and sud radio , the positions taken by the president are in line with the majority opinion in france. it should be em- phasized that a new cleavage is emerging in french public opinion: % of french people believe that anti-white racism is a reality (already in : “a fairly widespread phenomenon in france”), while % of them claim that there is “state racism” and % that there is “white privilege.” more- over, % of french people believe that personalities accused of slavery or racism belong to our history and that we should neither withdraw their statutes nor remove their names from the streets bearing them, against only % who think that this would be justified. moreover, % of respon- dents believe that this issue should be debated on a case-by-case basis. pierre-andré taguieff the french are therefore far from rallying to the inflammatory slogan- eering of decolonialists and indigenous people, who cannot bear to see the reality disturbing their big certainties about “white privilege,” namely, that public schools and universities promote social advancement, especially that of immigrant girls who thus reap the double benefit of emancipation from community constraints and social and professional integration. this is a reminder that the republican meritocracy excludes all racism as well as all separatism based on religious or ethno-racial grounds. but we must point out a paradox: the republican system also produces citizens who, like the educated assa traoré or rokhaya diallo, turn against the repub- lic, whom they accuse of “systemic racism.” ideological blindness or bad faith? certainly, a mixture of both. perhaps this is one of the figures of a more general democratic para- dox, which can be formulated as follows: the more social integration pro- gresses, the more the feeling of being discriminated against is aggravated. despite starting with a neoliberalism sprinkled with a mystical euro- peanism, president macron seems to have understood the urgency of reaffirming the principles of the republican tradition, inseparable from a universalist conception of citizenship and a well-understood national feel- ing, excluding xenophobia as much as multiculturalist (or more precisely multi-communitarian) utopia, and clearly rejecting the intimidating pos- tures of censors, purifiers, and “debunkers” who have professionalized the hatred of france and everything french. we can only welcome this, with- out rallying to his policy. in particular, it remains for president macron to rid himself of the confusion caused by his references both to national sov- ereignty, to be reinvented or regenerated, and to european sovereignty, which is simply a chimera. civilizational states and liberal empire—bound to collide? the annual telos-paul piccone institute conference september – , ◆ new york, ny keynote speaker: christopher coker, london school of economics civilization seems to be the new pivot of international relations. brexit, trump, and the resurgence of russia and china have put culture and civilizational identity at the heart of both domestic politics and foreign policy. from the identity politics that is sweeping much of the west to the pushback against the supposed universalism of the west’s liberal empire in much of the non-western world, civilizational norms are as important as military might and economic prosperity. at a time of heightened tensions between great powers that view themselves as guarantors of civilizational identity, are civilizational states and the western liberal empire bound to collide? this conference aims to bring greater conceptual clarity to current debates by examining some of the key terms, notably the relationship between “culture” and “civilization” and between “values” and “norms,” as well as by exploring practical ways for civiliza- tions to enter into a meaningful dialogue with one another. visit www.telosinstitute.net/conference / for more details about the conference. about the telos-paul piccone institute the telos-paul piccone institute develops new ideas for addressing the challenges of modernity worldwide through the resources of particular communities and tradi- tions. centered around a unique international group of scholars and practitioners, the institute combines critical analyses of issues of modernity with a sense for alter- native approaches in order to create innovative policy ideas. at the same time, the focus on communities and traditions grounds this vision in terms of local perspec- tives and decision-making. support our mission: become a member support our mission by becoming a member or by making a tax-deductible contri- bution to the telos-paul piccone institute. conference participation is reserved for institute members. visit www.telosinstitute.net/memberships/ for more details. www.telosinstitute.net critical theory for practical problems shepherdstown : race and faith shepherdstown : race and faith jack l. b. gohn the hopkins review, volume , number , winter , pp. - (review) published by johns hopkins university press doi: for additional information about this article [ access provided at apr : gmt from carnegie mellon university ] https://doi.org/ . /thr. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ https://doi.org/ . /thr. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ reviews solos, whipping off fouettés, unfolding her leg in a gorgeous supported développé, kicking out left and right, and whirling in a series of supported turns. diamonds was the last of balanchine’s “white ballets,” dance’s classical apparitions of heavenly perfection. as the finale of jewels, it transforms emeralds’ unfulfilled yearning and rubies’ symbiotic partnership into a grand vision of human potential, like that of william blake: what is it men in women do require? the lineaments of gratified desire. what is it women do in men require? the lineaments of gratified desire. the ideal and the actual fuse in jewels’ final moment, when the cavalier kneels to the ballerina one last time, and they divulge their dazzling secrets to a gratified world. —jay rogoff shepherdstown : race and faith i’ve been following the contemporary american theater festival for six seasons (often in these pages). produced each july in shepherdstown, wv, it focuses on new or nearly new full-length conventional plays (as distinct from musicals or from the “theater pieces” more associated with fringe theater) by contemporary american playwrights, mostly of the emerging variety (though there were productions of newer plays by the well-estab- lished sam sheppard and neil labute in recent seasons). in other words, this is a proving ground for fare that may be headed for off-broadway and then regional theater, not for either broadway or fringe festivals. catf provides thoroughly professional conditions: equity casts, top-notch sets, excellent acoustics, lavishness of costumes where it’s called for––in short (to borrow a phrase from the vocabulary of self-help books) it dresses the shows for the new york or regional theater job they want. there is a seriousness about the enterprise that might seem a bit conser- vative to some: no messing around with nontraditional casting, nothing fringe-y, limited fourth-wall violations. those things might appear to some to be major components of the future of the american theater, but catf exemplifies the present, a present which is not at all ready to con- sider itself vieux jeux. and in many ways, especially in the area of race, the festival aggressively pushes the envelope. about half the shows in the last two seasons, for instance, had major and often challenging racial themes, and many of the playwrights were nonwhite. this season, without a doubt, the most racially charged entry was the niceties, by eleanor burgess. the setup was simple: at a northeast- ern university that strongly resembles yale, janine, a middle-aged history the hopkins review professor, goes over a paper with zoe, an african american student. they differ, politely at first. zoe’s thesis is that the american revolution was a moderate one not because of the statesmanship of the founding fathers but because those who waged it had no desire to right the wrong of slav- ery and fix the fundamental problems of american society. janine demurs. she argues that historians must work with the pri- mary data available, and that everything not found in such data must be ignored. because nothing that might support zoe’s conclusions stands out in the primary data, she reasons, there is no good reason to subscribe to zoe’s conclusions. janine’s initial lines come across as measured, rational, and supremely composed. zoe’s initial riposte, almost as measured, is that this neat construct consigns us to relying entirely on the voices of white men, history’s winners, who had a nearly exclusive ability to create the record and were unreliable narrators. to zoe, janine’s utter dismissal of her theory ignores self-evident truths of human nature, which should be evidence enough. as the discussion grows more heated, leading to a crisis that leaks out of the professor’s office, it becomes both a proxy for and a microcosm of the larger disputes around race in our country. in the second act (i almost wrote “the second round”) zoe accuses janine of not being a suit- able teacher. when janine responds she earned her position, zoe reminds janine of all the reasons certain potential competitors may have fallen by the wayside on the way to earning that position: “[f]irst came years of slavery, and then came a hundred years of segregation, and then came a deliberate and systematic attempt to exclude black people from good school districts and good jobs and to lock them up or hunt them down for doing things white people do every day. i need you to say that whatever else it stands for, america has systematically persecuted one part of its population, in a way that benefits the other part. in a way that has benefit- ted you. . . . you won fair and square cuz everyone else had lead boots on.” the fight culminates with zoe demanding that janine make personal repa- rations for the illegitimate benefit she has received. with the positions of the parties so lucidly laid out, this rather shocking demand seems––less so. there is little doubt who burgess thinks the winner is. and that is a mistake. the unwritten rule for shows that are truly duels of ideas gener- ally provide that each side will get enough good lines so that the spectator can reasonably come out agreeing with either. the dispute in freud’s last session, for instance, could be called for either sigmund freud or c. s. lewis. burgess opts for the path less traveled and shows one of the women as the clear winner. the imperfection is more than that, however. the polemic victory for one of the characters means there should be no need to tilt the balance by any other means. nonetheless, burgess puts her thumb on the scale, and has the losing party also act corruptly at two or three points. it seems inconsistent with this party’s character everywhere else in the play. it would be better, i believe, if the winner had emerged on her own terms reviews from the clash of views and identities, making this a contest of admirable people fated by skin color and history alone to be adversaries. this is a minor flaw in a show that will send you out with your mind abuzz: it’s a clash of nearly perfectly opposed titans. and there are lots of different ways to deliver the lines. i look forward to seeing other produc- tions with other actresses; the parts are that juicy. (that said, robin walsh as janine and margaret ivey as zoe gave these roles a great sendoff.) the other two shows with race at or near their center lacked the nice- ties’ crystalline clarity. welcome to fear city, by kara lee corthron, was more ambitious, a look at the bronx years ago, a time and place where a lot of things happened, and one vitally important thing, hip-hop, came into being. other occurrences included the tightening of the financial screws on lower-middle-class black families in the bronx, and the shut- ting down of economic opportunity, with attendant impacts upon living arrangements, health, and emotional well-being. they included urban decay and what was euphemistically called urban renewal, which focused largely on the destruction of buildings, i.e. the cityscape within which black families were still trying to live their lives. also the rise of aggressive policing of minority young men via endless stops and searches. this mate- rial is all presented in the midst of a loose, black-family dramedy. hence, we see: e (dyllon burnside), a young man with underemployed mechanical aptitude, afflicted by gay impulses he does not want to deal with and the urge to make some kind of mark in a worse-than-indifferent world; e’s mother wanda (cherene snow), who can’t safely take in her family because of section housing rules but does it anyway, and whose respiratory problems mandate a visit to the er that her finances will not permit; e’s sister neesy (adrian kiser), academically gifted but not smart in love, who had followed a man to california only to be ditched, and has now stumbled home to support herself with topless waitressing; and e’s friend cheky (vincent ramirez), whose distinction is that he has a “j-o-b” as a ups deliveryman, but lives only for the block parties where he serves as a dj. their joint frustrations wind them all up tighter and tighter until they must find release. we see e slipping into nefarious activities connected with “urban renewal,” as he is observed sardonically by a rat (yaegel t. welch), and fighting to have his rap poetry attended to (his delivery is not very good). we see neesy flirting with another potential mr. wrong. we see wanda’s health declining. and we see cheky scrappily going on assembling his career, sparking dance parties with stolen electronic gear. meanwhile, fire is literally consuming the neighborhood. and in the midst of all this, we witness performances of this new rhyme chanted over rhythm tracks as the ensemble dances. we can feel how this artistic form responds to the pressure inside each of them. the end of the first act communicates the power of this aborning musical style in a performance that involves the audience especially well in the confined space of a small theater-in-the-round. this was a play, not a musical, but the proto-hip-hop performance was recognizably a first-half closer. the hopkins review the play would have worked fine if it had stopped there. the second act is not as strong, and, comparing what was on stage with what was in the script, it became apparent that that act was more of a work in progress than a finished product. among the defects was a lengthy transfiguration sequence, where the ensemble devolved first into a sort of enactment of white racist tropes, a minstrel show version of themselves, and then (if i’m understanding correctly) a sort of surreal essential version of them- selves, confused by gibberish talk. then there was a bring-to-date on the characters. finally, there was a kind of flash forward in which subjects like ferguson and black lives matter were conjured up, leading to a moment where one character exhorted the audience to declare its solidarity with raised fists––we did, and we walked out happy because we did. two observations about that raised-fist moment. first, as already described, it was the culmination of some sloppy playwriting. second, it still worked. the crowd with whom i saw the play, mostly senior and white like me, would not seem like an obvious target to have been solicited for the gesture, nor an obvious demographic for cooperating and joining in, especially when (to convey the request) the fourth wall was broken (which in itself always produces awkwardness). but even through the chaos, the show had built up a momentum and an appeal, especially through late iterations of song and dance, that transcended everyone’s identities. at that moment we all came from the bronx. also, we were crazy about those characters, and wanted to say a rousing goodbye to them. i hope the sloppiness gets fixed, though; corthron should lose the transfiguration and the deliberate gibberish talk near the end. i would also lose the ferguson and the black lives matter material, which is worth- while but badly anachronistic in a play intended to capture a moment years back. instead, i’d urge corthron to focus on her own title, or perhaps better on what lies behind it. there are two different kinds of fear referenced in the play. one is the fear that informed a real-life pamphlet further described by corthron in the program notes entitled welcome to fear city: a survivor’s guide for visitors. it was handed out to new york airport visitors. as the rat summarizes: “some corn-fed meatball from iowa is in fear city limits just by goin’ to broadway to see fuckin’ annie.” call it white fear for short. it is overblown and foolish. then there’s the black variety: e’s fear of asking a boss for a raise, and his fear of doing too much in his questionable cooperation with urban renewal, and wanda’s fear of going to the er. where exactly corthron is going with this theme, how- ever, is not clear, because black fear is not always unreasonable, and often responds reasonably to the objective situation. the four central characters all end up transcending something by the end. maybe fear is the wrong word for it. their transcendence is what mat- ters and what we admired. i am certain that the characters’ refusals to give up on themselves or on the bronx, expressed in, but not only in, the music, is what the audience was identifying with when it raised its collective fist. reviews in his recent memoir dispatches from pluto, british writer richard grant, trying to suss out race relations in the mississippi delta region, proposes this formula: “in the south whites didn’t mind how close blacks got, so long as they didn’t get too high socially and economically, and . . . in the north, it was the other way around.” the town of byhalia, a poor exurb of memphis, lies one county over from the delta, and the play to which evan linder has given the town’s name seems to reflect those same delta racial dynamics. this might be surprising, because in the annals of civil rights struggles, byhalia is mainly known for a traumatic moment in when a police killing of a young black man there ignited lengthy boycotts and protests, referenced in the play. but, at least by , the time of the play, things are much more nuanced, and enough water has flowed under the bridge so that a white character does not even recognize the name of the young black man who was shot. byhalia, mississippi depicts instead a place where blacks and whites can be close friends or lovers without anyone commenting on it much except when things go really wrong. it’s not giving away a great deal to say what goes wrong here, since that cat escapes from the bag in the second scene: interracial adultery leading to an unexpected biracial child. and a good deal of the play is given over to what one might call the geographic ques- tion: whether the white mother should even attempt to raise such a child in byhalia. but the bigger question is marital: can the white mother who cheated and her estranged husband (who cheated first) reunite despite all the hurt––and can that husband accept fatherhood under these circum- stances? the comic tone throughout suggests how these questions will be resolved, but, as in most romantic stories, getting there is the main fun. these are not generic romantic characters. the wife, laurel (jessica savage), describes herself as a “redneck momma,” and the pejorative label certainly fits her husband jim (jason babinsky) as well. their story is race- and class-specific. jim is a weed-smoking, not-really-employed guy who does not look like much of a catch, certainly not what his sardonic jesus- loving mother-in-law celeste (hollis mccarthy) was hoping for for her daughter. even with laurel’s job as a schoolteacher, she relies on celeste to pay the power bill. laurel summarizes the situation just before the baby is born: “things are not good, jim! . . . things are never going to be good. and you know what? . . . i’m good with things never being good. i’m fine with it.” but of course the revelation of the baby’s race and history is bound to destabilize even this already unstable structure of a marriage. if laurel is going to rescue it from complete collapse, she is going to require a great deal of centeredness and luck––and jim. the path back for this couple will bring jim into uneasy reliance upon his black best friend karl (yaegel t. welch), and laurel into confrontation with her old black frenemy ayesha, laurel’s boss’s wife (adrian kiser). in these encounters, playwright linder seems to be confirming but also refin- ing richard grant’s aperçu. face-to-face, the racial differences hardly need to be mentioned and play only a small role in how these characters deal the hopkins review with each other. but the social environment in which these pairs find each other matters a lot. there may not be room enough for someone like karl to stay friends with someone like jim. and ayesha can neither understand nor tolerate the prospect of laurel raising her half-black baby in byhalia. somehow the challenges posed by karl and by ayesha must be met. it emerges that the strongest card laurel has to play, with both ayesha and jim (and also with her mother) is simply her unflinching determina- tion to stay put in byhalia. there is no suggestion that there is any magic in byhalia itself; there may be magic, though, in just staying put and going on with one’s life plan, not deviating because of changed circumstances. the virtue of byhalia, mississippi lies precisely in its modesty. it pre- scribes no rules, apart from loving one another and telling the truth, for getting through a marital and race-inflected social crisis in a small town; it simply shows how one not-overwhelmingly admirable couple does it. and at that, the true secret here may just be the sitcom-like jokes. those, and the blackout line at the very end of the play, which may bring a lump to the throat. of course the modesty of the play’s ambitions preclude it from making the hard observations about race of the two previously mentioned entries, but it does enable some presentation of the way things may actually work out on the ground a lot of the time. there are worse aspirations. the most ambitious play in this year’s festival may have been the smallest, a one-woman show called wild horses, by allison gregory. this comically indulgent reminiscence of youth, à la ah, wilderness! or a christmas story, during its roughly hour-and-a-half running time, covers much ground. the narrator recalls two -hour stretches of her life as a -year-old, but in them we find ourselves encountering very distinct characters, and dealing with themes as diverse as first encounters with alcohol and sex, strains in a parental marriage, animal welfare, sibling rivalry, teenage friendships and what the passage of the years can do to them, and, most of all, the simultaneous wonder and danger of encounter- ing, as gregory summarizes in the program notes, a teenager’s dilemma of having “so many needs” and “so little power.” this heady mix presents its own combination of wonder and danger, a novel’s worth of content shrunk to the size of a play, and presented through a single performer. that performer, kate udall, did a jaw-drop- ping job keeping all the characterizations separate and making us fall in love with her characters. i have mentioned the festival’s sometimes elaborate sets: sometimes wonder can be evoked by the relatively modest. here, designers jesse dreikosen and sam transleau did wonders by parking a camper van at one end of a theater in the (three-quarters) round. as the audience entered, it encountered not only normal raked seating on three sides, but also a few tables and stools in the middle where some of the spectators sat, and, at the far end, the camper fitted out as a working refreshment stand serving audience members until the action began. after udall’s character, identi- reviews fied only as the woman, entered, the camper became a swiss army knife of adaptability, serving in turn as basement bar, the side of a house, stash for props, and situs of a wild experiment in driving by the narrator’s ear- lier, completely untrained self. meanwhile, the space between the specta- tors at the tables became a range the woman could freely roam, rapidly changing orientation so that the great annoyance of theater in the round, speakers facing away from spectators, was minimized. and because the play was presented as an act of raconteur-dom anyway, which presup- poses an audience, there was no fourth-wall problem when the woman interacted with audience members (asking them, for instance, to hold her purse or turning one of them into a quondam steering wheel). have any teenager’s real-life few hours really been so full of incident? probably not, and the compression does take a toll on dramatic verisi- militude. one audience member i spoke with on the way out was clearly troubled by this. it did not bother me because “turning the accomplish- ment of many years into an hourglass” is what theater does, and shoving some of those accomplishments closer together in the time represented is a traditional move. what matters here is not the strictness of the account (in real life a raconteur putting a satisfying tale together is often apt to take just such liberties with the timeframe). the point is the group portrait of the youngsters (the woman’s younger self, her partners in crime zabby and skinny lynny, the callow young men who pursue them or whom they pursue, and the woman’s big sister, aka the favorite) in all their confusion, pain, and, most important, their exuberance and their desire to meet life head-on, even if they do not really know what that meeting will demand or entail. if the compression did not bother me as a dramatic strategy, it did trouble me a bit as dilution of message––as with fear city. with so many themes wandering around in a single play, there are likely to be some underdeveloped issues and some tonal dissonances; the drama in the par- ents’ lives, for instance, seemed a bit too sketchy, lacking explanation or depth. and because of the dominant ruefully comical tone set by the narra- tor’s own adolescent experiences, it was not really possible to assess how we were supposed to respond to the parents’ separate trials, which could have been either tragic or not, based on the limited evidence presented. (we get it and can forgive, of course, that a teen’s self-preoccupied mind may tune out the pain among adults in close proximity, but a storyteller does not enjoy the same privilege; the audience’s curiosity about all the major characters should ordinarily be satisfied.) likewise, the animal wel- fare piece came with too few explanations. it looked as if the protagonist and her friends had stumbled on a major piece of villainy, but maybe not, and in any event we did not learn much about the putative perpetrators. still, these are minor carps. this was my favorite of a very strong field. and speaking of overstuffed plays, that charge can certainly be laid at the feet of everything is wonderful, by chelsea marcantel, although the stuffing here was more philosophical and closer to tragedy. at the heart of the hopkins review the issues was the tension between the benevolence that religions preach and their response to apostates, a tension particularly vexing with largely closed, self-involved faiths like the amish. the more closed a community is, the harder it becomes for that community to live up to the benevolence it preaches, particularly towards those who have challenged the integrity of the community by leaving it. protection of the community boundar- ies tends to trump benevolence. and there is a problem at the opposite extreme as well: solicitude for a community’s boundaries may lead to too-ready reconciliation with those who have violated its standards but remained in communion. marcantel has dramatized these paradoxes in the context of an amish community. on the evidence of the play, the amish are generally peaceful and forgiving; indeed, we are introduced at the outset to eric (jason babin- sky), a young outsider who through negligence has done a terrible wrong to the community, and comes seeking forgiveness and healing, receiving plenty of both. the treatment we witness eric receiving provides a striking counterpart or counterpoint, as the case may be, to the community’s treatment of two other young violators of its standards, miri (jessica savage) and abram (lucky gretzinger). the difference in the treatment they receive is partly owing to the nature of miri’s and abram’s respective transgressions, but also depends upon how they relate to the community’s boundaries. miri, having left the community, has been excommunicated, so that she cannot sit at her family’s dinner table or sleep under its roof or touch them, a penalty which is as keenly felt by her family as by her. yet, as we eventually learn, she left only when those community boundaries failed to provide her meaningful protection or support in the light of a wrong done to her. abram’s failing is not revealed at once, but he has always stayed within the group, and has in consequence received the community’s abso- lution in a way that seems far too easy. in short, we are witnessing a situation where community sanctions, perhaps rational in the abstract, lead to irrationally unequal consequences. dramatically, this conflict cries out for someone to defend the commu- nity, to justify its ways. yet for better or for worse, the community, the antagonist which has created this ethical mess, is not directly represented. instead, there are only the three members of miri’s estranged family: sister ruth (lexi lapp), mother esther (hollis mccarthy), and father jacob (paul deboy). when we see the community meting out its inequitable justice, we see it happening only through them, and they too are victimized by it. they do what they do simply because it is what is laid down in the ordnung, the group’s unwritten rules. it is a code as unequal to the tests presented to it as is the code of military justice which forces captain vere to hang a virtuous young man in billy budd. and the ordnung is just as unapproachable and unchangeable in its abstractness as that code. the story here is, thank goodness, not billy budd; the conclusion will not prove quite so bleak. however, that statement must be followed imme- reviews diately by the acknowledgment that it is not easy to figure out what hap- pens in the conclusion. i spoke with a number of members of the audience about it, and none of us could work it out. the script makes the obscurity a little clearer, but there seem to be limits even on the page. throughout the play, there are shifts back and forth between the present and the past, and part of the key to the end is that present and past occupy the stage together. things happen in that space that probably could not literally happen anywhere in the “real” fictional timeline. those things create the feeling of resolution, but perhaps without the play having fully earned it. clearly, what the characters need is an overthrowing of the ordnung, or at least the insertion of some exceptions to it, so that they can effectively forgive each other. nothing short of that will earn the feeling that the end- ing strives for. and it does not seem as if that has actually occurred in the world of the play, notwithstanding a sort of transfiguration of the entire ensemble in the show’s final moments. in reacting to the play as a whole, therefore, we need to take a step back from the conclusion. and fortunately we can. we do not need the last few minutes, or at least not this version of them. if the resolution enacted before us is wanting, the sketching out of the problem is beautifully done. we have been brought to the point where we can see clearly how religion has let its adherents down, and how the way past that disappointment lies in human connection, moral accountability, and forgiveness. whether these particular characters achieve it is not that important. the play may be set in an amish world, but dramas with many simi- larities could be set in catholic or jewish or muslim worlds, and probably among most other faiths. i do not read marcantel as indicting religion as such; she shows us how much groundedness and understanding faith gives, and not just what faith frequently takes away. every faith needs, and has, its own ordnung, but in order to live fully and well, marcantel seems to be saying, believers will always need to transcend it. and then, as the play hints, believers will also need to return to it. every faith journey will thus be a work in progress, forever. a faith journey taken to a different kind of extreme is the subject of david meyers’s we will not be silent, which imaginatively recreates the gestapo interrogation of sophie scholl, a young woman whose religiously inspired resistance to the third reich led to her execution by guillotine in february . this kind of confrontation is almost a genre. we have wit- nessed the scene in various ways at various times, but the essentials do not differ. there is always a table. there is always uncomfortable lighting. the inquisitor always has the full powers of the state at his back. the prisoner answering the questions is often restrained, sometimes under torture, usu- ally in fear for his or her life. and, given the situation and the nature of the prisoner, the outcome is usually a foregone conclusion. the state will win the legal contest, and the prisoner will pay with life or freedom. but on the stage in front of us, the prisoner and the interrogator are pri- marily fighting over something other than the prisoner’s survival, and for the hopkins review that reason the odds in the contest are not as lopsided as they may seem. the fight is over souls: not only the prisoner’s but the interrogator’s. and from a dramatic standpoint, this is the real struggle. in the play the interrogator is named kurt grunwald (paul deboy), although it would appear that he is based on a real-life gestapo investiga- tor named robert mohr. like the historical mohr, grunwald apparently tries to save scholl by having her inform on her brother. perhaps unlike mohr, grunwald also tries to give sophie (lexi lapp) a chance to go free by letting others take all the responsibility, though grunwald fully and correctly anticipates that she is unlikely to agree to saving her skin in that way. and this is the interesting twist: we do not know what kind of game grunwald is really playing. on the evidence presented to this point in the play, when he offers these outs to sophie, he might be serious or he might just be trying to provoke acts of self-sacrifice which will have the not-so- incidental effect of more firmly incriminating her. and that ambiguity as to grunwald’s strategy betokens an ambiguity about his motives, indeed about what he is going through. is grunwald actually a secret admirer of sophie’s heroism, unwilling to emulate her simply because he lacks her courage, or are his professions of empathy with her situation just a secret policeman’s trick? does he know the answer himself? the author does not tip his hand on this dilemma until the last three pages of the script. the genius of the play is how this ambiguity is handled up until those last three pages. there is a certain progression in such dramatic interroga- tions. we know it from examples like the interrogations of thomas more in a man for all seasons, and cromwell’s examinations of anne boleyn’s doomed associates in mike poulton’s dramatization of hilary mantel’s wolf hall, and the mossad dialogues with adolf eichman in evan weiner’s captors, danforth’s interrogation of john proctor in the crucible, and a thousand movies. it typically, if not invariably, includes stages such as denial by the accused, apparent exoneration, partial confession, attempts to win over the interrogator, self-doubt of the interrogator, promises of leniency attached to unacceptable conditions, existential crises on the part of the prisoner, and finally a reckoning, in which we learn which of the two has prevailed. the listed stages all occur here. and in every one but the last, the ambiguity is preserved and grows richer, because grunwald’s pressing of scholl for either a confession or a conviction could plausibly stem from a desire to make an example of her for the third reich, or a martyr of her for those who find the third reich horrifying. ultimately, just as the play establishes, scholl was executed a day after a brief trial. but her memory has been kept very much alive in today’s germany. so in real life she fulfills the exemplary function of martyrdom; in the world of the play, however, it seems most likely that her example will be forgotten. that risk of oblivion heightens the existential question confronting her: if by betraying her principles she could prolong her life, as opposed to adhering to her principles, dying, and having no impact reviews at all, which choice should she make? and this is not just her existential question: it is his as well. it would appear that grunwald has made the opposite choice. but has he? the very end of the play reopens that ques- tion. the theatergoer will not resolve these moral and logical dilemmas entirely, but will leave the theater breathless from identifying and working through them as far as he or she can. as these summaries hopefully establish, this was a challenging, thought-provoking, and frequently rousing selection of plays––i believe the festival’s strongest season on my watch, further confirmation, if any were needed, that today’s american playwrights are a versatile and pow- erful breed. ––jack l. b. gohn these comments appeared in substantially different form on the baltimore page of broadwayworld.com in july . megan marshall, elizabeth bishop: a miracle for breakfast (houghton mifflin harcourt, ), pp. in the nearly forty years since elizabeth bishop’s death in , her reputa- tion has grown to exceed that of any of her contemporaries or successors. her friend robert lowell stands nowhere close to the pinnacle he stood on at the time of his own death in , while john berryman, randall jarrell, anne sexton, or theodore roethke scarcely challenge bishop’s supremacy. the next generation of poets, born a decade or more later, for all their acknowledged technical and human accomplishments haven’t and prob- ably won’t win the special place accorded bishop. to put it flatly, she is the poet no one is permitted to condescend to, surely not to dislike. brett mil- lier’s sturdy -page biography of the poet appeared in ; the library of america has published in one volume everything of bishop’s except her incomplete, unpublished work, which has been collected in edgar allan poe and the juke-box. now megan marshall, who won a pulitzer some years back for her biography of margaret fuller, has ambitiously attempted a very personal account of bishop’s life, while singling out for brief com- mentary a score or more of, in marshall’s opinion, her best poems. what makes this book something other than a straight biography is the active presence in it of the biographer. marshall has chosen the somewhat risky procedure of alternating her account of bishop’s life with a parallel (much shorter) one of her own. a student at radcliffe in the s, she took writing courses from both lowell and bishop, and the six parts into which her book is divided are each prefaced by an account of her own relation to the scene in question. for example, the book begins not with bishop’s childhood, but with an account of a memorial service held for her at radcliffe shortly after her death. marshall gives us the picture of an audience waiting for the poet john ashbery, who is scheduled to kick off issn: – journal for art market studies ( ) https://www.fokum-jams.org; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/ . /; doi . /jams.v i . while museums have begun – prompted not least by public debate – to confront the issue of their own institutional decolonisation by questioning the acquisition circumstances of the items in their care, and thus potentially the legitimacy of their holdings, the art trade seems as yet unfazed by concerns about consent and duress in provenance transactions of african items. in june , two sculptures representing deities from the igbo community in today’s southeast nigeria were sold at auction in paris for , euros including buyer’s pre- mium. both the scholar chika okeke-agulu and babatunde adebiyi, legal adviser for the nigerian national commission for museums and monuments, expressed concerns about the sale in view of the objects’ provenance via the french dealer jacques kerchache (also referenced in passing in our article by alexandre girard-muscagorry) from what was a conflict zone at the time of transfer. conversely, the auction house maintained that there was no “suggestion that these statues were subject to improper export”. in the commercial world, the question of legality remains the predominant criterion for deciding whether to proceed with the sale of an object. nevertheless, legal circumstances may change, as is evident in recent draft legislation by the french conseil des ministres regarding the restitution of african objects in french museum collections previously considered “inalienable”. ethical issues already guide the approach to transactions of other objects, as previously discussed in our issue on politics. they are however applied unevenly, with larger, international auction houses no longer selling objects belonging to the category of human remains, whilst smaller firms continue to offer such material in “tribal arts” sales. in the wake of the black lives matter movement, monuments to those who benefited from slave trade have recently fallen across the western world, perhaps indicating a more long-term change in perception of historical events and relations, but certainly a need for informed and prolonged debate. this renewed focus on what was perhaps quoted on bbc news online (https://www.bbc.com/news/world-africa- ). also, see scott reyburn, disputed african artifacts sell at auction, in the new york times, june . editorial journal for art market studies ( ) susanne meyer-abich editorial the most devastating form of extractive trade in history points to the continuous social consequences of the modern global slave trade. our article by zoe cormack points to the potential entanglement between the slave trade and the wholescale extraction of african material culture. as shown by some of the articles in this issue dealing with more recent developments since decolonisation (in particular memel-kassi), the consequences of this long history of extraction are also apparent in the current state of heritage protection and practice in africa. the recent population forecast commissioned by the institute for health metrics and evaluation at the university of washington school of medicine envisages nigeria to become the world’s second biggest country by . the sub-saharan african population is set to triple in the next years. it is hard to imagine that the art trade would remain unchanged by restitution demands from more dominant and more confident african countries, or by the cultural turns it may engender. our current issue on the art market for objects originating from africa examines their entry into and movement through the markets from a historical perspective, as they advance through different classifications and associations, from the ethnographic and the association with natural history to the status of art and antiquities. we hope you find that the contributions add insight to our subject. susanne meyer-abich s .. shut up and play: black athletes, protest politics, and black political action christopher c. towler, nyron n. crawford, and robert a. bennett iii the convergence of sports and celebrity can have a powerful influence on everyday politics, especially for groups underrepresented in mainstream american society. this article examines the relationship between race, celebrity, and social movements, specifically colin kaepernick’s protest of police violence and whether his activism mobilizes black americans to political action. using the black voter project (bvp) pilot study, we explore african american political engagement in the election, a time devoid of president obama as a mobilizing figure. we find african americans who strongly approve of kaepernick’s protest engage in politics at elevated rates, even after accounting for alternative explanations. moreover, approval for kaepernick also moderates other forces rooted in group identity, such as identification with the black lives matter movement. in the end, kaepernick and the protest movement he leads offers a powerful mobilizing force for african americans. believe in something, even if it means sacrificing everything. —colin kaepernick for nike’s “just do it” advertisement campaign b lack celebrity activism has a long tradition in american politics. black actors, artists, musicians, and athletes are said to have a responsibility to use their celebrity platforms to raise the voice and concerns of black people (e.g., raymond ). some of the most notable examples are black sports activists who used athletics and the playing field to challenge the racist norms of us society. in , three-time olympic gold medalist wilma rudolph declined to attend a celebration in her honor because the event would be segregated. muhammad ali refused to enlist in the us army in in objection to vietnam, famously saying, “no vietcong ever called [him] nigger.” john carlos and tommie smith stood as medal winners on the podium at the summer olympics in mexico and raised their black-gloved fists in a salute to black power as the us national anthem played. more recently, the black lives matter (blm) move- ment has spawned a new generation of sporting celeb- rities protesting state violence against black americans. players with the women’s national basketball associa- tion (wnba) led pre-game protests in , and later that year, four of the top players from the national basketball association (nba), including lebron james of the cleveland cavaliers, opened the espy awards show by addressing the killing of unarmed black people by the police. also, in , former san francisco ers quarterback colin kaepernick stirred controversy when he and teammate eric reid chose to kneel on the sideline during the singing of the national anthem to protest the dramatic killing of unarmed black men by police in american cities like baltimore and new york, ostensibly in solidarity with the black lives matter (blm) move- ment (branch ). but, for all that controversy, little attention has been given to the influence of these black athlete activists, or sporting celebrities, on black political action. although various models account for racial differences in political behavior between black and white americans—often sug- gesting black political elites have the potential to empower individual blacks (dawson ; harris-lacewell ), none examine black celebrity activists as a mobilizing force. although studies on celebrity have shown professional actors, athletes, and artists do have a noticeable influence on a variety of outcomes (austin et al. ; becker , ), few have thoroughly tested the impact of celebrity on political behavior in general, and much of the existing research has yielded mixed results related to electoral participation. *data replication sets are available in harvard dataverse at: https://doi.org/ . /dvn/lgltn christopher c. towler is assistant professor of political science at california state university, sacramento (towler@ csus.edu). nyron n. crawford is assistant professor of political science at temple university. robert a. bennett iii is visiting assistant professor of health, exercise, and sport studies at denison university. doi: . /s © american political science association march | vol. /no. special issue article https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://doi.org/ . /dvn/lgltn mailto:towler@csus.edu mailto:towler@csus.edu https://orcid.org/ - - - https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core moreover, sport celebrities “have not generated the same interest as celebrities within the realms of music, film, art, or politics” (andrews and jackson , ). in this article, we argue that accounting for the influence of a specific type of celebrity, black athlete activists, and their influence on a specific audience, black americans, offers a clear demonstration of the influence that celebrity has on politics. because sport fans possess or develop affective attachments to sport celebrities, we claim black sport stars who engage in political protest are especially well positioned to influence racial in-group members for at least two reasons: they are credible in- group messengers engaged in issue-congruent activism— that rooted in exposing racial grievances of the group—and their protest action often results in professional consequen- ces. to understand these dynamics, we consider the protest activity of colin kaepernick to examine what, if any, influence he has had on contemporary black political engagement (for more on the critical nature of black mobilization, see chinni ). we expand our analysis of political engagement beyond voting to include protest and other modes of political expression because black athletes often encourage protest, boycotts, or action outside of the realm of traditional politics (for a discussion of subtle effects, see pease and brewer ). we first introduce a definition of celebrity that focuses attention on the protest activities of black sport stars. then, we consider the broader effects of celebrity on economic outcomes, social behaviors, and politics. next, we describe the protest actions of black sport stars during the black power movement as a gateway to our discussion of contemporary cases of black sport activism, foreshadowing our expectations about colin kaepernick. the final sections describe the survey data we use to test our expectations and present the findings. the results suggest the protest activity of colin kaepernick significantly influences black political action, specifically encouraging action beyond voting, and hint at the influence that he, among other black celebrities, could have potential as a movement leader. we conclude with a discussion of celebrity, sport culture, and race. celebrity, sport, and politics the sport industry is a powerful forum for celebrity. the average per game attendance of the five major sport leagues exceeds twenty thousand fans, with the national football league attracting the highest attendance. de- spite the volume of this attention and the claim contem- porary celebrities are most likely to emerge from the entertainment or sport industries (turner ), not all professional athletes are celebrities. according to rojek’s ( ) description of celebrity, colin kaepernick may have achieved celebrity in terms of his rank among competitors, but he was not well-known for his “well- knownness” in the way boorstin ( , ) conceived of celebrity. both descriptions highlight the difficulty in defining celebrity: the fleeting nature of fame, as popular- ized by artist andy warhol’s observation that everyone would be “world-famous for fifteen minutes.” thus, rojek ( ), giles ( ), and drake and miah ( ) correctly emphasize the mediated production of celebrity (e.g., through social media). although informative, none of these definitions of celebrity is entirely satisfactory for our purposes. not even the specific characterization of sporting celebrities as the “product of commercial culture, imbued with symbolic values, which seek to stimulate desire and identification among the consuming populace” adequately captures the unique relationship between sports, politics, and athlete activism for black america (andrews and jackson ). therefore, to examine the importance of the black athlete activist as a celebrity, we draw on street’s ( , ) description of the celebrity politician as an “entertainer who pronounces on politics and claims the right to represent. . . causes, but who does so without seeking. . .elected office.” this view of celebrity provides an important context for understanding black athlete activists, or, black sport stars, as celebrity politicians. in addition, this definition best captures celebrities’ ability to engage in public gestures similar to the political protest engaged in by the black sport stars whom we are interested in here (andrews and jackson ; bryant ; jackson ; miller and wiggins ). much of what we know about the effects of celebrity is concerned with the economic value of celebrity endorse- ments, specifically whether contracting celebrity endorse- ments pays off (agrawal and kamakura ; erdogan ). several studies indicate the return on investment (roi) is positive and substantial: celebrity endorsements yield increases in sales, stock returns, and brand credibility (chung, derdenger, and srinivasan ; elberse and verleun ; silvera and austad ), with one in five ads around the world featuring a celebrity (halonen-knight and hurmerinta ). commercial brands therefore have an incentive to cut ties with controversial celebrities, because negative information from a celebrity endorsement can facilitate the negative transference of affect to the brand (sanderson, frederick, and stocz ; white, goddard, and wilbur ). this explains why many were surprised by the decision of the sport apparel company, nike, to name in early september the former san francisco ers quarterback as one of the faces for its th anniversary “just do it” campaign. almost immediately, angry, mostly white, customers went to social media to broadcast themselves live destroying the nike apparel they owned. even the president of the united states took to twitter to admonish the company: “what was nike thinking?” he asked. this brings us to the question of celebrity and politics, for which there are two possible approaches. one is to consider celebrities as emergent politicians, advocates, and activists. this line of inquiry focuses on sport and celebrity diplomacy, for instance, and considers the role perspectives on politics special issue article | black athletes and protest politics https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core —or folly—of celebrity ascendance across domains (brockington and henson ; hoberman ; hulia- ras and tzifakis ; lines ; majic ; nygård and gates ; strenk ). the second approach, which we take, is to examine the effects of celebrity on public attitudes and mass behavior. one notable example is garthwaite and moore’s ( ) finding that oprah’s endorsement of then-presidential candidate barack obama yielded an additional one million voters in the democratic presidential primary. however, the influence of a mononymous celebrity of such acclaim, like oprah, may be an outlier. the literature suggests young adults are not only more likely to be politically influenced by friends and family than by celebrities (o’regan ) but also that celebrities tend to exert the greatest influence on self-efficacy, involvement, and complacency (austin et al. ; becker , ). additional research has suggested that accounting for the extent to which individuals identify with celebrities, as well as the celebrities’ credibility in terms of issue congruence, may reveal more about their influence (basil ; fraser and brown ). therefore, if sport fans possess or develop affective attachments to sport celebri- ties, as some contend, and the public considers celebrities more credible and trustworthy than politicians (frizzell ), then black sport stars engaged in issue-congruent protest should be well positioned to influence racial in- group members (mcclerking, laird, and block ). there may be many reasons for the potential influence of black sport stars, but at its core, it may reflect the tendency of black sporting celebrities to engage in race- based protest politics that complement ongoing social movements, such as black power or black lives matter, in their efforts to spotlight the unfavorable political, social, and economic condition of black americans (leonard and king ; raymond ). for example, as figure shows, black americans believe colin kaeper- nick’s protests were an effort to bring attention to police violence, and nearly % supported him and other players protesting the national anthem (intravia, piquero, and piquero ). high media visibility or the potential thereof, in addition to political controversy and backlash, may make black athlete activists an ideal source for social and political messaging (see, e.g., kuklinski and hurley ). consider that more than one-quarter of black americans identified colin kaepernick as their top choice to lead the national blm movement, ahead of the movement’s cofounders alicia garza, patrisse cullors, and opal tometi (figure ). therefore, there are at least two factors fundamental to our understanding of black celebrity athlete activists: the use of celebrity to represent black causes without seeking figure attitudes about national anthem protests by race and question wording (source: baker ) march | vol. /no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core political office and their ability to appeal to the black community, and often america at large, because of the capital their fame allows them to wield. in addition to the well-documented power of racial group identity—in- cluding group-based protection, affect, and receptivity to messengers of the same racial in-group (bobo and hutch- ings ; dawson ; huddy ; tate ), there is reason to believe that black celebrity activists can have a politically empowering influence on black americans (for discussion, see meyer ). rebellion and punishment: the black athlete activist as celebrity politician black sport stars engaged in activism in the athletic arena have long recognized sports as a useful political tool to gain prestige and protest (strenk ). athletic protests are appealing to black athlete activists because sports are organizational and group based, and black athletes are often well represented among successful athletic compet- itors (hartmann ), providing them with the resources to engage in various forms of sports activism (cooper, macaulay, and rodriguez ; meyer ). moreover, the role of black sport star activism is decidedly different from that of other celebrities, because the athletes’ goal is seldom to shift the movement of which they are a part toward “consensus-style politics,” as meyer ( , ) contends other celebrities do. in , for example, during the burgeoning black power movement, harry edwards helped organize the olympic project for human rights protest (ophr). this effort used the summer olympics that year to protest racism and the poverty that affected black communities throughout the united states. the most notable gesture, as mentioned, came from tommie smith and john carlos, who both protested by raising their black-gloved fists as they were standing on the medal stand while the us national anthem played. in the summer of , three black players of the nfl’s cleveland browns, including walter beach, were inter- viewed by the cleveland plain dealer about the hough revolts in cleveland the previous summer. these demon- strations were led by blacks who felt disenfranchised by limited job opportunities and segregation in the city and resulted in millions of dollars in destruction. beach said he “sympathize[d] with the residents of hough, knowing their content and the causes” (bennett , ) many black athlete activists engaged in individual and collective protest, especially at the collegiate level throughout the s. with their involvement spanning both college and professional sports in the s and s, there was a shift from ‘shut up and play’ to athlete- activist (moore ); many, edwards ( , ) con- tends, arrived “in the arena as warriors in the struggle for black dignity and freedom.” however, what is also important is the extent to which these “revolting black athletes” were threatened with banishment from sports, incarceration, and even death if they used their celebrity capital to challenge white supremacy. mohammed ali was unable to box from to , because no state would give him a license figure respondents’ top choice to lead a national blm movement (tillery n.d.) perspectives on politics special issue article | black athletes and protest politics https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core following his refusal to enlist in the army; john carlos and tommie smith were stripped of their gold medals shortly after the summer olympics in mexico; and art modell, owner of the cleveland browns, chided walter beach for his comments to cleveland’s plain dealer about the hough demonstrations and warned him to focus on football rather than social problems (parrish ; suchma ). beach said he “had a lot of difficulty in football” from that point on; the following summer, the browns placed and then illegally removed beach from the waivers list (bennett , ). he never again played in the nfl. that black athlete-activists have often suffered pro- fessional consequences for their protest reminds black americans of the ways in which the white power structures threaten to punish outspoken and esteemed members of their racial in-group. for example, muham- mad ali’s refusal to enlist in the us army ignited a sequence of consequential events: the revocation of his passport, the denial of his boxing license, and the forfeiture of his heavyweight boxing title. more recent threats of similar professional penalties for colin kae- pernick’s kneeling became explicit during a political rally in huntsville, alabama, in september when president trump foretold the quarterback’s professional fate: wouldn’t you love to see one of these nfl owners, when somebody disrespects our flag, to say, “get that son of a bitch off the field right now. out! he’s fired. he’s fired!” you know, some owner is going to do that. he’s going to say, “that guy that disrespects our flag, he’s fired.” and that owner, they don’t know it, they’ll be the most popular person in this country. indeed, the nfl league owners took note: kaepernick was shut out from playing in the nfl the following season. in response, he filed a legal complaint against the league, alleging that teams colluded to deny him employ- ment opportunities because of “his leadership and advo- cacy for equality and social justice” (kaepernick v. national football league, ). because of the collective identity their protests repre- sent, close consideration of black sport celebrities engaged in activism may refine models of minority political participation. the case of colin kaepernick is instructive because his silent protest was anchored in racial solidarity against police violence, and like the experience of walter beach and others, after kaepernick’s contract expired, no other nfl team signed him. his experience may remind black americans of the ways in which white power structures punish outspoken black celebrities and mobilize in response (crawford ; hodge et al. ; musgrove ; nunnally ; warner ). kaepernick’s posi- tion as a claimant in a lawsuit against the nfl suggests he was harmed by an unfair action taken by the league, which is important insofar as others have argued that the black community mobilizes around controversial black public figures who, they suspect, have been targeted, retaliated against, or harassed by white-dominated institutions in realms such as sports, media, and law enforcement (russell-brown ). black americans also understood kaepernick’s protests to be an effort to spotlight american racism and police brutality, which helps explain their overwhelming support, as shown in figure , for his and other players’ protests of the national anthem (intravia et al. ). moreover, it is not only the masses of blacks who remain steadfast supporters of kaepernick; a poll of defensive players from nfl teams revealed that % believed kaepernick “belonged” on an nfl roster (chiari ). the “in- tensity and ferocity of mainstream american opposition to the demonstration[s]” (hartmann , ) of black sport stars may not be as surprising as it is revealing. the case for colin kaepernick the context for the sport activism of colin kaepernick was the killing of unarmed black men by police in us cities, including new york city, baltimore, and fergu- son, missouri, a suburb of st. louis. during a preseason game in august in which kaepernick was starting, he chose to kneel on the sideline during the national anthem in protest, along with his teammate eric reid, which sparked a national debate (branch ). even though other black sport stars were similarly engaged in grassroots activism in response to police brutality (cooper, macaulay, and rodriguez ; gill ), the backlash was immediate, and the ire focused almost entirely on kaepernick. we focus on the former ers quarterback for several reasons. with the aid and abetting of national and social media, the public came to recognize colin kaepernick as the celebrity leader of the blm movement (see figure ). second, he is the only athlete in his protest cohort to remain ousted from the profession for his protest action; he also sued the nfl for alleged collusion to deny him professional opportunities on a team. third, the nfl settled kaepernick’s lawsuit, giving him damages for collusion. these factors make kaepernick the most compelling case to search for a relationship between support for celebrity protest action and political engage- ment at the individual level. empowerment by social movement: hypothesis to understand kaepernick’s political influence, his protest actions must be placed in the broader context of the protest movement he has come to represent: blacks lives matter (blm), the most prominent campaigner against state- sanctioned violence and racism toward black people (for discussion, see meyer ). group-based models of politics emphasize the influence of racial group identity on group norms, behavior, and a sense of linked fate (dawson ; whitby ; white, laird, and allen march | vol. /no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core ). blacks have found great success mobilizing through organizational, group-based resources like the black church, the institutional backbone of black civic engage- ment. today, new technologies have allowed different organizational, group-based resources to emerge, enabling movements like blm in particular to build a powerful grassroots digital presence that can leverage media and kaepernick’s celebrity voice (stephen ). therefore, because group-based models suggest racial group identity is a powerful mobilizer (dawson ), the blm move- ment may heighten blacks’ sense of solidarity and ignite group mobilization (miller et al. ), we offer the following hypothesis: h : when considering group-based resources (i.e., racial group identity and the blm movement), we do not expect that approval of kaepernick’s protests will independently influence black political mobilization. empowerment by black athlete activists: colin kaepernick support hypotheses the emergence of a black athlete activists like colin kaepernick may nonetheless have an empowering celebrity-elite influence as blacks move between protest and politics (stout and tate ; tate ). atten- tion to black political empowerment was resurgent but short-lived following the election of barack obama as president. at its core, questions of empowerment seized on the familiar puzzle of descriptive representation and its effects on feelings of linked fate, black turnout, trust, and efficacy (e.g., gilliam and kaufmann ). however, highly mediated incidents of racial violence across the country caused an outcry and ignited a social movement, including blm, which reinforced the view that obama’s presidency was yet another hollow prize for black representation. in addition, president trump’s taste for controversy, aggrandizement, and bold pronouncements of law and order while using explicit racist, sexist, and islamophobic language raises serious threats to already vulnerable communities; recent research directly connects opposition to trump, which is characterized by perceptions of racism, to significantly higher levels of political interest and engagement (towler and parker ). thus, although blm’s use of online organizing may be limiting the power of the movement to urge blacks to act—research suggests face-to-face contact is the strongest mobilizer (gerber and green )—we believe that the organizational network, specifically its built-in-leaders, such as kaepernick, repre- sent a mobilizing elite. moreover, if our theory is correct, kaepernick should serve as a celebrity figure who compels blacks already identifying with blm to feel empowered and engage in politics. in general, we expect attachment to the broader blm movement will offer blacks a positive reason to engage in politics. we also expect colin kaepernick, acting as a black celebrity leader, will further empower blacks, compelling them to act. on the other hand, if approval for kaepernick’s protest is simply a symptom of group- based politics, blacks who support kaepernick will not participate in politics any differently from blacks who are less approving once blm identity is considered. however, if, as we posit, approval for kaepernick’s protest offers additional motivation beyond traditional factors associated with group-based mobilization, blacks who strongly ap- prove of kaepernick’s protest will engage at higher rates than others, because kaepernick’s celebrity protest repre- sents something more to them. moreover, the influence of kaepernick approval should only elevate the political action of blacks who also already identify with the black lives matter movement. this leads to our final two hypotheses: h : blacks who strongly approve of kaepernick’s protest action are significantly more likely to engage in politics even after accounting for linked fate and black lives matter identity. h : black attitudes toward kaepernick moderate the relation- ship between black lives matter identity and political engage- ment, such that blacks who report strong blm identity and strong approval for kaepernick’s protest action are the most engaged. data, methods, and analysis to test our hypotheses regarding the relationship be- tween kaepernick approval and political engagement, we turned to the black voter project (bvp) pilot study. the bvp pilot study is an original dataset that we created in the months following the election. the sample is comprised of black respond- ents located in six battleground states first identified in the multi-state survey of race and politics, all with significant black constituencies —georgia, michigan, missouri, ohio, north carolina and virginia—as well as the state of california. data were collected from march through april , in states where black turnout could potentially swing an election (california was included for comparison). because of concerns regarding low black mobilization during the general election, with reports suggesting that black turnout dropped as much as % in some battleground states, a focused analysis proves useful in understanding ways to increase the potential political power of black constituencies (fraga et al. ; gillespie and king-meadows ). focusing on battleground states allows conclusions to be drawn about mobilization in black populations instrumental to federal election outcomes. however, although they are informative, these results cannot be generalized to blacks across the entire country. we rely on two proxies in the bvp pilot study to assess support for colin kaepernick and the celebrity- perspectives on politics special issue article | black athletes and protest politics https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core driven protest movement with which he has been associated. respondents were asked, “based on what you have heard, do you approve or disapprove of colin kaepernick’s and other nfl players national anthem protests?” to isolate blacks who expressed the most support for kaepernick and preserve as much variance as possible in a measure with little disagreement, we coded approval of kaepernick on a dichotomous scale ( – ), where high values correspond to strong approval of colin kaepernick’s protest. to examine the conditional effect of kaepernick approval on attachment to the broader blacks lives matter movement, we probed respondents’ attitudes toward it: “how closely do you identify with the black lives matter movement?” this measure was coded on a three-point scale ( – – ) such that higher values corresponded to respondents who identified more closely with the blm movement. if our claims are correct, not only will blacks who strongly approve of kaepernick participate in politics at high rates but also those who strongly identify with blm will participate in politics at higher rates than blacks who strongly identify with blm but are not as approving of kaepernick. to examine political engagement, we assess whether blacks voted in , their intention to vote in , and their participation in several other political behaviors that go beyond voting, such as signing a petition, boycotting, demonstrating, attending a political meeting, contacting their representative(s), and donating to a political cam- paign. although the utility of voting is central to research in political science, recent work suggests that nontradi- tional political acts beyond voting significantly predict how closely a representative’s actual roll-call vote record aligns with community interests (leighley and oser ). both voting in and vote confidence for were coded on dichotomous scales ( – ), where blacks who did not vote in and were not confident that they would vote in and blacks who voted in or blacks who expressed certainty that they would vote in the midterm elections. each political act beyond our measures of voting was coded on a dichotomous scale ( – ) such that participation in such an act within the last months. specifically measuring political action within the last months eliminates the possibility that our models capture a re- lationship between political engagement earlier in life and attitudes toward kaepernick. moreover, any political participation in the months before the survey would also have occurred after colin kaepernick’s protest action became national news, suggesting that the protest action we are measuring occurred at least during (or after) the time his protest was taking place. in an ideal setting, longitudinal data would allow for a clear understanding of the directional relationship between support for kaepernick and political engage- ment; the cross-sectional nature of our data, however, limits our ability to say with certainty whether support for kaepernick leads to engagement, or vice versa. still, modeling political engagement in a multiple regression setting allows us to account for other factors associated with a politically active lifestyle, such as political interest and political knowledge. if our results hold in the multivariate setting, we can state with confidence that our proxy for kaepernick approval is measuring some- thing more than a selection bias. moreover, additional model specifications (available on request) account for political action sometime in life prior to the last months, which provides additional evidence that the political action we are measuring in the last months is associated with attitudes toward kaepernick, rather than being a reflection of past political tendencies. in addition to identification with the blm movement and support for kaepernick, we account for several other sociodemographic and political factors that might also be associated with political engagement, including political interest, political knowledge (an index of questions about congressional representation, the vice president, and supreme court justices), ideology, and political trust (refer to the online appendix for a full list of variables and coding). furthermore, earlier research suggests that fac- tors associated with group-based resources are particularly important when examining black political participation. hence, identity with blm must be accounted for, along with church participation and broader racial group identity (linked fate), if any significant differences in black political action are to be uniquely associated with kaepernick’s celebrity. black political participation: results and analysis current and historical research on black political partic- ipation suggests that group-based resources, along with political and sociodemographic factors, generally explain black political participation. this study assesses whether colin kaepernick’s celebrity galvanized black supporters even further, leading to significantly heightened levels of political action. although colin kaepernick is relaying much of the same messages found in many sectors of the black community, such as the blm movement, does kaepernick’s celebrity leadership move blacks enough to evoke political engagement? before we examine the relationship between support for kaepernick and political participation, it would be helpful to establish the link between support for his celebrity protests and the blm movement itself. al- though kaepernick credits the blm movement for much of his perspective and activism, do blacks who support blm recognize the same link? table presents the bivariate relationship between blm identity and kaeper- nick approval and suggests that they do. a full % of blacks who strongly identify with blm also express strong march | vol. /no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core approval for kaepernick, compared to only % of those with weak blm identity. moreover, the two measures are correlated at . , suggesting they are related within the data of black individual attitudes. this basic relationship not only offers validation for kaepernick’s anecdotal association with the blm movement at the individual level but also highlights the need to examine blacks’ support for kaepernick as it relates to identity with the blm movement; history suggests that celebrity leaders who emerge from the sports industry often join in an already ongoing social protest. as we begin to examine the association between support for kaepernick and black political behavior, our results offer mixed support for our claim that strong blm identity and approval for kaepernick are related to political action. tables and present the bivariate relationship between blm identity, approval for colin kaepernick, and black political engagement. at the bivariate level, we find a significant relationship between strong blm identity and black voter participa- tion as it pertains to turnout in the general election and confidence that one would vote in the midterm elections. yet, support for kaepernick fails to significantly define blacks who voted in or who identify as confident voters in the midterm election. for instance, in the case of turnout in the general election, percentage points separate the proportion of blacks who strongly identify with blm from those with a weak attachment, and a -point gap separate blacks who strongly identify with blm for those who express confidence that they would vote in . there is a similar proportion of voters and of confident voters who approve of kaepernick’s protest. al- though this may seem surprising, revisiting kaepernick’s personal politics suggests his influence as a political leader may not be intended for the traditional task of voting. in a november interview, kaepernick expressed disgust for both republicans and democrats as he explained why he did not cast a vote in the election (brinson ). although his decision not to vote garnered much criticism, it does offer some explanation as to why his celebrity leadership may not be associated with black voting behavior. therefore, at the bivariate level, how some blacks feel about blm is significantly associated with voter partic- ipation, whereas kaepernick approval is not. these patterns only hold if we limit political participation to voting. table displays the bivariate relationship between both kaepernick approval and blm identity, and political participation beyond voting. according to table , at least a -point gap separates the proportion of blacks who strongly approve of kaepernick from those who do not when it comes to both signing a petition and participating in a boycott. when it comes to participating in a political demonstra- tion, attending a political meeting, contacting one’s representative, or donating to a political campaign (or cause), at least a -point gap separates blacks who strongly approve of kaepernick from all others. although table approval of kaepernick’s protest by strength of blm identity strong blm id med blm id weak blm id total n strongly approve of kaepernick % % % no strong opinion on kaepernick % % % total n note: relationship significant at x , . . table traditional political participation by kaepernick approval and strength of blm identity voted in confident voter yes no yes no total n strongly approve of kaepernick % % % % no strong opinion on kaepernick % % % % strong blm id % % % % med blm id % % % % weak blm id % % % % total n note: relationship between traditional political participation and blm id significant at x , . . perspectives on politics special issue article | black athletes and protest politics https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core less pronounced, similar differences characterize the relationship between blm identity and political partic- ipation beyond voting. thus, our bivariate results suggest there is a significant association between the way blacks perceive their identity with blm and their voting behavior, whereas both blm identity and kaepernick approval are significantly associated with other political acts beyond voting. moreover, considering the correla- tion between blm identity and kaepernick support, along with kaepernick’s indirect connection to the blm movement at large, we believe that attitudes toward kaepernick—as a celebrity leader of the movement against police brutality— also moderate the relationship between blm identity and political engagement. in the next section we present a more rigorous multiple re- gression analysis to further test these claims. multiple regression analysis the next step is to account for alternative explanations when examining the relationship between approval of colin kaepernick and political participation, both as expressed in voting and beyond. we engaged in multiple variable regression modeling to account for ideology, partisanship, political knowledge, political interest, po- litical mistrust, approval of former president obama, and racial group identity (or linked fate), along with various sociodemographic and political measures. at first glance, the bivariate results hold even after account- ing for an overabundance of additional factors (refer to tables a and a ). table displays the predicted probability of a black respondent engaging in politics based first on blm identity and then on their approval of kaepernick. after accounting for other factors, the differences between black approval of kaepernick and voter turn- out remains insignificant (refer to table a ). in other words, variables such as political interest, college education, and blm identity account for differences in black voting behavior. moving from a low to high identity with blm predicts a % increase in the likelihood of voting in and a % increase in the likelihood of expressing confidence they would vote in . in the case of voter turnout, identity with blm, regardless of attitudes toward kaepernick, predict blacks’ likelihood to vote. however, when predicting political action beyond voting, strong approval of kaepernick predicts signifi- cantly higher levels of political engagement across the board (refer to table a ). for instance, compared to blacks who do not express strong approval of kaepernick, individuals who strongly approve are at least % more likely to have participated in politics beyond voting in the last months and are % more likely to have participated in a boycott (table ). furthermore, blm identity is only significantly associated with contacting one’s political representative. therefore, support for kae- pernick is a more consistent predictor of nontraditional political engagement (beyond voting) than blm identity, table extra-traditional political participation by kaepernick approval and strength of blm identity petition* % boycott* % demonstrate* % meeting % contact rep.* % donate* % strongly approve of kaep. no strong opinion on kaep. strong blm id med blm id weak blm id total % *relationships significant at * x , . . table change in predicted probability: traditional political participation variable change in predicted probability (min-max) voted in % confident vote in % blm identity * * strong kaepernick approval political interest * * college education .* %* *relationships significant at x , . , one-tailed test. march | vol. /no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core even after accounting for a host of alternative political explanations and measures of group-based resources. at the intersection of celebrity and politics: kaepernick as a moderating force our results suggest that, although approval for kaeper- nick’s protest is strongly related to blm identity, each works differently when examining black political behavior. whereas strong blm identity is significantly associated with voting, approval for kaepernick’s celebrity protest movement is significantly associated with other political action such as signing a petition and participating in a boycott. however, attitudes toward kaepernick may also moderate the relationship between blm identity and political behavior. put another way, are blacks who strongly approve of kaepernick and the blm movement even more likely to vote, participate in politics in other ways, or both? thus, this final section explores the moderating effect, if any, that kaepernick may have on the relationship between blm identity and political action. to examine whether attitudes toward kaepernick moderate the power of blm identity, we constructed an interaction term and added it to our previous model specification (see, e.g., block ). a quick glance at the regression results suggests that either our base measures for blm identity and kaeper- nick approval, or the interaction measure, are significant depending on the political participation outcome (refer to tables a and a ). however, as many have previously pointed out, the statistical significance (or z-statistic) of a multiplicative interaction term does not indicate whether x has a statistically distinguishable relationship with y at a particular value of z (ai and norton ; berry, demeritt, and esarey ; brambor, clark, and golder ). considering the challenges that arise with correctly interpreting interactions terms, we explore the panels in figure , which depict the probability of voting and participating in politics in various ways, by blm identity and kaepernick approval. figure presents the probability of voting in and of expressing confidence in voting in by blm identity and kaepernick approval (refer to table a ). as blm identity shifts from weak to strong, there is no significant difference in voting behavior between blacks table change in predicted probability: extra-traditional political participation in last months variable change in predicted probability (min-max) petition % boycott % demonstrate % meeting % contact rep. % donate % blm identity – * strong kaep. approval * * * * * political interest * * * * college education * * * * * – *relationships significant at x , . , one-tailed test. figure predicting traditional political engagement (conditional effects) perspectives on politics special issue article | black athletes and protest politics https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core who strongly approve of kaepernick and those who are less favorable: kaepernick approval fails to moderate the positive relationship between blm identity and the likelihood of voting. however, strong approval of colin kaepernick elevates the likelihood of other actions above and beyond blm identity. figure presents the proba- bility of participating in six political acts: signing a petition, boycotting, demonstrating, attending a political meeting, contacting one’s representative, and donating to a political campaign, by blm identity and kaepernick approval (refer to table a ). with the exception of demonstrating, kaepernick approval moderates the relationship between blm identity and political participation in nonelectoral forms of action. (considering the blm movement is protest-based, it is not surprising that participating in a demonstration is one area figure predicting nontraditional political engagement (conditional effects) march | vol. /no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core where kaepernick fails to move the needle beyond movement participation itself.) moreover, among the nonvoting forms of political action, kaepernick approval fails to differentiate levels of political participation among blacks with weak (low) identity with blm, further solidifying our claim that kaepernick’s role as a celebrity leader offers additional motivation for many blacks who already sympathize with the broader blm movement. discussion activism by black professional athletes matters to black political action. our findings reveal a relationship be- tween the social protests of sport stars like colin kaepernick, the corresponding black lives matter (blm) movement, and black political behavior. they generally suggest that black americans who strongly approved of colin kaepernick and were highly identi- fied with blm were more likely to engage in several acts of nontraditional political engagement. these findings are important to the broader politics of celebrity in the sports industry, especially for what they tell us about the influence of black celebrity elites: our work demon- strates that this black celebrity interaction has the potential to mobilize black americans to political action. these results are consistent with other works on celebrity in politics. however, the case of colin kae- pernick is unique because it allows us to reconsider the relationship between black celebrity activism and black politics. we agree with other scholars who suggest that the credibility of a celebrity and his or her issue congruence may be more important than celebrity itself. as such, our findings suggest that kaepernick is a legit- imate source of protest politics within black communi- ties. in contrast, if becker ( ) is right, and the public is more receptive to celebrity viewpoints on issues that are less politically salient, then black support for kaepernick shows a meaningful congruence in the black public–elite interaction on issues typically outside of mainstream white politics: race and racism. one explanation is that black celebrity athletes are aware of threats to the racial group and therefore use their resources to advocate on its behalf. many black athlete activists have used their celebrity to call out social and economic injustice, often at great professional costs to their athletic careers. yet, the political value of their activism is understudied. our data provide initial evidence supporting the notion that pro- fessional athletes like kaepernick may serve not only as national voices for justice but also as important links between social movements and heightened political engagement. moreover, black activism that encourages nontraditional engagement beyond voting seems to be even more understudied, even though such actions have equally important political implications as voting. as previously mentioned, leighley and oser ( ) find that the likelihood of issue congruence between constituents and their political representatives signifi- cantly increases when individuals participate in ways beyond voting, especially for lower-income individuals. because this relationship is especially powerful for salient issues, and less-wealthy individuals are already prone to more policy incongruence with representatives, we be- lieve black celebrity leadership like kaepernick’s may in fact be instrumental to the long-term process of shifting public policy on one of the most salient issues across black america: police violence. furthermore, our findings show that approval for kaepernick is uniquely powerful for blacks who already strongly identify with blm, leaving us to wonder what influence he could have if he chose to take on an official leadership role in the movement. in addition, under- standing kaepernick as a link to political engagement is important, because underrepresented communities are currently instrumental to any democratic coalition look- ing for political success in an electorate facing historical polarization. future studies should continue to explore the role and influence of black professional athletes on prosocial, economic, and political outcomes relevant to black communities, emphasizing the potential for celeb- rity leadership in an official capacity and examining behavior and attitudes over time. lastly, our study highlights a need for greater attention to these broader patterns of black elite–public interaction. the data from the black voter project (bvp) pilot study are novel but also limited. for instance, panel data are ideal for understanding changes in political engage- ment over time, but no such data measuring black attitudes toward celebrity politics currently exist. addi- tionally, our dataset was limited to respondents from seven states, albeit states where blacks have a real chance of influencing electoral politics, limiting the generalizability of our results. nonetheless, our results suggest a powerful relationship between support for kaepernick’s protest action and black political engagement at the individual level, dynamics that are otherwise underexplored in the main of political science. conclusion it would be easy to conceive of sports as simple social institutions that primarily organize and promote athletic competition, from t-ball to the olympics. in thinking about sport culture, we often encounter this generalization, which introduces the familiar warning that politics is “out of bounds” in the athletic arena. but this view is at odds with our findings and is generally contradicted by a history in which sports are a regular exchange for nation-building and contentious politics, domestic and abroad. still, the demand that black athletes “shut up and play” underlies an important question: what counts as acceptable politics in sports? perspectives on politics special issue article | black athletes and protest politics https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core when the united states decided not to boycott the olympic games in adolf hitler’s berlin as it began to confront the “ugly circumstances” of “hitler’s anti- semitic programs” (kass ), it placed jesse owens and other olympians in the middle of a geopolitical ordeal that would break out in a world war three years later. but by many accounts, owens’ achievement of winning four gold medals that year uprooted nazi ideas of aryan superiority and frustrated hitler; one story, which may be apocryphal, holds that the german führer refused to shake the hand of the black sport star (watkins ). whatever the case, many agree that the olympics were high-charged political theater. in photographs depicting the medal presentation, for instance, owens can be seen on top of the winner’s podium, with germany’s lutz long behind him, both with their hands raised in their respective salutes to their country and its flag. why was owen’s salute not recognized for its political symbology, while other silent gestures like the raised fists of john carlos and tommie smith, or kaepernick’s kneeling, are lamented as inexcusably political? the difference is not due to gradients of fame, athletic accomplishment, or even race, but rather to the impact of the hypervisibility black sport stars project to the world through protest. owen’s salute may have been acceptable because it reinforced the relationship between sports and a liberal democratic ideology, which are supported by routine military participation in big sporting events and singing the national anthem, a tradition that spread across the sport industry amid a wave of post–world war ii patriotism. in contrast, protest politics is rejected because its goals and tactics are outside and at odds with formal political systems (see, e.g., tate ), and because attention to racial or social grievances undermines the vision of national unity that sports propagate. the empirical findings in this study provide new insight into this dynamic and answer hartmann’s ( ) question about whether black sport activism has a measurable effect. they underscore the importance of recognizing black sport activists as nontraditional elite actors, as celebrities who not only exert uncomfortable pressures on their sport industry but who also have the potential to influence nontraditional political action. our data show that black sport activism has a measurable effect on the behaviors that have to date been overlooked: nontraditional political behaviors that are no less essential to a functional democracy. considerably more work will need to be done to fully determine the influence of athlete activists and other celebrities. for example, although injustice continues to beckon celebrities to use their platform to advocate for a cause, conservative republicans have also drawn on the capital of black celebrity to help reshape the party’s anti- black image. kanye west’s donning of trump’s “make america great again” trucker hat, for example, opens up new opportunities to examine the power of black celebrity in politics generally and to further explore the juxtaposi- tion that progressive black sports stars, such as kaepernick, pose to an ever-present mainstream american politics determined to move beyond issues of race. supplementary materials tables a –a to view supplementary material for this article, please visit https://doi.org/ . /s notes white americans also make the association between kaepernick and the blm movement. throughout the s, black student athletes were inspired by the black power movement, leading to protests at several institutions of higher education, including san jose state university, university of california at berkeley, and the university of kansas. many athletes at other universities also voiced griev- ances around wide-ranging racial inequalities on campus regarding admissions policies, treatment by coaches, and the lack of black faculty, coaches, and staff members. the nfl guidelines for the waiver process allowed other nfl teams to claim beach, but they had to agree to take on the remainder of his contract with the browns. however, if no club selected him after a - day period, he would become a free agent and would be able to sign with whatever team extended a contract to him. but none did. the perception, outlined in kaepernick’s lawsuit, that public and private actors may have conspired together against kaepernick and other nfl players is also relevant, as the complaint reads: “president trump and vice president mike pence have posted tweets and engaged in various public relations stunts designed to retaliate against mr. kaepernick and other players that have joined in kaepernick’s peaceful protest” (demand for arbitration n.d.). one explanation for the backlash and the focus on kaepernick is that professional sport leagues appeal to different political bases; for example, the nba’s fan base is left leaning, whereas the nfl is equally popular among conservatives and liberals. observers have argued that sport activists in the nfl run the risk of offending conservative fans in a way that sport activists in the nba do not (baker ). taylor’s ( ) examination of the black lives matter movement suggests that strong black women leaders and new ways to connect across social media and technology create an institutional capacity to organize a new generation of black activists while remaining in conversation with the “old guard” leadership of the civil rights movement. march | vol. /no. https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core the multi-state survey on race and politics (mssrp) is the basis for one of the most data-driven analyses of the tea party and contemporary far right politics, parker and barreto’s ( ) change they can’t believe in. the data were drawn from a stratified state-based sample. therefore, we opted to cluster our standard errors by state, because we expect errors to be correlated for the respondents within each state. this approach is common with geographically stratified data and follows established research practices. with- out clustering errors at the state level, the intra-class correlation would generate misleading results; thus, all models are estimated using standard errors clustered by state (aerts et al. ; arai ; cameron, gelbach, and miller ). it may be the case that black populations making up a smaller proportion of the state’s electorate hold different political attitudes that would be reflective of a different political environment. we include categories of strong, medium, and low strength of identity across our measure of blm identity for several reasons. unlike support for kae- pernick, we believe interesting relationships may exist between levels of blm identity across the scale, especially when examining the conditional effect of kaepernick. furthermore, most blacks who express a medium or weak blm identity still identify as either liberal or independent, suggesting that the measure of blm identity was not simply isolating liberal and conservative blacks. a durbin–wu–hausman test (an augmented regres- sion test) for each dependent variable failed to reject the null hypothesis: model residuals testing for the use of an instrumental variable is insignificant. all addi- tional model specifications mentioned are available on request. as brambor and colleagues ( ) note, analysts cannot determine whether an interaction term should be retained in a model simply by looking at the significance of the coefficient on the interaction term. indeed, it is perfectly possible for the marginal effect of x on y to be significant at different values of variable z, even if the coefficient on the interaction term is insignificant. each measure compared individuals who participated in the specific action in the last months to all other respondents. focusing our examination on recent political participation only further validates the claim that associations between political action and attitudes toward kaepernick are temporally authentic. barriers to voting, such as voter id laws, restrictive rules regarding early voting and voter registration, and denial of absentee ballots are shown to dispropor- tionately disenfranchise black communities. in addi- tion, extremely gerrymandered districts limit the ability of black voters to elect a critical mass of first- choice candidates with substantial political power. for one account, see berman . references aerts, marc, helena geys, geert molenberghs, louise m. ryan, eds. . topics in modelling of clustered data. oxfordshire, uk: chapman and hall/crc. agrawal, jagdish and wagner a. kamakura. . “the economic worth of celebrity endorsers: an event study analysis.” journal of marketing ( ): – . ai, chunrong and edward c. norton. . “interaction terms in logit and probit models.” economics letters ( ): – . andrews, david l. and steven j. jackson. . sport stars: the cultural politics of sporting celebrity. lon- don: routledge. arai, mahmood. . “cluster-robust standard errors using r.” department 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treacy & o'sullivan, ). the internet has not been an exception, and it has triggered the development of new business models and service delivery mechanisms both in the public and private sectors (bergh & benghiat, ; luna-reyes & gil-garcia, ). in the private sector, for example, businesses like amazon have applied information tech- nologies and data analysis techniques to transform the retail industry (bergh & benghiat, ). in the public sector, technologies have also promoted change, although research suggests that change has not been transformational, but incremental (norris & reddick, ). however, recent trends in open data, big data, and data analytics have renewed both the possibility and interest in transforming government activity, particularly in the development of policy (janssen & helbig, ; puron-cid, gil-garcia, & luna-reyes, ). in particular, some researchers have identified the potential impact of social media data and petitioning systems in the early stages of policy making, contributing to the improvement of problem definition and agenda setting activities (hagen, harrison, & dumas, ; janssen & helbig, ; luna-reyes, ). more specifically, janssen and helbig (in press) pointed to the need for developing methods to analyze content developed with such platforms as sources of inspiration for policy makers. however, data collected through these platforms poses at least two challenges for its effective use. first, these datasets include large amounts of unstructured textual data that makes manual reading too burdensome to understand the content. although recent efforts to develop advanced text mining tools have contributed to the first chal- lenge, the use of such tools poses a second challenge given that there is still much to learn in its application and interpretation by policy ma- kers. in this way, it is rare to find empirical examples of textual data being successfully adopted for policy making. however, one of the motivations behind opening data by government is to promote in- novations that facilitate the exploitation of these data (mergel, kleibrink, & sörvik, ). motivated by these challenges, we explore data from the we the people petitioning platform to answer two research questions: ( ) what is a potential solution to efficiently extract and effectively present topics expressed in large volumes of textual data?, and ( ) to what extent do policy makers consider visual analytics solutions to be usable and useful for policy making?. to answer the first question, we extend previous work on topic modeling (hagen, ) by applying topic modeling for topic extraction and visualization tools such as ldavis for presenting the extracted topics. then, to answer the second research question, we test the usability of these possible solutions with policy makers, data https://doi.org/ . /j.giq. . . received august ; received in revised form june ; accepted june ⁎ corresponding author at: school of information, university of south florida, e. fowler avenue, cis , tampa, fl - , usa. e-mail address: lonihagen@usf.edu (l. hagen). government information quarterly xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx - x/ © elsevier inc. all rights reserved. please cite this article as: loni hagen, et al., government information quarterly, https://doi.org/ . /j.giq. . . http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/journal/ x https://www.elsevier.com/locate/govinf https://doi.org/ . /j.giq. . . https://doi.org/ . /j.giq. . . mailto:lonihagen@usf.edu https://doi.org/ . /j.giq. . . analysts, and communication specialists to empirically show their perspectives on adopting such visual analytics tools for everyday practices. in this way, this research contributes to the data-driven policy making literature by proposing a framework to facilitate the analysis and visualization of large volumes of text data, and by diag- nosing government practitioners' responses and feedback on such visual analytics tools for policy making. the structure of the paper is as follows: the second section presents background information about “we the people” data. the third section discusses theoretical foundation of value creation through open data and introduces topic modeling and visual analytics research conducted in open data context. the fourth section describes the data and methods, including a potential solution to distill and present re- presentative themes expressed in large volumes of text data. the fifth section presents our key findings from the usability evaluation. the sixth section discusses the main findings in terms of barriers and lim- itations, and the final section includes conclusion and future research. . background: we the people open data the us e-petitioning platform “we the people” (wtp) was launched in as the flagship initiative of the obama administration to in- crease public participation in government (the white house, ). the data created through e-petitioning includes petition title, petition texts, signatures and their accumulation, some characteristics of peti- tioners and signers, issue categories and metadata (the white house, ). according to the platform rules, petitions that accumulate more than , signatures in less than days get an official update from the white house. although not all petitions reach this threshold, data from past petitions are made available to the public for free use, re-use, and distribution as open data (ubaldi, ). datasets are updated about every months by including new data. following general prin- ciples of open data as a source of innovation, the wtp platform provides an api to facilitate data access and manipulation (see https://petitions. whitehouse.gov/developers/get-code). moreover, the platform pro- vides some analytical tools developed by civic programmers (https:// obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/ / / /hackathon-here- white-house). it has been suggested in previous research that open petitioning data are potential sources of policy topics of public interest (hagen et al., ). in this way, open petitioning data becomes the focal point of interest in this research. wtp open data is unique in three aspects. first, the dataset includes direct expressions of citizen opinion to governments, which is rarely available in traditional information sources such as major news outlets, survey results, or administrative data. therefore, the petition data can be used to inform public opinion and sentiment regarding policy mat- ters to policy makers. second, the wtp dataset is a good example of a technically advanced open data set; it is a quality dataset arranged with defined metadata, arranged in a machine-readable format, and is made available through an open api. third, wtp data is a by-product of a petitioning platform, and governments are flooded with similar types of datasets as the use of social media platforms increases. the major challenges in using wtp data for creating value for the policy-making process is the volume of data and the unstructured nature of petitions. use of unstructured data such as abundant text data has been recognized as one of the biggest challenges of big data ana- lytics (siegel, ). while open government and open data initiatives create and share unprecedented amount of text data including citizen expressions, the process of going through them are too time consuming and complicated to be practical, especially if policy makers need to go through large volumes of text (walters, aydelotte, & miller, ). these types of big textual data are growing exponentially as the number of government-led platforms and adoption of commercial social media increases. topic modeling and the recent development of visualization tools may help to reduce cost and time related to the analysis of large volumes of text data. . literature review . . analytics to create value through open data governments around the world have exerted efforts to “create and institutionalize a culture of open government” (nam, , p. ) by embracing the ideas of transparency, civic engagement in governance, and policy making (aitamurto, ; the white house, ). opening data not only brings changes in government's culture towards “open- ness, transparency and accountability,” but can also increase public engagement by cultivating a culture of sharing and collaborating through open data (ubaldi, ). these cultural changes and active citizen engagement can create economic innovations (mergel et al., ; zuiderwijk, helbig, gil-garcia, & janssen, ), improved government performance (ubaldi, ), and increased accountability of elected officials (sivarajah et al., ). unfortunately, actual crea- tion of value through innovative use of open data has proven to be a difficult task. despite the increasing initiatives of open data platforms, reported use cases and created value have been lacking (najafabadi & luna-reyes, ). for example, out of , datasets published in data.gov (the united states' open data portal), only apps are made available in the platform as of november . data and technology barriers are one of the major obstacles in achieving innovation through open data initiatives (magalhaes & roseira, ; toots, mcbride, kalvet, & krimmer, ; zuiderwijk et al., ; zuiderwijk, janssen, choenni, meijer, & alibaks, ). early on, scholars stressed the importance of open data technolo- gies—in terms of uniformity and integration of information sources as well as the importance of creating metadata (dawes, pardo, & cresswell, ). later, studies recommended that interactivity and usability are crucial elements to make open platforms available for meaningful citizen engagement (toots et al., ). more recently, open data scholars identified certain technical requirements—such as machine-readable formats, use of apis, tools for data wrangling, and technical competence of users—are lacking in achieving innovation using open data (magalhaes & roseira, ; zuiderwijk et al., ). as scholars commonly have recognized, publishing data is not en- ough to attain innovation using open data (janssen, charalabidis, & zuiderwijk, ). the success of open data depends on active external participation to use the published data (attard, orlandi, scerri, & auer, ). however, for non-technical users, the fundamental lack of ex- pertise and knowledge required for the collection, manipulation, ana- lysis, and interpretability of the data hinders meaningful engagement with open data, and it is a critical problem (graves & hendler, ). an important portion of open data users may be non-technical users who want to analyze trends over time to understand longitudinal changes but cannot perform required tasks due to a lack of expertise. recent studies have rightly pointed out lacking capabilities of the supply-side open data platforms for supporting non-technical users (chatfield & reddick, ) as well as lacking best practices for using the data (bertot, butler, & travis, ). . . visualization of topic modeling for understanding topics and themes expressed in large volumes of text data, topic modeling has been frequently adopted to automatically discover latent themes in a document collection based on the co-oc- currence of words (blei, ). the outcome of topic modeling includes topics (a keyword list sorted by the relevance ranking to the topic) and topic proportions in each document. in general, five to thirty highly ranked keywords are presented as a topic. topic modeling is an unsupervised machine learning method that extracts topics without relying on prior human knowledge. so, there are two noticeable issues when applying topic modeling results for policy making. the first issue is doing it right. it is important to make proper decisions and care in the process of modeling to produce human l. hagen, et al. government information quarterly xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/developers/get-code https://petitions.whitehouse.gov/developers/get-code https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/ / / /hackathon-here-white-house https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/ / / /hackathon-here-white-house https://obamawhitehouse.archives.gov/blog/ / / /hackathon-here-white-house http://data.gov interpretable topics (boyd-graber, mimno, & newman, ). hagen ( ) extracted topics using petitioning data, although this study focus is limited to showing “how to train and evaluate” topic modeling and does not show how topic modeling results can be presented and utilized for policy making and can be implemented for everyday practices. our work extends these efforts to produce interpretable topics that are, therefore, amenable to policy making. the second issue of topic modeling for policy making resides in how to interpret the meaning of topics and relationship among them (hagen, ; sievert & shirley, ). given that topics are extracted based solely on the statistical traits of term co-occurrence, there is no theo- retical reason to believe they are easily interpretable by a human (boyd- graber et al., ). however, some digital government studies have adopted topic modeling to identify and understand public opinions ex- pressed in text data. reddick, chatfield, and ojo ( ), for example, extracted topics appearing facebook posts as an effort to create a social media text analytics framework. hagen, uzuner, kotfila, harrison, and lamanna ( ) extracted emerging topics from wtp data using a small set of petitions created in the early years of wtp (initiation to mid- ). although both examples are steps in the right direction, these studies only displayed topic words with limited interpretations, and it is still hard to make sense out of the topic modeling results for non- technical readers based solely on the presented topic words. in order to improve interpretability of topic modeling results, more recent studies have adopted visual analytics to present topic modeling results. cassi, lahatte, rafols, sautier, and de turckheim ( ) explained the re- lationships between the ways in which the academic literature and social needs as expressed in discussions among members of the eur- opean parliament approach the topic of obesity. visual analytics tools were effective in presenting the clear misalignment between academic studies and social needs in terms of the obesity issue. in addition to an improved interpretability, visual analytics tools enable meaningful engagement of non-technical users. graves and hendler ( ) proposed the use of visualization methods to provide simple mechanisms for non-technical users to explore open data. using over public datasets, keshif, a visualization tool, “let the user de- fine what is being visualized and explored, not how” (yalçın, elmqvist, & bederson, ). poucke et al. ( ) demonstrated that researchers can build complex and automated processes with multiple mouse clicks instead of programming codes. using rapidminer (rapidminer, ), a big data analytics tool, non-coding scientists can prepare data, train and validate models, and embed analytic results. as such, experts of open data stressed the importance of data analysis and visualization tools to achieve innovation using open data (toots et al., ). consumers and end users of open data are diverse (e.g., government employees, innovators, citizens, and journalists/researchers/activists) (gascó-hernández, martin, reggi, pyo, & luna-reyes, ). one of the most popular user groups of open data have been technicians who used open data to develop new tools. developers and data suppliers (most often using open data) get together through hackathons in order to create new services and products using open data. however, we do not know to what extent these products and services have been used by governments to create value, nor do we have information regarding their influence on actual policy making. perhaps we can achieve in- novation from open data when we make visual analytics tools available on open data platforms alongside open data sets. moreover, innovative use cases, if provided on open data platforms, can stimulate users' creativity. further, user-perception on usefulness of a new technology also influences the users' intention to actually use the technology. . methods . . data we used data collected through the publicly available white house application program interface (api) that contains all petitions related data appeared on the wtp website between september , (the initiation date), and july , . this corpus contained petition documents. we combined each petition title and its corresponding ra- tionale into one document, which forms the basic unit for this analysis. fig. is an example of a wtp petition. available datasets include meta data (including signature counts, user tagging information, the petition creation dates, signature dates and initials of signers). . . tools for assessing and visualizing data we collected the wtp ogd data from the wtp api and stored them in a mysql database (an open source structured query language (sql) database) (oracle, ). we queried relevant data fields (petition creation date, title, petition body, and signature counts) from the sql data for the analysis. after selecting petitions written in english, we converted all texts to lower case, normalized white spaces, eliminated punctuations, non-al- phanumeric characters, and removed short words of only one or two characters using r tm package. we used an english stopwords dic- tionary included in the “mallet” package to eliminate less informative words such as “a,” “the,” and “of,” which appear in almost every english documents; “amp” is added in the stopwords dictionary to eliminate “amp” which is a processed version of ampersand (&). we used the r mallet package to train latent dirichlet allocation (lda) topic models (mimno, ). statistical topic modeling such as lda (blei, ) extracts a coherent theme, which is a probability dis- tribution over a vocabulary assuming that documents are composed of multiple themes. each theme (or topic) is generally represented by words (we call this topic words) that appear the most frequently in the relevant documents and also is represented by documents that are the most representative of the theme. in deciding number of topics to produce, we followed suggestions made by hagen ( )— topics were produced using petitions and topics are good quality topics for a direct human interpretation, and a manual content analysis result by pew ( )— issue categories are reported after manual analysis of wtp petitions. based on the two studies, it is apparent that about policy issue-dimensions can reasonably reflect the wtp corpus. we decided to produce topics expecting that about topics would be “human interpretable” topics because a small portion of the final topics are likely to be low quality for human interpretation (boyd- graber et al., ; hagen, ). using random initiation, we have produced ten sets of topics to reassure random initiation does not influence the stability of the topics. we found that most of the topics ( out of ) make sense for human interpretation (appendix i reports the topics, labels, and quality). we then developed visualizations for these lda topics using ldavis, an open source topic modeling visualization tool (sievert & shirley, ). we also aggregated available information from the dataset (i.e., signature counts and dates of petition creation) as well as google trends for topic interpretation. fig. shows the framework of the visual analytics using topic modeling. to help the interpretation and further analyses, we labeled each topic based on the ldavis visualization results. the topic words were sorted in descending order based on the estimated term frequency within the selected topic (red bars in fig. ), which informs topic words that are highly relevant to the specific topic. the relevance of a term to topic is given by a weight parameter λ. topic words displayed in fig. (a) are acquired using λ = . topic words displayed in fig. (b) are results from using λ = . , an optimal value suggested in the lit- erature (sievert & shirley, ). the width of the blue bar indicates the “corpus-wide frequencies of each term,” and the width of the red bar represents “the topic-specific frequencies of each term” (sievert & the r script and the data we used for the analysis is available: https:// github.com/lonihagen/topic-modeling l. hagen, et al. government information quarterly xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx https://github.com/lonihagen/topic-modeling https://github.com/lonihagen/topic-modeling shirley, , p. ). for example, the red bars for “election” and “clinton” are fully red, with no blue bar showing (in fig. (a)), which means that these terms are used exclusively in topic , and thus are highly representative of the topic . when used λ = . in fig. (b), these two terms are the first and the second most highly relevant terms representing the topic . after extracting the topics, labels are se- lected from the top topic words (except police & blm) displayed by ldavis (relevance parameter λ = . ) and by also considering semantic meaningfulness. the size of circles (on the left side of fig. , which shows the global topic view) “are proportional to the relative prevalence of the topics in the corpus” (sievert & shirley, , p. ). for example, topic is prevalent in about % of the corpus, while topic is prevalent in about % of the corpus according to the circle size displayed in fig. . the biggest topic and the smallest topics tend to be hard to interpret because they often include a mixture of different topics according to a study conducted by hagen ( ). also, the distance between topics indicates the semantic distance of topics. for the usability assessment, we created a software package which has interactive features (snap- shots of the package is in figs. , , and ). in addition to the important topic words, the visualization enables the representation of relations between topics, and the prevalence of topics in the entire set of petitions. for example, fig. shows topic , which is a topic about police brutality and the black lives matter (blm) movement (rickford, ). the left pane of fig. shows topological positioning of topic , which is located close to topics (http and china—lacking human rights in china), (prison sentence topic), (white genocide) topics. the right-side pane in fig. shows the most relevant words representing the topic: “police,” “officers,” “enforce- ment,” “officer,” “violence,” “black,” “shot,” “law,” “unarmed,” “brown,” and “killed.” in addition, when we click the first topic word “police” for example, we can see other topics that include “police” in their topic words. for example, fig. shows that topics (prison sentence topic) and (terrorism syria topic) include the term “police” in topic words. since the size of topic is bigger in this case, the term “police” plays more important role to form topic (prison sentence topic) compared to topic (terrorism syria topic). as such, the ldavis results show contextual richness of topic modeling results by informing topological position of the topics, and fig. . an example of an wtp petition. note: the first two lines (bold and large font) are the title of the petition, and the rest of the text is the rationale of this petition. fig. . framework of the visual analytics of topic modeling. l. hagen, et al. government information quarterly xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx fig. . ldavis results using λ = (a) and λ = . (b) focused on “clinton” topic. l. hagen, et al. government information quarterly xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx relations of the topic with other closely related topics. also, the red bar on the right pane shows the level of importance of each term in the topic. these added information provided by ldavis provides a rich snapshot of public opinions expressed in wtp petitions. in addition to ldavis visualizations, we produced two other types of visualizations. as a way of visualizing the popularity of each topic, we decided to show signature counts over time (see fig. ). some topics such as election clinton, police & blm, and prison sentence topics seem to gain public attention over time. other topics such as food labeling, guns firearms, marijuana, and secession topics show overall negative slopes and thus indicate decreasing levels of attention on these topics. some other topics have different behaviors depending on external events. police & blm topic, for example, includes topic words such as “police,” “law,” “officers,” “violence,” “enforcement,” “officer,” “black,” and “death.” the majority of petitions representing the topic are critical of police brutality, especially against african-americans. among the top highly relevant petitions to the topic, petitions requesting police officers to wear body cameras were extremely popular, starting on fig. . ldavis results using λ = . (b) focused on “police & blm” topic. fig. . topics including “police” in topic words. l. hagen, et al. government information quarterly xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx august , right after the michael brown case, a black male shot by a police officer on august , . similarly, several petitions under the guns firearms topic were in- itiated right after sandy hook elementary school shooting on december , , but the level of public attention to the guns firearms topic (reflected in number of signatures) have been decreasing ever since (see guns firearms topic in fig. in the second row). other information sources such as google trends can be used to compare petition topics and popularities against the keyword search results of google trends (see fig. ). google trends results can be used as a proxy to measure what people are thinking (stephens-davidowitz, ). we selected relevant topic words from a sample of six topics and searched in google trends in the united states (https://trends.google. com/). the google trends results are displayed in the left column, in contrast to the wtp topics and signature counts displayed in the right column of fig. . some wtp topic popularities seem to correspond to people's thoughts reflected in google trends. for example, the attention paid to the topics, marijuana, guns firearms, and secession, have decreased since they were peaked in in both google trends and the wtp topics. the election clinton, and police & blm topics have gained higher attention in google trends as well as in wtp (fourth and fifth rows of fig. ). these results indicate that wtp may reflect the public's attention to certain topics, and topic modeling results combined with signature counts can reveal the level of popularity of certain topics. however, due to the platform specific effect, it would be naïve to think that wtp al- ways should correctly reflect the public's attention. for example, the white anti genocide topic was extremely popular in and has de- creased in popularity on wtp, while making gains in popularity on google trend (the last row of fig. ). during and after president obama's reelection, there were organized activities relating to petition creation and signing on wtp regarding “white genocide” issues (hagen, ), which has gradually decreased since then. specific groups of people were dedicated to spread out the agenda on wtp. as seen in the google trend results, the public started paying attention to this topic much later (since mid- ) than wtp, according to google fig. . changes of number of signatures per topic by time. l. hagen, et al. government information quarterly xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx https://trends.google.com/ https://trends.google.com/ trends results. these interpretations are merely examples, and were not provided to the experts. if the visual analytics are effective, we expect that policy makers can acquire actionable information and insights that can be used for their policy making. note: y axis of the google trends results represent search interest relative to the highest point on the chart for the given region (u.s.) and time. a value of is the peak popularity for the term. a value of means that the term is half as popular. y axis of the topic popularity is log values of signature counts of petitions assigned to the topic. . . usability assessment usability assessments have been used as tools to involve users in the development of technologies to better understand their needs as well as forms in which technology can support their work processes (howell & lang, ; rubin, ). user-centered approaches to application development involve the use of tools and methods to help software developers and analysts improve the usability of their applications. the international standard organization (iso - ) defines usability as the extent in which a product –in this case a visualization tool—can serve the needs of a specific user group. usability tests are commonly used to assess information systems. the iso standard identifies three main indicators for usability, effectiveness, efficiency, and user sa- tisfaction (iso - ). effectiveness refers to the extent in which the product features help the user to accomplish the stated goals. efficiency is related mainly to the extent in which the product helps the user to reach these goals with the least possible effort. finally, user satisfaction refers to the subjective perception of the user and the interaction with the product. nielsen ( ) suggests additional indicators such as learnability (how easy is to move around the interface), memorability (how easy is to remember how to use it) and errors (how many errors people make when interacting with the system). the utility of the system –providing the features you need—is closely related to usability. in fact, it is suggested that the usefulness of a system results from considering both usability and utility (nielsen, ). we adopted a heuristic evaluation approach to usability testing fig. . google trends and topic popularity. l. hagen, et al. government information quarterly xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx (nielsen & molich, ), to assess potential ways in which our vi- sualizations may support the process of policy making as well as po- tential improvements. we were mostly interested in understanding the utility of the visualizations, as well as its learnability and user sa- tisfaction. in this way, we designed a set of questions with these di- mensions in mind. we also included questions related to the nature of their expertise and current positions to better understand their re- sponses. finally, we asked them to give suggestions for improvement and general comments. the interview included questions (see ap- pendix ii). consistent with the heuristic evaluation approach, we used these questions to explore the expert perspective on the visualizations. we approached experts who were either policy makers, data analysts, or communications specialists. although our original plan was to involve only policy and data analysts, one of them suggested the inclusion of a communications specialist. sample size is consistent with usability testing practices, and experts were selected using a con- venience sampling (rubin, ). usability tests were conducted with each expert individually during the months of may and june in . each interview started by asking experts about their background, experience in data analysis, and per- ception about social media and petitions sites for policy making. then, we introduced ) interactive ldavis interface, snapshots of which are shown in figs. , , and ) topics and signature counts by time, shown in fig. , and ) google trends and topic popularity, shown in fig. , to the interviewees. it is important to note that some visualizations pre- sented to the interviewees were interactive, allowing them to explore relationships among topics in the computer, and doing some simple analysis with the graphs. each expert had a chance to interact with the ldavis interactive visualization tool, as well as the two graphs for – min. after introducing the visualization tools, we asked experts about their interpretation about the utility, learnability and satisfaction of the visualization tools in their daily job. each interview had a duration of to min. five sessions took place in a discussion room on campus reserved by a member of the research team and the other one was conducted at the participant's office. . findings: usability assessment in this section of the paper, we include the main findings from the usability assessment of the visualization tools introduced in previous sections of the paper. data for the assessment comes from the six face- to-face interviews with experts in data analysis, policy making, and communications. among the experts, three were policy makers from different levels of public sectors of new york state, including institution level, district level, and state level. only one of them had experience of using data visualizations for policy making. there were two other ex- perts who were data analysts with a background in information science. one of them has significant experience in data analysis, algorithm de- sign, and health informatics, and the other has several years of ex- perience using data visualization for decision making in the private sector. we also interviewed a communication specialist from a public institution, considering her potential in using data visualization for decision making as a criteria for selection. table presents an overview of main responses from experts in the usability assessment. all experts found at least some topics to be relevant for the policy conversation. expert suggested that topics in the interface varied in terms of re- levance, some of them were more important than others. we found that experts were able to use the interactive ldavis in- terface, and that –in general—their interpretations of the data were consistent among themselves. in general, experts perceived that it was easy to interact with the visualization interface and interpret the results especially with a brief introduction from the interviewer. as it is shown in table , at least two of them found them less intuitive than the other experts and harder to interpret. some of their reactions included phrases such as “the interface is designed very well, everything is very clear, i feel comfortable interacting with it,” or “your introduction helps a lot… for me to understand the interface and to interpret the visuali- zation.” they think the tool is potentially helpful for analyzing large amounts of qualitative data through theme generation, and the data visualization provides an easier way to communicate with people pos- sessing different levels of technical proficiency. for example, one mentioned, “couple years ago, we have received a lot of feedback from the residents in our district through the survey we sent out, however, due to a lack of staff and technique, we did not know what to do with it. now i can see that this tool will be very helpful with analyzing those kind of feedback”. another one explained, “i think this tool will be very useful to put information into different categories or themes,” and “data visualization provides summarized results and present it in a very vivid way. it is especially good at presenting the trend and the changes over time.” some interviewees without prior experience using visualization, however, conveyed their struggle: “the data visualization catches my eyes but i am not sure whether i understand it correctly. some of the themes are very self-explanatory, some are not. maybe because i do not have enough experience, but i think it is very important someone can help people to interpret it in a right way.” some experts found visualizations over time (see fig. ) particularly interesting, finding different ways of describing them. some of them described the trends using phrases such as: “it seems that the search interest does not match the signatures over time, i don't know why. some results are even opposite….” and “hmmm, it is interesting, the search interest does not necessarily match the signatures overtime, which means that people who are interested in search some topic but may not end up act on it to sign the petition about that topic….” in addition, most of the experts recognized the utility of lda tools in analyzing qualitative data in general, and they also pointed out po- tential areas of improvement and obstacles for them to implement these tools in their own practice. for example: currently, this tool only focuses on topic extraction. however, as a policy maker, when we make decision, we mainly focus on under- standing people's opinion, whether they are for or against some is- sues. we would also be interested to know what specific issues about certain topic that people are interested in. for example, the health care topic, what specific issues people are interested in, do they support or against it? a couple more shared concerns are associated with a lack of re- sources and the need for training in the use of this type of tools. for example, one expert stated: i am working in the same office with other legislators, and we share one analyst. most of the time, i will conduct research on my own. for me, i will need some training to be able to use and understand this tool. also, we have to consider the budget of the department to implement this tool, or even hire some technical person to manage this tool. it is not feasible for my department, at least for now it is not feasible. similarly, another expert shared: designing and implementing a visualization tool requires additional funding, staffs with technical skills, data analytical skill, critical thinking, reflective ability, communication skills….training is ne- cessary, especially for people with no technical background to learn how to use the tool to help with their daily work. for one, the actual incorporation of the tool into his daily work was unclear: “i rarely use data visualization in my own work, i can see its merit, but i am not sure how to incorporate [it] in my work, maybe in the future, there will be an opportunity for me to do so.” experts provided suggestions for the future improvement of the tool. referring to the ldavis interface, one of them suggested, “i think in the interface, instead of numbers, adding the labels to each topic will make l. hagen, et al. government information quarterly xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx t ab le o ve rv ie w of m ai n re sp on se s fr om ex p er ts . t op ic e xp er t e xp er t e xp er t e xp er t e xp er t e xp er t e xp er t ba ck gr ou n d le gi sl at iv e d ir ec to r (p ol ic y a n al ys t) p ri n ci p al d at a sc ie n ti st fo rm er t ec h n ol og y d ir ec to r at p w c t ru st ee fo r th e n y s h ig h er e d u ca ti on se rv ic es an al yz in g p ol ic y im p ac ts c ou n ty le gi sl at u re r ep re se n ta ti ve c om m u n ic at io n s sp ec ia li st . u se r of d at a in n ew s. r el ev an ce of th e to p ic s o n ly th e u kr ai n e r u ss ia , se ce ss io n to p ic s ar e re le va n t. so m e ar e re le va n t. so m e ar e re le va n t. so m e ar e re le va n t. m an y to p ic s ar e bi g is su es in re al li fe . so m e ar e m or e re le va n t to ge n er al p u bl ic in te re st th an th e ot h er . in te rp re ta bi li ty v is u al iz at io n of to p ic s ov er ti m e ar e m or e m ea n in gf u l th an a si m p le to p ic m od el in g p re se n ta ti on it se lf . in te re st in g to p ic s. so m e to p ic si gn at u re s se em to m at ch th e ge n er al in te re st ov er ti m e, li ke c li n to n & el ec ti on . li ke s th e d at a vi su al iz at io n of si gn at u re s ov er ti m e, bu t h e w ou ld li ke to se e it ac ro ss lo n ge r ti m e fr am e to ge t a m or e in fo rm at io n . so m e to p ic s ar e ve ry va gu e. c h an ge of th e n u m be r of th e si gn at u re s m at ch th e ch an ge of th e p u bl ic in te re st in p ol it ic s in re al li fe . h e fe lt th e re su lt s ar e in te re st in g, bu t it co u ld h av e be en li tt le co n fu si n g w it h ou t so m e ex tr a ex p la n at io n s. t h e se ar ch in te re st d o n ot n ec es sa ri ly al ig n w it h th e n u m be r of th e si gn at u re s. it ca tc h es m y ey es , bu t n ot ve ry se lf - ex p la n at or y. m or e in te re st ed in th e re su lt s w it h bi g in cr ea se or d ec re as e. le ar n ab il it y v er y u se r fr ie n d ly . if im p le m en te d in to th ei r d om ai n , on ly n ee d m in or tr ai n in g to u se it bu t n ee d m or e tr ai n in g to u n d er st an d th e m ec h an is m be h in d it . n ic e d es ig n . v er y ea sy to in te ra ct w it h . e as y to in te ra ct w it h it bu t n ot cl ea r w h at ar e th e in si gh ts th at ca n be d ra w n fr om th es e re su lt s. e as y to u n d er st an d an d in te ra ct w it h th e in te rf ac e. it w il l be co n fu si n g w it h ou t ex p la n at io n . it is p re tt y se lf -e xp la n at or y af te r th e in tr od u ct io n . it is ea sy to in te ra ct w it h th e in te rf ac e. u ti li ty g oo d to an al yz e fe ed ba ck fr om re si d en ts au to m at ic al ly . m ay al so be h el p fu l to an al yz e so m e co n tr ov er si al is su es (o n ly to a ce rt ai n d eg re e) . it w il l be u se fu l to tr ac k lo n gi tu d in al ch an ge if it ca n be p ro ve d re p re se n ti n g ge n er al p u bl ic s. d at a vi su al iz at io n h el p ea si ly co m m u n ic at e in si gh ts w it h p eo p le w it h d iff er en t le ve ls of te ch n ic al ba ck gr ou n d s. it w il l be h el p fu l to d ea li n g w it h la rg e am ou n t of qu al it at iv e d at a. g oo gl e tr en d re su lt s m ay be tt er re p re se n t ge n er al p u bl ic in te re st ra th er th an p et it io n si gn at u re s. h el p fu l fo r el ec te d offi ci al s an d p ol ic y m ak er s to ge t to kn ow th e sp ec ifi c p eo p le 's co n ce rn an d at ti tu d e to w ar d s ce rt ai n is su es . h el p in te ra ct w it h d at a, an d ea si er to ex tr ac t in fo rm at io n fr om th e vi su al iz at io n . sk il ls n ee d ed to be ab le to p ro d u ce or ap p ly th es e to ol s m ak e su re th at th e d at a ar e fr om ex p er t so u rc es th at ca n re p re se n t th e ge n er al p u bl ic s. n ee d to be tr ai n ed to u n d er st an d th e m ec h an ic s be h in d th e sc en es . n ee d so li d te ch n ic al sk il ls to p u t th in gs to ge th er . a ls o n ee d te ch n ic al tr ai n in g to u se th e to ol s. h ow to u se th e to ol to eff ec ti ve ly co m m u n ic at e w it h cl ie n ts an d le t th em u n d er st an d th e in fo rm at io n co n ta in ed in th e vi su al iz at io n . c ri ti ca l th in ki n g, be re fl ec ti ve , go od at m at h ,c om p u te r sc ie n ce an d te ch n ol og y. d at a an al ys is sk il l, p ro gr am m in g sk il ls . d at a an al yt ic sk il l. p ot en ti al of so ci al m ed ia to in fl u en ce p ol ic y co n ve rs at io n s so ci al m ed ia an d p et it io n s si te s d efi n it el y p la y a ro le , bu t it ca n n ot re p re se n t th e ge n er al p u bl ic be ca u se of ac ce ss is su es . n ot su re h ow m u ch it w il l h av e im p ac t on le gi sl at u re s or p ol ic y m ak in g. sk ep ti ca l be ca u se th ey on ly re p re se n t sm al l gr ou p s of p eo p le w h o ar e ei th er fa r- le ft or fa r- ri gh t. n ot su re if so ci al m ed ia an d p et it io n ca n re p re se n t th e ge n er al p u bl ic . it 's go od to co ll ec t fe ed ba ck an d in te ra ct w it h p eo p le . n ot su re h ow it w il l aff ec t th e p ol ic y m ak in g, m ay ra is e aw ar en es s. p et it io n s w on 't n ec es sa ri ly le ad to an y ch an ge in p ol ic y m ak in g. in ap p ro p ri at e co n te n ts of th e p et it io n s m ak e p eo p le vi ew th em as n on -h ig h qu al it y re fe re n ce . l. hagen, et al. government information quarterly xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx it easier to see which circle represents which topic.” another expert suggested including some measure of people's interest or sentiment analysis, “for me, i would like to see the tool to generate more in-depth analysis on what specific aspects related to each topic that people are interested in, and conduct some sentiment analysis to see what their attitudes towards these aspects are.” finally, another expert suggested including in the visualization information about the validity of the analysis, “besides the results of the tool, i would be more interested to see how to validate the tool.” finally, all experts expressed skepticism about how well social media or online petitions reflect the interests of the general public to some extent. for example, one of them mentioned, “in my opinion, online petitions only represent a small group of people who may share a very extreme idea or has strong motivation to express themselves. it is difficult to assess to what extent it represents the more general in- terest.” another expert also discussed the importance of his local con- stituents and issues related to online platforms access, “as a policy maker, i care more about the interest and need of the people in my district. in my district, most of the people do not participate in online activities, their opinion may not be shown from these petitions.” . discussion using topic modeling and visualization tools, we observed that the government experts recognize adopting visual analytics tools as a dis- tant future, rather than current and feasible practices. so, we begin the discussion by deliberating barriers and suggestions for adopting visual analytics tools for policy making based on our interview results. . . barriers, limitations, and suggestions all experts thought the tools are potentially helpful for analyzing large amounts of qualitative data by generating themes, and that the data visualization offers an easier way to communicate with people with different technical backgrounds. however, the interview data also identified issues involved with adopting these tools and their corre- sponding analytics results into their work practices. experts stressed that developing “user-centric” tools that support achieving their goals will be crucial. when it comes to “user-centric,” previous efforts of providing tools for “users” have mainly assumed users are citizens or developers (cisco, ; sahuguet, krauss, palacios, & sangokoya, ). efforts to develop tools with government practitioners as “users” have been lacking. government practitioners are bounded by structure, rules, regulations, and limited resources, which makes tool development and implementation often difficult. our tool is specifically designed for government practitioners by adopting no-cost, open source tools in order to address resource con- straints issues. even with the open source tools, the experts identified that a lack of skills are the major barriers for them adopting visual analytics tools. experts stated that training and some level of guidance on interpreting lda analytics results will be necessary for them to adopt these results for policy making. in fact, experts stated that the minimal level of introductory training provided to them during the study regarding the ldavis tool was very helpful in interpreting the lda results. this is in line with a previous study's findings, which stressed the importance of training to increase confidence of data users (gascó-hernández et al., ). interestingly though, when it comes to implementing the tools in their practices, experts assume that the new tools should work while keeping the current work practices uninterrupted. a policy maker working in the legislative field stated that he relies on document review and door-to-door visits to collect feedback, which information he re- ferences for agenda setting activities. and, he stated that new tools such as lda analytics are not relevant to his work because it does not fit into his current work practice. when it comes to implementing new tools, therefore, it would be helpful to assess current work practices, and to include a feedback loop so that newly adopted tools factor into current practices to bring improvement in work practices, rather than being regarded as a disruption. ostensibly, this view may vary across levels of government and the perceived access to technology by constituents. . . higher bars for adopting information acquired by data-driven analysis for policy making when the visual analytics results were presented (without providing our interpretations), the experts responded with mixed responses in terms of interpretability of the visual analytics results. while all the experts were able to make sense out of the ldavis presentations, which we thought was promising, they were split on interpreting the signature trends and the comparison results with google trends. this is see- mingly because interpretation of these additional visual analysis results requires a technical understanding and contextual knowledge of plat- form specific effects. experts tended to expect that wtp should represent the entire public's opinion to add value to the policy process, and based on this expectation, some of them concluded the analysis was not useful for their decision making because these results cannot be generalizable. interestingly, when asked about the usual ways of introducing topics into the legislative or policy agenda, experts suggested pathways in- volving only one or two simple pipelines. each expert identified only one or two ways that lead to agenda setting in their offices, which are based on letters written by residents, issues people talk about, stake- holder's concern, or reflecting an institution's priorities and subsequent discussions. that means, although experts also depend on a single path to agenda setting, when the analysis results are produced based on one or two platform(s) and computational methods, they raise the bar to conclude the results are not usable for their policy making because the data and analysis results are not generalizable (which we do not claim it can be generalizable). considering policy makers' higher expectation for information ex- tracted via a data-driven process, visual analytics should consider in- cluding multiple data sources for conducting analyses. this way, di- verse pathways can be produced that can be helpful for agenda setting and are not bounded by one specific environment. to clarify, contextual information attached to data are still important for policy making. what we need to be careful about in analytics tool development is under- standing the extent we can deliver information by reflecting the con- textual basis for that information. . . implications on tool development as previous studies have suggested, making good quality open da- tasets available would be a good start for open data initiatives, but analytics tools provided alongside the datasets help create immediate benefits by extracting useful information from the data. in fact, some u.s. open data sites provide tools for visualization. for example, new york city, san francisco, and orlando, among many other major cities, provide interactive visualizations through private vendors. unfortunately, any analytical tool that also enables textual analysis is not yet available in these platforms. our study has implications for tool development so that engineers can develop usable and useful tools for government practitioners using open data. we demonstrated that our topic modeling analytics and vi- sualizations could be useful for policy making when there are large volumes of text data. in order for the lda results and visualizations to be useful for decision making and agenda setting, government practi- tioners wanted to see more granular information regarding each topic. specifically, experts suggested that knowing more granular levels of issues than topic level and public attitude expressed in each topic would be highly valuable for making decisions based on the lda analytics results. for example, as stated above, one expert suggested that repla- cing numbers with labels will be more useful for understanding topics l. hagen, et al. government information quarterly xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx at a glance – a move that would make the tool more user-friendly. all in all, the study highlights the importance of user (in this case, govern- ment practitioners) engagement in tool development process. . conclusion in this paper, we extend open data research by suggesting a process to extract and visualize textual big data in order to make sense of it. lda topic modeling was used to extract emerging topics from petitions, and visualization tools such as ldavis were used for visual presenta- tions of the topics. then, we interviewed experts to assess the us- ability of the prototype visualizations as well as to gather more general impressions of their potential value for policy making. the interview results of the visual analytics tools show that the experts were positive about the usability of the analytics results and tools regardless of their technical experience. still, experts had overall high standards for usability and usefulness. while acknowledging the potential of these tools they also desired to maintain their current practices for setting policy agenda. in addition, experts expressed that a lack of resources and training are major barriers for adopting such tools. visual analytics tools have evolved so that practitioners, even those who are not big data scientists or engineers, can use these techniques to extract useful and actionable information (marr, ). our results suggest that achieving tangible benefits from using open data for gov- ernment policy making through innovative tools and techniques may require overcoming major barriers. nonetheless, involving policy ma- kers as well as policy analysts in the process of tool building and ana- lytics may provides insights and lessons for the continued adoption of visual analytics for policy making. this study contributes to the open data literature by producing and testing possible solutions to extract useful information from text data using visual analytics and lda topic modeling. we expect that these solutions may offer insights to government practitioners as well as scholars of e-government. these possible solutions can be used to convince and motivate other policy makers and to encourage and in- spire others to participate in the open data movement. this study also contributes to the policy and data analytics literature by applying topic modeling, an automatic topic extraction method, for policy making. hagen ( ) demonstrated the process, validity, and evaluation of topic modeling using a wtp data set. hagen called for more case studies using topic modeling with additional datasets in order to establish the validity of adopting unsupervised learning methods. compared to hagen ( ), we produced similar topics using a bigger data set, and captured new topics reflecting important issues during – , such as the u.s. presidential election and the black lives matter movement. our study also validates the stability of mallet topic mod- eling for extracting interpretable opinions. some limitations should be noted. the lda topic modeling we adopted for the study treats words as discrete entities, which is called bag-of-words representation, which does not capture the full meaning of the text. this is considered as one of the weaknesses of lda models. more advanced topic modeling methods could potentially increase quality and interpretability of the topics. studies show that including semantic information in topic modeling can improve topic quality (batmanghelich, saeedi, narasimhan, & gershman, ). also, putting higher weights on named entities such as person name, location name, and events can improve interpretability and usability of topics (krasnashchok & jouili, ; lau, baldwin, & newman, ). topic modeling is an unsupervised machine learning methods, which is de- vised to enhance human decision making. therefore, rigorous vetting of interpretability and utility are extremely important. so, some recent studies showed that incorporating user feedback in the topic modeling process can improve the interpretability and usefulness of the topics (feng & boyd-graber, ; kumar, smith-renner, findlater, seppi, & boyd-graber, ). in the future, we plan to adopt more advanced topic modeling tools to enhance interpretability of the topics, and also to analyze attitude and sentiment associated with each topic, as the experts suggested. further, we are also interested in studies on training programs to fa- cilitate open data use for value creation using analytical tools. future research will benefit from more domain-specific tool development and from including policy makers in the tool development process. in this way, the application will be tailored to the needs of users, and both usability and value will be augmented. loni hagen is an assistant professor at the university of south florida's school of information. her current research interests are in use of computational methods to extract actionable information from open data for data-driven policy making. her research domains include e- participation, emergency communication, privacy, and cybersecurity. thomas e. keller is a research scientist affiliated with research computing and the genomics program at the university of south florida. his current interests are in data relating to text analysis using open data and social network analysis as well as computational and evolutionary biology with epigenomics and deep learning. luis felipe luna-reyes is an associate professor in the department of public administration and policy. he has been a fulbright scholar and he is currently faculty fellow at the center for technology in government. he is also a research affiliated at the universidad de las americas, puebla and a member of the mexican national research system. his research is at the intersection of public administration, information systems and systems sciences. he uses multi-method ap- proaches to contribute to a better understanding of collaboration and governance processes in the development of information technologies across functional and organizational boundaries in government. he is the author or co-author of more than articles published in leading journals and academic conferences. xiaoyi zhao is a phd candidate in information science phd pro- gram at the university at albany, college of emergency preparedness, homeland security and cybersecurity. her current research interests are exploring the utilization and impact of open data using mixed methods including quantitative and qualitative data analysis and system dynamic modeling acknowledgements loni hagen was supported by the national research foundation of korea grant funded by the korean government (nrf- s a a ). appendix i: topics table a lda-topics, labels and topic quality. topic id label topic words people people time make country american stop government states president obama** president obama congress states united petition act administration tax budget* tax federal pay government money dollars budget employees (continued on next page) l. hagen, et al. government information quarterly xxx (xxxx) xxx–xxx table a (continued) topic id label topic words cancer disease** health care cancer disease research medical treatment patients election clinton** vote investigation election clinton investigate people federal party prison sentence** justice years prison case life trial court release terrorism syria** war terrorist people stop government terrorism genocide syria guns firearms** law amendment gun rights states laws ban weapons children gender children child women sex law sexual parents rights religion* rights government religious human freedom god religion church national holiday* day national american house holiday white awareness world water park energy** water national energy park land oil areas gas police & blm ** police law officers violence enforcement officer black death internet companies* internet service information access companies small business government students school education** students school education schools student public children college ukraine russia* ukraine russian russia puerto sanctions japan ukrainian rico visa immigration** visa immigration united states status family green home military veterans** military service members veterans soldiers war army forces white anti genocide** white anti genocide countries whites racist word code http & china* http www org chinese people human china world animal* animals animal dogs wild hong dog kong horses secession* states united government state america people powers nature vehicle & faa** vehicles safety vehicle faa aircraft air cars flight medal award* medal honor freedom award presidential game team american food labeling** food fda products foods health safe labeling ban marijuana** marijuana drug cannabis medical schedule hemp states substances ebola & tpp* ebola trans media trump trade partnership people protect fda & blood fda blood life india drug sri sikhs drugs mcllellan mcclellan act iran veterans toxic nuclear congress health charly wingate charly robbery pardon vietnam max retrial wingate circumcision based on the topics and visualization results, human coders put labels following the guideline reported in . and also judged the quality of each topic. table a shows the label, topic quality (indicated by number of asterisks), and eight topic words for each of the topics extracted from the petition data. asterisks in the “label” column in table a indicate topic quality judged by a human annotator; ‘**’ indicates “good quality,” ‘*’ indicates “fair quality,” and no asterisk indicates “poor quality” topics. appendix ii: interview questions (irb approved) six to eight sampled policy analysts from capital region of new york state will evaluate the practical usefulness of the text mining tools developed by the researchers. we will come to the interviewees' work places and interview them individually. we will prepare three sets of electronic in- struments: ) the interactive software loaded with the visualization results, ) one electronic file containing graphs reflecting topics and petition signatures, and ) another electronic file containing images showing google trends and topics in two columns and six rows. the participants will be instructed about data and data mining tools used to create the visualization and presented images, then will be requested to investigate all of them. any questions will be answered by the investigator(s). after the participants are finished with the investigation, they will be prompted to answer to the questionnaire. the participants will be given as long as necessary to complete the investigation. the questionnaire includes the following questions: . what kind of analysis do you do as everyday practice? . how things get into the conversation in regards with legislative or policy agenda? . what do you think about using social media and petition sites for possible agenda for legislatures or more in general to establish policy? . what is your general perception of the relevance of these topics for current legislative and policy agenda? . what is your interpretation of these results? . how user friendly are these tools from your point of view and experience? . how useful do you think this tool and images would be for your work and practice? . what would you do to improve the tool and make it more helpful for your practice? . how well do you think that these images and analyses represent the interests of the general public? . what do you think about skills needed to be able to produce/apply these tools? . do you feel comfortable about applying similar technologies in your work? what kind of skills would be needed to be able to do this? . is there any other 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- x( ) -x/rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - x( ) -x/rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - x( ) -x/rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - x( ) -x/rf https://doi.org/ . /s - https://doi.org/ . /s - http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - x( ) -x/rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - x( ) -x/rf http://refhub.elsevier.com/s - x( ) -x/rf 	university of south florida 	from the selectedworks of loni hagen 	 	open data visualizations and analytics as tools for policy-making 	open data visualizations and analytics as tools for policy-making 	introduction 	background: we the people open data 	literature review 	analytics to create value through open data 	visualization of topic modeling 	methods 	data 	tools for assessing and visualizing data 	usability assessment 	findings: usability assessment 	discussion 	barriers, limitations, and suggestions 	higher bars for adopting information acquired by data-driven analysis for policy making 	implications on tool development 	conclusion 	acknowledgements 	appendix i: topics 	appendix ii: interview questions (irb approved) 	references wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ what is species memory? or, humanism, memory and the afterlives of ‘ ’ what is species memory? or, humanism, memory and the afterlives of ‘ ’ birgit m. kaiser and kathrin thiele are we on the same page here? because we too are also now struggling to move beyond the knee-jerk limits of the us and the them. one key historical ‘site of memory’ in which the jamaican novelist, dramatist and cultural theorist sylvia wynter places the emergence of the modern fig- ure of man and the possibility of its contestation is ‘ ’. in her seminal essay, ‘ : a new world view’ ( ), she approaches the ‘ event’ as a historical entanglement that not only lays bare the systemic omissions – especially of blackness – within figurations of ‘man’, but also affords an out- line of a new ‘species-inclusive’ account of humanness. wynter argues that such a ‘new world view’ upon the event and its unfolding afterlife has to move beyond the binaries of colonizer/colonized or perpetrator/victim that continue to dominate memory practices. this oppositional model of remem- bering (based on a logic of ‘us versus them’) presents ‘ ’ either from a cele- brant (‘european’) perspective as a discovery and ‘glorious achievement’ or from a dissident (what wynter calls ‘native’) perspective as a violent invasion that precipitated five centuries of colonization, ‘genocide and ecocide’. per- haps surprisingly, yet decisively, wynter acknowledges aspects from both perspectives, stressing the atrocities and the accomplishments of the plane- tary five-centuries-long event of ‘ ’. her main point here is that arguing from any one of the oppositional stances still remains a ‘product of the intel- lectual revolution of humanism’, i.e. neither of them yet leaves the colonial order. in ‘ : a new world view’ she points out that such binary fram- ing of ‘european’/‘native’ in the caribbean and the americas always/already ignores the formerly enslaved peoples of african descent, a third element which, however, profoundly shapes the antagonistic and dualist dynamic at play in the colonial set-up and still also informs its reversal: ‘it was on the basis of this triadic model and its dually antagonistic and interactional dynamic that the new syncretizing cultural matrix of the now-emerging world civilization of the caribbean and the americas was first laid down’. the oppositional model, still effective at the quincentennial memorial event, then once more reiterated the fundamentally dualist ordering principle of humanist man, positing amerindians and europeans (despite significant inequality) on the side of life/man/free and invisibilizing africans on the side of death/nonhuman/enslavable. while the act of remembrance was meant to counter the oppression and injustices of colonial history, its oppositional ‘native vs. european’ confrontation failed to tackle the systemic violence and © the author(s). published by informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution-noncom- mercial-noderivatives license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . /), which permits non-com- mercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited, and is not altered, transformed, or built upon in any way. parallax, , vol. , no. , – , memory after humanism https://doi.org/ . / . . parallax http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/ . / http://www.tandfonline.com http://www.tandfonline.com http://www.tandfonline.com https://doi.org/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf racialized onto-epistemological order that ‘ ’ put in place. it is now high time, wynter argues, for a third perspective, from which to commemorate, i.e. to give meaning to ‘ ’: an ‘ecumenically human’ or ‘species’ view – a perspective decisively beyond humanism, such as ‘we’ know it. it is a project that aims to account for the human species beyond the exclusivist, exception- alist and speciesist understanding of human as ‘man’. ‘ ’ is in this sense a significant case of probing connections between criti- cal posthumanism and memory studies. questioning the remembrance of as wynter does exceeds the analysis of the dynamics of collective mem- ory around historical events and their aftermaths. to be sure, ground-break- ing work has been done on the dynamics of cultural memory, its transnational interconnectedness and violent amnesias, especially also high- lighting the particular position of african and african-descended communi- ties. these aspects already came into focus – especially for the caribbean – in the differently nuanced intellectual, cultural-political movements of négri- tude, antillanité and créolité, but also prominently in paul gilroy’s black atlan- tic ( ). as gilroy notes, ‘the black atlantic as a non-traditional tradition, an irreducibly modern, ex-centric, unstable, and asymmetrical cultural ensemble that cannot be apprehended through the manichean logic of binary coding’. bringing african and black experience into memory in the ameri- cas has been a crucial, prominent focus of cultural and black studies. like- wise, not least since michael rothberg’s multidirectional memory ( ), memory studies has stressed the dynamism and multidirectionality of mem- ory practices, breaking away from merely binary models. what wynter adds to these and other crucial cultural and memory studies achievements, how- ever, is her insistence on the systemic transformation of our conception of humanness. less concerned with the conflicts and confluences of narratives from different communities, her work brings to the fore the euro- and anthropocentric ‘initial conditions’ from which humanness has been thought and which even a dynamized and multiplied paradigm of memory leaves largely unquestioned. wynter takes ‘ ’ as a key site for founda- tional questioning of what ‘we’ mean by being human. her project of a new ‘species-inclusive’ account of humanness – ‘the single issue with which global warming and climate instability now confront us’ as she argues in a recent interview – urges for ecumenical and ecological, posthuman(ist) and/as non- anthropocentric origin narratives that intra-link a recasting of being human in hybrid species terms with/in the planetary habitat. at the beginning of ‘ : a new world view’, wynter phrases her project as follows: can we therefore, while taking as our point of departure both the ecosystemic and global sociosystemic ‘interrelatedness’ of our contemporary situation, put forward a new world view of from the perspective of the species and with reference to the interests of its well-being […]? the central thesis of this essay is that we can. kaiser and thiele in what follows, we will pursue the stakes of this proposition and the ques- tion we derived from it in our title: ‘what is species memory?’ we want to ask if ‘we’ – to be read as a ‘species-inclusive’, ‘ecumenical and ecological’ pronoun – can move beyond ‘the knee-jerk limits of the us and the them’ that have dominated memory-claims and political collectives. what would ‘species’ mean in such a project, and how would it revise the dominant con- ceptions of humanness and memory? we will address these questions mainly via wynter’s critical analyses of the concept and world view of ‘man’. how- ever, given the centrality of narrative – i.e. the production of origin stories otherwise than ‘man’ – we will interlace our discussion with her own poetic probings of these questions in her novel the hills of hebron. to do this seems appropriate also in view of the strong emphasis in caribbean thought on the transformative powers of poetic knowledges. the hills of hebron con- fronts the history of slavery and colonialism in the caribbean, and makes palpable the particular challenges that memory faces there. it makes visible the effects of ‘ ’ for us today, exploring the potentials of a new perspec- tive to revise the established order of man and to tell, and hence remember, ‘our’ history (and future) differently. first, we will briefly turn to the novel itself, before presenting the relevant steps of what we consider wynter’s specifically post-humanist argument (‘species memory’). finally, we will return to the implications for processes of memorizing and/as narrativizing of such a ‘new/third perspective’, again with more direct focus on the novel. the racial economy of the archive the hills of hebron is written in the context of the anti-colonialist nationalist movements in the caribbean in general, and in jamaica in particular (jamaica gained political independence in ). yet, as natasha barnes concludes in her reading of the novel: ‘the hills of hebron is remarkable for the manner in which it portends the crisis of nationalism and feminism […]. [it] makes sylvia wynter, whether she intends it or not, the progenitor of a forceful feminist critique of our greatest modern foundational moment’. set in colonial jamaica in the early twentieth century, the novel portrays the community of ‘new believers’ (inspired by alexander bedward’s jamaican revivalist movement) who withdrew to the mountains, following their self- proclaimed prophet moses out of the economic misery and racial oppression of the city of cockpit centre. the novel begins with the community in upheaval, roughly two decades after their exodus and some time after moses’s death by self-imposed crucifixion, now awaiting the return of isaac, moses’s son, who has been educated in the city and who his mother, miss gatha, claims is hebron’s legitimate new ‘elder’. in their quest for human dignity, community and memory, the people of hebron confront a profound problem: as descendants of ‘slave ancestors’, they face what katherine mckittrick calls the ‘racial economy of the archive’ – that is, the fact that archival memory of the slave trade displays only the ‘violated body, the corpse, the death sentences, the economic inven- parallax tories of cargo’ or the fact that in the official records also of post-slavery colonial jamaica, the descendants of slaves find themselves ‘only in the blank spaces between the lines’. they live in the ‘interstices of every date on which a deed was done, […] imprisoned in mute anonymity, the done-tos who had made possible the deed’. their individual and collective pasts have been erased in the middle passage and even long after the official abol- ishment of slavery (in jamaica in ) the slave-descended communities continue to suffer economic and social marginalization. it is this crux, to remember and envision human dignity if all has been lost, being written out of the records and out of humanness itself, that wynter’s novel confronts. if the archives mark blackness as death or absence, any recuperation or re- membrance would, as mckittrick suggests, consequently have to ‘imagine those lives that are so inconceivable, so unworthy of documentation, so radi- cally outside the archives, that they are merely psychic impressions of life and livingness’. the hills of hebron contributes in such poetic manner to this task. seeking a way forward, the new believers had followed moses into the mountains. in hebron, he had ‘promised them those things that had been lost in their trespass across the seas, across the centuries’; there they could recover ‘the loss of gods and devils that were their own’. in its por- trayal of a black community that retreats to the mountains, the novel thus also evokes the caribbean stories of marronage: of the free communities formed by maroons during the period of slavery, those who escaped the plan- tations and took refuge in the dense forests of the islands’ hinterlands. the novel recalls the rebellions of those ‘nonassimilated antillean[s]’ who escaped the plantation/urban white economy and withdrew to what wynter with ref- erence to glissant calls the ‘“non-domesticated” mountains’. it revisits aspects of the ‘hitherto repressed historical beginnings’ of the jamaican past: slavery and its marronage resistance, colonial racism, bedward revival- ism; and it therefore remembers key elements of the african experience in caribbean/jamaican history. importantly, moses had promised his people a way out of the deep-rooted injustice by their move into the mountains and by proclaiming himself the son of the christian god. well before the flight to hebron, moses already aimed to prove this claim by publicly staging a first ‘exodus’, which, however, ended in defeat, with his internment in a mental asylum. there, however, in conversations with his irish doctor, he comes to understand that the ‘englishman made god in his own image’ and he realizes that his pro- phecy had failed so far, because he wanted as a ‘black man […] to be wel- comed as son by a white god’. moses concludes that to exit this colonial frame of mind, god in his own image must mean that ‘god was black’. thus, after his release, he founds hebron on those premises, making it a project to ‘build a black heaven on earth’ – a vital move to resist racial oppression. and yet – this is what we consider wynter’s significant twist in the context of nationalist movements as barnes has also argued – the novel does not end here. instead, it shows how this is only a first step in anti-colo- nial struggles. the substitution of white with black is a reversal, but not yet systemic transformation. kaiser and thiele ‘we have never been human’: moving from reversal to systemic transformation the reversal of whiteness into blackness is, according to wynter, only a ‘mere negation of “white power”’. it is not yet the transformation of the hegemonic onto-epistemological order – or of what we have called with mckittrick ‘the racial economy of the archive’ that precisely lives off the silences of those voices the novel turns to. from a memory studies angle, wynter’s crucial point is that the omission of blackness is not an issue of ‘merely’ forgetting the african-descended communities in narratives of the caribbean post/colonial setting; it is not an amnesia that could be redressed by turning the tables or by including forgotten voices as a now acknowledged group. the problem to be faced is of a much more foundational nature: the omission is constitutive of ‘our’ worldview as a whole, so that adding new voices into the current anthropo-scene is insufficient in the sense that – speaking with audre lorde – it continues unreflectively to use the ‘master’s tools’. wynter’s work stresses the systemic dynamic of exclusion and colonial violence and she shows that while the distinction victim/perpetrator or colo- nized/colonizer has found a position in intelligible spaces, be it in history or memory studies, the systemic omission of blackness remains constitutive of or is systemically tied to the western tradition of humanism. we need to dig a little deeper here into wynter’s historical analysis. in the fourteenth/fifteenth century – with the humanist revolution in the renais- sance, the emerging new sciences and the colonization of the americas – a new ‘descriptive statement’ of humanness took form which, wynter argues, is still hegemonic today, despite shifts and adjustments over time. in great historical detail wynter’s oeuvre describes how, at this specific historical threshold, the european formerly theocentric, latin-christian, scholastic order of knowledge was trans-scripted onto what is now called a ‘modern’ or human-centric one, and how in the process of this onto-epistemological shift the figuration of humanness itself moved from an earlier ‘latin-christian self’ to the modern genres of what she has termed man and man . draw- ing on humberto maturana and francisco varela’s notion of autopoiesis and the systems-theoretical notion of code (as an ordering principle along which symbolic life/death is distributed), wynter shows how the figure of po- litical man emerged post- along the code ‘rational/irrational’, crucially including amerindian peoples in the new world and excluding peoples of african descent. man ’s coding then shifted in the nineteenth century, when – with the global spread of the ‘new’ bio-centric figure of homo oeconomicus or man – bio-evolutionary thinking replaced classical theo-rationalism. the code rational/irrational was thereby rescripted as ‘evolutionary selectedness/ eugenicity and/or dysselectedness/dysgenicity’. it revised the systemic ordering principle, now newly aligned with the emerging bio-sciences in the wake of darwin’s biological theory of evolution and malthus’s economic model of population regulation. with darwin, wynter explains, being human became part of biological species evolution. however, while situating the human thereby as a biological species within evolution and the principles of natural selection, the new ‘laws of nature’ nevertheless again secured the parallax (hierarchical) nonhomogeneity of humankind by encoding bio-centric man within a newly racialized order – the ‘new symbolic construct […] of “race”’. unlike hierarchies established along the code rational/irrational, people of ‘deviant’ behaviour (in wynter’s words not only blacks and colo- nial natives, but also homosexuals, the jobless and the poor, i.e. encompass- ing those in this category which fanon termed the ‘wretched of the earth’ ) were now written out of humanness as evolutionarily dysselected or geneti- cally deficient, despite the allegedly species-encompassing biological concept of man. while this shift certainly produces a difference in how we think (and live) humanness, the systemic dehumanizing operations of racism and systemic expulsion remain intact. given this historical analysis, wynter urges us to look for a ‘third perspec- tive’, a ‘new world view’. she argues that only a foundational rewriting of knowledges will eventually initiate a transmutation of the entire knowledge/be- ing/power constellation of ‘ ’, and only then a perspectival shift can affect everything. to stress this once more, and also in view of memory practices, the third means neither a simple inclusion of an additional element, nor is it a dialectical sublation where a synthesis overcomes the antagonism. in con- versation with anti-humanist western thought (e.g. bateson, foucault, der- rida, maturana/varela) and most prominently with decolonial thought (fanon, césaire), wynter argues that the racialized foundations of man / man can never be redressed by merely including within the category of man what this very category requires to be kept outside. systemic omissions are non-recuperable within the system itself, because as ‘dysselected’ they already belong to it as its very motor. this understanding follows the systems-theo- retical logic, yet reads it from a critical perspective that allows for an aware- ness of significant power differentials which are often forcefully neutralized in western systems-theoretical or cybernetic thought. wynter’s third perspective then gestures towards an otherwise than oppositional dynamic in order to trans- form systemically the onto-epistemological order of the colonial setting that is in place since . her argument states clearly that what has been (under- stood as) human so far has never accounted for the entire species; it only ever was and is the ‘overrepresentation’ of one ‘ethnoclass or western-bour- geois’ version of being human. and while transmuting man /man into a ‘new’ perspective might seem like a contradiction in terms – after all, does wynter’s painstaking analysis not precisely show how the binary codes never disappear but only ever become trans-scribed with/in a new system? – put- ting forward an ecumenical praxis of being human, i.e. a ‘species-inclusive’ perspective beyond the dualist/triadic dynamic, will make a difference. and it will do so also in view of today’s multifaceted ecological devastations on a planetary scale by initiating a different ‘referent-we’ and propter nos, after ‘the ends of the referent-we of liberal monohumanist man ’. ‘we’ have never been human: this is one of wynter’s key interventions. her work highlights the theoretico-political obligation to first attend to the reduc- tion of the human to cartesian-cum-biocentric-man, before any moving be- yond – posthuman(ist) or after humanism – can be seriously considered. kaiser and thiele while striving beyond man /man is indeed – also for wynter – most urgent, current posthumanist discussions need to beware not to take ‘the map for the territory’ once more. by suggesting a reading of wynter in conjunction with posthumanism, then, we are not easily fitting any such label or striving to transcend the earthly condition of ‘us’ as human. rather, we regard her critical analyses of what is called human as a most fruitful contri- bution to current attempts to undo human exceptionalism and speciesism; attempts in which, however, ‘man’ often too quickly disappears into ‘nature’ or ‘life itself’, from which a systemic interconnectedness is then claimed. we want to join claire colebrook in arguing that any such straightforward move ‘beyond’ cannot do the job thoroughly enough. colebrook cautions against any posthumanist tendency that ‘renounces human privilege or spe- cies-ism but then fetishizes the posthuman world as man-less; “we” are no longer elevated, separated, enclosed, detached from a man-less world, for there is a direct interface and interconnection – a mesh or network, a living system – that allows for one world of computers, digital media, animals, things and systems’. by leaving unquestioned what it means to be human to begin with, such approaches fail to deconstruct ‘man’. they further an ul- tra-humanism that once more leaves intact the violent structures (for humans and non-humans alike) on which existing humanist ‘man’ is built and by which ‘he’ is written. if the human is assumed to be nothing but an interface, already at one with a world that is one living system, then posthumanism would be nothing more than the negation of a humanism that never was. it becomes an ultrahumanism precisely because once man is abandoned as a distinct system or inflection, he returns to characterize nature or life in gen- eral. although colebrook and wynter certainly speak from different theoretical angles, colebrook’s argument for us resonates well with what we laid out above. wynter’s concern is crucially how to break with cartesian-cum-biocen- tric-man and heal his socio-ecological devastations. it is – with fanon – the question, ‘how do we extricate ourselves?’. yet in contrast to positions that then move man into nature, wynter insists on a non-speciest-specificity of the human as a hybrid biological/symbolic species. it is this significant speci- ficity that we want to turn to now in our concluding section. new origin stories according to wynter, earlier transmutations of onto-epistemological orders of knowledge were always triggered from positions liminal to the existing order. so also now, ‘newness’ can only come heretically from ‘this “gaze from below” western world-systemic, ultimate underside, periphery ex-slave archipelago’s liminally deviant perspective’, or what mckittrick calls demonic grounds. hence, any transmutation of man also has to be made conceiv- able from such a ‘heretic’ position, and in wynter’s view it is fanon’s think- ing which effectively ruptures man ’s restricted, biocentric conception of humanness. from the liminal position that he occupied within man parallax (condensed prominently in black skin, white masks in the interpellation ‘look, a negro!’), fanon derived the central insight that ‘besides phylogeny and ontogeny, there is sociogeny’. sociogeny, wynter argues, implies that humans are not merely biological beings, but an ‘auto-instituting […] self-in- scripting mode of being, which is, in turn, reciprocally enculturated by the conception of itself which it has created’. and from this sociogenic, i.e. in a sense foundationally culturalist perspective, she draws another figure: homo nar- rans. she argues that the specificity of humanness, our very ‘species-specific cognitive mechanism’, lies not merely in bios (purely biological organicity (‘the mesh’)), but in ‘a hybrid nature-culture, bios/logos form of life bio-evolu- tionarily preprogrammed to institute, inscript itself’. or, to say the same with fanon: humans are always-already both skin (bios) and mask (mythoi), and wynter turns this into her proposition that humans live in biological/cultural, auto-poietic collectives that are upheld via retrojected origin stories. they/we are ‘a hybrid-auto-instituting-languaging-storytelling species’ emerging out of the neuro-chemical evolution of the human brain and/as the symbolic-se- mantic evolution of language. her conception of a non-biocentric species – to which we link ‘species memory’ here – designates then still a mode of life with/in its bios existence (i.e. she works with evolutionist and neurobiological insights), yet as neuro-bios-cum-languaging existence (all at once), or as a biological and/as symbolic life-kind. in this move, wynter brings two things to the fore: first, as outlined earlier, that biocentrism and its man version of the human have foundational racial fault lines, thereby urging us not to dis- card the figure of the human as surpassed in posthuman(ist) debates, but to return to it otherwise than in terms of man ; and second, she also shows that being human as such a hybrid praxis (instead of being human as noun) would imply ‘a mutation of the species beyond man’ by fundamentally tak- ing into account the ways ‘we’ narrate ourselves. narrative is central to wynter’s suggestion of homo narrans, as our hybrid praxis of being human that is pre-programmed to invent mythoi (divinity, nature, life, origin stories), which in turn are wired into bios (our cognitive, opiate-rewarding kin-recognition). in this light, let us return again to the hills of hebron. the novel is not very recognizable as what is currently seen as posthuman(ist) literature. it is neither about non-human agency nor does it provide us with figurations of a new humanity. it does, however, re-mem- ber (dimensions of) the omitted black communities and stories on the one hand, and, on the other, as we will show in this concluding turn, it demon- strates the dangers that arise when these stories remain within the order of knowledge that white supremacy has established (man/god). the novel in this double sense then calls for new origin stories, yet it does not tell them. and for a good reason: to begin with, they will have to be plural, and fur- thermore, from within man , ‘we’ do not yet know what this being human will mean. once ecumenical and ecological, posthuman(ist) and/as non-an- thropocentric origin narratives will have been fabricated and retroactively projected onto a past, only then can new modes of knowing, minding, and kaiser and thiele acting – hopefully along codes that do not replicate the ever-same eco-geno-suicidal wor(l)ding strings – emerge. the future will first have to be remembered, imagined. as the novel shows, retreating to the hills and implementing a black chris- tian god still inscribes hebron into the same registers of the word of man that sustain the colonial system and its aftermath. hebron, seen as an antechamber to the kingdom in heaven, is ‘only’ the other side of the plan- tation, its reversal, where moses had ‘promised that the masters would be slaves, and the slaves masters. stars and new continents would be theirs to rule over, and their subjects would be angels, white angels’. at the pivotal moment of his crucifixion, moses, however, realizes that hebron’s legacy of christianity has changed little: ‘god is white after all… god is white!’, he exclaims before he dies. hebron had reversed things, but it ended up ossi- fied; a still poor, secluded, and illiterate community in which his son isaac turns out to have raped the current elder obadiah’s wife, rose, and runs off with the money that his mother had scraped together to ensure isaac’s eldership and her personal legacy. during the community’s ensuing search for the perpetrator – a search that spans the novel’s entire length – hebron literally dries up in this (post)colonial constellation. not a drop of rain falls for an entire season, with the community’s survival ‘up in the mountains’ at stake. the novel shows hebron to inscribe black jamaicans into the judeo- christian-transmuted-into-humanist story of man – but as a necessary ‘third’ in addition, and not yet a ‘third’ as perspective; as the search for one’s own story, but not yet a systemic transmutation of man /man . the reader of the hills of hebron only senses a pushing through when, finally, obadiah comes to terms with the truth behind rose’s pregnancy (isaac’s rape) and accepts the child, turning to the project of now ‘build[ing] a good road, a broad road out into the world’. then the rain starts to fall again, and oba- diah reflects that he can now ask the people for ‘a new response to a new ritual, a new morality, a new right and wrong, a new god’. now the time is ripe to arrive, we might say with wynter, at a human(e) story of jamaica: a new propter nos beyond group-specific narratives, a perspective of the species that also re-members/narrates itself as species. what wynter argues in relation to glissant therefore holds equally true for her own novel: the descendants of the maroons must ultimately ‘leave the certainty of [their] ancestral retreat in the mountains in order to join in the struggle for the future that was being fought out in the lowland plantation plains’. there – in proximity to the plantation system, its ruins and pres- ences – the ‘psychic costs’ of the contradictions and exclusions of the human- ist-colonial order are most intensely experienced. obadiah’s refusal in the hills of hebron to keep the community bound only to past violence (racial oppression, rape, the believers’ acceptance of drought as divine curse), as well as his refusal to refuse mixed genealogies (refusal to refuse the child as his), makes it possible to embark on a search for new responses – a new cere- mony. wynter’s novel and her work in general gesture towards such new propter nos that takes into account the irrecoverable past of the (hitherto) parallax systemically excluded; a past that needs to be fabulated for the future, and that needs to intertwine the heritage of marronage with those in the ‘plains’, of both slaves and slaveholders. her invitation for further discussion seems to be this: come down from the mountains to make new liminal positions possible, to enable a different ‘maroon refusal’, one that can produce a sys- temic transformation; break open the binary code/coding that structures ‘ ’, take account of the systemic omission and move what counts as human into new directions. it is an invitation to re-write oppositional claims of memory and work toward the human(e) story, a propter nos beyond group- specific narratives, a ‘species memory’. any such human(e) story will, it seems to us, remain perspectival and fractured, i.e. it does not gesture towards a new universal. yet, it can highlight the complicated relationalities and co-im- plicatedness that make ‘us’ as species, and as such, it can help to transmute how ‘we’ relate to – and therefore narrate – what it means to be human, with/in our habitats. notes wynter and mckittrick, “unparalleled catastrophe,” . in this article we cannot do justice to the breadth of wynter’s oeuvre. we take ‘ ’ as our main anchor point, a particularly pertinent essay for us in view of questions of (post)humanism and memory. the quo- tation marks around ‘ ’ indicate the dis- cursive-political complex (‘the event’) unravelling in the wake of the historical date of . we call it also a ‘site of mem- ory’ in the sense of a ‘nœud de mémoire’ (see rothberg et al.) to highlight multidi- rectionality and transnationality as essential dimensions of memory processes that also underlie wynter’s understanding in ‘ ’. wynter, “ ,” and ; referring to cerio’s and harjo’s contributions to news- week . ibid., . for this specific use and (quantum) tem- porality of ‘always/already’, see kirby, quantum anthropologies, . wynter, “ ,” . ibid., . ‘beyond’ is in italics to mark the non- teleological character and non-linear decon- structive temporality, close to the ‘always/al- ready’ as mentioned above in note . also, ‘we’ is put in scare quotes in order to prob- lematize the exclusivity of the humanist tra- dition and ask after more plural modes of ‘we’. let us note right away that we thus read wynter’s work as neither speciesist nor human-exceptionalist. for us, wynter con- siders the specificity of being human; she does not deny – to borrow a phrase from karen barad – that we are ‘of the world in its dynamic specificity’ (meeting, ). for a slightly more critical perspective on possible resonances between wynter’s work and posthuman(ist) scholarship, see alaimo, exposed, . gilroy, black atlantic, (emphasis added). in a similar vein, stuart hall notes the triadic model of présence américaine – présence africaine – présence européenne, “cul- tural identity,” cf. wynter, “ ,” . elsewhere in this issue, nathan snaza also draws on wynter in relation to multi- directional memory in his reading of posthuman(ist) education after auschwitz. on the importance of inquiring into ‘initial conditions’ in posthuman(ist) endeavors, see kirby, “initial conditions.” a currently pressing case in point is the black lives matter movement and the facts that called these protests in the u.s.a. into existence. see, e.g., https://sentencingpro ject.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /black- lives-matter.pdf and https://blacklivesmat ter.com, accessed june , . wynter and mckittrick, “unparalleled catastrophe,” . the formulations ‘intra-link’ and ‘with/ in’ follow karen barad’s interventions on intra- rather than inter-action and her use kaiser and thiele https://sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /black-lives-matter.pdf https://sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /black-lives-matter.pdf https://sentencingproject.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /black-lives-matter.pdf https://blacklivesmatter.com https://blacklivesmatter.com of ‘/’ in her ‘agential realism’ (barad, meet- ing). wynter, “ ,” . wynter’s work in many places draws explicitly on aimé césaire’s oeuvre, and most strongly on his address “poetry and knowledge.” the stress on poetic knowl- edge reappears in many caribbean authors, e.g. audre lorde, Édouard glissant or derek walcott. our reading of wynter’s novel is informed by the insightful earlier essays on wynter’s novel by barnes, lid- dell, and toland-dix. barnes, “reluctant matriarch,” . wynter, hebron, . mckittrick, “mathematics,” . ibid. wynter, hebron, . ibid., . earlier, wynter writes: ‘some weight of memory in their blood carried the ghosts of dark millions who had per- ished, coffined in the holds of ships’, . mckittrick, “mathematics,” (emphasis added). wynter, hebron, . the maroon, edouard glissant writes, is ‘the one who refuses’ (fourth century, ). the term was originally derived from the spanish cimarrón (non-tamed animal) (see wynter, “beyond,” ). for further refer- ences to resistance strategies of refusal and marronage in radical black studies, see also moten and harney, the undercommons; and ferreira da silva, “toward.” wynter, “beyond the word,” . ibid., . wynter, hills of hebron, . ibid., . ibid. ibid., . crucially, the reader only learns at the end of the novel that moses was able to secure the rights to the land for hebron by very worldly means: aware of the reverend’s rape of a young believer, he uses that information to receive the land title. this title is inspired by donna har- away’s rephrasing of latour’s ‘we have never been modern’ in when species meet, . wynter, “creole criticism,” . lorde, sister outsider, . we want to insist, however, that ‘insufficient’ does not mean unnecessary. the remembering of those voices that are silenced by/in the archives is an indispensable task, not only politically and ethically, but also in order to arrive at a new understanding of human- ness. ibid., . we focus on darwin here because bio- centrism is central to our argument. yet, malthus’s contribution is important, too, as it was he who replaced rational political with rational economic man. for malthus, see e.g. ibid., . wynter, “ ,” . for an analysis of these shifts in and for the late twentieth century, see especially wynter’s ‘open letter’ to her colleagues, titled “no humans involved,” an essay sparked by the police beating of glen rodney king. wynter, “unsettling,” . wynter’s is a rather classical understanding of darwin’s evolutionary thought. for a different re- reading of darwin from a feminist material- ist perspective, see grosz’s discussion in the nick of time. ibid., . for the relation of ‘referent- we’ and propter nos see also wynter, “ ,” . wynter, “on how.” as in so-called transhumanism. the sub- title to transhumanist icon ray kurzweil’s the singularity is indicative: when humans transcend biology. see, e.g., timothy morton’s idea of ‘the mesh’ (ecological thought, ). colebrook. posthuman, . for a read- ing between colebrook and wynter that also inspired us here, see cornell and seely, spirit. colebrook, posthuman, . fanon, black skin, white masks, . wynter follows asmaron legesse’s insight that a coded system of knowledge and its ‘reflex automatic functioning of rules of figuration’ (wynter, “ceremony,” ) can only be breached from liminal exis- tential positions. and in “ ,” wynter describes columbus’s ‘heretic’ position within the latin-christian order after cir- cumnavigating cap bojador as a moment of realization that the earth was inhabitable beyond what that order of knowledge made conceivable. wynter and mckittrick, “unparalleled,” . mckittrick, demonic grounds. fanon, black skin, ; see wynter, “unparalleled,” . wynter, “africa,” (quoted in kamu- gisha, “caribbean,” ). parallax wynter, “ ,” . wynter, “africa,” . ibid., . for some even too affirmatively; see e.g. weheliye, habeas viscus, . cornell and seely, spirit, – . wynter, hebron, . ibid., . wynter, hebron, . ibid., . wynter, “beyond,” . ibid., . bibliography alaimo, stacey. exposed: environmental politics and pleasures in posthuman times. min- neapolis: university of minnesota press, . barad, karen. meeting the universe halfway. quantum physics and the entanglement of matter and meaning. durham: duke university press, . barnes, natasha. “reluctant matriarch: sylvia wynter and the problematics of carib- bean feminism.” small axe ( ): – . cerio, gregory. “were the spaniards that cruel?” newsweek ( ): – . césaire, 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the map for the territory, and reimprisoned ourselves in our unbearable wrongness of being, of desêtre: black studies toward the human project.” in not only the master’s tools: african-american studies in theory and practice, edited by lewis gordon and jane anna gordon, – . new york: paradigm, . wynter, sylvia. “unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation – an argument.” cr: the new centennial review ( ): – . wynter, sylvia and katherine mckittrick. “unparalleled catastrophe for our spe- cies? or, to give humanness a different future. conversations.” in sylvia wynter: on being human as praxis, edited by katherine mckittrick, – . durham: duke university press, . birgit m. kaiser is associate professor comparative literature and transcul- tural aesthetics at utrecht university.email: b.m.kaiser@uu.nl kathrin thiele is associate professor gender studies and critical theory at utrecht university. email: k.thiele@uu.nl together, they coordinate terra critica: interdisciplinary network for the critical humanities. parallax mailto:b.m.kaiser@uu.nl mailto:k.thiele@uu.nl 	 the racial economy of the archive 	 `we have never been human`: moving from reversal to systemic transformation 	 new origin stories 	notes 	bibliography wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ the new normal asnc president’s message the new normal with the first wave of the covid- pandemic under control, and new supplies of personal protective equipment distributed, most health care facilities have now reopened for elective testing procedures. though it feels good to be back in the laboratory, we all recognize we have not returned to business as usual. adjusting to the new normal—as it changes—remains the new normal. six months after all this began, with over million confirmed cases and over , mortalities, we return to work with concerns about a second resurgence of covid infection in our minds. this is why routine clinical work now begins, at most institutions, with daily symptom checks for physicians, screening question- naires for patients, and enforced mask use for everyone in the hospital. our delays to returning to care for patients safely, have created long wait lists for tests— and each test now takes nearly twice as long to perform because of extra time between tests to allow for cleaning the rooms, exercise equipment, and scanners. changes to the hospital are also rife in nearly every domain: our waiting rooms have been reorganized. our schedules have been adjusted. our exercise rooms have been equipped with increased air exchanges. imaging proto- cols also have been changed to facilitate rapid throughput. along with these daily practice changes, lab clo- sures and trainee redeployment have pushed us to educational innovations. most of american society of nuclear cardiology (asnc) in-person meetings were transformed, over the past few months, to webinars or online meetings. several new asnc courses were developed to specifically educate trainees at these challenging times. the result: for the first time ever, asnc has been able to reach and educate its members and non-members, in over countries. since covid lockdowns, our courses, spanning over person hours, reached hundreds of fellows-in-training, medical students, and researchers, many of whom had not pre- viously attended our asnc annual meetings. we also received more feedback than ever on the content we shared and witnessed a wider dissemination of nuclear cardiology clinical and molecular imaging information. these positive steps forward in clinical case interpreta- tion, molecular imaging research, are likely to remain an integral part of asnc’s educational offerings in the second half of and beyond. yet, making up for lost hands-on-experience in nuclear cardiology for trainees during covid remains a difficult challenge to address. fortunately, several pro- fessional boards have appropriately adjusted training requirements for fellows-in-training. asnc, along with several other professional organizations, has advocated with the nrc on behalf of the trainees to allow a modification to the cfr part . (c)( )(ii)(g) so that fellows-in-training would be allowed to receive training via online learning during this covid- public health emergency. what also remains unknown at this time is what to do about that fact that, even as we shift into phase , some patients remain reluctant—and understandably so—to return to their cardiovascular testing. what we do know is that there are now new factors, such as post- covid job loss or unexpected full-time parenting obligations, that will further impact potentially life- threatening delays in healthcare for both diagnostic testing as well as ischemic heart disease symptoms. these delays may not be seen equally among this country’s citizens. higher incidence of hypertension, diabetes, and obesity put african americans at higher risk of covid complications as well as cardiovascular sharmila dorbala, md, mph, fasnc. asnc diseases. it is recognized that this population is well- known to have reduced access to healthcare, due to a variety of socio-economic factors. how can we ensure that disparities in health in the african american pop- ulation are not exacerbated by covid or other social stresses? over the last several weeks, this country has wit- nessed the challenges facing our society that aspires for equality for all. on june th, several universities and researchers around the world paused their research and clinical work in support of the ongoing black lives matter movement. the association of black cardiolo- gists, the american college of cardiology, and the american heart association denounced racism and violence and stated ‘‘it is crucial, now more than ever, that our efforts help to mitigate the unacceptable dis- parities among our most vulnerable populations.’’ as a global medical society dedicated to high-quality, patient-centered imaging, the asnc supports the prin- ciples of health, fairness, equity and diversity while condemning racism and denouncing violence. asnc urges all its members to re-initiate, deepen, or join in an effort to proactively overcome both implicit and unin- tended bias, in order to improve the cardiovascular health of all populations, so every individual has an equal opportunity to live a longer and healthier life. together let us make this the new normal in nuclear cardiology. references https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/. https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/ -ncov/need-extra-precautions/ racial-ethnic-minorities.html. https://abcardio.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /urgent-letter- from-abc-and-partners_may .pdf. publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. journal of nuclear cardiology� dorbala volume , number ; – the new normal https://coronavirus.jhu.edu/ https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/ -ncov/need-extra-precautions/racial-ethnic-minorities.html https://www.cdc.gov/coronavirus/ -ncov/need-extra-precautions/racial-ethnic-minorities.html https://abcardio.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /urgent-letter-from-abc-and-partners_may .pdf https://abcardio.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /urgent-letter-from-abc-and-partners_may .pdf 	the new normal 	references the once and future liberal: after identity politics review the once and future liberal: after identity politics mark lilla harper collins, new york, , pp., isbn: - - - - contemporary political theory ( ) , s –s . https://doi.org/ . /s - - - ; published online june once and future liberal can be seen as an extension of lilla’s provocative essay published in the new york times titled, ‘the end of identity liberalism’ (november ). the book under review here cannot be divorced from the newspaper essay that tried to grapple with the election of mr. donald trump as president of the united states, and the subsequent polarising reactions it fanned across the country. international readers have approached this essay in the context of brexit, the election of prime minister narendra modi in india and a general rise of ‘right-wing’ politics across the globe. these events have triggered debates on the questions of identity, diversity, democracy and liberalism, both in academic and non-academic spaces. there are four parts to this short book. the introduction sets the tone of the book in terms of lilla’s positionality and the political context that has made this work necessary. this is followed by two chapters titled anti-politics and pseudo-politics that outline the background of the problem confronted by the book – ‘american liberalism in the twenty-first century is in crisis: a crisis of imagination and ambition on our side, a crisis of attachment and trust on the side of the wider public’ (p. ). after a succinct account of american political history mapping the crisis in liberalism, the chapter politics proposes a path for liberalism to overcome its present challenges. lilla outlines his template for liberal politics in the us from his self-identified standpoint of a ‘frustrated american liberal’ (p. ). he is ‘frustrated’ since liberalism as ideology had prevented liberals from delivering a vision of the us that can inspire citizens from every walk of life and region of the country. in contrast to the republicans, who during reagan’s administration offered a blueprint for what american life ought to be, the liberals ‘don’t bring an image of what our shared way of life might be’ (p. ). the author is trying to orient the democratic party to win elections and influence political institutions so that, in the long run, liberals can bring the changes they want and need. � macmillan publishers ltd., part of springer nature. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s www.palgrave.com/journals in the book, political history of the us has been broadly divided into two ‘dispensations’ – roosevelt’s and reagan’s. roosevelt’s administration or ‘dispensation’, the word used by lilla, projected an american society where solidarity, opportunity and public duty were the watchwords; during reagan administration, instead, self-reliance and the minimal state were given pre- eminence. thus, for lilla, the former was political and the latter anti-political. he suggests that liberals failed to counter the political imagination of what ought to be the american way of life during the reagan administration. this failure did not come unexpected: its seeds lay in what lilla terms ‘the great liberal abdication’. (p. ) lilla argues that, after roosevelt’s administration, liberals did not grasp the social transformations taking place and were not able to propose a vision for shared destiny. the rise of identity liberalism reinforced reaganism, i.e. individualism. in the second chapter, pseudo-politics, lilla plots the shift within the civil rights movement that triggered the move from ‘we’ to ‘me’. he argues that, initially, the aim of the civil rights movement was to articulate the problems of the vulnerable citizens in terms of their citizenship rights deprivation. however, the movement shifted gears in the later stage to foreground identification with different social groups. he suggests that, from a concern with ‘what can i do for my country?’ the discourse shifted to ‘what does my country owe me by virtue of my identity?’ lilla traces the journey of new left in the us polity, foregrounding its present concentration in universities. he analyses the emergence of identity liberals on campuses and how they engage in debates where there is no communication beyond the affirmation of political positions emanating from subject positions. even though the initial articulation of identity politics can be seen as correcting historical wrongs, especially with regard to african-americans, later on it became a site for exclusionary self-definition. its net effect is that it ‘turned young people back onto themselves, rather than turning them outward toward the wider world’ (p. ). as a result, the pursuit of the common good was lost, and so the advance of identity liberalism marked the retreat of liberal politics. politically, it meant that a politics centred on people and their belonging to different groups failed to appeal to all people – therefore, identity liberalism could not win elections and exercise power. identity liberalism is no longer a political project: it is currently reduced to an evangelical one. why is that so? evangelism speaks truth to power while politics is about capturing power to speak the truth. the way forward for lilla is to articulate a civic liberalism that resonates among citizens and that conceives of the state as something shared by all americans, irrespective of their background. every citizen should be treated as a citizen, and this requires that identity politics be left behind. as lilla says, it is time to ‘get real’. ‘citizenship’ as political status transcends the exclusions associated with identity labels and helps foster a sense of solidarity. he warns that ‘as soon as you cast an issue exclusively in terms of identity you invite your adversary to do the review s � macmillan publishers ltd., part of springer nature. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s same.’ (p. ) lilla wraps up his short and crisp political history of modern us by setting an agenda for liberals. he makes a call beyond anti-trump politics to rescue liberals and liberalism. the solution he offers has four components – the priority of institutional politics over movements, the priority of democratic persuasion over aimless self-expression, priority of citizenship over group and individual identity and civic education to overcome individualistic and atomised nation. finally, he pleads for an education which moves beyond identity-based concerns so that future citizens can think with, relate and have a sense of compassion for people outside their worlds. the key for the survival of liberalism and production of liberal citizens is the imagination of a different future. one can disagree with the tone of lilla’s dismissal of identity politics. nevertheless, he raises an important question about the feasibility and effectiveness of identity politics given the difficulty of forging alliances between identity groups. lilla takes on a difficult task, and he has received brickbats from leftists, centrists and liberals since he started to work on this topic in november . the focus on identity politics as the mode of politics in diverse societies raises two important concerns: how to bridge the gap between the majority and minority communities without pitching one against the other; and secondly, will the deepening of identity politics hinder the possibility of forging inter-community dialogues and solidar- ities? both these questions are critical since any feeling of deprivation or alienation by any social group can upset the working of a democracy. lilla’s work can be seen as an attempt to reach a pareto optimal political condition. this is a difficult task since it requires scaling down the democratic value of certain political phenomena, such as social justice movements, without dismissing them. the argument he makes against black lives matter has already received its share of criticism. to live up to the commitments we made to the rule of law, equality and justice, our politics demand equal treatment of all at all times. in other words, one has to shift the focus from the effort to become more and more sensitive to the other to an effort to see this other as part of ‘us’. such a position will demand us to push identity in the background in the pursuit of the equal treatment of people. lilla says ‘one has to get real’ and this is a difficult task. this book has stirred the hornet’s nest but lilla does not control the outcome of his intervention: we do. is this work damning identity politics? is it a manifesto for democrats? or is it a template for liberalism to navigate the choppy political waters? it is definitely not a dismissal of identity politics. lilla makes it very clear that the way out is to appeal to something that all americans share but this does not imply denying the existence and importance of identities (p. ). in providing a manifesto for democrats, he is trying to highlight the limits of identity liberalism. this is a powerful and controversial suggestion, and a crucial one to engage with. can we organise society and mobilise voters without making an appeal that finds resonance with all? in the absence of a shared common ground, not only liberalism but also democracy will review � macmillan publishers ltd., part of springer nature. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s s have difficulty moving forward. this is this book’s provocative invitation to reflection. rakesh m. krishnan university of hyderabad, telangana , india rakeshmkrishnan@gmail.com review s � macmillan publishers ltd., part of springer nature. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s 	the once and future liberal: after identity politics 	mark lilla harper collins, new york, , pp., isbn: - - - - article doi: . /djph. . . , copyright (c) delaware academy of medicine / delaware public health association the impact of racism and the influence of faith on the mental health of african americans w. james thomas, ii, b.s., m.div., d.min. senior pastor, calvary baptist church, dover, delaware revisiting one of the videos of the funeral services for mr. george floyd, one of the immediate factors of concern was the comfort of the family. as much of what needed to be said was expressed, as a pastor and helping professional, the concern was the mental space within which the family was living at that moment. all of what was said by the various speakers was true – systemic racism, racial disparity, police reform, white privilege – all of these topics deserve and require dialogue. however, the mental health impact of racism is a concern that should be given equal treatment. when reflecting on the murders of rashard brooks, a -year-old married father of four children, george floyd, a -year-old african american man, ahmaud arbery, a -year-old african american man, and breonna taylor, a -year-old african american woman, there is no doubt that these deaths were horrific, unnecessary, and the result of systemic issues. but equally as horrific are the long-term mental effects associated with these types of incidents, as well as the long litany of stories that have been told and retold by family members and friends, as well as those yet to be told that share the same narrative. as horrific and tragic as these stories are, there will be other murders just as horrific and just as tragic in the days to come. the american journal of public health has concluded that continued racism has very real mental health effects, such as depression and anxiety. dr. laia bécares, a public health researcher, wrote, “awareness of racial discrimination experienced by others can continue to affect the mental health of ethnic minority people. dr. bécares suggests that we can even be impacted secondhand. then, there are direct incidences, such as the occurrence in an area of central park called the rambles, where amy cooper, a white woman, who was walking her unleashed dog, encountered christian cooper (of no relation), a black man, who was bird-watching in a wooded area. mr. cooper informed ms. cooper that, per the ordinance of the city of new york, her dog needed to be on a leash. ms. cooper became agitated, called the police, and informed them that she had encountered a black man in the park and feared for her life. mr. cooper, who amazingly remained calm, was guilty of nothing but informing ms. cooper of the law. this was an explicit example of the development of insecurities and avoidance that can be invoked by racial discrimination. black people constantly live in a guarded state, which inevitably affects our mental, physical, and even our spiritual health. insecurities and avoidance are stressors that are created by racism and discrimination when, for no other reason than being in proximity of white people, there is the false assumption of danger or some other life-threatening possibility. not only does the proximity create the opportunity of a false narrative, but it causes black people always to be aware of the possibilities within that proximity and raises the awareness of the physiological and psychological impact of racism and discrimination. often, just being in the same area as white people can create unrealized stress. mary gregory, a nurse at the st. vincent medical center in toledo, ohio, said, “it is important to refer to racism as a public health “crisis” instead of an “issue.” gregory’s rationale was that racism met the criteria of the cdc’s guidelines of a public health problem: ) a burden on article doi: . /djph. . . , copyright (c) delaware academy of medicine / delaware public health association society that continues to increase, ) the impact on certain parts of the population more than others, ) preventative strategies could help, but ) nothing has been done to address the matter adequately. since racism is, in fact, a public health matter, the availability of and access to medical and mental healthcare must be addressed. there are obvious disparities in regards to medical and mental healthcare for african americans, and these ethnic inequalities and race-based exclusions from both medical and mental healthcare threaten the hope and future of people of color. this is exacerbated by the stigma and lack of education in our communities on the issue of mental health. some of the stigmatization stems from the historical context of mental health among african americans. racial disparities in diagnosing mental health conditions are sometimes presented as an effect of biology, but they are not. those diagnoses were the direct result of the racist thinking that existed in psychology, which dates to at least the th century. african american stories of oppression recalls how slave owners and their white physicians invented psychiatric “disorders” such as “draeptomania” to explain the reason slaves felt the need to escape. these white physicians went so far as to distort statistics to suggest that freedom would be a threat to the mental stability of slaves. when considering the historical context, it is reasonable to understand the apprehension of african americans toward mental health. in the area of mental health, primm has suggested that african americans have been misdiagnosed at higher rates than white patients. culturally, mental health is viewed as a weakness, which is counter-cultural to the expectation of african americans to be survivors and overcomers. even spiritually, african american theology insists that because god is on the side of the oppressed, our faith in god will provide for us the necessary healing. so, the slow embrace of the reality of mental illness and the importance of therapeutic approaches to mental health stems from historical encounters, cultural expectations, and religious fortitude. the past president of the american public health association accurately defines racism as “…a system of structuring opportunity and assigning value based on the social interpretation of how one looks, that unfairly disadvantages some individuals and communities, unfairly advantages other individuals and communities, and saps the strength of the whole society through the waste of human resources” (apha past-president camara phyllis jones, md, mph, ph.d.). we see this reenacted daily in various forms and fashions. it is primarily for this reason, this imposing of value, that african americans are more often than not struggling with the proper valuation of worth in a society that has historically devalued us. as much as the professional services offered by mental health providers are needed in african american communities, the institution most often approached for assistance are faith-based institutions. the church was the first source of ownership for african americans, and it has become the “resource center” whenever there arose a crisis in both the community and the individual; it has always been considered a place of refuge. from emotional strength to educational opportunities, to financial assistance, to simple inspiration, the black church has been the “one-stop-shop” for african americans. the church in the african american community embodies community values and exhibits the virtues that the community understands. despite the current rhetoric related to the relevancy of the african american church, it was and continues to be the church that provides safety and security for african americans when society excludes them because of race and class. in the pulpit, the pews, and the basements of african american churches, historically black colleges and universities (hbcus) and the civil rights movement were birthed. article doi: . /djph. . . , copyright (c) delaware academy of medicine / delaware public health association the african american church has long been a place of safety and security for black people. in , a group of black men in jonesboro, louisiana, founded a group called “the deacons for defense,” an organization purposed to protect the congress for racial equality against violence from the ku klux klan. the group would be noted as one of the first visible defense forces for african americans in the south. historically, the church has become a place where survival strategies have been developed, and protection of the rights of african americans has been demanded. today, the church endeavors to be a pivotal force as it redefines itself to declare that “black lives matter forcibly.” the african american church continues to provide the affirmation and dignity to people who are yet struggling for equality and justice. it should not be considered strange that people eventually turn to their faith when the impact of racism manifests itself. the perfunctory aspects of the african american church may be somewhat antiquated, such as suggestions to simply pray or trust god; however, the power and strength that comes from the faith that is promulgated from the church have provided african americans the mental solitude they could not get elsewhere. the theology of the african american church embodies the very character of the community. the sense of community, ritual, and discipline can be therapeutic and positively functional for one’s mental health. rush university medical center published a study in the journal of clinical psychology observing how faith actually helps protect patients against the symptoms of depression. the study indicated that “…for patients diagnosed with clinical depression, belief in a concerned god can improve response to medical treatment.” the study found that persons with strong religious convictions were more likely to experience an improvement in feelings of hopefulness, measured by feelings of expectation for the future and motivation for the present. specifically, participants who scored in the top third of the religious well-being scale were -percent more likely to get better with medical treatment for clinical depression. wendy cadge, a brandeis university sociologist, reviewed eighteen published studies on prayer that were conducted between and . from her review, she discovered the evolution of ideas about the relationship between religion and medical science. “i do not know why physicians and scientists conducted these studies,” according to cadge, “but personal religious beliefs appear to have played a significant role, along with curiosity.” of course, this is no strange phenomenon in the african american community – prayer was always the “gold standard” when dealing with any issue. faith and science need not clash but can be complimentary. faith does have a significant role in the conversation on racism and its view on the mental health of those who are christians. any truly biblically conscious individual cannot deny the fact that racism is a sin. it is a sin, like other sins, that requires a power greater than the human resolve alone to conquer. faith, in general, and the christian faith in particular, depends on a power greater than that which we possess. when analyzing the impact of racism and the influence of faith on the mental health of african americans, the outcomes are profound. the profundity is due to the systemic nature of race and how racism impacts nearly everything that touches the daily lives of african americans – where we shop, where we bank, where we live. that does not necessarily suggest that african americans are alone in being subjected to racism and its mental effects. we know that is not true. however, it is to suggest that in the united states, african americans have been the most frequently targeted when it comes to racism and have suffered significant negative consequences as a result. the bureau of labor statistics shows that % of employed asians worked in management, professional, and related occupations — the highest-paying major occupational article doi: . /djph. . . , copyright (c) delaware academy of medicine / delaware public health association category — compared with % of employed whites, % of employed blacks, and % of employed hispanics. it is suggested that these statistics speak to the racist hiring practices that kept african americans out of business for decades under jim crow. it can also be explained by more subtle forms of prejudice today. the point of racist hiring practices is further evidenced by a harvard university study that found that when blacks and asians “whitened” their resumes — used “american” or “white”-sounding names — they got more callbacks for corporate interviews. twenty-five percent of black candidates received callbacks from their whitened resumes, while only % got calls when they left ethnic details on their resume. our faith provides for us the framework to think through racism and see a path forward – but that does not come without the challenge to first see racism for what it is. our faith becomes the lens through which we respond to the pain and brokenness and exclusion that racism has historically inflicted and justified for centuries. our faith informs us that racism is a sin. it must be dealt with in the heart first before there can be a changing of the mindset that perpetuates racist thinking, white privilege – the historical and contemporary advantages in access to a better quality of life that is based on race – and white supremacy – the belief that white people constitute a superior race and should therefore dominate society. how does our faith become the tool of our survival and the consolation of the disruption of our mental stability? john calvin, in his work, “institutes of the christian faith,” poses two critical questions: “who is god?” and “who am i?” if the first question is answered incorrectly, the second question will inevitably be answered incorrectly as well. faith, in the african american tradition, challenges the western epistemological perspective of humanity. faith, in the african american tradition, resists the notion of a white coded humanity as being the “correct” standard. faith, in the african american tradition, resists the notion that africans needed to be rescued from heathenism, barbarianism, and uncultured behavior. as much as some would decry christianity, as with anything else, it is not christianity that is the problem; it is the misuse of christianity and the abuse of the name of god to justify oppression, colonialism, racism, and injustice that is the true problem. faith, when it is accurately and authentically practiced, provides hope in the time of mental anguish and anxiety. faith is where we educate ourselves and unlearn false and unhealthy narratives and embrace the truth concerning who god is and who we are. our faith creates space for us to reimagine a different world. for christians, this is the picture of christ on the cross, creating new possibilities and the space to become and overcome; to embrace and motivate us not to accept anything other than the truth of god – especially when people have been wounded by injustice, oppression, and suffering. lest we think of the space that our faith provides us as some unattainable utopia, hope provides the platform for the creation of a new agency, a new experience, and a new reality. hope provides the strength to move beyond empty rhetoric that excites us for the moment - especially when that hope becomes intentional praxis and not just poetic pleasantries. faith, therefore, reinforms our experiences of racism, provides an informed perspective, and encourages us toward a more robust practice and demand for change. our faith reinforms our experiences of racism by encouraging us to reimagine our world and work toward that renewal. by faith, we can have the “beloved community” that is based on justice, equal opportunity, and authentic and intentional love for one another. by faith, we can imagine better days and a better life. however, we are not naïve – we know that faith without works is dead. article doi: . /djph. . . , copyright (c) delaware academy of medicine / delaware public health association for african americans, faith is an incredibly important part of the context of mental health. this is evident by how we discuss or relate to mental health. when african americans refer to mental health, usually, our faith interjects itself in the script (i.e., depressions as a loss of faith). this is why, more often than not, african americans will reach out to their pastor before they contact a mental health professional. this has little to do with the mental health professional, although there are some stigmas attached to the mental health profession. consulting with their faith leader, however, has more to do with the fact that what they receive will be more aligned with their own beliefs and perspectives on mental healthiness. obviously, this can be problematic on both sides of the spectrum. on one side of the spectrum, some pastors are not formally trained in mental health disciplines. on the other side of the spectrum, many times, the mental health professional may not be immediately open to the acknowledgment of a person’s religious values, beliefs, and faith orientations. there is space for continued conversation on the incorporation of a faith perspective within the context of racism and its impact on mental health. every faith leader who is true to their calling understands the social responsibility that is required to spiritually lead people in a fallen context. it is our faith that allows us to reimagine a better, more enriching life for all people. why? our faith informs us that our differences extend past our ethnic and racial differences – we are all sinners who are in need of a savior. when we recognize that we all are human beings with equal dignity who are individually struggling to become who god intended us to be, it should provoke a generous spirit, attentiveness to the inherent dignity of people who are different from us, and goodwill that reflects godliness. our faith informs us that “better” is possible. if we can get past the hubris of our present mindset and honestly give consideration to context, the societal wounds of racism can be adequately addressed. when we read the gospels, we see human weakness, but we see a church and a faith that has survived. that is just one example of how faith can lead to hope despite human weakness. it is our faith that informs us of the image of god in every human being, it is our faith that helps us to understand the evil that defaces that dignity, and will be our faith that causes us to seek forgiveness when we fail. so, when we incorporate faith into our mental health perspective, it enables us to dig deep and have a potentially different conversation – a conversation that makes a difference. mental health has most recently confronted the faith community and insisted that it be included in conversations on faith and wellness. although dealing with mental health has always been a part of the faith journey of african americans, it has been cloaked in spiritual verbiage. today, mental health must be identified and acknowledged for what it is and how it has affected african americans both historically and currently. despair, depression, and feelings of hopelessness are not “demonic,” but are issues that require professional help. these are mental health issues that must be addressed and not merely relegated to a “deliverance service.” faith communities are now confronted with the urgency of addressing mental health. addressing issues of mental heath start with the faith community itself, becoming comfortable with the conversation, and destigmatizing mental health. when this occurs, more individuals will become more comfortable with discussing their struggles in real ways and not in ways that undermine their need to be directed to mental health professionals for assistance. that also means that faith leaders must acknowledge and recognize when their skills are not sufficient to help individuals who are dealing with mental health issues. the influence of faith on the mental article doi: . /djph. . . , copyright (c) delaware academy of medicine / delaware public health association health of african americans must include recognizing when people need to be referred to professionals. the influence of the faith community concerning mental health also means educating faith communities. educating faith communities includes raising awareness, providing congregations with ways to recognize mental health, hosting seminars, and having conversations with mental health experts. people cannot be “healed” from what they cannot recognize or acknowledge. conversations on mental health can be part of the process of the destigmatization and lead to the normalization. none of the above-mentioned ideas negate faith. it is our faith that has sustained us. that is why there can be no underestimation of prayer. the bible instructs us to “…pray for each other so that you may be healed. the prayer of a righteous person is powerful and effective” – james : . there is no competition between mental health professionals and the faith of believers. if nothing else, they work together to re-ignite hope and healing. the church must remind itself to do what it has historically done, and that is to listen, learn, and lament while pointing people to the reason for leaning on faith – to be made whole. correspondence: pastor thomas, bishopwjt@gmail.com references . wallace, s., nazroo, j., & bécares, l. ( , july). cumulative effect of racial discrimination on the mental health of ethnic minorities in the united kingdom. american journal of public health, ( ), – . pubmedhttps://doi.org/ . /ajph. . . jackson, v. ( ). in our own voices: african american stories of oppression, survival, and recovery in the mental health system. pp - , p. - . retrieved from: https://power u.org/wp-content/uploads/ / /inourownvoicevanessajackson.pdf . primm, a. b., & lawson, w. b. ( ). african americans. in disparities in psychiatric care, ruiz, p. & primm, a.b., eds. washington, dc: lippincott, williams & wilkins. . fitchet, g. ( , feb). belief in a caring god improves response to medical treatment for depression. rush university medical center. retrieved from: https://www.sciencedaily.com/releases/ / / .htm . cadge, w. ( ). saying your prayers, constructing your religions: medical studies of intercessory prayer. the journal of religion, , – . https://doi.org/ . / . calvin, j. ( ). the institute of the christian religion. translated by henry beveridge. christian classics ethereal library, grand rapids, mi https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=retrieve&db=pubmed&list_uids= &dopt=abstract https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?cmd=retrieve&db=pubmed&list_uids= &dopt=abstract https://doi.org/ . /ajph. . https://doi.org/ . / 	the impact of racism and the influence of faith on the mental health of african americans 	references article doi: . /djph. . . , copyright (c) delaware academy of medicine / delaware public health association what taught us about the politics and teaching of public health erin knight, phd, mph and corinne bogan university of delaware abstract the covid- pandemic has illuminated the critical need to make greater investments in public health and build the capacity of the public health workforce. among the professional competencies needed to address the ongoing morbidity and mortality associated with covid- , as well as other current and future public health challenges, is the ability to effectively engage in the political process. while we acknowledge that public health institutions and workers are under-resourced and are grateful for their tireless efforts to control the pandemic, we argue that their efforts have been severely hampered by a notable absence from politics. we argue that our ability to protect and promote public health has been further challenged by divisive political rhetoric from the former presidential administration, which has amplified a culture of self- interest and individualism. such values are counter to public health and threaten our ability to address the disproportionate impacts of covid- on low-income communities and communities of color, along with the myriad of health inequities experienced by marginalized communities in the us. we assert that public health professionals must be better equipped and supported in their efforts to challenge powerful majorities that have generated such unhealthy and unequal social and environmental conditions. policy change related to social determinants of health should be an integral component of our intervention strategies and political advocacy should be considered a core competency for training future public health professionals. the field needs professionals comfortable and adept at working within the political sphere; students are eager for skills that allow them to translate their passion for social justice in health; and the persistent and pervasive health inequities experienced by marginalized communities demand such action. introduction most of us can agree that was a year unlike any in our recent memory, characterized by a range of domestic and global challenges affecting our health, economy, environment and even our democracy. among ’s litany of challenges, the covid- pandemic obviously stands out has having particular relevance for public health. we argue that the global pandemic provides important, if not new, lessons for health professionals. while much has already been written about this, including for example, the need to invest in public health infrastructure and the need for better coordination across jurisdictions, we present lessons related to the politics of covid- .we argue that staying within the confines of the science of public health without paying appropriate attention to both politics and policy is not sufficient; further, it will stunt our ability to promote health equity. we believe that many of the lessons to be learned from the past year related to the interplay of politics, social justice and science are not new – ; but rather, that the events of and the magnitude of health inequities and their structural precursors that have been exposed by the pandemic, , call for increased urgency to apply those lessons. while we recognize that health has always been political, the devastation associated with covid- , especially in communities of color, coupled with the trump administration’s influential disregard for science and ethnonationalist rhetoric, have created a particularly polarized article doi: . /djph. . . , copyright (c) delaware academy of medicine / delaware public health association environment for addressing health inequities , which requires an enhanced set of competencies for public health professionals. specifically, public health professionals of the future must be equipped to engage more fully with the political process in order to reduce ongoing morbidity and mortality associated with covid- , and to address other current and future public health challenges. this commentary evolved from a graduate master of public health (mph) class assignment and represents the combined perspective of a first-year mph student and her instructor. disproportionate impacts of covid- as many have argued, covid- has exposed persistent inequities that have systematically undermined the physical, social, economic, and emotional health of minority populations within the us. the disproportionate burden of covid- on vulnerable communities, especially black, indigenous and people of color (bipoc), should be of no surprise to public health professionals; the economic and health insecurities magnified by covid- have existed for decades and a concerted effort to address them is long overdue. with this in mind, we believe public health professionals must do more to protect at-risk communities from covid- . in the short-term, this includes securing protective equipment for essential workers and bipoc who are less likely to have the privilege of working from home ; expanding testing, contact tracing, and healthcare services (including vaccination) in low-income neighborhoods with overcrowded apartments and high rates of homelessness; and extending the national moratorium on evictions. public health professionals must also advocate on behalf of the incarcerated population, approximately % of which is black, despite the fact that african americans make up just % of the overall population. personal protective equipment should be secured for correctional facilities and inmates as social distancing is not possible. additionally, states should consider policies to release nonviolent inmates, particularly those that are medically compromised, to mitigate inevitable and uncontrollable outbreaks. individualism, nationalism and health inequities while important, the aforementioned strategies are merely band-aids, and do not address the years of lacking upstream investment in the country’s social and economic system. more important is the need for the public health sector to lead targeted efforts to address the structural racism that underlies the pervasive and persistent health inequities experienced by bipoc in the us. documenting inequities, describing social determinants of health, and developing upstream interventions is necessary but insufficient. as the black lives matter protests of (and the events that precipitated them) remind us, good intentions are not enough, and we must do more to actively dismantle racist policies, institutions and structures. despite clear evidence that death and disability are collective problems, progress in responding to covid- through a comprehensive public health approach has been stunted by the debilitating first language of individualism in american culture, described by wallack and lawrence. this language and preoccupation with individual freedoms, personal responsibility, and limited government have been amplified by the former administration’s nationalist and populist rhetoric, and has contributed to a fragmented federal pandemic response, individual non-compliance with covid- safety mandates, and the lack of a coordinated national strategy for disaster relief and vaccine distribution. stone argues that “presidents lead as much with their rhetoric as with their policy goals” and goes so far as to assert that former president trump’s article doi: . /djph. . . , copyright (c) delaware academy of medicine / delaware public health association rhetoric is “destroying the ‘culture of community’ necessary for progress on health equity”. encouraging individuals, especially those who have been vaccinated, to behave in ways that prioritize collective well-being over individual freedom may prove to be even more difficult as the pandemic wears on and as vaccines offer a false sense of absolute protection. individualism is not a sufficient public health strategy ; nor is an ideology of ethnonationalism, which prioritizes those with a narrowly defined american identity (i.e. native-born, english-speaking whites with a european and/or, christian background). within the us, efforts to mitigate the disproportionate impact of covid- call for prioritizing high-risk communities in vaccine distribution and for targeted strategies to ensure equitable access among bipoc even within other high-risk categories, such as essential workers and those with underlying health conditions. however, people of color are less likely to be vaccinated compared to their white counterparts for a number of reasons, including distrust of the healthcare system grounded in historical abuses and ongoing racism. we worry that barriers to vaccination among communities of color have been exacerbated by racist rhetoric, which has been demonstrated to have a ripple effect causing others to express racists views. while contemporary american politics may prioritize individualism and limited regulation, the nature of disease (including, but not limited, to covid- ) starkly reminds us that human life is interconnected. globally, the need for equity in the allocation and distribution of vaccines across wealthy, middle-income and low-income countries is both a matter of social justice as well as one of national self-interest. achieving herd immunity through vaccination rests on our ability to reach all parts of the globe. yet, as of mid-january, more than half of the seven billion vaccine doses that have been purchased globally have gone to high-income countries, despite the fact that these countries are home to just % of the world’s population. further, “vaccine nationalism” has economic implications for the global economy. just as our health is dependent on the health of our neighbors, we must recognize the interconnection of our economic wellbeing. according to a recent study, “the global economy stands to lose as much as $ . trillion if governments fail to ensure developing economy access to covid- vaccines, as much as half of which would fall on advanced economies” such as the us. market justice vs. social justice clearly, the covid- pandemic has raised important considerations regarding the appropriate balance between health and economic well-being, and it behooves us to remember that economic conditions are critical determinants of health. however, the central issue remains the injustice of a dominant market ethic described by beauchamp in public health as social justice. in this landmark paper, beauchamp describes how the market model encourages victim blaming and attention to individual behavior rather than the social preconditions of such behavior. in doing so, the market model unfairly protects majorities and powerful interests from their fair share of the burdens of prevention, while spreading the costs of public problems among the general public. the free-market ethic is alive and well today, for during the worse economic downturn since the great depression, jeff bezos added $ billion to his networth. meanwhile, . million people in the us were unemployed as of december , and social services are unable to keep up with increasing demand. if public health professionals want to sustainably and meaningfully address the health inequities that have been magnified by covid- , we must prioritize addressing poverty and economic inequality—the strongest determinants of health—while developing america’s second language of community. further, we must do article doi: . /djph. . . , copyright (c) delaware academy of medicine / delaware public health association better at “finding ways to align with constituencies, lend our science and our knowledge, and create a base of power for progressive social change.” while the field of public health has already expressed support for reducing income inequality to advance health, the current and incoming generation of professionals should push to reclaim public health’s power as a leader of progressive social change on a larger scale. of equal importance is the need to shift cultural understanding of social welfare and the interdependence of human beings—a shift that has started taking place in the context of environmentalism and ecosystems. now is the opportunity to initiate a change in conversation and in mindset at the national and global level and push for community values to be reflected in public policy. health and politics admittedly, making decisions about mask mandates, restrictions on businesses and vaccine distribution—not to mention things like poverty reduction or income redistribution—is complex, and policymaking invariably results in “winners” and “losers.” even before covid- , health has always been profoundly political. according to bambra and colleagues, health is political because ) it is unequally distributed; ) social determinants are amenable to political interventions and dependent on political action; and ) the right to health is, or should be, an aspect of citizenship and a human right. however, politics is not inherently bad—at its best, it is an essential component of a democracy. it is the process of making decisions, and while those decisions should be grounded in the best possible evidence, science alone does not tell us how to act. rather, policy decisions are also grounded in values and power. while a full discussion of power in politics is beyond the scope of this paper, we know that those with more power have greater influence in the political process when they wield their influence. understanding the interplay of science or evidence, values, and power in political decision-making sheds light on why the former administrations’ disregard for science, their racist and xenophobic rhetoric, , , , and their powerful influence were such a dangerous combination for efforts to control covid- . from a public health perspective, policy decisions about how to protect and promote health must be grounded in accurate information and evidence, as well as the field’s underlying value of social justice, and the interests of communities most affected or most at risk (rather than those with the most power). public health’s role in the political process while public health institutions have been stretched thin and workers deserve our gratitude for their exhausting and important efforts to test, trace, treat and vaccinate against covid- since early , we argue that public health professionals have shied away from political engagement, focusing primarily on epidemiology and the promotion of individual behavior change, at the expense of our collective wellbeing. active and consistent involvement in the political process is necessary for public health professionals to address this pandemic, and other public health challenges. fairchild and colleagues describe the shifting mission of the public health profession over time, describing the tension between our science-based identity and one that is more closely tied with social reform, and call for a “back to the future” realignment of public health that reclaims its place as part of an emerging reform movement. they remind us, for instance, the progress of sanitarians who led reform efforts in the th and early th centuries. requiring housing to have indoor plumbing, improving tenement laws, and imposing housing density regulations had positive effects on rates of tuberculosis and other diseases. we article doi: . /djph. . . , copyright (c) delaware academy of medicine / delaware public health association agree with fairchild and colleagues that in recent decades “the field of public health has been constrained by self-imposed limitations and, all too often, has avoided engagement with those who challenge complacency and existing power relationships” and we argue that being science - or evidence-based is not incongruent with advocating for social change. reclaiming our place as part of social reform means advocating for universal policies that protect and promote the health of all, such as paid sick leave policies and stronger social security and income protection programs; as well as targeted strategies to address health inequities. this includes, most notably, advocating for policy and practice changes in housing, healthcare and criminal justice to address residential segregation, implicit bias in the healthcare system, and mass incarceration. as referenced earlier, the disproportionate burden of covid- on bipoc is just one of many examples throughout our history where marginalized communities experience health inequities. improvement in this area thus depends on significant political engagement from public health professionals, challenging the powerful special interests that have generated such unhealthy and unequal social and environmental conditions, and amplifying the voices of communities. lessons for training future public health leaders ultimately, the events of and their impact on health inequities speak to the need for public health professionals to participate more fully in the political process, and this means training public heath students on how politics works and how to work within politics. we are a field grounded in evidence-based decision making, but we must do a better job advocating for the use of our evidence, and do so in ways that align with the field’s underlying values of social justice and community. this means building skills related to advocacy, communication and community engagement. it also means understanding the ways in which values underlie policymaking and building the capacity of public health workers to confidently engage in political debates from a strong position of scientific authority, as well as moral leadership. similarly, we need to train future public health leaders to understand their role in building and maintaining trust and collaboration between and among the health system, government entities, and communities. this includes the ability to be empathetic, learning from and respecting diverse perspectives, and holding ourselves and each other to the highest ethical standards. finally, we need future public health professionals to be better equipped to work within the complexity that is health and politics. this includes communicating in a way that is accessible but not overly simplistic, and building bridges across disciplines, sectors, communities, political parties, and foreign nations. the council on education for public health (ceph), which is an independent accrediting body for programs and schools of public health, has identified a list of competencies meant to be incorporated in training for students preparing for careers in public health. while several of the competencies for mph schools and programs are consistent with our recommendations, we encourage ceph to consider more explicit language that ensures we are universally training students to be effective in the political sphere, and to address the structural and political determinants of health inequities, as they revise their accreditation criteria this year. as ceph continues to promote flexibility in the way in which instructors and programs meet the various competencies, we encourage greater attention to public health pedagogy among instructors, such that innovations in how these critical skills may be developed are shared and replicated. in our experience, students are passionate about social justice in health, and are eager for training that allows them to apply this passion in ways to advance public health and health equity. similarly, article doi: . /djph. . . , copyright (c) delaware academy of medicine / delaware public health association training students to be competent in areas related to politics and advocacy is challenging and often outside of our more “scientific” comfort zones. we look forward to learning from and working with others to help our students meet the public health challenges of and beyond. references . sheehan, m. c., & fox, m. a. 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( ). revisions to accreditation criteria timeline and plan. https://ceph.org/about/org-info/criteria-procedures-documents/criteria- procedures/ -revisions-criteria/ https://doi.org/ . /ajph. . https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ 	what taught us about the politics and teaching of public health 	abstract 	introduction 	disproportionate impacts of covid- 	individualism, nationalism and health inequities 	market justice vs. social justice 	health and politics 	public health’s role in the political process 	lessons for training future public health leaders 	references concept expansion as a source of empowerment the harvard community has made this article openly available. please share how this access benefits you. your story matters citation cikara, mina. . “concept expansion as a source of empowerment.” psychological inquiry ( ) (january ): – . doi: . / x. . . published version doi: . / x. . citable link http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn- :hul.instrepos: terms of use this article was downloaded from harvard university’s dash repository, and is made available under the terms and conditions applicable to open access policy articles, as set forth at http:// nrs.harvard.edu/urn- :hul.instrepos:dash.current.terms-of- use#oap http://osc.hul.harvard.edu/dash/open-access-feedback?handle=&title=concept% expansion% as% a% source% of% empowerment&community= / &collection= / &owningcollection / &harvardauthors= afb a df e a fcc &departmentpsychology http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn- :hul.instrepos: http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn- :hul.instrepos:dash.current.terms-of-use#oap http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn- :hul.instrepos:dash.current.terms-of-use#oap http://nrs.harvard.edu/urn- :hul.instrepos:dash.current.terms-of-use#oap cikara concept expansion as a source of empowerment in the target article, haslam explores the incidence, origins, and potential consequences of concept creep in psychology. he dedicates the majority of the article to documenting how concept creep has manifested in six psychological concepts: abuse, bullying, trauma, mental disorder, addiction, and prejudice. haslam convincingly demonstrates that these concepts have indeed expanded over time to include both qualitatively different and less severe forms of each concept. i agree whole-heartedly with haslam when he says: “understanding what drives this trend and evaluating its costs and benefits are important goals for people who care about psychology’s place in our cultures. equally important is the task of deciding whether the trend should be encouraged, ignored, or resisted.” throughout the article, haslam is careful to avoid normative claims regarding creep’s costs and benefits with regard to any one of the concepts in isolation. regarding prejudice, for example, he notes: “it is important to reiterate here that by documenting the expanding meaning of prejudice in recent social psychology i am not questioning the validity of this expansion or advocating a return to a narrower understanding of the concept…my point is simply that the concept now refers to much more than it did several decades ago.” however, haslam does state that as a general phenomenon, concept creep may “have potentially damaging ramifications for society and for psychology that cannot be ignored.” specifically, he suggests that concept creep may cause more people to identify as victims, which may reduce their sense of agency. drawing on ‘moral typecasting’ theory (gray & wegner, ), he states: “a possible adverse looping effect of concept creep is therefore a tendency for more and more people to see themselves as victims who are defined by their suffering, vulnerability, and innocence, and who have diminished agency to overcome their plight.” the goal of this commentary is to challenge this last suggestion. focusing on concept creep as it relates to prejudice and discrimination, i highlight three mechanisms by which conceptual expansion may actually serve to empower “victims,” interaction partners, and rd party allies. (it is worth noting that several of these mechanisms could generalize to the other concepts highlighted in the target article.) first, labeling less qualitatively and quantitatively prototypical instances of prejudice as prejudice may reduce targets’ uncertainty about their experiences. thus, rather than diminishing agency, concept expansion may dampen diffuse negative arousal, reduce an avoidance orientation to intergroup interactions, and inspire greater engagement in collective action on behalf of one’s group. second, these labels may serve to reduce uncertainty among well-meaning interaction partners and rd-parties, fostering stronger alliances in the long term between disadvantaged and advantaged individuals and groups. finally, concept expansion may open up institutional channels for redressing social ills and inequalities that would remain closed if less prototypical manifestations of prejudice were considered categorically distinct. labels reduce uncertainty and associated affect uncertainty is inherently aversive especially when it relates to the self and other people (lopes, ; sorrentino & roney, ). it is associated with physiological arousal in the hypothalamic-pituitary-adrenal (hpa) axis of the brain (greco & roger, ), is often accompanied by diffuse negative affect and anxiety (gudykunst, ), and in social interactions, leads to misunderstanding and attribution of negative intent (cohen & steele, ; devine & vasquez, ; kramer & wei, ; morewedge, ; stephan & stephan, ). as such, uncertainty is a strong motivator of behavior. people act to reduce uncertainty (festinger, ; fromm, ; hogg, ) and avoid situations that are uncertainty-inducing (e.g., camerer & weber, ). one strategy for reducing uncertainty is labeling or identifying the cause of an event (pennebaker & graybeal, ). increased certainty, in turn, diminishes both positive and negative affective states across a wide variety of contexts (bar-anan, wilson, & gilbert, ; davis, nolen-hoeksema, & larson, ; wilson & gilbert, ). for example, people who are prompted to write about negative events in their lives report greater well-being (pennebaker, ). this phenomenon is best illustrated by the research on affect-labeling. simply labeling emotions as they arise decreases both physiological reactivity associated with those emotions (berkman & lieberman, ) as well as the self-reported intensity of said emotions (lieberman, inagaki, tabibnia, & crockett, ); the effects of affect-labeling have been shown to last up to a week (tabibnia, lieberman, & craske, ). because labels can be qualified, people can reap the benefits (e.g., uncertainty- reduction) of labeling events without invoking the most severe or prototypical instance of that label. hence the qualification in “micro-aggressions.” furthermore, people can recognize not only that an experience belongs to a certain class or category, but also that any specific instance can be relatively more or less severe without corrupting the other members of said category. for example, most people would be happy to label cerulean as “blue”; however, labeling cerulean as blue would not make people any less likely to say that navy is also blue. in sum, labels may promote positive hedonic consequences without necessarily producing what haslam calls “semantic dilution.” empowering targets of prejudice being the target of overt prejudice is associated with many threats to psychological well-being (e.g., crocker, major, & steele, ; tropp, ). as haslam notes, however, overt bigotry has in recent decades been replaced with more subtle (but no less insidious) forms of prejudice and discrimination (bonilla-silva & dietrich, ). potential targets now have to contend not only with the effects of being discriminated against but also the ambiguity of whether a gesture or policy is intentionally biased against them. as noted, uncertainty may exacerbate the emotional responses triggered by these episodes (bar-anan et al., ), but may also undermine a target’s subjective sense of legitimacy in addressing potential bias (ellemers & barreto, ). people assess the validity of their perceptions by comparing their experiences and abilities with others (suls & wheeler, ). labels allow for the validation of one’s experiences via communication with other people who have had similar experiences. validation from others, in turn, reduces uncertainty (berger, ; berger & calabrese, ; bradac, ). thus, labeling subtle forms of prejudice as prejudice may reduce uncertainty both within and between individuals, which in turn, reduces diffuse negative arousal. this is not to say that the prejudice label reduces negative affect globally: for example, in this case anxiety is likely to be replaced with anger. however, the label may cikara shift a target of prejudice from an uncertainty avoidance orientation (i.e., “shun further intergroup contact”) toward an approach orientation (i.e., “point out perceived injustice”). though emotions like anger are negative in the short term, they (along with feelings of collective efficacy) are critical for motivating collective action on behalf of one’s group (van zomeren, postmes, & spears, ). the importance of shifting the emphasis in intergroup relations from prejudice- reduction to empowering disadvantaged groups is well supported by recent research (for reviews, see dixon, levin, reicher, & durrheim, ; dovidio, gartner, & saguy, , ; see also cikara & paluck, ). particularly when groups are of differing status, fostering harmony (e.g., by making common identity salient or cultivating positive intergroup contact) may have the ironic consequence of reinforcing ideological and structural biases that promote the hierarchical status quo. for example, leading two groups in a discussion emphasizing their commonalities (as compared to group differences) leads disadvantaged groups to be more optimistic—and less accurate— about how advantaged groups will split resources between the groups (saguy, tausch, dovidio, & pratto, ). interventions and experiences that promote harmony also decrease preferences for social change (saguy et al., ), lead to lower levels of anger, decrease expectations regarding the group’s capacity to effect change, and decrease motivation to challenge inequality (ufkes, calcagno, glasford, & dovidio, ). for example, women’s engagement in collective action increases after exposure to overtly hostile sexist attitudes (e.g., the belief that gender relations are antagonistic and that women just want to control men), but decreases after exposure to paternalistic sexist attitudes (e.g., the belief that women and men should collude in the interest of the protection and adulation of women who conform to traditional female stereotypes; becker & wright, ). thus, it seems that some degree of conflict is required for social progress in inequitable intergroup contexts (dovidio et al., ). rather than chipping away at targets’ agency, labeling less prototypical forms of prejudice as prejudice may trigger emotions and motivations that embolden disadvantaged groups and individuals to engage in behavior that ultimately effects concrete social change. empowering interaction partners and rd parties humans have a strong desire to be—and to be seen as—moral. this drive makes it difficult for advantaged individuals to acknowledge their privilege (and inequality more generally; ellemers & van den toorn, ). moreover, in intergroup contexts, members of advantaged groups are motivated to shape interactions such that they emphasize their preferred perspective (e.g., “all lives matter” in response to “black lives matter”; saguy, dovidio, & pratto, ). these tendencies, coupled with the fact that most people explicitly endorse egalitarian values, mean that subtle (and often unintentional) manifestations of prejudice and discrimination will go unnoticed and unexamined by the (accidental) “transgressor” and other bystanders. in other words, the only person who will be aware of the prejudice is the target. haslam states, “to count perceived discrimination and ambiguous micro- aggressions as unqualified instances of prejudice is to subjectivize the concept. in addition to this subjectivity, the concept of micro-aggression extends the concept of prejudice by encompassing acts of omission and phenomena that reflect anxiety rather than hostility.” haslam is correct that these cases subjectivize the concept of prejudice, but he stops short of recognizing that there are objective consequences of micro- aggressions nevertheless (the exact kinds of consequences that psychologists are invested in understanding). the failure to label, for example, a micro-aggression as prejudice does not mean the speaker will be shielded from feedback indicating that they have offended their interaction partner. if anything, the speaker may walk away from the interaction uncertain as to why the interaction did not go well. what will they do with this uncertainty? as psychologists, we have a reasonable hypothesis: in the absence of a better explanation, accidental “transgressors” are likely to attribute the negative arousal associated with uncertainty to their interaction partner (schachter & singer, ; vorauer, main, & o’connell, ). again, we see how uncertainty could contribute to increased avoidance of intergroup interactions, except this time from the perspective of the person who may have had no intention of being biased or expressing prejudice. once behaviors are collectively identified (or labeled) as prejudiced, people’s strong desire to be moral may motivate follow-up behavior to redress (accidental) transgressions and deeper inequities (brown & cehajic, ; brown et al., ; cryder, springer, & morewedge, ). in fact, marking discriminatory practices with labels indicating they are norm violations may also trigger bystanders’ anger and engage rd party norm enforcement (e.g., fehr & fischbacher, ). this mechanism may draw in allies who might otherwise be unaware of these instances of prejudice and discrimination. once rd parties demonstrate their awareness and opposition to subtle prejudice, they can shift the collective norms for the entire community. for example, in a field experiment conducted in a high school, “referent” students (assigned to treatment based on their central positions in their school’s various subgroups, within its complete social network) significantly changed their peers’ perception of the norm that harassment was typical (paluck & shepherd, ). specifically, socially influential students took part in an anti-harassment seminar and then participated in a school-wide assembly in which they publically expressed their anti-harassment stances. from the beginning to the end of the school year, prescriptive norms regarding harassment changed significantly among those students who had frequent contact with the “referents” (relative to those who did not). opening up institutional channels for change finally, concept expansion may allow targets to seek justice through appropriate institutional channels. our social institutions and the law move more slowly than our cultural understanding and sensitivity to more subtle manifestations of prejudice and discrimination. for example, labeling less severe forms of mental disorders as disorders makes it possible for patients to get treatment covered by their insurance. similarly, labeling less prototypic prejudice as prejudice may make it easier for institutions—from hr offices to the justice system—to garner resources and funds to provide better support services to those in need. conclusion in this commentary i have reviewed several potential benefits of concept expansion as it applies to prejudice and discrimination. of course, this is not to say that cikara i believe there are no costs associated with expansion. rather, this commentary is specifically meant to challenge the suggestion that conceptual expansion causes more people to identify as victims, which then reduces their subjective sense of agency. as haslam notes: “a serious appraisal of conceptual creep must reckon with these potential downsides.” i agree with this statement. that said, i would counsel us to consider its potential benefits as well. author’s note i am very grateful to susan fiske, mahzarin banaji, and carey morewedge for helpful comments on earlier versions of this commentary. address correspondence to mina cikara, department of psychology, william james hall, harvard university, cambridge, ma . email: mcikara@fas.harvard.edu cikara references bar-anan, y., wilson, t. d., & gilbert, d. t. 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https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core so c ia l sc ie n c es a randomized control trial evaluating the effects of police body-worn cameras david yokuma,b, , , anita ravishankara,c,d, , and alexander coppocke, a the lab @ dc, office of the city administrator, executive office of the mayor, washington, dc ; b the policy lab, brown university, providence, ri ; c executive office of the chief of police, metropolitan police department, washington, dc ; d public policy and political science joint phd program, university of michigan, ann arbor, mi ; and e department of political science, yale university, new haven, ct edited by susan a. murphy, harvard university, cambridge, ma, and approved march , (received for review august , ) police body-worn cameras (bwcs) have been widely promoted as a technological mechanism to improve policing and the perceived legitimacy of police and legal institutions, yet evidence of their effectiveness is limited. to estimate the effects of bwcs, we con- ducted a randomized controlled trial involving , metropolitan police department officers in washington, dc. here we show that bwcs have very small and statistically insignificant effects on police use of force and civilian complaints, as well as other policing activities and judicial outcomes. these results suggest we should recalibrate our expectations of bwcs’ ability to induce large-scale behavioral changes in policing, particularly in contexts similar to washington, dc. body-worn cameras | field experiments | policing police body-worn camera (bwc) programs are rapidlyspreading across the united states. in , the us depart- ment of justice awarded over $ million in funding to support the implementation of bwc programs throughout the country ( ), and a nationwide survey found that % of large police departments either have already implemented or intend to implement a bwc program ( ). much of the expansion has been motivated by a series of high-profile, officer-involved shootings, many of which were captured in bystander video and shared across social media. stakeholders such as the american civil liberties union, campaign zero, and black lives matter have urged the police to equip bwcs as a technological solution to improve policing, or at least to document police practices and civilian behavior to resolve disputes ( , ). the widespread support for bwcs is due, in large part, to their anticipated effects on behavior. both officers and civil- ians on the street may comport themselves differently if under the watchful lens of a camera. a wide range of research, dat- ing back to the classic experiments at hawthorne works ( ), has suggested that people act differently when they believe they are being watched, from increasing work productivity and charitable giving ( – ) to encouraging honesty ( ), promot- ing adherence to recycling rules ( ), stimulating voter turnout ( ), and reducing theft ( ). across these settings, monitoring appears to shift behavior into alignment with socially acceptable conduct. in the policing context, cameras are expected to encour- age officer adherence to departmental protocols and deter police from engaging in unprofessional behavior or miscon- duct, especially unjustified use of force ( ). similarly, civilians interacting with a bwc-equipped officer may be less likely to engage in inappropriate or combative behavior. the underlying social or psychological mechanisms linking bwcs and behavior could include greater self-awareness, heightened threat of being caught, or a combination of the two. whatever the exact mecha- nisms, commentators sometimes allude to a so-called “civilizing effect,” wherein bwcs are predicted to calm all parties involved and reduce the likelihood that violence occurs ( ). by captur- ing the police–civilian interaction, the cameras are also expected to have evidentiary value, both for internal affairs and criminal investigations ( , ). the existing evidence on whether bwcs have the anticipated effects on policing outcomes remains relatively limited ( – ). several observational studies have evaluated bwcs by compar- ing the behavior of officers before and after the introduction of bwcs into the police department ( , ). other studies com- pared officers who happened to wear bwcs to those without ( , , ). the causal inferences drawn in those studies depend on strong assumptions about whether, after statistical adjustments are made, the treatment is independent of potential outcomes. in particular, we would need to believe that, after conditioning on a set of pretreatment covariates, bwcs were as if randomly assigned. a small number of randomized controlled trials (rcts) of bwcs have been conducted, with mixed results. in a series of rcts conducted across several sites in the united kingdom and the united states, bwcs appeared to increase police use of force at some sites and decrease it at others ( , ). cam- eras appeared to decrease complaints in some experiments but not others ( , ). further trials found no detectable treat- ment versus control differences on measured outcomes ( ). the extant set of rcts has typically been limited by either small sam- ple sizes or shift-level random assignments that introduce the potential for within-officer spillover ( , ). methods we collaborated with the metropolitan police department of the dis- trict of columbia (mpd) to design and implement an rct to evaluate the effects of bwcs citywide. specifically, as part of mpd’s deployment of bwcs to its police force, approximately half of all full duty patrol and station significance police departments are adopting body-worn cameras in hopes of improving civilian–police interactions. in a large-scale field experiment ( , officers of the metropolitan police depart- ment in washington, dc), we randomly assigned officers to receive cameras or not. we tracked subsequent police behav- ior for a minimum of mo using administrative data. our results indicate that cameras did not meaningfully affect police behavior on a range of outcomes, including complaints and use of force. we conclude that the effects of cameras are likely smaller than many have hoped. author contributions: d.y., a.r., and a.c. designed research, performed research, analyzed data, and wrote the paper.y the authors declare no conflict of interest.y this article is a pnas direct submission.y published under the pnas license.y data deposition: the cleaned dataset sufficient for reproducing the difference-in-means estimates of the treatment effects have been deposited in the open science framework, https://osf.io/p vuh/.y d.y., a.r., and a.c. contributed equally to this work.y to whom correspondence should be addressed. email: david yokum@brown.edu.y this article contains supporting information online at www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental.y published online may , . www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. pnas | may , | vol. | no. | – d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , https://www.pnas.org/site/aboutpnas/licenses.xhtml https://osf.io/p vuh/ mailto:david_yokum@brown.edu https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /pnas. &domain=pdf officers were randomly assigned to wear bwcs, while the other half remained without bwcs. with , mpd members participating in the trial, this study is the largest randomized evaluation of bwcs conducted to date. our project was deemed “not human subjects research” by the yale univer- sity irb (protocol no. ), as all study activities were carried out by mpd. the primary outcomes of interest were documented uses of force and civilian complaints, although we also measure a variety of additional policing activities and judicial outcomes. all outcomes were measured using administrative data. before obtaining outcome data, we developed a detailed write-up of the methodology and planned statistical analyses (a preanalysis plan) and publicly shared it on the open science framework. the preanalysis plan is included in si appendix. our study encompassed the entire department and included geographic coverage of the entire city. we identified eligible officers within each of the seven police districts (as well as several specialized units) based on the fol- lowing criteria: the officer was on active, full duty administrative status and did not have a scheduled leave of absence during the study period, held a rank of sergeant or below, and was assigned to patrol duties in a patrol district or to a nonadministrative role at a police station. eligible officers within each district or special unit were then randomly assigned to one of two groups: (i) no bwc (control) or (ii) with bwc (treatment). specifically, treatment entails assignment of an eligible participant to wear and use a bwc in accordance with mpd policy. mpd general order spt- . specifies that “[m]embers, including primary, secondary, and assisting members, shall start their bwc recordings as soon as a call is initiated via radio or commu- nication from ouc [office of unified communications] on their mobile data computer (mdc), or at the beginning of any self-initiated police action.” the general order enumerates the range of events for which officers are required to activate their bwcs; this list is included in si appendix. randomization was implemented using a block-randomized assignment procedure. this approach, which uses pretreatment information to group officers into blocks before randomly assigning a fixed number of cameras to officers in each block, increases the statistical power of the experimen- tal design and enforces treatment-versus-control balance on the covariates according to which blocking occurs. we applied a two-level blocking approach: the “major” blocks were the seven police districts and three special units, and the minor blocks were constructed using a clustering algo- rithm based on the background characteristics of the officers ( ). based on the eligibility requirements noted above, our sample consisted of , mpd members, with , members assigned to the control group and , members assigned to the treatment group. as anticipated in our preanalysis plan, some officers who were assigned cameras did not install or use them, and some officers who were not assigned cameras nevertheless obtained them. we estimate two compliance measures: the number of videos uploaded to the video database by treat- ment officers and the average length of the videos in minutes, as compared with control officers. if officers complied with the randomization proto- col, we would expect that officers assigned bwcs would make vastly more videos per year, as well as have a longer average length of videos, than their counterparts in the control group. on average, treatment officers uploaded about videos annually (compared with videos uploaded among con- trol officers). the average video recorded by a treatment officer was over min long, while the average video recorded by a control officer was just . min long. for both manipulation check measures, the treatment assignment is both substantively and statistically significant (p < . ). we conclude that compliance with the study protocol was high. following best practices in settings encountering two-sided noncompli- ance, we conducted all of our analyses according to the original random assignment ( ). our experiment thus recovers estimates of the effect of being assigned to a bwc on a variety of outcomes (the intention-to-treat effect). measurement strategy. we assessed the effect of bwcs on four families of outcome measures: police use of force, civilian complaints, policing activity, and judicial outcomes. i) police use of force was based on officers’ self-reported use of force (in accordance with mpd policy). it included a count of all use of force inci- dents as well as measures of serious uses of force (as defined by mpd policy), nonserious uses of force, and use of force incidents by the race of the subject of force. ii) civilians can file complaints in two ways: with mpd itself or with the independent office of police complaints. our measure was the total number of complaints associated with an officer from both sources. we also disaggregated the complaints by disposition: sustained, not sustained, or unresolved due to insufficient facts. iii) the policing activity category included traffic tickets and warnings issued, reports taken from particular types of calls for service, arrests on specific charges (e.g., disorderly conduct, traffic violations, assaults against a police officer), and injuries sustained by officers in the line of duty. we used these measures to evaluate the effects of bwcs on officer discretion and activity, as well as on civilian behavior. iv) finally, we examined the effects of bwcs on judicial outcomes, mea- sured by whether mpd arrest charges are prosecuted by the us attorney’s office (usao) or the office of the attorney general (oag) and the disposition of those charges. our examination of this set of outcomes was constrained by limitations in the available data. namely, we did not have access to the full datasets managed by the usao, oag, and the courts. we instead had access to a subset of these data available to mpd, which captures only the initial charges on which an individual was arrested. a consequence is that we were unable to track court out- comes for any changes to those initial charges. as this limitation applies to both control and treatment groups, however, we were still able to conduct a preliminary analysis on the evidentiary value of bwcs. due to logistical constraints, mpd deployed cameras on a district-by- district basis over the course of mo. officers in two of the seven police districts received cameras in late june , with the deployment to the remaining districts taking place from march to may . by integrating randomization directly into the bwc deployment process, we were able to conduct this study at marginally low cost to mpd. to address the staggered deployment process, the data collection period varies for each police district, based on the start date of bwc deployment in that district. all outcomes were obtained at the officer level and trans- lated into yearly rates. these rates were calculated from the date that the cameras were first deployed in each district. we calculate these rates before and after the intervention based on a window of d, because is the number of days between deployment and the end of the study period for the district that was the last to receive cameras. the pretreatment and post- treatment periods are of the same length for all districts; the pretreatment measurements come from the same -d window (in the previous year) as the posttreatment measurements, to account for seasonality in policing and desensitization to the treatment over time. because all of our outcomes are unconditional event counts translated into yearly event rates per , offices, our measurement procedure avoids the posttreatment bias that would be associated with measuring various conditional quantities. for example, we might want to measure the frac- tion of an officer’s civilian interactions that include use of force, but, since the officer–citizen interaction is posttreatment, we cannot condition on it without the risk of bias. estimation strategy. we use two estimators of the average treatment effects: (i) difference-in-means with inverse probability weights to account for differential probabilities of assignment by block and (ii) regression of outcome on treatment assignment with controls for pretreatment char- acteristics and inverse probability weights. specifically, we control for the pretreatment value of the outcome (e.g., past use of force), pretreatment covariates for the officer, and indicators for each major block. eq. provides the exact specification, as preregistered before the realization of outcomes. ypost = β + β z + β ypre + β block + β x + �, [ ] where z is the treatment indicator (officer assigned camera or not); ypre is the pretreatment value of the outcome under study; block is a vector of indicator variables for an officer’s home district or special unit; x is a vec- tor of pretreatment covariates that includes race, gender, and length of service; and � is the error term. we estimate eq. using weighted least squares regression with inverse probability weights, which are calculated as the inverse of the probability of each unit being in its observed condi- tion ( ). we use hc robust standard errors for variance estimation ( ). we conduct our primary analysis among officers in the seven districts of dc (n = , ). we exclude officers in special units from this analysis, as policing activities and camera use patterns may differ between these units and the district officers. we conduct this analysis at the officer level, and report results as a yearly rate per , officers. our analyses were con- ducted by two independent statistical teams, to help avoid coding errors and as a check of convergence in results. data availablity. the cleaned dataset sufficient for reproducing the difference-in-means estimates of the treatment effects will be made | www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. yokum et al. d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. so c ia l sc ie n c es fig. . average difference (with % confidence interval) between bwc and non-bwc groups, per , officers over a year for police use of force, complaints filed against officers, and arrests for disorderly conduct. we show findings from both our difference-in-means (dim) estimator and ordinary least-squares (ols) regression including pretreatment covariates. available at the open science framework at https://osf.io/p vuh/. we are unable to make public the raw data from which the cleaned dataset was produced, due to privacy concerns of both officers and civilians. we are also unable to release the officer-level covariate information that we use to esti- mate the covariate adjusted models, as these data would uniquely identify individual officers. results across each of the four outcome categories, our analyses con- sistently point to a null result: the average treatment effect estimate on all measured outcomes was very small, and no estimate rose to statistical significance at conventional levels. because our study has a large enough sample size to detect small effect sizes, these failures to reject the null are unlikely to be due to insufficient statistical power. fig. plots the estimated average treatment effect (as a yearly rate per , officers) of bwcs on police use of force, civilian complaints, and offi- cer discretion (as measured by arrests for disorderly conduct). our best guess is that cameras caused an increase of (se = ) uses of force per , officers, per year. this estimate is not statistically significantly different from zero. the effects on complaints ( per , officers per year, se = ) and arrests for disorderly conduct (− per , officers per year, se = ) were also nonsignificant. effect estimates on court appearances, judicial outcomes, domestic violence calls, and other measures of police behavior (all null) are included in si appendix. discussion we consider here a few possible explanations for our null find- ings. first and most obviously, it is possible the null finding needs no explanation: the devices, in fact, have no effect on behavior. perhaps neither the officer nor civilian involved in an interaction are actually aware of or affected by the camera, either due to attention being diverted elsewhere or desensitization over time to the presence of the cameras. second, washington, dc may be different from other places in important ways. perhaps bwcs have no effect in the nation’s capital, but they do in other municipalities. we are sympa- thetic to this possibility, but we also note that, as bwcs were randomly assigned within each of the seven police dis- tricts, we conducted the equivalent of seven mini-experiments. despite substantial district-to-district heterogeneity in baseline outcomes, we observe small, insignificant effects in all seven districts. a third explanation for the null findings considers the possi- bility that other factors are masking the true effect of the bwcs: the cameras do affect the measured outcomes, but these effects are being hidden by interference across units, or spillovers from treated to control officers. approximately one-third of calls were responded to by control officers only, one-third by treatment officers only, and the last third by a mix of treatment and control officers. this distribution of calls indicates that control officers were frequently performing their duties without cameras nearby. as a check of whether the introduction of cameras affected both treatment and control officers, we examined time trends for documented uses of force and civilian complaints before and after cameras were deployed (analysis presented in si appendix). we observed no differences in precamera versus postcamera outcomes for either group. finally, the true effect of bwcs may be masked by the widespread presence of nonpolice cameras (e.g., civilians’ cell phones). civilians regularly record encounters with mpd mem- bers with their own cameras, and closed caption television (cctv) is widespread. perhaps the bwcs do not change behav- ior at the margin, simply because there is no more room to have an effect. to explore this possibility (we note that this analysis was not preregistered), we examined the effect of treatment on use of force at night, when exposure to nonpolice cameras is lower. we also found no effect of cameras on this alternative dependent variable. other researchers have suggested that bwcs may fail to affect results because of nonadherence: officers, for a variety of reasons, may not use their assigned cameras according to departmental policy ( , , ). officers may fail to activate the camera, for example. we have no indication that nonadherence was a widespread problem in our experiment. for % of the days in , mpd averaged at least one video (and often many more) per call for service associated with a treatment officer. further, even for the % of days in in which the number of videos uploaded was less than the number of incidents for which we would expect them, the difference is minimal, with % average adherence based on our measure. that said, effects may depend on the level of discretion officers are given to activate the cameras, although evaluation of that possibility will have to await further experiments. we acknowledge that bwcs may have had effects that are not measurable with administrative data. for example, it may be the case that there were uses of force that were previously going unreported, and those have now dropped with the introduction of bwcs. however, because our data do not capture unreported uses of force, we are unable to detect this kind of change. as a matter of speculation, however, we find it implausible that we would measure very small effects on reported outcomes but that the true average effect on unreported outcomes is large. in summary, we measured the average effects of bwcs on documented uses of force and civilian complaints as well as a variety of additional policing activities and judicial outcomes. our sample size was unusually large, enhancing our ability to detect differences, should they exist. in addition, our compar- ison groups were constructed from an individual-level officer randomization scheme, which avoids several problems of infer- ence present in other methodologies used to date. we are unable to detect any statistically significant effects. as such, our experiment suggests that we should recalibrate our expec- tations of bwcs as a technological solution to many policing difficulties. acknowledgments. we thank katherine barnes, jd, phd, donald green, phd, bill egar, phd, jennifer doleac, phd, and donald braman, jd, phd, and reviewers from the lab @ dc and its partners for valuable feedback. we thank the many individuals who participated in briefings and shared their thoughtful insights and opinions with us. this study would not have been possible without the metropolitan police department of the district of columbia. they welcomed our research team and were committed to under- standing, as rigorously as possible, the impacts of the bwc program. special thanks go to chief cathy lanier (ret.), chief peter newsham, matthew bromeland, commander ralph ennis, heidi fieselmann, derek meeks, and all the sworn members who dutifully adapted to a new, complicated pro- gram and participated in the study. we also thank the executive office of the mayor, especially mayor muriel bowser, city administrator rashad young, deputy mayor for public safety and justice kevin donahue, and yokum et al. pnas | may , | vol. | no. | d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental https://www.pnas.org/lookup/suppl/doi: . /pnas. /-/dcsupplemental chief performance officer jennifer reed, for dedicating their support, time, and resources to advancing evidence-based governance and policy in the district. thanks to objectively for layout and web design. we thank the laura and john arnold foundation for generous financial 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( ) police, camera, evidence: london’s cluster randomised controlled trial of body worn video (college policing, london). . moore rt ( ) blocktools: blocking, assignment, and diagnosing interference in randomized experiments. r package version . - . available at https://cran.r- project.org/web/packages/blocktools/index.html. accessed october , . . gerber as, green dp ( ) field experiments: design, analysis, and interpretation (ww norton, new york). . samii c, aronow pm ( ) on equivalencies between design-based and regression- based variance estimators for randomized experiments. stat probab lett : – . | www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. yokum et al. d o w n lo a d e d a t c a rn e g ie m e llo n u n iv e rs ity o n a p ri l , https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-awards-over- -million-funding-body-worn-camera-pilot-program-support-law https://www.justice.gov/opa/pr/justice-department-awards-over- -million-funding-body-worn-camera-pilot-program-support-law https://www.joincampaignzero.org/solutions#solutionsoverview https://www.joincampaignzero.org/solutions#solutionsoverview https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/blocktools/index.html https://cran.r-project.org/web/packages/blocktools/index.html https://www.pnas.org/cgi/doi/ . /pnas. #blackbabiesmatter: analyzing black religious media in conservative and progressive evangelical communities religions article #blackbabiesmatter: analyzing black religious media in conservative and progressive evangelical communities monique moultrie religious studies, georgia state university, atlanta, ga , usa; mmoultrie@gsu.edu received: august ; accepted: november ; published: november abstract: this article explores how conservative and progressive black protestants interrogate the theological theme of the sacrality of black life through digital media. the innovations of religious media in black evangelical communities remain an understudied phenomenon in african american religion, making this an apt arena for further discovery. this current intervention into the study of african american religion examines digital activism through examples of religious media produced by blacks for black audiences. this article begins its interrogation of the sacrality of black life by juxtaposing those who contend that black babies matter as pro-birth-oriented, religiously motivated activists with those religious opponents asserting black lives matter who present an intersectional pro-life approach. the comparison of views relies on womanist cultural analysis as its main methodology to analyze and interpret digital media and explore its ramifications for african american religion. keywords: digital religion; digital activism; black lives matter movement; sacredness; black religious media the black lives matter hashtag was coined in july and popularized by three women of color in response to the acquittal of trayvon martin’s killer. while this hashtag activism increased after the murder of mike brown in august , there has been a persistent campaign to expose structural racism and police violence, which has been met with a continuous backlash from police supporters and proponents of broader social agendas. one such black lives matter retort came from evangelist alveda king, the niece of slain civil rights leader dr. martin luther king, jr. she circulated an image of black lives matter protesters (some with their hands up, others carrying a black lives matter banner) with an accompanying quote “dear planned parenthood, if black lives matter to you, stop aborting our babies and butchering our women!” this article investigates such religious media interaction with both #blacklivesmatter and #alllivesmatter tweets, particularly focused on media presented from until present. frederick douglass famously stated, “i prayed for years but received no answer until i prayed with my legs,” and this rhetoric remains true for both conservative and progressive black evangelical actors working within virtual worlds to create social change. the innovations of religious media in these black evangelical communities remain an understudied phenomenon in african american religion making this an apt arena for further discovery. this current intervention into the study of african american religion examines digital activism through examples of religious media produced by blacks for black audiences. this article begins its interrogation of the sacrality of black life by juxtaposing those who contend that black babies matter as pro-birth-oriented, religiously motivated activists with those opponents asserting black lives matter who present an intersectional pro-life religions , , ; doi: . /rel www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions http://www.mdpi.com http://dx.doi.org/ . /rel http://www.mdpi.com/journal/religions religions , , of approach. the comparison of views relies on womanist cultural analysis as its main methodology to analyze and interpret digital media and explore its ramifications for african american religion. . digital media and african american religion christian ethicist reggie williams writes in a christian century special segment devoted to assessing the black lives matter movement that because the “story of white supremacy is dynamic, adapting in real time to evidence that it is a lie,” this forces movements to change to address this adaptability (williams , p. ). social movements have typically relied on media and technology to articulate their messages to the masses, and contemporary social movements are no different, except the medium has changed to digital and religious media. for instance, in the past, a social justice message could be spread through mimeographs, flyers, faxes, magazines, and even church bulletins. today’s movements for social change are using multivocal platforms like digital media. for the purpose of this study, digital media refers to online offerings such as blogs, social media websites like facebook and twitter, as well as traditional means of communicating messages like print and ad content. while digital media encompasses various forms of virtual media, it is never value neutral as it is always imprinted with a dominant message from its producers. this is also true of religious media that shares many of the same formats as digital media, although religious media tends to be produced and viewed by persons sharing common values or beliefs about religion. both forms of media can be constantly updated, and communications scholar heidi campbell considers this “digital religion,” or religion that is performed and articulated online but also reflects how digital media is shaped by religious practice. digital religion should be highly influential to scholars of black religion because it engages millions, and brings in what historian josef sorett names as the cultural practices that “affirm black life and don’t necessarily register (or are misread) on the radars of mainstream media” (sorett , p. ). yet, despite its influence on black religious practitioners, scholars of black religion have been reticent to fully interrogate digital religion or new religious media’s impact on black religiosity. this exploration into the contemporary black lives matter movement necessitates a foray into black religious media particularly new religious media. one work delving into black religious media is the recent text televised redemption: black religious media and racial empowerment, which makes impressive strides detailing how black religious media has provided african americans with tools to be moral citizens. carolyn rouse, john jackson, and marla frederick co-authored the book that defines black religious media as “not only media produced by black religious groups but also media produced by others about the black religious experience” (rouse et al. ). their work was particularly invested in religious media effecting changes in the consumer and the impact of religious media in the aftermath of the black lives matter campaign. thus, this article traces the merging of black lives matter rhetoric into media produced by/for black conservative and progressive christians. it examines tweets, facebook posts, digital billboards, and bodily protests with the aim of understanding both groups’ efforts to liberate black people. while this article will not trace the historical use of media in social movements, it does share the sentiment that although black lives matter campaigns might be identified as “not your grandfather’s womanist cultural analysis describes the merging of womanist methodology and cultural studies to analyze digital media from the perspective of the black producers and consumers of media. this methodology includes a close reading of the texts (in this case, twitter, facebook, and blog posts) while being sensitive to their articulated religious perspectives. i would like to acknowledge toni bond leonard, one of the founding mothers of reproductive justice, for her assistance in preparing this article. (campbell , pp. – ). she notes that digital religion is marked by the traits of online culture and traditional religion, e.g., “interactivity, convergence, audience-generated content with beliefs and rituals as practiced in traditional religious spaces.” there are significant offerings that look at various types of religious media that has impacted black religion from radio, printed sermons, to televised religiosity. for instance, consider the works of lerone martin, barbara savage, wallace best, judith weisenfield, jonathan walton, marla frederick, shayne lee, and monique moultrie, among others. new religious media references web-based technologies. religions , , of civil-rights-movement,” the participation of religious actors merges old tactics with new media opportunities. philosopher of religion terrence johnson contends that the black lives matter movement emerges from an african american religious context as it “inherits its call to ‘(re)build the black liberation movement’ from the black church’s historical role in developing a theology of liberation based on social justice” (johnson ). he is clear that is he not indicating any causality from the black church to the black lives matter movement; instead, he is positing that that they share vocabulary, songs, and even political ideology such that the basic building blocks for what defines justice and what it means to be human are found in black churches. this is contestable given the cognitive dissonance many black millenials have with black religiosity and especially black christianity. yet, when one looks at activism regarding black lives matter from black persons claiming a religious identity, this is not as specious a claim. demographically, one can make a claim that african americans who do not eschew christianity are a part of the digital religion population that syncs new media with their religious lives. according to a pew center study, % of – -year-old african americans who use the internet use twitter (compared to % of younger whites) and there is a noticeable six percentage point difference among black youth using social networking sites like facebook compared to whites (pew research center ). given the statistic that black protestants have retained more millenials than any other racial demographic, it is reasonable to presume that these millenials are media oriented and invested in the cultural practices and rituals that sorett described (lee ). this would make digital media significant for black protestant meaning making. scholars contend that the black lives matter movement has decentered the black church as the site for meaning making and solutions to the injustice of the world. analysis of religious media associated with the movement supports this assertion, as this is certainly not the call to return to the black church’s status quo. instead, activists on both the left and right are expanding the church and the message of christianity’s involvement through their activism. women and gender studies scholar brittney cooper asserts that the movement has issued a clarion call to the black church to affirm a theology of resistance rather than a theology of respectability such that jesus serves as more than a savior delivering persons from the punishment of personal sin but the sins of racism, patriarchy, homophobia, and transphobia (cooper , p. ). while more conservative activists may not share all of cooper’s goals, they certainly support the claim that jesus’ salvific power extends beyond the soul to bodily concerns. . conservative religious actors utilizing digital religion conservative religious activists were early adapters to digital media just as conservative evangelicals were among the first to utilize radio and television mediums to proclaim their versions of christianity. black christian conservatives use of social media represents a continuation of earlier campaigns targeting individual sin like gambling, drinking, prostitution, adultery, and abortion. many opponents contend that the recent upsurge in digital activism connected to the black lives matter movement represents a capitalization on the deaths of blacks. yet, conservative users of social media respond that they are merely putting into perspective protesters’ claims that black lives matter by forcing the inclusion of black fetuses as lives that should also matter to liberal activists. similar to their forbearers in the church of god in christ, in order for them to align themselves with the holy spirit, they are called to be “in the world, and not of it.” this calling has led them to some of the same media outlets utilized by progressives, such as twitter and facebook. cobb ( ). see chapter of televised redemption for a more thorough discussion of religious media in social movements. (butler , p. ). for the last forty years, there has been a sustained black religious media response to abortion access in black communities sphere headed by typically black male clergy. new media has in some ways democratized the ability to advocate for pro-life causes within black religion as it gives access to persons like ryan bomberger who lack clerical credentialing but has become a major force in the pro-life movement. religions , , of for example, rev. clenard childress, a new jersey pastor and founder of blackgenocide.org calls the black lives matter movement the best thing that happened to the “anemic black pro-life movement.” childress has regularly supplied protesters from his two hundred–member new jersey congregation as they see black lives matter protests ripe for the anti-abortion message. he specifically recruits other black pastors for this type of activism, as he believes christians have a moral duty to inform the community of systematic targeting of black communities through eugenics and population control. childress primarily utilizes digital media like the all black lives matter project circulating through historically black colleges and universities’ campuses to advance his cause. his website, blackgenocide.org, is his gift to the anti-abortion movement, as it is a multi-media mural presentation of his views comparing black abortion to genocide. childress argues that the black lives matter movement has given his cause a way of beginning a conversation with younger blacks, and this is also true of rev. alveda king’s outreach through the priests for life organization. while both childress and king used imagery and tactics connecting their cause with the civil rights movement, both see in the black lives matter movement an opportunity to make an impact on a cause that they feel religiously called to pursue. in alveda king’s march blog post “why all lives matter,” she opens with an image of a fetus with the caption “black lives do matter! hands up-don’t abort,” which she attributes to the www.africanamericanoutreach.org website, which is an arm of her organization, civil rights for the unborn. the blog makes comparisons between the ferguson police department scheme to disproportionately issue tickets against blacks to planned parenthood’s “systematic” targeting of minorities. king began connecting her anti-abortion cause to the black lives matter campaign as early as the darren wilson acquittal in . she and others argue that the disregard for black life starts much younger than teenage years and that nonviolence should begin with nonviolence to black children in the womb. in addition to using her blog, king also has an impressive media-oriented website with videos, recordings, and memes meant for wide distribution. she capitalizes on the vast network of catholics and civil rights organizations providing a warehouse for those seeking resources on black (and religious) anti-abortion views. perhaps the most successful and notable digital activist utilizing religious media to offer alternatives to the black lives matter movement is ryan bomberger, the founder of the radiance foundation, an organization devoted to “creatively affirm(ing) that every human life has purpose”. he is the creative force behind the billboard campaigns from toomanyaborted.com that sought to expose the disproportionate impact of abortion on the black community by naming black children an endangered species and calling the womb the most dangerous place for black children. he has gained greater contemporary notoriety because of his someblacklivesmatter media posts and intervention into the black lives matter campaign to juxtapose the number of blacks killed by police with the numbers of black abortions performed yearly. he considers himself a factivist whose god-given purpose is to help people understand they have intrinsic value. ryan’s graphic design background means he utilizes digital media masterfully with his main goal being to promote a single issue—being pro-life. in fact, he proudly proclaims that he is pro-birth and not “whole life” because he doesn’t want to “dilute what it means to be pro-life,” especially since everyone should be pro-birth, which he (cunningham ). childress figures prominently in the anti-abortion documentary maafa : black genocide in st century america that argues that the maafa did not end in slavery but continues in the current plot to exterminate the black population through abortion. (king ). rev. alveda king garners a lot of traction with her statements because of her use of statements from her uncle, the civil rights icon dr. martin luther king, jr. yet, she is also notable from her funded position as an african american outreach activist with the largely white organization priests for life. the radiance foundation states that its mission is to be an “educational, faith-based, life–affirming organization” utilizing “creative ad campaigns, powerful multi-media presentations, fearless journalism, and compassionate community outreaches” http://www.theradiancefoundation.org/about/. bomberger bemoans christian gatherings that focus on crafting a pro-life ethic that focus on food desserts, lead and mercury in water, global warming, animal rights, etc. his christian work is committed to one goal—preventing abortions. blackgenocide.org www.africanamericanoutreach.org http://www.theradiancefoundation.org/about/ religions , , of likens to being pro-breathing. bomberger contends that his activism is science/fact based but also centered on his christian faith. . theological framings for black babies matter campaigns these conservative christian activists share similar biblical and theological framings that condition their responses to contemporary social issues like abortion or even civil rights protests. common ground is typically found in the sacredness of human life, which for conservatives begins at conception. this article does not offer a thorough juxtaposition between the theological justifications for and against abortion. instead, it looks more narrowly at the specific rationales for sacrality of human life debated from religious media activists on each side. evangelical ethicist david gushee wrote a substantive treatise on the sacredness of human life, and his argument is instructive for exploring how these black conservative activists understand abortion or even the taking of black lives by the police. gushee begins with evangelical definitions for sanctity of human life that parallels some of the digital media statements by black conservative black babies matter activists. he summarizes the literature by stating that human life is sacred because it is precious to god (based on psalms : ), because humans are created in god’s image (based on genesis : – ), and because god also took human nature in the form of jesus (based on john : , ). gushee admits that debates on the sacredness of human life are often waged over abortion and that the theology of creation depends heavily on biblical rationale. his text provides similar logic to what is espoused by activist groups. unlike activists, gushee acknowledges that the biblical base for being pro-life is disputable because there is no “explicit condemnation of abortion” in the bible, but this acknowledgement comes with significant biblical support for the pro-life position found in biblical affirmations that god is creator of every human, that fertility is a part of god’s plan, children are thus gifts from god, and finally that even in the development process, god is present and providential. these views on the sacredness of human life are shared by most of the religious activists on the conservative and progressive side. yet, conservatives often go a step further to insist that this sacredness begins at the moment of conception, whereas progressives attribute sacredness and human life to a live birth. particularly popular among conservatives is the proof they find in psalm : – , which states, “for you created my inmost being; you knit me together in my mother’s womb. i praise you because i am fearfully and wonderfully made . . . my frame was not hidden from you, when i was made in the secret place, when i was woven together in the depths of the earth. your eyes beheld my unformed body.” activists like rev. alveda king argue that this scripture speaks of the unborn child as a person with whom god is interacting, and activist ryan bomberger states that this scripture shows just how purposeful every life is to god, with no child being unplanned. in media presentations like “the beauty of possibility,” they promote god imbuing each embryo with purposeful life, and they contend that they are the true advocates for the full thriving of black life. prominent in their rhetoric is that black lives matter proponents must care about black life from the “womb to the tomb,” as rev. alveda king reminds her audiences that “everybody’s civil rights count” (heretik ). the rationale behind this logic is that every person carries the image of god, and this begins in the womb. thus, every black zygote, embryo, or fetus is already a part of god’s plan and deserving of respect expected of all persons. this mentality is then distributed through multi-media presentations like videos, tv show appearances (rev. alveda king is a regular on fox whole life refers to the comprehensive view of the intrinsic dignity of all humans that includes issues like poverty, environmentalism, euthanasia, etc. and is ultimately concerned with more than abortion (herreid ). this would require a vast comparison and even if just narrowing down perspectives from the protestant black christian perspective, this still leaves hundreds of years of debates. for a more thorough analysis of catholic and protestant views on abortion, see (castuera ). (gushee , p. ). gushee’s definitions of the sacredness of human life are taken from evangelicals and catholic christians before he provides his own historically and theologically researched definition that is useful for this discussion. ibid, p. . religions , , of news), documentaries like maafa , billboards, and social media like instagram and facebook posts. for instance, the radiance foundation cross-posted on may , #thingsjesusneversaid: some lives matter, which reiterated for their followers their message that all babies matter to god and thus should matter to society. these organizations feel that they are tackling this particular social issue out of a god-given purpose to defend the lives that god created. ultimately, through their rhetorical choices, only those caring about life at conception can stake a claim in defending life throughout its development. this results in a pro-birth doctrine that many conservative activists like ryan bomberger are happy to accept, while opponents contend that this is a myopic view that limits these justice-oriented organizations’ full capacity to work on behalf of the black community. the debate around the black lives matter movement has amplified this tension as lines are drawn with antagonists within the conservative movement questioning the black lives matter movement’s commitment to black life in light of its perceived silence on the disproportionate number of black abortions performed annually. bomberger has been perhaps most adamant in this charge, stating, it’s more than abundantly clear that so-called #blacklivesmatter activists and the multi-million dollar organizations funding the movement aren’t really concerned about the racial justice and the brutality that ends the majority of black lives. these passionate, but confused, advocates seem incapable of realizing that their voice was only made possible by being born . . . by the strength and courage of their own mothers who did not allow violence to take away yet another unarmed black life. (radiance foundation ). he reasons that abortion is the number one killer in the black community and he is fulfilling his faith and social justice commitments by being pro-life. one of the issues prevalent when black conservatives attempt to enter conversation with progressives supporting the black lives matter campaign is that they are lambasted as being too far outside their faith. michelle higgins, a young black woman serving as director of faith for justice, a christian advocacy group in st. louis, was asked to speak at an intervarsity christian fellowship mission conference in december , and she dared present black lives matter as a movement on a mission for god. since only in evangelicals ( %) surveyed stated they did not support the message of the black lives matter movement, higgins statement may not have earned her pushback, but then she stated that evangelicals are “too busy withholding mercy from the living, so that we might display a big spectacle of how much we want mercy to be shown to the unborn,” and intervarsity felt it had to intervene to reiterate its pro-life stance. higgins tapped into the pro-birth consensus that amplifies god’s mysterious work in creating human life but then seemingly abdicates religious authority for working on behalf of the living. . progressive religious actors utilizing digital religion progressive black religious activists are eager to point out this seeming discrepancy and have responded to the #alllivesmatter and #blackbabiesmatter hashtags with their own theological justifications for their participation in the black lives matter movement shown through digital religion. contrary to conservatives who utilized religious media as a mean of converting others to their cause; progressive religious activists seemed to use their religious media to communicate and organize acts of resistance in alignment with the black lives matter protests going on in various cities. black lives matter activists were adamant that the “model of the black preacher leading people although white women currently make up the majority of abortion patients at %, black women are disproportionately represented in the abortions received, with black women representing % of abortions performed while constituting only roughly % of the total population. see (jerman et al. ). intervarsity’s interim president responding that “scripture is clear about the sanctity of life: that is why i’m pro-life and committed to the dignity of my black brothers and sisters,” while simultaneously stating that they did not endorse everything attributed to the blacklivesmatter movement (oppenheimer ). religions , , of to the promised land isn’t working right now,” so many clergy are following the lead of the young activists on the ground. secular activists have made clear that they will not be silenced in favor of more seasoned religious activists as shown in johnetta elzie and members of the ferguson “hands up, don’t shoot” movement rushing the stage to take the microphone away from rev. al sharpton during his december “justice for all” march. thus, unlike conservative religious actors who are the primary producers of their activist rhetoric and social justice activism; progressive religious actors often are re-circulating the actions planned by secular black lives matter organizers to their religious networks. this is not to indicate that progressive religious actors do not utilize their own forms of religious media to be more persuasive to their audiences. for instance, rev. dr. pamela lightsey, an ordained methodist elder, livestream broadcasted her visits to ferguson because she felt there was a void coming from the faith community and she wanted to showcase the “rich theology present in the black community” that was being articulated on the ground but not recorded by the national secular media. as a seminary associate dean, she went down to ferguson as a representative of the boston university school of theology and the reconciling ministries network’s (a united methodist social justice group) communication staff, and she recorded hours of footage of day-to-day interactions between the protesters and militarized ferguson police. her interviews with activists and citizens of ferguson illuminated how police brutality, public policies like ticketing schemes that unfairly penalized poor blacks, and how denial of proper health care and quality education were all conditions that the black lives matter movement was seeking to alleviate. lightsey’s use of livestream is a ready example of how progressive religious media associated with black lives matter tended to rely on the instantaneous nature of social media to organize. they were following or re-posting millennial activism, which was particularly dependent on social media for gathering and spreading information. black lives matter activists were often suspicious of the media produced outside of their networks, instead flocking to social media and their own means of reporting. perhaps this is also shared logic by progressive religious activists like rev. traci blackmon and rev. starsky wilson, who both have a significant social media presence via facebook and twitter, and who are deeply ingrained in the physical location of ferguson. progressive religious activists’ digital religion also motivates them to use resistance tactics in the non-virtual world. rev. traci blackmon, pastor of the christ the king united church of christ (a church outside of ferguson), described how she first learned of mike brown’s murder via facebook, and while watching it gain more attention (trending on facebook), she asked others who wanted to pray about it if they could at least pray at the police station (francis , p. ). this simple action launched a protest in front of the police station, one of the first on-the-ground actions. she has continued her activism both in and outside of ferguson through the social media hashtag #prayingwithourfeet as she has journeyed to washington, d.c. to protest the repeal of the affordable healthcare act. blackmon in part utilizes social media because she recognizes that alternative “modes of storytelling—like livestreaming, social media, activist reporting” all shape the narrative, and people of faith who are called to be storytellers must take responsibility of the “narratives of the scriptures we hold sacred” (moujaes ). rev. shaun jones, assistant pastor of the mt. zion baptist church in st. louis, was interviewed in ferguson & faith: sparking leadership & awakening community. he noted that when he and other clergy went to the activists in the streets willing to learn from their commitment and sacrifice and to have their back without trying to stand out front, then they were accepted as part of the movement. see (francis ; cobb ). (lightsey ). this was her mechanism of supporting the protest for justice by moving outside of mainstream media as she claims her amateur shot videos were viewed by close to million people. livestream’s mission is to “enable organizations to share experiences through live video, unlocking a world where every event is available live online.” https://livestream.com/about. this is not to indicate that those using #ferguson or #blacklivesmatter were all insiders, as clearly the conservatives religious actors previously discussed indicates. twitter recorded these two hashtags as the # and # most used hashtags with the responding #alllivesmatter tweet used only about / as much, with about % of these tweets being used by someone opposing abortion. see (pew research center ). https://livestream.com/about religions , , of likewise, rev. starsky wilson, pastor of st. john’s united church of christ (a church in north st. louis) described finding out about mike brown’s murder via twitter and mobilized with other clergy via e-mail to go to the police station to get the thirteen youths who had been arrested during a protest released on their own recognizance. he was considered a trusted source of civilian reporting during the ferguson unrest, and his presence on the ground earned him trust with youth activists, so much so that his church was chosen as the headquarters for the black lives matter freedom ride and the ferguson october teach-ins. he has certainly proven that “hashtag activism is activism” as persons might be tweeting from the comforts of home, but they are also “getting up and doing the work that needs to be done” (vega ). . theological framings for progressive participation in black lives matter campaigns the progressive religious activists that were discussed also share similar biblical and theological framings that motivate their actions in the digital and physical world. they also share a common belief in the sacredness of human life, but for progressive religious activists, this sacrality does not end after conception but mandates working on the behalf of the sacred nature of black life throughout its stages of development. they share david gushee’s consensus on the sacred nature of human life, but they mediate his perspective through the lenses of black liberation theologies. black and womanist theologies often link the sacredness of human life to a consideration of the full humanity of blacks that are lived out in a belief that god cares about the full thriving of black life. rev. willis johnson, a pastor of wellspring united methodist church in ferguson, offers one of the most succinct depictions of black lives matter and theology of creation: yes, black lives do matter, and yes, they matter because there’s a god who believes that all life is sacred. while this has racial implications and tension an economic reverberation, there’s a historical record of a system and a culture that are violent toward black people at any given time . . . so there is a god who is a god of all the oppressed. there’s a god who cares, and there’s a sacredness of person because we’re all created in the image of god. (francis , p. ). belief that god’s image is imprinted on all life meant that as religious activists they needed to be concerned with the racial and economic realities of black people. womanist theologian kelly brown douglas contends that according to an african worldview, all is sacred because it is connected to the creator god who is sacred. she remarks that god intends for black bodies to be cherished and respected because biblical scripture teaches that god looked out at creation and it was good. beyond this basic building block for sacredness of human life in womanist theology, she states that this good creation requires that black bodies be free from human constraints that prevent them from being who god created or threatens their life. thus, “black life has meaning beyond the images constructed by the narratives of a stand-your-ground culture” (douglas , pp. – ). thus, as laborers for justice, progressive religious activists are encouraged to resist anything or anyone that threatens the fullness of black life. in essence, to be fully black is to be fully human and the “quest for black people to be seen as fully human is a significant component of this movement for racial justice”(francis , p. ). the daily dehumanization that occurs with inadequate education, health care, policing, disproportionate imprisonment, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc. threaten the capacity to be fully human and fully created as god intended. thus, black lives matter religious activists push back against stereotypes and discrimination and shows god’s love and god intentions in the world. this action is imbued with their liberation theological determination that full humanity involves a more just notion of humanity that desires god’s freedom to be manifest in the lives of all. progressive religious activists are making plain a womanist ethic of incarnation that envisions black bodies as made from the same substance of god; thus, black humanity cannot be divorced from the god incarnate (turman , p. ). religions , , of digital religion is the newest mechanism utilized by progressive religious actors within the long history of affirming the sacredness of black humanity. perhaps part of the promise of digital religion is its mixture of old and new techniques to match contemporary times. for example, black churches have long held seven last words services to celebrate good friday, a significant liturgical marker in black christianity. in the seven last words: strange fruit speaks worship services, progressive religious activists merged the standard good friday preaching with a black lives matter emphasis and media capabilities. nyle fort, a young seminarian activist, organized a commemoration of the “conversations and words of black people who have been murdered by vigilantes or police officers” at riverside church; despite its physical locale, the service was live-streamed, tweeted, and catalogued on youtube for a much wider audience (wright , p. ; blackmon ). rev. traci blackmon preaches the first word commemorating amadou diallo. she reminds the audience that they are all gathered because of the failure to acknowledge the holy in one another, and she refused to just focus on the interruption of diallo’s life but instead will concentrate on his incarnation. this echoing of his sacredness and humanity is also represented in fort’s closing sermon commemorating sean bell who was murdered on his wedding day. fort’s sermonic close represents the intersectional approach to black life that has been at the forefront on the black lives matter movement and ultimately has been a part of the black church’s historical identity as an all-comprehending institution addressing all facets of black life. fort concludes with an invitation for all listeners to marry the movement for justice. he vows to “love black people unapologetically; unlearn systems of oppression of patriarchy, homophobia, capitalism, militarism, and white supremacist theologies; stand alongside my transgender brothers and sisters against trans-antagonism and violence; organize within my community; take care of my elders and to inspire a generation . . . and to not simply preach love with my lips, but to practice love with my life” (fort ). these commitments have been demanded since the enslavement of africans on american soil and have been a part of secular and religious black liberation efforts. yet, progressive religious activists’ focus on the combined sacredness of creation and the full humanity of blacks presents an opportunity to “pray with our feet until there is no more blood in our streets” (francis , p. ). . conclusions philosopher of religion eddie glaude describes america’s main problem as a value gap, e.g., the belief that white people matter more than others (or at its core, that some bodies matter more than others), and i contend that is at the heart of the divide between black conservatives and progressives in the freedom struggle—varying hierarchies of who matters. this value gap is present in almost every aspect of society from housing, health care, state-sanctioned violence, education, poverty, etc. yet, both conservative and progressive religious activists have solutions for this value gap that stem from their theological beliefs. this article has described the ways that black conservative and progressive religious activists have used new technology to go about the divine work of changing the world. both groups are motivated by deeply held theological principals that are receiving a much wider audience due to the influence of digital media. if the personal is political, then the virtual is also political. while much of this article has focused on various social media offerings, this is not to indicate that digital activism stops in the virtual realm. there are real life ramifications for each group’s efforts like the recent missouri “all lives matter act,” which tried to define a fertilized egg as a person with rights, and the ferguson commission report, which offered concrete paths toward change in ferguson. contemporary scholars of black religion must investigate these connections and causes to better understand how black religion is changing and where it is going next. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. religions , , of references blackmon, rev. traci devon. . last words: strange fruit speaks: “mom, i want to go to college”. video. available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zk rqqwd bu&list= plfcf n nedhwotvxx ki _mkds roo&index= (accessed on november ). butler, anthea. . women in the church of god in christ: making a sanctified world. chapel hill: university of north carolina press. campbell, heidi. . introduction: the rise of the study of digital religion. in digital religion: understanding religious practice in new media worlds. edited by heidi campbell. new york: routledge, pp. – . castuera, ignacio. . a social history of christian thought on abortion: ambiguity vs. certainty in moral debate. american journal of economics and sociology : – . [crossref] cobb, jelani. . the matter of black lives. new yorker, march . cooper, brittney. . black lives matter. christian century, march , p. . cunningham, paige winfield. . ‘black babies matter’: the black anti-abortion movement’s political problems. the examiner, september . douglas, kelly brown. . stand your ground: black bodies and the justice of god. maryknoll: orbis books. fort, rev. nyle. . last words: strange fruit speaks: “i love you (too)”. video. available online: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=hq hfnbavdc&index= &list=plfcf n nedhwotvxx ki _ mkds roo (accessed on november ). francis, leah gunning. . ferguson & faith: sparking leadership & awakening community. st. louis: chalice press. gushee, david. . the sacredness of human life: why an ancient biblical vision is key to the world’s future. grand rapids: eerdmans publishing, co. heretik, jack. . dr. alveda king praises trump for leading civil rights for the unborn. washington free beacon, july . available online: 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[crossref] turman, eboni marshall. . toward a womanist ethic of incarnation: black bodies, the black church, and the council of chalcedon. new york: palgrave macmillan. vega, tanzina. . shooting spurs hashtag effort on stereotypes. new york times, august . available online: https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/if-they-gunned-me-down-protest-on-twitter.html (accessed on november ). williams, reggie. . black lives matter. christian century, march , p. . wright, almeda. . spiritual lives of young african americans. new york: oxford, p. . © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://www.pewinternet.org/ / / /social-media-conversations-about-race/ http://www.pewinternet.org/ / / /social-media-conversations-about-race/ http://www.theradiancefoundation.org/no-you-dont-have-to-first-solve-the-worlds-other-injustices-to-be-pro-life/ http://www.theradiancefoundation.org/no-you-dont-have-to-first-solve-the-worlds-other-injustices-to-be-pro-life/ http://dx.doi.org/ . / - https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /us/if-they-gunned-me-down-protest-on-twitter.html http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	digital media and african american religion 	conservative religious actors utilizing digital religion 	theological framings for black babies matter campaigns 	progressive religious actors utilizing digital religion 	theological framings for progressive participation in black lives matter campaigns 	conclusions s jra .. symposium on the biden administration and the international legal order “to restore the soul of america”: how domestic anti-racism might fuel global anti-racism h. timothy lovelace jr.* on november , , president joe biden proclaimed that his administration would “restore the soul of america.” he declared that u.s. voters had given him a mandate “to achieve racial justice and root out systemic racism in this country,” and that he plans to use the nation’s restored moral leadership to create international consensus around u.s. values and urge foreign nations and intergovernmental institutions to adopt anti-racist agendas. to be sure, biden’s commitment to ending systemic racism is rooted in troubling notions of u.s. excep- tionalism and invokes an unfounded anti-racist nostalgia. we should never “restore” america’s racial past. nevertheless, biden’s commitment is, in many ways, refreshing and raises a crucial and productive question: how might the united states recalibrate the international legal order and address systemic racism within biden’s framework? one straightforward and pragmatic answer emerges: the biden administration should live up to the standards of those who inspired his campaign’s mission. in other words, truly improving the racial order at home might be a viable way to advance anti-racism abroad, including through existing international institutions. “to redeem the soul of america” more than a half-century ago, the southern christian leadership conference (sclc) adopted the motto, “to redeem the soul of america.” the organization’s president was dr. martin luther king, jr., and the organization blossomed through the toils of countless foot-soldiers and the unsung leadership of a black woman and a gay black man, ella baker and bayard rustin, respectively. when king was assassinated, the sclc was in the midst of the poor people’s campaign, which made a moral case to end racial and economic injustice and tied u.s. ideals to a broader human rights framework. in fact, one of the campaign’s legal and philosophical anchors was an “economic and social bill of rights.” simultaneously, king recognized the foreign policy implications of the poor people’s campaign—that the united states would be in a better position to support the practice of democracy abroad if it practiced racial equality at home. when joe biden launched his presidential bid, he wrapped his campaign in the mantle of the sclc. biden declared that the racist attacks in charlottesville, virginia in compelled him to run for president, and he stated * professor of law and john hope franklin scholar, duke university school of law, durham, north carolina, united states. matt stevens, read joe biden’s president-elect acceptance speech: full transcript, n.y. times (nov. , ). id. doi: . /aju. . © h. timothy lovelace . this is an open access article, distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. https://www.nytimes.com/article/biden-speech-transcript.html https://www.nytimes.com/article/biden-speech-transcript.html http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . / that the presidential campaign was a “battle for the soul of this nation.” during biden’s november victory speech, he emphasized many of the same themes. he reminded listeners of his campaign’s motto, thanked the diverse coalition that elected him, and specifically promised to back the black community who supported his cam- paign in its lowest moments. biden, who served under the nation’s first black president, pledged to assemble “a cabinet that looks like america,” and his selections thus far reflect his awareness that anti-racist efforts must be inclusive of women of color. kamala harris, biden’s running mate, is now the first woman, first black woman, and first south asian american woman to serve as vice president. women of color will likely have prominent roles throughout the administration, including linda thomas-greenfield, the administration’s nominee for u.s ambassador to the united nations. these personnel decisions suggest that the administration is confident that it can forge a new future of freedom globally by modeling anti-racism domestically. the president faces no easy march. he inherits an incredibly polarized political environment. more than seventy million americans voted for white nationalist donald trump. furthermore, while many americans have long resisted racial reforms in the united states, they have resisted even more strongly the idea of addressing racism on the world stage—from attempts to end the transatlantic slave trade, to marcus garvey’s petition to the league of nations, to w.e.b. du bois’ appeal to the united nations. and u.s. xenophobia is far from a bygone relic. the trump administration balked at human rights criticisms of its racist and xenophobic immigration policies, withdrew from the un human rights council, and refused to submit periodic reports to the un’s treaty monitoring bodies. nonetheless, the hurdles that the biden administration faces, though high, are not insurmountable. even if congress refuses to pass significant, anti-racist legislation, the president retains substantial executive authority to attack systemic racism in both domestic and foreign relations. moreover, nearly a generation ago, the united states ratified the international convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination (cerd), the international covenant on civil and political rights (iccpr), and the convention against torture and other cruel, inhuman or degrading treatment or punishment (cat). as a result, the present calls to end systemic racism domestically and internationally are not asking the administration to do anything new per se; the united states has existing treaty obligations to end systemic racism. in any case, if we take the president at his word—that he sincerely seeks to restore the soul of america and that he wants to set an anti-racist example for the world—it is imperative that those interested in eradicating systemic racism hold the administration accountable. uprooting systemic racism at home and abroad requires that the administration do more than gesture at the sclc’s motto or even appoint a diverse cabinet. it requires that the administration engage and embrace the substance of king’s human rights vision. because black lives matter the term “systemic racism” came to the forefront of mainstream u.s. politics in the wake of the murders of ahmaud arbery, breonna taylor, and george floyd. massive protests dominated , and demonstrations which started in the united states reverberated globally. activists have persistently raised important questions about the evolution of white supremacy in policing and, more broadly, in the criminal justice system. the protests against systemic racism have also revealed the depth and persistence of police violence, even against peaceful protesters. police violence during modern protests in ferguson, louisville, and minneapolis is eerily reminiscent of scenes from selma, birmingham, and memphis in the s. the biden administration must maintain its unequivocal stance here. it must also emphasize that police practices like tear-gassing protesters are not simply civil rights abuses. they are also human rights abuses in violation of the cerd, iccpr, and cat. recognizing as much, the biden administration should prioritize thorough pattern-or-practice investigations of alleged police misconduct and urge that congress, among other things, end the federal transfer of military-grade arlette saenz, joe biden announces he is running for president in , cnn (apr. , ). ajil unbound vol. https://www.cnn.com/ / / /politics/joe-biden- -president/index.html equipment to law enforcement, incentivize more non-carceral approaches to public safety, lower the mens rea stan- dard in federal prosecutions for police misconduct, and establish a national registry to monitor police misconduct. serious concerns over u.s. police misconduct have global resonance as well. in rio de janeiro, for example, police in the last decade have killed nearly , people, more than three-quarters of whom were black men. in paris, police officers claim to be colorblind, but the area’s black and arab populations are targets for police stops and violence at shocking rates. in toronto, police stop blacks at rates that surpass the stop rates in new york city, which became notorious for its stop-and-frisk policies. for the biden administration to restore dignified leadership in the united states and rally the world, it must support the human rights council’s efforts to investigate police violence against africans, people of african descent, and protesters. the administration should also press the high commissioner on human rights to engage more communities directly harmed by police violence and offer more sweeping accounts and recommendations to end racist policing. “i can’t breathe” it is critical to understand that systemic racism in the united states pervades much more than the criminal justice system, a reality that biden readily acknowledges. “i can’t breathe”—george floyd and eric garner’s cries as police stole their lives, and a sentence now a staple in demonstrations across the world—has multiple valences. covid- has disproportionately infected and killed people of color in the united states. in fact, autopsy reports showed that george floyd had contracted covid- before his death. sadly, the united states is not alone here. the pandemic has ravaged communities of color throughout the world. the united kingdom, for example, has acknowledged the racial disparities in its covid- infection and death rates. the biden administration should deliver covid- vaccinations, treatment, and testing in a way that recognizes that racial minorities are bearing the pandemic’s brunt and denounce the anti-asian hatred surrounding the pandemic. it should also collaborate with foreign governments and international institutions, including the who, to ensure health equity in and between countries. article (e) of cerd—plus basic concerns over human dignity, fairness, and equal protec- tion—requires that the united states and more than other countries end persistent health disparities. the covid- crisis has exposed and exacerbated a much deeper u.s. healthcare crisis that cannot be vacci- nated away. there is no fundamental right to healthcare under the u.s. constitution, there are presently more than thirty million uninsured americans, and people of color, and women of color in particular, suffer from a wide range of health disparities. in the “economic and social bill of rights,” king called america’s stark health dispar- ities an “abiding scandal,” and he demanded “the right to the full benefits of modern science in health care.” the biden administration must put forth legislation that guides the country to true universal healthcare in the absence of a federal constitutional right to healthcare, possibly in conjunction with promoting healthcare as a human right, including through reference to treaty bodies, such as the committee on economic, social and see george floyd justice in policing act of , h.r. , th cong. ( ). césar muñoz, brazil suffers its own scourge of police brutality, hum. rts. watch (june , ). eleanor beardsley, ‘no justice in france, either’: french protest police killings in u.s. and at home, npr (june , ). dan levin, not just a u.s. problem: black lives matter here, too, canadians say, n.y. times (june , ). aclu, joint oral statement submitted by the aclu to the th session of the human rights council on resolution / (oct. , ). adé olaiya, the impact of covid- on african diaspora communities: addendum to the report on key achievements realizing thematic objectives of idpad, unesco inclusive pol’y lab (apr. ). to the president, congress, and supreme court of the united states (feb. , ), in records of the sclc, part , box : . “to restore the soul of america” https://www.congress.gov/bill/ th-congress/house-bill/ https://www.hrw.org/news/ / / /brazil-suffers-its-own-scourge-police-brutality https://www.npr.org/ / / / /no-justice-in-france-either-french-protest-police-killings-in-u-s-and-at-home https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /world/americas/toronto-police-shootings-black-lives-matter-canada.html https://www.aclu.org/hearing-statement/joint-oral-statement-submitted-aclu- th-session-human-rights-council-resolution https://en.unesco.org/inclusivepolicylab/e-teams/people-african-descent-and-sustainable-development-goals/documents/impact-covid- -african https://en.unesco.org/inclusivepolicylab/e-teams/people-african-descent-and-sustainable-development-goals/documents/impact-covid- -african cultural rights (although the united states has signed but not ratified this treaty). there is no excuse for such injustice in any country, much less the wealthiest country in human history. the covid- crisis has also exacerbated many other inequalities involving basic economic, social, and cultural rights. in , king lamented that the black unemployment rate was twice the white unemployment rate. in september , the black unemployment rate was still nearly twice the rate of white unemployment. during the pandemic, people of color, especially women of color, have been more likely to work as frontline employees, more vulnerable to contracting covid- and less likely to receive hazard pay. the pandemic has similarly exposed existing inequalities in education, food security, housing, and environmental protections. the biden administration must immediately shepherd stimulus legislation that provides meaningful relief for the poor and working classes, who, again, are disproportionately people of color. at the same time, the adminis- tration must shame those who shame the poor and working classes for receiving federal covid relief and say nothing about the disparate relief given to corporations. as king stated, too often, “this country has socialism for the rich [and] rugged individualism for the poor.” “give us the ballot” the u.s. presidential election illustrated the need for stronger voting protections and full respect for u.s. obligations under the iccpr and cerd. for nearly two decades, jurisdictions have increasingly adopted voter suppression tools. in the wake of shelby county v. holder, the pace of disenfranchisement has quickened. moreover, during and after the election, the architects and enablers of actual voter disenfranchisement spread baseless claims that they were the victims of disenfranchisement. these claims, coupled with an emaciated voting rights act, threaten to fuel voter disenfranchisement under the guise of voter protection. more optimistically, the biden administration has endorsed the john lewis voting rights advancement act, legislation that accords with iccpr and cerd and honors the legacy of activists in selma and beyond. the administration could and should go even further. it should also press congress to grant statehood to the federal territories to bestow their u.s. citizens with full voting rights. these proposed reforms would help restore faith in democratic institutions and would help model to the world how democratic governments can confront their own legacies of colonialism as part of their commitments to protecting international human rights. no person is illegal one prominent area where the administration might push past king’s vision is immigration reform. although king corresponded with cesar chavez and praised the struggles of the united farm workers, king never imag- ined the immigration crisis the united states faces today. trump found widespread support among xenophobes by spewing hatred towards immigrants, championing the construction of a larger wall on the u.s.-mexican border, and using his executive authority to institute a discriminatory muslim ban. president biden should use his exec- utive authority to reverse america’s draconian course on immigration, denounce xenophobia and islamophobia globally, and adhere to the refugee convention. jose yglesias, it may be a long, hot spring in the capital, n.y. times (mar. , ). for a comprehensive treatment here, see jaya ramji-nogales, cultivating normative authority: the biden administration, migration, and the international legal order, ajil unbound ( ). ajil unbound vol. https://www.nytimes.com/packages/html/books/mlk-longhot.pdf https://doi.org/ . /aju. . https://doi.org/ . /aju. . to make the wounded whole finally, president biden has pledged to study the continuing effects of slavery and the possibility of reparations. this is wonderful news. his administration should also consider other forms of state-sanctioned discrimination, including jim crow and the u.s. government’s violations of treaty obligations to tribal nations. plans to end sys- temic racism, by definition, must be far-reaching and ambitious. furthermore, enduring problems like the racial wealth gap may never close without reparations. in the united states, the median white family has nearly eight times more net wealth than the median black family. since much of the racial wealth gap stems from discrim- inatory federal policy, the federal government has a moral duty to reduce the gap. universal programs like forgiving education loan debt and medical debt would shrink the racial wealth gap; reparations would propel this worthwhile project even further. here, critics of reparations often overlook an inconvenient truth. king called for reparations in the united states. in , king insisted that the united states adopt efforts like those in india where “millions of rupees [were] set aside each year to provide scholarships, financial grants and special employment opportunities for the untouchables.” and king was clear to his critics: reparations were not reverse discrimination. “to the argument that this is a new form of discrimination inflicted upon the majority population,” he asserted, “the indian people respond by saying that this is their way of atoning for injustices and indignities heaped in the past upon their seventy million untouchable brothers.” king’s vision for u.s. reparations accords with not only many past and present appeals for reparations around the world, but also articles ( ) and ( ) of cerd. conclusion: why we can’t wait if the biden administration seeks to end systemic racism and restore u.s. standing, it must move immediately. historically, the policy windows for racial reform have been short-lived in the united states. if anything, this nation’s history demonstrates that racist backlash often follows moments of racial progress. shortly after the emancipation of enslaved persons, southern states enacted black codes. after the powerful but all-too-brief experiment of reconstruction came redemption and jim crow. after brown v. board of education, massive resistance followed. and after the election of barack obama, trumpism flourished. in other words, while biden believes that he now has a mandate to end systemic racism, america’s lack of anti-racist resolve will likely put a soon end to his administration’s opportunity to make meaningful structural change. sadly, biden must also consider how electoral polarization might undermine his anti-racist mandate. midterm elections will come soon, and biden would do well to remember the backlash and congressional obstructionism that emerged just after he and obama took office. morally, placing another person or group’s freedom on a time- table is condemnable. king authored a book entitled why we can’t wait, decrying the calls for continued black patience with racism. legally, the united states has treaty obligations mandating the eradication of systemic racism now. for example, article of cerd, which the united states ratified in , requires that states parties to the treaty end racial discrimination “without delay.” neil bhutta et al., disparities in wealth by race and ethnicity in the survey of consumer finances, feds notes (sept. , ). martin luther king, jr., equality now: the president has the power (feb. , ), in a testament of hope: the essential writings and speeches of martin luther king, jr. , (james washington ed., ). id. international convention on the elimination of all forms of racial discrimination art. , dec. , , unts . “to restore the soul of america” https://www.federalreserve.gov/econres/notes/feds-notes/disparities-in-wealth-by-race-and-ethnicity-in-the- -survey-of-consumer-finances- .htm https://www.ohchr.org/en/professionalinterest/pages/cerd.aspx in the “letter from the birmingham jail,” king argued that humans are “caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny.” if this administration takes king’s vision seriously, it must seek to eradicate systemic racism inside and outside of u.s. borders. racism in the united states is part of a much older and global phenomenon that unfortunately thrives today in hearts, minds, and institutions. recognition of this foreign-domestic tapestry in the biden administration’s anti-racist policies has the power to advance the idea of a beloved community domestically and internationally. king’s vision was and remains a call to arms to act now and to work globally. “injustice anywhere,” king declared, “is a threat to justice everywhere.” martin luther king, jr., a letter from the birmingham jail (apr. , ), in a testament of hope: the essential writings and speeches of martin luther king, jr., supra note , at . id. ajil unbound vol. https://www.africa.upenn.edu/articles_gen/letter_birmingham.html https://www.africa.upenn.edu/articles_gen/letter_birmingham.html 	“to restore the soul of america”: how domestic anti-racism might fuel global anti-racism 	“to redeem the soul of america” 	because black lives matter 	“i can't breathe” 	“give us the ballot” 	no person is illegal 	to make the wounded whole 	conclusion: why we can't wait journal of underrepresented and minority progress issn: - print/ issn: - online volume , issue ( ), pp. – © journal of underrepresented and minority progress http://ojed.org/jump doi: . /jump.v i . a quantcrit approach: using critical race theory as a means to evaluate if rate my professor assessments are racially biased chuck alan baker delaware county community college, usa abstract research on race is a paradigm in qualitative methodology. researchers believe that when analyzing discrimination, numerical data may miss the subjective characteristics of bigotry. since the early s, research utilizing critical race theory in education employed a qualitative approach. recent research using critical race theory includes a quantitative approach called quantcrit. the online faculty evaluation site called rate my professor (rmp) is designed to allow students an opportunity to appraise faculty performance. using evaluations of faculty in a pennsylvania college from both rmp and iota , this research examines the validity of rmp in analyzing minority faculty’s teaching. as predicted by applying a quantcrit approach, results support that rmp evaluations show a race bias. keywords: african american, critical race theory, discrimination, faculty evaluations, minority, quantcrit, racism background issues of race, class, and gender are deliberated in colleges throughout the united states. social science disciplines often acknowledge the vestiges of bigotry, and courses on racism, diversity, ethnicity, sexual orientation, and other manners of discrimination rooted in america’s history are designed to enlighten students on the systemic and institutionalized manners of http://ojed.org/jump journal of underrepresented and minority progress discrimination that yet persist. critical race theory (crt) stipulates that race matters because of its systemic nature, that there are consistent reminders of it, and that an inherent white ownership of american cultural and legal doctrine requires that any progress in social equity must benefit non-minorities also (ladson-billings & tate, ). bell ( ) believed that the american structure relegates african americans into a perpetual underclass that is enduring, and more recent crt research places emphasis on school systems as a protagonist supporting inequality (hiraldo, ; ladson-billings & tate, ). the schooling system doesn’t simply instill manifest knowledge. one of its primary latent functions is to fortify traditional norms and normative behaviors. it is the schooling system that assists in the integration of citizens into society (henslin, ). crt takes the approach that minority integration into america reproduces disparity and that the institution of education is a leading protagonist of socialized inequality. crt theorists do not claim that race relations have not changed. the central premise is that race matters and african americans are the recipients of differential treatment in society (bell, ; hiraldo, ; ladson-billings, ). much of the civil rights era was predicated upon the ideology that laws, integration, education, and assimilation dilutes racism. crt theorists argue that laws, education, and integration may alter race relations but do not eradicate racial discrimination. take, for instance, the black lives matter movement. a pew center poll shows that % of postgrads, % of college graduates, % of those with some college education, and % of high school (or less) respondents support the black lives matter movement (neal, ). more educated people support the movement, and yet, social movements to offer liberty to minorities are nonetheless necessary. according to the national science foundation ( ), the largest percentage of doctorates conferred to african americans is in the field of education, and as african americans desire to effectuate change and establish egalitarianism, many well-educated minorities become college administrators (hiraldo, ). administrators, who are responsible for the fiscal health of an institution, place value upon student evaluations and may include them in decisions of faculty tenure and promotion. in contrast, faculty, who are responsible for educating students into their chosen professions, may see evaluations as likability of faculty appraisals similar to satisfaction surveys (patton, ). either the faculty is liked or not and those who aren’t liked often offer rigorous courses. given the importance that administrators place on student evaluations and their responsibilities of budget jurisdiction, online assessments provide evaluation data that seem journal of underrepresented and minority progress cost efficient. online evaluations, however, have low response rates (patton, ) and increase measurement error. research supports the distinction between online and face-to-face student evaluations. nowell et al. ( ) showed that student evaluations of faculty who teach online are lower, on average, than faculty who teach in a traditional classroom orientation after controlling for factors that are not under the faculty’s control (e.g., class size and time). in essence, when looking at characteristics that are under the faculty’s control and are related to instructor capabilities, the difference between online evaluations and face-to-face class evaluations was significant. since smaller sample sizes inflate measurement error, faculty often prefer evaluations of their classroom courses given the lower response rates of online students (sax et al., ). crt posits that race is another factor out of a faculty member’s control that may influence student evaluations. students often place salience upon unmonitored online evaluations that are easily accessible and gives them some information on faculty and the courses they deliver. rate my professors (rmp; www.ratemyprofessors.com) is a free online website for users at any higher education institution to anonymously provide evaluations of their instructors. these evaluations are disconcerting for a number of reasons. first, rmp content does not include dialogue between faculty and administrators. in addition, anyone, a student or not, can complete rmp evaluations. third, much of the ratings’ content has very little to do with faculty’s professional capabilities. faculty ability, for instance, has nothing to do with physical attractiveness and yet, rmp has a hotness chili pepper to grade attractiveness. the website’s novelty approach is very popular with people. along with the superficial nature of assessing physical attractiveness, could other characteristics, unrelated to pedagogy, influence rmp evaluations? since racism is salient in society and has motivated discriminatory practices in education and employment opportunities (baker ; omi & winant, ), open forums like rmp could have a race bias in evaluations. if race matters, according to crt, it would likely influence teacher ratings. while faculty may believe that the information stated on its site do not accurately depict the course delivered, students may use rmp evaluations to make decisions about which courses to take. from the crt perspective by using a quantcrit approach, this research examines if there is a race bias in faculty evaluations on rmp. http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ journal of underrepresented and minority progress literature review critical race theory evolving in bell’s ( ) thesis titled “faces at the bottom of the well: the permanence of racism,” crt posits that the structural inequalities embedded in america are ongoing due to the persistent apparatus supporting social inequity created through the legacy of discrimination. crt has several fundamental creeds that allow for its application. first, society will often place salience on overt and vicious forms of racism and yet miss the subtle forms that perpetuate inequality. when the media coverage about the slayings of trayvon martin and tamir rice are discussed, they offer validity to concerns about the continued existence of racism. yet, it is the covert, non-violent, and painful manners of racism that the discriminatory apparatus supports. second, that racism is enduring. although minorities have earned citizenship since the th century, discrimination is still pervasive. third, race relations change when there are converging interests between minorities and whites. minority social gains are couched in an ideology of social equity placed on a gradient leaning toward whites. fourth, white privilege is a property right for whites—the right of home ownership, employment, and upward mobility in employment, and the lack of social restrictions that minorities face. fifth is perceptions of equity and colorblindness under the law. when whites experience tangible losses (e.g., jobs) to minorities on affirmative action legislative justifications, they claim their th amendment rights have been violated. in essence, the law designed to establish citizenship equality (e.g., u.s. constitution) of minorities is used against affirmative action by whites. the education pipeline according to crt, discrimination against people of color is an enduring element of american society. groups desire to maximize their gains and minimize their losses (hobfoll et al., ; hobfoll & dekel, ). resource acquisition and control may converge around issues of race. resource competition, resource scarcity, and resource control motivate intergroup conflict, and the group suitability of an individual is often based upon the other group members’ acceptance of the original person’s phenotype, which is often embedded in issues of race (stephan et al., ; stephan et al., ). education is a resource that can be exchanged for economic gain in america. this is the intersection between education and race. at each phase in the education pipeline, from entering college and journal of underrepresented and minority progress getting adequate support to going into respective employment careers, racial diversity decreases (king, ). according to the national center for education statistics ( ) only % of faculty in america are racial/ethnic minorities and many of these are adjunct faculty. in the – school year, % of the students who graduated high school were latino. yet, only % of first semester college freshmen were latino. the african american percentages were flat for the transition from high school to college, but % of students who graduated high school were white and % who entered college were white. in essence, white college student populations were the only racial/ethnic group that increased in their percentage of students entering college while other groups show percentage declines (king, ). the education pipeline provides training to students at key points in their college learning experience as they prepare to be educators. at the final ends of the pipeline, that of entering the workforce and maintaining employment, while educational institutions claim that they desire diversity in faculty, they often will erroneously state a lack of qualified applicants when search processes and hiring decisions are made. according to a report by the association for the study of higher education (ashe), when minorities get employment in colleges, they are less likely to receive tenure and be promoted above the associate professor level (museus, ledesma, & parker, ). this idea of sifting and sorting through the education pipeline supports the idea that only the most competent minorities survive this gauntlet process. hiraldo ( ) discussed minority positioning in higher education reinforcing the property right interests of whites. most african americans who earn doctorate degrees, for example, do so in education administration. most tenured faculty in colleges and universities are not minorities. the secure positions for professionals, in academia, are those of tenure. it is the contract of tenure for faculty that has been reaffirmed by the supreme court as a property interest in perry v. sinderman (justia, ), which buttressed the current race inequality. crt supports that these property interests serve to separate minority administrators from the minority students and reinforce the students’ dependence on non-minority faculty. it is in this vein that the legacy of race relations perpetuates racialized oppression although the legal mechanism did not implement discrimination in a linear manner. race and educational standards crt offers critique of liberal doctrine. in education, as in most social institutions, the perception is that liberalism is unnecessary since social norms and laws are neutral. as institutions of education promote journal of underrepresented and minority progress diversity, it is important that diversity is not couched in color blind racial ideology. the premise that race is perceived through a color blind racial ideological lens denies the reality of established norms that promote inequality. given the legacy of discrimination, minimizing race is similar to the apathy that promotes racism. to be clear, color blind racial ideology promotes conventionalism supporting a status quo which, in-turn, supports racial inequity in america (poteat & spanierman, ). crt acknowledges that race matters in america. the durability of racial inequality is not only in the economic, political, and social realms of society, but it also penetrates educational norms and pedagogical instruction by educators. the white privilege doctrine turns the epistemological rationale for quality educators upon its head. kuh, nelson, and umbach ( ) examined the role of race and gender in pedagogical delivery. faculty of color and women are more likely to perform better on the effective use of several educational practices including (a) academically challenging curricula for students, (b) collaborative learning, (c) an emphasis on diversity experiences, (d) facilitating critical thought, and (e) fostering better educational experiences for students (kuh et al., ). according to the association of american colleges and universities (aacu, ), the activities that they stipulate as important in student–teacher engagement are (a) collaborative learning opportunities, (b) class assignments in which higher order intellectual tasks are required, (c) assignments that ask for diverse perspectives, (d) challenging activities, and (e) analysis versus memorization. the overlap between the aacu and kuh et al. ( ) is substantial and yet, most faculty positions are held by white males. along the lines of interest conversion in crt, of those post-civil rights increases in minority faculty, most are of white women. student evaluations a primary difficulty with student evaluations is that they may be motivated by student gratification with the ease of the course, the students’ grade in a course, or a host of factors for which faculty are not responsibe, rather than reflective of mastering the material (aleamoni, ; kulik, ; lawrence, ; neath, ). take, for example, faculty office hours. fusani ( ) showed that one in four students never contacted an instructor outside of the classroom. griffin et al.’s ( ) research reported that % of students never used office hours in their course. although students do not attend office hours, they often evaluate faculty with criteria that includes the student’s ability to understand course content and access to the professor. other factors that are not under the faculty’s control are class journal of underrepresented and minority progress size, course level, tutoring, and whether the course is an elective or not (griffin et al., ). scriven ( ) also cited assignments outside the classroom, course attendance, and textbook costs as associated with student appraisals, although these factors may have little to do with faculty competence. in this manner evaluations prove as a means to evaluate faculty on student’s perceptions of their grade and how much they like the faculty (germain & scandura, ). student perceptions of the grade they should earn correlate with the evaluations of instructors (snyder & claire, ). thus, if there are ample opportunities to receive the grade desired, the instructor’s rating is more favorable (aronson & linder, ). research by bavishi, madera, and hebl ( ) further supports that students evaluate professors on issues beyond their control, such as on race and gender. bavishi et al. had a sample of students who had just begun their college experience rate the capability of a faculty by examining the faculty’s resume. the researchers manipulated perceptions of the race of the faculty by changing their organizational affiliations and disguised gender through changing the name on the resume. the researchers found that resumes appearing to be from white males got the most favorable resume rating, even when students were examining the same resume and the only changes were organizations and gender name. when the resume had an african american organization affiliation designation, it was given the least favorable rating (bavishi, madera, & hebl, ). rmp and iota solutions evaluation tools rmp has over million ratings about professors and colleges (www.ratemyprofessors.com). as a point of advertisement, the website discusses these ratings as a manner of “joining the fun.” items included in the rating of a professor include the amount of homework and reading students must fulfill, as well as if faculty are caring, respectful, and inspirational. rmp’s design offers no means to filter out people who have not taken a course with the professor who is being evaluated. in essence, people who do not know the professor may offer a rating to inflate or deflate the faculty’s rating. iota is another website that offers an evaluation instrument so that students may assess faculty competence (iota .com). among other questions, iota faculty evaluations request student feedback on syllabus clarity, course design, and instructor expectations. these criteria are part of the faculty’s job responsibilities. at a college in pennsylvania students are given access to iota evaluation surveys of faculty several weeks before the semester ends. during these few weeks, students are http://www.ratemyprofessors.com/ journal of underrepresented and minority progress prompted several times to complete the evaluation. in addition, the evaluations are secure and only the students in the course, who have their own personal code, can access the evaluation survey. quantcrit approach crt describes the structural factors embedded in institutions that reinforce racial inequalities. historically, much of the research has been qualitative and over the last years has focused upon education (ladson- billings & tate, ). quantitative methods have been less than desirable given the manners in which such data is used to mislead, perpetuate inequality, and dilute attempts at social justice. in , for example, the american council on education reported that % of all doctorates were conferred upon asians. a close examination of the data, however, shows that % of those doctorates earned by asians were to non-u.s. citizens from asian nations (teranishi, ). in the present, attempts are being made to revive quantitative approaches to examine race issues (gillborn et al. as cited in garcia et al., ). gillborn et al. authored several defining principles for a quantcrit approach. these principles include that (a) racism is multifaceted and not readily quantifiable, (b) data sources may be biased and often benefit white race interests, (c) race categories are not fixed or innate and therefore, first-hand knowledge of minority experiences is important in such analysis, and (d) statistical assessment is not the entirety of race analysis but may be part of the encounter for race equity. in this manner, gillborn et al. stated the valuable but limited role that quantitative approaches play in examining racism. zuberi ( ) discussed the use of data during the eugenics movement of the th century and in , posed the question “how do we deracialize the social conditions that produce racialized inequalities?” in “the death of white sociology: essays on race and culture” ladner ( ) stated that personal values and social location should be filtered out of quantitative approaches in research. garcia et al. ( ) made clear that any quantitative analysis on racial justice must take into account the intersection of powerful social, political, economic, and historical factors. the social implications of institutionalized education is that it is a middle class pedagogy and in addition, historically, schools have taught an ethnocentric white doctrine. the quantcrit approach taken in this research acknowledges the intersectionality of these factors and their embeddedness in the institution of education. this research uses a quantcrit approach to deconstruct how social dynamisms through online media evaluation tools may reinforce perceptions of race inequality. journal of underrepresented and minority progress research method rmp is a free website that gives people the opportunity to evaluate the performance of college professors. in rmp, people may appraise whether they would “take the professor again,” the “level of difficulty” of the course(s), the “hotness” of the professor, and the “overall quality” of the course(s). in addition to these four criteria, statements may be made in which the student describes the professor through a tag and, in addition, makes open-ended statements about the professor. several of the possible tags may include tough grader, participation matters, beware of pop quizzes, respected, lots of homework, test heavy, inspirational, get ready to read, hilarious, caring, graded by a few things, and amazing lectures. furthermore, rmp scores are on a likert scale of – for the overall quality of a professor’s course and the overall difficulty of the professor’s course. the overall quality of a professor’s course is rated by how well the professor teaches, how helpful he/she is during and after class, and the professor’s approachability. the level of difficulty is a lone question based upon a scaled score ( – ). this research utilizes the aggregate overall quality and difficulty rmp scores of minority and non-minority faculty in a college located in pennsylvania. the rmp non-minority teaching quality evaluations scores range from a low . to . . the mean score is . . the non-minority level of course difficulty scores range from . to . . the mean course difficulty evaluation score for non-minority faculty on rmp is . . the range of scores for rmp evaluations of minority faculty’s teaching quality is a low of . and a high of . . the mean teaching quality score for minority faculty was . . the range for the minority faculty course difficulty score is a low of . to a high of . with a mean of . . iota solutions offers standardized evaluation products that colleges utilize to examine their faculty. some of the questions used for the evaluation of faculty are “exams and quizzes and assignments reflect important aspects of the course,” “how challenging is this course when compared to other courses,” “this course stimulated my critical and analytical thinking,” “assigned readings/materials are valuable in learning this course content,” “the pace at which we are covering the material is about right,” and “this course is meeting the objectives outlined by its competencies.” in addition, students may answer questions that evaluate their desire to learn material. these questions include “effort put into this course when compared to other courses,” “i am motivated to learn in this course,” and “on average how many hours do you spend on this course.” to journal of underrepresented and minority progress maintain equivalence with the rmp quality of course factors the data recorded by iota student evaluations were “instructional material adequate,” “the pace of the course is about right,” “the course stimulates analytical and critical thought,” “the instructor is well prepared for class,” “the instructor responds effectively to student questions,” “instructor creates an environment in which students equally,” “instructor knows when students do not understand,” “instructor willing to assist outside of class,” and “students can freely approach professor.” the iota student evaluation responses are on a likert scale from to . the responses range from strongly disagree ( ), disagree ( ), agree ( ), and strongly agree ( ). these survey questions address the rmp factors for the overall quality of the professor’s class. for white faculty, the range of iota student evaluation scores was . at the low boundary and at the upper boundary it was . . the mean white teaching score from was . . for minorities, the mean student evaluation score was . . the minority scores range from . at the lower boundary to . at the upper boundary. participants during the summer of , a purposive sample of instructors in a college in pennsylvania was used to examine if there is a race difference in student evaluations. race designation was gained from the college’s records office. through voluntary reply, race designation is recorded by the department of human resources during the hiring process. similar to census bureau designations, whites were non-hispanic white. there are full-time faculty at the college. of the full-time faculty, are white. to get an appropriate sample, faculty who are not white were included in the minority strata, and these other race groups include african americans, asians, native americans, hispanics, and people who are biracial. there are are minority faculty. the minority faculty classifications are african americans, asians, four latinos, and one faculty with two stated race designations. the data from the sample was separated along minority (n = ) and non-minority (n = ) strata for the total (n = ) faculty. the samples were matched with iota data. these were the race designations used in the iota and rmp assessment. these data allow to examine the following hypothesis: since rmp is an uncontrolled online evaluation tool, students and non-students may access it. students who participate may be motivated by a highly positive or negative affect of the professor. thus, a large proportion of students may avoid participating. to examine the validity of rmp as an evaluation tool, this research compares rmp evaluation results to iota journal of underrepresented and minority progress student evaluation results. iota gives students access to evaluate their faculty and they are persistently asked to participate. iota has been shown to depict professor capabilities. hypothesis : rmp results will differ from iota results in student evaluation of faculty quality. twenty-first century racism is often a subjective experience for minorities with objective results. the application of crt has traditionally taken a qualitative approach due to the subjective nature of racism. the quantcrit design lends itself, however, to analyzing statistical differences in academic credentials when comparing minorities and non-minorities. as stated previously, minorities have a more demanding journey through the education pipeline. perceptions about the pipeline can be examined qualitatively, but degree completion is a quantitative assessment. by the time minorities are hired, there should be a leveling effect when comparing the credentials between the groups. most institutions of higher learning require faculty to have a master’s or doctoratal degree to be hired for a faculty position. given that they are credentialed and have already been through much of the education pipeline, for those who are employed as faculty, race should not influence differences in student ratings. for research purposes, the operationalization of education is that faculty with a master’s degree were given a value of one and those with a doctorate were given the value of two. hypothesis : minority and non-minority faculty will have similar levels of educational capital and thus, perceived similarities of intellectual competence in their chosen fields. since students may perceive that they are purchasing a product instead of an opportunity to learn, they may seek out courses that are not rigorous. yet, competent faculty may offer demanding classes to facilitate student acumen and mastery of subject matter. after all, people do not want an incompetent surgeon to perform surgery upon them. thus, competent faculty are motivated to create thorough courses to maintain integrity and ensure that graduates have a commensurate skill set, but students may desire listless courses and the likelihood of social promotion affects enrollment. thus, it is predicted that the lower the faculty rating by people in rmp, the higher the course difficulty rating. journal of underrepresented and minority progress . x̅ – x̅ . . . √ (n – ) σ + (n – ) σ * [ + ] n + n - n n hypothesis : high rmp teaching quality scores will associate with low rmp course difficulty scores. crt supports that society may be willing to confront overt manners of racism. it is the covert and yet structurally entrenched forms of discrimination that perpetuate inequality. given the salience of race and the aspiration to appear impartial in evaluating minority faculty, people will desire to justify low ratings of minority faculty. since evaluations are anonymous, based upon crt they will be likely to have latent discrimination embedded in their application and in the aggregate, minorities will be scored as less competent. therefore, people who evaluate faculty on rmp will appraise minority faculty courses as more difficult and minority faculty as less capable of teaching than non-minority faculty. hypothesis : minority faculty will be more likely to get higher course difficulty scores and lower teaching quality scores in rmp when compared to non-minority faculty. results tables – in the analysis uses a comparison of independent means t-test approach. the formula for a t test of independence presents as follows: where x̅ is the mean of group one (e.g., rmp), x̅ is the mean of group two (e.g., iota ), σ is the variance of group one scores, σ is the variance of group two scores, n is the number of respondents in the first group, and n is the number of respondents in the second group. tables – use an analysis of variance (anova) approach. table allows for a robust comparison of iota and rmp course difficulty and teaching competence scores. table removes the white rmp scores for statistical assessment. the anova formula presents as follows. k ∑ x i – c.t. sum of squares between ∑ n i = sum of squares within = sum of journal of underrepresented and minority progress where k is the number of categories, and ∑ x i is the sum of the squared scores. c.t. is the correction term. (x ij – x̅ i ) ij is the variance within sum of squared scores. the computed f score ratio is the sum of squares between divided by (k − ) as the numerator of the computed ratio, and the sum of squares within is the denominator of the computed ratio. table below shows the t test of independent means results for quality of teaching at a college in pennsylvania as measured on rmp and iota . the mean rmp teaching quality score is . . the mean for the iota evaluations is . . the t test results show statistical significance at p < . with t = . at degrees of freedom (df). rmp scores are statistically higher than iota evaluation scores. table . rate my professor versus iota student evaluations (teaching quality). n m sd se rate my professor . . . iota . . . note. t test = . *, df = , two-tailed test, *p < . . hypothesis states that the rmp results of faculty quality will differ from those of iota . table shows that this statistical difference does exist. the next hypothesis focuses upon the similarities between the levels of education when comparing non-minority faculty with minority faculty. faculty education level was designated as (for master’s degrees) or (for doctoral degrees). table shows the results from this analysis. table . non-minority and minority education acquired. n m sd se non-minority education . . . minority education . . . note. t test = − . , df = , two-tailed test sum of squares within ∑ ∑ (x ij – x̅ i ) ij ssb (k- ) ssw (n-k) = computed ratio journal of underrepresented and minority progress the t test for table above shows that there is no statistically significant difference between non-minority and minority faculty’s level of education. the minority faculty have a slightly higher average level of education at . , but the mean is not substantially different than the white mean level of education at . . the standard deviation of non-minorities was . and the standard deviation for minorities was . . the t test showed not to be statistically significant and supports that the level of education between the faculty race groups is similar. table . rate my professor teaching quality and course difficulty. n m sd se quality . . . difficulty . . . note. t test = . ***, df = , two-tailed test; *** p < . . table shows the results when comparing rmp teaching quality scores with rmp course difficulty scores. notice that the rmp teaching quality mean is higher than the rmp course difficulty mean. the t test results show that the difference between the course difficulty and quality of teaching results in rmp are substantially statistically significant at  < . . the t test is . at df. the results from the analysis of hypothesis are corroborated in a statistically meaningful way. higher difficulty scores are associated with lower teaching quality scores. table shows the correlations and coefficients of determination results examining the relationships of rmp teaching and difficulty quality when comparing minorities and non-minorities. the statistics show that for teaching quality scores for white faculty, the . mean is much higher than the white course difficulty mean of . . the correlation coefficient is − . . there is a fairly strong relationship between difficulty and teaching quality scores for white faculty. in addition, as perceptions of course difficulty diminish, teaching quality increases. minorities have a similar relationship. yet, the mean teaching quality score for minorities is only . , while the perceptions of course difficulty are higher than whites at a . mean value. the correlation for minorities is − . . the coefficient of determination states that perceptions of course difficulty explain about % of the quality of teaching for whites and % of the teaching quality for minorities. the difference between the white faculty and minority faculty coefficients of determination is % better in predicting quality of teaching scores when using course difficulty scores for whites than for minorities. journal of underrepresented and minority progress table . non-minority and minority mean, correlation, and coefficient of determination (rate my professor [rmp] and difficulty). n m r r non-minority rmp . − . . non-minority difficulty . minority rmp . − . . minority difficulty . hypothesis states that minority faculty will be more likely to get higher difficulty scores and lower quality scores in rmp when compared with non-minority faculty. table bears this out. table shows that the teaching quality scores are statistically different at t = . at df at p < . . table . non-minority and minority rate my professor results for teaching quality. n m sd se non-minority . . . minority . . . note. t test = . *, df = , one-tailed test; *p <. . according to table , the t-test result is significant at - . . thus, minorities are more likely than whites to have their courses rated as ‘difficult’ in the rmp evaluations. this supports hypothesis that minorities will have lower teaching quality scores and higher course difficulty scores when compared to non-minorities. table . non-minority and minority rate my professor results for difficulty of course. n m sd se non-minority . . . minority . . . note. t test = − . *, df = , one-tailed test; *p < . . examining iota student evaluations in table shows that the t test was not statistically significant at . , df = , p < . for a two-tailed test. therefore, iota results show that, statistically, non-minority and minority faculty are similar. journal of underrepresented and minority progress table . non-minority and minority iota results for teaching quality. n m sd se non-minority . . . minority . . . note. t test = . , df = , two-tailed test the iota results show less difference in teaching quality when comparing minority and non-minority faculty than do those from rmp. thus, students who can be confirmed to be class participants do not evaluate faculty differently, in a statistical manner, based upon race. in contrast, people who go on rmp to evaluate white professors evaluate them much more positively than they do minorities and much more favorably than iota results (see table for rmp results and see table for iota results). on a scale from to , the rmp mean evaluation teaching quality score is . for white faculty. it is . for minority faculty. thus, it seems as if the rmp evaluations have a racial lag on minority evaluation results when contrasted with results for white faculty. this perceived lag on minority rmp scores can be viewed through an anova computation of white and minority rmp and iota evaluation scores. table shows the anova results from this assessment. table . analysis of variance for non-minority and minority iota and rate my professor evaluations. sse df mse f between . . . ** within . . total . note. sse = sum of squares error; mse = means square error. **p < . . the anova results in table show that the difference between white and minority rmp and iota scores is highly statistically significant. the f score is . and statistically significant at  < . . the mean for white rmp teaching quality scores (�̅� = . ) is much higher than the mean for white iota (�̅� = . ), minority rmp (�̅� = . ), and minority iota scores (�̅� = . ). table is another anova, but it omits the white rmp scores to verify that these white rmp scores are causing the statistical difference. journal of underrepresented and minority progress table . analysis of variance of non-minority and minority iota evaluations and minority rate my professor results sse df mse f between . . . within . . total . note. sse = sum of squares error; mse = means square error. table shows that when comparing the iota results for white faculty with the rmp results of minority faculty, and iota evaluation scores for minority faculty, there is no statistical difference. the f score is . and is not statistically significant at  = . . therefore, it is the white rmp scores, as shown in table , which cause this difference. rmp teaching quality scores show atypical favoritism toward non-minority professors. discussion since the latter th century, faculty have perceived that student evaluations are more akin to course satisfaction surveys than evaluation of faculty competence. students who receive low grades tend to project their academic results upon the professors’ pedagogical capabilities through giving faculty poor evaluations (aleamoni, ; kulik, ; lawrence, ; neath, ). given the legacy of discrimination and students’ desire for the path of least resistance, rmp is a response to student angst that may more likely be hostile to minority faculty. in , derrick bell ( ) discussed the permanence of racism, and crt supports that minority faculty are more likely to be negatively evaluated. this research addresses four hypotheses to examine if rmp shows a racial bias. the first hypothesis was “rmp results will differ from iota student evaluations of faculty.” the statistical results show this to be the case. the rmp scores were statistically higher than iota results in table . the next issue that white professors likely to get better results on rmp evaluations and iota evaluations than minorities. to address any difference of racial bias, initially, it is important to see if minorities and non-minorities have similar training experiences. to examine this issue hypothesis states “minority and non-minority faculty will have similar levels of educational capital and thus, perceived similarities of intellectual competence in their chosen fields.” the results in table show that there is no statistically significant difference between journal of underrepresented and minority progress minority and white faculty in education capital. next, this research examines if “high rmp teaching quality scores are associated with low rmp course difficulty scores.” table shows a large statistically significant difference between course difficulty and teaching quality scores. high teaching quality scores are related to low course difficulty scores in rmp. the fourth hypothesis states, “minority faculty will be more likely to get higher course difficulty scores and lower teaching quality scores in rmp when compared with non-minority faculty.” table shows that the correlation coefficients are negative and moderately strong for both minorities and whites. the coefficients of determination show that for whites, % of the variability in rmp teaching quality scores are explained by knowing how people rate the difficulty of the course and % of the teaching quality scores can be explained by course difficulty scores for minorities. table further corroborates the difference between evaluations of teaching quality in minorities and non-minority faculty, and table does so for course difficulty race differences. since the iota evaluations are offered to all of the students in a course, the response rate is much higher and therefore, a more accurate depiction of faculty performance than is rmp. table shows that there are no statistically significant differences between the assigned race groups. yet, there seems to be a white privilege status in rmp teaching quality scores at the pennsylvania college (see tables and ). conclusion this research uses a quantcrit approach to examine if rmp evaluations are biased against minorities. using a quantitative crt approach, the results support that minority faculty are given lower teaching quality scores and higher difficulty of course scores than are non-minorities. given the inequities embedded in the schooling system, this research analyzes if race plays a role in faculty evaluations at a college in pennsylvania. the student rationale for the difference between white and minority results could be that minority faculty are less competent in their ability to serve students. yet, this position is not supported. initially, the literature supports that minorities must go through a much more rigorous process to acquire an advanced degree (king, ), have more difficulty getting tenure, and struggle to gain upward mobility after being hired (ashe, ). in addition to the education pipeline being more rigorous for minorities, the iota results (see table ) show that minorities and whites have similar levels of education capital (see table ) and similar capabilities according to iota teaching quality student evaluations (see tables and ). thus, journal of underrepresented and minority progress the most rationale reason for these statistical differences is white privilege and systemic racism. in addition, the difficulty scores in rmp were significant. the persistence in low difficulty scores for white faculty suggests a bias that is not due only to the course design. another explanation for the lower rmp competence scores for minorities is the lack of controls to deny non-students the ability to evaluate a professor. it is impossible to know who is rating the faculty and therefore, the rmp evaluations lack scientific validity. implications although offering important findings, the quantcrit approach had limitations. first, the sample was small due to data limitations. of the faculty selected through purposeful sampling, two were eliminated due to a lack of rmp results. thus, the two strata with white faculty and minority faculty barely approaches research standards. secondly, the small sample size limits the external validity of these results beyond the institution in pennsylvania. future research could focus upon increasing the sample size of this research design. third, the relationship between iota evaluation index questions and rmp evaluation index questions were not exactly the same and there is a possibility that participants in the evaluation tools had differing perceptions of their meanings. although this is unlikely and they seem very similar, nevertheless there is such a possibility. fourth, iota does not offer a course difficulty evaluation that could mimic rmp’s and therefore, iota course difficulty ratings were excluded. fifth, since race is a subjective construct, racial inequality is multidimensional and not easily measured numerically. this research minimized that factors other than race could explain the higher teaching competence scores for whites. the two factors embedded in the design that could explain competence differences are level of education and types of occupation. teaching competence was shown to be comparable (see table ) and these evaluations are on tenured faculty teaching in similar fields. from a crt theoretical purview, these factors lend support that the statistical differences in this research is likely due to the social privilege status that white faculty experience. references aleamoni, l. m. 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(august, ). assessing response rates and nonresponse bias in web and paper surveys. research in higher education, ( ), – . journal of underrepresented and minority progress scriven, m. ( ). student ratings offer useful input to teacher evaluations. eric digest/ae. retrieved from https://eric.ed.gov/?id=ed snyder, c. r., & claire, m. ( ). effects of expected and obtained grades on teacher evaluation and attribution performance. journal of educational psychology, , – . stephan, w., renfro, l., duran, a., & clason, d. ( ). the role of threat in attitudes toward affirmative action and its beneficiaries. journal of applied social psychology, ( ), – . stephan, w. g., ybarra, o., & morrison, k. r. ( ). intergroup threat theory. in t. d. nelson (ed.), handbook of prejudice, stereotyping and discrimination (pp. – ). new york: psychology press. teranishi, r. t. ( ). race, ethnicity, and higher education policy: the use of critical quantitative research. new directions for institutional research, ( ), – . vescio, t. k., & biernat, m. ( ). when stereotype-based expectancies impair performance: the effect of prejudice, race, and target quality on judgments and perceiver performance. european journal of social psychology, , – . zuberi, t. ( ). thicker than blood: how racial statistics lie. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. dr. chuck a. baker is a tenured professor of sociology at delaware county community college. he teaches diversity courses and acknowledges the importance of differing perceptions among people. he has worked to foster intellectual diversity and pushes classroom dialogue into areas beyond the traditional topics of discrimination, promoting conversation independent of emotional talking points. email: cbaker @dccc.edu manuscript submitted: october , accepted for publication: november , revised: march , 	background 	literature review 	critical race theory 	the education pipeline 	race and educational standards 	student evaluations 	rmp and iota solutions evaluation tools 	quantcrit approach 	research method 	participants 	discussion 	conclusion 	implications 	references us healthcare workers march against racism despite the risks protesting in the coronavirus pandemic us healthcare workers march against racism despite the risks across the us, healthcare workers are risking exposure to one public health threat to speak out against another. bryn nelson explores what it means for healthcare workers when two public health agendas collide bryn nelson science journalist shortly before noon on june , dozens of healthcare workers in blue scrubs and facemasks, some wearing white coats, walked across the street from the university of washington medical center in seattle to a small grassy expanse bisected by a sidewalk and benches. there, more than people on their lunch break kept their distance from one another and knelt for minutes and seconds. the extended moment of silence represented the exact length of time that a minneapolis police officer knelt on the neck of george floyd, an unarmed black man, on may. floyd’s death in police custody, documented in part by a bystander’s video in which floyd repeatedly said, “i can’t breathe,” sparked weeks of riots, protests, and demonstrations against racism and police violence that rippled out to all us states and multiple countries around the world. for many healthcare workers, protesting one form of systemic racism and violence amid a viral pandemic that has disproportionately hit some of the same minority communities has become a tricky three-point balancing act involving their own health, the health of their patients, and the health of society. the day after the tribute at the university of washington medical center, a separate protest march drew thousands of chanting healthcare workers and their supporters to downtown seattle. other rallies crisscrossed the city, blocking major thoroughfares. and then, shortly after midnight on june, police clashed with shouting demonstrators in a neighbourhood known for its political activism, amid a cloud of tear gas, pepper spray, and “flashbang” grenades. a growing group of doctors, nurses, researchers, and other healthcare workers in seattle and across the us have been facing pushback from critics questioning whether health officials should be encouraging mass demonstrations as covid- rages. their answer: racism and police brutality are also public health emergencies with long term consequences. they have written public letters, launched petition drives, and organised marches throughout the us. estell williams, assistant professor of general surgery at the university of washington, organised the june rally in seattle with her husband, edwin lindo, a lecturer in the university’s department of family medicine. racism, they said, should be thought of as a powerful disease that can kill just as covid- does. “the ultimate goal of these protests is to improve our community, and we are being mindful and safe and recognise that there’s still an ongoing pandemic, and we want to preserve life,” williams said. but, for her family and others in the black community, she added, stress due to racism and police violence can increase the risk of chronic illness, which in turn can increase the susceptibility to covid- . “decrying racism and police violence as a public health crisis is the crux and intention of what took place on saturday,” lindo said. what’s the risk? some supportive healthcare workers have chosen not to march themselves, because of the risk of contracting the virus in often tightly packed outdoor protests and rallies where shouting, singing, and chanting could help disperse viral particles. trevor bedford, a computational biologist at seattle’s fred hutchinson cancer research center, posted his educated guess of how the protests and police response might increase the number of new covid- infections, sparking an online debate about the trade-offs and whether it was possible or even helpful to make such forecasts. the calculations have been complicated by long lags between exposure and case identification, spiking case numbers in several states that have loosened social distancing mandates, and flat or declining numbers so far in seattle, new york, minneapolis, and several other cities with massive anti-racism protests since the end of may. multiple observers have pointed out that the anti-racism movement has embraced protective facemasks, both as protection from covid- and as a symbol of how many minority communities have been left unprotected and vulnerable. facemasks emblazoned with slogans such as “black lives matter” and “i can’t breathe” have popped up around the country, and fliers for multiple marches in seattle have emphasised mask wearing and social distancing, though the latter is often harder in practice. sherise epstein, a resident physician at the university of washington and education chair for the uw network of underrepresented residents and fellows, helped organise the june show of solidarity at the medical centre. it was one of at least five held at medical campuses across the city that day. as a healthcare provider who had seen the consequences of personal protective equipment the bmj | bmj ; :m | doi: . /bmj.m feature seattle, wa, usa bdnelson@nasw.org cite this as: bmj ; :m http://dx.doi.org/ . /bmj.m published: june o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b m j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j.m o n ju n e . d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /bmj.m &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - mailto:bdnelson@nasw.org http://dx.doi.org/ . /bmj.m http://www.bmj.com/ shortages and the devastating impact of covid- , especially on black and indigenous people of colour, epstein said her personal decision to protest, participate in large gatherings, and even start facilitating them was difficult. but she also saw how racism and institutionalised oppression were integrally tied to the disproportionate health impacts on the same minority groups. “i think the gravity of the social movement outweighs the other pressures so much more,” she said. one medic’s answer on that same friday afternoon, volunteer devin speak helped organise a makeshift station of free snacks, bottled water, and medical supplies for protesters in front of vermillion, an art gallery and bar in the neighbourhood that’s been home to the loudest protests. speak said he was emphasising infection control measures such as washing the surfaces of donated items, encouraging frequent hand washing by volunteers, and distributing free facemasks and hand sanitiser. speak, who received medical training during a stint in the coast guard, had volunteered at a hospital morgue during new york’s crest of covid- cases. “when i was working in brooklyn, almost every single body i handled was black or latino, and that was directly a product of systemic health and wealth disparities,” he said. he’d like to see facemasks cast as not only protection but also a symbolic part of the movement against the health effects of systemic racism. people he encountered accepted the message he and other volunteers spelled out on posters in the main protest zone. during rallies against stay-at-home orders and business closures, in contrast, many protesters pointedly refused to wear masks and harassed others who did. multiple health experts contend that the risk of covid- has been heightened by police tactics such as the widespread use of tear gas and pepper spray to disperse crowds and mass arrests in which protesters are confined together in central holding stations. beyond their potential to inflame and damage airways, tear-inducing chemicals can cause forceful coughing and sneezing, a runny nose, heavy mucous production, and irritated eyes—all of which can ease the spread of covid- . on june, seattle’s mayor and police chief pledged to impose a day moratorium on tear gas for crowd control. but just after midnight two days later, the police used tear gas, pepper spray, and flashbang grenades to disperse protesters, citing “life safety” concerns after protesters allegedly threw bottles and rocks and pointed lasers at officers’ eyes. speak, who wore an n mask and gloves for protection while volunteering his services, recalled rinsing protesters’ eyes with saline solution after tear gas enveloped the capitol hill protest zone late on june. as he did so, three or four of the protesters coughed, spat, and dripped mucous on him as a result of their symptoms. “it was all over my leg and my hands, so i was really concerned about that,” he said. despite the risks, protest organisers say healthcare workers have joined the movement in droves. “there has been a huge outpouring of support,” williams said. and the continued protests and rallies around the city have been largely peaceful since the seattle police removed barricades and temporarily vacated a precinct on june. “historically, healthcare workers have focused on care within the four walls of the hospital or clinic,” lindo said. “and now i think they’re seeing the impact that is required and the change that’s required outside of it to make sure that our patients are safe when they go home.” competing interests: i have read and understood bmj policy on declaration of interests and have no relevant interests to declare. trevor bedford on twitter. https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/ ?s= . coronavirus in the us. latest map and case count. new york times jun . https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/ /us/coronavirus-us-cases.html. seo h. tear gas during covid- is a public health disaster. popular science jun . https://www.popsci.com/story/health/tear-gas-coronavirus/. this article is made freely available for use in accordance with bmj's website terms and conditions for the duration of the covid- pandemic or until otherwise determined by bmj. you may use, download and print the article for any lawful, non-commercial purpose (including text and data mining) provided that all copyright notices and trade marks are retained. the bmj | bmj ; :m | doi: . /bmj.m feature o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b m j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j.m o n ju n e . d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://twitter.com/trvrb/status/ ?s= https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/ /us/coronavirus-us-cases.html https://www.popsci.com/story/health/tear-gas-coronavirus/ http://www.bmj.com/ ama journal of ethics® march , volume , number : - peer-reviewed cme article: original research structural competency and reproductive health margaret mary downey, msw, and anu manchikanti gómez, msc, phd editor’s note: to claim one ama pra category credit™ for the cme activity associated with this article, you must do the following: ( ) read this article in its entirety, ( ) answer at least percent of the quiz questions correctly, and ( ) complete an evaluation. the quiz, evaluation, and form for claiming ama pra category credit™ are available through the ama education center. abstract reproductive health disparities—particularly those experienced by racial and ethnic minority groups—are considered a persistent public health issue in the united states. frameworks that focus on social determinants of health seek to identify the forces producing these disparities, particularly social conditions that create vulnerability to premature death and disease. such frameworks pose challenges to health care provision, as structural factors can seem immutable to health care professionals trained to treat individual patients. here, we discuss the links between reproductive health disparities and social determinants of health. we then apply to reproductive health care the structural competency framework, developed by physician-scholars to encourage health care professionals to address health disparities by analyzing and intervening upon sociopolitical forces. introduction the world health organization (who) defines reproductive health as an integral component of complete well-being, noting that reproductive health indicates that people “have a responsible, satisfying and safe sex life and that they have the capability to reproduce and the freedom to decide if, when and how often to do so” as well as access to “safe, effective, affordable and acceptable methods of fertility regulation” [ ]. reproductive health care’s success in advancing this vision is mixed [ , ], suggested by persistent reproductive health disparities in the us, particularly with respect to race, gender, and socioeconomic status. women of color and low-income women fare worse than their white and higher-income counterparts in nearly every aspect of reproductive health, including access to prenatal care [ ], maternal mortality [ ], cervical cancer mortality [ ], sexually transmitted infections [ , ], access to services (including assisted reproductive technologies) [ ], and education [ ]. ama journal of ethics, march https://cme.ama-assn.org/activity/ /detail.aspx http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /ecas - .html for clinicians trained to treat individual patients, the structural underpinnings of these reproductive health disparities pose practical and conceptual challenges. structural competency is a framework developed by physician-scholars that seeks to address these challenges and to encourage health care professionals to recognize, analyze, and intervene upon the structural factors that impact health disparities. here, we define “structural” factors as those that codify, in systems like medicine, law, or welfare, differential access to social, political, and economic opportunities [ ]. structural factors produce group-differentiated vulnerabilities to harm, including health disparities, as well as group-differentiated access to goods, services, and resources [ ]. in response to persistent reproductive health inequities and to challenges reproductive health professionals face in adequately engaging the social determinants of health, this paper applies structural competency to reproductive health care. the social determinants of reproductive health no single factor accounts for the persistent reproductive health disparities in the us. major health organizations, such as the centers for disease control and prevention (cdc) and the who, have embraced social determinants of health as an explanatory framework to highlight the role of unequal social conditions in creating and perpetuating avoidable differences in health [ , ]. these social conditions include those created by laws, policies, and practices overseeing “where persons work, live, learn, and play” [ ], such as those regulating health care professionals and wider spheres (e.g., zoning, educational systems, food access, courts, and labor markets) [ ]. the cdc states that familiarity with social determinants of health data can help practitioners better recognize “root causes” [ ], which health care professionals can miss if they only rely upon individual-level assessment and interventions [ ]. amidst calls for health care institutions to play a role in eliminating reproductive health disparities and in incorporating social determinants of health into practice [ ], scholars argue that reproductive health care operates within paradigms that directly and indirectly create or exacerbate reproductive health disparities [ , , , ]. these paradigms impede access to care and reify disparities for many women by limiting patient autonomy, perpetuating stereotypes about marginalized groups, and undergirding negative health care experiences that might curtail future health care seeking [ , ]. consider madrigal v quilligan, a federal class action lawsuit brought forward by latina women coercively sterilized in a los angeles public hospital. a former medical student testified that dr. quilligan, the named defendant under whom she trained, connected poverty, overpopulation, and social benefits of racialized sterilization. quoting dr. quilligan, gutiérrez writes “poor minority women in los angeles county ‘were having too many babies,’ that this was placing a ‘strain on society,’ and that it was ‘socially desirable’ that the women be sterilized” [ ]. here, public health policies underlay the connections between individual patient characteristics (e.g., being mexican, low income) and the perceived social danger of overpopulation. beyond quilligan, www.amajournalofethics.org examples of health care practices and policies that replicate reproductive oppression and impede care for many women include the twentieth century’s forced sterilization of poor and working-class women, disabled women, and women of color [ ] and the coercive sterilization of at least women in california prisons between and [ ]; long-acting reversible contraception (larc) promotion targeting racial or ethnic minority and poor women without regard for the ways that this might invoke population control [ ]; and state family cap policies that deny cash benefits to children born in families already receiving benefits [ ]. structural competency as a response to the challenges of addressing reproductive health disparities what should reproductive health care professionals take from these examples of reproductive oppression? first, reproductive health care professionals must realize that their field has played a role in exacerbating health disparities by serving as gatekeeper to services, resources, and technologies that facilitate or constrain reproductive choice [ ]. these practices are not matters of individual bias or failure or of health care professionals acting as “bad apples” [ , ]. rather, the medicalization of wider social problems (e.g., poverty, racism, nationalism) vividly emerges in reproductive health care [ ]. the (potentially) pregnant body is a site of systematized and heightened regulation and surveillance, particularly when those bodies are poor, disabled, immigrant, minority, and so on [ ]. the medicalization of social problems has ethical implications for reproductive health care professionals, who must balance their pursuit of patient care and respect for patient autonomy, justice, beneficence, and nonmaleficence with the realities of institutional and structural discrimination experienced by patients. indeed, research indicates that health care professionals do not feel equipped to understand or intervene upon structural factors, despite acknowledging the impact such factors have on their profession [ , ]. trained to treat individuals, reproductive health care professionals might contribute to the replication of problematic health care trends by ignoring structural barriers to care [ ] because they and their institutions lack the skills and resources to identify, analyze, and imagine structural interventions. structural competency, an emerging paradigm in health care, seeks to address medicine’s overemphasis on the individual (e.g., biology, behaviors, characteristics) while addressing the hierarchies that produce unjust health conditions. structural competency responds to dominant paradigms in health care education that neglect the ways in which access to the resources needed to make health changes and choices are influenced by unjust social determinants such as the differential treatment patients receive from health care institutions and professionals with respect to race, class, or immigration status, for example [ ]. developed by physician-scholars, structural competency is a means not only to analyze structural factors that impact health disparities but also to operationalize health care interventions to reduce health disparities, including in reproductive health [ , , ]. structural competency moves beyond cultural competency, which can ama journal of ethics, march http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /pfor - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /msoc - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /oped - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /oped - .html reinforce racial, ethnic, linguistic, or other stereotypes by positioning these cultural groups as unsophisticated subjects and professionals as sophisticated or objective [ ]. structural competency offers a means to pursue ethical practice in a context of structurally produced health disparities without blaming the individual for health outcomes produced by upstream social conditions that are ultimately beyond his or her control. universities and clinics across the us have engaged with structural competency, offering conferences, trainings, and semester-long programs [ , ]. a shift to structural competency is ultimately a hopeful one. to health care professionals, the social determinants of health can feel immutable; structural competency helps demystify health’s causal pathways and identify systematic ways to help patients. applying structural competency to reproductive health structural competency has particular utility in politically charged settings such as reproductive health care, where the day-to-day activities of health care professionals are highly sensitive to changes in the social, political, and economic spheres. successfully treating patients while navigating these rapidly changing conditions requires understanding of the structures shaping these conditions. metzl and hansen outline five core elements of structural competency generally: defining clinical interactions in structural terms, developing an extra-clinical language of structure, rearticulating “cultural” presentations in structural terms, observing and imagining structural intervention, and developing structural humility [ ]. here, we apply these elements to reproductive health care. recognizing the structures that shape clinical interactions. structural competency holds that recognition of structures shaping clinical interactions—including laws, funding mechanisms, and markets—is important, as it allows health care professionals to understand the wider spheres governing their clinical work. with that understanding, health care professionals can identify and correct missed opportunities to support their patients in navigating structural barriers to care. abortion counseling services provide an instructive example of the structures shaping clinical interactions and their implications for health care and outcomes [ ]. owing to targeted state legislation that drains clinic budgets by forcing compliance with regulations beyond what is needed for patient health and safety [ , ], many abortion clinics must meet patient need in minimal time. in turn, clinics cut services such as in-depth counseling, which provides space for patients to process their values and preferences related to abortion [ ]. furthermore, in-depth counseling can enhance quality of and access to care when it identifies structural barriers to health outcomes (for example, difficulties travelling to follow-up appointments among undocumented persons due to police checkpoints) [ ]. a structurally competent approach to abortion care, incorporated into education and training curricula, would provide health care professionals with a framework to understand and analyze the social www.amajournalofethics.org and political conditions that constrain the types of care available and influence clinical outcomes. developing an extra-clinical language of structure. an extra-clinical language of structure refers to incorporating terms and concepts from social, political, and economic theory into the health care encounter. consider the case of promotion of larc to prevent adolescent pregnancy. although adolescent pregnancy is now recognized to be influenced by a complex set of factors—including education, housing, and employment—that pregnancy prevention alone cannot solve [ ], higgins argues that promoting larc as if contraceptive efficacy were a panacea to structural barriers faced by young, poor women of color is unfair to patients and health professionals alike because it puts the onus on individual patients and professionals to solve a problem better addressed by more robust funding of education, housing, and employment programs [ ]. in this context, language engaging social conditions (e.g., poverty) is ineffectual and does not reach the level of extra-clinical language suggested by structural competency, given that these arguments are not informed by the rich discussions of structural barriers in social, political, and economic theory. drawing on structural competency, health care professionals might see how the absence of structural factors and social well-being in discussion of larc locates the origin of social problems in the reproduction of poor adolescents. they could then be ready to discuss contraceptive decision making with their patients (and colleagues) in terms that go beyond clinical effectiveness, which is commonly promoted by physicians as the most important contraceptive consideration for women, although women often consider other aspects such as acceptability, values, and autonomy to be of equal or greater importance [ , ]. a structurally competent perspective surfaces the ways that social inequities with respect to race, gender, class, and age are reproduced within clinical settings and in rhetoric about larc, highlighting the need for alternative counseling approaches (such as shared decision-making models, which seek maximum patient input and use patient- directed language) [ ]. rearticulating “cultural” presentations in structural terms. rearticulating “cultural” presentations in structural terms refers to understanding the structural factors producing differential clinical outcomes and presentations based on race or ethnicity and including these factors in any assessment and treatment plan. health care professionals must consider the ways in which their knowledge base (e.g., research studies that refer to young, poor, or minority women as “at risk” for pregnancy and that replicate moralizing risk discourses [ ]) and their professional norms explicitly and implicitly stratify women’s fertility based on stereotypes that are often framed as inherent to group “culture” [ ]. one example is the stereotype that young, poor women of color are at risk for unintended pregnancy due to the controversial notion of a “culture of poverty” [ , ] or “cycle of poverty” [ ] that devalues education and other means of social mobility and promotes promiscuity. in rearticulating “cultural” presentations, health care ama journal of ethics, march professionals should analyze how patients’ decisions, feelings, and resources related to reproductive health might be influenced by differential opportunities to parent and exercise autonomy over childbearing options. rearticulating cultural presentations in structural terms enables health care professionals to recognize stereotypes when they emerge in practice and to treat patients’ issues more accurately and acceptably [ ]. observing and imagining structural intervention. observing and imagining structural interventions means health care professionals are both aware of key examples of thinking beyond the individual and capable of envisioning how they might apply them in practice. reproductive health professionals can look to the past, present, and future to observe and imagine structural interventions. women of color launched the reproductive justice movement in , because they were dissatisfied with the reproductive rights movement’s narrow focus on “choice.” they openly challenged the exclusion of abortion access from health care reform and pushed for an intersectional understanding of reproductive oppression, particularly the forces that denied women of color the human right to have children and to parent with safety and dignity, as well as the right not to have children [ ]. these activists paved the way for minority women’s leadership in health advocacy and in organizing successful campaigns against unjust policies and practices [ ]. one example of reproductive justice in action is black women birthing justice, a san francisco bay area collective that seeks to ensure, for black women, the right to birth with safety and autonomy—where, how, and with whom they choose. this organization works closely with local health providers and grassroots community groups to expand access to the range of pregnancy and postpartum care options for black women (e.g., medicaid coverage of home birth, access to doulas and midwives of color, and access to trauma-informed, strengths-based breastfeeding support) as well as to increase the accountability of medical institutions to black pregnant women through community accountability boards [ ]. in the current political climate, health care professionals might consider structural interventions such as training in how to resist collaboration with us immigration and customs enforcement (ice) and other policing institutions within their own clinics and at community-led direct actions [ , ]. for example, citing erosion of community safety and public trust in local institutions, planned parenthood mar monte in california was one of signers of a letter demanding that the fresno sheriff immediately end a partnership between ice and the police department, which had facilitated detainment and deportation proceedings of over people [ ]. detainment and deportation can worsen reproductive health outcomes (e.g., increased risk for unintended pregnancy and sexually transmitted infections) by depriving patients of necessary reproductive care as well as subjecting undocumented women and families to disproportionate state violence and surveillance, thereby constraining their reproductive choices and experiences [ , ]. reproductive health care professionals might also consider following the example of movements such as white coats for black lives, which leverages clinicians’ professional www.amajournalofethics.org http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /msoc - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /sect - .html privilege to galvanize political support for the black lives matter movement [ ]. the black lives matter movement and reproductive health equity are inextricable, given that police brutality and surveillance can be understood in the words of one physician as “particularly extreme forms of maternal stress” and might influence black women’s health outcomes or childbearing decisions [ ]. as the political climate surrounding reproductive health intensifies, professionals are in a privileged position to advocate for structural interventions addressing not only the immediate reproductive health care needs of their patients but also the conditions that produce differential vulnerabilities in the first place. structural competency allows for more appropriate interventions by aiding clinicians in recognizing and responding to the most salient structural contexts in the clinical encounter itself while also motivating clinicians and their health care systems to intervene in the extra-clinical determinants of health. developing structural humility. structural humility is the capacity of health care professionals to appreciate that their role is not to surmount oppressive structures but rather to understand knowledge and practice gaps vis-à-vis structures, partner with other stakeholders to fill these gaps, and engage in self-reflection throughout these processes. self-reflection allows health care professionals to better discern how structures are impacting them and their patients and identify systematic ways to help patients. by definition, structural issues cannot be addressed by an individual. health care knowledge and interventions will always be partial. engaging with this reality rather than clinging to professional status and expertise means that professionals will be better able to capture the complexity of their own experience as well as that of patients and other allies. although necessary, increased awareness of structural influences on health through more robust education and training will only take reproductive health professionals so far. collective, coalition-based action to create lasting structural changes must follow reflection and awareness raising [ ]. one example is taking a collaborative, movement- based approach to reform, such as the movement for single-payer health care [ , ]. reproductive health care professionals are well poised to argue for full access to reproductive health care (including abortion) in legislation that expands health care delivery [ ], which would address social determinants of reproductive health by lowering financial barriers to the full-range of health care options patients need to achieve reproductive autonomy. in order to be fully visible and influential, they must do so alongside other health care professionals and advocacy groups such as physicians for a national health program or national nurses united [ ]. embracing structural humility, reproductive health care professionals must be careful not to dominate discussions or strategy at the expense of other stakeholders but rather cooperate and compromise as they move into spaces where multiple knowledges, identities, and priorities converge. ama journal of ethics, march conclusion structural competency represents a powerful framework for shifting the burden of eliminating health inequities from individual professionals and patients to institutions and systems, including health care, schools, and clinics. structural competency training with a reproductive health focus might improve clinician sensitivity to social determinants of health, encourage generative self-reflection, and open opportunities for solidarity with patients. it might help health care professionals offer safer, more acceptable, and therefore more effective care. given that reproductive health care professionals may work within “beleaguered” systems [ ], structural competency is a means to empower these professionals to face occupational difficulties and organize for transformative change [ ]. because changes in structure cannot be achieved by individuals alone, structurally competent reproductive health care 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white coats for black lives national working group. white coats for black lives: medical students responding to racism and police brutality. j urban health. ; ( ): - . . harrison am. medical students call for single-payer national health insurance. acad med. ; ( ): . . woolhandler s, himmelstein du, angell m, young qd; physicians’ working group for single-payer national health insurance. proposal of the physicians’ working group for single-payer national health insurance. jama. ; ( ): - . . single payer healthcare offers best options for women [news release]. boston, ma: our bodies ourselves. june , . https://www.ourbodiesourselves.org/history/press-releases/our-bodies- ourselves-endorses-single-payer-healthcare/. accessed january , . . joffe c. the politicization of abortion and the evolution of abortion counseling. am j public health. ; ( ): . . pérez mz. a new way to fight health disparities? colorlines. july , . https://www.colorlines.com/articles/new-way-fight-health-disparities. accessed october , . margaret mary downey, msw, is a doctoral candidate in the school of social welfare at the university of california, berkeley, where she also completed her master of social work degree. prior to attending graduate school, she practiced as a birth and abortion doula in philadelphia at the hospital of the university of pennsylvania and planned parenthood of southeastern pennsylvania, respectively. during this time she also served as a research specialist at the university of pennsylvania school of medicine on several national institutes of health-funded projects in partnership with the philadelphia departments of education and public welfare, supporting teachers and community- based clinicians in implementing evidence-based mental health services. her current research interests are reproductive health and justice and the political economy of health. anu manchikanti gómez, msc, phd, is an assistant professor at the university of california, berkeley, school of social welfare and the director of the sexual health and reproductive equity (share) program. for more than years, dr. gómez has worked as a health equity researcher; she has conducted research both in the us and globally on diverse topics, including contraceptive use, abortion, hiv prevention, gender equity, transgender health, and violence against women and children. dr. gómez’s current research focuses on three areas: the measurement and meaning of pregnancy planning; understanding contraceptive decision making within social, relational, and structural contexts; and evaluating the impact of and evidence base for policies related to reproductive health. www.amajournalofethics.org related in the ama journal of ethics #blacklivesmatter: physicians must stand for racial justice, october culture and moral distress: what’s the connection and why does it matter?, june forced sterilizations of hiv-positive women: a global ethics and policy failure, october is lower quality clinical care ethically justifiable for patients residing in areas with infrastructure deficits?, march physicians’ social responsibility, september when should screening and surveillance be used during pregnancy?, march the viewpoints expressed in this article are those of the author(s) and do not necessarily reflect the views and policies of the ama. copyright american medical association. all rights reserved. issn - ama journal of ethics, march http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /sect - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /msoc - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /pfor - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /ecas - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /ecas - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /oped - .html http://journalofethics.ama-assn.org/ / /msoc - .html 	peer-reviewed cme article: original research 	structural competency and reproductive health 	margaret mary downey, msw, and anu manchikanti gómez, msc, phd 	abstract 	introduction 	the social determinants of reproductive health 	applying structural competency to reproductive health 	recognizing the structures that shape clinical interactions. structural competency holds that recognition of structures shaping clinical interactions—including laws, funding mechanisms, and markets—is important, as it allows health care professionals ... 	developing an extra-clinical language of structure. an extra-clinical language of structure refers to incorporating terms and concepts from social, political, and economic theory into the health care encounter. consider the case of promotion of larc t... 	rearticulating “cultural” presentations in structural terms. rearticulating “cultural” presentations in structural terms refers to understanding the structural factors producing differential clinical outcomes and presentations based on race or ethnici... 	observing and imagining structural intervention. observing and imagining structural interventions means health care professionals are both aware of key examples of thinking beyond the individual and capable of envisioning how they might apply them in ... 	developing structural humility. structural humility is the capacity of health care professionals to appreciate that their role is not to surmount oppressive structures but rather to understand knowledge and practice gaps vis-à-vis structures, partner ... 	conclusion 	structural competency represents a powerful framework for shifting the burden of eliminating health inequities from individual professionals and patients to institutions and systems, including health care, schools, and clinics. structural competency t... social unionism and the framing of ‘fairness’ in the wisconsin uprising the university of bradford institutional repository http://bradscholars.brad.ac.uk this work is made available online in accordance with publisher policies. please refer to the repository record for this item and our policy document available from the repository home page for further information. to see the final version of this work please visit the publisher’s website. access to the published online version may require a subscription. link to publisher’s version: http://dx.doi.org/ . / citation: chesters gs ( ) social unionism and the framing of fairness in the wisconsin uprising. local economy. ( ): - . copyright statement: © sage publishing. full-text reproduced in accordance with the publisher’s self-archiving policy. http://dx.doi.org/ . / feature social unionism and the framing of ‘fairness’ in the wisconsin uprising graeme chesters university of bradford, uk abstract the concept of ‘fairness’ has been used to frame political struggles by politicians and activists across the political spectrum. this article looks at its use in the us state of wisconsin during the ‘uprising’ – a series of occupations, protests, recall elections and militant direct action that began in . these events were a response to a ‘budget repair bill’ that sought to strip public sector union members of their collective bargaining rights and to apply severe austerity measures within the state. this article suggests that although ‘fairness’ has a certain broad-based and intuitive appeal, its mutability means that it is unlikely to be successful in framing a structural critique that can build and sustain social action. instead, it argues that framing this conflict as an uprising suggested a more explicit form of resistance that enabled a wider mobilization, and this can best be understood as an example of social (movement) unionism – the extension of traditional work place rights approaches to include broader agendas of social justice, civil rights, immigrant rights and economic justice for non-unionized workers. keywords fairness, social movement, unions, wisconsin, uprising the common demand, says three-time madison mayor paul soglin, is ‘‘fairness,’’ a phrase broad enough to include collect- ive bargaining rights, resistance to cuts in education and public services, the steady privatizing of the university, and deep populist rage against wall street, corpor- ate power and particularly the billionaire koch brothers, who are considered the deep pockets behind the republican strat- egy. (hayden, ) this is an extremely important symbolic state, as this was where the union move- ment was born. . . wisconsin is the battle- ground, it wasn’t a random thing. (lane hall, overpass light brigade, interviewed april ) introduction this article addresses the ways in which the concept of ‘fairness’ has been used to frame political struggles at the local level by polit- icians from left and right, and it uses a period of contentious municipal politics in the us to analyse the utility of this concept corresponding author: graeme chesters, department of peace studies, university of bradford, uk. email: g.s.chesters@bradford.ac.uk local economy ( ) – ! the author(s) reprints and permissions: sagepub.co.uk/journalspermissions.nav doi: . / lec.sagepub.com at j b priestley library on october , lec.sagepub.comdownloaded from http://lec.sagepub.com/ as a means of framing appeals for more pro- gressive forms of politics. the intention is to bring a different lens to bear upon the con- cept of fairness by examining how this idea played out during what activists describe as the ‘wisconsin uprising’. this was a series of occupations, protests, recall elections and militant direct action during , in response to a ‘budget repair bill’ that sought to strip public sector union members of their collective bargaining rights and apply severe austerity measures in the state. arguably, ‘the uprising’ is still ongoing, and it has formed the basis for a re-appraisal of the relationship between trade unions and social movements and how issues of ‘fairness’ or perhaps more appropriately ideas of social justice can be maintained in opposition to the implemen- tation of aggressive austerity measures by municipal government. the concept of fairness has become increasingly popular in the socio-political discourse of the liberal-left in the uk, from fairness commissions (bunyan and diamond, ) to campaigns for a living wage, to permaculture activists and their principle of ‘fair shares’ for all. it inhabits the intersection of state and civil society, and transgresses the boundaries of local, national and global. fairness resonates with those driven by the desire to achieve the ‘good society’, whether they are polit- icians, activists or academics. it also suc- ceeds in being both inoffensive and all encompassing. fairness is a classic empty signifier and as such can be invested with a variety of meanings and put to work politically in a range of contexts and to varying ends. however, in a period where the social costs of austerity economics become ever more visible, it is also perhaps no coinci- dence that the idea of fairness, as intuitive a value as any, is increasingly mobilised to ask deeply political questions. is it fair that in the uk a majority of those in poverty have someone in their household in work (living wage commission, )? is it fair for a typical ceo of a ftse company to earn one hundred and sixty times the income of their average worker (high pay centre, )? is it fair for private debt to become socialized and should sovereign debt always be repaid regardless of the impacts on society (lienau, )? in the uk such questions of fairness and their consideration by local state and civil society partners in fairness commissions have led to some progressive outcomes, including the spread of the living wage and on one occasion the reduction in pay of a council chief executive. however, these changes are often locally imple- mented, piecemeal and can be self-limiting due to the partnership approach that typi- fies many local state – civil society initia- tives. indeed, fairness commissions can inadvertently encourage the idea that pov- erty and inequality are a result of the local context and might therefore only require action at this level. this echoes the strategic mistake of some environmental organisa- tions during the s, when faced with the ecological impacts of rapid globalisa- tion, which was to exhort their supporters to ‘think global, act local’ thereby ceding the global to trans-national corporations and extra-national governance organisa- tions. a mistake that was rectified by the emergence of the alter-global movement, most celebrated for its prominence as the chief opposition to the corporate influenced wto trade discussions and economic hegemony of the world economic forum and g structures. the concern then is that whilst fairness commissions enable some of those involved to signal their opposition to the restructuring of the welfare state at a local level, they do so without necessarily contesting the worst impacts of the social and economic restructuring that is taking place under the conceptual framework of neoliberal austerity. local economy ( ) at j b priestley library on october , lec.sagepub.comdownloaded from http://lec.sagepub.com/ in examining the concept of fairness that is underpinning such initiatives, this article will attempt to draw some lessons from an international context and to look instead at an instance of conflict, rather than cooper- ation between the local state and civil soci- ety. it will look specifically at the us state of wisconsin and its checkered history as a beacon of progressivism in the context of us public policy and labour relations. from analysis of how the concept has con- tributed to state–civil society relations his- torically, to its role in animating forms of contentious politics that have emerged in recent years. i will discuss how the pre- sumption of ‘fairness’ as a basis for public policy has a long tradition in this state, under the auspices of what its citizens refer to as the ‘wisconsin idea’. a form of ‘progressive’ politics that is closely asso- ciated with the founding and emergence of the state itself, and one that includes an emphasis upon progressive taxation, work- ers rights, opposition to corporate power and tight controls over political influence. i will also describe how the ‘folk memory’ of this tradition played into the highly public struggle to defend and maintain col- lective bargaining rights. these included payments of ‘fair share’ fees by non-union employees, which were targeted by the incoming republican governor – scott walker, a tea-party movement endorsed politician whose political support base and campaign contributors were ideologically opposed to the trade union movement. it will describe how the discourse of ‘fairness’ was employed by the governor, the labour movement and others and how it helped frame the largest labour protests in the us for decades, and it will question the utility of the concept as a means of representing and defending the principle of collective social and economic goods. in doing so, i argue that the experience of wisconsin public sector workers and those that engaged in the uprising highlights the potential of ‘social unionism’ or ‘social movement unionism’ (clawson, ; fairbrother, ; moody, ). i use these terms interchangeably as i suggest there is little difference between them for analytical purposes. however, i recognise they tend to be representative of specific forms of political and cultural expression. social unionism is a term most familiar from italian political theory whilst social movement unionism has its roots in the uk/us tradition. in essence, both terms describe the extension of traditional work place rights approaches to include broader agendas of social justice, civil rights, immi- grant rights and economic justice for non- unionised workers (chesters and welsh, : – ). it suggests that this approach is evolving rapidly, as changes to the law on both sides of the atlantic increasingly diminish the opportunity for more traditional repertoires of union engagement and their capacity to exert col- lective pressure through formal channels. social unionism tends to be motivated by an analysis of the ideological and conflictual nature of the politics underpinning debates about what is fair and therefore is oriented to a more strategic and long-term commit- ment to struggle. this is increasingly evi- dent in both contexts as a response to the narrowing of the political opportunity structure, in the shape of further restrictive trade union legislation. this includes, in the uk, the trade union bill - , which the trade union congress ( ) has sug- gested ‘threatens the basic right to strike’ and will necessitate a return to wider forms of collective action. in addressing these issues i am seeking to understand how the concept of fairness is operationalised in such contexts, the differ- ences in local state–civil society relation- ships, and the contrasting experiences on either side of the atlantic. underpinning these observations and at the heart of the article is an analytical model that provides chesters at j b priestley library on october , lec.sagepub.comdownloaded from http://lec.sagepub.com/ for the mobilising frame of ‘fairness’ to be analysed separately from the normative and moral presumption of what is fair between individuals, thus privileging the concepts political utility rather than its use as a means to measure the outcomes of policy. in addition to the secondary literature, this article is also informed by material from interviews carried out with civil society activists, trade union organisers and others who participated in the protests in wisconsin during . these were con- ducted in spring as part of a broader undertaking to research the dynamics of community responses to events that are trig- gered by actors outside their community, and which provoke fundamental challenges to the community’s ideas of justice, their collective identity and their ability to with- stand and respond to shock or trauma. understanding the wisconsin idea in , the wisconsin legislature passed the first worker’s compensation law in the us, providing aid to those injured in their jobs. by doing so, theodore roosevelt argued that wisconsin had become ‘literally a laboratory for wise experimental legisla- tion to secure the social and political better- ment of the people as a whole’ (stein and marley, : ). wisconsin was also the first state to introduce unemployment insur- ance, and this action coupled with the prominence of many of its legislators and academics helped set the example that helped shape the new deal and the imple- mentation of a national social security program. wisconsin was the bastion of a form of social and political progressivism that had numerous roots; it was a free-state and a centre of abolitionism from its foundation in and was an important destination for a generation of ‘forty-eighters’ who emi- grated from germany to settle in milwaukee after the failed revolutions in europe. these german émigrés brought with them a tradition of socialist politics that took root in the state and wisconsin was home to one of only two socialist sen- ators that served in the us senate. this tradition lasted well in to the mid th cen- tury, with milwaukee having a socialist mayor until . the history of progressiv- ism in the state, however, is probably a more powerful influence, and it is most often characterised in the form of robert la follette ( – ), a former republican then progressive governor, who became senator of wisconsin and who fought a presidential campaign for the progressive party gaining % of the votes in the election. ‘fighting bob’ campaigned to be president on a platform of opposing corporate power, nationalising the railways and utility companies, greater protection for trade unions and civil liber- ties, and in opposition to american imperi- alism in latin america. a powerful legacy of la follette and the history of socialist and progressive politics in the state is what is known as the ‘wisconsin idea’. this is an idea whose implications are not always easy to grasp and it sometimes leaves those outside of the state confused by its apparent role in the wider community mobilisation and its opposition to attacks on public sector work- ers. during two days in april , i inter- viewed five prominent local trade union and community activists and i asked each of them how best to summarise this idea. all of them described the wider public as hold- ing a belief in the civic duty of those in power to pursue a form of progressive pol- itics within the state, i.e. ‘the search for truth and fairness in public life by the university and public officials’ (civil society activist, interviewed april ). in this instance, my respondent wanted to empha- sise the role of the university of wisconsin in providing research led guidance to those local economy ( ) at j b priestley library on october , lec.sagepub.comdownloaded from http://lec.sagepub.com/ in public life, and indeed the university has a long and proud history of working closely with legislators to these ends. so much so, that it has effectively written this ‘idea’ in to the mission statement of the university, which dedicates itself to extending know- ledge, searching for truth and improving the human condition, all familiar refrains for a public university. it is perhaps strange then, that the present state governor – scott walker – attempted to have this idea removed and replaced in , substituting instead, in typically neoliberal and man- agerialist fashion, a commitment to ‘work- force readiness’. this move was later dismissed as an administrative error after considerable out- rage and protest and these responses shed some light on the apparent power of the wisconsin idea. it is less the expression of a commitment to values of the public good, to fairness in public life and to the implemen- tation of these values through social policy that worried the governor. after all, these values are open to reinterpretation through a conservative lens. rather it is the way in which these commitments have been histor- ically realised and the association of these ideas with progressivism and with those who used such ideas to great effect during the mobilizations in . the wisconsin idea is a key part of the folk memory that recalls the influence of ‘progressive’ values in state politics, and is closely associated with the policies pursued by la follette himself – progressive taxation, workers rights, oppos- ition to corporate power and political influ- ence, the extension of democratic accountability and opposition to predatory wealth. la follette believed the values of the university and its aim to search for truth and to build the good society were con- sistent with these policies and therefore the university and the state should be synchron- ous in their approach to realizing such poli- cies. when the mayor of madison – paul soglin – stated that a common demand of those protesting the governor’s attacks on public sector union rights was ‘fairness’, he was both acknowledging that the conflict went beyond the workers themselves and invoking the collective ideal associated with the wisconsin idea. it was an appeal to a form of progressivism that is rooted in the apparatus of the local state, and set deep within the public education system, but which also has a historical resonance with wider notions of citizenship. this version of the wisconsin idea links fairness to a set of political objectives, some of which can appear as radical now as they did when they were first articulated a hundred years ago. the up-rising ‘uprising sounds spontaneous, it is not being raised up, it is spontaneously up- rising.’ (kaja rebane, madison community and trade union activist, interviewed april, ) tyranny and oppression are just as pos- sible under democratic forms as under any other. we are slow to realise that dem- ocracy is a life; and involves continual struggle. it is only as those of every gener- ation who love democracy resist with all their might the encroachment of its ene- mies that the ideals of representative gov- ernment can even be nearly approximated. (robert la follette in nicholls, ) in early , the wisconsin ‘wave’ of pro- tests (fithian, : ; nicholls, ) brought global attention to what might otherwise have been a little local difficulty for a rising star of the tea party movement within the republican party – governor scott walker. huge mobilisations took place in wisconsin between february and june involving protests of over one hundred thousand people and the occupation of the state capitol building in madison for over three weeks. chesters at j b priestley library on october , lec.sagepub.comdownloaded from http://lec.sagepub.com/ this was the result of the governor’s plans to reduce benefits for public sector workers, requiring payment of health care provisions and increasing their contributory payments to pensions, but more pro- foundly, it also sought to limit the collective bargaining rights of public sector workers and effectively de-recognise their unions. the resulting resistance, which was wide- spread and involved private as well as public sector workers, campaign and com- munity organisations as well as just trade unions, led ultimately to the governor facing a recall vote. this was prompted by the collection of over nine hundred thou- sand signatories to a gubernatorial recall motion, which amongst multiple recall elec- tions for other elected politicians of both parties, was something that had only hap- pened twice previously in us history. these actions and the response they elicited are important in a number of ways. the actions of the governor were a dramatic illustra- tion of what naomi klein ( ) has referred to as the ‘shock doctrine’ of neo- liberalism. in this instance a right-wing republican governor, backed by wealthy tea party donors, sought to capitalise on the financial ‘crisis’ as a justification for fur- ther, arguably ideological attacks, on the public sector and its workers by using the familiar arguments of deficit reduction and the desire to balance budgets. however, the mobilisation of those targeted and their wider group of supporters also provided a very graphic illustration of the political pos- sibility of occupying public buildings and public spaces. reintroducing a repertoire of collective action, which, whilst not unpre- cedented in the us, had not been a feature of contemporary politics and which was to prove an inspiration for some of the early occupy movement (nicholls, ). the announcement of a budget repair bill on february might have appeared likely to be inconsequential. it was evident that an incoming republican governor would wish to put their stamp on the state’s fiscal policy but few expected how quickly this bill would transform the political context. wisconsin had been hit particularly hard by the outcomes of the financial crisis and the attendant recession in – , and this led to the state facing a significant shortfall for the budgetary period from june to june . whilst this deficit had been tempered by a one-off injection of aid from the federal eco- nomic stimulus plan, there was every expectation that the incoming governor, elected in december , would seek to reform the budget for the remaining period. however, what few realised was that walker’s plan was to roll in to this bill the inclusion of a full-scale attack on the collective bargaining rights of public sector trade unionists. walker had arrived in office on the back of a wave of tea party support which included significant financial backing from billionaire industrialists the koch brothers, as well as a range of highly influential conservative foundations and campaign groups – including the bradley foundation, whose president and ceo had been the chair of walker’s campaign to become governor. the bradley foundation donated approximately $ million to conservative groups and arts organizations between the years and (stein and marley, : ). the agenda of these sup- porters and the various think tanks they funded is free market fundamentalism allied to social and religious conservatism and they left very little time in proclaiming what they believed to be an appropriate course of action. the john k maciver institute for public policy, a small madison based think tank funded by the bradley foundation immediately set out their priorities for the new walker adminis- tration, including curtailing the role of the public sector unions, who might otherwise be a barrier to further neoliberal reforms. local economy ( ) at j b priestley library on october , lec.sagepub.comdownloaded from http://lec.sagepub.com/ in this sense what happened on february, should have been expected, but the history of the state, the wisconsin idea and the sharply, but equally divided polit- ical allegiances of the electorate, led many to believe that walker would avoid mount- ing such a direct attack on the trade unions. one of the first things we might observe then is the ease with which it is possible to underestimate a newly empowered political opponent driven by an ideological commit- ment. even if that opponent is operating within a political opportunity structure that would appear antithetical to their cause. in this instance, a context framed by socio-historical ideas of fairness rooted in a collectivist idea of the good society with a finely balanced and evenly divided elect- orate. we might also note that this initiative was far from isolated and appeared to be part of a wider ideological and strategic attack mounted against organised labour, as similar initiatives were unfolding in michigan, indiana and ohio. in this context it is prudent then to look for indications of the issues around which struggles might take place, and the potential for conflict here was evident as early as december , when walker was reported as ‘mulling over abolishing public sector unions’ at a press dinner (stein and marley, : ). whilst some of those attending the dinner seem to have considered this as little more than wishful thinking on his part, walker and his team were not only planning such a move they were also preparing a contin- gency plan in the event of a concerted response by the trade union movement. the budget repair bill included sections to deal with potential protests including indus- trial or collective action involving strikes, protests, walk-outs, etc. these included the ability of the governor to declare a ‘state of emergency’, after which he could sack any public employee who went out on strike, or whom engaged in some other form of work stoppage, delayed or damaged the work of the government, or who was absent for more than three days from work without evidence they were ill. the assertion of such powers enables us to recall the classic criticism of the ‘state of exception’ (agamben, ), where consti- tutional rights can be suspended, super- seded or rejected under the authority of sovereign power. therefore, even within representative democracies the state nearly always reserves the right to absent itself from democratic accountability, to domin- ate the production of meaning via its ease of access to the media and to utilise extra-judi- cial measures of disciplinary control where deemed necessary. in the run up to the announcement and in addition to the emer- gency powers walker imagined claiming under the proposed bill, he was also in close contact with the national guard and worked on a plan to deal with the potential of a strike by guards at one of the state prisons. indeed, it was reported that national guard officers in plain clothes went as far as to visit prisons to assess the logistics of taking over control in the event of a strike breaking out (stein and marley, : ). however, the difficulty with this plan was the presumption that the republicans would be able to move sufficiently quickly as to have the bill passed before the protests and other forms of collective action began, thereby allowing the provisions within the bill to be utilised to control protests against the bill. put simply, the intention was to create a situation where people could not protest against the bill because the bill itself made it unlawful. the timetable pro- posed by walker was to unveil the bill on friday february, formally introduce it to the legislature on monday, february, hear testimony for and against the bill at a budget committee meeting on tuesday, before passing it through both chambers – the senate and assembly – by the end of the week, friday, february. the problem for chesters at j b priestley library on october , lec.sagepub.comdownloaded from http://lec.sagepub.com/ the governor was that any fiscal policy put to a vote had to take place when the state government was quorate, a simple require- ment given it merely required elected repre- sentatives within state boundaries to be called to the house. however, this was quickly confounded as the senate democrats agreed to leave the state on thursday of that week, depriving the senate of the quorum needed and beginning what turned out to be a rather lengthy stay over the border in illinois. whether the senate democrats would have taken this action without the mass protests that broke out at the start of that week is debatable, but this exodus marked the culmination of a remarkably quick and determined response by trade unionists and community activists. some of which had been in preparation through formal afl- cio channels in the weeks leading up to the bill, whilst other actions resulted directly from the democratic culture inculcated by advocates of the wisconsin idea. as word spread over the weekend that the bill con- tained a major attack against the public sector unions, a well-organised exponent of the wisconsin idea, the teachers assistant association, a union for graduate student employees at the university of wisconsin, became one of the first to take collective action alongside students protest- ing anticipated cuts to the university’s budget. the protests on monday, february were valentines themed, and the taa had planned to participate prior to the announcement of the budget repair bill. their aim was to deliver hundreds of valentines cards to the governor’s office from students and graduate employees, pro- claiming their love for the university and opposing any cuts that might be forthcom- ing. in the event, however, it turned in to a far more raucous and determined oppos- ition rally with close to a thousand pro- testers entering the capital building and demanding to see the governor. this initial rally would set the scene for the protests that followed in the coming weeks, but it also heralded something quite different, a level of militancy and creative disruption that confounded the governor and his team and surprised many political commentators. the governor and the republican majority had been expecting protests and the possibility of strike action, but this was envisaged as happening after the bill had passed and including only public sector workers. they, of course, could be presented as having benefits that were in some ways superior to those in the private sector, and so the governor had planned a classic divide and rule strategy, playing off one sector of workers against another. however, this plan failed to take account of the preliminary work carried out by the wisconsin afl-cio, which had begun holding meetings amongst labour leaders from public and private sector unions in anticipation of an attack on union rights. therefore, as the students, taa protesters and others marched on the capitol building, two dozen officials from private and public sector unions were able to hold a joint press conference a short distance away, denouncing the bill and declaring their opposition to it and solidarity with each other. speed of action, organisation and communication between different sec- tors of the labour movement were therefore tactically important in heading off this potential line of attack. the following day, one of the first in line to give evidence to the joint finance commit- tee against the bill was kaja rebane, a taa member and social justice activist who entered the capitol building alongside cleaning staff. thereby securing herself the possibility of providing testimony before the arrival of ‘americans for prosperity’, a bradley foundation funded campaign group who were being bussed in to support local economy ( ) at j b priestley library on october , lec.sagepub.comdownloaded from http://lec.sagepub.com/ the repair bill. the taa would go on to play an instrumental and highly effective role in these early days of the protests, providing ‘two of the main cogs’ for the occupation that followed: ‘taa had a war room or control room in the capitol. . . they took it over and set up shop. . . they had an internet set up, a media set up, martialling for peace keepers and food for protesters.’ (kaja rebane, madison community and trade union activ- ist (taa), interviewed april, ) as the crowds at the capitol building swelled and increasing numbers of public sector workers signed up to provide testi- mony, there was evidence of a further and significant mobilisation against the bill, the presence of public school teachers, some of whom had spontaneously organised a ‘sick out’ phoning in sick to attend the rally in madison: i was teaching th grade in a public school and the night they dropped the bomb there was a union meeting in our union hall, at nine thirty at night, and we had two hun- dred teachers turn up. our union was tell- ing us we couldn’t do anything but our members were saying: ‘‘no, we want to call in sick and go to madison’’. so i want to say it came from the union, but it came from the membership, it was organic, people who had never given a rip about politics were pissed off! (joe brusky, ‘released’ union official for the milwaukee chapter of the wisconsin education association council (weac), interviewed april, ) the hearing of the finance committee contin- ued until a.m. wednesday morning – february, when republican members left and it was then continued by democrats throughout the remainder of the night, allowing protesters to effectively occupy the capitol building overnight and establishing a platform for a much longer and more orga- nised occupation. on wednesday morning, madison’s superintendent for education closed the schools in the city and some sur- rounding areas, as % of the public school teachers in the district phoned in sick to attend the protests. on thursday, these closures increased as teachers from across the state joined the protests in madison. walker’s plan was to exclude both police officers and fire fighters from the full impacts of the bill and yet both sets of employees rallied to support their public sector colleagues, with fire fighters and on one-occasion police officers taking turns to sleep over in the capitol building. indeed the regular parade of fire fighters with attendant pipe and drum bands became a major feature of the protest over the follow- ing days. for the next three weeks with the senate democrats exiled outside the state to avoid the bill being passed, the capitol building occupied, and protests involving both public and private sector workers growing exponentially, activists’ description of an ‘uprising’ appeared justified. as kaja robane, the activist who sneaked in to give evidence that tuesday morning puts it: this was a historic moment and people wanted to have their individual experience of it – there was this collective efferves- cence thing that happened. the first noon protest there were ten thousand, the next noon protest there were twenty thousand. i remember looking across the crowd and being amazed how quick it had grown, and thinking ‘‘oh, maybe we do actually have a chance’’ and that sense of power built and we started feeling con- nected and powerful. (kaja rebane madison community and trade union activist (taa), interviewed april ) thus it appeared as if the wisconsin idea had been given a material form beyond that of the plaster bust of ‘fighting bob’ la follette on the first floor of the capitol building. the idea had found a means of defending itself, an idea of fairness rooted in the collective good, was being fought for by ‘those of every generation who love chesters at j b priestley library on october , lec.sagepub.comdownloaded from http://lec.sagepub.com/ democracy (and) resist with all their might the encroachment of its enemies’ (robert la follette, in nicholls, ). the end of the beginning: the recalling of politicians and activism? over the next month, there were numerous protests in the capitol including a mass demonstration by over one hundred thou- sand people, with participants coming from a range of civil society organisations and community groups, representing faith groups, parental organizations, agricul- tural workers and both public and private sector workers. in a particularly strident demonstration of solidarity from outside of the public sector unions, small farmers organisations formed a tractor blockade which encircled the capitol building, whilst luminaries of the political and cul- tural left, including michael moore, jesse jackson, susan sarandon and tom morello descended on madison to partici- pate in rallies and give speeches to the assembled crowds. the uprising became a national and international event, with pro- testers articulating common cause with egyptian activists in tahrir square via placards and twitter feeds, whilst the local pizza restaurant was inundated with orders from across the country and the wider world, with people sending ‘solidar- ity pizza’ to those occupying the capitol building. as fox news ran ever more extreme denunciations of the occupation, using library footage of protesters clashing with police, albeit in front of palm trees, and therefore evidently not in wisconsin. activists responded by arriving in neatly printed palm tree t-shirts, some even carry- ing inflatable palm trees or on one occa- sion a palm tree ‘liberated’ from a green house to be deployed as a satirical symbol of disgust with the right wing news media. however, despite such creative and determined collective action, and although almost every means available to those opposing the bill was utilised over the next month, on march senate republicans managed to propose a revised version of the bill which could pass without the pres- ence of the democratic senators. this was signed in to law by governor walker on march , almost exactly a month to the day since the first public notification of the bill was made. although some commenta- tors anticipated this might be the end of the uprising, in many respects it continued to strengthen, but it also begun to have its energies channelled towards the aim of mounting a recall campaign. this is an electoral measure that enables the recalling of politicians to face a new election on pres- entation of a petition signed by twenty five per cent of the electorate that voted in the previous election. whilst recall is a powerful and comparatively common means of addressing dissatisfaction with elected rep- resentatives, many activists felt that whilst this might be inevitable, in that someone was bound to initiate the process, it would also divert energy away from the emergent and grassroots nature of the struggle: what happened in the arc of this whole thing is that it was extremely grass-roots and it then got immediately choreo- graphed by institutional politics, particu- larly by the larger unions and the democratic party. . . any militant or rad- ical actions got redirected in to recall pol- itics and party political discourse. (lane hall, overpass light brigade, interviewed april ) this is a point that is reiterated powerfully elsewhere (conatz, ) and it speaks to the tension in holding together a coalition of actors whose experiences and chosen rep- ertoires of action are divergent beyond a protest or march through which to illustrate what de nardo ( ) and della porta and local economy ( ) at j b priestley library on october , lec.sagepub.comdownloaded from http://lec.sagepub.com/ diani ( ) call ‘the logic of numbers’. as these authors suggest the logic behind such protests ‘is the same as that behind repre- sentative democracy’ (della porta and diani, : ) namely, it suggests that the majority outside the capitol building are not being represented by the majority inside. it was therefore inevitable that given the option to recall the governor and to prove this ‘logic’, those whose frame- work of reference was institutional politics would pursue such an option. the dilemma in wisconsin however was that the repertoires of collective action deployed, had from the beginning, involved more militant and creative tactics, including occupations, and wildcat strikes and the ‘collective effervescence’ this produced would inevitably be curtailed as the tactics turned back towards the familiar strategy of petitioning for an election. alternatively, an unsuccessful attempt at a recall motion could diminish the numerical logic for change and might well have irrevocably split the movement, diminishing the cap- acity for mobilisation established through the networks of opposition that had emerged. the desire to avoid such a split was a significant motivating factor given the breadth of support for the uprising and despite vocal criticisms of the recall strategy the resulting effort by activists across all groups demonstrated a significant commitment to maintaining unity amidst diversity. the recall motion required a huge invest- ment of energy by the activists concerned, as they returned to their own localities to raise the petition required, but it also pro- vided an organised platform for the con- tinuation of the struggle and further potential for tactical innovation. indeed, one of the most notable outcomes was a new protest repertoire, the tactic of ‘light brigading’, the use of illuminated signs held by activists on various overpasses during the long dark nights of the wisconsin winter. this technique was invented and pioneered by members of what latterly became the ‘overpass light brigade’ who consider their activities as establishing a ‘people’s bandwidth’ and it has since been adopted by ‘light brigade’ chapters across the us and internationally. the effort for the recall across civil society organisations in the state demonstrated the depth of the uprising and after a mere thirty days the mobilisation for the recall motion collected nine hundred thousand signatures. this was roughly % of the eligible elect- orate and the equivalent of % of those that had voted in the previous election. in total, approximately four hundred thou- sand more than was required to trigger the election. although walker narrowly won the gubernatorial recall election, there were a further four senate recall elections, the outcome of which led to the democrats gaining control of the wisconsin senate. walker was also subsequently alleged to have been at the centre of a plan to illegally coordinate fundraising efforts with a number of outside conserva- tive groups to help him in the recall election and if proven, this would mean he had bypassed state election laws, an allegation that remains a live issue and is presently before the us supreme court. what’s fair? if the ‘common demand’ of the protesters as claimed by the mayor of madison was ‘fair- ness’ and this amounted to a defence of col- lective bargaining and opposition to cuts to education and public services, then it was a correspondingly opposed account of ‘fair- ness’ that was also claimed to be at the heart of scott walker’s assault on the status of public sector unions, most notably on the idea of compulsory membership of a trade union as a condition of employment, the so called ‘union’ or ‘closed’ shop. in the uk legislation designed to restrict closed chesters at j b priestley library on october , lec.sagepub.comdownloaded from http://lec.sagepub.com/ shops began with the employment act and the pre-entry closed shop was made unlawful ten years later under the employment act. however, in the us where union negotiated contracts, some- times called security agreements, have often been regarded as a bulwark for employers against strike action, it remains a requirement of some workplaces that employees join a union on taking up employment. alternatively, employees can make a ‘fair share’ payment to the union to cover the costs of collective bargaining conducted by the union, as the recognised representative of the workers and from which they are likely to be a beneficiary. the argument for such fair share pay- ments is founded in a classical argument from rational choice theory, namely the ‘free-rider’ paradox. olson ( ) attempted to explain why a rational egoistic person would participate in collective action, when they might benefit from such action irrespective of their participation. putting to one side the inherently problem- atic category of the ‘rational’, a classic for- mulation of this problem for rational choice theory is the example of union membership. why would a rational person entering a workplace join a union when wage increases and improvements to working conditions negotiated by the union would be received by all the workers, unionised or not? the somewhat conservative argument of the trade unions is that in delivering contracts that are mutually beneficial for employers (no strike arrangements), and employees (better pay and conditions), they incur costs that are covered by union dues and that those who are not paying such dues should consequently pay their ‘fair share’. it is the compulsory aspect of such pay- ments that walker highlighted as a threat to individual freedom and as workers being coerced in to paying union dues, some of which would be channelled to sup- port democrat politicians. walker thereby framed the terms of the conflict as his opposition to politically motivated work- place organizing, proposing instead the ‘right to work’. olson ( ) responds to the ‘free rider’ paradox by formulating a ‘logic of collective action’, which argues that actors engage in collective action when there are selective benefits to be gained from such participa- tion. he distinguishes between collective and selective benefits, and argues that where a collective actor is sufficiently large that a benefit will accrue to those outside its membership regardless of their actions, the rational individual is indeed unlikely to par- ticipate. however, selective benefits that are contingent upon participation could also explain processes of mobilisation, because they allow an individual to rationalise col- lective action in terms of individual gain. in the example of union membership, these benefits can include acceptance by fellow workers, combined with an acknowledge- ment of the self-interest in the union’s main- taining its bargaining position, or because of certain tangible selective benefits such as those now being offered by unions, including legal assistance, professional development education, or certification for teaching staff, etc. the obvious problem with olson’s thesis is its tendency to express motivation in purely instrumental terms, and it has been criticised on these grounds (hirschmann, ). however, the imple- mentation of the budget repair bill, other- wise known as act has forced many unions to address some of the self-interest motivations that olsen highlights, as one union organiser puts it: if there is a silver lining in act , we have had to really build value in our members for why they have to join a union, because now it’s a decision they can make. as a union we have had to switch from a con- tract model to actually organizing or members. . . so now we have to educate our members about why they have to be local economy ( ) at j b priestley library on october , lec.sagepub.comdownloaded from http://lec.sagepub.com/ in a union. % of our members have signed up. (joe brusky, union official for the milwaukee chapter of the wisconsin education association council (weac), interviewed april ) whilst act has inevitably and severely impacted trade union membership across the public sector, its presentation by republicans as an unmitigated victory for freedom of choice is questionable. their argument was that many union members were coerced into membership and that this was unfair to those who wanted to retain their full earnings and not pay union dues or fair share payments. in the context of a neoliberal austerity plan where health and pension contributions for work- ers would also be increased, walker’s expectation was that the opportunity to off-set some of these increases by avoiding union dues would be an overwhelmingly tempting proposition. after all what good is a union defeated, a union without recog- nition or the power to bargain collectively? putting these questions to trade unionists, community activists and others elicited some interesting responses: we may have lost our collective bargain- ing but we haven’t lost collective action, and collective action is how we win things, we can as a group of teachers still do things collectively and still win those same fights. . . we’ve been successful and we’ve won victories. (joe brusky, union official for the milwaukee chapter of the wisconsin education association council (weac), interviewed april ) so i agree a political scientist would see it as a defeat, they would look at the political efficacy, the historian, however, would say ‘‘yes, but history’s not over.’’ we can see it in the socio-poetic configurations, we see it all the time, if we have a black lives matter rally or an education rally, a lot of the people active and organising are people we know from the uprising. the uprising feels ongoing, these feel like new manifestations of the ruptures, but i see them as very much part of the same thing. (lane hall, overpass light brigade, interviewed april ) conclusion: fighting the ‘fairness’ of austerity – the rise of social unionism ‘the daily, months-long cooperation between the madison and state police, fire- fighters, teachers, construction workers, students and homeless people far surpasses the momentary links between ‘‘teamsters and turtles’’ at the wto protests in seattle in .’ (hayden, ) tom hayden’s argument that what hap- pened in wisconsin was at least, if not more important, than the mass mobilisation against the wto in is an interesting one. the movement that was building before the wto protests and the movement those protests helped to shape, reconfigured links between organised labour and envir- onmentalists, it helped stall the wto nego- tiating process and empowered some of the smaller countries in their negotiations by providing them with allies in the street (chesters and welsh, ). if the uprising in wisconsin is to be judged to have an equivalent impact, then it will be because of the example of social unionism it provides, and because of the learning that emerges regarding opposition to austerity narratives and the mobilising potential of socio-political affects. by this, i mean recog- nition that the affective dimension of politics, here elaborated through a folk memory of the wisconsin idea and the tradition of pro- gressivism, can provide a real impetus towards sustained resistance. intuitions of fairness, shared feelings of injustice, informal solidarities, friendships and common cul- tural experiences can be as important in mobilising people as specific opposition to particular policies or legislation, and chesters at j b priestley library on october , lec.sagepub.comdownloaded from http://lec.sagepub.com/ maintaining and developing capacity for mobilisation can only be sustained in this way: ‘it’s hard to think of the movement as a fail- ure, when before there’s a group of people who were just so apolitical and then after it there’s this huge network of people who are now active.’ (joe brusky, union official for the milwaukee chapter of the wisconsin education association council (weac), interviewed april, ) ‘friendship too, the personal richness of radically expanding my social circle to this massively diverse group, personally this has been hugely rewarding, and that’s hard to quantify.’ (lane hall, overpass light brigade, interviewed april, ) the mobilising potential of affective relation- ships for social movements has long been recognised (jasper, ), and the capacity of these affects to shape patterns of cogni- tion, build networks and sustain emergent and dynamic movements has also been described in some detail elsewhere (chesters and welsh, ; protevi, ). the dilemma arises when we consider what fram- ing strategy might multiply the power of these socio-political affects and how the rela- tionship between the different organisational cultures of political parties, trade unions and social movements shape how opposition to austerity narratives can be framed. in considering the concept of ‘fairness’, it is important to be aware of its mutability as a frame. this is a concept that has an intuitive appeal and might appear to offer leverage against the framing of austerity, particularly given the disproportionate impacts of auster- ity measures upon the poorest and most dis- advantaged. yet, politically, ‘fairness’, as is demonstrated in the wisconsin experience, is an empty signifier, and one that can be invested with meaning from the left and right. scott walker began his campaign for governor with his own ‘brown bag movement’ encouraging voters to pack their own lunch in order to ‘afford wisconsin taxes’. he also made much of holding on to his ageing car, a ‘ saturn with more than one hundred thousand miles on it’, as well as taking a voluntary pay cut as a milwaukee county executive, all of which he suggested were actions intended to keep government spending down (stein and marley, : ). whilst these things might be considered trivial, and his opposition certainly treated them as such, they invoke a narrative of sac- rifice that enables the idea of fairness to sub- sequently be employed against those defending what are perceived to be estab- lished interests. the narrative becomes ‘we’ve all made sacrifices, so it’s only fair that those in the public sector should do so too’. in the uk the equivalent narrative of recent conservative and coalition govern- ments has been ‘we’re all in it together’, an idea which was ridiculed for being espoused by eton educated millionaires, and yet the idea of fairness underpinning a common pur- pose and that purpose requiring cuts to social expenditure has indeed gained traction. analysis of frame ‘alignment’ – the ability of political actors to align the views of a wider public with their own – provides us with a means for understanding the cognitive work movements do in elaborating symbolic appeals that can mobilise sections of a popu- lation. often this can occur through reference to a shared cultural heritage or other com- monality such as a history of progressivism or the more ambiguous concept of the wisconsin idea. as della porta and diani ( : ) have argued, frame alignment ‘pre- supposes a dynamic relationship between the development of a movement and the cultural heritage of both the country in which it oper- ates, and of its institutions’. therefore, in con- ducting frame analysis we engage in a means of interrogating the processes by which a movement accesses cultural resources and attempts to produce interpretations that res- onate with a broader constituency. local economy ( ) at j b priestley library on october , lec.sagepub.comdownloaded from http://lec.sagepub.com/ i would argue therefore that the claim by madison mayor paul soglin that the common concern underlying the wisconsin wave of protest was ‘fairness’ only tells a small part of the story. as tom hayden argues, ‘fairness’ can substitute for concerns about collective bargaining it can also indi- cate dissatisfaction with corporate influence in politics and with the austerity agenda of cuts to education and public services. however, the concept of fairness is also hos- tage to the structural and situational context in which such judgments are made, and by using it as a tool for mobilisation movements can inadvertently accept limita- tions upon their capacity to mount a struc- tural critique. if austerity is the context within which the determination of fair out- comes is to be made, movements might well find themselves embroiled in the discussion of individual choice and personal sacrifice, alongside a set of moral presumptions and judgments that can undermine solidarity. the strength of the wisconsin protests then was the ability of those involved to re-frame it as an ‘uprising’. as lane hall, an activist with the overpass light brigade puts it: ‘using the word uprising is a way that the grassroots have of reclaiming the energy of that moment, that space, it wasn’t the great recall campaign’ (interviewed april ). uprisings are not the raison d’etre of trade unions, nor of political parties, but as the prevailing political opportunity structure, fashioned by neoliberalism, reduces the trad- itional repertoires of trade union pressure, then the evolution of social movement unionism seems inevitable. in the uk we have already seen the unite union recom- mending to members that the words ‘‘so far as may be lawful’’ are removed from the rules governing the union’s actions, given the proposal of the government to raise the bar for strike actions above a simple majority of those voting. in wisconsin whilst union membership has dropped in the public sector, there is evidence of strategic innovation including teaching unions funding the ‘release’ of democratically elected teachers from class- room duties in order to conduct union activ- ities, and with it the rise of a significantly more grassroots and engaged cadre of union activists. as one released member, joe brusky, put it to me: ‘before the uprising we might get thirty to forty members at an action, now we get three or four hundred who consistently come out.’ as in much ana- lysis of social movements, the time frame in which that analysis takes place is often a decisive factor in determining judgments about its success or failure. in this instance, it would appear many have accepted that ‘fairness’ is unlikely to be a guiding factor in interactions between civil society and the state government, and as such a turn towards long-term resistance has taken hold, as joe brusky asserts: political wins are one thing, but this year we’re beginning to see the fruits of those early movements, black lives matter com- bining with the fight for , and immigra- tion rights people holding firm to that movement as well, we’re seeing a lot of these movements converging. there’s no way you can have such a mass movement and not see things coming from it. we’ve just been looking at too short a timetable before now. . . (joe brusky, union official for the milwaukee chapter of the wisconsin education association council (weac), interviewed april ) declaration of conflicting interests the author(s) declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. funding the author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article. chesters at j b priestley library on october , lec.sagepub.comdownloaded from http://lec.sagepub.com/ references agamben g ( ) state of exception. chicago: university of chicago press. bunyan p and diamond j ( ) approaches to reducing poverty and inequality in the uk: a study of civil society initiatives and fairness commissions. newcastle: webb memorial trust. chesters g and welsh i ( ) complexity and social movements: multitudes at the edge of chaos. london: routledge. chesters g and welsh i ( ) social movements: the key concepts. london: routledge. clawson d ( ) 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www.thenation.com/article/first-amendment-remedies-how-wisconsin-workers-grabbed-constitution-back-right-wing-roya/ www.thenation.com/article/first-amendment-remedies-how-wisconsin-workers-grabbed-constitution-back-right-wing-roya/ www.thenation.com/article/first-amendment-remedies-how-wisconsin-workers-grabbed-constitution-back-right-wing-roya/ www.tuc.org.uk/about-bill www.tuc.org.uk/about-bill http://lec.sagepub.com/ disclaimed or reclaimed? muslim refugee youth and belonging in the age of hyperbolisation cawo abdi cawo abdi is an associate professor of sociology at the university of minnesota, where her research interests include migration, race, gender, class, islam and development studies. her forthcoming book, elusive jannah: the somali diaspora and a borderless muslim identity (university of minnesota press, ) is based on research conducted in south africa, the united arab emirates and the usa. her articles have appeared in numerous journals, including development south africa and signs. she is currently engaged in a new project on the educational attainment and school choices of new migrants. correspondence to: cawo abdi, department of sociology, social sciences, university of minnesota, th ave. s., minneapolis, mn , usa. email: cabdi@umn.edu abstract using data derived chiefly from the somali community in minneapolis, minnesota, this paper explores the challenges confronting its youth. the findings are the result of an ongoing ethnographic engagement with this community that has been conducted for over a decade. stressing that marginalisation is due to the combined impact of race, religion and class, the article points to the factors that have led some youth in the direction of drugs and crime while others have opted for radical islam. in the post- / era of securitisation, with evidence of over-policing of the somali community, the challenges to incorporation are intensified due to the ongoing othering process of this refugee group. keywords: refugees; radicalisation; racialisation; policing; intersectionality; belonging; securitisation; youth; class; muslim; race; religion on sunday june at about : pm, allamagan mohamed abdullahi, a years old man, was killed in the somali residential areas of cedar-riverside in minneapolis (sawyer ), just across from the west bank of the university of minnesota. this murder, still under investigation, adds to dozens of other murders involving young somali men in minnesota over the last few years, the majority remaining unresolved (mckinney , hirsi ).\ allamagan in somali translates to one who seeks protection from allah (allah- magan). the name of this victim has little meaning in the american setting. ironically, like all refugees, the majority of somalis who settled in minnesota and other american cities came to this country to seek protection from the violence and turmoil that tore their homeland apart. in the somali civil war, it was men who were mostly targeted for clan-revenge killings, while women confronted multiple forms of gender-based violence (abdi ). somali refugees thus often assumed that physical, economic and emotional security would be achieved with migration, once they set foot on the land of the free. this is of course true for millions of other migrants and refugees still beckoned by lazarus’ depiction of the lady of liberty: ‘give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore …’ ( ). noteworthy also is that allamagan happens to be the son of a celebrity that the majority of somalis consider one of the top two or three playwrights, poets and actors in somali history. mahamud abdullahi isse, known also as sangub, lived in minnesota for over two decades and is the author, producer and actor of a highly regarded play, ‘qabyo’ among many other famed pieces. fatefully, qabyo deals with the challenges and cultural dissonance that emerge with settlement in a western context and the types of gender and intergenerational conflicts that life in a new country creates for somali families. a key theme in the qabyo series (two plays) deals with gender ‘transgressions’. these transgressions are said to stem from somali women’s access to novel legal and financial resources in the welfare state system in north america and western europe. the play depicts how some somali women ‘abuse’ these newly found rights to push for major changes in gender power imbalances in somali culture. examples that made this play a hit with somalis every-where include women refusing to let men off the hook from childcare and housework tasks that were exclusively women’s domain in somali society (abdi ). more importantly for this paper, however, are the themes regarding youth transgressions and the cultural shifts of younger generations. here the music tastes (gangster rap), clothing habits (sagging pants), interracial dating and revolt against parental authority are highlighted. sangub satirises the challenges intrinsic in migration, which he argued were unforeseen by those who have made it to the coveted western world, and unforeseeable by the hundreds of thousands of somalis stuck in refugee camps in kenya, yemen and djibouti, nor the millions of somalis internally displaced in the homeland who still dream of migration to the west. in this paper, the life and death of this young man serve as a metaphor for the plight of young somali refugee men (read muslim, black) and the over-policing and profiling that these men experience in the post- / and the black-lives-matter context. current public discussions on somali male youth revolve around their potential criminality – suspicions of drug and sex trafficking – as well as the newer ‘crisis’ of radicalisation, something that draws state and federal interventions and national and global media attention. this paper advances the debates on migration and racialisation in the usa as well as the impact of national and global war on terror for muslim migrant refugee youth. violence such as allamagan’s untimely death in urban america is illustrative of a form of inclusion for muslim, black refugee youth into racialised american society. somali youth deaths, which are often suspected to be in the hands of other somali gang members, are anchored in the racialisation and institutional racism that persist in the usa, violence that is normalised as characteristic of inner- city america. i argue that young somali men’s deaths in gang-related violence (somali on somali) rarely receive the necessary attention and resources, while the global pol-itical rhetoric on the war on terror disproportionately criminalises somalis in the usa, and somali male youth in particular. the racialisation process that incorporates new migrant and refugees of colour into the narrow categories that prevail in the usa (black-white), and the unrestrained power of homeland security and the federal bureau of investigations (fbi) agencies are shaping the definitions of what american liberty means for new muslim refugees of colour such as somali-american youth, with serious ramifications for the settlement experiences of newest groups in the usa. the paper builds on over a decade-long ethnographic work with the somali community (abdi , , , ). i have extensive data across sectors and generations, detailed in these publications, drawing from hundreds of interviews not only with somalis in the usa, but also with those in various parts of the globe (somalia, kenya, united arab emirates and south africa). finally, i draw from secondary newspaper coverage of the somali settlement challenges and opportunities and the ongoing media coverage of the somali refugee youth ‘crisis’ and radicalisation prevention initiatives in minnesota. the intention is to provide a critical portrait of the intersections of race, religion and class for new migrant communities in the us context. racialisation in twenty-first-century usa if and how migrants are (mis)incorporated to the american ‘nation’ has always been raced and classed (lowe , sanchez , foner and fredrickson , portes and rumbaut , bonilla- silva and mayorga ). the earliest waves of migrants seeking their fortunes in this new country were confronted with multiple opportunities and challenges, often contingent on when they arrived, where they came from and what they brought with them. the majority european migrants among the earliest arrivals were thus differentiated not only by class, with the majority’s migration decisions shaped by multiple factors (economic, political and religious), but also by race as understood in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. religion was also a key fracturing ideology that plagued europe for centuries, while region of origin mattered even for those leaving from areas that eventually became one nation state (gans , gabaccia and ottanelli , brodkin ). while major shifts have occurred in our understanding and practices of race, narrow constructions of who belongs, who marginally belongs, who does not and cannot belong to the ‘nation’ and who qualifies as american prevail (lowe , bonilla-silva and mayorga ). not surprisingly, non- white groups continue to be viewed as other, permanent outsiders (lowe ). more recent work on group relations and the construction of race illustrate the complex shifts occurring in the usa and the diversity of experiences within groups that are often lumped together (ong ). but what persists is the rigidity of structural forms of exclusion, and at times violence, subjected to some groups, even when they are embraced as part of the nation’s fabric as citizens (roberts , bonilla-silva and mayorga ). the exclusion of many people of colour from the ‘imagined community’ of the us nation confounds the recent population trends and demographic shifts predicted for the next half-century when the ‘anglos’– who have enjoyed both numerical and political power dominance in the american mosaic – are to become a minority; a trend already realised in some major cities in the usa (alba et al. ). more recent migrants and refugees whose national, ethnic or racial identity was not shaped by the narrow but hegemonic black-white binary in the usa shed light on the intersectionality of race, class and religion in the boundary-making and boundary-maintenance processes of post- / us society. some of these groups work around the margins of what is permissible to avoid reductionist categories that have real ramifications for the life chances of future generations. for example, research on west indian migrants shows that these groups take great pains to distinguish themselves from african-americans, with which they are often grouped and sometimes share residential proximity, to exercise a form of optional ethnicity in the rigid american racialisation schemes (waters ). so though the west indians share ‘racial’ characteristics with african- americans, their history and presence in the usa are dis-tinct, and the first generations’ efforts to overplay this distinction is understood to shield them and their children from overt and covert biases that white america subjects to african-americans (waters ). this distancing of course reproduces the racial stereotypes of inferiority of african-americans, further reinforcing them (pierre ). boundary-making in the usa is thus both fluid and rigid: more fluid for some and harder for others (gans , waters , , ). these boundaries are most rigid, though not absolute, for non-white groups as the privileges intrinsic in white-ness, europeanness, in america continue to be highly guarded (alba et al. ). with class boundaries, new migrants with the least skills and education therefore enter highly racialised and segregated spaces. portes and zhou’s( ) segmented assimilation argument – that new migrants become incorporated into the segments of the society that most resembles their socio-economic and racial characteristics –can be applied to new refugee groups from various parts of the globe. poor refugees of colour join america’s inner city, where african-americans are over-represented. such communities have for decades suffered social ills including poverty and disproportionate incarceration of men, with enormous moral costs for these communities as well as the nation in general (roberts , wakefield and uggen ). muslim refugees in the age of security in addition to race, religion now also serves as an explicit definer of group dynamics in the usa. faith as a categorising tool is as complex and as fluid as race, with religious groups often encompassing great diversity. while religious affiliation is often not visible to the eye, ways of identifying individuals’ faith abound – such as the name on your passport or the birth place as proxy identifier of religion. in that sense then, just like race, it can lead to sweeping generalisation and institutionalised exclusion of whole groups. in ways that are reminiscent of how jews were always suspect (and continue to remain so to a lesser extent) in europe and elsewhere until recently, or catholics in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries in the usa (moore , brodkin ), muslims are the ‘religious outsiders’ (moore ) of the twenty-first century in the usa, the result of the / terrorist attacks and also the global geopolitics of the post-cold war era. political decisions following these attacks produced discourses that define all muslims, whether on american soil or elsewhere, as potential perpetrators of bloodshed, as a category to be feared posing existential threats to western values (rothe and muzzatti ). fear of terrorism – now eternally defined as perpetuated by muslims – anchors the ‘politics of fear’ that dominates public and policy discourses in the usa (altheide ). as a result, american law enforcement agencies with unprecedented powers conduct sweeping policing within muslim institutions (mosques, schools, homes and businesses). overt and covert data collection measures instituted in the name of security are affecting all americans and undermine civil liberties enshrined in the constitution (shamsi and toomey ). but these violations have greater ramifications for some groups. the war on terror has ushered a new era in american security discourses, with myriad forms of justifications pushed through in the name of securing the usa. fear remains central to how such policies are justified, with potential violence in us soil often articulated to justify any measures taken to counter terrorism. as such, terrorism – and especially the attacks of / – enabled political actors to expand the definitions of the situation to all americans as victims. moreover, all those fighting to protect actual and potential victims should be permitted to do their work, unimpeded by any concerns about civil liberties or adding context and complexity to the simple analysis that was offered: evil people were attacking good people, and evil had to be destroyed. (altheide , p. ) not surprisingly, extensive scrutiny and profiling of muslims by law enforcement agencies are accompanied by intensive media coverage, which in turn influences general attitudes towards muslims. distrust towards, and even fear of, muslims abounds with many surveys on american attitudes to diverse religious groups reporting that muslims fare worse than other groups (pew research , ). in one of these surveys, pew reports that ‘ per cent of americans admit to feeling some prejudice toward followers of islam’ ( ). these negative attitudes are the product of systematic policing and profiling by the central intelligence agency, fbi and homeland security’s transportation security association (aclu ). as such, while racism in its most blatant form is illegal in the usa, securitisation and its demands for discriminate treatment of certain groups have become acceptable in the war on terror. despite civil liberties organisations’ outcry of the types of multiple abuses that prevail, secrecy as well as abuses anchor policies and practices around the war on terror (dakwar , shamsi and toomey ). the above discussion of the nefarious forms of racial and religious differentiation prevailing in the usa serves as an entry point to the contextual dynamics shaping new refugee groups, such as somalis’, settlement. two trends that i want to pay closer attention to in this paper are the disproportionate criminalisation, incarceration and policing of black youth in the usa – race – and the post- / patriotic acts and subsequent homeland security interventions into muslim communities and their institutions – religion. class is intrinsically embedded in both of these categories, as we will see below, but is often not as explicit as race and religion. in such arrangements then, how do we detangled the sub-national and supranational identifications that are often reified in the racialised and securitised us milieu, from the complex identities that new refugees and migrants bring with them? how do youth and their community leaders react to what amounts to panic around muslim refugee youth, racialisation and radicalisation? disclaimed and reclaimed? somali youth, whose lived experiences often straddle between nations and cultures, become part of the newest others as black and muslim refugees in the usa. whether these youth are born and come of age in the usa, kenya or somalia has little bearing for how they are identified in the american context. how they might identify can also reproduce the hegemonic categories embedded in centuries-old american history shaped by slavery as well as more recent discourses around the ‘clash of civilisations’. salience of racial and religious differences emerges as consequential for muslim refugee youth in the post- / us context. immersed in the ‘disclaimed’ persistent othering and racialisation of poor americans of colour affect new migrants and refugees identified as ‘black’. sociological research has for decades shown how race, class and gender, among other axes of inequality, shape the life chances of americans. structural forces or patterns of practice that change very slowly continue old and new forms of discrimination and prejudice against those holding the least power in society. as such, the continuing segregation in cities and towns in the usa reproduces multiple forms of hierarchies transmitted through the generations (massey and denton , peterson and krivo , brunson , rugh and massey , wake-field and uggen ). these settings continue to be plagued by over-policing, with the war on drugs, war on delinquency and the stop-and-frisk policies producing over-incarcerated and traumatised communities of colour all over the usa (aclu ).\ inner-city america now houses most somali refugee families who spent years and even decades in camps and who lost any property or assets that they might have owned in the devastating civil war in somalia. a community leader in ohio underscored the need and the unforeseen consequence of somali families’ pursuits of securing subsidised housing, as their low incomes cannot cover the exorbitant rental costs in middle-class residential areas. as such, this community leader commented on the double-edged nature of inner-city housing for somali families: many somalis believe that they are riding a high horse and accomplished something great once they receive government housing. for these people it’s a great assistance as it allows them to afford the rent. but when you look at it closely, it has become a great disadvantage for them. this is especially so for their children and the way these kids are being reared and the negative part of the [american] culture they are being exposed to–roble-teacher, columbus. (in abdi ) refugees thus remain cognisant of the need for affordable housing. but if lucky enough to get such subsidised housing, the fear of inner-city life for them and their children is not lost to them. as such, roble’s comments regarding how such housing entail somali children being reared within the ‘negative part of the american culture’ references the stigma and stereotyped perceptions that mainstream americans, as well as new migrants and refugees, hold towards african-american- dominated inner-city residential areas, and the types of social ills associated with these areas. residing in the inner city shapes how many somalis become integrated in us society. these new- comers become immersed in america’s structural racism, regardless of how they might reject the label ‘black’ as identity, an identity inconsistent with somalis’ sense of self. ‘i am somali, i am muslim, i am african, i am arab’, are identifiers that the first-generation somalis were familiar with. some of the second and . generation embrace a ‘black’ identity, not out of choice per se, but because that is how they know they are perceived in the larger society. community leaders also embrace this label as an alliance-building strategy with other minority communities, though the not- so-innocent black label in america is never lost to the majority across the generations. while some families choose to seek housing in suburbs, either in market rate rentals or with section eight housing vouchers which permit more choice in where one resides while still qualifying for subsidies, the majority of somali refugee youth attend schools that are somewhat segregated, with some going to schools dominated my minorities, as clear from the excerpt below: the high school that i went to was extremely diverse. it was a school of about student, but only per cent were caucasian; the rest were somali, mexican, hmong, and like mixed races, all these different things. (yasin, minneapolis) such segregation is consistent with class and racial divides in american public education. somalis who experienced decades-old political turmoil and long stays in refugee camps thus enter a new american reality. as a consequence, it is not surprising that relations between law enforcement agencies and new groups such as somalis resemble that found in poor urban america. a white minnesotan woman who has worked with somali youth in the cedar-riverside area for over a decade recounted examples consistent with the tense police–community relations that have recently occupied our airwaves around police brutality, harassment and abuse of young men of colour. anne recounted how such contact is experienced by somali youth on a daily basis. talking about a specific young somali man, she stated that: he actually didn’t have a bad record – pretty much, i mean, the things he had on his record were really minor type things. but, he was having bad experiences and the police had labelled him a gang member. the police actually, um, have a black binder that they carry around with them. anytime they could take the pictures of any of the kids around here they created their own mug shot type book and labelled them all as gang members. and so this guy, he would be picked up all the time. they would even do things like after there had been a sexual assault of an indian [native american] woman over by little earth by she said it was by a somali man. so there was all this tension. so the police picked up this guy on cedar avenue and brought him over there and dropped him off, like, franklin avenue. and so he came back …i was in the neighbourhood at the time … and he came back just furious because i mean that was really dangerous for him. so that kind of stuff … . (anne, minneapolis, ) staff who work in programmes around the cedar-riverside area detail the heavy-handing policing and the guilty-until-proven-innocent approach that some law enforcement officials use with somali and east african communities in minneapolis and st. paul. the around-the-clock policing subjected to this area divides the wider somali leadership, with some demanding more police presence in light of the incidence of homicides – such as that detailed in the opening paragraph of this paper. others however argue that police presence exacerbates the security condition, as it installs fear and further reinforces the perception that cedar-riverside residential area, which is home to thousands of somalis, is a no-go zone. this stigma closes off the somali community from the mainstream society that they are a part of and apart from. highlighting this tenuous relationship with law enforcement in minnesota, anne also commented on over-policing: so we have the riverside plaza security, the minneapolis police, the metro transit police, the park police, the u of m police and augsburg [college] security sometimes come through too. yep, yea. and yet we had to hire a security officer (laughter) because none of them want the responsibility of … what they all know to be true is that you can’t control what people do and none of them want to be here when something happens because they all believe something will happen again because we can’t control what people are going to do. now, you know, it would be great if that didn’t happen, if kids didn’t have guns and didn’t have rival-ries where they decided to use guns, you know? but they do. and they’re angry, and they’re poor, and they’re in place that doesn’t accept them very well. and a place meaning the united states and that gets into the whole immigration process and multiple identities and structural racism and the school system that doesn’t really care if they graduate meeting standards * … +. the above assessment of what is happening with somali refugee youth is no different from the widely decried experiences of the black men in inner-city usa. as western and wilderman put it, inner-city neighbourhoods continue to be chronically short of legitimate work and embedded in a violent and illegal market for drugs. high rates of joblessness and crime, and a flourishing street trade in illegal drugs, combined with harsher criminal penalties and intensified urban policing to produce high incarceration rates among young unskilled men in inner cities ( , p. ). the residential areas housing most somali refugee youth fit this characterisation. somali parents, most of whom are not as attuned to the racial history of the usa and whose language and financial resources limit the types of cultural capital required to advocate on behalf of their children, remain confounded by their children’s’ challenges. socio-economic struggles and racialised experiences inevitably exacerbate other forms of settlement issues that all migrants in a new country encounter. for somalis and for somali youth in particular, these challenges occur within the post- / context, where they have become prime suspects of radicalisation. reclaimed: radical groups beckoning a headline in the star tribune, a major minneapolis newspaper, painted all somalis as lurking terrorists. such coverage represents the type of fearmongering common in the rhetoric around securitisation in the usa. this headline –‘on battling recruitment in the land of , terrorists’– not only calls for more policing of those deemed danger to the nation, but also for policies that undermine civil liberties of citizens and residents (aclu ). former minnesota senator norm coleman perversely twisted minnesota’s ‘ , ’ lakes metaphor. it is ironic that somalis descended on this north star state in the first place attracted by its ‘ opportunities’ (the economist ) as poor refugees who themselves fled violence. pushing for more efforts to stop somali youth recruitment by extremist groups, and linking national- and state-level anti-terror initiatives, coleman addressed his comments to minnesota governor mark dayton stating ‘it is time for the governor and the legislature to raise more than concern about our potential status as the land of , terrorists’. as the number of people who are known to have left to join islamic state for iraq and syria (isis) from minnesota in the last year or so is estimated to be around , mostly somalis but including some non-somalis, the usage of , illustrates the hyperbolic narratives dominating this subject, and terrorism and islam in general. as others have already suggested, we witness a panic, with those deemed as other – muslims – identified as the culprit or potential danger to ‘us’. it is obvious that the rhetoric reproduced in various forms by most of the national and even inter-national media remains disproportionate to the threat that muslims pose on american security, with data clearly showing that far-right terrorism poses much higher danger to americans (washington post , scott ). congressional hearings such as that initiated by peter king feed media frenzy on an exaggerated danger of muslims in the usa plotting terror attacks (homeland security ). thus, the national and international intensive media attention on minnesota has given face to ‘home-grown terrorism’, with perceived threats and fear of extremism transformed from one that our government protects us through foreign policy interventions in iraq, afghanistan, somalia or yemen, to one where fear of our neighbours is whipped and thus justifies profiling of americans and non-americans in the usa (shamsi and toomey). unbounded scrutiny, interrogation and intimidation entail deleterious ramifications for the civil liberties of americans (rothe and muzzatti ), but even more so for newcomers who are already confronting other forms of criminalisation in their new settlement. ‘minnesota is ground zero in the recruitment of mostly young somali men and women by radical islamic terrorist groups whose principal aim is to attack and destroy america and its allies’, coleman, a former senator, wrote in this star tribune opinion piece ( ). identifying minnesota as the epicentre of recruitment is consistent with homeland security agencies’ ongoing initiatives within this area. minneapolis-st. paul is one of three cities (with boston and los angeles) identified for a national pilot project to countering violent extremism (cve) (white house ). though cve sounds neutral in its focus on all forms of violent extremist, there is no question that the word left out as the primary focus of this initiative is ‘islamic’ extremism. somali community leaders desperately try to figure out this fast-paced and complex web of policies that at once offer resources for programmes targeting inner-city muslim refugee youth, while simultaneously subjecting them to higher bar to prove their loyalty to america. as such, in a recent demonstration organised in front of minnesota state capitol in st. paul by somali organisations following the indictment of six somali men for trying to join isis, sadik warfa, the deputy director of somali diaspora, who spoke back to coleman’s claim, insisted that somalis belong to this nation: i want to make sure the media gets this message, this is not the land of , terrorists, this is the land of , good somali-americans! we are here to contribute. we’re not going to allow (you) to stigmatize us. we are standing with the families [of the young men indicted for trying to join isil] today as a proud community. so i want to make sure that you get this message, and i am sending this message to norm coleman and the star tribune! this is unacceptable! we can’t accept this! this is our country. in addition to the outcry above, there has also been some push back on initiatives such as cve. some muslim community advocates point out the contradictions intrinsic in public officials persecuting those accused of joining or planning to join islamic state of iraq and the levant (isil) and similar groups, while also disbursing funds intended for community programming to combat the lure of such organisations (muslim advocates , cair ). escalation of media coverage, programmes, fbi and homeland security-initiated community consultation events and competition for funding among somali and other muslim groups resulted in competing camps: some earnestly repro-duced the fear and became even more stringent provocateurs of the danger of (islamic) terrorism in our midst, while others expressed dismay at the profiling and victimisation these discourses entail for muslims in the usa. one community leader stated that many leaders feel that their hands became tied, as their organisation would be out of business if they refuse to be immersed in new initiatives proposed by security agencies. these micro dynamics are concurrent with the macro policy and militarily interventions in muslim nations-drone wars in afghanistan, yemen and somalia, for example – as highlighted by president obama’s speech in opening the cve conference in washington (hirschfeld ). the ‘terrorist inspired boundaries of the nation’s security now serve multiple imperatives, both domestic and foreign’ (rothe and muzzatti , p. ). thus the geopolitics of american foreign policy is also shaping muslim refugee lives in the usa. in addition to the challenges of settlement and integration that all migrant and refugees experience, the somali community and its youth thus become immersed in the politics of terrorism, security and patriotism. visits by fbi agents and presence and announcements about foiled attempts of somali youth planning to join al shabaab or isil are now omnipresent in local and national papers (e.g. see, radio france internationale , hosenball and bailey for reuters, elliot , scott for new york times, the economist , saiba for japanese newspapers). the limelight on the somali community has resulted in great apprehension. contact with law enforcement agencies is avoided, with profound distrust fed by the types of abuses and even torture subjected to muslims accused of terrorist-related offences (dakwar ). contact between law enforcement agents and the youth is tense, as highlighted by this excerpt from an interview with a cedar-riverside somali refugee man in his early s: they [fbi agents] wanted answers and they wanted them now and they were pursuing that by any means necessary. they were harassing; um they would come take them [young somali men] out of their classrooms. and they went about it the wrong way because i know from that our community is pretty tight knit community and we don’t like outside influence, especially if the outsider is coming in with aggression. we completely shut down. we are like ‘nope! they want something, something bad for us’. they *fbi+ were very very disrespectful! i’ve heard of many such incidents. i’ve seen incidents where they abuse their power. as a community we don’t understand! yes, we migrated to this country but we have rights! all you need to do is be educated about your rights. say ‘hey, i don’t think you are supposed to do that’. and i don’t know, but once you know your rights you can questions things. but if you don’t, you are kind of helpless. you just go along with what everybody says. uh! i mean it has gotten better, because they try now to get information in a more subtle ways, i guess, but the relationship is still severed. there is no way you can go back to that like ‘hey, we are the fbi, let us talk’. so there really isn’t a relationship to build on, i think. the assessment above of the relationship between the somali community and the fbi and other law enforcement officers (the police, for example) represents something that many somali leaders also express, though often wary of sharing this information publicly. the push to ‘collaborate’ to fit into the ‘national’ mould makes community leaders wary of criticising the heavy-handed ways that the fbi collects intelligence. any contact with homeland security and fbi personnel thus raises apprehension of the whole community, and somali community leadership is becoming further and further fractured as some are suspected of serving their own interests over that of the community by becoming ‘informants’ or traitors aligned with security agencies. conclusion allamagan – like most of the somali-american refugee young men who either die violently in the usa (canada, uk and other settlements) or fall prey to extremism – was born in somalia, but left as infant, spent a few years in kenya and came of age in minnesota. while his heritage was somali, he was an american, a product of minnesota public schools. he was one of a small number of somali men who grabbed the educational opportunities to be the first in his family to obtain higher education. alas, that achievement was not sufficient, as he died violently, with slim chance that his killers will be brought to justice. but hundreds and even thousands of other young men in his community confront the potential double burden of the lure of gangs and extremist groups as well as contact with institutions and policies that discriminate on the bases of race, religion and class. the repercussions of these policies are further cemented by zealous sensationalist local, national and global media. with an assault of such scale, we should worry about the prospects of many of the youth in this community and other communities sharing its racial and religious identity. the irony remains that refugees who made it to the usa continue to be perceived to have attained earthly eden by those they have left behind (abdi ). prior to the conflict, children born into prominent families such as allamagan might have died of accidental deaths, or incurable or undiagnosed diseases, but would most likely never have been involved in gangs or lived in residential areas deemed ‘dangerous’. the tragic ending of this young man counters what somali families sought in the usa. with the majority of somalis now defined by their refugee status, their recent migration, their inner-city housing, their religious identity and their vulnerability to extremist groups in the horn of africa or the middle east, there is a disconnect and confusion this community grabbles with. heavy on the hearts of many parents is not only the fear of gang violence, but also the fear of radicalisation and death in far-away places for their children. these two dangers are further exacerbated by constant harassment in the hands of law enforcement officials and overzealous media coverage. despite these bleak prognoses, the somali community leaders rightly underscore that the other-ing processes applied to this newest refugee group damage not only these young men, but also the wider minnesota and american community that they have joined. notes [ ] notwithstanding his place in somali literature, mr isse has left the usa under a cloud of suspicion, with allegations that he sexually abused a -year-old girl in the s. his criminal proceedings were never completed after his flight to the horn of africa, which resulted in his name being placed in the most wanted sex offenders list in the usa (pioneer press ). 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reckoning. nguyen’s pulitzer prize–winning novel, the sympathizer (grove/atlantic, ), calls—at times almost literally—for an interro- gation of the past. in it, and in his collection of nonfiction essays, nothing ever dies: vietnam and the memory of war (harvard, ), he explores how individuals, communities, and nations traffic in histories of colonial violence and racialized and sexualized power, as well as how they process loss to give structure and meaning to life in the present. in july , adriane lentz-smith interviewed the celebrated author, who shared his thoughts about the rela- tionship between fiction and nonfiction, the past and the present, and the ways in which narra- tives shape our sense of what was, what is, and what might be. viet thanh nguyen is a macarthur fellow, a guggenheim fellow, and university professor, aerol arnold chair of english, and professor of american studies and ethnicity, and comparative literature at the university of southern california, where he has won numerous awards for teach- ing and mentoring. born in ban me thuot (now buon me thuot), viet nam, he describes him- self as a refugee, first-generation college student, and beneficiary of affirmative action. in addition to writing and editing books and short stories, he also serves as a contributing writer for the new york times, and has published in numerous other outlets including the guardian, the atlantic, and ploughshares. his upcoming sequel to the sympathizer is entitled the committed. you were an academic before you were a fiction writer. why write a novel? my childhood ambition was to be a writer. i don’t know many people who want to grow up to be professors unless their parents were academics. in my case, i wanted to be a writer, and i then became an academic because i thought it was safe. but that was my day job, basically, and i took steps necessary to get and keep that day job. once i got tenure, i thought to myself, “i’m going to do exactly what i want to do, which is write fiction.” i wrote short stories. then my agent told me i had to write a novel, so that’s technically why i wrote a novel. but really, the ambition behind writing a novel is to tell a great story, but also to say something grand. that’s the kind of novelist i’d like to imagine myself being: one who says something grand, whether it’s about the human condition or politics or history or hopefully a combination of all those things. in the case of the sympathizer, i think that there was a certain amount of risk involved because i was still an academic and academics sometimes have a hard time under- standing the nonconventional. everybody, as far as i could tell, was patting me on the head and treating my writing as a kind of a hobby—even after the novel was published. only after the novel won prizes did people begin to concede that this was something legitimate, which is unfortunate. really, i believe in both enterprises, fiction and academic work. and i just wish that people on both sides would understand the validity of what everybody else does. © the author(s) . published by cambridge university press modern american history ( ), , – doi: . /mah. . downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog?doi= . /mah. . &domain=pdf https://www.cambridge.org/core i admire certain kinds of historians. the ones i like to read can tell a story. that is not true for all historians, but it’s almost certainly not true for most literary critics. many historians are crafting narratives, and i actually find that very inspirational. for example, i read this republic of suffering by drew faust before i wrote my second academic book, nothing ever dies. the book inspired me to think of how one can tell a story in academic nonfiction, and that was a crucial decision for me at the time. i love a novel full of ideas that understands how to work on the border, so within and outside of genre. that’s one of things that i appreciate about the sympathizer. i think that’s crucial. we’ve been talking implicitly about categories, fiction, nonfiction, acade- mia, creative writing or whatever you want to call it. but the stuff that interests me is the stuff that exists by crossing borders, by drawing from different things. the sympathizer, as you said, is a novel of ideas. it’s also, in my mind, like an academic novel, because i was trying to draw on various kinds of academic thinking and theories that have been important to me. likewise with the nonfiction or the academic writing that i do now. i can no longer be called a pure scholar; i think i’ve given that up. the writing that i do now in the nonfiction or scholarly vein is often inflected by personal narrative, memoir, and various kinds of narrative devices, because i just think it makes things more interesting to read. at this point, i really like to read academics who like to take chances with their writing and draw from different discourses. why write historical fiction (say, instead of contemporary fiction)? i never was interested in writing an historical novel; i was interested in writing a war novel. that required me, in the case of the war that i was interested in, to go into the past and to write a history. the reason why i wanted to write a war novel is because, as someone who is a refugee from vietnam and the war there, i understood that my place in american letters was to tell the story of vietnamese refugees. that’s the logic of race, commodification, multiculturalism that saturates the publishing industry—that creates opportunities and also enclosures for writ- ers of color. while i was not interested in only doing that, i was interested in doing it. i wanted to write about refugees, but the larger ambition was to make this claim that you can’t separate refugee or civilian experiences from war experiences. this would be a direct attack on the way that americans understand the vietnam war specifi- cally, but all kinds of wars in which americans are involved. it would be an attack on this whole system that that places someone like me into a certain kind of a category and says, “well, you can talk about this experience as a refugee here in the united states and the american dream and all that. but it’s americans and american soldiers and american men, white men specifically, who get to talk about this war.” so there was a huge narrative desire to break all these things down, but also that’s born from a political and theoretical impulse of critique based on our understanding of what a war is, what race is. so that was really the driving ambition to take me back into history. i’m not sure i would want to do that again, except the sequel that i just wrote is still a historical novel because it picks up from where the sympathizer left off and doesn’t get out of the s. do you find a particular defensiveness around the vietnam war on the part of white americans? do people respond to, say, world war ii or korea differently? when we talk about wars in which most of the people are already dead, there’s probably a greater liberatory possibility. all of this writing takes an act of imagination: just because you’re a soldier now doesn’t mean you’re qualified necessarily to talk about world war ii the visitors’ corner with viet thanh nguyen downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core any more than a civilian is. so with the vietnam war, i think that the fact that there are people who are still alive, who went through that experience, who could use their claims of authenticity to having fought there, has something to do with this sense of ownership. the fact that most of the soldiers who get to tell their stories are white men has something to do with this, too: you can’t take away whiteness and masculinity from this claim of authentic own- ership of this war experience. also, i think the fact that a lot of americans have deeply ambiv- alent feelings about this war further compounds this. you know, they feel guilty, or they’re angry that they might feel guilty. and then someone like me comes along. to generalize, the place for someone like me is to tell about my experiences; but if i talk about the experiences of the war that seemingly belong to white male soldiers or just white men, then i’m infringing on a territory that i’m not expected to be on. that can produce defensiveness. i certainly get my share of hate mail and critique either about this novel or about, you know, essays i publish in the new york times or time magazine, where i get into the whole territory of american identity and nationalism and war and so on. and if i were to talk about these things and say, “thank you, america, for res- cuing me,” then that’s perfectly acceptable. again, that is our [refugees’] place. but if i were to say, “you know, i wouldn’t be here unless americans had been there and invaded this country,” people just freak out. and basically, that’s what the sympathizer says. so all these things are wrapped up together. questions of identity, of who gets to write about certain things and what the united states is and what is a vietnamese person or what is a minority supposed to say or do in this country. how did you go about researching for your fictional work? i grew up obsessed with the war because at a certain point in my youth, i realized that was what had brought me here to the united states, so by the time it came to writing the novel, i had already done years of research as a hobby. i knew a lot of things about the war in general, conceptual things, historical things, anecdotes about the vietnamese experience that vietnamese refugees knew very well, but most americans didn’t know anything about. in terms of writing a novel, all that is very useful, but much of it remains background material. it provided me some useful information, like certain real historical figures to model my characters on and certain real historical incidents. many people who read the sympathizer may be surprised by the things that happened in there, but percent of what happens in the novel is drawn from real incidents or real personages. still, i did have to do some very specific historical research as a novelist in order to create fiction. so, for example, the first fifty pages of the novel is the fall of saigon. and i knew what that was about, i knew the rough outlines, but in order to create a fifty-page narrative description, i had to go and read everything that was available about the fall of saigon, because what i needed to know as a novelist was what happened on this day. what happened on the street that refugees had to use to get out of the city? what time were rockets falling on the airstrip? what torture techniques did the secret police use? i gleaned these details from research. those were the kinds of nuts and bolts things that the writers have to do that theoretical scholars don’t necessarily have to do. what kinds of decisions do you make about using historical scholarship, versus oral histories or community memories, etc.? the decision i made was that i wasn’t going to go out of my way to track down people who lived through this experience. some writers go out and interview a lot of people to get the modern american history downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core information they need, and sometimes they do that because there isn’t an archival record or there aren’t historical books written about these experiences. i’m thinking of min jin lee’s pachinko, where she interviewed a whole bunch of people about the korean experience of migrating to japan. in my case with the sympathizer, there was a ton of work, scholarly historical work and oral history compilations and so on and so forth. so i didn’t really feel the need or the urgency to go out there and find my own witnesses to this particular history. growing up in a vietnamese refugee community, i felt that i was already immersed in their experiences of the s, the sentiments, the experiences, the world views. i didn’t need to interview more people than what i already had grown up with. for the sequel to the sympathizer, which is set in paris of the s, i felt a little bit more of an obligation to ask questions of people, because the novel is set in the vietnamese community in france, in paris, and there’s not a whole lot writ- ten about them. plus, i had very particular questions that french people probably would not ask french people of vietnamese descent. i was coming at this as an american with a different sense of racial politics than french people have. in the novel, i explicitly wanted to do a comparison of racial understandings between france, the united states, and vietnam, because the novel is a critique of colonialism and imperialism, how these regimes operate differently whether you happen to be french or american, and the place of colonized or formerly colonized peoples in france or the united states. so i had a whole bunch of conversations asking what could have been, and for french people of vietnamese descent, these were potentially unsettling questions because they had never thought about these issues from the perspective of an american with my par- ticular hangups about race. those conversations were crucial. does it matter if novelists get all the historical details just right? there’s no right answer to this question. some readers want to be immersed in a nineteenth-century-style realist novel where everything is described. you want to make sure that you have the right place setting in a house, and you don’t want to get that detail wrong because someone who knows that that’s not what was used will be upset. and then there are other sorts of novels. for example, a lot of french novels that i read are skimpy on details. the ambition is not to create pointillist recreations of a certain place and time, but to create moods and feelings. the last book i read in that style was david diop’s new novel called soul brothers in french and in english, all blood is black at night. it is about senegalese soldiers fighting for the french in world war i. it’s not some kind of rich, immersive history of the war or the senegalese experience; it’s much more of a philosophical novel about the soul struggles of two particular senegalese soldiers. it’s very internalized. and that, to me, works perfectly fine. what other writers inspired you when writing the sympathizer? did you have any anti-models? as for anti-models, in general, i think a lot of american fiction about war, as i said, takes up the experiences of white male soldiers, and i did not want to do that. at the same time, a great deal of asian-american fiction—or vietnamese american fiction, which i would be catego- rized under—restricts itself to the immigrant experience or the american dream and is not strong on anti-imperialist and anti-colonialist critique. it shies away from class critique and marxist consciousness (there is a strain of that in asian-american literature, but the kind of the visitors’ corner with viet thanh nguyen downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core asian-american literature that gets privileged, prioritized, marketed, sold today is not that kind of stuff). i did not want to go in either of these directions. the book was influenced by writers i admired, who i felt were very critical and very caustic. i wanted to write a novel that was going to be fun to read, and so would have a character who is not only some kind of a marxist critic, but also who would be libidinous. it was important to me that this novel be fun, that it wouldn’t fulfill some american stereotype of political literature that has to be dry and didactic. i wanted a novel that could be didactic because i think the novel is didactic—i wanted to reclaim didacticism—but that would also be immersed in in the plea- sures of the narrator. some of the writers who i felt had accomplished this well included louis-ferdinand céline in journey to the end of the night and antónio lobo antunes’s the land at the end of the world, which is an autobiographical novel about a young portuguese man who is drafted as a medic to fight a colonial war in angola. it’s a very bitter, very funny novel, and rich in language. i wanted the sympathizer to be rich in language as well, for better and for worse, because i was reacting against this idea that asian-american writers have to prove our english ability. my attitude was, “okay, i have to prove my english ability by just going to excess.” finally, maybe the last major one that i can think of off the top of my head would be w. g. sebald—his whole corpus of work including austerlitz, rings of saturn, and on the natural history of destruction. here’s a guy who had no sense of humor, but he was a beautiful writer with thick, dense language, whose novels cross the line between fiction and nonfiction and dealt with history and memory and war. these were all concerns that i had as well. what can writers do with novels or short stories that they cannot do with nonfiction? what can writers accomplish in nonfiction works that can’t be done in fiction? i’m interested in writers who try to cross over. so sebald, for example. when i read his fiction or nonfiction, i can’t distinguish the voice between the two. whether it’s austerlitz, a novel about an orphan trying to recover his jewish past after world war ii, or on the natural history of destruction, a work of scholarship and criticism about the allied bombing of germany during world war ii, the voice is almost exactly the same—the rhythm of the prose. i really admire that accomplishment because his project is important. he is interested in the power of narrative, not the power of genre—not “i have to be a fiction writer or novelist” or “i have to be a historian.” his work is about the power of narrative to allow us to approach the past, whether from the angle of fiction or nonfiction. that has always been my ambition. but generally speaking, fiction and nonfiction take different directions. with fiction, you’re allowed to break rules. for example, i think of the sympathizer as a work of scholarship with- out footnotes because i could say all kinds of outrageous things in that book which i think are true but which i would have to do all kinds of research to prove in a university press book. fiction can be just as truthful as scholarship, but it’s free to forego the apparatus of footnotes and the like. it just lays out its argument, and readers have to grapple with it, accept it, reject it, whatever. yet because it has that possibility of freedom from the proof required in nonfiction, it may be harder for some readers to accept fiction’s truth value. in nonfiction, when you work with archives, people are willing to grant you from the very get-go a certain kind of authenticity, a certain kind of veracity, a certain kind of authority that they may not grant fiction. but you’re also not allowed as much freedom of movement modern american history downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core in nonfiction unless you’re willing to do the equivalent of breaking the fourth wall. i am won- dering if that’s possible. why not? why not introduce fiction into your scholarship at a certain point? there are certain scholars who have done that—and i’ve read some of these works that i find really interesting—but that’s not the mainstream of nonfiction or academic scholarship. and i’m not interested in the mainstream. i’m interested in the essential works that are at the margins or that try to cross over. in nothing ever dies, you argued that wars are fought twice, once on the battlefield and then again over their memory. the vietnam war continues to reverberate through american culture since that book’s publication, recently for example in spike lee’s da five bloods or hbo’s the watchmen. have recent attempts to turn the war into a usable past broken any new ground? the energies around the vietnam war are still with us. if anything, the rise of black lives matter and these new social movements on the streets are the sequel to what happened domestically in the s in the united states. from a foreign policy point of view, the vietnam war still remains lodged in the american consciousness because that war was not just about vietnam. that war has to be understood as one episode in a century’s worth of war that the united states has fought since the philippines to achieve global dom- ination through the pacific, and now the west that has gone all the way around the world to the middle east. what the vietnam war represents is the failure of that american ambition, or a rupture in that american ambition, that americans are still trying to recover from; the forever war that we’re engaged in now is simply an extension of the vietnam war. i think the vietnam war will con- tinue to remain resonant in the american consciousness for even longer. as long as the struc- ture of our society stays the same. as long as we’re still a military industrial complex committed to putting our military all over the world. and if the narratives that americans use to make sense of their wars remain the same, then the vietnam war will still keep returning. that’s what happened with da five bloods. it’s got an anti-racist critique from the perspective of black men, but because it’s so deeply invested in american narratives of the vietnam war—whether we’re talking about hollywood narratives or the “war is hell” narrative—it can’t escape from this american imaginary. it cannot under- stand what the vietnam war’s real meaning is for the united states, and therefore it cannot really understand the place of black men in this history and in this experience. so there will continue to be repetition in the dominant mainstream american imagination, and by that i mean both white and now black understandings of this war. michael mann has apparently fin- ished shooting his epic tv series about the battle of huế. i am nervous about that. i doubt it’s going to be divergent from anything i’ve described. and yet because the rupture of the s did produce a rupture in the american consciousness, there is more critical awareness of some of these kinds of issues, which is why we can have black lives matter now. there is an opening for a different kind of narrative or more critical approach both to the vietnam war and how it connects to the rest of american society. with watchmen, you basically have a lot of that happening. i have some criticisms, but generally i think the series is trying to connect american imperialism with what we would now call black lives matter. the series is prescient about what’s going on. there is that possibility. i hold on to that possibility, and i hold on to the fact that we as his- torians, scholars, and critics have a role in trying to bring that kind of a rupture forward and to the visitors’ corner with viet thanh nguyen downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core provide the kind of narratives that politicians and writers and filmmakers can draw from to produce something more interesting. because i think that, you know, the people who made watchmen did draw from both the political rupture, but also the intellectual rupture that took place in the s. are there literatures of exile that resonate with you? how much of your writing do you consider specific to your experience as a vietnamese american, and to what extent do you see the refugee experience as more general or generalizable? i’m reading hisham matar’s the return, which won the pulitzer in nonfiction in . it’s a literature all about living exiles and struggling against the gadhafi regime and imprisonment, political imprisonment, political exile. it’s a beautiful, beautiful narrative that’s also dealing with some really terrible history. reading it, i was like, well, my life story isn’t as dramatic as hisham matar’s, but the general contours of political exile and attachment to a country of origin or homeland resonate strongly. so i think in general, exiles and refugees do understand each oth- er’s emotional experiences. what is the difference—besides language—between being a vietnamese and vietnamese-american writer? are there different imaginings of, and claims on, the nation? i can talk about this as a writer and as a person. as a vietnamese-american writer, i write in english, and i do that because i can’t write in vietnamese. i would have to spend a lot of time learning the vietnamese language in a way that would allow me to write literary fiction. when i write in english—not that i have a choice, that’s my colonized condition—if i write in english, i have this strange position, that’s not unfamiliar, of being someone who is colonized, working in the master’s language and getting access to the master’s power because i’m speaking his lan- guage. i have no choice but to contest the american canon, this lover’s quarrel with american arts, as a. o. scott described with spike lee. because i know the dynamics of all this, i know that if i can test the master in his language, then i can circulate globally in the same way that the master already circulates. that is power that’s not available to vietnamese writers, most of whom are not known outside of vietnam. even when they get translated into a master’s language, like french, they’re still exist- ing in translation. they’re still a minority on the global stage. whereas i got lucky. i got the pulitzer prize, and that has global, symbolic, and real capital as a function of these very com- plicated histories of imperialism and colonialism and racism. by virtue of my position, i par- ticipate in all of that, and it’s a privilege that’s a very conflicted privilege versus a vietnamese writer. answering as a person, i’ll say that i once had a young vietnamese woman get very angry with me for referring to “vietnamese people in vietnam.” she wanted to know why i would say that. to her, when you say vietnamese people, you mean the people who live in vietnam. from my position as an overseas vietnamese or as a vietnamese american, these are very con- flicted issues because in the united states, vietnamese people will say they’re vietnamese, but they won’t say vietnamese american. the younger generation does, but i grew up with vietnamese people. we just said we’re vietnamese. to me, there is a real distinction between vietnamese people in the united states and vietnamese people in vietnam that needs to be drawn out that vietnamese people in vietnam don’t see. it’s still a very conflicted relationship in a lot of ways, because we vietnamese people in different countries live in parallel tracks that don’t necessarily intersect. modern american history downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core especially if we talk about vietnamese americans versus vietnamese people, you know, there’s a lot of historical emotional baggage and complexities that come along with this—a lot of mis- understandings and resentments and suspicions and love and intimacy that binds us all together in ways we may or may not want. i don’t know if i will ever solve that conundrum. and that is the way by which history still continues to ripple through my life. if vietnam is one place that has shaped you in some way, california is another. do you think of california as character or backdrop? california is definitely a backdrop for a lot of the work that i do. and i think, for example, of susan straight, who, you know, also takes california as a backdrop in her memoir, in the country of women. when i read that book and the rest of her work, i thought, this is not california boosterism, and it’s not the california of joan didion. there are many californias there. and this is not the california that new yorkers want to want to write about when they come over here. that’s the kind of california that i’m interested in, the kind of california that susan straight grew up in, in riverside. the california that i grew up in, in san jose. the california that no one talks about unless we ourselves talk about it. the california of people of color, the california of the working class, the california of refugees, the california that does not make it to hollywood, even though hollywood is in california. it’s all these people who are erased from hollywood stories who live in this state. that’s the california that i’m interested in. can you say something about your writing process? do you have different habits for fictional and nonfictional writing? do you revise? it just depends. with the sympathizer, because the language of the novel was so important, i revised as i went along, so i wrote a chapter or twenty pages and then i would immediately revise it. before i went to the next chapter, i felt pretty comfortable with the language of the previous chapter. it took about a month to write a chapter writing full time while i was on leave. the book that i’m writing now is nonfiction. it’s a mélange of different things, and the style is different. it will not be as dense as the sympathizer. if anything, it draws more from twitter as a form of writing. also, i’m living in a different time period: i have kids, there is covid, and i have to teach in a few weeks. this book has to be finished before the sequel to the sympathizer comes out because i will have to promote that book. thus, i’m just writing this one as fast as i possibly can. i’m not worried about the quality of the prose at this stage. i just need to put words down and write it as fast as possible. what kind of historical stories do we need more of right now? when you ask me that question, i think there are so many, so many possibilities. one of the things i thought about in writing nothing ever dies is the fact that the book focuses a great deal on memorialization and monuments, and one can go out and look at the memorials and mon- uments to atrocities, to the dead and all that. but the reality of it is that most deaths are not memorialized, and there are wide swaths of history where people have died in places where there are no markers. maybe as humanists, we would like to think everybody’s story gets told, that justice will always be realized. yet, i have to think there are probably whole populations that have been wiped out the visitors’ corner with viet thanh nguyen downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core whose stories have never been recovered. that’s just the reality. there’s probably more that’s been not memorialized, not told, than the reverse. which is to say, if you do your library research and books come up on your topic, you had better be doing something so unique that there’s a real reason for it. otherwise, maybe write something else. i, for example, have had a hard time writing about san jose of the s where i grew up. there aren’t that many books, as far as i know, about san jose of the s or s. not that many books about san jose period, so why did i not think that san jose was a worthy topic? writing this nonfiction book now, i made it partly about my san jose. there are so many histories like these that need to be told and recovered. modern american history downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use. https://www.cambridge.org/core 	the visitors&rsquo; corner with viet thanh nguyen 	you were an academic before you were a fiction writer. why write a novel? 	i love a novel full of ideas that understands how to work on the border, so within and outside of genre. that's one of things that i appreciate about the sympathizer. 	why write historical fiction (say, instead of contemporary fiction)? 	do you find a particular defensiveness around the vietnam war on the part of white americans? do people respond to, say, world war ii or korea differently? 	how did you go about researching for your fictional work? 	what kinds of decisions do you make about using historical scholarship, versus oral histories or community memories, etc.? 	does it matter if novelists get all the historical details just right? 	what other writers inspired you when writing the sympathizer? did you have any anti-models? 	what can writers do with novels or short stories that they cannot do with nonfiction? what can writers accomplish in nonfiction works that can't be done in fiction? 	in nothing ever dies, you argued that wars are fought twice, once on the battlefield and then again over their memory. the vietnam war continues to reverberate through american culture since that book's publication, recently for example in spike lee's da five bloods or hbo's the watchmen. have recent attempts to turn the war into a usable past broken any new ground? 	are there literatures of exile that resonate with you? how much of your writing do you consider specific to your experience as a vietnamese american, and to what extent do you see the refugee experience as more general or generalizable? 	what is the difference---besides language---between being a vietnamese and vietnamese-american writer? are there different imaginings of, and claims on, the nation? 	if vietnam is one place that has shaped you in some way, california is another. do you think of california as character or backdrop? 	can you say something about your writing process? do you have different habits for fictional and nonfictional writing? do you revise? 	what kind of historical stories do we need more of right now? genealogy editorial decolonizing ways of knowing: heritage, living communities, and indigenous understandings of place rachel breunlin neighborhood story project, department of anthropology & sociology, university of new orleans, new orleans, la , usa; rsbreunl@uno.edu received: august ; accepted: august ; published: september ���������� ������� abstract: in “decolonizing ways of knowing: heritage, living communities, and indigenous understandings of place”, we build on the scholarly and artistic practice of deep memory work to present a collection of articles, films, and artwork that contribute critical genealogies from the united states, africa, and the south pacific. in this introduction, examples from antoinette jackson’s work in the american south and rachel breunlin’s work with the neighborhood story project in new orleans and western australia are used to build the special issue’s framework around public scholarship and art. with a particular emphasis on polyvocality, visual ethnography and creative nonfiction, the introduction argues that the work of decolonizing genealogy can be supported by respecting epistemologies that are deeply connected to place. collectively, the contributors to the special issue demonstrate that creative practices around personal and collective histories can be an important way of reconnecting ties that may have been severed during years of colonialism. tell me the truth. didn’t you come from the other side? yes. i was on the other side. you came back because of me? yes. you rememory me? yes, i remember you. you never forgot me? your face is mine. —toni morrison, beloved (morrison ) i brought them cigarettes drew in a first coarse breath blinked briefly and saw them flash of blood memory they saw what was still them flash of the eye at dusk when i doubt i’m the one to tell this tale i hear them from that atchafalaya earthwork genealogy , , ; doi: . /genealogy www.mdpi.com/journal/genealogy http://www.mdpi.com/journal/genealogy http://www.mdpi.com http://dx.doi.org/ . /genealogy http://www.mdpi.com/journal/genealogy https://www.mdpi.com/ - / / / ?type=check_update&version= genealogy , , of te nakoy get up and tell it —jeffery darensbourg, “impostoral” . memory work: the use of multi-media in critical genealogies if genealogy is a pathway to our collective pasts, how can we use it as a tool to support the ongoing work of decolonization? as families have been both displaced and created during periods of colonization, how do indigenous communities hold onto their own genealogies, which are often intimately connected to place? at the same time, how do we interrogate dominant narratives of the past that erase other histories to develop a cross-cultural, ethical approach to genealogical research? when antoinette jackson and i envisioned “decolonizing ways of knowing,” we aimed to facilitate an international conversation about how living communities interact with their ancestors and confront the legacies of colonialism through deep “memory work.” deborah bird rose explains this method of scholarship and artistic practice in reports from a wild country: ethics of decolonisation: if the purpose of violence is to extinguish certain people, knowledges and perspectives, then memory continues to resist that violence. thus the moral burden of the past in the present includes the refusal to succumb to the world of violence and amnesia . . . and [works] against the comfort of monologue. (bird rose , p. ) the origins of “decolonizing ways of knowing” began in conversations antoinette and i had about the importance of public scholarship in helping families and communities confront oppressive histories in their lineages. in her first book, speaking for the enslaved, antoinette writes: many people have posed the question: why go back to the plantation? why bother reconstructing a negative time in american history? i understand their sentiment and skepticism . . . in school i remember stifling feelings of embarrassment behind a mask of indifference when slavery was discussed. i saw no use in looking back at that period in history. (jackson , p. ) feelings such as shame and embarrassment, although painful in the moment, are sign posts that something beyond the individual is going on. raymond williams defined the term “structures of feeling” to investigate how meanings and values in a society are “actively lived and felt” (williams , p. ). this work has been further developed by scholars such as sara ahmed, who writes in the cultural politics of emotion of how feelings can direct a desire for change or create paralysis (ahmed ). paying attention to them can also provide clues to recognizing when transgenerational transmission is occurring (breunlin et al. , p. ). when feelings are connected to historical experiences there is an opportunity to intercept trauma before it is passed on (atkinson ; schwab ). in her scholarship, antoinette began incorporating the stories of enslaved africans and their descendants into public narratives to challenge caricatures of forced labor and to highlight agency, creativity, and connections to the african diaspora and other global communities (scott ; jackson ). in new orleans, the mission of the house of dance & feathers, a small, grassroots museum, has had a similar goal (breunlin and lewis ; regis et al. ). located in the lower ninth ward of new orleans, the predominantly african-american neighborhood made international headlines in when the force of hurricane katrina’s storm surge broke a levee and leveled large parts of the community. in the aftermath, the founder and director ronald w. lewis rebuilt the museum in his backyard as a beacon of hope for the lower nine. in his exhibits, he included extended visual genealogies. for instance, in one shrine-like assemblage, he focused on the community’s african heritage, the middle passage and the plantations in south louisiana where his family had been enslaved. in the middle of the display, he placed a stuffed doll of a black woman dressed to work in a white family’s home. see figure . genealogy , , of genealogy , , x for peer review of if the purpose of violence is to extinguish certain people, knowledges and perspectives, then memory continues to resist that violence. thus the moral burden of the past in the present includes the refusal to succumb to the world of violence and amnesia…and [works] against the comfort of monologue (bird rose , p. ). the origins of “decolonizing ways of knowing” began in conversations antoinette and i had about the importance of public scholarship in helping families and communities confront oppressive histories in their lineages. in her first book, speaking for the enslaved, antoinette writes: many people have posed the question: why go back to the plantation? why bother reconstructing a negative time in american history? i understand their sentiment and skepticism… in school i remember stifling feelings of embarrassment behind a mask of indifference when slavery was discussed. i saw no use in looking back at that period in history (jackson , p. ). feelings such as shame and embarrassment, although painful in the moment, are sign posts that something beyond the individual is going on. raymond williams defined the term “structures of feeling” to investigate how meanings and values in a society are “actively lived and felt” (williams , p. ). this work has been further developed by scholars such as sara ahmed, who writes in the cultural politics of emotion of how feelings can direct a desire for change or create paralysis (ahmed ). paying attention to them can also provide clues to recognizing when transgenerational transmission is occurring (breunlin et al. , p. ). when feelings are connected to historical experiences there is an opportunity to intercept trauma before it is passed on (atkinson ; schwab ). in her scholarship, antoinette began incorporating the stories of enslaved africans and their descendants into public narratives to challenge caricatures of forced labor and to highlight agency, creativity, and connections to the african diaspora and other global communities (scott ; jackson ). in new orleans, the mission of the house of dance & feathers, a small, grassroots museum, has had a similar goal (breunlin and lewis ; regis et al. ). located in the lower ninth ward of new orleans, the predominantly african-american neighborhood made international headlines in when the force of hurricane katrina’s storm surge broke a levee and leveled large parts of the community. in the aftermath, the founder and director ronald w. lewis rebuilt the museum in his backyard as a beacon of hope for the lower nine. in his exhibits, he included extended visual genealogies. for instance, in one shrine-like assemblage, he focused on the community’s african heritage, the middle passage and the plantations in south louisiana where his family had been enslaved. in the middle of the display, he placed a stuffed doll of a black woman dressed to work in a white family’s home. see figure . figure . ronald w. lewis’s exhibit on the transatlantic slave trade on display at his museum, the house of dance & feathers in the lower ninth ward of new orleans/bulbancha. photograph courtesy of the neighborhood story project. figure . ronald w. lewis’s exhibit on the transatlantic slave trade on display at his museum, the house of dance & feathers in the lower ninth ward of new orleans/bulbancha. photograph courtesy of the neighborhood story project. throughout the american south, white children—often raised by women who were enslaved, and later employed by their parents—played with these dolls. into the th century, they continued to be collected by white families who displayed them in their homes. when i first moved to new orleans in the mid- s, they were all over the tourist shops. in his poem, “secret messages,” tom dent writes about encountering them on a walk through the french quarter: rain rain drenches the city as we move past stuffed black mammies chained to royal st. praline shops. check it out (dent , p. ) the dolls are mostly gone now, but ronald refused to forget them. in his interpretation of the exhibit, he explains: i decided to use boats and masks and figurines to show connections across places. the masks represent west african culture and the boats represent those slave ships . . . and in the middle, i put an aunt jemima doll with its image of racism. it’s easy to just push history to the side, but i don’t want to do that because it’s there. to be fair, i want to identify with it all. when i talk about my mama coming off that sugarcane plantation, i’m not ashamed of that because that’s where my roots are. as i was growing up, my mama always had her hair tied up in a scarf. when i see this doll, i remember that, too, and think about how my family survived those cane fields. (breunlin and lewis , p. ) ronald continued to exhibit one to reconcile two images in his mind—the woman who raised him, and a racist caricature of black women. calling forth w.e.b. dubois’s double consciousness (dubois ), he created what anthropologist gina athena ulysses calls rasanblaj—a haitian kreyòl word that means “an assembly, compilation, enlisting, regrouping (of ideas, things, people, spirits)” to challenge his audiences towards more honest discourse of our sense of the past (ulysses ). in the summer of , the massive black lives matter protests around the united states over the murder of an african-american man, george floyd, by a white police officer in minneapolis, minnesota, can also be seen as a form of rasanblaj. read as a collective text, the signs people have genealogy , , of carried document genealogies of racism and resistance in the united states. on june , i asked my -year-old son, max, what kind of sign he wanted to contribute to a protest that was planned at the central plaza of new orleans—just a short walk from the mississippi river. he said he would draw the black power symbol of a fist raised in the air to show support for black strength and leadership. at the protest, he stood next to a masked man in a baseball cap who held up a sign with a picture of trayvon martin ( – ), a black high school student who was shot and killed by the neighborhood watch captain of his father’s gated townhome community in florida after he called to report that the young man looked suspicious walking in the rain in a “dark hoodie” (coates ). nearby, niya zulu, one of my students who recently graduated from the department of anthropology at the university of new orleans, held a sign that covered most of her body: “police brutality equals lynching.” see figure . genealogy , , x for peer review of figure . signs at the black lives matter protest on june in the french quarter of new orleans. right to left, niya zulu’s sign “police brutality equals lynching”; a poster linking deaths due to police brutality with other attacks on black lives such as the shooting of -year-old trayvon martin; the author’s son, max etheridge, with a black power sign that he painted. photographs by rachel breunlin. i asked niya if i could take her picture with the sign because we were standing on the site of many government-sanctioned lynching. in , during a time when the site was known as plaza de armas (place d’armes), the spanish colonial government, the cabildo, publicly executed juan san malo and other maroons who had escaped slavery (hall ). but the murder of the maroons did not stop the resistance. in , participants in the largest slave revolt in the history of the united states marched from the german coast down the river’s levee towards new orleans. when apprehended, more than people were beheaded, and their heads were placed on poles, “dangling their dismembered corpses from the gates of new orleans. ‘their heads, which decorate our levee, all the way up the coast… look like crows sitting on long poles,’ wrote one traveler” (rasmussen ). in the s, the city of new orleans offered a reward for a maroon named squire, who became more widely known as bras coupé (severed arm), as legends developed around how he had avoided capture for months. wanted dead or alive, in , bras coupé was killed by an associate who then brought his body to the cabildo. as a warning to others, mayor denis prieur hung his corpse in place d’armes for days. literary historian bryan wagner quotes a contemporary account of the scene: no mardi gras procession, no special pageant that i know… ever attracted such surging crowds as were witnessed under that broiling, solstitial sun. men, women, and children; whites and blacks, freedmen and slaves; professional men and laborers in their working blouses all seemed to have gathered there to satisfy their curiosity (castellanos quoted in wagner , p. ). in the years since these violent acts against freedom, stories of san malo, the participants of the slave revolt, and the legacy of bras coupé have been part of counter-memories that focus on the lives, rather than deaths, of the early revolutionaries (barnes and breunlin ; wagner ). in protest, art, film, songs, and altars, the dead are still with us. see figures and . figure . signs at the black lives matter protest on june in the french quarter of new orleans. right to left, niya zulu’s sign “police brutality equals lynching”; a poster linking deaths due to police brutality with other attacks on black lives such as the shooting of -year-old trayvon martin; the author’s son, max etheridge, with a black power sign that he painted. photographs by rachel breunlin. i asked niya if i could take her picture with the sign because we were standing on the site of many government-sanctioned lynching. in , during a time when the site was known as plaza de armas (place d’armes), the spanish colonial government, the cabildo, publicly executed juan san malo and other maroons who had escaped slavery (hall ). but the murder of the maroons did not stop the resistance. in , participants in the largest slave revolt in the history of the united states marched from the german coast down the river’s levee towards new orleans. when apprehended, more than people were beheaded, and their heads were placed on poles, “dangling their dismembered corpses from the gates of new orleans. ‘their heads, which decorate our levee, all the way up the coast . . . look like crows sitting on long poles,’ wrote one traveler” (rasmussen ). in the s, the city of new orleans offered a reward for a maroon named squire, who became more widely known as bras coupé (severed arm), as legends developed around how he had avoided capture for months. wanted dead or alive, in , bras coupé was killed by an associate who then brought his body to the cabildo. as a warning to others, mayor denis prieur hung his corpse in place d’armes for days. literary historian bryan wagner quotes a contemporary account of the scene: no mardi gras procession, no special pageant that i know . . . ever attracted such surging crowds as were witnessed under that broiling, solstitial sun. men, women, and children; whites and blacks, freedmen and slaves; professional men and laborers in their working blouses all seemed to have gathered there to satisfy their curiosity. (castellanos quoted in wagner , p. ) genealogy , , of in the years since these violent acts against freedom, stories of san malo, the participants of the slave revolt, and the legacy of bras coupé have been part of counter-memories that focus on the lives, rather than deaths, of the early revolutionaries (barnes and breunlin ; wagner ). in protest, art, film, songs, and altars, the dead are still with us. see figures and .genealogy , , x for peer review of figure . (left): an altar dedicated to the memory of juan san malo, a maroon leader in south louisiana in the s, and other freedom seekers around the world, on display at the louisiana state museum’s arsenal # at the cabildo on jackson square as part of the neighborhood story project’s exhibit le kèr creole (the creole heart): runaway slaves, music, and memory in louisiana in . photograph by bruce sunpie barnes. (right): on the neighborhood story project’s altar is a copy of bryan wagner’s book dedicated to the history and legend of bras-coupé, an enslaved man who escaped bondage in the s (wagner ). the artwork on the cover is a beaded portrait of bras- coupé by demond melancon, big chief of the young seminole hunters. photograph courtesy of bryan wagner. figure . black lives matter protest at jackson square in new orleans on june . photograph by david grunfeld, courtesy of nola.com, the times picayune | the new orleans advocate. in , the city of new orleans renamed place d’armes “jackson square” in honor of andrew jackson’s leadership during the battle of new orleans. five years later, , people attended the unveiling of an equestrian sculpture of the former president rising from the middle of the square (wegmann et al. ). on the evening of the black lives matter protest in , thousands gathered again, but no one was allowed to enter the gated park. protestors surrounded the edges, and informal history lessons circulated: jackson was a slave owner who supported genocidal policies against indigenous nations in the united states. the river, held above us by man-made levees, was the figure . (left): an altar dedicated to the memory of juan san malo, a maroon leader in south louisiana in the s, and other freedom seekers around the world, on display at the louisiana state museum’s arsenal # at the cabildo on jackson square as part of the neighborhood story project’s exhibit le kèr creole (the creole heart): runaway slaves, music, and memory in louisiana in . photograph by bruce sunpie barnes. (right): on the neighborhood story project’s altar is a copy of bryan wagner’s book dedicated to the history and legend of bras-coupé, an enslaved man who escaped bondage in the s (wagner ). the artwork on the cover is a beaded portrait of bras-coupé by demond melancon, big chief of the young seminole hunters. photograph courtesy of bryan wagner. genealogy , , x for peer review of figure . (left): an altar dedicated to the memory of juan san malo, a maroon leader in south louisiana in the s, and other freedom seekers around the world, on display at the louisiana state museum’s arsenal # at the cabildo on jackson square as part of the neighborhood story project’s exhibit le kèr creole (the creole heart): runaway slaves, music, and memory in louisiana in . photograph by bruce sunpie barnes. (right): on the neighborhood story project’s altar is a copy of bryan wagner’s book dedicated to the history and legend of bras-coupé, an enslaved man who escaped bondage in the s (wagner ). the artwork on the cover is a beaded portrait of bras- coupé by demond melancon, big chief of the young seminole hunters. photograph courtesy of bryan wagner. figure . black lives matter protest at jackson square in new orleans on june . photograph by david grunfeld, courtesy of nola.com, the times picayune | the new orleans advocate. in , the city of new orleans renamed place d’armes “jackson square” in honor of andrew jackson’s leadership during the battle of new orleans. five years later, , people attended the unveiling of an equestrian sculpture of the former president rising from the middle of the square (wegmann et al. ). on the evening of the black lives matter protest in , thousands gathered again, but no one was allowed to enter the gated park. protestors surrounded the edges, and informal history lessons circulated: jackson was a slave owner who supported genocidal policies against indigenous nations in the united states. the river, held above us by man-made levees, was the figure . black lives matter protest at jackson square in new orleans on june . photograph by david grunfeld, courtesy of nola.com, the times picayune | the new orleans advocate. in , the city of new orleans renamed place d’armes “jackson square” in honor of andrew jackson’s leadership during the battle of new orleans. five years later, , people attended the genealogy , , of unveiling of an equestrian sculpture of the former president rising from the middle of the square (wegmann et al. ). on the evening of the black lives matter protest in , thousands gathered again, but no one was allowed to enter the gated park. protestors surrounded the edges, and informal history lessons circulated: jackson was a slave owner who supported genocidal policies against indigenous nations in the united states. the river, held above us by man-made levees, was the dividing line of the indian removal act of , which forced indigenous nations to relocate to “indian country” (saunt ). see figure . genealogy , , x for peer review of dividing line of the indian removal act of , which forced indigenous nations to relocate to “indian country” (saunt ). see figure . figure . cherokee stickball players on the edge of the tennessee river in chattanooga, tennessee, are part of public art project “passage,” by team gadugi (“working together” in cherokee). the site, formerly known as ross’s landing, was the beginning of the trail of tears. after the federal government’s indian removal act was passed in during andrew jackson’s presidency, thousands of cherokee were forced to walk to indian country in what is now oklahoma. around the world, diverse tribal nations have experienced similar displacement, which has been reinforced through an erasure of indigenous understandings of genealogy and their ties to land. in his ethnography, at home in the world, michael jackson writes: definition is itself at the roots of racism: the way we reduce the world to a word, and gag the mouths of others with our labels. one man put it very succinctly: “amongst ourselves we are people, whites turn us into aborigines.” (jackson , p. ) after years of critiquing the way racial categories have been used to divide and conquer, anthropologists have also become mindful of other traps of language, including “the most problematic connotations of ‘culture’: homogeneity, coherence, and timelessness” (abu lughod , p. ). in this special issue, we recognize that the word “indigenous” has been reclaimed by many first nations, while also acknowledging that the term developed out of early anthropological thought in the early th century when the discipline assumed, “cultures were bounded and isolated from each other and that they have a purity and authenticity that can be identified and catalogued” (regis , p. ). memory work breaks these assumptions down (harrison ; davis and craven ). on the -year anniversary of france’s founding of new orleans in , jeffery darensbourg, a historian and tribal councilman of the atkapa-ishak in louisiana, spearheaded bulbancha is still a place, a zine he produced with an indigenous collective in louisiana. see figure . figure . cherokee stickball players on the edge of the tennessee river in chattanooga, tennessee, are part of public art project “passage,” by team gadugi (“working together” in cherokee). the site, formerly known as ross’s landing, was the beginning of the trail of tears. after the federal government’s indian removal act was passed in during andrew jackson’s presidency, thousands of cherokee were forced to walk to indian country in what is now oklahoma. around the world, diverse tribal nations have experienced similar displacement, which has been reinforced through an erasure of indigenous understandings of genealogy and their ties to land. in his ethnography, at home in the world, michael jackson writes: definition is itself at the roots of racism: the way we reduce the world to a word, and gag the mouths of others with our labels. one man put it very succinctly: “amongst ourselves we are people, whites turn us into aborigines.” (jackson , p. ) after years of critiquing the way racial categories have been used to divide and conquer, anthropologists have also become mindful of other traps of language, including “the most problematic connotations of ‘culture’: homogeneity, coherence, and timelessness” (abu lughod , p. ). in this special issue, we recognize that the word “indigenous” has been reclaimed by many first nations, while also acknowledging that the term developed out of early anthropological thought in the early th century when the discipline assumed, “cultures were bounded and isolated from each other and that they have a purity and authenticity that can be identified and catalogued” (regis , p. ). memory work breaks these assumptions down (harrison ; davis and craven ). genealogy , , of on the -year anniversary of france’s founding of new orleans in , jeffery darensbourg, a historian and tribal councilman of the atkapa-ishak in louisiana, spearheaded bulbancha is still a place, a zine he produced with an indigenous collective in louisiana. see figure .genealogy , , x for peer review of figure . bulbancha # , a visual poem by jeffery darensbourg, a tribal representative of the atkapa- ishak nation in louisiana and contributing editor-who’s-not-a-chief of the zine bulbancha is still a place, the first publication of writing and art published by indigenous louisianans which he produces with his editorial partner, ozone . the poem first appeared in “verbivovisual: visual and multimedia poetry” at barrister’s gallery as part of the new orleans poetry festival in . image courtesy of the artist. in the introduction to the zine, jeffery explains the power of decolonizing the name of the city: bulbancha, “the place of many languages,” or “the place of many tongues,” is the original name for this area… bulbancha is much older than new orleans. it is also closer to the heart of the matter. before the first europeans came here, it was a place where people from around distinct native groups crisscrossed, traded, followed game and fish, moved to rising and falling waters and interacted with one another. it was a place of diversity, and changes, where people came and went in search of what they needed, including the chitimacha, houma, chawasha, washa, acolapissa, tunica-biloxi, baogoula, natchez, taensa, atakapa-ishak, and other groups as well. that was bulbancha then; this is bulbancha now: a complex, multi-ethnic, multicultural place (darensbourg , pp. – ). inspired by the cosmopolitan ethic of bulbancha, we have invited scholars and artists from africa, the south pacific, and the united states to develop a cross-cultural dialogue about decolonizing genealogy. following saidiya hartman’s “history of the present,” this project works: to illuminate the intimacy of our experience with the lives of the dead, to write our now as it is interrupted by this past, and to imagine a free state… as the anticipated future of this writing (hartman , p. ). here, we want to highlight our contributors who have combined genealogical research with creative nonfiction and autoethnography, as well as artwork, film, and a critical examination of archives, to contribute dynamic experiences with family, ancestors, and land. through the open-source format of this journal, we hope to redistribute critical genealogies back to the communities represented in the articles in ways that contribute to dialogues already at play, and to provide new opportunities to look at personal and collective lineages. figure . bulbancha # , a visual poem by jeffery darensbourg, a tribal representative of the atkapa-ishak nation in louisiana and contributing editor-who’s-not-a-chief of the zine bulbancha is still a place, the first publication of writing and art published by indigenous louisianans which he produces with his editorial partner, ozone . the poem first appeared in “verbivovisual: visual and multimedia poetry” at barrister’s gallery as part of the new orleans poetry festival in . image courtesy of the artist. in the introduction to the zine, jeffery explains the power of decolonizing the name of the city: bulbancha, “the place of many languages,” or “the place of many tongues,” is the original name for this area . . . bulbancha is much older than new orleans. it is also closer to the heart of the matter. before the first europeans came here, it was a place where people from around distinct native groups crisscrossed, traded, followed game and fish, moved to rising and falling waters and interacted with one another. it was a place of diversity, and changes, where people came and went in search of what they needed, including the chitimacha, houma, chawasha, washa, acolapissa, tunica-biloxi, baogoula, natchez, taensa, atakapa-ishak, and other groups as well. that was bulbancha then; this is bulbancha now: a complex, multi-ethnic, multicultural place. (darensbourg , pp. – ) inspired by the cosmopolitan ethic of bulbancha, we have invited scholars and artists from africa, the south pacific, and the united states to develop a cross-cultural dialogue about decolonizing genealogy. following saidiya hartman’s “history of the present,” this project works: to illuminate the intimacy of our experience with the lives of the dead, to write our now as it is interrupted by this past, and to imagine a free state . . . as the anticipated future of this writing. (hartman , p. ) here, we want to highlight our contributors who have combined genealogical research with creative nonfiction and autoethnography, as well as artwork, film, and a critical examination of archives, genealogy , , of to contribute dynamic experiences with family, ancestors, and land. through the open-source format of this journal, we hope to redistribute critical genealogies back to the communities represented in the articles in ways that contribute to dialogues already at play, and to provide new opportunities to look at personal and collective lineages. . honoring place through home languages after hundreds of years of british colonization, english is now the most spoken language in the world (mydans ). vast anglophone libraries and online databases have been developed and used to shape educational institutions. in many parts of the world, scholars and students who speak other languages predominantly write in english. while this special issue contributes to the anglophone archive, we encouraged our contributors to share epistemologies embedded in their home and/or community languages. when we take the time to pay attention to the translations, we practice a form of decolonizaiton. for instance, in the mid-twentieth century, w.e.h. stanner wrote to anglo audiences about what can be learned from indigenous languages in australia: no english words are good enough to give a sense of the links between an aboriginal group and its homeland. our word “home,” warm and suggestive though it may be, does not match the aboriginal word that may mean “camp,” “hearth,” “country,” “everlasting home,” “totem place,” “life source,” “spirit centre,” and much else all in one. our word “land” is too spare and meagre. we can now scarcely use it except with economic overtones unless we happen to be poets. the aboriginal would speak of “earth” and use the word in a richly symbolic way to mean his shoulder” or his “side”. (stanner , p. ) similarly, in kayang and me, kim scott meditates on how learning words in noongar, an indigenous language from western australia, helps connect to local landscapes. he shares the work of lexical cartographer jay arthur, who has asked anglo-australians to consider the limitations of english words used to describe australian ecologies. for instance, “[t]he word ‘drought’ in a country where rainfall is naturally irregular . . . encourages us to be disappointed, to feel cheated, to see the land as hostile (scott and brown , p. ). scott provides another example in the word “river,” which: only approximates what in australia is known as a river along the south coast a “river” is typically a tenuously linked sequence of ponds barred by a sandy beach from reaching the sea . . . kayang hazel tells me the noongar word for river is bily. it is also the word for navel. (scott and brown , p. ) the work of holding onto endangered languages can lead different ways of knowing. robin well kimmerer writes of how she learned a “grammar of animacy” by studying her family’s language. in english, verbs make up % of the vocabulary, but in potawatomi, they account for %. she explains what happen when nouns are transformed into action words: when bay is a noun, it is defined by humans, trapped between its shores and contained by the word. but the verb wiiwegamaa—to be a bay—releases the water from bondage and lets it live. “to be a bay” holds the wonder that, fro—this moment, the living water has decided to shelter itself between these shores, conversing with cedar roots and flocks of baby mergansers. (kimmerer , p. ) just as we would recoil in english from someone who refers to a person as “it,” so would a fluent potawatomi speaker if they heard someone objectifying plants or animals (kimmerer , p. ). in , i had an opportunity to work with a group of multilingual women from the kimberley region of western australia who traced their genealogies through saltwater, freshwater, and desert countries. in the tropical savannah of the kimberley, the seasons consist of “the dry” and “the wet,” accompanied, on the coast of the indian ocean, by one of the largest tidal ranges in the world. inland, the region is shaped by one of australia’s last wild rivers, the fitzroy, known as mardoowarra in the genealogy , , of nykina language. scholar and traditional custodian dr. anne poelina, a gifted cultural translator, explains the spiritual significance of the river for her tribe: [t]he river was formed in the beginning of time by nyikina ancestor, woonyoomboo. woonyoomboo is the human face of the mardoowarra and in partnership with yoongoorrookoo, the sacred ancestral spiritual living being, created the river valley tracks. woonyoomboo was an explorer, map maker, and scientist who named the places, animals, birds, fish, plants, and living water systems. (poelina ) the fitzroy’s wetlands and tributaries stretch to the edge of the great sandy desert, where many walmjarri, jaru, and mangala people lived on their traditional land until the th century and are still fluent in their languages. the collaborative ethnography i came to work on, singing out: aboriginal ladies’ stories from the northwest kimberley, was hosted by the jalaris aboriginal corporation, which is run by biddy morris and her husband, brett (breunlin and haviland ; haviland , ). biddy’s family is from bardi country on the coast, but she was born during the years after the australian government had created regional aboriginal reserves in an attempt at forced settlement. people who had followed seasonal migrations on their traditional country were forced to live in town. in , biddy’s mother gave birth to her in derby in a repurposed water tank where she made her home. their neighbors looked into the door that had been cut out of the tank, found them inside, and took biddy to the native hospital run by the western australian government. from the first days of her birth, she has been traveling between cultures, and recognizes the importance of honoring the skill sets needed to code switch between them. as walter benjamin writes, at its best, translation “does not cover the original, does not block its light” but shines back upon the original “more fully” (benjamin , p. ). for the women involved in singing out, the town of derby is a cultural crossroad between many different language groups. biddy’s aunty, bessie ejai, tells the history of the settlement: nykinia and warrwa people belong to here. this is their country. they used to call it, in the olden days, yarday. now they call it badulah. them white man named it derby. (breunlin and haviland , p. ) slowing down to discover what these names are referencing, we learn that “yarday” means “north” in warrwa, a language similar to nyikina that is now extinct—one of more than aboriginal languages which have been lost since british colonization (mcgregor ; poelina ). yarday is a “cardinal direction” in warrwa, one of four quadrants that form a fixed frame of reference for understanding where something or one is located (mcgregor , p. ). in this case, yarday helps us understand that the town of derby was founded in the northern territory of warrwa country in . named after edward henry stanley, the fifth earl of derby and the secretary of state for the british colonies, britain established it to support the growing pastoral industry, which was simultaneously displacing many aboriginal people from their land throughout the region. under the arc of this history, the last name bessie references, “budalah,” can be seen as an act of reclamation within these colonized boundaries. overseen by the winun ngari aboriginal corporation, it is a small community within derby that was developed to support aboriginal housing needs. there are many stories of birth in this home place. in , bessie was born under a boab tree in derby. amongst nyikina people, boabs are considered special places that are called ray/rai (cross ). anne poelina explains that rai is used for a place that, “gave rise to the formation of a person’s spirit.” it connects them to the life force, and “grounds their cultural birthright to that location” (poelina ). see figure . genealogy , , of genealogy , , x for peer review of figure . a boab tree (adansonia gregorri) in derby, western australia. closely related to the african boabab, they are found in the kimberly region of western australia and small parts of the northern territory. the pith of the tree is high in vitamin c, the seeds can be roasted, and water is stored in its trunk, which was important for families during the dry season. according to nykina elder annie milgin, boabs are home to spirits that come up from the roots and see out from the flowers (cross ). photograph by rachel breunlin. despite bessie’s family’s strong connection to nyikina country, when she was a young girl, the australian government’s welfare department sent her hundreds of miles away to the sunday island mission. growing up on the island, she learned to speak bardi with her friends, and english in school. she is now one of the last fluent speakers of her adopted language, and has spent many years trying to preserve it (one arm point remote community school ). she explains: i only know talking bardi… my mum used to talk to us in nyikina… i understand the old people talking to me, but i answer them in english (breunlin and haviland , p. ). in many ways, aboriginal english became a trade language—a liminal space between indigenous communities that were often displaced after british colonization. for instance, carlene wise’s mother (walmajarri) and father (mangala) came from desert country. she explains that, “whitefella mixed mangala up with nyikina and moved them to a big block out from the fitzroy river called looma” (breunlin and haviland , p. ). amongst the other languages, she learned her mother’s tongue from the great sandy desert: i grew up speaking walmajarri. it’s an easy one—nyikina and mangala are too hard. when they talk those languages, i tell them to speak english (breunlin and haviland , p. ). paul stoller has written about anthropologists being “sojourners of the ‘the between,’” yet biddy, bessie, and carlene are also sojourners; members of transnational families who have experienced both the insight and disconnections that come from moving between places and languages (stoller , p. ). carlene’s family still returns to the great sandy desert for funerals, but she does not feel as comfortable there as she does by the fitzroy. “after a few days, we wanted to go back to our river” (breunlin and haviland , p. ). see figure . figure . a boab tree (adansonia gregorri) in derby, western australia. closely related to the african boabab, they are found in the kimberly region of western australia and small parts of the northern territory. the pith of the tree is high in vitamin c, the seeds can be roasted, and water is stored in its trunk, which was important for families during the dry season. according to nykina elder annie milgin, boabs are home to spirits that come up from the roots and see out from the flowers (cross ). photograph by rachel breunlin. despite bessie’s family’s strong connection to nyikina country, when she was a young girl, the australian government’s welfare department sent her hundreds of miles away to the sunday island mission. growing up on the island, she learned to speak bardi with her friends, and english in school. she is now one of the last fluent speakers of her adopted language, and has spent many years trying to preserve it (one arm point remote community school ). she explains: i only know talking bardi . . . my mum used to talk to us in nyikina . . . i understand the old people talking to me, but i answer them in english. (breunlin and haviland , p. ) in many ways, aboriginal english became a trade language—a liminal space between indigenous communities that were often displaced after british colonization. for instance, carlene wise’s mother (walmajarri) and father (mangala) came from desert country. she explains that, “whitefella mixed mangala up with nyikina and moved them to a big block out from the fitzroy river called looma” (breunlin and haviland , p. ). amongst the other languages, she learned her mother’s tongue from the great sandy desert: i grew up speaking walmajarri. it’s an easy one—nyikina and mangala are too hard. when they talk those languages, i tell them to speak english. (breunlin and haviland , p. ) paul stoller has written about anthropologists being “sojourners of the ‘the between,’” yet biddy, bessie, and carlene are also sojourners; members of transnational families who have experienced both the insight and disconnections that come from moving between places and languages (stoller , p. ). carlene’s family still returns to the great sandy desert for funerals, but she does not feel as comfortable there as she does by the fitzroy. “after a few days, we wanted to go back to our river” (breunlin and haviland , p. ). see figure . genealogy , , of genealogy , , x for peer review of figure . biddy morris and carlene wise, co-authors of singing out: aboriginal women’s stories from the northwest kimberley, in western australia, with miwa in the foreground. photograph by james pillsbury. . embodied memory: returning to the dead in many parts of the world, the dead are invited into living communities to do memory work and participate in the day-to-day experiences of their families. embodied experiences of genealogy— whether calling on spirits through possession, passing on a craft, or unspoken habitus—connect family members to their ancestors. one of our special issue contributors, abiodun akande, grew up in ibadan, nigeria, attended university in ile-ife—considered to be the ancestral and spiritual heartland of the yòrùbá—before moving to ago’doyo (oyo city) for his first teaching position in art. he recalls: i have never seen anything like it before. i have been to so many yoruba towns, but there appears to be none that is comparable to oyo. it is like every household has a babaláwo (ifa diviner) or two, as well as other traditional religion worshippers such as sango, obatala, and osanyin as members. even some young boys between the ages of and years, who were my students, were practicing babaláwos or ardent worshippers of one form of yoruba traditional religion or another. amongst the òrisa (dieties) that are worshipped is egúngún-oya, the mother of the collective spirits of the ancestors. in yorùbá, the word egúngún: is a compound word formed by the combination of morphemes/e + gún + gún/, literally “that which facilitates or brings about stability, unity, peace, and joy” among others (fámúlẹ̀ ). “o-ya” is also a compound word which translates as “she tore.” revered by market women, egúngún-oya oversees the cemetery, and is called upon for transformation. Òrisa of wind and lightning, she harnesses the destructive power of tornadoes that form along the guinea coast when winds from the atlantic ocean, the saharan desert, and eastern dry savannah converge to bring about change—the same winds that build in the ocean to make land fall as hurricanes in the caribbean and figure . biddy morris and carlene wise, co-authors of singing out: aboriginal women’s stories from the northwest kimberley, in western australia, with miwa in the foreground. photograph by james pillsbury. . embodied memory: returning to the dead in many parts of the world, the dead are invited into living communities to do memory work and participate in the day-to-day experiences of their families. embodied experiences of genealogy—whether calling on spirits through possession, passing on a craft, or unspoken habitus—connect family members to their ancestors. one of our special issue contributors, abiodun akande, grew up in ibadan, nigeria, attended university in ile-ife—considered to be the ancestral and spiritual heartland of the yòrùbá—before moving to ago’doyo (oyo city) for his first teaching position in art. he recalls: i have never seen anything like it before. i have been to so many yoruba towns, but there appears to be none that is comparable to oyo. it is like every household has a babaláwo (ifa diviner) or two, as well as other traditional religion worshippers such as sango, obatala, and osanyin as members. even some young boys between the ages of and years, who were my students, were practicing babaláwos or ardent worshippers of one form of yoruba traditional religion or another. amongst the òrisa (dieties) that are worshipped is egúngún-oya, the mother of the collective spirits of the ancestors. in yorùbá, the word egúngún: is a compound word formed by the combination of morphemes/e + gún + gún/, literally “that which facilitates or brings about stability, unity, peace, and joy” among others. (fámúlè. ) “o-ya” is also a compound word which translates as “she tore.” revered by market women, egúngún-oya oversees the cemetery, and is called upon for transformation. Òrisa of wind and lightning, she harnesses the destructive power of tornadoes that form along the guinea coast when winds from the atlantic ocean, the saharan desert, and eastern dry savannah converge to bring about change—the same winds that build in the ocean to make land fall as hurricanes in the caribbean and southern united states. for this special issue, abiodun shares his research on two egúngún from Òyó. see figure . genealogy , , of genealogy , , x for peer review of southern united states. for this special issue, abiodun shares his research on two egúngún from Òyó. see figure . figure . egúngún masquerade in the nigerian city of oyo. photograph by akande abiodun. from in-depth interviews with a wide network of people who take care of the egúngún, abiodun shares the multiple ways that the “robust yorùbá belief in life after death” manifests itself in the spirits of ancestors in the city. in west africa, the active exchange between the living and the dead is often interpreted through divination. as one vodou priest in togo explained, “we ewe are not like the christians, who are created by their gods. we ewe create our gods and create only the gods we want to possess us, not any others” (rosenthal , p. ). many ewe shrines honor the spirits of enslaved people who were kidnapped in northern ghana and were either kept as slaves or sold to in the trans-atlantic slave trade. a white american ethnographer was informed by an afa diviner that she should reckon with her family’s past as well: why should you not pay your debts to the slave spirits the way we ewe do? you would be better off for it their spirits are powerful; they can help, heal, and protect you when you need them, if you honor them fully (rosenthal , p. ). in the united states, the descendants of slave owners are often reluctant, or outright hostile, at the suggestion that they should pay debts to those they enslaved. the memories are often preserved outside of dominant narratives, and through family and community practices. see figure . figure . egúngún masquerade in the nigerian city of oyo. photograph by akande abiodun. from in-depth interviews with a wide network of people who take care of the egúngún, abiodun shares the multiple ways that the “robust yorùbá belief in life after death” manifests itself in the spirits of ancestors in the city. in west africa, the active exchange between the living and the dead is often interpreted through divination. as one vodou priest in togo explained, “we ewe are not like the christians, who are created by their gods. we ewe create our gods and create only the gods we want to possess us, not any others” (rosenthal , p. ). many ewe shrines honor the spirits of enslaved people who were kidnapped in northern ghana and were either kept as slaves or sold to in the trans-atlantic slave trade. a white american ethnographer was informed by an afa diviner that she should reckon with her family’s past as well: why should you not pay your debts to the slave spirits the way we ewe do? you would be better off for it their spirits are powerful; they can help, heal, and protect you when you need them, if you honor them fully. (rosenthal , p. ) in the united states, the descendants of slave owners are often reluctant, or outright hostile, at the suggestion that they should pay debts to those they enslaved. the memories are often preserved outside of dominant narratives, and through family and community practices. see figure . genealogy , , of genealogy , , x for peer review of figure . tomb of the unknown slave at st. augustine catholic church in the tremé neighborhood of new orleans. every mardi gras, the northside skull and bone gang, an african-american men’s carnival organization led by bruce sunpie barnes, visits the memorial to pay homage to their ancestors. from left: seguenon kone, bruce sunpie barnes, bruce brown, bakari blackman, solomon israel, zohar israel, and ronald w. lewis. photograph by jeffrey david ehrenreich, courtesy of the neighborhood story project. in the gullah-geechee community around boone hall plantation in mt. pleasant, south carolina, antoinette documented how gullah families stayed connected to their ancestors through the art form of sweetgrass basket sewing (jackson ). more than years ago, slave traders deliberately kidnapped west africans from rice growing regions for their knowledge of rice production, which included the intricate skills in sewing baskets (fields ). african labor and ingenuity became central to the economy, craftmanship, and foodways that developed in the south. their skill set was, in fact, the basis for the region’s dominance in the exportation of rice from the th to the th centuries (carney ; jackson ; jackson ). see figure . figure . boone hill legacy collage. (left): jeanette lee, whose family descended from the boone hall plantation, sewing a sweetgrass basket. photograph courtesy of kyle stock. (middle): jeanette’s mother, ms. mattie gaillard, at her home in mt. pleasant, south carolina. (right): the former slave cabin where ms. mattie grew up in on boone hill plantation in charleston county, south carolina. photographs by antoinette jackson. in denise frazier’s article in our special issue, “the nickel: a history of african-descended people in houston, texas,” she writes of how she discovered connections between her family and the figure . tomb of the unknown slave at st. augustine catholic church in the tremé neighborhood of new orleans. every mardi gras, the northside skull and bone gang, an african-american men’s carnival organization led by bruce sunpie barnes, visits the memorial to pay homage to their ancestors. from left: seguenon kone, bruce sunpie barnes, bruce brown, bakari blackman, solomon israel, zohar israel, and ronald w. lewis. photograph by jeffrey david ehrenreich, courtesy of the neighborhood story project. in the gullah-geechee community around boone hall plantation in mt. pleasant, south carolina, antoinette documented how gullah families stayed connected to their ancestors through the art form of sweetgrass basket sewing (jackson ). more than years ago, slave traders deliberately kidnapped west africans from rice growing regions for their knowledge of rice production, which included the intricate skills in sewing baskets (fields ). african labor and ingenuity became central to the economy, craftmanship, and foodways that developed in the south. their skill set was, in fact, the basis for the region’s dominance in the exportation of rice from the th to the th centuries (carney ; jackson ; jackson ). see figure . genealogy , , x for peer review of figure . tomb of the unknown slave at st. augustine catholic church in the tremé neighborhood of new orleans. every mardi gras, the northside skull and bone gang, an african-american men’s carnival organization led by bruce sunpie barnes, visits the memorial to pay homage to their ancestors. from left: seguenon kone, bruce sunpie barnes, bruce brown, bakari blackman, solomon israel, zohar israel, and ronald w. lewis. photograph by jeffrey david ehrenreich, courtesy of the neighborhood story project. in the gullah-geechee community around boone hall plantation in mt. pleasant, south carolina, antoinette documented how gullah families stayed connected to their ancestors through the art form of sweetgrass basket sewing (jackson ). more than years ago, slave traders deliberately kidnapped west africans from rice growing regions for their knowledge of rice production, which included the intricate skills in sewing baskets (fields ). african labor and ingenuity became central to the economy, craftmanship, and foodways that developed in the south. their skill set was, in fact, the basis for the region’s dominance in the exportation of rice from the th to the th centuries (carney ; jackson ; jackson ). see figure . figure . boone hill legacy collage. (left): jeanette lee, whose family descended from the boone hall plantation, sewing a sweetgrass basket. photograph courtesy of kyle stock. (middle): jeanette’s mother, ms. mattie gaillard, at her home in mt. pleasant, south carolina. (right): the former slave cabin where ms. mattie grew up in on boone hill plantation in charleston county, south carolina. photographs by antoinette jackson. in denise frazier’s article in our special issue, “the nickel: a history of african-descended people in houston, texas,” she writes of how she discovered connections between her family and the figure . boone hill legacy collage. (left): jeanette lee, whose family descended from the boone hall plantation, sewing a sweetgrass basket. photograph courtesy of kyle stock. (middle): jeanette’s mother, ms. mattie gaillard, at her home in mt. pleasant, south carolina. (right): the former slave cabin where ms. mattie grew up in on boone hill plantation in charleston county, south carolina. photographs by antoinette jackson. genealogy , , of in denise frazier’s article in our special issue, “the nickel: a history of african-descended people in houston, texas,” she writes of how she discovered connections between her family and the broader african diaspora in bahia, brazil. at a conference, an afro-brazilian woman asked denise whether her grandparents ate with their hands: her question still haunts me to this day. it was as if she had time-travelled and caught the quizzical look on my ten-year old face as i observed how my grandparents ate. they used utensils, but there was also a mixing of various foods and a use of the thumbs with the pointer finger and middle finger to scoop mixed flavors of cornbread with chicken and greens into a delightful bite in a way that may be similar to how west africans use fufu. i asked my mother why my grandparents did this and was dismissed. it was as if my observation was shameful or not polite enough to prompt further inquiry. (frazier , p. ) once again, emotion is the first sign that a larger story needs to be told. when the feeling runs against dominant discourse, it may take time to begin to incorporate new ways of knowing. denise reflects: as i have gotten older, i have delighted in picking up pieces of arugula with my fingers at formal or casual dinners in public or in my own home. i frequently mix my foods, putting salad on top of beans and rice and mixing them all together. doing so honors the cultural memory that i have retained from my grandparents and celebrates the way they enjoyed eating—with utensils, as well as with their hands. (frazier , p. ) . carving out space: genealogies of the land in this special issue, many of our contributors emphasize the importance of connecting kinship to place. in many indigenous cultures, it is important to trace descent beyond human connections to the natural and built environment. as yirga woldeyes quotes in ge’ez in his article, “lalibela: spiritual genealogies beyond epistemic violence in ethiopia”: “ genealogy , , x for peer review of broader african diaspora in bahia, brazil. at a conference, an afro-brazilian woman asked denise whether her grandparents ate with their hands: her question still haunts me to this day. it was as if she had time-travelled and caught the quizzical look on my ten-year old face as i observed how my grandparents ate. they used utensils, but there was also a mixing of various foods and a use of the thumbs with the pointer finger and middle finger to scoop mixed flavors of cornbread with chicken and greens into a delightful bite in a way that may be similar to how west africans use fufu. i asked my mother why my grandparents did this and was dismissed. it was as if my observation was shameful or not polite enough to prompt further inquiry (frazier , p. ). once again, emotion is the first sign that a larger story needs to be told. when the feeling runs against dominant discourse, it may take time to begin to incorporate new ways of knowing. denise reflects: as i have gotten older, i have delighted in picking up pieces of arugula with my fingers at formal or casual dinners in public or in my own home. i frequently mix my foods, putting salad on top of beans and rice and mixing them all together. doing so honors the cultural memory that i have retained from my grandparents and celebrates the way they enjoyed eating—with utensils, as well as with their hands (frazier , p. ). . carving out space: genealogies of the land in this special issue, many of our contributors emphasize the importance of connecting kinship to place. in many indigenous cultures, it is important to trace descent beyond human connections to the natural and built environment. as yirga woldeyes quotes in ge’ez in his article, “lalibela: spiritual genealogies beyond epistemic violence in ethiopia”: “መካን ይቀድሶ ለሰብእ፤ ወሰብእ ይቀድሶ ለመካን” (place blesses humans and humans bless place). yirga elaborates on the importance of the ancient rock-hewn churches of lalibela, the town where he was raised, in the ethiopian orthodox tewahido church: like other indigenous perspectives, rather than being conceived as a tabula rasa, waiting to be authored or acted upon by human beings, the traditional beliefs of ethiopians understand place to have agency that can impose demands on human beings… like other african philosophical traditions…which view life as a sacred connection among the human, the non-human and the spirit world, lalibela’s churches are places embodied with spiritual meaning and identity (woldeyes , p. ). the tewahido church traces its roots genealogically back to king solomon and is considered the indigenous religion of most ethiopians. see figure . ” (place blesses humans and humans bless place). yirga elaborates on the importance of the ancient rock-hewn churches of lalibela, the town where he was raised, in the ethiopian orthodox tewahido church: like other indigenous perspectives, rather than being conceived as a tabula rasa, waiting to be authored or acted upon by human beings, the traditional beliefs of ethiopians understand place to have agency that can impose demands on human beings . . . like other african philosophical traditions . . . which view life as a sacred connection among the human, the non-human and the spirit world, lalibela’s churches are places embodied with spiritual meaning and identity. (woldeyes , p. ) the tewahido church traces its roots genealogically back to king solomon and is considered the indigenous religion of most ethiopians. see figure . genealogy , , of genealogy , , x for peer review of figure . bete giyorgis (st. george), one of the rock-hewn churches of lalibela, ethiopia, is home to a bee colony said to have begun in ce. yirga’s first language is amharic. in public school, he learned english, and in the rock-hewn churches, he learned to understand and read in ge’ez—an afroasiatic language that was originally spoken in the region , years ago (kebede ; woldeyes ). he learned this ancient language through the grassroot educational systems of lalibela: attending sunday school and from listening to the stories of the hermits, monks, nuns, priests and spiritual scholars who lived in communion with the church and our community… other times, my friends and i gathered in the compound of bete medhanialem and in the caves of amanuel and bete mariam churches to study scripture with the monk-scholar aba zekarias. he was referred to as arat ayina, four eyed— someone with the ability to see the past as well as the future. arat ayina knew infinite stories, verses and fables. he read from the ancient books written in ge’ez, and used amharic to educate us in the books of the ethiopian (woldeyes , p. ) amongst tewahido believers, the important sacred text is ገድለ ላሊበላ, the acts of lalibela, which was written in ge’ez, and recently translated into amharic. for his article, yirga translated parts of the acts into english “as a way to make the primary storylines in the text more accessible” (woldeyes , p. ). spending time in the churches was an important part of yirga’s education. even before he was able to read, the artwork that was displayed throughout the churches told stories of connecting the tewahido church back to the middle east. as he grew up, he heard the story of how when king lalibela was born, he was swarmed by bees, which was seen as an omen for miraculous deeds to come, and watched as people came to bete giyorgis (st. george) to receive holy honey that dates back to lalibela’s time in ce. i would like to pause for a minute on the bees. studies have shown they have complex skills in communication that are connected to advanced physics. in a chapter of spaces of hope david harvey calls “the insurgent architect,” he writes: figure . bete giyorgis (st. george), one of the rock-hewn churches of lalibela, ethiopia, is home to a bee colony said to have begun in ce. yirga’s first language is amharic. in public school, he learned english, and in the rock-hewn churches, he learned to understand and read in ge’ez—an afroasiatic language that was originally spoken in the region , years ago (kebede ; woldeyes ). he learned this ancient language through the grassroot educational systems of lalibela: attending sunday school and from listening to the stories of the hermits, monks, nuns, priests and spiritual scholars who lived in communion with the church and our community . . . other times, my friends and i gathered in the compound of bete medhanialem and in the caves of amanuel and bete mariam churches to study scripture with the monk-scholar aba zekarias. he was referred to as arat ayina, four eyed—someone with the ability to see the past as well as the future. arat ayina knew infinite stories, verses and fables. he read from the ancient books written in ge’ez, and used amharic to educate us in the books of the ethiopian (woldeyes , p. ) amongst tewahido believers, the important sacred text is genealogy , , x for peer review of figure . bete giyorgis (st. george), one of the rock-hewn churches of lalibela, ethiopia, is home to a bee colony said to have begun in ce. yirga’s first language is amharic. in public school, he learned english, and in the rock-hewn churches, he learned to understand and read in ge’ez—an afroasiatic language that was originally spoken in the region , years ago (kebede ; woldeyes ). he learned this ancient language through the grassroot educational systems of lalibela: attending sunday school and from listening to the stories of the hermits, monks, nuns, priests and spiritual scholars who lived in communion with the church and our community… other times, my friends and i gathered in the compound of bete medhanialem and in the caves of amanuel and bete mariam churches to study scripture with the monk-scholar aba zekarias. he was referred to as arat ayina, four eyed— someone with the ability to see the past as well as the future. arat ayina knew infinite stories, verses and fables. he read from the ancient books written in ge’ez, and used amharic to educate us in the books of the ethiopian (woldeyes , p. ) amongst tewahido believers, the important sacred text is ገድለ ላሊበላ, the acts of lalibela, which was written in ge’ez, and recently translated into amharic. for his article, yirga translated parts of the acts into english “as a way to make the primary storylines in the text more accessible” (woldeyes , p. ). spending time in the churches was an important part of yirga’s education. even before he was able to read, the artwork that was displayed throughout the churches told stories of connecting the tewahido church back to the middle east. as he grew up, he heard the story of how when king lalibela was born, he was swarmed by bees, which was seen as an omen for miraculous deeds to come, and watched as people came to bete giyorgis (st. george) to receive holy honey that dates back to lalibela’s time in ce. i would like to pause for a minute on the bees. studies have shown they have complex skills in communication that are connected to advanced physics. in a chapter of spaces of hope david harvey calls “the insurgent architect,” he writes: , the acts of lalibela, which was written in ge’ez, and recently translated into amharic. for his article, yirga translated parts of the acts into english “as a way to make the primary storylines in the text more accessible” (woldeyes , p. ). spending time in the churches was an important part of yirga’s education. even before he was able to read, the artwork that was displayed throughout the churches told stories of connecting the tewahido church back to the middle east. as he grew up, he heard the story of how when king lalibela was born, he was swarmed by bees, which was seen as an omen for miraculous deeds to come, and watched as people came to bete giyorgis (st. george) to receive holy honey that dates back to lalibela’s time in ce. i would like to pause for a minute on the bees. studies have shown they have complex skills in communication that are connected to advanced physics. in a chapter of spaces of hope david harvey calls “the insurgent architect,” he writes: genealogy , , of the intricacy and complexity of the communication system (and the accuracy and precision incorporated into it) demonstrates a truly amazing capacity for bees to encode and communicate information in the abstract, symbolic way that would shame many a communications or gis specialist . . . the entire repertory of bee dances with all of its innumerable parts and variations falls within a mathematical schema unknown to any architect. the only other known physical process to which such mathematics applies concerns quarks in quantum theory . . . if [bees somehow have this knowledge] then bees “know” (with a tiny brain) a kind of mathematics known to only a handful of people, but they may also be able to do what no human appears ever able to do—operate in quantum fields without disturbing them. (harvey , pp. – ) the symbolism of bees for king lalibela, who went on to create some of the most stunning architecture on the planet, may be explored in more depth as the relationship between bees and their environments continues to be studied. in , united nation educational, scientific and cultural organization (unesco) recognized lalibela’s “contributions to humanity” by naming it a world heritage site. tragically, in the process of connecting the churches to a network of international sites, the relationship between the people of lalibela and the churches was not appreciated. in seeing like a state: how certain schemes to improve the human condition have failed, james scott explains how “top-down” planning often misses the importance of respecting and incorporating “metis,” which he defines as: a wide array of practical skills and acquired intelligence in responding to a constantly changing natural and human environment . . . the practice and experience reflected in metis is almost always local. (scott , pp. – ) since unesco “inscripted” the churches in lalibela, many residents of the rock-hewn buildings, as well as the surrounding neighborhood, were forced to relocate. yirga explains that unesco adopted: new concepts such as “heritage,” “property,” “conservation,” and “authenticity” that do not incorporate the meanings and experiences local people have had with the churches in the region. the world heritage committee insisted on the creation of boundaries, buffer zones, and conservation zones around “the property”. (woldeyes , p. ) lalibela is not the only local community that has had a difficult time reconciling with unesco. while it may seem as an exceptional honor to be named a treasure of the world, the impacts of conservation and the development of sites for an international tourist market are often managed outside the communities that have historic ties to the sites (adams ; collins ; davis ). as a part of the united nations, which oversees the universal declaration of human rights—developed to protect individuals and nations who may be targeted for discrimination, displacement, and forced assimilation in the states where they reside—unesco could be a leader in developing infrastructure to support the land rights of living communities, yet often the economics of the designation interfere with supporting the living communities who are intimately connected to the sites (kirchenblatt-gimblett ; regis ). in , unesco recognized k’gari (pronounced “gurry” for english-speakers)/fraser island, off the southern coast of queensland, as a world heritage site. see figure . in their online database, the island’s exceptional ecology as the largest sand island in the world is discussed: majestic remnants of tall rainforest growing on sand and half the world’s perched freshwater dune lakes are found inland from the beach. the combination of shifting sand-dunes, tropical rainforests and lakes makes it an exceptional site (unesco). genealogy , , of genealogy , , x for peer review of figure . one of the sand dunes on k’gari (fraser island) overlooking takky wooroo (indian head). photograph by fiona foley. the description emphasizes the natural beauty of the island without acknowledging the traditional owners of the land, the badtjala nation. the unesco inscription occurred the same year that australia’s legal argument that the former british colony was founded on terra nullius (a land belonging to no one) was overthrown in the high court’s decision in eddie mabo v. the state of queensland. the following year, in , the labour government passed the native title act, which legislated how aboriginal land rights would be recognized. the framework excluded nations who were most directly impacted by policies of forced assimilation: the high court held that “when the tide of history has washed away any real acknowledgment of traditional law and any real observance of traditional customs,” the foundation of native title disappeared and native title rights were extinguished. as if merely substituting the notion of culture for an older version of race, the court argued that if aboriginal culture interbred with another “heritage” to some undefined degree, it forfeited these rights (povinelli , p. ). for generations, the wondunna clan of the badtjala nation has countered this argument with their cultural activism, writing, and art. following in her family’s lineage, artist and scholar fiona foley has created a stunning body of work dedicated to k’gari. see figure . in a review of her artwork in our special issue, “source to subject: fiona foley’s evolving use of archives,” art historian marina tyquiengco explains, “over the years, her practice of engaging the archive to connect with the genealogy of the badtjala has expanded to include the artist as a subject, witness, and/or participant” (tyquiengco ). in her own article in this special issue, “the people of k’gari/fraser island: surviving years of racial double-coding,” fiona weaves together her family’s genealogy with the history of the island, including the cultural activism of her mother, shirley foley, who was central to the badtjala’s native title claim (foley ). figure . one of the sand dunes on k’gari (fraser island) overlooking takky wooroo (indian head). photograph by fiona foley. the description emphasizes the natural beauty of the island without acknowledging the traditional owners of the land, the badtjala nation. the unesco inscription occurred the same year that australia’s legal argument that the former british colony was founded on terra nullius (a land belonging to no one) was overthrown in the high court’s decision in eddie mabo v. the state of queensland. the following year, in , the labour government passed the native title act, which legislated how aboriginal land rights would be recognized. the framework excluded nations who were most directly impacted by policies of forced assimilation: the high court held that “when the tide of history has washed away any real acknowledgment of traditional law and any real observance of traditional customs,” the foundation of native title disappeared and native title rights were extinguished. as if merely substituting the notion of culture for an older version of race, the court argued that if aboriginal culture interbred with another “heritage” to some undefined degree, it forfeited these rights. (povinelli , p. ) for generations, the wondunna clan of the badtjala nation has countered this argument with their cultural activism, writing, and art. following in her family’s lineage, artist and scholar fiona foley has created a stunning body of work dedicated to k’gari. see figure . in a review of her artwork in our special issue, “source to subject: fiona foley’s evolving use of archives,” art historian marina tyquiengco explains, “over the years, her practice of engaging the archive to connect with the genealogy of the badtjala has expanded to include the artist as a subject, witness, and/or participant” (tyquiengco ). in her own article in this special issue, “the people of k’gari/fraser island: surviving years of racial double-coding,” fiona weaves together her family’s genealogy with the history of the island, including the cultural activism of her mother, shirley foley, who was central to the badtjala’s native title claim (foley ). genealogy , , of genealogy , , x for peer review of figure . fiona foley scar tree ( ). oil on canvas. showing the trunk of a tree in southern queensland that has a scar from where bark was taken to build a shield, foley protests the hervey bay city council’s decision to tear down a tree that was a living example of the badtjala nation’s connection to their land. in an interview in the sydney morning herald, she shares the impact of the unesco inscription on k’gari: “it is disconcerting because basically the island is over-loved now. there are too many people and it takes its toll on the environment there.” the herald goes on to explain: although the badtjala people won their native title claim, foley says they gained very few actual rights and can’t make money from the tourism. it’s a point of ongoing frustration for foley, who has argued for a levy to be imposed on all vehicle permits for the island, the funds of which could be reinvested in badtjala cultural programs (kembrey ). of particular concern for fiona is the preservation of the badtjala language. she edited and republished her mother’s book, badtjala-english, english-badtjala word list. in this special issue, we also have the opportunity to watch a short film she directed on k’gari, out of the sea like cloud. with the help of her mother’s dictionary and singer/songwriter telia watson, the film repatriates a badtjala song back into their language. as fiona writes in her article, “our language had been sleeping for many years and was awoken. it was the first time the full weight of my mother’s work had been activated in such a space” (foley ). building on the importance of holding onto ties between language, kinship, and place, helene connor’s article in this special issue, “whakapapa back: mixed indigenous maori and pakeha genealogy and heritage in aotearoa/new zealand,” is centered on the lived experiences of maori genealogy. growing up, her grandmother, lulu coulter skelton, taught her how to recite her paphea (the formal way for a person of maori descent to introduce themselves) to understand and share her connections to their land and tribe. lulu skelton raised her children near their mountain, taranaki, speaking maori, and incorporating the intimacy she felt with the land into western holidays. helene writes: christmas time was usually shared with extended whanau and neighbours. she prepared a gigantic christmas family picnic. the children loaded the truck up and they trekked off to some outlying place—the bush or the lake—and dragged all the gear up there to enjoy lunch. when the parents fell asleep, the children ran riot in the bush to explore new territory (connor , p. ). her grandmother’s marae was at manukorihi, (“chorus of birds” in english), an ancient pa located in northern taranaki above the waitara river. famed for never being taken by another taua (invading figure . fiona foley scar tree ( ). oil on canvas. showing the trunk of a tree in southern queensland that has a scar from where bark was taken to build a shield, foley protests the hervey bay city council’s decision to tear down a tree that was a living example of the badtjala nation’s connection to their land. in an interview in the sydney morning herald, she shares the impact of the unesco inscription on k’gari: “it is disconcerting because basically the island is over-loved now. there are too many people and it takes its toll on the environment there.” the herald goes on to explain: although the badtjala people won their native title claim, foley says they gained very few actual rights and can’t make money from the tourism. it’s a point of ongoing frustration for foley, who has argued for a levy to be imposed on all vehicle permits for the island, the funds of which could be reinvested in badtjala cultural programs. (kembrey ) of particular concern for fiona is the preservation of the badtjala language. she edited and republished her mother’s book, badtjala-english, english-badtjala word list. in this special issue, we also have the opportunity to watch a short film she directed on k’gari, out of the sea like cloud. with the help of her mother’s dictionary and singer/songwriter telia watson, the film repatriates a badtjala song back into their language. as fiona writes in her article, “our language had been sleeping for many years and was awoken. it was the first time the full weight of my mother’s work had been activated in such a space” (foley ). building on the importance of holding onto ties between language, kinship, and place, helene connor’s article in this special issue, “whakapapa back: mixed indigenous maori and pakeha genealogy and heritage in aotearoa/new zealand,” is centered on the lived experiences of maori genealogy. growing up, her grandmother, lulu coulter skelton, taught her how to recite her paphea (the formal way for a person of maori descent to introduce themselves) to understand and share her connections to their land and tribe. lulu skelton raised her children near their mountain, taranaki, speaking maori, and incorporating the intimacy she felt with the land into western holidays. helene writes: christmas time was usually shared with extended whanau and neighbours. she prepared a gigantic christmas family picnic. the children loaded the truck up and they trekked off to some outlying place—the bush or the lake—and dragged all the gear up there to enjoy lunch. when the parents fell asleep, the children ran riot in the bush to explore new territory. (connor , p. ) genealogy , , of her grandmother’s marae was at manukorihi, (“chorus of birds” in english), an ancient pa located in northern taranaki above the waitara river. famed for never being taken by another taua (invading party), the te ati awa tribe commissioned a new meeting house, te ikaroa a maui, with elaborate whakairo (carvings), kohaiwhari (painted carvings), and tukutuku (weavings). they debuted it with a public ceremony in when helene’s grandmother was in her early s: see figure . genealogy , , x for peer review of party), the te ati awa tribe commissioned a new meeting house, te ikaroa a maui, with elaborate whakairo (carvings), kohaiwhari (painted carvings), and tukutuku (weavings). they debuted it with a public ceremony in when helene’s grandmother was in her early s: see figure . figure . carvings and weavings inside helene connor’s marae, te ikaroa a maui, owae marae, manukorihi pa, waitara. photograph by john houston ( – ). papers reference ½ x- -f. alexander turnbull library, wellington, new zealand. like yirga and fiona, helene grew up visiting a place where her genealogy was not just explained, but part of the landscape and embedded in the art, architecture, and scholarship of her family. it was here that she attended many ceremonies honoring people in her tribe. now a senior lecturer of maori education and social work at the university of auckland, helene has worked for years to teach best practices of culturally relevant mental health care for people of maori descent. sharing best practices that have emerged from her department, helene writes that finding strategies to overcome cultural displacement, such as reconnecting to one’s whakapapa, are important models for healing. . reclamations the models developed at the university of auckland offer important resources to support people who have been cut off from their heritage due to forced assimilation. in kayang and me, kim scott writes about his cultural displacement in western australia due to generations of state policies that enforced segregated housing, education, and job opportunities: i didn’t grow up in the bush. there was no traditional upbringing of stories around the camp fire, no earnest transmission of cultural values. the floor of the first house i remember was only partially completed, and my three siblings and i, pretending we were tightrope walkers, balanced on the floor-joints spanning the soft dirt and rubble half a metre below us. we moved to a government house on a bitumen street with gutters running down each side, and even though the street came to an end, the slope ran on and one through patchy scrub and past the superphosphate factory, the rubbish tip, the native reserve. figure . carvings and weavings inside helene connor’s marae, te ikaroa a maui, owae marae, manukorihi pa, waitara. photograph by john houston ( – ). papers reference x- -f. alexander turnbull library, wellington, new zealand. like yirga and fiona, helene grew up visiting a place where her genealogy was not just explained, but part of the landscape and embedded in the art, architecture, and scholarship of her family. it was here that she attended many ceremonies honoring people in her tribe. now a senior lecturer of maori education and social work at the university of auckland, helene has worked for years to teach best practices of culturally relevant mental health care for people of maori descent. sharing best practices that have emerged from her department, helene writes that finding strategies to overcome cultural displacement, such as reconnecting to one’s whakapapa, are important models for healing. . reclamations the models developed at the university of auckland offer important resources to support people who have been cut off from their heritage due to forced assimilation. in kayang and me, kim scott writes about his cultural displacement in western australia due to generations of state policies that enforced segregated housing, education, and job opportunities: i didn’t grow up in the bush. there was no traditional upbringing of stories around the camp fire, no earnest transmission of cultural values. the floor of the first house i remember was only partially completed, and my three siblings and i, pretending we were tightrope walkers, balanced on the floor-joints spanning the soft dirt and rubble half a metre below us. we moved to a government house on a bitumen street with gutters running down each side, and even though the street came to an end, the slope ran on and one through patchy scrub and past the superphosphate factory, the rubbish tip, the native reserve. genealogy , , of individuals were fined for being on the reserve and fined for being in town. their crime was being non-aboriginal in the one place and aboriginal in the other, after legislation was refined in the attempt to snare those who—as the frustrated bureaucrat put it—“run with the hares and hunt with the hounds” and to trip them as they moved to and fro across a dividing line. my father was mobile that way, always moving (scott and brown , p. ) kim scott’s father died in his s. his son said that he was not able to articulate the impact of his own experiences of colonization, but judy atkinson’s work in trauma trails: recreating song lines, may be able to describe some of his experiences with collective trauma: it seeps slowly and insidiously into the fabric and soul of relationship and beliefs of people as community. the shock of loss of self and community comes gradually. people, feeling bereaved, grieve for their loss of cultural surrounds, as well as for family and friends. feeling victimised, the same people may also carry a deep rage at what has happened to them, but may be unable to express their anger at those they perceive to have violated their world and caused the death of their loved ones (atkinson ) through his commitment to understanding his family history, and learning the noongar language, scott has been able to reconnect to parts of his heritage that were severed. around the world, artists, scholars, and community-based activists are reclaiming indigenous knowledges through acts of creation. the photography of greg semu provides one example. i first saw his work at the queensland museum of art in brisbane, australia, in . as part of unnerved: the new zealand project, he exhibited self-portraits that showed the different sides of his pe’a, the traditional men’s body tatau of samoa. in samoan, the verb tā means to strike, and in the case of tatau, refers to the “tap” sound of the comb used to penetrate the skin with ink. the verb tau translates as “to reach an end,” but also means war or battle. put together, tatau also translates as “rightness” or “balance.” see figure . genealogy , , x for peer review of individuals were fined for being on the reserve and fined for being in town. their crime was being non-aboriginal in the one place and aboriginal in the other, after legislation was refined in the attempt to snare those who—as the frustrated bureaucrat put it—“run with the hares and hunt with the hounds” and to trip them as they moved to and fro across a dividing line. my father was mobile that way, always moving (scott and brown , p. ) kim scott’s father died in his s. his son said that he was not able to articulate the impact of his own experiences of colonization, but judy atkinson’s work in trauma trails: recreating song lines, may be able to describe some of his experiences with collective trauma: it seeps slowly and insidiously into the fabric and soul of relationship and beliefs of people as community. the shock of loss of self and community comes gradually. people, feeling bereaved, grieve for their loss of cultural surrounds, as well as for family and friends. feeling victimised, the same people may also carry a deep rage at what has happened to them, but may be unable to express their anger at those they perceive to have violated their world and caused the death of their loved ones (atkinson p. ) through his commitment to understanding his family history, and learning the noongar language, scott has been able to reconnect to parts of his heritage that were severed. around the world, artists, scholars, and community-based activists are reclaiming indigenous knowledges through acts of creation. the photography of greg semu provides one example. i first saw his work at the queensland museum of art in brisbane, australia, in . as part of unnerved: the new zealand project, he exhibited self-portraits that showed the different sides of his pe’a, the traditional men’s body tatau of samoa. in samoan, the verb tā means to strike, and in the case of tatau, refers to the “tap” sound of the comb used to penetrate the skin with ink. the verb tau translates as “to reach an end,” but also means war or battle. put together, tatau also translates as “rightness” or “balance.” see figure . figure . self-portrait by greg semu of his pe’a, the traditional men’s tatau from samoa. image courtesy of the artist. figure . self-portrait by greg semu of his pe’a, the traditional men’s tatau from samoa. image courtesy of the artist. genealogy , , of in his exhibit, greg presented self-portraits of the exacting, elegant lines of the tatau against a wrinkled backdrop set up in a studio. before colonization, men in samoa who weren’t tattooed were called telefua—naked. to go through the long process was a sign of bravery. for greg, the process was a way of reconnecting to parts of samoan culture that had been cut off from him growing up in auckland, new zealand, in the s. greg’s parents were opposed to tattooing because of their mormon faith and focused on fitting into white/pakeha society. although fluent in samoan, they spoke to him in english. in auckland, greg’s generation was caught in the animosity that had grown between maori and other pacific islanders and turned to street photography to begin to read the complexity of the urban landscape. in his early s, he was introduced by one of his photography mentors to a tufuga ta tatau (tatau master) who descended from one of the two families in samoa that have passed on the tradition for generations and decided to go through the painful process. the traditional pe’a on his body provided a “passport” that connected him to other samoan men in diaspora. in subsequent years, he has worked with indigenous communities around the south pacific to reimagine their histories. in australia, artist eric bridgeman began his career creating a series of artwork that confronted the country’s stereotypes of people from papua new guinea. in staged portraits, he turned the lens of the white gaze back on the viewer. over time, however, he realized that focusing on this way of looking limited him and his relationship to his mother’s family in papua new guinea. as toni morrison has written, “the very serious function of racism . . . is distraction. it keeps you from doing your work. it keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being” (morrison ). instead of repeating himself, eric decided to focus his art practice in community with his grandfather’s tribe, yuri alaiku, of the southern simbu district of gumine in the highlands of papua new guinea. in , with the support of his uncle, joe kuman, the co-founder of his clan association, yuri alaiku kuikane association (yaka) and a lecturer at the university of goroka, eric helped found haus yuriyal, a collective of more than twenty members who come together to create art in a traditional round house. see figure . genealogy , , x for peer review of in his exhibit, greg presented self-portraits of the exacting, elegant lines of the tatau against a wrinkled backdrop set up in a studio. before colonization, men in samoa who weren’t tattooed were called telefua—naked. to go through the long process was a sign of bravery. for greg, the process was a way of reconnecting to parts of samoan culture that had been cut off from him growing up in auckland, new zealand, in the s. greg’s parents were opposed to tattooing because of their mormon faith and focused on fitting into white/pakeha society. although fluent in samoan, they spoke to him in english. in auckland, greg’s generation was caught in the animosity that had grown between maori and other pacific islanders and turned to street photography to begin to read the complexity of the urban landscape. in his early s, he was introduced by one of his photography mentors to a tufuga ta tatau (tatau master) who descended from one of the two families in samoa that have passed on the tradition for generations and decided to go through the painful process. the traditional pe’a on his body provided a “passport” that connected him to other samoan men in diaspora. in subsequent years, he has worked with indigenous communities around the south pacific to reimagine their histories. in australia, artist eric bridgeman began his career creating a series of artwork that confronted the country’s stereotypes of people from papua new guinea. in staged portraits, he turned the lens of the white gaze back on the viewer. over time, however, he realized that focusing on this way of looking limited him and his relationship to his mother’s family in papua new guinea. as toni morrison has written, “the very serious function of racism … is distraction. it keeps you from doing your work. it keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being” (morrison ). instead of repeating himself, eric decided to focus his art practice in community with his grandfather's tribe, yuri alaiku, of the southern simbu district of gumine in the highlands of papua new guinea. in , with the support of his uncle, joe kuman, the co-founder of his clan association, yuri alaiku kuikane association (yaka) and a lecturer at the university of goroka, eric helped found haus yuriyal, a collective of more than twenty members who come together to create art in a traditional round house. see figure . figure . the round house in wahgi valley, jiwaka province, papua new guinea, built by eric bridgeman’s extended yuri family. members of the art collective haus yuriyal meet to paint and bilas (to beautify) their community. photograph by eric bridgeman. figure . the round house in wahgi valley, jiwaka province, papua new guinea, built by eric bridgeman’s extended yuri family. members of the art collective haus yuriyal meet to paint and bilas (to beautify) their community. photograph by eric bridgeman. in an artist statement for an exhibit he created with haus yuriyal, eric writes: our drawings and paintings address old (tumbuna/bipo taim) ideas, woven and marked out by a new generation of men and women from our community. we have begun telling genealogy , , of stories through what we have seen and what we know—shields and bilum weaving. in the highlands we are surrounded by dramatic mountains and unique beauty, made delicate by the complexities of warfare, violence and colonial presence. we compound these sometimes challenging situations through ceremonial acts of ‘bilas’ (noun: costume/verb: to beautify). our studies into our own ancestral shields has led us as a group to understand the power of its visual language; to identify the signifiers of the tribal fight, learning from conflicts of the past in order to control forms of negativity, and come to harness the positivity of our designs for protection, and for amamas [happiness]. (bridgeman ) haus yuriyal is an example of the importance of creating “community-based grassroots structures [that] hold our memories sacred” (dizon and lê ). haus yuriyal’s success in australia is just one example of how, with a solid foundation, cross-cultural ties can be forged that develop long-lasting friendships, respectful dialogue, and economic opportunity across place. see figure . genealogy , , x for peer review of in an artist statement for an exhibit he created with haus yuriyal, eric writes: our drawings and paintings address old (tumbuna/bipo taim) ideas, woven and marked out by a new generation of men and women from our community. we have begun telling stories through what we have seen and what we know—shields and bilum weaving. in the highlands we are surrounded by dramatic mountains and unique beauty, made delicate by the complexities of warfare, violence and colonial presence. we compound these sometimes challenging situations through ceremonial acts of ‘bilas’ (noun: costume/verb: to beautify). our studies into our own ancestral shields has led us as a group to understand the power of its visual language; to identify the signifiers of the tribal fight, learning from conflicts of the past in order to control forms of negativity, and come to harness the positivity of our designs for protection, and for amamas [happiness]. (bridgeman ). haus yuriyal is an example of the importance of creating “community-based grassroots structures [that] hold our memories sacred” (dizon and lê ). haus yuriyal’s success in australia is just one example of how, with a solid foundation, cross-cultural ties can be forged that develop long-lasting friendships, respectful dialogue, and economic opportunity across place. see figure . figure . members of the art collective haus yuriyal work on paintings based on the art form of ancestral shields in their round house in the wahgi valley of papua new guinea. photograph by eric bridgeman. in , the neighborhood story project published return to yakni chitto: houma migrations, a book of black and white photography and that traces the genealogy of the houma nation, and their forced and voluntary migrations over hundreds of years (verdin ). the author, monique verdin, wrote about her father’s fierce pride in his heritage but also his embrace of multiracial, cross-cultural friendships that also supported him throughout his life. see figure . figure . members of the art collective haus yuriyal work on paintings based on the art form of ancestral shields in their round house in the wahgi valley of papua new guinea. photograph by eric bridgeman. in , the neighborhood story project published return to yakni chitto: houma migrations, a book of black and white photography and that traces the genealogy of the houma nation, and their forced and voluntary migrations over hundreds of years (verdin ). the author, monique verdin, wrote about her father’s fierce pride in his heritage but also his embrace of multiracial, cross-cultural friendships that also supported him throughout his life. see figure . genealogy , , of genealogy , , x for peer review of figure . monique verdin’s father, michelle verdin, with his friend john taylor in the lower ninth ward of new orleans in the late s. photograph by monique verdin. growing up, she visited lower ninth ward of new orleans to meet up with his friends. monique writes: in our shortcuts through back-a-town, he introduced me to his friend, john taylor. john told me, “everybody called your dad julio, but i knew he wasn’t mexican. i knew he was from the parish. i was going into the bayou bienvenue swamp and bringing out garfish, and your dad was always up from down the road selling shrimp, coons, or turtle to all the creoles who lived in the lower ninth ward.” both my dad and john were wild salesman who could see the truth. if you passed them in the street, maybe you wouldn’t think twice, but they recognized real, simple beauty from the freedom they found in that wildness (verdin , p. ). when we published return to yakni chitto, monique said that she wanted to honor her father’s love of their family’s traditions and his appreciation of other cultures by putting it into practice. as we talked about what the events could look like, we drew inspiration from a passage that she wrote about an afternoon in the mid- s when her father took her to their relatives, jane and anesie verdin’s home in pointe-aux-chenes: [w]e came up to a bunch of people gathered around a pile of freshly boiled shrimp on top of a makeshift plywood and sawhorse table, talking in houma french. that memory stayed with me through my childhood. it was unlike other parts of the u.s. i had known. it felt like home (verdin , p. ). in the unbearable lightness of being, milan kundera writes, “the brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful” (kundera , p. ). monique wanted to share this beauty that came from her extended houma family with her community and the broader, diverse audiences we imagined for the book and companion exhibit. at the neighborhood story project’s workshop in an old corner store building in the seventh ward, we hosted the exhibit and book release that emphasized leisure as “an affirmation of humanity” (jackson , p. ). our neighbors shucked oysters and cooked large pots of gumbo, we played bouré—a louisiana card game—and danced. then monique and i packed up the exhibit and brought it down to los isleños museum, dedicated figure . monique verdin’s father, michelle verdin, with his friend john taylor in the lower ninth ward of new orleans in the late s. photograph by monique verdin. growing up, she visited lower ninth ward of new orleans to meet up with his friends. monique writes: in our shortcuts through back-a-town, he introduced me to his friend, john taylor. john told me, “everybody called your dad julio, but i knew he wasn’t mexican. i knew he was from the parish. i was going into the bayou bienvenue swamp and bringing out garfish, and your dad was always up from down the road selling shrimp, coons, or turtle to all the creoles who lived in the lower ninth ward.” both my dad and john were wild salesman who could see the truth. if you passed them in the street, maybe you wouldn’t think twice, but they recognized real, simple beauty from the freedom they found in that wildness. (verdin , p. ) when we published return to yakni chitto, monique said that she wanted to honor her father’s love of their family’s traditions and his appreciation of other cultures by putting it into practice. as we talked about what the events could look like, we drew inspiration from a passage that she wrote about an afternoon in the mid- s when her father took her to their relatives, jane and anesie verdin’s home in pointe-aux-chenes: [w]e came up to a bunch of people gathered around a pile of freshly boiled shrimp on top of a makeshift plywood and sawhorse table, talking in houma french. that memory stayed with me through my childhood. it was unlike other parts of the u.s. i had known. it felt like home. (verdin , p. ) in the unbearable lightness of being, milan kundera writes, “the brain appears to possess a special area which we might call poetic memory and which records everything that charms or touches us, that makes our lives beautiful” (kundera , p. ). monique wanted to share this beauty that came from her extended houma family with her community and the broader, diverse audiences we imagined for the book and companion exhibit. at the neighborhood story project’s workshop in an old corner store building in the seventh ward, we hosted the exhibit and book release that emphasized leisure as “an affirmation of humanity” (jackson , p. ). our neighbors shucked oysters and cooked large pots of gumbo, we played bouré—a louisiana card game—and danced. then monique and i packed up the exhibit and brought it down to los isleños museum, dedicated to the history of canary islanders, to join a cross-cultural conversation about different migrations to st. bernard parish. see figure . genealogy , , of genealogy , , x for peer review of to the history of canary islanders, to join a cross-cultural conversation about different migrations to st. bernard parish. see figure . figure . a collage from the exhibit and book release of monique verdin’s book, return to yakni chitto. (top): events at the neighborhood story project’s workshop. (bottom): the exhibit, curated by artist michel varisco with poetry by raymond “moose” jackson, at the land memory bank and seed exchange’s installation, which included the building of a traditional houma palmetto hut, at los isleños museum’s annual fiesta in st. bernard parish. photographs by rachel breunlin, courtesy of the neighborhood story project. monique also developed a course, “palmetto weaving and indigenous knowledges,” at the neighborhood story project’s workshop where she co-taught with other indigenous scholars and activists. she harvested palmetto fronds from her family’s land in st. bernard parish and brought them to the office to dry. we asked my neighbors for buckets of water where we then soaked strips of the plants that would be used by the class. when people came to visit the workshop, they commented on the comforting smell of the palmetto—bringing them back to their childhoods when they didn’t think twice about lying on the ground of a forest and breathing in the cycles of birth and death around them. two weeks into the course, monique and i talked about how the teaching was going and she said the class allowed her to hold a space where everyone’s histories and experiences were welcomed. through the act of weaving, they participated in a shared activity that also tied their stories together. the course didn’t require any special skills—the idea was to get started and be guided in the process. it is the same way we create books. i learned the method when i read ngugi wa thiongo’s decolonizing the mind: the politics of language in african literature. this small book, shared by one of my african diaspora professors, guarav desai, in my last semester of college, had a profound impact on me. one of the central arguments of the book is that practicing in secret weakens our social fabric, as people see performances, art, and writing only in their final stages where they believe, “[o]h, it must take such brains!” (wa thiongo , p. ). in his own theatre productions, ngugi advocated opening up rehearsals as a process of “demystifying knowledge and hence reality” (wa thiongo , p. ). the neighborhood story project’s corner store building has provided a space for writing and creating books and art in the public eye. working on a special issue that draws people together from around the world creates a gathering space as well. borrowing the words of denise frazier, we “hope to spark the interest of every other person who has felt just out of reach of their sense of home and history” (frazier , p. ). as we have worked on editing the special issue, many spaces like churches, beaches, maraes, round houses, and corner store workshops have had to close because of the coronavirus pandemic. travel has become limited. around the world, our elders are dying, and borders have closed. many figure . a collage from the exhibit and book release of monique verdin’s book, return to yakni chitto. (top): events at the neighborhood story project’s workshop. (bottom): the exhibit, curated by artist michel varisco with poetry by raymond “moose” jackson, at the land memory bank and seed exchange’s installation, which included the building of a traditional houma palmetto hut, at los isleños museum’s annual fiesta in st. bernard parish. photographs by rachel breunlin, courtesy of the neighborhood story project. monique also developed a course, “palmetto weaving and indigenous knowledges,” at the neighborhood story project’s workshop where she co-taught with other indigenous scholars and activists. she harvested palmetto fronds from her family’s land in st. bernard parish and brought them to the office to dry. we asked my neighbors for buckets of water where we then soaked strips of the plants that would be used by the class. when people came to visit the workshop, they commented on the comforting smell of the palmetto—bringing them back to their childhoods when they didn’t think twice about lying on the ground of a forest and breathing in the cycles of birth and death around them. two weeks into the course, monique and i talked about how the teaching was going and she said the class allowed her to hold a space where everyone’s histories and experiences were welcomed. through the act of weaving, they participated in a shared activity that also tied their stories together. the course didn’t require any special skills—the idea was to get started and be guided in the process. it is the same way we create books. i learned the method when i read ngugi wa thiongo’s decolonizing the mind: the politics of language in african literature. this small book, shared by one of my african diaspora professors, guarav desai, in my last semester of college, had a profound impact on me. one of the central arguments of the book is that practicing in secret weakens our social fabric, as people see performances, art, and writing only in their final stages where they believe, “[o]h, it must take such brains!” (wa thiongo , p. ). in his own theatre productions, ngugi advocated opening up rehearsals as a process of “demystifying knowledge and hence reality” (wa thiongo , p. ). the neighborhood story project’s corner store building has provided a space for writing and creating books and art in the public eye. working on a special issue that draws people together from around the world creates a gathering space as well. borrowing the words of denise frazier, we “hope to spark the interest of every other person who has felt just out of reach of their sense of home and history” (frazier , p. ). as we have worked on editing the special issue, many spaces like churches, beaches, maraes, round houses, and corner store workshops have had to close because of the coronavirus pandemic. travel has become limited. around the world, our elders are dying, and borders have closed. many of the communities that have been impacted the most by colonialism and structural racism are now the most vulnerable. on march , ronald w. lewis passed away from the virus; the future of his museum, a site for decolonizing genealogies, remains uncertain. as people are experiencing all over genealogy , , of the world, the grief of losing a loved one is compounded by not being able to properly tend to our dead (kurutz ). in our special issue, poet and artist shin yu pai contributes an essay and film, “embarkation: reimagining a taoist ritual ceremony,” where she shares how she created a performance that incorporated poetry and film to heal from personal loss (pai ). see figure . genealogy , , x for peer review of of the communities that have been impacted the most by colonialism and structural racism are now the most vulnerable. on march , ronald w. lewis passed away from the virus; the future of his museum, a site for decolonizing genealogies, remains uncertain. as people are experiencing all over the world, the grief of losing a loved one is compounded by not being able to properly tend to our dead (kurutz ). in our special issue, poet and artist shin yu pai contributes an essay and film, “embarkation: reimagining a taoist ritual ceremony,” where she shares how she created a performance that incorporated poetry and film to heal from personal loss (pai ). see figure . figure . a still-image of film footage from the wang yeh boat burning festival in donggang, taiwan, by ye mimi, which the poet and artist shin yu pai incorporated into her grief ritual. image courtesy of ye mimi and shin yu pai. in her act of creation, she may inspire others who are grappling with personal and collective grief. in the next few months, we will continue to develop our special issue and present other articles that will contribute to the ethics of decolonization as we honor the dead. we welcome dialogue. as our editor- in-chief, sherry rankins robertson, writes to us, “in solidarity of global health.” funding: this research received no external funding. acknowledgements: i would like to thank my co-editor, antoinette jackson, for inviting me work on this project with her, and all of our contributors for their incredible scholarship, creativity, and time commitments to our special issue. thank you to editor-in-chief, sherry rankins robertson, for believing in the multimedia format, and to managing editor allie shi for helping us bring the articles to publication. thank you to helen a. regis, monique verdin and bruce sunpie barnes for communing with the dead with me, to nikki thanos and leo gorman for co-parenting during our coronavirus shutdown so i could write, to houma historian and philosopher and michael dardar and atakapa-ishak historian and publisher jeffery daresnbourg for reading drafts, and to biddy morris, carlene wise, and james pillsbury for your support from derby, western australia. thank you to my parents, douglas breunlin and cynthia hart breunlin, for raising me with a knowledge of the importance of transgenerational sequences, and to my son, max omar etheridge, for joining me in so much of my work. and finally, i want to acknowledge three important people in the neighborhood story project community who transitioned to the ancestral realm while working on this project: ronald w. lewis, kim “cutie” boutte, and sylvester francis, sr. our work isn’t done. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. references (abu lughod ) abu lughod, lila. . writing women’s worlds: bedouin stories. berkeley: university of california press. figure . a still-image of film footage from the wang yeh boat burning festival in donggang, taiwan, by ye mimi, which the poet and artist shin yu pai incorporated into her grief ritual. image courtesy of ye mimi and shin yu pai. in her act of creation, she may inspire others who are grappling with personal and collective grief. in the next few months, we will continue to develop our special issue and present other articles that will contribute to the ethics of decolonization as we honor the dead. we welcome dialogue. as our editor-in-chief, sherry rankins robertson, writes to us, “in solidarity of global health.”. funding: this research received no external funding. acknowledgments: i would like to thank my co-editor, antoinette jackson, for inviting me work on this project with her, and all of our contributors for their incredible scholarship, creativity, and time commitments to our special issue. thank you to editor-in-chief, sherry rankins robertson, for believing in the multimedia format, and to managing editor allie shi for helping us bring the articles to publication. thank you to helen a. regis, monique verdin and bruce sunpie barnes for communing with the dead with me, to nikki thanos and leo gorman for co-parenting during our coronavirus shutdown so i could write, to houma historian and philosopher and michael dardar and atakapa-ishak historian and publisher jeffery daresnbourg for reading drafts, and to biddy morris, carlene wise, and james pillsbury for your support from derby, western australia. thank you to my parents, douglas breunlin and cynthia hart breunlin, for raising me with a knowledge of the importance of transgenerational sequences, and to my son, max omar etheridge, for joining me in so much of my work. and finally, i want to acknowledge three important people in the neighborhood story project community who transitioned to the ancestral realm while working on this project: ronald w. lewis, kim “cutie” boutte, and sylvester francis, sr. our work isn’t done. conflicts of interest: the author declares no conflict of interest. references abu lughod, lila. . writing women’s worlds: bedouin stories. berkeley: university of california press. adams, kathleen m. . art as politics: recrafting identities, tourism, and power in tana toraja, indonesia. honolulu: university of hawaii press. ahmed, sara. . the cultural politics of emotion. new york: routledge. atkinson, judy. . trauma trails: reconnecting song lines. melbourne: spinifex. genealogy , , of barnes, bruce sunpie, and rachel 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brisbane, australia: milani gallery. carney, judith. . black rice: the african origins in the rice cultivation of the americas. cambridge: harvard university press. coates, ta-nehesi. . trayvon martin and the irony of american justice. the atlantic monthly. july . available online: https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/ / /trayvon-martin-and-the-irony-of- american-justice/ / (accessed on august ). collins, john. . ‘but what if i should need to defecate in your neighborhood, madame?’ empire, redemption, and the ‘tradition of the oppressed’ in a brazilian world heritage site. cultural anthropology : – . 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[crossref] © by the author. licensee mdpi, basel, switzerland. this article is an open access article distributed under the terms and conditions of the creative commons attribution (cc by) license (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /). http://dx.doi.org/ . /afar_a_ http://dx.doi.org/ . /praa. . .mu h u pt http://dx.doi.org/ . /dsp. . http://dx.doi.org/ . /genealogy https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/emisferica- -caribbean-rasanblaj.html https://hemisphericinstitute.org/en/emisferica- -caribbean-rasanblaj.html https://neworleanshistorical.org/items/show/ https://neworleanshistorical.org/items/show/ http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/ http://journal.media-culture.org.au/index.php/mcjournal/article/view/ http://dx.doi.org/ . /genealogy http://creativecommons.org/ http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /. 	memory work: the use of multi-media in critical genealogies 	honoring place through home languages 	embodied memory: returning to the dead 	carving out space: genealogies of the land 	reclamations 	references title counter cultures author ashanti alston omowali publication forum: university of edinburgh postgraduate journal of culture & the arts issue number issue date spring publication date / / editors maria elena torres-quevedo and valentina p. aparicio forum claims non-exclusive rights to reproduce this article electronically (in full or in part) and to publish this work in any such media current or later developed. the author retains all rights, including the right to be identified as the author wherever and whenever this article is published, and the right to use all or part of the article and abstracts, with or without revision or modification in compilations or other publications. any latter publication shall recognise forum as the original publisher. university of edinburgh postgraduate journal of culture and the arts issue | spring forum | issue counter cultures ashanti alston omowali jericho movement hmmm… i am thinking along the lines of: . one, two three, many ccs . being within a cc . the importance of the study and practice of ccs what if i reversed that order: . the importance of the study and practice of ccs . being within a cc . one, two, three, many ccs as revolution if i follow the later order i might be able to actually write this piece. . lord knows that we living in some strange, extra-ordinary times. particularly here in the entrails of the babylonian monster called the united states of america. hmmm… babylonian monster. babylon, biblical. from the prophetic black panther party. papa rage: eldridge cleaver. i am still in that mindset, that counter—cultural mindset of the s revolution. dig it? smile with me. seems like sooo long ago that we were studying events and processes that were going and growing counter to the american way. (how do i get this typewriter to stop capitalizing america? even this laptop is trying to keep me within the trumpian walls. never, never… but seriously, this effort of us aspiring revolutionaries to study resistance, and revolution was our layperson desire to make profound local and world changes. we knew that desire had to be informed, and we knew that we had to reject this understood american way of thinking and doing and existential being. what was our literature? books like the little red book of mao tse-tung’s quotations, das kapital, the communist manifesto, the cuban revolution and che guevara, the african, asian and latin american liberation struggles, the urban guerrilla struggles of brazil, germany and ireland, the workers struggle to “seize the means of production” of russia and china… etc., etc. we who had no previous desire to want to know about them before, now we are told how important they are to the struggles indigenous to us that we identify as black revolution, native sovereignty, puerto rican independence, the liberation of atzlan, women’s liberation, the detroit auto workers, the appalachian mountain folks coming into their own (can you dig it!). the panthers’ revolutionary constitutional convention and intercommunal efforts. all represent what? what? what? forum | issue counter-cultures. the counter-cultural. where is the resistance coming from? why is it coming from there? where is it going? and if you are the revolutionary-minded you wanna know how it can web together and over-whelm (not over-throw, i am an anarchist dontcha know) the death-oriented forces of the american way, the empire. study is what we did. now some of us were just teenagers, like me and jihad. we didn’t even make it to high school graduation before “them pigs” were trying to frame us for a cop that was killed in our hometown. but many movement folks were college students. they were either dropping out of college to pursue full-time organizer and or underground work or figuring out how to make their college/university learnings relevant to the nascent revolutionary cultures developing. history, sociology, anthropology, black and brown studies, women’s studies were gonna make their fields “serve the people.” chemistry and electronics students were gonna learn from the aforementioned and creatively use their fields and also “serve the people.” are you following me? stay awake. pour some more coffee… the study and practice were happening at the same time. not consciously or intentionally. it was just the intensity of the times. the s and early s. being counter to u.s. bullshit meant being constantly aware that the orwellian arms of the state would be after you the moment they found out that you, with your naïve self, had joined “the opposition” (off-shoot jordan klepper, from the daily show ). no, seriously. we studied as the bullets of white supremacy snuffed out the lives and dreams of folks like fred hampton. we studied as redneck arms continued to noose black necks. we studied as more and more caskets arrived home to the u.s. from the genocidal war on the viet namese people. we studied the very theme of counter-culture that, for a minute, seemed like we were actually gonna make this revolution happen in spite of the american nightmare suffocating us. as my own studies deepened and broadened in anti-authoritarian directions to make black resistance more resilient or recoverable, i learned how to be more observant of the local and international scene for… what? signs. because by this time, in the late s & s, the scene aint look like we were gonna win this thing. it seemed like all those spaces that were once hotbeds of freedom, liberation, revolution were done, exhausted, deeply wounded and not a rejuvenation, redemption song and fight-back arkestra in sight. i was depressed. but i kept reading and thinking. no matter how depressed, and no matter how much i denied it, it seems like the reading, the walks, the meeting reminiscing old comrades and mingling with new ones with bright eyes and buoyant naiveté allows you to hold on, so to speak. and the anarchist readings were telling me to look anew; that what you think is all you see may not be all there is. look, look deeper. and widen your scope too, jack. resistance is all around you right now. resistance, hidden in front of your face. they were there. the radical sociologies, anthropologies, psychologies, and histories… they were giving me new ways of seeing, of thinking about things. and they were being acted out and written by students and professors in the mix! and then the zapatistas hit! talk about a counter-culture. talk about the counter-cultural! oh my god! within euro-mexican society, seemingly out of nowhere comes this dynamic movement of the mayan people in the mountains of mexico. it captured the hearts of many a disillusioned revolutionary, like myself, and helped us to re-believe again. soon, more studies were popping up forum | issue everywhere of similar kinds of “hidden” rays of hope. the nigerian struggle against shell oil; the palestinian intifadas; the first nations land struggles of canada; the rebirth of anti-authoritarian movements right within the entrails of the babylonian monster; the battle for seattle against the wto. . to be within a cc. this is what you mean to me, as one who belongs to an old counter cultural movement that sprang out of the bowels of slave ships - years past-present. i come from out of a movement that has been and can only be a constant thorn in the side of the babylonian empire. this is that “being black” thing. this is that cc thing that even the seriously flawed but great movie black panther à-la-wakanda still makes known: that black folks within white supremacy anywhere and everywhere are cognizant of awfully deep needs for identity and freedom. my and comrades’ critical comments on that movie would take a whole lot more pages than this. but suffice it to say that it is critical to study these things as dynamics of any cultural resistance if you wish to aid that resistance towards its liberation. i needed to understand how, after years of american lies and assured political deception, “my people” could vote for barak obama for president???? in my mind it’s yet another setback. we’ll never get out of this mess. more of our political prisoners gonna die, while more photos of president obama and wife michelle gonna go up alongside mlk and probably jfk and bobby. lawd have mercy! yet it’s the contradictory nature of anyone’s oppression/liberation struggle. how do you look at it? what lens do we use? better, what lenses do we use to understand such craziness? what are folks who are putting a lot of thinking to this saying, writing, doing? if these things are kept in mind and one continues to hold out as well as onto loved ones and like-minded/hearted folks, hey, it won’t all look so bad, so hopeless. possibilities present themselves. as a youth i didn’t understand why the civil rights movement and the churches (the black church) didn’t take on a more radical stance against the monster. so the black panther party is where i went. while in prison as i read, i began to understand that the civil rights movement and the church had contradictory things going on. messy things. i came to appreciate the more radical side of a martin luther king. i came to understand that there were also radical churches and not so radical churches that still held us as a people together and gave us hope and self and communal esteem. it’s never black and white. and rejection cannot be done so flippantly. as a much older cat (then in my s) i didn’t understand this seemingly broad and entrenched apathy, disinterest and disillusionment. the crack epidemic was still ravaging my community: hiv/aids, gang culture… not looking good. but i was on the internet reading. anarchist. radical hip hop. liberation theology. there are some interesting readings in afro-futurism. they were telling me that even in the black community there were signs of resistance inside this culture that could not stop finding ways to counter the imperial tentacles of this strangling monster. folks wanted to breathe, uh-huhn. folks wanted to dream the way the elders and ancestors had challenged us to do. and while we were doing all that for life’s sake, folks (organic street intellectuals and folks in universities) were watching, participating and writing about it. sometimes those voices and writings got to us. like bell forum | issue hooks and of course, cornel west. but so did angela davis, dylan rodriguez, michelle wallace, sonia sanchez’ poetry, and tupac & biggie smalls, even with sometimes problematic words & performances. contradictory, messy, right? that’s the way it is. dialectics. the internal struggles will bring forth the essence of a thing (we learned that as panther marxists). uh-no, un-capitalize that! damn, laptop. here we were, on the ground-level, organizing as we were learning new intellectual languages, new ways to see, and ways to do. new ways of be-inggggg… praxis, that word. praxis. zines were in again. folks were sharing their thinkings while doings. within one tent of counter-cultures, now called a “convergence,” were spaces made for others. that word other would take on a life of its own. we went to shut down the republican convention in philadelphia. it was anarchist spring. when folks of color arrived and demanded space in the operations, it seemed like shit was gonna hit the fan. but the “spokes council” opened up and our entry (as entre, smile) created a new dynamic. anarchism was no longer old school, intentional or well you know, “we didn’t mean it.” folks were reading race traitor, anti-heterosexism, ageism, abolitionism. folks of color were reading them things too plus holding on to their “roots.” we were reaching back for multidimensional modes of understandings and living and fighting back. in our languages you heard talk of ancestors, elders, forgotten sheroes and heroes. we were trying to recapture rituals that would help us to re - member: reconnect with the past and understand that the so-called past is never disconnected from now and future. also in this re-membering we are connecting to acknowledging how the monster has caused our dismembering as a body of people and as individuals. we want to bring healing through justice to our folks in this counter-nation. we want to reconnect the ancient with the present with the future. and it is for those of like hearts and minds and willing to put their studies to serve the people use to see how we within this matrix of resistance can mutual assist each other in bringing down the imperial monster. dig it? there is this political cartoon that i have somewhere that depicts a map of the united states, but there are no states. there are just thousands of liberated territories or spaces. the idea being that we have to see and think and feel differently in the process of envisioning what this land can be. we have to be able to do that. we have to work from certain no compromise positions or understandings that this land we be on is turtle island. occupied turtle island like occupied palestine. the injustice begins there. the original sin begins there. leonard peltier as the longest held first nations political prison under u.s. confinement, is symbolic of a year sin that will not just go away, from wounded knee to standing rock. the technological empire that sits on the back of the turtle cannot erase nor silence the continued resistance from fn folks. the kidnapping, middle passage and enslavement of folks of african descent is the next original sin of white supremacy. the theft of mexican lands by american colonizers (texas, “new” mexico, california, etc.) and ridiculous “immigration” issues of the president trump ad-strangulation. add in asia, hawaii, puerto rico, alaska, guam, the dominican republic, the virgin islands (which still has political prisoners who fought against u.s. domination) and you have counter-cultural tinderboxes that could explode at any moment. where will we be? how will we position ourselves to aid in the impossible changing of this imperial landscape? forum | issue my wife and i were watching the idiotic box and few weeks ago. yeah, tis’ contradictory i told you! anyway, we like to watch the show “catfish.” there’s nev and whats-his-name. whats-his-name has often worn t-shirts supporting black lives matter and feminism. this particular episode he has a t-shirt that says, the future is female, acknowledging his support of growing counter cultural resistances, like blm, etc. last image: another favorite cartoon of mine out of an anarchist zine. it says something like, “we are not for the overthrowing of the system. we are for organizing and fighting to take back our lives away from the system until it just fades away into oblivion.” truth is, it said all that in about ten words but i can’t remember it exactly. i’m dammit. smile and gimme some slack. so, the import of this cartoon’s message for me is that we must recognize the insurgencies here. hidden? maybe; but resistance nonetheless. all around us. my bias is always towards the anti-authoritarian because i realize that folks are oppressed, tired and life moves within them to fight back in all kinds of ways. anti- authoritarian means you honor that and respect its dignity and self-determination. dig it. again, the s studies give you a hint: black power, flower power, anti-war, love-ins, poetry and off the grid communes. get my point? folks are studying today the growth of community gardens, social ecology, the return of witch wisdom, and indigenous/holistic health practices-- in new york i know folks who are developing ways for others who may be bipolar to function in healthy ways. some progressive churches have trained and implemented “peace teams” not just for guatemala but for the hoods they live in. what?! and because of the resurgence of police and gang-related killings in black and brown communities some folks are thinking about and developing ways to intervene to save their lives. spike lee’s problematic movie, chi-raq, was an attempt in that vein, and black panther a la wakanda will feed them thinkings in spite of itself. included in that is the old idea of organizing gun clubs. women led efforts to fight the high levels of rape has led to a myriad forms of safe spaces, empowerment spaces and mass political mobilizations of anti-heterosexist liberation. black lives matter hopefully aint done yet. what is happening cannot be controlled from any centrally controlled vanguard organization. one, two, three, many counter-cultures as not only a recovery of revolution but also as revolutionary improvisation. like jazz, taking these phenomena to places no man… (uh-uhn star trek), no humanity has ever gone before. the historical writings unearthing new stories of resistance, and exposing how technics of silencing those stories were used for decades and generations; the sociological writings that bring in the intersectional connections of other insights, the psychological writings that incorporate the anti- colonial and postcolonial perspectives (especially ‘cause they help me understand the sources of my own damn depression periods); the theological writings that speak to the spirit, the spiritual situation of individuals and peoples under all kinds of domination; the womanist/feminist and even the queer theoretical that can keep us from “slipping” back to the poison of the monstrous embrace. we need to continually understand and be continually open to understanding these times we live in. it is the only way to stay in the fight and to maintain some sort of optimism. like, believing we can really win folks. it aint over! forum | issue of the one-two-three-many counter-cultures i have high hopes for the one i know best – the black counter-culture. it is my hope that it stops getting bamboozled by the hypnotic americanism of uncle sam à-la-barack obama. somehow, we have to let uncle sam go. it’s still a rapacious relationship; still totally colonial; still killing us. black power offered us a way out back in the day (if i may use that expression). revolution, socialism, liberation were words that carried a lot of transformative potential. but man, each one led by some righteous folks, got bought off or distorted back into the embrace. we couldn’t “get out” from this relationship with this abuser. then i met abolitionist viviane saleh-hanna for whom abolition sounded like revolution, anti-capitalism & imperialism, anti hetero-sexism and self-determination by focusing on the role of penal colonialism and white supremacy worldwide. and she was immersed in black struggle here as a palestinian-egyptian pan-africanist critiquing western (particularly u.s.) criminology. the abolitionism of viviane saleh-hanna had a different way to look at the counter-culture of the black experience within the bowels of the monster. (in total transparency, what i am about to share with you is both personal and political. it involves two things: black feminist hauntology & professor viviane saleh-hanna. and… so? okay, viviane is my wife. she is a pan-africanist abolitionist. she is an activist abolitionist professor. she aint in academia for the prestige. she’s in it for the liberation of the planet from all systems of oppression.) her focus came a through penal colonialism and thus its abolition. i kinda watched her work on this paper on black feminist hauntology at home. after studying penal colonialism in africa, particularly in nigeria while living and working there for years, she eventually gets hired to teach in massachusetts. as a longtime member of icopa (international conference on penal abolition), being here in the united states with her knowledge of criminal justice, abolitionist critiques/involvement and passion for justice, she brings a fresh perspective to abolitionism that can deepen some of the more liberal/progressive abolitionist versions currently popular in the u.s. what makes it unique and powerful for me? besides taking penal colonialism for real, and european white supremacy for real, and heterosexism for real, she gave me a way to understand the challenge of “being black” in babylon as if it were wrapped in harriet tubman’s rifle on yet another excursion through the swamps to freedom. she says… freedom, liberation from this madness, involves seeing yourselves as trapped in a plus year relationship with a european rapacious monster that has built its empire and institutions (especially its systems of enforcement and punishment) on the back of first nations turtle island. when you can see that it is your imperial rapist and that it has intergenerational power and privileges, aint but one goal that totally makes sense if ya wanna be free. “get out!” within our communities we have to move towards not accepting the harm inherent in americanism. we have to accept the fact that the criminal justice system and penal colonialism fortifies itself, perpetuates itself, justifies itself and then uses its hypnotic powers to convince us (its primary victims) that it is for our own good. that it is, in fact, a reflection of their god’s thumbs up on the specialness of americanism. no! no! ya basta! that could possibly be the potential of black feminism and afro-futurism; that the “no!” begins to include even the historically excluded voices and activisms within the black community. black feminism & black lives matter gave a hint of that. revolutionary hip-hop gave a hint of that. liberation theology, black forum | issue liberation theology and womanist theology and spiritualities give us hints of potential new insurgencies that could help us break from this rapist embrace in explosive ways. these are things that i see as an elder who aint too active no more in traditional ways but who still wants to win by any means necessary (love you malcolm, happy rd birffday!) i still look for signs that the black counter-culture can finds ways to redemption, recovery (re-membering for a broken people). i still listen to conversations, watch cnn & msnbc, trevor noah & stephen colbert. i get disappointed with blm at times and hope they don’t disappear into despair. i join my wife in raising these two chilluns who are sooo young and soooo deserving to be the generation to be totally free. my mama’s gonna be and we just buried one of my nieces who was killed in a alley in my hometown. it’s rough. but in spite of it all, this so-called community aint through yet. i have faith that we will find ways to pull it together, beyond mere survival. we have to finds ways to get out! and in solidarity with others of like hearts-and-minds. folks are studying, that i know. folks are making analyses in intersectional ways. i read, and i ask questions. i drive my chilluns to school and watch other parents, even papas, show some genuine love to their little ones. that tells me it aint over. so, out of all my shit, my bouts of depression, my male shit, others male shit, there are the woman and queer folks, and the newer nationalists, both black and brown, whose ya basta! has a dual purpose. one, they want to deal with that rapist and mentality in a no-compromise and “breaking” manner, and two, they want to show love to the rest of us by challenging us to say “no! no more!” to what harm we have been laying on them for generations. they are the ones truly saying that in unity there is strength. come-unity. a new embracing is before us. and we can revisit the belief in victory being ours if we want it. i have rambled enough. i hope that readers will not be too frustrated in following this. it is streams of thought of one who still wants to be in the mix of one-two-three-many counter-cultures that brings an end to the rule of the international rapist. panthers just wanted to be a part of that worldwide phenomenon of insurrectionary burstings of freedom. i am still that cat, that anarchist cat. don’t let us down. free all political prisoners. they wanted us to get out! all power through the folks who care, who dare… ashanti alston national jericho movement may forum | issue author biography revolutionary, speaker, writer, organizer, motivator. ashanti is one of the few former members of the black panther party who identifies as an anarchist in the tradition of new afrikan ancestor kwesi balagoon (bpp & bla) within the black liberation movement. as a result of his membership in both the bpp and black liberation army (bla), he served a total of years as a political prisoner and prisoner-of-war. he is currently on the steering committee of the national jericho movement to free u.s. political prisoners. on top of all that, he is an elder-co-parenting two youngins’ ( & !) and a grandfather of a small “maroon nation.” ashanti resides in providence, rhode island. anglica editor grażyna bystydzieńska [g.bystydzienska@uw.edu.pl] associate editors martin löschnigg [martin.loeschnigg@uni-graz.at] jerzy nykiel [jerzy.nykiel@uib.no] marzena sokołowska-paryż [m.a.sokolowska-paryz@uw.edu.pl] anna wojtyś [a.wojtys@uw.edu.pl] assistant editors magdalena kizeweter [m.kizeweter@uw.edu.pl] katarzyna kociołek [kkociolek@uw.edu.pl] przemysław uściński [przemek.u@hotmail.com] english language editor barry keane [bkeane@uw.edu.pl] guest reviewers teresa bela, jagiellonian university, cracow bartłomiej błaszkiewicz, university of warsaw anna branach-kallas, nicolaus copernicus university, toruń małgorzata grzegorzewska, university of warsaw paweł jędrzejko, university of silesia, sosnowiec janusz kaźmierczak, adam mickiewicz university, poznań agnieszka kotwasińska, american studies centre, university of warsaw anna krawczyk-Łaskarzewska, university of warmia and mazury, olsztyn zuzanna Ładyga-michalska, university of warsaw ewa Łuczak, university of warsaw dominika oramus, university of warsaw marek paryż, university of warsaw wit pietrzak, university of Łódź paweł stachura, adam mickiewicz university, poznań mikołaj wiśniewski, swps university of social sciences and humanities, warsaw advisory board michael bilynsky, university of lviv andrzej bogusławski, university of warsaw mirosława buchholtz, nicolaus copernicus university, toruń edwin duncan, towson university jacek fabiszak, adam mickiewicz university, poznań jacek fisiak, adam mickiewicz university, poznań elżbieta foeller-pituch, northwestern university, evanston-chicago piotr gąsiorowski, adam mickiewicz university, poznań keith hanley, lancaster university andrea herrera, university of colorado christopher knight, university of montana, marcin krygier, adam mickiewicz university, poznań krystyna kujawińska-courtney, university of Łódź brian lowrey, université de picardie jules verne, amiens zbigniew mazur, maria curie-skłodowska university, lublin rafał molencki, university of silesia, sosnowiec john g. newman, university of texas rio grande valley michal jan rozbicki, st. louis university jerzy rubach, university of iowa piotr ruszkiewicz, pedagogical university, cracow hans sauer, university of munich krystyna stamirowska, jagiellonian university, cracow merja stenroos, university of stavanger jeremy tambling, university of manchester peter de voogd, university of utrecht anna walczuk, jagiellonian university, cracow jean ward, university of gdańsk jerzy wełna, university of warsaw anglica an international journal of english studies / quan manh ha and conor hogan https://orcid.org/ - - - university of montana the violence of duality in adrienne kennedy’s funnyhouse of a negro abstract adrienne kennedy’s psychodrama funnyhouse of a negro personifi es in her protagonist, sarah, the internalized racism and mental deterioration that a binary paradigm foments. kennedy also develops the schizoid consciousness of sarah to accentuate sarah’s hy- bridized and traumatized identity as an african american woman. kennedy’s play was controversial during the black arts movement, as she refrained from endorsing black nationalist groups like black power, constructing instead a nightmare world in which race is the singular element in defi ning self -worth. in her dramatized indictment of both white supremacy and identity politics, american culture’s pathologized fascination with pig- mentation drives the protagonist to solipsistic isolation, and ultimately, to suicide. ken- nedy, through the disturbed cast of sarah’s mind, portrays a world in which race obsession triumphs over any sense of basic humanity. the play urges the audience to accept the absurdity of a dichotomized vision of the world, to recognize the spectral nature of reality, and to transcend the devastation imposed by polarizing rhetoric. in the wake of the charleston shootings on june , , when a -year-old white man entered a historic black church in south carolina and murdered nine african americans in a premeditated act of radical, leftist terrorism, jon stewart, in his popular comedy series the daily show, in a rare diversion from humor, spat the following words into the camera: […] once again, we have to peer into the abyss of the depraved violence that we do to each other in the nexus of a, just, gaping racial wound that will not heal, yet we pretend doesn’t exist. i’m confi dent, though, that by acknowledging it, by staring into that and seeing it for what it is, we still won’t do jack s–. yeah, that’s us. (yahr n.p.) stewart voiced the immense frustration currently boiling over in the united states, as videos and images of brutality against blacks dominate news cycles and social media, sparking protests and the birth of movements like black lives matter. at a moment when the historically racial confl ict between blacks and whites has quan manh ha and conor hogan once again risen to the forefront of the national consciousness, literary works like adrienne kennedy’s funnyhouse of a negro remain painfully relevant. the plot of this drama consists of actions by attendants who surround sarah, the female protagonist, and projections from sarah’s mind in the moments before her suicide, as her various selves, all major fi gures in western history, discuss the self-revulsion that sarah has been conditioned to feel as a black woman in the united states. . the detrimental eff ects of assimilation each of sarah’s projected selves represents a facet of western culture, and kennedy contrasts each with the others to expose how current rhetoric perpetuates a simplistic, fl awed, and in sarah’s case, fatal paradigm. queen victoria and the duchess of hapsburg, historical principles of the colonial epoch, become demonic, wanton, and violent fi gures who represent the devastation that imperialism wrought upon the african continent. interestingly, queen victoria had african ancestry: deneen l. brown writes in an article published in the washington post that queen charlotte ( – ) was britain’s black queen who “passed on her mixed-race heritage to her granddaughter, queen victoria” (brown n.p.). patrice lumumba, the assassinated congolese president, often a symbol of resistance for the black power movement, is cast as a broken, defeated rapist, representing the ultimate failure of various black nationalist groups. jesus, the founder of christian faith, is projected as a hideous, tortured dwarf, who symbolizes the role that christianity has had in african american disenfranchisement. in her article written for the huffi ngton post, taryn finley quotes franchesca ramsey: “historically, white jesus has been used to oppress and erase the histories of people of color […]” (finley n.p.). ironically, the portrayal of jesus as a tortured dwarf evokes the image of a physically abused and exploited black slave. through these historical characters, kennedy examines the crushing weight of history on the black indi- vidual, which in the extreme can drive african americans to insanity and self- destruction. journalist and author ta-nehesi coates writes: in america, it is traditional to destroy the black body – it is heritage. enslavement was not merely the antiseptic borrowing of labor – it is not so easy to get a human being to commit their body against its own elemental interest. and so enslavement must be casual wrath and random mangling, the gashing of heads and brains blown out over the river as the body seeks to escape. ( ) in funnyhouse of a negro, kennedy off ers a harrowing vision into the private, personal torment born of this historical destruction, a destruction so often described clinically, with charts and fi gures. yet rather than suggest black nationalism or separatism as the solution, the play makes clear the fallacy of any response with th e violence of duality in adrienne kennedy’s funnyhouse of a negro race at its core, and the resultant suff ering when the worth of an individual is reduced to demographic identifi ers like ethnicity or gender. performance art diff ers in its examination of the human condition from the plastic and literary arts most signifi cantly in the directness with which it communicates with the viewer. rather than off er a work to be contemplated at the audience’s leisure, staged performances present a dynamic, shifting universe that demands constant, active engagement. the proximity of actor and spec- tator removes layers of separation between the work and the audience, often eliciting a primal, rather than cerebral, response in the onlooker, contributing to a more personal, intimate experience. traditionally, playwrights construct a plot within which their characters interact, conveying insight into various aspects of consciousness and society. it is seldom, however, that authors manage to create a new mode of artistic investigation and expression within established genres, employing truly innovative methods to reveal the generally concealed dynamics of interaction between human psyche and culture. kennedy is one of those rare innovators. in her terrifying dreamscape funnyhouse of a negro, she constructs a play in which the action occurs almost entirely within the rapidly deteriorating mind of sarah, during the brief moments preceding her suicide. delving into the surreal world of the subconscious, funnyhouse of a negro is unconstrained by temporal, physical, or logical restrictions. the action consists in a series of parallel internal monologues or projected conversations between sarah’s various selves, all monumental fi gures in the racial and colonial history of western civilization, interspersed with cynical interjections by a funnyhouse lady and funnyhouse man – sarah’s landlady and boyfriend, respectively. through the staged projec- tion of sarah’s mind, kennedy deconstructs the complex of culturally ingrained attitudes of mind that have infected the psyches of americans. to understand one result of such infection, we refer readers to a chapter on “black aesthetics,” in which vincent b. leitch paraphrases houston a. baker’s insightful observations: “black culture in america possessed a collectivistic rather than an individualistic ethos, a repudiative rather than an accommodative psychology” (leitch ). imposed by white slave owners, the lie of a natural racial hierarchy, suggesting that blacks are inherently inferior to whites, once internalized, foments the self- loathing psychosis that ravages sarah’s consciousness. kennedy’s deviation from the conventional aristotelian plot structure of a beginning, middle, and end refl ects the aesthetic she employs: “i see my writing as a growth of images. i think all my plays come out of dreams i had […].” she also states that “autobiographical work is the only kind that interests me” (qtd. in gates and smith , ). in writing funnyhouse of a negro, kennedy draws from her own experiences, relating some of her intensely personal feelings of anxiety, disenfranchisement, and frustration, and her play rings with authenticity, despite its surrealistic structure. kennedy captures a reality familiar to many african americans living under the constant threat of violence in a society that quan manh ha and conor hogan views them as racially inferior. she exposes truths that white americans often refuse to recognize, but which blacks must grapple with on a daily basis. claudia rankine, in an oped piece for the new york times, wrote in the days immediately following the june south carolina massacre: the confederate battle fl ag continues to fl y at south carolina’s statehouse as a reminder of a history marked by lynched black bodies. we can distance ourselves from this fact until the next horrifi c killing, but we won’t be able to outrun it. history’s authority over us is not broken by maintaining a silence about its continued eff ects. (n.p.) kennedy, through the fragmented hallucinations of sarah, illuminates the darker, often denied, part of america’s history, juxtaposing classically confl icting ideolo- gies to lay bare the violence that a binary social order generates. the distorted world of funnyhouse of a negro, far from rejecting history’s eff ects, magnifi es them, urging the viewer to recognize the necessity for a re-examination of racial politics in the united states. by casting the entire play in a nightmarish pall, kennedy anatomizes and reconfi gures western notions of good and evil, of positive and negative. through her hyperbolic demonization of the black as well as the white communities, she also rejects the reactionary rhetoric of the black separatist movement, of malcolm x’s early declaration: “no sane black man really wants integration […] for the black man in america the only solution is complete separation from the white man” (terrill ; original emphasis). instead of portraying one race in a more positive light than the other, she creates a funhouse mirror that refl ects racism, and the notion of race itself, as a distorted reality, magnifying its grotesqueries and demonstrating the dangerous absurdity of connoting immutable characteristics upon skin color. this decision to deviate from black theater’s conventions of the s to present proud, realistic depictions of everyday black life (like lorraine hansberry’s african american play a raisin in the sun), and to explore the murkier waters of a psyche tortured by racial politics ensured that her plays “remained controversial because of their failure to comply with the nationalistic orienta- tion of the black arts movement (bam) of the s” (boucher ). however, rather than weaken funnyhouse of a negro, kennedy’s rejection of a particular political agenda augments her ultimate message: any attempt to attribute superi- ority to skin pigmentation is absurd, whether it be white racism or black power. she uses a hyper-dichotic rhetoric to demonstrate her point: a binary paradigm, reinforced by language itself, seeds self-destructive insanity in the individual, and every citizen, whether black or white, must recognize this linguistic fallacy in order for the united states to progress beyond the disease of america’s racism, born in the belly of slave ships crossing the atlantic. th e violence of duality in adrienne kennedy’s funnyhouse of a negro . the violence of duality marcel danesi, in his analysis of the formation of structuralist theory, “opposition theory and the interconnectedness of language, culture, and cognition,” writes: “the implicit philosophical idea in early structuralism was that the human mind is inclined by its nature to perceive the world in terms of opposites” ( ). this tendency – to perceive meaning through the juxtaposition of theoretically contrasting terms or concepts – is the structural origin that kennedy reveals as dangerous in her indictment of language’s “violent hierarchy,” noted deconstructionist jacques derrida. poststructuralist critics, infl uenced by derrida’s monumental book of grammatology, recognized the inherent danger of binary thinking and the dual- istic paradigms it produces. the presence/absence dichotomy, fundamental to structuralism, suggests to the poststructuralist that, in the mind, every word also contains a “trace” of its binary opposite, and this diff érance allows the mind to generate meaning. derrida expanded upon the problem inherent in the presence/absence means of arriving at defi nition in his landmark work positions, in which he suggests that, in the moment of conceptualization, “one of the two terms governs the other,” connoting positivity upon one image and negativity upon the other, creating “a violent hier- archy” (derrida ). claude levi-strauss, a french structuralist anthropologist, utilized this insight into language’s primary power in constructing one’s under- standing of the world in his analysis of various cultures – among communities with or without a written language. in her study of poststructuralism’s impact upon modern anthropology “legacies of derrida: anthropology,” rosalind morris employs derrida’s and levi-strauss’s insights: writing is […] associated with violence, forgetting, and political hierarchy. it is the instrument of colonization and the means for disseminating an economic logic whose most salient characteristics are its abstraction of value, its simultaneous devaluation of utility, and its tendency to waste. ( ) in western history, the conventional use of language, especially written language, has supported a power structure favoring wealthy, heterosexual white men, ascribing a positive value to their recurrent representative adjectives and images: white, wealth, lightness, civilization, masculinity, logic – while demonizing their binary oppo- sites: black, poverty, darkness, primitivity, femininity, superstition. this linguistic inequality is part and parcel of racial oppression, and it is this binary system of defi nition that kennedy seeks to expose as poisonous in funnyhouse of a negro. because language is inherently rife with hierarchical notions of superiority and inferiority, kennedy’s decision to conduct her deconstruction of binary thinking within an individual’s consciousness is ingenious. the mind is the realm in which the signifi er and the signifi ed conjoin, yet this melding of words with images or quan manh ha and conor hogan ideas occurs so instantaneously that the process itself is rarely examined. kennedy recognizes the vast, often overlooked, power that this relationship between the signifi er and signifi ed holds over the manner in which an individual perceives reality. randi koppen observes: part of the creative process, as [kennedy] experiences it, is to allow oneself to be taught by these signifi ers with which she believes herself to stand in commu- nication – the signifi ers of a knowledge that actually proceeds from herself, from her own memory, but which is nonetheless outside the bounds of conscious cognition. ( ) to demonstrate the menace of the binary system of signifi er and signifi ed, kennedy invented a new form of dramatization, one not constricted by classic temporal boundaries. in funnyhouse of a negro, the protagonist’s dissected, multivariant consciousness occupies a dream world in which time is elastic, and in which her various fragmented selves are unleashed to roam wild, appearing and disappearing through the wormholes of her distressed mind. the schizoid nature of her psyche represents an unintegrated, rapidly collapsing personality whose covalent factions are at war with each other. the play exists within this internalized tempest of negro-sarah’s mental state. . black identity and kennedy’s critique of western colonialism the character sarah gives voice to the other living outside of the american power structure in virtually every aspect: female, mixed-race, a child of rape. sarah’s gender allows kennedy to explore her own more personal struggles, refl ecting her tendency to use her own life experience as a source for her dramatic material, and this personal dimension cements the character’s fundamental vulnerability. a theme of sexual violence pervades the play, alluding to both the specter of the black rapist, which has been used to demonize african americans, and the historical reality of white slave owners sexually abusing their female slaves. sarah’s mixed- race status contributes to her sense of alienation, of non-belonging to either race, black or white. she oscillates, instead, between two poles, trapped in the warped space of the mental and physical funny house that confi nes her. as a child of rape, forged in the crucible of the most violent and abhorrent act one human can commit against another, the self-loathing that permeates sarah’s character is exacerbated by an order of magnitude. stage directions describe sarah as representative of white america’s dismissive, dehumanizing vision of the african american race: “she is a faceless, dark character with a hangman’s rope about her neck […]. she is the negro” (kennedy ; original emphasis). faceless, inextricably linked with death, she is seen not as human but as a nightmarish shade, her entire being defi ned by her race. her fi rst monologue establishes the internal confl ict that w. e. b. du th e violence of duality in adrienne kennedy’s funnyhouse of a negro bois called “double consciousness,” or the tendency of african americans to defi ne themselves through the white ideals designed to disenfranchise them from birth. when an african american internalizes the linguistically and culturally instilled notion that the color of her skin indicates inherent inferiority, that another race is superior, it becomes nearly impossible to transcend the stigma. sarah embodies the manic self-hatred that results from this internalization, as she has european royal fi gures living inside her: she [queen victoria regina] wants me to tell her of a royal world where every- thing and everyone is white, and there are no unfortunate black ones. for as we of royal blood know, black is evil and has been from the beginning. even before my mother’s hair started to fall out. before she was raped by a wild black beast. black was evil. (kennedy ) as the footnote explains, kennedy refers here to the story of genesis . – . , which reads, “in the beginning […] darkness was upon the face of the deep. and god said, let there be light” (gates and smith ). the judeo-christian tradition, central to the development of western culture, begins with the image of light triumphing over darkness, as a result of god’s divine will. this symbolic victory colored all subsequent judeo-christian history and has been used to justify horrifi c atrocities, during the colonial epoch and continuously thereafter. for, while the bible extols the virtues of peace and benevolence, european mercantilists often rationalized the violent destruction of indigenous peoples and cultures through their perceived lack of godliness, ascribing a subhuman nature to people of color. a classic justi- fi cation for colonial expansion off ered by western conquerors was the desire to bring civilization, in the form of christianity, to unenlightened savages, masking the underlying motivation of colonial exploitation for the sake of economic profi t. kennedy uses each of sarah’s various selves to subvert the historically accepted racial hierarchy, the idea that one race is inherently superior and another inferior. according to rosemary curb, queen victoria in the play represents “white imperialist plunder of continents populated by darker races, the white man’s religion and culture, and the self-righteous puritanism of the sexually repressed victorians” ( ). in the western canon of historical fi gures, queen victoria is a symbol of the apex of colonial expansion, of civilization triumphing over barbarism, a rare example of a powerful woman in the political arena. she also embodies puritanical ideals of purity and virginity, of the rejection of female desire. however, in funnyhouse of a negro, she is introduced as a phantasmagoric fi gure, as is the duchess of hapsburg, with whom she is inextricably linked: “they look exactly alike [… with] an alabaster face, the skin drawn tightly over the high cheekbones, great dark eyes that seem gouged out of the head, […] a head of frizzy hair […] a stillness as in the face of death” (kennedy ; original emphasis). by casting these two women in such a charnel light, kennedy portrays the life-destroying nature of a racial gestalt, as well as precludes any attempt to quan manh ha and conor hogan appropriate these fi gures as representatives of a particular ideology prevailing in the modern era, western or otherwise. instead, they represent the danger of writing history in such convenient but misleading terms of victors and losers, superior and inferior, conqueror and conquered. such dichotomies fail to capture the nuanced experience of the individual, especially one trapped between binary linguistic oppositions. sarah voices this sense of entrapment: “i know no places. that is, i cannot believe in places. […] i fi nd there are no places, only my funnyhouse. […] i try to give myself a logical relationship but that too is a lie” (kennedy ). kennedy uses each projected fi gure to highlight aspects of the other, for while she uses queen victoria to satirize victorian oppression and repression, a sex scene involving the duchess is equally ludicrous. in it, the duchess and the funnyman are discussing her father’s rape of her mother, and then, inexplicably, they fall into the throes of passion. in their preceding conversation, the duchess’s description of her father is particularly vulgar and racist, this juxtaposition contrasting violent sexual assault with the ideal of sexual intimacy as a physical expression of love: “he was a wild black beast who raped my mother. […] he is the wilderness. he speaks niggerly, groveling about wanting to touch me with his black hand. […] he is the darkest, my father is the darkest […]. my father is a nigger who drives me into misery” (kennedy – ). in her article “a prison of object relations,” claudia barnett describes the duchess thus: “she was beautiful and powerful but she was also childless, miserable, and ultimately insane. onto this confl icted fi gure sarah projects her nightmares and fantasies, appropriately united in a fi gurehead who has fl ourished and failed” ( ). this combination of night- mare and fantasy further blurs archetypal boundaries and taboos, because the sex scene occurs directly after a discussion of rape. the conversation is rife with images conveying the “black brute” stereotype, as graphically imagined by the negrophobic writer george t. winston, president of the north carolina college of mechanical and agricultural arts, in his address to american academy of political and social science in : when a knock is heard at the door [a white woman] shudders with nameless horror. the black brute is lurking in the dark, a monstrous beast, crazed with lust. his ferocity is almost demoniacal. a mad bull or tiger could scarcely be more brutal. a whole community is frenzied with horror, with the blind and furious rage for vengeance. ( – ) kennedy, in having the duchess employ similar rhetoric to excoriate her father, demonstrates the dangerous absurdity of such caustic racism, for the scene is hyperbolically ludicrous, shifting from a stomach-turning discussion of rape to a love scene in an instant. the character of patrice lumumba represents a political, rather than a social, facet of oppression, as kennedy once again draws upon a western fear, this time the threat of an educated, revolutionary black man resisting colonial subjugation. th e violence of duality in adrienne kennedy’s funnyhouse of a negro one of the most conspicuous victims of modern american imperialism, patrice lumumba became the fi rst democratically elected president of the congo after belgian rule fi nally ended. he was assassinated less than a week after taking offi ce, through a joint eff ort by the cia and the belgian government, who funneled money to support the insurgent activities of a violent, but western-friendly, political faction. georges nzongola-ntalaja, an african american scholar, called lumumba’s murder “the most important assassination of the th century” and “a shattering blow to the hopes of millions of congolese for freedom and material prosperity” (nzongola-ntalaja n.p.). kennedy uses lumumba to demonstrate the arrogance of european and american power in the international political arena by melding lumumba and the father into one stereotype, that of the “black beast.” he parrots sarah’s opening monologue: “i am a nigger of two generations. i am patrice lumumba. […] he is black of skin with dark eyes and a great dark square brow […] then in africa he started to drink and came home drunk one night and raped my mother” (kennedy – ). although thoroughly convoluted, a close analysis of the elements of the monologue reveals that lumumba simultaneously represents both the historical fi gure and the fi ctional father as an amalgamation projected from sarah’s psyche. he represents a deep internalization of the scars of her racial and personal heritage, and his rhetoric demonstrates kennedy’s artistic dexterity in confl ating spacial and temporal dimensions as he describes himself as of “two generations.” he is constructed subtly as his own father, a familial and political time-traveling rapist: “i am patrice lumumba who haunted my mother’s conception” (kennedy ). the landlady confi rms the characters’ interchangeability in her monologue by describing the father’s attempt to reconcile himself with sarah: “he sat on a bench […] crying out – forgiveness, sarah, forgiveness for my being black, sarah. […] and now he is dead […]. he left africa and now patrice lumumba is dead” (kennedy ). these layers of blended internalization muddle divisions between characters, melding them into an amorphous representation of african american angst resulting from centuries of languishing under the imposition of social and political constraints. however, lumumba’s character also reveals kennedy’s disassociation from the black nationalist movement, through his inextricable connection with the tragic, demonic father, as well as through the descriptions of his brutal physical injuries, his shattered head and bloody eyes. lumumba, an african resisting the yoke of colonialism, was a hero for many in the black power movement in america, and yet he ultimately fell before his work really could begin. as georgie boucher observes: “his [lumumba’s] presence appears to be just as suff ocating to [sarah’s] being as that of sitwell and the fi gures of english royalty. [… lumumba] may be read as a visceral image of either a tragic hero or a failed, fallen extremist” (boucher ). the fi nal projection of sarah’s internalized selves is jesus, the most volatile of her selves. as the single most important historical and religious personage in western quan manh ha and conor hogan civilization, jesus represents a conundrum that funnyhouse of a negro grapples with: the transition of ideal to reality, of signifi er to signifi ed. in her article analyzing the impossibility of staging some of kennedy’s directions, erin hurley asserts: these impossible requirements highlight an impulse that lies at the core of theatrical representation: the impulse to substantiate or render the ideal. in the possibility that subtends that impulse [there] is, i think, a utopic sensibility – a sense that something diff erent or better could come out of current conditions. ( ) kennedy understands that a contradiction has developed through the history of christianity: the loving message delivered by jesus in the gospels has been distorted and disfi gured to serve eurocentric, colonial interests. to represent this perversion of an ideal, kennedy creates a truncated and distorted caricature of jesus: “[jesus’s] hair is falling more now” and he is “hideous” (kennedy, ; original emphasis). the character cries out: through my apocalypses and my raging sermons, i have tried to escape him, through god almighty i have tried to escape being black […]. i am going to africa and kill this black man named patrice lumumba. why? because all my life i believed my holy father to be god, but now i know that my father is a black man. (kennedy ) using this caricature to weave sarah’s image of jesus with her other compo- nent selves, kennedy projects the grimmer aspects of the black experience as victims of a subverted christian doctrine – the “raging sermons” that draw random, out-of-context verses from the old and new testament to justify atrocities against blacks, from lynchings to political assassinations. these misguided, overzealous, and all-too-often self-serving christians completely misinterpret the core of the value system propounded in the gospels, which generally promote love, forgive- ness, and inner peace, besmirching the name of the vast majority of the faithful who attempt to adhere to these ideals. that the character jesus states, “i am going to africa and kill this black man” (kennedy ), reinforces kennedy’s attempt to demonstrate how a peaceful religion became the vehicle for violence and oppres- sion, and it reveals the inherent absurdity of using christianity as a means for justifying atrocities. additionally, kennedy uses jesus to represent the repressed fear of white racists of all historical eras and geographical locations: the fear that they were fundamentally no diff erent from africans, a realization that would reveal that they were in fact enslaving and torturing human beings just like themselves. kennedy captures this fear in the completion of the preceding quotation: “why? because all my life i believed my holy father to be god, but now i know that my father is a black man” (kennedy ), a realization that, in her case, precipitates sarah’s collapse and her suicide in the concluding scene. sarah’s suicide serves as the ultimate insight into the spurious nature of many culturally and linguistically established values (values used to support artifi cial th e violence of duality in adrienne kennedy’s funnyhouse of a negro notions of racial superiority or inferiority, for example), demonstrating the fallible subjectivity behind binary thinking – a fallible subjectivity that ascribes, culturally and linguistically, a positive value to whiteness and a negative value to blackness. the stage directions themselves emphasize this fallacy, describing lightness and darkness in equally negative terms: “it is set in the middle of the stage in a strong white light, while the rest of the stage is in unnatural blackness. the quality of the white light in unreal and ugly” (kennedy, ; orginal emphasis). this fundamental issue of dichotic thinking, woven into the fabric of language itself, resists any convenient solution. as shelby steele notes in a chapter on white guilt in his revolutionary study on race relations the content of our character: a new vision of race in america, the response off ered by the extremists of the black power movement, for example, who called for separatism and self-imposed segregation, ultimately represents a reaction detrimental for all parties: with black power […] knowledge of ill-gotten advantage could now be evidenced and deepened […] into the sort of guilt from which institutions could redeem them- selves only by off ering […] forms of reparations and compensation for past injustice […]. after black power, racial preferences became the order of the day […]. blacks, then […] must be seen as generally ‘less than’ others. their needs are ‘special’ […]. they are seen exclusively along the dimension of their victimization, so they become diff erent people with whom whites can negotiate entitlements, but never fully see as people like themselves […]. the selfi shly guilty white is drawn to what blacks like least in themselves – their suff ering, victimization, and dependency. this is no good for anyone. (steele – ) kennedy, in hindsight, underscores the failure of programs like affi rmative action, a policy intended to treat symptoms, while allowing the deeper causes of racism to metastasize. as steele explains, in many respects, black americans today are worse off than they were during the early days of the civil rights era, because the solutions off ered by the government are more an attempt to placate white guilt than to actually promote equality and progress. he argues that what america needs are “deracinated social policies that attack poverty rather than black poverty […]. the white message to blacks must be: america hurt you badly and that is wrong, but entitlements only prolong the hurt while development overcomes it” (steele ). blacks, receiving certain “benefi ts,” are now expected to repress their feel- ings of rage and frustration at the stagnancy of social change, because somehow through affi rmative action whites have atoned. funnyhouse of a negro forces this repression to the forefront of the conversation, demanding a complex refl ection on the incredibly convoluted racial politics of the united states. georgie boucher asserts that kennedy portrays a fractured protagonist whose multiple selves […] enable an examina- tion of the notion of internalized racism, whereby black subjects internalize deep quan manh ha and conor hogan feelings of inferiority assigned to them externally by racism. additionally, kenne- dy’s fractured protagonists also convey the failure of the essentialist project of black nationalism in the s, adopted to aid the ontological crises of african americans. ( ) this assessment certainly is supported by kennedy’s play. the simplistic appeal of black nationalism, or any sort of identity politics, is obvious, as it off ers a clear other to blame. yet is premised on the same ideology as white supremacy: an individual’s value should be derived from a nexus of demographic vectors, and nothing more. in today’s climate of polarization and sensationalist rhetoric, kennedy’s plea, to recognize the hell created within a binary paradigm of ‘us and them,’ black and white, men and women, is more germane than ever. conclusion a cursory reading of kennedy’s play suggests total dismay for the human condi- tion. the play presents no truly redeeming character, and even the christian deity is removed from a position of exaltation, which ultimately precipitates the negro sarah’s psychosis and suicide. the play examines the dangerous eff ects of binary thinking, generated in language itself, and the subsequent psychological collapse these binaries produce funnyhouse of a negro off ers a dystopia generated by demographic divisions, yet in the play neither race is redeemed, and images of blackness and whiteness are suff used with equal revulsion. nevertheless, an audience might extrapolate from kennedy’s play the transcendent view of an enlightened harmony in which one color or race is not dichotomized as superior to another. blackness and whiteness then might be perceived as non-essential relics of a fl awed binary paradigm, replaced by unity under a common human essence. to demonstrate unequivocally the unsustainable and destructive nature of racially defi ned hierarchies, kennedy ends the play with sarah’s suicide. her method of suicide, hanging, is an allusion to the brutal culture of lynching used to terrorize and subjugate blacks in the american south. kennedy captures the indiff erence of white bystanders in the fi nal lines of the play, spoken by the white landlady: “the poor bitch has hung herself,” and then by raymond: “she was a funny little liar” (kennedy ). these casual observations voice the fi nal, tragic irony, which must astound the sensitive audience by its coldness. the utter absence of compas- sion refl ects the violence cultural and linguistic dichotomies all but guarantee, and demonstrates kennedy’s twin insights: race itself is an artifi cial, dangerous construct, and focus on phenotypical attributes inevitably leads to an oppression that denies the essential humanity of both the oppressor and the oppressed. it is far past time that american society began to recognize the profound implications of kennedy’s funnyhouse of a negro. transcendence of the binary patterns of th e violence of duality in adrienne kennedy’s funnyhouse of a negro thinking that divide the races must be paramount in an on-going eff ort towards true equality. tragically, we have again recently seen the sanguine failure of this transcendence realized in a charleston church and on streets throughout the united states. until we learn to transcend our black and white paradigm, we are all doomed to occupy kennedy’s absurd funnyhouse, and to repeat the history that she so scathingly portrays in her groundbreaking drama. references barnett, claudia. . “a prison of object relations: adrienne kennedy’s fun- nyhouse of a negro.” modern drama . : – . boucher, georgie. . “fractured identity and agency and the plays of adrienne kennedy.” feminist review : – . brown, deneen l. . “britain’s black queen: will meghan markle really be the first mixed-race royal?” the washington post (november ). https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/retropolis/wp/ / / /brit- ains-black-queen-will-meghan-markle-really-be-the-first-mixed-race- royal/?noredirect=on&utm_term=. bd c c c coates, ta-nehisi. . between the world and me. st ed. new york: spiegel & grau. curb, rosemary k. . “fragmented selves in adrienne kennedy’s funnyhouse of a negro and the owl answers.” theatre journal . : – . danesi, marcel. . “opposition theory and the interconnectedness of language, culture, and cognition.” sign systems studies . / : – . derrida, jacques. . positions. trans. alan bass. chicago: university of chicago press. finley, taryn. . “jesus wasn’t white and here’s why that matters.” the huffi ngton post (december ). https://www.huffi ngtonpost.com/entry/jesus-wasnt-white-and-heres-why-that- matters_us_ c e b efe d bea gates, henry l., and valerie smith, ed. . “adrienne kennedy.” the norton anthology of african american literature. rd ed. vol. . new york: norton. – . hurley, erin. . “blackout: utopian technologies in adrienne kennedy’s fun- nyhouse of a negro.” modern drama . : – . kennedy, adrienne. . funnyhouse of a negro. the norton anthology of african american literature. rd ed. vol. . ed. henry louis gates and valerie smith. new york: norton. – . koppen, randi. . “psychoanalytic enactments: adrienne kennedy’s staging of memory.” hjeas (hungarian journal of english and american studies) . – : – . quan manh ha and conor hogan leitch, vincent b. . american literary criticism since the s. nd ed. new york: routledge. morris, rosalind. . “legacies of derrida: anthropology.” annual review of anthropology : – . nzongola-ntalaja, georges. . “patrice lumumba: the most important assas- sination of the th century.” the guardian (january ). http://www.theguardian.com/global-development/poverty-matters/ /jan/ / patrice-lumumba- th-anniversary-assassination rankine, claudia. . “the condition of black life is one of mourning.” the new york times (june ). http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /magazine/the-condition-of-black-life- is-one-of-mourning.html?_r= steele, shelby. . the content of our character: a new vision of race in america. new york: st. martin’s. terrill, robert e. . the cambridge companion to malcolm x. cambridge: cambridge university press. winston, george t. . “the relation of the whites to the negroes.” the an- nals of the american academy of political and social science : – . yahr, emily. . “read jon stewart’s blistering monologue about race, ter- rorism and gun violence after charleston church massacre. the washington post (june ). https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/style-blog/wp/ / / /read-jon- stewarts-blistering-monologue-about-race-terrorism-and-gun-violence-after- charleston-church-massacre/ wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk params is empty sys_ exception wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk no params is empty exception params is empty / / - : : if (typeof jquery === "undefined") document.write('[script type="text/javascript" src="/corehtml/pmc/jig/ . . /js/jig.min.js"][/script]'.replace(/\[/g,string.fromcharcode( )).replace(/\]/g,string.fromcharcode( ))); // // // window.name="mainwindow"; .pmc-wm {background:transparent repeat-y top left;background-image:url(/corehtml/pmc/pmcgifs/wm-nobrand.png);background-size: auto, contain} .print-view{display:block} page not available reason: the web page address (url) that you used may be incorrect. message id: (wp-p m- .ebi.ac.uk) time: / / : : if you need further help, please send an email to pmc. include the information from the box above in your message. otherwise, click on one of the following links to continue using pmc: search the complete pmc archive. browse the contents of a specific journal in pmc. find a specific article by its citation (journal, date, volume, first page, author or article title). http://europepmc.org/abstract/med/ racism and social injustice as determinants of child health: the american pediatric society issue of the year comment racism and social injustice as determinants of child health: the american pediatric society issue of the year steven h. abman , clifford w. bogue , susan baker , waldemar carlo , stephen r. daniels , michael r. debaun , candice fike , catherine m. gordon , mary b. leonard , robin h. steinhorn , leslie r. walker-harding and for the american pediatric society (aps) pediatric research ( ) : – ; https://doi.org/ . /s - - - we are now experiencing extraordinary challenges that are adversely impacting the health and well-being of our children and their families. these include multiple and very inter-related issues: coronavirus disease (covid), black lives matter, the struggling economy, immigration, environmental toxins, child abuse, gun violence, and others. beyond responding to the complex acute stresses of clinical disease, the covid pandemic has further unmasked chronic issues of racism, social injustice, disparities, and inequities that permeate our health care system. – for example, the disproportionate effects of covid in black, latinx, and native americans is reflected by a greater susceptibility for disease, hospitalizations, and mortality with infection. , such findings reflect many factors, including racial differences in jobs and exposures, nutrition, and other chronic health illnesses, such as diabetes, obesity, cardiovascular diseases, and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. well beyond the covid pandemic, discrepancies in maternal, child, and adult health care, leading to death at earlier ages and worse morbidities, have been long recognized as reflecting major inequities in availability of health services, insurance coverage, social and economic factors, and other issues. , , thus addres- sing concerns underlying structural racism and sustained inequities in health care requires a greater awareness of the persistence of the us as an unequal society. – as pediatricians, we know that racism and social injustice are endemic in our society and have adversely affected many aspects of child health and well-being, with clear evidence of life-long consequences. – these include worse perinatal out- comes for both mother and child, higher rates of childhood disease-related morbidities, and the persistence of adverse effects on health into adulthood. – clearly, there is an especially important imperative for pediatricians and child health providers to play in addressing racism, bigotry, social injustice, and inequities in our research and health care system most broadly, which includes important and longstanding issues addressed by the black lives matter movement, as well as long- neglected issues in native children; ethnicity; religion; lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender rights; and ongoing problems related to immigrant families, especially those seeking asylum in our country. the american pediatric society (aps) issue of the year in addition to our individual commitments to address issues of racism and social injustice especially as related to child health outcomes, there is a clear need to develop rigorous approaches linking key medical and non-medical groups and institutions to develop impactful strategies and action plans. – the aps is committed to improving the short- and long-term health and well- being of children by providing a forum to promote effective strategies to enhance research, education, training, and advocacy in pediatric academic medicine throughout north america. as part of its approach toward developing strategic plans to address key issues in pediatric academic medicine, the aps selects a major theme to target each year through selection of its “issue of the year.” while recognizing that major problems cannot be readily solved in year, identification of an issue of the year provides a focus that will launch a series of approaches including developing greater awareness of the problem and related issues, stimulating work toward developing greater mechanistic insights underlying the basis for and nature of the problem, and developing strategic action plans for interventions and further investigation. in recognition of its critical importance, the aps has targeted “racism and social injustice as determinants of child health” as the aps issue of the year. in addressing the “issue of the year,” the aps is particularly aware of the unique opportunities for pediatricians, especially from within academic medical centers, to leverage the skills of the aps as a group to have a long-lasting impact. the aps fully espouses and supports efforts to develop innovative strategies to challenge racism and social injustice, just as readily as we support the highest values underlying research, education, and training in our medical centers. we further support action to identify and eliminate the institutionalized racism that has held back our ability to achieve the highly valued goals and missions that we embrace. we also support actions to recognize and remove unconscious bias while aiming for full inclusion and engagement of all individuals in our diverse culture. as an initial step, the aps recently published a joint statement with the society for pediatric research (spr) to express the commitment of these societies to address issues of racism and social injustice. clearly, a major responsibility of the aps must be to particularly address racism and social injustice in collaboration received: july accepted: july published online: september department of pediatrics, university of colorado anschutz school of medicine and children’s hospital colorado, aurora, co, usa; department of pediatrics, yale university school of medicine, new haven, ct, usa; department of pediatrics, university at buffalo jacobs school of medicine and biomedical sciences, buffalo, ny, usa; department of pediatrics, university of alabama birmingham school of medicine, birmingham, al, usa; department of pediatrics, vanderbilt university school of medicine, nashville, tn, usa; department of pediatrics, university of utah school of medicine, salt lake city, ut, usa; department of pediatrics, harvard university medical school and boston children’s hospital, boston, ma, usa; department of pediatrics, stanford university school of medicine, palo alto, ca, usa; department of pediatrics, university of california san diego and rady children’s hospital, san diego, ca, usa and department of pediatrics, university of washington school of medicine, seattle, wa, usa correspondence: steven h. abman (steven.abman@cuanschutz.edu) www.nature.com/pr © international pediatric research foundation, inc () ;,: http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - http://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:steven.abman@cuanschutz.edu www.nature.com/pr with other groups, but the aps can especially tackle issues related to the aps’ major leadership role in academic pediatrics that are clearly major avenues of opportunity within the aps mandate. thus it is particularly incumbent for the aps to act throughout the academic community to address these issues with regards to child health most broadly but especially to improve the education and training of medical professionals, ranging from students, residents, fellows, faculty, and staff at our medical centers; support expansive and multi-pronged research addressing these vital issues; explore research programs that strongly engage those underrepresented in medicine and research among its investiga- tive team members to enhance their careers as academic leaders; and to promote the application of novel curricula design and other training approaches to increase awareness of social factors and improve the quality of care for our diverse patients and their families. we clearly must provide sponsorship and opportunity for underrepresented groups in medicine to achieve an increase in diversity within leadership. this will also create more representa- tive role models to encourage young people from all stages of the “pipeline” to become engaged in careers in pediatric medicine. using our roles as scientific investigators, academic leaders, advocates, and teachers, the aps membership is in a unique position to advocate for many changes to increase public awareness of these issues, to provide information on the scientific evidence and impact of our research, and to enable the implementation of novel strategies within our medical schools and institutions along these lines. the aps will address racism and social injustice in academic medicine and child health planning is currently underway to target these issues, with action plans that target both “inward” actions within the aps organiza- tion as well as “outward” goals. first, in partnership with the spr, the aps has published a clear statement that expresses our societies’ views to work toward combating racism and social injustice through missions of advocacy, research, education, training, and community engagement most broadly. second, we must “clean our own house,” including applying the very values of promoting diversity, inclusion, and antiracism within our own organization. to address changes in the aps that best reflect these values and long-term goals, changes are underway for revision of the aps mission and vision statements, as well as updating our nomination process and other by-laws (fig. ). promoting diversity, inclusion, and engagement within the society is important to model our values and achieve our goals more successfully. changes in the nomination process for aps member- ship, with continued expectations for high standards of achieve- ment, will include more pro-active identification of potential members with diverse backgrounds; impactful contributions in research, advocacy, and leadership; and playing an active role in developing novel strategies in health care practices and delivery, training, medical education, and social engagement, especially as related to issues of racism and social injustice. we have recognized that, within the aps, we must strive for greater inclusion of african american, latinx, native americans, and women who are underrepresented in membership and leadership to best represent and support the best of academic pediatrics and its multiple missions. , the aps and academic medicine more broadly are enriched by leaders from a diversity of racial, gender, and ethnic backgrounds and applying primary interests in specific academic themes, issues, and skill sets, ranging from advocacy to broad research areas, including patient- and laboratory- and population-based sciences. while pediatrics has made inroads in increasing gender representation in the field, the same has not occurred for many underrepresented ethnic groups. bringing this talented and diverse group together provides a potent voice to tackle many child health issues in a multi-pronged and comprehensive fashion. while being inclusive and seeking to achieve goals of antiracism and social justice, we must further be mindful that these responsibilities and specific tasks for mean- ingful actions should be a balanced workload from all. as academic leaders, we should all become the role models and exemplify our values through our own personal actions, especially as they extend into our roles at our own departments, medical centers, and communities. the american pediatric society shaping the future of academic pediatrics through engagement of a diverse and inclusive group of distinguished child health leaders guiding values: thought leadership in academic medicine carrer support and transitions advocacy equity diversity inclusion integrity excellence increasing knowledge of racism and social injustice issues through research, education, training and leadership. increasing approaches to recruit, sustain and promote career development to achieve a diverse and inclusive work force throughout the academic “pipeline.” leveraging aps membership and experience in research and leadership to implement strong edi policies throughout academic medicine. develop collaborations with other medical and non-medical groups to achieve governmental support and to apply our vision to successfully enhance child health. developing unique coaching strategies to more specifically advise and develop academic leaders with greater diversity and inclusion. promoting equity. diversity and inclusion (edi) throughout all academic medical centers. developing and supporting novel strategies to achieve edi at all levels of training, research, policy implementation and leadership. fig. the american pediatric society missions, values and goals for addressing the “issue of the year- racism and social injustice as determinants of child health”. racism and social injustice as determinants of child health: the american. . . sh abman et al. pediatric research ( ) : – we further plan to use the aps’ influence and scientific credibility to drive evidence-based discussions of the harmful effects of social marginalization and racism on public health. evidence clearly shows that racism is a public health issue and is a pediatric issue. exposure to racism early in life has life-long impacts, biological and otherwise. aps must become more external facing and use its voice as distinguished academic pediatric leaders to impact broader societal discussions and policies about racism, diversity, and inclusion. the aps has both opportunity and obligation to work to educate and move people to action, especially in partnership with other outstanding forward-thinking pediatric groups as the american academy of pediatrics, spr, and many others. aps should speak out on the importance of addressing diversity, inclusion, and engagement challenges throughout all stages of the pipeline. for early and late career stages, recognizing, mediating, and supporting diversity and inclusion will help to keep academic pediatrics strong, and this is core to the aps mission. these issues are planned for further presentations and discussions through virtual forums, such as the joint aps/spr virtual chat series and an anticipated aps town hall virtual forum on racism and social injustice, followed by other seminars to highlight several specific issues regarding the impact of racism on child and life-long health and the high perinatal morbidity and mortality rates. summary from these extraordinary challenges come opportunities to aggressively address both short- and long-term issues of racism and social injustice, as black lives matter has been a vital “wake- up call” to those who have not previously taken action, including those involved with child health. as pediatricians and leaders of academic medicine, the aps has a particular opportunity and mandate to leverage its strengths to work toward creating healthier and more just society. acknowledgements the authors are grateful for the outstanding support of the aps staff, including jaimee chumley, eileen fenton, and shelley jobe, and the aps membership. this work was not supported by funding from any source. author contributions each of the authors contributed to the concepts and content in the manuscript and helped with the writing and final production of the manuscript. additional information competing interests: the authors declare no competing interests. patient consent: patient consent was not required for this work. publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. references . kendi, i. x. how to be an antiracist (one world, ny, ). . williams, d. r. & cooper, l. a. reducing racial inequities in health: using what we already know to take action. int. j. environ. res. public health , – ( ). . owe, w. r., carmona, r. & pomeroy, c. failing another national stress test on health disparities. jama https://doi.org/ . /jama. . ( ). . trent, m. et al. the impact of racism on child and adolescent health. pediatrics , e ( ). . dreyer, b. p. et al. the death of george floyd: bending the arc of history towards justice for generations of children. pediatrics https://doi.org/ . /peds. - ( ). . hardeman, r. r., medina, e. m. & kozhimannil, k. e. structural racism and sup- porting black lives- the role of health professionals. n. engl. j. med. , – ( ). . hardeman, r. r., medina, e. m. & boyd, r. w. stolen breaths. n. engl. j. med. https://doi.org/ . /nejmp ( ). . price-haywood, e. g., burton, j., fort, d. & seoane, l. hospitalization and mortality among black and white patients with covid- . n. engl. j. med. , – ( ). . yancy, c. w. covid- and african americans. jama , – ( ). . matthews, t. j., macdorman, m. f. & thoma, m. e. infant mortality statistics from the period linked birth/infant death data set. natl vital stat. rep. , – ( ). . siddiqi, a., jones, m. k., bruce, d. j. & erwin, p. c. do racial inequities in infant mortality correspond to variations in societal conditions? a study of state-level income inequality in the u.s., – . soc. sci. med. , – ( ). . petersen, e. e. et al. vital signs: pregnancy-related deaths, united states, – , and strategies for prevention, states, – . mmwr morb. mortal. wkly rep. , – ( ). . macdorman, m. f. et al. recent increases in the u.s. maternal mortality rate: disentangling trends from measurement issues. obstet. gynecol. , – ( ). . minehart, r. d., jackson, j. & daly, j. racial differences in pregnancy-related morbidity and mortality. anesthesiol. clin. , – ( ). . abman, s. h. et al. the american pediatric society and society for pediatric research joint statement against racism and social injustice. pediatr. res. https:// doi.org/ . /s - - - ( ). . fuentes-afflick, e. aps presidential address - the courage of our dreams. pediatr. res. , – ( ). . nolen, l. how medical education is missing the bull’s eye. n. engl. j. med. , – ( ). racism and social injustice as determinants of child health: the american. . . sh abman et al. pediatric research ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /jama. . https://doi.org/ . /peds. - https://doi.org/ . /peds. - https://doi.org/ . /nejmp https://doi.org/ . /s - - - https://doi.org/ . /s - - - 	racism and social injustice as determinants of child health: the american pediatric society issue of the year 	the american pediatric society (aps) issue of the year 	the aps will address racism and social injustice in academic medicine and child health 	summary 	acknowledgements 	author contributions 	additional information 	references rethinking campus sexual assault: we must be leaders in anti-bias practices, civil rights and human rights original article rethinking campus sexual assault: we must be leaders in anti-bias practices, civil rights and human rights amy bonomi published online: august # the author(s) abstract during an era when campuses nationwide are increasingly in the spotlight for a range of sexual assault infractions, rothman proposes four groundbreaking thought experiments that challenge the status quo in campus-based prevention programming and call for us to do better. namely, rothman’s thought experiments—which suggest that campuses ) invest in fighting structural oppression at the societal level, ) direct their social norming work at the macro level, ) educate preventionists in consent and pleasure related to kink, anal sex and group sex, and ) enact education and counseling for sexual violence perpetrators—provide us with fresh opportunities to examine our willingness and capacity to change and to become even more impactful leaders in practices to reduce sexual violence. in the present editorial, i argue that for rothman’s experiments (which are focused funda- mentally on changing underlying power structures at the intersection of gender, race, sexuality, ability status and socioeconomic status) to be optimally effective, campuses must first engage intensively and systematically in anti-bias curricula to prepare us to be effective fighters for civil rights and human rights. accordingly, we must be willing to acknowledge that biases exist in all of us, that biases operate in across environments to both privilege and disadvantage at the intersection of gender, race, sexuality, ability status and socioeconomic status, and that we must replace our biases with equity-focused actions for greater equity for all. i applaud rothman in her outside-the-box thought experiments, join her in challenging us to do things differently on our nation’s campuses, and hope we have the courage to be leaders in anti-bias, civil rights and human rights practices to more impactfully reduce sexual violence against women and non-majority groups. keywords sexual violence . sexual assault . college . prevention . programs . human rights women accuse ex-usc campus doctor of sexual abuse, say the school ‘let it happen’ reads a recent headline for abc news (thorboeke ). over the last six months, this head- line is tragically one among many revealing sexual violations involving campus doctors and students. other universities with similar headlines: michigan state university and ohio state university. universities are increasingly in the hot seat, with many scrambling to reexamine and reevaluate prevention and re- sponse practices and policies. while the range of prevention and response activities varies across college campuses, most u.s. campuses have student-focused intervention and bystander programming, such as green dot which is effective in reducing sexual assault and relationship violence (coker et al. ). yet, student-focused campus prevention programs and ap- proaches are not enough to stop sexual violence. why? first, by targeting only students in prevention programming, cam- puses miss the full range of occupants, including students, alumni, administrators, faculty and staff—all of whom collec- tively shape campus climate, dialogue and interactions. second, sexual violence is normative within our broader so- cietal culture (farrow ) and embedded within larger civil and human rights infractions involving sexism, racism, homo- phobia, xenophobia, ableism and classism. third, as in the case of the ex-usc physician, not all campus sexual assault involves student perpetrators. this is why the essay by rothman, bpreventing sexual violence on campus in the u.s.: four thought experiments,^ (rothman ) is timely and groundbreaking. in the essay, rothman proposes four thought experiments that * amy bonomi bonomi@msu.edu department of human development and family studies, michigan state university, w. circle drive, east lansing, mi - , usa journal of family violence ( ) : – https://doi.org/ . /s - - -z http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - -z&domain=pdf http://orcid.org/ - - - mailto:bonomi@msu.edu challenge the status quo for sexual violence prevention pro- gramming on college campuses and call for us to do better. rothman’s thought experiments provide us with fresh opportu- nities to examine our willingness and capacity to change and to become leaders in practices to more substantially impact sexual violence against women and other non-majority groups. rothman’s first thought experiment is that universities stop investing in sexual assault prevention and instead fight structural oppression—including sexism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, ableism and classism—which creates the underly- ing context and conditions for sexual assault. this is not at odds with the plethora of human rights concerns raised by the michigan state university community during a town hall fol- lowing the sentencing of former msu physician larry nassar for his sexual crimes involving more than women students and athletes (nawyn and bonomi ). namely, during the town hall which drew to people from the campus community, the who squeezed into the town hall room demanded fundamental change in how we privilege and deny power and rights by gender, race and ethnicity, sexuality, abil- ities, and tenure status (the class system in academia) (nawyn and bonomi ). in essence, rothman’s first proposal is consistent with what many within a heavily scrutinized college campus—michigan state university—are calling for. as well, rothman’s proposal aligns with martin luther king’s appeal for each of us to: become a dedicated fighter for civil rights … it will enrich your spirit as nothing else possibly can. it will give you a rare sense of nobility that can only spring from love and selflessly helping your fellow man. make a career of humanity. commit yourself to the noble struggle of human rights. you will make a greater per- son of yourself, a greater nation of your country and a finer world to live in. (king ) to become dedicated fighters for civil and human rights re- quires us, in an initial step, to get serious about anti-bias cur- ricula aimed at reducing sexism, racism, homophobia, xeno- phobia, ableism and classism. moreover, unlike bystander in- tervention and other prevention programing, which is typical- ly aimed at changing student behavior, all campus administra- tors, faculty, staff and students, must take part in anti-bias curricula in ongoing, sustained ways. the evidence shows that participation in campus-based anti-bias curricula by at least % of faculty and administrators within an academic unit improves equity actions in the short term (carnes et al. ) and produces more equitable hiring outcomes in the long term (devine et al. ). what might this look like? to start, we might collaborate as administrators, academic units and service provision units in anti-bias curricula aimed at the plethora of gender bias (carnes et al. ), including biases that implicate women as sexual gatekeepers (england et al. ), blame them for sexual crimes (niemi and young ), and disadvantage them in nearly all aspects of life, including academic leadership (carnes et al. ). in simultaneous fashion, we must exam- ine how gender bias operates at the intersection of race, in- cluding how women of color are disproportionately excluded from research and national conversations concerning violence against women (jones ), and how they experience less equitable opportunities for key leadership positions on college campuses (mainah and perkins ). for anti-bias curricula to work in preparing us to be effec- tive fighters for civil and human rights more broadly at the societal level, we must be willing to acknowledge that biases exist in all of us, that biases operate across environments to both privilege and disadvantage at the intersection of gender, race, sexuality, ability status and socioeconomic status, and that we must replace our biases with equity-focused actions for greater equity for all (carnes et al. ). and, as rothman astutely notes, working toward greater equity for all will re- quire those with power to surrender some of it for the greater good (rothman ). on college campuses, this means, for example, evenly distributing women and men in key admin- istrative roles. it means doing away with the common practice of appointing those with minority status as token members of key committees and decision-making bodies (davis ); rather, individuals from minority backgrounds must be repre- sented equitably at the table, with equitable voice and decision-making authority. in sum, if our ultimate goal is fighting for civil rights, for human rights at the societal level, we must also do so in our own backyards. rothman’s second thought experiment is that universities refocus their social norming missions beyond campus to the macro level, such as raising awareness at the macro level about how adhering to traditional gender role norms and sex role scripts elevates risk of sexual violence. rothman’s pro- posal can garner energy in the midst of national social norming movements aimed at raising awareness about sexual and relationship violence; for example, the recent twitter hashtags #metoo, #maybehedoesnthityou engaged millions in online conversation about the realities of violence against women (mccauley et al. ). as an initial strategy, what if university administrators part- ner with faculty, staff, students and alumni to lead social media dialogue that first acknowledges how upholding traditional gender roles privileges men over women in academic settings (e.g., former msu physician larry nassar’s sexual abuse was downplayed for a period of time) and then establish measur- able pledges to challenge adherence to these norms to create more equitable conditions for all? as an example, recent twitter dialogue following the hashtag, #howiwillchange, is engaging men and boys in the #metoo movement (pettyjohn et al. in press). to enact this effectively, significant efforts must be made to break through the problematic reality j fam viol ( ) : – and tradition on college campuses of privileging some voices over others. in this regard, i maintain that all campus admin- istrators, faculty, staff and students will need systematic (and ongoing) anti-bias training at the intersection of sexism, rac- ism, homophobia, xenophobia, ableism and classism, and commit to fighting for civil and human rights to promote equity for all. rothman’s third thought experiment is that sexual assault prevention experts be trained in consent and pleasure related to kink, anal sex, group sex and increasingly popular (but traditionally non-normative) sexual behaviors on college cam- puses. such training would bring college campuses up to date with the reality of the sexual lives of college-age students. while i agree with rothman’s proposal, i maintain that such training be provided to all campus administrators, faculty, staff and students within the context of anti-bias curricula—which will encourage an in-depth examination of deeply ingrained biases that implicate women as sexual gatekeepers (england et al. ); for example, biases that might lead to our wrongly ascribing blame to women for not stopping kink sex from crossing over into unwanted sexual assault. it will also require training for all across campus regarding the role of alcohol and drugs within kink sexual interactions and sexual crimes, in- cluding the ways in which alcohol is normative on college campuses and the ways in which it is used to manipulate sexual consent (bonomi et al. ). rothman’s fourth thought experiment involves campuses providing education and counseling for sexual violence perpe- trators. supported by the surging emotion and momentum at the national level associated with #metoo, #maybehedoesnthityou and high profile sexual violence scandals, for education and counseling for sexual violence per- petrators to be received well on college campuses, we will need to first demonstrate genuine support and engagement in anti- bias curricula to address the widespread disadvantages that exist for women, for persons of color and those from interna- tional backgrounds, for sexual minorities, for those with differ- ent abilities, and for persons from lower socioeconomic envi- ronments. as well, campuses will also need to demonstrate clear commitment and action in fighting for civil rights, for human rights in partnership with others at the broader societal level; this will again require the surrendering and evening out of power, which will test our courage and will. in summary, i applaud rothman for having the courage and innovation to abandon her bstandard lecture notes on the social-ecological model and bystander intervention^ to chal- lenge us during this historical period, when national social movements (e.g., metoo, black lives matter) might be lever- aged to support change efforts on college campuses, and uni- versities can serve as leaders in national movements to impact historic and contemporary injustices at the intersection of sex- ism, racism, homophobia, xenophobia, ableism and classism. through her courage and innovation, rothman has provided us with four thought experiments, which call for us to do things differently, and at the very root, fundamentally chal- lenge our willingness and capacity to change and to become leaders in anti-bias, civil rights and human rights practices to more substantially impact sexual violence against women and non-majority groups. i join rothman in her outside-the-box thought proposals, and challenge us to step up for civil and human rights. open access this article is distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution . international license (http:// creativecommons.org/licenses/by/ . /), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided you give appro- priate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the creative commons license, and indicate if changes were made. references bonomi, a. e., nichols, e., kammes, r., chugani, c., de genna, n., jones, k. a., & miller, e. ( ). alcohol use, mental health dis- ability and violence victimization in college women: exploring con- nections. violence against women, epub ahead of print, , – . carnes, m., morrissey, c., & geller, s. e. ( ). women's health and women's leadership in academic medicine: hitting the same glass ceiling? journal of women's health, ( ), – . carnes, m., devine, p. g., baier manwell, l., byars-winston, a., fine, e., ford, c. e., forscher, p., isaac, c., kaatz, a., magua, w., palta, m., & sheridan, j. ( ). the effect of an intervention to break the gender bias habit for faculty at one institution: a cluster randomized, controlled trial. academic medicine, ( ), – . coker, a. l., bush, h. m., fisher, b. s., swan, s. c., williams, c. m., clear, e. r., & degue, s. ( ). multi-college bystander interven- tion evaluation for violence prevention. american journal of preventive medicine, ( ), – . davis, m. ( ). why stem for women of color is important to us all! the huffington post. retrieved from https://www.huffingtonpost. com/marietta-davis/why-stem-for-women-of-col_b_ .html devine, p. g., forscher, p. s., cox, w. t. l., kaatz, a., sheridan, j., & carnes, m. ( ). a gender bias habit-breaking intervention led to increased hiring of female faculty in stemm departments. journal of experimental social psychology, , – . england, p., fitzgibbons shafer, e., & fogarty, a. c. k. ( ). hooking up and forming romantic relationships on today's college campuses. in m. s. kimmel & a. aaronson (eds.), the gendered society reader ( rd ed., pp. – ). new york: oxford university press. farrow, r. (producer). ( ). harvey weinstein's army of spies. the new yorker. retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/news/ news-desk/harvey-weinsteins-army-of-spies jones, f. ( ) why black women struggle more with domestic violence time (september , ed.). http://time.com/ /ray-rice- black-women-domestic-violence/. king, m. l. ( ). address at the youth march for integrated schools on april retrieved from https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/ king-papers/documents/address-youth-march-integrated-schools- -april- . mainah, f., & perkins, v. ( ). challenges facing female leaders of color in u. s. higher education. international journal of african development, ( ), – . mccauley, h. l., bonomi, a. e., maas, m. k., bogen, k. w., & o'malley, t. l. ( ). #maybehedoesnthityou: social media j fam viol ( ) : – https://www.huffingtonpost.com/marietta-davis/why-stem-for-women-of-col_b_ .html https://www.huffingtonpost.com/marietta-davis/why-stem-for-women-of-col_b_ .html https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/harvey-weinsteins-army-of-spies https://www.newyorker.com/news/news-desk/harvey-weinsteins-army-of-spies http://time.com/ /ray-rice-black-women-domestic-violence/ http://time.com/ /ray-rice-black-women-domestic-violence/ https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/address-youth-march-integrated-schools- -april- https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/address-youth-march-integrated-schools- -april- https://kinginstitute.stanford.edu/king-papers/documents/address-youth-march-integrated-schools- -april- underscore the realities of intimate partner violence. journal of women's health, ( ), – . nawyn, s., & bonomi, a. e. ( ). inside msu: taking risks to im- prove climate. journal of american college health, , . niemi, l., & young, l. ( ). when and why we see victims as respon- sible: the impact of ideology on attitudes toward victims. personality and psychology bulletin, ( ), – . pettyjohn, m. e., muzzey, f. k., maas, m. k., & mccauley, h. l. ( ). #howiwillchange: engaging men and boys in the #metoo move- ment. psychology of men & masculinity, (in press). rothman, e. ( ). preventing sexual violence on campus in the u.s.: four thought experiments. journal of family violence. published online july . https://rdcu.be/ skh thorboeke, c. (writer). ( ). women accuse ex-usc campus doctor of sexual abuse, say the school 'let it happen'. https://abcnews.go.com/ gma/news/women-accuse-usc-campus-doctor-sexual-abuse- school/story?id= : abc news. j fam viol ( ) : – https://rdcu.be/ skh https://abcnews.go.com/gma/news/women-accuse-usc-campus-doctor-sexual-abuse-school/story?id= https://abcnews.go.com/gma/news/women-accuse-usc-campus-doctor-sexual-abuse-school/story?id= https://abcnews.go.com/gma/news/women-accuse-usc-campus-doctor-sexual-abuse-school/story?id= 	rethinking campus sexual assault: we must be leaders in anti-bias practices, civil rights and human rights 	abstract 	references the human rights state: justice within and beyond sovereign nations review the human rights state: justice within and beyond sovereign nations benjamin gregg university of pennsylvania press, philadelphia, , viii+ pp., isbn: - - - - contemporary political theory ( ) , s –s . https://doi.org/ . /s - - - ; published online june the human rights state is an important work of political imagination. this is a compliment to the author and an evaluation of the book’s argument. in prose, both light and evocative benjamin gregg asks us to rethink human rights as a freestanding moral ideal to which we should aspire. rather than seeking a foundation for rights, however tenuous and contingent, he argues that the only grounding human rights need is found in ‘an intuition about justice, an interest in justice, a motivation to do justice’ (p. ). the indefinite article is important, as gregg wants to understand human rights as social constructions that are very much still under construction, and as such open to interpretation from a multitude of moral perspectives. this multitude is held together by an intentionally vague but universal sense of justice – in all its diverse expressions – and a functional necessity to protect individuals from the power of the modern state. elements of this approach are familiar from recent attempts to rethink human rights as grounded on contingent practical or political foundations. gregg’s book, however, takes this familiar project in an idiosyncratic and invigorating direction, which provides both the most promising and least satisfying elements of the project. by taking the social construction of human rights seriously, gregg clears the way for an uncompromising recognition that human rights are claims people make for themselves, from within their own context and in response to the particular injustices they face. this political and activist understanding of rights is an important conceptual move. following from this, he makes the case that human rights and the nation state are intrinsically linked. yet this relationship is defined by an inherent tension. human rights entail a transfer of sovereignty from the national territorialised community to the diverse de-territorialised individual human body. gregg talks of an imaged human rights state that exists in the collective consciousness of dedicated activists and a human rights backpack used to arm the vulnerable for political engagement. yet, these metaphorical moves are in some � macmillan publishers ltd. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s www.palgrave.com/journals measure stifled by the complacent liberal view of the politics and institutions involved in realising the human rights state. in the first section of the book, gregg re-conceptualises human rights. his first move is to elaborate the human rights state as an idea: it is an imagined political community called into existence by individuals; it is not, however, a universal community, as the creation of a human rights state is a response to a distinctive context of injustice. therefore, the normative content of the human rights state is drawn from the particular political and cultural milieu that inspires its inception, even as its normative claims aspire to universality. further, there are many human rights states, each distinctive but linked by the ambition of overcoming the exclusive sovereignty of the nation state. most fundamentally, gregg is suggesting that a human rights state emerges from the normative contradiction at the heart of national sovereignty, which makes the state both arbiter and creator of the law. the human rights state is an imagined community that grants individuals the authority to make their own rights claims and recognises the legitimacy of those claims. this is why gregg suggests that a ‘human rights state operates alongside a correspond- ing nation state’ (p. ) and ‘seeks to make that recognition and self-granting acceptable within the terms of a modified nation state sovereignty’. (p. ). there are many human rights states, perhaps many corresponding with one nation state. but this diversity serves the purpose of reforming existing nation states rather than creating new ones. here we have the first example of gregg’s imaginative and acquiescent impulses coming into tension. in the remainder of the first section, gregg expands upon the creative political potential of the human rights state and its deontic power to make rights claims that seek to transform the nation state. in chapter , he offers the idea of a human rights backpack as a way of metaphorically de-territorialising human rights. this entails thinking of the source of our rights as coming not from our membership in a nation state but rather from human action that performs these new rights claims, expressing the non-formalised power of individuals working in concert. the backpack then represents the transfer of political agency from the national sovereign community to the mobile individual acting in concert but resolutely autonomous. the content of the backpack is the performance, ‘the donning of the backpack, of displaying the backpack, of carrying human rights in the backpack, or sharing the backpack’s human rights with others’ (p. ). this performative reading of human rights is linked to the human body in chapter , in which gregg challenges the inside/outside border logic of national sovereignty. he considers the figure of the modern slave, drawing out how individuals in this state find no value in border logic as they are denied membership, thus existing always outside the community of rights and laws, while also experiencing the protection of sovereignty as a further threat to themselves. drawing on this analysis gregg argues that we should understand the human body as having the power to border the world, to draw the distinctions between inside and outside. ‘i propose endogenizing review � macmillan publishers ltd. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s s the bordering function by transferring it from the nation state to the individual members of a human rights state. then border jurisdiction ceases to be a matter of where an individual resides and becomes a matter of what an individual has been assigned’. (p. ) rights, then, are not present where the individual is recognised but rather when individuals have worked to assign and recognise their own rights. the first three chapters of gregg’s book offer a promising reconceptualisation of human rights, with a breadth that is evocative but without sufficient depth to be wholly convincing. i have focused on the arguments in the first section because i think they are filled with promise, as they break down divides between critical and apologetic accounts of human rights, and between theory and practice. yet, the rest of the book is less inspiring as it tries to fill out the conceptual sketch at the start. in section two, gregg wrestles with the practicalities of how the human rights state can engage in effective political action. he considers how the human rights state might be realised through university education in the us (chapter ), through informal political education in eastern europe (chapter ) and through advances in digital communication technologies (chapter ). each chapter offers insights into how this work might be done, but the imagination that sets the early sections of the book apart wanes. in particular, gregg’s focus on political action as persuasion rather than coercion seems naive in our contemporary moment. i am not suggesting that human rights are best served by coercion or violence, but rather that anyone hoping that human rights might challenge the violent and coercive power of the nation state needs to consider political action more carefully. insufficient attention is given to the material prerequisites to engage in the kind of sustained activism gregg advocates. further, he does not seem to appreciate the extent to which building the effective power of the human rights state involves taking power from the actually existing nation state, including the individuals and communities that benefit from the existing order. it would have been more useful for gregg to consider practical cases like the black lives matter movement in the us or the eu migration crisis, as they would have done more to develop the political element of the argument and allowed for a more focused consideration of the extent to which the nation state is amenable to reform. in the final section of the book, gregg turns to the challenges to the human rights state, and his assessment is both too sanguine and too modest. he is at his most, convincing and arguing, against using armed intervention as a tool of human rights promotion, rightly suggesting it needs to be an exceptional tactic of last resort, as all it can hope to accomplish is putting an end to the killing of innocent civilians. his view that patriotism can be rendered in more cosmopolitan terms, while admirably aware of the challenges, reads as optimistic in the face of the recent rise of virulent populist politics, for example. and finally, in defending the rule of law rather than democracy as essential to the human rights state, gregg takes a step backward. while a hesitance to articulate a universal institutional form is review s � macmillan publishers ltd. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s understandable, he undercuts his own argument. the human rights state he imagines is expressly a democratic vision, as it seeks to carry forward the power of individuals to make their political and social lives for themselves in concert with others. the rule of law may be an important tool to realising this vision but its moral core is a democratic impulse of inclusion. the most compelling moments of the book take up that democratic impulse: it is an unhappy capitulation that they are not followed through. nonetheless, gregg has given us a lively and important book, filled with potential and frustration, but steadfastly trying to do some good in our troubled times, for which it is both a deeply democratic and commendable book. joe hoover queen mary university of london, london e ns, uk centre for global cooperation research, duisburg, germany hoover@gcr .uniue.de j.hoover@qmul.ac.uk review � macmillan publishers ltd. - contemporary political theory vol. , s , s –s s 	the human rights state: justice within and beyond sovereign nations 	benjamin gregg university of pennsylvania press, philadelphia, , viii+ pp., isbn: - - - - why black lives matter in science editorial why black lives matter in science systemic racism has held back under-represented minorities, especially black people, in scientific research. we’re committed in our roles as journal editors to help correct this inequality. at the time of writing (mid-june), millions of people are still reeling from the shocking video of george floyd, a black man who lost his life at the hands of a police officer in minneapolis — followed closely by another death in atlanta of a black man named rayshard brooks. such events have amplified the sad fact that anti-black racism remains a major issue in the united states and throughout the world. the protests that followed these deaths, propelled by the black lives matter movement, are waking many people up to the injustices that black people suffer — injustices that reach far beyond their treatment by the police. the scientific community is not immune to such injustices: black researchers have been held back by pervasive, systemic racism. this spurred a call for academic and stem professionals (using the twitter hashtags #strike blacklives, #shutdownstem and #shutdownacademia) to strike on june , to reflect, self-educate, and come up with concrete action plans to address the problem of systemic racism in the scientific community. “in the wake of the most recent murders of black people in the us, it is clear that white and other non-black people have to step up and do the work to eradicate anti-black racism,” wrote the organizers at http://www.shutdownstem.com. “those of us who are not black, particularly those of us who are white, play a key role in perpetuating systemic racism. direct actions are needed to stop this injustice. unless you engage directly with eliminating racism, you are perpetuating it.” the message is clear: it is not enough to simply be not racist; one must work harder to be anti-racist. instead of going about our normal business on june, nature methods editors used this day to reflect and to brainstorm what actions we as journal editors can take to help combat overt and systematic racism in the scientific community. we quickly realized that one day is hardly enough time to truly understand the depth of this issue or to put plans immediately into action. it is just the start to what we know will be a long process that will require continual attention and that will challenge us in multiple ways. as curators of nature methods, we aim to publish the best, most cutting-edge science. most papers we publish come from well-funded labs in wealthy countries — labs that, despite some increasing diversity, still tend to be overwhelmingly run by white, male principal investigators. and so we recognize that we are complicit in a biased system that favors certain groups of people to the detriment of others. we pledge to work harder and smarter as editors to right this inequity. we commit to carefully appraising our internal decision-making processes for implicit biases. while we have already been making a concerted effort to promote diversity in our pages, we know we can do better. we will carefully consider inclusion when inviting researchers to contribute reviews or opinion pieces. we will feature more black scientists and other under-represented minorities in our magazine content. we will increase the diversity of our reviewer pool to include broader geographical areas. we will do more outreach, including giving talks about publishing and about editorial careers, to a more geographically diverse audience, and reach out to younger students at early career stages. finally, we will not tolerate or engage with any researchers, no matter how famous or important, who make racist comments in our presence, whether against someone on our team or anyone else. we will hold ourselves accountable to these action plans by revisiting how we’ve done a year from now. our editorial team is diverse, but includes no black editors. most of us have experienced discrimination of some kind, but we do not have first-hand knowledge of the sorts of horrific experiences many black scientists have been sharing on twitter under the hashtag #blackintheivory. we stand in solidarity with black scientists and are committed to doing what we can to chip away at the mountain of inequality in the scientific community. with open minds, we invite our readers of any color, via e-mail or twitter, to share ideas about journal content that might be of utility and interest, and about how we can make further positive changes. the challenge of overturning the systemic racism ingrained in scientific culture might seem insurmountable. but there is something that everyone can do to support our black colleagues and the broader black lives matter movement, whether it is making a statement by protesting or striking, donating money to causes that promote racial justice, volunteering time or expertise to reach out to under-represented groups, putting diversity in the forefront of any selection process, reflecting on and checking one’s own implicit biases, or simply speaking out when one sees racism happening. ❐ published online: july https://doi.org/ . /s - - - credit: erin dewalt nature methods | vol | july | | www.nature.com/naturemethods http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf https://twitter.com/hashtag/strike blacklives https://twitter.com/hashtag/shutdownstem https://twitter.com/hashtag/shutdownacademia http://www.shutdownstem.com/ https://twitter.com/hashtag/blackintheivory https://doi.org/ . /s - - - http://www.nature.com/naturemethods 	why black lives matter in science
 from radical progressivism to authoritarianism by barry l. clark, december any americans, and perhaps westerners for that matter, look around at the world and the culture with confusion. much has changed since wwii, a lot more since the s. those changes pale in comparison to the turbulence and transformation in the last thirty years. the changes in the cultural landscape in the s would have been at best laughable notions in . like frogs in a boiling pot, few really recognize the change for what it is, transformative and revolutionary. rather than upfront, comprehensive and collected into one easily identifiable category, the cultural revolution has been incremental and progressively elaborating in its manifestation. it is perhaps that fact that has kept most americans blind to what was truly occurring. to be certain, segments within the populace have taken exception to pieces and parts of the revolution as it unfolded, usually in terms of what they perceived as singular, stand-alone issues. some opposed abortion, others fought for gun rights, while others fought for the family or for morality in society. at the same time various camps that fought for one issue ignored others, these were separate issues, not connected components to them. some might support gun rights but shrug their shoulders over family issues, etc. all the while failing to realize that all the issues the progressive left has championed over the last four decades have been interconnected to them, it was all part of a larger fight. to many that held to some distant notion of what america was founded as, what rights mean, what right and wrong are and who we ought to be, the understanding that there was a comprehensive fight going on never occurred to them. to the radical, this is revolution the same cannot be said of the left, those that adhere to a radical, revolutionary progressive ideology. this is certainly not a homogenous group, all following lock-step to the orders of a behind the scenes mastermind. there is no center of gravity of this movement, it is an ideology and as such, it exists beyond mere personality and singular organizations. that being said, there are guidepost that they all heed, sacred texts if you will that shape their actions. saul alinksy’s rules for radicals, published in at the height of the counter-culture movement is one such document. modified versions of alinsky’s rules are used by justice democrats, brand new congress, the young turks, antifa, youth climate strike, green new deal, and others. m https://www.influencewatch.org/political-party/justice-democrats/ https://www.influencewatch.org/political-party/brand-new-congress/ https://www.influencewatch.org/organization/the-young-turks-network-tyt/ https://www.influencewatch.org/organization/the-young-turks-network-tyt/ https://www.influencewatch.org/movement/antifa/ https://www.influencewatch.org/movement/youth-climate-strike/ https://www.influencewatch.org/movement/green-new-deal/ alinsky made it clear that radical change was a power structure and not merely a reformation of the status quo. he advised that “[a]ny revolutionary change must be preceded by a passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people.” (alinsky , p.xix) traditional-minded americans have failed to understand this as a revolution. it is this failure to fully grasp what has been occurring is the prime reason that the progressives have been so successful. most americans thought nothing of monuments being torn down, these were just granite things and people said it hurt their feelings. to oppose abortion or homosexual marriage might make one look backward and hateful, let the bible beaters fight that. a person that does not own guns may not see the reason to oppose gun control. there are just too many shootings, so they remain silent or even join the progressive cause. none of those people realize that each of those issues fed into the progressive agenda. some were easy wins that built momentum, others attacked the foundational philosophical foundation of the old order. each issue, and each victory built toward greater progressive victories. the radicals were aligned by an ideology that focused them, traditional america was confused and divided. decline and failure of classical liberalism this change did not begin in the s with the counterculture. as hans hermann hoppe points out in democracy, the god that failed, “classical liberalism has been in decline for more than a century. the second half of the nineteenth century in the us, as well as in western europe, public affairs have increasingly been shaped instead, by socialist ideas” (hoppe , p. ) in fact, classical liberalism itself began to fail soon after it was first theorized during the enlightenment. once classical liberal theorist began to abandon notions of universal truth the philosophy began to divide into error and ideology. (b. clark ) however, this is not to say that there were no good ideas that arose from enlightenment. ideas that in their original form aligned with truths men had come to accept prior we good notions. at the time of the founding of the united states, enough of the prime tenets of what was good of classical liberalism were written into the form of government to produce something unseen in human history. what then might explain the decline and failure of classical liberalism? if forced to provide one word that signifies the core of the battle it is ‘truth’. truth abandonment of truth polluted and perverted classical liberalism and it is truth itself that radical progressives now assault. all of the issues and singular battles are part of a revolution and new metanarrative against truth. in fact, each of the issues that have comprised the cultural war in the last years have been battles of truth. it was never about marriage, or monuments or words, not to the progressives at least. each one of those fights was an assault on an accepted truth. by breaking down the narratives of truth in civilization they gained the power to assault ultimate truths. in the philosophy of commonsense, i argue that truth, universal truth, must exist. i begin with the premise that the same thing cannot be affirmed and denied at the same time. “anyone that proclaims that no truth exists is, in fact, making an argument for the existence of truth, an argument that relies upon a statement that no truth exists in appealing to truth. it is impossible to honestly argue for the existence of no truth by stating that there must be a truth that no truth exists.” (b. l. clark , p. ) it is impossible to really and honestly attack the notion that any truth exists. besides, the radical progressives do believe that they hold to some truth, even if they cannot universally define it. thus, they have focused their attacks on the truths that hold up the system they want to destroy and replace. permanent things as truths most of the progressive attacks have centered on permanent things or on elements that directly support permanent things. permanent things are as russell kirk described, “[t]hose elements in the human condition that give us our nature, without which we are as the beasts that perish. they work upon us all in the sense that both they and we are bound up in that continuity of belief and institution called the great mysterious incorporation of the human race.”(kirk ) in a significant way, the big story of the bible teaches us that throughout time and various revelations, certain things remain important, permanent. these lessens began in genesis. god created man, life, being and existence (genesis : ) and then a relationship to man with order and law (genesis : ), then the family (genesis : ), wages of sin (genesis : - ), and finally the concepts of social order, civil law, and society. (beginning in genesis : ) *one might argue that life is not permanent, it ends, and our mortal bodies die. true, but our being and existence is, guaranteed through the second permanent thing, our relationship with god (b l clark , p. ) these concepts have been central to western civilization for two millennia. without these permanent things, western civilization ceases to be the west, a point not lost on the progressive revolutionaries. their attacks on these permanent things, or on items that support permanent things include the following: http://barryclark.info/category/cultural-war/ • abortion: an attack on the christian metaphysical notion of life as a permanent thing - a truth accepted by the west for centuries; it was not liberty to choose as the slogans claimed, it was license to ignore truth. • historic monuments: removing monuments and renaming institutions was an attack on the vestiges of a view of history that was contrary to the progressive/socialist narrative; not a real attempt to heal racial division, it increased such. • gun control: is about denying humans natural rights to property, life, and liberty, unarmed people are incapable of defending those rights from their neighbors and from government. without an ability to defend life, liberty, and property all other permanent things are imperiled; it was not about stopping crime or shootings. • homosexual marriage: an attack on the foundational element of civilization, the family, the third permanent thing as well as on the notion that sin itself exists. it was not about love or fairness and only concerned with ‘liberty’ insofar as that meant license to ignore universal truths. • transgenderism: an assault on the very core of western ideas of realism, existence and of the christian metaphysical reality that gave rise to those ideas. transgenderism is a denial of natural, knowable and observable truths and therefore perhaps the boldest attack on truth yet. • critical theory: in all forms but particularly that of critical race theory, critical gender theory and other variations are an assault on social order, the fifth permanent thing. these theories have come to dominate academia and the ideology of the left. they create racism and genderism as forms of division and hate. they elevate entire classes to hapless victims and others to wanton oppressors, giving de facto moral superiority to one and stripping the other of humanity. • the subtle but persistent war on masculinity is an assault on the family and of truths the west has accepted concerning gender roles for centuries. • language orthodoxy: in orwellian fashion, the domination of the language, or as daryl mccann argues “the sixties revolution has gone the way of the french revolution, the russian revolution, the chinese revolution and every other left- http://barryclark.info/topic-index/western-tradition-of-common-sense/ https://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/the-war-over-toxic-masculinity/ wing revolution that comes to mind. the radicalism of yesteryear somehow turned into pc orthodoxy or what we might call correctism.” (mccann ) many americans over the last forty years looked at the issues above as completely unrelated, having little to nothing to do with each other. most never stopped to wonder why the same groups, with the same tactics and methods, were on the side of change in each case. if ordinary americans look around now in confusion as to how everything has so fundamentally changed it is because they failed to realize all of this was always a battle about truth. this difference might best be described in a simple question; does a person believe ethics exist because truth exists, or do they believe truth exist because ethics exist? there is a magnitude of difference between the two answers to that question. in the former, ethics are universal and guided by both knowable and revealed truths. in the second, man is left to continually wonder, argue and eventually just acquiesce to the majority view of what is true and correct just for the moment. an ideology, not a conspiracy at times of confusion, it is often easier to look for a singular target to focus our angst and fear upon. it is a lot easier to look around at our world and conclude that all of the changes are part of a conspiracy, controlled by some secret cabal. once one looks at the historical progression, how one event enabled progress to follow and how there seems to be a flow and a theme to it all the simple answer might seem that someone or a group must be at the center of it all. unfortunately, that is the very nature of an ideology. once diffused into a population it takes on a life of its own, always centering adherents back toward its core loci. this does not mean nobody has ever conspired to advance progressive issues, people conspire all the time. it does not mean that some groups have been more successful than others in taking a lead to shape the intellectual positions of the ideology. it does not mean that there have not been significant individuals that represent the public face of the ideology. however, as an ideology, once diffused, it can survive in the wild without any of the groups or people you might name as famous progressive advocates. if those were removed others would replace them. an ideology cannot be killed by eliminating specific people or organizations, a lesson the us failed to learn in the middle east after almost years of war. history of the revolution the following is not a mere history lesson, nor just a presentation of a view of history, it is the path that government in america followed from the notions of classical liberalism written into the declaration of independence and fought for in the american revolution to the current state of cultural, legal and governmental affairs. one cannot separate the path that got us here from the position we now occupy. it has been a series of events, a slow progression and a cascading failure. hoppe in democracy noted that accepting the moral status of government was the initial cause of classical liberalism going astray. “liberalism’s erroneous acceptance of the institution of government as consistent with the basic liberal principles of self-ownership, original appropriation/ property/ and contract, consequently led to its own destruction. first and foremost, it follows from the initial error concerning the moral status of government that the liberal solution to the eternal human problem of security-a constitutionally limited government-is a contradictory praxeologically impossible ideal. contrary to the original liberal intent of safeguarding liberty and property, every minimal government has the inherent tendency to become a maximal government. “ (hoppe , p. ) in the american republic, this began before the republic itself was born in . the federalist, centralist would have been a more appropriate term, held ideas of a more powerful, central government that might provide the most public good. men like alexander hamilton, james madison and john jay were the most vocal of this original group but the ideology grew and became one of the opposing points of view that led to the american civil war. the anti-federalists, more aptly called federalists because of their view of a republic with a central government possessing only certain delegated powers, included thomas jefferson, samuel adams, and patrick henry. this view came to be called sectionalism, with its most famous supporter and advocate being john c. calhoun. from until the issue was one of disagreement and debate, tempered by the existence of checks and balances placed within the constitution that ensured neither side could assert dominance. much like the vast gulf between how one views truth, the difference in viewpoint between a republican and central form of government is vast, too vast to exist side-by- side for long without conflict. to a republican (anti-federalist), government was inherently oppressive and should be restrained as much as possible and this restraint was best achieved locally. to the centralist (federalist), government was a force that could perform good and was best centralized to make it more effective. these are https://calhouninstitute.com/about-john-c-calhoun/ https://calhouninstitute.com/about-john-c-calhoun/ diametrically opposed viewpoints. civil war was inevitable on the american continent so long as these two views existed alongside each other with the relative power to check and confound the other. by , as an inept professor of mine once told me, the issue was settled on the battlefield. the meaning of the original compact, of the tenth amendment and of sovereignty were redefined. in the initial revolution from one view of original intent to another was completed with the fourteenth amendment. as george p. fletcher points out in our secret constitution: how lincoln redefined american democracy we essentially had a second constitution after based upon “organic nationhood, equality of all persons, and popular democracy” concepts different and opposed to those of our first constitution which promulgated “peoplehood as a voluntary association, individual freedom, and republicanism”. (fletcher ) this revolution is not without controversy. leave aside the centralists narrative that three years into the war it was suddenly about ending slavery, a feat that surely could have been done in a more economical and less destructive way than a war costing millions of dollars and over , lives. this was not their narrative at the beginning of hostilities, then it was about power and control and the preservation of their centralists worldview. however, it is the actions after the war with the irregular circumstances of implementation of the th amendment that were most transformative. as forrest mcdonald concluded in was the th amendment constitutionally adopted?, “clearly, then, the fourteenth amendment was never constitutionally ratified.” ( mcdonald , p. ) mcdonald makes a compelling case, that the procedures used to force ratification were not only irregular but unconstitutional. however, this amendment was necessary. the opposing voice to centralism had been silenced, disposed of political power and impoverished but the mechanism of original intent was still in place. the th amendment ensured that the revolutionary change of - would stick. the progressive movement itself was possible only because of the events of - . paul d. moreno states in the american state from the civil war to the new deal that progressivism was initially a shift toward expanding government power and away from constitutional limits. (moreno ) prohibition, federal government welfare, a central bank, the federal income tax, and even eugenics all owe their existence on the american continent to that revolutionary change. each of those programs and movements began with good ideas, with high notions of what ethics were and a faith in government as a moral entity. each in its own way failed, prohibition created more crime, welfare more poverty, the income tax created more intrusive government and denied people their rights to their own property. finally, eugenics, born in america and championed by people like margaret sanger, manifested itself fully in germany and the holocaust. (conley ) all these programs and ideas, progressive ideas, resulted in less freedom and all failed to ultimately achieve the goals the original proponents championed. that is, as hoppe pointed out, the key fallacy of placing moral hope in government. this is of course not to imply that humans ought never ‘progress’ or improve. to attach such a notion to me would be to build a strawman. the problem with progressives since the mid th-century is their failure to understand that government is a necessary evil, not a moral agent. as much evil and suffering as good will always come from any and every law written with good intentions. in the th-century progressives did not understand this. in the late th and early st centuries they understand it full well but have come to view ethics through the lens of a power struggle; if the other side suffers in order to do what they perceive is good, so be it. this is how radically far the progressive movement has come and thus why progressivism, as adhered to by radical revolutionaries in our era, will ultimately lead to authoritarianism. radical tactics understanding the history, those events that have built upon an ideology and put teeth at the disposal of progressives of our time is important, yet this does not explain the tremendous success of the ideology over the last years. saul alinsky’s rules for radicals does help explain it. alinsky drew on lessons from marxist tactics while trying to separate the counter-culture and progressive revolution in america from that term. rules has been and is being used by various progressive groups since its publication in . many have modified the tactics to fit their own personalities and approaches, but the basic principles remain unchanged. alinsky spends the first short chapter of his book discussing morality but quickly descends into a worldview that obviously believes ethics determine truth. he states: means-and-ends moralists, constantly obsessed with the ethics of the means used by the have-nots against the haves, should search themselves as to their real political position. they are passive-but allies- of the haves they are the ones jauques maritain referred to in his statement, “the fear of soiling ourselves by entering the context of history is not but a way of escaping virtue.” (alinsky , pp. - ) https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/ / / /margaret-sanger-was-eugenicist-why-are-we-still-celebrating-her alinsky is quoting maritain’s most machiavellian thoughts, perhaps out of context because maritain stressed an acceptance of ultimate truth as the source of ethics. (sweetman ) by choosing and misquoting maritain, alinsky attempts to add philosophical and theological credence to a set of ethical rules that allow and encourage progressives to do some evil in order to accomplish some good, good being defined by progressives. by avoiding machiavelli, alinsky steers clear of what many in the counter-culture would have seen as an icon of the oppressive state. the point, however, as alinsky makes clear from the outset, is that right and wrong do not matter, winning does. as he says, “the third rule of the ethics of means and ends is that in the end justifies almost any means.”(alinsky , p. ) taken plainly, one can infer already how progressivism ultimately ends in authoritarianism, just as socialist ideas and inflamed passions in the french revolution ended in tyranny. speaking of lincoln’s illegal, and alinsky admits it as such, suspension of habeas corpus he states, “he who would be critical of the ethics of lincoln’s reversal of positions have a strangely unreal picture of a static unchanging world, where one remains firm and committed to certain so-called principles.” (alinsky , p. ) compare that to a contemporary of lincoln’s, alexander stephens who said: “times change and men often with them, but principles never!” (a. h. stephens ) alinsky admits here a disdain for principles, principles derive from truth, thus is illuminated to full objective of the progressive movement, the elimination of universal truth. an axiom of histography is that the victor often writes the history of the war. the judgment of future generations is generally shaped by those histories. alinsky acknowledged this when he advised, “the seventh rule of the ethics of means and ends is generally, success or failure is a mighty determinant of ethics” (alinsky , p. ) if you win, who is to judge your actions as right or wrong he is saying. he does not forgo the need for the air of morality, to appear to hold the moral high ground, “the tenth, rule of the ethics of means and ends is that you do what you can and clothe it in moral arguments.” (alinsky , p. ) we can readily observe this in the current progressive movement. all their causes center on ill-defined notions of fairness and justice and appeal to emotions. they turn hatred of an entire race, ‘whiteness’, into an appeal for action, anger, and vitriol toward an entire class, the rich, into calls for equity, using the most dangerous of human emotions and passions clothed in a false morality to advocate their cause. equity, justice, fairness are their battle cries, just as alinsky suggested, “the eleventh rule of the ethics of means and ends is that goals must be phrased in general terms like “liberty, equality, fraternity”, “of the common welfare, “pursuit of happiness” or “bread and peace!’ whitman put it: “the goal once named cannot be countermanded.” (alinsky , p. ) alinsky was not above targeting people individually, he even suggested it. he provided an example of a new school board chairman that opposed his group’s proposals. by the account of alinsky’s follows this was a good church-going, family man with no apparent vices. but that did not matter, he was in the opposition and according to alinsky, there can be no black and white on an issue, everyone is for or they are opposed, there is no room for compromise. alinsky and his group used ridicule, isolation, polarization and ‘freezing’, think modern canceling and doxing, on this man. he advised, “ridicule is man’s most potent weapon it is almost impossible to counterattack ridicule” and ‘if you push a negative hard and deep enough it will break through into its counterside” and finally, “pick the target, freeze it, personalize it, and polarize it.” (alinsky , pp. - ) in terms of how to find issues to stir the mob toward action, alinsky states, “in the beginning the organizer’s first job is to create the issues or problems” and that “the major premise for tactics is the development of operations that will maintain a constant pressure upon the opposition.” he also demonstrated little confidence n the masses to actually understand the issues or know what they really want. it was the organizers job to help them figure that out. lastly, he advised that the mobs tend to get bored of an issue and organizer’s need to continually find new issues to keep everyone engaged. (alinsky ) we have seen and continue to see almost all of these tactics in use by the progressive revolutionaries. consider for a moment, if you were a progressive organizer in the late s, an adherent to the ideology described above, a person that sought revolutionary change. how would you accomplish that? you could not launch a frontal assault on the family and marriage from the start. as alinsky said, “any revolutionary change must be preceded by passive, affirmative, non-challenging attitude toward change among the mass of our people.”(alinsky , p. xix) it would take time to get most of the population into at least a neutral position on gay marriage. in the meanwhile, you have to keep the momentum going, you have to keep and expand your base of support. you would realize that a traditional ally of your cause, black americans, have historically been more opposed and less accepting to homosexuality than the general population. (lewis ) how can you eventually use your coalition to address all the issues on your plate if you risk losing an important constituency? you pick battles that are easy to win early and that speak directly to that constituency. you bring racism back to the fore and create a racial divide. beginning in the s the issue was removing the ‘battle flag’ and proximations of that image from state flags. in the s it was mobilizing progressives to support black lives matter and then an assault on monuments and statues. it manifested into an attack on privilege and whiteness, equating unrepentant and non-woke whites as morally inferior and unworthy of being heard or seen. it gave birth to an entire concept in social science known as critical race theory, derived directly from marxism. those were all easy wins, they kept the coalition together and cemented much black support, support needed later. through those three decades, the issues of gun-control, religious tolerance (of christianity) and homosexuality were not abandoned, they were just not foremost in the progressive agenda. media and the entertainment industry did most of the heavy lifting, moving enough of the apathetic, low-information, non-critical thinking middle toward neutrality or acceptance. a logical person, in the position described above in the late s, would have likely operated exactly as it all played out, alinsky wrote the rules and they work. there is no neutral ground there remains an illusion in domestic politics that a center exists, that a person can be thoughtful, diligent, compassionate and undecided. perhaps in terms of parties, there is often a decision to be made, as in to vote at all. to be certain many republicans are neoliberals or neoconservatives. however, between progressive or not, there can no longer be a place for a truly undecided. a person either believes ethics exist because truth exists, or do they believe truth exist because ethics exist. if they fail to recognize the question, if they do not see the vast philosophical difference of metaphysical opinion concerning truth, then, of course, they are undecided, because they are unaware of the fundamental question at play. america is more divided than at any point since , precisely because of the vast philosophical and metaphysical differences in the two camps. (clark ) the progressive seeks only a non-challenging attitude from the non-woke ‘undecideds’ of society. they do not need their support per se, they simply must gain their apathy. using the example of the bolshevik take over after the russian revolution alinsky notes, ‘the task of the bolsheviks is to overthrow the imperialist government. but this government rests upon the support of the social revolutionaries and mensheviks, who in turn are supported in the trustfulness of the masses of people. we are in the minority- in these circumstances, there can be no talk of https://calhouninstitute.com/americas-great-cultural-political-divide/ violence on our side’ the essence of lenin’s speeches during this period was ‘they have the guns and therefore we are for peace and for reformation through the ballot. when we have the guns then it will be through the bullet.’ and it was. (alinsky , p. ) the progressive, like his marxist master and teacher, is a patient and cunning creature, willing to take small game, steal resources when his adversary is not looking and bide his time until the mass of the population either does not notice or care about his schemes, it is then, once power is gained that he can show the full fright of his teeth and claws. the ‘undecided’, unengaged, un-informed masses are separated only by degrees from the pimple-faced kid that dons a black bandana and marches for antifa. each does his part, in his own way, for the progressive cause. implications many americans still hold to a belief that permanent things should be preserved. many of those have also come to hold dear pieces and parts of postmodern progressive ideology that often make it difficult to understand what preservation means. fewer still retain faith and allegiance to one of the permanent things of western civilization, christianity. of those that profess to believe, many are confused by strange doctrines that derive from false ideology. americans do not even have a political party they can go to the polls to vote for that is clearly on the side of preserving permanent things. democratic socialist progressivism and republican neoconservatism are two sides to the same ideological coin. without a party, an organized and untainted religious institution and a rally cry, traditionalists seem to have no hope of reversing the cultural decline and ideological ascendancy of progressivism. it is too far entrenched, in churches, academia, and the political system. whether this is the ultimate outcome and the last vestiges of traditionalism and conservatism are to go extinct, remains to be seen and beyond the scope here. however, without a significant change, it seems certain. is progressivism really socialism? william english walling in progressivism--and after certainly conflated socialism and progressivism to a large degree. he termed progressive reforms as “useful but temporary makeshifts” to the socialist plan. (walling ) walling among other things was a co-founder of the naacp, a member of the socialist party and a vocal supporter and apologist for soviet communism. john d. stephens in the transition from capitalism to socialism states that western capitalist democracies moving to become welfare states through progressive policies was a realization of marx’ theory that when the conditions were correct a capitalist society would transform into a socialist one. (j. d. stephens ) already in the us, a third of millennials polled advocate socialist programs. (langlois ) so it seems that in the mind of socialist progressivism is a form of socialism, and in the mind of many in our culture that hold to progressive ideology socialism looks pretty good. if they are not the same, they are close cousins. we can conclude therefore that progressivism must necessarily lead to socialism. must socialism lead to authoritarianism? despite the overall denial in general academia and propensity to label all authoritarianism as a right-wing phenomenon, sabrina de regt points out in left-wing authoritarianism is not a myth, but a worrisome reality that not only does it occur on the left but that fascism and communism have much more in common that most scholars care to admit. (regt ) henry a. giroux, a man of solid marxist ideological credentials, argues out in terror of neoliberalism that the us has entered a dark stage of cronyism, what he terms neoliberalism and most would recognize as neoconservatism. he concludes that this ideology, really just the right side of the left-leaning coin, as progressivism and neoliberalism and neoconservatism all derive from flawed version of classical liberalism, has destroyed the foundations of the capitalist economy, controls the media and the culture and has all access to government and power. (giroux ) the conclusions of both de regt and giroux agree with hoppes theory in democracy, the god that failed, in that classical liberalism, polluted near the root, generated ideologies that could not long stand without resorting to authoritarianism. in the us, all the democratic party and most of the republican party, the neoconservative branch, have aided and assisted in putting in place the mechanisms by which authoritarianism might manifest itself in america. as a reaction to or fulfillment of progressive ideology, authoritarianism has the real potential to become reality via three paths. first, progressive socialism itself, coupled with high-minded but impossible ideas would certainly lead to authoritarianism. socialism combined with an ideology that seeks to create equality and justice where they do not exist in nature, by necessity must create new laws to achieve those goals. when initial efforts fail, and they must because it is impossible to make all men equal unless you strip all men of all abilities and possessions, the progressive must create more laws and programs, more taxes and more redistribution of wealth. under such circumstances, by the very nature of its unrealistic goals and the collective power of socialism, progressivism must by necessity end in greater authoritarianism. second, neoliberalism/neoconservatism could retain power and expand its infrastructure so as to become immune to populist ideations for the right or left. this sort of status quo creeping authoritarianism would be invisible to most americans, imperceptible, as civil liberties were further eroded, surveillance increased, and police powers expanded incrementally as they have over the last decades. lastly, a counter-reaction to the progressive social justice movement could theoretically utilize the same disregard for constitutional limitations and appetite for expanded government power to enact some form of fascism as a counter-cultural revolution. this is perhaps the favorite boogeyman of the left, often incorrectly conflated with neoconservatism and their grasps at power. this is the least likely path to authoritarianism. traditionalists and real conservatives are simply not that organized and besides, real conservatives believe in constitutional limitations and principles; concepts incongruent with totalitarianism. power corrupts and governmental power is no exception. in us history we can clearly observe the central government moving from a position of first among states to an entity that would allow , citizens to die to ensure its continued existence. we have seen the rise of faceless, distant agencies that control much of what we do. we understand, intuitively and by observation, how government grows. we can infer what greater centralization and more power and control will mean. no concept that was once sacrosanct - free speech, religious liberty, self-defense, private property, parental rights and even life itself - is not guaranteed in such a scenario. may not be a reality in anyone’s life that perchance reads this, but totalitarian autocracies begin somehow, and our path seems a sufficient start. we can only observe the path the ideology has taken thus far and the ethics of its adherents coupled with the propensity of the mob toward violence to deduce the possible outcomes. about this monograph is part of the fourth turning clash of inter-civilization cultures project. doi: . /rg. . . . (b. clark ) authoritarianism : generational theory : gun control : retrenchment : cultural war : politics : faith and reason barry l. clark is a southerner, father, husband, christian and a retired army field grade officer. author of five books and of several papers and articles on ethics, culture, history, geopolitics and military affairs. twitter: @onlybarrylclark web: http://barryclark.info/ author of: • retrenchment: christian defense of permanent things https://www.researchgate.net/publication/ _fourth_turning_clash_of_inter-civilization_cultures_thesis http://barryclark.info/tag/authoritarianism/ http://barryclark.info/tag/generational-theory/ http://barryclark.info/tag/gun-control/ http://barryclark.info/tag/retrenchment/ http://barryclark.info/category/cultural-war/ http://barryclark.info/category/geopolitics/politics/ http://barryclark.info/category/humanities/faith-and-reason/ http://barryclark.info/about/ https://twitter.com/onlybarrylclark http://barryclark.info/ https://amzn.to/ tbei • the philosophy of commonsense: a cultural war primer • a commonsense case for christianity • things you are not supposed to know about a military career • the annotated secessionist papers, second edition copyright barry l. clark all rights reserved, copyright© bibliography alinsky, s. . rules for radicals: a pragmatic primer for realistic radicals. vintage. knopf doubleday publishing group. https://books.google.com/books?id=vih ubz qu c. barry clark. . “america’s great cultural and political divide.” the calhoun review, . clark, b l. . retrenchment: christian defense of permanent things. https://books.google.com/books?id= hpddwaaqbaj. clark, b l, b l clark, b mccandliss, m peirce, w e block, t e woods, k l clauson, et al. . the annotated secessionist papers: second edition. the calhoun institute. https://books.google.com/books?id=-jvhdwaaqbaj. clark, barry. . “fourth turning clash of inter-civilization cultures thesis.” https://doi.org/ . /rg. . . . . clark, barry l. . “the philosophy of commonsense : a cultural war primer.” https://books.google.com/books/about?id=ck -dwaaqbaj. conley, john j. . “margaret sanger was a eugenicist. why are we still celebrating her?” . https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/ / / /margaret-sanger-was-eugenicist- why-are-we-still-celebrating-her. fletcher, g p. . our secret constitution: how lincoln redefined american democracy. oxford university press. https://books.google.com/books?id=p vsyor fic. giroux, h a. . terror of neoliberalism: authoritarianism and the eclipse of democracy. taylor & francis. https://books.google.com/books?id=x-ptdwaaqbaj. hoppe, h h. . democracy -- the god that failed: the economics and politics of monarchy, democracy and natural order. perspectives on democratic practice. taylor & francis. https://books.google.com/books?id=bvdkdwaaqbaj. kirk, r. . enemies of the permanent things: observations of abnormality in literature and politics. arlington house. https://books.google.com/books?id=xlcbaaaamaaj. langlois, shawn. . “more than a third of millennials polled approve of communism.” market watch. . https://www.marketwatch.com/story/for-millennials-socialism-and-communism-are- hot-capitalism-is-not- - - . lewis, gregory b. . “black-white differences in attitudes toward homosexuality and gay rights*.” public opinion quarterly ( ): – . https://doi.org/ . / . mccann, daryl. . “how the left turned free speech into hate speech.” quadrant ( / ). moreno, p d. . the american state from the civil war to the new deal: the twilight of constitutionalism and the triumph of progressivism. the american state from the civil war to the new deal: the twilight of constitutionalism and the triumph of progressivism. cambridge university press. https://books.google.com/books?id= uupwdgnlgc. regt, sabrina. . “left-wing authoritarianism is not a myth, but a worrisome reality. evidence from https://amzn.to/ sdyusc https://amzn.to/ sdcvja https://amzn.to/ qigv https://amzn.to/ s uhgz https://books.google.com/books?id=vih ubz qu c https://books.google.com/books?id= hpddwaaqbaj https://books.google.com/books?id=-jvhdwaaqbaj https://doi.org/ . /rg. . . . https://books.google.com/books/about?id=ck -dwaaqbaj https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/ / / /margaret-sanger-was-eugenicist-why-are-we-still-celebrating-her https://www.americamagazine.org/politics-society/ / / /margaret-sanger-was-eugenicist-why-are-we-still-celebrating-her https://books.google.com/books?id=p vsyor fic https://books.google.com/books?id=x-ptdwaaqbaj https://books.google.com/books?id=bvdkdwaaqbaj https://books.google.com/books?id=xlcbaaaamaaj https://www.marketwatch.com/story/for-millennials-socialism-and-communism-are-hot-capitalism-is-not- - - https://www.marketwatch.com/story/for-millennials-socialism-and-communism-are-hot-capitalism-is-not- - - https://doi.org/ . / https://books.google.com/books?id= uupwdgnlgc eastern european countries.” communist and post communist studies, no. : – . https://lesacreduprintemps .files.wordpress.com/ / /left-wing-authoritarianism-is-not-a- myth-but-a-worrisome-reality-evidence-from- -eastern-european-countries.pdf. stephens, a h. . a constitutional view of the late war between the states: its causes, character, conduct, and results ; presented in a series of colloquies at liberty hall. a constitutional view of the late war between the states. national publishing company. https://books.google.com/books?id=mggtaaaayaaj. stephens, j d. . the transition from capitalism to socialism. palgrave macmillan uk. https://books.google.com/books?id=apsxcwaaqbaj. sweetman, b. . the failure of modernism: the cartesian legacy and contemporary pluralism. american maritain association publications. american maritain association. https://books.google.com/books?id= is dsso wwc. walling, w e. . progressivism--and after. library of american civilization. macmillan company. https://books.google.com/books?id=bo paaaayaaj. https://lesacreduprintemps .files.wordpress.com/ / /left-wing-authoritarianism-is-not-a-myth-but-a-worrisome-reality-evidence-from- -eastern-european-countries.pdf https://lesacreduprintemps .files.wordpress.com/ / /left-wing-authoritarianism-is-not-a-myth-but-a-worrisome-reality-evidence-from- -eastern-european-countries.pdf https://books.google.com/books?id=mggtaaaayaaj https://books.google.com/books?id=apsxcwaaqbaj https://books.google.com/books?id= is dsso wwc https://books.google.com/books?id=bo paaaayaaj / / reflections on a feminist now in places of undying colonialism | home | business name https://www.apartheidstops.com/single-post/ / / /reflections-on-a-feminist-now-in-places-of-undying-colonialism / homehome blogblog research teamresearch team contactcontact reflections on a feminist now in places of undying colonialism june , | sarika talve-goodman the recent conference staged as a collaboration between our erc project, apartheid-stops, the world literatures: cosmopolitan and vernacular dynamics research programme at stockholm university and the wits institute for social and economic research (wiser) in johannesburg presented the opportunity for participants to enter into dialogue concerning our different localized and ongoing political struggles. upon arriving in south africa, we learned that a massive stay-away was being organized to remove jacob zuma from office. interventions such as a conference paper on failed utopias in post-apartheid literature, or one on frantz fanon’s warnings for postcolonial societies, called critical attention to our uneven, localized, and transnational emplacements. (place: not the same as home, but where you find yourself embedded, entangled, implicated, located.)    as a researcher currently working in israel- palestine on topics relate to south africa, the usa, and the global anti-apartheid movement, i've often struggled with my own position as a jewish american feminist dissident academic, one embedded in continuing structures of colonialism and oppression. i've struggled with the question of how to navigate the academic boycott, for example, when some of my academic allies and lifelines are here, or what it means to critique ongoing legacies of colonial violence and slavery from university buildings that overlook palestinian refugee camps and slums.   i recently learned from louise bethlehem, citing isabel hofmeyr, that frantz fanon—the anticolonial revolutionary psychiatrist and writer—remains, along with steve biko and achille mbembe, one of the most stolen authors from the libraries of south africa.  this made sense to me, since it was in south africa twelve years ago that i first read fanon. i was years old, an idealistic university student from the johns hopkins university in baltimore, a historically white institution in the center of a predominantly black and struggling city. i was on a human rights summer exchange program at the university of western cape and university of cape town organized through bard college. it was the ten-year anniversary of the end of apartheid, and the conversation, whether with faculty and students, or drunk people on street corners, was urgent. i felt called into a sense of localized but globally connected struggles that were political, cultural, personal, and historical. i learned to own the whiteness and class moses tladi: painting homesickness august , 'shir cushi”: african- american spirituals &quo... august , how resistance led to london's selous street b... august , centenary of nelson rolihlahla mandela's birth... july , how huddleston and powell squared off about racism... june , elizabeth williams: "if you do not write your... may , apartheid, jewish identity, and early israeli fore... march , how masekela’s journeys in exile shaped his music... march , letters of stone: a podcast interview with steve r... november , august ( ) july ( ) june ( ) may ( ) / / reflections on a feminist now in places of undying colonialism | home | business name https://www.apartheidstops.com/single-post/ / / /reflections-on-a-feminist-now-in-places-of-undying-colonialism / privilege that shaped my life experiences, without them becoming—as they were in the united states—sources of guilt, or barriers against relation and solidarity.   that summer, the loudest narrative of anti-colonial struggle in the now, one that i heard from the majority of my cohort of black male african students from south africa and surrounding countries—citing thinkers like fanon and biko— was an exclusionary and masculinist one. i remember one moment in class when one of these students called out the handful of white students for being silent, and i remember thinking, but i don’t know how to answer to that address. the fact of my being a woman, as well as my jewishness—my own lived experiences and history of racialized, gendered, and sexualized difference and violence, especially growing up in missouri—were too easily ignored, or swallowed up by discussions of whiteness.   this failure, or discomfort, in speaking on behalf of whiteness in south africa is when i started seeking out feminism in a different way. it was something that first came from my grandmother, who wanted her daughters to have financial independence, and then from my mother, who brought feminism together with jewishness and anti-racism, and then became mine and lived. growing up in the racist and segregated city of st. louis, i learned that both feminism and jewishness—and the histories of loss, genocide, displacement, statelessness, and immigration carried within modern jewishness—meant showing up for and fighting alongside anyone oppressed, excluded, or marked as other. i learned early on from having an activist mother that a life of struggling against injustice and solidarity work isn’t clear, easy, or romantic. it’s messy, and sweaty, and often painful. we are pitted against each other, we are discredited, we are broken down, we are slandered in public and in private, we are hated, but we continue to speak up.      it wasn’t the life i wanted—my fantasy was to be some kind of healer in the mountains—but i was called into feminism through encounters with violence, exclusion, and the feeling of being at odds, that something is wrong. it came from an overwhelming sense of injustice, especially the unbearable politics around the idea of home in the current world in which we live. when i returned to baltimore from south africa, hurricane katrina had just hit, and busloads of mostly african american refugees from louisiana and mississippi arrived with no place to go. it was there and then that i became consciously emplaced within a historical and global struggle against structural racism—and the sexism, homophobia, and ableism built into it—rooted in shared, uneven, and ongoing histories of violence.   after this i also began to explore my own jewish entanglements and histories between europe, the usa, and israel-palestine—the politics of violence and exclusion brought home. (for a powerful exploration of the politics of home as one of violence and march ( )november ( ) october ( ) july ( ) june ( ) may ( ) january ( ) december ( ) november ( ) / / reflections on a feminist now in places of undying colonialism | home | business name https://www.apartheidstops.com/single-post/ / / /reflections-on-a-feminist-now-in-places-of-undying-colonialism / exclusion see rosemary george’s the politics of home.) i went to study abroad in israel, which one day would bring me back as a doctoral and then postdoctoral researcher. being here, in israel, is what finally brought me, over a decade later—via the erc project —back to south africa, and back to fanon.   during the conference, we heard richard pithouse—a south african scholar and public intellectual—give a talk on fanon, based on a piece he had just published for the popular press. what pithouse gave us, through fanon, were tools for thinking about how the manichean logic of colonial modernity continues in the present, through the dynamics of what achille mbembe calls the postcolony (societies emerging out of colonialism and colonial violence), as well as in the logic of some progressive movements themselves.   pithouse reads fanon’s last work, the damned of the earth (commonly translated as the wretched of the earth), as a warning against the likely pitfalls of the postcolony. in this work, fanon outlines how colonialism justified its violence through what he calls “manichean delirium.” pithouse explains:   ...for fanon racism, as an ideology, is organised around the idea, whether explicitly asserted or implicitly assumed, that humanity is riven by a fundamental split that, while marked on the body, is ultimately ontological, a constitutive feature of being. virtue, reason, beauty, maturity, civilization and hygiene are projected onto one side of this split, and their opposites, real or imagined, onto the other.   in his article, pithouse explains that the government of zuma works through seeking “to incite manichean delirium as a mask for the preservation and extension of a predatory and repressive order.” i thought about the connections between the authoritarian postcolony and predatory capitalism of zuma’s south africa—which, pithouse explains, has elements of the colony and the postcolony—and netanyahu’s israel, and now trump’s usa. pithouse gives the famous example of george bush saying “either you are with us, or you are with the terrorists.” we are still living in the age of manichean delirium and colonial modernity. the conditions of the postcolony are shared.   fanon probably first encountered the idea of manichaeism— pithouse posits in the article as an aside—through simone de beauvoir’s brilliant book of feminist philosophy the second sex, where she explains that the “good” becomes defined through a manichean destruction of the woman as other.  i locate my own entry into fanon, through feminist and queer readings of his work, which helped to bring it home to me, that is, to bring it into my own body and struggle in how to live in this world. these sources helped clarify my investments in thinking beyond and against the violence of the nation-state, in transnational modes of oppositional solidarity through difference. fanon’s often masculinist and homophobic politics—as diana fuss and many others have discussed—seem to offer little to anti- / / reflections on a feminist now in places of undying colonialism | home | business name https://www.apartheidstops.com/single-post/ / / /reflections-on-a-feminist-now-in-places-of-undying-colonialism / homophobic or anti-misogynist agendas. thinking fanon with anti- racist feminist and queer thinkers is essential for helping to bring these tools of struggle into conversation with the now, in order to imagine something beyond racist, masculinist, and heteronormative epistemologies, beyond the political logic of borders and nation-states, and beyond the economic logic of a predatory and globalized capitalism that is actively destroying people’s lives and the planet.   pithouse discusses that for fanon, manichaeism was also a powerful tool against an external source of oppression, a resource for the colonized. but the goal, for fanon, is that this manichaeism is ultimately transcended through struggle. this happens through intellectual work and the philosophical concept of mutuality—a kind of radical participatory process of mutual recognition and learning. in pithouse’s words, this opens up “a radically democratic understanding of struggle, rooted in local practices in which dignity is affirmed, discussion carried out and decisions taken.”   pithouse ends hopefully by writing that fanon “insisted that the pathologies of both the colony and the postcolony should be confronted with a radically democratic project, the constitution of popular counter-power, and the ‘objective necessity of a social program which will appeal to the nation as a whole’. we should do the same.”  yes, we should, and perhaps it starts, following fanon, with transforming education into a radically democratic project of learning and activism on the ground. at the same time, we need to ask what a transformation of the nation as a whole would look like, following audre lorde’s famous dictum that the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house. we need to transform the master’s house completely.   fanon would probably see black lives matter—based in the intersectional analytics of women of color feminism and queer of color critique—as a transcendence of manichaeism through radical democratic struggle. the movement has no centralized leadership, addresses erasures and marginalizations that have occurred within progressive movements, and remains committed to creating modes of analysis and solidarity not based on homogenous identity categories but through difference. my hope—from where i am emplaced now, between the us and the middle east—is that we transcend the polarizing manichean rhetoric around israel-palestine to explore the transformative potential of transnational solidarities such as “ferguson to palestine.” then we can focus on the everyday work of opposing and transforming localized and / / reflections on a feminist now in places of undying colonialism | home | business name https://www.apartheidstops.com/single-post/ / / /reflections-on-a-feminist-now-in-places-of-undying-colonialism / global systems of state-sanctioned violence, devaluation, terror, and death from where we are.        we must remember—from wherever we are situated in interlocking globalized systems of racialized, sexualized, and gendered oppression and privilege—that the possibilities for oppositional solidarity and struggle, for meaningful dialogue and change, are diverse, multiple, and open. as sara ahmed writes in her stunning and most recent book, living a feminist life: “to build feminist dwellings, we need to dismantle what has already been assembled; we need to ask what it is we are against, what it is we are for, knowing full well that this we is not a foundation but what we are working toward.”     works cited   ahmed, sara. living a feminist life. duke university press, durham: .   fanon, frantz. the wretched of the earth.  grove press, new york: .   fuss, diana. “interior colonies: frantz fanon and the politics of identification.” diacritics, vol. , no. / , , pp. – . jstor, www.jstor.org/stable/ .   george, rosemary. the politics of home: postcolonial relocation and twentieth century fiction. university of california press, berkeley and los angeles: .   lorde, audre. “the master’s tools will never dismantle the master’s house.” this bridge called my back: writings by radical women of color. ed. by cherrie moraga and gloria anzaldua. watertown, perspephone press: .   mbembe, achille. “provisional notes on the postcolony.” africa: journal of the international african institute, vol. , no. , , pp. – . jstor, www.jstor.org/stable/ .   http://theconversation.com/what-discerning-book-thieves-tell-us- about-a-countrys-reading-culture-   http://www.theconmag.co.za/ / / /manichean-delirium-in-the- time-of-jacob-zuma/ the asm journals committee values the contributions of black microbiologists the asm journals committee values the contributions of black microbiologists patrick d. schloss,a chair, asm journals committee, melissa junior,b director, asm journals, rebecca alvania,b assistant director, asm journals, cesar a. arias,c,d editor in chief, antimicrobial agents and chemotherapy, andreas baumler,e editor in chief, infection and immunity, arturo casadevall,f editor in chief, mbio, corrella detweiler,g editor in chief, microbiology and molecular biology reviews, harold drake,h editor in chief, applied and environmental microbiology, jack gilbert,i editor in chief, msystems, michael j. imperiale,a editor in chief, msphere, susan lovett,j editor in chief, ecosal plus, stanley maloy,k editor in chief, journal of microbiology and biology education (jmbe), alexander j. mcadam,l,m editor in chief, journal of clinical microbiology, irene l. g. newton,n editor in chief, microbiology resource announcements, michael j. sadowsky,o editor in chief, microbiology spectrum, rozanne m. sandri-goldin,p editor in chief, journal of virology, thomas j. silhavy,q editor in chief, journal of bacteriology, peter tontonoz,r editor in chief, molecular and cellular biology, jo-anne h. young,s editor in chief, clinical microbiology reviews, craig e. cameron,t isaac cann,u a. oveta fuller,a ariangela j. kozikv adepartment of microbiology and immunology, university of michigan, ann arbor, michigan, usa bamerican society for microbiology, washington, dc, usa ccenter for antimicrobial resistance and microbial genomics and division of infectious diseases, university of texas health science center, mcgovern medical school, houston, texas, usa ddepartment of microbiology and molecular genetics, university of texas health science center, mcgovern medical school, houston, texas, usa edepartment of medical microbiology and immunology, university of california, davis, california, usa fdepartment of molecular microbiology and immunology, johns hopkins bloomberg school of public health, baltimore, maryland, usa gdepartment of molecular, cellular & developmental biology, university of colorado, boulder, colorado, usa hdepartment of ecological microbiology, university of bayreuth, bayreuth, germany idepartment of pediatrics, university of california, san diego, california, usa jdepartment of biology, brandeis university, waltham, massachusetts, usa kdepartment of biology, san diego state university, san diego, california, usa lboston children’s hospital, boston, massachusetts, usa mharvard medical school, boston, massachusetts, usa ndepartment of biology, indiana university, bloomington, indiana, usa obiotechnology institute, university of minnesota, st. paul, minnesota, usa pdepartment of microbiology and molecular genetics, university of california, irvine, california, usa qdepartment of molecular biology, princeton university, princeton, new jersey, usa rdepartment of pathology and laboratory medicine, david geffen school of medicine, university of california, los angeles, california, usa sdepartment of medicine, university of minnesota, minneapolis, minnesota, usa tdepartment of microbiology & immunology, university of north carolina, chapel hill, north carolina, usa ucarl r. woese institute for genomic biology, university of illinois, urbana, illinois, usa vdepartment of internal medicine, university of michigan, ann arbor, michigan, usa black lives matter. the ongoing problem of police brutality and the resulting deathsof george floyd ( ), breonna taylor ( ), and many other black people in the united states ( ) has rightly shaken the country. acts of racism should cause us to question the level to which we have personally participated in the systems of racial inequity that facilitate such acts. we all have an obligation to identify the ways that systemic racism functions in our society and in science. as scientists, we prefer to believe that we are driven by data and are immune to such detrimental behaviors. yet, if we are honest, we know that this is not always true. citation schloss pd, junior m, alvania r, arias ca, baumler a, casadevall a, detweiler c, drake h, gilbert j, imperiale mj, lovett s, maloy s, mcadam aj, newton ilg, sadowsky mj, sandri- goldin rm, silhavy tj, tontonoz p, young j-ah, cameron ce, cann i, fuller ao, kozik aj. . the asm journals committee values the contributions of black microbiologists. appl environ microbiol :e - . https://doi .org/ . /aem. - . copyright © american society for microbiology. all rights reserved. ed. note: this editorial is being published by the following asm journals: antimicrobial agents and chemotherapy, applied and environmental microbiology, clinical microbiology reviews, ecosal plus, infection and immunity, journal of bacteriology, journal of clinical microbiology, journal of microbiology and biology education, journal of virology, microbiology and molecular biology reviews, microbiology resource announcements, microbiology spectrum, molecular and cellular biology, mbio, msphere, and msystems. address correspondence to patrick d. schloss, pschloss@umich.edu. accepted manuscript posted online july published editorial crossm september volume issue e - aem.asm.org applied and environmental microbiology september o n a p ril , a t c a r n e g ie m e l l o n u n iv l ib r h ttp ://a e m .a sm .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - https://orcid.org/ - - - x https://doi.org/ . /aem. - https://doi.org/ . /aem. - https://doi.org/ . /asmcopyrightv mailto:pschloss@umich.edu https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /aem. - &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - https://aem.asm.org http://aem.asm.org/ between and , the horrific tuskegee syphilis study was performed to observe the natural history of latent syphilis infection in black men ( ). the premise of the study was driven by the racist pseudoscience of social darwinism. the study directors hypothesized that black men were inferior to white men. the study directors lied to the men about their condition, leading the men to infect their partners and children. furthermore, when penicillin was shown in to treat syphilis, the doctors hid the treatment and refused to treat the men. leading peer-reviewed journals of the time published results from the study. this textbook example of racism in microbiology underscores the historic role of scientific publishers in disseminating racist ideologies and points to the potential for scientific publishers to prevent the spread of racism. as the journals committee of the american society for microbiology, we are committed to promoting the work of black microbiologists and the issues that impact the black community. to do this, we must improve the representation of black microbiologists across the peer review process, recruit black authors to publish their research in asm’s journals, and identify aspects of peer review where there is oppor- tunity for bias to affect our decisions to publish their research, something that we wish to avoid. we must also reassess the scopes of our journals to ensure that the micro- biological problems that are important to the black community are published within the journals of this society. issues that affect the black community matter. black people in the united states in are, and historically have been, disproportionately and negatively impacted by infectious diseases ( ). the flint, mi, water crisis brought significant suffering to the primarily black community, including outbreaks of legionnaires’ disease ( ). black women are more likely to have a preterm birth, of which half are associated with a microbial etiology ( ). black children are more likely to have asthma, a disease which is associated with increased bacterial burden in the lungs ( ). black people are more likely to have a severe case of and die from coronavirus disease (covid- ) ( ). in new york city and elsewhere, the death rate due to covid- for black people is twice that for white people ( ). black people are also far more likely to be affected by sexually transmitted infections, including hiv, and evidence suggests a role for underlying structural inequities, such as mass incarceration and unequal treatment when seeking medical care ( , ). these disparities in health are an outcome of differences in socio-economic factors and the corresponding disenfranchisement. these include less access to health care, food deserts where nutritious and affordable food is not available, and poorly funded public health infrastructure. a person’s race provides no biological basis for the observed health disparities, and to assert otherwise will slow the identi- fication of solutions to these disparities. unfortunately, research related to solving such problems is often discounted. a recent analysis of research project (r ) proposals reviewed by the national institutes of health found that the community- and population-level research topics of interest to black scientists placed them at a disad- vantage for a fundable outcome and accounts for much of the reduced success rate of black scientists ( ). as an academic publisher, we have a responsibility to help to promote the importance and legitimacy of work that is important to the black com- munity. black scientists have made significant contributions in spite of the systemic racism that they have faced throughout their lives. these scientists should be able to put their energy into their science rather than into overcoming the bias and prejudice that deters their efforts and devalues their humanity. as an example, george washington carver was born into slavery yet went on to become a preeminent plant biologist, chemist, and microbiologist despite many barriers to safely obtaining an education (https:// www.tuskegee.edu/support-tu/george-washington-carver). he improved the lives of farmers by developing alternative crops to cotton, harnessing the power of rhizobia to help improve soil health, and fighting fungal plant pathogens. he impacted the lives of many black and non-black people. numerous black microbiologists have had significant impacts on topics that are particularly relevant to black communities and beyond, including drs. william hinton, ruth moore, jane hinton, and many others. in an editorial applied and environmental microbiology september volume issue e - aem.asm.org o n a p ril , a t c a r n e g ie m e l l o n u n iv l ib r h ttp ://a e m .a sm .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://www.tuskegee.edu/support-tu/george-washington-carver https://www.tuskegee.edu/support-tu/george-washington-carver https://aem.asm.org http://aem.asm.org/ interview at the microbe meeting in new orleans, la, dr. marian johnson- thompson (university of the district of columbia) recounted the lives of many of these and other black microbiologists ( ). she told the story of dr. moore, a professor at howard university who attended a general meeting of the asm. because of segrega- tion, she was not able to stay at hotels within the city or eat at any of its restaurants. although we want to believe that such systemic racism no longer exists within our discipline, we must constantly question that assumption. the stories of these microbi- ologists emphasize that representation matters. they underscore the fact that unless the perspective and challenges of black communities are represented, then they will not be addressed. in a recent msphere of influence article, dr. michael johnson recounted his shock that although there was a % increase in the number of biomedical ph.d.’s awarded to black people and those from other underrepresented groups (urgs) between and , there has not been a meaningful change in the number of assistant professors from urgs over that time ( ). in his article, he asks how he wound up at a research-intensive university as a black professor. he asks two questions of himself: “by what miracle did i beat the odds to get here?” and “what can i do to get other urms [underrepresented minorities] in a similar position as myself?” yet, it is not dr. johnson’s responsibility alone to remove these barriers. as a publisher of microbiology research, we acknowledge the important role that we have in the career development of junior scientists and the role that we have in giving legitimacy to scientific questions. for too long, we have not promoted the work of junior black and other scientists from urgs as much as we could have. we have been too passive in recruiting these scientists to publish in our journals. scientists like dr. johnson should not think that their success is a “miracle.” we also must ask ourselves what we can do to get more scientists from urgs into faculty and leadership positions. although we should always strive to recruit more people from urgs into science, the data that he reports indicate that the problem also lies with retention of this talent. as leaders of the asm journals program, we need to take a greater role in mentorship. we can recruit more junior scientists from urgs to be peer reviewers, put them in leadership positions, and publicly recognize them. as the journals committee, we seek to improve the representation of black micro- biologists and therefore take on the responsibility to do the following. ● learn from the stories of black microbiologists, past and present. we will listen. black microbiologists should not have to shoulder the burden of dismantling systems of inequality on their own. ● ensure that diverse voices and viewpoints are represented among the editors in chief. we will conduct open searches that actively recruit black scientists and scientists from urgs. we will not constrain the candidate pool to current or past editors and editorial board members, which have traditionally been the source of candidates. ● appoint editors in chief who understand that the impact of their journal is dependent on the diversity of their authors, reviewers, and editors. we will ask candidates to state their experience fostering diversity, equity, and inclusion in their application. ● improve the representation of black scientists and those from other urgs across the peer review system. each journal will develop a plan that will be regularly evaluated and used as a criterion to determine whether an editor in chief should be reappointed. ● be alert to implicit and overt bias when handling manuscripts from black and other scientists from urgs. we will work with our editors and others to under- stand bias and study where it can manifest itself in peer review. ● more fully represent the scope of how microbiology impacts the black commu- nity. we will solicit input from black microbiologists for topics that are not being editorial applied and environmental microbiology september volume issue e - aem.asm.org o n a p ril , a t c a r n e g ie m e l l o n u n iv l ib r h ttp ://a e m .a sm .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://aem.asm.org http://aem.asm.org/ addressed adequately within asm’s journals and revise the scopes of the journals accordingly. ● promote black microbiologists. we will ensure that their representation is equi- table when selecting papers for editor spotlights, authors for commentaries, and subjects for biographical reports. ● help develop the next generation of microbiologists and more actively listen. we will participate in opportunities to serve and mentor black scientists and those from other urgs through the annual biomedical research conference for minor- ity students (abrcms) and the annual conference for the society for advance- ment of chicanos/hispanics & native americans in science (sacnas). ● identify appropriate methods for identifying and quantifying representation of black microbiologists. we will collaborate closely with the asm taskforce on diversity, equity, and inclusion. there is no place for anti-black or for any form of racism within microbiology. to solve the most important microbiological problems of today and prepare for those of the future, we must leverage the experiences, perspectives, and expertise of everyone. references . boone a. june . one week that shook the world: george floyd’s death ignited protests far beyond minneapolis. star tribune, minneap- olis, mn. https://www.startribune.com/george-floyd-death-ignited -protests-far-beyond-minneapolis-police-minnesota/ /. . gardner h. june . ‘this is for you, baby’: days of protests are about more than breonna taylor. courier-journal, louisville, ky. h t t p s : / / w w w . c o u r i e r - j o u r n a l . c o m / s t o r y / n e w s / l o c a l / / 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underrepresented minority assistant professors in medical school basic science depart- ments has a long way to go. msphere :e - . https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - . editorial applied and environmental microbiology september volume issue e - aem.asm.org o n a p ril , a t c a r n e g ie m e l l o n u n iv l ib r h ttp ://a e m .a sm .o rg / d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://www.startribune.com/george-floyd-death-ignited-protests-far-beyond-minneapolis-police-minnesota/ / https://www.startribune.com/george-floyd-death-ignited-protests-far-beyond-minneapolis-police-minnesota/ / https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/local/ / / /louisville-protests-more-than-breonna-taylor-lmpd-shooting/ / https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/local/ / / /louisville-protests-more-than-breonna-taylor-lmpd-shooting/ / https://www.courier-journal.com/story/news/local/ / / /louisville-protests-more-than-breonna-taylor-lmpd-shooting/ / https://doi.org/ . /d - - -z https://doi.org/ . /d - - -z https://doi.org/ . / https://www.medrxiv.org/content/ . / . . . v https://www.medrxiv.org/content/ . / . . . v https://doi.org/ . /mbio. - https://doi.org/ . /s - - - https://doi.org/ . /s - - - https://doi.org/ . /peds. - c https://doi.org/ . /cid/ciaa https://doi.org/ . /jama. . https://doi.org/ . /ajph. . https://doi.org/ . /ajph. . https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/nbk / https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/books/nbk / https://doi.org/ . /sciadv.aaw https://doi.org/ . /sciadv.aaw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yqaozdcl gm https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - https://doi.org/ . /msphere. - https://aem.asm.org http://aem.asm.org/ 	references durham research online deposited in dro: september version of attached �le: accepted version peer-review status of attached �le: peer-reviewed citation for published item: baron, ilan zvi ( ) 'falsi�ability, the politics of evidence, and the importance of narratives.', critical studies on security., ( ). pp. - . further information on publisher's website: https://doi.org/ . / . . publisher's copyright statement: this is an accepted manuscript of an article published by taylor francis in critical studies on security on feb , available online:http://www.tandfonline.com/ . / . . . additional information: use policy the full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-pro�t purposes provided that: • a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in dro • the full-text is not changed in any way the full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders. please consult the full dro policy for further details. durham university library, stockton road, durham dh ly, united kingdom tel : + ( ) | fax : + ( ) https://dro.dur.ac.uk https://www.dur.ac.uk https://doi.org/ . / . . http://dro.dur.ac.uk/ / https://dro.dur.ac.uk/policies/usepolicy.pdf https://dro.dur.ac.uk falsifiability, the politics of evidence, and the importance of narratives ilan zvi baron is an associate professor in the school of government and international affairs. he has been a visiting fellow at the leonard david institute for international relations at the hebrew university, jerusalem, and a visiting assistant professor at the university of british columbia. his most recent book is, how to save politics in a post- truth era: thinking through difficult times. address: durham university, the al-qasimi building, elvet hill road, durham, dh tu, england, united kingdom email: ilan.baron@durham.ac.uk abstract: this article addresses the rise of alternative facts and fake news in politics, and highlights why scholars of security should be concerned with them. the article explains how the scientific method itself has contributed to the conditions in which facts are easily undermined and argues that we need to recognize the role that narratives play in how we interpret and engage with this world. keywords: narratives; post-facts; interpretation, falsifiability, science mailto:ilan.baron@durham.ac.uk falsifiability, the politics of evidence, and the importance of narratives one of the more famous definitions of the scientific method is that of falsification. this definition is found in the work of karl popper ( , ) who writes that, ‘according to my proposal, what characterises the empirical method is its manner of exposing to falsification in every conceivable way, the system to be tested.’ regardless of whether or not popper has the final word on what constitutes science, it is fair to say that this definition remains foundational to contemporary understandings of how scientific work is done. indeed, it is not a definition that i am interested in contesting. instead, i am going to suggest that this definition provides us with an opportunity to understand, first, how the rise of alternative facts (or debates about ‘truthiness’, as stephen colbert would have it) became possible and, second, why narratives are so important both in the construction of knowledge about the world, and for our ability to develop normative arguments as counters to alternative facts and a post-truth politics. this discussion is important for thinking about security because all claims pertaining to a security matter depend on some kind of evidence. there is no threat without believing that the threat is real. there is no security risk without there being a danger of some sort. there needs to be evidence justifying decisions that send soldiers into harm’s way (hence the debates in the lead up to the iraq war and colin powell’s presentation to the united nations). the creation of fake news as a weapon to be deployed, as it appears russia did by using facebook and other media to influence the american presidential election, is further ground for taking very seriously how factual claims function as evidence in our public political and security discourse. the rise of alternative facts is not just something for reporters to be concerned about. it is of concern to scholars of politics, security and international relations. the rise of alternative facts (and that corollary accusation of ‘fake news’) is closely aligned with the political success of donald trump. the centrality of this epistemological position to the tump administration was made plain when trump spokesperson kellyanne conway went on nbc’s meet the press on january , and introduced into the national and international lexicon the term ‘alternative fact’. the introduction of this nomenclature was directed at re-defining what constitutes a fact as a means to dismiss some factual claims over others, but the political implication of it was that any ostensibly factual claims made by the white house are true regardless of evidence to the contrary. in response, chuck todd, the nbc reporter who was speaking with conway, replied to her statement by saying, ‘alternative facts are not facts, they’re falsehoods.’ in this exchange, we are provided with what appears to be the underlying character of the post-truth phenomenon: that empirical claims need not rely on any empirical evidence at all. those who challenge such unfounded claims are accused by those presenting the alternative facts of peddling fake news. the significance of conway’s invention of ‘alternative facts’ may not be especially surprising as politicians in general have a reputation of playing fast and loose with the truth in order to achieve their goals. yet there is something that is if not new here, of particular significance because of the trump white house is prepared to not only regularly dismiss evidence, but to do so by attacking evidence as fake, and make up their own evidence instead (often by tweeting). trump’s claims about the dangers posed by mexicans and the need for a wall along the border is a further example of how political policy claims are being made without recourse to any evidence. it is not beyond the realm of possibility that he could provoke a trade war (if not a real war with north korea) with countries he accuses (without any evidence) of giving the us a bad deal while this characterisation refers primarily to the trump white house and its supporters, a similar pattern exists elsewhere. for example, in the uk during the referendum about whether or not to leave the european union (eu), senior member of the conservative party, michael gove, dismissed the claims of the remain campaign on evidentiary grounds when he claimed during the referendum that, ‘people in this country have had enough of experts’ (mance ). indeed, much of the debate during the referendum was over evidence, or rather the absence of it from the ‘leave’ side, which clearly misrepresented the consequences of leaving the eu. it is very plausible that they were aware of the deception, hence the decision to scare people into voting leave by focusing their campaign on societal and other security risks ostensibly posed by immigration (watt ; hall ). underlying the fake news position is the respectable logic of falsifiability, and of the ways in which facts are regularly presented to support opposing political positions. to those who do not understand how falsifiability works, it easily appears as though facts can be generated to support almost anything. moreover, the public is not always able to interpret scientific findings nor understand how the scientific method works (nor appreciate that within academic training we learn to constantly question each other’s conclusions, but that this does not necessarily diminish the strength of research findings), so when a study is challenged it lends credibility to the popular view that facts are only as good until the next one comes along that replaces or debunks the previous one. in this sense, the very idea of falsifiability offers a generalizable position whereby any fact and any knowledge claim is suspect. the scientific counter to this position, that there are empirically objective claims, is unhelpful and also largely irrelevant. simply put, it does not matter whether or not there is a superior empirical basis for any particular claim if the process by which the claim is made can be manipulated and if the claims themselves are regularly contested and occasionally refuted. there is a paradox here whereby the process of producing facts creates the conditions for undermining these same facts. contemporary politics aside, the methodological issues at stake here are not new. it was on the related question of relativism that alan sokal ( ) launched his polemical attack against post-modern or post-structural social and political thought during the so-called science wars of the s. his argument should concern anyone interested in normative work, since it was the ability to deploy evidence in support of normative positions that drove his critique. then, as now, this natural-scientific position was flawed on its own terms because it ignores the political consequences of how falsifiability or related testable requirements of scientific research methods contribute to, and may even undermine, the meanings of scientific conclusions. the production of new knowledge and the discovery of new facts do yield advancements in knowledge. however, so long as our focus is exclusively on searching for or producing more accurate facts, it is easy to undermine other facts – less accurate ones – that do not measure up to the required standard. this constant undermining of previous knowledge may be the norm for academics, but in the public sphere it can be reframed from being part of the scientific method to undermining the claims of academic research. moreover, much like the deployment of the ‘fake news’ label for political purposes, methodological claims can be used within academia to advance personal ambition at the expense of others. the story of amy cuddy, recently reported in the new york times magazine (dominus ), is indicative. dr cuddy became famous for her psychological work about ‘power poses’ that suggested that certain physical poses can yield an increased sense of confidence along with physiological changes in testosterone and cortisol levels. her work, however, became a target and was vigorously attacked by other scholars in the field using different statistical tools as their weapon (although ego, personal ambition, and gender were also involved). hers is a striking example of how a debate about method (in this case, about p-values) was used to shatter a scholar’s academic career and promote that of her attackers, without considering the greater (and obvious) methodological point that all claims to specific interpretation over methods are equally logically falsifiable as any other. the kind of intense ‘methodism’ (wolin ) that was used to attack cuddy is disingenuous in how it ignores the clearly obvious interpretive (and power) dynamics that inform how methods are applied and deployed in a professional capacity. the extent that scientific work is characterized by different methods and multiple interpretations of how to apply specific methods is partly why paul feyerabend ( ( )) argued that there is no single method that defines science. none of the above is to suggest that there is no such thing as evidence. indeed, evidence matters a great deal, especially in the construction of normative argument. questions about in science, this debate is more easily witnessed by looking at the problems inherent in induction. a good survey of this and other methodological debates of relevance is (chalmers ) insecurity and injustice often rely on evidence to demonstrate their veracity. moreover, explanatory and normative work both invoke causal claims without necessarily asking what kind of causality is being invoked. however, the focus on the production and contestation of facts and evidence can serve like a smokescreen, directing attention towards the grounds on which evidence is based – occasionally leading toward ontological claims as critical realists do – when the point of debate ought to be about the hermeneutic framework in which the interpretations are made. in research areas that speak to the socially constituted and socially constructed world of our interactions, the form of the interpretations in which we locate and debate facts are narratives. political theorists have noted the centrality of narratives in normative work (crary ; schiff ). richard rorty ( , ) goes so far as to say that narrative is what the theorist does: ‘how can one be a theorist – write a narrative of ideas rather than people – which does not pretend to a sublimity which one’s own narrative rules out?’ narratives provide a story in which we are able to locate claims about the world, ourselves, and others, and interpret their meaning. through narratives that make sense to us, we find the hermeneutic framework that transforms the world into sensical meanings. facts, consequently, are always produced in and by a claim to a particular narrative. this claim does for different approaches to exploring causality see: kern ( ), jackson ( ), kurki ( ). an accessible introduction to this kind of realism is manicas ( ). for an example of the application this methodology into ir see wight ( ). which is not to say that debates about causality have not also taken seriously the role of narratives. see suganami ( ), not mean that everything is relative because the narratives are meaningless if they cannot be shared in a meaningful way with others. as anna wibben ( , ) notes, we are not only beings that create meaning (homo significans), but are also ‘homo fabulans because we interepret and tell stories about our experiences, about who we are or want to be and what we believe.’ wibbens argues that security studies needs to take narrative seriously, and methodologically this means turning toward ontology and the related methodology of interpretation. those who rely on ontological claims to ground what constitutes facts are right about at least one thing: we need to take ontology seriously. however, they are wrong to dismiss one of the central insights of an ontologically-focused philosophy, which is that interpretations are a central part of our being. this insight is why martin heidegger ( ( )) refers to his methodology as hermeneutic-phenomenology. however, one does not need to turn to heidegger to find that interpretation matters as a significant aspect of our being in the world within which we find ourselves. relatedly, max horkheimer ( ) noted in the s that there needs to be a distinction between the social and political contexts in which we are able to produce a type of knowledge that can be deployed as a fact, and a methodological awareness about how we value different types of knowledge. he identified that research cannot be divorced from the conditions in which it is produced. what can be loosely described as the continental tradition of philosophy and political thought has repeatedly offered multiple avenues by which to recognize the centrality of interpretation, and thus also of narratives, for our political being. a relevant methodological discussion of narratives can be found in clifford and marcus ( ). while not all interpretive activities can be described by a reference to narratives, narratives can be understood as the framework in which our interpretations exist. people filter knowledge, and no pretending about some objective universe of facts can overcome this characteristic of human beings. this act of filtering is the means by which we identify what claims make sense, and how, but it functions by a recourse to our own self-understanding. the post-kantian tradition has tried to resolve how this process of making intelligible functions through particular epistemic categories. what this line of thinking does, however, is remove our own construction as beings from the act of knowledge production. one of the achievements of phenomenology is locating ourselves centrally in the production of meaning. by emphasizing that our existence as particular beings in specific contexts is important in how we interpret meaning in the world, identity takes on a greater role. it is, for this reason, unsurprising that public political debate often turns on identity claims instead of ostensibly objective factual ones. indeed, narratives cannot make sense if we are unable to locate ourselves in them in some way, and thus they always pertain to identity-claims. the implications of how this form of interpretation works for security is evident in how we navigate competing interpretations of the same facts. for example, in the case of black lives matter versus blue lives matter, the facts are in a sense the same: the number of deaths by police. what changes is which number carries as in jones ( ). see also, hochschild ( ). black lives matter is an activist movement concerned with raising attention about the violence and racism faced by black people. its origins are in the african american community and with the greater significance, of proportionality versus total sums, and this comes down to interpretation. the normative dimension of this interpretation comes down to which interpretation of the evidence makes sense to us – which statistics carry greater emotional resonance – and this means locating the facts within a narrative that the interpreter in some way belongs to. using facts to advocate political change is meaningless if they cannot be located within a narrative in which these facts make sense. to put this another way, the veracity of facts within the sciences cannot be divorced from the culture of knowledge within which the sciences operate. this conclusion does not lead to the opposite, that there are no facts outside of this world. rather, it points to the limits of how far we are able to deploy what count as facts, and to the very real significance of how our narratives help us to interpret the social reality that we are faced with. there is still the possibility to deploy empirical evidence in pursuit of normative goals. what matters is caution in how evidence is used and the acknowledgement that it simply does not matter how many fallible studies one conducts if the research cannot be located within a narrative whereby it makes sense. the importance of narratives is not just a debate over methodology. hannah arendt ( , - ) remarked in her short book, on violence, about the problematic nature of treating facts of the social and political worlds as if they are the equivalent of the same type of knowledge produced in the natural sciences. the more we pretend that what is done in physics, for example, makes sense in fields outside of the natural sciences, the more we undermine our potential to develop normative arguments in politics. number of an african americans being killed by the police. blue lives matter was a counter movement in the united states that focuses on the lethal dangers faced by the police. narratives are not everything, but they are important. evidence matters, but narratives are a form of evidence. it is not as though facts do not exist, or that social scientists should dismiss the scientific method. rather, the point is that an approach that emphasizes facts unproblematically cannot account for the other fact which is that people interpret the world in a variety of different ways, and that an appeal to factual, ostensibly objective, knowledge is ultimately meaningless when the knowledge fails to make sense according to how we understand ourselves in the world. to put it more pragmatically, it does not matter whether there is or is not an objective real world of facts out there if we do not accept the knowledge that describes this world as valid. the more we constantly try to get our data right at the expense of all other forms of knowledge production, the less we are able to question those conditions under which we assume that such data can tell us what we want it to. thus, instead of ‘thinking’ (arendt ), we treat people and problems like puzzles where the boundaries are clear and easy to find, and all we need to do is put the rest together. with such a dismal view of the human condition, is it any wonder that people have turned away from facts and embraced truthiness? the current political significance of alternative facts and fake news is in how they undermine the ability to deploy progressive political agendas. it is a mistake to counter them by trying to argue for solely for increased scienticism. doing so would be self-defeating as it can never escape from the political consequences of falsification and its ability to undermine itself. rather, we need to accept the inherent contingency of the world, and recognize the role that narratives play in how we interpret and engage with this world (baron ). all evidence is political, empirical facts and narratives included, and this matters in the study of security if only because the stakes – people’s lives – in matters of security are quite significant. the next time evidence is deployed in the construction of a securitizing argument, by a politician, an activist, a political pundit, a journalist, a blogger, or a scholar, it is important that we consider the role that narratives play in framing the presented data as evidence. arendt, hannah. . on violence (harcourt brace and & company: london). ———. . 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( ). being and time (blackwell: oxford). hochschild, arlie russell. . strangers in their own land: anger and mourning on the american right (the new press: new york). horkheimer, max. . critical theory : selected essays (continuum: london). jackson, patrick thaddeus. . the conduct of inquiry in international relations: philosophy of science and its implications for the study of world politics (routledge: london). jones, dan. . "seeing reason: how to change minds in a 'post-fact' world." in new scientist. kern, stephen. . a cultural history of causality : science, murder novels, and systems of thought (princeton university press: princeton, n.j. ; oxford). kurki, milja. . causation in international relations: reclaiming causal analysis (cambridge university press: cambridge). mance, henry. . 'britain has had enough of experts, says gove', financial times, june . manicas, peter t. . a realist philosophy of social sciences: explanation and understanding (cambridge university press: cambridge). popper, karl . the logic of scientific discovery (routledge: london). rorty, richard. . contingency, irony, and solidarity (cambridge university press: cambridge). schiff, jade larissa. . burdens of political responsibility: narratives and the cultivation of responsiveness (cambridge university press: cambridge). sokal, alan d. . beyond the hoax: science, philosophy and culture (oxford university press: oxford). suganami, hidemi. . 'agents, structures, narratives', european journal of international relations, : - . watt, nicholas. . 'eu referendum: vote leave focuses on immigration'. http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum- . wibben, annick. . feminist security studies: a narrative approach (london: routledge). wight, colin. . agents, structures and international relations: politics as ontology (cambridge university press: cambridge). wolin, sheldon s. . 'political theory as vocation', the american political science review, : - . http://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-politics-eu-referendum- compassionate response: intersection of religious faith and public policy boston university openbu http://open.bu.edu bu open access articles bu open access articles - - compassionate response: intersection of religious faith and public policy this work was made openly accessible by bu faculty. please share how this access benefits you. your story matters. version citation (published version): me collins, s garlington. . "compassionate response: intersection of religious faith and public policy." journal of religion & spirituality in social work: social thought, volume , issue , pp. - . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://hdl.handle.net/ / boston university http://www.bu.edu/disc/share-your-open-access-story/ compassion and public policy compassionate response: intersection of religious faith and public policy mary elizabeth collins, a.m., ph.d., associate dean and professor boston university school of social work mcollins@bu.edu sarah garlington, mssw, mphil, ph.d. assistant professor ohio university social work program department of social & public health college of health sciences & professions garlingt@ohio.edu mailto:mcollins@bu.edu abstract much of social work practice is rooted in compassion. addressing compassion as a virtue, this article examines the possibilities for compassion to be more explicitly and purposefully built into actions at community and policy levels. we discuss the definition of compassion, examine the religious roots of compassion, describe some ways in which religion and policy intersect, and provide contemporary examples of compassion at the interface of religion and policy. in the discussion, we conclude with further thoughts about how compassion might be elevated in our collective societal actions and address the role of social work in these efforts. key words: compassion, virtue, policy practice of all the ways in which the united states might currently be considered polarized, cruelty versus compassion may be the most fundamental. it is obvious that some forms of suffering continue to exist, and in some cases are widespread, even in our modern and wealthy country. in response to suffering, individual, organizational, and governmental actions can either perpetuate cruelty (through bullying, discrimination, so-called “get-tough” policies) or act to relieve suffering (through kindness, solidarity, social welfare policies). religion provides a moral force to promote compassionate response in many circumstances. religion also intersects with public policy in multiple ways that may reinforce compassionate response through governmental and community action. social work is deeply engaged in promoting more compassionate response at all levels of practice. although not required to align with religious tradition, there are many ways in which social work engages with spirituality toward improvement for clients or society (canda & furman, ) and in which religious organizations are part of the provision of social welfare (cnaan, boddie, wineburg, ; garlington, ). with focused intervention efforts at all levels, social work also has a responsibility to understand and act upon how policy and community activities can address suffering through compassionate action. examining the intersection of religion and public policy through a lens of compassion, thus, helps us to see work already happening as well as to find creative paths for social change. engagement with religion is not new for social work, but we emphasize the significance of the shared goal of compassion--relieving suffering and furthering social justice. addressing compassion as a virtue, this article examines the possibilities for compassion to be more explicitly and purposefully built into actions at community and policy levels (we do not focus on the individual level in this paper) and we examine the potential role of religion in such efforts. the paper is organized as follows: ( ) definition of compassion; ( ) the religious roots of compassion; ( ) a description of some ways that religion and policy purposefully intersect; and ( ) contemporary examples of compassion at the interface of religion and policy. we conclude with further thoughts about how compassion might be elevated in our collective societal actions and the role of social work in these efforts. defining the virtue of compassion although compassion is sometimes alluded to as a feeling, emotion, or attitude, our discussion focuses on compassion as a virtue. virtues require habits of character as well as action in addition to thoughts and feelings. as a profession, social work frequently articulates “values”, but “virtues” is a more recent concept. recently, however, social work scholars have begun to examine the use and potential of virtue frameworks (mcbeath & webb, ; banks & gallagher, ; adams, ; chamiec-case, ; donaldson & mayer, ). chamiec- case ( ) helpfully distinguishes virtues from values. “…values are beliefs about what is most important to us, what we consider our priorities, and what we believe has worth. virtues on the other hand, are the deeply ingrained traits or dispositions which form our character-what fundamentally makes us who we are and is manifested in our actions” (p. , italics in original). virtues' focus on character is applicable at the larger macro level. organizational mission, for example, identifies the character of the agency that will impact decisions. character of a nation might also be observed through enacted policies. some authors have highlighted certain virtues and their relationship to social work. donaldson and mayer ( ), for example, argue that justice should be considered a core virtue in social work. they argue it is both a personal and social virtue; “it is social in that it is manifest in one’s interactions with self and others, and in how one pursues the arrangements of social institutions and communities” (p. ). in many ways similar to our presentation in this paper, donaldson and mayer trace an understanding of justice as a philosophical concept, justice’s roots in christianity, and justice’s relevance to social work at all levels of practice. further, they identify the need to cultivate this virtue in social work education compassion is often confused with related, other-focused virtues such as charity, altruism, or mercy. the distinguishing attribute of compassion is the idea of shared suffering and the “simultaneous interplay of cognitive, affective and volitional dimensions” (davies, , p. ). further emphasizing the fundamental importance of shared suffering, comte-sponville ( , p. ) explains that compassion is a form of sympathy; it is sympathy in pain or sadness – in other words, participation in the suffering of others. there is a clear moral component involved: “[s]haring in the suffering of another does not mean that one approves of him or shares whatever good or bad reasons he has for suffering; it means that one refuses to regard any suffering as a matter of indifference…. this is why compassion is universal in its principle and the more moral for not being concerned with the morality of its objects…” (comte-sponville, , p. ). there have been extensive philosophical debates about compassion. comte-sponville ( ), nussbaum ( ), and davies ( ) have articulated the history of the various pro- compassion and anti-compassion arguments. in his historical review davies ( ) suggests the deep division is between those who have argued that compassion is essentially a “feeling” and therefore irrational versus those who have argued it contains a cognitive dimension and is a form of reason. moreover, davies ( ) explains there are two “classes” of the words meaning “compassion” that have been used over the years. the first are terms that basically mean “fellow-suffering” or “suffering with”. the latin commiseratio and the german mitleid are of this type. the other class of words does not carry the exact meaning of “suffering with”; nonetheless these have been used as synonyms for compassion. such words include the latin clementia, misericorida, humanitas; the english “mercy” and “pity” and the french pitié. despite their use as synonyms for compassion they lack the specific element of suffering-with that is the essence of compassion. zembylas ( ), in particular, raises concerns about the expressions of pity in relation to compassion, identifying that “pity” “denotes the feeling of empathic identification with the sufferer” whereas “compassion” refers to both the feeling but also, and critically, accompanying action (p. ). the treatment of compassion as a virtue, and our linkage of compassion with public policy, places it within the context of the discussion of virtue theory in politics. virtue theory is not new; foundations were developed by aristotle and saint thomas aquinas, among others, with contemporary treatments by scholars such as macintyre ( ). virtue theorists debate regarding the qualities of virtue that lead to human flourishing. theories of virtue often denote both a core and an ideal; those that are necessary for society and those that make it ideal (sabl, ). justice is typically identified as a core virtue, often the core virtue. it is one of the four cardinal virtues (along with temperance, prudence, and fortitude) recognized in classical antiquity and enduring within later philosophical and religious tradition. compassion is more likely to be considered as an ideal, but this may open to debate. several authors discuss the linkage of compassion and justice (zembylas, ; collins, cooney, & garlington, ; porter, ). zembylas ( ) cites hoggett ( ) stating, “…it is only an intelligent compassion which can feel the pain and think critically about the injustice, thereby fusing an ethic of care with an ethic of justice” (p. ). we return to this linkage in our discussion. zembylas ( ) also identifies the need for a politics of compassion. zembylas suggested that vulnerability, rather than suffering may be the more appropriate term to ground political applications of compassion. the idea of a common human vulnerability (i.e., not just “them” suffering) allows us “to explore how we might move beyond dichotomies that single out the self or the other as victims”. moreover, the realization of the common humanity (rather than the suffering of “the other”) leads to “a simultaneous identification and disidentification with the suffering of the other” and “recognition of symmetry and asymmetry with the other removes the arrogance of claiming that we know and feel their pain and suffering” (p. , italics original). this may lead to questioning and challenging arguments based on binaries such as us/them, citizen/foreigner, friends/enemies, and good/evil (p. ). recognizing asymmetries of suffering raises issues of structural inequalities and can result in collective and civic anger resulting in action at the community level (zembylas, ). religious foundations of compassion religious treatments of compassion often address beliefs regarding the nature of evil and resultant human suffering, the role of “deservedness” among the suffering, understanding of the “other” (those outside of the group) and whether they are eligible for compassion, and specific methods to cultivate compassion. after providing a brief presentation of religious – primarily christian -- perspectives on these issues related to compassion we hone in more specifically on the understanding of the “other”. in addition to his concise history of the philosophical treatment of compassion, davies ( ) also engages in linguistic analysis of the bible to identify the source of compassion. in comparison to philosophical thinking about compassion which engaged with the problem of cognition and affectivity in compassionate acts, in the judeo-christian tradition, “compassion takes on a new priority since it is intimately linked with the action of god for his people, with his own self-naming and with the life of the saints who follow god’s ways” (p. ). in the new testament, davies ( ) notes the development of terminology that adds a more positively affective dimension regarding mercy and actions toward others. “compassion” is to be the preferred translation of these terms rather than the more legal-oriented “mercy.” for christians, jesus is to be understood as the incarnate compassion of god. davies ( ) also articulates an “ethics of naming”; “the ways in which we choose to speak of god will legitimate or prioritize particular principles of action in the world, which acknowledges the intimate relations between the way in which we speak of god and our own highest ideals and values (p. ).” for example, deuteronomy emphasizes the responsibility to show compassion towards “widows and orphans” and to the “stranger”, and, paul articulates the need for christians to exercise the “compassion of christ” (p. ). each of these reflects the ideal of compassion in slightly different forms. o’connell ( ) emphasizes the communal force of compassion in the new testament. a common theme of the gospel accounts of jesus’ compassionate actions is that many of the commonly held attitudes toward those suffering precluded these people from participating in the wider community. thus, the message is not only one of compassionate response to individual suffering but the repair of relationship of the excluded with the larger community. the story of the good samaritan (luke : ) may be the most well recognized description of compassionate response in the bible. numerous discussions and interpretations of this story, alone, have led to extensive debate about lessons of compassion. perkins ( , cited in o’connell, ) argues there are no boundaries on who should receive this love, and it becomes a cornerstone for jesus’ call for a liberated humanity. perkins’ ( ) interpretation also offers three crucial points: ) the parable is directed toward the wealthy (as symbolized by the character of the samaritan); ) in it, jesus suggests we “miss the point” if we focus on a moral or economic calculus to determine what we owe our neighbor; and, ) given the historically contentious relationship between jews and samaritans, the samaritan’s act of compassion, and compassionate acts more broadly, are counter-cultural. o’connell ( ) summarizes that compassion, in this gospel lesson, “… overrides social, cultural, racial, economic, and religious boundaries (p. )”. very clearly, there is no “other” in this perspective of compassion. compassion, of course, is not limited to christian beliefs and traditions. it is a core element in other major religions. several old testament passages refer to compassion, including the psalms (e.g., “the lord is good to all; he has compassion on all he had made” [psalm : , new international version]). in islam, ‘allah/god’ is an ultimate source of compassion and teaches tolerance, love and compassion to individuals. “the holy qur’an, islam’s divine book, says ‘o people, be compassionate to others so that you may be granted compassion by god.’” (shahzad, murad, kitchlew, & zia, , p. ). examples provided by vieten, amorak, and schlitz ( ) include the sanskrit seva (in sikh and hindu-derived traditions) which refers to being of selfless service to the needs of others and in some buddhist traditions metta in pali or maitri in sanskrit is used to refer to both a quality and a practice of unconditional and unattached loving-kindness. buddhism has a particular emphasis on compassion. whereas compassion is considered a virtue in most religious traditions it is considered the defining virtue in buddhism. yet, similarities across religions abound; “one finds rough equivalents of the ideal of divine unlimited love across the major spiritual and religious traditions” (post, , p. , cited in vieten, et al., ). barad ( ) specifically compares the writings of the dalai lama and st. thomas aquinas regarding compassion, identifying some differences but concluding they are essentially writing about the same thing. in both traditions, compassion requires acting to relieve distress as well as having sympathetic feelings about it. religious and spiritual traditions have developed methods of encouraging virtuous behavior. the cultivation of “other-regarding virtues”, like compassion, has implications at personal, societal, and “perhaps global” levels (vieten, et al., , p. ). these authors list some of the ways in which religious and spiritual communities have encouraged virtuous behavior: providing moral education; establishing formal precepts or vows that advocate an ethical lifestyle; furthering opportunities to express compassion or perform acts of community service or social advocacy; encouraging peer influence toward virtuous behavior; engaging in philanthropic rituals or structures (for example, passing the collection plate or tithing); engaging in community-supported initiation-like activities such as the mormon mission; and creating and reproducing a variety of poems, scriptures, slogans, songs, and symbols that may assist in internalizing moral goals (vieten, et al., ). these religiously structured activities, however, are rarely enough to lead individuals in virtuous other-focused behaviors; individuals must internalize these moral orders through personal transformative experiences; “… the most exemplary altruism is often associated with the agent’s personal experience of the utter enormity of the transcendent, including a sense of overwhelming awe. overawed, the deeply humbled self is transformed through something like an ego-death to a new self of profound humility, empathy, and regard for all human and other life” (post, , cited in vieten et al. ). intersections of religion and policy: compassion for “the other” in some eras and contexts religious authority has been the predominant force in setting public policy (e.g., medieval catholic europe, contemporary islamic states). in other times and settings religion is nearly non-existent as a factor in public policy (e.g., communist regimes). in present-day, industrialized western nations the relationship is more nuanced than either of these extremes. religion, heavily related to culture often provides an underlying ethos to democratic debates and religious organizations are often partners with governments to address social need. in the u.s., for example, religion and policy have intersected in at least three ways: the gradual historical shift in responsibility of social welfare from private charity organizations (often religious) to public government agencies (bane, coffin, & thiemann, ; martin, ), the fit of religion within a constitutional structure and legal framework (e.g., rules about tax exemptions, contracting for services), and the role of religious organizations and actors as interest groups in contributing to and advocating around specific policy issues (collins, cooney, & garlington, ). the discourse around responsibility for social welfare needs, private or public, has certainly shifted towards an emphasis on creating government structures to serve citizens in need over the last years, even more so with the development of the modern welfare state. this has not been a complete shift in any sense. religious organizations have contracted with government agencies to provide services from the beginning, and we have seen a shift back to an expectation of charity organizations to take more responsibility for meeting community needs. the changing expectation of responsibility is related to the definitions of target populations and deservedness (schneider & ingram, ), including how we, through policy, define the “other”, what rights the other has to resources, and who is expected to care for the needs of the other. more comprehensive, well-funded social policies generally serve those who are less likely to be defined as the other, while policies and programs designed to help groups seen as less deserving are more regressive, punitive, and underfunded. government is responsible for the social welfare of some, but communities (and religious charitable organizations) are more responsible for the undeserving because they are more frequently operating out of compassion and not entitlement. religious charitable organizations and congregations also fall under the auspices of federal law through the tax code, for example. tax exemption brings with it restrictions on political activity (through the johnson amendment), such as lobbying for specific political candidates running for election (stanley, ). the constitutionality of the johnson amendment has been subject to debate (stanley, ) and there are current efforts to limit it through a presidential executive order and a bill introduced in congress (valverde, ). while religious organizations’ political participation is certainly shaped by this legislative parameter, our discussion of compassionate action is more focused on program and policy advocacy. interest group policy advocacy is closely related to our nation’s views on social welfare responsibility. for our purpose we focus on how religion contributes to the development of public policy concretely as an actor in policy formation as well as more implicitly through promotion of certain social values that influence policy choices. certainly not all policy advocated by religious organizations would be considered compassionate. for example, adherents of the “prosperity gospel” in which material resources and good health are believed to be granted by god to those with faith (schieman & jung, ) might be expected to pursue different policies than those with a compassionate foundation. these might include policies focused on individual reward, wealth accumulation, and neglect of the poor. yet, as we have noted, religious traditions all have some form of imperative to practice compassion. examining religious actors as policy advocates provides a unique view of policy through a compassion lens with a specific focus on the “other”. our earlier description of religion’s emphasis on compassion also explicitly addresses the “other”. when religion emphasizes “community”, calls for a more engaged political presence come to the forefront. gordon ( ), for example, emphasizes both “solitude” and “solidarity”. solitude focuses on interiority, the withdrawal from social life to journey within in pursuit of wisdom, contemplation and creativity. on the other hand, the vocation of solidarity “is to sensitize and conscienticize human persons to the horizontal reality of suffering in the human community” (p. ). as o’connell ( ) has noted, new testament treatments of compassion identify that christ heals social isolation as well as physical suffering. perspectives such as these, which focus on community, shift the religious sentiment away from a solely individualized orientation between self and god. solidarity itself has a rich history conceptually and practically. we note the significance of solidarity in linking compassion and justice, along with the need to give solidarity a thorough discussion of its own. while beyond the scope of this paper, exploring the relationship between solidarity, compassion, and justice will provide greater insight into our collective responses to social problems. from a religion perspective, o’connell ( ), among others, has articulated numerous ideas of “political theology”. there are several sources of this, including feminist theology (e.g., farley, ) and liberation theology (e.g., gutiérrez, ) which overtly link religious commandments to engagement in political processes for transformation of social structures. building on religious ideas about the role of compassion in restoring community, these ideas very explicitly identify the need to engage in political processes to reform systems that cause human suffering. although religion’s role in the political realm is not new, within mainstream discourse religion has not continuously voiced ideals of compassion in this manner. despite ongoing work to address human needs, there are not uniform views regarding appropriate political approaches, role of government, and locus of responsibility for action. explicit examples of compassion, religion, and public policy collins, cooney, and garlington ( ) have provided a more extensive review of the strengths and risks of compassion-focused virtue approaches to policy. they note that the appropriate understanding of “shared suffering” from a policy perspective has three elements. first, there needs to be administrative infrastructure to support the interpersonal element of shared suffering. community-based collaborative networks involving professionals, paraprofessionals and volunteers are needed to do the work of compassion. second, there needs to be formal policy recognition that suffering does occur and that those suffering have a right to the alleviation of suffering as a component of justice. third, there needs to be sustained funding to allow continuity of assistance throughout the period of suffering. in further work, collins, cooney, and garlington ( ) identified examples of federal policies that had elements of compassionate response and utilized a policy analysis model to identify specific components of policies through which compassion is (or is not) apparent. consistent with a definition of suffering regarding “the loss of truly basic goods” (nussbaum, , p. ) the analysis focused on the loss of: life (terminal illness), safety (domestic violence), and home (community disaster) and analyzed relevant public policies (the medicare hospice benefit, the violence against women act, and the stafford disaster relief and emergency assistance act) to determine the role that compassion plays in these governmental responses. findings suggested that each of these policy domains included providing some type of interpersonal connection, but utilized differing means of doing so. each provided for interpersonal contact with sufferers both through professional intervention – including social work -- and the use of volunteers. coordination was central in each domain but the mechanisms of coordination and the relevant parties involved in coordination were sources of variation. numerous other policy examples might also be analyzed through the lens of compassion. these might include, anti-trafficking, homelessness, and foster care, for example. each involves human suffering, is addressed by federal and local policies, and engages religious communities and professional social work in both service provision and advocacy. having described religious foundations of compassion and the interface of religion and public policy, in the remainder of this section we provide three additional examples that identify the intersection of religion and compassion to influence policy actions. in particular these examples indicate ways in which religion participates in policy dialogue and can influence communities to assert compassion for the “other.” the us conference of catholic bishops (usccb) migration and refugee services. the mission statement of the usccb committee on migration ( ) clearly states the centrality of religious belief to the mission, “grounded by our belief in jesus christ and catholic teaching, migration and refugee services (mrs) fulfills the commitment of the u.s. catholic bishops to protect the life and dignity of the human person. we serve and advocate for refugees, asylees, migrants, unaccompanied children, and victims of human trafficking.” mrs works with grassroots catholic networks across the us to promote fair immigration and refugee policies and advocate for the passage of immigration reform. initiatives aim both to educate catholics about the church's teaching on migration and to advocate the positions of the u.s. catholic bishops within congress and the president’s administration. the website identifies several different mechanisms by which mrs engages in policy advocacy: ( ) the development and distribution of policy position papers; ( ) fact finding trips to regions undergoing a migration related crisis; ( ) public statements on issues related to migration and congressional testimony in support of legislation to protect migrant populations; ( ) implementation of a wide range of national educational initiatives to inform and promote the church's vision on migration; and, ( ) involvement in a wide range of coalitions that further protection of migrants. the usccb has been a vocal proponent of a humane and compassionate approach to migrants. in preparation for national migration week the usccb produced and distributed a tool kit. statements included: “with respect to migrants, too often in our contemporary culture we fail to encounter them as persons, and instead look at them as others or render them invisible. we do not take the time to engage migrants in a meaningful way, as fellow children of god, but remain aloof to their presence and suspicious of their intentions. during this national migration week, let us all take the opportunity to engage migrants as community members and neighbors – all of whom are worthy of our attention and support.” the tool kit includes a number of items consistent with advocacy strategies (e.g., fact sheet on migration and refugees, templates for letters to the editor and for letters to senators/representatives, talking points [e.g., “welcoming immigrants is part of the catholic social teaching and reflects the biblical tradition to welcome the stranger”], social media templates, ideas for community engagement, and for religious services (i.e., homily suggestions, migration-related prayer petitions). faith-based organizations and black lives matter: the civil rights movement in the s and organizing in african american communities historically have had churches and theology at their center. marsh ( ) provides a detailed history of this relationship between faith and social justice, including a discussion of the student nonviolent coordinating committee (sncc) as “applied religion” (marsh, , quoting organizer diane nash). much of the revolutionary theology forming the foundation of the movement was based on “celebrating the common grace of women and men, black and white, the privileged and the poor, who found themselves together, miraculously, in the south, working in common cause for a more just and human social order” (marsh, , p. ). the current organizing of the movement for black lives (m bl) (also known as black lives matter) has shifted from this history to focus on how current social and political contexts define (and oppress) black communities as other as a means to transform these contexts to “imagine new ways forward for our liberation” (“m bl, , about us”, p. ). the presence of religious leaders and language is less dominant in the m bl writing and speaking than in the civil rights movement, and some writers have identified tensions between traditional african american religious leaders and m bl leaders (blumberg & kuruvilla, ; jennings, ). whether related to generational or strategy differences, the historical religious frame is not a primary tool for the ongoing movement, though religious organizations including churches are well represented in the list of endorsing organizations (m bl, , “more endorsers”, p. ). one of these endorsing organizations, fellowship of reconciliation (for), uses the language of “beloved community” from martin luther king, jr. (king, , p. ) and includes “engaging the theology of nonviolent resistance” as part of its work (for, , “what we do”, p. ). in a range of activities and support for other organizations, for focuses on grassroots community building as a foundation for advocacy. through a framework of nonviolence, their work identifies and supports communities disproportionately impacted by government actions and public policy issues, such as solitary confinement in prisons, climate change, and international military actions (for, , “how we work”, p. ). most recently in response to the u.s. presidential election, for has explicitly identified protecting the rights of marginalized communities as a priority “in a spirit of empathy and learning” (for, , “a public call to protect all people”, p. ). programmatic activities include active involvement in coalitions such as the national religious campaign against torture (for, , “how we work”), providing civil disobedience trainings (for, , “what we do”), providing organizational/movement developmental training and support (for, , “what we do”), and acting as a fiscal sponsor for developing groups (for, , “what we do”). within the movement for black lives, for supported the development of a curriculum by the deep abiding love project in (jean, ). this curriculum, “coming to ferguson: building a nonviolent movement,” pushes activists to reflect on their role as outsider when working in marginalized communities. while the language of compassion is not explicit, the emphasis is on deep listening, humility, and facilitating leadership from marginalized communities (jean, ). from this specific curriculum to for’s general framework of the beloved community as part of the m bl, compassion with religious roots is a component of the work being done for black lives matter. compassion, however, is not explicit in the policy agenda and many activists have resisted talk of compassion, empathy, or love as softening the needed confrontational change (see, for example, smith [ ]). interfaith entities and support for muslims: the organization, muslim advocates, focuses on concerns largely experienced by muslim americans but is an interfaith-supported organization. the three areas of programming—addressing racial profiling, strengthening charitable giving and organizations, and countering hate—are addressed specifically for muslim americans and also extend to any individual experiencing injustice (muslim advocates, , “mission”). religious affiliation is a key part of the need for advocacy, but, as with the other examples discussed, it is a motivation as well. organizational activities are centered on the rights of a specific other, based on religion and sometimes race, and how these civil rights discussions reflect the rights of all americans. one strategy of muslim advocates is to facilitate the development and growth of muslim non-profits in a political context when donations to muslim organizations are often suspect just by prejudiced association. this emphasis on charitable giving is framed as both an american and a muslim value on helping the other: “charitable giving is an american value, and a religious tradition for many people of faith including muslims. american muslim nonprofits and mosques help feed the hungry, aid the sick, and in many important ways better our communities” (muslim advocates, , “charities”). the organization is very active in federal legal challenges and policy advocacy for civil rights. in the past few years, and particularly in the last few months, numerous interfaith gatherings have occurred particularly aimed at supporting muslims who may feel targeted and scapegoated based on their religion. in boston, a crowd of about , gathered at the islamic society of boston cultural center to “pray, share personal stories, and pledge to stand together against a wave of incivility, hate speech, and violence” following the presidential election. members of various faiths gathered as well as political leaders including the mayor of boston and u.s. senator elizabeth warren (fox, ). a group promoting peace and support for muslims in america gathered during an interfaith rally at first united methodist church on nov. th in an chicago-area neighborhood (chicago tribune, / / ). the religions for peace usa our muslim neighbor (omn) initiative engages in activities designed to advance understanding of islam and muslims in middle tennessee, a region identified by the council on american-islamic relations and the center for american progress as arguably one of the most islamophobic areas in america (religions for peace, ). numerous other examples of inter- faith gathering to promote solidarity and justice have occurred in many cities across the u.s. and in other countries. current debates related to national security and immigration restrictions have led to larger and more pronounced inter-faith efforts in support of muslim-americans and refugees from muslim majority nations. conclusion in this conclusion we consider how compassion might be elevated in our collective societal actions. compassion is fundamental to religious thought, yet, religions are also quite realistic that practice of compassion at the individual level is a challenge. religions have developed multiple mechanisms aimed to inculcate compassionate action. religion, therefore, may have a more pronounced role in advancing the compassionate society by enhancing the range of actions as a political force. the various methods of cultivating compassion have largely relied on individual and congregational level actions. broadening the repertoire of cultivation mechanisms to include efforts within the larger society may be part of the role of religion. to a lesser extent public policy has incorporated and reflected specific compassionate action in some cases. although often not labelled as arguments about virtue in public debate, we agree with lejano ( , p. ) that “virtue is actually a strong component in policy discourse, though it may be masked as other things”. in the case of the virtue of compassion, specifically, there must be a recognition of suffering and a commitment to do something about it. social work is often central to this effort to articulate the needs of communities and populations to claim resources. policy history has numerous examples of widespread suffering that remains unacknowledged. injustices related to race, ethnicity, social class, and other characteristics remain rampant across the globe but are often neglected by the policy spotlight. this is a failure to act with compassion—to recognize the suffering and act to address it. again, with an emphasis on social justice and human rights, social work is often in the forefront to rectify these injustices. one purpose of understanding public policy through a lens of compassion is to remind us that public policy can serve to alleviate suffering and correct injustice. indeed, “budgets are moral documents”, as articulated by circle of protection ( ), a group of christian leaders committed “to resist budget cuts that undermine the lives, dignity, and rights of poor and vulnerable people (p. )”. engaging in policy practice is a central component of the social work profession. greater familiarity with entities such as the circle of protection may aid social work in its policy advocacy efforts. we have been clear in this paper that compassion does not occur solely on an individual level and it is not simply kindly action toward another. compassion is related to restorative justice, repairing a community, and recognizing and affirming suffering. these become particularly prominent when the focus of compassion is the “other”. in this way, we also support others scholars (e.g., zembylas, ) who have identified the inter-relationship between compassion and justice. the recent, very large, vocal public demonstrations in support of muslims provide a concrete example of how compassion and justice are interrelated. these demonstrations are, typically, visible signs of solidarity that also promote action steps related to furthering justice. understanding the compassionate actions of religious groups helps social workers practicing at community and policy levels see opportunities for “strengthening the social fabric” and “helping create a more just society” – two grand challenges of the social work profession (american academy of social work & social welfare, , p. ). religious organizations intersect in policy spheres in multiple ways. we offered three contemporary examples in which religious groups are highly engaged in compassionate action. notably, in our democracy, religious organizations can engage in debate and discourse about appropriate policy actions and can formally engage in policy processes like any other interest group. at more local levels, religious groups can engage in social action based in principles of solidarity with the other. because of a robust commitment to compassion, religious organizations may provide the vehicle for instilling and institutionalizing more compassionate response in public policy. connecting religious traditions’ compassion and public policy serves to highlight one way we as a society translate personal action and responsibility to the common good into social structures. furthermore, public-private partnerships are a common mechanism by which faith-based organizations and professional social work intersect with government (at local, state, national, and international levels) to advocate for and implement compassionate responses. anti- trafficking initiatives, for example, may involve the usccb and the state department as well as catholic charities, and internationally, catholic relief services and its partners in other countries. this rich intermix of players is typically needed to address large complex problems causing major suffering. importantly, the solution is not the devolution of responsibility to faith- based organizations. faith communities and faith-based organizations typically do not have sufficient resources to address the range and depth of human suffering. complex partnership models that act on the local and global stage can, however, provide the infrastructure, and shared purpose needed for sustainability. compassion is relevant to social work practice at all levels of micro, community, and social policy. in common parlance compassion may be most frequently associated with individual level action, and, in the profession literature, compassion fatigue resulting from prolonged empathic response to human suffering. our focus has been on the larger macro levels of community and policy practice, where, aside from political rhetoric, an explicit focus on compassion has been less visible. emphasizing virtue, and with particular attention to the religious foundations of compassion and the role of religion as an actor in policy, we provided some examples of compassionate action in the public sphere. these should be maintained, enhanced, and amplified. virtue requires habits of character. hence, efforts to promote compassion at the multiple levels we discussed require ongoing and deep commitment. while acknowledging that differing organizational, community, and policy environments may be either more or less conducive to compassionate action, virtue requires perseverance in pursuing compassionate response. we also recognize that in a complex society no virtue should dominate all policy actions. but certain times may call for certain virtues to rise to the fore. in the current climate compassion seems to be scarce, and thus, more forceful articulation of its place in public policy is particularly warranted. religious entities and the profession of social work both play critical roles and in many ways are aligned in pursuit of a compassionate and just society. adams, p. 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( ). the “crisis of pity” and the radicalization of solidarity: toward critical pedagogies of compassion. educational studies, ( ), - . http://www.usccb.org/about/migration-and-refugee-services/index.cfm http://www.usccb.org/about/migration-and-refugee-services/index.cfm the adta’s first half-century: ma(r)king history with an eye to the horizon editorial the adta’s first half-century: ma(r)king history with an eye to the horizon david alan harris published online: october � american dance therapy association abstract the author, as co-editor of the american journal of dance therapy, introduces six essays by a small group of experts, invited to share reflections on the social, political, economic, scientific, and cultural context for the development of the profession of dance/movement therapy (dmt) over the first half century of the american dance therapy association (adta). through allusions to pivotal events in the united states circa , this introductory editorial characterizes the u.s. zeitgeist around the year of the adta’s founding. specific references are made to the signing of the voting rights act, the establishment of medicaid and medicare, the founding of the national organization for women, as well as the violent tar- geting of civil rights marchers in selma, alabama, and the spontaneous launching of the modern lgbt rights movement with the stonewall rebellion in new york’s greenwich village. commentary on the six essays to follow the editorial includes discussion of dmt as a female-dominated profession, which has apparently suf- fered the economic consequences of gender bias. strategies for countering deval- uation of the profession and building respect for it—including improving dance/movement therapists’ cultural competence, upgrading both quantitative and qualitative research, and fostering alliances between the adta and sister institu- tions—are likewise advanced. keywords american dance therapy association � cultural competency � dance/movement therapy � feminism � history � interpersonal neurobiology � qualitative research & david alan harris ajdt.david@gmail.com chicago, il, usa am j dance ther ( ) : – doi . /s - - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &amp;domain=pdf http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &amp;domain=pdf as a way of making history, the american journal of dance therapy marks the first years of the american dance therapy association (adta) in part with this curated collection of six historical essays. the journal’s co-editors invited a small group of experts to share abbreviated reflections on a half dozen specified topics chosen to address the social, political, economic, scientific, and cultural context for the development of the profession of dance/movement therapy (dmt) over the adta’s first half century. the published essays themselves deserve to be read as historical documents, and with both history and the future in mind. what do the authors tell the adta’s membership about dmt’s past that may help us, collectively, as we imagine our future and move forward to address its challenges? certainly, dance/movement therapists working in bring a diverse set of expectations and assumptions about the world and its peoples that is quite different from the possibly more homogeneous perspective of the women who first set the adta in motion. what are some of the salient features of the sociohistorical context in which the dmt professional association gestated, was given birth to, and pulled itself up to its proverbial feet to take its first baby steps? in order to usefully assess where the dmt profession has come from and where it ought to be headed, it may be instructive to look at the zeitgeist at the adta’s birthing and to compare it with our own at the publication of this issue. landmarks of u.s. history circa are readily identified, even five decades later. just as today, social movements at that time were actively fomenting change, seeking to redefine the geopolitical position of the u.s. in the world, and to redistribute the nation’s power to address persistent and widespread inequities. the federal government’s role in protecting the health and welfare of all its people was a subject of contention, and then as today the financing of mental health care generally lagged behind that for other medical concerns. by the time the adta was formed, the civil rights movement had already begun to produce some of its most lasting legislative gains. when president lyndon baines johnson signed the voting rights act of , few dreamed that five decades later—given sweeping demographic changes and an electorate in which african-american women would have come to vote at a proportionately higher rate than any other cohort nationally (lopez & taylor, )—the son of a kenyan father and an kansan mother would be in the final year of his two-term presidency. neither would it likely have been foreseen, however, that voting rights would remain severely contested. following a u.s. supreme court decision (shelby county v. holder, june , ) that largely gutted the act, civil rights groups today are once again having to challenge restrictive laws newly implemented in states north and south, denouncing them as implicitly designed to suppress the vote among african-americans and other diverse constituencies (hebert & lang, ). while far from having permanently ushered in a golden era of racial equality in u.s. institutions, it would appear nevertheless that the courageous lunch-counter sit- ins, marches, and bus boycotts of the s and s have fostered the mainstreaming of ‘‘diversity awareness’’ (ingram, ) as central within the national ethos. what impact has this history had on the dmt profession’s evolution? although the adta may not have been at the vanguard of this am j dance ther ( ) : – campaign, in a multicultural and diversity committee was added to its board of directors. as dmt expands its scope in various countries across the globe, questions of fair representation and diverse leadership may continue organization- ally for years to come—and especially since in the u.s. within a couple of decades persons of european descent are expected no longer to constitute a majority of the population as a whole (colby & ortman, ). what guidance may be drawn from the past as the adta shapes an equitable future in the midst of such changes? certainly, there is evidence among dmt’s early advocates and practitioners of involvement in social justice movements (adta monograph, ). as devoted champions of putting bodies on the line, dance/movement therapists at the adta’s founding might at the very least have engaged with a political form of kinesthetic empathy from a distance—a civil disobedience of the spirit—in response, for example, to the violent, state- sponsored assault on the black bodies seeking to cross the alabama river via selma’s edmund pettus bridge, in . similar engagement, whether virtual or more physically embodied, may be possible for dance/movement therapists in the age of social media. today’s black lives matter movement—a diverse activist collective responding to the hundreds of recent police killings of young men of color in the u.s. by galvanizing popular pressure for changes to the nation’s racialized criminal justice system (ghandnoosh, )—affords a compelling option. for dance/movement therapists in the u.s. today, particularly those in institutions that serve culturally diverse clienteles, such issues and commitments are far from peripheral. richly informed by such sociohistorical engagement, the first of the essays in the pages that follow deconstructs developments in the dmt field germane to a half- century of changing meanings related to a range of social classifications, including those based on race, ethnicity, language, national origin, gender, class, age, disability, sexual orientation, and gender identity. dr. meg chang’s commentary, dance/movement therapists of color in the adta: the first years, reminds dmt practitioners that understandings of what constitutes cultural competence for therapists—or, as others have properly reframed it, cultural humility (tervalon & murray-garcı́a, )—are very different in than they were a half-century earlier. she alludes to changes in best practice informed by trends in migration and a growing u.s. multiculturalism. the generations that initiated and established dmt deemed ‘‘colorblindness’’ a virtue, she suggests, and a basis for ethical and educational standards. encouraging dmt professionals, particularly those super- visors trained in the last century, to unpack the colorblindness myth, chang recommends replacing it, including through practitioners’ ongoing self-examination and exploration of the ground of cultural competency at both the individual and collective levels. like chang’s essay, dr. christine caldwell and lucy leighton’s dance/ movement therapy, women’s rights, and feminism: the first years is steeped in the contemporary critique of privileges founded in race and gender. the national organization for women (now)—like the adta—was organized in , with betty friedan as first president, and now held its inaugural national conference that same year in the nation’s capital. identifying dmt as a ‘‘female-dominated am j dance ther ( ) : – field,’’ caldwell and leighton deliberately chart the discipline’s historical development, and that of the adta, in relation to that of the second-wave feminist movement in the u.s. while acknowledging dmt’s progress in countering psychotherapy’s broader ‘‘patriarchal bias,’’ the authors question the degree to which dance/movement therapists have successfully advanced women’s rights, or taken feminism into account—citing as evidence this journal’s dearth of published articles on these subjects. caldwell and leighton also elucidate shortcomings in second-wave feminism itself, pointing to the tendency of such figures as friedan in the s to exclude from now’s purview issues related to women of color, lesbian, bisexual and transgender women, and women of lower socioeconomic status. as may perhaps be inferred from the caldwell and leighton essay, nowhere is the difference between the sociocultural spirit of the times at the adta’s founding and that years later more pronounced than in prevailing attitudes toward sexual minorities. not until three years after the professional association’s start did the so- called stonewall rebellion take place in new york’s greenwich village—in the event that is widely agreed to have launched the modern-day movement for the civil and human rights of lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender people (duberman, ). that several-day rebellion in june , activated by a group of trans women of color who fought back against police harassment and violence during what was then a routine raid at a gay bar, is widely celebrated as having spurred a national ‘‘gay liberation’’ struggle to decriminalize consensual sexual expression and identity (duberman, ). with countless incremental steps in the interim, stonewall thus led in time to the u.s. supreme court decision, in june , (obergefell v. hodges ) which legalized same-sex marriage nationwide. fewer than months after that ruling, u.s. attorney general loretta lynch, the first african-american woman in that role, would passionately defend the rights of transgender people as firmly grounded in ‘‘the founding ideals that have led this country—haltingly but inexorably—in the direction of fairness, inclusion and equality for all americans’’ (phillips, , para .). tellingly, a few weeks after the attorney general spoke so forthrightly on the matter of transgender equality, the adta (n. d.) itself issued a public statement opposing anti-lgbtq legislation at the state level. lynch’s declaration signaled an advance in human dignity and freedom essentially unimaginable five decades before, and the adta in following suit has demonstrated its membership’s corresponding concern for expanding social justice. beyond the aforementioned milestones in the developing struggle for equality regardless of race, gender, sexual orientation, or gender identity, a number of other pivotal events of the mid- s have contributed meaningfully to shaping the sociopolitical and economic landscape for the dmt profession in the u.s. a half century later. during the relatively brief tenure of president johnson’s great society, for example, legislating expanded access to healthcare through the creation of both medicaid and medicare was accomplished (glass, ), and with decidedly less rancor than has been the case with so-called obamacare, the affordable care act of . accordingly, christine hopkins, in dance/movement therapy careers amid changing systems: the first years, an essay that explores the economics of am j dance ther ( ) : – dmt, cites these groundbreaking developments in the ways that people in the u.s. access health care—balanced at either end of the half-century—as well as a number of other pivotal changes in between. examining these matters from within the framework of postindustrial capitalism, the author discusses how changing models for health care delivery in the u.s. have affected dance/movement therapists. many of those in the profession’s early generations, she notes, practiced initially in state- run psychiatric facilities, the widespread closure of which ultimately eliminated numerous dmt jobs. in the s, the rise of so-called managed care, which reapportioned access by removing relevant decision-making from medical profes- sionals and giving that power to corporate operatives, further challenged providers, including those in dmt. hopkins’ sources indicate that even implementation of the affordable care act under president barack obama—despite expanding health insurance coverage to a reported . million new subscribers nationally in its first months (u.s. department of health and human services, )—failed to secure parity in insurance coverage for behavioral health vis-à-vis medical treatment, notwithstand- ing directives designed to address this disparity. she reports instead that a lack of scrutiny has meant minimal compliance with government rules that require equal access to mental health care. touching on a wide range of challenges faced by dance/movement therapists over the last years, hopkins zeroes in on a fundamental lack of respect and recognition for dmt in particular within what she identifies as the already stigmatized field of the mental health professions. pointing to the prominence of women in dmt, she protests that women remain underpaid relative to men: women were compensated less for their work than their male counterparts when the adta’s female founders were establishing the discipline of dmt, and the latest data underline the stubborn continuation of a gender-based pay gap (tankersley, ). dance/movement therapy’s innovators had created the profession in the period after world war ii, during which an estimated five million women had entered the u.s. workforce only to be largely displaced by surviving troops coming home (u.s. department of labor women’s bureau, ). in the postwar years when dmt began to take shape, women’s inclusion in the workplace and their earning capacity were still seriously contested matters. the de facto devaluing of dmt, and the financial risks faced by those who study and practice it, may be seen as an outgrowth, in part, of this structural bias against women and their work. in this context, dance/movement therapists, whether solitary entrepreneurs or working as a collective, often with adta support, have developed, as hopkins states, ‘‘adaptive strategies’’ for ensuring both professionalism and the profession’s sustainability. among the innovations designed to strengthen dmt have been alliances with various sister institutions. an affiliation (albeit short-lived) with the national board of certified counselors, for instance, precipitated state mental health licensure for many dance/movement therapists by naming dmt a specialty of counseling. other strategies have included working in coalition with other creative arts therapists and the ‘‘arts in healthcare movement,’’ as well as upgrading research on dmt’s efficacy as a way of establishing the discipline, at least in certain am j dance ther ( ) : – of its various manifestations, as firmly evidence-based practice worthy of investment by the nation’s healthcare consumers. dr. sherry goodill, in her essay, dance/movement therapy and the arts in healthcare: the first years, chronicles in some detail how representatives of the two parallel yet somewhat dissimilar disciplines have sought to collaborate for mutual benefit despite rivalries over scarce resource allocations. goodill notes that the arts in healthcare movement emerged just a few years after the adta’s founding. decades later, when in her leadership role as vice president and then president of the adta, she sought to foster the building of relationships between the organization and related groups, and through such alliances to participate jointly in legislative advocacy at the federal level. working in coalition, she indicates, necessitated paying attention to defusing mistrust between creative arts therapy representatives and those from various arts in healthcare organizations. such challenges were no doubt intensified by funding limitations as well as differences associated with the respect and recognition conferred by opportunities afforded through access to such financial resources. goodill notes that collaborative efforts nonetheless allowed for dmt’s increasing integration with other services for active military personnel and veterans—large populations of federal employees seen as seriously underserved in terms of mental health programming (see, for example, s. , ). goodill underscores the importance for the adta, particularly when joining in coalition efforts with arts-in-healthcare practitioners, of clarifying boundaries in terms of scope of practice, education, and other professional parameters. given that practitioners in both fields may pursue employment in medical settings, where patient care may be enhanced through participatory arts programming, the alliance between dance/movement therapists and persons sharing the arts within healthcare settings may prove beneficial not only in terms of strengthening these professionals’ careers, but by enabling improved outcomes for participants. the remaining two essays in this collection, rather than focusing on dmt’s position relative to social institutions or its evolution as part of u.s. social history since the founding of the adta, discuss dmt in the context of developments in the history of scientific discoveries, methodology, and discourse during this same period. dr. robyn flaum cruz charts dmt’s roots in scientific experimentation, and dmt practitioner-researchers’ increasing capacity to demonstrate the disci- pline’s effectiveness during an era when demands for evidence of this kind have become omnipresent within the u.s. healthcare system. by contrast, dr. cynthia berrol focuses on the meaning and impact of one particular scientific discovery— that of ‘‘mirror neurons’’—a finding with the potential for upgrading dmt’s appraisal by those outside the profession, as well as for informing appreciation of the discipline’s neurological underpinnings among dance/movement therapists themselves. in dance/movement therapy and developments in empirical research: the first years, cruz identifies a dearth of efficacy studies for psychotherapy generally until well after marian chace’s prolonged experimentation with what has come to be called dmt. decades later, when research into psychotherapy interventions’ clinical outcomes and cost-effectiveness had become the norm, am j dance ther ( ) : – ‘‘evidence-based medicine’’ grew to be a ubiquitous demand. as calls for accountability came in turn to dominate the practice of dmt and other health professions, dance/movement therapists commonly experienced the institutional expectation for evidence of dmt’s effectiveness in economic terms: continuing services—and careers—depended on it. cruz observes that not until after the s, however, did basic scientific research into the human brain and its functions emerge—that is, after this journal’s march debut, a development that her essay points to as emblematic of larger advances within dmt research. illuminating historical correlations as much as causality, dr. cruz pays special attention to ways that dmt and the research investigating it have begun to enrich scientific and medical research more broadly. she highlights shifts through time in what has come to constitute acceptable research methodology, for example. alluding to dmt researchers’ expertise in utilizing qualitative tools, she notes that in recent years the national institutes of health have begun to require all funded projects to incorporate qualitative as well as quantitative components in their studies’ methodologies. in addition, acknowledging dmt’s increasingly global profile, cruz cites her own collaboration with the dr. sabine koch ( ) in affirming how dmt researchers internationally are contributing importantly to a clinical literature that addresses ‘‘the effectiveness of body-mind interventions’’ (p. ), a field of rapidly expanding interest. in remarking on the growth of research into the mind–body connection, the cruz essay serves as a useful introduction to the one that follows—by her colleague, dr. cynthia berrol—which more directly addresses dmt and what siegel ( ) has aptly termed, interpersonal neurobiology. in her essay, cruz cites today’s emergent neurophysiology and neuropsychology research, and suggests that collectively it serves to strengthen dmt’s claim as an evidence-based practice—in the treatment of posttraumatic distress, for instance. a number of luminaries in these fields, in addition to siegel, including perry ( ), schore ( ), porges ( ), van der kolk ( ), and ramachandran and seckel ( ), have generated research questions, methodologies, and/or findings that may likewise prove of great interest to dmt professionals, as well as to others looking to comprehend dmt’s unusual strengths. rather than examining these contributions to the latest relevant research, berrol in her essay, reflections on dance/movement therapy and interpersonal neuro- biology: the first years, recounts the history of her personal introduction to the mirror neurons discovery. after years of studying and publishing about dmt in relation to brain science, she initially encountered the breakthrough at a lecture by vittorio gallese, the eminent italian neuroscientist whose research team had first detected and identified these neurons in the pre-motor cortex of macaque monkeys’ brains. as berrol writes, the finding that the same set of neurons fired when the subject observed another engaged in a movement as when the subject itself performed the movement ‘‘illuminated the importance of the motor system in the process of interpersonal development.’’ as such, the neuronal-activity discovery has resonated deeply with dance/movement therapists, given a clinical practice, including widely used variants of mirroring techniques, which has been demon- strating a similar interpersonal relatedness through movement since well before the am j dance ther ( ) : – adta was ever imagined. as berrol infers, the work of gallese and his colleagues, like that of others advancing interpersonal neurobiology, has been deepening dance/movement therapists’ theoretical understandings of the neuronal substruc- tures to attunement, attachment, intersubjectivity, and empathy itself. accordingly, this new research amounts to a validation of assumptions that dmt practitioners have been making about their practice since the discipline’s first generation. when read together, the essays by drs. cruz and berrol, both reporting on salient examples from the great surge in scientific research into the brain over recent decades, are telling manifestations of dmt’s incremental progression toward achieving the elusive aims that all of the authors in this collection seem to address, whether overtly or by inference—a heightened level of recognition and respect. by successfully embodying through their research and writing this ambition to keep moving dmt forward, the authors of all six essays in this collection help illuminate the road ahead for the adta’s next half century of service. conflict of interest the author declares that there is no conflict of interest. references american dance therapy association (n. d.). adta states opposition to state bills targeting lgbtq citizens. retrieved from adta website: https://adta.org/equality/ american dance therapy association. 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( ). the body keeps the score: brain, mind, and body in the healing of trauma. new york: viking. david alan harris bc-dmt joins christina devereaux in co-editing the american journal of dance therapy. he studied at mcp hahnemann university with sherry goodill and gayle gates, and worked for a time under the supervision of arlynne stark. he has taught the course, social and cultural diversity, for antioch university new england, and has lectured and taught on five continents about the application of dance/movement therapy in fostering recovery from torture and other severe forms of interpersonal violence. am j dance ther ( ) : – http://dx.doi.org/ . /j.mehy. . . https://www.washingtonpost.com https://aspe.hhs.gov/sites/default/files/pdf/ /ib_uninsured_change.pdf http://njdigitalhighway.org/enj/lessons/ww_ii_industrial_production/pdf/women_workers_in_ten_war_production_areas.pdf http://njdigitalhighway.org/enj/lessons/ww_ii_industrial_production/pdf/women_workers_in_ten_war_production_areas.pdf 	the adta’s first half-century: ma(r)king history with an eye to the horizon 	abstract 	references untitled covid- and ethnic minorities are we responsible for the racial inequalities of covid- ? varathagini balakumar, arangan kirubakaran, shabnam tariq the covid- pandemic has revealed the depth of social and racial inequalities in the united kingdom. these inequalities existed long before the pandemic, but they have taken on a greater significance in the past few months. perhaps this is a direct result of the death of george floyd and the ongoing black lives matter protests, which have brought inequalities and institutional bias to the forefront of public consciousness. the nhs, for all its merits, should not be exempt from scrutiny. the circumstances around publication of the public health england report are a perfect illustration of the problem at hand. the apparent delay in publication and potential suppression described by khunti and colleagues is striking: if we were not in the middle of worldwide anti-racism protests, would this report have gone quietly unnoticed? although the reasons for the adverse effects of covid- seen in the black, asian, and minority ethnic (bame) population are subject to debate, ranging from differences in genetics to socioeconomic factors, there is, to some extent, an insidiously dangerous mindset among policy makers and major stakeholders. the predominance of sickle cell disease in the afro-caribbean population and the prevalence of diabetes in the south asian community are well known, for example, but these issues are rarely described as key national policies for the betterment of public health. our categorisation and characterisation of these issues is also problematic as they are often framed as intriguing statistical variations among ethnic groups rather than key priorities for public health policy. combatting these inequalities is a difficult and multifactorial process that will not be easy to reverse. nevertheless, as a society, and particularly as healthcare professionals, we must take collective responsibility for resolving these problems. covid- has brought us to a sombre reflection: through our inability and reluctance to solve these inequalities, have our actions (or lack thereof) as healthcare professionals and as a society contributed the steep death toll of covid- in the bame community? competing interests: none declared. khunti k, platt l, routen a, abbasi k. covid- and ethnic minorities: an urgent agenda for overdue action. bmj ; :m . doi: . /bmj.m pmid: abuelgasim e, saw lj, shirke m, zeinah m, harky a. covid- : unique public health issues facing black, asian, and minority ethnic communities. curr probl cardiol ; :. doi: . /j.cpcardiol. . pmid: this article is made freely available for use in accordance with bmj's website termsandconditions for thedurationof thecovid- pandemicoruntilotherwise determined by bmj. you may use, download and print the article for any lawful, non-commercial purpose (including text and data mining) provided that all copyright notices and trade marks are retained. the bmj | bmj ; :m | doi: . /bmj.m letters schoolofmedicine,cardiffuniversity, cardiff cf ys, uk darent valley hospital, dartford, uk balakumarv@cardiff.ac.uk cite this as: bmj ; :m http://dx.doi.org/ . /bmj.m published: july o n a p ril b y g u e st. p ro te cte d b y co p yrig h t. h ttp ://w w w .b m j.co m / b m j: first p u b lish e d a s . /b m j.m o n ju ly . d o w n lo a d e d fro m https://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /bmj.m &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - mailto:balakumarv@cardiff.ac.uk http://dx.doi.org/ . /bmj.m http://www.bmj.com/ book reviews by a ‘wider range of animals than any other hero’; there is the lion when he meets nausicaa, the octopus when he is clinging to a rock before he makes landfall at scherie and a bat when he is clinging to the fig tree in book ; of these the lion is a relatively common comparator, but the latter two are most inventive and typical of the homeric poet. under- standably the journey to the underworld (nekyia) is a chosen theme to explore and explain odysseus’ character and motivation to return home to ithaca and to cheat death in the process. overall, this is an excellent resource and accessible to students, though the sections on the epics themselves would be best read after the text has been studied. doi: . /s not all dead white men. classics and misogyny in the digital age. zuckerberg (d.). pp. . cambridge, ma: harvard university press, . cased, £ . , us$ . , € (paper, £ . , us$ . , € . ). isbn:  - - - - . jo lashly shrewsbury high school. i found this quite a difficult book to read; not because of its complexity, though in a way it was, but because of the sometimes difficult subject matter. it is an interesting book and very apt for its time, coming, as it does, in the age of trump, the handmaid’s tale and black lives matter, but there are so many acronyms to cope with and an overwhelming feeling of the desperate inadequacy felt by the major players in the ‘manosphere’. while i was reading it, the republican national conference was being reported from the states, ‘mrs america’ was being advertised on uk television and there were reports of women calling for one-vote households where the man of the house had the final say, ‘if it were a godly household’. the premise of the book is that the alt-right, the trp (the red pill, named for the choice between red and blue pills in the matrix) and sundry other groups that seem to be united by a resentment against women, people of colour and the liberal élite, have hijacked (and misrepresented in part) classical literature to give a gravitas to their ideas. the author, donna zuckerberg, younger sister of facebook founder, mark zuckerberg, is a classicist and well-read in the literature that she discusses. she is also not blind to the societal norms of the ancient world that kept women more closeted than is the case for western societies these days; but it is a usa-centric approach (that is not to say that there are not elements of it in other western societies but it seems to be less desperate). the alacrity with which these groups focus on classical texts, particularly stoic philosophy and greek tragedies such as hippolytus, is understandable in some respects; but it is also typical of a society which was heavily based on classical constructs – see their political architecture, the naming of the senate and the latifundia plantations of years ago that were tended by slaves (though other western societies were not blameless in this respect). zuckerberg explains how stoicism in particular reinforces the belief that men are guided by rationality and women by emotion which means that women should be ruled by men. she also explains how a reading that stops at this point is missing the point that women too could aspire to true virtue though with the gendered language of the ancient world (virilis, ἀνδρεῖα). whilst the chapter on stoicism was interesting, it would be the chapter on ovid that, i think, would draw in more people. this chapter focuses on the use by the ‘manosphere’ of ovid’s ars amatoria as a handbook not only on seduction but on how to treat women generally. whilst there are parts of this work which are not very savoury (and indeed there are elements of the amores (the behaviour of the narrator in iii. perhaps?) too with which we might take issue), zuckerberg does acknowledge that this is a work of literary fiction and probably not to be taken literally; and the resentment of the members of the ‘manosphere’ is apparent particularly in the section on danish women who, it seems are immune to ovidian seduction techniques as they have ‘no idea what it feels like to not have medical care or free access to university education. they have no fear of becoming homeless or permanently jobless. the government’s soothing hand will catch everyone as they fall’. so, it seems that women are only prey when they are likely to be vulnerable, which rather reinforces the idea that many of those in these groups are inadequate. sadly, the use and abuse of classics is not restricted to the alt-right and the the red pill group: there are numerous examples amongst some uk politicians of latin (and greek) tags and references being dropped into speeches or interviews, perhaps to advertise an élite education and to sound clever. this does classics no good and is unfair on those who work so hard to bring it to a wide range of people, especially those who are encouraged to exert their critical faculties on it, as should be done with all subjects. no civilisation can be perfect, but the faults and beauties should be seen for what they are and not highjacked for political or societally sinister motives. this is an interesting book, but one which i cannot see being widely read in schools. in times of financial probity, it might be a luxury. i am glad i read it, though there are some views that i would hope never to encounter. still, forewarned is forearmed, and a knowledge of how some of these groups work is a useful tool. doi: . /s x aristotle: poetics zerba (m.), gorman (d.) (edd., revised trans.). pp. xxxviii + . new york & london: w. w norton and company, . paper, £ . . isbn: - - - - . maria bergquist merchant taylors’ school, northwood aristotle’s poetics is perhaps the most influential work of literary theory. as such, it enjoys a wider audience than some of aristotle’s other works. this edition, with its introduction, glossary, notes on https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core the journal of classics teaching the text, and range of contextual and interpretive material, serves as an excellent introduction for students from any discipline. assuming little knowledge of the text or of aristotle, the intro- duction gives a brief biography of the philosopher and sets out the state of greek literature in his time before moving on to focus on the poetics. the work is first situated in aristotle’s philosophi- cal system by means of a brief discussion which distinguishes poetics as ‘productive’ knowl- edge and identifies the different aristotelian causes of tragedy. this understanding of the poetics as one case of aristotle’s way of thinking about the world is one of the strengths of the introduction, particularly for students of litera- ture who approach the poetics without wider knowledge of ancient philosophy. z. and g. here and elsewhere also stress the way in which aristotle understands art as something organic and proceeds with methods similar to those employed in his study of biology. further sections of the introduction address some of the most important terms and arguments of the poetics: mimesis, plot, char- acter, hamartia, reversal and recognition, katharsis, thought and language, tragedy and epic. these concepts are, on the whole, intro- duced in an admirably clear and succinct manner. there are times, however, when more could be done to introduce the range of criti- cal discussion on a topic. the section on katharsis, the meaning of which is famously debated, might have been clearer had it included a summary of the main theories like that set out in the glossary entry for the term. the introduction draws on various texts which are appended after the translation of the poetics, which is a revised version of james hutton’s clear and accurate translation. these additional texts, thoughtfully selected to illuminate the poetics, are divided into ‘ancient contexts’ and ‘interpretations’. the ‘ancient contexts’ comprise extracts from classical texts with which aristotle’s poetics engages either explicitly or implicitly. examples of reversal and recognition are drawn from the odyssey, oedipus tyrannos, and iphigeneia in tauris. extracts from plato’s ion, phaedrus, and republic sketch out the challenges plato sets to poetry, a pattern of concerns to which aristotle’s poetics offers an alternative. they also encourage the reader to consider other ideas relevant to aristotle’s understanding of art, such as the idea in the phaedrus of discourse as a living organism. extracts from aristotle’s physics, nicomachean ethics, politics, and rhetoric help the reader to see how the poetics fits into aristotle’s wider system and give further instances of problematic terms such as katharsis. the ‘interpretations’ offer modern critical discussions of the work. i say ‘modern’: the first two interpretations given are taken from the works of scaliger and sidney, demonstrating the influence of the poetics in early modern europe. the remaining six critical interpretations are from the th and st centuries and treat a range of topics from the content to the reception of the work, illus- trating something of the breadth of questions asked of the poetics in modern scholarship. the great strength of this edition is the way in which it enables any reader to gain an understanding of the poetics in its own con- text and the extraordinary influence which the work has exerted since the renaissance. the student will find that material is pre- sented accessibly. they will also find that they are forced to think for themselves: notes and subheadings offer guidance, but ulti- mately the format of the book encourages careful, independent attention to the text and the contextual material. the series of norton critical editions claims to ‘set the standard for apparatus that is right for undergraduate readers.’ the clarity and accessibil- ity of this edition means that it would also be an excellent and thorough introduction to the poetics for students in the sixth form. doi: . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms. https://doi.org/ . /s downloaded from https://www.cambridge.org/core. carnegie mellon university, on apr at : : , subject to the cambridge core terms of use, available at https://www.cambridge.org/core/terms https://doi.org/ . /s https://www.cambridge.org/core Постмодернизм vs целостность: социально-политический дискурс postmodernism vs wholeness: socio-political discourse doi: . / - - - - УДК . Получено: . . Одобрено: . . Опубликовано: . . Ишутин А.А. канд. филол. наук, доцент кафедры Фундаментальных юридических и социально- гуманитарных дисциплин Московского финансово-промышленного университета «Синергия» e-mail: a_ishutin@inbox.ru ishutin a.a. candidate of philological sciences, associate professor, department of fundamental legal and social-humanitarian sciences, moscow university for industry and finance «synergy» e-mail: a_ishutin@inbox.ru Аннотация Целью настоящей работы является рассмотрение мировоззренческих истоков и политических последствий постмодернизма в современном мире. В статье использовались такие методы научного исследования, как сравнительный метод, ретроспективный метод, герменевтический метод. Автор статьи утверждает, что в контексте краха проекта Модерн и идеи механистического человека идеологией западной цивилизации становится постмодернизм. Поначалу постмодернизм обозначил себя только в узком мире философских кружков, но уже тогда провозгласил себя мировоззрением радикального завершения эпохи целостности, «Больших проектов», «метанарративов» и всеобщности. Яркими представителями данной сверхидеологии стали философ Жиль Делёз и психоаналитик Феликс Гваттари, которые в качестве нового социального идеала провозгласили ризому, в которой, как в грибнице, отсутствуют корни, центры и опоры. Так и современный человек, согласно их мировоззрению, не должен укореняться нигде и ни в чём: ни в ценностном, ни в культурном, ни в пространственном плане. Человек в социуме становится неукоренённым кочевником, который не способен ни познавать мир, ни преобразовывать его. В результате происходит стремительное разделение мира на номадический рай кочевников-гедонистов и номадический ад для большей части населения земли. Согласно крупному европейскому элитарию Жаку Аттали, данная ситуация становится неотменяемой социально-политической реальностью. Ключевые слова: целостность, модерн, постмодерн, метанарратив, ризома, мировое дерево, кочевничество, номадизм, элита. abstract the purpose of the article is to examine the ideological origins and political consequences of postmodernism in the contemporary world. the article uses such methods of scientific research as the comparative method, the retrospective method, and the hermeneutical method. the author of the article claims that in the context of the collapse of the project «modern» and the idea of a mechanistic man, postmodernism becomes the ideology of western civilization. at first, postmodernism identified itself only in the narrow world of philosophical circles, but even then it declared itself as a worldview of radical completion of the era of wholeness, «big projects», http://study-english.info/translation-candidates.php mailto:a_ishutin@inbox.ru «metanarratives» and universality. prominent representatives of this ideology were the philosopher gilles deleuze and the psychoanalyst felix guattari, who proclaimed «rhizome» as a new social ideal, in which, as in a mushroom, there are no roots, centers and supports. in the same way, a contemporary man, according to their worldview, should not take root anywhere or in anything: neither in value, nor in culture, nor in spatial terms. a person in society becomes an unrooted nomad who is not able to cognize the world or transform it. as a result, the world is rapidly divided into a nomadic paradise of nomadic hedonists and a nomadic hell for most of the world's population. according to a european representative of the elite, jacques attali, this situation is becoming an irrevocable socio-political reality. keywords: wholeness, modern, postmodern, metanarrative, rhizome, world tree, nomadism, elite. Введение С начала Перестройки элита нашей страны весьма сильно ориентирована на Запад в ценностно-смысловом плане. Радикальному реформированию в новейший период отечественной истории была подвержена не только сфера экономических и социально- политических институтов, также была сделана масштабная попытка изменения общественного сознания, духовной жизни, традиционных ценностных ориентиров [ ; ]. И данная тенденция актуальна до сих пор. Но буквально с каждым днём становится все более понятным, что современная российская элита сильно неоднородна: противостояние условно «консервативной» части и так называемых «системных либералов» всё более прорывается на поверхность политической и медийной жизни страны. «Консервативная» башня не готова идти на то, чтобы соглашаться со всеми агрессивными выпадами Запада против России во внешней политике, но даже для представителей этой башни по-прежнему пиетет перед западными экономическими моделями, глобальными структурами, куда обязательно нужно почему-то входить, и культурными веяниями, слишком силён. Нам необходимо понять следующее: а какой именно мировоззренческий мейнстрим движет современным Западом, а также – то же это мировоззрение и тот же это Запад, в который во времена Перестройки (а скорее всего, ещё задолго до неё) возмечтала войти советская номенклатура? Перестройка ознаменовала масштабную трансформацию политической и правовой систем, выразившуюся, в частности, в коренных изменениях в структуре высших органов власти, формированию правовой основы многопартийности [ , с . – ]. Демократия, гласность, права человека, сменяемость власти, участие народа в выборном процессе, устремлённая вдаль стрела прогресса − весь этот набор классического либерально-буржуазного модерна по-прежнему актуален? Или всё вышеперечисленное, несмотря на сохранение самой терминологии в дипломатическом языке, является реликтом уходящего, «модернистского» Запада, а на его место пришло нечто иное, сильно мутировавшее, то, что следует после Модерна и во многом его отрицает? Попытаемся разобраться в данных вопросах. Тема постмодернизма как важнейшая в социально-политической плоскости современности разобрана в той или иной степени в работах Д.А. Силичева «Постмодернизм: экономика, политика, культура» [ ], Франка Фехнера «Политика и постмодернизм» [ ] и И.В. Цуриной «Социально-политический контекст философии постмодернизма» [ ]. Отдельно хотелось бы отметить статью Ю.В. Ирхина «Социум и политика в постмодернистском зазеркалье: взгляды, подходы, анализ» [ ] и фундаментальный труд Ю.В. Бялого «Концептуальная война» [ ], в которых содержатся важные замечания в плоскости сопоставления модерна и постмодерна. Наконец, в одной из работ автора статьи обозначена роль постмодернизма как разрушителя социально-политической идеи целостности в онтологическом плане и идеи проектирования в социально-политической сфере [ ]. Методы Необходимо обозначить методы, используемые в данной статье. Исходя из специфики статьи, автор задействует сравнительный метод для сопоставления политико-философских концепций Модерна и постмодерна. Также используются ретроспективный и герменевтический методы. Применяя ретроспективный метод, автор проследил эволюцию постмодернистской парадигмы от узкого философского течения до глобального социально- политического проекта. Применяя герменевтический метод, автор статьи исходил из необходимости исследования текстов идеологов постмодернизма, их анализа, понимания и интерпретации, что позволило достичь определённых научных целей в соответствии с замыслом и тематикой статьи. Социально-политический кризис Модерна и «механистического» человека После Первой мировой войны начинается тяжелейший кризис того проекта, который так или иначе вдохновлял Европу, начиная с xvii в., проекта, за которым закрепилось название Модерн. Остальное человечество в связи с активными колониальными захватами европейцев постепенно воспринимали аналогичные ценности, естественно со своей спецификой. Новое время действительно породило веру в бесконечный прогресс научно-технической сферы, нравственных, духовных и интеллектуальных начал в человеке. Также ко всему этому должен был приложиться, конечно, и прогресс в социальной сфере, т.е. общество постепенно должно было становиться более справедливым. Первая мировая война со всей очевидностью продемонстрировала, что прогресс технический, прогресс личностный и прогресс социальный движутся слишком неравномерно, что человек по-прежнему остался «волком» (homo homini lupus est − афоризм, который любил использовать крупнейший политический мыслитель Нового времени Томас Гоббс) и что это не может не приводить к ужасным бойням. Пессимизм в отношении Модерна начинает носить всеобъемлющий характер. Буквально во всех сферах культуры этот пессимизм себя так или иначе проявляет: декадентство становится, так сказать, творческим фоном эпохи и выражается непосредственно как в продуктах творчества, так и в стиле поведения многих субъектов творчества (поэтов, писателей, художников и т.д.), которые таким образом нарочито демонстрировали кризис уходящей системы ценностей. Справедливости ради следует отметить, что существенная часть философской и социально-политической критики Модерна была вполне обоснованной. Так, ещё Фридрих Ницше писал: «Человек − это канат, натянутый между животным и сверхчеловеком, − канат над пропастью. Опасно прохождение, опасно быть в пути, опасен взор, обращённый назад, опасны страх и остановка. В человеке важно то, что он мост, а не цель…» [ , с. ]. Ницше небезосновательно отметил, что человек − это именно состояние, причём крайне неустойчивое, что ratio (краеугольный камень западноевропейского Модерна) − это далеко не единственная и не самая важная составляющая человеческого естества и что механизация человека − это серьёзнейшая опасность, которая может привести к ужасающим последствиям. Какие экстравагантные выводы последовали у Ницше из вышеуказанных обоснованных констатаций − это отдельная тема, но то, что он нащупал острейшую социальную проблематику будущего ещё в xix в., когда в Западной Европе господствовал радикальный позитивизм, можно поставить ему в заслугу. В русской социально-политической и философской мысли отношение к Модерну было двоякое. С одной стороны, многие русские мыслители и в xix, и в ХХ в. последовательно противопоставляли своё мировоззрение западноевропейскому рационализму, эмпиризму, позитивизму и схематизму именно по причине их односторонности и неспособности соединить воедино гносеологическое, этическое, эстетическое и социально-политическое начало (В.Ф. Одоевский, славянофилы, В.С. Соловьёв, В.Ф. Эрн и т.д.). Идея же развития вполне принималась в русском смысловом поле [ ]. Итак, в ситуации жёсткого кризиса Модерн нуждался в корректировке, которая означала наполнение его идеей целостности: познания, человеческой личности и общества. Однако всё пошло в совершенно противоположном направлении: а именно по пути окончательного разрушения как идеи целостности, так и идеи развития вообще. Для осуществления данной неприглядной функции оказался востребован постмодернизм. Раскрепощение частей: мировоззренческие основания постмодернизма Постмодернизм обозначил себя в мире философских кружков только в - -х гг. ХХ в. Жан-Француа Лиотар в г. выпускает книгу «Состояние постмодерна», которая становится программной. В ней Лиотар провозглашает конец эпохи «Больших проектов», «метанарративов» и всеобщности [ ]. Более того, он заявляет, что в итоге целостности необходимо объявить войну [ , с. ]. Постмодернисты, начав свою деятельность из университетской среды, провозгласили крах Модерна и появление мира после-Модерна, а это означает принципиально иное мировоззрение. Яркими персонажами постмодернизма стали философ Жиль Делёз и психоаналитик Феликс Гваттари. Их творческий союз, выраженный в совместных работах, принёс понимание того, каков он, новый мир, в восприятии постмодернизма. Грядущий мир, согласно их точке зрения, − это мир Руин. Вспомним, что ещё древние греки говорили о Космосе как об объекте, свойством которого были целостность и структурность. В грядущую эпоху всё это нужно забыть: остались только обломки систем и смыслов. Как и фрагменты античных статуй, эти обломки бессмысленно пытаться склеивать в погоне за утраченной целостностью [ , с. ]. Разрушая целостность в сфере онтологии, постмодернисты переносят это разрушение и в социальную плоскость. Человек, согласно их мировоззрению, не должен укореняться нигде и ни в чём: ни в ценностном, ни в пространственном плане. И в этой ситуации их идеалом становится «ризома» (фр. rhizome «корневище»). В мире ризомы всё происходит абсолютно спонтанно через случайные трансформации. В мире ризомы, как в грибнице, отсутствуют корни, центры и опоры [ , с. ]. В нём нет осмысленной причинно-следственной траектории «корень — ствол — ветви — ветки — листья». «Мы не должны больше верить деревьям, их корням, корешкам, мы слишком пострадали от этого», — эмоционально заявляют Делёз и Гваттари [ , с. – ]. В ризоме нет того, что ещё с самых древнейших времён было осознано человеком в качестве основы мироздания − Мирового древа. Российский филолог В.Н. Топоров, крупнейший специалист по мифологической картине мира, характеризует Мировое древо как важный «для мифопоэтического сознания образ, воплощающий универсальную концепцию мира»: «древо жизни», «ось мира» (axis mundi), «древо восхождения», «мировой столп», «древо центра», «небесное древо», «шаманское древо», «мировая гора», «древо плодородия», «мистическое древо», «древо познания» и т.п. [ ]. То есть Древо мира было символом великой вселенской смысловой вертикали, символом, который возник ещё в далёкие мифологические, языческие времена. Такую вертикаль переняли монотеистические религии (христианство, ислам). Однако и светские идеологии Модерна (буржуазный либерализм и социализм), откинув ритуальную составляющую, от ценностной и смысловой вертикали не отказались, так как без неё развитие невозможно в принципе. В онтологическом плане постмодернизм задался недвусмысленной целью обрушить эту вертикаль окончательно и бесповоротно (хотя само слово «цель» глубоко чуждо постмодернизму). Для этого и была обоснована концепция ризомы как абсолютной противоположности Древу. Делёз и Гваттари отмечают, что «ризома − это нелинейный процесс, весь состоящий из мгновенных и случайных «ветвлений» в любом направлении». Действует ризома «благодаря вариации, экспансии, завоеванию, захвату, уколу» [ , с. ]. В ризоме отсутствует понятие «глубина», всё происходит на поверхности по линиям ускользания [ , с. – ]. Связующий каркас отсутствует, линии ускользания могут друг https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%d %a %d % %d %b %d %bd%d % %d % %d %b %d % %d %ba%d %b %d %b _%d % f%d %b %d % b%d %ba https://ru.wiktionary.org/wiki/rhizome#%d %a %d % %d %b %d %bd%d % %d % %d %b %d % %d %ba%d %b %d %b https://ru.wikipedia.org/wiki/%d % a%d %be%d % %d %bd%d %b %d %b %d %b %d % %d %b друга касаться, однако это соприкосновение может быть только очень кратковременным, почти мгновенным и, что самое важное, лишено цели, смысла и целостности. То есть человеку в этом мире совершенно не на что опереться. По пути ему встречаются только линии ускользания и тотальная зыбкость, поверхностность во всём. «Ускользнуть» предлагается даже от смерти, которую, конечно, нельзя отменить полностью, но которую можно растворить в потоке вариаций-трансформаций [ , с. ]. Более того, искать ничего незыбкого и не нужно, так как его в принципе и нет. Уничтожение в человеке и человеческом обществе стержня, смысла и целостности стало побочным эффектом постмодернизма (а можно предположить, и его изначальной задачей). Кочевничество как социально-политическая модель постмодернизма В контексте отсутствия глубины и смысла человек превращается в кочевника с отсутствием укоренённости в чём бы то ни было: в семье, в стране. «Никогда не пускать корней, хоть и трудно избежать такого соблазна» − провозглашают Делёз и Гваттари и даже в этой связи вводят понятие «антигенеалогия» [ , с. ]. Становится предельно понятно, почему в русской философии, публицистике и литературе такое большое место занимают идея почвенничества и идея целостности, причём часто в одном смысловом поле. Философ-почвенник xix в. Н.Н. Страхов писал: «Мир есть целое, то есть он связан во всех направлениях, в каких только может его рассматривать наш ум. Мир есть единое целое, то есть он не распадается на две, на три, или вообще на несколько сущностей, связанных независимо от их собственных свойств. Такое единство мира можно получить не иначе, как одухотворив природу, признав, что истинная сущность вещей состоит в различных степенях воплощающегося духа» [ , с.vii–viii]. Но вернёмся к постмодернизму. В нарисованной им картине мира нет места коллективизму или соборности вообще. Человек может слиться с толпой таких же кочевников на недолгий промежуток времени, а затем так же легко ускользнуть к другому кочевому племени, в другую «тусовку». Здесь действительно вспоминаются такие слова из молодёжного сленга, как «тусовка» и «тусовщик». Они весьма точно отражают суть явления. Движение как категория носит совершенно случайный характер, оно может быть внезапно искривлено, оборвано, перескочить на другую траекторию по принципу ризомы. Говорить о какой-либо ответственности в данном контексте неуместно вовсе. Бегство в новизну здесь носит болезненный и несколько даже параноидальный характер. Параноидальность заключается в том, что человек должен больше всего бояться надзора власти и бежать от неё, бояться и бежать. Причём речь идёт уже не о конкретных репрессиях, а о том, что вообще любая укоренённость тоталитарна по своей сути. Итак, о социальной целостности в данном случае речи быть не может. Но и о целостности личности тоже можно забыть, так как индивид без цели и смысла не может быть личностью. Такой индивид живёт случайными встречами и поверхностными отношениями, у него нет системы ценностей, да и по всем остальным параметрам он слишком «подвижен». Такой кочевник-тусовщик не способен познавать мир и тем более преобразовывать его, только случайное скольжение с подвижными функциями и фиктивной новизной. Вспоминаются в данном контексте нескончаемые агрессивно навязываемые дискуссии уже нашего времени о том, что пола вообще нет, а есть гендер, который может меняться в зависимости от настроения: сегодня мужчина, завтра женщина, и наоборот. Итак, Делёз и Гваттари объявляют настоящую войну любой оседлости и, конечно, самому основному институту оседлости − государству с его нормами, идеологией, культурой. Осуществляя исторические экскурсы, они даже начинают восхищаться кочевыми ордами, которые исторически якобы побеждали оседлые государственные (конечно, всегда «тоталитарные») образования. Делёз и Гваттари отмечают, что «у кочевников нет истории, у них есть только география» [ , с. ]. То, что можно найти гораздо большее число обратных примеров, когда оседлые цивилизации побеждали кочевников и, что самое главное, именно оседлые цивилизации оставляли существенный культурный след в истории, они грубо игнорируют. Вспомним в этом контексте русского социолога и геополитика Н.Я. Данилевского, который в своей знаковой работе «Россия и Европа», рассуждая о культурно-исторических типах, называл кочевые цивилизации «отрицательными», подразумевая, что их функция в мировом историческом процессе сводится к тому, чтобы помочь погибнуть стареющим «положительным» цивилизациям [ , с. ]. А вот, по Делёзу и Гваттари, врываться в чужой мир в непрерывном хаотичном движении, присваивать чужое − это и есть настоящая свобода. Это и есть стиль кочевника: он потребитель, а не созидатель. Такова суть номадологии как проекта [ , с. – ]. Постмодернизм в сфере политической футурологии Все эти постмодернистские интеллектуальные изыскания, возможно, так и остались бы просто эпатажем в рамках университетских философских кружков, если бы на них не обратили самое пристальное внимание серьёзные элитарии. Постмодернистские идеи оказались востребованы в самых верхах, и на языке постмодернизма заговорили в сфере большой политики. Например, Жак Аттали, глава Европейского банка реконструкции и развития, человек, игравший немалую роль в аппарате президента Франсуа Миттерана, в начале -х годов начинает активную деятельность в сфере футурологии. Эта деятельность выразилась у него в весьма значимой и замеченной книге «На пороге нового тысячелетия» [ ]. Неудивительно, что появление книги совпало с распадом социалистической системы. Мир двух противостоящих друг другу модернов закончился. Начиналось что-то совсем иное с концептуальной точки зрения. Образ будущего, продвигаемый Аттали, поразительным образом совпадает с постмодернистским идеалом глобального кочевничества Делёза и Гваттари. Аттали считает, что это желаемое состояние стремительно приближается развитием информационных технологий и установлением глобального рынка. Он говорит о всемирном «торговом строе», хотя точнее его следует обозначить не как «торговый», а как «банковский», и Аттали как человек из верхов банковской сферы не может об этом не знать. В новом мире укоренённость бессмысленна вообще, актуален только «номадический» (т.е. кочевнический) идеал с определённым набором переносных гаджетов: персональный компьютер, кредитная карта, плейер, мобильный телефон и т.п. [ , с. – ]. Обратим внимание на то, что в начале -х, когда Аттали озвучивал впервые эти положения, уровень технических гаджетов был куда более скромным. Не было ещё доступной всем мобильной связи, компактных ноутбуков и интернета во всех мобильных устройствах. Всё перечисленное − это условие освобождения от диктата пространства. Также в будущем, согласно мнению Аттали, необходимы номадические предметы для самолечения и самодиагностики, а в идеале биопротезы и инструменты для генетических коррекций. Это нужно для освобождения уже от диктата времени. Особое внимание Аттали уделяет «магнитной карточке», которая заменит индивидуальность человека полностью и станет и удостоверением личности, и чековой книжкой с пропуском к глобальному Рынку, и вообще «протезом Я» человека [ , с. ]. В более новой своей работе «Краткая история будущего» он подробно расшифровывает термин «виртуальные кочевники» [ , с. – ]. На первый взгляд, возникает ощущение того, что ничего негативного в продвигаемом образе будущего не предлагается: мобильный телефон и планшет со «всеми знаниями мира» − это действительно очень удобно. Однако проблема в том, что «номадический рай» со всеми благами будет доступен, согласно предсказаниям Аттали, только для узкой группы лиц. Эта группа пребывает в состоянии нарциссизма и полностью свободна от власти, семьи, ценностей, общества и т.п. (идеальная постмодернистская персона). О «райские обители» кочевников-гедонистов будут тщетно биться кочевники-изгои. Изгои будут грызть друг друга за то, чтобы урвать от «рая» хотя бы какие-то крохи. Возникает два совершенно разных мира, между которыми устанавливается жёсткая перегородка [ , с. – ]. Общество становится абсолютно толпо-элитарным, и это уже не имеет ничего общего даже с классическим капитализмом. Вспомним, что в xix в. преобладало иное мировоззрение: все народы движутся по пути прогресса, но есть те, кто делает это быстрее, и те, кто медленнее. На этой почве между европейскими нациями и возникала жесточайшая конкуренция. В наибольшей степени «самоуверенная» идеология превосходства над всеми остальными была свойственна англосаксам. В лаконичной поэтической форме такой англосаксонский снобизм был выражен, например, Редьярдом Киплингом в строчках про «бремя белых», которые несут цивилизацию «угрюмым племенам» [ , с. ]. Однако всё же такой подход не предполагал разделение мира на номадический рай нарциссов-гедонистов и номадический ад (фактически новый каменный век) для большей части населения земли. Разумеется, странно было бы романтизировать классический капитализм, однако важно зафиксировать тот факт, что за последний век произошла мутация Запада, и вектор этой мутации лежит как раз в мировоззренческой плоскости: от Модерна к постмодерну. Заключение В нынешней реальности мы можем воочию наблюдать, как постмодернизм уже заработал в качестве социополитического проекта, только приводит это, увы, не к прогрессу. «Номадические» постмодернистские симптомы налицо. Во-первых, это трудовые номады, которые огромными потоками перемещаются из страны в страну. Эти перемещения отнюдь не приводят к культурной ассимиляции и, пожалуй, даже её уже и не предполагают, так как национальные государства, в которых национальная культура была условием возникновения наций, становятся реликтами уходящей эпохи Модерна. Приобщаться к культуре суверенного государства трудовым мигрантам необязательно. Такая ситуация приводит к колоссальной межнациональной напряжённости. Возникают криминализированные этнические анклавы, куда боятся заходить даже представители правопорядка. Для многих западноевропейских городов такая ситуация − печальная реальность. В США полыхают агрессивные акции «black lives matter», которые ставят под вопрос американскую идентичность. Непростая ситуация с национальным вопросом и в России. Во-вторых, это военные номады − частные армии, которые уже стали реальностью нашего времени. Особенно такими армиями славятся США. Наиболее известными американскими частными военными компаниями стали academi (в прошлом blackwater), erinys, dyncorp, kellog, brown and root. Россия регулярно становилась жертвой подобных неофициальных структур в конце -х и на протяжении всех -х годов. Достаточно вспомнить две чеченские войны, в которых отметились многочисленные «банды кочевников» и из так называемого «цивилизованного» мира, и из всего остального. Следует отметить, что России в сложившейся ситуации тоже приходится принимать новую реальность и создавать свои частные армии (ЧВК Вагнера, например). В-третьих, это экономические номады, которые занимаются искусственным уничтожением и погружением в нищету целых стран и народов посредством экономических манипуляций и долгового удушения. Такое киллерство с далеко идущими экономическими последствиями описано, например, в книге Джона Перкинса «Исповедь экономического убийцы» [ ]. Таким образом, постмодернизм − это не просто экстравагантное философское течение ХХ–xxi вв. Это и есть социополитическая сверхидеология современного Запада. Мы имеем все основания предположить, что постмодернизм получил распространение не сам по себе, постепенно привлекая сторонников за пределами университетских кружков, а потому, что он оказался весьма востребованным со стороны определённого сегмента глобальной, транснациональной элиты. Разумеется, постмодернизм − это мировоззрение этой элиты вовсе не для себя самой, а именно идеальное информационное оружие против толпы, которая должна пребывать в состоянии раздробленного сознания, тотального непонимания происходящих процессов, если сказать резче, «калейдоскопического идиотизма». Категорическое утверждение невозможности целостного человека и целостного общества [ ] делает нереальным для граждан и какое-либо проектирование своего будущего, а это весьма удобно для глобальной элиты, у которой с проектированием всё весьма неплохо. Но трагизм ситуации в том, что такой подход неминуемо приводит человечество к обществу ещё большей социальной несправедливости. А для российской элиты есть серьёзный повод для размышления: а нужно ли входить в такой Запад, который столь радикально мутировал и в котором населению России может быть уготовано только место в «номадическом аду»? Литература . Аттали Ж. Краткая история будущего. – Санкт-Петербург: Питер, . – с. . Аттали Ж. На пороге нового тысячелетия. — Москва: Международные отношения, . – с. . Бялый Ю.В. Концептуальная война. – Москва: МОФ ЭТЦ, . – с. . Грицанов А.А. Постмодернизм: Энциклопедия. – Москва: Книжный дом, . – с. . Данилевский Н.Я. Россия и Европа. Эпоха столкновения цивилизаций. – Москва: Алгоритм, . – с. . Делёз Ж., Гваттари Ф. Тысяча плато. Капитализм и шизофрения. – Москва: У-Фактория, АСТ, . – c. . Долгих Ф.И. История отечественного государства и права: учебное пособие. Москва: Московский финансово-промышленный университет «Синергия», . – с. . Ирхин Ю.В. 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[politics and postmodernism: postmodernization as democratization]. wien, passagen publ., cop. , p. the american archivist vol. , no. fall/winter aarc- - - page pdf created: - - : : :pm harrison w. inefuku to the editor: in an essay published in the atlantic, ibram x. kendi defines white privilege: white privileges are the relative advantages racism affords to people identi- fied as white, whether white people recognize them or deny them. to be white is to be afforded one’s individuality. afforded the presumption of innocence. afforded the assumption of intelligence. afforded empathy when crying or raging. afforded disproportionate amounts of policy-making power. afforded opportunity from a white network. afforded wealth-building homes and resource-rich schools. afforded the ability to vote quickly and easily. from an archival perspective, we can add, “afforded value in one’s stories, perspectives, experiences, and histories. afforded representation in archives. afforded inclusion in history.” frank boles’s article, “to everything there is a season,” argues against a social justice imperative in archives. i’ll focus on boles’s argument against the idea that archivists should create a “universal” record of human activity to illustrate how the article and its selection for the american archivist brown bag lunch at the saa annual meeting is an example of systemic racism in academic publishing and scholarly communication and its impact on knowl- edge construction. in arguing against representation in archives (conflating representa- tion with universality), boles sets up a false dichotomy between institutional policy and representative collecting. whether representation is included in institutional collecting policies is a matter of interpretation. the depart- mental responsibilities of the university archives at my institution read, “the university archives serves as the primary repository for the historical records of iowa state university. the university archives collects, describes, preserves and exhibits university records that contain historical, administrative, legal, or fiscal value.” does this statement exclude the acquisition of records gener- ated by marginalized communities on campus? a social justice lens, which focuses on power imbalances and seeks equity in access to resources and opportunity, says no. whiteness, however, leads us to assume that work around diversity, inclu- sion, and social justice is “peripheral” and “activist.” as Özlem sensoy and robin diangelo write, “because dominant institutions in society are positioned as being neutral, challenging social injustice within them seems to be an extra task in addition to our actual tasks.” if an archives’ role is to document the functions, activities, and history of its parent institution, then ensuring that the minutes of the asian american and pacific islander staff affinity group are acquired is just as much part of that mission as acquiring the minutes of the faculty senate. d ow nloaded from http://m eridian.allenpress.com /doi/pdf/ . /aarc- - - by c arnegie m ellon u niversity user on a pril the american archivist vol. , no. fall/winter aarc- - - page pdf created: - - : : :pm to the editor boles goes further to argue, “[t]he archival community should concede that the hope to holistically document society be abandoned because of the continued failure of the community to articulate how to fund and how to define this goal.” advocating for an abandonment of the goal to ensure marginalized communities are represented in the archival record is, in effect, dismissing the contributions by and about archivists from marginalized communities. it also conflicts with saa’s strategic plan and goals, which call for completeness and diversity in the historical record. the publication of this article, which has been criticized for being poorly argued, reliant on logical fallacies, and lacking a deep understanding of and engagement with the literature, and its selection for the american archivist brown bag session rightfully raises questions about the peer review process and organization of brown bag sessions at saa annual meetings, which fall outside the purview of the program committee. boles positions his article as being about appraisal. was the selection of peer reviewers limited to those with expertise in appraisal, or was it also sent to reviewers knowledgeable about inclusion and social justice? the areas of expertise selection menu in the american archivists’s user registration form does not include diversity, inclusion, or social justice. who was involved in the plan- ning of the brown bag luncheon? the selection of the article generated contro- versy and in doing so, definitely stirred discussion—but in doing so, it created a spectacle of diversity and inclusion. if the intention was to highlight an article on diversity, why not choose an article that centers the perspectives and experi- ences of marginalized communities? if there were no such articles in the publi- cation queue for the journal, what obstacles exist that are pushing scholars writing by and about marginalized communities to publish in alternate venues? it’s important to think about this article and the canceled brown bag within the greater context of systemic racism in academic publishing and scholarly communication. the dismissal of scholarship by and about communi- ties of color is not uncommon. education scholars delores delgado bernal and octavio villalpando argue that “by marginalizing the knowledges of faculty of color, higher education has created an apartheid of knowledge where the domi- nant eurocentric epistemology is believed to produce ‘legitimate’ knowledge, in contrast to the ‘illegitimate’ knowledge that is created by all other episte- mological perspectives.” likewise, psychology professor stanley sue writes that the methodologies and theoretical grounding employed by scholars of color and other marginalized identities as well as those who employ social justice approaches are frequently criticized for being too narrow, biased, and/or lacking in intellectual and scientific rigor. d ow nloaded from http://m eridian.allenpress.com /doi/pdf/ . /aarc- - - by c arnegie m ellon u niversity user on a pril the american archivist vol. , no. fall/winter aarc- - - page pdf created: - - : : :pm harrison w. inefuku this incident is one of many recent examples in which academic journals have published pieces that are poorly written or challenge the contributions by scholars of color: • weeks before the saa annual meeting, ethnic and racial studies pub- lished a critique of the black lives matter movement that was charac- terized as lacking intellectual rigor; • over the summer, college & research libraries published a review of rose l. chou and annie pho that centered the defensiveness and fragility of the reviewer, rather than on the experiences of the authors who contributed to the book; • in , third world quarterly published an article that argued that the global south benefited from colonialism; and • in , the american historical review published a review of ansley t. erickson’s making the unequal metropolis: school desegregation and its limits that criticized the author for not referencing sociobiology, a discred- ited theory that naturalizes racism and justifies racist viewpoints. in this letter, i am not arguing that theory and practice related to social justice within archives should be free from critique, nor that frank boles is racist. we all grow up socialized in whiteness, which impacts how knowledge is created, through archives (in its role as the primary sources of history) and scholarly communication. this article and the brown bag luncheon must be viewed as part of a pattern in which the construction of knowledge, through academic publishing and scholarly communication, continue to marginalize communities of color and the work of archivists of color in addressing these systemic issues. i call on the editor and editorial board of the american archivist, with input from saa membership, to develop and publicize a plan to reduce bias in publishing the journal and increase the representation of authors from marginalized communities. © harrison w. inefuku iowa state university notes i thank des alaniz, barrye brown, angela lieu, mark a. matienzo, and susan a. vega garcía for providing feedback on drafts of this letter. ibram x. kendi, “the greatest white privilege is life itself,” the atlantic, october , , https:// www.theatlantic.com/ideas/archive/ / /too-short-lives-black-men/ . see https://www.lib.iastate.edu/about-library/organization/departments/special-collections. i am using whiteness in the sense defined by april hathcock as “a marker for the privilege and power that acts to reinforce itself through hegemonic cultural practice that excludes all who are different.” april hathcock, “white librarianship in blackface: diversity initiatives in lis,” in d ow nloaded from http://m eridian.allenpress.com /doi/pdf/ . /aarc- - - by c arnegie m ellon u niversity user on a pril the american archivist vol. , no. fall/winter aarc- - - page pdf created: - - : : :pm to the editor the library with the lead pipe, october , , http://www.inthelibrarywiththeleadpipe.org/ / lis-diversity. Özlem sensoy and robin diangelo, is everyone really equal?, nd ed. (new york: teachers college press, ), . see eira tansey’s blog post, “peer review for archivists (or, wtf is going on with this saa pre-print),” for example, http://eiratansey.com/ / / /peer-review-for-archivists- or-wtf-is-going-on-with-this-saa-pre-print. delores delgado bernal and octavio villalpando, “an apartheid of knowledge in academia: the struggle over the ‘legitimate’ knowledge of faculty of color,” equity & excellence in education , no. ( ): . stanley sue, “science, ethnicity, and bias: where have we gone wrong?,” american psychologist , no. ( ): – , https://doi.org/ . / - x. . . . zuleyka zevallos, “whitewashing race studies,” other sociologist (blog), july , , https:// othersociologist.com/ / / /whitewashing-race-studies. college & research libraries, twitter post, july , , : pm, https://twitter.com/crl_acrl/ status/ ?s= . sahar khan, “the case against ‘the case for colonialism,’” duck of minerva (blog), september , , https://duckofminerva.com/ / /the-case-against-the-case-for-colonialism.html. scott jaschik, “the wrong reviewer,” inside higher ed, april , , https://www.insidehighered. com/news/ / / /history-journal-apologizes-assigning-review-book-urban-education-and- inequality. d ow nloaded from http://m eridian.allenpress.com /doi/pdf/ . /aarc- - - by c arnegie m ellon u niversity user on a pril post-digital cultures of the far right - online actions and offline consequences in europe and the us parallel por t s sociot echnic al change f r om t he alt- rig ht t o alt-tech joan donovan, becca lewis and brian friedberg before the insurgence of the so-called ‘alt-right’ into contemporary politi- cal discussion, white supremacists have long used the internet as a means to organize and share information. early adopters of email and bulletin board technology – organizations such as the aryan nation and the ku klux klan – saw great possibilities for using networked communication technology to circumvent social, physical and legal restrictions on the ex- pression of racism and antisemitism. sites like aryan liberty net ( ) and stormfront ( ) provided early platforms for the sharing of racist propaganda, novel means of organization and recruitment, and new tools to harass and intimidate vulnerable populations (berlet ). the in- creasing ubiquity of online communication has allowed white suprema- cist groups to grow and transform, preserving the movement’s knowledge and tactics for decades. more than a tool for communication, social media platforms are in- creasingly condemned for supporting the organization of a broad base of white supremacists. one key event, the unite the right rally, held on august in charlottesville, north carolina, was organized by a broad coalition of white supremacists, many of whom were highly active online. this violent gathering led to the death of heather heyer and the injury of dozens of others. much of the subsequent criticism lodged against social | according to the as sociated pres s st yle guide, references to the “alt-right ” should always be in quotes. for more infor mation, see: ht tps://blog.ap.org /be hind-the -news/wr iting-about-the -alt-right | souther n pover t y l aw center ( ): “stor mfront: a histor y”, march (ht tps://w w w.splcenter.org /hatewatch/ / / /stor mfront-histor y). jo an d o n o v an, b e c c a l e w i s an d br ian fr ie db e r g media companies concerned the failure to enforce their own ‘terms of service’ contracts in the lead up to the rally. corporations such as goo- gle (including youtube), twitter, facebook, cloudflare, godaddy, airbnb, uber, paypal, discord, patreon, and others reacted by ‘no platforming’ (i.e. refusing services) known white supremacists account holders. the event revealed a fissure across platform companies’ terms of ser- vice and their willingness to enforce them. platform companies showed a commitment to ethical use by banning far-right and extremist accounts, which was debated in the media as a form of censorship. in this case, the actions by internet companies prompted a significant change in far-right organizing: the alt-right suddenly needed the support infrastructure of an ‘alt-tech’ movement. one of the organizers of the charlottesville rally, tim gionet (aka baked alaska on social media) told the la times: “we’re getting banned from using payment-processing services, so we have no other choice. if that’s the gamble they want to take, i guess they can, and we’ll make our own infrastructure” (pearce ). this question of infra- structure emerges for social movements in the face of particular obstacles, and donovan ( ) argues that this infrastructural turn happens when a movement’s very survival is threatened. therefore, while no-platforming efforts have raised public awareness of online hate speech and racist organizing, they have also necessitated the development of alternative platforms to prolong the life of the movement. we argue that these so-called ‘alt-tech’ platforms also serve as recruit- ment and organizing sites for the far right, allowing for direct communi- cation and continued engagement. all of which begs the question: what shifts in the sociotechnical organization of networked communication have enabled extremist communities to flourish? we take up this question by exploring how alternative sociotechnical systems have developed after the violence in charlottesville. in computer science, parallel ports were an early hardware solution for connecting peripherals, allowing for multiple streams of data to flow simultaneously. the concept of parallel ports as a type of forking (i.e. changes in the organizational flow of information to allow for process- ing different streams of data) is embedded within the design of tech- nical systems and the open source movement (kelty ). it is also an important frame for understanding the maturation of networked social movements as they are both structured by and structuring their own technological infrastructure (donovan ). by porting the social p ar all e l p o r t s movement community from one platform to another, movement leaders are making decisions about what technological features are necessary to sustain the movement. we use the figure of parallel ports here to analyze the development of alternative platforms. we ask: is the ‘forking’ of the alt-right’s techno- logical development driven by a need for stabilization? or, is it the case that the alternative technology developed in the wake of charlottesville is something fundamentally different? in this article, we describe the de- velopment of a social media platform called gab to show how technology was used by the alt-right to align with other online movements. while there are points of affinity where these movements have overlapped, we describe how the design and widespread adoption of gab, a small online social media platform, rose in prominence after the riot in charlottes- ville. gab sought to bridge these movements not only to expand its user base but also because technology is a movement unto itself. technological change is often intertwined with social movements learning to use the technology and innovating at the margins of utility (mattoni ; don- ovan ). as such, mapping technological change and the adoption of new technologies by social movements is a critical site for understanding sociotechnical systems designs and their challenges. ta c t i c a l i n n o v at i o n a c r o s s t h e a lt- r i g h t a n d a lt-te c h doug mcadam ( ) explains the process of social movements’ deve- lopment and decline through a theory of tactical innovation. in order to develop and to reach their goals, social movements must understand the broader political context in which they are positioned and devise tactics accordingly. violent and disruptive tactics have a higher success rate than more institutionalized routes (piven/cloward ), but to achieve success these disruptive tactics must change often (mcadam ; piven/cloward ). the transformation of tactics either leads to legitimate power or the insurgents must develop new forms of disruptive protest (mcadam ). in order to study social movements in this way, mcadam develops three concepts that emphasize the relationship between movements and counter-movements: tactical innovation, tactical adaptation, and tactical interaction. tactical innovation refers to “the creativity of insurgents in jo an d o n o v an, b e c c a l e w i s an d br ian fr ie db e r g devising new tactical forms,” i.e. an initial action. tactical adaptation is “the ability of opponents to neutralize these moves through effective tacti- cal counter,” i.e. the responding action. tactical interaction is the process through which these actions are understood and offset, much like a chess match (mcadam : ). but, how does a social movement choose its tactics and decide on a course of action? the political opportunity structure is key to understan- ding how a movement’s chosen tactics are limited to the legitimate and illegitimate means available to meet a desired goal. holly j. mccammon ( ) illustrates how political defeats, factionalism, and the limitation of particular resources led in some cases to tactical stasis and in other cases provided an impetus for tactical innovation. as well, a movement’s orga- nizational readiness, its ability to mobilize resources and communicate tactics, often shapes what tactics they have in their repertoire. kim voss and rachel sherman ( ), melissa j. wilde ( ), and marshall ganz ( ) have called attention to tactical innovation as it re- lates to the biography of a movement’s leaders. while some measure of charisma must always be present for leadership to be effective, successful leaders often have affiliations with other movements, coupled with strong alliances both inside and outside the movement, and the ability to inno- vate to reach their desired outcomes. in the case of the unite the right rally, we see the field of political op- portunities opened wide for white supremacists in the lead up to and fol- lowing trump’s election. not only was the national media receptive to their messaging and dedicated a large amount of resources to covering their movement, but jeff sessions became the attorney general, whose agenda was highly focused on other racialized issues, such as tracking the gang ms- across borders and labelling black lives matter as ‘black identity extremists.’ within charlottesville itself, the political gains of the black lives matter movement included renaming lee park as justice park and removing the large statue of robert e. lee. the alt-right, led by richard spencer and other charismatic figures popular on social media, chose lee park to stage the unite the right rally to protest the removal of the statue. this would also draw in counter-pro- testers who wanted to protect their earlier wins. here, spencer’s choice to rally in charlottesville was a tactical innovation that sought to produce a confrontation with local activists in order to gain media attention. in may , prior to the unite the right rally in august, spencer and others p ar all e l p o r t s held a torch-lit protest in the same park. this protest got significant media coverage, despite the event itself being rather low-energy with only a few dozen people in attendance. by organizing events spencer brought in new recruits and created alliances with new groups, mainly militias, who want- ed to share the media attention. online recruitment for the unite the right rally depended largely on sharing digital fliers and memes. spencer enrolled speakers from several other white supremacist organizations who raised funds so their mem- bers could attend. the mass rally was the most significant call to action across the us white supremacist movement in years. the organization of the event relied heavily on the belief that for the movement to grow and continue to influence politics, members had to show up in person. while communication about the event online occurred on every prominent so- cial media platform, certain sites were key conduits of information, such as chan, discord chats, altright.com, and the daily stormer (a white na- tionalist message board) along with podcasts such as the daily shoah, alt-right radio, and youtube channels by baked alaska and others. the event itself was organized to bolster the leadership of several charismatic figures. the goal was to rebrand the image of the white nationalist move- ment as one with a youthful and rebellious vision. if they were too timid to face potential violence or could not afford to travel, others were asked to participate online. the simultaneous use of multiple platform companies’ products coupled with lesser known communication tools as their movement’s in- frastructure ensured that if one line of communication were shut down the event could still carry on. online video streams from far-right public protests are often closely followed in discussion threads as they happen, so it was not surprising that when a major act of violence occurred in charlottesville, online participants jumped at the opportunity to impact the course of events by manipulating media narratives in an attempt to get journalists to blame their political opponents. for movements with their roots on the internet, it is imperative that tactical innovation occurs in real time, where offline events feed into on- line dialogues that shape a movement’s followers’ ability to communicate with one another. that is to say, infrastructure is integral to the socio-tech- nical design of a movement like the alt-right. while charismatic leaders are instrumental in providing ideological frames and being spokespeo- ple to the media, day-to-day participation in networked social movements jo an d o n o v an, b e c c a l e w i s an d br ian fr ie db e r g is largely monotonous. with few possibilities to meet in public without opposition, the alt-right has relied on creating an abundance of online media, forums, and opportunities for engagement that require internet infrastructure for the survival of their movement. as platforms began to remove far-right accounts and content, the alt-right adopted a developer’s mindset and fashioned solutions out of existing code and resources. in the next section, we describe these steps taken by the alt-right to align with an alt-tech community in the wake of no platforming after charlot- tesville. ta c t i c a l i n n o v at i o n a s a r e s p o n s e t o ‘n o p l at f o r m i n g’ the unite the right rally was a horrifically violent event. in the lead up to it, much of the online discussion revolved around open-carry permits, where some posted pictures of themselves posing with homemade weap- ons, handguns, and rifles. in some online forums and chat services, the coming event was described as a ‘civil war’ and ‘battle with antifa’. for those counter-organizing in charlottesville, residents repeatedly attended city council meetings asking for the permit to be revoked because there was going to be violence. emboldened by previous symbolic victories of harassment campaigns such as gamergate (losh ) and far-right intervention in the pres- idential election (daniels ), leaders of the alt-right and other white nationalist groups openly promoted unite the right on public forums, anonymous imageboards, social media and youtube. gamergate was a large-scale online coalition of anonymous trolls, right wing pundits and social reactionaries who united to attack prominent women in the video game industry in . for the alt-right, coordinated amplification of the call for many far-right factions to coalesce under a single banner would not have been possible without strategic use of public-facing media and simultaneous backchannel coordination and communication. the tactics for coordination owe much to gamergate, relying on similar social and technical networks for organization and amplification (losh ; mas- sanari ). after the violence of charlottesville, many platforms that took lighter approaches to content moderation were forced to confront the growing p ar all e l p o r t s threat of large-scale white supremacist organizing on their platforms. symbolic targets, such as removing blue check marks on twitter and the removal of facebook pages, were chosen to give the impression that plat- forms were both willing and able to respond to this threat. some, like spencer, called for platforms to be regulated like other public utilities in the usa, where net neutrality applies to speeds afforded by internet service providers but not the content itself. in the usa, platforms are allowed to choke/censor/moderate content in the interest of the online community, which is key to market retention. in other countries, such as germany, racist content is restricted by tighter government regulations, placing legal burden of removal on social media platforms and hosting sites. there are, however, easy technological circumvention techniques that allow for access, such as the use of the tor browser or vpns that mask location. others, in response, called for alternative platforms to arise and fill the communication and amplification void left by large-scale banning, or for right-wing operatives to double-down on pre-existing platforms with lax approaches to censorship or mission statements aligned with free-speech absolutism. this was a critical shift in the far-right’s ability to stay or- ganized as platform companies reacted to their violence. by shifting the focus from alt-right to alt-tech, a new wave of organizing continued online while offline events faltered or were completely overwhelmed by counter-protesters (neuman ). one such influential platform, gab, found its niche in the fall of . while there were many other platforms competing for attention and users at this time – voat, bitchute, and minds – gab stood out as one that adopted a public stance on the issues of free speech, technological design, and white nationalism. we focused our study on the public communications of gab founder, andrew torba, and analyzed the design of gab to illustrate how the platform capitalized on this crisis within the far-right movement to simultaneously populate their platform and provide infrastructure to the floundering social movement. during an interview with far-right media personality alex jones, an- drew torba, founder of gab.ai, encouraged the claim that, “this is a war we need to fight on facebook, google, twitter everywhere – we gotta drive people to gab.ai, to infowars.com to drudge report.” gab is a small so- cial media platform that combines elements of twitter, reddit and face- | source: ht tps://w w w.youtube.com/watch?v=bmix xpny n , : . jo an d o n o v an, b e c c a l e w i s an d br ian fr ie db e r g book (sovryn ). launched in , gab saw a rise in users in late , after a summer of far-right public actions across the us. designed to supplement or replace the regular social media habits of its users, gab’s designers consolidated the features of larger platform services for a user base vocally dissatisfied with other social media services. in the summer and fall of , gab positioned itself to take on users abandoning twitter as a fork in three overlapping movements: the free speech movement, the open technology movement, and the alt-right. in the us, freedom of speech as a public value is commonly invoked as a defense of vile and vicious speech. this is how liberal and progressive groups, such as the american civil liberties union, got caught up defen- ding the rights of neo-nazis in charlottesville (goldstein ). instead of exclusively pushing far-right propaganda, gab saw itself as a defender of vile speech and movement infrastructure; both a place for organizing and technological development. by asking not only for users to join, but also technologists, free speech fundamentalists, and far right provocateurs, torba’s gab was bringing together different factions of online movements across parallel ports. th e p o l i t i c a l id e o l o g y d r i v i n g a lt-te c h two days before the unite the right rally, gab announced the ‘alt-tech alliance.’ they wrote: “ t he free speech tech alliance is a pas sionate group of br ave engineer s, produc t manager s, investor s and other s who are tired of the st atus quo in the technolog y industr y. we are the defender s of free speech, individual liber t y, and tr uth.” however, on august , after the fallout from charlottesville, gab was removed from the apple play store because, as apple told ars technica: “in order to be on the play store, social net wor king apps need to demonstr ate a suf f icient level of moder ation, including for content that encourages violence and | gab ( ): “announcing t he fr ee speech tech allianc e”, augus t (h t t p s://me dium.c om/@ g e t ong ab/announc ing - t he - al t- t e c h - allianc e - b e b e c a). https://medium.com/@getongab/announcing-the-alt-tech-alliance- bebe c a p ar all e l p o r t s advocates hate against groups of people. t his is a long-st anding r ule and clear ly st ated in our developer policies. developer s always have the oppor tunit y to ap- peal a suspension and may have their apps reinst ated if they ‘ve addres sed the policy violations and are compliant with our developer progr am policies” (quoted in lee ). torba used this decision as an opportunity to raise capital using a crowd campaign and redoubled his efforts at recruitment (kircher ). in press and marketing campaigns for his platform, torba pushes the bounds of platform accountability by calling out other social media plat- forms for censorship. taking a stance of american-centric free speech absolutism, torba and staff refuse to monitor or moderate hateful content, despite gab’s community guidelines strongly advising international users to adhere to their particular nation’s speech laws. these policies create a haven for users banned from youtube, twitter, and facebook. a lifelong conservative dissatisfied with his previous experiences in silicon valley startups, torba has publicly embraced the controversy and began circu- lating white nationalist talking points in an attempt to draw in new users (brustein ; hess ). on gab, twitter, youtube and medium, tor- ba frequently aligns himself with conservative and far-right causes. im- mediately following charlottesville, gab became an important hub for the far right, where they coordinated trolling brigades to attack journalists and others on twitter. in a medium post entitled we are at war for a free and open internet, torba walked back his claims about his platform’s positions on free speech and hate speech while publicly defending his de- cision to remove a notorious neo-nazi hacker, weev, for violation of their domain registrar’s terms of service. asia registry, the domain registry for gab, threatened to take the site offline if they did not remove antisemitic | for more infor mation on gab’s communit y guidelines, see ht tps://gab.ai/ about /guidelines. | gab ( ): “e xposed: anti-white ‘hate speech’ on twit ter by cnn, buz z- feed, n y t, and l a t imes repor ter s”, medium (blog), august (ht tps:// me dium.c om/@ g e t ong ab/e x p o s e d - an t i -w hi t e - ha t e - s p e e c h - on -t w i t t er- by- c nn - buz z feed-ny t-and-la-times-repor ter s-fa e ). | gab ( ): “we are at war for a free and open inter net ”, september (ht t p s://medium.c om/@ ge t ongab/we -ar e -at-war-for-a-f r ee -and- open-int er ne t- f ba bf ). https://medium.com/@getongab/exposed-anti-white-hate-speech-on-twitter-by-cnn-buzzfeed-nyt-and-la-times-reporters-fa e jo an d o n o v an, b e c c a l e w i s an d br ian fr ie db e r g posts by weev (hayden ). in an effort to reclaim their reputation, a new ‘censor-proof social media protocol’ ipo was launched to expand in- vestment opportunities in the gab ‘family’ of projects, and to keep gab in the tech press. gab’s marketing, as a centralized platform for the far right, relies on the fear of social isolation coupled with a willingness to involve the plat- form’s services in political debate. in , emboldened by large-scale ral- lies in california, tennessee, and virginia, far-right groups escalated their ongoing attacks against both the mainstream media and racialized groups using targeted harassment on platforms. known white supremacists op- erated openly on twitter, with only the most violent content subject to removal. in response to public pressure and critical reporting on the con- tinual harassment and spreading of extremist propaganda, twitter issued an updated hateful content policy on december , . aimed at curb- ing hate speech and harassment, the policy would more aggressively ban users for violent and egregious behavior observed both on and off the plat- form. twitter’s announcement regarding tighter control of hate speech on their platform was preemptively decried as a form of ‘censorship’ amongst far-right communities. for several weeks leading up to twitter’s terms of service update, conservative and far-right networks employed the hashtag #twitterpurge. gab has experienced difficulties raising funds as they are both unwill- ing and incapable of supporting or acquiring advertisers. alt-tech plat- forms, like gab, are limited in their ability to interact with financial and advertising systems available to larger established platforms, like twitter. on other platforms, advertisers threaten and withdraw support when it is discovered their marketing materials are paired with content promoting hate (solon ). the influence of advertisers on a platform’s standards for monetization and hosting limits bad actors who seek a means of am- plifying their messages. alongside the inability to secure advertising re- venue, gab’s mobile app has been continually rejected from the apple and google mobile stores, limiting their audience. there are no third party applications that can work with gab’s architecture, which is limited by a | for more infor mation on fundraising see: ht tps://w w w.st ar tengine.com/ gab-selec t. p ar all e l p o r t s private and reportedly fragile api. we now turn to discussing the techno- logical features of gab to illustrate how the ability to consolidate so many of the features popular on other platforms, like twitter, youtube, face- book, and reddit, shows the promise of such tactical innovation to provide a all-in-one social media experience, but ultimately that the public uptake of a technology depends largely on the charisma of leadership and the values of its community of users. th e te c h n o l o g i c a l i n f r a s t r u c t u r e su p p o r t i n g a lt-te c h gab became a central hub for the alt-right movement following the unite the right rally as torba positioned his technology as the only unmo- derated space online. since then, gab has continued to develop social movement community, integrating new features as twitter, facebook, and youtube’s terms of service pose problems for infrastructural stabili- ty. keeping with their goal of being a one-stop community platform, gab offers users an experience designed to recreate twitter, facebook, and reddit in a ‘censorship-free’ environment – it mimics many functions of its main rival twitter, the social connectivity of facebook, and the news aggregation and voting system of reddit. these are not merely inferences; gab’s creators and community posit the platform as a viable alternative for users unsatisfied (or permanently banned) from these major social media sites. gab is therefore a prime example of how the greater alt- tech space integrates and modifies the pre-existing models of interaction their user base has come to expect from their social media experiences elsewhere. here, gab is not one platform among many, but is a hub that brings together many nodes – including white supremacist, misogynist, and ‘free speech’ communities – under the banner of alt-tech. while largely replicating and consolidating features found elsewhere, gab has a few unique tools or early innovations. gab includes the ability to | for more infor mation on gab’s api: ht tps://dev.to/welcome/the -day-i-broke - gabai | gab ( ): “announcing the free speech tech alliance”, august ( h t t p s ://m e d i u m . c o m /@ g e t o n g a b/a n n o u n c i n g - t h e - a l t - t e c h - a l l i a n c e - b e b e c a). https://medium.com/@getongab/announcing-the-alt-tech-alliance- bebe c a jo an d o n o v an, b e c c a l e w i s an d br ian fr ie db e r g filter keywords and followers, predating twitter’s ability to remove certain terms entirely from a feed, as well as muting individual users who may be engaged in harassment. however, gab does not feature a block system on ideological grounds. the introduction of ‘pro memberships’ expands dedicated users’ power to control their experience, as well as introducing features to incentivize creators to use gab as their primary broadcast plat- form. moreover, international news of white nationalists being banned from hosting services or detained while travelling has bolstered use of gab in countries outside the us. as a result, gab provides a place for discussion and coordination of translocal ideologies called ‘networked nationalisms’, “a belief that national borders are strengthened by the international coop- eration of far-right politicians and ‘identitarian’ movements to preserve the white race and culture” (donovan et al. ). while ‘strong borders’ are often invoked by white nationalists in order to establish ties between europe and the usa, the use of online platforms has digitized this rhe- toric in the form of popular memes. these memes, such as the ‘no more brother wars’ series, propagate on gab and help other users to identify with each other as a form of solidarity. alt-tech alliance. by deviantart user swytheq. | source: ht tps://w w w.deviant ar t.com/sw y theq/ar t / - - -t he -alt-tech- alliance -is- coming- . p ar all e l p o r t s while being begrudgingly accepted by right-wing pundits, journal- ists, and content creators, gab has yet to find its ‘cool’ among younger users. gab’s logo itself is a transparent appropriation of pepe, a cartoon frog meme associated with the culture of the image board chan, the alt- right and the online campaign for donald trump. breitbart and infowars writers have amplified hostile attitudes to major tech firms in their re- porting, helping to bolster gab’s reputation. resultingly, gab has become an echo chamber for the most disgusting content offered online, where antisemitism, misogyny, anti-lgbtq, and racist epithets circulate expo- nentially. while technologically gab can be glitchy and unstable, it has integrated some of the most popular features offered by other social media platforms. however, few journalists comment on the innovative incorpo- ration of technological features because torba’s public expressions of his political ideology overshadows every discussion of its design. c o n c l u s i o n our analysis shows that technology is not politically neutral. instead, the leadership of the platform company, alongside the profile of the user base and the content they circulate have a significant impact on how platforms are perceived by the public. gab provides a limit-case for analyzing how the alt-tech movement continues to be wedded to the values espoused by the developers. instead of assessing the technology on the qualities of its design, its designers’ politics are built in and can alienate potential new users. by cloning features common to larger platforms and consolidat- ing them into a single user experience, gab’s platform is both political and infrastructural. in the politics of platforms, tarleton gillespie writes that platforms, “like the television networks and trade publishers before them, [...] are increasingly facing questions about their responsibilities: to their users, to key constituencies who depend on the public discourse they host, and to broader notions of the public interest” (gillespie : ). he goes on: “unlike hollywood and the television networks, who could be painted as the big bad industries, online content seems an open world, where anyone can post, anything can be said” (ibid.: ). the day has come where youtube, twitter, facebook, reddit, and google have now become media giants, like hollywood. as such, the social reckoning for platform corporations requires attention to key communities, audiences, jo an d o n o v an, b e c c a l e w i s an d br ian fr ie db e r g and public interests. alt-tech platforms, like gab, now serve as a warning that without moderation policies, users will share noxious content, which becomes a liability for indexing quality and for promoting the platform’s features. moreover, all communities have rules, both online and off. re- sponsibility lies not only in the design, but in the enforcement of a plat- form’s terms of service, much like a code of conduct. and so, we return to our main question: is technological development within the alt-right driven by a need for stabilization? the answer here is: sometimes. while movement leaders, like richard spencer and tim gionet (baked alaska), understand why gab is important for organizing a social movement community online, they also recognize the need for stay- ing on more established platforms, like youtube and twitter. both called for new regulation to make net neutrality a feature of platforms that allow for unmoderated sharing of user generated content. critically, while gab would stabilize the internal life of the movement, it would not be ideal for reaching out to new audiences, recruiting new members, and capturing media attention; all of which are central for prolonging the life of move- ments (donovan ). for networked social movements, having a pres- ence on all available platforms ensures stability when counter-movements tactically adapt and create obstacles, like in the event of ‘no platforming.’ is it the case that the alternative technology developed in the wake of the violence in charlottesville is something fundamentally innovative? while we identified that gab both clones and consolidates features from other platforms, it does not significantly change how online movements connect, collaborate, or organize. in fact, the engagement on this small platform has become so vitriolic that it may do more to destroy the allianc- es across these movements than to build them. while torba’s public proc- lamations heralded the platform as the only place online where speech goes unmoderated, he had to remove some racist posts because online infrastructure does not stand outside of the information ecosystem. pres- sure to change one’s platform can come from the public, journalists, or from other infrastructure companies. no single user or platform can act in isolation given the architecture of the internet. that is to say, while platforms may be organized as parallel ports, which can function inde- pendently of one another, they must be plugged into other internet ser- vices such as service providers, domain registrars, and cloud services. as a result, the terms of service for companies that are deep in the stack may become the ultimate arbiters of what content gets to stay online. p ar all e l p o r t s in conclusion, because hundreds of movements coexist online and use internet infrastructure to recruit and get organized, the charisma of movement leaders and the political values of the movement will deter- mine how their social movement community tactically innovates both online and offline. the violence in charlottesville both gained the alt- right widespread media attention, but also propelled online companies to ‘no platform’ white nationalists. the use of violence by social movements often has similar effects, whereby movements that resort to violence of- ten become heavily surveilled by formal authorities, such as the police. however, in this case, sanctions came from platform companies who were implicated in the communication and coordination of the alt-right, which suggests that technology makers are a movement unto themselves. as such, the burgeoning alt-tech movement as well as the online free speech movement will have to choose their political alliances more carefully if they are to succeed in recruiting and retaining members that do not also support far right perspectives. platforms, as sociotechnical infrastructure, will adapt to new forms and norms of conduct, but the values that support design must also support a diversity of tactics and users. r e f e r e n c e s berlet, chip ( ): “when hate went online”, april (http://www. researchforprogress.us/topic/ /when-hate-went-online/) brustein, joshua ( ): “how a silicon valley striver became the alt- right’s tech hero”, august (https://www.bloomberg.com/ news/articles/ - - /how-a-silicon-valley-striver-became-the-alt- right-s-tech-hero). daniels, jessie ( ): “the algorithmic rise of the ‘alt-right.’” in: con- texts / , pp. – . donovan, joan ( ): “after the #keyword: eliciting, sustaining, and coordinating participation across the occupy movement.” in: social media + society / , pp. – . donovan, joan ( ): “‘can you hear me now?’ phreaking the party line from operators to occupy.” in: information, communication & socie- ty / , pp. – . jo an d o n o v an, b e c c a l e w i s an d br ian fr ie db e r g donovan, joan/lewis, rebecca/friedberg, brian ( ): “networked na- tionalisms”, july (https://medium.com/@mediamanipulation/ networked-nationalisms- deae ). ganz, marshall ( ): “resources and resourcefulness: strategic ca- pacity in the unionization of california agriculture, – .” in: american journal of sociology / , pp. – . gillespie, tarleton ( ): “the politics of ‘platforms’.” in: new media & society / , pp. – . goldstein, joseph ( ): “after backing alt-right in charlottesville, a.c.l.u. wrestles with its role.” in: the new york times, august (https:// www.nytimes.com/ / / /nyregion/aclu-free-speech-rights-char lottesville-skokie-rally.html). hayden, michael ( ): “nazis on gab social network show there is no such thing as a free speech internet”, september (https:// www.newsweek.com/nazis-free-speech-hate-crime-jews-social-media- gab-weev- ). hess, amanda ( ): “the far right has a new digital safe space”, november (https://www.nytimes.com/ / / /arts/the-far- right-has-a-new-digital-safe-space.html). kelty, christopher m. ( ): two bits: the cultural significance of free software, durham: duke university press. kircher, madison m. ( ): “alt-right-friendly social network gab raises $ million”, august (http://nymag.com/selectall/ / /alt- right-gab-raises-usd -million.html). lee, timothy b. ( ): “google explains why it banned the app for gab, a right-wing twitter rival”, august (https://arstechnica.com/ tech-policy/ / /gab-the-right-wing-twitter-rival-just-got-its-app- banned-by-google/). losh, elizabeth ( ): “all your base are belong to us: gamergate and infrastructures of online violence”, april (https:// culanth.org/fieldsights/ -all-your-base-are-belong-to-us-gamergate- and-infrastructures-of-online-violence). massanari, adrienne ( ): “#gamergate and the fappening: how red- dit’s algorithm, governance, and culture support toxic technocul- tures.” in: new media & society / , pp. – . mattoni, alice ( ): “technology and social movements.” in: snow, da- vid/della porta, donatella/klandermans, bart/mcadam, doug (eds.): the wiley-blackwell encyclopedia of social and political movements. p ar all e l p o r t s mcadam, doug ( ): “tactical innovation and the pace of insurgency.” in: american sociological review / , pp. – . mccammon, holly j ( ): “‘out of the parlors and into the streets’: the changing tactical repertoire of the u.s. women’ suffrage move- ments’.” in: social forces / , pp. – . neuman, scott ( ). “boston right-wing ‘free speech’ rally dwarfed by counterprotesters”, august (https://www.npr.org/sections /thetwo-way/ / / / /bostons-free-speech-rally-orga nizers-deny-links-to-white-nationalists). pearce, matt ( ): “squeezed out by silicon valley, the far right is creat- ing its own corporate world”, november (http://www.latimes. com/nation/la-na-alt-right-money- -story.html). piven, frances f./cloward, richard a. ( ): “collective protest: a cri- tique of resource mobilization theory.” in: international journal of politics, culture, and society / , pp. – . solon, olivia ( ): “google’s bad week: youtube loses millions as advertising row reaches us”, march (https://www.theguar dian.com/technology/ /mar/ /google-youtube-advertising-ex tremist-content-att-verizon). sovryn, stone ( ): “gab: a cultural primer”, december (https:// medium.com/@stonesovryn/gab-a-cultural-primer-cefa f ). voss, kim/sherman, rachel ( ): “breaking the iron law of oligarchy: union revitalization in the american labor movement.” in: ameri- can journal of sociology / , pp. – . wilde, melissa j. ( ): “how culture mattered at vatican ii: collegiality trumps authority in the council‘s social movement organizations.” in: american sociological review / , pp. – . file:///c:\users\albrecht\downloads\ 	donovan, lewis & friedberg: parallel ports. sociotechnical change from the alt-right to alt-tech affect & subjectivity ali lara, wen liu, colin ashley, akemi nishida, rachel liebert, & michelle billies we are a group of critical theorists who read, thought, wrote, and practiced together while living in new york city during the emergence of occupy wall street, black lives matter, and recently the us presidential election. while our biographies span multiple geographies, we met as researchers, theorists, teachers, and activists across a diverse number of campuses in the city’s largest public university, the city university of new york. this special issue emerged as affect studies provoked our imaginations independently in ways that felt crucial for the development of our respective and reflexive political and theoretical projects. we entered the complexities of using affect studies, inspired especially by the generative tension of theory ‘versus’ practice. through a collective process of collision and creativity, we experimented with what affect studies could do for our intellectual and political commitments, affecting subjectivity to politicize affect. in this piece, we introduce this special issue, which advocates for affect studies as a mode of critical inquiry of use to radical projects of queerness, blackness, disability, decolonization, and temporalities of the body; a turn that is dependent on our re-engagement with subjectivity. after reviewing the legacy of scholarship on subjectivity to which our work is both continuing and responding, we discuss the debates around the role of the subject in affect studies and the political dimension of affect before thinking through the contributions of the five pieces in this special issue. collectively we are affecting subjectivity through an attention to matter, the non-conscious, and identity, and politicizing affect through an attention to form, ontology and practice. overall experimenting, we hope, with anzaldúa’s call to, “move beyond confining parameters of what qualifies as knowledge” ( , p. ). from subjectivity to affect and back again the concept of subjectivity has been tremendously important for the development of the social sciences and humanities since the second half of the twentieth century. in the editorial introduction of the launch issue of subjectivity (previously the international journal of critical psychology), blackman, cromby, hook, papadopoulus and walkerdine trace subjectivity as a primary category of social, cultural, psychological, historical and political analysis. with althusser’s demonstration that state apparatuses produce identities through institutions that interpellate and ultimately create subjects, the discursive creation of ideological positions first situated subjectivity at the center of structuralism. a less-passive subject capable of cultural resistance followed, through stuart hall's take on gramsci in the s, initiating the move of structuralism’s subjectivity away from both a marxist economic perspective and biological determinism. by the late s, the study of subjectivity shifted from ideology to power/knowledge and from a theory of the subject to processes of subjectification. in this foucauldian perspective, subjectivity came to be understood as "the experience of the lived multiplicity of positioning" (blackman, et al. , ), the experience of being subjected to power/knowledge-discursive practices and technologies of the social through which subjects subjectified (disciplined) themselves. other contributions for the theorization of subjectivity during this poststructuralism came from phenomenology's grasp of the subject's accounting for experience, mainly through language, and feminism's insistence on the political character of personal experiences and the centrality of the body (see enciso & lara, ). according to blackman et al ( ) badiou's critique of subjectivity as an epiphenomenon of the operation of power/knowledge within material, socio-historical and institutional relations, initiated an ontological crisis that began to question the poststructuralist commitments to discourse and signification, inaugurating another turn in the study of subjectivity. deleuzian philosophy and his notion of ‘control society’ claimed that "there are forms of materiality out of which subjectivity is modulated and augmented" (p. ). this concern for material singularities that became the condition of possibility for an early interest in disciplines previously excluded or critiqued – most notably neuroscience – to help theorize these other-than-socially-constructed components of subjectivity. eventually these movements lead to ‘the affective turn’ (clough & halley, ; blackman & venn, ; gregg & seigworth, ; lara & enciso, ). two decades on affect studies has consolidated an important body of literature that, while diverse, shares a concern for attending to non-conscious, non-cognitive, trans-personal and non-representational processes, as well as the communicative capacities of bodies and matter ‘beyond’ discourse. with massumi's take on deleuze ( ), and sedgwick’s take on tomkins ( ) in early foundational texts, affect studies became quickly recognized as a turn in critical theories characterized by a return to some expressions of ‘hard’ science as well as to process philosophies. since this time, the scientific and philosophical sources of affect studies have diversified significantly. for example, if process philosophers like deleuze, guattari, bergson, james, whitehead, and spinoza, were the initial background (lara, ), affect scholars are now also finding inspiration in contemporary thinkers like ranciere's philosophy of aesthetics (see panagia, ), harman's object oriented ontology (see clough, ), or malabou's material plasticity (see sparrow, ), among others, opening the field to both speculative realism and the continental tradition of western philosophy more generally. similarly, while affect studies’ relationship with science began with theories of neuroscience such as those proposed by damasio or ledoux, or with evolutionary perspectives on the physiology of the organisms such as those proposed by ekman or tomkins, it now also includes thinking with genetics and biological sciences, mathematics, and quantum physics/the physics of small particles, among others (blackman & venn, ). theorizations of technological advances, particularly with regard to digital media, have also become another important ally in affect studies, this time in thinking the human organism as endlessly mediated by technology in ways that challenge traditional forms of subjectivity (clough, ; see also hansen, ). most recently post-structuralism is no longer the ‘straw-man’ of affect studies. as evidenced in the namesake of this journal, there has now also been a return to subjectivity. mark hansen’s ( ) “post-phenomenological phenomenology”, for instance, addresses human experience through the study of what he calls sensory environment in its interaction with human body. and steven shaviro’s ( ) ‘discognition’, speculating from science and science fiction literature, addresses what it is to be a conscious-cum-sentient being governed by mental processes that are not necessarily rational. patricia clough's ( ) notion of the ‘non-human unconscious’ addresses the reconfiguration of subjectivity and sociality emerging from non-human relations and the dissociation of the self brought forth by the ‘datafication’ of experience. these examples take advantage of the theoretical and political potential of affect studies, which, according to cromby, comes principally through two main focuses of attention: “the deliberate or incidental manipulation of material intensities” and “the ways that feelings can instantiate in the present the influence of the indeterminate future” ( , p. ). we too make use of these and other promises to contribute to this collective, radical work of rethinking subjectivity. but first, we consider the contentious debates around affect and subjectivity to recognize their importance in the framing of our projects. missing subjects, apolitical affects the ‘missing subject’ is one of the predominant critiques of the turn to affect. whether decentered or entirely stripped of analytical meaning, in much of affect theory there was much unease about what a vacated subject meant for questions of power and agency. wetherell explicitly bemoans this loss in determining that much of affect theory “rest(s) on a kind of anti-humanist negation of subjectivity…(where) subjectivity becomes a no-place or waiting room, through which affect as autonomous lines of force pass on their way to something else." ( , p. ) for her and other critics, this move threatened a centering of forces that, while impacting people, could not be traced in any meaningful way to their conscious (or unconscious) actions (ellis & tucker, ). the launch of subjectivity very much recognized the significance of this threat. while standing by the need for scholarship that understands subjectivity as processual becomings, blackman et al ( ) warned that this scholarship could have the problematic effect of ‘flattening the subject’ into something fixed and static and presumably apolitical or at least theoretically non-valuable. citing hemmings ( ), they cautioned that a ‘giving up’ of the subject often inferred that theoretical work centering subjectivity was outdated, off-trend, and sometimes even intellectually naive. those theorists that they were critiquing assumed that a decentering of the subject allowed for a theorizing that did not have to deal with the messiness of identity, representation, social construction, and experience where that messiness often led to work that folded back into essentialism and determinism. the affect critics pointed out that they unfortunately also circumvented scholarship that sought to decenter the normative subject by theorizing differential productions of marginal subjectivities; work that has become increasingly valuable for bringing to subjectivity an analysis of race, sexuality, gender, disability, and additional forms of alterity. the turn to affect, then, was rightfully critiqued as yet another instance of a refusal to engage in legitimate questions of oppression and being, as brought to the academic table by those who lived those bodily productions. asking whose subjectivity matters, these critiques spoke more broadly to a tendency within hegemonic theory to avoid taking seriously subaltern theories that address the messiness of the marginality, identity, materiality, and politics of lives and liveliness. thus, related to this concern, is what the affective turn inferred about subjectivity itself. some elements of affect studies deem affect distinct from emotion, thereby threatening to reduce emotion to a solely cognitive function. as greco and stenner point out, "drawing an overtly sharp (and value laden) distinction between affect and emotion serves, paradoxically, to perpetuate the illusion that such words refer unproblematically to states of the world, thus bypassing the need to think carefully about the conceptual issues at stake" ( , p. ). ahmed also highlights this problem when she argues that, "we might note as well how the turn to affect, and the designating of affect as what moves us beyond emotion, allows the reduction of emotion to personal or subjective feeling" ( , p. ; see also terada ). while much of affect theory problematizes both ‘reason’ and ‘emotion’, sidelining the latter as non-material could reenact the cartesian binary in a way that marks subjectivity as a messy ‘feminized’ space of experience and emotion while pure affect becomes the ‘masculine’ space of the ontological objective real that much of feminist thought has tried to dismantle. likewise intent threatens to be sidelined as analytically non-valuable. as leys ( ) points out, the loss of subjective intent seems to infer a loss of sociality that troubles the idea of subjective action. this deemphasizing of experience leaves behind troubled questions of politics, action, and agency; for how might power be challenged if the subject is seemingly deterministically produced through forces of affect that leave no room for spaces of resistance. herein lies a second overarching criticism of affect studies – the ‘apolitical affect’. refocusing on ontology and processes instead of epistemology and identity threatens to not only abandon the subject’s capacity for agency but also selectively neglect the critical hermeneutic traditions of poststructuralism. for hemmings ( ), the political productiveness of affect studies required a chronology of critical scholarship that took seriously subjects in the margins, holding up racialized and gendered bodies as rejecting naturalizing narratives. hemmings argues that it is only based on such theorizations of power and the subject that affect studies can afford its freedom of attachment and ability to move beyond the binary structuralist positions. in this sense, the fluidity of affect, especially in sedgwick’s and massumi’s works, threaten some sort of anachronism. a discontinuity with poststructuralist constructivism, a faith in something “other”, and the exclusive priorities of autonomy and choice offered by affect neglect the ongoing role of social forces in the formation of subjects. however, rather than rejecting sedgwick and massumi, hemmings suggests that affect studies could benefit from reassembling with “both the social and in critics’ engagements with the nature of the social” (p. ). from our perspective, affect studies is neither an ahistorical hegemony that denounces the significance of subjectivity, nor a celebration of the neoliberal illusion of free choice via its critique of mediated agency. the critique of the missing subject and the critique that affect is apolitical are one and the same: a critique of the lack of politics of the sovereign subject qua a conscious, self- contained organism of free will. how certain subjects affect and are affected is not a random process, but demands theorization toward the level of population, toward how affect moves through or gets ‘stuck’ to certain bodies-in-formation and that also participates in creating subjectivities across various political contexts, or what has recently been called 'affective capitalism' (karppi et al. ). in other words, affect theory does not need to denounce the important analytic category of the subject, rather it can highlight a kind of politics that addresses the subject through processes of circulation, engagement, and assemblage, rather than as originating from the position of a sovereign subject. some examples of the theorization of subjectivity that addresses the affective experience in relation with social configurations are found in approaches such as walkerdine and jimenez ( ) who think through communal beingness in steeltown in south wales; or brown and reavey's ( ) affective approach to the sense-making process of people with traumatic experiences; or blackman's ( ) approach to processes of mediation like voice hearing, suggestion, and telepathy; and stenner and moreno ( ) who feature affective experience as liminal in the context of organ donation. as argued by krause ( ), what affect theory rejects is the politics of the subject, the organic conscious subject that embodies the notion of sovereignty, that is central in the establishment of liberal democracy. the turn to affect thus helps to rethink the assumption that agency and politics must begin with the subject and then to consider that affect studies requires a re-theorization of subjectivity. indeed, as affect studies has grown, there has been an emergence of scholarship that explicitly connects affect and politics, or amplifies the inherently political capacity of affect (seigworth & gregg, ). scholars of affect studies have radically contested and destabilized social constructionism, epistemology, psychoanalysis, humanism, and disciplinary boundaries that occupy academia (puar, ). they have contributed to our understandings of how molar power and control circulates through affect, while simultaneously theorizing molecular resistance and visionary potential (anderson, ; chen, ; clough, ; massumi, ; protevi, ). pointing to oppressive modes of control, blackman ( ), drawing on clough ( ), states that, “affect can be captured through strategies of biopolitical governance…(where) capitalism has developed more strategies and techniques for modulating and augmenting affect in ways that might close down hope and extend biopolitical racisms” (p. ). anderson ( ), for instance, analyzes an industry of carefully crafted scents that manipulate people’s affective experiences; chen ( ), too, analyzes the ways in which matter is animated through transnational racism by theorizing the case of the lead crisis in the u.s. where matter— lead—is racialized as a product of china, depicted as harmful to innocent u.s. children. affect then, can, “unite us, divide us, and determine the social and political value of different types of bodies” (gatens, , p. ). that bodies can be induced to certain propensities and tendencies brings the necessity to “meet affective modulation with affective modulation” (p. ), requiring, as massumi ( ) continues, an aesthetic approach to politics. for massumi, such politics are “dissensual”, a holding of alternatives “without immediately demanding that one alternative eventuate and the others evaporate" (p. ). for panagia ( ), the politics of sensation involve rupturing the configuration of that which is given to the sensible domain of the human body through aesthetic experience, the first political act, panagia argues, is always an aesthetic one. for highmore ( ) this is an “experiential pedagogy of constantly submitting your sensorioum to new sensual worlds that sit uncomfortably with your ethos” (p. ). such expanding of “affect horizons” promises an "opening up to the affective, sensorial tuning and retuning of the social body" (p. ). these theoretical directions represent what we found most promising within the affective turn: its resonance with the ways that brown, black, feminist, queer, and indigenous scholars have long been politicizing feelings, flesh, and spirit (e.g., anzaldúa, ; lorde, ; nash, ). lorde’s ( ) seminal writing on the power of the erotic is just one example: in the way my body stretches to music and opens into response hearkening to its deepest rhythms, so every level upon which i sense also opens to the erotically satisfying experience, whether it is dancing, building a bookcase, writing a poem, examining an idea. (p. ) explicitly attending to the erotic as a means to trouble a splitting of the embodied from the political, lorde’s project joins with the above quoted call by anzaldúa's ( ) for new kinds of theory and new theorizing methods; one that could be answered by affect studies. within affect studies, “the body is as much outside itself as inside itself” (gregg & seigworth, , p. ). it is this entanglement that witnesses an inherent participation and potential within the world, and thus that makes an intervention in the traditional notion of the individual and its ancestral demands for a particular kind-cum-standard of subject. this subject is, effectively, ‘he’ who is disconnected from the world – de-supernaturalized, de-sensitized, and emerging from the same explanatory principles that justified the occupation of indigenous peoples, the enslavement of black peoples, and the institutionalization of mad peoples (wynter, ). displacing the subject through affect studies, then, is an enactment of our critical commitments to queerness, blackness, disability, decolonization, and the temporality of the body. affecting subjectivity, politicizing affect with the launch of subjectivity, the editors recognized that there was far more work to be done, "in linking the current recourse to affect, central to much contemporary sociological and cultural studies work, with models of psychical or neurological functioning that do not bring in psychological individualism through the back door" (p. ). it is here that we locate the contributions of this special issue, where we use the affective turn to further our critical theorizations of subjectivity. however we do so with another twist. one of the original priorities of subjectivity was the creation of “an eclectic inventory of subjectivity that reads prior intellectual conceptualizations in the light of current political priorities”. thus we also put our experimental subjectivities to work for a range of intersecting radical political and theoretical projects. we use the promises of the affective turn to both affect subjectivity and politicize affect, collectively experimenting with how to do a more response-able scholarship within contemporary conditions of capitalism, racism, (hetero)sexism, and rising fascism. affecting subjectivity among the various ways that our pieces affect the theorization of subjectivity, some common identifiable openings are the possibilities of affect for exploring the relation between material process and subjectivity, looking for non-conscious processes with relevance for the emergence of subjectivity, and rethinking categories previously associated with identity. first, papers in this collection offer analyses of subjectivity that are rooted and embedded in material relations at various levels – from stolen land, to populations, to human bodies, to small molecules. ashley and billies, for example, explore non-representational thought through an analysis of “blackness as a material capacity”. moving away from the individual subject as well as the individual human body, their analysis takes us to an understanding of the productive capacities of blackness at the level of population. the emergent event of race does not solely create black identities, but “black spaces, black thoughts, black presence, black bodies - human and otherwise”, ontologically informing black matter such that subjectivity is a processual post/relational population emergence. whereas in this theorization, black matter emerges from assemblages modulating affective capacity, in nishida's contribution material relations work as the basis for the emergence of subjectivity. nishida looks at relationality among different bodies in the healthcare system, particularly those entangled in recursive practices involving disabled bodies and care provider bodies. according to nishida, “recursive encounters and practices slowly change the register of the bodies involved, allowing them to accumulate ontological knowledge about the other body”. this ‘affective relationality’ grounds the growth of a subjective process between care providers and care receivers whereby, “not only do some bodies slowly learn from and adapt haptically to one another, but also a sense of sympathy and intimacy begins to circulate between them”. although material relations and subjectivity also might come from somewhere else than the organic relations, it is the openness of the human body that allows for this co-capacitation and subsequent creation of ‘something bigger.’ switching scales, lara develops a bergsonian understanding of perception based on description and speculation. bringing together notions like diffraction and attunement, he suggests an understanding of perception as “a process with material base”, or “the concatenation of material modifications of rhythm in different scales of the reality”. as well as exploring material interchanges and synchronization at the organic level, lara also turns to a molecular scale of reality by speculating what kind of space-time entanglements are brought by red wine into the production of the subjective perception of time. lastly, liebert approaches a post- / cultural and political paranoia as directly related to colonization, thereby invoking decolonial commitments and indigenous ontologies that enable a reading of this affective milieu as potentially (r)evolutionary matter. second, our contributions offer theorizations of subjectivity as arriving through non- conscious entanglements or assemblages, thus opening questions around what kind of subjectivity productions emerge through non-conscious activity, and what could be done to subjects through this capacity for unawareness. ashley and billies describe inundation as an affective process where “knowledge” emerges as informational code, made material. it is through the coreferencing across innumerable sites of inundation such as memory, discourse, and materiality, that memories of future events are felt but never lived. blackness in this way becomes known, felt, lived, not at the level of consciousness but sensed, like the breathing of air. this capacity of blackness sets the condition of possibility for “black risk”, a pre-conscious process less dependent on black subjectivities than productive of them through population production. another non-conscious event affecting subjective production might be found in what lara calls “diffraction in the mind”, the sudden appearance of space-time-matter relations that are apparently not taking part in the current event, but that appear in human perception by virtue of our organic engagement with matter, expanding or contracting lapses of time, and even more, bringing physical qualities from somewhere else to the present event. in his words, “perception – and subjectivity in general - is embedded in a material and spatiotemporal process aesthetically expressed that cannot simply be neglected”. similarly, nishida foregrounds ontological connections of bodies, instead of subscribing to the traditional understanding of human connections made through cognition-based communication (e.g., verbal communication). exploring the relationality of subjects that are not only socially constructed as ‘different’ but are made to differ based on the types of capacities they embody, she engages with a pre-conscious development of relationality. by doing so, her work also embodies the principle of disability studies which works to destabilize cognition- and rationality-centered definitions of human subjects. drawing on anzaldúa, liebert proposes an unsettling and reparative reading of pre-paranoid subjects that appeals to the concept of la facultad as a pre-conscious engagement with human and non-human entities, reclaiming this experience as a capacity that references our participatory relationship with the world. third, in our papers, race, gender, sexuality, class, and disability are no longer identitarian containers for the sovereign subject so much as dynamic processes. liu's contribution explores shame’s capacity for circulation and its potential to rethink theories regarding the formation of queer identities as shameful subjects. an alternative formation of queer subjectivity is possible, liu suggests, if we develop a curious engagement with shame “as a capacity for circulation and an intensification of affect that can accumulate on particular ‘sticky’ social objects”; which can benefit the theorization of subjectivity via a theorization of identity at the level of populations. the question of the accumulation of properties in certain populations is also present in ashley and billies' expansion of blackness. for them our understanding of blackness could move from a racial quality of subjects to an ontological becoming attached to bodies, but also body parts, places, events, ideas, and so on. their analysis leaves identity as an epiphenomenon of emerging of events (rather than an inescapable quality that the subject is tied to), thus asking what blackness does and what kind of surplus value derives from its production. in a similar vein nishida's analysis points to the production of identities within the u.s. neoliberal assemblage of public healthcare for low- (or no-) income disabled people. disabled and care provider bodies participate in this exploitative assemblage, yet in doing so they relate through difference resulting in their co- capacitation. as nishida explains, the subject enters into care practices that cultivate the openness of the body, as well as its constant relation with other bodies and its surroundings, thereby reconfiguring the subject. directly facing the practices by which one is cast into identity categories, liebert names the effect of the colonial subject haunting psychology’s diagnostic practices. her diffraction of these practices opens up a landscape where the paranoid subject lives “beside-the-mind”, a psychic borderland of pain and possibility. politicizing affect in affecting subjectivity, our papers also experiment with politicizing affect. we have chosen to break the rules of habitual or dominant modes of critical inquiry and activism. breaking- &-entering established forms, ontologies, and practices, we trespass to breech borders and invite alternative kinds of engagement. first, committed to exploring the different registers, temporalities, and scales of activity participating in affective circulation, affect studies requires that epistemology and methodology be considered in terms of emergent ontologies and thus that we might look to aesthetic resources for their speculative and evocative capacity. ashley and billies rely on experimental writing “to evoke an experience in which the reader becomes immersed within a field of sensory blackness while expressing an affective analysis that exposes black affective relations… in a prolific, nonlinear fashion”. swarming the reader with elements of inundation, their form provokes a feeling of how informational blackness emerges as felt sensation that expands beyond a conscious knowing, demonstrating an understanding of population production through both quantitative and qualitative evocations of coded blackness. lara, too, attends to form, proposing experimental writing as a way to speculate about the molecular relations that escape phenomenological experience, to take seriously causal relations expressed in poetry while simultaneously exploring organic interaction through observation. this “non-methodological” procedure doesn't pay fidelity to any epistemological model, it is rather engaged with a disobedient and creative believing that “knowledge has more possibilities when it emerges from an entanglement of science, philosophy and aesthetics”. as well as by selecting human and non-human interlocutors that trouble a colonial divide between the knowers and the known, liebert experiments with a “slippery” style that enacts and demands the “mystified” approach to paranoia, and to present day politics, invited by her analysis. second, we disobey through ontology. liu's contribution elaborates on how the epistemological commitments of both lgbtq psychology and the queer approach to gay shame make them coincide on “localizing shame as an object attached to a single subject, whether it be the white gay male or the unhealthy queer”. as an alternative, liu turns to psychologist silvan tomkins’ theory of affect to address shame as a process of circulation and movement between bodies. this approach allows an ontological move towards a curious engagement with how shame moves across differently sexualized and racialized bodies, therefore shifting a seeming political obsession over the binaries of pride and shame, health and pathology, toward a broader concern with the affective movements of populations. in their analysis of black risk as an affective surplus that produces and moves populations, ashley and billies likewise offer a counter-framing that invites black resistance as excess, modulating the production of populations primed for forms of political intervention. importantly for them, this intervention can be analyzed at the ontological level in order to take seriously the affective modulations that lead to resistant possibilities across, not within, bodies. with her concept of affective relationality, nishida examines solidarity and relationality through ontology. she asks how “solidarity—or in this case, relationality— may be developed and nurtured when the differences among people are based on not only identities but also embodied differences in capacities.” she continues that “[a]s much as such capacity and debility are constructed socially, i also integrate the ontology of impairment or disability into my analysis—by foregrounding the reality of embodied capacity and debility which gives a rise to the care industries.” offering an unsettling and reparative reading, liebert’s ontology welcomes paranoia’s liveliness, allowing this capacity to “look back” at psychological and political practice, inviting us into an apprenticeship that may lessen colonization’s grip. third, through this collection of papers, we break-&-enter taken-for-granted modes of practice, seeing political capacity where its perhaps not otherwise allowed. liu’s turn to tomkin’s theory of affect rethinks the political potentials of embracing the affects that are traditionally thought as negative. rather than conceptualizing shame as an object to be rid of, or to be reprivatized through homonormative policies such as same-sex marriage, liu argues that “shame can, indeed, be transformative in the context of relational reciprocity, as tomkins states that it is motivated by an ‘incomplete reduction of interest or joy’ ( , p. ) that is about mutual gaze and interconnectedness,” especially at a time of neoliberal hyperindividualism that fractures collective agency. nishida argues that affective relationality between disabled people and care providers offers a basis of self-organized assemblages, or what harney and morten ( ) call the undercommons, which interrupts the neoliberal assemblage that violently produced their relationship in the first place from within. likewise, liebert’s reparative reading asks if there might be radical potential within the very coils of “psycurity” assemblages, which otherwise direct paranoia in ways that animate a neocolonial security state. as a response to the bifurcation of nature within psy practices, her subsequent conceptualization of paranoia as a capacity beside-the-mind further opens the possibility that instruments that might otherwise be used to ignore experiences may instead be used as a means of attunement, while redirecting any interventions away from the individual and toward experiences’ space of encounter. twists and turns further theorizing subjectivity via the insights developed in affect studies leads necessarily to conditions of possibility in the emergence of subjectivities outside conscious and rational activity. we have pointed out ways in which our contributions look at material relations and non-conscious processes as some of those conditions for subjectivity to emerge and that exploring them allows us to rethink categories previously associated with identity. one of the most interesting provocations of affect studies is that some of these conditions of possibility for the emergence of subjectivity might be distance-driven - made possible, for example, by configurations of the social environment that bypass conscious human activity. in that sense, as clough ( ) has suggested, the political power of affect studies lies not just in what the body can do, but also and more importantly in the analysis of what the body can be made to do. we can expand that principle towards an analysis of the tendencies or propensities in the emergence of human subjectivity; or what subjectivity can be made to do. in that vein, politics emerging from the theorization of subjectivity based on affect theories are necessarily politics beyond a sovereign version of the subject. it is a politics aware of a distributed agency surrounding us in our lively world. politics beyond the politics of the subject, doesn't mean neglecting the politics of the subject, rather it means to further explore the ways in which new forms of control and manipulation of populations are setting conditions for the emergence of racialized, gendered, disable bodies, as well as the perpetuation of general homogeneous states of the body. rather than an abandonment of the subject, we find in affect studies a provocation to return to a desire to diversify the theoretical approaches to subjectivity. in their introduction to the affect studies reader, gregg and seigworth ( ) advocate for theory – any theory, with or without a capital t” – to operate with “a certain modest methodological vitality rather than impressing itself upon a wiggling world like a snap-grid of shape-setting interpretability” (gregg & seigworth, , p. ). such shape-setting is rather like what liebert in this issue calls a “think-net” – casting a mode of ‘explanation’ that captures, domesticates, stills the world, rather than respecting the mystery and liveliness of all matter, or what barad ( ) might describe as “meeting the universe halfway”. in contrast, anzaldúa describes theory as that which, “produces effects that change people and the way they perceive the world” ( , p. ), an unending practice of border-crossing and metamorphosis, perhaps what one might even call shape-shifting. overall, in this special issue, this collective experiment, we hope to have welcome turns in the theorization of subjectivity and twists in the affective turn, strengthening our own capacities to be theoretically nimble and humble, responding to the world in ways that challenge the dominant conceptions of reality that circulates through the present political moment. reference list ahmed, s. 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( ). unsettling the coloniality of being/power/truth/freedom: towards the human, after man, its overrepresentation. the new centennial review, : . 	from our perspective, affect studies is neither an ahistorical hegemony that denounces the significance of subjectivity, nor a celebration of the neoliberal illusion of free choice via its critique of mediated agency. the critique of the missing subje... racism and health in rural america racism and health in rural america katy b. kozhimannil, carrie henning-smith journal of health care for the poor and underserved, volume , number , february , pp. - (article) published by johns hopkins university press doi: for additional information about this article [ access provided at apr : gmt from carnegie mellon university ] https://doi.org/ . /hpu. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ https://doi.org/ . /hpu. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ © meharry medical college journal of health care for the poor and underserved ( ): – . racism and health in rural america katy b. kozhimannil, phd, mpa carrie henning- smith, phd, msw, mph abstract: this commentary responds to the recent article by dr. james et al. on racial and ethnic health disparities in rural america, published in the november issue of morbid- ity and mortality weekly report. we applaud dr. james and colleagues for their important contribution uncovering intra- rural racial and ethnic disparities and build on their paper by discussing potential mechanisms, including structural racism. we also discuss several pragmatic steps that can be taken in research, policy, and practice to address racial and ethnic disparities in rural communities and to work toward health equity for all rural residents. key words: rural, disparities, race, ethnicity, racism. the word “rural” often evokes scenes of pastoral landscapes and agrarian occupa-tions or of small towns where everyone knows everyone else. in this traditional imagery, rural residents are frequently assumed to be—and are portrayed as—white. more recently, rural life has been described, in the media and in research, as a struggle, with public health crises such as the opioid epidemic and rising mortality rates, which have had a disproportionate impact on white rural residents. , while these images and issues are based in real life stories of some rural residents, in the way of sweeping generalizations, they do not reflect the reality of all rural residents. far from being homogeneous in the racial and ethnic profiles of their residents, rural areas in the u.s. are increasingly diverse, both racially and ethnically. in fact, more than % of all rural residents (more than million people) are people of color* and american indians. while people of color have lived in rural communities for centu- ries, substantial growth in their numbers has occurred over the past several decades, with no sign of those trends slowing. , still, there has been a notable lack of research on intra- rural differences in health by race and ethnicity. as such, findings reported *rural populations are defined as populations living outside of metropolitan areas. the term “people of color” is a socio-political construct used to refer to individuals not of european ancestry, including individuals of african, latino/ hispanic, asian, or pacific islander descent. commentary katy b. kozhimannil is an associate professor in the division of health policy and management, university of minnesota school of public health and the director of research at the university of minnesota rural health research center. carrie henning- smith is an assistant professor in the division of health policy and management, university of minnesota school of public health and an investigator at the university of minnesota rural health research center. please address all correspondence to katy b. kozhimannil, division of health policy and management, university of minnesota school of public health delaware st. s.e., mail code mmc , minneapolis, mn . email: kbk@umn .edu. racism and health in rural america by james et  al. in the morbidity and mortality weekly report (mmwr) rural health series make an important contribution to that space and move the conversation on rural health forward in urgent and important ways. putting findings from mmwr paper in context as dr. james and her coauthors show, people of color and american indians in rural communities generally suffer worse health than white people in those communities. specifically, using data from the – behavioral risk factor surveillance survey (brfss), they found that rural residents from racial and ethnic minority populations were more likely than their non- hispanic white counterparts to have poor/ fair self- rated health, to be obese, to go without physician care because of financial concerns, and to have no usual health care provider. these findings reflect wider- ranging racial and ethnic disparities in health and access to care, – but this was the most comprehensive study to date documenting such disparities specifically occurring among residents of rural, non- core counties, that is, non- metropolitan counties with no town of , residents or more. however, people of color and american indians in rural areas are not unilaterally worse off than white people. there are certain areas where racial and ethnic minority populations exhibit greater resilience to particular health behaviors. for example, dr. james and colleagues find the highest rates of binge drinking in rural areas among rural white adults, and recent mortality data indicate that the rising tide of the opioid epidemic has led to an increase in overdose deaths that disproportionately affect rural white men. additionally, rurality appears to be protective against the risk of suicide for african americans, in contrast with other races/ ethnicities, while suicide rates in general are higher among rural residents than among their non- rural counterparts. (for african americans, suicide rates are highest in urban communities. ) when examining racial disparities in a rural context it is important to recognize the specific kinds of resilience that rural communities may confer, especially when there is a cul- tural, historical, or spiritual significance to place in a rural context, as is the case with predominantly african american communities in the black belt of the southeastern u.s. or tribal communities living on reservation lands. above and beyond health outcomes, the paper also demonstrates significant differ- ences and disparities in socio- demographic characteristics within rural communities by race and ethnicity. these differences generally render people of color and american indians more vulnerable than white rural residents. for example, dr. james and col- leagues report that fewer than % of people of color and american indians in rural communities have a college degree, compared with % of non- hispanic whites. additionally, more than half of rural people of color and american indians have an annual income below $ , , compared with fewer than one- third of non- hispanic white people in rural communities. in light of research showing a strong connection between socioeconomic factors and health, future work must build upon the james et al. findings to examine how much these social factors act as determinants or mediators of health outcomes and health disparities in rural communities. for example, would kozhimannil and henning-smith adjusting for them erase any of the differences the authors found in health? if so, effec- tive health interventions may include addressing economic disparities. it is also worth noting the fact that the james et al. paper finds sizable differences in the geographic distribution of racial and ethnic groups. for example, far from being equally distributed across the country, rural non- hispanic black adults are much more likely to reside in the south ( %; including the south atlantic, east south central, and west south central census regions) than any other racial or ethnic group in the study, including non- hispanic whites. more than one- third ( %) of all rural non- hispanic white adults live in the midwest and nearly % of rural american indian/ alaskan native adults live in the west. geographic distribution matters because, as the authors note, different locales expose individuals to different state and regional historical, policy, environmental, and social contexts. within rural communities are diverse populations people of color and american indians in rural communities include both recent immi- grants and people with deep historical roots in rural communities, including indigenous people and descendants of former slaves. both of those populations have faced centuries of systemic oppression that may manifest itself in poor health outcomes today. thus, the dynamics that relate to health for rural people of color and american indians include both ) challenges faced by rural people generally, where residents are lower- income, older, and sicker and have poorer access to health care systems and services; , and ) exacerbation of these challenges based on immigrant status and structural racism. , the second set of dynamics are particularly reticent to change and may drive some of the outcomes uncovered in the work of dr. james and her colleagues as well as other researchers in rural health and health equity. the historical and structural contexts of race in the u.s. render people of color in general, and black and american indian people in particular, vulnerable to poor health owing to challenges in accessing care, lower quality of care, and worse outcomes of care. , indigenous communities have endured loss of land, livelihood, and health, suffering poor health outcomes for centuries. with origins in slavery and genocide, health decrements for black and native people in rural communities are longstand- ing. immigrants to rural areas face challenges, too, including language, cultural differ- ences, and barriers to accessing health care. immigrants are also disproportionately represented in physically demanding work in rural areas, including in agriculture. addressing challenges faced by rural residents, and especially by those who are immi- grants or those who suffer longstanding structural inequities, is a crucial component of research, policy, and clinical strategies aimed to improve rural health. improving health for rural people of color and american indians dr. james and colleagues highlight the rapidly changing demographics of immigration in rural america and make recommendations that address improving care for this population through, for example, meaningful implementation of the culturally and racism and health in rural america linguistically appropriate services (clas) standards. in this discussion, dr. james and colleagues make useful and practical suggestions for how to leverage existing tools to work toward health equity in rural communities. however, in noting that these tools can be used by “rural communities [to] identify disparities and develop effective initiatives to eliminate them,” [p. ] they are putting the onus on the community. certainly, interventions should be community- driven, but state and federal policymakers have a responsibility to support these efforts. rural communities are already disadvantaged in terms of socioeconomic status and infrastructure and there is evidence that rural communities with higher proportions of racial and ethnic minority groups face even steeper challenges. more attention should be paid to how existing tools and resources are used and to whether they serve to widen disparities between communities that have the capacity and resources to devise and implement solutions, compared with those that do not. historical populations, such as african americans living in the black belt and native communities on tribal lands, are not as prominently discussed in the article; certainly the health challenges that span generations are particularly entrenched and resistant to change. importantly, however, these merit sustained attention. explicit and implicit narratives concerning race and racism are omnipresent today, in heated debates about black lives matter, police brutality, and the role of protests in today’s society. usually lost in these debates, though, is the rural context, where deeply- entrenched systems of oppression may be difficult to overcome, especially if widespread imagery of rural life does not include images of people from racial and ethnic minority populations. addressing the historical context of racism in rural communities in order to achieve health equity, it is crucial to prioritize efforts to recognize and dismantle the pernicious effects of racism on health in rural communities. to do so, it is important for researchers, policymakers, and clinicians involved in rural health care to do three things. first, recognize how racism has shaped the history of rural communities. for ex- ample, it is important to understand the establishment of living arrangements and conditions for people of different races, and how race may have influenced the alloca- tion of resources and opportunities differentially. was the local hospital segregated by race at any time? for how long and to what extent does the residue of such a history affect health care delivery at the hospital today? were discriminatory housing policies in place that separated neighborhoods by race? and, importantly, how does this historical context shape access to resources and opportunities today? secondly, to move toward equity in health, it is important to “center at the mar- gins.” that is, become aware of the experiences or identities that are conceptualized as normal, and question that conceptualization, seeking a more inclusive view of normal if it is found to be lacking. frequently—and highly problematically—whiteness is the assumed baseline, and other racial and ethnic identities are seen as different, or even pathologized clinically. indeed, this is common in health services research. dr. james and colleagues note that “the only comparisons tested were between non- hispanic whites  and other racial/ ethnic groups.” [p. ] centering at the margins would put the kozhimannil and henning-smith experience of the most marginalized population at the core of the analysis, and compare other populations with the one that is suffering most. third, taking personal responsibility for asking the question, “how is racism operat- ing here?” in one’s own setting can illuminate actionable steps to dismantle racism in all communities, including rural settings. building on the james et al. article the contribution of dr. james and colleagues is a crucial first step in clearly laying out intra- rural health disparities by racial and ethnic identity. they propose next steps, and below we lay out several additional strategies that may be undertaken in research, policy, and clinical and public health practice. for research, we propose several next steps for work to add more nuance and better understanding to these initial findings. first, we suggest examining geographic differences in the disparities found in the article. for example, is being black in the rural south associated with better or worse health than being black in the rural northeast or west? second, we recommend adjusting for socio- demographic differences to understand better how much of the health differences we see is explained by differences in income, education, and other socio- demographic characteristics. such knowledge is important in order to determine where to target interventions. third, we would like to see analyses such as those conducted by dr. james and col- leagues repeated with a sample of children. doing so would provide evidence to see whether racial and ethnic disparities in health are more or less pronounced among rural children, which will inform the course of health disparities over coming generations. fourth, it would be useful to conduct similar analyses in rural micropolitan counties to see whether the results hold in more populous rural settings or whether they are most pronounced in the most sparsely populated rural settings. fifth, and finally, we recommend examining the role of intersectionality and of other identities within groups classified as rural. for example, while it is useful to document racial and ethnic disparities in rural communities, are there also disparities by sexual orientation, nativity, or gender identity? how do intersections of marginalized identi- ties influence outcomes? for policy and programmatic interventions, we also have several suggestions. first, as we discussed in detail above, we urgently advocate for explicitly and sys- tematically addressing and dismantling racism in all contexts, including in rural areas. second, we encourage policymakers and public health practitioners and clinicians to consider workforce issues germane to these discussions. given both the longstanding his- tory of racial and ethnic minorities in some rural communities and the recent increases in diversity in others, how do we recruit a well- trained and culturally competent or representative pool of health care providers to provide sensitive, high- quality care to all rural residents? additionally, it is important to address occupational issues inherent among rural populations—for example, recent immigrants are more likely to work in physical labor in rural settings; are they protected against injury? additionally, given the aging of rural america, especially among non- hispanic whites, we will need to racism and health in rural america rely on a diverse workforce of younger and middle- aged adults to provide long- term services and supports. how will cultural bridges in those settings be spanned? what protections and trainings will be in place for workers? third, we urge policymakers to think critically and proactively about the role of state and federal policies in perpetuating or alleviating rural health disparities. for example, state medicaid policy plays an important role in access to care for economically vulner- able populations. this is particularly true in rural america, where incomes are lower and reliance on medicaid, when available, is more common. in the james et al. paper, non- hispanic black respondents had some of the worst outcomes in the paper and were much more likely to live in southern states where medicaid was not expanded under the affordable care act. how have changes in access to care and insurance affected health and health disparities among diverse rural residents? finally, we urge policymakers and the public health, clinical, and health services com- munity to address the social determinants of health, including addressing educational quality, poverty, infrastructure, and transportation, among others. doing so would benefit all rural residents, but might have an especially beneficial impact on the popula- tions whose health is the most vulnerable. there are racial and ethnic disparities in vulnerability to poor health outcomes in rural communities, and there is also a deep pool of resilience strengthening the diverse residents of rural america. we present several potential and overlapping options for research, policy, and practice to improve health equity in rural communities. regardless of which seem most politically, economically, or socially feasible, doing nothing cannot be an option. the james et al. article illuminates shameful health disparities that build on centuries of oppression for which we are collectively responsible. in the frequent discussions about the wellbeing of rural america, we cannot allow ourselves to lose sight of such disparities and must act urgently and decisively. ultimately, the whole of the country benefits from the vitality and productivity of rural areas, by virtue 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henning-smith . garfield r, damico a, stephens j, et al. the coverage gap: uninsured poor adults in states that do not expand medicaid—an update. meleno park, ca: the henery j. kaiser family foundation, . available at: http:// www .nasuad .org/ sites/ nasuad/ files / the- coverage- gap- uninsured- poor- adults- in-states- that- do- not- expand- medicaid - issue- brief .pdf. . foutz j, artiga s, garfield r. the role of medicaid in rural america. meleno park, ca: the henery j. kaiser family foundation, . available at: http:// www .kff .org / medicaid/ issue- brief/ the- role- of-medicaid- in-rural- america/. microsoft word - . colloquy_tausig.docx music & politics , number (winter ), issn - . article doi: http://dx.doi.org/ . /mp. . . introduction: at risk of repetition benjamin tausig abstract the introduction to the colloquy offers a synoptic discussion both of the women’s march and the essays that follow, routing its summary through questions of repetition and emergence, and through questions of pastness and futurity. the inaugural women’s march occurred in a confusing and stressful historical moment, with many strategic questions in flux. the introduction considers what it meant both to organize a protest event under such circumstances, and what it meant for ethnographers to try to study it in that moment. it considers, moreover, how scholars of sound, music, and protest can proceed methodologically when quite literally no one is sure what is happening, much less what will happen next. the introduction describes some of the racial and tactical fissures of the march, especially through questions of repetition, and prefaces the theoretical discussions of agonistic democracy and dissensus that follow in the other contributions. i did not lose my voice at the women’s march in washington, dc, in january , but i did lose other people’s voices. somewhere, perhaps on the metro or the bolt bus back to new york, i left my small, weather-beaten field recorder. so i depend now on my memory to recall the sounds of that historic day. aside from being out a few hundred dollars to replace the recorder, i am remiss that i cannot replay the ten hours of interviews, songs, chants, and ambiences that i documented. but perhaps the loss of these recordings might be instructive for analysis, even more than hearing them again would be. after all, the women’s march had extraordinary effects, yet as little as two years later, it is clear that the political conditions under which it was held have already changed dramatically, that there is effectively no going back. perhaps we—that is, all of us committed in some way to the political program of the march—should listen for new emergences, recognizing the march not as a settled matter but as part of a dynamic history in which we remain immersed. i therefore thematize the loss of my sound recordings, and the lost possibility of replaying them, as i introduce this colloquy of four contributions written by astute ethnographers of sound, music, and political dissent. in my introduction to their work, i offer a synoptic discussion both of the women’s march and the essays that follow, routing my summary through questions of repetition and emergence, and through questions of pastness and futurity. the women’s march was in some ways a singular event. subsequent anniversary gatherings have been far smaller, and nothing quite like the original has happened since. but the initial march was also multisited, divided across nearly cities and more than countries, and was therefore heterogeneous in tactics and aesthetics. in that sense, it was not singular at all. this should be no surprise. the event was organized under political duress, as a response to an incoming presidential administration that was openly hostile to women, and vestiges of central organization were only fleetingly apparent. the march was in fact hotly debated from its inception—who would be in charge? whose concerns would be centered? what would the participants demand? how, in fact, would womanhood be defined?—but limited time meant that things would move forward before these matters were settled. people had not broadly agreed on what the event meant, but millions went anyway. the march appeared music and politics winter at first like the beginning of a newly permanent political condition, the sort of gathering that many agreed would need to be repeated often in the ensuing years if it were to become a serious response to the new political order. and yet the questions above only intensified over time, ensuring that the inaugural march would be more first draft than finished product, an opening toward some uncertain politics to come. the ways in which the event was singular, the fact that it could and would not be repeated in its initial form, is historically notable in its own right. but for the purposes of this colloquy in particular, that singularity also raises compelling questions about ethnographic methods for the study of music, sound, and protest. what are the limits and possibilities for an ethnography of an emergent movement, whose structure will soon radically shift? all of the contributors to this colloquy were present at the march in either washington, dc, or new york city, as both participants and observers. and all had conducted long-term fieldwork about music, sound, and protest in other geopolitical contexts. but none were seasoned ethnographers of the movement at hand—indeed, no one was, because this movement was nascent. the essays below therefore draw necessarily on ethnographic studies of the non-iterative. they are efforts to propose explanations amidst ongoing political change. even the colloquy itself grows from moments of uncertainty and rapid change. these essays are adapted from a roundtable held at the society for ethnomusicology (sem) conference, the first sem at which participants could meaningfully reflect upon the new us presidential administration and its implications for scholarship, teaching, and life more generally. the previous year’s conference had been held november – , , in washington, dc, just two days after the election, with many attendees battling sleep-deprivation and feelings of panic and denial. that year’s conference was an unsettling blur, an effort to reckon with events that no one had yet processed and yet from which no one could turn away. the feeling was not too different from that of the first women’s march ten weeks later: urgent but slippery, without ready reference or recourse. a grieving with no avenue toward closure. a determination to act, but a vacuum of options for doing so. a feeling like trauma. one year later, the conference (and our roundtable) was a halting first attempt at intellectual reflection amidst a still-unfolding situation. ethnography often asks its practitioners to make thoughtful decisions and to adopt broad perspective despite circumstances that are immersive, cloistered, insecure, and unfinished. but such circumstances resist any bird’s-eye vantage. this colloquy therefore presents ethnographic commentaries in which emergence and uncertainty are not noise, but in many ways the heart of the data. from the fieldwork to the roundtable to the colloquy you are reading, we remain in the thick of things. meanwhile, the authors also draw attention to particular relationships between music, sound, and politics. their essays are only obliquely about music as an isolatable object of study. perhaps most notably, the figure of the protest musician is decentered as an agent of political transformation in favor of a reading of sound as a material of dissensus. dissensus, and the related notion of “agonistic democracy,” draw upon chantal mouffe and jacques rancière. for mouffe, power is inherent to politics. power cannot be checked or avoided, no matter how putatively rational the actors in a given public sphere may be. there is dissensus is defined by sonevytsky, via rancière and mouffe, as “a manifestation of politics through the eruption of something previously inaudible.” dissensus is an appearance of difference and dispute where these things are not supposed to be, according to the geographies and hierarchies of power maintained by the state. dissensus is thus contentious, but also necessary to any politics worthy of the name. manabe adds that dissensus “occurs when the people who have no voice challenge the logic of exclusion.” the forum contributors as a group find the analytic of dissensus especially compelling, and invoke it throughout the forum in auditory terms. the ideas of mouffe and rancière were not predetermined as threads for the colloquy, but were instead chosen independently by multiple contributors. see especially maria sonevytsky. see especially shayna silverstein and noriko manabe. at risk of repetition no ground for conducting politics, no system of rhetoric so logical and universal, that would allow political negotiations to circumvent power imbalances and other forms of human difference. because pure rationality is impossible, the notion of consensus can only ever be a fiction that obscures the operations of power in political relationships. therefore, agonism—a mode of political engagement in which adversarial relationships are acknowledged and accepted—is the best way to mediate between actors whose differences can never be fully reconciled. dissensus, then, after rancière, is the condition of agonistic disagreement in which true adversarial politics remains possible. a protest event that manifests dissensus by reframing the political visibility of marginalized people, for example, is for rancière genuinely political. such an event does not merely display difference, but reorganizes power and visibility in favor of the excluded. this is the progressive result of dissensus. each of the essays in this colloquy asks what sound does or can do in political demonstrations to remake place and politics dissensually, to open new possibilities and agencies for excluded subjects. and here the function of sound as a catalyst for dissent and dissensus is foregrounded, as opposed to a more conventional focus on musical works, songwriters, and mediums of circulation, as is often seen in studies of protest music. nevertheless, the colloquy does not seek to celebrate sound for its allegedly unique capacity to unsettle political structures. rather, the authors think suspiciously about sound, control, and political change. what seemed to occur at the women’s march (a new movement descending on the capital, making loud demands) is not the full story at all. volume does not always correlate with power, ethics, or even the likelihood of transformation. these essays think through sound, dissent, and dissensus in subtler ways. several of the contributors pursue questions of repetition directly, remarking upon the relationship between the women’s march and forms of political memory. manabe notes, for example, that many of the chants heard at the march had roots in movements as far flung and apparently disconnected as the american civil rights movement, the anti-pinochet rallies in chile in the s, and the wto protests in seattle. the fact that chants, including those heard at the women’s march, are freighted with such histories is at once a source of power and tension. these histories can at times even become a source of embarrassment, especially at protests staged by certain factions of the american left, which is in some corners self-conscious about appearing to repeat its own historical tactics. when venerable chants are powerful, it is often because their familiarity enables them to be used in what manabe describes as a “folk praxis,” a participatory type of engagement that feels accessible and inclusive. this is because almost anyone can join a chant that they already know, or that is easy to learn. accessibility has long been a guiding principle for chanting at protest events, and manabe in her transcriptions of various popular calls at the new york women’s march found many examples of rhythmically simple, reliably eight-beat patterning. the us labor movement, among others, pioneered this kind of chant-making many decades ago by prioritizing simple, familiar tunes (often adapted to the context at hand) that enabled mass participation. this is one way that repetition and predictability can serve sonic dissent, despite the risks that repetition carries. but not the only way. sonevytsky notes, for example, the astute performance of janelle monáe, who at the washington, dc, march invited the mothers of children murdered by the police onstage so that the crowd could, for each victim, “say their name.” this is a tactic that has been music and politics winter described as “surrogation,” or a dramatizing of wrongs that have not yet been addressed. surrogation is an unyielding type of repetition, a mode of dissensus that has especially characterized the protests of the movement for black lives in recent years. manabe explains these surrogations as intertextual expressions—past events called back in the present. the murders of eric garner, trayvon martin, sandra bland, and many others have been routinely surrogated at recent mass protest events; the repetitions of specific chants (e.g., “i can’t breathe!”) have rekindled the dead themselves. the effect of this has been an insistence that those unjustly killed will not be fully laid to rest without reparations for their deaths. repetition in such cases functions as a sonic haunting or, in silverstein’s terms, the emergence of “protest spaces” through “tactical bodies.” sonic repetition is useful in these and other ways. such referrals to history—the repetition of old songs, the tenacious resurrection of injustice—are potent; marchers feel that potency as a sobbing rising in their chests and filling their sinuses. repetition and collective memory create binding affects. but repetition, as noted above, also carries risks. if a chant feels generic, for example, too clearly part of a genre or too closely associated with a past movement understood to have failed or grown archaic, then that chant can make its speaker sound feeble. silverstein writes incisively of andre lepecki’s notion of choreopolicing and choreopolitics to explain this trap, and it is a powerful explanation indeed. when protesters are heard (including hearing themselves) as slipping into predictable choreographies of dissent, the power of speech to initiate a dissensual or agonistic political moment may be lost. treading too close to historical repetition, marchers risk being heard (or ignored) as little more than echoes of past failures. however, it is worth asking whether the fear of repeating historical dissent is somewhat specific to the american left, and perhaps even more narrowly to its bourgeois wing. manabe notes the unusually high value of “sonic innovation” at protests in the united states. such taste for innovation is not only globally unusual, but far from universal even within the women’s march. perhaps the desire to create innovative chants and design innovative posters signaled a concern about historical repetition, a fear that this new movement might be hindered by seeming too much like past movements. one blogger, describing a march a few weeks prior to the massive january event, echoed a common sentiment when she wrote that “the search for an effective response to trumpism has been frustrating thus far. i’ve been disappointed by recent rallies. a women’s strike on a monday during the holidays was of course not well attended. i was confused that the loudest voices were singing outdated chants rather than focusing directly on the politics of today. i nearly left. then i saw a great sign stating—make protest great again. in that moment, i realized resistance to trump has yet to be defined and attending this rally was my opportunity to define it.” for this blogger, overly familiar chants did not usefully link protesters to leftist movements of the past. to the contrary, such chants marked a failure to respond adequately to the unique challenges of the present. novelty should reign instead. this mandate seemed evident in the posters that many people carried. part of the pleasure of attending the women’s march involved listening for clever, original chants and watching for equally clever signs. these creative objects were documented and then shared on social media as examples of ingenious individual expression. (i noted (and retweeted) one daphne brooks, “‘all that you can't leave behind’: black female soul singing and the politics of surrogation in the age of catastrophe,” meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism , no. ( ): – , https://doi.org/ . /mer. . . . ; vanessa k. valdés, “spaces of sounds: the peoples of the african diaspora and protest in the united states,” sounding out! blog, december , , https://soundstudiesblog.com/ / / /spaces-of-sounds-protest-in-the-united-states-and-the- peoples-of-the-african-diaspora/. antonia ferraro, “make protest great again!” momtropolis website, december , , https://themomtropolis.com/make- protest-signs-great-again/. at risk of repetition handmade poster that cleverly showed the rotten tomatoes rating for the b-movie paul blart: mall cop to be higher than donald trump’s approval rating). cosmopolitan, the cut, slate, huffington post, teen vogue, buzzfeed, and many other publications each ran lists of the “best,” “most clever,” or most “badass feminist” signs from the march. the fashion for creative novelty contrasted with the janelle monáe-led “say their name” chant, which figured the past not as “outdated,” as something to be creatively surpassed, but as a subject of ongoing political contention, in continuity with the present. to add a further comparative example, i note that the demand for creative expression at contemporary united states protests is distinctly higher than it was at protests in thailand during my own recent fieldwork there. in thailand, censorship is far more acute than in the united states. there, a protester might join a chant that is thoroughly familiar and longstanding, not at all inventive, and yet still quite provocative, even to the point of inviting arrest. “moments of rupture” that achieve dissensus will not always be moments of novelty. different contexts assign different values to repetition, and from these assignments emerge different fields of dissensual possibility. speaking of the non-west, this forum helps to situate and even provincialize the women’s march by reflecting upon it comparatively. all four of the other contributors place the march in conversation with case studies outside of the united states, including ukraine, syria, and japan, while benjamin harbert also describes the march in terms of broader geographies of gentrification and rurality in the united states. these gestures of national and international comparison are especially vital in a moment when a state of perpetual emergency exhausts media consumers with a politics from which they may feel ethically unable to turn away, and which tends to force people into a posture of critical and political isolation. faraway genocides fall below the fold while trifles flow through feeds; readers/viewers are solicited by being loudly insulted, and the machine that hails us has no volume knob. under this assault, even the left has retreated to the oxygen-starved citadel of america-first, as ethnonationalist threats pass through the gates. under these conditions, it is vital to remember that the united states is not the center of all worlds. silverstein reminds us that while “the grammar of syrian protests may register as somewhat familiar to our western sensibilities, the ontological-political conditions of protest in the syrian regime are extraordinarily different.” she describes the constraints of public gathering in syria, as well as their transformation during the arab spring, in ways that do not readily map onto the constraints that abide in major american cities, where choreopolicing at the level of the street as well as the more diffuse choreopolitics of political power are idiosyncratic, not a reflection of how things work everywhere in the world. manabe provides a clear comparative example that reveals how the production of protest sound functions differently in japan, where the police have a habit of shunting crowds into isolated, fractured lines to minimize their visual presence, thus necessitating the use of multiple loud noisemaking devices. the colloquy, as a whole, reveals what a starkly different kind of event protest can be from place to place, and from state to state. placing the january women’s march (and its aftermath) in comparative study with other movements in other places can help illuminate what the march did and did not accomplish, how it did and did not function, and perhaps, referring to sonevytsky’s conclusion, how it might eventually help instantiate a public sphere of genuine agonistic democracy. dissensual possibility, meanwhile, is also a product of geographies of race and class, which produce nodes of radically different experience and possibility, as harbert describes. this point directs us to a critique of the women’s march that need not be an outright dismissal, but that cannot be ignored. namely silverstein. music and politics winter the march, following both sonevytsky and silverstein’s citations of moss and maddrell, appeared largely as white, cis, hetero, and bourgeois. historian ashley farmer warned, even before the march (and she was far from alone in doing so), that “calls for solidarity often ring hollow for black women ... many black women see the recent election as the latest iteration of white feminists’ betrayal.” as a result of this wariness, the congratulatory post-hoc representation of the event as non-violent by its organizers and some participants fell flat for many observers, who like farmer noted a long history of representation-without-inclusion for women of color within american leftist movements. the march thus threatened to obscure the fact that violence is overwhelmingly initiated by the state, and almost always visited upon marked and vulnerable people, who were not understood to be in control of the event. it was thus arguably a privilege of the women’s march, not an achievement, that it was managed with traffic-direction and high-fives rather than batons and handcuffs by the notoriously vicious dc police, as silverstein notes. perhaps this lack of friction ultimately limited the march’s capacity for dissensus and dissent. after all, what kind of productive agonism, what kind of reorganization of power, can emerge when constraints are not violated, when boundaries are not transgressed, when an event plays close to a choreographed pattern of smooth consensus between the police and citizens? this is not a call for violence, but an empirical observation about where dissensus can and cannot occur. and it is noteworthy that dissensus, where it did occur at the march, was not achieved by novel chants or the avoidance of repetition. creativity was insufficient to truly provoke the state. silverstein claims, after anusha kedhar, that counterintuitively “black lives matter protestors stage cooperation as a form of disruption.” one might add that at the women’s march, janelle monáe and others also staged repetition as an effective form of disruption. i conclude, finally, with a word about assholes, no small part of the focus of the march and its sounding. i wish to briefly consider the auditory logic of assholes, especially as it is discussed by silverstein, before returning to repetition. the chant that sticks most firmly in my memory from the march, that i can somewhat recollect but never quite rehear, is that of the word “asshole,” voiced by the crowd in a low, descending minor-third interval as we passed in front of the president-elect’s own hotel on pennsylvania avenue. i made a point of reflecting on the asshole chant, which even in that moment seemed especially consequential. perhaps i knew that i would never be able to hear it again as i was hearing it in that moment, even if i had not lost my recorder. the long low waves of the word lingered in the canyon of buildings. we trudged slowly through that lingering layer of echo, refreshing it with our voices as we passed someone else’s citadel, a redoubt of power that would only ever engage us antagonistically, not agonistically. we wanted desperately to violate its sanctity, perhaps to undo the hardened and misogynist distribution of power that it signified. suddenly, on a high floor, three children appeared behind a window, pushing aside the curtain so that they could see the march. they stood and watched us. but could they hear? the window must have been thick, and the children were many floors up. were our words audible? were the children interpellated as assholes? were their parents? was the president? perhaps, but to be an asshole is to already know one’s own impunity, and nonetheless not to care. following silverstein’s discussion of the asshole siren, an alert that is unapologetically louder than necessary, we may identify assholery as the mode of governance that rushes into the void left by the absence of an agonistic public sphere. assholery is a mobilization of power without shame or reflection, a knowing foreclosure of the possibility of dissensus. assholery moreover resists hearing its own ashley farmer, “the long history of black women’s exclusion in historic marches in washington,” black perspectives, january , , https://www.aaihs.org/the-long-history-of-black-womens-exclusion-in-historic-marches-in-washington/. at risk of repetition identification. naming an asshole, however inventively or originally, does not in itself diminish that asshole’s power. the asshole chant, alas, produced shit in which we chanters ourselves were left to wallow. in this colloquy, the four contributors whose pieces follow this introduction offer cogent sonic analyses of the women’s march in january , including its successes and its failures so far, but above all its emergences. “what we hear,” writes sonevystky, “is that there is work left to do.” this scholarship is acutely necessary because there will, quite soon (maybe even as you read this), be a next time, and this next time will not be a repetition of the last time. if there is one thing to know from listening to political movements, it is that movements do not stand still; they move. bibliography brooks, daphne. “‘all that you can't leave behind’: black female soul singing and the politics of surrogation in the age of catastrophe.” meridians: feminism, race, transnationalism , no. ( ): – . https://doi.org/ . /mer. . . . . farmer, ashley. “the long history of black women’s exclusion in historic marches in washington,” black perspectives. january , . https://www.aaihs.org/the-long-history-of-black-womens-exclusion-in-historic-marches-in- washington/. ferraro, antonia. “make protest great again!” momtropolis website, december , . https://themomtropolis.com/make-protest-signs-great-again/. kedhar, anusha. “’hands up! don't shoot!’ gesture, choreography, and protests in ferguson.” the feminist wire. october , . https://thefeministwire.com/ / /protest-in-ferguson/. mouffe, chantal. agonistics: thinking the world politically. london: verso, . rancière, jacques. dissensus: on politics and aesthetics. london: bloomsbury, . valdés, vanessa k. “spaces of sounds: the peoples of the african diaspora and protest in the united states,” sounding out! blog, december , . https://soundstudiesblog.com/ / / /spaces-of- sounds-protest-in-the-united-states-and-the-peoples-of-the-african-diaspora/. a response to carla moscoso’s “populism, the press and the politics of crime in venezuela: a review of robert samet’s deadline: populism and the press in venezuela (chicago: university of chicago press)” a response to carla moscoso’s “populism, the press and the politics of crime in venezuela: a review of robert samet’s deadline: populism and the press in venezuela (chicago: university of chicago press)” robert samet accepted: august / # springer science+business media, llc, part of springer nature it is a pleasure to receive this review of deadline: populism and the press in venezuela and to have the opportunity to engage with carla moscoso’s insightful analysis. i’m grateful for many of the reviewer’s key points, which are organized in a helpful chapter-by-chapter summary. i will return to many them later in my reply, but i want to begin by explaining what i take to be the book’s broader significance. two decades of the tumultuous twenty-first century have undone easy assumptions about the democratizing influence of media technology. rather than spreading liberal democracy across the globe, the political, economic, and technological openings of the late twentieth century sowed the seeds of populist revolutions. the political grounds beneath our feet are shifting; what happens next is anyone’s guess. if we are to make predictions, much less act upon them, we need a conceptual framework suited to the times. that is especially true when it comes to thinking about the role of news media in political processes. so many of our normative pronouncements about what media outlets should or should not do are still playing catch up to what media outlets are actually doing. there was no better laboratory for observing the transformation of news media in times of populist upheaval than venezuela during the hugo chávez era ( – ). when i arrived in , venezuela was the acclaimed epicenter of the “left turn” in latin american politics. the capital, caracas, was home to an old and powerful private press, a robust alternative media movement, and a burgeoning state media. digital technology and social media platforms were booming. so too were broadcast and print news outlets. today, caracas’s incredibly diverse media ecosystem is a thing of the past, destroyed in part by the extreme political polarization that pitted supporters and opponents of the late president hugo chávez against one another. much of what we are witnessing now in the usa and europe was already on full display in venezuela: openly partisan news outlets, selective reporting, accusations that the government was censoring the press, international journal of politics, culture, and society https://doi.org/ . /s - - - this reply refers to the comment available at: https://doi.org/ . /s - - - . * robert samet sametr@union.edu union college, schenectady, ny , usa http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . /s - - - &domain=pdf https://doi.org/ . /s - - - mailto:sametr@union.edu counter-accusations that the press was trying to overthrow the government, real concerns about fake news, and cynical accusations that real news was actually fake. theories of populism provide a robust framework for understanding the role that media plays in these polarizing times. specifically, they allow us to observe how news outlets construct “the people” in the likeness of an aggrieved victim. that is the case i put forward in deadline. the book starts from the premise that grievances, large and small, are what fuel populist movements, and it describes the role that news media plays in amplifying these grievances. at the heart of the story is a practice that i observed alongside crime reporters, which epitomized journalism in the chávez era. crime reporters focused on gathering and airing denuncias (accusations or denunciations) about all manner of wrongdoings. in dead- line, i show how this practice of public denunciation functions as the discursive scaffolding of populist mobilization; it was the observable practice though which a collective fiction, the will of the people, was brought to life. by following this practice from the ground up, we can observe the process through which populist movements take shape, and we can make more accurate predictions about where they are going. what i take to be the book’s main contribution is its description of how news media constructs the collective fiction atop which both populism and democracy rest. there is scholarly consensus that every populist movement is built in the image of “the people” (e.g., canovan ; kazin ; laclau ; panizza ). what is still missing is an adequate description of the part media play in creating this imagined community. some might take this to be a purely academic matter, but i disagree. predicting the fortunes of any populist movement depends on a strong understanding of its political base, how that base is formed, and how it evolves over time. ethnographic studies of populism are few and far between. methodologically, ethnogra- phers work differently than most social scientists. the resolute empiricism of participant observation—its inductive move from the specific to the general—means that ethnographers are often pigeon-holed, their theoretical contributions asked to play second fiddle to other, less grounded methods. in my introduction, i describe deadline as a roadmap for studying the relationship between media and populism ( – ). along with natalia roudakova’s losing pravda ( ) and reece peck’s fox populism ( ), it is one of a handful of recent works that provides a bottom up perspective on our current predicament. it does so from an admittedly unexpected angle. *** crime news may, at first glance, seem like an odd starting point for a book that sets out to rethink the relationship between media and populism. charismatic leaders or grassroots activists might seem more intuitive, but this common sense is predicated on decades of forgetting. the racialized specter of crime—along with immigration and terrorism—has been the key ingredient of rightwing populism since the mid- s. stuart hall was the first scholar to recognize the pattern in his writings on authoritarian populism ( , ). not coinci- dentally, hall’s point of departure was a study of crime news and moral panics in great britain (hall et al. ). britain at the dawn of thatcherism was, of course, quite different than venezuela in the chávez era, but in both contexts, urban crime became an object of populist mobilization and counter-mobilization. when i began fieldwork in , i was not pursing a project on populism or even crime journalism. i planned to compare how different visions of democracy translated into different samet ways of practicing journalism. going in, i knew that venezuela was deeply polarized between chavistas (supporters of president chávez) and the opposition, but i did not fully appreciate the extent of the polarization until i started conducting interviews with journalists. everything— from the most cataclysmic events to mundane details of personal behavior—was colored by the chavista/opposition divide. i chose to work with crime reporters because urban violence was perhaps the one thing that everyone agreed was out of control. after a few weeks working alongside crime journalists, i became interested in their use of denuncias, a term that roughly translates as “denunciation,” “accusation,” or “complaint.” crime journalists saw it as their job to expose wrongdoing, and denuncias were the medium through which they operated. some denuncias were based on painstaking investigations ala bob woodward and carl bernstein’s reporting on the watergate affair. however, most denuncias came from brief interviews with crime victims or their families, after which they were broadcast over the airwaves or published in the crime pages. these public accusations were often emotion filled, and they framed outrage over crime as part of a popular backlash. but it was not just crime journalists or the opposition who were using denuncias. the news media was flooded with denunciations of all political stripes. anyone familiar with latin american politics since the cold war is likely familiar with the use of denuncias by activists and human rights defenders (e.g., tate ), so i was surprised to discover that with the exception of sylvio waisbord’s work ( ), very little had been written on the subject. *** my attempt to explain the carousel of accusations and counter-accusations in venezuela’s news media led me to theories of populism and specifically to the work of ernesto laclau. although i have deep reservations about many of laclau’s normative stances—especially on the relevance of class identity, but also his definition of democracy—it is nonetheless possible to separate the normative from the descriptive. laclau effectively solved the riddle of populism, but he did so from within a theoretical tradition that is alien to many social scientists. as a result, his work is routinely misunderstood. the most egregious mistake is made by scholars who reduce “discourse” to mere words and their content (e.g., weyland ). discourse is a practice. as the ordinary language philosopher j. l. austin reminds us, every saying is also a doing; every utterance or act of inscription is a physical speech act that can be observed, quoted, mimicked, reframed, etc. ( ). the following thought experiment provides the clearest explanation as to why denuncias matter to the formation of populist movements. think of a large mass of agrarian migrants who settle in the shantytowns on the outskirts of a developing industrial city. problems of housing arise and the group of people requests some kind of solution from the local authorities. here we have a demand, which is perhaps only a request. if the demand is satisfied, that is the end of the matter; but if it is not, people can start to perceive that their neighbors have other, equally unsatisfied demands—problems with water, health, schooling, and so on. if the situation remains unchanged for some time, there is an accumulation of unfulfilled demands and an increasing inability for the institutional system to absorb them in a differential way and an equivalential relationship is established between them. (laclau : ) a response to carla moscoso’s “populism, the press and the politics of... denuncias channel unfulfilled demands. media is the primary institution through which demands are broadcast, yet media is largely absent from laclau’s theory of populist mobili- zation. starting with denuncias gives us the closest thing we have to a litmus test of laclau’s ideas, but it also allows them to be reformulated based on close observation of the discursive practices that he hypothesizes. that is one way of reading chapters – of deadline so that they add up to something more than a series of observations about news coverage of crime in venezuela. chapter is about the role that media plays in political polarization or the formation of an external frontier that distinguishes allies from enemies. chapter looks at denuncias as an articulating practice through which chains of equivalence are formed that link otherwise disparate grievances. chapter looks at different ways the popular will can be mobilized, and it identifies repetition (performativity) as the key mecha- nism through which denuncias operate. chapter tackles the principle of popular sovereignty as the underlying logic that animates both populism and democracy, a point that laclau recognized but also obscured. deadline describes crime news as a conduit through which the popular will is produced: it channels demands for vengeance or protection via a stream of denuncias, accusations, and call- outs; it frames these demands in the name of victims and their families; it depicts crime victims as representatives of the sovereign people; and it depicts the victimizers—the criminals, the corrupt cops, the weak politicians—as enemies of the people. all of this is overlaid with racialized and economic assumptions that map directly onto long histories of oppression. the people most likely to be cast in the role of criminals were poor and working-class people of color from the urban popular sectors. this was the group most closely associated with chavismo and the bolivarian revolution. all of this fits the pattern of rightwing populism that stuart hall identified. today, these tactics are brazenly exploited by the likes of jair bolsonaro, victor orban, and donald trump. how then to explain the fact that nicolás maduro, heir to arguably the most successful left movement of the twenty-first century, also took up the gauntlet of punitive populism? *** ethnographies change in the writing, especially ethnographies that were over years in the making. deadline started off as my ph.d. dissertation. when i began writing, i had a neat framing in which punitive populism was a strategy deployed by the opposition against the chávez government. that was consonant with much of what i observed, but it failed on two counts. first, it ran the risk of downplaying the backlash against crime as just another media- fueled moral panic. nothing could be further from the truth. for most of the period covered by this book, venezuela’s homicide rates were among the highest in the world and outrage was fully justified. second, it failed to recognize the strong support for law and order policies within chavismo itself, support that president maduro later used to legitimize a series of brutal police crackdowns. over the past years, police have killed thousands of people from the very sectors that the bolivarian revolution pledged to protect (unhchr ). with time and distance, i began to see this as a story of how punitive populism can emerge from within an avowedly leftist project. i’ve given this extended overview in order to help frame my response to moscoso’s review and specifically three points that i believe to be most important. i am taking them out of order so as to make my reply coherent. samet first, i agree with moscoso that moments of populist rupture usually coincide with moments of economic crisis. in chapter , i describe how the economic crisis of the s and s helped create the conditions of possibility for the bolivarian revolution and hugo chávez. was economic crisis a precipitating factor for venezuela’s punitive turn? yes and no. when nicolás maduro assumed the presidency in , he inherited what would become the worst economic crisis in modern venezuelan history. his open embrace of mano dura was tied, in part, to economic instability as well as attempts to paper over rifts within his coalition. that said, the groundwork for venezuela’s punitive turn had already been laid. the rise of police killings, the expansion of the carceral apparatus, and the shock-and-awe policing of poor barrios—all of this was underway in caracas long before venezuela’s petroeconomy began spiraling toward collapse. while i am not interested in dismissing the role that economics plays in the formation of populist movements, deadline argues that we need to deepen our understanding of historical materialism beyond the purely economic. grievance is the material force that drives populism. i am not making an esoteric theoretical point here by grounding populism in the experience of suffering. if we assume that populism is a mechanical response to the crises of capitalism, then we risk repeating the mistakes of the chávez administration. president chávez’s ingoing belief was that violent crime rates would fall alongside economic inequality. that did not happen. instead, crime rates went up. by late , just before i began fieldwork, it had become clear that crime was becoming a significant political issue. instead of addressing the problem, the president and his supporters tried to paint it as a media-driven panic. this brings me to a second cogent point that moscoso raises–that deadline could have shown more about the way that government-friendly news outlets covered the subject of crime. i agree. the lacuna reflects the polarized dynamics of venezuela’s public sphere. during my time on the caracas crime beat, most state media outlets rarely covered crime news for reasons that were both ideological and pragmatic. ideologically, crime news reinforced racial and economic stereotypes about the popular sectors that the bolivarian revolution was eager to overturn. pragmatically, crime news only served to reinforce a narrative of govern- ment failure. for both of these reasons, pro-government news outlets tended to avoid crime stories. when they did turn to the topic, the coverage was propagandistic in the worst sense. pro-government outlets played up small victories, downplayed failures (unless the failure could be set at the feet of an opposition politician), and accused their colleagues in the private press of manufacturing a crisis. the absence of crime news from pro-government media was part of an attempt to deal with perceptions of insecurity rather than the problem itself. it dovetailed with a question that bothered many of my closest interlocutors on the crime beat. why, we wondered, did chávez ignore soaring crime rates? the best explanation is that a substantive solution was already out of reach by the time it had become clear that the original plan (reduce crime by reducing inequality) had failed. security depends on justice. it depends on law abiding police, ethical judges, reasonable statutes, propor- tionate sentencing, accountable institutions, and equal treatment of all persons regardless of their socioeconomic status. venezuela’s justice system was in shambles from top to bottom, and it desperately needed substantive reforms, but far reaching reforms depend on the good faith of all the parties involved, which is virtually impossible to accomplish under conditions of extreme polariza- tion. it is on this count that the opposition bears equal responsibility for venezuela’s devolution into punitive populism. rather than affirming a commitment to democracy, their actions undermined the good faith necessary to build a functioning polity. that brings me to one final point. the reviewer is correct to observe that populism is a recurrent feature of latin american politics, but i am not sure we have read the same a response to carla moscoso’s “populism, the press and the politics of... genealogy or take away the same lessons. it was scholars from latin america—like gino germani ( ), di tella ( ), and francisco weffort ( )—who pioneered research on populism. this first wave of research explicitly approached the phenomenon from the ground up in a way that provincialized charismatic leaders and resisted conflating populism with authoritarianism. the “rediscovery” of populism during the s and early s by some us and european scholars seems to have ignored this fact. it is true that caudillismo is an unfortunate habit that latin american republics keep repeating, but populism does not begin with charismatic leadership nor does it ineluctably lead toward authoritarianism. while i completely agree with moscoso that democracy is not reducible to popular sovereignty, neither is it conceivable without it. scholars who tried to imagine democracy absent popular sover- eignty have been the ones most surprised by populism’s inevitable return. my disagreement is not so much with the reviewer, whose comments are generous and thorough, but with the bibliography that i suspect may stand between deadline and many of its readers. democracy is dangerous. not bad, mind you, but powerful and open to different articulations. for that reason, i think it is important to avoid a reactionary response to populism even in its most authoritarian forms. trying to stuff populism back into its box is a shortsighted strategy if you are trying to preserve democratic ideals. those of us who want to save democracy from its excesses need to pay closer attention to democracy’s discontents. we should denounce the racism, classism, and the injustice of punitive populism wherever it emerges, but we also need to understand its origins and its justifications—not in order to excuse brutality against the most vulnerable, but to counter it. for a denunciation of punitive populism to be effective, it has to tap into certain grievances and immobilize others in a way that creates its own groundswell of support. the recent success of the black lives matter movement is a good example, but i would caution that there is no one-size-fits-all strategy of resistance. popular movements follow the same general pattern, but their outcomes are determined by the specific details of history. predicting the trajectory of any popular movement begins with a material appreciation of the grievances that animate it and the different actors that bring it to life. media is at the heart of these processes. if we want to actually understand where news media fits in these tumultuous times, then we need to move beyond liberal platitudes about what democracy should be in favor of a more clear-eyed (but still faithful) account of what democracy actually is. that is what i hope readers will take away from deadline. references austin, j. l. ( ). how to do things with words ( nd ed.). cambridge, ma: harvard university press. canovan, m. ( ). the people. malden: polity press. di tella, t. ( ). populism and reform in latin america. obstacles to change in latin america, edited by claudo veliz, pp. – . london: oxford university press. germani, g. ( ). authoritarianism, fascism, and national populism. new brunswick: transaction publishers. hall, s. ( ). the great moving right show. marxism today, ( ), – . hall, s. ( ). the hard road to renewal: thatcherism and the crisis of the left. new york: verso. hall, s., critcher, c., jefferson, t., clarke, j., & roberts, b. ( ). policing the crisis: mugging, the state, and law and order. hampshire: palgrave macmillan. kazin, m. ( ). the populist persuasion: an american history. cornell university press. laclau, e. ( ). on populist reason. new york: verso. panizza, f. (ed.). ( ). populism and the mirror of democracy. new york: verso. peck, r. ( ). fox populism: branding conservatism as working class. new york: cambridge university press. roudakova, n. ( ). losing pravda: ethics and the press in post-truth russia. new york: cambridge university press. samet tate, w. ( ). counting the dead: the culture and politics of human rights activism in colombia. berkeley: university of california press. unhchr. ( ). “report of the united nations high commissioner for human rights on the situation of human rights in the bolivarian republic of venezuela.” accessed online at https://www.ohchr. org/en/hrbodies/hrc/regularsessions/session /documents/a_hrc_ _ .docx waisbord, s. ( ). watchdog journalism in south america. new york: columbia university press. weffort, f. ( ). state and mass in brazil. studies in comparative international development, ( ), – . weyland, k. ( ). clarifying a contested concept: populism in the study of latin american politics. comparative politics, ( ), – . publisher’s note springer nature remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. a response to carla moscoso’s “populism, the press and the politics of... https://www.ohchr.org/en/hrbodies/hrc/regularsessions/session /documents/a_hrc_ _ .docx https://www.ohchr.org/en/hrbodies/hrc/regularsessions/session /documents/a_hrc_ _ .docx 	a... 	references family medicine vol. , no. • october commentary t wo seismic issues, racism and covid- , have engaged the united states in the last several months, acting together to create what is known as a syndemic —a set of linked health problems that interact synergis- tically to contribute to excess burden of dis- ease in a population—that seriously impacts the health of all of us. racism is old; it has always been a defining characteristic of our country. triggered by episodes of police kill- ing of people of color, particularly the murder of george floyd, we have seen extraordinari- ly broad discussion about it. the black lives matter movement reminds us of the history of racism in the united states, from slavery, to lynchings and jim crow segregation, to mass incarceration (the “new jim crow” ), and the inequity that begins at birth for every black child as a result of the social constructs of race and racism. covid- is new, the biggest world-wide pandemic at least since the influenza pandemic. while it started in china, the unit- ed states has become the world epicenter of the disease with the most cases and deaths (over million cases, more than a quarter of all those in the world, and nearly , deaths as of this writing). as everywhere, the disease has hit the poorest, sickest, and most vulnerable communities the hardest; in the united states that has meant minorities, in whom the infection rate is at least twice that of whites. the causal virus sars-cov- does not discriminate, but the society in which it occurs does. people of color, and especially african americans, have far higher rates of most chronic diseases, which makes them more vulnerable both to becoming infected and for worse outcomes when infected. even before covid, african americans had mortality rates much higher than those of whites, particularly for the most common chronic diseases: diabe- tes, cancer, heart disease, and stroke. , people of color are not more vulnerable, and do not have more chronic disease as a result of genetics or biology. the genetic variation among people of the same race is at least times that between races. , the true causes of population health disparity are collectively known as the social determinants of health (sdh): factors such as adequate housing, food, income, and education, to provide the basis for a reasonably healthy life. in the united states, racism is a major sdh. people of color are overrepresented at lower socioeconomic levels; black families have an average wealth of less than % of that of white families. chronic stress is a critical outcome of the sdh, whether from worrying about whether you can feed or house your family, or from fear that you, or your spouse, or your children, may be killed or jailed at any time, when simply walk- ing down the street or driving your car can put you in danger. racism has placed people of color, over generations, in the situation of something old, something new: the syndemic of racism and covid- and its implications for medical education joshua freeman, md (fam med. ; ( ): - .) doi: . /fammed. . from the department of family and community medicine, university of arizona college of medicine, tucson, az; and the university of kansas school of medicine, department of family medicine. october • vol. , no. family medicine commentary having worse sdh. this makes them chroni- cally less healthy, more likely to have chronic disease, less likely to have adequate health insurance, and more susceptible to the effects of a pandemic such as covid- . it is this impact that creates and perpetuates the cur- rent syndemic. while sdh have a huge impact on the pres- ence and severity of disease, medical outcomes are often tied to access to treatments impacted by the quality of a person’s insurance. a uni- versal single-payer health insurance system would obviate that disparity, because everyone would be covered, and when everyone is in the same system everyone has access to the same options for diagnosis and treatment. medical education also occurs within this racist reality. lashrya nolen, a medical stu- dent writing in the new england journal of medicine, uses the fact that early lyme dis- ease only appears as the characteristic bulls- eye lesion of erythema migrans on white skin to suggest that the failure to recognize it may cause later diagnosis and a greater likelihood of advanced lyme disease in people of color. more importantly, she makes the general point that “normal” is consistently assumed to be “white”. recently, the practice of adjusting estimated glomerular filtration rate levels for african americans has been questioned, and a number of major hospitals have abandoned it. several recent articles address the continuous experience of racist and derogatory comments from physicians and patients alike, the pre- sumption of a greater likelihood of self-destruc- tive behaviors by members of minority groups, and the degree to which such comments are often not only unchallenged but assumed to be normative. - one paper in particular, from a group of medical students, provides an outstanding review of both the deep roots of racism in medicine and the current practice in medical education of using race to create shortcuts and heuristics that are frequently wrong, as well as racist. the authors succinctly state that “the imprecise use of race—a social construct—as a proxy for pathology in medical education is a vestige of institutionalized racism,” and make a number of suggestions for amelioration. additional curricular strategies for addressing racism in medical education can also be found in the family medicine special issue from jan- uary . for medical education to successfully ad- dress racism, it must start by examining ev- ery area in which teaching and learning occur, from basic science lectures to clinical rounds to the informal or hidden curriculum. seminars addressing unconscious bias are good, but we must have zero tolerance for conscious bias, ca- sual racism, and comments about people and false assumptions about populations, just as we should for sexual harassment. we must em- power those who challenge such statements or behaviors, and protect them, even when it is the most junior student challenging the most senior attending. why do we teach students to open their presentations with race: “the pa- tient is a -year-old black male”? in general, most references to race are inherently racist. they certainly are never “just a joke.” the performance of our medical schools and academic health centers should be evaluated on how they actually perform in four key ar- eas: . diversity: does the school produce a health workforce that looks more like america by enrolling and supporting a group of students that is truly diverse in ethnicity, gender, socioeconomic status, and geographic origin? . social determinants of health: does the school teach and carry out programs aimed at addressing the sdh? does it require every patient presentation to ad- dress the sdh equally with the traditional medical content? do students make home visits to understand first-hand the con- text of people’s lives? how much student training occurs in community and primary care settings? . disparities: through its programs of edu- cation and community intervention, and its research agenda and practice, does the school explicitly work to reduce disparities in health care and health among popula- tions? do its graduates practice in spe- cialties and areas of need, and thus help reduce health disparities? . community engagement: does the aca- demic health center clearly identify the community it serves? does it involve the community in determining the location of training, the kinds of programs it carries out, and in identifying the questions that need to be answered by research? these changes are not going to happen easi- ly, quickly, or without offending anyone. indeed, it is quite possible that they will not happen, or not happen as broadly and deeply as they need to, if left to the same people who have family medicine vol. , no. • october commentary been running the existing medical education system. they strike at the heart of our tacit assumptions of normal. but normal is not the same as adequate. to achieve health equity, and a healthy and safe society, we all need to take this on, students, faculty, and patients. we need to take it seriously, and take it to the limit. correspondence: address correspondence to dr joshua freeman, jfreeman@kumc.edu. references . merrill s. introducing syndemics: a critical systems ap- proach to public and community health. san fracisco: jossey-bass; : . . alexander m. the new jim crow: mass incarceration in the age of colorblindness. new york: new press, . . gutierrez p, clark s. covid- world map: which countries have the most covid- cases and deaths? the guardian. august , . https://www.theguardian.com/world/ / aug/ /coronavirus-world-map-which-countries-have-the- most-covid- -cases-and-deaths. accessed september , . . hammonds em, reverby sm. economic reforms might be the best health-care reforms. washington post. august , . https://www.washingtonpost.com/outlook/ / / / economic-reforms-might-be-best-health-care-reforms/. ac- cessed september , . . woolf s, johnson re, fryer ge, rust g, satcher d. the health impact of resolving racial disparities: an analysis of us mortality data. am j pub health. ; : - . wezerek g. racism’s hidden toll: in america, how long you live depends on the color of your skin. new york times. august , . https://www.nytimes.com/inter- active/ / / /opinion/us-coronavirus-black-mortality. html. accessed september , . moscou s, anderson mr, kaplan jb, valencia l. validity of racial/ethnic classifications in medical records data: an exploratory study. am j public health. ; ( ): - . . lewontin r. biology as ideology: the doctrine of dna. new york: harper-collins publishers; . . lewontin r, rose s, kamin l. not in our genes: biology, ideology, and human nature. new york: pantheon books; . . hansen s. here’s what the racial wealth gap in america looks like today. forbes. june , . https://www.forbes. com/sites/sarahhansen/ / / /heres-what-the-racial- wealth-gap-in-america-looks-like-today/# f c c. accessed september , . . derrick cb. sirens: decades of harassment by the police. guernica. july , . https://www.guernicamag.com/ sirens/. accessed september , . . nolen l. how medical education is missing the bull’s- eye. n engl j med. ; ( ): - . doi: . / nejmp . zoler ml. dropping race-based egfr adjustment gains traction in us. medscape. july , . https://www.med- scape.com/viewarticle/ . accessed september , . . tweedy d. medical schools have historically been wrong on race. new york times. july , . https://www. nytimes.com/ / / /opinion/sunday/coronavirus-med- icine-blackness.html. accessed september , . . goldberg e. for doctors of color, microaggressions are all too familiar. new york times. august , . https:// www.nytimes.com/ / / /health/microaggression- medicine-doctors.html. accessed september , . . gordon m. racism, hazing and other abuse taints medical training, students say, democracy now! npr. june , . https://www.npr.org/sections/health- shots/ / / / /racism-hazing-and-other- abuse-taints-medical-training-students-say. accessed sep- tember , . . okwerekwu ja, what happened when i talked about what others ignore — racism in medicine. statnews. april , . https://www.statnews.com/ / / /racism- medicine-lessons/. accessed september , . . okwereku ja, the patient called me ‘colored girl.’ the senior doctor training me said nothing. statnews. april , . https://www.statnews.com/ / / /racism- medical-education/. accessed september , . . nieblas-bedolla e, christophers, b, nkinsi nt, schumann pd, stein e, changing how race is portrayed in medical education. acad med. may , . published ahead of print. . society of teachers of family medicine. family medicine journal. . volume , issue . zimmerman, reflection, voices in bioethics, vol. ( ) © anne zimmerman. this is an open access article distributed under the terms of the creative commons attribution license, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction, provided the original author and source are credited. a reflection on voices in bioethics, covid- , and a new website anne zimmerman we are pleased to announce that voices in bioethics has moved to the columbia university libraries. with renewed focus on academic strength, we aim to contribute to the array of bioethics literature by continuing to publish op-eds and research essays. voices in bioethics brings together diverse views through an academically rigorous online format. our articles seek to identify issues as well as present workable long-term solutions. when voices in bioethics started its covid- page in march, predictions seemed surreal—it was hard to anticipate the toll the virus would take on the us population. there was an attitude of denial: it cannot happen here. with over twenty-five articles published, we have seen unexpected issues, varying points of view, and practical recommendations. spates of public health advice contradicted themselves leaving the public wary of recommendations, especially inconvenient ones. many argue a renewed trust in medicine, science, and public health will result from covid- yet there is evidence of distrust after public health officials were wrong to suggest certain measures like mask wearing would be ineffective and others, like wearing gloves would be highly preventive. when the supply of medical equipment was slow to meet demand, doctors and nurses were overwhelmed, and the number of deaths was rising, public health experts were both revered and blamed. politics added to the turmoil as a divided country saw mask wearers versus the unmasked as teams of democrats and republicans. some republicans tended to push for the right to work, freedom, and prioritizing the economy and jobs. democrats tended to lean into trusting public health wanting to follow orders some of which proved useless, others of which, like stay-at-home orders and closing businesses, saved lives, flattened the curve, and slowed viral transmission. the polarization grew while many shared goals were overlooked. racial violence continued and protests erupted shining a light on long-term injustice, police brutality, and white privilege. the pandemic contributed to the divide as its effects on people were vastly different by race and ethnicity. racial disparity in covid- death rates is a different kind of brutality left unaddressed. the protests led to some shift in the political divide and is said to have pulled in some new supporters who have noticed four hundred years in that black lives matter after all. in an uplifting moment, the supreme court confirmed lgbt people do have constitutional protections against discrimination in the workplace, yet three justices disagreed in a scathing dissent. the health and safety of those employees is dependent on fairness and equality and the court’s opinion gives hope that the majority will interpret the constitution appropriately. covid- also shows global inequity – many of our authors search for ethical global solutions like pandemic zimmerman, reflection, voices in bioethics, vol. ( ) surveillance, use of artificial intelligence and technology, preparation that allows early testing of novel viruses, and new ways to detect viral outbreaks and limit transmissions. i want to personally thank our student editorial staff and interns for their assistance migrating our documents to the new website while along with alumni editors, they continued to edit documents and attend editing workshops to improve output quality and provide a consistent author experience. as voices in bioethics moves to its next stage, beginning its partnership with the columbia libraries, we hope our submissions will continue to address the difficult arguments, analyzing ethical dilemmas and hard choices. our role in changing times, political division, and technological change in medicine and science is to examine controversies, narrow them, and provide both practical and philosophical commentary. our efforts to understand both sides of polarized discourse while presenting strong and convincing ethical views is challenging. ethics is not just presenting both sides: it is determining what the ethical choice is and how to make that choice through personal behavior and public policy. michigan journal of community service learning spring , pp. – review essay post- ferguson service- learning: black girlhood matters terri laws university of michigan- dearborn shapeshifters: black girls and the choreography of citizenship aimee meredith cox durham, nc: duke university press, the august , fatal police shooting of un- armed black eighteen year- old michael brown in ferguson, missouri spawned an embodied move- ment focused largely among millennial black americans. the ferguson moment that became the movement was conceived in by three queer black women as the hashtag, black lives matter (blm). alicia garza, one of the founders, recounts that they developed the hashtag out of their frustra- tion and anger following the jury acquittal of the killer of seventeen year- old trayvon martin by a self- proclaimed citizen- protector who had per- ceived martin to be a threat to his neighborhood (garza, ). after the ferguson moment, young blacks, along with differing degrees of involve- ment from other racial and ethnic allies, grasped the collective power of citizenship for themselves. in the shift from hashtag to movement, images of the black dead at the hands of sworn officers of the law were overwhelmingly male. as the death toll mounted, it gave the appearance that it is primari- ly the lives of black men and boys that have most prominently mattered, although black women and girls have also been snatched from this life when they, too, have been deemed threatening – some- times merely by attitude and word in the name of claiming the right of liberative free speech. regard- less of how it may otherwise be interpreted, the blm movement carries the hallmarks of civic en- gagement. given the urban service spaces shared by peer educators and community partners, the blm cultural impact presents opportunity and challenge to community service learning (csl) educators to develop what sheffield ( ) refers to as “strong” csl in which campus- based service- learners move beyond the self- transformative lessons of effective albeit “weaker” versions of csl to participating with members of the target community to decon- struct the structures of their oppression in order to transform communities. civil protest undergirded by blm sentiment and coupled with attention from mainstream media out- lets has made more (especially white) americans aware of the inequitable and aggressive treatment that black boys and men have long experienced at the hands of the justice system. and although the protests did not eradicate the characterization of black maleness as universally menacing and vi- olent, the movement created space for alternative cultural and societal readings of the bodies of black boys and young men. one example of visual dis- play was the #iftheygunnedmedown campaign that originated on social media and was then re- distributed and discussed through mainstream me- dia outlets. black millennials, often males, posted side- by- side images of themselves draped in the garb of their intersectional situatedness. in one slide, they might be dressed as a university or med- ical student on graduation day next to a photo of themselves in the casual attire of a “homeboy” at a party. these different photos of the same person demonstrate the effectiveness of media images in shaping the perception of young black men. image posters understood that to sustain the negative nar- rative of black males, the media would choose to distribute their “homeboy” photo rather than their graduation photo. they also understood that they were creating their own digital footprint, while at the same time proclaiming that neither set of cloth- ing could automatically allow them to escape the experience of harassment by a justice system they see as more interested in policing than protecting and serving them. regardless of attire, culturally, we have been taught to read black male bodies to laws suggest imminent threat. in shapeshifters, aimee meredith cox observes that although this singular cultural reading of black male bodies is more than a little problematic, there is a societal and cultural language to talk about boys and young black men, but that black girls and young women are “illegi- ble” (p. vii). cox wants to make black girls and young wom- en “legible” (pp. vii, - ). she wants readers of her text to learn to “read” black girls and young women beyond the elementary narratives with which they are familiar such as in hypersexuality. before the lives of black girls and young women can be known, they must first be seen, be made so- cially and culturally visible. by clearing multidis- ciplinary theoretical ground, cox makes black girl- hood studies visible to the academy. black girls are subjects and existential entities unto themselves, not black versions of the more often seen white girls whose cares and concerns normalize what it is like to be female. furthermore, cox chooses to do so without suggesting that the attention given to black males such as michael brown or other un- armed black males killed in officer- involved shoot- ings is inappropriate or that the attention should be diminished. neither is it her aim to “romanticize [black girls] to counter negative representations. black girls are not the problem. their lives do not need sanitizing, normalizing, rectifying, or trans- lating so they can be deemed worthy of care and serious consideration” (p. ). black girls’ lives are worthy of study, and their lives matter for the the- oretical knowledge that they produce. black girls and young women matter – to themselves, but also to their families, to their communities – including detroit – as representative of urban life across the nation. shapeshifters: black girls and the choreogra- phy of citizenship joins seven other texts published since in the emerging field of urban and third world black girlhood studies. without replication, this scholarship follows a pattern similar to that of the late s and early s womanists who saw that black women’s concerns could support their own social and theological critique differen- tiated from both white women’s focus on patriar- chy and black men’s fight against racism. cox’s approach addresses particularity to which driscoll nods in her essay, “girls today,” published in the inaugural issue of the peer- reviewed jour- nal, girlhood studies. driscoll examined literature written for a variety of purposes and provided a retrospective analysis of categories that she saw as delineating contemporary girlhood studies; the field had evolved from the innocence of interests in girls’ leisure activities and “tween” life. the girls and young women cox introduces sometimes have burdens more serious than those of most adults yet they still imagine “girl talk” and hope for a “girl world” (driscoll, pp. , ). in her ethnography, cox builds a non- comparative, self- contained theory of black girl- hood from the precarious, quotidian existence of black girls and young women. between and she served as a volunteer and staff member at the pseudonymic fresh start homeless shelter and other programs of the similarly fictionally- named give girls a chance (ggc) social service agency located in southwest detroit. she used her unprec- edented access to the residents and staff to conduct her fieldwork. cox shows how power and social systems both confine and exclude black girls and young women from the fullness of citizenship. in her text, black females, primarily teenagers and early twenty- somethings, work out the details and issues of their lives, including race, gender, and sex- ual identity development and the appropriation and performance of the same. in using this fresh mate- rial, cox seeks to modernize the understanding of the sexual threat under which too many black girls and young women constantly live, placing them at risk even when they thwart or slip away from the immediate peril; more than half of black girls are estimated to have been sexually abused before the age of eighteen. often, this black girlhood is told through its historical roots of the sexual abuse of black girls and women during american enslave- ment and the jim crow era; this historical narrative is vital to understanding why black females con- tinue to be read as hypersexual objects rather than engaged as empowered subjects. cox’s modern- ization demonstrates that the experience is not only a historical marker on the bodies of black girls and young women. shapeshifters is arranged in three parts with five chapters. in part one, cox sets out the scope of the text through the theoretical literature and the social context of the black- gendered experience in the urban north. set in detroit, the city’s history as a twentieth century geographic siren song to work- ers in the u.s. and the world, is a continuously- present background. the city as a backdrop gives cox a unique opportunity to demonstrate how the post- industrial, disinvested urban experience plays a substantive part in economic imprisonment and political disempowerment even when the person herself is not impoverished. and the reader who is familiar with this context understands that as dif- ficult as is the economic ecology described, the city’s municipal bankruptcy falls outside the period of cox’s field work; it is yet to come. part two of the text marks out the established, external review essay views of black girls and young women, especially as drawn through the dominant gaze of american society and the socio- political terrain of protest, re- sistance to dominant structures, and the presumed or narrative limitations of citizenry placed on the lives of black girls and young women. finally, in part three, she allows the young women to demon- strate their growth and development, to put on full, embodied display how they have come to better understand themselves, some as mothers, and all as striving, interdependent, or independent young women ready to claim their citizenship and educate their communities about the needs of black girls and young women. this outline brings cox’s sub- jects into sight allowing them to become legible. the scope of this content sets the stage for service- learning educators to design what sheffield ( l) refers to as strong community service learning, the description of which i will return to below. in the first chapter of shapeshifters, the author introduces three generations of the brown family, headed by grandmother, bessie, who is a late great migration transplant to detroit from alabama. bes- sie’s arrival near the end of the second wave of the largest in- country movement of u.s. citizens is pivotal. historians mark as the end of this great population shift from the rural south to urban centers of the u.s. south, north, and west. the lat- ter generations of the family meet with economic struggle rather than success. sugrue ( ) notes that automobile manufacturers began to relocate auto assembly plants from the city of detroit to its suburbs and to smaller cities in the midwest in the late s, so unbeknownst to the later migrants, the deindustrialization of the city had already begun and the increased use of automation was reducing the number of workers needed. instead of access to the well- paying, albeit low- skilled jobs available to bessie’s twin brothers who had arrived in detroit years earlier, bessie found work in the city’s kitch- ens serving customers and cleaning restaurants and clubs. like her brothers, bessie had not completed high school. and just a few years after her arrival, the teen- aged single mother was the family’s pri- mary breadwinner taking care of her mother, mary, and her own growing family. her brothers had been blues performers back home and intermittently continued performing in black detroit’s paradise valley entertainment district, but bessie had little expectation that they would contribute to the family. neither did she anticipate on- going assistance from the fathers of her six children. in revealing bessie’s expectations, cox demonstrates the gendered expe- rience of caretaking as a restriction of agency often attached to being female. being born female limits the construction and pursuit of dreams; bessie ac- cepts it as the normal flow of life. the reader can easily imagine the blank stare that she has at cox’s questions about whether bessie herself had ever entertained dreams such as those that allowed her brothers to pursue the limelight of the stage. but bessie’s granddaughters and other ggc program participants, especially as represented through the words and eyes of janice, feel entitled to pursue a life as they envision it for themselves, rather than as does the dominant society, the staid black girlhood narratives, and the social services adults assigned to mold the young women to fit within the dominant vision. cox writes, janice and her peers point to the ways that creative self- making, or shapeshifting, can be reclaimed by black girls and women through the exercise of critical entitlement. a sense of entitlement exhibited by black girls is one that explicitly acknowledges the intrinsic value of all human life and the right to be protected and cared for. (p. ) the text is most successful when cox allows the young women to speak for themselves as they in- creasingly do through the vignettes she presents in chapters two through five. therein the reader gains a sense of their desires; their individual and col- lective agency; how they strive through setbacks, failures, disappointments, and recriminations; and their occasional, hard- fought accomplishments. the events in the lives of these young women sometimes leave them speechless, and when that happens, cox’s coaching dialogue helps them locate sufficient words to unveil the depth of the young women’s hurt, fear, anger, and frustration in the face of what i describe as a lack of protected- ness – not protection, protectedness – the lack of protection without or with minimal cultural ex- pectation of it. the barriers that befall these young women are systemic, familial, and sometimes per- sonal. the reader sees the details of what it means to have no capital resources, few or no family to count on or other social support resources, only to be able to hope that another shelter resident will be available to provide child care and to be grate- ful that the shelter can provide transportation at the end of her work shift so she will not have to wait at night on the horribly unreliable detroit bus system and possibly fall prey as a victim of crime. race and class explain much of the lack of protectedness. gender is inherent in the subject matter, but cox documents how to read the social landscape in or- der to see that, comparatively (again, comparison is not cox’s primary approach), young white girls do not suffer the effects of gender discrimination in exactly the same way. being black and female laws is not just different in degree; it is different in kind. two vignettes illustrate the point. we meet the striving, seventeen year- old shar- ita. she became a resident of the shelter after her family’s apartment caught fire. sharita’s family consists of her mother and three brothers – five year- old twins and a brother who is five years older than she. when fire destroys their home, the fam- ily turns to a relative for shelter: a single mother with two young daughters. under these crowded living conditions – two adult women, four young children, an early twenty- something male, and sev- enteen year- old sharita – sharita’s mother reasons that a female who is young and attractive will have an easier time locating other housing than anyone else in the family; therefore, sharita must go. as a shelter resident, we see sharita’s youthful attrac- tiveness and articulation skills put to good use; she is called upon as an exemplar of the ideals of ggc’s transitional housing uplift programming as well as a representative of the altruistic intentions of the agency’s donors. seen as well- spoken, shar- ita’s rising from the ashes of homelessness to be admitted to michigan state university makes for a great, feel- good story. for a time, sharita becomes a high- profile, resident spokesperson touting the opportunities for her and evidence of the return on donor investment dollars. but sharita never gets to exploit her determination or her youthful attrac- tiveness for her self- willed benefit. she and cox unexpectedly cross paths when cox is a customer paying for her fast food meal in a restaurant drive- through. cox and sharita arrange to meet, and cox engages with her in an informal interview. cox learns that sharita had not been able to enroll at michigan state; the young woman found out that she needed to pay a portion of the tuition – a sum she did have – and (once again), she did not have housing when she arrived in east lansing to begin what should have been her first semester at col- lege. sharita’s social service agency caseworker had known of her circumstances, and the executive director had been made aware, but no one had fol- lowed through with solutions, so sharita was left to locate her own solutions. leaving in an ideal- ized celebratory send- off riding in the fresh start- paid cab, sharita directs the taxi driver to take her to another shelter; without tuition and housing she cannot begin college. sharita turns to what is most available in this urban economic ecology, fast food jobs and, at different times, a boyfriend who may or may not be a part of the drug trade. throughout this vignette, cox leaves room for the inevitable judg- ment that readers will heap onto sharita’s mother for her decision. however, to stop to exercise such a narrow judgment is to miss the point entirely. shar- ita’s story helps to demonstrate the theoretical work of wanzo ( ) in which a black woman must be a certain type of sympathetic character to stir the concerns of the dominant media and “populace and [to] produce institutional effects” (as cited in cox, p. ). narratives that involve a transformation from tragedy or degradation to uplift allow black women to become legible in the larger society and, possibly, to be considered subjects worthy of sympathy and concern. sentimental political storytelling [the theoretical name]  .  .  . elimi- nates the larger social and historical context so that the individual is charged with her own transformation. (cox, pp. - ) the second sample vignette did not occur in her field experience, but it demonstrates one of the fine examples of cox’s attention to the vast theoretical literature needed to develop her argument about the fundamentally different examination of the lives of black girls and women. here, cox pres- ents the kidnapping and escape episode of seven year- old erica pratt. erica becomes the her- oine of the news stories about her. taken from her family’s yard and confined to the basement of an abandoned building, over the course of that night and part of the next day erica chews through the duct tape that bound her wrists, made her way up stairs, kicked through a wooden panel, and punched through a glass window. two young boys playing outside heard erica’s yells for help, notified adults, and set up her rescue. in one of the few times in her text that cox comes close to making a racial comparison, she introduces that the media had also covered the kidnapping of three young white girls in . in those stories, the author illustrates the differing expectations of protection. all of the girls had been kidnapped from their homes. two of the white girls, danielle van dam and elizabeth smart, were taken from their bedrooms; the third, saman- tha runion was taken from her yard, like erica. the youngest girls, danielle and samantha, and , re- spectfully, were sexually assaulted and murdered, their bodies found later. elizabeth smart, older at , was eventually located. the author wants her readers to understand a number of issues about how they are taught to “read” these crimes against girls that distinguish the public response to kidnapped white girls versus the kidnapped erica. for one, cox observes, abductions of black girls and young women often go unnoticed by the me- dia. when there are media reports, a “limited social lexicon . . . makes violence against black girls and young women legible to the broad public. erica’s kidnapping can be recounted as part of the story of review essay drug- and gang- related kidnappings in an embattled neighborhood in southwest (black) philadelphia” (p. ). contemporaneous reporting suggest- ed that such crimes did not occur in the types of communities in which the white girls lived. on the other hand, according to cox appealing to theory from coatney ( ), black children “are expected to defend and care for themselves, while the lack of protection and the various incarnations of vio- lence they face are normalized” (p. ). erica sur- vived because at seven years old, she had learned her lesson well; she behaved as would be expect- ed by a black girl like herself: she was “resilient, determined to fight for herself, and demonstrated a unique pragmatism that belies her years” (p. ). and for it, the media credited her quick thinking and her physical strength; they aired her story in part because it supports the cultural narrative. eri- ca’s ability to take extraordinary measures to save herself is entirely different from the cultural expec- tation for her white peers. the expected norm for white children is that, quite simply, they have pro- tection and never face such a dilemma. shapeshifters allows readers to see the world through the eyes and experiences of black girls and young women. in it, cox successfully opens the in- tellectual space that augments the “societal and cul- tural language [we already use] to talk about boys and young black men” (p. vii) so that we can begin to develop more language to talk about black girls and young women. in the service- learning context, cox’s work is best put to use as content resource. yet its use need not be limited to the population at- hand. the prob- lems she identifies are also often – but not always – a factor of poverty, so the text teaches students about the interconnectedness of black girls and young women with children and/or older adults for whom they may provide caretaking as well as the needs of middle class unmarried women who, for diverse reasons including mass incarceration and lower black male life expectancy, may live for long periods without a partner often as caretakers. the quality of life for these heads of household- caretakers is further diminished by the low wages that too many black women earn. using u.s. cen- sus data, the national partnership for women and families ( ) reports that average earnings for black women measures only sixty percent of earn- ings for men (substantially less than the oft- quoted seventy- nine cents to the dollar earned by white women), a figure that highlights the disproportion- ate poverty of these families, and an environment of striving to survive rather than to thrive. we saw this striving to survive in sharita’s vignette. poverty is more than the lack of financial resources; it is lack of access to think and plan beyond the short- term, not the lack of the capacity to do so. dreams must be put on hold or put to death. but recall: cox has not written her text to display black girlhood as a victimized class; she has written it as a factual ac- count of what they live with in order to develop a picture of how they see their own lives in spite of how the world around them sees (or more accurate- ly fails to see) them, and how they address their will to live fully, regardless. now that these young women are visible, we can now return to service- learning, including sheffield’s model. chesler and vasquez scalera ( ) remind us that the combination of service- learning, race, and gender provides challenging yet “potentially pow- erful learning experiences” (p. ). coles ( ) integrated a race focus in her sociology courses and found that white students who were largely from the suburbs and small towns most often participated in the service- learning option. chesler and vasquez scalera noted that a race and gender focus in a service- learning setting is intended to teach partici- pating students about identities and communities – their own or those of persons in communities where they engage “and/or as part of efforts to challenge and transform racist and sexist aspects of commu- nity life and community agencies/institutions” (p. ). coles acknowledged students’ discomfort in these cross- cultural exchanges. she also provided several pedagogical strategies including orientation discussions and substantive reflection. coles sug- gests that community members may “express  .  .  . resentment at being the object of study and obser- vation or at being perceived as only a receiver of services” (p. ). all of these factors are important to consider in what i am terming the post- ferguson era. on the point of “resentment,” an updated in- terpretation is to anticipate an unyielding determi- nation for community members to set their own agenda, tactics, and priorities. shapeshifters offers service- learning students an excellent content pre- view of race, gender, and class before they enter an urban community site. coupled with sheffield’s ( ) model of “strong csl,” it can awaken stu- dents’ community engagement imaginary beyond the still critical but weaker versions of csl expe- riences described above by coles and chesler and vasquez scalera. to sheffield, it is insufficient for students to learn about themselves; he thinks csl is made even better when the experiences help to transform communities. in his text, strong community service learning: philosophical perspectives, sheffield ( ) seeks to address a frequent criticism of csl that it is insufficiently conceptualized (p. ). he combines community service pedagogy with philosophical laws grounding in dewey’s pragmatism while acknowl- edging that current research in the field observes the use of social theories such as critical theory, he- gemony, and social justice with an aim to diversity; together, these theoretical approaches bolster the practice of csl. the social justice component of the learning comes alive as an outward expression of the inward reflection that is often standard prac- tice in the service- learning pedagogy. as sheffield envisions this version of csl, students unite their inner democratic transformation with communi- ties’ understanding of their needs (pp. - ). sheffield is wise to halt the criticism by some ed- ucators who may view the social justice link as a form of “political indoctrination” (p. ). rather, using the work of heybach ( ) who references greene ( ), sheffield asserts that it is . . . concerned with the self- reconstructive process that comes in understanding one’s ‘situatedness’ relative to self and communi- ty . . . so conceived, social justice is reflective of community, service, and reflective learn- ing . . . in that way, social justice and csl with a social- justice aim, is a deeply democratic mode of being, rather than an orientation based on political dogma. (pp. - ) students’ experiences with diverse communities move beyond self- reflection and self- reconstruction to become useful to those communities with whom they are now partners. incorporating sheffield’s language, i began this essay by arguing that in the post- ferguson era, communities demand to be engaged in appropri- ating their citizenship according to their under- standing of self, situatedness, and the collective self- determined needs of their communities. this stance challenges service- learning project de- signs to include more pre- engagement preparation to be able to see and hear community partners with greater levels of complexity. it suggests that service- learning projects be designed to share in the work of the democratic activity which will be needed to change the systems that inhibit the prog- ress of striving community partners. campus- based learners are regularly called upon to continuously develop writing skills and to collect data through research and communicate findings, especially through visual and digital means. these are in- valuable resources to communities where residents spend more of their time striving to survive than striving to garner the democratic power to which they believe they are entitled. recall the sense of entitlement described above and anticipated by jan- ice in shapeshifters. i highly recommend this book. its topic is im- portant and cox’s non- comparative approach to her task is made more apparent by acknowledging that comparative language frameworks are the more efficient means to which we are accustomed in this discourse; cox overcomes this flawed, norm- replicating rhetoric. black girls and young women too often continue to be seen in reference to black males and white females. an admonition: in spite of this recommendation, the text often drags. the author’s writing captures the considerable descrip- tion made necessary by the new ground that she is breaking. in such, cox seeks to overlook stereo- types. yet in the placement of these descriptions it is sometimes pages or several vignettes before she reveals the explanatory relevance of the descrip- tion for black girlhood theory. these displace- ments leave the reader with anticipatory questions until cox’s interpretation of the girls’ experiences emerges. this is not inherently problematic, except that the author is carving out new intellectual space at the same time that she is teaching the legibility of black girls and young women’s lives. it takes a mo- tivated reader to push through for the valuable theo- retical stance in this substantive work regardless of how many pages or vignettes it takes to reach it. she will deliver; it requires patience. to be sure, this is not cox’s problem alone. i read her text as a post- ferguson primer on black girlhood. (most likely, the timelines of the publishing process would not have allowed her to observe her text through this post- ferguson lens.) shapeshifters, with its self- determining stance, helps to illuminate the emer- gence of gendered hashtags beyond #blacklives- matter. arguably, the most well- known of these is “#sayhername” coined by the african american policy forum; it gives attention to the fact that there have also been police- involved brutality and killings of black girls and young women (african american policy forum, n.d.). despite the caveat, the vignettes give college students ample reflective material to better understand this population from the interior life of these young women. designing the service- learning experience using sheffield’s strong csl will not only disrupt narratives, it will prepare students to participate in the needed radical improvements of the neglected urban landscapes of the twenty- first century in which they will share rather than avoid or gentrify space. seeing and knowing all the potential partners takes time, com- mitment, and incremental structural change; revo- lutionary democratic citizenship always does. review essay notes bill chappell, “people wonder: ‘if they gunned me down,’ what photo would media use?’” npr.org august , . harriet jacobs’ slave narrative, one of the few from a black american woman, is an excellent source for the depiction of the day- to- day sexual threat in enslavement. h. jacobs ( ). incidents in the life of a slave girl. new york: dover publi- cations. originally published boston, . as was bessie’s experience, the greatest pro- portion of black women worked in service jobs. see sugrue, , p. . cox notes that she uses pseudonyms for the young women in her narratives. according to their website, the african amer- ican policy forum was founded in with the mission to seek intersectional social justice. they have also coined hashtags #blackgirlsmatter and #whywecantwait. i learned of the former hashtag after i had subtitled this essay. references african american policy forum. (n.d.). retrieved from http:www.aapf.org/ chappell, b. ( , august ). “people wonder: ‘if they gunned me down,’ what photo would media use?’”. retrieved from http://www.npr.org/ chesler, m., & scalera, c. v. ( ). race and gender issues related to service- learning research. michigan journal of community service learning, , - . cullors, p., & ross, r. ( , february ). the resilient world we’re building now. (k. tippett, interviewer). retrieved from http://www.onbeing.org/programs/ patrisse- cullors- and- robert- ross- the- resilient- world- were- building- now/ dostilio, l. d., & getkin, d. ( ). service- learning as catalyst for integrating community engagement across core academic functions. in w. j. jacob, s. e. sutin, j. c. weidman, & j. l. yeager, community engagment in higher education: policy reforms and practice (pp. - ). rotterdam: sense publishers. driscoll, c. ( ). girls today: girls, girl culture, and girl studies. girlhood studies, , - . garza, a. ( , october ). “a herstory of the #black- livesmatter movement”. retrieved from http://www. thefeministwire.com/ / /blacklivesmatter- / national partnership for women and families. ( , december). african american women and the wage gap. retrieved from http://www.nationalpartnership. org/research- library/workplace- fairness/fair- pay/ african- american- women- wage- gap.pdf rustin, b. ( , february). from protest to politics: the future of the civil rights movement. commentary, p. . sheffield, e. c. ( ). strong community service learn- ing: philosophical perspectives. new york: peter lang. sugrue, t. j. ( ). the origins of the urban crisis: race and inequality in postwar detroit. princeton, nj: princeton university press. author terri laws (terrlaws@umich.edu) is assistant professor of african and african american studies and health and human services at the university of michigan- dearborn. her teaching includes courses in the history and culture of detroit and womanist religious thought. laws conducts research in race, religion, health inequities, and bioethics. http://www.aapf.org/ file:///\ulib-storage.m.storage.umich.eduulib-storagestaffgroupspomjcslmjcsloavolume% _ originalsterrlaws@umich.edu pipeline by dominique morisseau (review) pipeline by dominique morisseau (review) lisa b. thompson theatre journal, volume , number , march , pp. - (review) published by johns hopkins university press doi: for additional information about this article [ access provided at apr : gmt from carnegie mellon university ] https://doi.org/ . /tj. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ https://doi.org/ . /tj. . https://muse.jhu.edu/article/ performance reviews / the bride”—but all the carrying on by the brides- maids and groomsmen grew tiresome long before one of them stepped forward to take over for the rabbi and get the derailed ceremony back on track. while i now pronounce is animated by the anxiety of marital commitment, molly smith metzler’s cry it out examines the identity crisis of being a new mother. jessie (jessica dickey) and lina (andrea sy- glowski) are backyard neighbors on maternity leave in suburban long island. there are class differences between them—jessie is an acquisitions attorney at a big manhattan firm; lina has an entry-level job in hospital administration—but that does not stop them from forming a meaningful bond based on their common experience. things get complicated when the much wealthier mitchell (jeff biehl) ap- pears to ask if they would welcome his wife, adri- enne (liv rooth), also a new mother, into their coffee klatch. the scenes that follow provide a touching and variegated depiction of what it means, for bet- ter or worse, suddenly to be living a life defined by sore nipples, baby monitors, stretch pants, and a nagging anxiety about whether to go back to work or not. in the scene when lina does just that, the loss of friendship with jessie was compelling and sad, thanks to the honest, unforced acting of syglowski and dickey. their performances, framed by the ef- fective staging of director davis mccallum, helped metzler’s play stir compassion for the predicament of career women who want to be mothers. basil kreimendahl’s we’re gonna be okay is also about neighbors with class differences, but the kids in its two typical american households are troubled adolescents and the moms and dads are preoccupied with the threat of nuclear war. they live in cartoonish side-by-side shotgun houses that suggest the “little boxes” made of ticky-tacky that malvina reynolds sang about in . that is the year when the play takes place, right at the time of the cuban missile crisis, and efran (sam breslin wright), a middle-class, white-collar salesman type, spends the first act convincing his working-class neighbor sul (scott drummond) that they should go in together on constructing a bomb shelter to protect their wives and children from the coming apocalypse. the wives and children—efran’s wife leena (kelly mcandrew), his gay son jake (andrew cutler), sul’s wife mag (annie mcnamara), and their angst-ridden daughter deanna (anne-marie trabolsi)—are each alienated in their individual ways. in the second act the two families merge and take refuge in the unfinished shelter to wait for the world to end. and as cabin fever sets in, the play suggests that in effect it already has—not from a cold war nuclear showdown, but in the cataclysmic change in social and cultural values that will define the s, ’ s, and beyond. kreimendahl’s comedy offered a tender satire on the naiveté of american family values during the age of ozzie and harriet. the writing is clever and honest all at once, but the second act struggled to satisfy the narrative expectations generated by the first. efran’s increasingly agitated behavior sug- gests that he—the embodiment of both patriarchy and paranoia—is the bomb that is about to explode, but that threat is too easily defused when his wife simply insists that she has had enough and then burns her bra in a gesture of comic defiance. that leads to a sexual encounter between the teenagers that suggests a breakdown of the gender binary, but before any of these storylines could play out, a big bang and blast of blinding white light ended the play on an inconclusive note and the hollow reas- surance that “we’re all gonna be okay.” are we? as a hopeful though uncertain assertion, kreimendahl’s title resonated with other plays in the humana festival. the wedding vows in i now pronounce were never actually spoken; cry it out ended with a mother’s profound ambivalence about going back to work. there was great anxiety about how life will turn out for the characters in these plays, just as there was a mounting anxiety about an eruption of violence for the audience of recent alien abductions. it is tempting if a bit facile to associate this apprehension with liberal dread during the early months of the trump presidency. still, part of what made a play about air-guitar en- thusiasts a crowd pleaser at the st humana fes- tival was the sheer escape it offered from the hard and complicated realities of the present moment. scott t. cummings boston college pipeline. by dominique morisseau. directed by lileana blain-cruz. lincoln center the- ater at the mitzi e. newhouse, new york city. june , . the world premiere of pipeline at lincoln center theater cemented dominique morisseau’s reputa- tion as a playwright who explores issues of social justice in the united states through complex narra- tives of race, class, and power. much like her earlier work, which includes sunset baby and the detroit project: detroit ’ , paradise blue, and skeleton crew, pipeline reflected morisseau’s deep investments in telling intimate stories about african americans confronting monumental challenges. the produc- tion’s program included a “playwright’s rules of engagement,” which encouraged a sense of com- / theatre journal munity and respectful audience participation, such that, if inspired, spectators could engage in call- and-response or talkback to the performance. the show i attended also included a post-performance talkback with the playwright and performers, giv- ing the audience yet another chance to respond to the play’s themes and further aiding in morisseau’s efforts to build community. directed by lileana blain-cruz, pipeline served as a theatrical rebuttal to conventional ideas about the black family, the role of education in black lib- eration, the strength of black women, and the value of integration. the production rejected stereotypes, clichés, and easy answers to many of the persistent issues and debates that african american cultural producers and intellectuals have wrestled with for decades. while telling the story of inner-city public-school teacher nya (karen pittman), her ex- husband xavier (morocco omari), and their son omari (namir smallwood), morisseau complicates rather than contradicts what audiences think they know about black single mothers, absentee black fathers, failing public schools, school safety offi- cers, black youth violence, and the anxieties of the black middle class. pipeline’s title evokes the social phenomenon identified as the school-to-prison pipeline that fun- nels black children, especially poor public-school students, into juvenile institutions and eventually prisons. the narrative contends with the aggressive use of policing and guards in schools, zero-tolerance policies, and the disproportionate punishments handed out to black girls and boys that criminalize black children. there are resonances in pipeline with the work of black playwright-performers nilaja sun and anna deavere smith. while sun’s no child . . . and smith’s notes from the field focus mostly on the fate of working-class black and latino students in the public-school system, morisseau concentrates pipeline on one black middle-class family in order to address similar issues in both private and public schools. in performance pipeline’s distinct approach raised questions about whether class privilege pro- vides a prophylactic that can protect black children against systemic racial injustice. the play also called attention to another pipeline in the us educational system: the one that delivers those born into privi- lege into positions of power. although the school that omari attends is exactly the kind of institution that feeds directly into the elite echelon of society, the lack of diversity in terms of student body and staff as well as academic subjects raised questions about whether a black boy could also benefit from such a space. the production made another important interven- tion in its challenge to perceptions of black fami- namir smallwood (omari) and karen pittman (nya) in pipeline. (photo: jeremy daniel.) performance reviews / lies as dysfunctional. while the black family, black parenthood in particular, remains under constant critique, morisseau refused to respond to the criti- cism by creating a morally upstanding and intact family. instead, pipeline asked its viewers whether a black boy can succeed in america with his soul unscathed? the production presented a divorced mother and father struggling to assist their son as he attempts to navigate a hostile world that they themselves can barely manage, despite their middle- class trappings. pittman performed nya as a loving and devoted, yet flawed mother who pursues every avenue to help her son succeed. substance abuse, infidelity, and foul language all appear in the play as coping mechanisms that she adopts as a way to manage not only the stresses of single parenting, but also of teaching at an under-resourced school. through the character, morisseau destabilizes what black feminist scholar michele wallace once called the myth of the superwoman, rejecting the notion that survival requires perfection from black mothers. morisseau’s weaving of canonical literature by richard wright and gwendolyn brooks throughout the play allowed the production to talk back to the us educational system, while also demonstrating the power of black literature to craft tender, yet brutal depictions of black boyhood in the country. her dizzying reimagining of brooks’s poem “we real cool” haunted the production. nya’s expli- cation of the four verses for her students revealed how evocative the poem’s depiction of young black boys in remains. this scene also demonstrated the power of black literature to capture the fates of those too often relegated to the pipeline that leads them nowhere and the ability of art and education to confirm that black lives matter. notably, it was a question posed by omari’s teacher about wright’s classic novel native son that served as the lightening rod that threatened his fu- ture. in this moment omari worried about being perceived as a “monster” like the boys in the pool hall in brooks’s poem or like wright’s protagonist bigger thomas. the threat of the black boy as mon- ster appeared repeatedly in pipeline. the vibrant film projections by hannah wasileski presented during scene transitions provided glimpses of young black students at an urban public school. it was difficult to discern whether the students in the footage were simply being teenagers or if they were on the verge of being dangerously out of control. the projections served to remind audiences of how often fear of black male violence emerges in the american imagi- nation, even in the minds of black boys themselves. powerfully, pipeline invited audiences to ques- tion assumptions about what constitutes a “good school” and the idea of school choice, especially if both elite and low-performing schools fail their black students both culturally and pedagogically. new york, with its labyrinth of highly segregated schools, ranging from elusive private academies to under-resourced public schools, provided the ideal setting for the world premiere of the play. over- shadowing the show was the specter of the even- tual prize of acceptance to a prestigious college or university; it loomed large in the background of the story, as does its alleged guarantee for a successful adulthood. pipeline not only encouraged its audi- ences to consider the cost of educational achieve- ment to the souls of many, but also to interrogate what constitutes a successful society. lisa b. thompson university of texas at austin the top of bravery. by jeremy v. morris. directed by tawnya pettiford-wates. quill theatre, richmond triangle players, rich- mond, virginia. february , . blackface minstrelsy haunts american vernacu- lar performance, from children’s cartoons to soror- ity selfies, but in the top of bravery it took center stage. running for three weeks at the richmond triangle players, jeremy v. morris’s new play was a collaboration between quill theatre and the af- rican american theatre of virginia, with support from the conciliation project. even if it had not debuted in the former confederate capital and less than a month after trump’s inauguration embold- ened racism across the country, morris’s choice to perform a blackface repertoire would have been provocative. but the top of bravery was, like the figure that inspired it, brave and virtuosic. the play heather velazquez (jasmine) and namir smallwood (omari) in pipeline. (photo: jeremy daniel.) black women's history and the labor of mourning uc irvine uc irvine previously published works title black women's history and the labor of mourning permalink https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ b d j journal souls, ( ) issn - author millward, jessica publication date doi . / . . peer reviewed escholarship.org powered by the california digital library university of california https://escholarship.org/uc/item/ b d j https://escholarship.org http://www.cdlib.org/ full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=usou download by: [the uc irvine libraries] date: june , at: : souls a critical journal of black politics, culture, and society issn: - (print) - (online) journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/usou black women’s history and the labor of mourning jessica millward to cite this article: jessica millward ( ) black women’s history and the labor of mourning, souls, : , - to link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . published online: jun . submit your article to this journal view related articles view crossmark data http://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=usou http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/usou http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=usou &page=instructions http://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=usou &page=instructions http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - souls vol. , no. , january–march , pp. – comments from the field black women’s history and the labor of mourning jessica millward the image of the grieving african american mother, especially sybrina fulton (trayvon martin), lucia mcbath (jordan davis), and lezley mcspadeen (mike brown), replaying across our television and computer screens has become all too common. isabel wilkerson noted, “there was a lynching every four days in the early decades of the twentieth century. it’s been estimated that an african-american is now killed by police every two to three days.” for many, the images of grieving mothers also struck a cord with many in that we saw in their eyes the pain of mamie till mobley and her son emmett. the story of this family is well known. in the wake of the massacre of nine african americans in south carolina, claudia rankine used the example of emmett till and mamie till mobley to underscore the ever-present acts of violence directed toward african americans. in three white men in mississippi lynched a -year-old emmett. visiting from chicago, till violated southern norms by speaking to a white woman. till was awakened in the middle of the night and taken from the home of his relative. he was tortured before being shot in the head. his body was weighed down by a cotton gin tied to his back and thrown into the tallahatchie river to sink. when his lifeless body was pulled from the river, the handsome young man was unrecognizable. when till’s body returned to chicago, his mother insisted on an open casket. she sent her only child away for a summer to have him returned in a casket. it is a pain that only a parent can under- stand. yet, the image of mamie till is ever present in my mind. as a scholar of slavery, i often ask questions about enslaved mothers and their power to protect their children. sometimes the answers are triumphant but more often than not answers are unsettling. the answers echo the comment made by a respondent in claudia issn - print/ - online #� university of illinois at chicago doi: . / . . d ow nl oa de d by [ t he u c i rv in e l ib ra ri es ] at : ju ne http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . rankine’s new york times op-ed who lamented that, “the condition of black life is one of mourning.” this special volume of souls provides the occasion to discuss the hidden labor involved in the production of black women’s history. this article argues that contem- porary violence against african americans is influencing scholars to articulate a vocabulary that publically acknowledges what we once kept quiet; that there is a psycho- logical and sometimes physical cost associated producing monographs dedicated to african american pain. the labors of writing about haunted and hunted subjects—that is, african americans in the face of sanctioned and unsanctioned violence—is produc- ing a body of scholarship dedicated to grieving publically, be it in the form of formal op-eds, or as tweets and facebook posts. inevitably, this increased attention to and acceptance of mourning is shaping the field of african american women’s history. by articulating the necessity to grieve and utilizing public spaces to mourn, african american women’s historians are shaping an academic discourse to help process the constant state of trauma that often accompanies our scholarly production. the history of black women is a long study in mourning. during slavery planters ensured that they profited from the reproductive capacities of enslaved women. enslaved mothers, on the other hand, contended with the reality that there was quite literally a price on their children’s head. the realities of enslavement left many mothers without children. children were sold. children ran away. children died. and children were killed. rather than the stereotypical callous matriarch devoid of feelings, enslaved women existed in a constant state mourning. darlene clark hine’s classic assessment about the culture of dissemblance is no less important in slavery. there are examples of enslaved women who refused to have children and those who simply walked away form their children. failure to develop a bond with children was a way to manage the inevitable grief associated with losing that child in the future. in this present moment when so many african americans are victim to police viol- ence scholars of slavery are pointed in their commentary on the relationship between african american motherhood and mourning. as daina ramey berry and jennifer morgan note, “we must say to ourselves and our children that, for many people, our lives, no longer associated with the accumulation of wealth for others, now do not matter at all. because in the current racial marketplace, the only people compen- sated for the loss of black lives are those who take them. … black men and women appear to be disposable to all but the families and communities who mourn them.” mourning then, accompanies every aspect of the african american history from slav- ery through its afterlife. writing about the present means grieving the lives of count- less african americans who are systematically being hunted by law enforcement officials. speaking specifically about the role of mothers in the current black lives matter movements, kali gross notes that, “hearing the voices of grieving mothers of slain daughters only strengthens the movement to halt state-sanctioned anti-black violence. it also continues the cause for making black lives matter by valuing the humanity of black women and the families and supporters who do actually mourn them.” black women grieve for their slain sons and their slain daughters. the key difference is that the media forgets many of the victims and this is particularly true souls january–march d ow nl oa de d by [ t he u c i rv in e l ib ra ri es ] at : ju ne if they are black women and girls. but their family does not forget victims of any kind of violence, nor do their communities forget them. the mourning takes on an added layer, however, when those sworn to serve and protect proceed to hunt and kill furthering african americans’s long distrust of the government. by articulating the relationships between the value of black lives and historic silences, scholars are illuminating the bereavement process in a manner that cannot be ignored. if our scholarly dna contains the traditions, training, and historiography that we bear witness to and write about, follows then that our etheric energy (our aura) con- tains the imprint of that work. stated more plainly, african american women histor- ians carry the energy of previous generations. some of this energy is negative; some of it is benign; and some of it is pure inspiration. it is nearly impossible to be a black female scholar writing about history without feeling grief for all the ancestors, especially our enslaved foremothers. i note my own experience with charity folks, a woman who was manumitted from slavery in annapolis, maryland. while conduct- ing research for my dissertation, i found two documents related to the manumission of charity folks, her children’s manumission, and that of her grandchildren. my research into folks’s life forced me to confront the challenges of historical memory in recover- ing african american women’s lives. perhaps more than african american men, african american women were elided by the experience of bondage. for a long time those two documents were the only evidence that charity folks existed. but charity was not content with being invisible. she was a ghost who refused to be silent. she nudged me time and time again to reclaim her story. i learned that charity was an important member of the free black community of annapolis and her descendants were involved in the long struggle for african americans in the united states. reconstructing folks’s life did not simply include stories of success. it also meant trying to understand her pain—a historic pain born out of social conditions, legal policies, and popular constructions that were anti-black, anti-woman, and for the most part anti-black-women. in essence, i found myself often in mourning. mourn- ing her experiences; mourning her losses; mourning the conditions of those who were enslaved and never freed. in addition to the emotional toll that reclaiming her story claimed on my psyche, i also experienced severe health problems while working on the project. other scholars have been less public with their experience but can recount the psychological stress and physical symptoms related to producing a book on african american women. the labor of mourning also involves navigating the pressures of the academy. the edited collection black women in the ivory tower, for example, provides evidence of the amount of disease and death that seems to fall disproportionately on african american women in academia. deborah gray white notes, “[t]he ivory tower can be an exhilarating, stimulating place. but it can also be isolating, debilitating and lonely, especially for those who not only buck the status quo but who’s very bodies stand in opposition to the conventional wisdom regarding academia.” in her work on african american women and the tenure process, chamara kwayke notes rates of terminal illness among african american women scholars. elsa barkley brown sug- gests, as embodied subjects, the weight of the academy falls disproportionately on comments from the field d ow nl oa de d by [ t he u c i rv in e l ib ra ri es ] at : ju ne women of color, and black women in particular. grief and mourning take on an added layer when one interviews black women scholars about the personal sacrifices made to do work in a space that was never conceived to include them. how do we grieve our lives in the academy, writing about haunting historical sub- jects, and witnessing the systematic hunting of black youth by the power structure? we cry. we talk. we agitate. we organize. and we write. social media provides an immediate release of our frustrations. perhaps more importantly it provides the space to grieve with and organize with others. for example, in early , marcia chatelain from georgetown conceived of the #ferguson syllabus. since then concerned scholars of african american history have created a series of teaching materials which can be found on twitter and other social media under the hashtags such as #fergusonsyllabus, #charlestonsyllabus, #ifidieinpolicecustody, #sayhername, #whathappenedtosandrabland? and, unfortunately, the list continues to grow. when confronted with the case of charnesia corley who was sexually violated while in police custody, daina ramey berry started the #blkwomensyllabus. the list was picked up several places on twitter and later formalized as part of the african american intellectual history webpage and featured by essence. as storytellers and secret keepers it is important that scholars of black women’s history engage in what some scholars call, “soul care.” the cross-generational dialogues in african american women’s history conference at michigan state university represented this notion of soul care. co-conveners pero dagbovie and daina ramey berry organized the weekend as a tribute to pioneers in the field of african american women’s history. participants honored and thanked pioneers of black women’s history and acknowledged the difficult road in keeping trans- generational narratives alive. during the course of the conference, it became clear that soul care was crucial for black women historians and soul care was dependent upon finding a safe community. as jessica marie johnson has noted, “at the heart of our craft are the conversations we have with each other. but at the heart of doing african american women’s and gender history is the kinship, trust, and intimacy we build with and among each other.” the community of women, so crucial during other historical eras, is just as important for those of us in academia. we need to allow ourselves the permission to grieve the trauma that we witness via the women whose lives we document. it is important to allow the space for grief and mourning as it relates to scholarly production just as that we allow that space for circumstances in our daily lives. we also need to find moments for joy. as we write about the unquantifiable, and indeed the unimaginable, aspect of human loss, we can better understand the ability to survive. notes . isabel wilkerson, "where do we go from here," essence.com, january , , http://www. essence.com/ / / /where-do-we-go-here-essay-isabel-wilkerson (accessed april , ). souls january–march d ow nl oa de d by [ t he u c i rv in e l ib ra ri es ] at : ju ne http://www.essence.com/ / / /where-do-we-go-here-essay-isabel-wilkerson http://www.essence.com/ / / /where-do-we-go-here-essay-isabel-wilkerson . claudia rankine, “the condition of black life is one of mourning,” new york times, july , . http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /magazine/the-condition-of-black-life-is-one- of-mourning.html (accessed april , ). . jessica millward, finding charity’s folk: enslaved and free black women in maryland (athens: university of georgia press, ), – ; see also jennifer l. morgan, laboring women: reproduction and gender in new world slavery (philadelphia: university of pennsylvania press, ). . millward, finding charity’s folk, – . . darlene clark hine, “rape and the inner lives of black women: thoughts on the culture of dissemblance,” in her hine sight: black women and the re-construction of american history (new york: carlson publishing, ), – . . daina ramey berry and jennifer l. morgan, “#blacklivesmatter till they don’t: slavery’s lasting legacy: the historical value of black life and the casual killing of eric garner,” the american prospect, december , . http://prospect.org/article/blacklivesmatter-till- they-dont-slaverys-lasting-legacy (accessed october , ). . kali n. gross, “how do mothers of slain unarmed black daughters grieve?” huffington post, december , . http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kali-nicole-gross/how-do- mothers-of-slain-unarmed-black-daughters-grieve_b_ .html (accessed october , ). . see jessica millward, finding charity’s folk, especially the prologue, xvii–xxii. . millward, finding charity’s folk, xxi. . millward, finding charity’s folk, xxi. . deborah gray white, ed., telling histories: black women historians in the ivory tower (chapel hill: university of north carolina press, ), – . . chamara j. kwakye, loud silence: black women in the academy (ph. d. dissertation: university of illinois, urbana-champaign, ). . elsa barkley brown, “bodies of history,” in telling histories: black women historians in the ivory tower, edited by deborah gray white (chapel hill: university of north carolina press, ), – . . imani brammer, “thank #blkwomensyllabus for the ultimate reading list to empower black women,” essence.com, august , . http://editor.essence.com/ / / /thank- blkwomensyllabus-ultimate-reading-list-empower-black-women (accessed november , ); see also jessica marie johnson, “charnesia corley and a storify for the #blkwomen- syllabus,” african american intellectual history society, august , . http://aaihs.org/ charnesia-corley-the-blkwomensyllabus-storify/ (accessed november , ). . session title, “beyond talk: herstory in action,” cross generational conversations on black women’s history conference, michigan state university, march , . see also thomas moore, care of the soul: a guide for cultivating depth and sacredness in everyday life (new york and london: harper perennial; reprint edition, ). . jessica marie johnson, “my oah tribute: stephanie m. h. camp & deborah gray white,” as posted on diasporahypertext, april , . http://diasporahypertext.com/ / / /my- oah-tribute-stephanie-m-h-camp-deborah-gray-white/ (accessed november , ). about the author jessica millward in an associate professor in the department of history at the university of california, irvine. she is author of finding charity’s folk: enslaved and free black women in maryland (athens: university of georgia press, ). comments from the field d ow nl oa de d by [ t he u c i rv in e l ib ra ri es ] at : ju ne http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /magazine/the-condition-of-black-life-is-one-of-mourning.html http://www.nytimes.com/ / / /magazine/the-condition-of-black-life-is-one-of-mourning.html http://prospect.org/article/blacklivesmatter-till-they-dont-slaverys-lasting-legacy http://prospect.org/article/blacklivesmatter-till-they-dont-slaverys-lasting-legacy http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kali-nicole-gross/how-do-mothers-of-slain-unarmed-black-daughters-grieve_b_ .html http://www.huffingtonpost.com/kali-nicole-gross/how-do-mothers-of-slain-unarmed-black-daughters-grieve_b_ .html http://editor.essence.com/ / / /thank-blkwomensyllabus-ultimate-reading-list-empower-black-women; http://editor.essence.com/ / / /thank-blkwomensyllabus-ultimate-reading-list-empower-black-women; http://aaihs.org/charnesia-corley-the-blkwomensyllabus-storify/ http://aaihs.org/charnesia-corley-the-blkwomensyllabus-storify/ http://diasporahypertext.com/ / / /my-oah-tribute-stephanie-m-h-camp-deborah-gray-white/ http://diasporahypertext.com/ / / /my-oah-tribute-stephanie-m-h-camp-deborah-gray-white/ 	notes 	about the author racial physics or a theory for everything that happened full terms & conditions of access and use can be found at https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rers ethnic and racial studies issn: - (print) - (online) journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rers racial physics or a theory for everything that happened marcus anthony hunter to cite this article: marcus anthony hunter ( ) racial physics or a theory for everything that happened, ethnic and racial studies, : , - , doi: . / . . to link to this article: https://doi.org/ . / . . published online: feb . submit your article to this journal article views: view related articles view crossmark data citing articles: view citing articles https://www.tandfonline.com/action/journalinformation?journalcode=rers https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rers https://www.tandfonline.com/action/showcitformats?doi= . / . . https://doi.org/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rers &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/action/authorsubmission?journalcode=rers &show=instructions https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/mlt/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf&date_stamp= - - https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/ . / . . #tabmodule https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/citedby/ . / . . #tabmodule guest editorial racial physics or a theory for everything that happened marcus anthony hunter department of sociology, university of california, los angeles, los angeles, usa abstract this political commentary invokes the concept of racial physics, a theory of race and racism influenced philosophically and metaphorically by albert einstein’s principle of equivalence and theories of relativity, especially in light of the recent political season. the goals for this essay are twofold: ( ) provide a critical race conscious assessment of the political season both within the united states and abroad, and ( ) demonstrate how race and racism reflect a broader social cosmology of great consequence, underscoring the tendency among humans to develop constructs that persist across space and time with effects that mirror the nature and properties of matter and energy. article history received january ; accepted january keywords race; racism; trump; brexit; eurozone; einstein; racial physics; racial gravity introduction in , from oshkosh, wisconsin to philadelphia, pennsylvania to charlotte, north carolina to the united kingdom to france white backlash and retrench- ment reared their ugly, though often hidden, heads. white majorities proved to be not so silent. we learned that it will be from white supremacy’s cold dead hands that a woman will be president of the united states, that the progeny of africa and syria will enter europe and maybe become european, and that post-racial will never cease being anything more than an anti- black jedi mind trick convincing the vulnerable and ignorant that the future is now and it will be progressive (e.g. alexander ; bonilla-silva ; carbado ; collins ; crenshaw ; emirbayer and desmond ; feagin ; gilroy , , ; omi and winant ). race and racism drew people apart and together in ways that require deeper attention, revealing multiple and overlapping geographies of politics, futures and oppressions. to be sure, the ability of race and racism to have this effect is not new. whether in pogroms, the passageways of the underground railroad or the toussaint l’ouverture-led haitian revolution, the force of © informa uk limited, trading as taylor & francis group contact marcus anthony hunter hunter@soc.ucla.edu ethnic and racial studies, vol. , no. , – http://dx.doi.org/ . / . . http://crossmark.crossref.org/dialog/?doi= . / . . &domain=pdf mailto:hunter@soc.ucla.edu http://www.tandfonline.com racism to accelerate white mobility and backlash while simultaneously motiv- ating, organizing and oppressing marginalized peoples has been consistent and effective across space and time (e.g. cohen ; du bois , ; harris ; hartman ; james ; marx ; rodney ). in my exploration of these persistent properties of race and racism, i found myself dreaming my way into the physics courses of professor albert einstein. awakened suddenly by the spirit of serendipity i read einstein’s many writings, particularly his theories of general and special relativity. i was especially drawn to his insight about how gravity and acceleration/force collaborate as co- parents of the human experience of nature, matter and energy (einstein , , , ). “what if human collectives create powerful social systems mirroring pro- cesses occurring in the natural world?” i asked as i began mentally aligning einstein’s analogies about dropping rocks, elevators and train tracks with the political events of . this brief essay reflects this intellectual conver- gence in an effort to offer a new frame and understanding for the persistence and influence of race and racism. the central claim: white power enterprises (e.g. imperialism, colonization and manifest destiny) alongside the resistance and movements of minorities produced the enduring principles of the social world: social gravity and social acceleration, race and racism, respectively. stated differently, the history, acts and agitation between the oppressor and the oppressed since the colonial period has participated in making race function much in the way that einstein characterizes gravity. much like how gravity affects matter in the natural world, in the social world race in varying degrees draws people apart and together, binds people to sidewalks, neighbourhoods and institutions of civil society. racism, in turn, operates as a socio-economic and political accelerant and force that leads to racially dispa- rate outcomes and privileges. in what follows, i build a theory of race and racism influenced philosophically andmetaphoricallybyeinstein’sprincipleofequivalenceandtheoriesofrelativity. i will use his philosophical and scientific insights on general and special relativity as a springboard to provoke a new imagining and awareness of the workings of race and racism, especially in light of the recent political season. thereafter, i build out the metaphor to illustrate how political events of the past year affirm that race and racism are not only obdurate and enduring, but also function and influence the social world in ways that deeply mirror major components of einstein’s theory for the effects and understanding of gravity, acceleration and simultaneity; thus there are two interrelated goals for this essay: ( ) providing a critical race con- scious assessment of the political season both within the united states and abroad, and ( ) demonstrating how race and racism reflect a broader social cosmology of great consequence, underscoring the tendency among humans to develop constructs that persist across space and time with effects that mirror the nature and properties of matter and energy. m. a. hunter race as gravity, racism as accelerant “the present book is intended, as far as possible, to give an exact insight into the theory of relativity to those readers who”, einstein ( , ) writes at the book’s opening, “from a general scientific and philosophical point of view, are interested in theory, but who are not conversant with the mathematical apparatus of theoretical physics”. to illustrate the physical and philosophical principles guiding his theories of relativity, einstein offers an example preg- nant with great insight. suppose “i stand at the window of a railway carriage which is travelling uniformly”, einstein ( , ) first asks us to imagine, and drop a stone on the embankment, without throwing it. then, disregarding the influence of the air resistance, i see the stone descend in a straight line. a pedestrian who observes the misdeed from the footpath notices that the stone falls to earth in a parabolic curve. standpoint and intersectional vantage points are angles in and through the truth about (the) matter. importantly, einstein notes that his theories of rela- tivity are not merely a matter of physics but also a philosophy – an epistem- ology and ontology for the nature and ways of things. add to this example, einstein’s physics provocation better known as the principle of equivalence. roughly, the principle holds that the impact of gravity on mass and the force on inert matter are identical. from einstein’s provocation, a popular analogy drawn from everyday life has been used often to illustrate this principle: the elevator. imagine stepping upon an eleva- tor. at the moment of entrance your body feels a force acting, keeping your feet to the elevator’s floor. this same force felt upon entering the elevator is then relatively indistinguishable from the subsequent movement of the eleva- tor upwards or downwards. of course, the descent or ascent if hurried could mean that the individual would suddenly be lifted from the elevator floor in a state similar to that of free-floating astronauts in space. in his later life, einstein would also provide important criticism of the nature of race and racism that share links to his understanding of physical principles and theories. not only convinced that “whiteness is a disease”, in a essay “on the negro question” einstein ( , ) aggressively noted how race and racism seemed a form of social magnetism and force historically oppressing black people: i am firmly convinced that whoever believes this suffers from a fatal misconcep- tion. your ancestors dragged these black people from their homes by force; and in the white man’s quest for wealth and an easy life they have been ruthlessly suppressed and exploited, degraded into slavery. the modern prejudice against negroes is the result of the desire to maintain this unworthy condition. this patchwork of einstein’s theories of relativity alongside his condemnation of whiteness provide an opportunity to explore the enduring legacy of race ethnic and racial studies and racism of the sort he critiqued, illustrating the resilient gravitational pull of race especially when paired with the force of racism, its relatively indistin- guishable kindred social process. ‘la resistance’ will not be televised because the queen is brexiting stage left racial gravity is a feeling. it is the invisible hand organizing us all. racial gravity also pulls bodies into formation. and so it was that i arrived to paris just as the eurozone was determining where and how to allocate syrian refugees, african asylum seekers and unemployed (and usually young) eastern europeans. during that spring of several protests occurred all around paris metro over this allocation and asylum, thus falling under the broad umbrella of “immigration”. while in other nations and places immigration may be or appears as a discrete issue, in a country with a history like france this could not be further from the truth (see e.g. fanon , ; james ; memmi ). over the last decade, france’s reputation as one of the world’s most perva- sive and effective colonizers was now intervening in its future. the revolutions and uprisings that roiled throughout the african continent have roots in the colonial period and also involved (and sometimes required) contemporary intervention by the french, british and united states governments. though long-forgotten stateside by many white europeans, in nations across the world, especially in africa and the caribbean, the era of the european expan- sion and colonization set many oppressions, migrations and immigrations in motion (e.g. beaman , a, b; lamont ; rodney ; wac- quant ). and the eurozone, the popular shorthand for a geo-political economic strategy of european stability and contraction, was no longer proving to be an effective buffer or nation-state binding agent. i arrived to paris a few months after the massacre at the charlie hebdo headquarters. in the weeks following the attack, extreme conservative marie le pen and her father were politically cashing in on the fear leading to a surge in the nationalist right. despite the sentiment among white franco- philes that people of colour and immigrants were everywhere in france, i found they were everywhere in certain places. after querying locals on where people of african and arab descent dominate, i was told time and again of the “lost territories”, suburban exburbs of urban france where dreams of white socialism died decades ago. it was on the streets of parisian suburbs like st. denis that descendants of those brutalized, enslaved and colo- nized were seeking refuge, work and full citizenship, many of whom though black were natural born french citizens. unable to locate a critical mass of black or arab elected officials, pro- fessionals or rentiers, i saw how race and racism worked much like the elevator m. a. hunter metaphors commonly used by physicists for einstein’s principle of equivalence. there is an elevator in france (the eurozone) and during the great recession everyone who stepped on it could feel the weight. whether or not someone then gets pulled up or down on that elevator gets understood as an edu- cational, class or moral issue or failing. yet those who are ascending in french society are still pretty white, and those who were descending look rather much like descendants of the colonized and enslaved. and so i took the inventive train round-trip from france’s gard du nord to london’s king’s cross station. that the united kingdom, england in particular, uses the english channel as a buffer from the rest of europe and the world has been a critical feature, if not a metaphor, of british geo-politics and xenopho- bia for some time (see e.g. alexander , ; gilroy , ; rodney ). a medium through which to retreat, retrench and re-protect, the train rides illustrated just how close and how far away the united kingdom could be when and if it chooses. indeed, i dare say the security measures for travel by train between paris and london rival that of international air travel security, while much less precaution takes place when flying within and across mainland europe (say from paris to milan or paris to amsterdam or belgium to berlin). recovering from its own series of terror acts and threats, the united kingdom was not unlike france in its noticeable though underreported racial xenophobia. and with the syrian civil war emboldening turkey’s recep tayyip erdogan, breathing new life into vladamir putin’s russian empiric dreams, many voters outside of the united kingdom’s urban core wanted out of the eurozone altogether. though many saw a need for there to be refuge for syrian and african asylum seekers, it just would need to happen in somebody else’s country. to be certain, the need to flee areas of asia minor and africa is impacted by current political dangers on the ground, but were set into motion by the pur- poseful underdevelopment of africa and neoliberal and neoconservative con- quests. as a mechanism of these sorts of geo-political approaches, race again worked as social gravity, putting countries and peoples in their “proper” place. meanwhile, racism rolled like a wave effect from london to berlin in hopes of accelerating and decelerating the fortunes of the powerful and the powerless, those at home and those abroad. power and privilege are to whiteness as ser- vitude and caste are to blackness. africans are black, even if they were not born in africa. arabs are black. as an emergent permanent service class across europe, eastern europeans are black. disqualified for many benefits from the welfare state due to their age, youth across europe are black. race hits you in the elevator of opportunity, and racism shoots you in whatever direction sometimes without any notice. and so the english countryside and northern ireland brexited and marie le pen is campaigning on racial quotas. what a eurozone this has become. ethnic and racial studies how america got trumped “chickens coming home to roost”, an emboldened malcolm x proclaimed more than fifty years ago to reporters upon questions about the events sur- rounding the assassination of president john f. kennedy. an expression of his insight about the collateral damage of white supremacy and anti-black- ness, malcolm x’s comment would lead to his being silenced by the nation of islam and a permanent reputation as a radical agitator within and outside of the civil rights movement. as i boarded the plane to michigan on election day, malcolm x and his provocation had been weighing heavy on mind. i had never been to the university of michigan-ann arbor. so when the opportunity came to give a lecture on black detroit in november i jumped at the chance. amidst the clearing rain clouds, i arrived at detroit international airport just in time to watch the election returns. during a lively discussion over the drive from the airport to ann arbor, i was convinced that our prolonged punish- ment known as the presidential election campaign season would end with the formal selection of the nation’s first woman president. focus groups and polls had for the previous two weeks indicated a vast swing in the elec- torate in favour of hillary clinton, with some models suggesting she would win the presidency by significant margins. still, there was tension and fear in the air. “trump could still win”, i was reminded just as we arrived at the graduate hotel in the centre of ann arbor. once checked-in and relatively unpacked, i began tuning into various stations for the election returns. exit polls in places like pennsylvania, my home state, were hot topics. according to early exit polling many white voters had rejected donald trump, telling exit pollsters that they instead chose to vote for write-in candidates, the green party nominee, clinton or some derivative thereof. this seemed to make sense, especially after the widely discussed revelation of trump’s use of mints to bypass laws protecting women from physical harm and molestation. yet, within a few hours pennsyl- vania and michigan turned red before my eyes. a dejected rachel maddow, wall magician john king’s look of surprise, and a solemn lester holmes were the sights and sounds of the announcement of the election result that trump would become the forty-fifth president of the united states. like many campuses across the country, the next morning ann arbor was sombre and unusually empty. for many, the election was a matter of life or death and the next four or more years will prove trying at the very least. yet, i cannot help but to continually ask myself: “what would malcolm x think or say?” – especially given that michigan was his birthplace. have we not witnessed an assassination of some sort during this presidential cam- paign? the integrity of black and brown people, women, immigrants and muslims has surely been attacked if not assassinated over the last two m. a. hunter years. and there has most definitely been a roosting of chickens. these chick- ens, however, dissembled their way into the coop. the exit polls were not wrong simply due to mere statistical errors. rather, many white voters lied. they lied in focus groups. they lied in robocalls. they lied just before election day and sure enough kept on lying. the exit pollsters had been duped. there had never been any real political departure away from trump. the media and democrat campaign to disqualify trump and turn sup- porting his candidacy into shorthand for being a proponent of racism, sexism, heterosexism and xenophobia did not work. though many predicted that trump’s temperament, incendiary comments and political incorrectness spelled his doom among educated white women and latin@ voters, in states like florida, michigan and pennsylvania the tide turned and all of a sudden most all of the map of america was red. white resentment fomenting during the obama presidency has concre- tized into white retrenchment of the sort that black feminist legal scholar crenshaw ( ) warned of nearly three decades earlier. indeed, many trump voters across race, gender and class dissembled until they reached the safety of the voting booth where they roosted, bringing to the surface all of the redness that has been hidden in the nooks and crannies of the amer- ican south. now that america’s redness has been exposed and the chickens have roosted, it is white america that has illustrated that race is gravity and racism can accelerate a rich white man into the white house over and over. black holes or how the future is black though in different locations and time zones and arranged by varying his- tories, over the last year we witnessed white dissembling and retrenchment that fomented into a resounding political backlash in the united states, france and the united kingdom. shrinking white majorities and power elites found themselves, for different reasons, attracted to the effective orient- ing magnetism of race, closing ranks around the what painter ( ) effec- tively dubbed “the history of white people”. einstein’s search led him to reconcile that his principles and theories highlighted the eventuality of black holes, physic’s version of pandora’s box. black holes it seems emerge from all of this natural commotion, containing and obscuring alternate real- ties, new futures even. the same can be said in assessing the passing political season. the combinations of white dissemblance, xenophobia and retrenchment have opened up holes of opportunity full of black possibilities. the black lives matter global consortium’s traction and ascension bespeaks the mani- festation of these possibilities (hunter and robinson ). perhaps this pol- itical season where (white) america and (white) europe sought to be great again were a stopgap measure on the eventuality of new majorities and ethnic and racial studies new ways of being complicit. like the cosmic holes einstein brings our atten- tion to the future is relatively unknowable and most definitely black. political eventualities equal the majority’s complicity squared. notes . my conception and use of the term is drawn from crenshaw’s ( ) critical insight about how white supremacy and domination have the ability to dig in their collective heels as juridical, political and social apparatus. . humans are social beings. this observation is a central tenet across the social sciences. that humans perform and accomplish identities and establish and maintain institutions, politics and structures is also a somewhat settled notion. but some serious considerations of this question can be found, for example, in the work of urban ecologists, many of who sought to demonstrate how resi- dential and communal patterns within chicago reflect a “natural order” of human movement and habitation. roughly, the urban ecology logic asserts: as new groups age out and are incorporated into the body politic they are then replaced geographically and socially by subsequent incoming groups. however, as a generation of race scholars have shown, conventional wisdom on matters of human sociality and ecology often pay short shrift to the invention and intervention of race and racism in the world order (see e.g. bronfenbrenner and brofenbrenner ; park ). . the elevator analogy is quite common and can be found in provocative iter- ations in smolin ( ) and wald ( ). . the quote is pulled a longer powerful analysis offered by einstein in the essay. furthermore, his lecture and time at lincoln university, the historically black college, influenced his anti-racists leanings. einstein ( , ) further offers: there is, however, a somber point in the social outlook of americans. their sense of equality and human dignity is mainly limited to men of white skins. even among these there are prejudices of which i as a jew am clearly con- scious; but they are unimportant in comparison with the attitude of the “whites” toward their fellow-citizens of darker complexion, particularly toward negroes. the more i feel an american, the more this situation pains me. i can escape the feeling of complicity in it only by speaking out. importantly, einstein would be one of few prominent intellectuals to volunteer to testify on behalf of w.e.b. du bois after the united states state department falsely accused and tried du bois as a foreign agent/spy in . . this is not to say that race and racism operate or function in this matter simply because they are mere preference. . this conservative shift is well covered and forecasted in great detail in skocpol and williamson and their analysis of the “tea party” ( ). . for a richer and fuller understanding and guidance on and about the impact and contemporary cache of string theory in physics see smolin and harnad ( ), smolin ( ) and polchinski ( ). . as it turns out my endeavour into the world of einstein also revealed an inter- esting professional overlap between physics and race scholarship: those who study general relativity today are neatly packed into marginal spaces across the ivory tower. much like their race scholar counterparts, they are compelled m. a. hunter to integrate their inquiries into the hegemonic areas of interests in their disci- pline. surely, infighting abounds from this professional tension mirroring the fraught lines brought to the surface during this political season. for this added insight, i am greatly indebted to my colleague jacob foster for help in locating these internal public disciplinary lines, debates and dialogue. see also smolin ( ). acknowledgements i thank karida brown, jacob foster, zandria f. robinson and dante taylor for their encouragement and helpful feedback. disclosure statement no potential conflict of interest was reported by the author. references alexander, c. . the art of being black: the creation of black british youth identities. new york: oxford 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relativistic theory of the non- symmetric field. princeton: princeton university press. einstein, a. . relativity: the special and the general theory. princeton: princeton university press. emirbayer, m., and m. desmond. . “race and reflexivity.” ethnic and racial studies ( ): – . fanon, f. . the wretched of the earth. new york: grove/atlantic fanon, f. . black skin, white masks. new york: grove press. feagin, j. r. . “the continuing significance of race: antiblack discrimination in public places.” american sociological review : – . gilroy, p. . “the end of anti-racism.” journal of ethnic and migration studies ( ): – . gilroy, p. . the black atlantic: modernity and double consciousness. cambridge: harvard university press. gilroy, p. . against race: imagining political culture beyond the color line. cambridge: harvard university press. gilroy, p. . “between the blues and the blues dance: some soundscapes of the black atlantic.” in the auditory culture reader, edited by m. bull and l. back, – . oxford: berg. harris, c. i. . “whiteness as property.” harvard law review : – . hartman, s. v. . scenes of subjection: terror, slavery, and self-making in nineteenth- century america. new york: oxford university press. hunter, m. a., and z. f. robinson. . “the sociology of urban black america.” annual review of sociology ( ): – . james, c. l. r. . the black jacobins: toussaint l’ouverture and the san domingo revolution. new york: penguin. lamont, m. . money, morals, and manners: the culture of the french and the american upper-middle class. chicago: university of chicago press. marx, a. w. . making race and nation: a comparison of south africa, the united states, and brazil. cambridge: cambridge university press. memmi, a. . racism. minneapolis: university of minnesota press. omi, m., and h. winant. . racial formation in the united states. new york: routledge. painter, n. i. . the history of white people. new york: ww norton & company. park, r. e. . “succession, an ecological 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